The Last Hellfighter

by Flowers, Thomas S.

  In those weeks, Mina bloomed as well. The round balloon of her stomach grew a few inches more, and the rose of her dark cheeks brightened. There was a definite glow about her, one Ben noticed with much delight. The thought of being a father, having a son—or daughter— still felt alien to him, but a fantastic alien feeling it was. With James taking the spare room, he made plans to build another room onto the house. A room for the baby. The seed would be sown soon and there would be time yet to finish projects on the farm. He could get the wood needed from a friend in town, a fella by the name of Caleb Leslie who didn't mind doing business with colored men. James could help, he was a surprisingly skilled carpenter.

  He pulled hard on the straps, keeping his focus on the lane, the last canal to be plowed, the last of the seed to be planted. Ben watched, his gaze narrowing as the soil—the earth split open, revealing a dark brown underbelly. Fred and Tess brayed, giving what last they had for the day, he heard them, but he also heard something else, something far away in another time and place. The horse dragged on and the soil opened, the soil...opening into...a trench.

  A trench.

  Somewhere else.

  Far from here, but here nonetheless.

  Men shouting.

  Like ghosts around him.

  Another sound vibrated against his chest.

  A whumping sound.

  And whistling.

  Screeching overhead.

  And thundering upon the ground.

  Constantly now.

  Constantly.

  Without hesitation.

  Or mercy.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  Whump.

  In the shadows...

  A face.

  Bald.

  Red eyes.

  Talon fingernails.

  Hideous.

  Unnatural.

  Fangs filling its mouth.

  Smiling down at him.

  Hungry.

  Waiting.

  Wanting.

  Who?

  Him?

  All of them?

  Ben...

  Ben.

  "Ben?"

  Ben shook himself awake and pulled up hard on the reins. Fred and Tess protested, giving short guttural whines. His throat and lips were as dry as dust. And as the horses came to a stop, he stood and fell off the seat on the plow blades into the dirt.

  More shouting around him now.

  Footsteps. Heavy. Panting.

  He looked up into the face of his brother, James.

  And then shortly thereafter, Mina.

  She offered a drink and he drank.

  Feeling the cloud lift, his mind cleared, and so Ben sat up, assisted by James.

  "I'm sorry," Ben said. "I must have been daydreaming."

  Mina looked at him sideways. "You better be sorry, you gave me a start."

  Ben glanced at her and then looked away. Fred and Tess trotted and brayed, sounding annoyed. "I don't know what happened, too much sun, I suppose."

  Mina grunted her response.

  "Want me to finish the row?" James offered.

  Ben shook his head and gestured that he wanted to stand. James and Mina both helped him to his feet. "Nah, I reckon we've done enough this season. Let's spread the seed and see what grows."

  Mina protested. "Not you, Ben. I want you to come inside for a spell."

  Ben started to argue.

  "No mind, brother. I can fill the seed," James said, touching Ben's elbow. He smiled in that knowing sort of way and started off toward the barn. He took Fred and Tess and led them along.

  Watching James for a moment, waiting for him to be out of earshot perhaps, she turned back to Ben. "What was that really about?"

  Ben frowned. "I don't know."

  "You don't know, or you don't want to talk about it?"

  "I don't know, both?"

  "What were you thinking about?"

  Ben scratched the back of his head. "France," he said.

  "The war," Mina said as kindly and patiently as she could. But there was always that tone, that phrase of the word, as if it were ritualistic, unholy, and dirty. As if the sum of everything he saw and experienced could be compacted into such a simple term.

  Ben was silent for a moment. And then he said, "And...something else."

  Mina turned her head. "Something else? Worse than war?"

  Ben nodded and then shivered against a sudden chill in the breeze.

