So Brave, Young, and Handsome (18 page)

“Away from you, it appears,” I couldn’t resist telling him.

He chuckled. “It’s true, I’m a reduced specimen now. Oh, I may hold off the grave awhile yet, but look how small I’ve become. How brittle.” His tone was of incredulity; I suppose small and brittle were conditions he had never imagined for himself.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Do for me—when do you leave, Becket?”

“In the morning.”

“Well, then, I’ll trouble you to take me to the train station.”

“Really? Are you strong enough to travel?”

He held my gaze a moment before answering, “I’m strong enough.”

And did I see something in his eyes? Did I see a dark personage crouching, back in the shadows of his brain? No. If I am honest with you, I didn’t see a thing.

The morning we left the Hundred and One I received a telegram from Susannah. The timing was dreamlike as Siringo and I stood on the boardwalk amid luggage while Mr. Bodes growled up in the swabbed Packard. The sun went sizzling up the bleached Oklahoma sky, which atoned for the fungoid exhale of the drying ranch. James Clary had stepped out to say goodbye, though he didn’t offer to shake hands because his were covered with violet antiseptic. I didn’t even notice the Western Union boy until he asked my name. Of course I fumbled and scrabbled at the envelope—I had been gone from home for twenty-six days, but they felt like years upon my shoulders.

The telegram said
I MISS YOUR FACE, COME HOME
.

I don’t remember laughing aloud, though Siringo told me later that I did—it would become my greatest merit as far as Siringo was concerned, that a woman cared for me—I laughed, it seems, then flush with new generosity I picked up Siringo’s two leather suitcases which he called his rhino grips and set them in the back of the Packard. When Bodes opened the passenger door Siringo fell into the seat.
Poor doddering oldster
was my thought, for he worked his mouth and finally produced the words “Goodbye, Clary,” for the doctor was nodding to us in his delicate way.

“Stay away from the black doors,” Clary whispered to Siringo, leaning forward.

“You’ll go through them before I do,” replied Siringo.

“I’ll not go through them at all,” said the doctor.

“Got religion did you?”

“You are the completest argument for it I have ever met,” said Clary, at which Siringo with surprising vitality leaned out and grasped the doctor’s violet hand, and so impulsive and free of calculation did this appear that I could only conclude the old monster was capable of gratitude after all, even toward the simpleton who had saved his life.

Speeding north from the ranch, Charles Siringo grew lighthearted. He hummed and chortled; we tore along the peeling mudplains and the dust we raised got into our teeth and tasted of swamp. My final glimpse of the Hundred and One was, like my first, of an elephant. No doubt the same elephant. It was at some distance, seemingly confused, charging and tilting and changing its mind. I suppose it still woke each morning expecting an African sunrise.

After some miles we came to an intersection. East would take us to Ponca City and the train station; west—well, I didn’t know where west would take us. In truth I wasn’t thinking about west. I was thinking about Susannah in her orange skirt.

“West, Becket,” Siringo said.

“Ponca City is east,” I replied, pulling to a stop.

“East is not our direction.”

You may guess I felt a touch of frost in the old spinal column, though I still hoped we had merely misunderstood one another.

“You asked for a ride to the depot. That’s where we’re headed.”

“The depot was never my intent.”

“No? What was your intent?”

He didn’t reply. Often, I would find, he didn’t reply, and these were usually times when I already knew the answer to the question I had asked.

I made to put the car in gear. In a tone of confidential humor he said, “If you turn east, Becket, you will never get to Ponca City.”

Now you are thinking, Just a blasted second here—he was enfeebled! He fell into the car! But I am telling you that now I did glimpse the dark creature squatting behind the flatness of his eyes.

“I know what you want,” I told him.

“Why, I want you and me to travel west in company. That’s fairly clear, I hope.”

“I don’t know where Glendon is. I can’t be your guide.”

“Then go as my companion. I need a driver. We’ll have a pleasant time.”

“I’m going home, Mr. Siringo.”

Siringo said merrily, “You are fibbing to yourself, Becket. You tell yourself I am infirm, but you don’t believe it.”

“I believe my two eyes.”

