Freewheeling: Rambling in Spain: Book Iii

By Tom Foran Clark

Having journeyed together on bikes clear from northern Italy, south to Sicily and west across Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the two vagabonds Pike and Emery have separated under mysterious and ominous circumstances. Sans bike, sans Pike, Emery now enters Spain on the ferry boat the Andalucia, aboard which he meets Rita, a lovely surprise acquaintance of the now missing person, Pike.
The two rent a car and drive up the Costa del Sol the Sunshine Coast -- to San Roque, a lovely Andalusian village with a beautiful old city center and steep streets, whitewashed courtyards, and balconies full of flowers. They drove on to Estepona, the legendary Salduba, the Muslim Estebbuna, from which they again could see the heights of Gibraltar and still further mountains of North Africa. Estepona shone white against the sparkling blue sea. The paint used on the houses was made from the surrounding limestone mountains. The old town was a maze of cobbled steep, narrow streets, squares, and patios past hotels, restaurants, cafes, tapas bars, shops, and bodegas wine cellars. They came to a wide promenade lined in palm trees garlanded with flowers.
Eventually they land in the town of Benala de Guadix in the eastern part of the Province of Granada, where the people literally lived under the ground. In the Barrio Santiago region of the Sierra Nevada were over two thousand Guadixian-style cave homes. In downtown Guadix, signs pointed to the "Barrio Troglodyte" the cave district. The region was famous, not surprisingly, for its hand-crafted earthenware, sold roadside for miles around.
They go to Valencia, the city of Spain's national hero, El Cid, and "the homeplace of Paella," and on to Sagunto, where everyone was out for a siesta, it seemed out of town for the siesta. Do you think were the first people ever to visit Sagunto? Rita ventured, puzzled. The two went down to the Port and the Playa de Malvasur. But there was nobody else there not a soul. Emery and Rita walked northward and stopped at Canet de Berenguer on the Rac de Mar Beach, a beautiful beach with still finer sand and more dunes. A light chill fell with the dusk. The two sat on the beach wrapped in blankets and watched the lights go on up and down the coast, then retreated for the night. When Emery was sure Rita was asleep, he ventured out alone to have another look at the moon and stars and constellations. It seemed to him that he'd sat down on the perfect spot. Unhurried winds swept by as through a corridor, whistling. The oceans gentle lapping came in, then back out, all up and down the shore.
It was mid-January when Emery and Rita took the Metro to the Madrid airport. Pike was flying in from Bostons Logan Airport on a direct Delta Airlines flight. Emery cried when he saw him Pike looked happy. Rita gasped. The not so long ago emaciated Pike had put some weight back on. His cheeks were almost plump. His clothes were neat and tidy. He looked good. He had his heavy, hairy golden coat over his arm, and only a light pack on his back. On Pike's head was a big new smooth and golden Stetson cowboy hat. When he lifted it and waved it at them, they saw hed gone a little bald. Pike called to them. "Is it really you, Emery? Rita, is it really you?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503598522

Tom Foran Clark

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has also lived in New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, France, and Germany. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, as a graphic artist and copy editor in advertising firms, as a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, as a public library director. Long a bookman, he has for many years been the proprietor of the online bookstore The Bungalow Shop. Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher, radical abolitionist, and chronicler and biographer of the lives and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of another collection of stories, The House of Great Spirit, and the novel Jacob’s Papers.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tom Foran Clark.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015913267

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-9854-6

   Softcover   978-1-5035-9853-9

   eBook   978-1-5035-9852-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

For Doug Widmark

. . . time will come

When they shall meet no object but may teach…

Of human suffering, or of human joy.

– William Wordsworth

from The Excursion

Chapter One

Having just passed by the Rock of Gibraltar, the boat Emery was on, the Andalucia, was approaching Spain. A passenger apparently more excited by that fact than Emery was – a passenger called Jack – suddenly jumped up on, then slipped from, the boat rails – or stepped off, or leapt – whatever it was.

