The Tunnel of Love

by DILLON ANDERSON

AS the ferryboat eased out of the Bolivar slip, I and Claudie got out of our Ford and went forward to watch a school of porpoises playing ahead of us in Galveston Bay. It was a blistering July day, and the heat waves dancing on the water between us and Pelican Spit made the quarantine station there look like a bay scene painted on loose canvas.

From the Texas mainland to Galveston Island, the ferryboat took us no more than a couple of miles or so; but as we drove away from the slip into Galveston, it seemed that the distance might as well have been a lot farther. We had left the smoke and steam and dust of places where money was being made, and in no time at all we found ourselves breathing whiff’s of Sen-sen, witch hazel, fresh popcorn, and all the other gaudy smells of places where money was being spent. This easy climate began to agree with us right away.

That afternoon when we were having beer and pretzels and hard-boiled eggs on Murdock’s Beach, I counted our money. “Look, Claudie,” I said, “we are down to eight dollars, and we would be worse off if I had not made a very sound bet yesterday on that little black quarter horse. Why don’t you be quiet awhile and let me do some thinking?”

Claudie, who hardly ever talks much anyhow when he eats, just went on chewing. With the last hard-boiled egg, I blotted up some mixed salt and pepper from the newspaper it was wrapped in, and right where the salt and pepper had been, I read: —

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

Going concern operating from trailer house has opening for partner with an automobile.

It was signed “Professor E. Ludington Pye, Buccaneer Hotel, Galveston.” I passed the paper over to Claudie and he cut out the notice with his pocketknife. The Buccaneer Hotel was standing there right across the street.

I and Claudie bought shaves and shoeshines in the hotel barbershop, and marched up to the mail desk where a nice clean-looking blonde was polishing her fingernails. She said that Professor Pye did not exactly live at the hotel; he just used some of the facilities, including the mail department. She thought he might be along any time.

We waited, and pretty soon we saw a very fancy character come into the lobby. I could tell that it was the Professor the minute ho walked in. The mail lady pointed us out to him and steered him over to us. He was a thin-faced, thin-flanked fellow of around forty, with a sharp look about his face and head. His black hair was long and parted right in the middle. He wore shell-rimmed glasses which were hooked onto a long black ribbon that ran into a little sprocket of an affair pinned onto his lapel, and his coat and pants did not match. This two-tone effect impressed Claudie, but I thought from the first that the pants that went with his coat had simply worn out.

I showed him the ad and told him my name was Clint Hightower. He said, “Who is this big fellow who seems to be here with you, Mr. Hightower?”

“That is my associate, Claudie Hughes,”I told him. There is a program all over the country of calling people who work for you “associates.” It is supposed to make them work harder for the same pay.

“What is your proposition, Professor?" I asked him, not wishing to waste a lot of my time unless this citizen had something good.

“First,” he said, “I want to know what your line of business is; what kind of experience have you had, Mr. Hightower?” He blew on his glasses and polished them with a silk handkerchief; then he tucked the handkerchief into his coat sleeve and looked at me through the lower part of his glasses.

“Well,” I said, “I have tried not to limit myself.”

“Can’t you be more specific?”

“All right,” I answered, “I have tended bar, I have sold fire extinguishers, patent medicine, and lightning rods, and I have tuned pianos. I have written, but I have not chiseled, tombstone epitaphs, and once, in Des Moines, Iowa, I won a hogcalling contest. I have sold Jewel tea and trained Tennessee walking horses.”

The Professor said, “But . . .”

I went on: “I can organize a union and I can call a scjuare dance. I was a consulting statistician in the Department of Agriculture at one time. I can read the Morse code. I can play a mandolin, and I can preach a fair sermon from either the Old or the New Testament. I do not do manual labor. My friend Claudie here handles that for me and sings bass.” Claudie cleared his throat.

“What,” the Professor asked, after a little pause, “are your present engagements?”

“We can be had on the right basis, Professor Pye, but from the way you have been talking, a body might suppose that you had the automobile and we had the trailer. You’re asking a lot of questions for a man who is nothing but stranded.”

The Professor put out a lot of guff about offers he had from sedans, convertibles, station wagons, and such; but when I squeezed the water out of this talk, I found that he was just trying to make the best trade he could with us. He finally admitted that his wife—“a preacher’s daughter at that,” he said —had taken his car the week before and gone back to her mother’s in New Orleans.

