Yellow Mesquite

by John J. Asher

  THE TWENTY-SECOND of November and the quality of the light was changing, a thin, cool edge to the glare.

  The pumps were gassed and greased. He had thieved the tanks, run the sediments and entered the results in his logbook. The transport trucks had come and gone. Stringy red clouds followed the sun down to the western horizon as he turned the pickup onto Chaparral. He brought the truck to a stop under the big mesquite alongside the house, took his lunch bucket up from the floorboard and climbed out.

  Sherylynne met him at the door, eyes big, tearful.

  He came to a stop.

  “Kennedy’s dead.”

  He stared. “What?”

  “The president. He’s been shot.”

  Impossible. But he saw it was true.

  “It’s all on TV.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Hurry,” she said, urging him into the house. “Look.” On the TV he stared at Walter Cronkite speaking in low, reverential tones.

  “I was at the clinic and one of the nurses heard it on the radio. She brought the radio up front and everybody heard. It happened in Dallas. They got a man that killed a policeman in the picture show right after. They think he did it.”

  “They don’t think it’s a plot, do they? By the Russians or anything?”

  Sherylynne paled. He saw that a Russian invasion hadn’t occurred to her.

  He said, “I guess if it was, we’d know it by now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they were gonna attack us, they’d have already done it in all the confusion.”

  Sherylynne looked out the window as though she expected Russians to come pouring over the horizon any minute. “They swore in Lyndon Johnson. He’s president now.”

  “Well, see there?”

  “See there what?”

  “Things are under control, not as confusing as it might look.”

  Sherylynne’s eyes welled up again, the freckles dark across her nose. “He’s dead. Kennedy’s dead.”

  Harley put his arm around her. Assassinated. It sounded like something you heard about in third-world countries.

  He and Sherylynne sat in front of the TV all evening.

  Governor John Connally had been hit, but was still alive. The man they caught in the movie theater was Lee Harvey Oswald, and it looked as if he was the man who had killed J. D. Tippit, the police officer. No one seemed to know any more than that. They ran it over and over and every time it was a shock. Then they’d analyze it all again.

  It was late when he and Sherylynne finally shut the TV off and went to bed.

  “That old car’s not running too good,” Sherylynne said.

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “Every time I stop, it dies.”

  “Um. Prob’ly just needs the idling set up. It run okay on the road?”

  “Yes. Only when I stop.”

  “I’ll take it tomorrow and leave you the pickup.”

  “Wendell offered us that Corvette again.”

  “We’re not taking that Corvette.”

  “I don’t see why not. It just sits out there, not doing anybody any good.”

  “He gave us that pickup to use. That’s enough.”

  “That’s a company truck. Got his name all over it.”

  “Got his name all over that Corvette, too.”

  “Well, I’m the one has to be seen driving around in that old wreck of ours. It’s embarrassing.”

  “People give you something, then they assume a position of superiority. They feel free to start telling you what to do.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “What did Whitehead say about the assassination?” Harley asked.

  “He knows John Connally. Did you know he knows John Connally?”

  “Yeah. What did he say about it? Whitehead?”

  “He said, ‘It’s that Meskin son of a bitch, Castro.’”

  Again they lay in silence.

  “Castro, huh?”

  FOUR DAYS THE news matched the weather: gray and dismal. Dignitaries from around the world had filed into the White House to pay their respects. Evidence was piling up against Oswald. According to the news, a school psychiatrist’s report once stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was a potentially dangerous schizophrenic. His mother reported that he was a good boy. Live TV showed detectives bringing Oswald out of the elevator. They were ushering him through a crowd of reporters and onlookers when a man stepped into view and fired a shot. Oswald buckled down from sight. Everything was a jumble, everyone yelling, Oswald’s been shot! Oswald’s been shot! They said it was undoubtedly the most astonishing sequence ever filmed live to a television audience.

  TUESDAY DAWNED CHILLY and windy-wet. He drove out to the lease, the radio on. It was all assassination talk.

