CARBON HILL

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

35.  ANSWERS

 

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Linn looked up.

His chief deputy and one of his oldest and dearest friends squatted across the tombstone from him.

It didn’t surprise the lawman the Navajo had come up on him silently, undiscovered.

Linn looked over at The Bear Killer.

“Fine watchdog you are.”

The Bear Killer, stretched out on his back with all four paws in the air, snored.

“Don’t blame him,” Barrents grinned.  “It’s a fine day, the sun’s out, it’s a peaceful place for a nap.”

Linn glared across his many-times-great-grandfather’s tombstone.

“And don’t give me that look, Pale Eyes.  You’re here to raise hell with Old Pale Eyes for not pulling your nephew out of the meat grinder.”

“Yeah,” Linn affirmed, standing.  “That’s right.  I am.  He’s … they’ve … “

He swept the garden of stone with a broad gesture.

“They’ve intervened, yes, but sometimes the right thing to do is nothing.”

Linn looked away, his jaw hard and set.

“You didn’t see what they did to him,” he said quietly.  “You didn’t …”

“No,” Barrents agreed.  “I didn’t.  I read the coroner’s report, but that’s here” – he tapped his forehead with his foreknuckle – “but that’s not to see it and know it here.”  He set bent fingertips against his breastbone.

“It’s … seeing it done to your own family …”  Linn’s voice trailed off and for the first time he felt his stomach roll over. 

“I’ve never had the pleasure.”

Linn blinked, shook his head, looked at his old friend and managed a half grin.  “Now you sound like me.”

“What, never had the pleasure?  Just imitatin’ your bad examples, boss.”

“Trust me to cause trouble.”

Barrents stood – more like he flowed upright, the man’s moves were graceful and catlike in any situation – and his face was absolutely unreadable.

“Well?  You came up here to commune with your ancestors.  Did you find any answers?”

“Yeah.”  Linn glared at his Very Great Granddad’s tombstone.  “Nobody home.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No.”  Linn took a long breath, looked around, seeing more than the tomb stones.

“You’re seeing memories,” Barrents said quietly.  “You’re seeing the old man who told you of bailing out of that crippled B17.  You’re seeing your uncle’s friend, Elmer, the one with the silver plate in his head where an artillery shell blew the railroad ties off his cribbed-over foxhole.  You’re seeing another uncle who said a .44 pistol would knock you on your butt and you spent the rest of your life hating the man for insulting you.”

Linn nodded.  “Yep,” he affirmed.  “You’re right.”

“And you’re realizing what this place is.”

“Yeah.”  Linn’s jaw bulged a little, then he shook his head.  “This is an empty field filled with carved rocks.  We two – and The Bear Killer and Apple-horse – are the only life here.”

“Go on.”

“No spirits, no souls, no incorporeal beings, nobody laying underground straining to hear what we may have to say.  Just … a field, and carved rocks, and the memories we bring with us.”

“The man is smarter than he looks,” Barrents murmured approvingly. 

“So why am I here?”

“Pale Eyes, do you remember your Christian belief about being surrounded by a great cloud of believers?”

Linn looked curiously at the Navajo.  “Yeah.  I remember.”

“You are.”

“Just me?”

Barrents’ eyes smiled a little, though the rest of his face was impassive as ever.

“This place is a lens, you can focus on that great cloud in a place like this.”

“So I bring my own spirits with me.”

“You’re the one dragging around all those ghosts.”

“Kind of like a magic wand is just a stick, it’s nothing by itself, but when it’s used to make magic it focuses the user’s thoughts.”

Barrents smiled at this and declared in a nasal, carnival-barker accent, “Give da man a seegah!”

“Okay, here I am in the walk-in lens, where are my wise and powerful ancestors?”

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Barrents murmured, smiling as something white and furry thrust up against his leg:  he rubbed the white wolf around the ears and the wolf opened its jaws, smiling as only the great canines can, a smile that invites the unwary to come closer and become lunch.

“Is this one live or Memorex?”

Barrents smiled and what had been a real, warm, solid wolf, was a twist of fog that seemed to corkscrew into the ground.

“Like I said,” Barrents said quietly, straightening, “don’t underestimate yourself.”

“Are my answers here, where I can look at Old Pale Eyes’ stone and demand answers of him, or are my answers elsewhere?”

Barrents hesitated.   “I don’t know,” he admitted.  “I knew I would find you here, but … I don’t know how to find the answers you’re looking for.”

“I think I know where to go.”

“The Spirit Cliff?”

Linn nodded.

“No.”

Surprised, Linn looked directly at his segundo.  “Eh?”

“Your Celtic ancestors would say the veil is thin there.”

“Easier to penetrate.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Old Pale Eyes did.”

“So did your Aunt Sarah and she almost did not come back.”

Linn looked at Sarah’s tombstone, considering.

Sarah Llewellyn, he read.

Faithful wife and guardian.

He smiled, for the name and the attribution were carved in an arch, and within the arch, a rose.

“Oh, and by the way.”  Barrents frowned, reached inside his shirt brought out a plastic bag of something bloody and furred.  “This is yours.”

Linn blinked, surprised, accepted the strange package:  he turned it over, looked up in surprise.  “A scalp?”

Barrents laughed, a good easy laugh, his teeth a startling white against his weather tanned face.  “I have another just like it.”  He leaned forward, resting the heels of his hands on the ancient stone’s gently curved top.  “I couldn’t let you go out and do all the revenge work all by your lonesome now, could I?”

Linn’s eyes narrowed and he nodded, and the two men shook hands.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

36.  I’M THE SHERIFF

 

The print was not bad for having gone screaming through millions of miles of space, through a couple repeaters, then across the continent to his terminal, to the printer on his desk.

It was his little girl’s handwriting.

He’d avoided reading the glowing computer screen, he wanted to wait until he had something tangible on his grip.

He wanted to at least pretend that what he held was actually written by his little girl.

Daddy, I’m scared, he read.

Linn made a sound somewhere deep in his neck, shook his head.

He knew this was not the answer to his question, but maybe, just maybe, if he kept reading, he’d find it.

We almost died when the seal blew.

I lost people, Daddy.

Linn blinked.

He’d used those same words when people of his jurisdiction died.

He’d set up late at night with firemen, their shoulders bowed under the weight of fatigue and of grief, and listened to their words as they sat around the table in their fine brick firehouse:  he’d listened to them describe how the fire was through the roof before they arrived, but “WE lost the structure” – it was lost before they arrived, but “WE” lost the house:  how they weren’t even called until it was too late, but “WE” lost a woman, “WE” lost a child.

The Sheriff listened to tired voices and self recriminations, he listened to men discuss the fire in technical, almost clinical terms, he heard them acknowledge that the fire could not have been extinguished in time, the structure could not have been saved unless they’d been called much earlier, the people could not have survived without working smoke detectors, but it always came back to “We lost the house,” and “We lost those people.”

He returned to his little girl’s letter.

 

Marnie glared at the flat plastic keyboard.

Everything shipped to Mars had to be as light as possible, as small as possible, as efficient as possible; what she’d been issued as a keyboard came rolled up in a tube that was recycled into something else almost immediately – what she had looked like the heavy plastic she’d seen people put over their windows in winter for insulation, only it had a keyboard printed on it, and it plugged into the tiny box that claimed to be a computer.  The screen was just as thin and just as cheap but at least it worked.

Her fingers knew the keyboard intimately and she typed, but slowly, making many mistakes, because there was no tactile feedback – it was like using a sheet of paper instead of a keyboard, and the back space key was her very good friend.

At least, she thought, I have my own personal handwriting font.

She wrote.

 

Connie’s fingers were warm on her husband’s shoulders.  “Marnie?”  she whispered.

He nodded.

“Read it to me,” she whispered again, “I didn’t bring my glasses.”

He smelled tea and smiled; she knew what he was about and she’d brewed a pot of Earl Grey, knowing he’d not be to bed until he finished whatever their daughter sent.

“You don’t wear glasses,” he murmured, and she leaned down and kissed the side of his neck.

“Just another of my feminine wiles.”  Her breath was warm on his ear and stirred the fine hairs along its outer curve.

Sheriff Linn Keller read the words from their daughter, their little girl, Sheriff Marnie Keller, aloud.

“One of our people went insane,” he said, eyes following his daughter’s handwriting.  “He took a cutter and sliced the side of the dome.  It tore and blew out and he was tethered back so he wouldn’t be blown out, and he went into another section and slashed it as well.

“We lost people who were asleep or unprotected.  Some still live in their atmosphere suits – since this event, almost everyone sleeps in their suits – I was into mine before our section depressurized and I slung my gunbelt around my middle.  Habit, I guess.  I feel better with that Smith & Wesson on me.  It’s obsolete and it’s under powered but all a force pistol does is hit like a padded fist.

“I cycled through three airlocks and I found this lunatic cut into the director’s suit – the director saw him and tried to grab his arm and he laid the man’s suit open.  Never brought blood but the decompression killed him.

“I pulled the Smith and put three rounds through the murderer’s helmet.  The first two drove a pilot hole and the third went in and did the job, then I began shutting the emergency seals and helping the repair teams get the slashes covered and sealed off.”

“Dear God,” Connie whispered, shuddering at the mental picture her husband’s quietly spoken words painted.

“There is surveillance everywhere, Daddy.  No privacy except for the Boudoirs.”

“I don’t want to know,” Connie murmured.

“We are biological creatures,” Linn murmured, reaching up and laying his hand on his wife’s.  “I wouldn’t want a camera in our bedroom either.”

“What else does she say?”

Linn turned back to the screen.

“Video corroborated my testimony.  There was talk that I should have used the force pistol to stun him down so he could be rehabilitated.  Those who so said were shouted down by everyone else.  The collective mindset is considerably less liberal and far more … pioneer … Dr. Greenlees and I confide professionally and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the lunatic survived that a noose of thirteen turns would have been procured.”

“Our little girl,” Connie murmured.

“The repair crews were feted for their swift action in preserving our atmosphere.  Air is more precious than gold.  I was commended for working with the repair crews and for shutting two airlocks that failed to automatic.  No word about accurate fire under stress because that’s my job.”

His eyes dropped to the next paragraph and he could almost see her shrug.

“I’m the Sheriff.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

37.  TURF WAR

 

Sarah Lynne McKenna.

Sarah formed the letters deliberately, precisely.

“Sarah,” Emma Cooper, the schoolmarm, said in her gentle voice, “shouldn’t you be signing your papers with your new Papa’s name?”

Sarah looked at the schoolteacher, paused her pen in mid-air.

“Mrs. Cooper,” she said in an equally gentle voice, “he isn’t my Papa.”

Emma Cooper shivered at Sarah’s quiet words.

Not because of her words.

Because of her eyes.

Her eyes changed, at times, and this was one of those times … her eyes were always a light blue, but now – now, they went cold, glacier’s-heart cold, and just as hard.

“Sarah … your Mama must … care for him.”

“Mrs. Cooper,” Sarah said, standing quickly, suddenly, “walk with me.”

Sarah sat at the edge of the bench; she rose and turned, and Mrs. Cooper followed her star pupil outside.

Sarah waited until Emma Cooper descended the three steps leading into the schoolhouse, waited until the schoolmarm was abreast of her before looking at her – not so much a look, as a command, Come with me – and the two walked slowly through the little schoolyard, toward the tree the boys loved climbing.

“Mrs. Cooper,” Sarah said, “I do not doubt my Mama saw something in … that man.” 

She positively spat the words.

“He cares not for Mama, nor for my sisters and I.  He has drained Mama’s inheritance, he has nothing to show for the drain.  She asked him once and he became angry – he became angry to the point of drawing back his hand to strike her.  I think he would have but he saw me looking at him and he lowered his hand.” 

Sarah’s voice hardened and her eyes were on the horizon.

“Mrs. Cooper, if looks could kill, I would be flayed, filleted, dismembered and roasted slowly over a small fire, not necessarily in that order.”

“Oh, dear,” Emma Cooper murmured sympathetically.

“It gets worse.”  Sarah looked at the schoolmarm, her eyes swimming.  “He is going to send my sisters and I to a boarding school back East.  I think he means to … to have no more to do with us.”  She bit her bottom lip, fumbled out a lace-edged kerchief.  “I think he means to murder Mama and abandon us.”

“Surely he wouldn’t do that,” Emma Cooper said faintly.

“I know men, Mrs. Cooper,” Sarah whispered, then blew her nose noisily.  “I know men.  I’ve known men since I was a very young girl.”  She glared suddenly at the schoolmarm, her face pale, very pale and very tight over her cheekbones:  “I’ve … known … men since I was a very little girl, Mrs. Cooper.  I know the evil they do.  I’ve seen it.  I survived it.  I won’t let it – I won’t let him!” – she spat the word viciously, hissed it out of her mouth – “he won’t hurt my Mama and he won’t hurt me!”

Sarah turned, arms crossed over her belly, half sick.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cooper.  I … I have to go.”

“Sarah –“

Sarah ran, almost blindly, ran away from the neat little whitewashed schoolhouse, ran across the street for the only sure and safe haven she knew of.

She ran to the Sheriff’s office.

 

The Society of the Rose was not a Western phenomenon.

Rose Courts existed and indeed predated medieval Europe; there have historically been matters that could not be handled by the legal system, matters that had to be handled, and these were handled by the Star Courts, so called because the stars bedecking their ceilings reminded all that only Heaven itself was a higher authority than theirs.

Somehow the term “Star Courts” gained disfavor in early American history, and so its name changed, though not its methods, nor its purpose.

Thanks to their sub rosa nature, thanks to the flower suspended from the ceiling, they became known on this continent as the Society of the Rose.

The Society met in Firelands, upstairs in the old stone building as they always did.

Men and women in a variety of uniforms, and some in dignified but civilian attire, attended, and among them of course was the Sheriff and his uncle, the Chief of Police.

They had a guest, and the guest asked to speak.

“My friends,” he began without preamble, “I represent both NASA and another three letter agency with which you are familiar.  We have an agent – I should say, we have a member of our Society – on Mars, and I would enter her name into the rolls here, as this is her home.”

Linn leaned forward a little, listening closely, and their visitor turned and looked closely at the visitor in his expensive, three-piece suit.

The visitor turned.  “Sheriff Keller, I understand your handwriting is quite good.  It would honor our Society if you could enter into the rolls the name of your daughter, Marnie.”

Linn blinked and Will thumped him happily on the back, grinning.

“That’s our little girl!”  Will laughed.  “Think you can handle that pen, hoss?”

Linn stood and bit his bottom lip as the hall thundered with applause and the grinning participants roared their approval.

Their visitor watched as Linn dipped the ancient, steel nib quill in modern black ink, and carefully scribed his daughter’s name on the heavy rag paper page.

“I regret that we can not present her coin directly,” the visitor continued, “but she is aware of her credential and her utter authority as Sheriff on our Mars station.  Sheriff Keller, if you could accept her coin on her behalf.”

 

Next day, Linn rose, stretched, turned off his computer, stepped out into the lobby area behind the dispatcher’s desk.

He frowned, then raised an eyebrow, pulled the phone from his shirt pocket.

His cell phone, like most peoples’, had particular ringtones for certain callers.

This one sounded like a tinkling chandelier.

He only had one individual with that ringtone, and he pulled out his phone, hit the button, and just that fast, his stomach hit his boot tops.

It wasn’t a phone call.

It was a text.

From Marnie.

And it did not bode well at all.

The Sheriff read the coded message and he had this awful feeling that, once again, he was right, and not for the first time, he disliked being right sometimes, and this was one of those times.

The message read:

TANGO WHISKEY

TANGO WHISKEY

TANGO WHISKEY

 

Old Pale Eyes looked up as a young Sarah McKenna thrust through the door.

She shut the door quietly but firmly, leaned back against it, her eyes pale, as pale as the Sheriff’s.

“I need your help.”

Old Pale Eyes rose, his eyes hard, for he could not miss the distress in his daughter’s expression.

“Name it.”

“You and Judge Hostetler,” Sarah said, then stopped:  gathering herself, she wrapped an adult dignity about her like a cloak, started over.

“You and His Honor the Judge formally presented me the Bible that belonged to my mother.”

The Old Sheriff nodded, slowly, his face impassive.

“That was when I found that I was your daughter.”

Again the slow, single nod.

“I don’t know what to call you.”

The Sheriff opened his mouth to reply and Sarah thrust a stiff finger at him.

“DON’T you DARE say not to call you late for supper!”  she snapped, and the Old Sheriff stopped, and managed to look very innocent, and he closed his mouth.

Sarah lowered her arm.

“I … don’t have …”  Sarah whispered, her eyes lowering with her hand, then she looked up.

“Mama is married to a cad, a blighter, a bounder, a blaggard, a … a … a scoundrel!”

“Serious words,” the Old Sheriff murmured.  “I presume you can back them up?”

Sarah raised her chin defiantly.  “Yes I can!”  she snapped.  “He’s spent Mama’s inheritance, he’s bankrupted the ranch, I believe he’s gambled it away – when Mama demanded an accounting of the monies he took from her inheritance, without her consent” – she raised her voice slightly in emphasis – “he made as if to slap her. 

“I was looking right at him and he looked at me and that’s the only reason he didn’t hit her.  He’s going to send us, all of us, away – send us East, to boarding school – but he can’t have the ranch as long as Mama is alive and I believe he means to murder her.”

The words came out in a rush.

The Sheriff regarded his daughter, his child, this get of his loins, as coldly as as dispassionately as if he were assessing the words of a stranger.

He was not at all unused to being lied to.

He was used to people trying to use the law, and the lawmen, for their own purposes, and he well knew that young women and girls at the cusp of womanhood can fall prey to fancies and fantasies.

This, he could tell from hard experience, was not one of those times.

“All right.”  His words were quiet, but hard-edged.  “What can I do?”

Sarah’s return gaze was as direct as her words.

“Teach me how to kill.”

 

Linn looked at the three lines on his cell phone’s display.

Tango Whiskey, he thought.

Tango Whiskey.

T.W.

Turf War.

His lower jaw thrust slowly out and he wished most powerfully he could be there instead of here, for he had this awful feeling his daughter, his little girl, his Marnie, was going to need some backup.

He remembered the last time Marnie was home, how they rode long into the evening, how they sat on a bale of hay in the barn, listening to the horses, smelling like horse sweat and leather, how they leaned into one another, how Marnie laid her head over on his shoulder and sighed like she did when she was a little girl.

He remembered the advice he’d given her.

“Marnie,” he’d told her, “you’re going to an entirely new place.  You are going to the frontier, you are going to the edge of civilization.  The only order will be what you bring with you.  You will be Sheriff, and you will be in responsible charge of everyone’s safety.”

“I know, Daddy,” she sighed.

“There’s something that goes with that.”

“Oh?”  She lifted her head up, looked at her Daddy’s quiet, pale-blue eyes, not quite glowing in the growing dark.

“Marnie, you’re going to have people who want to take authority from you.  They’ll want to stake their claim of authority, they’ll want to be more important than you are.  Don’t let it happen.  If there’s a turf war, hit it hard and hit them hard and don’t let anyone, and I mean anyone, take that authority from you.  They’ll try, they surely will, and you can’t let that happen.”

Marnie nodded seriously.  “I won’t,” she whispered.

“John Greenlees is a good man.”  Linn gripped his daughter’s hands, his big callused hands warm and strong the way they always were.  “Confide in him.  And if you need me to swing some weight, let me know.”

“They’ll be monitoring all commo, Daddy.”

“A code, then.”

“If it’s a turf war, Daddy, I’ll send Tango Whiskey.”

“That’ll do.”

“Anything else, I’ll reference a name and you’ll know the case.”

Linn raised an eyebrow.  “That,” he said slowly, “is impressive.”

Marnie laughed, stroked her Daddy’s grey-shot mustache with her fingertip, the way she did as a little child.  “You always told me I was impressive.”

He nodded, kissed her fingertip.

“You’re going to have an iron-grey mustache.”  Marnie tilted her head, smiled.  “You will look very distinguished.”

“I already look distinguished,” Linn protested, and they laughed.

Sheriff Linn Keller looked at the .38 Smith and Wesson in its glass front frame, hanging on the wall, knowing its mate was on Mars, on his daughter’s belt if he was any judge.

I wish it was one of my .44s, he thought.

I wonder what it would cost to send her a shotgun?

A young fortune, probably.

 

Marnie, like most of the rest of the colonists, slept in her atmosphere suit.

Her quarters were separate and secured from the rest of the station; she slept with her visor raised, knowing it would take a howitzer – or a noisy session with a sledgehammer – to get to where someone could tamper with her atmosphere.

She slept with her revolver on her belt, the issue force pistol ahead of the old, obsolete, Second War Surplus Smith & Wesson Victory Model.

I wish it was one of Daddy’s .44s, she thought; then, I wonder what it would cost to freight me a shotgun?

She blinked, studied the ceiling, and he communicator lit up, chimed.

She sat up, hit the receive bar.

It was the new Director.

“Sheriff Keller,” he said formally, “report to my office.”

Marnie frowned at the image.  “What’s up, Doc?”  she asked, the standard greeting at the station, and she gauged the man’s response carefully:  he shifted his eyes to his right, as if looking at someone …

Someone waiting inside his door, Marnie thought.

Ambush.

“Sheriff Keller, this is no time for levity.  You will report to my office and you will surrender your unauthorized weapon.  I cannot permit you such a dangerous device that could decompress our station!”

Marnie cut the connection before her eyes could go dead pale and betray her sudden surge of rebellious anger.

She’d learned long ago to still her tongue; she’d screwed down her security parameters well enough she was satisfied no one could eavesdrop on her, but she did not trust that new Director, not after demanding she surrender the only truly effective weapon she’d had since taking office.

She looked around her diminutive quarters, her eyes settling on a plastic simulacrum of a Stetson, printed from recycled packing by a well-wisher.

She snatched it up and slapped it on her head.

If I’m going to war, she thought, I’m dressing the part!

 

“If you’re close enough,” the Old Sheriff said in a loud voice, for Sarah’s ears were stoppered with warmed, mashed down bees wax, “shoot for the face.”

He held up a pine plank, spanned it with his hand, spanned his own face with his hand, spanned the plank again.  “Let’s try this.”

He leaned it up against the fence rail, stood Sarah arm’s length from it.

“Now, like I told you, just –“

Sarah did not wait for further instruction.

She eared the hammer back, thrust the muzzle of the Sheriff’s Army Colt at the plank, and blasted a thumb sized hole through seasoned pine.

The Sheriff closed his mouth, looked at Sarah.

She looked at him, her face solemn, then she thrust the pistol out again and drove another hole, touching the first.

“That,” she declared, “was to show you it was not an accident.”

She backed up four steps, fired again.

Backed two more.

Fired.

Backed two more.

Fired, and fired the sixth round, which struck an inch to the right.

Linn raised his eyebrows and nodded.

Not many women cared to handle a full-house .44, and he’d loaded a full charge at his daughter’s insistence, and she’d handled it.

She’d handled it well.

 

Linn hesitated as his finger hovered over the keypad.

He blinked, considered, then changed screens, composed a reply that eight minutes later would arrive at the Mars receiver and would be relayed to Marnie’s screen.

TIGER IN CAGE KEY IN LOCK

I’ll wait until she gives me the go-ahead, Linn thought.

I know who to call, to swing political weight behind the Sheriff, and against whoever is challenging her authority.

 

Marnie knew her rapid stride was watched by the Director; his behavior displayed a degree of paranoia, and if he wished to disarm her, and he had a confederate waiting inside the door, this meant a coup.

Marnie did not press the annunciator and wait for the door to be opened.

She used her security override key, swiped it through the mag-reader, took her plastic Stetson by the brim and waved it quickly through the door.

Something slammed it to the wall on her right and she knew someone had a case of nerves and a force-pistol.

She crouched, spun, fired once, the Smith’s concussion deafening in the small space:  the ambusher fell, brains and blood spraying onto the wall behind.

Marnie made a fast scan, thrust her pistol’s muzzle at the Director.

“You are under arrest,” she announced coldly.  “Place your hands on the desk and make no move unless I tell you to, or, you, will, be, shot!”

The Director raised a white-plastic, oval-shaped pistol that looked like a streamlined Buck Rogers squirt gun.

Marnie shifted quickly to her right and the force-bolt drove past her, hitting a girder and dissipating with a static crackle.

She fired once more and the Director fell back, a hole between his eyes.

Atmosphere alarms began blaring and Damage Control lit up the Director’s screen.

Marnie shoved the carcass to the floor, bent over and hit the receive bar.

“This is the Sheriff,” she announced, “meteorite strike at the Director’s office.”  She hit he control that sealed the Director’s office from the rest of the complex.  “Dr. Greenlees to the director’s office, two down fatal.”  She snapped her visor down, felt the pressure-change in her ears.

It was unnecessary, she knew, but it was protocol to seal one’s suit when the building was holed:  the walls were self-sealing and it would take a hole the size of a softball to overwhelm the self-repair mastic.

She used her master override code to examine the Director’s pending transmissions, and sure enough, he had a bad one ready to send.

Sheriff Marnie Keller froze the message, transferred it to an encrypted file on her computer; with the message aborted, another filled its place in the que of data to be transmitted.

She scanned backwards from the aborted message but found nothing more that would cause her trouble:  as was standard, she data-dumped the new Director’s entire hard drive into encrypted storage.  She’d go through it later.

Damage Control showed up, more concerned with patching two holes than with the bloodied carcasses on the floor:  they assumed the meteorite strike killed both men, and the Sheriff did not tell them otherwise:  she’d covered their faces, apparently out of respect, and it wasn’t until the self-sealed holes were checked, the repair crews returned to quarters and the doctor’s arrival, that the Sheriff removed the bloodied covers from the dead men.

“This one” – she thrust her chin at the man in the corner – “tried to bushwhack me.  The new Director was going to force-bolt me point blank.”

“How point-blank?”

“He was ready to shove it against the side of my head before he pulled the trigger.”

“That would be lethal,” Dr. Greenlees said slowly, his face hardening.

“Yeah, well, he missed.”

Dr. Greenlees raised an eyebrow.  “So I gather.”

“You’ll need to issue a cause of death.”

Dr. Greenlees examined the damage done by the slow moving, round nose slug.

“Him” – he indicated the bushwhacker – “I can call that a meteor strike.  This one” – he flipped a dismissive hand at what used to be their new Director – “obviously he was mentally affected by the recent decompression.  In fact …”

His voice drifted off and he smiled a tight little smile.

“It’s okay.  The monitors are off line.”

“I believe our new Director was displaying an unfortunate case of post-decompression syndrome.  Combined with the mental stresses of being on Mars, taking over after the Director’s death … it was just too much for the man.”  He winked at the Sheriff.

“Sounds good to me,” Marnie nodded.  “Shall we get these out of here?”

Dr. John Greenlees nodded, rubbed his hands.  “I do love a good conspiracy,” he said quietly.

 

Sarah Lynne McKenna was accustomed to dressing like a grown woman, in order to model her Mama’s creations in Denver for the buyers who came in from all over the West Coast.

She was very good at costuming, and at quick-change, and she’d been doing this since ten years of age.

She’d gotten to slipping away from her Mama’s hotel and appearing in the local theatres, backstage, where the charming little girl was shown tricks of makeup and disguise – tricks that she took to like the duck does to water.

She’d never tried the reverse, to make her fifteen year old self look much younger, but her Mama’s life – and sister’s, and hers – depended on her success.

A little girl’s frock, white stockings, frilly pantalettes and flat slippers were quick, a ribbon in the hair – but the Colt Army revolver on her bed would have to be disguised.

She looked at her faithful rag doll, a boon companion for many years and handed down to her sister, discarded and forgotten on her bed.

Sarah smiled a wicked smile and reached for the seam ripper.

This was the day she ran from the house, ran big-eyed and silent until she ran into the porch rail and bent over it and heaved up her guts, coughed and threw up and coughed again, unable to speak, and her Papa, the Sheriff, and his pale-eyed son ran into the house, through the blue haze of sulfurous gunsmoke, to find her Mama standing in the kitchen, wide-eyed, pale and in shock, and a man, dead, on the floor, six holes evenly spaced, starting just below his belt buckle and moving up his body in a straight line, with the last hole squarely through the bridge of his nose.

Old Pale Eyes found out later, after the death of the Rosenthal he’d thought a friend, the Rosenthal he’d thought a good man, that Rosenthal had indeed bankrupted the McKenna holdings from gambling debts, and the lean waisted lawman with the iron grey mustache felt his eyes go pale when he confirmed that Rosenthal actually had sold his wife and daughters into slavery to keep from being killed himself – Rosenthal was dead, and this collector, this slaver, this rat-faced carcass, was dead as a result.

Old Pale Eyes arranged to have his wife Esther come out, and she took Bonnie and Sarah and the girls home with her, while the other ladies of Firelands came out and scrubbed out the blood:  Linn and Jacob replaced the bloodied floor boards, the maid opened windows and replaced odor-stained curtains, and two days later, when mother and daughters re-entered their home, holding hands and trembling a little with the memories of what had been, found their home to be as clean, as undisturbed, as they wished to remember it.

 

Linn’s phone tinkled again and he read the message on the screen.

OUT OF WHISKEY.  GOOD THING.

Out of whiskey, he thought.

The war’s over.

He reached into his pocket, withdrew Marnie’s coin in its protective plastic sleeve.

“I don’t know what you did, honey,” he said aloud, “but it must’ve worked.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

38.  ALLOCATION

 

A century ago and more, a pale eyed lawman sat at this particular table in the Silver Jewel.

He’d been Sheriff for some time, he’d been re-elected multiple times, he’d proven himself a corner stone of the community:  he’d imported the very first Firelands Fire Department steam firefighting engine, and he’d brought in veteran firemen to run it.

Bricks from his wife’s kilns formed the fine new fire station and its tall, almost bell-tower hose drying structure, and it was his directed investments – and the Irish fire chieftain’s trade in high-altitude firehorses – relieved Firelands of the expense of maintaining a full-time fire department in an era when volunteer was the rule and not the exception.

The pale eyed Sheriff, that lean lawman with his iron-grey mustache, sat at the table in what was locally known as the Lawman’s Corner, and he turned a squat, broad glass of something water clear and not over thirty days old, slowly round and around with surprisingly gentle fingertips, staring into its crystal depths as if to pull out some profound secret.

Dr. John Greenlees, a lean and dignified man in an immaculate black suit, sat across from him, his delicate surgeon’s fingers almost caressing his own glass.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Linn said softly, sounding almost lost.

Doc nodded, once, slowly.

Linn’s hat was hung on the peg overhead, Doc still wore his:  it was routine for a man to wear his cover in the saloon, and Linn’s skypiece hung above was a signal that he intended to be there for a while.

He’d accepted the drink just shy of an hour before.

He hadn’t touched it yet.

Sarah, his daughter, raised in another family, had declared her intent to marry a particular fireman – she announced it last year, having kicked out of her shiny patent slippers, swarmed up on the table set up outdoors, one of several tables set up for the community celebration.

She skipped like a dancer down the middle of the table, avoiding pie, cake, meat and gravy, she twirled like a ballerina, then she dropped her heels flat to the tabletop, put two fingers to her lips and cut loose with a most unladylike – but very effective – attention-getting phwee-tweet!

She’d pointed to the corner of the house, up on the third floor, to the recent and freshly-painted repairs, and she loudly credited the survival of her sisters and herself to the questions answered by a most patient Daffyd Llewellyn, and she gave him full credit for the automatic escape ladder she’d had built and installed, down which she and her siblings descended to escape the spreading house fire.

She took her skirts, swung them left, then right, as she danced the length of the table again, and spun:  she raised her arms overhead, then stopped, struck a pose and declared, “I intend that Daffyd Llewellyn should be my husband, catch!” – and so saying launched herself off the table, hanging momentarily at the apex of her arc, flying with arms spread and toes pointed behind, and Daffyd Llewellyn stood quickly, powerfully, caught her easily as she fell: surprised, he laughed, then as the full realization of her words settled into his consciousness, he laughed again, a good booming Welsh laugh:  he swung her up, put her feet back on the table and withdrew a box from his pocket.

“I’ve been waitin’ f’r th’ right time t’ do this,” he declared loudly, holding the box up at arm’s length:  “I’ve had my eye on this lass for some time now, and now’s the time!”

He opened the box, threw back its hinged lid.

Sunlight caught something green and sparkly and he worked it free of the box’s satin lining, went to one knee, looked up at Sarah, looking like a goddess on a dinner table.

“Sarah Lynne McKenna,” he shouted, his face reddening, “will ye marry me?”

Sarah clasped her hands together under her chin, bouncing on her toes like a little girl.

“Aren’t ye fergettin’ somethin’!”  Sean, the great, broad-shouldered Irish fire chieftain declared loudly.  “Ye must ask her father!  Ye canna’ plight yer troth wi’out th’ blessin’ from th’ family!”

“Where is the man!”  Daffyd shouted, rising and looking about.  “Where is he!  I’ll ask him now!”

“He had to go back into town,” Bonnie McKenna said gently, looking at Daffyd with soft, violet eyes, then at her daughter, the child she’d helped save from the terrible life she’d known as a wee child.  “I’m sure we can arrange a meeting.”

Daffyd Llewellyn rose and took Sarah’s hand.

“Sarah, me dear,” he said, swallowing hard, “it is my intention t’ put this ring on your fair finger.  It belonged to me Grandam, an’ she a Welsh princess, and a Woman of Power, such as ye are yersel’.”

Daciana and Bonnie both looked sharply at Daffyd, then at each other, as if the man had just uttered a great secret that only they three knew.

And so it was, that evening in the Silver Jewel, that the Sheriff waited for Daffyd Llewellyn to arrive, that he might formally ask the father for the daughter’s hand in marriage.

The Sheriff had already talked it over with Levi, Bonnie’s husband.

Levi grinned broadly and clapped his hands happily on his dear friends’ shoulders in manly approval.

“Let him ask you,” he said.  “I have no objection.”

“And Llewellyn?  Do you approve of him as family?”

Levi gave the Sheriff a knowing look.  “After both of us looked into his antecedents?  Linn, I don’t think they come any better than that man!”

Linn nodded.  “Figured the same myself.”

“He’ll be along in an hour.”

“I’ll be back at my table.”

Doc Greenlees was at “the feed,” as the gathering was called – whenever the family Rosenthal celebrated, they ate and ate well, and knowing this would be the public announcement of Sarah’s betrothal, it was a well stocked feast, and not a soul there went away hungry – Doc was at the feed and well knew of the proposal, and of the intent, and so he came to be with his old and dear friend.

 

A century and more later, another lean waisted, pale eyed lawman sat at the same table, and another physician, another John Greenlees, sat across from the table from him.

For this occasion, the Sheriff specifically requested the Daine boys’ product, water clear and not over 30 days old, and he’d set for about an hour, most of it occupied with turning the glass slowly round, and round, and round again, while screens were set up and communications lines checked.

There was an eight minute commo gap between Earth and Mars.

For purposes of this communication it did not matter.

It marked a first, an event of significance.

Sheriff Marnie Keller, Second Martian District, had been carefully chosen for her broad base of experience:  she’d proven her worth not just as the supreme hand of the Law on this far outpost, but she’d also proven a very skillful negotiator, a bargainer, a deal-maker, acting as de facto liaison between miners and almost everyone else:  she’d been the one to instigate bootleg distillation of fermented potatoes, she’d arranged for reflective sheeting to be harvested instead of scrapped, and turned into huge solar reflectors, which boosted their greenhouse and therefore a more natural oxygen production; she’d pointed out that the so-called waste from fermenting their bumper crop of potatoes made superb feed for pigs, freighted as fertilized eggs, carried by a single living brood sow, implanted (over the sow’s objections) via in vitro to guarantee a broad variety of pigs, to avoid inbreeding as long as possible – their farm, as it was called, might have been somewhat … odiferous … but it was also proving fertile, and the carbon scrubbers removed the objectionable odors.

The Sheriff proved herself as useful in the agricultural section as in her own bailiwick, improving their ability to grow both oxygen, fiber and food, preparing more composted soil for future crops.

Every one of the Martians was chosen for their versatility; there could be no waste, and they had to have redundancy – it wasn’t to the point where everyone could do everyone else’s job – but there had to be significant overlap.

All of Firelands knew of the far Sheriff’s role in saving miners’ lives, men caught in a slow moving avalanche, how she patched holes in their suits with the issue kit, how she brought her antigrav skimmer close and ran air lines from her tanks to their suits to replenish atmosphere lost to damage; she’d gone into a section to fight a fire, getting it extinguished only seconds before the automatic scram valve would have opened to dump the atmosphere – the fouled air was run through carbon scrubbers and to the greenhouse, where the high carbon dioxide content was happily taken up by the tall legumes and exchanged for oxygen.

The screen at the Sheriff’s table flared and glowed and the image of young Dr. John Greenlees, dignified in his issue jumpsuit – it was one of two, and the only garments he had other than the atmosphere suit – and Marnie, who modestly wore a sheet-plastic vest over her skinsuit.  They were seated, as were her Papa and the older Dr. Greenlees.

Marnie and her Martian doctor were holding hands and giggling like a couple kids, their ears red with embarrassment, but looking happier than anyone ought to be.

“Sheriff,” a reporter asked, “how does it feel, knowing your daughter is so far away?”

Linn looked at the reporter, at the shoulder-fired camera behind her, carried by a scruffy fellow in sacky camp shorts and a T-shirt with a cartoon character on the front.

“Feelings,” he said quietly, “don’t enter into it.  I’m interested in facts, and the fact is that my little girl is too far away for me to help if she gets in trouble.”

“Does that bother you, Sheriff?”  the reporter pressed.

Linn glared hard and pale eyes at the reporter.  “You’re damned right that bothers me,” he snapped, the pointed an accusing finger at the camera’s polished lens.

“I address myself to every young man who intends to marry a pretty girl, so listen close.”

He looked at the reporter, back to the camera.

“Every father’s daughter is Daddy’s Little Girl.  Remember that.  No matter how old she gets, no matter how capable she is, no matter how well she can kick butt and take names, she will always, always be Daddy’s Little Girl, and Daddies have a way of taking care of their little girl.”  He frowned.  “Unless she’s on Mars.”

“Daddy?”  Marnie’s voice came from his right, and he snapped his head around.

“Daddy, John has a question for you.”

“Sheriff,” Dr. John Greenlees said confidently, “I realize there is an eight minute gap before this signal reaches you, so I’m going to make the most of the time I have, I’m told our relay on Phobos will go dark in nine minutes and we’ll have to wait a while before we receive your reply. 

