Washed-out Horns
When Sig started quoting Bob Dylan, like the words to the songs actually fit what was happening, I tried to get away. I liked it better when he was drinking, when he was showing off and not just trying to show off. With Sig there was a difference. It wasn’t right, seeing him act like he knew something he didn’t, understood something he hadn’t even listened to. Then again, I had seen him do worse. I tried not to think about that. I didn’t want it to ruin another good night.
There was a midnight festival up by the river and I went there early, before dinnertime, to take in the sun and the wind before too many people showed up, and Sig was already there. He didn’t see me. He was talking to a couple of German girls who were in town for the summer. I had spent the night before talking to one of them over at the Copper Corner but I drank too much and when I went outside for some fresh air I forgot to go back and follow up on my luck. Now Sig was at them, telling him that he did twenty years of schooling and couldn’t even get the day shift. Jesus Christ.
I looked at Sig and the girls laughing, and wondered if he would pied-piper them away, too, like he had with Erin. Why did he have to be the one that came back to town? Sometimes I thought he was singlehandedly draining the town of all it’s women. He didn’t even mean to, they just looked at him and either went away with him on one of his broken jaunts down south or they looked at him, looked at those happy blue eyes, and started thinking about how much better their life could be, if only. I don’t even know what ‘if only’ but there was something in his eyes that got women dreaming.
It was a bright day and a strong wind cut out through the mountains and still held a touch of frost. Even over all the festival noise I could hear the river run. The ravens were out, watching everyone. They looked like they were waiting on something but I couldn’t figure out what. And the air smelled of those Czech sausages that Emil’s father was grilling. I spent most of the festival avoiding Sig. I got close enough a few times to hear him talk, hear him quote Dylan or go into one of his stories about the rodeos down south. I was glad no one was serving any beer. He would have started telling everyone about his dreams then, hoping it would get more beer flowing his way. And it always worked, too. It drove me nuts. Why the hell did people want to hear about his dreams so badly? They hadn’t meant anything for years, not since I was a kid.
Just before midnight I ran into Stella. She was hiding a bag of red wine in her purse and we drank it, sitting in the grass, not really talking, and I fell asleep listening to girls laugh.
* * *
When I was a kid, my father still spent the winters in town. Or close to it. Sometimes he stayed with us for a little, at least until the air bristled with tension between him and my mother, and sometimes he got a room or small apartment. Once or twice, he spent a few months motel hopping out on the highways. I found out years later than he usually skipped out on the bills and then settled them up come summer, when he got riding or digging again and had enough money to go around. Half the time people just let him off the hook, though. I don’t know how he managed that. No one could afford that kind of loss. He didn’t even need to sing them a hard luck song.
Word got around that he was something else on a horse, winning events down south and everything, and he got to stay out at the Horse Shoo, in the caretakers’ cabin. The manager looked like some old gunfighter and even smelled of what my father called black powder smoke, but during the winter he came and went and kept his distance from the stables and from my father and anything that looked like work. My father called him Mr Clark but said that wasn’t his real name. I tried to avoid him because he always looked at me like something was wrong. I took it personal.
I liked the caretakers’ cabin. It was old and there were even holes in the wall – at twelve I was sure they were old bullet holes – so that frozen winter wind just ripped right through, but my father plugged them up with wet newspaper that froze over and the whole placed smelled of stale wool and horses. The stables were about fifty feet away and when I spent the night and the weather got bad, I could hear the horses kicking up a storm in the stalls. The electric came and went so my father used kerosene lanterns even during the day. At that time of year there wasn’t much difference between night and day anyway and I would spend hours in his bed reading a book called The Old Curiosity Shop that Gwyn had left behind. I had trouble getting past the first two pages, but they were a good first two pages.
