SHORT STORIES!

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

BENEATH AN OCTOBER MOON

Sarah Lynne McKenna's eyes glowed pale in the darkness.

She was less the beautiful young woman she'd been, and more a creature of the night: a man's body lay dead behind her, a man she knew, a man who'd fired the single shot from his rifle. 

Spilled shot and a dropped powder horn told Sarah he'd tried to reload it, he'd been interrupted and he'd been killed as he used his rifle as a close-in, hand-to-hand weapon as he'd learned in that damned War so many years ago.

She surmised this from the broken ramrod, and the fact that the Pennsylvania pattern rifle was broken at the wrist.

Sarah Lynne McKenna considered his body, she picked up the foot long stub of a ramrod -- a spiral striped hardwood shaft, splintered, sharp: she looked around, listening with more than her ears, and part of her -- a stained section of her soul that knew the touch of evil -- told her that she was indeed not alone.

Sarah looked at the body again, frowned: the neck was broken, the face bore what looked like claw marks, something she'd seen before.

Sarah Lynne McKenna rose, the broken hardwood hidden in the folds of her skirt at her side.

"You may as well come out," she said pleasantly.  "I can smell you, and I hope you don't look as bad as you smell."

A figure stepped out of a shadow, a shadow that would not have hidden a rabbit: the figure was human, or at least had been human, at one time. It was well dressed, it was overdressed:  were it in a European city and visiting the theatre, it might have been less incongrous, but here, in the Colorado mountains?

A ruffled shirt, a gaudy, faceted, square ruby at its throat, another on a heavy silver necklace worn like a badge of honor about its neck, a shimmering-black, blood-red-silk-lined cloak, and a top hat which it swept off as it bowed to the cold-eyed young woman.

"Allow me to introduce myself," she heard: the words were cultured, accented, polite, offered in gentle tones -- tones belied with the look of utter lust he gave both the dead man's body lying on the ground, and the young woman's body standing before him.

"Don't bother with the introduction," Sarah interrupted.  "I know you."

"You do not know me," he smiled, taking a step toward her, his eyes beginning to glow a dull red, like Hell's fires heating black sand underfoot -- something Sarah had seen firsthand, when she descended to the Infero to retrieve the stolen half of her childhood's soul.

"Oh, but I do know you," Sarah said, and there was no smile in either her voice or her face.  "I have seen you in my father's eyes and in the faces of men that I've killed. I've seen you in demons slain by men who swung steel together when the world was young and I've seen it in the eyes of the man who wanted to murder my mother and I."

He took a step toward her, began to raise his hands.

Usually he could mesmerize the female with his voice, with his eyes: this one did not mesmerize, she did not grow quiet and passive, nor did she freeze in fear:  he took one pace toward her, she took one pace toward him.

He stopped, surprised.

"I have known you since I was a little child," Sarah said quietly, and her eyes glowed from within, shining like tiny moons, an ice-white that brought a chill to the killer's already cold heart. "You are Evil, and Evil visited itself upon me before I was yet a maiden."

His eyes widened: desire overrode good sense, his lips peeled back, revealing preternaturally long canines, his hands spread, revealing the bloodied claws he'd hooked into the dead man's face and head before he twisted hard, snapping the neck and killing his victim instantly.

He did not expect a mere human to move with such speed, and he did not expect the sharpened hickory ramrod to drive up through his stomach and very precisely through what used to be his beating heart.

He froze as he felt centuries of his life fleeing him, he looked down with incredulity as this impossible weapon protruded from the opening in his waistcoat, he looked up in utter astonishment to see a shining silver crescent in the moonlight, just before his head parted company from the rest of his body and then he dissolved into a hissing cloud of dust that fell to the earth in an irregular heap.

Sarah Lynne McKenna considered the heavy blade she held, a blade in which she'd had Black Smith incise a heavy, vinelike engraving down the full length of both sides, into which she'd had the smith forge-weld silver wire, a blade in which she'd had the gifted ex-slave engrave the Insignia of the Rose -- the superimposed Christian Cross with the Seal of Solomon, both heavily engraved and inlaid with silver wire -- and on the other side of the fighting blade, the Rose itself, beautifully and artistically rendered, and also inlaid with silver.

She turned the blade, caught the reflection from the moon overhead.

Cutting the throat of a living man would have left his life's blood on her blade.

She looked at the dust he'd become, looked at her blade's clean, unmarred surface, slid it back into its sheath between her shoulder blades, arranged her hair to hide it again.

She felt Daciana, and then she smelled her:  she smiled, turned, tilted her head a little as the Gypsy circus acrobat paced up to her, silent in backless slippers.

She looked at Sarah, then very obviously, in a very exaggerated manner, leaned to the side and looked at what used to be one of the creatures she and her Grandmere dreaded.

"Komm mitt," she said, turning:  Sarah followed her as she knelt beside the body of a man who'd done his best to kill whatever this thing was that rushed him, all teeth and fangs and an obvious threat.

Daciana took a dagger -- ancient, ornate, businesslike, its blade sharply tapered -- she placed it over the dead man's breastbone, pushed.

The carcass convulsed, then ached backwards, gave a single, prolonged scream that was barely at the edge of hearing, then --

Silence.

"His soul iss safed," Daciana explained.  "Hadt I not used silver he voot haff bekommen Loup-

Garou, oh, how you say --"  

Daciana frowned and shook her hand, searching for the word.

"Werewolf," Sarah suggested.

"Ja, werwulf," Daciana nodded.

"Do we need to do anything with the ashes?"  Sarah turned, gestured to the small pile of dust.

"No. Ist beyond resurrection."  Daciana stood, bent, gripped the dagger, pulled:  it took some effort to draw it free of the breastbone.

"It looks like you've done this kind of thing before," Sarah observed.

Daciana gave her a bleak look.  "Ja," she affirmed.  "I haff."

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

WORDS

Time shattered like a dropped mirror.

I am going to kill you all.

Sarah Lynne McKenna's quiet smile, her slight lowering of her head, her inviting expression, was the last thing three men saw.

You are nearest me.

I will kill you first.

The others will not know what happened and then I will be behind them.

Old Pale Eyes' coat tail flared outward, his hand opened, bladed beneath the rising, silk-lined material, streaking with an unreal slowness, as if pushing through cold, clear honey toward the ivory handle of his left-hand Colt's revolving pistol in its black, floral carved holster.

Sarah's blade usually lived in the sleeve of her dress; when it came out to play, it liked to taste blood, and when she brought it out into the light of day, she brought it out with an icepick grip: she drove it upward, through a man's lower jaw, through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and out the top of his skull, and she released her sleeve-knife's handle as she spun, light as a dancer, whirling on the balls of her feet: her second slender blade in an icepick grip: she drove it hilt-deep into a man's kidneys, detonating an absolute sunball of utter, paralyzing agony, pain of such magnitude that his entire body froze, his scream locked deep within his throat, unable to escape.

Sarah rolled through her first spin, moving fast enough her skirt had yet to flare outward: she passed behind the third man, moving slowly, slowly, knowing exactly where she was in space and in time, knowing her turn would bring her out facing the third man's right earlobe, knowing her bulldog .44 would be in her hand and rising toward the earlobe she saw in bright, sharp, absolute clarity, she saw a tiny scar under it, she saw the hair that hung over the earlobe from behind, as her finger tightened on the curved, slick trigger, and the smooth mechanism of her well used and well cared for pistol chuckled to itself and rolled its package of chemical fire and sledgehammer payload under the hammer, and a tenth of a second before British death drove through the would-be killer's brainstem, an American .44 caliber freight train opened a railroad tunnel through this third man's skull, opening a momentary channel just below his nose and coming out the back of his head.

The twin detonation snapped the spell, shattered the feeling of unreality: Sarah saw things normally again, saw blood and gore spray in two directions as the third man collapsed as if boneless.

Sarah pulled the pistol back against her side, turned, catlike, pale eyes wide, a quiet smile on her face -- and somehow that smile, the expression of a woman who'd just done something she really, really liked doing -- somehow that satisfied look was colder and more terrifying than her ice-pale eyes.

The second man, the one with the flat, slender, checkered handle sticking out his back, was last to hit the ground.

He'd been out of the fight when Sarah started her move, he just didn't realize it; as the Sheriff turned, face pale, flesh drawn tight over high cheekbones and lips pulled back in a visible snarl: he turned slowly round about, his pale eyes like a battleship's cannon swinging to bear on a new threat:  men shrank a little, stared.

Where three stood shoulder-to-shoulder, two with pistols and one with a shotgun, now all three lay in the street, suddenly, unexpectedly, and the pair that stopped them had weapons in hand and were very obviously ready to continue the fight.

 

"Who were they, sir?"

"Two were bought and paid for," Linn answered quietly as he hunkered, squatting on the balls of his feet, studying the dead.  "These two I recognize. Tinhorns. Likely thought they could make a  name for themselves."

"Kill Old Pale Eyes and be a big man?"  Sarah murmured, shaking her head.  "Don't they know there's a high price for stupidity?"

"They paid it, all right," Linn agreed.  "Experience is a hard teacher but a fool will learn at no other."

"I like that epitaph," Sarah smiled, taking the Sheriff's arm as he rose.  "By the way, handsome, you owe me a dance."

"I owe you more than that," Linn admitted.  "I could have taken two of them, but when that one started to bring a shotgun up when the other two were distracting me --"

"That's why I shut them up," Sarah interrupted, looking at once very innocent, and very guilty:  she fluttered her eyelashes, tilted her head.  "And poor little old me, I will just plainly have such a difficult time retrieving my blades from those two dastardly scoundrels!"

Jacob grunted skeptically, squatted, gripped, pulled: it took some work, but he got Sarah's blade from one man's skull:  the other was less difficult to remove, she hadn't wedged it in bone -- for a miracle, he thought -- he carried her blades over to the horse trough, sloshed them clean as he could, brought them back.

Sarah stripped off her gloves, took the blades in a dainty grip, and wiped them clean on dead men's coats, casually, as if it were an everyday occurrence, unworthy of her emotional involvement.

A set of Irish-green eyes watched from a window not distant, and a shotgun was lowered and parked back in its corner.

Linn looked at Sarah.

"Thank you."
Sarah's smile was brilliant as sunrise itself:  she scampered like a little girl, ran into the long tall lawman's belly like a happy little girl, seized him around the middle and laughed, "Oh, Papa!" -- only the presence of a staring population, and the carcasses bleeding on the street, kept the scene from being one of a touching, filial affection.

 

Esther Keller looked up, smiled, rose:  "Sarah! How delightful!"

Sarah giggled like a little girl, skipped over, hugged her 'Nother Mother quickly:  "It worked!" she whispered as they stood in cheek-to-cheek embrace.

Esther's green eyes widened:  "You simply must tell me all about it!" she murmured, her expression one of delight.

"Do you remember the dance move -- like this, on the balls of the feet, where the houri will take off her veil and hold it above and behind her head?" Sarah giggled, and Esther's cheeks colored delicately, for she'd taught Sarah certain dances, certain steps, guaranteed to fire a man's soul, to inflame and blind him with desire -- "and you taught me the draw and the up-thrust, like this" -- Sarah's sleeve-knife appeared, drove into an invisible opponent's bottom jaw, a rising stroke, delivered from beneath -- "and if I pirouette, so! and thrust, so!" -- Sarah's cheeks were reddened as well, as she looked at Esther, as she saw the approval in the older woman's face, as Esther clapped her hands together in delight:  "So that's how you did it!"

"I did," Sarah squeaked, bouncing on the balls of her feet like an excited little girl.  "I did as you taught me, and it kept Papa from being surprised!"

Esther rose, embraced Sarah again, a motherly envelopment:  "Thank you," she whispered, and Sarah hugged her back:  "Thank you for showing me how!" came her return whisper, and the two drew apart, giggling like a pair of schoolgirls.

Esther reached over, tugged at the bell-pull:  "Do stay, dear, I should so enjoy your company over some nice hot oolong!"

Sarah's eyes widened and she slowed, suddenly unsteady: she fumbled for the back of one of Esther's embroidered, velvet-cushioned chairs, sat, suddenly, the color draining from her face as she felt the strength run from her limbs like water from a slit water-skin.

"I did it," she whispered as the full realization of what she'd done sank in and hit bottom wtih a solid ker-thud.

She looked at Esther, and her expression was one of a shocked little girl.

She tasted copper and she felt half sick and she heard her own whisper as if from a great distance.

"I really, really did it!"

She opened her eyes and realized she was looking straight up at the stamped-tin ceiling, that she was lying on Esther's bed there in her office, that Esther was sitting beside her, carefully wiping her cheek with a cool, wet cloth, another folded and placed over her forehead.

Esther looked at her with understanding and with sympathy.

"I've done the same thing," she soothed.  "When we women handle something like that, it's the most natural thing in the world, because it is given to us to do it."  She smiled, took Sarah's hand in her own, rubbed Sarah's knuckles with a motherly palm.  "It's not until we put it into words that we truly realize just what we've done. It's not until we say it in words, that it suddenly becomes very real!"

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GAMMAW'S DOLL

 

Shelly sighed and looked sadly at her little girl's retreating backside.

Her sisters happily embraced graceful femininity: her sisters were happy to be Girly Girls, sweet and feminine and curls and smiles, and Dana ...

... didn't ...

Oh, she wore the dresses and the skirts Shelly sewed for her; she behaved in a ladylike manner, unless it suited her not to: Marnie was become a deputy and now Sheriff of her own demesnse, but she'd never failed to be girly and feminine, at least most of the time.

Shelly remembered how, as little girls, Marnie and her sisters all smiled and glided across the stage at the annual Little Miss Firelands pageant, how she'd primped their hair and sewn their frilly dresses, how they'd minced across the stage and smiled, and how Dana ...

... didn't ...

Shelly picked up her coffee and sought solace in a face full of fragrant steam, then she shook her head and laughed a little at the memory of her sweet little Dana, scowling with her bottom jaw thrust out, a preschooler in a frilly dress and frothy-white petticoats crossing the stage in her patent-leather slippers: instead of gliding, instead of mincing, instead of lifting her hands a little in a sweet feminine little-girl manner, Dana's white-gloved hands were fisted, her arms stiff at her sides, her head thrust forward like an ill tempered bear, stomping across the stage with a scowling CLUMP CLUMP CLUMP ... 

Today, when her brothers were tormenting her, she shoved out her bottom jaw and ran silently upstairs, and came back down with a favorite doll -- but one she only carried when she was unhappy, and Shelly realized she never knew why Dana went to this particular rag doll when she was teased, when she was upset about something.

Shelly waited in the kitchen, looked at the dishes; most were done, only a few were left, and of these remaining, none were moved out of a Christian charity to wash themselves:  Shelly sipped her coffee, saw the door open again.

Dana came in, her doll locked in her elbow: she turned, closed the door, started up the stairs.

"Dana," Shelly called softly.

Dana stopped, looked at her Mama with big, bright-blue and innocent eyes, then came scampering over to her Mama.

"Dana, is that the doll your Gammaw made you?"

Dana nodded, her blond curls bouncing.

"Is that the doll you carry when you're not happy?"

Again the silent, innocent, wide-eyed and hair-bouncing affirmation.

"Are you unhappy now, Dana?"

This time Dana shook her head, but she rotated so far to the left and to the right that her entire young body turned as well: dizzied, she giggled, seized a convenient chair and steadied herself.

Shelly tilted her head, not quite frowning, but with a puzzled-Mommy look on her face.

"What happened, then?" she asked.

Dana took a deep breath and explained, all in a rush, in a little girl's loudly-declared, breathy, all-in-one sentence:

"Gammaw said it's a Dammit Doll an' I should use it instead of dwiving my bwuvver through the floor like a fence post!"

Shelly blinked, surprised:  "I see," she murmured.  "She made you a ... Dammit Doll?"

Dana nodded vigorously.  "Angela needs one too 'cause she's a girl an' girls aren't supposed to take a fwyin' pan to someone an' she's just a liddle girl an' your fwyin' pan is rrreal heavy!"

Shelly smiled a little at Dana's studious frown, at her intentional effort to correctly form her R instead of the little-girl W sound.

"What can you tell me about a Dammit Doll?" Shelly persisted -- it was a line of questioning she'd learned from her husband, the Sheriff.

"Gammaw sang it to me," Dana said, hugging the doll and turning left, turning right, her skirt flaring a little as she did, then she took the doll by its legs and drew out a chair, raised the doll overhead and proceeded to beat it against the chair seat, chanting in time to her thrashing blows:

Whap! "When you're angry,

Whap! "When you're mad,
Whap! "When you want to slammit,

"Just whap! beat this doll

"Against whap! the wall,

"Yell whap, whap, whap! DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT!"

Dana brought the doll back up into the bend of her elbow and regarded her Mommy with the look of a little girl who was very pleased with herself.

For her part, Shelly was grateful she'd not taken a sip of coffee: she tried to hide her smile behind her knuckles, she tried to stifle her laughter by lowering her head:  her efforts were for nought, and as a Mommy's laughter filled the kitchen, Dana stamped her little foot and put her knuckles on her belt and declared, "Well she did!" which inspired her Mommy to greater mirth and merriment.

Right about then, the door opened and the Sheriff stepped in, puzzled: Shelly was leaned back in the chair, her head thrown back, making the approximate sounds of a chicken laying a paving brick, Dana was industriously beating a rag doll against a chair, and Linn wondered just what in two hells ailed two of the loveliest ladies in his life.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

PUBLIC RECORD

"You stole a bicycle."

"I didn't! Just borrowed it, they said it was okay --"

"The owner has a diffent story."

"Well he's lying!"

"It was a girl's bike."

"Then she's lying!"

"You stole from the All-Night!"

"I paid for those!"

"Cashier says otherwise."

"She's lying!  I paid for those --"

"We have video showing you picking up items and putting them inside your hoodie."

The prisoner slouched down in his chair, arms crossed inside his oversized T-shirt.

"You knocked two children down and stole one's bicycle. That's two counts of assault on a juvenile, one count of assault with intent to steal, one count of grand larceny --"

"Whatchoo mean grand larceny! That crap bicycle is so cheap --"

His attorney raised his hand, spoke quietly to his client.

"Then you fled, so there's flight to avoid prosecution --"

"I didn't fly, I was on a bicycle!"

"So you confess to taking a bicycle."

"Man, I ain't confessin' to nothin'!"

"You'll be a really big man in prison, you know that," the deputy said casually:  "getting beat up by a little girl and all."

"Man, I didn't get beat up --"

"You were roped by a little girl on horseback, she yanked you off the bicycle and dropped your sorry backside in a muddy ditch, she yanked you off your feet every time you tried to stand up!"

"She didn't have no reason to do that! I dindoo nuffin!"

"Then why did we find you prints on the bike, why do we have video of you stealing it, why did we find the stolen goods in your hoodie?"

The prisoner glared, turned his face away from the deputy.

"It's like this. We don't have to make it public knowledge that a little girl beat you up. If we do that, you'll be the laughing stock in lockup. No one will take you seriously and no one will believe a word you say."

"A word with my client?" the attorney said.

The deputy rose.  "Have your talk, I'll be right outside."

 

Marnie Keller sat very properly, hands folded in her skirt, her knees together, her ankles crossed.

She sat very straight, her chin lifted a little, and Sheriff Linn Keller wondered how in the world his ten year old daughter had grown so much, so fast.

He blinked, dismissed the thought.

He'd already discussed the takedown with his daughter; he'd already gotten her statement, how she'd seen the thief stuff his take into his hoodie, how she followed him outside, how she saw him shove two girls and grab the bicycle away from one of them -- a brand-new, high-end ten-speed touring bicycle, and how he'd pedaled away, laughing.

Marnie told her Daddy how she'd run for her Apple-horsie, how they'd taken out after the thief -- she realized he might have a weapon and she didn't, so she had to take him off the bicycle and fast, and her hand closed on the plaited reata she'd been working with for a few years.

Marnie described how much easier it was to drop a loop over the fleeing felon than it was to try and rope a calf that didn't want caught, how she'd snubbed the line and how Apple-horse dropped back on his haunches and the felon flew backwards off the bike and let out a yell and landed butt-first in the cold and muddy ditch, and how Apple kept backing like he'd been taught, keeping the line taut:  Marnie had been obliged to yank the fellow off his feet four times before he realized he was going nowhere.

Linn nodded, expressionless; he went in and spoke quietly to the prisoner and his attorney, and after less than a minute, the court appointed attorney asked what kind of a deal they could strike, that his client was most concerned about people finding out that a little girl caught him and held him for the responding police.

When the Sheriff returned to his office, he sat and leaned forward, elbows planted on the desk blotter, sandpapering his palms thoughtfully together.

Marnie waited, feeling suddenly very uncertain.

"You won't have to testify," Linn said at length.  "He's agreed to plead guilty if we don't publicize that he got beat up by a fourth-grader."

Marnie nodded solemnly.

"Now as far as apprehending a fleeing felon."  Linn took a breath, considered, looked at his daughter speculatively.

"I suppose I should tell you not to do that, it's too dangerous."

"I know you're supposed to say that, Daddy."

"I can't say that to you."
Marnie looked at him, half surprised, half concerned.

"Marnie, when it needed done, you did it, and I am pretty damned proud of you!"

"Thank you, Daddy," Marnie said in a small voice:  she looked to her left, at a portrait of her Gammaw, taken right after she assumed office, and then she looked at her pale eyed Daddy.

"I will be Sheriff," she said -- she said it as fact, not as speculation, not as desire, not as plan.

"I will be Sheriff, and I have to handle these things."

Sheriff Linn Keller felt a thrill of fear singe his belly, as if he were hearing the thundering words of an Old Testament prophet, speaking in the ringing tones of absolute fact.

That the words were softly framed by a pretty little girl, made them all the more troubling.

 

 

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

FAN MAIL

Few people realized there'd been a succession of The Bear Killers.

Linn and Jacob, and now Marnie, knew the grief of taking their old and dear friend on their final ride: the younger successors to The Bear Killer learned what it was to be held, and to have their fur dampened by their humans: such is life, for all lives end, some sooner than others.

Not all The Bear Killers, as we've seen, were boy dogs, and not all of The Bear Killers were all black.

Most were.

There were exceptions.

Heads turned and people stared, open mouthed, as Marnie rode into town one fine day, in all white:  a white, knee length, divided skirt, white blouse and an embroidered red vest, a white Stetson with a red hatband:  of course she wore her signature red cowboy boots, and a red gunbelt and holster, with her Uncle's .357 secure about her slender waist: her Appaloosa gelding was mostly white, its very few light tan spots doctored a little to a distinct reddish hue, and trotting happily beside her, The Bear Killer, wearing a red K9 vest with the gold six point star and K9 in black.

That's not really what caught the eye.

This Bear Killer was pure white.

 

The Firelands Gazette prided itself on covering local news.

When their Irish Brigade entered a nearly empty grain silo to retrieve a victim overcome with something, Bruce Jones was there, capturing the moment when a man was fed through the hole in the side of the silo, strapped to a backboard, the green-plastic oxygen mask on his face.

When the local rifle team scored first in the State, it was front page news; their sports page did feature their ball teams, yes, but the rifle and pistol teams were covered equally as thoroughly as football and basketball, and when The Bear Killer sang a song of mayhem at the door of an abandoned house, Bruce's photography helped identify two of the eight who simultaneously fled the house by a variety of doors, windows and a hole kicked in its decaying wall.

Somehow it did not surprise the Sheriff at all that he received a beautifully composed, perfectly framed photograph of his daughter, riding down Main Street, a little bit of a smile on her face, with a pure white canine pacing along beside her.

That was the afternoon when Deputy Sheriff Marnie Keller, her six point badge hanging from a conveniently designed slot in her vest, gripped a double handful of blued steel justice as she called through the doorway, "You can come out so I can see who you is, or I can come in and see who you was," and later that day -- after Marnie cuffed and stuffed this first suspect -- The Bear Killer, dancing eagerly on white forepaws, sang a song of death and torpedoed into a pile of laundry, which then exploded with the screaming efforts of a wanted felon that didn't seem to appreciate a set of canine fangs, seemingly inviting him for supper.

The Sheriff's office routinely received mail from the public; not all were complimentary, not all were positive, but there was one file dedicated exclusively to The Bear Killer.

The two most recent entries were from Editor Jones of the Firelands Gazette.

One was a photograph of a beautiful young woman, all in red-trimmed white, riding into town on a morning-sun-lighted white-and-red horse, with a huge, white dog pacing along beside her, looking up at her in apparent adoration.

The second was the same dog, bristled up and looking twice as big as he had in the first shot: it was a very dynamic photograph, with laundry rising like an explosion, this white Bear Killer perfectly framed against a dark-blue bedsheet spraying up behind.

It did not hurt the photograph's composition a bit that The Bear Killer had a subject by the arm, the arm's hand was wide-finger splayed, and a weapon was clearly seen falling from said subject's now-opened grip.

The Sheriff looked at the pictures and smiled; he slid them into the file jacket, along with children's stick drawings of big black dogs with big smiles.

He slid the drawer shut and laughed a little, shaking his head.