“Sheriff, I am asking for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”  He looked at Marnie and Linn saw their interlaced hands tighten. 

 

Daffyd Llewellyn chuckled as he slid the drink away from him a little.

“Ye should have seen her, Sheriff,” he said softly, shaking his head.  “So sure of herself!  She declared she’d have me f’r a husband wi’ the certainty of the sun a-comin’ over the mountains yonder.”

Linn nodded, his eyes softening.  “She tends to do that,” he agreed.

“But it’s no’ proper to go further without askin’ you for her hand.”  He frowned.  “I’d be interested in the rest of her real estate as well, y’understand,” he continued nervously, then colored a remarkable shade of scarlet as Linn’s smile spread to the rest of his face, and he began to laugh, and then he threw his head back and laugh well indeed.

Linn rose and thrust out his hand:  Dr. Greenlees and Daffyd Llewellyn both rose as well, and the lawman and the fireman shook firmly on their deal.

“Daffyd Llewellyn,” Linn declared loudly, so the entire Silver Jewel – the entire packed-full, pretending-not-to-listen Silver Jewel – “you are a good man and true, and you are a man I trust.  Yes, you may have Sarah’s hand in marriage, along with the rest of her lovely self!”

“Papa!”  Sarah exclaimed, then laughed, too delighted to be shocked.

Daffyd Llewellyn turned to the crowd who by now were standing, watching and listening and making no secret of it.

“What say you, my friends,” Daffyd shouted, holding up the little white box.  “Shall I put the ring on her finger?”

The roar that replied was universally, firmly and most decidedly in the affirmative:  tables and chairs were hauled back, the piano struck up Pretty Redwing, and the curtains drew back on their little stage, where the Daine boys were leaning confidentially toward one another as they tuned fiddles, a double strung Mexican guitar and a five string banjo.

The Sheriff waited until the Ring of the Princess was slid on Sarah’s hand, and Daffyd risen from his gentlemanly kneel, before he raised his glass of distilled detonation.

They celebrated and danced until well late in the night.

 

The pale eyed Sheriff and the black-suited physician watched as the younger Dr. Greenlees slid a diamond on Marnie’s finger.

“I had so many ounces of weight allocation,” he said, “and I’ve been planning this moment since tenth grade.”  He gripped Marnie’s hands and looked into her darkening blue eyes and admitted, “I never thought I’d be proposing on Mars!”

The signal faded, crackled, and was lost, but it didn’t matter.

A good payload of Kentucky Drain Opener was hoist, and was drunk, and whether it was this century or another, it was a most happy moment:  tables and chairs were stacked, shoved back, the Daine boys appeared from behind the red-velvet curtain of the Silver Jewel’s small curved stage, and they celebrated and danced until well late in the night.

 

Dr. John Greenlees gripped Marnie’s hands lightly, and she was surprised he was trembling a little.

“Since tenth grade?”  Marnie asked softly.

He nodded, then considered.

“I wish,” he said slowly, “that your grandmother were alive.  She’d … I wish I could tell her …”

Marnie froze, sniffing:  any odd smell was cause for immediate investigation, but this time, she didn’t have to hit the alert.

Marnie smiled, for she smelled roses, and she knew her pale-eyed grandmother knew, and approved.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

39.  ONLY ONE

 

Law and Order Harry Macfarland squinted in the dusty mineshaft.

The smoke was gone, the explosion long rolled across the valley and shattered against the opposite hills, but dust hung sparkling in the lignite mine.

It wasn’t the good black bituminous he’d known back East, back below Sedalia in Perry County; the dust there glittered like diamonds, hanging in the air … this dust, this brown coal dust, was heavier and coarser and only the fines hung in the air.

Harry’s wet bandanna clung to his face, the dark stain in front of his nose and mouth showing where his forethought kept some of the floating crud out of his lungs.

Harry’s lantern was surprisingly bright – it was a Davies lamp, a gift from his old friend, that pale eyed Sheriff – he’d brought it over along with a newspaper, an account of a mine explosion near Shawnee, and he set both of them on the sleepy-looking town marshal’s desk.

“That’s a Davies lamp,” he’d explained.  “You can go into firedamp and not blow yourself to hell.  Watch the flame.  If you see a second flame above the first, pull back.”  The Sheriff’s eyes were haunted as he looked from the Davies lamp to the Marshal.

“If you pull back, do it fast.”  He frowned and looked at the floor, then looked back up.  “I don’t make friends that easy, Harry, and no man is so rich he can throw away a friend.  I want you around for a while.”

Harry nodded, eyes drowsy, his boots carelessly propped up on his scarred desk top, one crossed over the other; Harry was leaned back in his chair, hands across his belly and fingers interlaced.  To be honest, the man looked to be half asleep.

It was an appearance he took pains to cultivate.

Now, in the dark and cold mineshaft, he was anything but drowsy.

He raised the lamp, right eye squinted shut, a trick he’d adopted after seeing the Sheriff do it:  by screwing his good eye shut, it wasn’t night-blind from looking at the flame, or a campfire, or a kerosene light, and he’d been with the Sheriff the night he had desperate need of his night vision. 
Law and Order Harry Macfarland breathed air today because the Sheriff’s vision was not impaired one year ago that night

Harry raised the gleaming lamp again, peering into the dark.

“Hello!” he called, and his voice ran away from him in the shadowed distance.

Harry kept on, one foot ahead of the other, keeping a steady pace.

Now what’s that? he thought, squinting a little, then he realized he was seeing a mine car.

Where’s the men loading it? he wondered.

He didn’t have to wonder long.

He stopped, shivered, looked around.

The Davies rested on a handy peg and Harry unscrewed the cap off his canteen, lifted his bandanna, took a swig, then splashed a little on the face rag.  He leaned forward as he did so he wouldn’t run water down his front. 

Another drink and he screwed the lid back on the canteen.

He was thirsty, but the man he found wasn’t.

The man still wore his high top miner’s shoes and he still wore a belt and that’s all he wore.

The explosion had shredded the clothing he wore – well, most of it, anyway:  he squatted, ran the lantern over the body, frowning as he did.

Anywhere there was a seam – the shirt cuffs, the pants cuffs, under the belt – there was still a run of material, but that was absolutely it.

The skin was speckled and Harry ran gentle fingertips over the face and then the neck.

The dead man was blasted with fine rock grit like he’d been in front of a stone throwing shotgun.

Who was he?  Harry wondered, holding the lamp down more toward the man’s belly so the light would cast on the corpse’s face.

His jaw tightened a little as he recognized the miner.

He stood, hung the lamp back on the peg, picked the dead man up:  the mine car was just under level full:  he grunted, one arm under the man’s shoulder blades, the other under his knees: he rocked back on his heels, then straightened, heaved the lifeless, limp form onto the mine car.

I ain’t a-carryin’ you out, he thought. 

I’ll let that-there mine car do the work.

Hell, why not.

He put his life into loadin’ the thing.

Least it can do is haul his carcass out of here.

Harry went on down the shaft.

 

The relief train rolled in just after midnight.

Hard rock miners, picks, shovels, lamps, oil, a portable kitchen, kept ready and in a building dedicated to rescue efforts – all loaded onto flatcars and into boxcars, with the desperate speed of men who knew what it was to work underground, who knew what it was to feel the sudden rush of air and know before the sound reached them that part of the roof fell and probably murdered someone they knew.

Law and Order Harry Macfarland pushed the mine car, laboring steadily, the Davies lamp on its front end to let rescuers know that something dark was coming out of the shadows.

He pushed steadily, a hard man not unused to hard work, but definitely not used to pushing a carload of ore weighing a number of tons:  once he got it going – which took some doing, which involved a bruised shoulder and gritted teeth and talking to God about it – he got the heavy car moving, and pushed harder, and got it moving faster, and he got it to the mouth of the mine just in time to collapse.

Hard hands gripped him under the arms, he felt himself picked up, carried:  his damp, filthy face rag was pulled down, a voice said “By God! It’s Harry!” – and he coughed, shivered and growled, “Put me down!”

“Sure, Harry,” a familiar voice said reassuringly, and a fresh set of arms came up under him and picked him up like a man will pick up a little child.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he heard, and he coughed, turned his head, spat grit and tasted dirt.

“I need a drink,” he said huskily.

“Yeah, well, so do I.”  He felt himself being eased down onto something soft and grimaced.

“Daggone, my back,” he groaned and tried to roll over.

“That’s right, I forgot.”  A hard-muscled arm ran under his knees, pulled them up, taking the unkind bend out of the small of his back.  “You just rest.  I’ll fetch you up a good snort and some coffee.”

“You ain’t makin’ the coffee, you pale eyed sheep herder!”  Harry challenged, then turned, coughing like a tubercular.

Linn squatted by his old friend, a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“No, Harry,” he said reassuringly.  “I ain’t makin’ the coffee.”

 

Harry refused to partake of anything resembling a formal bath, for all that the Sheriff had arranged four folding canvas tubs – “they use those in Africa,” he explained, and Harry swore and allowed as they could keep ‘em, he’d use a washpan like God intended, and Linn hoisted his palms-up hands and shrugged.

“I ain’t no per-fyoum wearin’ dandy!”  Harry flared.

“Yeah, God loves you too,” Linn sighed.  “I got clean duds for you.  That-there brown dust just filthies up everything.”

A girl in a maid’s uniform and starched apron and cap came into the private canvas-walled room, eyes properly downcast, stacked a carefully-ordered set of clothes on the chair and curtsied.  “Your boots will be ready soon,” she said, and Harry’s jaw dropped.

“My boots?”  he squeaked.  “You pale eyed chicken thief, whattaya doin’ with ma boots?”

“Harry,” Linn said patiently, “you done ruined the shine on them ones, I’m havin’ a boy black ‘em for you.  Get ‘em all polished up so you’ll look like the true gentleman you are.”

Harry came boilin’ up off that folding canvas cot, realizing to his surprise he was standing on a canvas floor. 

Linn didn’t know what was the man’s greater surprise:  that he wasn’t standing on dirt, or that someone would be so extravagant as to lay perfectly good canvas on the ground just to stand on.

“I’ll fetch you in that dish pan.  Water’s hot.  Brought a razor, too, and a strop.”

“Clean clothes,” Harry muttered, shaking his head, “a bath and a shave.  Hell, I might as well be in Kansas City!”

“Was you in Kansas City, Harry, you’d be soakin’ in attair bath tub,” Linn grinned as he ducked around the hanging door flap.

If Harry had a boot handy, he’d have heaved it at the retreating lawman.

 

“How many we got out?”  Linn asked quietly.

“That one that Harry found,” a short, blocky Hungarian miner replied.  “They was only his tag on the mine car.”

They heard another mine car, the tracks telegraphing steel wheels on steel rails for a quarter of a mile or more.

“Let’s see what these guys found.  They was close to the end when I headed back out to find you.”

“Did you find anything that might have caused the explosion?”

The miner held up a scarred, dented butter lamp:  it looked like a tiny brass teapot, it was meant to be worn on a miner’s camp, its open flame was fueled with an oil called Miner’s Sunshine, and miners generally used butter in it because it was cheaper and worked almost as well, even though burning butter stank.

“If they hit a pocket of firedamp,” he said, “this would light it off.”

“Damn,” the Sheriff swore.

“You’re from  New Straitsville, ain’t you?”
“Nah.  Near to it.  Just south of Corning.  Hatfield’s Mill on Sunday Creek.”

“Ah.”  The miner nodded. “Sunday Creek Coal Company.”

“Yep.”

“Now … Sheriff, I’m lookin’ at that-there Davies lamp.”  He turned and pointed to Harry’s lamp, still flickering brightly from its hook on the front of the squarish mine car.  “I don’t know of any miners that use those out here.”

“I give that to the Marshal.”

He saw a look of respect come into the man’s eyes.

“You’ve seen mines explode.”

“Yep.”

“Ya, me too, back in the Old Country.”  He shivered.  “I mined back East but I come out here for gold.  Coal mines –“  He shivered again.  “Quick way to get killed, them black coal mines.”

The Sheriff nodded, then turned, and the miner saw the corner of his mouth twitch, as if a smile were tugging at it.

“Hey you pale eyed pig thief!”  Harry yelled.  “You got one of them canvas tubs open yet?”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

40.  YOU COWARD!

 

Carbon Hill at its best had a feeling of being worn out.

Old Pale Eyes walked his Cannonball mare down the main street, solemn faced as he usually was, at least until he saw a familiar figure slouched against the side of a building out by the church.

The church itself enjoyed the same air of ancient dilapidation as most of the buildings there in town:  at one time it had a coat of paint, but the wood was so dry it drank in most of the pigment; boards greyed out with sun and wind and the dry, dry air, and the blond haired boy’s clothes, bleached by bare knuckle washboarding and lye soap and sunlight, seemed to suck the weathered grey from the building and adopt it as its very own.

Linn turned his Cannonball mare and walked the horse up until the mare’s left shoulder was near enough for the lad to touch.

Linn looked down at the boy, remembering a very long time ago what it was to be young.

“You recall our bet,” he said without preamble.

“Yes, sir,” the lad said in a small voice.

The Sheriff tilted his head a little.  “You lose a tooth, son?”

“Yes, sir, it fell out.”  He looked down, discouraged.  “Mama said the Tooth Fairy run out of money so I didn’t get nothin’ for it.”

“Times is hard, son,” the Sheriff agreed, reaching into his vest pocket:  he flipped the boy a spinning coin and said “Give that to your Mama and tell her the Tooth Fairy is back in business.”

“Gee, thank you, Sheriff,” the boy said in a rush, shifted his weight.

“Hold on, son, we’re not done.”

The boy was like a drawn bow, an arrow ready to launch on a fast flight home, but the Sheriff’s quiet, strong voice stopped him.

“You recall we had a bet.”

“Yes, sir?”

The Sheriff turned a little, lifted the flap on his saddle bag, reached in.

He withdrew a leather poke – a colorful poke, it was buff and red in alternating panels – and he tossed it to the lad.

The boy caught it neatly.

“You won,” the Sheriff said, a hint of a smile peeking out his pale eyes, “and you won right well.”

The boy felt the marbles shift inside the poke and he grinned quite a bit more broadly than he had when he caught the double eagle the Sheriff spun at him:  boys know what marbles are, but money is kind of an intangible, and to a lad his age, all he knew was that his Mama would be happy to get it.

“Now head on home and give that coin to your Mama, and tell her an old soldier remembers a dipper of cold water.”

The breezy “Yes, sir,” kind of spun around in a little cyclone behind him, whirling where he’d stood a moment before:  the lad was gone, a blue-denim streak heading for one of the miner’s shacks.

The Sheriff watched him go, then gave Cannonball a light touch with his spurless heels.

The copper mare obediently began plodding toward the main street again, while her pale eyed rider remembered a hot afternoon, back during that damned War, when a pretty girl gave a thirsty soldier a dipper of water, tooth-aching cold and fresh drawn from her well.

The Sheriff was not a soldier anymore and hadn’t been for near to half a century – well, not quite that long, but a good long while – and the girl had long since grown into a woman:  the Sheriff had puzzled over where he’d seen her, he’d puzzled for a week and a half before he dreamed it.

His dreams were most intense and most telling right before he woke, and when he woke he swallowed and he could still taste that cold well water, and he remembered how his bottom teeth clicked against the granite enamel on the steel dipper.

He looked at the weathered shack, and at the weathered church, and he rode slow down the main street with weathered buildings on either side.

He ho’d Cannonball in front of the Marshal’s office.

Harry was (as usual) busy propping the porch post up with his off shoulder.

The Sheriff dismounted, threw Cannonball’s reins over the rail without bothering to whirl them around even once; he scratched his nose, affecting an air of complete disinterest, then sauntered leisurely up onto the boardwalk, leaning against the other side of the porch post.

Neither man spoke for several long minutes.

“How you like them polished up boots?”  Linn finally drawled.

“I oughta kick you right in the shin bone with ‘em,” Harry replied quietly, his eyes half lidded.

“I thought you’d like ‘em.”

“You made more work for me, you pale eyed chicken thief.”

“You called me a chicken thief once already this week.”

“All right,” Harry growled, “groundhog thief, then!”

“Ain’t no groundhogs out here in the mountains.”

“You,” Harry finally rejoined after thinking for a moment, “always were a trouble maker!”

“Yep,” Linn agreed, taking a long breath and blowing out through pursed lips.  “I kin git in trouble just a-settin’ in my easy chair.”

Silence grew between the two lawmen.

A passing miner stopped and inquired if it took two lawmen to hold up a porch post, and the Sheriff solemnly allowed as if either of them pulled away, why, the other was such a potent man as that-there solid post would crack and fall over under the influence of the remaining shoulder, and all three men laughed.

They watched a wagon loaded with brown coal rumbling down the street, the ox mindlessly plodding along beside the drover; from inside a building not far away, a pistol shot brought the Sheriff’s head up a half inch.

“Murphy’s shootin’ rats ag’in,” Harry explained, and the Sheriff relaxed.

“Them rats enny good t’ eat?”  Linn asked quietly.

“We et ‘em at Vicksburg an’ glad we was to git ‘em.”

Linn nodded.

Had anyone been looking at the lawman with the iron grey mustache, he would have seen his light eyes go dead pale, but with an expression of sorrow.

Harry remembered what it was to be inside the siege, starving.

The Sheriff remembered what it was to ride into Vicksburg after its surrender, and to have a woman come begging for a crust, for a bite – not for herself, but for her daughter, and Linn remembered how he and his Sergeant emptied their wallets and gave this skeletal soul with the parchment-skinned child in tow, every bit of food they had between them.

Most of a half hour was ticked away while the two lawmen leaned, and watched, and listened, and mutually considered infinity, or its reasonable facsimile, until at length Linn said “Now what’s wrong with them-there shined up boots?”

“You melon thief, now I gotta keep ‘em all shined up an’ lookin’ good!  You done made me more work!”  Law and Order Harry Macfarland complained.

“What, you run plumb out of animals for me to steal, now you gotta pick on the garden?”

“You never heard of a melon thief?” 

“I’ve known a couple but never been called one before.”

“Well now you l’arned somethin’ new!”

Linn nodded slowly, blinking like a sleepy cat.

“Aiyup.”

 

Shelly Crane glared at the barred door.

She folded her arms and thought dark thoughts about the classmate that playfully pushed her into the old lockup and slammed the door.

Someone – she wasn’t sure who – yelled “Hey, I found an old lock!” – she heard the lock’s shackle scrape against the door’s locking plate, she heard a click, and then another voice swore.

“You idiot!” – it was her boyfriend – “where’s the key?”

There was a long silence, and then the other voice swore softly.

“Please tell me you didn’t lock me in here!”  Shelly said, her voice edged with anger.

“We’ll find it,” her boyfriend pleaded, and she heard the sound of boards being raked aside, pulled loose, then quieter:  “Where did you find that lock?”

“It was right there –“

“You got a flashlight?  I can’t see nothin’ –“

“The key oughta be close –“

Shelly grabbed the bars, shook the door – it barely moved – for all its age, it was heavy and it was solid – “YOU GET ME OUT OF HERE!” she screamed.

She heard a muffled discussion, the sound of two sets of sneakered feet at a panicked run.

“Are you leaving me?”  she shouted.  “You coward, ARE YOU LEAVING ME HERE?”

She heard the sound of an engine start, the sound of tires spinning on dirt, the sound of desperate, heavy acceleration.

She let go of the bars, drew back a step, dusted her hands together.

“’Come over to Carbon after the game,’ you said,” she whispered, her voice bitter:  “’it’ll be fun,’ you said.”

She gripped the bars again, shook the unmoving door furiously, screamed, “CARL MCFANN, YOU COWARD!!!”

She let go of the bars, folded her arms.

“Just see if I ever, EVER go out with you again,” she muttered.  “Just see if I ever do!”

She turned, looked around the shadow-dark steel cube, shivered.

Her imagination populated it with hollow-eyed prisoners, shibboleths with loose teeth and shredded clothes dripping off fleshless arms –

She looked down, at the reassuring white of her cheerleading sneakers, at the white panels in her pleated skirt.

“I’m alone here,” she whispered.  “No rats, no ghosts, it’s too cold for snakes –“

She shivered, hugged herself, wishing for at least a heavier sweater.

It was already dark when they arrived; it was darker inside the steel lockup, it was getting cold, and it wasn’t until the stars were out, hard and bright against the night sky, that she heard a horse approach.

She heard saddle leather squeak, heard boots hit the ground, heard the voice, deep and reassuring and familiar.

“You all right in there?”

She almost collapsed with relief.  “I’m scared,” she quavered, “I’m cold, I’m … it’s dirty in here and there’s no place to sit down …”

“Let’s see here,” she heard, then a jingle of keys; there were metallic sounds and finally a click and a jingle and a quiet “There now,” and the door swung open.

She saw the familiar silhouette of the lean old lawman and she saw headlights approaching in the distance:  the door squealed as the lawman’s callused hand drew it open.

“Step on out of there,” he said in a fatherly voice, and she almost ran out of the steel hoosegow into the man’s chest.

It was kind of like running into a solid, warm, living, wall.

Shelly didn’t care.

She seized the lawman in a desperate embrace, whimpering like a scared little girl, and his strong, warm arms closed around her as he rumbled, “There, now, little lady, just hold onto me, I’m here, I’m here, hold right onto me,” and she did, with a strength he hadn’t felt for a very long time.

She shivered, the fear she’d denied herself coming out through her hide, coming out with increasingly strong tremors, allowing herself the luxury of letting this man she knew, this man she trusted, hold her while she quietly fell apart.

“Nobody likes those things,” he rumbled, his voice deep and distorted with her ear pressed to his chest.  “Nobody likes to be locked in one of those.”

Shelly heard running feet, a shout:  “Shelly!  Shelly, we’ve got the Sheriff, he’s got keys!”

Shelly looked up into the amused, pale eyes of a lean old lawman with an iron-grey mustache.

“Go to him,” he smiled quietly.  “Kick him in the shins if you like.”

He released her and she saw something few people saw.

She saw a quiet, understanding smile, the smile of a father who loved his daughter very much.

She turned, walked toward the approaching figures, towards the Sheriff’s cruiser and the jacked-up pickup truck, then began running toward them.

There was the squeak of saddle leather, the sound of a walking horse, and when the pretty girl in the cheerleader’s outfit turned and pointed, all they saw was an empty street.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

41.  THE SECRET

 

“Miss Crane?”

Shelly Crane jumped, her spoon clattering to the fake-marble tabletop.

The drugstore was restored to what it used to be in its glory days, a genuine soda joint, all chrome and marble and stools at the counter:  the young man behind the counter wore a starched shirt and a bow tie, a white soda jerk’s hat, and he made an art form out of tossing ice cream from behind his back and catching it neatly in the fancy glass sundae cup.

Shelly Crane sat at a table, alone; she’d been absently dabbling her spoon in the melting vanilla ice cream, and she hadn’t noticed the Sheriff’s approach, not until he spoke in his usual gentle voice.

“I’m, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,” she stammered, her cheeks reddening:  the Sheriff eased himself down in the chair opposite her, deliberately placed his Stetson on a third chair.

“I owe the apology, Miss Crane.  I startled you.”

Shelly gripped her spoon nervously, placed it awkwardly on the napkin.

“Now that everyone has slept on it, can you tell me what happened last night over in Carbon?”

Shelly Crane’s face turned an absolute scarlet and she turned her eyes away, then looked quickly around the ornate, polished, shiny drugstore.

When the Sheriff sits down with a pretty young girl, it turns heads; they were being watched, and they both knew it.

“I didn’t want to ask you to come in for questioning,” the Sheriff smiled.  “There are … connotations … to being Called In for Questioning.”

“I, um,” Shelly replied nervously, then took a quick, impulsive bit of her sundae.  “Thank you.”

The Sheriff leaned back and smiled a little as the soda jerk set a chocolate sundae down in front of him.

“Ah, thank you,” he said quietly, handed the lad a folded bill:  “I’m paying for hers also, keep the change.”

“Thank you,” the soda jerk exclaimed, his grin quick, boyish; he looked bashfully at Shelly, then turned, snapped his fingers and cut a quick dance step before turning and swinging his hips around the end of the counter to return to his duty station behind the polished marble and chrome fixture.

“My great weakness,” Linn admitted, digging his spoon happily into the confection.

“I thought cops liked doughnuts,” Shelly said, immediately regretting her words:  she ducked her head, wishing she could crawl under her flared-glass sundae bowl.

“Most do,” the Sheriff agreed, “but this” – he tapped his spoon delicately against the tulip-flared glass – “is my great weakness.”  He winked and whispered, “It’s a secret, don’t tell!”

Embarrassed or not, Shelly giggled, looked shyly at the older man with the amused pale eyes.

“That’s better,” Linn said reassuringly.  “Now what happened last night, now that you’ve had a good night’s rest to settle things out?”

Shelly took a long breath, conflicting feelings chasing themselves across her young face.

“My boyfriend wanted me to go to Carbon with him after the game,” she admitted, “and I did, and he thought it would be such a joke to push me into that old jail cell and lock the door!”

“I see.”

“I am so very glad you had a key to that lock!”

Linn nodded slowly, drawing back a little, his look suddenly a mixture of suspicion and thoughtfulness.

“Now let’s suppose you were telling this to a stranger, somebody who wasn’t there,” the Sheriff said quietly, his voice pitched a little deeper, calculated to be calming, reassuring.  “Let’s start right after you got locked in.”

“Carl McFann,” Shelly said, her hands closing into fists, “pushed me in there and I almost fell, and he slammed the door, and he laughed!”

Her voice was still quiet but there was a definite edge to it, and the Sheriff looked beyond her, at those watching, listening.

“Let’s continue this party a little later,” he said quietly.  “Too many ears.”

Shelly turned, glaring at the other school-agers who were elaborately pretending to pay absolutely no attention to the pair.

Her head snapped around in surprise at the Sheriff’s pleased grunt, saw the man drawing the spoon from between savoring lips.

“Mmmmm,” he hummed with pleasure.

“You really do like it,” Shelly marveled.

“Told’ja.”  The Sheriff took another bite.  “Dig in, it’s too good to waste!”

She did.

A half hour later she was seated beside him, behind his desk, giggling as he pointed at a picture.

“That’s her?”  Shelly squeaked as she looked up at the Sheriff, delight in her bright sophomore’s eyes, and Linn nodded, grinning.

“Just don’t tell,” he cautioned, “but yes, my Mama the Sheriff used to be a cheerleader!”
“I’ll bet the boys were after her,” Shelly breathed mischievously, and Linn laughed, leaned back.

“Well, they were,” he agreed, “until her prom date got frisky and she left him alone in his car with a broken nose, and another fellow came limping in talking in a very high voice –“

“She didn’t!”

“Oh, but she did!”

Shelly covered her mouth with bent fingers and tried not to laugh, and managed to make a strangled, sputtering sound instead.

“My Mama was a looker, I’ll grant you that,” Linn sighed, then he looked directly at the high school cheerleader.  “Just like you are, Shelly, and no I am not putting the moves on you.”  He gave her a fatherly, almost serious look and continued, “I know what it is to see my little girl grow up and I see so much you can do if you choose.  Don’t let anyone stampede you into moving too fast, Shelly, not dating, not anything.”

Shelly was suddenly uncertain.

“Now that I’ve ruined the moment,” Linn said, straightening and shoving the picture album back on the desk blotter, “let’s try again.  Your boyfriend shoved you in that steel box and slammed the door and locked you in.”

“Um, yeah,” Shelly said uncertainly, scrambling to get her mental feet under her again.

“Then what happened?”

“He tried to find a key.  So did Donnie.  They were digging around trying to find a key that might have hung beside the lock or maybe it was in the lock and fell out.”

“What happened then?”

“They didn’t say a word, they just started running and I yelled at them and they didn’t say a word to me, they just … ran …”

Linn reached out, took her hands in his.  “You’re watching this like you’d watch a movie, Shelly.  It’s playing like a projection on the screen of your imagination.  You are sitting in here and you are safe, no harm can come to you.”  He gave her hands a gently squeeze, released them.

“I heard him start the truck and then he left and he burned rubber in the dirt.  I remember smelling the dirt he threw up.  It took it a minute to get to me but I smelled it.”

“Go on.”

“Then you showed up.”

Linn nodded.  “Go on.”

“I don’t know how you knew but you were there.  They’d been gone for a while.  Maybe twenty minutes.  They had my purse and my cell phone was in my purse and I didn’t have any way of telling time and then I heard you outside and you rode up and I heard your saddle squeak like it does when you dismount and you came to the door and asked if I was okay in there.”  Her words tumbled over one another like a dam-broke stream:  the pretty cheerleader hugged herself, shivered. 

“I was cold, Sheriff.  I was so cold, and you … I heard you pull out a keyring and jingle it and you unlocked the door and opened it and I ran into you and you held me.”

She looked up, tears streaking her cheeks.

“Thank you for holding me,” she whispered.  “I was so lost!”

Linn nodded, his face impassive.

“Go on.”

“Then they came back and I saw your cruiser with them and you told me to go to him and kick him in the shins if I wanted to.”

Linn blinked, and she saw the corners of his eyes wrinkle up just a little.

“So did you?”

She nodded.

“Did it hurt?”

“No,” she groaned, dropping her chin into the heels of her hands, slouched forward, elbows on her knees.  “No, I was wearing my cheer sneakers.”

Linn frowned, leaned back, looked at his Mama’s high school photograph.

He turned the photo album so Shelly could see it.

“Mama wore saddle shoes,” he said matter-of-factly.  “They had a hard rubber sole.  Good traction on the gym floor, didn’t leave marks and hurt like hell when she kicked someone.”

Shelly looked at the Sheriff, and the Sheriff began to regret he’d pointed this out.

“Shelly,” he said finally, “I can press criminal charges against your boyfriend if you’d like.”

She shook her head.  “No no no no no,” she said rapidly, hands up, palms toward him:  “I just … I don’t … I won’t be seen with him, ever again!”

Linn nodded, rose.  “Good enough.  That’s all I need.”

Shelly stood as well.

“Sheriff?”

He looked at her, his pale eyes a distinct, light blue.

“Thank you for … letting me hold onto you last night.”

Linn nodded.

“It’s … Daddy’s been dead three years now, and …”

She looked up again and he saw her bottom lip start to quiver, and then her face wrinkled up and she kind of collapsed into him and started crying again.

Cindy opened the door and the Sheriff motioned her in, thrust his chin at the box of tissues on his desk:  Cindy snatched out a half-dozen kerchiefs and thrust them into the Sheriff’s outstretched hand.

He let the distressed girl cry for a while, then when she came up for air, he carefully blotted the tears from her cheeks, murmuring in a quiet and fatherly voice:  he had her close her eyes, pressed the balled tissue against her damp eyelids, dropped the damp mass in the trash can and accepted another handful from his dispatcher.

“Here, now,” he said gently, “let’s blow that pretty little nose, shall we?” – and Shelly did, a loud and unladylike honk:  she sniffed, accepted another sheaf of sheets and dabbed at eyes and nose and hiccuped, looked up at the Sheriff.

“I’m sorry,” she squeaked, cleared her throat, coughed, tried again.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” she said in kind of a husky whisper.  “Daddy’s been … I miss my Daddy!”

Linn looked over at the dispatcher as he wrapped his arms around the distressed girl and held her while she started crying again, and Cindy saw her boss’s eyes were damp and glittering.

For all that the Sheriff was a hard man and a strong man, Cindy knew he was an old softy sometimes, and this was one of those times.

Linn had one of the deputies sit desk while Cindy took Shelly home.

He himself contemplated his Mama’s high school picture, then turned the page and looked long at her official portrait, with her six point star on the front of the blue suit dress’s lapel:  his practiced eye could tell where the holstered pistol rode under her off arm, and from her strong side belt:  her suits were custom tailored to help hide them, but offer instant access – features that had kept her alive more times than one.

He took a long breath, his jaw thrust out, as he turned the page and looked at the most difficult of the pictures he kept in the book.

It was himself, much younger, and his older brother, his Pa and his Mama, and he remembered the day.

He leaned his elbow on the desk blotter, rested his cheek bone against his knuckles.

“I miss you,” he whispered, “I miss you all” – then he snatched a tissue, wiped savagely at his face, snarling a little, forbidding himself to feel the grief he knew the picture would cause.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

42.  THE LORD’S MERCY

 

“Good lookin’ bunch.”

The voice was deep, approving, and Linn raised his head, then rose from his chair, a quiet fury mounting within him.

“I reckon you’d like to belt me one,” Old Pale Eyes said.

Linn stood, came around the desk, his step slow, the very image of a contained explosion.

He reached forward and gripped his thrice-great-grandfather’s coat sleeve.

He felt hard, lean muscle beneath.

“You are made of rawhide and whalebone,” Linn said slowly.  “Was I stupid enough to slug you, likely you’d knock the dog stuffing out of me and not break a sweat.”

“You’re smarter than you look.”

“I’m told that’s proof the Lord is merciful.”

The Old Sheriff’s eyes were bright with amusement and approval.

“You don’t scare easy, do you?”

“I seen hell,” Linn said quietly.  “Same as you did.”

The Old Sheriff nodded.  “Yes you did,” he agreed.  “I seen wars come and I seen wars go and it ain’t the tools, it’s the man and it’s all the same.”

“Yeah.”  Linn’s voice was a harsh rasp as memories of combat overseas rolled into view like a Leviathan breaching a calm ocean’s surface.

“I had nightmares for years,” the Old Sheriff admitted.  “Could not abide someone touchin’ my back.”

Linn nodded.  “Same here.”

“I recall that one fella did and you just plainly beat the livin’ hell out of him.”

Linn nodded.  “I ain’t particular proud of that.”

“You didn’t know he was plannin’ to snatch yer gun.”

Linn turned his head a little, eyes narrowed.

“Oh yeah.  He figured a little hick town, a hick cop, surprise him and yank his gun, kill him with it and disappear.  Go to the next town, rob someplace, kill any witnesses, drop your gun at the scene of the crime and move on.”

“Is that why –“

Old Pale Eyes nodded.  “Yep.  He had warrants outstanding that out-ranked any hold you had.”

“Just as well,” Linn muttered.  “Saved me from a court appearance.”

“As I recall, you marked him good.”

“I did,” Linn said tightly, then shivered.  “I realized I was killin’ him barehand so I throwed him throw a plate glass window to get him fur enough from me so I wouldn’t!”

“Like I said,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled, “smarter than you look!”

Linn’s eyes narrowed.  “You let that girl out last night.”

“I had a key.”

“Why didn’t you help Nicodemus?”

The Old Sheriff took a long breath, thrust his jaw out.

It was looking at an older reflection of himself, Linn realized.

“I could have,” he admitted. 

Linn’s hard, cold, pale eyes were an accusation in and of themselves.

“He was an agent,” Linn said quietly, his voice sharp edged.

“Agents run the risk of being found out.”

“You’ve intervened with others.”

Old Pale Eyes nodded.  “I did.”

“And you didn’t help Nicodemus.”

“Nope.”

“Any particular reason, or should I tear into you knowin’ full well you’ll knock me into next week?”

“Hit me if you like, won’t make any difference.”

“No.”  Linn’s voice was bitter.  “It won’t even make me feel better.”

“That answer can’t come from me.”  Old Pale Eyes leaned back against the wall.  “It’ll come but it can’t come from me.”

Linn nodded.

“Your daughter.”

“Marnie, what about her?”

“She’s a girl to be proud of.”

“I am.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I know.  She’s the hell and gone off-planet and eight minutes for a message to travel one way.”

“She’s kept that whole damn place from dyin’ more times than one.  You raised a hell raisin’ spit fire and a damn good thing.”

Linn’s face was hard and set.

“That’s why you held that little girl the way you did.  She missed her Daddy and for a minute she was safe in Daddy’s arms.”

“Yeah.  Reckon I did.”

“You did a good thing.  You give comfort.”  He straightened.  “Never doubt the good that you do.”

Linn opened his mouth to reply, but Old Pale Eyes was gone, just that fast.

There was nothing, no one, to which to make reply.

He blinked, shook his head, opened his office door and stepped out into the lobby.

“I need some coffee,” he muttered.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

43.  PULL!

 

“This used to be their livery.”

Linn looked around.

Like Firelands, the Carbon Hill livery was back, well back from their saloon, but directly behind.

“Must’ve burned down,” he muttered.  “Not much left.”

Barrents went over, kicked some weeds aside, frowned as his boot found something solid.

“Post here, it’s … looks like it was burnt off.”

Linn nodded.  Fires were not uncommon in the tinderbox of a livery stable; it was at once their greatest danger and their greatest fear, which is one reason it had been built a distance from the rest of the flammable structures there in town.

Barrents sauntered back to the cruiser, brought out a box, a plastic clay bird thrower dangling from his off wrist.

Linn shucked the double-ought loads out of the 870, thumbed in bird shot.

“You ready, boss?”

“Pull!”

Linn swung on the bird and blew a hole in the sky; unfortunately, it wasn’t that part of the sky occupied by the spinning claybird.

Barrents twisted another brittle disc into the thrower’s jaws.

“Pull!”  BANG!

“Rat feathers!”  Shak-SHAK!  “Pull!”

One after another, the orange domed, black-rimmed clay pigeons sailed into the sky, barely crossing; one after another, a smoke-trailing empty kicked out the side of the Remington riot gun; one after another, the Sheriff spat a profane exclamation with each miss, until he’d not only missed twenty in a row, he’d gone through rat feathers, bat feathers, lizard feathers, dragon claws and finally lapsed into a frowning silence rather than resort to the common Anglo-Saxon labiodental fricatives.

“Just as good as you did last week,” Barrents deadpanned.

“Yeah, well, I reckon that’s some kind of a record.”

He thumbed two rounds in the magazine while Barrents placed clay birds on two fence posts, each one about twenty feet away.

This time it was Barrents who yelled “Pull!” – two shots, two hits, two clouds of smoky dust drifting on the cool breeze.

“No holes in the pattern,” he said thoughtfully.

“Not unless it’s a little hole they’re getting through edgewise.  Your turn.”

Barrents accepted the shotgun, placed it on the folding card table commandeered for the purpose; he worked his earplugs into his ears; the black-eyed chief deputy loaded up with birdshot.

“You ready, Boss?”

“Say when!”

“Pull!”

The first claybird was a straight, going-away shot, right over the Navajo’s head.

He followed, dropping the muzzle a little, and the bird disappeared like a bad dream.

