The Night Visitor (12 page)

The effect of this attention from the young woman wafted sweetly over the unrepentant liar, much like the promise of the first warm breath of spring. Horace smiled at the daughter of the pair, but he was careful to direct his next words to her father. “I been up in Alaska and Canada for the last coupla years, doin' some gold-prospecting here and there. Didn't have much luck. Now I'm headin' back toward Arkansas. And I'm kinda lookin' for some work right now. Just to get me through the winter. If you need a top hand here to move some dirt, you just call ol' Oscar. He'll tell you I'm the very man for the job.”

“I'm sorry to be the one to break the news,” Moses said with downcast eyes, “but Oscar Humboldt passed away about nine months ago.”

A wonderful mixture of shock and grief distorted the clean lines of Horace's face. “Old Oscar… he's… he's dead?”

Moses nodded. “Stroke. We were all shocked—it was very sudden.”

Flye turned his back, and walked several paces away. He removed a grimy handkerchief from his hip pocket, and wiped at his eyes. Without turning around, he said: “Poor Old Oscar. I cain't hardly believe he's dead.” He waited tensely for a response.

Didn't come.

Time to play the last card. “Well, I guess I'd best be gettin' along now.”

Moses and his daughter spoke simultaneously.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

“Mr. Flye …” she called out.

Father and daughter exchanged pleased glances. It was not the first time they had entertained the same thought.

Horace Flye bit a smile off his lips, then turned to face them.

Nathan McFain—who had been left out of the conversation—was scowling, pulling at his scraggly white beard. This Flye guy sure looked and sounded like a slicker. But he needed a job. And he had a bunged-up ear and was missing a finger… so maybe he'd work cheap.

Nathan McFain, who had a nervous habit of pulling at his tobacco-stained beard, walked back to the ranch headquarters with the newcomer. “I can pay you minimum wage for eight hours a day. Any overtime, well, that's between you and the eggheads. If Professor Silver wants to pay you some extra, that's between you and him.”

“Well,” Horace said, “I guess that might work out all right.”
Hot diggity!

McFain paused by the barn and scowled at the battered trailer hooked to Horace's old pickup. “I don't expect you'd want to winter in that. When the tourist business is slow, my hired help gets bargain rates on the cabins. Jimson Beugmann—he bunks in Winchester. It's got a fireplace and I let him gather deadwood off my property. I could put you up in one of the cabins with a gas furnace… O-K Corral goes for… say three hundred a month plus utilities. Unless you got somebody with you. Then it's an extra fifty a month per person.” McFain eyed the little trailer suspiciously. “You got a wife or anything?”

Horace, avoiding the rancher's piercing gray eyes, shook his head. “No. I useta have me a woman, but I'm alone now.” Butter wasn't big as a minute, so he wasn't about to pay an extra fifty bucks a month on account of her. Anyway, this fella
looked like he might not be too happy to find out his new employee had a kid. “I guess, at least for a while, I'll just stay in my trailer. Maybe,” he added hopefully, “I could plug my electric in somewheres …”

McFain, disappointed, nodded. “Yeah. I put in some RV hookups for the tourists. Electric, good well water, sunk a two-thousand-gallon septic tank. Even strung cable TV, but that's been disconnected.” The unfortunate entrepreneur shook his head at the remembrance of this folly, then pointed a crooked finger to a long swayback ridge dotted with ponderosa. “They're up there amongst the pines on the east hump of Buffalo Saddle Ridge. Just take the gravel lane around behind the cabins. You can use a hookup for… oh, let's say a hundred a month. Long as you don't plug in no electric heaters or hot-plates or stuff like that.” He frowned meaningfully at his newest employee. “I got a separate meter on the campsite so I'll know if you do.”

“No need to. I got bottled gas for my heat and gas cookstove.” Horace used his hand to shade his eyes from the sun, and scanned the piney ridge. It was already looking like home.
Have a mighty nice view from way up there. And privacy to boot. Butter would even be able to go outside and play now and again without being noticed by this ornery old coot.

