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then.”
    Arch created a stir of his own in Monroeville. When one of his schemes was going well, he would pull into town in a fancy convertible, announcing his arrival by honking the glittering, trumpetlike horns that preened themselves on the hood. Caesar himself could not have asked for a louder or more triumphal fanfare. When his plans were not working, on the other hand, which was increasingly the case in those dark Depression years, he would slink in and quietly make his way to the Faulks’ so that no one, particularly his creditors, would know that he was there. Even in that effort he was usually unsuccessful. One night at eleven o’clock, long after everyone had gone to bed, a marshal knocked on the door to serve him with a warrant; fortunately for Arch, he had left after dinner. Whether he was noisy or silent, however, he was not able to impress many people in Monroeville: they knew a con man when they saw one. “People made fun of him,” said Mary Ida. “He was always after that million dollars just beyond his reach, something too big to grasp. And that caused what I reckon you would call psychological problems for Truman. Even when he was a little boy he felt there was something wrong with his daddy.”
    As he had everyone else in his life, Arch dazzled Truman with promises, and when he felt that he was not being properly treated on Alabama Avenue, Truman would defiantly mention his daddy, who he said would come to rescue him from his woe. Arch said he would buy him a dog and books, both of which Truman desperately wanted. But neither the dog nor the books ever arrived. More than once Arch swore that he would take him down to one of the beaches on the Gulf Coast. “Truman would be so excited that he would skip,” said Mary Ida. “He would jump up into the air he would be so happy, and he would get a new swimsuit and be all ready to go. But Arch wouldn’t come through. He never took him down there once.”
    Eventually even Truman saw through his father and realized how empty all those promises were. The day of revelation came when Arch, bestowing smiles and How-do-you-do’s on everyone in sight, drove into town in one of his big cars and offered to take Truman and a couple of his friends to lunch in Mobile. Truman gathered his friends, Sook gave him two dollars—a fairly substantial sum at that time—to buy some books, and Arch, as good as his word, piled everybody into the car and set off for Mobile. Disappointment was delayed until they were in the restaurant, where Arch, whispering into Truman’s ear, asked him for the two dollars Sook had given him. “I never trusted him again after that,” Truman said.

6
    A S rarely as they saw Truman, his parents saw each other even less, and by the fall of 1930 the story of Arch and Lillie Mae was rapidly approaching its conclusion: after six years of their strange, twilight marriage Lillie Mae wanted out. She had many reasons, but the deciding incident, the one that convinced her, seems to have been the discovery that he had tricked her into driving a carload of bootleg liquor into Monroeville.
    She had, in fact, probably done the same thing many times before without knowing it; because he was night-blind as well as near-sighted, Arch often asked her, or anybody else who was around, to sit behind the wheel when he wanted to go anywhere after dark. But he did not tell her what was in the trunk, and when she found out that she was engaged in such a common, low, and even hazardous pursuit as carrying illegal hootch, she was furious and unforgiving. “That was the final straw for her,” said Mary Ida. “She couldn’t stand for him to disgrace her like that in Monroeville. A bootlegger was beneath anybody’s nose.”
    He had finally gone too far, but Lillie Mae’s problem was what it had always been: a lack of money. She had never earned her own living, and Arch’s income, unsteady and increasingly irregular as it was, was all that separated her from total