Black Cat Weekly #93

Chapter 5

byLate morning, Eddie Johnson saw the log cabin sitting alone in the flat green valley. Above it was a clear October sky; around it were outbuildings and a split-rail fence; behind it was a gray wall of towering white-capped mountains. By the time he’d walked his horse past a pond and through an open gate in the fence he saw a woman with curly blond hair standing in the cabin’s front doorway, watching him and holding a rifle. For the moment it was pointed at the ground, which he took as a good sign.

Eddie stopped, nodded a greeting, and told her his name. His smile wasn’t returned.

In a careful voice she said, “What is it you want?”

“Just a drink for me and Jasper, here, if you can spare it.”

She answered by pointing the rifle at a well in the corner of the yard, then continued watching him while he watered his horse and then himself. When he’d finished, he hung the dipper on a hook, swung back into the saddle, and tipped his hat. “Much obliged, ma’am.”

Only when he’d turned his horse and started moving away did she seem to relax a bit. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Where you headed?”

“East,” he answered, reining in. “Dakota Territory.”

“That’s a far piece.”

Eddie smiled again. “Long as I get there fore it snows, I’ll be fine. Jasper don’t much like the cold.”

They studied each other a moment more. From somewhere out back he heard the grunting of pigs and the clucking of chickens. Finally, her face softened.

“Come on inside,” she said. “I got some biscuits left from breakfast.”

Two minutes later he was sitting across from her at a wooden table in the main room of the cabin, a combination parlor and kitchen. If a log house could be said to have a parlor. The rifle, an old Winchester, now stood propped in the corner.

The blond woman gave her name as Marian and said she’d lived here for some time, she and her son Joey. “He’s out huntin’, at the moment,” she said.

Eddie bit into a biscuit and chewed awhile. “Don’t you worry about him? I wouldn’t let him wander too far, alone.”

“We’re used to being alone, Mr. Johnson. My husband Joe died six months ago, just keeled over while plowing a field. Besides, our current trouble’s in the other direction.” She nodded toward a window and the flatlands beyond, and her expression darkened. “A neighbor named Boone Stokely. Him and his men.”

Eddie studied her profile. “They want your farm, don’t they,” he said. “They want you off this land.”

She turned, frowning, to look at him. “How could you know that?”

Suddenly Eddie felt tired. “Let’s just say this ain’t my first Western.”

“Your first what?”

He was saved from answering by the sound of distant hoofbeats. Both of them stood and moved to the window. Four horsemen were approaching, raising a tall dust cloud.

“It’s Stokely,” Marian said.

Without a word Eddie walked out to where he’d tied Jasper and fetched a three-foot-long leather case from its place behind his saddle. As he reentered the house he saw Marian staring at the heavy case, and immediately understood the confusion on her face: she wasn’t wondering about the contents—she was looking at the zipper. Metal zippers like this wouldn’t be in use until almost fifty years from now. Eddie wished he could explain, but this wasn’t the time.

“See what they want,” he said to her. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Her eyes searched his for several seconds—Who ARE you?—before she picked up her rifle and stepped past him and into the doorway to face the four mounted men in her front yard. They sat there in a row, easy and arrogant in their saddles, staring at her. One of them, a bearded man with a fancy vest, obviously the leader, spoke before she could say anything.

Who ARE you?“Who’s your visitor?”

“That’s none of your business, Mr. Stokely. You need to get off my land.”

He broke out an evil smile. “That’s just it, lady. It ain’t your land.” He rested both forearms on his saddle horn, obviously enjoying looking down at her. “You got lucky awhile back, when my uncle died, but I’m the boss now and I got the same views he had. This is still open range. I want you gone, and the other squatters too.”

“Homesteaders,” she said, her voice firm. “We’re homesteaders.”

He shook his head slowly. “You heard what I said. You got two weeks to pack up that boy a yours and—”

Eddie’s voice cut him off. “I believe the lady asked you to get off her property.”

He’d stepped around the woman and was facing them now—but none of the four riders were looking at him. They were staring at what he held in his hands. Eddie knew they hadn’t seen a Thompson submachine g*n before. No one had, in the 1880s.

“Who the hell are you?” Stokely growled. “And what’s that thing?” All four men’s hands were now resting on the grips of their holstered revolvers.

“I’ll show you,” Eddie said. Aiming between two of the horses, he planted both feet and pulled the trigger. The short g*n spit fire and roared, a pounding, chattering blast of sound. Behind them, just inside the rail fence, a tree stump exploded, ripped into splinters by two dozen 45-caliber rounds.

The gunmen yelped, and all four horses whinnied and leaped and bucked. One of the men was thrown, and the others hung on like rodeo bronc riders. When his horse settled down, Boone Stokely never looked back; he galloped away through the gate at full speed, and his three men followed as if their tails were on fire. The one on the ground had to chase his mount out and across the flats on foot. Eddie and the lady of the house stood and watched until all of them were out of sight. Two hats lay upside-down and forgotten in the silent, dusty yard.

Eddie’s ears were still ringing. When he looked at Marian her mouth was hanging open, her face pale as a bedsheet. After a long hesitation she swallowed and said, “Where in God’s name did you get that?”

“It was given to me by a friend. A fella who did a gangster film in Chicago two years ago.”

“A what? Film?”

Eddie was still staring after the horsemen. “It’s like a play,” he said. “A performance.”

“What kind of performance?”

“Sort of a story, in pictures. This one was about real people, named Elliott Ness—he’s the one my friend played—and Al Capone.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. Trying to explain to her about movies, and about two men who in his world were long dead but in her world weren’t even born yet, would accomplish nothing at all. He walked back inside and returned the still-warm Tommy-g*n to its leather pouch. She followed him and sagged dazedly into her chair at the table, still holding her Winchester. He sat also and zipped the carrying case shut.

