We were in the little backyard of our house around two in the morning, and the grownups had all gone home or off to bed. Except for Uncle Billy.
I was sixteen. Old enough to have stopped saying things like “going on seventeen,” but not so grown up that I had a problem sleeping until one in the afternoon.
So, when Dad got up from the grass, stretched, and said, “Well, I’ve leave you two to solve the world’s problems,” I was ready for the voyage to dawn on Uncle Billy’s magic carpet.
Story time.
My mom and her friends had cleared away the food and the dirty dishes. All that was left was the plate of brownies and the pot of coffee.
Dad’s friends who’d enjoyed the barbecue and frijoles out there and the stories about fish that got away and 14-point bucks just missed deferred to Uncle Billy. It was a combination of affection and respect.
The affection was for his stories.
The respect was for his surviving 75 years, but even more for his short fuse with fools. Respect is one thing with an elder, and another thing with a rattlesnake. I could tell that none of the men in the backyard ever thought for a second about crossing Uncle Billy. Even though I hadn’t seen him turn narrowed eyes and cutting words in the direction of a fool, it was easy to see in advance that a victim would be left behind on the asphalt, unrecognizable roadkill, crushed under the wheels of a speeding cattle truck of scorn.
Uncle Billy wasn’t around much. I knew he’d lived in Laredo before, but he was mostly somewhere else. Every once in a while, the unusual relative would show up at the house on Garfield St. with a lot of road dirt on his clothes.
I never did figure out how he was related to us. There was something about a half-brother of a second cousin of my dad’s. There was also something pretty clear about “don’t ask.”
If my dad was a straight-arrow businessman and head of a conventional family, Uncle Billy, as they said, ‘never worked a day in his life.’ There was no wife. He had no children. Uncle Billy didn’t stay anywhere long, much less go to church. He hadn’t voted for Eisenhower. He rolled his own Bugler cigarettes. No books, but a pint of Four Roses in his duffel bag.
When the two of us were left out in the yard with the bats and the lightning bugs, I was ready to listen. And lucky for me, I did.
Uncle Billy shuffled over to his bag on the picnic table in the dark and took a long swig out of the bottle.
“You know who Wolfman Jack is? The guy who growls and howls on the radio at night up in ‘Cuña?”
“Yeah, sure, I’ve heard of him. Everybody has. But I don’t think he’s up there anymore.”
“Probably not. His station, XERF, though, has been around for, hell, at least forty years. And there used to be three or four, maybe five, other stations like it. In border towns, just across the river in Mexico. There was a big one in Nuevo Laredo, too. Bet you never heard of it. And strong! Damn you could pick up those stations around the world. I knew a guy in Del Rio who said he picked up that radio through the fillings in his teeth. Ha! If you believe that, boy, you better stay away from the poker table. Somebody said they make spies in Russia listen to Wolfman Jack to practice English.
Hey, is there any coffee in that pot? It’s okay if it’s cold. Thanks.
Crazy communists. Spies listening to ads for quacks and patent medicine! Are you kidding?
Well, there are suckers aplenty in this country who listen to that crock and send money to a PO Box in Del Rio for a hard-on in a bottle. Or pills to lose 50 lbs. What do you expect from people like that? Back when they were the only station a lot country folk could get, XERF and the rest of those stations used to play hillbilly music, and let preachers run their mouths. That was a damn strong signal they had. At night. People listening in Canada, and yeah, all the way to Moscow. That’s a lot of watts. How far you think KVOZ goes? Hell, you lose it before you get to Encinal or Aguilares. But there used to be one of those border blaster radio stations right over in Nuevo Laredo. XENT. Back in the 30s. It’s long gone now.
You never heard of it, did you? No, that’s right, you said you didn’t. Never heard of ‘Doctor’ Norman Baker either, I bet. No, of course, you didn’t know about him either, but I did. And not just about him, I actually knew him.
Boy howdy, I could tell you Doc Baker stories that would make your hair curl. Your mom and dad weren’t here back then. People like me who were around in the 30s could tell you about Baker. Old man Cox who owns the drugstore by Jarvis Plaza knew him. And Doc Cook? The City Health Inspector, he hated Baker’s ass.
Doctor Norman Baker. Ha! Doctor, my ass. Baker never darkened the door of no med school. But he was a big deal in Laredo. Yup. Thirty years ago, during the Depression. And you never heard of him.
Uncle Billy keeps right on going and doesn’t miss a beat as he rolls a cigarette.
