The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  “You sorry, low-down, no-good, smart-alecking, son of a—” he said.

  By then he was alongside the cab. And what so suddenly silenced him was not the bandit’s mask, a spotted red bandana, covering from the eyes down the face of his passenger; that was a sight to which the ferryman had grown so accustomed that he hardly noticed it anymore during this and the last two dusty summers, when often the entire population of both sides of the river would appear, when issue out of doors at last they must, gotten up as desperadoes, male and female, large and small; and only by oversight—for this had been a bandana day if ever there was one—was he not wearing one himself. No, what stopped the ferryman’s tongue while opening still wider his mouth was that between the two fingers sticking out of the window of the cab was something that looked like a ten-dollar bill, and unless his ears deceived him the voice from behind the bandana had just said to keep the change. At that price he was welcome to take another shot at sinking the boat! Meanwhile there came no shooting from the shore, no Halt! in the name of the law. Evidently his passenger was not a fugitive.

  What he was, what the whole gang was, the ferryman concluded after a quick appraisal of the vehicle, coupled with the continuing whoops and catcalls from the shore, was a road show of some kind, a small-time carnival, a tent show or a medicine show. The truck—truck or van, bus, whatever the hell it was—was really a house on wheels, with a curtained window in the body just above the cab, and sticking out of the roof a stovepipe out of kilter, and hanging off the rear a rickety flight of steps leading to a door. Along the side was painted a picture (the other side, he would find as he passed it later coming forward to dock in Texas, was, or was as nearly as an amateur hand could make it, a duplicate) in colors whose kindergarten brightness not even the thick coat of dust nor the prevailing duskiness could dim. Hard to say just what the moment intended to be depicted was—the coming of a storm or the passing of one. The sun, of a fiery orange and spoked with beams, was either just emerging from or just going behind a huge inky cloud rent by a jagged bolt of lightning the shape of a flight of stairs in profile, sharpened at the point, rendered in aluminum. Out of the cloud a shower of raindrops was falling, a direct hit from any one of which was apt to prove fatal to the people living in the farmhouse down below or to the two-legged animal (one hind, one front) in the barn lot. Above and below the depicted scene, in a mixture of print and script, small letters and capitals, all staggering and wavy and falling steadily downhill and all bunched together at the end, was a hand-lettered sign.

  “Say,” said the ferryman, “you fellers a tent show or something?”

  “Say,” said his passenger, “don’t it seem to you like we’re kind of drifting?”

  The ferryman scooted back to his tiller and nosed back upstream. He shifted gears on his engine. Now he could see the lights from the cars on the Oklahoma shore only dimly, but he could still hear, though unable to make out the words, shouts and laughter. Bunch of cut-ups, he said to himself, who had had a bet among themselves which would get across the river first, not caring a damn how many lives they endangered along the road and obviously not whether they sank his boat and him along with it. Drinking probably. Road-show people. He had ferried their kind across before. Free spenders always. Easy come easy go. He would really rake in the money tonight!

  The old engine was in high gear, and presently the ferryman discerned, down at the bottom of his vision, like the sediment at the bottom of a glass of the river water, a darkening, a shoreline: Texas. Then for the first time his passenger poked his head out. He inched it out cautiously as a turtle and looked back towards Oklahoma. There was nothing to be seen, yet in the light of the running lamp on its pole, above the mask, the eyes smiled. As Moses must have smiled on reaching the far shore of another body of red water and looking back.

  “Say,” said the ferryman, stopping on his way forward to dock, “tell me, what does it say here on the side of your truck? I seem to have mislaid my specs.” (The letters were a foot high.) He could hardly see the man, not only because it was dark and so little of him was unmasked, but also because of the height of the cab.

  “Lost your glasses, eh? Your reading glasses, was they?”

  The ferryman said nothing, only gritted his teeth.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. See that picture? That thundercloud? That bolt of lightning? Them raindrops? What the words spell is, ‘Lightning rods for sale.’”

  “Can’t read a word without my specs,” said the ferryman, squinting. “But now that you say so, I can make it out for myself. Lightning rods for sale.” Thinking of that ten-dollar bill, and of the weather for the past several years, he said, “Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought your business had been so good here lately.”

  They bumped the dock. The driver started his motor. He revved it. The ferryman threw his hawser and dropped the chain with a clatter. As the driver went past, the ferryman said, “Pull over to the side of the road there if you like and …” The rest was finished on a falling cadence—the spoken equivalent of that line of lettering along the side of the truck—as, with a low-gear growl, taillight wigwagging over the bumps, the truck shot up the hill. “… and come back with me to …” The taillight disappeared. “… pickyourbuddiesup.”

  II

  When it had gone about a mile down the road the truck turned right down a side road running parallel to the river. Over this it jounced and swayed for about a mile until it turned down an even rougher road—“gully” would be a better word—an old logging trail hacked through the tall pines which led back to the river. He was not driving fast now, not only because the road was rough and the dust in the air such that he could not, but because he was safe now. He knew what the ferryman did not know, that he would find no customers waiting for him when he got back to Oklahoma.