  Chapter 22

  Champagne was not unlike most towns in what is commonly referred to as No Man's Land. Such a nickname is telling for the rectangle shaped quadrant on the upper tip of Texas, the lower west end of Oklahoma, the far-right ear of New Mexico, and the left and right foot of Colorado and Kansas, respectfully. Though technically predominately Oklahoma, no state really laid claim to this area, it was in fact as the nickname suggests, No Man's Land. And for centuries, no man ever dared living in these parts. Only a few, scattered souls. Native Americans, first. Cattlemen and cowboys, second. Ranchers, third. And then finally came the farmers who tore up the buffalo grass and planted seeds of wheat. And for a time, the harvest was plentiful. It fed a hungry America. It fed the troops across the Atlantic in the mud-soaked trenches of France. And while Russia was in revolt, it fed most of Eastern Europe as well.

  When the war ended, and revolution had shimmered, still more and more came to lands such as Champagne looking to strike it rich—but not everyone. Some, like Ben and his wife and brother, came looking for a fresh start at life, something besides the endless toiling of hard thankful labor. If they were to labor, wouldn't it be better to do it out in God's country, in the fresh unspoiled air where one could benefit from hardship?

  In 1919, Champagne was settled. There were no streets in those days. Only hovels carved out of the land. Cellars dug into the dirt with steps leading to front doors. That's how the people started out here. People like Herbert, Martin, Sam, and Roy Westfield. Four brothers who lived here longer than most folks. And still lived the same as most folks, in a dugout with walls of hard clay, and compared to other settlers, a marginal stretch of land. They refused to grow anything other than greens. Pappy Westfield had been a cowboy in his youth, herding longhorns from Texas to Kansas and back again until the barbwire had gone up and the cattle business fell flat on its face. But he remembered the buffalo grass and the buffalo that tended it, the natural face of the land and resisted how the farmers were ruining the Lord's perfect intention. Pappy spent his days mostly with a bottle to his lips, rocking in front of the burrow they called home, spitting into a tarred pail with a curled unmovable lip and a furrowed eye on the horizon. Some said he was waiting for God's wrath to bring His judgement upon the heathens.

  Not everyone in Champagne thought as the Westfield's did. Todd Oliver for instance, known better by folks in town as Ollie, wasn't around when the Indians rode horses following the buffalo—he wasn't around when the cowboys wrangled cattle. No, Ollie came with the trains and buildings that sprouted overnight. He came just before the roads had been paved and Fords and GMs rolled down main. And when he came he brought with him all the music he had enjoyed on the east coast, the same music his father had enjoyed—God bless his soul, thinking nothing of what was but only of what could be. When he stepped off the train for the first time and laid his eyes on that forever horizon, his heart drummed a little higher. He couldn't quite catch his breath, nor could he stop smiling. Champagne was a place he'd only known in paperbacks, fantasies of the wild west. But somehow this was better. To Ollie it was as if they'd plucked a piece of modernity on the front porch of that fantasy place—the same place in his dreams, dreams boys have of adventure and running free without a single adult to tell you otherwise.

  So, in Champagne he built a tower of sorts, a radio tower, and he broadcast his father's favorite tunes and even gave a little airtime to David Soul, a pencil thin fella with a pencil-thin mustache under his long nose, who combed his hair straight back and had a sort of knowing kinda look in his
eyes. He was the only reporter and soul proprietor of the Champagne Herald who like many in this infant American town had dreams. Of building an empire? Such things are hard to say. Perhaps some notoriety, book deals, maybe even to become a household name someday. And of course, to have his own building and be free of the shared space with Ollie and the nearly constant broadcasting of jazz. David Soul once had sandy blond hair as a boy, but it turned dark and greasy looking by his teenage years and never changed much since, except for perhaps a few inches of recession. His folks were ranchers in a neighboring town and he could have easily gone into the family trade. But wrangling cattle wasn't in his cards, nor did he want it to be. He liked stories and exposés. His pa called them muckrakers, but David came to be very fond of the likes of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens—investigative journalist who took on the corruption in government and business fueled his own desires, and promoted his exodus from the town he'd grown into adulthood in and led him to Champagne, a town not unlike many others whose exclusive existence seemed tethered to the export of wheat. His very first piece covered a real estate agent by the name of Bruce Perkins who'd bamboozled thousands of dollars selling lots in Champagne that did not exist. Many of his recent exposés covered the need for soil conservation legislation. To say he was an unpopular resident would be an understatement.

