This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  “I ought to take you both home with me,” the preacher said to Frenchy, “set you to work learning about the Redeemer and the path He walked. I know you boys are lost. There’s no sin in that. We all find ourselves lost now and again. Jesus Himself spent forty days in the wilderness. His suffering lent salvation to all men.”

  “I told you,” said Frenchy, narrowing his eyes to meet those of the preacher, “we ain’t lost. We’re just going fishing, is all.”

  The preacher’s boy was on his knees now, grabbing his hat and fixing the brim. Tears and blood mixed in the dust. Flies buzzed across the road.

  “The path to righteousness is the Lord’s inspiration. You boys ought to study on that before you commence to walking any further. There’s only one road worth following, and it’s the Lord’s. You remember that now.”

  With those words, the preacher strode past Frenchy and Alvin, scooped the little boy up by the crook of his arm, and headed on down the road. Alvin watched them go, his knees shaking.

  “Amen,” Frenchy said, and gave them one more whistle. Neither preacher nor little disciple looked back. Near the curve at the bottom, they passed out of sight.

  Alvin swatted a fly off his face. Frenchy tossed a stone into the blackberry bushes, stirring up some bees. It was a long walk up the road, but Alvin was so afraid to follow the preacher back into Hiram they headed off just the same, deciding to walk home to Illinois if need be. Five hours later, God rewarded them with a ride north courtesy of a businessman from Galesburg, who had been visiting an acquaintance down in Bowling Green. When they reached Farrington, both boys received an enthusiastic whipping with a hickory rod in the tackroom of Uncle Henry’s barn, followed by a lecture whose chief message was that life’s highway holds extremes of danger and delight and only sinners and fools tempt its fancy.

  Chester Burke’s tan Packard Six was parked in a grove of old oak and black walnut trees on a shady bluff above the Missouri River a couple of miles from a small town called Hadleyville. Chester sat behind the steering wheel, reading a morning newspaper whose pages riffled in the morning breeze. Alvin Pendergast stood a few yards off in the sunlight, combing his hair and studying his look in a small hand-mirror. His face was sallow and thin, and he had a cough and a slight fever. Back home, he’d be in bed, sweating up the sheets, or maybe riding a train to the sanitarium. Far below to the east, a steamboat plied the wide green swirling current upriver.

  Chester called over to him. “Look here, kid: the Babe hit another one. Rupert’s gold mine. Greatest drawing card the game’s ever had. I tell you, nobody stands ’em up like the Bambino. I saw him at Comiskey last year, swaggering around outside the clubhouse with a bottle of beer in each hand and it wasn’t yet breakfast. Well, wouldn’t you know it, he hit about a hundred balls out of the park in batting practice, went three-for-four in the game, then left with a dame on both arms! Can you feature that? Of course, Cobb was the real showman—get a hit, swipe a base, knock some poor dumb bastard on his keester. A genuine sonofabitch. My kind of ballplayer.” Chester folded the paper to read the next page. He looked back over his shoulder. “Not much of a baseball fan, are you?”

  Alvin stuck the comb and mirror into his shirt pocket. “I don’t like games at all. They’re for babies.” Also, he hated getting sweaty from running about in the hot sun. Sports were for dumbbells.

  “Don’t be a philistine, kid. Baseball’s great for the country. Keeps us square and healthy.”

  “Sure it does.”

  “You’re smart, kid. Anyone tell you that before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it’s true. Stick with me, you’ll go far.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You sick or something?” Chester asked, looking Alvin in the eye with a worried frown.

  The farm boy turned away, scared of being found out. “No, sir.”

  “Got the Heebie-Jeebies?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Don’t let it stir you up too much.”

  “I won’t,” Alvin said, strolling off to the edge of the river bluff. At home, he might have been finishing up with his chores right about now, getting ready to go fishing with Frenchy. They had a spot all picked out for springtime, a little shelter dug into the riverbank by the winter storms on the Mississippi where they could sit in the shade with a tree branch dangling trotlines in the current. Frenchy had been collecting bait for a couple of months, ten dozen nightcrawlers in one gallon fruit jar alone. Frenchy hated fishing alone, so without Alvin there he’d call on Herbert Muller who didn’t know a catfish from a groundhog, but who wanted to pal around with Frenchy, hoping to line up some work in the summer. If Alvin ever went home, he planned on crowning Herbert Muller with a rock.

