Texas Summer (6 page)

They leaned the guns against the dry chalk rock that rose at their backs, and sat down. Harold brought out the cigarettes and offered them, so that Lawrence took one first, and then Harold. And Harold struck the match.

“Got the car tonight?” he asked, holding the light.

Big Lawrence didn’t answer at once for drawing on the cigarette. “Sure,” he said then, admitting, “but I’ve got a date.” In this incredible sunlight, the flame of the match seemed colorless, only chemical, without heat.

“Where you gonna go?” Harold asked. “To the picture show?”

“I dunno,” said Lawrence, watching the smoke. “Maybe I will.”

The water hole was small, about ten feet across, overhung only by a dwarfed sand willow on the other bank, so that all around the dead burning ground was flushed with sun, while one half of the hole itself cast back the scene in shimmering distortion.

Over and on the water now, in and through the shadow that fell half across them, played wasps and water spiders, dragonflies, snake doctors, and a thousand gray gnats. Then the hornet came — deep-ribbed and golden, whirring bright as a spinning coin; it hung in a hummingbird twist just on the water surface in the deepest shadow of the tree, and Lawrence threw a rock at it.

And an extraordinary thing happened. The hornet, rising frantically up through the willow branches, twisted once, and came down out of the tree in a wild whining loop, and lit exactly on the back of Harold’s shirt collar, and then very deliberately, as Lawrence saw, crawled inside.

“Set still,” said Lawrence, taking a handful of the shirt at the back and the hornet with it, holding it.

Harold had his throat arched out, the back of his neck scrunched away from the shirt collar. “Did you git it?” he kept asking.

“Set still, god dang it,” said Lawrence, laughing, watching Harold’s face from the side, before finally closing his hand on the shirt, making the hornet crackle as hard and dry as an old wooden penny-matchbox when he clenched his fist.

And then Lawrence had it out, in his hand, and they were both bent over it looking. It was dead now, wadded and broken. And in the shade of Lawrence’s hand, the gold of the hornet had become as shoddy drab as the phosphorus dial at noon — it was the stinger, sticking out like a wire hair, taut in an electric quaver, that still lived.

“Look at that goddam thing,” said Lawrence of the stinger, and made as if to touch it with his hand.

“Look out, you’ll get stung,” said Harold.

“Look at it,” said Lawrence, intent.

“They all do that,” Harold said.

“Sure, but not like that.”

Lawrence flicked it with his finger, but nothing happened.

“Maybe we can get it to sting something,” said Harold, and he tried to catch a doodlebug crawling on a bluebonnet that grew alone between them, but he missed it. So Lawrence bent the flower itself over, to get the stinger to penetrate the stem. “It’ll kill it,” he said. “It’s acid.”

Lawrence held the tail of the hornet tightly between his thumb and finger, squeezing to get more of the stinger out, until it came out too far and stopped moving — and Lawrence, still squeezing, slowly emptied the body of its white filling. Some of it went on his finger. Lawrence smelled it, then he let Harold smell it before he wiped his finger on the grass.

They each lit another cigarette. Big Lawrence threw the match in the water, and a minute after it had floated out, took up the .243, drew a bead, and clipped it just below the burnt head.

“Why?” he asked Harold, handing him the rifle. “Are you goin’ to the show tonight?”

“I might,” Harold said.

“Yeah, but have you got a date?”

“I reckon I could get one,” said Harold, working the bolt.

“I’ve got one with Helen Ward,” said Lawrence.

Harold sighted along the rifle.

“You know her sister?” Lawrence asked.

“Who, Louise?”

“Sure, maybe we could get ’em drunk.”

Harold held his breath, steadying the rifle. Then he took a shot. “Sure I know her,” he said.

They shot water targets, with the rifle, Harold using up the shots Lawrence owed him. Once, however, after he dug an old condensed-milk can out of the bank and sat it afloat on the water, Lawrence took up the shotgun and held the muzzle about a foot from the can.

“TNT,” he said, and pulled the trigger. “Hot damn!”

They sat there for an hour, talking a little and smoking, shooting at crawfish and dragonflies, or underwater rocks that shone through flat yellow or, more often, dull dead brown.

Then they heard the train, the whistle, distant and ghostly.

