E-peshawari
Copyright© 2015 by Old Man with a Pen
Prologue
The sleeper slept, the dreamer dreamt, the thinker thought, the buyer bought, the widow wept.
"Fuck! Josie! Gimme another white. Josie! Get in your magic bag and gimmie another white. Josie? This is no fucking time to play games."
I would have pulled over ... if there was any place TO pull over. This road? This trail was one snake turn after another. I couldn't even look to see if Josie was awake.
Josie Henshaw, 16 years old, my co driver, navagator, loader, helper, nightmare ... nothing pretty about Josie ... just one step past a whinny. She was asleep on the seat ... I think ... she was supposed to be asleep.
Which is where I should have been seven hours ago ... but I wasn't. I was arguing with the log company push. The push is the yard foreman.
We had pulled into the yard to load our logs. There wasn't a great deal of work going on. This crew worked the logs out of the cut and down to the yard road with mules ... better conservation and less damage to the woods. The yard road was worked with oxen and the only machinery visible was the stacker. Decks of logs for different mills were stacked together.
The pusher was trying to fuck me. I could see ... directly in line of sight ... the deck of the logs labeled Johnson and Son in bright red fluorescent spray paint ... the logs we were supposed to pick up.
The logs he was trying to palm off had NO paint ... pure trash, beaver-bait, blow-downs and culls. The tornado that ripped through here three years ago left buckskins standing and those were in that cold deck too.
Tornado trees were twisted the length of the trunk ... if a sawmill blade so much as touched the butt-end of one of those twisters, the cut released the twisted fibers and the log turned into a gigantic grenade. They could be cut across the grain to fell them; a lengthwise cut was a catastrophe in the making.
The year after the tornado a deal between cruiser and scaler sent a few of the twisters to a rival mill. The first few logs through the six foot mill-blade cut just fine ... the first twister killed the sawyer, left the saw cradle and hydraulics a disaster and the saw blade was found a mile away stuck in the side of a Brinks armored truck.
Mr. Johnson wasn't having any of that crap.
We finally got what we paid for, Johnson and Son, the whole deck, loaded, chained and placarded, when the cook's flunky came running up and pulled on the pushers sleeve.