The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (33 page)

When, aged twelve, I accidentally opened our family skeleton cupboard one day and discovered hidden therein the fact that I myself had Indian blood, I at first did not know which to be, overjoyed or infuriated. I felt like the changeling prince in the storybook must have felt on discovering his true birthright, and discovering simultaneously that he had been done out of it, stolen and brought up by peasants as a peasant. I reproached my kin for having kept me in ignorance of this most important fact of my heritage. I begged for further knowledge. They seemed to know little and to care less. She was a Cherokee or a Choctaw, no one was sure which, and the man who had brought her into the family was dismissed as the squaw man. Possibly even she had been a half-breed (they seemed to prefer to think so), and so my share was only about one sixteenth, an amount to which most everybody in Oklahoma would probably have to own. Better just forget it, they said. Family matters, they seemed to be telling me, were best kept in the family. I vowed that when I grew up I would join a tribe and become an Indian.

Well, I grew up, all right, and in the process I lost my desire to become an Indian. Dirty pigs! My God, a white man may be poor, but if he's got any self-respect at all, he keeps himself clean, at least. They haven't got bathtubs? No running water? We never had, either. We toted the water in by the bucketful from the cistern, heated it in kettles and pots on the range, bathed in a number-three washtub on the kitchen floor. But we bathed. Every Saturday night. When we got done, and Mama got done reaming out our ears, and we stepped out, the water in that tub looked like blood, like a hog had been scraped in it, from that red Oklahoma dirt. We might have been poor, but we were always clean.

And poor as we were, we held on to our morals. We got pretty hungry, too; but we never stole, nor let our children thieve right out of the store bins in town. We'd have starved sooner than do that. And sooner than see our daughters and our sisters do what some of those Indian girls did for money, we'd have killed them first.

You can't help people that won't help themselves: that's another thing I learned in growing up. You've got to have ambition. Whenever we got a dollar ahead, we didn't come into town with it and buy a quart of white lightning from some bootlegger in a back alley, get drunk and go crazy and start taking the place apart, wind up in jail with a head caved in from the constable's billy club, no use to ourselves or our families for the next thirty days. Indians just can't hold their liquor? In that case they ought to let it alone. I've heard it said they drink because they're downhearted. Because they've had it rough. Had a raw deal. We've all had it rough. We've all had a raw deal. But did we sit around moping about it forevermore? We bettered ourselves.

And just how rough did they have it when it was really rough all over? Living out there on the reservation all through '31, '32, '3, '4 on a steady government dole? Not much of a dole? Well, it was more than we got—and we paid taxes! They never had to worry that the bank was going to come around one day and say, “Well, Ed, old friend, you've been here a long time, and I hate to have to say it, but looks like you'll have to get off, you and your wife and kids.” Best landlord in the world, good old Uncle Sam!

An Indian won't work. And don't give me none of that stuff about not having incentive. The answer to that argument is here: in 1935 a law was passed that the tribes could no longer hold the reservation lands in common (which is socialism) but it had to be divided up and parceled out among the members. The idea was to drag them into the twentieth century. Give them some incentive. Teach them what it means to a man to own his own little plot of ground, and to want to increase it, come up in the world. To weed out the freeloaders and give the real hustlers a chance to rise to the top of the heap. Did those lazy, good-for-nothing Indians work that land any harder when it was their own? They did not.

Now 1935, the year that law was passed, just happened to be the year when oil was first brought in around our section. I am not saying there was any connection; but once each Indian owned his own piece of land he was free to sell it if he had a mind to, not be told by the tribal council that the land didn't belong to him, couldn't be traded. And how do you suppose they spent the money they got for the sale of their land? Well, I got my share. If they didn't have any better sense than to spend it with me, that was their lookout. They wanted what I had to sell, and if I hadn't taken their money, there were plenty more who would have.

