by Max Evans
The coon maneuvered close to the bank—Ake’s bank—where he intended to find sanctuary at the top of some high tree. What it actually climbed, though, was Ake. Now Ake was tall enough, all right, but I couldn’t understand how a coon so well equipped for survival could have mistaken him for a tree. This coon had the fighting qualities of a grizzly bear and the sinuousness of a snake, but right now he was in a dither. He was in good shape, though, compared to Ake, who was howling in anguish and beating about in all directions.
The hounds dragged their wet carcasses from the creek and made straight for him. They too attempted to climb Ake’s frame. As a result, he was bowled over like a sapling in a tornado.
The coon dashed off to another perch—a real tree this time— and climbed up and up and up. Ake might have viewed the coon’s mistake with a lenient eye if the six powerful, sopping wet, slavering hounds hadn’t suddenly borne down on him. Intent only on their prey, they trampled every inch of his face, eyes, ears, and open mouth. This was too much for him. It was that coon who had started all this, and now Ake decided to settle accounts. He ran up to the tree flashing the light until he spotted the critter and then, yelling savagely, he made a mad ascent.
The rest of us cheered him on. Big Boy yelled, “Get the fat bastard and you’ll have coon meat for a week.”
There was one disadvantage working against Ake—the flashlight. It was difficult to carry it and climb, too. But gradually he made his way up. The coon was a much better climber, but the tree finally ran out of branches, and finally the coon was out on a limb—literally—and Ake was stretching out his hand for it. Ordinarily, he would have shaken the limb until the coon fell free to the waiting dogs on the ground. However, this had become a personal matter with Ake. Just as his hand touched the coon, he dropped the flashlight. The noise that followed was something to be remembered. The squalling of the wild coon, the ripping sound of branches and limbs—some of them Ake’s— the bellering and baying of the hounds, and the assorted yells of our hunting party all shattered the night air.
Clem held the lantern as high as he could and barged headlong into the creek. The racket increased as he reached the opposite bank. The light of the lantern now revealed Ake at the foot of the tree flailing one long arm as if pumping water. Attached to the arm was a live coon.
Clem yelled, “Is he biting, Alee?”
A painful croak came from Ake. “Naw, he aint, you silly bastard. I ‘m just shakin' hands with the friendly little son of a bitch.”
The dogs were in a great turmoil, all trying to get at the coon at once. In their anxiety they clawed Ake some and finally sent him toppling again.
The coon dived into the water. The hounds, seeing victory slip from their slobbering jaws so many times, gave up the chase then and there. There was no stirring them up again.
We made our weary way back to the pickup where there was a weak nightcap of water from a canvas bag. Some were wet, one was scratched and otherwise generally becarved, and all were exhausted and ready for sleep.
Uncle Bob remarked on the way back, “Should have brought more dogs.” Then after a silence he added: “You’ve sure as hell got to hand it to that old coon. He whupped the whole damn bunch of us.” And he began to laugh.
Fifteen
I took Josepha over to Ragoon and we played around there a couple of days. We got along just fine, and my feelings toward her were ripening, but the image of Mona still flickered between us. She read my mind on the way back to Sano.
“Pete.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s an awful lot of talk going around the country about Mona and Big Boy.”
“I know,” I said.
“But it’s serious,” she said, leaning up in the seat of the pickup and turning to me.
“I know,” I repeated.
“Jim Ed Love has spread the word that Les Birk is going to get Big Boy.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” I said. “He hasn’t got the guts.” “That’s right,” she said, “but Jim Ed will figure out a way so Les will go free and clear.”
“I don’t care how damn smart Jim Ed is, Les won’t get away with it.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Because I’ll get Les just like he gets Big Boy. Besides,” I told her, “Big Boy’s not so easily got.”
“He has lots of other enemies, you know,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. He’s stomped hell out of a bunch of lice, and every damn one of them had it coming.”