I still missed Gwyn. Or at least I thought about her a lot. After she had gone, I kept going out to the shack she had been staying in, but I didn’t spend the night there anymore, not without her. I went through the place, went through the few things that were left behind and took what had been hers. There wasn’t much. A bottle of scotch with one inch left over that I took home and stashed under my bed; a few wooden bears and an old shirt that smelled but I kept it close anyway. And the book. One night when I was out there, I thought about how my father was always finding old pistols way back when. Once it got him arrested, but after that, after I had come along, he just seemed to turn up with them, like it was normal for him to be looking around an old farmhouse’s crawl space or behind walls and under floorboards. He never hung on to them, he didn’t know what to do with them, and they just slipped away; traded in for half a package of cigarettes or an inch of scotch. He would have looked at Gwyn’s loot and thought that some people had all the luck. She would have thought the same thing about him. I was just glad that a girl like Gwyn wasn’t going around finding old weapons. Jesus Christ.
Finally, the winter came on hard and they closed off the roads so the snow got too high to walk through. But by then I was spending a lot of time out at the Horse Shoo with my father.
* * *
When I woke up the festival had petered out. Stella was gone but I was holding the bag of wine and there was still a little in there. I blinked at the daylight, the sun up too early, and looked around. A few people were carrying on, too tired to have any real fun, but dragging it out anyway. The stalls had been folded up and packed away, the stage was empty, but wine and a few cases of beer had been brought out of hiding. I took a sip of Stella’s wine. It shook me up.
A skinny woman I met a few years back, when I was down south working a rodeo I had fallen into, was playing her fiddle quietly for a group of blank-faced locals, but I didn’t know if it was real because I thought she had been killed not long after I met her. Poisoned for sleeping with the married owner of the saloon she used to play in. At least that’s what I heard. But people tell a lot of stories.
Sig was still there. Of course. Sitting with a girl who had been working at the donut store all summer. She had really nice eyes and I had even made her laugh once or twice when I had gone in early for coffee, before too many people showed up and ruined the place. I smiled because I knew he was barking up the wrong tree. The girl was too smart for his lines. She didn’t even like Dylan, told me once it was all just moaning and groaning that unhappy kids listened to. I took my coffee and donut from her and grinned, told her she was right, and thought she was too young to be calling anyone else a kid.
Sig was looking at me. He didn’t look away either, and I felt like a damn jack rabbit in a fox den. What the hell did he want?
The girl took Sig’s hand and kept talking to him. She leaned against him a little and I saw that faraway look on her face.
He stood up, still looking at me, and walked over. His work shirt was open to the last two buttons, showing the scars along his ribs where he had been stepped on when he was showing off after he’d already come second in one of the big rodeos, and he got a cigarette going. He sat down next to me and the air fogged up with nicotine, old beer and the oiled smell of animal skins.
He reached for Stella’s wine and I let him take it. I was done drinking anyway.
“Sig,” I said.
He shook his head. There was a cold wind and I thought summer would be shorter than usual this year. “Why do you always call me that?” he asked.
“It’s your name, isn’t it.”
“Yeah.” He took another sip of the wine. “I’m looking for some help with a job.”
“I’m not looking for work.”
“You’re never looking for work.”
“Well, I don’t need any.”
“You don’t need any? I heard you lost your truck.”
“I didn’t lose it.” How do you tell a guy like Sig you gave it away?
Sig started laughing softly and I wondered what he already knew.
***
I don’t think Gwyn ever told me the truth about anything. She didn’t have it in her. It didn’t matter though. I still knew what I saw. Or what I dreamed. That was real. That was true. And she got me talking. It was all nerves on my part, but she pushed it, got me thinking, so that I got ideas in my head that I knew somehow, some day, I would follow through.
Back then, my mother was still making the two of us those Sunday night dinners and on Mondays I took leftovers out to Gwyn and we sat out front of the hunting shack, on logs I had sawn down and rolled close together, and ate cold fried chicken. She could really eat. I don’t know how she was so thin. And the way she licked her lips to clean away the chicken always got to me. She caught me looking sometimes and teased me a little by biting her lip or licking it slowly. I pretended I had no idea what she was doing and went back to my chicken and told her about how I was going save up; hitch rides down to Texas to work the bulls next summer, maybe she should stick around and come with me. If she had stayed, I might have done it, too. And not because it was what I wanted to do.
