Marie was waiting for me at the depot, all kisses and hugs. She was thin as a cedar stay and her hair had gone from blonde to that muddy color blondes go. She was still smoking cigarettes like they were the breath of life itself. Right off I noticed the odor of food all over her, and when I told her she smelled like she'd just stepped out of the kitchen, she said, "Well, I have. I'm working these days in the cafeteria over at the college. In fact, I got to hustle you home and get on back to work."
In the truck she told me that Crissy was in school and David was at the house. "He's real nervous about seeing you," she said. "It's some kind of business deal. He says soldier boys always get out with a load of cash and he wants to talk you out of some of yours. For the good of us all, he says."
Marie looked at me like she wanted me to commit to something, so I asked her what it was and she said she didn't know, "exactly," which was a lie plain enough, and then we talked of other matters as she drove us out of town.
She told me how she hated her job and how, though he had a knack for coming up with money, it seemed David could never find anything but temporary work, and how Crissy had grown tall like her daddy but hadn't outgrown the problem with her lungs, and how that afternoon she would have to leave work again to take Crissy to a doctor's appointment. She told me all kinds of things. And I had that uneasy feeling you get when you arrive some place and realize that the people have been living on their own all the time you've been gone without pausing to wait for you, and that you've waded into something that's like a swiftly moving river full of water and debris that have come from far away. We were easy with each other, telling stories and catching up, but when we rolled into the yard her eyes cut to me and held on. She smiled like a sister. She touched my arm. Her fingers rubbed the material of my uniform and then she squeezed my hand, and she looked as happy to have me as I was to be there.
The house was small but sturdy, with stone walls and a tin roof, an old ranch house that the owner rented to them for next to nothing. She said it was a bargain David had made for some work he did. Out back a stand of mesquites shaded a barbecue pit and a Honda motorcycle that was under repair. Toys and tools were all around. On the kitchen table waited two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and hanging from tape between them was a paper napkin with WELCOME HOME JOHNNY BOY printed on it in red crayon. Under the table lay old Shepherd Fred who didn't move except to thump his tail when Marie spoke his name out of habit and a natural politeness that extended even to dogs and bums.
"I'm afraid it's not much of a party," she said. "But I remembered you loved the Colonel's chicken." Then she yelled, "David, where are you, man, look who's here," and before it was out of her mouth he was standing in the doorway, grinning stupidly amid the haggard flabby skin on his face and the matted waves of dark hair on his head, and at almost the same instant I caught the smell of marijuana which had come in with him. Marie smelled it, too, because her face fell right down to her chest and her eyes showed anger, over it being so early in the day, I suppose.
But all of that was lost in David's booming talk. He snapped to attention and saluted me and he said, "By God, it's him, all dolled up like a general and covered in a hero's medals and looking like he could whip Cassius Clay with one arm tied behind his back." At first I thought he was mocking me there was something in the tone of his voice but then it changed and he was on me, shaking my hand and slapping my back in a big way as if we'd been best of friends all our lives. He gave me a bear hug and a "Whoopee!" and the dog hefted up to put in his two bits, barking and rubbing up against David and me, and there was the feeling of warm and friendly mayhem in a warm and friendly place. Marie was grinning at David by then. She shook her head in that manner women have which says I love you in spite of yourself, and I could see that she was hoping we'd hit it off together again.
David said, "You didn't tell him the surprise, did you?"
"No, I certainly did not," Marie said and she gave me a we've-got-a-secret look. She was about to go on with something when David interrupted too loudly with a "sit down here and take a load off and eat some of this good food," and Marie had to step in again, saying I might like to clean up first and relax.
"Why sure," he said, swaying a bit and holding on to the table for support. Then he sat down at the table and just stared at me with that stoned grin. So Marie showed me to Crissy's room and told me to make myself comfortable as Crissy would be sleeping with them for a while.
"Consider it yours till you get on your feet," she said.
It was a narrow bed, a kid's bed, but it was soft and folded around me like no military cot had ever done, and I intended to rest there for just a moment. Well, the next thing I knew David was standing over me, blocking the ceiling light, barking wake-up slogans like a drill sergeant, and when I dragged myself up I could tell it was quite dark outside.
We ate cold chicken and sent it down with two six packs of Dos Equis in the heavy brown bottles which they kept raising high to toast my return to the world. Then David rolled a number from what he called his "special reserve." By the time the dishes were in the sink we were all smiling and laughing, telling tales on each other, and then little Crissy started wanting to know when we were going to go see the surprise for Uncle John.
So David said, "Well, how about right now."
The four of us squeezed into the truck and David drove us back through town to the highway where we headed north. When I saw the eerie blue lights of the Alpine Regional Airport it came to me what the surprise was.
"Isn't she a sight," David said as the headlights lit up the plane, an old four-place job with the wings below the cockpit. It looked pretty scraped up. The windshield was cracked and one of the tie-downs was kicking in the breeze. "I call her Easy Rider," David said with a smile.
