Share it:

THE LEGEND OF KATIE DOLLAR

By

D.L. CHANCE

   Katherine wiped her eyes and, ignoring the searing pain in her raw, bloody hands and fingers, slowly dragged one last rock into place on top of the ugly mound piled up over the body of her son.

   With the second grave she’d scratched out of the heat-blasted dirt in the past twenty-four hours finally finished – her husband preceded the boy in death just yesterday – she slowly came to her feet and staggered backwards a yard or so to consider her handiwork.

   There was nothing to make crosses from, she realized. For as far as she could see across the desert in all directions, there weren’t even any small sticks she could fashion into crude crosses for the graves. Soul-crushing sorrow overwhelmed her again, and she sank to her shredded knees in the rough desert gravel to wail her grief impotently at the distant sun-blasted hills.

   More than an hour later, physically exhausted and emotionally shattered beyond tears, Katherine wiped her blood-crusted palms on her tattered khaki skirt. She levered herself painfully upright and limped to where the Ford sat broken and brooding; its oily lifeblood staining the faint wagon tracks stretching out of sight both ways across the endless desert basin. She didn’t bother to check for rattlesnakes in the shade under the rusty Model T touring car. Snakes had already killed everything that made her who she was, and they no longer mattered. Climbing into the back seat where everyone in the world she loved had died screaming in agony, Katherine pulled a musty blanket over her and, absently brushing a stray shock of dirty-blonde hair from her eyes, settled in where she could watch the graves. Sometime later, she drifted off to a fitful, restless sleep.

   Katherine had never wanted to go off to Arizona looking for gold in the first place.

   Even with the depression deepening after the stock market crashed a couple years back, her husband’s work as an accountant was steady and dependable; and in demand with so many company owners trying to stay out of jail while their companies closed out the books and shut down.

   Life in Chicago was good. Even if she hadn’t been able to pick up extra money by baking her special-recipe pies and selling them to restaurants in the neighborhood, they could still send the boy to a private school, pay the apartment rent, and take the occasional evening out to dinner and a movie if they weren’t particular about the food or the seats.

   Then a yellowed scrap of fate – a page torn from the journal of a long-dead gold prospector and evidently forgotten for decades – fell out of an old ledger book her husband was working with at home one winter weekend. The ink was faint and fading, but the handwriting was crisp and neat. The unknown writer had obviously been an educated man. The text was simple and concise, and the map drawn on the back of the paper made perfect sense when compared with the clear instructions on the front. And, apparently, no one else knew about it.

   It was, Katherine’s husband insisted after studying a railroad map of western Arizona, a simple matter of going out there and getting rich.

   RICH!

   And besides, he pointed out, the Arizona desert had to be a safer place for the boy than Chicago, where ruthless gangsters battled each other relentlessly in the blood-spattered streets. After picking up the gold, he’d suggested, they could continue on into California; where there wasn’t any depression if the movies could be believed.

   Katherine pointed out how rumors about the Volstead Act possibly being repealed soon would legalize liquor again, and maybe put an end the constant gangland warfare. But her husband was so positive, so convinced the expedition couldn’t fail, and everything would be even better for the little family.

   The map pinpointed a spot in the Quartzsite region near the foot of a place called Signal Peak. The instructions on how to find the long forgotten gold mine were so precise, it seemed to Katherine a pretty good bet others must surely have rediscovered it years back. Her husband listened patiently to her, nodded sagely, then explained why this was the best course of action to secure the future of their little family.

   Finally, she reluctantly agreed to take a train as far as Quartzsite, at sit-up coach rates, where her husband assured her he’d be able to buy some kind of secondhand car or truck for a reasonable price considering how many people could no longer afford the gas or upkeep it took to run them.

   And besides, he’d said if it turned out there was no gold maybe they’d head on into California anyway. Winters were almost non-existent in California, and there was always lots of work in a place like that for a man who knew his numbers. And it would be nice to swim in the ocean in December.

   So he made plans, tied up loose ends, compiled long lists of equipment they’d need at the site, made copies of the map and instructions so the original could remain safe in a bank vault, and they left Chicago in an April snowstorm. All of his sensible plans seemed to be working out.

   Yes, back in early spring, it all made sense. It always made sense when he explained his ideas. He was, after all, used to working with numbers; and numbers always had to make sense.

