“How much did that Mormon feller charge ya…ta hep ya, that is?”
“Oh, he dint charge me nuthin’. He jes axed me fer a d’nation.”
“How much was that?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
Jimmy whistled between his brown teeth.
“Three hunnert dollars and ya dint find your pappy’s kin…”
Jimmy tilted Buster’s chin up so he could shave his neck.
“Ah’ll bet you cain’t even r’member that feller’s name in the ly-briry, can ya?”
“Heck, ah cain’t. His nametag said Flowers—and ah thought that there’s a funny name for a feller. Beverly Flowers.”
“Lookit how dirty you was,” Jimmy said, changing the subject and pointing to the grey scum floating to the surface of the tub water. “You can git out now.”
As Buster stepped out, Jimmy presented him with an old pair of pants and a shirt then left the room. The tan shirt, sans badge, was from the Lame Horse County Sheriff’s Department. Buster put it on and wandered over to Jimmy’s workbench. There was a brace of large frame Colt revolvers, a little automatic, leather repair tools, gunpowder, bullet-making equipment, and several boxes of Vulcan dynamite blasting caps. There was a cardboard box with a dusty old Contax camera and telephoto lens, a Silvertone wire recorder with earphones, and mounted on the Masonite backboard was a shrine of antique barbed wire surrounding a newspaper obituary for Sheriff James Morgan—a stern looking man with a haircut similar to Jimmy’s and a mustache.
“Is this here a picture of yor Grampie?” Buster called into the next room.
Jimmy walked back in and squinted his eyes to see what he was looking at.
“That’d be him.”
“Ah see the ra-zem-balance,” Buster said, scrutinizing the hawkeyed image in the faded rotogravure. He tried to read the obit. “Says here he was a-sass-i-naded by left wing el-ee-ments.”
“That’s right. The damn union people.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Why don’t you ask your friend, Sheriff Dudival, ’bout it?”
“Ah thought he was yor friend, too.”
“Yeah, he is.” Then he barely heard him mutter, “…Jes caint dupen on him, is all.”
“Well, he’s been plenny good to me and I don’t like you talkin’ ’bout him like that!” Buster barked back to him, surprising even himself. Jimmy clenched his jaws combatively then relaxed them into a smile.
“Ah like that…that you stuck up fer a friend. Would you do that fer me, let’s say?”
“Ah don’t think you should have these blastin’ caps jes layin’ ’round like this,” Buster said, sidestepping the question.
“They ain’t hurtin’ nobody.”
“That ain’t the way Mr. Svendergard taught me ta handle dynamite.”
“Well, he don’t have a lot to say ’bout it no more, now does he?” There was a little coughing laugh from the other room. “Get in here. Ah got somethin’ for ya.”
“Ah hope it’s breakfast.”
“Plenty a time for that later. C’mon now…”
When Buster came back into the other room, he was surprised to see Jimmy grab for a nasal cannula attached to an oxygen tank.
“What’s wrong with you?” Buster asked.
“What does it look like? Ah cain’t breathe.” He took a couple of deep sniffs then twisted the outflow valve shut so he could light a cigarette. Buster’s eyes tracked to an army surplus medical kit that Jimmy had laid out on a towel with sutures and several feet of catgut.
“What’s that all for?”
“Need to do some work on yor face.”
“Cain’t ah go to the doctor?”
“We ain’t payin’ those bastards a hundred bucks for an office visit! Now, set down here and stop bein’ sech a weak tittie.”
Buster sat down on the chair and looked warily as he strung the catgut through the first hooked suture.
“Where’d ya learnt to do this?” Buster asked, not unreasonably, as Jimmy daubed his face with rubbing alcohol.
“Haven’t ya ev’r darned a sock?” The bedside manner part of the procedure over, Jimmy jabbed the first suture into the ugly cut above Buster’s eyebrow.
“Jiminy Christmas!” Buster yowled.
“This might sting a little.”
“Good gravy! Ain’t you gonna give me somethin’ for the pain?”
“You had enough of that last night.”
