The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (44 page)

The balloon holders were divided into teams, like contestants in an unequal spelling bee, Oxygens on one side, Hydrogens, two to one, on the other.

“Now then, when I say ‘Go!'” said Prof. Simms, “the first of you Oxygens and the first two of you Hydrogens let go of your balloons, and you”—turning to the rifleman—“hold your fire until I tell you, then as quick as you can, bust all three balloons. Don't miss any or we'll get the wrong proportions. Go!”

Three balloons, a blue one, a red one, and a yellow one, soared aloft. The cross-eyed youth raised the rifle to his shoulder, blinking at the glare, wetting his lips. Up, up, the balloons soared, smaller and smaller. The rifleman licked his lips more rapidly. At last:

“Fire!” said the Professor.

Three cracks: three clean hits. The balloons disappeared. Tatters of colored rubber fluttered to earth.
Go! Fire! Go! Fire!
So for the next half hour. The kids were diverted, but as for their parents and grandparents, they turned their faces up, observed the bursts high overhead, then looked down, looked at him to see what was coming next. There was not a smile among them, not even a kindling of interest, just patience, stolid, dumb, unimaginative patience. Not that they were skeptical. On the contrary, with these people a problem different from the one he was used to coping with began to disclose itself to Prof. Simms. Folks generally had to be convinced that he could make it rain; these were going to have to be convinced that he couldn't. Prof. Simms felt a moment's panic. He had put down his toe and found that he was swimming in depths of gullibility over his head.

Prof. Simms next brought out his rockets. The first of these was launched at half past ten. It burst with a satisfying bang, placing a puff of white smoke high above, the only thing visible in the vast, empty sky. He sent up, at a dollar and thirty cents apiece, two dozen of them. As each went off he studied the upturned faces. Ordinarily a fireworks display tickled them so they forgot everything else; when they remembered, and realized that in fact no rain had fallen (by which time he was in the neighboring county), they said, well, he had put on a dern good show, that alone was worth the price. But though fireworks must have been a rarer event in their lives than in most, this crowd could think of just one thing. Dynamite, balloons, rockets: all this excitement they had had, and still they stood there solemn as a convention of cigar-store Indians, waiting for rain. He had, however, one trick left: a performance on Old Magnet. If that didn't get them, nothing would.

Magnet, the
pièce de résistance
of his act, was an invention, rather a collage, of Prof. Simms's own. Ordinarily Old Magnet had merely to make her appearance for somebody in the crowd to declare, “'Fore God!” or words to that effect, “Would you just look a-here what's coming now! I George, Sam, if that contraption can't make it rain, be about the only thing it can't do, won't it? Sounds,” the speaker was apt to observe, as soon as Prof. Simms began fiddling with the dials, “like she's clearing her throat to get ready to say something.” Which in fact she once did. Suddenly remembering her long-dormant, not to say dead, function, she brought in station KRLD, Dallas, and gave out five whole minutes of Chicago cotton and grain futures before she could be tuned out. However, an early-model battery-set radio was merely a part of Old Magnet. Above a bank of switches like the manual of an organ were arrayed needle gauges, fuses, the works from a telephone box, the exposed coil from a Model-T Ford, more vacuum tubes, an electrical rheumatism cure, and a great deal more junk the origin of which Prof. Simms himself did not know. Leading off all this was a long coil of wire attached to a large horseshoe magnet.

For, as Prof. Simms explained—unless there was somebody in the audience to do it for him, and generally there was: some know-it-all who would save him the necessity of a further lecture, and to whom the Professor would listen with a quizzical brow and a half smile, although if there were not, as here, he employed the same explanation himself—it was your magnetism that drew all your other elements together. That charged your dust particles and made them draw your atoms of oxygen and hydrogen and form your drops which your clouds then soaked up. For a cloud was nothing more nor less than a sort of sponge, as you might say, a dry sponge looking for some water. There were your clouds (they still hung there, unmoving, not a breath of wind to stir them, hardly a breath of breath); your dust and your oxygen and your hydrogen were there. Now the thing was, to send up some magnetism. If that didn't do it …

Well, if that didn't do it, then the only thing to say was, there were times and places when all the advancements of science were to no avail. Time to begin to take the moral approach, or rather reproach. Half jokingly now, to be borne down on harder a little later on. But as of now to say, “Well, if what we're about to do next don't turn the trick, then it's for you folks to say why, not me. I don't know what you all have been up to, but if the Good Lord is displeased with you—and that's about the only thing I can think of to explain a sky like that after all we've done—why then you realize, of course, that Albert Einstein himself if he was here couldn't make it rain. It's for you all to say why He is down on you; but till you folks make it right with the Lord, why, I'm just wasting my time and talents. When all's said and done, He's the one that's got His hand on the hydrant, you know.”

