Tylen Brackus

I will tell you at the outset that I have seen some puzzling and imponderable events or situations in my life. That life is now halfway through its eighth decade. Some of the circumstances were believable, some not; some I wanted to believe, some I didn't. All of them, each instance whether believable or not, had been caused or created or somehow set into motion by the attitude or action of generally distinctive and memorable men and women, whether for what they were or what they did, or, in some circumstances, what they did not do. Believe me, the chance of something not happening is oftentimes as much a story as that which happens. My wife Agnes was a woman such as I have spoken, and old acquaintance Tylen Brackus was such a man. As Agnes did things at her own swift command, Tylen also did things; he moved things at appropriate rate, though he was born into this life with but one fully useful arm, the other a mere shaft with a mere hand. His deformity was, as one might say of him, in miniature.

No god was he, nor was he supernatural in talent. Tylen, to say the least, as can be said of most of us even on our best days, was vulnerable or suspect of vulnerability. Yet the man was equipped with an inordinate amount of energy, an energy that he simply had to call on, as if all he had to say was Giddy-up and it was there. And he was a loner by most standards.

Tylen, I was quite sure at this time, was in the morning's mix. It was that kind of a day, and the October clouds were raggy and less than unique, filled with promise of the ominous sort, darker than usual, inertia buried in them, as if they were hanging there for a definite purpose. Out over Pressburn Hill the hidden sun presented a slightly silver edge on one long cloud that seemed to hover with a timid grace.

This is how it all happened; for the third day in a row, from my own little house out beyond the old woodworking plant long closed and boarded up, I noted a plume of smoke, a feathery wisp of it tall and slender, rising above the trees, as if from a flue. I was as far out of town as you can go before you are someplace else. I knew that there was nothing either civic or habitable over that way to demand what could be considered a hearth flue, but nevertheless I ran my mind about the ground that crawled off slowly through trees to the top of Pressburn Hill, plotting the ascendant geography of the area. The small stream in there was very quiet, the near-silent way it lurked at tree roots, ambling along until deep winter took hold of it, which it usually did. The old abandoned rail line that once had brought material to the plant by the carload or took away products, now had sparsely visible portions turning to rust. And again I reminded myself: Nothing much out that way. There was only, suddenly coming to mind, that small cave in the hillside ledge, like a hole in the wall for a minor abode. Perhaps a fire might be there. Not a known night's hangout really anyplace in there for displaced persons, yet perhaps the smoke signaled a morning breakfast fire for a hungry itinerant, his throat dry and in-drawn by the need for food. Or a hunter lost of a night. I thought the nights had become quite chill of late for any extended stay. I promised myself I'd check next time I went out there for mushrooms or on my constitutional.

I put the consideration to my Agnes, for fifty years a sounding board, a definitive conscience, and the tremble of a daily tuning fork of all things noisy or noticeable about us. "What do you make of that, Agnes?" I said, pointing from the porch out over the bank of trees to the narrow lift of smoke, now as thin as cigarette smoke above the thickness of trees. Its blue tint, as well, was fading against the backdrop of Pressburn Hill.

Round and pleasant Agnes, whom on one occasion, and one only, I had called Aggie, and that occasion a full fifty years earlier, turned to me and said, with her soft mouth pursed in certainty, "That's breakfast, Dewey. I can smell it." Her smile was the morning edition and her yellow apron was still tied at her ample waist, herself but the matter of half an hour from our own breakfast. It went with her blue eyes, the yellow apron, for somewhere between the two they melded in a pleasantness that had wholly shaped my life. Colors became her, my Agnes, as well as did being ample and being direct. Warmth, the length of her body, as if bundled, had long been my night's certainty.

On this late October morning Lyle Agersea had come up on my porch roughly at that moment, bringing his last vegetable gift of the year, a small squash out of his garden. And we talked about it, that thin thread of smoke, though we both knew he had come to see Agnes first hand for the day. In his own way he highly favored Agnes, once having taken her to a picture show a half-century earlier. You'd have to say there was no quit in Lyle Agersea. He was as sturdy and as straight and as durable as his denim trousers, the two with patches, with worn spots, proud of their long and sure delivery, and time left in each. His smile was direct as he said, "I swear, Agnes, your coffee travels two acres of crusty ground quick as a boar down a rifle bead. It is memorable."

