Wild Pitch

by A. B. Guthrie Jr.

  Back on the crest of the ridge, Charleston moved from one place to another, his eyes on the ground. I didn’t know what he looked for until he said, “Jase, it’s damn unlikely it was any kind of automatic, which would eject the casing itself, but isn’t it likely that a man used to guns would work the lever or pump without thinking? Unless, of course, he’d thought about that.”

  We scuffed through the grass and examined the gravel without results, and then got back in the car.

  “Now,” the sheriff told me when we were rolling again, “we’ll drop in to pass the time of day with Mr. Ben Day.”

  I spoke the thought that came to me. “Mr. Charleston, excuse me, but oughtn’t you to be armed?”

  He turned long enough to grin at me and answer, “My cause is just.”

  I wasn’t wise enough then to hook up his words to the quotation.

  We drove on toward Ben Day’s, some five or six miles farther down. The sky was deep and blue any way you looked, and the wind as quiet as the sun in the grass. It would have been a good day for baseball, and it was hard to think that anyone hereabouts, on this summer-kissed afternoon, could have taken a pot shot at Buster.

  Day’s place was just a so-so ranch with plenty of acreage but most of it stony and pretty bald. In sight after we turned into the half-mile dirt lane came the sprawl of house and weather-battered outbuildings and quite a lot of machinery, some of it broken and discarded and the remainder neglected, all standing or lying in faded red and green colors. A couple of orphaned lambs—we called them bums—bawled for handouts at the back door, though they were big enough to rustle for themselves. A gopher flirted his tail at the edge of a scattered woodpile. We had no more than pulled up than Day opened the back door and came out. We left the car and went to meet him, Charleston, of course, in the lead.

  “Hello,” Charleston said. “Nice afternoon.”

  Day looked friendly. He always looked friendly. He had a toothpick in his mouth and tongued it to one side so’s to answer. “Howdy, Sheriff. Always glad to see you.”

  You wouldn’t think a man could make a toothpick insulting, not with a grin to go along with it.

  “Good,” Charleston said. “You know why I’m here.”

  “Let me take a guess. You wouldn’t be hawkshawin’ around?”

  “Just asking questions.”

  “And Ben Day, he’s your man. Sorry, Sheriff, I don’t know a damn thing, except the radio just said old Hogue was still hangin’ on.”

  “Yeah. I’m trying to locate any party or parties that saw anything at the picnic.”

  “Wrong number.”

  “Or did anything?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor. I et, thinkin’ that was what to do at a picnic.”

  While the sheriff sized him up, he stood slouching easy in his work clothes—denim shirt, denim pants hitched low and corral-stained, western hat cocky-cocked on his head. Wind and fists had coarsened his face. His nose slanted off from an old break.

  “Cut it out!” The sheriff’s voice had an edge to it now. “You didn’t see anything or do anything, so you say. Were you with the bunch all the time?”

  “I be goddamned.” Day’s tone was still soft. “Does a man have to have a permit to piss? Maybe I did piss, goin’ off by myself on account, you know, of ladies bein’ present. Maybe I climbed the hill to my pickup for a bottle or more cigarettes. Maybe.”

  “Maybe you did. Maybe you saw, time of the shot, whether Buster had his hat on or off?”

  “No help. The hat ought to tell you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The sheriff turned away. I was thinking of more questions to ask, though I didn’t suppose they would have got answers, not from that mocking and insolent and confident ex-con.

  Before we reached the car, Day called, “You’re welcome. Just let me know if I can help.”

  We were near town before Charleston spoke again, and then all he said was, “One thing I would bet on. He climbed the ridge.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Buster Hogue’s condition remained the same the next day, which was Saturday. The hospital had him marked down as critical, no visitors, and a neurosurgeon had been called in on the case.

  That’s what the sheriff told me when I showed up bright and early. He was drinking a cup of coffee, the sheriff was, and old Jimmy was hovering around as if he thought Charleston should spring into action like a goosed frog. Jimmy was a good lockup man and got along fine with the prisoners, no doubt because he had been a live wire himself before age cut down on the current. Now and then he had a beer, saying he had drunk enough of the hard stuff to give the D.T.’s to all the hard cases on record. These were about the sum of his qualities, though. As a detective he rated somewhere around minus one.

