Texas Summer (7 page)

They were walking in the street now in front of Lawrence’s house. Tommy Sellers and Ralph Wilton were at the curb, throwing their gloves up through the branches of a stunted cedar tree where the ball was caught.

There were some people standing around the steps at Lawrence’s front porch. One was a young woman wearing an apron over her dress — and a little girl was holding on to the dress with both hands, pressing her face into the apron, swinging herself slowly back and forth, so that the woman stood braced, her feet slightly apart. She stroked the child’s head with one hand, and in the other she was holding the dead cat.

They watched Harold and Lawrence in the street in front of the house. Once, the woman moved her head and spoke to the big man standing on the porch, who frowned without looking at her.

Harold didn’t turn in with Lawrence. “See you at the picture show,” he said.

As he walked on, the fall of their voices died past him.

“How’d it happen, Son?” he heard Lawrence’s dad ask.

He turned off on a vacant lot that cut through toward the livery stable, where he would meet Les Newgate for his ride home. Halfway across, he pulled out the paper and opened it. He studied it, brought it up to his face, and smelled it. Then he put it back in the paper and inside his shirt. “Ain’t nothin’ better’n fried rabbit with biscuit an’ gravy,” his granddad always said.

VII

O
N AN EAST
T
EXAS
prison farm, about two hundred miles away, a different kind of action was unfolding. Cap’n Jack, his cheek bulging with chaw, was shouting furiously: “Git ’im, Bull! Git that black son’bitch!”

And Bull Watson, 250 pounds, pig-bristle haircut, emptied his ten-gauge riot gun at the escaping prisoner, kicking out craters of red dirt on both sides of the man who scrambled over the culvert and up the ragged embankment.

A dozen other prisoners, all black or Mexican, cheered him on: “Go, Big Nail, go!”

“
Vamos, amigo!
”

“Big Nail gonna make it! Hot damn!”

And as the prisoner disappeared into the scrub-brush at the top of the embankment, Bull tried to avoid the Cap’n’s glare of contempt.

“Ah may of gotta piece of ’im, Cap,” said Bull.

“You got shit, that’s what you got,” said Cap. He spat a glittering brown trail of Red Man into the dust, then turned to the toothless Mexican trusty standing alongside and pointed to the old pickup with the faded letters: TEXAS STATE PRISON SYSTEM.

“Go git the dogs!” he bellowed, “an’ git Slim an’ Dusty! Tell Warden Big Nail’s makin’ a run fer it!”

The trusty turned and headed for the truck, as the other yelled after him: “An’ bring my Winchester!”

“If Warden don’t want ’em runnin’,” muttered Bull, “then how come ah can’t use my thirty-thirty on the job?”

“’Cause he don’t want nobody gittin’ killed, that’s how come,” said Cap, then spat and added quietly, “an’ ’cause he’s a goddam nigger-lover...now, jest shut your hole an’ git on over yonder an’ check them leg-irons.”

Bull hitched up his trousers and headed toward the prisoners, while Cap pulled out his .357 Magnum and slowly cocked it.

“Awright,” he said in a low snarl, “if they’s anybody else wants to give ole Cap a little target practice” — he fired a deafening shot over their heads, causing them all to flinch — “he can jest start haulin’ ass.”

Across the culvert and beyond the embankment, Big Nail moved through the mesquite brush like a wounded animal, half hobbled by one leg-iron he had failed to slip.

“Big Nail be long gone from this place!” he said aloud. “Glory to the fuckin’ Jesus!”

In the distance behind he could hear Cap’n ranting at the prisoners and he knew that the Mexican was not yet back with the dogs.

“Long gone now. Hot damn! Praise to the fuckin’ Jesus!”

He ran without letup until he reached a narrow branch of the Cotton Mouth River — dried now in the raging heat to scarcely more than a rocky creekbed. But the water was deep enough to cover his feet.

“Well, shit-fire,” he said. “And so long, hound-dog!” And he stepped carefully into the precious fluid and headed downstream.

