Shaking the Nickel Bush (19 page)

When I'd taken that eight-dollar sitting room I'd planned that I'd need it for no more than two days, but I had to keep it three, and I must have had the attorney up there a dozen times. With his applelike cheeks, smooth forehead, wrinkleless eyes, and nondescript nose, I could have modeled him without having him up there at all, except for his mouth. Try as I might, I couldn't shape it so it didn't come out with either a smirk or a sneer. The worst of it was that he'd have been satisfied with any one of a half dozen smirks I came up with, but I couldn't make myself leave them alone. That was one time when I was as eager to heave plaster at a model's face as Lonnie had ever been, but I could no more leave that mouth alone than I could fly to the moon. I must have made it over a hundred times before I gave up, took the clay model to our cheaper room, splashed on the mold, dried it, and let Lonnie pour in the plaster for the casting.

Altogether we were six days in El Paso before that bust was finished and ready for delivery, and it didn't help my feelings a bit that the little attorney liked it. He had a regular reception at his office for the “unveiling,” and the last thing I saw as I left was that durned plaster face with the mouth smirking at me. I delivered the bust at five o'clock in the afternoon, and an hour later Lonnie and I were rolling out of town, where there was plenty of space to sleep without paying hotel bills.

17

Ladies' Man Lonnie

T
HE cuff of my Levi's was empty when we left El Paso, and the roll of bills in my pocket was just about as big around as my thumb. But I thought I'd learned one lesson I'd never forget: big cities were places to go broke in, not to make money in—particularly since Lonnie had become a Beau Brummel and ladies' man. It had cost me five dollars a day spending money just to keep him out from under my feet. I'd foolishly established the rate that first day in Lordsburg, when I'd given him the five by mistake, and once he'd ascended to that standard of living I couldn't cut him down without breaking both his pride and his heart.

I had another lesson to learn, and it didn't take me long to learn it: isolated towns weren't too good for my new business either. The smaller the town—so long as it had a banker—the surer I was of getting a job, but if I took them one at a time, I'd be all winter in rebuilding the treasury in the cuff of my Levi's. From constant working with clay day after day, my eye had become sharp enough, and my fingers deft enough, that I could knock out any ordinary model in five or six hours. But even though I was lucky enough to have bright sunshine and a dry breeze, it required at least two more days for the mold and casting to dry enough that I could finish the job. Worse still, there was nothing for us to do—except to clean our saddles, practice throwing our ropes, or something like that—while we were waiting for the plaster to dry.

I made the mistake of doing an isolated job like that at the first town we struck north of El Paso. After his week of high living in the city, Lonnie was a pest. We were still within an hour's drive of El Paso, so he thought I should give him a fiver every day and let him go back to entertain his girl friends. Of course, I wouldn't, and I tried to ignore his pestering while I was shaping up the clay model, but it finally got on my nerves and I lost my temper.

“Your trouble is that you need work, and if I hear any more of this pestering you're going to get it,” I told him crossly. “I'll sell Shiftless and take in some old rattletrap in trade, then you'll have something to keep you out of my hair.”

Lonnie couldn't have been any more shocked and bewildered if he'd been listening to a judge pronounce his death sentence. “Jeepers Creepers, buddy!” he whispered. “You wouldn't do nothin' like that! She's our. . . . She's our. . . .”

“Our nothing!” I told him. “She's my flivver, and I'll do whatever I please with her. Since we struck Lordsburg you've blown in more than sixty dollars, playing big shot and ladies' man. I'm not squawking about the money; you had it coming to you, but I am squawking about your blowing it on the dames. It was your money; I wasn't going to tell you what you could do with it, but if you'd turned part of it on Shiftless you could say
our
flivver. As it is, you've nothing to say about what happens to her.”

Lonnie didn't get right down on his knees, but I was afraid he was going to. “Honest-a-God, buddy! Honest-a-God,” he told me; “I'd of turned every dime of it in if you'da said the word. Look, buddy! Look! I'll get me a job . . . washin' dishes, or anything. Honest, buddy, I ain't goin' to ask you for another dime out o' the business . . . not for nothin' . . . even makin's. Look, buddy, gi'me just one more week, will you? I'll promise you I'll. . . .”

Nobody could have stayed mad at Lonnie long, I least of all. “Okay,” I told him. “I won't sell her till you start pestering again, but the minute you do she's a goner. Why don't you go for a good long walk? This would be a cracking good day for a hike.”

