The Meeky Mouse

By Adam Dumphy

A “modern western” for men, this novel is set in 1943 and describes a little known off shoot of WW1I. In a partly true scenario it involves an attempt of Japanese Intelligence to establish a radio receiving station high in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico.

A Marine newly returned from Guadalcanal and seeking only the quiet necessary to heal his wounded body and mind encounters the tense situation of Mexican/Americans vs. Anglos in a small New Mexican valley.

And he meets two Mexican/American women who behind their attractive faces seem to have dark shadows.

Being asked to locate the receiving station results in a shoot out between a marine-trained marksman with his Garand and the traditional Winchesters of the old west.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 2, 2005
• ISBN: 9781463475093

Adam Dumphy

Inflamed by a novel of and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, titled, “The Kansas City Milkman”, Adam Dumphy searched out and contacted a clandestine enlistment center for the British Ambulance Corps operating there. Clandestine as it was at the time an illegal act to aid either side in the conflict. To Adam that fit the novel and made it all the more interesting to him and more Hemingwayesque. He ever after felt the British people generally to be biased and intolerant as he was rejected and simply for being only twelve years old. Still he found himself fascinated by that most peculiar of wars even as some men are towards our American Civil War. All the books and information he collected then he still has. His loyalty he has tried to maintain unbiased to either side although it has varied in degree from one side to another from year to year. Now from the vantage point of eighty years of age the only thing he can decide with certainty about the affair is that both sides got a very “bad press”. But then he believes that is true of most major events.

Book preview

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

About the Author

To

Irene

And

Mair who is so like her.

The Meeky Mouse

Summer 1943. War Time San Diego, CA.

Chapter 1

The reason the Jeep was so cheap was the shrapnel holes all through it. Only $250.00. the handwritten sign said.

It’s plenty cheap all right because of all those holes.

The very tall, blonde, young man walked all around it and observed it carefully from every side.

"I almost said shrapnel wounds." He thought as they were one inch sized holes on the driver’s side, at the site of entry, and had expanded to three or four inch sized holes on exit through the hood and shallow body, besides the fabric top was shredded.

The impact had given the body a definite tilt, lifting the driver’s side and tilting the frame down and to the right.

It caught it good somewhere, sometime. He mused.

He walked around it again. Only three and a half years old it was a 1939 Willys.

Another sign said, Runs good.

How it had gotten here on the back lot of a third rate used car dealer, Manny’s Motors, in the South Bay section of San Diego he couldn’t think. Equipment was so scarce in these wartime days; the services were all so sorely stressed just now that there were hardly ever surplus sales. Every truck, tank and gun was recovered and repaired or supposed to be.

Probably smuggled in from Mexico after being sold as junk by some enterprising CB to a freighter off some South Pacific Island. He thought.

Suddenly he decided he liked it. Wanted it, coveted it actually. And in a manner totally characteristic of himself he looked into his mind to try to discover why.

Counting on his fingers, he enumerated:

1. He had always wanted a Jeep.

2. He needed transportation.

3. He was intending to head for the roughest and most desolate country he could find.

4. An errant thought came. He resented it, rejected it, but it returned and persisted. Wasn’t it just possible he felt a certain empathy, a comradeship, with this battered old wreck? After all he was full of shrapnel holes too. He had a tilt. His left shoulder was still humped, the arm hanging unnaturally where the surgeons at the Navy Hospital had put the pieces back together as best they could. They had even done some fancy tendon transplants to try to keep the shoulder from dislocating again.

He considered this further. He wasn’t old either just five weeks less than twenty-one. And like the Willys he was already cast off, out of the main stream of the war and the world. In a kind of junk yard of his own and going for cheap.

Well, hell. Either way he wanted it. He removed a thin wallet from the back pocket of his comfortably worn, old prewar Levi’s. Opening it the torn threads of the center section showed as white strands where the celluloid filler that usually held pictures; family pictures, high school pictures, a girl friend’s picture, had been torn out savagely, leaving broken threads and now only two flat slabs of leather.

