The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Once the first reel was running good, Hoppy wandered over to the edge of the woods to relieve himself. He could’ve done it right beside his truck and nobody would have seen him because all eyes were fixed on the screen, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d just started a stream running when he looked down and there was Billy Millwee taking a leak right alongside him. Hoppy chuckled, but then he said, “Billy, I wish you wouldn’t copy every little thing I do.” Then he had another chuckle when he imagined that right up there on the screen Hopalong Cassidy might need to unbutton his britches and water the sagebrush. Hoppy was always doing this: imagining things on the screen, filling in what the pitcher show left out.

  Sometimes while the show was running Hoppy liked to mosey down towards the screen just so’s he could turn and study folks’ faces. Now, when the shooting started as Hopalong Cassidy captured the half-breed rustler Lone Eagle, Hoppy could watch as the audience hollered and whooped and whistled, and a lot of them used their fingers as six-shooters. Hoppy was also able to identify the several people who had never seen pitcher shows before, because they weren’t making a ruckus, they were just sitting there with their mouths wide open and their eyes like saucers. Hoppy liked to try to recall the first time he himself had ever seen a pitcher show, when he was twelve, the same age he’d had his first wet dream, and he honestly hadn’t formed an opinion as to which was better.

  If their looks didn’t say anything about how they were taking the show, Hoppy liked to just study them anyhow, to see how many of them he could recognize by name. This being his third annual trip to this town, he knew most of them by now, although there were a couple of pretty girls he couldn’t recall having seen before, or maybe they had just grown up and blossomed since he’d last seen them.

  Known or unknown, these people in this audience were his family, and he felt a great fondness for them one and all. Most of them sat together as families, although the kids preferred sitting on the grass or blankets right down in front of the screen. There were a few loners who weren’t sitting next to anybody. There was Mercy Boonlatch, a widow-woman who earned her living carding wool from the few sheep who still wandered these pastures getting cockleburs in their wool that Mercy had to pick out after the shearing. And over there was Clemmie Whitlow, likewise a widow-woman, who knits the yarns spun from Mercy’s wool into stockings and gloves and sweaters. In cool weather, Hoppy wears a sweater she’d knitted for him two years ago in return for just a week’s worth of tickets, ninety cents worth, a good price for such a nice sweater. Hoppy couldn’t understand why Clemmie and Mercy weren’t the best of friends, and he intended to find out, one of these days. Clemmie had a reputation for being the meanest woman around, and Hoppy had heard too many tales of her sorry life and ways.

  Yonder sat Billy Millwee’s folks, Bardis and Ruby, who ran the feed store, or tried to, since Bardis was the town drunk and Ruby wasn’t very bright. Hoppy’d eaten dinner at their house once last year and told them just half-joking that he was gonna steal Billy one of these days when he got to be old enough to travel. “You’re welcome to him,” Bardis had said.

  During his inspection of the audience, Hoppy always kept one eye on the screen, watching for that little white cue spot in the upper right corner which warned that the end of the reel was near, and when he saw it he ran back to the truck to change the reel. He hoped that next year he’d be able to buy a second projector so he wouldn’t have to stop the show while changing the reels, but meanwhile he had got his movements figured out and timed them so he could thread the new reel into the projector and have it running in less than a minute after the old one ran out. Even so, there would always be some folks, mostly kids and teenagers, who would get impatient and restless during the changing of the reels and start cutting up, starting horseplay and roughhouse, usually inspired by the fighting that had been happening on the screen. The same bunch of rambunctious rascals were also inclined to tussle whenever the screen showed anything romantic, like when Hopalong’s good-looking sidekick Lucky Jenkins starts gallivanting around with the ladies.

  But tonight, because “The Hills of Old Wyoming” has some cowboys singing in it (as a rule Hoppy hated the whole idea of the singing cowboy, but here was an exception), whenever Hoppy changed reels the audience broke into song, singing the words from the movie:

  Let me ride on a trail in the hills of old Wyomin

  Where the coyotes wail in the gloamin.

  For it’s there that my heart’s at home

  In the night let me rest with the blue sky for my ceilin.

