Bad Characters Read online

  Evangelist Gerlash gave his daughter a sharp look. And, flustered, she stammered, “I mean, owing to the outstanding nature of Gerlash’s information, the price of this invaluable book is a mere nothing. The truth in this book will stick and mark you forever.”

  “You want this book bad, don’t you, sister Emily Vanderpool?” asked her father. “You are a good girl, and good girls are entitled to have this book, which is jam-packed with answers to the questions that have troubled you for years. You can’t tell me your mammy and pappy are so mean that they wouldn’t give their little girl a quarter for Gerlash on the Bible. Why don’t you skedaddle over to home and get the small sum of twenty-five cents off your Christian ma?” He opened his notebook and checked my address. “Over to 125 Belleview Avenue.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Opal. “I could eat me a horse.”

  “Never mind you being hungry,” said her father, with a note of asperity in his mushy voice. “Don’t you doubt me, sister Vanderpool,” he went on, “when I tell you your innocent life is in danger. Looky here, when I got a call to go and enlighten the children of darkness in Mangol, just down the line from here, I got that call like a clap of thunder and I knew I couldn’t waste no time. I went and I studied every den of vice in the city limits and some outside the city limits. It’s bad, sister. For twenty-five cents, you and your folks can be prepared for when the Mangolites come a-swarming into this town.” He glanced again at his notebook. “While you’re getting the purchase price of my book, please ask your pure-hearted mother if I might have the loan of her garage to preach the word of God in. Are you folks centrally located?”

  “My brother’s got his skunk skins drying in it,” I said. “You couldn’t stand the smell.”

  “Rats!” said Evangelist Gerlash crossly, and then sternly he said, “You better shake a leg, sister. This book is offered for a limited time only.”

  “I can’t get a quarter,” I said. “I already owe her twenty cents.”

  “What’re you going to have for supper?” asked Opal avidly. “I could eat a bushel of roasting ears. We ain’t had a meal in a dog’s age—not since that old handout in Niwot.”

  “Alas, too true,” said her father. “Do you hear that, my sister Emily? You look upon a hungry holy man of God and his girl who give to the poor and save no crust for himself. Fainting for the want of but a crumb from the rich man’s groaning board, we drive ourself onwards, bringing light where there is darkness and comfort where there is woe. Perhaps your good Christian mother and father would give us an invite to their supper tonight, in exchange for which they and theirs would gladly be given this priceless book, free of charge, signed by hand.”

  “Well, gosh,” I said, working my tennis shoes on over my wet socks, “I mean … Well, I mean I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” said that great big man, glowering at me over the tops of his severe spectacles. “Don’t you go and tell me that a good Bible-reading girl like you has got kin which are evolutionists and agnostics and infidels who would turn two needy ministers of God away from their door. To those who are nourished by the Law of the Lord, a crust now and then is sufficient to keep body and soul together. I don’t suppose Opal and I have had hot victuals for a good ten days, two weeks.” A piteous note crept into his versatile voice, and his brown eyes and his daughter’s begot a film of tears. They did look awfully hungry, and I felt guilty the way I did when I was eating a sandwich and Reddie was looking up at me like a martyr of old.

  “Didn’t she say her daddy ran a grocery store?” asked Opal, and her father, consulting my vital statistics, smiled broadly.

  “There’s nothing the matter with your ears, Opie,” he said. And then, to me, “How’s about it, sister? How’s about you going down to this Safeway store and getting Opal and I some bread and some pork chops and like that?”

  “Roasting ears,” said Opal. “And a mushmelon.”

  It had suddenly occurred to me that if I could just get up and run away, the incident would be finished, but Evangelist Gerlash was clairvoyant, and, putting two firmly restraining hands on my shoulders and glaring at me straight in the eye, he said, “We don’t have a thing in the world tonight to do but show up at 125 Belleview Avenue round about suppertime.”

  “I’d rather cook out,” said Opal. “I’d rather she brought the groceries.” Her father bent his head into his hands, and there was a great sob in his voice when he said, “I have suffered many a bitter disappointment in this vale of tears, but I suppose the bitterest is right now here in Adams, Colorado, where, thinking I had found a child of light, she turned out to be a mocker, grinding under her heel shod in gold the poor and the halt. Oh, sister, may you be forgiven on the Day of Judgment!”

