The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  The major companies responded by simply going overseas. At the time, the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, which began producing during World War II, had a virtually endless supply of light crude that was both refinery-friendly and cheap—costing only twenty cents a barrel to produce, compared with seventy cents in Texas, and without all the government interference. Pretty soon, cheap foreign imports flooded the American market, and when that happened, Bob threw up his hands and said to hell with it.

  “From now on,” he told Opal, “I work for my own self.”

  He’d been thinking a lot about Davey Jones, Abe’s brother, the gambler who’d taught him and Bud how to play dice. Davey had quit farming and now owned a fleet of dump trucks, which Bob helped drive on occasion. In fact, the whole Jones gang drove dump trucks. When the twins, Eldon and Weldon, grew ornery and wouldn’t stay in school, Davey bought them trucks. Same for his wife Maudie, his son Wayne, even his daughters, Katie and Maxine. If the girls had a date, they went in a dump truck, and it was always a Ford.

  Meanwhile, out in Odessa, Abe and Fannie’s boys—Earl and Raymond and Troy—had started their own company with a front-end loader and a used bobtail truck. In just a few years, Jones Brothers Dirt and Paving Contractors would build many of the new interstates across Texas.

  Whenever there was no work in the oil patch, Bob hooked up with Davey’s crew for jobs hauling caliche, mainly to build drill pads and lease roads. They answered a work call like a gang of Huns, the whole convoy growling down the highway in a swirling white cloud. Seeing all those trucks idling at the gate, Maudie and Maxine behind the wheel, shirtsleeves rolled, the foreman always gave them the job.

  But Davey remained a compulsive gambler. He’d still disappear for ten days at a time, losing work and his family’s savings in a string of poker games. Landlords evicted them, and the bank seized their things. When the bank came for the family car, Davey one-upped the repo man by tossing a Sears catalog inside and setting it ablaze, leaving nothing but the steel wheels. Once, years earlier, when Davey had gambled away their cotton money and the cupboards went bare, he took a calf—which the kids had trained as a pet, teaching it to jump on a chair and sit like a dog—and had it slaughtered. When the children returned from school they were horrified and refused to eat it.

  Yet the kids loved their father, despite his disease. For one, he knew how to have fun: when the army drafted the twins, they dressed Davey in fatigues and snuck him onto the base, where he won hundreds of dollars shooting dice. And his big heart was boundless: no week passed without Davey bringing home a stray kid he found on the streets and asking Maudie to feed him, despite their having little to eat themselves.

  His behavior drove his wife to fits of rage. She pulled a gun on him one afternoon and Davey responded by drawing a pistol of his own. It took the sheriff locking them both up overnight just to keep the family together.

  Opal couldn’t stand the mention of Davey Jones’s name in her house. But Bob liked Davey, and better, he liked his trucks and the freedom they allowed.

  “The Joneses answer to nobody,” he’d say.

  Bob decided to get a truck of his own. He’d noticed a better opportunity than building highways or hauling caliche—but it wasn’t glamorous or even vaguely romantic, like the oil patch. In fact, it might even be harder, if that was possible.

  It was dirt, but not just any kind.

  The millions of tons of topsoil that blew off the farmers’ fields now settled in great mounds across the county: along the shoulders of the highway, in ditches and creekbeds, anywhere it could drift. The worst was on ranches, where it gathered against the tumbleweeds that stuck to fence lines, piling so high it buried the barbed wire. Cattle were walking right over it, onto highways and neighboring property. Ranchers couldn’t clear it away fast enough.

  And what would Bob do with that dirt? Big Spring was growing by the day, thanks to the air base and refinery and oil fields that needed labor. In order to house all the new arrivals, homes were being built with tidy yards and landscaping that required topsoil. Not only that, but all over town sprinklers churned in vain against the drought to keep the grass alive. At the golf course and country club and in neighborhoods far and wide, the turf needed cover to hold down the moisture, and Bob had the best possible kind, already chock-full of nutrients—soil that had borne a million bales of cotton, in fact. It just happened to be momentarily displaced.