For a moment, the rancher forgot about his new hired hand. Nathan stared through slitted lids at the pine ridge. Off to the west—on the yonder hump of the Buffalo Saddle—was the McFain family burial plot. He didn't go out there often; maybe once a year on Memorial Day to clear out the weeds and leave some flowers. It was an awfully lonely place, where the unceasing winds whispered in the dry pines like spirits exchanging secrets. Ghosts gossiping about the living… those who would soon be coming to join them. The old man dismissed this dismal image. And returned his attention to the itinerant four-flusher. “So,” the rancher said with a merry glint in his eye, “I guess you dug up lots of old bones in your time.” Nathan McFain spat tobacco juice on a dry sprig of rabbit bush.

Horace Flye nodded wearily. “Oh yeah. Tons and tons.” It
was such a well-crafted lie, he was beginning to believe it himself. “Makes me tired just thinkin' about it.”

After the rancher had left with Horace Flye, the scientists attended to their peculiar business. Father and daughter were absorbed in the delicate work of exposing a long arc of mammoth rib. Moses was on his knees, a small pointed trowel in his hand. He spoke without looking at Delia, almost as if he addressed himself. “It is absurd to be conducting this work during the approach of winter.”

She sighed—they'd had this conversation a half dozen times. “Then why don't you tell Mr. McFain we'll put it off till May?”

The old man pushed himself erect, and rubbed at the painful knot of muscles in the small of his back. “Because he's too eager to generate a tourist attraction. If we leave, he'll rush in here with a couple of ranch hands to attempt the excavation on his own. And make a terrible mess of it.” Or, almost as bad, McFain might call in some of those Young Turks from the Denver Museum of Natural History.

Delia, who was brushing away sticky grit from a fragment of brownish fossil bone, did not respond.

But Moses Silver knew how to get a rise out of his daughter. “So what do you think of our new employee?”

She looked up from her work with the small horsehair brush. “Oh… you mean Mr…. I can't quite recall his name.” It was a transparent lie.

Her father smiled indulgently. “Horace Flye, he called himself. So,” he pressed, “what do you think of him?”

The young woman shrugged. “What's to think? One man's pretty much like another.”

“On the contrary,” Moses wagged his finger at his daughter, “and I quote:
‘It is an alluring and enduring lie that all men are born equal.'”

“And which sage made that pithy observation?” She knew, of course.

“I confess—it was my own modest self.” He bowed with a farcical flourish of his hand.

She laughed. “You are such a pompous old poop. And you're politically incorrect to a fault.”

He shot back the expected response. “The fault is not mine, child. ‘Political correctness' is merely the intellectual Mc-Carthyism that's currently in season.”

“And a pernicious poison in the Well of Reason,” she reminded him. Just to be helpful.

“That does have a nice ring to it.” He brushed gritty dust off his khaki trousers. “I don't think that Arkansas scoundrel would know Oscar Humboldt from Adam's Aunt Minnie. He certainly knows nothing of paleontology. But perhaps …” The old man regarded his daughter's upturned face with an impish grin. “Yes, of course—he's more the archaeologist type. It's not a well-kept secret that you're a bunch of grave-robbers skulking around in academic disguise.”

The young archaeologist ignored her father's oft-repeated jibe.

He persisted, “I'll wager our Mr. Flye has excavated Anasazi burials with a back-hoe.”

Delia smiled at this comic figure who had sired her. “Then why did you agree to hire him?”

Moses chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. “I do wonder myself. Hmmm. Perhaps because you're so desperate for just such a man and—”

“Daddy!” she screamed in mock anger, and hit his shin with the brush handle.

“Or,” he continued, undeterred by the mild attack, “perhaps I agreed to take him on because Mr. Flye has such appalling effrontery. Imagine, daring to insult my intelligence with such a preposterous pack of lies. Anyway,” he admitted on a more conciliatory note, “he does look like a man who's used to working with his hands. And,” he added with a mischievous wink, “he did fight off a fierce bear to protect those poor little Girl Scouts.”

“Shame on you. Daddy, for being such an old cynic.”

Moses chuckled, and mimicked Flye's nasal tone. “Shucks, it was just a
little
bear,… 'twasn't all that much.”

She rapped him again with the brush handle, though more smartly this time. “Maybe he does exaggerate just a little. But he's a nice man. And he needs work.”