  “Whyn’t you go get us some eats?” said Opal, cajoling. “If you get us some eats, we won’t come calling. If we come calling, like as not we’ll spend the night.”

  “Haven’t slept in a bed since May,” said her father, snuffling.

  “We don’t shake easy,” said Opal, with an absolutely shameless grin.

  My mother had a heart made of butter, and our spare room was forever occupied by strays, causing my father to scold her to pieces after they’d gone, and I knew that if the Gerlashes showed up at our house (and plainly they would) with their hard-luck story and their hard-luck looks and all their devices for saving souls, she would give them houseroom and urge them to stay as long as they liked, and my father would not simmer down for a month of Sundays.

  * * *

  So I got up and I said, “All right, I’ll go get you a sack of groceries.” I had a nebulous idea that my father might let me buy them on time or might give me a job as a delivery boy until I had paid for them.

  To my distress, the Gerlashes got up, too, and the evangelist said, “We’ll drive you down to Main Street, sister, and sit outside, so there won’t be no slipup.”

  “It’s Saturday!” I cried. “You can’t find a place to park.”

  “Then we’ll just circle round and round the block.”

  “But I can’t get into a car with strangers,” I protested.

  “Strangers!” exclaimed Evangelist Gerlash. “Why, sister, we’re friends now. Don’t you know all about Opal and I? Didn’t we lay every last one of our cards on the table right off the bat?” He took my arm in his big, bony hand and started to propel me in the direction of the Ford, and just then, like the Mounties to the rescue, up came Mr. Starbird’s official car, tearing into the campgrounds and stopping, with a scream from the brakes, right in front of me and the Gerlashes. A man in a deputy’s uniform was in the front seat beside him.

  “Why, Emily,” said Mr. Starbird as he got out of the car and pushed his hat back from his forehead. “I thought you went on home after that ruckus we had. You’ll be glad to hear those scalawags are going off to the pen tomorrow, so you can come back to jail any time after 10 A.M.”

  Opal giggled, but her father shivered and looked as if a rabbit had just run over his grave. “We’re getting outa here,” he said to her under his breath, and started at a lope toward his car.

  “That’s them all right,” said the man in the deputy’s uniform. “They set up shop in the feed store, and when they wasn’t passing out mumbo-jumbo about the world going up in firecrackers, they was selling that medicine. Medicine! Ninety per cent wood alcohol and ninety per cent fusel oil. Three cases of jake-leg and God knows how many workers passed out in the fields.”

  Mr. Starbird and the deputy had closed in on the Gerlashes. Mr. Starbird said, “I don’t want any trouble with you, Mister. I just want you to get out of Adams before I run you out on a rail. We got plenty of our own preachers and plenty of our own bootleggers, and we don’t need any extra of either one. Just kindly allow me to impound this so-called medicine and then you shove. What kind of a bill of goods were they trying to sell you, Emily, kid?”

  The deputy said, “That’s another of their lines. We checked on them after they left Mangol, checked all the way b
ack to Arkansas. They get some sucker like a kid or an idiot and give them this spiel and promise they’ll go to Heaven if they’ll just get them some grub or some money or my Aunt Geraldine’s diamond engagement ring or whatever.”

  I said nothing. I was thrilled, and at the same time I was mortally embarrassed for the Gerlashes. I was sorry for them, too, because, in spite of their predicament, they looked more hungry than anything else.

  * * *

  Opal said, “If we went to jail, we could eat,” but her father gave her a whack on the seat and told her “Hush up, you,” and the procession, including myself, clutching my Bible and Tom Sawyer Abroad, moved toward the tent and the Model T. The sheriff took two cases of medicine out of the tent and put them in his car, and then we stood there watching the Gerlashes strike camp and put all their bivouac gear into the trailer. They worked swiftly and competently, as if they were accustomed to sudden removals. When they were finished, Opal got into the front seat and started to cry. “God damn it to hell,” said the child preacher. “Whyn’t we ever have something to eat?”