Sharon turned and looked at him, raised an eyebrow.

"I never get fan mail like that," he complained.

Sharon opened the bottom drawer of her desk, reached in: Linn heard her rustling around in a box.

"Here," she said, tossing something underhanded.  "Have a dog biscuit."

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

"STAY THE HELL OUTTA MY TOWN!"

 

I stood in front of my Granddad's grave with my Stetson in hand.

It was proper that I wore uniform, it was proper that mine was one of a half dozen bullets, set in a neat row on top of his tomb stone, mute reminders of the one round the man fired before he was killed.

Granddad's revolver hung in a frame back in Mama's office.

I'd shot the hell out of that good old revolver and had two more just like it and I'd shot hell out of them too, and I've honestly lost track of how many .38 S&W reloads I cranked through that single stage press I dedicated to that one round, back when Mama was familiarizin' me with Granddad's revolver... back when I was just a boy, back before I raised my right hand and got sworn at and a badge hung on my shirt pocket flap.

'Twas a cast bullet I set on his sandblasted marble.

I know.

I'd cast it myself.

It is proper that a man remembers his ancestors.

That's not the only reason I'd come out here.

I needed some time away from Firelands.

We'd had a couple of bad ones and I'd been in the middle of both.

I couldn't keep one man from puttin' a 12 gauge through the roof of his mouth -- I swindled, sweet talked, blannied and did my best used-car-salesman's powers of persuasion to get him to put the gun down, put it down, put it down, and I'd woke up every night after that, sweatin' cold like the grave itself, seeing that bright moment before the gun's concussion blinked my eyes, remembering what it was to see a man's death, and him just out of arm's reach --

I blinked, shook my head:  I taken a long breath, looked around the rural Athens County graveyard.

I was shaking again, I was breathing fast.

That was the day I tried to keep another man alive and try as I might, I could not keep his life from running, bright-red and frothy, from between my fingers.

Doc told me there was not one damned thing I could have done to save him, he was dead before I got there, he'd just not quit bleedin' out, and Doc's words were a comfort to the thinking part of my brain, but them two nightmares took turns a-wakin' me up, my two immense, utter, absolute, failures.

Just like the Irish Brigade.

They didn't say a house fire was through the roof before they got there.

They said "We lost a house."

They didn't say people died because there was honestly no way to have saved them.

They said "We lost someone today."

Hell, even their medics said the same thing -- didn't matter if someone was stone dead before anyone called the squad, they said "We lost one today."

I have no idea why we all do that, but we do.

It ain't right, but we do it anyway.

"Rest easy, Granddad," I said, and my voice was that of a grandson who regretted never knowing his grandfather, then I came to attention and rendered a correct salute, I performed a correct about-face and paced away from the grave.

Mama suggested I come out here and talk to Granddad about it.

I didn't talk much.

It wasn't far back into the first little village, Granddad's cemetery was out 78 north of Glouster.

I knew all these Southeast Ohio villages were speed traps, so I was scrupulous as to my velocity, and a good thing, but on impulse I wheeled into the town square and parked.

I looked at the rusty stubs of pipe where parking meters used to stand, back when there were businesses on the main street:  I looked around, as was my habit, and locals looked back mistrustfully: can't blame 'em, nobody wants a cop around unless they need one.

Didn't bother me what they thought.

They looked at me and I glared at them and they looked away, slouch shouldered, and shuffled off.

Damn shame, I thought.

This used to be a busy and thriving community, back when coal was being mined.

I looked around again, pocketed the rental's keys and crossed the alley by the old beer joint, went about halfway up, opened the police station's steel door the width of four fingers and called, "Permission to come aboard!"

It's polite to announce yourself in this part of the country:  Mama was a paramedic and a badge packer both, hereabouts, and she warned me it was wise to identify before going through a door, as it prevented misunderstandings -- like inheriting a charge of heavy shot heading in the opposite direction, which she considered very bad luck.

"Granted," a gruff voice replied.

I came on in, six foot two of tan uniformed Sheriff's deputy, a Western Stetson on my head and a single action .44 on my belt.

The town cop rose from behind his desk, or started to:  he got halfway to his feet, his knees buckled and he went ghost-white:  right before he fell, right before his chair went out from under him and he went a-sprawlin' on the green painted cement floor, he gasped "My God!  Ted!"

I swung around the desk, I laid my fingertips into his carotid groove, felt life pulsing strongly against my questing pressure:  I tilted his head back, knelt beside him, laid a hand on his belly with my ear at his nose and mouth.

"We have a pulse," I said out loud:  "Spontaneous respirations."

Reckon I've been around our Irish Brigade's medics too often, that's what I'd heard them say.

I straightened as the supine man grunted:  he raised a hand, I gripped it in both mine.

"Easy there," I said.  "Just lay still for a minute."

He blinked, blinked again, looked at me, his eyebrows drove together in puzzlement and rose in surprise:

"Ted?"

"Can you stand?" I asked, and he grunted "Yeah, help me up," and I helped him sit: he reached up and put his left hand on the edge of the desk.

"On three, my count," I said.  "One, two, three."

He came to his feet.

I seized his four caster office chair and remembered how Old Pale Eyes used to regularly and very publicly murder office chairs that offended him: as this establishment lacked a wood stove, I didn't think it wise to suggest he take an ax to it for having abandoned him in such a cowardly manner.

"Name's Keller," I said.  "Firelands County Sheriff's Office, Colorado."

He blinked, squinted a little:  "You're Willamina's -- "

"Her second born, yes, sir."

He shook his head.  "Dammit, boy, you're the image of your grandfather!"

"Flattery," I deadpanned, "will get you everywhere.  I came out to talk to his headstone."

"Well hell, don't just stand there, let's go find us some coffee and tell me about your mother!"

I looked at the man's name tag and nodded.

"Mama spoke of you," I said.  "She spoke with respect."

He stopped, then started for the door again without replying.

It wasn't far to the Burr Oak Restaurant.

Turns out I was in the company of the Chief himself, a man named Warren that everyone knew, most greeted, and a few glared at:  myself, my eyes were busy and I cast a wide mental net, for this was a strange town, a different culture:  Mama spoke of Appalachian Ohio as its own culture, a culture that was once fiercely independent, insular and mistrustful, but was steadily eroded by the increasing drug culture. I knew I was being sized up -- any new cop in town always is, every new hire is tried, and though mine was a uniquely different uniform, I was very obviously a lawman, in the company of a lawman they knew, and that made me as much a target as the Chief.

We went in, took a table in back:  I turned my chair so my back was squarely to the wall, at which the Chief laughed and waved a hand:  "Don't worry, nothin's gonna happen here --"

My head came up, I heard someone start to cough, then the cough stopped and I was on my feet and moving.

I could see her shoulders heaving and she was making no sound.

Her elderly husband was coming out of the booth, he moved as if to block me.

I drove in, reaching for her.

She must have been a dancer.

I took her hand and brought her out, she was on her feet and spun as light as a ballerina, I whirled her around, got my arms around her, gripped one fist with the other and SLAMMED my thumbside fist into her diaphragm, praying Dr. Heimlich's maneuver would succeed.

It didn't.

I thrust a second time.

Nothing.

Three thrusts, she sagged in my grip --

I have to do something even if it's wrong -- 

I brought my hand back, slapped the flat of my hand hard between her shoulder blades, my other arm around her belly, she was broke over like a shotgun --

Something flew from her mouth, hit the floor --
I got my knee under her backside, brought her upright, she took a breath, took another.

I turned her, held her under the arms, her face pinked up and she nodded:  her husband came up to us and I turned her, they embraced, I turned and looked back the length of the little shotgun restaurant and damn near every booth emptied out and people were standing and staring, and I did like I do at times like this.

I opened my mouth, and something stupid fell out.

I raised a finger and said "Big sigh of relief all around," and I turned and looked at the couple, and they were heading for the front door, an elderly couple ready to die of embarrassment but grateful they were alive to coomplain about it.

People drew back from me as I walked back to where the Chief was standing.

The waitress was standing there, looking at the memory of what she'd just seen, then she blinked and looked at me and squeaked "Coffee?" and I smiled and said "Yes, please, and a little cow with it if I could."

Chief Warren sat, and I picked up my Stetson -- I'd dropped it onto my chair when I come out of my seat -- then I sat as well and dropped my skypiece on my lap.

"Nice job," Chief said.  

"Thank you.  I had good teachers."

"Your Mom?"

I chuckled.  "Actually a fellow named Crane. He's our squad captain."

The Chief's talkie hissed, then a hurried voice:  "523 code ten, Twelve Main," and  the Chief was on his feet and moving.

I was right behind him.

We ran out the back, turned left -- we had to, an ugly yellow creek about thirty feet wide yawned behind the restaurant's back door and footpath -- Chief led the way at a jogging run down between two buildings, ducked between two decaying brick walls, came out on the main street.

We came out in the middle of a general knock down drag out, with two cops and three townies, and the cops were not on the winning side.

Chief might have been old but he was tough: you don't get to be Chief of Police in an ex-coal mining town by being soft:  he was in the middle of it, all elbows and knee strikes, I grabbed one, yanked him back and introduced his face into a convenient car hood, which limbered him up considerably; I let go of the back of his head and let him fall.

I ducked a swing, drove a right into the nearest belly, came up and brought my elbow back into the owner's kidneys, stepped back, hands up, open, looking around.

A third one's hand went to his belt.

My .44 was in my hand, the hammer rolled back to full cock and I yelled "DON'T!"

He took a look at my gun muzzle and froze, then raised his hands, palms forward. 

I grabbed him between the shoulder blades, drove him face first into the siding of an abandoned building of some kind, I lowered the .44's hammer and holstered, brought out a set of cuffs and got this one in irons:  I was not feeling at all kindly so I ran my arm under his cuffed arms, grabbed the back of his neck, bent him over and frogmarched him up to where the Chief had a second one in cuffs.

The one whose face had taken a good close-up look of a Chevrolet hood, was on the ground, wiping at his bleeding nose, and the whistling alarm of an electronic siren was suddenly loud as the local medic squad came around the corner, lit up and blowing.

Chief and one cop had two prisoners bent over, securing them in irons, but the young officer who'd been in the middle of a beatdown was on the ground, curled up, groaning:  I relieved my prisoner of some things he really shouldn't have had, laying them out on the hood of the car.

Their cruiser rolled up, stopped:  I fixed the young fellow with a cold eyed glare and snarled, "I took these from this prisoner. Assault with weapon specification, resisting and anything else the Chief wants to put on him. These three were beatdown on your partner yonder."

Now when there's a general disagreement of this kind, there are often those who want to inflame the situation, and that happened here: I don't know if they were family, or if they were druggies, or if they were troublemakers who wanted to throw gasoline on the fire, but they were at the front of the car, yelling at the Chief and the young fellow who were busy getting the prisoners organized.

I can move silently when the notion is upon me, and it was.

I swung around the aft end of the car, I took me three long strides and opened the passenger door of the cruiser: their shotgun release was the same kind as ours, I pulled out the 870 riot gun and about the time the bravest loudmouth reached in and tried to grab a prisoner, I drove the shotgun's butt hard into his kidneys, kicked the back of his knee, belted the back of his head as he went down: the one beside him turned, fists up, and I drove the gunmuzzle into his belly hard enough I intended to punch the shotgun's muzzle out the back of his shirt.

I hit him hard and I shoved him back and I didnt have to look to know where the action release was, I had that muzzle as deep into his gut as I could drive it when I cycled the action.

I did not raise my voice.

I did not have to.

"Give me an excuse," I said coldly, and I felt the blood run from my face and the skin tighten over my cheekbones.  "Give me just one excuse."

We added him to the list of prisoners.

County was kind enough to help transport.

Chief and I set and filled out paperwork down at County -- he called the prosecutor, explained that an out of state lawman helped with the arrests and could he come down and take my affidavits so I wouldn't have to fly clear back from Colorado to testify -- the prosecutor arrived about the time that Chief and I abandoned our documentation and jumped into a good old fashioned knock down drag out when two more prisoners were brought in and tried to escape, and apparently both lawmen and the lawless were impressed at the sight of a lean waisted Colorado deputy seizing two prisoners by their shirt fronts, hoisting them both off the floor, slamming them both against a brick wall and inviting them in a quiet but very cold voice to be very peaceful, because I'd had enough of their foolishness for one night.

Chief and I drove back to Glouster well after midnight, each of us with a steaming cup of coffee from a doughnut shop drive-through; halfway there, we got a call for an overdose, the squad was out on another run, we lit up and I ended up shooting Narcan up some Jack Doe's snot box and then pinning him down when he came out of his narcotic stupor -- I was ready, Captain Crane was discussing its use with Mama and I'd been listening, he said they often wake up swinging, and this one did.

Matter of fact he barely missed the Chief with his first swing.

I got him face down and set on him and as my backside was on his shoulder blades, he was thrashin' and yellin' and we just let him kick til he calmed down and the squad got there, he refused transport so we got him in irons and took him to County.

I'd gone back to Athens County to remember a man I'd never met.

Ended up that I didn't see an end to hostilities until the sun was just startin' over the eastern ridgeline.

I was tired and so was the Chief.

He shook my hand as we stood beside my rental car.

"Ted," he said, "I like you, you're a hell of a good man in a fight, if we need your testimony I'll give you a call, but" -- he grinned -- "stay the hell out of my town, and tell your mother I said hello!"

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

NIGHT RIDE

A needle with wings pierced the dark skies, drawing a trail of muted thunder behind it.

Deputy Sheriff Linn Keller looked through the open doorway between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, eased his head in and grinned at the pilot.

"Like to take the wheel?"

Linn chuckled, laid a warm, companionable hand on the pilot's shoulder.

"I learned long ago to leave professional grade work to the professionals," he said quietly.  "I do thank you for the offer, but I'd rather leave it to someone who knows his business."  Linn looked around the tiny cockpit, laughed again.  

"Buddy of mine flew bomber in the Second Disagreement."

"Do I know him?"

"Likely not.  He died here some years ago.  Fellow named Hostetler.  I think Mama had some track on his ancestry."

The pilot nodded.  "I think she tracked my bloodline to Atilla the Hun."  Linn saw the man's head lift a little, knew he was grinning as a thought ignited his proverbial light bulb:  "No, that wasn't me, that was my ex-wife!"

They both laughed; Linn knew the man was a confirmed bachelor and had never married.

"Hoss used to fly commercial, after the War."
"Pilot?"
"No, he'd fly as a passenger, but when he'd disembark, he'd poke his head through the curtains that separated cockpit from cabin and he'd say 'My, look at all those clocks!' and the pilots would look at him like he had three eyes."

They both laughed again.

"How many flight hours did the man have?"

"A hell of a lot more than the civilian pilots he tormented!"  Linn looked ahead, into the featureless dark beyond the windscreen.  "Can I get you anything?"

"No, I'm good, thanks."

Linn nodded, withdrew:  he was one of four passengers, and the only one destined for Firelands: he knew the Lear would land long enough for its guests to disembark, stretch their legs and tend any other necessities, take on fuel, then they would continue on west, and south.

He pushed his pocket watch up out of its pocket, pressed the stem: the cover opened and he smiled a little as he looked at the portrait, shrunk down and preserved behind a clear plastic coating: his wife's photograph looked back at him, and he wondered how many men had gone West by less swift means, and looked at the image of a loved one, either left behind, or about to be rejoined.

Linn was in uniform, including his favorite .44: he'd been a deputy a very few years, and in spite of the short time he'd worn the six point star, he'd used that very revolver to good effect when the need arose, and more than once: he knew other lawmen regarded him as  ... well, less than intelligent, for not carrying something with greater capacity.

Linn had used this .44 thumb buster in some truly difficult moments, and he'd made every shot count: to date he'd not had to fire more than three times on any one occasion, though he knew Fate could throw him a curve ball and he'd end up more than willing to trade a good percentage of his eternal soul for a belt fed Browning.

For now, though, he was confident in what he had.

His fellow passengers -- a mother and father, and two children, a boy and a girl -- were relaxed; the adults were almost asleep.

The children were restless, alert, watchful of the long tall deputy.

Linn came back to them, crossed  his legs at the shin bones, lowered himself quickly, easily,  sat cross-legged on the carpeted deck:  his Stetson was on his seat and he was eye level with the pair, and two sets of solemn, uncertain, curious young eyes regarded his: the boy spoke first.

"Mits-ter," he asked, "did you ever shoot anybody?"

Linn rubbed his chin, frowned a little, considered.

"Yes I did," he said, nodding.  "As I recall, I hit 'im, too."

Two sets of young eyes widened and the little girl asked, "Did you kill him?"

"Nah," Linn grinned.  "I shot him with a spit ball about this big."  He held his hands cupped around an invisible sphere the size of a basketball.  

"Aww! Ya did not!"
"Did too," Linn protested, wide-eyed with a sincere attempt at The Innocent Expression.  

"Wha'd ya shoot him that big with?"

"A mountain howitzer," Linn replied, straight faced.

"Naahhh, ya did not!" came the juvenile protest.

Linn frowned, considered.  "Y'know," he said, "come to think about it, I didn't use the mountain howitzer on that one.  They're big enough you have to pull it behind a horse and I couldn't get a horse into the plane here."

"Huh?"
"Oh, yah," Linn nodded seriously.  "My horse hates to fly.  Won't set foot in a jet if he had to."

"You have a hoooorse?" the little girl asked, suddenly wide eyed and hopeful.

Linn grinned, unbuttoned his right hand shirt pocket flap, pulled out his cell phone.

"Here," he said, "let me show you."

Two little children, restless and sleepless in spite of the Lear's hypnotic waterfall of sound, ooh'd and aah'd as they swiped through Linn's collection of horse and dog pictures.

Linn's phone was recovered and secured in his shirt pocket when the parents woke, when the children climbed back in their seats and fumbled with their seat belts, as Linn rose and settled into his own seat:  the landing gear whined and thumped beneath them and they felt as much as heard the high pitched screech of tires on cold pavement.

The Lear whistled through a slow turn at the end of the runway, made a slow taxi back to the hangar and flight shack; the fuel truck held back, waiting for the pilot's signal.

Linn rose, picked up his single grip, settled his Stetson on his head.  

"Here's where I get off," he said:  the pilot came back, winked at the children, opened the door: the two halves opened and Linn stepped down, stopped as he came off the last step.

His whistle was surprisingly gentle.

Two children, a boy and a girl, crowded against one another in the open doorway, the chilly night air swirling in around them as a horse trotted toward them, ghostly in the dark:  they saw the tall deputy rub the horse's nose and neck, then laugh as something big and black and the size of a young bear melted out of the nighttime and looked at them with button-bright eyes, its huge brush of a tail swinging, before it gave the pale eyed deputy a good ear washing.

The passengers disembarked and stretched their legs, availed themselves of necessary facilities: they were less than a half hour on the ground, and would have less than that in the air before they came to their destination, but two children would remember for many years a soft voiced deputy that showed them pictures of a spotty horse and a huge dog, the same horse and the same dog that came out of the night like ghosties, and as the Lear's engines sang power and pushed them back in their seats, they looked out the side window and saw a man and a horse, running hard beside them, then turning away and disappearing into the night.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

A PRETTY GOOD LIAR

John Greenlees stood in a curved stone corridor, staring at a series of portraits, all ancient, all carefully preserved behind glass and hung reverently on an equally ancient stone wall.

Above them, the metropolitan police department carried out its daily work; around them, men in shirts and neckties and shoulder holsters strode here, wandered there, some carrying sheafs or sheets or files of paper: John Greenlees and the pretty young woman on his arm ignored this sparse foot traffic and instead considered the image before them.

John bent a little, studied the hand engraved brass plate, carefully tacked to the ornate, polished, absolutely dust-free frame, a picture frame well older than his father:  he read the words, his lips soundlessly tracing them, as Marnie watched, amused, smiling.

"Detective Agent S.L. McKenna, Firelands," he read, then he straightened, resumed his careful study of the figure in the portrait.

It was a glass plate or an Ambrotype or something of the kind, he wasn't sure which, only that it was sealed, it was climate controlled, it was beautiful in its detail, and it was the absolute, you-could-be-her image of the young woman on his arm.

There were other framed tributes, lining the length of the underground corridor: serious men in somber suits and Derby hats looked sternly to the left or to the right, stiff, formal, unsmiling, the original subjects long dead, their images still projecting a masculine ideal of strength and discipline.

Detective Agent S.L. McKenna stood, her hand feminine, gentle, resting on the back of an empty chair, on which rested a small bouquet of flowers, a revolver, a set of cuffs, a shield shaped badge: the woman looked at the camera, her expression gentle, kind, feminine, very much at contrast with the other portraits on either side.

Marnie's hand was claimed on his arm; he laid his hand over her gentle fingers, looked at her and back at the portrait.

"I can see why you wanted me to see this."

"Do you recognize the dress?"

"Didn't you wear that to Prom?"

"I used this portrait as the pattern."

John smiled.  "I remember you looked really good in that."

"Even if I had to deck that idiot driver?" Marnie teased, and they shared an understanding look. 

Marnie looked back at the image of her honored ancestress.  "She did some work for the Denver Metropolitan, most of it unofficial, and when she wore a dress, she wore one she could fight in."

"Is that why most of your dresses are handmade?"

"That's one reason," she admitted.

"How about those two portraits in the Firelands Museum?"

Marnie laughed.  "I look enough like my ancestress that I posed for one of them!"

"So those are you and not her."

"One is," Marnie teased. "I won't tell you which."  She looked back at the one staring at them from across more than a century.  "This one is haunted."

John frowned a little, looked seriously at the pretty young woman beside him, this pale eyed beauty in high heels and a flowing skirt.

"Haunted?"

Marnie turned a delicate shade of scarlet, her cheeks standing out like apples: John was willing to bet her ears would be quite warm to the touch, should he be forward enough to insinuate his long, slender, surgeon's fingers through her carefully-styled hair to find out.

"There was an event here in the City," Marnie said, "and I stopped in to say hello ... in that dress.

"Some of the fellows wanted to take my picture beside the portrait, and they did, and when we dismissed I took a wrong turn and got lost."  She laughed quietly, looked past him, down the long, curving corridor.  

"I got lost, John, I got so thoroughly, absolutely, turned-around lost that I ended up back here and didn't realize it ... and two fellows who weren't part of the party saw me, standing ... here, exactly here, in front of the portrait. I started to raise a hand in greeting and realized I didn't know them, and I froze, and it was the exact pose of -- her, with her hand on the back of a chair."

Marnie sighed. "One dropped his folder of papers and the other spilled coffee down his shirt front, and then the two of them turned around and left. They didn't run, but they walked fast, and from then on, this portrait was said to be haunted." 

Marnie sighed again.

"I gathered the dropped papers, placed them on the nearest desk -- the nearest door was not locked -- and that only added to the reputation, because whosever office that was, swore they locked their door on the way out."

"Are the museum portraits haunted?"

"The whole museum is haunted, John."

John frowned a little: he was young enough to labor under the misconception that he knew more than most, but old enough to realize that maybe he didn't -- but the existence of haints, speerts, spooks and boogers were outside the realm of possibility in his mind.

"I've helped out here with training, especially some of the unofficial training. They'll have me handcuffed in an interrogation room, for instance, and I'll walk out and toss the handcuffs at someone who's been lax in their techniques. That worked well until another of me walked out a minute later and tossed another set of cuffs into the same lax detective's lap ... cuffs that haven't been used by the department for a century, and of course both of me were in this dress."

She thrust her chin at the portrait.

"So apparently my ancestress is still active."

Marnie smiled.

"I'm hungry.  How's for dinner? Your'e buying."

 

They spent the day together; they rode back to Firelands on the steam train, took a horse drawn carriage to the Firelands museum -- Marnie wore a shimmering blue cloak over her blouse and skirt -- they went inside and regarded two portraits, one rendered in oils, the other, a large, framed, color photo.

Both were of the same woman, in the same frozen moment, in exactly the same attire.

Both had dark eyes, almost black eyes, a Spanish mantilla and scarf, and a flowing, red, traditional flamenco dress: she was in mid-turn, one hand low and turned away, the other above her head, her head tilted back a little, with just a hint of a smile: the image was dynamic, and seemed to move, even in its stillness.

John looked from one to the other, nodding slowly: he could almost hear the castanuelas in the dancer's hands, the rhythm of hard heels punishing the close-fitted floor boards --

"That was one of the most difficult modeling jobs I ever had," Marnie murmured, and John looked at her in honest surprise.

"Look at the eyes."

John looked at both the exquisitely-detailed, extremely lifelike oil painting, then the photograph.

Both women had striking dark eyes, Mexican-dark eyes: he looked at Marnie, looked back.

"The painted portrait," Marnie explained, "is easily altered to give the subject those eyes, but this one" -- she thrust a chin at the image -- "I wore scleral contacts, and that had to be one of the most frightening things I've ever done!"

Marnie's composed expression dissolved into distress; John turned to her and they held one another, John honestly lost as to what he'd done, or what he should do: Marnie shivered in in his embrace, her face buried in his shoulder, and his arms tightened as she whispered fiercely, "Hold me, John!"

It did not take long for her internal storm to pass.

