Authors: Tim Curran
4
Tyler Cabe came into the St. James Hostelry out of the storm, rain dripping from the brim of his Stetson. He wiped the mud from his boots, crossed to the fire in the hearth and warmed himself. A slim woman in a blue denim bustle dress was polishing the banister with a rag.
“
Good evening,” she said.
“
Ma’am,” Cabe said. “I need me a room. Maybe for a week, maybe more. Possibly less.”
The woman walked over to the desk, opened the ledger. “I’m sure we can set you up, Mister—”
“
Cabe. Tyler Cabe.”
He got a good look at her and saw she was quite pretty. Her hair was just this side of midnight, her cheekbones high, her eyes like melting chocolates. And her voice was nice, too. Velvety, sweet. It had a fine Southern twang to it…but one softened by an upper class upbringing. Cabe figured she was from a fine family.
“
And your business?” she asked.
Cabe just looked at her. Most hotels and rooming houses did not ask such questions. But Whisper Lake was a wild town by all appearances, so you couldn’t blame the lady for being particular.
“
I’m a bounty hunter, ma’am,” he said, neither proud nor ashamed. “I hunt down folks for a living. Sometimes animals. That bothers some people. Does it bother you, ma’am?”
“
Not in the least.” She wrote these things in the ledger. “Just let’s understand ourselves right off, Mr. Cabe. What you do is your own business, just don’t drag it back here. This is a respectable place for respectable people. You want to drink, whore, and gamble, that’s your affair, but keep it out there. I won’t have it under my roof. Is that understood, Mister Cabe?”
He walked over from the fire, rubbing his hands together. “Yes, ma’am. It is. I’m not here to hell around, I’m here on business.”
“
Very good. The rooms are five dollars a day. Breakfast is at eight and supper at five, promptly. Lunch is your own affair.”
“
Five dollars…that’s pretty steep, ma’am.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is. But this is a mining town, Mr. Cabe. There are other hotels that charge fifty dollars a night. But if you prefer something more economical, there are many bunkhouses you can get a bed at. A straw-filled mattress for two bits a day, still warm from its previous occupant. But here, the rooms are clean. There are no bugs. And the food is good.”
Cabe paid her for two days. “Guess you talked me into it.”
Grabbing his bag, he followed her up the stairs. His room was small, but comfortable. Bed, bureau, wash basin, tiny closet. A window looked out over the rainy/snowy streets.
She lit an oil lamp with a stick match. “So you’re a bounty hunter. Hmm. Never met a bounty hunter before. You hunt down men and collect the bounties. How does that make you feel, Mr. Cabe? Does it make you feel important? Like a big man?”
“
No, ma’am. More like a small man with a full belly.”
She smiled at that. “An impertinent answer to an impertinent question.”
Cabe sat on the bed. “I could use a bath, ma’am, if you could arrange it. By the way…I didn’t catch your name?”
“
Oh…yes, how rude of me. Janice Dirker,” she said.
5
Well, this was really gonna be something, wasn’t it?
Cabe soaked in the hot water and thought about the war and Jackson Dirker—his wife and the hotel he owned. More he thought about it, more he started thinking how funny it all was. How everything comes back to a man sooner or later. His past was like some ghost he’d stuck away in a box, trying to forget about it, and now it had gotten loose, was coming right back at him.
And Dirker? Jackson Dirker?
How did he honestly feel about him? That was a good question. He did not like the man, not really…
yet,
he didn’t exactly hate him anymore. Time had dulled his anger. He felt neutral, if anything. It would have been much easier to hate him if Dirker was more offensive, was inclined to brag about what he’d done. But that’s not the sort of man he was. Sure, Dirker was still a dirty son of a whore, but he was hardly the demon that had plagued Cabe’s memories all these years.
And that only made things tougher.