Two and three were crossing shots, going away at a long angle; he drove them into dust while he felt they remained in his rapidly-spreading shot swarm.

Twenty times the Sheriff slung the bird, twenty times his segundo fired, and twenty times the clay pigeon was blasted into dust.

“Your turn, boss.”

This time Linn scrounged an old tin can, tossed it up with his off hand, drove it straight up in the air, and BANG BANG BANG he hit it three times before it hit the ground.

Barrents nodded, his face grave, his eyes merry:  the deputy accepted the shotgun, bent to pick up the other mostly rusted to hell tin can, and slung it into the air.

Barrents hit it five times on its way down.

Linn shook his head.  “You and Brother Beymer!”  he muttered.

Barrents closed the action, pulled the trigger on the empty chamber, stuffed the 00 rounds back in the magazine.

“We done here, boss?”

“Other’n for cleanin’ up the cans, yeah.”

Linn reached into the box and pulled out a black plastic trash sack, began stuffing not just the shredded cans, but the other miscellaneous trash the weeds had harvested over the years.

“Out with it, boss,” Barrents said, folding his arms and leaning against one of the only posts still standing.

“What?”  Linn muttered, pretending to ignore his chief deputy’s question.

“Spill the beans, boss.  You never come out and humiliate yourself on the back end of a twelve gauge unless something is under your hide.”

Linn stopped, obviously considering, then he slowly, carefully, worked the air out of the trash sack and knotted its neck.

He turned, walked very slowly, very deliberately back to the Suburban, tossed the trash in the back.

Barrents saw him pretend not to look to his right, and Barrents saw a quiet half-smile, hidden as quickly as it arrived.

Linn worked his earplugs back into place, pulled an empty soda can from the back of the cruiser, walked back to where they’d been shooting.

He tossed the can up a few times, just a little, toss-and-catch, toss-and-catch, then he pitched the can up – fast – he drew, fired, fired again.

The can spun, then spun faster, wobbled to the ground.

“I get bored with that,” Linn said loudly.

Barrents grinned, pulled out a quarter-sized knockout from a junction box.

“Try this, Boss,” he yelled, flipped the coin-sized steel punchout into the air.

Linn raised his Glock, fired.

Watching eyes widened at the lawman’s draw, the watcher’s ears heard the quick, whistling whizzzz! as the steel circle was launched into low earth orbit.

Barrents clapped his hands together, once, then dry-washed them in obvious delight, laughing.

“As good as I am with a shotgun,” he declared loudly, “you’re better with a pistol!”

“Yeah,” Linn grunted.  “I get it honest.”

The watcher was a schoolboy; he flinched as a hard hand gripped his shoulder, and he flinched as a deep and gravelly voice opined quietly, “You’re damned right you get it honest.”

The teen-ager dropped a little, twisted, looked at the tall, tanned old man with light eyes and an iron-grey mustache, a man who smelled of leather and horse sweat, a man who looked tough as dried rawhide, but a man with a smile hidden deep in those pale eyes.

“Who are you?” the lad blurted, and the lean man in denim and flannel and a vest smiled with the corners of his eyes and looked fondly at the Sheriff as he and his deputy finished packing up to leave.

“I,” the old man rumbled, “am that man’s granddad, and you are going to remember just how well that man shoots.”

Somehow the teen-age spy doubted not one little bit that yes, he most certainly would remember!

 

It wasn’t until the drive back that Linn finally told Barrents what was eating him.

“You remember Rosie’s little drunk?”  he began, and Barrents nodded:  the skinny fellow was a familiar sight to the law enforcement community, mostly because the cheapest beer he could find was almost the only nutrition he’d had for as long as they could remember, and he’d been found dead, sitting in a stamped-steel chair on the librarian’s back porch.

“The Veterans’ Administration won’t allow near enough for a funeral.  The family has to put a thousand down for his funeral. They want a viewing and cremation but he has to be embalmed before the viewing.”

“Money sucking parasites,” Barrents muttered.

“Yeah.”

“Veteran, you say?”

“Yep.”

Barrents shook his head.  “Screwed over in life and in death.”

Linn nodded.  “You could say that.”

“Can his family afford it?”

Linn was quiet for a long moment before replying, “They can now.”

Barrents turned his black eyes forward, stared through the windshield for several long moments.

“Good.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

44.  PA DON’T LIKE ‘EM AND NEITHER DO I

 

Jacob Keller was Sheriff.

Jacob Keller looked at the skunk buggies and at wires draping above the street, he considered music he heard that wasn’t plucked from banjo strings by living fingers and he steadfastly refused to use that box on the wall in his Sheriff’s office that connected with something called Central, a disembodied voice that should be coming out of a woman’s living throat instead of from a black rubber cone a man held to his ear while talking into another black rubber cone sticking out of the aforementioned box.

Jacob was tall and lean and pale eyed, Jacob had scars from encounters with less than pleasant people, Jacob had a quiet manner and a gentle voice, unless he was not feeling quiet nor gentle, then he could sharpen the edge of his voice and use it to cut someone long, deep and continuous.

He considered it a fault and it was one of his only regrets, that he’d used his voice to hurt folks:  he had no qualms about taking a stick of stovewood and belting someone across the back of the head, or smacking their hand hard enough to break a bone to knock a weapon out of their grip; he slept well at night knowing the men he’d killed deserved it, but the one thing that bothered him most was the memory of the hurt in peoples’ eyes when he spoke harshly, and with that cutting edge to his words.

His son was his chief deputy – he’d joked it was a family tradition, especially when Nicodemus’s little boy strutted along behind his Pa and allowed as he was gonna be Sheriff when he got bigger, and him not much more than knee tall to a grown man – and right now Nicodemus was out serving papers on a fellow who had a disagreement with someone else.

Nicodemus looked much like his Pa.

Now where Jacob’s mustache was starting to go iron grey in sprouts, Nicodemus still had the face fur of a good chestnut-red, a good Clan Maxwell red, he called it:  Jacob had some notion that yes, he had Celtic blood somewhere in his background, but he didn’t make any real study of it:  Jacob was who he was, and in this he was content:  if his son wished to look into their come-befores, why, he was welcome to do that.

Hell, he was a man grown, he could do as he pleased without anyone else’s let-be.

Jacob’s eyes tightened a little at the corners as he considered his son.

Nicodemus was a fine man, and had his father’s approval, though Jacob had the fault too many fathers share, and that was that he hadn’t expressed his approval in so many words.

He’d told his wife, Annette, that Nicodemus knew he was proud of him, and Annette asked, “Have you ever said as much?”  and Jacob looked at her with honest surprise.

“Hell, woman, he knows it already!”  Jacob exclaimed, but he felt a tick of doubt as Annette gave him “That Look” and said in her gentle voice, “Has he a crystal ball, Jacob?”

Nicodemus was, in many ways, his father’s son, and his pale-eyed grandfather’s grandson:  he also inherited the gregarious nature of his Mama’s people, and so, on his way back to Firelands, he stopped at a rancher’s hail, and the two went into the man’s house and Nicodemus complimented the rancher’s wife on her beauty, kissed the hand of their nine-year-old daughter and seized their year-old son under the arms, hauled him well more than man’s-head-high off the ground and laughed as the little boy squealed with delight as he flew miles above the earth, safe in this strong man’s rib-surrounding hands!

They shared pie and coffee and much good talk, and finally the rancher pulled out two war prizes he’d been given, and Jacob nodded as he examined the pair.

One was a German Luger, finely finished and beautifully made, and the other was an American .45 automatic, stamped PROPERTY US GOVT.

“You know these are just the comin’ thing,” the rancher said.  “If the Guvvermit thinks enough of ‘em to spend good money on all it would take to supply all them sojers …” 

He let the sentence dangle.

Nicodemus smiled a little as he regarded the Luger.

He’d seen them before, matter of fact he had one, but it was not really what he’d wanted for a belt gun:  the light barrel felt awful whippy in his hand, and he wasn’t satisfied with the way he shot it.

“I reckon I’ll keep my Colt,” he said softly as the rancher’s wife came in with pie and a steaming coffee pot.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller glared at the silhouette target.

The target, for its part, was not in the least intimidated by the elder lawman’s pale eyed gaze.

Chief of Police Will Keller had fired groups at each of the several boxes, circles and stars surrounding the grey silhouette, and he was not at all happy with the way he’d performed with the issue pistol.

He considered for a long moment, then unbuckled his belt, peeled out of the retention holster and bent over to dig around in his gun bag.

“Set me up a fresh target,” he told the rangemaster, and another colorful silhouette target was clipped to the overhead bar and run out to the regulation distance.

The rangemaster was supervising qualification, and Chief Will Keller was qualifying for the first time in a very long time, and the rangemaster frowned a little as Will threaded on a thumb break holster and a double speedloader pouch.

He held his counsel as Will loaded a revolver, thrust it in the basket weave holster, set the thumb break.

He drew, placed three shots on each of the squares, shooting double action.

Instead of groups the size of a dinner plate, he was punching clover leaves.

He reloaded, smoothly, quickly, easily; his hands had eyes, and his last six went into the silhouette’s eyes, neatly, precisely.

“Reckon this’ll do,” Will drawled laconically, shooting a challenging look at the rangemaster.

The target was run back and the rangemaster looked long at the neatly placed shots.

His reply was just as long winded.

“Yep.”

 

Nicodemus swung easily into the saddle, thanked the rancher for his hospitality.

“You sure you don’t want to start carryin’ them new automatic loadin’ pistols?”  the rancher grinned, knowing full well Nicodemus wouldn’t.

“Nope,” Nicodemus smiled a little, for he knew the man’s thoughts:  “no, I’ll keep my revolvin’ pistol, thank’ee anyhow.  Them fancy automatics …”

His Apple-horse danced a little under him and Nicodemus stroked the gelding’s neck, soothing him.

“Pa don’t like ‘em and neither do I.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

45.  I OUGHTA HANG YOU RIGHT HERE

 

Linn looked over at Barrents and swore.

Barrents reached forward, wiped his finger along the row of rocker switches and mashed the go pedal.

The Suburban didn’t have the big monsterhorse engine of a previous generation, but what it had was fuel injected, and the gleaming cruiser surged forward like it had been boarded across the backside:  the Sheriff was grimly silent as his segundo expertly wheeled the marked four wheel drive in a four wheel drift around the curve, then steered a straight course for the fairgrounds.

Barrents saw two more cruisers approaching – one Firelands police, one Sheriff’s cruiser, both of them lit up with their ears pinned back.

Barrents reached for the siren control, gave the black plastic knob a twist and happily crowed, “Yodel dog!” as a hundred watts of electronic siren screamed like a damned soul from the twin speakers bolted down on the brush guard.

Inside the stable, Chief of Police Will Keller seized the offender by his shirt front and slammed him hard against the wall, missing the timber upright and knocking the tin sheathing loose:  he spun, threw the man hard, slinging him along the wet, concrete, manure-fouled walkway between the stalls.

He walked up to the man, straddled him, seized the back of his vest and hauled him upright, quickly, viciously, then released him and kicked his backside, hard, knocking him face-first again into the filthy cement.

His mind heard, accounted for and disregarded two distinct sirens on approach; he heard tires slide, the sound of running feet, and he had the offender off the floor and slammed hard against a post, his hand around the man’s throat, as backup came running in both ends of the fairground stable.

Linn came in with a double handful of shotgun, as was his habit; Barrents had a rifle across his chest, muzzle down, the low ready he’d used in the Marines:  both men were looking left, looking right, advancing at a cautious trot.

Linn saw a crying woman – but a woman crying without tears, her face red, clutching a red-faced, clench-fisted little boy to her:  the woman had a red and bruised cheek that was swollen and coloring up, and Linn knew the woman was not crying from sorrow or grief … she was crying because she was mad, and perhaps it was a good thing his uncle the police chief arrived before she found a pitchfork.

He rather suspected the bloody-faced individual pinned choking against the post was the offender.

“Stay there,” Linn said to the woman, his voice low, urgent; he and Barrents came up on either side of the pale-eyed police chief, as did the other two officers.

“You,” Will grated, his eyes dead pale and granite hard, “are under arrest.”

His lips parted and his smile was absolutely wolflike.

“First of all I am charging you with domestic violence.  If I could charge you with being a damned coward I would, and I’d hang you myself, right here.”  His hand tightened around the man’s throat just a bit more, making it hard for him to breathe.

Neither deputy, nor the policeman, nor the Sheriff himself, made any more to dissuade the Chief from his hard and strangling grip around the criminal’s neck.

“Next I am chargin’ you with assault on a law enforcement officer.”  His words were slow, measured, utterly menacing.  “With firearm specification.  That means you are going away for a very long time.”  He bent his elbow some, loosening his grip just a bit on the man’s throat.  “Cowards don’t last long in prison.”

Will looked at his officer, standing on the other side of the post from the prisoner.

“Go talk to the lady.  I reckon she’ll be happy to give you a statement.  Might see what the boy has to say as well.”

“Yes, sir,” Eddie Smith said crisply, swinging around the post and behind the Sheriff and stepping carefully around piles of horse manure on his way down the concrete runway.

“He’s walkin’ on tippy toes?”  the Chief asked quietly, so only they could hear, and Linn nodded, his eyes wrinkling just a little at the corners.

“Thought so,” Will rumbled.  “Shiny shoe syndrome.”  He turned his cold gaze like a gun turret, bringing them to bear on the pinned prisoner.

“Now you come around at me with a rifle.”  His teeth gleamed beneath his mustache.  “I don’t allow that.  You’re gonna be nice and quiet and you’re gonna do exactly as I tell you, otherwise I am going to knock the dog stuffing out of you and your miserable carcass will never, ever, be found.  I’ve done it before, y’know.”

His comment was so casual, so uncaring, so matter-of-fact, that the prisoner’s florid face paled noticeably.

“First off, you have the right to remain silent.” 

Will recited Miranda’s warning (he never called it “the Miranda warning,” he always called it “Miranda’s warning” after a line he’d been fed as a rookie cop), and ended with, “Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”

The prisoner, seeing he wasn’t alone and there were witnesses he could call on later, tried to bluster “No.  No, I don’t understand, and you assaulted me and you’re strangling me –“
Will drove a hard fist into the man’s belly, and there was absolutely no sympathy in either the Sheriff’s eyes, nor his deputy’s.

“I gave you your rights and these witnesses will attest to that.  That’s all I have to do.”  He seized the man, spun him, slammed him face first into the post.  “Hands behind your back.”

He nodded curtly to his officer.  “You’ll want to hose this one off so he don’t stink up my jail.  Might have to launder your back seat afterward as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take note of his every word on the way in, don’t ask him any questions, but once he’s locked up, let ‘em know an old man his grandfather’s age knocked him into the middle of next week.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chief Will Keller waited until the now-cuffed prisoner was half-escorted, half-dragged to the cruiser, waited until he was contained in the back seat, before turning toward a stall and the back end of a genuinely huge horse.

“You gonna let me come in there?”  he rumbled, patting the horse’s hinder in a comradely manner, twisting his hip as a hoof lashed out:  he went on up beside the horse, crooning to the big brown warmblood, finally coming to its head.

Hands and voice and a gentling touch and finally the horse’s ears came up, and though it shied twice when the pale eyed old lawman reached for it, it finally allowed Will to caress its ears and its nose.

“You’re shiverin’,” Will rumbled.  “You been beat, haven’t you?  You don’t like loud voices much.”

“But I don’t wanna!”  came the wail from down the stable.  “Mama, noooo!” – and young and running feet scampered noisily toward man and beast.

Will’s eyebrow went up as the boy slithered fearlessly under the horse and came out at its head, and he nodded approvingly as the horse laid its jaw over the boy’s chest, almost as if to tuck the lad into itself – a protective move – and Will nodded again.

“Now there’s a good fellow,” he rumbled, and the horse’s ears swung to him momentarily.

“I don’t want ‘em to send you away,” the boy whimpered.

Will squatted.  “Son, how old are you?”

“Eight, sir.”

Will nodded.

“You smokin’ cig-gars yet, son?”

The boy looked surprised, then grinned a little.  “No, sir.”

“Don’t reckon you’re drivin’ neither.”

“No, sir.”

“You like this horse.”

“Yes, sir.  He’s mine but Pa was gonna kill him!”

“Any pa’tickelar reason?”

“Yes,” a woman’s voice said defiantly from the next stall, and he saw the bruised face looking between the boards.  “He wanted to kill the horse to hurt Jimmy and get back at me.”

Will nodded.  “Cruelty to animals.  I’ll add the charge.”

“That’s why he had the rifle.  He was going to shoot Stomper here but I wouldn’t let him.”

“When did he belt you?”

“When I told him I was leaving him.”

“Still gonna leave ‘im?”

He saw the fury in the woman’s eyes.  “No man,” she said quietly, a deep and abiding fury hiding in her voice, “no man hits me and gets away with it.  Either I put him away in jail, Chief, or I’ll kill him.”

“A wife beater is like a sheep killin’ dog,” Will said thoughtfully.  “Once they taste blood they never stop and the only cure is a bullet.”

He frowned at the boy.  “That-there is an awful big horse for someone your size, son.  You ride this fella?”

“Bareback, sir.  I … Pa wouldn’t … he said a saddle would be wasted money.”

Will looked over at his nephew.  “Linn, we know anyone that does saddle work?”

Linn nodded, looked at his segundo, looked back.

“I do, Chief.  Let me see what I can scare up.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

46.  STOMPER

 

The Sheriff did not regret one bit the check he wrote for the veterinarian’s visit.

He’d grown with horses and dogs and he knew the value of both to a boy, and when he saw how this big Stomper-horse laid its chin over the boy’s chest as if to protect him, he remembered being very young himself, and how a huge and absolutely black horse did the same to him.

Right now he was watching a lad in blue jeans and a grin brushing down his big brown Stomper-horse, and he was waiting for the boy to finish before bringing one out of his bag of tricks.

It was a rather large bag.

It had to be.

He walked up on the boy and the horse.

Stomper-horse regarded him warily, but not as skittishly as he had at first:  Linn had Stomper brought out to his place, where he had pasture and room to run, where he had horses to run with.

Stomper was a warmblood – he was big, a draft horse mix, but he was a good looking animal, not as blunt and blocky as an animal dedicated to the plow … Linn remembered reading his aunt Sarah’s account of riding her Snowflake, an absolutely huge Frisian, and describing the experience as akin to trying to straddle the dining room table.

“Jimmy,” he said softly, and the boy turned, curry still in hand.

“Let’s see how Stomper does with a saddle, shall we?”

“Saddle?”  the boy said, puzzled.

“You ever saddle a horse?”

“No, sir.”

Linn nodded, picked up a saddle blanket and one of his own saddles.  “Kind of like this.”  He walked outside, whistled; Jimmy watched as the Sheriff saddled one of his Appaloosas, listened as he spoke of no wrinkles in the blanket, and put a stirrup up like this hung over the saddle horn, and how to cinch without the horse swelling out its belly with intent to hang the rider upside down.

“Reckon you’re tall enough to saddle Stomper in there?”

Jimmy looked crestfallen.  “No, sir,” he admitted.

“We’ll figure it out,” the Sheriff said breezily.

Less than ten minutes later, lawman and little boy were saddled up and walking their mounts across the pasture.

Jimmy’s eyes were huge and delighted as his young backside got used to settin’ in a brand new, just-for-him saddle, and the Sheriff remembered what it was to be a little boy on top of a man sized horse, knowing he was taller than anyone else, even giants, and that something absolutely huge and utterly powerful lived just underneath his seat, and he remembered innocently accepting the magic that accompanies such a moment.

Connie had their young one on her back, sleeping in a pappoose carrier, as she and Jimmy’s mother watched the pair riding slowly across the meadow.

Jimmy’s mother suddenly panicked, grabbed for her phone.  “Oh, no,” she moaned.  “No, no, no, no!”

“What’s wrong?”  Connie asked.

“What time’s the train?” – just as the steam-whistle howl of the restored steam engine wailed in the distance.

Jimmy’s voice was thin and frightened, his mother’s breath was caught up in her throat as Stomper whipped around and began running toward the board fence just as hard as he could go, the Sheriff wheeling his Apple-horse around and pursuing.

The women watched as the Sheriff shook out a loop, spun a flawless lariat over his head, the loop soaring like a circling cobra, ready to strike –

Jimmy’s voice slammed a steel hatch over its head, locking itself in his throat as Stomper thrust hard against the earth and lifted his forehooves and sailed over the whitewashed fence, one rearhoof just nicking the top board:  Apple-horse sailed easily over, landed lightly:  Jimmy’s chin came down to his chest as his head whipsawed down, and only luck and a double handful of saddlehorn kept him from tumbling over the horse’s shoulder to the unpleasantly firma terra below them.

“He hates trains,” Jimmy’s mama gasped.  “He hates trains!”

Connie’s mouth opened.  “Wha-a-at?”  she asked, watching helplessly as her husband came along side the big brown Pegasus, his lariat loop collapsing, then horses and riders disappeared as the grade dropped on the other side of the hill.

Connie gripped the mother’s arm. “Can you ride?”

“Yes,” she hissed, and the two women began running for the barn.

 

Apple-horse was born in the mountains and grew up in the mountains, high in the thin air:  his lungs were big, his blood thick and rich, and none of the Sheriff’s modest herd found altitude a handicap.

Apple-horse paced Stomper easily, enjoying the run:  the Sheriff had pursued horses before, and always on this particular mount.

The Sheriff was not enjoying the ride at all.

Stomper was charging toward the train, the combination that had both ore cars behind the engine, and after the few freight cars, a passenger car.

Quickly, suddenly, Linn slowed Apple, then squirted ahead again, on Stomper’s starboard side:  he ran the Appaloosa’s shoulder hard into the warmblood’s, a desperate move to try and turn the horse:  yelling, he kept his gelding hard against the big brown horse, turning him a little, a little more, a little more, until – still running flat-out, still charging this metal monster it apparently hated – they were running beside it instead of at it.

The Sheriff knew this territory and he knew that – worse case – he could halt Apple-horse and they would live.

That would be the worst case, because there was a trestle ahead, and trestles are built over low places, and this one was very low and very steep and it was getting very the hell too close.

I can grab the boy and yank him to me and let that big brown horse go over –

 

Connie rode like an Indian, low over her mare’s neck, seeming part of the horse more than its rider:  another woman followed on a swift little bay, a horse that was comfortable with its herd, and when this part of its herd was heading for someplace else at a good velocity, the bay followed, determined to keep up, irrespective of the unfamiliar soul in the saddle.

Connie led the way like an arrow loosed:  she shot straight across the far meadow, calculating to intercept the running pair, and her instinct was good.

Too good.

Her mare reared, protesting, muttering, for she didn't want to stop, she wanted to run some more;  the bay, on the other hand, was more than happy to slow to a stop, and snuff loudly at the ground, hoping to find something besides tough, dry grasses to eat.

Connie felt her stomach shrivel up as she saw Jimmy and her husband running the absolute rim of the canyon, finally drawing away from the precipice, but not until her imagination populated the yawning gulf with her skydiving husband and a kicking, screaming, falling Appaloosa gelding.

She watched the pair turn and run uphill, toward her, and Linn had the warmblood by the cheekstrap:  with the grade, with the run, with the Appaloosa slowing, with the man’s touch and his voice, Stomper slowed, until they came up beside the women, the blowing, sweating horses coming to an easy stop just as Jimmy’s Mama’s bay happily greeted her herd with a sweet whinnying whistle.

Connie looked at her husband, trying to think of what to say.

Jimmy looked from one to another, wondering who would speak first, and finally filled in the void with his own voice.

“That was fun!”  he declared.  “Can we do it again?”

Linn turned Apple-horse and looked directly at the grinning lad, remembering the feel of his Apple-horse’s hooves barely touching earth, remembering how gravity was reaching up from the chasm and hauling at him, remembering how close he’d come to one final flight, straight down.

The youngest Keller, secure in his papoose backpack, yawned widely and quietly dozed back off.

“Um,” Jimmy Hill’s mama offered helpfully, “I forgot to tell you … Stomper really hates trains!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

47.  THE DOZER

 

Lexie was young, and Lexie was curious, and Lexie sat beside her Mama and kicked her young legs, happily drumming her heels against the underside of the padded seat until her Mama’s gentle hand and whispered voice stopped her restlessness:  she looked around, bright-eyed, listening to steel wheels chuckling against steel tracks beneath her, hearing at once a rhythmic click-click, click-click, and a strong, steady rumble:  she hadn’t paid much attention to the big, burnished and colorful steam engine, though her Mama politely endured the docent’s explanation.

Lexie paid little attention to the story of the restored Baldwin and its origin, its naming, its being sold by a man with a broken heart, how it slept in a dry desert for half a century and then was discovered and retrieved, rebuilt and restored, and how it worked the short line between Cripple Creek and Carbon Hill, primarily as a tourist line, but doubling as an ore hauler for the gold mines when needed.

Lexie stood up, then turned and knelt on her seat, looking over its padded back:  the seat behind her was empty, but the very back seat, the one against the wall, was occupied by a pretty lady wearing an old fashioned, shimmery-green dress, with her hair all jacked up, and a fancy diamond greenish something at her throat.

“Mama,” Lexie asked, turning and dropping onto her bottom, “why is that pretty lady wearing that oldie dress behind us?”

Lexie’s Mama was a nurse from back East, on vacation from delivering babies at an Appalachian hospital:  she turned and smiled, and the pretty lady smiled back, then returned to the little book open in her hand.

“She is a docent,” her Mama explained, and Lexie replied “Oh,” as if that explained everything, at least for all of six seconds, when she wrinkled up her nose and asked her Mama, “What’s a dozer?”

“It’s kind of like a tour guide,” her Mama said in that oh-don’t-ask-me-too-many-questions that Mamas get sometimes, and so Lexie hopped to her feet and scampered around the end of the seat, back toward the pretty lady.

“Hi,” she greeted her, bouncing a little on her toes.  “I’m Lexie an’ Mama says you’re a dozer!”

The pretty lady laughed, closing her book and placing it on the seat beside her.

She was a little pale, but the color came up in her cheeks as she laughed, and her hair was red and really pretty all on top of her head the way it was, and she wore a pretty little green hat on top that perched like a rare bird on a tropical tree branch.

“My name’s Lexie,” the child continued.  “What’s a dozer?”

The pretty lady laughed and tilted her head a little and Lexie’s mama smiled to see it, for she was keeping track of her active and curious daughter:  the woman was obviously one of the scenic railway’s volunteers, she thought, an historic interpreter who told passengers how it was way back when.

“Why, I don’t know,” the woman said, widening her pale eyes innocently.  “What do you think it means?”

Lexie frowned.  “I think it means you tell us about old stuff.”

The woman’s laugh was pleasant, and contagious:  the passenger car rode the rear of the train, which gave them the best view of the terrain, as they could see out the end windows as well as the side windows, and indeed the terrain was nothing short of spectacular.

There were a little over a dozen tourists in the railcar, and they smiled to hear the woman’s laugh:  a few of them got up and came back to the rear of the car, for none of them noticed the woman when they boarded.

“Do you mean how Firelands used to be, back when we rode horses and men with gold fever came through and bought up shovels and lanterns and high topped boots?”

Lexie nodded.

“Men rode horses because horses can carry their gear and the rider as well, horses can cover ground in a hurry – like those ones.”

She pointed out the window and Lexie saw a really big brown horse with a little boy clinging desperately to the saddlehorn, a spotty horsie running beside it, and a man reaching out to seize the big brown horsie’s cheek thing, and they were running down hill straight toward the train.

“You can see,” the woman explained in a gentle voice, “the brown horse is a runaway, and the man on the Appaloosa is turning it so it doesn’t run into the side of the train.”

“That would hurt,” Lexie said in a small voice, anxious eyes turning from the window to the woman, and the woman’s gloved hands brushed a wisp of hair from Lexie’s face.

“Yes it would,” she agreed, “but I think he can turn them.”

Someone a few seats up looked out the window and ahead, and Lexie heard an “Uh-oh!”

“Now the man will have to turn his horse and the big brown horse,” the woman explained without looking, “because if he doesn’t, they’ll hit the side of the train and be hurt – but if he does turn them, he has a big drop-off just ahead.”

Lexie’s Mama was listening to the woman’s words; her eyes flicked ahead, saw the surprised look on other passengers’ faces as they looked out and forward, and she felt her stomach tighten the way it did when Dispatch called their wing and said an ambulance was inbound with a difficult delivery.

“What’s a drop-off?”  Lexie asked innocently, her brown eyes big and round, and the woman smiled gently, looked up at Lexie’s Mama.

“I can see where she gets her good looks,” she complimented.  “She reminds me much of my girls when they were little.”

Lexie’s Mama came out of her seat and crossed the car, her nose an inch from the window, staring as the man on the Appaloosa fought the brown horse to turn it:  she saw the earth disappear ahead of them, and as they came abreast, man and horses turned and never slowed, galloping on absolutely the very edge of the drop-off.

Kelley’s mouth opened and her stomach fell about ten feet as she saw the occasional hoof-swing out over the chasm as they ran:  rocks and clods fell away, fell the way man and horse would fall, and still might.

“Sometimes a horse took a fright, or took a notion,” the pretty woman was saying, “and had to be caught.  Sometimes they roped it and slowed it, sometimes they rode beside it and turned it, and sometimes they just got away.”

The train continued on its way, over the trestle, the sound changing, becoming a little more hollow, a little softer as the railcars’ sound no longer reflected off packed gravel ballast back into the cars’ bellies:  heads turned, watching man and horses and a scared little boy charging uphill to where two women sat their horses, obviously waiting.

“The Sheriff,” the woman explained, “had pale eyes and an iron grey mustache, and his horse’s name was Cannonball, because she ran like a cannonball fired from a field gun.”

“What’s a field gun?”  Lexie interrupted, and the woman laughed, and more people smiled:  the tension was eased off, now that man and horse had turned from their approaching doom, and a little girl’s innocence and a kindly woman’s replies filled the car with her curious voice, and the gentle explanations.

“That’s a cannon.  Big noisy thing that shoots bowling balls.”

“Oh.”

“Now the Sheriff had a pale-eyed son who rode an Appaloosa stallion.  Do you know what an Appaloosa is?”

Lexie shook her head, her ribbon-tied pigtails swinging briskly as she did.

“It’s kind of a spotted horse.  It’s native to the American West.  The Sheriff’s son became Sheriff and he raised the Appaloosa on his ranch.  That one you just saw is one of his horses.”

“I like horsies,” Lexie declared.  “They’re fuzzy.”

The woman laughed a little and patted Lexie’s hand with her lace-gloved fingers.  “I’ve never heard them called fuzzy, but yes they are,” she agreed.  “Do you ride horses?”

“I’d like to,” Lexie said wistfully. 

“We’ll see what we can arrange,” the woman said, leaning close and speaking quietly, then put a finger to her lips:  “No promises now, but if it’s possible …”

Lexie’s eyes got big and wide and she jumped out of her seat and scampered down the aisle to where her Mama was still in the seat she’d moved to.
“Mama, Mama,” she said excitedly, “I’m gonna ride a horsie, that nice lady said –“

Lexie pointed –

Lexie and her Mama and three other people looked where the delighted little girl was pointing –

The corner seat was empty, all but a book, as if laid down by an interrupted reader.

As they were ready to leave the train, someone picked up the book and handed it to Lexie, and she showed it to her Mama, explaining that the nice lady with pale eyes was reading it.

“ ‘Legends, Lies and Tall Tales of Firelands County, Colorado,’” she read aloud, “by S. L. McKenna.”

“I think we should give it back to her,” Lexie said, and her Mama agreed:  the conductor took Lexie under the arms and swung her to the depot platform, then offered his hand as her Mama descended the cast-iron steps to the painted wood.

“Excuse me,” Kelley said hesitantly, “one of your docents was reading this earlier, and I don’t seem to find her.  Could you give this back to her?”

The porter blinked, puzzled.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said slowly, “but we don’t have any docents scheduled aboard today.”

“Mama, there she is,” Lexie exclaimed happily, pointing to the end of the platform, and a woman with elaborately-upswept red hair raised her parasol, then turned and smiled at them, and as they watched, she disappeared.

Kelley’s mouth fell open and she looked at the porter.

“I think you’re supposed to have this,” the porter said.  “We’ve seen this before.”

Kelley looked down as he placed the paperback in her hands, looked at it as if he were handing her a dry, salted-down codfish.

Lexie seized her Mama’s hand, pointed, jumping up and down with excitement.

“Mama, Mama, look!  It’s the horsie-mans!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

48.  THE HORSIE-MANS

 

“Ma’am,” Sheriff Linn Keller said gently, “I’d be obliged if you’d let Jim and I ride for a bit.  We both need more saddle time after …”

He swallowed, took a long breath, blew it out, looked over at Jimmy.

“After all that.”

Connie sidled her mare up against the gelding, took the woman’s hand.  “If he doesn’t ride now he’ll be too scared to ride ever again,” she said quietly.  “We can ride with them.”

Anna Mae nodded, looked at her son.

“Heels down,” she said, “back straight, reins in your left hand.”

Jimmy blinked, shivered, released his death grip on the saddle horn – matter of fact, he let go of it like it was hot, for he remembered that only the greenest amateur ever held the saddle horn.

He picked up the knotted reins, held them in his hand, palm up.

“We’ll get you a pair of gloves,” the Sheriff said thoughtfully. “With me, then.”

Apple-horse led, followed by Jimmy on his big brown Stomper-horse; the women rode side by side, following, and they set an easy pace back into Firelands.

Their first stop was the Mercantile.

Lucky enough, the proprietor had a good stock of leather work gloves; the Sheriff nodded his approval as Jimmy worked his hands into a pair, pronounced the fit good:  their next stop was the shoe store – “If a man’s gonna ride, he’d oughta ride proper,” the Sheriff said quietly as he paid for the lad’s boots and three pair of socks, a dauber, boot polish and two brushes.  “I’ll show you how to polish those up.”

Not fifteen minutes later, four horses were tethered in front of the Silver Jewel, and their riders were inside, set around a table, talking happily as a meal was brought over and set down in front of them.

Anna Mae looked at the taters and gravy, smelled steaming fragrance from green beans with onions and lots of bacon, and as the Sheriff split open a sweet roll and buttered it generously, then handed it to Jimmy, she swallowed hard and willed herself not to cry.

It didn’t work.

They were back in the back, in the private room where the Ladies’ Tea Society held its meetings, where private gatherings were held; they were alone, and no one was there to see this woman hide her face in the cloth napkin and try her best to stifle everything she’d been keeping corked up.

Jimmy, of course, was alarmed; he started to scoot over to his Mama, but the Sheriff’s light grip on his arm stopped him:  Linn crooked a finger, leaned over, and Jimmy leaned toward the lawman, listened as the pale eyed man spoke quietly, very quietly, into his pink-scrubbed ear.

The Sheriff explained in little more than a whisper that women were remarkable creatures, that they were far stronger than anyone realized, and they could stand an immense amount of strain, but they have to let it out and when it’s safe – when they know they can let it out safely – they will, and tears are as much a safety valve for a woman as a pop-off valve is for a steam locomotive.

Jimmy puzzled over this, for he was still quite young and he wasn’t sure quite what a pop-off valve was, other than it was what went bad and spit hot water all over their basement floor last month:  the Sheriff had every intention of riding down to the depot when The Lady Esther was ready to leave, he and Jimmy and that big Stomper-horse, for he was of a notion that exposure to the train would lessen the big warmblood’s dislike of its mechanical competitor.

“Your Mama,” Linn whispered, “is letting out some of that Ungodly strain she’s been feeling.  This have been really had for her for some long time now and she can finally vent off some of it.”

The Sheriff’s cell phone went off – it sounded like a great bronze bell, tolling with a majestic slowness, and Jimmy grinned quickly, his face lighting up – “Cloister bell?”

Linn nodded, winked, pressed a button: “Uncle Will.”

He listened, a frown almost forming before assuming a professionally expressionless face:  Jimmy watched and listened, trying to puzzle something together between the “Mmm,” the “Uh-huh,” and “I thought as much.”

Connie and Jimmy’s Mama were talking, quietly, the way women will; the youngest pale-eyed Keller slept soundly in his Mama’s arms.

Linn hung up, looked long and thoughtfully at the woman diagonally across the table from him, then smiled a little as Connie wiped her eyes and returned his gaze.

“I didn’t expect … this,” she said, her voice husky.

“No,” the Sheriff agreed.  “I reckon not.”

“I’d … we came out here …”

“You came out here because your husband is a wife beater and he wanted to stay a step ahead of the law.  You came out here because he made you come, you and Jim here, you came out because he said you were going to.  You expected to beaten and browbeat and treated as badly as you were back East.  I’d say he told you nobody would help you, nobody would like you, nobody would help you.  I’d say he tried his best to isolate you, physically and emotionally, psychologically most of all.”

Anna Mae was silent for several long moments, then swallowed a suddenly-dry throat and husked, “How did you know?”

“That was my Uncle Will.  He’s Chief of Police.  He’s my Mama’s twin and he finds things out.”  Linn slid the phone back into his shirt pocket.  “He got hold of some people back East and looked into your husband’s doin’s.” 

He frowned, looked at his plate.

“I’m about ready for dessert.  Once we’re done here I’ll take you down the street to a friend of mine.  Attorney.  If you want divorced from that wife beatin’ scoundrel, we’ll make it happen, we’ll get you set up with a place of your own, and you don’t need to worry about your husband.  He’s going up river for assault on a police officer with weapon specification – automatic prison time – then once we’re done with him here, he goes back East to face two local felony counts and then Federal charges of fleeing across state lines.”

Anna Mae tilted her head back and took a few deep breaths, her eyes closed, and she shivered.

“No,” she finally whispered.  “No, Sheriff, I did not expect any of this.”

 

Stomper stopped, more because the other horses did rather than any command from his youthful rider.

Jimmy’s Mama, Anna Mae, swung easily down, tied off the bay mare, Connie stepping down with her.

“Jimmy, with me,” Linn said quietly, and the two turned their horses and walked across the street and down the alley, and over toward the railroad tracks.

They turned together and walked their mounts alongside the gleaming tracks and to the end of the depot.

“We’ll wait here,” the Sheriff said, easing the weight off his backside:  Jimmy, watching, did the same.

Linn saw the boy imitating him and he remembered what it was to be a boy, and what it was to imitate something he saw in an older man, and how good it felt when it worked, and he knew how good it felt to ease his weight off his saddle setter.

Linn swung down and let Apple’s reins dangle, ground-reining him; he walked over to Stomper, took him fearlessly by the cheek strap.

