The Case of the Halloween Ghost

by John R. Erickson

  I don’t allow it, never have.

  I was all set to dive through the window, ready to by George take out glass and screen, the window frame, even part of the wall if necessary. I mean, I was that stirred up. But Slim called me off.

  He started down the long, dark hall that led to the back bedroom. “Come on, dogs, I’ve got a job for you.”

  Drover went streaking down the hall, and I followed.

  Funny thing about that house. The farther away from the stove we went, the colder it got. Slim’s bedroom was about right for hanging meat. It was so cold back there, our breath made fog in the air.

  Slim turned on the light. He was hugging his arms by this time and standing on the sides of his feet, and his teeth were chattering.

  He pointed towards the bed—a bare mattress laid across squeaky springs and covered with two old quilts and a cow hide. He jerked the covers back and said, “Up! Come on, dogs, jump up!”

  Okay, if that’s what he . . . we jumped up and he pulled the covers over the top of us. All at once it was very dark and very COLD. Then we heard Slim’s footsteps on the floor. It sounded as if they were heading back towards the living room.

  I heard Drover’s voice in the darkness. “Hank? I’m f-f-freezing! What are we doing under here?”

  “I’m n-n-not sure at this point, but it probably has something to do with that noise we heard. Apparently Slim wants us to hide under here until s-s-s-something develops.”

  “I think I’m developing f-f-frostbite.”

  “I know what you m-mean, Drover. This may very well turn out to b-b-be the c-coldest bed I’ve experienced in my entire career.”

  “I think it’s the c-coldest bed in the whole w-world.”

  My teeth were chattering so badly that I couldn’t speak. For several minutes we lay there shivering in the darkness, waiting for someone to make the next move.

  It was clear by this time that Slim had devised a clever trap for the trespassers. Yes, of course. It was an old trick, see. You hide your secret weapons, lure the villains into the house, and then, when they least expect it, you spring the trap on them.

  Pretty smart.

  We waited. My ears were perked, my entire body was poised for action. I heard footsteps coming down the hall. Someone was walking . . . no, someone was running towards the bedroom!

  “Get ready, Drover, I think this is it.”

  “I’m so cold . . .”

  “Shhhhh.”

  The footsteps came closer and closer. Now they were in the bedroom. Someone switched off the lights and then . . .

  I hate being used. It gives me a lousy feeling deep inside the inner receptacles of my mind. It makes me . . .

  Okay, here was the deal. Very simple. Slim put me and Drover into his cold bed so that we could warm it up for him. While we lay under the covers, shivering and fighting off frostbite, he had gone back to the living room and warmed his backside on the stove.

  That’s why he had been so anxious for us to go home with him. It had nothing whatever to do with lonesomeness or trespassers. If I’d known that . . . oh well.

  When he was sure we had pre-heated his bed, he came loping back into the room and jumped under the covers. Right off, I got a foot in the face. You know what he said?

  “Get that cold nose away from me!”

  Well, there was a very good reason why my nose . . .

  It turned out to be a pretty rough night. Slim did everything in his sleep but sleep. He talked, he moaned, he thrashed, he snored, and most of all, he kicked. And then there was Drover’s twitching and wheezing.

  Noisiest bed I ever slept in.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I decided I’d had enough. I poked my head out of the covers and was about to go in search of a quieter place to sleep when all of a sudden . . .

  I perked my ears and listened. There it was again, that same eerie music coming from outside the house.

  Oh brethern ain’t you happy?

  Oh brethern ain’t you happy?

  Oh brethern ain’t you happy?

  Ye Followers of the Lamb.

  Fellers, I didn’t know who that was or why they were out there singing in the cold, but I never would have guessed that it might be a bunch of ghosts.

  Chapter Three: Slim Cleans House

  Slim was a single man, don’t you know. Sally May often referred to him as “a dirty bachelor.”

