Chip Harrison Scores Again

Thirteen

There was a stretch of time then when nothing happened you would want to read about. I didn’t do much but drive, and I didn’t work too hard at that, either. I would push the old Cadillac until I came to a town that looked decent enough and pick out one of the large Victorian houses with a sign in front that said TOURISTS OR ROOMS or something of the sort. They would generally be run by a widow living alone, or two old maids, or a widow and her old maid sister, and the rooms were clean and comfortable and only cost two or three dollars a night, which was less than half what the cheapest motel would charge. Sometimes they included breakfast, or sold it to you for something ridiculous like fifty cents.

I stayed in so many of those places I have trouble remembering which was which. They were all the same in so many ways. There would always be a small portable television set, and it would be the only piece of furniture in the house that was less than thirty years old. There was usually a spinet piano in the parlor that no one had played in almost that long, and if I stayed more than a night the woman would ask wistfully if I played the piano, and would be sad to hear that I didn’t.

“No one ever does,” she would say. “I suppose I ought to sell it for all the use it is, but I cannot bear to, Mr. Harrison. I just cannot bear to sell that piano.”

If they all sell them all at once, the market for second-hand pianos is going to collapse overnight.

There were always framed photographs on the piano, and on the carved sideboard in the hallway. You could tell the frames were silver because they were usually slightly tarnished. And there was generally a vase of cut flowers on the sideboard next to the photographs, and there were potted plants all over the place. The plants were usually green and healthy.

Sometimes there would be a cat or a dog. More cats than dogs, all in all. The cats tended to keep to themselves. The dogs tended to be very small, and bark a lot, primarily at me.

I couldn’t tell you just how many houses like this I stayed in, or how much time I spent this way. I wasn’t very much involved in time, for some reason. I would be very conscious of the time of day because as soon as it was nine or ten at night I could go to bed and not think about anything until it was time to get up the next morning. But I didn’t bother with days of the week, or what month it was, or that sort of thing. I didn’t read newspapers or look at television. I knew there was a whole world out there but I didn’t want to think about it. I had a bath every night and put on clean clothes every morning and when my clean clothes began to run short I did a load of wash in my current landlady’s washing machine. Some of them didn’t have washing machines of their own but knew a neighbor who would let me use theirs.

Sometimes I stayed one night and then left, I particularly if there was a yipping dog in the house, or if there were other boarders. If I felt like staying, I would have a look around the house for something that needed fixing. Usually I didn’t have to look very hard because the woman would apologize for whatever it is.

“You’ll have to forgive the appearance of that room because it needs repapering, Mr. Harrison”… “The boy who used to do my yard work was drafted into the Army last month, Mr. Harrison, and I just can’t keep up with my rose beds”… “I don’t know how this house can go another year without painting, Mr. Harrison, but I had a man out to give me an estimate and, land, the price he asked!”

I changed a lot of faucet washers and replaced a lot of broken panes of glass. I cleaned out some basements and mowed and reseeded lawns and trimmed shrubbery and hauled trash. I patched plaster, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and I put up wallpaper, which was. In Columbia, Missouri, I painted a whole house without falling off the ladder once. I guess that summer of apple-picking was valuable.

That was for the woman who hadn’t known how the house could go another year without painting. She told me this at breakfast, and it was a breakfast that came free with my three-dollar room rent, and it was such a good breakfast and such a clean comfortable house that I figured I wouldn’t mind spending another week or two there.

So I said, “Well, I could paint it for you.”

“But I couldn’t afford it. The size of this house, and he wanted nine hundred dollars.”

“If you’ll pay for the paint and brushes, and find out where I can borrow a ladder, I’ll do it for five dollars a day and my keep.”

“Why, I just can’t believe that, Mr. Harrison! How can you afford to do that?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t have all that much else to do, actually.”

It was really very satisfying doing things like that. With that house, I saw that she bought the best paint, and I took my time and did a good job. At the beginning I’m sure she was scared to death I would fall off the ladder and kill myself. The same thing had occurred to me. But I didn’t, and the house got painted, and I slept ten hours a night in my room and ate three good meals a day, and when I washed out my brush for the last time she paid me fifty dollars and couldn’t believe that was all it was going to cost her.