Man overboard! Emery cried out – or rather tried to cry out. It had happened so fast – in an instant. Jack had flown. He’d hit the water hard. Emery felt sure he was a goner. "Somebody!, Emery meant to yell, but only a choked, hoarse gasp came out. He looked imploringly at the passenger called Rita. Man overboard," Emery attempted once more, weakly.

"Good one, Jack!" Rita shouted. Her chestnut face turned still darker color, filling up with blood. She would later tell Emery she’d been furious with Jack not for his plunging into the water, but for his plunging into the water exactly when she’d turned with Emery toward him to share her momentous announcement – that Emery knew Pike – and Jack had pre-empted her big moment.

The Andalucia tilted once more as a bunch of passengers rushed to the place at the side of the vessel where Jack had jumped. People crowded around us to see. There was Jack, in the ocean, splashing merrily. "Look! someone cried. There he is! Someone help him! He’s upside-down!"

"He iss upside-down, but he iss not falling offerboard, the passenger called Dieter insisted. Jack, far from drowning, was swimming. He iss an expert schwimmer," Dieter said.

Almost leisurely, Jack was making brisk headway toward the shore of Spain with his very able backstroke. Rita! Dieter! he called out, Meet me at the hostel!

"Ach! Of course I must carry him his tings," Dieter complained.

The boat’s captain was stern. He strolled up with great dignity of demeanor and purpose – neat, in white, clean-cut, sun-tanned – obviously posing, wanting to appear seaworthy, capable, professional. What was the story on this young man who had jumped overboard?

Rita explained that passenger Jack had his passport with him, and that he had chosen to swim to shore. The captain, in a hurry, said he’d notify officials and let them deal with it. Then he went back to the business of guiding the boat in.

Once off the boat, Dieter, Rita, and Emery took a taxi from the bustling port straight to the youth hostel, the Albergue Juvenil on the Barriada El Pelayo. Rita took Emery by the elbow and steered him to the desk. This is Richard Mark Emery, she announced to the clerk. Has any mail arrived here for him? In fact, two envelopes awaited Emery.

One of the two letters was from Pike, postmarked Lawrence, Massachusetts. Emery read it aloud. I’m on my way! I’ll see you in Madrid, meet you at the airport – he gave the flight details – "and if Rita, Jack, and Dieter are ready, we’ll head for St. James right away. And if they’re not ready, still we’ll head for St. James."

The other envelope had been sent by Hafida Kethouna from Taza, Morocco. This Emery read to himself. Roughly translated from the French, the note informed him that her beloved brother, Abdallah, had been hit by a truck while riding Emery’s bike and, with Allah’s blessings, he’d died instantly.

Feeling feint, Emery headed for a nearby couch and sat down. Rita sat down next to him. You’ll be okay, she soothed him. You’ll be fine. Now Jack showed up at the Albergue, wearing brightly colored Andalusian garb, and sat down on the other side of Emery on the couch. "Are you somebody I know? Jack asked. I’ll go check on Dieter, Rita said, taking her things with her. You look familiar, Jack said, Were you in Morocco? Oh yeah, now I remember. You were on the boat. Why are you crying? Why aren’t you saying anything?"

Jack looked like an extra in a pirate movie – this washed ashore, buoyant, swashbuckling Jack. Emery was going to answer him, but then Dieter returned to the lobby calling out, "Ach, vee ver chust going to look for you at the police station! Rita was right behind Dieter, excitedly revealing the news, That’s Emery."

"You are Emery? Jack said, apparently astonished. Wow! Sorry I didn’t stay to talk with you on the boat. Oh well, time doesn’t go backwards. Here we are. It’s amazing to see that you exist. This is not something we figured was going to happen. For all we knew, you were a figment of Pike’s dog-gone imagination. We couldn’t tell what was true or even possible from what was whacko coming out of that guy’s mouth."

Emery, Rita said, again sitting down next to him, brushing the tears from his cheeks, we’d like to take you out to dinner. Go put your stuff away and wash up. We’ll go to a taverna for some beer and tapas. Does that sound good to you?

