Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “Goddamn you, Gigglehorn. What have I got to do to shut that yap of yours?” Gigglehorn answered by grabbing the sheriff’s balls and trying with his last bit of strength to twist them off. Sheriff Morgan, in excruciating pain, fired his gun, sending a load of graphite and steel shavings into Ned’s face.

  “My eyes!” Gigglehorn screamed in agony.

  After the Vietnam War, the doctors at the VA hospital had assured Shep Dudival’s mother that one day her son would snap out of whatever nightmare he had been living. Dudival looked down at Ned Gigglehorn, ’coon-faced. And he woke up.

  “I threw her out the helicopter,” Dudival said quietly.

  Sheriff Morgan, in a crouched position trying to restore order to his scrotum, gathered himself and faced Deputy Dudival. There was no question that he had a weak link in his midst.

  “What the hell was that about?” Deputy Dudival had his eyes glued to Gigglehorn writhing on the ground.

  “Nothing,” Dudival replied dully. Sheriff Morgan lifted Dudival’s Smith & Wesson out of his service holster and clapped it in his hand.

  “Then shoot that communist sonofabitch!” Dudival slowly raised his eyes from Gigglehorn to his boss. He looked at him in a way that Sheriff Morgan did not like. Then Dudival raised the gun. The barrel started to come Sheriff Morgan’s way—prompting him to quickly lay his hand on the butt of his own pistol. Behind Dudival’s back, Deputy Grizzard was posed to sap him, but Dudival reholstered his weapon and bent down to Gigglehorn.

  “What’s gotten into you, man?”

  Dudival didn’t answer. To Morgan’s utter astonishment, he lifted Gigglehorn to his feet, threw him over his shoulder and carried him out to his cruiser. If he took Gigglehorn to the miner’s clinic, they would probably kill him. Instead, he drove to Dr. Solitcz’s still extant house. Gigglehorn, as it turned out, would lose only partial sight in his left eye, but his face would be blackened for life. Only prostitutes, from then on, would ever call him “handsome.”

  Sheriff Morgan and Deputy Grizzard smuggled the two union organizers onto a freight train in Grand Junction. Authorities found the dead men the next afternoon in Chicago. The bartender at the Suit Yourself was frightened enough of Morgan to testify to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation that the union men had been drinking in his bar then left out the back entrance. That was all he knew. There was no one to connect Morgan to the murders except his deputies.

  Two weeks later, Grizzard was found in his skivvies floating face down in Svendergard’s quarry. He had apparently been drinking—this according to Sheriff Morgan who wrote the coroner’s report himself. Dudival did not need to be paranoid to believe that Morgan was “tidying things up.” What had been keeping him alive so far was Morgan’s hope that Dudival could somehow change Jimmy’s sexuality. But that bit of matchmaking had come a cropper and Dudival knew he was now—like the late Deputy Grizzard—a liability.

  The miner’s union, in the meantime, did not take the murder of their comrades well. They, like everybody else, knew who was responsible and implemented their vendetta. Hubris, as is so often the case, ended up being Sheriff Morgan’s undoing. His assumption that he was at the top of the Vanadian food chain caused him to violate the cardinal rule for any man who carries a gun for a living: never be a creature of habit, and never let your guard down. Morgan arose everyday at the same time. Had coffee at the same café at the same time. Had his lunch at the High Grade at the same time and took his nap in the alley next to the Geiger Motel at the same time. People who do things the same way all the time are a joy to assassins—in this case, two large men from the union who came to town dressed like lumberjacks and checked into the Victorian Vanadium Hotel. They claimed they were in town looking for work. This information was passed on, in the style of the Romanian Secret Police, from informant to informant to Sheriff Morgan. He saw them once or twice walking around town in heavy woolen trousers and plaid shirts and swallowed their cover story.

