by Bart Paul
Also by Bart Paul
NONFICTION
Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s
Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin
FICTION
Under Tower Peak
Cheatgrass
Copyright © 2019 by Bart Paul
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First Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names: Paul, Bart, author.
Title: See that my grave is kept clean / Bart Paul.
Description: New York: Arcade/CrimeWise, 2019. | Series: A Tommy Smith high country noir | “An Arcade CrimeWise book.” |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020782 (print) | LCCN 2019021468 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948924399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948924375 (hardback)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Westerns. | FICTION / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Western stories. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.A92765 (ebook) | LCC PS3616.A92765 S44 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020782
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover painting by Denise Klitsie
Printed in the United States of America
To Cal Barksdale
“There’s just one kind favor I ask of you …
Please see that my grave is kept clean.”
—Blind Lemon Jefferson
“Shooting people isn’t all fun and games.”
—Sam Peckinpah
The first thing I noticed was the girl. I was opening the corral gate just before sunup and watching Sarah’s dog bring in the horses and mules. They broke out of the tamarack and splashed through the creek, then crossed the meadow to the corral, running by me fast, the dust they raised hanging in the air. The kid couldn’t have been more than ten. Her ratty high-tops with no laces scuffed up dust just like the animals did. Her shorts were small on her, and a dirty Little Mermaid jacket hung too big around her shoulders. She looked like she was headed for a day at some low-rent Disneyland or maybe a haunted carnival, not an early summer hike in the high country.
The dog got the stock penned, and I closed the gate. The girl dropped behind to watch. The man and woman walking ahead of her didn’t seem to notice. They were looking at the cabin.
“What place is this?” the man said.
“Aspen Canyon Pack Outfit.”
He nodded, looking around at our setup. He and the woman kept moving, talking amongst themselves and still not noticing the child dawdling behind. The dog trotted over to the girl, who squatted down the way kids do and let the dog check her out.
“Hi, mister,” she said.
“Hey.”
“What’s his name?”
“Hoot.”
“Hi, Hoot.” She looked up. “Can I pet the horses?”
“I dunno. I guess. Sure.”
I pulled a handful of hay from the stack outside the fence and gave it to her. I showed her how to keep her hand flat so’s not to get bit, and she held it out to one of the mules whose head was first over the top corral pole. The girl squealed when those big mule lips touched her hand, but she seemed to enjoy herself and didn’t notice me studying her. She looked sort of grimy and had a sour old-clothes smell to her that cut through the whiff of fresh hay and corral dust. My own little girl was just a couple of months old and had that cool new baby smell, so for the first time in my life I noticed such things.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER ONE
“Come on, dammit,” the man hollered.
He was hustling back down the trail past my half-finished cabin about forty yards away. Sarah stood in the open front room of the cabin with our baby, Lorena, against her chest, watching. The guy hustled up to the kid and clamped a hand on her arm.
“Quit dragging ass,” he said. “We got to hurry. You don’t want her to give you the hot sauce, do you?”
The kid shook her head.
When the guy finally talked to me, our eyes didn’t meet. “Sorry, sir.”
I was looking at his scuffed-up city shoes and all-black clothes that looked like he’d been clubbing in them for a week straight. He had ten years on me, so the “sir” sounded peculiar. The girl wiped the mule slobber on her shorts and yanked her arm from his hand.
“Thanks, mister,” she said.
“Sure, kid. Have a nice hike.”
“‘Bye Hoot.”
The sun burned through the tops of the Jeffrey pine down-canyon, and the first rays hit the kid’s dirty yellow hair and shined it right up. She looked back at me as she walked away, following the guy along up the trail to where the woman was waiting. Even at a distance, I could see the woman’s heavy face, red and weathered, and the scrawny hips of a rummy. I headed back up to the cabin and climbed the temporary plywood steps to the porch. The big front room only had three feet of the log walls in place, snugged up around the base of the rock fireplace with electrical conduit poking out of the logs where the outlets would go. Only the two bedrooms and a bathroom were totally closed in, but I never got tired of looking at it or smelling the fresh-cut pine. Sarah watched the three of them walk up the trail and vanish into the aspen.
“They look like refugees,” she said.
“Yeah, but from what?”
I could still hear the seedy looking pair yammering loud out of sight in the trees as Sarah got an extra blanket for Lorena and we walked up the slope through the aspen to Harvey’s trailer for breakfast. I thought I heard a motor like from an ATV or dirt bike at the trailhead across the creek, but the sound drifted away and we went inside. Harvey’s wife, May, had sausage, eggs, home fries, and coffee waiting. We sat at the dinette all crowded together, and May took Lorena on her lap and hugged on her, then handed her back to Sarah so she could nurse while we ate.