Lonnie took off as though he were afraid I'd change my mind again, and when I went back to work on the model I couldn't help feeling sorry for the way I'd jawed at him. A walk for Lonnie would be just about as entertaining as pounding mud into a rat hole. And with all his talk about getting a job, how could he if we were going to keep running around from town to town while I hunted out bankers who would be flattered to have a marblelike bust of what I thought they might have looked like in their youth?

Although I'm sure Lonnie spent most of the day sitting in the shade of some bush, not more than half a mile from camp, he didn't come back till late afternoon—just soon enough to drive me into town for my client's okay on the clay model. But by that time I'd had a chance to do considerable thinking, and on the way back I told him, “We're going back to doing our business the way we did it in that little canyon west of Safford. We'll make camp at some place where there are at least half a dozen towns within twenty-five or thirty miles, then we'll spend a day getting jobs, and I'll have the customers bring their pictures to camp, and come back for the finished busts. In that way I'll have clay models to work on while the plaster molds and castings are drying, and if we can get orders enough I could turn out one a day. Your part of the business will be to tend camp, do all the cooking—except the gluten bread—and to drive me wherever I have to go. Then you'll get five bucks from each job. You can pay half the gas and grub bill, and do whatever you like with the rest of it. Is that a fair deal?”

Lonnie nearly let Shiftless run off the road as he hugged an arm around my neck and told me I was his buddy, but I couldn't help feeling guilty, for he thought we were going straight fifty-fifty. I'd never told him I got more than ten dollars for a bust—and I didn't have any intention of letting him find it out. If I did, and we split even, he'd only spend the money on girls, then we'd go broke if the bottom should fall out of our business.

Of course, I hadn't told Lonnie all my plans, but there was no need of that. No one had to tell me that we'd been lucky in the area around Safford. There I hadn't had to do any selling at all. Mabel had started the ball rolling for me, then one banker had told another, and all I'd done was to visit with my clients when they came to see me, collect twenty-five dollars and a tintype from each one, show him the clay model when it was ready, and deliver the plaster bust when he came back for it.

I couldn't expect that sort of luck everywhere we went, and I couldn't expect bankers to fork over twenty-five dollars before they'd seen my work, no matter how many letters of recommendation I might show them. I'd have to have a sample of my work to show, and I'd have to tell them there would be no payment required unless they were well pleased with the finished marblelike bust. There would be some risk that a finished piece might be refused, but I felt I could afford to take it, for I'd never made a likeness that didn't please my client. Even if I did have one or two finished busts refused, the lost time would be much more than made up by that saved in travel.

The thing that bothered me most was what I'd use for a sample. The first time I'd used a little horse's head, but it didn't seem like a good plan to show a banker a horse's head and tell him, “I could make one just like that of you.”

It wasn't until I began putting the mold plaster on the model I'd made that day that I got the right idea. I'd just put the first couple of flecks over the eyes and ears when Lonnie came hurrying toward me, calling, “Aw, buddy, leave me sling some of it at the old buzzard. I ain't had a chance to sock one of 'em since we left Safford.”

He socked to beat the band, and his face lit up like a sunrise as he whanged on one handful after another. I just watched his expression and let him keep right on until there wasn't a speck of clay showing, and by that time I knew I had just the right model for my sample—that is, if I could catch that expression a few times more, and was able to work it into the clay.

During the time we'd been in town Lonnie had seldom got up before ten o'clock, but the next morning he was up by sunrise. He had a fire built and the coffee water on to boil before I was up, and for the first time since I'd known him he washed the breakfast dishes. I didn't offer to help, but set an armature up in Shiftless's shadow, got out a big lump of clay, worked it pliable, and began blocking out a head and face. After Lonnie had finished with the dishes he spent an hour polishing Shiftless, but being very careful not to get in my way. Then he began scouting around through the brush and lugging in armfuls of firewood. By ten o'clock he had as much as we could have used in a week. He knew it as well as I did, but he was so anxious to show me he was carrying out his end of our deal that he kept right on lugging.

I didn't even look up at him when he passed me with an armful of wood. I didn't need to. I knew his face so well that I could almost have made a model of it with my eyes closed. And he didn't pay any attention to what I was doing either, until I'd gone about as far as I could without him. Then he called, “Jeepers, buddy, I didn't know you had another job ahead. Where'd you get it?”

“I found it last night,” I called back. “Come on over here.”

