The Devil's Breath

by R. R. Irvine

  Graham, still panting, merely nodded. “It gets everyone at first, the altitude.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Looking skeptical, the man moved behind the desk. “Well now, you must want a room.”

  “If you have one.”

  “We’re empty this time of year.” Graham glanced over his shoulder at the half-dozen old-timers who’d become his audience.

  “Oh, they don’t live here. They’re waiting for lunch. Our restaurant opens up again at eleven.” The man took a pair of half-glasses from the pocket of his heavy wool shirt and adjusted them on his nose. “Well now.”

  “Something with a bathtub.”

  “And a nice view of the Uintas,” the man said as he wagged his head at the spectators. “All our rooms have mountain views.” He grinned. “My name’s Lamar Mortenson. And I’ll know yours as soon as you sign the register.”

  They knew who he was, Graham decided, but kept the thought to himself.

  Mortenson read the name out loud for the benefit of those in the lobby. He had an I-told-you-so tone.

  After that, the hotel keeper led the way up a narrow flight of dark wooden stairs and down a dim hall, stopping in front of Room 211.

  “As a member of the town council, Mr. Graham, and owner of Bridger House, I want to welcome you to Moondance. You must be here about the property?”

  Graham grunted and tried the door. It was unlocked.

  “We remodeled not long ago,” Mortenson said.

  If 211 had been remodeled, then the work had been done to resemble the early 1900s. Pale pink wallpaper patterned with dreary green vines covered the walls. The light fixture, a cluster of three low-watt bulbs, was painted an off-white. And the bedspread was an aged yellow just like the window shades.

  The bed itself was small, like a piece from pioneer days when people were either very short, or very short of sleep.

  Next to the bed stood a marble-topped nightstand complete with a china pitcher and bowl. Against the opposite wall crouched a low chest of drawers. Both pieces of furniture would have been collector’s items in Los Angeles, but here in Moondance they merely looked old and musty.

  “What do you think about our big plans for Moondance?” Mortenson asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought that’s why you’re here?”

  Graham said nothing.

  “The whole town’s in on it,” Mortenson went on. “It has to succeed.” It was half statement, half question. He sounded like a man who wanted to be reassured that he was doing the right thing.

  “I’m sure it will work out,” Graham told him, hoping that the man would go away.

  Mortenson thumped the bed, then turned back the spread and said, “Clean sheets, every day.”

  Over the bed hung a sepia portrait in an oval walnut frame. Graham recognized Brigham Young immediately: Brigham Young who’d led the Mormons out of Nauvoo, Illinois, after Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, had been murdered; Brigham Young who’d sought haven for his people in Utah, a land no one else wanted.

  “Do you smoke?” Mortenson asked.

  If his answer had been yes, Graham had the feeling that the man would have pulled Brigham right down off the wall.

  5

  THE HOUSE on Nauvoo Lane looked too frail to survive the winters of Moondance. Yet obviously it was a good fifty years old and took Graham back to his childhood in Salt Lake, to a time when houses were utilitarian shelters, not a means of displaying status.

  Seeing Del Timmons again made Graham realize that the man went with the house. He, too, added to Graham’s sense of time travel. Timmons had the seamed face of a pioneer, wore blue jeans as if he meant it, and had hair cut so short that his pink scalp showed through.

  “Harry called,” Timmons said. “I been expecting you. You might as well come in.” There was little grace in the invitation, but he did hold the door open for Graham.

  Inside, a small living room was crammed with a huge bright blue sofa and matching chairs, so overstuffed they looked grotesque. There was one picture, a seascape print, beneath which stood a bookcase designed for and holding a set of encyclopedias.

  Like it or not, it was the kind of room that made Graham feel he’d been there before.

  As soon as they were seated, Timmons said, “How are you going to make a living around here? There can’t be more than an acre or two of usable land out at Lew’s place. Not that you could farm it anyway.” Timmons waved his right hand to illustrate his point.

  “I’ll get by.” Graham smiled. He knew the man expected more of an answer than that.

  “They say you’re a painter.” His eyes took in the plastic-covered hand before glancing at the seascape.

  “I painted animals mostly.”

  Timmons’s eyebrows jumped like grasshoppers. Graham hadn’t seen that kind of reaction since the day he told his father that he was going to be an artist.

  “There can’t be much money in painting animals, whatever kind they are,” Timmons said.

  Old anger, savored over years of struggle, bubbled inside Graham. But he forced himself to keep his answer to a nod. He felt slightly dizzy. He needed rest, he decided, and a car to drive back to the hotel. “About your Jeep,” he began, “I—”

  “You’re a stranger here,” Timmons said. “You always will be. I don’t like doing business with strangers.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  Timmons cocked his head and squinted suspiciously. “I carry a lot of weight in this town. I—”

  He was interrupted by the howling of a dog. The sound came from the backyard.

  “Damn that mutt,” Timmons grumbled. “I’ll be right back.”

  The man stormed into the kitchen. When Graham heard a door slam, he tiptoed into the kitchen and peeked through a dirty window. Outside, a dog was tied to a stake by a short rope. At Timmons’s first kick the animal stopped howling.

