Chapter Twelve
Sully
“So how much do you know about Gravel Gulch, huh, City Slicker?”
“I mean, whatever’s in the brochures and online,” Dean insisted, quietly tugging at the garish blue “Pistol Creek, Kentucky” souvenir shirt Sully had picked up at his very own Corner Country Store that morning.
Sully secretly smiled at the ill-fitting souvenir, hoping it wouldn’t be on the sexy little stud much longer anyway.
“Which is?” Sully muttered, angling his cowboy hat so that the mid-morning sun was shaded from his tired, no doubt baggy eyes.
“Didn’t they hang two bank robbers and that set off the curse?” Dean asked, tugging at his collar like a kid on his way to church. “There’s a webpage about it online, but it wasn’t very good. And yours was more like a sales page, so...”
“There’s a history section on there,” Sully bristled, having written it his own damn self. Edited it and formatted it and cropped the damn pictures, too. “Seems to me like a good little overachieving college boy like you would have sought that out first and foremost like, Dean.”
Dean glanced over, once again giving Sully’s cowboy outfit a sultry once over. “I figured that’s what you’re here for, Sully.”
Sully tipped his well-worn hat and gave his sprightly young passenger a sultry little wink. “You got that right, pardner.”
Dean rolled his eyes but couldn’t hide his cheeky grin. “So, are you gonna do that all day?”
“Do what?”
“Wear that outfit? Use that accent? Talk in cowboy talk?”
“What, you don’t like it?”
Dean started to answer, shaking his head as if by rote, then stopped himself. Nodded. Smirked. “Actually, it’s kinda sexy?”
Sully sat a little taller in the saddle, ehr, driver’s seat, beaming with pride as he explained, “I wear it for the tourists, you know? Ghost town. Old west. Cowboy guide, they really go for it.”
Dean frowned. “And nobody calls you out about the inconsistencies?”
“The what now?” Sully frowned, taking the turnoff from Route 9, heading south on County Road 7 for another mile or two.
“You know, like the fact that Gravel Gulch is in Kentucky, so ... not the Wild West, exactly? And that most of the townsfolk worked at the mill or logged for timber up in the hills, so ... not a lot of actual cowboys?”
Sully took his eyes off the deserted two-lane road, not another car as far as the eye could see. “No, Dean, they don’t.”
“Never?”
“Ever,” Sully conceded, glancing away with a new cut to his jib.
“Oh, well ... sorry?”
“You don’t sound sorry.”
“Well, I am,” Dean insisted, reaching over to squeeze the faded denim covering Sully’s thigh. “Honest, maybe ... maybe now you can tell me the history of Gravel Gulch, you know, like you were going to before.”
“You mean, before you insulted me?”
“Yes, that.”
“I don’t think I want to now.”
“Come on, Sully, you have to.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I mean, I am paying for this tour, so...”
“No, you’re not!”
Dean squeezed his thigh anew, skinny little fingers creeping up toward his crotch. “Okay, fine, well pretend like I am then, okay?”
“I suppose when you put it that way,” Sully teased, the two-lane road still deserted as the sun continued to rise behind the towering trees on either side of the roadway.
“Legend has it that, once upon a time, the Carter brothers ran a bloody streak up and down Clay County. They were Civil War deserters, ruffians, bank robbers, murderers, thieves, lowlife scumbags with, apparently, really bad memories.”
“Whaddya mean?” Dean asked, curling up on the seat next to him in his garish tourist clothes and nodding up at Sully as if he were telling him a bedtime story.
“I’m glad you asked,” Sully beamed, lapsing into tour guide speak as the turnoff for Gravel Gulch appeared, the road sign faded, dented and marred by no less than a dozen bullet holes.
Fitting, he thought, before taking his voice down two full octaves to weave the spooky tale.
“Turns out, they’d already robbed the Gravel Gulch Savings & Loan the year before but, in their hot streak of madness and mayhem, forgot all about it.
