Watch With Me Page 6

  “Son,” he said, “don’t never gamble.”

  And sometimes they just sat together while Tol told things.

  One night, Tol said, when there was a full moon, he woke up, it must have been about three o’clock, and he could see Miss Minnie lying beside him on her back with her mouth open. Tol took the end of his forefinger and dabbled it into Miss Minnie’s mouth and wiggled it around. And then he composed himself and breathed deeply. He heard Miss Minnie smacking her mouth. And then she sat straight up in bed.

  “Mr. Proudfoot! Mr. Proudfoot, wake up! I have swallowed a mouse!”

  “Miss Minnie,” said Tol, his laughter shaking the bed so that, of course, she caught him, “there ain’t much I know of to do for somebody that’s swallowed a mouse.”

  Elton was a fine addition to Tol’s and Miss Minnie’s life. He liked them, they made him welcome, and it got so he would be over at their place whenever he could escape from home. He was a help. He didn’t mind work, and he was bright. He saw things. He was interested in things. It often turned out that something Tol or Miss Minnie needed to have done and did not much want to do was something Elton was glad to do. He not only wanted to earn one of Tol’s dimes or quarters and eat quite a lot of Miss Minnie’s good cooking—he wanted to do the work. He seemed a godsend to Tol and Miss Minnie, who had no child of their own. They loved every little opportunity to pay attention to him. When he ate with them, they stuffed him like a sausage. Miss Minnie served him biscuits two at a time; when he bit into the second one, she popped two more hot ones onto his plate; while he buttered them, Tol would refill his glass. Miss Minnie baked pies and cookies for him, and brought him little snacks where he was at work.

  When Tol saw how apt Elton was at driving a car, all his worry about getting to the Fair melted right out of his mind and flowed away. He saw that Elton, being young himself, belonged to the young world of machines. Whereas an old poot like Tol could drive an automobile only fearfully, and certainly with no skill, this Elton was already master of it, even at so young an age, and had no fear.

  “Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “the boy can drive. He can take us to the Fair.”

  And Miss Minnie said, “Oh, why didn’t we think of that before?”

  She thought and then added, “But, Mr. Proudfoot, won’t it be too expensive?” They were then in the very pit of the Depression and, though she and Tol owed nothing and had savings, she felt it was appropriate to worry.

  “Well,” Tol said, “we ain’t going probably but this once. If we figure in all the times we haven’t gone and all the times we ain’t going to go, it’ll come out pretty cheap.”

  “It would be nice to go once,” she said.

  “You ought to see him go,” Tol said. “That boy’s worth a share in the railroad.”

  They secured Elton’s agreement, broaching the subject with some care lest, after all, he might not want to undertake so daunting a project.

  “Why, sure!” Elton said, grinning on behalf of himself and several others. “I imagine I can drive her.”

  They set the date. They told Elton to get permission from his folks.

  And Elton did. Understanding the situation a good deal better than they did, Elton got permission from his folks to help Tol clean a fencerow on that day, which, as it happened, was a Saturday. He said he was supposed to stay overnight and go to church with Tol and Miss Minnie the next day, so he would need to take his Sunday clothes.

  As a last precaution, Miss Minnie got her nephew, Sam Hanks, who drove a cattle truck, to draw her a map showing how to get to the Fair. Sam sat between Tol and Miss Minnie at the kitchen table.

  “Now here’s the stockyards, Tol. You know how to get there.”

  “Aw, I know how to get there, all right!” Tol said.

  “Well, starting from there, here’s what you do.” And Sam drew the streets onto a paper, telling them the various buildings and other landmarks by which they would recognize the turns, and they watched and listened and nodded their heads. He folded the map when he had finished and handed it to Miss Minnie, who laid it by her place at the table so she would remember to put it in her purse.

  Sam had his doubts about Tol’s driving. If they had had a bigger automobile, he might have offered to drive them himself, but he didn’t favor being squeezed into that little coupe with Tol and Miss Minnie, and so he let it slide, only hinting a little warning to Tol.

  “You’ll be all right, now, won’t you, Tol?”

  “Sure.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  If he had known their driver was to be a twelve-year-old boy, he surely would have interfered, but they didn’t tell him, because he didn’t ask. As for them, they just took for granted that if Elton could drive in a pasture, he could drive anywhere—and as it turned out, they were right.

  Elton had to raise his chin to see over the dashboard, but under his guidance the Trick, as Tol Proudfoot pointed out to Miss Minnie, performed like a circus horse. They pulled out onto the road just as the sun was coming up. For the first dozen miles or so, they were on roads that were dry enough, but were chug-holey and narrow, and they had to go slow and be careful. And then they got onto the blacktop and just went whirling along, going faster by a good deal than Tol and Miss Minnie had ever gone in their lives. Elton drove with a big grin on his face, concentrating on his work, and Tol and Miss Minnie watched the country fly past and commented on what they saw. And every so often Tol would point out to Miss Minnie how splendidly Elton was driving.

  Tol was having a wonderful time. For there they went, speeding through the world in the early morning, the Trick running as dependably as a good horse, but much faster; Tol had left his cares behind. And even though she had been a schoolteacher and felt a certain obligation to remain serious in the presence of the young, Miss Minnie, too, felt the intoxication of their speed and became merry and carefree.