  And some came looking for work—any kind would do. Bill and Ann Norton came to Champagne escaping the increasing rise of starvation in poverty-stricken Chicago. The coined Windy City could offer nothing for them or their young daughter Susan. The Nortons arrived carrying between them all that they possessed—three meager suitcases flayed around the edges, the clothes on their back, and a dirtied porcelain doll. After arriving, many unanswered prayers were answered as both Bill and Ann were able to find work. Bill labored on a nearby farm for two dollars a week. Considering how things looked elsewhere, two dollars a week was just fine. Ann found employment locally as a teacher. The school could not offer her much as a salary, the Depression seemed to have finally caught up with Champagne, but they were provided trade goods, perishables, milk and eggs and bread, and room and board, a place for the Norton's to call home.

  Down some ways from the schoolhouse, pieces of city life sprouted just as thick as the wheat in the fields. Among many new establishments, Bab's Beauty Boutique was curiously modern, even for Champagne. But the customers came without much regard to the seemingly provocative etching in the large glass window of a woman arching her head back with a sort of smile or smirk or both, biting her pencilled lips in what those ankle length dress wearing church ladies called seductively. Bab's, known as Beverly by only her parents, paid those hens no mind. There was always some righteous crusade and she knew her place was the least of their worries. What those pew warmers really were after was another establishment, what patrons affectionally referred to as the Red Building, a literal red building next door to Dell's, a bar Prohibition never really touched.

  The Red Building existed before much of the town did. In many respects Champagne followed the life cycle of similar forty-niner boomtowns: trains, wheat, taverns, and whorehouses—in precisely that order. Madame Westenra, a tall, tightly dressed red head, had been in Champagne longer than the farmers and just as long as most of the Ranchers. She had but two rules for patrons of her fine establishment. No hitting—above the neck. And second, if one of her girls turns down a prospecting male there will be no further debate. Among all the many vices Madame Westenra allowed in the Red Building, rape was severely punishable. If the perpetrator walked away intact, he should consider himself lucky. Though, truth be told, few dared to ever cross that line. Even among newcomers, the Madame was surrounded by rumor and fable. That she had once run with Bonnie and Clyde knocking over banks. And that she once bootlegged with Machine Gun Kelly. And that she played cards with the Dillinger Gang and perhaps even might have had an intimate affair with John himself. Whatever was true or not, she rarely left her establishment. When she did there were none she would socialize with, nor would any of the civilized of Champagne wish to be seen socializing with her—except for Arthur Holmwood.

  But to be fair, Arthur Holmwood, middle-aged with short cropped hair, grayed around the sides, and thick reddish mustache, socialized with everyone, it was part of his job. Arthur was one of three lawmen within the hundred-mile radius that was Champagne, Texas. Being sheriff meant that he was an elected official, and surprising only to those ankle length dress church ladies his light stance on the Red Building was not unpopular. A good number of folks came to Champagne with family, but a good many more came alone. And lonely men with nothing but a bottle of hooch and the endless blowing wind are two ingredients for trouble. From his prospective, the Red Building served the greater good. No mind that he himself was single and a regular—rumor was a client of Madame Westenra herself.

  Not all of Champagne was of rumor and vice.

  Dr. John Seward cared little for neither gossip nor vice. He'd seen enough of that working his forty-year practice in the city of Houston, Texas. At the tender age of sixty-seven, Seward wanted nothing more now than to retire. He moved to Champagne with those hopes and bought a small plot, enough land to grow the necessities of life and perhaps enough to supplement his retirement. When the Depression hit in 1929, investments he'd made shriveled and died, along with any thought of not working. Now, a few doors down from that Whites Only General Store, the good doctor opened a new practice which would be his last.

