Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  This is not what Clel wanted to hear, another chore to add to his ever-growing list. “No, we ain’t got no signs. You’d think the fence would be enough.”

  “Well, I guess it’s not.” The state law was fence to keep out, which meant that if you didn’t want anything on your land, you were responsible for the fences, but evidently it took stronger measures for the two-legged variety. “Why don’t you run into Shipton’s and get some of those yellow metal no hunting signs and just wire ’em to the fence?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you call me.”

  He mulled that one over. “Sheriff Connally woulda let us shoot ’em.”

  I reached over and took his coffee away from him. “Yep, Lucian probably would have done the job himself, but we’re living in more enlightened times.” I drained his cup and handed it back with a smile. “Ain’t it grand?”

  I pushed off the truck and casually thundered the entirety of my 255 pounds, shoulder first, into Henry’s chest, emptying his lungs and sending him sliding backwards into the frosty grass below. I turned to smile and wave at Clel as I cut behind his truck and ran for my life. Past the county line, another hundred yards to my driveway, and another hundred to the cabin. I would never make it. I started listening to the rhythm of my breathing as I pushed with every muscle I didn’t have. Maybe this was all I needed every morning, somebody angry to chase after me. I figured it could be easily arranged. This was not the first time a white man in this part of the country had found himself in this particular situation. I must have pushed him farther than I had thought, because I could just make out the scratching of his shoes as they fought the shale bed at the side of the road.

  Tell them Standing Bear is coming.

  My head started feeling gorged with blood, whereas my legs began feeling as if they’d been left out overnight. To make things worse, my clammy sweatpants were now riding up the crack of my ass. I wondered if the Seventh Cavalry had had this problem as I ran for all I was worth, listening to the growing pat of his cushioned running shoes. I thought about turning to meet him, but the sound seemed to be coming from a distance yet, and I figured I’d play it out till the end.

  The sun was shining on the driveway when I got there, and I was careful not to slip on the thawing frost as I cut the corner and headed into the final furlough. The receding wind was enough to flip the dried leaves up in salute as I passed, and I started thinking about making it: mistake. It didn’t take much, just a little nudge that forced my left foot in front of my right just before we got to the Big Bonanza irrigation channel. The results were cataclysmic as my already top-heavy momentum carried me into the only partly empty ditch.

  By the time I got to the cabin, Henry was standing with two young men at the southeastern corner about ten feet from the front log wall. One of them was the young man with the strong features I had seen at the bar the other night. I walked past the ’69 half ton sitting in my drive and glanced at the hand-lettered writing on the door. Hopefully, Red Road Contracting’s carpentry skills were better than their sign painting ones.

  “Well, if you do the porch at ten feet, then you can use dimensional twelves for the roof overhang.” He turned to look at me. “Run the porch all the way across the front.”

  “Porch?” They were looking me over, but I guess they figured I was covered with mud every day.

  “Yes, most people have areas outside their houses so that they can keep the majority of the outdoors outside.” Henry folded his arms and looked at me. “Charlie Small Horse, Danny Pretty on Top, this is Sheriff Walter Longmire.”

  Pretty on Top was Crow, so it was a two-tribe deal. “How much is this going to cost?” I had to do this quickly; my pants were already starting to harden.

  “I am glad you asked that question, because I like to be real up front with people on the cost of things. That way there isn’t any problem later on.” He looked down the front of the house and imagined the porch that would be the first step forward in home improvement I had taken in years. “About fifteen hundred in materials if you use rough-cut, not including the tin. Then labor.” Charlie Small Horse and I were going to get along.

  After my shower, using soap as shampoo, I passed them on the way to the Bullet. They had already placed stakes and run string lines to give the general dimensions of the structure, and Charlie Small Horse was using a digging bar to break away the frozen topsoil. He paused to look up and smile as I carefully stepped over the bright green twine.

  His head tilted a little as he looked at me. “You really a sheriff?”

