“You got plenty of wood?”
Oliver poured crushed coffeebeans into the boiling water. “I got a world of it but it’s all on the stump,” he said.
“If it don’t get too rough I’ll come over after a while and cut you a load.”
“Ah, no need in that. I can buy me a little jag. I guess you got your own to worry about.”
“I cut some back in the summer when I wasn’t doing anything. Anyway, what I came to see you about was signing this paper for me.” As he spoke Winer was withdrawing the typed note from beneath his jacket and proffering it toward the old man.
Oliver shook his head. “You’ll have to read it to me. What is it?”
“It’s a note to borrow some money. I found a car I wanted down at Kittrel’s carlot and they sent me over to the bank, they have to have a cosigner and the man there said they’d let me have the money if you’ll sign the note.” Winer paused. “You were the only one I could think of who might sign it.”
“Well, well,” the old man said. He took the paper and studied it at arm’s length, peering at the typed hieroglyphs he couldn’t read. He seemed imbued with a curious sense of pride and as the room filled with the fragrance of boiled coffee and the heat from the stove dissipated the chill he grew expansive. He laid the note with care atop the table and taking the pan from the stove filled two earthenware mugs with coffee.
“I hope it ain’t like the paper I signed for Hodges one time,” Oliver said, grinning to himself. He handed Winer a cup of coffee. “There for a few years I kindly took a interest in that boy. I had a idy I might help him a little here and there, kindly straighten him out, but I doubt you could do that with a block and tackle. He come down here one time with a paper he wanted me to sign. He’d answered a advertisement in one of these here farm papers and he was goin to be a salesman, I made my X and two or three weeks later we went out to town to pick up this stuff that come in. Lord God. You never seen the like of junk. It come in on a boxcar at the depot. It was boxes and boxes of stuff, looked like stock for a grocer store. Pie fillin and flavorin and horse liniment and you wouldn’t believe the bottles of sweetsmellin stuff. He had to hire a truck to haul it home in and I don’t reckon he ever sold any of it. They dunned me about it a long time and I used to get letters from this lawyer in Chicago and I finally scraped around and paid it. I don’t know what Hodges finally done with it, I believe he used all that brilliantine himself and he smelled purty high for a year or two and then it all died out.”
“I’ll pay the note off.”
“I know you will. I was just thinkin about how Hodges looked when he saw all that stuff. All them boxes and him without even a bicycle to haul it on.”
Weather accomplished what Blalock nor anyone else had been able to do. It got Motormouth in motion. He turned up around noon at Winer’s complaining.
“Goddamn, I’m about froze to death,” he told Winer. “You talk about cold. Last night I near about shook myself to death and woke up with the river froze over and the weather says just more of the same. The radio said how the windshield factor was ten below zero.”
“The what?”
“It said the windshield factor was ten below zero and bearable winds.”
“I think it said variable.”
“Variable or bearable, it’s a cold son of a bitch. Are you about ready?”
“Ready? Ready for what?”
“Hellfire. To leave. To go to Chicago like we said. Well, I’m goin. I was goin to sell the Chrysler to Kittrel but I’ll give you first shot at it. You want it?”
They went out into the yard and stood looking at it. A cold drizzle fell and the car gleamed dully. Winer studied it from all angles, imagining what it looked like beneath the array of antennas and lights and coontails.
“I’ll take eight-five dollars in cash and if it ain’t worth two hundred I’ll kiss ye ass. I give twenty dollars for them foglights by theirselves.”
“I guess you know what you want to do.”
“The hell of it is I don’t know whether I do or not. I bet that’s a big place up there. I wanted you to go with me but I reckon you got stars in your eyes.”
Winer took out his wallet. “I’ll give you eighty-five for it if you’ll show me how to drive it. I never drove anything except Weiss’s tractor.”
“Why hell yes, slide your ass in here, son. You’ll be learning from a master.”
Late in the day they drove into town and parked by the bus station and Motormouth went in and got his ticket. He returned with it and they sat awaiting the bus and staring out across the rainwet streets and an unaccustomed silence settled upon Motormouth, a vaguer depression befell him as dusk drew on. At last the bus came and he got out with his cardboard box lashed with staging and strode purposefully toward it and mounted the steps. He turned and raised a hand. The bus door closed behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss. Winer watched the bus out of sight.
Oliver must have already been abed, for he was in his long underwear when he cracked the door and peered out. Winer handed him the banknote.
“You can tear this up. I don’t reckon I need it after all.”
“Well. I heard of a good credit risk but you about the beat of any I ever seen.”
“I never even used it. I bought Motormouth’s car and it was a lot cheaper than the one Kittrel had.”
“Well, where’s Hodges gone off to?”
“His bus ticket said Chicago.”
“Chicago,” Oliver repeated in an awed voice. “Lord God.”
She must have been watching from a window, for as soon as he parked the car the front door opened and she came out onto the porch. Grinning, she came down the steps and approached the car.
“What are you doin with Motormouth Hodges’s car?” she asked.
“It’s mine, I bought it,” he said. He got out and let the door fall to, walked all around the car pointing out its virtues. She wasn’t really looking at the car, stood grinning at him in a curiously maternal way.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “You don’t have to sell it to me.”
“You want to go for a ride.”
“I don’t know. How’d you learn to drive so fast?”
“Motormouth showed me.”
She was laughing. “Oh Lord. I’ll just wait then.”
“He said I was learning from a master.”
“Well. Maybe in that case. I never rode with a master before.”
Mormon Springs fell away and on the way to town he was seized by a feeling of elation, the colors and sounds of this bleak winter day seemed heightened and he was possessed by a rockhard assurance that things were going right. Turning momentarily from the road he glanced at her bright profile against the dreary, rolling countryside and he didn’t see how things could go wrong for anyone who had a girl who looked as pretty as she did: there was a juststruck perfection, she looked new and unused to him, nothing had quite touched her.
“You know what I’d like to do?”
“No, but you can do whatever you want to.”
“I want to eat at the Daridip. I never did that before.”
“Where’s Hardin at?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. He can’t stop me if I’m already with you, can he?”
“What’d he say to you about those blankets?”
“Nothin.”
Winer looked at her. He didn’t believe her but he didn’t say so.
“Then I want to go down on Brushy where they buried Daddy. I ain’t been down there since the funeral and I been wantin to go. You reckon we could?”
The grave was an oval of red earth. Wire flowers tilted and twisted askew by fall winds. Cliched sentiments gone weatherbeaten and forgotten, cheap celluloid flowers blatant in their artifice. There was no headstone and a meal marker driven into the earth certified who was there in watermarked type. Thomas Hovington, she read. It was like being famous, she thought, seeing your name in cold print like that. She’d never seen it before.