Disappearances (10 page)

My father seemed in no hurry to leave. He strolled leisurely around White Lightning, whose bent fenders were now resting on the ground. He kicked at a tire as though trying to make up his mind whether to buy the car. He did not once look at the house.

After perambulating about the dooryard, surveying the Packard, the apple tree and the back of the house, he motioned for Uncle Henry and me to follow him through the milk house and into the cow stable. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness I saw that there were hundreds and probably thousands of whiskey cases lining the walls. Except for the empty cow stanchions the place looked more like a whiskey warehouse than a barn. But the whiskey was not all my father wanted us to see. At the far end of the stable, directly below a chute from the hayloft, was a large pile of brightly burning loose hay.

“That's the element of surprise,” my father said. “A bonfire.”

“Christ Jesus,” Uncle Henry said, turning for the door. “He's burning down barns.”

“Wait a minute, Henry. I want it to be going good when we start up the vehicles. If they know the barn's afire they won't bother with us. Not with all this stock to get out.”

There must have been old hay caught in the chute because suddenly the fire was leaping up into it and crackling like mad. Then the entire wall was ablaze.

“That should do it,” my father said. “Shag ass, boys.”

Uncle Henry and I did not need to be told twice that it was permissible for us to vacate the premises. We bolted for the door. Outside dark smoke was already starting to billow out of holes in the roof.

Rat started the lead car. By the time he was inside White Lightning with us the Packard was moving around the corner of the house. We were so weighted down that we had trouble getting under way, but White Lightning was too much car to buckle under a mere forty cases of whiskey. We came around into the dooryard in front of the house just as a man with a machine gun rushed off the porch, his long white hair flying back over his blue shirt. He began firing at the back of the Packard. He was so intent on what he was doing that I don't think he ever saw us. He went up and over the hood with the gun still hammering. His head struck the windshield, which splintered into a thousand pieces as he went on over the top of the car. Then we were thundering down the lane on the oil pan with our laps full of glass.

The Packard was going at a furious clip and getting well out ahead of us. We were doing better than fifty ourselves, but the dirt road at the bottom of the lane looked forever and a day away. Behind us someone was shooting again. I could hear the bullets ripping into the whiskey cases on the luggage carrier and in the back seat. Uncle Henry pushed my head down. Trying not to get cut on the shards of glass, I held tight to Rat's legs to keep him from jouncing out through the gaping opening where the windshield had been.

There was a tremendous explosion. I thought the whiskey in the burning stable must have gone up all at once. I lifted my head just in time to see the Packard turning end over end through the field beside the lane. At the same time it was coming apart. Wheels and doors, cases of whiskey and fenders flew in every direction, as though bailing out of their own volition. What was left of the car finally flopped into a marshy spot and remained sticking up in the air at about an eighty-degree angle. All that remained intact were the chassis and steering wheel, to which my father still clung, waving to us like a triumphant aviator. We swerved out around the crater in the lane where the land mine had gone off and stopped.

“Stay here,” Uncle Henry said. As he got out I heard him say, “I told him I didn't like no guards.”

I jumped out of the car anyway and ran after Uncle Henry down through the marsh. My father stood near the skeletal remains of the Packard. “Look at this, boys,” he called. “Not a hubcap left on her.”

“Oh, Christ,” Uncle Henry said, pointing up at the barn. Flames were jumping out through the roof. A man ran up the highdrive and opened the sliding door of the hayloft. Two others emerged from the milk house with whiskey cases. The man we had struck with White Lightning lay unattended in the dooryard.

A large truck rolled backwards down the highdrive from the loft. We began to run back toward White Lightning, which at the same time started off down the lane. Rat was driving off without us. We shouted for him to stop, pounding on the windows as we ran alongside the accelerating Cadillac. Instead of slowing down Rat panicked and drove off the road into the marsh. The hood came unhinged and popped up. Rat got the front wheels back onto the lane, but the rear wheels remained out of sight.

“Oh, Christ,” Uncle Henry said again, and if he wasn't exactly praying he wasn't swearing this time either.