  He came out of the trees and into a clearing at the river’s edge. He drove down as near to the water as he could. Leaving the headlights burning, he got out. Had anybody been there (in which case he would not have gotten out) that person would have seen that the mask and a pair of ankle-top shoes, socks, and supporters was every stitch the man had on. Not that he was exactly nude, but there are no seams in a suit of feathers and tar.

  Basically he was white Leghorn, but there was an inter-sprinkling of barred rock, Rhode Island red, some gray goose, some guinea hen, and even some bright bantam rooster, all fluffy and fine, being pinfeathers and eiderdown of the kind and assortment to be expected from the stuffing of a featherbed, saved over the years by some farmwoman from all the poultry killed and plucked for many a Thanksgiving and Christmas and family-reunion dinner. The man’s long, red, wrinkled, leathery neck, notched with bones, his crawlike Adam’s apple, the wattles underneath his chin and his beak of a nose enforced his resemblance to a chicken—one in molt. His eyes, probably blue, were so bloodshot they were purple. He was bald on the crown, though his straggling reddish-gray hair was long enough to drape over the bare spot ordinarily. But upon his pate someone had recently wiped a paintbrush well charged with creosote and there a solitary pinfeather now stuck up like a cowlick. He was around forty-five years old, a stringy man of medium height who looked taller because of the stoop in his shoulders, the unmistakable stoop of one who from boyhood has followed the plow. He had long stringy arms on the lower parts of which where the feathering was sparse the veins stood out in permanent high relief like the grain in old weathered wood, say the side of an abandoned and never-painted haybarn. He was in a state far past mere weariness, bordering on collapse, and he was swearing steadily, possibly unconsciously, a sort of unedited imprecation almost as if he were humming to himself without any tune.

  He went now around to the back of the van and hauled himself up the steps, opened the door with his shoulder, and fell inside. A crash sounded and a yelp of pain as he stumbled over something. He was out again shortly with a battered pail and a three-foot length of frayed-ended garden hose. He removed the Irish potato that served as a cap to the gas tank, poked the
hose down the hole, put the end in his mouth, sucked, spat, and directed the flow into the pail, all with a polish which showed a good deal more practice than could have been gained on a single gas tank. He stepped into the light of the headlamps and, raising the pail shoulder high, poured half the contents over himself. He commenced plucking. In time a pile of sodden feathers lay at his feet; it looked as if half a dozen fryers had been scalded and plucked on the spot. He went back inside the van, returning this time with a thin cake of soap and a napless threadbare towel.

  He eased himself into the tepid, opaque water, his head sticking up like a turtle’s on that long seamy neck. Taking a deep breath, he ducked under. He came up spitting. He lathered his head and his underarms and his chest and ducked under again and came up spitting once more. He climbed out on the bank and rubbed himself down. When dry, the reddish-gray mat of hair on his chest looked like rusty steel wool. The smell of tar and gasoline had by no means been washed away.

  He returned to the van and went inside and lighted a lamp, revealing some kind of broken machine in a heap in the middle of the floor, a huge round one-legged claw-footed dining table, a high-backed hickory-splint rocking chair, an oval dirt-colored rag rug, an immense chifforobe of black wood, three cylinders of cooking gas, a small potbellied stove, a woodbox (empty), a two-burner Coleman range on a shelf and on the floor beneath the shelf a coal-oil can with a sodden corncob stopper, an unmade daybed. A shelf ran high along one wall, and he began searching among the stuff on it. While his back was turned a small tarred and feathered dog, possibly of the rat-terrier breed, divided about equally between dog and long feathered tail, recently very wet and still very moist, slunk up the steps with its tongue lolling and into the room, and trying to make itself still smaller than it was, stole unnoticed underneath the bed.

  The assortment of paraphernalia on the shelf included some half-dozen road flares of the kind left by night alongside detour signs, three or four old automobile batteries, two wooden boxes, one opened, the other unopened, labeled EXPLOSIVES, HANDLE WITH CARE, and a collection of apparatus vaguely electrical-looking, including coils and switches and fuse boxes and a hand-cranked generator with a much-worn armature rather resembling a large old-fashioned coffee mill. Behind all this he found what he was looking for (though success in his search brought no pause in that steady mumbled cursing) and began taking them down: quart cans of paint. He pried the lids off. There, scummed over, was the orange of that sun on the side of the van, and there the blackish blue of the cloud and there the red of the barn, the white of the raindrops—when all was dumped together into a pail and stirred, it was the color of mud.

  As he stirred, the man regarded two other cans on the shelf above the cookstove. These were cans of tomatoes, with labels like miniatures of the sun painted on the panel of the van. He stopped stirring, rose, and went towards them, his eyes glazed, entranced. Then he caught himself and returned to the paint bucket.

