Now the door opened and two new men dressed in old-fashioned khaki workman’s clothes entered. It was no coincidence that their entrance had been timed with the completion of prayers. It wasn’t as though they didn’t believe in a greater power. They just didn’t believe that greater power to be Calvina Stumplehorst. Ned Gigglehorn was in his mid-sixties. He was the more squat and muscular of the two. His neck was thick and wide at the shoulders and shaped like the base of a stalk of celery. However, there was no ignoring his most salient characteristic—that being the blackened band of skin around his eyes. He’d been shot directly in the face with snakeshot. This was referred to as a “raccoon face” or in the vernacular of the older locals, a “’coon face.” Miraculously, the shot didn’t blind him, but the particles, deeply imbedded in his skin, were there for life—a punishment by the local constabulary and Mine Management for a speech he gave in 1969 at the Odd Fellows Hall calling for a wildcat strike. His disfigurement would have made an ordinary man shy from showing his face in public, but not Ned Gigglehorn. He stared at people aggressively—daring people to look at him and see for themselves how capital regarded labor.
The taller man, who sat down opposite Buster, was Doc Solitcz. He and Ned shared a cabin together—separate from the others. He was in his seventies, rail-thin with a shock of white hair that he combed across his forehead like John F. Kennedy. He conveyed a certain curiosity in the twinkle of his eye—a curiosity that cost him his medical license when he thought to remove his own appendix to test the efficacy of the new method of spinal anesthesia. Calvina Stumplehorst gave the de-frocked doctor free room and board in exchange for veterinarian care for their line of quarter horses and cattle and, more importantly, science lessons for their daughter’s home school courses—if he agreed to feather in creationism. He reconciled his principles by shrugging off religion as nothing more than the Enlightenment’s lazy eye—somewhat crossed and out of focus—but not fatal to the patient.
Breakfast would be the only meal the two men deigned to share with the others. Dr. Solitcz looked across the table at Buster, a slightly humored expression at the corners of his mouth.
“You the McCaffrey boy?”
“Yessir.”
“We’ve followed your career with keen interest. Haven’t we, Ned?”
“You’re the one who killed his foster fathers.”
“That ain’t true,” Buster said, coming to his own defense.
“No?”
“They never proved it!” Skylar Stumplehorst said, repeating what Sheriff Dudival had told him.
“Well, if you’re wrong…” Gigglehorn sipped at his coffee, “…you’re next.”
Some of the other hands at the table laughed, but Gigglehorn wasn’t joking. Despite the light-hearted sound of his name, he never went for a joke if there was a throat available.
Mrs. Stumplehorst gave a little snort. ‘That would serve him right for bringing this heathen under our roof!”
“Gigglehorn…” Mr. Stumplehorst protested, “…you take the cake! Why would this young man here wanna kill me of all people?”
Gigglehorn calmly tapped a verboten cigarette out of his pack of Luckies, lit it, and blew smoke across the table at Mr. Stumplehorst. Buster looked to Mrs. Stumplehorst for her reaction, but funnily enough, she said nothing—only stiffening ever so slightly.
“Mr. McCaffrey here is going to kill you because you’ve exploited him. Plain and simple.”
“I will not have you make trouble under my own roof, you big-mouthed bastard!” bellowed Mr. Stumplehorst.
“Mr. Gigglehorn…” Mrs. Stumplehorst said, mildly interceding on behalf of her husband, “…if this young man is to murder my husband, I sincerely doubt he will be motivated by your dusty socialist principles.” Calvina nodded with self-satisfaction to her daughters who, except for Destiny, were watching the breakfast debate with slack-jawed disinterest.
“Ma’am, I believe that, in this young man’s short time here, he has already been given justification for killing your husband.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Molotov?”
Gigglehorn stood to his feet and bellowed at Skylar Stumplehorst.
“You gave the poor sonofabitch a bed that wasn’t fit for a dog!”
Ned was always monitoring the working conditions at the ranch on behalf of his fellow workers, and a detail like Buster’s bed had not escaped his attention. Buster looked nervously to Mrs. Stumplehorst for her reaction. Surprisingly, she seemed unperturbed—more concerned with the sticky handle on the maple syrup pourer than Gigglehorn’s outrages.
