Shaking the Nickel Bush (11 page)

By late afternoon it was noticeable that our new engine parts were beginning to get worn in a little. Shiftless began pulling better on every hill, and she didn't boil so badly when we reached the top.

Darkness was just beginning to settle when we came to a canyon that looked impossible to me. The road leading down into it twisted like a corkscrew, and on the far side it seemed to rise at a forty-five degree angle until it curved out of sight around a mountain shoulder. Worse still, we'd worn out our hand brake, were out of water, and the only person we'd seen since morning was a woman in a little hamlet eight or ten miles back. “Let's camp right here and turn back in the morning,” I told Lonnie. “If we'd ever make it to the bottom we'd never get up the far side, and if we should have an accident nobody would find us for a month of Sundays.”

Lonnie didn't like the idea at all. “Jeepers Creepers, buddy,” he told me, “there ain't no sense turnin' back now! Them big cattle ranches I told you 'bout is just the other side of these hills. We're almost to 'em. Look, buddy! The way old Shiftless pulled that last hill she'll go up that little one yonder on the fly. If you're scairt why don't you get out and walk? I can put her through there as easy as pie.”

I was scared, but I didn't like to admit it, so I said, “All right, but you stop halfway down. Then I'll go ahead to give you a push up the far side. You'll never make it without.”

Lonnie didn't stop halfway down. Shiftless acted as if she'd taken the bit in her teeth and was headed for home. With one foot on the brake pedal and the other on the reverse, Lonnie could no more hold her back than he could have held Niagara Falls. How he ever managed to hold her in the roadway is a miracle. From the time we plunged over the brink until we reached the bottom of the canyon there was never a second when her hind wheels followed the front ones. She switch-tailed from side to side, flinging rocks down into the canyon at our left and sideswiping the cut bank at our right. I don't believe there was ever a moment when she had all four wheels on the ground.

All I could do was to hang on, but Lonnie rode Shiftless out as if she'd been a bucking bronco. Just as we reached the bottom of the canyon he yanked the throttle wide open and sent her tearing up the far side. For the first hundred yards or so she raced upward as though she still had the bit in her teeth, then as we rounded the first curve, high on the cliff side, the engine began knocking and she slowed her pace. Without touching the wide-open throttle Lonnie jammed the low-speed pedal to the floor boards. For a fraction of a second Shiftless surged ahead, then stopped as though she'd seen something that frightened her, and began rolling backwards, gaining speed at every turn of the wheels.

Lonnie braced his back against the seat and threw his full weight onto the low-speed pedal, but Shiftless's only answer was an angry roar from her motor. Desperately Lonnie grabbed for the useless hand brake and stamped the foot brake to the floor, but Shiftless paid no more attention to him than if he'd been a fly on her windshield. She seemed to have decided it was time she took matters into her own hands—and maybe it was just as well that she did.

Lonnie was so busy fighting the useless control pedals that he never once turned his head to see where we were going. I did. And for a few seconds I thought it would depend on the lives we'd led. The road we were careening down backwards was no more than a pair of rough wheel ruts, curving around the shoulder of a canyon wall. On the outside of the curve there was a sheer drop-off of thirty feet or more. On the inside the cliff rose straight up, with a rubble of broken stone at its base.

As if Shiftless were human and could see where she was going, she followed the wheel ruts around the curve for a hundred feet or more, bouncing and pitching wildly. Then, at the only spot where the rubble heap was wide enough to have held her, she leaped out of the ruts, backed onto it, and came to a neck-cracking stop—her engine still roaring defiantly.

For a few seconds both Lonnie and I were too numb to think or move. Then he reached for the ignition switch, as if in a dream, and said, “Jeepers Creepers, buddy, we musta sheared off the half-moon key.”

The whole thing had happened so fast that neither of us had time to become frightened—only numbed. But when Lonnie spoke, it broke the tension and our nerves let go. For two or three minutes we just sat there, shaking as if we had chills and fever. As soon as I could speak without my voice quavering I asked, “What's the half-moon key?”

“The key that wedges the drive shaft into the main driving gear,” he told me. “Shear it off—when your hand brake's petered out the likes of ours—and you ain't got no more control over a Ford than over a bicycle that's throwed its chain, 'cause the foot brake is on the shaft.”

“Well, I guess we're licked,” I told him. “It would cost more than old Shiftless is worth to have her hauled to a garage from way out here.”

“Aw, Jeepers, buddy,” Lonnie wailed, “you're all the time runnin' Shiftless down. It wasn't no fault of hers. She only done it 'cause we fixed the engine up too good—made it too stout for that little bitty key. It won't cost next to nothin' to fix her up good as new again. Them keys only costs a nickel apiece. Tell you what we'll do, buddy; you make camp and I'll hike on back and get one.”

