Beyond the Black Stump (2 page)

By the time he was sixteen he was leading a thoroughly dissipated life and was giving his parents a good deal of anxiety, though they had no idea of the full scope of his misdoings. There was little left for him to experiment with in the spheres of tobacco, alcohol, or girls, but marijuana cigarettes had just been placed before the youth of Hazel by a Mexican-Negro halfbreed who worked in a liquor store. Few of the boys or girls at the High School really enjoyed them, being healthy young people raised in the clean conditions of a small town in the country, but the cigarettes were obviously vicious and so fit subjects for experiment by broad-minded adolescents learning about Life.

The end of it all came when Stanton Junior was in the last term of his junior year. He had a friend called Chuck Sheraton who came to school in an old Plymouth tourer, a merry and inconsequent young man whose one ambition was to fly airplanes. Being friends, they made common property of many of their belongings, including their girls. One evening in the early summer they were playing a complicated game based on “touch last” in their two cars around the streets of suburban Hazel, Diana Fawsitt driving with Chuck and Ruth Eberhart, a notable cheer-leader at the football game for Hazel High, with Stanton. It was a good game, though rough upon the fenders, but that evening they carried it a bit too far. Stanton, coming down 4th Street and crossing Roosevelt Avenue at seventy miles an hour, hit the Plymouth broadside on and hurled it on its side to the sidewalk. Diana was thrown out and killed almost instantaneously. Chuck got concussion and a fractured shoulder, but made a good recovery. Ruth got scars upon her face and arms that would last her lifetime as she went through the windscreen, and Stanton got three fractured ribs upon the steering wheel. An empty bottle of whisky was found in the Chev, the doctor pronounced both boys and Ruth to be under the influence of liquor, the post-mortem
revealed Diana to have been pregnant, and a further research revealed that Ruth was pregnant, too. All the participants were sixteen years of age.

This happened a few months after Pearl Harbor when the citizens of the United States, including even Hazel, had more important things to think about than the misdeeds of their teen-agers. Moreover, it was less than eighty years since Hazel had been established as a town, and only about fifty since the trails leading to the east had been made safe from the marauding bands of Indians. In such a place the legislature acts more directly and with fewer inhibitions than in districts with a longer record as communities. Diana Fawsitt was dead and nothing would bring her back to life, and though these boys had killed her it was difficult to argue that she was entirely blameless in the matter; all four of them were culpable in some degree. It seemed profitless to Judge Hadley to start anyone upon a road that might end at the penitentiary; he dealt with the case summarily in ten minutes when the boys came out of hospital and sentenced Chuck and Stanton to a year in the reform school, suspending the sentence indefinitely subject to satisfactory reports from the police. It only remained for the parents to clean up the mess.

When the Eberharts pressed Ruth to declare the father of her child she took two days to think about it in the hospital, and finally decided that Chuck Sheraton was more fun than Stanton. Accordingly when they came out of hospital Ruth and Chuck were married, rather quietly in the circumstances, the bridegroom being still in High School though Ruth’s education was considered to be finished. Stanton was left to re-model his life alone, guided by the practical good sense of a father who was ruefully conscious of incidents in his own youth that would not bear a close examination, and who was inclined to blame himself for not looking after his son better.

The weeks that followed were not happy ones for Stanton. Because he was in hospital with broken ribs and possible internal injuries nobody cared to rub it in that he had killed Diana Fawsitt, but he suffered a good deal from frustration in his first love. Ruth had been his girl, not Chuck’s, and if she was pregnant he had a good idea which of them was probably responsible. That she had thrown him over for Chuck was a bitter blow to him, a blow which struck far deeper than the general disgrace. It was intensified when
he was able to meet Chuck in the Piggy-Wiggy café and found, as they discussed their position over a milk shake, that although Chuck liked Ruth well enough he didn’t particularly want to marry her or anybody else at the age of sixteen. They were in the grip of forces more powerful than they were themselves, however. Neither of them was old enough to stand up and flout the opinion of the whole community in their hour of disgrace. Chuck was not prepared to stand up to the citizens of Hazel and declare he wasn’t going to marry Ruth when she claimed him as the father of her child, which he might well have been, and Stanton was not prepared to stand up in the face of all his other sins and claim paternity from Chuck. A succession of milk shakes did nothing to resolve their problems but left them better friends than ever, united in the disapproval of all Hazel. From their meeting at the Piggy-Wiggy café Chuck went on to matrimony with Ruth and Stanton turned to work for an anodyne, his grief for Ruth tempered by a secret relief that it had proved impossible for him to get married at sixteen.