With the afternoon sun filtering down from the treetops, Big Nail moved through the woods with his hobbled gait like a figure crossing the strobe-lit landscape of a horror film — a gaunt black hulk of a man whose knife-scarred face, even in repose, appeared set in a permanent scowl because one of his wounds had severed a facial muscle or two controlling his features. It was, however, an expression not inappropriate to his temperament, which was villainous in an almost absolute sense. It was as if he could no longer tell whether a hand was beating him or caressing him; he had become the dog that snarls while it is being fed.

When he emerged from the woods and the streaming dappled light, he had lost his pursuers. The distant dogs were silent, thwarted by the water-covered trail. But Big Nail’s face showed no sign of gladness at that fact nor even relief; his eyes remained dead. Long ago something in him had been broken for good.

Back in the office at the prison farm, the Warden was reviewing the situation with Cap’n and Bull Watson. Under a trophy-size set of mounted antlers, the Warden sat at his desk, his feet with the new low-top customized Justins propped on a nearby chair for all to see. He considered himself a cut above Cap’n and Bull Watson so he did not chew Red Man but diligently smoked a whiskey-seasoned briar instead; his corduroy jacket had deerskin elbow patches and a shooter’s pad on the right shoulder.

“Warden, I’ll tell you one thing,” Bull Watson was saying, “that nigger would’ve been in two pieces right now if I had my thirty-thirty on the job.”

The Warden gave him a sad, reproachful look. “Well, that’s as fuckin’ may be, Bull, but the plain fact of the matter is that if you missed him with a goddam scattergun, how in God’s great name could you have hit him with a rifle?”

He looked over to Cap’n for confirmation. Cap’n took out an empty coffee can that he carried in his jacket pocket for the purpose and spat a mouthful of brown Red Man juice into it, before giving Bull a straight look.

“Reckon Warden’s got a point there, Bull,” he said, but then backed off a little. “’Course now you wudn’t aiming to kill ’im with that ten-gauge, was you?”

“Why hell no,” said Bull, as if they should both know better. “I was jest tryin’ to take off a foot or somethin’. Jest somethin’ to slow ’im down. He was
movin’,
Warden.” Then he added: “I still think I may have got a piece of him.”

Warden tapped his pipe bowl into an ashtray with a show of strained patience. “Well now, Bull, be that as it fuckin’ well may be. But Cap’n here says there weren’t no blood found at the scene. None whatsofuckin’ever. Now in light of your theory that presents somethin’ of a mystery, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, Warden, like I say, he was movin’ faster than a northbound mail train.” He forced a small chuckle. “Hell, I don’t think he had
time
to bleed.”

The other two failed to see the humor.

“I was sure hoping,” said Warden, “that we could git ’im back here before it makes the Fort Worth news-wire. It ain’t exactly the kinda Pee-R we need jest now. But seein’ as who it is, him bein’ so goddam mean an’ crazy, I reckon we better put out a all-points on ’im.” He turned to Cap’n as if he were addressing a child. “You think you can handle that?”

“Yessir, Warden,” said Cap’n briskly, trying to introduce an element of military smartness, in the hope it might distance him from the errant Bull Watson; and he got up to go and do it.

“But I’ll tell you one thing, Warden,” he felt obliged to add. “I’d jest bet he don’t git too far — not wearin’ that leg-iron.”

“Yep,” said Warden, “that’s as may be. But if I know Big Nail, he’ll probly git far enough to make
somebody’s
worst nightmare come true.”

VIII

H
AROLD CAME INTO
the open-end, dirt-floor shed where C.K. was sitting on the ground against the wall, reading a
Western Story
magazine.

The boy was carrying a pillowcase that was bunched out at the bottom, about a third filled with something, and C.K. looked up and smiled.

“What you doin’, Hal — bringin’ in the crop?”

Harold walked on over to one side of the shed where the kindling was stacked and pulled down an old sheet of newspaper, which he shook out to double-page size and spread in front of them. He dumped the gray-grass contents of the pillowcase onto the paper, and then straightened up to stand with his hands on his hips, frowning down at it.

C.K. was looking at it, too; but he was laughing — in his sometimes soft and almost soundless way, shaking his head as though this surely might be the final irony. “Sho’ is a lotta gage,” he said.

He reached out a hand and rolled a dry pinch of it between his thumb and forefinger.