  Looking downriver, he thought about Doc Hartley coming out to the farm to see if the consumption had returned. He hadn’t traveled to the sanitarium with Alvin, nor had he ever visited. He hadn’t told Alvin or his folks about the artificial pneumothorax treatments or how the wards smelled of formaldehyde and death. During that first month at the sanitarium, Alvin watched two brothers no more than nine or ten years old die in the ward together, side by side, like two little pasty white ghosts, hacking their tiny lungs out. Alvin had expected to die himself. He’d thought that’s why he had been sent away: to spare his sisters the pain of seeing him croak at home. He saw sixteen people die in his ward during the year he spent at the sanitarium. How could his folks think he’d ever go back there? He’d rather jump off a bridge or dive under a train. If they were intending to send him back to the sanitarium, maybe he wouldn’t ever go home again at all.

  Chester honked the motor horn.

  Alvin spat over the bluff, then returned to the auto and climbed in. Man-sized sunflowers flanked the ditches on both sides of the road and swayed in the draft of the Packard as Chester sped off toward town. There was no traffic for miles. Nobody on the highway at all. It was a funny day, Alvin thought. Not even many birds whizzing through the air. After a while, they ran by the Hadleyville city limits sign. It was almost noon. Shade trees lined the road that led through the back neighborhoods. Flowers bloomed on the white fencelines that marked a few dooryards. A sign read: Lots for Sale—Easy Terms. Chester kept the automobile in low as they motored toward the center of town. The quiet sidewalks shimmered in the heat. A couple of blocks farther on, Chester pulled the car over into a Dixie filling station under the shade of a huge weeping willow and let the motor idle. Alvin looked around. Storefronts and flags. Leo Brooks Boots & Shoes, Franklin Bogart’s Grocery Emporium, Barton Brothers Clothing and Furnishings, a Ford agency and repair garage, and a furniture store with a fluttering advertising banner: Let us feather your nest with a little down! Half a dozen automobiles were parked across the street, a few pedestrians strolling about. It was a nice town.

  “Why’re we stopping here?” asked Alvin, watching a small hound dog chase a bird across the street. He was feeling jumpy all of a sudden.

  Chester shut the engine off and climbed out. “You thirsty, kid? There’s a lunchroom right around the corner. Come on, I’ll set you up to an ice cold dope.”

  Alvin grabbed his cap and stepped out of the car. The sun was warmer than ever. Most of his family had the constitution for heat; his sisters sat indoors in the kitchen until high noon, then went out past the barn to play dolls in the tall grass meadows while he’d be hiding under an old shagbark hickory whenever he wasn’t working, keeping to the shade. The family said it was his red hair that made him burn. Fishing at the river with Frenchy, he had to wear a floppy hat and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar. The hat made the girls along the shore think he was bald. He already suffered his affliction; now he had the hat, too. It was humiliating. My dear son, we all have our crosses to bear, his mother told him, but what did she know? She worked in her garden everyday and hardly ever needed a sunbonnet.

  The attendant came out of the filling station, a freckle-faced towhead hardly older than Alvin himself. “What’ll it be
, fellows?”

  “Shoot some gasoline into our tank,” Chester said, handing the boy a couple of dollar bills.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll be back in about ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chester gave Alvin a nudge. “Let’s go, kid.”

  They entered a narrow one-room building across the street where three men in suspenders and blue overalls sat hunched over a game of checkers at a table by the front window. The one kibitzing was smoking a three-for-a-nickel stogie and held a punchboard on his lap. Except for the old fellow in the white chef’s hat, reading box scores from the morning sport sheets beside the cash register, they were the only people in the building. Six empty tables were arranged along one wall parallel to a short order counter that ran from the front of the building to the rear. Chester chose a seat at the table next to the back door. Alvin took the chair across from him and studied the lunch program hung on the wall behind the cash register: meatloaf, lamb, beefsteak, roasted chicken, baked ham and tomato soup—each dinner for 50¢.

  “Do we have time to eat?” he asked, feeling a queasiness in his stomach that was either nervousness or hunger, probably both. He’d crammed down five hardboiled eggs, smoked bacon, a plate of toast and three cups of coffee for breakfast, but was already hungry again. His appetite was strange since he had gotten sick. Some days he never felt like eating a bite; the next day he couldn’t keep his belly quiet.

