Let Me Tell You About Osh: Fixit Man and Reluctant Detective

By Adam Dumphy

Even into the late 90’s Pine Valley, a bucolic village in the mountains above San Diego, CA was a divided community. Not by race or religion but by propane vs electricity, piped in water vs a walk to the well, and septic vs outhouse.

Responsible for the maintenance of all of these was Osh Oshman, the premier fixit man in the hill country. In his propane powered, ancient Ford truck he putts up and the down the dirt roads to keep his neighbors connected to the conveniences of modern living.

His other attributes include baking the best bread anywhere, talent on the banjo, and a penchant for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Now in his mid forties his recent marriage to his boyhood sweetheart has brought a dislocation in his life and his diet. The new little bride worrying about the longevity of her man, insists on organic, vegetarian meals and, a waitress only for a lifetime, as a cook the things she turned out often didn’t turn out.

When three outhouses in the area were rendered unusable by the deposition of a dead body in each, Osh reluctantly decides that it is his responsibility to stop this desecration of the time-honored edifices.

            With the aid of a Cocker Spaniel, reluctant courier of the bad guys, and a half-grown and half-tame mountain lion with a penchant for chasing motorcyclists, he investigates the deaths successfully.

It requires a good deal of local knowledge but fixit men who are in an out of the backdoor of all the houses in the area when the owners are not at their best, know a lot about their neighbors, and common sense, while uncommon does bring results.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 6, 2006
• ISBN: 9781467817998

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

Let Me Tell You

About Osh

Fixit Man And Reluctant Detective

by

Adam Dumphy

US%26UK%20Logo%20B%26W.ai

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200       

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

500 Avebury Boulevard

Central Milton Keynes, MK9 2BE

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 2006 Adam Dumphy. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 8/29/2006

ISBN: 1-4259-4536-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-1799-8 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

To

Harry, Fred, Ernie and John

The fixit men that keep my place up and running and me broke.

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 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

About the Author

Pine Valley, Calif. June 1995.

Chapter 1

The hell with the cholesterol, Mandy, I want peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast like before.

For breakfast and lunch and dinner, like before, I suppose, if I’d let you. Now you sit down to your breakfast and eat slowly chewing each bite twenty times.

He looked down at a bowl of soggy white mush. What is it?

Low fat farina and skimmed milk. Next week, maybe, her voice down geared from defiant to cajoling, you can have an egg.

They faced each other across the steaming ironstone bowl on gingham place mats on a spindly-legged Victorian table. Osh a great, shaggy-bear of a man with more hair sticking out of his ear canals than over his scalp, peered out through a scruffy, grayish beard and shaggy eyebrows. His only visible features were a patch of sun-tanned cheeks, a stub of a nose and two baby blue eyes. His shoulders stretched to the limit the extra-large L.L. Bean shirt. Wide wale corduroys hung low on his flat belly and he wore size 14, rubber-bottomed leather-topped pac boots on his feet as winter or summer he was wading in water most of every day.

A patter of gravel on the roof interrupted the scene.

I’m not at home. The great man shouted so loud that it echoed off the hills above the little cabin. He glared back down at the farina his more immediate problem.

Mandy hurried to the window. It’s that nice, new couple from the Forestry Cabins and Osh I wish you would put in a phone or at least leave the gate open so customers won’t have to throw gravel to get you to come to do their fixit.

Osh tasted the farina.

Mandy encouraged. There wasn’t that good? Rich and smooth?

Aargh. Osh groaned.

He turned to glare at the pert, redheaded bundle of contradiction across the table from him. She was plain featured except when she laughed, which she did most of the time, then she glowed. Short, slender if well muscled with a remarkably large bosom which had been the bane of her existence since girlhood and which she made every effort to hide with floppy shirts, lace sewn at the bodice and wrap around scarves. It was her pert little behind that caused men to look, and then turn and look back again but she didn’t realize that and she bustled about heedless of the attention it attracted.

Osh got to his feet, after the first taste of the mush he was less reluctant to get to work than before so he headed out into the yard. A white Ford van was parked at the foot of his gravel drive on the County Road and outside his locked pine-pole gate. A stocky young man stood at the fence.

What the trouble? Osh bellowed.

Toilet drain is plugged. The young man called.

You got a drain snake in your garage. Osh countered.

Tried it. No go. No flow.

Osh considered. It was probably a plugged septic line, which was not his favorite type of fixit. But then since it was sort of an emergency he could leave home breakfastless and eat at the coffee shop in town, that is if he had any money. He searched his pockets to find thirty-eight cents. Hell, a doughnut was a quarter and coffee a dime but you have to leave a tip.

