by Ralph Moody
“Oh,” he said, “there you are! Go on in while I drop this letter down the chute. Should have sent it away last night.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d stepped through a doorway and found myself on the moon. The floor, about fifteen feet square, was covered with sheathing paper, splashed with plaster, and pockmarked with bits of stepped-on clay. Instead of the fancy furniture I had expected, the room was bare except for a big worktable in the center, a cluttered tool bench at one side, an easel, and a couple of plaster-spattered chairs. Standing here and there were a dozen or so pedestals, some with plaster heads or busts on them, and some that were covered over with pieces of damp cloth. On a shelf under the worktable were plaster hands, arms showing the overlapping and twisting muscles as though the skin had been peeled away, a broken foot, and three or four bas-reliefs.
I was still standing just inside the doorway, looking around, when Ivon said from behind me, “This is my shop; I live in the other room. Come, toss your hat into the bedroom, and we’ll see what we can do about an armature.”
As Ivon spoke we walked part way down along the wall, and he opened the door to a bedroom that was as spick-and-span as the shop was messy. There was a thick carpet on the floor, pictures on the walls, and all the furniture was dark, satiny mahogany. “How good a shot are you?” he asked as he pointed toward a post on the nearest twin bed. “I don’t go in from the shop without changing my shoes. Fortunately, I have another door from the hallway.”
I sailed my hat for the top of the bedpost, and I happened to have good luck. It lit like a horseshoe over a peg, and spun around a couple of times without falling off.
“Good eye!” Ivon said. “No wonder you can whittle a horse. Can you make them look like any special one?”
“If people know the horse himself I don’t have to tell them which one I’ve whittled,” I told him.
“Tie him up somewhere and use him for a model?” he asked.
“No, I never tried that,” I said. “If I’ve known him well I can remember what he looks like, and I guess I just kind of see him in my head.”
“Good! Good!” he said. “Now let’s get at that armature. How big a horse do you want to make?”
That evening Ivon showed me how to twist the wires and make an armature for a horse a foot high. I never knew anyone, except my own father, who was so patient. He didn’t try to do it for me; just showed me how and let me do it by myself. And with all the horses I’d whittled, he told me something I’d never noticed—that the average horse is square; his body the same length as his height at the withers, with his forelegs, neck, and head each about half of that length.
Before we started he took a piece of charcoal, knelt, and with a few quick strokes he sketched a rearing stallion on the floor. “The armature is simply the skeleton,” he told me as he drew a heavy black line that looped through the head, along the arch of the neck, curve of the back, and length of the tail. “There’s the main stem,” he said. “Now we’ll attach lighter wires to it and shape them into the bones for the shoulders, hips, and legs.” As he spoke he drew in the lines to show me exactly how the wires would be bent and shaped, so as to be hidden inside the clay. And how those for the tail and hind legs would extend down through a wooden base to hold the framework firm and solid. Then along the back he sketched in hanging wires, with heavy crosses at their lower ends. “Those are wooden bats,” he said, “to support the weight of the body instead of ribs.” The whole thing hadn’t taken more than five minutes, but when he’d finished I knew everything I’d need to know about armatures.
The second evening Ivon showed me how to moisten the clay, work it pliable in my hands, lay it on the armature with the face of my thumb, and scrape it into the shapes I wanted with his tools. The third evening he watched me as I finished the head and neck of my horse, making suggestions to help me here and there. Then, when I was putting the damp cloth on it to keep it from drying out until I could come again, he asked, “Why don’t you move in here with me? That would save you a long walk these evenings, and you could be quite a help to me with some tricky castings I’d like to make this winter.”
“I’d like to,” I told him, “but I couldn’t afford the rent.”
He asked me how much rent I was paying for my room, and when I told him he said it would cost me the same there. My eight dollars a week couldn’t have been a quarter of what that apartment cost in wartime, but it was the nearest to a home I’d ever had away from home, and Ivon taught me all that I had the ability to learn. By the end of the war I’d made hundreds of horses, and eight or ten portrait busts of friends we had at the plant. They didn’t have the lifelike look that Ivon’s did, but anyone could tell whose portraits they were.
