“Nowhere in particular.”
“A wetback I know swore he saw you about a year ago outside a motel in Sweetwater. I told him he was crazy. I said you probably weren’t even on this side of the country.”
Troy let his gaze climb the tower, hinging his head back to follow its latticework into the sky, where it appeared to undulate like a rope bridge.
“Your wetback was probably right,” he said. “A good deal of my work revolves around the West Texas hospitality industry.”
Harlan laughed, a noise that managed to sound forced and involuntary at the same time. “Your work my ass. I don’t know how you’ve stayed around here without somebody recognizing you, catching up to you.”
“I don’t stick around anywhere long enough,” Troy said. “But you know what’s funny? People don’t pay much attention to people in motels. They just assume they’re strangers they’ll never see again. Maybe wetbacks pay more attention because people never notice them, either.”
Harlan ate rapidly, noisily. “Maybe,” he said with his mouth full. “And maybe you’re just lucky like you always were.”
He gathered up the dishes and reflexively turned on the television, which came to life in the middle of some kind of cheap-looking Western movie. On the screen, two men were having a fistfight that ended with one of the men, a lone gunfighter—he looked like a gunfighter, anyway, because of his black gloves and sleeve garters—stumbling across an expanse of desert sand, cradling his bloodied gun hand. The sound was off, so Troy couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on.
“When does this thing get powered up?” he asked, looking at the base of the tower, which tapered to a single, almost balletic point, poised on a ceramic insulator that resembled a giant lozenge.
Harlan crowded past Troy, bound for the stock tank with his coffeepot and an armful of dishes. “There ain’t been a signal out of here in two years—the little country-and-western station that had it went under. The company hired me to come out here and check on the place because high school kids were busting in at night to drink beer and screw each other, God knows what else, dope I imagine. When I first came it looked like somebody’d slaughtered something in the shack—took me two days to clean it up.”
He slowed at the grassless lunette swept out by tires at the head of the dirt road. “As soon as they know I’m gone they’ll be back out here like a shot, the shaggy little sons of bitches. But maybe I won’t need it by the time we get back.”
“ ‘We’ isn’t coming back,” Troy said. “If we find her, I’m on my way again, back to regular programming.”
A quarter of a mile out a crop duster crossed low in the sky heading east, a single-engine Piper that looked and sounded like a yellow jacket. It was close enough that they could see the head of the pilot inside. The plane momentarily dipped a wing but Harlan just followed it with his eyes and didn’t raise a hand to return the greeting. Troy turned to look at the Nova—such a ludicrous lump of shit-brown metal, sitting right out in plain view—and wondered what a crop duster was doing in the sky in November.
“We’ve got to hit the road today, Harlan,” Troy yelled over the receding drone of the airplane’s engine.
Harlan headed toward the tank, talking as he walked away. “What else are we going to do, sit around here and play catch-up? I need an hour to break the place down. Stow your things—whoever’s things they are—in the truck bed. Then you can follow me out into the pasture. We’ll put that car down behind a windbreak and pull off the plates, cover it with brush . . . That’s how you and your boys would handle it, ain’t it?”
“No boys, Harlan,” Troy said. “Only me. And that’s what I’d do.”
Sept. 5, 1972
The first time I stole a vehicle it was just an old tractor, a dirt-red Allis-Chalmers diesel. I was seventeen. It was so easy I think it ruined me. Nobody locks a tractor, there’s no key. Just a soot-blackened starter button and a choke and it shudders to life like an earthquake, like it was planning to all along.
I took it one night to get to the state line bar west of Bronco, to work out a bootlegging run I had planned for rodeo weekend with two older boys. (We lived in a dry county bordered closely by a wet state, a piece of geographic luck that presented moneymaking opportunities.) Nobody could come get me and I wasn’t about to walk the two miles from my uncle’s, where I was plowing that summer. So I took the tractor and parked it behind a windbreak ridge a hundred yards from the bar and then drove it back to the spot behind the old hand’s trailer where he was keeping it.
It wasn’t his tractor anyway—the bank had been trying to repossess it for a month. But I treated it as if it were my very own, I think mostly because I’d already anticipated how satisfying it would feel to take something with impunity, to be in sole possession of the knowledge of my act. I guess I always knew I would be good at it.
I left Texas in my early twenties to see if I could make it somewhere else, learn something about the world. I bumped through Tucson and San Diego, then Sacramento and up north as far as Spokane and Seattle. I found legitimate work here and there but I ended up mostly robbing houses until my nerves couldn’t take it anymore; I understood why so many house burglars became drunks and drug addicts. Automobiles were easier and the money was better. From the beginning I liked everything about the business of stealing them.
Almost as much as horses were in previous centuries, automobiles are essential for livelihood in the West, and when I consider the comparison I focus gratefully on the fact that progress has led to the discontinuation of capital punishment for the act of stealing something so vital.
When I first got into the business I apprenticed the way people in legal occupations do. My first job was a body shop in Hobbs, New Mexico, working for a man who had been pointed out to me as someone in need of specialized automotive work. By my mid-twenties I ran in the kinds of circles where I heard about openings like that. As you might expect, this one required no automotive skill beyond taking a car apart, though I ended up doing little of that. I was the go-getter, the night man.