Be by in half an hour. He shouted and started toward the barn, which did duty as a garage.

Mandy caught his arm and directed him back into the house.

That’s my Baby Boy. After all we are pretty broke and though I am not an expensive woman we could use a little fix up of our own around here.

Broke? Well maybe at the bank but everything we got is paid off and we don’t owe anybody a cent.

I know. Now you eat your bowl of cereal and maybe there will be something sweet for desert. Cinnamon toast. You know you get grumpy, I mean more grumpy, when you’re hungry.

Osh was astonished. Grumpy? Me? He always thought of himself as the most placid and pleasant of individuals.

Oh Osh. It is just that I had to wait so long... She stopped almost teary. She was referring to their late marriage, which had occurred only two months ago when both were in the mid forties. Osh had loved her since both were children growing up in Pine Valley, a hamlet hidden in the Coast Range of Southern California. Headstrong and romantic she had eloped with a city fellow one night under the influence of a full moon when she was fifteen. In a week she had regretted it and returned home, legally married and totally and unalterably out of Osh’s reach. Since then Osh had waited for her, taking care of her actually, while she worked as a waitress in the coffee shop for years until she was a widow.

In a voice reflecting the near tears she continued, It’s just that I waited so long for you and have been so happy these months, I want to keep you and keep you healthy for a longtime. And the doctor book says...

He wasn’t listening. He was looking into her eyes. He shrugged then followed her inside and sat down at the table. He took another mouthful of the farina and as she hurried passed he reached out a long arm out to give her a pinch on the fanny.

Mandy leaped and shrieked Osh! Really. At our age!

Always wanted to do that when you were waitressing. You used to bend over right in front of my end stool at the counter when you got out the catch-up bottle. Almost did once.

Oh Osh. She blushed and giggled like a teen. Did you really? And you still want to?

Osh still nervous about his good fortune in catching her and always afraid he might say the wrong thing changed the subject. This stuff tastes like boiled sawdust.

Chapter 2

Osh chewed, choked and to divert his mind he gazed out the picture window of the little cabin, down the long slope toward the town, Pine Valley. Only forty minutes from downtown San Diego and though that close to the fifth largest urban sprawl in the country it still maintained a log cabin, cowboy-country atmosphere since further building was proscribed until enough water supply was found to furnish the houses already there.

It was one of the few places in Coastal California that featured towering pines for they escorted the main street through the valley and gave it their aura and the sweet, pine scents of resin and freshness. Pine Valley’s one restaurant, one motel, two gas stations and two dozen scattered houses and cabins still knew the peace and pace of an earlier day. Crows cawed from the pine branches, or interrupted traffic on the main street while they investigated taco wrappers, which blew out of the trash bin of the eatery. Tree squirrels interrupted life running across the road chasing or being chased by one another or complaining about a cat watching from a pine pole fence. After dark skunks or raccoons performed backyard raids on any trash area or possums might be found sleeping peacefully on the hammock of any shady, back yard. In the big meadow by the old highway horses and deer grazed together while coyotes slunk by, head over their shoulder in their characteristically jealous, snarly way. Over head California Red Tail Hawks zoomed along at hat brim level.

Osh’s four-acre plot was separated from the County Road by a quarter mile of gravel road and completely surrounded by Forestry land to give them complete privacy. The first building in the area it was once an adobe built by the Osuna family in the 1770s when one could pick the nicest place in the county to homestead. It had been replaced and expanded by Osh’s Granddad, his Father and Osh himself with whatever materials were at hand. It was now of field stone below and native log framing above and had expanded into a respectable two bedroom, kitchen and sitting/dining room with inside conveniences. Mandy had furnished it with egalitarian splendor from her extensive country antique collection. Heavy oak tables, nudged Hoosier pie safes and stood cheek to jowl with Pennsylvania Dutch or Victorian knickknacks or horsy tack.

Osh looked about approving everything to realize the mush was all down and was handed a piece of buttered, homemade bread with low cholesterol spread.

Where is the cinnamon?

I said ‘maybe’. I just found out I’m all out. Didn’t get any when I was in PV Tuesday. I forgot my shopping list. I’m not used yet to living outside town.

Forgot ‘cause you were so busy talking to Tug Weller at the garage, probably. He is always so ‘tre’ gallant when you are around. Osh wasn’t yet entirely over the hurt of his years of waiting. You don’t understand Mandy. Boys need a lot of sugar.

I understand you perfectly well, always did, and I will promise to make it up to you tonight with dinner by candlelight and maybe dessert in bed. She backed away. I said ‘maybe’. Now off you go on your jolly rounds.