  ’Till the wind’s lullaby comes stealin

  From the hills where my heart’s at home.

  Wake with a song! Wake with the sun!

  Saddle to mend, cattle to tend, plenty to be done.

  Let me live on the range where a man has room

  In the hills of old Wyomin. In the hills of old Wyomin.

  Of course they couldn’t finish all of that during the minute it took him to change reels, but he slowed down a little so they could at least sing the last part of it. It sure was a pretty song, and Hoppy liked the idea of a man having room to roam in, which he himself sure did.

  This kind of pitcher show always ended with somebody, usually Hopalong Cassidy himself, riding off into the sunset. Hoppy had seen it happen so often that he would have been shocked if the show ended any other way. The real reason for the riding-off-into-the-sunset was obvious: our hero couldn’t afford to stick around and get permanently involved with anybody; he had to make himself available for future adventures elsewhere. But Hoppy (our Hoppy) understood the symbolic reasons as well: the sunset is a climax, and it’s in the far distance, and you want to bring a story to a close by moving from the here-and-now into the there-and-whenever. Hoppy wondered if, when this here story itself comes to an end, he’ll be a-driving ole Topper off into the sunset somewhere. (Of course nothing’s stopping you from flipping to the last page and finding out, which is a privilege that readers have over pitcher-show-goers.)

  Everybody got up to go, moving real slow as if they couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. Hoppy relished watching this part: the men stood taller and looked more manly and distinguished; the women all wore toothy smiles and held their heads up as if each one of them knew she was the best and the purtiest. The kids were each ten years older. The impossible became possible for a little while.

  It was late, almost eleven o’clock. None of these folks were used to staying up that late, and many of them who had come on foot had a long way to walk to reach home, maybe an hour or more, and most all of them had to be up at dawn, but it was like New Year’s Eve, a special occasion. Watching the lights of their lanterns, flashlights and headlights twinkling like lightning bugs and disappearing into the darkness, Hoppy knew that they’d all be back the next night, and the next, until he was gone.

  It was quiet. Then somebody cleared their throat, and he turned to see in the dim light Ila Fay Woodrum, attempting to speak. Her folks, Birdie and Leaster, had done already headed off for home with their lantern. Ila Fay hadn’t opened her mouth when Hoppy was having supper at their place, and now here she was trying to speak. She took a deep breath and let it out all in a rush, “Don’t you reckon you could use me as a magician’s assistant? All them tricks you do? Don’t you need somebody to help? Or be your juggler’s assistant? Hold your balls or whatever? I’d go with you wherever. I’m ready to go whenever. I just get so tired of being called ‘Leaster’s least’un,’ and I aint all that least, now, am I?” As if to emphasize her lack of leastedness she thrust out her chest, and Hoppy had to notice that her bosom was well-furnished.

  For a long moment Hoppy had a fantasy of taking Ila Fay with him and teaching her how to levitate or disappear or conceal things, or at least to juggle. He probably could use a magician’s assistant, and he thought it was real clever of her to call it that. She wasn’t all that ill-favored to look at; in fact, she was kinda cute. And she could cook, no doubt about that. He was plumb ti
red of his own breakfasts, let alone his suppers. The trouble was, he didn’t want to abduct the last remaining child of his friends Birdie and Leaster. Oh, heck, that wasn’t his main reason for turning her down. No. He tried, in his fumbling way with words, to express his main reason. “Ila Fay, hon, some’ers out there in this big wide world is a feller who is bound to be your man someday, and I sure wouldn’t want to keep you from him.”

  “Maybe he’s you,” she said.

  “I’d never ask my woman to live the life I have to live,” he declared. “You just caint imagine what it’s like. All this roaming. Most folks on the road has somewhere to get to, but I don’t. I’m just a nomad. Do you know what that is? I’m just a no-man nomad, and you’d specially be disappointed in the no-man part of me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ila Fay said.

  “I just aint able,” he said. There. He’d said it. It was the same words his grandfather Long Jack Stapleton had said to his grandmother Perlina the first time she’d tried to get him to lay with her. Hoppy’s equipment wasn’t imperfect like Long Jack’s but his management of it apparently was.