  Charleston wasn’t springing, not yet. For all I could tell he was just fooling around in his head, his face relaxed and his eyes exploring his thoughts. He did say, “Saturday. Nobody home likely, unless old McNair or Chouquette.”

  I asked, “Anything for me?”

  “Maybe later.”

  So I excused myself and walked down to old Mrs. Jenkins’ house. It was a white, rambling picket-fenced place with a chicken run in the rear, all left to her by her late husband, who had died to the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves,” though he didn’t hear it, having gone conveniently deaf some time before. That was the story around town, anyhow, but you had to allow for embroidery.

  Once and sometimes twice a week Mrs. Jenkins wanted me to chop the head off a fryer so’s to have meat in the skillet and no blood on her hands. Also to make sure she didn’t cut off a finger while performing the execution herself.

  She gave me good-morning after I had knocked on the door and said yes to the butchering and sailed back in the house, resting her vocal chords, I guessed, for the parade to the post office.

  I caught and decapitated the chicken, collected the customary two bits and went away to the hummed blessing of “Work for the Night Is Coming.”

  Even with the almost-super highway skirting the town, the place was busy, not yet having accepted the idea that Saturday and Sunday were one in the realm of nongainful endeavor. It was Mabel Main’s day off, though, and she came coursing down Main Street with the high-kneed gait of a harness horse. She was all bone and fast action, and she was also the best telephone operator ever known, which was why she had survived automation. When the company proposed to replace her with dials and wrong numbers, the subscribers threatened to cancel out and establish a co-op. So Mabel stayed on, being charged up to good will, it would seem. She knew everything. If Mrs. Smith gave her Mrs. Jones’ number, she would say, that being the case, “This is Mrs. Jones’ day to play bridge at Mrs. Sandusky’s. Want me to ring her there?” The telephone office provided a good lookout, too. So Mabel knew when Frank Featherston was visiting Mrs. Younce, the widow, because she could see Frank’s old faithful setter waiting on Mrs. Younce’s porch for Frank to finish his business. That last bit is one of the truths or part-truths that a young fellow picks up, barely believing.

  Mabel said to me, “Howdy, Deputy, you fireballer. How’s the sleuth?”

  “Sleuthing.”

  “And the high sheriff? Too busy, I bet, to pass the time of day, huh?”

  There was a look on her face that seemed to say more than the words. Did she have something to tell him, something she’d listened in on? Or was it that she just hankered to see him, being more than a bit smitten, as people said? Eeeny, meeny. I could see her going for him but not him for her, though at forty or thereabouts he couldn’t hope for the pick of the field. Miny, mo.

  “Leave it to him,” I told her.

  She let out a humph and left me, striding knees high.

  Buster Junior was leaning against the front of the Bar Star Saloon. He was a muscular, mouthy and ill-tempered son of a bitch, and why he and Ben Day hadn’t tangled I didn’t know. One of those accidents of time and opportunity, probably. Or brother peas in a pod.

  I asked about his
father.

  What he answered was, “That goddam sheriff! What’s he doin’? Ironin’ a crease in his britches on account of he sits down so much? Tell him to get off his ass.”

  I doubted that I could whip him, but still I could feel my pitching arm tense. And it worked against me that he was older by several years—which made a big psychological difference at age seventeen.

  “You tell him,” I said, “but I wouldn’t advise it.”

  He was mouthing something as I turned and walked off.

  Otto Dacey was coming up the street with his blank look and damp pants. He was the swamper, meaning sweeper, that I’ve told about, and wasn’t allowed in the bar until closing time, which usually meant that the saloon closed on time. You couldn’t get upwind from him there.

  He stopped and shook his head sadly and said as I maneuvered away from his scent, “That poor Mrs. Jenkins.”

  “Yeah, Otto, but she gets along,” I answered.

  He kept shaking his head. “People crazy. So many.”