“Sure you don’t want me to stay here and work on that kitchen wiring for you newlyweds?” Harvey said.
“Nah, you need a break or you’ll sull up on me. A day at the head of a string of mules will do you good, old man.”
“I could lead that bunch myself, then,” he said. “Give you a day o
ff.”
“‘A day horseback in this canyon ain’t never no hardship.’ That’s what you used to tell me.”
“I guess a junior partner’s got no pull in this outfit,” he said. He winked at Sarah.
“Don’t make Tommy sorry he was so generous,” May said. “He’s putting everything he has into this place.”
“Hell, Mother,” he said, “the boy just wants company on those long hours in the saddle.”
“That’s what he has me for,” Sarah said.
“I ain’t touchin’ that,” Harv said.
He poured us all more coffee. I’d worked so many summers for him when I was in high school, it struck us both funny to turn the tables, but he was a pretty famous packer in his day and still had a million friends, even after being out of the business a couple of years. Either way, Harvey was glad to get back to it. Being a poor carpenter and worse electrician, I knew I’d be screwed without his help on the cabin. And Sarah said I was such a grump, if I was starting a business involving actual human beings I’d need all the help I could get.
“Harv just likes watching the way the backpackers grouse when they see the new cabin and trailers where there wasn’t anything the year before,” May said. She was looking out the trailer window at the winding trail outside. “I heard him tell one guy we were putting in a whole subdivision. Fellow like to soil himself.”
Harvey and I worked out some last-minute details of a trip to the Tower Peak country we’d be making in less than a week for two couples from Newport Beach, then we headed down to the corral dragging halters. We started catching fresh horses and mules for that day’s trip for the Forest Service. We had sawbucks on six head in no time, and our saddle horses caught. The day before, Harvey’d sorted the loads of tools and supplies we’d be hauling and had them laid out on the pack platforms ready to go. We hoisted the bags and slings and tools up on the animals, tarped them, and lashed them down. Then I went over to the cabin to kiss my girls goodbye. Lorena had dozed off during breakfast, and I watched Sarah set her down in her crib in the bedroom. She took the deputy uniform she’d need that afternoon down from a hook, peeled off the dry-cleaning plastic, and hung the thing in the sun.
“My shift starts at four,” she said.
“I’ll be back in plenty of time.”
“Your mom said she’d be here around two,” Sarah said, “so you’re good either way.”
My mom, Deb Smith, and her boyfriend, Burt, had been living forty miles up the road on Sarah’s dad Dave Cathcart’s ranch for almost a year, helping him out with his cattle, but this new grandmother thing had Mom hovering close to the baby. She claimed not to mind when she’d have to drive Lorena to the sheriff’s office in the middle of Sarah’s shift so she could nurse. We’d named the kid for Sarah’s mother who’d died when Sarah was eight, and she had a way of looking at that child that got to me every time. I ran my hand over the log wall and the plank door with the iron hinges Harvey had made for us in his shoeing forge, and I had to catch myself. Things were about as good as I’d ever dared hope.
Sarah looked around the half-done cabin like she’d been reading my mind. “We’ll remember this,” she said.
We stood over the crib together for a last second, then I kissed her and picked up my saddle pockets and my jacket and walked out of the aspen shade into the sun where the horses were tied.
Harvey and I rode past the corrals and followed the dirt track into the trees leading three mules apiece. Harvey wasn’t quite right. This was more a two-man job, and I surely did enjoy his company, though I’d never say so.
In a few minutes we were looking down a steep cut into Aspen Creek. A few minutes more and we were in scattered Jeffrey pine, the sound of our hooves muffled by the pine duff and the powdery dust with fresh cattle sign on either side of the trail.
We were heading about seven miles up the canyon to resupply a Forest Service trail crew fixing rockslide damage in the Wilderness Area. We followed the creek as the canyon widened with Harvey out front on his big sorrel mare, him holding the mule’s lead with his rope hand resting on his hip, a Winston poking out of the fingers of his rein hand, talking nonstop and never looking back, just like I remembered him doing when I was halfway around the world. I was riding a big common gray gelding I’d just bought, taking him for a test ride before I put customers on him. The morning was warm and blue-skied, and we were seeing the first of Bonner and Tyree’s cow-calf pairs in the willows and bogs along the creek.
Then the bankside tamarack thinned down to nothing, and the first big meadow spread out in front of us, descending from right to left with sage and aspen scattered high on the canyon slope. The left side of the canyon was pine-timbered and steep, with boulder slides running between ridges of trees. Beyond the last slide, five glacier-cut granite peaks were set out in a row, looking smaller and smaller off into the distance, only one of them important enough to be named. It was a country of impressive peaks, and you couldn’t name them all.
