Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “That’s very interestin’. Very interestin’, indeed. Pay ain’t ver’ good ’n yood be kickin’ ’round in the comp’ny of scum mostly.”

  “Heck, ah’d be havin’ my own place here.”

  “And jes’ how do you plan pullin’ that off?”

  “Sheriff says anythin’s posserble if a feller puts a mind to it.”

  “Oh, he said that, did he? Anythin’s posserbull. You jes…” The cowboy snapped his fingers. “And ya got yorself a ranch!” The cowboy laughed and laughed then bent over coughing until he expectorated a wad of yellow phlegm on the ground that was variegated with blood like the yolk of a quail’s egg.

  Buster almost gagged. “Well, ah’m sure it aint gonna be that easy…”

  “No, pard,” the cowboy said, wiping his mouth. “It ain’t goner be easy. Some folks out here kilt for their land. But anythin’s fuckin’ posserble! ’Fact jes last year, ah seen a heifer born with two heads!” The cowboy pulled at his crotch making an adjustment. “Quirley?”

  “Uh, sure.” Buster said, not knowing that he was agreeing to a hand-rolled cigarette.

  He looked on with horror as the cowboy tapped the tobacco into the rolling paper, licked the gummed end, then put the whole thing in his mouth to wet it. Buster didn’t want it anymore, but didn’t want to incite him. He could see the notched grip of a Colt peeking out from a shoulder rig under his coat.

  “There you go, cowboy.” He lit it for him and lit another one for himself. ”You lahk it out here?”

  “Yes, sir, ah do.”

  “It ain’t fer ever’body,” he said, casting his squint around the mesa. “Takes a lot of seein’ to.” The real meaning of that understatement would not become clear to Buster for another ten years.

  Buster went over and rubbed his horse’s nose.

  “What’s his name?” Buster said puffing his first cigarette.

  “Name’s Nicker,” the cowboy said disingenuously, not quite pronouncing it that way.

  “That ain’t a very nice name,” Buster said.

  The cowboy’s eyes flashed and he snatched the butt from Buster’s hand, pitched the ember and stuck it back behind his own ear.

  “Nicker’s the sound a horse makes, for yor goddamn infermashun! Do you know who the hell yor speakin’ to?”

  “No sir, ah don’t.”

  “Ah’m Jimmy Bayles Morgan!” he said angrily. “Don’t you go to the school?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Don’t they teach ya who the goddamn founders of this town was?”

  “Ah thought the people who found it were the Indians.”

  “No! The folks who kep’ it.”

  “Kep’ it from what?”

  “From the socialists with the labor unions and what not, you nitwit!”

  “Ah don’t know nothin’ ’bout all that.”

  “Are you a cretin or a moron?”

  Buster only knew what a moron was.

  “Ah’m a cretin, sir.”

  “Bro-ther, you take the fuckin’ cake!” The cowboy laughed, shaking his head. “All right, jes tell me one fuckin’ thing you do know with all the damn taxes ah pay in this damn county to ed-u-cate you.”

  “January fifteenth is Martin Luther King Day.”

  That caused another spell of coughing from the cowboy.

  “Are you fuckin’ with me? That’s what they teach you in school…about a goddamn womanizin’ communist? What grade you in…fourth?”

  “Seventh.”

  “Christ Almighty, seventh grade!” The cowboy turned and looked down into the valley, seeming to focus on the Vanadium Elementary School. “Ah got a good mind to ride down there Monday mornin’ and pay that school a visit!”

  “Please don’t do that!” Buster blurted.

  The cowboy narrowed his eyes and slowly approached Buster until they were nose to nose and he could see the dark brown nicotine stains on the cowboy’s teeth and the smell of his consumptive breath.

  “Why the hell shoont ah?”

  Buster had no idea who Jimmy Bayles Morgan was, but one thing was certain, he would say anything right then to keep this character from embarrassing him at school.

  “Because we’re fixin’ to learn ’bout the town founders in the eighth grade.”

  “About how my granddaddy, Sheriff Morgan, saved this damn town from damn Swedes and wop anarchists?”

  “Yessir. We’re gonna be gettin’ that.”

