The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “I aint talkin about food, or money, or clothes, or a roof overhead. I’m talkin about keer. About somebody to belong to. About somebody who gives a damn. Could I have some more of that Dew?” Hoppy obligingly tilted the demijohn over Carl’s glass, and Carl took a brave swallow and asked, “Hoppy, do you believe in ghosts?”

  Hoppy snorted or scoffed, or both, but said, “I’ve never seen one, personally, but I’ve heared plenty about ’em, and I aint fixing to deny ’em. They don’t scare me, though. Do they scare you?”

  “No, they don’t try to. They do keer for me, and they come at night and take me out into the woods to talk and to dance and play.”

  Hoppy gave Carl a sharp look, though it was getting too dark to see the youth’s face clearly. He was beginning to think that Carl might be a little touched. “What do these here ghosts look like?” he asked. “Anybody you know?”

  “No, they’re not like folks. I mean, they’re little people. No more’n that,” Carl used his hand to indicate a dwarf’s height. “I caint tell if they’re gals or fellers, but somehow it don’t matter. And some of them have wings like butterflies. Or dragonflies. And all of them are so light and pale and ghostly you can see right through ’em.”

  “Sounds like fairies to me,” Hoppy declared.

  “Oh, do you mean there is such things? Have you seen fairies?”

  “Not when I was awake. Do your fairies talk like everbody else talks, or in some strange language?”

  “They sound just like everbody else, only…only more songlike sort of.”

  “So you’re trying to get away from them, is that it?”

  “Aw naw, they’re my friends. And they said they’d always be with me wherever I go. I’d like to know iffen they’ve follered me.”

  It was full dark now, and Hoppy glanced around, as if he might see some of Carl’s fairies cavorting in the moonlight. Even if the young man was someway not right in the head, Hoppy was thoroughly enjoying his company. There was another hour or so to kill until bedtime, even assuming he might care to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and Hoppy knew he’d have to invite the kid to spend the night. He could put the folded sheet-screen on top of the folded tarp to make a pallet on the floor of Topper, and that would be fairly comfortable. Hell, he was halfway tempted to offer the boy his own cot and sleep on the pallet himself. But meanwhile they could just sip their Dew and enjoy some conversation. Hoppy considered trying to explain to the boy what was obvious to Hoppy: that the boy had just cooked up all those fairies out of his lonesome imagination, the same way all of us have made up imaginary playmates at one time or another. But wouldn’t it be better to let the boy go on believing whatever he wanted to believe?

  One thing was for sure: Hoppy knew that he wouldn’t be able to get rid of Carl, not easily. For the first time in his long experience with runaways or would-be runaways, he had one that he might just keep. Whether Carl seemed like a kind of grown-up Billy Millwee, with a little Kit Carson thrown in, or whether he just had better reasons than Ila Fay or any of those other gals had, he had somehow won Hoppy over, even if he was a little peculiar in his notions about those sprites or elves or leprechauns or whatever. Hoppy knew that such critters had a reputation for being naughty and full of mischief, and he hoped Carl’s fairies would behave themselves.

  Hoppy rolled himself a cigarette and lit it, then with the same match he lit one of his kerosene lanterns, turned low, just enough so they could see each other. The dim light from the glowing wick made Carl’s soft, pleasant face seem sort of ghostlike, and Hoppy was inspired to wind up and deliver himself of a rumination about ghostly aspects of the business in which he was involved, not just the images on the screen (and many times a newcomer to the experience of pitcher shows had been compelled to go behind the screen to see what was there, as if the ghostly image on the screen was not substantial), but the fact that William Boyd, with his white hair and white eyebrows (not to mention his white horse Topper) is a ghostlike presence in all his appearances as Hopalong Cassidy. Of all Hollywood’s actors, Boyd was the palest, most unreal, most haunting of all the ghost presences on the silver screen…Hoppy paused to be sure his listener got the significance of that word “silver,” because silver is the most ghostlike of tints. Carl listened raptly to Hoppy’s ideas and digressions, and Hoppy was amazed at himself, that he was so talkative. He reflected, although not aloud to Carl, that a true friend is somebody who brings out the best in oneself, especially one’s best words.