He counted the contents again carefully. It was always the same, $438.00, when it wasn’t less. That and the $2000.00 in War Bonds were his total assets. When he went over seas he remembered that as a new, very suddenly made orphan after an auto accident, he had owned the family house in solid, comfortable Mission Hills, a Beach house in Ocean Beach and a little ranch in the Laguna Mountains. And had $20,000 odd in cash in a joint bank account. That was before…. Well that was neither here nor there, now. Another story…

He counted again, still the same. Well maybe Manny would take less.

Chapter 2

The next day plus one he was heading the battered old Jeep out and away from San Diego on Highway 80 toward Route 66. And he wasn’t the least bit sorry to be leaving Dago. He had heard it called at various times and places: The Avocado Center of the World, The American Beauty Rose Center of the World, The Best Climate in the World, the Center of Fun in the Sun in the World. And also The lousiest liberty town in the world, and the North End of the Tijuana Sewer". It was now simply what it was.

He sighed at the thought that it wasn’t the town that he knew and grew up in. That had been a bifid village, with a below-Broadway section with bars and locker rooms and assorted sailor bait. And then there was above Broadway a very conservative, small, Southwestern town.

Then it had a few streets laying at the top of the slope toward the bay and ending at the bay. A few houses sprawled over a few stumpy hills, which were here called mountains. It had two streetcars only, which tooted and stuttered and sparked their way down town and at times to the beaches from the car barn, an old dairy barn in North Park.

There were two high schools, bitter rivals, and miles of long, clean, white, sandy beaches where the rollers came in soft and blue like they had just left the Orient and stopped only to clean up their act about Hawaii. And one could body surf a good half mile from the breakers to the beach. There were a couple distinct and distinctive communities of Spanish style, stucco houses built in the twenties and that was all.

A wonderful town to grow up in and he looked back on his boyhood as ideal. Now it was a hive of aircraft activity; of flying and building planes, of bedroom communities for the 4F’s who drew down big salaries, drove big cars and lived the good life in the best housing, while chasing Rosie the Riveter who wasn’t running very fast. The poor wife of an enlisted sailor or Marine had to live three or four in a bedroom in a rented house with the understanding that they all stayed out late on the night when a husband came home from the war.

That was another world too, now. Best forget it.

The Jeep however pleased him. It was at first a little nerve wracking to drive. Tilting down and to the right as it did, it gave the impression that the highway sloped and looked for all the world as if one was heading off the right lane into the curb. On correcting this, one found oneself over the centerline.

But the Jeep pleased him in other ways too. Three of the seats had been left with Manny for a credit. A piece of marine plywood extended from the forward fire wall to the rear body frame, being long enough for a comforter as a mattress, and with his sleeping bag made a satisfactory bed. A cross shelf in the rear held a Coleman stove and beneath it a box of food and utensils. On top of all and piled indiscriminately were a few clothes.

The fabric roof was now neatly mended and more or less rain proof but he was accustomed to ignore rain after thirteen months in Guadalcanal. Along the side and under the bed was his Garand, his really. Issued to him in Boot Camp it had cost him $20 to have a gunnery sergeant accurize it, and his also as with it he had fired top man in the regiment. When he was wounded the second time on the big island and found he was being sent home he dismantled it, padded it, and packed it in his sea bag so no one could feel it from the outside and brought it home instead of worn out uniforms. A lot of weapons were lost like that.

Beside him was his Father’s old Colt .44-40 about the only thing he had left of his Father’s after his aunt had held the estate sale while he was overseas.

He was equipped then for most anything and that too was satisfying.

But he was eager to get along. So eager he didn’t stop until midnight in El Centro for a bowl of chili and a roll of French bread, $0.68, total, now down to $264.75.

He stopped about 3:00 AM to sleep a little but he was too excited to be on his way, to sleep long. Also mostly he wanted to see if his memories of dawn on the desert were as vivid as he recalled.

They were. First the velvety and impenetrable black, soft, dry, dark blanket of the desert night. Then the first light, felt not seen. Then the moment of the Arabic definition of dawn, when a white thread could be told from a black. He wanted to try that but by the time he had found two threads it was too late. And even before he was watching for it the saguaro’s all grew a shadow behind them and almost instantly the entire world was rose grey; sand, sage, cactus, rock, all a faint rose that increased slowly. Then a tiny sleepy looking rim of the sun peeped over the edge of the desert as if testing it’s welcome. It seemed to retreat a moment and then came gradually into view and bringing with it warmth and cheer.

