The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  In every town on his route—and there was a total of twelve pretty little towns on his circuit, running from Osage in the north to Oark in the south, Wesley in the west to Tilly in the east—in every one of those towns there would always be a bunch of girls who would flock around him as they were doing right now, openly flirting with him though he never knew what to say to them, and then later, after the pitcher show or even during it, one of them was bound to ask to be allowed to “jine” him. Of course jine was the way he pronounced join himself, just like everybody else. But it rhymed with shine and repine and thine and sign and divine and he’d been tempted to write a song or two about it, especially about one of those gals whose name was Clementine, but writing songs about it was the only thing he could bring himself to do, and he sang the songs only to himself.

  He couldn’t accept any of their offers, not even from the ones who came right out and said something like, “Hoppy, honey, why don’t I climb up there and keep you company while the pitcher show is a-running?” How could he answer that truthfully by saying If we was to recline with you supine and our laigs intertwine, you might opine that your design was mighty fine but mine was out of line? He never said any such as that. All he could say was to tell them that it might be dangerous for them to climb up onto the truck bed amidst all that machinery with his delco pumping away to generate the electric to run the show, and besides he couldn’t fool around while the show was running (which was just an excuse, because most all of the time he didn’t have anything to do except change the reels). Then he’d have to close the door in their face, the door to his truck’s back-end that served as projection booth and home, and hide behind the door with his jug of Chism’s Dew, needing several swallers to still the beating of his thwarted heart.

  And sometimes what the girl meant by jine was not simply to get together with him for the purposes of jining themselves together carnally, but actually hooking up with his tour, becoming, depending on who said it, his assistant, his helper, his sidekick, his partner, his slave, or his wife. He didn’t need any of those. One pretty gal once said she wanted to “ride shotgun” with him to whatever town he was going to next.

  Now Hoppy studied the girls around him, trying to select, in his imagination, which one of them might make him an offer tonight. They weren’t all pretty; a couple of them were mudhens, and one was a clock stopper. The girls went on a-chattering amongst themselves, not saying anything straight to him although it was pretty clear they were saying everything for him. All of these people knew that he didn’t have any gift for gab, which was another thing he hated himself for: he had never learned how to chaw the rag, swap yarns, or toss words. He had to be content to listen to others. By and by, the girls joined the womenfolk in taking their leave from the store porch in order to go home and start supper, and the men were able to reclaim their seats upon the empty nail kegs, rails, captain’s chairs and other furniture of the store’s porch. The kids remained standing or squatting in the dirt of the road beside the porch.

  They never took their eyes off of him, and eventually he stood up, stretched, yawned, and declared quietly, “I reckon I could use a few of you’uns to help me set up the seats.” He climbed back behind the wheel of his truck and drove it on over the meadow beside the mill, behind the store, and parked it in the spot where it would remain for the duration of his run of shows, with its rear end facing the broad swath of meadow where he would set up the seats and the screen. Soon Billy Millwee parked his little wagon right alongside in the same position. Hoppy needed three kids to help him lug the screen out of the truck, unfold it and unroll it and hang it between a couple of elm trees at the end of the meadow. It was just several bedsheets sewn together side by side, and painted with a chalky white paint called alabastine, a gallon of which was among the supplies cluttering Topper’s interior. He needed the other kids to scour the neighborhood in search of tomato crates to support pine planks and form the benches for the audience to sit upon. The kids scattered and returned by and by lugging a total of maybe thirty tomato crates, and carrying, two by two, a dozen long pine planks.

  When they were finished setting up the seats, Hoppy gave each of the kids a paper ticket that had the word “Admission” printed on it. It was the same kind of ticket, printed by Weldon, Williams and Lick of Fort Smith, that was used in all the big town theaters, and Hoppy had several rolls in two colors, green for kids, red for adults (although, this story being in black and white, you can’t really tell the difference).

  Hoppy knew that before the week was over, one of these kids would ask to go with him. Turning down the gals might have filled him with sorry regret, but turning down the kids sometimes broke his heart, and he could have killed himself. He was a hero to those kids, and one of his sorry life’s biggest pleasures was to see their faces light up at the first sight of Topper as he drove into town: the kids would laugh and shriek and clap and carry on like the dickens, and somehow every last one of them who couldn’t earn a ticket by helping out with the setting up and the cleaning up afterwards managed to scrape up enough pennies or a nickel to pay the five cents not just once but each of the six nights that he would play a village. Sometimes when they’d already spent the one free ticket he gave out for helping set up and clean after the first show, he’d think of other ways they could earn a free ticket: he told them if they would collect a jar full of houseflies he’d let them in. That made the grown-ups and womenfolk happy too, getting rid of all those houseflies. Once or twice he had let them collect lightning bugs, but they couldn’t do that and watch the show at the same time; that is, as soon as it got dark enough for the lightning bugs it was dark enough to start the show.

