The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 14

Roscoe Moss had crashed on an old sofa in the back of his brother's feed and grain store. He'd been up half the night helping deliver Shep Holworth's new Appaloosa foal. The animal had not been right; one eye on the colt was missing and his reflexes were shot. The poor animal couldn't stand, no matter how hard they tried to get him up. Then his lungs collapsed. Roscoe had done everything he could, but he had learned his rudimentary medical knowledge as a Marine Corps ambulance driver, and he didn't have the veterinary skill to save the animal. In the end, Shep had decided it was easier, and cheaper, to just put the foal down.

It had bummed Roscoe out, and he had come back to Moss Feed and Grain, pulled down the bottle of Scotch, and while watching the late late movie on the old black-and-white, gotten completely hammered. Sometime before sun-up he'd fallen asleep on the couch.

Roscoe's main job was to guard the switching station for the old Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad. Often, long lines of loaded boxcars were parked on the Badwater siding for several days, waiting for one of the high-hood switchers to connect the line and pull it north to the switching yard in Pueblo, Colorado. Roscoe was the "yard bull." He had been deputized by the County Sheriff and could make arrests if thieves tried to steal radios out of the Japanese automobiles left on his siding waiting for the Pueblo hookup. Roscoe had made over twenty arrests, mostly Native Americans off the nearby Ute Reservation. Unless they were repeat offenders, he usually ended up just holding them in the Feed and Grain for a few hours before turning them loose. He was half black, half Ute himself and didn't have the heart to call the Sheriff on the poverty-stricken Indians.

It was six A. M. when he was brought out of a deep sleep by a racket at the store's back window. It was an incessant pounding, and he could hear someone shouting, "Hey you!" Roscoe sat up and rubbed his eyes, then he ran a hand through his tight black Afro hair. He looked out at the source of the noise and saw a very scruffy, long-haired blond man with wild eyes pounding on the windows with dirt-scarred knuckles. Roscoe's head was still thick with whiskey, as the bum continued pounding on the glass. Finally he stood. "He ain't open till nine!" Roscoe shouted at the man through the glass.

"I need a doctor. Where's the doctor?" the bum shouted.

"Ain't got a doctor here. There's six people live in this place. You want a doctor, gotta go t' Government Camp, 'bout sixty miles yonder, toward the mountains." Roscoe turned and moved back to the couch, but the man started hammering on the window again.

Roscoe spun around, and this time anger flared. "Hey, listen, you," he shouted. "There ain't no doctor. Stop yer bangin' or I'm gonna come out there an' fold ya over."

An ex-Marine and bull-riding champion, Roscoe Moss, Jr., was generally up to that task. He was forty-eight years old, but there was not an inch of fat on him. His brown skin was rippled with slabs of muscle.

"Open the fucking door. I need a phone," the bum yelled and continued his incessant, brain-jarring racket.

Roscoe moved angrily across the floor. He snapped the lock and, in one motion, pulled the door open, grabbed the scruffy man by the shirt, and yanked him forward.

Without exactly knowing how it happened, Roscoe Moss was suddenly spinning half off balance, half in the air. He pirouetted out of the door and, in a matter of seconds, was flat on his back in the dirt behind the Feed and Grain. The bum was somehow miraculously sitting on his chest, holding a cocked fist a few feet from his nose.

"I said I need a phone," he snarled.

Roscoe was not used to being tossed around like a rag doll, but he was still groggy and hungover, he reasoned. As he looked up at the threatening hobo astride him, he saw the rage in the man's blue eyes suddenly change to pleading desperation.

"You gotta help me. Please," the bum said. "I'm in trouble. My friend's dying! I got the shakes… I need a drink."

"Just get the fuck off me," Roscoe demanded.

The bum got off and the embarrassed yard bull got up, brushed himself off, then looked around in the dirt for his dignity. "For a guy with the shakes, you move pretty good."

"My friend's dying," Lucky repeated.

Roscoe looked closely at the bum. The man had moved so quickly he had been just a blur in that moment before Roscoe felt himself flying through the door, landing helplessly on his back. The 'bo was a mess, his feet wrapped in garbage bags.

"Need a doctor," Lucky said.

"Gonna take 'em more'n half an hour to get here from Government Camp."

"We can't wait that long. He's choking to death!"

"I'm kinda a veterinarian. I'll get my doctoring bag. Maybe I can help."

"Come on then," the bum said, and moved away from him at a run. He turned to look back at Roscoe, who still hadn't moved. "Come on/" the bum shouted.

