The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (41 page)

Speed twisted the handlebar grip. The engine responded impatiently.

“I hope,” Geraldine shouted back, “yawl hit oil.”

But although a new derrick was erected and a new string brought in and sent down fifty-one hundred feet, six weeks later the foreman was saying, “Well, Floyd, that's how the dice roll. Sometimes you strike it lucky, sometimes you don't. Right?”

“Yeah,” said Elgin. “Yeah, that's right. Sometimes you strike it lucky, sometimes—”

“It's all in the game,” said the foreman. “Right?”

“Yeah,” said Elgin. “Yeah, that's—”

“Can't bring them all in,” said the foreman. “Right?”

“No,” said Elgin. “No, you can't bring them all in.”

They were dismantling the derrick from the top, throwing down the pieces and stacking them in a trailer. Others meanwhile took apart the toolshed. When they were finished all that was left was the enlarged outhouse which looked now like a boxcar forgotten on a railroad siding, a hole in the ground seven eighths of a mile deep, and an eternal flame. When all the equipment was stowed they drove away. In one truck rode the crew, waving back as they went, beginning already on the box lunches Sybil had packed for them. The Floyds waved until they were out of sight, sighed, and turned back towards the house. Over everything a stillness settled, made more intense by the hiss of the flare.

With only the two of them to cook and keep house for Sybil did not know what to do with herself. She sat in the kitchen or out in the yard peeling potatoes or shelling peas in piddling amounts, rousing herself with a jerk now and again from out of a study, dashing a tear from her eyes from time to time at the memory of Geraldine. Elgin poked about the spot where the derrick had stood, kicking clods. It was too late in the year to think of planting a crop, though how they were to get by without one was hard to figure, Sybil having told him that rather than making a profit on her boardinghouse venture she had used up their savings and owed the butcher and the grocer the bills for the last three weeks. They tried to occupy themselves but they both just moped. Their lives had gone flat. The gas flare made it impossible to do anything. Its light kept them awake, its noise deafened them, its heat scorched them. Too bright to be looked at even in the glare of noon, it illuminated the midnight: a flaming sword, like the one set to guard the east gate of Eden.

“Well, Elgin, never mind, hon,” said Sybil. “We've still got our health and we've still got each other. So don't go breaking your heart over that million dollars.”

“Aw, for pity's sake, Sybil,” said Elgin, “what kind of a fool do you take me for? Do you think I ever really believed we were going to strike oil? Me?”

The Rainmaker

I

T
HE HUNDRED
-
MILE
stretch of the Red River from the Arkansas-Oklahoma line west to Hugo (or if you were on the other side, from Texarkana west to Paris, Texas) was, in 1936, served by a single ferry: the one on the Clarksville-Idabel road. You were, in either case, always on the other side from the side the ferryboat was on when you drew up at the landing; and as it had no schedule, not even one to fall behind in, you could sit there honking till the cows came home, the ferryboat would cross over for you whenever its owner felt like it and not before. Maybe not then. For if, in running his trotline as he came across (he hauled in sometimes as much as twenty pounds of channel catfish), the ferryman should sight an alligator gar, he would drop his tiller and cut loose with his .30-30—the bullets whining off the water and over the heads of any waiting passengers—and he might on such rudderless occasions fetch up a mile or more downstream from the landing; for the current is deep-running and strong, though on the surface it does not look as if there is any current; indeed, it does not look like a liquid, but rather like a bed of red clay, of the consistency of what potters call “slip,” and looks as if it would not only be unsuited to any of the uses to which water is generally put, but that getting it to pour would be like starting a new bottle of ketchup.

The ferryboat (raft, really) took but one car at a time. If there should happen to be more than one they just had to wait while the boat went across and came back—an inconvenience which the driver of the lead machine in the field of fourteen bearing down upon the Oklahoma landing one July day in 1936 was counting heavily upon. He was a stranger to those parts, but no stranger to back-road ferries. Neither, however, was he a stranger to the tricks of fate; and should the boat happen to be on the other side, well, he thought, with a glance of his strained and bleary eyes into the rearview mirror, he might just as well drive right into the river. And with a glance at the speedometer and a thought for his brake-drum linings, or lack thereof, he might not be able to keep from it if he tried.