Marnie slacked her grip, as did he:  she took his hand, drew him over to a bench, salvaged from some long dead church -- there was a brass plaque tacked to it, attributing its origin, which John ignored, his attention on the downcast eyes of his beloved.

"John, you know my birth parents are dead."

John nodded, gripping her hands gently, loosely: he knew better than to hold her tightly, knew she had to understand she could escape if need be.

"My birth-father was killed and then the murderers started to break down the door. Mommy pulled the register loose from the wall. I turned backwards and backed into the duct, I wiggled back and Mommy put the register back into place. She stood up and ran away from the duct and then the door broke open and I was far enough back they couldn't see me.

"I watched them beat Mommy and do terrible things to her and they wanted to know where something was and she kept screaming Daddy took them 'cause she knew they'd killed him and he couldn't tell them otherwise, and when they left, Mommy got me out an' we left and came out here."

Marnie shivered as she told the tale: John draped her cloak back around her and she drew it tight, her head on his shoulder, almost hiding under the enveloping garment.

"It was dark in the duct where I was hidden," she whispered.  "I lay in the dark and shivered and watched what they did to my Mommy. When I posed for that portrait I went to an optometrist and had him fit me with a set of colored contacts, scleral contacts that cover the entire front of the eye. They were supposed to have a pinhole in the middle so I would have some vision."

He felt her arms tight around him, drew her tighter into his side.

"These were blinding contacts. No pinhole. The kind people wear when they are training to teach the blind, they have to live blind for so many weeks before they're allowed to teach, that way they know what they are talking about.

"I wore those contacts for that portrait, the photograph," she continued.  "I danced blind, John, and it was the most terrifying experience I've had yet. All I could think of was hiding in the darkness of that dusty dirty tenement ductwork and watching them hurt my Mommy."

"You'd never know it by looking at it," John murmured.

"I know," Marnie whispered.  "I'm a pretty good liar, even in a photograph."

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

WORMHOLE

Sheriff Marnie Keller squatted at the round opening in native bedrock.

It appeared to be granite or something similar ...if it wasn't granite, it's something close enough -- in texture at least, though it was a much more distinct blue than she'd ever seen, back home.

Two things concerned her.

One was some scraped off fibers, as if someone slithered into this curving tunnel.

The other was the knowledge that someone's child was in that tunnel, that there'd been a tectonic shift, that they'd shouted into the tunnel and heard nothing in return.

Sheriff Marnie Keller unbuckled her gunbelt: she wore a skinsuit -- not her original, white Olympic skinsuit -- no, this was woven of something that honestly put Kevlar to shame: she'd experimented by leaning her hip into a grinding wheel, and she felt neither friction's heat through the material, nor did the abraisive wheel cause the least damage to the material.

Marnie touched the side of her skintight helmet: the visor appeared over her face and she looked at the rescue chief, somber in hardhat and overalls.

"Even with these hips, I'm skinnier than any of you," she said, "plus I'm still Earth strong."

"At least let us tie off --" the rescue chief began, then swore as the Sheriff slid into the hole and disappeared.

"Dammit, woman," he muttered, "howinell we gonna get you out?"

"I heard that," Marnie's voice came over his headset.

 

What was that I read ... I was still a girl at home... something about Sarah crawling through a skinny little mountain tunnel ...

Marnie worked steadily down the smooth, almost slick passage: it looked almost like something dissolved its way through solid rock: it was almost rough, at least back at the opening, rough enough to have rubbed fuzz off an adventuresome child's coveralls.

Sarah didn't write about the texture of her passage, only that she was almost naked and it was tight.

So far this is a constant diameter and nearly circular.

Sarah got to the narrowest part and realized if she tried to back up, her garment would bunch up around her and bind and she'd be stuck.

At the tightest she had to move on fingertips, with her arms stuck out ahead, and toe-tips behind. She moved an inch at a time or just under, and in complete darkness.

Thank God for these helmet lights ... I really, really hate the dark!

"Rescue One, how copy?"

"Copy, Sheriff, how's progress?"

"Nothing in sight. I'm wondering what made this hole."

"You got me, Sheriff. I was thinking a worm."

"A worm with acid skin that melts holes in rock," Marnie muttered.  "Jolly!"

"Hell, Sheriff, this hole could be a thousand years old."

"Or two days."

"Has that fuzz dissolved where it rubbed against the rock?"

"No, ma'am."

"Chances are it wasn't recent. If it was melted with acid, that fuzz would be dissolved by now."  She paused, considered.

"Chief? What about heat? -- what's that ...?"

Marnie froze, squinted: something ahead didn't look like curving rock.

"Chief, I see something, stand by."

 

Nancy sat at her control panel.

She hadn't touched the panel in just over two months.

She didn't have to.

She wore a shining black helmet -- or, rather, she wore a ship.

No, that's not right either.

Nancy was the ship.

When she heard one of their more adventurous children found a hole in the rock -- a hole exposed by a recent excavation in a lower level -- when shelistened to the comms and heard the child took a hand light and slithered into the hole, and disappeared -- Nancy smiled a little.

Seven light years away, her ship disappeared; it reappeared in the hangar, displaced air automatically compressing into a fast-vol reservoir: the ship seemed to fade a little, then sank through its cradle and the floor, and as Nancy's mind expanded and quested through rock and strata underfoot, she felt the Sheriff's mind and smiled a little.

There. 

I found her.

She felt herself drift through the strata, turned, came up a little.

Nancy powered a skinfield on her ship, just enough to phase the Sheriff and the adventurous child into her same frequency of existence: they were drawn to her hull, stuck fast, but phased out of existence so they could all penetrate the rock as easily as Nancy.

She'd heard the Sheriff go into the hole, she knew she'd gone into the same tubular void as the missing child, and a moment later, her ship solidified again on its cradle, the Sheriff and a protesting, yelling, kicking, arm-swinging child stuck firmly to its side.

Nancy's eyes were still closed: she didn't need them to see two of the launch crew wheel a platform over, saw them run it up beside her ship, saw them grip child and Sheriff both, then look at her and nod.

Nancy cut the skinfield that held her two passengers: they walked noisily down expanded-steel steps and into the launch bay, and Nancy's ship disappeared again, reappearing where it had been floating between two stars, seven light-years away.

 

Marnie turned off her helmet lights, raised her visor: the bay door slid open and two worried parents ran into the cavernous bay, seized their child, hoist him off the floor.

Marnie and Nancy both ignored them.

Marnie walked over to where Nancy sat, eyes closed, unmoving.

Marnie seized a chair, hauled it around, sat.

Nancy never moved, never opened her eyes.

"Thanks," Marnie said.

Nancy smiled, just a little.

"I wondered," she said slowly, "if I could micronavigate through solid rock."

"It worked."

"Simulations looked good."

"How long did it take you to run the sims?"

"Two-tenths of a second. Longer than I expected."

"Those calculations would have taken NASA how long?"

"Today's technology? Five, maybe ten years."

"And you did it in two-tenths of a second."

"I took my time."

Marnie laid a hand on Nancy's knuckles, gripped her gently: Nancy flinched a little, opened her eyes, blinked, turned her head and looked at the Sheriff.

"It's so limiting, living in my body again," she whispered.
"We need to talk," Marnie whispered back.  "Walk with me."

The two women made their escape by a different door; Nancy moved slow, as if she hadn't been on her feet in some time.

"I hate the dark," Marnie admitted.  "When I was a little girl, I hid from the murderers that broke into our apartment."  She stopped, leaned her shoulder against the shining-slick, green-glazed wall.

"It was dark and I was terrified, and ... I hate the dark!"

"What did you find down there, besides that adventurous little boy?"

"Nothing," Marnie admitted.  "I got as far as a tired little boy who'd just stopped and gone to sleep."

"Typical man!" Nancy laughed. "I could go back in and look around ...?"

Marnie shook her head.  "No. I'll set motion sensors in case there's something in there."

Nancy turned, leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes.  "I'll take a look."

"You're as curious as I am," Marnie muttered, and Nancy smiled a little, then she smiled a little more.

"Here, take a look," she whispered, reached, touched Marnie's cheek with her fingertips.

Marnie gasped, looked around.

Nancy's ship slammed back into existence in its cradle, her eyes snapped wide open, scared.

Marnie opened her eyes slowly, looked at Nancy.

Granite-hard, ice-pale eyes burned into Nancy's wide, frightened eyes.

"Now you know what my nightmares are," she whispered.

"But it's not possible," Nancy whispered, her voice strained.  "Mars doesn't have a liquid core anymore, it's not hot, it can't be --"

"Maybe we weren't on Mars," Marnie whispered, her voice as intense as her gaze: "you weren't in the wormhole, you were in my nightmares, where I walk black sand that glows red in the distance and demons glare at me from behind boulders, waiting to attack me.  I used to live there, when I was a little girl."

Nancy shook her head.

"No. No, that's what you saw. You're seeing your nightmares. All I saw was tunnel. Miles of tunnel."

"I'll set the motion sensors."

"Set 'em deep."

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

CARVED IN STONE

Sheriff Marnie Keller's image appeared on the planet-wide news broadcast: the preface was coded and prevented what followed, from being automatically retransmitted to Earth.

Much of what occurred on Mars was not known to Earth, by general agreement of the colonists.

They'd tasted independence, they liked independence, their general and universal opinion was that they did not need Earthers interfering, thank you very much, especially when they considered that contact with the Confederacy was very likely going to be ruined if Earth got their meddling hands on the situation.

Consequently, when the Sheriff came on the nightly news to make a statement, people stopped what they were doing and paid attention.

"I have a son," Marnie began with a slight smile, "and as a mother, I can tell you" -- she leaned closer to the camera, as if sharing a confidence -- "few things are faster than a little boy who's just peeled off his diaper and is running away from the bathtub."  She leaned back, smiled a little more, remembering the moment, then grew serious.

"Rumor and speculation make my bare bottom baby look like cold molasses, so here's what we found.

"You've heard we located a wormhole. I'm not talking about something out in space, this looks like something a worm bored through solid stone. This one was about this big" -- the camera drew back and Marnie's hands came up, held an invisible circle big enough for her to dive into -- "it curved into solid rock and went generally downhill, always on a gentle curve. One of our curious little boys found it and grabbed a flashlight and went exploring.  He's fine, I went in and found him."

Marnie made a face, shook her head, looked at the camera with a mother's half-resigned, half-dejected expression.

"Typical man. He got tired so he just went to sleep, never mind we're trying to find him."  

Their pale eyed Sheriff was not a professional speaker; she wasn't a politician; when she spoke, it was Marnie that spoke, not some masked figurehead, keeping themselves insulated from their official role.

"He's out and he's fine, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.

"We found what made those holes, and it's not worms, so you don't have to worry about giant nightcrawlers boring holes in your floor. That's the main reason I wanted to come on here today. "First off:  you, are, safe."

She paused for effect, she looked very directly into the camera's shining lens, then she smiled.

"As usual, reports of coyotes on roller skates, coyotes with anvils, giant magnets or crates marked ACME, should be reported immediately, but you won't have to worry about something boring a hole in your bedroom wall."

Marnie's bottom jaw thrust out, she leaned her elbows on her desk top, frowned, considered.

"Folks, a lot of  years ago, a war destroyed this planet. We know that something was launched that bored holes in the planet, something that curved through solid rock and left a smooth tunnel behind. We don't know if this was a weapon, or if this was something intended to liquefy the planet's core, or maybe to freeze it and strip the planet's magnetic field.  We don't know. We've got teams trying to find out. As soon as we do find out, I will let you know.

"You know me. I plan ahead so far as I can. I've got resources and I am using them."

Her face grew serious.

"If we find a situation that requires evacuation, we'll be able to remove everyone and everything to a friendly world. Until then we'll do what we do best."

She grinned, looking less like their pale eyed Sheriff and more like someone's good-natured big sis.

"We'll continue using the Asbestos Method.  You know ... just gettin' by as-best-as we can!"

 

Marnie looked at the drone's image.

"It looks like a rock."

"It's far denser. A couple thousand years ago it was plasma. Now --" he shrugged -- "it's hyper-dense and cold. Whatever it was ... if it was radioactive, it's dead now."

"My Gammaw didn't like mysteries and neither do I," Marnie snapped.  "I want answers and I want them five minutes ago!"

"People in hell want icewater, Sheriff," her chief engineer flared, and Marnie waved a white-gloved hand.

"I know, I know, Chief, you're right."  She rubbed her forehead, frowned, looked up.

"Chief, tell me this.  How soon do I need to carve the word CROATOAN on the nearest tree trunk?"

The engineer swiped the screen on his tablet, tapped it a few times, swiped it again.

"I don't think you'll have to start looking for a chisel anytime soon, Sheriff."

 

Sheriff Marnie Keller leaned back in her chair, fingers laced behind her head, stared at the smooth, featureless ceiling.

She remembered the portrait of her pale eyed ancestor, Old Pale Eyes himself, and she remembered reading his handwritten account of the Firelands raid.

"They tried to destroy Firelands," she whispered aloud, putting her thoughts into words.

"Now we have Firelands here on Mars, and I find out someone tried to destroy it long before we got here."

Marnie closed her eyes.

"You were able to fight back, Grandddad. You and everyone in town came together and laid into the raiders and killed every last one of them."

She brought her hands down, felt her fingers close into fists.

"Whoever tried to kill this planet is long dead."  

Marnie took a long breath, blew it out.

"Well, if I can't do anything about it, I suppose it's time for supper."

She stood, looked at two pictures on her desk: a pale eyed boy, a pale eyed girl, both dead, both killed in an alien attack, and she felt the old anger wake up again.

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

STAFF MEETING

The centrifuge ran on close-tolerance, well-oiled bearings: it ran almost silently, it was very precisely counterweighted, it was big, and it was wide: Marnie was probably its most frequent user, but not its only user.

Today, though, she stood alone on what looked like a broad, gently curved deck.

Willamina's visor was up, she was breathing room air; she wore her new skinsuit, the one that looked like woven silver, the suit that so far had been proof against anything she'd come up against.

She faced the enemy she'd been up against before, or at least its simulacrum: dark charcoal, it was bipedal, bibrachial, it had a head: charcoal grey, featureless, it stood like a dark and looming mountain.

Marnie seldom let her feelings their rein.

Today was her exception.

The suit began to move, and so did she.

Marnie snatched up a staff longer than she was tall, a fighting stick of Ohio ironwood, seasoned, smoothed, dented, dinged up on the ends: the simulacrum was fast, and it was strong, but Marnie was faster and Marnie was running with a high pressure boiler, and Marnie was firing her boiler with long-suppressed feelings.

The suit turned, twisted, surged toward her: Marnie's attack was swift, and deadly, and to the few that watched, frightening.

Marnie's attack was in silence.

There was no screaming war-cry, there were no words of accusation, no declaration: no, she was ice, in a silver suit, she was death with a spinning blade: as fast as the servo-suit was, she was faster: as precision-guided as the suit's hands were, her staff was faster, blocking, striking, destroying.

It wasn't until she'd defeated it three times that she made the first sound, her words loud, sharp, echoing in the vast, circular arena: she drew back a half-dozen steps, lowered her head, staff held across her chest at an angle.

"Damn you," she hissed, hatred thickening her voice, "you killed my CHILDREN!"

This time she did attack with her voice: until now she'd carefully kept out of the construct's reach, she'd avoided the grasp or swat.

Sheriff Marnie Keller, wife and mother, warrior and pale eyed killer, screamed at the top of her lungs as she charged.

The Confederacy had long before made complete assessments of the exosuit's capabilities, of what it could withstand, where its tolerance limits were.

Their tests were conducted with the weapons of their knowledge, with energy weapons and phase converters, but not once had they assessed the exosuit's resistance to less advanced weaponry.

Sheriff Marnie Keller's grief was blazing now, her soul was white hot with utter, absolute hatred, focused on this one enemy.

A seasoned wood staff, in the hands of a skilled practicioner, is a formidable weapon indeed.

A battle exosuit, suitable for war, had proven no match for a full-house .357 at close range, and now, as the centrifuge put both combatants at 1.25 Earth gravities, a warrior with granite eyes and tight-stretched, dead-white skin, shattered the knee mechanism, the elbow mechanism, broke the graspers' structural integrity, drove enough of its internal casing out of shape to warrant an emergency shutdown -- her pattern of attack was so blazing, so utterly devastating, so completely unexpected, unanticipated, and so absolutely, positively effective, that her visor snapped down, the emergency decompression alarm flashed into stroboscopic life, and the exosuit was slung out an emerency ejection chute.

It barely made surface before its reactor went supercritical and turned just under an acre of Martian surface dust, into thermally fused and slightly radioactive glass.

Marnie walked slowly, as if she were a hundred years old, back to the entrance hatch:  she secured her staff in its locker, waited until the Spinner coasted to a stop, cycled through the hatch into the hallway.

Dr. John Greenlees was waiting for her.

He handed her a plastic cup of something water clear, something made with locally grown grain sprouts, distilled not a week earlier:  Marnie slugged it down, tossed the empty into the nearest recycler.

Dr. John unscrewed the cap on a one-litre water bottle, handed it to her.

Marnie slugged down half of it on one breath, came up for air.

"Feel better?" John asked gently.

Marnie nodded, her eyes still hard, but a little color coming back into her cheeks.

"I'm glad you got that out."

"I haven't even started," Marnie snarled.  "They killed our people, John, they murdered our children."

Her husband nodded slowly.  "They did that, dearest.  They did that."

"I can't kill the dead, John."  Marnie's voice was husky, tight.  "They killed our children and we killed them and not even the Witch of Enodor could raise them so I could kill them all over again."

"Speaking of your mental health," John said in a gentle voice, and Marnie glared at him, then she looked away and laughed.

"It's the drunk that's the last to know he's impaired," she quoted.  

"You're not drunk, Marnie."

"No, but I've held my hatred close to my heart ever since they were killed," she said bitterly.  "I've polished it and cherished it and it feels good to hate!"

"Yes it does," John admitted.  "And that's not as chief medical officer.  That's as husband and father."

Marnie sagged.  "How many Gs did I pull?"

"Once you got wound up and swingin'?  You usually work at one-two-five. I had you up to one and a half."

"Dear God," she whispered, remembering the moment when she broke the suit's elbow, when it bent the wrong way, right before she drove her boot into the side of its knee hard enough to destroy it, to make its servos whine with the effort of remaining upright on one leg and what little it could bear on its destroyed joint. "One and a half Earth gravities.  I never noticed."

"I know."  John ran his arm around her shoulders.  "Why don't we go have supper, dearest.  You won't even have to cook."

Some distance away, unbeknownst to either Sheriff or physician, a small group of men assessed their slow-motion replay of the Sheriff's attack, consulted the analysis of damage to the exosuit.

One man looked up, looked at the others.

"Now," he said thoughtfully, "now I can understand why our ancestors were abducted."

"If a mere woman can destroy one of their war-suits," a voice said thoughtfully, letting the sentence dangle, unfinished.

The Ambassador half-laughed,half-snorted.

"Friend," he said decisively, "there is nothing at all mere about that woman!"

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GIFT OF THE MOUNTAIN WITCH

Gracie Daine felt suddenly awkward.

She and a woman she'd long admired, but had frankly been intimidated by for a very long time, stood two arm's lengths apart, or just a little more.

Gracie held the wire-wrapped hilt of a Schlager blade, and she was honestly lost.

Esther Keller held hers as well: the blades crossed near their tips, they both slanted upward: Esther drew back a graceful step, raised her blade in salute.

Gracie hesitantly stepped back, raised her own.

Esther swung her blade down, tilted her head a little, smiled.

They'd been at blades for a half hour: slowly, gradually, left handed and right handed: this was not as much a lesson in blade-fighting, as it was a window opening to a deeper lesson.

Exactly how Gracie knew this, she wasn't at all sure, but she was certain there was much more to this moment than crossing sharpened steel.

Esther lowered her head a fraction.  

"Gracie," she said gently, "tell me how you fiddle a tune."

Gracie blinked, surprised.

"I, um, I don't --" she stammered.

"You stop thinking, and you play the tune."

Gracie blinked, nodded.

"Yes.  Yes, that's right."

"Gracie, did your Mama hand you a set of scissors when she died?"

Gracie's mouth opened a little in honest surprise, sadness filling her eyes:  "No," she admitted.  "She didn't have the chance."

"Have you heard her whisper to you?"

Gracie nodded.  "I didn't tell nobody," she admitted, "but ... when I tend the young'uns, she ... I can feel her, in my hands, and ..."

Esther smiled a little.  

"Do you think when you feel her in your hands?"

"No'm," Gracie said slowly -- far slower than her mind was running.

"Gracie, sometimes we stop thinking so we can do as we must. Fiddling a tune is one way we do it. I play piano the same way. I can't think of every note I want to play, so I stop thinking and play it."

"Yes'm, that's so," Gracie said in a small voice.

Esther stepped up to the younger woman, retrieved the schlager blade.

"Enough steel for today," she smiled.  "Next lesson."

She turned and picked up a cloth, wiped one blade, then the other:  she placed them in a beautifully finished, satin lined case, closed the lid carefully.

"Gracie, your mother was a Wise Woman."

Gracie hesitated.  "Most called her a witch-woman," she hazarded.

Esther turned suddenly, her hands rising quickly, fingertips barely touching the sides of Gracie's head, ahead of her ears:  Gracie froze, unable to move, mesmerized by those suddenly-huge, glowing, green eyes, framed with the ornate, glowing red hair --

Gracie felt suddenly powerful, strong, she felt ... she felt deep, in a way she couldn't quite understand --

"Come," Esther said, her voice urgent: her hand closed about Gracie's wrist, and both women ran for the carriage.

Esther brought the dapple about, whistled, snapped the reins:  the dapple set out at a spanking trot, Gracie gripping the side of her seat, Esther's expression intent and serious.

 

It was a bad burn.

Scalds always are.

Esther hauled back on the brake, turned, jumped from the barely-stopped carriage with no trace of her usual decorum: Gracie heard her snap, "With me, Gracie!" and she, too, jumped, landed flat-footed, snatched her skirts and followed the fashionably-gowned, green-eyed wife of that long tall Sheriff.

Two women ran around back of the ranch house, toward a child's panicked screams, those high-pitched screams that drive through a grown man's soul like a Bowie knife, the screams of a child burned and in agony.

Esther dipped a hand into her reticule, came out with a shining set of scissors, quickly split the child's brief garments, peeled them back.

"Gracie," she said, her voice low, urgent: the mother shrank back from the sight of her child, naked on their kitchen table:  she turned her eyes from flesh, blanched, red-edged, blistered, from the child's face, mottled, arched backwards in utter, screaming agony, the sound of her child, her baby, as its screams filled the universe, shattered against the dome of the heavens themselves, echoing back and focusing on the mother --

Esther looked at Gracie, her eyes full of a knowing, the kind that is not of this earth: Gracie felt Esther's fingertips on her face again, she felt herself suddenly expanded, as if there were a thousand of her, all surrounding the table.

Gracie felt her hands move.

Esther cupped a hand under the child's head.

Gracie's hand was inside Esther's.

Gracie drew a long breath, and the breath she drew in, filled Esther's lungs.

Two women became one: Gracie saw her hand come up, but it was Esther's hand but it was hers and she was confused and then she threw her thinking to the side and became --

The Esther/Gracie blew her/their breath gently over the burned child, pushing the now-visible fires from screaming-pained flesh:  Gracie saw the flames pushed away by their breath, by the gentle push with their hand.

Gracie heard Esther's whisper and she knew it was her own whisper:

"There came an Angel from the East, bearing Frost and Fire."

Gracie saw the Angel, soaring over the far horizon -- this was no cherub of peace and gentleness, this was a warrior on great, powerful wings, this was a creature of hard-eyed determination, with all the cold in the world, blue and searing-iced trailing cold-vapors in one hand, and in the other, the heat of ten thousand suns, and somehow Gracie knew this vision, this warrior, was a very real creature, summoned by the power of this red-headed woman, this Woman of Power.

"There came an Angel from the East, bearing Frost and Fire.  In Frost, Out Fire."

Gracie saw their hand pushing the flames from the child's scalded limbs, she saw flames guttering as if from a stiff wind, fires blown from the living flesh.

Gracie saw the angel's blue-rippling sphere descend into the child, saw the blisters recede and disappear, saw flesh go from blanched-white and scalded-red to normal, pink and healthy.

She heard the words they were thinking, they recited together, Words of Power, Words of Silence.

"There came an Angel from the East bearing frost and fire.  In frost, out fire, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

Their third breath blew out the last of the flames.

Their last hand-push shoved the fires from living flesh.

The child stopped screaming, laid there naked and shivering.

Esther leaned back, looked at Gracie.

"No man may heal in this manner," she said.  "Only women may carry this Gift.

"You already have it, Gracie. You are already a Woman of Power. Your mother did not transfer her Power to you by giving you a scissors on her deathbed, because you already have it."

Gracie shivered to hear Esther's quiet, almost whispered, words.

She'd heard the Parson listen to a man once, she had no idea what was being spoken, but she heard the Parson's reply:  "I know you speak the truth, for I feel the Spirit in your words," and so it was here.