“You reckon it’s dried out enough?” Harold asked, as he squatted down opposite. “I don’t wantta leave it out there no more — not hangin’ on that sycamore, anyway — it’s beginnin’ to look funny hangin’ up out there.” He glanced past the end of the shed toward the farmhouse that was about thirty yards away. “Heck, Dad’s been shootin’ dove down in there all week — an’ this mornin’ that ole hound of Les Newgate’s was runnin’ round with a piece of it in his mouth. I had to get it away from ’im ’fore they seen it.”

C.K. took another pinch of it and briskly crushed it between his flat palms, then held them up, cupped, smelling it.

“They wouldn’t of knowed what it was noway,” he said.

“You crazy?” said Harold. “You think my dad don’t know locoweed when he sees it?”

“Don’t look much like no locoweed now, though, do it?” said C.K., flatly, raising expressionless eyes to the boy.

“He’s seen it dried out, too, I bet,” said Harold, loyal, sullen, turning away.

“Sho’ he is,” said C.K., weary and acid. “Sho’, ah bet he done blow a lot of it too, ain’t he? Sho’, why ah bet you daddy one of the biggest ole hopheads in Texas! Why ah bet you he smoke it an’ eat it an’ jest anyway he can git it into his ole haid! Hee-hee!” He laughed at the mischievous image. “Ain’t that right, Hal?”

“You crazy?” demanded Harold, frowning fiercely. He took C.K.’s wrist. “Lemme smell it,” he said.

He drew back after a second.

“I can’t smell nothin’ but your dang sweat,” he said.

“’Course not,” said C.K., frowning in his turn, and brushing his hands, “you got to git it jest when the flower break — that’s the boo-kay of the plant, you see, that’s what we call that.”

“Do it again,” said Harold.

“Ah ain’t goin’ to do it again,” said C.K., peevishly, closing his eyes for a moment, “...it’s a waste on you — ah do it again, you jest say you smell my sweat. You ain’t got the nose for it noway — you got to know you business ’fore you start foolin’ round with this plant.”

“I can do it, C.K.,” said the boy earnestly. “Come on, dang it.”

C.K. sighed elaborately and selected another small bud from the pile.

“Awright now, when ah rub it in my hand,” he said sternly, “you let out you breath — then ah cup my hand, you put you nose in an’ smell strong. You got to suck in strong through you nose!”

They did this.

“You smell it?” asked C.K.

“Yeah, sort of,” said Harold, leaning back again.

“That’s the boo-kay of the plant — they ain’t no smell like it.”

“It smells like tea,” said the boy.

“Well, now that’s why they calls it that, you see — but it smell like somethin’ else too.”

“What?”

“Like mighty fine gage, that’s what.”

“Well, whatta you keep on callin’ it that for?” Harold wanted to know. “That ain’t what that Mex’can called it — he called it ‘pot.’”

“That ole Mex,” said C.K., brushing his hands and laughing, “he sho’ were funny, weren’t he?...thought he could pick cotton...told me he used to pick-a-bale-a-day. Ah had to laugh when he say that...oh, sho’, he call it lotta things. He call it ‘baby,’ too. He say: ‘Man, don’t forgit the baby now!’ He mean bring a few sticks of it out to the field, you see, that’s what he mean by that. He call it ‘charge,’ too. Sho’. Them’s slang names. Them names git started people don’t want the po-lice, nobody like that, to know they business, you see what ah mean? They make up them names, go on an’ talk about they business nobody know what they sayin’, you see what ah mean?”

He stretched his legs out comfortably and crossed his hands over the magazine that was still in his lap.

“Yes, indeed,” he said after a minute, staring at the pile on the newspaper, and shaking his head. “Ah tell you right now, boy — that sho’ is a lotta gage.”

Harold picked some up and crumpled it.

“You reckon it’s dried out enough?” he asked again.

C.K. took out his sack of Bull Durham.

“Well ah tell you what we goin’ have to do,” he said with genial authority, “...we goin’ have to test it.”

He slipped two cigarette papers from the attached packet, one of which he licked and placed alongside the other, slightly overlapping it.

“Ah use two of these papers,” he explained, concentrating on the work. “That give us a nice slow-burnin’ stick, you see.”

