The Timeless Love Romance Collection

by Dianne Christner

  “Naw. Better.” Frankie bobbed his eyebrows. “Girls. I saw ’em.”

  “Here? At the camp?”

  “Sure thing. Two gals, and they say the redhead’s a real dish. Word is they’re over visitin’ ol’ Bruno Hodges. Lucky stiff.”

  Justin rolled his eyes and peeled off his dirty work shirt, which reeked of sweat and loamy mountain soil. The pungent, sulfurlike stench from geothermal mud hung in the nearby rivers, the air, and even his hair, messy as it was. The CCC barber had whacked it off short when he showed up in Pinedale, Wyoming, a year and a half ago, but now it hung over his forehead, thick and shaggy. Not slicked back like the movie stars.

  “Tommy Wills said one of them dolls is a looker. Swell, huh? Course after this long out in the sticks even the old broads start to look good. Know what I mean?” Frankie elbowed Justin in the ribs. “Man, I can’t wait to get back to Ohio!”

  I can’t wait till you get back either, pal. Justin dug a clothespin out of his pocket and shook out his freshly washed CCC bandanna, securing it to the rusty piece of wire that served as a clothesline. After dozens of washings in hard water and ruthless army-issued soap, its crisp navy had faded to an unappealing moldy blue-gray.

  Laundry aside, President Roosevelt’s New Deal ideas were pretty good, Justin thought as he stuck the clothespin in his teeth. At least the CCC, anyway. Shipping hundreds of jobless guys out of the cities and into state parks to do construction and rebuilding might sound a bit nuts, but it worked. They got a paycheck sent back to their folks, and good, honest, hard work to keep them off the streets and out of crime.

  And the parks got fixed to boot. Which worked especially well with the drought and dust storms hitting the prairies hard.

  The army ran the camps, which served double duty in the event they ever needed recruits—what with the regimented formations and work groups, the morning calisthenics and uniforms. Thousands of guys, all ready to march off to the front with pickaxes, shovels, and bags of pine saplings in their hands.

  “Well, I’ll go back to Columbus as soon as I can get a real job of course,” Frankie jabbered on. “This place is the pits! It’s not worth the pay, puttin’ up with all them mosquitoes and cold an’ whatnot. Out in the crummy sticks, gettin’ covered with mud!” Frankie waved brown-and-red-streaked arms for emphasis.

  “I think it’s swell.” Justin straightened his bandanna to catch the breeze. “One of the best things to ever happen to me. All the fresh air and work. I’d stay here forever if they’d let me.”

  “Are you nuts, Fairbanks?” Frankie pretended to knock on Justin’s head. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Justin raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you just get here?”

  “Yeah. Five crummy weeks ago. The only reason I’m here is ’cause it sure beats hangin’ around town with straw in my pockets, since everybody’s outta work.” Frankie kicked a grass tuft. “This Depression business stinks, ya know? The economy’s s’posed to be comin’ back real soon though—jobs and everything, too.” His certainty seemed to falter as he tugged off a mud-caked boot. “That’s what everybody says—things’ll probably be back to normal by the end of the year. Don’t ya think so?”

  Justin slapped a mosquito. Picturing the line of hobos down by the rail yard at Cheyenne. Bone thin, their clothes wearing out in gaping patches. At least here at Camp Fremont, Justin had never gone hungry. Although some of the burned beans and slobbery boiled cabbage made him think going hungry once in a while might not be so bad.

  “Anyhow, Ma’s real proud I can finally send home a few bucks every month to help out.” Frankie eyed Justin. “Who you sendin’ yours to?”

  Justin’s throat tightened at the sound of the word home.

  “My older sister Margaret gets my dough,” Justin replied, not meeting Frankie’s eyes as he picked up a wet shirt. “She takes care of Beanie.”

  “Beanie? What is he, a dog?”

  “My younger brother Benjamin.” Justin shook out the shirt. “We call him Beanie. He’s a swell kid.” He looked sidelong at Frankie, as if daring him to say even a syllable in jest. “The swellest kid I’ve ever seen.”

  “What about your folks?”

  “No folks.” Justin took another clothespin out of his mouth and secured the bandanna tighter as it slid off the line.

  “Crummy. Sorry for ya.” Frankie scrubbed his face with his dirty shirt, mud still smeared over his left ear. Trying to hide a pale blue oval as it fell out of his patched pocket, grabbing it out of the grass.