It was already growing dark, so I told Lonnie there was no use in starting out for the key till morning. Then we got out and looked Shiftless over to see how much damage she'd done herself when she backed up onto the rubble heap. It didn't amount to much of anything. The gasoline tank was battered in but not broken through, one fender was crumpled, the tail-light was smashed, and there were three or four big dents in the body, but the axle and wheels were undamaged.

The only place to make camp was right there in the roadway, but we weren't much worried about the traffic, so we built our fire between the wheel ruts, ate our supper, and spread our bedrolls. I'd pushed Shiftless up so many hills that I was bushed; I couldn't wash the dishes because all the water we had was in the radiator, and it had turned cold at sundown, so we rolled in between the blankets as soon as we'd eaten. As always, Lonnie was in first, for he never bothered to take off anything but his hat, boots, and britches. He was already snoring by the time I'd crawled into my roll and pulled the tarpaulin up over me.

The next thing I knew I was awakened, half frozen and sure I'd heard some strange sound. The night was coal-black and bitter cold, but I threw the tarp back and sat up to listen. From the direction of the rubble heap where Shiftless was perched I heard the intermittent sound of rocks being grated against each other. There could be no doubt that something was prowling around on the rubble—something big and heavy. Suddenly there was the ring of tin against stone. That sound could have been made only by our dishpan. I was sure that some large wild animal, probably a bear, had smelled our food supply and was into it—and if we lost that we were really licked. I didn't have nerve enough to launch an attack in the blackness, so I felt quietly around until I'd found a rock the size of a baseball, yelled, “
Get out of there!
” and heaved it.

Lonnie's howl and the sound of broken glass came back before the last word was out of my mouth.

“Jeepers Creepers, buddy! What got into you?” he shouted from the blackness. “You've went and busted the windshield, and you dang near brained me!”

“What in the world are you doing out there?” I shouted back.

“Dreenin' the radiator,” he hollered as if I were a mile away. “What else would I be doin'? Leave old Shiftless freeze up solid on a night the likes of this and she'd be ruint. It would bust the engine block, and then where'd we be at?”

It seemed to me that might be the best thing that could happen to me. It would be as easy to walk and carry my outfit as to push Shiftless up every hill—and a lot cheaper—but it would only have hurt Lonnie's feelings to tell him so, and he already felt bad enough about my having broken the windshield. I just pulled the tarp up over me, and was asleep before he came back to bed.

The next morning was freezing cold, but I rousted Lonnie out as soon as I had the fire built and breakfast on to cook. By half an hour after sunup he'd shown me what I'd have to do while he was gone, and had started back to get a half-moon key—a dollar in his pocket, a loaf of gluten bread under one arm, and two cans of salmon under the other.

I didn't expect to see Lonnie again for a couple of days. It was nearly forty miles back to Mesa, and since leaving there we hadn't passed any place where he might get a half-moon key. The job he'd left me was a big one, but there was no need to hurry on it. He'd said I'd have to jack Shiftless up, block her on stones, take the rear axle off, and the differential housing apart. That was the only way we could get the broken key out and put the new one in.

I didn't have to jack Shiftless up, just wedge big rocks under her frame, right where she was perched, then work others out from under her hind wheels until they were hanging free. But the taking apart was tough. The only tools we had were the set wrench that had come with her, an old monkey wrench that slipped open if I put much strain on it, a battered old carpenter's hammer, and a pair of pliers. Every bolt was rusted solidly into place, and no one of them took me less than an hour before I was able to fight it loose. It was nearly sundown, and I was still fighting the last bolt, when I heard a clattering of stones on the far side of the canyon. Again I thought it must be a bear, grabbed the hammer in one hand, the monkey wrench in the other, and wriggled out from under Shiftless.

It wasn't a bear. It was Lonnie. He was riding a horse, without saddle or bridle, down the steep roadway at a pounding trot. As he crossed the bottom of the canyon and started upward, still at a trot, he shouted, “I got it, buddy! I got it! Had to go clean in to Mesa!”

“Where did you get that horse?” I shouted back, “and how did you make it so fast?”

“Borrowed him! Borrowed three-four of 'em,” Lonnie told me as he rode up and slid to the ground. “Jeepers, wish't I'd thought to take along my saddle! My behind's dang near wore to hamburger.”