“Next summer? By then I’ll be long gone.”
It hurt a little to hear her say that. “Where to?”
I liked listening to Gwyn’s plans. Even if they weren’t real. Maybe I just liked listening to her voice. Once in a while she’d get quiet and hold my hand and look out at the trees, seeing something in her head. If she held on to me too long, she’d suddenly let out a short laugh and tell me I was alright for a kid, like she was so much older than me.
The cabin at the Horse Shoo reminded me of her. I thought it was the kind of place she’d have liked. But I had a good history of being wrong.
And I spent a lot of time alone out at the Horse Shoo too, like I had at Gwyn’s. There wasn’t a lot of work to do over the winter but my father would head out early to do one chore or another, and then sometimes I wouldn’t see him for a day or two. I didn’t tell my mother. I don’t know where he went. He didn’t seem to know either. He wasn’t drinking then. I wondered if he had been out chasing down a dream, but I didn’t ask him.
With my father coming and going like that I got worried about the horses. Their water froze up overnight and they couldn’t drink. If I wasn’t around to break up the ice and throw hay at them, I didn’t know if they’d make it, so I started to wake early when I was in town and thumb a ride in the dark up to the Horse Shoo and when my father found out he moved a bedroll into the barn and started sleeping in there, whether or not I was spending the weekend with him, and sometimes I’d walk into the barn in the morning to check on him and the horses both and I’d see him sleeping in an empty stall and I got the feeling he liked it more than the cabin, that it made him feel like he was out rambling again. The cabin was too much home for someone like my father.
***
I did need the work. Even if it was with Sig. All the same, I spent three days scurrying around town, avoiding bars and empty doorways, wishing I could high tail it out of town in a truck I didn’t have, before I knuckled down and went looking for him. He was easy to find.
Stella was covering for the summer at the Copper Corner and when I walked in, she looked up at me and started laughing. I didn’t know why. Sig was sitting across from her, leaning into the bar, talking about how great her hair was. He still smelled of cigarettes and horses. The smell always stayed with him, like they were in him, even when he had gone months without getting near a horse. Stella shook her hair out without noticing. Sig did that to people. He was right, though, she did have great hair. The kind that every redhead wants. Or maybe that was just me.
There wasn’t anybody else in the bar and I wondered why they were listening to Waylon Jennings. At least it wasn’t Dylan. Things were looking up.
I sat down and Stella put a bottle of Coors in front of me. I looked at the mountains on the label. As soon as I saved up enough for a new truck I’d head off, lose myself for a few weeks in mountains that looked like that. There was a lot I wanted to save up for. Over the years I kept inching toward a plot of land up off the highway to Cubby Hill, where there was a solid trailer-home that looked out over low parkland that no one ever used. Two years ago some kid moved in for the summer and built a stone firepit behind the trailer. Did a good job of it, too. No one ever seemed to stay there more than a few weeks and that was in the summertime only. Half the roads were closed off in the winter and when I drove by I liked the way the trailer sat there, so much white sky behind it, far from anywhere, far from anyone. It looked like a hell of a place to live. But that kind of money was a long way off.
“Change your mind about the job?” Sig asked.
“I don’t know. Tell me about it.”
“Nothing to it.” He tapped his bottle and Stella put down a new one. I wondered how far along he was. With Sig, it could be hard to tell. “Search and rescue.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You know Dan Plummer?” he asked.
“I know who he is.”
“He needs a hand tearing down the old structures at his place by Moon Ridge.”
Moon Ridge got my back up. People said Moon was short for Moonshine, because people used to make booze up there and got even richer than the miners they sold to, until it all went bloody. But then people told a lot of stories. Only a handful were true.
“Plummer needs a hand?” I asked.
