The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The most impossible thing about the story, more so than the heroics of the goddess on the painted horse and the presence of such heroes as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and the kid Kit Carson, was that Zamorro and his henchman were constantly riding on into Santa Fe to report on their progress or lack of it to their boss Dupray, and then riding back out, hundreds of miles, to wherever the wagon train had reached. Hoppy allowed as how distance had no meaning in a good story.

  Hoppy was happy that whoever made the film never ran out of ideas for ending each episode with a cliffhanger, including one which was actually that, with our hero Clark hanging onto a puny little shrub sprouting out of the side of a bluff (from which he was rescued eventually by the mysterious helpful Rider who dangled a rope down and tied it around the painted stallion to pull him up). The serial was packed with hazards and dangers—gunpowder wagons exploding and ambushes and runaway stagecoaches and trapdoors to fall through—and even though you knew in your heart that somehow the good guys would escape in the next episode, it was always a breath-stopping thrill when it happened.

  The gender of The Rider was not revealed until the eighth episode, although there were some keen-eyed watchers who guessed earlier that she was a woman, and even some conjecture among the bawdy men on the store porch as to whether The Rider was actually fuckable.

  It was Hoppy’s custom to show all the remaining chapters of the serial, one after the other, on Saturday night, and because everybody couldn’t hardly wait to see how it all turned out there was a better attendance on Saturday night than any other night. He had shown four other full-length Hopalong movies, “Hopalong Rides Again,” “Borderland,” “North of the Rio Grande,” and “Rustler’s Valley,” none of them very different from “The Hills of Old Wyoming”—same people, including Hopalong, same sidekicks, Windy Halliday and Lucky Jenkins, same ugly mustached villains, same settings mostly with lots of desert mountains, same thundering hooves and blazing guns and all. Hoppy couldn’t have told you, if his life depended on it, the difference between one pitcher show and the next. But the serial rolled right along each night as the wagon train got closer to Santa Fe and the desperadoes grew more desperate to stop them and the lovely Rider performed miracles of rescue with her painted stallion.

  It was close to midnight when the last episode of the serial came to its conclusion and our hero Clark rode off into the sunset but with that Lady on the Painted Stallion right beside him! Everybody clapped as hard as they could and cheered as loud as they could, and if they couldn’t they just come out with a mighty “Ah!”

  Several folks stopped by the projection booth on their way home to say something like “I wush we didn’t have to wait a whole year for the next time you’ll be coming around,” and “Why don’t ye just stay more with us instead of going some’ers else?” and “You’d better just come home and spend the night with me and not never go anywheres” and “It’s sure going to be lonesome and tiresome when they’s not any more pitcher shows to watch.”

  The next morning, Ewell Tollett violated the Sabbath by opening his store long enough for Hoppy to bring in and redeem the various items he’d accepted in barter for tickets: about twenty dozen eggs, four gallons of butter, eight slabs of bacon, a dozen chickens, and a lamb. With part of the proceeds, along with the ten dollars Tollett owed him, Hoppy also stocked up on various supplies to get him down the road.

  At noon of that Sunday, there was a dinner-on-the-grounds at the schoolhouse, which was also the church, and although the circuit-riding preacher Emmett Binns had given a fiery sermon denouncing pitcher shows and condemning the audience for the waste of money, Hoppy had slept late, as had quite a few other people, and did not attend the church services, going instead to redeem his barter with Tollett. But he showed up in time for the dinner, which was mostly in his honor. In fact, even that preacher Binns showed up, long enough to eat and to make faces at Hoppy. There were several platters heaped high with fried chicken, and every single pie and cake known to man…or done by woman.

  When it was all over, Hoppy sure did hate to leave. They gave him a paper poke full of leftover fried chicken to take with him, as well as his choice of pies and cakes. When he got behind the wheel of Topper and started the engine, Ila Fay Woodrum came rushing up and jumped on the running board and said to him, “Have you thought about it? Have you thought about me? I’m ready to go. Just say the word.”

