The boys walked outside through light rain and drove down the main street, looking silently at the lights through the rain-beaded glass, and went to the motel, where they sat and lay in the sterile room and listened to Benny’s radio on the dresser. Through WSM in Nashville, a galloping, thudding rhythm led Johnny Cash into a song: “I long for a trip, I don’t need no grip, I’m takin’ one more ride. Way out there in the prairie air, I guess it’s in my hide, where the clickety clack of the railroad track is caw-aw-lin. . . .”
Benny rose from the wooden, cushioned chair next to the door and said, “I think I’ll go to town and find somebody to buy some regular beer.”
“Need any money?” Quint asked.
“No.” Benny returned to town at a leisurely speed. Turning into main street, he went even slower to watch the sidewalks. He turned around when he was out of the light and came back down the dozen blocks of the main part of town. He went around a block at the other end of the drag and stopped. There were almost no cars, and only a few people were on the street walking. He went into a bar with a brass foot rail and a long mirror on the wall. The bar was very quiet, and, feeling out of place before the distracted gaze of the white-shirted bartender, he left and walked east up the south side of the street. The movie house, The Palladium, was across the street, and people were coming out as the first feature ended.
He was nearing the end of the block when a man about fifty years old stepped around the corner and got close. “Can you let me have two bits?” the man asked, eyebrows rising in a plea above his patchy brown eyes and toothless mouth.
“What for?” Benny asked.
“A sandwich. I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
“I’ll give you a dollar if you’ll go with me to the liquor store and buy me a case of Coors, not three-two.”
“That’s a deal,” the man said, smiling. Benny rolled the windows down to dilute the odor and left the man outside the store when they had completed their transaction.
The rain spattered the town and fields intermittently till the deadest hour of the night, and at three o’clock it came down hard, sluicing over terraces and standing on ground already saturated. It fell for three hours, and the harvesters were beaten yet again by the time the sun arose and the rain stopped. The boys did not know about the harder rain, but Johnny had lain awake and listened. He got up at dawn, carrying a cigarette, and stood barefoot on the knobby metal steps outside the trailer house door. The puddled water slanted the sun into his eyes whichever way he looked.
The boys lay around the room all morning. Benny and Quint read magazines. D.W. listened some to his friends and to the radio, but most of the morning he lay in bed and dozed. They left the door open for air. Just before noon, Benny put his head back on the chair and asked, “Why don’t we go swimming?”
“Should have thought of it before,” Quint said. “Rhymes with women.”
They went by Johnny’s to say they would eat later and bought trunks in town. There were more young men than women at the pool with the harvesters being distinguishable from Draper boys by their skin, darkly tanned on the arms and neck or from the waist up but white as milk on the legs where heavy jeans and perspiration kept them bleached. Some wore cut-off Levis and Wrangler jeans. A boy came running out of the dressing room in his dingy underwear and was intercepted by friends and forced back inside. “Ain’t nothing wrong with it,” he shouted in a slurred voice.
The boys tried to talk with some of the dozen or so girls who were not with anyone, but only Quint had success. By four o’clock he had one in a corner of the pool with his hands on the pool’s edge on each side of her. They spoke so lowly that D.W. could not hear them when he walked to within a few feet. The girl, a small, heavy bosomed creature with short, dark hair, spoke infrequently as Quint talked. She looked at him more and more directly, and Quint gazed back with his cloudy gray eyes framed in water-beaded lashes. At five, he left her sitting on the edge of the pool and went to where D.W. and Benny were at a round lawn table drinking Cokes.
“Does she love you?” D.W. asked, laughing.
“Maybe,” Quint said, “She needs to go, and I thought I might give her a ride. She’s here with some other girls. Do y’all mind?”
“Naw, we’ll change clothes and wait on you,” Benny said. “I’m starting to look like a grape that’s been in the sun too long.”
