Dreaming Northward by Craig Lancaster

Author:Craig Lancaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Story Plant
Published: 2023-12-20T13:30:16+00:00

Oscar Ray

1905-1970

You’ve seen some hell on earth in your time, sure enough, but for sheer boredom and no prospects, you’re not certain anything exceeds eastern Oregon. Maybe eastern Washington, the same endless high desert and igneous rock and windblown empty spaces. The same slow-moving idiots. They should have divvied those two states vertically rather than horizontally, you think. Coastal paradise on the left, the bullshit you gotta drive through to get there on the right.

Anyway, you set your current lack of being impressed aside. What eastern Oregon has going for it, you know, is that it’s not Idaho. You’ve played that one out, a good thing you had going for a while in Wallace, damn near the payoff, and then it turned. An old man and his wife—older than you, if you can believe that—almost relieved of their house, until their kid comes in from Boise and starts sniffing around and catches the scent of you. Another shotgun under your nose—third one—and the best deal you were going to get, under the circumstances: Leave now, don’t ever come back, and I won’t call the law and I won’t blow your head clean off your shoulders and onto the lawn.

That’s the thing about rooking people out of what’s dear to them. It doesn’t always work—and when it goes wrong, it’s sometimes spectacularly so—but the cops almost never get called. The shame of it all is too great. How could they be so stupid, so naïve? It’s what you count on—that they are, in fact, so stupid, and that when the deed goes down, one way or another, their primary concern is making sure nobody else finds out.

Your pickup bounces on a dirt road, jostling the hamburger you just had in Madras, not the worst thing you’ve eaten of late. You’re thinking of swinging back toward town, finding a flophouse, considering your damn meager options, when you see her in the yard, scattering feed for a group of scrawny chickens. You pull up behind the car parked there—Jesus, a ’51 Nash Statesman, looks like, and you wonder how the wheels ain’t come off it—and you step out of your pickup and you make a proper introduction of yourself. Then you tell her that the trim on her house there—nice place, ma’am, really nice—looks awfully weather-worn. You’re handy with a saw and a bucket of paint, you say. Happy to help. Better to get it now before the rodents move in and you’ve got a real problem.

“What’s it to you?” she asks.

Nothing, nothing at all, you say. You’re a handyman and she looks like she could use one, that’s all. Unless, of course, she has a husband, and maybe he’s just been busy with other things. You know how it is with men.

“Nah, ain’t got one of those.”

Well, then, you say, maybe you can help. With the trim, you say, not the husbandin’, and you laugh, and she doesn’t.

“I don’t know you,” she says.

Well, you say, we can fix that. Oscar Ray, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, originally, but moving out here, always liked it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.