  “I don’t believe it.” Justin spun around.

  “Don’t believe what?” One corner of Frankie’s mouth turned up in a guilty smile as he dug for the handkerchief in his pocket and wrapped it around the eggs.

  “Gimme that.” Justin held out his hand, and Frankie reluctantly plopped the two speckled birds’ eggs there.

  “Got the nest in my other pocket. You want that, too?” Frankie scowled. “And some petrified wood and obsidian and stuff—but I ain’t givin’ ya that. You can go get your own, for all I care. Yellowstone might be the pits, but I’m takin’ some souvenirs with me when I go. Least I can do to make up for all this time I’m wastin’ planting stupid trees.”

  Justin shook his head in disgust, turning the eggs over in his hand. “You know you’re not supposed to take anything, bonehead. Some of those birds are rare, and this is a public park. What’s the matter with you?”

  Frankie didn’t answer, snatching up his green army surplus backpack and digging through it. A panicked look on his face. He dumped the bag upside down and dislodged a wooden geyser plaque that had been ripped from its base, some agate stones, and a couple of smashed crystals.

  “Hey. I’m talkin’ to you, Frankie!” Justin grabbed his arm. “You ain’t supposed to take nothin’ out of the park. You’re a thief. Put everything back!”

  “I ain’t puttin’ anything back.” Frankie shook the backpack. Rock chips and broken cookies trickled onto the grass. “I swear I put it here.”

  “Put what here?”

  “Aw. Nothin’.” Frankie shook the pack again and tossed it on the grass with a shrug. “At least I got my agates.” He held one up to the light. “Nuts, huh? I bet each a these’ll fetch a nice bit a dough.” He tossed a red agate like a coin. “But this ain’t the best thing I found, by a long shot.”

  “It’s people like you that destroy this place, you know?” Justin huffed, blood seething in his throat.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Frankie snatched the eggs out of Justin’s hand. “Every wet sock says that and then goes and carves his name on the rocks when nobody’s looking.”

  He wrapped the eggs in his handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket. “There’s a place up in the ridge—the one where we built that trail—with a swell waterfall and a mess of blue flowers. I might go back and see if I can find me some more a these eggs.”

  “You do and I’ll knock you in the jaw.”

  “You don’t wanna tangle with me, Fairbanks. I’m givin’ ya fair warning. Might find your bed short-sheeted, and who knows what else.” Frankie rocked back carelessly on the balls of his feet. “Anyhow, before I leave here I’m gonna catch a mess of owls and stuff, too, and see if the pet shop’ll give me a couple a bucks for ’em. You’d do the same if you had any sense.”

  Justin shook his head. “I don’t know why you’re even here, Frankie.”

  “Yeah, well, me neither. Hope I won’t be much longer.” Frankie curled his lip in derision. “Stuck in Roosevelt’s rotten Tree Army, bungling my way through the mud.” He stretched his back. “Say, you gonna go over to Hodges’s an’ take a look at them dames?”

  “Like this?” Justin wiped a grimy hand against his once-white undershirt then lifted soiled pant legs to show even more soiled ankles. Toes caked with reddish-brown soil from hacking trailways and cutting clearings out of the moist earth. Filthy work, but ironically Justin felt cleansed.

  “Naw, idiot! After we clean up.” Frankie tossed his shirt hard, and Justin
caught it at face level. He tossed it up and over a corner of the long, angular Civilian Conservation Corps barracks so it stuck there on the shingles. One dirty sleeve waving like a roughed-up surrender flag.

  “Hey buddy! What’d ya go and do that for?” Frankie wailed, jumping vainly for the roof.

  “Aw, quit your whining, baby.” Justin rolled his eyes as Frankie stalked around, picking up branches. “You’d drive the longest-suffering preacher insane, you know that?” He would, too, with his constant nagging, like a skinny, buzzing mosquito. His shrill voice rang through the camp, tinny-pitched with an underdeveloped eighteen years of youth.

  True, Justin could count off the same eighteen years plus one, but the gulf of life and hardship that stretched between them rendered Justin an old man. Why, even the CCC recruiters had written him down as twenty-one when he first stepped up to enlist, probably on account of his thick build and sour expression, unlike the fresh-faced young recruits. The burly sergeant had chuckled as he scratched out “twenty-one” to write “eighteen.”

