KITT PEAK
By Al Sarrantonio
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2011 Al Sarrantonio
Cover design by David Dodd
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For
Pat LoBrutto
Who's been there
Chapter One
Bad day.
They had all been bad days lately. Thomas thought about other times when there had been no bad days, only days to get work done, to work with his hands and mind. Even when bad things were involved — even when death was involved — his days in the Army, as the very first Negro lieutenant in the Buffalo Soldiers, the all-Negro regiment of the cavalry, had been good ones.
Foolishness, he thought.
Steel your mind.
It seemed as if he had spent a lot of time lately steeling his mind. And it seemed as if it was getting harder to do. Retirement did not agree with him; and even the Sherlock Holmes stories, which had always brought him so much joy, and which he still looked forward to receiving every six months in a packet of Strand magazines sent from New York, brought him little solace these days. It was as if his restless mind could no longer concentrate on mere fiction, that the loss of his vocation had, over the last months, begun to turn him into the one thing he had always guarded against.
You're soft, Thomas.
You're soft and if you don't watch it, you're going to get old.
He rose from the chair he had been sitting in, the one facing the front window of his home on Maple Street in Boston, Massachusetts, and waved an impatient hand at the air.
Bah, he thought, it's all foolishness. I'm already soft, and already old. An old man sitting in front of the window waiting for the mail.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement on the street outside, and turned to face the window again. Sure enough, the mailman was making his slow way up the path toward the house. John Reynolds, his name was. Bundled up to the chin against the cold, with his cap pulled down over his earmuffs. He looked like a blue tick.
The mailman caught his eye through the frosted window, and Thomas started to wave his hand in greeting; but Reynolds merely looked away, scowling. Another bigot in a country of bigots. Thomas was sure that if the force of the federal government wasn't behind Reynolds, the man would have dropped the mail in the snow and walked away.
As it was, there was the sound of the mail-man jamming the letters into the box and hurrying away, his back to Thomas as he left the gate open on his way to the next house.
Scowling himself, biting back his anger, Thomas went to the door, opened it, bracing himself against the blast of cold air that pushed in, pulled the crumpled mail from its wall box, and closed the door again.
His pension check was not among the creased letters, and, momentarily, another flare of anger rose and then died within him. Damned bureaucrats. Ever since Roosevelt had come to office in 1901, two years ago, the system of government had come to a complete halt. The damned Republican cared more about trees and bears than he did about the men who had fought, and too often died, in Indian wars, making the West safe for white settlers. And Roosevelt of all people, who had at least been out there himself, seen the land with his own eyes, experienced at least some of the hard-ships, and knew what it was like . . .
A single letter fell from the mass of handbills and fluttered to the floor. For a moment hope rose within Thomas, thinking that maybe the check had come at last. For an instant, he even thought that perhaps Roosevelt wasn't a bad sort after all —
But it was not a government check at all. Thomas raised the envelope to the lighted window. There was something dimly familiar about the scrawl of handwriting on the face. The letter looked as though it had been through a war. Besides the mailman's crumpling, the letter was torn in one corner and stained with something that looked like coffee across the front. The lettering on the address was smudged.
Thomas turned the letter directly to the light. The coffee stain, up close, was clotted and uneven. . . .
Chicory coffee.
Only chicory coffee would leave that distinctive gritty blotch. And the handwriting. . .
The lettering, he now saw, was not smudged at all, but had been written with a dipped quill in a trembling hand. A blotter had been badly employed, further running the letters. The writing was familiar. . . .
Adams. Bill Adams, one of the very few white men in the 101st Cavalry worth a spit. He had been Thomas's friend and confidant, the only non-private, with the exception of young Sergeant Chase, who had been sorry to see Thomas retire.
But Adams had never trembled over anything, not at Fraser Pass during the war with Victorio, not in the teeth of death in Limpia Canyon, when surrounded by an overwhelming force of rogue Mescaleros commanded by Victorio's vengeance-seeking brother. . . .
Thomas almost tore the letter open, and then hesitated over the tear along one edge.
Examining it more closely, he saw that the tear had been made deliberately, a small thumb-ripped opening that had then been straightened down the edge by the pull of a knife or letter opener. But the would-be opener had hesitated before the letter could be pulled out, and had abandoned his task.
Thomas faced the letter toward the window again, and studied the postmark.
April 14, 1902.
Nine months ago.
And with a postmark from Tucson, Arizona. Is that where Adams was?
Again suppressing an urge to open the letter, Thomas instead crossed the room, lay the letter down on a lamp table while he bent to pull a wooden cartridge box from under his bed. He had to move aside a stack of Strand magazines to get at the box, which was covered with dust. He rested the box on his knees and blew the dust off. Glancing at the unmade covers of the bed, he winced momentarily, realizing just how soft he had become. Instead of sharp military corners, the covers were piled in a heap, unmade.
