The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (42 page)

When it had gone about a mile down the road the truck turned right down a side road running parallel to the river. Over this it jounced and swayed for about a mile until it turned down an even rougher road—“gully” would be a better word—an old logging trail hacked through the tall pines which led back to the river. He was not driving fast now, not only because the road was rough and the dust in the air such that he could not, but because he was safe now. He knew what the ferryman did not know, that he would find no customers waiting for him when he got back to Oklahoma.

He came out of the trees and into a clearing at the river's edge. He drove down as near to the water as he could. Leaving the headlights burning, he got out. Had anybody been there (in which case he would not have gotten out) that person would have seen that the mask and a pair of ankle-top shoes, socks, and supporters was every stitch the man had on. Not that he was exactly nude, but there are no seams in a suit of feathers and tar.

Basically he was white Leghorn, but there was an inter-sprinkling of barred rock, Rhode Island red, some gray goose, some guinea hen, and even some bright bantam rooster, all fluffy and fine, being pinfeathers and eiderdown of the kind and assortment to be expected from the stuffing of a featherbed, saved over the years by some farmwoman from all the poultry killed and plucked for many a Thanksgiving and Christmas and family-reunion dinner. The man's long, red, wrinkled, leathery neck, notched with bones, his crawlike Adam's apple, the wattles underneath his chin and his beak of a nose enforced his resemblance to a chicken—one in molt. His eyes, probably blue, were so bloodshot they were purple. He was bald on the crown, though his straggling reddish-gray hair was long enough to drape over the bare spot ordinarily. But upon his pate someone had recently wiped a paintbrush well charged with creosote and there a solitary pinfeather now stuck up like a cowlick. He was around forty-five years old, a stringy man of medium height who looked taller because of the stoop in his shoulders, the unmistakable stoop of one who from boyhood has followed the plow. He had long stringy arms on the lower parts of which where the feathering was sparse the veins stood out in permanent high relief like the grain in old weathered wood, say the side of an abandoned and never-painted haybarn. He was in a state far past mere weariness, bordering on collapse, and he was swearing steadily, possibly unconsciously, a sort of unedited imprecation almost as if he were humming to himself without any tune.

He went now around to the back of the van and hauled himself up the steps, opened the door with his shoulder, and fell inside. A crash sounded and a yelp of pain as he stumbled over something. He was out again shortly with a battered pail and a three-foot length of frayed-ended garden hose. He removed the Irish potato that served as a cap to the gas tank, poked the hose down the hole, put the end in his mouth, sucked, spat, and directed the flow into the pail, all with a polish which showed a good deal more practice than could have been gained on a single gas tank. He stepped into the light of the headlamps and, raising the pail shoulder high, poured half the contents over himself. He commenced plucking. In time a pile of sodden feathers lay at his feet; it looked as if half a dozen fryers had been scalded and plucked on the spot. He went back inside the van, returning this time with a thin cake of soap and a napless threadbare towel.

He eased himself into the tepid, opaque water, his head sticking up like a turtle's on that long seamy neck. Taking a deep breath, he ducked under. He came up spitting. He lathered his head and his underarms and his chest and ducked under again and came up spitting once more. He climbed out on the bank and rubbed himself down. When dry, the reddish-gray mat of hair on his chest looked like rusty steel wool. The smell of tar and gasoline had by no means been washed away.

He returned to the van and went inside and lighted a lamp, revealing some kind of broken machine in a heap in the middle of the floor, a huge round one-legged claw-footed dining table, a high-backed hickory-splint rocking chair, an oval dirt-colored rag rug, an immense chifforobe of black wood, three cylinders of cooking gas, a small potbellied stove, a woodbox (empty), a two-burner Coleman range on a shelf and on the floor beneath the shelf a coal-oil can with a sodden corncob stopper, an unmade daybed. A shelf ran high along one wall, and he began searching among the stuff on it. While his back was turned a small tarred and feathered dog, possibly of the rat-terrier breed, divided about equally between dog and long feathered tail, recently very wet and still very moist, slunk up the steps with its tongue lolling and into the room, and trying to make itself still smaller than it was, stole unnoticed underneath the bed.