Smooth and friendly Lyle could also have been the history teacher at the school, knowing a story or two about our neighbors. He could knock off a story the way some men could knock off shots of rye or bourbon, the bottle as handy as the grip of it, as well as the weekend. "Only thing out in that direction'd be the old freight car they left behind," he said, pointing with his full arm and the cup of coffee at the end of it, and not a tinkle of sound from his steady hand in illustration of his good health. He thought about his words for a moment and then added, "When the mill closed, the tracks, at least most of them, were torn up for scrap metal. For the war, you know. Trees growed all around it now, like as can't see it unless right up close. Them doors was welded shut. Some of the boys a few times tried to burn it down, that old boxcar, but never got it full caught. How long since you been out there, Dewey?" Lyle had a way with punctuation, as well as storytelling.

I know objects, large or small, at times even huge ones, which are inactive for long periods of time, seem to sift or disappear into background. Inertia itself might take them out of a visible realm. They fade, lose their contours and identities, become patchwork on the near horizon. Deserted, forgotten, out of touch, they become like old grave sights where family lines at last falter and die out. For me, the abandoned freight car was such a thing.

Lyle didn't wait my answer. His face was lively as ever; clean-shaved, a pinkness on the high cheekbones and wide brow, his eyes bouncing like aggies in a game, popping here and there. "What I'm thinking about this morning, Dewey," he said, putting that old smile up for Agnes' second cup of coffee, "is that Tylen's due in town pretty damn soon. First good snow does it. Don't nobody know where he hies out to in the spring, ever since Comerford Mabel up and died on him. What, been ten years now? Lonely is what gets you lonely. Sure can say that about Tylen. And clockwork too. First good snow brings him in. It might be a month of cold running up before it, but it's the first snow does it."

"Ever think about that?" My curiosity had spoken.

"Hell, it's like he's leaving no footprints behind him. Always comes in during the storm, takes up a place with old Betty Marlin or Elder John, whomsoever's got a spare room. And no trail back into wherever he come from."

"He never looks none the worse for wear," I said, remembering how Tylen climbed up out of the grade one or two years earlier, waved as he walked past the house and into town, the little bundle of his Matilda wagging off his shoulder like some Aussie going down the road, casual is as casual does.

"What's that man do of a summer, you think, the way he finally comes into town, gets his room, showers, changes clothes like he don't want any trail dust falling from him, giving away his long-hidden abode? He don't waste any time finding a woman spend time with, go to a picture show, have a meal. Saw him get drunk only once and was the first night he was without Comerford Mabel. Man has a different clock and a different paddle, far as I can see. Bill Barley at the gas station said he once stayed inside Elder John's house without coming outside the whole month of December. That's as near hibernating as any of us can get."

Lyle kept lighting up when Agnes poured, and kept talking. "He gets his grub every week or so at Molly's store, when he comes to town, looking none the worse for wear. He don't look much beat up or worn down for being out there in the woods. Would think he'd show some of that. But just slips away at night like he wasn't here in the first place, that neat pack on his back, the good hand holding his cudgel, the other tucked in his armpit like always. None of the youngsters ever come across him while hunting or fishing. Never see an old fire or any kind of sign. Like he might just keep going off into the next county, halfway out being halfway in someplace else. I'd almost pay to know." He stared hard into the cup as if he were reading the remnants of coffee grounds.

When the pot was empty and the squash set on the kitchen counter, as if a promise had been made it would sure to be used before the day was over, Lyle cut off his visit. In his mottled dungarees and heavy denim patchwork jacket he crossed the field the way he had come, the same way to and fro as every one of his frequent visits, turning once at the big tree to wave back at Agnes, who would always wait to wave back. Now that's what I call a fifty-year romance, Lyle having no quit in him.

So later that morning, menial chores done, I told Agnes I' be taking a spin off through the trees and would be home by lunchtime. My own good old denim jacket was snug and stood well against the small breeze coming down the way from Pressburn Hill, and I carried a good stick for balance and for knocking at things.

Fifteen minutes later I came across the old freight car nearly buried under the overhang of leaves and limbs from a cluster of willows and an occasional pine tree. Long ago, after the car was abandoned, the locks on the doors were welded shut and up one side I could see where the young arsonists had tried to torch it; the black scars of that fated attempt lay a dull patina on the surface of the wooden car, which, in its younger days, must have been a sour-looking maroon; the drab remnants of that color showed in corners less touched by the weather, dabs of maroon an artist had left.

