Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Rancid Crabtree? How come they call him Rancid?”

  “You got a cold, Eddie?” Jake said. “You didn’t smell nothin’?”

  We sniffed. Why yes, a pungent odor still lingered in the air, even after the brisk breeze Miz Weed had let in through the windows.

  “You’re right,” Eddie said. “I guess I was too scared to smell when we were at the bar with him and you.”

  Jake gave us a crazed look. “Just as well, I’d say,” he grunted, tossing back a shot of whiskey. “You boys don’t get any of your weird ideas, hear? You’ll steer clear of Crabtree, if you know what’s good for you!”

  Eddie and I plodded off toward town and the matinee, both of us enjoying the warm and satisfying feeling that comes from sudden wealth. With a whole dollar, we could buy out half the town. We could buy real estate, if we had any use for it.

  “Hold up a sec,” Eddie said. He pointed far off to a thickly forested area between two mountains. “You know what? Trapper Crick flows out of there.”

  “So?” I said, reluctantly distracted from contemplating the purchasing potential of our dollar.

  “Well, I was just thinking,” Eddie said. “Maybe we should sneak up there, find Crabtree’s cabin, and spy on him. Maybe we could see him do some mountain man stuff. Maybe he’d shoot a bear or something. What do you think?”

  “Didn’t you hear what Jake said about Crabtree, Eddie? Anybody who goes up there probably doesn’t come back.”

  “Oh, you know what a kidder Jake is. How about it?”

  “Sounds okay to me,” I said. “I’ll tell you what, you can sneak up and spy on Crabtree while I stand watch.”

  “I was kinda thinking we’d do it the other way around,” Eddie said. “Where was you thinking you’d stand watch?”

  “Right about here,” I said. “But maybe not quite this close.”

  Before spying on Crabtree, we had to wait a few days for the image of the fierce old mountain man to fade below our terror threshold. Most of our adventures resulted from our level of boredom rising above our level of fear. One morning when we had nothing else to do but sit on the Muldoon corral fence and use ourselves as bait for mosquitoes, Eddie determined that his boredom had just about reached critical mass. “We’ve waited long enough. Let’s go spy on Crabtree.”

  “Geez, Eddie, I don’t know,” I said, wiping out three mosquitoes on my arm with one swat. “I’m not that bored yet. Besides, if old Crabtree catches us, he might kill us.”

  “Of course he’ll kill us, Pat, if he catches us. That’s what mountain men do when they catch somebody spying on them. But he ain’t going to catch us.”

  “Yeah but—”

  “C’mon, you can’t chicken out on me now. Don’t you want to be a mountain man?”

  “Sure.”

  “See, we can spy on old Crabtree and learn how to do all kinds of mountain man stuff. It’ll save us a whole bunch of time if we don’t have to learn it all on our own. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck in school practically forever.”

  Eddie was right, I could see that. The faster we learned how to be mountain men, the sooner we could leave school, go off into the wilderness, and live off the land. Second grade had been a terrible bore the previous year. And it wasn’t one bit better this year! Right now it looked as if I might never get out of second grade.

  “You’re right, Eddie. Let’s go.” “Great! But we better tell Ma and Pa first.”

  “Why tell them, Eddie? They’ll probably just get all nervous and shaky like always and then tell us we can’t go, because it’s too dangerous.”

  “I know, but I don’t like them to worry. You don’t say nothin’, okay? I’ll handle this.”

  Both of Eddie’s parents seemed to suffer from some kind of nervous disorder. In fact, Mr. Muldoon’s face would begin to twitch every time he saw Eddie and me together, and Mrs. Muldoon would wring her hands and sometimes even chew on a fingernail. I’d told Eddie I thought maybe his folks had some kind of strange disease, but he said he was pretty sure their nervous condition was just a result of drinking too much coffee. “Coffee’s awful bad for the nerves,” he’d explained.

  Both Eddie’s parents were in the kitchen when we burst in on them.

  “Good cripes!” Mr. Muldoon yelped, frantically brushing spilled hot coffee off his pants. “How many times I got to tell you boys, walk through the door just as if you was regular human beings. You don’t have to take it off the hinges!”

  “Sorry, Pa,” Eddie said. “Anyway, I just want to let you know Pat and I are going on a hike.”

