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Wild Pitch
A Sheriff Chick Charleston Mystery
A. B. Guthrie Jr.
To my children
Bert and Helen
and with thanks to
Charles J. Katz, M.D.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
People come in all shapes and sizes, it has been said, and so, somewhere in this world, someone may find a resemblance to himself in one of my characters; but I do not know, have not met, and never have heard about this possible counterpart.
A. B. G., JR.
CHAPTER ONE
I was squeezing a baseball when a shirttail character named Lancaster banged into the sheriff’s office to report what he said was a murder. For reasons other than alliteration we called him Loose Lip or Loose for short. The old wall clock that I wound once a week said the time was 11:30 P.M.
“By God, Chick, by God, a shootin’, a downright murder! A damn murderer on the loose! Buster Hogue, that’s who. And there at the annual picnic.”
Chick Charleston answered, “Easy.” He was an easy man, mostly, that is. “Now who and what?”
“Buster Hogue, I told you.”
“Shot or shooter?”
“The shooter shot him, like I been sayin’. In the head. Smack in the bald spot.”
“Sit down, Loose. One thing at a time. Where, now?”
“In his head. Oh, there on that little flat on the river. You know. Where we picnic every year, us that lives in the canyon and roundabout there. You’ve seen it, fishin’. Mouth of the canyon. You comin’?”
The sheriff leaned back in his chair. I found I was still squeezing the baseball, though the reason seemed pretty remote.
“Who fired? Was there a fight?”
“Hell, no, no fight. It was a picnic.”
“Yeah, a picnic.” The sheriff sat a little more forward, as if the movement might bring some order into Lancaster’s report. “Who did it?”
“Would I be here if we knew? Wouldn’t I be helpin’ with a rope? It was a shot out of the dark, and that’s where you come in, to find out. That’s what taxes are for.”
Loose’s taxes, I happened to know, were delinquent, what little they were.
“Is Buster Hogue dead?”
“As good as. What do you expect with a bullet in your bean?”
“Where is he now?”
“Loaded on a truck and comin’ in slow. The boys rigged a litter for him. Got to go easy on account of that rocky-ass road, though Buster ain’t feelin’ nothin’.”
“All right. Now let’s start from the first.”
“Chick, you ain’t listenin’. I done told you. All this palaver, and you might be corralin’ that bushwhacker.” Loose flung a wave toward me. “And here’s that pitcher of yours just feelin’ a ball.”
“Just tell me. All of it.”
“It was a good night for it, for the picnic, I mean. Moonlight as all hell. We even shot at a mark, some of us, and done fine. That’s how bright. Maybe forty or so of us there, countin’ famblies and guests. A bottle or two had went ’round, like they do. After we had target practiced and drunk and et, we set around the fire. There was some singin’. Buster, I happened to take note, had took off his hat.”
“You wouldn’t know whether everybody was there. All the time? When the shot was fired?”
“Some was roamin’ around, I guess. Don’t ask me who. And some probably had to go off in the bushes, after drinkin’ and stuffin’ theirselves.”
“No one saw the shot, I take it. No one saw the sniper, even in the moonlight?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. Might have been up on a ridge, or behind a bush or jack pine or all three. It was plumb lucky—or likely it won’t do no final good—that Doctor Ulysses Pierpont was there.”
“He’s that psychiatrist?”
“I guess so. Head doctor, they say, and Buster was shot in the head. He wrapped up Buster’s skull and said it looked serious, the doctor did.”
“He coming along to town?”
“No. He said he’d done all he could, which was plenty good, way I saw it. He sure shooed that professor away, him that was first tryin’ to help Buster.”
“Who?”
“Hawthorne, that’s his name. Professor Hawthorne. Kind of a newcomer. But, Christ sake, shake a leg, Chick!”
“We’ll wait for the truck,” Charleston said.
“Wait!” Loose’s tone had gone shrill.
