The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  “Dulwich’s cat,” I said.

  “Who’s gonna take care of her?” said Sophie. “What’s gonna happen to her?”

  I thought about it a minute, then said: “We’ll take her with us.”

  We left Los Angeles on Route 66—the same highway Dick Prettie and I had taken to Lake Arrowhead.

  Sophie was in the back seat with Dulwich’s cat, who was in her cage. Sophie had brought along her cat food and food dish and water dish and cat toys, but understandably Tinker seemed pretty unhappy, meowing loudly every second or two.

  “Where are we going, by the way?” asked Darla.

  “New York,” I said.

  “Is that cat going to be doing that all the way to New York?”

  “She’s just scared, is all,” said Sophie. “She’ll be better soon.”

  “You know, Darla,” I said, somewhat coldly, “we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for Dulwich. The least we can do is take care of his cat.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Geez.”

  The rabbit ranches and avocado orchards Dick and I had seen were lost in the darkness. There wasn’t much traffic. I drove pretty fast. We listened to the radio and Darla smoked and Tinker meowed and Sophie talked.

  “I made sandwiches for us, is anybody hungry?”

  “I’m not,” I said, and Darla shook her head.

  “I’m not either. We can eat ’em later. See my lunchbox? It’s a Jackie Coogan lunchbox.”

  She handed it up to Darla. A picture of the adorable waif as “The Kid” covered the front of it.

  “Cute,” said Darla, and handed it back.

  “Jackie Coogan’s gotten too old to play kid parts now. I don’t even think he’s been in a movie since Huckleberry Finn. I was in the third grade then. He played Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn. He also played Tom Sawyer in Tom Sawyer.”

  She wasn’t acting all that downcast about what had happened to Dulwich. It probably didn’t seem real to her. I guessed it would sink in later.

  We passed the turn-off for Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino and the road jogged north and then we were in new territory as far as I was concerned. In the back seat, Dulwich’s cat had calmed down, or just exhausted herself, and Sophie was finally running out of steam too.

  “I think Tinker’s sleeping,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “I think she’ll be all right. Dulwich told me she loved to travel.”

  A minute or two passed, then Sophie said: “It’s kinda lonely back here.”

  “Wanna come up here with us?”

  Sophie eagerly scrambled over the seat, kicking me in the head in the process.

  “Oops! Sorry.”

  Now she settled down between Darla and me. Within five minutes, she was asleep, her head on Darla’s shoulder.

  “What’s her story?” said Darla quietly.

  “Kind of like the story you told me about yourself. She’s leaving home because she has to.”

  “Poor kid.”

  And in a sort of flash I could see that it was all going to work out, that we were going to become a family—man, woman, kid, and cat.

  The road began to rise, then in a series of switchbacks it climbed the face of the Sierra Madre Mountains. We passed over the mountain range at the Cajon Pass, then began a winding descent through an evergreen forest.

  Darla had been silent for so long I thought she was asleep too. I thought I had the night to myself. But then I heard her say: “Why are you crying?”

  “Dulwich, I guess. I guess I was crying about Dulwich.”

  “I’m sorry, Danny.”

  “You know, it was my fault.”

  “What was?”

  “Him getting killed.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “He wanted to kill Mousie, but I talked him out of it. Then Mousie wound up killing him.”

  “You’re not to blame. Things just happen.” She lit a cigarette, moving carefully so as not to awake Sophie. “You shouldn’t feel so bad. In a way, I think Dulwich died happy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the last word he ever said was ‘Danny.’ And the last thing he ever saw was you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think he was probably in love with you. From everything you told me.”

  “In love with—? That’s crazy.”

  She shrugged. “Is it?”

  “Who turned off the bathwater?” Sophie mumbled fretfully in her sleep, then her face began to twitch, then she turned over and leaned against me and was quiet again. Headlights flared into the car, as a vehicle came up fast behind us. When it pulled out in the other lane to pass, I saw it was a truck. STEVE’S STOVES was painted on the side. That Steve sure got around. The truck roared by, then its taillights dwindled as it left us behind. Steve was in a hurry. As long as there was anybody in the world that still needed a stove, Steve would be on the job.

