Shaking the Nickel Bush (10 page)

The next morning each hour dragged like a week, because there was nothing we could do but sit around Larsen's restaurant and wait for a phone call from the lawyer. I'd have forgotten all about the doctor if Mr. Larsen hadn't reminded me that it was a week since I'd been to see him, and that I'd better get a report sent off before we left town. I did, and it cost two dollars.

It was after ten o'clock when the call came. Mr. Larsen answered the phone and said the lawyer wanted to talk to me. His voice sounded as if he were an old gentleman, and a kindly one. He said he had been out to talk to Joe, and though there was no doubt advantage was being taken of us, the best he had been able to do was to get the bill reduced to thirty-five dollars, but that included getting the engine started and running. When I asked him what we owed him he said there would be no charge, that he had done it as a favor to Mr. Larsen.

When we got out to the garage Joe had Shiftless chained to the back of his truck, and was as pleasant as if we'd never had a bit of trouble. “With all them new bearin's and bushin's and piston rings, she's likely to pull a mite stiff till the oil gets worked in good around 'em,” he told Lonnie. “Might take two-three turns around the block 'fore she gets limbered up and runnin' good, but that's all right with me. I won't make you no charge for my time, nor for the gas it takes neither. Just hold her in neutral till I get you out on a straightaway and to rollin' good, then leave her into high gradual, and fish around a mite with the spark. If she don't take right holt and go to firing in high, kick her into low. That'll fetch her 'round in a hurry.”

I climbed in beside Lonnie, and he was as excited as a little boy at a carnival when Joe pulled us out of the garage. We started at a crawl, and every couple of feet Lonnie turned the wheel a little to one side or the other, but I couldn't see that it made any difference. Shiftless seemed to have her own ideas about where she wanted to go, and wandered a little from side to side, like a cow following a crooked path through a pasture. And the more Joe picked up speed, the more Shiftless wandered.

When Lonnie let the clutch pedal up Shiftless sort of hunkered for a fraction of a second—like a horse getting set for a buck jump. Then I thought she was going to sunfish instead. Her hind end slewed around, and from under the floorboards there was a shriek that sounded as if we'd run over a hog. Shiftless bucked and switched her tail for a few lengths, then began bouncing, sort of like a little girl skipping down a sidewalk. After a hundred yards or so the skipping smoothed out, and I could tell that the engine was turning over, but no matter how much Lonnie jiggled the spark and gas levers Shiftless never fired a shot.

After Joe had pulled us around the block a couple of times, he stopped his truck, came back, took the engine hood off, and fiddled with the ignition wires a minute or two. Then he looked up at me and said, “Now wouldn't that frost your eyeballs? This magneto has went deader'n a dodo. But that won't make no difference to you. It'll build right up again soon's you've drove it a few miles. All you need is a hot-shot battery to get it started off with, and I've got an old one I'd leave you have for fifty cents.”

The hot-shot battery was all we needed to get the engine started. As soon as Joe wired it up, he pulled us again, and Lonnie had barely let the clutch pedal up before the engine backfired a couple of times and started with a roar. Old Shiftless acted as happy as I felt, and put on a shimmy dance that nearly rattled my teeth loose. The minute the engine started Joe stopped his truck and came back again. He didn't pay any attention to Lonnie, but above the roaring, rattling, and backfiring, he shouted to me, “There she is—runnin' like a top. Thirty-five fifty and she's yours.”

Lonnie couldn't get the chain unhitched fast enough to suit him, and by the time I'd paid Joe he was back behind the wheel. He didn't wait for Joe to pull his truck out of the way, but backed Shiftless a few yards, reversed, and went around the old truck as if he'd been heading for a fire. As far as I could tell, the engine didn't have any knocks in it, but it would have been hard to hear a blacksmith's hammering above the rattle of the doors and fenders. Joe had folded the engine hood when he took it off, and had tossed it onto the back seat. The sides were slapping together like cymbals in a jazz band, and every few seconds the exhaust would backfire as though a sheriff's posse were after us.

Lonnie's face was beaming, and above the noise he yelled, “Got to expect a little backfirin' till she gets warmed up! Listen to that engine, buddy! Ain't she sweet! I'll just take her a turn down the road till I get used to the feel of her.”

