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Adobe Flats: A Resurrection Man Novel © 2014 by Colin Campbell.
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For my daughter, Ann.
One thing I definitely got right.
I love you.
the present
That’s a neat trick, that balancing thing.
You should be in the circus.
—Jim Grant
one
Steam hissed up from Jim Grant’s lap as scalding hot coffee shrivelled his nuts and turned the front of his jeans into molten lava. At least that’s what it felt like when his efforts to peel back the lid of his latte tipped the king-size paper cup over his nether regions and threatened to melt his gonads. Hot coffee in his lap and a swirl of white foam down the front of his T-shirt like a question mark. Not the best start but par for the course considering his reception since arriving in Absolution, Texas. About as friendly as the one those Mexicans got who visited the Alamo.
Grant’s frosty reception began even before he arrived. On the train from Los Angeles—not the main line express but the third change after leaving the city of angels. The parched scrubland passing outside the window reminded Grant of that other place, the one where devils ruled and angels feared to tread. When he had asked the conductor how long before they stopped at Absolution, the conductor’s reaction had set the tone for all that was to follow.
“This train don’t stop at Absolution.”
“That’s not what my ticket says.”
The conductor examined Grant’s ticket. The printout gave his journey as Los Angeles, California, to Absolution, Texas. The railroad official frowned and scratched his head.
“We ain’t never stopped at Absolution. That’s a request-only stop.”
“Well, I’m requesting it. How long?”
The conductor handed the ticket back.
“Next stop after Alpine.”
He pulled a pocket watch out of his waistcoat pocket, more for effect than necessity. Grant reckoned this fella knew exactly how long before they arrived at the place the train never stopped at.
“Half an hour. Bit more, maybes.”
“Thanks.”
Grant settled back in his seat and watched Texas drift by through the window. Dry and brown and dusty. He couldn’t remember the last patch of greenery he’d seen since changing trains. He didn’t expect to see any more up ahead. Considering why he was here, that seemed appropriate. He glanced at the leather holdall in the overhead rack and thought about what was inside. Then he turned his attention to the scenery again.
Absolution wasn’t anything he was expecting either.
Steam didn’t rise up from the engine as the train pulled in at the one-stop bug hutch of a town. It wasn’t that kind of train. This wasn’t the iconic steam engine of the Old West, with its cowcatcher grill and enormous chimney; it was the squat, bulky diesel of the Southern Pacific that hadn’t changed shape since the ’50s. Grant felt like Spencer Tracy stepping down from the streamliner at Black Rock. That was another place trains never stopped at.
Heat came at him like he’d stepped through an oven door. Dust kicked up from the boards of the platform. Calling it a platform was an exaggeration. A raised section of wood and nails with three steps at one end that led into the parking lot. Parking lot was an exaggeration too. The hard-packed sand and gravel might have been a parking lot once upon a time, but nobody parked there nowadays. The ticket office was boarded up and closed. No wonder the conductor had looked nonplussed as he pulled the portable stairs back into the carriage. The door slammed shut. The engine roared. There was a hiss from the brakes, then the huge monster eased forward. It slowly built up speed as it nosed into the desert, and a few minutes later Grant was alone in a landscape so bleak he wondered why anybody wanted to build a town there in the first place.
He took his orange windcheater off, slung it over one shoulder, and walked to the ticket office. The boards creaked underfoot. He felt like he should be wearing spurs. Dust puffed up around his feet. The office was just that, a small square garden shed in the middle of nowhere. There was no waiting room or restroom or any other kind of room apart from enough space for one man to sit inside selling tickets. Back when anyone caught the train from here. Grant guessed that was a long time ago.
He glanced over his shoulder towards the town.
Absolution was just a row of uneven rooftops breaking the smooth lines of the horizon. Not as far away as they seemed, and not close enough to pick out any detail. Just flat, featureless buildings among the scrub and rock. He squinted against the blazing sunlight. Even the blue sky looked bleached and unfriendly. When he looked closer, Grant could see there were more buildings than he first thought. Smaller and lower than what passed for the main street. A couple of water towers in the distance. A few weather vanes beyond them.
Nothing moved. There was no sound apart from the wind coming in off the flatlands. Then Grant heard pounding footsteps from the other side of the ticket office. He stepped to one side so he could see. A cloud of dust broke the stillness. A man was running towards him. He didn’t look happy.
“What you think you’re doin’ here, fella?”
