by A B Guthrie
He didn’t wear a down coat. His was of old, heavy wool that reached to his knees. He had a scarf wound around his neck and black earmuffs under his hat.
“Why did I take this job?” I answered him. I had the car under way.
“Idiots, both of us. Idiots in occupation as well as location in a country where polar bears freeze their balls off. Idiots.” He made a swipe at the windshield though most of the mist had cleared off.
“Shot in the foot in a tent, huh?” he said, not indicating a change in subject. He never did. He just let his mind hop around.
“By a robber. That’s what the man said.”
“What man?”
“A backpacker who stumbled onto the scene.”
After a silence Doc said, “Jase, you give me new faith in myself.”
“How’s that?”
“A tenter and a backpacker! In this weather! We aren’t the only fools, my boy. We’re not even the biggest fools. By comparison we’re brains, and God loves us.”
He settled back as if satisfied with his intellectual rating.
Abruptly he sat forward and asked, “In the foot, huh?”
“That’s our information.”
He made a noise in his throat and slumped back again.
Not so long ago the road we followed had been a bone-rattler, boulders alternating with holes, and man and machine suffered from it, from traveling what realists had called “that rocky-ass road.” But since then the county had paved most of it, and we made good time. The night was clear and dead. Along the sides of the pavement vegetation stood stiff, as if it had seen its last season. Only the stars, winking at the frozen world, gave some appearance of life.
We turned left where the road forked, and our wheels crunched on gravel. We crossed the main-river bridge and turned right, headed for the canyon of the South Fork. An animal—a frost-bitten deer, I made out—jumped from the borrow pit and crossed in front of us. Two others followed. I had to brake sharp for them. Doc murmured, “Venison.”
Guy Jamison’s dude ranch was dark. I drove on without stopping. Six miles more, and I saw the tent. A dim light shone through the canvas.
We got out there, Doc with his satchel and I with a flashlight that I turned on, directing its beam here and there as we walked. The tent was shored up with clods, muddied sticks, and dirt. At the sides of the flapped entrance there were grouse feathers and rabbit skins.
“Anybody home?” I called out.
Words that I couldn’t distinguish answered the call. I entered the tent, Doc right behind me. There was a lingering warmth in the place, coming from a sheet-iron camp stove. A man on a low cot reared up and asked, “Who are you?”
I replied, “Rescue squad,” and took a quick look around while Doc went to the patient. Besides the stove, the tent was fitted with a rough table, a counter made of planks laid across makeshift trestles, a couple of wood blocks for seats, a bucket of water on another block, a lighted lantern that sat on the table, and the cot on which the man now half-lay. Angled against a corner was a small-caliber rifle. Near it were a couple of apple boxes used for shelves. A couple of paper bags rested on them.
“I’m a doctor,” Doc said. “How’s the foot?”
“Hurts like hell.” The man was dressed, except for his feet. He didn’t appear either big or small. He could have done with a razor, could have done with it, say, a month ago.
“Gunshot wounds usually do. Let me look at the foot. Jase, see about some hot water.”
A pot already was on the stove, pretty well filled. I put a couple of sticks in the firebox.
Doc was unwinding the bloody rag from around the man’s foot. He said, “Shine your flashlight over here, Jase.”
When I had focused it, Doc tried feeling the foot, to find broken bones if any, I supposed.
The man let out “Ouch.”
More to distract him than extract information, I asked, “What’s your name?”
“Tuttle. Kingston Tuttle.”
“Be damned if I ever expected to work on King Tut,” Doc said.
Tuttle let out a sudden yelp of pain. He followed it with “Leave out your old wit and the shit.”
“Such language I never heard from a king.”
I asked, “Where you from?”
“Anywhere you say.”
“Hot water ready, Jase?”
“Right here.” I felt the heat of the pot through my mitt.
