I spent the rest of the night tapping, trying to raise him again, but I reckon he just squatted there and laughed at me. Between bad company and original cussedness he was a pretty mean lot. I didn’t want any part of him, or Velma Burke either. I remembered her. She was kind of an angelic knockout to look at — green eyes and red hair and rose-petal skin, and blow-away slim — easy to fall for, I guess if you didn’t know her the way I did, from being in the same high-school class.
I wasn’t likely to forget her, because she did me real low-down dirt once, whispered to me for an answer in a history test and I gave her my guess, which was it was Benedict Arnold shot Alexander Hamilton. It sounded reasonable to me, but it was wrong, and when it come up that way on both papers they had us both on the carpet and Velma made out she’d guessed wrong and she’d seen me peeking at her paper. And that was the girl I was to drop everything and do a big favor for.
Well, I wasn’t much use to Blatch & Cummings in Columbus, and I didn’t sleep coming back next night, though I made sure the car wasn’t Mt. Minnequamagog but Polecat Springs. Then that Thursday, while I was still groggy inside, old J.M. Blatch told me to get over to Bay City and find out about spoilage trouble there with our canned beets. Yes, Bay City is in Michigan and Lebanon is close by. I was crazy enough, to wonder if maybe Puggy and his spirit friends hadn’t fixed it to spoil those beets.
I went. And, after I’d smelled enough sour beets to last a lifetime, I hired a car and spent the weekend looking for the Cass place near Lebanon. And what beat me, being in the state of mind I was in, I couldn’t get track of any Cass place within fifteen miles of that town.
I didn’t just check the courthouse records and then drive around aimless. I covered the local real-estate men and the editor of the paper and the oldest inhabitants. If anybody named Cass had so much as dickered for an acre of land near Lebanon since Methuselah’s time, I’d have got wind of it.
So I was sure I was crazy. Only, on the train coming back to Chicago, I got a queer feeling on my right thigh like nothing I ever had before. And when I took my clothes off that night, there, neat as you please, in red on my skin, branding me like a steer, not to be rubbed off or washed off — I found that out fast — was Puggy’s call letters: Dash-dash — dash-dot-dot-dot.
I still recollect how that place felt — not like a burn or an itch or a sting or a prickle, but more like the way you feel in the back of your neck when you suspect somebody is staring at you and you turn around and sure enough they are. It was real, all right. I should know. I lived with it for years.
I got salve from drug stores and goop from advertisements about “blotched skin” and “stubborn blemishes.” I gave up swimming because I didn’t want people to see it. Finally I took it to the best skin doctor I could hear tell of and gave him the story.
He looked at my leg and said something about “interesting stigmata” and told me to come back Friday and he’d have a colleague there to look at it. Well, before Friday I looked up “stigmata” in the dictionary and it said stuff about “certain mental states, as in hysteria.” So I never went back.
Next thing was to have it out with Puggy. So I wrote the Pullman outfit asking for sentimental reasons if they could locate me a car named Mt. Minnequamagog, and they wrote back short but polite that there was no longer any such name on the list. That made sense. She was probably overdue for scrapping. But that letter disappointed me so I didn’t hardly bother to wonder where Puggy was hanging out, now that they’d put the blowtorch to his old home on wheels.
Always and forever I had that feeling in my leg, and it looked like there was no chance at all of ever getting rid of it. I took to drinking heavier and going out with a class of people I’d never liked before. I hung on to my job, but it was plain that old J.M. had stopped thinking of me as a comer the way he had. And even though I knew Puggy’s old car was gone for good, I worked up a creepy feeling about trains so strong I took to driving or flying wherever I had to go — planes were coming in by then. For years I never set foot in a railroad car.
But, come winter of 1935, I was stuck. Ice all over, and I had to testify in a lawsuit about a refused order in Evansville. The airport was snowed in; trains were still running, though. And every train was so jammed, the best I could get was Lower Two. The car was named Mountain Melody, but even so you probably have a rough idea of how creepy I felt about it.
She had plenty of clicks for me to wince at and listen to. Then, right out of Englewood, as speed picked up, they come cold and clear: Ditdidit — ditda — da, and that’s Morse for RAT.
I just froze.
Dididididit — diditda — dadit — daditda, says the clicks, and that’s Morse for PUNK.
I unfroze enough to work my nail on the sill. “This not your car.”
“My car, chum,” says Puggy. “Renamed years ago. Some professor of Indian stuff noticed her and wrote the company did they know what Minnequamagog meant in Indian and they found out it was something you’d blush to chalk on a fence. How’s your right leg, you double-crossing swindler?”
Well, it was jumping and pulsing awful, that’s how it was. I could scarcely keep from hollering. But I got a grip on myself and sent him all about how I’d combed Lebanon, Mich., and finished up: “I’m not spook enough to make out how you figure I get your mark on me because you don’t know what you’re talking about. But I do know there’s no Cass place in that end of Michigan, nor ever was.”
No answer for a spell. Then very slow: “What state was that?”
I sent: Dada — didit — dit-didit — didididit, meaning “Mich.”
There was another long break, then a string of bad language sent sloppy but heartfelt, then: Didit-didit — dit-dit — diditda — ditdaditd — dit-dit — dit-dit — daa — didit — a — dididit — dada — didit — dididit — dididit, making: “You fool, it’s Miss.”
I might have known. Practically every state in the Union has a Lebanon, and Puggy’s dots were always unreliable. The string of dots on the tail of Miss. could easy make Mich., if the sender was careless. Or maybe I read it wrong. That was Puggy’s idea.
I said it was his fault, and we had it backwards and forwards all the way to Terre Haute. I don’t reckon any such language ever got into code since old man Morse invented it. But I didn’t argue about what I did next. My leg was leaving me no choice but to hightail it for Lebanon, Miss., first chance.
Soon as I got back from Evansville, seeing thawing weather had cleared the highways, I told J.M. I had family trouble, borrowed a week against my 1936 vacation, and took out in my own car. With me went a big flashlight, a stout claw hammer, and a short stepladder.
This time it was a breeze. The day I struck Lebanon, it rained cats and dogs, so there wasn’t anybody much outdoors to wonder about me. Three questions located the old Cass place — a played-out little cotton plantation five miles from town on a miserable road, with nobody living there.
It took time, and I hadn’t seen mud like that down along the creek since France in 1918. Raincoat or not, I got soaked to the skin. But here was my tree, big as a circus tent and hollow as a night-club smile. And here were the cigarette tins, each with a big rusty nail through a corner. I sure was relieved. I could just see myself convincing Puggy they were gone.
It come to ten thousand dollars, like he said: six five hundreds and seventy hundreds, all in those oversize, pre-Depression bills. They were going to cause comment at a bank, but I reckoned a story to fit could be cooked up when the time come.