Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(An adventure in the past, with Letty, Stephen and their childhood friends, during the 1930s. I may continue writing about Luna City in the past, when I finish the 12th chronicle. It’s a place very dear to me, but several present-day story arcs are coming to a natural conclusion.)

From – The Secret Life of Brownies

Letty McAllister was just eleven years old and her older brother Douglas was thirteen, in summer of the year that the brownies appeared in Luna City; 1932. That was the third year of the great Depression, although Letty and Douglas and their friend, Stephen Wyler were barely aware of that. Something to do with a stock market crashing Letty gathered from overhearing adults talk it over, with somber faces and worried voices.

“I think it means the Fat Stock Show,” Stephen Wyler assured them, late in 1929 when Letty and Douglas consulted with their friend. He was the son of a rancher, and fairly familiar with matters to do with cattle and other beasts of the Wyler Ranch.

“Are you certain?” Douglas asked, not entirely convinced. The adults seemed to have been most particularly worried. “I don’t believe there are cattle in New York City.”

“Perhaps it was some other kind of stock,” Stephen conceded.

As it turned out, the depression had nothing at all to do with the San Antonio Fat Stock Show. What it meant to Luna City was that lean times came in, hung up coat and hat and decided to sit for a long spell. It meant that local small ranchers and farmers went bust, losing home and properties to foreclosure by the bank, and then a cascade of failing banks and small businesses shutting up for good.  All that, and for Luna City it also meant an increase of bums and hobos drifting through, looking for work or just a free meal. Since no one had any money to spare to hire farm hands, the hoboes mostly drifted on, although there were some who were agreeable to doing chores by the day in exchange for a few meals and a place under a roof to sleep.

The McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler, together with a handful of friends from school, had built themselves a clubhouse with odd planks and tree branches brought down by winter floods. They settled on a sheltered declivity in the riverbank not far from the burnt-out ruins of an old mansion on a hill commanding a view of the river, and the washhouse and bathrooms for a tourist camp which had never really gotten off the ground. The owners of the derelict tourist camp had long given up on the property, even before the stock market crash, and left the cabins and the paved space to molder away, baked in the harsh Texas summer sunshine, and blasted by winter winds, perhaps proving that even in good times, the tourist camp wouldn’t have made a go of it. Nothing had lived anywhere near the owl-haunted ruins of the old mansion for decades, although there was a shed, leaning perilously to one side, and an icehouse with thick and insulated walls built into a sloping hillside not far from a pile of burnt timbers and brick, tangled over with mats of wild morning glory vines. Stephen, Douglas, their tag-along acolyte Artie Vaughn, and Letty’s friend, Retta Livingston sometimes dared aspirants to membership in their private club to brave the spiders and other critters who inhabited the ruins of the roofless bathhouse and the icehouse as a condition of membership. The old icehouse was a dank cave, hidden among the brush; so far, no one had accepted the dare.

It was Retta, who lived with her family on a small farm on the outskirts of Luna City, who first mentioned the brownies. Retta and Letty were in the same Girl Scout troop, a troop led by Mrs. Rowbottom, who was the wife of the Reverent Calvin Rowbottom, the minister of the Methodist church in Luna City.

“Mrs. Allison says that she is being visited at night by helpful brownies,” Retta commented one afternoon, when they had gathered at the clubhouse to share out a little bag of penny candy that Stephen Wyler had brought with his allowance money. “Like the story that Mrs. Rowbottom told us about brownies coming in at night to do chores for people who leave them a bowl of milk or something.”

“Who’s Mrs. Allison, when she’s at home?” Stephen asked, flippantly. “And how can she tell?”

Retta regarded Stephen with an impatient expression. “Mrs. Allison lives across the small pasture from us – on the edge of town. Her husband finally got a job helping to build that big ol’ Hoover dam in Arizona and such. They have a little boy – Samuel, but he caught polio this summer and it took him really bad. The doctors said to keep him in in the hospital in Karnesville, he was that bad sick. He even got put in that iron lung machine for a week! They were afraid that he might die of the polio, or be paralyzed for life. Mrs. Allison, she tries to keep real cheerful about his condition, but she told my ma that he might never be able to walk again. Mrs. Allison, she goes to Karnesville purt’ near every day on the bus, so that she can see to Samuel in the hospital. He’s only six years old – the same age as my little brother.”