Doc opened his satchel and got out what he needed. “Lucky,” he told the man. “Clean wound. No bones broken, I think. Maybe bruised.” With soap from his bag and water from the pot, he was cleaning the bloody foot, having first rubbed alcohol on his hands. The water was too hot for immediate application. He would take a piece of gauze, hold on to a corner, dip the gauze in the water and then wave it around before using it.
I looked up from the foot. “A man shot you, you said?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Can you describe him? What did he look like?”
“You don’t take notes with a hole in your foot. Don’t bug me. Medium, just all-around medium, that’s what he was.”
“You reported he robbed you. What did he take?”
“I don’t know. Not much to take.”
“Your rifle?” I asked.
“I guess he didn’t see it.”
Doc was preparing a hypodermic.
“What were, what are, you doing here?”
“Look around, for God’s sake. Camping. Living with nature. Living off nature.”
Doc said, “King Tut becomes Henry David Thoreau. Remarkable transformation. Bare your arm, Henry.”
“What’s that for?” Tuttle asked, looking at the needle.
“Against tetanus, known to the laity as lockjaw.”
As he put away the needle, Doc said, “Dipper of water, Jase.” At about the same time, he took a tablet from a vial. “Swallow this.”
“Why?”
“So you can go camping again, Henry. You’ll need two legs.”
After Tuttle had washed down the pill, Doc said, “All right. Now friends, we take sad leave of Walden Pond.”
We bundled Tuttle up. Doc put his cold-weather gear back on. I looked around for Peterson’s backpack and found it behind the stove wood. On second thought I stepped to where the rifle stood and took it in my hand.
“Hey,” Tuttle said, “that’s mine.”
“Want it stolen? That robber might come again.”
We managed to put Tuttle into the car, along with the pack and the rifle, and set out for town. Guy Jamison’s dude ranch was still dark. I didn’t stop there.
“To my office,” Doc told me. Those were almost the only words spoken on our way back to town.
We laid Tuttle out in one of the two rooms Doc kept for emergency patients. “I’ll be here a while,” he informed me, “if Charleston wants to call.”
Charleston was waiting for me, and I made my report.
“Did you wake up the Jamisons? Ask them to watch out?”
“No, sir. It didn’t seem worth it.”
“Your decision. Good enough for me.”
He called Doc and talked for a minute, then said, “Come on, Jase.”
Doc didn’t greet us or ask any questions. He just opened the door and said, “He’ll be hobbling around before you know it. Jase knows where he is.”
Tuttle was wide awake. Doc had put quite a bandage on his foot. On the night stand were a glass, a pitcher of water and a bottle of pills.
He frowned at us. “Can’t you let a man rest?”
Charleston took the one chair in the room, and I stood. “Soon enough.” Charleston spoke shortly. “My deputy here has asked you some questions. I have some more.” He leaned toward the bed and went on, his words building up like a lawyer’s summation. “You can’t describe the robber, you don’t know what he took, and you were shot in the foot.”
Tuttle moved back in the bed, taking care with his foot. “That’s right.”
“I find it funny.”
“You wouldn’t with a bullet hole in you.”
“Let’s talk about that hole. What position were you in when he fired?”
“You expect me to remember?”
“You were standing up?”
“Not after he shot me.”
“Now the doctor tells me that the bullet went almost straight down, almost vertical, top of your foot to the bottom. Explain that.”
“I won’t. I can’t.”
“I can. You were holding the rifle in your own hands, holding it butt up and muzzle down, and you were careless. You shot yourself. If I could think of a charge, I’d be tempted to run you in.”
Charleston had spoken with a harshness unusual for him, but it served its purpose. Tuttle broke. He brought his hands to his face, groaned and said, “Oh, Jesus! It’s all spoiled.”
We waited for him to go on.
“I said I could live off nature. I promised to prove it. Thoreau did.”
Charleston’s gaze came to me, and he said under his breath, “With many a square meal at the Emersons.”