  Ila Fay didn’t need to ponder the matter very long before she seemed to understand, and that was another mark in her favor: she wasn’t dumb. “Well,” she said at length, “let me know if you change your mind.”

  “It aint my mind that needs changing,” he said.

  And after she was gone (she was halfway home in the dark before it hit him that he should have offered to light her way home for her with his flashlight), he really overindulged the moonshine, and overindulged his hatred of himself, hatred not for anything he’d done but for what he had neglected or failed to do. Landon Boyd’s motto, private and awful, was: If I had only done what I had ort to’ve done. He stayed up late, got pickled on his jug of Chism’s Dew, realizing that he didn’t have to get up early in the morning like all these other folks did (another reason for having no use for himself). He was just sober enough to turn the projector to face the wall and thread it with his private reel, “Assortment,” and then to recline on his bunk and watch as the various naked people performed various mating postures and procedures. He was either too drunk or too filled with self-abomination to play with himself properly, and after a brief flogging of his tired member he fell asleep. After a while the Delco generator ran out of gasoline and stopped producing electricity, and the projector died.

  Chapter four

  The heat woke him. The scorching day was already afoot, and the pitiless sun was blazing through his window. Hoppy hated daylight almost as much as he hated Landon Boyd. It was too hot inside his truck-shack to start boiling water for his coffee, so he set the kerosene stove down off the truck, and put it beside Billy Millwee’s wagon, left where he’d parked it the night before.

  He poured just a dollop of dog hair into his coffee, and that made him feel a little better, although his head was still pounding.

  He took his fish pole and tackle and went off down the creek to try his luck, but didn’t get a nibble.

  After a dinner of crackers and sardines, he walked on over to Tollett’s General Store. He didn’t wear his Hopalong hat but just an ordinary old farmer’s straw hat. There were already several men gathered there wearing similar straw hats, lounging around easy-like, leaning back with their hands behind their heads or whittling several sticks into flinders, chewing tobacco, and jawing about this, that, and th’other. Hoppy had his own keen Barlow knife and he started in to shaving a stick right along with the others.

  “Don’t reckon it will rain tonight,” Ewell Tollett said. The white sky was cloudless and blank—appropriate, Hoppy thought, for a story that’s all in black and white.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Hoppy remarked. And, since Tollett did a pretty fair business in his store and was probably the richest feller in town, Hoppy offered, “I’ll bet ye ten dollars it rains tonight.”

  “Haw!” Ewell retorted. “You’re on. It aint rained a drop this month and it aint never gonna rain on yore pitcher show.”

  Was Hoppy still a bit drunk? Or just a reckless gambler? No, he simply had good reason to believe, on the basis of previous experience, confirmed more than once, that whenever Chapter Two of “The Painted Stallion” was shown, an episode that ended with a cloudburst, there was always a real deluge in the actual here-and-now world. It had happened three times already on the three Tuesdays in the three towns where Hoppy had shown that episode. The impossible had become possible so certainly that Hoppy had told himself he could probably earn a living as a traveling rainmaker, one of those fellers (most of them con men) who visit drought-stricken areas with showy equipment that makes a lot of noise and is supposed to create rain, but never does. Hoppy could get away with it, and all he’d have to do is show Chapter Two of “The Painted Stallion” wherever they needed rain. But he didn’t even need to remind himself that he wasn’t in this racket for the money he made.

  Several other men wanted to make bets with Hoppy on the ridiculous notion that it might rain, but they couldn’t afford to lose their money as easily as Ewell Tollett could. So the subject of talk was allowed to change, and before they got around to swapping their favorite dirty tales, they spent some time talking about that strange Injun on the painted stallion in the serial who seemed to be a guardian angel for the pioneers. Hoppy wouldn’t think of giving away the fact that the Injun was actually a pretty white gal, although he found his thoughts drifting to just who she actually was, which is never revealed throughout the serial. Had she maybe been a white captive of the Injuns? How could she tell the difference between good fellers and bad fellers so that she could be the guardian angel of the good guys? Where did she spend the night, or eat, or fix herself a new supply of the keen arrows that she was shooting all over the place to warn the good guys or kill their enemies? Wondering about these questions, Hoppy allowed his restless mind to fantasize about Julia Thayer (or Jean Carmen), who played the part, a most desirable specimen of womanhood. He entertained himself with fantasies of how Julia would cure him of his hopeless case of not being able to last more than a minute in the act of love.