“What about the brownie visiting?” Letty was fascinated. The bus to Karnesville came by the McAllister house, and the Tip-Top Ice House and Gas around nine o’clock on weekday mornings, ten on Saturdays. (The bus didn’t run on Sundays.)

“It was right curious,” Retta answered. “Mrs. Allison went to Town Square to wait for the bus to come … as she didn’t want to miss it. It stops by Dunsmore’s grocery …”

“Only it isn’t Dunsmore’s grocery anymore,” Artie Vaughn added, rather unnecessarily.

“We know that!” Letty pointed out, “It’s just that the man who owns the grocery store ever since Mr. Dunsmore went to prison and had to sell up never has anyone working there who stays long enough for anyone to remember their names. They don’t stay in Luna City long enough to matter.”

“Well, anyway, there was a lot of people standing around, and Mrs. Allison said that she came away in such a rush that she had forgotten to let the chickens out, and to stack up the cord of firewood that was delivered. She talked about that and so much else … but when she came home after dark that evening … she saw that all the wood had been stacked ever so neatly, the chickens had been let out – and then put away again. There was a little note, left where the milkman had delivered two quarts of milk to the ice-box. One of the bottles was gone, but the note said ‘We took the milk, we needed it for the baby’ and just a little scrawled ‘B’ for a signature.”

“No one ever locks their doors around here,” Stephen remarked. “It could have been anyone, walking in.” He looked around at the ring of faces. They were gathered in the Club – a little ramshackle tipi of branches and odd planks brought down by previous winter’s floods leaned up against a mostly-dead cottonwood tree. Stephen, the McAllisters and their other friends had built it for a secret clubhouse, in an out-of-the-way bend in the river, below Luna City. “Maybe Mrs. Allison out to start locking her doors when she goes to spend all day, every day at the hospital. There are a lot of scurvy rogues on the tramp, you know. Just to be on the safe side.” Stephen had picked up the phrase “scurvy rogues” from an adventure book about pirates on the Spanish Main and used it at every opportunity.

“Well, she does at night,” Retta allowed. “Being that she is all alone in the house, and her husband is away…”

“She ought to have a dog,” Artie Vaughn said. “Dogs are the best guardian. Like Rin-Tin-Tin…”

“Yes, but a dog would chase her chickens, less’n she kept an eye on it,” Retta replied. “And anyway … maybe a dog would chase away the brownies. And then they wouldn’t ever come back.”

“Did they?” Letty was fascinated – it all seemed as if a fairy story was coming to life – and in Luna City! “Come back again to Mrs. Allison?”

“They did!” Retta replied, triumphantly. “She thought at first that one of her neighbors was playing a little game with her, so she left a note on the stoop under the empty milk bottles. She thanked the Brownies for stacking the wood and looking after the chickens, and asked if  they would dust the parlor and hanging out the wet washing for her, as she wouldn’t have time to do it in the morning before she went to Karnesville … and when she came home, the laundry was all dry and folded up neatly, and the parlor was as clean as a whistle!”

“Was it a neighbor, funning with her?” Artie was deeply impressed.

“She doesn’t think so,” Retta answered. “And she says now that she wouldn’t do anything to frighten them or chase them away. The Brownies have been such a help when she is so worried about little Sammy, it doesn’t matter to her who they are or where they came from. She leaves a note for them about the chores that need doing while she is away, and a bottle of milk, every morning. She also leaves them bread, cookies, and other things to eat. And every evening when she comes home, the chores are done, and the milk and food she left for the Brownies is gone.”

“That sounds like a miracle,” Letty ventured, and Retta nodded.

“It’s someone doing a good deed, without wanting any credit for it,” Douglas agreed. He was older than the other children by two years, thoughtful and intelligent. He was their natural leader, because he could see and understand aspects and matters of the larger world, matters that the others frequently found baffling. “But look, guys… (and Douglas used that generic denominator to the Club, although two of them were girls.) … do your brownies in the stories have babies among them? They said in that first note – they needed milk for a baby.”

Letty shook her head. “Mrs. Rowbottom never said anything about baby brownies.”

“I don’t think they do have babies,” Letty replied, after a long pause. “They are just sort of helpful spirits.”

“Look, guys,” Douglas continued. “I can believe in being helpful. Neigborly. I can believe that someone is helping Mrs. Allison, but I don’t believe in helpful spirits – brownies, elves, Santa Claus or any other fancy. That’s not logical in the real world.”

