The Cunning Man

by D. J. Butler

  Bang!

  The shot was loud in Hiram’s ears. He smelled the powder and felt the shock of the gun discharging. Something stung his left arm and he lost his grip. Stepping forward, he balled his right hand into a fist and coldcocked the shooter with one punch to the jaw.

  As the man collapsed to the ground, Hiram smelled the stink of sour milk.

  The woman was left holding the rifle.

  The gunshot had stopped the fight. Germans, Greeks, and others drew back as Sorenson stormed about, swinging his newspaper to keep both sides apart.

  One of the cops bellowed, “Stop right there! This is the police!”

  “Quite the haymaker,” the woman said.

  Hiram shrugged. “I didn’t have much choice.”

  “My name’s Mary.” She worked the lever to eject the shell and then pointed the rifle at the mud. “Some people call me Gil.”

  “Hiram.”

  “You’re under arrest!” the white policeman blustered.

  Dimitrios and Hermann glared at each other, surrounded by their countrymen. Sorenson spat on the ground. “You two started dis. I won’t forget it.”

  Hiram expected to see the policemen taking away the Greek and German leaders. He was shocked when, instead, the colored man grabbed him and roughly twisted him to one side, looking at his arm. “This fella’s been shot.”

  The sting. “I must have just been grazed,” Hiram said. “I barely noticed it.”

  “You’re under arrest,” the white policeman said again. He grabbed Mary, dragging her down toward the Model B.

  “She didn’t shoot me,” Hiram said.

  The colored policeman squinted at Hiram.

  “No?” the white policeman said. “Then she can explain it to us in the station. She’s trouble, this one. Organizing labor to try to force honest businessmen out of business.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Mary cried. The Germans looked embarrassed, but none of them moved to intervene. “I just want them to pay a fair wage and to stop sending children down into the mines!”

  “Explain it at the station!” the policeman said again.

  Hiram touched his arm where it stung and found blood on his fingertips. “Officer, she’s telling the truth.”

  The pudgy white policeman turned to Hiram. “You wouldn’t happen to be Hiram Woolley, would you?”

  Hiram nearly snorted in surprise. “I am.”

  The officer pushed Mary over to the colored policeman and the pair marched toward the Model B. She didn’t fight.

  The white policeman reached into his pocket and took out a card. “Naaman Rettig, from the D and RGW, is looking to talk to you. He heard you might be arriving today. Lucky I found you, huh?”

  Hiram took the card; it was white, with raised gold lettering. “Look, officer, I’ll let this man know you gave me his card, but about this woman, she didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The fat cop harrumphed. “She’s done plenty wrong.” He turned and followed his comrade down the hill.

  “I’ll come to the station!” Hiram called to Mary as she was pushed into the back seat of the police car. “I promise!”

  Chapter Seven

  The miners were dispersing, Bill Sorenson chasing them away. Ammon and Samuel stood staring at each other across foot-churned mud.

  Hiram wanted to follow Gil…Mary…the arrested union organizer, but he was afraid that if he left, Ammon Kimball would grab his brother and snap him in two.

  “Pap,” Michael said. “The gun.”

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” Hiram murmured. “There’s hydrogen peroxide in the car.” He probed the wound with his fingers again, and was pleased; the blood flow had virtually stopped.

  That was his heliotropius at work. The dark green stone with blood-red streaks prevented him from being deceived and also stanched the flow of blood. It was also said to drive out poison, prevent deception, and bring rain.

  Also fame, which made Hiram reluctant to carry it. He didn’t want fame.

  He slipped Naaman Rettig’s card into his pocket. The railroad man might be able to do something about Mary McGill.

  “You’ve corrupted Dimitrios Kalakis, I see.” Ammon Kimball glowered at his brother.

  “No more than you’ve corrupted Hermann Wagner. I bet you promised him Bill Sorenson’s job!” Samuel’s face flushed bright red, sweat dripped from his round eyeglasses, and spittle speckled his lips.