The assortment of paraphernalia on the shelf included some half-dozen road flares of the kind left by night alongside detour signs, three or four old automobile batteries, two wooden boxes, one opened, the other unopened, labeled
EXPLOSIVES, HANDLE WITH CARE
, and a collection of apparatus vaguely electrical-looking, including coils and switches and fuse boxes and a hand-cranked generator with a much-worn armature rather resembling a large old-fashioned coffee mill. Behind all this he found what he was looking for (though success in his search brought no pause in that steady mumbled cursing) and began taking them down: quart cans of paint. He pried the lids off. There, scummed over, was the orange of that sun on the side of the van, and there the blackish blue of the cloud and there the red of the barn, the white of the raindrops—when all was dumped together into a pail and stirred, it was the color of mud.

As he stirred, the man regarded two other cans on the shelf above the cookstove. These were cans of tomatoes, with labels like miniatures of the sun painted on the panel of the van. He stopped stirring, rose, and went towards them, his eyes glazed, entranced. Then he caught himself and returned to the paint bucket.

Still naked, he went outside carrying the bucket and a brush, a worn-out broom, and a rickety stepladder. He swept down the side of the truck, coughing at the dust he raised. He stood the ladder beside the truck and climbed it to the top carrying the bucket. The paint was thick; one coat was going to have to do. He started in on top, first turning up the volume of that constant maledictory static he was making, and with three broad strokes of the brush, one of which he had to stretch so far to complete that he almost toppled off the ladder, he slashed through the words:

THe 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs

He coughed, stepped down a rung, and painted out the ascending sunrays. Stepping down another rung, he painted out the cloud, the base of the lightning bolt, the face of the sun. He rested a moment, coughing, rubbing his eyes, swearing, then stepped down and painted out the tip of the bolt of lightning, the remainder of the cloud. Then he had to come down off the ladder and rest. He had not slept in thirty-six hours. Not slept? He had not drawn one unterrified breath in all that while! His eyes felt as if all the dust in the world, or at least in Oklahoma, was underneath the lids. He climbed the ladder again and blotted out forevermore the falling raindrops. Stepping down, he painted out the farmhouse and barn and that one sui-generic head of livestock. Then dipping his brush in the paint and not even wiping it on the lip of the pail, with a curse (he would have all this to do again around on the other side), a vicious swipe and a spattering of mud-colored drops, he painted out the large bottom word:

RAiNMAKeR

III

Just plain unemployed Orville Simms, dressed now in khaki pants and shirt, drove that night until he could drive no farther, until his eyelids began to anneal, his hands to palsy on the wheel, until he began to have waking nightmares of windmill derricks, whole forests of them alongside the road and stretching away into the night, going south now through Red River County and into true night, the vast Texas night, with stars overhead, not the daytime night of dust; and then, after he had awakened barely in time to keep from going off into the ditch for the third time, he pulled off into somebody's cowpasture, started to get out of the cab and go back to his bed, and passed out at the wheel. His sleep was sound—too sound—comatose. He moaned, he whimpered, he twitched. Throughout the night frequent shudders shook him, jerking him almost awake, as in his dreams he felt himself falling from a height.…

Two days earlier, in Oklahoma, Prof. Simms was driving down a country road when his radiator came to a boil. The truck was an old enough model to have for a radiator cap one of those round glass gauges with a mercury column inside. It was older than that: not only Prof. Simms but numerous previous owners, though occasions had not been wanting, had come too late ever to see that thermometer rise. What it had long done instead was steam up inside the glass, and in another moment any mercury column would have been invisible anyhow—the whole cap was, the whole front end.