Forgot about the money they’d stolen from the good people of Gravel Gulch and, more importantly, the bank teller and two customers they’d killed during the shootout with local police afterward.
“The townsfolk hadn’t forgotten, though.
When they heard from neighboring counties that the Carter Brothers were on their way into town, they set up an ambush.
They were just civilians, like you said, miners and loggers and mill workers, but most were former soldiers and more than a few were successful bootleggers and, well, once those brothers stumbled into town thinking it’d be an easy score, were they in for a shock.
“Anyway, after a brief shootout, the boys were dragged to the town square and put in nooses, made just for them. The local preacher asked if they wanted to share any last words and, besides a string of cuss words the locals say you can still hear on windy afternoons to this day, Colton Carter refused but his older brother, Colson, hissed and spat out a curse on the whole town. Said as long as Gravel Gulch stood, no one who was there that day to ambush him and his brother would ever be safe again. Ever.”
“For real?” Dean asked, mouth slack, eyes wide and literally hanging on every word.
Sully nodded, gently turning off the paved road to the gravel lane that would take them to Gravel Gulch, once and for all.
“No one took it seriously, of course. They all laughed, the hangman pulled the lever and, well, after a few twists and jerks, that was it for the Carter Boys. But days later, strange things started happening around town. First, an accident at the mill took the foreman’s life and two of his best men.
Closed the mill for days. Tragic, but not quite curse-worthy. Yet.”
“Yet?” Dean asked, hugging himself as the ghost story portion of the tour finally took hold.
“Not yet.” Sully wagged a warning finger before continuing the tale, voice slowing to match his speed as the winding gravel road led them inevitably toward their final destination.
“Then, a few weeks later, a strange illness spread through the school, killing the teacher and three of the students. Bad, but scientific. Medical. Heartbreaking, yes, but easily explained. But every week, it seemed, another tragedy befell poor little Gravel Gulch. The bank manager got trapped in the vault and suffocated. The midwife started delivering still births. After a cave-in at the mine cost six lives, folks had had enough: the townsfolk started moving out in droves. The ones left behind started hearing strange howls in the night, bloody red sunsets and tumbleweeds that chased them straight down the street! A year after they hanged the Carter brothers, the townsfolk of Gravel Gulch had all fled town, one by one, leaving it abandoned. The way you’ll see it today, glasses on the tables, dishes in the sink, clothes still drying on the lines, is the way the town’s last resident, Bertha Maplethorpe, left it after her husband got trampled by his own horse while hitching up their wagon to join the exodus straight out of town. ..”
As if on cue, a bend in the road brought the crooked, creaking, hanging by one rusty chain “Welcome to Gravel Gulch” sign into view. Dean sat up straight, well-worn sneakers barely touching the floor as he craned his neck for a better view as Sully pulled up just short of the locked gate.
“Hang on a sec,” he grunted, swinging open the truck door and sliding to the ground in his favorite cowboy boots.
He wrangled the key at the end of a souvenir Gravel Gulch chain and undid the padlock, noting that after months spent idle, it would need a good greasing before tourist season picked up in the summer.
Once unlocked, he swung the gate wide until it clicked into its hitch, smelling the fresh spring air in his nostrils and glad for the chance to be out of Pappy’s Pub for a whole twenty-four hours.
That is, if Dean took the bait.
He seemed like he might, smiling appreciatively as Sully eased himself back atop the bench seat of the old red truck. “That looked pretty sexy just now, cowboy.”
Sully teased his hat just a smidge higher in reply. “Yeah?”
Dean purred the way he had earlier that morning. Or was it night? “Very ranch hand like, swinging that gate open, like you were about to herd a head of cattle straight through to town.”
Sully chuckled for real, Dean’s eyes wide and rapt with the Wild West fantasies of old. “Come on, City Slicker,” he teased, sliding the idling truck back into drive for the rest of the short trip to Gravel Gulch. “Let’s get your tour started, once and for all.”