This Side of Jordan Page 24

  “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.”

  “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!”

  Th
e 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 inspirati
on 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?”