  “Nope.” Chester took a package of Camel cigarettes from his vest pocket. He called to the man at the cash register. “Say, dad, how about a couple of Coca-Colas?”

  The old fellow nodded and went to get the drinks from an icebox under the counter. They had drawn the attention of the men playing checkers. Chester lit his cigarette and gave them a friendly wave. The old fellow in the chef’s hat brought two opened bottles of Coca-Cola and set them down in front of Chester. “That’ll be ten cents, please.”

  Chester dug into his trousers and came up with a nickel and a handful of pennies which he sprinkled out onto the counter. “Take your pick.”

  After the fellow had gone, Chester took a sip from one of the Coke bottles. “See those three onionheads over there by the window?”

  Alvin nodded. In fact, he had been trying to ignore them. He didn’t know much about folks in Missouri and what they thought of strangers. Were they friendly here?

  “Well, I’ll lay they’re trying to figure out whether we’re bootleggers or drugstore cowboys,” Chester continued, “and we both know they couldn’t tell a bootlegger from Hoover’s grandmother. But what they’re worried about are their birdies. That is, whose we’ll be loving up this afternoon and whose we’ll be ignoring. Trust me, kid. Losing their dames is the first thing folks get muddleheaded over when fellows like us come into town. We could go out and rob them blind, and while they’ll be plenty sore, they’ll start forgetting about it in a month or so. But if we were to drive off into the sunset with a couple of Hadleyville’s sweeties, they’d hunt us down like animals, shoot us full of holes, and cut our carcasses up for the hogs.”

  Four more men wearing denim overalls came into the lunchroom and said hello to the old fellow at the cash register and took the table beside the checker players. One of them looked over at Alvin and Chester, and murmured a few words to the fellow beside him. The others seated at the table began talking among themselves.

  Chester leaned across to the next table and grabbed an ashtray for his cigarette. Alvin felt a bellyache coming on. Chester had brought him here to Hadleyville to help him take some money out of the First Commerce Bank on Third Street. He’d told him so just after breakfast when he paid the bill. “It’ll be easy as pie,” Chester said, handing Alvin a note that read:

  “You’re going to present this to one of the tellers,” he said.

  “Don’t joke me,” Alvin replied.

  Chester laughed and told him to get into the car because they had to reach Hadleyville by noon. “Don’t worry, kid,” Chester said, while they were driving along the highway. “You’ll make the grade, all right.”

  Alvin asked, “You sure we ain’t got time for a couple of pork chop sandwiches? I’m awful hungry.”

  Chester took a quick drag off the cigarette. “I’m sure.”

  His eyes were bluer than any Alvin had ever seen. He shaved each morning. Smelled like cologne. Wore fresh collars and a swell suit. Had his shoes shined before breakfast. Smiled at everyone he met. Never seemed scared, neither, Alvin thought. Now that was something worth learning. He could do a lot worse than taking after a smart fellow like Chester Burke.

  A raucous cheer came from the checker game as somebody won. The old fellow at the cash register clapped. Out on the sidewalk, two rag-tag boys on bicycles rode past carrying fishing poles. Alvin felt envious; that’s where he ought to be going. He could probably show ’em a good thing or two. The twelve o’clock whistle at the shingle mill across town shrieked, signaling the noon hour.

  Chester snuffed out his cigarette, then drained the last of his Coca-Cola. “Let’s go, kid.”

  Alvin studied the men at the checker game. Did they have any suspicions? Before today, he hadn’t done more than carry Chester’s suitcases for him and sit around the hotel lobby in New London while Chester finished his appointments; after changing a flat tire at Hannibal, Alvin didn’t even have to leave his room. Ten dollars a day he’d earned, seventy dollars since the dance derby, more dough than he’d had in his hand all year. Once he hit a thousand dollars, he could buy his own motor and get a shoeshine every morning, too.

  Out on the sidewalk, Alvin asked Chester, “You ain’t going to cut me out, are you?”

  A black Essex sedan rushed by toward the downtown.

  Chester smiled. “Of course not, kid. I’m a square shooter. Trust me. There’ll be kale enough for the both of us, you’ll see.” He stared up the street toward the middle of town while lighting another cigarette.