That’s the way it is. Always has been and always will be. Just wait. In fifty years, you’ll say something about Trans-Texas Airlines, or Chic-E-Lin’s, or Pepe Martin, and nobody will care a rat’s ass about what the hell you’re talking about. You’ll see. You’re what? Seventeen? Okay, sixteen, and you think you know what’s going on just because you saw somebody’s dad sneakin’ out the back gate at somebody’s mom’s house. So what! You dunno nothin’. Bet you don’t have any idea why Tom McFadden has two Cadillacs and all he does is teach people to fly in that old Cessna of his. You don’t have any idea where his money comes from, do you? Who’s smuggling dope in? Or who’s running mercury out? Where’s the money comin’ from? No, but you’ll find out one of these days — or you’re even dumber than you look.
Those are the real secrets people talk about. Which means they ain’t really secrets at all. Keep your eyes open, boy, and you’ll be surprised at what’s goin’ on in this town. Always has been like that. That’s Laredo for you, nothing is ever what it looks like it is.
When I first showed up here in 1913 or ‘14 I was a hot shot runnin’ guns across to Nuevo Laredo. We didn’t care who was buyin’ ‘em. Carranza, Huerta, Pancho Villa. You couldn’t just haul the guns over the bridge with all the Customs and military sent down to stop it. As if the Mexican Revolution was interested in Laredo! But we was going to get the ammunition across. There was real money in it back then. Hell, there still is. The Mexican armies, all of them, loved the 30.30 rifle. A couple of Laredo merchants sold more 30.30 ammo in 1915 than all the rest of the dealers in the United States. Combined! There was one hell of a lot of deer huntin’ that year, wasn’it? Hell, the ferrocarrileros on the other side were great. I knew some smugglers who had trained swimming donkeys, mojados, who’d swim across the river with boxes of bullets strapped on their backs and then walk right to the place where they knew there’d be the drop with some watermelon waiting for them.
You’re just a kid. You think all the secrets are about who’s messing around in the dark. Ha! Money may not be the root of all evil, but how people get it is the root of all the good stories. Without a doubt, son. At least in a border town.
Norman Baker got rich the old-fashioned way… with a con game. People said he started out legit as a mechanic in his father’s machine shop in Kansas and even invented a damn automatic organ, you know, like a player piano with rolls that you cranked through, but it was an organ running on compressed air… aw hell, you don’t know what that was, but the… what was it called?—the calliope, no… what was it? The goddamn Calliaphone! It sounded like something at the circus, but at least you didn’t have to know how to play it. You just turned on the compressor and put in the paper music roll and listened like the RCA dog turning your head this way and that way.
Hey, you awake, kid? Okay, thought you were nodding off. You bored?
Baker made some money on those con-crap-tions, as I call ’em, but he got rich as a phony cancer doctor on the radio. When I was tryin’ to get in on the oil game over in Torrecillas — never did make a dime out there, what do they call it now, Oilton? — hell, I had to dig a little peyote for the Indians so I wouldn’t starve to death when they stole the lease I won in a craps game in Brownsville, Old Baker, though, he had it all figured out that when you mixed quack medicine with the radio, the money would come in faster than you could count it ‘cause when you are just running a regular miracle-cure grift you have to be careful to get out of town before anyone figures out what you’re doing and comes back pissed off, wanting their money back. With radio you don’t have that problem. You just take the money out of the envelope and you keep it and on top of that, if you’re across the river in Mexico, who’s gonna come find you to ask for a refund when the pills filled with flour and ground clover don’t do anything?
You can bet your ass nobody was thinking about this when Marconi invented radio. They thought it would be good for sending news and keeping track of ships at sea. And I guess it was. But grifters and politicians always turn every newfangled thing into a new version of an old swindle and that’s what happened with radio. It didn’t take long for the quacks to start hawking cure-alls and the thieves running for office to start buying suckers’ votes with bullshit.
Baker didn’t do anything special. He got the idea from Doc Brinkley …who wasn’t a legit doctor either. Brinkley was the guy who was selling his hard-on treatment out of the old XER station in Ciudad Acuña. For $50 he’d cut you open, you know, down there, and tuck a slice of goat testicles in there and sew you up. Can you believe this shit? Okay, even if you don’t believe me, no shit, he got rich off that con game. That and selling dehydrated water crystals. The Del Rio Hotel never had a night with a vacancy with the full house of limp husbands from all over America and Canada who’d come down on the train for the implants.
Don’t ever underestimate the number of suckers out there, Baker and Brinkley didn’t, and the politicians don’t either.