“Uh, is there a problem with your bed, son?” Mr. Stumplehorst asked, finding himself alone in all of this.
Buster just looked down at his plate.
“What’s he gonna say? The kid’s only got two gears—Shy and Murder,” said Gigglehorn.
“It ain’t exactly first rate, truth be tole, sir,” Buster said, quietly.
“Well, if that’s true, there’s nothin’ to get homicidal about, son. I’ll tell you what…seein’ as you’re unhappy with the sleeping arrangements from now on you can sleep with the Doc and Foghorn Leghorn here. How’s that?”
“That’d be jes fine with me,” Buster said turning to Doc and Gigglehorn to see if it was okay with them. Gigglehorn stared at him blankly—his mouth, once again, his undoing.
Stumplehorst, pleased with his Solomonic judgment, got up from the table. “Then we’ll have no more talk about this murdering business from now on. Will we, McCaffrey?”
“No, sir.”
Then, Mrs. Stumplehorst clapped her hands twice, and the hired hands stood and marched from the table in single file, passing her at the doorway.
“Thank you for breakfast, ma’am,” it was compulsory for them to say, as they all shuffled out. Buster wanted to look back at Destiny, but he dared not.
At the corral, the other hands had already saddled up before breakfast. Buster had yet to be assigned a horse.
“That’s your cayuse…over there,” someone said.
There was a lone, unsaddled stallion in the corner of the corral and he was a sad sight, indeed. He was filthy and hadn’t been brushed or seen to all winter. The other fellows were watching Buster’s reaction, straight-faced. A joke was being played out on the new guy or possibly Mr. Stumplehorst—if pushing Buster to his limit could lead to his murder. Buster slowly approached him.
“’Lo there, old clomper. How ya doin’?”
“…Name’s Stinker,” Jared Yankapeed said. “You’ll see why any minute now.”
Buster stood a few feet away having a reconnoiter. The nag’s chest leaned noticeably over his front hooves. Bob Boyle had taught him that when a horse did that, it meant it was trying to get the weight off his caudal hoof, or heel, because it was in pain. Buster lightly touched his side and the hay burner shuddered. He waited, letting the horse get used to him, then smoothed a hand over Stinker’s sides. When Stinker relaxed, Buster gently lifted his front leg and placed it between his knees. The sole of his hoof was packed with hardened mud and debris, but the culprit was the hoof wall. It was raised—creating painful pressure against the shoe all the way up to his navicular bone.
“Well, that ain’t good…” Buster said quietly. “Any a you fellers know where they keep the far-yers tools ’round here?”
“Stumplehorst’s gonna be out here presently. He don’t wait on nobody.”
“Won’t taker but a minute,” Buster said.
“Yor funeral…”
Yankapeed gestured to one of the other cowboys. Sourly, he got down from his horse and went into the shed. He brought back a toolbox with the farriers’ tools—pincers, hammer, rasp, and hoof knife. He tossed it at Buster’s feet then got back on his own horse.
Buster laid the horse’s leg across his knee. He pried off the shoe, scraped the inside of the hoof removing all debri
s and impediments, clipped the hoof wall all the way around with the pincers, drew the rasp across it until it was nice and level, replaced the shoe, hammered in the nails, bending them over then rasping that surface smooth, then dropped the leg back to the ground. He accomplished all of this in one minute and forty-five seconds. Now, having his rhythm, he completed the other three legs in a total time of four minutes and thirty seconds. None of the other cowboys had ever seen anything like it. As for Stinker, he looked ready to tap down a crystal staircase in a Busby Berkeley musical. Buster threw a blanket on his back, then his saddle and bridle and gave him a comforting chuck to the jowls.
The boys in the corral could hear the door slam shut at the house. The old man was coming. Buster calmly walked the toolbox back to the shed. As Mr. Stumplehorst opened the gate, Buster took three great strides—leaping into the air and landing squarely on Stinker’s back without ever touching the stirrups. One of the boys, though he would never admit this to Jared Yankapeed, even wrote his mother about it.
“Ever’body ready?” said Mr. Stumplehorst.