  “I just wish you would look at that young man how he can drive!” Tol said. “Why, he can handle this Trick like he’s a piece of it.”

  “I’m just the nut on the steering wheel,” Elton said.

  And Miss Minnie said, “Well, Mr. Nut, drive right on!”

  That was when the left hind tire went “pish-pish-pish-pish,” and Elton had to pull off on the side of the road.

  Tol, who could do anything that needed doing with a horse and any of the tools he had been raised with, was utterly perplexed when confronted with a flat tire. Largely because of his eager help, it took Elton the better part of forty-five minutes to get the car jacked up and the impaired wheel off and the spare on and the car jacked back down again.

  “Well, I don’t expect we’ll have any more flat tires today, do you?” Tol said when they were going again.

  “There is no way to know what to expect,” Miss Minnie said pleasantly but with a noticeable diminution of merriment. “We had better have that one fixed.”

  And so at the next service station they came to, they turned in. Only one man was working there, and he was busy, and they had to wait. There was a car ahead of them, also with a flat tire, and cars kept coming to the gas pump. It was getting hot now, and Tol and Elton got out to watch the mechanic while he worked, and Miss Minnie sat in the Trick with her white-gloved hands crossed on top of her purse in her lap, the picture of patience.

  When the mechanic started work on their tire, which gave them license to draw closer, Tol started passing the time of day with the mechanic. Commercial transactions embarrassed Tol. When he had to receive payment from somebody, the feeling would always come over him that it was too much; when he had to give payment, the same feeling would suggest that it was too little. The passage of money seemed to him to discount all else that might pass between people. And so he always strove to see to it that when the money finally had to pass, it would pass as if in secret under cover of much sociable conversation. A
nd besides, he was interested in people and curious about them.

  He found out the man’s name, which was Bob Shifter. He found out where he lived, and where he had lived before. He found out that Bob Shifter was no kin to old man Claude Shifter who used to live close to Ellville down by Hargrave, or if he was he didn’t know it. He found out how long Bob Shifter had been married and how many children he had. He found out the mechanic’s wife’s maiden name and his mother’s maiden name. He found out all that and a lot more, and he didn’t have to ask more than three or four direct questions, for Bob Shifter was more than glad to tell the story of his life, and not in much of a hurry, once the talk started, to fix the tire.

  The day was no longer young by the time they paid Mr. Shifter and got a good drink out of their water jug and started on again. But soon they were coming into the outskirts of the city. Now Tol began to experience their adventure as a reality, for the outskirts stretched out a long way before the city itself began. They would go through some of the city before they got to the stockyards, and there was a vast amount of it beyond.

  He cleared his throat and said, “When you get me beyond the stockyards, by thunder, you’ve lost me!”

  Nobody said anything.

  After a while, to make sure they understood exactly what his qualifications were, he said again, “When you get me past the stockyards, I don’t know left from right, nor up from down. I don’t for a fact.”

  But by then they were approaching the stockyards, and Miss Minnie was digging in her purse for Sam Hanks’s map.

  “Now!” she said, drawing it out and unfolding it.

  And then it was her turn to be assaulted by the reality of that day, for the map, past the stockyards, which had been boldly labeled “STOCKYARDS,” did not have a single name on it. Beyond the stockyards, where they now were, and going past in a hurry, the map was just a squiggle of straight lines and right-angle turns. And Miss Minnie understood, in a sort of lightning flash, the urban experience of her well-traveled nephew: when he drove his truck in the city, he went by landmarks, even such landmarks as he had recited while he drew his map, causing her and Tol to see visions of where they were going; past the stockyards, he didn’t know the name of anything.

  “Well, there’s an example of misplaced faith,” said Miss Minnie in a voice that was precise and restrained and yet carried unmistakably the tone of familial exasperation.

  They stopped for a red light and then went on again.

  “What’s the matter?” Tol said. Miss Minnie had never taken that tone with him, but he knew how he would have felt if she ever had, and so he felt sorry for Sam Hanks when she took it with him.

  “There are no street names,” Miss Minnie said. “The map is perfectly useless.”

  “Aw, naw, now, it’s not,” Tol said.

  “I fear it is,” said Miss Minnie.

  “Well, it shows you where to turn,” Tol said, putting his big forefinger down onto the paper. “Here. Look a-here. Right here. Turn!” he said to Elton, pointing the way.

  And Elton turned left out of the middle of the great street they were on into a smaller one.

  “Listen to all the horns,” Tol said.

  “If we don’t know the names of the streets,” Miss Minnie said, “how can we know where to turn?”

  “Well, we just turn where the line turns,” said Tol. “Keep a watch out now. Sam told us what to look for. Maybe he said the names of the streets. Maybe we’ll remember some of them. Look at the signs.”

  So they began watching for the street signs. Miss Minnie was wearing a black straw hat with a stiff brim. “She was turning her head this way and that, looking for signs,” as Elton would tell it later, “and that hat like to sawed off Tol’s left arm and my head.”

