The Longest Road

by Jeanne Williams

  “We’re not cars,” objected Laurie.

  “No, but we’re on the road.”

  “Why not?” chuckled Marilys.

  At Texon, oil derricks reared in all directions and pipelines stretched across earth soaked and crusted with overflows from slush pits. McCamey was a few wooden stores surrounded by shacks, derricks, and red storage tanks. Every sign here looked as old as the town.

  Red tanks accompanied the highway for a time through land that rolled like a bumpy carpet of sage, mesquite, and all kinds of cactus. Then the tanks stopped. The Ford crossed the Pecos River and climbed to a high tableland that was lonesome as God, stretching to dreamlike far-off azure ranges that faded into the sky. This wasn’t the desolation of the Dust Bowl where crops had once flourished. This country belonged now, as it always had, to eagles, hawks, rattlesnakes, and their skittering prey. Sun and the tang of sage purified the air till it almost hurt human lungs accustomed to civilized poisons.

  Fort Stockton’s limestone and red stucco courthouse dominated a sprawl of adobe and stone houses and the ruins of the old fort. The stone guardhouse was inside the park, where springs gushed and a sign recorded that Comanche Springs had been a watering place for Indians on their annual autumn forays into Mexico. The army post was established in 1859. Gold rushers stopped here to rest on their way to California, and later, the stage line to San Diego.

  But Way had not.

  North against a bitter wind through thousands of acres irrigated by springs. Pecos’s old cowtown buildings were jostled by new ones raised by oil and irrigated farming. A norther howled down with gusting wind and snow that made travel out of the question. All day, the hotel filled up with travelers refuging from the storm.

  “Nothin’ between here and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence and that’s blown down,” several of them said, repeating the old saying as if they’d just made it up while they stamped off snow. When the Roadsters played that noon and night, it turned into a party, with those who knew the words singing to the music and a lanky, sandy-haired cowboy borrowing the guitar and nasally chanting songs Laurie had never heard before, “Strawberry Roan,” “Bad Brahma Bull,” “The Hills of Mexico,” “Zebra Dun,” and one about the Colorado Trail that was so haunting and lovely that she asked him to play it again.

  Weep all you little rains,

  Wail, winds, wail—

  All along, along, along

  The Colorado Trail.

  The storm moved out that night. Next morning, the sun dazzled off the whiteness blanketing the plains to the sky’s blue rim. By noon, big supply trucks had cleared the highway and the Roadsters were in Big Spring by night.

  “We haven’t seen any Way-signs since Ranger,” Buddy lamented. “If he’s stopped painting ’em, how’ll we know where he’s been?”

  “I guess we won’t,” Marilys said.

  Nothing in Sweetwater, nothing new in Abilene. They struck south. Ballinger, Paint Rock, Eden, Menard. Towns ran together in Laurie’s mind. Texas was such a big state! Fredericksburg, Boerne, San Marcos, Austin, down to Laredo, up to the East Texas oil fields and towns, where they had to buy “new” tires and get the engine worked on. Back west across the northern rim of the state to the Panhandle, Pampa, Borger, Canadian, Perryton, swing down to Burkburnett; one of the roughest of the boom camps but calmed down considerably, though wells still pumped in the middle of town.

  There, about the last place they could look in Texas, was a tourist court with a sign painted in Way’s distinctive flowing style: SWEET DREAMS CABINS—YOU’LL THINK YOU’RE HOME TILL WE BRING YOU YOUR MORNING COFFEE! Nobody but Way could have painted that steaming cup so that you almost smelled it.

  “Kirkendall’s your brother?” asked the owner, a paunchy, thin-haired man whose false teeth didn’t fit. “Well, he paints a nice sign, and could’ve got more jobs here like I told him, but the last I saw of him he was hitchin’ a ride north.”

  Burkburnett was right on the border. North was across the Red River into Oklahoma. Marilys swallowed but her eyes stayed lit up. “When was that?”

  “Oh, must have been five-six days ago.” The man clicked his teeth disapprovingly. “His clothes were stickin’ out of holes in his old cardboard suitcase but instead of gettin’ a new one, he had him a jug of booze. Hope you can get him straightened out, ma’am.”

