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Hellfire

Page 7

by Jeff Provine


  “Forget what?”

  Flipp clamped his lips and his eyes closed. After a moment, he said, “I don’t like to think about them.”

  “About what?”

  Flipp threw his head back. “I just want to forget!”

  “Ether isn’t the solution to your problems,” Ozzie told him. “I have to tell Dr. Sims about the theft. Maybe he can work with you to heal your mind.”

  Flipp’s head settled back onto his chest. “It’s not my mind that’s the problem.”

  “And what is the problem?”

  “There are things on the other side of the wall.”

  “Your wall?”

  “Not that kind of wall,” Flipp told her. “The wall between life and death. Things, vile things, squirm around on the other side. They’re starting to come through.”

  He snorted, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. Then he laughed. His laughter came as a screeching bark.

  Ozzie slammed the hatch shut and latched it.

  Chapter Ten

  Tom Husk stepped off the train and into Shreveport, Gloriana’s second city. It was a far cry from the sleepy town of Bastrop, where farmers made up the bulk of the population. There, people kept mostly to themselves, working their farms and coming to town for socials on the weekend. The only time the town felt crowded was market day, when steamwagons were loaded with harvests of vegetables, grains, and fattened animals. Once the work was done, people danced in the streets to music played by men who formed bands without practicing.

  In Shreveport, every day was market day. The train yard had six lines of rails where cars were traded out, and all six were buzzing already in the morning. The passenger train spat out well-dressed customers like Tom Husk onto the brick platform next to the station. Boys in caps chased after them with hands full of rock candy and sugared fruits, offering anything for a few coins. Black porters in garish, red uniforms hauled luggage and crates out of the baggage cars. Only the shrill whistle of steam could be heard over the roaring din of voices and bodies.

  Husk looked back over the trains. Cattle lowed and stamped awkwardly in their wooden cattle cars facing east. They must have arrived from up the Texas Trail, probably as confused as any creature alive since leaving their pastures on a ranch a day or two before. Some of the cattle were being emptied out by men with wide-brimmed hats and long willow rods. The rest would be shipped east to hungry folks as far away as Ohio.

  The farthest track stood beside the rock-covered embankment that led down to the Red River. Its water was as rusty as its name, carrying mud and loose debris down from Indian Territory. A tall steamboat rested at the port. While men worked cranes loading crates destined for New Orleans, a gang of elderly men in straw hats sat in the shade, several of them fishing.

  Husk straightened himself up and rested his hands by holding the lapels of his gray suit. He liked this suit: light-cotton fabric, grown in Gloriana, manufactured in Gloriana. It showed what a great state this was. The cut was that of a businessman, not too fancy and not too plain. Too fancy, and common people wouldn’t want to talk to him about anything other than how much money he had. Too plain, and the people with money wouldn’t want to talk.

  Reporting was all about getting people to talk. First, he had to find someone who knew something worthwhile. Every town had gossips, but they could talk for hours about something that didn’t matter or couldn’t be printed in a paper without a libel case. The men working the train yard probably knew a share about the train crash story, but Husk imagined their boss had already told them to keep tight lips and refer snoopy journalists to him. He might as well ask the bricks on the platform.

  If there were anyone who knew a story, and had the time and the druthers to share it, it was old timers. Husk looked back over at the band of men out fishing. They might have a lead or two, and men out shooting the breeze would make it clear whether they knew something. He hopped off the safety of the brick platform and down to the gravel-spotted train yard. Husk’s boots crunched on the rocks and then went quiet as he reached the grassy edge.

  The cool breeze from the shady bayou cut right through the warm morning sun. It would be sultry this afternoon, but now it was practically pleasant. Far from the bustling train yard at the edge of the trees, the old men had a comfortable spot to wait out large river fish.

  They looked up from beneath their straw hats. All of their thin lips were pressed tight. Several of them were chewing.

  Husk tipped his hat. “How do, gentlemen?”

  A slow, grumbling chorus of “how do” came back.

