Билл Пронзини - The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

In the booth Hood hung on tight to Kincaid’s hand. Five bottles of Bud had given her a buzz and she was feeling free and easy, the way she had ever since she’d let Kincaid talk her into taking the two thousand dollars and running off with him. She’d never felt about anybody the way she felt about Kincaid. Oh, sure, she’d been real afraid there for a while, but she wasn’t anymore. It’d been three months now and they were a long way from L. A., out in the middle of nowhere with their tracks all covered behind them. Safe.

She didn’t much care for the nowhere part, but that would change sooner or later. Kincaid would get a job or find some other way to make money, and when they had enough they’d head east to one of the big cities. Chicago, New York. Or Miami. She’d always wanted to go down to Florida. You could get lost forever in a place like Miami...

“Hello, Teresa.”

Hood looked up, blinked, gasped. Incredibly Hood was standing right there looking down at her, big as life, big as death. The first moment of shocked disbelief gave way to jets of fear when her eyes focused on the gun in his hand. Jerkily she started to stand up. Across from her Kincaid was doing the same — but before he got all the way up there was a deafening roar and his head exploded in a burst of bright red.

Hood screamed, her eyes bulging wide, her hands clutching at the edge of the table.

“I told you. I warned you what would happen if you ran out on me.”

“Oh God, Joe, no! Don’t!”

“Goodbye, baby.”

Hood threw up her hand, as if a hand could stop a bullet.

Hood walked slow out of the Buckhorn, crossed the deserted road again, and got into his car. The seat and the steering wheel were fire hot. He knew he should start the engine, get out of Line as fast as he could, but he didn’t do it. He had nowhere to go, nothing left to do. Now that Teresa and Kincaid were dead, he just didn’t care anymore.

End of the line for them. End of the line for him, too.

The Glock was still in his hand. After a time, all in one motion, he lifted it and put the muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

It was a wide spot on a secondary road in a corner of the Nevada desert.

Line, it was called. Some name for a town, Hood thought as he drove in. Maybe whoever founded it had called it that because the road ran line-straight through it from one section of sun-blasted wasteland into another. Or maybe it was because of the dozen or so old-fashioned western-style buildings that faced each other across the road like sagging blocks stretched out along a plumb line.

Dry, dusty, deserted except for an old man sitting in the shade in front of one of the storefronts. A dead town. A nowhere place...

It was right after supper and we were all settled around the cookfire, smoking, none of us saying much because it was well along in the roundup and we were all dog-tired from the long days of riding and chousing cows out of brush-clogged coulees. I wasn’t doing anything except taking in the night — warm Montana fall night, sky all hazed with stars, no moon to speak of. Then, of a sudden, something come streaking across all that velvet-black and silver from east to west: a ball of smoky red-orange with a long fiery tail. Everybody stirred around and commenced to gawping and pointing. But not for long. Quick as it had come, the thing was gone beyond the broken sawteeth of the Rockies.

There was a hush. Then young Poley said, “What in hell was that?” He was just sixteen and big for his britches in more ways than one. But that heavenly fireball had taken him down to an awed whisper.

“Comet,” Cass Buckram said.

“That fire-tail... whooee!” Poley said. “I never seen nothing like it. Comet, eh? Well, it’s the damnedest sight a man ever set eyes on.”

“Damnedest sight a button ever set eyes on, maybe.”

“I ain’t a button!”

“You are from where I sit,” Cass said. “Big shiny mansized button with your threads still dangling.”

Everybody laughed except Poley. Being as he was the youngest on the roundup crew, he’d taken his share of ragging since we’d left the Box 8 and he was about fed up with it. He said, “Well, what do you know about it, old-timer?”

That didn’t faze Cass. He was close to sixty, though you’d never know it to look at him or watch him when he worked cattle or at anything else, but age didn’t mean much to him. He was of a philosophical turn of mind. You were what you were and no sense in pretending otherwise — that was how he looked at it.

In his younger days he’d been an adventuresome gent. Worked at jobs most of us wouldn’t have tried in places we’d never even hoped to visit. Oil rigger in Texas and Oklahoma, logger in Oregon, fur trapper in the Canadian Barrens, prospector in the Yukon during the ’98 Rush, cowhand in half a dozen states and territories. He’d packed more living into the past forty-odd years than a whole regiment of men, and he didn’t mind talking about his experiences. No, he sure didn’t mind. First time I met him, I’d taken him for a blowhard. Plenty took him that way in the beginning, on account of his windy nature. But the stories he told were true, or at least every one had a core of truth in it. He had too many facts and a whole warbag full of mementoes and photographs and such to back ’em up.

All you had to do was prime him a little — and without knowing it, young Poley had primed him just now. But that was all right with the rest of us. Cass had honed his storytelling skills over the years; one of his yarns was always worthwhile entertainment.

He said to the kid, “I saw more strange things before I was twenty than you’ll ever see.”

“Cowflop.”

“Correct word is ‘bullshit’,” Cass said, solemn, and everybody laughed again. “But neither one is accurate.”

“I suppose you seen something stranger and more spectacular than that there comet.”

“Twice as strange and three times as spectacular.”

“Cowflop.”

“Fact. Ninth wonder of the world, in its way.”

“Well? What was it?”

“McIntosh and his chute.”

“Chute? What chute? Who was McIntosh?”

“Keep your lip buttoned, button, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about the damnedest sight I or any other man ever laid eyes on.”

Happened more than twenty years ago [Cass went on], in southern Oregon in the early nineties. I’d had my fill of fur trapping in the Barrens and developed a hankering to see what timber work was like, so I’d come on down into Oregon and hooked on with a logging outfit near Coos Bay. But for the first six months I was just a bullcook, not a timberjack. Low-down work, bullcooking — cleaning up after the jacks, making up their bunks, cutting firewood, helping out in the kitchen. Without experience, that’s the only kind of job you can get in a decent logging camp. Boss finally put me on one of the yarding crews, but even then there was no thrill in the work and the wages were low. So I was ready for a change of venue when word filtered in that a man named Saginaw Tom McIntosh was hiring for his camp on Black Mountain.

McIntosh was from Michigan and had made a pile logging in the North Woods. What had brought him west to Oregon was the opportunity to buy better than 25,000 acres of virgin timberland on Black Mountain. He’d rebuilt an old dam on the Klamath River nearby that had been washed out by high water, built a sawmill and a millpond below the dam, and then started a settlement there that he named after himself. And once he had a camp operating on the mountain, first thing he did was construct a chute, or skidway, down to the river

Word of McIntosh’s chute spread just as fast and far as word that he was hiring timber beasts at princely wages. It was supposed to be an engineering marvel, unlike any other logging chute ever built. Some scoffed when they were told about it; claimed it was just one of those tall stories that get flung around among Northwest loggers, like the one about Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox. Me, I was willing to give Saginaw Tom McIntosh the benefit of the doubt. I figured that if he was half the man he was talked of being, he could accomplish just about anything he set his mind to.