FLIPKA

Chapter Eight

I did not have a plan. No, I did not. In fact, I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t being paid to watch ninety minutes of Hope and Crosby with a barracks full of girls who thought a double entendre was an extra large meal. In fact, I wasn’t getting paid at all unless you count the fact that I got to keep my job. Whoop-de-do! I could return to Vegas on the very next stage and report to Sheriff Hyman that all was hunky-dory up in Enev City. I imagined what I would say to him.

Butters to Hyman:

What we have here, your Worshipfulness is a group of young lassies, hormones raging to beat the band, who found an old journal and became enamored of its author—a gallant young cavalry officer whose writing is so poetic that, heck, I’m half in love with him! Driven by lust, they figured out a way of knocking out their dim-witted counselors (me included) so they could presumably track down the mysterious caves of Osceola and return the sacred journal to the banks of Echoing Waters. It’s all just so romantic I could cry; how about you? 

Ha, I chuckled, wouldn’t it be a gas to watch Hyman wince at that story! To see him look up at me with disbelief, you gotta be kidding sprawled across his face. It might, just might, compensate for two days spent in the middle of nowhere. But, as silly as Hyman might consider girlish infatuations, the fact that his daughter was a red-blooded female lusting after a man (albeit a dead man) and not a lesbian devil worshipper would wag his inner Hef, getting me off the hook. I could hand the journal over to Winnie Peterson and, if it was indeed genuine, let her have the honor of donating it to the local historical society for preservation in a dusty, rarely visited museum where, under glass, his story would remain a mystery; where every now and then a vacationer might stop briefly to admire his beautiful penmanship, lamenting she had not the time to read the words, there being too many other relics to peruse and a martini waiting back at the hotel. 

But to tidy up the case then and there, ambling off into the sunset, would have all the satisfaction of eating just one Cheeto. I had to know more. Such as, where had they found the journal and how had they managed to knock me out? They might be up to something dangerous.

It didn’t take long for the antics of our onscreen nincompoops, Hot Lips (Hope) and Scat (Crosby), to put half the room to sleep and the rest to groaning, especially when Hot Lips and Scat realize they’d been hypnotized—a plot twist designed to artlessly cram more silliness into a plotline that already included a wicked stepmother, the Brazilian cavalry, and papers containing words so evil that Bob Hope tells the camera, “The world must never know.” I had to get out of the room before I screamed. 

Once outside in the bright yet cold air, I realized what I really needed was a comfy sofa to wiggle my rump into, a good book to digest, and a decent cup of tea flavored with honey and smelling as exotic as it tasted: orange blossoms, ginger and a dash of jasmine. But instead, I decided to check out the old cemetery behind Palmer House. Teenagers are always fascinated with cemeteries, death, and black clothes. There are all sorts of theories about why teenagers go through this phase, the most commonly accepted being that they are mourning the death of their childhood, a concept I pondered as I wandered up the hill unnoticed by anyone, or so I thought.

The cemetery gate was only four feet high, warped by age, and falling from its hinges. First it fell toward me and then away. Finally I wiggled it open far enough that I could awkwardly insert myself into the graveyard, all the while feeling as though I was being watched and I was, by the middle-aged senora in charge of housekeeping in Palmer House. Dios Mio. The crazy woman from Vegas is entering the graveyard. I waved at her. She crossed herself vehemently and then disappeared beyond the fluttering curtain like a scene in a Hitchcock film. 

The graves were laid out in several rows of approximately twenty headstones each, some partially shaded by struggling oaks. The oldest graves were in front and dated from the 1880s—two decades after the cavalry had given up their quest for glory. In the bright sun, the sand-eroded inscriptions were nearly impossible to decipher. Further on, clusters of gravestones seemed to mark an era. An era of the McEnery family clustered under one of the healthier oaks: 

McEnery, Bertha, b. 26 Jan 1890, d. 08 Mar 1890 

Budded on Earth to bloom in Heaven

McEnery, George Henry, d. 15 Jul 1890, age: 10m 6d 

We part dear one to meet in a brighter world above

McEnery, Sarah, b. 9 Mar 1826, d. 8 Nov 1899 

Mother, A precious one 

Mom is gone. 

Advice we loved is stilled. 

A place is vacant in our home. 

Which never may be filled.

Many tombstones had been damaged and lay forlorn and neglected in the dust, the only flowers memorializing the dead, tumbleweeds, hundreds of them, blown in by the storm and now trapped by the fence. When I was a child, I thought the tumbleweed lived off air and was about the most useless plant ever invented by God. But later I learned the tumbleweed was just a plant with a bad plant habit. Plants afflicted by this bad habit refuse to die in the normal manner; their roots rot first allowing them to break away for a wild ride across the desert and through towns—traveling in gangs of other bad plant habits who refuse to go gentle into that good night, attacking moving cars, big rigs and trains. They are every bit as dangerous as locusts who decide to commit seppuku on the highway, but when trapped against a cemetery fence, the rebel tumbleweed resembles a pile of skeletal rib cages. 

I was trying to read the inscriptions on the decaying wooden markers at the far end of the graveyard when I heard someone calling my name. Miss Butters, Miss Butters. It was Thanh. She looked shipwrecked, poor thing, panting as though she’d been running up the hill. 

“Hey kid. Why so glum?” I asked as she bent over to catch her breath.

“Bonny has visitor—caseworker. Merry go with her.”

“And Leticia?” 

“I dunno. Saturdays we allowed phone call but I no want to call home. They call me useless trash.”

“So you decided to come up and snoop around the graveyard with me? Perhaps find your Major Olivore.” 

“Major Olivore not here. Dead not honored here.”

“He’s not? Then where is he?”

“Echoing waters.”

“Oh yeah,” I chuckled. “How do you get to this Echoing waters?”

“I don’t know. I only here three days.”

“Do the other girls?”

“They have map.”

Aha. I knew there were pages missing from the journal. “Where did they find his journal? Up here at the graveyard?”

She pulled strands of jet black hair out of her eyes and pointed to a ridge about a hundred yards up the mountain, beyond the fence. I asked how they’d gotten there—short of sprouting wings and flying. That’s when she showed me. Ah, how easily they’d led me right into their trap again. The little shits.