Me and Billy (6 page)

“What was his line?” Billy said.

“He had four or five things he could use, depending on how the land lay. His specialty was his Royal Wurtzburger Tonic. All-purpose thing, good for what ails you. Everybody feels low a good deal of the time, so an all-purpose tonic is likely to be a hit, for it takes in near everybody. But it wasn’t his line that counted, it was his spiel. When he got warmed up and was going good, people didn’t care what he was selling. They wanted to throw money at him. He’d of died a rich man if it wasn’t for his weakness.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Feeling sorry for people in trouble. His spiel was so powerful, he got to where he believed it himself. He started giving the tonic away to the needy and went broke.” The Professor shook his head. “You always got to fight off the temptation to do good.” He clapped his hands together. “Well, time’s a wasting. The first thing we need is a reliable source of water.” He sent us off into the woods to find a stream or a pond and fill up a couple of five-gallon cans. Then he set off for the little town of Sabbath. We found a stream, filled the cans, and came back and lay in the grass by the van, listening to the mules graze. I was feeling about as content as I ever felt in my life. I had a full belly and no pots and pans to scrub, for the only dish we’d used was the Professor’s barlow knife, and he’d wiped it off with a clump of grass.

But there was something bothersome about it. This Professor made Billy look like small change when it
came to lying and stealing. He was going to encourage Billy in exactly the wrong direction I wanted him to go. Billy was going to fit in with the whole thing like he was born to it. I leaned up on my elbow to look at him. He’d got a handkerchief over his eyes to keep the sun out and was getting ready to doze off.

“Billy, I want you to keep it in mind that we ran off from the Home to find that gold lake, not traipse around the countryside skinning people.”

He didn’t move anything but his mouth. “I knew you were going to start up with that, Possum. I just didn’t think it’d come so soon.”

“Well, just keep it in mind. We didn’t run off to skin people. I never agreed to that.”

He still didn’t move anything but his mouth. “What’s wrong with skinning people? It’s their own fault.”

“Why’s it their own fault?”

He took the handkerchief off his eyes and sat up. “Blame you, Possum, what’d you have to bring this up for? I was feeling comfortable as could be and starting to doze off.”

I lay back down. “Well, I know,” I said. “I’m feeling mighty comfortable myself. But you got to keep in mind what I said. I never agreed to skinning people.” He let out a phony snore so as to make his opinion of the matter clear, and we dozed off.

We woke up when the Professor came back from town. “I’m glad to see you two was alert and guarding the van from crooks.”

“We weren’t asleep,” Billy said. “We were just resting our eyes from the sun.”

“That’s why I didn’t hardly have to raise my voice above a roar to get you to open them up,” he said.

“We couldn’t help it,” I said. “Anyone would of fallen asleep after what we did last night.”

“Keep it in mind next time.”

“What was the town like?” Billy said.

The Professor frowned. “I asked around. Bad luck. There hasn’t been any considerable sickness for a spell, and the livestock is all healthy. You can usually count on finding trouble of some kind anyplace you go, but I couldn’t turn up any in Sabbath. It’s mighty provoking to find people without troubles.”

“Maybe we could make them sick some way,” Billy said. “I reckon if you mixed up a good dose of kerosene, shoe polish, and onion salts, you’d make them sick pretty quick.”

“Yes, that’s the right idea, Billy—poison them. But how’re you going to get them to swaller enough of it down?”

I hoped they weren’t going to try that, for I didn’t see how I could go along with poisoning people. Luckily, the Professor decided against it. “Trouble is, if someone died they might get suspicious. No, I’ll have to think of something else.” He began to whistle “The
Old Oaken Bucket” and went off into the van. We could hear him rummaging around in there, and after a bit he came out carrying a small packet. “Here’s something that might do.” He opened the packet and took out a stack of small labels. Printed on them was a picture of a dog and the words
Thurman’s All-Purpose Elixir Formula for Diseases of the Internal Organs.
“You see, boys. It covers most everything but a busted leg or itchy scalp.”

“What’s the dog for?” I said.

“They were meant for dog medicine. The fella that ordered them never came to pick them up, and I took them off the printer’s hands for fifty cents.”

“Won’t they get suspicious when they see the dog?” Billy said.

“We’ll explain that the elixir makes you healthy as a dog. That’s a familiar saying—healthy as a dog.”

