Twelve.
That was how many times lightning had struck the twisted, aged, pine behind our grandfather’s cabin. I traced my fingers along the deep grooves welted around its trunk like vines, souvenirs from the countless volts of electricity hurled down from the hands of Zeus himself.
They reminded me of tattoos—mementos exchanged for pain.
None of the other pine trees around it had the same.
My brother Deo paced around the ancient tree, shovel in his hand, eyes scanning the dark earth between its gnarled roots.
“I hope this works, Danny.”
“It should. The signs are there, and we both know Lolo never lied.”
I had perfected acting confident around Deo, even if I was in the dark just as much as he was.
“Over here.” he called, stopping on a vacant patch of grass a few feet away, “This looks like a good spot. Just pray we don’t run into too many roots below.”
Striking his shovel into the ground, he whisked the cigarette perched above his ear and raised it to his lips. The dawning sun had begun to peek over the mountains to the east—which for Deo, meant it was time for his morning pick-me-up.
“How long do you think this will take us?” he asked as he inhaled the smoke from his nicotine stick.
“A day? Maybe two.” I said, pulling out a pair of frayed work gloves from my back pocket. “It depends on how deep this thing goes.”
Over the crickets’ incessant buzzing, I heard the roosters crow from the next town over, echoing their greetings across the vast spread of the northern mountains. I read somewhere that sound traveled farther in cold air, and I wondered if that was the actual reason I could hear them—or because my senses had been in an anxious overdrive since we arrived here.
I made my way back to the cabin and reached for the other shovel resting against the back door.
Lolo’s carved initials were still legible on the wooden handle.
“I hope you were right, Lolo.” I murmured as I hiked back to my brother, and sank the shovel deep into the soft earth.
************
“It’s called Tezos.”
“Te—what?”
“Tezos. Like Jeff Bezos, but with a T.”
Deo always had these ideas—breakthroughs, as he called them—at the worst of times. I folded up the job classifieds I’d been scanning and braced myself.
The lopsided clock hanging from our dingy, dirty-white apartment wall read 2:29AM.
Most normal people were asleep.
“It’s basically like Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency. Digital gold.” he continued, pointing to random colored graphs on his outdated laptop.
He had come a long way. It used to be organic supplements obtained—supposedly—from endangered sharks. Then it was slimming pills that “all the Hollywood people used.”
There were the whitening soaps.
The juices.
The salad mixers.
He even went through a lotto scratch-off phase a few years ago. All in search of the big break that would push him over the top.
I stared blankly at the dilapidated laptop’s screen. There was a cube-shaped discoloration by the top corner. A sign, I figured, that the obsolete device was ready for retirement.
“See how Tezos keeps growing? But here’s the catch… this thing hasn’t even popped yet.”
“And?”
I realized how dismissive my tone sounded, and raked my mind for a follow-up question, “I mean—what does popped mean?”
“It means it hasn’t taken off yet! So if we buy now, while the price is low, we can get in on the ground floor! Then, we ride this thing as it skyrockets to millions!”
I smiled weakly. I’d learned not to interrupt when he was on one of these breakthrough speeches, but I’d also learned to nip these things in the bud before they devolved into another regret we’d both spend the next few months recovering from.
“And where are we going to get the money to put into this thing?”
A look crossed his face, like a child begging for more cake after they’d already eaten their slice.
“I was hoping maybe you’d have some.”
I chuckled and resisted the urge to pinch the space between my brows. Money had been especially tight lately, with the call center I’d been working at for the past two years shuttering our department. They called it restructuring—which was another way of saying they found another third-world nation where they could pay folks even less.
“I have enough for this month’s rent and food for the next two weeks. Three, if we’re lucky.”
“What about our savings?”
I pinched the space between my brows. Between the two of us, I’d always been the one who made cash through regular employment. Deo considered himself more an idea person—a free spirit who was going to change the world like fellow dropouts Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
In other words, it was my savings.
But then again, he was my brother.
“As I said, it’s enough to cover this month’s rent and a couple of weeks worth of food. I don’t even know if we’ll be able to cover the rest of the bil-“
“OK, OK, I get it.” He grumbled, pulling his laptop away and sulking over to the window, where the view of a nearby hill overrun with houses hollowly stared back at him. “It’s just… This is almost a sure thing… To get us out of here…”
“I know,” I answered, as I resumed scanning the classifieds. “We just don’t have anything else left to risk right now.”
He flipped his laptop screen shut and reached for the pack of cigarettes by the door.
“I’m going for a walk.”
************
The noon-high sun continued to mercilessly beat down upon us, leading me to call Deo back inside the cabin before we both collapsed from heat exhaustion. A pile of fresh dirt, as tall as me, now stood at the base of the lightning-etched pine while an equivalently deep hole in the ground gaped.
Deo’s head popped up from the trench, his sweat-soaked shirt wrapped around his face like an under-budget bank robber. Like mine, his burnt shoulders gleamed with a crimson red, courtesy of the sun.