He thought of Sherlock Holmes.
At least I haven't reduced myself to taking cocaine.
He shook his head.
That's no excuse.
He turned his attention to the box, and went slowly through it. Two letters from Lincoln Reeves on top, the most recent received nearly a month before. Whose turn was it to write? With shame, he realized that he had not written back to Reeves, not answered either this letter or the last. The young man he had thought of as his Watson must wonder at this point if Thomas was even alive.
He set the two letters aside on the unmade bed, resolving to answer them this day.
Next were family papers, the deed for this very house from his deceased Aunt Martha Johnston Mullin. The house had been left to her by the abolitionist Fay Gordon, who had died proud though nearly penniles
s after Boston ostracized her for her relationship with a former black slave. There were other papers relating to the property, various town ordinances meant to ostracize the property itself, abolitionist lawyer writs blocking those moves by the city of Boston, etc.
Next was a flat of cardboard, and beneath that, Thomas's Army papers.
He had located the last correspondence from Bill Adams in a moment. Nearly three years. The handwriting on the last letter, from Adams's newest, and last, post at Fort Brayden, in northern Arizona, was firm and confident. He remembered the letter as being full of hope. Adams would be retiring in six months, and moving to Arizona to live with his daughter. There had been some chatting about old times, about how they would have to get together after Adams's retirement even though both of them knew that would probably not happen, about Bill's sorrow that Thomas's bid for reenlistment had been turned down. Thomas even recalled Adam's phrasing, "They stepped on your neck real good, Thomas, and I'm sorry there's nothing I can do about it. Comes with the territory of laying low on the ladder all these years. If only Grierson or one of the other mucky-mucks were still in power in Washington..."
Thomas laid the letter back in the cartridge box, rose, and retrieved Adams's new letter from the lamp table.
So. . . he thought, a faint stirring of juices long dormant, of interest and excitement, already beginning to rise within him.
He opened the letter carefully, unsticking the back flap, noting how carelessly it had been sealed to begin with.
He pulled the letter from within.
As he unfolded and looked at it, a pang of sorrow drowned out the rise of interest; but then the excitement quickly overcame the sorrow, pushing it to the back of his mind.
He pulled the letter up to his nose. It nearly reeked of alcohol. An amber stain, different from the coffee stain on the envelope, washed the upper right-hand corner of the page. That was where Adams would have kept his whiskey glass. He was, Thomas remembered, right-handed. And so, that coffee stain on the envelope was evidence that the letter had been written in the throes of alcohol, and was probably sealed and mailed during the aftermath of attempted recovery, while Adams had been drinking coffee.
The letter was dated April 10th, bearing this out.
If anything, the handwriting on the letter was even worse than that on the envelope.
Thomas folded the letter flat on the table top and read:
~ * ~
Dear Thomas,
It is not with joy that I write you this time, I'm afraid. Things have not gone as I had planned. Perhaps if this were the Army, things could be handled differently, but I doubt it. We both know how the Army operates, and in this case the result would be no better. There is a man in Tempe, name of Cross, who would help, but I heard he's out with the 66th, scouting, and won't be back from California for at least eighteen months. He owes me, but that's another story.
My Abby is gone, Thomas. . . .
~ * ~
Here there was an obvious pause while Adams took a drink; there was evidence that the spill on the letter had occurred at this point. Thomas could almost see his friend blotting the alcohol from the page before continuing. The letter went on:
~ * ~
I'll be honest with you, because you'd figure out anyway that I'm in the bottle and feeling badly. Seems I invested a bit too much in my life after the Army, and when things did not turn out as I planned I took a bit of a fall.
But my Abby, as I said, is gone. She's only nineteen, now, Thomas, you may remember my talking about her years ago. To me she was only a baby then, and her momma was raising her on the Papagos reservation here, though in Christian ways. In my head, she was always my little girl, but when I came back to Tucson she was all grown up, with ideas of her own. She didn't want to live in Tucson City with me, at least not at first; but even after she came to live with me I could see she wasn't happy. But then, things seemed to get better. And then she disappeared.
~ * ~
Again there was a pause, Thomas could feel it. And once again when the man went back to writing, he was drunker, and his hand less steady:
~ * ~
Thomas, I'm a desperate man, if you can't tell. Abby's mother was a good woman, and tried to raise her the way I wanted.
I have no right to ask this of you, old friend. I realize that Boston must seem very far away from the Army and from Arizona, but . . .