“Call me a nature freak, but I believe in the primitive life. That’s how I want to live, away from men and their problems and their artificial creations. Back to the old days, the good days, the days of our ancestors.”
Sentimentality was hard for Charleston to take. Me, too. Hysteria was worse. But we listened.
A whimper escaped Tuttle. “I told people I could do it. I bet I could do it. I made a big thing of it. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? What will they think of me? What will they say of me now? Just crazy. Just another oddball. Had this idiotic notion, and look where it got him. Laugh. Laugh.”
Charleston said, “Time to go, Jase.”
5
I was making it a point, though not on instructions, to be in the office in time to talk to Charleston. Now, at the switchboard, Blanche Burton halted me. “You’d never believe it, Jase,” she said. “Never in this world. He’s a dear man.”
“No doubt about it,” I answered.
“Guess who?”
“Don’t I fit the picture?”
“Go along with you. It’s the new deputy.”
“News to me,” I told her. It wasn’t really, now that she had spoken. “Who might this darling man be?”
“That’s not for me to tell. It’s for you to find out. I almost fell over.”
I had a notion to say, “Backwards, of course,” but didn’t. A man thinks a lot of things he doesn’t express. “When will I meet this fine specimen?”
She waved. “Just go through the door.”
I almost fell over myself when I saw Ike Doolittle. He wore over new boots a new pair of pants, creased, and a good wool shirt. Gone were his whiskers except for a trim mustache. He looked younger and somehow bigger. Whereas I had thought, when he took off that old sheepskin coat, it was like peeling a peach to get at the pit, now in his new clothes and a short-waisted jacket the pit was filling its covering. I had time, too, to notice the breadth of his shoulders. He was still short, of course, maybe five feet four, but I put his weight at 130 pounds or close to it.
He saluted me. “Sergeant Doolittle of the Northwest Mounted Police.” He stood near the desk at which Charleston was seated.
Charleston shied a smile at me. “All right, Ike,” he said. “Check on Tuttle and take the pack to the backpacker, then check back in.”
“Yes, sir.” Doolittle put on a new down coat and a new pair of furred gloves. I imagined Charleston had advanced money for the whole outfit. It would be like him. Doolittle went out, carrying the pack.
“So?” I said to Charleston as I seated myself.
“So it is. I think your hunch will work out. We’ll see. He hardly needed instructions about operations. I’ll put him in a cruiser.”
“No cruiser for me?”
“When you require one, of course, but for the most part I want you, to be in easy reach. For important things.”
I took his words for a compliment. “It turned out last night wasn’t so important.”
He yawned, needing sleep, I supposed. “It was important for Tuttle, the fool, and important for us in a way, part of our duty. We just couldn’t let him lie there in his tent.”
“I know that.”
“Sure you do. And you know that half and more of our job is just chasing rabbits.”
A call came for him then. He said “Yes” into the phone and listened. “All right. He insists, huh? Go on. Take him back out.”
He hung up and explained to me, with a motion toward the phone. “Ike. We’re delivering rabbits now. Peterson wants to go back to that tent.”
“Back?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Seems he swore he would backpack to Minneapolis, and he can’t count the trip from the tent into town because he didn’t have his pack with him. Matter of conscience.” He shook his head. His smile was twisted.
“Two of a kind, he and Tuttle,” I said.
“Not quite, Jase. Tuttle’s first thought was to save face. God spare us from such. Makes wars, face-saving does.” He rose and put on his wraps. “Take over, boy.”
It developed there wasn’t much to take over. I talked to Tad Frazier over the radio. He was hot, he thought, on the trail of a stolen car. I took the license number and relayed it to Doolittle. After midnight the owner of a beer-and-snack joint just south of town reported someone somehow had made off with a hundred-dollar bill. I asked him if he had left the cash drawer open. He couldn’t remember. I asked when. He couldn’t remember when either. He’d just found out. I asked about suspects. He didn’t want to accuse anybody. I told him a deputy would be right out. I thought of going myself but decided in favor of Doolittle. The man probably had just misplaced the money. No suspects? On a freezing night when customers would have been mighty few? Let Doolittle chase the rabbit.
