Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (2 page)

“Oh, you don't have to worry, Miz Weed,” Eddie said. “Mom says she'd never set foot in this ‘pit of sin.'”

“Is that right, Eddie? Your mom said ‘pit of sin'?”

“Yep. So don't you worry about her showing up. Anyway, Jake gives us the best price for our empties.”

Jake put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

“I bet he does,” Miz Weed said. “Jake's mighty generous with my money. Well, finish your pops, and then scat! This pit of sin ain't no place for two seven-year-old boys.”

“Gee, Miz Weed,” I said. “If you're afraid of us seeing some evil, neither Eddie nor I would mind a bit.”

The way she rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling, I could see Miz Weed was giving my comment some serious consideration, but at that very moment the swinging doors burst open with a bang and a rattle. The joyous ruckus of the saloon died an instant death. Jake's jaw sagged. Every head swiveled toward the intruder. Eddie and I wheeled around on our stools.

Looming there in the doorway stood the most frightening
figure I'd ever seen or even imagined. He was tall and lean, with a huge hawkish nose and a shaggy mustache that drooped down past the edges of a grim mouth. Mean little eyes squinted out from beneath bushy eyebrows. Rivers of sweat had cut little channels down his face through what appeared to be a crust composed of dirt, smoke, grit, and the odd flying insect. Escaping from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, gray-streaked hair hung down almost to his shoulders. Grease and grime coated his buckskin shirt, and from his belt hung the largest knife I'd ever seen. In one hand he carried a rifle.

Behind us, Jake mumbled, “I can see this ain't gonna be one of my better days.”

After glancing about the room to make sure everyone was properly terrified, the man strode up to the bar right next to Eddie and me. He laid the rifle on the bar within easy reach, probably just in case some fool might have an attack of lunacy and cause him a bit of annoyance.

“Whiskey!” he growled.

“Yes sir!” Jake set a shot glass of whiskey in front of him.

“You call thet whiskey!” The man picked up his rifle and swept the glass off the bar with it.

“What am I thinking of!” Jake set the bottle on the bar. The man tilted up the bottle and chugalugged a goodly portion. Then he growled at Jake, “Now get me some pliers.”

“Pliers! Pliers!” Jake croaked, rummaging about under the bar. “We got some here someplace. Hope we got some. Don't have much call for … Ah! Here they are!”

The man grabbed the pliers, opened his craterous mouth, and stuck the pliers back in so far they must have touched his tonsils. He then clamped down and began wrenching on the pliers, all the while making the most terrible, ghastly, sickening sounds I'd ever heard. And then he hauled out a massive tooth and flung it on the bar in front of Jake.

“Thar, gol-dang ya!” he said to the tooth. “You and me is parted company. Let thet be a lesson to you, causin' me thet kinda misery.”

He spat a glob of blood on the floor, took another gulp of whiskey, plunked a silver dollar on the bar, picked up the bottle and his rifle, glanced about the room one more time to make sure everyone was behaving himself, and strode out the door.

The collective sigh of relief heaved by the saloon's patrons rattled the windows. Thinking I might have just witnessed some evil, I turned to Jake. He was mopping sweat off his forehead with a bar towel. “What was that?”

“That, Patrick, was a mountain man, somehow left over from history.”

“Gee, a real mountain man!” Eddie said.

“As real as you could find nowadays, I reckon,” Jake said. “This here was only the second time I ever seen him. He burst in here one night a couple years ago and roared out at somebody, ‘Now I got you, you no-good thievin' rat!' Well, half the boys in here fit that description, and they jumped up and run out the back door. Don't know if he ever did catch the feller he was after. If he did catch him, I don't imagine there was much reason to wait breakfast on him in the morning.”

“Gripes, Jake,” I said. “Where does the mountain man live anyway?”

“Oh, I think he mostly roams the mountains, but I understand he's got a little cabin up Trapper Crick. Course, nobody in his right mind ever goes up there. If he does, I don't reckon he comes back. So I'm not sure about the cabin.”

Miz Weed, who had been rushing about throwing open all the windows, suddenly noticed us again. She wasn't too pleased, or so I judged from the really bad word she
blurted out. “You twerps got exactly thirty seconds to get your business done with Jake and your butts outta here!”

“Gee whiz, Miz Weed, we—”

“Twenty-five seconds!”