  He took his idea down to State National Bank and secured a loan for a brand-new truck, a Ford F-500, powder blue, with a manual-lift bed that held five cubic yards of the stuff. Then he phoned the Herald and placed an ad, using the colloquial term for the sandy West Texas loam:

  YARD DIRT

  Red Cat-Claw

  or

  Fill-In Dirt

  Phone 4-5376

  Sure enough, the ad found its audience, and people began calling. Bob wasted no time getting to work, for there was money to be made in this drought.

  * * *

  While Bob took advantage of the blowing soil, Opal’s brother Herman cashed in on the dying range grass. Since the late thirties, he’d established himself as a trusted cattle hauler and was well liked by the local ranchers. So when the drought turned their pastures to dust and forced them to sell their herds, Herman had eight trucks and trailers waiting, each capable of holding up to thirty cows.

  In 1951, he and his brother Tooter hauled forty-two loads off the Tom Good ranch, north of town, and took them to Oklahoma, where the bluestem was still green. Homer was twelve at the time, and his father brought him along to keep him out of trouble. Homer worked as a swamper, sweeping manure from the trailers and helping offload the animals. His father never spent money on motels, so at night they pulled the trucks over and spread cots beneath the trailers to sleep. After two weeks, one of the biggest ranches in West Texas was empty.

  After clearing Tom Good’s pastures, they moved to Lorin McDowell’s place. Back when McDowell’s father had settled their sixty sections in 1883, the grass was belly high on his horses. Like most early stockmen, he ran as many as two hundred head over a single section, relishing the bounty. But decades of overgrazing had whittled down the range. And now with the drought, the land was growing patchy, the grass bitten down to the roots. McDowell set aside twenty-five purebred Brahman cows, and the rest—over a thousand head—he loaded onto Herman’s trucks for the feedlot in Fort Worth. From there, they traveled by train to the Sandhills of Nebraska, the Flint Hills of Kansas, and the Black Hills of South Dakota, where McDowell had taken his father’s stock during the drought of 1917, the experience that had left the furrow on his brain.

  Clint Murchison, one of the richest oilmen in Texas, built a feedlot in Lubbock that held ten thousand head, which he fattened on cottonseed cake and alfalfa that he grew up north. For three years Herman ran Murchison’s cattle from Lubbock to the slaughterhouse in Fort Worth. If they had to drive through the night, Homer took the wheel on the long, straight stretches so his father could sleep.

  “Just wake me when it’s time to shift,” he told him.

  But in 1954 Murchison opened his own slaughterhouse in Lubbock and the work vanished overnight. By then ranchers and speculators from out of state were capitalizing on the drought. They bought cheap cattle at the local auctions and shipped them to where food and water were still plentiful and prices were higher. One of the biggest markets to open up was in Southern California, where everything moved through the Union Stockyards in Los Angeles.

  When Homer turned sixteen, in June 1955, he drove his mother’s Buick downtown and got his commercial license, which allowed him to start driving—legally—for his father. Only a short time had passed since he’d run away from home and sat in the Duncan Hotel, listening to the radio. Summer break had just begun, and the drought was stretching into its fifth scorching year, with the worst yet to come. The morning after Homer’s birthday, he awoke to find a truck idling out front, its trailer loaded with twenty-five whiteface Hereford bulls. Hi
s father stood at the door.

  “You’re taking these to L.A.,” he told his son, and handed him a map. And for the next two years, whenever school wasn’t in session, it wasn’t the Mississippi River that rose up between Homer and the church house, but eleven hundred miles of wild American road, a blacktop Chisholm Trail that carried him toward salvation and delivered him from himself.

  * * *

  The job was straightforward: get to the stockyard before any animals died from the heat, see that they were fed and watered, and collect payment from the commission house—which amounted to about five hundred dollars. On the way back, he was to pick up a load of hay in Yuma to sell in Big Spring, and he was to stop someplace to rest.

  There was only one way to get to Los Angeles, which was straight west on Highway 80, so Homer pointed the wheels in that direction and was gone. The truck was a 1952 Ford F-8, its cab and trailer painted fire-engine red. The forty-foot trailer was made with oak sideboards bolted to metal posts, with two dividers to separate the livestock and keep them from clustering on the hills.