I could only take Lonnie's word for his own condition, but it was easy to see that the horse was nearly worn to hamburger. He stood with his head hanging to the ground and his sides heaving. Lonnie wouldn't go into much detail, but admitted he'd swiped a horse at the first ranch he came to, and had traded off whenever he had a chance. When I told him he was going to get us into bad trouble, he only laughed and told me, “Shucks, buddy, I ain't stole nothin'. Them nags all headed for home again as quick as ever they could catch their breath.”

As if the horse he'd ridden into camp had understood him, he turned and plodded off down the road.

It took us only a couple of hours the next morning to put old Shiftless back together, but it took us two more days to cover the thirty miles to Roosevelt. Each hill was steeper than the one before it, Shiftless boiled from morning till night, the hot-shot battery went completely dead, and the only way we could get the engine started in the mornings was by camping at the top of a hill, so we could get coasting fast before we threw it into gear.

Before we reached Roosevelt we'd eaten everything we had except cabbage, canned salmon, and gluten flour, and we'd have run out of gas and oil if a rancher hadn't sold us some. That's the most we got out of any cattleman we went to see. The rest of them just shook their heads and told us to come back and see them in the spring. We decided that the best thing we could do was to turn southeast and get down to Globe, where I could see a doctor and we could pick up some more grub.

It took us three more days to get as far as Globe. We followed every wagon track that led off the road, so as to be sure we wouldn't miss a ranch where we might find jobs, but all the good it did was that Lonnie managed to mooch a few free meals. I spent most of one night trying to make gluten bread, but I guess I'd let my sour dough get too cold some night when we'd been in the mountains. It was just milky slop when I poured it into the flour, and it turned out to be as dead as our hot-shot battery. The bread baked all right in the Dutch oven, but it came out like the stuff the cook in Tucson made for me. The only way I could eat it was by holding a chunk in my mouth until it softened up enough to chew, or by soaking it in the juice left at the bottom of a can of salmon. I tried boiling some of it with cabbage, but it went all to mush and spoiled the taste of the cabbage.

9

Christmas Eve

T
HE
doctor at Globe charged me two dollars and a half, and when I asked him why it was so much he said the extra fifty cents was for filling out the card. Everything was higher in Globe than it had been in Phoenix. They were charging forty-five cents for meals in the restaurants, gasoline was eighteen cents a gallon, and oil two bits a quart.

When I'd bought a whole case of salmon, fifty pounds of cabbage, and ten pounds of peanuts in Phoenix, I'd thought I had enough grub to last me for a month. But with the two of us eating out of it during most of the eight days we were up in the Salt River country we were down to less than half a case of salmon and, of course, most of the gluten flour. Then too, we'd decided to take Mr. Larsen's advice about following the Gila River eastward. To do that we'd have at least two days of driving through the San Carlos Indian Reservation where there'd be no chance of finding jobs. There was nothing to do except to lay in a supply of groceries at Globe, regardless of how high the prices were. While Lonnie was at the restaurant and I was waiting for the doctor to examine my specimen, I made out a list of the things we'd get. And I was careful to put on it plenty of cheap things Lonnie could eat—a side of bacon, ten pounds of dry beans, potatoes, and white flour for pancakes, and I remembered to put down dry yeast and baking powder. Even by getting the cheapest things I could think of, one orange crate of groceries cost over six dollars.

It was getting along toward dark by the time we'd bought the groceries. There were only two days left till Christmas. I got to thinking about it while we were stowing the stuff along Shiftless's running board, and for a few minutes I thought it would be nice if I just went over to the dime store and picked up a few little things I could send the folks back home—nothing expensive, but just any little things to let them know I remembered them at Christmas. Then I had to change my mind. In the first place it would look pretty chintzy for me to be sending dime store presents—after all the stuff I'd written Mother about having a fine job and plenty of money. Then too, the postage would probably cost as much as the presents, and they wouldn't get there anyway till long after Christmas, and Shiftless's gas tank was nearly empty, and I was already down to $12.60.

But I couldn't just let Christmas go by without doing anything for anybody, so I gave Lonnie three dollars and told him to go and get the gas tank filled and two quarts of oil put in the crankcase, and to buy another hot-shot battery and see that we had plenty of air in the tires. Then I told him I had to go see a fellow about a dog, and I'd meet him on that same corner in twenty minutes.

As soon as Lonnie was out of sight I beat it for a clothing store where I'd seen some pretty cheap prices in the window. The stuff they had was even cheaper than the prices, but I got Lonnie a fairly decent pair of jeans and a blue shirt for $1.89. While we'd been fixing Shiftless he'd got so much grease on the ones he had that he looked more like a coal miner than a cowhand, and I was afraid that might hurt our chances of getting jobs—so I was really doing more for myself than I was for Lonnie. When he came past the corner where I was waiting, I tossed the bundle on the back seat and jumped on the running board so he wouldn't have to come to a full stop. We only drove two or three miles out of Globe, then made camp for the night before crossing the line into the Indian reservation.