The name of the rail line the car was originally birthed to, no longer visible, came out of my memory; I could hear the steam whistle, feel the ground chug and tremble, see the old legend saunter past the crossing in its spastic fashion near my youthful home, humping, banging, out on the road, out on the free road: The Nickel Plate Road. It sang out that name, that tune; The Nickel Plate Road! The Nickel Plate Road! Long ago I had savored its adventurous title, tossed it through my teeth again and again, day after day, night after dreams, and heard it in the back of my mind, along with the quickened menu of The Route of the Phoebe Snow, The Old Lackawanna, The Mississippi and the Yazoo Valley, The Boston & Maine, Grand Trunk Western, Delaware Lackawanna and Western, New York, New Haven and Hartford, Rock Island (oh, good old Rock Island), Bangor and Aroostock (potato cars for a mile it seemed), and the singing again, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.

As a youngster I had been mesmerized, hypnotized, sent off on dreamy adventures by the names posted in great letters on the sides of freight cars and coal cars, and those little houses like shanties on wheels riding the end of trains sometimes 200 cars long, where railroad men ate and slept and spent much of their lives crisscrossing America, watching America grow. Freight cars on the move. Tankers and coal gondolas on the move. Great steam engines, puffing, shaking, and beating it down the rails. The joy of seeing other places used to fluster me with its richness, the sudden flare of its warmth totally numbing me to the bones. Not yet subsided, the call of the open road, I swear still making its call on me with the fact of this abandoned boxcar.

Now, before me, dreams gone down the road, the old boxcar seemed to sag; rust had touched its great wheels and mild but honest decay crawled about its face, inertia having painted it anew. About it too, as much a part of its identity as the old legend, a slight acidic smell, that of ash or old fire, as if the light flames the boys had introduced to its sides had permanently touched the air. The thin memories of smoke I smelled- my grandfather's pipe filled with cut Edgeworth tobacco, an orange campfire into which my friends and I had tossed potatoes waiting the delicious blackness, the iron monger's stove at the dump where my grandfather worked --- even as the wind began to blow, leaves at temperament beginning their endless and haphazard flights into the wind and with the wind, and then a very fine snow started to fall. The ground, quickly, with sudden charm and celerity, accepted whiteness and wind and my homeward path.

For three long and interminable days, clouds permanently in place above us, it snowed. It snowed that finely-particled snow so easy in its promise, so dreadful in its fate, that had driven me home from the side of the old Nickel Plate Road freight car. And we did not see Lyle for a week, until he and the sun showed up one morning, both frisky, bright, boding chatter as he walked up the road.

"Agnes," he said, the lightness on his face and in his eyes, him brimming with a week's worth of news and no-news, "I swear I could smell your coffee clean acrost the field, clean as gunshot on opening day. I swear, Agnes, it was that clean."

The bowl of his hand accepted her cup as he added his choice bit of news, him practically jumpy all the time with wanting to tell it; "and Tylen not yet showed his face. Not showed a minute's worth! Down to Molly's they been talking 'bout a search party going out there, where ever the hell he be, and hauling his bottom back in here before he freezes himself altogether."

A week later Tylen Brackus still had not showed up at Molly's store or at Elder's place.

You have to hand it to Lyle. He got the energy going in them, pulled the crowd of men together, the sheriff but a paid hand at that and a little put back in his place by Lyle's energy, got them pushing at themselves. "Think of being out there, the snow putting you in your place, freezing your little ass off, and only one hand to help yourself. If he needs us, old Tylen must be sitting beside himself with worry and we have to get out there."

So we went, some only as far as we dared to go. Some only as far as the tree line on Pressburn Hill, the snow too much to contend with. Some not being such good friends to the one-armed man. The younger guys cutting away on skis, snowmobiles, one or two on horseback. Rag tag as you can imagine a small town muster.

And there, under the willows, under the remnant pines, out along the backside of the closed woodworking plant, the slight and slender file of smoke issued from one corner of the Nickel Plate Road boxcar. The small army halted as they eyed the smoky residue patina left over from the young arsonists. The welded joints still secured the doors, each great span easily seen as not having been moved in this recent lifetime.

Molly's husband Clocker said it must be on fire and none too soon as far as he was concerned, everybody knowing his boy Charlie was one of the group which had set that last match. "No way in or out of that car, boys," he said. "It'll burn for sure this time."