My hands were itching for the feel of the clay again as I stood there on the sidewalk in Phoenix, watching the old Mexican build up the sides of his jar with his wet hands. I waited until the jar was finished, then went in and asked him what he’d charge me for a bucket of clay. He started off with a dollar, but I worked it down to sixty cents for the clay and an old bucket to carry it in. Then I told him I’d come back and get it within an hour.
Lonnie wasn’t at the stockyards when I got there, but I recognized a couple of the boys who were hanging around. One of them thought he might have hopped a freight back to Tucson, and the other thought he’d gone west—maybe to look for me at Wickenburg, or to go on through to California for the winter. I told them where he could find me if he came back, then hunted around the yards for pieces of baling wire and sticks I could use for making armatures.
I don’t suppose that bucket of clay weighed more than twenty-five pounds, but with my back and legs and arms as lame as they were, it felt as though it weighed a ton before I got back to my hotel room. After I’d made another trip out for a pair of pliers, I spread the tarpaulin from my bedroll on the floor and spent the rest of the morning twisting up an armature for a little horse, dampening my clay, and working it over to get out any particles of sand or grit.
My fingers were too rough to do a good job of smoothing the clay, but I whittled myself little tools that worked real well, and that afternoon got away from me as though it had been only a half hour long. When I went over for my supper I took the Larsens the horse I’d made—an old mare we used to have when I was a boy—and anyone might have thought I’d brought them a present worth a hundred dollars. Of course, it was worthless in clay, because it would crack and warp out of shape as soon as it dried, so I told them I’d take it back to my room and cast it in plaster of Paris.
The rest of that week was fun. I made a horse for the doctor and another for the hotelkeeper, and my plaster casts came out better than I expected. In Arizona the plaster dried a lot faster than in Delaware, and the matrix chipped off cleaner. In the middle of the week I sent Mother a money order for fifty dollars, with a long letter telling her that my boss had furnished me with an outfit, so I hadn’t had to buy one, and that he’d given me a raise in pay. Then I told her a long story about his sending me around to the back country to inspect his cattle herds, and I said I didn’t know just where I’d be but that I’d write often.
The Larsens must have spent hours in finding things I could eat and cooking them for me. Even with the few things on my diet, every meal was different, every one was enough for two men, and after I’d taken them the horse they wouldn’t let me pay them a penny. Each day I went to the doctor the first thing after breakfast, and each time he said my heart sounded a little better. Each day my back ached less, the stiffness drained out of my arms and legs, the black-and-blue spots faded, and the scabs began peeling off the scratches on my face and hands.
I could have been happy to stay right there in Phoenix all winter, just fussing with the clay and going over to Larsen’s for my meals, but of course I couldn’t afford to do it. I’d told Mother I had a good job and could send her fifty dollars a month, my room was costing a dollar a day, I’d already told the Larsens they couldn’t feed me any longer
for one little plaster horse, and I had no idea how big my doctor’s bill might be. I was already down to $364, and if I didn’t find some kind of job pretty soon I’d go broke again.
6
Outfitting
EVEN though I knew that Lonnie was sort of a lazy bum, I wished he’d show up again. I didn’t know how to drive a flivver, and he’d told me he knew all about them. Besides that, he was a happy-go-lucky boy and good company, and I didn’t exactly like the idea of starting out into the back country alone, particularly with a flivver. If it broke down I wouldn’t know how to fix it, and it seemed to me that a fellow would be in a pretty bad way if he were stuck like that, alone and out in the middle of a desert.
I waited until the doctor said he’d release me the next day, then I took another walk down to the stockyards. Lonnie was there, sitting in the shade of the weigher’s shack and talking with some cowhands I’d never seen before. He seemed as glad to see me as if I’d been his long-lost brother. I’d just come around the corner of the shack when he jumped up and came running to meet me. “Jeepers Creepers, buddy!” he shouted, “I figured you’d lit out for home with all that dough you made up to Wickenburg! When you didn’t show up for three-four days I moseyed on up there to find you, and a guy named Ted told me you’d done right good—only got skun up a little.”
