Webb's Weird Wild West Read online

  The flap itself had started during Thanksgiving Week 1896. According to an article in the San Francisco Call, an electrician named J. A. Heron had been contacted by airship pilots. They took him to a deserted field north of San Francisco and he performed repairs on their craft. As a reward for his labor he was taken on a 4,400-mile journey to the Hawaiian Islands. The trip took 34 hours. He described the vessel as resembling a great silver cigar, which caused many of us to take the cigars we were smoking out of our mouths and examine them closely. A week later the Call reported that Mr. Heron’s wife reported that Mr. Heron had been in bed asleep during the supposed journey. We all laughed at our foolishness until Rosa, who tells the Tarot cards for a dime, said there might be more to that story than meets the eye. None of us asked her what she meant because she charged a nickel to answer questions. Hamlet MacKenzie may have asked her later. He was nickeling and diming his daddy to death, but that comes in later. Instead we moved out onto the porch and watched the skies. We all wanted to see that airship. Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring a cold breeze to the backs of his fellows around the campfire by saying, “I have seen strange shadows in the sky.”?

  Malcolm MacKenzie had no time for airship watching. His wife had up and died on him two years ago. His two daughters Jeffalina Davis MacKenzie and Roberta Elee MacKenzie were gettin’ near marriageable age and the boys in the bunkhouse were gettin’ a mite too sociable. And then there was his son Hamlet—who was named by his mother and thus avoided a Civil War handle—had he been born anywhere or anywhen else his curiosity and drive would have made him into a fine philosopher, scientist, or fictioneer. Hamlet spent handfuls of dimes with Rosa learning the arcane lore of the gypsy peoples—and much else besides. Hamlet had himself a personal telegraph station run out to the ranch. That’s right, a personal station with wires run along the fence posts all the way from town. He spent hours getting and receiving message from other operators. He said he was a node in the worldnet but nobody rightly understood Hamlet. Most folks thought Hamlet was loco. In fact, we’d often debate it right on the porch of the Amarillo Hotel—was Hamlet loco?

  The next sighting of the airship was by a Texan and therefore of unquestioned veracity. In the Daily Texarkanian April 25, 1897 Judge Lawrence A. Byrne reported that he had seen the airship at the McKinney bayou. The ship landed and is pilots showed him through. The judge explained “about the machinery being made out of aluminum and the gas to raise and lower the monster was pumped into an aluminum tank when the ship was to be raised and let out when the ship was to be lowered.” Hamlet MacKenzie, who took damn near every paper in Texas, read the article to us hisself. And you can bet there was a lot of watching the sky that night.

  Hamlet rode off to sample some of his sweetheart’s larruping good pecan pie. Hamlet was a sweet lad, a late bloomer, no doubt due to his mother’s tender influence. He was between hay and grass—or as you might say, boyhood and manhood. He still had not put away boyish things like his telegraph and his sense of wonder—and many of us hoped he never did.

  Meanwhile there was trouble on MacKenzie ranch. While Hamlet was off pirootin’ with his sweetheart, four of Malcolm’s best cows—all of ’em with calves—had come down with the staggers. Malcolm stayed up all night with them, nursing them—drilling holes in their horns and pouring in boiled milk.

  One of his hired hands rode off the next morning—saying that if a herd gets the staggers it’ll get dead. Might as well start looking for work now.

  * * * * * * *

  Cow carcasses swelling up in the sun. Bursting. Turkey buzzards and the little orange and yellow flowers of a Panhandle spring. Creek running low and Hamlet looking pale from so much time at his telegraph. He was very concerned about what the Turks were doing to the Armenians. Genocide was still a new word then.

  Malcolm’s arthritis began to act up and there seemed to always be bills waiting for him in town.

  Hamlet rode into town on his sorrel gelding to pick up some bills, some salve for the cattle, and his copy of the Argus-Leader of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Seems that two farmhands, Adolph Winkle and John Hulle, had signed affidavits stating that the airship had landed two miles outside of town to repair some electrical apparatus on board. The boys had talked to the occupants, who said they had flown over a hundred miles in thirty minutes and would “mail a report to the government when Cuba is declared free.” He waited around mournfully like he was about to spend some money at Rosa’s table, but thought better of it, and rode off.