  Graham was back in the living room by the time Timmons returned.

  “You’d think that mutt would learn,” Timmons muttered.

  “About your Jeep,” Graham said. He wanted to get out of there.

  “Harry told me what you wanted. I’m open to offers, seeing as how you’re Lew Graham’s nephew.”

  The next fifteen minutes pushed Graham to the point of exhaustion. They included an inspection and a test drive, after which he offered two thousand dollars as Harriet had suggested.

  “Twenty-five hundred,” Timmons countered immediately.

  Graham knew he could do better if he played the game, maybe even waited a day or two. But he didn’t have the stamina. He brought out a book of traveler’s checks and started signing.

  As soon as Timmons held the chits in hand, he said, “You paid stranger’s prices.”

  “I’m glad. I wouldn’t want to be thought of as a friend.”

  Timmons snorted. “Old Lew didn’t have many friends left, not after he went against the town.”

  “He showed good taste, if you ask me.”

  “You probably already know,” Timmons said, obviously struggling to sound more friendly, “that we want your land for our Hunting Ground.”

  “What the hell is this Hunting Ground anyway?”

  “It has nothing to do with hell.”

  “I don’t know about that. I have a feeling you people are going to make my life hell if I don’t give in.”

  “We’ll pay a fair price.”

  “Why do you want my land so badly?” Graham was intrigued now and somewhat leery.

  “You ought to hear that from the mayor. He speaks for the council. Besides, it’s his plan. I never did like it. I still don’t.”

  “Then why bother me?”

  “I don’t want you thinking we’re a bunch of hicks. We won’t be messed with. Take my advice and go back where you came from. Remember, bullets don’t respect property lines.”

  If Graham hadn’t already signed the checks, he would have walked out, Jeep or no Jeep. “I don’t like being t
hreatened,” he said.

  “I’m only giving you advice. Good advice at that.”

  Graham wanted to ask more about this so-called Hunting Ground, but Timmons gave him the creeps. So he turned away and headed for the Jeep.

  Timmons kept pace. “Not so fast. There’s something I want to know.”

  “You have your money. That’s all you’re entitled to.”

  “Are you going to sell your land?”

  “No.”

  “Is that for certain, or are you trying to jack up the price?”

  “I’m here to stay.”

  Timmons smiled. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  ******

  Graham wavered between choosing sleep or food. Finally his stomach won. He parked the Jeep in front of Bridger House and entered the hotel’s restaurant. Just as he’d come to expect in Moondance, his arrival stopped the action. Mouths, and there seemed to be a lot of them for two-thirty in the afternoon, snapped shut.

  It felt as if all eyes were on him as he stomped to one of two empty tables and sat down. Using his mechanical hand, he speared a menu from between the salt and pepper shakers.

  “Good afternoon,” a woman said from the next table. Only then did he realize that he’d seated himself next to Harriet.

  “May I join you?” she asked.

  Graham shrugged and dropped the menu. “Have you been assigned to keep an eye on me? To make sure I don’t start any nasty rumors?”

  She ignored the comment and said, “Try the hot beef sandwich.”

  She sipped lemonade while he ate.

  When he finished, he said, “I’m beginning to pile up debts. First, you give me, a stranger, a ride. Then you serve me a drink. And now you’re selecting my food. If this keeps up, I won’t have to do any thinking for myself.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” she said.

  “Of course I do. Tell you what. As soon as I get settled in, I’ll cook you a dinner. My number one dinner, as a matter or fact.”

  “I rate number one, do I?”

  “To tell you the truth, I really only cook one dinner. Other than that, I just warm food.”

  He dropped his plastic hand into his lap, where it was out of sight.

  Her eyes followed it.

  Graham tensed. She probably thought he couldn’t manage an edible dinner.

  “All right,” she said, “you have yourself a date. I’m looking forward to it.”

  She smiled. In it, he read sympathy. Damn. He shouldn’t have invited her, her or anyone else. The last thing he needed was pity.

  Then again, maybe she was playing reporter. Maybe she wanted to snoop into his life.

  More likely, she was acting as a spy for the mayor.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to keep that date,” he said. “I’m used to all the conveniences of the big city.”

  “Lew’s place isn’t quite as primitive as you might imagine.” She sounded determined to hold him to that dinner date.

  “What’s it like? I don’t remember.”

  “For an artist, it might be a little too dark.”

  Graham stared at her. Her expression hadn’t changed. She wasn’t being funny. She really did think of him as an artist who needed light to do his work.

  But light was not his problem. Quite the contrary. From now on, whatever he put on canvas ought best to be done in the dark. Viewed there too.

  “How much work do you think I’ll have to do before I can move in?”

  “Stock the larder. That’s about it.”

  “Good. The sooner I’m out of Bridger House the better.”

  “When you said that, you reminded me of Lew. You have the same kind of determination.”

  “I hope that’s a compliment,” he said.

  Her lips flirted with a smile.

  He smiled back and asked, “How well did you know my uncle?”

  “He was a fixture around here. Everyone knew him. But in the last few years, when his health was as bad as his temper, I was one of the few who could get along with him at all.”