   Usually.

   Full darkness had come to the desert hours later when a nagging bladder roused Katherine from an agonizing series of nightmares, each worse than the last. Tempted as she was to just lie there and relieve herself in the seat, she shuddered against the gathering cold and slid out of the car.

   Squatting beside the back bumper, Katherine held on for balance and absently noted a three-quarter moon rising over the distant eastern horizon. She wondered if it was the last moon she’d ever see. When she noticed the graves, and recalled their significance, something in her hoped this would be the last night she had to endure alone before joining those she missed so desperately.

   There’d be no one to bury her though, she thought sadly. Oh, she’d crawl back into the Model T and make sure all the windows were shut and the doors were locked. But sooner or later animals would get to her corpse and scatter her bones and other remains across the desert like she was just another rotting piece of carrion.

   Pushing herself stiffly upright with the bumper, Katherine granted her tears one last opportunity to flow before even that most human of releases was denied to her in death. But tears wouldn’t come. She drew a deep breath, and slowly let it out. A coyote somewhere in the distance began a plaintive barking howl and was immediately answered by one much closer.

   So it starts, she thought, lowering her head.

   Shuffling back to the rear car door, she saw something shiny on the ground; something round and bright glinting in the steadily increasing moonlight. Katherine looked closer and saw it was a silver dollar half-buried in the dirt. It must have fallen out of her husband’s clothing when she was trying to get him properly buried, she guessed. She scooped up the dollar and dropped it into her shirt pocket, thinking she might get at least a small measure of revenge if one of the coyotes coming to eat her ended up with the large coin jammed down its filthy throat.

   In the car, she took a cautious sip of brackish water from the crockery jug in the front seat. Then she drank as much of it as possible. No sense in wasting it, especially since she wouldn’t need it in another day or so.

   Returning the jug to where it came from, Katherine shook out the blanket they’d bought from an elderly Indian at the Quartzite train depot. The old man claimed to be a Navajo, and he’d told her the long story about desert spirits. She wrapped the Navajo blanket tightly around herself and shivered.

   Anything else she might have used against the increasingly cold darkness had been left behind at the spot where the car first broke down four days before, and she’d needed the backseat space to let her husband lie down as much as possible after he’d been bitten while trying to crawl under the car. She’d tried to drive on, until the engine seized up and busted into pieces and left them completely stranded. Then her son had stumbled onto an even larger rattlesnake while looking for firewood; wood she now knew didn’t exist in the high desert.

   Katherine tried to sleep, but was startled awake several times by coyotes standing on hind legs on the running boards and leering into the windows, steaming the glass with their breath and leaving greasy saliva smears to distort the view. After the first few times, screaming no longer kept them away. She was just thankful the disgusting creatures couldn’t stand on the rear bumper; she couldn’t abide the thought that one might be sniffing at the glass inches from the back of her head.

   Instead of continuing to cry out, she fingered the delicate silver chain around her neck, tracing the charm she’d carried since her father gave her the keepsake a few years before he and her mother died in a train wreck. The pendant was made from thin silver wire shaped to form the nickname her parents called her by as a little girl; back before her now equally dead husband decided he preferred Katherine to Katie.

   Eventually, she drifted back to sleep.

   A milky grayness filtered through the car when she woke up a couple hours later needing to pee again. But, squinting through the heavily smeared windows in the dim light of dawn, she counted two coyotes lying on the hood and four more lying scattered on the ground near the car. There were doubtless more of them around, she knew. Figuring she was going to die anyway, and would be beyond humiliation if her body was ever discovered by people, she let go where she sat and drifted back to sleep.

   The sun was high in the sky when a shadow roused her the next time. She turned her head and, through gummy eyelids, glimpsed a man staring in the side window.

   “Jake,” he yelled, “there’s a live one in here!”

   Shocked past the point at which she could continue to comprehend reality, Katherine fell into a black unconsciousness far deeper than mere sleep.

   “Katie,” a woman’s voice said softly, “you must wake up now.”

   Katherine moaned and struggled to open her eyes. But she didn’t have the strength it took to do even that much.

   Katie?

   “Katie,” a man’s deep, graveled voice said, “you’re safe now. Safe. But you have to come back. You have to wake up, Katie.”