  Exactly what “bachelor” meant, I wasn’t sure, but I understood the “dirty” part. His house, for example. The next morning he hopped out of bed and chunked up the stove. Then he came streaking back and crawled under the covers again. While he waited for the stove to warm up, he talked to me and Drover. We had poked our heads out from under the cow hide.

  “Boys, I hate to take radical action, but if Miss Viola was to see this place in the shape it’s in, she might think I live this way all the time. I looked at Drover and he looked at me.

  “Now, she don’t like clutter so we’ve got to move a few things around. And she don’t like mice, so we’ll have to do some whittling on the mouse population. Do you boys think we can handle it?”

  I barked and tried to whap my tail under the covers. Slim had definitely picked the right dog for the mouse job. There wasn’t a cat or dog in the county that could beat me at mousing, when I really put my mind to it.

  Slim heaved a deep sigh. “Well, we ain’t getting any younger or any better looking. I guess we’d better start cleaning the dadgum house.”

  He pulled on his clothes and boots and we all went out and backed up to the stove. For half an hour or more Slim stood in front of the stove, making sour faces at all the junk in the living room and wondering where he ought to begin.

  That was something to wonder about, all right. Shall I try to describe the house? Okay.

  Living room: Four pairs of dirty socks, two undershirts, three towels, one pair of red long-john underwear, one pair of jeans, three boots, two spurs, a pair of chaps, two saddle blankets, two catch ropes, one pigging string, and one old boot top that had been sewed at the bottom so’s it would hold cow medicine.

  That was only the top layer. Beneath all that stuff was a six-month supply of reading material: The Livestock Weekly, The Cattleman Magazine, Western Horseman, and the Ochiltree County Herald.

  Coffee table: Three cups partially filled with coffee, and one of them had two dead june bugs floating around on the top; four empty pouches of Taylor’s Pride chewing tobacco; a corncob pipe and a tin of Prince Albert’s tobacco; an empty cracker box, an empty sardine can that had been used as an ashtray, and the wrappers from three Snickers candy bars; a bottle of three-way cattle vaccine, a dehorning tube, and a whet rock; cracker crumbs and pipe ashes, one banana peel, and the core of an apple.

  Hanging on the knob of the closet door was a pair of striped boxer shorts, and spilling out of the closet was a saddle, a pair of shotgun chaps, two more boots, a pair of five-buckle overshoes, and a sheeplined coat.

  From my position in front of the stove, I couldn’t see much of the kitchen, just a sink piled full of dirty pots and dishes, a skillet of cold grease on the stove, and a sack of garbage sitting beside the back door.

  Oh, and on the kitchen table: two empty jelly jars, a jar of peanut butter, half a sack of bread, and more crumbs and jelly spills than you could count in an average ranch day.

  I’ve never been what you’d call a fussbudget, but even I could see that this place had gone to seed.

  Well, the minutes passed, then an hour, and still old Slim stood there in front of the stove, shaking his head and talking under his breath. Then, at last, he bit his lip and set his eyes in a hard squint.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this junk, but dang it, I’ve got to do something. Come on, dogs, I’ll move junk and you catch mice!”

  And with that, old Sl
im left the stove and charged into the middle of the mess. He went through that living room like a mowing machine, and fellers, mice were going every which direction, looking for a new home.

  In the first thirty minutes, me and Drover notched up three head apiece, and we only nailed the slow ones and the cripples. The rest of them got away.

  Saddle, boots, leggings, blankets, and ropes went flying into the closet. When it got so full that it wouldn’t hold anything else, Slim pushed on the door until he got ’er shut.

  Then he opened up the stove and started pitching in all the newspapers and magazines—and one sock, by mistake. He watched the sock burn up and said, “Well, there’s one I won’t have to warsh.”

  Next, he got a feed sack and went around the house gathering up all his dirty clothes. When he was done, he scratched his head and wondered aloud what he ought to do with the sack. He ended up putting it in the back of his pickup.