  He knew that when the last show was shown on Saturday night, the last episode of the serial, and it was time for him to get ready to move on to the next town, there would always be more kids than big gals who asked to go with him. He knew their dreams: they’d seen the magic of the pitcher show, they’d entered for a spell a world where the people are more real than real at the same time they’re more fantastic than fantasy, and somehow the kids thought that if only he would let them go with him they could stay in that world forever or even become real cowboys with lavish attire and handsome horses, or at least movie actors pretending to be cowboys. He knew that dream, because when he was nine he had run away from home to join a circus. They’d turned him away, and not long after that he’d jumped off that barn to see if he could fly. He remembered those hopes and expectations.

  Usually, because he simply didn’t have the time or the patience to try to explain to the kids that there just wasn’t any world beyond that screen, that that screen was just a bunch of alabastine-coated bedsheets sewn together and the world projected on that screen was pure-dee make-believe, and that the next town he was heading for wasn’t really no different from this here little town, he’d tell them that his life was hard and lonesome and uncomfortable, riding his beat-up old truck Topper all over the roughest kidney-busting roads and scary mountain trails, the food was lousy and scarce, the pay was practically nothing, and besides the whole life was just seasonal, warm weather only, nothing to do during the cold months. He could usually scare them off with a frank picture of his existence, if need be showing them the complicated machinery of his projector and his delco, but if that didn’t work he had to throw in something else made up, such as that he had a disease, the exposure to all them electrons generated from his projector had left him with a bad case of the cathodes, which is contagious and could only be helped by the large amount of good corn liquor that he had to consume.

  These things were said to them when they begged or politely asked to go with him. But there had been times when they didn’t ask; a kid would just hide himself somewhere in the back of his truck, even under his bed, and he wouldn’t discover him until he’d started to set up in the next town, forty or sixty mile down the road, and then all he could do would be to tell the boy what a mistake he’d made and hand him over to some officer of the law
, whilst the tears would be a-streaming down the boy’s face and welling up in Hoppy’s eyes. It always broke Hoppy’s unhappy heart, but he knew he didn’t have any room in his life or his truck for somebody else’s child. He’d unstopper his jug of Chism’s Dew to take away the pain, even though it was not generally his practice to imbibe before the last customer had headed off home after the show.

  Sometimes he wondered if he might hate himself even more if, as he lived in either hope or threat of doing, he came across some kid he couldn’t say no to, some kid who was just right, some kid who reminded him of himself when he was a kid wanting to run away from home. Some kid like Billy Millwee, only several years older.

  Chapter two

  It wasn’t every day that somebody asked him to supper, let alone dinner. He reckoned that if he’d acquired a name for being a bright and breezy table-talker, he might’ve got more invites, but the word had probably got around that he was a pretty dull feller when it came to making chitchat. He didn’t exactly hate himself for this, no, not out-and-out teeth-grinding loathing, but there was little in this life that he disrelished more than having to sit at the supper table with the menfolk and boys while the womenfolk and girls hovered around, and all eyes watching every bite he bit and every chew he chawed, and everyone waiting for him to say something clever. He’d much rather eat in the back of his truck, right out of cans, and pass up the pies and cakes so as just to eat in peace without having to say nothing. And usually he did, but on his first evening in town, having spent most of the day traveling, driving the truck over those kidney-busting roads, he was ready to take it easy and let the womenfolk wait on him, as they still did in the time-honored tradition, unlike these here big towns among the flatlanders where it was rumored that womenfolk actually sat down at the table with the menfolk.

  Besides, Birdie Woodrum set out a swell supper, not just leftovers from noon dinner as most folks had, but a supper that was practically a dinner itself, with freshfried chicken and freshmashed taters and freshstirred gravy and all. Him and Leaster Woodrum was the only ones at the table; the other boys had flew the roost, and so had most all the girls, so that only the baby remained to help her mother wait on the men. The girl, Ila Fay, maybe seventeen, wasn’t a knockout but she didn’t give you an eye-ache either. Like all the other girls in town, she thought Hoppy was some feller. Her prince, her eyes said. He couldn’t set down his gnawed drumstick before she’d offer him the platter.

  “Don’t seem to me,” said Leaster Woodrum with his mouth full of mashed potatoes, “that it’ll come a rain this week.”

  Some moments drifted by before it occurred to Hoppy that he was expected to offer his opinion on this matter, and then he had to ponder what the best opinion would be. No rain, at least not at night, meant better attendance at the pitcher shows. But was Leaster hoping for some needed rainfall? It was hard to tell. “I reckon it might could,” Hoppy said, and allowed Ila Fay to ladle some more green beans onto his plate.

  There were no less than four desserts offered up, a sweet potato pie, an egg custard pie, a lemon layer cake, and some strawberry shortcake. Hoppy knew he’d have to have some of each, not that he didn’t care to, so Birdie would feel happy. Birdie was known to have spells of deep downheartedness. Leaster himself was none too happy ever since the bottom fell out of the market for railroad ties. It occurred to Hoppy to attempt conversation. “How’s the chairs coming along, Leaster?” he asked.