“Come on,” said Lawrence, tight-lipped.

They left the guns and climbed the bank up to the trestle — to the understructure of it, a labyrinthine tangle of creosote beams, crisscrossed and jutting out abruptly where it had been repaired and shored up over many years, the Tinkertoy work of a mad child.

Under the tracks now, they moved spiderlike through the angled beams toward the middle of the span. The whistle of the train sounded again, closer now — and, beneath their hands and feet, along their arms and legs, whenever their bodies touched the wood of the trestle, they felt the tremor of the approaching train.

At a point near the middle, where two beams crossed about four feet directly beneath the tracks, they stopped, crouching, each with one foot in the V where the beams bisected, their hands grasping the tie above them that separated the tracks. They could tell from the increasing tremor of the structure how much closer the train was — about the length of a football field — and now they could hear the train itself, the rumble of it, still distant, almost peaceful, like a drowsing bull.

Big Lawrence turned, his face flushed almost crimson, so that his grin was strangely incongruous. “
Don’t fergit!
” he said.

“I won’t,” said Harold.

They waited a few seconds more...three, four, five...“Now!” said Lawrence, and they raised their heads up between the tracks so that their chins were resting on the tie.

Even before he looked at the train, Harold was aware how Lawrence, without turning his head, had cut his eyes over quickly to make sure that Harold’s chin was on the railroad tie, the way it was supposed to be, thrusting forward, throat pressing into the wood — and his eyes open. In this position, the tops of their heads were about two inches higher than the rails themselves, and their faces toward the oncoming train.

What Harold saw was like a scene in a movie when the camera is shooting up at an angle from the floor, magnifying and distorting — the locomotive — now in extreme close-up, the lower part especially, the cowcatcher, seen as a gigantic black plowshare, appearing knife-pointed and razor-sharp. And then the sound of the train’s whistle was an ear-shattering hysterical scream, but inside it, above it, came Lawrence’s own scream: “
Don’t fergit!
” And suddenly the train was on them, an unimaginably explosive eclipse. Harold strained to keep his eyes open, because that was the thing, and it was what Big Lawrence had told him not to forget.

And afterward, it was the first thing Lawrence wanted to know. “Well, did you?”

“Yeah,” said Harold, then added, “as long as I could...till the cinders got in ’em.”

“Yeah,” Lawrence admitted, “me too. Anyway, it’s just the first part that counts — when it’s comin’ right for you, that’s when it really counts.”

“Yeah,” Harold agreed, “that’s when it really counts.”

Or at least he said he agreed. It was not easy to disagree with Big Lawrence. Also he believed in his heart that Lawrence was probably right; if something was so scary that you didn’t want to do it, then it must be worth doing. The whole idea, of course, had been Lawrence’s. At first it had somehow seemed quite natural. They had been walking across the trestle, and when they heard the train coming, they started to climb down the side, at least enough to be well off the track.

“Wait a minute,” Lawrence had said, taking hold of Harold’s arm. “We don’t have to git off yet. It ain’t even in sight.”

They had waited until the locomotive had come around the bend, about a hundred yards away.

“We’ll make him blow the whistle first,” said Lawrence, but the whistle was already shrieking, and the engineer peering ahead and shaking his fist.

Then, clinging to the crossbeam beneath the tracks, they had watched the train roar by overhead. That was when Lawrence got the notion of climbing high enough to put their heads up between the ties. The idea of keeping their eyes open to watch the train’s horrific approach was fairly new, and this was only the second time they had tried that part of it. Harold was relieved that even Lawrence had not been able to keep his eyes open the whole time.

They climbed down from the trestle and went back to get their guns. Then when they passed near the stumps, Harold crossed over and picked up the dead rabbit, Lawrence watching him.

“What’re you gonna do with that damn thing?” Lawrence asked, sounding angry.

“Aw I dunno,” said Harold. “Might as well take it along.”

Lawrence watched while Harold held it by the ears and kicked at a piece of newspaper, all twisted dry and yellow in the grass. He got the paper, shook it out straight, and he wrapped it around the rabbit.

They started across the field, Lawrence not talking for a while. Then they stopped to light a cigarette. “I got a good idea,” Lawrence said, cradling the rifle to one arm. “We can cook it.”

