I used to spend many afternoons in county libraries, reading at the public tables, using aliases to check out books that I would mail back anonymously from other towns. I loved the democratic quiet of libraries—the sound absorbed by all the paper and buckram and dust—but eventually I had to give them up because librarians began to spook me; they’re as bored as bartenders and remember faces just as well.
I became a reader less from a love of books than from the love of how an open book in your hand seems to cause people to leave you alone. I still read anything that passes through my hands: magazines, Western novels, dime novels, thrillers, detective mysteries, romances, science fiction, history novels, small-town newspapers, TV Guides, sales catalogues, instructional manuals—even an instructional manual can be satisfying if someone has put some time into it—penny shoppers, road maps, dictionaries and textbooks, cookbooks, hymnals, and the Bible, the only book regularly available in the rooms where I live, always found in the second drawer of the nightstand.
In libraries I especially liked reading old newspapers. My interest followed a kind of formula: The papers couldn’t be too old, from World War II or the Depression, because that information had already been filtered and pressed down into history and newspapers seemed like just the scattered leavings. But if the news was too recent it felt too close; I couldn’t get a perspective on it and the lies and exaggerations seemed too apparent. Somewhere in the middle—anywhere from a couple of years to ten or fifteen—was the sweet spot. I could spend hours at a polished wood library table paging through the big books of old municipal newspapers, reading them with the pleasure of a good novel.
My travel pattern carves an erratic crosshatch across the Texas Panhandle. If you took pen to map to track my path—as some district attorney will—the resulting figure would look like an elaborate Jacob’s ladder or a cat’s cradle, the lines radiating from multiple convergences and ricocheting back out again, no line left too short or retraced too often. The lines pass mostly through small towns with small sheriff’s departments, sometimes through towns that no longer exist, uninhabited, un-post-officed, two or three brick shells against the road to show that an attempt was made—Lahey, Bronco, Sligo, Allred, Hud, Goodnight, Tascosa, Nara Visa, N.M.
Early on I made the decision to confine myself to the wide open of the High Plains because it was the place I knew best and because it has always given me the comforting illusion that I can see whatever’s coming at me from forty miles. But the longer this goes on the further I need to range off the llano, to put greater distances between myself and the jobs; I have to keep my motels, my stories, and my aliases in constant tripartite rotation, preventing any from congregating too closely in time or space in a way that might lead a man whose face I only dimly recall to spot me across a café floor and stare covertly in my direction over the top of his laminated menu, leaning in to whisper to his booth mates: “I’m telling y’all: That’s the same son of a bitch!”
The clothes I’m wearing tonight belonged to a personal injury lawyer from Oklahoma City. I hit a little jackpot with him: pigskin suede jacket, single-breasted, center vent, Bert Paley label; dark brown Dacron dress slacks by Corbin; baby-blue dress shirt, Van Heusen Vanopress; rust-colored tie embroidered with a crosshatch pattern of Conestoga wagons; gold-plated winding watch, Benrus; polished shell cordovan wingtips, Florsheim Imperial, nearly brand-new, still stiff. I robbed his room at the Black Gold Motel in Pampa while he was in the shower.
He was traveling with all the signifiers of his prosperity and belonging: wedding band; watch; fountain pen; dress Stetson; wallet with driver’s license, family pictures, BankAmericard. I never take a man’s wedding ring, his toothbrush, or his family pictures, though in this case his two young sons vaguely resembled me so I kept a snapshot of them, figuring it might come in handy. He had ninety-seven dollars and fifty cents in cash, and a pair of brown-tinted sunglasses, lying here on the bedside table, next to a paperback spy novel dog-eared at pg. 117, the part where it was starting to get good. I’m wearing his socks; his belt; his undershirt; his boxer undershorts, laundered bright white for him by someone; his aftershave, Corral Pour Homme, expensive-looking, with aromas of pine needles and soap. Accuse me of what you want to, but not seeing things through has never been one of my shortcomings.
