Harris and Me Read online

  He had thrown down the bow and by this time was running across the yard trying either to make the granary or the house. It didn’t matter which because Buzzer was on him in three bounds and the two of them went rolling in a cloud of dirt and screeches.

  “He’s killing me!” Harris screamed. “Help me!” Arms and legs and paws and tufted ears seemed to be everywhere.

  I was worried about Harris—though I didn’t think he could be killed by anything—but I wasn’t about to cross Buzzer. I yelled, “Buzzer, you stop that now...”

  Which of course had no effect at all. The fight kept roiling and boiling, and I’m not sure what the outcome would have been but suddenly the screen door on the house swung open and Clair was standing there, her hands in her apron.

  “Harris! You quit playing with Buzzer now and come inside—we have to get ready for town.”

  And that stopped Buzzer. When the dust settled he was standing on top of Harris, looking at Clair, spitting out bits of bib overall, his stump tail wriggling happily.

  “Get off me, you gooner,” Harris said. “Didn’t you hear? We got to go inside...”

  He rolled out from under Buzzer and stood. His bibs were in shreds and he was bleeding from a dozen or so cuts but seemed in one piece and he ran to the house. I made a loop around Buzzer, who spat once more and went back toward the barn, and I followed Harris into the house.

  “Is there a dance or what, Ma?”

  Harris was by the sink where Clair was pumping cold water into a steaming pan of hot water to cool it.

  “Yes. There’s a dance and a party for the Halversons—to help them rebuild. Their house burned.”

  “Is there a picture show?” The tragic news didn’t seem to bother Harris much. “Do we get a picture show?”

  She smiled and nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  “Can we have pop?” he added. “Don’t we get to have pop for the picture show?”

  She didn’t answer that one but instead bent his head over the sink and started cleaning it in much the same way she or Glennis cleaned the separator parts after milking: pouring hot water on a spot, scrubbing with a stiff-bristle brush until he screamed—or actually well after he screamed, ignoring the cries for mercy and some first-rate profanity—and then doing another spot.

  I stood watching all this, not thinking that I would be next, until Harris was done—literally and figuratively—and then Clair turned to me.

  “Put your head over the sink, dear—you look like you’ve been swimming in manure.”

  I did so and in moments understood why Harris had screamed so hard. It felt like the brush was made of nails. She dug and probed at every crevice and opening on my head, pouring scalding water between bouts of scrubbing until I felt like all my skin was gone.

  “There,” she said, pouring water the color and consistency of the Mississippi down the sink from the dishpan. “Now you’re clean. We’ll go right after chores, so you two stay clean and change clothes after we milk.”

  Harris went out the door at a run, jumped off the porch down into the grass, and ran around in circles, prancing like he was riding a horse. “Maybe it’ll be Gene.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was still hurting from the scrubbing and felt to see if any of my ears remained.

  “Gene Artery, you dope. Didn’t you hear what she said? They’re going to have a movie show. There ain’t but about three picture shows in the world and one of them is Gene Artery.”

  “You mean Gene Autry?”

  “Right. He runs around shooting things and he never misses. You ought to see it. He can shoot the gun clean out of somebody’s hand and never a miss. Man, I hope it’s that Gene Artery picture show. I’ve only seen that one fifteen or twenty times and it gets better each time. He’s got this fat guy runs around with him who’s dumber than a pump handle and is always getting into trouble. I don’t see how he stays alive from one picture show to the next...”

  “It’s a movie.”

  He stared at me.

  “It’s not new each time. They just do it once and then they show it all over the place.” I had seen Gene Autry movies many times, and others, Roy Rogers, some war movies.

  He snorted. “Sure. You must think I’m as dumb as the fat guy. Heck, you can see them moving each time. Don’t you suppose I know what’s real and what ain’t?”

  He just didn’t understand and I thought to explain it more except that it was all a bit fuzzy for me as well. I knew about movies and all but I wasn’t exactly sure how they were made—not certain enough to take a lot of questions. Besides, a secondary consideration had arisen that had me puzzled.

  I was sure we were well into the middle of a huge wilderness. In all the drive up here with the deputy, we hadn’t passed a town or a road to a town and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why they would have a motion picture theater in the middle of the forest.

  “Where do they show the movies?” I asked. Harris had completely ignored Clair’s warning and was playing in the dirt where we had a couple of old iron toy tractors and had made a farm.

  “On the wall,” he answered. “Where else? Don’t you know nothing?”

  So I dropped it, thinking I would find out soon enough.

  It was an hour until we milked—which seemed a week—and another hour after we finished milking and separating to eat supper and change clothes. After wolfing food—almost but not quite keeping up with Louie—Harris ran upstairs and changed. He came down in moments with clean bibs on—still without a shirt, without shoes, and the side buttons open on the bibs showed he had no underwear on. I put on a clean tee shirt and came downstairs to find that even Louie had dressed for the occasion. He had changed shirts—not to a clean one (I don’t think anything he ever wore was clean) but a different dirty one.