And with that, he plunged the suture into his face again. Buster yowled and Jimmy just left it there while he retrieved his Chesterfield Commander that had been left smoldering in the ashtray and took a drag. Tears were running down Buster’s face, and his nose was dripping like an icicle on a south facing roof.
“So, you wanna be known as the town fool.”
“No, sir.”
“Well, yor winnin’ the e-lection, unopposed.”
“What’s it to you, anyways?”
“Makes me sick to see a man makin’ a fool of hisself over a dumb girl.”
“What ah do, or don’t do, don’t concern you.”
Jimmy was going to say something, but didn’t.
“And Destiny ain’t dumb. She plumb gone to college!” Buster said, defensively.
“What’re you talkin’ ‘bout? College! She jes went and got herself a fuckin’ reelstate license! And if you think sellin’ our land’s any proper way to make a livin’, yor a bigger ass than I give you credit fer!” Jimmy plunged the suture into his eyebrow once again. With all the jagged black catgut sutures bristling from his face, he was starting to look like a rag doll at an amateur craft fair.
“Ow, ow, ow!”
“Lemme ask you somethin’. You gotta a job?”
“Ah’m fixin’ to git me one.”
“Yor fixin’ to git one.”
“Why?” Buster asked suspiciously.
“You ain’t gonna git one ’round here.”
“And just how are you so sure a that?”
“The Stumplehorsts put the word out. They don’t want you bird doggin’ their daughter. An’body give you a job gonna be on their shit list.”
“But…but ol’ Pop likes me.”
“Ah see ah’m gonna have to curry the kinks outta you,” he said, turning on his oxygen for a quick pick-me-up. “Stumplehorst likes you to yor face, unnerstan? To yor back, that’s ’nother thing ’ntirely. A two-faced man…well, that’s one thing ah truly cain’t abide,” he said, his irises slowly narrowing darkly.
In fact, as we now know, there was not just one, but many things Jimmy Bayles Morgan could not abide. And these defects that he found in Man’s very nature kept him in a constant state of deadly vexation. Over twenty years had passed since the town biddies had refused his custody of the McCaffrey baby—the baby he had found. But that didn’t stop him from monitoring and surveilling him—the way he had learned at Sheriff Morgan’s knee. So, it should come as no surprise that he could not abide the child molester, Carlito Dominguez—who he blew up with dynamite before he could get his hands on Buster. Nor should it be surprising that, nudity aside, he could not abide Gil Svendergard denying Buster an education—and gave him that little push off his perch and into his cement contraption. And despite his tough veneer, Jimmy Bayles Morgan could not abide Buster living under the roof of a wife-beater. And so, he did a little work on Bob Boyle’s brakes. But as far as Stumplehorst was concerned, he had let him live. After all, he finally had the boy back under his control, so why not be magnanimous?
“Have you seen her?” Buster asked.
“Seen who?”
“Destiny.”
“Oh yeah, ah seen her.”
“How is she?”
“All right, ah guess.”
“Does she ever ask ’bout me?”
“Fuck n
o.” The catgut was holding Buster’s brow from drooping. “But, she’s prolly pretty busy…whorin’ for cocaine from that real estate guy.”
Buster looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, and then started to blubber.
“C’mon, now. This is disgraceful! Cryin’ over Destiny Stumplehorst, my goodness!”
Buster was inconsolable. Jimmy sat back and watched him cry and cry while he reheated his coffee and chain-lit another cigarette. “What about that VonMorsch girl? Seen her lately? Ah’ll tell ya, she’s a pretty good looker. Got a nice little ass on ’er, too—and she was the 4H swine champion—six years runnin’! Lemme tell you somethin,’ friend, that’s three good qualities in a ranchin’ wife right there!”
“Ah don’t wanna be with any other girls,” Buster said quietly.Jimmy shook his head at the hopeless lump in front of him.
“Here. Have something to eat. You might even grow a ball or two.” He grabbed a bowl and poured some Lucky Charms into it, then noticed some mouse turds speckling the presentation and gave them the boot with a flick of his finger before pouring on the powdered milk and water.
“Much obliged,” Buster said, sniffling. Jimmy was studying him now.
“Here’s a thought. Why don’t you throw in with me?”
