Benny leaned toward D.W. and Quint and put his elbows out. “You know, I can’t figure out if these people are crazy or smart,” he said, his head bobbing on his hands.
“Some of each,” Quint said. “They’re smart for trying something different and crazy for fear it won’t work.”
A table away, Alice glanced at the cook and Johnny took Mike to the restroom. Finishing the meal was more relief than satisfaction. The boys finished first and strolled outside through the trading post. Benny paused to finger some turquoise and silver jewelry, and the man in the false mustache contemplated him before asking, “Can I help you?” When he dropped his gaiety, Benny saw, he looked like Emmett Kelley, the solemn clown.
“No,” Benny said. “It’s pretty, though.”
Because they were going into eastern Colorado and not toward Denver or farther west, the mountains remained on their left and did not come closer. In fact, the mountains had faded when the caravan was well into the state. The country was like much of Texas, but there was the difference of a relative absence of irrigated land. Eastern Colorado was flat in all directions around the sign reading, “Cherokee 18 Miles.” But still it had a different feel from the Texas Panhandle. It was cooler. Harvest crews were not so numerous in Cherokee as they had been at Alexander. The boys saw no more than three or four pickups with gasoline tanks and pumps parked in the sun-lightened street. A young woman with a broom waved at them from the sidewalk outside a beer parlor, making the gesture one of simple friendliness.
The boys’ motel room was not impressive, but neither was it bad. The furniture was old but well maintained. The room was a little dusty but otherwise clean. It seemed almost antique. With a high wooden dresser, an ancient mirror and dented beds, it was like a 1930s room assembled for a museum display. Within an hour they cleaned up, put away their things and started to the beer hall. “Colorado Kool-Aid,” D. W. said.
“Quint, are you sure you only have to be eighteen?” asked Benny.
“Eighteen for three-two beer and twenty-one for anything more,” Quint said, explaining that three-two beer was only three-point-two percent alcohol.
The town was hot in the late afternoon, so the air-conditioned hall proved a pleasure before the first drinks could be ordered. The boys sat on bar stools. “I suppose you’re all eighteen,” the woman who had waved at them said from the other side of the bar.
“As a matter of fact, we are,” Benny said.
She smiled and said, “What will you have, then?”
“Coors,” Benny said. “What else in Colorado? We’re tired of that old Texas bootleg Schlitz.”
The bar maid served the beer in medium-size glasses with the Coors emblem on them. “Seventy-five,” she said.
“Only twenty-five cents a glass?” Benny said. “I can see I’m going to like workin’ in Cherokee.”
“Who are you from?”
“Victory, Texas,” D.W. answered.
“What brings you on the harvest?”
“We came for the peace and quiet,” Quint said.
The woman laughed and said, “This is the peace and quiet capital of the world.”
In her late twenties, she wore her hair in an indefinable style between a pixie and a medium-length farmer’s daughter’s cut. She covered her generous bosom with a gray sweatshirt with a red Alfred E. Neuman Mad Magazine “What, Me Worry?” decal. Her jeans were well-fitting but not overly tight Lee Riders, and her hips and legs were thick yet shapely like the nude figures in Old West barroom paintings. Her eyes were a cloudy blue like the place mats she set the glasses on. Her smiling mouth was the best of her features, not too big and shaped in a perfect Cupid bow. The boys drank from the clear glasses till the room started filling with men from the fields. The pool table and shuffleboard were suddenly in constant use, and an extra woman arrived to help.
“How’s it going?” Benny asked a man in a straw hat.
“Pretty good. The fields are all dry. The wheat’s ready.”
“We better get back,” Quint said. “Johnny’ll be along.”
“How do you know it won’t be later?” D.W. asked.
“It’s a little after seven,” said Quint, checking the clock above the mirror. “He’s found a job by now. It never takes my brother longer than this to find a job. I don’t want him to have to look for us.”
