Chapter Three - Oklahoma
The boys were laughing in the cool, post-rain air when they drove up to and got out in front of the garage-like dwelling that was their temporary home. The two-level structure had a tin roof that usually made it intolerably hot in the late afternoon, but today the old rooms reeked of rain. The boys pushed one another and laughed before the cracked bathroom mirror as they washed their faces and combed their hair. When they were dressed and scented with after shave lotion, they came down the steps inside the house, walked across the scraggly vegetation of the yard and got into the Ford. There was total quiet. The night air sharpened the smell of the stitched leather seat covers. Quint touched the ignition and the engine caught, pulsing un-muffled as he backed out of the driveway-yard, stopped and started up the street.
Heading north, he pushed the car to eighty miles an hour and held it there as it sped lightly over the straight, gray highway. They were forced to close the windows but opened both vents full. They found music on the radio, turned it up loud and sat back smelling the flooding, rain-sweet air, watching the road race under the car and listening to the music and the bass explosion of the engine. Quint lit a cigarette when the headlights showed a sign saying “Oklahoma.”
“You boys ever see Drunkard’s Mountain?” he asked.
“What is it?” asked Benny from the back seat.
“Just a mountain of beer cans. There’s two or three dives up up here. Drunkard’s Mountain is the cans they’ve thrown away. Do y’all want to stop or go on to Edgar and get some suds there?”
“Let’s get up here and then decide,” Benny said.
Five miles farther, just past the crest of a slight rise in the terrain, was Drunkard’s Mountain. There were half a dozen low, dilapidated buildings where a few late model cars were parked. To the north and east were tens of thousands of cans piled as deep as six feet and covering more than an acre, glittering in the moonlight. Quint slowed, looking at Benny and D.W., who shrugged. Benny motioned to keep going, saying, “We’ll stop on the way back.”
“How’re y’all likin’ wheat harvest?” Quint asked. “Hot work, ain’t it?”
“It looks even hotter in the trucks,” D.W. said.
“It is when you’re sitting still. You cool off when you get on the road. I used my physics to figure out how long it would take you to finish a patch.”
“I don’t guess I’ll get to church very much,” D.W. said. “Daddy told me I should if I get the chance but not to worry about it. I guess you have to work all the time if you can.”
“You sure do. But there’ll be Sundays when you can go if you want to.”
“All I want is new country,” Benny said. “I’m tired of Victory.”
“You get to where you go into a new town, see it and get ready to go on to another one in four or five days” Quint said. Johnny says we’re like Old West drifters.”
“I expect to enjoy it, but I’ll be glad when it’s over,” D.W. said. “I should come back with over a thousand dollars for college.”
“Y’all know we can’t do like we did around Victory, don’t you?” Quint asked.
“What?” Benny asked.
“Well, we can’t be taking risks all the time just for the fun of it. This is a small crew, so any little screw-up hurts. Johnny has to do good this time.”
“How come?”
“He just does, Benny. This ain’t the same as working for somebody like when we’d go chop cotton and chop more cotton than weeds till we got enough for a case. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know it. There’s no reason to get your nose out of joint. We’ll do all right. We always do.”
“You still have to try,” D.W. said.
“We’ll try,” Benny said. “Johnny’ll be rich.”
Edgar looked like Crow’s Corner except it was darker and stiller. The difference was a harshly lighted store at the edge of town with a sign flashing, “Beer, Liquor.” Dark-haired and looking oldest, Benny went in after the beer. The old clerk’s eyes were yellow, and his dead face was punctuated with blackheads. Almost as the screen door slapped shut, Benny said, “A case of Coors.” The man looked from side to side up and down the street and, seeing no cars, pulled the box of beer from a freezer behind him and set it on the counter. He took Benny’s five dollar bill and gave back three quarters. Benny carried the beer out to his smiling friends. They drove the vacant streets for half an hour, and when they came near the city limit sign, D.W. leaned far out the window with his arm cocked and a bottle in his hand. He threw it as violently as he could, and it flipped squarely into the sign and exploded, “Pomp,” into a brief, brown circle.
