The Green Guardian of a Yellow Gold Submariner by Scott M. Brents

“The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it’s a state of mind. It’s whatever you want it to be. It could be a scorpion dancing by the fire, or a stingray gliding through the depths.” —Tom Mix (paraphrased)

MR. GREENSKIN

The cognitive dissonance between my early morning activities and those later that afternoon could not have been greater, though the cloudless blue sky was the same in both time frames.

Earlier that day, I had been playing clock solitaire in a blissfully air-conditioned Amtrak train car while sipping a cold beverage, riding the metal equine along the countryside at a steady clip toward Benson, Arizona, where I would disembark, obtain a rental car, and then drive to a motor lodge in Sierra Vista. Once checked in, I would then drive to a nearby ghost town to hunt for treasure. Or barbwire. Or horseshoes. It didn’t really matter. It was adventure I sought. I have a list I’m going through.

Which was where I now found myself, smack dab in the middle of adventure, just outside of the ghost town of Fairbank, facing an angry green Mojave rattlesnake I had accidentally bumped into with my metal detector. The Garrett Ace 400’s sensor coil had collided with an entirely different and extremely dangerous type of coil.

Just as my Amtrak horse was not an actual horse, the pistol I was packing was by no means a Colt Peacemaker. It was a translucent white plastic spray bottle that I carried to quickly rinse off coins and items dug up or to sometimes mist myself on the throat or face if it wasn’t too humid. Ninety percent of the time, evaporative cooling doesn’t work in Dallas, but if I am in an area where swamp coolers work, then God bless my water bottle. It’s like a portable AC. The narrow hammerhead face of the nozzle is yellow. The nozzle tip, the trigger, and the screw-on retention ring are blue. I had, in fact, just misted my forehead and closed eyes as I stepped up slightly onto a mostly flat rock before bumping into the rattler because I was paying way too much attention to my comfort than to the ground I was scanning. Startled, I dropped the detector from my right hand, still holding the water bottle in my left.

I could have stepped back but might have tripped down the two inches off the rock, and then the snake could have been upon me. Or not. I didn’t know how it would react to my backing away and possibly falling. Instead, I froze. The warning electric buzzing was a promise of a nasty death—or at the very least an expensive and scary visit to the nearest emergency room, wherever that room might be. The term “crazy spirit rattle” popped into my brain as the snake’s tail kept vibrating with a blur, counting my life down in rattles per second under a postcard’s azure sky.

The infamous dual toxins of a green Mojave guaranteed that there were no guarantees of what would happen if I were to be bitten out in the middle of nowhere with no people. It’s not the desert that kills people like me—it’s their lethargic hubris. No one knew where I was, for I had told no one, and Fairbank, Arizona, is not a major tourist attraction, plus I was not even in the immediate ghost town area proper. I had crossed an old train bridge over what was presumably the dry as a bone San Pedro and then walked south, parallel to the riverbed, for perhaps two or three hundred yards.

I slowly, ever so slowly, raised the water bottle forward and gently pulled the blue trigger. A fine mist of water formed into a slow-motion nimbus above the snake and seemed to hang there a moment before descending like a teasing caul. I could not have been more thankful for there being no wind.

The rattling stopped.

I squeezed the trigger again. The thick black tongue of the large reptile flicked in and out, capturing and testing the micro droplets. Again, I considered stepping backward off the rock to get out of striking range but wasn’t convinced that was the best action to take. Instead, I kept gently squeezing the trigger about every seven seconds until there was enough moisture on the snake’s head and portions of its back skin to really bring out its striking—no pun intended—greenish hue as more and more desert dust was washed away from its body. I was a modern John the Baptist in the wilderness, not taking up a serpent like some literalist Appalachian preacher, but instead baptizing one with a twenty-ounce utility bottle purchased at Costco, and the baptism was having a noticeable cooling effect on the snake’s temper.