  He had to remind himself, eventually, that this was supposed to be an interview of an applicant for the newly created job of all-round helping hand. Tomorrow he would find out if Carl had the ability to thread the projector and fire up the delco and maybe even juggle. But there remained a few questions to be answered tonight, so Hoppy could sleep on the answers. “Can you by any chance play a musical instrument?” he asked.

  “I’m fairly good on the pianer,” Carl said.

  “Glad to know it, but we aint got room for one of them.” Hoppy was aware that the long heritage of motion pitcher showing had once included a live pianist to accompany the silent pictures, but the smallest piano he’d ever seen was still too big to be lashed to Topper’s tail end.

  “I can play the banjo and the dulcimore too,” Carl said. “But I never had ary of my own.”

  “Maybe we can find you one some’ers. Well now, I reckon they’s just one more question I have to ask you, but it’s a important one. Can you read?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s something I can do.”

  “The reason I ask is, you may have noticed all those words written out in ‘The Painted Stallion.’ Even though it’s a talkie, there are all them there titles or captions, like in the beginning where it says, all capital letters, ‘TO THE HEROES OF YESTERDAY! THOSE PIONEERS WHO BRAVED THE PERILOUS TREK WEST? WARD, DEFEATED A HOSTILE WILDERNESS, AND BLAZED A GLORIOUS TRAIL ACROSS THE PAGES OF AMERICAN HISTORY.’ Or like each episode has those words about each of the main characters, like ‘Dupray—deposed official determined to destroy the American wagon train before it reaches Santa Fe.’ Quite a few of these folks can’t read, you know, and you probably noticed that some of ’em had to ask whoever was sitting next to ’em to read those things for them, but oftentimes whoever’s sitting next to ’em caint read neither. I’d get out there and read those things for everbody myself, but I’ve got to be making adjustments on the projector early in the show, so what I need is for you to get up in front of everbody and read the captions for us. Do you reckon you could do that?”

  “I aint never spoke in front of a crowd afore,” Carl declared. “And my voice sure is shaller.”

  “It’ll do.” Hoppy wondered how much longer it would take before Carl’s voice broke. Sixteen was pretty old to still be talking alto. “And maybe we’ll find somebody who’ll sell us a cheap banjo or dulcimore.” Hoppy stood up and stretched, and declared, “Well, it’s time to grab ourself a flop. I’ll fix ye a pallet on the floor.”

  “That’s okay, sir. I’ll just sleep out here on the ground.”

  “The hell you will. You’d get drenched with dew and I aint talking about Chism’s Dew. You’ll be comfy on a soft pallet in the back of the truck.”

  Hoppy prepared the pallet, and then said, “Well, we’d best shake the dew off the lily, and I aint talking about Chism’s Dew neither although that’s what caused it, I imagine.” He walked away from the truck a good little distance and unbuttoned his britches and started a stream, but Carl didn’t join him, as Billy Millwee had once done. When he’d finished and shaken it and turned, he said, “Don’t you need to shake your lily too?”

  “I reckon not,” Carl declared, and after they’d gone to bed, Hoppy couldn’t help but wonder if the boy might wet the pallet. He was still awake some time later when he noticed the boy getting up from the pallet and going out. But he didn’t return quickly, and Hoppy had to get up and go look for him. He found him at a distance from the truck, on the edge of the deep woods.

 
; “Any of your fairies show up?” Hoppy asked.

  “They did, but you scared ’em off.”

  Chapter six

  Carl Whitlow sure did make himself terrible useful right off the bat. Hoppy woke to the smell of coffee making and bacon frying, and right short he had breakfast laid out on the little table, and damned if there wasn’t even some fresh cream for the coffee, which cream, Hoppy learned, Carl had obtained from a cow in some nearby pasture. He had also obtained, from an undisclosed nearby source, a straw broom, with which he had given Topper a thorough sweeping, badly needed, not to mention a dusting and a wiping too. Hoppy wondered if Carl had had some help from his fairy friends. He was glad to see everything looking so freshed up but he was abashed that he’d allowed everything to get so crummy in the first place. And the breakfast was just right. How did Carl know the eggs was exactly the way Hoppy liked ’em, over easy? But Carl wouldn’t eat with him, hanging back to wait on him like womenfolk did until Hoppy was done. Hoppy wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, because he’d already decided that Carl was a right peculiar feller. For instance, he wore that hat all the time, never took it off, and Hoppy wondered if he slept in it. It was just a old floppy felt fedora, a size too big and the band sweat-stained. It just barely cleared the ceiling. Hoppy knew that before long he’d have to get Carl some new duds, if they could find a store big enough, or else have to order from Sears Roebuck.

