Midnight Hat Trick

by Vernon, Steve

  He picked up the broken blade of the shovel from underneath the bench.

  Sprague walked into Helen's garden and used the shovel blade to dig himself a hole where the green beans grew in the summer. He pulled the snow over himself until only his nose was poked out into the air. He didn't know if he was going to turn into a vampire, like they did in the movies. He hadn't seen Rufus or Fergus or Leo turn, so he guessed he wasn't but he couldn't be sure, now could he?

  He lay there for a while wondering just how long it would take to die.

  Maybe he wasn't going to die?

  Maybe the vampires had bit him in just the right kind of way to turn him into a vampire himself?

  Count Sprague.

  Count Gumboot Sprague – Lord of Evil and Master of Labrador.

  Sprague was just trying to imagine himself with a harem of evil vampire babes and a half a dozen or so helpless minions when he felt a hot flush about his hips and the snow went yellow beneath his ass.

  "Damn it," he swore.

  It was just as well. He'd look like a complete and utter asshole in a cape and fangs.

  He laughed at that, from beneath the snow.

  The laughter turned into a racking cough and something broke inside the man and the yellow of the snow slowly turned a darker shade. The wind blew a little colder over the blood-stained rink and the peaceful garden and somewhere in the heavens the snow began to softly fall.

  Hammurabi Road

  The moon was a stone's throw away from the Jack Pine Stretch and the lights of the town were nothing but a distant memory and the three of us were bunched together in the front seat of the pickup on account of the back seat being crammed full of Tyree. He was kicking up some, trying to shuck himself out of the duct tape, snare wire and rope we'd tangled him up in, but other than that he wasn't making much of a sound. The gag helped some and fear of retribution did the rest.

  "Moose are the worst," I said.

  "Worse than cows?" Donny asked.

  The thing about Donny was he didn't always care about hearing the answer. To him talking was a little like table tennis. The object of the game was to snap that ball right back at the other guy just as fast and as hard as you can. Donny had an incurable habit of asking questions because it pretty well guaranteed an answer. Words just felt good coming out of his mouth, I guess. I didn't mind. Donny looked up to me and made no secret about it. I did my best to live up to his respect. Bert and Ernie couldn't have done it any better.

  "Worse than bears," I said. "Usually a moose will just bounce, but man alive when they get their hooves tangled up in the tracks the engine will drag them a mile before letting go. You've got to hose their carcasses out of the locomotive's wheel trucks. I'm telling you that nothing stinks like dead moose. Not even Irvin."

  Donny liked that. He grinned me that Donny smile of his. Half cocked to one side, all bright and innocent. Looking at that Donny smile I knew that nothing could ever change between us. Donny and I were arguing about what kind of track-kill stank the worst after it had been pile-driver-pureed by a half a mile of freight train. It happened more often than you might think.

  "You're sure about that, are you?" Donny asked.

  "Sure as shooting," I replied.

  "Shooting isn't sure," Donny pointed out. "Sometimes people miss."

  Donny had a point in his own weird kind of way. That was Donny's magic. He wasn't slow or retarded or whatever you want to call it. He just had a different way of looking at things, was all.

  "You know what I mean Donny."

  "I know what you figure you mean, but you're only guessing. There are three sides to every story," Donny said. "Yours, mine and the truth."

  I smiled and nodded, preferring not to argue, but I did know what I was talking about. In my twenty years of railroading I'd shoveled and swept and hosed more track-kill from off of the CNR rails than the rest of this pickup truck combined, including Tyree. There was something magnetic in those rails that called for the kill more surely than the north wind calls the wandering wild goose home.

  "Do you think there are any bears out here?" Donny asked nervously.

  Donny gets antsy when you mention bears, even the Winnie the Pooh stuffed kind. He's got what you might call a history with bears.

  "All of the bears will be down to the town dump by now, feeding off of the weekend leavings," I said. "And here we are out here, missing the show."

  It was as true as train tracks. The bears hang around down at the old town dump and waited all week for the garbage trucks to roll in with something good to eat. It was easy pickings, sure, but I think it was also just something for them to do. Just the same way we'd go up there to the dump on the weekends and watch the bears picking through the garbage. Sometimes life was just a way of making the time go past.

