This Side of Jordan (29 page)

“Sure, I guess so,” Alvin stammered weakly, trying his best to play along. “I just ain't thought that much about it. Nobody told me what to do today, so soon as my feet started itchin', I went and got on the train.” He summoned a feeble smile. Lying didn't seem that tough, anymore.

Chester drew a bottle of Canadian whiskey from his handbag and filled a shotglass on the table beside him. “What he means to say, darling, is that he thinks school's for the birds. Melvin's commercial, see, and he's gotten up a meeting to try for a professional team in St.

Louis and believes he can cinch a job so long as his mother doesn't find out. She's something of a trueblood Christer from a rock farm down by Abilene, and more than anything in the world she wants Melvin to get ducked before she passes on to her reward. He's still got a raft of faith in the Old Book, of course, and the importance of church fellowship and all, but he can't just chuck everything to take a swim for Jesus. Well, at any rate, as you can see, the poor kid's feeling awful bum about it.” Alvin saw the pretty brunette staring at him, a bright twinkle in her eye as she took another sip from the silver hipflask. He felt a slight chill from his fever and had to steady himself.

Alma said, “Why, I'll bet you a cookie that Melvin's mommy is darned proud of her boy even if he isn't a Sunday School teacher.” She offered Alvin her hipflask. “Here, honey, have a jolt. It'll help. Honest.”

Chester grabbed her wrist. “Don't tempt him, sweetheart. When I met Melvin in the lunchroom of that rube burg this morning, I could see the poor fellow was already about to crack. Why, he almost fainted in his eggs, didn't you, kid?”

“Sure I did.” The farm boy noticed that the brunette's kimono had parted above the waist giving him a discreet peek at one of her pale pink breasts. Suddenly he felt flushed, and stifled a cough even as his peenie stiffened.

Alma frowned. “Gee, honey, that's awful! Maybe you hadn't ought to've taken that church dope so hard. My momma, bless her heart, baked peach pies for twenty-two years at the Methodist fair back in Kimball and never took her eye off the pulpit until Reverend Waller called her down one Sunday evening for sneaking a gallon of sweet-wine into the punch, and him, that mucker, with a cocktail shaker in his office closet and Mabel Hutchins from the choir waiting up in the attic. Poor Momma came home fussing that Reverend Waller didn't have any call to bawl her out like he did, and if the Lord only asked temperance of the congregation, well, forget it! And I tell you, honey, Momma never went back. If you ask me, all religious folks are crabs.”

Chester downed his whiskey with a smile. “Gee, that's a swell story, sweetheart, but would you mind awfully taking a smoke in the toilet? Melvin and I have a few things to talk over and that means man to man, darling, get what I mean?” He walked over and opened the door to the washroom annex and jerked his thumb at her to get up.

“Clarence, honey, you know I told you I don't smoke.”

“Well, this is as good a time as any to get the habit.” He tossed her a package of Chesterfields from the table. “Here, now beat it.”

“Hey!”

He grabbed her harshly and gave her a kiss on the lips. When Chester stepped back again, the brunette was smiling. He said to her, “You love me, don't you, darling?”

“Honey, I'd give you a clout in the head if you weren't so nice to pat.” She wiggled her fingers at the farm boy. “Toodle-loo, Melvin.”

After the toilet door closed, Chester dragged Alvin over to the window and sat down in front of him. “She's a peacherino, isn't she?”

He nodded. “She's slick, all right.”

Chester clucked his tongue. “Dumb as a cow, though. For two hours now she's been gassing about some fellow her sister's going with and how he bought her a new electric refrigerator.” Chester poured another shot of Canadian whiskey and drank it in one gulp. Then he took a cigarette from his robe and lit up. Flicking the spent match onto the table, he told Alvin, “Look here, you boys are going to ride through to Omaha, then change trains to the Missouri Pacific. I need to run in on someone tomorrow morning at Council Bluffs, so I won't be traveling with you after tonight. When you get to Icaria, there's a flophouse on Third Street owned by a fellow named Spud Farrell. He'll hire you a room for the week. Pay him cash-money. He's an old hellcat, so he'll give you the lowdown on the smart neighborhoods and where the best eats are. If you like, you and the midget can give the circus a once-over before I get there on Saturday. Just don't go till after dark. I'll be staying at the Belvedere Hotel. That's downtown on Main. I'll telephone to Spud when my train gets in. He'll let you know I arrived. All right?”