Stomper’s eyes walled and he pulled hard, fetching the Sheriff off the ground:  Linn came down, fell back, hauled up off the ground again:  Stomper dropped his head, shivering, defeated.

Linn reached up, caressed the horse’s neck; the horse flinched at his touch.

“You’re expectin’ to be beat, aren’t you?”  he murmured.  “You’re fine, fella.  You’re fine.  You’ll not be hurt.”

Stomper wasn’t listening.

Eyes walled white, ears laid back and nostrils flared, Stomper sank to the ground and rolled over on his side.

Jimmy kicked out of the downhill stirrup and planted his hoof on the ground as the horse went down; alarmed, he looked at the Sheriff.

Linn felt along under the horse’s jaw, pulled his pocket watch, whistled.

“’Way too fast,” he whispered.  “God Almighty, what happened to you?”

A quiet voice and a gentle touch as Stomper came back to consciousness was enough to bring the horse to its feet – unsteadily, to be sure, but on its feet.

Linn kept a good grip on the cheek strap as The Lady Esther came coasting into station, coming in almost silent, her exhaust pure white in the thin mountain air.

Stomper muttered a little and slashed his tail, but offered no further comment.

Jimmy saw a little girl at the window of the passenger car, one hand spread like a pink starfish against the glass, her other pointer finger and her nose flattened against the pane.

Inside the passenger car her child’s voice excitedly declared, “Mommy, Mommy!  It’s the horsie-mans!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

49.  A LONESOME PLACE

 

There are consequences to a man’s actions.

When the gangsta jacked the bolt on a buzz gun, the side of his head erupted in a bloody spray, and the hidden rifle’s report was muted:  to his credit, their leader did not flinch, but motioned the others back in the car.

“I told you to come alone,” Sheriff Linn Keller growled.

“You have not come alone.”

“Good thing, too.  Now suppose you send your boys down the road so just you and I can talk.”

Hard brown eyes squinted at hard pale eyes, and finally he blinked, shrugged, shouted something obscene at his driver and motioned vaguely along the dirt road they’d just come up.

“Two of my men are dead,” the man said without preamble. 

“Do tell.”

“I am told you had them killed.”

“’Fraid not,” Linn smiled, and the smile was that of a fanged creature:  “I do my own killin’.”

“Then you do not know how they were killed.”

“I do not know who, where, nor when, neither.  Suppose you fill me in.”

The gangsta gave the Sheriff a long, appraising stare.

“I could have you killed.”

“Kill me yourself,” the Sheriff invited.  “Right here, right now.  You’ve got a gun in your belt. Use it.”

“You are too ready.  I would die like that fool.”  He thrust a chin at the unmoving carcass.

“No,” Linn corrected.  “You would die with your eyes shot out and I would take your gun for a trophy.”

“You did not call me here to trade insults.”

“You’re right.  Tell me about my nephew’s murder.”

Linn saw something deep in the man’s eyes.  “Your nephew?”

“Let me refresh your poor failin’ memory.”  His voice was rough-edged, deep, the kind of a voice you hope to hear speaking in friendship and not in enmity.  “He was skinned alive.  About a third of his hide was peeled off.  I figure he died of shock which is why the skinner quit peelin’.  They’d cut out his eyes and took off some other parts and they run a sharp little blade under each of his finger nails before pullin’ ‘em out by the roots.  Ring a bell?”
He could tell it did; the man’s eyes saw more than the Sheriff’s brief description.

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

“He was my nephew, my family, and I do not let that pass.” 

“Then you deny shooting arrows through two of my men’s heads.”

Linn frowned a little, turning his head slightly as if to bring a good ear to bear.  “Now say that again,” he invited, speaking slowly, his voice that of a curious man who just heard something unexpected.

“You know.  No head.  Cut off.”

“Where’d this happen?”

“You should know!  You were there!”

“You don’t reckon …”  he murmured, then looked sharply at the gangsta.

“You seen any strangers hereabouts?”

“Stran – what?”

“My Mama had a price on her head from servin’ over in the Sandpile.  They swore they’d come and take her head and mine as well.  So far nobody’s showed up and now this – my nephew murdered by slow torture and your men’s heads taken.  What else did you see?”

“I did not see a thing!”  he protested.  “I was not there, I did not see it!”

“Then who was?  If that was my county that’s a double murder I have to investigate –“

“No, no, no,” came the agitated reply, hands waving in front of his body:  “no, no, I find, I find who did this thing, yes?”

“I’d appreciate the help.”

 

Will Keller, twin brother to Linn’s mother and past Sheriff Willamina Keller, thumbed one last round into his ’73 rifle’s magazine.

He’d cast the .44 caliber bullets of solid gold.

Nicodemus’s gold.

His thrice-great-grandfather, second Sheriff of Firelands County, Colorado, was a member of the Society of the Rose, and had been given a small supply of .44-40 rounds with solid gold bullets – to be used for those times when he was judge, jury and executioner, when it was necessary to operate with the authority of the Star Court.

Uncle Will had ten such rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord, he thought as he brought the Winchester clone to shoulder, but God subcontracts, and I am a subcontractor.

 

He had one of two marked men in his sights.

The trigger was smooth and curved against his finger and he set the front bead on the man’s earlobe.

Will came into town two hours later.

Back in the mountains, a portable veterinary crematorium quietly, efficiently, disposed of two carcasses; the trailer mounted burner could dispose of a grown and mature bull, and had:  its current content would be no challenge at all.  It had plenty of fuel, both for the incinerator and for the generator, and while the Chief of Police drove up to the cemetery to talk to his youngest son’s gravestone, the mortal remains of two of his murdering torturers were being reduced to their component elements.

“Nicodemus,” he grated, “I killed the last two that did that to you.” 

He stopped, hands closed into fists:  he took a long moment to steady himself.

“I took some of your gold to make the bullets.  It seemed fittin’, somehow, that your gold sent that pair to hell.”

He patted his vest pocket, felt the hard lump.

“’Course, it bein’ gold and all, I couldn’t just leave it inside ‘em, now, could I?”

Will looked over at the oldest stone in the family plot and smiled grimly.

“Now Pale Eyes, you don’t think I’m lettin’ your namesake do all the work, do you?” he asked.

A gust of wind whispered in reply, sighing through the budding branches of the tree said to be sprouted from the original hangin’ tree – just that, a whisper of wind, a breezy sigh, nothing more.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

50.  PIE, AND HORSES

 

“Well, it worked.”

Linn grunted as he slung another shovel full of barn manure into the wheelbarrow.

Will waited patiently as the Sheriff filled the Irish buggy, dollied it outside, dumped it.

“You keep workin’ yourself like that, you’ll die of a heart attack,” Will drawled, folding his arms and leaning a shoulder against a post.

Linn parked the shovel against the wall, dropped heavily onto a bale of hay.

“Talk, then.”

Will shook his head slowly, regarding the pale eyed badge packer with a look Linn knew well.

“You are as hard headed and as contrary as your mother,” he said softly, “and I am an expert on that subject.”

“Yeah, I get it honest.”  Linn pulled off his leather gloves, shoved the in a hip pocket.  “I got iced tea in the house.”

“It worked.”

“Good.”

“Aren’t you going to ask what “It” was?”

The older man’s expression was amused; he looked like he was fairly bubbling inside, waiting to impart a choice information.

“Suppose you tell me.”

Linn nodded.

“I showed some people pictures of Nicodemus.”  He sauntered over to the bale of hay, eased down on it as carefully as Linn had set carelessly. 

“Do tell.”

Will put an arm around Linn’s shoulders.  “He was my son, Linn,” Will said softly.  “He …”

Will’s head dropped a little and he cleared his throat.

“I showed some people pictures of him … grinning the way he did, that big grin at graduation with him wearin’ that mortar board and that purple bathrobe they call a graduation gown.  I showed ‘em a picture they took from the deputy’s cruiser cam, him leanin’ ag’in the back of his car in them sacky shorts and no socks and his shirt unbuttoned, lookin’ like a college boy out for the afternoon.”

Linn coughed, spat, nodded.

“That, and some other stuff we did …”

Will took a long breath, sighed it out.

“Your Mama was right, you know.”

“She generally was.”

“She told me wars aren’t all fought on the battlefield.”

“Yeah.”

“She …”  Will slowly, slowly rubbed his palms together, calluses whispering a little in the barn’s shadowed quiet.  “She told me you defeat the enemy in his mind first and then you beat him everywhere else.”

Linn nodded.  “Yeah.”

“Them fellas that did all that to m’boy …”

Will let the words trail off, and Linn let them trail for a bit.

“We convinced ‘em they’d killed the wrong fella, an’ when we visited all that hell on ‘em for it, why, they set among themselves a-killin’.”

Linn nodded. 

Will’s hand tightened on Linn’s shoulder, his arm strong and warm across the younger man’s high back.  “I know you blame yourself.”

“I asked him to.”

“He coulda said no.”

“He did it for me and look what happened.”  Linn tasted ashes and bitterness and his uncle heard the bitter in his voice.

“Lawmen take that chance every day.”

“I can chance me.  I … chanced him and he’s dead.”

Linn nodded.

“I’m his father.”

“I know.”

“I don’t hold you to blame.”

He felt the Sheriff shiver a little.

“I’d worried about that.”

“Your Mama was right about somethin’ else.”

“How’s that?”

Will’s voice was as grim as the look on his face.

“I avenged myself on his killers and it don’t help.”

The two talked quietly for a little longer, then they walked back to the house, left their boots on the front porch and went inside for iced tea, and voices that were tight and bitter with suppressed grief and self-recrimination, laughed now as two strong men took turns hoisting a squealing, laughing infant high overhead.

Connie took pride in taking care of her men, and Connie wouldn’t let Uncle Will across the threshold unless she could set him down and feed him, and it was over pie and coffee that conversation turned to horses.

“Now tell me about that great big horse I seen you ridin’,” Chief of Police Will Keller rumbled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with pleasure as Linn gently guided a small piece of good homemade pie into his little one’s mouth.

“Well, y’see, it’s like this,” Linn said in a nasal voice, and both men laughed.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

51.  RHYTHM

 

The engineer frowned at the steam gauge, the water tube, thrust a disapproving jaw forward as he leaned out the window and looked down the tracks, ahead of the laboring locomotive.

They were pulling a grade and heavily loaded, and the restored Baldwin locomotive was barking hard against the load of ore and humanity trying to drag her back down the grade.

Few things on God’s green earth were as sweet as the sound of a steam engine pulling hard, and The Lady Ester had her ears pinned back and she was pulling:  her exhaust cracked loudly in the rocky cut, her exhaust blasting skyward every time the drivers came around.

He knew the sanders were running, dispensing coarse sand just ahead of the drivers, crushing the shining quartz-and-silica crystals into powder, increasing the traction between slick steel wheels and the polished steel rail; he had plenty of water, steam pressure was just right and the dynamo on the boiler’s nose was spinning happily, current screaming between the two carbon-arc elements inside the big reflector, thrusting a cone of incredibly white light out ahead of them.

The engineer knew the Z&W was well ahead of its time for using the new safety couplers – railroaders were commonly missing one, two or several fingers, thanks to the old link-and-pin couplers, but not on the Z&W, not thanks to the original Lady Esther, the red-headed, green-eyed wife of the Old Sheriff, nossir!

Thanks to that forward seeing woman, the Z&W ripped up and sold off its iron rails and replaced them with steel rails – steel wasn’t brittle, like iron was, steel wouldn’t shatter under the weight of the passing freight, steel wouldn’t break in two and whip up and gut out a passenger car, as happened just after the Old Sheriff bought the rail line and gave it to his wife as a wedding present.

The fireman knew they were on the hardest part of the pull:  he kept the boiler well coaled, but not excessively:  the native brown coal wasn’t hot enough for their taste, they imported good Eastern anthracite, hard coal with far more BTUs per pound than the good gleaming black bituminous, or anything their pitifully wet brown coal could provide:  given this diet, The Lady Esther labored like a giant, and pulled loads over the hump and down to the gold mines’ refinery.

Other freight, other destinations; they ran passengers locally, and this was well received, and it was commonly said that the railroads as a whole should return to passenger trains, but the money wasn’t there for a large scale operation, and so the Z&W ran its racks and hauled its freight and carried its passengers, and did it behind a genuine steam locomotive.

The tourist trade made a surprising volume of their passengers, year round, but mostly in summer; the locals were politely amused by such folk, but were too mannerly to express their amusement.

The engineer bumped the throttle open another notch, the restored Baldwin labored steadily up-grade, and as they came to the crest, came to the break-over, the sun ran red knuckles over the horizon and began to winch itself into view.

The engineer grinned to see it, the way he always did.

He wasn’t about to tell anyone, but he was in love with his locomotive.

He loved his lady, Esther, his Lady with a sense of rhythm, for in her four-count chant, he could set any song in the world and she kept perfect time to the music in his mind.

He leaned out the window of his steam locomotive, a figure in hickory-striped cap and leather gloves and flannel shirt, a figure in bib overalls, and as The Lady Esther thundered past like a heavy-breathing, fire-eating beast of legend, a watcher might believe that, somehow, they’d been taken to an earlier age.

The engineer pushed the nickle plated, heavy-cased pocket watch from his bib overalls, pressed the stem, flipped the cover open, nodded.

“We on time?”  the fireman asked.

A mile post came into view, passed them, white and ghostly in the dawning shadows.

“Right on time!”  the engineer grinned.

God Almighty, I love what I do! he thought, and reached up, and gave the whistle chain a happy tug.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

52.  PAIN OR HELL

 

Linn drew his pistol, gripped the slide and drove the muzzle into the car’s window.

Screams blasted out as the safety glass crumbled and fell, the Sheriff holstered his sidearm and ran an arm into the car’s hot, smoky interior.

Something clawed at his arm as he fumbled for the door’s release, found it, pushed, felt the electric locks release:  he seized the door handle, swore as he burned his fingers, yanked the door open.

He felt his legs blistering, moved with the speed of desperation.

He reached for the seat belt’s release, his mind refusing to sort out the several voices:  all he knew was, he had to get as many out as he could, before he couldn’t move.

He grabbed two children, threw one over his shoulder, managed to seize a third: he staggered back through the burning gasoline, his legs screaming in agony, and he set out at a dead run for the cruiser.

Barrents blasted the dry-chem extinguisher at the spreading pool, looking like some kind of a Navajo ice-dragon, breathing a spreading cloud of suffocating cold on a fire-god’s fury:  he pushed the fire back, at least for a little, and the Sheriff ran through hazed agony for the side door of the cruiser.

He was nearly blind with pain:  a hand came out of nowhere, hauled open the side door and he heard the empty extinguisher’s steely ring as it hit the ground somewhere near his right boot.

He leaned forward, dumped the child over his shoulder onto the back seat, pretty much threw the other two of his precious cargo into the passenger rear of the cruiser and turned, ran back to the flames.

Distantly, faintly, he heard Barrents’ voice, shouting something.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t important.

The driver was still in there.

The driver’s door was bound – it started to release, ground a little, and the Sheriff snarled from between clenched teeth, pulled hard, falling back and landing on his backside as the door’s handle broke off in his hand.

A woman inside the car pounded on the window with a desperate palm.

Her face was barely visible for the smoke inside, her hand pale as she beat the imprisoning glass.

Linn came off the ground, his eyes pale, the ancient blood-curse roaring into fury and life:  he drove the gunmuzzle into the glass again, roaring like a Berserker charging into battle, he seized the door, planted his boot sole against the side of the silver-grey van, his face pale, tight-drawn, teeth bared:  the door released with a BANG and the lawman landed on his back again, coming off the ground like a cork coming out of deep water:  he reached past the screaming, clawing woman, drove his thumb into the seat belt’s release, yanked it free:  he seized her wrist, ran his arm under her shoulders, then released the wrist and thrust his forearm under her legs:  he backed, lifted, turned, staggered quickly for the cruiser.

Barrents opened the driver’s rear door and hooked his arms under the woman.

Pain overrode rage:  Linn collapsed, falling to hands and knees, hearing from a great distance, a distance across the blazing gulf of his agony, heard sirens, heard running feet:  he rallied, came off his knees, the pain of his burns blasting against his brain.

The Sheriff threw back his head and screamed, one long, throat-ripping shriek of unadulterated, distilled, unbelievably pure, absolute, overwhelming, nerve-shattering hellburn pain.

 

The fire department engineer twisted the throttle knob on the gleaming stainless-steel pump panel, bringing the Kenworth engine up to speed, the twin-impeller pump whining under his rubber fireboots as it slung water against the closed valve at the end of the cloth-jacketed firehoses:  one, then another, Elkhart brass nozzle in leather-gloved hands opened their throats, vomiting water at 125 pounds per square inch, and the Irish Brigade put the wet stuff on the hot stuff, knocking down the conflagration, hitting it hard, wading in close:  the tanker pulled up alongside the pumper, connected large-diameter lines, opened the quarter-turn valves, giving the big red pumper another two thousand gallons of water to drink.

The Sheriff shivered silently on the ambulance cot as the hydraulic lift whined, lifting cot and patient both into the squad’s interior, and the lean-waisted lawman with the singed mustache and burned legs remembered about five seconds’ worth of the drive from scene to hospital.

 

Connie had the baby changed and in the carrier by the time Will knocked:  she opened the door, baby carrier in hand, her face pale, but her voice firm.

“He’s hurt?”

Will nodded.

“Let’s go.”

It was not the first time Connie had ridden in a police cruiser, it was not the first time she’d ridden in a cruiser running lights and siren.

It was the first time she’d ridden lights-and-siren when not one single word transpired for the entire ride.

 

Linn glared at the emergency room ceiling tiles, willing himself to be silent, locking his screams behind muscle-bulged jaws.

He could not prevent sweat from popping out on his forehead, he could not prevent himself from shivering, and when Connie was brought in, he could not keep his hand from trembling as she seized it, sandwiching it tightly between both hers.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely, damning his weakness as a tear slid out the left corner of his eye.

“What did I tell you about being a hero?”  Connie hissed, then bit her bottom lip.

“I should listen to you,” Linn whispered back.  “You are younger, smarter and better looking than me.”  He tried to grin and it didn’t quite work.  “Younger and smarter, anyhow.”

A nurse pressed the piston on a syringe and the Sheriff relaxed as the narcotic dikes reared up to block the fiery pain-waves crashing against his consciousness.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller thanked the nurse for the chair she brought him.

“Coffee will be along shortly,” she said quietly.  “I’m having a big pot made.”

Will nodded.  “Likely we’ll need it,” he rumbled.  “I reckon it might be better if I call the bakery and have them send supplies.  They’ve got those card board boxes with a plastic bladder, full of coffee.  Gallon apiece.  No sense us usin’ up all your supplies.”

Uniformed men were arriving:  someone observed once that lawmen were like a tribe of Scotsmen, step on one toe and the whole clan hollers, and this wasn't the first time one of their own had been hurt.  Word travels fast among the Brotherhood of the Badge, and both nurse and police chief knew that there would be a lot of coffee drunk that night.

The nurse looked at the closed door beside and behind the seated Chief's right shoulder.

It had been an hour since the Sheriff was brought in from the emergency room.

She knew he was still being worked on:  they had a burn specialist on staff, and a good thing:  rumor ran as fast as a wind-pushed grass fire, and she’d heard everything from blistering to burned to the bone, and the longer she didn’t hear what it actually was, the worse her imagination got.

“Is it true he was burned getting a child out of a wrecked car?”

“Three children,” Will rumbled, “and the mother couldn’t get out.  Door was jammed.  He got it open, God knows how ‘cause I surely don’t.  We tried to shut the door once the fire was out and there’s no way in two hells human hands could have got it open.  The … it looked like she hit a tree and it skewed the door frame.  Might as well have been welded.  Busted the gas tank and he run right through it to get the kids out and he did.  Standin’ in burnin’ gasoline to do it.”

Will shivered.

“I’ve been gasoline burnt.”

He looked down at his fingers, at the brown, burn-scarred skin behind all ten finger nails.

“How he stood that I will never know.”  He looked up at her.  “How are the children?”

“Those were –“ 

The nurse’s surprise was plain to see as her voice faded and quit altogether.

She’d taken care of the children herself and she had no idea that they were – the Sheriff got them – she didn’t know –

“Yep,” Will nodded.  “He got every one of ‘em out.”

 

Linn’s hand closed around the wire-wound handle of a fighting blade.

It was Damascus forged, razor sharp, just short of a yard of blood-thirsty steel, and he knew how to swing it.

He looked around at the dull-red landscape, black sands that glowed a barely perceptible crimson, as if lit from underneath.

So this is it, he thought.

He remembered being a young boy, remembered his pale-eyed Mama talking quietly one evening, talking about how she woke when her Uncle Pete was dying.

She knew he was dying and she said, “Uncle Pete was a hard headed man.  If he was hurt or if he was sick or if he was in trouble, he’d say ‘I got me into it, I get me out of it,’ and he would.”

He remembered his Mama’s hand on his shoulder, drawing him close as they sat on a bale of hay there in the barn, and his Mama’s words came to him now.

“Uncle Pete fought until sunup, and then he won, and the phone rang.

“I picked it up and said ‘Hi, Aunt Martha, Pete’s dead, isn’t he?’ – and Aunt Martha gasped, ‘You witch!’”

I’m dead.

Now I get to fight for possession of my soul.

The first Darkfighter charged him, launched like a cat:  he braced, sword back for a thrust to the belly.

The shield on his left forearm shivered under the first impact and he heard a screaming and realized vaguely it was his own voice, and he didn’t care.

He was filled with uncontrolled, unadulterated Rage, the purest, most addictive blood-lust he’d ever known, and he thrust, spun, swung the blade quickly, a wide arc to his right, splitting a reaching arm for its length, bringing an inaudible whistling scream of a hell-demon’s voice:  he swung the shield, back-bashed another hard with the projecting center boss, then turned it and sliced with the shield’s sharpened edge, wading into the second one with a quick figure-eight of shining steel.

He stood on black sand that glowed with an almost invisible red and he knew with no doubt at all, exactly where he was.

A wave of black and lurching figures came over the horizon at a shambling run.

Linn’s nostrils flared and his lips pulled back from even, white teeth, and he filled his chest with the hot, dusty air and threw back his head to roar his war-challenge.

He heard sand grate under a boot sole, looked to his left.

He didn’t know the man who stood beside him, but the man bore a shield and brought his sword up to belt level, ready to thrust:  he looked over at the Sheriff, nodded once, and Linn knew this was a man with whom he could swing steel.

The air shifted to his right and a pale-eyed maiden in a flowing white-silk gown rode high atop an immense, rippling-black war-horse, a lance socketed in her right stirrup, its silver tip bright, shining, pure, painful to look at.

A huge black dog with red eyes and slavering jowls paced up beside the war-mare, bayed his own challenge to the low, stony ceiling, studded with stalactites and glowing with the same near-invisible red as the hot, black sands.

The Warmaiden lowered her lance, couched it under her arm, drew the silk from the lower half of her face and smiled, and her smile was not that of a beautiful young woman.

It was the smile of a veteran warfighter whose blood sang for the sheer lust of killing.

Swords raised, lance couched, fangs bared, they launched across the sands as one, charging the legion that sought to overwhelm them.

 

“He’s waking up,” a voice said.

“I should hope so,” another said, “if his blood pressure stayed that low he’d go into kidney shutdown.”

Linn fought his way like a swimmer coming up from a too-deep dive; hot black sands turned to the sterile, light-green hospital room, the oncoming demonic horde became the sound of the air handler, and a worried set of eyes over a surgical mask looked down at his own.

“And how are we feeling?”  the nurse asked gently.

Linn looked around, looked back.

“What’s this ‘we’ stuff?”  he grated.  “My head aches. I’m not in heaven. I’m cold.  I'm not in hell.  I must be alive."  His voice was labored, almost gasping.  "That's me. Now how about you?”

Dr. John Greenlees chuckled behind his own surg mask.  “He’ll live.”

“Hey Doc,” Linn said, grimacing, “what was that stuff you shot me up with?”

“Do you want some more?”

“No,” Linn gasped.  “I’d rather have the pain than go back to hell!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

53.  MAMA

 

A pale-eyed woman in a blue suit dress sat and watched the sleeping man in the hospital bed.

A lean old lawman with an iron grey mustache stood beside her, his hat in his hand, his other hand on her shoulder.

“He looks like you,” the woman whispered, as if not to disturb the sleeper.

“He’s not that homely,” the tall man rumbled quietly, and his hand tightened a little on her shoulder.

She reached up and laid her hand on his.  “I could take his pain, you know.”

“I know.”

“I want to.”

“I know.”

“Could we … could we heal him?”

“Could.”

The woman considered, her jaw thrusting out as she frowned.

“It would cause … problems, wouldn’t it?”

“You know it would.”

He felt her shoulder rise a little as she took a long breath, blew it out, shook her head.

“Part of me wants to say to hell with the problems and just do it.”  She looked up at the lean old lawman, tears streaking her cheeks.  “He’s my little boy,” she whispered, her voice catching.

The pale eyed old lawman looked at the man with wrapped legs and IV lines and his own jaw muscles bulged:  he, too, knew what it was to want to heal his sons, he knew what it was to be hurt, but in all his years on God’s green earth he’d never stood in a slow flowing puddle of liquid fire and ignored the pain.

He’d never done that.

He’d known pain but he’d never known that kind of pain.

“He’s quite a man, you know that.”

She nodded, miserable, dabbing at her nose with a lace-edged kerchief.

“I want to help,” she whispered.

She rose, walked over to the hospital bed, bent, kissed her son’s forehead as he slept, looked down at the grown man with wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, at the grey streaking his mustache, then reached down and closed her hand around his, gently, the way a mother will when her child is sleeping and she doesn’t want to wake him.

His hand tightened a little in response and she bit her bottom lip.

“I have to do something,” she whispered fiercely, turned, glared at the older man watching from beside her now-empty chair.  “I have to do something!”

“Then do something,” he rumbled.

 

Connie tapped delicately at the heavy wood door, then opened it a little, looked in.

Linn was still asleep.

She tiptoed in, looked back at Uncle Will sitting at the door, holding their diapered child on his lap:  young Wesley Albert chewed happily on a knuckle, then reached for the Chief’s mustache, well out of reach but still intriguing.

Will looked up at her.  “We’ll be fine,” he said softly.  “I’ll teach him how to play stud poker.  Tomorrow I’ll teach him draw poker and then it’ll be three-card monte with deuces, treys and one-eyed jacks wild.”  He tilted his head, a manly go-ahead.  “He needs you, Connie.  Go on in.”

Connie slipped through the opening, closed the door carefully, fearfully.

They were alone, at least for the moment; nurses came and nurses went, quickly, quietly, efficient and brisk and businesslike, at least until you watched their hesitations – when they hesitated to lay gentle finger-backs against the patient’s cheek, when they hesitated and then gave the covers an unnecessary twitch, as if tucking a little boy in bed, when they hesitated and whispered a quiet word of encouragement.

Connie knew to look for these things.

Linn’s mother Willamina had told her these secrets, for in her earlier years she too had been a nurse, and the two had giggled over old photo albums of Willamina in her nursing whites, and a photograph that got her fired – where she had a child in one arm, straddling her left hip, and she had a big single action revolver cocked and thrust out at arm’s length toward an individual, fury on her face and determination in her stance.

She’d saved the child from being abducted and held the criminal for police, but the picture made the paper, and the hospital did not want the world to think they had warriors instead of angels in white, and so she’d been let go.

All this went quickly through one level of Connie’s mind, while another looked around the empty room, and she wondered what could be done to make it look less sterile, less businesslike, less like what it was.

Linn took a long breath, opened his eyes.

“How do you feel?”  Connie blurted, immediately kicking herself for a reflexively stupid statement, and Linn smiled drowsily, raised his hand, closed it gently around his wife’s palm.

“Never better.”

“Liar.”

He smiled again, almost sadly.

“I dreamed of Mama,” he said, and bit his bottom lip.

Connie nodded, not really knowing what to say to that.

“I was a little boy again and she held me on her lap and she hugged me like she used to.”  He blinked, swallowed, cleared his throat.  “I miss her.”

“I miss her too.”

“She always did like you, Connie.  She thought the world of you.”

“She had good taste,” Connie said innocently – she smiled at the surprise in her husband’s expression, then they both laughed.

“You’ve got good taste in husbands, too,” Linn said, a little more strongly. 

“I know.”

“Those kids in that car … how are they?”

“Just fine.  They’re just fine.”

“How about their Mama?”

“She …”  Connie hesitated. 

“Connie?”

“I’ll let Uncle Will fill you in.”

Linn’s face fell.  “I was too late,” he whispered, closing his eyes and turning his head away.  “Damn me, I didn’t do enough!”  His voice was bitter, his jaw shut with a click of teeth, she saw his hands fist up with anger.  “Damn!”

“No – no, Linn, she’s alive, you got her out, it’s all right –“  Connie was uncertain, almost to panic, but she knew she had to allay her husband’s distress.  “You got her out in time, she’s alive, she’s not hurt, she’s okay –“

“What then?”

“She’s been arrested for drug abuse, child endangerment, reckless operation, I don’t know what all, she was almost overdosed when she wrecked –“

Surprised, Linn looked up at his wife, then nodded.

“How’s Wes?”

“He’s chewing on everything.”

“Don’t let him near any extension cords.”

“He’s not a puppy, Linn!  He doesn’t have any teeth –“

Linn laughed quietly, brought his forearm up over his eyes, shook his head.

“Woof,” he chuckled, then lowered his arm.  “Dear heart, how about you?  This has to be hard on you –“

Connie laughed.  “Linn, I had to buy a new deep freeze, it’s in the basement where you were going to put it when we talked about it.  I’ve got casseroles and baked goods enough to feed Coxy’s army and if I lined up everyone who offered to do laundry, sweep floors or change Wes’s diaper, the line would circle this hospital twice!”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.  “I didn’t set out to get burnt.”

Connie caressed her husband’s stubbled cheek.  “You strike a heroic figure with your legs wrapped.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” he muttered as a brisk rat-tat, tat interrupted them:  the door swung wide and a half-dozen surgical scrubs with masked and gloved people inside them came into the room, pushing two stainless-steel carts piled with neat stacks of hospital grade … stuff.

“I think I’m about to get some work done,” Linn sighed.  “Why don’t you go on out and let Uncle Will bore you with tales of my misspent youth, or his.”

A nurse screwed the blunt end of a plastic syringe into the IV line, kinked the line tightly on the uphill side, pressed the piston slowly.

Connie turned and went out into the hall.

Just before he lost his grip on the here-and-now, Linn heard the happy squeal of their little boy, and he smiled.

Reality wavered, fell away, a watercolor reflected in a rain-puddle:  he was falling again, falling through space and through realities, and he stopped a-straddle of his Apple-horse.

His boots found the stirrups without looking and he stood in the stirrups, grinning, for his legs were his legs again, as they’d always been, and he looked around.

It was morning:  cool morning, with a little ground fog crawling slowly over the thick, tall grass, his breath steamed as he exhaled and he eased his knee against the horse to turn it, slowly, in a full circle.

“Well?”  Willamina asked, smiling the way she always did, and he turned again, and there sat his Mama on her red Cannonball mare.

Son looked at mother for a long moment, seeing her as he remembered her:  young and strong and beautiful in blue jeans and Carhartt, with that quiet, knowing, half-smile of hers.

“Am I dead?”  he asked, almost hopefully, then felt guilty for the asking of it:  he had responsibilities, he had a son, he had a wife, he had an office of public trust –

“No.”  Willamina smiled.  “I’m causing trouble again, I’m blocking that juice they shot into you.  This is all me.”

Linn nodded.  “I’m glad for it.  Last they shot me with that stuff I went to hell and we had a fight.”

“I know.”  She smiled.   “You put up a good fight, too.  When you die I reckon they’ll hesitate to try and take your soul.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“You never are.”

Linn looked closely at his mother.  “How is it you’re here?”

Willamina shrugged.  “I’m causing trouble.  I’m not supposed to do this.”

“But you’re doing it anyway.”

“I’m your mother.  I’ll do whatever I have to.”

Linn eased his weight back down into the saddle, considering.

“Your mother,” he said slowly, “was a damn drunk.”

Willamina nodded.  “That’s right.  Not just a drunk, a damned drunk.”

“That’s why you never drank.”

“Oh, I drank, just … carefully.”

Linn nodded.  “That’s why I drank the same way.  Carefully.”

“You never did get in the habit of drinking a whole glass full of Two Hit John and then throwing it up.”

“Hard on me to throw up, Mama.  About tears me in two.”

Willamina nodded.  “I’m blocking that juice they shot into your arm.  We both carry the genes for addiction.”

“Thank you,” Linn nodded.  “I told Doc I’d rather have the pain.”

“He doesn’t understand.”

“I’ll have to explain it to him.”

“He’ll listen.  He’s one of the few doctors that actually will listen.”

“Mama …”

Linn’s voice was a little softer.

“Mama, earlier … I remembered … you held me on your lap and I was a little boy …”

“You needed to cry, Linn.  Big strong men don’t cry but a hurt little boy does, and that’s the only way you could let it out, so I … arranged it.”

Linn nodded.  “It hurt, Mama.  It hurt bad.”

“I know.”  He saw the pain her eyes, saw her swallow.  “I know it hurt.”

Linn looked around.

The fog was heavier, higher; it was starting to wisp in between them.

“Mama, you don’t have much time, do you?”

“No.  Not much now.”

“Thank you.”  He wanted to very much to embrace his Mama, feel her warm and real against him like he used to when he’d hug her as a tall, strong high school senior, like he did the time he patted her on top of the head and said ‘Nice little Mini-Mommie,’ and she cocked a fist and said “Shut up or I’ll punch you right in the kneecap!”

The fog came in thick between them, and he was alone.

He turned his Apple-horse again and found a lean old lawman on a copper mare looking at him with amusement.

“She’s right, you know,” the slender waisted old lawman with the iron grey mustache grinned. 

“How’s that?”

“You do look an awful lot like me!”

 

Dr. John Greenlees laid a gloved hand on his patient’s shoulder, and the Sheriff opened his eyes, took a long breath.

“How you feelin’?”  Doc Greenlees asked, his mask puffing out a little as he spoke.

“I been better,” Linn grunted.  “When’s breakfast?”

Doc Greenlees nodded.  “Well, that’s a good sign,” he chuckled.  “What’s your appetite?”

“Doc, right now if it don’t move I’ll eat it, and if it moves it had better be fast!”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Doc, we need to talk.”
Dr. Greenlees’ eyes were serious as he looked down at his old friend.

“I’ll arrange it.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

54.  A LEAN OLD LAWMAN

 

Wilma Kincaid slung the camera from her off shoulder, with her heavy canvas messenger bag:  she had a week’s vacation, so she flew out from back East and rented a car, rented a Blazer much like the Sheriff’s office used, drove with the help of a talking electronic box and accordion-folded maps, and finally she pulled up to the end of the road, stopped, considered the terrain.

She leaned down and pulled the second shifter one click, engaged the front axle, drove diagonally across the washed-out gully and back up onto the rutted dirt road, grunting as the car lurched and bounced and scrambled up to good footing:  she turned back onto what used to be a road, then carefully straddled the rutted-out tracks and finally, slowly, carefully, came back onto solid roadway and into the main street of Carbon Hill.

She’d bought a cheap folding card table for this expedition, and a single, folding chair:  she set up the table right in the middle of the street, started pulling papers from her messenger bag, weighted them down with candy bars and bottles of water.

Somehow she wasn’t surprised to hear the approach of a horse’s hooves.

She took a long drink from the bottle she’d opened five miles earlier, screwed the lid back on, turned and smiled at the lean old lawman who swung down from a shining copper colored mare.

Wilma, of course, had no idea if this was mare, stallion, gelding or capon, just that it was a shining, healthy looking horse:  the Sheriff looked older, somehow, but she recognized the same pale eyes, the same good natured wrinkle to the weathered corners.

“Thought you’d be back,” he said approvingly.  “What maps do you have?”

“USGS topo,” she replied, unrolling the green-and-white detail map, moving her improvised paperweights to hold it:  “here’s a county map, but I wanted the greater detail and elevations.”

He studied the map, frowning a little, nodded.

“Now that’s some detail,” he said thoughtfully.  “I never drew one quite that fancy.”

“Oh, you’re a mapmaker?” she exclaimed happily.

“Learned how when I was Cavalry.  Drew maps of this whole area.  I think they’ve still got ‘em over’n Firelands someplace.”

“I’ll have to ask about them.”

“I thought you’d be back, but I’m curious, Miss Kincaid.  What exactly brought you back here?  There’s nothin’ left but buildin’s fallin’ in and old men’s memories, and not much of those left.”

Wilma stared at the sagging old mercantile, brought her camera around, studied the screen on its back:  the old lawman saw her finger twitch on a button, heard the mechanism’s click.

She didn’t see him shake his head, but she heard his soft “If that don’t beat all.”

“I wanted to study Carbon a little more,” Wilma admitted.  “I thought I was chasing ghosts when I was out earlier and I’m afraid it was just my imagination.”

Sheriff Linn Keller’s eyes smiled as he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“If you’re lookin’ for ghosts, Miss Kincaid,” the lean old lawman with the iron-grey mustache said softly, “they might be closer than you’d expect.”

 

“So how soon can I blow this popsicle stand?”  Linn greeted the doctor.

“And good morning to you too,” Dr. John Greenlees chuckled.  “Have you had breakfast?”

“No, and I’m not a’tall happy with bland eggs and wallpaper glue that claims to be oats!  Didn’t anyone hear about basil and garlic or maybe lemon pepper?”

“Picky, picky,” Doc Greenlees muttered, shaking his head.

“Doc, I got work to do!”

“I believe you have some healing to do.”

“I can do that just as well at work, Doc.  I know I’ve got to keep the burns clean and dry so I don’t plan to go wadin’ through no septic tanks.”

“Two million comedians out of work and you’ve got to come along,” Doc muttered, shaking his head.  “Do you know how lucky you were, wearing blue jeans instead of your polyester uniform pants?”

Linn’s eyes were haunted as he nodded.  “Matter of fact I do, Doc.  My uncle went down when his Huey got shot full of holes in d’Nam.  He was wearin’ the nylon sided boots and they welded to his ankles in the fire.  Pilots wore all leather to prevent that.  He was just a ground pounder being taken from one firebase to another.”

Dr. John Greenlees nodded.  “I remember.”

