Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

After looking around I decided on a small used coupe which I could get for $900. I didn’t regard it as an extravagance, for when I left Reno I could resell it for almost what I paid for it, so I would not be out much. It was light blue, with very smart lines, and I thought I looked very well in it. So they gave me driving lessons and by the end of a day I could do everything very confidently, even back. So by the end of two or three days I was ready for my trip to Goldfield.

It was a very long drive, nearly two hundred miles, and I have to confess that a large part of the way I was quite frightened. The road was built over a flat plain covered with gray alkali dust, with only a few tufts of dry grass showing, and this plain extended for miles and miles. Only once in awhile would I meet a car, and except for them and an occasional rabbit that would hop across the road I couldn’t see a living thing or any sign of human habitation. It was my first close contact with desert land and it was like rattling madly through space that didn’t mean anything.

I had started around eight o’clock in the morning. I gassed and had lunch at a little town about halfway down and arrived at Goldfield around supper time. It didn’t look at all as Pa Selden had described it or like the pictures he had shown me. For it is practically a ghost town now, and I discovered that some years ago they had had a fire which wiped out most of it, with the ruins still there. But the hotel was the same, a big brick building five or six stories high, with a completely deserted lobby full of the leather furniture and oil paintings that were fashionable thirty years ago. The proprietor came forward to meet me and I said: “Can you let me have a room?”

“Lady,” he said, with a very sad smile, “I can let you have a dozen?”

It was all very sad and yet somehow romantic and affected me the way the Welsh music did the first night

I met Mr. Holden. At dinner the proprietor stopped by my table to ask if everything was all right, and when he found what I had come for he called several men who were in the bar and they came and took off their hats in a very elegant way and sat down at the table with me. I offered them something to drink, and they accepted with the most comical little speeches. They were all men of advanced middle age and they wore the big hats you see in the West, and looked exactly like the illustrations in Western stories. It turned out they were old-timers who had been in Goldfield during its great days, and one of them said he remembered Pa Selden, but I don’t believe he did at all. Because they constantly told tall stories to kid me and make my eyes pop open, and yet with the most perfect manners. But they all believed that some day Goldfield would come back, and I think it was this that made it all seem so romantic and so pathetic.

But next morning two or three of them were on hand to guide me around, and ugly as the old gold workings were, I found them completely fascinating. They showed me everything from the big piles of ore, which had turned green with the passage of years, to a new mine that had recently been opened up where they said $750,000 had been spent on equipment with not an ounce of pay dirt taken out yet. Then they took me to an assay office which was a rough shack on a back street, where a man poked his head out and acted very mysteriously while we waited outside for him to let us in. They explained that assaying is a very secret work. But pretty soon we went inside and the assayer talked to me and I thrilled all over when he showed me what he called a “button,” which remained in his crucible after he had made his tests, and I realized I was handling a little lump of pure gold and that this was the first step in the production of money.

I left next morning and beyond Tonopah I noticed something in the road ahead of me. The desert air was so clear that things were visible for miles before you actually got to them, and so I drove some little time before I was sure it was a man, and some little time after that before I could see a car beside the road down on the desert floor. He stood up when I approached and motioned me to stop. This was something I would have been afraid to do anywhere near civilization, but out there in the desert everything seemed different and I felt I had to. He was a small, nervous-looking man of about fifty and wore gray flannels, a sports coat and felt hat, all very rough and yet very good quality. He lifted his hat and seemed very annoyed. “I’ll borrow your shovel, if you don’t mind.”

“Shovel?”

“They took mine out when they washed the car yesterday and forgot to put it back, damn them.”

“But I have no shovel.”

He looked at me then for the first time, and his eye was very sharp. “You have no shovel? Didn’t they tell you about that?”

“Nobody said anything to me about a shovel.”

“Never start across this desert without a shovel, a towline and a jar of water. All right, if you have no shovel we’ll have to hook on the towline.”

I got out then and saw what had happened. He had pulled out for a passing car and the whole shoulder had given way, dumping him out on the desert floor, where his wheels were buried up to the axles in the alkali dust. What he wanted the shovel for was to dig them out and probably sprinkle enough gravel in front of them to enable him to get back on the road. He wasted no time in explanations, however, but at once got the towline out of his car, made it fast to his front axle and, as soon as I had pulled up a few feet, to my rear axle. Then he got in his car, took the wheel and told me to pull up until the towline was tight. This I did. When my car stalled I started it again and he yelled: “All right, give her the gun.”

I gave her the gun but I didn’t move. Then I became aware of a smell of burning rubber, and he yelled at me to stop. I then assumed I had been spinning my wheels without moving him. But when he came, jumped in my car and pushed me from behind the wheel I discovered it had been a little worse than that. The traction of my wheels had caused the road to slide again, and there I was, hanging over the edge and about to go down in the desert any second. Before he jumped into my car he had unfastened the towline from his own front axle, and now shot my car ahead just as the whole road gave way and spilled out onto the desert in another slide. When we were on safe ground he stopped, took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. “Close shave.”

“Yes, it certainly was.”

“Wait a minute.”

He got out, unfastened the towline from my rear axle, coiled it up and pitched it in the bottom of my car. “Well, you’ll have to give me a ride in to Hawthorne — that’s the nearest place I can get a tow car.”

So I gave him a ride in to Hawthorne, which was about ten miles, but I let him drive, which relieved my nervousness. As soon as he made sure the garage there would pull him out he thanked me and then asked: “Where do you live?”

“I’m staying in Reno.”

“At the Riverside?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where I live. I’ll see you there.”

Next morning while I was eating breakfast he sat down at my table and began to talk without saying good morning or anything. I found out it was his custom to begin in the middle or perhaps where he left off yesterday, without any preliminaries at all, and while it was an unusual way to do, it was completely a part of him. He was in the same rough clothes, and lit a cigarette, then glanced at me sidewise. “I kept trying to place you yesterday — haven’t I met you somewhere before? My name is Bolton. Charles Bolton.”

“No, I think not.”

“Then I’ve seen you somewhere. What’s your name?”