The snow was drifted high against one side of the freight car, and we were about to pass by, leaving it to smolder or whatever it was at, when I knocked at the side of the car with my cudgel.

A weak knock came back.

"What the hell!" Lyle said, as I knocked again. The weak knock came back.

"Someone's in there, boys. Must be old Tylen."

"How in hell could he get in?" said Clocker, trying to push against the huge door. "Didn't go this way. Try the other side." A few of the boys trudged to the other side and came back. "Didn't get in that way either."

They buzzed a spell, the lot of them, snowmobile engines shut down, two horses mouth-clasped, and in a moment, when wonder and concern was hitting at them, the weak knock came again.

"Jeezus, God!" Albert Binworthy, the old submarine sailor let out. "Sounds like the Squalus out there off Portsmouth, down a couple a hundred feet and the boys banging out the last message. Jeezus, God!" A chill hit the back of my neck like the edge of a blade.

The weak tapping came again. It hit me suddenly that if it was Tylen, there was a way in. I slipped under the end of the car, snow going up my sleeves, down my neck, my eyes searching for an opening, a way in. I saw a twist of black conductor wire tight up against one of the great axles, and saw where it went through a hole drilled in the bottom of the car. It was electrified I knew. It looked like Tylen's work more and more. I crawled a bit further. I heard Lyle yell out, "You all right down under there, Dewey? You all right?"

The weak tapping came again for a moment. Then all I could hear was the whisper of wind as it tried my neck for openers, as it came the length of the freight car and brought the total chill with it. "Dewey," Lyle yelled again, "Agnes be well pissed off at you if you mess up down there." The silence came then as all paid attention again to what Lyle was saying.

It was the shape of it that caught my eye. The squareness of it. The right angles of it. The lines of it. A trap door of sorts cut up into the floor of the car. I pushed at it. At first there was minimal resistance, then a wisp of air hit at my face, and the whole section slowly lifted away heavy as a slab of granite. I stood up, my head and shoulders passing up into the body of the abandoned freight car. Light hit me. A bulb glowed. The tapping came again. I saw the small rosy redness of an iron stove. I saw two chairs. I saw a radio dial. I saw a cord of wood piled against one end of the boxcar. I saw a full size bed in the other end of the freight car, and the crude and deformed hand of Tylen Brackus pointing his stick at me, and him saying, "Is that you, Dewey? Damn it, boy, I knew you'd get here. Got myself in a poke of trouble. Broke my arm week or more ago I guess. Couldn't lift the trap door to get out of here once I got in here, seems like it's been a long haul for me now." He fell back on the bed, finally letting himself go, knowing that help was now at hand. I think he fell asleep.

With some difficulty we got him out of the car and onto Nate Murphy's snowmobile for a quick ride to Doc Fenton's office beside Molly's store.

It was all reconstruction after that. How he dismantled each unit that would not pass through the trap door, all of it done under the car itself. The bed. The stove. The crates he used for books and storing stuff. We'd found a radio. A fan. Knew how he tapped into the old electric wire circuit by the mill and laid a line all down the old track bed. Wonder hit us at how we had not seen anything amiss, had not a clue, and piece by piece little insights, forgotten little twists, began to come to light as the whole episode brought itself together. Misplaced or lost or junked articles came back into memory. The radio was Bit Murray's, thrown out at the landfill, as well as Fred Lewis' old Franklin stove. Paul Lavelle swore the bed was his honeymoon bed last seen at the backside of his barn. He'd completely forgotten it under weed and brush. Everybody had a take about one or more of the furnishings.

To this day, long after Tylen, one snowy night at Elder John's, chased Comerford Mabel all the way home, it's always been the picture of him with the one good arm and that one twisted little arm and the twisted little hand, perhaps in darkness under the freight car but hardly in distress, taking things apart for their last transport, for there was the night, later on, that the car went up in flames, the fire fully caught and naught but the wheels and axles and steel framework left.

And I was seeing it all, all the marvelously imponderable things of life in all its makeup: Lyle hit by lightning one day crossing the field, just after his old girlfriend set the last cup of coffee in the cup of his hands; and Molly's husband Clocker breaking his neck after falling down the stairs with his arms loaded with dishes, and Doc Fenton lost in a snowstorm and found frozen after a tough delivery of a newborn, and that utterly silent morning when my ample and round and direct Agnes was not warm against me for the first time in our lives together. Just like I had seen Tylen Brackus, at night, under the freight car, working at those terrible odds he always faced up to.

by Tom Sheehan | Prose Home | Next 

Assault on Mount Carmel

Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead end in the north section of town. And in the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared out the news, all the lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was being played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys among those who would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us had only seen in Saturday newsreels at the theater.