As the day lightened there was the numbing dampness from the scanty, night dew seeping through everything to chill the bones and make one want to hurry back under the covers. And finally the heat starting up that would dry out his bones and reduce the aching in his shoulder. The long day of sunshine had begun.

He continued on, stopping to nap in the shade of a smoke tree during the heat of the day but started again seeking something, uncertain in his mind really as to what. Something he had longed for overseas but which he could not precisely define.

It was in eastern Arizona near the New Mexico borderline that he saw a row of purple lumps far ahead in the distance and realized suddenly what he was searching for. He had always loved the desert. Even as a child he felt happy and at home there. Now it was doubly happy as he realized that his shoulder had not been hurting, at least not as much, for a few minutes at a time, now.

He loved the desert and wanted always to live there but he wanted also something to look up to. Not just across the endless and gently rolling desert only, but with a mountain or a mountain range or maybe just a hill to complete the scene in his mind. Maybe even with pine chevroned slopes and snow topped peaks to really look up to. Mountains. And peace and quiet. No people, no loud noises, no nothing unnatural. Especially no women.

Chapter 3

His sleeping and eating habits had been desultory for three days now and he was feeling a little light headed when he saw a friendly-looking, one lane road leading north across the flats toward a deep ‘V’ notch in the mountains in the distance. On impulse he turned and followed it. That too was invigorating as for nearly two years he had never been able to do anything, anything at all, unless approved or ordered by someone else. Now he could do whatever he wanted to do. Any silly thing he wanted. Any time he wanted.

He ignored the roadside sign, not wanting to know the distance or names; he didn’t want to know anything about it in advance. At mid afternoon he slowed and stopped before a large, rambling, shingle building, remnant of an earlier day.

It actually had a high false front hiding the true size of the place but most inviting was a long shaded porch along the entire front.

Scissors Crossing Store and Garage, the sign said, except someone had partly painted over the word ‘garage’. Gas, Groceries, Mercantile. was added to make up for the lack of a garage it seemed. Stepping up onto the porch and out of the glare he found the porch huge and deep but not exactly commodious as it was cluttered to the very railings with used furniture. Salable mostly but some surely not. There were stoves and ice boxes and refrigerators with the round fan on top, and hand washers and wringers, and their electric cousins, shovels and picks and hay hooks and push plows and wheelbarrows and more, more accumulated junk than he had ever seen before but apparently in this country all marketable merchandise.

As his eyes became accustomed he looked about curiously, approvingly. Tripping over a huge scythe blade he looked at a small wood stove hanging from the wall. Eagle he could make out on the door. Rome, Georgia. and below that Patent 1867. It seemed to have been never used.

He reached forward to touch a row of new canvas water bags with rope ties and a cork stoppers.

Behind him he heard a cackle. Hee, hee, hee. There is the chekaco for you. First thing they want is a useless, leaky water bag. Terrified that if they get two feet of the road they will die of thirst.

The young man dropped his hand embarrassed and turned to acknowledge the truth. A little old man was seated in a wicker chair his legs covered by an Indian robe even in this heat. At least he assumed it was a man for between the fifteen-gallon hat and the battered Romeo slippers there was little to be seen.

As the hat brim tipped up a wizened, crinkled face showed momentarily. With no teeth, the lips collapsed together into a cleft and the nose was so long it seemed to hook under and hold up the bony chin.

Now Grandpa don’t be always funning the young ones. It ain’t no sin to be young. I wished I was.

It was a friendly voice and with a friendly face to match. A large, heavy lady maybe sixty in loose housecoat and slippers was behind him. Could the old man really be her grandfather, Tim wondered. If so the old man must be about a hundred. Looking again he noticed the Lady’s hair was unashamedly grey, pulled back comfortably, about a round, cheerful face with plenty of wrinkle and laugh lines from undaunted years of living. She was refreshing to the young man, used as he was to the middle aged but young acting ‘blue hairs’ in town with their hair not just blue but wired in place with hair spray and renewed each week. Their faces lifted or so creamed, or wrinkles covered with so much make up, trying to desperately be young, and turned out in a fancy dresses or too tight slacks.

