This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  “87, LADIES AND GENTS, 87!”

  Hazel added a bean to her card. Bertha frowned at hers.

  “The next morning he built a fire, then killed a wild hog and ate it with crackers from the crew’s rations. Not until the moon lit the night sky nearly two days later, was he able to see Lampong Bay and walk out of the jungle along the Koeripan to the appalling ruin of Telok Betong. At the first of September, Uncle Augustus took a ferry across the Straits of Sunda to locate Louis Hurlburt. The volcanic island of Krakatau had mostly disappeared, as had the seaports of Anjer and Merak, along with the Dutch admiral’s pretty daughter, her collection of Java sparrows, and more than thirty thousand poor souls. Though Uncle Augustus searched the west coast of Java for a month from Tjeringen to Bantam Bay, he never found his companion, and the malaria he contracted from tramping through those damp jungles of paradise remained with him for the rest of his days.”

  “12, LADIES AND GENTS, 12!”

  Nobody spoke at the table. Rain dribbled off the tent sides, and the electric lanterns shook in the damp breeze. Then the ruddy fellow shoved his chair back and stood up. He tossed his burnt cigar out into the mud and stared the dwarf in the eye and began clapping. The four ladies remained seating, but they joined in, too, with a fine round of applause. Rascal acknowledged their admiration with a stiff bow from his seat.

  When they were through clapping, the farm boy remarked, “Well, that’s a swell story. Was any part of it true?”

  “Of course,” replied the dwarf, sliding a bean to the bottom row of his card. He added, “Uncle Augustus wrote it all down in a private diary which was bequeathed to me after a Prussian sniper took his life at Delville Wood. I value no possession of mine more greatly and it’s been immensely instructive these past few years. Dear old Uncle Augustus believed that our lives bear irrefutable testimony to the immortal purpose of character and courage in this world, and he held selflessness as the pinnacle of virtues. Indeed, his epitaph on the family mausoleum at Hannibal reads most eloquently: We owe respect to the living; to the dead, we owe only truth.”

  “13, LADIES AND GENTS, 13.” The pitchman’s voice sounded weary.

  The dwarf slid another bean across his bottom row, then cried, “Why, I believe I’ve won!” He stood and shouted loudly enough for everyone under the tent to hear, “BEANO!”

  Alvin got up and walked off into the rainy dark.

  The breeze felt warmer somehow, but the drizzle persisted. When he was sickest with consumption, Alvin had dreamt of angels in gauze masks wandering the halls of the sanitarium in search of those whose failing lungs would lead them to God’s bright countenance, or eternal night, depending upon whether the Bible was true or not. Now he wondered how it felt to be carried away by a giant sea wave. He imagined a blast of wind and the sky of stars disappearing, his body thrust suddenly upwards like a bird in flight.

  Alvin walked out to the front of the muddy camp where the roadside stand was crowded with motorcars and people. He smelled liquor in the dark and burning pipe tobacco. The woman he had seen with the child under the beano tent sat in the rear seat of a brown DeSoto. She held a cup of coffee to her lips, sipping like a cat. A pack of men in suits and neckties stood behind the automobile just under the rear awning, yammering away about Jack Johnson and Kansas blue laws. Another crowd of fellows in a Ford runabout pulled in off the road, soaking wet and singing “Alabamy Bound” at the top of their lungs. Getting to the short order counter ahead of them, Alvin bought a hotdog and a Coca-Cola from the change in his pocket and went off to the side of the building. A large truck roared by on the wet road. Alvin felt the damp draft on his face as it passed. Stifling a cough, he ate the hotdog and drank his soda pop and threw the empty bottle into a thick growth of sumac. An angry voice cursed back at him from the dark and a sturdy-looking man in mudcaked overalls and a denim jacket came out of the bushes, buttoning up his fly. Looking Alvin square in the eye, he produced the empty pop bottle. “Fill this up with corn liquor, young fellow, and I won’t crack you in the head like you just done me.” Then he bent forward so Alvin could see a bloody laceration at the hairline.

  “I didn’t even know you was there,” the farm boy said, though he might have supposed in a place such as this there would be someone lurking in the bushes.

  “You ain’t been around all that long, have you?”

  “What of it?”

  “You been sick, ain’t you? Don’t lie to me. I can see it in your eyes. You got the cure, but it ain’t made you well, so you gone looking for another and all you found is more trouble, and now you’re sicker’n you ever been, and that’s the plain truth, ain’t it?”

  Alvin wiped his nose with the back of a sleeve and shook his head as the rain began to fall harder again. “I catched a cold this morning, that’s all.”

  The man took a sniff of the pop bottle. “I had the whooping cough once, and that wasn’t nothing but a sidetrack. Am I better off for it? Well, I can still do a pretty fair buck-and-wing when the fiddler plays, and peddle bananas enough for a suit of up-to-the-minute clothes and a swell lay every other week or so with any little slip-shoe lovey I like, if that’s ‘better off’ in your lingo.”

  “I ain’t said nothing about that,” Alvin replied, watching another automobile streak past. The man tossed Alvin’s empty pop bottle back into the sumac. He smelled like onions when the wet breeze shifted and one of his eyes sagged unnaturally and Alvin guessed he had a kink from too much back-stall booze.

  “Who was it that run you off? Your daddy? Is that how come you’re looking all blue? He tan your britches once too often?” The man chuckled.

  “What’s it to you?” the farm boy answered. He didn’t care for this fellow and wished he hadn’t begun gabbing with him in the first place. He felt his fever coming on, maybe even a coughing fit.

  The man stared at Alvin like he had a bug on his face. “Well, don’t pay no mind to that. We all done things we ain’t proud of. We like to be held up to our better angels, but it ain’t always that simple, is it? Why, I seen men so beaten down with shame that life become just a dark cloud they couldn’t see out of no more, and I’m here to tell you liquor don’t cure it, neither, though some of us surely believed that’s so. Truth is, nobody’s wise to how cold-blooded and mean this world can be when a fellow’s out of sorts with the straight and narrow and can’t see his way back and there ain’t no forgiveness waiting up the road.”

  “I ain’t asking no one to pass the hat,” Alvin said, temper rising. He didn’t care for folks feeling sorry him even when he was hid away in the sanitarium, and he surely didn’t need no dumbbell’s sympathy.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “You said it.”

  The wind gusted hard, blowing wet leaves across the rainy night sky. The young bunch in the Ford runabout swung back out into the road and drove off, still singing like melon vendors. Alvin envied them, wished he’d been invited along.

  The man said, “I guess you’re a pretty tough egg, aren’t you?”

  Alvin frowned. “How’s that?”

  “You don’t let nothing stir you up, do you?

  “Well, I ain’t no baby.”

  “Oh yeah?” The man smirked. “Well, answer me this, sonny boy: who’s buying your breakfast?”

  The cabin door was ajar when Alvin came back from the roadside stand. He peeked through the window and saw Chester beside one of the camp cots with an electric lantern in hand. His suit was smudged with dirt, his felt hat dripping rainwater. When he noticed the farm boy on the stoop, he said, “I got a job for you boys.”

  A damp gust of wind shook the walls of the small structure and hundreds of tiny flecks of rotted wood cascaded down from the ceiling.

  Alvin shielded his eyes from the glow of the lantern. “What’s that?”

  “I’ll show you outside.”

  “Thunderstorm’s coming,” Alvin noted after smelling the air. Farm life had taught him how to smell a storm on a night wind, hours before it arrive
d. It was a dandy skill, but didn’t earn him much more than dry clothes on a rainy day.

  “We don’t have time to worry about rain,” Chester replied. “Too much work to do tonight.”

  The dwarf rose from a dark corner of the cabin, suitcase in hand. Illuminated in lamplight, his eyes glowed yellow and his skin looked waxen and old, his hair white as corn silk. Chester directed the lamp toward him. “You can leave that here. You’ll be coming back soon as you’re done with the job.”

  Rascal put down his suitcase. “All right.”

  “Storm’s coming up,” Alvin said, tucking his shirt in. “Be here soon. Maybe quicker.”

  “I heard you the first time,” Chester said, bringing the electric lantern back toward Alvin, suspending it in front of his face. “I tell you, don’t worry about it. Weather’s got nothing to do with your job tonight. A little rain won’t bother a thing.”

  “Be more’n a little, I’d guess.”

  “No matter, you’ve got plenty of work to do, rain or no rain.”

  “There’ll be rain,” Alvin assured him.

  “Swell,” said Chester, losing patience. “I’ll be waiting by the car. Hop to it.”

  He walked out.

  Alvin went to the cabin door where black droplets swirled about on the wind. Close on the heels of an electric flash in the east, thunder boomed across the dark. He took a hard look at the sky. Lightning could strike a man dead in an instant. On the farm, cows and horses got hit now and again. Fried to the bone, carcass smoking, even in Noah’s rain. Alvin felt the dwarf beside him, also studying the clouds with a watchful eye.

  “Won’t pay to get hit by lightning,” the farm boy said, holding a hand out into the rain which was falling harder now. His shoes and socks felt soggy.

  “I remember being terrified of it as a child,” the dwarf agreed. “Auntie had to close my windows and tie down the shades so that I couldn’t see it flash. I’d hide under the bedcovers until the thunder stopped and Auntie told me it was safe to come out.”

  Alvin shook his head. “That’s dumb.”

  “Oh?”

  “Everyone knows you can’t hide. If it’s got your name, you’re fixed, and that’s all there is to it.”

  The dwarf stared up into the dark, rain blowing about overhead. “I don’t believe in that sort of silly superstition.”

  “Don’t matter if you believe it or not,” Alvin replied, watching sheets of rain drench the tourist camp. “It’s a fact, just the same. If you doubt it, go on and take a walk out there. You don’t need a lightning rod on your head, neither. Just remember: it’s not in God’s plan to have everybody check out in their sleep.”

  He smiled, hoping he’d gotten under Rascal’s skin a little, stirred him up some.

  Another lightning strike lit the sky to the east. The dwarf counted by seconds to nine, then the thunder roared across the prairie. As the echo died away, Chester’s voice followed from the automobile parked under a black oak by the road. “Hurry up, goddamn it!”

  Standing just out of the rain beneath the big oak, Chester held the electric lantern over the rear seat of the Packard for Alvin to see inside. Pale lamplight made visible a youth’s face partly wrapped in gunny cloth and shadows. His eyes were shut and his hands folded into the heavy overcoat that covered him up.

  “He’s out of the game,” Chester said, as if it weren’t obvious.

  Alvin’s skin crawled. “You shot him?”

  “He slipped on a banana peel and broke his neck.”

  The dwarf slid quietly into the front seat on the driver’s side for a better look.

  Alvin stared at him, heart thumping. The boy wasn’t much older than himself.

  Chester spoke up. “He had more spirit than brains.”

  “Huh?”

  He handed the lantern over to the farm boy whose legs were trembling now.

  “He had a set of keys I needed and didn’t care to negotiate for them. He was a stubborn little sonofabitch.” Chester smiled. “I liked that.”

  Alvin directed the lantern again toward the rear seat of the Packard. Chester had hiked the boy’s collar up higher than normal to hide the bruising about the larynx, but the swelling showed still in his cheeks and eyelids. Alvin found himself transfixed by the boy, slumped in the seat, looking drunk and passed out, yet in fact deader than last November’s turkey. The farm boy pressed his face to the glass and watched the dwarf climb into the rear seat beside the dead boy as if they were old friends out for a ride in a motorcar. Alvin shuddered as rain began to fall in earnest.

  Chester said, “He’s just some hick. Nobody to concern yourselves over. Go on, jump in and get acquainted. We need to beat it out of here before somebody sees him.”

  “How come you brought him here, anyhow?”

  “Well, I thought you boys could give him a swell send-off.”

  Half a mile or so from the tourist camp, Chester pulled off the high way onto a narrow road that led east through a soggy wheat field to a dilapidated farmhouse and a sagging old barn. He parked next to the storm cellar behind the barn and got out. Both Alvin and the dwarf joined him there in the rain. Chester said, “Come on, get the kid out of the car.”

  He took the electric lantern off the front seat of the Packard and switched it on. “Look here, boys, I have to be getting along. I’ve got an appointment in town tonight and it won’t pay to be late. There’s a shovel and a pickaxe in the cellar.” He handed the electric lantern to the farm boy. “When you’re done putting this kid in the ground, go back to the camp and get some sleep, then meet me at the Methodist church in the morning. You remember it? That tall skinny white building with the steeple we passed by this afternoon. If you hurry along, it won’t take you more than a couple hours. When you get there, don’t go in until the service lets out, all right?”

  With the rain pouring down harder, Alvin asked, “Where do you want us to bury him?”

  “I don’t care.”

  Then Chester got back into the Packard and started the motor. A great cloudy fog of exhaust billowed out of the tailpipes. He told the farm boy, “Go on, get him out of there.”

  Alvin gave the lamp to the dwarf, then reluctantly leaned inside the Packard and grabbed the dead boy by his shirt collar and pulled him up off the seat. The boy’s corpse smelled like fresh shaving soap; Alvin figured it was still a few hours yet from stinking. He tugged it into the doorframe as the dwarf put the lantern down in the mud and took hold of the boy’s legs and pulled. Together, they dragged the stiffening body out into the mud beside the rear wheel.

  “All right, now close the door,” said Chester, lighting a cigarette. He switched on the automobile’s headlamps. “I’ll see you boys in the morning.”

  They stepped back as Chester stuck the transmission into gear and rolled away from the barn, and watched as he drove quickly down toward the county road, honking once before he disappeared into the rainy dark. It was a mean and peculiar road they had been following since Hadleyville, Alvin thought, as that awful sinking in his heart began once again, mostly a lot of winding around and doubling back and traveling the old routes nobody else chose to drive. Tonight and tomorrow it’d be Iowa, and a week afterward Oklahoma, or maybe Nebraska again. All summer long, Chester had been sneaking in among these people like some dark angel on Judgment Day, cleansing the scrolls of those whose sad fortune had drawn them across his path. Alvin knew his own soul had been soiled by complicity and no apology made to the families of the murdered would redeem him. Sick in his heart for what he’d seen since Hadleyville, believing that retribution for the guilty was assured, he had ridden quietly these many miles and raised no conflict with Chester for any of it. Why not? If consumption had sealed his fate like the doctors whispered behind his back, how come he lacked the courage to meet God at the Gate of Virtue? What held him back? If he weren’t so afraid of Chester, he would have gone to the police and told them everything. That’d fix him, all right. Sure, Alvin knew he’d probably wind up in jail himself
, or get shot, but at least he wouldn’t be stuck out in the middle of another wheat field, burying a dead body whose killing he didn’t have any part of. Why couldn’t he just go and do that? Why was he so goddamned yellow?

  Alvin picked up the lamp and held it over the dead boy’s face pelted now by rain as he lay in the mud. Wind blew open the boy’s collar, exposing the fatal bruise to the lamplight. Feeling a sudden touch of nausea, he turned away and headed across the yard toward the storm cellar to get the shovel. One of the doors fell off its hinge as he raised it open. The cellar was black as tar. Nine steps led downward into the dark. Two of the boards were cracked through with splinters. These steps Alvin maneuvered past by clinging to the cellar walls, lamp suspended in front of him. Old webs clouded the stairwell. The floor of the cellar was damp and smelled horrible. Alvin ran the light back and forth, wall to wall. More webs, junk, boxes, tins and bottles. He spied rat droppings atop several of the boxes. Frenchy had been bitten once, hunting through a dank fruit cellar in the dark where he didn’t belong. The howl he had made when a nesting rat bit him in the hand carried clear up to the house where Aunt Hattie was hanging out the laundry. His crazy screaming scared the daylights out of her and when she saw his hand and Alvin told her about the rat, she fainted dead away in the dust.

  The cellar was leaking. Alvin’s shoes sloshed in the mud as he directed the lamp here and there. A dead mouse floated inside a lidless fruit jar. Scores of eviscerated flies and moths lay in ragged webs suspended beneath the support beams. An odor of wet rot persisted even with the cellar door propped open to the storm. The lamp was mostly useless. Alvin kicked at the junk along the walls from one corner to the next until he finally located the shovel alongside a stack of boards. Holding the lantern with one hand, he slid the shovel out with the other, careful not to disturb whatever might be lurking beneath the lumber. He wondered how Chester knew about it. Maybe this was where he had murdered the boy. What had brought him out here? Was it just to kill the kid? Did he give the poor dope some line about bees and honey to string him along? Alvin decided Chester was the evilest fellow he’d ever met. He wished they’d never said hello. What on earth had persuaded him to cross the river with Chester that night? Was he so sick and lonely that he’d needed the company of a fellow who didn’t know him from Adam but offered up a slice of pie if Alvin would walk out on his family? Having consumption clouded his judgment back on the farm, made him tie his shoes backwards and forget to water the chickens. Some days he’d walk out of doors with his fly open or leave the keys to Daddy’s auto on the fencepost. He grew tired from hardly nothing at all and had to sit down until he got yelled at. All his decisions seemed confused. Then again, choosing right from wrong wasn’t so easy when his fever spiked and he spewed blood with a cough. If Alvin hadn’t gotten his relapse, he’d have never run off like he did. Now he had traveled so far from home, he doubted he’d ever get back. How could he? After all he’d seen and done, Chester wouldn’t ever let him go; Alvin knew that for a fact. And if he snuck out one night? How would he know where to go that hadn’t any spotters or gun mates of Chester’s just waiting on him to show his face? How far could he get before one of them caught him in an alley somewhere and shot him in the head? He had no auto to drive, and not enough dough for a train ticket. Too sick to walk more than a few miles, too scared to seek help, Alvin felt caught in a trap of his own stupidity. He was doomed and he knew it. All that was left was to see how it played out, in what dark place or gallows he’d meet his just reward.