by Darcia Helle
It's just not possible to tell this story without profanity, so yes, there is profanity. When the story is about a place called Shit-Struck…you're just already there and have to deal with it. The thing about Shit-Struck was that everyone who was there, they wanted out. Andie Jo could tell it was getting worse, because she'd been counting the pass-ons. There were seven now in the last year. That's good business in a small town when you get one a month.
When everyone in town wants out of town, you've got a problem town. When people arrange their demise so they could finally leave, you must be talking about Shit-Struck. It didn't start out that way - whenever that was – when someone decided a town needed to be where this one was. No one could even remember why the town was there in the first place.
There were man-made hills of tailings about a half mile east from town. They kept the sunrise from being real, for thirty whole minutes later in town than for the folks on the other side of those hills. Andie Jo had a plan for stuff like that extra, unused dirt, but her best plan had just come to her as she was thinking of the first plan.
Shearstuck, California may have had something to do with the uranium mining back in the Fifties, but no one was really sure anymore. It only had ten good years behind itself, when something went wrong with the money and the place began to become what it became. Surrounded by dusty government land, most of which had abusive warning signs posted on every dirt trail, Shearstuck seemed to turn into dust itself. Lots of years later the tired locals were drinking late at the Bar one morning, and one of the smartest called the place Shit-Struck and…well, it stuck.
Situated stupidly, it was only a few miles off the interstate, but there had been no direct exit made to the town. You could see the lights at night, but if you happened to run out of gas, it was a painful walk through scrub and gullies to get to the only filling station in town. Interstate motorists always complained how far they had to drive, just to get gas, and why didn’t someone put a truck stop out on the highway? Locals accepted the complaints, and the cash, and never had an answer for the question.
Andie Jo had a wicked story to tell, when someone would ask what a girl like her was doing there. But she didn't get anything of such questions from the regulars anymore; they happily purchased her beer, but they were all wary of her.
She loved dirt. She liked to do things with dirt. Shit-Struck had an abundance of it.
People said just talking to Andie Jo could mess them up a bit, and she liked that - but she didn't like they thought she was weird - when the subject was her interest in dirt. There were a lot of things one could do with dirt and her current thing was called the Reptilliarium. It amounted to nearly a dozen big stock tanks that she had pulled out of town from the bankrupt lumber yard. The road still had the gouges in the pavement; people teased her that she could have rolled them all out and spared some bumps for everyone else. She never even smiled with them at that.
But, she had the tanks all buried to their rims in the back of the Bar, all fenced in like they were precious. Each one held a handful of the biggest and nastiest snakes anyone could imagine, or look at for a dollar. Didn't rain enough to worry about the tanks filling up and the snakes getting out, but they were filled in a bit with dirt to give the snakes something natural to slide round on. Andie Jo fed them road kill mostly, and sometimes she hunted rats for them with a pistol, in back of the Bar, when the road kill was scarce. But the Reptilliarium was only a good idea to her, and not her first. Her best idea was going to change her life, and it wouldn't even let her escape Shit-Struck.
She had a plan to stay there and be just fine.
It was pass-on number seven that started her thinking. She imagined the conversation with the dearly departed that she could have had,
"What the hell happened to you? Didn’t you see that truck?"
"Yes."
"Did you try to move?"
"No. I was waiting for it."
He was definitely a candidate for her new dream situation, because he found his way out of town and it was poetic. There was only one road in, and it was the only way out. When he left town – dead - it was in that out direction, and so Andie Jo had a plan to put her first plan on the back burner.
Instead of opening the Bar the next morning, she pissed everyone off by walking down that road. They figured she just had enough of the place, so they looked around for a way to get the Bar door open. What she had wondered, was how quickly a dead guy could get out of town, and since the dead sort of floated along in all the movies, she just sort of floated out of town the way they did. Folks at the Bar were sure Andie Jo was history.
The door turned out to be an easy pry.
Floating didn't tire her out at all and she guessed she was a dozen miles away from Shit-Struck when she decided to sit down and rest underneath the only trees nearby. That was the spot where she would make her dreams come true. The ditch wasn’t too deep to drive across, and she hadn’t seen a fence for miles. All she needed was one of the abandoned trailers in town and a plyboard sign.
That’s a very cheap corporate startup for sure.
Dead people leaving town would get about that far, she guessed, before they decided to stop for a while, and so… she would give them a place for their first rest, on the way to their resting place. It just made too much sense to be left to someone else’s creativity.
So, she would open the Last Chance Motel and Mausoleum. Her guests would be dead people, on their way to the Everlasting.