  “A hike?” Mrs. Muldoon said, chewing a fingernail.

  “You’re not taking any of my tools, are you?” Mr. Muldoon said. “You boys stay away from my tools. I don’t want you chopping down any more trees, or building deep-sea-diving outfits with my milk buckets, or building airplanes on top of the barn roof, or digging pit traps in the pasture to capture wild animals, or starting campfires, or—”

  “Naw, we’re just going on a hike, Pa.”

  Mr. Muldoon’s face twitched. “Well, I guess there isn’t too much harm in that. For gosh sakes, just don’t build nothin’!”

  “Lord save us, no!” Mrs. Muldoon cried, wringing her hands. “And don’t build any more rafts out of fence posts! You’ll drown for sure.”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Muldoon said. “Besides, I need all the fence posts I got left!”

  “You make sure your hike doesn’t take you anywhere near that pit of sin, Pig Weed’s Saloon,” Mrs. Muldoon said.

  “We won’t go near Pig Weed’s,” Eddie said. “We’ll stay clear of that evil place.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Muldoon said, “I guess I could make you a sack lunch for your little hike.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Muldoon said, “and no more snares! The last one I caught my foot in nearly broke my leg. Can you think of anything else, Sarah?” His face twitched again.

  “It’s just so hard to cover everything, Herb. It’s just so hard.”

  Eddie was probably right. His folks must have drunk way too much coffee.

  An hour later, Eddie and I were working our way up the Trapper Creek trail. The trail was overgrown with brush on both sides and obviously didn’t get much use.

  “Remember what Jake said?” I asked Eddie. “How he suspected that anybody that came up Trapper Creek probably didn’t come back?”

  “Yeah, I been thinking about that. Maybe we shouldn’t stick to the trail. Let’s cut up over that ridge. We might be able to see Crabtree’s cabin from there.”

  We crossed a log over the creek and climbed up to the ridge. Sure enough, tucked away in a clearing down below was a little cabin. Eddie and I lay down side by side so we could just peek over the rocky lip of the ridge. An overgrown logging road entered the clearing from the far side, and at the end of the road an ancient truck rusted its way toward oblivion. All kinds of interesting junk was strewn about among tall weeds: a set of bedsprings, part of a milk separator, a broken table, a gas tank, a wheel from a hay wagon, and dozens of things we couldn’t even recognize. And then there were the bones, gleaming whitely in the sun.

  “Any of those bones look human to you?” I whispered to Eddie.

  “Most of them,” Eddie whispered back. “I don’t see no human skulls, though. He probably keeps a collection of them in his cabin. I reckon old Crabtree just tosses his victims out in the yard after he kills them.”

  “Geez!” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “Don’t worry, Pat, he won’t ever spot us up here. Besides, we want to see him do some mountain man stuff.”

  We lay there for what seemed like hours without catching a glimpse of Crabtree. Wisps of smoke drifted up out of the stone chimney, so we were pretty sure he was home. Then I noticed a faint odor. It seemed to be growing stronger.

  “You smell that, Eddie?”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty awful.”

  “What do you suppose it is?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Crabtre
e is burning some rotten old hides in his stove.”

  “It keeps getting stronger.”

  “Wind must have shifted and be blowing the smoke up here.”

  The hair on the back of my neck lifted. My hair was always a pretty good detector of danger. “I’m getting a little scared, Eddie. Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Y-yeah. Uh, I don’t want you to get too scared, Pat. We b-b-better head on home.”

  I started to push back from the ledge but my feet bumped into a rock. I moved my feet to one side to get around it. But the rock moved, too. This seemed a rather bad omen. I turned and looked up. Towering over us was—Rancid Crabtree!

  What happened next was all kind of a blur. I do recall being snatched up by the back of my shirt, and I had this image of Eddie’s legs running like crazy but unable to get any traction because they were way up in the air. And then something was pulled over my head and I was flipped upside down. The next thing I knew, I was being bounced along on Crabtree’s shoulder like a bag of grain. At one point I was dropped on the ground. I heard a paper sack being opened and then the rustle of waxed paper followed by chewing sounds. Crabtree was eating our lunch! Then I was hoisted back up and carted off again. Finally, I was dropped on a hard surface of some kind. All this while I’d tried to keep my breathing to a minimum so as not to call attention to myself, but now I stopped breathing altogether and listened for sounds of Crabtree. Silence. The odor was fading. The murderous old mountain man had probably left me in one of his secret places, intending to come back later and finish me off. And then I heard a muffled cry from Eddie.