  “The word,” he said, “is ‘sorry.’ I sure am sorry.”

  When he backed out into the road, and turned, with everybody waving at him, he started off slowly, knowing that nobody would watch him drive out of sight, which is very bad luck according to an old old Ozark superstition. He noticed that Billy Millwee with his little wagon was attempting to follow him. Hoppy wasn’t sure whether Billy wasn’t just imitating him in his leaving. He hollered at Billy, “Next year, when you’re bigger, I aim to take you with me.”

  “Promise?” Billy said, with tears running down his cheeks.

  But Hoppy had never made a promise in his life, and he was forced to push his foot down on the gas pedal and leave Billy in the dust. He wasn’t riding off into the sunset, which wouldn’t set for a good little while, and he wasn’t riding west but east, but he was sure riding off and this was THE END as far as that town was concerned.

  It was only sixty miles or so to the next town on his route, but those sixty miles were rough going, up mountain trails with hairpin switchbacks and off along sheer craggy ridges whose height made him terribly nervous, and through dark woods with rarely a sight or sound of any critter of any kind. He didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday and he was tempted to camp out if he came to a good fishing stream, but the dense forests were kind of spooky and he decided to get on.

  It was nigh onto suppertime when he saw the cluster of buildings down in the valley, and he lifted his bugle and stuck it out the window and commenced playing his taps-like tune that said “From far yonder up the mountain road here he comes again, folks, Hoppy Boyd, the happy moving showman of moving pitchers to show you another good’un.”

  One by one and two by two they all came a-running, even the grownups and womenfolk, and every dog in town, and followed him as he slowed down along the main road. He didn’t stop at Bedwell’s General Store but drove on over to the schoolhouse meadow, where he would park his rig and set up his outdoor show, so that the screen could be hung from the side of the two-floor schoolhouse. Right and left he had to decline invitations to supper, on account of he was already well-supplied with leftovers from the previous town. He did a little juggling and some hocus pocus and answered their questions about the names of the shows. Tomorrow night after the first installment of a fabulous serial called “The Painted Stallion” they would all be treated to a fine Hopalong Cassidy movie called “The Hills of Old Wyoming.” Several folks, womenfolk too, asked him why he couldn’t just have the first show tonight, but he had to remind them it was still Sunday and he didn’t ordinarily ever show a pitcher on the Lord’s Day. He had to turn down several invitations to come go home and spend the night. One by one and two by two they left him alone.

  He climbed up into his home in the back of his truck to fetch his jug of Chism’s Dew, and damned if there wasn’t a kid sitting on his bunk. Not just a kid, either, but a well-growed boy. His first thought was that the boy had just climbed up there as soon as he had stopped and parked, but then he realized the kid must’ve stowed away at the previous town and ridden all those sixty miles back here. If that was the case, then Hoppy would have to fetch some officer of the law to see to it that the kid got safely back home.

  Chapter five

  In spite of himself, his voice was gruff. “All right, you,” he said. “Climb down off the truck.” The kid lifted up his toesack passel, just a rag bundle that probably held all his worldly goods, and climbed down off the truck, out into the light where Hoppy could see him. He wasn’t a little boy; he was tall, with what seemed a full body inside his loose-hanging overalls, maybe four
teen or fifteen, with a pleasant freckled face and fine-boned features beneath a stained felt hat, and his overalls were old and had been patched and repatched by his mother or his sister. He even looked like the young Kit Carson in “The Painted Stallion” although he was older and prettier. His first words to Hoppy, in a voice that hadn’t even broken yet, were, “If you don’t want me, I guess I can make myself scarce.”

  So he had done already seen that first episode of “The Painted Stallion”! Hoppy’s first thought was to say, gruffly, “Then you’d better make yourself scarce,” but instead he said the same words that Hoot Gibson, or Walter Jamison, as the wagonmaster was called, had said to young Kit Carson, “How long since you’ve eaten, son?”