She would be popular in a place like Shit-Struck because the clientele was steadily increasing. The trailer was going to be tough though; she didn't know if any of them still had their tires, but that was just fine-print stuff to her.
One week, and a nearly ruined pickup truck later, Andie Jo was at the same spot; she had peed on it, and in a place like Shit-Struck, well, the spot was still sort of there when she got back with the trailer.
For dead people, there would be no need for electricity, TV, water, other stuff like that; those ran up costs when you only rented to people with liquid blood. She had spray painted the sign and leaned it up next to the door just in time for one of the locals to drive by, heading into town, and they drove in front of the trailer in circles, yelling at her to ask if the Bar was open. Their brakes were bad and they couldn't stop, so, the circles.
She told them she thought it was open, but they should go on in and see; it was only a dozen more miles.
Andie Jo waited only three days before her first true guest came in the kitchen window. She would have been sad that the fellow died, but now he was a client, so the sadness didn't fit the situation. They just looked at one another, and she suddenly realized that talking to the dead might have been something she needed to look into beforehand. She wasn’t sure how.
"Do you have a room?"
The first question in her head was answered.
"Yup,” she replied.
"Is it nice?"
She looked at him sideways, "Does it matter?"
The answer took a couple of seconds thought.
"I'll take it. But, how do I pay for it?"
"Well I'm flexible about that. I figure you lived long enough to keep some brains when you died, so to speak, and that you could work that out on your own. So, it depends on you. What can you pay for the room?"
The guest thought a few minutes more and said, "I'll be right back."
A few minutes after he went out the window again, there was a crunch of gravel in the yard just off the road. A lady in a nice dress came in the front door and asked if she could have a glass of water. Andie Jo wondered who could look so pretty as they passed-on and why would they need the water? But she answered yes, and gave the lady a drink.
With a really neat, completely blank expression, the woman took off a huge ring and set it on the counter in front of Andie Jo. When the lady walked back out the door, the guest, surprisingly, more or less poured out of her and was back at the counter. Realizing that was a live one, Andie was very glad the lady had been dre
ssed because that pouring-out business would have been too gross to watch. But there he was again, hardly creeped out at what he’d done, and asked her if that sort of payment was the kind of thing she was expecting.
She picked up the ring and looked through it at his dried up complexion and smiled with satisfaction.
"That will do very well. Do you mind sharing the room?"
"Do you have other guests?"
"No, but I just didn't know what might be going on in town, someone might wander out later, just trying to be prepared." The guest looked off in the direction of town and was quiet for a moment.
"Not tonight, at least," he said.
"You get room number one," and Andie Jo pointed to the end of the trailer and tried on the ring the lady had left behind.
"Hey?" she yelled as he floated down to the end, "would you ever mind if someone played golf over your grave? I'm taking a survey."
"No, I don't guess that would ever bother me at all."
“Man, is that ever the answer I wanted to hear…” she muttered, wiggling her hand to make the ring flash in the sunlight from the kitchen window.
Another week later - and this time the pickup was toast - Andie Jo pulled the screeching second trailer right up behind the first. The right rear tires were completely gone, about two miles back, and she left more signature road marks for the locals to talk about.
She was open for business, and ready for a busy first season.
“What the hell is that girl doing out there?”
“I don’t know, but she’s getting some junk out of town. I bet those snakes are hungry. She’s been gone two weeks now.”
“I’m not feedin’ em,”
“Who are we gonna get to run the Bar?”
“It can run itself, I guess. Sort of like a really big vending machine.” And the few, really early locals laughed, and tossed a few more bills in the shoebox at the end of the Bar.
Twice that month Andie Jo had to run off some warm visitors. No, she didn’t have a spare room – town was only a few miles down the road, and who would want to stay in a dump like hers anyway? AND…YES!...that really is the name of her business.
“Last Chance Motel and Mausoleum? For sure?”
Andie pointed out the open front door, to her considerably more professional looking sign on the two-lane right of way.
“Wouldn’t have painted that if it wasn’t.”
She got the feeling, that laughter would piss her off after only a few more nosey breathers.
“Do I have a roommate?”
“No, Roger. Can’t you tell on your own when one of you arrives? Sheesh!”
“Oh, I’m sorry…you’re right.”
“And, haven’t I told you, stay in your room when a stray comes in the door? It might be a kid, and I can’t be scaring kids out here. They’ll shut me down for sure!”
“Yeah, I remember…I’m sorry.”
“God, being departed doesn’t mean you’re suddenly smarter, does it?”
“No, I guess not. I don’t seem to understand things any more than I did when I was alive.”
“Well, I forgive you. Just this one last time though!”
