Wild Pitch

by A. B. Guthrie Jr.

  It took me a minute to figure that out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was no work for me the next day, or none to speak of. Again I appeared at the office in good time, thinking perhaps we’d drive out for more interviews, but the sheriff had a more pressing engagement than that of corralling a sniper.

  “County commissioners are meeting today,” he said after reporting that Buster Hogue was still alive but still blotto. He shuffled papers under his hand on the desk. “Reports, bills, authorizations, all that stuff. Pisswillie. And though it’s none of their business, they’ll be curious about our crime wave. Damn curious.”

  “Especially Reverend Hauser,” I said. The reverend had been elected because the pulpit made him an honest man. My family being medium religious, I had been exposed to his on-high hellfire more than once. I went on to ask Charleston, “You ever hear him preach?”

  Charleston gave me his smile, which sometimes but not now said more than his words. “I never heard him do anything else,” he answered. “Why don’t you go fishing, Jase? Wish I could.”

  I didn’t go right away because a start at that hour would have put me on the river in the heat of the day, an unlikely time to catch trout. I hung around after he’d left and fooled around with my mail-order fingerprinting set which, the advertisement had indicated, would transform a simpleton into a sleuth. I hadn’t brought my baseball along because my arm was sore from wild pitches.

  In the jail was a roustabout, arrested for assaulting his wife, failure to support six snotty kids and other assorted charges, all of which could be proved to nobody’s benefit. Jimmy Collins told me the man wanted to see me.

  He was one of those men, born a nothing, who had spent his life proving he could be less than that. A harsh judgment but my own at the time. Even so, I could feel sorry for him.

  “Hi, Claude,” I said through the bars.

  “You want to do me a favor, kid?”

  “Depends,” I answered. His eyes, streaked with red, and his face, swollen and painted by whiskey, suggested he wanted the drink I couldn’t bring him.

  “That goddam Buster Hogue!” he said. “If there was any man in him, he’d bail me out.”

  “From the hospital?”

  “You know what he did? He gave me my time, that’s what. No reason a-tall. Just hustled me to town and dumped me off and shorted me to boot on my pay.”

  “When?”

  “When? How do I know when? I got drunk. Wouldn’t you, bein’ treated so mean?”

  Jimmy Collins had come up to listen.

  “Before Thursday? Before the annual picnic?”

  “I guess so. Ask somebody.”

  “Who locked you up?”

  Jimmy said, “I did. Off duty, too.”

  “What day, Jimmy?”

  “Aw, the time fits, Jase, but nothin’ else does. It was late Thursday night. No. Way early Friday morning, his missus called me. He ain’t no culprit, not of the shootin’. You think Chick wouldn’t have got on to him if he was?”

  Charleston would have, of course. Any fool would have known that much.

  Claude was saying, “About that favor, kid?”

  What he wanted was an ad in the paper, thanking his friends for their kindnesses while he was behind the bars and, more than that, suggesting earnestly that he would appreciate further expressions of sympathy.

  I asked him, “Who pays?”

  “Boy,” he answered, after searching the pockets he knew were empty, “it only costs two bits or so, and I figure I can trust you just like you can trust me.”

  In the office I wrote out a little ad, being weakened by his reasoning, and showed it to Jimmy.

  Jimmy grinned in approval. “You know, his wife, bunged up as she was, brought him sandwiches and a cake, damned if she didn’t. And two pals twice come in with a half-pint. I passed ’em on. What the hell, Jase? The law don’t believe in cruel and unusual punishment. Now he’s thirsty again and wants a repeat.”

  I took the ad to the Clarion and paid for it. It cost thirty-five cents.

  Afterward, I picked up grub at the Commercial Cafe for Jimmy’s two guests, delivered it and went home for lunch. My father said I could have the car, as long as it was fish and not fowl I meant to pursue. By “fowl” he meant pullets, which was another name he used for my dates.

  All the time, driving, I kept thinking of that oversize trout, that wowser, that I had seen in the big hole alongside the picnic grounds. But I wouldn’t start there. I would drive above it and fish downstream, hitting the hole along about sunset. There was good fishing on the way to it, in the neighborhood of the gully that hid Pierre Chouquette’s place.