  His sweetheart, Emily Boadicea Jones, strolled by a tad later and asked if any of us had seen Hamlet. We told her he had just rode off, and she looked near to tears. Hadn’t seen him much lately, she said.

  * * * * * * *

  “It’s like this, son—what with the cattle dying, I just can’t afford to keep you in luxuries. I admire this worldnet concept you’ve thought up and I know you’re vitally interested in the situations in Cuba and Armenia, but son you’re gonna have to be like the rest of us and just wait on your news from word of mouth.”

  “Will I have to cut off my studies with Rosa, too?”

  “Son, I promised your mother I’d take care of you. I don’t know for the life of me why you hang around the old heathen with her terror cards and spells. It just ain’t, it just ain’t white, son. I’ll let you have a dime a week and for the love of God don’t tell me how you spend it.”

  * * * * * * *

  We all heard of Hamlet’s plight. He weren’t the kind of man to keep his troubles to himself.

  “If you ask me, that boy had been spending too much of his daddy’s money. This is liable to make a man out of him,” said Sam the barkeep, drawn to an easy consensus like iron filings to a magnet.

  Hamlet didn’t ever hear the remark because he was in the curtained off area with Rosa—that dimly lit chamber where the course of the future was made plain to you for a small fee. One of the boys walked over and put his ear to the filthy red satin drapes listening to their exchange, and manfully trying not to choke from the combined smells of stale patchouli and the fermenting brown spittle in the gaboons.

  “... and that’s the story, Rosa. Well, I have these two nickels.”

  “So you can ask two questions.”

  “Rosa, I’ve given you a passel full of nickels in the past, can’t I have a few freebies?”

  “I’ve told you before, if you don’t pay for it you won’t have any respect for it. Mysteries may be cheap, but they ain’t free.”

  “But I’ve got to know. I have to know things.”

  “You father has buried a coffee can full of silver dollars in the stall of his favorite horse.”

  “That’s against emergency. So he can take care of his payroll.”

  “You live to know things. Would Faust have hesitated to steal it?”

  “Who’s Faust?”

  “Do you want to pay for that question?”

  “No.”

  After a beat he spoke again, sliding a nickel across the table.

  “Rosa, this airship thing. What’s the real key to what’s going on here?”

  “The real key is in the first sighting. Not in the man’s experience but in what his wife said.”

  “What will bring me closest to the airship—where do I start?”

  “The first step is obtaining a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Go, I can tell you no more.”

  As he rode back to the ranch he saw the telegraph company clipping his wire.

  * * * * * * *

  Hamlet’s papers continued to come—and as he stopped riding into town daily—we took to reading them, then folding them up nicely. We noted some things about the airship.

  * In Jasserand, Texas, it had brilliant lights, and the farmer who encountered the crew by night was told it ran on “condensed electricity.”

  * In Harrisburg, Arkansas, the airship had a gun capable of firing 63,000 times a minute. The crew told “Ex-Senator Harris,” when they awakened him at 1 A.M., that the ship was held aloft b
y anti-gravitation wire. They were planning to go to Armenia or Mars soon.

  * In Holton, Michigan, the airship took an “honest citizen” for a ride, after which he talked of nothing but aerial navigation and the great revelry of the night.

  * The airship was seen at night by many men. It was seen in Pine Lake, Michigan; Eldora, Iowa; Dallas, Texas; Waterloo, Iowa; Sisterville, Virginia. It was on its way to Greece, Cuba, Armenia, Mars, or New York. It had bright lights. It needed electrical repairs, water, beef, trout, bluestone, and a corkscrew. It was 200 feet long, 800 feet long, half a mile long.

  And the occupants wore goggles, smoked glass or mirror shades.

  * * * * * * *

  Jeffalina Davis MacKenzie rode into town on a buckboard driven by Joseph Carpenter, foreman at the MacKenzie ranch. She bought two gingham dresses and spent the afternoon with her best friend, Emily Jones. They rode south as the sun began to set—whereas the ranch lay to the north. When Emily closed up her dress shop, she stopped by the Amarillo Hotel for a plate of black-eyed peas and ham hock. We questioned her. She said that Jeffalina had rode off with Joseph never to return. Did she know any particulars? Two things. One, Hamlet was stalking around the ranch with a wild look in his eye and his shirt done up wrong. Two, wherever she went to she was going to get a better name than Jeffalina.