Quint went with D.W. and Benny with a wave of his hand to the girl. Inside, they dried off and got into their jeans and T-shirts without showering. When Quint returned from taking the girl home, he waited only till they were coming to the pickup to say, “Got me a date, boys! We need to work something out. I go get her at six, just in a little bit. We’ll go get hamburgers and go to the indoor show at seven. Got to get her home by eleven. The thing is, if I can get her in the room, can y’all get lost and be back no later than ten-thirty? She says her old man hates wheat harvest guys.”
“Okay, no problem,” they said. Quint changed into blue slacks he had not worn so far during the summer, shaved, rubbed in Brut after shave, put on a yellow Banlon shirt and brushed his hair. It was nine when he came back.
“You boys got somethin’ to do?” he asked.
Benny and D.W. stood against the wall while Quint opened the pickup door and helped the girl out. She looked the same as at the pool except that she wore a blue and white cotton print dress instead of a swimsuit. They lingered as she moved into the light and through the doorway, glancing at them and otherwise ignoring them. Benny turned before he got to Main and parked five blocks down. “Let’s go wander around,” he said. They were heading east when two men came out of a liquor store. “Hey, buddy, can you give us a ride?” asked a man about thirty-five with stubble the same length on his head and face.
“Where’re you going?” Benny asked.
“We’re working for a man; we need to go see him.” The man had an urgent, disorganized air, and his companion was a shorter, heavier man about the same age who kept his mouth in sort of a semi-smile as he got into the back.
“How far is it?”
“About a mile or less.”
“What do you think?” Benny asked D.W., who answered with a shrug and a turning away of eyes.
The taller man talked constantly on the way to the pickup, saying he and his partner had been with a family from Floydada, Texas, since May. He said they had decided to quit and go home but did not say where home was. He directed Benny through eastern Draper to near the edge of town and had him stop in front of a mailbox across from some trucks and a trailer house that the boys saw was more capacious than Johnny’s. “Wait for us,” he said.
Watching them cross the street, Benny said, “A thought came to me back there. What if they hold us up or something?”
“I guess they’ll hold us up,” D.W. said. “How much have you got on you?”
“About forty dollars.”
“I don’t think they’re carrying anything. Anyway, the gun’s right here in the glove compartment, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. Let me see it.”
D.W. handed the pistol to Benny, who cocked and uncocked it and gave it back. “We probably won’t need it,” he said. “But let’s go look on innocently and make sure they don’t bring back the wrong stuff.”
D.W. put the pistol up, and they crossed the street to where the short man was carrying two suitcases and a cardboard box. “Put it in the back,” Benny said. The taller man had been talking to a young woman in the kitchen. He came down the high steps, and she stepped out onto the makeshift porch and stood there in the tumid light of a lamp on a thin pipe.
“You don’t know when your daddy’ll be back?” the man asked.
“No, he didn’t say how long it would take.”
“Is he feelin’ any better?”
“Same.”
“Sideboard fell on us,” the man told the boys. “Laid me up for two days.”
“We hate for you to go,” the woman said.
“Well,” h
e said, turning with a wan wave of his hand. She watched them go and went inside, catching the storm door so it did not bang shut.
“Guess we left ‘em without any hands,” the man said. No one said anything else until they were on the street where Benny had picked them up. “Comes a time when a man’s gotta go home,” the man said, asking, “Know what I mean?”
“I reckon,” Benny said.
“I was gonna give you five for the ride.”
“We can use it,” Benny said as the men got out. He went west on the highway on which he had run from shooting the cow and stopped on a dirt road a mile off the asphalt and three miles out of town to look at the lights from town and watch the road for cars. They had each finished a couple of beers at ten-thirty, and D.W. said it was time to let Quint have the pickup. “Still dark in there,” Benny said when they pulled up outside the windows. “Must know it’s us.”
D.W. knocked and returned when there was no answer. Just before eleven it started raining. “Looks like we’ll be blessed with a little more rain, five feet high and rising,” Benny sang.
D.W. put his arm out and said, “It’s warm; we ought to get out in it.” They squished across the muddy parking lot and crossed the street to the sidewalk on the other side. “Hoo-wee!” D.W. hollered.