  It was another one of those days, bright as new brass, with not a cloud anywhere. It was hot enough for you, as people ask in their sweat, lacking anything else on their minds, but it would cool off later on, and a man would feel released from midday embrace. I always thought of late afternoon as kitten-fur soft. In the Northwest we have days like that, day after summer day of burning sun and hot breeze, and grain farmers look at the sky, fearing hail. Then come the late-afternoon cool and the hours of no-breeze, and all is right in the world.

  The sun was relenting when I pulled off the road and rigged my tackle. Until later, I figured, a wet fly, rather large, would work better than a dry midget, and so I tied to my leader a Size 8 Royal Coachman, that old reliable.

  From the beginning the fishing was good, if not extraordinary. By the time I came opposite Pierre Chouquette’s gulch, I had ten trout in my creel, all good size for the pan. Some of them were cutthroats, the best eating, and some rainbows, the gamest. Together they made a good mess, as my old man would have said. I decided then that I’d walk up the gulch and, on my own, talk to Pierre, provided he had returned. So I shortened my line and fixed the hook to the cork of the rod’s butt and set out on that quarter-mile stroll.

  Before I saw Pierre, I knew he was home, for his old team stood in the shade of the barn, fighting flies, and his lumber wagon was pulled up in the yard. I found Pierre behind his single-room residence, barking a log with a draw knife. Someone must have ordered peeled logs for a cabin.

  He heard me before I told him hello and looked up and smiled. He was a small man and polite, though a hermit. Half French and half Cree or Chippewa, he had a complexion tinted like a Brown Leghorn egg. He hung his draw knife on a crotch of his sawbuck and waited for conversation.

  “Hard work,” I said.

  He made a little outward gesture of his hands, as if I had exaggerated, and cast a glance to the west. “Stop pretty soon,” he answered.

  “Don’t let me interfere.”

  He said, “Weather, it will.”

  I looked to the west, too, and couldn’t see a cloud, but I knew better than to challenge a man whose partner was nature. A mother blue grouse walked close to us, clucking to her unruly brood like a schoolteacher.

  “Guess you’ve heard,” I told him, “that there’s some hope for Buster Hogue.”

  He answered, “Hogue?” not with like or dislike or a show even of interest.

  “He’s unconscious yet, but the bullet didn’t go through his skull.”

  “So” was all I got out of him.

  “You’ve heard about the picnic and him getting shot in the head by somebody unknown?”

  “I go to the mountains for logs. But shot he was, you say. No doubt.”

  “In his bald spot, by the light of the moon. The sheriff’s hot on the trail of whoever did it.”

  “Many people do not like Buster Hogue.”

  “Including you, Pierre?”

  His face didn’t change. “Why not?”

  “You don’t know who it was shot him? Who might have? No ideas?”

  “Plenty idea, but—” With a wave of his hand he gave his ideas to a breeze that had just started up. “I’m in mountains. Five days. Six. Maybe week. Maybe more.” He spoke like a man to whom days were a stream, one like another, without definition or date.

>   There were ten or so other logs piled to the side of the one on the sawbuck, and I tried to figure how long it would take one man to get to the mountains, cut them and trim them, bring them back and unload. One man. Two horses. Eleven logs. X miles. An old grade-school problem popped into my head: If it takes one man ten days to perform a given task, how long will it take ten men, working half-days, to do the same thing? Yeah, and how much wood would a woodchuck chuck—?

  Suddenly the breeze turned into gusts, and I could see low thunderheads rising from over the mountains. The weather bureau could do with Pierre.

  “Want coffee?” he asked.

  “Thanks. I better get back to my car,” I said.

  It was raining before I reached it, a hard pelt of a rain that was so close to hail that I wondered about crops to the eastward. Lightning jagged down, one bolt so close it barely beat out its own thunder.