  “He was never an easy man. I know that.”

  “Once, he asked me to marry him,” Harriet said. “But that was years ago when he could still do things for himself. After his first heart attack, he would never have asked. He was too proud.”

  “I take it you said no to his proposal.”

  Harriet laughed. “He didn’t really want a wife. He wanted someone to keep house for him, more like a hired hand.”

  He peered into his lap, then back to Harriet. She flushed, embarrassed that she had said “hired hand.” It was strange, Graham thought, that his infirmity put sensitive people at a disadvantage.

  “One thing I’ll say about my uncle. He had good taste in women.”

  She flushed even more. “I wanted to tell you myself, because a lot of people around this town have nothing better to do than gossip. And I’m free game when it comes to that kind of talk. Of course, that’s what I get for abstaining from church.”

  “You make that sound like a sin.”

  “Here, it is.”

  “My uncle must have been preaching at you all the time.”

  “Not really. He always said I’d come back to the faith with or without him.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the Lew Graham I remember.”

  “He was my friend. But to have been his lover would have been impossible.”

  Graham didn’t know what to say.

  “Maybe you don’t believe me,” Harriet said. “But that’s all right too. Nobody else in town does either. They can’t understand a man and a woman just being friends.”

  Now it was Graham’s turn to be embarrassed. To cover his discomfort, he ordered more coffee. Then he said, “When I was growing up in Salt Lake, coffee was a sin. I’m surprised they serve it here.”

  “Times have changed,” she said. “The church is still against it, but that doesn’t stop people from drinking it.”

  “What about smoking?”

  “Times will never change that much, not in Moondance. If you smoke, you’re in big trouble. Most of the people in town won’t let you set foot inside their doors if you reek of tobacco.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “I haven’t smoked in quite a while, not since my divorce. I only smoked before because my wife did.”

  The thought of his wife, Noreen, still caused Graham intense self-doubt. Had he acted too quickly? Had she really been too young to trust?

  The only answer he received was a sharp twinge in the nonexistent little finger of his right hand. Opening and closing his substitute hand did no good. He slammed the monstrosity against his knee. The resulting pain was nothing when compared to the agony he’d gone through with Noreen.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” he’d said. “I’m thirty-seven, not some kid.” Those had been his words to her in the hospital; they’d come in response to her solicitous kiss.

  Despite her tears, he continued the attack. “I’m a cripple, for Godsake. Worse. For the rest of my life I’ll be nothing but a charity case.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Really it doesn’t.”

  “Sure. And just how the hell will you be able to support us?”

  “I don’t mind working.”

  Then, viciously, he added, “The only thing you know how to do well is screw.” Lord, he prayed, don’t let her listen to these lies.

  “Jack, please.” It was a plea that he ignored.

  He squinted at her beauty, certain that she wasn’t capable of loving a cripple. No, it wasn’t love she was offering him. It was pity. But what could he expect? At thirty-five, he’d married too late. And Noreen had been a baby at twenty-two, only twenty-four at the time of the accident.

  How could a child adjust to a crippled artist whose oh-so-realistic technique depended on a rocksteady right hand?

  So he kept at her. Over the weeks of his rehabilitation he flew into tantrums, cursing her, threatening her with
acts of violence that, to his ears, sounded exactly like the ridiculous lies they were. But in the end she believed him and walked out, leaving him to initiate the divorce.

  Now, sitting in the shabby cafe in the wilds of northeastern Utah, Graham felt terribly lonely. The life ahead of him was as empty as the blank canvases that haunted his dreams. He wanted to reach out to Harriet, to touch her, to feel her warmth, to draw strength and courage from her as his uncle must have done.

  But he didn’t know her that well. He didn’t know what she’d say or do if he touched her.

  So instead, his mind went back to the past, to the accident. He had been driving home after a morning spent trying to capture a sunrise on canvas when the wrong-way driver came at him head-on from what was supposed to be a freeway exit.

  The drunk, said the coroner’s report, was killed instantly.

  Graham was lucky enough to have escaped with his life.

  You can’t punish a dead man; punishment is reserved for the living.

  Graham lived because of his seat belt. But the dashboard—safety engineering by Gillette, he remembered hearing one of the highway patrol officers say—had sliced off his hand with razorlike precision.

  What haunted him most was the sound of that amputation, and the feel of it, a vibration that shook his soul as the cleaver edge cut through bone. It was a jarring wack of a sound.

  After that, pain, bright and bursting inside his skull, took possession of him. And when that grew beyond bearing, consciousness slipped away.

  When he woke in the hospital, the pain was still there, like a fire eating at him. And that was the moment he saw the look of horror—disgust, too—on Noreen’s face. Her shock-distorted eyes had fastened on the bandaged stump at the end of his right arm.

  Along with Noreen, Graham had lost his manhood. The old urge was gone. Even his steel-hard morning erections had disappeared.

  After the divorce, he sold the equity in the house and every painting he owned. Half the proceeds went to Noreen. His share, the money with which he’d fled to Moondance, had come to nearly thirty thousand dollars, not a great deal to finance a long, empty life.