“Far as blue jeans, yeah, and cowboy boots.  The commissioners give me hell for it some time back and I didn’t much care what they thought.  I got burnt up under ‘em and some through ‘em but if they’d been that polyester stuff I’d be fried to the bone from the knees down.”

“Your shins would have anyway and maybe your kneecaps.”

“I yelled at Barrents to stay the hell out of the fire.  He chased it back with a dry-chem.  Good thing, I’d reckon.”

“His trouser legs melted in front but by some miracle, he wasn’t burned,” Dr. Greenlees said slowly.  “He came in while you were being treated in ER and I went over and split his pants to the belt along the front crease.  He wasn’t too happy and I didn’t care.  I needed to see if he was burned as well.”

“Was he?”

“No.”

“Good.  He listened.”

“He also told you to stay out of the fire.”

“I never was good at listenin’.”

“Neither was your Mama.”

“Flattery will get you anywhere, Doc.”

“I’m counting on it.”  He crossed his arms, studied the restless lawman as if regarding a specimen.  “ I suppose you’re happier now that your catheter is out.”

Linn blinked, grinned.  “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Never liked them.  I had to have one in when they put a stent in my kidney after they blew my kidney stones to gravel.  I was not at all comfortable nor was I happy.”

Linn shivered.  He’d had two kidney stones, which was about ten too many, and the helpful ER nurse remarked to him that she’d both had children, and had kidney stones, and of the two, the stones hurt worse.

“Let’s discontinue the IVs today.  I’m estimating discharge between noon and dinnertime.”

“Supper hell,” Linn muttered, “I’d as soon get out of here now!”

“Not quite now.  I want to take one more bandage change and have a good long look at those burns.  Your blue jeans helped but you still received some serious burn injury.  I’m afraid the scarring will be significant.”

“Well horse feathers, there goes me wearin’ mini skirts this summer!”

Doc Greenlees shook his head, stood.

“I’ll see about lemon pepper for your eggs.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

55.  THE CHEERLEADER AND THE GHOST CHASER

 

Shelly Crane dabbed at her ice cream.

“Bad habit,” a familiar voice said, and she looked up, surprised.

“Mind if I join you?”  the Sheriff asked, pulling out the chair opposite her and setting down whether or not he had her let-be.

“I, um, you were, I thought –“

“You thought I’d been burnt up in a car fire.”  Linn picked up his spoon, took the first bite of his chocolate sundae.  “Mmm,” he hummed, “they don’t have this in attair hospital!”

“Yee-aaahhh,” Shelly said uncertainly.  “You werrrrrrreee …”

“Well, I’m not.”  Linn looked at her, amused.  “Now let’s go back to Carbon Hill and tell me again about getting locked in that old jail.”

“Do I have to?”  Shelly made a face, which brought a quiet laugh from the lean lawman across the marble-top table from her.  “I thought we took care of that.”

“Tell me how you got out.”

She blinked, surprised.  “You let me out.”

“Hm.”  He took another bite of his sundae.  “Tell me exactly what happened.  Start with the night.  How much light did you have?”

“Light?”  She laughed.  “I would have given fifty dollars for a light!”

“So you couldn’t see clearly.”

“Sheriff, I was inside a dirty old steel box and it was night and you were wearing that broad-brimmed hat of yours like you always do, but I know your voice and you rode up on that horse of yours and you smelled like horse sweat and leather and –“

Shelly’s voice ground to a slow stop.

“Wasn’t that you?”

“Miss Crane,” the Sheriff said formally, “first of all, you have done nothing wrong and I do not believe you’ve lied to me.  Matter of fact you’re very honest in your testimony, you are very straightforward and believe me I appreciate it.  There’s more to this than meets the eye and I think you are key to figuring it out.”

“Figuring what out, Sheriff?”

“Finish your sundae.  I have someone I want you to meet.”

When they were walking out – to the stares and quiet comments of the other after-school students there in the drugstore – the Sheriff saw a movement he didn’t like, and stopped, turned to three uncomfortable-looking strangers setting at a table with nothing in front of them.

“You, stand up,” he said, and a change came over the man, a change as visible as cold water suddenly cascading over a rock face.

It was like a chill came over that part of the room, and the Sheriff tasted copper and his pupils dilated as his eyes went frosty pale and he felt that old familiar whole-body knowledge that he was less than three heartbeats from killing someone.

“Shelly, head for my office,” he said, his voice tight.  “You, stand up and keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

His hand moved faster than their eyes could follow, his laser gripped Glock taking a close-up look at another’s left eye.  “You on the floor, now, before I put you there.”

The second pistol appearing in the Sheriff’s other hand persuaded the three at the table that perhaps they really, really should do exactly what this lawman said.

Linn knew there were camera phones pointed at him and he did not care.

“You.”  He thrust his chin at the third individual, still seated.  “Stand up very slowly.  All three of you, hands in plain sight or you will be shot.  Now you take that table and draw it back, that’s right, stop.  Pull this chair back beside the table.  Now both of you” – he lifted the gunmuzzles slightly – “on your knees here in the clear space.  Do exactly as I say or you will be shot.  That’s right, on your knees, now prone out, both of you.  Arms straight ahead, palms flat on the floor.”

The whistle of an approaching siren gave him a little relief; his gut unknotted maybe a quarter of a turn, but no more.

“Just hold real still now and you’ll live to see sunrise.”

The Sheriff never raised his voice; he did not shout, he did not bark his orders, he spoke as easily, as casually as if in a conversation about the weather or the alfalfa crop on his ranch, and somehow this was more frightening than if he’d screamed his orders with an enpurpled face and the cords in his neck standing out.

Chief of Police Will Keller followed two patrolmen into the drugstore:  the Chief had his favorite working tool, a pump shotgun, cocked and locked and held at high port:  at the Sheriff’s direction, they secured the two prone subjects in irons, then conducted a search incident to arrest.

“Chief,” Linn said, “that one there” – he’d holstered his pistols, the belt gun in its security holster and the hidden pistol back into the inside-the-waistband holster under his vest – “has a hidden pistol at the small of his back.  I observed his move to conceal it when I walked past him.  The other two I have reason to believe are engaged in a drug buy or a deal of some sort.  They are strangers and they didn’t order anything, they’ve been at this table for fifteen minutes with no activity besides quiet conversation, which I find suspicious.”
“Chief?”  one of the patrolmen said, holding up a pistol with thumb and forefinger.

“Secure it and keep looking,” Will growled.

The pistol went on the tabletop, followed by a second, a switchblade and two baggies of white crystalline substance:  more drugs came off the second, plus a sizable amount of cash and a half-dozen cell phones.

“Well, well,” the pale-eyed Chief Keller murmured.  “Seems like we hit one today.”

“Your collar, Chief,” the pale-eyed Sheriff Keller said quietly.  “I spotted a suspicious movement I’d come to associate with a concealed weapon.  The bust is yours.”

Will nodded.  “We’ll take it from here.  See you for supper?”

“Yep.  Can you handle these desperadoes?”

Will’s smile was a cosmetic show of teeth, and his eyes as he looked at the cuffed and glaring prisoners were cold, hard and utterly without mercy.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.  “We can handle ‘em.”

Linn waited until two cruisers hauled off the prisoners, two to a back seat, one in the other; it was but a minute’s walk to the Sheriff’s Office.

He came into the lobby, looked at Miss Kincaid and Miss Crane both.

“Ladies,” he said, “please come with me.”

They followed him into his office.

He left his door open.

“You’ve probably seen this picture before” – he indicated a framed print, taken from a glass-plate negative, tapping the wall beneath it with a bent foreknuckle.

Wilma Kincaid nodded, puzzled, looked at the cheerleader, wondering what she had to do with their presence in the pale-eyed lawman’s inner sanctum.

“Now I want you both to see something.”

He went behind his desk, pulled open a drawer, withdrew an album:  he paged through it, tapped a print with his finger.

“Here is an enlargement.  I love those old plate photographs, they had long exposure time which really, really saturated the detail and you can enlarge them to an amazing degree and still keep the detail.”  He turned the album around so the two women could see it right-side-up.  “Now look at this fellow here.”

His finger was above the head of a pale eyed lawman with an iron grey mustache.

“Now look at me.”

It took Shelly Crane a few moments longer to realize what Wilma Kincaid saw almost immediately.

“Now I am not this man,” Linn said, “but consider this.”

He turned the page, another enlargement, this of the pale-eyed woman in the print, glaring at the camera as if she wished she could kick it off its tripod, crush it under a boulder, set it on fire and then get mean with it.

Beside it was a pale-eyed woman in a tailored blue suit dress and heels.

“This” – he tapped the left side of the page – “is my many times great Aunt Sarah Lynne McKenna.  She was an Agent of the Firelands District Court, she was a master of disguise.  I would call her a mistress of disguise but she’d probably come rip-roarin’ out of her grave and kick my backside for calling her a mistress.”

His eyes darkened slightly at his foray into humor; the two women smiled, Wilma actually laughing a little at the idea.

“And this is my Mama.  She was Sheriff before me.  Again – she could be the twin for her.  Or vice versa.  Just like” – he turned the page back – “each could be the twin for the other.”

He straightened.

“Now Miss Crane.”  He stopped, frowned.

“Miss Kincaid.  You came from Carbon Hill, you said.”

She nodded, puzzled.

“You said I was over there and you spoke, I said something about mapmaking.”

She nodded again.

“I’ve been here all day, Miss Kincaid.  What else did my other self say to you today?”

“You said –“ 

She looked at Shelly, back at the Sheriff.

“You … don’t look as old as you did … this morning …”  she said slowly, her eyes widening.

“You came back to Carbon looking for ghosts, and what were you told by Old Pale Eyes?”

Wilma Kincaid’s mouth opened and closed and she sat down abruptly.

“Miss Crane.  Could you tell Miss Kincaid here about your time in the Carbon Hill jail?”

“My boyfriend – he’s not my boyfriend – he –“  Shelly swallowed.  “I got locked in the old jail.  It’s not a jail like we think of a jail now, it’s … it’s just a steel box and a door and the door looks like a jail door and he locked me in and didn’t have a key and the Sheriff let me out” – she gestured to the patiently listening, pale-eyed lawman – “but he, I, he, um, he rode up on a horse and he had keys and …”

Linn waited, patiently, leaning back against his desk, then turned and looked at the framed print on the wall, turned and picked up the album, held it up, tapped the side-by-side print of the Old Sheriff and himself.

The color ran out of Shelly Crane’s face like red ink squeezed out of an eyedropper.

Wilma Kincaid’s expression showed none of the dismay of the high-school sophomore:  rather, she looked with delight at the photograph, then at the Sheriff, she thrust to her feet, eyes shining.

“It was real!”  she exclaimed, jumping with excitement, seizing the Sheriff’s arms, looking for all the world like a kid at Christmas:  “It was real, it was real, it was realitwasrealitwasreal!”

Linn laughed, cupping her elbows and laughing with her.

“Slow down, now,” he cautioned, “let’s get our rational feet under us!”

“A ghost,” Shelly squeaked, cupping her hand around her bloodless lips.  “I got rescued by a ghost!”

Horrified, she looked with wide and frightened eyes at the Sheriff.

“Oh my God, Sheriff, I can’t tell anyone, they’ll think I’m insane, they’ll put me in the nuthouse, my God, Mom will make me wear a straitjacket –“

Linn released Wilma’s elbows, went back behind his desk and closed the album.

“First of all, Miss Crane, you are both sane and rational.  What you say, what you heard, was all very real” – he gave her a sharp look – “otherwise you would still be locked in that steel box.  Now Miss Kincaid.”  He looked directly at the flush-cheeked woman just sitting back down.  “It’s your turn.  Tell us your story.”

“I was over at Carbon Hill today,” she said excitedly, “and it was you – it wasn’t you – it was him – was it him?”

“It wasn’t me.”

She thrust both fists into the air.  “Yesss!”  she hissed happily.

Linn laughed.  “Does that really surprise you?”

“Shouldn’t it?”  She stared at the Sheriff as if he suggested it was routine for fish to sprout wings and soar through the heavens – then, “He said he was a mapmaker and he had made maps of this area, do you still have them?”

Linn nodded.  “They’re in the museum.  Miss Crane.”

Shelly looked up at the Sheriff, suddenly uncertain.

“Miss Crane, as far as anyone knows, you are helping me investigate a cold case.  That’s not a lie.  My four-times-great grandfather, The Old Sheriff, died better than a century ago and that’s pretty cold.” 

The phone rang.  “Excuse me,” he said; there was a brief conversation, he hung up, frowning.

“I have to give a deposition,” he said, “my apologies:  Cindy, my dispatcher, will give you directions to the museum.  I want you both to go out there and poke around, take a look at what’s there, I’ll call ahead and see that the maps are available to you.  Miss Crane, if I may, I’d like to invite you and your parents to supper at my place tonight.”

“Your wife will kill you,” Cindy said from the doorway.  “You’re already having Jimmy Hill and his mother over, and the police chief.”

Linn raised a finger, picked up the phone, dialed a number.

“Connie?  Have you started fixing for supper tonight?”  He smiled a little, the intimate smile of a husband hearing his wife’s voice.  “Okay, don’t put ‘em on to boil.  Abandon the notion.  What say we eat out, I’ve got more guests, let’s let the Silver Jewel do the work.”  He nodded.  “Love you too, dearest.”

He pressed the hookswitch, punched in another number.

“This is the Sheriff,” he said, “I’d like to reserve the private room tonight.  Party of eight and we’ll need supper.” 

He looked up and smiled just a little.

“Ladies, you are both invited, and I would be very much obliged if you would guest with us tonight.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

56.  A PRIEST, A FIRE CHIEF AND

AN ENGINEER WALK INTO THE BAR

 

Conversation was easy and laughter was frequent that night, back in the private room, the room with the many framed prints where the Ladies’ Tea Society met regularly:  Connie was more than willing to let Daisy’s girls do the work, supper was good (as it always was) and filling (which it always was) and after the dessert course, Linn stood up, patted his flat belly and said, “BURRRRPPPP!”

He blinked innocently and said “I didn’t have an actual belch backed up so I had to use the word instead.”

Uncle Will cheerfully tossed a roll at him, to Jimmy’s curly-headed delight:  his Mama looked at her son and delighted that the boy was laughing again, that the walking-on-eggshells mentality was melting like winter’s snow, now that they were out of her poisoned marriage, and now that he had men worthy of the name influencing his life.

“Now I reckon you’re all wondering why I called you here tonight.”

“You didn’t want Connie to cook for all these people,” Uncle Will challenged, and again they laughed, Connie especially, discreetly hiding her amusement behind her linen napkin, as young Wesley Albert squealed and waved his arms:  Connie looked down at him with a mother’s affection, and she knew the lad – fed and warm and freshly changed – would be asleep in less than three minutes, no matter the fuss and bother around him.

“I have assembled the wisest minds I know,” Linn continued, looking pointedly at the high-school sophomore and the Eastern ghost hunter sitting beside her, trying to look innocent and not having much luck at it, “because I need help figuring out something and I’ve found it profitable to consult those who are younger, smarter and better looking than me, not necessarily in that order.  Matter of fact when I looked in the mirror last I realized that would be about anyone comin’ or goin’, so I’m in luck!”

Uncle Will tossed another roll and him; Linn caught it, tossed it back, grinning.

“Whattaya wanna know?”  Will called, and Linn realized his Uncle, widowed now and back in the saddle as Chief of Police, looked happier than he’d been for some long time.

“I am a curious man,” Linn said, slowly lacing his fingers together in front of him, then drawing them apart and steepling his fingertips:  “I’m seeing over the years that our blood line has been preserved and almost steered, and it’s always come back here to Firelands.  It’s gone back East and now Marnie is clear the hell and gone up on Mars” – he always referred to the Red Planet as “clear the hell and gone” as if it were part of its formal title – “Mama was saved by the shade and essence of the Old Sheriff, Old Pale Eyes himself, Marnie was saved by Mama’s essence, Aunt Sarah made herself manifest and so has that big black horse of hers, but it’s always been for a purpose, it’s always been to answer a question.”

He scratched the side of his neck, frowning.

“Now how come we’re so special that the honored dead come back to answer our questions or keep us from being killed, and how come nobody came back to save Nicodemus, is our bloodline really all that and a bag of chips?”

Shelly Crane giggled, Wilma Kincaid smiled:  they were still getting used to what Connie called “The Language of Linn,” and she’d warned them that her pale eyed husband didn’t speak English all the time, there were times when his vocabulary was made entirely of colloquialisms and dialect.

“I think I can help,” a familiar voice spoke from the doorway.

Linn gestured the newcomer in.  “Introductions are in order,” he said as three men filed into the room, shut the door quietly behind them:  “gentlemen, it would be unmannerly not to offer you supper, have a set and be fed!”

“We ate outside,” Fire Chief Finnegan said, patting his belly happily:  “Brother Zacharias here suggested we not interrupt your party, and so we’re full as a tick!”

“In that case have a set and we’ll order up coffee or some other vile drink, whatever’s your pleasure.  My friends, this is Wilma Kincaid, she came out from back East and found ghost hunting very much to her taste, and she spoke with one yesterday.  Shelly Crane you probably know already, everyone knows everyone else here in Firelands, she’s a cheerleader and a good one by all reports, and she also had an encounter with the same shade.  Ladies, this is our Fire Chief, his name is Finnegan and he’ll pull your leg as soon as look at you, this is Brother Zacharias from the Rabbitville monastery, and this is Richie Fitch, he’s one of the engineers with the Z&W and he’s the man who can get the most out of a steam engine!”

The waitress poked her head in the door, Linn motioned her in:  she brought in a tray of truly incredible proportions, proceeded to stack the soiled dishes thereon, quickly, efficiently, making it look easy.

“And will anyone want coffee?”  she asked brightly, looking around, then looked at the Sheriff.  “Never mind, I’ll bring two pots and three more coffee cups.”

Linn waited until the door was closed behind her before murmuring, “Remind me to give her a good tip when we leave!”

“Sunrise in the second, to win,” Chief Finnegan said with a perfectly straight face.  “Now what’s this about wanting to hear about our haunted fire engine?”

Brother Zacharias placed a thick, worn album on the table, tapped it with gentle fingertips.  “The pictures you requested.”

Fitchie shifted in his seat, frowning a little.

“Fitchie, you go first,” Linn prompted.

Richie Fitch frowned, rubbed his upper lip, pulled his ear and frowned again.

“I’ve heard of haunted trains,” he began slowly, then looked at Wilma Kincaid.

“You’re a ghost hunter.”

“It’s … yes, I am.”

“Hm.”  He nodded.  “You’ll hear about haunted trains, about trains that come screaming out of the fog or the rain, she’s always an old train, a steamer, she’s glowin’ red as hell’s fires under her belly and she’s runnin’ hard and blowin’ steam out the pop off valve.

“She’ll run through a red signal, she’ll go blasting by the station or the switchman’s shack or past a solitary hobo alone on the tracks, and you can feel her shiver the earth underfoot and you can feel the wind of her passing and she’s silent.  She’s always … dead silent.  And she always means something bad just happened, or sometimes she prevents … like the time an engineer saw her comin’ straight at them down the single track.  He laid on his Diesel air horn and locked up the air and threw the sanders to ‘er and he barely got her stopped with the nose of his Covered Wagon just hanging over the edge of where the trestle was an hour before, and that ghost train nowhere to be seen.

“I’ve never seen anythin’ of the kind –“  he looked sharply around the table – “but Bill has, he’s seen the Old Sheriff and he’s smelled the Old Sheriff’s wife Esther, she who ran the railroad and made it a-profit again.  Bill …” 

He shot a guilty look at the police chief and then the Sheriff.

“Should I tell ‘em that Bill took a shot at a ghost?”

His voice was so rueful, his expression so uncertain, that they could not help but laugh:  Fitchie nodded to the fire chief, who unfolded the red-flannel bundle he held.

“Now this,” he said, standing and holding up the bib front shirt with the gold Maltese cross in its center, “this is what the firemen in the 1880s wore, but ‘twas wool and not flannel.”  He draped the shirt carefully over the back of his vacated chair.

“I brought this shirt because I had it dry cleaned.”

He stopped his narrative as the other guests looked at one another, and finally Wilma Kincaid asked hesitantly, “You … had it dry cleaned?”

He nodded grimly.

“Y’see, I was sick th’ day the children were to see the firehouse.  They came down from school and they got a tour and they went back all happy and giggly like children are and they sent me their thank-yous.”

He opened a brown manila envelope and spread several childish drawings on the table.

“Y’see here, this one” – he tapped it with a forefinger – “that’s showin’ th’ big heavy wooden double doors, an’ that” – he tapped another – “is supposed t’be th’ fire chief a-drivin’ the steam fire engine out wi’ three mares in harness, though it looks like either mice wi’ long ears or three Easter Bunnies.”  He rubbed his hairless lip thoughtfully. 

“Look a’ th’ chief’s face now.”

Heads bent, eyes studied the crayoned image.

“Y’see that black curled handlebar mustache?  Every one o’ these drawings has it.  Every one of ‘em has th’ big wooden doors.  They all show three mares.  Ever’ one of them.”  He leaned on the table, his voice low, intense. 

“They said th’ fire chief was there wi’ his white helmet an’ his big black mustache an’ black boots t’ his knees, he had red hair an’ a great gusting laugh an’ they loved that shiny steam engine wi’ th’ wee steam whistle.”

“It sounds delightful,” Wilma said tentatively.

“It sounds wonderful, but th’ chief wasn’t there, th’ children ne’er showed up a’ th’ firehouse – if they did, they’d no’ ha’ drawn wooden doors, we’ve not had wooden doors for two decades!”

“What?”

“It’s been an o’erhead door f’r better’n twenty years, we don’t ha’e any mares in residence, th’ steam engine is awa’ for restoration!” 

He looked at the Eastern ghost hunter.

“Is it ghosts ye want, lass?  There’s ghosts a-plenty here!”

Chief Will Keller cleared his throat.

“If I may,” he said courteously, and Chief Finnegan sat down.

“Let’s talk a little more about the firehouse, shall we?”

He turned in his seat so he could face their Eastern visitor.

“One of my men was on patrol, midnight shift.  He sometimes dismounts.  He’ll park the cruiser and walk, says it helps him stay awake.  It’s an effective technique, I have no objection, he has a radio and stays in contact.

“He was on dismounted patrol one night and he saw a light inside the firehouse.

“There was no alarm over his radio like there usually is – we normally signal when there’s a fire run – but he’d received nothing.

“He reported the double doors also, and this surprised him because he knew the firehouse had the overhead, powered, roll-up doors.

“The doors SLAMMED open and a big, red-headed Irishman in a red wool shirt” – he gestured to the fire chief’s example – “and a white helmet, and the thick, curled, black handlebar mustache, swung a blacksnake whip and curled his lip and whistled.

“The patrolman heard the whip sounding like a pistol shot three feet over the mares’ ears, and he heard the Irishman roar ‘St. Florian, St. Christopher and the Madonna, Ladies, RUN!” and the mares thundered out of the bay, drawing the smoking, hissing steam firefighting engine behind … he turned to watch them run up the street, and they were gone … he turned and looked at the firehouse, the windows were dark and the overhead door was shut.

“That was the night we had a line of duty death, an officer walked into a live electric line knocked down at the scene of an accident.”

Linn nodded, looked at the monk.  “Brother Zacharias, how say you?”

Brother Zacharias opened the album he’d brought, turned it.

“These are our modern day Sisters,” he said.  “They’ve been known since their inception as the Faceless Nuns, because they wear a white silk veil over their entire face, even when singing, or asleep.

“They are a nursing order and they are known for their skill as healers, combining native herbology with a strong faith in addition to modern nursing techniques.

“They of course bring all their life’s experiences with them when they join our Order.

“They are also known as the Order of St. Mercurius, and we have the honor to have a relic from the martyred Saint in our Monastery.”

He turned the page, revealing a print of a silver spearpoint.

“This is hafted on good elm.  It is stored in a locked, chip-carved and locked casket, a hand’s-breath wide on each side and longer than a man is tall.

“It is kept in a secured alcove behind the High Altar, and none may access it without due ceremony and two of our Inner Order present.

“And yet” – he looked around, one eyebrow raised – “and yet there are times when it is missing.  Always it’s a time of great need, always it’s someplace distant from the Monastery, and always, always it’s one of our Sisters who rides with the Lance upright in her stirrup, holding it like a warrior-maiden as she rides a truly huge, gleaming, shining, rippling black horse.”

He looked at the engineer with an understanding expression.  “Like your ghost trains, the horse’s passage is utterly silent.  If she rides through the observer, she’s like a gust of cold wind running through the watcher’s body, but otherwise she is soundless.”

His fingers caressed the image.

“The spearpoint is of silver.  It looks like silver – dull in color – but when Sister Mercurius rides, it blazes too brightly to look upon.”  He straightened.  “I myself have seen her riding in the distance, her white riding silks flowing in the wind behind her.

“Always it is the same.  Someone is ill, dying, incurable:  the butt of the Lance is driven hard against the door, and the door opens, and the horse rides easily through the doorway, no matter how low it is.

“The rider will lower the lance head over the sufferer, and it blazes like a sun, and none can look at it – and when the light fades, horse and rider and the lance are all gone, and the one who was sick, is sick no more.”

Brother Zacharias turned a page again, nodded.  “This is Sister Mercurius,” he said, his finger above the head of one of the White Nuns.  “She sang like one of the Heavenly Choir, and in her memory, the Sisters sing just as beautifully.”

Ghost hunter and cheerleader were clearly interested, leaning toward the album, then Shelly turned her head and asked, “Sheriff, what was that about the Old Sheriff’s ghost saving your mother?”

Linn smiled sadly, nodded to his Uncle Will.  “Chief,” he said softly, “you want to tell her?”

Chief of Police Will Keller nodded, drumming fingertips on the tabletop.

“Willamina,” he said softly, “was my twin sister.  She served in Afghanistan.  Her unit was jumped, they got separated, she took a round through the receiver of her AR and put it out of action.  She drew her pistol, ambushed a terr and took his AK and his mags and proceeded to put the red-handed hurt on the enemy that jumped them.

“She shot the rifle dry three times over, until a shell exploded close by and she lost her grip on the AK . Nearly fell down a well, lost the rifle down the hole, pulled her Beretta.

“She shot up all her rounds and another shell blew her into a bomb crater.

“She was laying on her back with an empty pistol in her hand – the Beretta slide locks back when she’s empty – she threw the pistol and screamed at the terr grinning at her from the rim of the bomb crater to come and get it.

“She’d pulled her knife and she was too stunned to get up and the terr –“

“What’s a terr?”  Jimmy Hill interrupted in his little-boy voice:  his Mama shushed him, and Will smiled and winked at the lad.

“Sorry, son,” Will rumbled pleasantly, “you wouldn’t know that one.  Terr” – as he pronounced it, the word rhymed with “burr” – “is short for terrorist.”

“Okay,” Jimmy nodded, eyes wide and innocent.

“Anyway the terr raised his rifle toward my baby sis, and there was this BOOM, BOOM from the rim of the bomb crater above her head, and two smoke rings – black powder smoke rings – wobbled out over the crater.

“The terr folded up like a cheap suit.  He’d just taken both barrels from a shotgun right in the gut.

“Willamina looked up as a lean waisted old lawman with an iron grey mustache and pale eyes shouted, “NO ONE SHOOTS MY LITTLE GIRL!” – then he looked squarely at her, and he faded, and he was gone.

“I understand Willamina appeared on Mars and grassed that miner that was ready to drive an explosive charge into Willamina’s chest.”  He looked at Linn, and the Sheriff nodded.

“You understand correctly.”

“Now, Miss Crane.”

The cheerleader looked quickly at the Sheriff, surprised and afraid of being put on the spot.

“How solid did the man feel who let you out of that locked jail cell?”

Shelly blinked.  “He was real,” she said firmly.  “He … I ran into him and he held me like a father and I was so scared …”

“You needed your Daddy, and there he was.”

“I needed my Daddy,” Shelly whispered, trembling a little.  “He wasn’t Daddy but he acted like one.”

Linn nodded again.

“Miss Kincaid.  When you saw what you took to be me, over in Carbon, what did you observe?”

“You – he – it?”

“He will do.”

“He,” she nodded in agreement, “was riding a red horse.”

“Red,” Linn echoed thoughtfully.  “Can you be more specific?”

“It was a … it was copper.  Bright, shining, new-penny copper.”

Linn looked at his Uncle and they said with one voice, “Cannonball!”

“What’s a cannonball?”  Jimmy asked.

“Cannonball,” Will explained, “was my sister’s horse.  Cannonball was also the horse the Old Sheriff rode.  He named her that because she ran like a ball fired from a cannon!”

“Wow,” Jimmy breathed, eyes wide and wondering.

Brother Zacharias looked toward the window, the one opening out onto the street, and his eyes widened:  alarmed, he stood, and Linn followed his shocked gaze as Shelly Crane asked nervously, “Do you suppose we’ll see any ghosts tonight?”

Linn was to the window in a moment:  adults looked over the curtains, between the curtains, Jimmy pulled them over his head and grabbed the windowsill, his breath fogging the cool glass.

Outside, a woman all in white, a woman with a silk veil on her face, drew a truly huge, gleaming, shining black mare to a stop:  moonlight brought out the muscled ripples beneath the healthy, shining fur:  even if the moon had been eclipsed, the light blazing from the Lance she carried would have lit them almost like a daylight flare.

The woman reached up, unfast her veil from one side, drew it aside to reveal a terrible scar running from the corner of her eye, diagonally down her face, and down her throat, to disappear into the low collar of her white nun’s habit.

They could hear her voice plainly, despite the several feet that separated them, despite the closed window.

The woman’s lips moved and they clearly heard her raspy whisper:

“I used to sing opera.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

57.  A CURIOUS MAN

 

“That was quite a powwow you held tonight.”

Linn glared at the Old Sheriff, apparently solid and real, leaning hipshot against the door frame.

“Don’t you ever knock?”

Old Pale Eyes chuckled, came on in; Linn noted idly that he hadn’t bothered either to open the door, nor to shut it behind him, as it was already shut.

“Your Mama used to tell me the same thing.”

“Now about that powwow.  Have a set.”

The Old Sheriff eased himself down into a chair; it creaked slightly as his weight came on it.

“I thought ghosts were incorporeal.  Mist, fog, moonlight through a window.”

Old Pale Eyes chuckled.  “Be kind of hard to shoot a double gun if I was made of meadow-fog, now, wouldn’t it?”

Linn nodded slowly.  “It would.”

“You have a question.”

“Several.”

“Ask, then.”

“Why are you still here?”

Linn saw the older lawman’s eyes tighten a little at the corners, and he saw the nod, slow, shallow, a nod of approval.

“My work isn’t done.”

“What is your work?”

The Old Sheriff spread work-callused palms and shook his head.  “Believe me, son, if I knew that, I’d bust my backside to get ‘er done so I could go on home!”  He looked sharply at the younger Sheriff.  “You’ve been there.  You’ve seen the Valley.”

Linn nodded slowly.  “So did Mama.”

“I know.  She didn’t want to come back and neither did you.  That’s why you weren’t surprised when I told you my work wasn’t done.”

“Yeah.”  Linn leaned back in his chair, remembering.

He’d died when both his lungs collapsed, died at 4:30 the next morning in the Intensive Care Unit.

He remembered looking down at his own long, tall carcass on that hospital bed and thinking, “That poor fellow needs a good square meal,” and then realizing …

… that’s me …

… and he remembered the world falling away from him on a long, shining arc, and just that fast – those were the words he used, “just that fast” – he was in the Valley.

The Valley of the Shadow, he explained later, was not the dark and foreboding place we imagine when read of it in Scripture.

The Valley is green.

It smells of a thousand green growing things.

He was told – not told, really, it wasn’t words that were used, it was an instant, to-the-core understanding – that his work wasn’t done, and he had to go back, and that when his work was done, then he may come home.

He too considered – after he awoke, after he looked up at the shocked Code Blue team and said “Hi there” – he considered that if he, too, knew what his work was here below, he’d bust his own hump to get it done so he, too, could go back.

Linn nodded.  “Yeah.  Know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“I know you do.”  The Old Sheriff brushed his mustache – a quick left-and-right whisk of the knuckle, an unconscious habit – and he frowned.  “You recall your Mama told you about that shell crater and how I drove that fellow both barrels, and then I looked down at her and said ‘Nobody shoots my little girl!’ and faded.”

“I recall.”

“Your Mama did the same thing with Marnie up there in New Firelands.”

Linn looked directly at his honored ancestor’s image.  “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

“Nope.”

Linn raised and eyebrow and the Old Sheriff could not suppress a quiet smile.

“Jacob used to do that.  Hoist just one eyebrow.  Your Mama did the same thing and so did Sarah.”

“We saw Sarah earlier.”

“I know.  She likes doing that.  My darlin’ little troublemaker.”

“You said that’s not what they call it up there.  What do they call it?”

The Old Sheriff leaned his elbows on his knees, rubbed callused palms together with a dry, raspy sound, loud in the nighttime office.  “They just call it Firelands.”

“I see.”

“She’s found somethin’ to use for bullets other’n lead.  Lead’s scarce, they ain’t found any on-planet and it’s too expensive to freight.  She’s writin’ you some kind of a letter tellin’ you about it.  Powder to reload is … they can make that, they can make the loadin’ dies and a press, but primers will have to be shipped.”

“I can arrange that.”

“So can I.”

Linn raised an eyebrow and gave his many-times-great Granddad’s image a long, hard look.

“I know that look,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled.  “Your Mama was good at that one.”

“Reckon I get it honest.”

“You do for a fact.” 

“You can ship primers?”

“I’ll tell you a secret.”  The Old Sheriff stood.  “That little popgun of a pistol she’s got ain’t much.  It was barely enough.  You got somethin’ with authority, I can get it to her fast and easy, you want to send a case of ammunition, that’s easy too.”

“How?”  Linn’s voice was skeptical – he wished to tread carefully, it does not profit a man to call another a liar unless he wants to wade into a knock-down drag-out knuckle storm – but as Sheriff, he’d learned to separate fact from bullroar.

The Old Sherif reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a coin.

Linn reached into his own vest pocket and pulled out an identical coin.

“I reckon she ought to have her genuine coin instead of just a pretty picture.”

Linn rose.  “Let me get the stuff together.”

“Set.  We ain’t done.”

Linn eased back down in his padded, armless office chair.

“Now about Sarah.”

“What about Sarah?”

“When I died, my thoughts were for my little girls especially.  I reckon that’s why I come back like a freight train when your Mama was about to be killed.  My only regret when I died was that I wouldn’t be around to keep my little girls safe.  Well, they done all right, and it wasn’t until your Mama ended up shot empty and with nothin’ but a knife ag’in a rifle that I stepped in.

“Sarah died at war.  She tore into a whole crowd of ‘em and she took most of ‘em with her.  They killed her but she killed damn near every one of them and that’s one reason the Yankee American doughboys were feared by folks from that part of them Hartz Mountains.  ‘Course it didn’t hurt none when our boys was shootin’ the pointy things off them Germans’ helmets just for fun.”

Linn nodded, chuckling.  “I’d heard they did that.”

“Sarah died satisfied.  She’d got her little girl off safe, she’d stopped the hull darn riotin’ mob that come to kill her father in law and her and figured to burn down that big fancy stone castle house thing of theirs.”

“How come you didn’t step in and keep her alive?”

“She was havin’ too much fun.  It was her time to fight and die and she did us proud.  Her work was finished.  It was needful that her little girl should end up here in Firelands and be raised up not knowin’ who her folks were.  The blood lines still run back East and blood finds blood.  That’s why your Mama and your Uncle Will’s folks married.  Blood reckonized blood and birthed pale eyed twins and then here you are.”

“Was my Pa of this blood line?”

“No.”  Again, the slow sandpapering of palms together.  “No, but he had … some things about him … that you needed to inherit, and you have.”

“Why do I need them?”

“Because there’s one hell of a fight a-comin’, Linn, it’ll be partly of this earth and partly not and I can’t tell you more than that, only that hell’s a-comin’ and we’re goin’ to need the best warriors.”

“Where does Sarah come into this?”

“She combined our blood with the Llewellyn line.  They came into our blood back East and it’s come back together ag’in, and it’ll focus here.”

“So I’ve got relatives to meet yet.”

“One’s on her way now.”

“Where do I find her?”

“She’ll find you and you’ll know her.  She’ll be wearin’ Nicodemus’s class ring.”

“He didn’t say anything about a girl.”

The Old Sheriff smiled.

“I don’t reckon he said a thing about him plantin’ seed in a fertile field, neither.”

There was a knock at the Sheriff’s door.

The Old Sheriff stood, disappeared:  Linn called, “Come on in,” and Cindy opened the door, pulled it open.

A nervous looking young woman came through the door, walking carefully: Linn came out of his seat, seized the chair the Old Sheriff had just occupied, drew it out: “Please, sit,” he said, and she lowered herself into the chair slowly, carefully, one hand on a very pregnant belly.

She blew air out through pursed lips, then murmured, “Thank you.”

Linn looked at her right hand, swallowed.

He recognized the ring on her finger, the ring wrapped with chenille to make it fit her slender finger.

Linn went to one knee, took her hand in both his:  her hand, her fingers, were soft and cool, and she was trembling a little.

“Nicodemus?”  he asked gently, and she nodded, her eyes bright, almost ready to spill over.

Linn turned, grabbed the box of tissues off his desk, set them down in her lap.

“I have nowhere else to go,” she whispered, wiping at closed eyes, “and Nicodemus said if anything happened I was to come here – I didn’t – I don’t –“

Her hand tightened on his and she bit her bottom lip, stiffening a little.

“How long have you been in labor?”  Linn asked, his voice suddenly professional.

“Two hours.  It’s not false labor this time.  It’s different.”

Linn nodded.  “You came to the right place.  Is this your first pregnancy?”

She nodded.

“Has your water broken?”

She shook her head.

“Good.”  He ran an arm under her knees, the other behind her shoulders, and she ran an arm around his neck:  he stood, carrying her easily.

Cindy was still in the doorway, watching; she pulled the door open, then skipped ahead to shove the heavy glass inner door open, then the outer.

Cindy opened the passenger door of the Sheriff’s cruiser.

Linn got her set inside and situated and he held her hand, patted it with his other:  “I’ll give you a nice easy ride,” he said quietly.  “It’s not far.”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip.

“Cindy, could you call –“

“On it!”  Cindy chirped happily, stepping up onto the boardwalk and seizing the door handle.