Warming up didn't do much for the backfiring. By the time Lonnie had driven a quarter of a mile a wisp of steam was shooting out of the radiator cap, and by the time he'd gone a half mile anybody might have thought we were driving Old Faithful geyser, but Shiftless was backfiring as much as ever. Lonnie slowed to ten miles an hour, and we went down the street to Larsen's, sounding as if we were celebrating the Fourth of July.

I don't know how we'd have got out of Phoenix without the Larsens, and I hate to think of what might have happened to us afterwards. As soon as we drew up in front of the restaurant Mr. Larsen came out to meet us. He didn't say anything about the geyser that was shooting up from Shiftless's radiator, or the firecrackers that were shooting out of her exhaust pipe. He leaned over the engine, put an ear down toward it, and told Lonnie he'd done a fine job on the bearings. “Bound to heat up until they get worn in a bit,” he said. “Want to borrow my hose to set a trickle of water running through the radiator?” As he said it he reached down and moved the spark rod back to the retarded position. The backfiring stopped, and the exhaust sounded like the feet of a galloping pony.

“Nice job! Nice job,” Mr. Larsen said as he listened to it. “Hitting on all four.” While he listened he turned the adjustment screws on the carburetor a trifle, and the sound of the exhaust changed to the steady four-beat rhythm of a trot. “This needle point is in good shape,” he told Lonnie. “Honed it, didn't you?”

I'd never heard Lonnie say “sir” to anyone, and I had to be careful not to grin when he said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Larsen, I honed it right to a fine point like you told me, and I leveled them distributor points with a platinum file. If you'd tell me where your hose is at I'd go get it.”

When Lonnie had started away for the hose Mr. Larsen winked at me and said, “You'll be all right. He'll take care of it, and he learns quick. He hasn't wanted you to know it, but he's been pestering me with questions all week. Don't let him advance the spark more than half an inch when you crank it. The timing gears are set a bit forward, and it might kick your head off. You'll get a spark knock on the hills, but don't let that worry you. It won't hurt anything. Decided yet where you're going to head for?”

“Lonnie's been talking about going east toward Globe,” I told him.

“That's all right,” he said, “but go much farther east and you'll run into Indian Reservation. You wouldn't do any good there, and if you turn north toward Flagstaff you'll run into mountain country. Thought about following the Gila? The river has some pretty good ranches along it, and the weather's warmer down that way if you want to get lots of sun on you.”

“Does the railroad follow the Gila?” I asked.

“Most of the way,” he said, “and there are towns all along it, so you would have no trouble finding a doctor and sending in your report every week. Here comes Lonnie. I'd let him idle the engine and run water through the radiator an hour before I started out if I were you, and I'd take along some extra. A tight Ford is apt to boil away a lot of water in the desert.”

It was well after noon before we got away from the Larsens, and anyone might have thought we were their own sons. Mr. Larsen went all over the engine with Lonnie, answering questions and showing him how to adjust the carburetor and the condenser points and the distributor. Then he helped him fix a rack on one of the running boards, and load it with our groceries and extra gas and water. While Mr. Larsen worked with Lonnie I did what I could to help Mrs. Larsen with the few customers they had. I waited on the counter while she did the cooking and dished up the orders, but in between she was scurrying around like a squirrel getting ready for winter, packing an orange crate with things for us to take along.

She filled one side of the crate solid with food—four big loaves of gluten bread, nearly half a baked ham that she said was for Lonnie, a quart jar of stewed chicken for me, coffee, condensed milk, onions, potatoes, carrots, and half a dozen bunches of celery. In the other side of the crate she had packed a frying pan, coffee pot, dishpan, butcher knife, a couple of cups, plates, knives, forks, and spoons of different sizes. Then she gave me a black iron pot—about ten inches across and five inches high—with a heavy iron lid that had an inch-high rim. Except for a pint jar in the center, the pot was packed tight with dish towels.

“That's your sour dough,” Mrs. Larsen told me as she showed me the jar. “You won't find many ranch cooks who can make you gluten bread that's fit to eat, but there's no reason you can't make it for yourself. That recipe of your mother's is fine—only that it needs a few caraway seeds to make the bread tasty—and you'll have to use sour dough in place of store yeast, because you can't count on finding yeast at a ranch cookhouse.”