The man was out of breath. His words came out in a rasping voice that sounded like a smoker’s but was probably just desert dry from a hard life. He carried a key to the ticket office but didn’t offer to open it. Grant was visiting, not leaving. He didn’t need a ticket. He held the leather holdall in one hand and nodded his head towards the departing train. Explaining the obvious seemed the way to go.
“Just got off the train.”
“I can see that. How come?”
Grant could see this was going to be hard.
“Well, it just kinda stopped. Then I got off.”
“No need to be flippant, young man.” The man spat on
the boards to prove he could spit. “This ain’t no place for gettin’ shirty.”
The parchment face looked like it was shaped from stripped hide. It was lined and cracked and as dry as the voice. There was no twinkle in the eye to soften the harshness. It was impossible to guess his age, but Grant figured somewhere between old and ancient. Running from town hadn’t helped. When he got his breath back, his voice leveled out.
“Sunset Limited hasn’t stopped here in years.”
Grant tried a smile to lighten the atmosphere. “That’s a step up from never.”
The man looked puzzled. “What?”
“Conductor said it never stopped here.”
“Weren’t far short. Seems like never.”
Grant let out a sigh. This conversation was going nowhere. He glanced along the rails at the disappearing train. The long silver streak was banking to the right as it took the long, slow bend around the distant foothills. He turned back to the man with the ticket office key.
“Looks like never was wrong and the years have rolled by, ’cause it sure as shit stopped today. And here I am.”
The eyes turned to flint in the parchment face. “Yes, you are. And that begs the question, don’t it?”
Grant waited for the question it begged, but it didn’t come. This fella was as inscrutable as Charlie Chan but not as friendly. The black trousers, white shirt, and faded waistcoat suggested an official position, but if his job was to sell tickets he must have been on short time. He was no great shakes as a meeter and greeter either.
“You’re not much of a welcoming committee.”
The parched skin tightened. “Who said you’re welcome?”
Grant nodded. “Nobody, I guess.”
The town was only a short walk from the station, but it felt like miles away. The buildings were gray and dull, without any hint of life or color. No smoke from the chimneys. No glints of sunlight from moving vehicles. Place was as barren as a long-shit turd. Dried up and dead and full of crap. The station attendant pressed home his point.
“Nobody asked you to come here.”
Grant kept calm but couldn’t leave that one unanswered. “How do you know?”
Then he set off walking towards town.
two
The main street was a long stretch of nothing much. A dozen buildings at most on one side of the road. A couple more across the street. Grant stopped on the dirt track from the station before stepping onto the wider dirt track that was First Street. Swirls of sand blew across the road. He realized it was tarmacked, but the two-lane blacktop was so faded it look like cracked earth. The center line was unbroken yellow stained brown with the passage of time. A smell of mint drifted on the wind, and Grant noticed the first piece of greenery since getting off the train. A straggly plant behind a low picket fence surrounding a low-slung bungalow. Like a gatekeeper’s house guarding the track to the station.
Grant stepped onto the sidewalk. Nobody was out walking. A handful of people were dotted about across the street. Some sitting on chairs outside the only two-story building, leaning the chairs back on two legs against the wall. A couple more standing in shop doorways farther along the street. Two or three staring out through plate-glass windows coated in dust. Nobody moved. Nobody shouted a greeting.
The building he wanted was obvious. He ticked off the others anyway—standard practice when entering hostile territory. There was a pharmacy, a grocery store, the ever-present hardware store, and some kind of eatery called the Famous Burro. Grant wondered if that should have been burrito, then remembered a burro was a donkey. He didn’t fancy eating donkey. A bit farther down the street there was a post office and a clean-looking shop marked Front Street Books. There wasn’t anything that looked like a bank. He turned the other way. More of the same, not amounting to much. The town petered out with a few dried-up houses and a gas station and railroad-car diner beyond them.
He turned back to the two-story building. The Gage Hotel. The place with the two fellas leaning back in their chairs. Cowboy boots and faded blue jeans. One had a cowboy hat pulled low to shade his eyes. The only thing missing was a piece of straw hanging out the corner of his mouth, or maybe chewing a matchstick. Neither man spoke. They just stared.
Accommodation was a priority. Looked like the Gage Hotel had the monopoly. Grant left the smell of mint behind and crossed the street. Time to see if the booking clerk was any friendlier than the ticket seller.
The hotel lobby smelled of cracked leather and coffee. It was dark and dingy and should have been filled with smoke. The overall impression was of a gentlemen’s club. Half a dozen leather chairs were grouped in pairs on either side of three glass-topped coffee tables. Two leather sofas against the wall complemented the chairs. A cigarette machine sat at the bottom of a carved wooden staircase. The stairs started beside the reception counter, which had a heavy bound ledger and a manual bell that you pressed for attention—the kind that dinged once when the internal hammer struck.