  “C’mon, Fairbanks! Gimme my shirt! Why’d ya do it? Why’d ya do it?” Frankie continued to jump, waving that ridiculous twig at the roof. Hurling it as hard as he could, where it caught in the folds of his shirt and hung there, immobile.

  Oh well. Justin’s lips curled into a smile. At least now something would keep him busy for a while.

  “You’d drive the longest-suffering preacher insane.” Justin’s words stung like an ant on his leg, and he was instantly sorry he’d said them. He knelt on the patchy grass and scrubbed at his boots, wishing he hadn’t even thought of preachers. Just the sound of the word made bile rise in his stomach.

  “Hey, gimme my shirt back!” Frankie tried to throw a sort of headlock around Justin’s neck, but Justin flicked it off.

  “I’m busy gettin’ ready for formation.”

  “Busy? Oh yeah? So’s your grandma,” Frankie mocked, huffing. Blowing out his lower lip as Justin calmly sponged dirt off his jaw with a cloth, his fingers tracing the long line of his scar. He could still feel it—a wicked reminder of everything he wished he could forget.

  “Say, where’d you get that scar from anyhow?” Frankie picked up a rock and tossed it at the roof. It rattled across shingles and bounced off, and two heads appeared in the window.

  Justin threw the cloth next to the basin, pretending not to hear. Dropping to one knee, he began unlacing his dirty boots.

  “Hey, bozo. I’m talkin’ to you! Where’d you get that scar?”

  “What scar?” Justin didn’t look up, pulling out his laces with more force than necessary. “And you call me bozo again, and you’ll be sorry.”

  Frankie spit out his breath. “Aw, whaddaya mean what scar? That big thing across your lip down to your chin. And that little line on your forehead under all that pretty hair.” Frankie used a mocking tone, hunting for another rock. “What are you, Frankenstein or somethin’?” He nodded toward Justin’s leg. “You got a stiff knee, too. I see you limpin’ sometimes.”

  Justin didn’t answer for a long while, scrubbing the mud-caked leather laces with a rough cloth.

  “Don’t wanna talk about it, huh? Musta been bad, all right. What, a bar fight? C’mon, Fairbanks! Spill it.”

  Justin sighed, throwing down his laces. “Look, Frankie. I … An accident, okay? It was an accident.”

  He tried to blot out the crunch of metal and glass. The screams. The stench of burning rubber and the strident car horn, stuck on, blaring into his leaden mind. The pain he should have felt but didn’t as his blood leaked out, and his shaky hand wavering, reaching, reaching for another bottle. Alcohol reeking on his breath.

  “That’s all you’re gonna tell me? Swell, Fairbanks. Thanks for nothin’.”

  Justin pressed his fingers to his muddy forehead. He could still hear the shocked whispers: “Reverend Summers passed away?” Windows had glowed with candlelight all over dark Berea, Kentucky, like ominous lightning flashes. “What happened?”

  “I need my shirt! I need my shirt!” Frankie was complaining again, jumping vainly for the gutter and trying to crawl up. Cheeks flushed and arms flailing. Somebody stuck a walking stick out the window, waving it at the roof.

  Justin put his hands on his hips and shook his head, unable to keep back a laugh somewhere between pity and derision.

  And pity eventually won out.

  “Hold your scrawny horses, Frankie. I’ll get it.” Justin unhooked a clothes wire and jabbed it up toward the shingles, catching the shirt neatly by the sleeve. He slid it toward the gutter and over the edge of the barracks building like a freshly snared cutthroat trout. Right into Frankie’s upturned hands.

  “Next time you do that, I’ll pound you,” Frankie snapped, not bothering to thank him.

  Justin snorted. Frankie, pound somebody? Frankie White was a chigger. A little, annoying chigger who resorted to messing up people’s beds before inspection and stealing their underwear. Slipping ice under the blankets.

  Justin hooked the wire back in place and reached into the basin, cupping handfuls of water to his dirty face. Inhaling the same sharp sulfur-water stench that boiled up from geothermal pots with their layers of overlapping colors: unnaturally blue-green and cobalt, ringed with otherworldly yellow and copper-colored rock.

  Like eyes of a giant peering up through the dusty, pine-studded earth. The acid in the pools was so strong it’d eat your boots off if you weren’t careful.

  Everything in Wyoming was like this—vast, strange, and wild—heart-thuddingly large and startling—like Justin had landed on an alien planet. He saw it all through curious eyes: enormous, snorting moose with heavy fans of upturned antlers. Geysers puffing up steam from cracked earth like freight trains. Snowdrifts in alpine meadows at the tops of the mountains, and big-shouldered buffalo in shaggy brown coats. Ice in the river flows.