To this, as to everything else, they listened without so much as nodding their heads—never even scratched them. Even that little boy in the slicker, following at his heels as he played the wire off the coil to the base of the windmill, just gaped solemnly at him.

An assistant from the audience was instructed in what order to throw the switches once Prof. Simms was on top of the windmill. He stood at the base of it, the horseshoe tucked into his belt, the wire trailing from him, looking up at the fan. Prof. Simms disliked heights, and he never failed at this point to think, surely there must be a better way than this to make a living. Taking a deep breath, he commenced hauling himself up the rungs of the tall, narrow ladder.

Just beneath the fan blades a narrow platform ran around the derrick. Standing on this platform the Professor signaled to his assistant down on the ground. Grasping the derrick with one hand, with the other he pointed the magnet out into space. Hardly was the last switch thrown when over the horizon appeared a huge black cloud.

“Great God!” gasped Prof. Simms.

Recovering himself at once, he said, “Don't be a fool, like those down on the ground, Orville.”

But even as he said this the cloud doubled in size. “If you didn't know better,” said Prof. Simms, “blessed if you wouldn't almost believe there was something in it.” And despite himself a small shudder of fear, of awe ran through him—fear of, awe of himself.

Meanwhile the people down on the ground had not yet seen his cloud. He leaned as far out from the derrick as he safely could, holding out his magnet. Slowly he drew it back to his chest. Be damned if the cloud didn't leap to follow it! He repeated the gesture: again the cloud raced nearer as if in response. “Well! If this don't beat anything I ever saw!” said Prof. Simms.

Now the people down below saw it. Heads snapped around in that direction and fingers pointed and even up on his perch Prof. Simms heard the universal intake of breath. Three or four times more he repeated his gesture of drawing the cloud on with his magnet, and each time it leaped obediently to follow. The whole sky in that direction, from the ground up to the dome, was now solid black.

A gust of wind whipped his face, followed by another which shook the derrick and turned the fan blades over a couple of revolutions. Prof. Simms looked down. “There! That ought to satisfy you!” he said. He laughed to see them scurrying for shelter down below, drawing their jackets over their heads, whipping up the teams of their wagons, some diving underneath the wagonbeds. He had not long to gloat, however; a blast of wind shivered the derrick, very nearly plucking him off. The fan blades spun. He decided to climb down. He put his foot on the first rung of the ladder, looked down, and saw nothing. People, wagons, his own van, the base of the windmill, everything had disappeared. At that moment he got an eyeful of dust. In another moment all thought of getting down was put out of his mind by the blast.

And there, like a possum up a persimmon tree, clinging for dear life, while the derrick shook and shuddered and the dust came at him like a sandblast and the fan blades whirred like an airplane propeller, his eyes squeezed shut, the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs spent the next twenty-four hours.

At the end of that time, when the wind had died and over everything had settled a Pompeian silence, Prof. Simms ventured down to reconnoiter. Halfway down he still could not see the ground. At that point he paused to listen. It was then that he noticed for the first time the smell, like a freshly surfaced asphalt road; but hearing no sound, he figured they were all still indoors or in the storm cellar, unaware that the storm had stopped, and that this was the moment to make his break. So he went down farther. Then he saw them. They were squatting around the base of the derrick waiting for him like a party of hunters waiting for a treed coon to come down. Like himself, they wore bandanas over their faces, only to them it lent the sinister look of a band of vigilantes. Halting in his descent, he called down, “Well, I told you all I never guaranteed anything, didn't I?”