Reception was unmanned.
A smoke-stained wooden fan spun slowly from the ceiling. The gentle thwup, thwup, thwup of the rotor blades reminded Grant of something bigger, but he pushed the thought aside and focused on the reception counter. Patchwork shelving divided into pigeonholes covered the wall against the staircase. Each pigeonhole had a hook out front, and each hook held a key. Room numbers went from 1 to 25. None of the keys were missing. All the rooms were vacant.
Grant crossed the lobby and dropped the holdall on the floor. He spun the register on its rotating stand and looked for a pen. The squiggly writing looked faded and old. Proper fountain pen ink, not biro. He tried to make out the date of the last guest, but it was smudged and indistinct. Didn’t look like yesterday though. An old-fashioned quill pen jutted from an inkwell on the counter. He picked it up and studied the ink-crusted nib.
“You is about to deface a historical document there, son.”
The voice came from the office door behind the counter. The face that went with the voice was drier and more parchment-like than the ticket seller at the station. The desk clerk limped into the room and spun the register back around. He indicated a desktop computer that Grant hadn’t seen below the level of the counter.
“We’ve gone all newfangled for checkin’ in.” The desk clerk scrutinized Grant’s face. “You must be the fella got off the Sunset.”
“That obvious, is it?”
“Sure is. First time the Sunset’s stopped here in over a year. First new face in town for almost the same.”
“I guess I’ve got a choice of rooms, then.”
“Ain’t got no rooms.”
Grant let that sink in. This fella was no more welcoming than the welcoming committee at the station. The only difference was where the ticket seller had nobody to sell tickets to, the desk clerk had a customer right in front of him but wasn’t about to rent him a room. Grant figured that made him even less of a welcoming committee. The elephants in the room were the keys hanging from each pigeonhole. Grant nodded at them.
“Got a lot of keys, though.”
“That I do. But each one’s taken.”
Grant felt like he should fold one arm up his sleeve. This was playing like an homage to Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock. He wondered briefly if the clerk was having him on—a little gentle humor—then dismissed the thought. The lines etched into the clerk’s face were more from grimaces and frowns than smiles and laughter. His voice was gravel dry.
“Block bookings.”
Grant smiled just to show the clerk how to do it. “Let me guess. Cattlemen from the local ranch. For when they come to town after driving the herd.”
“Ain’t no cattle ranches in Absolution.”
“Oil men, then. For a break from the rigs.”
“No oil neither.”
Grant kept his voice conversational. “Place hasn’t got a lot going for
it, then, has it?”
“It’s got enough. We like it the way it is. Don’t need strangers comin’ in and tellin’ us our business.”
Grant leaned forward and rested his elbows on the counter. “And what business is that?”
“None of yours, that’s what.”
“Tourism, maybe? You’ve got Big Bend National Park just south of you.”
The man tensed. Grant had touched a nerve. Maybe the lack of tourists was part of the reason the town looked so dry and lifeless. The clerk didn’t expand on the theory.
“We get by.”
Grant shifted his weight to one elbow and reached over the counter with the other hand. He slipped the nearest key from its hook and tossed it in his palm.
“Well, you just got by with one extra guest. I’ll take this one.”
The clerk looked indignant. “That room’s taken.”
“I know. By me. If the fella who’s block-booked it drifts into town, I’ll change rooms. Name’s Grant. Jim Grant.”
Grant picked up the holdall, grabbed a town map from the display stand on the counter, and turned for the stairs. The fan continued to thwup, thwup, thwup. Grant continued to ignore the memory. There was a thump outside as one of the chair-leaners on the porch stood up. Grant was on the second step before the front door opened, but he didn’t look back. He already knew who it was. The one in the boots and cowboy hat.
The clerk finally found his voice. “I need more than that—for the register.”
Grant leaned over the banister rail. “Thought you’d gone all newfangled.”
“Same applies. Name won’t do. Where you from?”
Grant set off up the stairs again and spoke over his shoulder. “Out of town.”
The stairs creaked all the way up.
Checking the map in his room explained why tourists didn’t stop here on their way to Big Bend. The founding fathers had pinned their hopes on the Southern Pacific and built the town on either side of the railroad tracks. Road traffic used the 90 just north. The 385 ran north to south all the way down into Big Bend National Park. The crossing of those two roads was at Marathon, west of Absolution. The road through Absolution went nowhere.
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