Marty Shambles

The Golden Child

The name’s Waterloo Clyde. I’ve been working these hills for longer than anybody. I didn’t take up with too many women in all this time. Women found my countenance disagreeable. The hills have always been the warm bosom what grabs me and holds me through the long nights.

I had some lean times and some boom times, striking a nugget here or some flakes there. Whenever I had had the gold in my pocket, I drank and fucked it all away, until I had to go back into the hills for more.

I did call on the Widow Vern a few times to go for evening strolls. She and I would saunter past the gas lamps on the cobblestone plaza of The Town. She was fair in manner and presentation, and carried an ebullient air.

I asked her one evening, “Will you be my wife? There’s no use in both of us being alone.”

She replied, “Waterloo Clyde, I can look past the face, but you are too dirty and too poor to marry.”

I didn’t take too much offense to it. She was right. I was dirty from living in the dirt, and I was poor from not having enough money.

This happened out on her porch, where we could have iced tea within the quiet scrutiny of The Town, who needed to know we weren’t up to any funny stuff. Such were the morays of the time.

“You’ll see, ma’am. I’ll get a big payday and buy me a bathtub. I’ll wash up real good, so you’ll be proud to be around me.”

She said, “If you can get me a baby, I’ll marry you. My insides ain’t fit for childbirth, according to Doctor Tom. So that’s the deal. You have my word.”

I figured I could find a baby. Babies wasn’t as rare as gold and I found that plenty of times. So I went to the hills and started mining for babies. 

I spent years digging thousands of holes. I found some gold here or there, but mostly it was just mud.

One night I heard the holler in the dark. It was a baby’s cry. I followed it and found its source were under the ground, there in the clearing where the pines gave way to the stars. 

I began to dig. I dug like I dug into the grip of a bottle: with fury and trepidation. I hacked through roots and bramble, digging toward that plaintive wail. I used my hands when the cry got louder. What was born from that hole was a lump of gold 19″ long, roughly the size and shape of a child, there in the full moonlight. I knew what I had to do. 

I went back to The Town. I shaved part of the nugget off to pay a metal worker to sculpt me a golden baby. He had it finished within a fortnight and I presented the baby to the Widow Vern.

“Why Waterloo Jones, this not what I meant. I wanted a human baby, not a decadent facsimile of a baby.”

“Is it not as expensive as a baby? Love it like a baby. Everything is transactional.”

“Yes I suppose there is love to be had in a golden child. I think I’ll call her Goldie.”

And we paraded the baby through the streets, all hailed it as a triumph, and the Widow Vern became Mrs. Waterloo Clyde.

“We need a new house for Goldie,” she said as she nursed the metallic child.

And so I went, hat in hand, to the bank to ask for a home loan. 

Mr. Bankman, the owner of the bank said, “That’s no problem, Mr. Clyde. We’ll just need the golden baby as collateral.”

“Mr. Bankman, sir, that’s quite gracious of you, however, I don’t think I can square that with the wife. You see she’s become very attached to the baby. She’s not going to take too kindly to being separated for the duration of the mortgage.”

Mr. Banksy Bankman thought on this a second. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do because we do want your business. We will place the baby under glass and put it in our lobby. That way your wife can visit the baby during business hours.”

I thought this was a good compromise and presented it to Mrs. Clyde. She said, “So We need a bigger house to accommodate the baby, but if we get a bigger house, we have no baby to accommodate.”

“True.”

“How does that make sense?”

“I guess it really doesn’t. But we need to choose one or the other.”

“Why?”

“Because Mr. Bankman says it is so.”

“Oh. Well let’s get the house then. I can go visit the baby all day every day. Or whenever it suits me.”

This meant I had to work digging up them hills for enough gold to make the payments on the house. This was difficult because the hills was picked over like a Thanksgiving turkey, days after the feast. It wasn’t just ol’ Waterloo Clyde roaming the hills anymore. Word of the golden child spread far and wide. Now every pissant with a shovel was combing the hills, eating up all my glory.

I had to go so far to find gold, I never even visited the house I was paying for. I sleep still in a hole in the ground.

Meanwhile, throngs gather to see the golden baby. People swear they hear the baby crying still, like it did that night below the ground. Others claim to hear nothing but the echo of a marble bank lobby packed to capacity.