When they got back to the tracks, the train Lucky and Mike had been riding on had stopped and there were two brakemen looking down at Mike. One of them was kneeling, taking the gold ring off Mike's finger.

"Hey, whatta you doing?" Lucky said. "Leave that alone! His dad gave him that." He snatched the ring away.

"He ain't gonna need it. This piece a' shit already caught the westbound," the kneeling brakeman said.

Lucky pushed him away in frustration, got down on his knees, and put his head over his friend's heart. "Can't hear anything," he said fearfully.

Roscoe pulled the stethoscope he had used on Shep's Appaloosa out of his bag, opened Mike's shirt, and placed it on the young hobo's chest. He also could hear no heartbeat. He checked from several places, then put his hand on the young man's forehead. The body already seemed cold.

"I'm sorry," he said softly.

"You two're the ones that cut the brake hose, aren't ya?" said the brakeman who had been trying to steal Mike's ring.

Lucky was still looking down helplessly at his friend.

Suddenly, the other brakeman standing behind Lucky moved up and hit him as hard as he could in the back of the head with a long metal spanner. Lucky's knees buckled and he collapsed right on top of Mike. The blow opened a nasty cut in the back of Lucky's head, and blood immediately ran down onto his T-shirt collar.

"What'd ya do that for?" Roscoe screamed at the brakeman.

"These motherfuckers cut our air just so they could jump off the train. Fuckin' hobos. They do it all the time. We're gonna be stuck here for half a day. Gonna get reamed. The Trainmaster'll be up here from Sierra Blanca fuckin' us over, screamin' about his shitty timetables. I'm callin' the Sheriff; at least this bum's gonna do his thirty days."

"Ain't no need ta call 'em," Roscoe said. "I'm the yard bull here. I'll call the Government Camp substation." Roscoe dug around in his pocket for his deputy's star to show them, but it wasn't in his pocket. Maybe he'd left it back in his motor home, which was parked behind his brother's house. Or maybe it was still in the glove compartment of his pickup. He wasn't sure.

When Lucky regained consciousness the bugs were all over him. They were crawling in his eye sockets, eating his eyelids. He sat straight up, screaming, trying to get them off his face, but for some reason he couldn't move his hands.

"Fuck, fuck… fuck!" he screamed.

"Shut up!" Roscoe commanded, his own headache from the whiskey nearly unbearable.

"On me. They're on me, Oh no, oh no, get 'em off!" Lucky was in the back office of the Feed and Grain, handcuffed to the heavy wooden bench there.

"Ain't nothing on you. What the hell you talking about?" Roscoe Moss, Jr., said, stepping back, startled.

Lucky was completely lost in the D. T. S and was no longer able to separate the dementia from reality. He felt the bugs nibbling on his face, and what made it worse, he couldn't move his hands to knock them off.

"Shheeeiiiittt!" he screeched. "They're eating my eyes, they're eating my fucking eyes! Help me, fer Chrissake!" He was thrashing on the bench, desperately yanking against the handcuffs. When he opened his eyes he saw Roscoe's shocked face, but he also saw a giant tarantula on his left wrist. It moved slowly up his arm, until it wiggled under his T-shirt, crawling in through the armhole. He could see it writhing under the cotton, and was helpless to fight it. His mind started to spin out of control, his vision blurred.

"They're all over me! Get 'em off, please!" he wailed.

Roscoe was knocked back by the ferocity of the hobo's scream and the violence of his actions. Lucky was yanking his handcuffed wrists so hard that blood was squirting from cuts where the metal shackles dug into him.

"Shit!" Roscoe said. "Stop it!"

Roscoe was panicked; he didn't know what to do. He grabbed a phone off the counter and dialed. "Gimme Doc Fletcher," he said to the nurse. " 'Mergency!" After a minute the doctor came on the line.

"What can I do for you, Roscoe?"

Roscoe explained the problem, and when he was finished, Lucky was pulling his handcuffs so violently he was deeply scarring the wooden arm of the bench.

"OHHHHHH, GOD… PLEEEASE," he wailed.

"Go to the liquor cabinet, get some liquor, and pour it in him till it stops. That's all I can tell ya t'do for now," the doctor said. "Other than leave him be till he comes out of it."

Roscoe hung up and ran and got his bottle of Scotch off the store shelf. He opened it and poured four shots into Lucky, who swallowed them like a man parched on the desert. The effect was like cold water going into an overheated engine. Lucky started to calm down as the whiskey hit his bloodstream and sedated his rioting nervous system.