  “You bet we will, mister, if we can just catch up to him.”

  Once back in the truck, they all looked at each other. “He’s not far ahead,” said Marilys.

  “But he’s across the river,” Laurie objected. “He’s in Oklahoma.”

  Marilys started the truck. “So that’s where we’ll go.”

  “But that’s across the state line!” Fear tightened Laurie’s throat and she caught her friend’s arm. “Marilys, they could send you to the electric chair!”

  “They’ve got to catch me first.” Marilys laughed and threw back her head so that her dark hair caught waves of sun. “Anyhow, I know things Dub wouldn’t like to have out in public. He won’t want me to go on trial.”

  She couldn’t talk if she was dead. Would Dub go that far? It was too late to worry. They were crossing the bridge.

  Farmers were plowing, some with tractors, some with horses, turning up brown-red soil the color of their own skin, though sometimes Laurie glimpsed a weathered white face. “Do you know what kind of Indians they are?” she asked Marilys. Morrigan would know. Was he still in Oklahoma? Could they possibly meet up with him again?

  “I think they’re Comanches,” Marilys said. “Kiowas and Apaches, too, I think.”

  “Apaches!” Buddy shrieked and watched as if hoping a man in overalls following his plow would suddenly change into a loin-clothed warrior with lance and bow.

  “I thought Apaches were farther west,” Laurie puzzled. “In Arizona.”

  “A lot are, I think.” Marilys frowned in an effort to remember. “I’m not real sure, but it seems I’ve heard these Oklahoma Apaches—their parents and grandparents, of course, not the ones you see—were shipped to Florida with Geronimo after he surrendered. They got sick in the east. Finally the government sent them to the Comanche Reservation. The officer in charge got them started at raising cattle and they built up a real fine herd and learned to farm. Geronimo was an old man when he died up near Fort Sill. Not long after that, sometime before the Great War, the government decided the Apaches weren’t prisoners of war anymore and let them decide if they wanted to take up land allotments here in Oklahoma or go live on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Some went there. Others stayed here.”

  “How come there are still reservations in New Mexico and Arizona but there aren’t any here?” Laurie wondered.

  Marilys shrugged. “Oklahoma has good fanning land and lots of oil. Even after every Indian got a one hundred sixty-acre allotment, there was lots of reservation land left to open up to white homesteaders. You look around the country, honey. The only reservations left are on land white people don’t think is worth anything.”

  And land they had coveted, like the Dust Bowl, was dead now, dead as powdered buffalo bones. But this land they passed through now alternated fields with rolling hills that were covered with buffalo grass foraged by cattle that had wintered better than most they’d seen in Texas.

  In Waurika, there were Way-signs but no one knew where he’d gone, not the owners of the gas station, the tourist court, or the café, which each had a new sign. The one at the café had been painted only three days ago.

  Three days! “At least we’re on his trail,” Marilys said, spreading out the Oklahoma map she’d gotten at the gas station.

  That was both encouraging and discouraging. Would they always be a week behind, a few days, even a couple of hours after someone saw him hop a freight or hitch a ride? “I guess we’ll try the oil fields,” Marilys decided, folding the map. “Duncan first.”

  “Just so we don’t get over around Altus where Grandpa Field might see us,” Laurie said. When she grew
up, when it was safe, she’d go to visit Rosalie.

  That night they camped off a dirt road branching from the highway, parking beside a small creek. The winter-bare cottonwoods, ashes, and willows didn’t completely shield them from view, but Marilys was afraid of getting stuck in the sand if they went farther.

  Laurie and Buddy gathered fallen limbs and built a cheerful fire while Marilys made potato soup with lots of onions and baked biscuits in the dutch oven. This was the closest they’d been to Way yet. If they could just find him and get back across the border to Texas where kidnapping didn’t mean the electric chair! Or maybe, with Way, they’d just head for the Louisiana oil fields, where Dub was much less likely to find them.

  “We’d better get rid of these Texas plates tomorrow, maybe trade trucks if we can,” said Marilys. “Dub will have the law watching for us. There’ll be lots of vehicles with Texas plates around the oil towns but maybe not so many with a woman driver and two kids.”