I asked him how he had come to own it and his smile really bloomed then: "Swapped for some work time and a little cash." To which Marie added, "A little cash, my foot, it was everything we'd put away," and I could tell this was still a sore point between them. When I asked how it handled, they were silent for a long time until Crissy mumbled, "It gots to be fixed."
Then David threw in, "That's what I've been wanting to talk to you about, Johnny." And all at once they were after me, telling me how this was our ticket to a future. If the plane were running, they said, David knew he could eventually set up enough commuter and cargo business that within a few years we could be working several planes between Alpine and El Paso and a number of points in between. They mentioned a dozen grand ideas. "And here's the mondo banana," David said. "Mexico! There's the real money. I'm talking the future now, once you've learned to fly."
"How much would it take?" I asked and they went silent again, glancing at each other, till David said, "Twelve-hundred."
"But I've only got a thousand."
"I can get the rest, no problem."
"That money's all I've got in the world, David."
"Make it nine-hundred then, and I promise I'll have it back to you within a month, and with plenty of interest to boot."
The feeling in the close confines of the truck cab at that moment was that there was much more to it than I'd been told. And I wasn't positive I was going to stay in Alpine even for a month. There was always Houston where I still had friends. But here were their hopeful faces, staring at me in the back glow of the headlights, and little Crissy sitting on my lap.
Marie said, "You don't have to, now, Johnny."
"That's right," said David. "There's no pressure being applied here. You do what you got to do."
But here were their faces, tired out from work and worry and hard living, and the buzz was wearing off for all of us.
Crissy put her head against my chest and I could feel her little body breathing, hear the faint wheeze in her lungs. I said, "Well, why not," and their eyes shone with relief and joy, and there was lots of expensive talk out of David on the way home.
II
So Alpine became my new address and I more or less settl
ed in. I bought clothes and a clock radio and even began to scout around for a place to live once we got the business going.
David was in and out over the next few weeks as he scrambled for engine parts and the best deals on labor for the work he couldn't do himself. I occupied my time with repairing the motorcycle, which had been thrown in as part of the payback for my 900 dollars, and we went drinking in the bars at night after Crissy had been put to bed. I would pester David about his progress with the plane and he usually muttered something about a hydraulic valve or the carburetor and he would go on to other topics, vague things about the bright outlook for our lives. It was funny, we never talked about the war, other than to mention the places we had been and how glad we were that it was over for us. And even with just that little bit Marie would say, "That's enough now, let's talk about something else."
Then the big day came. I had gone up into the mountains on the motorcycle that afternoon, just to see them again and to think. It was dark when I got home, but the house was all lit up and in a real stir. Marie jumped on me immediately, wanting to know where I'd been, telling me that David had flown the plane.
"It's fixed," she said.
Then she disappeared into the back of the house. The smell of Mentholatum was heavy in the air and I could see the vaporizer spewing out mist back in their bedroom. Which meant Crissy'd had one of her attacks. Shepherd Fred wandered out to greet me and his old cloudy eyes seemed to be asking for help. Marie said David was waiting for me at the airport. When I asked about Crissy she glared at me as if I were the cause of her problems.
"She needs to go to the hospital, but we don't have the money, of course, and no insurance, of course, and the doctor won't speak to us anymore because we owe him so much" She caught herself, let out a breath full of weariness. "Go on down there and take your ride and for God's sake be careful."
The plane was ready to go when I arrived, and it was making quite a racket. In the cockpit we could communicate only by yelling and pointing with our hands. All the seats were missing except the pilot's, so I had to sit on a crate and just hang on as best I could.
It was a beautiful sight once we crested the hills and David turned us south away from the town. A crescent of purple sunset was still glowing above the western horizon and the desert was a dark, ragged carpet below us. Soon David tapped my arm and hollered, "Spicville," pointing straight ahead, his face and hand shining green in the lights of the control panel. He banked it hard around to the north and took us home to a rough landing; we bounced and I heard scraping sounds behind me. David said there was plenty of work left to do, but the engine was sound and the plane solid enough to start earning a return on our investment.
"If we play it right," he said in the bar where we had gone to celebrate, "if we play it right, and act quickly, we could make enough next week to set us up for a long time to come."
I asked him what he meant and he looked at me across the table with the face of a man who is still trying to decide something. He said, "Smuggling," and then he pulled back from the table, sitting up straight and proper as if to distance himself from the word. In a whisper he told me he had been in touch with a rancher up in the mountains who had fallen on hard times and was looking for a way to save his spread. The rancher had made contact with some business associates in Mexico.
"To put it simply," he said, "I'm talking a dope deal."
"Has this been your plan all along?" I asked and he nodded yes. "You mean I've already invested in a smuggling operation?"
He said, "Now listen, Johnny, like the old saying goes, it takes money to make money, and how the hell else would we get started? This is my chance, man. Let's face it, the only thing in my life that I've ever done right is fly airplanes. One deal like this is all we need.
"And there's another little item. Your sister's a wonderful woman. She took me out of the dirt and cleaned me off, and I've tried to take care of her because of it. But I'll tell you, unless something changes for us soon, I don't know how long we can last." He said, "And no telling what would happen then."
"You should have told me, David."
