Whitehead opened a bottle of white wine and poured a round. Mavis lifted her glass. “May you live long, useful lives and forever be happy.”
Whitehead raised his glass in turn. “Over the lips and over the gums—look out, stomach, here she comes!”
“Wendell, please.”
Sherylynne laughed. “And may we get rich to boot.”
“Now, there’s a gal after my own heart. Hell, yes. May you get rich to boot.”
“Money isn’t everything,” Mavis said.
“Hell it ain’t. You’ll notice it’s them that always had it says that.”
“Money’s nice, of course, but there are just as many unhappy people with money as without. Perhaps more.”
“By god, I’ll be unhappy with it,” Whitehead said.
“Me too,” Sherylynne said.
“Let’s stop this vulgar talk of money,” Mavis said.
“Vulgar, hell. There ain’t nothing vulgar about money that I can think of. Being without it, now that’s what’s vulgar.”
“Well, let’s not go on about it.”
“What do you think, boy? You think money’s vulgar?”
This wasn’t something Harley wanted to get into, but Whitehead was looking at him, waiting. “I don’t think there’s anything noble about poverty,” he said.
“There, Miz Mavis. The boy’s got his head on straight.”
“But money’s not everything, either,” Harley added.
“Aw, c’mon now. You’re talking through your hat.” Whitehead stripped a drumstick to the bone with his teeth.
Sherylynne smiled. “I’m like you. I’d rather be with it.”
“Money,” Whitehead said around a mouthful of quail, “is the object of the game.”
“Not for me it’s not,” Harley said.
Sherylynne stared at him through the soft light, a look of mild surprise.
“W’hell,” Whitehead said, “You told me yourself you want to a be a famous artist and make a lot of money.”
“I said a good artist, yes; but if I had to make a choice between being a good artist, just getting by, or being a bad artist and getting rich, I’d rather be good.”
“By god, it’s fellers like you I like to deal with—no mind for bidness.”
“He’s a well-balanced young man,” Mavis said. Harley wondered whether he detected an edge to her voice.
“I’d like another glass of wine, please,” Sherylynne said.
Harley looked at her over the rim of his own glass. Her eyes were glassy, a little smile stuck on one side of her face.
Whitehead drained the bottle into her glass. The young Mexican girl cleared the plates, then set out a bowl of fresh fruit and a marble board of soft cheeses. Lupe brought out more glasses and two decanters with glass stoppers.
“Do you miss home?” Mavis said to Sherylynne.
“Oh, no.” Sherylynne said, and then paused, a look of sadness overtaking her. “My mom maybe.”
“How ’bout your daddy? What’s he do?” Whitehead said.
“I don’t have one. I mean, my real daddy’s dead. I have a stepdad, but…” Sherylynne shrugged.
“You must miss Philadelphia,” Harley said to Mavis.
“Occasionally. But I go back quite often.”
Harley asked about Philadelphia. He hungered to hear more about New York, but didn’t want to bore Sherylynne and Whitehead.
Sherylynne brightened again as Whitehead told about himself and a couple of his friends, and how they had made some of their money. Whitehead and Mavis seemed to know everybody who was anybody. Mavis spent a lot of time in Dallas and Houston. She humorously mentioned that she thought of Texans as “a unique blend of rugged individualism and freewheeling capitalism, pulling off their million-dollar deals in the true spirit of the Old West—lying and cheating every step of the way.” She didn’t say whether that included Whitehead.
Apparently, Easterners were more conservative, but just as unscrupulous. Mavis seemed to think that everyone in Texas was “new-oil rich and loud,” and everyone back East was “old-money rich and flint-lipped.” The Texans Mavis spoke of were a different breed from what Harley knew. The only oil he was familiar with leaked out of the crankcases of old cars.
“We’re meeting some friends next weekend in Ruidoso for the races,” Mavis said. “Why don’t you and Sherylynne join us?”
“Sounds nice,” Harley said, “but we’re still trying to get settled in.”
“We’d love for you to come as our guests.”
“Thanks, but we couldn’t do that.”