  With a full load, the whole enterprise labored at forty miles per hour, just on the straightaways, plus his father had insisted that Homer stop every two hours to check the tires and oil, and to make sure that none of the livestock had laid down. An animal that lay down could be trampled to death in a matter of seconds, and to get one back on its feet often required offloading the entire trailer.

  Although he’d just received his commercial license, it wasn’t the first time he’d driven alone. With so much stock to move, and ranchers wanting it done quickly to mitigate loss, his father had already allowed him to take several loads. Mostly they were short hauls to sale barns in Fort Worth and Amarillo, which he traveled to by back roads to avoid the police. And once there, no one bothered to ask his age.

  At sixteen, Homer weighed 120 pounds drenched in saltwater, but he carried himself like someone older and bigger, and it helped that he knew his job. Only once had his livestock ever arrived dead, and that was the previous winter when he’d hit a blizzard on the way to Amarillo. Heavy snow had blocked the highway and paralyzed traffic, forcing Homer to pull over and wait for a grader to clear the road. It took half the night to get moving, and when he finally reached the stockyard, he found a calf frozen to the trailer floor.

  But when it came to handling his vehicle, Homer was one of his father’s best drivers. He’d hung around the shop long enough to learn how to repair most mechanical problems, as long as it didn’t require pulling apart the engine. Plus he could back the forty-foot trailer into a chute this wide and hit it flush the first time. When you can park a truck like that, no one will tell you anything.

  * * *

  He pulled over at a truck stop just west of Odessa and peered through the slats, looking for lay-downs. In his hand was a homemade Hot-Shot, built with a lantern battery, doorbell, and two beer openers wired to the end of a walking cane. Any bull touched with one usually bawled and got up. But from what Homer could tell, they were all still standing.

  In the other hand he carried a ball-peen hammer, which he bounced off the tires and listened for an echo—a sign they needed air. As he walked the perimeter of the truck, one of the bulls let forth a steaming piss that splattered through the slats and soaked his shirt—a smell that would linger on him the whole way west.

  He reached Van Horn by late afternoon, the horizon a jagged line of mesas as he ran the lip of the Chihuahua Desert. Outside it was blazing, but the Ford had no air conditioning, not even a firewall to protect his feet from the engine—an old V-8 that threw off heat like a potbellied stove. Even with the windows down, the temperature inside the cab reached 115 degrees. The water in his thermos tasted like copper, yet he couldn’t seem to drink enough. The only relief came from a small floorboard vent, which, if positioned right, blew a stream of hot air up his pant leg and dried the sweat.

  He approached El Paso near dusk, the whole sky shot through with orange and red. After that, it was desert all the way to Banning, California, and he intended to drive all night while the weather was cool. By now the air had turned crisp, and with the change in temperature, he became aware of the tingling in his skin and the way his jaw was clinched tight.

  Before leaving that morning, his father had given him a handful of Benzedrine pills from a bottle he kept in the medicine cabinet. Homer had swallowed five back in Sierra Blanca to get him through the desert, and now he could feel them kicking in. They were less potent than the pills used by the other drivers, who bought them by the fruit jar across the border in Juarez. Even still, five bennies were enough to turn on your jets.

  He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a rumpled pack of John Ruskin cigars and lit one. He then clicked on the radio and turned the knob until a familiar voice rang through the speakers.

  “This is your old neighbor and friend Bill Garrett doing the talking, down by the silvery Rio Grande.”

  It was station XERF, located across the border in Acuña, the same one that Bud and Frances used to listen to back in Forsan. It used a 250,000-watt transmitter to blast everything from “Honky Tonk Blues” to Charles Jessup’s hellfire to the far corners of the earth—as far as Korea, some said. By a stroke of luck, Homer had caught Garrett’s country and western hour, and the cab soon filled with the sound of Ernest Tubb singing “Walking the Floor Over You.” He puffed his cigar and watched a jackrabbit cross his beams, then vanish behind the black veil of desert. He placed a steady foot on the gas.