“Takin’ folks on pony rides?” Buster guffawed, milk dribbling out of his mouth. “Thas no job for a real cowboy. No ’ffense.”
Jimmy had to bite his lip. “None taken. ’Course, it’d only be temp’rary ’til you got back on yor feet…”
“Yeah, ah don’t know ’bout that…”
“There’s probably some advantage to bein’ in proximity to your amor verdadera, but who am ah to say?” Buster considered that new wrinkle for a moment, while Jimmy considered pulling the stitches out of his face.
“All raht,” he finally conceded. “But jes ’til ah get back on my feet.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cabin Fever
Jimmy cleared a tack room for Buster to bunk. His shack—it wasn’t quite accurate to call it a house—was erected in 1883, as the date on the newspapers used as insulation inside the walls could attest. There was no foundation, just four piles of rubble under each corner. The front of the place was constructed with split logs, but the sides and back were a hodgepodge of materials that looked like the original builder had panicked—with winter quickly approaching—and nailed up anything he could find to have a roof over his head by first snow. The ruin owed its structural integrity to a century-old Peking Cotoneaster shrub that had grown into a thicket surrounding the tumbledown’s perimeter—holding its warped and rotting bits in place like a soiled dove’s corset.
There was telephone and electricity at the shack, but Jimmy had only paid for their initial installation and never a penny more. In his mind, the power and telephone companies had traversed his land, so in exchange for that, his fee would be free service and telephone for the rest of his life. What utility company would agree to a deal like that, you wonder? A utility company that wasn’t just a recorded voice on the phone, but an actual person sitting in an office in town—who knew very well what a Morgan was capable of doing when crossed.
Jimmy was like no other person Buster had ever known. He never saw Jimmy put anything in his mouth besides coffee and cigarettes. The only food in the cabin all winter was a fifty-pound bag of flour and a fifty-pound bag of Anasazi beans. Jimmy supplemented their diet with deer that he shot in any season—not feeling he had to hew to game laws dictated by the state. When Buster complained about eating the same thing every night, Jimmy went out and rammed one of Stumplehorst’s Angus with his truck. Buster was mortified and called Jimmy out to explain himself.
“Ol’ Stumplehorst had it comin’…firin’ you jes b’cause you poked his daughter.”
“What if they find out? They might think ah did it!”
“Nobody’s gonna find out. Ah removed the ah-lids and the gani-tayla to make it look like an alien moot-il-ayshun.”
For several weeks after the beating Buster received, at the now eight-fingered hands of Cookie Dominguez, Buster walked hunched over like an old man. His pummeled kidneys produced an alarming cabernet-colored pee. He couldn’t ride his horse for fear of puncturing a lung with his broken ribs. His teeth were tender and loose. Repeated blows to his skull gave him unexpected dizzy spells—forcing him to suddenly grab the nearest object to stay upright. Jimmy didn’t like it when that object was him.
“Brisk up!” he’d say, and push Buster off.
Jimmy couldn’t abide a freeloader, so Buster helped out when he could with simple domestic chores. Jimmy had lived alone in the shack all these years and had probably never swept, washed, or fixed anything. A wet, soapy rag, when wiped across any surface, yielded the tacky burnt sienna of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of cigarettes. Buster, well trained by Edita Dominguez, scrubbed and swept every inch of the place. A normal person would have welcomed the new hygiene of his surroundings, but not Jimmy. It rankled him when he saw Buster cleaning.
“What the goddamn hell’re you doin’? That’s what we got Messicans for!”
Of course, Jimmy would never think of actually hiring anyone to do the cleaning, he just didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take a racist shot. And when he caught Buster doing his washing, he really hit the roof. Buster had taken it upon himself to drag out an old washtub and washboard. Jimmy only had two changes—work jeans, work shirt, newer jeans, and an Indian-patterned western shirt for Saturday night at the High Grade. There were some other items whose purpose to Buster seemed mysterious—a couple yards of cotton swaddling and some Ace bandages. Jimmy happened to come outside while he was examining them and angrily threw his cigarette in the wash water.
“What in Christ’s name!”