It was getting late in the afternoon when I and Claudie took the Professor in our Ford to a trailer camp down on the West Beach where we looked over his place of business. It was an old gray trailer house with two entrances; it was equipped with a coal-oil stove, two beds, a cot, and a little cage to hold the Professor’s pet coon, Julius. On one side of the trailer house was painted a large outline of a human head, all divided into sections labeled Pity, Kindness, Ambition, Love, Religion, Hope, and several other worth-while topics. Under the head, in big red letters running the whole length of the trailer, the words PHRENOLOGIST INSIDE were painted. We walked around and on the other side was a sketch of a camera on a tripod, with the words PHOTOGRAPHER INSIDE in big letters below.

“Which,” I asked, “did Mrs. Pye do?”

The Professor had a way of not answering questions right away, and it was not until he had adjusted his glasses and fired up an underslung pipe that he said, “We alternated, Mr. Hightower, but I always preferred the chair of phrenology.”

“What did you usually do?”

“ Photography.”

“Well,” I stated, “you can have your phrenology full time if we team up. I believe Claudie can handle the photography.”

It was growing on me that once you let this fellow know where decisions were made, you had him. By this time, his manners were along the “excuse me” line — a little like those of a funeral parlor attendant. He sidled up to ask the next question, and said, “What would be your part?”

“Psychology,” I said. Then I looked over the trailer for enough space to spell it out.

When the Professor explained his plan to leave in a day or two with a traveling carnival show, I didn’t waste any more time; I agreed that I and Claudie would join up with him. The carnival was going to follow the cotton-picking season north across the State of Texas.

The next day I painted my psychology sign on the rear of the trailer and went to the public library to check up on my new job.

2

Two days later we hooked the trailer onto our Ford and drove behind the red carnival trucks and cars to Richmond, Texas, where the rich overflow loam of the wide Brazos bottom had produced a bumper crop. The cotton gins were running twentyfour hours a day, and money was plentiful.

The first afternoon in Richmond we watched the carnival folks set up their concessions near a grove of oak and pecan trees on the riverbank. I was about to put the trailer right in the big middle of it all when we were told very harshly to get the hell out. That was how I first found out that the Professor was not with the carnival in the way I had thought. He hadn’t even made any arrangement with the head man, Mr. Flick, who owned some of the concessions and had an interest in all of the rest. It turned out that the Professor’s plan had just been to mooch along on the carnival crowds by setting up the trailer as near as possible to the carnival grounds.

We parked across the street from Mr. Flick’s operations that first night, but we were so close to the show that we were getting as much of the bright lights as any of his concessions. After a little while he came over to speak to us. Mr. Flick was a smallish fellow with a big face and a loud voice, and he had a very peculiar accent that I was never quite able to button down. He was wearing a double-breasted suit with wide lapels and padded shoulders. He talked without taking a black cigarholder out of his mouth, and he talked a great deal. He was going to sue us; he was going to enjoin us; he was going to have the sheriff of Fort Bend County after us; and as he talked, he kept taking a little comb out of his pocket and combing his hair. I never cared for a grown man who was always combing his hair.

I waited for the psychological moment to speak, while the Professor and Mr. Flick fussed and argued. It all boiled down to this: Mr. Flick wanted us to go away or else give him a 25 per cent cut in our take. The Professor said he did not wish any entangling alliances with anybody’s carnival.

When the talk got pretty loud, Claudie came out of the trailer. Claudie is pretty dumb, but he is a very large citizen, and that night, in the bright glare he looked as big as a skinned mule.

“Claudie,” I said, “Mr. Flick is not being very nice to us, I’m afraid.” Claudie gave Mr. Flick a very ugly look.

“What’s the matter?” he asked without taking his look away from Mr. Flick.

“Well, it’s this way,” I explained, while Claudie stood there sort of hovering over Mr. Flick. “We don’t care if some of our customers do business with Mr. Flick’s carnival, do we? But Mr. Flick, here, is sore at us because some of the carnival’s customers might be doing business with us.”

“Sore, huh?” Claudie made it sound like one word.

“I am not bothered by this big oaf,” Mr. Flick said, and here he made his mistake. Claudie, of course, didn’t know what an oaf was; but Mr. Flick said it in the same way you would say some of the few things that Claudie will not allow himself to be called at all. Claudie latched onto the scruff of Mr. Flick’s neck with his right hand and with his left hand he caught Mr. Flick by the seat, of his pants. Claudie lifted him right off the ground and started moving away fast with him, while Mr. Flick’s arms and legs waved about in a very helpless way like a beetle’s legs when he is turned over on his back. I stopped Claudie as soon as I could and sent him back into the trailer. It took the Professor and me quite a few minutes to quiet Mr. Flick down and stop him from talking about several very rough programs he had in mind for Claudie. Then I made my move. I said: “Tell you what we’ll do, Mr. Flick; we’ll give you 10 per cent of our take if you will let us set up this trailer anywhere we want in the carnival layout.”