  * * * * * * *

  A week went by without Hamlet showing up at all. The Sears catalog arrived in the mail, and we went over its contents with a fine-tooth comb. We didn’t find nothing. Maybe Rosa had just been spoofing. But that didn’t seem like our Rosa. Many a man rubbed a nickel between his thumb and forefinger, but none of us asked. Rosa had learned her trade from the Python, skin-shedding oracle of Apollo. She knew the striptease of mystery. Show a little bit, but a very little bit, and leave them wanting more. All art, perhaps, comes down to the hootchy-kootchy dance of Salome. You could lose all your nickels trying to force the feather boa from her shoulder. So we didn’t ask. We were grown men, mature men, men with families.

  We needed our nickels.

  The most spectacular sighting of the airship occurred in Vernon, Kansas. Mr. Alexander Hamilton, a well-established farmer, whose veracity was guaranteed by the sheriff, mayor, and other established citizens, revealed (in The Farmers Advocate) the dark doings of the airship. It passed over his farm late at night. “It was brilliantly lighted within, and everything was clearly visible.” Occupied by six of the strangest beings he had ever seen, Mr. Hamilton could not understand their language. Their intent seemed clear enough. As the great craft whished over the farm, a three-year old heifer began to bawl. Mr. Hamilton ran to its aid and found a thick red cord about its neck. The cord was tangled in his barb wire and went on up to the brightly lit ship. He tried to free the terrified animal, but his barlow pen knife just skittered across the hard surface. The fence wire began to twang and pop from the posts. So Mr. Alexander Hamilton stepped over to it and cut the wire away from the red cord. At once the heifer began to rise in the air, and as the airship floated out of sight, it screamed and screamed in terror.

  When we read this account, we grew cold in sickness and fear. Yet the sight of the cow rising (in our mind’s eye) redoubled the curiosity. Someone said, Hamlet ought to know about this. Somebody else volunteered to take The Farmers Advocate and the Sears catalog out to Hamlet. There was an unspoken desire for all the things that came afterward. We wanted him to do what he did—so we are just as guilty.

  * * * * * * *

  Silver dollars have a special rich sound when they fall on a wooden table—banging one against the other and the wood. The sight or the sound or the smell of money is always a powerful message. It’s a strong enough message that it will cut through all others in a crowded, noisy room. All heads turn. But this sound was particularly poignant. We knew that Hamlet had dug up his father’s savings. It would be awhile before old Malcolm knew, but we knew. And when that rich clang of money came from behind Rosa’s curtains, Emily Jones put down her fork. She got real pale, because a lot of her future was in that money. She left the dining room, kind of drifted out, and was never the same afterward.

  “Take it,” Hamlet said.

  We couldn’t hear what followed, as though Rosa had used her witchcraft to put a wall of silence around her place. Well Hamlet had paid dearly for her information. After half an hour, Hamlet emerged from behind the drapes with an ashen expression and the Sears catalog under his arm. He got some paper from the desk clerk and straightaway wrote out an order. He left it with the clerk along with some money for its postage, and to pay for the item when it arrived.

  We questioned the clerk after Hamlet’s departure. The item would cost $2.30. Hamlet said it would be a small box.

  We moved out onto the porch to whittle and watch the skies. Somebody opined that we were too excited by this thing—after all, there had been cigar-shaped balloons in Europe. True, everyone agreed (for we were a well-informed bunch), but those had been crude affairs. They didn’t whish or swoop, they didn’t have powerful searchlights or massive guns. When their inventors tried to fly them, it was by day in front of huge crowds. This mystery came forth by night. Someone—or something, remembering the words of Mr. Hamilton—had a vastly superior technology to our own.

  * * * * * * *

  “You spent all of my money—everything—on this? A two-ounce jar of thornapple salve?”

  “It’s more than a jar of thornapple salve, Dad, it’s the key to the airship mystery.”

