Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “Crap,” said the sheriff as he threw his latest generic cigarette down into the mud.

  Buster McCaffrey smiled sheepishly, and even a half a smile was something to behold. Tall and thin as a stretch of barbed wire, his teeth were as big as a horse’s—big enough to accommodate Eskimo scrimshaw of Whale Hunting in the Bering Sea—and freckles formed a saddle over the bridge of his wad-of-bubblegum nose. His hair was reddish and fanned around his small jug ears like twists of dried hay. Above each eye was a brow bent like a piece of angle iron in permanent amazement. Taken separately, his characteristics would seem odd, one might even say freakish. And yet, gathered all together, his appearance, for some reason, comforted people. If you asked them why this was so, no one could ever say. But whether they realized it or not, Buster subconsciously reminded people of Howdy Doody.

  “Hey, uh…some mess, huh?”

  The men turned their attention to the woman in his arms. She was wearing black satin cargo pants and a somewhat soiled white top that provided a gauzy view of her nipples. Clutched in her hand was a piece of black metal.

  “What’s that there she got, Buster?”

  Buster looked down to see what the fellow was referring to.

  “Ah b’lieve that’s a burner from that ol’ Vikin’ stove top. She was diggin’ in the mud with it.”

  “Mrs. Mallomar?” said the sheriff.

  Mrs. Mallomar just looked at him blankly. Buster jiggled her to get her to respond.

  “Uh, you r’member the sheriff, doncha, ma’am?”

  When she still didn’t speak, Buster winked to the head Emergency Medical Technician on the job. “Ah think she’s gonna need some seein’ to.” The EMT nodded with tacit understanding. It would actually take the better part of four months before anybody understood the half of what had transpired in this house.

  The EMTs came forward to relieve Buster of Mrs. Mallomar, but she clung even tighter to his neck.

  “No, I’m staying with him!”

  Everyone looked back to Buster. He visibly blushed, knowing that none of Mrs. Mallomar’s antics were being lost on the sheriff. Buster, trying his best to avoid the sheriff’s eyes, turned to Mrs. Mallomar, cajoling.

  “They’re jes’ gonna take ya down to the clinic and check ya out, ma’am. Ain’t that right, fellers?”

  “That’s right, ma’am,” one of them said to Mrs. Mallomar’s bosom.

  Now came the hard part. Buster pried Mrs. Mallomar’s fingers from his neck and tried to pass her over to the EMTs, who, by this time, had a stretcher with restraining straps waiting. Mrs. Mallomar, obviously disoriented by the ordeal of the last six hours, resisted their help with punches and kicks as well as a jazz-scat stream of profanity—the verbal thrust of which dealt mostly with different forms of sodomy.

  Buster waited out her solo and then said, “It’s all right, ma’am. They’ll be nice to you down there. We’re jes’ gonna put this back, ma’am,” and gently pulled her fingers from the stovetop burner. “We’re done with our diggin’ fer now.”

  “No, please!”

  “Ma’am, it’s for the best.”

  “Ow, my god! What was that?”

  A female EMT had surreptitiously brought a syringe from the vehicle and plunged fifteen milligrams of Versed into Mrs. Mallomar’s exposed left buttock as the others wrestled her onto the gurney.

  “It’s just a little something to help you relax.”

  “But you didn’t even ask me if I was allergic to anything!”

  “Are you allergic to anything?” the EMT said, a little late in the game.

  “Why don’t we just see if I go into cardiac arrest, you stupid bitch?” Even in her weakened state, Mrs. Mallomar was formidable.Buster tried to be helpful.

  “Uh, did ah mention…she ain’t allowed to have nuthin’ with wheat in it,” Buster said.

  It seemed like an eternity—with the sheriff staring a hole in him—before Mrs. Mallomar was stowed into the ambulance. Buster shook his head and blew a low whistle.

  “Jiminy, look at that house!” Buster said. The sheriff was still silent. “I guess you’re pretty disserpointed with me right now, ain’tcha?”