“What the hell kinda answer is that? Here, have another drank.”
“I think I’ve had about enough.”
“I’ll have one,” Sherylynne said.
“By god a’mighty. This one here knows how to have a good time, I bet’cha.”
Sherylynne grinned crookedly. “I know how to have a good time.”
“We’ll get back to you on Ruidoso,” Harley said before Whitehead could pour her another glass. “Right now we’d better call it a night.” He put his napkin down and rose from the table. Mavis stood, then Whitehead. Sherylynne sat for a moment, then got to her feet, a little unsteady.
“The meal was delicious,” she said. “Y’all have to come eat with us sometime.”
“We’d be delighted,” Mavis said.
Harley couldn’t imagine Mavis and Whitehead gathered around the little chrome-and-Formica dinette with him and Sherylynne in the tiny kitchen on Chaparral Street.
Mavis and Whitehead followed them out onto the portico. Paladin trotted up, nosing at Sherylynne again.
“Wendell, get that dog away,” Mavis said sharply.
“He’s okay,” Sherylynne said, holding the dog off.
“It was so nice meeting you, dear. Thank you both for coming.”
“We’ll expect y’all next weekend,” Whitehead said.
“Wonderful.” Sherylynne said. “That’d be just wonderful.”
Once in the truck, Sherylynne lay down in the seat, her head on Harley’s lap, and went to sleep.
Chapter 20
For Real This Time
IT WAS SAID that there was nothing between West Texas and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence. Blowing snow, sleet and ice storms were the norm. Tank hatches iced over and had to be chipped free. Tumbleweeds bounded across the long country under flatted skies. He had traded his beaked-down straw hat for a wool watch cap; his cold, grease-hardened leather work gloves for wool mittens. He grabbed a few minutes in the pickup now and then, thawing his hands with the heater going.
Seven months now, pumping wells, almost two years since he’d left Separation with the intention of studying art in Dallas. He and Sherylynne had saved a little money for New York, but nothing like he had hoped.
The Whiteheads were continually having him and Sherylynne attend one event or another, using up his days off on everything from the races in Ruidoso, until the season ended on Labor Day, to benefits, fundraisers, and assorted doings at the Petroleum Club in Midland. Memberships to the Petroleum Club itself had put a serious dent in his and Sherylynne’s savings. Understandably, Sherylynne was lonely in Midland, so he went along, not only for her, but to please Mavis. Equally as troubling as the money, was the time he lost from painting.
Some weeks back, Mavis had begun wearing a turban. One evening at a benefit auction in Odessa, she excused herself before dinner. Later, she confessed that she was taking chemotherapy, a fairly new and questionable treatment that had aroused considerable controversy within the medical establishment itself. While she and Whitehead traveled less, they asked him and Sherylynne to dinner more often.
He saw Wesley Earl from time to time, coming and going, and while he liked the man, Wesley Earl’s interests pretty much began and ended with football and hunting. Álvaro alternated, covering for each of them two days a week, pumping their leases, so they never had the same days off, therefore little time to socialize. He had only met Wesley Earl�
��s wife, Maxine, a few times. A solid little woman, she had a broad Indian face and straight black hair that she tried to keep curled, “with difficulty,” she confessed to Sherylynne.
Pumping wells demanded attention, but overall it was an easy, uncomplicated job. As Whitehead said, “A pump ain’t pumpin’, it ain’t making no money.” Like Wesley Earl, Harley soon got in the habit of carrying a few books and magazines in the truck. Only where Wesley Earl’s collection ran toward Sports Illustrated and Louis L’Amour, Harley was still slogging through Sidney’s assigned reading, weighing the virtues of those goodtime Epicureans against the self-sacrificing Stoics. Then there was Espinoza and Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Kant. For the most part, it was rough going. The language was convoluted and hard to comprehend. He finally settled on three pages a day—which was about all he had time for—which he tried to make sense of and retain.
