A Cold Place In Hell

by William Blinn

  “You just did.”

  “And you haven’t said a word about what I’m trying to do here. Like to hear your thinking on it.”

  “Actually, Billy, you probably don’t.”

  “Hard card to play?”

  “Is indeed.”

  “Play it anyway.”

  There was a belly avalanche building in me. Never again. I swore it. Never again. But there was Billy’s question still floating there in the dark. “Billy, I only had a feeling like this once in my life when it came to you.”

  “When was that?”

  “The second just before your ass settled down on Black Iodine.”

  “You damn well stink.”

  “It’s my honest thinking on it.”

  “Not talking about your thinking, Wilbur. I’m talking about your stinking, which you do. Piss and puke and Lord knows what all. You need to get yourself down to One Legged Indian Crick and dip yourself good. Get buck naked and dip good.”

  I couldn’t stop a shiver running through me. “Billy, that water’s cold. My nuts’ll be up around my ears.”

  “Then they’ll be right next to your brain, and that won’t be any big change for either one.”

  And that was when an important thing started to get clear for me, and this is what that thing was: When a person starts into that reading ringaround and putting new words and thoughts into their heads, those new things need to get tested out in the fresh air, and when they get tested out, they show up as smart-ass sassy back talk. Might be better, might be worse, but it sure as hell ain’t the same.

  My hair was still sopping from my time in One Legged Indian Crick when the Dutchman clawed my shirtfront and was dragging me on out to the front, saying that Hef wanted us to be riding fence on the South Fork, Hef’s thinking having to do with the road running out there that the railroad people was coming in on. Hef said any break in the fence might offer too much shortcut temptation to the railroad folks and that wouldn’t be right of us to do, tempting new neighbors like that.

  Being with the Dutchman was a lot like being alone. With the exception of not being able to blow back gas without much worry about being too close. The Dutchman was a good worker, but he didn’t have much to say, though he knew English good enough and he bellowed it out behind a closed crib door at Honey’s.

  We were on our third day out. Didn’t see Billy for any of that time, of course, but Heflin told me later he put Billy to work getting the tack room cleaned out and ready to go, and that Billy did a fine job of it, still with his nose in a book every lunchtime and night until the lantern couldn’t fight off the darkness anymore. Cookie was on the short side with Billy, mainly because Billy kept bringing him those cookbooks of Mrs. Starett’s. Hef said he thought it was because the books served up an insult to what Cookie was stirring up for the boys each night, but I had me a different thought, which was that Cookie couldn’t read a word in them books, or any other, and he didn’t want anybody to know that fact.

  The Dutchman and me were making good time on the fence, and planned on heading back the morning of the fourth day. Knowing we had that coming, the night of the third day was a restful time, rabbit on the fire, coffee hugging the coals. Sun slipping down. Woodpecker hammering nails into the gloom. Cowboy life has its points, pard.

  “What’s that there?” the Dutchman said. He pointed off and I looked in the direction of the pointing.

  It was a wagon train of a sort, with maybe fifteen wagons all told, heavy wagons, freight wagons, each one of them with a big black design on the side, the railroad name curlicued into the design. The horses were leaning hard into the traces, snorting and breathing deep. They were pulling heavy loads they were, and it wasn’t often that heavy loads got teamstered into Salt Springs, but maybe that’s just the railroad way.

  “What’s in ’em, ya think?” the Dutchman said.

  “The wagons, you mean?”

  “Um.” That was a Dutchman yes.

  “Survey things. Map things. Road-planning things. Just things.”

  “How come? Just for the oil?”

  “Oil’s money, Dutchman. Money’s like manure. It stinks up the air and the stink brings the flies. We’re looking at the flies.” The line of wagons just kept coming. The wheels rutting through, the skinners bitching and swearing and hawing them on. They could probably see our fire from where they were, but I didn’t see any of ’em take special notice. They were pointed to Salt Springs, and it looked to me like they might just keep right on going through the new night. The smell of that manure must be awful strong.

  Some people are always downwind of that shit.

