Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  Fortunately, Buster’s mother was young and strong enough to plow through the snow and climb three barbed-wire fences. There had been much conjecture in later years as to whether this had a bearing on Buster’s lagging mental development. Being introduced to the world upside down for such an extended amount of time must have had an adverse effect on him, everyone said—not least because of the life-long scar that ran along the medial section of his skull, from when mama didn’t quite clear that last barbed wire fence at the highway.

  It was the cowboy, Jimmy Bayles Morgan, the only one in town sober on New Year’s Eve, who stopped to help her. Vanadium’s sole doctor had recently had his medical license revoked. The closest hospital was one hundred and twenty miles away. The mother had lost too much blood already, and there was no time to be delicate about it. Jimmy was forced to make a decision that even a doctor would have been reluctant to make. In the back of his pickup were chains for delivering breach-birthed colts. And so, Buster McCaffrey was yanked roughly into this world, and his mother left it less than an hour later. That’s how the sheriff recorded it in his journal. Jimmy, not knowing what else to do with this gigantic baby, wrapped him in a horse blanket and drove him and the body of the dead mother to the only place that was open that night, the sheriff’s office.

  Sheriff Dudival called Janet Poult and told her to get down to the jail immediately to do some emergency nursing. She had just had her fourth child. Her breasts were huge and still filled with milk. So much did she lactate that the sheriff’s Half ‘n’ Half and Dr. Peppers were forced off the shelves of the office refrigerator and replaced with Ball jars filled with her breast-pumped over-production. Before long, Dudival was able to track down Buster’s mother’s family but they’d wanted no part of him. His mother had been shunned. To her kin, she no longer existed; therefore, Buster didn’t exist, either. That’s how the sheriff recorded it. The only thing left was to give the girl a proper burial. The county paid for the service and named Buster a ward of the court.

  Jimmy Bayles Morgan wanted to keep him for his own, but the Women’s League of Vanadium would not hear of it. Buster was no stray calf, dog, or crippled chipmunk that had limped into cow camp. He was a human being, they said, and more importantly a Christian—despite his dubious pedigree. Besides, Jimmy Bayles Morgan was a rough character and a blasphemer to boot. And so, the town set out to find Buster a good Christian home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Adopted by the Dominguez Family

  Buster’s mother was buried on a sunny January day at the Lone Cone Cemetery. The storm that caused her death was long gone. In fact, all the roadside snow had already melted, and it now looked as if the storm had never happened. Mrs. Poult brought Buster to say a final goodbye before showing him off to local prospects for adoption. Serving as Official Breast Feeder was beginning to show its wear and tear on poor Mrs. Poult. It was virtually impossible to get Buster to give up a sore nipple once he had clamped on. Mrs. Poult would be forced to pinch Buster’s nostrils together making him gag for air while she switched him off to the auxiliary. Once, when she had fallen asleep while nursing, she awoke to discover the breast that Buster had been suckling had been reduced to the size of a zucchini, while the other one was still the size of a 4-H winning eggplant.

  After the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on his mother’s coffin, Buster was passed around to interested parties. Everyone agreed that he was a nicely behaved baby of sanguine temperament. Jimmy Morgan looked on grumpily as Edita Dominguez held Buster over her head and jiggled him until a long strand of drool ran from his mouth down onto the head of her eldest son, ten-year-old Cookie. From the expression on his face, one could gather that he was none too happy to acquire a new brother, although perhaps it was too soon—it had been only three months since his last baby brother suffocated mysteriously in his crib. Mrs. Dominguez, on the other hand, was thrilled to tears as she hugged Buster and looked entreatingly to the Vanadium Women’s League for approval. They gave it.

  Mrs. Dominguez was a Cantante. The Cantantes were a famous Hispanic family who, some people said, lived in Vanadium before the Indians used the area as a respite from the brain-cooking heat of Sleeping Ute Mountain. When the whites came, the Cantantes were able to coexist peaceably with them because they had nothing the whites wanted. The Cantantes did not compete with them for grazing land, for they raised no cattle. Nor were they involved in the early contretemps between the cattlemen and the sheep men, for they herded no sheep. They already had a trade—one that had been passed down through generations. They were tile makers. Their work could still be found on every countertop and in every restroom in Vanadium. They manufactured their products at their ten-acre homestead and were particularly famous in tile circles for their “Negrita,” a small black octagon which received its distinctive lustrous ebony patina by way of a long-held family secret: the tiles were kilned under layers of sheep manure.

