Weird, Weird West Read online

  I poked around the closet and tapped the walls, but the wood sounded solid enough. I peeled back some faded wallpaper, but nothing seemed out of place. There were so books up on the closet shelf. I liked books. I looked them over. A few classics, I remember, like some Edgar Allen Poe and some short stories by Ambrose Bierce. A couple of books struck me odd, because they were on witchcraft and the Salem trials. Stuff like that. Couple of those books looked old, and I mean really old, you know? Old enough a book collector might pay for them. I put them to one side.

  By now the sun was going down. Bobby Lee, he was pretty thrashed. He got to pacing back and forth on the porch. He had found a couple of old lanterns and fired them up. I was afraid to go out and tell him about the books. Good news or bad news, it seemed certain he would beat me to within an inch of my life. Still, I needed one of those lanterns if I was going to keep looking around. I kind of slid down the wall, and while he was whizzing off the edge of the wooden porch, I took one back inside.

  I tell you, I was just about to give up when I tripped. My boot caught just the edge of a loose floorboard. I knelt down and pulled. I heard nails groaning. I moved the lantern back. I can't describe how weird the lighting was. Flickering yellow waves and dark, dancing shadows. The smell of cat pee and the dust everywhere.

  I pulled harder and the board came up, rusty nails screeching. There was a hole down below, dug a long time ago in hard, unforgiving desert ground. A hole like a foul-smelling mouth.

  And there was something in that hole.

  It looked kind of like an old treasure chest, you know? With the wooden slats along the sides? What was weird was the size of the padlock. It was big enough for a chest five times as large, and it had been fastened to a long length of thick chain. The chain was all rusty, but the lock must have been stainless steel. I blew some dust off and it gleamed in the light of the lantern. I bent over and pulled and was amazed at how heavy it was.

  "Bobby Lee!"

  "What, damn it?"

  "Come in here a minute. I think I found something. Maybe a treasure chest, Bobby Lee!"

  "The hell you say!"

  He came stumbling in to the blackened stench, his own lantern instantly doubling the light. He shoved me out of the way. I was a skinny kid, and I went flying into the stack of magazines. My face bounced off the wall and I fought back tears. When I touched my fingers to my hairline, they came away red. A scalp wound tends to bleed.

  BLAAAAAM!

  I swear I never heard anything so loud in my life. Bobby Lee, he had pulled his revolver and put a bullet right through the pad lock. I shook my head, trying to clear my ears, and splattered bloody drops everywhere. I was curious as hell, too, so I leaned forward over the edge of the hole.

  Bobby Lee yanked the chain away and opened that box. Then time just kind of stood still.

  I thought it was an animal at first.

  It was small, and the leg and arm bones had been broken so it would all fit in the chest. The skull was grinning up like that cat in Alice In Wonderland. There were two black and empty eye sockets, and they seemed to lock right in on me. What knocked my socks off was the hair. That skull still had long, blonde hair with a bright pink ribbon right in the middle of it.

  "Jesus!" Bobby Lee said.

  He jerked backwards and slammed into me. I fell face first into the hole in the floor. I ended up kissing the skull of that dead child. I tell you, I can still taste her chilly teeth.

  I think she liked it.

  I pulled up and away in horror, and saw that I had left a long, drooling streak of fresh blood behind. It touched her mouth.

  Something crashed into the side of my head and I went ass over teakettle into the darkness. "What freaking treasure?" Bobby Lee screamed. "You got me in here for this?"

  Like I said, I had been getting my ass kicked regular by a series of drunks since I was knee-high to a tadpole. I knew I was in a world of hurt, because now Bobby Lee had a real mad going. He started pacing in circles, kicking boxes and screaming to beat the band.

  "A lousy body! Now what? Get the goddamn cops into my life? I can't have that, you little wimp!"

  Another kick to the ribs. I curled up patiently.

  "I knew that sonofabitch was a pervert," Bobby Lee shrieked. "A baby killer! Guy leaves me a house, and turns out he's a psycho! Look what you got me into now, you little bastard! What the hell were you thinking?"

  I knew I'd best not answer.