This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Not ever. The family that lives there now most likely is unaware of its past. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, a dimming of the eyes, a bending at the knees, a slow turn at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.

Some houses have peculiar histories. This one did. For a full fifteen years at the gray house at the end of the road the big weekly poker game had been going on, and during the war it had been conducted behind thick black curtains that let out no light. "They'll be no beacon trail markers from this game to the Navy Yard," a few miles distant, said Mountain Ben Capri. Mountain Ben, once an expert trapper and fishing guide, owned the house, ran the game, and his wife, the Blackfoot named Dread Child Lovey, made sandwiches on occasion, poured drinks, and picked up loose change. That loose change would have paid some mortgages, it was said, for the stakes in the game were sometimes monumental if not momentous, all according to those said neighbors on that dark cul-de-sac and other parties around town. Some few people in town could remember when Mother Shannon had a shady place of business in the same abode, most of them elderly men, perhaps a few elderly wives or widows.

The only outsider allowed inside that oft-coveted and dark setting was the young and pesky Frankie Pike, high school football hero of some renown, who tried to sit in one night, showed his money when demanded, had not enough, so finally he asked to simply look on. Subsequently, because of good humor and an abundance of energy, Frankie became the company runner, getting special orders from the half dozen classy restaurants out on the turnpike, hitting the package store for beer, wine and hard stuff when necessary (ordinarily through the back door), collaring the best cigars in town, and not leastwise directing unwanted players away from the game site. After a few games and seeing all the opportunities around him, Frankie with no flies ahovering cut a deal with Smokey Carlton of Smokey's Diner that they should get a supply of bags, wrappers and boxes from the big restaurants and provide their own specials, as if the biggies had done the service. Smokey was glad to oblige, even though some of the town's big spenders and known tough guys took part in the game. "They're all probably playing with somebody else's money any way," Smokey would say if caught up for a reason. Frankie, to up the kitty, even went to work at Gargan's Texan Hilltop Restaurant for two days, time enough to stash a supply of purloined imprinted bags and napkins out in the woods. Flies stayed off Frankie like he'd been sprayed with killer juice.

Frankie and Smokey had made a good deal, and they smoked the players with substitute foodstuffs prepared right in the back of the small chintzy diner rather than in one of the popular restaurants. "I got so much booze in there, Smokey, they're half drunk half the time and well into it the other half. That old lobster boater Cal Landers wants Hilltop sandwiches all the time and now yours are as good as theirs are, only Cal don't know it seeing the Hilltop wrappers all the time. Some nights they can't tell Grade A from swill. And I see DC Lovey scooping a bit of change every now and then, too. She puts the wet tray with booze and stuff right on the pot or on someone's stash and lets that old green paper stick to the bottom. There ain't no pesky bugs setting on that old mountain man either, way he goes through jacket pockets when no one's looking. Moves so easy for such a big man. Hate to have him tracking me down. I've seen him go outside and go through some of the cars more than a few times. Smooth he does it, like a ghost in the night, like maybe he heard special information during the game."

So the game had been going on, and in one quick night the war was over. The whole town celebrated, lights flashing on and off, a few stored up firecrackers or bottle rockets set off, a lot of horns and sirens cutting loose from long silences. Except the house on Mount Carmel. Nobody went in and pulled a shade back, nobody came out on the porch to see what was going on. The game was the thing. Only the game.

And that didn't sit well with a lot of people. "Tell me, Frankie," Clint Wardley the undertaker said one night around the cracker barrel in the back of the package store, "what the hell makes you think they're such sacred cows in there?" Clint was always in a starched collar, a white one, and locked into his trade. They said his father had died in the same stiff collar. "They all come my way sooner or later." You never knew if Clint's words were promise or threat.

