The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Maybe he’s given up on us,” Sharline said.

  They had a pleasant Sunday afternoon drive up into Newton County, passing through some real pretty country. Late in the afternoon, halfway to their destination, Hoppy stopped along the road and set the brake and said, “Hon, it’s about time you learned how to drive this rig.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t I do enough different things to help out? Why do I have to learn how to drive?”

  “Are you planning to stick with me?” he asked.

  “Like molasses,” she said.

  “Then you never know when the time might come someday that you’ll need to take Topper yourself and go somewhere. Or leastways help out with the driving from town to town.”

  So Sharline got behind the wheel, but she was clearly flummoxed. Hoppy explained each of the things she’d have to use—the starter, the choke, the gas, the clutch, the brake. There wasn’t any other traffic on the highway, which was truly a high way, with views far off into the mountains of Newton County.

  It took her several attempts to learn how to let out the clutch while pressing the gas at the proper rate, and Topper lurched and bucked all over the place. And once she got it going fairly smoothly, she couldn’t master the proper turning of the steering wheel to stay on the road. She slammed on the brakes. She stared at Hoppy. “I wet my dress,” she announced.

  He laughed. “That’s better than you could do that time the seat caught on fire.”

  They spent an hour on Sharline’s practicing the operation of Topper, but she never could get the hang of it. Hoppy reasoned to himself that Sharline was loaded with so many talents in so many different things that maybe she just didn’t have any room left over for the management of a complicated piece of machinery like a motor truck. “Don’t feel bad,” Hoppy consoled her as he returned to the driving himself. “I can’t play a lick on the pianer. I’ve been doing all the driving myself for so long I reckon I can just go on doing it.” Soon the highway crested a plateau that afforded a fabulous view to the north, miles and miles of mountains, blue mountains behind green mountains and misty gray mountains behind the blue mountains. He pointed. “Right up yonder way is Stay More. You can almost see it from here.” Sharline wanted to know if he would ever take her to his hometown. He told her he’d have to go there sometime soon just to get another jug or two of Chism’s Dew, and to check his mailbox, although he never got anything of significance in the mail.

  Before reaching their destination, Hoppy handed her his bugle. “Let’s see if they’s one other thing you can learn to do. Let’s see if you can’t blow a tune on that.” She put it to her pursed lips and tootled, but couldn’t create a tune. Hoppy took it back, driving with one hand, and played for her his tune which went From far yonder down the road here he comes again, folks, Hoppy Boyd, the happy moving showman of moving pitchers to show you another good’un. She watched him, and just as she could learn to roll cigarettes from watching him do it she could learn how to press and purse her lips and puff her cheeks to get a tune out of that bugle. She practiced for a while until she got pretty good at it, although the tune she finally came up with was more like From far yonder down the road here they come again, folks, Hoppy and Sharline, the happy moving showmen of moving pitchers to show you a bunch of good’uns.

  “That’ll do just fine,” he said, as they came into the outskirts of the village. “Now stick the bugle out the winder and give it all you got!”

  So their arrival in the town was just as heralded as any of his lone arrivals had been. And as in all the other towns, one by one and two by two they all came a-running, even the grownups and womenfolk, and every dog in town, and they followed Topper as he slowed down along the main road and came to a stop at Faught’s store. Unlike Ewell Tollett and Art Bedwell and many other storekeepers of Hoppy’s acquaintance, Arlis Faught was a fairly young feller, a real good-looking young man, and he was postmaster besides, or rather his mother was, and he ran the place for her.

  The store was closed, because it was late in the day and also because it was Sunday, but Arlis Faught came a-running from his house across the road and acted like Hoppy was his long lost brother. The two men were about the same age and even looked alike, although Hoppy thought that Arlis was a darn sight sightlier than himself. Hoppy introduced him to Sharline, and couldn’t help but notice the sparkle in Sharline’s eyes, probably caused by Arlis’ good looks as well as by his courtly manner. The various young ladies in the crowd were giving Sharline such jealous looks as would have damaged a lesser gal.