Doc Baker’s game was curing cancer. He had a phony hospital up in Iowa that was taking in money hand over fist. The hospital was raking in so much money he bought most of the buildings in town, it was Muscatine, now I remember, and he bought the newspaper and the radio station, re-named it KTNT, “Know The Naked Truth,” ha ha ha! No, really! Baker was all bullshit, all the time. He wore purple suits like a pimp and he did do a lot of work naked all right. More like the naked liar.
When he got in trouble with the doctors at the American Medical Association, I guess because they were jealous, they shut him down. So he just packed up everything in his two purple 12-cylinder Franklins, you probably never seen one, they were fancy luxury cars back then, expensive, they stopped making ‘em, and like I said, they were painted purple with TNT painted on the doors, I mean, Baker loved purple, he wore them purple suits, wrote in purple ink, and painted the inside of every damn building he owned purple, and he drove down here to set up a brand-new bogus hospital money-maker in Laredo and hawk it from a radio station across the river. When the trucks hauled down the long sections of the two 300-foot tall antennas from Iowa, the damn bridge, the old one that washed out in the flood of ’54, sagged and made big crackin’ noises and damn near collapsed, that equipment was so heavy. They set up the station eight miles out of town, just off the highway to Monterey. There wasn’t no electricity strung out that far, so they ran the station off a pair of 1340 kilowatt generators. Hell, at night you could hear the rumble of those big Caterpillar diesels all the way to the river. You’re talking serious equipment. You can’t broadcast 150,000 watts of cancer cure on the cheap.
No, Baker had lots of money. You’d see Baker around Laredo all the time in one of those purple Franklins once XENT was broadcasting. He’d go by the post office to pick up all the fools’ money people comin’ in and then head over to the bank to deposit it – or at least the checks, he probably kept the cash. Lots of lady friends ridin’ around with him. They always say “money’s the best men’s cologne.” People said he had a trunk out at the radio station full of cash, ten-dollar Gold Eagles, silver dollars, maybe even some gold bars. Like I said, Baker was rich. Then he’d go by his fake hospital over by Three Points to check on the patients he was curing of cancer “without surgery and without X-rays” as he always said.
One time I got a look around inside the XENT studios, both floors, all purple, the place looked like a whore house, no, not like the ones across the river, more like the high-class ones in New Orleans or Baltimore. Saw the hillbilly acts singin’ with their feet propped up on little stands while the limpiabotas were shining away on their shoes grinning. The Laredo mint was printing money for Baker.
He thought he was a big shot and that if he could sell quack medicine, he could sell people anything, so he got the crackpot idea of running for US Senator back in Iowa. He drove up there in a convoy of purple cars, and he’s goin’ round the state sellin’ the Laredo hospital and booklets and kissin’ babies. Get this: his campaign slogan was “So different.” Now that’s the most truthful campaign slogan ever! He lost, but Doc Different still got 27,000 votes. Musta been all those folks he’d cured of cancer.
But the AMA in Chicago, and Doc Cook in Laredo, and the Feds caught up with him and got Baker convicted of violating the Federal Communications Act, or some radio laws, I dunno. He lost the license for the Laredo hospital and Albert Cook made sure it was nailed shut for good.
So it was “Arkansas, Here We Come!” Like most things that need a brain in Arkansas, you know, they don’t care too much about the finer points of things like, say, training teachers or licensing doctors or registering hospitals.
Baker bailed and took off for Arkansas leaving XENT still on the air with the same old crap. Left it in the hands of his lady friend, Miss Thelma Yount. She’s the one who stole all Baker’s money and buried it somewhere, nobody knew where. Not nobody, though. I know where it’s buried.
I’d got in a little trouble with some guys on a ranch in Wyoming, so I hightailed it down here to make it a little harder for them to break my arms. Florine, you know, over at the trailer park up at the end of Santa Maria, the one she runs, well, Flo’ let me hide out in one of the empty trailers that didn’t have no runnin’ water as long as I helped out fixin’ some things and doin’ a little clean up.
Right next door was this little tin-roof house where Jesús Llorente was living with his niece. I tell you, Chuy was in real bad shape with TB, he couldn’t hardly get out of bed.
I knew him from since a long time ago, when he was just a kid running errands for Baker and sweeping up the XENT studio. Later on, he was a chauffeur driving Baker in the damn purple Franklin back and forth over the bridge from this side to the other. So when Baker goed up to Arkansas and left ‘Miss’ Thelma Yount in charge of everything here, Llorente worked for her.
