South of Heaven (3 page)

S
he was just about the teensiest little ol’ girl that ever lived—short, I mean, and weighing maybe about ninety-five pounds. But the way she stretched her clothes, it was kind of a case of the parts being greater than the whole. She drew back her hand as though to slap me, and then she asked just what I thought I was doing, and just who did I think I was. And before I could answer her, she asked just what I thought I was looking at.

“Well?” she demanded, her eyes blazing. “Do you want me to take them out and show them to you? Do you, you big stupid goof!”

“Ma’am,” I said. “Ma’am, I—I—”

“Or maybe you want me to take my pants down and show you my bottom,” she said, adding that I seemed to like to play with it. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it? To get my pants down so you can kick me again!”

“Please, ma’am,” I said. “I didn’t know you were a girl. I mean, your back was to me and you had that stocking cap on and your jumper was hanging down over your, uh—how was I to know, anyway?”

“I’ll bet! I’ll just bet,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite so angry. “Just where is this pipeline job I’ve been hearing so much about?”

I told her the job wasn’t going to start until tomorrow, but the beginning of it was up the river about five miles. “Come out in the street and I’ll show you.”

She went with me, a little stiffly, and I pointed—far, far away up the Pecos. They were just specks from here, blinking and winking as the sun hit them—the rows of sleeping and office tents, and the hundred-yard-long chow tent. But you could see a long way out there, if your eyes were used to it, and I could even identify the tractorlike generators, and the strungout lengths of pipe—looking like matchsticks from this distance—and an antlike speck, moving here and there, which had to be the camp guard. But the girl looked up into my face, frowning suspiciously, apparently unable to see a thing.

“Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” she said. “You’re not just teasing me or something?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll be up there working this time tomorrow.”

“But”—she made a helpless gesture. “But why does the pipeline start here? What are they going to put in it?”

“Take another look,” I said. “Off over this way.” I pointed again, and she moved in close to me to sight along my arm. It made me feel so prickly and funny that I could hardly keep my mind on what I was saying. And it kept me from wondering about quite a few things that I might well have wondered about. For instance:

She was no tourist; she had come here, knowing what she was coming to—a girl with a purpose. Yet she apparently knew nothing at all about it. She was smart; you knew that at first glance. But her behavior, some of the things she said, were downright dumb. And that cut-down Dodge of hers was a very solid job—someone had put a lot of work and money into it. And the tires were top-of-the-line and practically new.

It was a car that would take you anywhere and out again. And do it fast. And why it had taken her here, why she should be here at all…?

Well, you see? But I didn’t. Not at the time.

“See off over there,” I said, her black hair brushing against my face. “Do you see all those pumping jacks?—Hundreds and hundreds of them stretching off to the horizon.”

She shook her head, saying rather crossly that she couldn’t see a thing. I said that was natural enough, I supposed, the stuff being so old and weathered practically the same color as the landscape.

“But, anyway, that’s an oil field. What used to be the largest shallow oil field in the world. It’s pretty well pumped dry now, but there’s more natural gas here than you’ll find any place in the country.”

“What are those?” She squinted. “Like matches being lighted! There!…There goes another one!”

I told her those were flambeaux. Big steel torches running up into the air to burn off the gas, so it wouldn’t drift around and cause trouble.

“That’s what this pipeline is about,” I went on. “They’ll build a big casinghead plant around here somewhere to dry out the gas and then they’ll pump it down to Port Arthur.”

She nodded, thanking me and drawing away again. She said she guessed she’d better get back to fixing the tire; and I said I was sure it was the valve rather than the tire and I could fix it in a minute. But why didn’t we have some breakfast first?

“Well…” she hesitated, “I
could
use some coffee. I was driving all night, and…and…Are the restaurants very high out here?”

“Not for out here. Five to ten cents for a glass of water, and other things accordingly. But don’t you worry about that,” I said, taking her arm. “This is on me.”

She came along without much urging. The Greek stopped us at the door, making me show my money before he would let us in. Which was reasonable enough in a town with six hundred floaters and a normal population of less than fifty. I let him see the five, and we went on back to the kitchen to wash up.