He held out his right hand. “Would you test my grip then?”

I looked at his hand. It quivered, which gave me confidence. I said, “Don’t humiliate yourself, you’ve had a hard time. You need to go home and continue your convalescence.” But I remembered Glendon saying
Keep out of his grasp
, so my hand stayed on the wheel.

“You daren’t shake my hand?”

Feeling every ounce a coward I said, “I do not trust you.”

“Very well.” And turning away he opened the door and got out of the car and hobbled over to the side of the road. He sat down in the dead ryegrass, bending in what I remember as an inadequate breeze against the heat. “I’ll wait here. Someone will be headed west, eventually.”

“Don’t be absurd. It’s going to be warm today. It’s warm already.”

“I’ve been warm before. Get on your way.”

In fact I wanted to get on my way but dreaded my swarming conscience down the road. Siringo had nearly died from that bullet wound; we were miles from town and had yet to see another auto on the road. If he didn’t get a ride, he would soon tip over and dry out. His mouth would draw open and he would become a leathery ribcage on that arid plain.

I said, “I’d rather not leave you here.”

“West,” he said, as though at play.

“Oh, come on. Come on now,” and getting out of the car I stepped up to Siringo with the universal signal of entreaty.

I held out my hand.

He nodded and reached for it. Next moment came a pop and blast of creamy white! No doubt my eyes whirled back and caught a glimpse of my skull. I jerked my hand to my stomach and bent over it with a cry.

“Why, what’s happened to you?” asked Siringo, getting awkwardly to his feet like any innocuous grandpa.

I couldn’t answer. For that matter I couldn’t breathe. I sat down in the rye where he had been and rocked and made a few high noises.

Stooping in he remarked, “Well, that looks just terrible.” What looked terrible was the ring finger of my right hand. He’d given it a tug and a sidewise twist so it sat unhinged above its socket.

“Tell you what,” said Siringo, now taking my elbow and with disquieting strength lifting me to my feet, “let’s drive west.”

I stumbled along in his grip and he opened the driver’s door of the Packard and settled me quite gently behind the wheel.

“How am I to drive,” I said, for though my breath was returned my vision still spun with pain and I sweated like the opium enthusiasts Redstart had described to me from Conan Doyle.

“It will do you good. It’s soothing to drive, that is common knowledge.”

I had no words. I whacked the steering wheel with my left hand but of course that was the hand Siringo had bitten in his ravings. My wrath had nowhere to go. I started to pull at the agonized finger but felt the cool ghost of a looming faint. The finger was getting big and I couldn’t put it straight.

“You’ll feel better once we start moving,” he said.

So I steadied my breath and palmed the shifter and let out the clutch as if balancing tippy drinks and turned the Packard away from the sun. At the same time I began instinctively to bargain. “I’ll tell you where he is,” I said, as we began to climb off the caked floodplain into regions of spongy grass and cowland.

“You don’t know where he is,” Siringo replied.

“I know where he’s going. Approximately. I don’t have a street number or anything, but I know roughly.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Roughly will be useful. I prefer specific, of course—but roughly will do.”

I opened my mouth to say, He’ll be at a fruit orchard in the Rienda Valley. You see how quickly I’d have betrayed my friend? But Siringo stopped me.

“Oh, I know it’s California for Glen—Mexican Joe gave me that much! You clutch onto your details for the present, I don’t need them yet.”

“But I can tell you now! Then you can go on, unencumbered by me, and I can go home.”

“Unencumbered, hey.” Siringo took enormous wheezy pleasure from the word. His laughs soon deteriorated into furious coughing, which tired him out but didn’t ruin his cheerful mood. He said, “Becket, I know you long for home. I expect you’ve a doting wife. A flock of tender kidlets! But I need to make sure of your candor.”

“I’ll be honest.”

“You’ll be honest if you come with me, because the consequences of dishonesty will be obvious to you.”

“But I’ll tell the truth!” I’m sorry to say I nearly screamed the words.