  Leaster looked surprised, probably because he’d never heard Hoppy ask a conversational question before. Last year Hoppy had given Leaster a foot-powered turning lathe that he’d picked up in exchange for a week’s worth of tickets for a whole family of Biddles over in Mt. Judea, and Leaster had started using his stock of white oak timber, formerly hacked into railroad ties, to turn into chair posts and rounds for frames whose bottoms he braided from bark, making a real easy chair that was good to look at. “I sold three of ’em last week,” Leaster said. “Dollar and a quarter each.” He finished his pie and shoved away from the table. “So I figure I can afford tickets every night for the pitcher show.”

  “Aw, I’ll just let you in free,” Hoppy offered, but Leaster wouldn’t hear of it.

  While Birdie and Ila Fay sat down to have their supper, Leaster and Hoppy went out to sit on the porch and smoke. Sitting out there, Hoppy could also watch the slow but steady arrival of folks heading for the mill meadow to attend the pitcher show. Some of them were driving cars, a Model T and a couple of Model As, some were on their mules or donkeys, but most were on foot, and they all waved real big to see Hoppy sitting there in his black ten-gallon hat.

  Leaster studied the glowing end of his hand-rolled cigarette for some time, as if it were a strange insect, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Hoppy, where are you from, anyhow?”

  Sometimes he got asked that question, but not too often. Most folks who asked it just wanted to be reassured that Hoppy wasn’t some furriner from the next county over. It wasn’t too hard to answer, so he did. He was born in Stay More, a remote, lost town in the deepest wilds of what became his territory for the showing of pitcher shows, and Leaster Woodrum had heard tell of it but had never been there, mainly because it wasn’t on the way to anywhere. He had heard tell that it ought to’ve been called “Get There” instead of “Stay More,” because the former was a lot tougher to do than the latter. Hoppy didn’t want to include Stay More among the dozen little towns he visited on his tour, not because it was so hard to get to, nor because its population was dwindling, nor even because of all his unhappy memories about growing up there—or trying to. He tried to explain to Leaster that Stay More was not on the circle of his circuit, that it was more in the center, that if his circuit of twelve towns was like the face of a clock then Stay More was the center pin where the hands were attached. But that was just making excuses. More than once he had asked himself, when he had nothing better to ask, as so often he did not, just why he couldn’t set up his shows in the town of his birth. The best answer he could come up with, and it wasn’t an answer so much as one more lame alibi, was that he didn’t want any more folks telling him about his grandpa.

  The last few times that he had stopped in Stay More just to say howdy or to buy the fixings for smokes at the store or a demijohn of Chism’s Dew from Luther Chism, or to check his mailbox at the P.O. (he never got nothing that amounted to nothing), or just to heed the pleading of the town’s name (which supposedly had been bestowed by an Indian early in the nineteenth century), he always turned out having to listen to one more tale about Grandpa Stapleton. He thought he had heard them all, but there was always a new one waiting for him whenever he nodded his head in response to the question, “Say, aint you Long Jack’s grandchild?”

  He was told there was a clear family resemblance. The few remaining old-timers who had actually known Long Jack Stapleton always said, “You kind of favor him.” If there weren’t any ladies present or eavesdropping, one of the men might boldly make a crack in the way of hinting that maybe Hoppy was endowed, or rather unendowed, with the same shortcoming which had given Long Jack his ironic nickname. He had heard all the tales about that too, speculations about just how Long Jack had wound up unendowed: the doctor who had circumcised him had been drunk; the organ had been bitten off by a dog, or by a wolf, or by Long Jack himself during a nightmare; or Long Jack in a moment of conscious frustration or shame—or maybe accidentally—had hacked it off with an axe. There were lots of sawmills in those days where it could have happened. Whatever the real means of amputation, the shortcoming did not hinder Long Jack in his marital relations: he fathered several children, one of them Landon “Hoppy” Boyd’s mother. On his Grandmother Stapleton’s side, Hoppy traced his ancestry back to Jacob Ingledew, who had founded the town of Stay More. Hoppy may have resembled his grandfather Long Jack in some ways—the gentle face capable of animation and compassion—but Long Jack Stapleton had been a huge man with red hair and a bushy red mustache. Of course this here is all in bla
ck and white so the color of Long Jack’s hair and mustache can’t really matter. But Hoppy was more inclined to blondness: not the sort of white blondness that made the real Hopalong Cassidy silver-haired at the age of forty but a kind of straw-colored fair-hairedness. And he was tall, taller than the real Hopalong, but not gigantic like his grandfather. He remembered as a small boy asking his grandfather if he would ever grow as big, and his grandfather said, “If you believe it, you can.”

  He did not remember very much about his grandfather, not because little was memorable but because he had for some reason forgotten most of the details of his childhood, not because it was too painful to remember but because your progress through the perils of the life you’ve got here and now ought not be hampered by the baggage of the life you used to have. So most of what he knew about his grandfather came from what he heard from others, including his mother and including all those old men who loved to sit on the store porch all afternoon whittling sticks into flinders, passing the jug of Chism’s Dew around, and telling endless tales about the way things used to be when things were always more lively and interesting than they’ll ever possibly be again. Hoppy didn’t believe half of what he heard but he liked to listen anyhow. No, he liked to listen because he didn’t believe half of what he heard.

  And he knew this fact about the nature of pitcher shows: they are man’s attempt to make believable—because they’re showed—the most unbelievable things.