“Still,” Josepha said, “they didn’t like it. And another thing, lots of girls are feeling sort of let down. They don’t ever feel too happy about a married woman stealing an eligible man.”
I began to feel irritated with Josepha for the first time. “Sure, he’s made a whole countryful of haters. That always happens when somebody’s his own man and goes his own way. Sure, he’s stepped on some toes. But I’ll tell you one thing, Big Boy bothers nobody that doesn’t bother him.”
“What about Mona?” she asked softly.
Then I knew she had been leading up to this all along. “That’s their business,” I said. “They love each other and they intend to get together. I admire them for it. They’ve had something together that hardly anybody in the whole cockeyed, goddam world has feeling or guts enough to take. Even if somebody does get killed. And I’m not so sure it’ll be Big Boy.”
She was silent a while, gazing down the wind-whipped road. I knew she had wanted me to say something else, but I couldn’t. It hung and ached in my throat.
My relationship with Josepha was something I couldn’t analyze even to myself. When I looked at her I saw she had more actual beauty than Mona, and was just as poised. She was always clean, always pleasant, could show tremendous enthusiasm and yet somehow remain calm. It seemed she had merged the fire of her Irish and Spanish blood with the quiet acceptance of the older Latins. The lonely, isolated place of Sano was her birthplace, and she had remained there, giving much of her time to many sad, lost causes. She ran the store for her father while he was out in the hills at his old mine, looking for that rich, elusive vein. Not only was she his daughter but in a sense his wife and mother, too. She was the youngest of a large family, and the only one who hadn’t left home.
I had first dated Josepha when she was a senior in high school, commuting daily the sixty-odd rutted miles by bus. I knew, as everyone knew, that she had many chances to get married. In fact, everyone expected us to marry right after her graduation, but then the war was upon us, and—well, I’d put it off indefinitely. She stayed in Sano while I was overseas, writing me faithfully, telling me all the news of Hi Lo and letting me know how much she missed me.
When I came back I felt sure I’d marry her. Yet I hesitated for some reason. She was, in all respects, just about perfect for a man of this unpredictable land—a complement to him in public, a source of peace, trust, and stability in private. But . . . was it Mona I had unconsciously waited for? I didn’t know. I wanted to scream.
Who really knew Mona? Did even Big Boy know her, or was he caught, as I was, in a sex-baited trap?
Josepha was as clean and clear as a summer morning after a night’s rain. All she was, all she could be to a man, was plunked right on the line. And why didn’t I have the guts to admit she had thrown away a fair portion of her life waiting for me? God, she must hurt during the long nights alone. She had courage and patience, and here I was like a cheap bastard trying to get into bed with my best friend’s woman.
Now Josepha was beginning to fight. Her claws, those women’s weapons that sink deeper than a Spanish dagger, were extended and groping for a target.
We parted with nothing settled and both of us upset. As I drove into Hi Lo I saw Big Boy’s pickup in front of Mitch Peabody’s grocery store. I parked beside him. He came out after a minute and dumped an armload of supplies in the back of the pickup.
“Headed for the ranch?” I asked.
“Naw, thought I’d stop down at Lollypo
p’s and see what’s goin’ on in this dried-up town.”
I could tell by his unusual pallor and the way he gritted his teeth that he had heard talk. If he got drunk now there was liable to be a serious accident in Hi Lo.
I heard myself saying: “Listen, Big Boy, I was headed out to Tinker Grits to see if he has any iron for a cattleguard. Why don’t you come and keep me company?”
“How long you fixin’ to be?”
“Just long enough to get the job done,” I said.
“AH right.”
I knew he always enjoyed talking to Tinker. Maybe if I could get him in a good humor he’d go on back to Hoover Young’s and stay out of town and trouble a while.
On the way out he said: “Haven’t seen Tinker in two or three months. He must be working on some great new invention.”
“He’s always doing that,” I said.