They walked the highway and followed the dirt street five blocks to where they were quartered on the back side of the motel. A cool wind brought the smell of the wheat fields, and the tree in front of the door waved its branches like a hulking scarecrow. They had been in the room less than half an hour when Johnny drove up. They met him by the car hood, and he said they would work tomorrow as soon as the combines and trucks were ready. Alice’s meal was pork chops, fried potatoes, corn and tea in shaved ice and fat, sweating glasses. The days in Cherokee passed felicitously. The fields were hot here, too, but flat and easy to cut. The combines ran flawlessly, and each night the young men and sometimes Johnny went to the hall and drank away their thirst with delicious beer.
The only disturbing aspect was the grasshoppers. The second field they cut was rich with ripe, thickly waiting heads of wheat, but a close look showed grasshoppers by the millions. It was like the locust invasion of the Mormons’ fields in Utah. As Johnny explained it, there was no danger. The insects had come in just the day before and would not have time to do more than minimal damage. Still it was peculiar to watch them ride the auger and threshed wheat into the mound of wheat in the hopper and swim around. The crew cut all of the field and put the last two truckloads into one of the farmer’s tin silos. Quint cranked the engine on the long, pipe-enclosed auger, winding the rope and pulling it twice. He signaled for D.W. and Benny to raise the truck beds and pour the wheat into an old tire and the auger’s mouth. The crop teemed with the grasshoppers as it waved into the rear sideboards. The auger looked dilapidated but worked well, biting the loads clatteringly and spilling them down into the empty, looming cylinder of evenly wrinkled tin. In a brief time the trucks were empty. Quint killed the auger after scooping up wheat that had spilled over the tire and sending it up, too. The others walked around to him.
“What now?” Benny asked.
“I don’t know about us,” Quint said. “Those grasshoppers have a dream situation. They can eat themselves to death.”
On his third night in town, Benny asked the barmaid if he could walk her home, and to his surprise she told him “yes.” He met her outside a little after midnight, and they walked a block before he took her hand. “You know, one thing about harvest is you don’t get to see many girls,” he said. “At home I’d shave and put on my best clothes and go to Terkel and be on a par with anybody. On harvest you’re part of the riffraff, or at least a lot of people have that attitude. I can see you don’t.”
“Well, on the one hand I really like people, but on the other I don’t care what they think,” she said. “That’s what I tell myself.” They were at her house, a small dwelling with chipped white stucco walls.
“Can I kiss you goodnight?” he asked, smiling.
“Sure.” He kissed her firmly but did not make it overlong. She stood on tip-toe on the packed dirt street.
Benny walked in through the open door and sat on the edge of the bed. “How’s the fishing?” D.W. asked, pushing Benny’s arm.
“Fair.”
“You’re still way ahead of us. I think you got the only girl in town.”
Thirsty from the effects of the beer, they got water from a bag hanging off the pickup’s right side mirror, and the combines and trucks gave them a full day of perfect operation. The field would be their last in Colorado. Johnny told them that after they finished that night or in the morning they would load up and go into Nebraska. He noted that Nebraska had strict laws concerning what plants and seeds could come into the state and that a thorough cleaning of the equipment was crucial. They worked late trying to complete the job, but it was apparent at eleven o’clock that it would take at
least another two hours. The stars were profuse, so Johnny pulled the pickup lights on and off to bring Benny and D.W. in. Benny washed and shaved to meet the barmaid as the beer hall closed. He arrived in time to go in with D.W. and Quint but waited outside, leaning against the wall.
“Hi,” she said. “Did you just get off?”
“Yeah, for a while I thought he’d keep us late.”
“It was nice of him not to.” She started walking and took his hand.
“It’s a nice night.”
“It really is.”
They did not speak again until they reached the house. He stopped in the street, and she kissed him and said, “Why don’t you come in for a little while?” He followed and stood with her on the cracked linoleum of the living room floor and kissed her. “Do you like iced tea?” she asked.
“Sure, I’d like some,” he said, sitting on the couch.
“How old are you, Benny Byrd?” she asked when she sat down with him.
“Eighteen. I look older than I am.”