  “Well, I et a lot at that dinner-on-the-grounds, so I aint hungry.”

  “So then I caint say, ‘I guess maybe we better see the cook and get you some supper. You see, a scout for this train’s got to keep his strength up.’ Since I caint say that to make this conversation go the same way it did in the pitcher show, I can only say, ‘This aint a wagon train and you aint a scout and we’re not heading for Santa Fe.’” Hoppy surprised himself by talking so much; it was the most words he had said in one stretch in quite some time.

  “No, sir,” said the lad sadly, instead of the happy “Yes, sir!” that Kit Carson had said. “But 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?”

  “Say!” Hoppy interrupted. “Are you a friend of Ila Fay’s?”

  “I know her.” The boy had a very pouty mouth.

  “Know her, hell. You just quoted her, word for word.”

  “Well, I was listening in when she spoke them words to ye, sir. I was just a-fixing to say something like that myself, but she beat me to it. And then you turned her away.”

  “So if you were listening in, do you recollect what I said to her to turn her away?”

  “Yes sir, first you told her that some’ers out there in this big wide world is a feller who is bound to be her man someday, and you sure wouldn’t want to keep her from him. That don’t matter to me, because I aint looking for a feller.”

  “But what I said after that?”

  “You said you’d never ask your woman to live the life you have to live. You said that she just caint imagine what it’s like. All this roaming. Most folks on the road has somewhere to get to, but you don’t. You’re just a nomad. You asked her, ‘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.’”

  “Don’t you never forget nothing?” Hoppy asked in amazement at the boy’s word-for-word recollection.

  “Sir, you aint no more of a no-man than I am,” he said. “That don’t matter to me nohow. I just want to be your helper, sir, and your partner…and your friend.”

  Hoppy studied the youngster, who stood with a bearing that reflected his pluck. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

  “Uh, Carl, sir,” the boy said.

  “Carl what?”

  “Carl Whitlow, sir.”

  “You any kin to Clemmie Whitlow the knitter?”

  “Um, yeah, she’s my aunt.”

  “Does she know you was fixing to try and take up with me?”

  “Naw, sir, but she don’t give a hoot.”

  “So you’re from that there town but you don’t know nobody in this here town?” Hoppy didn’t want anybody hereabouts recognizing the boy.

  “I never been here afore, sir.”

  “It aint but sixty mile and you aint never been here before?”

  “I never left home, sir,” Carl said, and added, “before now.”

  “Son,” Hoppy said, struggling to sound nice and gentle, “lookee out yonder. That town aint a bit different from the one you just came from. Schoolhouse is a mite bigger but the store’s the same size. Now you may think you’ve escaped from something, but you aint. It’s just the same little old two-bit hick town with the same old kind of folks in it, and if you was to be my helper you’d just be stuck here for a whole week, seeing the same old pitcher shows all over again, and then we’d go on to another town that aint a bit different from this one, and show the same shows all over again, and so on, and on and on, till hell freezes over.”

  “Sir, I’d never get tired of watching ‘The Painted Stallion.’”

  “So you really want to be like young Kit Carson, huh? You kind of favor Sammy McKim, which is the name of the actor who plays him. Well, I’m sorry to tell ye, but you’d never get a chance to do all them heroic deeds that he did.”

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  My, but the boy was full of spunk. “We might as well sit down,” Hoppy offered, and fetched a chair off the truck for his guest to sit on. He sat on the folding steps that led up to the truck. He remembered that when he had discovered the boy he had been on his way to go and get his Chism’s Dew, so he climbed up and got the jug. It’s rude not to offer your guest something, regardless of how young they are. “Care to jine me in a snort?” Hoppy brandished the stoneware demijohn.

  “What is it?” the boy wanted to know.