“I never heard it before,” I said.

“Well you have now,” the Professor said. “After I spiel on it awhile, it’ll be familiar enough, around Sabbath, leastwise. All right, where’s them water cans?”

We dragged them out in front of the van, and he set to work mixing the elixir, adding a little kerosene here, a little mustard powder there, a dose of red pepper, a dollop of gunpowder, dipping his finger in now and again to taste it. Finally he was satisfied. “There. Take a taste of that, boys. You never tasted anything like it in your lives.”

Billy dunked his finger in and sucked it off. “Wow,” he said, and spit. “Phew. It tastes like something died in there.”

“I told you it was remarkable stuff.”

I dipped my finger in but was more cautious and just gave the finger a little lick. It was awful stuff, all right. “Professor, I don’t think anyone could choke down more than a spoonful of that stuff without heaving.”

He squinted and took a little taste himself. “Hmmm. Maybe you’re right, Possum. That’s my problem. I got an artistic nature and can’t rest on a thing until I pushed it to the limit. I guess I better toss in a couple more quarts of water.” He shook his head, kind of rueful. “Hate to dilute it, though, when I got it so near to perfection.”

We spent a couple of hours filling little jars with the elixir and pasting the labels on the jars. Then the Professor spruced us up as good as he could—made us wash our faces and hands in the stream, tuck in our shirts, smooth out our hair with our fingers—and gave us a stack of handbills. They said:

NOTED PROFESSOR ALBERTO SANTINI, SAVANT OF THE HEALING ARTS FINAL TOUR BEFORE DEPARTURE FOR THE COURTS OF EUROPE WHERE HIS MEDICAL WIZARDRY HAS SAVED THE LIVES OF PRINCES

At the bottom he’d inked in, “2
PM, COURTHOUSE SQUARE, ONE APPEARANCE ONLY.
”

“Get out of town fast; that’s the general idea,” he explained. “All right, go on into town and stick ’em up everywhere.” He gave us a paste pot and a brush, and we went into town.

He was right about it being a one-horse town. There was nothing to it but the main street with the usual shops—butcher, notions, grain-and-feed store with three farmers sitting on the loading platform chewing straw—a couple of churches that needed paint; and down at the end of the street, Courthouse Square. Except there wasn’t any courthouse there, just an empty lot with a couple of cows grazing in it.

There weren’t hardly any human beings around, either—three or four people ambling along the wooden sidewalk, a couple of shopkeepers standing in their doorways with their arms folded. They were outnumbered by the dogs snoozing in the dusty street.

We began sticking up the handbills where we could. I wondered if someone would try to stop us, but the only person who paid us any attention was the barber standing in the door of the barbershop. As we came by, he stepped out in front of us. “Lemme see one of them,” he said. Billy gave him a handbill. “What’s this here about? I can’t read too good without my glasses.”

“Professor Alberto Santini,” Billy said. “He’s a genius. He cured the king of France of the plague in fifteen minutes. All the doctors over there in France couldn’t touch it, no matter what they tried.”

The barber squinted at Billy. “I thought they didn’t have a king in France no more. I thought they cut off his head awhile back.”

“That’s right,” Billy said. “This was before, when he still had his head on. The Professor waltzed in there, had him stick out his tongue, roll his eyes back, and such. ‘It’s a real hard case,’ he told everybody that was standing around. ‘But I got just the thing for it. Thurman’s All-Purpose Elixir.’ He gave the king a shot of it, and about fifteen minutes later he was getting dressed up to go to a dance.”

I stood there with my mouth falling open and my eyes wide. I knew Billy. He wasn’t dumb, and he was generally pretty quick to come up with a story when he had to. But I’d never heard him pull anything as smart as this. Of course he’d got the idea of putting in a king from the handbill, where it said the Professor was headed for the courts of Europe. Still, it was pretty smart; I had to admire him for it.

“Keep the handbill,” Billy said. “If you know of anybody who’s suffering, tell them they’d be a fool to miss out on a chance like this.”

I decided to cut in before Billy carried it too far. “Is that really Courthouse Square down there?” I said, pointing. “We didn’t see any courthouse.”