  “Buster…” The sheriff began to say something, but stopped when he noticed two of his deputies eavesdropping.

  “Don’t you have something to investigate?” the sheriff barked. They snorted insolently and sauntered away.

  “What’s there to investigate? The house jes’…done fell down,” Buster said nervously. The sheriff sighed like the last of the air from a flat tire.

  “Buster, I’m gonna have to ask you a few questions.”

  Buster scraped the helix of his right ear with his little finger and scrutinized what had accumulated under his fingernail.

  “Shoot.”

  “Where’s the mister?”

  “Uh, ain’t he with you?”

  “No, he is not.”

  “Maybe he drove hisself away.”

  “His car’s still here.”

  “It is?”

  “It is.”

  The sheriff studied Buster’s face as it momentarily clouded with that new piece of information.

  “Is he in that house somewhere?”

  “Ah don’t rightly think so. Ah b’lieve he left the house.”

  “You’d tell me if anything had happened to Mr. Mallomar…”

  “Ah know what yor thinkin’, Sheriff. All’s ah can tell you is he was fine last time ah seen him.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Las’ night.”

  “Last night. He came home last night and you were here in the house with his missus?” Buster squirmed at the implication.

  “Well, sir. Ah were in the house tryin’ to get them cattle out.” This, to Buster, was the big news of the evening—that a herd of cattle had actually been inside a house. “Did y’all see ’em?”

  “Musta been ’bout fifty head in there,” one of the rescue men answered convivially, but slunk away when the sheriff glowered at him.

  One of the deputies emerged from the house, wiggle-waggling something above his head.

  “Mr. Mallomar’s wallet!”

  The rescue workers were now watching the sheriff’s reactions. As far as they were concerned, there was enough evidence to hang the foreman.

  “Do you know why Mr. Mallomar would leave the house without his wallet or his car?” Buster scratched his head, cogitating on that.

  “It’s a booger, Sheriff.”

  “Yes, it certainly is a booger.”

  The sheriff led Buster further away from the others.

  “Remember what we always said about lying?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you having sexual relations with Mrs. Mallomar?”

  Even Buster, who had never read a newspaper in his life, knew how much trouble a former president of the United States had gotten into with this question, and how better off the president would have been by just telling the truth. But now, when it came time to his turn at bat, he, also, looked for the same nuance of language to hide behind. Unfortunately, he lacked the language skills to pull it off.

  “Ah ain’t at liberty to say,” he offered weakly.

  “Why not?”

  Another man came through the doorway holding a rope that had been fashioned into a noose. Once again, the sheriff turned to Buster.

  “What’s this?”

  Buster looked at it every which way—as if seeing a rope for the first time in his life.

  “Lord, if ah know. It’s got kinda a loop on the end of it.”

  “It’s called a noose!” Buster flinched. “Why would they have a noose just laying around the house?”

  Buster took a deep breath.

  “Ah ain’t at liberty to say.”

  “You ain’t at li
berty to say? Where’d you get this kind of talk?”

  “That’s what Mr. Mallomar used to say when he dint wanna tell somebody somethin’,” Buster said glumly.

  “Used to say?”

  “Says. That’s what he says all the time and ah guess ah took it up.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Mallomar is gratified with the results of his mentorship. That is, if he’s not laying dead under that heap of a house over there.” The men were all waiting for this conversation to conclude in the only way it could.

  “Buster, I got no choice but to take you in.”

  “Aw, but Sheriff, ah ain’t killed nobody…”

  “That’s what he always says,” someone muttered.

  “Turn around. I’ll have to cuff you.” Buster almost burst out in tears, but complied docilely. As the sheriff escorted him to the back of his cruiser, Buster called out to the diggers.

  “Hey, fellers, keep an eye out for my ro-day-oh buckle, will ya?”

  Sheriff Dudival pushed his head down to fold him into the back seat.