“Sure.”

“Tell the midget if he does anything to put this job on the fritz, I'll pop him so hard he'll need Western Union to tell you good morning.”

The farm boy coughed into his fist, then nodded. “I was out looking for him when I walked by your door and seen that girl sitting here. I ain't exactly sure where he is right now.”

“I just saw him back there in the smoker playing cards with a flock of bond salesmen. What'll you bet he'll have 'em all busted by midnight?”

As the train passed another crossroad, Alvin heard the girl humming a few bars of jazz in the toilet. Her voice was wonderfully clear and lovely. Chester listened briefly, then took a drag off the cigarette and stood up. Somebody buzzed insistently to enter another drawing room back up the darkened aisle.

Chester told Alvin, “All right, you better scram now and get your sleep. You're not looking that fresh and there's a little song sparrow next door waiting for me to love her up.” He led the farm boy to the compartment door. “So long, kid.”

Leaving the drawing room, the farm boy bumped straight into the conductor who had blocked him back at the vestibule. One glance at Alvin and the conductor's face went sour. “You? Why, I shoulda—”

“Awww, keep your shirt on, pal,” Alvin growled, squeezing past. “I'm beating it already!”

 

At Icaria, the train station was located in a section of town that had run down when the Singer Sewing Machine Company quit its thread mill contract and the labor turnover sent hundreds to public charity and pauper funds. Worn-out plank sidewalks led from the noisy Missouri Pacific locomotives and the crowded depot, past a potato warehouse and a grimy brickyard and a packing plant into the pathetic neighborhood of scratch houses and shiftlessness. A sudden cloudburst had descended upon Icaria earlier that week, drenching the old dirt roads to mud. Sewer drainage by the train district was dismal, too, the oily stench nauseating as the farm boy and the dwarf carried their suitcases past a row of shabby Negro residences and across the railroad tracks toward Third Street. They stopped for a few minutes to watch a freight train going back light to Kansas City. Sooty-eyed men stared at them from empty Illinois Central boxcars and sagging tarpaper cookshacks. Gray clouds were scattered about the late morning sky and the day was cool. A quarter mile past the tracks, a collection of broken-down flivvers crowded the yard of a squat framehouse on Clover Lane across the road from a blacksmith shop and a closed millinery. On a plank fence next to the elm-shrouded house, billposters had pasted a bright colorful notice for
Emmett J. Laswell's Traveling Circus Giganticus.
According to the advertisement, all the tent shows would open after the street parade on Friday. That meant this afternoon.

“I've never ridden a camel,” remarked the dwarf, comparing the Arabian dromedary on the elaborately drawn poster to a notice in the morning paper he had purchased from a newsbutcher in the clubcar. “Have you?”

“Sure I did,” Alvin lied. “It wasn't nothing special.”

A black second-hand Chevrolet drove by in the rutted street. The farm boy put down his suitcase. He had slept better than he expected in the upper berth and woke just after dawn with the fever dissipated and his cough subdued. He was still tired, but not quite so enfeebled as he had been. The eggs he ate for breakfast in the buffet car had set him up just fine. Down behind the framehouse was a chilly creek hidden by dense cottonwoods and shagbark hickory trees where a pack of boys playing truant from school for the day rough-necked along the soggy embankment, voices chattering like nutty mockingbirds. Alvin expected to see hundreds of kids just like them at the circus by sundown.

Back near the depot, a steam whistle shrieked.

The dwarf asked, “Did Chester mention to you whether or not our flophouse puts up suppers? I'd rather save my card winnings for an emergency.”

“I got pocket money enough for eats till the end of the week. If that don't do, he says we can wash dishes at a lunch counter.”

Alvin picked up his tattered suitcase and started walking again. A cool breeze swept through the thick cottonwoods and brushed dust along the old board sidewalk.

“Actually, I'm quite good at dishwashing,” said the dwarf, folding the newspaper under his arm. He rushed to keep up. “Auntie despised it, so she decided that doing them ought to be my after-supper chore. I also directed Bessie's weekly marketing and regulated many of the household duties when Auntie went on holiday. Why, in less than a month I learned how to prepare cowheel jelly and sausage pudding and rummeled eggs, while Pleasance taught me to improve boiled starch by the addition of some salt or a little gum arabic dissolved. Isn't that fascinating?”

