City Boy (31 page)

“Say, Herb, which girl is it?” asked the handy man, still grinning.

“Aw, Cliff's crazy.”

“I think maybe he ain't.”

“O.K., I don't care if you know. It's Lucille, the red-headed one.”

“Oh. That one.” Elmer nodded with great comprehension. “Yeah. Many's the snake I've known like that one. Bigger, but the same idea.”

“Snake!” said Herbie, aghast.

Cliff explained, with a little pride of inside knowledge, “That's what they call girls in the Navy.”

“You been in the Navy, Elmer?”

“He had four years,” said Cliff.

Herbie looked at the handy man with new admiration.

“Herb, she ain't worth feelin' low about,” said Elmer. The boy dropped his eyes. “But I reckon my sayin' so don't make it so.”

“She said she was my girl. An' then just 'cause I couldn't dance good—” Herbie choked.

“Where you gonna get fifty dollars?” Elmer asked.

Herbie was startled. “What for?”

“Why, with fifty dollars fer lumber and grease and a little help from me I think maybe you could rig up yer doggone ride at that.”

Hope gleamed in the boy's eye. He sputtered, “Why Mr. Gauss—Uncle Sandy—anybody'll give it to me. Shucks, you charge a quarter a ride, an' with everybody takin' a couple rides an' the parents an' the visitors from the village an' all, you'd make easy a hundred an' fifty dollars. I figured all that out.”

Elmer shook his head. “I guess possibly you would, but them guys won't lend you no fifty dollars. The whole idea sounds crazy. Maybe it could work, but you ain't gonna get them convinced. Would yer ma er pa give it to you?”

Herbie thought of wrangles with his mother over quarters, and the frequent earnest discussions between his parents over the narrowness of the family income. He shrugged. “I could try, but Mom is pretty tough. An' whenever I want somethin' my pop just says what my mom says.”

Cliff remarked, “I got five dollars.”

They all fell silent. Some happy horseflies buzzed back and forth between the sunshine outside and the fragrant shade of the stable Clever Sam pawed the floor and heaved another long sigh in his sleep.

“It wouldn't be fair anyhow,” Herbie spoke up, “if you helped me build it. They' disqualify me.”

Elmer blew a vast cloud of blue smoke, which wreathed in the still air. “Wouldn't nobody get to be Skipper if that how it worked. I build the whole Mardigrass, more or less. Last year they give Skipper to Yishy Gabelson fer the House of Hell. Shucks, all he did was say ‘Elmer, less make Bunk Sixteen into a House of Hell.’ I thought up th' traps an' all that, an' built 'em, what's more.”

“I'd help build, it,” said Cliff. “I ain't got no idea of my own. This sounds like fun.”

“Well, I think I know where I can get the fifty dollars,” Herbie said, slowly and reluctantly.

The handy man's eyes opened wide. “Yeah? Where?”

“Never mind. I can get it.”

Elmer stood and knocked gray ash and red embers out of his pipe against the heel of his boot. “You git it an' I'll build it,” he said. “That's to say, I'll help you build it. You kids'll have to work like stevedores. I have a heap o' other things to build, too.” He slipped the pipe into his shirt pocket and walked out.

Cliff whispered excitedly, “Hey Herb, where in the—” and broke off as he saw the handy man's head poke around the doorway again.

“Herb, I still say she ain't worth it. There ain't no snake worth all that work,” he said. His head disappeared and the boys heard him shuffling placidly away.

“Cliff,” whispered Herbie, though there was no reason to whisper, “remember the time we sneaked in the Place on a Sunday?”

“Yeah.”

“An' that safe in the office, and my pop saying the combination was my brirthday?”

Cliff's jaw fell open, and he stared at his cousin.

“I'm gonna get the fifty dollars outta that safe!” Herbie said defiantly.

“Herb, you—you gonna
steal?
”

“Steal your Aunt Sadie! I'm gonna
borrow
fifty bucks. You heard Elmer say we'd make a hundred fifty easy. All right, I get that money tonight, we build the ride, I earn a hundred fifty Saturday night. Sunday I mail fifty bucks back to the Place—no, seventy-five bucks,” he said in a burst of virtuous inspiration, “twenty-five bucks interest. Is that fair or ain't it?”