  One of the donkey engines was dead, and when he tried to fire it up, a clanking sounded inside the engine housing. A connecting rod had come loose. He’d have to call help out from Odessa for that.

  He started back to the truck, but stopped, seeing movement in the thin brush a hundred yards away. A glimpse of gray; then a wolf trotted into the open and stopped, head lifted, alert. A slow prickle chilled the back of Harley’s neck as he and the wolf looked at each other across open ground. The wolf’s stance was regal, wind ruffling the tufts of thick hair around its neck. The wolf looked back in the direction from which it had come. It looked again at him, then continued on it way, watching with sharp yellow eyes until it passed from sight beyond a stringy line of shin oak. Harley went weak in the wake of an adrenaline charge.

  SHERYLYNNE HAD HIS dinner warm in the oven. He washed up. She had a bowl of ice cream while he ate. He told her about seeing the wolf. She thought it was probably a dog. After dinner he looked up “wolf” in an old 1940s set of The Book of Knowledge he’d picked up at a garage sale in Midland for five bucks. In volume II, pages 597 to 598, it said of the wolf:

  It is nothing to him that some of

  his line have been won to service

  with human beings. He remains

  a splendid and terrible savage. His

  place is assured in the scheme of

  nature by reason of his audacity,

  his cunning, his ability to meet

  adversity and changing conditions….

  Later, after Leah was put to bed, he made drawings of Sherylynne as she watched TV. It was the first time in several days he had made drawings. It was the first time in four days there was anything other than assassination news on television.

  Chapter 26

  Yellow Mesquite

  HARLEY LOOKED ON as if from a distance as Whitehead sat hunched over his plate, raking rice dressing into the spoon with his table knife in a continuous shoveling motion. “God a'mighty, if this ain’t better’n anything I ever ate. Boy, Harley Jay, you got the best damn cook in the whole state a Texas right here!”

  Sherylynne glowed.

  “He’s giving that dirty rice a fit, isn’t he?” Harley said, only halfheartedly trying to stifle the resentment he felt.

  “That’s not dirty rice; that’s rice dressing,” Sherylynne said curtly.

  In spite of his mood, Harley thought she looked beautiful in her new dress; a dark russet in color with gold trim, it fell from her high, belted waist to her sandaled feet, adding a note of Egyptian-like elegance to her gangly grace. Her hair was swept up in back, pinned with an ivory comb. Candlelight glinted on the tiny rubies in her earlobes.

  “Dirty rice, rice dressing, by god, I think I’ll have me some more.” Whitehead scooped it steaming onto his plate—fluffy rice with ground pork, oysters, and chicken livers seasoned with minced onions, garlic, peppers and celery. Sherylynne complained that the oysters were out of a can and not freshly shucked, as they would have been back in Vinton, Louisiana.

  She had already put a largemouth bass on each of their plates, the fish flecked with paprika, garnished with parsley and lemon slices. She made glazed carrots in a lemon-butter sauce and green beans wit
h almond slivers. This was more than a meal in itself, but Sherylynne had to have that rice dressing; any real meal called for at least one Cajun dish. It was in her bones as surely as her French blood.

  Leah, just over two now, sat in her high chair at the corner between Harley and Sherylynne. They picked fish from the bones and mushed up the soft white meat on her plate. Leah bounced in the chair, laughing and making baby sounds, stuffing food in her mouth and ears. When she had finished and was starting to get cranky, Sherylynne picked her up and wiped her hands and face with a warm washcloth. “Past your bedtime, little lady.” Leah laughed and patted her face.

  Whitehead glowed. “Lord god, ain’t she the purtiest thang you ever laid eyes on.”

  “Harley has good news,” Sherylynne said.

  Harley looked at her, quizzical.

  “He’s going to New York,” she said, smiling, watching him closely for a reaction.

  “Batshit,” Whitehead said. “He’s always going to New York.”

  “Only this time he’s really going,” Sherylynne said.

  Harley hadn’t moved, watching her in surprise.