Linn shut the passenger door, gently, no sense in slamming it and scaring the poor girl.

He climbed in, started the engine, backed into the empty street and pulled a U-turn to head downhill, toward their shining stone hospital a few blocks away.

“By the way,” the Sheriff said as he ruthlessly suppressed the impulse to wipe a finger across the rocker switches and mash the go pedal with a polished Wellington boot, “my name’s Linn.  Nicodemus was my nephew.”

She nodded.  “He told me about you,” she gasped, then laid a hand across her belly and shivered.

“Not far now.”  Linn’s voice was surprisingly conversational, considering the circumstances; men often get rattled when a woman is in labor, and so far, he wasn’t.  “The Spanish never ask what your name is, they ask how do you call yourself, so … what would you prefer that I call you?”

“Beth,” the pretty young woman gasped.  “Call me Beth.”

Linn turned, turned again, braked easily and gently in the ambulance entrance, under the tall, broad overhang and right in front of the sliding glass doors.

The ER crew looked out the doors, wondering what the banging was, and they saw the Sheriff’s cruiser, the Sheriff himself kicking the sliding glass door, a woman in his arms.

 

Connie picked up the phone, bouncing little Wesley Albert a little, trying to soothe the fussy child.

Jimmy Hill sat at the kitchen table, a half-eaten sandwich in front of him, looking absolutely, utterly lost.

“Hello, Grandma,” her husband’s voice grinned in her ear, “I have some news!”

Connie looked at Jimmy and felt an old and familiar ache.  “I, um, honey, something happened.  I think you should come home.”

“Are you hurt?”  The Sheriff’s voice was suddenly tight.  “Is Wes okay?”

Connie turned a little, spoke softly so they lost-looking little boy couldn’t hear her.

“It’s Mrs. Hill.  She died an hour ago and Jimmy is here with me.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

58.  AND YOU SHALL HAVE HER!

 

Call it what you want – the Madness, the Rage, the Insanity, it don’t matter.

I knew it back in that damned War and I knew it now.

I’d known it when I ran screaming into battle with a double handful of battlefield pickup musket and I knew it when I drove shining steel into a man’s throat and I knew it when I battled for my life, belt-buckle-to-belt-buckle, using a rifle for anything but a rifle’s purpose, and I knew what it was in other battles to seize that incoming rifle and twist, to pull my hand forged belt knife and jump on top of a man who had a knife of his own and to drive steel into him like a sewing machine while my off hand held his wrist to keep him from doin’ that to me.

I’d stood in both victories and threw my head back and screamed, for the fire inside me was more than I could stand, and if I did not let it out I would have burnt up, such is the battle rage that seizes a man.

I knew it now.

Jacob and I ran beside the railroad tracks, my mare and his stallion, their necks out and their ears back and we rode with the speed of desperate men, for there’d been a derail and people were hurt, and it was my fault.

My fault!

I owned the railroad and I hadn’t got the iron rails replaced with steel and one of the iron rails came loose as the engine passed over it, the rail flipped up and gutted out a passenger car and the rest of the train, what little there was, come off the tracks.

People were dead and it was my fault, my fault!

We found the engine, breathing steadily, stopped on the tracks, the engineer in the cab but his fireman back somewhere in the wreckage, searching.

We looked over the shattered scene and then I saw it.

A small hand, gripping a rag doll.

I am a strong man and I have waded in blood up to my ankles, I know what it is to seize a man by the throat and shake him like a terrier shakes a rat and to see the light go out in his eyes and know that I did this, I killed him, and I have been shot and blowed up and I know the feel of steel as it cuts my hide or gets drove into me, but none of that did me a damn bit of good when I saw that little pale still unmoving hand and the bright calico of that rag doll.

My knees give out and I knew in that moment what the Bible meant when I read “My bones are poured out like water” for that’s just exactly how it felt.

I felt like that back in the Ohio country, back when I come home from that damned War, when I come back to our cabin on the shore of the Sweet Sea the native Erie knew:  I felt like that when I found my wife, my Connie, was dead one week to the day from small pox, and our daughter, my daughter, my little Dana who I’d last seen when I was home on invalid leave … she was at a neighbor’s, in an unheated shed, dying of the same pox.

I’d brought her home all wrapped up in one of Connie’s quilts and I stoked up the fire in that cold dead fireplace and I held my little girl and I rocked her and when she breathed her last, when that one last little warm breath sighed out ag’in the side of my neck and her soul come out with it, I felt like I did just now.

I’d got Dana a bright calico rag doll for it was near to her second birthday, and that’s just when she died, on her birthday, in my arms, in the cabin Connie and I built for us and for our future.

I sunk down to my hands and knees and then that Rage come on me, for that little hand was stuck out from under what used to be the side wall of that-there passenger car, and I heard a distant roar like a madman attacking a mountain with a singletree, and I seized that wall and I throwed it off that little girl like I was flippin’ a playing card off a marked deck.

I went down on one knee and I brushed her cheek with the back of a curled finger and I wondered why there was a drop of wet splashed on her cheek, for the sky above was clear and blue and free of clouds, and then I felt the wet running down my own cheek.

I wasn’t roaring now.

I was growling.

I felt the snarl, like a predator’s warning rumble, starting way down in my chest and I run my arms under that still little form and I stood up and threw my head back and let out a scream of pure absolute pain, for it was like holding my little girl again, and I buried my face in the front of her frock and I am not the least bit ashamed to admit I cried like a lost child.

When I come up for air I looked up and there was just a little puff of a cloud directly overhead and I set my teeth and took a breath and shouted, “NOT THIS ONE!  NOT THIS ONE TOO!” and then I looked down at her and I saw her chin quiver.

I set down right there in the grass and in the dirt and the splintered boards and I did not care.

I held her tight, I held her like a drowning man will hold a float and I whispered, “Don’t leave me, darlin’, stay with me, I’m right here,” and I felt her take a breath, and I felt her take another, and then she twisted a little and she run her arms around my neck and she grabbed holt of me like she was the one a-drown and I was the float in the water.

Wasn’t a day later that I was settin’ in our little whitewashed church, settin’ in the front pew and starin’ at the rough wood cross on the back wall, behint the altar.

I recall ‘twas near to sun down and the sun was almost red as it come in through the windows on the one side.

I’d spoke with Charlie Macneil that morning and allowed as that little girl’s parents were both killed and she didn’t have no one out here, and I’d just as soon take her in as my own.

Charlie knew about Dana and Connie, back in Ohio, he knew what it was to lose people, and he didn’t say much – a good friend knows when to be silent, and to listen, and he was one of the best – him and the Judge must have had a palaver, for as good a friend as he was, he was equally as good at poking goose feathers into me to kind of deflate my grand opinion of myself.  I recall once I was getting’ just all kind of high-and-mighty about me and he quietly warned me that I was confusin’ myself with someone important, and another time when I was holding forth at length on some subject or another, he got impatient and allowed as if I knowed so damned much, why didn’t I hang out a shingle and make a million dollars?

God’s blessing upon the man, both times, it’s exactly what I needed, and today when I set feelin’ all kind of lost in that front church pew, I looked at that-there rough timber cross and the big boxy altar a man could hide behind, and I cleared my throat and spoke my piece.

“God,” said I, “I have ever come here for refuge and to seek Your greater wisdom.

“I’m a-standin’ here with my hat in my hand –“

I looked down at the Stetson in my grip and grimaced.

“You can see that already.”  I shook my head, feeling kind of foolish, listened to my voice echo and die inside the empty church.

“God, You know I found that little girl in that wreck.  She’s orphaned now.  I’ve sent word back to Kentucky and their Sheriff where she comes from, he telegraphed me back and said her folks was all ‘twas left of their family.

“She has nobody, Lord, and You know my little Dana died of the small pox.”

I had to stop and take a couple of breaths.

I stood there looking at the floor and then I looked up at that rough timber and I declared in a firm voice, “God, if it ain’t too much, I’d like to have that little girl for my own!”

I said it loud and I said it strong and I said it all full of confidence, for that’s how a man should come before the Lord, and I like to died or at least fell over in a dead faint when  a deep and booming voice replied, “THENNN YOOOUUUU SSHHAAALLLL HAAAVEEE HHEERRRRRRR!”

I’m more than satisfied the color run out of my face like red ink out of an eyedropper.

Charlie Macneil and His Honor the Judge Donald Hostetler stood up from behind that big boxy altar they were hidin’ behind, and they was laughin’ and I set down kind of sudden, and then it hit me funny too and the three of us laughed like a bunch of damned fools, and that’s how I got my daughter Dana, she with chestnut hair and Kentucky-blue eyes and a gift for looking absolutely innocent, didn’t matter what mischief she was got into.

 

Old Pale Eyes took off his Stetson as he crossed the threshold of the little whitewashed church.

He stood respectfully for a moment just inside the door, then paced slowly, deliberately down the aisle.

He remembered the day his daughter, his Dana, married that young fellow, and she was his little girl no more, but a woman grown and another man’s wife.

He remembered coming down this aisle with a child in each hand, and his red-headed, green-eyed Esther ahead of him, carrying an infant, the maid with her, carrying a basket of supplies.

He smiled as he remembered, for these were good memories, these were memories of a good life well lived, the memories of a man who loved well and deeply.

Sheriff Linn Keller didn’t have to look to know his Very Great Grandfather’s tread.

A tall, lean, pale-eyed lawman with an iron grey mustache sat down beside another tall, lean, pale-eyed lawman.

They sat beside one another, looking almost like father and son, and they let the silence between them grow long.

“I always found comfort here,” Old Pale Eyes rumbled.

Linn nodded.

“You’re thinkin’ about that boy.”

“Jimmy Hill.”

“His Mama just died.”

“She had a cancer.  It eroded through her aorta and she just fell over dead.”

Old Pale Eyes nodded.  “What’ll become of the boy?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Silence for a few moments, then Old Pale Eyes stood up and walked slowly across the front of the church, up the four steps; he crossed behind the podium and walked slowly behind the altar, eyes busy.

“You lookin’ for somethin’ particular?”

The lean old lawman with the iron-grey mustache nodded.  “Lookin’ to see if anyone was a-hidin’ up here.”

He turned again, and was gone.

Linn's eyes narrowed and he turned his head a little as if to bring a good ear to bear and he wondered, "Now why would someone be hidin' behind the altar?" -- then he shrugged and dismissed the thought.

Linn sat and thought a few moments more, then he stood and looked at the rough timber cross on the wall behind the boxy altar.

“Lord,” he said, “that boy, that Jimmy Hill, he’s pretty much an orphan now.  His Pa lit out of here and left his Ma to die and just left that boy behind.  He’s a good kid, Lord, and I’d like to adopt him.”

“Perhaps,” a voice said, “I can be of some help.”

Linn turned slowly, nodded to the approaching Judge.

“Your Honor,” he greeted him as the distinguished jurist limped slowly up to him, his hand out.

“I believe,” the Judge said as they shook hands, “that a boy should have a father to look up to.  The one he’s had is a poor example.  I believe you will be a much better example for him.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“The formal adoption process is somewhat lengthy, but I believe the Court will offer no objection if he stays with you in the meantime.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“I can’t tell you it will be easy, raising another man’s get.”

“Raisin’ your own is not always easy, Your Honor.”

The Judge nodded.  “I was fortunate,” he admitted, resting a fatherly hand on the Sheriff’s shoulder.  “I had a good father who completely overlooked the fact that I was the get of another man’s loins.”  He nodded, patted the Sheriff’s shoulder approvingly.  “I believe you will make a fine father for your children, Sheriff.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

59.  NEW BUNK, NEW ROOM

 

The stairs in the Sheriff’s log home were broad, unusually so for the era in which they were constructed.

They’d been built broad and they’d been built stout, and they’d seen generations of family’s ascent and descent.

They saw a lean-waisted lawman in his best suit carry his bride up them for the very first time, and they saw the same lean-waisted lawman carry his drowsy little girl upstairs to her bedroom, they saw another man carry a pale-eyed Sheriff, his bride, up the stairs, and these stairs saw mother and father both carry their little one upstairs to bed.

They’d seen men with slow and funereal tread carry a long box down the stairs, for wife and for husband alike; they’d seen children tumble down the stairs on Christmas morning, they’d seen children toboggan down the stairs on cardboard, to come rolling up against the opposite wall with a solid thud that surprisingly broke neither the wall, nor their young bones.

These patient old stairs saw another lean-waisted Sheriff, a man with pale eyes and a mustache just going to his hereditary iron grey, a man carrying a worn-out little boy upstairs to his bedroom.

The Sheriff undressed the lad carefully, slid him between the flannel sheets, drew the covers up and tucked them around his chin.

Jimmy wiggled a little and let out a little sigh, and the Sheriff quietly, carefully, drew up a chair and sat down at the lad’s bedside.

Jimmy opened his eyes, looked innocently at the lawman.

Linn remembered when he came through the front door, came home at his wife’s summons:  he hugged his wife and she nodded to the kitchen.

He’d taken a step toward the kitchen, called “Jimmy!”

He saw the boy’s eyes widen in panic and the color washed out of his face and he looked like a rabbit about to get snake bit and as the Sheriff came into the kitchen, he’d twisted away with his arms up and whimpered, “Don’t hit me!”

He hadn’t.

He took the boy carefully in his arms and held him and whispered, “You’re safe here, I won’t let anyone hurt you,” and the boy unwrapped his arms from around his head and ran them as far around the embracing lawman as he could manage, and he clung to Linn and shivered, and Linn pulled him out of his chair:  he sat down a little awkwardly, but sat with the boy on his lap, holding him, while the child shivered silently, clinging to this one anchor, this one constant, this one reference that had never, ever hurt him, that had never lied to him, that had never let him down.

Now Jimmy looked up at the Sheriff, blinked, looked around.

They’d painted the room together, the boy and the lawman, they’d laid down old sheets and they’d given the walls new color, and it still smelled faintly of fresh latex paint, despite having the windows open all day to air out.

“We painted this,” Jimmy whispered.

Linn nodded, smiled a little as he did.  “Yep.”

They’d taken out the old bed, which Linn had intended to do for some time, and brought in a brand new one, a new bed and new box springs and mattress; they’d put it together, and Linn remembered what it was to work with his own father.

He’d shown Jimmy the marvels of a socket set, and how to use a combination wrench, to use either the open end or the box end, depending on how tight a spot he was working; the operation was not critical and truth be told it could have been handled with a common crescent wrench, but Linn saw curiosity and understanding both in their turn as Jimmy changed out one socket for another, as he gave the socket an experimental twist to see which way the locking dog was swung, as he carefully tightened up the bolt.

They painted the room together, they built the bed together, they made the bed and tucked in the sheets, and when they were done, Linn reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter.

“Let’s see if we did this well enough,” he winked as he flipped the quarter into the air.

It landed on the cover with kind of a dull thwup … and that’s all it did.

Linn gave an exaggerated sigh.

“My Mama was a Marine,” he explained, “and when she made a bed, you could bounce a quarter on it.”  He made a rueful face and admitted, “I’m not that good!”

Jimmy yawned, a great, drowsy yawn, the kind little boys make that looks three sizes too big for his small carcass:  he blinked again, his eyelids heavy, and he whispered, “We made this bed.”

Linn nodded, smiling a little.  “Yep.  New room, new bunk, specially for you.”

“I never had a new room before.”

Linn nodded.

“I never had a new bed either.”

Linn laid a gentle hand on Jimmy’s blanket covered shoulder. 

“Get used to it,” he said softly.  “They’re all yours.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

60.  A LISTENING EAR

 

Jimmy managed to hatchet the sawed chunks into kindling.

Connie was a bit uncomfortable turning him loose with a cutting tool, but the Sheriff showed him how it worked and asked him to fill two five gallon buckets with kindling.

Jimmy had never split wood in his life.

It took him a bit to get the hang of it, but he managed, though he ended up chunking the blade into the wood, then lifting hatchet, wood and all and driving it down onto the splitting stump.

He arranged the kindling in the first bucket, working in as much as he could, shaking and thumping it to pack in all the wood he possibly could, wanting desperately to do a good job for the Sheriff.

He straightened, then sat, laid the hatchet on the block, closed his eyes, and took a long breath.

Something big, wet and cold shoved at his hand and automatically he lifted his hand, and something huge and furry thrust itself under his arm.

Jimmy’s eyes were still closed:  he didn’t need to look to know he had a new friend.

He just didn’t know how big a new friend he was about to make.

Connie came out to the barn to make sure he hadn’t cut off most of a hand or something, and she didn’t hear any sounds of industry.

Puzzled, she crept in, until she heard his voice.

He was talking with someone.

She peeked carefully around the edge of the doorway and saw that he had one hand on The Bear Killer’s shoulder, and his profile – though shadowed – showed all the earnest expression of a child, discussing something important, to someone who was actually listening.

“He used to whip me,” Jimmy said, and Connie’s hand went to her mouth as she heard the pain in those few and simple syllables:  he’d holler my name and he’d take that belt to me and it hurt and he’d call me stupid and he didn’t let me do nothin’.  He never let me help with anything ‘cause he said I was stupid.”

Connie saw one bucket was packed clear full – something she’d never managed to do, she’d always tossed in kindling loose and convenient – and she saw the hatchet was laid on the chopping block, its edge away from him.

“The Sheriff let me put in bolts an’ use tools an’ everything, an’ we painted the room an’ he let me pick out the color an’ I never got to paint my own room before!”

Connie stifled a giggle as The Bear Killer turned his huge head and licked Jimmy’s face.

She backed up a few steps, then turned and walked very quietly back to the house.

She knew everyone needed a listening ear.

 

Jimmy leaned against the huge and furry shoulder of the curly black Tibetan mountain Mastiff.

The immense dog smelled like wind and sage and … well, like dog.

“I never had a dog,” Jimmy murmured, and then he heard a muffled, deep BOOOOOMMM and a scream and another BOOOOOMMMM and another scream, and then more screams and of a sudden The Bear Killer was GONE! – Jimmy came to his feet, eyes huge and scared, and he fell behind the hay bale, curled into a tight ball, hands over his ears, whimpering in fear, eyes screwed shut and lips pressed together hard enough to blanch them white.

He did not know what was going on but he could hear screaming and he could hear a terrible monstrous raging yammer and he froze, froze with fear, froze with dread, all the terrible memories of his young life roaring out of the rocky hell where they lived not far below the surface, and he tasted copper as memories and raw terror seared through him like ghosts sleeting through the rocky teeth of a haunted graveyard.

His hands were hard over his ears and he couldn’t hear the piercing whistle of an electronic siren, his eyes were tight shut and he was as low as he could get on the chaff-littered board floor, wishing the entire hayloft would open its belly and bury him beneath a million feet of hard packed twine squared hay bales.

The Bear Killer raged against the front door with the voice of a thunderstorm, his voice somewhere between a chopping yammer, an enraged roar and a bear’s enraged bawl:  two swipes and the screen was less than shreds, he threw his hard-muscled mass against the inner door, shivering it repeatedly.

Sheriff Linn Keller mashed the sole of his polished Wellington boot hard on the throttle, knuckles white as he gripped the wheel:  every light on his cruiser was lit up, he had the siren wound over to YELP and he honestly did not give a good damn for what the tach said, for how many RPMs he was twisting out of that big-block V8, nor what his forward velocity was.

The panic alarm came from his home and then the shots-fired alarm.

He’d grabbed his favorite working tool for unpleasant situations, a twelve gauge pump gun with rifle sights and an extended magazine, and he kept it stoked with 00 buck and the modified choke tube:  it was clamped in the gunrack and secure, ready to release at the touch of the hidden button.

He drifted all four tires around the last curve, slung the back end of the long wheelbase Suburban in a controlled fishtail, going from blacktop to his gravel driveway, and he side slid to a stop in front of his own door.

One wave of his hand shut off siren, lights and released the shotgun, gripped its fore end:  he was out of the cruiser at a dead run, charging up the steps of his own home at the top of his voice:  The Bear Killer was still raging at the front door and Linn hit the door with his shoulder, ignoring what used to be a screen door:  he backed up to the edge of the porch, yelled “BEAR KILLER MOVE!” and charged the door again.

It opened just before he hit it and he came through the doorway sideways, tripped, landed hard:  he rolled, came up on his knees, shotgun up, teeth bared, a vision of a fighting demon escaped from some infernal war:  he was parchment-white, his face looked like dried skin stretched over a skull, his eyes were dead white and his teeth were bared in a mummy’s deathly grin.

The Bear Killer shot in right behind him, swift as an arrow and silent as death:  claws scrambled on hardwood and he collided with the wall before getting his legs under him again.

Blue smoke hazed his living room and blood splattered over most of the far wall.

Connie stood in the middle of the room holding what used to be a shotgun, her double gun, the one she kept loaded for unpleasant occasions, and he remembered he’d loaded some blackpowder loads and must have left two of them in her gun, for the air was thick and tasted of sulfur and iron.

He came to his feet, sanity returning to his skull if not to his expression, and he looked at his wife, his shotgun pointing to the floor.

Connie looked at the two barrels and a receiver in her hand and Linn saw the broke off stock was splintered and bloody at what used to be a checkered English wrist.

Connie’s face was coming back from pale and she was getting red and that meant fear was replaced with anger and this went fast into rage and she pointed at a still figure on the floor, a figure that used to have a head, and Linn saw the far window was gone.

The Bear Killer was all a-bristle, lips peeled back, sniffing at the still and bloodied figure on the floor.

Linn watched without emotion as the big Mastiff hiked his leg and cast his ballot on the deceased.

Linn seized his wife’s arm near the shoulder:  “ARE YOU HURT?” he shouted and she shook her head, then pointed again.

“He was standing over Wes with a knife and he said he was going to stab him in the head –“

Linn looked out the window.

There was movement near the barn.

“Where’s Jimmy?”

“He’s in the barn.”

“BEAR KILLER!  WITH ME!”

Linn charged past his wife, The Bear Killer with him, and the two ran for the barn just as hard as they could go.

 

Jimmy felt something touch his shoulder.

He was too scared to even flinch.

He heard someone breathing hard, breathing scared, the way he’d heard his Mama breathe before his Pa caught them and beat them both, and he held his breath, willing himself to stillness, to utter stillness, not daring even to tremble but not able to prevent it.

He screamed when a hard hand grabbed him and yanked him up, pulled him deeper into the barn.

His hands fell away from his ears and he saw something black soaring over the hay bale and he felt a clawed paw rake his shoulder and whoever had him let go of him and a monster was roaring like a cyclone with fangs and hell’s own hate and the Sheriff ran in, shotgun to his shoulder, and Jimmy heard the Sheriff’s voice, “BEAR KILLER!  STAND DOWN!” – and Jimmy sat down, dropped down on his skinny backside, straight down into straw and dirt and he was too scared to scream, too terrified to cry, and something huge and black spun and came up against him and he felt more than heard the deep, menacing, rumbling snarl, more a suppressed roar hidden deep in the Mastiff’s curly-furred chest.

The Sheriff walked up on them, his shotgun looking past the little boy, and the pale-eyed man said quietly, “You came to kill my family.  You’ll do as I say or I will kill you.  Bear Killer, watch him.”

The black Mastiff – Jimmy shivered as The Bear Killer turned, for he could see the big canine’s eyes, and they glowed like coals in a campfire, they glowed red and his lips were rippling back from ivory fangs as he snarled an invitation for the intruder to so much as twitch.

Linn squatted, quickly, his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

“Jimmy,” he said quietly, “are you hurt?”

Jimmy shook his head.

Linn ran his arm around the boy, held him tight, tight, held him like he didn’t ever want him to go.

“Jimmy,” he choked, “I couldn’t stand it if you’d been hurt!”

Jimmy heard vehicles, voices, running feet:  he didn’t look, he didn’t watch, he knew somehow that more lawmen showed up and whoever grabbed him was taken away, he knew there were lots of people around and he knew something very bad happened, and he knew that a man’s arm was around him and as long as that tall, slender Sheriff had him, he’d be safe, he’d be protected.

 

Connie wandered out onto her front porch, little Wesley Albert in her arms:  she sat heavily on the porch swing, unfocused eyes not seeing the Omaha-orange-and-white ambulance parked squarely in front of the front steps.

Someone came up to the swing – she recognized the tread, it was her husband – his weight came on the porch swing beside her, and someone else, and she didn’t know who and she didn’t care.

Linn ran his arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulled her close to him, he parked the shotgun against the porch rail and ran his other arm around Jimmy, and he pulled them both tight to him.

“I killed him,” Connie said faintly.  “I killed him.”

She stared blindly at the fiberglass side of the ambulance.

“He was standing over Wes,” she said.  “He had a knife and he said he was going to stab the Sheriff’s kid through the head.”

She swallowed, dropped her head.

“I shot him, Linn.  I grabbed my gun and I give him both barrels and I beat him and I beat him and I beat him –“

She shivered, took a convulsive breath.

“The other one jumped through the window and I killed him, Linn, he tried to kill our baby and I killed him –“

Her voice tapered off into a tortured squeak and he felt her start to shake.

“Jimmy had a close one but he’s not hurt,” Linn said reassuringly.  “You kept our child safe and you kept yourself safe.  You did nothing wrong, dearest.  You are all safe.  I don’t care about anything else.  All of you are safe!”

 

That night, Jimmy floated between flannel sheets, suspended between realities as his consciousness cascaded into the limitless depths of the black lake of slumber.

He descended through the layers of existences, planes of thoughts sleeting like bright, flat lightning, there and gone, forgotten as soon as they were conceived, until he reached the quiet strata where a boy’s soul goes to escape the waking reality that is life.

Here he dreamed, here the faithful subconscious sorted out the day’s confusion and replayed it as image and allegory, and sometimes issues of absolutely no importance, little plays and operettas that made no sense whatsoever.

Jimmy slept, and he dreamed.

Was a watcher to study the sleeping form, an observer would take note of fingers that twitched, then splayed in a fear response; there would be twitches, little sounds of distress, the eyes would roll back and forth beneath closed eyelids as the breathing quickened:  perhaps there would even be a sheen of sweat as the heartbeat increased, maybe a leg-twitch as the impulse to run, to flee, overrode sleep’s paralysis.

He was hiding behind the hay bale when a giant hand descended from the stratosphere, a hand big as two football fields that seized the back of his jacket and hauled him up into the black sunlight.

There was a black, curly-furred dragon, all fang and coals-red eyes and huge leathery wings, there was the impact of flesh on flesh and a giant that looked like the Sheriff raised a shotgun the size of field artillery and shouted with a voice that shook mountains and blew the fire out of stars, “LEEEAVEEE HIMMMMM ALOOOOONE!” and then Jimmy was a little boy again and the Sheriff was holding him, holding him tight like something precious, whispering in his ear that he was safe and all was well and no harm would come to him, and a very deep part of his young soul heard the truth hidden in those words.

A watcher would have seen the sleeping form’s pulse slow, the breathing slow and deepen, the hands relax.

In the other upstairs bedroom, a man with pale eyes and bandage-wrapped legs sweated and twitched, his hands closing into fists:  he shivered a little, and a tortured sound escaped his paralyzed throat.

His wife rolled over and laid a hand on his breast and his hand shot out from under the covers like a striking viper, slapped down hard on the wife’s hand, pressing it to him, desperate to escape the nightmare.

His body did not betray the horrors his mind relived.

Pale eyes snapped open and his wife whispered, “It’s all right, you’re home, you’re in your own bed,” and the living fire that consumed his legs diminished to their steady ache of healing flesh:  awakened now, he trembled, and his wife continued, her whisper plain in the nighttime hush, “You got them out, you got them to safety, they’re alive, you saved them,” and she felt his chest rise, and she felt the nod of his head and saw his eyes close as he willed himself back to sleep.

In the darkest shadowed corner, perhaps, a lean old lawman with pale eyes and an iron-grey mustache remembered what it was to relive the horrors he’d seen, the agonies he’d known, and how his own green-eyed, red-haired wife laid her hand on his breast in just that same manner.

We might even see his quiet nod, before he turned and blended into shadow and was gone, but we will never know, for we were never there.

We may, however, catch a scrap of conversation, we may accidentally overhear when the Sheriff confided to the Parson that he and his wife fell asleep holding hands and more often than not, when they woke, still holding hands, that she too had suffered nightmares, and he’d woken and held her as she relived her own distress at realizing that she could become a warrior-mother when the occasion demanded.

But in order to overhear this soft-voiced conversation, we would have to be standing in the Silver Jewel, or perhaps sharing a seat at the Parson’s table, so we’ll just have to use our imaginations here.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

61.  THE PARSON’S TALE

 

The Reverend John Burnett leaned back in his swivel chair and laughed.

His wife smiled to hear it, for the man was the community’s crying shoulder, its confidante, its listening ear; his was the counsel that was sought (and more often than not ignored), the man asked to say Grace or a blessing before dinners, gatherings or meetings, his were the ministrations sought for weddings and funerals, baptisms and there were always the emergency calls at odd hours when someone was hurt, or ill, or expected to die.

Reverend John was a patient soul, a man given to listening before speaking, and sometimes just listening – and so he was known as a wise man, for he listened, and he listened not to reply, but he listened to understand.

He sat in his parsonage office now, rocked back in his aging swivel chair, re-reading his early account of the very first wedding service he ever performed, and his wife wiped her hands on her apron and smiled, for it was good to hear the man laugh.

She turned her head and smiled again, for there was a knock at her kitchen door.

Nobody ever came to the kitchen door – it was at the rear of the parsonage, everyone came to the front, everyone but a certain pale eyed lawman, and nobody else used the sharp, shave-and-a-haircut summons tapped on the doorframe with the blunt end of a folded Barlow knife.

“Why good mornin’, Sunshine,” the Sheriff greeted her, sweeping off his Stetson with that boyish grin of his:  “can Johnny come out and play?”

It was his standard greeting, and she laughed, getting the last of the shortening off her hands, stepping aside and tilting her head a little:  “Coffee’s on, John’s in his study.”

The Sheriff winked and he slipped past her, his tread almost silent on the spotless hardwood floor, and Mrs. Pastor (as she was known in the community) shut the door and returned to her baking.

The Sheriff paused at the doorway, knocked on the door frame.  “Permission to come aboard?”  he asked, the way he always did, and Reverend John looked up and smiled. 

“Come in, come in,” he said, amusement in his voice, “you told me the other day you can get in trouble just settin’ in your easy chair” – the man was a natural linguist and could address someone in their native accent and use their colloquialisms flawlessly, and so he greeted the Sheriff in the lawman’s own native tongue – “I was just reading my early record … the very first wedding I ever performed!”

Linn eased down into a chair, a little more slowly and a little more carefully than he usually did.

“How are your legs?”  Reverend John frowned, closing the book with a finger for a bookmark.

“Givin’ me grief,” Linn admitted.  “I’ve got some infection, they pain me some at night and right now they itch like seven hundred dollars, so I reckon that means they’re healin’.”

Reverend John shook his head and tried to whistle, but only managed a dry hiss.  “Dear God,” he murmured, and it was less an exclamation than a prayer, “I don’t see how you stood in burning gasoline!”

“It wasn’t easy!”  Linn laughed.  “De Lawd lukes out atter fules an’ chillin’s, and I must have qualified under both!” 

He leaned forward, knees spread, legs almost out straight – usually, the Reverend knew, he’d have his boots under him, feet flat on the floor and ready to stand at any moment; he’d sit hunched forward, elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together before he spoke, something he did only when he felt safe, when he was not threatened or in his formal persona as Sheriff.

“It’s just a damned good thing I was wearin’ blue jeans instead of those plastic uniform pants.  Polyester or whateverthecottonpickin they’re made of.  They’d have welded to my legs and burnt me to the bone.”

“Cotton,” Reverend John nodded.  “Wool is better.”

“Yeah, well, if I’d have known I was going to stand in the river of fire I’d have worn Nomex!”  Linn frowned.  “I looked at Nomex uniform pants.  They do make ‘em but I’m not payin’ that kind of money when blue denim –“

He shook his head, leaned back, and the Parson could see the man was troubled.

“No man wishes to burn, Parson.  No man wishes to fry.  Christian Hell is eternal fire, eternal pain and there’s no pain like a burn, Parson.  I’ve been burned before and it wasn’t pleasant and when I was fightin’ to get those kids out of that car it was like half my mind was over here” – he shoved something invisible to his right with a flat palm – “and it was on fire and screaming and wanting to run away and hide, and the rest of my mind” – he thrust a hard finger to his left – “was focused on getting those kids out of there!”

His eyes paled when he uttered the words, his throat tightened and the Parson could see the man shiver.

“I loaded up all the children that were in there, I had ‘em over my shoulder and under both arms and I’d have carried one in my teeth if I’d had to” – his words were coming faster now, his voice lower, still precise but quicker, like his breathing – “and as I run out of that river of fire toward Barrents all I could hear was that woman screaming to get out, screaming at me to get her children to safety, screaming that she didn’t want to die.”

The Parson’s wife hesitated at the doorway, coffee in each hand; she looked at her husband, and the Parson shook his head, once, and she nodded, and withdrew.

“I went back, Parson.  I went to the driver’s side and her door was locked, just like the passenger door was.  I had to bust the window to get to the door lock and I busted hers out too. 

“The fire was starting to roll into the car.  I’d left that passenger door just hang open when I got those kids out of there.  She was looking at that ugly dirty yella fire curling up beside the car and I reckon she smelled her own hair a-singe and she went into panic and she couldn’t have poured water out of a boot if she’d had to.”

The Parson nodded as the Sheriff took a long, shivering breath, blew it out.

“Parson, I dove in that busted out window up to my belt buckle and I retcht down and stobbed attair seat belt buckle with my thumb” – he held up a bandaged thumb, smiling ruefully – “bent my thumb nail back to my wrist and it still hurts!”

The Parson chuckled with the man:  painful though it was, the way he said it was funny, and meant to be funny, to lighten the moment, then the Sheriff’s smile fell to the floor and shattered and his eyes were as haunted as the rest of his expression.

“When she run into that tree it jammed the door shut and you couldn’t have got it open with a pry bar.

“I didn’t care.

“I retched down and unlocked the door and then I grabbed holt of it and hauled hard enough to break off her door handle and damned if I was going to let her die in there, my mind quit workin’ or I’d have grabbed her and drug her out attair busted out window.”

His jaw thrust forward and he was breathing open mouthed, and the Parson knew the man was reliving the full event, for the first time, since it happened.

Reverend Burnett knew this was a necessary debrief; he’d been Chaplain for the emergency services back East, and he knew a debrief immediately after a critical incident was very important, and he knew the Sheriff had been denied the chance to do this:  he leaned forward, listening with both ears and with both eyes.

“I had a-holt of that door, Parson.  I grabbed a-holt of it and I allowed as it was comin’ open peacefully or otherwise and I didn’t much care which.”

He hesitated, looked at his hands, at his palms, not seeing them, seeing instead the broken out window, seeing chunks of safety glass glittering on the door sill like a handful of careless diamonds.

“I set my boot on the side of the car and I hauled on that door and somethin’ groaned and it warn’t me and it let go with a bang and I probably shot ten feet and landed on my back” – he frowned, reached behind him – “maybe that’s what they was workin’ on there in the horse pistol.  I think ER said they pulled some gravel out of my back.  Anyway I got that door open, I dove in and got her under the legs and around the back and I thought she was gonna choke me she had such a grip around my neck and I’m a-runnin’ for Barrents wonderin’ if I was gonna pass out from strangulation before I got her to the cruiser.”

He snorted.  “I don’t recall much after that.”

Mrs. Parson was at his side – it was a testament to the Sheriff’s having turned his vision inward, to that terrible memory, that he had no recollection of her approach, or her stopping and standing beside him for two seconds before lowering the coffee mug into his line of sight.

He blinked, shook his head, reached up with both hands and took the mug.

He looked up at her and said quietly, courteously, “Thank’ee kindly,” and she wasn’t sure which struck her as more significant, the look in his eyes or the fact that the liquid’s surface shimmered and rippled and betrayed the sudden tremor in his normally dead-steady hands.

Linn took a deliberately noisy slurp of his coffee, then lifted his head and dashed the clinging drops from his grey-shot mustache.

Mrs. Parson reached down, touched the lawman under the chin:  he obediently raised his head, one eyebrow quirking curiously, for the woman was more than a perfect lady, and for her to touch a guest was a definite rarity.

“Sheriff,” she said quietly, “you trim your mustache like a military man.”

“Habit,” he said quietly, concentrating on holding his coffee cup level without looking at it.

“I think you would look good with a handlebar mustache,” she opined.  “I’ve seen photographs of past Sheriffs and they had beautifully curled mustaches.”

Linn’s eyes smiled.  “I’d like that,” he admitted.

“I know your mother was a Marine, and you keep yours military-trimmed for her.”

Linn looked at the Parson and shook his head.  “I,” he sighed, “am transparent as a window!”

“Think about it.  You would look good with a villainously-curled handlebar.  I’m trying to talk Chief Finnegan into growing one as well.”

She turned, started back for the kitchen.

“There is pie, if you’d like to adjourn to the table.”

The Sheriff and the Parson looked at one another and with one voice said, “Sounds good to me!”

 

There had always been a Parsonage Cat, never as an official office, just a constant fixture; whether the current bearer of that title had any ancestral relation to the original, nobody really knew:  Smokey, the grey resident feline, greeted visitors, assessed visitors, begged belly rubs from visitors, and in the case of the Sheriff, declared the man’s left shoulder his rightful throne, and so the Sheriff sat very straight, drank coffee very carefully, and ate his pie with an exaggerated care, for though Smokey was draped bonelessly over his shoulder, the lawman wished not to disturb the warm, furry neck drape.

After the ceremonial, purring, snuffing of the lawman’s left ear, Smokey dropped his chin and promptly went to sleep, the Sheriff smiling quietly the way he always did with the big puddy tat’s attentions.

“Now just out of curiosity,” Linn said, as the atmosphere and the mood had entirely changed since his arrival, “what were laughin’ at when I came in, or is that something you can discuss?”

Reverend Burnett stopped, blinked; then he chuckled, raised a finger, took a sip of coffee to clear his mouth and swallowed.

“You told me one time you can get in trouble just a-settin’ in your easy chair.”

The Sheriff nodded.  “I did that,” he admitted.

“I was reading my written account of the first wedding I ever put on.”

Linn nodded, smiling just a little:  it wasn’t often the Parson opened up about his past, and if the Sheriff was being given a peep at the feline in the burlap, so to speak, he might learn a little more about this sky pilot he’d come to regard and trust as a friend.