The cook was skimming a stew with a big spoon, and taking a swig now and then from a pint bottle of vanilla extract. He was lean and mean-looking, and I figured that if you looked in his pocket you would probably turn up a Wobbly card. Almost all oil-field cooks were Wobblies—members of the I.W.W. To their way of thinking, Eugene Debs was a conservative, and about the only person they had any use for was Big Bill Haywood.

They all hated the bosses; just any bosses. Most of the time they were about half-stewed on flavoring extract, which gave them belly pains and made them a lot meaner than they normally were.

“Hist,” he said, jerking his head at me as I started to dipper water into the wash basin. “Don’t use that goddam river water (
excuse me, lady
). Why save money for a goddam Greek capitalist (
excuse me, lady
)?”

He filled the basin with about three dollars’ worth of drinking water. As we began to wash, I gave him our breakfast order—hot cakes, ham and eggs, and coffee. He said we’d get the goddam meat for free (
excuse him, lady
), so never mind ordering it.

“And don’t hurry so goddam fast, will you? I’ll fix you some scoff to take with you.”

We were moving kind of carefully when we went back into the restaurant because we both had a couple of big sandwiches stuffed down inside our shirts. We ate breakfast pretty carefully, too, since the Greek kept shooting glances our way, and we’d got a lot more than our check showed. Each of us had a big slice of ham hidden under our eggs, and there was about a pound of butter under our hot cakes.

In retrospect, there doesn’t seem much to have laughed about. We were cheating an honest businessman, and, if anything, we should have been ashamed of ourselves. Still, to us, a couple of youngsters come together, sharing with each other, the situation was funny as all hell. We’d quiet down for a minute and concentrate on our food. And then our eyes would meet, and that would set us to laughing all over again. We were laughing and carrying on so much that our food was cold before we’d finished it all.

Of course, the Greek caught on to what had happened, and he didn’t think it was a bit funny. I figured on getting about two dollars change back from my five. But what he gave me was fifty cents. I started to argue about it, and he got all excited and red in the face and began hollering.

The cook came to the kitchen door and looked out. Then he came out, waving a meat cleaver as he headed toward the Greek. The Greek grabbed up a sawed-off baseball bat. Carol—that was the girl’s name—Carol and I got the heck out of there.

I’d been right about the tire. All it needed was some pumping up and an adjustment of the valve. We worked on it together, making a job out of it, you know. Hunkered down side by side in the red dirt like kids playing at mud pies. Along toward the last, Carol turned to me just as I turned toward her, and our faces were barely an inch apart. We looked at each other, hardly breathing. Her eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger, and her mouth softer and softer. Her lips parted. They moved toward mine, and her eyes started to drift shut, and…

Fruit Jar drove up.

He wheeled into the curb, bouncing the Model-T’s tires against it. He hollered at me, motioning for me to come over to him. I did so, taking my time about it. Wondering how he’d managed to get the heat which he was obviously full of.

“Let’s have some stash, Tommy,” he demanded, and I stepped back a little to avoid his breath. “We got to get over to Matacora.”

“What for?” I said.

“Because,”—he caught himself, his mouth growing crafty—“Give me the dough, Tommy. I ain’t taking you if you don’t.”

I said I’d give him fifty cents if it would do him any good. He snatched it out of my hand, red eyes glaring at me from behind his sunglasses. “You got more than that! You and that broad were scoffing in the Greek’s!”

“So?” I said.

“So where did you get the stash?”

“Where did you get it for that load of heat you’re carrying?”

He let out a string of curses. He said it would be his happy ass if I ever rode with him again, and I said I wouldn’t ride with him again if I was paid to.

He revved the motor, cursing. The car shot backwards, then stopped as he turned to yell at me.

“Better start walking, you cheap chiseling punk! They’re hiring on in Matacora!”