  Knute and Clair and Glennis were all fresh and clean—Knute was wearing a newly ironed work shirt and I realized I had seen Clair ironing it two days before, heating the iron on the back of the stove and pressing a bit at a time.

  Knute drank another cup of coffee, then nodded and without speaking went outside, leading the entourage to the truck.

  The truck was old—how old was and is open to conjecture. As was the actual make. It had been patched and rebuilt so many times with so many different parts that it might have been a Ford or a Dodge or even a Chevrolet. Whatever it was, it had been dead for a long time and Knute kept it running with a Lazarus approach, a mixture of miracle and work.

  It didn’t have a battery and we all stood watching while he cranked it, advanced the spark a bit, cranked it again, advanced the spark a little more, and cranked once more. This time it kicked so hard it nearly broke his arm. He swore eloquently—I began to understand where Harris found his ability—and then backed off on the spark, cranked once more, and it started with a sound like the pistons were exchanging holes.

  He stood, smiling, and we all clambered in. That is, Glennis, Clair, and Knute got in front. Louie climbed in the rear of the truck and sat on the bed, his back to the cab, and Harris and I joined him.

  I still had no idea where we were going but everybody was so glad to be doing it that I fell in with the enthusiasm.

  “We don’t get to town that often,” Harris screamed—a full bellow was necessary to override the sound of the engine. There was no muffler at all and very little tailpipe. What pipe there was ended at the front of the bed so the full din of the engine came up around us. “It’s the best thing there is, especially if we get some pop to go with the picture show...”

  I got about every third word and he had to translate over the engine sound and he finally gave up.

  Knute turned right at the end of the driveway and we started driving—ricocheting might be a better word—down a mud track that went through miles of forest.

  When we’d done this for half an hour we came into a clearing a mile across—hacked out of the forest the way Knute’s farm had been cleared—and in the middle of this clearing stood four frame bui
ldings and a tall sheet-metal covered grain elevator. A set of railroad tracks ran alongside and past the four buildings.

  Harris smiled widely and pointed. “Town.”

  I said nothing, but the way it looked reminded me of nothing so much as some villages I’d seen in the Philippine Islands—a scattered collection of huts thrown in the middle of nowhere.

  We bounced across the tracks, turned on a dirt road that went in front of the buildings, and stopped in front of a clapboard-sided shanty that seemed about to fall in on itself. It had no windows in the front or the sides but an open door and a crude wooden porch across the front. Above the door in rough, handpainted letters were the words:

  LUMBERJACK LOWNGE

  The other three buildings looked much the same except one of them had a glass window in the front and was apparently a dry goods store.

  I couldn’t for the life of me see what everybody was so excited about. There were already six or seven trucks parked in the street—not in any order, just left where they stopped, as Knute now did with our truck—and as the engine died with a gasp, a thin boy about my age walked out of the door and onto the porch. He was holding a bottle of Nesbitt’s orange pop and as soon as he saw our truck he turned and tried to get back in the door.

  He was far too slow.

  “Hunsetter, you gooner!” Harris bellowed as he piled over the side of the truck. “Where the hell is my aggie shooter?”

  Harris bounced once on the ground and landed on top of the boy. Orange pop sprayed in the air as they went down and rolled into the street in a cloud of dirt and curses. It was a view of Harris I was becoming accustomed to, and I was wondering if I should help or get a bucket of water or pry them apart with a stick when Clair took my arm.

  “Come on inside, dear. They’ll be in when they’re done playing...”

  It was becoming evening and the room was dark—the only light came through the open door—and it took a moment for my eyes to get accustomed to the dim light.

  When they did I saw a plank bar down the left side of the room with no stools, three tables on the right with benches instead of chairs. At the back of the room there was a small wooden platform next to what I took to be a back door. On the platform there were two fiddle cases and an accordion so big it seemed that it would take two men to play it.

  The room was full of people, all of a set piece with us—clean but in rough clothes. The women in starched dresses, the men in overalls. There were young people scattered here and there, all drinking Nesbitt’s orange pop. Glennis and Clair waved at somebody and went to sit at the tables while Knute and Louie went to stand near some men at the plank bar.

  I knew nobody, but for the moment it didn’t matter. I was watching Louie.

  He drank like he ate. A man in the back of the bar—also dressed in bib overalls, although he was wearing a tie with his work shirt—gave Louie and Knute each a tall, dark bottle of beer. Knute took a drink and put his down to speak to a man next to him but Louie stared straight ahead and simply upended the bottle and pushed it in to the back of his throat and drained it, licking the bottle opening dry with his tongue when it was empty.

  He set it on the bar and the bartender brought him another one. He did the same. He kept doing this until I felt a tug at my sleeve and turned to see Harris.

  “I hate a gooner that will steal a marble from a man...”

  He looked some the worse for wear, being scuffed and dirty, and one suspender of his bib had come undone, but he was holding up a large cat’s-eye aggie shooter marble with pride. He dropped the marble in his pocket and moved to the bar to stand next to Louie.

  I followed and was going to ask what had happened to the other boy when I saw him come into the room. He was in worse shape than Harris, seemed to be dragging a leg and favoring one arm and was bleeding slightly from the nose, but had about the same amount of dirt on him and moved to stand with some grown-ups and ignored us.