  He was so caught up in this sexual reverie that he didn’t mind too awfully much when the men proceeded right into their hour of dirty tales, a contest to see who could tell the funniest and bawdiest yarn. Hoppy wasn’t able to compete in the contest, not because he didn’t know any lewd stories (he had heard hundreds on store porches elsewhere) but because he was simply incapable of narration.

  The dirty stories trickled off when a bunch of kids came running to the store porch to admire their hero. To amuse them, Hoppy performed a few sleights of hand and hocus-pocus, and that helped make up for his complete failure at telling dirty stories to the men, or telling any kind of story for that matter. It wasn’t just because he was not much for talking, and it certainly wasn’t because he was uncomfortable with dirty tales, which he greatly enjoyed so long as somebody else was retelling them, but he simply didn’t know how to make a story, how to begin it, how to walk it or lead it, and above all how to give the ending a real thump. Maybe it was just like his failures in sexual relations. He couldn’t satisfy a girl. He couldn’t satisfy a listener. So he had to let his pitcher shows do it for him. And serial pitcher shows, like “The Painted Stallion,” were a kind of long drawn-out, stopping and starting, almost coming but postponing, snatching grabbing jarring bumpy act of love. Especially if every episode has a strange helpful bare-armed lady in an Injun’s war bonnet romping atop a mighty paint horse.

  Later that evening, Hoppy got his tarp out of Topper and unfolded it and erected it as a canopy with Topper supporting two corners and a couple of poles the other two. Usually the tarp, which was made of heavy duck cloth painted with alabastine too, served as a screen when the wind caused the bedsheet screen to flutter too much, but he had learned to offer the tarp to his audience as protection in case of rain, although few of the audience had ever accepted it.

  Experience had taught him to
expect exactly what happened this night: when Chapter Two, “The Rider of the Stallion,” was getting close to its end, after The Rider had saved our hero Clark from being mobbed by the bandits, and the long wagon train was approaching a river (the Arkansas?) to cross, the dark heavens opened to the sound and sight of thunderbolts and the downpour began, both on the screen and on the audience. But nobody got up to run for cover, even though his tarp was there, and he was standing under it keeping dry himself. Everybody watched the episode right down to its cliffhanging end, when our hero Clark, driving the wagon across the swollen river, was conked from behind by the same hooligan who menaced him throughout the story, and fell unconscious into the covered wagon as it capsized in the water.

  While Hoppy was changing the reel to start the main feature, Ewell Tollett, soaked to the skin, stuck his head through the door and said, “I aint got ten dollars on me. But you could take it out in trade over at the store.”

  The next night, the third episode of “The Painted Stallion,” like each episode, began with an exact repetition of the closing scenes of the previous episode, and so was also in a downpour, but strangely enough this did not cause any further rainfall in the here and now of this real world. Unaccustomed as he was to public speaking, Hoppy made a brief announcement to the audience beforehand, assuring them that no further rain would fall. Several men in the audience spoke up, thanking him for the rainfall of the previous evening, which was badly needed for the parched crops, and assured a good second haying.

  That wagon train faced many perils as it braved repeated attacks from the bandits hired by the deposed lieutenant governor of Santa Fe, who was bent upon keeping the settlers out of the territory. The villain, Dupray, aided by his ruthless confederate Zamorro, would stop at nothing to foil the efforts of the wagon train to reach its destination and fulfill the storyboard: “Westward! The trail to Empire! From Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, dogged pioneers fought to penetrate a wilderness of savage Indians…massacres of death. Even worse were the white renegades…outlaws and bandits unscrupulous in their greed.”