Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “Mother, why did you do this to me?!”

  Destiny was calling from the pay phone outside of the GNC Live Well vitamin store.

  “Stop this preoccupation with yourself, young lady. I’m giving you a chance to redeem yourself in the eyes of God and your family.”

  “Why does God care if I get a real estate license?”

  “The recent sale of the Puster ranch has made your father and I consider divesting of some of our Vanadian property. Paying a broker 12% is not in the family’s best interest. Therefore, once you attain the license, you will do the transactions and that money will stay with the Believers.” Destiny just let the phone dangle and walked across the street where she drank seven shots and seven beers—each time toasting. After the third or fourth round, she had all the other people in the bar saying her toast as well.

  “To your fucking mother!”

  Most daughters get over their hatred of their mothers by the time they are nineteen. By that time, even they get bored of the sulking, door slamming, screaming, and crying. Unfortunately, Destiny never had the typical opportunities to vent these emotions—aberrant behavior at home was regarded as Devil’s work and treated with powerful tonic enemas if she so much as looked cross-eyed at her mother. Destiny realized that going home without a diploma would be physically taxing in the laxative sense of the word. So, she stayed in Grand Junction and created her own abbreviated college experience by getting high with the college kids at Mesa State and in three weeks, returned home to Vanadium, Colorado—Real Estate License in hand. However, she had no intention of ever living at home again.

  “Can I help you?” said Cord Travesty, of Lame Horse Realty. He had heard the doorbell tinkle when he was in the bathroom, but neglected to give himself one last looking over in the mirror before coming out. Two telltale dabs of cocaine remained on either side of his nostrils. Cord Travesty was one of the many real estate agents who were now circling Vanadium. Five years earlier he’d worked for the Telluride Ski and Golf Company. That’s where he got his nickname, Cord—for the corduroy he groomed onto the slopes every night in a giant SnowCat. One night, during a storm, as he stared cross-eyed at the snow clinging to his windshield wipers on lower Bushwacker, he received a vision as to how he was going to break out of his working class rut. The answer was right in front of him. Cocaine. In the next six months, he acquired a pilot’s license and flew a twenty-year-old Aero Commander under the radar and down the Pacific Coast to Mexico. There, he loaded up at unmarked airstrips and then flew back to Telluride with his precious cargo. His main clients were the hippies in Telluride who pushed the miners out of town, then the TV and movie people who started buying property there, and then the Trustafarians—the kids of wealthy parents who hung out and struck a Rasta pose. The town was crawling with DEA men back in those days, but Cord had slipped through several big busts. However, after fifty trips to Mexico, he started feeling superstitious and sold his plane. With the cash that he kept hidden in the kitchen of his house behind a wall of wine corks, he bought two hundred acres of sheep grazing land that would eventually adjoin the airport. From that deal, he made enough to be a partner in the Staircase to Heaven development—twenty-five ranchettes that sold for a minimum of seven hundred thousand—and the Fool on the Hill Ranch. He now had his grubstake to play with the big boys. If he were smart, he’d parlay it into dirt where he’d have fuck-you money for life. Vanadium, the last big expanse of undeveloped ranch land, in Lame Horse County, was just that place.

  “Is the manager here?”

  “Yeah. I’m the owner.”

  Cord didn’t look like a manager or an owner. He was dressed in a vintage cowboy shirt, jeans, and old boots that he had bought at a chic resale shop in Telluride. This was his new “look” to make greenhorns passing through think that he was a good old boy from Vanadium who knew what he was talking about.

  Cord looked Destiny over as he sat down on one of three moth-eaten couches that surrounded a beat-up table. Not having desks in the office was another one of his ideas. Cord took a sip of his coffee from an Amerfarm Pesticide cup—another phony touch. To Cord, Destiny looked like she could be sixteen, seventeen—eighteen at the most. She was trying to act sophisticated, but he could tell she was wearing her black pants and white blouse from church choir. She, like most of the town kids that came in, was probably here to hit him up for money for the Vanadium school trip or money for the 4H.