I knew from what Lonnie said that he’d been to the movie lot, and I knew from the looks of him that he hadn’t done any riding, but I asked, “Did you try your hand at the falls?”
“Uh-uh!” he told me. “I watched a couple of them runs, but that ain’t my kind of ridin’! Don’t mind getting spilled off a bronc, but I ain’t about to let nobody tip one over on top of me. ’Course, if I’d been a trick rider the likes of you, I’d have tried it, but I ain’t never took up that end of the business. How much dough did you make?”
I didn’t think there was any sense in telling him, so I just said, “Not as much as I wanted to, but maybe enough to buy a secondhand outfit and a cheap flivver.” Then I told him what Jim Magee had said about driving out through the back country to find jobs, and asked if he’d like to go along. It didn’t take him two seconds to decide that he would. The first thing we did was to take his bedroll from the stockyards to my hotel room, and on the way I told him how I’d planned things out—but I didn’t tell him that I planned to leave four fifty-dollar bills in the cuff of my britches.
“The way I figure it,” I said, “is that we can go as much as $130 for a flivver, an outfit, and grub and room rent until we get started. I expect the doctor to charge me about twenty, and that would leave us with fourteen bucks for grub and gas on the road till we find jobs. Do you think that will do it?”
“Jeepers!” Lonnie shouted. “You bet your sweet life it’ll do it, buddy! Man alive, that’s a fortune! This town’s full of broke-down old flivvers we could buy for forty to fifty bucks, and there ain’t one of ’em so bad I can’t make it good as new with four or five dollars’ worth of spare parts—secondhanded stuff we can pick up at a junk yard. That would leave us eighty or ninety for outfits, and this time of year you can pick up a dang good outfit in a hockshop—saddle, blanket, chaps, and the works—for forty to forty-five bones. Jeepers, buddy, we’re in the chips! You musta took the jackpot at Wickenburg!”
“No,” I told him, “only a piece of it. Not enough to buy more than one outfit till I’m sure you’re right about the price of flivvers. Remember, it’s going to cost money to live till we’re ready to hit the road.”
“Look, buddy,” he asked, “do I get an outfit if I can find a flivver for fifty bucks and fix it for ten, all in one day?”
“You bet your life!” I said. “As good a one as I get for myself.”
We spent the rest of that day and evening looking in the secondhand lots and junk yards, and going to see every old jalopy that was advertised in the paper. But the only thing we could find for fifty dollars was an old Maxwell that wouldn’t run and looked as if it had been caught in a tornado. At breakfast next morning I told Lonnie to keep on hunting while I made my last trip to the doctor, got a card filled out, and paid my bill, then I’d meet him at our room at ten o’clock.
When I told the doctor I was leaving for the back country in a day or two he went over me from head to heels. Then he talked to me for more than an hour—telling me he was still inclined to agree with my family physician, but that I mustn’t ride any bucking horses under any circumstances, must get all the sunshine I could on my body, and must stick rigidly to my diet. He made me promise that I wouldn’t leave Phoenix without at least fifty pounds of fresh cabbage, fifty pounds of gluten flour, a case of canned salmon, two dozen eggs, and ten pounds of peanuts. Then he charged me only ten dollars for all my visits. I think it was because I’d made him the little plaster horse.
Lonnie was waiting for me when I got back to the hotel, and so excited that he began talking before I had the door half open. “Listen, buddy,” he shouted, “I found a crackerjack of a bargain—1914 Ford tourin’ car—one of them that’s got the brass radiator. The bloke wanted a hundred bucks for it, but he’da took seventy-five, and there ain’t scarcely nothin’ wrong with it ’cepting a couple o’ loose connecting-rod bearings. The tires is almost next to new, and with two bucks’ worth of Babbitt bearings I could have that engine fixed up so’s’t she’d climb Pikes Peak on high. ’Twouldn’t take no more’n a couple or three hours.”