“Wait.” The sheriff’s one word, spoken as it was, snubbed Loose up, like a fretful horse to a post. “But I’ll alert Old Doc Yak.”
Old Doc Yak wasn’t the right name of the town’s only doctor. Old-timers, remembering a past-and-gone cartoon character, had nicknamed him that, and the nickname had buried the real one. I couldn’t see that that aged and rickety pill-prescriber could help much. He wasn’t a surgeon: he was a homeopath, which itself is something apart from the common-run healers.
While the sheriff called and as we waited, I had time to think about Buster Hogue. Years ago, I knew from report, he had started out with just about one cow and one acre of land. By one means or another—hard work he always said, not without truth—he had built that first stake to maybe fifteen thousand acres, not counting leased land, and a herd of cattle too big for more than loose estimate. And he still was expanding, or had been.
He was land-hungry but a far shot from land-poor. Along the way he had picked up plots, quarter sections, sections and more, being in a preferred spot because in the later years he had the cash ready. He was grass-hungry, too, which isn’t quite a repetition of what’s already been said. He liked the grass of his neighbors, or liked his cattle to feed on it. And so, on occasions fitting and proper, he left their gates open and let some of his cows through. Or so it was said. And it must have been true, else no one would have heard about altercations.
Hogue had always come out of these quarrels with a whole hide—which was no wonder much. He was a combination of good nature, apology, bluster and toughness, and he could swing weight befitting the biggest rancher in the county. People as a whole rather admired him, more maybe for the mix of his talents than for the size of his roll. Even the wronged ones seemed to wind up resigned if still resentful. No one, I thought, could actively hate the old, fat son of a bitch, not really hate such a character. But now, it appeared, someone had.
We were waiting outside, me minus my baseball, when the truck pulled up. The sheriff directed it to Old Doc Yak’s office. There four of us took hold of the litter and steered it inside. Buster Hogue wasn’t dead yet: dead men didn’t snore. After we had lifted the litter to a table, Doc Yak shooed us out, all but the sheriff.
Three men had come in with the truck—Guy Jamison, who owned it, Blue Piatt and Oscar Oliphant. The last two were crusty old-timers who had little places up toward the canyon. The world would have said they didn’t amount to much. Guy Jamison, younger by a score or so of years, was a right man, who was establishing a dude ranch and outfitters’ business four miles up in the mountains. We talked about the shooting and got nowhere beyond the bald fact of it.
The sheriff came out and announced after he had spotted me, “He’s got a chance. The doctor says the bullet didn’t break through the bone but fractured it plenty. We have to get him to the city. Jason”—that was me—“lacking an ambulance, I’ve begged the hearse off Felix Underwood. He doesn’t want to drive that sixty miles to the hospital. Go get it, please.” He looked around. “You, Terry, there. How about going with him?”
Terry Stephens said, “Sure thing.” He was a friend of mine about my own
age, which was seventeen.
So I fetched the hearse, and we gentled Buster Hogue in. Just as we were about to wheel off, Old Doc Yak scrambled out of his office and climbed into the corpse section alongside Buster, aiming if he could, I guessed, to see that the hearse didn’t fulfill its true function during the trip. That was a thing you could say for the doc: he lived and died with his patients.
As we pulled away, the sheriff was beckoning to the other men to come with him.
It was a long drag to the city, but Terry and I didn’t say much, both of us feeling ghostly, I supposed, in a machine that had taken so many men to the graveyard. There seemed to be the smell of old roses and wilting carnations in it and the vapors, the dust, of dreams come to an end. Or the faint, lingering spirits of ancient codgers and grandmas whose dreams died ahead of the flesh.
The downing moon was ghostly, too. At full blush a full moon seems to spin like a fixed top. This one, just over the mountains, had lost its whirl and was ready to topple. Its long, last rays, ahead and to the side of our headlights, made crazy, light-and-dark strangers of the humps and hollows and buttes and small groves that both of us knew. Shortened and elongated, cast out of shape, weird, they kept us company and shut up our mouths.
