AHMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

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  THE CASE OF THE OLYMPIC CUP by Joe Helgerson

  I owe my first stretch as a dead man all to Sheriff Huck. Call me ungrateful if you want, but the next time he's in hasty need of a corpse, he can go whistling at some other deputy's keyhole. Being dead takes a pile more work than you might expect, especially with the sheriff in charge of your remains.

  "Just lay low and hold your breath,” he said in a hush, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “You can manage that much, can't you?"

  Well of course I could. Matter of fact, I was something of a champion when it came to holding my breath. The skill had come in handy since turning lawman and having to deal with remains that ranged from fly-blow to bleach-boned. But before I got around to sucking down my last breath, I had a question that I was—so to speak—dying to ask.

  "What's that bowie knife for?"

  "Never you mind about that,” said the sheriff, exasperated.

  Tucking the knife under his armpit, the sheriff carefully lifted a blue glass bottle from a coat pocket. Though the afternoon was hot as a boiler room and humid as the bottom of the river, the sheriff was wearing white officer's gloves while doing all this, so never you mind wasn't anywhere near answer enough for me. You see, Sheriff Huck never wore gloves. Tugging them on and off would have come under the heading of work, which the sheriff opposed in all forms.

  "You're not talking to Deputy Tom,” I reminded him.

  Time was when my fellow deputy would have been first in line for a job so full of glory as playing dead, but those days had faded into the mists. Deputy Tom had turned in his badge and announced he was running against the sheriff in the upcoming elections. It was a sore point, so naturally I brought it up every chance I got.

  "All right,” the Sheriff groused. “The knife's for explaining things. That make you happy?"

  "What kind of things?"

  "How-you-got-dead kind of things."

  "What's in the bottle?” I asked, watching him uncork the blue-glass bottle as I eased to the floor.

  "Now what do you think?” he snapped. “Seeing as how somebody just stuck this knife halfway through you."

  'Course the sticking had only happened in the sheriff's mind, which was the one part of him that got exercised regularly.

  "Blood?” I guessed.

  "From a pig that's done using it,” he agreed. “Now hold still."

  And he poured a good sized pool of it on my shirt front, right over my deputy badge. Dropping the bowie knife at my side, he emptied the rest of the bottle over the big blade and told me to make myself comfortable.

  "In about two minutes I'll be sending Wattle in here,” he said.

  "He's liable to start screaming,” I pointed out. Wattle McFee was on the excitable side.

  "I'm counting on it,” the sheriff said. “You just do your part and leave the rest up to me."

  It was that last bit that had me most worried. Pharaoh had probably fed Moses a line about the same size.

  * * * *

  It was about as late as you could get in the summer of 1904, and Sheriff Huck had drafted me and four other sides of beef to accompany him down the Mississippi, from our hometown of Marquis, Iowa, to St. Louis. We were headed to the third Olympiad, which was joined at the hip with a world's fair that St. Louis was throwing. All the world was watching, leastways that's what all the posted bills claimed. The movers and shakers behind the fair had knocked down a small forest, rearranged a stream, and thrown up an entire city to house the fair. The whole spread covered over a thousand acres.

  We were headed down there to compete for the Tug-of-War Olympic Cup, which the sheriff was all a-sweat to win because his popularity had the sags. It'd come to light that'd he'd made a mistake or two in his youth. Follies, he called them, but the voters of Marquis weren't so forgiving. Worse yet, former Deputy Tom spent all his time asking folks if they really wanted a sheriff who'd pulled his name out of a book written for kids. (Sheriff Huck Finn's God-given name was too sissy sounding for law work, so he'd paid one of Mr. Mark Twain's books a visit.) According to ex-Deputy Tom, books were fine things for pressing prairie flowers, but they had their limits.

  That's what was behind the sheriff's brainstorm of winning a cup at the Olympics. Anyone who could lead a bunch of he-men to a world championship ought to make a pretty good lawman, or so the sheriff reasoned the voters would think. The way ex-Deputy Tom turned all peppery when he heard about it? It seemed the sheriff was onto something surefire.

