The Christmas Knife

by Jackie North

  But even as he drove through the low, sloping grasslands towards the Black Hills and the cutoff to Interstate 90, the storm seemed to ease. It was as if as the road curved around to the west, he was in a little pocket of pine trees and stone, where the winter storm was not so bad. The snow was still coming down, of course, but the wind had eased, and he thought he could even see sun trying to shine through the thick grey clouds.

  That was when another phone call came. Clayton thought about ignoring it, and cursed that he'd not simply turned off his phone to save on the battery. Had he left his charger behind at the motel? But the number that flashed was area code 303, which was Colorado, so Clayton pressed the button on his steering wheel to answer it.

  "Hello," he said, without any warmth in his voice, for the person at the other end of the line was sure to be another shyster with a story to tell that would try to be convincing but which would fall utterly flat.

  "Hello?" asked a male voice. "Is this Mr. Nash?"

  "This is he," said Clayton. "What do you want?"

  "This is Kyle, Kyle Tobin. I'm calling about the stolen Bowie knife and the Indian beaded sheath."

  "And the reward money," said Clayton. His mouth felt stiff and he rolled his eyes. He wanted to keep the call short so he could concentrate on the road. It was mid-afternoon and it was going to start to turn dark soon.

  "No, no, actually," said the voice of Kyle. He gave a little laugh, which made Clayton want to hate him, but then Kyle cleared his throat. "I feel bad about this. I've got an item that I realize was stolen."

  "What?" asked Clayton, his voice rising into sharpness so fast it cracked.

  "I was at the Mountain Man Arts and Crafts Festival in Ft. Collins, do you know it?"

  "No, I don't know it," said Clayton, sharply.

  "Well, it's a thing," said Kyle. "You know, in the summer they put on mountain men camps. These are reenactment guys and gals, right? Well, in the winter, it's too cold to camp in a canvas tent for most, so they put on a little indoor festival at the fairgrounds, and they do demos and sell old west and mountain man stuff."

  "Uh-huh," said Clayton.

  The road turned directly west at Spearfish and he knew he needed to stop before he took the long stretch of road to Lusk, Wyoming. That was where the snow would get very bad, down south, where the wind came shooting across the plains with nothing in its way. Maybe the gas station would have a cheap phone charger he could buy, so he could charge up his phone.

  "Well, I'm a software engineer," said Kyle, telling his story that Clayton simply did not want to hear. "I work from home, but I really like this stuff, you know? I wish I could have been a mountain man, or at the very least a cowboy."

  "Why are you telling me this?" asked Clayton as he pulled into the next gas station on I-90 on the west side of Spearfish. "I don't care, just tell me that you have it, and I'll come get it from you and I'll pay you the reward."

  "Well, you could do that," said Kyle slowly. "I could give you my address, but I want to tell you what happened so you know why I don't want the reward."

  "You don't want the reward? Hang on," said Clayton as he pulled to a stop next to a snow-flecked gas pump. "Call me back in five minutes if you mean business. I'm on the road and need to gas up."

  He clicked the hang up button with his thumb, and turned off the engine.

  Snow spatted on the windshield, swooping up beneath the metal canopy with the grace of a skilled gymnast. He felt the cold coming up his pant legs, and zipped his down jacket all the way up to his neck. He had no scarf, no gloves, and no hat, and though it had been sunny and fair-skied when he'd set out to Dickinson, he should have known better. December was no time to fool around with the weather, especially when you were headed to the middle of nowhere.

  Quickly, he gassed up the car, tore off the thin receipt to shove into his pocket, then closed the gas cap before heading inside for a quick bathroom break. After that, he'd grab some snacks for the road, as he was already caffeinated enough. Some beef jerky would do him good, and maybe some powdered donuts, which he loved.

  Inside, the little convenience store was a tad warmer, but it was poorly stocked, as if the owner imagined that nobody would be driving anywhere on Christmas and would therefore not need anything to eat. Clayton bought his food for the road, turning up his nose at the two hot dogs sliding greasily across the metal rollers, paid for his stuff, and went back out to the car.