  Of a sudden he got out of breath and bent way over, holding his stomach. Up came a couple of cans of beer and most of the beef jerky he'd had a couple of hours ago. Worshipping Ralph slowed him down some, so it got quiet in there. I considered trying to crawl back onto the porch, but I wasn't sure I'd make it. A rib was burning pretty bad.

  So there we are in this stinky, empty, darkened house with a couple of kerosene lanterns on low and blood splattered everywhere. There ain't nothing outside but open desert and that dying town a few hundred yards away. Just then a couple of coyotes started howling at the full moon.

  And I heard something.

  Something down in that hole…moved.

  Bobby Lee didn't catch it, he was still spitting out the taste of warm beer and puke. I knew he'd get his wind shortly and come at me again. I also knew there was a fair chance I'd end up in that hole with the kid, kissing her piano-key teeth forever. So I started trying to crawl away.

  I think that's the sound Bobby Lee heard, and he got to his feet. He was still plenty pissed off, and I was the nearest target. He started to step over that little hole in the floor, one boot went up and got ready to smash my kidneys, and everything just sort of stopped.

  I don't know how to explain it, really. Except maybe it was kind of like when you're in a bad car accident? The world seemed to slow down and run sideways for a couple of minutes. I felt like I had all the time in the world to observe things, even take notes. In reality, it probably only took a couple of seconds.

  A big SNAP sound, like a board cracking.

  Bobby Lee's leg broke in two, just like that. He shrieked high, like a girl on the playground and his reddened eyes got all big and bulging, but for some reason he just stayed there, kind of hanging in the air like that, and then SNAP the other leg broke. It just jackknifed right up there, like the first one.

  Bobby Lee screamed again. I think I screamed too.

  I ain't ashamed to tell you I wet my pants at the sight of him hanging in thin air, those two big, muscular legs bent all unnaturally up and over. That face...I started crawling like beetle, making for the living room. I could see the cool night air and the black sky speckled with stars. Somehow I knew if I made it out there I'd be okay.

  He kept on screaming and crying. Oh, it was a terrible sound. This was a man who had seen combat in the Pacific and here he was weeping and wailing. What it was is, I think it broke every bone he had, one by one. Fingers, arms, elbows, shoulders, on and on and on. And it somehow it managed to keep him alive until the very end. Alive.

  I got out on the porch and looked back. I know you ain't gonna believe me about any of this, but here's what I saw: A little, squashed bundle of broken bones and shredded, bloody gristle. It was just hanging there in the light of the lanterns like something on a thin, black thread. It still had some of Bobby Lee's face, not much, and as I watch the rest of those facial bones collapsed inward. Silence, and the whole gory mess just dropped into the floor with a splaaaat.

  I was hoping he'd left the keys in the car, and he had. I fired that old red Ford up and started to clear the driveway. One of the lanterns was out, and the other was beginning to fail. Suddenly the floorboards snapped back where they had been, flat like before I'd moved them. The old papers and magazines and boxes all flew up into the air, spun around like in a silent wind, and settled back down.

  Then the second lantern flickered out.

  It was like nobody had ever been there.

  I drove all night and into the next day. I didn't stop until I was somewhere in Califo
rnia. I sold that red Ford to a shady dealer near Fresno and got on a bus. I never looked back. I ain't never let anyone beat on me since, neither. After what I saw that night, nothing scares me. I saw combat in Korea, and I'll tell you something: Nothing ever scared me so much as whatever it was got Bobby Lee Gifford that night.

  Part of me knows it's still there, waiting for someone to drop by with a couple of drops of blood and a man that needs killing.

  And that's it. You believe it or not, it don't matter to me.

  But that's why I don't want nothing to do with you and what you're offering. You give the damned thing to charity, or let the government take it for back taxes. I don't care. I don't know how you found me, but please just lose me again. And I don't care who left the place to me, or even that somebody discovered oil on that property. I don't want to know what it's worth.

  Give that house in Dry Wells to somebody else.

  And them bones.