(Now that  I am mostly recovered from a ghastly cold, and have managed to finish the notes for West Toward the Sunset, I am back to work on Luna City. Herewith part of a chapter called Fame, wherein Joe Vaughn becomes a literary sensation. For all the wrong reasons, of course.)

“I thought you should know, cher,” remarked Richard’s boss, Lew Dubois, the C-suite level manager who had become at least a much of a friend over the years of their acquaintance, “That Anne’s good friend – you will recollect Madame Creighton Doyle, who writes the novels most romantic and amusing? Her newest novel is to be launched upon her millions of breathlessly waiting fans tonight. Alas, the formal party sponsored by her publisher will be in New York, and not here.”

“Oh, the best-seller. Yes, I recall – and I honestly I can’t say that I mind in the least,” Richard replied. When he cast his mind back to the previous year, he remembered briefly encountering Trish Creighton Doyle on several occasions. She was a woman of certain years, given to wearing flowing, chiffon-laden garments. The customary dreamy expression on her countenance suggested that her mind was most usually occupied somewhere other than the here and now – unimaginably far, far from the mundane here and now. “We are simply full up with guests at the moment! Even with forewarning…”

“This is in the nature of a forewarning,” Lew replied. “But not as it concerns the Cattleman or the Crystal Room, but rather some of our dear friends. First, I am nearly certain that many of Madame Doyle’s readers will fall upon her latest like famished wolves on a tasty piece of filet mignon … and decide that they simply must see for themselves the enchanted circle of stones … that real circle which was made so many years ago. Madame Doyle has put the pictures which she took of the pagan monument on her website as part of the advance publicity…”

It was mid-morning at the Cattleman Hotel, the hour when Richard and Lew could both be found in Lew’s office, confabulating over what to expect in the near future, about any foreseen and unforeseen events affecting management of the ornate boutique hotel which had dominated the western side of Town Square for more than a century.

“The stone circle at the Age of Aquarius? ‘Strewth – I had better warn the Grants,” Richard considered the prospect with a shudder of horror. “It was bad enough the last time that they were mobbed by visitors; treasure-seekers, ghost-hunters and UFOlogists all converged on the place a couple of years ago. It was a mob scene, culminating in a riot, and then in their old place burning to the ground, although the all-hands brawl had nothing to do with the fire. I couldn’t get a decent nights’ sleep for weeks. At least this time, they have a pleasanter place to live in… and Judy will be thrilled no end, having oodles of imaginative visitors to listen to her tales of New Age this and that…”

“Oh, most definitely, my friend,” Lew agreed. “Tell M’sieu and Madame Grant to expect any number of visitors to their magnificent stone circle…”

“Which, alas, looks much more impressive with the aid of artful photography and the cooperation of nature,” Richard replied. “The marker stones aren’t anything like Stonehenge or Avebury, being about a quarter the size. I’m afraid the baying fans will be quite disappointed…”

“But not in another aspect,” Lew was fiddling with his computer, and the printer across the room whirred and clanked into life. “My wife has sent me a copy of the news release regarding Madame Doyle’s book … the cover was embargoed until the very last minute…”

“So, the Grants will get a boost in visitors to the Age,” Richard mused, as Lew collected a sheet of paper from the printer tray. “And likely the good Colonel Walcott’s reenactor group … I do recollect that the Doyle woman was taking pictures of their encampment and costumed reenactors at the 4^th of July celebration in the square … what is the plot of the book? I know someone told me once, but I can’t recall. Something about a woman going through the stone circle and traveling into the past…”

Lew nodded in grim agreement. “A woman of the most modern American times … and discovering fulfillment and love in the arms of a fearless Comanche warrior chieftain of almost two hundred years in the past…”

Richard snorted with rude laughter as Lew handed him the paper. “According to some of the stories I’ve heard from the reenactors, that would have been about the last … oh, f**k me running! Has Joe Vaughn laid eyes on this… this … Oh, my god. He will absolutely lose his mind when he sees this, let alone what Jess will think…”

“I suspect that Madame Vaughn will be amused,” Lew observed. “To discover that her husband has been made into the bare-chested hero on the cover of a best-selling romance…”

“Joe will die of embarrassment,” Richard replied. “And he will most definitely do gross bodily harm to the first person who ventures a jesting remark…My god, I suppose I shall have to tell him. I can only hope that he will not reach out and slaughter me, once I show him this abomination!”