A couple of men in white helped us unload Buster at the hospital’s emergency entrance. By his long, hoarse but regular breathing, you could tell he was quite a ways from dead yet. Doc Yak went inside for a while, came out and climbed in with us, and we set out for home.
CHAPTER TWO
I wasn’t a deputy sheriff that summer when Buster Hogue got his skull cracked, or ever afterward for that matter. I was too young for a badge. What I was was a flunky, though the word didn’t occur to me then. I served a few harmless papers, sat at the phone on occasion and ran errands, of which driving that old hearse with its unconscious cargo was the most important to date.
Old Jimmy Conner, who was deputized but served mostly as jailer, wouldn’t have agreed with me as to what was of first importance. I saved his bum feet by trotting to the Commercial Cafe and bringing back grub for whatever guests he happened to be entertaining at the moment. The sheriff had two other deputies. One of them was assigned to the other end of the county, where a brash oil-field settlement had sprung up. The remaining member of the resident staff was Halvor Amussen.
Halvor was an oversized Norwegian or Swede or Dane and, in any case, all tomcat. He and old Jimmy had a way of switching around on day and night shifts so you never could be sure which one at which time would be on duty. No matter. One of them always was.
Besides being convenient for Halvor, the arrangement suited Jimmy all right. His wife was a practical nurse and hence a hit-and-miss homebody. Sometimes, for want of some place to go, Jimmy would hang around the office long after his shift. The circumstances, his and his wife’s, seemed to make for a good marital relationship.
The county force was big enough, given my help, of course. Our town numbered only about 1500 souls and the county maybe 3500 or 4000 at the most.
Though I wasn’t a deputy, I could still count myself a member of the crew, and every week Charleston paid me three to five dollars, depending. I thought the money came from the county. It didn’t.
The job gave me pride. To be seen with Chick Charleston, who was Mister or Sheriff to me, gave me more. He looked like justice or law or clean order, and all of them tallied up. Habitually he wore polished boots and white, fitted shirts, often with a string tie, and a sand-colored stockman’s hat and frontier jacket and pants. If anything was lacking in the picture, it was a holstered six-gun, which he seldom strapped on. But he moved with a smooth, thoughtful assurance, with an easy grace, natural to him, that in itself spoke authority.
Chick Charleston had drifted into town when I was in grade school and, for one reason or another, had stayed put, coasting along on an income or savings that people speculated about. He wasn’t above being a good extra hand, though, when it came to branding or trailing cattle to and from summer range. His right name was Charles Charleston. “I guess,” he explained to me once, smiling his open smile, “the old folks were so stuck on the sound of Charleston that they wanted to repeat it, even bob-tailed.”
His old folks, rumor had it, were among the descendants of the English and Scottish dudes who had staked out their cattle kingdoms in Wyoming and gone belly up in the mortal winter of 1886–87. Maybe so. He could talk our language, the loose, occupational language of the small western town, but he could also talk the language of a culture beyond most of us.
A strange gink, the town thought before it got used to him and accepted him as part of its pattern along with the judge and the banker, the wet-pants half-wit, who swamped the Bar Star Saloon, and old Mrs. Jenkins, who yelled hymns while ankling to and from the post office where she never got any mail.
Then, provoked beyond endurance one night, he thrashed Ben Day, an ex-con and born brawler and also owner of a run-down ranch, who had whipped every other man he could get to stand up to him. So Charleston’s admirers put him up for sheriff, an office he didn’t much want, and put him back in the courthouse four years later without opposition.
If I didn’t know where my pay came from, I did know for sure that I was where I was because once I was a juvenile delinquent.