   “P-Poppa?”

   “What did she say,” the man asked someone else in the room. “I thought I heard her say something.”

   “I didn’t catch it, Doctor.”

   Doctor?

   Katherine drew in a deep breath and suddenly smelled the harsh chemical and organic odors of a hospital. She tried to lean forward, and realized she was lying in a bed; and no longer folded into the backseat of the old Ford out on the desert.

   “Okay,” the doctor’s voice said, “give her another few hours, then – ”

   “Wh-Where am I?”

   “Yes? Did you say something, Miz Dollar?”

   “Doctor, she’s trying to sit up.”

   Katherine felt a gentle but firm hand against her chest.  

   “You just lie back, now,” the doctor’s voice said. “You were suffering a deep catatonic state when your husband brought you in two days ago. But you’re going to be fine if you just lie still and allow yourself to heal.”

   “My…my husband?” Katherine’s heart raced. Maybe the endless nightmare in the desert had been nothing but some kind of sickness-induced bad dream after all! “Where is he?” Katherine knew her eyes were open, but she still couldn’t see. “Where is my son?”

   “Son?”

   “My little boy!” Katherine screamed and began to thrash about on the bed. “Where is my boy?”

   “Sedate her,” the doctor snapped, holding her down. “Let her sleep awhile longer, and I’ll stop by and see her again tonight.”

   Katherine desperately called to her son, until her mouth no longer worked right. Then the blackness overcame her again, and her silent screams went unheard as well as unanswered.

   She knew many hours had passed when she slowly opened her eyes again. At first she thought she was still partially sightless because the room was so gloomy and dark, then she realized it was twilight outside.

   Her mind was sharp and clear though, and she knew her husband and son were not here. They were not coming. They were never coming. They were dead, no matter what she’d been crying about before she was drugged back into sleep.

   She sighed and shuddered.

   “Are you awake, Katie,” a voice asked softly from across the darkening room.

   She flinched, startled. “I-I think so,” she murmured. “I can’t see you.”

   The tall, slim figure of a man unfolded itself from a small chair in the corner and came a few steps closer, but not all the way to her bedside. She couldn’t make out his face in the dark.

   “I’m the one who brought you here,” he said. “We found you out on the desert. You were just barely alive.”

   Tears sprang into her eyes.

   “And I put some more rocks over those graves before bringing you in,” he added gently. “Coyotes were trying to dig them up.”

   She sobbed out loud.

   Holding his hat in his hands, he let her cry for a few minutes until she sniffed and wiped at her eyes.

   “Thank you.”

   He nodded silently.

   “They told me my husband brought – ”

   “That’d be me, Katie,” he said, his face jerking suddenly toward the open door at a slight noise somewhere in the hallway. Wordlessly, he crept to the door and glanced both ways down the hall. Then he eased it shut, but didn’t turn on the light. “I had to tell them that, or they wouldn’t take you.”

   “Why not?”

   “Because…it doesn’t matter just now. What matters is that you get better and get out of here.”

   “Why?”

   He hesitated for a second. “That doesn’t matter either.”

   She turned her face away from him. “Why didn’t you just let me die?” she asked. “That’s what I wanted.”

   He snorted. “Now, Katie, I’ve done lots of bad things I’m gonna have to answer for sooner or later,” he said lightly, “but just letting a woman die when I might can save her is not going to be one of them.”

   “H-How do you know that name?”

   “It was on your necklace,” he said. “So I naturally figured—”

   “My necklace!” Her hand shot to her throat. “Where is it?”

   He moved quickly to the door and listened closely, then walked back to stand near her. “You’re gonna have to keep it quieter than that,” he said softly. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

   “But – ”

   “Your necklace is in the drawer beside the bed,” he said. “I watched them put it there. They threw your clothes away because they were tore up and dirty, and your skirt stunk like piss, ‘scuse my language. They put the dollar in your shirt pocket in the drawer with the necklace. That’s all there was on you.”

   “I see.” Katherine laid her head back on the pillow. She did see. Everyone she loved was dead; she had no idea where she was; she was without clothing; and she was at the mercy of a man who had illegally claimed to be her husband. But she still had her necklace and a buck. “Thank you for everything, Mr. Dollar,” she said.

   “Mister Dollar?”

   “Isn’t that your name?”