  Whitehead grinned. “Boy, Harley Jay, I can tell you one thang: You ain’t gonna find nothing like this to eat in New Yark. You get off up there, you gonna flat starve to death. I got me a little hamburger up there once, me’n Mavis, and it wasn’t nothing but a little old patty a-bleedin’ on a biscuit, no lettis, no t’maters, no onions. Just a little old patty ’bout this big.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger the size of a half dollar. “You gonna flat starve to death.”

  “If they can live on it, so can I.”

  “But see, they ain’t used to no better. They don’t miss what they ain’t never had. I can tell you right now you ain’t gonna find nothing like this, and if you did it’d cost you a arm and a leg.”

  “Everybody in town can’t be rich. There’s got to be places for ordinary people.”

  “Ordinary people? In New Yark City? Hah! They ain’t no ordinary people in New Yark City! And what there is, they live in them high-rises stacked on top of each other like a buncha damn chicken coops. I don’t know what would possess anybody to want to leave a clean, wide-open country like this and go live in a hole like that.”

  Harley was aware of Sherylynne smiling at him across the table—an intimate, conspiratorial smile that moved him close to tears.

  Leah was beginning to be cross. Sherylynne stood, spoke softly to her, then carried her back into their bedroom.

  A bit giddy, Harley poured another round of wine.

  “The first advice you ever gave me, was, ‘get on up there to New York City and jump flatfooted right in the middle of it.’ Your exact words.”

  “And that ain’t the worst of it, neither. Them high-rises, they’re mostly guva’mint projects. That means we’re paying for ’em. Socialism, that’s what this country’s comin’ to. Listen, boy, they ain’t no free lunches and they ain’t no free high-rises, neither. New Yark’ll be wantin’ to borrow money from us ’fore you know it.”

  Sherylynne returned, having overheard the last of the conversation. “Us?” she said to Whitehead, taking up her wine glass.

  “Texas. We’re supportin’ half the Newnited States already.”

  Harley grinned. “I can’t say about that, but I can tell you this: New York City, that’s the center of the art world these days.”

  “Paris, France,” said Whitehead. “That’s where all them artist are.”

  “Not in the last fifty years they’re not. New York’s where it’s happening.”

  “You wanna see some real art, come lookit what I had hauled out to the house today.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You know that old pump-jack I had in that toolshed out behind that number three crackin’ unit? Well, that was my first pumpin’ well. I finagled old T. W. Mosier outta that Norstrom lease, and then I worked a percentage deal with Chester Dupree for some equipment. That old pump was a piece a junk, but by god, I got me a fortune started with it. Yes-sir-ree, started me a fortune with it!”

  Sherylynne watched Whitehead, rapt, always fascinated by the stories of how he had made himself out of nothing.

  “That the sculpture?” Harley asked. “That old pump-jack?”

  “Had it sandblasted and painted fire-engine red. Then I had ’em haul it out to the house, set it up out there in the yard right next to the swimmin’ pool. I seen a big iron piece not much different in Houston last week. Some welder by the name of Calder put it together.”

  “Alexander Calder?”

  “Big red steel outfit. Well, I got me one not all that different and it didn’t cost me diddley squat.”

  Harley didn’t say so, but a pump-jack had more in common with the rocketing power of a Mark Di Suvero construction than Calder’s big whimsical toys. He could see it in his mind’s eye, though, that pump-jack out there next to the swimming pool. That pool alone, sprawling around the yard in the shape of a cowboy boot, had offended Mavis. What would she think now, with an old red pump-jack dressing it up? She’d have a fit if she could see some of the things Whitehead had bought these last few months. For some reason Whitehead seemed to feel obligated to keep on buying art objects, even after Mavis’s death, and he didn’t seem to be enlisting the help of his advisers, either. Junky art was creeping over the house like a fungus.

  Whitehead drained the last of the wine into his glass.

  “There’s brandy,” Harley said.

  “Yes,” said Sherylynne. “Let’s have some brandy.”