Cabe thought:
You ain’t here to address past wrongs. Keep that in mind. Giving Dirker trouble won’t fill your poke. You’re here to find that Strangler, to run that mad bastard to ground. That’s it. You start trying to crowd Dirker, there’s gonna be trouble. He’s the county sheriff. He could make life real unpleasant for you.
But…Sammy, Pete, Little Willy Gibson. What of them?
Gibson had died in the woods that day, Sammy at Camp Douglas. Pete had been exchanged with Cabe, mustered out to another unit. Was it justifiable to hate twenty years after the fact? The bible preached forgiveness, but Cabe had never been a real forgiving sort and wasn’t much on scripture. But on the other hand, he was not a hateful nor violent man, despite his occupation. Whenever possible he tried to get by on his wits, to outsmart his adversaries.
But Jackson Dirker…dammit, the man knew how to yank his chain. Cabe had gone into his office, planning on staying in control and that sonofabitch had worked him into a lather without never once raising his voice.
The South had lost the war. It was a fact. Like any good son of the Confederacy, that still hurt some, still burned in a secret place. But Cabe couldn’t sit around stewing that the Yankees had trampled the family holdings like others. His people were dirt poor sharecroppers from Yell County, Arkansas…they never had shit to begin with. If the Yankees had burned the farm, it would have been a distinct improvement.
So he couldn’t cling to that.
Sometimes, he wondered just what there was to cling to.
Running callused fingers over the scars threading his face, he decided to hell with Dirker. He’d sort that out later, if and when the time came. Now there was business and money to be made.
6
Sometimes Caleb Callister thought about his life and the building blocks that it was erected from. But not often. Now that Hiram was dead and buried some seven months, Caleb was the sole owner of the Callister Brothers Mortuary which would soon be renamed Callister Funeral Parlor. Occasionally, Caleb missed his brother, but not too often. They’d always had a pretty good arrangement—Caleb made the coffins and Hiram embalmed the bodies. Handling corpses was nothing Caleb cared for. After Hiram died, he’d tried his hand at it for a time, but it made him sick touching that cold clay so he’d hired an embalmer named Moss out from Stockton, California.
Moss was capable and he minded his own business, which was a plus. Caleb didn’t have that much to hide—not since Hiram’s passing that was—but last thing he needed was some young snip fresh out of mortuary school nosing into his affairs. Caleb was a gambler and a womanizer and most knew it, but he liked to keep such things quiet. For by day he was a respectable business owner. And he didn’t need Moss spreading stories about the teenage girls Caleb had brought to the mortuary or what he did with them in the rooms above.
Some things had to be kept secret.
Like the history of the Callister brothers, for instance.
Nobody in town knew much about them. Like everyone else they had just drifted in like leaves before a harsh Autumn wind. They blew in and set up a cabinetry shop and then the local undertaker had died, so Hiram decided they should get into that end of things, too, since most cabinetmakers were undertakers as well.
So they did and in a town with a very high mortality rate like Whisper Lake, it proved very lucrative. Extremely so. Eventually (and with the population boom) the Callisters gave up making cabinets and concentrated on coffins and undertaking. And this is all people really knew about the Callister brothers, aside from whispers and gossip.
They didn’t know that they were from Logansport in western Louisiana or that their father had been a cabinetmaker and his father before him. They didn’t know what it was like growing up with a man who was hardened by life and physically powerful from uncounted years of harsh manual labor. A man that liked to drink and use his fists on his family. Caleb himself had tasted the fury of those fists on numerous occasions as had Hiram. And that time the old man had caught Hiram out in the barn with that other boy doing those disgusting things, he’d nearly beaten him to death.
Only Caleb’s intervention had saved his life.