Quint did not exceed the speed limit unless he saw no headlights in either direction. In a short while they saw the low lights of Drunkard’s Mountain. The Ford gurgled and backfired, shook jarringly off the highway and rocked over the road toward the buildings. Contrary to their distant appearance, the buildings were not all bars. Two or three were quiet and looked like domestic dwellings of some kind. All were board shacks. From one came voices and music. The boys heard it when the engine died. “Looks like a good place to get knifed,” Benny said. The smoke inside was so great that it came almost to the low ceiling. Only by raising their noses a little as they moved across the dirt floor to a table could they breathe clean air. When it was obvious no one would come, Quint went to the bar and came back with three bottles of beer. “I guess it ain’t so bad,” Benny said.
Only one woman was in the tavern. Drunk and subdued, she sat with a group of men at a table near the youths. The men talked quietly but argumentatively. The bartender was a small man who moved more hastily than necessary behind the makeshift bar. Four other men of various ages sat or stood randomly around the room. One of them, a slender man in his late twenties, went to the pool table by the wall opposite the bar and started playing. The table stood on a rectangular slab of concrete above the dirt floor. One of those with the woman watched the player intermittently and then went to the pool table. “Play?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said the other. “Rack ‘em up.”
“Eight ball, dollar a game?”
“Yeah, sure.”
The challenger was older and larger than his opponent. He wore a white western felt hat cocked back and a corduroy western suit. He reeled slightly whenever he turned. Benny, sitting with his face level with the pool table, watched the colored balls, the upper halves showing, float in an infinite variety of trajectories and velocities over the shining green felt. The rest of the bar was dark. The table, upraised and illuminated, was the natural attention point, and the patrons gazed frequently at the game. The players began with eight ball, a sedate game in which one man shoots the striped balls and the other the solids until one makes all of one set and then the eight ball. They changed to nine ball, a faster game using nine instead of fifteen balls, and raised the bet to five dollars a game. They became louder, less controlled, with the bigger man cursing and waving his cue stick and the younger man saying things abruptly to himself and stepping fast around the table.
The big man lost four games in a row. He sensed the people watching and became more demonstrative. The other man, dressed in a green tank top shirt and tight black slacks, compressed his lips each time he shot. When he won, he reached across the felt to take the crushed bills, thrusting himself into the light and, without folding it, pushed the money into his right front pocket. Both men drank from bottles on nearby tables in the dark. The one who was not shooting stood in the shadows. The big man shot the red three ball and the ball missed the pocket, banked and knocked the nine two-thirds the table length and into a corner pocket. It was only the second game he’d won, so he exulted, “Take ‘em any way you can get ‘em, but take ‘em! My luck’s back! Let’s raise it to twenty-five and let me get some my money back!”
“Okay by me,” the other said.
It was almost an even game, but the smaller man was soberer and more skilled and thereby won after fifteen minut
es. As the winner, he was about to break the newly racked balls for another game when the big man interrupted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let’s up the ante some more.”
“To what?”
“Fifty. Got the guts?”
“Yeah, I got ‘em.”
While the big man stood at the far end of the table close to the balls, his opponent set his feet and positioned the cue ball for the break shot. He wiped the inside of his right eye with his left index finger, cued the ball high and stroked it cleanly. The white cue ball flew straight into the yellow one ball, shattered the diamond formation, backed up about a foot and drove in again. The nine ball, reacting to forces too mercuric to follow, broke through the splattering melange of color and rolled hurriedly to the far left corner pocket. In the bar, someone laughed. The green-attired man rested his palms on the table and smiled. The big man’s face turned red, his eyes bulged, and he started around the table. “You low life bastard!’ he shouted. “You set me up!” He slammed a ball into the table and was half around it when something smacked the side of his face. Falling, he hit his head on the table and the concrete.