I drowsed at my desk, to be wakened by Halvor Amussen, calling from Petroleum. Nothing doing there except that the cold was breaking records. He just wanted to talk, making sure someone was alive.
I went out to the switchboard and talked to Mrs. Carson for a while, or, rather, she talked to me. Then I napped some more and went home.
6
For the next two days, or, rather, nights, I didn’t earn my keep. I came to work. I stayed. I napped. I stood ready to answer calls, but few came in and these were unimportant. Neither did anyone else do anything but put in time, save for the sheriff. Three women, one of whom I hadn’t met, manned—or womaned—the switchboard and radio, which largely were silent. Tad Frazier took over the day shift, Ike Doolittle the night, and I filled in as the schedule demanded. Mostly we hung around the office, saving gasoline, glad to be out of the cold, and talked and drank the coffee the women kept brewing. Ike reported that the hundred-dollar bill had been found. The owner’s wife had taken it for safekeeping, not wanting their cash reserve to mingle with common currency. We were all a drag on the economy.
Again except for the sheriff. What with correspondence, record keeping, attendance at meetings and other dull chores, he was occupied.
Even so, I had a sense of impending developments, and so, I thought, did Charleston. Off and on I had another mutilated animal to think about, this time across the line in Canada. And the victim wasn’t a cow or steer. It was a pony. Who would want to kill a pony? For what reason? The devil with those speculations. No mutilations made sense.
But it wasn’t that report that promoted our mood. It may have been the unnatural quiet in the town, a quiet that the cold alone couldn’t account for. To walk the streets was to see almost nobody, least of all strip miners. I walked them and thought about a movie in which a man found buildings and standing homes but not one living being, human or animal.
It wasn’t until late Monday afternoon that Charleston told me, “Jase, there’s that environmental meeting tonight. I think you should be there.”
I knew about the meeting. It was to be held in the high-school auditorium with some official presi
ding.
I said, “It’ll give me something to do, at least.”
He opened a desk drawer and brought out a file. “It’s a state hearing, aimed at sounding out public sentiment about strip mining, but I’m sure some federal men will be there, representing the Bureau of Land Management. Both state and federal acreage is involved, as well as some private land already leased. But here.” He thrust the file at me. “No need to tell you.”
Before he said good-bye, leaving me with the file, he said, “Things might get hot.”
From the file I learned that the boosters for mining would have as their lead spokesman one Arthur Oldham, a public-relations officer for Energy Associates. One circular referred to him as Oily Arthur, saying Energy Associates was the child of Texas oil interests. Opposing him would be Judge John Church. The local chamber of commerce sided with the coal people. Naturally, I thought. Already I had come to the conviction that businessmen had the foresight of moles.
After the opening statements, the file informed me, the hearing would be opened to general discussion.
Shortly before eight o’clock I bundled up and walked to the high school. Maybe two dozen cars were already parked close by, and others were nosing in. So a sizable crowd would attend, maybe not altogether because of the issue. Winter-bound people always welcomed a good excuse to get out. What if that frigid air nipped at the lungs and frosted the nostrils? What if cars wouldn’t start later? Here was something going on. Here was a diversion, here something to do, even if not so important as a basketball game.
A rough count showed fifty people were already in the auditorium, and others were arriving as I finished the tally. Tim Reagan and Tony Coletti, my friends the strip miners, were on hand. So was Chuck Cleaver, the rancher, his usually friendly face creased with concern.
A desk had been placed on the floor below the stage, where the curtain was closed. No theater then. Just informality. A man sat at the desk, waiting. Close to him was another man I took to be the official reporter. He didn’t have anything on me. I had my note pad and a couple of pencils and enough knowledge of shorthand to keep pace. In the front row four other strangers sat. They would be officials, state and federal.
