The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Thus he was almost relieved to bring Carl back for the duration of their stay at that town. Before they got there, he stopped and parked along the road so Sharline could climb into the house part of Topper and change from her pretty dress into the new overalls. She wrapped that inner-tube around her bosom again too. And then pushed her hair up into her new ten-gallon hat. “Howdy, Carl,” Hoppy said to her. “Mighty proud to see ye again.”

  When they arrived at the schoolhouse yard where they’d been parking Topper, Hoppy was dismayed to see that his screen had been removed from the side of the schoolhouse and there were a group of men erecting poles and sticks and brush into a sort of “roof” over the seats his audience had sat upon. At first the brush pile struck Hoppy as the makings of a bonfire, and he wondered if the folks of this town were a-fixing to smoke him out. But then he recognized one of the men, not a local townsman but that circuit-riding preacher, Brother Emmett Binns, with whom he’d had previous run-ins. Binns was dressed differently from the other men, all of them wearing farmers’ work clothes and him in a suit and tie and black preacher’s hat.

  “Doggone,” Hoppy said to Carl, or Sharline. “Looks like they’re fixing to put up a brush arbor.” She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about, so he needed to ask, “Do you know what a brush arbor is?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Brother Binns put one up in our town last year. But he waited until after you’d gone. He even told us that was his intention, not to interfere with your wicked pitcher shows.”

  You didn’t see brush arbors very much any more, but in the old days they was a common fixture of the revival circuit, when one or more preachers would hold weekday as well as Sunday meetings, the purpose of the brush being to shield the congregation from the hot midsummer sun, although some brush arbors met at night too, and always there was a lot of musical accompaniment for gospel singing with fiddles, mandolins, banjos, guitars, and even a piano.

  Hoppy parked Topper where it had been before, and they got out and approached the men. “Howdy, Binns,” Hoppy said. “Couldn’t you have waited a couple of more days until we were finished?”

  “Brother Boyd,” Binns said, although he ought to have known that Hoppy wasn’t of any religion, “all the folks hereabouts got the idee that you had done gone away anyhow.”

  Binns was a slick character, reminding Hoppy more of a traveling salesman than a minister of the gospel. “Heck, we jist took a run down to Clarksville to do some shopping. Didn’t you see my screen a-hanging on the schoolhouse? You don’t think I’d go off without my screen, do ye?”

  “No telling what you fly-by-night fellers might do,” Binns said. “Anyhow, these folks are ready for the Word of God, aint ye, brethren?” He looked around at the other men, and a few of them nodded their heads in agreement. Binns went on, “Everbody hereabouts is ready for an old-time brush arbor, which as you can see we’re putting up.”

  “You’re putting it up right over the seats for my pitcher show,” Hoppy pointed out.

  “Do you own them seats?” Binns asked. “Didn’t you just throw ’em together out of boards and tomater crates that you found around here? Them seats belong to the Lord now.”

  Hoppy couldn’t think of a quick retort to that, so he was surprised that his assistant could. “Emmett Binns,” Carl said, “you’ve always been liable to just take whatever you please, whether it belongs to ye or not.”

  Brother Binns glowered at Carl, or Sharline, and looked him or her all over, and then peered closely at his or her face. “Well as I live and breathe,” he said. “If it aint Sharline Whitlow! Gal, what are ye decked out in them men’s togs for? And what are ye doing over here so far from home? Does your maw know you’ve took up with Landon Boyd?”

  Carl’s voice changed into Sharline’s, right there in front of those men who were listening. “I’m his assistant,” she said. “I’m part of the show. I can juggle and do magic tricks and norate the words on the screen and sell candy and popcorn and make myself useful in all kinds of ways.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Brother Binns. “And I’ll bet you’re living in sin with him right there in that truck-house thing.”

  “No, I aint, but I’d sure rather do it with him than with you!”

  Brother Binns blushed; he got pretty red in the face, and looked nervously around at the other men and then lowered his booming voice. “Maybe we ought to be elsewhere,” he said.

  “The elsewhere you ought to be is plumb out of this town,” she said.