“How deep does that damned thing go?” he groaned as he trudged back into the cabin, his boots dragging mud all over the wooden floor. “Six hours in, and all I see is more dirt.”
“Take a break. We’ll get back to it later.” I advised as I tossed him a can of sardines from our meager supply bag. “There’s rice on the stove. Try to save some for tonight.”
In the cramped kitchen, Deo pulled drawers and cabinets open, scanning the bare shelves, his sardine can in hand.
“Can opener?” he asked.
“Over by the sink.”
Save for some utensils, a pair of sleeping mats, and a few remnants of shabby, antique furniture; the cabin was barren. Only one photograph hung from its empty wooden walls: a faded picture of Lolo, Deo, and I, from decades ago.
I stared at it for a moment, and lowered my head. A pang of guilt rippled through me.
We should have taken better care of this place, I whispered to myself. Between the odd job schedules and the extra expense of fares to Buguias and back, the cabin just fell lower off the priority list.
Too low, I thought.
I knew Lolo would’ve understood, but I still felt that I had let him down.
I hated that feeling.
Plopping myself on the dusty sofa, I dug into my lunch with my hands. With my stomach grumbling, and my arms and shoulders throbbing from the hours of digging, these cheap sardines tasted better than they should have.
Deo stood by the door, propping himself against the frame, holding his plate on one palm and looking out toward the scarred tree.
“I’m tired of this,” he said.
“Yeah, my arms are killing me too.”
“No… not that.” he said, picking up a sardine from his plate, “I’m tired… of being nothing. I’m tired of having to eat canned fish. I’m tired of getting my hopes up and then getting disappointed.”
I continued eating.
“Do you ever feel like we’ve never been given a fair shake? You hear about people, who haven’t gone through a fraction of what we’ve been through, living like kings. It’s just not fair. Like—when do we get to reach the top?”
“It’s not like the movies, Deo.” I mumbled through a mouthful of rice, “It doesn’t happen like that in the real world. You have to put something in if you want to get something out.”
“But we have! It’s the reason we’ve got absolutely nothing right now! We’ve put so much into all these things and we still come up short!”
A thick, heavy silence fell upon the room, shifted only by the agitated rumbling of approaching thunder.
“We have to cover the hole before it gets rained in,” I said, cutting the tension and setting my plate down. “There should be a tarp out back by the pansiyon.”
“Yeah…” said Deo, clearing his throat. “We better get it.”
Outside, the blazing sun now hid behind a darkening curtain of dreary clouds. Deo and I carried the tarp back to the pit, and arranged the covering in silence.
I didn’t tell him, but I often wondered the same thing.
Had we ever been given a fair shake?
************
Lolo had been sick for a while.
With no one else to care for him, and me having to work, Deo spent the most time sitting by his side at the hospital. There wasn’t much he had to do, save for being present and periodically buying supplies from the pharmacy, but I knew Deo hated being there.
Lolo was dying, and we both knew it.
His diagnosis sounded more like a mess of foreign words strung together at random, while countless vials of intravenous fluids hung around his bed like Christmas decorations. Judging by the hushed tones of his doctors, or the subtle way the ward nurses lowered their eyes whenever we asked if he was going to get better, it wasn’t long before we understood.
We buried him behind the house, next to Lola and Ma’s pansiyons.
I remember thinking how strange it was that everyone we had ever known as family lay here—a neat row of concrete graves.
Only Deo and I remained.
“Have you seen this picture?” asked Deo, as we organized what remained of Lolo’s belongings. “How old was I here, five?”
My eyes glazed over the faded photo of the three of us, standing in front of Burnham Lake. Deo was most likely five, and I was nine. It was probably one of the first times we ventured out of Buguias as kids, evidenced by the broad, toothy grins on our faces.
“I haven’t seen this in ages.”
“We should hang it on the wall outside, spruce the place up.” Deo joked, holding back tears. “Decorate this crib.”
We rummaged through more cabinets and shelves. Apart from gardening tools and a few pocketbooks, there wasn’t much left that Lolo hadn’t passed on to us long before he died.
The contents of one drawer, hidden behind a stack of old newspapers, however, struck my attention.
“Deo,” I beamed, holding up a glass jar filled with a collection of rusted bullet shell casings. “Remember these?”
If there was one thing Lolo was proud of, it was how the land where our cabin now stood once served as a Japanese camp during the war. As children, Deo and I would find shell casings each time we went out to play in the woods. We’d collect a handful and exchange it with the old man for a piece of candy each.
“I can’t believe he kept these!” said Deo, as he shook the jar in his hands, the casings clinking against the glass. “I wonder what we could we could trade for these guys…”
I peered into the dusty drawer hoping for more mementos, but nothing else was inside—except for a single, unburned purple stick of incense.
“What’s that?” asked Deo, picking the stick up and holding it up to his nose. “Smells weird.”
“Incense,” I answered, memories flooding back.
“Why a single stick?”