Beginning to wonder if she had made a serious error calculating the remaining live population in Shit-Struck, Andie Jo was surprised and a little relieved when someone’s pickup coughed to a standstill just shy of her front door a few weeks later.
The door down the hall opened, and just as quickly closed again.
She was about to smart off again at her guest, when the front door opened. She just stood there, behind the dusty kitchen counter, with a mason jar of apple juice in her hand when a stray walked boldly in. She was afraid to turn her gaze down the hallway.
“You’re out of Molson at the Bar, Andie.”
She continued to just stand there, not sure if she was all that happy to have a real voice to talk to, but she had to admit, it had been lonely. Praying that there was nothing otherworldly floating up the hallway, she only smiled.
“Aren’t you comin’ back, ever? None of us know where you buy your stock. We’d hate to have you close the place up, even though…you don’t seem to be runnin it much anyhow.”
Andie Jo moved her eyes around a bit, not to look at anything really, but when her brain gears got moving, so did her eyes.
“Roger! Can you watch things out here for a few hours?”
She did look into the hallway then, and seemed to listen, but the local saw there was nothing to look at. Whatever the local wondered didn’t matter. She smiled at him and took one last sip of her juice.
“Chet, I guess I’m free for a bit. Let’s go restock that cooler in town.”
Never having thought to ask how long he intended to stay, Andie Jo suddenly had a motel manager. Her best idea was becoming almost too easy to be true. She wouldn’t even bother hurrying back.
She did hurry back anyway. Only thirty-one dollars and twelve cents in the damned shoebox, there had also been two hundred dollars worth of stock pissed away. She spent a good hour blasting all the hangdog drunks, threatening to make them all drink Bud if they ever did that to her again. She called for a half delivery, and glared at Chet until he offered to take her back out to the Motel.
“No, Chet. You’re gonna do better than that. The delivery will be here tomorrow, you are going to load it into the cooler. I’m taking your truck for a few days.”
She fingered the obscenely large-set ring in her pocket as she made Chet wince under her stare. A short time, and very short conversation later, Andie Jo was pulling away from the Motel in Chet’s rattling old beater, on her way to find out just how rich that pretty thirsty lady had been when she started shedding jewelry in the dusty kitchen. Roger was pretty sure things were going to be quiet for a few more days. He had always wanted to go to Vegas, and hoped she had a nice time there.
She did.
Did she ever!
When a town is as parched and poor as Shit-Struck, it wouldn’t be surprising that it could smell wealth coming. Parades have been organized in smaller places, just because a pizza place was opening up. However, Roger was correct, things stayed quiet in town, even a few weeks after Andie Jo returned Chet’s pickup with a few less rattles. She was hardly in the Bar any more often, and only back a few days from whatever adventure she had gone to find, and she was seen driving something marginally better than Chet’s newly spruced guzzler. Nothing fancy, mind you, but the Barkeep was no longer walking as the result of her old pickup still being chained to that second trailer – she had shown up at the Bar one afternoon in something that was now the newest vehicle in town. Locals wondered the wrong way, hoping there might be some new brands of beer to try in the near future. Shit-Struck was truly stuck in its ways.
Not a goat-choking windfall, that ring had matched a few years earnings at the Bar at least. Andie Jo stood in her new Motel office – a cell phone on the dusty kitchen counter and a generator powered water cooler where the fridge used to sit – and she wrote out a few figures and made a few calls. Her best idea was about to breathe some life into her first idea. Roger was watching over her shoulder.
A small sigh caught their attention.
“Oh, neat!”
If Roger had been pleased, his face could no longer show it. If the new guest had been relieved, that couldn’t be discerned from her face either. They were similarly expressionless.
“Do you have a vacancy?” she asked quietly.
Andie Jo looked into the far-away eyes of someone she had never seen before; not even a glance. This was no dearly departed local. Andie wondered absently if there were some incorporeal referral service she didn’t know about, and hoped it didn’t come begging any fees.
“I don’t mind sharing,” the new guest continued.
Andie shot a glance at Roger.
No. The departed didn’t seem to think of such things anymore.
“Damn, that sucks,” Andie thought to herself.
“Yes, Sugar. I have plenty of r
ooms. Roger will help you pick one out, and whatever you two do after dark, I couldn’t care in the least,” she smiled. “We do charge a modest rate though.”
The slightly built spirit only stared, not the least hint of awareness in her eyes.
“But you don’t have to worry about that right this minute,” Andie suddenly gushed. “You can work that out anytime you like. Can’t she Roger?” and she made a swipe with her elbow, and regretted it because Roger seemed to crunch a bit at the touch, and he floated errantly to the end of the kitchen counter. “Sorry about that, Dude,” she winced.