  “Or leastways,” Hoppy suggested, “wait a couple of nights until we’ve finished our run of pitcher shows.”

  Brother Binns transferred his glower from Sharline to Hoppy. He could only look hard at him for a long little spell, trying to think of something to say. “Matter of fact,” he finally said, not in his booming voice but just in a growl that Hoppy and Sharline could hear, “I was just about to suggest that you and me share this brush arbor until such time as your shows is over. You use it by night, I use it by day. But on second thought, that would be hypocrisy, since one thing I aim to do is preach against your sinful entertainments, to show these good folks that watching pitcher shows is not only against Scripture, it’s not only a waste of their hard-earned nickels and dimes, it’s also an indolence that is an abomination unto the Lord!” His voice rose with these last words, and he continued so everyone could hear, “When I get through with you, Boyd, they won’t be a soul in this country who’d spend a penny to watch one of your shows!” His voice dropped again, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to help these good folks finish this here brush arbor.” He turned to go, but turned back, almost whispering, “Listen. I don’t know what she has told you, or what she plans to tell you, about me, but just so’s you’d know, Sharline Whitlow don’t live in this world, she lives only in her imagination.”

  He stormed off to rejoin the work on the brush arbor.

  Sharline wasn’t looking indignant. She had a big smile on her face. But she wasn’t looking at Hoppy either. Maybe she was avoiding his eyes. Maybe she was just looking off into the distance, as if she might spot some of her elves to come and help her. Then she reached up and gripped the brim of her new ten-gallon hat and pulled the hat off, allowing her long hair to spill down across her shoulders, then she put the hat back on. She glanced at Hoppy. “I guess I aint fooling nobody,” she said. And she climbed up into the back of Topper, and shut the door behind her.

  Chapter eight

  He seriously began to doubt that he ever would be able to get to sleep. It was bad enough, all the things on his mind that wouldn’t dare let him alone; it was terrible that sleeping beneath him was a gal. Well, not beneath in the sense of underneath his own self, but down below in the lower bunk. And not terrible neither, not because she was a gal, but he was a feller and had never in his whole life slept in the same room, let alone the same bed, even if it was a double decker, with a gal. Those nights she’d slept down there as Carl didn’t count, did they? And he wasn’t too awfully sure that she was sleeping. He listened for her breathing, to see if it was regular, but couldn’t make it out amidst the chorus of night sounds: crickets, tree frogs, katydids, cicadas, nightingales, whatever. For all he knew she might’ve snuck out in the dark to spend the night with her fairy friends…or even with Preacher Binns. He hadn’t yet managed to learn the details of whatever had once transpired betwixt the two of them. He had hoped before bedtime to worm the truth out of her, but he’d been loath to broach the matter, and anyhow he couldn’t be certain that whatever she told him would be the truth. Hadn’t Binns said that she lived only in her imagination? Maybe she’s only imagining me, Hoppy thought, just one amongst a thousand rapid-fire thoughts that flitted through his sleepless skull; Maybe I don’t even exist except in her fancy. He tried rolling over on his back and cradling his clasped hands under the back of his head. That was just a little more comfortable. It was awful hot, even with Topper’s windows and the door wide open. Under ordinary circumstances in such heat Hop
py would be sleeping bare-ass naked, but of course he wouldn’t dare strip down to nothing in her presence. And she was sleeping—if she was sleeping—in her slip, a silky thing she’d picked out in Clarksville that covered her up pretty well, although the glimpse he’d caught of her before putting out the lamp was like as if she had nothing on, her curves and all. It was some kind of wonder that they had wordlessly agreed to go on sleeping together, or, not together of course in that sense but in such proximity to each other. There was something terribly exciting about the situation, which was another contributing factor to Hoppy’s sleeplessness. The thought that she was a real pretty gal and she was right down there below him made it impossible for his swollen member to unswell.