  That was true but Laurie was sad at swapping off the Ford that had carried them so many miles. Sleeping in it as they did, it felt like home, the only home they had. As soon as the dishes were done, Laurie got out the harmonica and began to play.

  All the roads, all the miles, rivers and plains, canyons and hills, all the people and all the towns … Well, yes, Morrigan, you gave me a song for that.

  I’ve been a-wandering early and late,

  Oklahoma to the Golden Gate,

  And it just sure looks like

  I ain’t ever goin’ to cease my wandering.…

  Buddy started singing. Marilys got the guitar. They hadn’t sang or played for several days and the music poured out of them now, hope and fear, loving people and places and losing them, and how it was to be human. They were finishing “Tumbling Tumbleweed” when two men stepped from behind the truck.

  Pulled-down hats, light-colored and broad-brimmed, darkened their eyes. Fire glinted off their badges and pistols. “You sound so purty we hate to interrupt,” drawled the shorter, stockier one. “But I’ve got a warrant here for Marilys Shannon, wanted for kidnapping two boys or one boy and a girl across a state line.” He quoted from memory. “‘May play a guitar and harmonica and sing to raise money.’ Hold out your hands, ma’am.”

  He pulled linked metal ovals out of his pocket. “Don’t!” Buddy yelled, running to shield Marilys. “She didn’t kidnap us!”

  “We want to be with her,” Laurie pleaded, grasping the man’s arm. “Please, mister—”

  He brushed her away. Marilys said nothing. She put down the guitar and got to her feet. Slowly, she put out her slender, graceful hands. The officer bent to slip on the handcuffs.

  Laurie didn’t really think. She caught up the guitar, stepped back, and crashed it down as hard as she could on the man’s skull. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Buddy launching himself at the other lawman, hanging onto his arm, grappling for the gun.

  The bottom of the guitar shattered but the man only fell to his knees, though his hat pitched to the earth. Marilys grabbed his gun. “Stay right where you are!” she ordered both men, and to the one trying to break Buddy’s bulldog grasp, “Give the boy your gun, mister.”

  The officer shook Buddy like a pup, clouted him sideways so that the boy rolled over and over, but before the man could level the pistol, Marilys pulled the trigger. He staggered back, half-whirled around by the impact of the bullet, clutching his right shoulder while the gun dropped to the sand.

  Buddy sprang for it and scooted to the side. “Let’s tie them up,” said Marilys. “Use the rope that holds the tarp over the back of the truck.”

  Laurie hurried to obey. Blood running through his fingers, which he held now at the back of his shoulder, the wounded man spoke through gritted teeth. “Aren’t you goin’ to stop this bleedin’? Let me bleed to death, woman, and it’ll be murder of a law officer on top of kidnap.”

  “We’ll bandage you up soon as you can’t give us any more grief,” Marilys said.

  The stocky man, still on his knees, lunged at her. She swung the barrel of the pistol down on his head. This time he went all the way to the ground. Blood ran out of his dark hair, dripped to the sand. Laurie gasped, then swallowed and kept on tying the other man’s hands before Marilys ordered him over to a young cottonwood and told him to sit down so Laurie could tie his feet together.

  “Scalp wounds bleed a lot,” Marilys said as Laurie started on the heavyset officer. “I don’t think I hit him hard enough to crack his head. Here, let’s tie him to this tree.”

  “We—we aren’t going to just leave them out here, are we?” Laurie quavered.

  “Oh, they could get loose after a while and it’s not cold enough to freeze them, but because they were dumb enough to get shot I suppose we’d better let someone know about it.” Marilys sounded so disgusted that Laurie didn’t press further. “Get our oldest clean towel and a pillowcase,” Marilys instructed as she checked Laurie’s knots and added some of her own.

  The bullet had gone out the back of the shoulder, making a much bigger wound than the neat hole in front, Marilys deftly plugged it with toweling and a pad and had Laurie hold the dressing in place while it was secured with strips of pillowcase.

  “You bitch!” the man snarled. “You can’t get away. Now you’ve pulled this, everyone’ll be ready to shoot you on sight.” His face twisted in a savage grin. “Maybe you ain’t heard but that Bruno Hauptman’s been convicted of murdering that Lindbergh baby he kidnapped. Sentenced to die next month in the electric chair. I’d sure like to pull the switch on you, sweetheart.”