Jake grabbed the mountain man's dollar off the bar and handed it to us. “You boys git.”

“But, Jake, you didn't even count the empties!”

“Yep, I did,” he whispered. “Got X-ray vision can see right through those ole gunnysacks. Come out a dollar even.”

“Wow, a whole dollar!” Eddie cried. “Thanks, Jake!”

“Not so loud,” Jake said, glancing over at Miz Weed, who paused from counting off seconds to glare at her bartender.

We set the sacks on the floor, grabbed the wagon, and headed for the door. Jake's X-ray vision wasn't all that good. There wasn't more than twenty cents' worth of empties in those sacks. Sometimes we felt bad about taking advantage of Jake, but the feeling never lasted long enough to make a nuisance of itself.

At the door, Eddie suddenly stopped and turned. “What's that mountain man's name anyway, Jake?”

“Crabtree,” Jake said. “Rancid is what folks call him. Rancid Crabtree.”

“
Rancid
Crabtree? How come they call him Rancid?”

“You got a cold, Eddie?” Jake said. “You didn't smell nothin'?”

We sniffed. Why yes, a pungent odor still lingered in the air, even after the brisk breeze Miz Weed had let in through the windows.

“You're right,” Eddie said. “I guess I was too scared to smell when we were at the bar with him and you.”

Jake gave us a crazed look. “Just as well, I'd say,” he grunted, tossing back a shot of whiskey. “You boys don't
get any of your weird ideas, hear? You'll steer clear of Crabtree, if you know what's good for you!”

Eddie and I plodded off toward town and the matinee, both of us enjoying the warm and satisfying feeling that comes from sudden wealth. With a whole dollar, we could buy out half the town. We could buy real estate, if we had any use for it.

“Hold up a sec,” Eddie said. He pointed far off to a thickly forested area between two mountains. “You know what? Trapper Crick flows out of there.”

“So?” I said, reluctantly distracted from contemplating the purchasing potential of our dollar.

“Well, I was just thinking,” Eddie said. “Maybe we should sneak up there, find Crabtree's cabin, and spy on him. Maybe we could see him do some mountain man stuff. Maybe he'd shoot a bear or something. What do you think?”

“Didn't you hear what Jake said about Crabtree, Eddie? Anybody who goes up there probably doesn't come back.”

“Oh, you know what a kidder Jake is. How about it?”

“Sounds okay to me,” I said. “I'll tell you what, you can sneak up and spy on Crabtree while I stand watch.”

“I was kinda thinking we'd do it the other way around,” Eddie said. “Where was you thinking you'd stand watch?”

“Right about here,” I said. “But maybe not quite this close.”

Before spying on Crabtree, we had to wait a few days for the image of the fierce old mountain man to fade below our terror threshold. Most of our adventures resulted from our level of boredom rising above our level of fear. One morning when we had nothing else to do but sit on the Muldoon corral fence and use ourselves as bait for
mosquitoes, Eddie determined that his boredom had just about reached critical mass. “We've waited long enough. Let's go spy on Crabtree.”

“Geez, Eddie, I don't know,” I said, wiping out three mosquitoes on my arm with one swat. “I'm not that bored yet. Besides, if old Crabtree catches us, he might kill us.”

“Of course he'll kill us, Pat, if he catches us. That's what mountain men do when they catch somebody spying on them. But he ain't going to catch us.”

“Yeah but—”

“C'mon, you can't chicken out on me now. Don't you want to be a mountain man?”

“Sure.”

“See, we can spy on old Crabtree and learn how to do all kinds of mountain man stuff. It'll save us a whole bunch of time if we don't have to learn it all on our own. Otherwise, we'll be stuck in school practically forever.”

Eddie was right, I could see that. The faster we learned how to be mountain men, the sooner we could leave school, go off into the wilderness, and live off the land. Second grade had been a terrible bore the previous year. And it wasn't one bit better
this
year! Right now it looked as if I might never get out of second grade.

“You're right, Eddie. Let's go.” “Great! But we better tell Ma and Pa first.”

“Why tell them, Eddie? They'll probably just get all nervous and shaky like always and then tell us we can't go, because it's too dangerous.”

“I know, but I don't like them to worry. You don't say nothin', okay? I'll handle this.”

