The Grand Piano Chase

By Kit Stokes

Gary Bullock faces two crises--finish a grad school theses in weeks or be expelled, and "get a life or get out of mine," as his pregnant girl friend announces. He flees to Mudstone in response to the first crisis and once there is accused of stealing an $85,000 piano. In a summer full of unintended consequences Gary and Dan inspire the grand piano chase, as all seek to gain a finder's fee from the IRS. Expelled from college, Gary begins a new life as a small town journalist, and Dan falls in love with Nadine, a piano prodigy, at first sight. About to be arrested on his wedding day for concealing assets from the IRS, Dan is rescued by the arrival of Sherrie. In a series of persuasive arguments, direct actions and shrewd horse-trading, she satisfies the IRS, saves Gary's inheritance by marrying him. Having learned that books are not life, Gary settles in to a genuinely satisfying life in Mudstone, the soon-to-be father of twins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483574622

Book preview

16

Chapter I

In Medias Mudstone

The West is full of surprises. A man can ride through the Rockies just once and be touched forever by the spectacle of lowering peaks, the sighing of aspen in the clear air of timeless valleys, the trail of strong men who have gone before—good and bad, red and white—their footsteps echoing still through nights of ten thousand stars. I learned that from Louis L’Amour. But Louie, not even you could imagine what owlhoots have stooped to rustling these days. When I eased out of the saddle at my Uncle Dan’s cabin after two days of hard riding, the first man I met accused me of being part of the gang that had stolen his grand piano. Now I hadn’t seen my uncle since I was twelve, and for all I knew he might have dabbled some in grand theft. Me, I had given up thievery after stealing a watermelon in Ohio when I was nine. It bothered my conscience something fierce. And the melon had been overripe, to boot.

The place had been deserted when I first arrived, except for a mule behind the barn, and he paid me no never-minds once I shut off the Honda and dismounted. Dan’s spread lay on the north edge of Mudstone Creek, Colorado, about two hundred acres if the fence lines were trustworthy, and the owner gave every sign of being a pack rat. Clutter was everywhere. Three school busses occupied the side by the trail up Elk Jaw. One had undergone a partial transformation and sported bunk beds. Odd lots of lumber were piled separately about the property, as were three left front fenders, two green and one from a Dodge Dart, primed and ready for paint. I recognized it only because Sherrie still drove one. There were also some rolled-up scraps of fence wire with posts still attached, as well as a collection of doors, windows, stock-watering tanks, and even a shed piled with wooden horses and old television sets. Arranged and sorted the way it was, the junk appeared in slightly better condition than utter abandonment would have accounted for, as though someone had lavished periodic hopes upon it. At the end of a short dirt driveway that bent past the shed and barn, the cabin perched on the only truly flat spot. It featured oiled logs over a concrete block foundation and had an upstairs, judging from the doorway that opened onto a small balcony suspended over the larger porch below. A broker would call it a chalet, I guess, and get all choked up about its rustic charms.

After I had shut off the motorcycle, a squeaking continued in my ears. It turned out to be a pair of hummingbirds swooping in great arcs about a feeder on the porch. In New Mexico I was more used to seeing buzzards hanging silently in the sky. I set the helmet on the left mirror and hailed the house. No one answered. Through the screen I could see that the main door was open, but I did not enter. Seventeen years ago I had been a kid when Dan Keogh had last seen me. I was dropping in unannounced, in hopes he might put me up for the summer, but my midwestern manners prefer not to compromise a welcome before it is extended. Besides, it felt good just to sit awhile on the porch steps, the jangle of the day’s ride easing slowly from my bones.

The back section of the property undulated upward toward the peak of Elk Jaw mountain. It was a splendid vista. I had almost reached a first name acquaintance with the hummingbirds when a car pulled onto the creek road from town and stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel and watched the house. I tried to ignore him, but having my idleness observed almost nagged me into rising and approaching the car. The driver, however, acted first, exiting the car and striding up the incline, the gray suit and vest suggesting a lawyer, perhaps, or a professor, one of those ambitious Eastern types.

He was a short man with a round face. Neatly clipped wisps of light blond hair encircled the balding head, with heavy matching eyebrows near invisibly set above a pair of silver-rimmed glasses—the kind of character, I guessed, who as a kid might have been called Whitey by the guys who liked him, and taunted as an albino by those who didn’t. As if to compensate for his stature, he spoke first, a regular take-charge specialist.