Every time I'd come back with dirty dishes Mrs. Larsen would catch me and tell me things I'd need to know—how I'd have to keep the sour dough jar not too warm and not too cool, and how to add a bit of grated raw potato, flour, and warm water each time I used any, so as to keep the starter alive and fermenting. Then she explained how to mix my dough in the dishpan and bake it in the Dutch-oven pot—clearing a place for it at the center of a burned-down campfire, filling the lid with live coals, then heaping others around the sides, and covering the whole thing with sod or hot ashes. She said we could roast chickens in it the same way, or use it for making stews.

When we pulled away from the restaurant the Larsens were standing on the sidewalk, waving to us, and they hadn't let me pay them a penny for anything.

We stopped only a few minutes at the hotel—just long enough for me to pay what was due on our room, and to carry out our bedrolls and outfits. I was going to throw away the bucket of clay I'd been playing with the week I was laid up, and the sticks and wires I'd used for armatures, but there wasn't any place I could throw them easily, so I just set them in the back end of Shiftless along with the rest of our stuff.

8

Back Country

I
T
was midafternoon on my twentieth birthday when we pulled away from the hotel in Phoenix, and I think Lonnie was the proudest man in Arizona. Shiftless's engine started up with a roar when he pulled the throttle open, and she bucked a little when he let the pedal back and threw her into high, but once we were rolling she perked along as steady as a trotting horse. We were making about fifteen miles an hour as we headed for the outskirts to pick up the eastbound highway, and Lonnie was watching the road and twisting the wheel back and forth as if we'd been making fifty-five.

“What did I tell you, buddy?” he called out above the rattle of the fenders and the squeaking of the springs. “Didn't I tell you I'd fix her up good as new? Listen to the sound of that motor, would you! Tickin' like a five-dollar watch! But I ain't goin' to press her none—not while her guts are brand new. Don't aim to go no further'n Superior tonight. From there we'll get out into the back country and find us a coupla good jobs.”

“We'd better,” I told him. “I've only got twenty-four twenty left in my pocket.” There wasn't any sense in telling him about the fifty in the cuff of my Levi's.

“Jeepers!” Lonnie shouted. “You must have did better than you told me in the horse falls, buddy! I reckoned you'd be dang near dead broke by now—what with all the little extry parts we had to buy and all—but shucks, with twenty-four twenty and all the grub we've got, we're set for the winter, even if we don't find no jobs. Old Shiftless, she won't cost us nothin' from now on—only two-bits for gas now and again. Betcha she'll make twenty-five miles or more on a gallon.”

“She'd better, if we don't get jobs pretty soon,” I told him. “Don't forget, I have to go to a doctor every week, and they seem to have a standard price of two dollars.”

Lonnie took one hand off the wheel long enough to reach over and slap me on the shoulder. “Look, buddy,” he told me, “you don't have to worry none about the dough. Like I told you, I'll toss my pay checks into the pot—the whole works, 'ceptin' for a buck or two for makin's and the likes of that—till I've paid you back every dime you've spent up to now. Way I look at it, I got more need for an automobile than what you have, so I'll just buy you out and take Shiftless off'n your hands. That way I could furnish the car and you could furnish the gas, and it would be a fifty-fifty deal. 'Course we'd split whatever little it'll cost us for grub when we ain't workin' steady.”

“There's no need of that,” I told him. “If you pay half that's plenty, and when we're done with it you can have it. I'm going back to Colorado in the spring, and I wouldn't have any use for an automobile there, even if I knew how to drive one.”

“It's a deal, buddy!” Lonnie shouted, “It's a deal!” He drove on for a quarter of a mile or so, then without taking his eyes off the road he asked, “Say, buddy, how much do I have to kick in 'fore we put the papers in partnership?”

“Five bucks,” I said. “Wasn't that what I told you when we bought her?”

“Uh-huh, I know,” he said, “but I wasn't sure you'd remember. You understand, buddy, I ain't talkin' about buying in halvers for five bucks. It's just . . . Well . . . It's just that I'd be mighty proud to have my name wrote down on the records as half owner of an automobile—a good one, the likes of what Shiftless is now we got her fixed up.”

“That's all right,” I said. “I'll go and have your name registered along with mine whenever you pay the first five.”

We were already out of town, and Lonnie was sort of herding Shiftless along a gravel road. Sometimes she'd wander over to the right side, and sometimes over to the left, and Lonnie would spin the wheel just in time to keep her from wandering off onto the desert. He got so excited he didn't stop her in time when I told him I'd have his name registered with mine. He threw an arm around my neck, hauled my head onto his shoulder, and told me, “You're a buddy! That's what you are! And look, buddy, I'll never leave you down—not while there's an inch o' skin left on these hands.”

