The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch
1
The name of the place was Ragged-Ass Gulch.
That was the name the town had been born with anyway, back in the days of the California Gold Rush when gold fever raged up in Trinity County as well as in the Mother Lode and a group of miners discovered nuggets in Musket Creek north of Weaverville. Nobody seemed to know any more why the town that sprang up along the creek's banks had been so colorfully dubbed. But it wasn't unusual for miners, who were themselves a colorful lot, to give their camps unconventional names; Whiskeytown, Lousy Ravine, Rowdy Bar, Bogus Thunder, and Git-Up- And-Git were just a few of their other inventions.
At any rate, Ragged-Ass Gulch had flourished for three or four years, with a population of fifteen hundred at its peak, until the gold in the vicinity petered out and the miners left for other diggings. Then, slowly, it had begun to die. By the mid-1850s, only a hundred or so people remained and the town was renamed Cooperville, after the largest of the families that came to settle there. Those hundred had shrunk to less than thirty by the turn of the century, which made it a virtual ghost town. It was still a virtual ghost town: at last count, exactly sixteen people lived there.
I had my first look at it on a bright morning in mid June. Beside me in the car, Kerry said, 'Good Lord, it's beautiful,' in a surprised voice. 'No wonder the people who live here don't want the place developed.'
We had just angled between a couple of high forested cliffs, and down below the mountains had folded back to create a huge park-like meadow carpeted with wild clover, poppies, purple-blue lupine. The town lay sprawled at the back end, where the narrow line of Musket Creek meandered through the high grass and wildflowers. Most of the buildings were tumbledown-and off to the left I could see the blackened skeletons of the four that had burned ten days ago-but at a distance the sunlight and the majestic surroundings softened the look of them, gave them a kind of odd, lonely dignity. Far off to the east, you could see the immense snowcapped peak of Mt. Shasta jutting more than fourteen thousand feet into the dusky blue sky.
'Now why would anybody call a pretty spot like this Ragged-Ass Gulch?' Kerry asked.
'Somebody's idea of a joke, maybe. Miners had strange senses of humor.'
'That's for sure.'
She put her head out of the open passenger window and sniffed the air like a cat, looking off toward Mt. Shasta. She seemed to have begun to enjoy herself finally, which was a relief. She hadn't wanted to come because she was miffed at me, and I'd had to do some fast talking to convince her. Ordinarily I would not have considered bringing Kerry along on an investigation; my profession being what it was, it was seldom a good idea to mix business and pleasure. But in this instance, there were extenuating circumstances.
When we reached the meadow, the road deteriorated into little more than a pair of ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. It angled off to the right and eventually forked; one branch became the single main street of Cooperville, nee Ragged-Ass Gulch, and the other hooked up and disappeared into the flanking slopes to the west, where I had been told some of the townspeople lived.
The first building we came to was on the near side of the fork. It was one of the few occupied ones in the town proper, a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store buildings were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair; a sign that said Cooperville Mercantile hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter, and the facing wall was plastered with old metal Coca-Cola and beer signs. Around back, to one side, was a frame cottage with a big native-stone chimney at one end. The folks who lived in the cottage and ran the businesses were the Coleclaws: one husband, one wife, one son.
I pulled in off the road and stopped next to the gas pump. A fat brown-and-white dog came around from behind the store, took one look at the car, and began barking its head off. No one else appeared.
'I'll go see who's here,' I said to Kerry. 'You wait in the car, okay?'
'Like a nice dutiful little wife?'
Here we go again, I thought. 'Come on, babe, you know this is business.'
'It wasn't supposed to be business. It wasn't supposed to be Ragged-Ass Gulch either.'
'Kerry…'
'Oh, all right. Go on, I'll wait here.'
I got out of the car, sighing a little, keeping my eye on the dog. It continued to bark, but it didn't make any sudden moves in my direction. I took the fact that its tail was wagging to be a positive sign and started toward the entrance to the store.
Just before I got there, a pudgy young guy in grease-stained overalls appeared in the doorway of the adjacent garage. 'Be quiet, Sam,' he said to the dog. He didn't say anything to me, or move out of the doorway. And the dog went right on yapping.
I walked over to where the young guy stood. He was in his middle twenties and he had curly brown hair and pink beardless cheeks and big doe eyes that had a remote look in them. The eyes watched me without curiosity as I came up to him.
'Hi,' I said. 'You're Gary Coleclaw, right?'
'Yeah,' he said.
'I'd like to talk to your father, if he's around.'
'He's not. He went into Weaverville this morning for supplies.'
'How about your mother? Is she here?'
'No. She went to Weaverville too.'
'When will they be back?'
He shrugged. 'I dunno. This afternoon sometime.'
'Well, maybe you can help me. I'm a detective, from San Francisco, and I-'
'Detective?' he said.
'Yes. I'm investigating the death of Allan Randall, over in Redding-'
'The Munroe guy,' he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. 'The fire. I don't know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him.'
'Is that what your father says too?'
'That's what everybody says. Listen, you working for them? Them Munroe guys?'
'No.
'Yeah, you are. Them damn Munroe guys.'
He wheeled away from me and hurried back inside the garage. I called after him, 'Hey, wait,' but he didn't stop or turn. An old Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanics' carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel, Kerry asked, 'Well?'
'He wouldn't talk to me. And his folks aren't here.'
'What now?'
'The Cooperville fire,' I said.
2
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the fork, two more occupied cottages sat side by side; the nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavyset woman in her late sixties or early seventies, wearing man's clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the