  I had it right. They had got right on going through the night on their way to Salt Springs, and by the time two days later when me and the Dutchman rode back into town, there was already a little encampment, tents mostly, but with some having flooring shoved up off the ground and most having little pennants flying off from the tent peaks with the same railroad name and design we saw on the sides of the wagons. They’d laid in provisions and were getting themselves organized for a considerable amount of staying. There was a considerable number of the little survey telescopes on the three-stick stand-ups, and all the telescopes was polished and shiny as a gambler’s glass eye. I asked the Dutchman what he thought, and he said “Um” again.

  The envelope was propped up on the blanket wrapped on my bunk in the Starett bunkhouse. The lettering on the envelope was in thick black ink, printed stick-figure-like: Wilbur Moss. I looked around at the rest of them there, looking to see if I saw a smirk letting me know they was running me off to find a snipe, but nobody was doing anything to signal that. I opened the envelope and perched on the side of my bunk. I read.

  DEAR MISTER MOSS:

  I WOULD APPRECIATE YOU STOPPING BY THE GENERAL STORE TO TALK OVER THE IDEA OF YOU FULFILLING YOUR CIVIC DUTY TO SALT SPRINGS.

  KINDEST PERSONALS,

  MARSHAL WILLARD GANEEL

  I read it over a lot of times; finally just the last part, which I stared at for a buncha ticks. Marshal Willard Ganeel. Mother Superior Whore. General Running Ass Scared. Marshal Willard Ganeel. There’s some words aren’t supposed to be leaning up against one another, and the three words at the bottom of the letter I was holding were in that same hole in the outhouse. Marshal Willard Ganeel. Shit on a duck. I musta mumbled something or another, because when I looked up at the rest of the boys, they were on board with what I was thinking. Told me that Willard got himself appointed marshal while me and the Dutchman was riding fence.

  “Appointed? Appointed by who?”

  “The town council.”

  “The town council? Who the hell got on the town council?”

  “Starett and Blackthorne.”

  “Who appointed them to be on the town council?”

  “Starett and Blackthorne appointed themselves.”

  There’d never been a lot of questions inside me about whose town this was, and now it looked like there wasn’t any room for any questions at all. And when I turned it over a few times, I started to see why there wasn’t any new mayor for poor Salt Springs. Whoever was mayor would be looking back over his shoulder to the one who wasn’t, and the one who wasn’t the mayor would be edging around to climb into that chair. But when they split it straight down the center, they’d be looking out for each other and walking through each door back to back, making all their appointments, like Willard, and plumping up all the oil and railroad people along the way.

  Once oil happened in town, I kept hearing folks telling each other that change was a good thing. I seen a lot of the change. Hadn’t seen much of the good. Felt like things were happening more and more quick, but that there wasn’t any clear road we were on, that moving was all that was needed, any direction, any way, any gain. Seemed like we were trying to pee in a windstorm. It’ll all get out, but it might get sloppy.

  In the General Store, there was a room at the back where ladies would go to try on whatever had taken their fancy. There was no s
ign, no anything on the door. If you went to the General Store, you knew what that little room got used for. But there was a sign on that door now.

  It said: MARSHAL WILLARD GANEEL, with a white painted star over the letters.

  Willard was wearing the star badge when I walked in to see him, and there was shiny wax on his mustache now, too. I never remembered him with a gun and holster when he was just clerking, but there was one on his hip now. Red leather on the holster. Gunmetal gray on the pistol. Handle looked to be bone. Willard called over his helper, and him and me went back to the room where the ladies used to try on their clothes. There was a sweet smell in the air, a lavender kind of echo, and I couldn’t help thinking of a time when the room had a better use.

  “Let’s get to it, Wilbur. You interested or not?”

  “In what? Interested in what?”

  “I can’t be everywhere at the same time. Being marshal is an important job. I’m going to need a deputy.” He looked like a new bride putting out her first cherry pie.

  And me not hungry. “You talking about me, Willard?”

  “’Course.”

  “No.”

  “No? Who the hell are you to say no?”

  “Who do I have to be?”

  He drew himself up, like he’d sat down on a finger. “Don’t you even want to know how much it pays?”