  So everything was looking pretty sunny till we boarded the downriver steamer and found Sheriff Pericles Britches, from across the river at Split Rock, Illinois, training on the steerage deck with all his brothers. Somebody had put it in their heads to enter the tug-of-war competition too. And who should be grinning beside them but former Deputy Tom. You see, the five Britches brothers were a bunch of square-jawed, bronze-muscled, redheaded Samsons, without a Delilah in sight. They probably could have won a tug with a herd of bull elephants.

  Two days later I found myself flat on my back with a bloody bowie knife for company.

  * * * *

  The light from Wattle McFee's lantern filled the room for all of two seconds before I heard. “E-o-o-o-o-o!"

  If I hadn't known otherwise, I might have thought someone had dumped scalding water down his pants.

  The room went black as he stumbled back out, bawling, “Sheriff! Sher-iff!"

  Boots hit the floor running. Nearby doors were flung open, followed by shouts of “Quiet down!” During all that I sneaked a gulp of air and tried to get comfy. The next thing I heard was the sheriff's sleepy but mad voice, the one he used when having to dodge middle-of-the-night law work.

  "What is it, Wattle?"

  "Someone's finally gone and done it, Sheriff. They've killed Injun Joe."

  That'd be me. The sheriff didn't care for my real name of Stanley Two-shot, so he dipped into one of Mr. Twain's books again.

  Pretty soon there were boots tramping into the room that me and Wattle had been sharing, though calling it a room was being considerably generous. Stable stall was closer to the mark. With the hundreds of thousands of people parading through St. Louis for the World's Fair, hotel rooms were at a premium. Pricey too. So the sheriff did what he usually did, handed out horse blankets and cut corners. With the whole team assembled, I got to hear their say over my last remains.

  "He was a noble savage,” said the Reverend Farley, who was a circuit minister and part-time butcher, with forearms thick as hams and a heart of about the same dimensions.

  "Could have been me lying there,” Wattle moaned from outside the stall where he held the lantern.

  I guessed that all three of Wattle's fat chins were bobbing away at that thought. He was probably splashing on rose water too, the way he did whenever he thought no one was looking. His work as a blacksmith left smoke clinging to him, as I knew from sharing a horse blanket with him, especially when he draped an arm over my shoulder as we slept. (Thinking about all this helped me forget the fierce itch marching around the bottom of my foot, which I dasn't scratch, not so long as I was dead.)

  "We sure he's dead?” asked Cyrus Withering, a six foot tall undertaker who was awful possessive on the topic of the dearly departed. “Lift his hand. See if it flops."

  The sheriff lifted my hand, and I passed the flop test.

  "He's gone on ahead of us, all right,” said Reverend Farley, removing his black hat.

  "Kind of hard to tell where he's gone with these shadows,” said Tom Hefland, the last member of our team. He farmed north of Marquis and had a farmer's common sense.

  "Bring that light closer,” Sheriff Huck ordered.

  While Wattle handed the lantern closer, I eased in another breath. Then, with the light hanging somewhere above me, Wattle gasped, “What's that?"

  "Where I come from,” Tom Hefland observed, “it's called a knife. That stuff on his chest is called blood."

  "Whoa boys,” said the she
riff. “I'm afraid it's looking like foul play."

  "It appears there's a sinner on the loose,” Reverend Farley reluctantly agreed.

  "Only one?” Sheriff Huck said. “Has anyone seen Joe having a set-to with anybody?"

  There wasn't much to kick around there; I'm a peaceable giant.

  After a bit, Cyrus knocked on wood, saying, “Didn't Joe and that Tully Britches get into some kind of pushing and shoving over to the perfume fountain?"

  There was some truth to that, though the scuffle wasn't my doing. In the days leading up to the tug-of-war competition, Sheriff Huck had been keeping a close eye on the Britches boys, and when he spied one of them drifting into the World's Fair Palace of Liberal Arts, he gave chase, pulling me along. It turned out that Tully Britches was sneaking in there for a whiff of the famous perfumed fountain, which wasn't exactly the kind of pastime the big, strapping Britches clan was known for. Seeing Tully bend over for a sniff, the sheriff shoved me against him, knocking him head first into the fountain.