I know you must want to understand how a person could come to this—to the point where he can’t tolerate calling even an article of clothing his own, much less a television set or a car or, God forbid, a house—to the point where even the thought of belongings fills him with a kind of dread.
I can’t tell you what happened. I just know I woke up one morning and the world wasn’t the same and I couldn’t find a way back to the way it was before. I think everyone has that kind of door in his mind, that if allowed to open even an inch is very hard to get closed again.
Sometimes I think back to something that happened two summers ago, after I’d worked my way into a car-theft ring in the Dallas area with a catchment extending south to Waco and west to Abilene. The money was good and there was something about belonging to an organized outfit that gave me a feeling of pride, a feeling I later came to recognize as one of the more dangerous a professional thief can have.
My first job, a kind of audition, was to boost a car straight from a lot, a trophy—a pristine new-model Plymouth Barracuda, cobalt blue, shaker hood, rally dash, six-pack 440. I took it with no trouble on a Sunday morning in Wichita Falls, when the dealership was closed and a church quiet of the kind only West Texas knows had descended on the city. I ran it onto State Highway 81 from Bowie toward Dallas, and I don’t mind telling you I was proud of myself that morning—this was a breadwinner of a car. I could already feel the grudging respect coming my way when I brought it in.
But I wanted to pass some personal time inside this all-American internal-combustion cocoon. So I took it off onto the empty farm roads south of Bowie and blew it out for a couple of hours, floating on the sound of the pistons shivering the needle past 120.
Late in the afternoon I pulled off alongside a stand of dryland corn with a notch in the rows about a third of the way down one side. I knew what this notch would be harboring and as I pulled in I quickly found the patch of ripe watermelons, nestled down in the furrows like fat green babies.
I popped the trunk of the Barracuda and walked around thumping rinds. As I moved along the rows I caught sight of a weathered pine signboard speared into the dirt on a garden stake, the kind you see in nurseries labeling the plants, except this one was too big and had too many words for that. I had almost expected to see such a sign nestled somewhere down there among the melons. If you aren’t from the country you might not know the story behind this sign—a funny story, rooted in the lore of farmland almost as deeply as farmers’ daughters and apple pies cooling on windowsills. It goes something like this: Boys, mostly boys, raid watermelon patches, a birthright, rite of summer; farmers hew and cry and sit on their porches at night with shotguns across their knees, scanning the corn stalks for headlights; one day, an ingenious farmer gets an idea; he hammers a sign into his patch that says: “WARNING: ONE OF THESE WATERMELONS IS POISONED!” This works until the night when an even more ingenious melon bandit, calling his bluff, takes some paint and adds a postscript to the sign—“NOW TWO ARE!”—before carting off his share.
Maybe because of the way the story turned on the power of words, it found its natural home in church sermons, for which it was probably invented, and it was often used to teach farmland people something they already knew deep in their bones—you reap what you sow.
I thought about getting a pen and adding the coda to the sign, out of a sense of tradition. But I decided I couldn’t risk the low comedy of getting arrested for stealing produce, so I helped myself quickly to a small melon the color of a jadestone, and later, at a motel in Denton, I took a pocketknife and carved a big slice and ate it while I watched an episode of Bonanza.
I understood what was happening almost immediate
ly. I threw it all up, but whatever poison the melon contained was so noxious it must have instantly infiltrated my system because for the next three days I lay in bed barely able to move—my hands and feet painfully distended, my head and face so swollen I could barely open my eyes to see how terrifying and near-dead I must have looked. In my delirium I began to imagine that my head was slowly denaturing into a watermelon and that this was the intended effect of the toxin I had ingested, some alchemical compound engineered by a pesticide company as a terrifying deterrent to watermelon theft.
As the days went by, the room kept threatening to rupture at the seams. Even the light leaking in around the curtain edges was unbearable. A painting on the wall depicting a beautiful woman seated beneath a tree staring out at a river turned out to be a jigsaw puzzle held behind glass. This seemed like a joke someone was playing on me, as did the Japanese-looking wallpaper with a pattern of tree branches that keep changing into live snakes.
