This Side of Jordan (30 page)

“My young companion is the skeptical sort,” the dwarf explained, still smiling. “But, no, I am not a physician. Merely an interested bystander in humanity's welfare.” Rascal bowed once more. “At your service.”

Clare laughed. “Oh, I'm sure we'll have a wonderful time while you're here. Did you speak with Mr. Farrell about your room? I'm afraid he's gone to Perryville for the day.”

“No, but we'll pay cash-money,” said the farm boy, pulling a wad of small bills from his pants pocket. He felt like Rockefeller himself as he counted out ten dollars.

“Well, he's given you a corner room on the third floor with a fine view. I think it's adorable. Why, it even has its own plumbing.” She took the payment from Alvin and put it into a metal box beneath the counter, then brought out a pair of keys. “These are for you. Don't forget, supper's prompt at six.”

“What's that cost?” Alvin asked, gruffly. “Spud ought to know we ain't kings.”

“Why, it's included with the room.”

“Oh, that's swell.”

She offered Alvin a lovely smile. “I'll just bet your circus is a peach!”

The farm boy blushed. He knew he resembled a crummy hobo, but she was treating him like gravy. What gives? Did she like him?

Clare asked, “Will I see you there tonight? I'm through at eight.”

Because she was so pretty, he chose to go along with the gag. “Sure, we'll be there. We ain't set up regular yet with a tent like them other acts, so just look around for us. It's a pip of a show.”

She gushed, “Oh, I'm excited already!”

 

The room was at the end of the hall by a window that looked down onto a grassy backyard of goldenrod and sawtooth sunflowers and bleached white laundry suspended on a wire from the kitchen porch to the slatted fence at Weaver Street. Only a few tenants were in the half-dozen rooms hired for the month, and the house was quiet. Alvin put down his suitcase, then unlocked the door and went in. The dwarf trailed behind, his own suitcase in hand. Morning light glowed behind drawn roller shades at the back and side windows, brightening a bare room that had a wood floor, two small iron beds covered in ratty quilts, an oak dresser and mirror, and a pair of spindle chairs. The dwarf went to the closet while Alvin tossed his old suitcase onto the bed nearest the wall. He was tired of lugging it around. Another small door led to a toilet with an old tub and washbasin and a porcelain commode, which Alvin used immediately. In the room across the hall, he heard a fellow walking about reciting aloud from the Holy Bible.

“This sure ain't the Ritz,” Alvin remarked, as he came out of the toilet, buttoning his pants. He raised the shade above the backyard to watch a coal truck rumble down a wheel-rutted lane toward the railyard crossing and saw a pair of carpenters laboring on a wooden scaffold next door and a woman in an old hoop skirt across the road scattering corncobs among muddy hogs in a small wire-fenced pen. Frenchy once had a painting job until he got drunk at noon behind a lunch wagon and fell off the scaffold and landed on a cow, breaking her back. It cost him three days pay. Aunt Hattie like to boxed his ears.

Fastening the linen shade, Alvin said, “I'll bet you that painter fellow ain't drank no turpentine, neither. It smelled like kitchen brew to me. I seen drunkards at home tackle a bottle of overnight that knocks'em flat sudden. Some doctor's probably using the stomach pump on him right now. What do you bet that Spud fellow hired us a room in a booze flat?”

The dwarf closed his suitcase and shut the closet. “Oh, I suspect there aren't a dozen establishments in this town unfriendly to the contentious fluid. Although I'm quite immune myself, drinking's become quite the thing to do, you know. Why, this past year even dear old Auntie refused to go to bed without enjoying a good-night toddy. Shall we go visit the circus this morning?”

“Nope, Chester said not till after dark.” The farm boy sat on the mattress, testing its firmness. He felt tired again; he'd have a nap if he weren't so hungry. He sniffed the quilt, wrinkling his nose at a damp musty odor. “Ain't this a swell dump? I bet you we got bedbugs.”

The dwarf went over to his own bed and climbed onto the mattress and bounced up and down squeaking the springs. Then he rolled over onto his stomach and sniffed the blue quilt. He slid off the bed and peeked underneath. When he stood up again, he announced, “Blue ointment and kerosene, mixed in equal proportions, then applied to the bedstead.”

“Huh?”

“A very fine bedbug remedy,” said the dwarf.

Alvin got up and went to the door. “How's about we get us some eats and watch the street parade? I'm awful hungry.”

 

Spud Farrell's boardinghouse was closer to the grimy neighborhood of stovepipe shanties and truck gardens than to downtown. Here the narrow streets were unpaved, and motorcars had cut a thousand tracks in the dirt, and occasionally horse-drawn wagons still lumbered along under honey locust and sugar maples where tired men wearing overalls and denim walked to work at the railyard and sawmill each morning, metal buckets in hand.