Some four years before, a friend and I had broken into a vacant country house to warm up after being caught in a blizzard while hunting ducks. Kindling and paper being right at hand, we built a fire in the old Cole’s Hot Blast stove. Then, comfortable, we roamed the big house and happened on to pillows and began chasing and beating each other with them. The pillows were stuffed with feathers. At first, I mean. We tossed away the slack covers, found some soap and drew pictures on mirrors. My contribution to art was a naked man at the ready. My friend did even better.
And yet there was a kind of innocence in all we did. We didn’t set out to do damage. We didn’t aim to show off, or chagrin or embarrass anybody. We didn’t give one thought to other people. It was as if the house, vacated, never again would be seen by human eyes. I doubt we even went that far in our thinking, if any. We were there, the house was there, and so—
It happened, though we didn’t know it then, that my friend lost his bandanna during our frolic. It happened that a member of the family that owned the house found it. It happened that my friend’s old man owned and operated the only laundry in town. From owner to sheriff to laundryman—and then our inning in court.
We were summoned from class, my friend and I, and led by our fathers to the office of old Judge LePage, who was only a justice of the peace but solemn enough for any and all jurisdictions. Ours was a silent and sorry walk, with guilt riding us and our fathers marching on either side, but sorrier yet was the time to come.
There were maybe a dozen men in the judge’s little hearing room, all looking as if they never had strayed from the paths of righteousness since being signed up for the Sunday school cradle roll. They were stiff as set slabs of lutefisk, which is a dried fish that has to be soaked and lyed and otherwise treated before becoming unfit for human consumption.
All were like that but the sheriff, that is, the enemy who had exposed us. He sat in the front row, 175 pounds of law enforcement carefully dressed, and his face wore the look neither of censure nor triumph. I didn’t know what to make of that look. Thoughtful? Impersonal? Coolly resigned to the fool ways of boys?
Judge LePage called the hearing to order. The family representative told of the condition he had found the house in. The handkerchief was introduced and identified by my friend’s father. Except for our expressions, which must have been giveaways, there was the only real evidence against us—the bandanna and its laundry mark—but we weren’t by nature liars and, our throats choked, fessed up with little nods to the big questions.
The case was dismissed with a lecture, a light sentence you might call it unless you’d been there. Judge Le-Page’s words would have blistered asbestos.
The men filed out, offish and l
ooking defiled by exposure to us, and by silent groups and singles started on their separate ways. I edged out alone, not wanting company, even that of my friend, and took a cross street and looked away yonder to the high hills which appeared cold but neutral. I knew I’d get more hell when I got home, cold but not neutral.
It was then I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice said, “It’s all over, Jase.” A turn of my head, and I saw the friendly, little-smiling face of Chick Charleston, the sheriff who had found us out. His soft voice went on, “I know, Jase. It’s almightly hard to be a kid.”
So there was the beginning of friendship and trust. There was the beginning of my hanging around him and his office. And there was the reason for the white-chip position I occupied.
In the years right after my great disgrace, I grew up fairly tall, six feet plus a fraction. I had, I discovered, a strong right arm. I became a schoolboy pitcher and was good enough, though still in school, in time to pitch for the scrounged-up town team. As I got better I began to get paid, as much as ten dollars for some games. That money, plus sheriff’s-office cash, was enough for me. Why bale hay or build fence or nurse stock in those long summer days? Besides, I would be in the big leagues before long. All I needed was better control. Which was why I squeezed a baseball—to strengthen my hand.
I never made the big time. I never tried to. I went to college instead and had a go, not brilliant, at creative writing. My teacher, a shriveled professor, complained I was prone to lapse into the lingo of the country in which I grew up.
No, the big leagues weren’t for me. Though my right hand knit well enough, it still wasn’t good enough, not after I broke it trying to save the life of Chick Charleston.
CHAPTER THREE
“You savvy much about firearms, Jase?” the sheriff asked me.
It was morning of the same day I had returned from my joy ride in the old hearse. I had got out of bed early, choosing to miss sleep rather than goings-on, and had had breakfast and come right to the office. There had been few people about, and none knew enough to be curious yet.
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