Night My Friend (38 page)

A horn honked, and he turned to see Tom at the wheel of a green sedan, passing him and pulling into the parking area behind the bank. The time was 8:46.

Davy walked past the car and nodded slightly to Tom. There was no need to speak—they both knew what had to be done.

At exactly five minutes to nine Tom left the car by the lot exit and walked around to the front of the bank. He was wearing a jacket despite the heat, and Davy could see the sagging of the gun in its righthand pocket.

Then Tom disappeared around the back of the bank and Davy started walking across the parking lot, very slowly, with plenty of room between himself and the auto teller unit. The rear door of the bank opened, and the same two girls appeared, each carrying a white canvas sack.

Davy’s legs were beginning to tremble, but he kept on walking, gauging his speed by the girls’. He saw Tom round the corner of the bank building and start after them, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket.

It was the lively redheaded girl who happened to turn and see Tom, when they’d covered half the distance to the auto teller unit. She gasped something and put a sudden hand to her mouth.

His face already masked by the handkerchief, Tom pulled the blue-steel revolver from his jacket pocket and pointed it at the two girls. “The money!” he barked out.

Davy started to run toward them, forgetting his own handkerchief in the excitement. The two girls stood as if petrified, still holding their bags of currency as they faced the gun in Tom’s hand.

Then came the sudden crack of a pistol shot, and for a split second Davy thought that Tom had fired at the girls. He thought it until he saw Tom start to fold and crumple like an autumn leaf. Then he saw the bank manager in the doorway the girls had just left; the manager was holding a smoking gun in his hand.

Tom Hasker was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. He died without speaking, though in the final instant of life his eyelids might have flickered toward Davy, who stood above him with the others, trying not to see the bloody pool forming on the asphalt.

“Just a kid,” the bank manager said, his voice barely a whisper. “Just a kid and I killed him.”

“He was trying to rob you, wasn’t he?” one of the officers said. “Don’t let it worry you.” Then he turned to Davy once more. “What about this kid?”

“He was trying to help us,” the redhaired girl volunteered. “He came running up when the other one drew his gun.”

They questioned Davy for a time and then released him. He looked around for the girl, to thank her, but both girls had already been sent home by the manager.

Davy headed for home, walking quickly in the heat but not even noticing it, thinking only of Tom dying there in the parking lot for a crazy dream that could never come true. He wondered what would happen when the police found out that Tom had been a friend of his.

He remembered Tom’s car parked at the high school stadium and headed for it, not knowing exactly what he intended to do. When he reached it, standing alone in the noonday heat, he found that it was locked. Tom had a small suitcase in the back seat, and there was another suitcase on the floor, almost out of sight. It looked like a girl’s weekend bag.

“Hello,” a voice said behind him very softly.

He turned, startled, the fear building in him once more, and saw that it was the redhaired girl from the bank, the one who had gotten him off. “I—What are you doing here?”

She smiled at him, at his confusion, perhaps at his fear. “I’m Barb. I was Tom’s girl. That didn’t work out so well this morning. But don’t worry, we’ll do better next time. Won’t we?”

P
ERHAPS YOU’VE PASSED THIS
way before. The valley is sleepy in the summertime, but very beautiful, with lush fields of corn and oats rising against a backdrop of wooded hills that stretch for miles toward the horizon. Sometimes, especially in the late afternoons, a hawk or two will come circling overhead, looking for the evening meal or perhaps only for a place to light.

Tucker Baines passed this way, and sometimes on a summer’s night they still tell his story in the valley.

June is the warmest month, even warmer than July for some reason, maybe because on a July afternoon the heat is often broken by a blowing thunderstorm that comes in low over the hills. June, especially late June, is something else again; hot and humid without a chance of relief, when the big flies buzz around over the fields and roads, and even the hawks are listless in their circling. It was on such a day that Tucker Baines came into the valley.

He was, first of all, a wanderer. Born in the swampy Everglades of Florida to parents who ran a roadside alligator farm with a marked indifference to his upbringing, Tuck had learned early to shift for himself. He’d left them to their reptiles and each other at the age of sixteen, and headed nebulously north toward a world he knew only from comic books and movies which he saw infrequently.