The station was owned by an ex-cowhand named Jim Quaintance, who had run cattle and then hired on with a sheriff’s department before realizing that his temperament favored the other side of the law. His violent days were mostly behind him, but he kept a short-barreled shotgun on hooks beneath the cash register just in case.
He worked me like a sighthound. I’d come into the station in the evening, and by nightfall I was roaming the streets with a rider to take my car when I found another. Those were the golden years—so many doors so innocently unlocked, so many keys in the ignition for the turning. My only adversaries were dogs and insomniacs, but even at that age I had a second sense for them, lying in wait for me out in the darkness.
TWO
Harlan changed into a new set of khakis identical to the ones he had been wearing before, except these were washed and pressed. Before padlocking the shack he placed all his remaining food into a bucket for the dog, which didn’t wake to watch them leave. They set out before noon, headed toward Brownfield on their way to Tahoka, picking out a route on the empty farm-to-market roads that faintly grid the Panhandle before unraveling into capillary irregularity as the plains break up south of Midland.
A final fall heat wave had set in. The warmth spawned dust devils that rose from the harvested fields in spectral columns, drafting up a hundred feet toward low-pressure thermals, changing color as they wandered from red farmland to caliche to sandy loam. On the hot asphalt before the pickup, light lakes materialized like mercury pools, draining upon approach, refilling a mile down the road.
Troy looked out the window toward the bobbing black pumpjacks, dozens upon dozens, diminishing toward the horizon, some working in tandem, some out of rhythm, dancing their own dance. It seemed like some kind of a joke that the machines built to suck prehistoric sludge from the depths of the earth looked like mechanical dinosaurs.
Even with the gas pedal flush against the floor the p
ickup could no longer manage more than thirty. Sitting shotgun uncomfortably as the wind whistled through the window frames, Troy found it hard to believe this was the same truck he had known, the one in which he and Harlan had spent so many thousands of circuitous miles, in which they had learned the featureless geography of West Texas and how to drive through it. A black Diamond T, the pickup had been the pride of Bill Ray’s young life, the first vehicle he ever bought brand-new, in 1938, the year of Troy’s birth. In light of that event, the purchase had been an even more reckless financial extravagance than it would have been under normal circumstances. Fully loaded, the pickup had cost twelve hundred dollars, to the eight he would have paid for a new Chevy or Ford. He drove his old Packard all the way to Las Cruces to get it, returning after midnight to find that Ruby had locked him out of the house and that several of the neighbors seemed to know because their kitchen lights still burned brightly at such a late hour. Bill Ray slept in the pickup that night, luxuriating in the factory perfume of virgin upholstery. Ruby wouldn’t speak to him for a week, but she was eventually worn down by the simple sight of the truck, a one-ton apotheosis of American power—Lockheed hydraulic brakes; six-cylinder flathead Hercules; a hundred-thousand-mile guarantee. Advertisements called it “The Handsomest Truck in America” and it delivered on that unpoetic promise with a broad silver grille burnished like a bank teller’s window.
Thirty-two years later, that vehicle was almost impossible to bring back to mind. The odometer had zeroed over too many times to count and the digits behind the milked glass had lodged permanently at four nines and an eight. The factory black lay buried beneath several coats of beige latex house paint that Harlan applied semiannually with a brush. To check the rust he had painted over the chromework, too, chrome that Bill Ray had babied with a chamois, but rust had run rampant in the bed walls, which wore so thin that Harlan had to torch them and put up pine running boards. The boards fenced in a ragged wooden toolbox that stuck up two feet over the top of the cab, and behind the toolbox lay remnants of old chicken-wire coops that Harlan had built during years when he had sold hens and eggs door-to-door. For drivers passing it, the ramshackle pile of moving parts seemed like an apparition from the road’s past, an Okie rig finally repatriated from the California fruit fields.
Harlan’s one attempt at improvement had been to install a combination AM/FM and CB unit in a bracket under the dashboard, but the truck had rejected it like an unsuccessful transplant; the receiver worked for a month and the CB remained off because Harlan didn’t like talking to people on it. He filled the silence by singing country songs to himself, along with half-remembered, half-tuneless bits of doggerel that Bill Ray had sung, drawn from sources mysterious to his sons, perhaps lost to history:
Sy and I went to the circus
Sy got hit with a bucket of shit
But Sy got even with that damned old circus
He bought a ticket and didn’t go in.
Georgie was a-shaving one fine day
And sliced the nose right off-a his face
Well the doctor he sewed it on
Upside down
Now ever time it rains
George damn near drowns.
Oh I knew an old fellow from Boston
Who drove a little red Austin
There was room for his ass and a gallon of gas
But his balls fell out and he lost ’em.
One bright day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other
A deaf policeman heard this noise
And came to arrest those two dead boys.