  The only way he could force his busy mind to stop thinking about her was to rehash some of the items of the afternoon and evening. Fortunately there were enough citizens of the town who were caught up in the progress of the serial “The Painted Stallion”—of the wagon train on its way to Santa Fe—who wanted to know how it all came out, especially the latest cliff-hanger, and even wanted to buy some more of the popcorn, which the preacher had never thought to offer for sale at a brush arbor camp meeting, nor had any brush arbor ever had a concessionary attached to it. Even though the brush arbor overhead made viewing of the screen impossible from some of the seats, certain influential men of the town, prodded perhaps by their womenfolk and children, had persuaded Brother Binns to allow the brush arbor to be used during the evenings for the purpose of the pitcher shows.

  Binns had been adamant at first. Even though he had told Sharline the year before that he’d waited until Hoppy’s shows had left town in order to hold his meeting at her town, the real reason for that hadn’t been out of any respect for Hoppy or even politeness but just the fear that he wouldn’t be able to compete with the pitcher shows. And now, even though his brush arbor meetings were strictly daytime, he didn’t cotton to the notion of sharing the meeting-ground with a worldly, sinful pitcher show. One of the men—in fact it was Art Bedwell, who ran the general store and was the upstandingest citizen in town—said to him, “Brother Binns, look at it this-away: by the time you get done with your service, and everbody has had their fill of singing and shouting and salvation and all, nobody will be able to stay awake through the pitcher show!” And all the other men laughed, Hoppy too, though he was mildly worried about the truth of Art’s conjecture.

  Brother Binns had scratched his chin and after a while had said, “I reckon we might tolerate just a couple more nights of pitcher shows.” So the men had helped Hoppy put his screen back up on the side of the schoolhouse. The men also had rolled and lifted an old upright piano out of the schoolhouse and set it up beside the pulpit of the brush arbor for the use of the musicians who would be playing for the service.

  When Sharline had come out of Topper again, she had been Sharline, not Carl, dressed in one of her pretty new dresses and her nice new shoes, and her long hair flowing out from beneath the ten-gallon hat, her one silent acknowledgment that she was still, like her boss Hoppy, a pitcher shower.

  “No sense in trying to fool nobody no more,” she had remarked to Hoppy. And then she had sat herself down at that piano and had commenced a-playing, and you never heard nothing like it. Hoppy had truly regretted that this whole story is just in black and white, because that music Sharline played on that piano had been full of reds and golds and blues and greens. And her beautiful long hair—its color, which wasn’t dark but wasn’t light neither, just couldn’t be revealed in black and white. She had still been a-playing the piano when the first customers of the night showed up for the pitcher show, and they had all gathered around the piano to listen. Even Brother Binns had showed up. She had stopped playing in order to do her usual chores: selling tickets, juggling, the magic (and somehow a female magician’s assistant is much more magical than a male), making and selling popcorn, starting the projector, and reading out the captions for the benefit of the illiterate. Hoppy had wondered just how he had ever managed to get along without her. She was just as efficient as Carl had been…and lots better-looking to boot. And now that musicianship had been added to her talents, she was absolutely indispensable.

  To anyone who might have asked her, as some of them had done, “Wasn’t you a feller last time I seen ye?” she had said by way of answer, “That there ‘Indian chief’ on the painted stallion is not a feller neither.” And that had been the night, coincidentally and wondrously, that the episode of “The Painted Stallion” had made it clear that the magical guardian angel of the wagon train, despite her headdress and other Indian garb, was a woman.

  Now Hoppy sighed, and realized that being on his back wasn’t the best position for sleeping. He rolled over and squirmed a bit to get into a better sleeping position, and it caused the whole frame of the bed-bunk to shake. “Landon,” she said, just barely audible above the crickets and other night critters.

  “Yeah?” he said, just a little more audible.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Naw, I’m dead to the world,” he said, and chuckled. “How about you?”

  “Out like a lamp.” She giggled. “But I must be talking in my sleep.”

  “Go right ahead,” he said. “I’m a-listening to ye in my dreams.”

  But she did not say anything else for a while. Maybe he was just a-dreaming. If so, he wished that something noteworthy might happen. Most of his dreams didn’t have any talking in them. And here she was, by and by, with the next thing she was fixing to say: “I guess you’re wondering if Emmett Binns ever done anything to me.”