I had set up in business for myself in '33. I had the local distributorship for Cadillac. As you can just imagine, a man was not getting rich selling Cadillacs to Oklahoma tenant farmers in 1933 and '4. But all of a sudden the smart alecks who wouldn't let me in on the small family cars just a year or so before were all laughing out of the other sides of their mouths. For when a redneck who has followed a plow all his life lays down the traces and picks up a fortune in oil one day, he don't want him no Ford nor Chevrolet, he wants him a
car
—the longest, fastest, gaudiest thing on wheels. And there was I, with just what he was after. “The car you never thought you'd own”—that was my motto.

I sold them with all accessories already on. Radio and heater, chrome tailpipe, Venetian blinds, seats upholstered in leopard, zebra, spotted calf. The only thing that was optional was the steer horns on the radiator grille. I stocked Cadillacs in fire-engine red, oyster white, sky blue; but my hottest number of all was a bile yellow that sharpened your teeth like the smell of a sour pickle. That was the wagon that really got the braves from off the reservation.

Some people—especially those on whose own farmsteads one after another dry hole had been drilled—were complaining in those days that the Indians had been given all the oil-rich land. Others were not just sitting on their hands and howling, they were busy buying the redskins out. Some of those Indians sold out without even waiting for a drilling sample. Show them a few thousand dollars and that was all they needed to see—especially if they were seeing double. Others were told yes, no doubt about it, there was certainly oil lying under their land. But who knew how much? It might turn out to be a million barrels, and then again, it might not. It was a gamble, either way, but a bird in the hand … And there was I, or one of my men, before the ink on their
X
was dry—in line, I might add, with the Packard, the Buick, and the Pierce-Arrow dealers.

And then, a few months later, after they had run out of money to buy gas to put in them, or after they had driven them without any oil in the crankcase, you might see on a country road one of those Packards or Pierce-Arrows or Cadillacs hitched to a team of mules with the brave sitting on the hood on a blanket holding the reins, while inside, with the windows all rolled up regardless of the heat, sat the squaw and the papooses. Drive on a little farther down that same road, and you were apt to pass three or four more big-model automobiles upside down in the ditch or crumpled against telegraph poles.

But for running through cars, the Indian I am going to tell about holds the record.

One day one of my salesmen brought in a prospect known to everybody around town as John. If he had a second name, I had never heard it. John had sold out that very morning. Not being a very convivial sort, even in his cups, John had held out for and had gotten nine thousand dollars—plus a second bottle—out of the men who bought him out. He was a big buck with a face like a stone on the bottom of a creek, flat and featureless, and just as full of smiles. Underneath his arm, the one without the bottle, he carried a bundle wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine, which I knew to recognize. They always insisted on cash, and they wanted it always in ten-dollar bills, possibly because those of larger denomination did not look like money to them, and a ten really did.

Our demonstrator was one of those yellow dogs, and my man had brought John in, at around eighty-five miles per hour, in it. That was what he wanted, and he wanted it now. I had sitting out back some three dozen jalopies and homemade pickups cut down from old passenger sedans and coupés and touring cars—Stars, Moons, and so help me, one Marmon V-16. I had buggies, I had buckboards, I had I don't know how many wagons, I had me about half the mules in that county, for I'd seen booms before and I'd seen busts, too, and I was hedging against the day when they would need those wagons and teams again; I drew the line only at travois. On this deal, though, I wasn't going to have to take any trade-in.

I had on the showroom floor one exactly the same, but no, John here wanted that demonstrator. She had a few thousand miles on the speedometer, and I supposed he wanted that particular car, thinking he would get a little something off on the price. Little was what he would get, all right; but I was prepared to powwow. However, John did not want to bargain. He wanted that car the way he might have wanted a particular woman for a squaw and not her twin sister. He had seen what the one could do. I took his parcel from him (this had to be done cautiously—no sudden movements—like taking a bone from a dog), untied the string, and counted out four hundred and twenty ten-dollar bills. I told him that was what I wanted for my automobile. John studied the stack I had made for a time, then he stacked the rest alongside and studied the two of them. After he had my car he would still have more money than I would have. With a grunt, he pushed the smaller stack towards me. The bottle, too. To close the deal I had to drink with him.

