Chapter nineteen
So now Arlis runs to get his roadster, and when he comes back, they all try to get into it, with the rumble seat open, but Arlis says that only him and Hoppy can go, the girls will have to stay behind, because the extra weight might slow them down. Now as soon as Hoppy is in, Arlis lets out the clutch and roars off in pursuit of the villain in black. Never mind that Arlis’ roadster is also black, like all other vehicles except Topper. There are three or four cars ahead of them, other members of the posse, and all of them churning up a huge cloud of dust that nearly smothers the folks walking home from the show, or riding their mules, or sitting in their slow wagons. These folks gesture onward with their arms or shout “Go get ’im!” as the roadster zips past them. Arlis speculates that Binns might have been avoiding the main roads, thus he must have whizzed through town in the middle of the night, probably coming up from the Parker Ridge road and intending to reach Jasper or points beyond by the back roads. The Alum Cove road is mostly just one rough lane, but there are stretches along it that will hold two vehicles abreast, and on these Arlis passes, one by one, the other members of the posse, until the roadster is the lead vehicle, with nobody else kicking dust in their face until, after a few miles, they come within sight of the trail of dust raised by what can only be the culprit’s car, and, eventually, after more miles, they catch sight of its tail-lights. Those tail-lights begin to diminish. “He’s speeding up on us,” Arlis says. “He knows he’s being follered.” That’s practically an admission of Binns’ guilt, if there was ever any doubt in the first place that he is guilty. They chase him for a long time, up steep winding trails and down into hollers and across the vales. Hoppy has to admire Arlis’ driving, which is reckless enough to keep up with the car ahead but steady enough not to plunge them off into a ravine.
Hoppy tries to imagine this midsummer midnight chase as if it’s being filmed into a pitcher show. He even conjectures, aloud to Arlis, that some day they’ll be making pitcher shows that have a lot of cars chasing each other instead of just cowboys on their horses chasing each other, which might be exciting but also is kind of backward, as if it belongs to the previous century. “I do believe you’re right,” Arlis says. “But it would be a sight more fun to watch this chase on the screen than to be in it.”
Steadily they close in on the car ahead, somewhere past the hamlet of Mineral Spring, and Hoppy begins to wonder what they will do if they can catch him. Will Arlis attempt to force him off the road? Get ahead of him and block his path? Ram him from the rear? But Arlis can’t catch him. They pursue him all the way to Spunkwater, a nice little town that would have been on Hoppy’s route except for two reasons, one, it is just a little too little, and two, it is too close to Stay More, down the mountain a few miles. At Spunkwater, the road forks, the main road continuing on northward all the way to Parthenon and thence to Jasper. Hoppy is surprised to see that Binns turns west into the other fork, the Stay More road, which also goes eventually to Parthenon and Jasper, although nobody uses it for that purpose. Could Stay More be Binns’ destination? Of all the towns in the Ozarks, Stay More is one of the most isolated, hardest to get to, hardest to get out of, and thus a good place for hiding, if you’re trying to escape from anyone or anything. Hoppy wonders if that might be Binns’ intention, to hide out in Stay More. But he feels an unusual jubilation to be going in the direction of home. It’s a very steep and very rugged trail down the mountain, and they are so close to Binns that they can see his silhouette against his headlights, frantically clutching the steering wheel to keep the car on the terrible twisting trail.
“Right down yonder,” says Hoppy, “is a place where the road divides for a stretch, I mean, there’s the old road that goes one way, up high, and the newer road that goes another way, lower down, and is a kind of shortcut. They both meet up again farther along. Maybe if he takes the high road, you could take the low road and cut him off.”
“Good idee!” Arlis says. “But how come you to know so much about this road?”
“Stay More is my hometown,” Hoppy declares, with no little bit of pride in his voice.
Sure enough, Binns takes the high road. Here comes the part of the pitcher show that will have folks on the edge of their seats, Hoppy is thinking. Arlis mashes the gas pedal and whips down into the low road and zooms along it. It’s a straighter stretch, and they reach the spot where it meets up again with the high road well ahead of Binns, and Arlis brings the roadster to a stop blocking the high road. Arlis jumps out of the roadster, saying, “I hope he don’t ram me!”