The green Mojave uncoiled from its striking posture, its demeanor having completely changed. It came even closer toward me, black tongue darting, then stopped and raised its head slightly upward, almost cobra-like and looked around as if searching for something or as if approaching a treasure and checking to make sure nothing else was watching. Then it laid its head down onto the stone on which I stood, its snout not two inches away from my left hiking boot, gazing straight at the toe of it as if hypnotized. I knew the stone had to be hot under its chin, so I kept right on spritzing, watching the mist drift down onto the snake and my boot. At first the mist instantly evaporated off the rock but then started collecting around the spade-shaped head as the stone cooled down some. In an epiphany, I realized the depression in the rock immediately under the snake’s head was deep enough to pool water. I unscrewed the blue retaining cap ring and, bringing the bottle down as low as I dared, slowly poured some water out, a little at a time, instead of allowing it to splatter too hard onto the rock all at once. Every moment aware the head could lift without warning and strike. The water filled the divot in which the snake had lodged its head and the depression was deep enough so that it could submerge its snout. I remained as still as a Joshua tree as it drank. After it drank most of it, I again poured until the divot was full and up past its mouth. The snake’s head stayed in place like a magnetic water pump as I refilled the space. Then it drank again, the dense muscles in its lower jaw and behind the head expanding and contracting like balloons as it siphoned up the reverse osmosis-filtered mineral-enhanced water purchased from a vending machine at the motor lodge. City water is fine if I only plan to spray what I dig up, but knowing I would be using it to spray my face, I had opted for two bottles of filtered, non-chlorinated water, which turned out all the better for the now siphoning rattler.

My legs were aching from non-movement, but finally—after my filling the divot four times total—the snake had its fill. In the scariest moment of my heart-pounding existence, the rattlesnake went through my legs in a very deliberate and vigorous wide slide, between my boots, headed toward the dry riverbed behind me. Inwardly, I shuddered as it seemed to purposely bump and rub against the inside of both left and right boots as it departed, thumping me with its firm coiling muscles, as if scratching at a soon to be shed skin or maybe speaking snake body language, saying, thanks for the water, partner, but I don’t want to see you in these parts after sundown. Fairbank isn’t big enough for the two of us… unless you’re willing to become a ghost.

For all I knew, the serpent perceived me as some kind of water dispensing tree. Or maybe the creature was reading my mind and knew I meant it no harm. Perhaps I was going crazy and was already bitten and dying while hallucinating about amicable serpents.

Despite my panic attack, my mind flashed back to the comfort of that morning in the Amtrak train while throwing down playing cards. I realized with some smug self-satisfaction that while I hadn’t won a single hand of clock, I had certainly survived snake solitaire.

A smart person, a normal person, would have thanked their lucky suns and gotten the hell out of the ghost town. Minerva, my deceased wife, often said my pursuit of adventure sometimes eclipses my common sense. She was being kind by understating my tendencies.

After looking around to make sure the snake was indeed gone, I picked up the detector, inspected it, and found no damage. I screwed the nozzle head back onto the bottle. There was maybe a half-inch of water left.

I misted my face again and began detecting the area, starting pretty much exactly where Mr. Greenskin had been coiled, waiting for me.

I got a very strong, distinct, and unmistakable reading. Gold.

——————

Minerva

My interest in metal detecting intensified after Minnie’s passing in 2020. I hated sitting at home alone, thinking in never-ending circles of depression. She had purchased the Garrett for my fifty-fifth birthday in 2018 saying I was of sufficient legal age to comb beaches and pore over abandoned lots and to generally act like an eccentric obsessed with finding loose change. She also gave me an olive boonie hat that I still religiously wear to block the sun. It’s that kind of hat where you have the option of folding up a side brim to the head to snap attach it, similar to Christopher George’s Aussie slouch hat in the old Rat Patrol series. It has an overly long, adjustable chin cord. I sometimes snap up the left side. Sometimes the right. Never both.

Thereafter I dutifully took the Garrett with us whenever we went on our little weekend trips. I made it a point to use the detector at least once no matter where we stayed or visited. This sometimes required searching the lawn of a bed and breakfast or prodding a nine-foot square island of grass surrounded by cement sidewalk at a motel while it was over one hundred and ten degrees. I once dug up an odd brass good luck token coin during a snowstorm in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, at a travel rest stop while several interested fellow travelers stood around waiting as to what would appear. I’m not saying I always found something, but I am claiming I almost always powered the Ace 400 up and searched somewhere, even if only for a few minutes. It was a gratifying ritual, and Minerva enjoyed it as much as I did. She liked watching me use the metal detector because she could tell how much I enjoyed the hunt and because she had picked it out for me. Over the next couple of years, I found my share of trinkets, interesting items, and of course, trash.

But with Minnie gone, metal detecting had become something entirely different—an obsessive but very dependable survival coping mechanism—a distraction to hold onto my sanity. I eventually joined five geographically scattered detectorist clubs that meet once a month, but all five almost always fall on differently scheduled nights or weekends, which I had planned on and desired while looking for clubs to join so that I could attend as many meetings a month as possible and get out of the house. One of them was as far away as Texarkana—an odd little klatch that calls itself the Fouke Monsters Metal Detectorists Club. For the record, the Fouke Monsters make the best coffee, but all five clubs are keeping me afloat in ways I can never repay.