“Thought ah’d do some warshin’.”
“Don’t you unnerstan? Men don’t do laundry. That’s what we got chinks for!”
Jimmy hurried the soapy pile back into the privacy of his room. What was all that about?
The answer came two weeks before the ranch’s Memorial Day opener. While prying up a crumbling piece of planking on the front porch, a sizeable sliver found its way into Buster’s finger and broke off when he tried to remove it. Minor surgery was called for. He looked around for some disinfectant to sterilize his penknife. There was a closet outside Jimmy’s door that he postulated might hold such a thing. As he was perusing the shelves—cluttered with prescription medicine bottles and oxygen equipment—he was surprised to discover the same kind of device that Jimmy had once identified for him at the Puster auction. A douche bag. What was Jimmy doing with that, he wondered? And then he came across box of Tampax sanitary napkins. Had Jimmy once shared this cabin with a lady friend? In all the time he’d known him—unlike other cowboys—Buster had never heard Jimmy brag about his female conquests, but here was now evidence of a past relationship. Buster smiled at Jimmy’s caginess and thought he’d call him on it. Jimmy was in his room when Buster burst in excitedly with the incriminating Tampax box.
“Hey, you ol’ cayuse. You never tole me…”
But he never got to the end of the sentence. There, standing in the middle of the room was Jimmy—wrapping the Ace bandage around his chest, binding and flattening her unmistakabe women’s breasts. Jimmy quickly covered up.
“Get out!”
Buster shut the door in a panic and tried to close his gaping mouth. How could it be? The swearing, spitting, threatening Jimmy? The Jimmy at the auction, sitting on the fence like a man, cowboy boot hooked on the bottom rail firing up a smoke? The crotch-grabbing, gun-toting Jimmy—riding full blast down a sixty degree canyon wall? That was no woman. That had to be a man. But Jimmy Bayles Morgan was not, in fact, a man—although everyone on the mesa treated her as one.
In Buster’s defense, Jimmy didn’t make it easy for people to identify her gender. A dress had never graced her boyish figure,
not even when she was a little girl. She had always preferred rodeo-cut jeans and cowboy shirts neatly rolled to firm biceps. Her once blonde hair was worn in a fifties flat top—cut by a barber in Naturita. He had a faded style chart on the wall of his shop from which his customers—most of whom couldn’t speak English—picked what they wanted. Jimmy always chose the “Lee Marvin.” She slicked it with butch wax and toughened up the look with dark Ray Ban Aviators. Tomboys of Jimmy’s stripe were not uncommon in these parts. Girls with given names like Maureen often shortened them to “Mo,” Josephine to “Jo”, Wilhelmina to “Billy”—especially if they came from families where boys predominated. In Jimmy’s case, she was an only child. When she was four, her parents, raging alcoholics, left her to be raised by her grandfather, the Sheriff James Morgan. Before the advent of day care, Jimmy was forced to spend the entire day in her grandfather’s patrol cruiser—a front seat witness to untold acts of sadism and brutality. Jimmy emerged from adolescence as a swaggering, violent, bowed-legged, profaning, cigarette smoking copy of her grandfather and near proof of the Konrad Lorenz theory of social imprinting. But that still didn’t change the fact that she was a woman.
What was he to do? Jimmy would be coming out of her room soon. Red-faced with embarrassment, the little boy in Buster was urging him to run away, saddle a horse, gallop a few miles, and scream. But after pacing in the kitchen a bit, he decided against that. He decided to sit down, drum his thumbs on the table and act like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
The door to Jimmy’s room opened. Jimmy cast a quick look at Buster then went around behind him to the cupboard. She uncorked a pint of Crazy Crow then splashed three fingers into a dirty enameled coffee cup. She stood there looking at the back of Buster’s head—he remaining motionless, looking straight ahead.
“Ah don’t know how it was with them fuckin’ Dominguezes, the Svendergards, or them fuckin’ Boyles, but ’round here…we don’t go bargin’ inta other folks’s rooms without knockin’. Got that, pard?”
“Yes, sss…uh…ma’am.”
“Jimmy,” she said quietly.
Improbable Fortunes Page 15