Sentimental Journey (11 page)

He laughed quietly just as Sabri downshifted again into another turn.

She made a quick grab for the seat and got Cassidy’s thigh. She held on anyway, but as soon as they straightened she let go of his leg.

He wasn’t looking at that map anymore. She could feel him looking at her for a very long time. When he didn’t turn away, she asked, “Are you a betting man, Cassidy?”

“Sometimes. Why?”

“Twenty bucks says you were just grinning.”

“Still am, sweetheart. But don’t worry. If you want to cop a feel, I won’t stop you.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. My hands aren’t that small.”

He paused. “You’re pretty quick, Kincaid . . . for a blind broad.”

“You’re pretty obnoxious, Cassidy . . . for an officer.”

The truck rattled over a rut and almost drowned out his laughter.

She braced her palms on the cab roof.

“Here, this should help.” He dropped his bulky canvas pack on her lap.

It weighed a ton. “What’s in here?”

“A few necessities.”

“Oh.” She nodded knowingly. “A tank.”

She heard him fold the map, then felt him shift and tuck it in his pocket.

“We won’t be needing a tank to get out, sweetheart. By tomorrow we’ll be in
Gibraltar
, and before you know it, you’ll be home again.”

“You’re wrong, Captain. I’m not your sweetheart. I’m not anyone’s sweetheart.”

Sabri shifted the gears into overdrive. The truck screeched too fast into another turn. She leaned her head back against the cab and whispered, “I just hope that’s the only thing you’re wrong about.”

PART FOUR

TEXAS

“WITH PLENTY OF MONEY
AND
YOU”

ACME
,
TEXAS
, 1932

Red Walker lay in the brown stubble of a wheat field, his hands clasped behind his head and his bare feet in the warm dirt. He sucked on a couple of Sen-Sens and stared up at a big, blue
Texas
sky.

Everything was big in
Texas
.

His granddaddy Ross told him that a good hundred times.

“Everything’s big in
Texas
,” he would say in a booming voice that always ended with a crooked white grin that was bigger than any other Red had ever seen. He had a knobby, tanned, old farmer’s face; it was a face that was much kinder, but butt-ugly when you compared it to his daughter’s. Red’s mama, Dina Rae, was a real beauty.

His granddaddy told Red a farmer’s story, about how years before, in the days when you still dug a well with sweat and a shovel and a prayer, you could ride through the fields on horseback and that dadgummed wheat was shoulder-high.

Now it was the absolute Bible-swearin’ truth that most Texans could tell a tale as tall as a silo. They sort of figured any fool could tell the truth, but it took some sense to tell a good lie. His granddaddy was no exception, so Red never knew whether to believe him or not. If someone pulled your leg that often, well then, you’d better not believe them ’less you want to spend most of your life walking funny.

A few years later his granddaddy died on a soft summer morning, the kind of day that made you believe the angels just came right down from heaven and lifted him up there, like he’d always said they would.

In a will hand-scrawled on the back of an old wheat contract, he left a small wooden box to Red. Inside it were mother-of-pearl cuff links, a pocket knife with a real bone handle, and a few old photographs. Nestled into the south corner was a knuckle-sized hunk of real turquoise his granddaddy had carried in his pocket for some fifty-odd years, rubbing it with his fingers so “it took the worry right out of your head.” That worrying stone was smooth as spit.

After that day, on the wall above Red’s narrow bed, just where the last coat of green paint was chipping through to thirty-year-old yellow, was a small, square, jagged-edged photograph of his granddaddy. He was wearing that big old straw hat he wore every single day but Sunday for as long as anyone could remember, and he was riding good old Pete—a brute of a Morgan—through a golden field of wheat that was as tall as God.

Everything’s big in
Texas
.

That old man was right as rain, Red thought, lying there in the field and glancing at everything around him. Out back of his own daddy’s filling station, just past the big round sign with its red Texaco star, there stood a row of pecan trees nigh on thirty feet high. In July, when the no-degree
Texas
sun beat down and burned the breath clean out of your mouth, those trees were the only slip of shade for ten square miles.

You could see their thick green crowns all the way from the front steps of
Christ
Baptist
Church
, and those rugged trunks were harder than hell to climb barefoot. But a single one of those fourth-generation trees could throw down enough sun burnt nuts to feed icebox cookies and pecan pie to half of
Wilbarger
County
.