——————

Marker

Still shook up by my encounter with the snake, I looked all around—much as the snake had done before mesmerizing itself to the toe of my boot—then squatted down to dig.

About six inches down, I saw the first glimmer of precious metal and kept digging, carefully. It appeared to be a flat square. Maybe an ingot, I thought. But then my red plastic spade struck the gold surface in a way that made a hollow, clicking sound. Definitely not an ingot.

What I ended up pulling out of the ground was a small gold box about the size of a cigarette case. I raised the case up and gave one side a spray of water and wiped away the moistened soil and then sprayed again.

Within multiple horizontal and vertical Art Deco lines that brought to mind an artifact suited to The Great Gatsby, I could just make out the engraving, Anthony “King Meatball” Santorini.

I tried to open the box, but the locking mechanism would need some cleaning first, so I put it into my pack for later. I ran the Garrett over the hole I had just dug—Detecting 101.

This time, the signal was noticeably stronger.

Gold, gold, gold.

I dug down another couple of inches and in complete disbelief, uncovered a gold Rolex diving watch with a black dial… along with several small bones.

Presumably finger bones.

That was when I refilled the hole and decided to indeed get the hell out of Fairbank, Arizona.

It wasn’t until later back at the Mojo in Sierra Vista that it crossed my mind that the stone I had been standing on might have been serving as a type of anonymous placeholder for someone who had almost certainly been murdered. By the look of those small bones, it had been a very long time ago.

I had quenched the thirst of a great green dragon… on a grave marker.

——————

Mojo Motor Lodge

I had planned to treasure hunt for five days, but with the near immediate discovery of the watch and the gold case, an extreme change of plan was warranted. And the bones. Don’t forget the bones. They change everything, Mickey.

I switched to research vacation mode, keenly aware that it was a complicated find. I would be navigating the fine line between grave robbing and finders-keepers.

I would spend the rest of my trip either in my motel room scouring the web on the Lenova Chromebook or by the pool, drinking whiskey sours and playing solitaire at a table shaded by a generous red and white umbrella, every once in a while misting my face like I was a snake in the desert.

For lunches, I strolled down the street to The Planted Pig for plant-based pulled “pork” sandwiches that tasted exactly like meat and proved addictive. I’m by no means a vegetarian, but I will say that the sandwiches were excellent ambassadors for anyone arguing such a change in habit. In the evenings I drove about a mile down the main drag to a well reviewed tourist hotspot called The Turquoise Coelacanth for takeout seafood in the desert, with prices as fancy as the place’s name. It was also amazingly good food. I purchased a loose-fitting aqua T-shirt emblazoned with their prehistoric looking mascot fish testifying I had eaten there.

Eat. Research. Drink. Sit at poolside wearing burnt orange Crocs wishing Minnie were with me telling me they looked like duck feet. Go back to my room. Maybe drink inside this time, but don’t spill anything on the laptop. Process all the information I was finding on King Meatball, his connections to organized crime, his watch, and the gold box engraved with a very personal motto regarding endgame philosophy. Take a break from the computer. Back outside, fix another whiskey sour and shuffle my plastic cards, a blood red deck, made by the Copag card company. Minnie had bought me a box of twelve of them about a year before she got sick. Waterproof plastic, they last nearly forever and smell like an inflatable shark pool toy I had as a boy. Pure PVC. Minnie and I played cards a lot. She agreed about that smell, saying that for her, the cards evoked a translucent inflatable orange starfish from her childhood that she used to take to a place called Sandy Lake Amusement Park.

The Rolex turned out to be an 18K 1969 yellow gold Submariner. It was in amazingly good condition considering where it had been, and if I understood the estimates I found online, it was worth a great deal of money, anywhere from ten to thirty thousand, depending on various factors. That was the first year Rolex made the Submariner in gold instead of stainless steel, and it was just luck Anthony had had such luxurious taste. Depending on soil conditions, temperatures, and other factors, an earlier stainless steel “James Bond” version Submariner, while sometimes far more valuable, might not have held up as well in the soil for all those decades, but the gold had skated effortlessly through time. What King Meatball had been wearing when he met his end is often simply called a yellow gold Submariner 1680, and it was beautiful.