  “‘It’s the key to the airship mystery’,” Malcolm mocked, “It’s the key to my losing the ranch. It’s the key to me being landless and poor in my old age. It’s the key to losing every single thing your mother and I built. I thought there was some home in you, some glimmer of responsibility. You stole from your own father. You think I just planted that jar and money grew in it. Did your witch tell you that? But even worse, you stole it.”

  “I had to know and as soon as I know fully, I’ll write a book about it and we’ll have lots of money.”

  “Son, them starry notions ain’t gonna put bread on the table, but that still don’t address the question of being a thief. You’re a thief and everybody knows it. A thief and a consorter with the dark-skinned gypsy witch. You’ve brought a blot to our name. I can’t think of you as a MacKenzie no more. Take this.”

  Malcolm drew a wad of blue backs—Confederate money he carried for cigarette papers—and slapped it down on the kitchen table. “Take these, that’s all you’re worth to me. Put it in your saddle bag. I’ll give you a horse and tack. Then ride the hell off my ranch. If I ever find out you’re using the family name, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  Hamlet reached for the blue glass jar of thornapple salve, but Malcolm picked up a table knife.

  Malcolm said, “I’ll keep this. It was bought with my money. It’s mine.”

  Hamlet saw something he had never seen—the terrible power of the father. He went to his room.

  The boys were out fence mending, and Roberta had rode out to take them supper. Hamlet was alone in the big house with his father, and he heard something he had never heard before. His father was sobbing, which was like a bone in his throat. Sometimes he caught words. “First Jeffalina and now him, what have I done wrong? I tried. I really tried, Maudie. I tried to be a good father.” Hamlet’s saddle bag was small so filling it up was easy. He’d had to leave behind his clippings and telegrams, browning paper assortments of anomalies and miracles, wars and rumors of wars. He left aside the chunk of meteorite and shells from a sea he’d never seen.

  He went to say goodbye, but he saw tears on his father’s face and in the presence of this mystery he was silent. He went out the back way, and all his father heard was the closing of the door.

  With the falling of night he rode to Emily’s. She rented the small house her parents used to own. She kept a few hens and had a garden. He knocked very softly.

  We’ll draw a veil over that scene. Protective loving feelings overcame judgm
ent and we always thought of Emily as a used woman after that night.

  Malcolm had been very still sitting in his chair—slumped over the kitchen table. Sobs had ceased to rock his body, but he was tired from the sobbing. Just tired and he ached. He rose his head up slowly, and saw that it was dark. Roberta should be back by now. He thought of going to her bedroom, kissing her brow. His one good child. But suddenly fear possessed him that she might not be there. That she might be out with the boys seduced to performing wild acts. He could believe any monstrous thing of his offspring now and he wasn’t ready for the possible revelations that could come from opening that door.

  He picked up the jar of salve. He could smell its strong medicine smell. He thought that he ought to throw it out. “For arthritis, rheumatism, gout, bursitis, chill blains, pains in the joints, male and female complaints, lack of energy. Good for man or beast.” Ah, he thought, there is balm in Gilead.

  He took off his shirt and wiped off his arms and upper body with a scrap of red towel that served as a kitchen rag. He opened the jar and dipped three fingers into the snot-green, cold unguent. It was thick, jelly-like, but it spread like fire on his flesh. It found tiny cuts that he didn’t know of, and made them shout out their presence. With numbing ice-heat it soothed sore muscles. It seemed to go into his lungs and out his nostrils like smoke. He could feel it in his blood and on the inside of his eye sockets. It had a rich alien smell—something like the sharp smell of a creosote bush after a rain, something like desert sage, something like the incense he had smelled once in a Catholic church in Vicksburg. He plopped down in the chair, his eyes closed, giving himself entirely to the alien scent. It was the only time in years, perhaps the only time since making love to Maudie, that he had given himself totally to sensation. He closed his eyes and breathed in, breathed out. Felt the heat. Breathed in, breathed out.

  He must have slept a short time, before he heard the rustling in the grass. Somebody was out by the well. It couldn’t be the boys, they were sleeping halfway across the ranch. Hamlet wouldn’t have come back—he was honorable about some things—there was some of his pappy in him. Malcolm smiled in the dark realizing that he wasn’t a total failure.