Gracie felt the truth of what Esther said.

Neither woman spoke to the mother; they left as silently as they'd arrived, and Gracie realized that when Esther spoke, she'd not used words.

Gracie heard Esther's words in her mind.

It was not until they were back in the carriage, not until they were headed back toward Firelands, that either of them said a word aloud.

"What will -- I know her, but I can't think of her name -- did she send for help --"

Esther smiled.  "No. She had no time, and she had no one to send. We arrived, we came in without a word, we healed her child and we left. Not a word was spoken and she'll remember that we didn't even seem to see her. She's heard of mountain witches. If she asks, nobody saw us leave Firelands.  She may tell her child when he's grown enough to understand, or she may keep it secret."

"And men can't do this?"

"There is one man," Esther said, "who can stop blood with the Word, and who can blow fire. He's done both."

Gracie looked at Esther, confused.  "But you said ..."

Esther smiled a little.

"If my husband had been born woman, he would have been the seventh, consecutive, firstborn female, and a Woman of Power. It was not to be -- this was not the time -- his Mama miscarried very early in her pregnancy, and that soul went into her next child."  Her smile was that of a woman sharing a deep and cherished secret. "Because he could have been female, he can use those gifts. He knows he has them, he's used them, but he's never spoken of them. He showed my niece, Duzy, how to stop blood --"

Esther looked sharply at Gracie.

"Have you ever seen Jacob's scar, under his left collarbone, about here?"

Gracie turned a remarkable shade of red, and she looked away, for she had indeed seen Jacob's bullet scar, along with the shocking scars that mapped him from the neck to his heels.

Gracie swallowed, looked away, looked back, nodded.

"His father took Duzy's hand and wrapped it around a knife. He laid this across Jacob's wound and he taught Duzy to speak the Word."

"The same way you taught me, back there?"

"Yes."  Esther's eyes were forward, her smile gentle as she remembered seeing the memory in her niece's mind afterward. "Do you think you can do it now?"

Gracie considered for a long moment, then nodded.

"Yes," she said firmly.  "I can do it now."

"I'll show you how to stop blood when we get home. It's just like fencing, or playing music," Esther confided.  "Stop thinking and let it happen!"

Gracie remembered some of the injuries she'd seen already in her young life.

She was already considered a "Yarb Woman," with an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal plants.

This Gift of the Mountain Witch, she realized, just might be a good thing to have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GHOSTIES, AND THE GRAVY-YARD

Willamina's smile was broad, quick and genuine.

She squatted suddenly, lowered one knee to the floor, her arms wide: two sets of bare legs ran into her, their attached children delightedly exclaiming "Gammaw!"

Shelly came padding over, silent on bare feet, bouncing the drowsy newborn in her arms.

"Gammaw howcome why you wearin' black izzzit somebody died!"

Willamina laughed, hugged the pair again, stood:  Shelly handed her the drowsy little girl, and as Willamina laid the child against her bosom, Shelly draped the burp rag over Willamina's near shoulder: Willamina's wordless look was a understandable thanks: both mother and grandmother  well knew the tendency of the very young to foul a clean garment, and Willamina -- as usual -- was immaculate in her attire: by placing the barf towel, Shelly guaranteed the baby wouldn't.

Mothers carry moments in their hearts, and Shelly carried this one: her youngest, her face turned to the side on her Gammaw's shoulder, sound asleep, limp and trusting as her Gammaw glided into their living room, eager grandchildren following.

Willamina settled in the rocking chair she favored, the children gathering around, their shining faces turned curiously toward their pale eyed Gammaw.

"You asked me if somebody died," Willamina said, her voice gentle -- Shelly heard the smile in the woman's voice -- "well, yes and no."

"Huh?"

"We were discussing spiritualism at the Ladies' Tea Society," Willamina explained, "and I wished to dress the part." 

She leaned closer, gave them a knowing smile.

"We're getting close to Halloween." 

"Halloween!" Eager young eyes looked at each other, back at their Gammaw.

"The Veil is thin between the worlds this time of year," Willamina confided. "Why do we dress up for Halloween?"

"Ummm," the children chorused, looking hopefully at one another, as if to find some reply their Gammaw was looking for.

"Fun?" 

"Is it fun to dress up?" Willamina echoed the typically-brief answer

Young heads nodded solemnly.

"Do you know why it was originally done?"

Young heads rotated left and right, waited, their attention welded to their Gammaw.

"When the Veil is thin between this world and the Spirit World," Willamina said quietly, "spirits can cross over into the Land of the Living. When they do this, they like to cause trouble. Not all spirits are good. Some are very bad."  She looked from one young face to another. "Originally, people dressed up so these naughty spirits wouldn't know who they were -- and if they dressed scary enough, these spirits would be scared off!"

Big and alarmed eyes regarded her uncomfortably.

"Gammaw, do the bad spirits come outtada gravy yards?"

"Not generally," Willamina said. "Graveyards mostly have just plain old ghosts, and ghosts can't hurt you."

"Ghosties can scare you," a grandson hazarded, and Willamina crooked a finger, leaned down a little.

"I'll tell you a secret," she murmured.  "Fear is a choice. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice, and we're not afraid unless we choose to be afraid!"

"Really?"

Willamina winked.  "Really," she said confidently.

"Gammaw, you ever see ghosties in the gravy-yard?"
Willamina laughed, considered for a moment.

"You know," she said thoughtfully, "one night I did see a ghost."

Big eyes and small voices, a chorused "Oooooo," and cross-legged children's seated backsides may as well have been rooted into the floor: at the prospect of a story, none of them had any intent of moving from the spot.

 

She wasn't Sheriff yet, she hadn't yet raised her right hand and sworn; she was a working medic, she was a volunteer on the local fire department, and she accepted an invitation to ride over to Adamsville for a good old fashioned Welsh sing.

Brother Beymer went to OSU with the Reid twins and a close cadre of like minded young men.

Brother Beymer was blessed with perfect pitch -- both listening, and singing: the man had a fine, low-register tenor, not quite bass, and for no particular reason, he'd invited Willamina to ride over to Adamsville with his mother and himself.

This was maybe a week after Granddad Beymer and his son Bruce -- Bob's father -- passed away less than five days apart, which thanks to a quirk of Ohio law, meant that each preceded the other in death -- Willamina raised an eyebrow when he told her this and asked, "Sausages?"

"Yepper," Beymer replied, to the amused puzzlement of his elderly mother:  he explained to his Mama that Ben Franklin correctly observed that anyone who admired either sausages or the law, should never see either being made, which of course sidetracked the conversation to sausage making when Eleanor was growing up, to which Willamina listened closely, for she missed such conversations.

They'd driven over and had their sing, and Willamina rejoiced in the first and still the most authentic surround sound: the Reid boys were not only singers, they were musicians, and they all sang and played well into the night: when finally Willamina took leave of her hosts, back at the Beymer farm, she pulled out of their driveway and took a last look back, as she always did.

She saw Bob and Eleanor walking up the sidewalk toward the back porch, as they always did, and she saw Granddad Beymer sitting on his bench, waiting up for them: Willamina clearly saw his broke brim hat, his wrinkled, withered old hands folded over his cane, his pendulous lip: so nice of him to wait up and make sure they got home, she thought, looking forward to where her headlights were pushing the darkness aside, then --

Wait a minute, we buried him last week!

She spiked the brakes, looked back at the Deacon's bench --

Empty.

Willamina released the brake, came back down on the throttle, eased her aqua Dodge pickup down the gravel-and-tar township road, toward her apartment.

 

"Were you scared, Gammaw?"

Willamina smiled, shook her head.  "No," she admitted.  "I was surprised, yes, but not at all frightened.  Granddad Beymer loved picking apples in the fall, and I still remember how delightfully the back porch smelled of apples, year round. I smelled him on occasion when I would visit Bob and Eleanor, for I would smell apples, and I knew he'd come by to say hello."

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

THAT TIME OF YEAR

"Don't fall in."

Esther's voice was quiet, edged with amusement: her husband was a man of deep feelings, a man who tried to keep those feelings hidden: he was successful, for the most part, but to his wife, he was about as well hidden as if he were standing behind a pane of window glass.

Linn looked up, surprised:  he smiled a little, that gentle, quiet smile he never let anyone else see -- well, anyone but Sarah, and sometimes Jacob and his wife, and maybe their children and grandchildren, and of course the hired girl and stray children he ran across in the course of being Sheriff -- but mostly he kept his feelings hidden, contained, unseen.

He looked at his wife and she saw his ears redden a little, and he looked away to the side and down.

Esther laid a gentle hand on his.

"I know it's difficult," she whispered, and Linn nodded, then looked up in honest surprise.

Esther's smile was muted by the understanding sorrow in her eyes.

"He died this month, didn't he?"

Linn nodded.

"And your mother, one month to the day after."

"On her birthday, yes," he whispered, his throat tight:  he looked away, frowned, harrumphed: his attempt at sternness failed utterly, and he threw his head back, took a quick, deep breath, blew it out, took another.

Esther rose, and out of habit, so did he: when a lady rises, the gentleman rises with her, and Linn did: Esther glided from her chair to his, she ran an arm around his back, took his hand in hers, stepped back, turned:  they danced in their parlor, man and wife, gentleman and lady, pale-eyed lawman and green-eyed woman of business and commerce: Linn abandoned his thoughts, cast his memories to the side, relaxed his mind and allowed himself to unite with his wife in this moment.

Esther was alive, she was warm, she was real, her hand in his, her arm around him, her hand gripping his own, they turned, and then he was alone, standing in his parlor, one arm up, one arm around a memory, and he stopped, his shoulders sagging.

Damn this month, he thought.

Damn my remembering.

He looked at the cut-glass brandy bottle, looked at his chair, looked at the empty chair beside his.

He and Esther used to sit side by side, talking quietly: sometimes he would be reading, and she, sewing: she always took time to sit with her husband, to listen to her husband, she always gave him of her time.

Linn was careful, now that Jacob was Sheriff, to give more generously of his time than he'd been able to before: he'd wished Esther could see him as he sat at a table, one or another of their children on his lap, or maybe one of the grandchildren: he guided their young hands in the shaping of their letters, he gave them to understand the value of good, clear handwriting, he taught them, individually, how to write legibly, deliberately: Esther would have watched, and nodded her approval, and now, now when he sat with his young on his lap, it was they who were alive, and real, and warm, and it was his daughters who danced with him in the big round barn under the cliff's overhang.

There were those women who looked with envy at this lonely lawman, but these women were all married; women were scarce, and a single woman was a rarity: Sheriff Linn Keller was but one of many men without a wife, and most generally a woman was long since married before she saw this prize catch.

He did not reflect on this, though: he was still standing, alone, in his parlor, looking at Esther's empty chair, remembering her scent, how she felt, how she didn't dance ... no, he danced, and she floated: she was, with no doubt at all, the one best dancer he'd ever partnered with, for no matter his move, she anticipated it, and moved with him, and made it look easy.

Linn bowed his head, rubbed his closed eyes the way a tired man will: he looked up, walked to the door, opened it.

The hallway was empty, the house silent: he picked up his Stetson, slung his coat about his shoulders, thrust arms into sleeves, stepped outside.

Linn smiled a little as he looked to the mountains, seeing them clearly in his mind: cataracts were taking his eyesight, but he remembered how the mountains looked, and he knew these granite mountains would long outlive him: he remembered riding the mountain trails, he and Jacob, he and Charlie, he and a host of men with whom he'd traveled through this lifetime.

Esther would stand with him here, on their porch, and they would hold hands, and say nothing for the longest time.

A hand slipped into his, squeezed, and he squeezed back, gently, carefully, and a beautiful woman stood beside him once again, a woman with her hair carefully done up, wearing a fashionable McKenna gown: they stood thusly, tasting the mountain wind, and finally the woman turned to him and spoke.

"Papa," Dana said gently, "we are invited for supper tonight," and Linn nodded, turned:  father and daughter embraced, and she felt her big strong Papa laugh a little, the way he did when a thought sailed in and struck him cross-grained.

Dana asn't sure quite what was making her Papa laugh -- he'd looked almost sad, when she'd come across the porch behind him -- she tilted her head a little to the side, then ran an arm around his back.

Father and daughter danced on their porch, danced without music, and Linn laughed and took his Dana, his precious, under her arms and hoist her from the floor: she gave a little squeak of surprise and he brought her up to eye level, twiddled his mustache against her nose and made her giggle, and set her down.

Dana embraced her Papa tightly; Linn held his daughter carefully, as if she were delicate china and liable to break, and he felt his little girl's big sigh, as she held her Papa and said, "I miss her, Papa."

Linn laid his cheek down across the top of her head and she felt his arms tighten just a little more.

"I miss her too, Princess," he murmured.  "I miss her too."

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

A FOOL, AND A DAMNED FOOL

Dr. John Greenlees, physician and surgeon, eased himself down into the indicated chair.

It was a well upholstered, comfortably padded theater seat, one of many that filled the restored Opera House.

He'd ridden the steam train with a number of fellow recruits, all attired properly for the late 1880s: his own suit was hand made and fit him perfectly, to the delight of his wife -- who sat beside him in an equally well fitted McKenna gown.

As somber as Dr. Greenlees looked, his wife was equally beautiful: her dress was cut to flatter her womanly curves, she wore the proper foundations beneath: as they walked into the restored opera house, she had the expression of a woman who was exactly where she wished to be: on the arm of a man with whom she was utterly, completely and absolutely, enamored.

There was a ham radio convention in town: some attending tonight's performance hailed a man who looked like he might know what it was to pound brass, and indeed, this scarecrow-thin young man in the green eyeshade and sleeve garters, wrung their hands with delight and with enthusiasm, and they drew apart, talking animatedly in that specialized language that radio operators use: comparisons between modern, transmitted CW, and the simple click-and-clatter of a brass sounder were discussed, nuances of sending, of how to listen in order to tell dot from dash -- or, rather, dot from double-dot, a more difficult task than translate dits and dahs that emerged in tones from a radio's speaker.

No less than eighteen traveled from Firelands for this performance, an evening which was long anticipated, for which preparations began two years before: there were rumors, of course, but no one involved would either confirm nor deny any particulars.

There was, however, a notable and significant increase in the popularity of certain dance classes.

Dr. Greenlees turned his head a little and murmured to his wife, "Why are we dressed up again?"

"We are performers, dear," his wife and personal nurse replied quietly, snapping open a fan and delicately moving a light breeze over her face:  "we in the audience represent those who would've been here when --"

The curtains shivered, withdrew: an old-fashioned, baggy-pants comedian stood sadly in the center of the stage, wearing a sandwich board:  on the front, in a distinctly old-fashioned font, EAT AT JOE'S, FIVE CENTS" -- he turned, displayed the back side:  "ACT ONE."

There was a quick, raucous trombone fanfare from the orchestra pit, the player standing, enthusiastically blatting out his notes, until his fellow musicians swatted him down:  Baggy Pants turned, dejected, and sulked off the stage.

Dr. Greenlees looked around, saw multiple ranks of familiar young faces, frowned:  he turned the other way, searching, then settled back into his seat, his brows puzzled together.

"Is everything all right, dear?" Susan asked, and Dr. Greenlees said uncomfortably, "Somebody's missing."

"I don't understand."

"The football team is behind me, all of them.  I didn't know they were coming."

Susan turned, looked: she smiled, raised a gloved hand, waved, and grinning young men in well fitted black suits waved back.

"Who is missing, dear?"

"The cheerleaders."

Their attention turned to the stage.

The conductor tapped his baton on the tin stand in front of him, raised baton and his off hand, paused:  he raised an eyebrow, lowered his hands and placed them on his beltine, glared at the trombonist, whose instrument was leaning back against his shoulder as the fellow raised a long, well stuffed sandwich to take a bite:  shamefaced, he put the sandwich down, raised his instrument as the conductor thrust the baton at him, gave a little twirl: audience and his glaring fellow bandsmen alike saw the man's shoulders raise as he took in a great breath, he gave a discordant BLATT and a compressed paper snake shot out of his trombone, to the exaggerated fall-away-and-flail of the trumpeter ahead of him.

He worked the slide back and forth, then tapped his chest with a fist:  "Gas," he said loudly, playing to the audience, whose laughter had already begun.

Bandsmen settled into sobriety, the conductor raised his baton -- he hesitated, gave the trombonist a glare -- a mongrel dog, the offending sandwich in its jaws, leaped from among the instrumentalists, onto the conductor's dais, then to the stage:  a yell, the baggy-pants comedian chased across the stage, stumbling in his sandwich-board:  he stopped at mid-stage, turned to face the audience, displaying SANDWICHES 5 CENTS, then turned and chased stage left, and disappeared.

The conductor glared after this interruption, shook an admonishing finger at the trombonist, raised his baton.

Audience and orchestra were hushed for a moment, and just as the baton raised that terminal half-inch before beginning the downbeat, stray dog, sandwich and comedian went yelling across the stage, bringing the moment to a halt:  laughter again filled the theater, the Doctor's mirth and merriment joining with the general glee, which subsided momentarily, until the baggy-pants comedian crossed the stage once more, happily chewing on a long, well stuffed sandwich.

The conductor raised frustrated hands to his hair, pretended to pull at his white wig, exclaimed in frustration "You zee vhat I haff to put up mitt!" -- at which point the trombonist gave two slurred notes that sounded very much like "Uh-oh" -- at which point the conductor raised baton and free hand quickly, brought them down viciously, and the orchestra began a lively Can-Can.

Susan's hand was laid over on her husband's arm:  he felt her gloved grip tighten as a row of beauties in stockings, corsets, ornate headdresses and lobster tail dresses began high-kicking in a perfectly-coordinated chorus line across the stage:  two were in front, eight behind: very quickly it became obvious the two dancers in front knew their stuff, for their kicks were perfectly timed, exquisitely coordinated with the live music; they tossed their generous skirts, showing contrasting linings and petticoats (and a delightful amount of stockinged leg!) as the remaining dancers became somewhat less ... expert.

As a matter of fact, the pair in front, wearing ornate, glitter-face masks danced to absolute perfectiion, while the line behind them fell apart, lost their timing, kicked at the wrong beat or with the wrong leg: one, then another fell, the others turned, fell into one another and clearly tried to improvise something acceptable ... and managed only to contrast their efforts to the two who danced well, the contrast bringing yet more laughter from the audience.

The Can-Can is a high-energy dance; it ended, the audience pounded their palms enthusiastically together: the comedic row behind fairly fled from the stage, the pair in front made an elaborate, graceful, absolutely feminine curtsy, then they turned, flipped up their skirts to reveal their screaming-scarlet-silk covered bottoms:  on one, embroidered in silver, the word THE:  the other, also silver, shimmering in the spotlight, END.

The curtains closed charitably on this remarkable display, to the standing ovation:  those in the audience who wore modern attire, had never seen an 1880s-era performance; those in period attire tried to look stern, and failed utterly: Willamina's Warriors whistled, yelled, shook triumphant fists: the curtains parted a little, and the dancers, in a cluster, raised white-gloved arms in a synchronous wave: one fell against another, a screech, an arm drew back and the curtains closed quickly, separating what looked like a sudden and vicious catfight, from the laughing and most appreciative observers.

The orchestra raised their instruments at the conductor's baton: he brought it down on a slower curve, and the formal, dignified orchestra began the "Blue Danube Waltz."

This lasted about a minute and a half, until a familiar stray dog peeked out from the curtains' overlap, jumped into the orchestra pit: there was a yell, a yelp, the dog streaked back across the conductor's dais, bringing the conductor to the very brink of going over backwards: arms windmilling, he teetered for a long moment, recovered his balance:  he took two shaky steps forward, withdrew a large white kerchief from his sleeve, patted his face and forehead carefully: he dropped the kerchief, turned in surprise as the curtains twitched, then opened.

An ivory-white fan snapped open: scarlet-gloved fingers held it, a glittering, shining, lobstertail dress cascaded down behind a beautiful young woman wearing a sparkling glitter-mask over half her face, a tall comb in her hair, a lace mantilla cascading therefrom: a women whose stockinged leg barely thrust from the gap in the front of her long dress: the fan snapped shut, disappeared behind her.

Two old men approached this still, solitary, smoldering figure, one from her left, one from her right: each brought a chair and an oversized guitar, each guitar had twelve strings, and both men had the wrinkles of many years engraved in their weather-browned faces.

A set of castanets snarled, their bright chatter shocking in the silence: twice more, nothing moving but the dancer's fingers.

A Mexican guitar sings in a bass voice, and these did: they sang a song well older than the woman in the flamenco dress, older than the building in which they performed, older than the city that surrounded them.

The audience was absolutely silent.

Few had seen the Flamenco danced well -- almost as many had never seen it danced at all -- but all agreed that this beauty, this dark-eyed, black-haired young woman in a proper Spanish black-lace mantilla and comb, brought out a man's desire with little more than a turn of her wrist.

Woman's magic she wrought, spotlighted on the stage: color stood out in her cheeks as she danced, a solitary, scarlet-glittering figure whose motions were sensuality and femininity, brought to living, breathing reality: the flamenco must be experienced to be appreciated, and this flamenca was truly gifted: years of practice showed in her turns, in her rhythm, in the curve of her neck, her raw feminine allure blazing from dark eyes: not a man there who saw, did not feel his heart quicken: young men were fired with raw desire, old men felt again what it was to be young: time, and the audience, held their breath, silent and still with admiration and with awe at beauty brought to life, until the music quickened, until her steps quickened, until her heels hammered their imperative, until the castanuelas snapped once, and they froze, just as callused and aged hands slapped suddenly over the strings, stilling their harmonious voice --

She held, frozen, an arm up, an arm behind, her head back and turned ever so slightly, and this was the picture in the Firelands Gazette the next day.

Young John Greenlees was as enamored as any with this performance: Marnie came rushing up to him from outside, her cheeks red, her fingers cold: she was so sorry to have missed the performance, she had an emergency, how was the show --

Young John Greenlees hugged her, quickly, tightly:  "I missed you," he mumbled into the side of her neck:  he drew back, frowned:  "Your eyes are bloodshot."

"I had to wash them out," she said quickly.  "We had a situation."

"Marnie --"  Young John gripped her hands -- "you're not a deputy yet.  You're not supposed to get into situations!"

"I was the only one there, John," she snapped.  "It had to be done.  We made the arrest and if I hadn't --"

She stopped, bit her bottom lip, looked up.

"John, I'm sorry, there's something I have to tell you."  Her hand released his, seized his wrist, pulled hard:  "Come with me."  

Marnie raised a hand, curled her lip, whistled:  a taxi stopped, quickly, she opened the back door:  "Get in."

Surprised, he did, and she piled in beside him.

She gave the cabbie an address and they merged into the nighttime traffic.

"You do look good in that suit," she said approvingly.

"You'd look better in a McKenna gown," John frowned.  "What happened?"

"I'll show you when we get there."

It wasn't far to a high-end hotel there in the city; Marnie paid the cabbie and tipped him well, and John thought the man addressed his date as "Agent" -- but this took him by surprise and he wasn't at all sure -- Marnie held him by the wrist again, they walked in like they owned the place, went to the elevators.

Up several floors, down a hallway, Marnie produced a keycard and opened the door: she almost shoved John inside, hung the DO NOT DISTURB on the doorknob, slammed the door and threw both locks.

She turned, her back to the door.

"What's this about?" John demanded.

Marnie walked up to the uncertain-looking young man, placed her hands flat on his chest.

"John," she said softly, "you're right, I'm not a deputy yet."

She looked up at him, her expression vulnerable.

"There are extenuating circumstances, John, and I can't tell you about everything, not just yet.  I can tell you the cabbie called me Agent, and he wasn't supposed to let that slip. He must've figured you knew already."

"You're an ... Agent."

"I am, and I can tell you no more than that."  Marnie came up on her toes, seized his face between her hands, pulled his face down into hers, kissed him.

"John, there is something I must show you.  Wait here, and trust me please!"

Marnie withdrew into the bedroom, shut the door.

John had the distinct feeling that all was not well, and he didn't like the thought of being alone with a beautiful young woman: on the other hand, he really, really wanted to be with her, and curiosity was eating at him, wondering what she wanted to show him --

A knock at the door.

John took a long breath, lifted his chin, walked to the door: he flipped back one lock, turned the other, opened the door.

Dr. John Greenlees and Nurse Susan, John's parents, stood in the doorway.

Dr. John held a note.

"We got your message," he said.  "What's going on?"

Young John Greenlees felt more uncertain than he had in his entire young life.

"Bring them in and close the door," Marnie called.  "And John, there is a square of plywood behind the couch.  Set it in the middle of the floor, please."

Young John looked at his father.

"I have absolutely no idea what is going on," he admitted, and then hidden speakers began to play the compelling, driving rhythms of well-played, double-strung Mexican bass guitars.

It was a familiar tune, something they'd heard before.

A figure in shimmering red spun from the bedroom, to the compelling snarl of well-played castanets: Marnie stepped onto the plywood, her heels loud, and a beautiful young woman in a tall Spanish comb and mantilla, in a proper lobstertail dress, danced the flamenco for a young man she loved, and for the parents she'd come to respect as well.