  Donny had his own way of passing the time. He used to go down to the dump with a pellet rifle when he was a kid and even older, taking pot-shots at the bears. He liked to plink those bears with his bee-bee's, figuring they were so damn big they couldn't even feel it. Except one day one of them bears took it into its shaggy mind to prove Donny wrong. I never saw a grown man climb a tree so fast. Too bad the bear could climb too. If I hadn't pulled the pickup truck under the tree while Donny jumped for it the story might have ended up with what was left of Donny coming out of the bear's asshole in slow dark chunks. Ever since then Donny just didn't care much for bears.

  I guess I could understand that, just fine.

  "Dead skunk smells worse than bear," Donny looked nervously out the window, as if he expected Smokey the Bear to come running up from out of the darkness to break the window glass with a well-swung shovel. "Way worse. Don't you think so, Irvin?"

  "Shut up and let me drive," Irvin said, speed-jittering his Players filterless from one corner of his mouth to the other and back in an irritating kind of fuck-you-and-the-caboose-you-rode-in-on way. Irvin was like that. Dead focused on the task at hand. He didn't care for distractions of any sort, which was understandable given that we were driving down a dirt trail in the dark of a moonless night with our headlights turned off. That Irvin had good eyes, I guess. He leaned right over the steering wheel, his face practically jammed up against the windshield glass, just staring into the darkness and driving at it straight on.

  "What the hell are you steering by?" I asked. "You sure as shit can't see a thing."

  "I can see the starlight glinting off of the rail tracks," Irvin said. "That's all of the compass I'll ever need."

  I looked hard. It was true. You could see the rails glinting in the darkness. I guess the trail was always there if you looked hard enough for something to follow. Maybe that's what the railroad tracks were for. To let us know where we were going and where we had been.

  "I still think a cow is worse," Donny said. "When their guts blow up and all of that fart gas honks out. I seen two cows get it once, up around west of Wawa. They were humping on the track and I guess they didn't hear the train coming. They got creamed while they were creaming. Pretty damn funny, I think."

  "Wouldn't that have been a bull and a cow?" I asked. "If they were doing what I think they were doing?"

  "I don't know," Donny said with a shrug. "Maybe they were lesbian cows."

  I nodded. It almost made sense if you didn't stop too long to think about it. Most things did.

  "Scratch a cow, find a lesbian," Irvin observed. "Pretty girls put it out the best."

  Irvin was always the deep thinker of our bunch.

  The three of us had been together since we were kids. Irvin had six years on us, but he'd flunked grade twelve twice before his old man got him hooked up on the section gang. Irvin learned a whole lot more from diesel and steel than he ever learned in school. He followed the rails and he never looked back.

  "Man, there's nothing worse than cow farts," Donny said. "They stink like rotten grass gas."

  "Rotten ass grass gas," I suggested, stringing one more box car onto his line.

  "Rotten ass grass ga
s, passing fast," Donny elaborated, with a silly little giggle. Then we both started to laugh. It wasn't that funny, but the giggling and the gag-cracking helped keep our minds off of what we were getting set to do.

  "I'm trying to drive here," Irvin announced, in a louder than usual voice. "Do you fellows mind holding it down, or am I going to have duct tape the two of you shut up as well?"

  We both shut up. Not that we usually listened all that hard to what Irvin had to say, but we both knew what he was thinking about. It had been our buddies, who had died in that Hammer Abbey Hotel fire, and we had plenty to beef about with Tyree for setting the blaze, but it had been Irvin's big brother Gilbert who died there as well. Blood counted more than anybody's buddy in any book you cared to name, and some that had no name at all.

  There wasn't proof that Tyree did it, but the whole town knew it as a fact. Tyree had been royally pissed at the hotel ever since they threw him out for scratching up the snooker table the time he used a leaf rake for a pool cue. So I guess everybody just plain figured that Tyree had set the fire, and that was all the judge and jury we needed in these here parts.