“Yep,” said Buster eagerly.
No one else answered. Unlike the cattle round up scene in Red River, there was no yipping or yahooing, no horse rearing, no hat waving. Such was the apathy at the Stumplehorst ranch, which was understandable. The day’s work of a cowboy was often monotonous and mundane and this was going to be another one of those days.
Being the beginning of May, there was grass coming in, but the herd had to be moved several times a day so they didn’t wear out any one spot. As soon as they moved the cattle, the Stumplehorst daughters would enter the area with a chicken coop on wheels and let the chickens feed and defecate their particularly nitrogen-rich effluent, stimulating the regrowth of grass. This progressive system, by the way, was another program paid for, on the Stumplehorsts’ behalf, by a subsidy from the US Department of Agriculture. In the afternoon, some of the cowboys were released from cattle moving to ditch burning. Buster was given a torch connected to a BBQ-sized propane tank and sent off to burn the irrigation ditches that had clogged with weeds and grass impeding the flow of water to the alfalfa fields. After that, Buster chopped firewood—another job without an end. Each of these tasks Buster took on with unbridled enthusiasm—much to the annoyance of his colleagues. Some people spend their whole lives unhappily searching, while others are fortunate to find the one thing they were born to do. And Buster was the latter.
After ditch burning, Mr. Stumplehorst instructed Buster in the milking of cows. Buster, being the newest hand, would now have the job of rising an hour earlier for that chore.
“Why cain’t ah jes milk ’em in the affernoon?”
“Cows’re allus milked in the mornin’! It’s allus been so. Their teats’d be draggin’ on the damn ground if we milked’em in the affernoon! Got any more dumb queshuns?”
“No, sir!”
Next, Buster was assigned to the woodpile. There, he called upon every fiber of being so as not to let his attention slip and chunk the axe into his shin—for the woodpile was next to the house where Destiny and her sisters were hanging laundry and weeding the vegetable garden. At one point, Buster looked up to see Destiny watching him from behind a laundry line of women’s undergarments. She puppet-wiggled the hook-end of her mother’s brassiere as a gesture of hello. His heart raced as it did when he got a snoot-full of milkweed. Buster wiggled a finger back at her and scrambled through the left side of his brain for something to say.
“Saw your horse get kicked in the corral today,” he said.
“Is that right, smooth talker?”
Before Buster could improve his repartee, Mrs. Stumplehorst came outside and gesturing to the sky, issued new orders to her daughters. They immediately took the laundry down from the lines and hurried inside just as it started to rain.
That night, Buster gathered his gear from the bunkhouse and dragged it across the lawn to Doc Solitcz and Gigglehorn’s cabin. Calvin Stumplehorst had assembled it himself from a Sears Roebuck catalogue kit in 1943. It had a nice front porch, two bedrooms, and a loft. Buster knocked on the door.
“Who’s that?” That was Doc Solitcz’s voice.
“Buster.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Doc Solitcz, followed with a sigh of resignation, “come in.”
Buster entered and dropped his kit. The room smelled of tobacco, oil paint and old man’s clothes. A seventy-eight of the forties singer Jo Stafford played “Haunted Heart” on the Philco. There was a small fire going. Doc Solitcz ignored him, quietly attending to his hobby. He was an amateur botanist. In the corner of the room was a press where he dried and flattened botanical specimens on archival paper. On the other side of the room, at the foot of Gigglehorn’s bed was an easel with an unfinished painting of a little bird. There were over forty more oils hung all the way up to the rafters. Gigglehorn’s avian subjects all bore the same distinction of being painted with enraged expressions, even the tiniest bluebirds and sparrows. Buster stood there waiting for the old man to say something.
“Upstairs,” Doc Solitcz finally said, examining an oreocarya longiflora through his magnifying glass.
Buster shouldered his gear and ascended a narrow staircase that swayed precariously as he climbed. At the top, the height of the loft was a mere five-foot-five. Buster was unable to stand straight when up there and was forced to walk around bent at the waist—as if receiving a Japanese ambassador for the first time. There was nothing up there except a single bed. Buster sat on it. He wondered what he should do next. He didn’t want to intrude and pacing was awkward.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Nothin’.”