  I looked down at my uniform shirt and opened my coat to show him the badge. “Duly, at least until the next election.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  He smiled. “Hey, you’re the sheriff.”

  “I understand you had a little argument with Cody Pritchard the other day?”

  He looked at the digging bar. “Who?”

  I waited a second. “Cody Pritchard, the fella we found over near the Hudson Bridge Friday night?”

  “Oh, him . . .”

  “Yep, him. You had a little argument with him at the bar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was that about?”

  He shifted his wide hands on the digging bar. “He didn’t like Indians.”

  “How could you tell?”

  He poked at the hole. “The usual. He sat there and gave me hard looks till he worked up his nerve.”

  “He said something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “The usual shit.”

  “You say something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  He grinned with bad teeth. “The usual shit.”

  It felt strange to have somebody working on my house. It felt strange just to have anybody there. I looked over at the little red Jeep and figured I’d give her a call later.

  It was one of those beautiful, high-plains days, where the sky just blinks blue at the earth and you have to remind yourself to take it in. The second cuttings were all up and tarped, and the perfectly round shadows of the bales looked surreal stretching across the disc-turned fields toward Clear Creek like stubble fields at harvest home. I didn’t pass a single car on the way into Durant. It was a little before eight when I got to the office, and Ruby already had five Post-its plastered on the doorjamb of my office. I spotted them when I came through the front door. “It’s a five Post-it day already?”

  “Vic’s been here.”

  I sat on the corner of her desk. “I thought she wasn’t coming in today.”

  “She’s not, but she dropped some stuff off for you.” She looked up, and her hand went to her mouth. “What happened to your face?”

  I didn’t think the scratches were that bad, but there were a lot of tumbleweeds in the ditch. “It’s a long story. Turk head back for Powder Junction?”

  “After he decided how he was going to arrange the furniture when he got to be sheriff next year.”

  I rolled my eyes as I got off her desk, headed for my office, and snatched all the little yellow Post-its as I went in. This was the system she had devised to get me to do all the things I was supposed to do during the course of my workday. On the top of my desk was a Tyvek envelope from the Federal Bureau of Investigation via FedEx. It still gave me a cheap thrill to get stuff from the Bureau, kind of reassuring me that I was on epistolary terms with the big guys: my pen pal, Elliot Ness. Vic must’ve brought it in. She wasn’t as impressed by the federales; considered them a case of dumb-asses-with-degrees. I broke open the nylon-reinforced filament tape and pulled out the mummy-wrapped container as an envelope fell to my desk. It was from the General Chemical Analysis Division, file number 95 A-HQ 7 777 777. Hell, with all those sevens we were bound to get lucky. And we were. The FBI laboratory said the foreign chemical compound on the ballistics samples had been identified as Lubricant SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.

  Son of a bitch, th
at narrowed the field. That meant that whoever shot Cody Pritchard had done it with a black-powder shotgun. That didn’t make sense, though. I wasn’t even sure if you could shoot solid slugs out of antique shotguns without having them blow up in your face. And why use an antique shotgun? As the ultimate in nostalgia, at least thirteen American firms produced black-powder muskets, rifles, pistols, and shotguns, including flintlock and percussion designs. Traditional muzzleloaders are occasionally used for hunting, but black-powder arms turn up more frequently at pioneer celebrations, traditional turkey shoots, and in the hands of Civil War reenactment groups. They come with the original drawbacks of slow reloading, inconvenient ammunition, and lots of smoke. On the other hand, as certified antiques, their sale and ownership is generally not regulated under current firearm legislation. Two sides of the coin and neither one any help. Who had antique shotguns in this part of the country? The answer to that came roaring back: everybody. Even I had an old double-barrel Parker that had belonged to my grandfather and an old Ithaca 10 gauge coach gun. Okay, so it didn’t narrow the field. I looked up and found Ruby leaning against the doorjamb. “Yep?”

  “I just wanted to see your response.”

  I held up the letter. “To this?”