Good evening, young man. I represent the telephone company. He extended a card which announced that his name was T. Harold Lavery, that he was the district seven manager for Mountain States Telephone Company, and that he could be reached at three numbers—one each for home, office, and automobile. I took out the combination cardholder and notebook which I use in place of a wallet and inserted the card between my driver’s license and university ID.I’m looking for Dan Keogh. I don’t believe I know you, he continued. You wouldn’t by any chance be Keogh’s associate, Pat Lagelli, would you?

On a momentary impulse I extracted a card and handed it wordlessly to the T. Harold Lavery who did not believe he knew me. Sherrie had had a hundred printed up for my birthday. One would have been enough for the joke, but she said I could use the other ninety-nine to my profit in whatever bar or restaurant I happened to find myself a stranger in. The card was elegantly printed in neatly centered lines:

Hello!

My name is Gary Bullock.

I am an Unpublished writer.

Will you BUY this card?

She had gotten the idea when accosted in a bus station by a deaf man, selling sympathy in the guise of cards imprinted with the American Sign Language. T. Harold accepted the card without a smile, noting merely that I might improve my business prospects if I included a phone number where a publisher might reach me. And then, raising his eyebrows slowly, first one and then the other, he pursed his lips and pocketed the card.

Well, Gary, if that’s the name you prefer, he continued, my business today is with Dan Keogh. He’s got something of mine. Where might I contact him? It was plain that he still thought I was Pat what’s-his-name.

Look, my mother was Lily Bullock, his sister, I said, but I haven’t set eyes on him since I was twelve. He nodded dryly as I explained the terms of my own speculative arrival. But spying the open door, he suggested we might enter and look around.

Just the downstairs, he said. The piano I’m looking for is nine foot long and weighs more than half a ton. Not even Keogh could get it up those stairs. And without waiting for my unofficial assent, he pressed by and entered the house, leaving me to sidle tentatively in his wake. During his rapid circuit of the kitchen and living room, he ignored a frame holding parts of an old piano keyboard that leaned against the back wall. I don’t know much about grand pianos, but new or old they do declare themselves against any background. The only closed door turned out to be a bathroom. It had been a long ride, and when I came out of the bathroom he was standing by the phone, stroking his smoothly shaven chin.

It’s not in the barn, either, he said, anticipating a suggestion I had not thought to make. I’ve already looked. The unction he had used to gain entry had dried considerably by the time he turned to leave. Bullock, Lagelli, or whatever you call yourself today, we don’t see many strangers in Mudstone. For all I know, you might well be a party to this.

This what?

He had to have help moving it. I’m just wondering how many more of you Harley riders are out there.

Now, Hamlet had no trouble telling a hawk from a handsaw, but this ranny sure couldn’t tell a Harley from a four-year-old ‘82 Honda CB750. I ride alone, I said. I’d always wanted to recite that line to a stranger. Especially one who came on bottom-line tough, acting like he’d as soon skin a horsefly for the hide and tallow of it.

He tugged down on both points of his vest, standing as tall as he could, and bristled. Well, we’ll just see if T. Harold Lavery can’t give a lesson or two in sucking eggs, he said.

Do you wish to leave a message, I improvised. He minded me of a dude who was born silly and was having a relapse, but I saw no harm in humoring him.

He may think otherwise, but it’s my piano, bought and paid for with my money. You and Dan Keogh would do well to keep that in mind. I’ll attach the property, rolling or fixed, of any and all accessories to this crime, he said, with a speculative scowl that took in both me and the Honda. And don’t think we’re not ready for your phone tricks. We’re on to Captain Crunch and his cronies here. You’ll find that T. Harold Lavery is no man to fool around with.

When he said his name, it sounded like THE Harold Lavery, and he fired it off like three bullets, as if it were an incantation for an imminent being whose strings it was in his power alone to pull. The Fiesta he drove off in was a company car which bore on the driver’s door the logo of Mountain States Telephone Company, an eagle seated on a cross of Lorraine—which on closer inspection turned out to be a telephone pole.