  “How much money you got?” said Darla.

  “About 400 bucks. How about you?”

  “A lot less. Bud never liked me to have much cash. He wanted me to have to depend on him for everything. But he gave me all this jewelry that must be worth a mint.” She opened her purse, dug into it, pulled out her diamond engagement ring. “Like this,” she said, and then she pulled out her ruby ring. “And this. We can sell this stuff off whenever we need to. We can live in style. For a while, anyway.”

  I liked the “we.”

  “And I’ll get some kind of job.”

  “And I can start singing again,” she said dreamily, then dropped the rings back in her purse.

  “Why’d you shoot him?” I said.

  “’Cause he was about to shoot you.”

  “No he wasn’t.”

  “Well, I thought he was.”

  “He wouldn’t ever have shot me. Not in a million years.”

  “No? What makes you so special?”

  I didn’t answer. We passed through Victorville. It was starting to get light.

  Chapter 20

  JUST OUTSIDE BARSTOW, a billboard showed a picture of an evilly smiling hobo holding up a sign that said: CALIFORNIA OR BUST. Under the picture it said, in lurid black and red letters: “UPTON SINCLAIR—AN EPIC FRAUD! HE’LL TURN CALIFORNIA INTO A HAVEN FOR RADICALS, FLOATERS, AND BOXCAR TOURISTS! VOTE FOR FRANK MERRIAM FOR GOVERNOR!”

  We stopped at a Standard Oil station to gas up and use the restrooms. Sophie took Tinker around the back of the station to a weedy area where she used the restroom too.

  I went in the office to pay for the gas and buy a road map and some bottles of soda. The owner had a pockmarked face and wispy red hair that went every which way. He looked mean, but had a kindly manner.

  “Which way you folks headed?” he said.

  “Towards Arizona.”

  “Well, sody pop’s just fine and dandy, but if I was you, I’d buy me some water too. You’ll need it. It ain’t gonna be no church picnic out there. Not in August, it ain’t.”

  I bought three gallons, and we got back on the road. Route 66 turned due east here, straight into the heart of the Mojave Desert. The sun was floating up in front of us; I lowered the sun visor and Darla donned her sunglasses.

  We were all getting hungry. Sophie opened up her Jackie Coogan lunchbox.

  “I have three sandwiches. Delicious grape jelly and peanut butter, scrumptious butter and sugar, and boring Spam. Who wants what?”

  “What do you want, honey?” said Darla.

  “Well—grape jelly and peanut butter’s my favorite.”

  “Okay. I’ll have the butter and sugar. Danny?”

  “Guess I’ll have the Spam.”

  Soon it got hotter than I thought it possible to get. Heat mirages lay like puddles of water on the shimmering road. The landscape was unearthly and blasted-looking. What vegetation there was seemed primitive and savage: thorny cacti and twisted little trees with clumps of spiky leaves. You couldn’t imagine even bugs or lizards living out here. Off in the
molten-blue distance, mountain ranges jutted up like giant slag heaps. It was hard to see how the pioneers in the olden days had ever made it.

  A railroad ran parallel to 66. Sophie leaned out the window and waved wildly at a freight train coming toward us. The red-capped engineer saw her and waved back and, much to her delight, gave a long, mournful toot on his whistle.

  About an hour out of Barstow I saw an old jalopy pulled off on the side of the road, its radiator geysering steam. Two guys in shabby clothes were standing by it, one fanning forlornly at the steam with his hat. When I suggested that maybe we ought to pull over and give them some of our water, Darla said: “Keep driving, Danny. We need that water for us.”

  We did need it. We drank and drank it and still it didn’t seem to be enough, it was like it was evaporating right out of us without even taking the time to turn into sweat first. Our lips burnt and cracked. I felt like I was drying up, becoming a mummy. The tongue of Dulwich’s cat hung out as she panted like a dog. I wondered what she thought about all this. Snatched away from her peaceful, bird-filled bungalow court, encaged now in a baking Packard speeding over a dismal wasteland.