  I savvied his reference. Once he had been sent to the asylum—Central State Hospital we called it, being nice about stigma—and after a few months had been certified sane and released. It was his pride, his mark of superiority, that he was the one man in the county whose sanity had been tried, tested and proven. Sometimes I thought he was right, though he still peed his pants and, when he happened to think about it, peed in the gutter—which last was the reason he’d been sent to the asylum on a count of repeated indecent exposure.

  I said, “We’re all crazy but you, Otto,” and walked away accompanied by his smile.

  It was too early for lunch, and so I went to our backyard and practiced control, using an old door on which I’d sketched an exact home plate with some leftover paint. The strikes had a bare edge over balls.

  To this day I don’t know why Chick Charleston took me along on that summer’s trips unless it was that company helped him parcel his thoughts out. Or unless it was that, like any man, he liked someone to ride with and chose the first convenient free soul. Anyway, we hadn’t gone far that afternoon, bound for old Taller-Ass McNair’s place, when he said, “That bullet, Jase, it ricocheted off Buster Hogue’s skull. Hit it and veered up. What do you make of that?”

  “Foul tip,” I said.

  “Oh, pisswillie. You keep shaking hands with that baseball, and pretty soon your head will be diamond-shaped. If it’s not too much to ask, take your mind off your mitt and aim it at bone head and firepower.”

  He was smiling as he spoke, smiling that easy, disarming smile of his which suggested peace, not police, but still held the hint of purpose and force to go with it.

  I said, “All right, Sheriff,” and at once began thinking about next day’s ball game, which was against Bear Paw and was sure to be tough, that team by report having recruited three or four city ringers.

  But neither ball game nor shooting was enough to fill my mind by itself, not on a day like today with the air clear and clean as at the beginning of time, with the green-fringed, business-as-ever river to our left and the wild grasses barely saluting the breeze. It was a day for the final, elusive truth to come out of hiding.

  McNair’s place lay west of the Rose River—which meant we had to follow the highway, take Loose Lancaster’s road for about twenty miles and then turn left and cross the one bridge over the stream, passing the picnic grounds on the way. Thereafter the road was little more than an old wagon trail, flanked and centered with boulders that a driver had to snake through, else lose his car’s guts on the everlasting stone. And the road that swung off of it to the coulee in which McNair had his shack was even worse. Which was one reason why federal agents hadn’t closed down his still in the old Prohibition days before mine. Another was, I’d been told, that his moonshine was almost as good as prescription whiskey, and what agent didn’t like a good drink when his day’s work was done?

  McNair’s house was little more than a shed. There was an old wagon beside it with one broken wheel and a beat-up Ford that might have been bought from old Henry himself. A pitcher pump stood rusty at one side of the shack and a pile of saw logs at the other. They were just about the total of exterior decoration except for a little wash bench with a bucket on it and a rag of a hand towel that drooped from a nail.

  A big, surly dog ran from behind the house, charged close and dared us to get out of the car. While I hesitated, wishing for a ball bat, the sheriff dismounted. He stooped and spoke and held out his hand. “Easy, you potlicker,” he said, his tone soft. The dog took a sniff and retreated a yard or two, growling but undecided.

  Old Man McNair appeared at the door, pulling his hat down against the sun’s glare. He waited, wordless.

  I got out of the car, keeping an eye on the dog. I never had been crazy about dogs, not since a neighbor’s pet bit me while I was stooped under a currant bush trying to retrieve my baseball.

  The sheriff said, “Howdy. Nice afternoon.”

  The old man had a beak that an eagle would have accepted with thanks, sharp eyes set close beside it and a mustache fertilized by tobacco. As a baby he must have been rocked to sleep while astraddle a barrel. But, for all his years and bowlegs, he looked fit enough.

  “Goddam heel flies,” he said to the sheriff’s greeting. He spit at a wild showy daisy, turning it into a sunflower.

  “Ease off, old pardner,” Charleston said. “Thought you’d want to know Buster Hogue’s holding on.”

  “Thanks.” The old cuss didn’t mean thanks. He meant get the hell gone.

  The sheriff studied him as if wondering where to use a pry bar. Then he asked suddenly, “You at the picnic?”