There was another explosion. A wicked whizzing whine passed over our heads. Carcajou made his baying insane noise from the dooryard. “LaChances,” he bellowed. “Surrender, LaChances.”

He was standing in his blue uniform and cap next to the open maw of the truck, from which a long black smoking barrel projected. He lifted his arm and brought it down. “Fire,” he roared.

Uncle Henry and my father threw me to the ground. There was that terrible whining noise again, then a metallic shriek. When I looked back in the field I saw that the Packard had been cut completely in two. We jumped up and ran toward the Cadillac.

“Steer, Bill,” my father shouted.

I got in behind the wheel and pushed Rat over out of the way. He had gotten a whisk broom out of the glove compartment and was busily sweeping broken glass off the seat and singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Over the crazy whinnying laughter from the dooryard the cannon exploded again. The raised hood vanished.

Meanwhile Uncle Henry and my father had their backs up against the whiskey cases tied on the luggage carrier. “Give it to her,” my father called. I stepped hard on the gas, and the back wheels spun and dug deeper into the muck. I thought we were going to have to head for the woods to be run down one by one like the unfortunate LaChances, whose name Carcajou continued to bellow between cannonadings.

“Let up,” my father shouted to me. “Lift up on your end, Hen. Heave her right on out.”

My father and Uncle Henry were probably the two strongest men in Kingdom County, but I was still amazed to look back and see them raise the rear end of that huge overloaded Cadillac entirely out of the mud and over onto the lane. Then Uncle Henry was behind the wheel and my father was sitting on Rat's lap. Rat was singing about a voice calling on his ear; his eyes were shut and his whisk broom was going vigorously over the dash, my father, and me, wedged in the middle looking down through where the windshield had been and into the exposed workings of the engine.

“See all them little rods dance,” my father said, leaning forward to get a better look. “That's power, Henry. You've got a fine car here.”

“Yes,” Uncle Henry said. “And well broke in, too.”

As we skidded onto the dirt road at the foot of the lane we took a shot broadside. It plowed through the right rear window, the six top cases of whiskey on the back seat and on out through the roof, hurling us sideways across the road, and up on two wheels. Somehow Uncle Henry kept us from turning over and got us back under control again. If all his experience outrunning G-men at high speeds over bad roads ever paid off, it was that early morning in 1932, south of Magog.

At last we were between woods on both sides of the road, and out of range of Carcajou's salvos. Both Rat and my father were in states of exultation, though for very different reasons. Rat appeared to be having an experience of grace, probably induced by shock. He was trembling all over and shouting phrases from a tongue that had not been heard or spoken since the construction of the Tower of Babel. At the same time he was furiously whisking my father, who bounced up and down on his bony quivering knees like a ventriloquist's dummy in the throes of a severe seizure.

“What did I say, boys? Did Quebec Bill say you'd be in for some surprises or not? Did you see them running around up there? See the flames, boys. Look back over the trees, Hen. See the smoke.”

Uncle Henry had little leisure for observing barn fires. The impact of the broadside had twisted the body of the car around at approximately a forty-five-degree angle to the frame so that as we sped down the road we seemed perpetually to be veering off into the opposite lane.

The car reeked of whiskey. Rat interrupted his ecstasy long enough to get an unbroken bottle out of one of the damaged cases behind us. He broke the seal, unscrewed the cap and chugged down a third of the contents. Then he looked at my father with just the whites of his eyes showing and shouted, “Abba babba babba. Quinquist, quinquist. Boola boola, Calvin Coola.”

Uncle Henry was sweating hard and wrestling hard with the wheel. Evidently the rear axle had been bent when Rat drove off the lane. We progressed the way a snake that has been run over drags its paralyzed rear quarters behind it.

“There's where we turned off last night to take that shortcut over the ridge,” my father said.

“I know,” Uncle Henry said. “It warn't that difficult to follow your trail.”

“Wait until Evangeline hears about this,” my father said.

“Yes,” Uncle Henry said. “Wait until she does.”

“Your car's broke in a little more,” my father hazarded.

