“Shoot my, dawg, will you!” she yells at the character. “I said I’d kick your butt from here to Scranton when I caught up with you, Dud Wingle!”
“Leave me be!” he squawks, trying to pry her hands off his shoulders. “He was chasin’ deer! He was chasin’ deer!”
Thud—thud—thud. “I don’t keer if he was chasin’ deer, panthers or butterflies.” Thud. “He was my dawg and you shot him!” Thud. She was drawing quite a crowd. The characters in rubber boots are forgetting all about us to stare at her and him.
Up comes a flatfoot who I later learn is the entire manpower of Chiunga Forks’ lousiest; he says to the big woman: “Now, Ella” a few times, and she finally stops booting the little character and lets him go. “What do you want, Henry?” she growls at the flatfoot and he asks weakly: “Silver Bell dropped her calf yet?”
The little character is limping away rubbing himself. The big broad watches him regretfully and says to the flatfoot: “Yesterday, Henry. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to look for my new hired boy from the city. I guess that’s him over there.”
She strolls over to us and yanks open the Buick’s door, almost taking it off the hinges. “I’m Mrs. Ella Parry,” she says to me, sticking out her hand. “You must be the Cornaro boy the Probation Association people wired me about.”
I shake hands and say, “Yes, ma’am.”
The officer turns me over grinning like a skunk eating beans.
I figure Mrs. Parry lives in one of the wood houses in
Chiunga Forks, but no. We climb into a this-year Willys truck and take off for the hills. I do not have much to say to this lady wrestler but wish I had somebody smuggle me a rod to kind of even things a little between her and me. With that built she could break me in half by accident. I try to get in good with her by offering to customize her truck. “I could strip off the bumpers and put on a couple of foglights, maybe new fenders with a little trim to them,” I say, “and it wouldn’t cost you a dime. Even out here there has got to be some parts place where a person can heist what he needs.”
“Quiet, Bub,” she says all of a sudden, and shields her eyes peering down a side road where a car is standing in front of a shack. “I swear,” she says, “that looks like Dud Wingle’s Ford in front of Mi/’ Sigafoos’ place.” She keeps her neck twisting around to study it until it is out of sight. And she looks worried.
I figure it is not a good time to talk and anyway maybe she has notions about customizing and does not approve of it.
“What,” she says, “would Dud Wingle want with Miz’ Sigafoos?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” I say. “Wasn’t he the gentleman you was kicking from here to Scranton?”
“Shucks, Bub, that was just a figger of speech. If I’d of wanted to kick him from here to Scranton I’d of done it. Dud and Jim and Ab and Sime think they got a right to shoot your dog if he chases the deer. I’m a peaceable woman or I’d have the law on them for shootin’ Grip. But maybe I did kind of lose my temper.” She looked worrieder yet.
“Is something wrong, ma’am?” I ask. You never can tell, but a lot of old dames talk to me like I was their uncle; to tell you the truth this is my biggest problem in a cathouse. It must be because I am a kind of thoughtful guy and it shows.
Mrs. Parry is no exception. She says to me: “You don’t know the folks up here yet, Bub, so you don’t know about Miz’ Sigafoos. I’m old English stock so I don’t
hold with their foolishness, but——” And here she looked real worried. “Miz’ Sigafoos is what they call a hex doctor.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“Just a lot of foolishness. Don’t you pay any attention,” she says, and then she has to concentrate on the driving. We are turning off the two-lane state highway and going up, up, up into the hills, off a blacktop road, off a gravel road, off a dirt road. No people. No houses. Fences and cows or maybe horses, I can’t tell for sure. Finally we are at her place, which is from wood and in two buildings. I start automatically for the building that is clean, new-painted, big and expensive.