“You will be most tactful, revealing this information, of course,” Lew appeared to have been relieved of a dangerous burden. Someone else would take on the fraught chore of telling Joe Vaughn that a casual picture of him, snapped as he came from a turn in the civic dunk tank the last 4^th of July and briefly embraced and kissed Jess, had been utterly transformed by a cover artist … transformed every possible detail save Joe’s clearly recognizable dark, hawklike countenance. He was recognizably on the cover as a bare-chested, dark haired Comanche warrior embracing a slender woman with flowing hair and a diaphanous drape of some kind. Now Richard recalled Araceli’s description of Trish Creighton-Doyle’s output – always the studly romantic hero, embracing a woman clad in something flowy … only the period details and setting distinguished one of the Creighton-Doyle oeuvre from another. Lew appeared to have handed off that dangerous assignment to Richard – a case of discretion being the better part of valor.

“Lew, I will be the very soul of diplomacy,” Richard assured his boss, while taking a good long look at the full-sheet picture of the book cover.

A Time-shattering Romance, from the best-selling author of Those Bolyn Girls.

Richard’s heart sank, right down to the level of his kitchen clogs. For a long moment, he wished that he could hand this off to his redoubtable Aunt Myra, she who was unaccountably adept with blades, small arms, and the physical martial arts, ostensibly a traveling international journalist but most likely an operative for a secretive governmental agency designated M-something-or-other.

Richard was halfway through his final pre-supper circuit through the Cattleman’s restaurant kitchen when his cellphone buzzed with the urgent message from the VFD; all available volunteers report to the firehouse immediately. He had been a volunteer for the past several years – and this was one of his standby days. He wasn’t yet a full-fledged fire-fighting volunteer, due to his erratic attendance at training sessions, but he had scored well enough on the required first aid exams and victim rescue tests to qualify to ride out with Chris in the VFD ambulance. He rushed into the office, to pull his coat out of the closet, and collided with Lew Dubois as he rushed out again.

“You, too?” he gasped, and Lew nodded.

“We’ll take my car, cher. Mr. Charboneau, from housekeeping has been called as well.”

The two men hustled out of the service door, where the old stables used to be, joined in the parking area by a large and normally silent Fred Charboneau, the resident handyman, who had married into the sprawling Gonzalez/Gonzales clan. The rain was pelting down in a manner which reminded Richard keenly of summer in Bickley. Both Lew and Fred hefted duffle bags of turnout gear into the trunk of Lew’s late model Lexus and peeled out of the narrow employee lot on two wheels. It was barely three blocks to the VFD station, already being converged upon by an assortment of civilian vehicles.

“It’s hard to believe that something is on fire in this weather,” Fred Charboneau observed. Richard and Lew laughed, hollowly.

“It is said to be most difficult to make something fool-proof, as fools are most ingenious,” Lew replied. Richard, remembering the flood on the river of some years previous, ventured an explanation.

“Probably an emergency rescue on the river, or a low crossing … some kid messing around on the riverbank and getting swept away.”

“Could be, cher,” Lew found a place to park as close to the station as he could, and they all dashed through the driving rain – which now seemed determined to achieve in four hours what it had taken Noah’s flood forty days and nights.

There wasn’t anything but somber faces in the briefing area, once Milo Grigoriev finished outlining the situation, and setting the search parameters. Every single one of the volunteers in the room knew Joe Vaughn, some of them had even played on the Moths Varsity football team, back in the days when he was the high school football hero. There wasn’t a single one who would mind getting soaked to the skin, or worse, scouting along the two most likely back-country roads – just to make certain that he would be found and returned, safe and sound.

“The weather folks predict that the worst of this storm will pass over the search area in half an hour to forty-five minutes,” Milo Grigoriev concluded, “There’s a hazard in sending out a search while it’s still pissing down to beat the band … but they call it the Golden Hour for a damned good reason – if we find someone injured – badly injured –  and get them to medical care within that hour, then there’s a much better chance for survival and recovery. We have to risk it, people. It’s a matter of life and death. You know the plan, then. Go, people. Find Chief Vaughn – and stay safe out there.”