By chance the ferry was on the Oklahoma side that day, having been trapped there the previous noon when the wind began to rise and the sky to blacken over. Now the wind had died but the darkness lingered. It was not evening or even very late afternoon, but over everything lay, lower than any cloud, denser than fog or smoke, and of a color like snuff, and almost as acrid, a uniform suspension of fine red dust, so that the air was to air what the river water was to water. And so the ferryman could hear the cars coming long before he could see them, could hear the horns honking steadily as a flight of southering geese and growing louder, nearer, in numbers such as had never before demanded his services at any one time, hardly in any two weeks' period, sounding like a wedding cortege or like a high school celebrating a victory of its football team. So he was ready and waiting for them, with his engine started and idling, the gate chain lowered, his two running lights lit, the hawser poised to cast off, and his other hand out for his half dollar. He coughed and spat, thinly and of the color of tobacco juice, though at the moment he was not chewing. This dust was not something raised by the approaching cars; it was the prevailing atmosphere in Oklahoma that spring and summer, and the one before, and the one before that, when with dust storms following one another often not two days apart, dark as night piled on night, it had come to seem almost the native air. This had been one of the worst.

Then the ferryman saw them, the headlights filtering bloodshot and diffuse through the red pall, then saw the line of cars, with one, a truck or a van or a bus, away out in front, the ones in the rear all closely strung together and undulating in waves over the rutty road like the segments of a caterpillar, the horns whooping now like a pack of hounds, and all of them coming at considerable speed—considering, that is, the visibility, the state of the road, and the fact that the combined age of the fourteen cars and pickups running the race was in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty years.

The river level during the past three rainless years had dropped steadily; now there was a long sandy incline down to the ferry landing. When it reached the top of this bank the winning car was a good hundred yards in the lead. If the driver even paused to see whether the boat was there, it was not apparent to the ferryman. The car came down the bank lurching and swaying from side to side, rattling, the radiator boiling, out of control or with a flat tire or, as was entirely possible from the look of it, with no brakes, picking up momentum as it came and headed for the boat as if with deliberate intent to sink it. The ferryman had no time to shout and barely time to jump. He jumped onto the boat rather than aside on the bank; had he not he would surely have been left ashore, for with the propulsion imparted by the car the boat shot twenty feet out into the water at one bound. It slapped down, scattering spray, bounced again and then again, skipping like a flat skimming stone, the front end leaping so high that whereas in the first moments it had seemed certain the car would plunge over the wheel chocks and through the forward chain, it seemed certain the next moment to roll into the river off the stern. Each time the bow slapped down it lunged forward, then as the bow rose it scurried backwards, and now with the deck awash it began skidding sideways. All this while the ferryman was down on his knees looking as if a mule had kicked him and slipped the knot in that hawser in his hand. The truck heaved a final burp from the radiator, sputtered, and died. The ferryman staggered to his feet, fetched breath, and commenced cursing. Clenching his fists, he started forward. From behind him on the shore came a chorus of derisive honks and laughter and shouts.

“You sorry, low-down, no-good, smart-alecking, son of a—” he said.

By then he was alongside the cab. And what so suddenly silenced him was not the bandit's mask, a spotted red bandana, covering from the eyes down the face of his passenger; that was a sight to which the ferryman had grown so accustomed that he hardly noticed it anymore during this and the last two dusty summers, when often the entire population of both sides of the river would appear, when issue out of doors at last they must, gotten up as desperadoes, male and female, large and small; and only by oversight—for this had been a bandana day if ever there was one—was he not wearing one himself. No, what stopped the ferryman's tongue while opening still wider his mouth was that between the two fingers sticking out of the window of the cab was something that looked like a ten-dollar bill, and unless his ears deceived him the voice from behind the bandana had just said to keep the change. At that price he was welcome to take another shot at sinking the boat! Meanwhile there came no shooting from the shore, no
Halt! in the name of the law
. Evidently his passenger was not a fugitive.