  “Hop, a whole year is just too blamed long,” Arlis Faught said. “Tomorrow when the post office opens I’ll show ye the calendar, that has got the days marked off since you was here last. I just caint tell ye how tickled to pieces we all of us are to have ye back again!” But he didn’t have to try to tell. The kids were clapping and the dogs were barking and some folks were dancing a jig.

  “Same place as last year?” Hoppy asked Arlis.

  Arlis nodded. “Right out back.” There was a broad meadow right behind the Faught store that made a great theater. It had a steep slope to it, but that was almost an advantage, with the screen at the lower end. As Hoppy drove around to the meadow, with Arlis hanging on to the running board and everybody else following, Sharline used her new-found flair for the bugle to blow a rousing rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  When Topper was parked in the place where it would remain for a week, Arlis said, “Never mind that it’s Sunday. Let’s us have the first show tonight!”

  “You know I caint do that,” Hoppy said. “But if you waited for a whole year, you can wait for one more night.”

  “Then come on over to the house and let Maw feed you some supper and spend the night with us in a good feather bed!”

  Hoppy laughed, thinking that Arlis’ phrasing made it sound like Arlis and his mother and Hoppy and Sharline would all get into one bed together. He knew that Arlis was just being polite anyhow and didn’t really mean the invitation. It was Hoppy’s duty to say, as he did now, “I thank ye kindly, but I reckon we’ll be fine enough right here with Topper.” He really liked Arlis, though, and wouldn’t have minded having supper at the Faught place.

  After Hoppy answered the crowd’s questions about the first show, “The Hills of Old Wyoming,” and prompted Sharline to give a verbal preview of “The Painted Stallion,” the crowd dispersed.

  “This is a right nice old town,” Hoppy said to Sharline, before they climbed up inside their truck-shack.

  “It’s all up so high,” she observed. “Not like the last two towns that are down in a valley surrounded by mountains.”

  “We’re right on top of a mountain here,” he remarked. Then he suggested, “Why don’t I drag the stove out here into the yard so we can fix supper out here?”

  He climbed up into Topper to get the stove. Inside, he saw at once that something was wrong. Something was missing, although it took him a moment to figure it out. Then he couldn’t believe it. All of the cans of film were gone from their rack on the wall! He searched all over the floor, thinking they might have got jostled out of their perch. But there was no mistake: every last reel of film he owned had been taken…except for the reel for the last episode of “The Painted Stallion,” which hadn’t been taken out of the projector when it was finished. He looked under the bed, and there, wrapped in the towel he kept it in, was his one private reel, “Assortment.” But all the other reels were gone.

  He jumped down. “Sharline, goddammit,” he said. “We are in one hell of a fix. Somebody has took all the film!”

  “No!” she said. “How could they do that?”

  “He could have climbed up into Topper while we was having dinner at the Bedwells.”

  “Emmett Binns?” she said.

  “I don’t know who else,” he said.

  They both thought back, and recounted the last time they had been inside of Topper and any other times they might not have been watching the
truck. They reflected upon the fact that Topper, like all the houses in the Ozarks, had no lock on the door. They reflected upon the fact that theft was practically unknown in the Ozarks…until it had started happening at the camp meeting and perhaps had become infectious and contagious. Mostly, they reflected upon Emmett Binns and his mean, low-down, misbegotten motives for having taken several hundred dollars worth of pitcher shows.

  Then all they could do was reflect upon what could possibly be done. Hoppy wanted to go right away right back to where they’d come from, where the films had been stolen, and he even started up Topper and got it out on the road before Sharline could talk some sense into his head and persuade him there wasn’t any point in going back there, because Binns would be long gone.

  So he stopped Topper and turned it around once again, but not before Arlis Faught had seen him and come a-running. “Thought for a second you was a-leaving town!” Arlis exclaimed to them.