  Husk nodded to the pair of men with fishing poles leading down to the water. “How’re they biting?”

  “All right,” one replied. “Boats churn up the water plenty, but the catfish are back out, at least.”

  Husk hummed in agreement. He wasn’t much for fishing, but getting the story was all about making the talker comfortable. In his career as a journalist, he had gotten just about anyone to talk about anything, from neighbors cavorting in the dead of night to the baker’s wife admitting he used two-thirds the amount of dough for each biscuit than he did five years before. Nothing sold papers like people thinking they were being cheated, unless it was something terrifying. With trains crashing and the Rail Agency being even more secretive than usual, this story might be both. He still had to warm up the men before he could get them to tell him anything really juicy.

  “River traffic ruin the fishing much?” Husk asked. “We don’t get too much of that back in Brastop.”

  “You’re from Bastrop?” an old timer chewing on a bit of straw chirped up.

  “Sure am,” Husk replied. He smirked a little. Throwing out a town name was a good way to build a bridge.

  “You know Molly Prichert?”

  “Sure do,” Husk told him. His smile broadened. Names were even better. “She makes a great peach pie. I just about went broke bidding on one for the charity auction last fall.”

  The man with the straw snorted. “That’s my girl, Molly. That Prichert boy better be treating her right.”

  “Oh, he is,” Husk assured him. “That furniture store of his is selling so much they can hardly get the new stock off the train before it’s out the door.”

  The man grinned, showing a few yellow teeth around his chewed-brown piece of straw. “Doin’ better than a river-hand’s wife, I suppose.”

  A few of the other men grunted. Husk suspected their sons-in-law didn’t own furniture stores. Still, he had one willing to talk.

  He stuck out his hand to the man with the straw. “Tom Husk, editor and reporter for the Bastrop Daily Star.”

  The man took his hand and shook it. “A newspaperman, eh? What brings you all the way to Shreveport?”

  “We had a train wreck up there yesterday,” Husk said. “I’d seen you’d had one of your own a while back, so I came down to see if I could find any stories about it.”

  The man stopped smiling. His straw dropped in his mouth.

  Husk glanced around the group. The other men had turned away.

  He bit his tongue. Something was very suspicious about the train wreck if locals wouldn’t talk about it. If a dog bit a man, that would be on everyone’s lips for the next day or two, and might sell a paper or two. If a man bit a dog, everyone would buy the paper to read about it, but it would be so shameful no one would talk to an outsider about it.

  Husk needed to lighten the mood. He cleared his throat and said innocently, “I guess trains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe we should be sticking to river travel after all.”

  The old timers hummed and grunted in mild agreement.

  Husk reached under his hat to scratch his thin hair. He sweated.

  “You folks seem to be doing pretty well with the Red River right there,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t have a town without it,” one of the men with the fishing poles said.

  Husk felt a smile coming on and stopped himself before it gave him away. Someone was talking; it was a s
tep in the right direction. “Oh?”

  “Thirty years ago, there weren’t a Shreveport, just the Great Raft.”

  “I’ve heard a little about that,” Husk said, leading him on.

  Another old timer whistled. “Weren’t nothing ‘little’ about it! That raft stretched all the way from Carolina bluffs down south up to Loggy Bayou.”

  “Practically into Indian Territory,” one added in a gruff voice that showed its years of tobacco.

  “That big, eh? How’d it do that?”

  The man with the fishing rod pointed downriver. “Right here’s where the Red River takes on all the water from Twelve Mile Bayou, McCain Creek, and the like. All that western swampland dumped sawyers that tripped up the debris floating down the Red River, mostly trees and limbs that fell in during the rainy years. Some of it impaled on the banks, and that started up a natural floating dam. Stuff at the bottom couldn’t rot out fast enough to keep up with the fallen wood from upstream. Year after year, it piled up over a hundred miles.”

  Husk whistled. It was pretty impressive, though he doubted it would make the newspaper. “What happened to it all?”