I returned to the porch, somewhat puzzled about the zealous collecting of overdue phone bills in Mudstone. And despite his insinuations about Count Chockula and Captain Crunch, I didn’t know a single phone ttrick. I remembered having tried to called ahead, only to find that the operator could not get through. Kept claiming it was busy. The thought of spending an entire summer without a phone, however, suited me. One thing about Louis L’Amour’s heroes, they never got a wrong number. Or got put on hold. But how the times have changed, Louie! Your yarns have a way of taking off like a bullet. And yet as dusk set in and I tried to frame an anecdotal summary of my first day in Mudstone, a ricochet from a popgun would have shamed it. Try as I might, I could not find a punch line for a story about a little man with heavy white eyebrows madly pursuing his El Dorado of a grand piano. Every attempt collided with the fact that I knew next to nothing about my uncle Dan.

I had motorcycled up from New Mexico to north central Colorado seeking three undistracted months in which to edit my thesis advisor’s book and write an ending to my western novel, Elephant Canyon. Now, I don’t see myself as being into literature, though that’s the way Professor Donald D. Spenser (PhD, Am. Lit.) puts it. But when the graduate college at Northeastern New Mexico University denied my petition for one more extension to complete my degree requirements, he turned all business. It’s out of my hands, Gary, he said. Get your novel up there on the shelf next to Louis L’Amour by the end of October, or there’ll be no Master of Fine Arts from N.N.M.U. for you.

But before I could even tell Sherrie that night about Spenser’s ultimatum, she dropped the second surprise of the day on me. She told me I was to become a father sometime in December. Matt Correll, the hero of my western, never had to face such difficulties in the plot I gave him. If he had, he would simply have proposed marriage and thenthe verb is invariable--swept her toward the altar in the last chapter. I had tried that with Sherrie. But when I proposed, she turned me down—said her child wasn’t going to have an academic bum for a father. She collects rocks and even makes a fair living selling them, but nothing that I said would induce her to collect me. Your ivory tower’s a dream, she said. Get a life.

Now, I am built to handle only one crisis at a time. And the threat of being bounced out of grad school in ten weeks, my last three years of effort flushed down the toilet--that seemed more immediate than December’s blessed event. So I grabbed my TRS80 laptop and took to the road. Call it a retreat. Sherrie says I’m touring my life instead of living it. I only admit that when things get troubled, the road is an open door to the West. So when the crisis of my academic life collided with my impending fatherhood, I retreated unannounced to Mudstone, were I had once spent the summer of my thirteenth year with my uncle Dan and my Grandfather.

To understand Sherrie with for the past two years, you have to know that before we met in New Mexico she’d spent a year on an Australian walkabout. Sharon Rose is self-reliant, perhaps, to a fault. But though geology and rocks had drawn her down under, the harder rock of mateship in the outback repelled her. She returned to America convinced that there was more to life than being a sheila. I told her once how Nazi storm troopers had degraded women with their notions of kitchen, church, and children—what they called Kuchen, Kirchen, und Kinder. She said that sounded somewhat civilized in comparison with station-life in the outback. But burn down the church, put a dirt floor in the kitchen, and bear all the children you can deliver yourself between meals—and you might understand what it means to be a sheila.

I never thought I demanded much looking after, but she seemed driven toward a rectitude that would not abide an unkempt life. I admit to being happier in a library than in an employment office. But I am far from being the complete slob. I will wipe my nose when needed, if not my feet. I told her I was concerned with Being, with living in the eternal present, and she with Becoming. She told me that she was concerned with Being Pregnant and that the Becoming was not optional. I tried, Louie, but I couldn’t sweep her an inch. She had her house, her rocks, her growing list of mail order customers—don’t ask me why people buy rocks by mail—and she filled her days making the seasonal rounds of the meets, those flea market bazaars where they pile up rocks on tables and let the buyer beware. Some of them even take Visa and Mastercard. Sherrie does.

Women sure make life a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Sherrie showed me a geode once. It was just a plain ordinary rock--about the size of a cantaloupe—till someone got the idea of splitting it open. You wouldn’t believe the difference it made. All crystalline inside, it was—clear in places and rainbowed in others, making a body think of chandeliers and cathedrals and such. I ask you, is there a waste of beauty in a world where even plain old rocks can surprise you with what they’re keeping private?

After T. Harold Lavery left, I sat back on the silent porch and wondered about the chances of my summer working out. Less than an hour ago I had motored unsuspecting round the bend in the long downslope that skirted Elk Jaw Mountain. Mudstone Creek didn’t seem to have changed much in the last seventeen years. It was still quiet and isolated, still picturesque enough to shelter a score or more of unpublished writers like me. Two manuscripts bulged in the Honda saddlebags—Elephant Canyon, my pot-boiler of a western that lacked an ending—and Spenser’s How to Author Really Effective Novels. The author allowed that perhaps even the title needed some work.

