Rainbow’s End

15

Bledsoe left, and I went outside with him, but she still sat there staring at the money. As he got in his car he said: “I don’t think that girl’s going to do it. I think she’s hipped on that money. OK, it’s a lot, and putting it out in a sycamore tree, if only for one night, is a heartbreak — but nothing like the heartbreak it’s going to be if it’s taken from her and on top of that, she does a stretch in Marysville. She seems to like you, and I think it would help if you remind her that Mrs. Howell holds the cards, if she wants to play them. She’s not in your power, as this girl seems to think. She and you are in hers, but bad. Because if you killed Shaw to save a girl from being killed, that’s one thing, and no one could possibly mind. But if you killed him to steal the money, if the three of you had that idea, that’s a whole new ball game. Unfortunately, it’s Edgren’s idea, and Mantle’s, or seems to be. Police have that kind of mind.”

He drove off after calling through the window: “You’re still riding for free — no charge for this, Dave.” I waved, but when I went back inside, she was still sitting there, still staring at the money. I asked: “Are you going to do what he said?”

“Yeah, it was easy for him to say, it cost him nothing to say it. It’s not his money, it’s mine. It’s mine and I’ve got it, so why should I give it up? Go hiding it out in some sycamore tree? And another thing: How do I know that Edgren will give it to me? Or that he won’t swipe it from me?”

“You have to trust someone.”

“For one hundred thousand bucks, this lawyer wouldn’t trust anyone. Why should I?”

“In other words, you’re not going to?”

“I have to think about it.”

“Then I have to warn her.”

“Warn who?”

“Warn who do you think?”

“Then if that’s how you feel about her, and how you feel about me—!”

“Her? And you? What about me?”

“What do you have to do with it?”

“Didn’t you hear what he said? So long as she sticks around, she can send the both of us to prison. I’d rather get her out of the way — try to get her out of the way.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“I assume she’s in Flint — laying low till things blow over and it’s safe to pick up the money. I’m going to tell her it’s been found, and she’d better make tracks for Cuba. Or Mexico. Or someplace. She may do it. I don’t know.”

“With my two thousand bucks?”

“It’s worth it.”

“To whom?”

“Didn’t you hear him? To us.”

“Of my money, you mean.”

“I’m getting a bit sick of your money.”

“I’m not.”

We sulked at each other, and then she asked: “And how are you going to Flint? She has your car, don’t forget. And you’re not taking mine, I promise you.”

“Truck.”

“What truck?”

“Pickup truck I have to haul stuff into town. Out in the wagon shed. What was the wagon shed, when it was built.”

“Then OK, warn her.”

“I’m going to. But I’m also going to warn you. What you do today is going to affect the rest of your life — to make it, financially at least, or wreck it, in every way there is. I strongly suggest to you that you not drive off with this money in your car or carry it to your hotel, or anywhere. And I also suggest that you not do anything before talking to someone else — someone you have confidence in, like York. Be sure you tell him what Mr. Bledsoe said, and once you have his reaction you can take it from there. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

I started for the door. She jumped up at last. “Is that all you have to say?”

“I’ve said too much already.”

“Nobody minds, that I notice.”

Suddenly I went over and took her in my arms. But she didn’t really come to me. After a moment or two she lifted her face and I kissed her. If she kissed back, I can’t be sure, but if she did it wasn’t a real honest kiss, kind of a halfway thing that said of course she liked me, but at the same time I must remember that one hundred grand was one hundred grand, or that $98,000 was $98,000. It was the kind of a kiss that can count.

Flint was 60 miles, an hour by the old way of driving, an hour and a half now, and it was a beautiful morning, a spring day in March. The first few miles were low hills, rolling country covered with farms, but coming in toward the Monongahela River, the mountains began to show gray, a little cloudy on top as though they were made of smoke and you could throw a rock through them if you could throw a rock that far. At Clarksburg I hit the west branch of the river, and pulled out on a roadside park, to sit and look for a minute and drink it in. I knew then, of course, if I’d ever forgotten it, that I was mountain, and that this country spoke to me, in a way no other country could.

I also wanted to think, to pull my wits together and decide what I wanted to say, face to face once more with Mom. If I played it the way she wanted, it would be duck soup, as I knew, regardless of what had been said or done or not done that night in my bed back home. If I played it a different way, the way I more or less had to, I could be heading for trouble, real trouble, mean trouble. The question was, could I shade it the least little bit, act friendly without starting something I couldn’t stop? What I came up with was: take it as it comes; don’t cook it up in advance, let her lead to me, don’t go out to meet trouble. After a couple of nice inhales, I started up again and drove on, came to Deer Creek soon and followed it up to Flint. I don’t know if you’ve seen an abandoned coal camp, but I do know that if you have, you don’t care to see it twice.