  The Cantantes were the first Vanadians to keep books and have a bank account. During the Great Depression, they were the first to supply food and clothes to the needy, even to the Indians. The Cantantes were the first to use a lawyer instead of arson and firearms to resolve a business conflict, the first to suggest a tax to provide schooling for Vanadian children, and the first to suggest having a lawman who was responsible for keeping the peace in the town.

  Edita Cantante was the first woman to be elected President of the Vanadian Rotary. She was also the head of the PTA and the Library Association. To their faces, the Cantantes were respected. But to their backs, Vanadians distrusted them. They were suspicious of their success and their ability to handle money. Some people said the Cantantes were Maranos—secret Jews hiding from the Spanish Inquisition—in spite of the fact that they wore conspicuous crucifixes and attended Catholic mass three times a week. That’s why the family always felt they had to try a little harder. They drew the line, however, with the first serious man to court their eldest daughter, Edita Theresa, Buster’s new mother.

  Carlito Dominguez had been a drifter and a small town Romeo when he met the zaftig and serious-minded Edita. He was quick to size up her family’s influence in the area. Likewise, her father, Jorge and his brother, Guillermo, were quick to size him up as a loser devalued further by the mestizo cast to his features. Needless to say, they disapproved of the match.

  “Edita,” they said. “You don’t have to marry the first man you meet.”

  “Why not?”

  Why not, indeed? After all, who was she to meet in this county of Anglos and Indians? Dominguez was the first Hispanic to come to Vanadium in a long time. There was no telling when the next one would breeze through in an emerald AMC Gremlin. In the end, her family would be worn down by her mopiness and her silence around the dinner table. They agreed to let them marry. Despite their nagging reservations, they took Dominguez in and taught him the family business. Then he was found, soon after the nuptials, drunk at the High Grade, Vanadium’s only café and bar, bragging about how much money his new family had. Guillermo Cantante, Edita’s uncle, dosed Dominguez’ tequila with a maggot he had harvested from a two week-old road kill. That night, Dominguez ran a fever of one hundred and seven degrees and dry-vomited and shat for eleven hours straight. When the concerned Edita stepped out of the room to empty his chamber pot, Carlito was given some friendly advice. He was told he was never to drink and talk about the family’s money again. After that, he didn’t. And when Carlito was found having an affair at the Geiger Motel with a divorcée who worked at the cooling and heating store, once again, Uncle Guillermo stepped in. A large and powerfully built man, he grabbed Dominguez through the window of his truck before he could pull out of the parking lot and drove him to a far out location on Lame Horse Mesa. There, Guillermo staked him five feet from a red ants’ nest and painted his genitalia with clover honey. When Guillermo returned three hours later after meeting friends in town for coffee, Dominguez’s bitten member had already swollen
to the size and color of a Chinese Emperor’s coy. Once again, Uncle Guillermo gave him some friendly advice. Don’t be unfaithful to Edita. After that, he wasn’t. Years passed, and the old Cantantes eventually died off leaving Dominguez as head of the family. His ascension to the tile throne was soured by a daily reminder of his treatment at the hands of the Cantantes. His son Cookie, by some cruel genetic twist of fate, had grown into the spitting image of his old nemesis, Guillermo Cantante.

  Enter Buster. He went from being an orphan to the center of attention with his three brothers and two sisters. Cookie, the eldest, did not take part in the joy of having a new baby in the family. Instead, he observed from the shadows. While technically still a child, Cookie already had the personality of a dyspeptic adult soured on the world. He was scary-looking to begin with. Even before he got diabetes, even before he was on his own and became bloated and puffy from alcohol, cheese sticks, and TV trays of Banquet fried chicken, his eyes—two malevolent drips of Bosco—looked swollen shut in a wince of unspeakable pain; pain that, when the time was right, Cookie Dominguez would make sure the world came up with the balance due.