  “You never cared about the mine,” Ammon growled. “Father’s disappearance wasn’t enough to bring you back, so what did it? Is it money? You’ve run out of money again and you’ve come home to beg, only you’re too proud to ask for anything, so you’ve talked poor old Dimitrios into helping you try to steal my inheritance?”

  Samuel let out a yowl. “The mine belongs to all of us! And so do, so did, so will, Father’s other things. His other things!”

  Ammon’s eyes narrowed. “It was you. You were the thief!”

  Hiram stepped forward, putting himself between the two brothers. They ignored him. He closed his fist around the bloodstone and concentrated. Which brother was lying?

  “Pap.” Michael’s voice was soft, but insistent.

  Samuel’s flushed face darkened further. “I have taken nothing, nothing, nothing that didn’t belong to me.” His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “What I was given, I have returned! You know, Ammon, you know, but you hate me. You hate me and it’s blinded you!”

  Ammon laughed, a single bark like a dog losing interest. “Go back to your paint squirts, and get the hell off Kimball Corporation land. Before one of the monsters you’re so anxious to believe in gets hold of you!”

  The bloodstone lay inert throughout the conversation.

  The older Kimball stomped away, shouldering past Hiram and heading down the hill and across the canyon toward his house. Samuel stared after Ammon, the round glasses unable to hide the rapid fluttering of his eyelashes. Then the younger brother moved, with less certainty, feet dragging in the mud-crusted snow, and seemed to fade into the landscape in a cloud of his own frozen breath as he moved down the canyon.

  “Pap,” Michael said, “you should have shot that guy with the rifle. This is the whole reason to have a gun, so you can shoot someone who’s threatening you.”

  “There were too many innocents standing around,” Hiram said. “And that’s not the reason I carry the pistol.”

  Michael looked skeptical. “Well, you don’t carry it to let me target shoot.”

  “I carry the revolver so I can shoot someone who’s threatening you,” Hiram said.

  “Thanks for that, I guess.” Michael frowned, hands on hips. “You want to go down to the jail to try to rescue that lady unionist, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  They turned and headed down to the Double-A.

  “Yeah. Only the difference is, I want to do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you want to do it because you made a promise.”

  “Keeping promises is not a terrible thing, Michael.” One of the large promises Hiram had kept in his life was his vow to Yas Yazzie to take care of Yas’s son. Michael. He’d promised it in Yas’s dying moments, as he’d accepted Yas’s revolver, and, at Yas’s insistence, scratched his own initials next to his friend’s on the barrel—an H.W. next to a Y.Y. Yas’s wife Betty, Michael’s mother, had died of the Spanish flux shortly after Michael’s birth.

  Michael had never known his birth parents. He’d lost Grandma Hettie while he was quite young, and then his adopted mother. The boy had grown up surrounded by tragedy. Maybe that was why Hiram had never been hard on Michael. Maybe that also explained the young man’s tendency to lash out.

  “I’ll drive,” Michael said. “You’re so righteous, the truck might wither at your very touch.”

  As they descended to town, the late afternoon sun gave a blue cast to the snow frosting the hills around Kimball Canyon. Beneath the blue-white caps, the canyon walls tumbled down in yellow and orange scree, split by horizon
tal shelves of stone.

  Michael explained how the forces of erosions cut the canyon through the layers of rock, wind and rain, ice and sunshine. He pointed out that south and west, the layers were cracked into multiple thin slices. On the north and east, the stone remained in larger blocks, rounded divots scooped out of the stone.

  For Michael, it was all the action of wind and rain on the stone.

  To Hiram, the divots made the stone appear as if dozens of skulls lurked just behind the façade of the rock and were straining to push through. The land felt haunted. He remembered how he’d almost succumbed to one of his spells when he’d gazed into the dark windows of the Kimball family home.

  What had gone wrong in the Kimball family?

  And should Hiram do anything about it? He had delivered the groceries; his job was done.

  Or was his work truly done, if he left the mine unopened? Did that make him like a doctor who only dispensed morphine to relieve the pain, and didn’t try to treat the underlying disease? If he only gave the men food, but left them idle and without means to feed themselves in the future, he had only delayed the pain and violence that must result.

