Most days in Misty Harbor were spent in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. You had to keep your head low, though, or the bigger fish could take it. Didn’t care how they done it either. Some would even stoop to voodoo, buying a zombie, witchcraft or the Black Arts, summoning a demon, or possession. Though, even the worst stopped at running with the Vampires. Those parasites were nothing but trouble and none of them were worth trusting. Most tried to run them out of town but they’d find a hidey hole and get outta sight. But that was Misty Harbor and Misty Harbor was home.
Don’t get me wrong, though, Misty Harbor was nothing like The CITY. No building stood above six floors in Misty Harbor. In The CITY they had them skyscrapers. The CITY could swallow you whole and no one would ever hear about you again. At least in Misty Harbor there was someone who would be in your business and know what became of you. It was seldom that someone could disappear in Misty Harbor. And no one could go to The CITY without being changed. Hell, even Matilda Waddick came back a different person. Then there was the time Parsley Dennison went for the weekend and comes back wearing cologne! Parsley and Scurv Larson went back a ways but when Parsley came back to Misty Harbor smelling fancy they parted ways. Us mugs had always wondered about old Parsley’s lack of manliness anyways.
Now, Timothy Colt was raised on the outskirts of Irishtown, upriver north of Misty Harbor proper. Irishtown was the last burb before the farmlands began so Timothy came from a more innocent background. He really wasn’t used to mob wars, gang violence, protection rackets, dirty coppers, and the works.
I’ll give it to Timothy, though. He moved down to the waterfront and worked the docks like he was born to them. Hard worker, he was too. From sunup to sundown he put in his hours, every day, every week. Didn’t spend his money uptown or downtown. Heard tell most of it was sent home to his mother to hold. He was saving up, you see. He wanted to get his own farm so he and Matilda Waddick could settle down.
But Matilda got tired of waiting and wanted to help out. She went north up the coast to The CITY to earn her own fortune. Problem was she changed, as everyone does. The tall buildings and the bright lights were too strong an influence. They were too much distraction. Some blamed magic but I think it was just the size and look of the CITY. Sure she made her dough, but once she had her own nest egg she wasn’t so sure she wanted to settle down back on some humble farm north of Misty Harbor. She didn’t give into sin and wickedness like a lot of other frails have been known to, though, but the world had captured her and the fertile fields north of Irishtown just weren’t wide enough spaces for her. Could have been worse, though. She could have went south to Wisconsin and found work in Brewerton, or the twin cities of Minnesota’s St. Basilica or Grainburg. But going to the CITY was bad enough.
Let me back up a bit. Tim Colt was a strapping young lad, tall and good looking. His time spent at the docks working the shipyards filled out his frame, turning a young boy into a grown man. His physique became one that would turn a skirt’s head and make the dames’ hearts beat faster. But he didn’t have the roving eye. His heart was true. He was ignorant of the looks the local gals give him when he passed by on his way to work or back to his apartment. I remember watching as some would call out to him as he passed by. Suggesting all sorts of things they could do together. Some would shout out a price, some would promise “free attention.” But Tim paid them no never mind.
Now Matilda was as fair a vision as ever walked the desperate streets of Misty Harbor. Yet truer than the saints of the pedestals in Deus Romana was her manner. Sweet and sincere her beauty shown yet her eyes yearned for other sights.
“I love you, Timothy. I do!” she tried to explain “but I’m not ready to settle down anymore. There is no one else! I just have to see a bit of the world in my time. I hope you understand.” Tears dotted her long lashes as she wept her heart out to her young man.
Timothy was crushed. He went on a bender that night. The first time he ever went drinking. Last time, too, I guess. Got roaring drunk and got into a fight. It was in a dive bar down on the waterfront. Tim was sitting at a table in the back, nursing his latest in a long line of drinks. Lazy Eye Murphy was sitting next to him, doing his inebriated best to try and console the lad.
“Ah, dem dames is just trouble anyways!” he spat before sucking the head of foam off his mug. “You’ll see, Timmy me boyo. Dis is probably fer the best.”
“Lazy,” Tim barely drawled, speech much slurred by drink, “but she’s the love of my life. I can’t live without her!”
“Okay, okay,” Lazy capitulated. “But you’s gonna hafta let her go and find out what the world’s like. Maybe she’ll come back to you.” Lazy twitched constantly. Blessed with a mania that kept him ever on the move his reflexes were better than most men but his nervous twitch made it appear as if his entire diet was strong, black coffee and undiluted sweets.
“But what if she don’t?”
“Then, she don’t! Look, Tim, nothing you can do right now about any possibility. Best to have anudder drink and just forget about it for tonight.”
“HAW HAH HAH! So I tells this frail I don’t care what she’s being paid or for what, I wanna see her backside heading into the bedroom!” The table next to theirs, as I heard it, erupted into mirth at the words of the slick wheeler and dealer who thought he was something.
“Eddie, one-a-deese days yer wife is gonna find out about you.” A thick-necked icebox in a derby told the first speaker. His white face and slack jaw showed him to be an undead.