  Alvin watched a group of women come out of Bogart’s Grocery Emporium, burdened with packages. They were smiling brightly. Another automobile went by and a dog chased across the street, barking in its dusty wake.

  The farm boy followed Chester back up the sidewalk to the Dixie filling station where he bought a stick of chewing gum to settle his stomach. When he came out again, Chester reached into the backseat of the Packard for a gray brim hat and gave it to Alvin. “Here, put this on.”

  Alvin frowned, but took off his checked cap and tried the hat on. It felt tight. He looked across at the garage window to see his reflection. He shook his head. “It don’t fit. I prefer my own better.”

  He took it off.

  Chester said, “Put it back on. You’ll wear it to the bank. Throw the other one in the car.”

  “Well, what’s it all about?”

  “It’s part of the gag.”

  “Oh.”

  Chester grabbed Alvin’s cap and tossed it into the Packard, then climbed in behind the wheel. Before Alvin could get around to the passenger side, Chester stopped him. “You’re going to have to walk there. It’s only a few blocks or so. This is First Street. Follow it to Chapman, take a left, go to Sixth, take another left. You’ll see it on the corner by the town square. First Commerce Bank. You can’t miss it.” He checked his pocketwatch. “We’ll meet inside at a quarter till. Don’t be late.”

  Then Chester put the car into gear and drove off.

  The freckle-faced towhead inside the filling station watched through the plate glass. Alvin gave him the bad eye so he would mind his own business. He hated people staring at him. For half a year after Alvin had come back from the sanitarium, he’d felt like a sideshow freak, people looking at him wherever he went like they’d never seen someone return from the dead. When the towhead pulled a linen shade down against the sun, Alvin really felt alone, so he began walking down the sidewalk past the corner of the lunchroom and across the intersection into the next block of shade trees and modest lumber houses and smaller shanties of corrugated
iron that looked more like fancy car garages. He took the stick of gum out of his shirt pocket and stuck it into his mouth. A couple of Fords rattled by. People across the street walked in and out of stores. He ignored them all, pretending like he walked down that sidewalk each day of his life and had every right in the world to be there. Don’t act like a hick that ain’t never been to town, he reminded himself. Folks notice that. They can tell when you’re somewhere you never been before and don’t belong. He chewed vigorously while he walked and held his head up so nobody would think he was timid. He smelled the blossoming home orchards behind the houses and spring flowers that grew beneath butterbean vine along picket fencelines in the shade where the dark earth was damp from recent rainshowers. The concrete sidewalk was cracked here and there, and tufts of grass grew in the fractures. Towering elm trees and poplars and cottonwoods arched overhead. More motorcars passed and the I.G.A. store across the street gave way at Williams Street to a neighborhood of elegantly fretted wood houses and gardens. Alvin heard hose nozzles hissing, piano scales from sunlit parlors, a hammerfall on steel echoing across the warm noon air. It ain’t so bad, he thought. Why, a fellow could get used to a new place like this in a hurry if he needed to. To hell with the farm and everybody treating him like an invalid. He’d thrown all of that over and was done with it. His confidence growing by the minute, the farm boy walked ahead with a fresh bounce in his step.

  Two blocks on, Alvin paused in front of a large two-story framehouse whose dry, ratty lawn covered most of the square lot. A lovely magnolia out front, a thick white oak in the side yard, and two black cherry trees toward the back fence provided shade for a lot where nearly everything had died from neglect. Even the paint on the fence pickets out front had peeled and vanished in a drier season, somebody’s initials carved into the wood. The place looked abandoned and it wasn’t only the lawn. Nearer the house, just under the shade of the magnolia, dozens of children’s toys lay broken and scattered in the scruffy weeds—alphabet building blocks, tin bugles, wooden soldiers, wingless aeroplanes. Back along the side of the house where coralberry grew beneath the window boxes, an old tire hung down from the branch of the oak tree on a short length of rope. When they were kids, Alvin and Frenchy would go twirling in a tire they had hung inside Uncle Henry’s barn. The stunt was to get as dizzy as possible, then play wirewalker along the tops of the stalls from one end of the barn to the other without falling off. Strolling out of the barn without stinking head to foot from horse manure was considered the game’s supreme merit badge.