  Tully came out smelling like ambrosia and swinging like Sullivan. Ladies in flowery hats went squealing everywhere.

  "That wasn't anything,” the sheriff said, dismissing the notion but sounding relieved that someone had remembered it too. “Leastways, not something to kill a man over."

  "Those Britches boys have sent me some business over the years,” Cyrus said, referring to caskets that needed filling.

  "I thought,” Wattle squeaked with a shudder, “all the Britches boys had a letter P to the front of their names?"

  "Oh they do,” said the sheriff, who was something of an expert on the Britches clan. He and Pericles, the eldest brother, had had some run-ins over the years. “Tully's ma wrote Penrod in the family Good Book, but he never cared for the sound of it."

  "He the one never married?” Reverend Farley asked.

  "The same,” answered the sheriff. “Keeps to himself a good deal."

  I could feel the hangman's noose tightening around Tully's thick neck already, which seemed a mighty raw thing to let happen, even to a Britches. But since there was still plenty of time to save Tully's neck, if it came to that, and since I had a terrible curiosity crackling inside to find out what the sheriff was up to, I went on being dead.

  "We just can't allow folks to go around bumping off lawmen,” the sheriff said, his tone telling me that he was pulling one of his thoughtful faces. “There's no telling where it would lead. But for now, maybe we'd better clear out until the local constabulary has a chance to take a look here."

  Thank God. My lungs were fit to burst.

  * * * *

  Last to leave was the sheriff, who kneeled down beside me as if wanting one last word with a fallen comrade. Real low, he says, “There's a loose board in the back wall, to the bottom. Meet me at the gymnasium in five minutes."

  After a bit, I collected the bowie knife, rolled across the floor, and pushed out the board the sheriff had mentioned. Replacing the board, I slunk over to the gymnasium at Washington University, which stood next to the fair and was hosting the Olympics. Sheriff Huck was hanging back in the shadows.

  "What's that you're holding?” he said, gruff like, the way he gets whenever I show some gumption.

  "The knife that killed me."

  "Hand it over,” he said, but before putting out a hand for it, he fumbled around in a coat pocket for those white gloves again. “You've got a bright future as a dead man, Joe. Now why don't you just lay low for a couple of days, over to the Sioux village at the fair would probably be the spot, someplace you can blend in. By then this will have all blown over and you can rejoin the living. Go on now, git. I'm supposed to be hunting up the law."

  And that was all he told me, which was typical, to say nothing of predictable. When he slipped me a gold double-eagle and gave me a shove, I naturally gave the coin a bite, just to see.

  * * * *

  Into the night I plunged, headed for the nearest stop of the electric railroad. The railroad swept me down the fair's pike, where thousands of lights blazed away bright as day. People said that Edison fella helped put ‘em in himself.

  I pulled up my collar and bent down my hat brim, not wanting to be recognized. When the sheriff gave me an order, I generally tried to carry it out, even if it didn't make any sense, which it usually didn't. Fact was, it was mostly because his orders made so little sense that I followed them. I was always kind of hoping the reason for them would catch up to me along the way. Every once in a while the fogs parted and his orders made sense for a second or two. Whenever that happened, I felt a tiny step closer to understanding the difference between a pale white man, such as the sheriff, and a nut-brown red man, such as myself.

  But as to why I was pretending to be dead, the reason for that stayed muddy no matter how long I slogged after it. A mile or two went by before I gave up worrying about the sheriff's reasons and got busy taking in the sights.

  The electric car bumped past the Festival Hall's dome, which was built bigger than St. Peter's of Rome. Everything at a come-out like this fair was billed as bigger or better than something, so the waters of the Grand Basin reflected enough palaces to keep your eyes bugging clear around the clock. What's more, almost everything you saw was made out of something called plaster of Paris and set to be tore down once the fair ended. Come back in a year and it'd all be gone, a fact that made the whole place seem like an illusion. If there was anywhere a live person could pretend to be dead and get away with it, the fair was it.

  Eventually I swung off the train and made my way to the Anthropological Pavilion, where tribes of people from around the world got to show off how they did things. The headhunters from the Philippines, which we'd recently won from Spain, stole the show, but there was also Patagonian, African, and Japanese tribes showing their wares and eating everything from fried grasshoppers to boiled dog.

