Maggie looked into the flagman’s house from the door. He seemed more dead, as if that were possible, and she didn’t even know the telegraph code for S.O.S. She galloped back to Christopher’s car and clambered in. The caboose was rolling by.
“You kicked me in the teeth,” Christopher said. “I think you’ve ruined my needle act.”
“Sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t. The needle act was disgusting. “Christopher, could we try and catch up with that other car and see where it goes?”
“What about getting help for that poor old man back there?” Pure sarcasm.
“We can send it. And if he’s dead, he’s dead, isn’t he?”
A snowball had a better chance in hell than they had of catching the other car, so Christopher said he’d try.
Maggie studied the road map under the flashlight. “You know what? We’ll be coming into Williamson soon. I’ll bet the train stops there and that’s where they’ll meet up. I’ll bet I’m right.”
“And what if you are? What do we do then?”
“I wish we had a gun,” she said.
“What?”
“I told you once, my father’s a deputy sheriff. He’s a farmer, but he’s also a deputy sheriff.”
“I don’t like guns and I don’t like deputy sheriffs,” Christopher said. “Process servers, that’s all they are.”
“All the same,” Maggie said. Then: “I’ll bet that was a mailbag they snatched. The way he waved his arms—that could be how the old man did it every night.”
“Okay, tell me something if you’re so smart,” the magician said. “Why bump the old guy off first? Why not grab the mailbag from him after the train’s gone through and nobody’s around? If it was a mailbag.”
“Because …” Maggie said slowly, “they didn’t mean to kill him. He was asleep and they just wanted to make sure he stayed that way and didn’t see who they were. I’ll bet they live around here. It’s Christmas and they’re broke. There was bound to be money in the mail. Christopher, can’t we go any faster?”
“You make me nervous every time you say Christopher. We got about five miles left before she boils dry again.”
“There could be a reward, you know, and we’d split it,” Maggie said. “Hey! Where’s your stage gun, the one you shoot the rabbit with?” It was another of his tricks that Maggie didn’t like. She was pretty sure he had a deaf rabbit because of it.
“It’s in the green metal box with the silks,” he said. “Just don’t upset the goddamn livestock.”
Maggie, her knees on the seat, flashlight in hand, began the search for the green box. A car passed, going the opposite direction.
“That’s your guy going back to pick up his buddy on the tracks.”
“No,” Maggie said. Through a small space between boxes she saw the train running parallel to them, sometimes quite close. She prayed they wouldn’t have to cross the tracks again before Williamson. They’d never make it to the crossing first. She also prayed she could find the green box. She shone the flashlight into the sad, pink eyes of the rabbit where he stared out the window of his case.
“Williamson’s a ghost town since the Depression,” Christopher said. “The train won’t stop there.”
“Want to bet?” She spotted the green metal box on the floor. It was underneath three suitcases and the Chinese Head Chopper. She had to change places with the rabbit to get to it. Talk about Alice in Wonderland. It took a long time but she got the box out. By then her fingers were numb.
“Williamson, three miles,” Christopher read a road sign.
“Any sign of their car?”
“I can see a taillight if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s theirs,” she said with conviction, changing places again with the rabbit. She got out the gun and four blank cartridges, wedged the box between the rabbit and the cage of turtle doves, and loaded a cartridge. That was all the starter’s pistol would take at a time.
“I must be crazy to give you that,” Christopher said. “What do you think you’re going to do with it?”
“Just have it.”
They were losing ground to the train, running even at the moment with the caboose.
“Try and keep up, Christopher. Maybe I’ll catch sight of him.”
Christopher swore at damnfool women who thought they were Annie Oakleys.
Williamson was a ghost town, to judge by the outskirts. The streetlights were dead—empty, broken globes. Houses were boarded up. Even the billboards were bare. But the train was slowing down, its whistle sharp and measured, a distinct signal. A trainman came out onto the caboose platform and began to work what seemed to be levers. A noisy shudder ran the length of the train.
“It’s stopping,” Maggie said, and they were passing car after car now. Between two of the cars she glimpsed a figure with a great hump on his back. “I see him!” she cried. “I’ll bet he jumps before they stop.”
“He’ll kill himself if he does. He must be frozen stiff.”
Suddenly they lost complete sight of the train where the road made a hairpin turn, going steeply downhill. When they saw it again it was dead ahead, stopped across the tracks.
A thin row of high-slung lights lined the station platform. Light shone from the stationmaster’s office, but the rest of what once was an elegant gabled building was in spooky darkness. The car Maggie convinced herself they had followed was parked next to the platform. Christopher wouldn’t drive near it.
“Okay, park and we’ll walk,” Maggie said. “Just pretend we’re going to report the old man to the stationmaster.”
“I’m not pretending. That’s all I am going to do.” He turned the Chevy around and parked facing the highway which continued parallel to the tracks. Main Street crossed the tracks down into the town. “If anything happens run like hell back here. They’ll find that old man without us.”
