A Dead Man's Tale (2 page)

Mrs. Reed Fidgets and Frets

Having heard Sam’s Mercedes arrive a few minutes earlier, Irene Reed was wondering what was keeping her husband. Desirous of finding out, she pulled on a black silk robe, slipped her bare feet into a pair of black velvet house slippers, and padded from the parlor into the dining room to peek between the curtains at the snowy backyard. The lady’s pouting lips carried on a conversation with her petulant thoughts.

“Oh, there he is.”
But why’s he standing in the snow like some dodo that don’t know where to go?
“And what’s Sammy laughing about?”
Probably some stupid joke.
The humor critic arched a penciled-on left eyebrow. “Now he’s talking to himself!”
What next?
(She is about to find out.)

Samuel began to sing. Loudly. (“Just the Two of Us.”)

“Oh, I hope the neighbors don’t hear!” The embarrassed wife shook her head in dismay. “That’s what happens when a man doesn’t get enough rest and relaxation.”
But working long hours is how he makes so much money.
Irene’s eyes got as big as silver dollars. “Would you look at that—it’s cold enough to freeze an Eskimo and he’s taking off his overcoat—and his jacket!”
Well if that ain’t goofy, I don’t know what is.
“Now he’s rolling up his shirtsleeve.”
Maybe Sammy’s started taking dope again.
“First it was popping pills, now he’s about to stick a hypo into his arm.”
Oh, I can’t look!

The delicate creature beat a hasty retreat into the parlor.

Not to worry, Mrs. Reed. Your husband is not about to insert a hollow needle into his arm; the mere thought of puncturing his flesh makes Sam cringe. Whenever he needs a specified fluid injected under his skin, a shady lady in town performs that disagreeable task for him. What is the eccentric man’s purpose in baring his forearm? Professor Reed plays his cards close to his vest, so it’s hard to say. But sooner or later, he’s bound to give himself away.

As her chilled silk-stockinged toes were getting all comfy-cozy on the warm brick hearth, Irene Reed scowled prettily at the crackling fire.
Soon as I get warmed up, I’ll go to the back door and yell at the silly bastard.
The lady of the house turned her cold backside to the fireplace. “But I won’t let on that I know he’s started pumping drugs into his veins.”
I’ll be all sugary-sweet.
“That’s what Sammy likes.” She poured herself a stiff shot of Tennessee sour mash whiskey and tossed the fiery liquid down her throat.

As Samuel Reed rolled his sleeve down, refastened the cuff, and slipped into his jacket, he was experiencing a conflicting mix of emotions that combined to a near-zero sum. The downside was a violent death that awaited him around some dark corner. But such an outcome need not be inevitable, and it was counterbalanced by an opportunity. Make that a
once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity. The irony of the descriptor produced a thin little smile under the dapper man’s immaculately trimmed mustache. So absorbed was the scientist-entrepreneur in his thoughts that he was startled by his spouse’s shrill screech from the back door.

“I’ve been waiting up for you, Sammy—don’t stand out there in the cold like a silly old goof.” Irene added a shiver and a “Brrrr!”

Buttoning his woolen jacket, her husband called out, “I’ll be right there, dear.”

“Well hurry up—I’ve got something
special
waiting for you!” With this enticing invitation, his gorgeous wife disappeared inside, leaving the door open wide.

Still a bit giddy from his extraordinary experience, Samuel Reed needed to get a fix on his temporal coordinates. He entered through the rear of his home and stepped into a little-used game room that was provided with all manner of entertainments, from computerized tests of manual and mental skills to old-fashioned amusements like a Ping-Pong table, a 1950s’-era pinball machine, an antique Reno Sally slot rigged to fleece the occasional guest who could not resist feeding it quarter-dollars. Oblivious to these garish furnishings, he switched on a century-old Tiffany floor lamp and peered at the Cattleman’s Bank calendar, whereupon—every morning without fail—he crossed off the previous day. The last date with an X through it was the second of May.
Which makes this the third.
Reed’s eyes goggled, his mouth gaped, and he heard himself say, “I have a month and a day left!”

Again he was distracted by his spouse’s summons—this time from their spacious parlor. “Don’t dillydally, Sammy—come in here by the fire.”

He smiled at the girlish pout in Irene’s voice. “I shall be there directly.”

“I’ve got something sweet and yummy—come to Mummy and get some while it’s hot!”