“Yeah, but Herbie—opening yer own father's safe—”

“I'll stick a note in the safe, see? It'll
say
that the money ain't stole, only borrowed.” Herbie was warming up to the project. “If
they
know I ain't stole it, and
I
know I ain't stole it, then who says it's stealing?”

“I say so,” answered Cliff.

“Why?”

“'Cause it is.”

Herbie considered this a very vexing answer, the more so since it had a ring of truth. But he felt logic all on his side.

“Look, Cliff. Suppose I were to take Clever Sam outta here now, see? An' ride him away, an' never bring him back, but instead bring back a fine race horse and stick him in the stall. Would that be stealing?”

“Takin' Clever Sam sure would be.”

“The heck it would! How about the race horse?”

“Where would you get the race horse?”

“What difference does that make? I'd swap Clever Sam for him.”

“Oh! Then you wouldn't have the race horse to start with?”

“'Course not, stupid. If I had the race horse, I wouldn't need Clever Sam.”

“Guess not.”

“All right, then. You see my point.”

“Yeah. If you had fifty bucks, you wouldn't hafta steal it.”

Herbie grew red in the face and shouted, “All right, all right, all right! Then it's stealing! You'll die before you admit a plain fact. I don't care what you call it, I'm gonna do it!”

“How you gonna get to New York?”

“Hitch-hike.”

“How you gonna get outta camp?”

“Sneak out after taps.”

“You gonna go to New York an' back in one night an' get back before reveille?”

“Yeah.”

“Herbie, it's three miles to the main highway. There ain't no cars go by here after sunset, you know that.”

“I'll walk to the main highway.” Herbie's answers were getting weaker and more sullen.

“An' back in the morning?”

“An' back in the morning.”

“O.K. Taps is at ten o'clock, reveille at seven. That's nine hours. You got two hours of walkin', seven hours of drivin'—that's sayin' you get hitches right away, no waits—an' at least an hour gettin' the money. Ten hours' work to do in nine hours.”

Herbie saw his plan in all its outrageous foolishness. He walked up and down the stable and kicked disconsolately at stones and straws. “You win. I go to the Mardigrass as an old lady. I wasn't so anxious to steal from my pop's safe, anyway. What are you gonna do?”

“I dunno. I can't ever think of them kinda things.”

“Whyncha go as Tarzan? We could fake up a leopard skin—”

“I know how you could save pretty near an hour gettin' to the highway,” interrupted Cliff.

Herbie looked at his cousin doubtfully. Cliff seemed serious.

“Well, how?”

“Clever Sam.”

“Are you nuts? I can't ride him.”

“No. But both of us can, I think.”

“Cliff, you wanna get mixed up in this? I thought you said it was bad business.”

“I said it was stealin'. I dunno if it's bad or not. If you think it ain't bad, I guess it ain't. Maybe sometime a guy's gotta steal.”

Had Herbie been a philosopher he would surely have taken this as his cue to expound the popular modern doctrine “The end justifies the means.” But he was only a boy trying to recapture a lost love, so he said, “Would Clever Sam stand for it?”

“We can find out easy enough.”

Cliff opened the door of the stall and punched Clever Sam in the ribs. The horse opened his eyes and looked around murderously, until he saw who was disturbing him. Then he groaned, yawned, heaved himself away from the wall, and suffered himself to be led out of his stall. Cliff leaped up on his bare back.

“We don't have to saddle him. Get up on this bench here and climb aboard.”

Herbie obeyed, not without some trembling. Seated astride the beast m front of Cliff he felt himself seventeen feet in the air and very insecure. The horse's long backbone seemed to sag slightly at the double weight, and he looked around at his burden and snorted indignantly.

“Yeah, I know, Sam,” said Cliff, “but this is an emergency. If you don't like it, we won't do it. Gee-up.”