“Come down here, then.” Doc Solitcz said.
Buster slowly descended the stairs, gradually straightening his frame.
“Look, McCaffrey, I’ll be honest with you: if it weren’t for my friend’s big yap, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, sir. And don’t think ah ain’t ah-ap-preesh-yi-atin’ him talkin’ up fer me.”
“Nothing against you, personally, but as you can see, this cabin’s less than nine hundred square feet and you’re taking up four hundred and fifty of it just standing there.”
“Well, sir, ah’m sorry ’bout that. Cain’t hep how big ah yam. Ah’ll try to stay outta yor way.”
“Well I appreciate that. Thank you.”
Buster just stood there.
“What is it?”
“Ah don’t want you ta think ah’m nosey, but ah were jes wunnerin…”
“Wunnerin’ what?”
“Ah were jes wunnerin’ how Mr. Gigglehorn here’s the only one who’s allowed to smoke at the breakfast table and talk back at Missus Stumplehorst.”
Doc Solitcz chuckled to himself and considered whether to tell him or not.
“Well, I don’t suppose I’d be telling tales out of school…” Doc Solitcz pushed a fresh plug of tobacco in his pipe. “Ever been to Nucla?”
“It’s ’bout ten miles from here, ain’t it?”
“Mr. Gigglehorn grew up out there…in a socialist commune.”
“Ah hear tell of it.”
“Well, Ned’s parents and about a hundred of them belonged to the International Workers of the World, Wobblies, they were called. And he was brought up with this cockeyed notion that it was one’s sole duty to promote the cause of the Workers…”
The doctor went on to say that as a grown man, Ned was a famous orator in these parts—always looking for a soapbox to stand on to address a crowd. Some of these speeches had been made at the Atomic Mine before they fired him in 1963. He was a regular speaker at the International Order of Odd Fellows on Main Street, but he wasn’t shy to exhort the drunks at the High Grade Bar—even interrupt people’s dinners at the Buttered Roll. One might think it would be hard to raise a crowd in an ignorant mining town to hear a speaker extol the virtues of Mar
x, Engels, and Mao Zedong or to be punished by Ned’s off-key rendition of “There is Power in a Union,” but Ned could always fill a house. Before cable and satellite made it possible to raise a television signal in Vanadium, going to see Gigglehorn was big entertainment; not to hear him speak, mind you, but to see him fight. The Atomic Mines Corporation, when notified Gigglehorn was holding forth, invariably sent their stooges to shut his trap. When this happened, the town was treated to an epic battle.
Gigglehorn had worked a pick and shovel since childhood. The muscles in his back piled all the way up to his shoulders to the back of his ears leaving little room for his neck. His forearms were as big as fire extinguishers—his fists, hard and knotty as the handles of a shillelagh. When he threw a punch, it wasn’t just his angry one hundred and eighty pounds he put behind it, but the power one only possesses from standing on the moral high ground. Sometimes it would take ten men to send him to the hospital—most of them joining him there with broken noses, jaws, ribs, and ruptured spleens. Eventually, Atomic Mines ran out of men who were willing to interfere with his First Amendment Rights and sent Sheriff Morgan.
Morgan carried two WWI-era Officer’s revolvers in .455 Eley. The revolver in his right holster was loaded with deadly dumdums. The cylinders in his left were loaded with bespoke cartridges filled with graphite, granite dust, and metal shavings. This was what Sheriff Morgan used on poor Gigglehorn. However, his ’coon face was not enough to deter Gigglehorn from maintaining his speaking schedule. He was only quiet when the sheriff and his deputies escalated the violence and cracked his skull open—putting him in a coma.
Gigglehorn was never “quite right” after he was discharged from the hospital two months later. He could be walking or riding in a pasture when suddenly he would be gripped by—what he would describe as—a magnetic force that wanted to pull his head to the earth. He would be forced to lay there—anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes—popping and jerking on the ground like a drop of water on a hot oiled pan. During one of these attacks, an associate noticed that Gigglehorn was having a seizure twenty feet from where a hydrology company recently drilled a dry well for the Stumplehorsts.
Improbable Fortunes Page 9