Benny looked back and saw a police car coming. “Huh, oh,” he said. “We’re in the jailhouse now, old buddy.” They did not realize until the water hit them that the car was not going to stop. Riding the curb, the cop raised a shoulder-high wave of dirty water and leaves that caught them at its crest. “Oh!” they grunted in unison, and they stood there in surprise as the car pulled out and away.
“Shoot,” D.W. said, holding his arms out. Benny laughed in a kind of cough. They turned around and laughing, moved back through the rain.
Chapter Twelve - An Interlude
“I was thinking,” said Johnny at breakfast. “Would y’all like to see the Frontier Days Rodeo over at Cheyenne?”
“Can’t,” said Quint. “I got a date.”
“I would,” Benny said. “I guess it’s the biggest rodeo in the world.”
“Just about. How about you, D.W.? I think it would make us a little more cheery to get away from here, maybe change our luck.”
“Sure, why not?”
“I don’t know what’s on. It may be the Wild West show. I think a couple of the Gunsmoke characters are in it.”
The four sat around the little kitchen table where it folded down from the wall in the corner opposite the stove. Alice had begun cooking for herself and the children, and Mike ran in from his bunk bed to lean tousle-headed against his father’s arm. Johnny looked out at the muddy ground and mud-bespattered trailer houses and cars. “We already lost a lot of our lead,” he said. “I got a big job at Gray Wolf, Montana, but it won’t be ready till the middle of August or later.”
The boys spent the day reading and talking in and around the motel. D.W. started to ask Quint about the girl, but Quint’s manner put him off. Benny stayed to himself, too, reading a library book, “The Autobiography of John Wesley Hardin.” They went to Johnny’s trailer house at dusk, and Quint left in the pickup. Johnny and his family were dressed and ready, and they were forthwith all in the Nova heading northwest toward Wyoming. The car swayed slightly from the overload. Mike and Leigh did most of the talking as Leigh sat between Johnny, who drove, and Alice, who held Reagan while Mike rode between Benny and D.W. in the back. They left the rolling Nebraska farm land and found the flatter, more arid terrain of southeastern Wyoming. Although Johnny stayed under sixty, they reached Cheyenne without impatience. To save money and time, they stopped at a drive-in and ordered hamburgers, where Johnny got a rodeo program from a carhop.
“Just like I thought,” he said. “The Wild West show’s tonight. They got more rodeo tomorrow night.”
“What’s the entertainment?” Benny asked.
“Festus Haggen and Davy Crockett.”
“Hunh,” D.W. and Benny said together.
Reading down the list of contestants on the back of the program, Johnny exclaimed, “Jim Bob Altizer! I know him.” They stopped at a light in front of the main street.
“Johnny, I think I’d just as soon look around town,” Benny said. “I never seen Cheyenne before.”
“It’s all right with me if you stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll keep him out of trouble,” said D.W., smiling.
“Where can I pick you up?”
“In front of that picture show,” Benny said, indicating a theater in the middle of the block.
“Be there at ten-thirty. That’s two and a half hours.”
They walked three blocks to the Mayflower Inn, where the walls were bedecked with autographed photos of country and western singing stars. Asian bar maids brought bottles and cans of beer to a growing crowd, and a short, black-haired man was singing a Jimmy Dean song: “How many arms have held you and hated to let you go? How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know.” The singer was a homely man who was too thin for his black frock coat, but his voice was clear and strong and good both on the high and low notes. D.W. and Benny ordered Coors in bottles, which they immediately received. “Who is it?” D.W. asked.
“Lloyd Ballard,” said Benny, reading a piece of cardboard taped on the drum behind the singer’s legs.
“Is that him?”
“Nah, that’s his bass man. Lloyd Ballard’ll be out when the place fills up.”
