Sheriff Poole & The Mech Gang

A short story by

Copyright 2013 by Charles de Lint

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.

for John Joseph Adams

who got me to write this story

I know what Tommy Mansfield’s looking at the
moment I usher him into the barn. It’s the first thing everybody
sees: that old poster from the Showdown Ranch with a painting of
the whole Mech Gang facing down a lone lawman on a dusty street.
You can see variations on that theme in any of the western art
galleries in town, except the bad guys wouldn’t be clunky robot
outlaws that look like they should be on the cover of some old
sci-fi pulp magazine. But back in the day robots and animatronics
were the whole theme of the Showdown Ranch.

“I remember that place,” Tommy says moving
closer to the image. “My uncle took me and my brother one
weekend—God, years ago. That poster’s still in nice shape.”

Everybody in town knows about the folly of
Showdown Ranch, but only the old folks remember that it was my
dad’s folly. It’s mine, too, even though we lost the land, lost all
the workshops, lost everything except for what I’ve managed to
salvage and stash away here in the barn. I’ve got the complete set
of the Mech Gang now—all five of them—though they’re missing a bits
and pieces. I’ve got Sheriff Poole, too. The only thing wrong with
him is some scorching on the left side of his face, which makes him
look more like one of the villains instead of the hero.

Nights I can’t sleep I leave the farm and
walk to the next canyon over, the dog at my side. He sits and sifts
through the night air for smells he likes while I sift through the
ruins of Showdown Ranch. Developers were going to do something with
the land but then the bottom fell out of the real estate market,
and Linden is just far enough into the foothills of the Hierro
Maderas to make the commute to Santo del Vado Viejo less attractive
than those developers might have hoped. They’ve got the whole
canyon boxed in with chain link fencing, but that’s not going to
stop anybody. It sure doesn’t stop me.

One day I’ll buy the place back. Moon dreams,
Mason tells me, trying to hide the worried look in her eyes, but I
just smile. I know it’s not going to be tomorrow. Probably not for
a whole mess of tomorrows. But I’m a patient man. And until then
I’ll keep going through the rubble from the explosion and salvage
what I can.

Tommy looks away from the poster. His gaze
travels around the barn, but there’s not much to see. I’ve got the
Mech Gang stashed under tarps in the old horse stalls. My workbench
takes up the opposite length of the wall. The sheriff is lying
there, except there’s a tarp over him as well, so unless you knew,
you’d have no idea what I’m working on.

“So what did you want to show me?” Tommy
asks, finally pulling his gaze away from the poster.

Tommy’s a picker, one of those guys who
travels the countryside looking for deals on antiques and junk that
they can buy cheap and sell for a profit. I met him at Sam’s Garage
in town. I was getting gas for the truck; he was asking Sam’s widow
if she’d mind him poking around the field of junked cars behind the
garage. When I realized what he did for a living—when he told me
his personal obsession was old carnie rides—I knew I had to invite
him back here.

“Well,” I tell him, “it’s not a vintage
Ferris Wheel or a Tilt-a-Whirl, but it’s something special all the
same.”

I lead him to the stall that holds the leader
of the gang and hit the light switch before I pull off the
tarp.

“Tommy,” I say. “Meet Johnny Scales, the
leader of the Mech Gang.”

I’ve seen him a thousand times and I still
find it impressive whenever I take off the canvas covering. Scales
stands six-foot-four with a barrel chest, arms and legs like
enormous metal tentacles, and a head like a bucket with what appear
to be two lights for eyes and a grill where his mouth would be if
he were a man. He’s wearing oversize jeans and a cowboy hat, and
has a six-gun strapped on. He’s not wearing a shirt. His curved
chest door is open, showing an intricate tangle of clockwork
parts.

I turn to Tommy and his reaction is
everything I hoped it would be: shock and awe.

“My God,” he says. “It’s a freaking work of
art.”

It takes him a long moment before he can tear
his gaze away to look at me.

“Does it still work?”

“He,” I correct him, “and yes he does—after a
fashion. Would you like to see?”

“Are you kidding me?”

I grin and walk over to Scales. Reaching into
his chest, I flick a lever, then close the door. There’s a whirring
sound inside his chest and after a long moment his eyes slowly
begin to glow.

“Don’t much care for your tone,
stranger.”

The voice is a recording and comes out of the
mouth grill sounding like a radio just off the station.

Tommy takes a couple of steps back—I don’t
think he’s even aware he’s doing it. I hold my hand over a
holstered six-gun that I’m not carrying.

“Are you going to draw or suck eggs?” I
say.

The right arm moves, the hand draws his gun
and he’s firing before I can even clear my imaginary holster. If
the gun had bullets in it, I’d be dead. As it is, all we hear is
the click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. Scales blows
on the end of his gun and smoothly returns it to its holster. Then
he’s still once more, his glowing eyes the only sign of “life.”

“Holy crap!”

Tommy’s staring wide-eyed with a huge grin on
his face.

“I didn’t think it was a real machine,” he
says. “I mean, I’ve seen it live when I was a kid, and I’ve looked
at the YouTube videos, but I always thought there was a guy
inside.”