“Needs someone to do it. I’m the one that needs a hand.” He finished his new beer. Just like that. And asked for another one. It meant he had money this time. “The buildings are nearly a hundred years old. They’ll come down easy.”
“I thought they came down years back. Hit by a storm or something.”
“A couple did. I was there when it happened.”
I looked at Sig. I got a bad feeling, but then he told me how much the job paid.
***
My father’s dreams came in bouts. When he was in a dry spell, he just sort of muddled through the world, a little lost, looking for words and what to do next. It was alright though; back then, he knew when to shut up. And so it got quiet in the caretaker’s cabin. Sometimes I forgot we were both there. More often than not, we weren’t both there. It was just me. Me and my memories of Gwyn. I kept holding on to those, replaying them, trying to see her again, trying to spend more time with her, even if only in my head.
She had made it half way through the book. There were creases, really small ones, on the tops of the pages where she marked her place. When she was still in the hunting shack, I liked watching her read, but it never lasted long. She’d catch me out, like I was doing something wrong, and throw the book at me, and then she’d show me how to make a tinder stick. She told me I wasn’t any good at it, and took my hands and guided the knife along the wood and I tried to make sure she didn’t notice my brain exploding every time she touched me. Her hands were rough, especially for a kid. I guessed it was from all the time she spent trying to carve out those wood bears that lined the windowsills of the shack. She really dug into the wood. I was pretty sure there was something else going on.
I dreamed about her, too. And when I did, I was glad my father wasn’t around. He would have seen it all over my face.
When I woke up, after dreaming long and hard about Gwyn, I knew she was far away. She wouldn’t stop either, not for a long time. Talk about jealous. The sun was still down but there was a blue buzz out the window, over the snow; morning moving slow, and I went to water the horses. There were six of them, all a little shaggy and bored from the long winter. I cracked the ice with a shovel and turned on the water, then I looked in the empty stall where my father kept a bedroll, but it was empty.
He was gone again.
Sometimes, if a dream hit my father right, he started out right away. My mother had told me about a time or two when he would just up and go, drive through the snow all night or pack up and walk into Deerfoot Valley or over near McGill where the mines had been before it all went south. Once he found a skull with eight gold teeth and another time, he found a case of whiskey when he fell into an old cellar. After a dream, he kept going until he found what he was after. He always knew it was out there, knew that he was right. Some days later he’d turn up on Steele Street, outside Anton’s, waiting for him to open so that he could sell whatever he had in his pockets.
I spent five or six days looking around the woods near Horse Shoo. At night, alone in the cabin, I read The Old Curiosity Shop and ate scrambled eggs and tried not to think about how sometimes my father went out and didn’t come back for a year.
A few days later I woke up in the night and my mother was there. She took me home and we didn’t mention my father, but I kept running through the dreams he had told me, thinking that I might be able to follow them, find him.
***
I had been stuck in town for a couple of months. It made me itchy. When the wind blew, I wanted to go with it. One night I said something vague about it at the Copper Corner and Stella snorted, told me I was turning into my father. I left without finishing my drink.
The first two weeks in town I stayed with my mother but after a bit the two of us started huffing around the house like a couple of bulls penned in too tight, and Mrs. Luther, next door, kept asking me to fix her plumbing and after I did, she told me what was wrong with my work and that I had to do it again. She paid me in day old casserole, though, so it wasn’t the worst deal, but then she started acting like she was doing me a favour.
Griff didn’t let me stay at the campground because of the summer tourism and after a few nights in the park Roy Lanksy saw me and told me to watch his place while he was down south playing cards, but it was right in town, half a block from Main Street. I could hear cars and people and that weird hum of town all night long. It freaked me out. Made it hard to breathe. I wondered if the park would be better. And I looked forward to getting out of town, even if it was just Moon Ridge, and even if it was with Sig.