By the first morning I was struggling to get breath around my tongue, which felt like a slab of uncooked meat lodged in my mouth. Ideas drifted up into consciousness that had no coherence in and of themselves except that some seemed to be buoyant and keep me afloat while others sank as soon as I grabbed them, pulling me beneath the surface. Besides respiration the only thing I could hold in my mind for any length of time was the image of the gleaming Barracuda sitting out in the parking lot, begging to get made. I also thought about the farmer—a man likely to become my murderer, a man who might well have been a pillar of his community, a churchgoer, yet a man who had taken considerable time and effort to syringe actual poison into his near-worthless watermelons. How many had he poisoned? Or did I pick the one winner out of them all?
I kept the maids at bay by bellowing when they knocked. Around the evening of the second day, the motel owner used the passkey to let herself in. She was middle-aged, tough-looking, broad-hipped, dressed in a turquoise pantsuit. I managed to veil myself partially with the sheet.
Probably for specific legal reasons she remained with her feet just behind the threshold of the door. She asked me in an abnormally loud voice: “Sir, is there something the matter with you? Sir, do you need someone to take you to a hospital?” I heard myself answer, telling her I had the flu. I asked if she could get me a glass of water, maybe something to eat. But the voice that came from my mouth sounded nothing like me. It sounded vaguely like Harlan but more like a wounded animal that had acquired powers of speech to articulate its dying. I was afraid she couldn’t understand me. But she went away and came back with a plastic gallon milk jug of cold water and another empty jug cut in half, for me to vomit into. Much later—I had no idea whether it was a day or a week—she returned and left an unplugged crockpot full of beef broth.
She wore strong perfume that smelled like potpourri and the untanned tops of her breasts rose up out of her blouse like crescent rolls. She parted the drapes to bring a little light into the room and stood disapprovingly over what it illuminated. “Now you eat this for me and I’ll check back in a few hours,” she said. She turned up the A/C and put the television on for me with the sound low.
I watched the small black-and-white screen without being able to focus my eyes. When I did I saw images of an immense crowd of soldiers somewhere, clapping and whooping, laughing, gathered around three tall highline poles. Each of the poles seemed to have three or four men dangling from it. I watched with mounting horror, thinking it was news footage showing soldiers who had killed some men, probably Vietcong, and strung their corpses up on poles in front of a jeering crowd. I couldn’t understand why we would be allowed to see such a horrifying scene on network television. But after a while I realized it was only a USO program and the men on the highline poles were still alive. They were just GIs who had climbed up there to get a better view of the dancing girls in Bob Hope’s show.
I had no memory of eating but the cooker was empty when the woman returned to take it. She came back with it full and lingered this time, talking, trying to lighten the mood. She stopped calling me sir and seemed to have formed a maternal feeling toward me.
“I think you might pull through, sugar. And that’s good for me, because when somebody checks out of here toes up it does a number on my motel association rating.”
The whole time, she never asked a single personal question, never threatened to call an ambulance. She seemed to understand I was in no position to present myself to a doctor—motel proprietors can be that way sometimes, as complicit as fences.
I’m fairly certain now that this kindhearted woman never existed but was a figment of my contaminated brain, conjured up as an embodiment of my will to survive, to sweat the poison from my blood.
There’s an aspect of a high fever that’s magnificent, as if you’ve been freed from all physical encumbrance, floating on a cloud lighted from within by unearthly light. Then you realize this must be what a man feels near death as his body begins to surrender itself, so you lie there torn by a strange mix of euphoria and dread.
I had a dream in the middle of it. I was riding in the passenger seat of a car whose make I couldn’t determine, driven by a man I’d known during my first days stealing cars in New Mexico. He had been paired with me as a kind of mentor, but he didn’t particularly like me and I didn’t care much for him, either. He was an alcoholic and wore a suit jacket with the lining sagging below the hem like an old woman’s slip showing beneath her dress. He always called me hombre.
Finding myself in a car with him was clearly a dream because he was already dead. We were in the middle of nowhere, in front of a little white-shingled farmhouse. I didn’t know the house but I had the distinct feeling it knew me, that I must have lived in it at some point and forgotten about it.