At the bottom, of course, was the “creek,” a freshwater mountain stream, quite pretty if that was all. Above it was what was left of the spur, the railroad connection that ran down to the main line beside the river. But for whole stretches the rails were gone, with nothing left but weeds. Then when some rails would show they were rusty and slewed around. Above the spur was the road I was driving on that wasn’t much but was in better shape than the spur. Above the road were the houses the miners had lived in, all falling apart now, with busted windows and doors hanging off their hinges. But in between were gaps, where houses had been carted off, and those houses had been loaded on trucks and stolen.

When that merry larceny stopped was when Sid Giles got the job of being caretaker and watchman. You didn’t steal any house with Sid walking guard in the night. Whether he stole the houses himself, as a way of promoting the job, or had it done, or what, I don’t know, but there could have been a connection. Anyway, right now he lived in the “big house,” as it was called, the old super’s mansion, which was next up on the slope. It was painted a cream color and was really something to see. As I passed I saw Sid’s housekeeper, a woman named Nellie, come out and shake a rug. I didn’t stop, but took note that my car wasn’t there. On account of the rise of the hill, the place had no garage, but it did have a carport, and a school bus was parked there.

Highest of all was the tipple. A tipple is a conveyer belt, a bucket chain that runs down the mountain side from the drift mouth to the spur, and carries the coal down to the railroad gonds. A “drift” is the main tunnel into the mine. From it run “entries,” branch tunnels to the rooms where the coal is mined. The mine trains are hauled out by electric locomotives onto a trestle above the conveyer belt. The mine cars dump the coal on the buckets, and the buckets carry it down. In the morning the miners walk up the buckets to the drift mouth, to ride into work on the mine cars, and in winter, of course, it’s dark. That is, most of the miners walk up the buckets, but some of them walk up the mountain side by a path. “They look like a long glowworm,” a miner told me once, “walking along with their miners’ lamps lit. Know who those miners are? They’re the one-legged men who lost a leg in the mine. When a miner gets hurt that’s how he gets hurt — he’s ‘rolled agin the rib,’ as they call it, so it crushes his leg. And after he gets well, the company gives him a job on account they’re kind and considerate, and doesn’t arrest him for carelessness. There’s 20 or 30 of them working in every mine.”

The tipple, of course, was falling apart, with the bucket chain all gone, either moved to some other mine or sold for scrap or something, and the housing over it gone. But the trestle was still there, with a straight drop to the road. I wanted to stop and check if what I had heard was true, that Sid had a falls rigged there to lower the booze to his truck for transportation to Fairmont. But stopping was not recommended. It wasn’t possible that the place wasn’t guarded by thin guys with rifles. You wouldn’t see them, but they’d be there.

So I went on to the place I was headed for, which was a cabin back from the road, about a mile above Flint, in a kind of flat place by a hollow that had been cleared years before for farming and now was used to grow truck. It had a dirt lane leading in, kind of bumpy but not too bad, and was built of heavy logs with two sides hewn off flat and the ends shaped to criss-cross. They were cut short on one side of the house, to let in a stone fireplace and stone chimney rising up. Inside it had two rooms, the one at back with an oil cook stove at one side, a bunk on the other, and table with chairs in the middle, the one in front, with fireplace, settees, and low table. The furniture was old, homemade, and goodlooking, the rugs hooked and beautiful. Even the floor was something to see, being of white pine, scoured with sand until it shone like satin.

Aunt Jane lived there, the head of the Giles family in that part of Harrison County. She lived with Borden Giles, a son, who I knew wasn’t home, as no car was there, and so she opened for me herself — a gray-haired woman of 60 but smallish and not bad looking. She had a touch of Mom’s slick shape and of my mother’s high-toned way of holding herself. She knew me at once — though it was some years since I’d been there — and was really surprised to see me, not just make-out surprised, a point which I noted at once, as she wouldn’t have been if Mom was somewhere around. She didn’t kiss me, as by her lights she shouldn’t, but did shake hands very friendly, first wiping her hands on her apron. It was gingham and clean. Her dress was wool, of some dark color like brown, and under it she had on pants. I patted her hand after shaking it and watched her eyes, how they looked. Sure enough, they were searching my face, trying to guess what I wanted, which reinforced my first feeling that she had no news of Mom or any idea where she was.