  “Speaking of that political mess they call New Yark, come another three weeks, we’re gonna get that Barry Goldwater in the White House; then we gonna start getting this country back on its feet again.”

  “I thought you were a Lyndon Johnson man,” said Harley.

  “That Lyndon, he done got too big for his britches, let that White House go to his head.”

  “There’ll never be another president like Kennedy,” said Sherylynne.

  Whitehead laughed. “All the women still think old JFK was the bee’s knees.”

  “He did a lot for the arts,” Harley said.

  “Art, fart,” Whitehead said dismissively. “This is a country we’re running, not a Sunday sewing circle.”

  Harley gave him a sharp look.

  “You can’t run a country on art. I don’t know why you don’t give up that useless business, anyhow.”

  “Useless? You’ve got some high-priced art on your own walls. You think it’s useless, I’ll take it.”

  “That was Mavis’s doing. The woman had an eye for investment; I’ll say that.”

  “She knew what was good.”

  “This piddlin’ with art, that’s for wimmin and faggits. You need to get in the real world, boy.”

  Harley felt his blood pressure jump. “You think you live in the real world? You can have it.”

  Whitehead leaned forward, glaring. “Boy, I got more money in my pocket right now than you’ll ever make in a lifetime!”

  “That’s right,” Harley said, hearing himself, losing it. “You’re some kind of moneymaking idiot savant! That’s the only part of your lizard brain that ever developed.”

  Sherylynne slammed the table with her hand. “Harley Jay!”

  Whitehead’s chair scraped back as he got to his feet. His complexion had turned the color of raw liver. “You callin’ me a idiot? You, a ne’er-do-well dreamer that don’t have two nickels to rub together?” Whitehead jabbed a finger toward the painting Harley had been working on. “You, who thinks that gobbledygook on the wall there is art?”

  Harley leaped to his feet, glaring at Whitehead. “You wouldn’t know art if it slapped you cross-eyed!”

  “I know that ain’t art! I know that! Yeller Mesquite? Batshit! Ain’t nobody on God’s green earth ever seen a yeller mesquite!”

  Harley wheeled around, stormed out through the living room, jerked the front door open, and plowed out into the yard.


  Sherylynne rushed out after him. “Harley Jay! Are you crazy?”

  He climbed into the Chevy, slammed the door shut, backed out onto the road and drove away, spinning gravel from under the tires.

  In twenty minutes he arrived at the lease, mostly on autopilot, mentally replaying the scene with Whitehead. He pulled off onto one of the caliche roads and eased along a hundred yards to the pump-jack at the end. He stopped and sat, still trembling. He and Whitehead had had run-ins before, but they had never got to the point of name-calling. Harley wondered if losing Mavis had anything to do with Whitehead’s behavior. He had always made Harley feel second-rate, but he was worse since Mavis died.

  Harley opened the door and got out. The pump-jacks, their engines putt-putting, nodded up and down across the plains, the smell of crude heavy on the thin night air. He wandered a short distance into the scruffy wilderness, then stopped and studied the night sky. A half-moon rode low in the southwest; the Milky Way trailed a swath of glitter overhead from horizon to horizon, shimmering, as if falling through space in slow motion.

  The rocks and brush, the buffalo grass, thistle, and prickly pear were vividly clear in the spectral light. A whippoorwill cried out in the distance. Scrub mesquite and sagebrush played tricks on his mind in the eerie light. He was torn between keeping one eye on the night sky and one on the ground for rattlesnakes.

  He stopped abruptly. A chill swept through him as an earthbound shadow slipped through the brush ahead.

  The wolf.

  He wanted to turn tail and run like hell… But common sense told him there was no way he could ever outrun a wolf. And besides, wolves were not known for attacking people—according to the book, anyway. Unless they were rabid. Or starved.

  The wolf stepped into the open not fifty yards away and stood, head high, looking at him. Harley hunkered down, squatting on his heels. His heart pounded. He tried not to look at the wolf in a direct, confrontational way, but watched from his peripheral vision. The wolf hopped a few steps to one side, then a few steps to the other, watching him in turn.