  And there were Medea and her children. He had personally run over Medea’s husband. Could he really leave while that family was in such dire straits?

  And if the problem at the root of all this trouble was a haunted mine, could Bill Sorenson or Ammon Kimball or any of the others really do anything? Or would it take someone with the wisdom and lore of a cunning man?

  Hiram sighed. In any case, he had to get Mary out of jail. Surely when he made a formal statement that she hadn’t shot him, she’d be released.

  Though that might mean he’d have to implicate the German fellow as the shooter. He didn’t relish that idea. But surely he could say the shooting had been an accident.

  There was some truth in that.

  Kimball Canyon opened into the larger Spring Canyon at the site of Dollar’s.

  “I kind of want to stop and get a Coke, Pap.”

  Hiram, too, felt hot and thirsty. He thought of Gus Dollar’s wax poppet, though, and wanted to push on. “Let’s wait until we get down into town.”

  He looked at Dollar’s as they drove past. Three cars were parked beside the clapboard building. The other canyons opening at this crossroads into Spring held other mines; this was the coal center of the state, and, together with the railroad, that made the area the industrial heart of Utah. Gus Dollar made his living selling things the company stores didn’t provide, and he drew traffic in by a charm. He must talk to many miners, and miners’ wives and children.

  Could Gus tell Hiram what had happened to the Kimballs?

  But the thought of talking too much with Gus made Hiram uneasy. He examined his heart to find the cause. Was it that he disliked another man knowing that Hiram knew hexes and charms, or that his father had had other wives? That surely was a part of it. Hiram was private by nature. Grandma Hettie had taught him to be even more discreet than he was already naturally inclined to be; a person who worked charms was often misunderstood, and easily accused of being a witch.

  What else, though?

  Hiram laughed out loud. Michael stared at him, swerved slightly, but managed to stay on the road.

  “What’s so funny?” his son asked.

  “Mankind,” Hiram answered. “The Fall. Me.”

  Envy. Wasn’t that it? Envy, pure and simple. Gus was wealthy and successful and by every indication better at hexing than Hiram. Their very first encounter has consisted of Gus besting Hiram with a charm, drawing Hiram into his store to sell him Cokes.

  And then, as if to rub in his superiority, the man had given him one of the Cokes for free.

  But no, that hadn’t been Gus’s purpose. He’d given Michael a free drink out of generosity.

  Though…could a free bottle of chilled Coca-Cola be a vehicle for a hex? Was it possible that Gus Dollar had given Hiram the second Coke for free as a way to bewitch Michael?

  Hiram laughed out loud again.

  Envy.

  “You’re weird, Pap,” Michael said. “I’m not saying I don’t love you. But you’re an odd one.”

  Hiram took the revolver from his coat pocket and put it back in the glove box, along with the loaded full moon.

  Spring Canyon was broad and green. Junipers and lodgepole pines climbed up the canyon walls, and the gambol oak and cottonwoods clustering along the banks of the water flowing down the canyon’s center—Spring Creek, probably?—would add further green, come spring. The canyon twisted gently this way and that, revealing small herds of cattle sheltering in each new bend and drinking at man-made pools. The canyon opened for the final time sinking down toward the Price River.

  Michael continued his geology lesson. “And this decline is known as a high alluvial fan. The creek grew wider and dumped more sediment out as it slowed down.”

  “And I wanted you to stay in school. It seems you got schooling.”

  “Libraries are fun, teachers aren’t, and I can talk to girls at church, which might be the only good reason to go.”

  The road wound down the fan, past a row of small bungalows and then a wooden sign that read Helper.

  “That’s us,” Michael said. “Professional helpers. Only we don’t get paid. So volunteers, I guess.”

  “The town got its name from the railroads,” Hiram told him.

  “The Helper Railroad?” Michael frowned. “I thought it was something longer, the DGGWR, or something.”

  “The D and RGW. Denver and Rio Grande Western. No, a helper locomotive is an extra engine car they attach to a train when it needs additional push to get it uphill. West of here, the railroad goes uphill steeply.”