“I’m ten years older.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes. We’re both grown.”
“I guess you are, aren’t you? You just got out of high school. It’s been a long time since I was in high school.”
“So much the better. All I did was waste my time and bung myself up playing football.”
She laughed and said, “I guess it isn’t much to look back on.”
“People have nothing to savor except each other.”
“You’re smart,” she said, “smarter than me, I’m sure. What do you think of me?”
“I like you.”
“Do you have any idea how alone somebody can be?”
“I don’t know. I think everybody is alone, more or less.”
She stood up, took his hand and walked into her bedroom. “Come on, baby,” she said. They made love once, had more tea and resumed their intimacies. Benny took his time, sitting and talking after they had stopped, but he never said it was his last night in town. About three a.m., he kissed her at the door and walked back to the motel.
The crew finished at mid-morning and took the machinery to an empty pasture near the farmer’s house and, while Johnny got the money, began cleaning the trucks and combines with brooms and a water hose. The boys made a good start before Johnny returned, but the task took another two hours of hard work. Johnny said the state of Nebraska prohibited the entry of “noxious weeds” and would turn back any equipment that looked likely to be carrying any. So with Benny and Quint sneezing from hay fever, they kept at the machinery till they had it show room clean. They took the sideboards off the trucks and stacked them in the middle of the beds, and Johnny left to find a place in the ditch to load. By four o’clock they were done. “Be ready to roll at six,” he told them at the motel.
“Where to next?” D.W. asked.
“Draper, Nebraska. If we can get in there and finish in a week, we might make South Dakota before Montana. I’ve got a good job in Montana.”
“Who is it at Draper?” Quint asked. “Ol’ Schlitz, I mean Schultz?”
“Yeah, I thought it would be a good jumping off place.”
He left them with the rest of the day, and D.W. and Quint spent most of it in the beer hall. Benny went to the grocery store and passed the afternoon reading and eating fruit and drinking milk at the motel. Quint and D.W. talked pleasantly with the bar maid three or four times, but none of them mentioned Benny or the previous night. At closing time, the boys went outside to see if he was there; seeing he wasn’t, they crossed the street and sat on a dirt bank.
“She’ll be out in a minute,” D.W. said. “I suppose one of us could ask to walk her home.”
“Women decide,” Quint said. “She hasn’t shown any signs.”
“I wonder why Benny didn’t show.”
They watched her open the door in the dark building and come outside. She looked around briefly as if she thought he would not be there but was not sure. Satisfied, she put on a light brown scarf and walked away.
Chapter Ten - Deepening Ditches
They left Cherokee before dawn and were well on the way to Draper by the time the sun was a finger’s width above the earth. All the wheat fields had been shorn. They saw how the combine drivers’ skills were apparent by the evenness or unevenness with which the stalks had been sheared. Few fields had the tabletop smoothness of having been harvested expertly. Benny sang a few bars from “Ring of Fire:” “Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring. I fell for you like a child. Oh, but the fire went wild. I fell into a burning ring of fire. I went down, down, down, but the flames went up higher, and it burns, burns, burns the ring of fire, the ring of fire.”
“You like Johnny Cash, don’t you, Benny?” D.W. asked.
“I really do. He lays it out there flat.”
“In more ways than one.”
“I know he’s not a real good singer, but he puts it out there on the table. He’s raw, and he gets the rhythm down good. I think songwriters get their ideas out of books sometimes. I was reading a Thomas Wolfe book last year, you know, ‘Look Homeward, Angel?’ and saw something about a ring of fire.”
“Prob’ly. Ever been to Nebraska?”
“Naw, I never been above Oklahoma.”
“I’m anxious to get there. Draper’s bigger than Cherokee. It’s got five or six thousand people. I looked on the map. Have you called your mother and daddy?”
“No, I been writing letters,” Benny said. “Have you called yours?”
“I called ’em night before last. I’d rather call than write.”
“I hate to talk on the phone.”
“You keep trying to make everything perfect.”
