Yellow Mama E zine

THINGS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN AT A PLACE THAT DOESN’T EXIST

 

by Joseph S. Walker

 

           The Jolly Roger Ranch doesn’t exist.

 

           Ask anybody who’s been there.

 

           Check any map you want. Look at images taken from satellites.  You’ll see an unbroken stretch of wild country, on the eastern edge of a national forest, with just a few overgrown old logging trails barely visible through the trees. There’s no helipad. No sprawling mansion. No outbuildings or parking lot. No cluster of unmarked, shallow graves. None of it was ever built, certainly not by nameless workers from Asian countries who never found their way home.

         Go to the courthouse in the nearest town and ask to see the real estate records. They’ll be happy to show them to you. The land is unimproved, undeveloped, unclaimed. The last owners on record were farmers who left for the richer soils of the Midwest generations ago, eventually forfeiting their claim due to unpaid taxes. An obscure oil company in Texas bought the mineral rights to the area, but never did anything with it.

         Drive the dusty county roads that would be closest to the ranch, crossing your fingers that you don’t break an axle. It won’t be long before the county cops pull you over to ask your business and politely suggest it be conducted elsewhere. Even if that doesn’t happen, you won’t find a way in. Certainly there’s no abandoned barn built up against a rocky bluff, and if you drive into the barn, the rear wall won’t open to reveal a brightly lit tunnel that runs directly into that bluff and empties out, a mile and a half later, at the base of a smoothly paved road that winds up into the hills. Why would there be such a tunnel or such a road, when there’s nowhere for it to go?

        Because the Jolly Roger Ranch doesn’t exist.

       And I wasn’t driven into that tunnel when I was eight years old, knowing not a word of English, thousands of miles from my home. And the most powerful men in America weren’t already at the ranch waiting for me. And the things that happened to me there never happened.

         How could they happen, when the Jolly Roger Ranch doesn’t exist?

 

        Here’s how you know for certain that the Ranch doesn’t exist.

       Over the last year there have been news stories about the man who doesn’t own the ranch and some of the people who didn’t go there and aren’t his friends. Just a few stories, a trickle, offering the barest hints of the things that didn’t happen there, couched in the most tentative language possible. It’s enough, though. Enough that in any sane society, any just society, the men named in the stories would be in chains, rotting in the most secure cells the country could build. They would be subjected not just to prosecution, but revulsion. They would be spit on and attacked if they ever appeared on a public street. They would be stripped of their honors and positions and possessions, and their names would become synonymous with evil. They’d spend the rest of their lives seeing hatred etched into the faces of everyone who looked at them.

        None of that has happened, so the Jolly Roger Ranch must not exist.

        What other explanation could there be?

 

          Jolly Roger was the name of Captain Hook’s pirate ship in Peter Pan. It was a ship belonging to a man driven by his obsessive, all-consuming need to destroy childhood, in all its joy and innocence, as represented by Pan. “Hook” was not the pirate’s real name. In his novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “to reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze.”

         If the Jolly Roger Ranch existed, it might seem telling, that it would be named for such a ship and such a goal and such a man.

          But, of course, it doesn’t.

         Rage, though. Rage exists. It can be hidden, buried, even forgotten for a time, but rage doesn’t vanish. Especially not after everything else has been burned out of you, torn away to leave only that steady white core, the thing that can only die when you do.

 

         Since the ranch doesn’t exist, I couldn’t have escaped from it, after being there three years. I couldn’t have made my way through the woods for days, delirious and starving, before finding my way to a couple who knew something of the ranch that isn’t there and hid me from the men who couldn’t have been hunting me. The couple couldn’t have helped me eventually make my way to a quiet network of other survivors who would become, in time, my true family.

        None of that could be real. You can’t survive things that didn’t happen at a place that doesn’t exist.

 

         The network I can’t be part of, since it doesn’t exist, hasn’t spent the last year building an arsenal. We haven’t accumulated guns and knives, combat gear, night-vision goggles. We haven’t gotten our hands on a pair of shoulder-mounted missiles. We haven’t found veterans who believe in the fairy tale that is the Jolly Roger Ranch, veterans who train us in the ways of stealth and strategy and death. Most especially, we don’t have explosives liberated from mining operations out west, enough explosives to turn a ranch that doesn’t exist into a mile-wide pillar of smoke blotting out the sun.

          We’re not planning to slip into the woods around the ranch that doesn’t exist on some moonless night. We’re not going to have green and black stripes painted across our faces to mask the features the men who have never been there never really saw in the first place. We’re not going to rouse these men, who aren’t sleeping in the stained sheets of the beds that aren’t there, to show them that there is a law that everyone must answer to, however powerful, however rich, however famous. The law of the bullet. The law of the blade. The law of the fire.

        We’re not going to watch the smoke rising and clasp each other’s hands and say The Jolly Roger Ranch doesn’t exist.

 

END

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       Joseph S. Walker is the current President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and the author of more than 100 published stories. He has been a finalist for the Edgar, Derringer, Thriller, and Shamus Awards, and is a two-time winner of the Al Blanchard Award. His stories have been included in four editions of The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year.

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       Kevin D. Duncan was born 1958 in Alton, Illinois where he still resides. He has degrees in Political Science, Classics, and Art & Design. He has been freelancing illustration and cartoons for over 25 years. He has done editorial cartoons and editorial illustration for local and regional newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His award-winning work has appeared in numerous small press zines, e-zines, and he has illustrated a few books.