“Ah, Fats Wallow, if you weren’t such fun to be around I’d’ve had you committed long ago. Too bad they don’t commit gaunts! You don’t unnerstand. I could give two plug nickels for what my wife thinks!”
“You gotsta listen to dis, Fats!” the third of the trio chirped.
“’At’s right, Vinnie” Eddie paused. “You keep one in the kitchen not for what she can feed you in the bedroom, and one in the bedroom not for what she can feed you in the kitchen! As the priest says, a wedding dress is white because all new kitchen appliances come in white. A good woman is like a two-door coupe. You drive ‘em until you wear out the bearings and then you trade them in.”
Not being able to shut out the derisive conversation at the next table Timothy and Lazy Eye overheard everything and I guess ol’ Tim took offense.
“So why do you keep your bar hall friends, for what they can feed you in the bar hall?” he asked Eddie Treacle quietly, making the question sound more like a thinly veiled innuendo questioning the mobsters, um, orientation..
Eddie was never one to turn from an insult, when he could recognize one, that is. As one he and his two cronies rose from their table, Eddie breaking a beer bottle as he advanced. Lazy was up in a heartbeat yelling, “TIM!” as the three approached. Even with the layer of alcohol blanketing his senses and reflexes Tim closed with Eddie in a flash and, sidestepping the stab of the broken bottle, chopped down on Eddie’s outstretched arm, breaking bones in the thug’s forearm. Lazy, meanwhile, picked up a chair and with one swing, connected with both Fats and Vinnie, laying them both flat. Fats lost an arm but being a gaunt he’d probably have it attached soon as he woke up. Eddie was screaming like a demented banshee. Cradling his arm against his chest he swung a roundhouse with his other at Timothy but a quick duck saved Tim from the blow and as he came up he landed a blow that sunk to his wrist in the thug’s midsection. Eddie when down in a heap and stayed there. They handled themselves as well as if I had been there to help, but I wasn’t so I can only relate they way I heard it told.
The two looked about. No one really paid attention to their altercation and none looked to move to help those on the floor. Tim and Lazy paid for their drinks and left for the evening. Tim went back to his apartment and slept off the night’s self-affliction.
Bad thing about that him beating up Eddie Treacle was Eddie had him some tough acquaintances. He ran numbers for Knuckles DiMacci, don of the east arm of the mob in Deus Romana. Don DiMacci wasn’t about to let an insult like Eddie incurred go by unnoticed. There was a matter of recompense to be had. There was an object lesson that needed to be “perpetrated upon the provocateurs of this little debacle,” as the don put it.
Tim moved on with his existence sans Matilda. He threw himself into work, forgetting about the farm and the future, still sending money to his maw back home. The nest egg was forgotten. The drinking was given up. The first only hangover of his life was more than enough incentive to adopt the teetotaler life. Now and then he’d go and visit his white haired mother and sometimes he’d take Lazy Eye or Junior Davis or me along and we’d enjoy good company and good food. Course no visit went without a tour of the farm, the barn, livestock, fields complete with scarecrow guarding the corn. She was proud of her homestead. Mrs. Colt’s was the place to get invited too especially during the holidays!
I was out there one Thanksgiving with Tim and Lazy Eye. Now Lazy Eye warn’t no high society nob what with his drinking and all, but when he was off the juice he could clean up respectable and hold a decent conversation. Him and Mrs. Colt could go on and on about similar subject like they shared some common history or was of the same age.
We had spent the early afternoon outdoors while the turkey baked. We was watching the crows busy themselves in the corn patch while the scarecrow looked innocently on. I remarked to Tim’s maw that he didn’t seem to be doing his job and she replied scaring crows warn’t his career, protecting the farm was. I allowed that I didn’t understand her remark and she proceeded to explain,
She began a dissertation that all but fuddled my brain about pagan times and whicker men and keeping the tide of chaos a bay. Lazy Eye joined in with talk of harvest guardians and golems of grain and how they was appeased back in the days before Rome saddled the land with the crucifix. It was pretty much all over my head but made for spooky, interesting talk that evening. When the two ran out of words we returned to the house and gathered around the dinner table to enjoy another of Mrs. Colt’s feasts as ghost stories continued long into the dark.
Timothy continued working. Days turned into months which turned slowly into a few years. The slight against the greasy mobster was an all but forgotten, drunken episode in his past.
Then one night a police sedan pulled up outside Tim’s apartment building. The bulls came charging in, brandishing billyclubs, cuffs, and chains at the ready. With a hand none too gentle they hauled him downtown and grilled him about the murders all night, murders the victims of which they would not tell him. With methods appropriate for police on the dole they encouraged him to spill what he knew, which proved to be nothing once his alibi for the previous day was confirmed. He had been at work all day, within sight of co-workers and supervisors alike. He even stopped by to have lunch with me, Junior, and the gang.
As he was being released the identity of the victims were revealed. His mother was found with her throat cut and all valuables lifted from her farmhouse. Behind the house, toward the fields, in a pose that suggested he had been trying to defend the house and its occupant was Lazy Eye Murphy. Itinerant vagabond that he was he had been known to help Timothy’s mother now and then and this time it cost him his life. It was definitely a mob hit. No doubt about it, but the cops in Misty Harbor are “paid” to behave a certain way and sometimes they go to great lengths to earn their money.