  Mr. Starbird, abashed by the dirty girl’s tears, took out his wallet and gave her a dollar. “Don’t you spend a red cent of it in Adams,” he said. “You go on and get out of town and then get some food.”

  Evangelist Gerlash, having cranked the car, making a noise like a collision, climbed into the driver’s seat, and grinned at the sight of the dollar. “I have cast my bread upon the waters and I am repaid one hundredfold,” he said. “And you, in casting your bread upon the waters, you, too, will be repaid one hundredfold.”

  “Amen,” said Opal, herself again, no longer crying.

  “Now beat it,” said Mr. Starbird.

  “And give Mangol a wide berth,” said the deputy.

  The car shook as if it were shaking itself to death, and it coughed convulsively, and then it started up with a series of jerks and detonations, and disappeared in a screen of dust and black smoke.

  * * *

  Mr. Starbird offered to give me a lift home, and I got into the front seat beside him while the deputy from Mangol got in back. On the way up the hill, Mr. Starbird kept glancing at me and then smiling.

  “I’ve never known a girl quite like you, Emily,” he said. “Memorizing the books of the Bible in the hoose-gow, wearing a buck-private hat.”

  I blushed darkly and felt like crying, but I was pleased when Mr. Starbird went on to say, “Yes, sir, Emily, you’re going to go places. What was the book you were reading down at my place when you were wearing your father’s Masonic fez?” I grew prouder and prouder. “It isn’t every girl of ten years of age who brushes up against some moonshiners with a record as long as your arm in the very same day that a couple of hillbilly fakers try to take her for a ride. Why, Emily, do you realize that if it hadn’t of been for you, we might not have got rid of those birds till they’d set up shop and done a whole lot of mischief?”

  “Really?” I said, not quite sure whether he was teasing me, and grinned, but did so looking out the window, so Mr. Starbird wouldn’t see me.

  Was I lucky that day! On the way home, I saw about ten people I knew, and waved and yelled at them, and when I was getting out in front of my house, Virgil Meade, with whom I had had an on-again off-again romance for some time and to whom I was not currently speaking, was passing by and he heard the sheriff say, “Come on down to jail tomorrow and we’ll get some Dr. Pepper.”

  The sheriff’s valedictory gave me great prestige in the neighborhood, but it also put an end to my use of the jail as a library, because copycats began swarming to the courthouse and making so much racket in the waiting room that Mr. Starbird couldn’t hear himself think, let alone follow Fu Manchu. And after a few weeks he had to post a notice forbidding anyone in the room except on business. Privately, he told me that he would just as lief let me read in one of the cells, but he was afraid word would leak out and it might be bad for my reputation. He was as sorry, he said, as he could be.

  He wasn’t half as sorry as I was. The snake season was still on me in the mountain; Mrs. Looby hated me; Aunt Joey was visiting, and she and Mother were using the living room to cut out Butterick patterns in; Stella had just got on to pig Latin and never shut her mouth for a minute. All the same, I memorized the books of the Bible and I won the New Testament, and I’ll tell you where I did my work—in the cemetery, under a shady tree, sitting beside the grave of an infant kinswoman of the sheriff, a late-nineteenth-century baby called Primrose Starbird.

  Caveat Emptor

  Malcolm and Victoria agreed that if they had not discovered each other at the beginning of the fall term at the Alma Hettrick College for Girls, where they taught, they would have lost their minds or, short of that, would have gone into silent religious orders. He was twenty-three and she was twenty-two and they were both immediately out of graduate school with brand-new Master’s degrees, whose coruscations they fondly imagined illumined them and dazed the Philistine. Malcolm had studied philosophy and the title of his thesis had been A Literary Evaluation of Sören Kierkegaard and a Note on His Relation to Mediaeval Christian Dialectic. Victoria, who had specialized in the sixteenth century, had written on Some Late Borrowings from Provençal fin amour in Elizabethan Miscellanies and Songbooks.