“That won't be long,” I yelled, “unless you watch where you're going.”

The instant Shiftless had caught Lonnie off guard she'd headed for the desert, and in pulling away from him my arm happened to hit the throttle lever and push it wide open. Shiftless let out a roar, plunged down over a low bank at the side of the road, and took off, bouncing and swaying, toward a big bunch of greasewood and cactus. Lonnie had all he could do to fight the wheel and keep us out of the cactus, and before he could get a hand free to pull the throttle back up we were a hundred yards from the road—right in the middle of a lake of loose sand six or seven inches deep. It had happened so fast that Lonnie never thought about his feet until he'd pulled the throttle up. Then he hit the brake pedal so hard he nearly drove it through the floor boards. For a second I thought I was in the horse falls again, and that Shiftless was going to somersault, but she didn't. She just slewed around to one side and stopped dead—engine and all.

Lonnie started to yell at me, then caught himself. “Don't never touch the throttle when I'm drivin',” he told me in sort of a shaky voice. “If I hadn't caught aholt of the wheel right when I did, we could of been in bad trouble.”

“Well, don't grab me around the neck again when you're driving,” I told him. “And it looks to me as if we're already in bad trouble.”

“No, we ain't,” he said, “but we're lucky that nothing got busted. Go give the crank a spin 'fore we settle too deep into this daggone sand.”

The crank wouldn't spin. All I could do was to engage it near the bottom of the turn and jerk it up. But nothing happened. After I'd jerked it a dozen times or more, Lonnie climbed out and opened the hood. “Flooded!” he told me. “There's gas leakin' out the top of the carburetor. Maybe I shouldn't ought to have goosed her. Turn her over a few more times and it'll dreen away.”

The engine was so tight that I nearly had to lift Shiftless off her front wheels every time I yanked the crank handle up, and it took fifteen or twenty more yanks before the engine backfired and started. When I climbed back in beside Lonnie I was so winded I couldn't say a word. He retarded the spark and fiddled around with the throttle till the engine stopped backfiring, then let the in-gear lever down and stepped on the low-speed pedal. We didn't move, but I could feel Shiftless's hind end swaying a bit, as if she were a horse switching at flies.

Lonnie held the low pedal down hard and opened the throttle little by little, but nothing happened except that Shiftless seemed to be hunkering down on her haunches. Lonnie put her back into neutral, and we both got out to see what the trouble was. Shiftless had dug her hind wheels in clear to the hubcaps and looked as if she were getting ready to sit down. “Well,” Lonnie said, “we got to dig her out, that's all. Wish't we'd remembered to bring along a shovel. What have we got to dig with?”

“You can use the dishpan,” I told him, “and I'll use the iron pot. Will we have to dig all the way to the edge of this sand pit?”

“Naw,” he said, “just a coupla feet in front of each tire—just enough so's't the hind wheels can get a holt on the ground.”

We scooped out a trough between the wheels, and for six or seven feet ahead of the front ones, then Lonnie climbed in and gave her the gun. Shiftless slithered and switch-tailed till she came to the end of the troughs, then bucked on for a few feet and dug her heels in again.

We tried the scooping four or five times more, but it always worked the same way. Then Lonnie decided it would be better if we cut brush and made a corduroy road for the wheels to run on. It did work better, but it was slow going because Lonnie had to stop every two lengths while I moved the road ahead. It was after sunset before we got Shiftless out of the deep sand, and by that time she was boiling so hard she looked like a locomotive blowing off steam. But we were on our way. We'd made nearly six miles out of Phoenix, so I thought it was best for us to make camp right where we were.

It's amazing how hungry scooping sand will make people, and camping out always seems to sort of whet their appetites. That night Lonnie fried himself a couple of big slices of ham, two potatoes, and three eggs. And I warmed up the whole quart of stewed chicken Mrs. Larsen had put up for me. I didn't plan to eat more than half of it for supper, and to save the rest for breakfast, but Lonnie and I got talking as we ate, and before I realized it I was scraping the last of the gravy out of the pot. It certainly made gluten bread taste a lot better than just eating it dry.