When she was done -- after the final heel-strike at the music's climax, when callused hands had clapped over the strings, silencing their deep-throated song -- as her small audience hissed out their pent-up breath, Marnie Keller lowered her head and looked very directly at them.

Her normally pale eyes were almost Mexican-black, and John understood why her eyes were bloodshot earlier.

Colored contacts.

"Nobody else from Firelands," she said, "knows that was me, tonight.  I wanted to tell you myself."

"Marnie Keller," young John breathed, "you are the most confounding, confusing, wonderful and gorgeous soul God ever put on this earth!"

"Don't forget contradictory," she smiled, snapping out an ivory-white fan and fluttering it delicately in front of her face, looking over it at them with smoldering dark eyes.

Another knock at the door.

"Answer it, John."

Dr. Greenlees turned, opened the door before his son could get to it.

A man in a modern suit stepped in, a bunch of flowers in his hand and surprise on his face.

"It's all right, Captain," Marnie said confidently.  "These are part of my innermost circle."

"Then you must be Dr. John Greenlees," the Captain said, extending his hand to Dr. Greenlees -- the physician was surprised at the gentleness of the man's grip -- "you are a surgeon, sir?"

"I am."

The Captain nodded, turned, gave a half-bow to Susan Greenlees:  "Ma'am," he said gently, then the Captain turned very deliberately to young John and shook his hand enthusiastically:  "Young man, if you do not marry this woman, you're a fool and a damned fool!"

Young John's mouth was open and he was looking uncertainly at Marnie and at his parents.

The Captain presented the flowers he held:  "Agent," he said, "your efforts cannot be officially recognized, but I can at least say thank you."

Marnie smiled, gave an elaborate curtsy.

The Captain looked around, looked back at Marnie.

"I have never seen the Flamenco danced better," he said softly: the man turned and left, drew the door firmly shut behind him.

"Double lock the door, John," Marnie said, then lifted the flowers to her face, closed her eyes, took a long, savoring sniff.

She opened her eyes, smiled quietly at Dr. and Mrs. Greenlees.

She glided over to the pair, confidence in high heels.

"I don't think you son is a damned fool," she whispered, and she and young John's mother shared a silent understanding in that moment that, as usual, completely escaped the understanding of the men present, at least until that moment when a ring went on her finger and the fiddler played "Turkey in the Straw."

That, however, is a story set back back home in Firelands, a story in which there was no trombonist, nor was there any stray dog absconding with a musician's lunch.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GAMMAW'S TORNADO

"Tornado?"

Linn swung the saddle up, hung it on the side of the stall, set one boot up on the bottom board.

"Darlin', there's a reason we don't get many tornadoes."  He gestured with a gloved hand.  "Mountains break 'em up. Tornadoes are rare."

"But not unknown."

"No.  Not unknown."

"You've seen them."

"I have."

"When was the last one?"
Linn looked at his wife, concern in his expression: he leaned back against the side of the stall, pulled off one glove, then the other.

"Dear heart," he said gently, "you and my Mama are cut of the same cloth."

"Flatterer."  Shelly came closer, all ball bearings and swivel hips, raising her hands to her tall husband's shoulders: his big hands spread wide, gripped her under the soft ribs, just above her carved-leather jeans belt, and he bent his head to taste her lips.

"Why the sudden interest in tornadoes?" he whispered, and Shelly pressed herself into her husband, lowering her lashes seductively.

"I dreamed of a tornado last night," she whispered, "and your Mama had it on a leash."

Linn laughed quietly, then nibbled at his wife's bottom lip with both his.

"The kids are at her house," Shelly whispered, her voice warm, musical, inviting.

Linn ran his left arm behind her shoulder blades, his other behind her knees:  he picked up his wife and carried his giggling bride deeper into the barn, away from any casual visitors: they were the only two at their little ranch that day, The Bear Killer would alarm them should any stray folk arrive, and they, husband and wife, saw fit to enjoy the pleasure of each other's company.

 

"Gammaw," Marnie asked curiously, "what's a tornado?"

"It's a twisting storm," Willamina replied, tilting her head curiously.  "Very windy, lots of noise and lightning. It's scary and it comes ahead of a thunderstorm. Do you remember when we got all that hail, before the thunderstorm, back a couple months ago?"

Marnie nodded solemnly.

"Do you remember how we raced across the pasture and got to the barn, and do you remember how your hair floated, and so did your horse's mane?"

Marnie nodded again, her eyes big with the memory, her expression solemn.

"Hail means there are updrafts in the storm, and updrafts mean there's a lot of energy in the storm, and hail is a good sign that storm just might spin down a twister."

Marnie blinked, nodded, her eyes never leaving her Gammaw's.

"Do you remember how your hair floated?"

Marnie nodded.  "I should have braided it," she said in a small voice.

"Do you know why it floated?"

Marnie shook her head.

"There was so much static in that low cloud overhead -- do you remember how black the cloud, and how low? -- it was ready to blast! the earth with lightning."

"It did, too," Marnie nodded, her voice quiet: her eyes were distant, the same way Willamina remembered her son's eyes becoming, when he was a little boy and remembering something significant.  "It touched the mountain and kaboom!"
"Lots of kabooms," Willamina laughed: she knelt, hugged her granddaughter, tilted her head and regarded the pale eyed child curiously.  "Now why would you be talking about tornadoes?"

"Mommy dreampt you had one on a leash," Marnie reported with the innocent honesty of a guileless child.

"Oh, she did, did she?" Willamina smiled.

Marnie nodded, her forehead puzzling into a little girl's wrinkles as she tried to figure something out.

"Gammaw, how'd you get a tornado on a leash?"
Willamina laughed.

"I didn't," she admitted, "but when one came along, I put it to very good use!"

 

Sheriff Willamina Keller glared at the hardcase on the other side of the locked jail cell's door.

He glared back at her.

She'd spotted him for trouble when he first came to town:  he was from the city, his neck tats told of time behind bars, he threw gang signs, and when his behavior became objectionable, he was asked, one time, politely, by an old rancher to watch his mouth.

After the general knock-down, drag-out fight that followed, after the off-duty police chief moved faster than an old man should be able to, after this troublemaking newcomer's bell was rung when the clerk at the All-Night picked up a heavy-glass bubble gum jar from the counter and belted the fellow over the head, after a set of irons, a trip to ER, then a stop at the processing desk, the defiant interloper glared defiantly at the pale eyed Sheriff, who regarded him as if he were an insect, pinned to a cork board.

A tone blared through the jail section, and the Sheriff's head came up: she turned, looked toward the exit.

"If that's a fire alarm," her unsavory prisoner sneered, "you gotta let me outta heere!"

"You're going nowhere," Willamina said quietly. "You're safer here than anywhere."  She turned, walked away, followed by a shouted string of obscenities and unpleasant invitations better imagined than reported here.

Sharon looked up, thrust a red pin in the county map beside her desk.

Willamina came over, watched as Sharon took an erasable red marker, made a quick series of shrinking circles above the first two red pins, then the third.

"Tornado," she said. "Confirmed by two ham radio operators."

"Are they safe?"

"They're safe, they're watching direction of travel."

"Where's it heading?"
Sharon's eyes were big.

"Here."

"Phone tree," Willamina snapped. "Alarm the town. We don't use tornado sirens so that won't help. Have you told the Irish Brigade?"

"No. That firehouse is a fortress."

"It won't stand a direct strike."

"Will we?"

Willamina laughed.  "Oh, yeah," she chuckled.  "We will. Matter of fact" -- she straightened -- "I'd better go bring my horse in."

Sharon watched the Sheriff's retreating backside as the woman skipped quickly back toward the back hall.

 

Sheriff Jacob Keller gripped his Apple-horse's bridle, squinted into the blasting wind.

His hat was long gone, it felt like the wind was going to knock him down and roll him down the street like a tumbleweed: trash, dust, roof shakes filled the air, and the sound like an insane train, runaway on a long, steep grade:  through slitted eyes he saw the spinning mass as it lifted, as it roared overhead.

Jacob's suit was filthy from the debris, his heart full of rage, the sorrowing rage of a strong man in grief: his pale eyed father was only just dead, and now this.

Jacob leaned into the wind, Apple-horse muttering his displeasure:  the stallion reared, hauling Jacob off his feet, then turned, not caring that his rider still had a death grip around the carved leather cheekstrap:  Jacob released his grip to keep from getting either kicked, or trampled:  Apple-horse was gone as if snatched by this roaring, blasting wind, and Jacob fell, rolled, tumbled like a little boy summersaulting in the grass, dirt and debris sandblasting at his exposed skin.

Unseen, in the Sheriff's office, a kerosine lamp fell, ignited the pool of liquid fuel: exactly how many lamps were shivered from their supports and shelves, nobody ever knew, but with this much wind there was no salvaging what had been a little log fortress.

Jacob Keller fought for the lee of the bank building, crouched until this demon storm passed, until the winds were lessened.

He sent word on the next train out -- he had to, telegraph wires were down, the storm's fury far overmatched trees and wires, and track crews had to clear blowdowns from across the rails -- Sheriff Jacob Keller brought in Italian stonemasons to rebuild their Sheriff's office, and he brought plans from his own home, his own stone fortress on the mountain's side, protected on two sides by native granite: his barn lost half its roof, he lost two cows to blown-over trees, he lost some fence, but others lost much more: he rode back down off the mountain with plans he and his father drew up years before, plans to rebuild the Sheriff's office in stone.

 

Sheriff Willamina Keller led her big black horse into the jail section.

She stopped at a particular cell, thrust in a wide, thick, heavy key, color coded: she'd dipped the key in the same paint they'd used to paint the big, square lock plate, so there would be no confusion if they had to release prisoners fast.

She looked up as her mouthy prisoner's eyes grew panic-wide, as his hands came up, his palms shockingly pale as he backed away from the door, clearly afraid.

Willamina walked her mare into the cell.

"This is Spindrift," she said.  "She's a Frisian. Her kind were bred to carry armored knights into combat. She's riot trained and so far she's bitten six people, she's bitten off two fingers, crushed one hand and one arm and she kicked a rioter to death."  Her smile was tight, humorless.  "I know. I was riding her at the time."

Willamina casually unbuckled the silver-mounted, carved-leather bridle, peeled it free.

"Don't try to pet her. She hasn't eaten anyone today and I expect she's hungry."

Willamina turned, closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and left her sleepy-looking mare, and her flat-against-the-back-wall, very-wide-eyed, utterly-terrified prisoner, alone, while the storm raged outside.

 

"Gammaw," Marnie asked, "did you really have a tornado on a leash?"

Willamina laughed, shook her head, looked at the clock.

"Not on a leash," she admitted, "but I've used tornadoes to my advantage before."

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

STRAIGHT RAZOR

Sarah Lynne McKenna paid the man, and paid him well.

He was a gifted metalworker: he'd made most of her blades, and blades she'd given as gifts: well and beautifully made, exquisitely tempered, shaped with an artist's eye and a craftsman's gift, each was designed for its intended purpose, alloyed to perfection, shaped with a good blade's seductive curves.

Sarah especially prized the throwing knives the man made.

It was rare to make two identical blades.

Black Smith made her multiple sets.

Sarah was young enough, and of a slight enough build, for a mature man to regard her with a man's protective instincts: she was old enough for a mature man to regard her with the desires common to the human animal: when Black Smith saw Sarah tilt her head curiously and puzzle her brows together, he knew she had a question, and so he ceased stoning the skinner he'd just fitted with a brass guard and riveted handles, turned, sat on a handy nail keg he kept for the purpose.

"You carry a straight razor," she said -- she looked at him with the innocent expression of a curious little girl, but he heard the incisiveness and intelligence behind the words.

He withdrew the device from a slender pocket at the back of his belt, turned it over in his big, strong, blunt-fingered hand: the blade swung open, then shut, then open again: he made a fist, and the blade was laid open along his knuckles, edge out.

"I can punch wit' dis," he said in that deep, soft-edged voice he used when he spoke with his favorite customer, "an' I hurts dem."

Sarah nodded.

"I could use a knife but we carrys dese allus d' time."

Sarah looked at him, blinking thoughtfully.

"What do you expect to cut with those?"

Black Smith's expression changed:  he closed the straight razor, slid it back into the inconspicuous pocket, hunched over with bulging-muscled arms crossed in front of him, elbows on his knees, clearly uncomfortable.

"Miz Sarah," he rumbled, leaning forward, speaking low and confidentially so only she could hear --

"Miz Sarah, has you ebber seen de spooks?"

Sarah's eyes widened: he saw her eyes harden, her jaw muscles tense, and he knew she had.

"Dere is haints, spooks, speerts an' dem t'ings from de Grave Yard what wants t' take a man's soul," Black Smith said uncomfortably, looking around:  "dey cain't come here 'cause I gots iron!"

"Iron?" Sarah echoed.

Black Smith nodded vigorously. "Oh yas'm! Dey sez in de Scriptures, where dey built de Temple ob Solomon, dey was not heered de soun' --"

Sarah raised an interrupting palm:  she looked very directly at the man and said quietly, "Mr. Smith, I am neither your master nor your owner. You may speak as you wish."

Black Smith grinned, quickly, sheepishly:  "T'ank you, Miz Sarah," he said, relief in his voice.  "I talks like that because folks expects it."

"You are your own man, Mr. Smith," Sarah said quietly. "Especially here, especially now."

He nodded.  "I knows that," he agreed, "but habit is a hard thing to break."

His words were a little slower, a little more careful: the man was returning to a speech pattern with which he'd been familiar, at least at one time, one he'd kept hidden, probably to maintain an image.

"The Temple," she prompted.

"Yas'm," he nodded, frowning:  he leaned back, looking up toward the ceiling above her head, his eyes tracking left, then right.

"Solomon, King ob Israel, was a magic worker an' a magic user," he explained. "He magicked in dem speerts from de desert, dem Jinns, an' dat's how he moved dem stones dey built de Temple of."

He'd spoken like an ignorant man for so long, the habit was proving difficult to overcome, but Sarah's ear heard an improvement in his speech, and and said nothing.

"Iron" -- he reached over, picked up a smooth metal rod with a light rust patina, "iron repels speerts ob all kind."  He looked at Sarah.  "I one time was really young an' Mama she tol' me never to go t'rough de graveyard at night. Well, I says to myself, I says I do dat ennyway an' one dem speerts it tried to git me."

Sarah's expression was serious: she'd long ago learned that men are prone to lie, and she'd trained herself to spot a lie.

When Black Smith said that a graveyard spirit tried to get him, she heard nothing but absolute fact in the man's voice.

"I had dis chunk ob iron wit' me," he said, shook his head:  he placed the rod carefully among its fellows, picked up a fist sized lump of scrap, looked at it thoughtfully, looked at Sarah.

"I had dis -- I had this -- with me."

Sarah nodded, listening closely.

"I hit with it, and I heard it scream."  

Black Smith looked away, uncomfortable with the memory.

"I been told about iron -- dey called 'em base metals -- bein' what you could use against haints, boogers, spooks an' speerts, an' ever' time I hit wit' dat lump of iron, why, 'twas like I burnt it, an' two fast licks an' it was gone!"

Sarah nodded.

"Miz Sarah, speerts -- ghosts -- can be cut wit' a sharpened blade. Iron or steel either one. Brass ain't as good, maybe copper is, I dunno, never tried it, but dis" -- his hand slipped behind, came back out wtih the straight razor -- "dis ain't dat good in a fight wit' men but it's f'r ghosts an' speerts an' d' like."

Sarah nodded, her face serious.

"I will remember that, Mr. Smith," she said quietly.  "Thank you for letting me know."

"Miz Sarah" -- Black Smith stood as Sarah rose -- "my wife, she knows t'ings, an' she said them speerts wants to drag you down t' hell."

"I know," Sarah whispered, her eyes haunted by memories Black Smith suddenly wanted no part of. "I know they do, Mr. Smith, and two good men kept them from keeping me there."  She looked very directly at the man.  "They used sharpened blades, sir, and they kept me safe."

Sarah stepped up to the man, gripped the back of his big, blacksmith-hard hand, turned it palm-up: she dropped a small poke into his palm, a poke that gave the clink of hard coin.

"Mr. Smith," she said quietly, "you are a good man.  Never doubt that."

Black Smith watched as the pretty young woman turned and left his smithy; he hefted the weight of coin thoughtfully as he heard her carriage retreating.

"T'anks you, Miz Sarah," he whispered to the hazy air in his smithy, then he turned, looked around, nodded.

His forge was banked, his day's work finished; his wife would have supper ready by the time he washed up and went in the house, and he would add this generous hoard to the rest of his earnings, secreted in a half dozen places about his house's stone floor.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

BACKHANDED!

Gracie's eyes were closed, her body relaxed: she saw Mars, far behind, turning slowly in its patient orbit; she saw the sun, distant, weak, and she saw stars, far more distant, bright points of light, steady, without glitter or shimmer: she loved to see their steadiness, she knew that they were ever-changing, that at any moment, any of them could detonate, or be ripped apart by a black hole, she knew that another gamma burst could come screaming in from a fantastic distance.

She didn't care.

She was content to relax, to let her mind expand, to listen with sensor buoys set well beyond Pluto's orbit: their solar system was big enough, no one ship could safeguard it, but by discreetly placing buoys about the periphery, they helped safeguard the inner planets, at least a little.

There was so much space to cover that there were huge gaps in their watch-nets, and they knew something small and fast moving would stand the greatest chance of slipping through: if an intruder were captured by a gravity well, it would be pulled down into a planet -- which is why Jupiter was so well regarded: it acted like a great magnet, attracting foreign bodies and absorbing their impact with no ill effects.

Gracie calculated the most likely routes of ingress, and she slept where she could watch three of them.

Her eyes snapped open.

There.

She gathered her legs under her, strode across space toward the incoming intruder.

 

Bonnie McKenna, woman of business and commerce, wife of a successful husband, lifted her chin.

No one saw her move.

Attention was drawn to a loud voice, a grasping hand, the shocked voice of a young woman:  "Unhand me, sirrah!"

Bonnie had a dancer's legs and a mother's anger, and she advanced on the man who'd presumed to seize her daughter's arm.

 

Gracie slipped between the layers of reality, coming out in the meteor's projected path.

Gracie was more than intimately connected with her ship, and her ship was more than advanced: her brain was changed for living with the ship, and the ship evolved itself because of its intimate connection with a living brain of remarkably high intelligence.

Calculations were impossibly swift -- so much so that, in Gracie's recollection, she did what was perfectly natural.

 

Bonnie McKenna's gloved hand described a swift arc.

She backhanded the stranger, hard, the impact loud in the saloon's shocked silence.

 

Gracie pirouetted like a dancer.

In her mind she made a half-turn, one arm out for balance, her wrist bent back a little, fingers curved, an instinctively feminine move: her other arm swung out, hard, backhanding the incoming meteor, hard: her timing was accurate, to the ten-thousandth of one second: the impact knocked the meteor out of trajectory, guaranteeing it would miss Mars by several thousand miles.

Gracie, unmmoving in her flight couch, held in place by a variety of straps, tubes and other connections, had not moved.

Her ship had become her body.

If the energy-field she commanded were visible, it might have looked like her, only bigger: there would have been a momentary blast of light, of heat, the shattering of stony fragments, and that extension of the field would have looked like a hand: as a matter of fact, were the entire energy-field visible, it would have looked very much like a young woman, turning like a dancer, one arm up for balance, the other swinging hard to backhand an unwanted intruder.

 

A man flew out the double doors of the Silver Jewel Saloon, a stranger to the territory: had he been better acquainted with its inhabitants, he might have been far less inclined to demand the favors of a lovely young woman, a young woman with pale eyes, a young woman with a mother who would not countenance a stranger's rudeness toward her eldest child.

Such a stranger would have known better than to accost a well known daughter of the mountains, a lovely and feminine creature who just happened to have a father, a brother, and a double handful of men who thought very, very highly of her, a group of men who seized the person of this unintelligent and ungentlemanly fellow and gave him an airmail voyage to the street outside.

Neither this stranger, who suffered a bad case of poor judgement, nor this sizable asteroid, moving at a truly unholy velocity, managed to cause any harm:  the former departed the territory, never to return, and never mentioning the moment when the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, backhanded him hard enough to break his nose and snap his head around, and the black-iron-and-stone asteroid screamed into the inner reaches of the solar system, curving very near the sun, then slingshot out into the void beyond at an increased velocity, never to be seen again.

 

If the scientists are right, and all of time exists now, then it may be possible that two women smiled in the same moment: one woman, wearing a fashionable McKenna gown, the other, wearing a pressure suit and a ship ... two women who each wore the contented expression of a woman who'd just done the right thing, and felt very good about having done it.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

AND A LOST SOUL LAUGHED

Danny Spears squinted a little, pulled his hat brim lower to try to sharpen his vision.

He swore, quietly: that pale eyed lawman was still after him.

There was no mistaking him: no other lawman in the territory rode a shining gold horse, no other lawman wore a black suit, no other lawman had a son that looked just like him, riding an Appaloosa stallion.

At least his boy and Macneil aren't with him, he thought, then fear walked cold fingers down his outlaw's spine.

If you can't see Macneil, chances are Macneil can see you, he'd heard a fellow owlhoot say once, and sure enough that hard-eyed Territorial Marshal nailed his fellow felon, hard, fast and nasty.

Didn't kill him but he sure took the fight clear out of him.

Macneil trained that pale eyed Sheriff's boy, he thought: he looked to his horse -- the stolen gelding was unconcerned, grazing, ears swinging listlessly as grass claimed his attention -- Spears wiggled back, back away from what could be a good ambush point, and he decided it would be less likely to find him a dirt bed if he ran, rather than tried to bush whack this short tempered Texas twister in a black suit.

 

 

Sheriff Linn Keller studied the tracks, looked ahead; was he to ambush someone, he'd shoot from one of three places.

Goldie-horse turned sharply right and surged uphill, toward the first of the three.

 

Margie Rucker looked around and decided she didn't like where she was.

Margie's Mama told her not to wander off, and of course that meant she did, and now she didn't see anything familiar.

She'd been following a bug and a butterfly and she'd squinted up at birdies way up in a cloudy-fluffy sky and she'd sniffed at wild flowers and she'd picked up rocks and threw them, and laughed the innocent laughter of a child, doing what children will.

Margie decided she was getting hungry and she wanted to go back to her Mama but she didn't know where her Mama was, so she looked around and frowned and then turned and started climbing, uphill, reasoning in her very juvenile mind that she could see further from uphill and maybe she could see her Mama from up there.

 

Spears knew better than to skyline himself by running straight uphill and over the ridge.

He circled, hunched over in the saddle, ran parallel to the ridgeline, hoping, hoping for a saddle, a gully, somewhere he could get to the other side.

His horse shied and went over half-backwards, half-sideways, landed on bare dirt and loose rock, slid: Spearsie's boot, for a miracle, came out of the stirrup and he seized a brushy trunk, felt it crackle as it nearly pulled loose -- his thrashing horse slid off his leg, downhill, thrashed to its feet, shook itself.

Trailing reins bade the shaken mount halt; Spearsie worked his leg -- not busted -- he slid downhill, made his feet, reached for the trailing reins.

A tiny set of clapping hands and a child's laughter and he turned, startled, reins in one hand and astonishment on his face, and a little girl in a faded blue dress and a sunbonnet too big for her gave him absolutely the biggest, happiest grin, she pointed her little finger at him and declared innocently, "That was funny!"

Danny Spears, lifelong thief and cheat, scoundrel and swindler, a lost soul if ever there was one, did something he hadn't done in a very long time.

He laughed.

Spearsie was stubbled, dirty, he smelled bad, his clothes were worn, soiled, unkempt, but somewhere in his corroded soul was at least a little decency.

He went to one knee and said, "Little lady, what in the hell are you doin' clear out here?"

The little girl shook her finger at him and said "You'll get your mouth washed out with soap for cussin'!" -- then she shoved out her bottom lip and planted her knuckles on her nonexistent waist and huffed, "My Mommy's lost an' I'm tryin' to find her!"

"Your Mommy's lost," Spearsie repeated, and the moment hung long and bright between them, and Spearsie threw back his head and laughed at the utter, absolute absurdity of the moment.

He was a wanted outlaw, he was running from that damned bloodhound of a pale eyed lawman, and here he'd found himself a little girl who allowed as 'twas her Mama lost, and not her!

"Where is your Mama?" he asked, his voice gentler, and his own ears were surprised, for his voice was so seldom gentle anymore, 'twas almost like hearing a stranger's voice.

The little girl thrust a sudden arm uphill:  "I can see her from up there!" she declared.

"Well, now, let's just find her," Spearsie said;  he picked the girl up, turned her, his arm across her belly:  one foot in the stirrup, him on the uphill side, mounting was easily done, and he set her on his stolen mount's neck -- she was but a wee child, and not heavy a'tall, and they turned their noses uphill and by golly now there was a saddle and they crossed without skylining themselves.