  Still naked, he went outside carrying the bucket and a brush, a worn-out broom, and a rickety stepladder. He swept down the side of the truck, coughing at the dust he raised. He stood the ladder beside the truck and climbed it to the top carrying the bucket. The paint was thick; one coat was going to have to do. He started in on top, first turning up the volume of that constant maledictory static he was making, and with three broad strokes of the brush, one of which he had to stretch so far to complete that he almost toppled off the ladder, he slashed through the words:

  THe 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs

  He coughed, stepped down a rung, and painted out the ascending sunrays. Stepping down another rung, he painted out the cloud, the base of the lightning bolt, the face of the sun. He rested a moment, coughing, rubbing his eyes, swearing, then stepped down and painted out the tip of the bolt of lightning, the remainder of the cloud. Then he had to come down off the ladder and rest. He had not slept in thirty-six hours. Not slept? He had not drawn one unterrified breath in all that while! His eyes felt as if all the dust in the world, or at least in Oklahoma, was underneath the lids. He climbed the ladder again and blotted out forevermore the falling raindrops. Stepping down, he painted out the farmhouse and barn and that one sui-generic head of livestock. Then dipping his brush in the paint and not even wiping it on the lip of the pail, with a curse (he would have all this to do again around on the other side), a vicious swipe and a spattering of mud-colored drops, he painted out the large bottom word:

  RAiNMAKeR

  III

  Just plain unemployed Orville Simms, dressed now in khaki pants and shirt, drove that night until he could drive no farther, until his eyelids began to anneal, his hands to palsy on the wheel, until he began to have waking nightmares of windmill derricks, whole forests of them alongside the road and stretching away into the night, going south now through Red River County and into true night, the vast Texas night, with stars overhead, not the daytime night of dust; and then, after he had awakened barely in time to keep from going off into the ditch for the third time, he pulled off into somebody’s cowpasture, started to get out of the cab and go back to his bed, and passed out at the wheel. His sleep was sound—too sound—comatose. He moaned, he whimpered, he twitched. Throughout the night frequent shudders shook him, jerking him almost awake, as in his dreams he felt himself falling from a height.…

  Two days earlier, in Oklahoma, Prof. Simms was driving down a country road when his radiator came to a boil. The truck was an old enough model to have for a radiator cap one of those round glass gauges with a mercury column inside. It was older than that: not only Prof. Simms but numerous previous owners, though occasions had not been wanting, had come too late ever to see that thermometer rise. What it had long done instead was steam up inside the glass, and in another moment any mercury column would have been invisible anyhow—the whole cap was, the whole front end.

  It never occurred to him to look for any standing water in the roadside ditches, where now not even weeds could any longer get a hold, and stockponds that he passed, or what had been stockponds, were dry white scabs covered over with a cracked layer of thin curling crust and invariably with an old car-casing, sometimes an old car, standing half-buried in the middle. Besides, the last three farms he had passed had shown evidence of habitation—that is, at each one dogs had come out to bark at him as he went past. This boiling of the radiator was a frequent occurrence, and what with that sign along the side of the truck, Prof. Simms had grown timid about stopping to ask for water, even a dipperful to drink. Especially he sought to avoid crossroads stores with their one gas pump and garden watering can meant for radiators, but with also along their porch the usual group of whittlers and spitters. To pull up with that radiator going like a factory whistle at noon and shooting up like Old Faithful when the cap was loosened, and beneath that collective gaze to go and get the watering can was more then the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs, RAiNMAKeR, could take. At such times he especially regretted that self-conferred title of Professor.

  Meanwhile the sight of that steaming radiator was a joy to Prof. Simms, and the farther he drove without finding a drop to pour down it, or down his own long dusty gullet, the more joyfully he licked his parched lips with his dry tongue. For fifteen miles he had been driving alongside fields where the cornstalks slanted earthwards and the brown leaves hung tattered and limp and where cotton in scraggly rows stood with bolls which ought long since to have burst white and were instead whole and hard, the shape and the color of and not much bigger than bottled olives. Once he stopped and got out to look closer, and found the earth pimpled and pocked from the last light shower, each pebble perched upon a column of dirt half an inch high and conforming exactly to its outline: a sort of microscopic badlands. Not God’s country, perhaps, but the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs’s country for sure. If not too far gone even for him.

  Just how far gone he learned when he stopped at an abandoned farmhouse for water. He learned then, too, that the countryside was blessed with the only other thing it needed to make it
ideal for his purposes: a long mental drought. He pulled up at the sagging gate and got out and went around back of the house to the well, from the rusty pulley of which hung a bucket that even folks giving up and leaving would not bother to take along. He let it drop, and listened, and heard a sound which, though it augured well for his business, could not but strike an old farmboy as sickening: not the expected sideways slap of an empty bucket striking water, but the dull dry kachunk of the bottom of the bucket upon hard dirt. Then behind him he heard a snort of dry, unamused laughter.