  After breakfast, before it got too hot inside of Topper, Hoppy gave Carl some lessons on the equipment. The delco was fairly simple, just how to fill the gas tank and how to crank it and start it, and where to oil it, sometimes how to clean the spark plug. But the projector, that big old Western Electric, was something else. Hoppy not only had to point out all the gizmos—the film chutes, the sprockets, the idler, the stripper, the pad roller, the sound gate, the projector head and magazines—but the exciting lamps and how to focus them and how to change them if they burned out. Carl thought it was exciting that the lamps were called exciting lamps, because they were a source of light and as important to the show as the sun is to the earth. Hoppy felt obliged to give Carl a basic lesson on electrons, cathodes, anodes, and photo-electric cells. Carl was a quick study. Hoppy thought of himself, the projectionist, as a weaver, who wove the film from the upper magazine down through all those loops around the various sprockets and through the various gates into the lower magazine. You had to have nimble fingers, and as it turned out Carl’s fingers were not only quicker but more sprightly than Hoppy’s. The film may pass the light aperture with a controlled intermittent motion, but it must pass the sound aperture with an absolutely steady motion. Before the morning was over, Carl knew as much as Hoppy could learn him about the big projector, and was able to answer correctly any test question that Hoppy could throw at him, for example, what is the purpose of the loops in the film? What does the loop between the intermittent sprocket and the sound sprocket do? Carl said, correctly, it absorbs the intermittent motion of the film.

  Before noon dinnertime rolled around, Carl wanted to be excused from the projector so he could start fixing dinner. Hoppy had to explain to him that unlike most folks who labor hard in the fields all morning and require a big dinner to get them through the afternoon, they hadn’t done anything in the way of tough manual work, and therefore all that Hoppy ever had for dinner was just lunch: something like a can of Vienna sausages or sardines and a bunch of crackers. But Hoppy was pleased to know that Carl considered himself able to fix a regular dinner if need be. There was still plenty of leftover pie and cake.

  When the afternoon heated up, as was his custom, Hoppy moseyed over to the general store’s porch to sit and whittle with the other men, but this time he took Carl with him, and introduced him simply as his sidekick. Carl did not own a pocketknife, so Hoppy treated him to one for seventy-nine cents at the store. Obviously, Carl hadn’t had much experience with whittling, but he got the hang of it. It doesn’t take much skill just to shave the flinders off a cedar stick. Whitlow the whittler, the men jibed. Carl was by far the youngest man there, but he was a big-enough boy that nobody thought nothing of his listening in when the men got around to their favorite pastime of telling dirty tales and jokes. Hoppy watched Carl’s face out of the corner of his eye, and some of the bawdy tales clearly didn’t mean a gol-darn thing to him, so later, when they were back at Topper and Hoppy was training Carl in the juggling of balls, Hoppy asked him if there was anything he hadn’t got in those jokes or tales, and Carl allowed as how he hadn’t understood some of the words. What was “nooky”? Was it the same as “tail”? And what was “tearing off a piece” torn off of? The poor kid didn’t even know that “screw” was something else besides hardware. But he caught on to juggling real fast, and in fact got to where he could juggle six balls at a time, which was one more than Hoppy could do. Hoppy worked out a routine where they could juggle together and catch each other’s balls. When the customers started showing up that evening, Hoppy let Carl sell the tickets, although some of the customers were a little slow or cautious to give their money to a stranger who was just a teenaged kid not wearing a cowboy hat like Hoppy. But with Carl handling the tickets and some of the juggling, Hoppy could devote himself to the magic show, which was his specialty. He hadn’t had time today to start giving Carl lessons on magic, teaching him the tricks and the secrets; eventually he wanted to use Carl as a prop in some of the tricks and maybe saw him in half or levitate him or something. Between them they were going to give these folks a real show for their money.