Reed inhaled deeply, put on his happy-face mask, and marched into the parlor, where piñon flames snapped and crackled merrily in a fireplace large enough to roast a side of prime beef flanked by a half-dozen tender piglets.

His darkly attractive wife, wearing a black silk negligee and a sly smile, was stretched out on a midnight-blue velveteen couch. Irene raised a smallish glass that was half filled with an aromatic amber fluid. Smiling seductively at her husband, the lady gestured to draw his gaze to a crystal pitcher perched on the hearth. “Would Daddy like a nice hot toddy?”

The husband sighed. “Mommy always knows just what Daddy likes.”

This is an appropriate time to leave Mr. and Mrs. Reed to enjoy the privacy of their luxurious residence.

Tomorrow morning, we shall pay a call on another sort of man altogether. Charlie Moon does not have a wife to come home to, and his bankroll would not choke a garter snake or grubstake a frugal silver prospector searching for “sign” in the badlands on the yonder side of Pine Knob. No, sir—not for a week, on a menu of moldy old corn pone, cold navy beans, and sour stump water.

May 4
Hard Times on the Columbine

Though you wouldn’t have guessed it from the hearty breakfast in the ranch headquarters. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Frank, who was serving it up on big platters, also provided nonstop cheerful chatter. The winsome lass was fairly bubbling over about how much she was enjoying her second semester at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic University in Granite Creek.

Every now and then when he could slip a slender word in edgeways, Charlie Moon contributed a remark or two.

Whenever Sarah finally ran out of breath, Charlie’s aunt Daisy commenced to entertain those present with her customary early-morning organ recital, which began with the composer’s well-known “Overture to an Aching Left Kidney,” followed by her lighthearted “Waltz with a Leaky Bladder,” and finally the big finale—an untitled fugue dedicated to Daisy Perika’s troublesome colon.

What a great way to start a day—and break an overnight fast with a feast.

After Moon had finished off three fried eggs, a Texas-size chicken-fried steak soaked in thick brown gravy, and enough crispy fried potatoes and made-from-scratch buttermilk biscuits to feed slender little Sarah for a week, the Ute rancher politely inquired whether anyone had a hankering for that last piece of beef in the cast-iron skillet. The ladies did not, so the tall, lean man helped himself to the lonely piece of meat, smothered it in a ladle of hot gravy, and made short work of the combination.

Will all that cooking, talking, eating, and whatnot, the Columbine kitchen was already a mite warmish and it was about to heat up by a few extra degrees that cannot be measured on any Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, or other temperature scale that you might care to mention.

Watch the girl do her stuff.

While Sarah helped Charlie with the dishes, the willowy youngster’s left hip just happened to bump him from time to time. It was enough.

These small intimacies inspired Mr. Moon to get out of the kitchen and onto the east porch first chance he got, which he did, leaving Sarah to sigh and Aunt Daisy to shake her head and wonder where all this foolishness was going.
Sarah has her cap set for my nephew but that silly girl is like a daughter to Charlie and what he wants for a wife is a grown-up woman and there’s a half-dozen brassy hussies just waiting to be asked and I wish one of ’em was a nice Ute girl but every one of ’em is a
matukach
but I’d just as soon he stayed single as marry one of them pale-skinned women because if that mixing keeps up for two or three more generations the whole tribe’ll look like they was from Norway and won’t that be a big joke on us Southern Utes but at least I won’t live to see it.

The old woman does tend to think in run-on sentences, but when you boil it all down to the dregs, Daisy Perika’s analysis of the edgy relationship between Charlie Moon and Sarah Frank was not so far from being right on the mark—and such tensions in a household raise a pertinent question: when a hardworking man is pursued by a romantic teenager and vexed by a testy aunt, what does he need from time to time?

A rejuvenating dose of rest and relaxation, that’s what.

But managing an outfit the size of Charlie Moon’s Columbine Ranch doesn’t leave much time for a fellow to enjoy the finer aspects of life, like angling for rainbow trout, dancing with a pretty girl who’s at least thirty years old, picking an old-time tune on his Stelling’s Gold Cross banjo, or just taking a long, peaceful walk in a shady forest of aspen and fir. Mr. Moon would dearly love to set aside a few hours for any one of these activities, but if it ain’t one danged thing that interferes with a man’s plans it’s half a dozen more. Here are a few f’r instances.

Purebred cattle falling like flies from the latest highly contagious and mysterious malady that perplexes even those folks with Ph.D.s in cowology.

