"Well, well. Let's try to figure out something to do."
She waited reverently while the local prophet sat in his bug, stared at
the wheels of the Gomez, and thought. The level-floored,
sagebrush-sprinkled hollow had filled with mauve twilight and creeping
stilly sounds. The knowable world of yellow lights and security was far
away. Milt was her only means of ever getting back to it.
"Tell you what we might try," he speculated. "I'll hitch on behind you,
and hold back in going down hill."
She did not even try to help him while he again cleaned the spark plugs
and looked over brakes, oil, gas, water. She sat on the running-board,
and it was pleasant to be relieved of responsibility. He said nothing at
all. While he worked he whistled that recent refined ballad: I wanta go back to Oregon
And sit on the lawn, and look at the dawn.
Oh motheruh dear, don't leavuh me here,
The leaves are so sere, in the fallothe year,
I wanta go back to Oregugon,
To dearuh old Oregugon.
They started, shouting optimistically to each other, lights on, trouble
seeming over--and they stopped after the next descent, and pools of
tears were in the corners of Claire's eyes. The holdback had not
succeeded. Her big car, with its quick-increasing momentum, had jerked
at the bug as though it were a lard-can. The tow-rope had stretched,
sung, snapped, and again, in fire-shot delirium, she had gone rocking
down hill.
He drove up beside her, got out, stood at her elbow. His "I'm a bum
inventor. We'll try somethin' else" was so careless that, in her
nerve-twanging exhaustion she wailed, "Oh, don't be so beastly cheerful!
You don't care a bit!"
In the dusk she could see him straighten, and his voice came sharp as he
ignored the ever-present parental background and retorted, "Somebody has
got to be cheerful. Matter fact, I worked out the right stunt, coming
down."
Like a man in the dentist's chair, recovering between bouts, she drowsed
and ignored the fact that in a few minutes she would again have to
reassemble herself, become wakeful and calm, and go through quite
impossible maneuvers of driving. Milt was, with a hatchet from his
camping-kit, cutting down a large scrub pine. He dragged it to the Gomez
and hitched it to the back axle. The knuckles of the branches would dig
into the earth, the foliage catch at every pebble.
"There! That anchor would hold a truck!" he shouted.
It held. She went down the next two hills easily. But she was through.
Her forearms and brain were equally numb. She appealed to Milt, "I can't
seem to go on any more. It's so dark, and I'm so tired----"
"All right. No ranch houses anywheres near, so we'll camp here, if Mr.
Boltwood doesn't mind."