Troy and Harlan had each spent so many years driving alone that the shells of their respective solitudes remained intact as they sat together in the pickup. But eventually Harlan’s voice penetrated Troy’s and Troy leaned forward to open his side of the windshield, finding that the crank was jammed. He reached to roll down his window but the handle turned loosely in his hand without disturbing the glass in the least, so he sat back and resigned himself, staring westerly at the combine-cut furrows of a sorghum field, whose long parallel lines began to create the illusion of a sweeping broom as the truck passed them. The sun was well up now in a cloudless pale sky and Troy remembered something someone had told him about this part of the Great Plains—that the only way the sky could get bigger was if the earth got smaller. Stretching out before him was a piece of earth that looked eventless even for the plains, as if nothing more consequential than breaking and planting had occurred there in all human history. Harlan sometimes knew stories about these patches of nothing county, stories not inscribed on historical markers because their particulars were either too trivial or too grim. He had always been an amateur student of history—intelligence gathered from newspaper articles and television shows, overheard conversations of settler-family ranchers—but his interest had deepened with age, in a way that tends to happen with much older men who suddenly feel the need to understand their place in the order of things.
“What about here, Harlan?” Troy asked, breaking the silence as the truck labored along a dirt farm road five miles west of Tahoka. “Did anything ever happen here?”
Harlan spat a length of tobacco juice into an empty tomato can he was holding between his legs and looked to his left for a long while.
“Right back yonder,” he said, easing off the gas and scanning the flatland over his shoulder. “There’s an old playa out there called the Double Lakes, a big salt lick now. About ten years after the Civil War this cavalry captain named Nolan staged a bunch of buffalo soldiers from San Angelo to find some Kwahadi Comanche that’d been raiding camps. But it was the dead of summer and a drought was on and those boys didn’t know what the hell they were doing. A bunch of ’em rode around for days and got lost on the plains and couldn’t find a drop of water—they ended up drinking their own piss, and then the piss of their horses, then the blood of the horses after they died. A few of the men died, too, if I remember.”
Troy looked out at the bleached flatness where Harlan had pointed and saw nothing remotely resembling a lake. “Right out there?”
“It started there,” Harlan said. “And that’s where those that survived returned. The funny thing—not funny to them, naturally—was that while they were out there dying, old chief Quanah Parker had already come in and talked the Comanche raiders into going peaceably with him back to the reservation.”
Harlan leaned forward and folded the bottoms of his forearms on top of the steering wheel the way someone would rest on a tabletop, his customary posture on the road. He turned partway toward Troy and laughed, baring teeth that were, like those of most people who had grown up in the area, permanently discolored with brownish-yellow striations caused by the natural fluoridation of the plains groundwater. Troy’s teeth had once looked just like this but several years earlier he had paid a dentist in Seagraves to bleach them, partly out of vanity but mostly to enhance an impression that he came from elsewhere.
Harlan had noticed Troy looking at his teeth.
“You know what they say about spending your life drinking this llano water?”
Troy didn’t want to know but he waited for the answer he knew would come.
“That if you dig up people’s remains, those that have lived here all their life, their bones will be the same shit-brown as their teeth. In other words, the place brands you right down to the skeleton. You might be able to fool people with your shiny white teeth now, but when you die your bones will tell the truth.”
Troy shifted his ass on the hard leather bench seat, seeking a more forgiving spot. “Thank you for adding that to my storehouse of knowledge, Harlan. Truly. Where in the hell do you get this stuff?”
“It’s all bone, ain’t it? Stands to reason!”
They drove on, coming to pavement and passing a small state rest area with a pair of low unshaded concrete tables, the least hospitable plac
e to rest that Troy could imagine. Harlan continued talking, mostly to himself: “You know, the thing we’re barely able to understand around here anymore—and we ain’t even removed from it by all that many years—is the kind of time it took to get around this country back when you got around on horseback. Anywhere. Days in the saddle just to go the hundred miles from Lubbock down to Midland. How godawful huge this land must have been back then.”
Troy looked down the road at the pale blue water tower visible over the town of Tahoka, a landmark that seemed to be getting no closer, seemed in fact to be receding as the truck plodded heavily toward it. “I’d pay good money for a horse right now—it feels like we’re on the back of an old smoothmouth mule,” he said. As he did the pickup’s engine made a hard sound, as if something in it had bottomed out and was struggling to regain the surface. Harlan eased off the gas and let the truck coast almost to a stop as a big propane tanker blew past them, shaking the pickup with its wake. Troy looked over, alarmed at the thought of having to walk in broad daylight, but Harlan’s face registered no sign of concern. He took the pickup out of gear and gassed it aggressively, then rammed the stick into second. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, like one of the mile-long freight trains that stop-started on the West Texas flatness bound for elsewhere, the truck began to regain momentum.
They had started out east instead of due south because a cotton farmer in Tahoka owed Harlan fifty dollars for a welding job, and before having to accept any of Troy’s ill-gotten money he insisted on making an attempt to get the little that was still his. They pulled in to a Shurfine grocery store, where a phone booth sat to the side of the building, next to a bagged-ice freezer. It was early afternoon and only one other car sat in front of the store, at the far corner of a lot in which hundreds of pop-tops had been embedded over the years by tires and summer heat, giving the asphalt the appearance of a lake filled with minnows swimming just beneath the surface.
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