Yellow Mesquite (13 page)

He took a stool and wedged his suitcase between his knees and the counter. He ordered two eggs over medium with a chicken-fried steak and hash browns, then sloshed it all down with ketchup and four paper cups of grape jelly. He had a second order of biscuits and jelly and finished it off with a glass of milk.

“Pretty big appetite,” the waitress said as she made out his check.

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t eat since yesterday noon. Sure was good, too.”

“You were on the bus last night.”

He recognized her as the broad-shouldered blond.

“I got off when you did,” she said.

“Oh, yes. I remember you,” he said, smiling a little.

“Shoot. I’m plumb wore-out. Come in from Abilene on that bus, then had to get down here at five this morning. Plumb wore-out.”

“That’s not much sleep,” he agreed.

“You must not a had much yourself. Where you staying?”
 

“I stayed in that bus station last night.”

“Aw, no.” Her head tilted. “That ain’t no fit place to stay. Just passing through?”

“I’m looking for a job, trying to find a man by the name of Wendell Whitehead.”

“Whitehead?”

“Lives somewhere around here. I don’t guess you know him, a big oil man?”

She frowned and puckered her lips at one of the men a couple of stools down. “Dub, ain’t that man named Whitehead bought out that West Texas Crude a while back?”

Harley leaned forward over the counter and saw the man resting on his elbows, holding a cup of coffee cradled in both hands, just under his nose.

“Was it Whitehead or Whiteside?” the man said, squinting up at the bill of his cap in thought. “They’s a buncha them Whitesides down around San Angelo and Robert Lee. I ain’t sure.”

Harley took the card Mr. Whitehead had given him almost two years ago from his billfold. The card was limp, but readable. “Whitehead’s the guy I’m looking for.”
 

“Um.” The waitress took the card and read: “Wendell Whitehead. Leasing and Refining. Kickapoo Road, Midland, Texas.”

A sun-browned man with a straw hat rolled to a beak down over his eyes leaned out over the counter.
 

“Ain’t there no phone number?”

“Nope. Just this address.”

“Ain’t he the one had that funeral here while back?” one of the other men said.

“Which one is that?” the waitress asked.

“The one got hisself killed out there in California with that bomb?”

“Oh…the feller that blowed hisself up?”

“His name was Whitehead, wasn’t it?”

Harley straightened. “You mean…he’s dead?”

“That boy,” the waitress said. “Yeah, blowed hisself up. Just a kid. I knew I’d heard that name. That was him all right. Whitehead.”

Harley eased back down. “This is no kid I’m looking for. This Whitehead, he must be forty-five or so.”

“That’s prob’ly his daddy,” the sunburned man said.
 

The waitress nodded. “Whitehead. Uh-huh, I knew I heard it. Must be his daddy you’re looking for, all right.”
 

“His son’s dead?”

“Read it myself. Boy blowed hisself up out there in California making one a them homemade bombs. Served him right, if you ask me.”

“Crazy kids. You never know what they’re gonna do,” another man offered.

“Know where I can find this Kickapoo Road?” Harley asked.

A lanky man with a half dozen powdered mini-doughnuts on his plate began to nod and gesture with his coffee spoon as he wallowed a donut in his jaw. “I’m muddin’ a well out that way. I know that Whitehead place.” He turned to the first man. “You know that place out there on Kickapoo Road? That one with the big gate and all that fancy rock work? All them yucca plants? That’s it. That’s that Whitehead place.”

The first man nodded, sipped his coffee.

The doughnut man turned to Harley. “I’ll be going out that way soon’s I get through here. You wanna ride, I can set you down right by the gate.” He grinned around the lump in his jaw. “Of course it’s a good half mile from there on to the house.”
 

“I’d sure ’preciate it.”

WENDELL WHITEHEAD SAT
slumped on the Italian leather sofa, staring, unseeing, at the complex weave in the Pakistani rug under his feet. Mavis was out in the kitchen with old Lupe the cook. He could smell bread baking, smell it above the chili and refried beans, and though he hadn’t eaten all day he hadn’t thought to be hungry.

It was near a month now since the funeral and Mavis was no better. It had shaken him seeing her like this. Buddy had been the apple of her eye, as people said. Buddy had also been the glue that kept him and Mavis together. He knew that, too.

He also knew that unlike himself Mavis was a woman of culture. From an old-moneyed Pennsylvania family, she was the one who had furnished the house with fine antiques and expensive art, and it was she who managed their social lives with a grace he only marginally comprehended, and frankly didn’t give a rat’s ass for except that it clothed some of his business dealings in respectability, presented him with opportunities and opened doors he might not have managed otherwise. Mavis was a valuable asset.

But Mavis was independent. She flew to New York, Boston, Philadelphia. She attended the opera and the ballet and saw all the latest Broadway shows. She bought paintings and antiques and stumped him by giving the damn junk to museums and charities. She had money of her own and wouldn’t be bullied. He understood all too well that there was nothing she wanted from him, that he had no real hold on her. He couldn’t boss her and he couldn’t buy her, and what other way was there to hold power over anybody? He had acquired her, as he saw it, because of her high-mindedness in the first place: She had chosen to marry him rather than have an abortion.
 

Yes, Mavis was a highborn woman, and even though she had smoothed out some of his wrinkles over the years, he knew that to her eye he was still a coarse, ignorant man. He knew too that, like the breeding of livestock, it was in the bloodline.
 