  We passed through towns. It wasn’t like the desert didn’t have any towns. But Daggett, Ludlow, Siberia, Bagdad, Amboy, Chambliss, Summit, Danby, Essex, Java, were towns in name only, usually consisting of no more than a gas station and cafe and some woebegone tourist cabins, and sometimes not even that, just a deserted train station by the railroad tracks. When the sun was at its highest and hottest, we reached our first genuine town, Needles.

  It felt like an oasis. Real trees were growing here, with actual green leaves on them, not thorns or spines. We drove slowly down the main street, looking for a place to eat, but everything seemed closed.

  “How come nothing’s open?” I said.

  “’Cause it’s Sunday,” said Darla.

  It seemed strange, that it was Sunday. Days of the week, months of the year, seemed so regular and normal; they oughtn’t to exist in a world that had lost its moorings, a world of murder and screaming, of shame and grief. Where a man’s teeth could roll across the floor like dice.

  “Look!” said Sophie. “Indians!”

  Indeed, four Indians, a man and a woman and two little ones, were walking down the street. They were dressed gaily, in red and yellow and blue.

  “Maybe they’ll know a place to eat,” said Darla.

  But when I slowed up beside them, they looked at us so sternly I decided to drive on.

  A little further along we found the Black Cat Cafe.

  A sign over the lunch counter said: “CUP OF COFFEE, CIGARETTE, & TOOTHPICK—6¢.” It was kind of a dumpy joint, but the food was okay. Darla had the fried chicken dinner and Sophie and I had hamburgers and french fries, and all of us gulped down glass after glass of iced tea.

  A radio was playing; when the news came on, the announcer reported that a sensational crime had occurred Saturday night in Los Angeles. Eight people, including notorious gangster Bud Seitz, had been murdered at Seitz’s home in Hollywood. Police said so far they had no witnesses or suspects.

  Darla and I locked eyes across the table. The waitress sighed and shook her head as she poured us more tea. “Big cities! You can have ’em! Me, I like a place that’s nice and slow. Like Needles.”

  We left the cafe and continued east. It was only a mile to the Colorado River and the Arizona state line. The hell of the Mojave ended at the green river. As we drove over the bridge, we could see a cluster of tents and makeshift shacks and old cars and pickup trucks on the river bank—a Hooverville in the middle of the desert.

  Next we had to climb over the ominously named Black Mountains. It was rough going for a while, in places the road wasn’t even paved, but when we came down the other side of the mountains it was with the feeling that the worst part of the journey was behind us.

  We were in Arizona now, and we could see a long way, and what we saw was beautiful. Sophie suggested we ought to sing a song like the people traveling to New York on the bus did in the Clark Gable movie.

  “Did you know Darla’s a professional singer?” I said.

  Sophie looked at Darla, wide-eyed. “You are?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  “I’m going to be a professional dancer someday. I’ve got swell dancing shoes. They’re in my suitcase. Danny and Mr. Dulwich gave them to me.”

  It took awhile before we could settle on a song that we all more or less knew the words to. It was “The Animal Fair”—

  “I went to the animal fair,

  The birds and the beasts were there.

  The big baboon by the light of the moon

  Was combing his auburn hair.

  The monkey bumped the skunk,

  And sat on the elephant’s trunk.

  The elephant sneezed and fell to his knees,

  And that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk, the monk…”

  Chapter 21

  WE GASSED UP the car at Oatman (POP. 500), and Sophie took Dulwich’s cat out again, and she scratched in the dirt and squatted and peed, and then we kept going. There was plenty of light still left in the day and though I’d hardly slept for the last two days I felt like I was getting my second wind and could drive forever.

  Sophie had the road map spread out, and it nearly covered her like a tent. “If we stay on Route 66 all the way, we’ll end up in Chicago. Can we go to Chicago?”

  “We can go anywhere we want,” I said.

  “But on the way to New York. We’re still going to New York.”

  “Of course.”

  “Darla, have you ever been to New York?”