When Prof. Spenser requested that I go over his latest manuscript for publication, I didn’t mind. It was just one hand washing the other. He was going to OK my novel for credit at NNMU, and I was going to sharpen his annual entry in the Publish or Perish shark-feed. What he actually said was Hell, Gary, you’re into this literature crap. You don’t watch yourself, you talk like a book anyhow. Just put in some of that avant garde deconstructionist lingo so I don’t come off soundin’ like some hick. Arvis, New Mexico, the Athens of Grinder county, is clearly no threat to Cambridge. When Ol’ Spenser asked me once what this hegemony was that he kept hearing about at the conferences, I told him it was the scientific name for sagebrush. Though I’m finishing a master’s degree in English, I like to maintain a delicate mix with my ain’ts and my whomevers—one of the results, probably, of too much concentrated study in the collected works of Louis L’Amour. Only the older professors, the real scholars, remark on the mixture. But even they must know that North Enema U is no Harvard and that graduate students like me are seldom candidates for the tenured professoriat.

It’s October now, but this crazy summer has not yet sorted itself out. I researched and wrote up some background chapters of it for Sid Brill, the Hollywood producer who paid me for the rights to The Ballad of Mountain Dan. He’s having some hack do the screen treatment. Claims I have no story sense. I’ve included a sample chapter later. Judge for yourself.

—2—

I had forgotten exactly where in town my grandfather’s place was. What little I knew about Dan Keogh came from family gossip. Just last year at the family picnic in Ohio, my attendance at which constituted the minimum duties of the clan, Aunt Martha—she with the whorls of baby-hair on her upper lip—had allowed over watermelon that if Dan Keogh had been Schubert, the world would have had an Unfinished Unfinished Symphony. She called it the Keogh Curse. Not that I had come to Mudstone needing my uncle to finish anything. I just wanted to be put up for the summer. Aunt Elsie was the one who first mentioned the family property in Colorado. She and Uncle Ralph had raised me after my mother died when I was only twelve.

After Dan had been wounded in Viet Nam, he had gone to visit his father, Owen Keogh, who lived alone in Mudstone. But within a week of Dan’s arrival, Owen keeled over and died while butchering a hog. Though all the property was left to his daughter Elsie, she had no objection to her brother Dan staying on, as long as he kept up the taxes on the place. I recalled a two bedroom log cabin with indoor plumbing and hoped he would put me up. Dan, the family agreed, had pretty much turned into a hermit and seldom wrote much in the brief notes he included when he sent the tax receipts every April. That terrible war, Elsie had sighed, before reaching for another ear of corn and asking me when I was going to meet a nice girl out there in New Mexico and settle down.

I didn’t tell her that I had been living with a nice girl for almost two years. Dan told me once that my tiny handwriting indicated a secretive character. I’m not convinced, but people in Ohio towns do carry on over the most ordinary things. And now that Sherrie was pregnant and had kicked me out, there’d be no explaining it to them. I wasn’t sure I understood it myself. But like I say, one crisis at a time. I was an unpublished writer with a deadline to meet. And Mudstone seemed a better place to write than Sherrie’s back in New Mexico, which chore I had tried for a year and a half. On the map Mudstone seemed close to the continental center for peace and quiet. After Sherrie’s place, I rather thought anywhere would have.

Pregnancy had not softened her sharp tongue nor modified her distrust of me and my honorable proposal of marriage. Here you are, almost thirty, she had reminded me at out parting, and you’ve never held a job for longer than five months. Actually I had been night man at the Arvis waterworks for seven months, before moving in with Sherrie. And what kind of writer is it that dawdles for thirty months over a simple story and can’t finish it? It was enough to raise one child, she concluded. She wasn’t going to put up with two. When I first rode into Mudstone Creek that late afternoon of a Thursday, it seemed an ideal writer’s retreat. The main and almost only fully paved street was deserted, and if the flattened valley harbored seven hundred houses, more than a few were abandoned. The sign said Pop. 1671 but a scattering of empty storefronts told of hard times since the last census. It was one of those string towns that mountain valleys seem to favor. Albuquerque started out that way, but it had been luckier. For one thing, it had kept its river, which is more than Mudstone Creek had done. Only a shallow dry coulee meandered through the backyards of the place. Except for the one hard-road that ended at the far end of town, everything else was dust. You don’t put the lid back on the sugar bowl, you got mud in your coffee.