The lady continued. Come in, Son. We see so few strangers out here it is a real event when one does come by. Have an orange pop on the house and give us the news of the rest of the world.

Warmed by the first friendly voice that had addressed him since he left the hospital he accepted an orange pop from the big kitchen refrigerator just inside the main room and leaned back against a counter to talk.

Talking was not his strongest suit but he tried to please.

"Well nothing is very changed on the West Coast that I could see. War is still a scrambled, sad affair. People are trying to help all they can and soldiers and sailors are good enough but the leaders seem to be pretty addle-brained still.

"With the Japs being about to be interned most people with names like Adolph or Schmidt or Mueller are streaking it for the border, good citizens or not.

There is said to be half a dozen Jap subs operating off the coast. One surfaced and shelled an oil storage tank near Santa Barbara but it didn’t hit anything. It drew off I guess just as scared as we were.

He paused to see if that was what they wanted to hear. The pair were listening, leaning forward eagerly.

"There is a rumor that we are releasing air balloons over Alaska to float by wind currents over Japan and drop bombs. I heard that one ended up in Georgia, didn’t hit anything there either.

"Eleanor had John L. Lewis to tea. They talked about paramutual betting mostly and never got to around to worker’s benefits, I heard.

"Going to be a ceiling on rents and with everything else going up in price, landlords are going to have to skimp it.

That is all I can think of but it is a pretty crazy world out there. Its awful nice to be here where it is so pretty and calm and quiet.

Prettiest country anywhere. the comfortable lady said contentedly.

Pretty now? Why if you’d ever seen the gamma and buffalo grass in the seventies why you’d knowed what pretty really… The old man interrupted.

Sure Grandpa. She looked back to the young man. You looking for quiet, Son?

I am. he said firmly. What’s that split mountain just follow your nose from your front door?

That the original Peralta Land Grant. It’s called the Old Old Peralta Place now. And that is about the prettiest valley in all the southwest. Like you read or dream about. You will agree to that won’t you Grandpa?

Well it ain’t too bad… but… The old man grumbled.

Clean spring, a little stream, oak ‘an pine on the hills, mountains enough to protect on the north and east from the northers, and a view so you can see one hundred and fifty miles across the desert to the Sierra Antilles in Mexico. If you looking for quiet and pretty you ought to take a look at that ‘afore you go.

Owners mind a visitor?

Nobody lives there now. Owners or nobody else is up there these days. Too small to feed a family on. Two hundred years ago the Peraltas come up from Mexico and had the whole of New Mexico to pick from and they chose the Old Old place as their home place. Their Home Place is in the big valley just next to it now. They gradually moved all their operations over there an’ call that the Old Peralta Ranch.

Peralta?

Yeah. A big, beeg, beeg, family with dozens of cousins and relatives, living all over the entire slope, an’ up the Big Valley to the ridge of the San Perdido’s where the Forestry land starts. Sheep and lots of ‘em. They graze three bunches at least in the valley in the winter and take them up to the high plateau early spring for the summer and autumn.

She watched him to see if he was listening. He was listening closely.

They used to own everything clear way down to the River but the Anglos come and took away all the flat lands. Mostly we starved to death for it. Cattle need a lot acres to fatten up in this country.

A battered Ford truck drove up out front piled high with wire cages of turkeys on the flatbed. It stopped in a jangle of iron and rusty screeches and a little old lady jumped down and out. In middy blouse, full skirt and boots she seemed spry as one of her birds and smelled strongly of turkey droppings as well. She engaged the comfortable lady in an animated conversation and the young man feeling an intruder bought three cans of stewed tomatoes, two of sardines and two melons and grinning at the old man turned down the water bag.

It came to $0.87 and his bankroll down to $228.34 but he had to eat.

The ladies stopped their gossip to see him off. Come back again, Son, and why don’t you get a look at that valley before you go. What’s your name?

There was a noticeable pause while he considered, then, Andrus. He said. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be known he just didn’t want anyone to be able to find him. Marnie for instance.

The ladies noticed the pause and watched him curious now.

He realized their interest and reason for it and added trying for a partial explanation. My great, great grandfather didn’t spell too good so when he came to the U.S. he spelled Andrews like that. Andrus.

Still aware of their suspicions