Red took out a thin red-paper Sen-Sen packet from the patched pocket of his denim overalls, flicked open the flap with one thumb in the city-slick way he’d seen a young fellow from Fort Worth do; then he held it up and shook a few of them onto his dry tongue. They tasted like a mix of licorice and his mama’s Camay soap, the kind she’d used to wash his mouth out when he repeated one of her curse words.

He’d first tried Sen-Sen to cover up the smell of the two
Chesterfield
cigarettes he’d smoked behind the old wooden water tower when he was eight. But now, four years later, he’d grown to like the way they made his mouth feel. They were cheaper than one of those blue packages of Clove gum and lasted longer. You got your few pennies’ worth out of a Sen-Sen pack.

He closed his eyes, figuring he’d sleep a bit. But he opened his eyes and cocked his head when he heard a distinct and distant hum in the air. He propped up on his bare elbows and looked eastward.

There, in that blue sky, was an airplane, flying right toward him.

He’d seen planes a couple of times, once up real close, when a barnstormer buzzed into Quannah on a Saturday in May a few years back and gave rides to whoever could afford to pay a dollar for one. His daddy took Nettie and him over so’s they could see that biplane in person. It wasn’t hard to figure out that his daddy had wanted to get his nose into the engine as badly as Red wanted to ride in the thing.

But they didn’t have dollars to waste on plane rides, so Red had just walked around it over and over again, spinning the propeller, sliding his hand along the bi-wings and the tail, trying to imagine what it would be like to get into that bucket of a seat, to put goggles over his eyes and fly right out of Acme, Texas, away from the bootlegged beer bottles that filled the kitchen trash can every day, away from the chipped supper plates that weren’t good enough to give away with a gasoline fill-up and the jelly-jar glasses they used for meals, away from the hollering that echoed in their lopsided old house out back of the gas station, hollering that came from his mama’s restlessness and his daddy’s confusion.

Red stood up, shaded a hand over his eyes, and watched.

The biplane flew overhead; it rocked its wings at him and circled once. He waved back at the pilot, then ran through the field after that plane, still waving, ran and ran and ran, until his arms were spread out like wings and his face was turned up toward the sun and the sky and tomorrow.

“Billy Joe!”

Red stumbled and fell on his knees, his palms skidding into a warm furrow of dirt. He knelt there in that rust-colored
Texas
farm field while the plane kept on flying away, until it was only an arrow in the distant sky that was as unreachable as a dream.

He stood, dusted himself off, then shoved his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls, where a hunk of smooth turquoise slipped right into his fingers as if it were meant to be there. He looked toward the house and the female voice that called him.

The sun caught his mama’s bright red hair, a burst of shining color against the weathered wood of their scrappy gray house, which was really little more than a three-room shack that leaned like a Saturday night drunk and sat under an old wooden water tower with a narrow platform that was a favorite spot of his. That water tower was branded with cigarette burns along the back rail, and he could sit there on that puffy platform for hours, wishing, dreaming, and looking out to the west where there was nothing but the flat Texas horizon for as far as his eyes could see.

“Billy Joe!”

It must be after
four o’clock
. She never got up before
four o’clock
, and that was just because she had to get ready for work. Six nights a week she played honky-tonk piano at a club just across the
Oklahoma
border called
The Afterthought,
where the
Harmon
County
law enforcement turned a blind eye to the drinking and gambling because the governor’s brother owned half the place.

Red’s older sister, Onetta, said she heard the church ladies laughing about Mama’s job. They said it was pretty far-sighted of Dina Rae to be working in a club called
The Afterthought.

He didn’t exactly understand what that meant, until Nettie explained.

Dina Rae Ross Walker had been known to drink enough beer between dusk and dawn to try to forget she had a husband whose hands and fingernails were never clean and who reeked of oil and grease and the small town she’d always wanted to leave far behind her.

“Billll-eeee Jooooooooe!”

His mama called him Billy Joe, or if she was real mad, William Joseph. His daddy just called him Red. Just Red, after his full head of wavy red hair—a gift from some Ross relative, a Scot who settled here after The Clearances.

Billy Joe or Red. What they each called him pretty much typified his folks’ marriage. That, and what they called each other when they were yelling late at night. He wondered sometimes how those two ever got together in the first place.

“William Joseph Walker!”

He cupped his hands over his mouth. “Coming!”

She raised the long-necked brown beer bottle in her right hand. A gesture that looked like a toast.

He ran toward her.

She stood in the open doorway, her long slim arm propped casually on the splintered, crooked frame of the screen door. She was taking a good draw off that beer.

She’d started early today.

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”