  “If I’m ever expected to walk into Rooney’s and pull out some fuzz cheek who’s trying to prove he’s got a pair by puttin’ holes in my body where my body doesn’t now have any holes, then it don’t matter how much this job pays, because it couldn’t ever pay enough for me to go anywhere and do anything like that.”

  “You got the wrong idea about this job and what we’re looking for you to do. You wouldn’t ever be asked to do anything like that. Besides, you wear a sidearm. You must know how to use it.”

  “Willard, about three days ago, I killed a rabbit with this gun.”

  “Well, there you are. You must be pretty good. Rabbits are quick.”

  “I hit him over the head with the butt of the pistol, Willard. For all I know, there’s a mouse nest in the barrel of this fucking thing.” I was slowing him up, and that was good. “You said about the job that goin’ into Rooney’s wasn’t the kind of thing ‘we’re’ looking for you to do. Who’s the ‘we’ part of this deal?”

  “Don’t bone me, Wilbur. You know who it is. It’s Fergus Blackthorne and Mr. Starett. Matter of fact, your name came up from Mr. Starett.”

  “Why? He tell you?”

  “He did. Said you got a steady head, be easy to get on with. Knew the kind of town we had and how we didn’t want people throwing rocks in our pond. Same thing he said about Billy Piper. Same reason we took Billy on to run the school.”

  Lord God Almighty, they gave Billy the job. Lord God Almighty. Willard hadn’t stopped talking, but I was so spun around it took me a time to catch up.

  “... said the same thing about the both of you, that you’d go along to get along and we was at a time when getting along was an important thing, because we were at a place where that was an important thing. That’s when he said the part about not throwing rocks into the pond. I didn’t understand that at first.”

  “So, Billy gets the school-teaching job because he wouldn’t be giving anybody any trouble.”

  Willard’s head bobbed. His mustache shined like he dipped it in snot. “Same reason you got your job, Wilbur.”

  “I hadn’t said I’d take the job, Marshal Ganeel.” He liked it that I’d called him that.

  “You turning it down?”

  Stood there in what used to be the ladies’ changing room without a right-angle thought in my skull. “I might need to talk to Billy about it. You got any idea where he might be?”

  “Said he was going out to the railroad camp and see how many had families coming out with kids. After that, he was going out to the Pecker Draw. Starett said he’s let Billy have the flatland there to build up a schoolhouse. Starett thought you might want to help Billy at doing that.”

  From cowboy to deputy to part-time carpenter. I wondered if I ever had a plan that didn’t gallop off the cliff with me in the saddle. I shuffled off to the door, then turned back, peering hard at Willard Ganeel and his badge and his gun. I asked him how much the deputy job paid.

  He told me.

  It wasn’t even close to bein’ close.

  I found Billy out at Pecker Draw. He was hammering stakes into the ground, wrapping strings around them, using the strings to lay out an outline of what he thought the schoolhouse ought to look like. Whatever it was going to look like was looking like it was going to be half a barn or better. There was string outlines for two outhouses behind, one for the girls, one for the boys. He was slick with sweat and smiling like a birthday child. He heard me coming up on Geezer, waved me on over. “Hey, Wilbur! You showed up right when I got all the work done.”

  “It’s a gift I got.” I reined in Geezer when we got close to the strings laid out. Stood up in the stirrups looking it over. He was standing there looking up at me, waiting. “Big,” was all I said.

  Billy pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it up to me. “Got to be,” he said. “Take a look.”

  I unfolded the piece of paper and what I read there was this:

  Mary Mae Cawper, 9

  David Disalle, 11

  Elizabeth Forrester, 9

  Cynthia Gorman, 13

  Bobby Bo Jensen, 7

  David Lundstrom, 14

  Louise North, 10

  Marcus Quint, 8

  Mary Quint, 6

  Addison Samuels, 15

  Theodore Zachary, 10

  “My first class,” Billy said. “Or, at least, the first half or thereabouts.” The look on my face must have had that slowest-hound-in-the-pack frame around it, so Billy went on. “Those are the kids of the railway people who’ve got wives following them on up here. Stands to reason the oil engineers will have about that many, give or take, and if that’s so and I just double the railroad part, there’s likely to be twenty-four or five in the class. At least, right around that number. That’s a lot. Needs room. Not to mention when we add in Rooney’s kid and Nicholas.”

