Population: 666
Nancy A. Collins
Hopedale Press
Originally appeared in Curse Of The Full Moon (Ulysses Press, 2010)
Revised digital edition ©2013
Cover photo © Nancy A. Collins
Find out more about Nancy A. Collins at:
truesonjablue.blogspot.com
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***
The evil came with the night, adding its shadow to those already cast by the half-moon that hung in the New Mexico sky.
Its arrival was not presaged by the howling of dogs or the shooting of stars, but by a hot, dry wind gusting in from the Continental Divide that made babies whimper in their cradles and the bones of old women creak like ship timbers.
One such old woman, sleeping nose to tail, awoke from a dream of rabbits and lost love and stared at the stars stretched above her head with amber eyes. She sniffed the night air and caught a scent she did not like. The old woman twitched her ears and clicked her teeth, as she was wont to do when uneasy.
There was trouble headed her way; trouble that walked like a man. It had been a very long time since she had last smelled such a thing, but not so long that she had forgotten the thing that carried such a scent.
The old woman got to her feet and trotted back in the direction of the shelter she called home. There would be no more dreams of better days and chasing rabbits that night.
***
It wouldn’t be fair to call Limbo a flyspeck on the map, but it wouldn’t exactly be lying, either.
Even in its glory days, before the copper mine played out, Limbo was more a collection of houses clustered around a company store than a real town. When the Depression hit for real, Limbo took the blow like a hedgehog. By the time World War II rolled around, it was a legitimate ghost town.
For the better part of seventy years Limbo was forgotten, save for the occasional hermit and footloose hippie. Then, about ten years ago, a group of strangers stumbled across the old ghost town, and Limbo was reborn.
The strangers who came to Limbo were strange indeed, but certainly no less peculiar than many who had come to before. In the due course of time the new arrivals drew up a town charter, elected a town council and appointed someone to keep the peace. That someone was Roy Skinner.
Since Sheriff Skinner more or less comprised the entire Limbo Police Department, he did not wear a proper uniform, like the lawmen down in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Instead, he wore a pair of dungarees and a denim work shirt with a star cut from sheet metal pinned to his chest. His squad car was a late model Jeep Wrangler outfitted with an old CB radio that worked when it damn well felt like it, but Roy took his responsibility to the citizens under his protection very seriously. After all, everyone had the right to be safe from enemies and live free of fear, no matter what kind of skin they wore.
***
The day began as they always did for Roy. He woke before the sunrise, careful not to wake his wife as he padded into the bathroom for a quick shower. By the time he was finished, Bonnie was awake. She was sitting naked on the corner of the bed, braiding the long, dark hair that hung to her waist.
“Sleep well?” she asked as he dried himself off.
“I had strange dreams,” he said, yawning wide enough to display his back teeth. “It felt like I was being watched.”
“You look tired,” she said, caressing his thigh. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come back to bed?”
“Believe me, honey, there’s nothing that appeals to me more,” Roy sighed, dropping down next to her. “But today’s perimeter check.”
Bonnie leaned forward, resting her chin on his shoulder. “Couldn’t you put it off?”
“It takes me all day to check on the farthest points of my jurisdiction. Besides, what if Silas has fallen down his shithouse again? It would be another week before anyone would find him.”
“You’re always using Silas falling down the outhouse as an example for why you have to go to work!”
“Well, it was a pretty traumatic situation.”
“For you or him?”
“Hey, I’m the one with the acute sense of smell!” he laughed.
By the time Roy finished dressing, Bonnie was at already frying up bacon and eggs on the wood stove. The twins sat at the kitchen table, forks at ready.
“Morning, Daddy,” they chimed in unison.
“Morning, Kasa; morning, Hoke,” Roy said, kissing his daughter on the top of the head while tousling his son’s hair. A heaping platter of bacon and scrambled eggs arrived at the table just as he sat down.
“Now, kids, let your daddy have some food,” Bonnie chided. “He’s got work to do today.”
“What do you have to do today, Daddy?” Hoke asked as he munched on his bacon.
“Perimeter check.”
“You think Silas fell down the shithouse again?” Kasa giggled.
“Kasa Skinner! Language, please!” Bonnie admonished, fixing her daughter with a disapproving glare.
“Sorry, Mama. I meant do you think Silas fell down the crap house again?”
“That’s better,” Bonnie said. “But not by much.”
“So, what are you kids supposed to be learning today?”
“Miz Powaqa is teaching us about the big bomb they built in Los Alamos.”
Roy raised an eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”
“Some of the littler kids at school got scared when Miz Powaqa started talking about wars and the bomb.”
“What about you two?” Roy asked. “Are y’all scared?”
The twins exchanged glances, but it was Kasa who answered. She had always been the dominant of the pair. “A little bit. But World War Two was a long time ago, right? They don’t have bombs anymore, do they?”
***
Roy pulled up in front of the Limbo General Store, which also doubled as the post office and town hall. The store’s proprietor was seated on the wide wooden porch in a rocking chair, perusing the newspaper.