“Did I ever tell you the story of the Spanish Cave?” Harvey said.
“Buncha times.”
“‘Bout the guy’s grave and—”
“Closer to a thousand times, actually.”
“So whaddya think?” he said. “You think there could be a hidden cave as big as a boxcar in this canyon with a dead Spanish guy with a box of treasure and a gold-handled sword all laid out like in some church?”
“Sure, except there weren’t any Spanish guys exploring this side of the Sierra a couple hundred years ago. It was just mountain men like Walker and Carson.”
“Just ’cause nobody’s found something yet don’t mean it ain’t there,” he said.
“Then ask Kit Carson about it. You and him are old pals, right? Him and Frémont?”
“You just might be finishing that cabin all by your lonesome,” he said. “Smartass. I find that gold sword, I’m keepin’ it all to myself.”
The trail was far from the creek now, and worn deep and narrow on the upper edge of the meadow with black mud where it crossed the springs, and gravel fans spilling out on the grass from the snowmelt runoff. We saw more cattle on the meadow grass off to our left. Out ahead the trail disappeared into a line of aspen.
“Some guy wrote about that cave back before World War Two,” Harvey said. “His son useta go deer hunting with me every fall, and it was him told me about it.”
“Well, if there was such an awesome place, cowboys, loggers, or backpackers would’ve found it. Besides, not a lot of caves in this granite.”
“The guy wouldn’t just make up a story like that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You got no sense of imagination,” he said.
“I can imagine that old Spaniard must be pretty ripe by now. Pretty damn ripe.”
There was a squeaky chirp in the distance, and I scanned the sky until I saw a golden eagle zipping down behind the treetops. I always loved seeing those dark old monsters and remembered missing them when I was overseas. We passed into thick aspen at the top of the meadow, the breeze fluttery in the leaves. I turned back to watch the stock pick their way over the deadfall. I was watching my mules to see how they handled themselves and their loads as they turned back and forth through the winding trail. I’d bought these six the month before from a trader who helped the Marines supply animals for their mountain warfare training base out by Sonora Pass and for overseas deployment. They were out of Belgian-crossed mares and well matched for color and size. They didn’t come cheap, but once I’d seen them I had to have them. I’d saddled them and messed with them, but this was the first time they were on the clock. They were all between four and eight years and used to working together, so I was feeling proud of how they handled themselves. I was kind of bursting at how fine the whole string looked, too, but wouldn’t say so out loud.
“What the damn hell?” Harvey said.
We heard a commotion ahead and saw flashes of color through the trees. The second mule in Harvey’s string sucked back
and Harv dallied his lead mule’s rope till the scared one settled. Then we heard branches snap and a shout for help. We sat tight until people on foot came toward us all ragged and stumbly. It was the seedy-looking couple who’d passed through the pack station at sunup with the little kid. The guy looked sweaty and frantic.
“Help us,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“It’s our little girl,” he said. “She’s gone.”
He kept coming right up on us, heedless of the animals and what they might do. Almost like Harvey and me weren’t there either.
“Whaddya mean, gone?” Harvey said.
“You gotta help us,” the woman said. “She’s our baby—and now she’s gone.”
“When’d you last see her?”
The guy pushed down alongside Harvey’s string till he got to me, crowding the stock and bumping into the packs. A couple of the mules stepped away sideways, mindful of the idiot in their midst. “I dunno,” the guy said. “Hour ago?”
“An hour?” Harvey said. “Jay-sus Chroist.”
“It was less than that,” the woman said. She pushed through the trees behind the guy and looked at him cross. “We sat down to nap and sorta dozed off. When we woke up, she was gone.”
“I bet she’s somewhere close. You’ll find her.”
“Will you help us, mister?” the woman said.
“We got to get this load up the trail another few miles,” Harvey said. “Got guys waitin’ on it.”
“Where’d you take your nap?”
The guy pulled out a cigarette and lit it, watching me. “Back there a ways,” he said. He pointed up the canyon.
“Did you pass a fence at the bottom of a meadow?”
“I didn’t see no fence,” he said.
“You folks still came a long way fast since I saw you this morning. A real long way on foot. Maybe she got tired and laid down.”
“We wanted to see the sights,” the woman said. “Will you help us?” She pulled out a little bottle of Fireball and took a pull. There was sweat on her face. It was maybe nine-thirty in the morning.
I got off my horse and tied him to an aspen, then walked around the mules to Harvey.