Harold didn’t answer, but as they walked back toward the stumps, he looked at the sun.

“I wonder what time it is anyhow,” he said.

Using Harold’s pocketknife, Big Lawrence, after it was decided, sat on one of the stumps to skin the rabbit while Harold went pushing around through the Johnson grass, folding it aside with his feet, peering and picking up small dead branches, bundling them to build the fire.

At the stumps, Lawrence cursed the knife, tried the other blade, and sawed at the rabbit’s neck, twisting the head in his hand.

“Couldn’t cut hot nigger-piss,” he said, but he managed to tear the head off, and to turn the skin back on itself at the neck, so that he pulled it down over the body like a glove reversed on an unborn hand, it glistened so.

He had to stop with the skin halfway down to cut off the front feet, and in doing this, hacking once straight on from the point of the blade, the blade suddenly folded back against his finger. Grimacing, he opened the knife slowly, saying nothing, but he sucked at the finger and squeezed it between two others until, through all this heavy red of rabbit, sticking, covering his whole hand now, he could almost see, but never quite, where in one spot on his smallest finger, up through all the thick dark blood of the rabbit, he was bleeding too.

He went down to the water hole to wash his hands, but he finished skinning the rabbit first.

When he got back, Harold was bent over, ready to light the fire.

Then it was Lawrence who squinted at the sun, still monstrous but lower now in the western sky. “Well, are we goin’ to the goddam picture show or not?” he demanded.

“I don’t care,” said Harold, looking up at him. “Do you want to?”

“Well, we better git back if we’re goin’.”

Harold pulled the old newspaper from where he had put it to start the fire. Then he wrapped it around the rabbit again, and he stuffed the whole thing inside his shirt. Finally he folded the skin square and put it in his back pocket, like a handkerchief.

Lawrence had the rabbit’s head. He tried to get the eyes to stay open, and one did stay open, but only the white showed when he sat it on the stump. He took a rock from the windbreak Harold had built for the fire and put this on the stump, too, behind the head, and they started across the field. When they were a little way out, they took shots at the head, and finally Lawrence used the last of the shotgun shells he had coming to go up close and blast the head, and finally a part of the stump itself.

“Bombs away!” he said the last time he pulled the trigger, up close.

Before they reached the street where Lawrence lived, they could hear Tommy Sellers cursing and Crazy Ralph Wilton, farther, yelling: “All the way! All the way!” and as they turned in, Tommy Sellers was there, coming toward them, walking up the middle of the street, swinging his glove by one finger.

Harold pulled the wad of newspaper out of his shirt and held it up to show, and Tommy Sellers stopped and kicked around at a pile of dead grass in the gutter, while in the distance Crazy Ralph was yelling: “All the way! All the way!” Then Tommy Sellers found the ball with his foot, and, bending over, in a low twisting windup from the gutter, without once looking where, he threw it — and the ball lifted like a shot to hang sailing for an instant in a wide climbing arc toward the sun.

Big Lawrence brought his rifle off his shoulder. “Ka-
pow!
Ka-
pow!
” and the barrel point wavered, sighting up the lazy wake of the ball. “Dead-sonafabitch-bird,” he said.

Tommy Sellers was standing closer now, hands on his hips, not seeing half a block away, where Crazy Ralph, with his eyes wild, his fingers nervously tapping the glove palm, was trying to pick the bouncing throw off the headlight of a parked car.

“Goddam that thing stinks!” said Lawrence, making a face when Harold opened the newspaper. The paper had become like a half-dried cloth, stiff, or sticking in places and coming to pieces. Almost at once a fly was crawling over the chewed-up part of the rabbit.

“You know what it’s like?” said Lawrence. “Rotten old afterbirth!” and he spat, seeming to retch slightly.

“What was it?” asked Tommy Sellers, looking closely at the rabbit, then up, not caring, dancing away to make an over-the-shoulder circus catch of the throw from Crazy Ralph.

As they walked on, Harold wrapped the newspaper around the rabbit again and put it in his shirt.

“It’s already startin’ to rot!” said Big Lawrence.

“Aw you’re crazy,” Harold said.

“
Crazy,
” repeated Lawrence through clenched teeth. “You’re the one who’s crazy. What’ll you do...eat it?” He laughed, angrily, spitting again.