When Sig picked me up in the morning at the donut shop, hands full off coffee and a box of chocolate glazed, he was driving Plummer’s truck. It was one of those new Chevy’s, all big tires and shiny paint. Give it a week, I thought. Sig could take the shine out of a diamond.
I looked at the donuts. It was an even dozen. “Who else is coming?” I asked.
“Just us.” Sig looked back at the shop and waved at the girl behind the counter.
“You know she’s not on commission, right? You and me don’t need more than one or two.”
“I got a sweet tooth,” he said.
“Right.”
“And Plummer’s picking up the tab.”
I wondered where else Plummer would be picking up the tab.
It took a while to get out to Moon Ridge. Sig drove like a geriatric. I had never been out there before, so I just sat back and let him hum along, watched the mountains grow.
Moon Ridge was off a valley full of Jack Pine and a creek ran through it, shallow and fast. Most of the land had been cleared a long time ago. A few birch and scrub managed to grow up near the main house, which wasn’t much considering the Plummers. I had seen the inside of their home in Whistle Flat. I didn’t know if the main house was coming down too, but it would be a big job, especially with just me and Sig. I wondered if he had talked himself into more than he could chew. It wouldn’t be the first time. There were three outbuildings still standing, but not by much. They were all thin grey wood and broken windows. I tried to remember if I had ever crashed in one for a few days during some winter. They had that look. Gwyn would have been at home there.
Sig got out of the truck and looked around. He smiled and nodded to himself.
I took a donut and watched him. Part of me was waiting for the other foot to fall.
“Why’s Plummer want to take all this down?” I asked. “He rebuilding?”
“Sort of,” Sig said. “We got to talking one night at the Inn. He took me on as what you might call an advisor.”
“To advise him in what?” I thought he was hired to knock stuff down.
Sig winked at me. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t one of his barmaids.
“Remember I told you I shacked up here during a storm some years back?”
“Yeah.” Over the years Sig had shacked up pretty well everywhere.
“I found a hidden basement. Got two cases of eighty-year-old whiskey out of it.”
Everyone knew that story. “What’d you do with them?”
He didn’t answer, and I figured he drank them. Might have even made it all last a week.
“I also found a gold-digging licence from ‘99,” Sig said. “You know nothing was ever found here, right?”
“Nothing to find,” I said. I looked around. “Not around here. That’s why the moon shine.”
Sig shook his head. “You think Plummer knows that?”
Plummer never struck me as dumb. Just rich. And that’s not the same thing.
***
I didn’t go out to the Horse Shoo again for a few weeks. My mother made me go to school and mostly I went. I didn’t like school, especially in wintertime. The lights were just too bright inside. Winter was meant to be dark. After class, when it was dusk for a few hours, I checked the woods behind the house for animals. If I went far enough, sometimes I found the bones of small fry, the little animals that were easy pickings, and I brought them back to school and gave them to my biology teacher for what she called extra credit, but when I saw my grades I never knew where that credit had actually gone. Either way, she had a good collection of skulls and jaws from beaver and birds and racoons along her windowsill that made the classroom more tolerable. Once, I found a half-eaten ermine near the river, all white with winter and red with blood, but there was too much flesh to bring it to school so I put it in my desk at home until it smelled and my mother threw it away and cuffed me for being an idiot. It took weeks for the smell to go away. But it made my bedroom feel a little like the caretaker’s cabin, a little like a place that Gwyn might have liked, so I didn’t mind.
My mother told me not to worry about the horses, Mr Clark was still around, in and out of town like he did during winter, and he’d figure out about my father soon enough and know how to handle it. I thought about the gun powder smell of his and about how a man like that handled things.
Every so often I asked my mother if she knew where my father was, if he was back yet, but she just chewed her lip and thought so long about what to say to me that I got bored and left.
Sig’s dreams had enough history behind them that I was sure I knew what had happened; he had followed one of them. I just had to figure out which one.