  Laurie blanched. The hate in his eyes and voice was terrible and she understood that some of it was because he’d been bested by a woman and two kids. Marilys didn’t answer him, but tied the last knot on the bandage carefully before going to the other man. Laurie helped pad and bandage the creased scalp while Buddy put their cooking things in the truck. He held up the splintered guitar.

  “What about this?”

  “Put it in.” Marilys hugged Laurie as they got to their feet. “I’m sorry it can’t be fixed, honey. You sure crowned that fellow. The sound board’s broken, too. But we can save the strings, and we’ll get you another guitar soon as we can.”

  “It’s all right,” Laurie said.

  Only it wasn’t, no more than shooting law officers and leaving them tied to trees. She quailed at what Mama would have thought of that. But what else could they have done? It was W.S. Redwine’s fault! Even if it was a sin, she wished he was dead so he couldn’t keep causing them trouble, maybe even get Marilys sent to the pen if not the electric chair. And the guitar, the wonderful Christmas guitar, was broken!

  Laurie blinked back tears. She needed music and thought Buddy and Marilys might, too. She brought out the harmonica and played it all the way to Duncan, where Laurie called the police from a gas station and directed them to “some folks who need help.”

  She hung up immediately and they drove on through the night, fearful every time a car passed them or as they drove through slumbering small towns. How long would it take the police to locate the tied-up wounded men? At least a couple of hours. How long would it be till sheriffs, police, highway patrol—gracious, maybe even FBI men—were watching for a Ford truck with Texas plates?

  At last a wide dirt road turned off the highway. Distant lights blazed miles away, lots of them. What was such a big place doing so far off the main road?

  “Got to be an oil boom.” Marilys sighed with relief. “Lots of strangers coming and going, lots of Texas plates and trucks.”

  “But—”

  “Stay on the highway and we’re bound to get stopped.” Marilys turned the Ford into the best tracks she could find among the ruts. They couldn’t go better than ten jostling miles an hour. They could smell oil and hear the rumble of bull wheels and thud of drills pounding at rock and sand long before they drove into the sprawl of tents, shacks, and flimsy buildings that were surrounded on all sides by derricks, some only partl
y built.

  Work-stained men came in and out of cafés, boarding places, hotels, and dance halls, most of which were only tents. The signs were crude, not Way’s handiwork. Broken-down flivvers, trucks, and new autos that shone where they weren’t splattered with oil or mud were parked wherever there was room. Plenty of Texas license tags. Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kansas, too, though most were Oklahoma.

  Marilys’s tight-held shoulders relaxed a little. She steered off the road around some tents and parked among vehicles from half-a-dozen states. Buddy was asleep, his head in Laurie’s lap. They got him into the back of the truck, arranged the ropeless tarpaulin as best they could, and fell into sleep.

  Next morning they traded the Ford for a Studebaker truck. It had more miles on it and the tires were worn but it had Oklahoma tags. Laurie fought back tears and gave the fender a farewell pat when no one was looking. The truck didn’t know or care that it was being swapped to a redheaded roughneck. It was silly for her to feel they were abandoning it, and yet she did.

  Avoiding highways, keeping to country roads, they rattled from oil field to oil field, but found no trace of Way. Laurie didn’t say anything, but she watched for Morrigan, too. They were afraid to sing or play as a group but they blew a tire and replacing it took most of their dwindling cash. Marilys took a job waiting tables and Laurie played her harmonica in a different restaurant, jumpy, constantly on the alert for the law, while Buddy prowled to watch for police vehicles.

  At the end of a week, they had enough money to put brand-new tires on the Chevy truck they traded the Studebaker for, stock up on groceries, and buy gas for a while. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of lawmen apart from harried constables who had their hands full with drunken roughnecks who were trying to kill each other or beat up their women. The newer camps didn’t have jails so the rowdies were usually chained or handcuffed to heavy logging chains strung between two trees or poles.

  “We haven’t seen a Way-sign in a couple of weeks,” said Buddy with a weary sigh as they headed out of town.