“Everybody does.”

He takes a tentative step forward. “Who built
it—I mean, him?”

“My dad. Back in the day they were all in
perfect working order. I’ve got the whole outlaw gang, but they’ve
all got problems. Scales is in the best shape. The only issue with
him is that I still can’t get his legs to move.”

“He’s just amazing,” Tommy says.

I nod in agreement but the truth is, none of
the Mech Gang can hold a candle to Sheriff Poole. Beside him they
look exactly like what they are: clunky clockwork robots. But they
were the best Dad could do. What I don’t tell Tommy—what I’ve never
told anybody—is that they’re just poor echoes of the sheriff.
Everybody thinks they’re the way they are to make them look like
villains. But it’s more that Dad just didn’t have the skills or
parts to make them any better.

He had the sheriff for a blueprint, but it
wasn’t like he could take him apart to see what made him tick. I
mean, he could have, but there was no guarantee he’d be able to put
him back together again. It’s the same reason I haven’t dismantled
the sheriff. I suppose I could bring him in to some high tech
research company, but they’d be faced with the same challenge, and
these days, what does anybody know about clockwork mechanics?
Everything runs on microchips now.

But Dad figured a lot of it out—more than I
have so far, that’s for sure. Still, he was never able to make the
parts as small as they are inside the sheriff and still have them
work for more than a couple of days. The sheriff’s cogs and wheels
look like regular steel alloys, but whatever the metal actually is,
it’s stronger than anything Dad could get his hands on. His parts
had to be larger, and without that particular metal to sustain
their weight, they’d just break.

Bottom line, Sheriff Poole is something
special. Dad told me he dates back to the 1800s, that his own
great-grandfather either found him or made him. The sheriff is
supposed to be the reason the ranch survived Indian raids, rustlers
and whatever else was thrown at us. But he wasn’t able to stop what
happened the night the Showdown Ranch was shut down for good.

“I know a guy,” Tommy says. “He used to work
on animatronics in places like Disneyland, but he was always doing
his own research on how to make his pieces better. He’s an old guy
now—retired years ago. But he might have some ideas.”

I don’t say anything.

Tommy gets it right away. I thought he might,
which is why I showed him the Mech Gang in the first place.

“It’s cool,” he says. “We don’t need to let
anybody else know. You say the word and I didn’t see anything
myself. But I’ve got to tell you—this is something I’m never going
to forget.”

“Trust me,” I tell him. “I know. But there
just comes a time when you have to show it to someone who’s going
to appreciate it.”

“No one else knows?”

“Just my wife Mason.”

He smiles. “And I’m guessing she’s as
enthusiastic about them as my Ellen is about the carnie rides I
bring home. She almost left me when I came into the yard towing the
Ferris Wheel behind my truck.”

“I’d like to see those rides of yours.”

“Any time.”

We talk for so long that before I know it,
it’s time for dinner. Mason’d have my hide if I let Tommy go off
without at least an invitation.

We’re sitting on the porch after dinner when
the talk turns to the Showdown Ranch and what happened the night of
the explosion. Tommy made a good impression on Mason—especially
after offering to help with the clean up. We got the kitchen fixed
up in good time, coffees made, the desert night cooling down the
day’s heat when we stepped outside. Buddy’s asleep at my feet,
Mason’s dozing against my shoulder, but she straightens up when
Tommy asks the question.

“It’s hard to explain,” I say.

“Try impossible,” Mason says from beside me.
She smiles before adding, “But that won’t stop him from
trying.”

“It
looked
like the workshop just blew
up,” I say. “Like Dad wasn’t storing his oils and gasoline properly
and something set it off. But if you study the wreckage with a
suspicious eye like I have, you’ll see that it didn’t blow up from
inside—or at least not at first. Once whatever it was hit the
workshop—of course all that crap was going to blow. But someone
fired something into it first.”

Tommy has his feet up on the rail, looking
out at the desert night. He drops them to the wood plank flooring
and turns to look at me.

“You’re saying somebody
attacked
the
ranch?” he asks. “With what? A rocket launcher?”

“I couldn’t say what they used.”

That’s a lie. But while I like Tommy, I don’t
know him well enough to trust him with something this big.

“But I found a piece of the sheet metal
roofing with a hole in it,” I go on. “Perfectly round. Like a laser
had gone through it. But this was back in the sixties. Were they
even using lasers back then?”

“I don’t know.” He waits a beat before he
asks, “Your father…was he inside when it happened?”

“No, he was outside—where he got cut in two.
The coroner said it was from a flying piece of sheet metal.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

I shake my head. I almost add, “Not with what
I know,” but we’ve gone as far as I want to go with a stranger.

“So those carnie rides of yours,” I say. “You
have them all set up and working?”

For a moment I think he’s going to say
something more, but then he takes the hint.

“A couple,” he says. “I’m working on the
Ferris Wheel right now, but there’s a lot of weak metal, especially
in the baskets. I’m in a bind because they’ll never be safe to use
as they are, but I hate the idea of replacing all that vintage
metalwork.”