  “Now,” Tol said, “didn’t he say to turn past that big building yonder?”

  “Yes, perhaps he did,” Miss Minnie said.

  Elton turned, and they went along another street, and before long they turned again. They went on that way for a considerable time. Finally they could no longer be sure which of the anonymous angles on their map they had come to.

  “Well,” Miss Minnie said, “we’re lost.”

  “Well, we know something for sure, anyhow,” Tol said, and Miss Minnie allowed him to laugh at that all by himself.

  “Why don’t we ask somebody?” Elton said. “Looks like some of these people ought to know.” Elton had never ceased to grin. He was having a good time. As long as he was driving, he didn’t much care whether they were lost or not.

  Miss Minnie, too, had thought of asking somebody, but she had her pride. If there was anything worse than being a person who did not know where she was, it was appearing to be a person who did not know where she was. Perhaps she understood also that by giving Tol an opening for conversation with the public at large, they might delay their arrival at the Fair indefinitely. And now that her confidence had failed, she saw pretty clearly that they would have to ask not one but many people. She saw that the place was complicated beyond her imaginings or her ability to imagine. She saw that even if they had good directions, they would get them wrong. There was no telling the mistakes they would make.

  “It would be reasonable,” she said, having calmly resolved to think it through again, “since the Fair is so large an event, that there ought to be signs along the way, saying, ‘To the Fair.’ And so perhaps if we just look around a little we will see one of those signs.”

  Buoyed up by the cheerfulness of logical thought, Tol agreed.

  “And it seems to me,” she said, pointing with her gloved forefinger, “that a promising direction would be that way.”

  And so they wandered about for a while, looking for a sign, and found none.

  “Well,” Tol said finally, “why don’t we just look for a big street where a lot of people are going in the same direction. They’ll probably be going to the Fair, for there’s a many of them that goes. And we can just follow along. Don’t you see?”

  But it had got to where thinking did not much help either their spirits or their condition. And though they came to some more big streets, it appeared that about the same numbers of people were going in both directions.

  “We must go back to the stockyards and begin again,” Miss Minnie said.

  And that was the worst thought of all, for only then did they understand how lost they were. That they did not know where they were suddenly proved to them that they did not know where the stockyards were. They did not know where home was.

  Failure and despair came upon them. They could no longer say that they were on their way to the Fair. They had come to a place of railroad spurs, tall chimneys, and low buildings—a sooty, ugly, purposeful place that sunlight did not improve. And all the time they were wandering around lost, wasting their precious day, the Fair was happening; it was fleeing as a bird to its mountain. Miss Minnie had a vision of the light fading from the polished skins of apples and pears and plums.

  “Oh, goodness!” she said, and Elton thought she was going to cry, but she did not.

  And then a sort of wonder happened. Until he was about forty-five—when it was revealed to him that if he was going to get up early he ought to go to bed early—Tol Proudfoot had been a coon hunter, and so he was accustomed to being lost and to finding himself again. Once he understood that Miss Minnie herself was hopelessly bewildered, and that all rational measures had failed, Tol’s sense of direction began to operate. “Now, the stockyards,” he said, “if that’s where we want to go, is right over yonder.” And he pointed the direction.

  It was a direction diagonal to the streets, and so they had to go in a zigzag, tacking back and forth like a sailboat.

  “Slant her over that way a little, son,” Tol would say. And then, in a little while, “Now cut her back over this way.”

  And finally they were going pretty fast, amid much traffic,
down the middle of a long, broad street, and they could see, far down at the end of it, the stockyards. Tol was waving his hand, signaling to Elton to go straight ahead.

  “Oh, Mr. Proudfoot!” said Miss Minnie. “Where would we be without you?”

  And then, over on the left-hand side of the street, Tol spied a man on tall stilts, carrying a sandwich board that said:

  You’ll find it, friend,

  At the Outside Inn.

  It was perhaps the chief spectacle of the day so far. For fear the others would not see it, Tol lunged in the direction of the sandwich man and extended his hand to indicate where to look.

  “Look a-yonder!” he said.

  He had stuck his hand right in front of Elton’s face. His hand looked as big, Elton said, as a billboard. And when they had seen the sandwich man and exclaimed and Tol withdrew his hand, the world had changed. The car in front of them was stopping in a hurry for a red light. Elton clapped his foot onto the brake. And what happened after that happened faster than it can be explained.

  When the man in front applied his brake, as Elton would tell it, “his ass-end as-cended.” When Elton applied his brake, which he did a little too late, the Trick’s front end descended. And as everything stopped and got level again, the back bumper of the car in front chomped down onto the front bumper of the Trick.

  Elton and Tol got right out to see what the damage was.

  “It’s all right,” Elton said. “It didn’t make a scratch.”

  But Tol Proudfoot knew a calamity when he saw one. “Hung like two dogs!” he said. “By thunder, son, they’re hung like two dogs!”

  The car in front was far longer and far shinier than the Trick. And now its driver had got out and come back to see also. He had a white mustache and a red face and was wearing a suit and was in a hurry.

  Elton was grinning as if he could not wait for the world to show forth more of its wonders.