Emery put on the freshest clothes he had and walked with the three of them to a tavern nearby – noisy, harshly lighted, filled with a bluish haze of smoke. Everybody was yelling – a rowdy bunch. Dieter, white as a sheet, was shaking. He looked like he’d walked not only into the wrong room, but into the wrong life. Don’t worry about a thing, Dieter, Jack reassured him. We made it this far, right? What can happen now?

They took a little table in a corner. The revelers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to them. The four spoke in whispers, drinking beer and spearing, with toothpicks, exotically cooked appetizers called tapas – olives, cheeses, blood sausage, cow stomach, goat balls, pig tongue, sardines, squid, baby octopus, and on and on. Don’t think about it, Jack advised. Just dig in. His snappy little sayings and reassurances had an almost paralyzing power. He also had this penetrating gaze, as if he’d borrowed his eyes from some eastern guru for the purpose of looking deeper than he was.

"That Pike – what a guy! Jack reminisced. We never figured we’d actually meet you, he said again to Emery. Like that was going to happen. So much of what that guy was saying just seemed whacko. You get the picture? That was one gone guy."

"He vass a character," Dieter volunteered.

"He was almost dead, Rita stated plainly, peering deep into Emery’s eyes. "He had nothing. He was in rags. We were startled when we learned he was an American and not some wild, doped-up, insect-eating, unwashed Moroccan Berber, beggar, or leper. Closer inspection revealed he was covered with dust. He’d been robbed and beaten just about senseless, but the things he said to us made sense – at least made sense to me. We took him to dinner – we wined and dined him – and he told us his tale. It was Jack who made the connection," Rita paused meaningfully.

"The connection?"

"Yes, the connection to George Borrow."

George Borrow?

The writer, Jack said. "The Gypsies of Spain."

I’d never heard of him, Rita went on. "But Jack had read The Gypsies of Spain and also this other book by him called The Bible in Spain. Borrow sold New Testaments. Along the way, he met a man who sold oranges, like a kid with a lemonade stand, to weary travelers on a busy thoroughfare where pilgrims made their way to Santiago, the town of St. James. He stood in the shade of his booth by a river running through lush meadows in the hills just out of Madrid. They called him ‘Narangero’ – the man who sells oranges."

"Murcian oranges – Townsend told us."

"Arlen Townsend. Yes, Pike told us all about him. And about you. Jack in turn told him and us all about George Borrow and the Narengo and the thieves who robbed him – exactly like the Narengo in the story that Townsend told Pike. The parallels between the two stories were unmistakable. Jack was excited. Pike was flabbergasted."

I can imagine.

Well, wait, Jack said. It just gets curiouser and curiouser.

The thing is, Rita went on, "the whole story Borrow was telling – to get to the point – is this: the Narengo had a map and a book that had belonged to a Swiss pilgrim who went by the name, in Spain, of Senor Don Benito Mol, an energetic white-haired old man that sounded like the twin brother of Arlen Townsend, only with a big sombrero on his head. The Swiss had introduced himself: ‘I am Benedict Mol, a past soldier, now a soap-boiler, at your service.’ He’d been in Spain for forty-five years."

Did he have a wife and children?

Yes, in Minorca. He’d married a woman there, by whom he had two children. His wife died mysteriously, and his children vanished.

Just like Townsend, Emery said. The treasure hunter went to Italy? he conjectured.

No. He stayed in Spain. He was mad to get his hands on the treasure – what he called the ‘mighty schatz’ – somewhere in or near the church of Saint James of Compostella. He thought of the schatz day and night. ‘No one else but me,’ he’d told George Borrow, ‘knows of its existence’.

Pike must have fallen out of his chair when he heard all this!

"He did, in fact. He was totally discombobulated – on top of being forlorn and skinny and ragged. We offered to take him with us to our hotel to let him take a shower, but he refused. ‘No time,’ he said mysteriously. He showed us his map and book from Arlen Townsend in Assissi. He made us promise