  Harris looked up at the bartender and waited, and in a moment he handed us two orange pops. No money changed hands. I never saw any money for anything, beer or pop, pass over the bar and I thought it must be free but Harris corrected me later.

  “It’s writ down. Clel’s got him a notebook in back and he writes everything down. I’d like to have half what’s on that notebook—you could own every marble in the world.”

  We stood by the end of the bar, not far from Knute and Louie—who were talking horses and crops to the other men at the bar. Or at least Knute was. Louie was drinking beers whole just as fast as Clel the bartender could bring them.

  “He’ll pee hisself later,” Harris said, noting that I was watching Louie. “Just comes in the top and goes out the bottom like a pipe...”

  Presently three men separated themselves from the rest and without speaking or further ado mounted the platform, picked up the instruments—the smaller of the men hoisting the accordion with a short grunt—and began playing.

  It was barely music—sounded more like cats fighting inside a steel drum—but it was very loud and had a steady rhythm, and soon couples were dancing.

  Harris ignored the adults and kept watching the back door—or what I took to be the back door—with a steady intensity.

  We had gone through our pop and been given new ones, and as soon as Clel handed us our pop he started walking down the bar aimed for that door.

  “Come on.” Harris grabbed my arm. “We want to get good seats...”

  It was not a back door but the door to a storeroom. I followed Harris in—blinded by more darkness yet—and could vaguely make out a room full of beer crates stacked around the sides. In the middle on a rickety wooden table was an old motion picture projector and on the wall a sheet had been hung.

  Harris dragged me to the center of the room and pulled two beer crates up to sit on, directly to the side of the projector, then waited impatiently, holding his pop with both hands, while Clel and a dozen or so other young people came into the room.

  In the dim light from the door, Clel went to a box of what seemed to be car batteries on the side of the room and hooked two wires to the terminals with alligator clips. The projector came on and its beam of light hit the sheet with a dazzling glare.

  Clel worked in silence while we sat waiting, feeding film from the old reel through the projector with many clicks and jerks, hooking it to the take-up reel.

  Then he hit a switch and the projector started up with a noise not unlike the old truck that had brought us to town and on the screen was a picture of Gene Autry riding and shooting.

  It would be wrong to call what we were watching a movie. I had been to many films by that time and recognized that there were problems with this one. The credits and probably the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film were gone, lost over years of showing. The picture just jumped into the middle of the story with Gene riding Champ and shooting at somebody, and when the reel ran out—some thirty minutes later—he was still riding Champ and shooting at somebody. Though it was a talking film there was no sound equipment, so it remained silent and any idea of story line from dialogue was lost. The whole film was devoted to Gene riding Champion and shooting at something, with one scene where he played a guitar and sang and another where he jumped off a saloon roof onto Champion and rode away, either escaping some men in the saloon or trying to catch some other men who had run off.

  Then the reel ended with the screen going flash white again.

  “Damn.” Harris snorted. “I just hate it when it ends that way...”

  As if on cue Clel came back in carrying a dozen bottles of orange pop in a wooden case. He handed us each a bottle, then rewound the film and started it over and went back out front where the music was getting louder and more incoherent all the time.

  And the children all sat and watched it again as if seeing it for the first time.

  I leaned forward to whisper in Harris’s ear: “Isn’t there another reel?”

  “What?”

  “You know—of film. Isn’t
there another reel?”

  “Not unless you want to watch the news about the war. Clel’s got that one but it’s really short.”

  “The war?” The Second World War had been over for nearly five years.

  “Yeah—with the commie japs and all. They’re fighting like dogs over there. But it still ain’t this good. Now shut up and watch the picture show...”

  He turned back to Gene and we sat through another showing of the film.

  When it was done Clel reappeared with orange pop, rewound the film, and started it over.

  And over.

  And over.

  On the fourth showing I couldn’t stand it any longer and I left the back room to watch the goings-on in the front before I fell asleep.

  The room was lit by two Coleman lanterns hanging from the ceiling and full of smoke and sound. The music had gotten much louder and there was a smell of beer and sweat. It seemed that all the married couples—like Knute and Clair—were dancing in the small center of the room, leaving the tables empty, and all the old men like Louie were standing at the bar.

  Some of them were talking but Louie was silent and still drinking the way he had before—a whole bottle at a time. He looked almost the same but there was a glazed look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and I did a little quick figuring and decided that if he’d been drinking at the same rate all along he was probably well into twenty or thirty bottles by this time.

  I looked and, as Harris had said, Louie had peed his pants.

  I moved toward the tables to sit and watch the band and as I walked past the end of the bar Clel magically appeared and handed me another orange pop. This made me remember my bladder was bursting. There was no bathroom inside so I went to use the one outside and stepped into total blackness and nearly broke my neck and the bottle of pop, falling from the porch.

  In a moment my eyes became accustomed to the dark, and I saw that there were several young couples standing in pairs, holding hands, talking quietly. It took me some time to find the outhouse and use it and come back inside.