Clever Sam shuffled, backed, pawed the floor, and moaned. Then, at a few coaxing tugs of the reins, he walked out of the stable. Cliff made him trot twenty yards and turned him back. The animal was obedient, but the short trot was enough to jar the bones loose in Herbie's skeleton, or so he felt. Back in the stable he climbed shakily off Clever Sam and sensed a new sweetness in the feeling of a floor under his feet.

“He'll do it,” said Cliff, returning the horse to his stall.

“I'm beginning to think that it's just a crazy notion,” said Herbie, running his tongue over extremely dry lips.

But Cliff, whose ignition point was higher than Herbie's, was at last taking fire from the flame of adventure. “No, no, Herb. Honest, I think you could get away with it.”

“But it
is
stealing. You were right.”

“Yeah, sure, but if you give 'em back seventy-five, there ain't anything really wrong with it, is there?”

“Aw, it's impossible. Hitching all the way to the city, alone at night—I musta been outta my head. The heck with Lennie. The heck with Lucille. Who cares about her? That snake!”

“Herbie—
I'll go with you to the city!
”

Herbie was dumfounded.

“I mean it. That'll make it a cinch. I tie up Clever Sam in the woods by the highway, see? He'll just eat grass or sleep till we get back. You know you can't climb in the window of the Place, anyway. You need a boost from me.”

Herbie had forgotten this little detail, which would have been enough to wreck his whole enterprise. He wondered frantically what other pitfalls there were, even as he felt tempted. Until now the project had merely been one of the dreams which his imagination produced so easily. But he had made the mistake of sharing this dream with Cliff, so that he could no longer let it die away when it ceased to amuse him. It had become half-substantial in the act of speaking it aloud.

“Gosh, Cliff, suppose we get caught! Why should you take any risks? We could get put in jail!”

“Heck, Herbie, if you wanna do the thing, I wanna help you, that's all. Do you wanna do it or doncha?”

“Why, I—sure, I wanna do it. Why d'you suppose I thought it all up?”

“O.K. When do we go?”

And just as daydreams sometimes seemed as vivid as reality to Herbie, this reality now began to seem to him as far off and tenuous as a dream. Still not quite believing it was all happening, he heard himself say with the coolness of a general, “First off we gotta get our city clothes outta the camphor locker. They'd pick us up sure, wan-derin' around at night in camp clothes.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Wait after taps until your whole bunk's asleep, see, then sneak on down to the camphor locker an' meet me there. The duty counselor won't give us no trouble. It's Uncle Sid tonight, an' all he does is sit in the social hall an' write letters.”

“I gotcha. Hey, this'll be good.”

“The heck it will.” Herbie felt a tightening around his heart. “It's a crazy scheme. An' I still think I oughta do it alone, Cliff.”

“Well, never mind about that. I'll see you at the camphor locker.”

“Now, we don't say nothin' to nobody.”

“'Course. Let's go. It's lunch time.”

The boys left the stable and went down the hill arm in arm.

Herbie ate little lunch. He sat dreamily at the table, composing in his mind the letter to be left in the safe, explaining that the money was only being borrowed. Immediately after the meal he rushed to the empty office of the camp newspaper and wrote out the note on the rheumatic typewriter, hitting each key painfully with one finger.

All day he turned the midnight sortie over and over in his mind, and like a snowball it seemed to pick up perils and terrors with each turning. The ultimate object, the building of the ride for the Mardi Gras, seemed centuries away. He half hoped that Cliff would beg off—and he half hoped that he wouldn't, and that it would all prove a glorious adventure with fame and triumph as the prize. In this irresolute state he counted the hours as they dragged toward sunset, and he did some remarkably absent-minded things during the day, such as putting a pair of trousers on backward after his afternoon swim, and eating a whole plateful of the odious creamed mackerel known as “Gussie's Goo” for dinner, while his bunkmates regarded him incredulously. Herbie hunted up Cliff in the evening during letter-writing period and threw out veiled “feelers” about the difficulty and danger of the excursion, but Cliff persisted in talking calmly of other things. If he had had a change of heart, he was concealing it.