Both of Eddie's parents seemed to suffer from some kind of nervous disorder. In fact, Mr. Muldoon's face would begin to twitch every time he saw Eddie and me together, and Mrs. Muldoon would wring her hands and
sometimes even chew on a fingernail. I'd told Eddie I thought maybe his folks had some kind of strange disease, but he said he was pretty sure their nervous condition was just a result of drinking too much coffee. “Coffee's awful bad for the nerves,” he'd explained.

Both Eddie's parents were in the kitchen when we burst in on them.

“Good cripes!” Mr. Muldoon yelped, frantically brushing spilled hot coffee off his pants. “How many times I got to tell you boys, walk through the door just as if you was regular human beings. You don't have to take it off the hinges!”

“Sorry, Pa,” Eddie said. “Anyway, I just want to let you know Pat and I are going on a hike.”

“A hike?” Mrs. Muldoon said, chewing a fingernail.

“You're not taking any of my tools, are you?” Mr. Muldoon said. “You boys stay away from my tools. I don't want you chopping down any more trees, or building deep-sea-diving outfits with my milk buckets, or building airplanes on top of the barn roof, or digging pit traps in the pasture to capture wild animals, or starting campfires, or—”

“Naw, we're just going on a hike, Pa.”

Mr. Muldoon's face twitched. “Well, I guess there isn't too much harm in that. For gosh sakes, just don't build nothin'!”

“Lord save us,
no!
” Mrs. Muldoon cried, wringing her hands. “And don't build any more rafts out of fence posts! You'll drown for sure.”

“That's right,” Mr. Muldoon said. “Besides, I need all the fence posts I got left!”

“You make sure your hike doesn't take you anywhere near that pit of sin, Pig Weed's Saloon,” Mrs. Muldoon said.

“We won't go near Pig Weed's,” Eddie said. “We'll stay clear of that evil place.”

“Well,” Mrs. Muldoon said, “I guess I could make you a sack lunch for your little hike.”

“Oh,” Mr. Muldoon said, “and no more snares! The last one I caught my foot in nearly broke my leg. Can you think of anything else, Sarah?” His face twitched again.

“It's just so hard to cover everything, Herb. It's just so hard.”

Eddie was probably right. His folks must have drunk way too much coffee.

An hour later, Eddie and I were working our way up the Trapper Creek trail. The trail was overgrown with brush on both sides and obviously didn't get much use.

“Remember what Jake said?” I asked Eddie. “How he suspected that anybody that came up Trapper Creek probably didn't come back?”

“Yeah, I been thinking about that. Maybe we shouldn't stick to the trail. Let's cut up over that ridge. We might be able to see Crabtree's cabin from there.”

We crossed a log over the creek and climbed up to the ridge. Sure enough, tucked away in a clearing down below was a little cabin. Eddie and I lay down side by side so we could just peek over the rocky lip of the ridge. An overgrown logging road entered the clearing from the far side, and at the end of the road an ancient truck rusted its way toward oblivion. All kinds of interesting junk was strewn about among tall weeds: a set of bedsprings, part of a milk separator, a broken table, a gas tank, a wheel from a hay wagon, and dozens of things we couldn't even recognize. And then there were the bones, gleaming whitely in the sun.

“Any of those bones look human to you?” I whispered to Eddie.

“Most of them,” Eddie whispered back. “I don't see no human skulls, though. He probably keeps a collection of
them in his cabin. I reckon old Crabtree just tosses his victims out in the yard after he kills them.”

“Geez!” I whispered. “Let's get out of here!”

“Don't worry, Pat, he won't ever spot us up here. Besides, we want to see him do some mountain man stuff.”

We lay there for what seemed like hours without catching a glimpse of Crabtree. Wisps of smoke drifted up out of the stone chimney, so we were pretty sure he was home. Then I noticed a faint odor. It seemed to be growing stronger.

“You smell that, Eddie?”

“Yeah. It's pretty awful.”

“What do you suppose it is?”

“I don't know. Maybe Crabtree is burning some rotten old hides in his stove.”

“It keeps getting stronger.”

“Wind must have shifted and be blowing the smoke up here.”

The hair on the back of my neck lifted. My hair was always a pretty good detector of danger. “I'm getting a little scared, Eddie. Something doesn't feel right.”