  She smiled. “Underneath that.”

  I slid the envelopes aside and picked up a pair of what looked like sweatpants. In blue screen printing it said CHUGWATER ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT XXXXL. “Very funny.” Chugwater was a little town about two-thirds of the way down to Cheyenne and is known for its chili mix and Hoover’s Hut, a gas station/gift shop. I held the pants up for inspection. “You could fit three of me in here.”

  “Maybe she thinks you’ll grow into them.”

  “Everybody’s a wise guy.” I tossed them over my chair. “Do you think you can track down Omar?”

  “It’s hunting season.”

  “I know.”

  Her shoulders slumped a little. “If we had infrared satellite capabilities, I would say yes.”

  I eased my sore legs into a sitting position. “I guess what I’m asking is if you could make a few phone calls and see if he’s around and not in Rwanda?”

  “Sure, but I’m not making any promises.” She started to leave but not without a parting shot. “Read your Post-its, you have a busy day ahead of you.”

  I tossed the letter from the FBI onto my desk and picked up the little pile of notes. The first was a vehicle inspection that needed to be done down on Swayback Road, south of town. No one had done it yet because it was a twenty-mile loop, and there was nothing else down there. How was I supposed to keep Gotham safe when I was out in the hinterlands reading VIN numbers? The next was from Kyle Straub, the prosecuting attorney for the county; he probably wanted to know why it was that I had released a crime scene without consulting with him. Another one was from Vern Selby, the circuit court judge, about my trial date on Wednesday, and Ernie Brown, Man About Town, had called and wanted a statement for the Durant Courant. The final one simply said WE HAVE AN OCCUPANT. Hell. I yelled after her, “Who is it?”

  “Jules Belden.”

  Shit. “PI or D and D?”

  “Both; and assaulting an officer. I’ve got the report in here.”

  I got up, walked out, and sat on her desk again. Before I could get settled, the file was under my nose. I flipped through quickly enough to let Turk’s childlike scrawl piss me off and stuck it under my arm. “Anybody feed Jules?”

  “Not that I am aware of.”

  “Do you want to go down to the Bee and get him something?”

  “Do you want to finish these reports?”

  I stood up. “I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll alert the press.”

  As I made my way out the back door, I mused on the little bed and breakfast that we had behind our offices, two holding cells upstairs and the regular jail downstairs. Not too many people understand the differences between jails and prisons. Jails are county or municipal facilities; prisons are state facilities. Jails usually hold two types of lodgers: those awaiting trial for both felonies and misdemeanors and those who have been convicted of misdemeanors punishable by a sentence of one year or less. Prisons, on the other hand, only hold those convicted of felonies punishable by sentences of one year or more. Hence, in my opinion, the major difference between a felony and a misdemeanor was that you either got to stay out back and eat Dorothy’s cooking or share an eight-by-eight room with Bubba the Sheep Squeezer in Rawlins.

  The downside of sheriffing a jail was we had to provide three squares a day. The upside was that the Busy Bee Café was only three hundred yards away, past the Owen Wister Hotel and the Uptown Barber Shop, down a pair of crumbling, old steps behind the courthouse. The only time things got lean was on Sundays when Dorothy was closed and we fell back on the varied selection of potpies in the minifreezer in the back.

  As I slipped behind the building, I looked up into the windows of the courthouse and hoped that neither Kyle Straub nor Vern Selby would see me. I spotted their cars in the parking lot and made a mental note to deal with the powers that be later in the day, possibly with the charm of a personal visit. By the time I got past the barbershop, the thought of biscuits and sausage gravy quickened my aching step considerably. The Bee was perched next to the bridge alongside Clear Creek and, with its definite slant toward the water, was vintage Alistair MacLean. The little bell on the door announced my entrance, and a couple of hunters looked up; nobody I knew. I sat at one of the end stools by the cash register and picked up the paper. There was a picture of Ferg and the Search and Rescue team standing around eating donuts and drinking coffee near the Hudson Bridge. I was glad to see the Courant had captured the spirit of the thing. Above the picture, in medium print, was the headline LOCAL YOUTH DIES IN SHOOTING INCIDENT. Incident, that was good; at least everybody in town wasn’t referring to it as a gangland-style slaying. I guess I owed Ernie Brown a cup of tea and an interview. I folded the paper back and laid it on the counter for a quick read, as a steaming cup of coffee slid in front of me. “Somebody took the funnies.”