"Shit," Roscoe said. "You got a problem, Mister. You better go get yerself straightened out." Lucky slowly leaned back on the bench. His wrists were soaked with blood, but he was grinning, showing Roscoe the gap in his smile as the warm circle of Scotch expanded in his stomach, taking away the pain and delusion as it spread. "Man, that feels better," he finally said, then blissfully closed his eyes. He was so tired he could barely sit up.

An hour later when Lucky woke up, he was still handcuffed to the bench inside the Feed and Grain. The heavily muscled ex-Marine was sitting on a wood-backed chair nearby, looking at him studiously. "How'd you learn t'throw a man 'round like that?" Roscoe finally asked.

"Marines," said Lucky.

"Me too, I was a jarhead. In for four years."

"My head's killing me," Lucky groaned.

"That fella opened it up fer ya pretty good. Hit ya with a foundation brake spanner. I cleaned the wound off, taped it up, but you oughta get stitches."

Lucky was trying to sit up, but he felt dizzy, so he slumped back again.

"Tell me what happened to yer friend. How'd a kid like him die like that?"

Lucky wasn't about to share the details of what happened, no matter how bad he felt about it. If he told the yard bull about Mike's attack and the fight on the back ledge of the grainer, they would probably arrest him for murder. So he gave an abridged, reconstructed version of the story: "We jumped on the freight up by Vanishing Lake. I think he banged his throat real bad getting on. I got worried, so I cut the air and we jumped off the freight down here."

"Vanishing Lake," Roscoe said, alarmed. "They say some kinda killer bug is loose up there, people goin' nuts, attackin' each other. Somebody started a big ol' forest fire. It was on the radio."

Lucky was still trying to get a grip on his wavering consciousness. He sat up straighten "Whatta you mean?" he said. "What killer bug?"

"Don't ask me. They got the whole place quarantined. Maybe your friend got the bug!" Roscoe said, alarmed.

"Don't think so. Like I said, I think he crushed his larynx when we were getting aboard. The door handle whacked him in the throat," Lucky lied.

His mind was spinning with what the yard bull had just said. He started to replay the strange events he had witnessed at Vanishing Lake, ending with Mike, for no reason, clawing at his throat in the darkness of the tunnel, screaming obscenities while they fought desperately on the narrow ledge of the grainer.

Lucky looked down at the handcuffs holding his wrists to the wood arm of the sofa.

"Yer under arrest," Roscoe explained. "I'm holdin' ya here for the Sheriff. He ain't gonna make it for a bit, on accounta the substation at Government Camp is workin' with the military right now, lookin' for some scientist that started the fire. They got roadblocks up for two hundred miles."

"Where'd you put Mike's body?"

"Got him in the other room. My brother's gonna shit."

"Whatta you gonna do with him?"

"I ain't gonna do shit with him. I just watch parked freight cars for the SP," Roscoe said. "I ain't got nothin' t'do with this. Once the Sheriff gits here, he'll figger somethin', probably pack him off to the Medical Examiner in Government Camp, then they'll probably do him like all the other 'no names' we find dead 'round here… Just drop him in a potter's grave with a sack a' lye."

"You don't wanna do that."

"Yeah? Why's that?"

"You just don't wanna," Lucky repeated.

"Yeah? Well, it ain't gonna be none a' my doin'."

Lucky didn't want to wait around for the Sheriff. He knew he couldn't dry out cold in some cell, covered with bugs. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.

"He hoboed under the name 'Hollywood Mike,' but his real name was Michael Brazil."

"Yeah?" Roscoe said, not really caring.

"His father's a big-time movie producer."

Roscoe Moss now started to smile and shake his head in bewildered amusement. "Sure," he said. "Sure."

"Go look in his mouth."

"What's that gonna tell me?" Roscoe smiled. "He got his daddy's name engraved there?"

"Just go look in his mouth, you'll see." Lucky could still feel the Scotch, warm inside him. It had settled him, given him new courage. "Go on, take a look," he prodded.

After a long moment Roscoe got up and moved out of the back room of the store, muttering to himself. He had laid Hollywood Mike on the floor behind the counter, out of sight. He peeled back the tarp he had covered the body with, then took a pair of pliers and a screwdriver off the shelf and carefully pried Mike's mouth open. It was harder than he expected. The joints were already beginning to lock from rigor mortis, a condition that Roscoe knew from his ambulance-driving days would have the body board-stiff in an hour. After he got Mike's mouth open, he looked in. He couldn't see much in the dim light behind the counter, so he got a flashlight down off the shelf and shined it into Mike's mouth. "What'm I supposed t'be lookin' for?" he called to Lucky.