 

Sheriff Linn Keller turned, rode cautiously downhill: the terrain here was treacherous, he let his Goldie-horse pick the way: no sense in gettin' in a hurry and comin' to grief, he reasoned, and the second ambush point -- the one nearest where he figured the outlaw had run -- had fresh tracks.

I was right.

He looked ahead, pale eyes narrowed, his mind running fast.

If I were in a hurry to get the hell out of here, which way would I run?

 

Margie clapped her little pink hands together with delight and exclaimed "Mommeee!"

Spearsie cantered into the little encampment.

He'd not associated with "good people" for so long, he wore a perpetual scowl, a visibly guarded expression, but at the sight of a young mother screaming her daughter's name, running toward him with arms spread wide, at the sight of a relieved young husband coming around the team of oxen, Spearsie did something he hadn't done in a very long time.

He grinned.

It was a slow grin, almost painful, for his face wasn't used to it:  he rode up to the anxious mother, lifted Margie off his horse's neck, handed her down into the happy confusion of a little girl's delighted babble, a mother's relieved distress: he eased his horse ahead, toward the young man coming toward him.

A figure came over the ridge he'd just skirted, and Spearsie whirled his stolen nag, rode around the back of the ox-yoked wagon, headed for the timber not far away.

Sheriff Linn Keller rode into the encampment and grinned to hear the little girl happily chattering that she'd seen bugs and flutter-bys and she was kinda hungry and how come Mommy got lost, and Linn looked around, toward the timber where the outlaw had made his escape -- again -- and shook his head.

He looked at the mother, at the somewhat confused young husband and father, stuck out his hand.

"Name's Keller," he said.  "Sheriff, Firelands County, and I've got young'uns that swore up and down their Mama was lost too!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 23, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

A WISE OLD CREATURE

I can't see.

Why does my back hurt?

My feet are cold.

Mommy ...?

A little girl sat up and looked around.

A truly huge, black, curly-furred dog sat beside her, tongue out, looking around with her.

The child seized this familiar figure:  "Bear Killer!" she exclaimed, hugging the huge canine desperately: she knew The Bear Killer, he'd come to her school and the Sheriff was a nice lady, she let them pet The Bear Killer an' she'd heard The Bear Killer got a boy out of the river before he drownded and besides she was kind of scared.

"Bear Killer," she said in a small voice, "why is Mommy's car hurt?"

There was a wreck, she heard, and the mind-voice was as warm and as comforting as the huge black mountain Mastiff she was leaning against.

"Uh-oh," the little girl said, then, "Mommy?"

She's hurt, she heard, but she'll live.

The child felt that much worry unwind itself from around her stomach and fall away.

She frowned a little and looked around again and stood up and she felt really light and she didn't hurt anymore --

I don't hurt.

Of course not, she heard. 

Do you remember when you started to hurt?

When I was borned, she thought in reply, not realizing she wasn't using spoken words.

I was borned and it hurt and that's why I cried but I got used to the hurt an' now it's gone.

She looked curiously at The Bear Killer.

How come I don't hurt?

She felt a very old wisdom in the big black canine, and she felt surprise, and she realized she hadn't been able to see anything until she sat up, and she was sitting on top of the car but she was real light and she didn't hurt and this wasn't normal but it was nice not to hurt no more --

You can stay like this, she heard The Bear Killer's voice in her mind again, and you won't hurt ever again.

She looked into the car, she looked through its smoking, twisted wreckage, she looked at her Mommy, just starting to wake up.

She'll be very sad, she thought.

Yes, she will.  She loves you very much.

I don't want Mommy to be sad.

What about you?

A little girl stood and looked around, a little girl that saw the shining red trucks and people running toward her, and The Bear Killer turned his ponderous head toward her.

You must decide now.

If you stay it will hurt, but you will get better.

The child did not hesitate.

I want to stay with Mommy.

Then go to her, she heard: she turned, stopped, turned back, seized the wise old creature in a sudden expression of gratitude: thanks are not always said with words, and the innocent heart of a child can say more with that sudden, spontaneous embrace, than can be accomplished in an hour's oratory.

Men in fire coats and bunker pants ran up to the smoking wreck, bellied down, reached in: from the driver's side, a man reared up on his knees:  "DRIVER'S ALIVE!"

Shelly and her father ran, each with a medic box in hand, knowing the cot would be brought, knowing they had to get to the second patient, knowing the car was beat to hell, it was a roll over accident, nobody was thrown from the vehicle --

Captain Crane bellied down, twisted, reached in --

Shelly heard a pained whimper, a little girl's voice, scared and hurting:

"I want my Mommy!"

 

Sheriff Willamina Keller swore, viciously, smacked the face of her control unit.

Her lights were working, the siren wasn't:  she leaned on the horn, accelerated around one vehicle, another, reached down, pushed a switch: the passenger window dropped.

"BEAR KILLER!  SING!"

The Sheriff's Jeep accelerated out of town just as hard as it could run, and as they passed the All-Night, more than one heard the damndest siren they'd ever heard, something that sounded like The Bear Killer, his head out the open window, howling for death and blood.

 

A cold, wet nose thrust under the sheet and a little girl's hand felt warm breath and curly fur.

She was unconscious when they got her out of the car, when they jacked it up and used the hydraulics to pry apart what they had to, the child hadn't responded to loud voices or a knuckle rub -- when they took her blood pressure, the Captain and Shelly looked at one another -- 

"Rigid abdomen, left lung compromised."

"Load and go."

The Sheriff slid to a halt, The Bear Killer launched out the open window, galloped for the cot being run to the back of the squad.

Cot, medic and Mountain Mastiff piled in the back, and a little girl's hand opened and felt warm, curly, famliar black fur.

You didn't forget me, she thought, and The Bear Killer swung his huge head, looked at her, his expression very old, and very wise.

I'll be here when you need me.

 

 

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

DONE WELL

The Sheriff's hand was strong and reassuring on the young man's shoulder.

They stood with hat in hand, silent and solemn as the Parson came down the row, shaking the hands of the few mourners.

He stopped at Robert Hickmann, gripped his hand, gave him an appraising look.

"None of her family would take care of her," he said. "You did. You did the right thing, son, and I'm proud of you."

"She was my aunt," he said, his expression the bleak look of a young man whose entire reason for existence was suddenly gone.  

He stood and watched fresh dirt shoveled onto his aunt's coffin: as the hole came to level, he turned, and the Sheriff with him.

"What will you do now?" Linn asked, his voice gentle: Esther came up on the young man's other side, picked up his hand, placed her hand on his arm: the young man's spine straightened, his shoulders squared themselves back, the natural reaction of a gentleman, when given such intimate attention from a Lady worthy of the name.

"I don't know, Sheriff," he admitted.  "I honestly don't know."

"Why don't you have supper with us," Esther suggested quietly:  she stopped, and so did both her escorting men.

"Thank you, ma'am," Robert said: he frowned, considered for a moment, realized he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

"Thank you, ma'am.  I'd like that."

 

Linn handed Robert a broad, short glass, half full of distilled California sunshine.

Robert hesitated until the Sheriff poured a brandy for himself, hoisted it.

"To a man who's done the right thing," he said.

They drank.

Linn accepted the empty glass from his guest, set it and his own on the tray: the maid took the tray and withdrew soundlessly from the room.

"You took care of her aunt," Linn said.  "You did the right thing."

"Yes, sir."

"She couldn't have been easy. She wasn't in her right mind."

"No, sir."

"I recall she ran you out of the house a few times."

"She did."

"You never hit her back."

"No, sir."

"It must have been tempting."

"I was tempted, yes, sir."

Linn lowered his head, considered for a long moment.

"Did she leave you much?"

"The house and property, sir. Not much money. She never had much."

"I know. You provided for her."

Robert shrugged.  "She was family."

"Are there any other family?"

"No, sir, none that I know of."

"What will you do now?"

Robert considered for a long moment, staring at the far wall: it was an expression the Sheriff was familiar with -- he'd seen it often enough, this look of a man suddenly lost, without an anchor in an uncertain sea.

"I don't know, sir."

"Ever think of going into business?"

There was the ghost of a smile, there and gone, and the Sheriff knew there was something behind it.

"I'd thought," he said hesitantly.

Linn waited, knowing silence often provoked a man to fill the silence with something.

"I gave thought to a mercantile," he admitted.

"Good money in it," Linn nodded.  "Stock goods that people want, don't waste shelf space and shekels with things that won't sell."  

"Yes, sir."

"I know of a new silver strike."

Robert looked up suddenly.  "Sir?"

"My wife has an excellent business sense," Linn said frankly. "She thinks you will make a good investment. She invested in silver mining and she's been successful. I know for a fact that the man who sells shovels during a gold strike will make steady money when everyone else is knee deep in cold water, working theselves to exhaustion."

"Yes, sir."

"We're willing to set you up with a brand new mercantile. Building, stock, ledgers, even good white aprons so you'll look like a proper merchant."

Robert's grin was quick and natural, then he sobered.

"What about Aunt Lillie's place?"

"If you're inclined to sell, I'm inclined to buy, and I'll give you a good price."

 

Robert slid his ledger book back onto its shelf: he turned, an ever present smile on his face, a smile that broadened with genuine pleasure:  "Sheriff!"

The two shook hands.

"How's business?" the Sheriff asked.

"Booming!" Robert declared, and Linn stepped aside.  "Ma'am," he said, touching his hat brim as a young woman smiled shyly at the tall lawman, stacked her purchases carefully on the counter.

"You're busy," Linn said. "Just wanted to stop and say howdy."

"A moment, Sheriff," Robert said, quickly adding up the woman's purchases: the money went into something under the counter, her goods went into her woven basket, and Robert came around the end of the counter.

"Sheriff," he said, "I have never been busier!"

"You look good," Linn said, and Robert saw the smile hiding at the corners of the man's pale eyes.

"Sheriff," Robert said, "you made a considerable investment in what I'm doing here."

Linn made no reply: it was plain the young man was working toward something.

"Sheriff, if this silver vein holds, I'll be able to pay you back in a year and a half."

Linn nodded slowly.  "We'll not know when the vein peters out until it does."

"That's true," Robert admitted uncomfortably.

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," the Sheriff quoted. "You're doing a fine job here. I won't tell you how to manage your finances, I understand you've a separate account at the bank for paying me back."

Robert's grin was broad and genuine, and his chest swelled the way a young man's will in a moment of pride and praise.

"I know the banker. He's honest as the day is long. You can trust him."

"Thank you, sir."

 

Sarah gripped her Papa's arm and they stared at the new stone at the settled grave.

"She was fruity as a nut cake," Sarah murmured.

"She was," Linn agreed. "I remember when she was still in her right mind."

"I never knew her then."

"You'd have liked her."

Sarah leaned against her Papa, sighed.

"Papa?"

"Yes, dear heart?"

"Would you do something for me?"

"What's that, darlin'?"

Sarah lifted her head, looked up at her long tall Papa.

"Remember her as she was," she whispered. "Don't remember how she became."

Linn saw something troubled in his woods colt's pale eyes as she added, "Remember how she was, Papa, remember for us both!"

Linn laid a warm, strong hand on Sarah's gloved fingers.

"I'll do that, darlin'," he murmured.  "I'll do that."

 

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL

 

Two sets of feet stuck out from under the aging Dodge pickup.

Linn's big ones, and beside his well-polished, size-thirteen Wellingtons, Marnie's considerably smaller, decoratively stitched, red cowboy boots.

Linn was frowning at the bell housing, glaring at the starter that offended him.

"Thought so," he muttered.  "I'll need a half-inch nine-sixteenths combination, same size socket, short extension and a ratchet."

He lay there and gave the offending mechanism the full strength of his pale eyed Look of Displeasure.

This did not impress the greasy starter one little bit.

Linn sighed; it took him a moment to shift his weight, he opened his hand, ready to turn it over and push against the Hillbilly Creeper -- a big sheet of cardboard he was laying on -- WHAP cold steel in his palm: he closed on the unexpected gift, brought tool steel around, examined it by the glare of the tubular work light.

"W'al be damned," he grinned: he stuck his hand back out and WHAP the knurled handle of the ratchet landed precisely across his calluses:  he closed his hand, brought this back, grinned again.

Marnie felt a genuine sense of satisfaction as her Daddy's voice came muffled and muttered out from under the truck:

"I could get used to this!"

 

Marnie frowned, worked her hand into the cotton work glove.

Her Daddy changed out the starter and that worked without grinding now -- "Bendix was shot," he explained, "I could have changed out just the Bendix, but I'm lazy. Putting in a rebuilt was less work" -- then in his general check of the farm truck, he'd found a fog light out and decided to work on it later.

Her Daddy went inside and must've gotten a phone call, he left and wasn't back for a while, so Marnie put the time to good use.

She pulled the burnt out fog light bulb and donated it to the 30 gallon oil drum that served as general trash; she carefully picked up the new bulb, deliberately wearing clean cotton work gloves, so as not to get skin oil on the glass.

Her Daddy one time told her skin oil from fingerprints concentrated the high-intensity bulb's heat and caused premature failure: she'd watched as he put on a brand new pair of clean, unused cotton work gloves to change out the driver's side bulb a week before.

Marnie leaned down, slid the new bulb into its socket, wiggled it ever so slightly: her eyes smiled, just a little, but her face was otherwise expressionless: gasket, heavy glass lens, chromed frame, Phillip's-head screws (she gave each screw a quick twist in the end of the grease gun, her Daddy taught her that!) and she carefully tightened down the screws.

Marnie opened the truck's door, turned on the ignition, flipped the fog light switch, saw the green telltale beside the switch light up: she climbed down, walked to the front of the truck and gave a single, satisfied nod.

Marnie's Daddy was a typical man.

He didn't realize the burnt out bulb was replaced for maybe a week.

Marnie hadn't said anything, but she'd been disappointed her good work hadn't been noticed.

Lucky enough, about a week later, she was riding shotgun when her Daddy went to the feed mill: it was well later in the day than he usually went, out of habit her Daddy ran head lights and fog lights both -- "If some idiot hits us and claims he didn't see us," he explained, "we can take our headlights and fog lights for forensic testing and demonstrate they were on," and Marnie nodded solemnly, absorbing this Daddy-wisdom with her usual attentive silence.

It wasn't until they backed into the barn, not until her Daddy hauled out hundred pound sacks of feed, threw them over his shoulder and packed them to where he needed them, not until they pulled out and swung around so he could back into the correct stall -- not until Marnie crossed in front of him, and he saw light reflecting brightly and strongly from her fair-skinned legs between denim skirt and red cowboy boots -- not until she crossed the passenger side, where that fog had been burnt out -- not until Linn considered two concentrated pools of light blasting against the corrugated white interior of the door Marnie was sliding shut.

Linn waited until Marnie dropped the hand forged hook in the big screw eye to secure the door, waited until she came up beside him, waited until she looked up at him.

"Marnie," Linn said slowly, "I don't remember changing out that fog light."

Marnie gave him her best Innocent Expression.  "You didn't."

"I don't reckon it healed itself up."

"No."

Linn squatted, took his daughter's hands in his own.

"Have I you to thank for this?"

Marnie's solemn expression never changed.

"Yes."

Linn hugged his daughter, stood, hauling her off the floor: he stood there, both arms full of warmth, full of life: he felt the texture of her left-hand braid against his cheek and he whispered, "Thank you, darlin'. I'm sorry I didn't notice earlier."

Marnie hugged him back.

"Tell you what.  I think there's some ice cream in the freezer hasn't been et yet.  I'm sorry is only words but an apology works better with ice cream."

Marnie nodded.  "I wanted to make you proud of me," she said in a little-girl whisper,  breathy and warm in his ear,and her big strong Daddy laughed, hugged her again.

"You have, darlin'.  You most certainly have!"

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

NO GREAT SHAKES

"Jacob?"

Annette sat beside her new husband, her head over on his shoulder: they were young, but not too young, they were of proper age to marry, and to raise a family, the bride with the bloom of youth glowing in her cheeks, the groom with the green strength of youth contained in his tailored black suit.

Jacob's arm was around his beautiful bride's back, his hand gripping her gently: he leaned his cheek over against his wife's carefully styled and piled hair.

"Jacob, can we afford it?"

Jacob smiled.

He and Annette came up here, one of the few high points accessible by buggy, and then only if you were careful: they'd spread a blanket, they'd had a picnic, and now they sat, looking out over an incredible distance, at the sawtoothed terrain, the flawless blue sky, clouds like freshly laundered cotton.

They'd been sitting together, thus, silent, holding hands, leaned against one another, sharing the quiet intimacy of husband and wife: it's been said that silence is a gift, and silence can be shared only with someone with whom we are more than comfortable.

Annette spoke first.

"Jacob?"

"Hm?"

"Jacob, can we afford it?"

She felt her husband's silent laughter.

"Darlin', that house is paid for already. You've seen my balance sheets and you've heard my plans."  His free hand laid gently over hers and she felt his breath come in, go out.

"We can afford it."

Silence for a time, then:

"Jacob, will we ever leave?"

Jacob considered this for some long time, his eyes busy: they were in the lee of a rock wall, sunlight warming them, the wind carrying its eternal secrets across the high country.

"Do you want to leave?"

His words were little more than a whisper.

"No," Annette admitted.

"You've seen the ocean," Jacob murmured. "You've lived in the big city. Do you wish to return?"

He felt his wife's deep breath, felt her warmth against him.

"And miss this?" she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper. "No, Jacob. If I am with you, I am content."

"I'm no great shakes."

Annette pulled away from him, gave him a surprised look.

"Jacob Keller!" she exclaimed. "You saved me and a half dozen other girls from being taken, you drove us up to police headquarters and turned the girls loose on that lying politician, you rode us out of town, the two of us on your stallion, right down the city street in front of God and evrybody, and now you're building the nicest house I've ever seen, and you're no great shakes?"

Jacob shrugged, picked up a pebble, flicked it away.

Annette seized his chin between thumb and two fingers, turned his head toward her.

"Jacob Keller," she said, her voice low and fierce, "you've shown me your ledgers, you've shown me your investments. You are respected and you are looked up to, and you're no great shakes?"

Jacob grinned -- a broad, boyish grin, that grin she fell in love with the very first time she saw him, back when she was struggling in the hands of the man who wished to abduct her, right after Jacob persuaded the Philistine that he was no match for a lawman's Jaw Bone of  Jack Mule.

"Jacob" -- Annette shook her head, twisted, came up on her knees:  she seized his face in both hands, planted her mouth on his: her argument was intimate and persuasive, her arms around him a testimony to her passion: alone on the mountain, the two laid back on the blanket, and when they came up for air, Annette laying across his chest, her palm caressing his smooth-shaven cheek, she said "Jacob Keller, you are my husband and I love you" -- her fingers traced the curve of his ear -- "and if you ever tell me you're no great shakes, I will cloud up and rain all over you!"

Jacob laughed, nodded, delighting in the colors in his wife's eyes, and for a moment a stray Scripture quoted itself to him, something about contenting himself with the wife of thy youth, and he considered, just before he gripped the back of her head and brought her mouth back down to his, that he was doing just that.

"Darlin'," Jacob mumbled, and Annette drew away barely enough to let him speak, "you've seen the city and so have I, I've seen the East and I came back here."

Annette's hands were flat on his chest, barely rubbing his collar bones, her eyes huge, glowing, eyes he loved to gaze into --
I could swim in those eyes --

"I don't reckon to leave these mountains, darlin'," Jacob said finally.  "How about you?"

Annette's reply was without words, but her argument was most persuasive.

Husband and wife were alone on the mountain, and neither had any plans to depart therefrom.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

I DON'T SEEM TO REMEMBER

A man with pale eyes stood up in the eddying smoke.

He smelled sulfur and he smelled blood and he took a step, took another.

He looked around, looked at men dead and dying, at men ripped from shellfire and from bayonets and from Cain's rock, men lying in a lover's embrace, if you ignored each with steel driven into the other's guts and the off hand around the other's windpipe, each crushing and choking and ripping  the very breath from the other's soul.

A pale eyed man felt a bright detonation beside him, felt himself blown sideways, looked down: his side was caved in and bloody, and he reached down and took a man's head by the hair and pulled it out of his crushed ribs and the bleeding head smiled and opened its eyes and said "Hello," and a flock of birds poured out of his ripped open ribs and spiraled into the clear sky above, forming a tornado, black and twisting and hungry and coming after him, inexorably, inescapably --

 

Sarah Lynne McKenna sat up in bed, wide awake.

She threw back her bedcovers, turned: the Irish Brigade slept with their trousers down over their boot tops, and Sarah did too: she shoved sock feet into her flat-heeled Cavalry boots, hauled up the black drawers, hooked the galluses over her shoulders and cinched the belt: she snatched gunbelt and hat from the bedpost and she was fast up and covered by the time she got to the bottom of the stairs.

Snowflake was waiting.

Sarah didn't bother with a saddle: she climbed the fence, swarmed aboard her coal-black Frisian, locked her heels in her mare's great barrel and leaned over her neck, her hands flat and pressing just below the long, shining mane.

"Go, girl," she whispered, and Snowflake turned, pointed her nose at the fence, soared into the night sky and landed easily on the far side.

Sarah's blood ran cold as she heard a howl, mournful, sorrowing into the darkness, grieving to the stars, and she knew which coal-black mountain Mastiff was singing for the dead.

 

Daciana draped a shawl around her shoulders, slipped barefoot through her tidy little house: it was as painfully neat as she'd kept her circus wagon, back when she was still a bareback performer: two steps and she was in the little galley of a kitchen, small, as mercilessly efficient as anything aboard ship.

Daciana reached into the shadow, her hands pressing a draping kerchief about something round and smooth, on a very old, hand-carved base, drew it to the middle of her little table, where the moonlight would fall upon it.

Daciana whisked off the black-silk cover, stared into the crystalline heart of a truly ancient crystal ball, a flawless quartz sphere as big as two fists together, and older than any two people she knew.

"The Veil is thin," she whispered.  "Grandmere, what can you show me?"

Daciana stared, unblinking, into the crystal ball, and around her, movement, unseen in the shadows.

 

Esther lay limp in his arms, her head bloody, her chest not rising.

Gunsmoke and departing souls flowed around him like morning fog, hugging the earth, not wanting to leave, but flowing, flowing like a river of the damned.

Linn threw his back and roared, the soul ripping scream of a man whose eternal essence was suddenly of no value at all without this one bright light, this one lighthouse, this one reason he drew breath, and he looked again and it was Angela, bloodied and dead in his arms, and he buried his face in her belly and screamed, he blotted his tears into her dress and raised his head and looked again and it was Connie, his Connie, the woman he'd married in his youth, Connie, slender and beautiful with straight brown hair and he smelled death and he smelled rot and she was decaying, decaying with the pox thick on her face.

 

The hired girl ran, barefoot, terrified, for the front door: she had a lighted lamp in one hand, she seized the cut-crystal knob, twisted, pulled:  "He's upstairs!" was all she could manage, and drew back as Sarah snatched the lamp from her and ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, ascending at a dead run.

 

Daciana's Gypsy soul sang in the moonlight, her slender body swaying, eyes closed:  she rose, she spun, she danced barefoot, the shawl clutched in both hands, above her head: a Gypsy healer, witch-woman some called her, danced with the spirits, those shades crossing while the Veil between the Worlds was thinned:  a woman danced barefoot in the little kitchen, and memories and souls danced with her.

 

Linn raised his head.

His arms were empty.

He was alone, alone in a bare field, a field where darkness and pain lay thick on the grass, smoke and fog drifting past him --

He looked around, turned, searching --

His hand went to his side --

Healed --

He looked up, toward the trees, curious.

Someone was beating on a pine board with a setting maul ... slow, ponderous blows, summoning him, calling him.

What the hell is going on here?

He seized the fog, the drifting smoke-mist, he threw it aside like bedcovers, he strode for the trees --

Pain detonated in his foot and his face and he staggered back, shocked, raised the back of his hand to his nose --

"Papa!" Sarah called, ready to twist, duck or flee: Sarah had become an excellent judge of men and their probable reactions, and she did not see any attack in her Papa's eyes.

"What just happened?" Linn whispered, his throat raw, as if he'd been screaming.

"Dear Papa," Sarah said, and Linn nearly wept to hear the pain in his daughter's voice:  she set the lamp down on the dresser and hugged her pale eyed Papa with the desperate strength of a daughter who knows far too well the agonies that nighttimes bring:  she felt her Papa's arms, lean and strong, crushing her to him:  she felt his quick breaths, she heard his strained whisper, "You're real!"

"Papa, I'm here," she whispered back.  "How can I help?"

Linn released his daughter, staggered back a step, then two more, until his legs just touched the bed, then he sat, suddenly, heavily, dropped his face into his hands, groaned.

"I help," Sarah heard: she had no idea how, but Daciana was there: she held something, like Sarah had been holding the lamp.

Sarah saw the bedcovers were completely off the bed, as if a desperate man seized them and ripped them free in order to escape.

Escape what?

Daciana laid delicate fingers on the black silk scarf covering the ancient crystal.

"You saw them," she said, her voice low, musical.

Linn nodded.

"They were terrible."

Again, the nod.

"All your fault."

