DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (19 page)

     
The inside of the
saloon had a stamped tin ceiling, card and domino tables in back, a long bar
with old-time towel rings and a wall mirror and brass rail and spittoons, and
antlers nailed all over the support posts. A dozen cowboys and oil field
roughnecks were playing five-card stud and sipping shots with Pearl and Grand
Prize on the side.

     
The menu was on a
chalkboard over the bar. The bartender wore a red chin beard, and his eyes were
hollowed deep in his face and his arms were as thick as hams. A fat black woman
set a platter of barbecue sandwiches in the service window and rang a bell. The
bread was gold and brown with butter and grill marks and soft in the center
from the barbecue sauce that had soaked through. The bartender put four bottles
of Pearl on the tray and carried it to the card table.

     
"How much is
just the lima bean soup without the sandwich?" I asked. I had to keep my
hands flat on the bar when I said it, too, because there was a wood bowl full
of crackers and pickles right at the end of my fingers.
      

     
"Twenty
cents," he said.

     
"How much for
just a cup?"

     
"Where you from,
boy?"

     
"Louisiana."

     
"Go around back
and I'll tell the nigger to fix you something."

     
"I ain't ask for
a handout."

     
He pulled up his
apron, took a lighter out of his blue jeans, and lit a cigarette. He smoked it
and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He picked up the bowl of
crackers and pickles and set it on the counter behind him with the bottles of
whiskey and rum and tequila.

     
"You cain't hang
around here," he said.

     
It had started to
rain again, and I could see the water dripping off the Carta Blanca sign on the
face of the dead cougar. Its eyes were seamed shut, like it had gone to sleep.
A man opened the front door and the rain blew across the floor.

     
"How far is it
to the LaRose house?" I said.

     
"What you want
out there?"

     
"Mr. LaRose told
me to come out."

     
The cigarette smoke
trailed out of the side of his mouth. A shadow had come into his face, like a
man who's caught between fear and suspicion and anger at himself and an even
greater fear you'll see all these things going on inside him.

     
He walked down the
duckboards and used the phone on the counter. When he put the receiver back
down his eyes wouldn't stay fixed on mine.

     
"Mr. LaRose says
for you to order up. He'll be along when it quits raining," he said. He
set the bowl of pickles and crackers back in front of me, then pried off the
top of a Barge's root beer on a wall opener and set it next to the bowl.

     
"How about a
steak and eggs and those stewed tomatoes?" I said.

     
"Anything
else?"

     
"How about some
fried potatoes?"

     
"What
else?"

     
"How come a
Mexican would carry a M-1 carbine on a pipe truck?" I asked.

     
He leaned on the bar.
I could smell soap and sweat in his clothes. "Where you seen it?" he
asked.

     
"Coming north of
the river."

     
"You ever heard
of no God or law west of the Pecos?"

     
"No."

     
"It means you
see wets, you forget it."

     
"I don't
understand."

     
"It's a subject
you'd best carry on the end of a shit fork," he said.

     
An hour later the sky
was empty and dry and pale behind the hills and you could see the sage for
miles when Jude LaRose pulled up next to the sidewalk in a wood-paneled Ford
station wagon, leaned over and popped open the passenger door and looked at me
from under the brim of his Stetson with those blue eyes you didn't eyer forget.
He was a handsome man in every respect—tall, with a flat stomach, his gray hair
cropped GI, his skin sun-browned the shade of a cured tobacco leaf—but I never
saw beautiful eyes like that on a man before or since. They were the dark blue
you see in patches of water down in the Keys, when the day's hot and bright
before a storm and a cloud of perfect blue darkness floats across the reef, and
you almost think you can dip your hand into the color and rub it on your skin,
like you would ink, but for some reason, down below that perfect piece of
color, down in those coral canyons, you know a school of hammerheads are
shredding the bonito into pink thread.

    
 
I sat down next to him, with my duffle
between my legs, and closed the door. The seats were made from rolled yellow
leather, and the light from the mahogany dashboard shone on the leather and
reflected up in Jude's face.

     
"They want
you?" he asked.

 
    
"Sir?"

     
"You know what I
mean."

     
"There're ain't
any warrant."

     
"What was
it?"

     
"A man whipped
me with his belt behind Provost's saloon. Another man held me while he done
it."

     
"What
else?"

     
"I caught him
later that night. When he was by himself. It worked out different this
time."

     
He unsnapped the
button on his shirt pocket and took a Camel out and fitted it in his mouth
without ever letting go of my eyes.

     
"You're not
lying about the warrant, are you?" he said.

     
"I wouldn't lie
about something like that."

     
"What would you
lie about?"

     
"Sir?"

     
When we drove away I
saw the little black girl who had been laying steaks on the mesquite fire run
out from the side of the building and wave at the station wagon.

     
That night I slept on
a bare mattress on the floor of a stucco cottage full of garden tools behind
the main house. I dreamed I was on a flat-wheeler freight, high up on a trestle
above a canyon, and the trestle's supports were folding under the train's
weight and the wheels were squealing on the rail as they gushed sparks and
fought to gain traction.