The next day being Sunday Lonnie didn't think we should start out too early, and it was nearly ten o'clock before I could get him awake enough to roll out of his blankets. By that time we were both hungrier than bears, so Lonnie fixed himself the same breakfast that he'd had for supper. Of course, I couldn't eat ham or potatoes, so I just boiled myself three eggs and finished up the first loaf of gluten bread.

Shiftless was a little balky about starting, but not bad, and by noon we were on the road for Superior again. I think we'd have made the whole sixty-five miles before dark if it hadn't been for Shiftless's boiling. She started in before we'd covered more than three miles, and from there on the day was sort of off-again, on-again. Even though it was the middle of December the desert was as hot as summer. Every two miles we'd have to stop, drain out some of the boiling water, add fresh from the can we'd brought along, and wait for Shiftless to cool down. And every time we had to start her again the hot-shot battery was a little weaker, and it took more yanking on the crank handle before we'd get a spark strong enough to explode the gas. Worse still, the hotter Shiftless got, the harder I had to jerk the crank to turn the engine over, and the more she smoked when we had her going.

It was nearly dark when we pulled into Mesa, only about twenty miles from Phoenix, and anyone might have thought we were driving a freight engine instead of an automobile. The cloud of blue smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe was just about equal to the cloud of white steam pouring out of the radiator. We'd long since stopped bothering to put the cap on when we refilled, we were entirely out of water, and the new parts had swelled enough from the heat that Lonnie was having to drive with the low-speed pedal held down. We'd just made it as far as the garage when Shiftless coughed a time or two and stopped. Even then she smelled like a red-hot stove.

“Out of oil and water?” the garageman asked as he came out to see what we wanted.

Lonnie tried to tell him we had plenty of oil and were only out of water because all the engine parts were new, but the man wouldn't believe him—and he was right. When he opened the petcock at the bottom of the engine only a few drops of thick black oil dribbled out. In that twenty miles we'd only burned two gallons of gasoline, but we'd burned nearly three quarts of oil, and it was twenty cents a quart. The garageman showed us where it had seeped up around the base of the spark plugs, and he said we were pumping it up the scored cylinder walls like water out of a well. The only thing we could do was to wait a couple of hours for Shiftless to cool down, buy a couple of gallons of extra oil to take along, then camp as soon as we were out of town.

While I was cooking supper Lonnie told me he thought it would be better for Shiftless if we turned north and got away from the deserts until her new parts had worn in a little more. He said the best cattle ranches in the state were north of Globe, and that if we held to the northeast it would bring us right in among the biggest of them. Anything sounded good to me that might lead to jobs before we went broke, but I told him there would be no more lying around camp until noon, that I wanted to be on the road by daylight, so as to cover as many miles as we could in the cool of the morning.

I had to bully Lonnie a little, but we'd had breakfast and were on the road at the crack of dawn. For the first twenty miles we drove almost straight east, and Shiftless behaved fairly well. Then, soon after she started boiling, we came to a Y where the roads forked—one to the northeast toward the mountains, and the other southeast across the desert. Lonnie hadn't been more than half awake since I rolled him out that morning, but he perked right up as soon as he'd swung Shiftless onto the road toward the northeast. “Don't you worry no more about Shiftless boilin', buddy,” he told me. “Soon as ever we get into them mountains she'll cool right down, and with all them new parts she's got in her she'll pull like a team o' mules.”

She did—like the most headstrong and balky team that ever lived—and within ten miles that road turned out to be one that had been built only for mules. As soon as we got into the mountains it twisted like a snake in agony, both sideways and up and down. On the downgrades Shiftless would take off like a mule headed for the barn, weaving from side to side and picking up speed at every length. The only way Lonnie could hold her back enough to keep her on the road was by pulling up the hand brake and bracing himself against the foot-brake pedal. If the upgrades weren't too steep, we could grind them out at low speed, then stop at the top of the hill while Shiftless blew off enough steam that I could get close to the radiator and refill it.

By afternoon we'd worked out a system for the steeper hills. Lonnie would stop on the downgrade, a hundred yards or so before we reached the bottom of a gulch. Then I'd get out and run ahead till I was about halfway up the next hill. After I'd had time to catch my breath he'd turn Shiftless loose, come racing down to the bottom with her pitching and weaving, then give her the gun for the climb. By the time he reached me he'd have slowed to three or four miles an hour—with his foot braced against the low pedal and the throttle wide open. Then, with me pushing from the back, we could make it to the top before we came to a dead stop.