  “It aint none of your rotgut roastin-ear wine,” Hoppy declared. “The Chisms of Stay More has always made a superior firewater.” He poured some into a glass and held it out. “It aint even white,” he pointed out.

  “I never had none afore, sir,” the boy said.

  “And I reckon you don’t smoke nor cuss neither, do ye?”

  “I’ve cussed some,” Carl claimed.

  “Let’s hear ye,” Hoppy decreed.

  “Damn,” Carl said, and waited smiling for Hoppy’s approval, which was not forthcoming.

  “You cuss like a girl,” Hoppy said. He poured himself a generous splash of the Dew and clanked his glass against Carl’s. “Here’s down the rathole,” he toasted, and drank his off in one swallow, but Carl only took a timid sip and made a face. “You’ll get used to it,” Hoppy told him, but then realized that made it sound like Hoppy was going to keep him around long enough to have a chance to get used to it, so he added, “But I’m afraid I might not have any use for you. Can you drive this truck?”

  “Oh, gosh, sir, I wouldn’t want to try.”

  “Can you change a flat?”

  “A flat what, sir?”

  “Carl, this aint the army. You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ every other word. A flat tire, dammit. I don’t reckon you’ve ever messed around with any kind of a vehicle, now have you?”

  “My maw…I mean my Aunt Clemmie, she has a wagon, and many and a many a time I’ve hitched the mule to it and drove it.”

  Suppertime came and went, and although Hoppy had stuffed himself at that dinner on the grounds he reckoned he’d better have a bite or two at least to keep his stomach from growling at him in the middle of the night, so he fetched the poke of fried chicken parts, and he and Carl finished off a few of them, and then a sample of some of the pies and cakes, and Hoppy had a few more slugs of Dew although Carl didn’t manage to finish his first one. Hoppy found himself talking more than usual. There was just something about the boy that squeezed the words out of Hoppy. “You want to know the real honest-to-God reason I caint let ye jine up with me?” he said. “See if you caint understand it. When I play a town, like your town, everbody there is my family, and that town is my home for a whole week, and even though I am, as you would soon find out, a very hateful feller, leastways in my own eyes, I generally manage to feel that I am somehow doing some good in that town, so that it hurts me to leave it. But I have to leave it, I have to move on, you know, and I caint take anything with me. I have to start all over again in another town. I have to take that town and put it out of my mind. If I was to let ye jine me, I’d be hanging onto something I have to lose, I’d be dragging yesterday into tomorrow. It would be like…you know what ‘blackberry winter’ is, don’t ye, when they’s a late cold spell in May or early June, w
hen the blackberries are blooming but it feels like January?”

  “We had a real blackberry winter last month,” Carl said.

  “Well, then, you’d sort of be a blackberry winter to me. If you was to jine me, I’d probably take to callin ye ‘Blackie.’”

  “I don’t keer what ye call me,” Carl said. “Call me anything ye like. Just keep me.”

  “You ort to know I couldn’t pay you nothing. I’m saving up every penny I earn from admissions to buy myself another projector so’s I don’t have to have a gap between the reels.”

  “I aint looking for no wages,” Carl declared.

  “Well, just what are you looking for, son?”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘son’ cause you aint that much older’n me.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Take a good guess.”

  “Fifteen?”

  “Close enough. I’m sixteen. How old are you?”

  “Ten years past that.”

  “I would’ve taken ye for older’n twenty-six, but not much.”

  “So answer my question. Just what are you looking for? Excitement? You won’t find it hereabouts. Adventure? We aint going anywheres interesting. Education? I could learn you all I know between now and bedtime.”

  Carl took his first generous swig of the Dew, and coughed a bit. Then in a voice quieted by his cough or the significance of what he was about to say, he whispered, “I just need somebody to take keer of me.”

  “Your maw wouldn’t do that?”

  “I didn’t have a maw.”

  “Your Aunt Clemmie, then. I know she’s poverty-pore but couldn’t she feed ye?”