The other man, holding the butt end out, laid the cue stick on the table, bent to the fallen man and reached into his hip pocket. “Fifty dollars,” he said, taking the money from the billfold and walking out.
“Oh, honey, oh, honey,” the woman moaned, holding the unconscious head off the floor like a delicate vase.
“Get him out of here,” said the barman, moving in.
“Where?” the woman, red-eyed and blowzy, asked.
“Out, I don’t need any more.”
“We’ll get him out,” said a little man in a purple, flowered western shirt. “Come on, Jonas.” He and a chubby man in a T-shirt and the woman tried to raise the fallen man, but one stumbled and they dropped him and fell on him and the dirt floor. Benny and D.W. joined them and carried him outside.
“Where’s your car?” Benny asked.
“The Caddy.”
They moved with short, shuffling steps to the white car with fins and a big grill, and the woman held the door open for them to put the man in head first across the back seat. “Oh, Lord, I can’t tell if he’s breathing,” she said from inside the car.
“He shouldn’t die this quick from a crack on the head,” Quint said from behind them.
The chubby man got inside and put his ear to the injured man’s nose. “He ain’t breathing that I can tell,” he said. The woman began wailing.
“We need to know,” Benny said, crawling inside the car and looking at the man’s face in the near-darkness. It was pasty and flaccid. Benny smelled the luxuriant dark brown leather seat covers and carpeting under the odors of whiskey and cigarettes. He put his ear to the man’s nose and chest and heard nothing.
“Now?” the woman shrieked, her frightening breath and dissipated face in Benny’s face.
“Do you have a mirror?”
“What?”
“A mirror, to his nose,” Benny said.
The man in the purple shirt clambered into the front seat, jerked a mirror from a visor and turned on the inside light. Benny took the mirror, huge against the nose, and held it at an angle to the nostrils. “I see a little, I see a little!” the woman chanted, jerking Benny by the hair.
Benny took her hand away and looked wildly at the others outside.
“Let’s beat it,” said Quint. “Come on, Benny.”
Benny got his long body out of the car and told the two men and the woman, “Y’all better get him to a hospital.” Benny, D.W. and Quint walked in a tight group to the Ford, and Quint coaxed it slowly away from the buildings and didn’t let it go until they were on the highway. The fences and brush and telephone poles flitted silently by. The noise of the engine enveloped their conversation.
“We did have to help,” Quint said. “How would y’all like to be a witness in a murder trial?”
“Shut up, Quint,” D.W. said. “It wasn’t our fault.”
“I can’t believe this,” Benny said, sinking down in the back seat. “I knew we shouldn’t have stopped.”
“It’s a mess, all right,” D.W. said.
“It ain’t that bad,” Quint said, reaching over and slapping D.W. on the leg. “We didn’t kill him.” He looked into D.W.’s narrow blue eyes with his deer-like gray ones and raised his eyebrows.
The headlights found the sign announcing the state line, and D.W. lifted a bottle he had left open. They gave up talking as a frog-voiced disc jockey assaulted them with an unremitting flow of verbiage interspersed with song fragments and sales pitches. During a raucous song, the radio man made a long, falsetto “Ah-eee!” They didn’t know anyone was behind them until the inside of the car began flashing red. D.W. had just turned up the bottle when the lights came on, and he looked back and saw a Texas Highway Patrol car so close behind that he could not see the headlights. “We didn’t get very far,” he said, turning the bottle over under the seat.
“Don’t give anything away,” Benny said.
“I won’t,” Quint said, getting out.
“Where’d you get it?” the hard-faced man asked softly when they were beside the car.
“Edgar,” Quint said.
“Get it out.” The boys watched the patrolman open and pour out all the beer inside the car and in the trunk. “I catch you boys again,” I’ll th’ow you in jail,” he said. He nodded his hat for emphasis and turned to his car. The patrolman turned around, and the cars went opposite ways.