  “Help!”

  A door opened.

  “Help!”

  “For heaven’s sakes!” Mrs. Muldoon said. “What are you boys doing in those gunnysacks! How in the world? Why, the sacks are tied shut! And here’s a note! I can barely make it out. Let’s see: ‘Keep … these … younguns out of my … hair … or else! Yours truly … Rancid Crabtree. P.S. Thanks for … the lunch!’ My goodness, what terrible spelling.”

  “Forget the spelling, Ma,” Eddie said. “Get us out of these sacks.”

  Mrs. Muldoon seemed to be thinking about what to do next. “Oh, I will, Eddie, I will. But first I think I’ll make myself a nice cup of tea, put my feet up, and treat myself to a little peace and quiet.” The door closed.

  “Geez, I don’t know what gets into Ma,” Eddie said. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Pat. Next time old Crabtree won’t find us so easy to catch.”

  “Next time! What do you mean, next time, Eddie? He catches us again, he’ll kill us for sure!”

  “Naw, this is great. See, if he was going to kill us, he’d have killed us this time. Instead, he just hauled us back home. He ain’t as fierce as everybody thinks.”

  “Yeah, well, next time you go without me.”

  “C’mon, Pat, don’t you want to learn to be a mountain man? You want to spend the rest of your life in second grade?”

  One thing about Eddie, he knew how to push all the right buttons.

  As punishment for “tormenting” Rancid Crabtree, both Crazy Eddie and I were placed under house arrest for a whole week. Talk about your miscarriage of justice. You’d think we’d stuck Crabtree in a gunnysack and kidnapped him!

  Under the terms of our parole the following week, Eddie and I were forbidden to associate with any dangerous and unsavory characters—namely each other—for an unspecified period of time. So our only means of communication was Morse code, blinked with flashlights at night across the fields between our homes. One night Eddie blinked out this message to me: C-T-H-L-T-M-E-S-N-I-B. I blinked back a terse reply: B-I-P-F-O-G. As Eddie often pointed out, one of these days we’d actually have to learn Morse code. That way the message wouldn’t always have to be the same: “Meet me at the Big Tree.”

  I slipped out my bedroom window and ran to the Big Tree, a solitary cottonwood in the middle of our hay field. Eddie was already there.

  “I got our next raid on old Crabtree all worked out,” he said.

  “What raid? You know we’re not supposed to bother Crabtree anymore.”

  “Us bother him? He’s the one tied us up in gunnysacks and carted us home like a couple weaner pigs. It was just like he kidnapped us, and our folks didn’t even call the sheriff on him or nothin’. Shucks, I even heard Pa say he wished he’d come up with that gunnysack idea. Nope, we got to take revenge on Crabtree ourselves.”

  “Revenge? Eddie, don’t you understand? That old mountain man will kill us just for showing up, let alone us trying to take revenge on him.”

  “Well, not revenge really. What we’ll do is set a trap for him. See, I got it all drawn out here.” He turned his flashlight on a sheet of tablet paper. “This here is a wild-animal pit trap, just like the one we caught Pa in.”

  “Eddie, besides your pa, all we ever caught in that trap was a little skunk.”

  “Well, they was both wild, wasn’t they? Pa in particular. Now, with this other trap, see, we bend a tree over and tie a snare on the end of it. When Crabtree steps in the snare, he gets jerked way up in the air. I seen it done in a movie and it worked great.”

  “Eddie, we’ve never caught anything in a snare, either. Well, sure, your pa, but he’s easy—he isn’t a mountain man. Mountain men know all about snares and are watching out for them. Besides, what would we do with Crabtree after we caught him?”

  “You’re so dumb sometimes, Pat. The whole idea is, we don’t release him until he promises to teach us how to be mountain men.”

  “I don’t know, it sounds awfully dangerous to me, Eddie.”

  “Yeah, don’t it! I can’t wait!”