  The real truth was that most folks just didn't care for Tyree's family. You see, Tyree came from Norman Township, where the roads were all dirt and you got your water from an iron pump. That wasn't all that bad in itself. In fact the fact was nearly half of the local crew came from Norman township, but Tyree's family came from the side of Norman that folks on the other side of Norman loved to talk about the most, the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, so when somebody dumped a couple of quarts of gasoline in the backroom of the Hammer Abbey Railroad Hotel and threw in a lit book of matches after it, Tyree was the first usual suspect to be considered.

  Now the Hammer Abbey wasn't that much as hotels went. The rooms were small and you could smell what your neighbour ate for his supper at 3am in the morning when the night farts kicked in, but it was where the traveling men would hang their hats. The rooms were cheap and fairly clean and it was ice cube handy to the bootlegger's shack. So when it went up in blazes folks around here decided that they'd miss it.

  Still, there wasn't all that much in the way of material evidence so the courts and the cops didn't do much about it. The police just shrugged and Pontius Pilated their donut-stained hands into the air. Life moved on and the sun kept going up and down and the trains kept rolling.

  So it was up to us.

  We drove on in silence for a minute or two. That was about as long of a silence as Donny could hold on to.

  "Cow farts are bad," Donny allowed. "A piggery smells worse, though. You ever drive past one?"

  "There's a pig farm out by Coniston," I said. "You can smell the damn thing for miles."

  "Ain't that funny?" Donny said. "Pig shit smells so bad but bacon smells so good. How's that work, you figure?"

  "It's the smoke that does it," I allowed. "They smoke and salt the pork. That smoke drives all of the pig shit out of meat, I reckon."

  "I wish to hell somebody would smoke and salt you, Hanny," Irvin growled. "Maybe that'd do something about all of the shit you're so full of."

  That was my name, Hanny. It was short for Hanlan, my grandpa's name. My folks gave the name to me back when I was born and unable to protect myself from such abuses, figuring I could hold onto it after grandpa finally died. That's how it worked in our family. Names were handed down like old clothes in a kind of living memorial. Just as soon as somebody grew out of one name somebody else got to wear it.

  I figured on saving my money and buying myself a brand new name someday. I had in mind something snazzy, like Trick Magnet H. Flash, but first I figured I'd better learn how to rap. I figured that if I could just change my name it might just change my entire life outlook. I might grow a longer dick, and go up a whole tax bracket, and maybe even bag me a cheerleader or two.

  "I smoked Labrador tea once," Donny said. "It didn't do a thing for me. I never tried smoking bacon before."

  "You're not supposed to smoke Labrador tea," I said. "You drink it. It's good for farts, not that you need any help in that department. Your back door works just fine and dandy."

  It was true. Given enough hard boiled eggs and home brewed beer Donny could single-handedly lay down a counter-barrage on any Saturday bean supper you cared to name. It was kind of his calling in life. The man was made of methane and had a low and sonorous fart tone that always reminded me of a foghorn sounding out, somewhere far out to sea. The sound of his flatulence gave him a kind of a mysterious appeal that was strangely lost on most of the women we tried to hang around.

  "Well I smoked that Labrador Tea just the same," Donny said. "On account of Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis told me I could. I smoked it and then I said I was sorry, because Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis said that you had to apologize to anything that you killed in this life, even if it was only a tea bush."

  "Ha," I laughed. "If Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis tells you that shit is ham, are you going to fry yourself up a turd and slide it on in between two slices of fresh buttered bread?"

  Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis was our town's resident Indian. It was an honorary position and Billy took it as seriously as if it were something big like the Nobel Peace Prize or the Stanley Cup. People would point at him and make jokes about him. He was kind of upholding a tradition representing the kind of backwoods stereotype that let folks imagine that things didn't really ever need to change.

  "Who else would they tell their racist jokes about?" Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis had asked me once after I'd asked him if being the town Indian bothered him any. "I figure I'm taking one for the tribes. So long as I keep grinning and taking it nobody else gets that racist Indian crap dumped on them."

  The truth was, most of the real Indians around here preferred to stay on the reservations. They just didn't want to live anywhere close to town on account of the kind of people who lived in towns. Speaking as somebody who lived in town, I figured there was no accounting for taste, I guess.