Maggie trudged to the platform, passing close to the parked car. She didn’t go right up to look but she couldn’t see anyone in it. Maybe it wasn’t their car at all. The train let out an enormous sigh, every car simultaneously. Down the platform, on the other side of the office a man in a railway cap and a sheepskin coat was handing up bags from a Railway Express wagon. Behind Maggie the crossing bell was clanging furiously as though it could waken a dead town. More than half the train stretched out of sight beyond the Main Street crossing.
She looked around to see where Christopher was. He had cut over in front of the parked car and was striding along the platform toward where the baggage was being loaded. She’d be willing to bet he wouldn’t even mention the man they’d seen jumping the train. She ran to catch up with him but cast a glance over her shoulder every few steps. The magician and the stationmaster were talking when she looked back and saw two men running alongside the tracks, their figures caught for the moment in the crossing light. They were headed for the parked car.
She shouted, “Christopher!” He paid no attention. She ran back. The men separated, one on a beeline to the car and the other headed, stiff-legged, for the highway. No, she realized, he was heading for Christopher’s car. She dug the pistol out of her pocket and fired its single shot. A pop. A mere pop. Another cartridge might be louder but she was too shaken to reload. Her heart felt like it was beating itself to death, but she ran full speed for the Chevrolet. The other car roared into motion behind her. Its lights circled her: the driver meant to run her down or scare her off the road. She flung herself toward the bushes and kept rolling over and over. By the time she was safe and recovered her senses, both cars were heading onto the highway and on back the way they’d come. Christopher was running from the station, shouting “Stop! You thieving bastards, stop!”
Maggie picked herself up and made it to where the magician was sobbing with rage.
“He almost ran me over,” Maggie said.
“They’ve got my rabbit! They’ve got my whole goddamn life! What have you done to me, Maggie?”
She didn’t say anything until the ligh
ts of both cars disappeared. Then her mind began to work again. “What do they want with your car anyway? They won’t take it far. All they want is a head start so we can’t follow them again. Come on, Chris,” she coaxed. “Take one more chance on me. Let’s hike as far as the turn in the road.” She hooked her arm through his and pulled him forward.
“Don’t call me Chris,” he muttered.
As they neared the turn, the whole valley below them seemed swathed in a shimmering mist, a few pinpricks of light showing through. It was like an upside-down sky. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Maggie exclaimed.
“Shut up,” Christopher said.
But when they rounded the curve he cried out, “By God, you’re right! There she is!”
The Chevy sat in stubborn majesty, her radiator against the guardrail of the overlook.
Christopher turned the car around and refilled the radiator from the milk can. Maggie got in and thought about how long it had been since she’d got out of bed the previous morning. She had pawned her watch in Danbury, Connecticut, in October and lost the ticket in Framingham, Massachusetts, but she had a Baby Ben alarm clock in her book bag. She reached for it and knew at once that what was at her feet was not her book bag.
She sat very still and didn’t say a word until they were about to pass the Williamson station. “Christopher, you’d better stop.”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“My book bag is gone. They’ve taken it.”
“Hurray for them.”
She pulled the bag at her feet up onto her lap.
“What’s that?” he said, and then, “Oh, my God.”
He slammed on the brakes and even by what was left of the moonlight they could read the marking, U.S. MAIL.
“I reckon we’ll get your books back for you, ma’am,” the sheriff of Mingo County said, “but I can’t guarantee it’ll be by noon.” Noontime was the hour at which the best garage repairman in Tug River Valley had promised a mended radiator and two new tires. The sheriff figured that in due time the Norfolk and Western Railway might just pay for them. “But you’ll be yonder by a long ways then.”
The magician and Maggie had had a few hours’ sleep at opposite ends of an old leather sofa in the sheriff’s office. His wife had brought them a wonderful breakfast of ham, fried cornmeal mush, and eggs, with coffee enough to keep them awake all the way to the Michigan state line. The rabbit nibbled carrots from the woman’s root cellar, the doves traveled with their own supply of bird seed. Christopher took a five-dollar gold piece out of the sheriff’s wife’s ear and put it in her apron pocket—to give her kids for Christmas.
“I knew when I heard your story,” the sheriff summed things up, “it had to be the McCoy brothers. They weren’t ever known to do anything the easy way if they could find a hard one. And folks got to thank the good Lord that most times they’re just plain unlucky. Like your turning up tonight. A couple of years back they aimed to rob the local bank. They squeezed themselves through the ventilating system during the night and was inside waiting for the manager to open up the next morning. Only trouble, that was the day President Roosevelt closed every bank in the country. Nobody opened up. Some people round here blamed it on the McCoys at first. Dang near lynched them. They’d’ve saved us a pack of trouble since if they had.”
The sheriff took off his hat, scratched his head, and put his hat back on again. “It may turn out the best luck they ever did have was you finding the old man. They could hang for that if he don’t pull through. But that old man is tougher than all the McCoys put together. It won’t surprise me none if he lives to be state’s witness.”
Maggie and Christopher looked at one another. Then Maggie asked the question: “What’s the old man’s name, Sheriff?”
“Smith. Just plain Willie Smith.”
ERIC WRIGHT
KAPUT
Canadians are great storytellers, and two-time Arthur Ellis Award winner Eric Wright is one of the best. Like all good yarnspinners, he takes his inspiration where he finds it and doesn’t always realize right away what he’s found. Back in 1952, Eric worked for a year in Churchill, Manitoba. Some thirty-seven years later, it occurred to him that he might get a story out of his experience and here it is.
