Читать книгу Ghost Fever - Joe Hayes - Страница 7

Chapter 1

Across the Tracks

IT SEEMS LIKE most people these days don’t believe in ghosts. But almost everyone knows somebody who says they’ve seen one. I know a lot of people who swear they have, and I’m not about to tell them they’re lying. I just listen and enjoy the story. This one happened way back in the 1950s in Duston, Arizona, which is the town I grew up in.

Duston was a railroad town. The tracks ran right through the middle, maybe 100 feet north of Highway 75, which was called Main Street while it was inside the city limits. The south side of Main Street is where the town’s few stores were located: a drug store, a couple of variety stores, two cafés, a clothing store—a pool hall, of course—and a strange, dumpy business called The Cole Cash Store. South, behind Main Street, the land rose gently and the streets up there were paved and shaded with big elm and cottonwood and cyprus trees.

Between Main Street and the tracks, a strip of open land covered with sharp black cinders ran the length of the town. It belonged to the railroad company. In the middle of town, the train station interrupted the continuous stretch of barren cinders.

If you had grown up in a small western town back in those days, you’d know what the station looked like: a pitched-roofed wooden building painted yellow with brown trim. On the side of the station next to the tracks, there was a concrete platform for freight and passengers and, on the other side, a small parking lot.

North, beyond the tracks, the town extended for another six or seven blocks in a crooked grid of dirt streets lined with run-down houses made of adobe or weathered lumber. Everyone called that part of town “across the tracks” and no one lived there unless they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. If you did live there, the chances were you rented your house from a man named Mr. Cole.

Mr. Cole was the owner of The Cole Cash Store I mentioned. He must have gotten the name for his store from the expression “cold cash,” which people used to use back then. It meant money right there on the spot. His name was Cole, not cold, but he was trying to be clever and named his business The Cole Cash Store.

No one seemed to know what Mr. Cole’s first name was. They just called him Cole Cash, like the name of his store.

And everyone knew he wasn’t making much “cold cash” from that store because no one went in there. It was dirty! Once a kid named David Acosta went into the store and bought a candy bar. When he unwrapped it, he found a fat, white worm curled up in the chocolate. He took the candy bar to school and showed it to all the other kids. We stayed away from that dirty store.

If kids wouldn’t even go into the store, you can bet adults didn’t go there, so that’s how we knew Cole Cash didn’t make money from the store. We knew he made it by renting houses. He would buy up any old, tumbled-down house that was offered for sale. He’d rent those houses to families that were poor and couldn’t afford anything nicer. Cole Cash’s houses were all across the tracks.