"I'll say this for those boyos," Frankie Pike said, "they're not afraid of anybody or anything 'cepting that game not getting its place of a Friday night. That storm a couple of years ago that shut down the power for nearly a week, they had Mountain get Coleman lanterns and fired them all up. Mountain knows about white gas and them little wicks he calls mantles, like butterfly wings almost. Had three or four of them going he did, almost boiling the room away. Way I hear it, they talk about the game all week long, who did what last game, who can make the big fake and pull it off, who's getting shit luck with his cards and when it began. I think they have a pool on when it runs out, each having some kind of turn at it, it appears. They heard the war was over and that was it. They wasn't in it and wasn't getting away from it."

Frankie's sense of timing was as good as an actor, the stage set, pronouncements being made, his hunk of reality coming down on the conversation. His eyes collected and measured the audience. "Jake Crews said he ain't celebrating people getting killed or not killed. His daddy came home from the Great Stink in France back in '18 all gassed up and not much of a father from then on. Said he never got laid again, even though his old lady was a laundry bag. Life just became one big sour ball for him. Jake ought to know, him wearing the scars of it all, him being the only boy in that big house with that bad ass bastard. 'Cept for the game, he's been a loner most his whole life. I'll tell you this," Frankie added, bringing football right back into the balance, putting it all in his true perspective, handling the crutch of it with aplomb, "I'd be comfortable with him across the huddle from me in a big game. He has that fire in his eye you don't always get, if you know what I mean." Frankie'd get them nodding as though they had the privy inside on certain players that "didn't bring it with them all the time the way Frankie did."

Frankie liked to sit in the back of McGarrihan's Package Store, around the wood stove puffing on a winter day, a dozen pair of boots hoisted on the rim of that iron monger's stove, and hold forth with the other gabbers. They were the psuedo-historians, gossips, ward-heelers and petty politicians looking for the grip on someone, for rich gossip or a shared bottle they didn't have to pay for, you name the front and they come out of it. Frankie had shine here because of his football exploits, being, as many of them would say, "the best damn money player to come down the pike since Harmony Hiltz worked his magic at the stadium in the early Thirties, and then went up country and played for Dartmouth College."

The players in the Mount Carmel game on the other hand seemed a cut from another life; few of them appeared to be daily employed, always having a "piece" of one operation or another. Oftentimes an office was an inner coat or jacket pocket. For most of them money was practically spilling its green out of their pockets like some kind of algae growing down inside with the lint. None of them carried their money in a wallet, rather doled it out of thick clusters kept in the inner breast pocket of a jacket or in a shirt pocket under a sweater lying like a protective cover over the big bulge of paper. "They buy their chips with a wad of bills, ever last one of them, taking it out of an iron clip." Frankie said "iron" as if it were "eye-ron," bringing the boys deeper into the fold, getting real up-country homey with them. It was true old Yankee stuff he could get at when he had a mind to.

"How much money you think been showed in that room, Frankie, best lot?" Andy Tolliver was a member of the school committee who never went to college, never could spell curriculum, but had a magic for trading off "one for you and one for me" when things got tight. He was never without a bow tie, feeling undressed in his station of life if he were caught so. For twenty-six years he had been on the school committee. It was said Andy could get anything in the system for those who wanted it bad enough, including himself, with the mix of teachers. Now he wanted to know how much money was in that room at one time. Frankie had seen Andy pick up the new history teacher as she walked home late at night. Had seen it a four or five times, once waiting for two hours by her house before Andy dropped her off.

"Well," said Frankie, thinking Andy was at least twice as old as the new teacher and having a sudden admiration for him, curriculum or no curriculum, "one night, and this is the truth because I was able to count it out, there was over twelve thousand dollars in that room. Course," he added, the sparkle in his eyes, "some of that was loose change." The laughter was pleasant and a few of the listeners elbowed the guy beside them.

"Andy eyes lit up. "Twelve thousand dollars! My, God, that's almost the budget on raises for the next two-three years."

"Hell," Frankie said, "one night Mountain came back in from sniffing through the cars and leaned over Jud Duvall and whispered in his ear. They say Mountain told him someone had been fooling around his car, he has that Pierce Arrow with the big lights up on the fenders. So Jud went out and came back in with his sweater wrapped around something and kept it under his chair and Mountain was real nervous. I heard later Mountain had come across a stash of twenty-five thousand bucks and was scared to death of touching it, but had to tell Jud some way. He didn't want to be pegged for grabbing it. Mountain knows Jud would have him dropped in the river for less."