  A far cry from the simple farm roads of Kentucky.

  The memory of red dirt and hickory leaves made Justin’s eyes sting for a second, and he wiped his face with a cloth by the washtub. Leaving reflections of pine branches in shattered rings, like so many broken memories.

  “Fairbanks!” Ernie Sadler jumped through the open barracks window and crashed into Justin. “Don’t move!”

  A noisy group had congregated around the washbasin, slapping each other with wet rags and telling jokes, and they fell apart as Justin and Ernie plowed through them, nearly upsetting the washbasin.

  “What in the fool nonsense are you hollerin’ about, Ernie?” Justin shouted, pushing Ernie away and trying to right himself. Nearly putting his socked foot right on top of a baby Rocky Mountain rattler, which slid through the grass like a slender brown twig.

  Slithering away from Frankie White’s upturned backpack.

  Chapter 2

  Justin whirled his leg out of the way and jumped back. Two guys saw the snake and yelled, knocking into one of the wooden sawhorses that held up the basin. The basin lurched and splashed, falling into a wet heap on the grass, sending the snake scurrying in the other direction.

  A mountain rattler had enough venom to kill a human—and a baby carried exactly the same amount in a smaller package. One strike and Justin’d be on the ground, swelling and moaning in pain.

  “Hit it! Hit it!” screamed Ernie, grabbing up the walking stick and whacking away at the grass. “Where’s the machete?”

  Tucker and Jenkins fled for the barracks, pants half on and water dripping from their faces. Stumbling over discarded boots and the wooden sawhorse that had held up the basin.

  Tommy disappeared around the side of the barracks, shirtsleeve flapping off, and ran back wielding a garden hoe. Waving it in the direction of the snake. “Where’d it go? Lemme at it!”

  “Cut it out!” Justin bellowed, trying to wrestle the hoe away from Tommy. “You’re gonna scare it into striking! Just hush up and see if we can pick it up on the end of a stick.”

  “He’s right.” Ernie paused, panting, and sponged his sweaty forehe
ad. “Shut your traps, everybody! Tommy, gimme the hoe. C’mon. Let’s see if we can’t get it outta here nice and quiet like.”

  Justin’s head ached as he plodded back into the barracks, which smelled of pine, sweat, and dusty army blankets and cots. His pulse had slowed after he and Ernie managed to get the snake on the end of the hoe, coiled like an angry little doughnut, and tossed it in some bushes on the other side of a stream. It darted off into the rocks, forked tongue whipping in defiance.

  Justin had marched all over three barracks buildings looking for Frankie, ready to wring his puny neck, and finally heard him in the lieutenant’s office doing push-ups. Getting chewed out for some infraction while Lieutenant Lytle scratched out more demerits.

  Man, that kid was trouble. Justin had stalked back to the barracks in stony silence, not sure if he should squeal to the others about Frankie and the snake or not. He wanted to, but they’d all jump him—probably fifty guys—and the little squirt wouldn’t make it out of CCC camp with any teeth left.

  “So you goin’ over to Hodges’s place, Fairbanks?” Ernie looked up eagerly from the cracked window glass he was using as a mirror. Slicking back his hair with a comb a little too eagerly, smoothing it to the side. It shined back, sleek with gel, like a sheen of river ice.

  Obviously violent and excruciating death from a mountain rattler rated a distant second after women for Ernie.

  “You, too? I thought only Frankie was losin’ his mind over a bunch of gals.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. I ain’t seen this much excitement around here in weeks. Maybe months.” Ernie bent closer to the window and patted his hair back. “You’re comin’ after formation, too, ain’t ya?”

  Justin gave a derisive snort as he shrugged on a clean olive drab shirt. Army issue, and scratchy around the collar. “Naw. I got better things to do.”

  “Not me. It’s been six weeks since I’ve seen a gal, Fairbanks.”

  Frankie White swung through the door smelling like some horrid combination of cheap cologne and hair tonic, his chin bleeding from several shaving cuts. As if he still hadn’t figured out how to use a razor blade. “Remember that rancher we worked for, fixin’ fences or somethin’ equally stupid?” he said, butting in on the conversation. “He had a doll or two, didn’t he? I could swear I saw one back there in the kitchen.”