“Even at that,” I said, “seventy-five dollars sounds like a lot of money for an old flivver. Couldn’t we fix that Max . . . ?”
“Wait a minute there, buddy!” Lonnie broke in. “The transmission—the gears you shift with—they’re all shot to the devil on that Maxwell, and that’s what you got to watch out for when you go to buyin’ an old jalopy. It would cost leastways twenty bucks for a secondhanded transmission, and it would take me four or five days to take the busted one out and put the other one in. And what would we have when I got done? Nothin’, that’s what! The tires on it ain’t no good, Maxwells is always bustin’ down and they drink up gas like a cow drinks water. Fords’ll run all day on a gallon o’ gas and a spoonful of oil. You can’t wear ’em out, and if anything busts you can always fix it with a piece of balin’ wire. Jeepers, buddy, I’d trust that old flivver out in the desert a lot quicker’n I’d trust a Rolls Royce. You come take a look at it and I’ll betcha my life you’ll see the light.”
The flivver was in a combination garage and blacksmith shop, way out at the edge of town, and when we got there it looked worse to me than the Maxwell had. It must have been a desert car all its life, and through a hundred sandstorms. A coat of yellow paint had been daubed on thick over the original black, and a coat of red smeared on top of that—with a broom, I think—then it had been sandblasted until it was speckled from radiator to tailpipe, with all three colors showing through. The top was turned back, but I could see that the covering was stripped to tatters, and there were holes in the seats big enough for a rabbit to hide in. In hunting for some excuse for not buying it I asked Lonnie, “How about the gearshift on this one? Are you sure it’s all right?”
“Gearshift!” he hollered. “Fords don’t have no gearshift! They’re shiftless. Work off’n bands around a transmission drum.”
“Well, this one looks shiftless to me,” I said. “This corner sags down like an old nag standing on three legs!”
“That don’t amount to nothin’,” he told me, “just a couple of busted leaves in the spring. You can get all of them you want for a dime apiece in any junk yard, and it don’t take no time at all to put ’em in.”
“Well, it still looks shiftless to me,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s been driven a hundred thousand miles.”
“No it ain’t! Not a bit of it!” the owner of the garage told me. “This little car ain’t been drove over five thousand miles. Just took it in on a trade with old man Henderson, up Cavecreek way. Trouble is he didn’t have no place to keep it—left it stand out in the weather, so the paint got chawed up a
mite by the wind. Some good-for-nothin’ hired hand drove it over rough country, hunting strays. Busted a leaf or two in the springs, and left it run low on oil. ’Twouldn’t take next to nothing to put it into apple-pie shape. Time you boys put a fresh coat o’ paint on it a man couldn’t scarcely tell it from new. Them wore places on the seats would patch up slick as silk with a few strips of oilcloth and a little glue—I’d throw that in as part of the deal.”
The flivver still looked like a tired old nag that was on its last legs, so I shook my head and told Lonnie, “Shiftless is sure the right name for it. It’s even ding-toed. Look how the front wheels turn inward.”
Before Lonnie could answer, the garageman called out, “Bent radius rod, that’s all. Couple o’ swipes with a maul would straighten it right out. I told you that fool hired hand drove it over a bit of rough country.”
I’d heard people talk before when they’d been trying to sell something that wasn’t any good, so I didn’t pay any attention to the man but said to Lonnie, “There’s no sense in buying this one. It would take you a week to fix it up and wait for the paint to dry, and we can’t afford to hang around Phoenix that long. Besides, you’d have to buy tools for doing a job this big.”
Again the garageman beat Lonnie to the punch. “Not a bit of it! Not a bit of it!” he told me. “You boys could fix it up right here, and I’d leave you use my tools. Wouldn’t cost you a penny. I’d even lend you a hand on it, so’s’t you could have it ready to roll by tomorrow mornin’.”