Me and Billy (13 page)

“What about all those chunks of gold you said people were always finding up there?” I said.

“Hold up there, Possum. You didn’t listen to what I said. In the first place, I didn’t say anything about
always.
I said
every once in a while.
Every five years, ten years, maybe.”

“But still,” I said, “that’s evidence.”

He waggled his finger at me. “You got to listen, Possum. What I said was that every once in a while you’d
hear
about somebody coming out of there with a chunk of gold. Most usually the fellow who told you about it was somebody who’d heard it from the brother of a fellow who was on the most intimate terms with the sister of the wife of the fellow who actually found it. Only he didn’t have the chunk of gold anymore, because he lost it in a poker game.”

“That proves it,” I said. “That’s exactly what Cook said—the fella he met lost his gold in a poker game.”

Pa Singletary chuckled, but it was a pretty dry chuckle without much cheerfulness in it. “It doesn’t prove a thing, Possum, except that when people stumble across a useful story, they like to hang on to it. That’s the way it was with me. It’s believable that the fellow would lose his chunk of gold in a poker game.
By that time I’d been farming for twenty-five years, since I was a little boy, and my pa before me and my grandpa before him. I was mighty tired of it. I wanted something else for myself. So I worked on that story until I had it ready to try on Betty Ann’s ma.

“Well, she had a good deal more sense than me. She kept it in mind that it could have happened, but she also kept it in mind that a lot of other things not nearly as interesting could have happened, too. Such as that there never were any Aztecs with bushels of gold anywhere near these mountains, and if over twenty or thirty years a couple of fellas found two or three pebbles of gold in those mountains, there wasn’t anything unusual in that.

“But she saw I had got my heart set on going up there. She knew me. She knew I was getting more and more restless—always talking about some scheme to get off the farm. Go into Plunket City and set up this or that business, take up surveying, anything but farming. So she told me once we got the corn in and things generally buttoned down for the fall, she could handle the farm for a few weeks. Betty Ann was six, old enough to be helpful. So I went. There’s a little town at the foot of the mountains called Wasted Gulch that’s kind of a jumping-off place for the mountains. Folks up there have seen an awful lot of people pass through there, planning on being rich. I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was there for. There wasn’t any other reason for visiting Wasted Gulch. Nobody said anything about it.

“So I got me a little tent, food, blankets, and such, and went up into those mountains. I was up there three weeks. I searched everywhere, in streams, gullies, places where it looked like the rain had washed through. I didn’t find anything—not a single thing. Finally I ran out of food and came down out of there, looking the way most people look when they came down—covered with bites and scratches, half starved, my clothes torn and filthy, and sort of crazy from having been alone all that time.”

“Is it true about getting lost?” I said.

“Yes, that’s true. There’s no magic to it. Those mountains are pretty rugged—sharp peaks, cliffs, gullies that fold back on themselves. I was always coming around a corner to find myself up against a mountain wall or a drop-off too steep to climb down. I’d turn around to go back and, like as not, get confused and couldn’t find the way I got up there.”

“How’d you get out?” Billy said.

“There’s an old rule: find a stream. It’ll always go downhill and lead you into a bigger stream. Sooner or later you’ll come out. But I was pretty well lost for a while.

“Well, I got back to Wasted Gulch and rested there in the little hotel they got for a couple of days before setting out for home. None of the regulars up there said anything to me about the mountains one way or another—just passed the time of day in a polite way. But there was a fellow there hanging around the
lobby of that hotel who was looking to go up into the mountains himself. He asked me if I’d found anything. I didn’t lie to him. But I knew I’d made a fool of myself, and I didn’t want to admit it. So I gave him a wink. Now, I wasn’t fooling any of the regulars—they knew well enough why I was winking. But this other fellow, he believed in that wink, for he wanted to. And when I took off for home, he followed my trail. I wasn’t back here more than ten minutes, sitting there with Betty Ann on my lap, telling my story and feeling mighty glad to be home, when this fellow busted through the door waving a pistol. What’d I find up there, exactly where was it, and such.