Earlier that winter my father told me a row of dreams about dead horses. It didn’t seem to help him remember to do his job, but it set his mind off, wondering what was going on. When I asked my mother what part of town dead horses were kept in, she gave me that look again and shook her head and told me to go outside and play.
“It’s nearly thirty below.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
I started to put on my coat.
“Wait,” she said. “If you do go outside, where are you going to go?”
I shrugged.
“You aren’t going to go look for dead horses, are you?” She took a look at me. “Jesus Christ. The weasel was bad enough. Go upstairs and read your book.”
And I did. A little. Mostly the part about the old man walking alone at night. He was right. Night time is the best time for walking. I wasn’t allowed out at real night, but it was dark so early it was almost the same thing just walking home from school.
My father had also told me a dream about meeting the Queen of England in the Silverload mine. He liked that one. No one had ever found anything in Silverload. This really got him going. He wondered why people dumped so much time and money into looking there in the first place. There must have been something about it, he said. I heard about that kind of thing happening every few years. Old claims deemed nothing but dirt because no one looked hard enough, dug deep enough, stayed sober enough. Or to hear my father tell it, they shot each other before anyone found anything.
I asked around at school. No one seemed to know where dead horses were kept, but I knew where Silverload was, and I started thinking about how to get out there. It was too far to walk in winter but I gave it a shot anyway. It was only thirty below.
***
Sig surprised me. He picked me up early every morning at the donut shop and when we got out to Moon Ridge, he worked hard. And he knew what he was doing. Not that taking down a house needed much know-how, but he stopped me from bringing a wall and a staircase down on my own head. He opened his first can of beer early, when the wind was still cold with night, but he paced himself.
I liked being out there, at Moon Ridge. Away from town. Sig paid me at the end of every day at first and I tucked the money away. After the first week was over, he said he’d pay me every three or so days. He looked away when he said it, but I figured if he drank my pay, I could just go straight to Plummer.
The out buildings were old. Brittle and bare from a hundred years of bad weather. One more good windstorm would knock them down. Mostly it was tearing the boards out of the frame, and cutting it down so we could burn it later. It would be a hell of a fire. I hoped I would be around for that.
The main house was going to be more of a problem. The front door was locked but I kicked it open to look around. I didn’t know why Plummer wanted that one torn down. It was in good shape. Work had been done on it over the years, too. It seemed like a waste. Even the staircase that led to the small bedroom upstairs was pretty new. I looked out the window, at all the land, at Sig going at one of the old barn walls with a sledge hammer, dust and wood splintering out all around him, and I wondered what Plummer had planned. I couldn’t see him putting in a mine, tearing up the land with those hydraulic hunters. I thought about the fire again.
I also got to thinking that instead of staying at Roy’s, where I never really slept, I could just stay out at Moon Ridge. When I ran it by Sig, he gave me the thumbs up. The next day I brought out my pack and sleeping bag and set up on the front porch of the main house, out of the wind. I never thought to ask where Sig was staying. Mostly I didn’t want to know because then I’d probably have to do something about it, but at the end of the day when he drove off in Plummer’s truck and I was alone at Moon Ridge, I got a small campfire going, used up some of the old barn door, and fried a half dozen eggs for dinner and was glad to be able to breathe right again.
Come morning it was raining heavy and Sig didn’t show. I took it easy, glad for a day off, and glad to be so far out, at Moon Ridge. I thought Plummer was nuts. Who’d tear up a place like that? Pine snapped in the wind and the rain kept coming but I was safe under the porch, in my sleeping bag.
Sig didn’t show for a few days. I lost track of how many. The weather was good again, if a little cold for summer, but I liked it. And there was a lot of wind and it just kept blowing. I got a lot of work done, but didn’t start on the main house.
When I ran out of food, I walked into town. It took the better part of the day and it was a little after nine when I got to the Copper Corner. Even from outside the bar I could hear Dylan singing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Sig played that when he wanted to make a move on someone. I pushed through the door. Sig was in there, leaning close to Stella, making her laugh. I wished she were laughing at him, but knew that wouldn’t be true.