Smelling wood smoke from old cook stoves, the farm boy and the dwarf strolled Third Street toward downtown. Wooden fences on both sides of the dirt street advertised the circus, and tall ironweed grew in thick patches between fence posts and gates. Up on the corner, a woman in pink cotton and a white apron swept her porch with a flurry of tiny children at her feet. Just ahead on Elm, a postman walking his morning route shouted to a fellow in a flashy new Buick parked at the curb of a blue stick Eastlake framehouse where two elderly women shoveled manure from a wheelbarrow into a freshly dug spinach patch. Two blocks from the boardinghouse, Alvin smelled crap-foul backhouses and chicken coops and livery stables on the breeze. Farther on, he saw scrawny apple and peach trees in weedy backyards whose tin garages, cluttered with rusty junk, stood doorless to the brisk wind. Auto horns sounded through the sun-warmed elms and willows, and Alvin thought he caught scent of a fresh-baked cherry pie on a window ledge somewhere closeby. Whistling a Sousa march, the dwarf led Alvin down an alley shortcut where chirping catbirds nested in wild grape, and crabapple branches and dogwoods scratched at the plank fences. They paused briefly to listen to phonograph music droning from a third-story attic and morning voices exchanging airy greetings across kitchen porches. They stepped back against the fence as an empty milktruck rumbled by, and covered their mouths from the dust and exhaust that roiled up in its wake. Emerging from the alley, they discovered shrieking children running about at recess beneath a black oak in a dusty schoolyard on South Main near the creek. A slatted fence separated the square lot from a white high-steepled Lutheran church next door. On the stoop of the gray weatherboarded schoolhouse, a plump older woman was busy scolding a trio of boys in brown knickers. Behind her, a small girl in a soiled petticoat stood by the doorway sobbing. Waiting for a delivery truck to pass, the dwarf rushed across the dirt street into a prickly ash thicket that separated the schoolyard from the Ford garage on the other lot. There he spied on the children trading turns swinging from a rubber tire and skipping rope, playing jacks on a flat patch of dirt, throwing a scruffy baseball back and forth, wrestling and riding each other about pick-a-back. Alvin was content to observe from the sidewalk across the street. He hated school. Teachers were ugly and mean and assigned lessons not a fellow on earth could figure out by himself. He preferred shoveling horse manure to reading books. If a kid had a decent egg on his shoulders and wasn't afraid of work, he could find a job that paid enough to buy a new suit of clothes when he needed it and a movie every Saturday night and pocket money for emergencies without busting himself up over spelling words nobody knew how to use and stacks of numbers on a blackboard that usually added up to a horsewhipping on his bare bottom in the woodshed out back. What did the world care, anyhow, if he slopped hogs and went fishing instead of learning about Abe Lincoln?

After a few minutes, Alvin whistled to the dwarf and crossed the street to the Ford garage where he nearly choked from the odor of gasoline engines. Just ahead, a short bridge spanned the ravine. Tall sycamores rose beside thick cottonwoods from the creek bottom and Alvin bent over the iron railing halfway across and spat and watched his spittle disappear into the cold swirling water. Walking on alone up the sloping road to Main Street, he counted nineteen swallows perched on telegraph wires between a Shell filling station and a Western Auto Supply store. He took a minute to study the ads for Goodyear tires and Mobil Oil on a barnsiding as three automobiles and a smelly fruit truck roared by. He watched a nurse in white guide an old woman up to a doctor's office in another clapboard framehouse where a hornet's nest was stuck under the corner eaves. Somebody yelled out his name and he looked behind him. Two blocks down the road, the dwarf was hurrying across the bridge. Alvin gave another whistle, and went on ahead downtown.

 

They sat at a small marble top table by the front window in Moore's Café next door to the Royale movie house on Main Street. Cigarette smoke and conversation filled the narrow dining room, dishes clanked, cooking grease hissed in the kitchen. Alvin sipped carefully at a cup of hot black coffee. It burned going down, but soothed his sore throat just the same. He was feeling better and better. The dwarf stirred ice about with a spoon in his glass of orangeade and watched the men and women passing by on the busy sidewalk outdoors. He remarked to the farm boy, “Those children are terribly excited over the circus. Why, it's all they could speak of.”

“Nothing about arithmetic?”

“Oh, I'm sure most of them thoroughly enjoy schooldays. Incidentally, did I tell you that my father's Uncle Edgar taught moral philosophy at Virginia with William McGuffey himself? Much of my inspiration for learning came from the collection of
Eclectic Readers
my mother left me. Why, those books were among my very best friends at that time of my life.”

The dwarf put his spoon on the table and drank from the glass of orangeade.

Alvin noticed several customers were staring now. Whether it was at him or the dwarf, he didn't care; he thought it was rude, so he stared back until they were forced to look elsewhere. When he was in the sanitarium, visitors occasionally wandered into the sick wards and every so often Alvin would awaken from a nap to find himself the object of somebody's nosy attention. It made him feel worse than ever. He learned to despise people who couldn't keep their eyes to themselves.