The sound of the zipper seemed to jolt her awake. “I asked you a question,” she said, focusing on him. “Tell me about these ‘plays.’”

“They don’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that I don’t think Mr. Stokely will come back anytime soon.”

“He will eventually, though. What do I do then?”

Their eyes met, and after a pause he said, “I know some people working in the hills not far from here, close to where I’ll pass later today. They’re filming a war story, and they have—” He thought about how to put this. “They have access to Sherman tanks.”

“Tanks?”

“Big rolling machines that weigh as much as this house. We go way back, me and these people, and if I ask them to, they’ll come.”

Her eyes were wide now. “Come and do what?”

“Well—I’m thinking there’s no law around here. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m also thinking one of them machines I’m talking about might flatten a few of Mr. Stokely’s sheds and blow up a barn or two. He’s already seen this g*n, and what it can do. If he sees a thirty-ton tank rumblin’ through his front yard, I doubt you’ll have any more trouble out of him at all.”

Both of them fell silent then, considering that. Somewhere to the west, behind the house and toward the giant range of peaks he’d seen on the way here, something howled, long and mournful. A coyote, maybe, or a wolf. How strange it was, he thought, that the most dangerous things in this valley at this moment in history weren’t wolves or bears or mountains lions. They were men like those he’d just chased off.

Marian still looked to be in deep thought. “How can all these wonders—fancy guns, rolling war machines, metal sliding things that seal up a bag—how can they exist, and I not know about them?” she asked. “And who are these people who have them?”

“In the case of the tanks, it’s an old man from California. A moviemaker.” Eddie paused, thinking. “I’ll tell him and his crew, and they’ll help you.” He glanced out the still-open doorway at the yard and the well and Jasper standing there tied in the noonday sun. “I’d help you myself, but I have to leave. I got a job waitin’ on me.”

He scraped his chair back and rose from the table, but she didn’t. She sat there staring at him.

“What exactly is happening, here?” she asked. “And why won’t you tell me?”

Because you’d think I’m crazy, he thought. And you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Sometimes he didn’t believe it himself. For a long time now, Eddie Johnson had been living in two eras, one in the current year—1989—and one a hundred years earlier. He didn’t know how it happened, but he thought he knew why. He’d watched far too many movies in his life. Especially as a kid. He’d been obsessed with them. And something in that make-believe fantasy world, that magic…well, some of it had apparently spilled over into real life.

whymagicHe shook his head. “Talking to you about that would take more time and more know-how than I have, ma’am.” He added, “I got a long trip ahead.”

She heaved a sigh and followed him outside, where he put on his hat, stared at the mountains behind the house—he’d never seen such mountains—and said, “I’m much obliged for the biscuits.”

“I’m obliged to you too, Mr. Johnson,” she said, with a glance at the mangled tree stump and the two hats lying in the dirt. Then she fixed him with a stare. “You said you’re going where? Dakota Territory?”

“Yes ma’am. A friend a mine, young guy named Costner—he’s a film person too, the one who worked on that thing in Chicago I told you about—he’s making a movie of his own now, a Western that he says will show the Indians as good people, the heroes of the plains. I’m supposed to play a Union soldier. A speaking part.” The Civil War, at least, would be something this lady understood.

“That ‘film’ word again,” she said. “What in the Lord’s name are you talking about?”

“It’s just a job, ma’am. Like being a banker or cowpuncher or anything else.” Eddie gathered his reins and swung up into the saddle. “If you would, tell your boy I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him. I hope he brings back a buncha fat rabbits.”

She nodded, then said, as he was clicking to his horse, “One other thing. In your travels…did you ever run into a man named Shane? No first name, just Shane. Blond hair, fancy gunbelt, kinda short?”

“Can’t say I have. I know who he was, though.”

“Was?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m told he died, some time ago.”

Eddie saw her shoulders sag, and for just a second saw the gleam of a tear in her eye.

“I suspected that,” she said. “He helped us a while back, my husband and son and me, and when that was done he rode off. All of us hated to see him leave. Little Joey, especially.”

Eddie nodded. “Partings are hard sometimes.” He tipped his hat once again and aimed his horse east. Over his shoulder he said, “Best of luck to you, ma’am.”

A mile or so from the little cabin it occurred to him that neither of these two worlds he lived in—one real and one imaginary—was easy. Above all, he found himself wondering what his old friends working on the war movie would find if they humored him and drove one of the tanks west to help the woman in the cabin. Would the cabin, or Boone Stokely’s ranch, even be here? Or would they find a commercialized twentieth-century valley instead?

Somehow Eddie believed they’d find themselves in the 1880s, just as he had been, these past few hours. He believed Whoever was controlling all this time-travel craziness would somehow make that happen.

But even if it didn’t, even if no help ever arrived here, Eddie still felt things would be all right. That’s why he’d left the machine g*n, along with its case and its three hundred rounds of ammunition, underneath his chair at the kitchen table. He suspected Marian’s son Joey was a smart kid, and between him and his ma they’d learn how to use it—there were plenty of tree stumps to practice on. If and when Boone Stokely returned, with or without his henchmen, Eddie figured he wouldn’t make it home in one piece.

That thought made him smile a little, and for the first time since this morning his mind drifted to other matters, like the perfect weather and the fine view and the upcoming job.

“Wonder how cold it gets in the Dakotas,” he said to Jasper.

John M. Floyd is the author of more than a thousand short stories in publications like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, The Best American Mystery Stories (2015, 2018, 2020), and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is an Edgar finalist, a Shamus Award winner, a five-time Derringer Award winner, and the author of nine books. He is also the 2018 recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, The Best American Mystery StoriesThe Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021