Mr. Flick argued a little, but he was going to agree. When he did, the Professor said he wanted his side of the trailer right in front of the Ferris wheel, so that the first thing the riders would see as they came down would be his PHRENOLOGY sign.

“Hell,” said Mr. Flick, “I can’t build the carnival around your trailer.”

“Mr. Flick,” I answered, “don’t make me have to explain that to Claudie.”

“Well, all right,” he said, “and which concession do you want opposite your psychology racket?" He sounded a little sarcastic, I thought.

“I’ll take the Tunnel of Love,” I said. “Not the front where they buy tickets and start out on their ride. I want the rear where the riders pop out into the open after the first half of the ride and before they go back into the tunnel for the return trip. In that minute of daylight in the middle of the ride, I want them to see my PSYCHOLOGY sign.”

It was on this basis that we joined the carnival.

3

OUR business in the trailer prospered almost from the very first. Claudie learned to work the Professor’s camera a lot sooner than I expected. The Professor helped pose the customers, and Claudie got so good that he could develop a finished print of a family group in about the same length of time that it took the Professor to tell someone in the group that he possessed the most amazing bumps on his head that the Professor had seen in his lifelong study of phrenology. We hardly ever let a customer get away until he had been given the full course. Then we pooled our take, gave Mr. Flick about 10 per cent, and divided the rest three ways.

Cotton was bringing nearly thirty cents a pound that year, and the Professor found many chances to turn up unsuspected talents in men and women and children. He saw in the least promising prospects such ordinary futures as writing poetry, serving in the legislature, or teaching school. He saw heads of future generals, admirals, ranchers, governors, and even a few’ Texas Rangers among the members of the families of these farmers who only came around in the first place to get their pictures taken. One child’s head showed that he could even write a whole Sears Roebuck catalogue if he set his mind to it, and the Professor took three dollars from a farmer for finding enough bumps on his son’s head to make him Secretary of Agriculture when he grew up.

People preferred photography or phrenology and it took some selling to get them into my department; also, it turned out that the couples on the Tunnel of Love hardly ever unlooked each other as they rounded the bend near the trailer. But there was a better tone, as a rule, to the customers who came to me on their own hook. I was the only one in the trailer who gave them a chance to express themselves, since you do not talk while you are having your picture made; nor did the Professor listen to them while he was feeling the bumps on their heads. I picked up many a two-dollar payment simply by paying close mind to what they said and telling them how sorry I felt about it. Naturally, most of my customers were women.

After a week in Richmond, we started working our way up the Brazos Valley following the peak of the cotton-picking season as it moved north in the bottom land along this Texas Nile.

When we got to Waco late in September, Mr. Flick made a deal to set the carnival up for a twoweek stand in the old Cotton Palace Exposition Grounds. Our customers here stood in line on three sides of the trailer.

It was in Waco that Claudie got in a crap game with the bearded lady and her brother-in-law and lost nearly all the money he had made. I was never so disgusted with Claudie in my life. I spoke to him about trusting people he did not know, but he said that it had not seemed to him like real money; it had been so easy to make.

“You country hick,”I said. “You trout head. Your mind has not improved a bit since you left the Alabama wiregrass country where you came from. The trouble with you is that you cannot get used to money that has not been dug out of the ground with a-hoe and a plow.”

Claudie just looked down at a place where he was rolling a little pebble around with the toe of his shoe, and I went on: “In this work we are relieving these country people of their cash without having to do any manual labor, and it’s too much for you. You just can’t stand it.”

“Don’t your conscience ever eat on you for taking their money?" Claudie asked.

“No,”I told him, “it certainly does not; it might even be that the fun they have at the carnival is worth more to them than the money they spend on it.”

“Well,”Claudie said, as he walked away toward the freak shows, “I had a whole lot of fun in that crap game.”

4

WE LEFT the Brazos at Waco and went on to Fort Worth, where we found a stand in the north part of town near the stockyards.

The first afternoon we were there, I was sitting in the trailer listening to a champion rodeo rider that the Professor had brought in. He had picked up some bumps on his head by being thrown from bucking horses and this fact had naturally upset the Professor’s study. The champion was talking about his troubles with a girl he’d been two-timing, and I was listening to about every third word as I sat there looking over his shoulder at the couples going by on the Tunnel of Love.

Then it dawned on me that I was not hearing him at all. One of the two-seater cars had come out in the open from the Tunnel and swung around for the return trip, and there was only one person in it. She was the prettiest redheaded woman I had ever seen in my whole life, and she was looking right down at our trailer all the time she was in sight.