It never occurred to him to look for any standing water in the roadside ditches, where now not even weeds could any longer get a hold, and stockponds that he passed, or what had been stockponds, were dry white scabs covered over with a cracked layer of thin curling crust and invariably with an old car-casing, sometimes an old car, standing half-buried in the middle. Besides, the last three farms he had passed had shown evidence of habitation—that is, at each one dogs had come out to bark at him as he went past. This boiling of the radiator was a frequent occurrence, and what with that sign along the side of the truck, Prof. Simms had grown timid about stopping to ask for water, even a dipperful to drink. Especially he sought to avoid crossroads stores with their one gas pump and garden watering can meant for radiators, but with also along their porch the usual group of whittlers and spitters. To pull up with that radiator going like a factory whistle at noon and shooting up like Old Faithful when the cap was loosened, and beneath that collective gaze to go and get the watering can was more then the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs, RAiNMAKeR, could take. At such times he especially regretted that self-conferred title of Professor.

Meanwhile the sight of that steaming radiator was a joy to Prof. Simms, and the farther he drove without finding a drop to pour down it, or down his own long dusty gullet, the more joyfully he licked his parched lips with his dry tongue. For fifteen miles he had been driving alongside fields where the cornstalks slanted earthwards and the brown leaves hung tattered and limp and where cotton in scraggly rows stood with bolls which ought long since to have burst white and were instead whole and hard, the shape and the color of and not much bigger than bottled olives. Once he stopped and got out to look closer, and found the earth pimpled and pocked from the last light shower, each pebble perched upon a column of dirt half an inch high and conforming exactly to its outline: a sort of microscopic badlands. Not God's country, perhaps, but the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs's country for sure. If not too far gone even for him.

Just how far gone he learned when he stopped at an abandoned farmhouse for water. He learned then, too, that the countryside was blessed with the only other thing it needed to make it ideal for his purposes: a long mental drought. He pulled up at the sagging gate and got out and went around back of the house to the well, from the rusty pulley of which hung a bucket that even folks giving up and leaving would not bother to take along. He let it drop, and listened, and heard a sound which, though it augured well for his business, could not but strike an old farmboy as sickening: not the expected sideways slap of an empty bucket striking water, but the dull dry
kachunk
of the bottom of the bucket upon hard dirt. Then behind him he heard a snort of dry, unamused laughter.

“Wasting your time there, Mister,” the man said. “Been bone dry since last fall a year. If you're thirsty, step into the house here.”

“Thank you just the same. If your well's dry then I don't expect you've got much water to spare.”

“Enough to give a thirsty man to drink. When we ain't got that no more then I'll pull out.”

“Thank you kindly. But … well, I hate to ask it, but what I need is more than just a drink. My radiator's dry. If you're having to haul water, why I'll be glad to buy a bucketful from you.”

This suggestion the farmer did not even bother to spurn. Out of the drum he hauled it in he dippered a bucketful of water and, to Prof. Simms's embarrassment, himself toted it out and opened the explosive radiator and poured it in. Poured it in, that is, after letting the radiator cool down, and while waiting he came round and silently studied the picture and text on the side of the truck. After a while he spoke. He did not ask why a man who presumably could call it down from the skies whenever he felt like it had had to stop and beg a bucketful of water from a man who had to haul it in an oil drum from eight miles off, but, apparently unconscious that his illiteracy was a handicap, and certainly not conscious that any stigma attached to it, but rather as if a man who could read and write was something of a curio, if not indeed a freak, asked to know what the words meant. Prof. Simms told him.

“Is that a fact! Well, Mister, I mean Professor, we can sure use you around here! You have sure come to the right place!”

He believed he had. He believed he had. It was almost too good to be true.

“Yes, sir, we been just waiting for you to come along. We been trying to drum us up a rainmaker.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes, sir. Preachers done all prayed theirselves hoarse. Methodist. Baptist. Campbellite. Adventist. None of them done any good. Last week a gang of us men even went out to the reservation to ask the chief out there if he would have a try. The Indians, you know, they always pray for rain. Not to God, to the Great Spirit. But hellfire, we wasn't particular who sent it, as long as it come. So the men in town they thought it just might do some good and surely do no harm to ask him to see what he could do.”