  One day, completely out of the blue, Cookie asked sweetly if he could feed the baby. Edita was heartened by his, request—pleased that Cookie had finally accepted his new little brother. Patiently, she instructed Cookie on how to lift Buster into his high chair, how to tie the bib around his neck, and make up his little food tray with a little dab of mashed peas, apple sauce, and pureed carrots, and how much food he should put on the spoon. Then she put the spoon in Cookie’s hand and stood back with her hands on her hips waiting for Cookie to begin. He put the spoon down.

  “What’s wrong?” She said.

  “I want to feed him by myself.”

  “Can’t I stand here and watch, bollito?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want to be alone with him.”

  Edita hesitated. Her initial reflex was to say no, the loss of her last baby still haunting her.

  “Well, what’s it gonna be?” Cookie said, “I don’t have all day.”

  But then, she thought, perhaps it was time to lay her fears to rest.

  “All right, Cookie. If you think you can do it by yourself. I’ll be in the next room.”

  He waited with his hands at his sides until she left. Edita stood and listened before setting to work at the ironing board where a three-foot pile of Dominguez’s shirts awaited. She turned off the iron’s steam function to better hear. It was quiet in the next room, so she began to iron. A few minutes had passed when she thought she heard a choking sound. Or was it a baby chortling? She stopped and cocked an ear. No, that was choking! She threw the iron down and ran to the kitchen where she saw Buster, red-faced and desperate, trying to put his fingers in his mouth to clear his throat. His brother, meanwhile, sat impassively across from him, doing nothing. Edita pushed Cookie out of the way and quickly yanked Buster from his highchair, laid his stomach across her knees and began pounding his back. No good. She sat him up and performed what she could remember of the Heimlich maneuver that she had seen in a restaurant. Two violent contractions of her fists in Buster’s solar plexus sent the obstruction flying from his windpipe across the room where it smacked against the wall. Now being able to breathe, Buster managed a laugh and playfully reached lovingly for his brother’s face, but Edita held him tightly to her hip. At first glance, the object that Edita found near the wall, looked to be a Hershey’s Kiss. In that scenario, Cookie, out of affection for his brother, imprudently gave him a piece of hard-to-swallow candy. On closer examination, however, the object in question turned out to be a moving piece from the family’s popular board game.

  “Sorry,” Cookie taunted as if playing the game.

  “How did he get this?” Edita demanded.

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  Edita, slapped him so hard she turned his face sideways like a movie stuntman’s.

  “Can I give him a bath?”

  “Go to your room!”

  How was it possible? All of her children were raised the same way, given the same amount of attention and yet, while the others were thoughtful and obedient, helpful around the house—even talking about the colleges they wanted to attend some day—Cookie was pen pals with a man by the name of Richard Ramirez—who, Edita later learned, was a serial killer on San Quentin’s death row.

  She expressed her misgivings regarding Cookie’s moral turpitude to her husband, since he spent more time alone with Cookie than anyone else.

  “Entender algo. I am not his father. His father is the Devil.”

  It was clear that Buster’s security would rest solely on Edita’s shoulders. To her husband’s growing frustration, she moved the baby’s crib into their bedroom where it stayed for four years. During the day, while she cooked, did the laundry and the vacuuming, Edita carried Buster in a sling on her back. She bore him in this fashion until he weighed nearly sixty pounds—it having the welcome side effect of correcting her congenital scoliosis a doctor in Denver told her would never improve without surgery.

  When Buster was finally placed on the ground, he was only allowed to play with his sisters. They fussed over him—cornrowing his red hair and dressing him in their clothes. This went on until he was eight—despite a constant barrage of sissy name calling by Cookie. Buster’s sequestration with his sisters came to an end when he was ten and already a foot taller than Cookie—who was a paddle-footed, squat and corpulent nineteen. Still somewhat fearful, Edita felt Buster was now physically capable of protecting himself.

  “I’m thinking of letting you play with your brothers.”