  Hoppy cleared his throat. “The thought has crossed my mind. Not that it’s none of my business.”

  Another long silence from her. Then she said, “Not that he didn’t try. Boy, did he ever try.” Hoppy could hear her sighing over the memories. “But like he said, I don’t live in this world, I only live in my imagination. Well, if that’s true, and it aint, I confess to you that I have imagined what Emmett Binns could have done to me. He’s not bad-looking, you know. And he’s a great talker. Wait till you hear one of his sermons. And he did actually do Ila Fay Woodrum, and I had to listen to her brag about it and describe it and get me all hot with her words so that I did have to have some little make-beliefs of my own that he might have done me too. But he never did. That’s the honest truth. You have to believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I can’t even imagine what it’s like. If I live only in my imagination, then I must be dead as far as that’s concerned, because I can’t even begin to dream up what-all it would feel like.”

  Hoppy coughed. Whatever inclination he had for attempting to try to educate her was undone by the plain truth that he had no idea whatsoever of what it felt like to a woman, and even a pretty incomplete notion of what it ought to feel like to a man. He coughed again, and could only say, “Well.”

  “Ila Fay tried her best to tell me, and she said I could take a cucumber and warm it up in the oven and maybe get some notion of what it’s like, but a cucumber without any feller attached to it just wouldn’t be right, now would it?”

  All Hoppy could think of to comment was: “I reckon not.”

  “Yours doesn’t look anything atall like a cucumber anyhow,” she said.

  Hoppy assumed that was a compliment, but was embarrassed at the recollection of the number of times she, or rather Carl, had seen his equipment.

  There was such a long silence, except for the chorus of night critters (and Hoppy knew they were making all that noise purely and simply to make known their desires), that Hoppy began to wonder if she might have finally fallen asleep. But eventually she spoke again. “You’ll recollect I was listening when Ila Fay offered to do it with you and you turned her down on account of being a ‘no-man,’ you said. You told her you just wasn’t able. But she didn’t know what you meant, and I don’t know what you meant. Can you tell me?”

  Hoppy felt he owed it to her at least to make an effort to explain. He had alrea
dy told her, when she was Carl, about his sense of leaving several females frustrated because he hadn’t been able to make them experience the fit or attack which comes at the end of the deal. Now he said to her, “Last night I showed ye that blue movie of mine, the little reel called ‘Assortment.’ Of course I thought I was showing it to Carl, and I would never have showed it to ye iffen I’d known ye was a gal. Anyhow, you recall how some of them gals in those scenes would get so carried away, from all the inning-and-outing that the fellers was doing, that they’d finally just explode with a big spasm of delight? Well, I just aint able to keep on inning-and-outing long enough to give any gal that pleasure.”

  There was another long silence from down below, while Hoppy stewed in his self-loathing, before her words drifted up: “How come? Do you get winded or tired out?”

  “Naw, but the rapture of it makes me shoot off my jism too soon, and once that happens I get too limp to keep on.” He knew he was blushing, but it was dark and she couldn’t see him from down below nohow.

  “What’s ‘jism’?”

  “Didn’t Ila Fay never tell you about that? Didn’t nobody never explain to you how babies gets made?”

  “You must think I’m real stupid.”

  “Sharline, I don’t think you’re the least bit stupid. But most gals your age has got some notion of all the juices involved in the breeding of male and female.”

  “Could you show me what jism looks like?”

  Maybe I don’t even exist except in her fancy, Hoppy allowed, once again. She was having a weird dream and he was in it, and this was the part where he was supposed to whack off with his right and pour it into the palm of his left for her inspection. As quick as he was on the trigger, it oughtn’t to take more than fifteen seconds of whacking. He hated himself because he wasn’t bright enough to think of the idea of suggesting to her certain ways she might help produce the jism. That would come later in sad hindsight. “We’d have to get up and light the lamp for you to see,” he said. “I could just try and tell ye. It kind of looks like buttermilk.”