His smile almost hurt when he found the jar in Jack’s shoe with a role of $100 bills that Jack had used to buy hookers. And when he found Jill’s “mad” money in her secret diary behind the fake part of her top drawer he just couldn’t help it any more. He started laughing.
Now, anyone who really knew Benny knew he never laughed. In fact most of Benny’s friends had never even seen him smile.
But on this night he laughed all the way to the alley, swinging the black handbag like it was a toy.
He laughed and even whistled a little down the three blocks to the back of the Safeway grocery store where he was going to go through the purses and toss them in the dumpster. Every time he thought how much money he had found and how easy it had been, he laughed. He reached the dumpster and opened the handbag. He was set for the next two weeks. He didn’t have to worry about a thing.
Well, maybe not.
SEVEN
KEN THE POSTAL worker was still mad and still at large. And at the moment he was sitting beside the trash compactor behind the Safeway grocery store wondering who he should kill next and who he was the maddest at.
He saw Benny walk up with the woman’s handbag in his hand and open it over the dumpster, smiling and whistling. And because Benny was smiling so much Ken just shot him.
Benny, being a big strong boy, dropped the handbag into the dumpster and staggered back.
Ken followed him, pointing the gun at him.
Benny choked a little because the bullet had hit his left chest, nicking his lung. But somehow he had enough strength to keep moving away from Ken.
And Ken just followed him.
Right down the side of the grocery store.
Right across the parking lot.
And right into the street, where a cop named Roger spotted what was going on and yelled for Ken to halt.
Ken shot Benny again, twice.
Then turned to shoot Roger. But Roger had been around a few blocks before and he fired first, twice, killing Ken.
While all this was going on out front of the grocery store, it was trash day around back. The huge dump truck manned by Jerry and Tom picked up the dumpster and emptied it, handbag and all.
Then, since the Safeway was their last stop for the day, they headed for the city landfill not realizing what they carried, or the fact that they had run over blood stains from a recent shooting. To them it just looked like V-Eight Juice.
They dumped their load in the smelly landfill and left.
Henry’s penis was buried under a truck-load of garbage and bad lettuce. It would never find its way to Henry now.
Well, maybe not.
EIGHT
THE NEXT DAY a plow driven by ex-lawyer Carl pushed the pile of garbage into a hole to move it out of the way so more trucks could dump their loads. Carl, like the justice system he used to play with, was mostly blind, so he never paid much attention to what he pushed around with the plow. He just moved it around to make room.
Constance Poe, a perky blonde with a good attitude and a lousy ex-husband, drove her Datsun pickup up to the edge of the landfill. She had been planning to move and was searching for a small house to buy and make her very own. But while she was searching, she figured she might as well be cleaning out her apartment and she had filled her Datsun pickup with junk to take to the dump.
She opened the door, wrinkled her nose at the sour smell, and choked back down the instant breakfast she had had earlier. She hated the smell of garbage.
Her big black dog Shep jumped out and went sniffing around. He, on the other hand, loved it.
“You be careful,” Constance yelled to Shep as she started tossing the junk from the back of her truck onto the other piles of garbage.
Carl’s moving of the pile had exposed the handbag and opened it slightly.
Shep sniffed the bag, stuck his nose inside, and pulled out Henry’s penis.
Then with one gulp he ate it and went back to sniffing around.
Now it was certain that Henry’s penis would never find its way back to Henry, and to the burial it deserved. Henry was clearly going into the afterlife dickless.
Well, maybe not.
NINE
CONSTANCE FINISHED UNLOADING the truck, got Shep back inside, and headed for home. All the way she left the windows down to clear out the smell of the dump and Shep rode with his head sticking out the window, his tongue hanging out, drool splattering the passenger door.
At home she cleaned up by taking a long shower and tossing her clothes into the washer.
Then she spent a quiet evening listening to the news and all the awful things that had been going on around the city that day.
The next morning, she called her real estate agent, who said there was this great little house where the owner had just died and did she want to take a look? It wasn’t officially for sale yet, but the agent knew the attorney who was handling the place and knew it was going to be on the market real soon. Constance could get a real jump on it.
Constance said it sounded a little disrespectful to the dead, but sure, why not, really. The owner of the house was dead, after all, so who would really care. She and Shep piled into the truck and met the agent, Selma, at the house.
The house was a mess, with unwashed dishes and lots of garbage everywhere.
But to Constance it had possibilities.
And the back yard had this great hot tub. Blue, with great tile around it.
The agent didn’t mention that the previous owner had died in the hot tub. What Constance didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt her, the agent figured.
And while they talked about the house, Shep took a shit.
Right beside the hot tub.
Henry’s penis had come home.
When Constance moved in she planted a wonderful flower garden beside the hot tub and one flower grew even bigger than all the rest, right from the spot where Shep had shit.