“I was stuck. I told him I hadn’t found anything, it was all just a wink, but naturally he thought I was holding out on him and didn’t believe me. He stuck the pistol to Betty Ann’s head and said he’d kill her first, and if I still didn’t tell he’d kill Ma. I pointed across to the windowsill there and said, ‘There’s the gold, right there.’ He took his eyes off Betty Ann just for a second. I shoved Betty Ann onto the floor and grabbed the fellow’s arm, trying to twist that pistol out of it. It went off.” He stopped, for he was breathing pretty hard. “I guess you know where the bullet struck.”

We sat there dead still. For the longest time Mr. Singletary sat looking out the window. I could hear him breathe. He’d been living with that in his mind for all these years and would go on living with it for years to come, for how could he ever forget it when
every day he had to unlock that room and look at that face with the chunk shot off it?

All that silence was making Billy nervous and fidgety. “What happened to the fella who shot her?”

Pa Singletary raised his head up. “When he saw what he’d done, he lost his stomach for it and ran. I never knew what happened to him. I doubt that he tried to go up into the mountains, though.” Then he took out his gold watch and flipped the cover open. “Time for prayers,” he said.

I knew that Pa Singletary had told us that story for our own good. Well, told it for my own good, anyway, for I didn’t suppose that he cared much about Billy’s good right then, although he was such a nice fella, he might have. But I wasn’t going to let it throw me. I hadn’t heard that stuff about the Aztecs before, but it made pretty good sense. How else could that gold have got up there? Sure, Pa Singletary had had some hard luck out of the whole thing, but that didn’t mean it would be hard luck for everybody. Somebody was bound to have good luck—that stood to reason.

Oh, I would like to have stayed for a while longer. Living at the Singletarys’ was almost like paradise, if you discounted the hard work. It was still kind of unbelievable to me that people could go along being
nice to each other day after day without ever getting tired of it. I figured it had to do with what had happened to Ma Singletary: they’d got enough woe for themselves and didn’t need to add to it.

But as much as I liked being at the Singletarys’, I knew I had to get Billy out of there. He was going to do something to them, sooner or later. It wouldn’t be fair to them. And to be honest, I had a hankering to find that lake full of gold and fix myself up with a last name. Maybe after I’d got some gold I’d come back here, buy Pa Singletary a gold watch chain for his watch, take Betty Ann for a trip over to Plunket City, and buy her some dresses—the ones she had were patched pretty fair.

Of course we didn’t talk about the gold lake in front of Pa Singletary; even Billy could see we oughtn’t to do that. But we talked about it when we were haying, and after a while Betty Ann got curious herself. “You boys really going to do it? After what Pa told you?”

“Sure we are,” I said. “Your pa didn’t know about that lake. All the gold washed into there.”

She sighed. “I wish I could go on an adventure. I wish I could go anywhere. I hardly ever get off the farm. Down to the church on Sundays, over to Plunket City maybe once a year for clothes and such. I’ve never seen the ocean, never seen the mountains except from a distance. You boys are always having adventures—getting shot at for skinning people, going into the mountains hunting for gold. I wish I could go on an adventure.”

“Why don’t you come with us, Betty Ann?” Billy said. “Just run off with us.”

She looked down at the ground, thinking, and then she looked up at Billy. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Billy said.

“It’d break Pa’s heart. I’m all he’s got now.”

“That’s his lookout,” Billy said. “Besides, it was his own fault.”

She shook her head. “I thought about it a lot, Billy. Thought about being stuck on the farm, never seeing the ocean, never having adventures. I just never could twist it around to where it would be right for me to leave. You got to figure things like that out for yourself, and however it comes out, you got to do it.”

“Not me,” Billy said.

“How could I leave? Pa can’t look after Ma and manage the farm himself.”

“Maybe your ma will die soon,” Billy said.

“Billy,” I said, “haven’t you got any blame sense at all? Don’t say things like that.”

“Maybe she will,” he said.

“I don’t want her to die, Billy,” Betty Ann said. “I’ve got used to the way she is. It’s like having a puppy—you’ve got to love it even though it’s always wetting the rug and chewing up your slippers. Ma can’t help herself any more than a puppy can.”