“You know,” Big Boy said, “that old son of a bitch is going to come up with something one of these days that will rock the whole country back on its heels”
“I wouldn’t be one bit surprised,” I said. I was a little surprised by Big Boy’s admiration for Tinker, since I knew that just before old man Matson died he had taken all Big Boy’s savings, as well as his own, and invested them with Tinker in a worthless gold-mining operation. I also knew that Big Boy had been saving for four years to buy himself a new saddle. I said, “Say, just what kind of a mining deal was it old Tinker cooked up that time? I’ve heard fifty different versions.”
“Well, it was an unusual type of undertaking,” he said. ‘Tinker had planned to recover the gold from the Atlantic Ocean. He figured there wasn’t any use bothering with the Pacific, because six months after operations started he would have so much gold he’d control the world’s economy anyway. In fact, he said that tons of gold would have to be held in reserve or it would go down in value like pig iron. Damn, ain’t that a real keen notion, Pete?”
I allowed this to be true, and Big Boy warmed to his yarn. “Well, it’s kinda hard to explain, but anyhow, he finally developed a chemical that would recover hidden gold heretofore beyond the reach of man. He figured that a certain amount of the metal was in a liquid-gas form, and when it was heated for fire assaying or smelting this liquid gold escaped and was lost in the fumes. His chemical grabbed the gold and pulled its parts into a whole. You know, don’t you, that one of the most common methods for recovering gold is mercury-covered copper plates? Well, anyway, he would add a small amount of this chemical to the plates, and when the liquid gold came in contact with it, it grabbed it just like a magnet draws iron filings. Then by real slow, careful retorting he could turn the gold into powder and then melt it into the pure metal. Tinker proved this theory to the satisfaction of a bunch of people, including my dad, by assaying samples from old abandoned mine dumps and then testing them with his method. It never failed. His percentage of recovery was always much higher than the assay. All the investors tried like the devil to talk Tinker into getting a patent on his process. He just plain refused. He said: ‘When you register an invention in the patent office it is open to public inspection. Even though I could stop anyone from selling or claiming patent, the big companies could still use it in a slightly different form and it would be hard to prove damages.’
“Well, it was about this stage of the deal that he came up with the idea of recovering gold from the Atlantic Ocean. He claimed it was in the liquid form just made for his chemicals. His idea was to bend a reinforced copper sheet a hundred yards wide into a half-circle with a trough at the bottom. This trough would be filled with mercury and his own preparation. Then buoys would be attached to the top of the sheet and adjusted so that it could be pulled along just under the ocean waves. His plan called for a steamship to do the pulling. He figured that each round trip across the Atlantic and back to New York would recover several million dollars’ worth of gold. Even though the ocean holds only three cents a ton, he knew the sheeting would come in contact with several billion tons of water on each trip. Hell, with ten steamships in operation, paying their own way with other produce, passengers, and such like, why it would only take five or six months to control the gold markets of the world. Lord A’mighty, just think of that!”
“I’m thinking.”
“Well, anyhow, before he could get things going he’d used up all his original investors’ money. So he formed a stock company. That was his mistake. He got carried away and forgot to register the stock with either the State or Federal Securities commissions. He had raised about $100,000 and was on the West Coast trying to tie up an entire shipping company for his project. When the newspapers got wind of his idea, they splashed his plan all over the front pages—more as a joke than anything else: In three days this free publicity sold an additional $750,000 worth of stock for him. But another group had been reading the papers, too. On the fourth day the Federals picked him up and read the law to him. Poor Tinker spent eighteen months in a Federal pen. When he got out he put the formula for his invention in a sealed vault with instructions for it to remain unopened until thirty years after his death. Then he forgot it and went on to other things.”
Tinker looked like a genuine drunkard. He had a large potato shaped nose, deep-set watery eyes, and a scarlet complexion. His general appearance suggested a two-fifths-a-day man, which was wrong. He was a teetotaler. Big Boys explanation was, “He’s flushed that way because he’s always drunk on ideas.” He was about medium height. Even in the middle of the grimiest of work he wore a complete suit and necktie. This necktie seldom fit snugly but hung half done, stained and punched full of holes from various acids and chemicals. The rest of his drooping attire was in more or less the same sorry condition.