“It looks so fine now,” she said, walking around the house and admiring it from every angle. “It hasn’t looked so fine since he was alive. You don’t know what it’s been like, Mr. Harrison, thinking I would never live to see it looking right again.”

It made me feel good to leave a place in better shape than I found it. Sometimes I felt like Johnny Appleseed and other times like the Lone Ranger.

And I needed that kind of feeling, because if I let myself think about other things, about Bordentown things, I didn’t feel like Johnny or Lone. I just felt like a son of a bitch.

That first night, driving the Cadillac generally north and generally east, I was too numb to feel much of anything at all. It was a good thing Geraldine sent me away right off. If I had had a night to sleep on it God only knows what I would have done, but I was on the road before I knew exactly what was happening and there was never a point where I could turn back.

I kept wanting to for the longest time. But that was the one thing I knew I couldn’t do. I just couldn’t go back there again.

The car was a good one, old as it was, and plain driving was a good way to get away from yourself while getting away from Bordentown. I hadn’t realized they made Cadillacs with stick shifts, even back in 1954. I don’t suppose they made very many of them. The ones they made, they did a good job with. I got the hang of shifting pretty quickly, and after that there was nothing to do but drive.

What I would think about while I was driving, well, the hell with all that. Nothing very brilliant, I don’t guess.

I stayed at a motel the first night, and didn’t sleep much. It wasn’t exactly the Hilton. It was what I think they call a hot-pillow joint, and the room next door to mine was one of the ones they would rent out by the hour. If the walls had been any thinner they would have been transparent. All night long the bedsprings squeaked and groaned, and all night long different men and women told each other they loved each other, and they were all of them lying in their teeth. I don’t suppose I would have slept much anyway, but this didn’t help.

After that, though, it got easier. One thing the widows’ houses didn’t have was bedsprings wailing all night long. And I also learned that sleep was a great way to get through time without going crazy. I got so I could fall asleep right away, pulling the sleep over my head like a blanket, and I’d be good for ten hours, sometimes more. I never used to sleep that way before and never have since, just burrowing into sleep and sort of using it.

Every day Bordentown was a few miles further south and east and one day deeper in the past. You just let the past slip away from you and one day you turn around and it’s out of sight.

It’s that simple, and that hard.

I wrote three letters, one to Sheriff Tyles, one to Geraldine, one to Lucille. This was just a game I was playing with myself because I knew I didn’t intend to mail the letters. What was interesting was that the one to Geraldine was the hardest to write. I would have thought it would be the other way around. I tore them all up when I was done, and tore the pieces into smaller pieces, as if the FBI might come around and try to put the stupid letters back together again like jigsaw puzzles.

I also wrote a letter to Hallie telling her about the whole business in Bordentown. I actually expected to mail that letter when I was done with it, and I took a lot of time trying to get it just right, and of course when it was through I tore it up, too.

I did send Geraldine a postcard. I sent her a couple of them at different times. I could never once think of anything to write, so I would leave the message part blank or else just run the address across the whole length of the card. Miss Geraldine Simms, The Lighthouse, Bordentown, South Carolina. And the zip code, which I don’t remember, but I knew it at the time.

A lot of the time when I was driving there would be hitchhikers on the road, guys alone or two of them together or sometimes a guy and a girl. Back when I did a lot of hitching I would always promise myself that if I ever had a car I would never pass up a hitchhiker. And the people who gave me rides generally mentioned that they had thumbed their way around when they were younger, and that was why they felt they had to stop for me in return, even though they knew that it was supposed to be a dangerous thing to do.

Now I had a car, a big car with nothing but room in it, and there were all these people on the road, I never went a day without seeing a dozen of them, and I never once stopped. There were soldiers in uniform and hippies and straight-looking kids and older people, everything, and I passed them all up. Not because it was dangerous to stop, although I guess it is, but because I just didn’t want to talk to anybody.

It was a funny stretch of time. I guess I wouldn’t want to go through it again.