  Jimmy Bayles Morgan studied his face for a moment longer and spit. “You ain’t really, are ya?” Buster’s eyes started to fill with tears. “You just didn’t want ol’ Jimmy ridin’ down there raisin’ sand. Ain’t that the truth of it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lemme tell you somethin’, bub,” he said, jabbing Buster in the chest with a crooked, rheumatoid finger. “Ah don’t abide with a lahr.” Fortunately, the pair was interrupted by the sound of Dominguez’s dump truck. The cowboy turned and regarded its broad form breaking the horizon.

  “That the big bug?”

  “That’d be Mr. Dominguez, my foster daddy.”

  “Uh huh… What’s that greezy frijole like?”

  “He’s all right, ah guess.”

  “Nothin’…funny ’bout him?”

  “He ain’t funny at all.”

  “Is that raht?”

  Jimmy Bayles Morgan hocked up another goober and spit. Buster’s heart sank. He wasn’t intending to leave. Dominguez climbed down from the truck.

  “Morgan.”

  “Do-ming-gez,” Jimmy greeted him, accenting his ethnicity.

  “My boy causing you trouble?”

  “Trouble?” Morgan looked at Buster coolly. “How could he give me trouble? He’s jes’ b’tween hay and grass. Why, matter a fact, sir…Ah’d say, from all the shit ah seen shoveled, you got yerself a mighty fine worker here.”

  Dominguez stepped up from behind Buster, put his hands on his shoulders, massaging and sort of pinching the muscles running up to his neck.

  “He ain’t my own, but he’s a good boy.”

  Jimmy Bayles took in the Walmart Studio portrait and nodded appreciatively.

  “Ah’m a big believer in family, mahself.”

  Dominguez did not extend the repartee. They stood there in silence. Finally…

  “You got my check?”

  “Yes, indeedy, ah did.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Ah reckon ah best be puttin’ a wiggle on.”

  And with that, Morgan sauntered back to his horse and made a clicking sound. The horse dropped his front legs on command and Morgan just stepped on without even having to put a boot in the stirrup. The horse then stood up on all fours—horse and rider casually loping down a game trail into the canyon. Jimmy Bayles stopped for a moment and looked back at Buster, then continued out of sight.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Ah really coont tell ya,” Buster said.

  Dominguez let it go, turning attention to more important things.

  “That’s a nice pile of guano you got there. Biggest one in the family.” He motioned for the other children to get out of the truck and help load it.

  “We’ll use this load for the firing tonight,” said Dominguez. “Maybe I’ll even show you our family secret—that is, if you’re interested.”

  “Sure,” Buster said, taking Dominguez’s offer as a sign of commendation. Cookie, overhearing the compliment from the truck, took it with a sigh of relief.

  After dinner had been eaten, the plates washed, the carpet vacuumed, and the kitchen floor had been mopped with Spic ’n’ Span, the children were bid to bed. As the boys walked to the bunkhouse, Cookie Dominguez was suspiciously friendly to Buster. It wasn’t that he had stopped hating him, he still hated him. It was just that now he pitied h
im. He knew better than anyone what Buster was in for.

  It was around 11:30 when Dominguez opened the door to the bunkhouse. He came and shook Buster awake.

  “I’m doing a run of black octagonals. Come on.”

  “Be raht there,” Buster said.

  Dominguez left him to rub the sleep from his eyes. Ever so carefully, he shimmied down the side of the bunk bed so as not to wake his temperamental brother, but Cookie was only pretending to be asleep. He watched Buster go out the door and cross the garden, thankful that it wasn’t him that was being shown the family secret tonight. A few moments later, a huge explosion blew the windows out of the bunkhouse.

  Sheriff Dudival arrived at the scene with a fire truck. The heat from the explosion of the giant propane tank turned the cinder block building into a pile of white ash—still pulsating with enough heat to melt the windshield of Dominguez’s truck. The children were huddled around their mother who was, understandably, in shock. Cookie was now the psychotic head man of the family. His first act was to keep Buster away from the real Dominguezes. Somehow, Buster got the feeling that he was being blamed for this.

  Dudival approached the family.

  “Mrs. Dominguez, I’m very sorry about your loss.”

  Mrs. Dominguez burst into tears and held her children coveyed up around her.

  “Anybody have an idea how this happened?” The Dominguez family responded en masse in the direction of Buster who was sitting alone in singed pajamas on the other side of the yard.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Cookie spat. “He was the last one to see him alive.”