“Morning, Uncle Johnny,” Roy called out.
“Mornin’, Skin,” Uncle Johnny replied, peering over the top of the paper. “What’s new in the world?”
“You tell me,” Roy chuckled. “You’re the one with the newspaper.”
“So I am,” the older man said with a smile.
Uncle Johnny wasn’t Roy Skinner’s biological uncle, at least not as far as either man was aware. The title was more out of respect than kinship. Although the shopkeeper looked to be no more than fifty years old, and was in top physical condition, Roy knew Uncle Johnny was the oldest male in Limbo, and his wisdom was highly valued.
Although he was a shopkeeper now, Uncle Johnny had done damn near everything at one time or another, from merchant marine to cowboy to ramrod on a railroad gang. He had made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime, and knew how to deliver babies, set broken limbs and nurse sick calves. And, to hear him tell it, he’d been killed more than once.
Uncle Johnny had not been amongst the original settlers, but had sought them out after hearing stories of the resurrected ghost town. As such, he was
officially Limbo’s first inductee. It was Uncle Johnny who refurbished and stocked the old General Store, using his own personal fortune to provide Limbo with its necessities and the occasional luxury.
“What’s the date on that paper?” Roy asked.
“Relatively fresh. It’s just two days old. Sis brung it in when she fetched the mail.” Uncle Johnny pursed his lips in disgust. “Seems Santa Fe got itself a boney-fide serial killer.”
“That a fact? What they calling this one?”
“The Santa Fe Slasher.” Uncle Johnny clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Sounds like a ball team, don’t it? It’s a shame what folks get up to, ain’t it, Skin?”
“It sure is,” Roy agreed. “You say Sis is back already?”
“Yep. She an’ Tully left as the sun was comin’ up. She’s inside sortin’ mail.”
The interior of the store was dark, cool, and smelled of animal feed and aged wood. It was divided into two sections, one side of which was a long wooden counter fronted by a wrought-iron teller’s cage, behind which stood a wooden cabinet full of different-sized pigeonholes.
Behind the cage stood a young woman, little more than a girl, really, her blonde hair hanging to the middle of her back in a tidy braid, dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a poet’s blouse. She stood with her back to the door, popping the various letters into the appropriate cubbyholes.
“Morning, Sis.”
Limbo’s postmistress turned and smiled at Limbo’s sheriff. “Morning, Skin. How are Bonnie and the twins?”
“Fine as ever.” Roy glanced around. “Where’s Tully?”
“He’s out back splitting wood.”
Sis and her younger brother Tully were more of Limbo’s ‘inductees’. Six years ago they wandered into town dressed only in rags and dirt, Sis all of eleven, Tully barely four. Orphaned and long used to relying on one another to survive, they were as close to feral children as any he could remember seeing. It was Uncle Johnny who more-or-less adopted them, stating that he, too, had once been an orphan. In the intervening years, Sis had grown into a stunningly beautiful, and impressively strong-willed young woman, while Tully...
Well, Tully had grown.
Twice a week Sis drove Uncle Johnny’s pick-up, with Tully riding in back, down to Los Alamos, where she picked up supplies for the store while dropping off and picking up the mail for the entire town at a private mail drop.
There were others in the Limbo community who ventured forth into the wide world, mostly for economic reasons. As head of the Coyotero Tribal Arts Collective, Bonnie made quarterly trips to a trendy gallery in Santa Fe, where she sold the traditional blankets, dance shawls and pottery she and the others to the owner, who resold them to even trendier tourists and wealthy collectors in New York and Los Angeles. The six-figure income the handicrafts generated were placed in the community treasure chest, which went to pay for those necessities--such as feed and fuel--that Limbo’s citizens could not generate themselves.
The only regular visitor from the outside world was Billy Mustang, the owner of Kokopelli Fuel & Oil, who drove up once a month to refill the aboveground tank that served as the community gas station and swap out propane tanks in the various homes.
Most of the homes in Limbo had gardens, where corn, squash, and beans, were grown, and most of the citizenry also kept chickens. The only building with electric lights was the general store, which ran off a generator. The rest of the community warmed themselves with stoves fed by propane or wood, while solar panels heated water pulled from hand-dug wells by windmills.
The casual outside observer might assume from the proliferation of solar panels and high-tech windmills that Limbo was a commune full of back-to-nature, tree-hugging vegetarian hippies. But to do so would be dangerous. For every household contained more than one born hunter, and there was always meat on the table at every meal.
Most of those who lived beyond the homes clustered about the general store and the schoolhouse were ranchers. Some raised sheep and goats for wool and milk, while and others bred cattle for meat and horses for transportation. However, there were a couple members of the Limbo community who were prospectors. Known as the Old Timers, they were the quasi-hermits who were already living in Limbo when it was a ghost town.
Most of the Old Timers lived in primitive shacks that were little more than lean-tos. It was Roy’s duty, while on perimeter check, to stop by and briefly visit with each individual rancher and prospector, to make sure that they were okay and find out if any of them had experienced anything out of the ordinary since his last visit.