The case, while also made of what turned out to be 18K gold, had some interesting problems, specifically, the condition of the mystery contents. I was expecting cigarettes or mini cigars and to be honest, maybe even more finger bones, but instead, once I got the mechanism to release, I found a black, moldy rectangular object that did sort of resemble a pack of cigarettes but also looked like a block of very dried out wood. Since the box was not rated to 200 meters like the Submariner, the contents had been contaminated several times by seepage anytime it rained enough, followed by mildew, then another period of baking in the desert landscape, plus whatever microorganisms could trespass the less than hermetically sealed seam of the case. Judging by the distance from the dried riverbed, it’s also possible that the impromptu grave had at times become completely submerged during desert flash flooding events. Difficult events for a hinged non-airtight case but good times for a yellow gold Submariner 1680.

After a little prying, I split the husk-like block apart and discovered it was a deck of paper playing cards, fused together into one body by the elements after burial, but now that it was dismembered, it displayed faded pips and splotchy inky card backs as I peeled several more cards apart. I would not have been as surprised if I had but noticed sooner what was engraved on the interior back half of the gold case—Bury me with a deck of cards. Don’t forget the jokers.

Without a doubt, King Meatball had been a cards man, like myself, and whoever had buried him had not only killed him, but had granted his final wish, allowing him to be buried with his expensive watch and gold card box. It sounded like complicated behavior. And maybe a little dangerous, even all these years later.

——————

Meatballs From The Old World

Anthony “King Meatball” Santorini was last seen by several witnesses in Kemah, Texas, in the spring of 1970. He had been connected with a New York family but from all accounts ran a very small gambling circuit with the head in Kemah, while a network of gambling octopus arms ran up and down the Texas coastline in a very selective and established suction pattern. Santorini kept a low profile and got along with all local law enforcement by knowing where to carefully allow them to participate. He knew when to include them and when to warn them off for their benefit. He kept everything close to shore, never spreading further up into other towns.

His other passion, completely legit, was cooking. “Meatball” can be a term of derision or irony, but in Anthony’s case, the nickname meant exactly what it said. He was the king of meatballs—the meatball. His recipe had come directly down the maternal line all the way back to his great-grandmother who had never seen America, and he guarded the recipe the way others protected their money and power.

He cooked for the cops. He cooked for his girlfriends. He cooked for his enemies, and he cooked for his friends. He cooked for strangers, and he cooked for visiting relatives who flew down from New York to experience the Texas coast. He cooked for the rich, and he cooked for the poor bums—often ex-military—passing through looking for jobs. All of them would testify on a stack of blue-inked bibles that Tony’s spaghetti with meatballs was something that should be shared with rest of the world. In between bites, he was often told he should open up a legitimate restaurant, which he always dismissed, saying he loved to cook for people, but he didn’t want it to be tied up in business. It would be almost disrespectful to the recipe and to his ancestors. Then he would ask if you were ready for seconds.

For a great while, Kemah was heaven on Earth and fair skies. Then, on some type of business-related trip to Nevada, he had disappeared. Years went by with no information. King Meatball became a complete ghost. The Kemah gambling circuit quietly faded away.

Twenty-nine years later, in 1999, a deathbed confession surfaced, from Eddie Hula, Santorini’s longtime friend all the way back to WWII. Eddie was so nicknamed because of the large, dark green tattoo on his chest and abdomen of a topless hula girl that he had gotten during WWII while serving in the Pacific theater with Santorini under Captain Walter Karig. It was Karig himself, after seeing Eddie make the inked hula girl dance, who had first called him Eddie Hula.

For reasons unknown, but from way higher ups, Eddie Hula had been assigned the Santorini hit. He refused to provide details as to who ordered it or why, only that it was “business.” Hula said all the details were unimportant this late in the game—all of them were long dead, and many of those involved had died in prison or had themselves disappeared. Eddie just wanted to get it off his hula girl that he had been the triggerman and that it had always haunted him, particularly since Anthony had saved Eddie’s life once during a particularly dangerous ship explosion at sea in 1944. When pressed about the location of King Meatball’s remains, he would not specify. “I made sure he had his cards, including the jokers. It would have been a curse on me otherwise. Let the poor man rest in peace.”

I went down countless rabbit holes, learning more and more about King Meatball and his mini empire, but the stories were mostly superficial, uncorroborated, and a lot of it contradictory. You can only read so much online before losing your grip, and any old newspapers studied are only as good as the journalists who had written the articles. But I knew Eddie Hula’s confession was documented, and he had specifically mentioned burying Anthony with a deck of cards, and he knew about the joker admonition written in the case.