T
he main house was three-story purple brick, with white balconies
and widow's walks and poplar trees planted as windbreaks around the yard. There
was a bunkhouse with a tar paper roof for the fieldhands, rows of feeder lots
and corrugated water tanks and windmills for the livestock, a red barn full of
baled hay you could stuff a blimp in, a green pasture with hot fences for
Jude's thoroughbreds, a scrap yard that was a museum of steam tractors and
Model T flatbed trucks, a hundred irrigated acres set aside for vegetables and
melons and cantaloupes, and through a long, sloping valley that fanned into a
bluff above the river, deer and Spanish bulls mixed in together, belly-deep in
grass.

     
Every fence had a
posted sign on it, and for those who couldn't read, animals and stray wetbacks,
Jude's foreman had nailed dead crows or gutted and salted coyotes to the cedar
posts.

     
The lights in the
main house went on at 4
a.m.,
when
Mrs. LaRose, a black-haired German lady with red cheeks and big arms Jude had
brought back from the war, read her Book of Mormon at the kitchen table, then
walked down to the open-air shed by the bunkhouse and fired the wood cook
stove.

     
By 7
a.m.
my first day I was wearing bradded
work gloves and a hard hat and steel-toe boots and wrestling the drill bit on
the floor of an oil rig right above the Rio Grande, the drill motor roaring,
tongs clanging, the chain whipping on the pipe, and drilling mud and salt water
flooding out of the hole like we'd punched into an underground lake.

     
After a week Jude
walked down to my cottage and stood in the doorway with Buford, who was just
seven years old then and the miniature of his daddy in short pants.

     
"You got any
questions about how things run?" he said.

     
"No, sir."

     
He nodded. "You
sure about that?"

     
"I'm getting
along real fine. I like it here."

     
"That's
good." He turned and looked off at the sun on the hills. His eyes were
close-set, almost violet, like they were painted with eye shadow.
"Sometimes the Mexican boys talk. They forget what it was like down in the
bean field in Chihuahua."

     
"I don't pay it
no mind."

     
"Pay what no
mind?"

     
"They talk in
Spanish. So I don't waste my time listening."

     
"I see." He
cupped his hand on Buford's head. "I want you to take him to work in the
tomato field tomorrow."

     
"I'm supposed to
be on the rig."

     
"I want Buford
to start learning work habits. Come up to the house and get him at six."

     
"Yes, sir, if
that's what you want."

     
"My foreman said
you asked about the wages the Mexican boys were making."

     
"I guess I don't
recall it," I said.

     
He studied the side
of my face, all the time his fingers rubbing a little circle in Buford's hair.

     
"Next time you
bring your questions to me," he said.

     
I looked at the floor
and tried not to let him see the swallow in my throat.

Y
ou didn't have to roughneck long in Jude's oil patch to find out
what was going on. You could hear the trucks at night, grinding across the
riverbed. Jude's foreman had moved all the cattle to the upper pasture and
dropped the fences along the riverbank so the trucks could cross when the moon was
down and catch the dirt road that wound into the ranch next door, where another
oil man, a bigger one than Jude, was running the same kind of economics.

     
A white man got two
dollars an hour on the floor of a rig and two
twenty-seven up on
the monkey board. Wetbacks would do it for four bits and their beans. They'd
drill into pay sands with no blowout preventers on the wellhead; work on
doodlebug crews in an electric storm, out on a bald prairie, with dynamite and
primers and nitro caps in the truck, all those boys strung out along a
three-hundred-foot steel tape, handling steel chaining pins and a range pole
that might as well have been a lightning rod. I had a suspicion it made for a
religious moment.

     
I saw boys on the rig
pinch their fingers off with pipe chains, get their forearms snapped like
sticks by the tongs, and find out they weren't taking anything back to Mexico
for it but a handshake.

     
The ranch next door
was even worse. I heard a perforating gun blew up and killed a wet on the rig
floor. A deputy sheriff helped bury him in a mesquite grove, and an hour later
the floor was hosed down and pipe was singing down the hole.

     
That's not all of it,
either. Jude and some of his friends had a special crew of higher-paid wets and
white boys who'd been in Huntsville and on the pea farm at Sugarland that were
slant drilling, which is when you drill at an angle into somebody else's pool
or maybe a company storage sand and you pay off whoever is supposed to be
watching the pressure gauges. They'd siphon it out like soda through a straw,
cap the well, call it a duster, and be down in Saucillo, drinking Dos X's and
mescal before the Texaco Company knew they'd been robbed blind.

     
I had no complaint,
though. Jude paid me a white person's wage, whether I was clanging pipe or
watching over Buford in the field. He was a cute little guy in his short pants
and cowboy hat. We'd hitch a mule to the tomato sled, set four baskets on it,
and pick down one row and up the other, and I'd always let him drive the mule
and see how far he could fling the tomatoes that had gotten soft.

     
The second month I
was there, Buford and me started pulling melons at the back end of the field,
where a black family lived in a shack by a grove of dried-up mesquite trees.
Jude rode his horse out in the field and stretched in the saddle and leaned his
arms on the pommel and pushed his hat up on his brow with his thumb. Buford was
slapping the reins on the mule's butt and gee-hawing him in a circle at the end
of the row.