You can’t hide the one gas station that places like Mudstone manage to hold on to, and this one was at the south entrance to town. I parked the bike by the cheaper of the two pumps, which stood in front of a converted storefront. The sign in the window said GOOD STUFF. It also announced that while J.H. Stimmert was the Prop., the owner was one D.M. Keogh. While I filled the tank, I suppressed the notion that I might spend the summer cadging gas from my uncle. I took the $2.35—exact change—to the old man by the door, who lay reclining, both hands cupped behind his head, on an aluminum chaise longue, the kind with the orange and green plastic webbing. The tag was plain enough, $3.00, and it was probably good stuff. If you’ve ever spotted an enameled chair with one loose leg at a garage sale, held it up and pronounced it a perfectly good chair, you know what good stuff means. The perfectly good $3.00 chair was a match for the other collectibles in the window: some old mining tools, rusty but intact; assorted dusty bottles, the labels long gone that might have said whisky or patent catarrh specific; an incomplete set of curry combs; and a Remington, this one not a carbine or a painting but simply a typewriter. It was the twin of the one my dad had left me—or would have been if the h and y regularly jammed.

I am twenty-nine, slender to the point of whippiness, Sherrie says, with watery blue eyes, and according to Professor Spenser I know a great deal more about Jesse James than about capitalism. I admit to admiring the look of the old West, as modeled in the tintypes reprinted in the coffee table pictorial history that Sherrie gave me last Christmas. The boots, however, were more motorcycle that western, and the squint, too, owed more to long hours on the Honda than to the grainy photos of John Wesley Hardin I had made a study of. It’s true, however, that I deliberately cultivated a light brown mustache that droops on both sides, the kind the books call the Gunfighter’s Special.

The old man saw me eying the stuff in the window. His drooping gray mustache was a good half-pound fuller than mine. No motor-sickle stuff, sonny. But they’s four, maybe five, power mowers out back. One might even run.

I held out the money. Is the D.M. Keogh who owns this stuff Dan Keogh?

Who needs to know?

Gary Bullock. Lookin’ for my uncle Dan. Alls I know is my Aunt Elsie says he lives here on what she calls the Keogh property. Actually she spoke of it with pride as part of the family holdings.

Horace Stimmert here. Call me Hoss. Everybody else does. Both hands uncupped smoothly from behind the head, though neither offered to shake, the one taking the money I held out and easing it into the pocket of a faded plaid shirt, the other gesturing down the main road through town. He’s a Dan’l. Could be yours. You’ll have to ask him. He don’t talk much about family. You’ll find him in the last place at the far end of the valley. Can’t miss it. Dead ends ‘cept for the old Elk Jaw logging trail.

It was probably a mistake to call Mudstone a one horse town. At any rate, the remark wakened the historian in Hoss, who allowed that no one any longer kept a horse—not counting the merry-go-round variety—within the city limits, though the Mudstone Mavericks brought theirs in for the Fourth of July parade. He remembered swimming in the creek years ago. He claimed that toward the end it had been in a sorry state, too thick to drink but too runny to chew. And like the horse, the creek had not been seen since 1940, leaving strangers to conclude that the town which wasn’t much really had no business being there at all. Nearly four hundred families had once called it home, but after the strike when the smelter shut down across the county line over at Richler, it had fallen upon leaner days. The 1980 census had counted all 2671 residents, though the two Schmertmann kids in fact left a week after being counted, as soon as AutoPro over in Steamboat found them a transmission for uncle Otto’s ‘56 Dodge truck. The old man did run on, but I took no mental notes. For me the Old West belonged to the cattlemen. It certainly did not include miners and smelters and strikes. At best, I thought, Hoss might be adapted to play a bit part in chapter seven’s range war.Total concentration on a genre’ll do that to you.

On the way through town, I tallied the discarded washing machines and Chevvies that decorated every other lot. Mudstone looked like the junkman’s equivalent of the old elephant burial ground, where prehistoric Falcons and Kelvinators came to rust. The houses, which all had steeply gabled metal roofs, were separated by weedy patches given over to rusted pickups, household appliances and a hayrake or two, the curved fingers of which looked like the ribcages of prehistoric lizards. It suited me, for unlike the environmentalists, I take the view that everything’s got to be somewhere.