  Sheriff Dudival nodded that he’d take that under advisement and approached Buster. Dudival sat down next to him. Together they watched the hook-and-ladder boys ratchet a good forty-five feet up the front yard’s cottonwood tree to retrieve Carlito Dominguez’s smoldering right haunch.

  The sheriff lit a cigarette.

  “Hurt?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think fuckin’ happened?” Cookie shrieked, eavesdropping. “He killed him!” Sheriff Dudival looked back at Cookie, his face puffy from crying and made a mental note for his journal that, despite his gigantism, Cookie was something of an emotional weakling. Mrs. Dominguez put a gentle hand over her son’s mouth to quiet him.

  “You get along with him…Cookie, is it?”

  “He don’t cotton to me fer some reason only he knows hissef.”

  “Okay, let’s leave that for a moment. Were you out here when the explosion happened?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What were you doing out here at this hour?”

  “Mr. Dominguez wanted to show me somethin’.”

  “Show you what?”

  “How he makes them black tiles a his.”

  “Uh huh,” said the sheriff. He’d heard the rumors about Dominguez and Cookie, but Social Services was never called in, so he wrote it off as racially inspired gossip.

  “But ah couldn’t get the door open.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Ah guess it were locked.”

  “And then what happened?

  “All hell broke loose.”

  “You ever have any bad feelings with Mr. Dominguez? Like maybe he wasn’t treating you as well as his real kids, something of that nature?”

  “No, sir. Ah lahked him.”

  “You liked him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dudival just looked at him. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I’m going to have a look around.”

  “Sure thang.”

  Dudival got out his flashlight and began to pace the debris field. He stooped to look at something stuck on a sagebrush, then fumbled around in his shirt pocket for his reading glasses. It was a little scrap of paper with the letter V printed on it. He held it up to his nose and sniffed it, then put it in his pocket and kept walking. Something else had caught the beam of his flashlight. On the ground, one hundred yards directly in front of the kiln, was the cylinder from the workings of a lock. It was still hot to the touch. Dudival figured that it was from the kiln door. Someone had hammered a brad into the keyhole preventing the handle from being turned. Dudival put that in a Ziploc snack bag, then stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants and looked at Buster who quickly pulled his finger out of his nose. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then Dudival turned and walked away.

  Dudival would enter the evening’s events in his journal this way: The death of Carlito Dominguez was due to a faulty exchange valve in his kiln that prevented the build-up of kiln gas from being released thus resulting in a lethal explosion.

  When Dudival got back to his cruiser he immediately gagged. The inside of the car was filled with the smell of Dominguez’s burning flesh. He managed to suppress the urge to vomit—grabbing an Ol’ Piney car deodorizer from his glove compartment and holding it to his nose. He drove with it held there, all the way home.

  Three blocks above Main was Hemlock, which led to his trailer subdivision. Hemlock was a workingman’s street with its lawn displays of defunct clothes washers, hot water heaters, rusted manual lawn mowers, and blown car engines. Dudival, now approaching his own place, turned off his headlights, slowed to a crawl and pulled over to the curb. He was very proud of his house. It was as old as the others, but looked brand new. Two years ago, he freshened the exterior with a coat of “Regimental” from the “Sea and Sky” paint collection at Home Depot. He also sprayed gallons of Round Up on the perimeter to abate the weeds threatening the civilization of his crushed green gravel lawn. But he wasn’t studying his house to admire his industry. He was looking for a sign that someone was waiting inside to kill him. As benign a force to serve and protect that Dudival was, his predecessor, Sheriff Morgan, employed a style of law enforcement that inspired revenge—so he couldn’t be too careful.

  Dudival zigzagged from tree to tree until he was next to the house. He would take nothing for granted—no matter how silly this may have seen to his onlooking neighbor, Mrs. Doser, who’d gotten up in the middle of the night to take her anti-seizure medicine. Her husband, Mr. Doser, believed, when he was alive, that the uranium market would one day rebound and high-graded (stole) chunks of yellowcake from the mine in his Jetsons lunchbox. By the time Atomic Mines closed its operations, Mr. Doser had accumulated three hundred pounds of the stuff, which he kept for thirty years in barrels in the spare room next to where he and his wife slept. Back in the day, the mine officials actually extolled the health benefits associated with radiation. That’s why it came as a total surprise to the Dosers when the mister came down with leukemia. And even though Mrs. Doser had to have her bladder and 80 percent of lower bowel removed a few years later, she was still spry and nosy. She took a chair to her window and watched Sheriff Dudival, pistol drawn, crouched for action, sneaking up to his own house—like he always did—and wondered how a person could live like that.