He carried sketchbooks in the truck, and when he could grab a few minutes and the weather permitted, he made studies of everything from the pump-jacks to the scruffy brush, rock formations, lizards, snakes. Sometimes the drawings were realistic. More often he fractured the forms—not abstractions exactly, but distortions in an attempt to dig deeper into the true essence of things, to devise symbols and study the forces they affected. He read Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and all the art criticisms he could get his hands on.
He loved Sherylynne more deeply by the day, and devoted time and energy to making her happy. That wasn’t easy as her interest were limited. Not her fault, as her opportunities at seventeen-years-old were practically nonexistent.
ONE MORNING SHERYLYNNE threw up in the bathroom. She came out, pale, holding to a chair back.
Harley took her hand, felt her forehead. “You okay?”
She looked at the floor a long moment, bathrobe clutched tight at her throat. “I’m pregnant.”
He paused, at a loss.
She stood very still. “You’re not glad.” She let go the robe, cupped her face in her hands.
“Yes, I am. But… I thought we agreed to wait…?”
“I didn’t mean it to happen.”
“How about that diaphragm?”
She took a tissue from a box on the kitchen shelf. “Nothing’s a hundred percent safe.”
Now that he thought about it, she had been acting pretty strange the last few weeks.
“A baby,” he said. “Shoot. You and me. I bet we’re gonna have the best-looking kid in the county.”
Sherylynne began to cry, hard. He tried to put his arm around her, to comfort her, but she pulled away and went into the bathroom and locked the door. He had never heard anybody carry on so, sobbing, boohooing. He stood outside the door, trying to think of something to say, but he could only see his dream slipping away again, any hope of study in New York, fading.
As the surprise faded, the initial disappointment, he experienced a growing sense of elation—he and Sherylynne—a baby. They would still manage New York…somehow.
Chapter 21
Uncle Jay
GRADY JAY BUCHANAN had given Harley nickels, told him stories and tickled his ribs when he was little. Uncle Jay had loaned him money and given him advice when he was older—loaned him twenty-five dollars to leave Separation after Harley had blown all his going-away money on a gold ankle chain for Darlene Delaney. Harley had been named after him.
Some said Uncle Jay was a hell-raiser in his day, yet Harley thought he had carried himself with a certain Victorian dignity, his manner gracious, cavalier, especially when it came to the ladies. He wore black high-topped lace-up shoes, a broad flat-brimmed hat, and buttoned his shirt collars at the neck. He would have looked at home standing between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in a posed daguerreotype of the period.
The stories they told about Uncle Jay were mostly from the old days, when he and the town of Hardwater were both young and rowdy—stories of gambling, drinking, women. Grady Jay Buchanan was a man well known in that part of the country. He died of heart failure in April of 1962 at age seventy-seven. He died in bed with a forty-five-year-old waitress from the Two Dollar Pistol Club in San Angelo, Texas.
Sherylynne was due in another week, but determined to go to the funeral. Whitehead insisted they take his Mercedes, as it was more comfortable for Sherylynne than the pickup. It wasn’t something Harley wanted to do, driving into Separation in Whitehead’s Mercedes. It was all he could do to keep one step ahead of the Whiteheads so as not to be obligated. But his and Sherylynne’s old Chevy wasn’t all that dependable, and Sherylynne thought it would be wonderful.
Álvaro would keep his wells up.
Mavis came out onto the portico in her dressing gown to see them off. She held to the portico support. Harley stepped back to tell her good-bye. Then he put his and Sherylynne’s luggage in the trunk and helped Sherylynne into the passenger seat. She was big and awkward, exhibiting very little of the angular grace with which she had once moved so lightly. Now she trundled, waddling like a duck. However, he found something about her condition…what? Alluring? No, not exactly, but whatever it was, it stirred his protective instincts.
There were times when Sherylynne glowed with well-being. At other times she sat, staring, shoulders hunched, mouth drawn down, a faraway look in her eyes. She cried often for no reason. Pregnant women were a touchy item Harley had decided. But today she was in a chipper mood. She wallowed in the deep leather comfort of the Mercedes, carrying her tummy in her lap like a watermelon.
The pasturelands were green from a couple of recent showers, bluebonnets, buttercups, and Indian paintbrush blooming in the bar ditches. The sun was bright, the air thin and cool.