  “I usually find the whole paper funny.”

  Seemed like this country was loaded with good-looking older females, even if the pioneers deemed it hard on horses and women. Dorothy Caldwell was about sixty-five as near as I could figure and had run the Bee as far back as I could remember. The place had gotten its name from Dorothy’s claimed spiritual attachment to Napoleon and from the impressive bee collection that resulted from this fondness and that rested on the shelves above the cutting board. There were wooden bees, ceramic bees, stuffed bees, glass bees, every kind of bee imaginable. It was a small town crusade to provide Dorothy with bees from every corner of the globe, and I noted with satisfaction the little porcelain one on the end that had come all the way from Tokyo via Vietnam. The name was also due to the fact that Dorothy knew every piece of gossip circulating about the entire county. If I really wanted to know what the hell was going on around here, I would talk to her. Hell, she probably knew who killed Cody Pritchard. So I tossed it out. “Who killed Cody Pritchard?”

  Her face was immobile. “As opposed to Cock Robin?”

  “He’s missing too?”

  She rested her knuckles on the counter and leaned into me. “This is the second time this week you guys have been in here questioning me about this. Should I consider myself a suspect?”

  I bit my lip and thought about it. “As much as everybody else.”

  “Good. Things were getting boring around here, and I rather like having an air of mystery and danger.” She looked at my armpit; it was not the first file I had brought to the Bee. “Who’s that?”

  “Jules Belden.”

  She sighed. “Oh, God.” She looked up. “Do you want the usual?”

  “I didn’t even know I had a usual.”

  “Everybody’s got a usual.”

  “I’ll have the usual.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, sat the folder on the counter, and began reading the newspa
per. “In the cold, gray dawn of September the twenty-eighth . . .” Dickens. “. . . The slippery bank where the life of Cody Pritchard came to an ignominious end . . .” Faulkner. “Questioning society with the simple query, why?” Steinbeck. “Dead.” Hemingway.

  Ernie had been an English Literature major at University of Wyoming before landing the job of lone employee and chief editor for the Durant Courant in 1951. I had two favorite parts of the paper: the Man About Town on the editorial page, which was Ernie; and the Roundup, which was Ruby’s contribution to the fourth estate. The dispatcher’s log was transcribed and documented under police reports in a rather surrealistic style. This resulted in profound statements, such as “A pig was reported on Crow Street, officer dispatched. No pig was found.” I considered them my moment of Zen on a daily basis.

  A heaping mound of biscuits and spicy gravy slid over top of the paper, quickly followed by a napkin-rolled set of flatware. The usual. She reached over and grabbed the pot of coffee from the burner and poured me a fresh cup. “So, I’m assuming Jules Belden did it.”

  “Only if it had been alcohol poisoning.” I cleaved off a section of biscuit dripping with gravy the consistency of wallpaper paste. It was the only place in the state where you could get spicy sausage gravy, and it tasted wonderful.

  A lacquered fingernail tapped on the folder. “Do you mind?”

  “Go right ahead.” She flipped the file open and began reading Turk’s report.

  After a moment, “What does the little pissant mean by . . . ?”

  “Please . . . I haven’t read it yet. Don’t ruin the ending.” She propped her elbows on the pebbled Formica and rested her chin on her fists, cool, hazel eyes directly over me. “What . . . I’m chewing too loud? What?”

  “I just like watching you eat.”

  “Why?”

  “You enjoy it so much. You’re very appreciative.”