  Then he turned to the kitchen mess. He washed two plates, two cups, two glasses, two knives and forks, and set them on the counter to dry. Then he got a cardboard box out of the shop and started filling it up with dirty dishes, pots, pans, and his coffee pot.

  When he had it crammed full, he opened the oven door, poked the box inside, and shut the door again. He was proud of that. I could tell, ’cause he winked at me and grinned.

  Well, it was afternoon by this time and old Slim had worked himself down to a nubbin. He collapsed into the big easy chair beside the stove—“Need to rest my bones for a minute,” he said—and fell asleep.

  So did we. I mean, all that cleanliness had just wore us out.

  Next thing we knew, Slim’s boots hit the floor and he jumped to his feet. “Holy smokes, it’s five o’clock and we ain’t done yet!”

  He grabbed the broom and started sweeping. I watched from my place in front of the stove. First he went through the living room, and managed to stir up enough dust so that Drover’s allergies started acting up on him. Even I had a little trouble breathing.

  Then he made his bed and scrubbed the bathtub until it turned white. By George, that was a revelation to me. I’d always thought it was naturally grayish-black.

  From there he went to scrubbing on the toilet bowl. I happened to be standing in the door during this part of the deal. He was on his knees in front of the pot, looking down into the water. His hair had fallen down over his forehead. He filled his cheeks with air and let it out real slow.

  “Next time, I think we’ll eat supper at her house. This pot work is for the birds.”

  By the time he’d finished with the pot, his face was showing the miles and the years. He reeled out his pocket watch and held it up in front of his face. “Jeeee-manee Christmas, I should have started this a week ago!”

  He jumped up, tore off his shirt, washed under his arms, brushed his teeth, throwed some smell-good on his cheeks, and ran into the bedroom. He changed his jeans and polished his boots and trotted down the hall to the kitchen.

  Drover and I had been watching from the door. When we saw him coming, we scrambled down the hall to keep from getting trampled.

  “Out of the way, dogs, I’m runnin’ late!”

  He ran into the kitchen and started pulling things out of the ice box. He laid ten weenies into the cold grease in the iron skillet (he saved his grease, see, and that way he never had to wash the skillet) and put the skillet on the burner.

  Then he took a hunk of cheese, cut the mold off the outside, sliced it up, and laid cheese strips on top of the weenies.

  While the weenies sizzled in the pan, he poked at them with a fork and said, “This is one of my special recipes, boys. Cowboy Round Steak. Won’t old Viola be proud of us?”

  He opened a can of pork and beans and set it on a burner to warm. He seemed a little shocked when the paper label caught on fire and the beans boiled over on the stove.

  When he got his bean fire under control, he stood in front of the open ice box, staring inside and tugging on his chin whiskers.

  “She’ll want a salad, I guess.” He pulled out a brown lump of something and turned it over in his hand. Oh, it was a head of lettuce. He put it back. “Maybe bread would be good enough.”

  He slammed the ice box door and went over to the dinner table. He opened up a plastic sack with seven or eight pieces of bread in it, pulled them out a piece at a time, scraped the mold off with a spoon, and laid them on a saucer. He glanced around the kitchen and smiled. “Meat, beans, and bread. That ought to be enough for any human, don’t you reckon?”

  I barked. Sounded pretty good to me.

  It was getting along towards dark by this time. Slim turned off the fire under his Cowboy Round Steak, grabbed his coat and hat, and yelled, “Come on, dogs, it’s time to go pick up my petunia!”

  We dashed to the door and jumped into the back of his pickup. And off we went down the creek road to pick up Miss Viola.

  (I might point out here that Slim wasn’t actually having a flower for supper, as you might have thought. No. Now and then he referred to his lady friend as his “petunia,” don’t you see. Just thought I ought to point that out.)