  Despite all that separates them, their class status and wealth and perhaps even political disposition, and all the many different reasons that brought them here, necessity of many various flavors, the residents of Champagne shared one great similarity: They made a home in a place in which against all odds, against nature, was never meant to be hospitable, especially not for large populations. Still they came. And the town grew and grew. But as what had started at the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 approached, and the rain stopped falling, it begged the ultimate question...

  —if anything is ever truly meant to survive.

  Chapter 23

  James offered to drive as the brothers bounced down the steps of the farmhouse. Mina was yelling something through the screen door, reminding Ben not to forget to pickup a package that was delivered to the post office. She'd ordered something from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. She also added for him to pickup another catalog, they'd used most of the one she had in the outhouse.

  James still had his hand out.

  Ben slapped it away.

  "Oh, come on now, I've never driven before." James danced awkwardly out in front of him. Smiling with his large teeth.

  "Exactly. No one drives the Chevrolet but me." Ben pushed past him toward the truck.

  James followed behind, shoving his hands into his deep pockets. "Eventually you're going to let me drive around the farm, so I can learn, right?"

  "Eventually." Ben agreed.

  They both climbed in.

  Ben fired up the engine and shifted into gear.

  Mina was on the porch waving.

  The boys waved back as Ben turned down the drive and out onto the main paved road. The springs and shocks squeaked a bit, but none for the worse. Around them the fields of neighboring farmers looked just as brown as theirs. All waiting for that first summer downpour to drench the soil and feed the seeds and begin a new plentiful harvest come fall.

  Wind poured in through both windows and still it was dry and hot.

  James pulled out a rag from his slacks and dabbed his forehead. He glanced at Ben with an expression of mild concern. "Sure is a hot one, ain't it?"

  Ben nodded. His gaze on the road ahead.

  "Is this normal for out here? When you suppose we'll get some rain?"

  At this, Ben glanced at James. He looked back to the road. "I suppose soon. This is our first harvest, but last year it rained plenty. I'm sure it'll rain plenty this year too."

  James nodded silently.

  Silence fell betwe
en them for a spell.

  Again, James dabbed his forehead. "Who are we going to see again?"

  "Caleb Leslie."

  "Who's that."

  "A friend."

  "Close friend?"

  "Close enough."

  "Is this about getting the wood to build onto the house?"

  "Yup."

  "Why can't we buy at the mill?"

  "Cause we're black."

  "Oh. Right. Is this fella Caleb black?"

  "No."

  "Then why—"

  "Cause he's a friend, okay. Not everyone in Champagne is a negro-hating honky, okay."

  "Right. Sorry, Benjamin. I've never been real chatty before...before dad died..." James was looking into his palms, his face still furrowed in a strange seriousness. "I worry, is all. Back in Harlem, I knew every street and corner. I knew the docks and the ships and the fog horns. I knew seagulls and the smell of salt in the cold night air. The feeling of dampness in your lungs and on your hands. I knew what it meant to live back there...but out here..."

  Ben looked at him and back to the road. He sighed and patted James on the shoulder. "Don't be so nervous. Everything is going to work out fine, you'll see. Rain will come. The harvest is going to be plentiful. And in the mean time we're going to add on to the house before Mina pops out that baby and makes you an uncle. Okay?" At this, he gave James's shoulder a squeeze.

  James smiled weakly. "Uncle James. Yeah, okay. I like the sound of that."

  Ben laughed. "Yeah, me too."

  They continued into town. Off in the distance lightening flashed and thunder boomed, but there was no rain.

  There was no rain.

  * * *

  "I thought you said we weren't buying from the mill?" James whispered, he leaned forward, and stared bug-eyed out the windshield.