"Yeah," Linn gasped hoarsely. "Every one of them."  Sarah saw his fists close, seizing the tick in an absolutely crushing grip, tight enough his knuckles blanched and one or two popped:  he looked away, fury claiming his expression, his teeth bared:  "Every one of them," he hissed.  "Every one, my fault!"

Daciana backhanded him, hard.

Linn looked at her, startled, surprised, too surprised to take offense.

She snatched the silk from the crystal sphere and light, pure, silvery, beyond-white-light filled the room, blinding him --

Linn rose, slowly, his jaw dropping open.

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes.

"No," he said.  "No, no, no --"

"Oh yeah," Connie declared, plainting her knuckles on her apron strings and looking saucily at him.

"No. You're dead. I buried Dana on top of your coffin --"

He felt something tug at his trouser leg.

He looked down.

He wasn't in a nightshirt, he was in his black suit, and a little girl looked up at him with big bright eyes and he saw she had a china headed doll in the bend of her elbow.

He'd buried her with that doll, the doll he's bought for her second birthday.

"You're ver-ry big," she giggled, and Linn went to one knee, looked up at Connie, looked at Esther --

There were others behind them, men he knew, men in uniform, men he'd led, men who'd --

He stopped, swallowed, closed his eyes hard:  he stood, his little girl in his arms.

"Connie?" he said in a small voice.

Connie smiled that shy smile of hers, the smile he first saw in the shadow of Sugar Loaf Mountain, back near Paint Creek when he'd gone to sell furs to Scotty when he was young, so long ago --

The black silk floated back down over the crystal and Linn stood in his silent bedroom, still in his black suit, the only light was from the single lamp on his dresser, and he looked from Sarah to Daciana to the maid and back to Sarah.

He closed his eyes, took a long, steadying breath, opened his eyes.

"Ladies," he said quietly, "forgive me, but I don't seem to remember what just happened."  He looked at the maid, looked at his own arm, saw he was in his suit:  "Have I been to bed yet?"

Sarah took his arm, steered him toward the door, Daciana and the hired girl following.

"I believe there is pie," she said, "and I'd like to hear more about Connie and Dana."

 

 

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

I ONLY NEEDED ONE

Sheriff's deputies, their feet hard down on large displacement throttles, streaked down paved roads and drifted with protesting rubber around poorly banked curves.

A pale eyed Sheriff, considerably closer to the situation, eased his Appaloosa stallion into an easy canter.

Anxious young men screeched to a tire squalling stop in front of Carbon Hill's rebuilt Mercantile:  Jacob Keller followed his pale eyed Gammaw's example and made sure his fellows all understood sign language:  he directed two teams without words -- one team behind the Mercantile at the far diagonal corner, the second team halfway down the building to Jacob's left: this covered the exits, the windows.

Sweaty-damp palms gripped checkered-plastic handles of double-stack magazine pistols; Jacob was behind his Suburban's engine and front tire, shotgun cocked, locked and ready to rock.

He heard hoofbeats, turned, looked.

The Sheriff rode right down the center of the paved street: a pale eyed lawman on a good looking Appaloosa, a double barrel twelve-bore propped up on his right hip: he came up behind Jacob and dismounted.

"One man with hostages," Jacob said, "said he'd kill everyone if we came in."

"Do we know who it is?"

"No, sir, not even a description."

Linn stood, stepped around the front of the warm engine, strode for the newly-painted, freshly-restored, Carbon Hill Mercantile's front door, a huge black mountain Mastiff following.

Jacob rose, flanked left, held at the edge of the boardwalk as his father seized the door, shoved it open, went in muzzle-first.

Jacob heard the meaty smack of someone getting hit, he heard the shotgun boom once, twice: shouts, a woman's scream:  Jacob ran for the door, the skin tightening on his face, feeling the blood cool several degrees as an old familiar Rage coiled in his belly --

Jacob spun in, dropped to one knee, swung --

Frightened eyes, people on the floor, one man awkward and bloody in death, to his left, the Sheriff tossed his empty shotgun to the wide-eyed proprietor behind the counter.

Jacob took a quick step to the left, to get a wall to his back, stepped on a second body: he swore, silently, damning his tunnel vision, realizing that he'd be dead if his father hadn't killed this first door guard first.

Jacob watched as his father paced toward the back wall, where several trembling and outthrust arms were pointing:  a door, and behind it, presumably, someone they wished to find.

The Sheriff's pace was deliberate, measured:  time slowed, and each time the man's boot heel hit the floor, it was like an unseen hand raised a padded maul and brought it down, hard, on the drumhead of Doom itself.

In that bright, shattered sliver of a second, Jacob remembered later, he honestly never felt anything any more genuinely terrifying, than the deliberate pace of a man who was going to have justice, a man who would have it peacefully, or otherwise ...

... a man who genuinely did not give a good damn which of the two it would be.

Jacob saw the Sheriff lean back, kick the closed door.

Jacob saw splinters of wood from the boot-blasted door's lock --

-- the door swung in --

-- the Sheriff's leg came down, his hand hard around the plow handle of a single action .44 in a black, floral carved Jordan holster --

Several shots blasted toward Jacob, he felt a bullet nick his hat brim: he saw the Sheriff disappear inside the door, heard a single, sharp, slap-in-the-face BAM! of his father's .44 caliber belt gun, then ...

...silence ...

Linn stepped through the door, his broad shoulders disappearing inside:  Jacob rose, ran across the floor, eyes busy: he turned, scanned the room, looking for any sleepers, any back shooters: he turned, went into the back room --

Sheriff Linn Keller was standing over a corpse.

He brought his revolver up, flipped open the loading gate, punched out the empty, dropped it in his shirt pocket and reloaded:  Jacob looked around, barely heard the whisper of blued steel dropping back into gunleather.

Jacob turned, looked around here as well.

Linn turned, regarded his pale eyed son.

"Check the hostages for injuries," he said, his voice steady, and Jacob saw blood drip off his father's trouser cuff and run down his boot, and he saw a stain spreading on the man's shirt.

Linn looked down and swore, quietly, powerfully, then he looked at Jacob.

"How many times did he shoot?" Linn asked.

"I counted four, sir."

Linn looked down, squatted, turned the dead man's head, regarded the blue-edged hole just below the dead man's nose.

"I only needed one."

 

Later that day, as Linn discussed the shoot with Jacob, Shelly came in, Angela with her:  Linn reached a hand through the siderails toward his wife and Jacob surrendered his place beside the bed.

Angela waited until her Mommy was seated on that rolling stool thing Doc liked to sit on, then she came up beside her Mommy and folded her arms across the top of the siderail.

"Daddy," she said, "you only shot the bad guy once?"

"I only needed one, darlin'," Linn grinned.

Angela nodded importantly.  "I know what Marnie would say," she said, then she shook her little pink finger at her Daddy and declared, "Show-off!"

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

NANTUCKET AND GLOSTER

Daisy's head came up like a hound hearing the distant horn.

She snatched the towel from her shoulder, wiped her hands:  she reached behind, seized the dangles on her apron string, pulled hard:  she skipped out the door, the forgotten apron dropping to the kitchen floor.

Forgotten were the viands, victuals, stews and bread in the oven: her departure was seen, and two girls came in behind her to tend the kitchen in her absence.

Daisy skipped down the hallway, her breath coming quicker, her heart lightening: she'd been a child in Ireland, a green-eyed lass still in the Old Sod, when she'd first heard this sung -- she'd danced then, and collected the coins thrown her way, and she'd be damned if she'd miss dancing to this shanty!

The voices were loud, they were a little off key, there was a squeeze box:  Daisy buckled on her hard-heeled dancing shoes, tied a ribbon quickly in her hair to keep it from falling forward, ran up the three steps to the little stage.

Daisy seized the rope, pulled, quickly, parting the curtains: a tin pipe joined the squeeze box, Daisy's soul soared on the music, and her legs followed, to the whistles, yells and appreciation of the Silver Jewel's population.

It wasn't often they got seamen this far inland, it was not often at all the Sheriff raised his voice in song, but here he was, that pale eyed lawman and four horn-callused Nantucket whalers, or Glostermen, or whatever the hell they were -- Daisy didn't really know, and she didn't care.

Daisy's Pa treated her to the strap when she came home, flushed with success and with a double handful of coin:  no daughter of his would disport herself in such a shameful manner! -- Daisy went to bed welted from belt to ankles, and the next night she was back at the waterfront, dancing again, her cheeks red with defiance, and this time she kept her coins -- and her dancing -- secret.

Daisy's great delight was the Irish hardshoe, and she was good at it:  men pounded hard-callused hands on tabletops in time to the music and Daisy's brisk counterpoint to the heartily-sung saltwater chanty.

Upstairs, that dignified matron of society and commerce, Esther Keller, put down her pen and smiled, listening, remembering:  not long after, she came downstairs, her steps quick, light, men's voices buoying her heart and delighting her soul, for she, too, knew what it was to dance before men, to the disapproval of a stern and very proper father.

Esther slipped through the men at the bar, laughing, skipped down the hall and into the stage door:  she nearly ran up the three steps, lifted her skirts, fell in beside Daisy.

Shave his belly with a rusty razor, 

Shave his belly with a rusty razor, they sang, and two women fell into exact rhythm, dancing as if they'd punished the boards together for years:  the Silver Jewel's cook, and the Sheriff's wife, danced for the joy of dancing, danced for the men who sang for the joy of singing.

Daisy's cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining, and she danced for a man with broad shoulders and big hands, a red-headed Irishman who roared the seafaring song with the Nantucket men, an Irishman who kept time with a half empty mug of beer and an adoring look for the woman on stage:  the green-eyed woman of business danced for men who knew what it was to row a boat with desperate speed, a woman who danced her thanks for these Nantucket whalers whose efforts helped haul her from a river, a deep and muddy river, hungry for human sacrifice, and she danced for the pale eyed man who stood shoulder to shoulder with the big Irishman, singing as loudly and as lustily as they.

Two women danced for the joy of dancing, and a saloon full of men sang for the joy of singing together, and for the women who loved them enough to dance to their united song.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

APEX

"You know the rules," Linn said quietly.

The boy ran back to the bench, seized a set of earmuffs: he clapped them on his head, twisted the switch, ran up beside the Sheriff.

Linn turned, looked around: he and the neighborhood lad were the only ones at the range.

Linn nodded.

The grinning little boy raised his leg, stomped happily on the board protecting the switch: a well shaken can of something carbonated launched straight in the air.

A grinning little boy and a pale eyed Sheriff followed its flight with their eyes.

Somewhere near the apex of its rise, the boy's peripheral caught a blur: he hadn't time to steel himself for the concussion to follow -- BAM! -- and the can of cheap stuff EXPLODED in a bright spray against the cloudless late-fall sky.

"Reload!" the Sheriff laughed, and the little boy's hand dropped to the open carton -- he gave the aluminum can a half-dozen vigorous shakes, dropped it into a thin-wall tube that looked like some kind of a homemade mortar -- 

The Sheriff nodded --

A sneakerfoot stomped happily on the weathered pine board --

BAM!

An old veteran lawman grinned and a little boy laughed with delight.

Linn looked at the lad, came down on one knee.

"Like to try it?"

The boy's eyes went big and round as he looked at this most potent talisman of the lawman's profession, a blued-steel, .44-caliber, single-action revolver: unlike the blocky plastic he usually saw in a lawman's holster, the Sheriff's revolver held an aura, a magic, whether from the gold-inlaid vine-work bordered around the muzzle, whether due to the gold Thunder Bird hand-chased into the frame, whether because of the red-inlaid rose-stem-and-leaves on the top strap...

Or maybe it was because it belonged to this long tall lawman, a quiet man who remembered what it was to be a little boy, looking at his lawman Mama with big and adoring eyes.

"Set up four cans yonder," the Sheriff said, and the boy snatched up the torn-open carton: he ran for the plank not far away, set four cans on the plank: he snatched up blasted-open, concussion-flattened aluminum cans and worked them into the empty cardboard carton, ran back, dunked the trash in the burning barrel.

A grinning little boy looked up at the Sheriff, and the Sheriff gave the lad an approving expression, and each one's heart warmed to see the other's reaction.

Linn rolled the cylinder around and dropped the loaded rounds into his palm, placed them on the loading bench, went to one knee.

The loading gate snapped shut with a metallic sound and the Sheriff placed the plow handle in the boy's hand.

"You'll grip it like this," he said, "this finger -- like so, above the trigger guard.  Keep it there and keep it straight.  Now your thumb" -- gentle and fatherly hands covered his, adjusting the lad's hold on the big revolver -- "there, just like that.

"Now you remember I showed you how to run the sights."

The lad nodded solemnly.

"You'll run these just the same as you did the other. Now raise it up and get your sight picture -- both hands, just like that -- reach up with your off hand and ear that hammer back."

A youthful thumb thrilled as it laid over the checkered hammer spur, felt the texture, brought it back, feeling machined steel chuckling to itself in the mechanical mystery inside the frame: youthful imagination populated it with wheels and levers and cogs and many more moving parts than there actually were.

"Set your front sight where you want to hit, center it in your back blade."

Young eyes looked over square black sights.

"When it looks right, bring your finger down and ease back on that trigger."

The boy didn't have to look.

He felt the Sheriff's approval as the hammer dropped.

Linn had him lower the revolver for several seconds, then bring it back up: dry fire is instructive for novice shooters and veteran shooters alike, and Linn wanted to accustom the lad to the revolver's feel, to how it handles, before trying live fire.

"Okay. What do you think?"

The lad surrendered the revolver to the Sheriff, his eyes coveting this blued-steel treasure.

"I like it," he said in a small voice.

"Shows you have good taste," Linn grinned.

He dropped in three rounds -- alternated loaded, butter-soft, full-wadcutter handloads with empty chambers.

"Now."  He clicked the cylinder one more time, snapped the loading gate shut.  "First up will be a loaded round. Same as before. Sights, sights and sights."

The lad nodded, accepted the loaded revolver, his demeanor considerably less excited and visibly more serious.

"Use your off thumb and bring the hammer back."

Youthful imagination was less concerned with the complex mechanical mystery inside the frame, and more worried about how badly it was going to kick.

"When you're ready."

A little boy, not yet in his double digits, stood beside a long tall Sheriff, holding a double handful of frontier justice: young eyes held an absolutely perfect sight picture, young eyes widened with amazement as something blasted away from the plank with a spraying cloud of carbonation.

Forgotten was any apprehension about recoil, or anything else, for that matter.

Sheriff Linn Keller knew many delights in his life, and he rejoiced to see one today.

He saw the absolutely unapologetic delight of a little boy who knew he'd done a good thing, a little boy who stood beside a grown man he respected, a man who approved of what he'd just done.

 

Edited October 28, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

EXPERT OPINION

"Sir?"

"Yes, Jacob?"

"The Silver Jewel will be sending over supper for you."

"Good."  Linn shifted in his hospital bed, the way a man will when he's uncomfortable from what he considers an excess of bed rest.

"Sir, I've been considering the Carbon Mercantile."

Linn's eyes were carefully expressionless.  "Go on."

"Sir, it'll be remarked on that you went in with no more body armor than an irritated expression."

"I doubt me not," Linn grunted, "that it will be spoken of. Or more likely I'll get spoken to about it." Half his mouth twisted up, half a wry smile, an intentional expression, not a result of internal or external injury. "I was off duty, ridin' fence, I heard the traffic and I was close by."

"Sir, we could've made a tactical entry in front --"

"I handled it."

"Yes, sir, you handled it well but you were reckless."

Pale eyed father glared at pale eyed son, his eyes hardening and becoming visibly more pale.

"Sir, over and above the fact that I've only got one of you, and settin' aside that if you'd got killed, Mama would never speak to you again -- that was a tactically poor decision."

"It worked," Linn said coldly.

"Yes, sir, it did," Jacob agreed, "and this discussion won't leave this room, but damn it, sir, you're the only one of you I've got!"

"You said that already."

"Maybe I want to emphasize the point."

"You were talking tactics, now your'e being selfish."

"No more selfish that you were, you pale eyed hellraiser!" Jacob snapped.  "If you want to strip your blouse and step behind the barracks, put 'em up because I'll go toe to toe with you whenever you want!"

Sheriff Linn Keller eased forward, leaning away from his set-up mattress:  he glared coldly at his son and said, "I can fire you at any time."

Jacob leaned over the siderail and glared just as hard at his father.  "Fire me then."

Father and son regarded each other in hard headed, jaw bulged silence for several long seconds; the atmosphere between them fairly crackled, and finally Linn nodded.

"Sit down, Jacob," he said, leaning back.  "If you hadn't spoken as you did, you'd not have been doing your job."

"My job," Jacob said coldly as he settled back down on Doc's rolling stool, "is what you've told me in the past: to keep the man above you out of trouble, and to keep the people under me out of trouble. Right now I am trying to do just that."

"You're doing it well."  Linn's teeth showed momentarily and he frowned at this betrayal of his pain, his weakness.

Jacob hesitated and Linn stepped into the hesitation.

"You've hit me where I live, Jacob. I don't want to leave Shelly and I sure as hell don't want to leave while you're here to make life interesting. You have children and I delight in them and I don't want to not see them grow and become all they are going to."  His head dropped back against the sweaty pillow.  "Jacob, all I could think of was ... hell, I wasn't thinking," he admitted.  "The only thing in my head was that no one is going to come into my county and pull something like this."  He swung pale eyes to his frowning son, grinned.  "Look at the message it sent."

"That the Sheriff is a damned fool?" Jacob grinned.

Linn raised a hand off the covers, waved it.  "Besides that.  No, Jacob, you had the place surrounded, and when they looked out the back door and saw two rifles in their faces, they gave up and that left only the one.  I couldn't know that, but your tactics are sound.  No" -- Linn shifted again, frowning at the IVs in his left elbow, looking up at the chuckling pump, the bag above it -- "Why can't they put some Kentucky Drain Opener in that?" he muttered -- he looked at Jacob again.

"Jacob, this sends the message that we don't fool around.  Nobody will talk about establishing a perimeter, assessing the situtation and coming up with a plan.  The only thing that'll get talked about will be that this county kicks the door and goes in killin' without hesitation."

Jacob remembered the two dead men inside the front door, both with a fist sized hole through their wishbone, one with the distinct shape of a shotgun's butt mashed deep into his face where an old veteran lawman engaged the enemy at close quarters in an effective manner.

"I'll agree, sir, you didn't hesitate any a'tall."

"Had I been on duty instead of ridin' fence," Linn muttered, "I'd just have a bruise instead of a hole in my lung. Your Mama didn't say much when she was in but her eyes said plenty."

"Yes, sir."

"Sometimes, Jacob, we have to do something even if it's wrong. I did and it worked."

"Yes, sir."

"We want to send a message, Jacob. This sent the message that we don't negotiate, we kill. We don't hesitate, we kill. We send this message and we prevent future hostilities."

"I see, sir."

"Bruce Jones helps with that. Did you see last week's paper?"

It was a rhetorical question; in an era of increasingly electronic communications, the local newspaper was still quite popular, and a stray thought tickled the edge of Jacob's memory, something about a tourist's review of Firelands describing the quaint habit of actually reading a print newspaper in public, at the barbershop, even on a bench on the public street.

"I saw the paper, sir."

"You saw how he covered the Lawman's Invitational."

"Yes, sir."

"He publishes scores like he prints the football team's scores. He shows lawmen on the line, knocking down steel plates, he shows them running an assault course and he's gotten some great photographs of men at a dead run, brass flyin' in the air, knockdowns at half-mast" -- he stopped, nodded.

"That is also prevention, Jacob.  We want to impress on the criminal mind that if they come here, they leave in a rubber sack."

"Yes, sir."

"That's not why I went in like I did."

Jacob's left eyebrow quirked up.  "Sir?"

Linn leaned forward again, almost managing to hide a pained grimace as he did: being shot through the ribs is not a comfortable thing, neither at the time, nor when healing up.

"It made me mad, Jacob," Linn said.  "I won't have that kind of thing in my county so I went in with a full head of steam and I let my badger loose on 'em."

Deputy Sheriff Jacob Keller nodded, considered, looked back at Sheriff Linn Keller, rose.

"Sir," he said, "you are a hard headed and contrary old man."

"I'm not old yet, Jacob, but I fully intend to get there!"

Dr. John Greenlees tapped discreetly at the door, pushed it open, just in time to get a face full of laughter as father and son were apparently sharing something amusing.

"Are you ready to get out of here?" Doc asked without preamble, then added, "you contrary old man?"

Father and son looked at one another, looked at Doc, and Jacob shook his head.

"There you have it, sir," he chuckled, "I am now given expert opinion on the subject!"

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

THE FUEL PUMP AND THE LOTTERY TICKET

 

Dawn was streaking the eastern sky when Linn backed his Jeep into his usual spot.

He was not surprised the kitchen light was on, nor that the smell of bacon and eggs, of fresh brewed coffee, of freshly toasted bread, greeted him as he came through the door.

It did not surprise him in the least little bit that his pale eyed Mama was dressed for the day and waiting for him just inside the door, her arms crossed, her head lowered a little, and he walked through the radiating waves of her skeptical expression and embraced her, chuckling:  he laid his head over on top of her head and laughed quietly, drew back, looked at his Mama and declared, "Mama, I shot a Jeep last night!"

Willamina raised an eyebrow, gave him a skeptical look, but he saw the hint of a smile at the corners of her eyes.

Linn had long ago given up on figuring how his Mama knew when he'd be home.

He did his best to keep regular hours; last night was very much the exception, he hadn't come home all night, and his Mama knew -- she always knew! -- when he was on his way home, and mornings like this were the rule and not the exception: bacon and eggs were hot and ready to throw on the table.

They sat, they added some Extract of Bovine to their coffee, they picked up their forks.

"Well?" Willamina asked, giving her son a knowing expression.  

Linn set down his fork, threw his hands wide:  "Well, yas sees, it's like this," he said in a nasal voice, not far short of laughing again.

"We were out with Mitch's Jeep --  you remember the one, that old Army job they had to replace the gas tank on?"

"The one where the plastic lining stripped loose and floated around until it got sucked over the outlet and shut off the gas like a switch.  I remember."

"His fuel pump went out."

"Really," she replied,her voice carefully neutral.

"Poor guy, he's the best war-era Jeep mechanic I've ever met," Linn said thoughtfully, shoveling in fried eggs between phrases, with all the enthusiasm of starving youth. "He's not so much on these new ones unless it's strictly a mechanical problem."

Willamina nibbled a strip of crunchy bacon, her demeanor deceptively casual.

"How did you get home?"

Linn laughed.

"You wouldn't believe the Hillbilly Engineering we cobbled up to get home!" he laughed, picking up a slice of buttered toast.

"Try me."

Linn looked at his Mama: her expression was skeptical, his was amused.

"His sister used to be a nurse and she had some empty glass IV bottles."

Willamina raised an eyebrow.

"We murdered the cap loose and dumped it half full of gas, we crimped the cap back on as best we could --"

"Uh-oh," Willamina muttered.

"Uh-oh is right. He had some epoxy something in his toolbox and it set up fast enough we got a seal around the cap, then he said he didn't have a drill to put a hole in the hood."

"And ...?"

"I told him to figure where he needed the hole and I made one."

"You made a hole."

"In his Jeep's hood, right over the carburetor."

"And you used ...?"

Linn laughed again, took a noisy slurp of coffee.  "He's got a 44-caliber hole in his hood now. He ran IV tubing down into the carburetor. I stood up on the passenger side and leaned out over the windshield and regulated the pinch cock for throttle and we made it home -- we couldn't make much speed, but we made it!"

Sheriff Willamina Keller was good at gauging expressions and body language; she had the added advantage of Mother's Intuition: she had the added gift of an excellent sense of smell, and she'd detected a particular floral scent when her laughing son embraced her just inside the front door.

"And the girls ...?"

Linn laughed again, shook his head.

"Mama, I blew it. The fuel pump went out as soon as we got to where we were going -- his girl and mine were in the back seat -- they weren't happy, but Shelly pointed out we weren't trying to put the moves on 'em once we broke down."

Willamina made no answer.

"Shelly let me hug her when I got her home, and I told her Pa what happened. Turns out he'd already got a phone call and knew about it, so he knew I wasn't lyin' to him."

"I thought I smelled her perfume on your vest."

"She let me hug her at least," Linn said. "I'm surprised she allowed that. She said it was the one worst date she'd ever been on."

"Mm-hmm."

They finished breakfast; Linn washed dishes with his usual speed and efficiency as Willamina finished getting ready for work.

Linn switched his boots and shrugged into his old jacket and prepared to head for the barn; he hadn't slept, obviously, but he was young, and at that age, sleep isn't all that necessary.

Willamina stopped at the All-Night -- something she didn't usually do -- she saw Big Mike's truck was at the pumps, and Mitch was filling the tank.

She went up to the lad, laid a hand on his shoulder: he turned his head, grinned:  "Hi, Mom, whatcha doin'!" he greeted her -- an old joke between them -- Willamina said "How's that good lookin' Jeep of yours these days?"

Mitch sook his head sadly.  "I'm headed for the parts store right now," he said gloomily. "My fuel pump went out."