  The special at the High Grade on Fridays featured an open-faced turkey sandwich on a slice of white bread, covered in giblet gravy with mashed potatoes and a side of cranberry sauce for $3.99. Sheriff Morgan polished off his lunch with a glass of milk and a piece of rhubarb pie. He left a small tip, but didn’t pay. He never paid for anything in Vanadium. Such was the fear he inspired in everyone. Grabbing a peppermint from the bowl at the register, he walked across the street to the liquor store. He didn’t go inside, but around to the back where he examined the lock on the door. He opened a set of picks in a leather wallet and proceeded to select the correct combination that would allow him to open the door in the wee hours of the morning, setting off the burglar alarm and bringing Deputy Dudival to the call. After going through several picks, Morgan found the two that worked and wrapped them with scotch tape so he could identify them in the dark. When Dudival came through the door that night, he would then shoot him with an old twelve-gauge goose gun he kept for such purposes, loaded with untraceable blue whistlers. The plan implemented, Sheriff Morgan warbled a little bird whistle as he walked back across the street to his cruiser and pulled it into the alley beside the Geiger Motel. It was shady there and was his favorite place to nap, or “coop” in policeman’s parlance. In no time at all he was snoring up a storm, oblivious to the lumbermen who crossed the street behind him carrying a two-man saw. Very deliberately, they set to work on the telephone pole behind the sheriff’s car—timing each saw stroke with the sheriff’s own adenoidal wood cutting. It took them eight exchanges of the saw and a gentle push to send the telephone pole crashing down on top of the cruiser—flattening the sheriff’s skull with such force that his brains extruded out his ears like Frosty Freeze.

  Deputy Dudival watched this rendition of a classic Tex Avery cartoon through the Venetian blinds of his dentist’s office. Pericoronitis had demanded the removal of both his third upper molars. The righteous police officer in Dudival was telling him to get up from the dentist’s chair and do something about this, but the mask of laughing gas over his mouth and nose was telling him to sit back down and enjoy the show. And so, he took a deep, deep breath of gas and watched as the men dropped their saw, their gloves, walked calmly to a dark sedan and drove away.

  When it came time to make the arrangements for the funeral, Deputy Dudival was at Jimmy’s side handling everything. He chose the coffin, a mahogany laminated “Plainsman.” A guest list was comprised befitting a man of the sheriff’s stature, included the Mine’s top brass, the mayor, fellow sheriffs from neighboring counties and the Vanadium High School band. They played “Requiem” on Jews’ harps—for this was years before Buster, with Mr. Mallomar’s checkbook, had supplied the high school with real musical instruments. On the day, more than three hundred people showed up at Lone Pine Cemetery—some, admittedly, were there to make sure the sheriff’s demise was not just another Vanadium rumor. The President of the Vanadium Rotary, in lieu of a padre, spoke a few words over the Colorado-flagged coffin—for Sheriff Morgan was not a religious man. Jimmy didn’t cry or in any way betray her real emotions—one of them a nonspecific feeling that Dudival could have done more to protect her grandfather. After the funeral, Dudival considered turning in his badge, but didn’t. Jimmy was exposed without her grandfather. Whether she realized it or not, she needed him. And, of course, he loved her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Blood

  On the way home from the Big Dog Ranch, Jimmy stopped to see the only person who knew how handle a situation that had gotten out of control. Driving right into the walkway of Lone Pine Cemetery, she parked her truck and then staggered from headstone to headstone—at one point, resting at Buster’s mother’s grave before moving on to her own kin. Sheriff Morgan had a simple headstone with an engraved sheriff’s star and the word Order. Jimmy thought the engravers had made a mistake by not having it read Law and Order, but Deputy Dudival, the one who bought the headstone, felt the bastard didn’t deserve to be memorialized w
ith the word Law.

  Jimmy eased herself down onto the grass and filed her report. Then she listened for a good forty-five minutes. When her instructions had been completely issued, she arose painfully to her feet and placed a .455 Colt cartridge casing on Morgan’s headstone next to the many others. She felt better already. There was much to do. Fixing Buster’s love life had not been a high priority, but woe onto Cord Travesty who just happened to pull up to Jimmy at the town’s only stoplight and catch her jaundiced eye.

  b

  Destiny Stumplehorst was asleep that night in Cord Travesty’s bed when the phone rang. Since Cord was never sure if another girl was calling, he answered it.

  “Hello?” There was silence. “Who is this?” Click. He angrily slammed down the phone and crawled back into bed. “It was a hang up,” he said.

  About fifteen seconds later the phone rang again.

  “Fuck,” Travesty said rolling over and opening his eyes. “This is getting old.”