Shortly afterwards, Timothy Colt disappeared from his apartment, the shipyards, and Misty Harbor all together. It was at the same time Eddie Treacle let slip at every chance that fortune gave him that this is what happened to those that pissed him off. He would get even, even if it took years.
Yessir, with this kinda stuff going down Eddie thought he was really something. Cock o’ the walk. Now I didn’t like Eddie none. Not many did but when Knuckles DiMacci has your back no one messes with you. Mostly we steered clear of Treacle.
Then someone new slipped into the area. Deus Romana became the stalking ground for a new vigilante. Someone was hunting down Treacle’s number joints and was hitting them hard. According to rumor the first one hit was by the Trinity Bridges on the north side of the burb cozied up to the Vatican Heights. The take was cleaned out and the shell of a shack that Eddie was using had been stripped and then burnt to the ground. Another was fired near the Uptown Ferry and then again on the south side, near the fourth of the Seven Sisters another shack emptied and torched just the same.
Old Knuckles sent someone round to the old Colt farm but it looked like no one had been there for years. Even the fields lay fallow and overgrown. Weeds stood so tall you couldn’t even see the family scarecrow standing at its pole. Timmy was gone, probably headed for saner pastures. Knuckles’ hired goons returned empty handed and frustrated at missing out on delivering a good beating. DiMacci called for a meeting of the Italian Dons and asked Eddie to join them. Apparently the slick youth had pissed someone else off and with this wave of vengeance against their concerns he needed some schooling.
The night for the meeting was dark and drizzle painted the skies in dripping gray slate. A cool breeze had blown in from the north and had turned the October cold and forlorn. Outside the Machiavelli Restaurant black sedans pulled up periodically, disgorging large, overweight men in heavy trench coats and fedoras. Now and then someone would run out with an umbrella if the dignitary were important enough. A gathering of rogues was assembling and the joint would have been the perfect spot for a hit, had any other rival mob enough chutzpah to storm the place. None had and the meeting looked like it would proceed without interruption.
Interested spectators quickly curbed their curiosity once we figured out what was going down. Any business was better than sticking our noses into that business. By the third Sister the smaller stream narrowed and sitting in Vladislav’s Pub you could look out the front window and see the facing of the Machiavelli place. Sitting at the window we saw what happened that night.
Nursing a beer as I didn’t have much coin to share, ol’ Vlad let me sit a spell. He had joined me at the table and we mused over the goings on across the way. Sasquatch Smithe, protected against the elements by his coat of fur, trundled by with his horse drawn ice wagon and out of the corner of my eye it looked like something dark had leapt from its top to the roof of the restaurant.
“My friend, McGuiness, to me, it seems,” Vlad’s heavy accent rumbled, “that Mister Eddie Treacle might have bitten off more than he is to be chewing.”
I hadn’t had the chance to answer when old Treacle’s sports coup shot up to the front door. A dame was on each arm but he musta made them wait in the car for as soon as he got out they both got back in. He stood in the light rain, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. He looked with no small amount of vanity at his reflection in the car window and straightening, turned to enter the restaurant. He never made it.
Like a hawk swooping down upon some small critter something dropped lightly from the roof above to stand before Eddie. It was between Eddie and the door of the restaurant so Vlad and I couldn’t see it clearly at first. But I saw it tilt its head and would’ve sworn it was Timmy Colt. We could tell by the way Eddie he jumped was sure shocked by it. Digging a hand in his pocket he reached for his gun but before he could retrieve it his head left his shoulders. It seemed to just leap off! As we watched in horror, Eddie Treacle’s head jumped off his shoulders and plopped onto the roof of his coup. Then his body crumpled.
Standing between the coup and the restaurant, just outside the front door, was a scarecrow. A SCARECOW! Just like the one that used to hang in the field at Timothy Colt’s place. I should know, I seen it, I seen it a lots of times. It was a Scarecrow just like the one Timmy’s maw had! In his right hand was a sickle and it dripped black gore in the gloom. Both Vlad and I swore as we told those crooked coppers what we seen but they didn’t believe us. They thought we were hiding Timothy Colt and that Tim or someone else had dressed up to look like the straw man. Sure it moved just like the way Timmy used to move on the docks while working, had the same sway, and hunch to his shoulders when he lifted a bale. But it couldn’t’ be Tim. Because when the DiMacci goons came out and blasted away at that figure, the straw and hay went flying as bullets tore and ripped right through it. They didn’t hurt the thing at all! Then the thing threw back its head and laughed. It was a terrible, shrill, unnerving cackle. Vlad and I could hear it in the restaurant. It laughed long and hard as the dons blasted at it. Then it scrambled up the side of the restaurant just like Timmy used to run up a ship’s rigging. But I knew that wasn’t Timmy in that outfit. That was no outfit. It was a scarecrow. The flying straw and hay proved that. It couldn’t’ve been Tim. Could it?
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