  BLACKTOP

  This miserable world and Father Time have conspired to make me an old man who rocks all day in the shadow of the reaper. Most people talk down to me like I don't know spit, but there's a meat packing plant east of the home I'm in, and when the wind comes in off the plains it smells of dead things.

  That's what made me remember.

  Sit down. The cancer is going to take me shortly, so I have a need to speak of this. It all happened one summer in the high desert, when the black two-lane highway was like a pool of melting tar. First, you got to picture this: A wicked white sunshine that is so blistering hot it smacks the parched earth like a fist; there ain't a sound but the breathing of your horse and the demented buzzing of thirsty insects. Northern Nevada in 1942 was a quiet corner of the world where animals still did a lot of the hard labor, and thin, weathered old men could be seen around town wearing guns. FDR was President, that racial stuff hadn't even got started down south, and most of the other boys were off fighting the second big war. Me, I was a little too young and anyway, my left eye doesn't work so well.

  You can call me Zeke, but my given name was Ezekiel Collins. I was a skinny sixteen year old kid that year; working on my Grandpa's cattle ranch, maybe twenty miles south of Dry Wells. It had been bleached-bone dry and scorching hot all danged summer and that August day it was the worst I'd ever seen. It plumb squeezed the sweat out of a man, left you with an empty canteen a mouth full of ashes. If you were smart, you carried a pinch of salt to avoid passing out and getting nasty headaches. I got headaches a lot, in part because of that bad eye.

  My grandpa was in Ely on business that day. I was helping Injun Tom take twenty-odd head across the highway and up into the shade of some cherry trees at the foot of the mountains. A lot of this is a blur now, but as I recall it, Tom generally wore blue jeans with a vintage Colt tucked in the belt, boots stained with tobacco juice, a patched brown work shirt and a black cowboy had with one forlorn eagle feather sticking up from the band. That feather had some kind of Indian meaning, but Tom would never say what. He had dark brown skin, some Negro in him for sure; white hair and crows feet deep as scarred claw marks. He was on Blackie, a talented gelding with a broad chest and a sorry attitude. I was riding little Blaze, my favorite palomino mare.

  "Tom?"

  He grunted, deep in his throat. Tom had a spooky way of talking without talking. I just went ahead and asked him anyway. "What's your most favorite car?"

  He considered. "Maybe that cherry red Ford from '39."

  "Why?"

  "I got my reasons."

  "Because of how it drives?"

  "Because of its soul."

  I turned sideways. My butt made the saddle squeak a bit. "Your people think cars have a soul?"

  "Boy, around here the damned ground has a soul."

  "I don't understand."

  Tom scowled and spat. He spoke with an edge, but not without kindness. "You gonna work, or jaw all day?"

  "Sorry."

  "Anybody coming?" Injun Toms voice was also sandpaper hoarse, but in an oddly pleasant way. When he laughed, he sounded like Santa.

  "Hang on." I edged my mare forward.

  I loved Grandpa Ben, but he was family and prone to using the back of his hand for discipline so I avoided him, too. So Injun Tom was more of a mentor, and truth be told, he was one interesting hombre. He'd come to mean a lot to me. Tom had been born in the slums outside of Dry Wells God knows how many years before. His family had worked for my Grandpa for nearly fifty years, all told; bailing hay in the spring and both herding and slaughtering the cattle when the time came. When there was no work, they moved on. Tom, like them, would come and go with the seasons, as if in accordance with the workings of some inner mechanism. He was the last of his line, because he'd never married.

  When working for Grandpa, Tom slept in the bunkhouse, which had an old wooden shit-shack out behind it, and bathed in the freezing cold water of the stream. No electricity or new-fangled radio programs for Tom. He hardly ever went to the picture show on Friday night. He was pretty set in his tribal ways. Some nights we could hear him chanting what sounded like death songs; he'd be sitting by a small fire, down by that bunkhouse, all alone. You'd know he was gone again by the silence after dark.

  He'd lived a hard life, but to the best of my recollection, he never once complained.

  Now, Tom had no family left and didn't seem to have a pot to piss in, but he had an amazing collection of used cars. He must have had thirty of them, every shape and size. My Grandpa let him park them out by the stinky animal graveyard, a bit north, on a hill just above the alfalfa field. Tom tinkered with them whenever he had the spare time.