That night we went on a cooking spree. We built two campfires, and while Lonnie boiled beans and bacon in the dishpan I baked him a batch of biscuits in the Dutch oven, mixed up what I thought was enough gluten dough to make a good-sized loaf, covered it with a dish towel, and set it near the fire to rise. Lonnie was going to have filled the dishpan half full of beans, but I knew better than that, because I'd done some baching and found out how much they'd swell. My trouble was that I'd never tried to make any raised bread—except the batch with the dead sour dough.

I'd learned to bake biscuits when I was water boy and cook's helper on the Y-B ranch, but I never had better luck than I did with that first batch I baked in the Dutch oven. I'd been too tight to buy any butter with our groceries, but fried some bacon so Lonnie could dip them in the hot fat. I watched him dip two or three biscuits and stow them away, then decided that I might as well die of diabetes as starvation, so I dipped one myself. It was awfully good, and before we stopped we'd eaten every last biscuit. While we were doing it my bread dough went wild. When I first thought to look, it was the size of a basketball, and I didn't know what I should do to stop it from swelling any more, so I got out Mother's recipe and read it over again. It said, “Let rise, knead, let rise again, and bake in moderately hot oven.”

I couldn't knead the bread in the dishpan—Lonnie had it full of beans—and the only boards we had were those in the orange crates, but they were rough and covered with splinters. The only smooth thing I could find was the engine hood, so I washed it off, sprinkled on a little flour as soon as it was dry, and kneaded the bread there. It worked to beat the band. So did the bread. As soon as I set it back by the fire for its second rising it started growing. I let it go till it was nearly the size of a basketball again, then greased the inside of the Dutch oven, put the dough in, and crowded it down enough so I could get the lid on.

Everything seemed to be going all right till I filled the lid with hot coals. It lifted a bit and began to teeter, so I scooped up handfuls of sand and put it on top of the coals to hold the lid down. That seemed to do the trick all right, so I heaped up more coals around the sides of the pot and covered the whole works over with sand. Anyone might have thought it was a live dog I had buried in the pile of sand. It squeaked and groaned and wiggled, and looked as if the dog were trying to stick his head out. Of course, we knew the dough was still rising, but there was nothing we could do about it, so we just sat there till after midnight—waiting for the bread to get baked all the way through, and talking about Christmas coming in a couple of days, and about its going to be easy to find jobs as soon as we got down to the Gila valley.

I've wished ever since that I could remember just how I made that gluten bread. Of course, it got a necklace of sand where the top pushed up out of the pot, but that whittled off easy enough, and it was the best gluten bread I ever tasted. I'm sure the bacon grease I used for shortening didn't have anything to do with it, or kneading it on the engine hood, or covering the coals with sand instead of sod, because I tried all those things a dozen times afterwards, but the bread never came out so good again.

The next morning I had Lonnie up and wide awake by seven o'clock, and I let him have only pancakes, three strips of bacon, and coffee for his breakfast. I told him I didn't want to be tight but it would have to be that way till we found jobs, that I was going to eat only one egg at a meal and make out the rest on gluten bread and peanuts—with a little cabbage for supper.

From where we camped that night it was about sixty miles across San Carlos Indian Reservation, and we'd planned to make the whole distance in a single day, because there'd be no ranches where we could stop to look for jobs. For the first three or four miles it looked as though we were going to make it. Then Shiftless went into a fit of shimmying. She'd always wandered more or less, but it had always been in sort of long sweeping curves, and Lonnie had become so used to the feel of her that he could usually keep the curves from being very wide. But as soon as we got onto the Indian reservation that morning she began wiggling her front wheels the way a polliwog wiggles his tail. If Lonnie tried to go more than five miles an hour she'd shake herself like a wet dog.

At first Lonnie thought he might have put too much air in the tires, so he let a little out, but that didn't help a bit. Then, because we had to drive so slow, the fan wouldn't suck air through the radiator, so Shiftless boiled like a teakettle on a forge. At our first three or four stops we drained out part of the boiling water and added fresh from the can we always filled whenever we reached a town or river. The only trouble was that we had to put in five times as much as we drained out. The rest had blown off in steam. And we'd already found out in Globe that we'd have a twenty-five-mile waterless drive before we reached the Gila River. It took us till midnight to make the twenty-five, and we'd used up every drop of water we had long before we got there.