  Once again, his brief time inside of a gas station seemed to have encouraged the weather to turn colder and snowier. The whole sky was full of sharp white flecks coming down at an angle, and the wind, while it had not picked up, was now sharp and cold as a knife blade.

  He had at least a two-hour drive to Lusk, though in this weather, with the roads getting slippery, it would probably be a three-hour drive, at least. From there, it was probably another three hours to Harlin, Colorado, where he kept his small apartment. He'd promised to make it to Parker that day, but it was taking too long. If he made it home by midnight, surely he could get to Parker the next day, which would make it Christmas Eve, which would be fine.

  The wrench in the works was the most recent caller, Kyle Tobin, a guy who said he had the knife and sheath and who also said he didn't want the reward. He seemed to think that Clayton's coming to get the knife was a reasonable prospect, so he probably lived somewhere that Clayton could get to without too much trouble.

  But as Kyle's exact location was an unknown, at the moment, Clayton did not feel hopeful. This whole thing was turning out to be a shitstorm, and he was going to spend hours on the road to no purpose, and worse, he was going to let Sarah and her family down.

  He climbed back into his now icy cold car, started the engine, and waited while it warmed up before he turned the heater on. He tore open some beef jerky and gnawed on it. As he sat there shivering, his phone rang, and he tapped the button on the steering wheel to answer it. Five minutes on the dot.

  "Hello," said Clayton.

  "Hello, Mr. Nash?" asked the caller. It was Kyle. Of course.

  "Don't call me Mr. Nash, that's my Dad. Call me Clayton," said Clayton, though he didn't put too much friendliness in his voice, as he didn't want Mr. Kyle Tobin to get the wrong idea.

  This was not a friendly arrangement. It was Clayton doing his best at putting everything right, whatever it took.

  "Okay, so here's what happened," said Kyle, starting in on his story as though he and Clayton were old friends, and naturally Clayton would want to know about everything. This guy was way too talkative, considering he was conversing with a complete stranger that he'd allegedly stolen something from.

  "I'm at this arts and crafts festival in Ft. Collins just today," said Kyle. "I drove there to look at all the cool things, buy some homemade beef jerky, you know, the kind the mountain men make by hand? Anyway, I always like to imagine I'll go to the next mountain man rendezvous in the summer. There's like three in the state of Colorado alone, can you imagine?"

  "No," said Clayton, almost mumbling as he swallowed his beef jerky, unable to stop himself from thinking how much better it would taste if it had been made by hand, rather than by machine in a plant somewhere in New Jersey.

  "They sell stuff too, you know," Kyle went on, his voice seeming to warm to his subject. "You can buy a fringed jacket made from buffalo hide, you can buy a three-legged cast iron frying pan, you can buy soap made from goat milk, all that good stuff."

  "Uh-huh," said Clayton.

  He switched on the heaters full blast, with most of the air aimed at the inside of the windshield. He then pulled onto I-90, which was, thankfully, plowed, though the wind sent more snow spinning across the four-lane highway.

  He'd get to follow the bigger, more well-tended road for a while, and it made him feel hopeful about the rest of the drive, but he knew the truth. At Sundance, Wyoming, he'd turn south and be at the mercy of the elements in the worst way. At Sundance, there was no turning back.

  "Well, anyway," said Kyle, cont
inuing. "I'm walking by one of those booths that sell the really expensive stuff, you know?"

  "No, I don't know," said Clayton. "I don't go to arts and crafts festivals, so I don't know."

  "Oh," said Kyle, and the tone in his voice seemed to indicate that he thought Clayton was missing out on something really good. "Well, the booth had the good stuff, the real stuff. Antiques. Classy replicas, hunks of quartz, Native American pottery and beaded belts and stuff. In the corner of the glass case was a bone-handled Bowie knife, and beside it was this antique beaded sheath. The little card said it was hand done using actual Indian beads on brain-tanned deerskin, and I about lost my mind, as you can imagine."