  Hoppy broke the terrible news to Arlis, and said he didn’t know what to do but there just weren’t any films to be shown.

  Arlis took the news worse than Hoppy himself had. He was frustrated and furious. “Yeah, I know that preacher Emmett Binns,” he said. “And I wouldn’t put it past him. Where do you suppose he might have headed?”

  “They’s no telling,” Hoppy said. “That’s the problem.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll round up the boys,” Arlis said. “They’s about eight or nine fellers in this town who has got fairly good vehicles, and we’ll just make up a posse. Yes, just like in the Hopalong Cassidy pitcher shows where the posse tracks down the rustlers and the robbers. We’ll catch that son of a bitch. Pardon my language, Sharline.”

  That was some comfort to Hoppy and Sharline and helped them get through the sad night. Neither of them felt like sleeping. Hoppy speculated on what might be done if the posse couldn’t catch up with Binns. Hoppy didn’t have the money to order a whole new set of pitcher shows, and even if he did it would take an awful long time to mail off the order and get the films delivered. If he had the money, it would be quicker just to drive all the way to Memphis, but that was a horrible thought, and he wasn’t sure that Topper could stand a trip of that length.

  They might just have to give up showing pitchers and go to work for a living. Sharline would make a good schoolteacher or a good sign painter or a good barber or just about anything she set her mind to, and Hoppy could…well, Hoppy could find something to do, although his hatred of himself returned in full force when he realized that he really wasn’t good for nothing except showing pitchers.

  It was a perplexity, a sore kettle of fish such as had never confronted Hoppy in all his born days. He never would have got to sleep that night if Sharline hadn’t thought to do something about it. First, she went out in the moonlight into the woods and besought her fairy friends. Then by and by she came back and made Hoppy get into the bed, where she loved him for so long in so many various ways that he finally fell asleep.

  Chapter thirteen

  Word spread quickly all over south Newton County that a no-good scoundrel of a circuit-riding preacher name of Emmett Binns had robbed Hopalong’s Roaming Picture Shows of all the pitchers. People coming to Faught’s store and post office to get their Monday morning mail made a huge outcry over the news of this crime, and by late morning Arlis Faught had organized his posse: he himself would drive his good Chevy Cabriolet roadster, and he invited Hoppy and Sharline to ride with him. Eight other men driving various vehicles, half-ton pick-up trucks as well as coupes, sedans, and a touring car, would also eagerly join the determined posse.

  The difference between Faught’s posse and those of, say, the posse in “The Hills of Old Wyoming” that went out in search of the rustlers, was that a western posse customarily stuck together in their search for the evildoers; Faught’s men agreed to split up and fan out, going east, south, west, and north to cover as much territory as possible in their search for a certain black Ford coupe containing a runaway preacher and a couple dozen reels of motion pitcher film.

  “Let’s git ’im, boys!” Arlis shouted to his men as they started their engines and sped away. Two of the other vehicles accompanied Faught as far as Fallsville before they split off at the fork there, one heading south, the other west, while Arlis turned northward. From his discussions with Hoppy about Binns’ earlier movements, Faught had decided the best bet would be to hunt through western Newton County and up into Carroll County.

  It was a fine auto Arlis had, and speedy. That little roadster had white-wall tires, even, with the spare attached to the rear trunk, which actually was a rumble seat. There wasn’t a back seat, so all three of ’em had to sit crowded together in the front seat, with Sharline in the middle. Arlis loved to talk while he drove, which was fine with Hoppy, so that Hoppy didn’t have to talk any himself except to make an interjection now and then about Faught’s palaver. Mostly what Arlis talked about was pitcher shows and how much they meant to him and how he wished he could see them more often than the one time a year that Hoppy came around. Arlis knew more about Hop-along Cassidy than Hoppy himself knew. He even knew lots about the career of William Boyd the actor, who had already been a popular Hollywood star before an accident of destiny gave him a chance to become Hopalong Cassidy. He even knew the story of how Clarence Mulford, the author of the many Hopalong novels, had become furious at William Boyd for changing Hopalong’s appearance and character so thoroughly from what Mulford had intended.