   He chuckled. “No. I told them your name is Katie Dollar because that’s all I knew about you.” Then he became serious. “Do you know where you are?” 

   She shook her head.

   “You’re at a clinic on the Colorado River Indian Reservation,” he said. “Near Poston, on the Arizona  side. It was the closest place to find you a doctor.”

   Someone tapped at the window, and the man’s right hand instantly disappeared behind his back. He dropped to his knees and slithered toward the wall under the window, and put a finger to his lips.

   “Shhh.”

   When the tapping returned, he relaxed and came to his feet.

   “I’ve got to go for now, Katie,” he said, reaching over to lift the window sash. A dry desert chill drifted into the room. “These people will take better care of you than I can.”

   “Who are you?”

   “Sorry, I can’t tell you that either.” He stretched a leg over the window ledge. “I’ll come back and check on you, if you want. But right now, I’ve got a bank to rob.”

   “A what?”

   “You just keep that between us, Katie Dollar,” he said, tipping his hat.

   “Is your name Jake?” she asked, recalling hearing that particular name when she was found.

   “Not all the time,” he said. “But let’s keep that just between us, too.”

   Before she could say anything else, he was standing outside and lowering the window. Less than a minute later, the light came on in her room.

   “I see you’re already awake,” the doctor whose voice she recognized from earlier said. “That’s good, Katie.”

   Katie – she was getting used to thinking of herself as Katie again – shut her eyes against the sudden glare, but squinted intently at the newcomer. She was surprised. The man who’d brought her in said this was an Indian reservation facility, but she didn’t expect the doctor to be an Indian as well.

   He apparently mistook her surprise for simple confusion.

   “I’m Doctor Theodore Pablo,” he said, smiling. “But most people prefer to call me Doctor Ted.”

   Katie considered this. “Doctor Ted,” she said tentatively, “what’s wrong with me?”

   “Nothing too serious.” He stuck his hands into his white lab coat pockets. “Physically, you’re suffering from exposure, a variety of cuts and scratches, some bruising. And you’re seriously undernourished. Your husband said you weren’t home when he returned from a week-long business trip, and he found you wandering on the desert miles and miles from the house. Do you know how that happened?”

   Katie opened her mouth to tell him the man who brought her here was not her husband – that her real husband and son were lying buried God only knew where near some lonesome wagon tracks out in the empty vastness – but she closed her mouth instead. With no idea why she did it, she merely shook her head.

   “Well, I suspect you suffered from some severe emotional trauma to be in such a deep catatonic state when you arrived,” he added. “Do you remember anything about it?”

   She knew she couldn’t help what was probably a panicked look in her eyes, but Katie just shook her head again.

   The doctor reached out to pat her arm.

   “That’s something only you can work out, Katie,” he said gently. “Whatever it was must’ve been devastating. You said something about a son earlier. Did you lose your son?”

   Katie bit her lip and fought back tears.

   Sensing her distress, the doctor patted her arm again and glanced at his wristwatch. “If you need help sleeping, just tell the night nurse,” he said. “But I suggest you eat something, and get as much rest as you can. Your husband’s name is not on our tribal membership rolls, so we can only let you stay here for one more full day. I want you to be as healthy as possible when you leave us.”

   “Thank you, Doctor Ted,” she said, tears flowing down the sides of her face and into her hair no matter how desperately she tried to hold them back. “I’ll do my best.”

   Dressed in loose-fitting faded jeans and a man’s shirt one of the nurses brought her from home, and old but serviceable boots Doctor Ted told her his wife could no longer wear because of bunion problems, Katie walked through the front door of the small clinic to stand in the shade of a nearby cottonwood tree.

   She’d been allowed to eat breakfast before her release, so she wasn’t particularly hungry. But she had no idea what to do next. The nurse said she could catch a bus back to Quartzsite at a café in Poston, but the small reservation community was two miles up the dirt road. Watching a rising dust cloud a vehicle approaching from the direction of the little town was kicking up, and noting how the immensity of the open desert countryside made it look like the vehicle was barely moving, Katie decided two miles seemed too far to walk in the intense heat.