After five days of watching kids play in the Mojo Motor Lodge swimming pool like happy dolphins while I sometimes chatted with their tourist parents or even played cards with them, and after eating countless faux porcine sandwiches while I researched ancient organized criminal activity skillfully hived along the Texas coastline from the 1950s to the 1970s, and after endless internal debates on how I should proceed regarding notifying the authorities, after employees at both The Planted Pig and The Turquoise Coelacanth started calling me be my first name… it was time to go home.

——————

Marker II

Almost a year later, I was able to determine that the remains of Santorini had been properly transferred and processed and laid to rest in a cemetery in Baytown, Texas, where his mother and grandmother were buried.

There was a lot more to his story than what the media had barely reported, but it was old news that no one cared about anymore when compared to the latest celebrity or politician involved in some wild perverted, lowbrow scandal. All those romantic and dangerous gangsters of Kemah were long gone. Anthony had been only forty-five when he was buried the first time in Fairbank in an unfair riverbank in 1970.

And now, over half a century later, King Meatball had been reburied, with little to no publicity, in Earthman Cemetery in Baytown, Texas. I found a picture of his small simple gravestone online. No epitaph, but it does have his famous nickname where a middle name would normally be.

I knew, of course, there was more to be done. Sending in the anonymous tip three months after I had left Sierra Vista on where to find human remains had been a fine start—a gesture to get the facts off my own hula girl, so to speak. I did not mention my theory as to who it was, but the remains were verified as Santorini’s by authorities. It made me wonder as to what else had been on his person.

But there was still the matter of supplying the deceased with his requested deck of cards. I had been waiting all this time to hear where the final resting spot of King Meatball would be.

Minnie and I had talked about taking a vacation to the Texas Coast but had never gotten around to it. She had specifically mentioned wanting to go somewhere that you could feed the stingrays. Apparently, they even allow children to do it at the aquarium in Kemah. We had planned many things that ended up not getting done. I think of it as Minerva’s List and am slowly checking the items off. Visiting an authentic Old West ghost town had been on our list and was how I ended up in Sierra Vista and Fairbank in the first place.

The desert adventure in the West had been good for me. My next adventure will be the ocean. I’ll ride the trusty Amtrak from Dallas to the Gulf. When I get down there, I will feed the Kemah stingrays in Minerva’s memory and then poke around on the beach with my detector while wearing my boonie hat, pretending I’m Christopher George, barking, “Let’s shake it!”

Before returning home, there will be a side trip visit to Earthman cemetery in Baytown.

I will take a plastic deck of cards—one of my unopened Copags with the blood red back design. I will place the deck in a plastic container and then put that in a plastic bag and bury it about six inches down, aligned with the “King Meatball” engraved in the small rectangular granite marker. The cards won’t rot from moisture like his original deck that Eddie Hula interred with him after dealing him the ultimate betrayal.

As a fellow playing card man, I’ve got a soft spot for abiding by Santorini’s last request. True, he had been a shady criminal, a black hat wearer for sure, but he had also been a loyal Italian momma’s boy who knew how to cook the best meatballs in the New World by using the recipe from the Old World passed down from his great-grandmother.

Three jokers come with the deck I will take, and all three will be included for Anthony’s eternal game of solitaire.

I’m not overly concerned about the ethics of retaining the plunder of my Arizona adventure. I have decided it is absolutely a classic finders keepers situation. I am returning neither the yellow gold Submariner 1680 nor the engraved card case in which I now have a favored deck living. I may sell or keep either item, but what I will not do, is return them to the soil.

I will reinter the watch and the card case when the powers that be entomb King Tut’s funeral mask under the shifting sands of Egypt.

That means never.

I miss Minerva. Fiercely.

——————

Scott M. Brents lives and writes in Texas. He reads excessively and hoards far too many decks of playing cards. He claims just the opposite is true—that he doesn’t read enough and doesn’t own nearly enough card decks. His most recent story, “Zagklon, the Sparking Clown” appeared in the Best Short Stories From The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023 anthology. Before that, his story “The Orange Jester” appeared in The Starry Wisdom Library anthology in the United Kingdom. Most of his stories take place in the fantasy genre, leaning toward a classic Twilight Zone or weird fiction sensibility. Lately he has focused on realistic life drama, while incorporating unexpected elements—such as heretofore maligned serpents exhibiting trust. He has been influenced and inspired by many authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Harper Lee, Thomas Clayton Wolfe, and the great Joe Bob Briggs.

“The Green Guardian of a Yellow Gold Submariner” is his first attempt to summon the spirit of a Timeless West and is dedicated to the memory of his Number One Fan, Anissa Cheatham, 1971—2023