  It was dawn when he crested a hill outside Benson, Arizona, and pulled to a halt. On the side of the highway sat a small, makeshift truck stop where his father had told him to rest. The owner, a retired pharmacist, motioned the truck toward a series of corrals where a tall Indian offloaded the bulls and gave them hay and water. Nearby sat a single-room bunkhouse that had once been a chicken coop. The Indian had covered its walls with thick adobe, which kept the room remarkably cool, despite the surrounding desert.

  “How long you plan on being here?” the pharmacist asked.

  “I reckon till dark,” Homer said.

  Including stops to check the cattle and refuel, he’d been driving for twenty-four hours. The pills had worn off and his vision had taken on a shimmer, like trying to navigate through an aquarium. He pulled off his boots and lay down without even drawing the sheets. When he awoke, the sun was sinking behind the bony hills.

  He entered Los Angeles late the following day, roughly twenty hours after leaving Benson. The second leg of desert had largely been mountains, which the truck had labored to climb. It took half an hour in low gear just to get up Telegraph Pass, east of Yuma, where the narrow highway scaled a craggy divide. The temperature was over one hundred degrees, and halfway up the engine overheated, forcing him to pull over and prop an oil can between the hood and fender to let in some air. At the top, he made sure that none of the cattle had collapsed on the hill. Then he swallowed two more pills, kicked the Ford out of gear, and let it fly down the mountain.

  By the time he pulled into the L.A. stockyards, it was nearly dark. Two young cowhands waiting near the chutes helped unload the cattle and arranged their boarding. In the next few days, after the bulls had put on weight, an agent from the feedlot or packinghouse would walk over to the gate, eyeball the herd, and throw out a number for the whole lot. That’s how they did it in California. With the drought hammering prices back in Texas, it meant the buyer who’d purchased them in Big Spring for thirteen dollars a head would wind up making nineteen or twenty, even after subtracting the freight.

  But the buyers weren’t the only opportunists in the drought. Our family had certainly benefited from it, although you’d never catch Herman or Little Opal describe it that way. In the past four years, Herman had added four drivers and six new trucks. They’d moved into a bigger house out by the auction barn, and Little Opal drove around in a brand-new Buick. Even Bob was earning good money selling blow soil, enough to pay off his truck and shop for another. Betwee
n cattle hauling and dirt dobbing, they’d found their coin in the wreckage.

  The miseries of the older generation were receding into lore, becoming like the words in the country song, “the good old days when times were bad.” Homer’s cousin Bobby—Bob and Opal’s youngest boy, my father, now two years old—would grow up never knowing what his parents had endured, and he’d be spoiled rotten as a result. Homer suspected as much because people said the same about him, although they’d never seen the way his mother tore after him with a belt.

  Homer couldn’t collect his payment until the office opened the next morning. Knowing how his father felt about spending money on motels, he chose to sleep with the truck. Herman was such a miser that when Homer called collect to say he’d made it to L.A., his father refused the charges and hung up the phone. The operator had told him all he needed to hear.

  Homer unbolted the nose of the trailer and flipped it back so it made a shelf, pulled an old army blanket from behind the seat, and climbed up to his bed.

  The sound of the stockyard coming to life awoke him at first light. He sat up stiffly, having hardly slept, and listened for a moment to the chorus of diesel engines and lowing. He walked through the catacomb of sheep and cattle pens until he found the office, where inside sat an old man of about eighty.

  “Say, was that you I saw sleeping on your trailer?” the man asked.

  “Yessir, it was.”

  “Son, do you realize how dangerous it is around here? Someone’s liable to come and do mischief to you. From now on, have your daddy draw a bank draft on me and we’ll pay it once it gets here. That way you won’t have to wait.”

  Homer thanked the man and stuffed the freight check into his shirt pocket, then snapped it closed.

  Back at the truck, he left the trailer sitting in the parking lot, then drove to the Pacific Electric train station. He bought a trolley ticket to Long Beach, where he spent the morning at the amusement park.

  The Pike, as it was called, had the nation’s biggest roller coaster, the Cyclone Racer, which whipped out over the beach with such force that Homer swore he’d end up in the salt. He rode the Double Wheel and then the Rotor, a spinning thing that felt like being rolled down a hill in a barrel. And when his stomach couldn’t handle the dips and twirls anymore, he walked to the midway and took in the crowds.