   And even if she got to the bus stop in Poston without passing out again, the five-dollar bill Doctor Ted had given her, combined with the silver dollar in her hip pocket, wouldn’t get her very far. Certainly not back to Chicago. Her only hope was to get to a town large enough to get a job – as a waitress, a washerwoman, a cook, a store clerk, anything decent – and save up enough money to go back home.

   Back home?

   She shook her head and almost broke down in tears again.

   There was no home to go back to. Not in Chicago. Not anywhere.

   Her best course, she suddenly decided, was to keep moving west into California, as her husband had suggested doing if the gold didn’t come through. At twenty-eight, she was no longer a young woman. But she was far from too old to support herself.

   The vehicle coming from Poston – she could make out its shape as a flatbed truck now – didn’t seem to be covering much ground.

   She’d seen newsreels about thousands of farm families from Oklahoma and Texas beginning to overrun California in search of harvest work on the vast farms and orchards there. State officials and residents weren’t happy about the invasion, either. But if she avoided the agricultural areas and worked her way straight toward a large city such as Los Angeles or San Francisco as quickly as possible, she could…she could…she sighed.

   She couldn’t do anything.

   Oh, a church might let her sleep on a pew for a few nights, and there might be a café where she could trade kitchen work for a few meals, but she could already see her life was going to get a whole lot tougher before it got even a little bit better.

   Katie gazed off into the distance and noted absently how the truck was a little closer now, and another dust cloud from another vehicle had appeared some distance behind it. At least some people were going somewhere, she thought, utterly defeated.

   No matter what she might find in California, everything that meant anything to her was buried in shallow graves in the Arizona wastelands, and sooner or later the law would come to ask her about them. She needed to go, right now, and tell someone, some sheriff or state police trooper, about how her husband and son had died and where they were buried. But she had no idea where they were. Only the man who cheated her from joining them in death – and he claimed to be a bank robber – knew the location of the lonely graves.

   The truck suddenly slid to a stop on the road in front of her, trailing a huge lung-searing cloud of desert dirt.

   “Katie,” someone called from somewhere in the thick dust, “get in.”

   Wiping grit from her eyes, Katie peered at the truck’s only occupant. She vaguely recognized the voice. But the man, a tall Indian, she saw, was a stranger.

   “Who are you?”

   “I’m…I’m Jake.” He glanced into the rear-view mirror. “From the other night. Remember?”

   “Oh, yes.”

   “Katie,” he said reaching out to swing open the passenger door, “if you’re coming with me, you’ve got to get in now.”

   “Why should I?”

   “Because I’ve got your gold map.”

   Katie’s eyebrows shot up. She hadn’t thought about the damn map since her troubles started.

   “So if you still want in on it,” he said, revving the powerful engine under the big Chevrolet hood, “you’d better get in here now and let’s go, or we’re both going to jail.”

   She squinted at the approaching vehicle, and saw a flashing light on its roof. Then she heard the distant sound of a siren.

   “Both?”

   “It’s a long story, but you were seen at a little…well, robbery before I got you to the clinic,” he said sheepishly. “They got a look inside the car I was using at the time and saw you.”

   “You involved me in a crime?”

   He shrugged. “I didn’t mean to, it just worked out that way.” He glanced over his shoulder at the steadily approaching car. “But we don’t have time for this right now. Either you’re coming, or they’ll drag us both off to the slammer.”

   She didn’t miss his use of the word “us.” Apparently, since the friend who’d tapped at the window last night wasn’t anywhere to be seen, this Indian – this Jake character – meant he wasn’t leaving without her. She wasn’t sure just what that implied, or what it might lead to, but it was the best offer she had at the moment.

   “Okay,” she sighed, climbing in.

   In that instant, something in her changed.

   Something died, and something else was born to replace it. Katie became a different woman, a new woman – a woman who would never again allow herself to be at the mercy of anyone or anything.

   Anger and cold determination mixed with the sadness in her soul, and created an outlook completely foreign to her; a growing sense of a hard-natured new self.

   “But if you ever let me down,” she said through clenched teeth, “I swear I will kill you.”

   He smiled and popped the clutch, and the truck roared away even before she had the door completely shut.

   “I accept your terms, Katie Dollar.”

Keyword: THE LEGEND OF KATIE DOLLAR Part 1

Report this story | Add to Favorites | Send to Friends | Author's Profile

No Comments posted

Comments

Post a comment

Post a comment