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High Sierra
 About the Book
About The Movie
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Preview
Chapter 1
Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he´d be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert toward an ambiguous destiny in the Far West.
Then he´d felt secure and the world had seemed like a simple place. Grandfather Earle, an old man, sat on the porch in the summer, swatting at the flies and telling long involved stories of his experiences as a Union Cavalryman fighting the Morgan Raiders. Grandfather Payson, another old man, would drive over from his son´s farm and spend the long hot afternoons listening to Grandfather Earle, putting in a sardonic comment from time to time and guffawing in the wrong places. Uncle Wert and Roy´s father, Charley, worked hard in the daytime, summer and winter, but in the evenings they played checkers or cribbage in the kitchen or sat on the porch, watching the lightning-bugs flashing under the big sycamore trees and repeating all the gossip heard in town on Saturday night. The womenfolks were always busy at something; but whatever their work was, it never kept them from talking. They talked, talked, by the hour, and the soothing sound of their subdued conversations would drift out to the men sitting on the porch or the lawn, giving them a sense of happiness and security.
When Roy thought of the past it was always summer. There were a few simple scenes he liked to recall, and the older he got, the more frequently he let his mind wander back to that far-off time, a generation ago, which seemed to a worried man heading downhill like the morning of the world, a true Golden Age.
There was the swimming-hole. It was deep and wide; a pool formed near the mouth of a creek where it swung round a bend on its way to the big river. The grassy banks were steep and lined with tall oak and sycamore trees, whose branches broke up the hot sunlight and cast cool blue shadows on the water. Screaming and yelling, the kids would rush along the bank, casting off their clothes as they ran, and the last one in was a dirty name. They flung themselves from the high bank violently, some of them taking "belly-smackers" which echoed up the quiet creek and scared the big kingfishers, which flew from the trees with a heavy beating of wings, scolded the swimmers, then veered off upstream. The water was warm and sluggish. Sometimes it was so clear you could see shafts of sunlight striking to the bottom, through which swam schools of tiny sunfish and an occasional crawdad, which scuttled backwards rapidly into its little cave in the bank. Fat Evans, known to the grownups as "that chuckle-headed, lazy good-for-nothing," would clash rocks under the water, and heads would bob up suddenly all over the pool. They swam and dove and fought and yelled till the light began to fade, then there´d be a wild scramble for the shore; and the last one out usually found his clothes tied in knots.
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