“It was back in a little place you might never have heard of,” the Parson admitted, “one of those little you-can’t-get-there-from-here places called Chauncey, back in Ohio.”

“Know right where it is,” Linn nodded.  “Granddad was town marshal in Trimble, not far north of there.”

The Parson’s mouth opened in surprise and he nodded.

“Chauncey.  Coal mining town.  There’s still what’s left of one of the canal locks just outside town, behind the old Cuz’s Corner.  Last I heard it was closed and fallin’ in.”

“I, um …” 

The Parson’s ears turned red, for all the world like a schoolboy’s.

“You started this, Parson.  Out with it, now, let’s have it!”  Linn was grinning, reached up to caress Smokey, who raised his chin to accept his due.

“You already know I was Chaplain for fire, police and emergency medical.”

“I recall you sayin’.”

“A couple came to me asking for my services.  I wasn’t even through Seminary yet.  I felt the Calling and I was a working paramedic and I spoke to my station chief about it.  He opened a copy of Popular Mechanics and ran his big finger down a column in the Classifieds, ran down another and stopped.

“I looked at the ad and that afternoon I sent a check for ten bucks to a mail order outfit, and when it returned I sent fifteen bucks to the Secretary of State, and just that fast I was an ordained minister.  Marry, bury and preach, ticket good for a lifetime.

“Not a week later this couple comes to me.  She was not just Catholic, she was Old Country Catholic, and her family would not countenance anything short of a priest and a formal Catholic service.  The groom …”

“Uh-oh,” Linn grinned, and the Parson nodded ruefully.

“You’re right.  The groom was atheist as so was his family, and they would not have anything to do with a church or a priest, and the fight was on.

“When the dust settled, the atheists agreed to a church wedding – if the preacher didn’t match the church.

“The Catholics agreed if there was clergy and a church.

“Now who,” he said, “at that time was weird, warped, bent, twisted and otherwise strange enough to fill the bill?”

He raised his hand waved it back and forth.

“Now we start getting in trouble.”

“I can only imagine,” Linn murmured.

“As Chaplain I also held a police commission, I was an auxiliary officer in Glouster, and the groom and I entered into a conspiracy.”

Linn rubbed his hands together.  “I like this already,” he admitted.

“They wanted me in the character of a circuit riding preacher, so I did my best, and under the lapel I pinned my police badge, and under the coat I had a black powder revolver in a fast-draw rig.  When it came the right time in the service, I turned back my lapel and said “If anyone can show JUST AND LAWFUL CAUSE” – I stopped and looked around – “why this wedding should not occur” – I unbuttoned my coat, swept it back to show the revolver – “speak now and be dealt with.”

He laughed.

“Sheriff, have you ever truly heard Dead Silence?  Eyebrows disappeared under wig lines all over that church!”  He laughed again.  “I buttoned my coat and we went on with the service, when I said ‘You may kiss the bride’ here she came steamboatin’ out of the bride’s family, the Old Matriarch Herself, all elbows and kneecaps and a-swingin’ that umbrella, and I thought ‘Stand still for your beatin’, you’ve earned it,’ and she grabbed my hand and I’ll never forget her accent – “You make-a me laugh, you make-a me laugh, you da besty damn preacher I ever hear, you make-a me laugh,” and a good time was had by all.”  He chuckled again.  “Sheriff, do you know, that’s been almost forty years ago, and they are still happily married!”

Linn nodded.

“I’ve done better than three hundred wedding so far, but only about ten funerals before we moved out here.”  He blinked and the Sheriff saw the man’s eyes change.

“My first funeral was for a very good friend and a charter member of our fire department.  It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

“The next funeral was for my old police partner.”  The Parson looked directly at the Sheriff.  “You’ll tell your partner things you’d never, ever tell your wife, Sheriff.  I’d stood back to back with the man when the carnies surrounded us, it was two in the morning, black as your hat and they were half drunk and not much liking a small town cop pulling them over.  Don had a double handful of twelve gauge and I’m here to tell you a double handful of .357 revolver feels pretty puny when you’re surrounded by big-shouldered, dirty, tattooed troublemakers with chains and knives.  It’s not your wife at your back with a riot gun, it’s your partner, and …”  he paused, sighed out a breath, continued:  “That was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

“There were others, all people I knew, then one September I did my best friend’s funeral.  He and I were closer than my blood brother and I, and you know how close families are in the hill country.  That became the hardest thing I’d ever done.”

The Parson’s wife came up behind him, laid an understanding hand on his shoulder.

“One calendar month later, Sheriff, I did my own mother’s funeral.  Neither my best friend’s nor my mother’s … I had no prep time for either one, but I did them, and I did them well.  Sheriff” – he looked up, sorrow in his voice as well as his expression – “those in turn were the hardest things I have ever done!”

He swallowed.

“I know the Arabs say that which does not kill us makes us stronger, but I’ll be honest …”

The man’s smile was rueful.

“If that saying is true, Sheriff, I should be able to bench press a Buick!”

Linn laughed and nodded thoughtfully.

“Parson,” he said, “I think you may be right.”

“I’m afraid I am right.”

The Sheriff caught the change in the man’s voice: he frowned a little, looked closely at the man.

“You see, Sheriff, the second wedding was a week after the first, and one week after that – the bride was a widow with two children, the groom was a widower with three children – there was a house fire and we were called in for mutual aid.

“The fire started in a fuel oil furnace under the stairway.”  His eyes were distant, his voice quiet.  “A stairway is a chimney and it burned away the only escape the children had from upstairs.

“They had the infant sleeping with them downstairs – not them, she, the husband was at work.  She woke to smoke and fire and children screaming and the stairs were gone.

“She and her infant got out and … we got there and raised the ladder and our youngest member was up the ladder as fast as a man can run on level ground.

“I remember hearing him scream.

“He came to the window and handed a limp form to the Captain and I recall seeing vapor come from the child’s mouth as she was handed off.  I think it was her soul leaving her body.

“The Captain kicked his feet off the rungs and pressed his insteps against the side of the ladder and he slid down and landed flat footed.

“The medics ran up with the demand valve and the coroner was there, he said to wait a minute.

“He tried to raise her eyelid and the burned flesh split and he said ‘Fellows, don’t even try.’

“We laid those children out in the side yard where I’d done their wedding the week before.

“We sheeted them and the firemen stood there bareheaded as I knelt between those tiny little forms and then they turned and attacked that fire like a personal enemy.  By then, of course, it was too late.”

He looked up at the Sheriff.

“Fire is not my friend either, Sheriff, but I don’t carry the scars you will.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

62.  THE ROSE

 

It is hardly proper ladylike behavior to address someone in her living room with both barrels of a shotgun.

It is not quite ordinary protocol for the lady of the house to take her empty shotgun by the muzzle and swing it in a quick, vicious arc, caving in the top of the intruder’s skull.

It is less than ordinary behavior for said feminine, ladylike soul to continue to address the intruder’s skull with the broke-off end of what used to be a nicely stocked bird gun, until said skull is no longer recognizable as something human.

The human system is similar to an electronic capacitor:  a capacitor absorbs energy and stores it, then discharges it, generally in one bright burst.

The human system is somewhat more complex.

Connie Keller responded with a mother’s rage when she saw intruders in her home, with a fierce, bright, focused attack when she saw the knife, raised like an icepick, when the stranger’s voice declared an intent to drive the knife through the infant’s skull.

Connie Keller, a ladylike and feminine soul, the happily wed spouse of the pale eyed Sheriff, weakened her spine enough to lean against her husband and shiver, there on the front porch, with his strong and reassuring arm around her.

That night, as they lay together in bed, she needed a deeper reassurance, deeper than his arms, his voice, his warmth.

He gave her that deeper reassurance, in a language, in a manner, that did not use words, but communicated that deep and basic need in a manner unmistakable.

Outside the Sheriff’s century-old home, in the chill of the Colorado night, a shadow moved, flowing from one pool of shadowed darkness to another:  dark eyes gleamed when moonlight touched them, teeth shone white, white in the silver illumination, a moist black nose twitched and tasted the wind.

The Bear Killer prowled, restless, remembering the smell of the woman’s anxiety:  he remembered the smell of the two who came in unbidden, and a ridge of fur rippled down the length of his spine and across his shoulders, and then he remembered the one in the barn, when he launched over the small male and clamped hard jaws on the upraised forearm, the one with the black, blunt, steel noisemaker.

He could have crushed the arm easily – he could have torn it from the stranger’s body – but the Alpha’s training held true, and The Bear Killer bore the stranger to the ground, landing hard on him, holding him until given the command, “Stand down!”

He was fiercely loyal to his pack, and this loyalty showed as his lips rippled back from fighting canines and a deep, snarling rumble echoed deep in his great, voluminous chest.

He paced silently to the barn, slipped into a stall, touched noses with another great creature, a newcomer, another of his pack, a runner that loved the open pasture.

The Bear Killer ran with him, and they ran together for the sheer joy of running, and when the small male rode the great runner, The Bear Killer paced with them, until the big runner laid his ears back and left The Bear Killer galloping futilely in their wake, and the little male threw back his head and laughed, and the Alpha riding beside them laughed with him, for there is magic in a child’s voice, and it is a source of wonder to see the world through a child’s eyes.

The small one slept upstairs – The Bear Killer knew this, his scent drifted from the house, relaxed and content, and The Bear Killer smelled something else, and it brought a gleam of memory from his own passions.

Eventually the great canine drifted back to the house, curled up on the rug on the front porch, lowered his head on his paws and drowsed, as he always did, with part of his mind listening, awake, processing the smells and sounds of the night.

He could almost hear the stars wheeling gracefully overhead; the moon drew a veil modestly across her face, and when the sun finally reached up and grabbed the horizon and hauled its shining crown over the mountain’s granite teeth, the Sheriff’s wife woke, feeling content, feeling wanted.

She opened her eyes and her breath caught in her throat.

A fresh-cut rose, with dew still bright on its petals, lay moist and fragrant and very, very fresh, on the table beside the bed.

Connie’s splayed fingers went to her belly, and then to the rose, and her eyes grew very wide, and she smiled, and she smiled again as she remembered their night together.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

63.  FRAMED

 

“You’re worried.”

Cindy’s expression was innocent as she made her comment to the Sheriff.

Linn looked at her, surprised, the powdered-sugar, white-cream-filled stick doughnut between his teeth, looking like a ridiculous pastry duck bill.

Cindy took the box of doughnuts from him, led the way to the conference room and set the pastries in the middle of the long table:  she turned, swung her hips as she went out the door, kicked the door open and dollied in the coffee pot on its stainless steel cart.

The Sheriff chewed thoughtfully on the  still-warm doughnut, considering they were fortunate to have a family bakery there in town that showed promise of staying open for at least another generation.  Frank Grubbs was the local Scoutmaster, he was a master baker, he’d made nearly every wedding cake in the county for who knows how many years, and the Sheriff’s office was a regular customer when it came to packing off boxes of his fresh doughnut creations.

Frank was particularly fond of this particular clientele because they were unfailingly courteous, they paid in cash and they invariably overpaid:  they never left a separate tip, it was always at least ten bucks over the purchase price, and they never bought less than a full dozen at a time.

Cindy, too, noticed something about these purchases.

When the Sheriff was puzzled, or worried, concerned or agitated, he tended to get a dozen powdered sugar cream filled stick doughnuts, he came through the heavy-glass double doors with one stuck between his teeth and powdered sugar down his shirt front.

Cindy picked up the Sheriff’s mug and dispensed most of a volume of fresh coffee, added a splash of half-and-half and set it on the table by the man’s left hand.

“All right, long tall and handsome,” she said, folding her arms and tapping her foot and glaring over a non-existent pair of schoolmarm spectacles, “what’s eatin’ you?”

The Sheriff switched the doughnut to his right hand, picked up the coffee and took a noisy slurp.

“And another thing, you’d look better with a handlebar mustache!”

Linn swallowed, cleared his throat and gave his dispatcher an odd look.

“You,” he said, “are the … never mind.”  He shook his head. 

“No never you mind nothing,” Cindy persisted.  “Finish that thought and then answer the question, mister!”

Linn regarded his dispatcher with his head tilted a little to the side and she saw the grin start in his eyes and spread to the rest of his face, and then he laughed and set his stub of a doughnut on the table.

“Not on the table, don’t be a slob,” Cindy muttered, picking it up and whisking a small paper plate under it.  “Good Lord, were you born in a barn?”

“Nooooo’m,” Linn moo’d with a straight face.

Cindy raised her hands to the ceiling, implored of the acoustic tiles overhead, “What ever did I do to deserve this kind of abuse?”

Linn picked up the box, flipped back the lid, held it out.  “Partake,” he said, “and my dear Watson, just sit there and let me expound.”

“I’ll sit at my radio, thank you very much,” Cindy said tartly.

“I’ll fetch the doughnuts, you bring the coffee out, Barrents ought to be along here directly and he’ll want to know.”

“I knew it,” Cindy nodded.  “There’s something going on!”

“There’s always something going on.” 

They took their party out into the lobby and Barrents came through the doors as if cued by a director.  “Doughnuts!”  he exclaimed happily, reached in and plucked one forth, then stopped and frowned at the Sheriff.  “Out with it, boss, what’s eatin’ at you?”

“Am I that transparent?”  Linn protested, to which both Dispatcher and Chief Deputy chorused with a hearty “YES!”

“Well, hell, set down then,” Linn sighed, shaking his head.  “You are my inner circle and my command staff and you have a legitimate need-to-know.”

 

The Bell family was long established in the Firelands area.

Nelson Bell ran the brickyards a little ways from town, and would until the clay deposit was played out:  it was rare to have a good vein of fire clay here in the mountains, but by some trick of geology, the vein was discovered maybe a decade after the original Esther Rose Brick Works were built to make bricks for construction.

Fire clay meant fire bricks and there was always a demand for fire brick, and Nelson had run the brick works for twenty years:  he was near enough to retirement to toy with the idea of drawing rockin’ chair money, but his wage was good, he had full benefits, and he didn’t want to pay the unholy fees insurance would charge if he were financially on his own.

Nelson’s wife Leona was a distant enough cousin that marriage would not be problematic; their fertile union brought a stronger strain of the original Bell blood into their daughter, Carol, and it brought an unexpected benefit that made itself known at odd moments.

Like today.

Carol was half Connie Keller’s age, but the Sheriff’s wife and this daughter of their old friends were well acquainted, and when they met downtown, they slipped into the drugstore to indulge in something fattening and celebratory, not because they were really celebrating, but just because.

As they each settled into an ornate-backed metal chair, feeling like teenagers cutting class and having a milkshake instead, Carol tilted her head curiously and said, “Connie, look at me.”

Connie raised her head, surprised, and Carol blinked, then her mouth dropped open.

“Connie,” she whispered, “you’re pregnant!”

Connie turned a fierce shade of red and said “Shhh, Linn doesn’t know!” and Carol whispered back, “When did you find out?”

“This morning, just this morning!”  She smiled secretively and looked away, her cheeks apple-red as Carol asked, “What does the doctor say?”
“The doctor didn’t tell me,” Connie whispered, her eyes shining.

“So how do … you didn’t … a test kit …”

“Better,” Connie whispered, reaching across the table and laying delicate fingertips on the back of the other woman’s hand.  “A rose!”

Carol’s mouth opened wider and she clapped a hand over her mouth, delight in her expression and excitement in her posture:  the pair came out of their chairs and embraced, bouncing a little, Carol giving a happy little squeak, then they sat down again.

“How could you tell I was pregnant?”  Connie asked, looking down at the boy-child sleeping in his carrier.

“I just could.  I looked at you and I just knew.”

Connie giggled.  “Two centuries ago you would have been hanged as a witch!”

“Tell me about it,” Carol groaned.  “I should have known I had the Gift.  I was born on Christmas, they named me Carol, they said I was their very own Christmas Bell!”

Connie rubbed her forehead.  “I hope I don’t get morning sickness like I did,” she groaned.  “We were coming home from a trip and we drove all night.  We hadn’t gotten home yet and we were coming past a church in a little town – I forget which one – we were coming past this little church on a quiet little street just as they were letting out and it hit me.

“I didn’t dare speak, all I could do was stomp on the floorboards and Linn pulled over kind of quick.

“I opened the car door and threw up and I’ll bet those good church folk thought we were coming home from one hell of a party!”

They laughed quietly and talked and sipped their chocolate milkshakes, and Carol Bell stopped, a look of surprise on her young face.

“Carol?”  Connie asked.  “Carol, what’s wrong?”

Carol raised her eyes, looked at the Sheriff’s wife.

“I just remembered,” she said wonderingly.  “You remember your mother in law sold copies of the old original Sheriff’s Journals?”

“Mm-hmm,” Connie nodded, taking a tentative draw on her straw.

Carol tapped a lacquered fingernail on the polished, faux-marble tabletop.

“This happened before,” she whispered.  “My ...”

She looked up at the ceiling, lips moving, thumb touching one, two, three, four fingertips as she remembered, cataloguing something before looking down, discovery in her eyes and delight in her face.

“My five times great grandmother was named Carol and she was born on Christmas too!”

“Ooo-kaaay,” Connie said tentatively.

“She looked at the Old Sheriff’s wife Esther and said ‘Esther, you’re pregnant,’ just like …”

Her voice slowed noticeably as she put her thoughts into words.

“Just … like … I just told the Sheriff’s wife … she was pregnant.”

Connie reached down into her baby’s carrier, withdrew a red rose, put it to her nose, savored its scent.

“It would seem,” she said, “that you are agreed with!”

 

Linn chewed happily on a second doughnut, leaning forward a little to dribble powdered sugar on the big paper plate.

“I,” he confessed, “am afraid of new developments.”

“You, afraid?”

“Not afraid, really, just … concerned.”

“Concerned.”

“Yeah.”  He grinned, that quick, boyish grin of his, the one nobody ever saw unless the Sheriff was relaxed and his guard was down.  “You know how people will adopt a child and find out they’re expecting a week later?”

“Uh-oh,” Barrents said in agreement.

“No,” Cindy said confidently.  “She’s still breastfeeding.  She can’t conceive –“

“Wes is on solid food for a month now.”
Carol’s confidence washed away like a thin layer of watercolor.  “Uh-oh,” she said faintly.

“Uh-oh yeah,” the Sheriff agreed, holding his stick doughnut between thumb and fingers as if it were a fine cigar.

“Yooouuu,” Barrents said slowly, “haven’t been … trying … now ... have you?”

The Sheriff’s lecherous grin was his only answer.

 

“Here’s the one I took when they were out at our place.”

Carol looked at the picture, smiling a little.  “She looks so pleased!”

It showed mother and son and the Sheriff, or at least the top the Sheriff’s Stetson:  Jimmy was astride his big Stomper-horse, trying his brand new saddle for the very first time, reins in one hand and the other hand clamped on his saddle horn.

His mother’s face shone with pride.

“Here’s another.”

It showed Jimmy on his Mama’s lap, and she on a bale of hay, and they were both looking at something in the distance:  the shot was taken near sunset, when the sun’s rays are red and rich and perfect for color saturation.

“I’m having these printed and framed for Jimmy’s room.”  Connie blinked, remembering her own Mama.  “He should be able to remember what his mother looked like.”

Carol nodded, then frowned.  “You’re fostering?”

“Not really, it’s … Jimmy likes Linn, and we just love Jimmy, and I think Linn made some arrangement to keep him out of the foster system.”

“Are you adopting him?”

Connie smiled, nodding.  “We’d like to.”

She looked at the two pictures again.  “Do you think these will look good, all matted and framed?”

“Yes,” Carol said firmly.  “Yes, I do!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

64.  THE SHERIFF GOES TO CHURCH

 

“Oh, yeah.”

The sandy haired young man looked like he would be perfectly at home on the Ohio State University campus:  his shirt was unbuttoned, his chest tanned, his cargo shorts loose and comfortable, his moccasins scuffed:  a preppy college man or not, he apparently knew something about engines, because he hadn’t been under their car’s hood more than five minutes when he emerged, wiping his hands on a blue shop rag and nodding with a satisfied expression.

“Okay, start ‘er up,” he said, “but do not, do not hit the throttle!”

The anxious young man turned the key, released:  his old faithful Dodge – more old than faithful, truth be told – started easily, the way it always did.

The smiling stranger came up to his window.  “Most of the teeth are shot on your timing belt.  If you take this road one more mile, you’ll come to Fitzer’s Garage.  It’s a little place on your right.  Give old man Fitzer this” – he handed the young man an envelope – “it’s a gift certificate and it’s null and void if it’s opened, so don’t.  Just give it to him and tell him you need a timing belt put on and he’ll take care of it.”

He winked, then skipped around the car, slapping his hand lightly on the trunk as he swung around back:  he opened the passenger door and bowed like a courtier, gesturing the young wife in, and closed the door firmly as she drew the belt across her.

“Easy on the throttle,” he added, looking across to the young husband.  “Nothing over forty miles per hour and absolutely no hard acceleration no matter what.  Once you get there, leave it idle until Old Man Fitzer has the replacement belt in hand.”  He winked. 

The young fellow and his wife both looked at the envelope in his fingers.  “Thank you,” he said uncertainly, “do we owe you anyth …”

They both turned and looked.

“Where did he go?”

 

Jimmy frowned with concentration, one hand inside his boot, the other gripping the horsehair brush.

“Now that’s a nice job,” the Sheriff murmured. 

“It’s not as good as yours,” Jimmy sighed in a discouraged voice.

The Sheriff pulled off one boot, then the other.  “Tell you what,” he said conversationally, studying his burnished Wellington, “would you like me to show you how to put on a Gen-You-Wine Marine Corps Spit Shine?”

“Yeah!”  Jimmy breathed, looking excited for a moment – but just a moment, then it was like he pulled defensively back into a shell, fearful that his momentary enthusiasm might earn a stern reprimand, or worse.

Linn winked.  “Here’s how we do it.”  He set a Dixie cup of water down between them, dumped out a small handful of cotton balls and opened a new can of black boot polish.

“My Mama showed me how to do this.  Matter of fact she taught Pa and I both.  He was FBI but he couldn’t put a decent shine on a pair of shoes if he had to.”

“FBI?”  Jimmy breathed.  “Really?”

“Really,” Linn nodded. 

“Wow!”

Connie smiled at the sight of the two in the living room, both sitting cross-legged on the floor, discussing the finer points of boots and boot polishing in quiet voices; behind them, The Bear Killer regarded their efforts with a truly huge yawn.

 

The Dodge idled quietly, steadily, as Old Man Fitzer came out his front door, considered the faded green four-door with wrinkled, slightly gold-flecked eyes.

He closed one eye and consulted the mental inventory he kept of parts on hand, nodded.

“I got a belt,” he said.  “Know right where it is, too.”

He disappeared behind the counter, through the door with all the engine oil and spark plug stickers.

The young fellow and his wife went back outside, back out into the sun where it was a little warmer.

Old Man Fitzer came out with a half-inch ratchet in one hand and a belt in the other.

“Got ‘er right here,” he declared triumphantly, and the Dodge quit running like someone turned off the switch.

They looked at the car and heard something under the hood, something fell to the ground, something black and flat and rubbery looking.

Husband and wife looked at one another, profoundly grateful for the preppy stranger’s advice.

It took the man five minutes to install the belt, another half hour to satisfy himself it was properly timed:  it was almost perfect to start with (a rarity, he’d told himself, but when fortune fell in his poker hand, who was he to argue?) and he shoved the wrench into a hip pocket as the young fellow handed him an envelope and said it was a gift certificate.

Old Man Fitzer opened the flap, withdrew a half sheet of note paper, folded in two.

He opened the paper and he read it.

Old Man Fitzer was a poker player, and he was a pretty good poker player, and much practice gave him a fine poker face.

This did not, however, prevent the color from draining from his complexion.

He looked up, swallowed, cleared his throat, and very carefully, very deliberately, replaced the folded half-sheet in the envelope.

“Come on inside,” he said faintly.

 

Chief of Police Will Keller picked up the phone.

“Keller.”  His voice was almost brusque:  businesslike, brief, to the point.

“You’d best come on out to my garage,” he heard Old Man Fitzer say.

“Fitz, what’s wrong?”  Will sat very straight, feet flat on the floor, ready to stand and go to war.

“Just … just come out here, Chief.”

“Fitz, are you safe, can you talk?”

“Nothing … nothing like that, Chief, just … just get out here now!”

“On my way.”  His moves were as abrupt, as coldly efficient, as his voice:  phone cradled with one hand, hat picked up with the other, coat from the back of his chair and around his shoulders, arms in the sleeves before he’d taken two steps.

Not four minutes later he arrived; not two minutes after this he was turning the note a little to catch the light from the window.

Now Will Keller was a poker player too, and Will prided himself on being pretty good at the game, and he too had a pretty good poker face, which served him very well in his office as police chief.

Like Old Man Fitzer, though, he could not prevent the color from abandoning his complexion.

He reached for the station’s phone, punched in a number.

“Linn? I’m out at Fitzer’s Garage.  Get out here.”

The door tinkled and an elderly woman with grey hair, a woman in a gown from the 1880s, came through the door.

“How charming!”  the young woman breathed, and the older woman – a docent, perhaps, a re-enactor? – they knew they were very near Firelands, and they knew there was a scenic railway, a steam train, period attractions, or so they’d heard – but they blinked with surprise at the surprisingly current conversation, so at odds with the woman’s dated attire.

“Fitz,” she said in a peevish voice, “I wish to purchase a carriage!”

“Angela, I told you, we can fix you up with a horseless carriage –“

“A pox on your horseless carriage, I am a proper lady and I have horses, and what use would I have for a horseless carriage?  Now your sign says you sell carriages and I wish to purchase a carriage!”

A burly looking fellow, all broad shoulders and blue work uniform, looked over the woman’s ornate hat and called, “Hey Fitz, where you want this delivery?”

“Excuse me,” Old Man Fitzer breathed, slipping between his guests and walking quickly to the big glass windows with SERVICE hand painted in a neat arc across them both.

He blinked.

A brand-new, shining-black, ready-to-hitch carriage rode on a flatbed truck, right outside his station.

Thinking fast, he turned, looked at the older woman with grey hair and a demanding expression.

“Angela,” he said, “let’s go outside and see if your new carriage passes inspection.”

 

Jimmy looked over at the Sheriff as the man braked to a stop, thrust the shifter into park.

He nodded to the boy and said “Let’s go in,” and Jimmy stabbed his seat belt release with a stiff thumb.

The pair walked up on the group surveying the boomed-down carriage; Linn walked around in front of the woman, swept off his Stetson and swept up her hand, kissed her properly-gloved knuckles.  “Aunt Angela, how have you been?”

Angela looked affectionately at the Sheriff, her head tilted a little to the side.

“My goodness, you are getting ever so handsome,” she said fondly, then looked at Jimmy.  “And who is this fine young man with the good taste to be properly shod?”

“This is Jimmy Hill.  Jimmy, this is Aunt Angela, she’s –“

“I’m either a shirttail relative, an in-law, or an outlaw.  As it is, I’m his aunt which makes me your great-aunt, which means you call me Aunt Angela.”  She turned to Old Man Fitzer.  “The carriage is satisfactory, my terms are cash, I’ll need a receipt.”

“Yes ma’am, right this way,” Old Man Fitzer murmured, feeling vaguely like he’d been seized by a Texas cyclone and whipped in a few dozen dizzying spins, but grateful he’d been able to salvage the moment.

“Now Sheriff, don’t let this fine young man get away. I’ll need his help,” Angela called over her shoulder, and Linn chuckled a little as the young couple looked at him with uncertain expressions.

Uncle Will came up beside Linn, handed him an envelope, looked at the young fellow and his wife.

“Young man,” he rumbled, “would you fill the Sheriff here in on your little adventure up to now?”

Linn started to open the envelope and Will made a cut-off gesture.  “Wait,” he counseled, and Linn stopped, listened to the young couple tell of breaking down, of their unexpected rescuer, how he got them here, how he just kind of disappeared afterwards.

“Now could you describe this fellow for us?”  Will said quietly, his voice deep and reassuring.

Linn listened to the description, his left eyebrow raising a little as he did.

“Now,” Will said, “read what’s in the envelope.”

Linn withdrew the folded sheet, read the contents, re-read them.

Linn had a pretty good poker face, too, though by his own admission he couldn’t play poker worth a happy damn, though he could deal and make it look good.

Poker face or not, looking good as a dealer or not, the Sheriff could not prevent the color in his complexion from abandoning his face as he read.

Aunt Angela came out of the ancient service station, put two gloved fingers to her lips, cut loose with a piercing and most unladylike whistle.

“Cinnamon!”

A cinnamon colored mare came trotting from behind a small stand of trees.

“Come here, Cinnamon.  Jimmy, have you ever baited in a horse?”

“Um, no.”

“Open that envelope of chewing tobacco.”

Jimmy pulled the sliver-lined envelope open, nostrils flaring at the sudden, unfamiliar smell.

Angela looked in.  “Hmmm.  Not molded.  Fresher than your usual tobacco, Mr. Fitzer, my compliments.  Jimmy, pull out a pinch and put it in your palm.  I’ll hold the package.  Now walk up on Cinnamon with your hand held flat.”

Cinnamon stretched her neck out and snuffed loudly, then came closer and delicately rubber-lipped the tobacco off the boy’s palm.

He looked up at the Sheriff, discovery and delight in his expression.

“Now, Jimmy, this is how you harness a horse to a buggy.”

The young couple watched as the pair proceeded to marry the one horsepower propulsion system to the gleaming black carriage with the tuck-and-roll upholstery.

Will turned to the young couple.  “You two had supper?”

“N-no,” they said, shaking their heads a little.

“Aunt Angela will be heading into town.  Less than a mile and a half, nice place called the Silver Jewel.  If you need a place to stay, they have vacancies upstairs.  Follow her in, you can park on the street, won’t nobody bother your car.  This” – he thrust his chin at the envelope in the Sheriff’s hands – “gift certificate” – he shot a warning look at the Sheriff, who closed his mouth, the intended words unspoken – “is also good for a meal and lodging at the Silver Jewel there in town.  Food’s good, beds are clean and the Sheriff owns all but Daisy’s kitchen.” 

“The price is right,” the young bride said quietly, and her husband nodded.

Firelands and its steam train were on their “one of these days” lists, and getting royally lost, then their car conking out, had brought them much closer to that eventual goal than either thought possible:  but then they were on their honeymoon, and a honeymoon trip is woven of magic anyway, and this was just one more marvelous discovery on their new journey into a life together.

Dinner was delightful:  the atmosphere was interesting, the staff competent, the food excellent, their hosts charming, cordial and occasionally hilarious, as when the Sheriff himself described the proper method for catching a greased pig (which he’d done as a teenager), or eloquently verbalized the general sensation of galloping a horse at the very edge of a sheer drop, with the horse’s hooves knocking dirt and gravel over the brink, and the echoing voice of Eternity reaching up and clawing at them both, while his wife watched from the prominence above, encouraging him with supportive spousal shouts of “Will you quit fooling around and get up here!” or words to that effect:  their room was far better than they’d expected, and between personal exertion (which we will not describe – they were newlyweds, we will say nothing further on that count), the day’s stresses and the altitude, they slept well that night, and woke refreshed and happy.

Breakfast was as they remembered it from childhood, breakfast was flavorful and filling, breakfast was on Sunday morning, and the waitress – “one of Daisy’s girls,” the Sheriff had called the smiling young woman the night before – mentioned casually that church was in an hour, they had just time enough to get dressed and go.

The young couple looked at one another and with one voice said, “Why not!”

They’d packed away their good clothes the first night; it took but little effort to get dressed up again, and found themselves welcomed in a simple, New England Meetinghouse style church – just a simple rectangle, with a timber cross on the back wall, in front of the blocky altar; the choir was of a row of men in old-fashioned black suits, with two rows of women in dresses and hairstyles of a previous century, and music was from an ancient but flawlessly tuned upright piano.

It interested them to see someone else’s church, and to try and divine something of the community’s character by watching the parishoners.

They recognized the police chief; he was older, dignified, with an iron-grey mustache and a dark-blue suit; a row of men in red-flannel, cavalry-front shirts looked incongruously out of place – all five had villainously curled, absolutely black mustaches, knee-high leather boots, with their trousers tucked in the tops and bloused neatly, they wore red suspenders, they lacked only the pressed-leather Philadelphia helmets to have stepped straight out of an 1880s portrait.

Only the black, rectangular talkie with its rubber antenna and an earpiece betrayed their actual residence in the current century.

A young girl – she could not have been more than twelve – was dressed like a schoolgirl of the 1880s, and seated herself at the piano, her broad skirts occupying the entire bench:  she did not place any music before her, nor did she open a hymnal:  the young couple saw the Sheriff come in, with an attractive woman and a little boy, and an infant in his arms:  he had a broad, almost boyish grin, and spoke with an amazing number of people, his wife bearing a patient expression, apparently both accustomed and resigned to her tall, lean-waisted husband’s gregarious and outgoing nature.

An immense, absolutely black dog paced along with them, a truly huge animal with button-black eyes and a doggy grin, with the massive plume of a tail swinging slowly behind:  they took what was obviously their usual place in a pew, with the immense dog sitting beside the end of the pew, looking around, pink tongue making its occasional declaration of delight.

Piano player and parson exchanged a look, and the pretty young girl raised her hands a little, and positioned her fingers, as if to caress the keyboard before her:  instead of a gentle, soothing hymn, however, the briskly thumping “Pretty Redwing” surprised the young couple, and brought a general smile of approval from the congregation:  on the second stanza, the Parson stood, moved up behind the podium, and addressed the community in their well-filled, whitewashed church.

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” he declared, “and by golly that’s how we’re starting this morning!” – and then gave the name and number of the opening hymn, and the service was begun.

“You may be seated,” he declared, beaming:  he sorted through a stack of index cards, frowned at one, put it down, picked up a second:  “Milk, bread, eggs, sugar, detergent, shoelaces” – he looked up – “somehow I think I got the grocery list confused with this morning’s announcements!”

One of the firemen called, “You’re not supposed to imitate my bad examples, Parson!” and was met with the sky pilot’s quick grin and a ripple of laughter from the gathering, and the Parson riposted with, “Well, since my cards are confused, we’ll start with the opening prayer!  On your feet, then!” – and everyone stood again.

“O Lord,” Parson Burnett intoned in a firm voice, “we thank you for children saved from fire, and for treatment for a mother in need.  We ask a healing for burns received, relief for grief that yet aches our hearts, and thanks for a thousand memories of a strong young man with a laughing heart and a grand singing voice.

“We thank you for children and for elders and for horses and dogs, and for the lovely morning outside, and Lord,” he continued, as if addressing a personal friend, “did You notice how good it smelled outside this morning?  That was a gift and we thank You for it!

“We thank you for brave guardians who stride boldly where men shouldn’t have to go, we thank You for the skilled hands that heal us after such moments, and we thank You for a rose at the bedside, Amen!”

“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and the parson continued, merriment in his expression, “Sheriff, speakin’ of that rose, I understand it’s a girl,” and right there in the solemn and decorous gathering in the house of the Lord, the Sheriff seized his Stetson by its brim, scaled it to the ceiling above with a sudden leap and a joyous, full-voiced “EeeYahoo!” – he seized his wife under the arms and lifted her easily overhead, stepping out into the aisle and whirling her about, laughing, and Connie threw her head back and laughed with him.

The Parson shouted, “OLD HUNDRED!  SING, AND PUT YOUR HEARTS INTO IT!”

The Doxology was never sung with such fervor as was sung that Sunday morning.

Our young couple held hands through the service – they did back home, and they saw no reason to change for their visit here today – on their way out they were greeted by many, made welcome by all, and the pretty girl who played the piano with skill, and obviously by memory, slipped through the crowd and handed a fresh-cut red rose to the young bride, a dew-flecked, fragrant red rose, with velvety petals and an exquisite odor.

The bride noted the girl’s eyes were a very, very pale blue, just like the Sheriff’s, and just like the police chief’s, but she forgot that detail almost as quickly as she noticed it.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

65.  LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER KINCAID

 

Old Man Fitzer wiped the half inch drive ratchet with a shop rag, remembering.

That pale eyed Nicodemus had been the one best boy he’d ever hired.

He was likeable, he was just a damn good mechanic, he had magic in his hands – Fitzer smiled a little, remembering; some men need a fully stocked toolbox to do their work, others can bring about repairs with a rounded screwdriver and a worn out pair of slip joint pliers, and that pale-eyed Nicodemus Keller had been one of the latter variety.

Fitzer’s business (and his income) had more than doubled in the three years young Nicodemus worked for him, and Fitzer laughed well and often at the young man:  he had a marvelous repertoire of obscene marching songs and a grand singing voice to go with them, he was forever cutting up, and he used to spook the hell out of the old garageman by putting a glove on a handrail so it looked like a gloved ghost was casually leaning against the painted pipe.

He looked at the photograph someone took, just a casual snapshot:  Nicodemus, in his baggy shorts and his shirt unbuttoned, bronzed chest like a Greek god’s, barefoot moccasins:  he was in front of the building, balancing a ratchet wrench on his chin, one leg up, arms out.

Fitzer smiled a little, for he remembered that day, and he looked at the ratchet in his hand and wondered if this was the same wrench.

He considered tilting his head back and trying to balance it on his own chin, then decided against it.

 

Linn nodded and sipped coffee from a foam cup, looking across the desk at his uncle, the Chief of Police.

To look at the two, one could be forgiven for mistaking them for brothers, albeit separated by a decade, or perhaps even father and son, they looked that much alike:  they stood the same, they had the same pale eyes, Will’s mustache was gone completely iron grey, while Linn’s was just gray-shot:  Linn’s voice was lighter, a little higher, though he could pitch it low enough when it suited his purpose, while Will’s voice sounded like it came from a stone-lined, hand dug well about twenty foot deep.

“You recognized the handwriting on this,” Will said – a statement, not a question, and Linn looked at the “gift certificate” on his desk and nodded.

“Nicodemus.”

“He fixed that young couple’s car long enough to get to old man Fitzer’s garage.”

“That’s what they told us.”

“He said not to shut off the car until the old man had belt in hand.”

“I recall those words.”

“When old Fitz came out of the front door with the belt, theirs broke and fell off.”

“I recall that too.”

“That looks like another one for your ghost hunter Kincaid.”

“It does for a fact.”

“Yesterday in church.”

Linn tried his coffee again, blowing on it a little.  “This stuff is hot enough to scald the hair off a man’s tongue.  You make this?”

Will’s eyes tightened a little at the corners.  “Yep.”