“There ain’t any,” the barber said, and spit. “There ain’t any library on Library Lane, nor any railroad on Railroad Street. That was just to fool folks when the speculators set the town up back thirty years ago.
There was going to be a courthouse, library, grand hotel. You’d of thought they was moving the state capital out here.” Then he looked us over. “I don’t suppose either of you fellas wants a shave. I’ll do it for ten cents each, seeing as you ain’t got anything to shave.”

But even at ten cents it was more than we could afford. So we said we had to get the handbills up and would maybe come back later. We walked off down the street, and when we were out of the barber’s hearing I said, “Billy, I got to hand it to you. I never heard anything so smart. Where’d you get all that stuff?”

He grinned. “It was pretty good, wasn’t it? It just came out. I guess I got a knack for this business. Here I’ve been telling lies all my life for nothing, just giving ’em away. Now I’m going to get paid for ’em. I’m rising up from amateur to professional, you might say.”

He was mighty proud of himself, and it got me to thinking. Back there in the Home there wasn’t any right or wrong to anything. It was them against us. If you gave it any thought, which nobody did, you’d have a hard time figuring out who was in the wrong. But I was beginning to wonder if it might be different out here. Maybe there was a right and wrong to it now. There wasn’t much point in talking it over with Billy, though, so I said, “Billy, you ought to drop the king of France out of it. They cut off his head a long time ago. The Professor couldn’t of saved him, unless he was way over a hundred now.”

Billy frowned. “Well, all right. Next time I’ll make it the king of England.”

“They don’t have a king, either. They got a queen.”

“Blame you, Possum, you’re taking all the fun out of it. Who’s going to know if they got a king or a queen?”

“A lot of people, I reckon. You’d best make it the Queen of England, or else the king of someplace nobody ever heard of, like Utopia.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I read about it in a book, so it’s got to be somewhere.”

We finished off the handbills and went back to the van. After that there was nothing much to do but loaf around and finish off the food wrapped in the oilcloth. We were good and tired and turned in as soon as it got dark.

In the morning the Professor got out a cloth sign saying:

PROFESSOR ALBERTO SANTINI SAVANT OF
THE HEALING ARTS

We helped him rig it up across the front of the van. Then he said, “I don’t suppose either of you fellas is any good at singing and dancing.”

“I can sing a little,” I said. I could sing better than Billy, anyway. “But they didn’t have a whole lot of dancing at the Home.”

“Play the banjo?”

We shook our heads. “I figured as much. Well, we’ll have to do the best we can.” He went into the van, rummaged around a little, and came out with a horn and a couple of white nightshirts with all sorts of strange designs in green on them—flashes of lighting, a scale, a snake, dice. “Here, put these on. I got to make a grand entrance. Got to impress these here hicks. Billy, you know how to drive a mule?”

“Some,” he said. He didn’t have the faintest idea of mules, but he wasn’t going to miss out on his chance. It was just like I feared: he saw he was cut out for this business and wanted to get in on everything. I could tell the Professor saw it, too, and would encourage Billy in it.

“All right, Billy. You climb up there and drive us into town.” He handed me the horn. “Possum, you go along in front blowing on this horn. When we get into town, pull up in Courthouse Square and circulate among the throng, passing out handbills.”

He climbed into the van, and off we went, me tooting out a kind of rusty noise on that horn, and Billy cursing and shouting at the mules, which had a habit of stopping every five minutes to snatch a bite of tasty dandelions. Every time they did that, the Professor would shout from inside the van, “Give them a lick with the whip, Billy. I thought you said you could handle mules.” But Billy didn’t know any more about handling a whip than he did mules, and he spent half
the time tangled up in it when he wasn’t poking himself in the eye with the butt end.

We came into town. I felt like a fool in that nightshirt, making rusty noises on that horn, but luckily there weren’t all that many people around—not what you’d call a throng. We went on down the main street and into Courthouse Square. There wasn’t much of a throng here, either—about six or eight farmers in overalls and straw hats clustered on the sidewalk. Luckily, just as we got abreast of them, the mules stopped of their own accord. Billy wiped off his face with the hem of his nightshirt, and then we went amongst the people passing out the handbills. That entertainment lasted about three minutes. We went back to the van and stood side by side, trying to look like we knew what we were doing. I felt as foolish as could be and kept blushing, which made things even worse. I wished the Professor would hurry up and come out so’s there wouldn’t be so much attention on us, but he took his time. Pretty soon a couple more people drifted over, then two or three more, until the crowd had got up to fifteen or twenty.