~ * ~
Again a lengthy pause, before Adams asked the question he felt he had to steal himself to ask:
~ * ~
You're the best friend I've ever known, Thomas, and the best tracker. If you could help me, I would be beholden to you for my life. I hesitate to ask you for old times' sake, but if that's all that it takes, for my daughter, I'll do that. All right, my daughter is Injun, at least half, but she's all I have, and I don't want a horrible thing to happen. I'm afraid I must sign off now with this plea I've made. . . .
~ * ~
The letter was unsigned, with a running line, blotted carelessly, after the last word. Perhaps Adams had thought to reopen the letter, remembering that he hadn't signed it. Thomas wondered, also, if the man had hesitated to ask for his help, or found it so difficult, because Thomas was Negro.
That's an evil thought.
Sighing, Thomas walked to the window and looked out. Still holding the letter, he put his hands behind his back and clasped them. No, it wasn't such an evil thought. As much as Bill Adams was a friend, he had still found it difficult to ask Thomas's help, simply because of the difference in their skin color. Adams would deny it, but still, here in this time, thirty years after the War Between the States, Thomas was a second-class citizen merely because his skin was dark. In the Army, especially in the Buffalo Soldiers, the difference between him and Adams had been easier to ignore; but here, in the real world, the stigma was unavoidable.
Thomas stared out at the January white of Boston, where the people professed equality but didn't live it, and thought of the warmness of Tucson.
Adams had found it difficult to ask. But he had asked.
I'll help you, old friend, Thomas thought. I'll help you merely because you're my friend, and, almost as importantly, because if I don't, if I stay here in two-faced Boston, pacing the rooms of this little house and brooding, I will lose my mind, along with the rest of my pride.
Having decided, Thomas turned away from the window. There was a perceptible smile on his face. He held the letter almost lovingly in his hand, and placed it carefully on the lamp table as he turned to make the bed in sharp military corners, and thought of what he would need to take with him.
Chapter Two
Three days later, in Birmingham, Alabama, Lincoln Reeves's own life was turned upside down by the arrival of a letter. This one was delivered by a black man, though, with whom, if Lincoln had any enmity, he was unaware of it.
"Nice day, George," Lincoln said, meeting the man at his own rickety gate. Like everything else on the sharecropper's farm, it needed fixing. Like everything else, it would have to wait in line.
"They all the same to me, Mistah Reeves," George said, shaking his head. Lincoln tried to recall if he had ever seen the man smile, and came up empty. "One day goes intuh the next, and then th' nex' day come aftuh that."
"Whatever you say, George." Lincoln took his mail from the dour mailman and smiled. He looked at the slate-blue sky over the dusty field, the clouds, felt the almost spring-like warmth. As the mailman turned away, already shaking his head, Lincoln said, "Couple of months it'll be spring, and then I can get to planting. And won't that be fine, George?"
"Whatever you says, Mistuh Reeves," George said, continuing to shake his head as he went through the gate, closing it behind him. He chuckled slightly. "Whatever you says. You say hi to that wife and baby of yours, now, Mr. Reeves."
Lincoln watched the man retreat down the dusty road, then looked at the sky again. It would be fine. It certainly would. His first crop, on his own — well, almost his own — farm, and t
his was a fine day, and this was, after all, a fine life. Inside he heard Matty singing to the baby, and Lincoln had, at this moment, to admit to himself that he had done all right for himself. He had come about as far as he had wished, if not as far as he had hoped. And Thomas Mullin had told him — ordered him — to stay in the Army. What did the old man know? . . .
A moment later, glancing at the mail in his hand, Lincoln had a moment of wonder. Had he conjured Thomas Mullin up? For there, at the top of the thin stack of letters, was a crisply cornered letter from the Lieutenant, the first Lincoln had received in nearly a year. And here Lincoln had begun to worry about the old man, that things were slipping for him. Lincoln thumbed the flap of the letter open, wincing at the ragged tear he was putting in it, almost waiting for Mullin to snap a comment at him:
"What's the matter, Trooper? Are you so lazy that you can't open an envelope properly? What if that envelope were evidence? What if you were destroying evidence?"
Reeves pulled the thin sheet out, laughing inwardly at his picture of the man he had conjured up. Even now, even at this distance in time and miles, Lieutenant Thomas Mullin still made Lincoln's back stiffen up in salute, his mind more alert. It was silly... .
Lincoln read the short note, and instantly felt himself go rigid and alert. Not so silly.
"Matty!" he called, already wincing at the fight he would have with his wife. He could only hope she would understand.
Resolutely, steeling himself for the confrontation to come, he mounted the creaking steps of the farmhouse, vowing to fix them as soon as he returned, opened the squeaking screen door to enter.
A day later, filled with guilt and remorse, he was packed and ready to go. Another fine day was dawning; it would be even warmer than yesterday, the temperature climbing perhaps into the sixties. Wonderful weather for January. There were a lot of chores that wouldn't get done today. . . .
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