Tucker was also a musician of sorts, always had been since the age of seven when a drunken uncle made him a present of a shiny silver-plated harmonica. It had grown up with him, serving at times as his only link to the more settled joys of boyhood in the dismal swamp-side house.

So he wandered north with his harmonica, working by day in dusty gas stations that sat by the side of the highways like bulbous tumors, waiting to pump new life into the pipeline; life, and sometimes death. He remembered the time a tractor trailer had jackknifed on a curve down the highway, and taken a carload of vacationers with it down a grassy slope.

In many ways he hated the highways, hated especially the odor and clang of the gas stations where he worked. Perhaps that was why he started working nights with his harmonica, playing for his supper at the little greasy truck stops on the road north. When he was eighteen he was playing for drinks, even though he was still under age by most state laws, but he was not really a drinking man. One night he’d had too much and ran his jackknife into a man’s gut outside a roadhouse in North Carolina. He didn’t like to drink or fight or get into trouble, but sometimes it happened. Sometimes he moved out in a hurry, carrying only his harmonica and a few meager articles of clothing.

Gradually the harmonica became the center of his life. The tavern owners liked him, because he was a clean-shaven young man who could play
Night Train
as easily as
Greensleeves,
and because he worked cheap and always showed up. The customers liked him, too, liked the sounds which he coaxed from the instrument, hunched over it on a plain wooden stool with the single spotlight riveting their attention. Perhaps he could have made it all the way to Nashville or New York with that sound, but he was too much of a wanderer to be happy in the city. There was always a dirt road to be followed off the main highway, and that was how he happened into the sleepy valley so far from home.

The first person to see Tucker Baines as he wandered down the center of the road with his harmonica and jackknife and paperboard suitcase was Mariam Coty, the postmaster’s daughter. She had lived all of her life in the valley, venturing out only on occasional shopping trips to the big plaza beyond the river. Some spoke of her as a strange, shy girl, but in fact she was only lonely, bored with the sameness of the tassel-haired farm boys who were her only acquaintances. This boy coming down the road now, who surely was no more than nineteen or twenty, was a new face, a new interest.

“Lookin’ for somebody?” she asked, coming out of the mowed field to intercept him. “This is the Cory place.”

“I… no, not really.” He paused to rest his suitcase, and she saw that he was indeed handsome, with a firm, suntanned face and deep blue eyes that sparkled when he spoke. “I’m looking for a place to stay, I guess.” He glanced uncertainly toward the western horizon, as if calculating the remaining hours of daylight.

“A hotel? We don’t have any in the valley.”

“No, maybe just a drinking place, where they got a cot in back.” He pulled something from his pocket. “I play the harmonica, see? People pay me to play.”

She stared, entranced, at the shiny metal instrument with its double line of holes. No one in the valley was very musical except Miss Gordon, the piano teacher, and Mariam knew of only one other person in the whole area who played a harmonica. “I suppose you could play at the River Bend,” she said, speaking softly. “It’s the only night spot in the whole valley, if you could call it that. They’ve got a big new stereo jukebox, and the kids go dancing there on weekends. But I don’t know if they’d let you sleep there.”

“Could you show me where it is?” he asked, picking up the battered suitcase once more. “If it’s not too far.”

She fell into step beside him. “It’s not far.”

He liked the girl from that first moment, liked the valley and the tiny village that seemed to form its core. She introduced him to her father, and to a big man named Hark who seemed to be the sheriff. Then she took him to the River Bend, where a few farmhands stood by a rough plank bar, drinking beer with a self-conscious air of guilt. It was early, not yet supper time, and perhaps they felt they should still have been in the fields.

The place itself was almost gloomy in the afternoon sun, and the odor of beer was heavy in the air. In the evening, when the lights came on and darkness settled outside, it would be better. Tuck knew these places. He’d seen so many of them in the past three years.

“The kids dance in here,” the girl told him, leading the way to a bare back room where an unplugged juke box was the only adornment. “Not tonight, though. Just weekends,” she apologized.