He drove away fast, figuring maybe that I’d throw something at him. I watched, grinning, as he stopped at the garage gasoline pump, a couple of blocks away. He was falling for a rumor, of course, the kind that’s always floating around a jungle. It didn’t make any difference to me if the line was hiring in Matacora, since I already had a job nailed down, but I knew that they weren’t. All the men were waiting here. What sense would it have made to have them go all the way over to Matacora, and then have to be hauled back?

Carol came up and asked if there was any trouble. I said that there wasn’t a bit, and we could get back to fixing the tire.

“It’s already fixed, Tommy. You know that.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “I guess it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is, Tommy.”

We looked at each other. I held out my hand and said, well, I guessed I’d better tell her good-bye. “I mean, I guess I’d better tell you,” I said, “because I reckon a girl like you wouldn’t want to kiss a fellow good-bye that she’s just met. Right out in public, I mean.”

She took my hand and squeezed it. Staring down at the ground and then slowly raising her eyes to look up into my face.

“What makes you think I’m going anywhere, Tommy?”

“What?”

“What makes you think I’m going anywhere? That I’m not staying right here.”

“But…” I hesitated. “You mean you’re meeting someone here in town? You know someone here?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know anyone but you, Tommy.”

“Well,” I frowned. “I don’t know what you’d do around town. Things will be busy for a few weeks after the pipeline camp opens up, but then they’ll have to move it south to keep up with the job. So far away that the men can’t make it into town.”

Her head moved in a little nod, and she murmured indistinctly—about doing something around the pipeline, it sounded like. I looked down into her face, wondering why she was blushing so much.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you sure couldn’t work in the camp, Carol. They don’t have jobs for women. Why, the high-pressure wouldn’t let a woman set foot inside a pipeline camp.”

“The high-pressure?”

“The bosses,” I explained. “It’s kind of a bitter joke, something the Wobblies started, I guess. You know, like the bosses are always high-pressuring the working stiffs.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s, uh, very interesting.”

“Actually,” I said, “they don’t push anyone too hard. They can’t. A lot of the men just aren’t capable of hard work—they’ve been drifting, going hungry too long. And a lot more couldn’t be pushed without buying yourself a broken head. They’re jailbirds, chain-gang veterans, guys that would climb a tree for trouble when they could stand on the ground and have peace.”

“My goodness!” Her eyes were very big and round. “Why aren’t they arrested?”

“Who’s going to do it?” I shrugged. “The line’s a long way from civilization as a rule. It moves from county to county, through places where the population adds up to less than the pipeliners. Aside from that, the big bosses do a lot of covering-up where the law is concerned. They figure they have to, you know. Otherwise they’d lose a lot of time and the job would be held up, while the law poked around investigating and asking questions and arresting suspects, and so on.”

Carol said my goodness again, or something like that. To show she was interested, you know. I went on talking, stretching things quite a little, as you’ve probably guessed, to make myself look bold and brave.

Actually, there was quite a bit of law around the line. Not much of the official sort, but the kind you get from a rifle butt or a hard-ash pick handle. Judge and jury were the high-pressure, and they also carried out their own sentences. And troublemakers seldom came back for second helpings.

“Now, getting back to you, Carol,” I said. “I was going to ask why.…”

I broke off for she was staring past me, a startled look in her eyes. I turned around to see what she was looking at.

It was Fruit Jar. He was clattering away from the garage in his T-Ford, the torn-off hose from the gas pump trailing from his tank.

I groaned, wondering just how stupid he could be to try such a stunt, getting his tank filled with gasoline and then trying to run off without paying. Where was he going to run to in an area like this? How far did he expect to get in a twelve-year-old Model-T? A car that was already bucking and stalling and trying to die on him.

The garage owner obviously wasn’t worried. He was sauntering after Fruit Jar and taking his own sweet time about it. Then there was the roar of another motor, and Bud Lassen wheeled out from behind the garage.

Fruit Jar looked back over his shoulder. He tried to pour on more gas, and the car stalled and stopped. He fought with it for a moment, then threw himself out the door and started running.

Lassen shouted for him to halt—I’ll have to admit that. But Fruit Jar kept on running, probably too scared to stop. So Lassen turned out on the prairie after him.