“You said it.” Alvin suddenly felt a strong piss coming on and didn't see an outhouse.

“Oh, I doubt we'll have any trouble at all earning our way if need be.”

“Gee, that's swell,” the farm boy remarked, hurrying his pace along the wooden sidewalk. “Maybe you can buy your own pie tonight.”

 

The boardinghouse at Third Street and Borton was three floors high and dingy with flaking paint and missing roof shingles. Virginia creeper draped the clapboard siding, and thick patches of milkweed clustered to the foundation. Old sycamores shrouded the upper floors. A steep cement staircase led up from the sidewalk to a dusty veranda littered with apple crates and soiled cushions and potato sacks filled with discards. The screen door was ajar and a single electric light was lit in the entry. A stink of fresh turpentine issued from somewhere indoors and faint voices echoed throughout. Parked at the curb out front was a black truck with an advertisement on both door panels for
Timothy Meyer & Co. Painting
. Scattered leaves blew about the dirt road. Alvin's stomach was going sour as he grew nervous again being in a strange town. What if he got sick here? Where would he go? The dwarf went indoors ahead of him, passing a small placard on the siding that read:
No Invalids!

Upstairs, a radio set broadcast a jazzy dance program and the music echoed through the dark stairwell. The empty foyer for the big old house was gloomy and cool and smelled of linoleum and musty closets. Jade-green portières left of the entry hall across from the desk revealed a side parlor. A narrower hallway led to the dining room and kitchen at the back of the house. Overhead, the ceiling plaster showed cracks and water-blotches, and the brass light fixture had gone dark from years of tarnish. The front desk was unattended, so the dwarf set his suitcase next to a brass spittoon, then reached up from his tiptoes and rang the service bell. An office door behind the desk opened and a young blonde hardly older than Alvin came out. She was dressed plainly in a pale blue flower-print frock. Her hair was bobbed and curled and she had a darling face with brown calf-eyes. The farm boy's heart jumped when she smiled at him. “Good afternoon.”

“Hello.”

Her sweet face brightened further. “Why, you're with the circus, aren't you?”

Without hesitation, the dwarf nodded. “Dakota Bill, bareback riding and Indian knife tricks, at your service, ma'am.” He bowed elegantly.

The girl smiled. “Pleased to meet you. My name is Clare.” She looked across at Alvin. “You must be Melvin. Your telegraph arrived Wednesday evening.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course, it's just lovely that you'll be staying here with us. Why, I adore the circus.” Her brown eyes sparkled.

Alvin heard footsteps pounding down the stairwell from the second floor. A man's husky laughter echoed loudly out of the corner room above the parlor as a painter in lacquer-stained overalls came down the staircase into the foyer, look of distress on his face. He shouted to the blonde, “Honey, telephone Doc Evans, will you? I just swallowed some turpentine!”

“Oh, dear!”

“Tell him I'll be over his place in nothing flat!”

The painter hurried out of the boardinghouse and down to the sidewalk. The girl rushed back into the office and dialed for the operator. “Hello, Shirley? This is Clare.” She nudged the door shut behind her.

Alvin walked to the front door and watched the painter running up the sidewalk. One block behind him, a postman strolled along with his mail sack while a delivery truck and a tan Hudson-Essex rattled past in the other direction. Tall shady elm trees blocked his sight farther on. A train whistle sounded in the distance.

The office door opened again and the blonde came out, shaking her head. “Would you believe that's the third call this week Doctor Evans has had for turpentine poisoning?”

Alvin walked back from the front door as a draft from the street swept up into the boardinghouse. A cough rattled out of his chest, making his eyes water.

“One cup of castor oil, two eggs, milk, flour, water and a little saccharate of lime,” the dwarf announced, authoritatively.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It's a cure for turpentine poisoning, and quite effective, I should add.” The dwarf beamed.

The blonde smiled. “Are you a doctor, too?”

Wiping his eyes, the farm boy spoke up ahead of the dwarf. “He ain't nothing but a mouth that walks. Don't trust him.”