That being said, all but Richard, Chris Mayall, Lew and Steve Gonzales, a full-time FD employee scattered for their personal vehicles. Since the expansion of Venue Properties, International to include a lease on the Cattleman Hotel and a constant stream of day-trippers and holidaymakers, the VFD had found themselves in the way of a second ambulance, the vehicle and contents of necessary gear generously funded by the corporate Good Fairy. There were just the four remaining at the VFD to take any calls for EMS and an ambulance from Tina Gonzalez at the police station dispatch desk.  Chris tapped Richard on the shoulder.

“You’re with me, if they call for Number One Magic Bus. Lew, if you don’t mind – you’re with Steve on Number Two. You OK with that, Ricardo – Lew?”

“Fine with me,” Richard replied. This gave him time to change into his VFD gear, now that he had achieved the dignity of a locker of his own at the Fire Station, in which to keep the issue trousers, boots, and official shirt with his name embroidered over the pocket, against the day when the whole crew of volunteers was called out. Then he rejoined his First Aid fellows in the all-purpose room, where the on-duty firefighters whiled away the idle hour in luxuriously overstuffed Barca-loungers, waiting for various disasters to call them to action. A tall coffee urn perked away on a table in the corner, attended by a stack of heavy china mugs, and a dispenser full of sugar packets and little round containers of shelf-stable creamer.

Chris and Steve were watching an old film noir mystery movie from the 1950s, without much interest. A somewhat intrigued Lew was identifying the scene of the outdoor locations, since he had attended college in Los Angeles and had once intended a career in Hollywood set design, before diverted by chance into hospitality management.

“Lake Arrowhead was very popular for shooting scenes of mountain lakes and pine trees,” He was saying as Richard took possession of an empty lounge chair. “Alas, it looks nothing like the Alps of Switzerland at all … but in those days, very few people might know the difference, just by looking at a movie screen. But …”

At that moment, the duty room telephone rang, and Chris picked up with a crisp report;

“Luna City FD, Mayall speaking.”

“Ambulance call, 24 Pin Oak, elderly woman in distress,” reported Tina Gonzalez, from next door in the police station – the extension was on the speakerphone mode. Chris gave a deep sigh.

“Thanks, Tina. Sending Unit 2,” Chris hung up the receiver, and addressed the room at large. “Mrs. Mafilda Potrero – probably having a panic attack again. She always does, when it rains heavy like this. Never got over getting caught in a flooding low-water crossing, ten-fifteen years ago. Steve, you and Lew take it. Ricardo and I’ll wait to hear from the search party.”

“On it, Doc,” Steve shouldered into his rain slicker and hood. He and Lew vanished into the garage part of the station, and the brief wail of the ambulances’ siren could be heard until it faded into the sound of rain drumming on the metal roof. Chris sighed again. “You want some coffee, Ricardo? We may be here for a while.”

“Not unless it’s from the Café,” Richard replied. “I don’t trust anything calling itself coffee, unless it came from my kitchen or one that I supervise. Sounds as if you’ve gone to the dance with the Potrero woman before.”

“Frequent flyer, man,” Chris sauntered over to the coffee and helped himself. “Nice old broad, but still has PTSD from the fright of near drowning … in a foot of water over the old road a couple years back. I can relate. A good few puffs of oxygen, some sternly-worded reassurance, and she apologizes for having been such trouble, and brings out some butter cookies that her sister made, and brags about her grandchildren. All hunky-dory. But one of these days, she will have a heart attack or something for real … aannndd that’s why we send the Magic Bus over to 24 Pin Oak. Just in case. You might as well kick back and relax, Ricardo … by my reckoning, we won’t be called for …” Chris consulted his watch. “At least twenty-five minutes. Sooner, maybe, but only if Joe was exceeding the speed limit, and you know what a freak he was about that kind of thing.”

“How do you figure?” Richard was honestly intrigued. He really hoped that Chris was right. And that the rainstorm had blown through by the time #2 Ambulance returned to the barn. And really – if this call-out took too long, could Chris or Lew drop him off at the Age, and spare him the long trek on his bicycle?

“Joe told Jess that he was about half an hour out,” Chris explained patiently. “So, even in the rain, it will take almost that long for our search crews to reach the approximate area and begin to search. Longer, if they have to be careful in heavy rain. So, relax, Ricardo. Have a cup of awful coffee. Sit back and watch a dumb old movie. Betcha anything that Steve and Lew will be back before we get the call. We might even see the end of the movie.”