  “Um, I’m interested in working in your firm…?” Destiny was probably the last girl in the country to have picked up the annoying affectation of ending a sentence on the tonal upswing as if she were asking a question. “Is there any possibility of a position opening up here soon?”

  “My firm.” That’s a good one, Cord thought. “Where did you work before?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Do you have a real estate license?”

  “Yes.”

  Cord smiled.

  “So far so good. Where did you go to school?”

  “I recently completed the Thessalonians Home Study Course of Oxford, Mississippi.”

  Cord tried not to laugh as he got up painfully from the couch. He was still having trouble with his ACL. He took Destiny by the arm and started to show her out.

  “You’re the first person I’m going to call if anything opens up, Miss…?”

  “Stumplehorst. Destiny Stumplehorst.”

  “The Stumplehorsts who live up on the Mesa?”

  “The cattle ranch, yes.”

  Cord gestured for her to wait right there while he ran back in the office for a card. It would be real estate suicide to turn away the daughter of the largest landholder on Lame Horse Mesa.

  “Here’s my card. Cord Travesty. Do you have a minute for a cup of coffee?”

  “Uh, actually, no I don’t. I’m late for my meeting with ReMax,” she said disingenuously.

  “Don’t bother with them. They’re assholes.” He closed the door. “Look. You do understand that we don’t just send agents out into the field. They have to work in the office for awhile to learn the business.”

  “Well, sure. I’d be willing to do that,” Destiny said, not appreciating the full implication of that.

  “Okay, then. It’s settled. You can start on Monday.”

  She took a Spartan room at the Vanadium hotel, which had not been changed since 1946, but her newfound independence made it seem luxurious. She personalized it by putting a picture of her horse on the dresser next to the diaphragm that she had fitted by a gynecologist in Grand Junction when she wanted to strangle her mother.

  She sat on the single bed looking down on Main Street and thought about Cord Travesty. He was handsome, and sure knew about 1031 Exchanges and Conservation Easements. Where was Buster, anyway? It wasn’t like he was there beating down the door to lay claim to her.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hands Up!

  It was snowing the night a tall, bearded man wearing a stiff poncho—cut from the hide of an elk—came into Naturita’s Suit Yourself Bar. It was only the rougher sorts that drank there. He had ridden in on a horse, the storm having made driving impossible. The stranger sat down in the corner and ordered two shots of tequila. That was just the beginning. For the moment, it was just he and the bartender. The bartender poured. He drank. He drank until his eyeballs rotated independently of each other like those of a horned toad. When he decided that it was time to throw up, he calculated the distance to the front door and then the distance to the men’s room. The men’s room was closer, and there were chairs and tables to careen off of in support on the way there. In the filthy bathroom, he did what he had to do then rinsed his mouth and nostrils in the sink. Straightening himself, he finally took note of his surroundings and traced his fingers shakily over the black tiles that he may have had a hand in making when he was a boy.

  When he came back out to th
e bar, there were four new customers. They had driven into town in a monster truck with huge utility tires. They were all wearing the same motorcycle jackets that featured a gold beehive with the insignia “The Busy Bees.” The leader of the group gestured that they sit at the bar.

  It was Cookie Dominguez, now a hulking two hundred and seventy-five pounds.

  “Hornitos shots, cherry cokes, and four Ding Dongs!” Cookie demanded as he sat down. His rear end was so big and encompassing that the round seat of the stool completely disappeared beneath him—making him look like a Mexican-on-amphetamines-fudgsicle. The Bees began discussing business when Cookie stopped them, noticing the stranger in the bar’s mirror.

  “Hey, man,” Cookie said, turning around.

  “Hey,” the stranger said.

  “Some fuckin’ night, huh?”

  The stranger deigned not to reply, possibly thinking that Cookie’s question was rhetorical.

  “Did you hear what I said, bro? I said ‘some fuckin’ night.’”

  “Yep…it’s a booger.”

  “You from around here?” asked Cookie.

  The stranger didn’t answer.

  “What are you deaf, or something, motherfucker? I said, ‘are you from around here?’”