At one time it had bothered him, knowing he was nothing but oilfield trash, and he supposed that had something to do with his success—rising above his outhouse beginnings. Success or not, he had been short-changed from the get-go, always aware that, as a result, something was missing in his makeup.
 

He barely remembered his mother, who was supposed to have been a fortune-teller of some sort. He vaguely recalled big expensive cars driving up in the middle of the night, rich people in fine clothes, wanting their fortunes told, looking around at the dumpy little rooms, and at his mother with her tarot cards like she was a geek biting off chicken heads in a sideshow. That was about all he remembered of her before she disappeared. After she left, his daddy paid various people to keep him while he went off to work in Alaska, showing up every six months or so, just to say howdy, then off again.
 

His old man popped in once with word that his mother was dead. Someone had thrown her down a staircase in a hotel in Big Spring. There wasn’t much said about it, although a man came by, said he knew who done it, said he’d tell for fifty dollars. His daddy told the man he didn’t give a damn who done it, and sent him packing. That’s when he hauled ass himself, went over to old man Mosier’s when he was hardly twelve-years-old and went to work in the oil patch. He thought about his old daddy now and then, wondered if he was still out there, knocking around somewhere. Most likely he’d be dead by now. It was something of a disappointment that the old man hadn’t showed up at one time or another, looking for a handout.

So, yeah, when all was said and done, Mavis was a thoroughbred and he wasn’t nothing but oilfield trash.

And now Buddy was gone. Blowed hisself to a million pieces they said. Blowed hisself up with a homemade bomb out there in California with all them goddamn beatnik perverts, all them communist homo faggots. Whitehead hadn’t been satisfied with Buddy in life, and he wasn’t satisfied with him in death—a truckload of flowers drowning the house in stink and not even a body to bury. Without a body, there wasn’t any wrapping the thing up and being done with it. He had never thought of himself as a man of imagination particularly, had in fact avoided anything having to do with what wasn’t concrete, what wasn’t right before his eyes, like tarot cards and such crap as that. But damned if Buddy didn’t seem to be following him around, popping up in his face like old photographs he’d forgotten about, little flash pictures that must have registered in his brain at one time or other. Only now there didn’t seem to be any particular age to him, just his eyes with that same odd look. It was enough to make a man feel haunted, in spite of knowing better.
 

“Aren’t we lucky that we can grieve,” the minister said at the funeral. “We’re able to grieve because we’re able to love. What a sad thing if we could not grieve.” Horseshit. Now,
loss
, that was something a man could understand.
 

Mavis came in and sat stiffly in the leather recliner on the opposite side of the coffee table. Lupe followed and set a tray down. Lupe slanted a look at him, her old eyes glittering. She pulled her shawl up over her head, covering her wrinkled face, and then went back into the kitchen.

“You should eat something,” Mavis said without emotion. He couldn’t recall what Mavis usually wore, but he knew something was different, that she looked plainer. She had removed her jewelry and hadn’t worn makeup since the funeral. She sat across from him now, pale as Lupe’s bread dough, in a plain black suit with dark stockings and low-heeled shoes, hands loosely clasping a little lace handkerchief in her lap.
 

He didn’t remember when he had eaten, and was surprised and pleased now that Mavis had noticed. He couldn’t help but grin at the heavy rolls on the tray old Lupe had brought in. Mavis had been trying to teach Lupe to make French croissants for years, and they still came out like fat tortillas.

“Let me butter one a these for you,” he said, setting the tray on his lap, taking up the silver knife, lifting the top on the crystal butter dish. He was going out of his way, making an effort to do little things for Mavis since Buddy’s death—little gestures that fanned to life small flames of self-righteous sacrifice he was unaccustomed to.
 

Mavis gazed vacantly in the general direction of the tray. “I’m thinking of going to visit Maudie for a few weeks.”

He had been afraid of this. He spread a smear of butter on one of the croissants and handed it to her on the fine china plate. Damn women anyway with their dinky plates and their unpredictable ways. He knew Mavis would never come back if she went to visit her sister in Philadelphia. He knew that, and he knew it would change his life for the worse, that he would be lessened. He had known more than one man—men with money and men without—who, after their women were gone, had self-destructed, men who began to neglect their work and fell into bad habits of personal hygiene. Alcohol. Whores. Men who became slowly eccentric, living in shabbily furnished rooms, muttering to themselves.

Mavis reached for the plate, but stopped, her eyes falling into shocked focus over his shoulder. In the same moment old Lupe returning from the kitchen stopped and began to wail, her tiny black eyes fixed on the big picture window behind Whitehead. She crossed herself, slurring Hail Marys in a caterwauling howl,
“Santa Maria llena de gracias…”

Whitehead spun around. The skin prickled on the back of his neck. He shot up from the sofa, knocking against the coffee table—rolls, butter, peach preserves and coffee clattering off onto the rug.
 

A hundred yards down the road, Buddy was coming, swinging along, carrying an old suitcase.

Chapter 14

Substitute Son

T
HE DOUGHNUT MAN
let Harley off before an ornate arch sweeping high over a cattle guard in a hundred-yard stretch of fancy rockwork. Yucca and several varieties of exotic cacti grew from curbed islands of white gravel. An asphalt road ran straight as a chalk line from the cattle guard to a large two-story house and several outbuildings sitting on the flat plain a half mile away. The compound was whitewashed, dazzling in the early sunlight. