This Side of Jordan (9 page)

“Oh.”

After crossing over a plank bridge, they drove past a square wooden sign reading
Come back soon to HADLEYVILLE, MO.
Ahead stretched the road west to Kansas or Oklahoma or wherever they chose to go. The afternoon sky overhead was blue clear up to heaven. Alvin slipped the Packard into high gear and leaned back. How far away was Farrington, Illinois now? Farther than yesterday.

As the farm boy drove up the highway between the vast wheat fields, he asked, “Where're we headed?”

Chester laughed again. “Where do you want to go, kid? Name your poison.”

Just then the dwarf popped up from beneath the coats and suitcases in the rear seat and leaned his gnarled elbows on the leather seatback. There he announced, “Well, fellows, I don't know where we're going, but we're on our way.”

A
SEA OF PORCUPINE GRASS
, tall and golden in the mid-after-noon sun, surrounded a small white farmhouse and a ramshackle barn. Parked in back of the farmhouse was a tan Packard Six, deliberately hidden from the road. Alvin Pendergast stood by the iron pump watching the dwarf bathe in a water trough. Rascal had just dropped his knickers and kicked them aside, then stripped off his union suit and jumped in. He sank himself up to his chin and splashed water at Alvin.

“Why, it's not so bad,” the dwarf remarked. “Hardly smells at all.”

“Horses drink out of it,” the farm boy said, plugging his nose. “You could get a disease.”

Rascal dunked his head. Water stopped splashing over the sides of the trough. Submerged, the dwarf freed small air bubbles from his nose. Then a single finger broke the surface like a periscope, made a circle, and disappeared. All about the farm, wild grass in the empty fields swayed lazily. Crows yakked on the fence-posts. Alvin listened to bedsprings squeaking behind the window at the middle of the house where Chester entertained a girl from town. Every so often, Chester's head bobbed up into view, a nasty grin stuck on his face. The brownhaired girl beneath him squealed off and on while a portable Victrola that Chester had dug out of a closet played “Waiting on the Robert E. Lee.”

With a great splash soaking Alvin's shirt and pants, the dwarf emerged from the depths of the trough. He leaned forward, both arms hung over the wood.

“Do you have any soap?” he asked. “I still feel grimy.”

Alvin looked at the water stains on his shirt and pants. “You got me all wet.”

“Maybe you ought to climb in here and wash off.”

“I guess I'm washed enough already.”

The farm boy watched Rascal rub his scalp with the tips of his fingers, scrubbing diligently. The old pump filled the wooden trough to three-quarters full, but nobody had bothered to clean it out in a while. Horsehair floated on the surface of the water and stuck to Rascal's upper arms and chest. It looked filthy. Not a hundred dollars could get him swimming in there alive and willing.

“Of course, a sugar bath would be much more refreshing.”

Alvin frowned. “A what?”

“Sugar bath.”

“What's that?”

The dwarf wore an expression of incredulity. “You've never had a sugar bath?”

Alvin shook his head. “Never even heard of such a thing. Are you joking me again?”

The girl under Chester shrieked as the iron bed frame slammed against the back wall, rattling the window. Chester grunted a response, then laughed out loud. The song quit and he replaced the needle.
Way down on the levee in old Alabamee…

“They sound like dogs,” said Alvin, trying unsuccessfully not to listen to Chester rutting with his honey pie fifteen yards away. “I bet she's hating every minute of it.”

“I bet she's not,” the dwarf replied, continuing his scrubbing. His white hair was plastered flat on his scalp, almost invisible in the bright sunlight. The thick blue veins on his chest and skull made the skin look translucent. If Rascal had been outdoors at all since winter, Alvin thought, it must have been on a cloudy day. The dwarf dunked his head again, while the farm boy's ears went back to the window and the sassy girl squealing beneath Chester.

Half a day's drive from Hadleyville had led them across the Missouri border into Kansas where, after nightfall, Chester drove to the outskirts of a small town named Gridley and sent Alvin on foot to buy the three of them some supper. The road into town was dark and muddy and twice he tripped, negotiating the sinkholes between ditches. The sole restaurant in Gridley offered steak and onion dinners for forty cents, including tapioca pudding. They ate on a blanket in the wet grass under a sky threatening rain, then drove on to a tourist camp north of Abilene. Only Chester got much sleep those first few nights out of Hadleyville, taking his own cabin and staying to himself, as usual, and not being too talkative, as if something had put him in a foul mood. Meanwhile, Rascal kept Alvin up for hours, chattering endlessly about famous individuals he'd met: Lincoln's bastard nephew, Napoleon's barber's granddaughter, Teddy Roosevelt's wet nurse. Each episode ended with somebody offering Rascal a trip to Egypt or Norway or full-shares in a new railway venture financed by J.P. Morgan, rejected by the dwarf in favor of tending his award-winning vegetable garden in Hadleyville. Whether the dwarf actually believed his own stories Alvin didn't know, and once he had heard them each a dozen times, he didn't care much, either.

After twelve days of eating from paper sacks, they decided to stop for breakfast at Charlie Harper's Restaurant & Glassware Emporium in a little town called Harrison. Cheap soda glasses etched and fluted to resemble expensive Viennese crystal were mounted high on the walls with calligraphic tags beneath each one describing its stylistic lineage. Only the crudest hicks from the sticks could have been fooled, but Alvin managed to embarrass himself by asking how long it took to ship glasses like that across the ocean. The dwarf laughed so loudly the manager came out of the back room carrying a club. After eating, Alvin and Rascal went outdoors. Chester followed a few minutes later hand in hand with the darling brunette waitress and announced she'd be spending the afternoon with him. Her name was Rose, and her recently deceased Uncle Edgar owned a farm five miles south of Harrison. Since the day he'd gone into the ground, Edgar's house had sat empty, so they would all be more than welcome to sleep there overnight. She looked only slightly older than Alvin's sister Mary Ann who had her fourteenth birthday the week before Easter, but Chester didn't seem to care in the least. He told her his name was Calvin Coolidge III and that he'd made packs of dough in the oil game. After giving Alvin and Rascal a few dollars to buy groceries, he swept Rose off her feet and deposited her into the front seat until it was time to head out to the farm. Once there, they retired to Uncle Edgar's bedroom where they remained for the rest of the day, playing records, sipping gin from a hipflask and rolling in bed.

Rascal stood up in the trough and splashed water on his waist and legs. Out of modesty, he kept his back to the bedroom window. He told the farm boy, “A pound of powdered sugar mixed into a bath nourishes the skin. I try to take a sugar bath at least once a month.”

The dwarf climbed out of the trough. His splashing had made a muddy quagmire of the immediate area. He grabbed his white union suit and tiny brown knickers and put them back on.

“Sounds dumb to me,” said Alvin, keeping out of the mud. He heard the girl giggling now. What the hell was Chester doing to her? The farm boy hadn't taken that girl for a floosie when they first met.

Rascal wrestled his cotton shirt and red suspenders over the damp skin of his upper body. “That's just because you've never tried one.”

“I wouldn't want to. Sugar's for eating, not washing.”

The dwarf worked the pump to clean off his hands. “Don't be so sure. Sugar's just another one of God's gifts we're to use as we see fit.”

“Then I'll stick to sprinkling mine on hotcakes, thank you very much.”

The iron bed stopped squeaking. Rascal put on his black button shoes and slicked his hair with the wet palms of his hands. He smiled at Alvin. “That was thoroughly refreshing.”

The record ended as Chester raised the bedroom window and stuck his sweaty face out into the afternoon air. Alvin saw Rose get up off the bed behind him bare-naked and head for the bathroom. Seeing her lolling breasts got him going again and he tried to put her out of his mind, doubting that Chester would share her with his partners.

Chester called out, “Anybody hungry?”

“I am,” replied Alvin. “I'm starving.” That was a fact, too. His stomach was rumbling fierce.

“What do you want to eat?”

“Anything.”

“All we have are eggs and potatoes,” the dwarf announced. “Have either of you ever tried an Idaho soufflé?”

Chester disappeared from the window. Alvin could hear him talking to Rose about cooking. He didn't usually consult with them about meals. They ate where he chose and did what he said. That was swell with Alvin who didn't have many ideas these days, but Rascal voiced his opinion on everything from filling stations to petting parties. When Chester had first seen the dwarf in the backseat of the Packard, he hadn't raised his voice at all in ordering Rascal to get the hell out of his motorcar. Nor had he started shouting when the dwarf refused to do so on account of having planned and executed the better part of the bank robbery all by himself without even asking for so much as a red cent in profit. Chester kept driving, and after the argument quit a dozen miles down the road, he made it clear that Rascal would be allowed to ride along and take part if he was able to prove his worth in one fashion or another. This suited Rascal just fine. He had plenty of helpful ideas. Bootleggers and cutters and hold-up men intrigued him, and whenever Chester was off somewhere, the dwarf would philosophize about the nature and purpose of criminal behavior in modern society. Little of this discourse made sense to Alvin, though Rascal's enthusiasm for their adventure was infectious. For his own part, Alvin avoided Chester as much as possible, afraid of getting the bad eye, or a bawling out for having invited the dwarf along. Mostly, Chester had been pretty swell to Alvin, picking him up a sturdy old Montgomery Ward suitcase and a fresh pair of shoes as if they were best pals for no reason the farm boy could figure. After all, he wasn't doing anything special, just lugging trunks and looking after the auto. Anybody could have done that. What did Chester have him along for, anyhow? Maybe he'd gotten sick of driving around on his own. He had a smile for every occasion and treated Alvin better than anyone else ever had. But one evening when Alvin tried asking Chester where he grew up, he got told in just such a voice to mind his own business, and that was that. Besides which, later on that same night, Alvin's night sweats returned and his breathing became labored and he knew he was getting sicker again, and didn't want Chester to know it for fear of being put out on the road himself. So far, he was content to ride along a while further, if for no other reason than to see where they might end up. And where else did he really have to go besides back into the sanitarium?

“Do you prefer your boiled eggs with pepper or salt?” Rascal inquired of Alvin. “I ask this because I've become quite fond of pepper recently, much more so than when I was younger. I just used to detest it, while Auntie would sprinkle it on practically everything she served, even pie and puddings. One of her more despicable habits.”

“I hate boiled eggs,” said Alvin, stepping over to the pump. His hands were as dusty as his shoes. If it weren't for Rose, he might have stripped down and jumped into the trough himself. All the driving they'd done the past two days had made him feel smutty as hell. No doubt he stunk pretty badly, too. He drew water from the pump and splashed it onto his bare arms and face, ladling water onto the back of his neck and letting it run down his shirt. That felt good. Rascal headed for the barn while Alvin finished washing off. Indoors, Chester's voice carried across the farmhouse as he and Rose walked in one room and out another discussing supper. Hoping to avoid being dragged into the debate, Alvin followed Rascal into the barn. Chester had told them to sleep in the stalls in order to keep an eye on the Packard after dark. The dwarf had quickly made a bed of moldy straw and left Alvin wondering whether sleeping in the hayloft violated Chester's instructions. All the livestock were long since gone, and dried rat dung littered the floor. Wasn't there any room at the farmhouse?

Alvin called for Rascal. When he didn't hear back, the farm boy went looking for him out behind the barn where the fence was broken down. It had been some time since a plow had entered the field and the grass had grown tall. Maybe a dozen yards beyond the rail fence, the tips of the grass rustled, indicating where Rascal had gone tramping about. Sparrows sailed by overhead, darting high and low. Insects buzzed in the grass. Rascal giggled. Alvin lay down and closed his eyes and listened to the insects and the birds and the dwarf. When he and Frenchy were kids, they were always running out into the cornrows at twilight and playing hider-seeker with big sticks, which they used to slap the stalks and taunt each other. After dark, they'd huddle together with a kerosene lantern and dig for fishing worms in the black loam.

Alvin heard the grass rustle nearby. The dwarf sat down next to his shoulder and asked, “When's supper? I'm famished.”

“I hope soon. I'm hungry as a horse.”

A door slammed shut back at the farmhouse.

Rascal sighed. “I wish I were a farmer. I love animals.”

“You love spreading manure, too?”

“If need be. I'm not afraid of work.”

Alvin rolled onto his shoulder and spat in the grass. “You think you know what farm life's all about, but you're just a dumbbell. There ain't nothing swell about it at all, and if you grew up on a farm like I did, you'd hate it like the dickens, and that's a fact.”

“I doubt that very much,” the dwarf replied. “One man's cross is another man's lintel. You ought to try locking yourself in a closet for a couple of weeks if you don't think that's so. See how that suits your fancy.”

“Well, I'd rather live underneath that ugly old house of yours for twenty years than spend another day shoveling chicken shit.”

Rascal plucked a stem of grass and stuck it in his mouth to chew on. “When I was young, I had a chicken named Evelyn. Auntie sewed her a dress to wear when she went outdoors. I made her a bonnet with a red bow. She'd fetch buttons and thimbles all day long if you coated them with maple syrup or peppermint.”

“A chicken?”

“Yes.”