  “Back along Highway 89,” Michael said. “The way we came.”

  “Right. So they have to attach a helper locomotive here. Or more than one helper, sometimes. And they called the railroad station where they did that Helper, and then that became the name of the town.”

  “Surely,” Michael said, “such prosaically minded town fathers must soon rename the town Brothel. Or Prostituteville, that sounds very scenic. Or maybe they could use the French word for a prostitute. Is that something you learned in the war, by any chance?”

  “Michael,” Hiram said.

  “I’m just going by what you told me. Far more brothels than Lehi, you said.”

  “Well, that isn’t hard.” Hiram took the card out of his pocket and examined it. The front of the card had both Price, Utah, and Denver, Colorado addresses. On the back, scrawled in tight, almost illegible penmanship, were the words: Hotel Utah. “Anyway, we can ask this Naaman Rettig what he thinks the name of the town should be. We talk to him first, because maybe he can help us get the union lady out of jail.”

  “And then drive home?” Michael asked.

  Hiram didn’t respond.

  The road followed Spring Creek until it joined the Price River. Crossing the river on a bridge made of railroad ties, the Double-A was struck by a sudden fierce breeze, blowing from the north.

  Michael laughed.

  “You think it’s funny we might get pushed into the river?” Hiram asked.

  “No, I think it’s funny because it’s like Salt Lake City is huffing and puffing down the canyon, trying to blow Prostituteville right out of the state. Wait, is it Putain?”

  “Helper.” The Double-A left the bridge and bumped down onto dirt again. “Stop the truck for a moment.”

  Michael dutifully braked.

  Ahead of them and stretching away to their right was Helper. It was a town organized in parallel strips. Immediately to their right, along the river, was a tangle of bare trees and brush. Beside that stretched a field of desert grass, beaten brown by the winter. Across a gravel road stood the backs of the brick buildings of Helper’s Main Street. From this side, Hiram saw iron fire escapes, back doors, loading docks, and private parking spaces. Beyond Main Street and slightly uphill of it ran the railroad tracks. A train puffed westward now,
its second and third “helper” engines pushing right behind the first and a line of coal cars stretching out behind. On the far side of the tracks, on a gentle slope rising up and away from town, stood several streets of brick, adobe, and wooden bungalows. He smelled the coal smoke and cinders along with the dry winter grasses and the river. Above it all and to Hiram’s left rose a stark white and yellow cliff, hundreds of feet tall. Without a doubt, Michael would know the geology of the cliff.

  When Michael had quit school, Hiram had been uneasy; some of Michael’s teachers had looked relieved, liberated from the boy’s constant challenging. But Michael had attacked book after book on his own, most of the volumes provided by Mahonri Young. Mahonri had assured Hiram that Michael could get into a good college by taking written entrance exams, and Hiram had relaxed.

  Somewhat.

  Michael tapped the wheel and flashed Hiram a smile. “You don’t want to drive onto Main Street and see the brothels. And you don’t want to talk about them, so now you’re trying to distract me with trains.”

  “I wish you didn’t know what a brothel was,” Hiram said.

  “I’m seventeen, Pap, not seven.”

  “When I was seventeen, I had no idea there were brothels in the world.” Hiram sighed and then pointed along the river to a pair of tall cottonwoods surrounded by a clump of scrub oak. “Let’s just park it here, so we can be a little more discreet.”

  Michael parked the car. “Maybe we can sleep in this thicket too, Pap.”

  “Only if we have to.”

  The wind buffeted them again as they crossed the weeds. Passing between a stone wall and a gravel parking lot, they entered an alleyway. The sun dropped below the hills behind them, and the way abruptly transitioned from shade to near darkness. Ahead, on Main Street, Hiram saw passing automobiles and the harsh red and yellow glows that suggested neon lights.

  Lehi didn’t have neon lights. Hiram braced himself for what he knew was coming.

  Gravel crunched beneath Hiram’s and Michael’s Redwing Harvesters—they wore boots that were identical, though Michael’s were slightly larger.