The next day the boiling didn't bother us so much, because we were following the river and could get plenty of water to cool Shiftless down, but she wouldn't quit her shimmying. Even at that we thought we'd be able to make Fort Thomas for Christmas Eve, but we didn't do it. It was just turning dark when we left the reservation and passed the little flag station at Geronimo. Halfway between there and Fort Thomas one of our front tires whistled like wind around the eaves of a barn. By the time we were stopped, it was flatter than a dropped egg. Between the shimmying and the rough gravel of the road, the rubber of both front tires had been filed away till the canvas lining showed through.

I thought we were finished. Even with the change Lonnie had brought back after he bought the gas I had less than eight dollars in my pocket, and I was sure a new tire would cost more than that. Lonnie got down on his hands and knees, lit matches, and felt all along the tread of the tire. “We ain't bad off!” he shouted after a minute or two. “We ain't bad off at all, buddy! It just blowed out a little hole no bigger'n a lead pencil. Jeepers Creepers! I wish't I'd remembered to bring along a vulcanizin' set and a boot! I could fix this old baby up so's't she'd run another thousand miles.”

“How much would one cost?” I asked him.

“Well . . .” he said. “A good one would cost three, four bucks. But I could patch this little old hole up with a five-cent rubber plug and a ten-cent tube of rubber cement. And I could make a good enough boot by stickin' in a piece of old shoe sole. How far do you reckon it is from here to Fort Thomas?”

“According to the map it ought to be three or four miles,” I told him.

“Gi'me two bits and go to gettin' supper ready,” he told me. “I'll hoof it into town and be back by the time you get the grub cooked.”

We drove Shiftless off the road, I gave Lonnie the quarter, and he was starting off down the road toward Fort Thomas when I remembered it was Christmas Eve. I wasn't a bit sure he'd be able to fix the tire when he got back, and it seemed to me that we'd probably have to spend Christmas Day right where we were. Then we'd have to decide which we'd sell first, our outfits or Shiftless. That was what made me call Lonnie back. I knew how much he'd hate to part with either, and if we were going broke anyway, we might as well go in style. When he got back to me I passed him two dollars and said, “Tomorrow's Christmas. You spend all of that for our dinner—a good fat chicken we can roast, and all the trimmings.”

“Jeepers Creepers!” he shouted, grabbed the two dollars, and started away down the road at a trot.

I found some good dry greasewood for the fire, put a head of cabbage on to boil, and a pot of water for coffee. There wasn't any sense in warming up what was left of Lonnie's beans and bacon until he came back, and I could bake him some biscuits while he was fixing the tire, so there was nothing for me to do but sit and wait for him. But just waiting was no good because I couldn't stop thinking, and there wasn't much comfort in thinking right then. Just to have something to kill time with I got the clay bucket and box of sticks and wires out of Shiftless. Then I sat down beside the fire and began twisting up a little armature for a horse.

As we'd come through the reservation I'd seen an old Indian pony standing out on the desert; three-legged, with his head hung nearly to the ground. I felt about the way that old pony looked, and before I realized what I was doing I found myself bending an armature for a horse standing just as he had been. The light from the greasewood fire was good, and I dug deep into the bucket to find some clay that wasn't dried out too much. It had just the right feel about it, and when I began working it onto the armature it slipped under my thumb like wet silk. I fished around in the box till I'd found most of the little tools I'd whittled in Phoenix, and began scraping and shaping the clay the way I wanted it. I didn't try to make a nice smooth job of it, but let the tools pull on the clay a bit, so as to make it rough like that old pony's hair. And I put a big hay-belly on him, and sprung knees, and a bone spavin below one hock.

I was so busy with the old pony that I didn't hear Lonnie when he came back. I didn't know he'd been gone more than a few minutes when, from right above my shoulder, he said, “Jeepers Creepers, buddy! That's the Injun pony we seen on that little hill this afternoon! Why didn't you tell me you could do that stuff?”

“What's the sense?” I said. “It wouldn't help us to find a job . . . nor to find tires for Shiftless. I only do it when I've got time to kill. I've whittled them out of wood since I was a little kid. How did you make out?”

“Well, I've did worse,” he chuckled, and dropped two big fat hens down beside me. “And I got sweet potatas, and celery, and onions, and a pie. I had to snitch the vegetables off'n a sidewalk stand. The pie was four bits—it's mince.”

“And by the looks of these hens you snitched them too,” I said.

“Look, buddy, I had to,” he told me. “I wasn't goin' to leave Christmas go by without getting you nothin'.” As he spoke he fished into his hip pocket, brought out a real nice jackknife, and passed it toward me. “It ain't much,” he said, “but it might do for whittlin' horses.”

I knew that knife had cost at least a dollar, so before I reached for it I asked, “Did you swipe that too?”