  Clayton opened his mouth to say something sarcastic about arts and crafts and overly-priced supposed antiques and dreamers who wanted to live in the past when he stopped. At the same time, he had held that hand-crafted article in his own hands. Even though he wasn't much for history, the sense of what those beads had gone through, the beauty of Ricky's work, and the story behind it, of Adeline making such a wonderful pattern, had not gone lost on him.

  For the first time since Kyle had started telling him his story, Clayton thought he might begin to understand why he was telling it.

  "Okay, go on," said Clayton. He tore off another hunk of beef jerky with his teeth, keeping one hand on the wheel, squinting at the sky as he drove.

  "It was priced at seventeen hundred dollars. But I had the case of the wants so bad, I decided then and there to cut back on my goat milk subscription just to have that sheath in my hands."

  "Goat milk?" asked Clayton rolling his eyes even though there was nobody to see. "Oh, brother."

  "Hey," said Kyle. "Goat milk is good for you and it tastes delicious."

  "Whatever," said Clayton. "So you bought it."

  "Yes, I charged it." Kyle gave a little laugh as though embarrassed at his own foolishness, which he most certainly should be, for who paid that much for something like that? Well, software engineers who worked from home, apparently.

  But if Kyle was willing to pay that much, it might explain why the one woman caller had demanded one thousand dollars reward; the value of the item, which had been lost on Clayton, was now coming into importance. Uncle Bill, who didn't give a damn about money, had given Clayton something quite old and valuable, and in high demand in the mountain man world.

  "So why don't you want the reward?" asked Clayton as he tapped on the brakes to ease around the wide corner as I-90 curved south. The tires slipped a bit but then held, and Clayton took a slow breath.

  "Because," said Kyle, sounding a little exasperated, as if he'd been trying to explain this to Clayton for hours. "I've got these two friends, Brent and Richard, who live in Chicago. They're a couple, you know. Well, they were going to come out for Christmas, but there's a storm back east and a storm here, and so they're not going to be able to make it. And I've bought all this food!"

  "What does this have to do with—" started Clayton, exasperated all over again, but Kyle stopped him with a little high-pitched sound.

  "I'm getting to that," said Kyle. "They were online trying to deal with their airline tickets, hoping to get through, and well, while they waited they went shopping, as you do."

  "As you do," said Clayton.

  "They're well off, if you must know, and they shop a lot, and their apartment is always so nice. It overlooks Lake Michigan, you know."

  Clayton did know, as there'd been a news article about the high prices for apartments overlooking the lake. Some folks didn't know better than to pay almost three thousand a month for something they didn't actually own. Kyle's admiration for those who did was not a good reflection on his character.

  "So?" said Clayton.

  "Brent and Richard were looking on Craigslist to buy me something related to mountain men, because they're nice like that. That's when they saw the notice about the stolen knife and beaded sheath. It was the exact one I'd just emailed them about, so they were quick to tell me it was stolen. I was already home by that time, and I tried calling the festival hall to talk to the vendor, but I couldn't get through. And then I realized that if he was selling stolen goods, I should report him to the festival, and the police, and then I needed to answer the notice about giving the items back to their owner. Which is you."

  "You did all that, just today," said Clayton.

  "I went to the festival this morning, found out about everything else when I got home. I found the receipt, too, tucked inside. Then I reported it to the police, everything. Then I called you."

  Clayton ran his tongue across the inside of his teeth, tasting the salt from the beef jerky and tried to think it all through. The theft had happened last night, and the thief must have driven out of town within minutes to hook up with a vendor in Ft. Collins in time for when the festival opened.

  With contacts and connections like that, this wasn't the thief's first rodeo, and the Bowie knife and beaded sheath probably wasn't the only stolen item to have been taken and delivered, so Clayton knew he shouldn't feel so bad. Only he did; his carelessness led to the knife being taken.

  "Why don't you want a reward?" asked Clayton finally.

  "Because it was stolen property," said Kyle, his voice a little sad. "I should have known better because the vendor couldn't really explain where he'd gotten it and that should have been my first sign not to buy."

