The Briefcase
by Malcolm Johnson
i.
Other than finding the briefcase full of money, there was nothing remarkable
about the day we found the briefcase full of money. It was one of those
ghost-grey winter days, another regular raincoast day, our town struggling
to a soggy, sluggish start under a hanging cover of cloud.
Out to sea, the Broken Bank buoy was reading 2 metres at 12 seconds;
the water was 48 degrees, with lumps of swell the colour of lead
rolling in from somewhere out towards the Kurils and Siberia.
It happened in our town, Big Beach, a company town on the busted
side of boom-and-bust, 800 people living along the strand, trapped
between
the lines of surf and the menacing, still-primordial mountains of the
Canadian coast. In the winters most of us were unemployed; all we did
was surf, and that morning Sol and I were scrambling our way over the
wet rocks of the Cliffs, taking the standard shortcut through the cove
of Billie’s Bay to the great arc of Breakers Bay, where the high-tide
sandbars would be throwing out Triple-A A-frames, pushing long, carveable
walls left and right before closing out into the inside, where the
kids and the kooks would be caught day after day, almost admirable
in their endless, Sisyphean efforts against the whitewash.
The Cliffs were ancient, their rocks as dark and black as the gleaming
hide of a false killer whale and the airbrush coat of the jet-black
board Birk Berkeley rode on his 50-foot wave at Suicide Slide in the
Swell of ’89. Those rocks were as dark as it was that bad moonless
night, back when we were kids, when Cat Paradise lost her board and
was swept to sea, the Coast Guard searching, searching, searching before
calling it off in the evening of the next day. The Cliffs were a thrust
of lava from some unknown time before time, scoured smooth by the surf,
clung to by ochre stars and octopi, purple urchins and neon anemones.
We’d walked that way to the surf for twenty years, and it was
there that Sol saw it first – a flash of silver in a surge channel
cutting through a cleft in the rocks.
“
Dude, that looks like a briefcase,” he said, scrambling down
to grab it before another set poured through.
“
Cowabunga. Yeah, it’s a briefcase,” he said and climbed
back up, a shining metal attache case in hand. It was the kind of case
that you never see in real life, but have seen a thousand times in
two-star action movies on the satellite tv. It was in bad shape, bent
up and draped with salt foam and seaweed, but it was, without a doubt,
a briefcase.
“
Uh, what’s in it?” I asked.
“
I dunno, it’s locked.”
“
Huh. Weird. Ah well, throw it in the bushes. We’ll try to break
it open after the surf.”
ii.
Three hours later we were sitting in Sol’s kitchen, suits thrown
on the floor, coffee and chilli on the stove, files and chisels strewn
around the case.
“
Got it.”
“
Rad. Let’s open it. Who’s gonna do it?”
“
I saw it. I do it.”
“
Yeah, okeh. But dude, what if it’s, like, something bad?”
“
Like what?”
“
I dunno, like a time bomb or something.”
“
Get serious,” Sol said, a slight note of scorn in his voice. “Who
the heck wants to blow up Big Beach?”
And with that, Sol opened the case. There it was, something else
we’d
only seen on tv: nothing but stacks and stacks of crisp, clean American
hundred-dollar bills.
“
Oh my God. Whoa.”
“
Yeah. Whoa is right. Whoa. Uh, wow. Gnarly. That’s what I think
it is, right?”
“
Yeah, it sure is,” Sol said, all solemn, like a middle-aged man
with serious matters at hand. “Wow. Our ship’s come in.”
“
Sol, that’s money. US money.”
“
Uh-huh. That’s what it is, dude. That’s money like has
never been seen. That’s money like mines of my namesake, had
the Lord willed them to be opened once again.”
“
Sol?”
“
Yeah?”
“
You know you can’t take this. You know we can’t take this.”
“
What?”
“
You know we can’t.”
“
Bull, brother. This is Providence made real. This is the Sea showing
its favour for our faithfulness, for crossing those Cliffs, pure of
heart and mind, to surf every single day since we were four.”
“
Yeah, maybe, but think about it, dude. Think of the stuff that goes
on off this coast. Drug deals gone bad. Covert cargoes, slave smuggling,
frauds and founderings, American arms whisked out to Russian trawlers
to go God-knows-where. Shady and sinister stuff, man. We can’t
just walk into the bank and drop this stuff off. And we definitely
can’t tell the cops… those guys would just throw us in
jail for trafficking and take it themselves, or be all professional
and hand it to the Queen, duty and honour and salvage laws abided.
Those bills are probably marked, and someone’s gotta be looking
for them. This is crazy, this is the craziest thing ever, I mean, who
finds a briefcase full of money, but I don’t think there’s
anything we can do with this in this town. Dudes will show up in the
middle of the night and take us out. No questions asked, and who’ll
miss us? Whatever, man. It’s not worth the trouble. We’ve
got to get rid of it, or stuff comes down on our heads that we don’t
want coming down.”
“
No way, man,” Sol said. “Think about it. How many surfboards
are in here? A thousand? Ten thousand? How many wetsuits? How many
flights to Fiji? Shoot, think what we could do! Buy yachts, sail them
to Samoa with Janie and Jo, do the whole Robert Louis Stevenson thing
with surf. We could buy houses, cars, boards, buy a new start, buy
whatever… buy all of Breakers Bay, fence it, open it to nobody
but our crew, our own little Hollister Ranch… dude, think about
it!”
“
Dude, I know. I know. Tempt me not. I just think it’s going to
be more trouble than it’s worth. What comes from the ocean should
stay in the ocean. A million doesn’t really go that far anyway,
and armed assassins don’t break in at night and say ‘sayonara,
you clueless, thieving, soon-to-be-dead small-town small-timers.’ And
plus, what would Dora do?”
“
Take the money and run.”
“
Okeh, well, you get my point. We can’t do it. We just can’t.”
“
Yeah, yeah, I know,” Sol conceded. “But wetsuits at least?”
iii.
The next day was a carbon-copy of its predecessor: overcast to the
horizon, a solid swell spilling in from three thousand miles of heavy,
heaving sea. We shuffled across the dark rocks of the Cliffs, clad
in our one extravagance, brand new black wetsuits we’d bought
at Big Bob’s Surf Shop, shiny ones from Australia with stripes
down the side, the kind we’d always seen the pros wearing in
the magazines. As we climbed over into Breakers Bay that morning, all
decisions done and not to be undone, the briefcase full of money was
opened to the ocean. The sandbars were going off, and as a full fortune
in American cash blew over the black rocks, each bill fluttering like
a mew gull in the offshore wind, Sol and I went for a surf.
Malcolm Johnson is a Tofino-based journalist.