“I hope he aint armed,” Hoppy puts in.
Arlis opens the rumble seat and fishes around among his tools and brings out a tire iron, which he gives to Hoppy, and takes a jack handle for himself. So they are both armed in a sense.
They wait. It sure is taking a while. Finally the car comes along and screeches to a halt just short of the roadster, with the horn blaring. The driver jumps out, and Arlis and Hoppy both raise their irons to bash him with. But it’s not Binns. It’s Teal Buffum. Teal raises his hands. “Don’t hit me, boys!” he pleads.
“Have we just been a-chasing you?” Arlis asks him.
Teal is puzzled. “Why, no, I thought I was a-follerin you. You passed me way back down the road.”
Hoppy explains to Teal about the high road and low road and how Binns had taken the high road.
“But where in hell is he?” Arlis wants to know. “I don’t see how Teal could have come along this high road without bumping into him.”
They get back into the two vehicles and drive slowly back across both the high road and low road. They search the road itself carefully for any sign of Binns’ tire tracks, but the dust is so dry there is no imprint of any tracks, not even their own. Binns has disappeared into thin air, almost as if a giant eagle has plucked him and his car off the earth. But eagles don’t fly at night. One by one the other members of the posse arrive, and they have to explain to each one of them the weird situation of the high and low roads and Binns’ strange disappearance. There is a lot of head scratching. The members of the posse walk along both the high and the low road, kicking at the dust with their shoes, looking this way and that. Hoppy hasn’t felt so frustrated since he and Helen got interrupted. He says to Arlis, “This sure aint going to make a good pitcher show.”
There is nothing to be done. One by one the members of the posse head for home. Hoppy thinks that since they’re so close to Stay More, he might just ask Arlis to drive on down there, just for a look around, and if it weren’t the wee hours of the morning they could stop by Luther Chism’s place and pick up a jug or two of Chism’s Dew. He could sure use a slug right now to take the edge off his aggravation. But he doesn’t want to keep Arlis out any longer, and it’s a long way back home.
So they too follow the other members of the posse in retreat. One more reason for disappointment: to be so close to Stay More without being able to see it again. The trip back is much slower, more leisurely, and Arlis talks even more than he usually does. He conjectures possibilities: when Binns discovered that they weren’t following him into the high road, he might have stopped, turned around and headed back the other way and found a place to turn off before the other posse cars came up behind him. No, Hoppy says, there wouldn’t have been any place on the high road where he could have turned around; that narrow high road runs across the edge of a bluff. Well, Arlis speculates, is it possible that Binns could have reached the place where the high and low roads meet up again before they got there, and have gone on? No, Hoppy says, not unless he was going seventy miles an hour, which would be impossible on that risky trail.
By and by, Arlis begins to talk, in a roundabout sort of way, about him and Sharline, and how he had been so taken with her, how she charmed him out of his skin, how she was so much more spirited than Helen, and how much he’d lost his head in a way that he now regretted. He had no idee that her and Hoppy were so special to each other. He hopes that Hoppy doesn’t hold against him
his rashness and wrongdoing. Arlis rambles on in that vein practically all the way home, until finally Hoppy puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “Feller, I might’ve blown a gasket if you’d’ve taken her out to California. But you didn’t. So let’s us just forget it.” Having said these pacifying words, he realizes that what he has said and the way he has said it is exactly like Hopalong Cassidy does in every one of his pitcher shows, when someone has to apologize to him for something.
The dawn is coming up when Arlis drops him off at Topper. “Just one little question,” Arlis says. “How was it? With Helen, I mean. What you’uns were doing.”
Hoppy says, “I reckon it might’ve been a right smart more satisfying if she’d’ve finished.”
Hoppy doesn’t want to wake Sharline, so he decides to climb into the top bunk. He grabs hold of the bunk post and swings himself up…and nearly lands right on top of Helen. His landing misses her but jostles the bed and wakes her. “Oops, pardon me,” he says, and slips down and into the bunk with Sharline. He is plumb wore out and desperate for a little shut-eye, but the thought of Helen sleeping right up above keeps him awake for a while. Before he can numb his mind to let him sleep, Sharline wakes up. She is glad to see him. He tries to explain to her what has happened, the problem with the high road and low road, but it is all so complicated and ridiculous that the effort to explain it exhausts him into deep slumber.