Then I said, “What did he do next?”
“Well, after this run-in with the law he recouped his lost fortune—all the money left from stock sales had been returned to the original owners—by selling beans. These weren’t the pinto variety like we raise here in the Hi Lo country, but were large imported ones from South America. Tinker had long ago ruined his land by experimenting with odd fertilizers until now the toughest weeds had a hard time making a living.
“Well, he soaked these beans in a cheap perfume. Then he went around the country peddling them to housewives. ‘Just think,’ he’d say, ‘a whole garden of perfumed beans large as the end of your thumb. All you have to do is rub one behind your ear or carry it in your purse, and the scent of the garden of Allah is with you wherever you may wander.’ This appealed to the country women, and pretty soon Tinker was getting five dollars apiece for his beans. The rich part was, he’d go back once to each of his victims. They’d all tell him that the beans grew well enough but there was no scent. He’d say, ‘Well, madam, that is a tragedy, but you must have bought a bad seed. This is the only complaint I have had. To make it up to you, you may have two more seeds for the price of one. Adieu until next season.’ Can you image that much guts, Pete?”
I shook my head respectfully.
Big Boy went on: “The women wouldn’t report him after the second sale because they were ashamed to confess how they’d been hooked. Oh, he’s done a little bit of everything. He’s experimented with rockets, and cars that run on air, and thought machines—now there’s one for you, feller: you think into it and the answer comes back out soundless but you pick it up in your mind. ‘Knowledge beyond man’s most fantastic wishes and deepest desires’ was how he put it. The old bastard talks like a goddam poet along with everything else. Pete, I’ve heard my father expound on what a great mind Tinker has for hours at a time. Other folks could call him a madman and a moron, but my dad admired him plumb to the bone and believed to the end he would prove his genius.”
It was plain that Big Boy had inherited his father’s capacity for faith. Me? I just didn’t know.
We drove up to Tinker’s dilapidated homestead and stepped out in the earth-powdered wind. There were instruments, pipes, tubing, motors, bottles, and hundreds of other items piled in mountainous heaps all
around the house. A thousand dreams were rusting into Tinker’s ruined ground. We moved around the debris to the porch. It hung slackly, as if the wind would lift it to the heavens at any moment.
Big Boy ducked, stepped up to the door, and knocked. In a moment the door opened and was completely filled by the square, bulldozer body of Tinker’s Indian wife. When she saw it was Big Boy she smiled and said: “Tinker, he’s in the back pasture. He works.”
“Thanks,” Big Boy said, “we’ll drive over and see him.”
She closed the door silently.
As we drove up, we could see a huge boiler arrangement as big as a haystack with a funnel-like affair on top of it that would have made two stock tanks. Tinker was on top of the whole business, pouring a liquid into an iron barrel.
“What in the hell is that contraption he’s working on now?” Big Boy marveled.
Tinker was oblivious of us until Big Boy yelled: “Hey, Tinker, what’re you doing? Gonna blow up the world?”
He looked down at us, and his florid face broke into a toothless smile. He had all his teeth, but they were so black and stained they didn’t show at that height. He finished pouring from the gallon bottle and climbed down. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said, happily extending a small fat hand with fingers that tapered like precision instruments. “It is a miracle of the gods that you have chosen this moment to arrive. You are about to witness my first full test on the greatest invention of this or any other age!”
He was swaying in the wind, squinting his rheumy eyes almost shut against the dust as he talked.
“Having been gifted with the fine father you were, I know you will understand what I am about to say.” He spoke directly to Big Boy. “I know that the import, the world-rattling immediacy of this experiment, will not be lost on so fertile and open a mind as you have so fortunately been bequeathed.”