  When you get to be carrying as many rings around the trunk as I carry, you know enough to start yelling about a cloudburst as soon as you see a thunderhead building up. You know some of them just pass on over, some of them get blown off in another direction altogether. But as soon as Billy mentioned Nicholas tied in with his school plans, I saw a big black thunderhead on the horizon, a collection of cauliflowered darkness all rolling over on themselves and seeming to be getting bigger with each passing tick.

  “Bet you didn’t even know he’d be around, did you?” Billy said.

  “Who’s that? Who didn’t I know about?”

  “Rooney’s kid. Most people don’t even know he’s got one. Lives out past the junction with Rooney’s older sister. She’s been teaching the kid, but she’s about done what she can do, barely reading very good herself. I got it that Rooney’s glad to have him out from under.”

  Where Billy was looking, all he could see was sunshine and bright blue. “You going to build this up all by yourself?”

  He shook his head. “Mr. Starett’s going to split off some of his boys when it suits. And Mr. Blackthorne told Willard to have his deputy put a shoulder to the wheel, too.”

  “Well, I guess that’d be me.”

  A dove landed on Billy’s lips and turned itself into a feather-soft smile. “You, Wilbur? You agreed to be deputy?”

  “I plan on it, yeah.”

  “Damn-damn-damn. Why? What got in to you, Wilbur?”

  I wondered how many times in my day I’d said something like that to some wrinkled-up cuss, and how many times that old cuss knew if he said the truth I’d spit on his boots, so he didn’t tell me the truth, that all those wrinkles were like chapter headings that had knowledge I couldn’t even barely dream of. So I did what an old cuss does when a wet-eared
young buck starts telling you how good things are going to be and that the road around the corner is smooth all the way to the watering hole. I heard all that hope from Billy and did what an old cuss does in times like that, which is that I looked him square in the eye and lied and lied and lied. Live long enough and you’ll get to be real good at that.

  “I’m just too old for this cowboy crap, Billy. I got a rump that’s made out of solid bone boils. My butt and a saddle sounds like two rams locking horns in season. And ’tween the two of us, I got me a bladder that’s shrunk up considerable. I pee now about as often as I scratch my nose. That don’t lend with riding drag or even out mending fence.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “But I never knew anyone liked cowboy’n more’n you. Never.”

  “Never’s one of those words don’t apply to real life, Billy. ’Sides, I’m gettin’ just weary of the life overall. I’ve done pretty much everything a man can do at bein’ a cowboy. It’s a little boring, to tell you the truth. The notion of being deputy, even to someone as lunkheaded as Willard Ganeel, is kinda interesting. Like a challenge to me, like living a kind of life I never dreamed I’d get a chance to live.”

  I was tellin’ the truth; I just didn’t know it right then.

  VI

  Working on that schoolhouse with Billy was one of the most joyous times I ever had in my life. I puzzled on that for a time, trying to see why that was. It wasn’t that the work was easy, because we were straining our milk pretty much every day, what with getting the lumber cut and the foundation laid out proper, getting the measurements right, all the carpentry things that come with this kind of operation, all of which me and Billy have both done before.

  We’d be out of the Starett bunkhouse when it was still soft gray sky shine, and out to the construction before the sun mopped off the dew. Sometimes, we’d be shoulder to shoulder and we’d trade lies and stories and what was coming for Salt Springs with all the switchbacks going on in Salt Springs. Billy was all ready to buy, talking about the school and all it was going to mean, saying there’d even be a library in three years. I was just me, seeing grit in the cream and just waiting for it all to go sour. And if we wasn’t shoulder to shoulder, him up high and me down low, it was good just to be quiet, surrounded by sawdust and songbirds, and I coulda gone on like that for quite some time. And Billy coulda, too, and I know that on account of all the times he’d be singing to himself. Couldn’t carry a tune or remember the right words, so it was hard to know what song it was he was back-shooting.