“I was around seven or eight,” I began, replaying the scene in my mind, “Some old Japanese men came knocking at the front gate. They said they were veterans, and wanted to dig for their comrades’ bones… give them a proper send-off or something, I guess.”
“And where was I in all of this?”
“Probably inside. I remember walking up to the gate with Lolo and listening while they asked for permission to come in.”
“Let me guess, Lolo said no?”
“Lolo said no. This was just after Lola passed, and he wasn’t about to allow some guys to tear her garden up. He told them if they wanted, they could pray by the gate, do their rituals from there. He wasn’t about to let them dig up the yard for free.”
I reached for the stick of incense.
“I guess this was the only one that didn’t burn when he cleaned up afterward.”
“Lucky.”
************
Deo had always snored like a tractor, but tonight more so. He shifted to his side, unconsciously searching for a more comfortable position over the sleeping mats we laid out by the fireplace. Most of the wood had smoldered into ash, but I was still awake.
The rain had not let-up since it began earlier that afternoon, much to Deo’s dismay. He had been raving to go back and keep digging.
I had never seen him as excited for physical labor before—but then again, these were different circumstances.
There was much more he could gain.
I chucked another block of wood onto the dying fire.
I wondered if we’d find anything, or if we were chasing after a crackpot legend. Not even Deo’s monstrous snores could’ve drowned the whispers of doubt in my head.
What if there was nothing there?
Where else could we go?
What would happen to us?
What would happen to Deo?
My fists balled up as I reflected upon the absurdity of it all. Here we were, shivering on a cabin floor, banking on a story our Lolo once told us when we were little.
“Twelve,” Lolo said, pointing at the scars that skirted the tree’s trunk. “As far as your Lola and I have counted, at least.”
My eyes darted between the tree and the rest that surrounded it.
“Why only this tree, lolo?”
“I’m not sure, Danny. Some say this tree might just be unlucky. Others say maybe there’s something underneath—some metal perhaps.”
“Like gold?” asked Deo, his eyes wide. “Could it be gold, lolo?”
Lolo laughed and ruffled Deo’s hair.
“Maybe.”
“Why don’t we dig and see if there’s buried treasure?” I asked.
“I guess we could. But your Lola won’t be too happy if we make a mess in her garden and find nothing underneath. Besides, just because it’s free doesn’t mean it is—”
I woke up to my name being called frantically, and wet, clammy hands on my shoulders, shaking me awake. In the dim, bluish hue of dawn, I saw Deo standing over me, panting and drenched in a mix of sweat and rainwater.
“Danny! Wake up!” he said, his eyes glimmering with excitement, “I’ve found something!”
*************
The dawn sky remained overcast, with a drizzle lightly tapping upon our heads as we marched to the ditch. It seemed Deo had woken up in the middle of the night just as the rain had calmed and proceeded to continue digging alone.
“Come on down,” he beckoned, clambering into the muddy pit, which was now substantially deeper and broader than how we had left it yesterday. “Don’t worry; I brought the flashlight.”
I made my way into the soggy cavity and fixed my gaze over to where Deo’s flashlight beam pointed. At the far corner of the pit, the unmistakable outline of a box traced against the light.
Deo inched closer, shovel in hand, and tapped the blade against it. The clink of metal against metal confirmed our suspicions.
“What the…”
“I know.” Deo smiled giddily. “This could be it.”
I moved to the opposite corner as he resumed digging around the box, eventually exposing enough of its surface to lift free from the ground. It appeared to be made of brass, about a foot in width and length. Several prints that seemed like Japanese characters were etched onto its sides.
Deo and I hoisted the chest up together as we climbed out of the pit. The box was heavy, needing both of us to haul it to the surface.
“This is insane,” I said, catching my breath as we set the chest down on the dew-covered grass beneath the shade of the ancient pine. “What do you think is inside?”
“Gold,” said Deo eagerly. “It has to be gold.”
A knowing smile spread across both our faces. The continuous drizzle of rain tapped upon the box, a percussion beneath the crickets’ persistent humming.
“I almost can’t believe we found it,” I said, resisting the urge to pinch myself. “We did it.”
“Yeah. We did.”
We inspected the latches holding the box shut and found they were rusted through. We would need to be break them.
“Should we open it now?” I asked Deo with a grin, “Claim our treasure?”
“Of course! Let me go get the hammer!”
And so Deo dashed back toward the cabin, stumbling in excitement. I stood up and leaned my head against the aged pine, smiling in triumph with my eyes closed, as waves of relief washed over me.
The signs were right, I thought.
We were going to be okay.
I sighed deeply, tracing my fingers once again along the deep grooves welted around the tree’s trunk, listening to the soft, tranquil, patter of rainfall around us.
A certain peace sat within me.
The last thing I heard was the tense rumbling of the sky, just as the thirteenth lightning bolt came crashing down from the heavens toward the earth—straight unto the twisted, aged, pine.
Copyright © 2020 Cousin from Baguio