  Arlis, in his monologue about pitcher shows, even got somewhat poetic, which made Sharline smile with pleasure. “Up in these mountains, ye know, it gets mighty lonesome most of the time, with nothing much to do. Most folks don’t know nothing except that they’re a-living. And a life has got to be got through, with whatever can be found to pass the hours and the days and the nights, and they’s just not nothing that will kill off the tedious hours easier than a good pitcher show.”

  “I know what you mean,” Sharline said. “My life was empty and worthless until Hoppy came along.”

  “Where’d you meet up with ole Hop?” Arlis asked her, so Sharline was allowed to contribute to the chitchat for a while, talking about her family and where she’d grown up and how she stowed away on Topper in disguise as a boy, and so on. She even told things she hadn’t told Hoppy, such as that when Sharline was a child her mother Clemmie Whitlow had kept Sharline shut up in the corn crib all the time in order to keep her from having any contacts with people, who in her mother’s firm belief were hurtful and monstrous. Sharline’s revelations of her childhood prompted Arlis to talk about his own childhood, and before long Arlis and Sharline were swapping all kinds of stories about what a miserable growing-up they’d endured.

  Whenever they came to a town or a village, Arlis would stop at the post office, where he usually knew the postmaster or postmistress, and he would inquire if anybody had seen Emmett Binns or heard tell of his coming or going, and to request that Arlis be contacted at once if anybody did catch sight of Emmett Binns or his black Ford coupe. After stopping and getting out at one town, and stretching awhile because of the way they were crowded into the front seat, Hoppy declared that he’d never ridden in a rumble seat before and he offered to sit back there. So Arlis opened up the rumble seat and Hoppy climbed in. As they drove on, he noticed that Sharline kept sitting right where she had been sitting, in the middle of the seat with her shoulder up against Arlis’, and Hoppy wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary, that she could move over and give Arlis more room to drive. Through the back window, Hoppy could see that ole Arlis never did stop talking. Hoppy enjoyed riding open-air in the rumble seat although it was a bit dusty.

  By late afternoon, when they hadn’t caught a clue to Binns’ whereabouts, they decided they’d covered enough territory for one day and had better turn around and head on back, taking a different route home. The last town they came to before turning back was Omega, up in Carroll County, and there Hoppy discovered that Captain Thomson’s Pitcher Shows had set up to
play the town. Hoppy had never got along well with his competitor, whose route to the west of Hoppy’s was more extensive than Hoppy’s, and who had a much larger collection of shows which he showed on twin projectors so there would be no pause between reels. He also showed inside a big tent almost like a circus tent, with hundreds of folding chairs. Hoppy and Cap Thomson had once bickered over two towns in the west of Hoppy’s route which Thomson wrongly claimed belonged to him, although Hoppy had been playing them for the previous couple of years. Hoppy really wasn’t in the mood for stopping to say howdy to Cap Thompson, but a thought suddenly occurred to him, and he hollered for Arlis to stop.

  Cap Thompson had a house-trailer home that was separate from his huge tent. He didn’t smile when Hoppy climbed out of the rumble seat and said howdy. He said, “If you think I’ll let you have Omega, you’re bad mistook.”

  “Nossir,” Hoppy said. “I don’t want Omega, which is pretty far out of my part of the country. We’re just passing through, trying to find a preacher named Emmett Binns.”

  “Sure I know that rascal, but I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “Well, he stole all of my pitcher shows.”

  “You don’t say. That’s terrible. He must’ve had a good reason. I’ve heared him preach about how sinful pitcher shows are. How did he come to take ’em from ye?”

  “It’s a long story, and you don’t want to hear it. But he has put me out of business, and what I want to know is, do you have any extry pitcher shows that you would sell me or rent me or loan me the borry of?”