  It took us several days to get our traps set for the mountain man. The tricky part was coming up with the bait for luring Crabtree into our traps. But at last we were ready.

  Crouched in the woods at the edge of Crabtree’s clearing, we waited for him to emerge from his cabin.

  “I always thought mountain men got up at the crack of dawn,” Eddie said. “It’s already almost noon. Oh, look, he’s coming out.”

  Crabtree strolled from his cabin, stretching and yawning. Suddenly, he stopped and glanced about, as if his keen mountain man senses detected intruders nearby. Then he reached down and picked up the note Eddie had left on his chopping block. The note said: “We’ve come for our revenge, Mr. Crabtree. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll surrender. We’re waiting for you on the trail. Eddie and Pat.”

  Eddie nudged me in the ribs. “I bet he’ll get a big kick out of our note. Any second now he’ll burst out laughing.”

  The mountain man wadded up the note, threw it on the ground, jerked his ax from the chopping block, and came striding right toward us.

  “Then again, maybe not.”

  Forsaking dignity for haste, we retreated to our observation post up the hill on the far side of the creek. It was pretty clear Eddie had been wrong about Crabtree. He was just as dangerous and crazy as we’d been told. We watched as he approached our snare. Suddenly he stopped and peered at the ground ahead of him.

  “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich!” he roared, glaring this way and that into the woods. “You miserable little tadpoles thank a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is any way to bait a snare fer me? It’s a gol-dang insult, thet’s what it is! And Ah s’pose you thank thet puny tree you bent over is gonna snatch me up in the air? Wahl, Ah’ll show you somethin’! Ah’m gonna jump right in the middle of your snare and squish thet sandwich flat!”

  He put his feet together and hopped into the middle of the snare.

  “Gollll-dannnnnggg!”

  “It worked!” Eddie cried.

  “Wow, neato!” I said. “That was a really great idea. Eddie, hiding the pit trap under the snare!”

  We raced down to the pit and peeked over the edge. Crabtree sat in the dirt at the bottom. He glared up at us.

  “We got you now, Mr. Crabtree,” Eddie told him.

  “Looks thet way,” Crabtree growled. “You
done fooled me. Ah surrenders.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. “I hope you didn’t get hurt.”

  “Nope. Jist skeered me a bit. Fer a second thar when Ah was droppin’, it flashed through maw mind you might’ve put sharpened stakes in the bottom of the pit.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Naw,” Eddie added. “We didn’t want to kill you. That way you wouldn’t be able to teach us how to be mountain men.”

  “Mighty kind of you. Now, what’s this about me teachin’ you to be mountain men? What’s them?”

  “Well, like you are. We want to be just like you.”

  “You do? Wahl, thet’s the fust time Ah ever heard thet from anybody!”

  “See,” Eddie explained, “we want you to teach us how to hunt and trap and fish and how to live off the land like you do.”

  “Ah guess thet won’t be too hard, larnin’ to live off the land. Fust thang you gots to do is get yourselves the right tool.”

  “Great! What’s that?”

  “A can opener! Ah can teach you somethin’ about pit traps, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. You gots to dig them deeper.” Crabtree stood up. The top of the pit trap came only to his waist.

  “Oh, that,” Eddie said, a bit miffed at the criticism.

  “Well, we didn’t want you to break a leg or nothin’.”

  “Downright thoughtful of you.”

  “We got tired of digging, too,” I said.

  “Thet’s what Ah figured,” Crabtree said, climbing out of our trap. “So you pups wants to be jist like me. Mebby you two ain’t so bad after all. Ah likes to see thet kind of ambition in a couple younguns. But it ain’t gonna be easy. We can start right now. Fust thang you do is go dig me some worms, so Ah can catch me some fish fer breakfast. Then Ah got to go lay down and rest. Ain’t used to all this excitement so early in the mornin’.”

  Rancid kept his word, too. Over the years that followed, he taught us everything he knew. But it wasn’t enough. Much to my regret, we never did get to become mountain men.

  Smoke!

  For more than thirty years, I carried on a love affair with—how shall I put it?—an object of my affection. But my wife. Bun, intolerant of such matters, finally issued an ultimatum. “Get rid of that sop or else!” she said, without bothering to mince a single word. “Sop,” S.O.P., was her abbreviation for “stinky old pipe.”