"His bridgework," Lucky called back.

Sure enough, Roscoe could now see a complicated dental repair job, complete with gold fillings. "That sure musta cost a few bucks," he shouted. Then he snapped off the light and moved back into the room where Lucky was seated. "So?"

"He told me he was in a car accident up on Mulholland Drive last summer. He trashed his dad's Porsche and broke out a buncha teeth. How many twenty-two-year-old hobos you know got ten grand in dental reconstruction?" Then Lucky stretched open his own mouth, showing his own broken tooth for emphasis. "You don't wanna be the guy who dumped Buddy Brazil's kid in a hole with a bag a' lye."

"Whatta you think I should do?"

"Take a Polaroid of him and send the picture to his father in Hollywood. He's gotta be at one of the movie studios." Lucky paused. "Who knows… maybe he gives you some kinda reward."

Roscoe Moss finally nodded. "And what's in all this fer you?"

"He was my friend. I want him to get a proper funeral." Lucky hesitated, then added, "I can't go to jail, man. I can't go through that. I helped you, you gotta help me, one Marine to another. Semper Fi, brother."

Roscoe looked troubled. He moved over and sat down next to Lucky. "I let you go, there's gonna be hell t'pay. Not that I wanna give you no grief, but that Trainmaster is gonna drive up here from Sierra Blanca. I know him. He's a tough old buzzard, an' them two brakemen gonna be yellin' 'bout how you 'bos're all the time cuttin' the air t'slow trains. He'll go on 'bout how them products on that train is worth money-The interest on that trainload a' stuff would pay my salary fer ten years!' I'm gonna have t'listen t'that shit fer hours."

The two of them held each other's gaze.

"So, y'learned that trick a' yers fightin' in the Marines?"

Lucky decided to humor him, and smiled warmly. "It's called ground fighting. The idea is that all fights end up on the ground anyway, so you take it there first. Use the other guy's force against him. There's half a dozen choke points. You should be able to kill an opponent silently in seconds."

"You was a Ranger?"

Lucky nodded. Roscoe looked at him hard and said, "See, thing is I don't really like bustin' people. It sorta ain't in me."

Finally, Roscoe Moss, Jr., got up and left the room.

Lucky looked down in wonder at his bloody wrists cuffed around the arm of the sofa. Then he looked out the back window of the Feed and Grain. The dusty Texas-Oklahoma landscape was barren and bleak, like the last four years of his life. He wondered what had happened to Hollywood Mike. He remembered the horrible way Mike had choked on his own spit. His friend's eyes had burned with insanity, then had been empty and expressionless, devoid of soul. Suddenly Lucky wanted to run, wanted to get the hell out of there. He had never felt such a compelling desire to be someplace else. He wanted a new life… a life without alcohol, without dementia tremens, and the poverty of hopelessness and homelessness.

For three and a half years he had been riding the high iron, living in main stems or hobo jungles. He would catch out on the SP rails and head west to the Burlington tracks, then north to Oregon. Once there, he would have no reason to be there, no reason to stay, and would catch out again on the UP, heading east until he got to New York. Then it was the main central line to Fort Kent and back west again on the CN, fueled by restlessness and cheap wine. Around and around he went, human lint on a big useless spin cycle, sleeping under cardboard with the Sunday paper for a mattress. Then up again, with no reason or direction, wandering aimlessly to nowhere important, from nowhere special.

Suddenly, he wanted to sleep someplace warm, where he wouldn't wake up being hammered into oblivion for his shoes.

Then all at once, with Mike's death weighing on his mind, Lucky knew the journey was over. He was through with the liquor, through being a drunk. He would go home. He would talk to his old friend Clancy Black… Clancy would help him find a way to beat it.

Ten minutes later, Roscoe returned. He unlocked Lucky's handcuffs and opened the back door.

"Git on outta here. I'll figure somethin' t'tell the Trainmaster when he gets here."

Lucky moved to the door, past the half-empty bottle of Scotch.

"What's yer name?" Roscoe asked.

"Lucky," he replied.

Roscoe thought the greasy hobo was about as lucky as road kill. "Where you gonna go?" the yard bull asked.

"Pasadena, California."

"Why there?"

"It's home."

"Good luck, Marine," Roscoe said. They shook hands, and then Roscoe turned and went to the front of the store. As Lucky walked out the back door, he slipped the half-empty bottle of whiskey under his coat. He was through drinking, he told himself. That was settled. That was a done deal.

He had stolen the bottle just in case.