  He seemed to keep those cars running smooth as crap through a goose, but for some reason he never drove them anywhere.

  Late in the afternoon, sometimes when the sunset hit them just right, the multi-colored vehicles seemed like a battlefield strewn with the dead and dented bodies of lost medieval knights.

  Anyway, on this particular day, I was woozy from thirst, the heat and the glare of the mid-day sun. We'd already brought the cattle up to the long, bowed wooden gate. So Tom stayed mounted, clicking softly. Meanwhile, Blackie instinctively kept the small herd in line as I slid to the ground, opened the huge gate and latched it back. I was a slim, kid back then, with a full head of red hair; all in denim, wearing a white straw hat and a red bandana. I was sunburned and constantly peeling. Everybody called me Pinky.

  That's how I got the skin cancer that's punching my ticket, actually. We didn't know about such things back then. I wiped my face on my sleeve, shaded my eyes and peered down the highway, into the omnipresent, shimmering mirage.

  "Well?"

  I squinted. "Hang on a second, Tom. I can't see much of anything."

  "Herd's getting' frisky," Tom said. He sat up in the saddle, stretched and broke wind. "Gonna cross on their own soon, we don't get started."

  My job was to spot any oncoming traffic and decide if it was smart to have the cattle plod across the highway. Cows are pretty damned stupid, and they tend to take their time doing something. We didn't want to lose any cattle—or any drivers, either. Problem was, some folks went a little nutty in the middle of the wide, lonesome nowhere; a lot of tourists started speeding like demons, trying to make some sort of town before sunset. It didn't help that the signs in this part of the state just said "be safe and reasonable." If some dumb son of a bitch struck a prize Hereford going 90 miles an hour, well…there'd be one hell of a lot of spare parts and raw hamburger on the blacktop.

  "Yeah, somebody coming, Tom," I hollered. Just the effort of shouting made my head hurt again. I'd already passed out once and I needed some more salt. My eyes were blurry, but I'd seen a small, shiny speck of something metal, gleaming at the end of the highway. It emerged from the mirage like an insect, and seemed to gather speed. My ears caught the vague whine of a straining engine. "I'd say he's pushing that car pretty hard."

  "Then he don't deserve it," Tom said.

  "Why?"

  "Cars got
magic, boy. They're special. Any asshole would whip a horse to death don't deserve to own it, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Same goes for good cars."

  I peered down the road. "Well, then he's an asshole for sure."

  "Slow him down."

  I waved. "I'm trying."

  "Aw, hell."

  I turned my head and felt dizzy again. One of the calves had stepped out onto the molten hot roadway. Her momma followed, and a few other head just assumed it was time to go. Blackie tried to nose the little heifer back where she belonged, but the damage had been done. The cattle started milling around and within moments were partially blocking the road.

  "Stop that dumb bastard, boy," Injun Tom called. Then, to the cattle: "Yaw! Get back there, girl. Come on, move." He made a piercing whistle with his tongue and teeth and kicked at the lead cow.

  My stomach rolled, and I bent over to puke but nothing came up. I drank the last of my water and walked my horse maybe twenty yards down the highway; sat up in the saddle and commenced to waving my hat in the air. Again, I felt so dizzy from dehydration and sunburn I almost passed out. I shaded my eyes again. The driver didn't seem to see us.

  "Tom, he ain't slowing down!"

  "He'd damned well better."

  I waved again. The car, which I could now see was a dark 1940 Ford with silver trim and big tits for headlights, came on straight as a bullet. Behind me, I could hear Injun Tom struggling to get the cattle across the road and out of the way.

  I waved with both arms. Finally, the driver saw me in the roadway and hit the brakes. The screech was sudden and sharp; high-pitched as a woman giving birth. The ass-end of the Ford swerved from side to side, and behind it were twin black lines of burning rubber. He finally came to a complete stop maybe ten to twelve feet from my spooked horse. I could see him behind the windshield, red-faced and bug-eyed. He rolled the window down.