“What kind of fee?” the gentle voice asked.
“Roger will fill you in on all that, Hon.”
“Alright.”
Andie Jo watched as her business doubled, and so did the pace of ideas in her mind.
“Roger? When were you thinking of leaving?” she asked a few minutes later, when he returned showing hardly any concern there was now an unattached female in his room.
“I’d not been thinking of that at all.”
“That’s wonderful! Now, what I really would like to know – and you are paid up in full, you got that?...good! – what I’d like to know, Roger, Dear, is if you can move around where you like right now. Can she move around wherever she likes?”
“But, she only just arrived?”
“Can she get payment from wherever I send her? Sheeeeeeesh!”
“Sure.”
She made no reply to that answer at all. But, she put to work the many muscles in her face which Roger could likely not move had they been on fire. Andie Jo smiled the biggest smile she’d made since learning in Vegas what that monstrous ring had been worth.
“Go find out your girlfriend’s name, Rog. I can’t be calling her ‘Hey you!’ okay?”
And she went back to her notepad, scratching out half a page of scribbled numbers.
The locals drank the Bar dry again twice more, neither time finding the correct and helpful sum in the shoebox as they had been warned to do. Two other guests had arrived at the Last Chance Motel, and shortly thereafter seemed to permanently depart.
Roger and his girlfriend, Daphne (Andie choked at hearing that), they were both still there, and just as settled as that oxidizing old pickup, which was seeming to try and coax the second trailer into some naughty activity. Daphne had been out a few times, to locate the payment that Andie Jo requested, but as yet had not put any cash, or cashable items, on the counter.
Andie suppressed a wicked urge to call her a dead-beat to her face.
It was after another fruitless journey through the kitchen window, because Roger always used it, that Daphne floated back to their room, and Andie glared at her behind her back.
She was about to yell something that would have been wicked, when Roger spoke up.
“Someone is coming.”
“A new guest?”
“Too far away to tell, and not from town.”
“Has Daph ever told you how she heard about us?”
“No.”
“Well, if we aren’t getting locals, where the Hell are they coming from – and, I sincerely hope you aren’t going there…”
Roger seemed unaware of her slipup.
“From the desert. He’s not alone.”
“You can help me, Roger – can’t you? If there is trouble, I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, I didn’t actually ask anyone’s permission to set this place up, you know? There might be some damned… darned…regulation against giving your kind a place to stop, you know? I might be breaking a lot of rules, you know?” She looked out the window, though it was entirely the wrong direction of the approaching guests. “Maybe I broke one really big rule, you know?”
“No, you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m sure of that.”
“I sincerely hope you are right, Dude.”
“These two are not happy though, I can tell that from here. Would you like me to go ask them anything?”
Andie was weeping inside with joy, that she had promoted the stiff to manager.
“Go get em, Roger.” And she followed him out – by using the front door – to go hide in her pickup truck behind the trailers.
“What does a ghost fight look like, really?” she wondered; he was taking a very long time to come back, with anyone.
Far too pleased with her own success to even consider any employee problems, Andie was suddenly overcome with dread; those two distant figures might have been coming for Roger, or Daphne. What color card would a ghost need, to work outside of the hereafter? “Oh, God,” she moaned, “I’ve got his weightless ass in trouble with some Outer Limits INS!”
Finally overcome with curiosity, she crept around to the front yard again, and stared into the distance all around, hoping to see anything out there, to either be relieved about, or afraid of all over again. There weren’t any ethereal lights in the sky in any direction; no unholy winds or sounds. It was just Shit-Struck silent as usual.
“Daphne? Hon?” she called out as she reached for the front door, “We need to get to know one another a little better, K babe?”
Roger was hovering near the cooler, and the two new guests were just on the other side of the counter from him. All three of them, staring off different directions, into some void….
“And you can come back with the payment whenever you wish,” Roger intoned.
“Christ on a cracker!”
Andie Jo never learned the names of those two guests. She couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them. If ever there were an all-encompassing void after life, it could be seen in their eyes. Not that one could even call those eyes anymore. Those two guys were the most lifeless lifeless that she could dream in her worst nightmare. Having them floating around was going to get every one of them in deep trouble, and she knew it. She would rip up every note of her first idea, just to get rid of those two. It’s just that Roger kept telling her to wait. He knew something, and she never wanted to hang around to hear from them what that was.
“They have the payment, they just can’t bring it themselves,” he would say.
Two weeks later, she was numb from her lips to her toes, as she watched two dusty kids ride away into the desert on their dirt bikes. Neither of them awake yet to the five thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills she had stuffed under their helmets. The two desert demons had vanished, after explaining to Roger and Daphne where the payment could be found – out in the desert.
