Poltrock’s eyes shot open at the devilish talk, but when he looked around the den…
Gast wasn’t there. Poltrock was alone.
He shuddered in place. First those vile images and now this evil talk. Crazy, he thought. This is a crazy house…
What’s happening to me?
In his hand, he noticed that he was still holding the check.
Gast’s fine leather shoes snapped back into the room over the hardwood floor. “My wife is quite a busybody, as I’m sure you noticed. Forgive the interruption to our important discourse.”
Poltrock tried to shake cobwebs from him head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gast, but I must be much more fatigued from my trip than I thought. I feel so distracted. I didn’t even see you leave the room.”
“Your long journey from Raleigh, yes—certainly,” Gast remarked. “I escorted my wife to the kitchen; she insisted on showing me the funnel cakes she’d made. Oh, I know she didn’t really make them—she’s terrible in the kitchen—but I let her believe that I think she did. She’s quite worth the accommodation.”
He wasn’t even in the room when I heard the voice…
Poltrock was sweating. He was trying to order his thoughts. Somewhere, a dog was barking.
“Work for me, Mr. Poltrock. You’ll be doing yourself and this great land of ours a proud service.”
The job, the railroad, Poltrock finally remembered. A hundred miles of track per year, from here to Maxon… He looked at the impressive check still in his hand. “Mr. Gast, fifty dollars a month is indeed a handsome salary, especially with the economy so deflated from Northern taxes, but it’s just that—”
“I apologize for not making myself clear in the first place,” Gast interrupted with a raised finger. “Not fifty dollars per month, Mr. Poltrock. Fifty dollars per week.” Poltrock stared at the man and his overwhelming offer, and as the words left his mouth to take the job, Poltrock could’ve sworn he smelled urine.
CHAPTER FOUR I
Collier couldn’t remember what happened in the dream, but he remembered what it smelled like:
Urine.
He wakened from the nap aggravated and dry-mouthed. Yes, it was the smell of urine that permeated his slumber, and as he leaned up, he thought he recalled other details, not sights, but sounds.
A steady and nearly musical sound of metal striking metal. He thought of metal bars being clanged together, or hammers hitting steel. And something else, too…
A whistle?
Yeah. Like a whistle in a train yard.
He rarely dreamed at all, but when he did it was typically of things he could see: people, places. Not sounds and smells.
When he turned out of bed, he caught himself musing over, first, Lottie’s body, then Mrs. Butler’s.
Damn it!
A narrow night table stood by the desk, marbletopped. On it the clock told him it was 6:30 P.M. I invited Jiff to Cusher’s, didn’t I? At seven.
He roused, then showered in the small but homey bathroom.
Why smell piss in a dream?
More puzzlement, a chaser for the entire day. But a brief relief came when he thought again of the sounds. Metal striking metal. Hammers! Sledgehammers driving spikes—of course! This could only signify the sound of men laying railroad track, which made grateful sense since Mrs. Butler had mentioned something about Harwood Gast building a railroad in the late 1850s. Collier remembered the old paycheck in the case she’d shown him—a railroad check.
The East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, he remembered. The whistle in the dream, too, could only have been a train whistle.
One mystery solved, however useless. Next, in the sudden daydream, he pictured himself in the shower…with Lottie…
If all this horniness is from the fresh air and great outdoors, then I’m MOVING here once Evelyn gets her divorce, he joked to himself. But he couldn’t laugh, for one thing still bothered him.
That smell…
One of Collier’s earliest childhood memories, regrettably, involved the smell of urine. He’d been about ten when his father had taken him for a long drive. “Come on, kiddo. We’re going to go visit Granddad at that special apartment he lives in.” Collier was too young to grasp the entire concept of nursing homes, but he got the idea. The whole place smelled bad and was very quiet save for distant shouts. “Here’s his room, son. Now, remember like I told you. Granddad hasn’t been feeling well for a while, and he might not recognize us. But let’s just act like everything’s normal.” Collier guessed Granddad wasn’t in very good shape. When they entered the drab room, though—Collier gagged, and so did his father. The room reeked of urine.
Granddad’s bed lay empty and stained yellow. Another man in the next bed, who looked like a gray skeleton, jerked his face right at them and toothlessly bellowed, “That fucker don’t do nothin’ but jabber and piss! Turned the damn bed into a damn piss sponge—” A bony finger wagged at them. “—and these lazy fucks here don’t never change the mattress ’cept when one of us dies!” Collier broke out in tears from the shocking rant, but he already had tears in his eyes from the sheer potency of the stench. Strong, saturated, and old. His father ushered him out quickly and that’s when they learned that Granddad had died that morning. Collier remembered riding home in strange, choking silence, eyes still stinging long after the tears had abated. Even their clothes reeked of the smell.
The same unmistakable smell of Collier’s dream, only the dream had been worse.
Collier stepped out of the shower. Now why the hell would my mind make me dream of the smell of piss!
He dried off, then slipped on the robe hanging on the door. Gold embroidery on scarlet terry read BRANCH LANDING INN with crossed cannons beneath the letters C.S.A. She really takes this Civil War stuff seriously.
He stepped back in the bedroom, and stopped.
Sniffed.
That’s not urine I smell…is it?
It was his mind now, he was sure. Like when you were in the woods and were certain you felt a tick on your leg but when you looked there was nothing there…
He sniffed again and found the only scent to be a cinnamonlike tinge from a bowl of potpourri.
Thank God…
Knuckles rapidly tapped at the door.
Who the…Collier looked at the clock and saw he still had plenty of time before he met Jiff.
“Hi, sorry if this is a bad time!” The smiling housewifey face beamed when he opened the door. It was the Wisconsin woman.
Huh? Collier thought. “Oh, of course, your autograph.
I hadn’t forgotten.” But he thought, Jesus, lady! Can’t you see I just got out of the shower?
“We’re going out to dinner now,” she explained, “and we didn’t want to miss you. Oh, but we’d love for you to come along.”
“Oh, thanks, but I’ve already got plans…”
“Here, could you sign on this please? It would be a wonderful souvenir.”
She handed him a napkin that had the inn’s name on it. “Sure.” He tried to sound enthused. A flashing glimpse revealed her more closely than before. Probably pretty hot ten years ago. Her plushness was leaning toward fat but she still retained some cuteness within. Short, with a dark coif, and…Stacked, he noted of the volume of flesh filling the bra. The otherwise boring face and eyes lit up with the elation of being so close to a “star.”