The three wa-hooing Columbine cowboys that busted up the Harley’s Bad Boys Bar last week and “borried some fancy motorsikkles.” It was all just for fun, to hear them tell it. (The unrepentant sinners are locked up in jail, impatiently waiting for the boss to go their bail, and that’ll happen when cottonwoods leaf out in twenty-dollar bills.)

Over and above and on top of miscellaneous cattle diseases and pesky personnel problems, there are plagues of ravenous range worms and clouds of famished locusts that devour every last blade of grass on twenty sections in twenty minutes, and don’t even talk about broken-down windmills and wheezy bulldozers hitting on maybe two cylinders and hungry cougars who’ve acquired a taste for Columbine prime beef. Such problems tend to nibble away at a stockman’s razor-thin profit margin.

Which is why Charlie Moon looks forward to that happy time when he’ll be flat-out retired, and those sweet mornings when he can sleep in until 7
A.M
. and never have to look a homely Hereford in the face again or a bronc in the other end. Sad to say, like energizing the nation with nuclear fusion or solar power or wind, that longed-for day always seems to be twenty years away. In the meantime, the owner of the cattle operation is obliged to set a good example for his employees, which is why the Ute Indian was up well before the sun yawned and cracked a bloated fireball of an eyeball over the jagged Buckhorn Range.

It helped that most every morning on the Columbine could be rated somewhere between fine and fair, but this particular May 4 dawn had outdone itself. The eastern sky started off by showing off a pale, dusty blue that bloomed into a soft rosy hue, and just about the time Charlie Moon figured it’d done about all it could do, an armada of wispy cloudships sailed by to fill his eye with pearly pink that made him think of cotton candy and the cherry-flavored lips of the first girl he’d ever kissed.

But back to the heavenly display.

On the blue, rosy, pink background someOne had painted misty wisps of scarlet and also brushed on a few swirls of royal purple, which made a rainbow so pretty that it fairly made a man’s eyeballs ache. Imagine Moon’s surprise when the Artist struck flint to steel, making a white-hot spark that set the entire sky afire—what a fine show! For an encore, molten gold rolled off the snowy mountains like lava, threatening to sweep trees off the foothills and flood the deep Columbine Valley right up to the brim. Like most celebrations, the fireworks were over too soon, but the performance left a fellow thinking that life was about to dish out a dandy treat.

For a struggling stockman situated on the high, rolling prairie between the Buckhorn and Misery mountains, the hoped-for blessing might amount from anything to a boost in beef prices that’d been sliding down a slippery slope since last October, to an all-night root-soaking rain that’d revive sixty sections of parched pasture.

Fat chance.

Charlie Moon might as well hope that his aunt Daisy would settle down and behave like a normal woman of her advanced age. Or for that matter, that sweet little Sarah Frank would find herself a young man who was worth his boots and saddle, and thereby stop giving Mr. Moon the big-eye, which was downright embarrassing for a man that was old enough to be the Ute-Papago orphan’s daddy.

Odds were, this would be another run-of-the-mill day, much like a thousand others. The price of beef on the hoof would slip a little or maybe level off, and there would be no sweet rainwater to refresh the Columbine’s thirsty earth, Daisy would commit a fresh outrage sufficient to shock a deranged Nazi storm trooper, and Sarah would flutter her eyelashes at him and drop hints about how she was of an age to consider matrimony and had been for about three years now.

Charlie Moon figured he’d have to settle for what he had. These were hard times, and a man should be grateful just to make his way through one day and into the next. But one way or another, the Columbine’s bills would have to be paid. Which reminded him that there was another side to that coin—the rancher had a few unpaid debts he could call in. But after thinking it over, Moon realized that all his debtors were worse off than he was.

Except for the notable exception.

If I could figure out some way of collecting the back wages the county owes me for standing in as Scott Parris’s deputy now and again, that’d be a big help
. Intending to call Chief of Police Parris, Moon made a reach for the telephone. He hesitated. Even though this was county money, it didn’t feel right—leaning on his best friend.
Scott has troubles enough without me shoveling on some more.

On the other hand…

The county does owe me the debt—and some of it’s for work done two or three years ago.
This would be hard, but times were tough all over and the thing had to be done. Charlie Moon pulled the telephone out of his jacket pocket, found the programmed number, his finger was on the button…the stubborn digit refused to press it.

The rancher shook his head.
I can’t do this.

Not to Scott.