  “You want me to answer it?” asked Destiny.

  “No, that’s okay.” Travesty picked up the phone. “Hello?” Again, silence. “You assholes!” He slammed the phone down again. “Godammit. I’m gonna have to take an Ambien to get back to sleep. You want one?”

  “Sure,” said Destiny, at this point in her life loathe to turning down anything in the drug department. They each took a sleeping pill and then tried to get back to sleep. About two minutes later the phone rang once again.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to get it?”

  “Get it,” said Travesty at wit’s end.

  “Hello?” said Destiny. But then she heard something on the phone that made her eyes widen. She put the phone down. “I think I heard Maple.”

  “Who the fuck is Maple?”

  “Maple’s my horse.”

  “Your horse called you?”

  “I could hear her in the background.”

  Travesty sat up in bed.

  “Hey, look, I’ve been meaning to say something to you. You’re doing too much coke. It’s supposed to be for recreation and you’ve been making it your fucking life’s work.”

  “I know what my own horse sounds like. I heard my horse.”

  “Okay, never mind. Let’s just go to sleep and hope she’s used up her calling card minutes.” Travesty rolled over once again and put the pillow over his head. As irrational as this was, the phone call worried her. She turned toward the window and was trying to get back to sleep when she heard a horse whinny in the field beside the house. Destiny pulled back the curtains and saw a horse, about fifty yards away, standing in the rain.

  “Maple!” she yelled out the window. Travesty sat upright again.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me! What the hell is going on here?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s Maple! She must’ve gotten out of the barn.”

  “And what…she called to tell you she was coming over?”

  Destiny was already putting her clothes on. Travesty looked nervously out the window.

  “Something’s really fucked up about this.”

  “Hey, Cord, I’ve been meaning to say something to you. You’re doing too much coke. It’s supposed to be for recreation.”

  “What are doing?”

  “I’m gonna go out there and ride her home.”

  “Don’t. Don’t go out there,” he suddenly said, paranoid.

  “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  Destiny went downstairs, not seeing Jimmy sitting on the sofa in the dark, a bundle of dynamite on the glass cocktail table covered in the faint contrails of a white powder next to a gold-plated razor blade. As soon as Destiny went outside, Jimmy turned on the gas in the oven. She closed the windows in the kitchen and sealed it up by placing a couple of wet towels along the bottom of the door. Jimmy slipped on her oxygen mask and waited for the gas to accumulate. When she figured she had reached a threshold amount for a good blow, she laid some fuse out the back door, lit it, and got back on her horse.

  A mile away Destiny heard the explosion. She thought it was thunder. Days later, people were still finding dozens of For Sale—Contact Cord Travesty signs that Travesty had stored in the attic, scattered around town.

  Jimmy rode back to her ranch and laid down for a little rest. When the Big Ben wind-up alarm clock went off an hour later, she tried to sit up but first leaned over to hawk up a glob of sputum into a paper bag she kept by the side of the bed. Her vision was going downhill and she had a headache to beat the band. Laboriously, she slung her legs over the side of the bed and forced down a 400ml Dilaudid with the backwash from a can of beer. It took her the next fifteen minutes just to pull on her boots. Once on her feet, she steadied herself against the workbench and pulled down an old canvas rucksack. She monkey-barred her way over to the Kelvinator and opened the freezer door to remove a three-pound tri-tip that she’d carved off a steer that she alien-mutilated a couple of months ago. She perused her old dynamite collection and selected four sticks that seemed to sweat the least nitroglycerine.

  It took her four exhausting attempts to throw a saddle over Nicker. By the time she was done, she had to walk him over to a fence to use it to mount up—like she had taught a thousand undersized children. She pulled a rain slicker over her oxygen tank and took off on a lope toward Egnar, home to the Busy Bees.

  Cookie Dominguez’s headquarters was an old farmhouse attached to a dilapidated 1950s Desert Breeze trailer. Fifty years ago, a farmer had lived there with the dream of getting rich growing Echinacea for homeopathic drugstores. Today, the staunch traditions of western free enterprise and entrepreneurship continued with Cookie’s production of ten pounds of crank a week.