“Why? I wouldn’t, in your place,” he said. “Also, Becket, I want your company. It comes to light we are both of us writers. Two authors traveling together—the discussions we’ll have! Here, what do you think of this proposition? Men are built of words. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?” At this he leaned forward and slapped my knee heartily, as if we were a pair of thrown-togethers at the beginning of a long train ride, discovering our common love of bookish pursuit. “Men are defined by the words they use, and I have always said so!”

During this conversation I had continued to perspire until my face and hands and even the steering wheel were rimed with salt and dirt; my dislodged finger was a proud little melon. Bitterly I said, “Men are defined by their actions, Mr. Siringo. Yours define a bully and liar. I’ll have no more discussions with you than I would with any thug you care to name.”

It was a righteous short sermon, delivered, I still say, in as tidy a style as a man with one hand broken and the other bitten is likely to possess; yet envision my surprise when Siringo blinked and drew back from me, as though I’d gone out of my way to injure his feelings.

“Why, there ain’t any demand for talk of that sort,” he said, his voice turning back toward frailty and confusion. “No demand at all. A little thoughtful discourse is all I had in mind.”

And the strange thing, as I watched his face struggle with my little flash of resentment, was that I was sorry I’d said it. All he had to do was turn from me to watch the passing ranch land, show me the back of his crabbed webby neck shrinking farther into that huge collar. For several long moments I truly believed I’d been too hard on the old vulture. Why deny him his thoughtful discourse just because my finger ached? I came that close to making a sort of apology. Go ahead and laugh. A time was coming when I would relate all this to Glendon Hale, confessing my weak-mindedness; but Glendon only nodded and said Charlie had more traps than anybody, so many in fact that Charlie himself didn’t know them all; but his finest snare lay in believing every word that he said, until you believed them too and stepped readily into his palm.

We spent the night round a popping fire, having made some seventy miles. In that part of Oklahoma few trees grew bigger than cornstalks so we camped in the lee of a roofless farmhouse from which I pried enough planks to keep a flame. Watching me scrounge boards sore-handed appeared to help Siringo rebound from my earlier terse remarks and he was in tall spirits again, pointing out telling features of the old farmstead; the skeletal mill tower riven by lightning, a wide propitious chimney now rubbled, the lichened tilting posts of a vanished corral.

“It was a big corral once,” he said, as dusk faded. “These folks must’ve thought they’d made it.”

“I guess they did make it, for a while,” I replied.

“Nope, that’s vanity,” Siringo said. “It came to nothing, you will notice. Grasping after wind,” he added happily. He had a way of pronouncing doom in buoyant tones as if reading aloud from the comics. It made me feel bitter toward him—and toward myself, for lacking the wit to have simply driven away that morning while he sulked in the weeds. It was worse than annoying to realize he’d guessed right about me—that I would not leave him there in the sun to bake.

My hand, by the way, was improved. After perhaps ten minutes of knifing distress Siringo had abruptly reached over, taken my hand in his own and reset the finger while I yelped and jerked the Packard to and fro. One swift pull was all it amounted to—it shames me to tell you how strong were my feelings of gratitude. I am weak about pain. Immediately my outlook improved and the old strap seemed pleased with my advancing manners. When I thanked him he only cackled lightly, then tucked into a corner of the seat and fell
asleep with apparent confidence that I would try nothing untoward. Sure enough I didn’t. Pulling rotten planks off the farmhouse and stacking them by the fire, I was bitter about that too.

“Say—look what I got here,” Siringo said, as if remembering a treat held in reserve for this very hour.

Easing down on a precarious kitchen chair scavenged from the house he waved a copy of
Martin Bligh
. He said, “Hey hey,” as if I ought to be tickled, but the last thing you want is for a fellow like Charles Siringo to know you any better.

“Guess where I obtained this,” he said, his cheeks burnished with firelight.

“I don’t know.”

He propped an eyebrow and opened the book and angled it to better read the title page.

To my good friend Emma Davies, remember always the books that were your first loves
—

“Stop!” I cried. It was unseemly that he should read my heart-felt inscription so breezily. “You stole it from that girl!”

“No, sir. She gave it to me,” he replied.

“I don’t believe it.”

That sat Siringo up a little straighter, across the fire. He regarded me, his mouth open in apprehension.