  Chapter Four: Miss Viola and Her Dogs

  Miss Viola lived in an old two-story house, maybe two-three miles down the creek from Slim’s place. You go east on the creek road, see, and then when it curves back to the south, that’s her place off to the right.

  She lived there with her folks and a couple of smart-aleck dogs named Black and Jack. Black was the bigger of the two and he was . . . well, black, of course. Jack was smaller, kind of a yellow-brown mutt. Neither one of them showed much class or breeding.

  First thing that happened when we pulled up in front of the house was that them two dogs came running out to meet us, barking their little heads off. When Slim stepped out, they sniffed his boots and followed him up to the porch. Then, when he went inside, they came loping back to the pickup and started giving me and Drover a hard time.

  Black said, “I dare you to get out of that pickup.”

  And Jack said, “Yeah, me too. That makes it a double-dog dare!”

  I heaved a sigh. “Well Drover, it appears that we’ve been challenged. We have no choice but to get out.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Seems to me . . .”

  “Get out, Drover.”

  “Okay.”

  We jumped down and faced the mutts. They growled and raised their hair and backed up a few steps. Then Black said, “You’re in big trouble now, fella.”

  And Jack said, “Yeah, and you’re going to be sorry, and you’d better not take one more step or you’ll really be sorry.”

  I grinned and took one more step. Behind me, Drover did the same. We waited to see what the mutts would do about it.

  I knew they wouldn’t do anything, see. I mean, I’d run into their kind before, and very seldom did they ever . . . so I was kind of surprised when Black stepped forward and barked in my face. “Drover, did you see that?”

  “No.”

  “He barked in my face. That means that we move into Combat Alert. Prepare yourself for some violence and bloodshed.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  “Stay behind me and cover the rear. This situation is liable to get nasty before it gets any dirtier.” I marched over to Black and we went nose-to-nose. At close range, he appeared to be bigger than I had thought. That didn’t make any difference to me, of course, except that . . . well, he was a pretty big dog, is all I’m saying.

  Real big dog.

  Funny, he hadn’t looked that big from a distance. And neither had Jack.

  They were both big dogs.

  “You uh . . . barked in my face.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw you, so don’t try to deny it.”

  “I ain’t denying it.”

  “You realize, of course, that I saw the whole thing.
”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it was a mistake, well, we might consider a formal apology.”

  Black curled his lip and showed his teeth. “It wasn’t no mistake. I did it, I’m glad I did it, and if I had it all to do over again, I’d do it all over again.”

  “I see. In that case, I have no choice but to turn this thing over to my assistant. Drover, tell him what happens now.”

  Drover squeaked and his eyes crossed. “Who, me?”

  “Tell him about your karate. Drover’s a black belt in dog-karate. The last time he got into a fight, he killed three dogs and a horse.”

  “I did?”

  “Go ahead, tell ’em the whole story. They might as well know what they’re getting into. It was the biggest mess I ever saw. I mean, the place was just solid with blood and bones.”

  Black and Jack traded glances. Then Black said, “I think you’re bluffin’.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, “and so do I.”

  “Do you? All right, let’s have a little demonstration. Drover, walk up to the front porch and show ’em how you break porch pillars in half with one kick.”

  Drover gulped. “One kick?”

  “That’s right, just one. Course, you guys need to understand that the whole porch is liable to fall down. If that’s okay . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” said Black. He wasn’t grinning any more. “It ain’t okay to knock the porch down. We might get in trouble with the folks.”

  “That’s your problem. If Drover shows his stuff, something’s going to be destroyed. There’s no way around it.”

  They went into a huddle, and while they whispered, I threw a glance towards the house. Slim and the young lady had come out on the porch and were talking to Viola’s parents. I sure wished they would hurry. This deal showed signs of getting out of hand.

  I guess Drover was feeling insecure. “Hank, I hate to tell you this, I know you’ll be disappointed, but I don’t think I can do all those things you said. And I don’t remember killing three dogs and a horse.”