  Cookie’s gang all lived in the farmhouse. The trailer was filled with their equipment and the toxic chemicals for producing methamphetamine. Since the attempted bust by the DEA, Cookie had acquired two scarred-up Rottweilers from the dog pound. As soon as the dogs smelled Jimmy, they bolted out the pet door into the dark like torpedoes from an aluminum submarine in a redneck navy. Jimmy could have just shot them, but she had nothing against a couple of dogs that didn’t know any better. She calmly reached into her rucksack and cut the tri-tip in half with her grandfather’s sheepfoot folding knife and tossed a piece to each dog. They immediately stopped their snarling and ran off coveting their meat.

  With the rain and thunder making so much noise, she also didn’t feel it necessary to dismount and sneak up on the place Injun-style. She simply rode up to the house and walked in as if she’d been invited for Sunday dinner. There was a flickering blue light coming from the living room. Ironically, Benito Sandoval, one of the gang members, had decided to stay in this night to see who was going to be eliminated on American Idol. It must have taken Benito a ten count to realize he wasn’t alone. He slowly turned and was startled to find Jimmy—wrapped in a green army slicker head to foot, an oxygen mask over her mouth, dripping water all over the floor. He kind of laughed at the absurdity of her.

  “Who…the…fuck…are…you?”

  Jimmy, who never liked it when people didn’t recognize her, promptly shot him in the head. Then she took a moment to have a look around. She had to chortle at the condition of the place. This was definitely the interior decorating style of a gang on methamphetamines. Tweakers always have to be doing something with their hands. The microwave had been taken apart, as had the washer and drier. The stereo had been disassembled. Pieces of the dishwasher were arranged across the faded linoleum floor like a Rauschenberg. The parts of a vacuum cleaner were laid out the way cats take a chipmunk apart. There were posters of Hiram Graythwaite, the avuncular-looking leader of the Aryan Leaders of Tomorrow—a group quartered in Idaho—a Millet bullet press, at least ten thousand rounds of .223 ammunition, boxes of institutional peanut butter, and hundreds of cans of Spaghetti-Os. Cookie was obviously readying himself for his
own apocalypse. The gang also seemed to have a predilection for 500–piece jigsaw puzzles. Jimmy looked at her pocket watch. It was 1:30, closing time at the High Grade. She thought she better finish up.

  b

  Soon, Cookie Dominguez arrived home with his posse in the pouring rain. He didn’t go inside right away. He was just as cautious about entering his own home as Sheriff Dudival was. He stood in the rain and called his dogs. They barked: “all clear.” Cookie entered his house followed by the others, but pulled up short when he saw Benito in his BarcaLounger—the dogs sitting obediently by each armrest.

  “Hey, fucker. Whadaya think you’re doin’ sittin’ in my chair?”

  The other gang members clucked at Benito’s insubordination. He must really be drunk, they thought. Cookie slapped him on the side of his head, and his hand came away covered with blood.

  “What the fuck,” Cookie whispered and tiptoed to his bookcase pulling out a loaded Walther 9mm pistol from behind his first editions of Hiram Graythwaite’s neo-Nazi literature. Silently, he signaled to the others to get behind him while he ventured into the lab. Very carefully, he stepped through the hole that had been chainsawed in the wall that led to the trailer. Cookie strained to hear a sign of the intruder, but was frustrated by the volume of the television. A new contestant on American Idol was gratingly singing—in the ersatz operatic style currently popular—about how this was the moment that she would not mess up this time. Cookie turned and hissed to his colleagues.

  “Hey, one of you assholes turn that fuckin’ thing off!”

  One of gang hurried back to the living room and yanked the clicker out of the dead man’s hand. He pushed the button and—in that split second—realized that it wasn’t a TV clicker at all, but a garage door opener. When pushed, it sent an electronic signal to the garage door receiver. The receiver light turned red, and sent an electric current to the blasting caps Jimmy had wired to dynamite all around the lab. The blast ignited the multiple tanks of anhydrous ammonia used to convert the ephedrine from pounds of generic Sam’s Club Sudafeds into snortable methamphetamine. Jimmy didn’t bother to look back as the buildings, motorcycles, nails, bone, flesh, glass, and thousands of .223 rounds combined and shrieked through the night air. One more stop and she could go back to bed.