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ELGIN

  By M.A. Harris

  Copyright 2011 M.A. Harris

  Elgin’s First Life

  Elgin was born in Beauty, Wyoming, a tiny out of the way town that suited its name. The name on his birth certificate was Elgin Campbell Chalmers IV, though there were no Elgin’s, Campbell’s or for that matter Chalmers in his family history. His father, who had reasons not to remember his own name, thought it was a great joke, Elgin’s mother accepted it as she accepted so many other things.

  He grew up in the outdoors, a little wild, spending his time outside whenever he could, his mother got him to study enough to progress through the grades but that was the best she could do.

  A few weeks after his twelfth birthday Elgin’s mother simply wasn’t there any more. There was a flurry of concern but most of the locals decided she had simply finally had enough and walked out on the two ‘boys,’ she was never seen again. Elgin's father was never quite the same after that but his grief, though real was deeply hidden.

  Father and son lived in the 1970’s vintage 24 foot Air-Stream trailer. During the summer the Air-Stream was set up on the CircleSbarS ranch where Elgin’s father worked as a cowboy. In the cold months they moved it to the edge of Beauty, an easy walk from the end of Black Sky lake.

  Elgin’s father claimed to have always been a cowboy though no knew where he’d come from before he’s arrived and wooed the fair Jessica. He claimed to be one half Native American and a member of the local tribe, with no proof. His winter pass time after Jessica vanished was a letter writing campaign to get ‘his’ cut of the tribe’s take from the local casino and tourist industry, spending many hours on long rambling screeds to various people, papers, officials and offices about his terrible plight. Never to any avail.

  His sixteenth birthday fell on an early fall school-day Thursday. Elgin left his father on the lean-to porch leading to the Air-Stream's door, kicked back on a rickety old chair that looked like it was about to collapse, the coffee on his belly steaming in the cool dry air. The two exchanged glances and no more before the already wide shouldered boy walked out to catch the bus.

  That evening Elgin returned to find his father still kicked back in the old chair, the coffee cup in the same position, stone cold, eyes closed, face peaceful. The flakes of snow in the air were settling on the body, already the same temperature as the cold evening air. It was at the burial that Elgin found out that his father had been a week less than forty.

  After that Elgin was taken care of by a, perhaps self declared, network of cousins among the locals, people he'd known his whole life but never called kin. Most of his 'cousins' were identifiably Amerind, the blond, blue-eyed Elgin had always been a minority among them but had never complained about having to play the bad white guy again and again.

  He'd never been in any real trouble before and though he hung out with the local hooligans through high-school he didn't get it any more trouble than was normal. A ‘good looking boy’ he was not a hit with the girls, and though reasonably ‘common sensed’ he was never a good student or a hard worker, at least as far as school went.

  Elgin drifted into adult life with no plan and no ambition. At twenty nine Elgin still lived in the Air-Stream and worked at the ranch job he’d ‘inherited’ from his father. He wasn’t exactly a drunk, or a pot head, but he wasn’t sober much of the time away from the ranch. His only companion was a huge cat called Humphrey, or Humph.

  From a distance Humph looked like his Siamese mother, down to the brilliant blue eyes, but he was the size of a medium weight dog, some said his father had been a mountain lion. Humph certainly had the hunting instincts and grumpy disposition of a mountain lion. And it was a good thing that he was very good at hiding, and that Elgin was willing to stand up for him, particularly when small irritating local pets vanished under mysterious circumstances.

  Elgin knew he was a waste of oxygen most days and a disappointment to some in his extended family, such as it was. He didn’t let it bother him, unless he had a really bad drunk. But every once in a while he’d get drunk and do stupid things. The November of his twenty-ninth year, in the grips of a particularly bad ‘skinful,’ though few who didn’t know him well would have been able to tell, he saddled up an old pack horse and rode up into the mountains on a Friday afternoon, ignoring the oncoming wall of clouds that promised an early snowstorm.

  Saturday, half-frozen and still drunk Elgin drove his horse out of the safety of the camp in a deep cove in a rock wall, a hide he’d used many times, out into the snow and ice. An hour later the horse slipped and threw Elgin down a rocky precipice into a shallow stream. Unconscious, with one arm and both legs broken Elgin drowned in six inches of ice-cold water.

  It was only then that things started looking up.