“You fucking hear me? You shithead warden, you’re going to burn in Hell!” shouted the excited man, and he stamped his feet and jumped in frustration and rage. Tendrils of smoke rose in a circle around him.
“What?” he said as the gravel sagged beneath his feet. There was a sound like someone tearing a head of lettuce apart. The gravel heaved and abruptly gaped open. The hunter dropped down into a fiery red tube about three feet across that resembled an enormous blowtorch-heated pipe. With a shriek the preacher disappeared. The whole thing had happened in less than five seconds.
Immediately the entrance to the hot conduit closed up and the gravel of the turnaround looked undisturbed and solid except for a slightly soot-darkened circular depression marking the fatal entrance. There was a faint sulfurous odor, not unlike that of the tap water in Zmundzinski’s trailer kitchen back in Elk Tooth. The horse shivered but stood his ground.
“My God,” said Creel to Dull Knife. “Did that happen? Did we see that?” He walked gingerly toward the circular depression. He thought he could hear a distant and faint sizzling sound. He bent over and held his hand just above the gravel where the Reverend Pecker had stood only minutes before. It was definitely warm. He found a twenty-pound rock and dropped it on the spot. The gravel seemed to stir a little, but no fiery hole opened up. After half an hour of puzzled examination and deep thought he gave up and drove home in the dark. He didn’t know what had happened, but it had saved a lot of paperwork.
A week later Creel Zmundzinski had a rancorous run-in with two Texas lawyers and their friend, a California 1RS agent, who swore Creel would be audited every year of his future life, and that his children and his children’s children would also be audited.
“Another good reason not to git married,” said Creel.
The lawyers said he would do hard time in a maximum-security cell.
“I sure hope it won’t be in the cell next a yours,” he said, smiling.
None of them had Wyoming hunting licenses, although two produced Texas licenses and claimed there was a reciprocal agreement between Texas and Wyoming to honor each other’s licenses. Creel laughed and said he didn’t think so. The men had cut off the heads of the five bull elk they had shot, abandoning the carcasses in an irrigation ditch, clogging it and causing it to overflow. He made them clean out the ditch, dig a pit, and bury the flyblown carcasses, then drive ahead of him to the Pinchbutt pullout. He was careful to park near the road. It was a pullout to be approached with caution. He prodded them toward the far end.
“Just stand over there,” he directed, pointing to where the gravel had a darker color.
They slouched carelessly in the direction he was pointing. The faint circular depression was almost invisible, but he recognized it by the rock he had dropped after the Reverend Pecker’s quick exit and the darker gravel that marked the perimeter of the opening. He supposed it was soot that discolored the edges. He took up his citation book wondering how to get them to jump up and down or stamp. He didn’t even know if that would work. Maybe Preacher Pecker had been an isolated case. Maybe it only worked with backsliding ministers. Maybe some kind of cosmic forces had been in alignment. He pretended to ponder, putting his pen to his lips and tilting his head to one side.
“Gentlemen, tell you what. I’ll let you go this time if you’ll take part in a silly little thing. For my own personal satisfaction, if I’m goin a let you go I want a see you look ridiculous first. I’d like you to give a little jump—like this”—and he demonstrated—“and then I’ll laugh, but I won’t write you up.”
The three friends looked at one another and made faces indicating they were dealing with a lunatic.
“Let’s humor the man,” said the 1RS agent, and he gave a tiny jump, barely an inch. Nothing happened, but Creel saw a single faint tendril of smoke in the right place.
“Come on, make it a good jump,” he said, leaping high himself to encourage them.
One of the lawyers sprang into the air with a grace that Creel admired, and as the man landed, the ground opened beneath the trio and they dropped into the glowing borehole. The 1RS man had been standing with one foot outside the circle, and for a moment it seemed he might escape, but the tunnel exerted a powerful suction. Creel could feel it from twenty feet away as he watched the 1RS man whisk in like a fly into a vacuum cleaner nozzle.
So, he thought, the trick was in getting them to jump. It was a wonderful discovery, and he wasted no time in telling his fellow wardens the secret of the Pinchbutt pullout. The Hellhole, as he called it, saved a great deal of tedious paperwork and became so popular that sometimes several Game & Fish trucks were lined up along the road waiting a turn at the facilities. Wardens drove many miles to get outlaws to the wonderful hole. One wrongdoer, after a three-hour drive, threatened to sue for cruel and inhuman detention as the interior of the warden’s truck reeked of wet dog, manure, offal, and sardine sandwiches. There is no record that such a suit was ever filed.
They were all sworn to secrecy. Creel did not even tell his closest friend, Plato Bucklew.
The next season Creel Zmundzinski clumped into his favorite bar, Pee Wee’s in Elk Tooth. He sat at a back table where Plato Bucklew sat drinking boilermakers and reading the lonely hearts columns in the paper. Creel sighed, ostentatiously. Plato looked up.
“Matter with you? Didn’t get any bad guys today?”
“Got plenty. My hand’s about wore out from writin tickets. Gimme the same thing,” he said to Amanda Gribb, waving his hand at Plato’s beverages.
“So your hand is wore out—nothin unusual in that, is there?” He put a salacious twist on the question.
“It’s goin a be like that the rest a the season, thanks to the goddamn Forest Circus.”
“What’s that supposed a mean?”
“It means the goddamn Forest Circus screwed up the best deal I ever had.” And he told him the complete story about the Hellhole, about the line of wardens waiting to use it, about the unearthly shrieks of malefactors as they slid down into the brimstone.
“And? What’s Forest got a do with it?” Plato Bucklew worked for the Forest Service, and as much as he complained about his hardheaded, shortsighted bosses he did not like to hear a red-shirt, even Creel, put the organization down.
“Tell you what, I got me a bad nasty one today, cocky little rat works in a bakery in Iron Mule, killed a doe. Then he drops his pants and gets down on the ground and proceeds to have sexual relations with the dead doe. And I’m standin about twenty feet away.”
“Jesus!” Plato inhaled his whiskey the wrong way. “That’s”— he drew on his course in criminal psychology—“that’s like deviant bestial necrophilia! What’d you write him up for?”
“Nothin, except he was in a buck-only area. Game laws don’t say a word about deviant hunter necrofoliage or whatever.”
“Well, look at the bright side. It could a been a lot more writin. At least it wasn’t a buck—then it would a been homosexual deviant bestial necrophilia. So what did you do?”
“So I tell him to get his pants up and I take him to that certain pulloff and things sure look different. Looks like the Forest Service had a convention a road scrapers and backhoes in there. It’s all opened up, room for fifty cars, fancy trailhead signs, posts, two a the new shitters, garbage can, trail maps, the works. But I can’t figure out where the sweet spot was. I walked all over that place, smackin the ground with a fence post