The waiter came to their table, carrying a plate of lamb and sweet potatoes and another with pickled beets and chicken fricassee. As he set the plates down, lamb for Alvin, chicken for Rascal, he asked, “Are you two fellows with the circus?”

“Sure we are,” Alvin replied, already set for a swell fib. “I'm a lion tamer and my friend here does some juggling in a clown suit. It don't pay much, but we get by all right, I guess.”

The waiter looked skeptical. “Sort of late in the season for the circus, ain't it? We don't usually see you folks much after Labor Day.”

Alvin nodded. “'Course it is, but business was scarce this summer. Come wintertime, even circus people got to eat like everyone else, ain't that so?”

“I suppose it is.”

Downtown was filling up. Looking out through the window, the waiter said, “Got a swell parade today, do you?”

“Sure.” Alvin stuck his fork into the lamb like he was starving. “Sells a flock of tickets.”

A group of homely women dressed in black stopped at the window to peer in. One of them tapped on the glass and held up a placard upon which was written in thick black ink:
BOOZE
. The stocky woman next to her showed another placard reading:
Prisons, Insane Asylums, Condemned Cells!
Two more hatchet-faced women stepped forward and pressed tall placards to the glass:
Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
and
DRY or DIE.
Their grim focus was directed toward the farm boy and the dwarf. The waiter tried shooing them away, “Go on! Beat it!”

Not one of them budged.

The dwarf offered a salute and a pickled beet.

Flustered by the unwanted attention, Alvin blurted out, “How come them ladies are doing that? Who the hell are they?”

“Temperance Union,” replied the waiter, waving at them again to go away. “They don't care much for your sort.”

The waiter put the bill on the table and left. Most of the customers were watching now with considerable amusement. Several laughed out loud. Alvin had lost some of his appetite. The dwarf, however, ate his chicken fricassee as if he were alone in his own kitchen and hadn't a care in the world. Soon, after tapping sharply once more on the window glass and displaying their placards, the temperance women moved on. A hearty round of applause from the restaurant patrons cheered their departure. Once they were gone, the farm boy drank his cup of coffee and ate half the plate of lamb and sweet potatoes without any idea at all why he had been given the bad eye.

 

Main Street was paved with bricks and its buildings were tall and dignified. Telephone wires crossed above motor traffic along six blocks of prominent enterprise. A loaded trolley ran up the center of the street, bell clanging at each intersection. People shouted and waved and dodged automobiles to reach F.W. Woolworth's five-and-dime or Piggly Wiggly and the postal telegraph office at Fifth Street. Businessmen in wing collars came and went from the First National Bank as sewer diggers labored to repair a broken water main next to a Rexall drugstore. The farm boy and the dwarf strolled in and out of the late-morning crowd from block to block, admiring show window displays under striped awnings, buying pears from a vendor on Sixth Street and a hot pretzel at a stand on Seventh, stopping briefly in front of a German bakery to enjoy the aroma of hot cinnamon buns, then watching a pack of scrawny dogs struggle over spoiled pork chops in the narrow alley between Clarke & Son's hardware and the butcher shop. Halfway up Main, the dwarf ducked into Oglethorpe's Boots while Alvin stared at a group of pretty secretaries and lady typewriters on midday lark by the wide cement steps of Schaick, Pilsner & Allyson-Attorneys at Law. The farm boy walked up the block to the pool hall next door to McKinney's barbershop and found it jammed with young men in shirtsleeves and suspenders, the odor of cigarette smoke and hair tonic and liquor stiff as a saloon. Earlier, at the Ford garage, Alvin had seen two boys with flasks in their hip pockets, and noticed a box of quart bottles in the passenger seat of a Dodge coupé parked out front of Vickers Apothecary next to the Family Welfare Association at Fifth and Main. He presumed that Icaria was ankle-deep in liquor like any other town. Who had stopped chasing booze when the saloons closed? Most fellows his age thought it was sporting to drink and take joyrides around the county and get a girl going with a bottle of hootch in the dark. He knew a youth named Henry Sullivan from Arcola not sixteen years old who drove a liquor truck for George Remus until a gang of hijackers stiff-armed him one night behind a Diamond gas station in Indiana and broke his jaw. Alvin decided he was allergic to booze himself because of how sick he got after hardly a swallow, worse yet since the consumption; but his cousins of both sexes were drunk on canned heat more than once behind the dance hall in downtown Farrington and none of the adults seemed to care much at all, themselves occupied day and night hiding hootch in the rubber collars of wagon horses or filling empty milk bottles with raw corn whiskey. Not more than a dozen arrests for liquor traffic had been made in Farrington since Christmas, yet each Sunday morning Reverend Whitehead of the United Methodist church and Dr. E.G. Fortune of the Episcopalians reminded their flocks how proud the Lord was of them for staying dry.