She brought me a Coors and I drank it down.
“You’re thirsty,” Sig said.
I nodded. Watched Stella walk away and turn to look back at Sig. Jesus Christ.
“That’s one pretty woman,” he said.
I looked at her and my mind wandered. “She’s no Peggy Flemming.”
Sig looked at me and after a minute he grinned, “You’re not thinking about Peggy Fleming?”
How the hell did he know?
I held my bottle up and Stella brought me a fresh one. This time she stayed with us.
“You two strike it rich, yet?” She asked.
“On this job?” I laughed.
“Why not?” she said. “If Plummer thinks it’s a sure thing.” She trailed off.
“What does Plummer think is a sure thing?” I asked.
She pointed at Sig. “His track record.”
Track record of what? Sig was doing alright this time, this week, but it wouldn’t last. Everyone knew it, even if they didn’t admit it. Soon he’d be sleeping in doorways and stealing half empty beer bottles at baseball games.
Stella leaned into us. Well, into Sig. I was glad there was a bar between them. “Remember when he kept dreaming about the Woodford Hills? He was in here every night, trying to get backing for it. Here or over at the Buffalo Bar.”
“How do you know about that?” I asked. “We were fifteen?”
“And I was here every night, then, too.”
“It was like twenty years ago. It’s just another old story now.”
“But still,” She got that look in her eye, gave Sig the hard once over. He was used to it; let her take her time, let her remember him back then.
“He might have dreamed about Woodford, but he sure didn’t make anything out of it.” He had been arrested for stealing horse manure and spent a few weeks in a cell and when he got released, he went south to rodeo. Come October a professional went digging in Woodford and by the following summer it was one of the big operations with machinery banging away and heavy money filling other people’s pockets. “Anyway, what the hell does that have to do with Moon Ridge?”
Stella looked at me like I was an idiot. “He’s having those dreams again.”
I turned to Sig. He hadn’t had a real dream in years. We both knew it. “God damn it, Sig.”
***
I was thinking about my father too much, thinking about Gwyn too much, and I lost track of everything. I turned up to school on a Saturday morning and the janitor yelled at me. Also, all my father’s dreams had worked their way into me, so that even when I was awake, I dreamt about dead horses, too. Mine were in town, lying dead on the sidewalk. When I walked away from school, I was worried I’d find the streets littered with horses, so I walked out of town instead, turned up toward the highway. It was cold and there was a lot of snowfall on the roads and I decided it was as good a time as any to head up the road and see if I could make it to Silverload. Maybe my father would be there. It would only take a couple of days to walk if the highway had been cleared.
It wasn’t cleared. The snow went right up to my knee with every step. It would take a long while to get all the way to Silverload but I didn’t have anything else to do.
I hunched down into the wind and kept walking. It felt good, even with the wind full of ice. I liked the burn on my cheeks. And I thought about finding my father out at the old mine, thought about helping him and the two of us coming home with our pockets full. I had been with him once or twice before when he made a good find, a really solid weight. It was a good feeling. It was like finding a few extra months of life for the dead.
Soon the daylight went. I thought about Gwyn, wondered how far south she had gone. If she was even going south, like she told me. She told me a lot of things. Too many of them didn’t ring true. I didn’t like that. And I didn’t like how I still thought about her. I guess there was something else, something inside her, that just kicked me around the right way.
There was a lot of uphill out on the highway. And it was quiet. I liked it. The whole world had gone away.
It was late when headlights came toward me. The truck was coming slow, taking its time in all the snow. I thought about how Gwyn told me she used to slip away into the trees when a car came.
I just stood there.
It pulled up a few feet from me and waited. When the window came down, I walked up to it. Mr Clark looked at me. He had a sharp face, all dark eyebrows and dark thoughts. He still smelled like a shotgun.
“What the hell are you doing way out here?” he asked.
“Going to Silverload.”
“In the middle of the night? On foot?”