  “O-kay!!!”

  “But you have to be very careful around your brother, Cookie.”

  “Why, Mommy?”

  “Something is wrong with him…up here,” she said, tapping her temple with a finger.

  “Ah’m awful sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just careful.”

  Her warning delivered, Buster was released into the company of his brothers. The younger ones were delighted. Maybe they would no longer be on the receiving end of the games Cookie invented for them to play. In those games, the younger boys played the role of Hapless Law Enforcement to Cookie’s Sadistic Criminal Mastermind. No matter how hard Hapless Law Enforcement tried, they always wound up crying.

  “You know how to play DEA Man?” Cookie inquired of Buster.

  “Nope, ah shor don’t.”

  “Well, you’re gonna be the DEA Man. He’s the man with the badge.”

  “Gosh, thanks!”

  In the game of DEA Man, Cookie and his younger brothers had to move several five-pound bags of tile glaze around the compound and keep it hidden from Buster who was the green agent sent to the West from Washington, DC. There wasn’t much more to the game than that. The fun part for Cookie was when Buster discovered the drug cache. He would then jump him or descend from a rope somewhere and employ different faux martial arts moves. Unfortunately, the bullets in Buster’s imaginary government-issued sidearm had no effect on Cookie. Buster endured being karate chopped and flipped on his head too many times to count, but he never complained nor tattled on him.

  When Fridays rolled around, the Dominguezes would load all the kids into the back of the truck for a drive into town. Buster liked to sit above the rear fender of the pickup with his nose in the wind like a dog. All the kids had a few bucks in their pockets from chores and an idea of how they wanted to spend it—even though it always came down to the same things, candy for the boys, teen fashion magazines for the girls.

  Vanadium’s Main Street had resisted paving for over one hundred years—almost as if the town was holding out for the return of horse-drawn carriages. People passing through on their way to Utah drove slowly, not to enjoy Vanadium’s down-on-its-heels Victorian architecture, or raised wooden sidewalks, but rather
to avoid potholes that were deep enough to conceal a man on horseback wearing a stovepipe hat.

  Dominguez guided his Dodge Power Wagon into an empty space in front of the Buttered Roll, the town’s only restaurant without a bar. In those days, before Mr. Mallomar came to town, Vanadium hadn’t any need for more than one restaurant. The prevailing attitude was that paying for a meal outside the home was a useless extravagance. Buster could see Sheriff Dudival in the window booth having a cup of coffee and a cigarette with a crusty-looking cowboy. They both took notice of him. In fact, they seemed to be talking about him.

  “Have your asses back here in forty-five minutes,” Dominguez said.

  The kids all jumped off the truck and left on their predetermined missions. Cookie lumbered out the back with the difficulty of a fat kid. It didn’t help that he insisted on wearing a big woolen overcoat whenever he went to town—even in the broiling heat of summer. No one talked about it, assuming it was his sad way of concealing his weight problem.

  The pockets of Cookie’s coat were slit on the inside to allow his hands to reach all the way through. To the proprietor of a shop, it looked like he was just standing by the merchandise with his coat open, but inside the coat, his hands were grabbing whatever he desired. Cookie, alone, was responsible for 75 percent of Vanadium’s retail “shrinkage.”

  It was time to get going. He only had forty-five minutes. His parents insisted they be back at the house on Fridays by sunset. He started walking off by himself, then noticed Buster.

  “Hey, fuckwad. Come with me.”

  Happy to be included, Buster followed his brother into the hardware store. Cookie made a cursory inspection of plumbing supplies, power sanders, fuse boxes, rattraps, and poison. He was not really interested in any of that. He knew the owner of the store was watching him and that diddling around long enough would tax the proprietor’s attention span. When he saw him go back to reading his paper, Cookie headed to the real object of his desire—a pyramid of .22 caliber ammunition in the gun department. Dominguez had, ill advisedly, given Cookie a single shot J. C. Higgins rifle without ever bothering to ask why it seemed he always had an unlimited supply of ammo for it. Cookie opened his coat and slipped a few boxes into his shirt, then hissed at Buster.