This Side of Jordan by Monte Schulz

shirt and pants, the dwarf emerged from the depths of the trough. He leaned forward, both arms hung over the wood.
    â€œDo you have any soap?” he asked. “I still feel grimy.”
    Alvin looked at the water stains on his shirt and pants. “You got me all wet.”
    â€œMaybe you ought to climb in here and wash off.”
    â€œI guess I’m washed enough already.”
    The farm boy watched Rascal rub his scalp with the tips of his fingers, scrubbing diligently. The old pump filled the wooden trough to three-quarters full, but nobody had bothered to clean it out in a while. Horsehair floated on the surface of the water and stuck to Rascal’s upper arms and chest. It looked filthy. Not a hundred dollars could get him swimming in there alive and willing.
    â€œOf course, a sugar bath would be much more refreshing.”
    Alvin frowned. “A what?”
    â€œSugar bath.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    The dwarf wore an expression of incredulity. “You’ve never had a sugar bath?”
    Alvin shook his head. “Never even heard of such a thing. Are you joking me again?”
    The girl under Chester shrieked as the iron bed frame slammed against the back wall, rattling the window. Chester grunted a response, then laughed out loud. The song quit and he replaced the needle. Way down on the levee in old Alabamee…
    â€œThey sound like dogs,” said Alvin, trying unsuccessfully not to listen to Chester rutting with his honey pie fifteen yards away. “I bet she’s hating every minute of it.”
    â€œI bet she’s not,” the dwarf replied, continuing his scrubbing. His white hair was plastered flat on his scalp, almost invisible in the bright sunlight. The thick blue veins on his chest and skull made the skin look translucent. If Rascal had been outdoors at all since winter, Alvin thought, it must have been on a cloudy day. The dwarf dunked his head again, while the farm boy’s ears went back to the window and the sassy girl squealing beneath Chester.
    Half a day’s drive from Hadleyville had led them across the Missouri border into Kansas where, after nightfall, Chester drove to the outskirts of a small town named Gridley and sent Alvin on foot to buy the three of them some supper. The road into town was dark and muddy and twice he tripped, negotiating the sinkholes between ditches. The sole restaurant in Gridley offered steak and onion dinners for forty cents, including tapioca pudding. They ate on a blanket in the wet grass under a sky threatening rain, then drove on to a tourist camp north of Abilene. Only Chester got much sleep those first few nights out of Hadleyville, taking his own cabin and staying to himself, as usual, and not being too talkative, as if something had put him in a foul mood. Meanwhile, Rascal kept Alvin up for hours, chattering endlessly about famous individuals he’d met: Lincoln’s bastard nephew, Napoleon’s barber’s granddaughter, Teddy Roosevelt’s wet nurse. Each episode ended with somebody offering Rascal a trip to Egypt or Norway or full-shares in a new railway venture financed by J.P. Morgan, rejected by the dwarf in favor of tending his award-winning vegetable garden in Hadleyville. Whether the dwarf actually believed his own stories Alvin didn’t know, and once he had heard them each a dozen times, he didn’t care much, either.
    After twelve days of eating from paper sacks, they decided to stop for breakfast at Charlie Harper’s Restaurant & Glassware Emporium in a little town called Harrison. Cheap soda glasses etched and fluted to resemble expensive Viennese crystal were mounted high on the walls with calligraphic tags beneath each one describing its stylistic lineage. Only the crudest hicks from the sticks could have been fooled, but Alvin managed to embarrass himself by asking how long it took to ship glasses like that across the ocean. The dwarf laughed so loudly the manager came