He worked very hard in his last year at High School, abandoning his former ways of life. He had a good brain and a good background, with sensible and sympathetic parents to encourage him. It was his intention to go on to the University of Oregon at Eugene but he put in as a long shot for admission to Leland Stanford and, somewhat to his own surprise, he got in. He stayed there for four years, a sober-minded, hardworking, rather pale young man doing physics and geology, and he graduated with some distinction but no girl. From the university he had got a research job with the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. working on geophysics, and two years later he had joined the Topex team.

At the time when he returned from Arabia he would drink no alcohol at all nor had he done so since his High School accident; his renunciation of it had been absolute. He smoked very little, perhaps one pack of cigarettes a month, fearing perhaps that the tobacco habit, too, could get hold of a man and lead him into gross excesses of the flesh. In compensation he still ate a good many candies at the age of twenty-eight; a can of wrapped peppermints was generally to be found in one of the drawers of his desk, and he had a weakness for milk shakes and ice cream in its
various forms. He was an active and healthy man, the more so for his abstinence, physically well developed though sallow in appearance.

In the club bar he raised the question of his next employment with his boss. “Will you want me to go back to Arabia after this vacation?” he enquired. “I’d like to know ahead if it’s to be back there.”

Mr. Johnson shook his head. “Not Arabia. Have you got any preference?”

“I could do with a domestic assignment for a time,” Stanton suggested. “I’ve been out of the United States now for three years.”

“Are you getting married?”

The geologist shook his head reluctantly; he had expected that. Domestic assignments for geological work within the United States or Canada were usually reserved for men with families. “Not that I know of,” he said.

“We usually try to work married men into the domestic assignments,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s fairer on the kids.”

“I know it.”

“Have you got any other preference?”

“I’d just as soon it was a white country,” said Stanton. “I’ve seen enough of sand and Arabs to last me for a while.”

Mr. Johnson finished his drink, offered Stanton another orange juice, and when that was refused led the way into the dining-room. He ordered Crab Louis with a large cup of white coffee for them both, and when that was on the table he said, “What would you think of Paraguay?”

“That’s the new concession?”

“Surely. We’ll need geologists in the field there.”

Stanton ate in silence for a minute. “I’ll have to admit I don’t know much about Paraguay,” he said at last. “Not desert, is it?”

His boss shook his head. “I was never there myself, but I was in East Bolivia one time, and that’s just about the same. It’s forest country, jungle you might say. Communications aren’t so hot, apart from airstrips. Most of the heavy material goes up and down the rivers.”

“What’s the capital of Paraguay?”

“Asuncion.”

“Is the concession near there?”

“Well,” said Mr. Johnson, “it’s quite an area of country, of course. I’d say the nearest point would be about two
hundred miles from Asuncion. It’s in the Chaco Boreal, around Fort Diaz.”

“The people would be Spanish—like in Argentina?”

“I guess so. The executives and the technicians would be Spanish Americans. Do you know any Spanish?”

“Only a few words.”

“I’d say you’d have to learn some. It’s an easy language to get along in—not so easy to speak well. I don’t know that you’d find a lot of Spanish society out in the field. The labour would be mostly Indian.”

“Be a change from Arabia, anyway,” said Stanton.

They said no more about the future work, but sat for a time in the club lounge after the meal talking of other aspects of the Topex organisation. In the end Mr. Johnson said, “You’re going out West tomorrow, I suppose?”

“Unless you want me here.”