Uncle Henry did not reply.

As we approached the church on the outskirts of Magog we met our first car of the morning, a black sedan full of nuns. We must have appeared to be coming directly toward them because they pulled far over on their side of the road, then swerved off onto the church lawn into the damaged crèche. Shepherds and wise men, kine and asses were scattered in every direction. The members of the holy family were maimed nearly beyond recognition. A crude wooden image of Mary, which resembled a heavy-limbed cretin more than the virgin mother, flew out of the manger and landed in a salacious position on top of the radiator cap of the sedan. As we pulled away from this scene of desecration Rat reared up through the windshield shaking my father off his lap onto me. He brandished his whiskey bottle and shouted back at the nuns, “‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.' Exodus twenty: four.”

There was not much traffic on the long street between the taverns and the paper mill. By the time we reached the other end there was even less. Two cars and a horse-drawn milk wagon had run up onto the wooden sidewalk. A third car took refuge down a side street.

“How far is it to that log trace?” Uncle Henry said between clenched teeth.

“Not far,” my father said.

Uncle Henry peered over the wheel at the smoking engine. “That's too far,” he said.

He was right. Just as we turned off the gravel road onto the trace leading down to the lake we threw a rod. We had to keep going, though; now the lake was our only way out. Clattering, knocking, smoking like a chimney fire, smelling like a bombed distillery, White Lightning ran out her last five miles like the noble creation she was.

“Take her right up under the big fir, Hen,” my father said.

Uncle Henry did, and I have never been sure whether he shut off the key when we got there or White Lightning just died. As we sat looking out over the lake in the heavy silence that often follows the conclusion of long or difficult trips, I didn't dare ask.

Rat, who by this time had finished his bottle, opened his eyes and looked at the burned-out engine. “How are Henry and me going to get back home?” he said.

“By canoe, the same as I and Wild Bill,” my father said.

Rat shut his eyes and did not open them again until late afternoon.

My father and Uncle Henry and I got out and looked at White Lightning, which was no longer white, or any other recognizable color. The hood was gone, the windshield was gone, the springs and engine were shot, the back seat and rug were soaked with whiskey. “She looks like she was struck by lightning all right,” my father said.

Uncle Henry was examining the gaping holes where the cannonball had bashed in the rear door windows and curled up part of the roof like a piece of bent tin. “See there, Wild Bill,” my father cried, “I've doubled him over laughing.”

“I don't think Uncle Henry is laughing,” I said.

My father ran over and looked up into Uncle Henry's face.

“He's laughing inside, Bill. You don't know how Henry laughs inside.”

Uncle Henry looked at my father. “What time do you figure on setting out again?”

“At dusk, Hen.”

Uncle Henry nodded. “Well, boys, if you don't have any objections I reckon I'll lay down and sleep for a while. And maybe when I wake up this will all be a dream and I'll be back in the hotel. Maybe White Lightning will be down in the lot behind the hotel as shiny as ever. But I doubt it.”

“Henry,” my father said, “you are the best brother a man ever had. Do you know what I'm going to do for you? I'm going to get you a brand new Cadillac. See the haze on the lake this morning. It's going to rain. We may not have to buy any hay at all. A ton or two at the most will carry us through. The rest of the money belongs to you, Hen. We've still got twenty-five full cases. That's at least two thousand dollars profit after buying hay if we need to. That's a new Cadillac, Henry. That's Quebec Bill's gift to Henry Coville.”

“Bill,” Uncle Henry said, “that used to be a nine-thousand-dollar automobile. I ain't going to tell you how many runs in my old Ford I had to make to buy it. I ain't trying to lay the blame on you neither. I was the one that come to see you about this run, not the other way around. But I want you to understand one thing. You don't always listen too good but you listen to this. I don't want another Cadillac. I want White Lightning. And if it takes four thousand dollars or eight thousand dollars or twelve thousand dollars, I aim to put her back on the road again. Somehow. As good as ever. Do you understand that?” Without waiting for a reply he lay down close beside White Lightning with his head on his arm and shut his eyes.