  “Sure, I been there,” Darla said, with little enthusiasm.

  A billboard informed us the Tomahawk Trading Post and Restaurant was just three miles down the road and one could see the Amazing Indian Mummy there.

  “Oh, I wanna see the mummy!” said Sophie.

  “Wanna see the mummy?” I asked Darla.

  She shrugged. “Why not?”

  I parked in the shade at the side of the trading post, so Dulwich’s cat could stay cool while we were inside. There was a hitching post out front; no horses were tied up to it, but several cars were parked there, including a sleek silver Zephyr, which Sophie oohed and ahhed at.

  The trading post sold all manner of things Indian: pottery and turquoise jewelry and blankets and rugs and beadwork and baskets and buffalo-hide shields and arrowheads and tomahawks. I asked the pimply teenaged girl behind the cash register where the mummy was.

  “Right over yonder,” she said, pointing. “In that corner there.”

  It was a mummy, all right, in a glass case. A little mummy, curled up on its side, its arms holding its legs and its face tucked into its knees. Sophie began reading from a typewritten card scotchtaped to the glass: “‘The mummy of this little Indian girl’—oh, it’s a little girl!—‘was found in a cave by Bill Miller on his ranch near Kingman in 1912. She is believed to have been a member of the Walapai Indian tribe, and to have lived many hundreds of years ago.’ Many hundreds of years ago,” Sophie repeated as she stared in awe at the grayish-brown brittle-looking thing behind the dusty glass.

  We wandered awhile through the trading post with the other tourists—Darla bought some postcards, Sophie an Indian doll called a kachina—then we passed through a little hallway to the restaurant. We sat down at the counter, and a fat, jolly waitress named Ruthana served us up ice cream sodas.

  “I like your bracelet,” said Sophie.

  Darla was wearing her charm bracelet—the one Bud had given her, with the star, the crescent moon, the heart, the man’s hat, the Scottish terrier, the owl, the mermaid, and the lightning bolt.

  “Do you?” said Darla, looking at it; and then she began to take it off.

  “Here, honey. I want you to have it.”

  “Really? No kidding?”

  “Really and no kidding. Hold your hand out.”

  She fastened the bracelet around Sophie’s
wrist. Sophie held her arm up, and gazed blissfully at the dangling charms. She tapped the crescent moon with her fingertip, and it rocked back and forth.

  “Gee, thanks, Darla.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Soon Sophie’s straw was making slurping noises in the bottom of her glass.

  “Can I go back and look at the mummy?” she said.

  “All right,” I said. “But don’t wander off.”

  “I won’t.”

  She hopped off her stool and ran through the door, as Ruthana watched her approvingly.

  “You sure do have a cute daughter,” she said to Darla and me.

  Darla and I exchanged a look. She opened her purse, took out her cigarettes. Lit up.

  She looked exhausted. It seemed like a long time ago that she had been butchered by Dr. Brunder, but it had actually only been a few days.

  “That was nice,” I said. “Giving Sophie the bracelet.”

  She blew out a thin, fluttering stream of smoke.

  “She’s a good kid. A little trooper. She never once complained, going across the desert. She deserves a lot more in life than just some crummy bracelet.”

  “She’ll get it. She’ll get everything she deserves.”

  Darla looked at me musingly. “You’ll see to it, huh?”

  “Well—maybe we’ll see to it.”

  She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, even though she hadn’t been smoking it long enough to make any ash. Then she opened her purse again and took out her compact and looked at herself in the little round mirror, tugging at her hair, fiddling with an eyebrow.

  “Jesus. I look a fright. I’m gonna go powder my nose.”

  “Okay.”

  She slid off her stool and walked off, toward the restrooms in the hall. But then a moment or two later I felt a hand on my neck, and looked around and Darla’s face was just inches away, and she smelled like Jean Harlow and then her lips were on mine. This was a real kiss, a lingering kiss, a moist kiss. Then she pulled away a little, and looked at my face all over, and smoothed out the hair on the side of my head with her long fingers; then she turned and walked away.