  “It was just a big pile of rubbish blocking up the river, turning it into an impassable mire filled with snakes and gators. Folks wanting to settle west weren’t having any of that, so Washington sent out ole Captain Henry Shreve to come clear it up.”

  Husk arched an eyebrow. “How do you clear up a hundred miles of dead trees?”

  “The Heliopolis,” one man said, practically singing the name in praise. “Abel, you worked that boat, didn’t ya?”

  A round-faced old timer who hadn’t spoken yet coughed. His eyes were dark brown, almost like they led to endless tunnels. He rested, leaning back against the tree trunk. “Yep.”

  “Do tell,” Husk prodded.

  The man shook his head slowly. “The Heliopolis was Shreve’s patented snagboat, first of its kind, and it was a beast of a machine. It looked like an upturned spider, grabbing logs with claws from its crane-mounted hoists. We dragged away those big logs to the shore to be dried for lumber.”

  “And the smaller ones?”

  The man closed his eyes. “The smaller ones were drawn into grinders on the boat that fed straight into that maw of the boat’s vicious furnace. Even wet wood burned in a fire with Newton’s Catalyst, though it spewed out smoke black as the night and screamed as no man should hear.”

  “It screamed? What do you mean?” one of the other men called.

  “It screamed,” the round-faced man repeated. He opened his eyes again. They seemed to shiver in fear. “Most folks said we were making up tales, but I’ve sat around a fire with wet wood and heard it pop and hiss. This was no hiss. The wood groaned and cracked, and on top of it the fire let out a scream like a woman in childbirth.”

  He stopped and winced. “No, not like that. Nothing that’s going to cause any good like a newborn babe. I worked on Rob Utton’s pig farm as a kid. Whenever it was feeding time, the pigs would scream, an angry, horrible scream that wanted nothing but to eat the whole world. We ploughed through the whole raft like that, just eating up all that God-felled wood and screaming.”

  He went quiet and stared into the distance. Husk realized he and the other men were watching him. No one seemed to know what to say.

  Husk swallowed until he could speak. “But it was worth it, right? I mean, once the river was clear, that opened up the whole of northwest Gloriana to trade.”

  “Yup,” the old timer with the fishing pole said. “Gave us a river port right here in the middle of nowhere. They even named it in honor of Capt’n Shreve. Colonel Burr gave him a medal. That was right before he retired from being governor in ‘36.”

  Husk nodded. Burr, the founder of Gloriana, had been eighty when he finally retired. They said he was a man dedicated like none other. When he died shortly after passing the office on to his adopted son, they said he left a whole room full of instructions.

  “The Colonel always liked Shreve,” the man chewing straw said, “especially after Shreve kept getting sued by those boys in New Orleans for breaking their river monopolies. Colonel Burr’d been looking for an excuse to give him medals for years.”

  A couple of the men laughed.

  “Whoowee, the Colonel hated them boys in New Orleans!”

  Husk hummed. The old timers could talk for hours about anything, especially if they got onto the topic of Colonel Burr. Some people had paintings of him in their homes like an altar; others thought he was a slave-master to the whole of Gloriana, despite his dedication to abolition. He needed to get the talkers back onto trains.

  “Once the river port was set up, how much longer until the train came through?” Husk asked.

  The old men stopped their rumblings about Burr and turned back to him.

  One scratched a day’s worth of scruff on his chin. “Oh, it weren’t long at all, just a couple of years. That’s how I came to town, building on the bridge and laying rail out west on the Texas Trail.”

  “Back when it was the Republic of Texas,” another added.

  “That’s right. Burr was all about Glorianans helping out our ‘brothers to the west.’ Remember that retirement speech of his, talking about the importance of the railway and sending volunteers to the Texans?”

  “He probably would’ve declared Gloriana independent, too, if it weren’t already a state.”

  “Don’t you get started on Colonel Burr’s federal politics!”

  Husk groaned. He was losing them again. “But about that train—”

  “Barge coming in!” someone shouted. “Abel, we got ya.”