What he was, what the whole gang was, the ferryman concluded after a quick appraisal of the vehicle, coupled with the continuing whoops and catcalls from the shore, was a road show of some kind, a small-time carnival, a tent show or a medicine show. The truck—truck or van, bus, whatever the hell it was—was really a house on wheels, with a curtained window in the body just above the cab, and sticking out of the roof a stovepipe out of kilter, and hanging off the rear a rickety flight of steps leading to a door. Along the side was painted a picture (the other side, he would find as he passed it later coming forward to dock in Texas, was, or was as nearly as an amateur hand could make it, a duplicate) in colors whose kindergarten brightness not even the thick coat of dust nor the prevailing duskiness could dim. Hard to say just what the moment intended to be depicted was—the coming of a storm or the passing of one. The sun, of a fiery orange and spoked with beams, was either just emerging from or just going behind a huge inky cloud rent by a jagged bolt of lightning the shape of a flight of stairs in profile, sharpened at the point, rendered in aluminum. Out of the cloud a shower of raindrops was falling, a direct hit from any one of which was apt to prove fatal to the people living in the farmhouse down below or to the two-legged animal (one hind, one front) in the barn lot. Above and below the depicted scene, in a mixture of print and script, small letters and capitals, all staggering and wavy and falling steadily downhill and all bunched together at the end, was a hand-lettered sign.

“Say,” said the ferryman, “you fellers a tent show or something?”

“Say,” said his passenger, “don't it seem to you like we're kind of drifting?”

The ferryman scooted back to his tiller and nosed back upstream. He shifted gears on his engine. Now he could see the lights from the cars on the Oklahoma shore only dimly, but he could still hear, though unable to make out the words, shouts and laughter. Bunch of cut-ups, he said to himself, who had had a bet among themselves which would get across the river first, not caring a damn how many lives they endangered along the road and obviously not whether they sank his boat and him along with it. Drinking probably. Road-show people. He had ferried their kind across before. Free spenders always. Easy come easy go. He would really rake in the money tonight!

The old engine was in high gear, and presently the ferryman discerned, down at the bottom of his vision, like the sediment at the bottom of a glass of the river water, a darkening, a shoreline: Texas. Then for the first time his passenger poked his head out. He inched it out cautiously as a turtle and looked back towards Oklahoma. There was nothing to be seen, yet in the light of the running lamp on its pole, above the mask, the eyes smiled. As Moses must have smiled on reaching the far shore of another body of red water and looking back.

“Say,” said the ferryman, stopping on his way forward to dock, “tell me, what does it say here on the side of your truck? I seem to have mislaid my specs.” (The letters were a foot high.) He could hardly see the man, not only because it was dark and so little of him was unmasked, but also because of the height of the cab.

“Lost your glasses, eh? Your reading glasses, was they?”

The ferryman said nothing, only gritted his teeth.

“Well, I'll tell you. See that picture? That thundercloud? That bolt of lightning? Them raindrops? What the words spell is, ‘Lightning rods for sale.'”

“Can't read a word without my specs,” said the ferryman, squinting. “But now that you say so, I can make it out for myself. Lightning rods for sale.” Thinking of that ten-dollar bill, and of the weather for the past several years, he said, “Hmm. I wouldn't have thought your business had been so good here lately.”

They bumped the dock. The driver started his motor. He revved it. The ferryman threw his hawser and dropped the chain with a clatter. As the driver went past, the ferryman said, “Pull over to the side of the road there if you like and …” The rest was finished on a falling cadence—the spoken equivalent of that line of lettering along the side of the truck—as, with a low-gear growl, taillight wigwagging over the bumps, the truck shot up the hill. “… and come back with me to …” The taillight disappeared. “… pickyourbuddiesup.”

II