I said something to the champion about the tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive, and let it go at that. When I finally got him to leave, I could see the beautiful redhead coming my way from the exit of the Tunnel of Love.

By the time she reached the trailer house, I was as wide-awake as I had been for weeks. She was tall, slender in the waist, and right willowy in the way she walked; but in front and behind she was billowy, too, in ways that the plain cut of her gingham dress did not begin to hide. She almost passed by, but after she had taken one full look at the trailer house, she came to the entrance where I was sitting. She Was as pretty as a lilac bush in full bloom.

I asked her to come in, and for some reason my hands and feet began to feel bigger and heavier. All at once I felt sorry that I could not do a deathdefying tightrope act before we got down to psychology. She said, as she sighed and sat down, that she knew she had come to the right place. She had a way of meeting my look with her wide, greenish-gray eyes; and instead of looking down or away, as most women will do, she would hold on until I found myself looking away first.

“Madam,”I said, studying her strong, wellshaped hands and the plain band on her ring finger, “please tell me how I can help you. The charge will be two dollars.”

She did not look away until she said, “I have been missing my man in many ways. Do you think you can help me?" With this, something inside my chest vibrated like the other end of an arrow does when the bull’s-eye has been hit.

“Here,”I said, “is your two dollars back, lady. This one is on the house.”

“But I haven’t given you two dollars yet,”she said; and there I sat, holding out my two onedollar bills and feeling as numb and tingly as I do in cold weather, or when I hear “Mighty Lak a Rose" played on a violin cello. She continued: “I am a lonely woman, and with winter coming on I know I am going to miss him more than ever.”

“How far away is this man of yours?" I asked her in such a brittle voice that it sounded like somebody else. I was hoping he might be in Siberia or Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

She hesitated, a kind of peculiar smile flitted across her face, and she said, “Right now he is in the front part of the trailer with his hands all over some big blonde’s head.”

“Mrs. Pye,” I said, getting up from my seat after a few slack minutes, “this is where a word must be said to the id.”

“The what?”

“The id,” I explained.

“Sit down,” she said, as she leaned across the table toward me. “Tell me some more.”

I could not tell whether I had my heart in it any more or not; but going on, as she looked at me, was easier than trying to figure out what I might do instead. So I went on: “To a psychologist, when you want to do something, that is your id; when you know you should not do it, that is your superego; when you decide to do it anyway, that is your ego.”

“When you do not do it,” Mrs. Pye cut in without looking away, “that is sometimes your own fault.”

“Your psychology begins, Mrs. Pye,” I replied, “right where mine leaves off. You must know that my id ran off to the woods with yours as soon as you came in. Don’t you think we’d better head them off?”

Then, before she answered, I swung back into my routine. “ You may follow the id when you shouldn’t, and may never get caught; still you do not win.”

“Why?” she asked, and her long roan lashes were steady above the even look in her eyes. She was winning the argument all right.

“Because,” I went on, “you spend the rest of your life dodging the punishment that you know is coming to you for going against the rules. Your subconscious is always on your trail; it is a lot like the Northwest Mounted Police. Every noise in the night — every hoot owl, every tree frog, and every loud clap of thunder—all these are threats of punishment. That is the guilt complex, and it was discovered in Topeka, Kansas, where it is easier to get psychoanalyzed than it is to get a bone set or a tooth filled.”

Mrs. Pye said, “Do you mean they have discovered in Kansas that ‘the wicked flee when no man pursueth’?”

“Ma’am?” I said. Then I looked outside, and there was the Professor coming around the trailer with Julius the coon on his shoulder. As he came in, I said in a too loud voice, “That will be two dollars, please.”

The Professor drew in a quick breath, gulped, dropped Julius, and finally said, “Eula!”

Mrs. Pye said, “Oh, Exeter!”

I said to myself, “That answers one question. Now I know what the ‘E’ stands for in E. Ludington Pye.”

The Professor kissed her; then they kissed each other, and I saw that they were both in dead earnest. Mrs. Pye then opened a little paper sack and took out some persimmons she had brought along for Julius, and I could see that here was a real reunion. I stepped out of the trailer into the glare of the carnival lights; they were bright against the purple dusk settling along the high ground over to the east of the Fort Worth stockyards.

When the Professor and Mrs. Pye came out a few minutes later, they said that they wished to drive into Fort Worth right away to talk things over. I offered to handle any cases that might come up in the Professor’s department that night, and this seemed to please them both very much. When Claudie came out, I called him over to one side and took some pains to explain to him what wasgoing on. He grinned and said he was awful glad to see what a nice thing had happened to the Professor.