Andie Jo stared at a satchel of money, which Roger had explained was a drug deal gone very badly, at least for the two desert demons. They had shot one another, point blank, and guessed that the Last Chance was as good a place to come clean as they were ever going to get. It took them a while to find anyone wandering around in that remote location, and it was good those kids were on dirt bikes. Neither one of them could have driven the cars that were still out there in the canyons of that waste.
Andie Jo hoped those kids found those cars. They were probably as sweet-tricked and untraceable as the hefty bag of bills that she was eager to put her face into.
“I’m not even going to count this,” she told herself. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not…I’m not.”
Shit-Struck rumbled, as it hadn’t since the mines closed, one morning a few months later. Andie Jo had not been seen that whole time, and a really savvy young woman took up residence behind the bar in the Bar, and yes, she was employed, full time, by Ms. Andie Joe. That rumbling morning an entire parade of earth moving equipment pulled into town, not just a dusty road crew looking for staging space, but an honest to goodness dealership of power equipment, it seemed – every yellow behemoth on a glimmering new trailer truck. These were brand new, monstrous diggers and pushers and trenchers of every sort imaginable.
Andie Jo was in the lead truck, wearing a white hard hat.
She parked the whole mess right in front of the Bar, and in half an hour that place was singing like an Irish pub in Chicago. The Dirt Works F
un Park had come to town, and those flatbeds were aimed right at the tailings piles just east of town. The very last trailer in the line wore an ice blue and sea green mobile office on its back, and if the locals had bothered to have a look at it, all the hourly fees for renting the massive toys was printed right outside the ticket window.
An amusement park for real men.
One that would have them coming from Hong Kong, and Sidney, and Houston, and Toronto, and she hoped, Paris and London. Shit-Struck might eat more dust on windy days, but it would live again.
Shit-Struck had struck it rich. And it only cost Andie her goat-choking yearly tax fees, and a couple thousand dollars a year lease on that horrendous pile of uranium-less tailings. Shit-Struck had foundered, because the uranium was never out there. It was in Utah, or some other dirt filled place.
No one ever asked her how she did it. Not a soul alive even cared. There were sixty flavors of beer in those two new coolers now.
After five years Andie Jo had to close the Motel trailers. No, it wasn’t because she ever got tired of that place. It was the quietest part of town now. Even though Daphne never would shut up anymore. One day she just started blabbing. Even Roger would go wait in that sagging pickup for a while.
No, Andie closed the trailers, because they attracted too much attention. The place was even making papers outside the country. It sat on the roadside, the first part of Shit-Struck that anyone would ever encounter, and it was just a natural draw. She considered putting the Reptilliarium out there, because she wanted to expand the Bar, and add a restaurant. (She hated the food at the new Sheraton Hotel.) But, after an emotionless talk with Roger, she just decided to push the trailers into a great hole she had dug behind them.
“Yeah, go ahead and close,” was all he said about it.
She wondered where he would put Daphne, when the Last Chance was gone for good.
He probably wouldn’t miss her at all if they shoved her in that hole.
No, better than that, Andie Jo found a place for those two. Her best idea had made it all happen, and her first idea was rumbling out east of town as sweating, giggling men ripped the earth open in great gaping maws, and pushed it all back again the next morning.
No, Andie Jo never stopped having ideas. One more idea had been born behind that dusty kitchen counter, in a long-buried trailer house a dozen miles outside of town.
As she teed up her first ball on that main fairway, of the Last Chance Memorial Golf Course on opening day, she looked over the tops of two beautiful stone monuments – just sixty yards down the course. Roger on the right, in marble; Daphne on the left in granite. They told her the last names were not important anymore. Beyond those, were a few dozen other headstones; insane-to-the-very-core breathers, who had rushed to be buried on her tournament worthy links. Andie figured she could house at least a thousand noteworthy dead under her immaculate lawns. She knew, by her booked-solid two year schedule, people would come from all over the world to play on the only golf course with headstone handicaps.
“It really is a nice place.”
“Thank you, Roger.”
“Much better than the Motel.”
“Well, that was only a startup.”
“I like it. I really do.”
“You know, I think I can tell, too!” she smiled at him, not expecting in the least that he would do the same. She wished she could see him smile, just once. “You don’t really need them, do you,” she stated, rather than ask. “None of you really need such a thing at all, do you?”
“No. We really didn’t need the Motel either. But, it was the only thing like it. We liked that a lot. It showed you cared.”
“Yeah, well…those poor fools under those are going to pretty pissed when they realized how useless this place is, too,” she chuckled.
“Oh, not really. Everyone loves golf,” Roger sighed.