After half an hour of slow breathing in the gathering dusk on the porch, I felt my muscles beginning to unwind. Dan’s place was at the high end of the valley. There were several outbuildings, though what seemed a weathered shed was actually a pile of stacked barn-siding that had sagged against an orange ‘57 Maverick, hiding it except from the front, where one headlight hung from its socket, still shiny, like an eye gouged in a recent fight.

I wasn’t surprised when my mind turned to Heinie’s question. It often came back in the quiet dark after a long day. Heinie had been a friend of my dad and had, in fact, told me most of the little I know about him. I guess if I weren’t an orphan and a bit of a loner, Heinie wouldn’t have become such an intrusive presence. As it is, not a month has passed since he first asked the question fifteen years ago but that I have thought of it. At the time I not only didn’t know the right answer, I didn’t even know what a plausible one would sound like. Heinie wasn’t really German, and Henry was the name on the license that hung on the wall of his drugstore in Hillsboro, Ohio, where he gave me my first job, bicycling prescriptions around town. He must have given up explaining about his last name—the diploma from the Harrisburg School of Pharmacology was awarded that eighteenth day of June, 1951, to Henry Smollet—since the sign outside was for Smoller’s Pharmacy, not that anybody I ever knew called him anything but Heinie. My job included a lot of sitting around being ready, and I performed it by spending most of my wages at his soda fountain. If you pinch a paper straw just right, you can make a bottle of Pepsi last forty-five minutes--time enough to read a whole issue of Popular Mechanics, borrowed fresh from the rack. Heinie didn’t like for you to read unless you bought something. The only thing I ever saw him read was Louis L’Amour.

I can see him now, standing behind the soda fountain, the generous mustache of a grandfatherly Hal Holbrook brooding over his fixed smile. If you’d get your nose out of those magazines and read a newspaper once in a while, he’d told me the summer I was fourteen, you might scrape up enough gumption to make something of yourself. The papers that year had been full of stories about dominoes in Southeast Asia, stuff that did not compel my passionate attention.

Up in Cleveland a kid your age just graduated from college, he continued. And I read just last night about some little girl in North Dakota. Six years old, never had a teacher, and already plays the piano like Horowitz.

Now I’d never set myself up as a prodigy, but hearing about one did sharpen my anxiety. I had always assumed I would dazzle the grown-up world when the time came. But God, who I had also assumed was to provide the means, did seem a bit slow in revealing to candidate-dazzler me the particulars of my latent talent.

That summer was probably the first time I’d heard what I’ve since come to call Heinie’s Question. It came during the lull after I got to the bottom of the bottle and the long bubbly sucks were intruding on the hum of the ceiling fan, the kind that spin so slow you can count the revolutions. Heinie was the first grown-up ever to call me by my last name. Bullock, he asked, dead serious in that quiet way of his, Bullock, do you think you’ll ever amount to a pile of shit?

Now I wasn’t raised to talk like that, but I knew the first time he asked it that it deserved a serious answer. Like I say, not a month in the last fifteen years but that I’ve pondered the matter. I thought now of the little man from the phone company, unheeding of Thoreau’s warning to beware of enterprises that required new clothes. I thought of child prodigies, of gumption and ambition. I even recalled the perfect job I had had for seven months as night watchman of the Arvis, New Mexico, Municipal Waterworks and Sewage Treatment Plant, only to be let go because Bert Albertson, whose future father-in-law was Superintendent of Public Works, had been fired as a management trainee at K-Mart for shoplifting and needed a job.

Someone once said that a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg. Heinie’s question seemed an extension of that paradox. People, he seemed to think, might just be shit’s way of achieving mobility. Nevertheless, he would have agreed with Aunt Elsie’s prescription. Get your college degree, settle down with a nice girl and make something of yourself. Well, Heinie, I’m trying. But you see, it wasn’t Dickens alone who taught me about excremental imagery, nor was it just literary criticism that gave me this metaphysical uncertainty.

And it didn’t just come from Sherrie. At least, not all of it.