Mrs. Pye cried a little and told us that she had sold the Pye automobile and spent nearly all of the money on some sick relatives. She cried some more, and then admitted that she had put most of the money on some very slow ones at the Fair Grounds Race Track in New Orleans. I could see that this was the guilt complex. We all stood there looking at each other; then Mrs. Pye said to the Professor, “Wouldn’t it be just like old times, Exeter, if we only had a car to go into town?”

“Why don’t you take our car.”I asked.

This made them both very happy, and they were about to leave when Claudie went over to the car and took his gray foxtail off the radiator cap. Then he allowed as how he hoped there were no race tracks in Fort Worth.

“Don’t mind my friend’s jokes,” I said to them. “He wants you to go in the car, I am sure.” Then I turned to Claudie and said, “Don’t you, Claudie?”

While I was still looking at him, Claudie replied, “Yes, I guess I do.” Then, when I turned to look at Mrs. Pye again, Claudie added, “But not very much.”

Mrs. Pye smiled a nice, big, elegant smile at Claudie and said, “There’s one thing, though — we ought to have your registration on the car, just in case we get a parking ticket.”

While I was looking for the papers, Claudie fumbled around awhile, then he said, “Can’t you all get in touch with us if you need the papers?”

Claudie does not understand law points like this at all, so I said, “Please don’t pay him any mind; he is only the ox that treadeth out the corn. Here are the keys and here’s the registration.”

Then Claudie remarked, “Maybe you ought to leave us the papers on the trailer. Professor Pye. We might be spoke to by the law for overparking while you are away.”

The Professor did not hesitate; he gave me the title papers on the trailer, and they left. I turned to Claudie and cautioned him about his manners. I pointed out to him that he did not begin to understand female psychology. I could tell that he was doing his best to follow me, but it has always been hard to keep Claudio’s mind on one thing for very long. When I had finished, he said, “ The right tire on this trailer is flat.”

“You better fix it the first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll have to wait until the Professor comes back,” Claudie said. “The jack is in the car.”

About two weeks later, I and Claudie were sitting in the trailer discussing our past and our future. We still had a flat tire, since we had not seen anything of the Professor or Mrs. Pye or the car. It had been raining for two days, and there were no signs of the rain letting up. We were breathing smells there near the Fort Worth stockyards that were strictly different from the holiday scents in Galveston. The carnival had pulled out the day before, and we were very lonesome in the trailer. For a long time I and Claudie sat there looking out at the vacant block where all the lights had sparkled and all the laughing people had milled around while the carnival was there.

“Claudie,” I finally remarked, “after the carnival has gone away is a bad time to be at the place where the carnival was. Where all those people were happy and gay around the Kewpie dolls with pink and purple feathers, there are only empty popcorn bags and puddles of water. Down where you see those guy wires, they stood in line for a chance to chuck lopsided baseballs at the rag dolls, and . .”

“But nobody ever hit enough dolls to win the gold watch and chain,” Claudie put in.

“Please,” I said, “I have not finished. . . . Over there to the left, where that blonde in pink tights wrestled with the boa constrictor, you can’t see anything but the rear end of a vacant garage. The glitter is gone with the carnival. The echoes of the steam calliope don’t ring out any more against that row of billboards, and the Tunnel of Love has gone to Oklahoma. It’s getting so dull and quiet. around here, Claudie, that I wish to get the hell out right away.”

“How?” Claudie asked in his dumb, vacant way.

“Now, Claudie,” I cautioned him, “you almost brought up that subject that we agreed not to discuss any more.” I and Claudie had agreed that we would not talk any more about our car or Mrs. Pye and the Professor, or even Julius the coon.

That night we turned in fairly early, as there was nothing else to do and the rain kept pouring down. Claudie was soon snoring, but I stayed awake for a long time, since somebody had to do some thinking about the subject which I and Claudie had agreed not to discuss.

The next morning Claudie had bacon and eggs ready on the coal-oil stove when he came to wake me up. He brought me my coffee, already saucered and blown. The weather was nice and clear, and a fresh norther was blowing. In the middle of my second cup of coffee, I stopped and said, “Claudie, I have a real plan for us.”

“Good. What is it?”

“ We need a partner with an automobile. We have only a trailer. Where is the ad that we answered in Galveston?”

Claudie produced it and did not say a word.

“Here is a dollar,” I said. “Take that ad into town and get it run in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.”

Claudie grinned and said, “I already did.” Then he produced the classified section of the paper for the day before; and, sure enough, there it was. It read just exactly like the one we had read in Galveston, except Claudie had got the heading a little mixed up. It was headed: “Psychologist wanted.”