No one responded. They didn't even look up. In the silence he heard the familiar whimper of a dog. That smell he had noticed earlier rose more sharply on the still air. Like asphalt, or like a new telephone pole, freshly creosoted. He saw a fire; on it an oil drum steamed. The society below, he now noticed, was exclusively male. He scampered hastily back up the ladder four or five rungs. “Dern it!” he cried. “Whose idea was this anyhow, yawl's or mine?” He clambered back up into the protective gloom and to that rung of the ladder he clung for another hour, calling down from time to time, “Maybe yawl would like a refund? Hey? What do you say to that? Maybe yawl would like a refund, hey?”

IV

When Simms woke up in Texas he thought at first that he was still asleep and having nightmares. All around him for as far as the eye could stretch stood windmills thick as trees. He closed his eyes with a shudder, opened them and looked again. They were still there, but now he noticed that they lacked fans. Not windmills, then: oil-well derricks.

After breakfast, at which he was reunited with Samson, his dog, and after plucking Samson of his feathers, Simms drove down the road to the first gas station and general store he came to. Along the porch sat half a dozen men. Simms thought he had seen ignorant, backwoods, gate-mouthed, dull-eyed faces in Oklahoma, and before that in Arkansas, but here … Well, he was about ready to restore the sign on his truck. Memories of Arrowhead braked that thought. But before he knew it he had asked, “Been this dry hereabouts for a good spell, has it?”

“Dry? Mister, ‘dry' don't cover it. They haven't invented the word yet for the weather we been having.”

“Crops all burnt up, are they?” asked Simms, trying to look sympathetic and not grin.

“Ain't much left in the way of crops around here.”

“Folks having to haul water, are they?”

“If they are I just wish you'd tell me where they're finding it.”

“Ain't nobody much trying to raise crops around here no more. Folks in this section have done all give up fanning just about.”

“How much rainfall you folks had this year?”

“Oh, Lord, Mister, we done all just about forgot what rain looks like, ain't that right, O.B.? When do you reckon was the last time we seen rain?”

“Well, let's see. I remember it was raining when my wife was fixing to have our last boy. The last boy, that is, not the girl. And only yesterday she had to warsh his mouth out with soap for using dirty talk. He's precocious, still that'll give you some idea.”

“What did she use for water?” asked one of the others.

“Wellsir,” said a third, “I have paid up to six bits a pint for it right on the streets of Delco. R. D. Blair, that's got that deep artesian well, why my godamighty he's made more money off of that thing than most men has off of oil wells. I've seen bottled water go for twenty-five cents one of them little bitty old Dixie cups full. It's got so around here we dilute our water with whiskey, stranger. Costs too derned much to drink it straight.”

“Is it water you're talking about? Selling drinking water on the streets? In bottles? In paper cups? Like soda pop?”

“Naw, sir, not like soda pop. Soda pop don't cost but two bits a bottle. And if you take my advice you'll keep away from it. Won't nothing raise a thirst like a bottle of that damn pop. Worse than salted peanuts.”

“Well! I thought I'd seen dry sections of the country before, but this sure beats them all.”

“Yes, Lord, I reckon the man that comes up with a way to turn crude oil into drinking water will make him a killing here in Texas.”

“I hear they're fixing to bring it out in powdered form soon now.”

“Fixing to bring what out in powder form, Gus?”

“Water. Powdered water. Dehydrated. When you're ready to use it you take and mix it with a little water. They say it makes a pretty fair substitute. Tastes a little flat, they say, but does all right for mixing.”

“Lord, what won't they think of next, eh?”

It was true what those men said, people thereabouts had all given up farming; but drought was not their reason. They did not need to farm, not with oil wells pumping away in front and back yards and stretching away over former cotton fields for as far as a man could see. If they needed water it was not for the sake of their crops. They could use some to float those cabin cruisers in the one-time lakes that Simms passed. A bit for an occasional bath, maybe, and to water their flowerbeds. Mainly to wash those big Cadillacs and Packards and Pierce-Arrows that stood, sometimes double-parked, outside their cabin doors. They could pay for it, too, as no dirt farmer worried about his crops and his thirsty livestock could ever afford to pay. So in the hardware store in Delco, Simms said to the clerk, “Housepaint. Want some housepaint. Gimme a gallon of the white, quart of red, quart of yellow, quart of blue, and a pint-size can of aluminum. Don't bother to wrap them.”