She didn’t seem to mind talking about it, so I said, “What was she like before?”

“Oh, she was always looking on the cheerful side of things. When something went wrong, she’d say, ‘Betty Ann, just look on the bright side.’ She’d say, ‘No use crying over spilt milk, you have to take the bad with the good.’” She shook her head. “I don’t reckon she figured how bad it was going to be.”

“If it was me,” Billy said, “I’d rather of taken that bullet straight between my eyes and got it over with.”

“Billy, will you plea—” I started.

But Betty Ann cut in. “That’s what Pa says. He says if Ma knew what would become of her, she’d rather have died. Sometimes I see him looking at her when she’s acting real strange, and I know he’s thinking how awful she’d feel if she could come back to her old self and see what she was. I kind of figure he’s thought of putting her out of her troubles. But not me. I can’t help loving her—she’s like a puppy to me.”

“Do you think your pa might do it sometime, Betty Ann?” Billy said. The idea interested him.

She shook her head firmly. “No. He’ll think about it, but he won’t do it, for it would be a sin before the Lord. He says he owes it to her to make her as happy as he can and hope that in time the Lord will take pity on her. Sooner or later she’ll go, he says. But I’ll miss her.” She sighed again. “Still, I wish I could go on an adventure with you boys.”

The truth was, I wished she could, too. I’d got to where I liked her a whole lot, and I wished she could come with us. “Betty Ann, maybe someday you’ll get
to go yourself. Maybe if we find that lake, we’ll come back to get you and take you up there ourselves.”

“No,” she said. “I couldn’t go up to the mountains.” Then she brightened. “But maybe we could go somewhere.”

“All right. Once we find that gold, we’ll come back and take you somewhere.”

Finally the day came when it was time to say good-bye. Pa Singletary stoked us up real good at breakfast—eggs and potatoes
and
pancakes and syrup both. “No telling when you boys are likely to get your next good meal,” he said. We washed up the dishes, and then Pa Singletary shook our hands, and Betty Ann gave us each a nice big hug. I near busted out crying when she did that, and when we finally started for the door, I could see she was holding off the tears, too. But then the door shut behind us and we were off. I kept looking back over my shoulder at the little farmhouse, hoping I’d see something in one of the windows, and after a bit I saw a curtain jump and something move behind the glass. Then we were around the bend and gone. But for the next while I kept thinking about those people—how around this time Betty Ann was probably milking the cows and Pa Singletary was fetching breakfast upstairs to Betty Ann’s ma.

We went along for a couple days, hitching rides on farm wagons when we could and walking the rest of
the time. From time to time we’d hit a village where we could stock up on ham, cheese, bread—stuff we could eat raw. Neither of us was much of a hand for cooking. For the first day or so those mountains kept walking backward away from us; but at the end of the second day we realized that they were sticking much farther up into the sky than before, and the color had turned from hazy purple to green and gray—trees and rocks.

“I believe we’re catching up to them,” Billy said. “It won’t be long now.” I was getting excited. It had been a long time, and we’d come a long way, but now the real thing was about to start.

On we went, and by and by we came to an old wooden sign saying
WASTED GULCH
. The paint was mostly worn off, but it was clear enough. There wasn’t much need of it, anyway, for there wasn’t anything else around there that needed a name. A half hour later we began to make out the town down the road—the usual old wooden buildings sagging in four or five different directions. Like most of these places, there wasn’t much more to it than a quarter mile of oneand twostory buildings—anything three stories high stood out like a monument.

Shortly we came into town. Now we could see it wasn’t quite the usual thing: it was worse. There was hardly any paint on anything at all, just gray wood everywhere and most of the buildings likely to fall in on themselves if you gave them a hard look. There was
a general store, barbershop, two or three saloons, and a few other stores. The center of things seemed to be Wilson’s Miners’ Supply, and the Majestic Hotel, which was majestic in the sense that it was three stories tall but was otherwise as gray and sagging as the rest of the town. A couple of loafers leaned against the front of the miners’ supply, and three or four sat in rocking chairs on the Majestic Hotel veranda, chewing straw. That was about it, except for the mountains looming over it all.