All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-seven)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part ninety-seven)

i.

“I never saw his face”

“Okay, hey. Know what, you all? What I heard?”

Glee. The voice colored with it, glee over the body of vagabond Tinker, lying at the side of River Road. Drunk dead, stretched out in the lane…

“Horse shied, then…bam. Almost got throwed.”

Three, bride and groom and dad, crammed in the one seat, coming back to McClurkin’s from here, from Hopper’s.

Tinker…the landlord’s intimate friend.

At the bar Hopper did not bat an eyelash.

“Mucked him up a little, said, but sheriff don’t think it’s any foul play.”

“Now there’s a thing you don’t wanna happen. I’d take up with the teetotals, love of God.”

The youngsters whose start in life had been cursed by Tinker’s corpse, won a round of laughter and salutes. The railroaders lived on the bottom below the old hotel, in shanties hammered fast by Michael McClurkin, owner with his brother of the Belle Rivière. So it was things got named. The Greenway Inn was Hopper’s now. Every business Hopper ran, whether or not respectable enough to pay taxes, assumed that sliding-down, to a Hopper-standard clientele—

If Hopper opened the bottle, the whiskey was watered. You had to order your pint and glass, and get to a table with it. Richard…who would pocket a cork to suck on later, as need be…was not balled against the wallboards, gnawed inside by a madness of rage, for the loss of Tinker. No, not fixed this way because he couldn’t hold his liquor. He had never come to that, never not made it out of a drinking hole on his own feet.

Sheriff Holland, in the doorframe, just wanted a chat with all you. Since each other head had swung itself, Richard slithered like a snake under the gingham cloth…for no reason he understood. It would not kill his father if Holland dragged him out of Hopper’s by the collar.

“Didn’t see his face. Said not that big, had a good stink to him. Manhandled the basket off her arm, felt out the coin purse inside the band of her skirt…uh, yep. Nasty kinda crime.”

“And, you know,” the gleeful voice said low, “this gal works at the place.”

Richard had followed her into town for just that. The master of Crownhaven could make good, pay a few more dollars, buy his day help other potatoes and onions, a fresher bakery loaf. Richard had stolen her money; he couldn’t help where she kept it. Not one thing else he had wanted or done. Holland seemed wanting the guilty party lynched.

104

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-eight)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)