While I was drawing up the bill of transfer, the salesman took the customer out for his driving lesson. This was a little service I offered, free of charge. They were gone about half an hour. When they returned, Doyle—Doyle Gilpin, my star salesman, himself part Kiowa—had a big purple knot over one eye. John
X
-ed the contract where I showed him to and I turned his ignition key over to him. I counted out to Doyle his commission, locked the money in the strongbox, locked the strongbox in the safe, and went to the show window to watch. The other salesmen, the parts-department man, and the mechanics from back in the shop all came out and joined us. These performances were always a sketch.

To see that Indian come up on that automobile was worth the price of a ticket. He carried the key hidden behind his back, as if it were a halter, and Doyle swore he was talking to that automobile under his breath all the while he sidled up to it, to coax it into standing still. Though he had been behind the wheel for his driving lesson, old habit was strong, and now he did not come at her from the driver's side because, unlike a white man, an Indian mounts a horse from the right. He stood stroking the door panel for a minute, then opened the door, saw he was on the off side, nodded to himself, shut the door, and, holding on to her all the while, made his way around the front end—never go behind them: that's where they can kick you.

“You say he claims to know how to drive?” I asked Doyle.

“Ugh,” Doyle quoted.

It didn't look like it. He sat for the next five minutes behind the wheel doing nothing at all. “Hellfire,” I said, “he don't even know how to switch it on. Go out there and show—”

But John had known all along what to do; he had been just sitting there enjoying himself, like not wanting to put the match to a new brier pipe for savoring that never-to-be-recaptured moment of unused, fresh, factory-smelling ownership. The car John never thought he'd own for sure was his. They will tell you an Indian never smiles, but I have yet to see the one who doesn't when he switches on the ignition of his own new yellow Cadillac for the first time.

He put his foot on the accelerator and raced the motor up to where it sounded like a power saw, while we inside all winced. That was the one thing that used to bother me; I do hate to see a fine piece of machinery misused by falling into the wrong hands. Then he let out the clutch, or rather jerked his foot off of it, and away he went. He was right about that car: it bucked, it pitched, it snorted, it pawed, it leaped like—and in his hands, it was—a horse—an outlaw, a cayuse.

“Now you know,” said Doyle, “how I got this bump on my head.”

“Didn't you show him how to ease his foot off the clutch so as to keep that from happening?”

“Yeah, I showed him. He don't want to keep it from happening. That's the part he likes.”

Now he rode her to earth. The gears meshed, and with a sound like satin ripping, he was off, discovering the horn in the process. And for the next hour he raced up and down Main Street, chasing pedestrians up onto the sidewalks, running up on them himself, slamming on his brakes, sitting on the horn, and letting the clutch out fast and bucking like a bronco. The town constable, with a little urging from us car dealers, was not opposed to letting the boys enjoy themselves a little with their new cars, so long as nobody got hurt. There had been complaints about it in the beginning, just as the bankers had complained when pressure was put on them not to open accounts for the Indians; but just as the bankers came to realize that it was better for them as well to keep that money in circulation, so people generally came to realize that what was good for trade was good for the town as a whole. By about the time they had run through their complimentary three gallons of gas, the constable would tell them that was enough, and to go do their racing out on the country roads.

John, however, did not wait to be told. After a time he began to want company and tried to pick up a passenger, but nobody would ride with him. He invited Will Tall Corn, but Will just shook his head. Will's boy Henry was one of two friends to whom I had sold identical convertibles just a short while before, who, to settle a dispute the following week, ran them at one another head on from a distance of half a mile; that settled it, all right. Piqued that nobody would ride with him, John gunned out of town, going past my place and raising a cloud like a dust storm.