  The altitude of their academic ideals had not begun to dwindle yet and they shivered and shook in the alien air that hovered over the pretty campus of this finishing school, whose frankly stated aim was “to turn out the wives and mothers of tomorrow.” These nubile girls, all of them dumb and nearly all beautiful, knitted in class (that is how they would occupy themselves in their later lives when they attended lectures, said the dean when Malcolm complained of the clack of needles and the subordination of the concept of doubt to purling); they wrote term papers on the advisability of a long engagement and on the history of fingernail polish; they tap-danced or interpretive-danced their way to classes on walks between signs that read: Don’t hurt me. I’ll be beautiful grass in the spring if you’ll give me a chance.

  Pale from their ivory towers, myopic from reading footnotes in the oblique light of library stacks, Malcolm and Victoria had met on the day of their arrival in September. The heaviness and wetness of the day, smelling of mildew, had drawn them together first; both, being punctilious, had got to the Geneva S. Bigelow Memorial Library too early for the first convocation of the faculty and so, having introduced themselves, they had gone across the street to drink lemonade in a bake oven that called itself the Blue Rose and that smelled loathsomely of pork. Here, in a quarter of an hour, facing each other across a copse of catchup bottles and vinegar cruets and A-1 sauce, they found out that they had in common their advanced degrees, a dread of teaching and no experience of this kind of heat, since Malcolm came from the Rockies and Victoria came from Maine. Each divined accurately that the other was penniless and that it was this condition rather than a desire to impart what they had learned to girls that had brought them to this town, Victoria on a Greyhound bus and Malcolm in a tall, archaic Buick touring car.

  At the faculty meeting that morning and at all subsequent meetings they sat side by side. Their dismay, from which they were never to recover, began with the opening address by President Harvey, a chubby, happy man who liked to have the students call him Butch—the title was optional but the girls who could not bring themselves to use it were few and far between. He began his immensely long speech with a brief account of his own life: he had been born without advantages in a one-room cabin in the Ozarks and had had, in much of his youth, the companionship only of a blind aunt and an exceptionally intelligent hound, both of whom, in their different ways, had taught him values that he would not part with for all the tea in China; from the aunt he had learned how to smile when the sledding was tough and from the dog he had learned how to relax. His transition from this affecting homily to the history of Alma Hettrick was an obscure accomplishment. He described the rise of the college from a small female seminary with twenty students to the great plant
of national importance it now was. Year by year Alma Hettrick had grown with the times, adding something different here, cutting out something passé there, its goal being always that of preparing these young women for the real job of the real woman, that is, homemaking. They had dropped Elocution from the curriculum (the president smiled and his audience smiled back at him) and no longer taught how to use a fan, how to tat or how to communicate with a suitor in the language of flowers (the teachers laughed out loud and someone at the back of the room clapped his hands); nevertheless the emphasis was still on those articles of instruction particularly suited to the needs of a woman: Marriage and the Family, Child Care, Home Ec, Ballet for grace, French for elegance.

  Beaming like Kriss Kringle, the president concluded his speech with a timely observation: “It may be novel but I don’t think it’s iconoclastic to liken education to business. We are here to sell our girls Shakespeare and French and Home Economics and Ballet. They’re consumers in a manner of speaking. I don’t mean that a student consumes Shakespeare in the sense that the supply of Shakespeare is decreased but that she can assimilate his work just as her body would assimilate meat or any other food. Let’s each and every one of us sell ourselves to these girls and then sell our commodity, whether it’s those grand old plays or how to run a sewing machine. Good luck!”

  Two new programs had been added this year to help the consumer become a well-rounded woman and these were now briefly described by their directors. There was the Personality Clinic, headed by a stern-visaged Miss Firebaugh, who, with her staff, would counsel the girls on the hair styles and nail polish shades that would highlight their best features. And there was the Voice Clinic, where, presumably, harsh neighs and twangs and whines would be wheedled into the register of a lady. This clinic was under the direction of an ebullient Mr. Sprackling, who was as pink as a rose and had a shock of orange hair and sideburns to match and a fierce exophthalmic green eye. He had the air of a surgeon about him: one saw him cleaving tongues that were tied, excising lisps, loosening glottal stops, skillfully curing girls from Oklahoma who tended to diphthongize their vowels.