He selected a small segment from the pile and crumpled it, letting it sift down from his fingers into the cupped cigarette paper; and then he carefully rolled it, licking his pink-white tongue slowly over the whole length of it after it was done. “Ah do that,” he said, “that shut it in good, you see.” And he held it up for them both to look at; it was much thinner than an ordinary cigarette, and still glittering with the wet of his tongue.

“That cost you half-a-dollah in Dallas,” he said, staring at it.

“Shoot,” said the boy, uncertain.

“Sho’ would,” said C.K., “...oh you git three fo’ a dollah, you know the man. ’Course that’s mighty good gage ah talkin’ ’bout you pay half-a-dollah...that’ you
quality
gage. Ah don’t know how good quality this here is yet, you see.”

He lit it.

“Sho’ smell good though, don’t it.”

Harold watched him narrowly as he wafted the smoking stick back and forth beneath his nose.

“Taste mighty good too. Shoot, ah jest bet this is ver’ good quality gage. You wantta taste of it?” He held it out.

“Naw, I don’t want none of it right now,” said Harold. He got up and walked over to the kindling stack, and drew out from a stash there a package of Camels; he lit one, returned the pack to its place, and came back to sit opposite C.K. again.

“Yeah,” said C.K. softly, gazing at the thin cigarette in his hand, “ah feel this gage awready...this is fine.”

“What does it feel like?” asked Harold.

C.K. had inhaled again, very deeply, and was holding his breath, severely, chest expanded like a person who is learning to float, his dark brow slightly knit in the effort of working at it physically.

“It feel
fine,
” he said at last, smiling.

“How come it jest made me sick that time?” asked the boy.

“Why, ah tole you, Hal,” said C.K. impatiently. “’Cause you tried to fight against it, that’s why...you tried to fight that gage, so it jest make you sick. Sho’, that was good gage that ole Mex had.”

“Shoot, all I felt, ’fore I got sick, was jest right dizzy.”

C.K. had taken another deep drag and was still holding it, so that now when he spoke, casually but without exhaling, it was from the top of his throat, and his voice sounded odd and strained: “Well, that’s ’cause you mind is young an’ unformed, you see...that gage jest come into you mind an’ cloud it over!”

“My mind?” said Harold.

“Sho’, you
brain!
” said C.K. in a whispery rush of voice as he let out the smoke. “You brain is young an’ unformed, you see...that smoke come in, it got nowhere to go, it jest cloud you young brain over!”

Harold flicked his cigarette a couple of times.

“I reckon it’s as good as any dang nigger-brain,” he said after a minute.

“Now boy, don’t mess with me,” said C.K., frowning, “...you ast me somethin’ an’ ah tellin’ you. You brain is young an’ unformed...it’s all smooth, you brain, smooth as that piece of shoe leather. That smoke jest come in an’ cloud it over.” He took another drag. “Now you take somebody old as I is,” he said in his breath-holding voice, “with a full-growed brain, it ain’t smooth — it’s got all ridges in it, all over, go this way an’ that. Shoot, a man know what he doin’ he have that smoke runnin’ up one ridge an’ down the other. He con-trol his high, you see what ah mean, he don’t fight ’gainst it...” His voice died away in the effort of holding breath and speaking at the same time — and, after exhaling again, he finished off the cigarette in several quick little drags, then broke open the butt with lazy care and emptied the few remaining bits from it back onto the pile. “
Yeah...,
” he said, almost inaudibly, an absent smile on his lips.

Harold sat or half reclined, though somewhat stiffly, supporting himself with one arm, just staring at C.K. for a moment before he shifted a little to one side, flicking his cigarette. “Shoot,” he said, “I just wish you’d tell me what it feels like, that’s all.”

C.K., though he was sitting cross-legged now with his back against the side of the shed, gave the appearance of substance without bone, like a softly filled sack that has slowly, imperceptibly sprawled and found its final perfect contour, while his head lay back against the shed, watching the boy out of half-closed eyes. He laughed softly.

“Boy, ah done tole you,” he said in a voice like a whisper, “it feel
good!
”

“Well, that ain’t nothin’, dang it,” said Harold. “I awready feel good!”

“Uh-huh,” said C.K. with dreamy finality.