  "Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis is part-Cree," Donny said. "He told me so. He knows a lot about the wilderness and things."

  "Billy Three-Legs Tootoosis knows shit," I said. "The closest he ever got to the reservation was all those lonely Saturday nights he spent playing tepee with his wickiup in the back seat of his grandma's Ford pickup truck."

  "Do you girls mind shutting up?" Irvin was plainly pissed. "I got something more important on my mind than the fiddling proclivities of Billy Three-Legged's never-to-be-trusted right hand."

  Irvin didn't take his eyes off of the trail ahead, he just laid a track out for us to follow; a trail as cold and hard as frozen turds.

  "I can still smell that goddamn Hammer Abbey hotel smoke," he said, and we all knew what he was talking about. "And it isn't from any goddamn Labrador tea. I smelled it three goddamn weeks ago and so did you two, if I recollect correctly. And I can still smell it reeking off of that goddamned sad bastard stretched out in our backseat."

  "Goddamn, Irvin," I said, trying to lighten the mood. "That's four goddamns in as many sentences. That's got to be some kind of goddamn record. Are you fixing on starting up your own goddamn religion?"

  "Why the goddamn hell not?" Irvin asked. "Maybe I will. Call it the High Holy Tracklayers Bullshit-Flinging Church of the One-Eyed Pig-Fuckers complete with clog dancing and free liquor every Saturday night. I reckon it'd beat the hell out of what that old boy upstairs has been dishing out."

  It was well said, but I couldn't believe any of what I was hearing. Firstly, I was amazed that Irvin had thought of a name that out-did Trick Magnet H. Flash, but secondly I couldn't believe that somebody could speak so sacrilegiously in the middle of what we were up to.

  "Don't tell me you've got a grudge against God?" I said. "Irvin, I know you can get pissy, but how in the hell can you get worked up about somebody we only talk about once a week, excepting hockey season?"

  "Just because we don't talk about him, doesn't mean he isn't still hanging over our heads, nosing into our
business and butt-fucking our destinies."

  "Damn it Irvin," I said. "You could say that about the Prime Minister or the President and you'd be just as right. Why pick on God? He's a good old boy, hung his son on a cross and all that happy puck-shit."

  "Do you think so?" Irvin asked. "I've been hearing about how good and kind and merciful that old boy is upstairs, but I've read the Old Testament. You just take a look at all the folks that Jehovah decreed needed to be burned and sacked and smited out of their homes. That old fellow is a psychopathic serial killer, you just check the facts."

  "I like cereal ever since I was a kid," Donny said. "Especially the sugary kind, but not Captain Crunch. I like my cereal soggy."

  Irvin and I both ignored Donny. Sometimes that boy just insisted on driving in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road using the Saturday funny pages for a road map.

  "Irvin, those are just bible stories," I said. "They don't mean anything."

  "They're parables is what they are," Irvin said. "The preacher will read them to you once a week at Sunday school, trying to indoctrinate you into their way of thinking. It's like brainwashing, only dirtier. You got to face up to the facts, Hanny. What happened in the before colors the here and now like permanent oil paint."

  "Indoctrinate," I said, going for a grin. "That's a real good word, Irvin. You look that up in your Reader's Digest?"

  But Irvin wasn't in a grinning mood.

  "That's the trouble with you, Hanny. You look at me and all you can see is dumb old Irvin, but I'm a whole lot smarter than you'd think. You can't go on just an appearance. House paint and home improvements don't mean shit."

  Here it comes, I thought. Irvin hardly ever said anything, except when he wanted to say a whole lot.

  He kept on talking. I figured he'd run out of steam soon enough, but you never could tell with Irvin. Usually he said so very little, that when he started it was kind of like he had to empty out what ever crap he'd been holding back.

  "That's the whole problem. Folks are just relying on what they hear about this old fellow God. They look at the pictures and they see this big old Santa Claus-like looking fellow leaning down out of a cloud and cum-showering us with milk and honey and manna-o-manna and they figure he's no worse than Grandpa Walton."