That Thelma, she was a real piece of work that woman was. She musta been part witch ‘cause Baker did anything she wanted. He gave her jewelry and let her run up a credit account at the ladies’ dress shop on Iturbide, it’s gone now, La Parisienne. You shoulda seen the ladies’ faces when that floozy waltzed in.
People said Baker did broadcasts from that purple boo-dwar he had upstairs at the station in Nuevo Laredo an’ he’d turn on the calliaphone an’ then he be goin’ on about the AMA, the American Meatcutters Association, he called ‘em, and how the government was out to get him, you know, the whole nutcase thing, we’re talking tutti-frutti. And then his voice would get real low and next thing you know he’d be pantin’ and shoutin’ and you could hear somebody moanin’ “oh, oh, oh” in the background. Whatever they was doin’, no wonder people thought he was goin’ at it with Thelma on the air, live, broadcastin’ whoopie at 150,000 watts from Nuevo Laredo all the way to the North Pole.
The Laredo wives, they all hated Thelma. But their husbands thought she looked good enough to take a long stare at her whenever she walked by. Baker left her the whole radio station business, or so she said, and she collected all the money suckers sent in. And then during the war she shut it all down and sold the equipment to a guy from San Antonio.
So, in the meantime they convicted Baker in Iowa on federal charges for mail fraud and he was in Leavenworth doin’ four. When he gets out of stir, he tries to find Thelma and all the XENT money, but she’s disappeared.
Things in Nuevo Laredo must have been hot for her, too, with the Feds over here and the Mexican government thinking she’s got more money than she needs, so she and her pretty boy, Theodore Baire, I mean what kinda parent names a kid Teddy Baire? But the two of them poof!
That’s where Chuy comes in. You see, he drove them and the footlocker with a million dollars of Baker’s money down to Guerrero. Thelma and Teddy thought they’d ditched Llorente at a cantina and slinked off to bury the money until things calmed down and disappear for a while.
The thing is, Chuy followed them down to the river, not the Rio Grande, but the Salado, the little arroyo south of town that flows into the big river. There was moonlight enough for him to see right where they dug the hole.
He skeedaddled back to the cantina. They gave Jesús ten bucks for a bus ticket back to Nuevo Laredo, a couple of tacos, a beer, and “Adiós.”
Thelma and Baire head down to Tampico where they were going to hang out for a while. They had a nice fishing boat and they were livin’ on it and then one night they were out drinkin’ and doing whatever you do at night on a boat and they don’t come back to the dock. Three days later the boat drifts ashore, empty, nobody on board, all torn up inside, like somebody’d been lookin’ for something. Somebody like Doc Baker, I’m thinkin’. Anyway, Thelma and her boy never turned up. That’s all. Just plain vanished.
So Chuy is left as the only person on earth who actually knows where the buried treasure is. You shudda seen all the people diggin’ up Nuevo Laredo looking for “the XENT money.” They had to put a police patrol on the Panteón Municipal so many people were diggin’ up the graves at night. Somebody else said it was down in a well on a rancho off the Monterey highway, and other people swore the chest was hidden under the floorboards of one of the buildings near the mercado.
Baker was a magician. He turned normal people into fools with his cancer cures and then all over again with his goddamn buried treasure.
Llorente was spooked by what happened to Thelma Yount. He decided to lay low for a while before doing anything about buried money. Then he got drafted and the U.S. Army sent him off to be a soldier in Europe. During the Battle of the Bulge he got too cold, and then he got real sick, and then he came down with TB. By the time they discharged poor ol’ Chuy and sent him back to Laredo, he was sick as a dog. Couldn’t hardly breathe. By then he was too weak to go dig up the money. When I saw him there by Flo’s trailer park, he was in the back room dying. So much for the gubmint takin’ care of veterans.
One day when I was walking by, his sobrina called me over and said Jesús wanted to talk to me. I go in and it’s dark back there, all the windows covered up, and there’s Chuy gaspin’. There’s a bloody hanky in his hand by his chin. He says, “Oye, Billy, ven acá. Mira. Ya me voy. But listen. I have to tell you something before I go. You remember el tesoro del doctor Baker? ¿Te acuerdas? The lost money from XENT? Acércate, I know where it is. De veras, I swear.”
He coughs real bad, and I tell him, “Sure. I remember. Thelma ran off with it, the gold coins, all of it. Nobody ever found it. You know where it is?”