  McNair let out, “Where else?” and spit again.

  “So maybe you picked up some ideas?”

  “Keep guessin’.”

  “Ideas like who did it?”

  “Sons of bitches.”

  “That’s for sure. Who?”

  “Find out.”

  “I’ll do just that,” Charleston said. He added, “Given some help.”

  “I done sold out the last batch. Waitin’ for a new order.”

  The sheriff took a bandanna—silk, it looked like—from a pocket of his creased pants and used it on his forehead. “Hot here in the sun,” he said.

  It was sure-enough hot. The sun burned down out of a sky that had never seen a cloud and never hoped to see one. In the distance you could see the earth breathing heat waves.

  “Thirsty weather,” Charleston told McNair. “You got a bucket inside, I suppose.”

  Without waiting for yes or no, he veered around the old man and started through the open door. McNair turned to follow, saying nothing. That left me and that ugly stud dog, who had lain growling at the side of the shack and now made a sashay to get at my heels, but I pulled my arm back, baseball in hand, and so fazed him long enough for a skip through the doorway.

  Inside, there were a rickety stand table together with bucket and dipper, a straight chair held upright by baling wire, a wooden block to accommodate company, a bed with an old soogan on it, a sheet-metal stove with firewood beside it and an up-ended apple box decorated with a tin plate and one fork, both unwashed. They were about all I took in at first glance. Then I saw that Charleston had stopped before a deer-antler rack nailed to the wall. The horns cradled an old rifle, and one prong served as a hook for a hat. McNair had curved by him and was about to plant his old butt on the bed.

  “Spanish-American War?” Charleston said. I guessed his reference was to the rifle.

  McNair answered, “One kind. Springfield forty-five seventy. Hands off.”

  “Wasn’t about to,” Charleston told him. He moved over and took a drink from the dipper and let himself down on the block. Seeing that McNair had taken the bed now, I perched myself on the chair.

  “You’re Buster’s friend?” Charleston asked.

  “Heel flies and sons of bitches.” The old man spit the words out.

  The sheriff paid no mind. “Now you t
ake Blue Piatt or Oscar Oliphant or Pierre Chouquette or even Loose Lancaster—they aren’t what you could call Buster’s friends.” The sheriff had spoken softly, as if just reviewing the prospects in his own mind.

  “Ask ’em.”

  “Uh-huh.” Now the sheriff leaned forward, and his eyes bored at McNair. “How about Ben Day?”

  “I never seen nothin’. I don’t say nothin’. Quit your goddam buzzin’.”

  “Not yet, old-timer. You know as well as anybody that Ben and Buster had trouble, but Buster couldn’t push charges because he himself was outside the law. Ben held a grudge, though. I’ll lay odds.”

  “Damn your heel-fly soul! You shut up about Buster! Best man in the country, and shot down now, and you blackenin’ his good name.”

  The sheriff gave the old man a long, unmoving study. Then he said, “A friend, you call yourself,” and again fell silent. After the pause he pointed abruptly toward the horn rack, and even before he spoke I suspected it wasn’t the rifle alone that he had been looking at. “That hat there. Seems to have a hole in it. Or holes.”

  From where I sat all I could see was that the hat was an old one, once probably off-white and still pretty pale.

  “I declare,” the old man answered, calm as could be and as insolent. “Could have been tromped on by a calkshod horse, a bronc.”

  “Whose hat?”

  McNair pushed his own hat back on his head and to my surprise answered, “Buster Hogue’s.”

  “So?”

  “Damn picnic fools left it, totin’ Buster away. I picked it up. That’s how come.”

  Charleston got up, went over and examined the hat and said, “Hm-m.” Then he put it back on the prong and turned to McNair. “Lancaster said he had taken his hat off, and so his bald head served fine as a target?”

  “His name is Loose.”

  “Nickname.” The sheriff motioned to me, and I came to my feet and went out with him.

  The dog growled us into the Special.

  We were quiet while Charleston wound the car over the bouldered trail, but when the going got easier I asked the little question that was first in my mind. “What’s this heel-fly business, Sheriff? Heel flies, he kept saying.”