Well, maybe not.
What Came Before…
Nineteen-year-old Boston native Jimmy Gray had been traveling with his parents and older brother, Luke, headed west to find a new home and new riches.
Before even reaching Independence, they were attacked and robbed by Jake Benson and his gang. Jimmy’s parents were killed, his brother wounded.
In one of the wildest towns in all of American history, Jimmy Gray, a sheltered, educated son of a banker from Boston suddenly finds himself very, very much alone.
But then through some luck, he finds other young men about his age and down on their luck who might be able to help him.
Together, the five of them head west after Benson.
They end up hunting buffalo as he always dreamed of doing, but then they are hit with a massive flash flood and Jimmy is left alone, his friends more than likely dead.
Luckily, they all meet up again and are all safe. So they continue west, knowing that Benson is just ahead of them.
Suddenly they come upon Benson and his men killing a farm family. They manage to get one of the men separated from the others, but in a fall he accidently dies.
So they scatter to meet up later at a camp. They managed that but found a survivor of the killings. So one of them had to go back with the kid while the others followed Benson.
They caught him once again terrorizing a small wagon train and managed to scare him and his men off.
But then they had to cross the forty-mile desert. And right from the start, things started off deadly.
Then, in the middle of the worst part of the desert, they find a wagon train, horses stolen, water gone, only women and children left to die.
But what can they do? If they try to take them along, everyone will die.
They decide they can’t leave them and take them, barely making it to the river. Barely.
PART THIRTY-ONE
BACK INTO THE DESERT
JIMMY CRESTED OVER the ridge and looked at the deadly Forty Mile Desert. Its rolling sand seemed to stretch forever.
He and his friends had just mad
e it across that desert. They had barely escaped the intense heat and lack of water the first time across.
Now they were riding back into the desert.
Again.
Into the very good chance of death.
Again.
Jimmy felt more scared this time than the first time. Now he knew the dangers, and how close, very close, the desert had come to killing them all.
He remembered the intense agony of every step, the thirst, the feeling of fighting off losing consciousness and just falling into the hot sand.
Yet, within five days of beating the desert the first time, they were going to challenge it yet again.
This kind of stupidity he was sure was what got people killed in the west. And up until now, all of them working together had been pretty smart. At least, they had survived.
Challenging the Forty Mile Desert a second time wasn’t smart.
After making it across the desert the first time, they had stayed for three days on the banks of the Truckee River, camping with the women and children they had rescued.
Jimmy had not minded camping next to the river that long since the time allowed him to get to know Caroline a little better. She was his age and her father had been killed in a river crossing in the Wyoming Territory. It was just Caroline, her mother, and her little sister trying to make it to a homestead they had in California. She had no idea what they were going to do next, now that their wagon and all their supplies were lost.
For the first two evenings, Jimmy and the rest his friends had talked among themselves about giving up on their chase of the killer, Benson, and helping the women over the mountains and into California.
But by the third day, they still hadn’t decided what to do.
Jimmy’s goal was to track Benson and stop him, get the deed to the gold mine back, and make Benson pay somehow for killing his parents and all the other people he and his men had killed along the trail from Independence.
But at the same time, Jimmy couldn’t leave these women and children alone without food or supplies.
Joshua had suggested they just stay near the river helping the women recover for a few days and an answer might present itself, but then when pushed, he had just smiled and not said any more. He clearly had a plan, but he wasn’t sharing that plan with any of the rest of them, no matter how much they pushed him.
His only comment was simply to say, “It’s too crazy to talk about yet.”
None of them had seemed to mind the stay at the river either. The shade of the big cottonwood trees and the coolness of the river kept them all comfortable.
Truitt spent his time learning how to cook new recipes from the women, which was just fine by Jimmy and the rest.
Zach struck up a friendship with a girl named Sandra, and they spent a couple evenings walking along the river bank after dinner.
Longfeather was just happy that they were giving the horses time to rest. His passion was clearly those seven horses, and keeping them well.
Josh spent most of his time with his feet dangling in the cool water writing in his notebook, and every time he finished a story, C.J got to be the first to read it.
It was also Josh and C.J. who had enough reading to know some basic medical help for the older women who were slow to recover. Long as well had a few wilderness cures, as he called them, and they all three learned from one of the older women on how to treat sun-burned skin.
So it was three days well spent, as far as Jimmy was concerned, even though they might be getting farther and farther behind Benson.
On the evening of the third day, the wagon company that the Wild Boys had helped save from Benson back on Goose Creek arrived at the river, all of them splashing into the water just as the Wild Boys had done when they had arrived, even though it turned out they hadn’t run out of water.
They were all happy to see each other again, and over dinner that night, Jimmy told the new arrivals what Benson had done to the women’s wagon company.