  Carl was ready to start the projector showing the first reel of the serial but Hoppy wanted him out front to read the captions for the benefit of all those not blessed with the power of literacy. So Hoppy started “The Painted Stallion” himself and Carl stood up in front of the audience (it wasn’t the whole population of the town and wasn’t as large as the previous town’s) and looked over his shoulder to read the words when they came on the screen. His alto voice was stuttering at first but he got over it, although he couldn’t read the capital letters in a capital-letter voice but only a lower-case voice that was not audible beyond the first four or five rows: “trail to empire. 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…. across the western wilderness swept the legend of the painted stallion…. the rider of the painted stallion…. mysterious figure sworn to defeat outlawry….” At that point there was a close-up of The Rider with her bare arms and shoulders which ought to have been enough to let everybody know that she wasn’t an Indian chief but a woman, although most folks never got it until the eighth episode. She shot the first whistling arrow to warn of the ambush and then she and her painted horse leapt over a perilous chasm.

  Hoppy let Carl change the reels and he did it so quickly there wasn’t time for any restlessness to break out amongst the audience: no time for horseplay or roughhouse and if there was Hoppy was right there to stop it.

  After the show was over and everybody was gone, without even being asked Carl moved up and down the rows of seats picking up any trash that had been left behind. When Hoppy thanked him for that, Carl said, “Sir, you know, we could make even more money if we sold things to eat. Candy. Peanuts. Maybe even popcorn.”

  “Popcorn?” Hoppy said. It was a farfetched idea, eating popcorn at a pitcher show. But the more he thought about it, the more he was inclined to give it a try, so the next day he went over to Bedwell’s Store and waited for the candy drummer to show up, the man who came to sell boxes of candy to Art Bedwell, and when the drummer came Hoppy told him he was in the business of showing pitcher shows and that was his truck right over yonder by the schoolhouse, and could he get wholesale prices on candy? He was able to buy a box each of Baby Ruths, Oh Henrys, Butterfingers, and Powerhouses. Art Bedwell sold him, also at wholesale, a thirty-pound sack of peanuts in the shell and a
ten-pound sack of kernels of popping corn. Also two hundred little paper pokes for holding the peanuts and the popped corn. Carl suggested getting some salt to sprinkle on the popcorn so Hoppy bought a box. The whole outlay came to nearly twenty dollars, so Carl was going to be up the creek if he was wrong about refreshments for the customers. But that afternoon, among the loungers on the store porch, when the topic of conversation got around to the terrible heat of the day and the awful drought that had afflicted the area, Hoppy offered to bet anyone who cared to make a wager that it would rain this very night, and not only did Art Bedwell bet twenty dollars but various other men made bets ranging from fifty cents to five dollars, for a total of over forty dollars bet against Hoppy that it would not rain.

  “Sir,” said Carl on the way home from the store, “if we do make any money from a-sellin the candy and stuff, you’ll lose it all on that bet, and then some.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘sir,’” Hoppy said for the eleven-teenth time. It made him feel old. “Don’t worry. It’s a sure bet.”

  Both bets were sure. At the show that night, at a table set up beside Topper with a sign hanging above it that Carl had painted to proclaim CONCESSIONARY, Carl sold everybody plenty of candy, peanuts and the popcorn that he had popped on the kerosene stove and then properly salted and even buttered with the barter-butter that they had in good supply. Hoppy noticed the distinctive smell of the popcorn and thought it made a nice fragrance for the night air. Hoppy tried some of the popcorn himself and discovered that it gave your hands something to do while you were watching the show. But you don’t want your popcorn to get wet, so, as always happened with the second episode of “The Painted Stallion,” when the dark skies on the screen opened up and poured down, the skies here in this real world darkened and dumped a goose drownder on them, and everybody rushed their popcorn protectively to the cover of the tarp or of trees or of whatever closed vehicles they might have come in.