Ten years ago, this versatile Torontonian began writing detective fiction. By now, mystery readers know Eric Wright best for his Charlie Salter novels, but he’s no new hand at writing short stories. He sold the first one he ever wrote to The New Yorker in 1959. Eric is a founding member and a past president of Crime Writers of Canada and on the executive committee of the International Crime Writers League.
“Loneliness was bad,” he said. “It could do terrible things to people. But there was worse. I knew two fellas up here once—they worked a trapline near Mile 42—well, I tell you, they got to hate each other, those two, like one of them marriages where the husband and wife is exchanging notes all the time, not speaking. These two got like that. They couldn’t agree on anything after a while. Never mind, though, they had to stick it out to the spring.
“What they did to avoid arguments, they had a deck of cards, d’ye see, and they cut ’em to see who was to do the chores. They cut for everything. It worked out pretty well for a while. One of them would have a run of luck and he would have a nice time watching the other work, then it would swing back. Some of the chores was worse than others, of course, like going out to see why the dogs are restless in forty below in a snowstorm that fills your tracks behind you. That’s a bad one, because maybe you’ve got to scare off a pack of wolves, or a bear. Still, that’s how they worked it.
“Then one of them got cute. He picked up a book somewhere, probably from the mission or the Hudson’s Bay store, on how to be a conjuror. There was a bit in it on how to do card tricks and one of them showed you how to cut any card you wanted. This fella took the book and hid it and practiced when his partner was away on the trapline and he got so he could cut any card he wanted. Pretty soon his partner was doing all the dirty hard jobs and he was doing the easy ones, like making the coffee in the morning. His partner never tumbled to it, just waited for his luck to turn.
“Then he found the book when the other fella was away. He didn’t say anything at first, just waited. Then one night they thought they had a bear outside so they cut the cards and the poor fella lost again. What he did then was interesting. He took his gun and got dressed like he was going after the bear and went out the cabin and started to holler. His partner came out with his own gun and the fella who was being cheated shot him as he stood in the door.
“Then he fired off three or four rounds of his partner’s gun, laid him on the floor of the cabin with his gun in his hands, closed the place up, harnessed up the dogs, and three days later turned himself in at the Mountie post. He told the Mounties he’d shot his partner in self-defense. Said his partner had gone crazy and suddenly started shooting at him while he was out seeing to the dogs. Lucky, he said, he had his gun with him so there was only one thing to do. He tried to talk him out of it, but the fella just shot at him. The Mounties accepted that. They had no choice. It happens.”
Duncan Bane swallowed his beer in a long smooth slide and I signaled the beer parlor waiter for more. I figured we had a while to go before I got what I wanted.
I was in Churchill, Manitoba, collecting material for what I hoped would be an oral history of the north. My idea was to find some of the old people who were still around who had been there in the thirties, the old trappers, the missionaries, perhaps the odd Hudson’s Bay factor who had decided to stay after retirement.
So far I hadn’t had much luck. I had started in Flin Flon, then moved on to The Pas, and now I was in a beer parlor in one of the oldest settlements on the Hudson’s Bay. Churchill is a grain port for a few weeks a year, a year-round railhead for the twice-weekly train, and, as I was finding out, a tourist town. Duncan Bane was the chief tourist attraction.
I was staying at the hotel above the beer parlor and the waiter, hearing of my mi
ssion, had insisted that Duncan Bane was the man I should talk to. He was a trapper, now retired, who had come up north as a young man during the Depression. Now in his seventies, he spent his days in the beer parlor at his own table in the corner. I introduced myself to him, bought him some beer, and he started to talk. He had been talking now for half an hour and none of it was any use to me.
My experience of this kind of thing is that sometimes you have to wait a long time to get what you want. It’s like being an antique dealer who calls in at a remote farmhouse on the off chance that the owner will have something whose value he is unaware of. First you have to admire everything the farmer is proud of—the dishwasher, the microwave, even the VCR; then, down in the basement, while he is showing you his new furnace, you stumble over the hundred-year-old dry sink he is using for a woodbox. Oral history is like that. What you want to hear is the stuff they are slightly ashamed of.
I was beginning to think, though, that Duncan Bane was a waste of time. He certainly looked the part: old work pants held up by suspenders, a much-washed check shirt, and, best of all, a huge tangle of beard beneath a blue-veined bald head. He had cast himself in the role of “old trapper,” and he made his living, or his beer money, sitting in the parlor telling stories for tourists, and probably allowing them to take his picture, for a consideration.
So far he had told me three stories. The story about the two trappers and the deck of cards I had heard years ago in Winnipeg, then again twice on this trip, in Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage. Bane told it well from long practice.
First he’d told me the story of the miner who had struck gold in the north and gone to Winnipeg, hired three whores, then, to acclimatize them, filled the hotel suite with two feet of corn flakes so that he could teach them how to walk on snowshoes. This has always been one of my favorite stories. Bane claimed to have known the miner.
Mistletoe Mysteries Page 6