Silas Samuels’ shack had once been the foreman’s office for the Limbo Mining Company. It stood four feet off the ground on sturdy pillar-like legs and had a front porch, stairs and actual windows, although old burlap bags now covered most of the empty panes.
Silas’s burro, Sookie, sat in the shade under the shack, watching the sheriff warily as she munched on her oats. A hundred yards behind the Old Timer’s shack stood the gaping mouth of the old copper mine.
“Silas? You home?” Skinner called out as he climbed the stairs. He pushed on the door of the shack, which swung open, revealing a table, a chair, a pot-bellied stove, and a bed made of rags. There was no sign of Silas.
Skinner climbed back down the stairs, scratching the back of his head. He glanced around the tangle of disused mining equipment and ore carts that littered the compound. Wherever the prospector was, it couldn’t be far away, since he had not taken Sookie with him. Roy took a deep breath and stepped in the direction of the outhouse.
“Silas! You in there?”
“Sheriff--! Over here!”
Roy heaved a sigh of relief and trotted over to the mine entrance as Silas emerged from the tunnel, a miner’s helmet on his head.
Silas Samuels was tall and rangy, with shoulder-length gray hair and a grizzled beard. His face was as brown and seamed as a seasoned catcher’s mitt from long years spent under the Southwestern sun. His teeth were yellow and stubby as kernels on an ear of corn, but nowhere near as tightly spaced. In his canvas jeans, denim work shirt, and square-toed brogans he looked like a cross between Gabby Hayes and Tommy Chong.
Roy didn’t know how old Silas really was, but he assumed the Old Timer was between fifty and sixty-five. When questioned, Silas was, himself, somewhat vague on the subject, but from all accounts he had been squatting at the old mining facility since the Vietnam War. The old prospector made his living, such as it was, sifting through the abandoned mines that dotted the territory for various semi-precious metals and stones, such as copper and turquoise.
Where once he carried his finds to the nearest field office, now Silas sold the pieces of jasper and nephrite and chunks of copper ore he pulled out of the rugged terrain directly to the Coyotero, who used the stones to make necklaces and utilized the copper in the glazes on their pottery.
The Coyotero did not pay him in cash, but with vouchers redeemable at Uncle Johnny’s store. But as Uncle Johnny was fond of saying: no one came to Limbo to strike it rich; they came to escape the lives they left behind. Silas was able to provide himself with all the foodstuffs and fuel he needed, as well as feed for his beloved Sookie. It wasn’t the life of Riley, but it wasn’t bad for a man who talked to his burro and had a horror of being around more than four people at a time.
“Sorry I dint hear you callin’ th’ first time, Sheriff. I was down checkin’ on th’ timbers, seein’ they was shored up proper,” the old prospector explained, switching off the small battery-powered lantern affixed his helmet. “You got t’watch these ole mines, as they’re as likely as not to cave in on you.”
“So I’ve heard. You doing okay out here, Silas?”
“I ain’t falled back down th’ shit-chute, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at,” he chuckled. “I put in a new floor since then—replaced the one that got ate-up by the dry-rot. ‘Tain’t right when a man can’t take a decent squat without tumblin’ into his own mess. By the by, I ain’t never thanked yo
u proper for savin’ me, Sheriff. I don’t know what would have become of me if you hadn’t come along when you did...”
“Don’t mention it, Silas. Please. Don’t.”
Having satisfied himself that Silas was safe and sound, Skinner bid the Old Timer farewell, climbed back into his Jeep, and sped off in the direction of the next stop on the perimeter check, who just happened to be his mother-in-law.
***
“Why won’t you let us move you into town?”
“Because towns are not the way of my people,” Changing Woman replied simply. She stood in the shade of her one-room adobe, carefully watering her herb garden with a hollowed out gourd. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse made on her own loom. Her dark hair, liberally shot with gray, hung in twin braids down her back. Although she was the oldest female in the community, she was in robust health and possessed a mind as sharp as a knife.
“Besides, I can take care of myself.”
“I know you’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself,” Skinner sighed. “I’m just thinkin’ about the kids. Wouldn’t it be easier to train them if you lived closer?”
“The training they much undergo is not about ease or comfort,” Changing Woman said sternly. “You lived too long amongst the humans. You have learned their soft ways.”
“I didn’t have any say in the matter, Changing Woman. You know that.”
She paused, weighing Skinner’s words. “You are correct. I cannot fault you there. You were born of one flesh, yet mothered by another.”
Skinner frowned and quickly looked away. Even after more than a decade, it was still difficult for him to think of Edna Skinner, the woman who raised him from infancy and loved and protected him as fiercely as any child born of her womb, without a tear coming to his eye.
“Besides,” Changing Woman said with a shrug, “it is in the nature of shamans to live apart. It is how we receive our visions.” She turned to study her son-in-law. “How did you sleep last night?”
Nancy A Collins - 2010 - Population - 666 Page 1