  "Why is that?" asked Clayton, and while he told himself that he didn't want to know, he was starting to want to know.

  "Items like this, high ticket items, usually have a document that's called a provenance," said Kyle. "It gives the history of the item, all the hands it's passed through. It's used to authenticate paintings and art and antiques. It's supposed to keep you from buying a forgery."

  "Or stolen goods," said Clayton.

  "Right," said Kyle.

  Clayton raised his eyebrows, though there was nobody to see. He was learning a lot about a world that was beyond his own, which was, of late, focused on eighteen-wheeled rigs, GPS coordinates, and schedules that stretched him to the limit trying to get to the next stop on time. Not to mention bad food at gas stations, quick showers where they charged by the minute, and sleeping in the back of his own rig to save money. Spending almost two thousand dollars on a whim just because he wanted something was like a dream in a fairy tale.

  "I just want to give it back to you," said Kyle. "I don't want the reward. It would be wrong to take it."

  A five hundred dollar reward was probably a drop in the bucket to a guy who could buy an antique for almost two thousand dollars on a whim. Yet, the notion of not taking a reward was a noble one.

  Uncle Bill would approve of the gesture, though as Clayton cast a glance down at his phone thinking he'd call him, he saw that the battery was getting low. Where was his charger? Well, he'd wait to call Uncle Bill anyway because when he did talk to him, he wanted the whole thing taken care of so that he could, yes, tell Uncle Bill the entire story. By that time the knife and sheath would be safe beneath Luke's roof, and Shawn would be able to dream up adventures while pretending to be a mountain man.

  "Fine," said Clayton. "Where are you located?"

  "I live in Orchard, Colorado," said Kyle.

  "Orchard?" asked Clayton. "That's in the middle of nowhere, why the hell do you live there?"

  "I like it quiet," said Kyle, and his voice became a tad fierce, as if he had been defending his decision to move there from the start. "I live near Pawnee National Grasslands, which I think is beautiful and if you don't approve then too bad for you."

  "But jeezus," said Clayton. "What do you do in a blizzard?"

  "Same thing as I always do," said Kyle firmly. "I stock up on groceries, I have a generator in the cellar. The house is old but it's sturdy, and I have storm windows. I have a view of the river."

  "The South Platte," said Clayton.

  "It's nicer than most places," said Kyle, firmly, as if he was nodding at Clayton to prove his point.

  "I guess so,"
said Clayton.

  He didn't know what to think now. The guy sounded legit, but getting to Orchard would prove its own kind of adventure and would add hours to a drive that in normal weather would feel like it took no time at all. Except he had an errand to run, an important errand.

  "Listen, give me your address, and then I have to hang up. My cell phone battery is dying."

  Kyle gave him the address. Then he added, "It's a ranch house right on the river. Well, almost right on it; it's the last house on the road out of town just before you reach the South Platte. But why don't you just plug your phone into your charger?" asked Kyle.

  "I must have left it in the motel, or something," said Clayton.

  "You shouldn't be driving where you're driving without a charged up cell phone," said Kyle, in a gentle though scolding voice.

  "You think I don't know that?" asked Clayton, only a moment's hesitation away from adding the word asshole to the question. "Look, I'm going to stop at the Flying J in Sundance before I head south, okay. I'll be at your place around nine o'clock. Sheesh." Then he hung up.

  Chapter 5

  The Flying J at Sundance, right off the highway, was a little more crowded than he expected, considering the weather and the holiday season. But after he pumped his gas, he went inside to look around the little convenience store for a phone charger.

  As expected, the store had electric razors, postcards with jack-a-lopes on them, and all the starchy snacks a fellow could ask for. But no chargers. He grabbed a cheese and tuna sandwich from the rack, a cold iced coffee from the cooler, and headed up to the counter.

  He paid with his credit card, as usual, grabbing the receipt to shove into his pocket, when he realized that the cashier, a young lady with tightly pulled back hair and too much makeup, was looking at him carefully as she handed his card back to him.