Osh with his characteristic gait, awkward but covering the ground rapidly, headed around the cabin to the garages. The garages were still adobe having once been stable and bunk house, connected now with a roof making a dog run. In the open center was a battered, blue Chevy sedan and considering its numerous repairs and additions it was a ‘42, ‘43, ‘44, ‘49, ‘59 model. It now had a large round barrel mounted over the trunk. When the gasoline crunch had become serious, Osh, disgusted, converted the wreck to propane and while not exactly a motor boat, it got him where he wanted to go.

Waiting for the propane barrel to fill from the big tank in the yard he wiped down the spotless paint of the ‘93 Ford Ranger which was Mandy’s toy. It was stylish in that area and with low mileage.

The promobile fired up he chugged down the lane to the gate parked to open the pole gate. He closed the gate, relocked the chain and put the weather beaten boot upside down on the gatepole to signify to the knowledgeable that he was not at home.

At a comfortable twenty-five miles per hour he proceeded into town undeterred by the cars passing him honking in irritation or recognizing him and waving as they passed. He slowed at the outskirts of town to allow a roadrunner to drag a Kleenex box off to the side of the road.

Waiting he heard a hail from under a truck standing on the curtain of cement beside the garage.

Tug was working today. Mostly he spent his time at the Cafe drinking coffee. Hey Osh. Dance Saturday Night at the Center. Bring your banjo.

Osh considered then considered aloud, Double poached fish always tastes so good... he mumbled.

Tug knew his man. What that means is that you were figuring that the new game warden, who is single, will be at the dance and the lake will not be patrolled.

What?

You poach your pouched fish in that big double boiler in the yard. You can’t fool me. That’s what you were thinking. But you’ll be there Osh. You’ll be there.

What? Why?

Mandy is coming to town today. She owes a library fee and I’ll mention the dance to her. Oh you’ll be there all right.

I expect so, then. After forty-three years in the region Osh still wondered how everyone always knew everybody else’s doings.

He putted on; slowed for a chipmunk to skitter across the road then turned up Pine Creek Road. A large, barrel-chested man in only jogging shorts and with a large pedometer on his wrist took up the middle of the right lane. Osh knew the man as a former college football great and now head of some prestigious corporation in the city and that he would not give way to any car on this back road so he steered into the other lane and waved as he passed. Osh saw a good deal of the man. The guy had two Nordic Tracks in his exercise room with every known gadget attached and when something or other didn’t please him he’d mash his fist into it usually causing serious damage. Osh had saved up all the resulting parts and usually could make-do out of the old pieces to keep the things going.

Osh turned up a dirt road and stopped at a cabin on the very top of a pine-clad knoll. The little cabin of stone and shingle seemed to nestle on a huge, smooth boulder, bigger than the house itself, and looking as if the house had grown there. It was on Forestry Service land, was leased from them by a couple from San Diego. A couple and three dogs, two cats and frequent wild animal guests who might be been injured or homeless or lonely.

Osh who prided himself on his memory for names got out and greeted each of the animals by name. There was Digger, the playfull, Australian Shepherd, Conchita, the feisty Chihuahua, and Bruno, a sad eyed Walker hound. The cats were Smoky and Dusty and Stanley and there was a large, white rabbit with black ears named Harvey.

The young couple came out of the house and when he started to answer their welcome he realized he couldn’t for the life of him remember what their names were.

To cover his lapse he asked, What’s in the cage?

Female raccoon. Must have been in a fight as she is all cut up. She came here when she needed her feed cause she is nursing and were going to take her and her kits into the people in town who nurse wild animals, free. The young man answered.

Osh liked this young couple and again struggled to remember their names. Was the boy’s name Carl or maybe Ernie or George?

Damn. He wished he could remember their names. He decided that while animals were all individuals most people looked alike to him.

Say... said the young man suddenly.

He is Fred. Osh decided in his mind. No... Archie.

I hear you discover a lot of lost items in your job.

What’s that? Osh was pretty sure now the boy’s name was Fred. Then the rabbit, a big, white, buck, caught his attention as it hopped out of the porch into the midst of the menagerie. It gave a hard thump on the ground with his hind foot and the assorted animals all backed away, cowed.

Harry or was it Frank was still talking. I heard you found the Mission Bell from Santa Ysabel Mission after it had been lost for over thirty years.

Osh scratched his ear as he did when he was thinking.

Seems like I did. he admitted, It was in the Oatman’s barn. He stole it when he was in high school and got drunk on something he had been drinking.

That was in the days before Mandy had come into his home and so many exciting things had happened since then, that every thing before that time