When Lonnie came over to see what I wanted I told him, “You're working too hard, buddy boy. Sit down and rest yourself awhile; I just had a bright idea, and we can talk about it while I'm fiddling with this thing.”

I knew better than to let him see the face I was working on, because he'd have recognized it as his own, and I knew better than to tell him I wanted him to pose for me, because I'd get everything in the world except the animated expression I wanted. The only way I could get that would be by keeping him entirely unselfconscious, and by telling him whatever was necessary to make him bubble with happiness at the time I needed it. So, as he slumped down in the shade of a bush near me, I turned the back of the model toward him and moved the box I was sitting on so I could see his face right beyond that of the model. I managed to get the animated expression every time I needed it, but sometimes I had to go nearly overboard to get it. The worst mistake I made was in telling him that if he could pay in the eighty-five dollars I'd originally paid for Shiftless before we reached Santa Fe, I'd have her taken out of my name entirely and registered in his.

When you're busy on something you like to do, or when you're listening to things you like to hear, hours go by as if they were minutes. When I'd started on the model that morning I'd told myself I was going to make the best sample I possibly could, but I forgot all about its being a sample as soon as Lonnie came over there. It couldn't have been more than half an hour before I noticed that the clay face was beginning to come alive—as Ivon's always were. I don't know where the time went from then on, but we never thought about lunch, and the sun was way over toward the western mountains when I said, “Take a look here, Lonnie, and see how you'd like to sling plaster in this old buzzard's face.”

We couldn't have had a better salesman than Lonnie's happy likeness. He was so proud of it that the animated look always came back to his face whenever I had him bring it in to show a banker, and I never failed to get an order after he'd shown it. Of course, I had to work out a system where he brought his bust in, showed it, and took it back out to Shiftless. Then I went on and made my deal with the client. They were all the same: a marblelike bust made from a picture taken at any age, and a payment of twenty-five dollars if it was satisfactory when completed.

There was only one part of my original plan that didn't work out. It wouldn't do for me to let two or more clients come to see me on the same day. I could do a good job only if I had my client come to see me in the morning, visited with him till I had every detail of his features and expressions in my mind, then went right to work on the clay model while the memory was still sharp and clear in my head. I never had but one refusal, and that was when I tried to carry three likenesses in my mind at the same time. I always took the pictures, but I looked at them only enough to be sure I was right on the combing of the hair, and whether or not to put on a mustache.

There were a dozen towns within thirty miles of our first central camp—between El Paso and Las Cruces—and there were three fifty-dollar bills in the cuff of my Levi's when we broke camp and headed on up the Rio Grande. Besides that, Lonnie had turned in forty dollars toward his ownership of Shiftless. For the next two days our road was on the west side of the Rio Grande, parallel to the Jornada del Muerto on the east side of the river—the Journey of Death on the Old Spanish Trail. We passed through four or five towns before we reached Socorro, one of them good sized, but we didn't stop because they were all isolated. We did have a little excitement though.

About halfway between Hot Springs and Socorro we saw a small band of horses grazing through the brush, over toward the San Mateo Mountains. They were less than a quarter mile from the road, and Lonnie and I got the same idea at the same time. We'd had our saddles and cowhand outfits for more than two months, but had never had a minute's use of them and—with the way things were going for the cowboy artists of the Southwest—it didn't seem as if we were apt to for some time. We'd barely come in sight of the horses when Lonnie let out a war whoop and shouted, “Let's go ride 'em, buddy!”

“One's enough for me, you ride the rest!” I yelled back, and Lonnie pulled off the road.

We'd been traveling in our cut-off jeans, so we had to change into our cowhand duds, but we put everything on, bandanna and all. While we were changing Lonnie told me, “'Member, buddy, how we caught that old cow Christmas Day? It'll be a cinch to catch horses the same way, only easier, 'cause this brush ain't so tall, and I can drive right on over it.”

If we hadn't yelled so loud when we first spied those horses we might have had better luck with them, but by the time we'd changed our clothes they'd drifted on another quarter mile. With me perched on the running board and lashed to a top iron, Lonnie took off across the desert with Shiftless bucking like a Brahma bull. He didn't turn out for anything until we were closing in behind the little band of racing horses, and I had to hold on so tight I could neither build a loop in my rope or get a decent look at the horses. When I got it I thought for a few seconds that it was going to be my last look at anything on earth. The band took a sudden turn to the left, and Lonnie forgot he was mounted on Shiftless instead of a horse. He turned her right on the heels of the frightened mustangs.