She brought me in, sat me down by the fireplace, which had three logs already burning, disappeared into the kitchen, and was gone a couple of minutes. When she came out she had a cup and saucer in one hand, a coffee pot in the other. She poured, telling me: “You see I remember you take it black.”

“Thanks, Aunt Jane.”

Then, shooting it quick, on purpose, to catch me off balance: “Dave, where’s Little Myra?”

“Why do you ask?”

From mountain people, me included, you never quite get a straight answer. They don’t mean to deceive you, but they never come right out and say it. “It’s what you’ve come about, ain’t it?”

“It might be at that.”

“She don’t stay with me no more when she comes. Now she stays with Sid.”

“You mean, I should go there and ask? Not that I want to.”

“If she was there, I’d have heard.” And then: “Dave, there’s no need for you to go there, and I wouldn’t if I was you.”

“Aunt Jane, I don’t like him.”

“I didn’t say he likes you.”

“Maybe I found that out.”

“You mean you’ve seen him?”

“He might have been by, yes.”

“When, Dave?”

“Day before yesterday, maybe.”

“Asking for her, was that it?”

“Could have been, at that.”

“And she wasn’t there, Dave?”

“Not as I recollect.”

“He was looking for her, and you are. Where is she?”

“Wouldn’t say if I knew.”

After a long time: “Dave did she take that money?”

“Oh, so you know about that?”

“I got a TV in the back room. The man on it suspicions her.”

“Not on my TV.”

“We get Pittsburgh here.”

“And they say she took the money?”

“They don’t say it, they think it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can tell.”

She was right on top of the truth, though not yet the whole truth, and I had to make up my mind about it, if I was going to tell her that Jill had found the money and that that proved that the Pittsburgh suspicions were true. I decided against it. I couldn’t control what she’d tell in case Mom showed up and I had Jill to consider in light of what Bledsoe had said — and myself to consider too. Suddenly she asked: “What did you come to tell her?”

“To skip.”

“Where to?”

“Mexico, I would think. Anywhere, so it’s not in the U.S.”

“Get out of the country, you mean?”

“That’s it, but fast.”

“Dip into that money and—?”

“She ought to have enough.”

It had been bothering me that I’d driven straight over, without stopping for cash at the bank, to fix her up with what it took to skip with. But if she still had the $2,000, as she must have, that she took from the hundred thousand before hiding it, she didn’t need any cash from me.

I could feel Aunt Jane’s eyes searching my face and knew she must know I was holding something back, but before she could start working me over again, there was the sound of a car outside and then there was my mother — my real mother — parking behind my truck and getting out of her car. I went out to meet her, then helped her out and kissed her. She kissed me and whispered: “Is she here? Mom?”

“No.”

She kissed me again and then turned to Aunt Jane, who by then was at the door and who seemed glad to see her. She asked: “Aunt Jane, is Little Myra here?”

“Not that I know of, no.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Not as I recollect.”

We went inside, where Aunt Jane sat us down, and my mother turned to me. “I haven’t seen her,” I said.

“I came to warn her.”

“Of what?” asked Aunt Jane.

“Of that girl,” my mother told her. “Of that Jill, who’s on her tail.” For a moment, I thought she must know about Jill’s finding the money, which I didn’t want Aunt Jane told. But then I realized she meant the previous day’s conversation, when Jill shot her mouth off so loud. I cut in: “I’ve just asked Aunt Jane to tell her to skip if she comes.”

“What I came to say,” said my mother.

“And she has what it takes to skip with,” growled Aunt Jane, in a tone not friendly to Mom.

We sat back then and visited, with Aunt Jane bringing more coffee and my mother asking about people, all sorts of Gileses apparently, that I’d never even heard of. But pretty soon she got up, and I got up of course. We both shook hands with Aunt Jane, left our greetings to Borden, and went outside. I kissed my mother and put her in, telling her: “Be better if you let me pull out first.” As to why it would be better, I hadn’t quite figured out, but she said “OK” real quick, as the main thing was not to wink or do anything that might tip Aunt Jane we had stuff to tell each other that we didn’t mean to tell her. So I patted Aunt Jane once more, then got in the truck and drove off. But I drove slow to make sure my mother was back there, tailing me. As I turned into the road, I kept motioning with my hand, my left hand that is, that she should stay there, behind, and not make any effort to pass. I watched in the mirror, and sure enough her hand gave a little shake, and I knew she understood. It gave me a real lift, that she should know what I meant just from one little wigwag.