“I’m worried about that thing at Drunkard’s Mountain.”
“We won’t get pulled into it now,” D.W. said.
“It seems like I got death on me. I thought Johnny was going to die when the combine nearly fell off the truck or one of us would when we were under there with the chains. I can’t see how that could happen. I mean, he is so great at this.”
“It surprised me, too, but I think Hugh and Quint and him have been at it so long that they can get over-confident, whereas we’re cautious because we know we don’t know much. It’s the kind of thing that probably won’t happen again for another ten years.”
“Oh, I don’t think it will, either,” Benny said. “Just goes to show this is dangerous work.”
“The Bible says to flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, but I don’t feel like we’re doing anything real wrong. We shouldn’t fornicate, but that’s hard to avoid when you’re young. Me and Jackie used to make it after home games, but I broke it off because she’s a year younger and I want to start fresh at college.”
“Mother and grandma are strong Church of Christ, which y’all are, too; but I feel too turbulent.”
“I wandered so aimless, life filled with sin,” D.W. sang. “I wouldn’t let my dear savior in.”
Covering northeastern Colorado was easy, and they reached Nebraska in the early afternoon. Like Colorado was different from Texas and Oklahoma, Nebraska, stretching out ahead, expressed a character different from Colorado’s, greener and harder. The entry station waited a few hundred yards past the state line. Three combine-laden trucks, all evidently in the same outfit, were ahead of them in a line leading back from a small wooden office building. Everyone, even the state men, looked listless as the trucks, pickup and car came off the road and stopped. A Nebraska man was going over the second machine from the front, Johnny saw when he went to the office. He told who he was and where he’d been, and the man said there would be a wait of thirty minutes to an hour. “We gave ‘em a good cleaning,” Johnny said.
“He’s not as tough today as I’ve seen,” the man said. “He makes some of them almost disassemble the combines and put them back together. Usually it’s the ones who haven’t tried very hard to clean up.”
The boys sat on the running boa
rd of the blue truck and the asphalt by it and drifted around the entry station, watching the inspector and standing outside the office. “Where you from?” asked an older man who was part of the staff.
“Victory, Texas,” Benny said.
“Where’s that?”
“About halfway between Joy and Clapper.”
The man looked perplexedly at Benny and laughed. “Panhandle?”
“That’s right. We’re getting farther and farther from home.”
“I spent a winter and part of a summer at Farwell after the war. At least as cold as it gets here, and wind? I stayed sick two months.”
They waited while the inspector looked over the combine on the blue truck, and Benny and Quint left D.W. to get into the pickup. Johnny got the papers and trotted to his truck, started the purling engine and led the way into the new state. Within a few miles they were in the softly hilled farmland of southwestern Nebraska. The whole countryside was bright green. The highway became narrower with a marked hump in the center and sharper slopes to the shoulders. The ditches were deeper, not handy stopping places like the seven hundred miles of roadsides by which they had traveled since the summer started.
The stop took almost an hour, so Johnny’s intent to make Draper by sundown was barely possible. He went as fast as he could, but the aerodynamic impediment of the combines and accordion effect of four vehicles traveling together held them to an average of less than forty miles an hour. The scenery was different, however, and they found the last leg of their one-day jump a visual pleasure balancing the frustration of the late arrival. They trundled into Draper as twilight evolved into darkness. The road in curved around a wide hill, and the trucks leaned into the outer edge of the sparsely lighted town and descended gently into it with the sloping road. Their engines unwound with tense, descending “Oh’s” like exhausted athletes.
Johnny stopped in a parking lot-like place where he locked the trucks and attached the trailer house to the pickup. He chained the headers to the trucks, and he and the others went to a trailer park to set up the trailer house. When they were done, he got hamburgers for everyone on his way to take the boys to a motel. The Lantern Light Motel was a long, low string of solid-looking rooms. Johnny got keys at the office, and he leaned against the doorjamb and watched Benny pitch a suitcase onto a bed.
The Byrds of Victory Page 16