Chapter Four - Johnny’s Will
Johnny lay back on the bed, smoking, as first light touched the curtains. His burned face and rough hands contrasted with his white belly and legs, and a V-shaped patch of browned skin came down from his neck to where the shirt let the sun through. He focused on the grain of the plywood ceiling. When Alice awoke, she reached over him to his shirt on the nightstand and got a cigarette from the package in the pocket. He lit it for her with a silver lighter, singing, “Summer time, and the livin’ ain’t easy.”
“No, but we can do it,” she said.
“Men have been harvesting for thousands of years, but the equipment we have now is the best ever made. It used to take weeks to do what we do in a day.”
“There are a lot of references to it in the Bible. ‘Open your eyes and look at the fields. They are ripe for harvest.’”
Johnny chuckled and said, “That’s the way we like it. You get the feeling that God is watching you work out there under the whole sky, takin’ what’s been grown. It’s exhilarating. We’ll go to Dallas for a week when we get done, have some fun and buy you six new dresses.”
“I would like to dance and be free for a while.”
“Me, too,” he said, kissing her. He put his hand on the back of her moist neck and held her to him. Alice kissed him, put on her housecoat and went to the other bedroom to wake the children, and the boys and girl ran in laughing to Johnny, who laughed and put out his cigarette. As they were laughing and pulling at him and the covers and shouting for him to get up, he touched them and said, “Mike, Regan, Leigh.”
He drove the half-mile to town and waved to men in two pickups. At a filling station near the town square, he stopped and had the pickup and tank filled with gasoline. He paid the attendant twenty-three dollars, parked down from the station and walked across the bricked street to a cafe filled with food, smoke, clinking glasses and harvest bosses. A long-sleeved arm went up at a table and waved. The man was about forty, and he wore long brown hair and a spotless white straw hat.
“Phil,” Johnny said, putting out his hand.
“Johnny,” said Phil. “Some of y’all might know each other, Johnny Farnell, Jim Painter, Jake McAdoo, Billy Daniels. The others were in their late twenties to middle thirties. Phil and Jake were eating breakfast, and Jim and Billy were smoking.
“Did you finish?” Phil asked Johnny.
“Barely. We’re headin’ to Guthrie.”
“We got a big job in Oklahoma by Comanche. Pro
b’ly go on to Colorado or South Dakota after that if it’s ready.”
“Me and Billy want to cut in Canada this year,” said Jim Painter.
“I’d line up a thousand or two acres before I went to the trouble,” Phil said.
“How many combines you got this year?” Johnny asked.
“We got twelve.”
Johnny ordered coffee and lit a cigarette. “I’d like to go all the way up,” he said. “I’ve got good hands, my brother and two of his friends just out of high school.”
“Don’t you have new machines?”
“Yeah, two five-tens.”
“Wish we had some,” Jim said. “I spend my time fixing and my money buyin’ parts.”
“Do like old Mathis and his brother,” said Phil. “Buy new on installment and quit making payments when the summer’s over. Takes two or three years for the word to get around to the dealers and money boys.”
“And when it does you’re through,” Jake said with a mouthful of eggs.
“If I can, I’m going to get two next year and two after that,” said Johnny.
“You’ll have to make some money if you do,” Jake said. “They ain’t but about twelve thousand each. Well, you know. You bought some or the finance company bought ‘em for you.”
“A bank did. I’ve got better credit than that. I may go bust, but I’m gonna try. I don’t think it’ll be much difference, just in the way you run it with more machines.”
“That’s basically right,” said Phil.
Johnny put a dollar down and said, “Keep pushing.”
“Don’t run off,” Phil said. “We’re gonna go to my place and get up a card game.”
“Better move, got to get my hands up.”
The sun had completed half its ascension to the roof of the sky, bleaching the streets and rowed store fronts. Johnny’s pickup had stored enough heat to force him to roll down the windows. Quint was working under his car hood when Johnny rolled up asking, “What’s wrong with it besides the obvious?”
“Nothing, just fiddling with the carburetor.”
The Byrds of Victory Page 12