Jesús finally catches his breath and grabs my shirt. He pulls me over to him and says in a whisper, “I helped her and Teddy bury it. In Guerrero. Down by the little river. Where there’s the little bridge on the old road to Mier. Calle Flores, on the river side, there are three big blocks of piedra arenisca like a triangle. Allí mismo right in the middle, they buried the chest there that night. Go dig it up. Too late for me. Ya no me sirve pa’ nada.”
And that was it. Llorente was gone the next day. Me and his niece and Flo’ were the only people there when they buried him.
Damned if I’m not the only living soul who knows where the XENT treasure is, and now you do, too.
After they built Falcon Dam and flooded the low side of Guerrero it was too late. Nobody is ever going to dig up that treasure. Now it’s three feet deep in the mud of Lake Falcon, under thirty damn feet of water.
You’ve heard stories of buried treasure before. All those maps, they’re all make-believe. Just like Treasure Island. You know, the book.
But this one is true. I swear. On my mother’s grave.
There’s at least a million bucks of Norman Baker’s money under Lake Falcon. No shit.
There was pink light in the eastern sky. The sun would be up in an hour.
On the magic carpet with Uncle Billy and Doc Baker and XENT and Thelma and Jesús Llorente and the buried treasure had been an all-night ride.
Uncle Billy got up. Time to leave.
You could tell he didn’t want to hang around for breakfast and talking to my parents. He grabbed one of my mom’s brownies and his duffel bag off the picnic table and headed through the gate out to the street. I offered him a ride downtown, but he just grinned and walked off toward the Freer highway. He had a little hitch in his left leg as if he had a rock in his shoe.
I never saw Uncle Billy again.
A couple of years later when I was off in college, Dad wrote me that Uncle Billy had died. They found him outside of Phoenix on 66 under a table in a roadside park, I guess he woke up dead.
And damned if that didn’t leave me as the only person alive who knew where Thelma and Teddy buried the money.
Not that I could do anything about it.
But then about 25 years ago I was talking on the phone long-distance to Rolando García. We were reminiscing about silly things we’d done in high school. And then Role told me about how the decade-long Texas drought had dropped the level of Lake Falcon thirty feet. So much that the underwater part of Guerrero Viejo was emerging from the water again. He’d even been down there and made a video of the now-dry ruins.
That’s when I remembered Uncle Billy’s story about Doc Baker’s treasure.
Two days later, I checked into the Lakeview Motel in Zapata. The next morning I crossed over the dam and bumped down the dirt road to Old Guerrero in a rented Jeep. Making sure none of the tourists were watching me the way Llorente had watched Thelma and Teddy that night, I hiked down from the big plaza to the old school by the little bridge and turned north on what the faxed map Rolando sent me said was Flores.
There on the banks of the trickle that used to be the Río Salado were the three sandstone blocks arranged in a triangle, just like Chuy said. The rattlesnake guarding the spot went off duty and slithered over to the shade under a mesquite.
After it got dark, there was nobody around but me. In honor of Uncle Billy, I took a swig out of the pint of Four Roses I’d brought with me from Zapata. Then I got the shovel out of the Jeep and started digging. Quietly. Every couple of shovelfuls I’d pick my head up, look around, and listen. All clear. Nobody except me and some faraway coyotes.
It wasn’t long before the blade hit something hard. Thelma and Teddy were either lazy or in a hurry and hadn’t dug a deep hole, so it was easy to sweep away the sand and open the top of old footlocker. There they were, canvas bank bags of $10 Golden Eagles and banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. The locker was way too heavy to pull up out of the ground, so I just grabbed the bags and filled up the back of the Jeep. Heck, I left some of the loose silver dollars behind. Why be greedy?
How I got it all across the river and into the U.S. is another story for another time.
Anyway, it’s been great living here in the Bahamas. I’m a member of a local drinking group with a self-explanatory name, the Ex-Taxpayers Club.
Come visit me sometime. A guy from the house staff will pick you up at the airport. He’s the one with the dreads tucked in a huge snood. He’ll drive you out to my place on the beach.
I’ll mix up some margaritas.
We can sit under the palms, and I’ll tell you some Uncle Billy stories.
Sources:
Glen Martin and Dave Kirby, “Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” (1970), recordings by Charlie Pride and Doug Sahm.
[Uncle] Gene Fowler and [Uncle] Bill Crawford, “Purple Shadow on the Rio Grande. Norman Baker in Nuevo Laredo” from Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves, Austin: University of Texas Press (2002), pp. 67-102.