The man said he had an important piece of information to share before he dropped me off. We sat in front of the house for a long time and I became aware that he was fumbling with something in his lap, which turned out to be the scraps of a twenty-dollar bill he was diligently trying to tape back together with Scotch tape. I realized that he would continue trying to tape it back together for eternity and I felt bad for him.
What he ultimately told me turned out not to be important at all; it was something a high school football coach once said to me after I’d missed a tackle on purpose because I didn’t care for the game of football. The man repeated the exact words the coach had screamed on the practice field that day, gripping the center bar of my facemask, yanking me around like a wrestled steer:
“Son, I don’t care if you fuck up. But if you do I want you to fuck up going a hundred and ten miles an hour. Do you understand me? This isn’t about football, son. This is about life! This is the goddamned United States of America!”
Near dead in the noonday twilight of a cheap motel room, it occurred to me that I’d ended up following his advice.
*
The two brothers, her second cousins, had woken Martha in their native state, savaging each other, and she had been within seconds of loosing an ear-splitting scream when they suddenly bolted from the station wagon and the strange man opened the back door and threw something onto the seat and got into the car.
Martha saw him for a split second but he didn’t seem to have seen her. She thought he must have mistaken her aunt’s car for his own and she was about to sit up, but then something made her stop. She clamped her eyes shut and lay very still in the berth behind the backseat of the station wagon, where she had sought refuge from the boys on the way into town, stretched out along the seam formed by the carpeted floorboard and the angled seat back, a protected place she often claimed, staring up through the side window into blue sky, imagining herself rising out into the open air.
After a lot of yelling another man had gotten into the car and it had pulled out and Martha thought a panic sound she heard in her throat would escape from her mouth but it didn’t. The men had stopped talking now and all she could hear besides her heart pumping was the violent sound being made by the engine, not any
thing like the station wagon’s regular sound, and the thunder of the tires pounding gravel up against the floorboard below her head. She had never known anyone in her life who had been the victim of a car theft, because for most of her life she had not known anyone who owned a car. But she knew a car was being stolen now and knew she needed to do something, though every instinct in her body told her that if she did nothing, if she remained absolutely still and absolutely silent, it would be better. She would ride to wherever they took the car, which would probably be far from Tahoka; when they finally stopped she would wait for them to get out and then sneak away and hitch a ride and no one would be able to catch her.
In the year since they had brought her here to West Texas she had tried to run away three times but had never made it further than town, where too many people already knew why she was there and who she was: a Mennonite, or once one, from a family of Old Colony Mennonites, descendants of families that had migrated in the twenties from Manitoba and Saskatchewan through the Great Plains into the Chihuahuan desert, seeking freedom from state interference in their affairs and finally finding it in northern Mexico, along with persistent drought and deprivation.
Martha was one of eleven, a family of nine girls and two boys. Three years earlier, her father, an oat farmer on the brink of ruin, had set in motion events that had brought her to this place with what seemed like a negligible act of disobedience: He had shod the wheels of his ancient two-cylinder tractor with rubber tires. It was a modest concession to modernity, made to save badly needed money on gasoline and upkeep on the tractor—there were men even in conservative colonies who had done it years before. But in his colony rubber tires remained prohibited by ecclesiastical law because it was possible that a tractor with tires could be driven on public roads, could conceivably be driven all the way to Cuauhtémoc City. Such use of tractors for transportation could lead to an inevitable acceptance of the automobile—and once the automobile entered Mennonite life the struggle to keep worldliness at bay would be all but lost. Aron Zacharias knew men would come and eventually they did. He dug in his heels and they went away and others came, accompanied by concession-seeking groups of cousins and family friends, in whose presence he steadfastly refused each request to remove the tires. After almost a year of deliberation the elders finally excommunicated him and six months later Martha’s mother, under pressure from her family, who had expected some disgrace like this from him, formally shunned him—the worst punishment possible in a society defined by belonging. His church and livelihood had already been taken away from him and finally his children were, too.
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