The older man shook his head. “I’ll talk to P.K. about the new assignment for you, but he’s in Canada right now, and after that he’s going off on his vacation. I’ll have to write you, maybe in two weeks from now.” He pulled out his pocket diary. “Let’s see, you’ve got ten weeks’ vacation coming to you—that takes us to September twentieth. I’ll see you again then.”

They walked back together to the office, where Stanton spent half an hour in the Treasurer’s office putting in expense accounts and drawing money; from the office he telephoned his friend about a bed in his apartment, telephoned an airline office for a reservation to the West next day, and sent a telegram to his parents in Hazel. Then he walked out into the streets of downtown New York and took a bus up Broadway, savouring the city.

He loved his country very dearly, without realising it. He was a technician, and nothing technical was worth much to him that did not come from the United States. Overseas he had wondered at the little cramped style of the foreign motor cars; now that he was back in his own country the glorious, spacious vehicles of his own land were an acute pleasure to him; the cars that he had seen in his travels overseas could not compare with the new Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs. The origins of the techniques that pleased him so did not affect his thinking; that Otto was a German and Whittle an Englishman did not seem relevant when he considered the superiority of American motor cars and American
jet aircraft. Nothing was very real to him that did not happen in the United States.

His personal experience of the world outside America had been limited to Cairo, the Arabian desert, two days in Rome while waiting for air connections, and twenty-four hours in Lisbon. He had been impressed by the motor scooters in Rome, but they were the only things that he had seen in all his travels that had made him feel his own country behindhand. He was sensible enough to realise that there was more to the world than that, that London and Paris might have things to show him that he would admire, but the United States was his home, the place with the highest standard of living in the world, the place with the most glorious technical achievements, the place where he loved to be.

In the late afternoon he found his way into Abercrombie and Fitch and spent a delightful hour looking over the new styles in fishing rods with reels incorporated with the handle, the new styles in outboard motors and fibreglass boats, in camping gear and sleeping bags. A stainless steel barbecue set with fork, spoon, and skewer three feet long, with steel hand shields gleaming and bright, took his fancy and he bought it as a present for his father though his luggage was already overweight for the air line, and then the shops were closing and he made his way happily through the thronging crowds around Grand Central Station towards his friends in Peter Cooper Village. It was grand to be back in the United States again, but it would be even better to be back in Oregon again tomorrow, his own place.

He was a Westerner, born and raised in Oregon and educated in California. All the United States was good in his eyes, the meanest part better than the best of the outside world, but of the United States some parts were better than others. He did not greatly care for the Eastern states, infiltrated as they were with European influences and already burdened with three centuries of tradition. The racial problems of the South distressed him mildly, to the extent that he would not have chosen to live there, and although the technical advances of the Middle West were stimulating he knew a better country to live in than the plains of Michigan or Ohio. It was not until you crossed the mountains that you came, in his opinion, to the vital and virile heart of the United States, the states where men were men.
Less than a hundred years ago the immigrants had poured into his home country over the Oregon trail, travelling hard by covered wagon, fighting the Indians, facing death and injury each day of the six months’ journey that would lead them to the glorious new country in the West. The men, the women, and the children who had opened up the Pacific slopes were hard, competent, and virile types, and they influenced their country still. Stanton’s grandfather had made that journey as a child in 1861; at the age of eight he had seen men killed in an attack by Indians upon the wagon convoy, had helped his father hew a farm out of the wilderness a little to the east of where the town of Hazel now stood. Stanton knew that old man intimately for he had lived till the boy was fifteen, and he had heard from him the history of Hazel as it had grown in one man’s lifetime from the first shack in the virgin prairie on the edge of the forests and the mountains to the place that it was now, a place of paved streets, of drug stores, of quiet, decent homes in shaded avenues, of theatres and railroad tracks and airplanes, of the Safeway and the Piggy-Wiggy café. In his view the people of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California constituted the best stock in the United States because their descent from the pioneers was the shortest; he was proud to be one of them, and infinitely happy now that he was going home.