  Like most thunder showers, this one didn’t last long. By the time I braked the car above the picnic grounds, the sky was clear over my head. Everything smelled good to me as I scrambled down the wet ridge. Everything—grass, juniper, scrub pine—breathed revival. The patches of gravel lay polished, each pebble clean and distinct. The sun was low in the west. It had started kindling a cumulus cloud. A good time to fish, to catch that prize cutthroat.

  The picnic grounds, that peaceful bottom, looked the same as when I’d last seen it, except that Guy Jamison had taken his chuck wagon out. And except that the rain in its mercy had wiped away the rusty smirch of Buster Hogue’s blood.

  The peaceful bottom—and on some silver night I could see Buster, dead, haunting the place where a bullet had beaned him, hear him calling out “Who-o?” like an owl as he hunted the ridge.

  Then I fished. I fished carefully, used wet flies and dry, all that I had in my book, and even bemeaned myself by baiting a plain hook with a grasshopper. But I couldn’t get rise or strike from the big trout I’d seen. So I cleaned my catch at the river’s edge and then started climbing back up the ridge, using a chance course neither the sheriff nor I had followed before.

  If you go hunting arrowheads, go hunting after a rain. There was the reason, the rain, that I found it, a cartridge case, minus bullet, shining copper-bright in a patch of gravel close to the summit.

  It was a jacket like none I had seen. Centerfire, to be sure, and reduced as many were at the junction of charge and projectile, but still strange, strange at least to my inexpert eye. On its head, around the cap, was stamped the maker’s mark and with it the designation .303 SAV.

  I put it in my pocket.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I gulped my supper that night, having so much on my mind. Mother had exclaimed over the nice catch of fish and fed me some warmed-over flank steak with dressing and vegetables she had held back, knowing I would be late. I topped it all off with a piece of chocolate pie, eating it on the run, so to speak.

  In dry clothes, with a full stomach, I went looking for the sheriff. He wasn’t in his office or at the Bar Star or Commercial Cafe but answered, “Come in,” when I knocked at the door of the small apartment he rented in the Jackson Hotel.

  It was a pretty neat place, not woman-neat, what with books and magazines spread around, but neater than you’d expect from an old bachelor. He kept spic and span the little kitchen in which he often did his own cooking.

  I wondered again that he had never married, at least as far as we knew. He had explained his single state once by saying, “I reckon I’ve rolled too much to gather a missus.” Yes. Rolled over the best moss, I thought.

  “Sit down, Jase,” he said, motioning toward a hide-covered chair. “What about Salmo?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The trout family.”

  “Oh, I caught a nice mess, nothing big.”

  I didn’t have fishing on my mind, of course. I had Pierre Chouquette and, more important, the cartridge case in my pocket. My sense of the dramatic told me to mention the case in the third act.

  So I told him about my talk with Pierre, told it in detail while he listened without interrupting. When I had finished, he said, “Small potatoes and few to the hill. That was the crop forecast anyhow, Jase.”

  “He’s so polite but so damn mum.”

  “Short-spoken, yes, but it doesn’t mean anything. He’s shy. That’s why he lives like a hermit. He doesn’t hate people. They just make him uncomfortable. That’s my guess.”

  The thought never had struck me, but it wasn’t of any present importance, not when I was about to show what I had found.

  Before I could do so, he went on, “There are characters like that, a few, and they get a wrong reputation. Bunch quitters. The opposite of people like, say, Loose Lip Lancaster or, for that matter, even Mabel Main.”

  “Good night! Have you talked to her?”

  “Not lately. Why?”

  “I forgot! She stopped me on the street. I got the notion she might have something important to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “Right after the shooting.”

  The sheriff sighed and said, “All right.” He shook his head then, like a man burdened by an uncertain duty.

  To the move of his head I said, “I haven’t told it all, Sheriff. I fished that big hole by the picnic grounds and came back up the ridge a different way from before.”

  He looked at me with full attention, maybe suspecting my revelation already.

  The center of attraction likes to string things out. “It had rained, you know,” I told him. “Good time to spot arrowheads.”

  He endured me. It flashed in my mind that the twin lines at the sides of his mouth weren’t all made by smiles.