He and Sherylynne ate lunch at the Dairy Queen in Hardwater, and arrived at his parent’s around one. They hugged his mom and the twins and shook hands with his dad. The twins paraded around, making a fuss over Sherylynne. Anna Mae and Annie Leigh were fifteen now, graceful as fawns, and Harley felt a twinge of panic, seeing time going by so fast. Uncle Jay was dead and Harley’s baby sisters had morphed into young women. And what was he doing with his own life?
They drank iced tea and talked for a while. Then his mother insisted Sherylynne take a rest in Harley’s old room.
Anna Mae had won the coin toss that got her Harley’s room when he left for Dallas almost three years earlier, but at the moment they were fixing the room up for Aunt Julie. She would be living with them now that Uncle Jay was gone.
The picture of Jesus at The Last Supper still dominated the living room, still shimmied and turned into Jesus in The Garden of Gethsemane as you moved past.
His mother made a light supper and afterward his dad took him out and showed him the new calves. If the price didn’t hold on beef through fall, he was thinking about going into the sheep business.
“How’s your own job going?” he asked.
“With Whitehead? That’s good. Keeps me hopping.”
His dad looked toward the Mercedes. “Looks like you got a good future with that old man there. Them Whitehead’s sure been good to you.”
Harley gave him a quick look. “I earn my keep. Besides, I’m going to New York soon as I save up the money.”
Harley followed his dad’s somber gaze to the cemetery a couple of miles in the distance where the sun was sinking behind a row of pointed evergreens that reminded him of Vincent van Gogh’s Cypress Trees. The toolshed where the shovels and rakes were kept was visible at the back of the cemetery. The county truck and the backhoe were parked nearby. A canvas awning had already been erected over the hole.
“It’s a long way up there to New York, and you with a family and all.”
Harley forced a smile. “Well, we’re not gone yet.”
They went back inside where his mother was touching up her hair with a curling iron. She combed it out, then went into the bedroom and put on a new dress. The twins were already dressed in their Sunday best, and hovered close on either side of Sherylynne, quizzing her on everything from the use of makeup to what it was like to be pregnant, ad
ding their own opinions regarding the knotheads at the local AM radio station who refused to play Elvis or Little Richard, choosing instead to fill the airwaves with Lawrence Welk and gospel music. Finally his mother told them to leave Sherylynne alone, and they went out and sat impatiently on the sofa.
Harley went in and sat with them. “Looks like you girls are going to be aunts here before long. Auntie Mae and Auntie Leigh.”
Anna Mae laughed and rolled her eyes. “Just as long as we aren’t old-maid aunts.”
He grinned. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
Annie Leigh gave him a sly look. “After you left, our girlfriends stopped coming around as much.”
“But the boys, they made up for it,” said Anna Mae.
“I bet they did. I may have to come back here and hang out on the front porch with a big stick, keep those old boys in line.”
Anna Mae laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You probably would!”
“No boys for us. We’re going to college,” said Annie Leigh.
“I’m really proud of you two,” he said with a sudden rush of emotion.
His dad shaved and put on his old dark suit with the shiny seat. He bought one suit and wore it to church every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, to Wednesday-night prayer meetings and all weddings and funerals, and when that suit wore out, he went back to Sears Roebuck and bought another one.
Sherylynne wore one of the new smocks the Whiteheads had bought her. Harley put on clean Levi’s and a white shirt that his mother insisted on touching up with the steam iron. They all rode into Hardwater in the Mercedes to Tritt Funeral Home for the traditional viewing where Uncle Jay was laid out.
The entire Buchanan family and half the community of Separation was there, or had been, signed the guestbook and left. They stood in little groups, talking in hushed tones, lights dimmed, music soft, unobtrusive.
EARLY THE NEXT morning, Sherylynne was up and about. She said she felt wonderful. She helped his mother arrange the card tables they had borrowed, and set the non-perishable food out with the paper plates. Friends and neighbors had been dropping by since the day before, leaving off covered dishes. The Buchanan clan and friends would be over to eat after the funeral.
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