“Good batch.  I can’t make coffee to save my butt.”

“Your Mama used to brew it up extra strong and use it to strip varnish off rockin’ chairs.”

“I recall.”

“Cain’t be good for a man.”

“Nope.”

Will picked up his heavy ceramic mug, took a noisy slurp of his own.  “Stuff stunted my growth.”

“Mine too.”

Each man was over six foot and two fingers; one would have to wonder to what altitude they would have grown had they not been stunted by the brew, but that’s not part of our tale.

“Did you notice in church.”

“Notice what?  The Parson was in good form yesterday.”

“Oh, he was that,” Will nodded.  “I particularly admired his sermon.”

“He’s a plain spoken man, I’ll give him that.”

“Always did admire a sky pilot that preached the Book.”

“Yep.”

“More coffee?”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

Will drained his own mug, rose; the two men went out into the police department’s lobby.

“You didn’t happen to pay attention to that little girl that played the piano.”

Linn grinned.  “Didn’t recognize her, who was she?”

Will filled his mug from the stainless steel coffeemaker, motioned Linn into battery, waited until his nephew the Sheriff refilled his cup and added a splash of milk.

“You might recognize this.”  He thrust a bent foreknuckle toward a framed print.

“Sure do.  I’ve got that one in my own office.”

“Aunt Sarah was a troublemaker from the word go.”

“I recall reading.  I’d love to meet her in person.”

Will’s eyes tightened a little at the corners, amusement barely lifting the corners of his mustache.  “I’d like that too.  I reckon she was quite a character.”

Linn frowned, not quite putting together what his uncle was getting at.

“Come on back in.  I found a new plate.”

Linn’s left eyebrow went up, quick, tented, something he did when he was at once surprised and very interested:  if it had to do with Firelands’ past, especially with their ancestry, his interest was immediate and undisguised.

Will took another noisy slurp, made a quick left-and-right swipe with the back of his bent forefinger to dash the dribble off his mustache:  Linn noticed it was longer, not as brief a military trim as had been the man’s long habit:  Linn was growing his own lip broom out, and apparently so was his uncle.

Come to think of it, he recalled, the Irish Brigade went to full handlebar mustaches, and they look pretty good.

He recalled the portraits of Old Pale Eyes he’d seen, and he remembered the man’s gracefully swept mustache:  he smiled, just a little, and nodded.

That’s how I’d like mine to look.

Uncle Will opened his top left hand desk drawer, withdrew a stiff cardboard envelope.

“This is reinforced,” he muttered,”so it won’t break the glass plate inside.”

He carefully, delicately, opened the flap closure, reached in with thumb and forefinger, grasped a paper tab, pulled.

An inner envelope slid into view, drawn by its unused, gummed flap:  Will set the empty, reinforced mailer to the side, frowned, then picked the envelope up by its far end, tilted it to slide the glass plate photograph onto the desk blotter.

“I don’t dare handle it,” he admitted, “I don’t want to fingerprint the emulsion.”

Linn nodded, leaning over and tilting his head sideways.

Uncle Will turned the plate so it was right-side-up for Linn.

It was a mother and daughter, the daughter was of … well, roughly schoolgirl age:  she wore a skirt to mid-calf, she appeared to be wearing white stockings and high top shoes, the mother’s gown was immaculately fitted and the daughter’s frock matched the mother’s material, or so it appeared:  color photography was not yet accomplished in this era, but they looked very, very close.

“Recognize either of ‘em?”  Will rumbled, amusement in his eyes.

Linn bent down a little closer.

“Her eyes,” he breathed, staring at the girl.

“Yep,” Will nodded.  “She’s got our eyes.”

Linn looked up, his voice edged just a little with excitement a man feels when he’s made a discovery.

“Sarah?”
“Yep.  You’re looking at the girl who became Agent Sarah Lynne McKenna.”  He chuckled dryly.  “The Troublemaker herself.  From the letter I got with it, this was taken the day after she punched a Derringer into a bank robber’s soft ribs and gave him a 41-caliber stomach ache.”

“So that would be Bonnie McKenna.”

“Yep.”
Linn whistled.  “Now she’s a looker!”

“Old Pale Eyes fell for her the first night he come to town,” Will said softly, “and he had … he burned a candle for her until his heart just plainly broke when his wife Esther died.”

Linn nodded.

“Bonnie and Sarah McKenna,” Linn murmured, then looked closer at the girl.

“Waaaait a minute,” he said slowly, comprehension dawning in his pale eyes, and he looked up at his Uncle Will.

He looked into his Uncle’s eyes and his Uncle looked frankly back.

“She played piano last Sunday.”

“She did.”

Linn set his coffee cup down, nodded slowly, then Uncle Will saw the corners of his eyes start to crinkle up a little with amusement.

“What was it you called it, Uncle Will?”  he asked, and Uncle Will’s eyes crinkled at the corners as well.  “Another Kincaid?”

Linn looked at Nicodemus’s distinctive, almost calligraphic hand on the note, and then at the glass plate portrait of mother and daughter.

“Eee-yep,” he affirmed.  “That’s exactly what this is.  Another Kincaid.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

66.  MARBLES

 

Two boys and two girls squatted around a finger-drawn circle in the schoolyard.

It was the only bare place, the only patch of bare dirt, and that meant it was useful:  sticks and finger-swiped lines became obstructions, ditches, it served as a nine square foot motocross course, racetrack, battlefield, whatever young minds imagined it might be:  tourists frequently smiled and nodded at children, in period attire, in the yard beside the restored, whitewashed, one-room schoolhouse:  some visitors had been to colonial Williamsburg, and were familiar with children chasing hoops down the street with a stick, and with other re-enactments, or other historic restorations, that would employ children in garb and in character as local color.

None who looked upon this morning’s scene thought it odd, then, that one of the two boys could have come to school on a fine morning in 1885, and one dressed in the jeans and polished boots of the modern day, nor that the two girls were both in the skirts and high-top shoes of the aforementioned historic period.

Children of any era have imaginations and intelligence, and the two are closely intermeshed:  the frown of concentration seen on a child’s face, when they are all leaned over the finger-drawn circle, is the same expression on a research scientist’s face when puzzling out an esoteric formula, or a research chemist’s studying the reactions of an unexpected admixture of industrial chemicals that accidentally produced something useful.

Jimmy considered his shooter’s placement, looked at the other marbles’ locations, considered terrain, available cover, obstruction, trajectory, velocity, the Coriolus effect, wind direction and velocity:  he picked up his shooter, rattled it in his hand as if dice at a green-felt-lined Las Vegas high-stakes table:  young eyes watched his face, then his hand, as he knuckled down, thumb cocked inside his curled fingers.

The shooter streaked across the circle, hit the cluster of marbles with a sharp, glassy click:  the three marbles scattered, all three rolled briskly toward the circle’s boundary, all three stopped just inside the line.

 

The schoolhouse was very near the church:  back in the day, when Firelands was being blasted, sledgehammered and slip scrapered out of native rock and mountainside, this plot of ground was bought and donated by a dying man, a man who sought to expiate his sins and perhaps buy his way into Paradise with a generous purse:  he knew the blood he coughed up was his doom, he knew the long box waited patiently, and he knew it would be his home soon, and so with a dying man’s desperation, he spent all he had on the purchase of this chunk of ground, he had it graded and prepared, and he had the little whitewashed church built, and the schoolhouse beside it, and a greensward park between the two:  he lived long enough to see them finished, and he died with his soul at peace.

His was one of the first graves in the Firelands cemetery; his was one of the oldest stones there, and his name has been lost and forgotten:  since the coming of that Eastern ghost hunter, though none would admit it, most in town kept an eye out for shades, spooks, speerits and other creatures not of this world.

Almost all did so secretly, covertly, and if asked, would deny that they were doing any such thing:  Tony, the barber, made no secret of it, and declared that anything lost, misplaced, or suddenly found, was the work of the dead, his shop was rich with icons, crucifixes, portraits of the Madonna:  he stopped short of installing holy water at the doorway, but he had garlands of garlic braided and hung decoratively on either side of every door.

Spotting a ghost would be complicated by the good-natured and funmaking nature of the residents:  the women, especially those attending the regular meetings of the Ladies’ Tea Society, dressed the part, and practiced walking in long gowns so it seemed more that they glided, rather than walked:  children happily participated in this community funmaking, with the sense that they were getting something over on the tourists, on curious visitors who came to see the sights and ride the steam train, to eat at the Silver Jewel and gape at the Mercantile and listen to tales of reavers trying to raid the town and meeting an entire community more than willing to stop any such effort with an absolute wall of lead.

Consequently nobody took it amiss that children were in the schoolyard of the little whitewashed schoolhouse, squatting or kneeling over a finger-drawn ring scattered with bright-glass marbles, nor that their attire was a mixture of the then, and of the now.

On the other side of the schoolhouse, inside the little whitewashed church, two lawmen stood in the front of the church, hats in their hands.

They represented the ultimate in earthly authority, and yet they stood bareheaded out of respect, and their words were deferential in tone and polite in construction.

“Lord,” Linn said, “I do now know Your plans, but I am a curious man.  You know that because You made me that way, and for Your own purpose.  In this knowledge I am content.

“But Lord, You did make me curious, and I ask out of that curiosity.

“Lord, Nicodemus was taken from us under conditions that horrify and shock.  I did not want that to happen and I blame myself for his death.  He was working on my behalf and …”

Linn’s throat tightened, as did his right fist:  he clenched his front teeth together, sighed out a breath, took another.

“Lord, I’m sorry.  I am …”

Will’s hand closed gently, warm and firm, on his nephew’s shoulder.

“He was my son,” Will said, his voice deep and reassuring.  “If anyone should hold you accountable, it’s me.”

“Then why don’t you?”  Linn asked bitterly.

“You keep floggin’ yourself with that conscience of yours,” Will observed, “you’ll end up dyin’ of regret or a heart attack.”

“Yeah,” Linn gasped, turning his face away.

“This ain’t the reason we come here.  Get your train back on its tracks, your floggin’ your own back got you derailed.”

Linn nodded.

“Lord, I get distracted easy and that’s my fault,” he admitted.  “I come here to ask about Nicodemus’s ghost.  Uncle Will spotted that was Sarah’s shade that played piano Sunday.  ‘Twas lovely and I did not recognize her at all.  Lord, is there a purpose for their participation, or is this just entertainment?”

“Maybe my work isn’t done,” a voice said from directly behind him, and Linn snapped around with an impossible speed, one hand up to block, the other gripping the black handle of his carry Glock, its black eye fixed unblinking on the intruder’s middle.

Pale eyes looked into pale eyes, and Linn found he’d just knocked a woman’s hand aside, a woman who looked at him with amusement and maybe approval, a woman dressed in the style of the 1880s, a woman who looked enough like his own dead mother – but at a much younger age – to cause the lawman to lower his pistol, ease it into its holster with a plastic click, to stare frankly at this unexpected presence.

“Well?”  she asked, an impish smile reminding him most powerfully of his own mother, “is everything the way you remember it?”

“Sarah McKenna, I presume,” Will said politely.

The woman turned her pale eyes to the older man.  “You’ll look better with a handlebar mustache,” she said.  “I understand the Mercantile sells mustache wax, you will find it helpful.”  She looked back at the Sheriff, shook her head.  “You,” she sighed, “look enough like my brother Jacob …”

“And you look enough like my mother.”

Linn did a quick backtrack.  “You said you’re here because your work isn’t done.”

“Yes.  That’s right.”

“And Nicodemus?”

Now Linn, like anyone else of this modern and plastic age, had certain preconceived notions about ghosts, and none of these included the ability to become solid, to lay a hand on a man’s shoulder, play piano, nor to hold a conversation.  Matter of fact, he’d long thought ghosts were echoes, residual energy maybe, leftover passion but little more:  an actual conversation was something he did not expect.

He may not have expected it, but he was Sheriff, and he was not at all unaccustomed to handling the unexpected.

“Nicodemus.”  Sarah tilted her head, studying the Sheriff.  “He does favor you” – she looked at Will – “and you put your brand on that calf!  Did you know he even sounds like you?”

Will blinked, nodded.  “I … finally figured that out.”

“You two didn’t get along for years, did you?”

The look in Will’s eyes was answer enough.

“Then you realized one day just how much you sounded like him – those were your words – and your wife said something to the effect that you’re finally figuring that out, and it made you mad, but you realized it was true.”

Will nodded, his bottom jaw easing out a little.

Sarah laughed, clapped her hands together in delight, skipped up to the man and kissed him quickly, unexpectedly on the cheek, gripped his hand between her gloved palms:  “Thank you,” she whispered, and he was astonished to see a single, bright, crystal tear spill over and down her cheek.  “You …”

She bit her bottom lip and blushed a little, then looked back up, her eyes bright and brimming.

“You remind me so much of my Papa,” she whispered.

Will frowned a little:  like his nephew the Sheriff, his mind was busy, assessing:  on the one hand, this seemed to be an honest reaction, but on the other hand, he’d been lied to by the best of them, and the question was turning over in his mind:

Why is she doing this?

Is she trying to manipulate me?

What’s she trying to pull?

Outside, the children stood, marbles clicking in their leather pokes.

One of the boys grinned bashfully and said “I got to get back to Carbon.”  He hefted his multicolored poke and admitted, “The Sheriff give me this.”

Jimmy grinned, delighted that his Sheriff, the man that was taking care of him, had done this thing that pleased his marble shooting friend so much.

Jimmy turned to look across the front of the schoolhouse, toward the church, and when he looked back, he was alone.

“How’d they do that?”  he asked aloud, then shrugged, turned, started walking toward the church, marble poke swinging in his hand.

 

“You said your work isn’t done,” Linn prompted.  “What is your work?”

Sarah turned, her eyes pale, intense. 

“You are a link in a chain,” she said, “a very important chain.”  She turned, took Will’s hand, then reached for Linn’s hand and stood there, holding the two men with her gloved hands, her grip very real, warm, as real as anyone of flesh and blood.  “Each of us is a teacher and we each teach what someone else needs to learn, and sometimes we are the student and learn what someone else is here to teach us.”

She looked from one lawman to another, looked with the confidence of someone who knew what she was saying was right, was correct, with the confidence that her words described an absolute.

“It’s complicated,” she continued.  “Sometimes we help others prepare for their life to come.  Scripture tells us we war not against the flesh, but against powers and principalities.  This world is not all there is. Every word we say or say not, every thing we do or do not, has an effect in a world unseen.”

“So we’re being prepared for the life to come?”

“That, yes.  Some are being prepared for the war to come.”

“Run that one a-past me in low gear,” Will rumbled, and Sarah looked at him blankly.

“Take that one a-past him at a walk,” Linn translated.

“Oh,” Sarah blinked, and for a moment the men saw the little girl she’d been.

She considered, frowned.

The back door opened a little; Jimmy slipped in, sideways, closed the door quietly, faded back into a corner, a trick he’d learned early and well:  in the military, one is trained to break the visual signature, and he did, by taking advantage of architectural lines and held very still, allowing these background features to make him harder to see, more difficult to pick out from his background.

“I can’t tell you about that,” Sarah said slowly, “at least not yet.”

“Don’t tease me,” Linn said quietly.  “You talk about the war to come and then you won’t tell me more.  Is it with an extant enemy, will this be thermonuclear war, should we start digging fallout shelters, are there aliens coming with fireships from the sky, what’s coming?”

“Demons come boilin’ up out of cracks in the earth?”  Will’s voice was a deep, menacing rumble, and Jimmy shivered to hear it.

Sarah cooled visibly, her eyes growing pale and hard and just a little bit sad.

“I know what demons are,” she said softly.  “I know what it is for the demon hordes to strip the soul from a little girl’s body and try to destroy it.”  She looked from one lawman to another and shivered.  “I know what it is to have two men come to hell to find me and bring me back and to stand against impossible odds to do it.”  Her breathing came quicker and her fair complexion paled a little more.

“One of those men looked very much like the two of you” – she turned to Will – “and one lived on the ranch where you lived before you were married.”

“I’ll be damned,” Will murmured softly.

Sarah closed her eyes, bit her bottom lip again.  “No, the demon hordes are not going to come out of cracks in the earth.” 

“What’s coming at us, then?”

“I can’t tell you,” she whispered.  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“You have.  We know this much.  How do we prepare?”

Sarah turned, extended her arm.  “Jimmy, could you join us, please?”

Jimmy felt his stomach shrink a little.

He’d never been summoned without the fear he was going to be beat again.

Trembling, reluctant, he came up the church’s aisle.

Sarah kept her arm out, took the boy around the shoulders, drew him close.

Jimmy felt the pretty lady’s arm, warm and comforting, and he let her draw him into her side.

She was warm and she smelled good, she smelled like soap and sunshine and lilac water, and he trembled a little, like a frightened rabbit trying to remain hidden.

“This is how,” Sarah said quietly.  “By doing good.  This young man admires you, Sheriff, more than you realize.  You’re helping him heal, more than you realize.  He needs you, more than you realize.”

The Sheriff raised an eyebrow and Sarah laughed with delight.

“Now,” she declared, “now you do look like Papa!”

 

An old man on a red horse regarded the ragged little boy with pale eyes.

“How was marbles?”  he asked, and Tickie grinned a contagious, little-boy grin.

He hoisted his colorful leather poke the old man had given him and happily reported, “I got more!” and the Old Sheriff nodded approvingly.

“I’m glad you’re good with those,” he said confidentially, leaning down a little from the saddle as if to impart a secret: “I can play marbles about as good as I play poker, and I can’t play poker to save my sorry backside!”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

67.  SEEMS FAIR TO ME

 

Linn’s eyes were pale and his hand was tight on the walnut grip of his engraved Colt.

He was the hunted and he was the prey, and he knew the odds did not favor him, and he did not care.

He felt more alive when the stakes were his very life, the terrible legacy of surviving that damned War, a combined feeling of honestly not caring whether he died, and of reveling in the feeling that this, this was the ultimate contest, one man against another, one warrior against another, each knowing that there would be blood on the moon that night, and each intending it should be someone else’s.

He’d arrested an influential man’s son and he’d beaten the influential man in the middle of the street, honestly pounded the stuffing out of the loud and blustering coward, backhanded him to stop his loud mouth, kicked him into standstill and stomped his guts to keep him that way.

No man, especially no man of influence – or a man who fancies himself such a soul – will tolerate a public humiliation, and like anyone unable to win honestly, he set a hired killer after the pale-eyed Sheriff.

That one lay dead on Shorty’s slab, a foot and more of fighting knife drove up under his wishbone as the Sheriff pinned the man’s gun hand against the Mercantile’s storefront, honed Damascus steel blurred and shining and running like a sewing machine until the Sheriff’s fist was up to his wrist in the dead man’s belly and the hired killer’s heart quivered its last with half a dozen full length lacerations destroying its ability to do anything but shiver and die.

The man’s son – given a heavy fine and a week in the calabozo – made the mistake of coming after the pale eyed lawman.

His enthusiasm and his mouth overrode his good sense and he came running at the Sheriff, yelling, firing as he did:  the Sheriff drew his left hand Colt, eared the hammer back, took a sight and drove a .44 slug through the would-be assassin’s head.

Now the Old Man alone remained.

He was a coward, the Sheriff knew, and cowards are dangerous, and when he faded back against a building, listening with more than his ears, he watched out the mouth of the little alley between two buildings in Carbon Hill.

He’d ridden the steam train over when he heard father and son were making their brags, and the Sheriff installed his red Cannonball mare in their livery, paid extra for a bait of grain and a rubdown, and the normally busy coal mining town’s street got empty kind of quick as the lean waisted lawman strolled casually right down the very center of the dirt thoroughfare.

He knew eyes watched from behind windows, from around corners, he knew the man he’d beaten and shamed waited, probably with a rifle, and he also knew that he was moving, and a man’s hand isn’t steady when he’s unused to killing, and Old Pale Eyes was not at all surprised when the report of his pistol was echoed with the vicious, snapping report of a rifle.

The Sheriff turned toward the rifle’s sound, saw the smoke, charged.

He ran silently, pistol thrust back into its carved-leather scabbard, and he reached into the back of his collar and pulled out a shining length of hand-honed steel, and he saw the octagon barrel of the man’s rifle pull back and disappear.

He came around the corner, one hand up, ready to seize the gunbarrel –

The rifle lay on the ground, abandoned, further evidence of the lack of expertise of its user.

The Sheriff stopped, picked up the rifle, left handed, parked it against the side of the building adjacent:  there was the ghost of a movement and the Sheriff jumped straight up, jerking his legs high as he could, and fired straight down and angled under the building.

A shotgun blasted where his legs had been a moment before and the Sheriff came down, jumped again, the second charge missing as well:  he dropped, bellied down, fired three times under the building, the heavy slugs spalling stone off the foundation blocks.

Linn surged to his feet, ran to the back of the building, jumped up on a crate, stopped, breathing silently through his mouth.

Come on out, he thought, jump right on, you illegitimate son of Perdition! – eyes busy, he waited, listened, watched:  he was at the corner, he could see the side of the building to the street, he could see across the back of the building –

Chances are he’ll come out back, he thought, punching empties out into his hand, dropping them into his coat pocket so they would not fall to the ground and betray his position to any ambusher still under the building.

The fresh rounds dropped into place with reassuringly solid tunk, tunk, tunks: the lawman heard a muffled shout, an exclamation of pain, and he jumped off the crate, ran back down the alley.

A man with a shotgun was wallowing out from under the board walk, his face bloodied:  it was the man the Sheriff beat in the middle of the street.

The coward never heard the shot that drove through the back of his head and blew his eyeballs out of his skull.

Law and Order Harry Macfarland wasn’t long arriving, but he arrived in no kind of a hurry.

Linn was reloaded and washed up in a horse trough by the time Harry sauntered up.

He considered the carcass, tilted his head and squatted, turned the head and looked at the holes and the splatter.

“Think he’s dead?” he drawled.

“Oh, I dunno,” Linn grunted.  “Maybe he’s takin’ a nap.”

“A good long one.”  Harry hawked, spat, ignored the gathering crowd.

“This is the fella that tried smackin’ you, ain’t he?”

“Yep.”

“As I recall he come out in second place.”

“Yep.”

Harry nodded thoughtfully.

“Looks like he had a shotgun.”

“Yep.”

“He try and use it on you?”

“Yep.”

“Did he?”

“Nope.”

“Good.”

Harry coughed, spat again.

“He was a-crawlin’ out from under, looks like.”

“Yep.”

“He tried to shotgun you.”

“He tried a rifle right after I shot his boy.”

“That’s the other carcass yonder.”

“Yep.”

“Looks like he’s got a headache too.”

“Yep.”

Harry considered this, strolled out to where he saw the Sheriff’s boot prints in the dust, looked at the face-up corpse with outflung arms, a pistol clenched in the death grip of a brain shot.

“He was a-shootin’ at you too,” he called.

The Sheriff nodded.

Harry rubbed his chin thoughtfully, turned strolled casually back to the boardwalk and its grisly ex-occupant.

“You shot ‘im from behind.”

Linn’s expression changed for the first time since all this started, and Harry was not at all surprised that it was a slow, wicked smile.

“Yep.”

Harry knew what it was to stare down the twin tunnels of doom that was the business end of a two pipe shoot gun, and he looked at the scatter laying just fingertip length from the dead man’s hand, and nodded again.

He bent down, opened the gun, withdrew a loaded round, then the second, held them up for the Sheriff to see.

“You shot him in the back,” Harry pronounced.  “Seems fair to me!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

68.  HORSE SENSE

 

Jimmy knew the Sheriff tried long and hard to break Stomper of his hatred for the train.

Jimmy knew Stomper still disliked the train.

Jimmy remembered the Sheriff telling him how the Old Sheriff waited at a particular place along the rail line, where the steam train was slow, about the speed of a walking man, and he’d jump his copper colored Cannonball mare onto a passing flatcar and ride to the next slow point, where he’d jump her off onto a flat a mile shy of the station.

Jimmy had to stack a hay bale on top of another and then wallow the saddle up onto it, he managed to get the saddle blanket onto Stomper and get it pulled out smooth, he fell twice – both times he ended up bent over the saddle, once with most of the wind knocked out of him – but get up he did, and he gripped the saddle and bared his teeth and swung and hoisted and managed throw the saddle onto Stomper’s back.

Saddle and blanket slid slowly off the other side.

“No,” Jimmy groaned, half-falling, half-sliding off the hay bale.

He looked at the saddle and the blanket and he remembered the movie he and the Sheriff watched the night before.

“Stomper,” he declared, “I’m gonna ride you bareback but I’ll use a blanket so I don’t give you saddle sores.”

Stomper turned his head a little and blinked, ears swiveling slowly.

Jimmy managed to get the saddle blanket out from under the saddle, and he coaxed Stomper’s off-side hind hoof off the corner of the blanket, and he got the blanket up over the big warmblood’s back and then managed to half-climb, half-wallow himself a-straddle the big, wide back.

He was used to it now.

First time he tried it, he felt like he was riding the dining room table, but young joints are flexible, and he was not at all uncomfortable.

Hands and knees served to guide the tall, broad, powerfully muscled gelding:  Stomper came out of the barn, pacing happily into the enclosure, then he turned and gathered himself and Jimmy felt him surge under him and the “Uh-oh” he thought had no time to emerge from his young throat.

Jimmy grabbed Stomper around the neck as the big horse sailed easily over the white painted board fence and landed on the far side.

Jimmy’s legs splayed wide as his backside came off the horse’s spine, the saddle blanket spread its wings and floated away in the passing breeze, and Stomper made a hard, galloping beeline for the railroad tracks and the hated train whistling its steam-breath challenge in the distance.

 

Young Wesley Albert squealed happily as his Mama powdered his round little baby bottom and snugged a clean diaper in place, he waved pink little hands and laughed as she got him into a clean flannel onesie, he giggled as she fit him into the papoose pack she’d been given, and he crowed with delight as she slung it across her back, shrugged the straps snug and made fast the seat belt around her middle.

“There now,” she said, “that’s not so bad, is it?”

Wesley swatted and grasped at her auburn hair and chewed happily on a thick curl, and Connie buttoned her denim jacket and started for the barn, calling Jimmy’s name.

 

“Sheriff Keller.”

“Dearest, Jimmy’s gone and so is Stomper.”

Linn frowned a little.  “What else?”

“His saddle is on the ground and the saddle blanket is draped over the corral rail.”

Linn considered for a moment.  “Give him a half hour, dear heart.  Let’s see what he does.”

 

“STOMPER!”  Jimmy yelled, his seven year old voice edged with panic, and the warmblood’s ears swung back, then forward.

The hated engine was thrashing against the tracks below them, her exhaust barking loudly every time the drivers came around, a half dozen cars singing and clacking against steel rails as they followed the engine’s lead.

The warmblood snorted and trotted down the curving path.

Jimmy sat up a little more, gripping the gelding’s mahogany mane.

The train is really slow, he thought.

It’s slow on an up grade, just like the Sheriff said.

I’ll bet we can jump onto that flat car!

“Stomper, go,” Jimmy said, thumping his heels happily against big rounded ribs, and Stomper lifted his head and paced more quickly toward the tracks.

A little girl, visiting with her Mommy, blinked and stared at the little boy on the great big horse, coming down the mountain path towards them.

She was in the passenger car at the very end of the train and she could see to the side and she could see behind and there was one car behind them and that was just a flat car with nothing on it and she didn’t know why they put an empty car there but the big horsie came toward the train and the girl’s eyes widened as the horse swung its head as if considering whether to jump onto this moving platform.

Jimmy felt Stomper stiffen, then turn:  as much as he disliked the train, he liked even less the notion of jumping onto a moving flatcar.

They stopped and watched the train retreat from them, and Stomper shook his head and stomped his big dishpan sized hooves into the dirt and muttered to himself, and Jimmy saw a little girl at the back door of the passenger car, smiling and waving a little shyly, and he grinned and waved back.

 

Connie had her mare saddled and she’d just come over the break of the hill when she saw Jimmy and Stomper climbing toward her.

Jimmy smiled – it was good to see him smile, too many times she’d seen him with a fearful expression – he said “Hi!” as if it were at once a delight to see her, and the most normal thing in the world, then:  “I wanted to jump Stomper onto the train like the Sheriff said the Old Sheriff used to but Stomper didn’t wanna!”

Connie could not help but laugh, for like a little boy does, Jimmy ran his words together – this, and the rueful expression on his face, served to nullify any reprimand Connie might have given him.

“It sounds like Stomper has horse sense,” Connie laughed.  “I’m hungry, how about you?”

Jimmy’s expression brightened: “Yeah!”  he declared happily.

“I made soup and there are sandwiches waiting.”  Connie turned her mare and Stomper followed, and Jimmy’s belly reminded him it was plumb empty and hadn’t had a thing since … oh, at least an hour before.

Connie helped Jimmy hang the saddle back up, and Jimmy got the saddle blanket hung over the edge of the stall, and the two held hands as they walked back to the house, young Wesley Albert sound asleep in his papoose carrier, a curl of his Mama’s hair in his chubby fingered grasp.

Jimmy looked up at Connie and smiled.

“I kinda like holdin’ hands.”

Connie smiled back.

“Me too.”

 

Connie heard the receiver pick up, heard her husband’s businesslike voice.

“Sheriff Keller.”

“He’s back.  Stomper has good horse sense.”

“All’s well?”

“All’s well.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

69.  EARTHQUAKE?

 

It had been a long day.

The Sheriff took a personal hand in the running of his department and he was not infrequently on the road or in the field, investigating and interviewing and responding the same as a road deputy, when his office demands permitted.

He’d had to tell a father his son was dead, that his son had tied off a noose to the rafter of an abandoned barn and stepped out of the sagging hay mow into eternity.

He'd lied to the man, he'd looked him in the eye and lied through his pearly whites.

"It was an accident," he'd said, "a stupid idiotic accident, but that's all it was" -- because he knew this would be a kindness to the man, it would be a kindness not to tell him of the suicide note, the sorrowful last words of a grieving heart, broken and irreparably torn into shreds by the girl who'd just thrown him aside.

Better the man think his son had died by accident, than by choice.

Not twenty minutes later, he was first on scene at a rollover accident, and his were the first tears to fall when the driver was recognized – she was sixteen, she’d been his papergirl when she was twelve and thirteen, and she’d wheedled her Daddy into letting her take his restored ’63 Olds Starfire convertible to the library.

The Sheriff read the tracks and took the pictures, he documented the scene as best he could before turning it over to the state police:  then he ran his hand into his pocket, came out with a quarter, looked at the troop and said “Heads notifies.”

“Heads notifies,” the troop echoed.

The quarter spun in a quick, short arc, the pale eyed lawman caught it, slapped it on the back of his hand.

“Call it.”

The troop said “Tails.”

It was tails.

The troop looked at what was left of the Olds.

“You knew her?”
Linn nodded.  “Yeah.  I know their family.”

“It’s no easier giving a death notice to strangers,” the troop said quietly.

“I know.  As soon as you step up and remove the cover, you’re not a stranger anymore.”

“Yeah.” 

Linn tasted ashes and wished for a moment he was retired.  “I know.”

The Sheriff took a long breath, blew it out.

“I’ll leave it to you fellas.”

 

He’d been til well after dark with reports and loose ends.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

He came into his living room and smelled fresh paint, and smiled.

He didn’t have much left to do.

He’d started painting the basement stairway and he’d been interrupted any number of times and the job wasn’t done yet.

He slipped upstairs, cat footed, boots in his off hand, and slipped into his bedroom.

He stripped down to blue jeans and T-shirt and crept in sock feet back downstairs.

 

Jimmy heard the Sheriff coming up the stairs.

He heard his door open, there was a long delay, then it shut, and he heard the man creeping back down stairs.

Jimmy was suddenly wide awake and shivering with fear.

He’d heard nighttime sounds before, before he came to live with the Sheriff, sounds that meant his mother was being hurt again:  he would hear the man leave and he’d hear his mother crying quietly, trying not to be heard.

Jimmy tasted copper and he curled up tight, into a ball, and started to pull his pillow around his head, until he realized …

… there were no terrible sounds …

… and the man had gone downstairs …

… and there was no sound of a woman’s pain …

Jimmy’s chest was tight and his stomach was winding up in knots like it used to and he slipped out of bed and took long, tiptoe strides across the floor, opened his door, listened.

Nothing.

He looked down the stairway.

A light was on.

He gripped the hand rail with a fearful hand, eased his weight down on the very side of the step, knowing there would be less chance of a squeak, a creak, to betray his travel.

 

Linn dipped the brush into white latex, wiped one side on the rim of the can, laid a fresh, heavy coat on the wall, then spread it with quick, practiced strokes.

He didn’t see the curious little boy looking up at him, rubbing his eyes and watching the lean waisted man smile a little as he turned the wall glossy white.

Jimmy tilted his head a little, curious, and managed to trip over the grain in the hardwood floor, just as Linn reached a little too far to get a spot he’d missed.

Overbalanced, he started to go over:  the full can of paint rocked, tilted, Linn dropped the brush and grabbed –

Jimmy jumped back, eyes wide with terror –

The can spun through space, spilling a long white spreading tongue of latex pigment –

Connie sat bolt upright in bed, felt the floor shake under her bed.

Earthquake?

She threw back her covers, jumped from the bed, yanked her door open –

Jimmy’s bedroom door was open –

A light on downstairs –

A strangled groan, a whimper –

Connie ran downstairs, her white flannel nightgown flowing around her, for all the world like a pale ghost floating down an ancient staircase.

 

Jimmy backed quickly, eyes wide, terror locking his throat shut:  he hit the wall, sank to the floor as his strength poured from him like water, and he pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them and buried his face in them, waiting for the shout, the voice, the harsh hands, he waited to be thrown into the nearest wall, waited to hear the belt being whipped from trouser loops and the rumble through the air and the searing detonation of agony as the belt laid across him –

He felt warm, gentle hands grip his shoulders, he smelled soap and sunlight and roses and he heard a gentle woman’s voice whisper in his ear It’s all right, you’re safe, and he lifted his face and opened his eyes.

If he hadn’t been sitting on the floor already, he would have collapsed at what he saw.

 

 

 

The next day, Connie was bouncing Wesley Albert on her knee, laughing as she held the phone between cheek and shoulder.

“Carly, you should have seen him!”  she giggled, sounding for all the world like a junior high cheerleader, all happy and bubbly with some new and esoteric knowledge about a boyfriend, such as his preference for Old Spice cologne.

“He – I – I was in bed and I thought we had an earthquake and it was Linn falling off a ladder!

“No, no, he wasn’t hurt, well, yes he was, but he was trying to paint a wall up on a ladder and it was about three in the morning!”

 

Linn twisted like a cat, trying to kick the ladder away from him, trying to rotate, trying to get his legs under him.

His foot went between the rungs as the ladder tilted away from him and he remembered seeing the gallon can falling, rotating, the paint’s broad tongue becoming a pure-white pinwheel, spreading out under him and he let go of the paint brush and watched it float away from him as the walls tilted and the floor leaped up and slammed against his back –

He grunted as the wind drove out of his lungs and he felt like he’d been gut punched and he saw bright sparkling lights as the back of his head bounced off the hardwood floor –

He heard the wind grunt out of his throat and he tried desperately to get some air into his shocked lungs and he smelled latex paint and he rolled over in the slick and sticky puddle and tried to push up on all fours and Connie was there, her hand over her mouth, and behind her, Jimmy, backed up against the far wall, eyes big and shocked and Linn’s palms shot away from him, greased and lubricated by the slick latex paint, and he went facefirst into the white mess, turning his head at the last moment.

He tried again, slowly, carefully, and he came up on his elbows this time, not his hands, and he looked at his family, and he considered just how foolish he must look on the floor like that, and he laughed, and then he rolled over on his back again and he laid there in the paint and laughed like a damned fool.

When he finally ran out of laughter, he laid there and looked at his wife and in his own words, “I opened my mouth and something stupid fell out” – he said, “Connie, can you get paint out of blue jeans?”  and Connie opened her mouth, closed it, then planted her knuckles on her belt and declared, “I am NOT putting THAT MESS in MY WASHER!” – which struck the Sheriff as terribly funny, and so he begged a couple of trash bags from his beautiful bride:  his white-dripping clothes went in one, Connie brought him an old towel and he got the excess off him with the towel, and it went in with his clothes; he made his way to the mud room shower and spent some time getting white off his carcass, and all this time Jimmy stayed pressed back against the wall, still down on his bottom, still afraid to move.

He heard the man’s approach, he saw the Sheriff set down the five gallon plastic bucket and the flat bottom shovel:  he pulled a squeegee out of the bucket, shook the water off it, and Jimmy watched as the man used squeegee and shovel to get up the paint, and return it to the can from whence it had come:  he then scrubbed the floor with a big sponge, rinsing it often in the white plastic bucket of water, and finally he had his mess all cleaned up.

The Sheriff, in undershorts and a rueful expression, turned and sat down with his back to the unpainted wall.

He tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, feeling every one of his years and every one of the miles he’d ever inflicted upon his carcass.

He opened his eyes and turned his head, smiled tiredly at Jimmy, extended his arm.

Jimmy rose and walked carefully over to the man, a little uncertain, then he sat down beside the Sheriff and leaned against him, his head against the man’s chest.

Linn’s arm was around the boy and he drew him close, leaning his head over so his cheek was on the top of Jimmy’s head.

Jimmy felt him take a long breath, sigh it out.

“I,” he said quietly, “had a really, really bad day today.”

Jimmy nodded a little.

“I came home and all I wanted to do was go to bed.  That’s all.  I just wanted to lay down in my own bed and go to sleep.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“But I got ambitious.  I thought I could finish up that wall and have it done.”

Jimmy nodded again, looking over at the gleaming-wet wall, or that part of it that was gleaming-wet.

“I should know better than to work when I’m wore out.” 

His voice was tired, his eyes heavy.

“My own fault, Jimmy.  I tried to do too much.  My fault.”

Jimmy nodded.

It did not take long for the worn out Sheriff and the warm-cuddled boy to fall asleep, both of them sitting on the clean, slightly damp, hardwood floor.

Neither of them felt the blanket that draped around them, the hands that tucked the blanket carefully around their shoulders, and neither one saw the Sheriff’s wife, her hands clasped in front of her mouth, looking with a confusing, conflicting expression at this strong warrior of a man and this scared, hurt child of a little boy, and how in this moment, each of them needed the other, and each of them was healing now, thanks to the other.

Silently, barefoot, she flowed back up the stairs, looking less like a ghost and more like the mother she was.