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Summer of Fifty-Seven. Stephen C. Joseph
Читать онлайн.Название Summer of Fifty-Seven
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780865344730
Автор произведения Stephen C. Joseph
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Within five minutes, a red Thunderbird stopped. “Well, where you headed, son?” The driver was perhaps ten years older than I was, and he had the boots and the big hat to go with his smile.
“Aiming for Alaska to find work this summer, sir. Name’s Steve.” I never did get his name, or perhaps he never gave it.
“Well, I can get you the first hundred miles or so along your way, so get on in.”
We roared north in the dimming but crystal light, the two-lane asphalt cutting through bunchgrass that seemed to go on forever. Antelope raced along beside the Thunderbird, and occasionally sprang with daredevil leaps across the road ahead of us. As we crossed the Fremont County line, I was regaled by my native host with stories of the bloody wars between cattleman versus sheepherder of only seventy-five years ago. He was clearly partial to the cattlemen’s side. “Well, there’s a pretty fair roadhouse up ahead a few miles. I’ll buy you a Wyoming steak, son.”
My host seemed well, perhaps intimately, acquainted with both the waitress-cum-bartender and the surly cook. He introduced me as if we had been long-time buddies, and we two solitary patrons ate two and a half of the biggest (and toughest) steaks it has ever been my pleasure to consume. The roadhouse restaurant-bar consisted of a huge room with peeled wood beams and a lingering aura of what it must be like on a wild Saturday night, out here in the middle of nowhere. We drank what I later came to recognize as “western” coffee: black and watery, as opposed to “cowboy” coffee: black and strong enough to float the spoon. The pie of last season’s berries was sweet, juice-drippy, and measured about three wedges to the circle. We bid our hostess adieu. “So long, darlin’s, stop by if you get back this way,” she waved. We were off, with the sun lying just above the westward ridges.
I asked my host if he knew of a good place along the road up ahead where I could roll my bag out for the night.
“Well, son, it cools down pretty quick at dark around here, but there’s this old line shack up ahead a few miles. Only used at the spring and fall round-ups. Nobody will mind if you bed down in there.” And, true to his word, he dropped me off just before sunset, in Cowboy Heaven. Then, to my astonishment, he U-turned the ‘Bird, and roared back down the way we had come, no doubt to engage the waitress in further conversation.
It was a narrow, well-grassed valley, bordered by aspen rising to the ridges. In the river meadow behind the sagging wooden buildings and empty corrals, cattle and antelope were grazing together, side by side.
The old, slant-leaning bunkhouse itself was rusty and dusty and empty; a broken windowpane was loosely stuffed with a rag. Inside the building was one metal bedframe with a rolled-up old mattress. There was an axe with a splintered handle, and a cast-iron stove, and outside a stack of bone-dry wood stood by the corrals. I split enough of the wood to warm myself against the gathering evening chill. I fired up the stove, priming it with pages from last autumn’s Plnedale Gazette, rolled my bag out on the mattress, and fell asleep, listening to the scurrying of the kangaroo mice on the bunkhouse floor, the owls hooting in the moon-risen meadow, and the quickening breeze in the aspen. It was June 14, 1957, and my heart was easy in my breast.
I awakened suddenly, disoriented, perhaps with the awareness, or the sixth sense, that something was not right. A pale cottony white light filled the bunkhouse, suffusing everything with a silent glow that was almost, but not quite, luminescent.
I looked at my watch. The hands showed seven-fifteen, but the second hand was not sweeping. I put the watch to my ear, and realized it was stopped; it must have been damaged while I was splitting wood.
Moving over to a grimy windowpane, I saw that the same white light was shining everywhere. Had I died of blueberry pie overdose, and truly woken up in Cowboy Heaven? Apparently not quite yet; for on the ground lay three or four inches of powdery snow, with more coming down by the bucketful. What time was it? Probably at least mid-day, given the brightness of the light. My groggy mind now remembered something half-heard on the radio, was it only yesterday, short of Rock Springs? “Possible late-season blizzard moving up from Colorado.” My brain, still set to Eastern time and clime, had refused to register the possibility of a sudden snowstorm in mid-June. But here we were.
I packed and rolled my bag, slipped the poncho over my head (thus exposing the sleeping bag to the falling snow), and felt my way out the twenty yards to the road. Nothing was in sight in either direction through the diminished visibility. No tracks lay on the road; none made by human, animal, or Detroit. Back in the shack, I considered my situation more carefully. While I might get a bit hungry, I had at least a bag of peanuts and half an O’Henry candy bar in my Gladstone, and plenty of stovewood to keep warm by, and to melt snow water. So I was not without food or drink. A car, or a plow, was sure to come through that day or the next, this was the major road between Rock Springs and Jackson Hole. Things would work out; all I had to do was to be patient.
It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, with the snow still coming down hard, before I heard the sound of a car grinding up the road from the south. I grabbed my stuff, ran out to the road, and made the foolish gesture of sticking out my thumb, instead of waving my arms.
The car was all black, an ancient Nash, perhaps ’46 or ’47, with a dent for every mile. Behind it was towed a black flatbed trailer, and atop the trailer was secured, upright, a black Harley-Davidson, equally ancient and dented. The conglomeration came to a stop, skidding a bit beyond me in the powder. The sight presented an ominous and eerie apparition—a world of black on white.
He was all in black as well: black Stetson, black hair, black ‘cycle jacket, black jeans, black boots, and black gloves. He was stringy and well-used, and the three days’ stubble on his cheeks was, well, black.
He rolled the window down, squinting against the snowflakes and the white light. “Hey, bub, you sure picked a funny day for hitch-hiking. Where you bound?”
“North to Alaska, Mister.” The phrase was from the John Wayne movie of the same name, and its theme song, which proclaimed: “North to Alaska. We’re going North, the Rush is on!”
“From the looks of this weather, we must be almost up there already, bub. Hop in, I’ll take you to Jackson, just twenty miles up this Hoback Canyon road. You can get breakfast there.”
“Breakfast? It must be afternoon by now.”
“Shoot, bub, it’s not even seven-thirty on a beautiful morning in full Wyoming spring conditions. C’mon, hop in.”
He looked to me like Jack Palance, the bad black-hatted gunfighter in a number of classic Westerns, or maybe like Richard Boone, the antihero hero of the 1950s TV Series, “Have Gun, Will Travel.” I don’t know if he was a gunfighter or not, but he surely wasn’t bad. His name, I kid you not, was, of course, Jim Black, and that old Nash was warm and cozy and full of song and laughter as we skidded and sputtered slowly through the snowy Hoback canyon and came down into the little town of Jackson.
The snow stopped and the sun shone as we drove down the main street, with its many false-front buildings, themselves fronted by wooden boardwalks. Jim slid his rig to a stop in front of the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. “Whoa there. Get yourself the best breakfast in town here, bub. Try the Silver Dollar pancakes.”
I offered him breakfast, but he declined. “Got to get this rig up over to Cody for the bike races, and had best be moving along. There’ll be snow aplenty time I get to Yellowstone”
“Those races might be quite a goat-rope, if it’s snowing as much up there as it was where you picked me up. Thanks, and drive carefully.”
Jim laughed, winked, waved a gloved hand, and was gone, whistling one last chorus of “North to Alaska.”
I pushed my way in through the bat-wing doors (they might probably be there to this day, if you don’t believe me), took a revolving stool at the counter, and gazed down at the rows and rows of silver dollars inlaid all along the counter (which at night was the bar, and no doubt even busier than for breakfast). I left my Gladstone, minus the