They were all shocked, and said they had wondered what happened when they saw the men and wagons.
It was at that point that Josh told everyone about his plan. With enough men and horses, Josh thought they could go back and rescue the women’s wagons.
Jimmy hated the idea.
Hated it.
Period.
The last thing he wanted was to go back into that desert.
Ever.
If he had to go back east to get his brother, Luke, he would go north and go on the Oregon Trail before crossing that desert again. As far as he was concerned, Josh had lost his mind.
But the men from the second wagon company who had just come off the desert thought it was possible, and the light in Caroline’s eyes at the thought of having her family things back made Jimmy keep his mouth shut and think about it.
After talking with Long about the horses, and thinking about it for a few hours, he knew Josh was right.
He still hated the idea.
But he knew it was a good idea to go back into the desert for this reason.
Two days later, after the new wagon company’s horses were well rested and watered, they set Josh’s plan in motion.
Zach, Long, and Jimmy took all seven of their horses and loaded them with water bags and canteens and enough food and salty jerky to last for a day.
Three men from the new wagon company also went with them with nine of their horses. The plan that Josh had come up with would save five of the women’s wagons.
If it worked.
They left after dinner, as the air was starting to cool near the river.
As Jimmy rode out of camp with a wave from Caroline, his only hope was to see her and the river again.
PART THIRTY-TWO
THE PLAN
THE RIDE BACK to the women’s wagons, on rested horses, actually didn’t take very long. Going through the first time, it had seemed to take forever to walk from the wagons to the river. But being fresh, rested, and on horseback, riding fast and after dark, the ride back out into the desert took less than four hours.
That eased Jimmy’ worries a little, but not much.
They were back in the middle of the sand and there were still a bunch of things that could go wrong.
Very wrong.
When they reached the women’s wagons, the sun was not even starting to color the morning sky, but the moon gave them more than enough light to work by.
They emptied the personal possessions of the women from two of the most damaged wagons into the five wagons that seemed to be in the best shape. They shifted some of the load around so that two of the wagons were much lighter than the other three. Two wagons had to be pulled through the sand with just two horses each. The heavier wagons would have four horses in harness.
They moved the men that Benson had killed, and the two dead women, and laid them out to one side of the two wagons they were leaving behind.
Then, with a few words from one of the older men, Jimmy and C.J and Zach covered the bodies with a little sand and put a makeshift cross near them. It was the best they could do for the dead in the little time they had dared spend.
Jimmy knew it was much more than most people who died on this desert got.
They didn’t bother even covering the body of the dead killer. He wasn’t worth their time as far as Jimmy was concerned. Jimmy was just glad that Benson only had one man left in his gang.
With everyone riding in the wagons, they headed back to the river before sunrise.
So far, the plan seemed to be going perfectly.
So far.
But the Forty Mile Desert was the most deadly stretch of trail that Jimmy could ever imagine. He wasn’t about to go underestimating it now. Just being out on it again was crazy.
Zach drove one of the two light wagons with Jimmy riding along, since they were the two most inexperienced with wagons. Between the two of them, they managed to stay close to the wagon in front of them.
Long drove the other two-horse light wagon.
The men from the wagon company, with the experience of getting wagons all the way from Independence, drove the other three.
It got hot, very hot, sitting up on that wagon seat as the morning wore on and the sun climbed overhead.
Jimmy managed to keep his face in the shade of his hat and his hands and arms out of the sun as much as possible.
The sand kicked up by the horses pelted his skin like fine shot from a gun, and his eyes felt like they were coated in sandpaper.
Both he and Zach were constantly washing their eyes out.
The lead wagon driver drove the horses at a good pace and stopped every hour to rest them. Every hour they also rotated the horses between teams of two on the light wagons, and teams of four on the heavy wagons.
They all drank their fill of water, and gave the horses as much as they wanted as well. They had brought enough water with them to drink at that pace for a day. But if something happened to slow them down, they were going to have to cut back quickly.
Much to Jimmy’ relief, nothing happened.
They crested over the rise above the river in just under ten hours, and were welcomed back into camp near the river with a wonderful dinner, just twenty-four hours from the time they had left.
The smile on Caroline’s face that evening when she saw her family’s things was worth the trip back into the desert for Jimmy. She had even kissed him on the cheek to thank him, and then she made sure that he promised to come by their new homestead outside of Sacramento.
It was a kiss that Jimmy would always remember, and a promise he planned on keeping.
PART THIRTY-THREE
BACK ON THE CHASE
THE NEXT DAY, Jimmy waved at Caroline one last time, and then he and his friends left the Truckee River and headed up into the hills for Virginia City. They still had to somehow find Benson again, and stop him from killing any more people.
Smith's Monthly #11 Page 4