  All of the men stood up. The ones with fishing rods pulled in their lines and scooted back from the riverbank. Two of the men went to either side of the round-faced elder at the tree and took his hand. Husk watched as they hefted him onto his feet and led him to higher ground.

  Husk’s jaw drop. The old man who had witnessed so much in the settlement of Gloriana was blind.

  He turned away to keep from staring and looked upriver. A barge, loaded down with black coal, was pushed by a little steamboat. The red water flowed up around its edges, creating a high wake that sloshed over the rocky shore.

  The old man who had been chewing on straw, Mrs. Prichert’s father, caught him by the shoulder, “Bituminous coal, down from the Choctaw region of Indian Territory. More fuel for the fires of Gloriana.”

  “Mhm,” Husk confirmed. Then he paused and turned to the old man. Someone was willing to talk; now he just had to steer the conversation. “Do they use that coal in the locomotives?”

  The old man nodded. “Refills the train yards here in Shreveport. All the coal fields around here are that wet brown coal, what do they call it… lignite. That’s only good if you’ve got some Newton’s Catalyst to add to it.”

  Husk nodded. “We’ve certainly got plenty of catalyst around Gloriana.”

  “Maybe too much,” the old man said.

  Husk watched him a moment. The old man looked into the sky, seemingly at nothing at all.

  “What do you mean?” Husk asked.

  The old man kept looking away. “It’s strange stuff, that Catalyst. Makes fires do weird things, maybe things they shouldn’t. Sure, it’s made life easier and given us industry my pappy never would’ve dreamed of, but… People say they hear voices in the fire.”

  “Stoker’s Madness, going crazy from being near the fire too long. I’ve read a lot about it.”

  “Reading can only get you so far,” the old man said. “I’ve heard those voices. You ever hear ‘em?”

  Husk shook his head.

  The old man chewed up a little more of his straw. “Not everybody does. Some folks just feel sick, which they say is breathing gasses, but I don’t know.” He paused and looked down at the ground. “I knew those boys on the train that crashed. Jim Ralph and Matt Thompson, good boys. Jim had two little ones at home. The Rail Agency is giving his wife a pension.”

  “That’s good,�
�� Husk said.

  The old man spat. “I suppose so, but it was quick. I’ve never seen any Rail Agent let paperwork go through that fast, especially if it cost the railroad money.”

  “Still, that’s a good thing, right?” Husk asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Maybe it’s just my nature to suspect. I still don’t know if I trust that Prichert boy, and he’s my son-in-law, doin’ fine. On the other hand, it seemed almost as if the Rail Agency expected something to happen and were ready to tuck it away.”

  Husk’s eyes went wide. He patted his coat pockets for his pad and pencil. By the time he dug it out to make a note, the old man was walking away.

  “Wait, can I get your name?” Husk asked.

  The old man shook his head as he walked. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be asking for anyone’s name around here if you’re going to be talking about the train crash. Folks downtown wouldn’t like it.”

  Husk stepped in front of the old man. “I understand that it was awful, but the public has a right to know.”

  “Maybe the public will find out something it don’t want to know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  The old man glanced around Husk. Husk checked over his shoulder. The others were milling around the edge of the train yard, waiting for the river water to calm down before heading back to their perch overlooking the shady spots where catfish liked to hide.

  “Tell me,” Husk said.

  “We saw it,” the old man said. “The boys and I were fishin’, as usual. We saw the crash as train broke through the yard, all spittin’ fire and runaway headin’ west. Jim and Matt were scurrying out of the cab and doing their best to get off the train.”

  Husk nodded. “And the reports said the locomotive exploded, then rolled down the track for almost another mile.”

  “Yep, but Jim and Matt weren’t running from any explosion.”

  A chill ran down Husk’s spine, and he wasn’t certain why. “Then what was it?”

  “There was something else that came out of that locomotive cab, out of the flames, something they didn’t get away from. We all saw it.” His voice cracked, making the old man seem like a scared kid. The old man swallowed dryly. “Abel saw it, too.”

 

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