"Ouch!" Willamina sympathized. "Were you on the road?"

"I was way the hell out in the B&W," he admitted -- "the Bushes and Weeds" -- he grinned again, that quick, impulsive grin of the self-conscious young -- "we had to rig up a fuel system to get home."

"How could you rig a fuel system with your fuel pump dead?"

Mitch laughed; the nozzle shut off, his father's truck's tank full:  he turned, placed the nozzle back in the pump, screwed on the gas cap. "I rigged up my sister's vodka dispenser. She wanted to put vodka in an IV bottle and dispense drinks at a party, but they never had the party so she just put it in the back of my Jeep. She thinks it's a trash hauler."

"I see."

"We had to punch a hole in the hood and run IV tubing through it and direct into the carburetor. Had to take the air cleaner off. One of us stood up and held the IV bottle out over the hood and regulated flow with that IV pinch thing."  He shook his head.  "Took us all night to get back, but we made it!"

Willamina looked at the All-Night.

"I'm going to buy a lottery ticket," she said.

Mitch looked at her, surprised.

Willamina laughed. "I was replacing the bulb in my bathroom exhaust fan light yesterday," she explained. "The old one was only twenty years old, don't know why it failed so soon."

Mitch shook his head sorrowfully and intoned in a doleful voice, "They don't make 'em like they used to."

Willamina laughed, patted his shoulder.  "I dropped the replacement. It twisted out of my fingers just as I tried to screw it in, it did a swan dive over the shower curtain and I just knew it was going to explode when it hit the shower floor!"

"Uh-oh," Mitch grunted sympathetically.

"It bounced."

Willamina's smile was broad and genuine.  "It was a new LED bulb, they're plastic instead of glass. I put it in and it worked. With luck like that, I'm buying a lottery ticket!"

Mitch laughed, walked with her into the All-Night.

"After last night," he said, "I'm buying one too!"

 

 

 

Edited October 30, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GOOD SOWEEN!

A still figure in a long robe of unbleached linen, its hood thrown deep over its face, leaned on a traveler's staff: beside this silent, unmoving figure, quite the opposite:  a woman with an openly lustful expression: hussy she was, by appearances, she was a dancing-girl with a painted face, a harlot in a short skirt, stockings and high-heeled dancing shoes: Sean's great laugh boomed out into the darkness, bidding them enter, and so it was the Sheriff and his wife came to help their great, red-headed Irish chieftain celebrate the harvest, the Samhain, or as Sean declared it, "Soween!"

Linn threw his hood back, handed off his staff to a grinning Irish lad, embraced Sean most heartily: the two men laughed, their ribs cracking as each tried to haul the other off the floor: Sean succeeded, with little effort: the Sheriff did as well, though he had the harder task, as Sean was taller, bigger boned and more heavily muscled than the lean lawman.

Green eyes, and more than one pair, regarded this happy contest, each assessing the other's husband, the way that women will: the two turned to each other, each leaning her red coiffure into the others, smiling and talking quietly as they walked away, deeper into the room laughing quietly and sharing some feminine confidence or another.

One of Sean's lads came running through the happy gathering, balancing a carved-out gourd in his hand, a gourd he'd hollowed and carved eyes and a mouth, a gourd that trailed smoke from the coals he'd dropped in it: he ran out the back room and out the open front door, yelling into the night:  Daisy looked up, gathered herself to scold the wayward child, then shook her head as she realized he was long gone into the darkness.

 

Sarah sat with Daciana, sipping tea and talking quietly.

Each knew the Veil was thinnest this night, this Samhain, this Allhallow's Eve: shades stalked the night, shadows moved and whispered: children ran with innocent hearts, their purity proof against such malevolence, but darkness moved to capture what darkness believed rightfully its own, and one such prize was Sarah herself.

Sarah, as a young child, was recognized by the Dark as a potent enemy, one whose bloodline could seriously impair the march of evil in the ages to come: Darkness brought horror and shame to her in those very young years, seeking to cripple her spirit: indeed, half her soul had been torn away and taken to the fires of Hell itself, but her natural defenses kept her from being blasted, and she instead became a misshapen waif, sorrowing and alone in the hidden darkness, hiding from those creatures who would torture her while she remained -- at least, until her living self burrowed through a hole that shouldn't exist, a fistula between the Land of the Living and a place that should not be: she'd reunited with her stolen half, she'd emerged stronger, two men stood in armor from their earlier lives, men who'd swung swords together, and they safeguarded the gateway by which Sarah -- and then they themselves -- made their escape.

Shadows moved between the moon and their window; whispers, half-heard, promised death and ruin, should either of them leave the protection of Daciana's tidy little house, guarded as it was with wards, charms and spells, as was the adjacent round barn built in under the mountain's overhang.

Sarah smiled as the two old and dear friends talked in quiet voices; they ate a light supper and visited for no reason other than they delighted in their visits, and finally, when Sarah took her leave, Daciana smiled to see the gleam of a silver blade, held up alongside Sarah's forearm: the handle was wrapped with sliver wire, the tapered pommel served not only as a fighting knife's counterweight, but also as a skullcrusher: the two embraced, Sarah stepped outside, caressed her Snowflake-mare, stepped up on the mounting-block and into the saddle.

Snowflake was black as a sinner's heart, a shade that matched the night; silver on her bridle stood out like silver dollars tossed out on a black-velvet rug, and something dark coasted out of one shadow and into another, something just as black but far more deadly, something with eyes that burned red, like the coals in Sean's little boy's gourd.

"Fire and silver and Sarah," Daciana whispered, and the words became a ward, a charm, a spell in and of themselves, and there were those shades, crossed during this thinning of the Veil, which fled to hear the potent susurrant from the trick-riding Gypsy healer's lips.

Sarah turned.  "Good Samhain!" she called, her words happy, bright on the night air:  Daciana raised her hand, like a blessing:  "Good Samhain!"

In one house, a feast; in another, a visit between two good friends: childhood's innocence, and a fireheart gourd, protected the one, and harder guards, the other.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

QUIETLY, ON THE FRONT PORCH

A robed monk and a face-painted slattern held hands.

The world was near silent, as it usually is, just before dawn; a few birds, the occasional sound of a horse, a distant dog's bark, but otherwise ... otherwise, silence.

The air was ever so slightly damp: cool, almost chill; the pair were not cold, their connection warmed them as they sat side by side in the double rocking chair.

The monk released his careful grip on her hand, ran his arm around her, drew her close.

"Mmmm," she hummed.  "Keep that up and I'll have to corrupt my favorite monk."

Sheriff Linn Keller leaned over, kissed his wife under the ear, nibbled at the ear-bob on her earlobe, whispered, "I'd like to see you try."

"You, sir, are a cad!"

"I'm also a scoundrel, darlin', like to try me?"

Esther turned and gave her husband an openly lustful look.

"Yes," she whispered.  "Yes, I would."

It wasn't the first time she'd left lipstick on her husband's face, and God willing, it would not be the last: their eyes spoke of the lust-fires each ignited in the other's belly, their expressions quickly veiled as the maid rattled the doorknob and coughed before she opened the door and brought out her tray.

She placed the tray on the sidetable, curtsied as she always did, turned and swept back inside: coffee, tea, warm cinnamon bread with butter and honey reached over with scent-feathers and teased the two.

They heard the hired man open the barn door, as he always did, with a groan and an oath; they heard the maid's near-silent retreat back down the hallway in the house behind them; they knew the world was waking, but now, for this moment, they were alone, and together on their own front porch, and before they went inside and divested theselves of their Samhain guise, they relaxed and looked at the colors, boldly painted above and across the high mountain peaks.

"It's been years since we stayed up all night," Esther murmured.

Linn nodded, smiled, gripped her hand lightly, released:  "It's been too long."

"We're getting kind of old to stay up all night."

Linn kissed his wife, preventing her uttering any further heresy: her response to his effort showed that she did not believe her own words on the matter.

"Do you think the maid thinks we're too old?" Esther whispered, her green eyes glowing, promising delights best left to the imagination: Linn smiled quietly and whispered back, "If she does, I'll spank her!"

Esther giggled and Linn grinned, and so the two of them, man and wife, partners in life, looked at hot coffee, hot tea, warmed cinnamon bread, and decided that perhaps they would continue this conversation upstairs.

A robed monk swept a short-skirted dancing-girl up in his arms and carried her upstairs, and the maid smiled as she heard the bedroom door close.

She and the hired man had coffee and tea and cinnamon bread, which is what she'd planned all along.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

ACCEPTED

Reverend Johyn Burnett sagged, sat heavily on the tailboard of their first-out pumper.

He felt like someone pulled a cork out of his boot heel and drained out all his strength.

"My bones are poured out like water," he whispered, the sibilants echoing off the lowered fire helmet's visor.

A hand on his shoulder: he looked up.

"Chaplain?"
Reverend Burnett swallowed, tasted smoke, tasted the smoldery-wet-paper-trash-fire smell of a house fire.

The Chief turned, dropped onto the tailboard beside the sky pilot.

"You didn't have to go in."

"Yes I did."  

Reverend Burnett, Chaplain for the Firelands Fire Department, coughed, hawked, spat.

Chief Fitzgerald clapped his Firecraft-gloved hand on the man's shoulder, twice, rose: he went back into the fireground to supervise the overhaul.

The Chief stood, watching, then moved in to lend a hand: Chief he might be, but he was a fireman, and firefighting is nothing short of hot, dirty, hard work.

The bodies were gone, carried away in two vehicles, one a borrowed van, the other, the Suburban from their coroner's office:  the bodies were small, they were shrouded in white sheets from the ambulance, and they were the first fireground deaths their Parson and at least two of the Irish Brigade had to handle.

The Chief looked at the ladder, still set up against the highest window, a window where their youngest member dove into the now-missing window, headfirst: they'd arrived, they seized the ladder, ran it up as it was footed and hoist, it slammed against the side of the house with two men climbing it, both of the going up that ladder as fast as a man can run on level ground.

The junior member was first into the upper floor of the fire structure: cause of the fire had been an oil furnace under the stairs, and it burnt out the stairs, fast, trapping three children upstairs: mother and infant were downstairs, asleep, the father, at work.

The mother got out, with her youngest baby, but the children were upstairs, asleep.

The Chief stared at the window, still exhausting a thin trickle of smoke and steam.

Chad was inside, the Captain was most of the way up the ladder, and they heard a man's scream, muffled by the tight-cinched mask of his US Divers SCBA: men were running up with hoselines, nozzles, ceiling hooks: men froze to hear the sound of distress, because there's only one thing it could mean, and what it meant was very, very bad.

Chad shoved head and shoulders out the blown-out window, something in his arms, something filthy-blanket-wrapped and oblong:  "CAP I FOUND ONE AND SHE'S ALIVE!"

The Chief closed his eyes and remembered the moment, like a snapshot, permanently engraved on his memory.

Chad, his mask dangling from its neck strap, handing off the bundle to the Captain, the blanket suddenly bright in the glare of the spotlight, swung by an anonymous hand: he saw a thin vapor from a child's mouth as Chad handed the survivor off to the Captain.

It was strictly against regulation, it was forbidden, but they all practiced it, because it was fun: the Captain kicked his fireboots off the rung, drove his insteps hard against the uprights, tobogganed down the ladder: he landed, men's arms catching him, keeping him from going over backwards:  Shelly ran up with the resuscitator in one hand, the oxygen tank turned on, the demand valve ready in the other hand, and the coroner raised his arm to block her.

Shelly ran into the man's arm, shocked: the Coroner pulled the blanket open, tried to lift the child's eyelid.

The child's face was so badly burned, the eyelid split.

Dr. John Greenlees shook his head and said "Don't even try."

The Parson had run up with Shelly, as fast in bunker pants and fireboots as she was in Nomex trousers and Wellington boots: the Chief remembered the look on the Chaplain's face, remembered thinking "Now we'll see what you're made of."

They brought out the rest of the bodies, handed them down the ladder, quickly, for the fire was advancing: they got the last one out just as fire started out the window.

The Parson did not hesitate to help sheet and shround the little bodies; he knelt, and the few men available stood beside him, talking to God about the still, small forms laying on the spray-dampened grass, helmets in their hands, heads bowed, then every one of them -- every man there, Chaplain included -- turned and looked at the involved structure.

Hate -- good, honest hate -- hardened every man's face.

Every man there settled his helmet on his head, tugged his gloves more firmly onto his hands.

The Irish Brigade attacked the fire like a personal enemy.

They went into the house and did battle, belt buckle to belt buckle, with an enemy that wanted to consume them and the entire world -- fire is mindless, treacherous, sneaky, hungry -- if it could eat their souls, it would, and then it would eat the rest of the entire world.

The Parson was right there with them.

Reverend John Burnett took a savage joy in cutting into a wall with a fire ax to expose fire running up the inside of the wall, he drove the point-and-hook of a pike pole into the plaster ceiling, yanked down burnt plaster, chunks rattling off his helmet -- lath, chunks flaming embers, falling on his helmet, his shoulders as he exposed the heart of the enemy: he took his turn on the nob, driving his watery fist into the guts of the enemy, again and again, and the man knew hate.

The Parson learned to hate, that night, and he learned that no matter how hard you hate, it does not help.

He helped kill the beast that killed those innocent children, he was relieved on the knob by a fresh set of hands, he went outside and pulled his self-contained mask from his face and let it dangle.

As hard as he'd hated, as hard as he'd fought the enemy, those children were still dead.

Reverend Burnett went back to the side yard where he'd knelt beside the still bodies of innocent children, killed not from carelessness or maliciousness, but dead anyway, and then he walked back up to the tailboard of the pumper.

Reverend Burnett sat, heavily, suddenly, he accepted a bottle of water, he spread his legs, he bent over and threw up.

That was the night he was accepted by the Irish Brigade.

Until then he'd been a preacher, a nice enough fellow with fine words and a friendly manner, but still an outsider.

His firecoat still had the blue Scotchlite of the Chaplain, his helmet still had a reflective cross on the left and the right, with the reflective CHAPLAIN on its beavertail, but there was a difference.

His gloves were stained and dirty, as was his coat; his helmet, dirty, spattered with water and ash and the filth from a fire, and his coat bore the ground-in dirt common to the profession.

Reverend John Burnett, Chaplain and sky pilot, had gone through fire training with them, he'd pulled maintenance with them, polished apparatus and scoured floors and made coffee with them, but it wasn't until he'd shared a working fire with them, it wasn't until he'd gone to war beside them, it wasn't until he engaged in battle as one of them, that he was finally, truly, accepted.

He didn't realize it, of course.

He'd thought he was already accepted; he thought he was One of Them already, but it wasn't until after he'd performed the funeral service for the children, not until after he'd met the bereaved parents and counseled with them, not until the house was torn down, the foundations bulldozed into the crater that used to be a basement, not until he realized the Brigade greeted him with a little more warmth, their words more genuine, their hand on his back or on his shoulder more frequent, that he finally realized he was accepted into their inner circle.

The Parson would remember that night for a very long time; he would wake at night and smell it and taste it and he'd wake, still feeling the weight of the wet and filthy armor of a working fireman; he'd wake, hearing the hiss and click of the air pack as he breathed, he felt the woven-linen, inch-and-a-half firehose, heavy and turgid and alive in his gloved grasp, he heard the steady hiss of water escaping the Elkhart nozzle, soaking his gloves with the backspray, and then it was gone, and he was in his own bed, wide awake, listening to the silence.

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

TO LIGHT A CANDLE

The wooden panel slid aside.

The inside of the confessional was dark, quiet: the inside of the Sanctuary was always quiet, thick adobe walls kept out blistering heat and quite a bit of sound.

"I ain't here to confess," a rough voice said from the other side of the wooden screen.

"Speak your mind, son," came the reply, and a rough-dressed man with miles graven on his face, calluses on his hands and dust on his duds, looked with surprise at the screen: he considered, nodded.

"Friend of mine's dead," he said bluntly.

"A good friend?"

"The best."

"Where is he now?"

"I buried 'im as best I could. He's some miles back. Didn't have much to dig with but I done my best. I piled rocks on the grave so's nothin' could dig him out an' folks would know 'twas a grave and not to just run over it."

"How long did you know him?"

"Long time, Padre. Since the War."

The cowboy barely saw the tonsured priest on the other side of the screen nod, slowly: had his hairless dome not been shiny, he'd have never seen the movement.

"How did he die?"

There was a long silence.

Abbot William was taking Confessions that day, it was his turn in the rotation: as Abbot, he could have delegated this to a subordinate Brother, but he believed a leader should set the example.

He half expected his guest to leave, at his blunt question: he felt the man shift on his hard seat, then he said, "He kilt himself."

"I've known good men to do that," the Abbot said thoughtfully.

The cowboy looked with surprise at the grating.

"What caused him to do this?"

"He broke his leg. Got infected and then he smelt gangrene and he said he warn't goin' to die of the gangrene."

The Abbot nodded again.  "He was dead already."

"I reckon."

"There is no surviving gangrene."

"You seen it, Padre?"

"I was in the War."

Another lengthy silence.

"Padre, I been told killin' yerself is a straight ticket to Hell."

"It may be," the Abbot admitted, "but he was dead already.  No."  The Abbot shook his head. "A wise man once said 'God plays fair if He plays a'tall,' and I am inclined to believe that is very true."

"I'd not want him to go to hell. He was ... my pard."

Such volumes, the Abbot thought, in a single word.

"I would say you were fortunate to have had such a pard."

"Reckon so."

"Come with me."

The Abbot slid the latch back, stepped out of the confessional: the cowboy did the same.

They walked together to the ornate altar rail.

One man crossed himself and knelt; the other stood defiant, his broad-brimmed, sweat-stained hat in his hand, as the Abbot talked to God about it.

Abbot William rose, turned to the cowboy.

"We have a custom," he said. "We light a candle in remembrance of souls departed. Let us do that in memory of a good man. If you're hungry, I'd be pleased to share supper with you."

They turned from the ornate altar, walked to the tiered rack; the Abbot handed him a thin wooden splint, the cowboy lit a fragrant, hand dipped beeswax candle: he licked thumb and forefinger, pinched the flame out on the splint, handed it back to the Abbot.

The two stared at the candle's flame, steady and bright in its holder.

"I reckon he'd like that," the cowboy said slowly.

"Come. Talk is best over a good meal, and I'd like to hear more about your pard."

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

THE FRENCH HERETIC

Midnight shift, Firelands General Hospital, medical-surgical wing.

A nurse with silent tread moved like a ghost from room to room, making regular checks on the assigned patients: midnight shift was when things were either busy and stressful, or catastrophic: like most hospitals, they ran a short staff, and every nurse had to be as efficient as possible in order to get all the treatments done.

Bandage changes, wound vac maintenance, breathing treatments, prescribed or as-needed, IVs alarming, restless thumbs pressing impatiently on the nurse call: the nurse smiled, hesitated in the hallway, reached for the wheeled tower with the several monitors on it:  blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation, cords, tubes, Velcro wraps, complex, tangled, awkward: the nurse hooked a white sneaker around its base, pulled at the same moment as pulling on the upper section: the damned thing was top heavy and prone to fall over if carelessly moved.

The nurse began shift with a check on every patient.

One, a little old bluehair, gave him a surprised look when he said "Hello, I'm Jacques, I'll be your nurse tonight."

"You're a nurse?" she asked skeptically, whereupon he proceeded to feed her a good line of second hand horse feed and got her to laughing: after she found out he was as windy as a sack full of politicians, they got along just fine.

She'd hit her call button twice more through the night, once with the shamefaced admission that she tried to pour water from her pitcher into the glass and dumped it on the bed.
He got her into the bedside chair, winked and said "I'll take care of it" -- he disappeared, came back with fresh linens, a dry gown -- he'd stripped the bed, wiped it down, dried it and made it back up, and made it look easy -- then he picked up the gown, peered through nonexistent bifocals at the label and read, "Hot Cutter," then he looked over said absent spectacles and deadpanned, "That's French for One Size Fits Nobody."

Jacques was not the only heretic in Firelands.

The Sheriff was a heretic: a woman in a man's profession, good looking, too, but damned good at her job.

There was religious heresy as well, in which the populace participated with a glad heart: periodically, the black-robed Bretheren and the silk-veiled White Sisters from the Rabbitville Monastery would come to Firelands and hold a Catholic service: these were invariably so well attended that they had to adjourn from their little whitewashed church, to the more spacious firehouse: apparatus would be pulled out on the apron, chairs provided for those who needed to sit, otherwise the service was held in the ancient and traditional manner, with the congregation on their feet -- which took the Sheriff's tall son by surprise, so he sought out one of the Brethren -- Joseph, a subdeacon -- who explained that this was the rule and not the exception in an Orthodox church, and showed him pictures he'd taken in Alaska of just such a church, with and without congregation.

This one particular night, though, it was the French heretic, a male nurse, a man in a woman's profession, who drew laughter from a dour old woman who took a pointed delight in laughing at nothing, and in the years that followed, this French heretic who committed the heresy of becoming a nurse -- was thanked by his fellow nurses for his gentle way of bringing "That Old Witch" out of her perpetual state of criticism, which made their lives far less unpleasant when the old woman was readmitted multiple times before her death.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

GRAB SOME TIMBER

Sheriff's Deputy Linn Keller sat on a deadfall, his feet set wide apart and braced.

A friend of his sat beside him, white-faced and shaking.

Not far away, water chuckled to itself as it raced a rocky course down the mountain.

Ahead of them, what was left of a pickup truck leaned companionably against a rock half again bigger than its wrinkled, distorted, half-ton carcass.

Linn's eyes traveled back up the mountainside, as it had a dozen times already, following the path the truck tore coming down an impossible grade, following skid marks and tire tracks, small trees knocked off plumb and the occasional rock with paint scraped alongside.

They would discover later that the truck's previous owner burned up the tie rod ends from a bad case of Over Greasing: they were worn to the point of falling apart, and did just that, as father and son navigated a turn on their driveway, well up on the side of the mountain.

The truck whipped hard right and went straight downhill, one tire steering, the other snapped out sideways, ripped free of the rim and dragging: at first it tried to throw the front end to the side, then as the rubber parted company from rolled steel, it simply dragged: the father desperately tried to steer, his foot reflexively hard on the brake, until a rock tore a brake line and half his hydraulic system failed.

Linn was on patrol and caught movement, nailed his own brakes, shot a pale eyed glare through his windshield: he swore as he saw the truck's uncontrolled descent, swore again as he saw the truck was occupied.

He made a fast review of the terrain -- he'd been all over this section on horseback, and several times -- he pulled the front axle into gear, ground up a streambed, clawed up on a little bit of a bench.

For a miracle he was able to hit the Sheriff's repeater on the radio.

He knew the Cavalry would be along, and in short order, or as expeditiously as terrain and distance would permit: he set the switch to light up the repeater in his cruiser, ripped the talkie from its charging cradle, ran for the truck before dust and following cascades of fist-size rocks were done parading after the fugitive vehicle.

Neither father nor son were injured, though the father was almost in shock: who wouldn't be, Linn thought, coming down that grade and ramming a rock to stop -- 

Father and son were both seat belted in.

For a miracle, neither had any apparent injury.

Linn helped the father out the driver's window -- I probably shouldn't move him, but hell, he seems able, he thought -- the two men came around to the passenger side, carefully ignoring the damage done to the newly purchased, but worse for wear before they got it, vehicle -- the boy was lean and wiry and wiggled out his shattered window without difficulty, into the men's arms.

There was a deadfall just behind the boulder that stopped them.

A deputy, a father and his towheaded boy made their way to the deadfall.

Linn looked at them, indicated the improvised seat:  "Grab some timber," he said, and eased his own carcass down onto the bark covered deadfall.

The only sign that the pale eyed deputy was excited by this finding, was the fact that he'd set his feet wide apart when he set down: an observer might deduce he was braced for whatever would happen next.

The truck was busy steaming out its eternal soul.

It hadn't caught fire yet, and Linn reasoned it wasn't likely to: he did not smell gasoline, so the tank was intact -- thank God for small favors! -- he looked over at his friend, a fellow he'd gone to school with, a man with whom he'd been graduated from Firelands High, someone he'd known for years, who -- like him -- married his high school sweetheart, and was just as happy as if he had good sense.

"Larry," Linn said gently, "do you reckon you're hurt?"

Larry flexed his hands, opened them, looked at them, worked his fingers closed, then open, again.

"My hands are sore," he said. "I think I had a death grip on that wheel."

"The way it was bent," Linn grinned, "I'm not surprised!"

He looked down at the grade school boy beside him.

"How about you, Greg? You hurtin' anywhere?"

The lad looked at the lawman, shook his head.

Linn looked at the steaming wreck; a slight breeze brought him the smell of hot oil, of hot antifreeze.

"What do you think of all that?" Linn asked, looking at the boy, and Greg, like most children his age, answered with absolute honesty.

He looked at his father and declared loudly, "That was fun, Dad! Can we do it again?"

The lead element of the responding rescue team arrived in time to hear two men's loud and hearty laughter, the kind a man hears when two men just dodged a seriously large bullet, and just realized they'd live to tell the tale.

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103