while a figure with a shaded face, astride a howitzer, kept swaying in solemn delight.
a prison where it cost ten cents to go in and see a corpse from which the spirit had actually fled. Kitty Twist, wearing black elbow gloves, was selling tickets just the other side of the wall. They had grown rich and famous traveling from town to town but she giggled too much and he woke to her giggling. For she had locked him to her in a vise and it was a moment too late to get loose.
‘I’m just so ashamed,’ she told him later. ‘What ever got into you to make me do such a thing?’ In her eyes stood the same glass tears.
‘I must of just got carried away,’ Dove decided.
‘Promise you’ll never pull a sneaky trick like that on me again?’
‘I promise.’
‘Then I forgive you.’
‘You’re good to me. Real good. Just one thing I don’t understand.’
‘What’s that, Red?’
‘What’s wrestling with the bear?’
‘Solitary.’
And exhausted by forgiveness and good works, they slept the late light down.
‘Let’s hear your whistle, Red.’
Dove made a kind of feeble piping. Kitty waited.
‘That was it,’ he had to admit.
She put two fingers to her lips and sirened a low-pitched shriek. ‘When I put on the steam you can hear it two blocks – it means drop everything, it’s the nab.’
He stood, shifting from one foot to the other in the unlit areaway.
‘What’s the matter, Red? Afraid?’
‘Afraid of steppin’ on glass is all.’
She triggered a dime-store flashlight – ‘Follow the spot.’ Dove followed.
‘We’re lookin’ for Cousin Jim,’ she explained.
‘Got no cousin of that name,’ he thought he saw a way out of this – ‘fact is I got no cousin. See you later.’ She hooked his belt and hauled him along to the rear door of a shop. She knocked so imperiously that his feet tried to turn right around. Her hand around his waist held him still. He hoped she couldn’t feel him trembling. She knocked again. But all was locked and barred.
‘Make me a step.’
He made a stirrup of his hands and raised her until she secured a grip on the open transom; then it was up and over.
She dropped so softly on the other side that, though Dove listened, he did not hear her land. Then the door swung silently, he felt the flash placed in his hand. How had she gotten behind him? ‘Straight ahead to the register,’ she took command – ‘I’m backin’ you.’ And gave him a forward shove that carried him through to the cash drawer of exactly the same model of Ohmer register he had banged for his brother. So he banged this one too and the whole side fell out. He stuck his hand in the side, grabbed a handful of something papery. Under his feet a house cat leaped from sleep. Dove went headlong, shattering the flash and on his knees felt wings brush his hair – the fool cat was halfway up a wall trying to get at something big as an owl. Clutching his bills in a flurry of feathers and fur he saw the thing flutter, wall to wall, for the open door. Its wings got through just above the cat and Dove stumbled crazily after both just as the whistle-shriek rang out.
By the alley entrance light a small figure struggled with one twice its size. ‘Folks are certainly active tonight,’ he marveled.
The entrance was his only way out. He walked slowly till he was almost upon the wrestling pair – then jumped for it, felt a big hand reach and miss him and bounded free to the open street.
Over a fence and down the dark, over another and down a wall, big feet going every which way till he fell in a grassy plot.
With no sound but that of one sleepy cricket to heed the pounding of his heart.
‘I’m not sure whether you’d call that runnin’,’ he congratulated himself breathlessly – ‘but if I’d had a feather in hand I could call it flyin’.’
His hand had fastened so hard onto the bills he had to rub his palms to get the circulation going again. Then he stuffed them into the pocket of his jeans. This was no time for counting, what he needed was a railroad track.
If Dove had one sure instinct it was, like the rabbit’s, for keeping out of sight till you reach the end of town. He turned this way and that, till a signal tower’s red and green stars led him at last to a railroad embankment.
‘Which way to the S.P., Mister?’ he called down to a lantern swinging in the dark.
The light swung up. ‘You’re walkin’ the S.P. now,’ the lantern assured him – ‘keep off all trains not in motion.’
Dove put his back up against a telephone pole and waggled his loose tooth a while, but it wouldn’t come loose all the way. And as he waggled it seemed to him the pole he was braced against was in the middle of the track. A headlight came bearing down at ninety an hour but no hurry, it had been coming on for days. He slept on.
The clackety-banging roar of boxcars a dozen yards away woke him at last. Far down the line a little red caboose joggled and swayed like a caboose on a toy railroad.
Dove put his hand on his bankroll to make sure it didn’t jump out, and clambered into a rocking gloom.
‘Anybody here?’
No word but a creaking floor.
‘Good deal, Linkhorn,’ he congratulated himself. ‘Got yourself a private car and by God you’ve earned one.’ He closed the door and turned on his side. Sometimes crooks rode these trains.
The day and the night that followed always remained a hazed kind of memory to Dove. All he recalled clearly was opening the door the next morning and seeing a veil of mist so blue it blurred the outlines of house, hill and tree. And as the morning warmed the whole big blue world began to smoke faintly.
Louisiana.
In the long afternoon the clouds stacked. And still, over it all, that pale shifting veil.
A real southland haze in which one sees whatever one wishes to see. A haze that seeps behind the eyes and makes a wish-dream of everything.
‘I figure I’ll learn me to play the gee-tar,’ he dreamed against the boxcar door, ‘I’ll just go around playin’ a gee-tar – that’s what brings the purty girls around.’
Louisiana.
He saw a taller Dove in shining pants, astride a stallion white as snow, playing a guitar with one hand and holding the stallion back with the other, singing and prancing into New Orleans.
Louisiana.
His fingers wandered over unseen strings
Dove reined in a bit to let the people see him better.
Wishes and hopes in a blue-smoke dream as the big car rolled and his head lolled lightly. Nothing but peace and pretty weather. Dove dreamed that whole blue-smoke day away till the milking-stars came out.
Later, while lying prostrate on the top of the car, and the train was taking water in the wilderness, he thought himself unseen while flashlights and lanterns inspected couplings and wheels. But just as the train pulled out, someone called up laughingly, ‘Keep stretched or get down inside, son.’
So he stayed prostrate smack into a roaring blackness with a tunnel-roof scraping his back. Coal fumes piled down on him. He got his bandanna over his mouth and nose and hooked one arm under the wooden spine. All that kept him from fainting was the hope that no tunnel can last forever.
This one nearly did. When air hit him again his senses were reeling. He spat coal dust half across that fool state.