  In no time at all I found a Sioux village and hooked up with a teepee holding the Chasingbear family, who took me in like a lost brother. They didn't ask questions about where I was from, or where I was going to, or leastways not too many questions, not after I told them I was on the run.

  For the next couple of days I ate their stews and spent the sheriff's double-eagle on newfangled fair food like hot dogs and ice-cream cones. Old George Chasingbear told me a dozen times how he helped rub out Custer. On the second day I read about my demise in the paper.

  FIRST DEAD, NOW MISSING

  The remains of Stanley Two-shot, Olympic competitor late of Marquis, Iowa, are missing as of Thursday night. His teammates on a tug-of-war squad found him dead at the Kensington Lodge, formerly known as Tommy O'Rourke's Livery. Cause of death is thought to be a knife wound. An investigation is pending. Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of the deceased should contact authorities.

  That was buried on page five. Page one ran a story about the Philippine Igorots, who stood accused of kidnapping local dogs for their cooking pots. The St. Louis Humane Society was up in arms, but President Roosevelt sided with the tribesmen, observing that guests should be allowed their customs.

  When I asked George Chasingbear if he'd heard about any dogs being cooked up thereabouts, he promised to take me to a cookout that very night. But when the time came, I couldn't quite face the menu. Too much time around white men, I guess.

  I slipped off the first chance I got, heading down to the Great Basin, where the black waters reflected all the glory of the surrounding palaces, and you could take a tippy but romantic ride on a gondola, if you could find one open. I couldn't. There was some kind of men's glee club hogging all the boats, so I wandered around in the shadows for an hour or two before heading back to the Chasingbears’ teepee, where I had to listen to George sing “Meet me in St. Louie, Louie,” which was flying off everyone's lips. Along with roast dog there'd been plenty of drinks, so George made it pretty hot for that song.

  A follow-up article on my death appeared in the next day's paper, moving up to page four:

  TUG
-OF-WAR FUROR

  The Honorable Sheriff Huckleberry Finn, of Marquis, Iowa, and captain of that town's tug-of-war contestants, has lodged a complaint against a competing team from Split Rock, Illinois. Said Sheriff Finn, “There's foul play afoot. I'm afraid they've done away with our anchor man and disposed of his remains, which is a travesty against civilization and sportsmanship. We'll find a replacement and continue on against the odds, but in the name of fair play, we ask that the Split Rock team be disqualified from the Olympic competition.

  Well, there it was, my moment of clarity concerning why the sheriff had ordered me dead. The paper also printed Sheriff Pericles Britches's reply: “Unfounded accusations is Sheriff H. Finn's calling card. I try not to pay them much mind."

  * * * *

  Page one that day carried the marathon race scandal—the winner having sneaked an automobile ride most of the way—and an account of the fist fight that broke out after the fifty yard swimming race. My disappearance was in good company.

  On the third day I opened the paper and everything changed in a flash.

  SECOND OLYMPIAN KNIFED

  Olympic contestant Penrod “Tully” Britches was found knifed to death last night, the victim of an unknown assailant. The captain of a competing tug-of-war team is being sought for questioning.

  Soon as I read of Tully's death, I headed down to the levee to board a steamer headed upriver to Marquis and home, which seemed about the safest place for a dead man such as myself to be. You see, I was the captain of our tug-of-war team. Who told that newspaper I was alive enough to murder someone was a question that burned till I learned the answer, which wasn't long. I'd no more than planted a foot on the steamer's gangplank than ex-Deputy Tom Reywas stepped out of the crowd to say, “Getting around pretty swell for a dead man, ain't we?"

  A constable was standing beside him.

  Looking out at the world through bars stole my appetite clear away. It didn't help that the view from my window took in the fair's observation wheel,[*] which climbed twenty-five stories and couldn't help but remind me of all the wonders I was missing. More logs got thrown on the fire when a reporter climbed a ladder up to my jail cell window in search of a scoop. By then I'd been parked in that cell for two days without a single howdy-do from Sheriff Huck, so I was more than ready to sing. The reporter's offer to team up with me and make some news beat anything else I'd heard.