“I don’t drive.”
He reached out and opened the door for me. “Get in.”
“Silverload is the other direction.”
“I know that. I’m not taking you to Silverload. I’m taking you home.”
“But my father is out at Silverload.”
“What?” He frowned at me.
“He was dreaming about it.”
Mr. Clark nodded. “Okay. Well, I’m still taking you home. Otherwise, it’d be third degree murder to leave you out here.”
I thought he meant he would kill me. He looked pretty serious about it so I got in and we drove back to town. I had walked for ten, maybe twelve hours, but it took ten minutes to drive. That didn’t seem right.
“What are you moping about?” he asked.
“I was already nearly there.”
“What? At Silverload. No, you would have been walking all week.”
I shrugged. He looked me over. I wondered what he had been shooting to smell like he did.
When we drove through town he had to go slow. The snowploughs were finally out, clearing the roads. We got stuck behind one on Steele Street and when we passed the Buffalo Bar I saw my father, sitting in the doorway, his head against the wall that people always peed on. Someone opened the door and shoved him aside with their foot.
***
Plummer must have known that Sig was a liar. Who didn’t? Even so, somehow, when it came to those dreams of his, people still got caught up, even someone smart like Plummer. So, I let it go.
With Stella staying close to Sig all night, bringing him beer after beer so they both lost count, I knew I’d be on my own for a while. Even in the darkness of the bar I could see that Stella was getting that heavy look in her eyes, like she didn’t want to keep them open anymore. Sig slid me the keys to Plummer’s truck and wandered over to the jukebox. When Lay Lady Lay came on, I got the hell out of there.
I stopped by Paddington’s for groceries and then dropped them off at my mother’s but she was out. She always took extra shifts when Sig was in town. I thought it was because she was nervous about him coming by the house, but one time I dropped a hitchhiker off at the Inn and I saw Sig and my mother sitting at a table by the riverfront window, drinking coffee, grinning at each other. It was a small town. He knew where to find her. And she looked like she liked it.
The weather stayed good for a few days so I worked out at Moon Ridge by myself. It was better that way. I got more done. I didn’t have to worry about where Sig was in his drinking, worry about him buzzing another finger off with the electric saw. And I cooked a steak over the campfire every night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had enough money to eat steak three nights in a row.
At night I got the fire going really big. I liked the way it whipped in the wind, the way the sparks popped in the dark. And there was a lot of wood that needed burning. I got a bit carried away. Watching a fire can do that.
When the fire fell in on itself, with the wind blowing hard enough to smoke my eyes, I didn’t notice it had reached the porch of the main house. By the time I looked over, my sleeping bag was up in smoke and most of the porch, too.
I grinned. How slow can a man be? Why was I taking the buildings down plank by plank and burning them, when I could just burn it all outright. Save my back. Get the whole job done in a couple of hours.
I moved the truck back up the driveway and sat on the hood to watch the house burn. Watching a whole house go to flame is something. My bonfire looked like a Zippo next to it.
An hour later, when two trucks from the fire department showed up, most of the house was gone, but the fire was still licking the wind.
I told them not to worry about the house. They hosed the earth around it to stop the fire spreading and then stood there with me for a while, watching the whole thing. I think they liked it, too.
One of them got a cigarette going. “You squatting out here?” he asked.
“What? No. Dan Plummer hired me. He think’s Moon Ridge is the next Woodford Hills.” Everyone knew about Woodford Hills, even if they didn’t know about Sig. Then again, most people knew about Sig, too.
“Moon Ridge?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They used to make moonshine out here. The name stuck.”
“This isn’t Moon Ridge. That’s about forty minutes west of here.”
“This isn’t Moon Ridge?”
He gave me a long look and told his partner to go call the police.
Multi-award winning author, Michael Caleb Tasker was born in Montreal, Canada and spent his childhood in Montreal, New Orleans and Buenos Aires. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His short story collection “All Gone Now” is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press.