The heat of midday wakes him. The gals have fixed him a fine meal, bigger than breakfast but smaller than dinner, sort of halfway in between, with a ham omelet and his first mushmelon of the season. He washes up a bit, combs his hair and sits down to try to explain more clearly to Sharline and Helen just what happened in the pursuit of Binns. The gals have as much trouble as the posse did in understanding what could have happened. “Maybe my fairies got him,” Sharline says, and that might be just as good a explanation as we are likely to hear.
Now it is time to take down the screen, fold it up, and leave town. Arlis comes over to help. Hoppy, not just being polite, says, “You and Helen better just go with us and we’ll read ole Mr. Shakspear out loud in every town just like we done last night.”
Sharline says, “I’d sure like to have you’uns do that, but I fixed the sound on the projector, Landon. While you was sleeping, I got in there and messed around with it, and I flicked a tube in the amplifier and it all started working again!”
“Well, bless your heart, hon,” Hoppy says, and then he says to Helen and Arlis, “but you’uns come go with us anyhow, and we’ll have a lot of fun.”
“That’s kind of ye, Hop,” Arlis said, “but I reckon we might just head for California.”
So they say their goodbyes. Sharline and Arlis is looking at each other kind of moony-eyed, as if they wish they could sneak off and do it just one more time, but Helen and Hoppy are just looking at each other polite-like.
“Are you going on to Mt. Judy from here?” Arlis asks him.
“Naw, I had to give up Mt. Judy to the fellers who sold me that pitcher show. I aint sure where we’re going, maybe Piercetown or Hasty. But first I want to run up home to Stay More to take care of some things.”
“Maybe you’ll find Binns after all,” Arlis suggests.
“That would sure be hunky-dory,” Hoppy says.
Him and Arlis shake hands, and the two gals give each other a big hug, then Arlis and Sharline give each other a hug that isn’t too little, and Hoppy and Helen give each other a polite hug, and they all say, “Take care,” and “See you” and stuff like that. There’s an old superstition in the Ozarks that you must never watch anyone go all the way out of sight, so Arlis and Helen turn away at the last moment.
On the same road as last night, going to Alum Cove and Mineral Spring, Hoppy can’t help but notice that Sharline is crying. Not noisily, but she has to get out her hankie and dab at her cheeks. He doesn’t ask her what’s the matter, because he thinks he knows. “You really did care for him, didn’t you?”
“Arlis? No. I mean, yeah, he was a nice feller, but I never wanted to go to California with him. Helen did, and she is a great lady, and he nearly broke her heart, and I’m sad for her.”
“Don’t be sad. They’ll go to California together, and live happy ever after.”
Sharline sniffled. “We all misbehaved.”
“But you had a time, didn’t ye?”
“Yeah, I guess I had a time.”
It is getting on towards late afternoon when they reach Spunkwater and turn off down the mountain toward Stay More. Hoppy feels shivers running up his spine at the thought of seeing Stay More again and showing it to Sharline. He knows there isn’t an awful lot left to the town, compared with what it once had been, and he doesn’t know what Sharline will think of it. Probably it’s not all that different from her own home town, and it will be just one more wide place in the road to her. But he likes to try to look at things through other people’s eyes, just as he tried to watch “Assortment” through Helen’s eyes, and tried to watch last night’s car chase as if it were a pitcher show, and he is eager to see Stay More through Sharline’s eyes. There’s even a possibility, if she likes it enough, that he’ll decide to set up his show there and see if the home folks care for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
He is having a terrible time easing Topper down the mountain, not just with the roughness of the road surface itself, which hasn’t known a road grader for months and months, seems like, and is full of chuckholes and run-offs, but also the trail whips back and forth in hairpins all over creation, and sheer drop-offs scare him.
Halfway down the mountain they come to the place where the road temporarily divides, where they’d lost Binns the night before, and Hoppy decides to take the high road to point it out to Sharline. He is quickly reminded of why the lower road was necessary to replace the higher road: the old road runs right along the edge of a cliff that worries the daylights out of him, and he can just barely manage to creep Topper along it. “This is the way that Binns took when he disappeared,” Hoppy explains to her.