"Well, maybe I should have," he said. "But you never know about people, Johnny, how they've changed or whatever. I mean, I'm telling you all this on trust, you know. Nothing but trust."
Then we just sat there staring at the table until I asked him for more details. But he said no, he wasn't going to tell me any more, just in case. "Look, it's a good deal," he said. Most of it had been worked out, he told me, and there was very little risk: simply a matter of hopping down to a place in Mexico, hopping back to Alpine and then waiting a few days to collect our share. He said, "If nothing else it's a way for you to help your sister and Crissy. You could look at it that way, if you'd like."
"Does Marie know about this?" I asked.
"The question right now is you. Are you in?"
I told him that I'd have to think about it, to which he said, "Fine. That's fine. But time is short." He seemed to be watching me for something as if he were wondering whether he should have told me about it, as if he wasn't sure he trusted me now, now that I knew. "You'll keep it quiet, of course," he said.
The house had calmed when we got home, but Crissy was up all night coughing and wheezing, and in the morning she looked like she was close to death. Her skin had a gray tint to it and her eyes were dark and frightened. She needed help, Marie said. And I guess that's what made me decide to do it. That, and, when I remember who I was then, it was also the prospect of easy money and a night's-worth of blind excitement.
When he told Marie she let loose with a fit, calling us both losers and saying, "This is just what we need both of you in the penitentiary or dead somewhere in Mexico." To me she said, "I thought you had more sense." They argued for two days. He would leave, come back and leave again. She talked about how after all those years of living "low and fast" she thought she'd finally changed her life into "something resembling normal," but now she saw that people like her and David never really changed. "There is in fact only one kind of life for each person in this world," she said. "There's respectable and non-respectable and it's just nonsense to think you can ever be anything else."
This kind of talk went on until I had almost changed my mind. Then Crissy took a turn for the worse one night to the point that it sounded like she was drowning when she tried to catch her breath. We had to take her to the hospital. The doctor did something to her to make it better, but the hospital wouldn't let her stay even overnight, as she wasn't "serious" in their book and Marie and David were very far in arears on old bills.
In the truck, Marie said, "All right, do it. I guess you're going to whether I agree or not, and a mother with a sick child can't be choosy. But far as I'm concerned I know nothing about it. Do you hear me?" She let out a huff then and shoved Crissy onto my lap, like she was tired of the weight, and all the way home she was quiet, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window at something far away.
By now the outcome must appear obvious: that something went wrong with the scheme, that there was an accident or a double cross or that we got busted. But it was nothing like that, and this is the part I'm still trying to understand.
The night of the deal came and went just fine. We flew in the dark for about two hours, close above the hill tops, to what appeared to be a village. We landed on a road in the glare of headlights. Two men showed themselves. David spoke to them in Spanish. Then the four of us loaded half a dozen bales of marijuana into the plane. The smell was so strong that by the time we landed in a slight drizzle up in the mountains I had the feeling I'd been smoking the stuff steadily for a month or more.
It was an airstrip on a ranch. Again two men were waiting for us: the rancher and his son, about my age. We unloaded the bales into a pickup, covered it all with a tarp, and then David and I flew away into the mist. The only problem occurred back at Alpine Regional. David overshot the runway and the landing gears stuck in the mud as hard as if it were plaster of paris holding do
wn the plane. He screamed at the plane and cursed and banged his fist against the controls until he sort of caught himself.
"David," I said but he just stared. "David!" I yelled and shook him and he came out of it, muttering, "They'll smell it. Anybody gets within fifty feet of this crate and they'll smell it." In the drizzle a man appeared from the control room, but I saw him in time and went over to him, convinced him we could take care of it. And we did. We hitched up a chain to the truck and freed the plane, then he taxied her very slowly to the farthest reaches of the field where we spent an hour cleaning it out.
At home Marie was in a state. The house was so full of her cigarette smoke that it was like stepping into a cloud. She said, "I don't want to hear a word about it," and then she closed herself up with Crissy back in their bedroom. David made himself a pallet of sleeping bags on the floor in my room. We all went to bed, but none of us slept that night. Marie was up and down. I heard her pawing through the icebox and muttering to old Shepherd Fred as if she were asking advice. In the glow of Crissy's night light I watched David's hands shake, saw his lips moving as he tried to moisten a parched mouth.
Outlaws we were not. But this is the part that baffled me, given what I knew about David and Marie, how long they had lived with uncertainty. The next morning and for days afterward as we waited for word from the rancher there was a kind of a sickness about the house. They hardly spoke to each other except to snap short responses to questions, and everybody's eyes were glassy from lack of sleep. David kept saying, "Something's gone wrong," and he drank a steady stream of beer and Old Crow as if it were medicine. Marie was so twisted up with fear that she called in to work and stayed home in bed, and she kept Crissy out of school. Whenever a car passed on the lonely dirt road out front David would leap up and peek out the window. He even talked to me of buying a pistol, but then he said, "It wouldn't do any good, I'd never use it." Smiling numbly at the floor, he said, "Maybe cyanide pills would be better, one for each of us."
In An Arid Land Page 19