Chapter II

Of Social Animals and Opposable Thumbs

I thought about Heinie’s Question for a time, until my knees stopped twitching and the itch for conviviality asserted itself in the wake of the long day’s solitary ride. After unloading the rest of my baggage, I climbed back on the Honda and headed for Mudstone’s only visible bar, marked by a neon sign flashing from what passed for downtown—MARY’S SPOT…MARY’S SPOT…MARY’S SPOT. It was only a three-minute walk, but had it been only half a block, I would still have ridden. Writing a western had flooded my imagination with cowboy attitudes, among which was the notion that if a job can’t be done on horseback, it probably isn’t worth doing at all. That a motorcycle is not a horse is one of the smaller matters Sherrie and I have discussed. At length.

As I ambled up to Mary’s door, I saw that T. Harold had switched his surveillance and was now keeping an eye on all of commercial Mudstone: a block and a half of mostly boarded-up establishments, together with Ralph’s IGA, a boutique called Sunlight and Star Shadows, and Mary’s Spot.

I saw at a glance that Wild Bill Hickock wouldn’t have needed a wall at his back to feel safe in Mary’s Spot. It combined a bar, a diner and a drugstore all under one roof. To the left as you entered was a regular drugstore with a scattering of racks for greeting cards, cosmetics, and medicine chest fillers targeted at the minor aches of arthritis. At the back was an office with a sliding window through which prescriptions could be passed. A row of seven booths separated the drugstore from the bar and grill, which occupied perhaps twice as much space. Along the right wall the bar was garlanded by an irregular line of battered stools, no three of which matched. Between the bar and the booths were four circular tables. At the back wall stood a glittering juke box that would have been more comfortable in a room twice as big. Though there was not much empty floor space, the room was large enough to handle the crowd. Only six customers--two at the bar and the rest in several booths—occupied the attention of the man and woman who evidently ran the place. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender looked like a pharmacist. It was a novel combination, since I knew of no place in New Mexico where you can get drunk at night, try sobering up on coffee and pancakes the next morning, and get a prescription for paraldehyde filled the next evening.

Every town has a Mary’s Spot. Back in Hillsboro, Heinie’s place had a regular morning crowd for coffee, talk and donuts. Second cuttings of alfalfa, the politics of tax assessors and the dimensions of almost-caught fish had their annals tirelessly retold. In Mary’s Spot you could have a beer if you didn’t like coffee. The decor was as up-to-date as the poster listing the Denver Bronco’s games for next fall could make it—and as timeless as the classic tableau of Custer’s Last Stand, which sold little if any of Anheuser Busch’s fine products while gracing the corner by the foot plasters and aluminum crutches.

Young fella, come sit with us. It was the old man from the gas station and he clearly meant me. I took my beer and joined Hoss and another man at the front booth. They were both drinking Busch’s finest. This is Jerry, that motor-sickle fella I was tellin’ you about, Doc.

Doc was an open-faced man of about forty with dark curly hair that was a stranger to the brush. He wore a neat but faded blue shirt over what seemed a lumberjack’s frame, with a belly that rounded just enough to obscure the beltline. Welcome to Mudstone, Jerry. He spoke from the back of his mouth, pinching his words through a tight throat in a moist gravelly rasp. Except for the weekend crowd from Steamboat, we get about one point three strangers a month. Looks like you’re it for June. You’ve already met Horace, I see. I’m Jim Bothwell. They call me Doc. A firm handshake completed the formalities.

It’s Gary, not Jerry. Gary Bullock, I said. Bothwell did not seem a medical man, but then towns like Mudstone Creek would have been lucky to attract even a third-world chiropractor. Judging from the ankle-high work shoes, worn and rock-scarred, I pegged him for a geologist, with even money on whether the Ph.D. were real or honorary.

Horace tells me you’re kin to Dan Keogh.

I’m pretty sure he’s the one my Aunt Elsie told me about. But there wasn’t anyone home up at the cabin. I’d’ve phoned ahead but I couldn’t get any number from Directory Service.

Hoss guffawed, and Doc’s smile prolonged the joke till I felt like the dude who had mentioned animal rights at the rodeo.

Hoss explained. Mountain States wouldn’t give out his number on a bet, less’n you was workin’ for a Law Enforcement Agency. He spoke each capital letter as though tasting a particularly tart dill pickle. If they was any legal way to cut him off, they’d’ve done it.

I mentioned T. Harold what’s-his-face from the phone company, who had left off watching at Dan’s only to take up station outside the bar. He barged in looking for a grand piano. Didn’t say why. Where I come from, you fall behind in your bill they just cut you off, no matter if it’s Christmas.

It ain’t no overdue bill’s got his dander up, Hoss said. "Grand piano, was it? He came snoopin’