  Dudival stood at the right side of his living room window and peeked in. He was looking for the telltale glow of a cigarette, the clearing of a throat, or the sniffling of a tweaker’s runny nose. Then, he unlocked the door and crept inside using a combat position to “cut the pie” at every doorway. When he was finally satisfied no one was lurking, he closed the curtains and turned on one small lamp that he’d redeemed with coupons from the generic brand of cigarettes that he smoked. As for his house, it was obvious at first glance that it belonged to a bachelor. Dudival’s stock answer when the subject of marriage came up was that he never got around to it, like a forgotten item on a grocery list. When pressed, he would tell people he never found the right girl, but they would have to be from out-of-town to believe that. Folks from Vanadium knew that, long ago, he had actually found the right girl—the most unlikely of girls. To everyone’s understanding, but Shep Dudival’s, the romance was doomed from the start.
But that didn’t stop him from trying—just as newcomers to Vanadium find it hard to accept that tomatoes don’t grow well at this altitude.

  The décor of the house was neat in a military way—no dirty clothes strewn about, no piles of magazines and newspapers, no TV dinners left out, or filled ashtrays—the detritus typical of a man living alone. Instead, a bed made as tightly as the envelope of a Hallmark card, a small Pledge-polished fold-leaf oak table with a tin tray from the fifties that extolled the beauty of the Rockies as a travel destination, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a TV tray positioned in front of a black and white Zenith with rabbit ears. There was an area shag rug that was the color and texture of Chef Boyardi spaghetti, a gun safe, an old-fashioned percolator, and a framed black and white picture of a young boy standing next to a hard-looking peace officer with a brush mustache and campaign hat at the gun range in the quarry.

  Sheriff Dudival took off his duty belt, his flack vest, his uniform, and carefully hung them up. He went to the bathroom, peed, and flossed his teeth. The cylinder lock, which he had collected earlier in the evening in an evidence bag, now went into his safe. He changed into ironed, cotton pajamas, got into bed and opened his copy of Mrs. Humphry’s Manners For Men. “Gentleness and moral strength combined must be the salient characteristics of the gentleman…” When Dudival’s eyelids began to dunk like catfish bobbers, he turned off the light.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Svendergards’ Inhibitions

  At Dominguez’s funeral, the family—whose minds had been poisoned by Cookie—made it clear that they were no longer interested in keeping Buster. Buster’s availability was passed along to the various friends and Lookie-Lous who were there for the free food served at the wake by the Buttered Roll restaurant. The Women’s League of Vanadium—in emergency session—had decided on the Svendergards, a middle-aged couple who were childless and had missed out on adopting Buster in the first draft round. Mr. Svendergard owned six hundred and forty acres on Lame Horse Mesa, but was neither a farmer nor a rancher. He owned the Svendergard Cement Company, which sold gravel and concrete. Svendergard had been responsible for blasting over a hundred gravel pits, leaving the once beautiful ridgeline—as their neighbor, Jimmy Bayles Morgan was heard to grouse—“as pockmarked as Uncle Joe Stalin’s goddamned face.” Rumor had it that breathing all of the dusty particulate had a sclerotic effect on Mr. Svendergard’s vas deferens, preventing the proper expulsion of reproductive fluids. That’s what people in Vanadium said, anyway. On first meeting Gil and Zella Svendergard, one was struck by how fat and pink they were. Coupled with their blonde eyelashes and eyebrows, they bore an uncanny resemblance to Yorkshire swine. But despite the fact that the Svendergards were hale, corpulent, and jolly people, they never mixed well in Vanadian society. Some felt it was because they lacked a normal interest in horses, fishing, and guns. There was plenty of gossip about them in Vanadium, but nothing, please pardon the pun, concrete. Sheriff Dudival’s background check only showed a Chapter Seven filed in 1993, which was not deemed serious enough to hinder the adoption. As Buster took his things from the Dominguezes truck and carried them to the Svendergard’s, Cookie Dominguez suddenly jumped out from between the two trucks. He grabbed Buster by the hair and, as a gesture of fond farewell, punched him in the mouth.