Moses assumed a more serious tone. “You realize, of course, that Mr. Flye must pass… the usual test.”

“Yes,” Delia said glumly, “I know.” And he would flunk it for sure.
Unless he had a little help …

Horace Flye and his tiny daughter were up at dawn.

The head of the family—who appreciated variety in his meals—had a very greasy cheeseburger, canned chili con carne, and a Pepsi-Cola for this morning's breakfast. Butter's first meal consisted of a steaming bowl of canned tomato soup, saltine crackers, and a half-cup of coffee liberally enriched with sugar. Horace swallowed a delicious bite, paused, then burped loudly. One good thing about being a bachelor was that a man could burp and break wind most anytime he pleased.

The six-year-old girl—who had not mastered this art—faked a small burp that sounded more like a hiccup. Then, to enhance the imitation of her father, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Horace, whose mind was on the day's work, did not notice this small flattery.

The child looked out the long, rectangular window by the small table. Below were a bunch of pretty little cabins with red roofs. And beyond these, a big house with a blue roof. And a great big barn with a fence and horses. Some of the horses were chomping at bales of hay. She could see their breath in the cold morning air. Behind the barn, there was a big bulldozer, like Daddy had drove when he helped them build the forest road in Idaho. Someone had used this one to scrape away the dirt. To make a stock pond, Daddy had told her. Beyond the barn, there was a big field with no trees. And at the far edge of that brown field was the place with the tent, where Daddy had said he had a job of work to do. From up here, the tent didn't look all that big, but Daddy had said it could hold a dozen trailers like they lived in, and then some. From up here, everything looked little. “Are we going to live here, Daddy?”

He nodded over his bowl of chili con carne. “For a while.”

“Can I have some more coffee?”

“No you cain't.”

“Why?”

“Because it ain't good for you.” She pouted. “Why?”

“Don't you start that. If you want somethin' else to drink, get some orange juice outta the icebox.”

“It's all gone.”

“Then drink some water.”

She rested her chin in her hands. “I don't want no water.”

He muttered an oath under his breath, then poured her a small helping of coffee from the enameled blue pot. “Now that's all, y'hear?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She took a tentative sip. Soon as he went off to work, she'd wash the dishes. That was one of her chores, along with keeping the place clean. Then she'd boil some water and make herself some instant coffee. With lots and lots of sugar.

“Daddy?”

He didn't look up from his chili. “Yeah?”

“Who's them people I seen down there by the little houses?”

Butter was just like her mamma. Not satisfied till she knew everything about everybody. He recited a list of names, and this seemed to please her.

She repeated them aloud, rolling each syllable along her tongue. “Mr. Mick-Fain. Moses Sil-ver. Deel-yah Sil-ver. Them's pretty names. What was that skinny man's name?”

“Jimson Beugmann,” he said. “He works for Mr. McFain. He can't talk a'tall, nor hear a word you say.”

“Jim-sum Boog-mun,” Butter Flye whispered. “Boog-mun… Boog-mun.”

He wiped at his plastic chili bowl with a half-slice of white bread, then began to clear the table.

She slid off her bench seat. “Daddy—is Christmas almost here?”

He shook his head.

“You know what I want for Christmas?”

Her father showed no interest in this issue.

The child darted a look at the brown shoe box on her rumpled bed. Two rubber bands held the lid on. A sharp pencil had been used to punch a dozen holes through the cardboard
lid. “I want a nice little house for Toe Jam to live in.” Her father had named the creature. “He needs a house with doors and windows. And a really nice bathroom.” She wrinkled her nose. “One that don't smell bad.”

Horace understood that what his daughter really wanted was a house for herself. Butter didn't like the travelin' life no more than her mamma had. He piled his dishes in the sink and turned on the hot-water faucet.

She yanked at his trouser leg. “Daddeeee… can Toe Jam have a little house for Christmas?”

Just knee-high and already she was gettin' to be a real nag. “Well, maybe Santy Claus'll bring him one someday.” He shot her a fatherly scowl. “When you've learned to mind your daddy.”
That'll be the day when a bullfrog learns to play the five-string banjo and sing “Yeller Rosa Texas” all at the same time.