  “How’s Mommy?” the stranger said. The other Bees started laughing.

  “Who the fuck are you, man?”

  Cookie slid off his stool and knocked the chairs over on his way to the stranger’s table. The stranger made no effort to protect himself.

  “Yor brother.”

  Cookie squinted suspiciously. The man before him looked like he had lived under a rock for five years. The other gang members were getting a big kick out of this reunion. Cookie whirled on them, wild-eyed.

  “He ain’t my fuckin’ brother! That fucker killed my fuckin’ padre, man! So, shut the fuck up!” They shut up. He walked around Buster, examining him like an exhibit of a caveman at the Museum of Natural History. Still, he couldn’t believe it. “The fucker I knew was run off by the Stumplehorsts years ago…”

  “Sorry ta diserppoint ya, but ah’m back.”

  “Then that’s gonna be your last fuckin’ mistake.”

  The bartender was nervous. In this snowstorm it would take the sheriff a minimum of thirty minutes to get here—that is, if he had the guts to reach for the phone to call him.

  Cookie leaned down to look at Buster, his head slightly bobbing. With a mighty backhand, he slapped the hat off Buster’s head, sniffed, and made a horrible face.

  “Tú apestas, motherfucker!”

  Buster didn’t respond.

  “I said, ‘you stink, motherfucker.’”

  “Ah bet ah do.”

  “Here,” said Cookie helpfully, “Try some aftershave.” And with that, he broke a bottle of tequila over Buster’s head—opening a cut five inches long.

  Buster fell to the floor, momentarily unconscious. Cookie, now hyperventilating, put a quarter in the jukebox and cranked up Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” his favorite song to fight to. Then, bathed in the neon lighting of the point-of-purchase beer displays, Cookie and the Bees beat the hell out of him—maniacally stomping Buster’s head and kicking in his ribs. The bartender, who received a twenty-buck rake off and a small rock of crank when the Busy Bees used his place for business, was sure they were going to kill Buster and possibly kill him for witnessing it. He edged for the phone, but one of the Bees beat him to it and pulled it off the wall. Now he knew he was going to die. Cookie grabbed a silver napkin dispenser and squatted down next to Buster and began smashing his skull in beat to the ear-splitting music. He hit him a dozen good times, but on the backswing of number thirteen, the napkin dispenser flew across the room. Cookie felt something funny and looked at his hand. His index finger was gone—as was half of the other finger that he was partial to flipping as an obscenity. The stumps from both were squirting dark blood on his cruel heart’s accelerated downbeat. So jacked-up on alcohol and drugs—it took the pain a good fifteen seconds to get to his brain. Confused, he turned to his fellow gang members. They were holding their hands over their heads—looking at the new arrival.

  Jimmy Bayles Morgan stood backlit in the doorway wearing his granddaddy’s pea-green campaign hat and his heavy wool Doughboy WWI coat. He, too, had come to the bar on horseback for a quick snort and got more than he bargained for. Leveled in his hands were his grandfather’s cannons—the two Colt New Service revolvers with staghorn grips and lanyard cords attached to a Sam Brown belt. Smoke was still curling from the barrel of the pistol in his right.

  “You shot me!” Cookie cried.

  Keeping one pistol pointed at Cookie, he blasted another slug into the jukebox to create some quiet for what he had to say.

  “Hittin’ a man when he’s down…” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Ah cain’t much abide that.” Jimmy stepped forward into the bar, his hooded grey eyes barely visible. “Listen to me careful. Put yer hands b’hind yor neck and inner-lock yor fingers.” They started to do as he ordered, but Cookie stopped them.

  “Kill that sonofabitch, you fuckin’ cowards!”

  One of the Busy Bees reached for his pistol. Jimmy coolly shot him in the face with snakeshot. He screamed and fell to the floor clutching his eyes.

  He bent down to address the Busy Bee moaning on the ground.

  “How you enjoyin’ that ’coon face, sonny? An’body else want one?” There were no takers. “Now turn ’round and do as ah say! Walk to that wall yonder.” This time they were obedient. “Closer,” he said. “Until your dicks’er touchin’ the wall!”