A thought occurs to him at the same instant that it does to her, but she is first to spot the car. “Stop!” she says. And when Topper is completely still, she points. “Lookee down yonder!” she says, and he has to scoot across the seat to see where she is pointing. There, down below, a black car sits on the tree tops of a grove of pines which have cushioned the car’s plummet, but the car has crushed many of the tree branches. They can’t see the interior of the car from this height, so they can’t tell if there is anyone in it, dead or alive.
“That’s his car, sure enough,” Hoppy observes, and then he resumes steering Topper very carefully across the old high road until it meets the lower road and there is a place farther along where he can park Topper without blocking the road. Then from Topper’s cluttered interior he fetches his coil of rope, and says to Sharline, “Looks like we’ll have to do some hiking. Would you rather wait here, and let me do it?”
“Are you kidding?” she says, and she goes with him, first removing her pretty shoes that Arlis had given her and putting on her old shoes.
They walk on down the road toward Stay More for a good ways until they find a place where they can climb down into the ravine and hike to the grove of pines holding the car aloft. There would ordinarily be a stream of water tumbling through the ravine, but the drought has dried it up, and they have little trouble climbing over boulders to reach the base of the grove of pines. Inside the grove they crane their necks to stare upward but can just barely detect the silhouette of the car against the sky. The first tree limb is maybe twenty feet up. From that limb it would be easy to reach all the other limbs, on up to the car. But among all the things that Hoppy Boyd hates himself for is his fear of heights. The thought of trying to climb those tall pines and reach that car, maybe sixty feet up, scares him something awful.
“Let me go,” Sharline says, reading his mind. “When I was just a young’un, I used to climb trees all the time.”
“But I’m worr
ied the car could come loose and fall down on you,” he says.
“That’s just a chance,” she says. “Just one more chance in a life full of chances. Throw the rope up there over that limb.”
“What if he’s in the car, and still alive?” Hoppy wonders.
“That’s just another durn chance,” she says. “Throw the rope.”
So Hoppy throws the coil of rope over the first limb, and brings the other end down so that Sharline can grab aholt of it and climb up, hand over hand, her feet braced against the tree, to reach the first limb. Hoppy is amazed at her nimbleness, and believes that she really has had a lot of experience climbing trees.
She climbs to another limb, and another, and soon she is out of sight. He can only wait. He waits, commencing to get real nervous. Finally, he calls, “Sharline? Are you all right?”
“I’m nearly there!” she calls back. He waits some more. Then she says, “I’ve caught hold of the door handle!” He waits, holding his breath. She calls, “There’s nobody in it!” He waits, just a bit relieved to know that Binns isn’t up there. But what has happened to him? Then he hears Sharline holler, “Glory hallelujah! The back seat is full of reels of film!” He continues to wait, feeling elated to be in possession again of “The Painted Stallion” et cetera. “Wait!” she calls, “There’s something else! A tote, a big hold-all satchel sort of thing. I’m opening it!” Now she begins to recite the contents of the bag: two men’s shirts, a pair of trousers, three neckties, three pairs of socks and underpants, a comb, shaving mug and razor, toothbrush, a Bible, and a pack of rubbers. “Wait!” she calls. “There’s money!” Then there is a silence for several long moments. “Lots of money!” she calls. “Hundreds! I declare before goodness, maybe there’s thousands!” And, finally, she calls, “I’m a-coming down to get the rope.” Sharline returns to the first limb where the rope is draped, coils it up, and says, “I’m going to attach the tote to one end of this rope so’s I can let all the reels and stuff down to you.” Then she reclimbs the tree limbs, nimble as a monkey, and soon is lowering the satchel attached to one end of the rope, all the way down to where Hoppy is waiting for it. It’s a big bag, but she can’t get everything into one lowering of it, so he takes out all the reels and a smaller bag holding scads of bills, twenties and fifties and hundreds, and then Sharline pulls the empty bag back up and reloads it. Three trips are necessary to get all of the stuff down to the ground. And three trips to transport as much as they can carry to Topper.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 21