But of all the guys who talked shop and whatever around the stove, it was Wolf Stearns who kept alive the VJ Night ignorance of the game players, going back to that dark and bright night every chance he had. One of the guys not coming back was Wolf's cousin, Edwin Talbot, a Marine fighter pilot lost in the Solomon Seas on the day of his eleventh kill. "Guess who's birthday is next Wednesday, guys? You couldn't guess in a hundred years, now could you? It's Eddie Talbot's birthday. The kid would be twenty-five years old next Wednesday. Do you think those dinks at the game give a shit? Not in a hundred years. They played all through the war and when it came stand up time they stayed behind the damn curtains. Never even came out on the porch to see what was going on, never mind saluting someone for a change." His eyes would darken as if he were measuring an infinitesimal edge, like a wave of heat off the stove top or another space uncounted for, and he'd drop cautious tidbits like, "Somebody ought to teach them a lesson or two. 'S'all I got to say about it." Then Wolf would look again at a point in space none of the others could hope to find. Truth was, Wolf had been around a lot and never left much trail about what he was at or after. He had scars here and there, Wolf did, on his cheeks, one wrist like it had been ripped by barb wire, I'd bet on his back the way he scowled so much of the time, bitter angry, the world to be pissed on occasionally. Some guys said he was as dangerous as an animal caught in a trap.

A few other guys seemed to side up with Wolf but never got too vocal about it. So under the layers it was apparent that a means of revenge was swilling in the thicker cloth, probably dark and mean, and naturally would have the backing of the whole town who loved its heroes to the death.

When it happened it was clean and quick. It was just after midnight, Mountain getting sleepy in one corner, Dread Child Lovey about done with her work and smoking a cigar, Frankie Pike's errands long over and him ready to go home, when the door burst open and four masked gunsmiths stood aiming their sawed-off shotguns at the table. Mountain rose from his seat and one of the gunsmiths hit him with a crow bar. Mountain hit the floor like a pallet of concrete blocks. Dread Child Lovey continued to smoke her cigar, ignoring all the men in the room.

Jud Duval, pivoting idly in his chair, said, "If I were you guys, I'd…. " He said no more as the barrel of the shotgun was stuck in his mouth. "There'll be no talking but us," said one of the masked men. "Rake it up, Three," he said, pointing to the players. Empty their pockets, their money belts, their wallets. Clean out their jackets. Look under the chairs."

He heard Mountain groan and nodded to another gunsmith. "Hit him, Two." The man popped Mountain on the head again with the crow bar. Dread Child Lovey kept on smoking. Jud noted the men were all in sweat suits of a kind, with sneakers on. He recognized the use of coded names, and put that away for future reference.

The sweepdown was complete in every sense. Every coin, every bit of currency in the room, including the entire cash drawer kept by Mountain and Dread Child Lovey, was scooped up and placed in a black bag looking much like a doctor's bag.

Frankie started to move once, looking to get to a door, but was jabbed in the backside by one of the gun wielders. "Uh, uh, kid, we need you. You're going to be a bit of security for us. Hostage stuff. You're gonna earn your keep this night, hero." The guy turned to the others and said, "One frigging bad word outta any you guys, we knock off the kid. We're taking him with us. Don't nobody move around or scream until the big guy wakes up, and then I'd be real gentle about that. That's gonna be one pissed-off man."

One of the gunsmiths opened a door to a small pantry and motioned all the players and Dread Child Lovey into the soon-crowded space. The door was slammed on them and a couple of spikes were knocked into the door and the jamb. Silence came. Darkness set about everything, falling like enveloping clouds on top of Mountain who'd be out of it for almost another hour. Later we heard a couple of guys copped a few feels of Dread Child Lovey who never batted an eyelash or said a word in that small room crowded with game players. And later Mountain was really pissed because when he finally woke up and freed the players and his wife from the pantry, he found her underpants on the floor.

Mountain, they said, was like old Mountain, ranting and raving and carrying on like a wounded bear. Said he marked every one of the players with his dread eye, cowed them right out of his house like a curse was placed on them.

And the cops gave up the search for the kidnapped Frankie Pike two days later when he walked back into town, a couple of marks on his face, but healthy as ever otherwise. There never was another game at Mountain's place. The players, after a break of a few weeks, found another place to play, in the back of Tal Rumson's boathouse. It was said that Frankie walked with a jingle and a tingle and was never out of coin for the next year. But nobody did anything about it, figuring the players had finally paid their real dues.

by Tom Sheehan | Prose Home | Previous