They learned from watching that they were expected to keep drinking if they wanted to stay, so they were on their second bottles when Lloyd Ballard came in from the bar and stepped up on the plywood stage. The little excitement that he evoked quickly dissipated. He was no older than thirty, but bags wrinkled under his eyes when he squinted. He wore a gold, glittering shirt with matching boots, was about six feet tall and strongly built. He took a guitar with his name inlaid between the frets from where it leaned against an amplifier, stepped to the microphone as though it were a judgment and started to sing. The pleasant yet non-engrossing baritone pervaded the room. “Let’s go somewhere else,” D.W. said.
“Where?”
“Walk around.”
They got halfway down the block and came onto three young cowboys and a black boy polishing the boots of one. Benny and D.W. checked their own boots as they approached. The boy finished and looked up at the cowboy, whose roughly formed skull was closely barbered under his tilted straw hat. “That ain’t worth a shit!” the cowboy asserted, poking his head forward and staring at the boots.
“Want me to do ’em again?” the boy asked.
“Naw, I don’t,” the cowboy said, putting his boot on the boy’s shoulder and pushing him over backwards. The cowboys laughed and walked around him. Benny waited until the boy had rearranged himself and walked up.
“My old boots need some polish,” Benny said. “They look like I used ’em to stomp out a fire.” The boy started to work and Benny said, “Forget about those guys. They’re just a bunch of dumb asses.” Benny contemplated the street and the boy and boots, then put more than a dollar in change in the opened hand. The boy’s eyes were wild with humiliation, Benny saw, so he said, “They look real good.”
They began a peregrination to a broad assortment of places. There was one where a boy who played the guitar well and sang badly sat on a sort of balcony and widely missed entertaining the milling, disinterested patrons; and there was a teenage bar where only three-two beer was served and Benny danced alone to a rock ‘n’ roll band in his black cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, stomping bottles that had been dropped, getting a girl out of a booth where she sat with a youth and another couple and dancing wildly without touching her. Her partner went after her, and D.W. tripped him and stood over him with his fist raised, commanding, “Leave us alone!” They saw the bartender dialing a telephone and left for an affluent bar two doors down, quietly as they moved across the carpet to the long bar. Men in white felt cowboy hats looked at them from a t
able. Sedately, they each consumed a glass.
They were back on the street when a Volkswagen with two young women stopped. “Where’s the Mayflower?” a pretty woman with ash blonde hair asked.
“We don’t know,” said D.W. “Around here pretty close.”
The car hurried away, and Benny said, “Maybe we ought to go back.”
“It’s about ten-thirty,” D.W. said, checking his watch. “We need to look for the picture show.”
“You’re right. Johnny’s pretty nice to us.”
The movie house was easy to find. One street over, it was visible three blocks away. They went there and stationed themselves in front. The glare made them conspicuous, but they stayed. “Sure is hot out here,” D.W. said, popping loose the two top buttons on his blue and white striped western shirt.
“I hope they hurry,” Benny said. “We could get picked up.”
The theater had four planters filled high with greenery. Benny sat on one and D.W. on the adjoining one. Sweating, D.W. pulled another button loose. Benny slumped, too, watching for the Nova, and D.W. tore all his buttons free and lay back into the plants until he was almost hidden except for his legs and boots. He crossed his hands on his belly and closed his eyes.
‘D.W., let’s go,” Benny said, rapping D.W.’s boot sole. In the car, Mike stared with his hands circling his face on the rear side window. When D.W got out of the planter, Johnny turned to Alice and laughed.
“You boys need to get in here,” Johnny said through his open window.
“What’s wrong with Benny, what’s wrong with D.W?” asked Mike.
“Never mind,” said Alice in a low voice.
The youths lay against the doors on opposite sides of the back seat. Mike, sitting upright, was asleep between them. “Boys,” asked Johnny, “why are y’all so messed up?”
Benny laughed and said, “Too much fun.”
“Well, I got a family here, and I think you ought to consider that.”
“They’re young,” Alice said. “You’ve done it before.”
“We didn’t mean anything,” Benny said.
The Byrds of Victory Page 18