  With the compliance of the Busy Bees, Jimmy holstered one of the pistols and threw the bartender a rope.

  “Tho’ this ’round the poor boy’s feet, if you be so kind.”

  The bartender, with great relief, came around from the other side of the bar and did what was asked. Jimmy took some cash from his vest pocket and threw it on the floor.

  “Here’s for the damages. We ain’t pikers.”

  Jimmy mused at the unrecognizable bloody mess on the floor and shook his head.

  “My, my…lookit what you done did ta this poor bastard.”

  “I’m sorry I dint kill’m,” Cookie Dominguez said half laughing, half crying.

  Jimmy lifted his eyes and smiled at him.

  “Are ya?”

  When the Bartender was finished tying Buster’s legs, Jimmy wrapped the other end of the rope around his arm.

  “Don’t anybody foller me outside unless you wanna spend the night on a slab at Crippner’s.”

  The bartender watched as he carefully backed out of the bar, clicked for his horse to get down on his front legs and then mounted, cinching the rope around the saddle horn—never taking his eyes or guns off Buster’s assailants. He gathered his horse’s reins then clicked his tongue a couple of times and the horse started to back up. Buster’s unconscious body slid feet first across the floor, knocking over the tables and chairs like bowling pins as he exited the bar.

  Buster was conveyed, in this fashion, the whole five miles back to Lame Horse Mesa. He was too big for Jimmy to lift up and lay across Stinker’s saddle, so he thought, What the hell? Buster wasn’t going to get any more banged up sliding along the snow than he’d already been in the bar. Besides, Jimmy thought it prudent to ice down some of those contusions.

  In the morning, when Buster finally opened his swollen eyes, he didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t remembered Jimmy coming into the bar, either. Slowly, he focused on his surroundings: there was a smoldering cigarette and a half-drunk cup of coffee sitting on the workbench ten feet away.

  “You up?” came a recognizable croak from the other room. Buster swung his legs around to the edge of the bed, but when he tried to sit up, he almost passed out again.

  “Whoaa, Nelly,” Buster said.

  “That nog
gin’ prolly hurts like a sonofabitch, huh?” Slowly, Buster eased himself off the edge of the bed and discovered that he had no clothes.

  “C’mon out here.”

  “Where’s my clothes?”

  “Ah burned ’em.”

  In a few minutes, Buster shuffled into his parlor room naked. There wasn’t an inch of him that wasn’t blue or purple. Jimmy was pouring hot water from a camp kettle into a freestanding cast iron bathtub in the middle of the room. He topped it off with a scoop of Calgon Bouquet and tossed in a bar of Sweetheart soap for good measure.

  “Get in.”

  “Ah ain’t gettin’ in there. That water’s hot ’nough to make soup!”

  “Gotta be to kill off them cooties! C’mon Nancy, clamber in there!” Disgruntled, Buster slowly and painfully eased himself into the scalding water. He looked up to see Jimmy stropping a straight razor on a bridle strap.

  “This here was Grampie’s razor,” Jimmy said solemnly as if he were offering Buster the Holy Eucharist.

  “Where’s Grampie?” Buster asked.

  “Six feet south.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “They don’t make men like him no more. Ah can tell ya that.”

  Jimmy swirled an old brush around in a shaving mug and applied the lather to Buster’s face.

  “So, Sheriff Dudival tole me you went off ta Utah.”

  “Them Mormons was heppin’ me find my kin.”

  “They try ta feed ya that Jesus and the Injuns stuff?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Yor lucky ya got out with your skin. Thar some pee-culiar people.”

  “They got themselves a big ly-briry with the fam-lee tree of all the people who ever was.”

  “That’s how you found your kinfolk, was it?”

  “A feller hepped me. Looked up two hunnert and fifty-nine Tom McCaffreys.”

  “And which one of ’em was your pappy?”

  “None of ’em.”

  “Ah’m raht sorry to hear that.”