She introduced him then to an aproned bartender. His name was Smith, though it might have been anything else. Tuck had forgotten many faces like that in his travels. “Harmonica? Like Big Ben up in the hills, huh?”

“I don’t know Big Ben,” Tuck told him.

“Just as well. Hairy and mean.” He wiped at the bar with a damp cloth. “I’m just managing the place. Don’t know if I could hire you or not.”

“All I’d want is food and a place to sleep. And any tips they throw me.”

“They don’t throw tips at the River Bend,” Smith said with a chuckle. Then, “Let’s hear you play, boy. Won’t do no harm.”

So he played for them, played as he had in a hundred other roadside places; head bent, eyes closed, making the only kind of music he knew how, cupping his hands around the silver harmonica and playing, playing. When he paused between songs he noticed that the farmhands had moved in from the bar to listen, and he was not surprised. People had always listened to him when he played.

He ran through a shortened version of
Casey Jones,
and then did
Blue-Tail Fly
. He played some ballads of the Scottish border that a man in Carolina had taught him once, then finished with his favorite
Night Train
and a jazz version of
John Henry.
It was a lot of music to get out of a little harmonica.

“Never heard one played that good,” the bartender admitted. “Guess I could take you on for a week anyway, till the boss gets back.”

Tucker Baines nodded. He hadn’t expected any other decision.

When the boss came back, he liked Tuck’s playing too. Most of all he liked the crowds of kids who were coming every night now to the River Bend. They sat and listened and sometimes danced; and often toward the end of the evening they even threw dimes and quarters onto the little stage where Tuck sat and played his wonderful harmonica.

He saw the girl, Mariam, some nights after he finished, and once he sat for a long time with Sheriff Hark, talking about his travels and listening to a history of the valley’s residents. Hark was that sort of a man, big, talkative, interesting.

“You plan to stay around long, son?” he asked Tuck one night.

“Don’t know, Sheriff. I’m a sort of a wanderer, I guess. But it’s peaceful here. Don’t hardly see that there’s any work for you.”

“I try to keep it that way,” Sheriff Hark said. “Sometimes I have to crack a few heads to do it, specially at harvest time.”

Tucker Baines had been playing at the River Bend for two weeks when he finally met Big Ben. He’d heard a lot about the man, mostly from Mariam and the kids who came around. They’d all heard Ben and his harmonica, mostly at church suppers and family picnics. Tuck was better, they assured him, but Big Ben was pretty darned good.

One night when he was leaving the River Bend, figuring to stroll a while before bedtime, Tuck heard someone hail him from a parked car. “Come over here a minute, boy! Got a question for you!”

He walked over, squinting his eyes against glaring headlights, and saw at last a great mountain of a man stuffed behind the wheel of the ten-year-old sedan. “You want something?”

“I hear you play harmonica,” the big man said, speaking through a bushy mustache that almost obscured his mouth.

“I play a little.”

“One of these?” the man asked, holding out his hand. In it rested a silver-plated harmonica.

“Just like that.” Tuck studied the man in the reflected headlights. “You must be that Big Ben they talk about.”

“Ha! How did you figure that one out?” The man shifted uncomfortably, shoving his massive stomach around the steering wheel. “I’d like to hear you play, to play with you sometime. I was listening from here, and it sounded pretty good.”

“Thanks.”

“I got a cabin back in the hills. How about coming up?”

“Not tonight, thanks. I’m pretty bushed.”

“Tomorrow, the next night. I’ll pick you up when you finish.”

Tuck didn’t really want to go with the man, but there seemed no way out. He had a youthful sense of arrogance that told him he could best the mountain of a man in any contest, musical or physical, and perhaps that helped decide him to go. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said.

“I’ll be here.”

The old car pulled away almost at once, and Tuck watched until its taillights had vanished around a distant curve in the old dirt road.

By the following night, Tuck had forgotten all about the odd invitation. He’d spent the afternoon with Mariam, swimming in an old quarry a few miles off, and then he’d come back to the River Bend to have a light supper with Sheriff Hark. He was growing to like the man, to like most everything about the village. He wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was time to settle down.