“Well, I do, god dang it,” said Harold, glaring at him.

“That’s right,” said C.K., nodding, closing his eyes, and they were both silent for a few minutes, until C.K. looked at the boy again and spoke as though there had been no pause at all. “But you don’t feel as good now as you do at you birthday though, do you? Like when right after you daddy give you that twenty-two rifle? An’ then you don’t feel as
bad
as the time he was whuppin’ you for shootin’ that doe with it neither, do you? Yeah. Well now that’s how much difference they is, you see, between that cigarette you got in you hand an’ the one ah jest put out. Now that’s what ah tellin’ you.”

“Shoot,” said Harold, flicking his half-smoked Camel and then mashing it out on the ground. “You’re crazy.”

C.K. laughed. “Sho’ ah is,” he said.

They fell silent again, C.K. appearing almost asleep, humming to himself, and Harold sitting opposite, frowning down to where his own finger traced lines without pattern in the dirt floor of the shed.

“Where we gonna keep this stuff at, C.K.?” he demanded finally, his words harsh and reasonable. “We can’t jest leave it sittin’ out like this.”

C.K. seemed not to have heard, or perhaps simply to consider it without opening his eyes; then he did open them, and when he leaned forward and spoke, it was with a fresh and remarkable cheerfulness and clarity: “Well now, the first thing we got to do is to clean this gage. We got to git them seeds outta there an’ all them little branches. But the ver’ first thing we do” — and he reached into the pile — “is to take some of this here flower, these here ver’ small leaves, an’ put them off to the side. That way we got us two kinds of gage, you see — we got us a light gage an’ a heavy gage.”

He started breaking off the stems and taking them out, Harold joining in after a while; and then they began crushing the dry leaves with their hands.

“How we ever gonna git all them dang seeds outta there?” asked Harold.

“Now ah show you a trick ’bout that,” said C.K., smiling and leisurely getting to his feet. “Where’s that pilly-cover at?”

He spread the pillowcase flat on the ground and, lifting the newspaper, dumped the crushed leaves on top of it. Then he folded the cloth over them and kneaded the bundle with his fingers, pulverizing it. After a minute of this, he opened it up again, flat, so that the pile was sitting on the pillowcase now as it had been before on the newspaper.

“You hold on hard to that end,” he told Harold, and he took the other himself and slowly raised it, tilting it, and agitating it. The round seeds started rolling out of the pile, down the taut cloth and onto the ground. C.K. put a corner of the pillowcase between his teeth and held the opposite corner out with one hand; then, with his other hand, he tapped gently on the bottom of the pile, and the seeds poured out by the hundreds, without disturbing the rest.

“Where’d you learn that at, C.K.?” asked Harold.

“Shoot, you got to know you business you workin’ with this plant,” said C.K., “...waste our time pickin’ out them ole seeds.” He stood for a moment looking around the shed. “Now we got to have us somethin’ to keep this gage in — we got to have us a box, somethin’ like that, you see.”

“Why can’t we jest keep it in that?” asked Harold, referring to the pillowcase.

C.K. frowned. “Naw, we can’t keep it in that,” he said. “Keep it in that like ole sacka turnip...we got to git us somethin’ — a nice little box, somethin’ like that, you see. How ’bout one of you empty shell-boxes?”

“They ain’t big enough,” said Harold.

C.K. resumed his place, sitting and slowly leaning back against the wall, looking at the pile again.

“They sho’ ain’t, is they,” he said, happy with the fact.

“We could use three or four of ’em,” Harold said.

“Wait a minute now,” said C.K., “we talkin’ here, we done forgit ’bout this heavy gage.” He laid his hand on the smaller pile, as though to reassure it. “One of them shell-boxes do fine for that — an’ ah tell you what we need for this light gage now ah think of it...is one of you momma’s quart fruit-jars.”

“Shoot, I can’t fool around with them dang jars, C.K.,” said the boy.

C.K. made a little grimace of impatience.

“You momma ain’t grudge you one of them fruit-jars, Hal — she ast you ’bout it, you jest say it got broke. No, you say you done use that jar put you fishin’-minners in it. Hee-hee...she won’t even wantta see that jar no more, you tell her that.”