  “Buster, that’s the least of your damn problems.”

  b

  Down at booking, the corrections officers gave Buster a more thorough pat down. Then they fingerprinted him, photographed him, and collected his personal effects. He surrendered a bag of Bugler with some rolling papers, the keys to his Chevy Apache truck, his lucky Ute arrowhead, and his Colorado State Fair wallet with four dollars in it. The corrections officer looked up and smirked when he found a dried buttercup pressed between his social security card and an unpaid parking ticket. He was told to unstring the shoelaces from his manure-covered White’s Packers so they couldn’t be used to commit suicide. They took his hat. They gave him an orange county uniform and a towel, and then led him to lockup.

  Someone, probably the sheriff, had sent down orders that Buster be put in the “suicide watch” cell. It was brightly lit with a big porthole-like window that faced the correction officer’s desk so he could keep a constant eye on him. Buster sat on his bunk and looked around his new digs. The toilet was a one-piece stainless steel job, as was the sink. There was no mirror and, worse, no window. Was it possible for someone who had spent his entire life outside to survive the rest of it inside? He could already feel his strength ebbing. He would surely die if he couldn’t be out under the sky. That is, if they didn’t execute him first.

  Buster sighed and looked at his hands. They were as big as Rawlins baseball gloves and just as broken in. What made him think he could make his way in the world with his brain instead of these? Probably Mr. Mallomar. He was always overvaluing, pumping things up. Maybe his friends had been right when they’d told him not to get mixed up with people like the Mallomars. There was going to be plenty of time for regret. He wasn’t going anywhere. In his mind, he began to flip through the stupid events leading up to this—as if they were the embarrassing red-eyed snapshots the sober person always takes of the drunks at a party.

  Dudival stormed past Janet Poult, his secretary, who’d already heard what had happened at the Mallomar ranch on the police scanner, and slammed his office door behind him without even a “howdy-do.”

  He sat at his desk and rubbed his face with tedium and aggravation. Under the harsh florescent light, his face was a craggy composite of avalanche chutes, scree slopes, and deeply cut drainages, the result of forty years of wearing a badge in Lame Horse County. When he opened his eyes he saw that his lunch had been brought in—a paper plate of beef taquitos that Mrs. Tejera, the cook at the High Grade, had made especially for him. White fat had begun to congeal at its borders—the chalk outline of a murder victim on a sidewalk. Dudival knew that she was an illegal but left her alone. Vanadium couldn’t afford to have their best Mexican cook sent back to Chihuahua. She made chicken mole from scratch, and he would be damned if he’d send her packing. As the highest ranking elected official in the county, it was the privilege of the sheriff’s office—a precedent set by his predecessor Sheriff Morgan—to adjudicate most matters himself, without the help of judges or outsiders. But what he could do for Buster?

  Having no appetite, he threw his lunch in the trash and unlocked the top drawer of his desk removing his private journal. He opened it from the beginning and read in his own faded handwriting the narrative that he began recording over twenty years ago.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Native Son

  According to town lore, Buster McCaffrey was born on New Year’s Day. His mother, a slight nineteen-year-old Mormon girl from Monticello, Utah, left her folks to run off with a Jack Mormon—one who had lapsed in his faith and broken from the church. McCaffrey père was said to have worked for the Atomic Mines Corporation. This was 1987 and by then the mine was over forty-five years old—requiring the miners to go down two thousand feet to work a seam. Sheriff Dudival was never able to gather a complete picture of the man. Some said he claimed to have worked at the famous Eldorado uranium mine in Canada. Because of this experience, management put him on a jackleg percussion drill. A co-worker vaguely remembered a guy named Tom McCaffrey as a complainer, that he hadn’t been on the job more than a week before he started saying the mine tunnels were narrower than what he was used to up in Canada—and the place was giving him claustrophobia. One of the muckers—the people assigned to slushing the blasted rock and ore from the stopes and bringing them up the chutes to the main haulage-way—remembered a new guy, he believed his name was McCaffrey, being assigned to a miniature diesel bulldozer—six feet long and four feet wide. The muckers were paid less than drillers, but on the bright side, they got to sit on their asses all day. One of the old timers said he recalled a story about a guy—was it McCaffrey?—asleep on his dozer, not fifty feet from where the blasting crew put a charge of Tovex in the hole. After the blast, this fellow, McCaffrey, had the brass to tell the supervisor that fumes from his diesel had stultified him. He blamed the Atomic Mines Corporation’s lack of proper ventilation, once again citing the Eldorado Mine in Canada as the paragon of mining procedure. Management asked Sheriff Dudival to run a background check on him. When it came back, Sheriff Dudival said that McCaffrey wasn’t who he said he was. There had never been a McCaffrey on the payroll at the Eldorado Mine in Canada and his Social didn’t match. Concerned that he might be a troublemaker or a rank malingerer angling for a free ride on Workmen’s Comp, the Atomic Mines people instructed Sheriff Dudival to escort him off the property.