And sometimes Caleb wondered why he’d bothered because as the old man said, Hiram was “touched and not by the hand of the Lord.” Hiram was a strange boy, plump and bookish. He didn’t run and play with the other children. He collected beetles and toads and anything dead he happened upon. Liked to sun-dry dead things and sit around and look at them. Caleb thought it was sick, but Hiram was blood and what could he do but protect him? Except, the older they got, the more peculiar Hiram became. And it was Caleb himself, just shy of his twentieth birthday, that had to pay that boy off after what Hiram had done to him. And it wasn’t the first time. For Hiram was a pervert and he had fondness for children, especially boys. But Caleb protected him and kept his secret, though sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night, his skin crawling at the memory of things he’d seen.
But that was a secret.
The Callisters had been good at secrets. The old man had a few of his own. By the time he was fifteen, Caleb had been to the local brothel more than once, striking up friendships with some of the girls. Most, barely older than himself. They had confided in him that his father would come in drunk, throw money around, then want to take one of the girls upstairs. That he liked to use his belt on them. That was one of his secrets. Another was what happened to their mother. The old man didn’t think the boys knew, but they knew, all right. They didn’t believe she had up and run off. They knew the old man had come home one night in a drunken rage, stinking of whorehouse perfume and their mother had mentioned the fact. And the old man had savagely beat her. Kept beating her long after she was unconscious, pounding her skull with those massive fists until her brain had hemorrhaged and she had died. And that the old man had thrown her body in an abandoned well…where her bones still lay. Yes, the boys knew this, but they kept it secret.
Secrets, secrets.
Like how the old man had taken to regularly beating Hiram because he was so sick ashamed of “that queer little bastard.” Yet, Hiram remained at home even after Caleb had long since moved out. But trouble was going to come in spades and it finally did. Caleb had gone home to visit after three solid days of debauchery and found Hiram, naked and bloody, standing over the old man’s corpse with a hatchet in his hand. Hiram had nearly cut his head off. So another secret was born. They bagged up the old man in sack cloth weighed down with rocks and sank him in the depths of the Sabine River where he could spend eternity with his own kind—alligators and water moccasins and all the other slimy, slinking nightmares that called those dark bottoms home. Shortly afterwards, once the old man was declared dead
on account he just vanished and nobody in town liked him anyway
they sold off the properties and business and came west.
People in Whisper Lake did not know these things.
Nor did they know what Hiram did with the corpses of dead prostitutes that came into the mortuary. Or how Caleb had happened in one night and found him having sex with one of them. And by that point, Caleb was just damn sick of covering up for that goddamn deviant even if he was his older brother. And that when Caleb found him dead—suicide, coroner said, even thought they both knew it was far from the truth—it was really a blessing because sooner or later, Hiram was going to get caught doing something unpleasant and it would destroy everything Caleb had worked for. And when Hiram was buried, a lot of secrets were buried with him.
But there were secrets even Caleb did not know.
Like maybe how it was for Hiram that night when black, malevolent voices got into his head and made him see things and feel things and hear things that were just plain awful. Or how he opened James Lee Cobb’s casket and Cobb was awake in there, staring, staring with a single eye like a coal glowing in a furnace,
taking the blood sacrifice offered him. Or how Hiram went mad when Cobb took him by the throat and tried to scream but had no voice and his heart finally gave out, knowing, knowing that nothing could look like Cobb and live.
Caleb did not know about that, but he sometimes guessed awful truths.
People in town could not know these things. Nor would they honestly want to. Just like they didn’t know that Caleb Callister hated Mormons and was part of a vigilante gang that had murdered no less than twelve of their members or how omnipotent he felt when he pulled on that white hood and got down to business. And they didn’t know about those two Mormon girls the vigilantes had happened upon picking berries and how they had raped them continually until they’d bled and then slit their soft white throats and buried them in shallow graves no one would ever find. Or how the vigilantes laughed when renegade Indians were blamed for the disappearance of the girls. Nobody knew about that. Nor did they know that of all the Mormon camps and villages scattered in the hills and valleys, the vigilantes did not raid in the one called Deliverance. Because even the Mormons shunned that place and whatever had happened there, it was Devil’s work.