  I asked, “Guess what I found?”

  He wouldn’t guess.

  Under that pressure my hand dived into my pocket, took out the cartridge case and gave it to him. He studied it for what seemed like minutes. “Yes,” he said then. “A Savage three-oh-three. Deer rifle. Long time since I’ve seen one.”

  “Is it a clue?”

  “What else? About what I had expected, to boot.”

  He bent his head for a closer look at the case. His hair was beginning to show some gray at the edges. Aloud he asked himself, “A clue, but where does it lead us?”

  I answered for him. “We could ask around about who owned one.”

  “And the owner would say, ‘Sure. Take me in.’”

  “I mean the neighbors. Those roundabout.”

  “Who, we would know, weren’t the owners themselves.” Charleston wasn’t being sarcastic. He was just punching holes in my program. “Besides, Jase,” he continued, “they’re a pretty closed bunch, nearly all with a grudge against Hogue, except Old Man McNair. As for him, he might have one cached away.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “Not exactly. But, as the poet said, doth he protest his friendship too much?”

  Charleston took a cigar from his pocket, examined it and put it back. “Anyhow, thanks, Jase. The case is a sure-enough clue.” He got up and laid it in the drawer of a chest. “Feel like a sandwich or something? I do.”

  It was our luck to run into Buster Junior and his brother Simon, called Simp, at the Commercial Cafe. The nickname was cruel and too easy. Simple Simon wasn’t simple, unless you could call craziness simple. He was a man off to himself, away from the real, in some world his shadowed mind kept creating. When you addressed him, he might explode with a ho or a yah, or he might explode without provocation; but for the most part he mumbled aloud to himself, in slurred words no one could relate to the going-on conversation. Once in a while, for no reasons at all except for those known to him alone, he would bump, shoving, through the people around him and whoop at those seen or unseen or both. And once in a while, about the time you thought his case was hopeless, he would make sense. He wasn’t often brought into town, and, when he was, no one called him Simp, not in the presence of Junior. No, sir.

  There were half a dozen other customers in the place, seated and standing,
eating and gabbing. Their eyes came to the door as we entered. To the man at his right—Tad Frazier, it was—Buster Junior said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “Salute the flag, boys. Stand up for law and order.”

  Charleston paid no attention. He took a seat near the door and motioned me to one next to him, and, when Jessie Lou came up the counter to see what we’d have, ordered a ham-and-egg sandwich and coffee. I did the same.

  “Law and order,” Junior said, again to the company but for our benefit. “In this town the order is for the law to drag ass.”

  Charleston kept silent, not meaning to goad Junior, I felt sure, but goading him just the same. Junior leaned forward on the counter so as to get a good view of the sheriff. “You hear me up there?”

  Before he answered, Charleston took a sip of water from the glass Jessie Lou had set out. “I hear,” he said, and gave a little smile to the glass.

  “Instead of makin’ an arrest,” Junior said, speaking to everybody again, “what does he do? He low-rates my old man. Tries to run down his name. As if any son of a bitch could!”

  Jessie Lou slid the sandwiches to us, a worried look in her eyes. I could feel an eagerness in the rest, the eagerness of men to see other men fight. The rights of the case didn’t matter. Who might win was of secondary importance. Junior’s words were fighting words, so let’s you two fight.

  Charleston took a bite of his sandwich and began chewing thoughtfully.

  Junior turned his stare up the counter again. “What you got to say?”

  “I’m hungry.” After a pause Charleston added, “Let the condemned man eat.”

  Simp broke out with “Ho” to somebody unseen. The sheriff moved to have a look at him. Simp sat unnoticing, his lips working, as if nothing was happening here to compare with the events of his world.

  “If it wasn’t for that goddam tin star!” Junior said.

  Charleston went on eating.

  It began to look like no contest, with Junior the winner by default, to the general disappointment. With everybody else quiet, Simp’s mumbles sounded plain, but mysterious.

  Charleston ate the last of his sandwich, took a sip of coffee, wiped his mouth and turned on his stool. His voice was mild. “I’d like to talk to you, Junior.”