  Dudival recorded in his journal that he waited for him at the main gate the next morning, but McCaffrey never turned up for work. He learned that McCaffrey and his wife had bought a little piece of land up on Lame Horse Mesa—this was when you could still get it for cow pies—and headed over there to tell him he was fired for falsifying his application.

  He found the McCaffreys living in an abandoned sheepherder’s wagon. Sheriff Dudival knocked on the tiny, rickety door. This missus came out and said McCaffrey was gone.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Didn’t they tell you?” she said, tearing up.

  According to Sheriff Dudival, Mrs. McCaffrey broke down and said that her husband had come home from work the day before with bad news. There had been an accident at the mine. He had been exposed to a deadly level of radiation.

  She said the doctor at the mine gave her husband one week to live. Even worse, he said there was a 90-percent chance he would contaminate their unborn child if he were to stay with them—in as close quarters as theirs. She suggested that they move, and get a second doctor’s opinion, but he wouldn’t hear of it. There was no time, or money. No, the only thing for him to do, in everyone’s best interest, was to leave. Were any of the other men exposed as he was? No, he said. But then, none of the other men had stood up to the Corporation and complained about the unsafe mining conditions, either. Had management tried to kill him? Who knows? I’m dead anyway, he answered. He asked that she put a change of his clothe
s in his rucksack and hand it to him through the window with some of the money from the coffee can. With much hand wringing and tears, off he went to die at the Miners’ Hospice in Grand Junction.

  After telling the tragedy to Sheriff Dudival, she apologized for not offering him a cup of tea or coffee and asked why he had driven all the way out there. Dudival was momentarily flummoxed. There was no use, at this point, telling her that her husband had been fired. He excused himself saying that there was something in the patrol car that Atomic had asked that he give her. Sheriff Dudival had just been to the First Bank of Vanadium exchanging parking meter coins for paper money. He put the bills in a plain envelope and wrote “Atomic Mine—McCaffrey” on the front of it.

  “He left without collecting this,” he said. “Good luck to you, little lady.”

  He handed over the money and left.

  The night the baby came, the Mormon girl was alone. Even if there had been a phone in the creaky sheepherder’s wagon, there was no one she knew to call.

  Confident from her experience as midwife to countless kittens and cattle born on her parents’ Utah farm, she went into labor at four in the afternoon. Calmly, she boiled some water and prepared clean rags for swaddling. Things went smoothly at first. She dilated. Buster’s head began to appear, albeit painfully. From the mother’s perspective, the baby’s skull was as large as a Hopi dancing gourd, and his shoulders were as broad as the front quarters of a spring lamb. She bore down. She squatted. She used imagery—pretending he was a stubborn piece of sourdough that needed rolling out with a rolling pin. Dithered, she even tried pulling him out by his ears. But he was just too big—a “buster,” as it were. Six long hours later, labor ground to a halt, with the baby hanging halfway out. To complicate matters, a storm had moved in and had blown four-foot snowdrifts across the mesa. Buster’s mother decided to go for help. She put on her overcoat and headed for the highway walking bow-legged through the snow, with Buster hanging upside-down from her body, swinging between her legs like the clapper of a church bell.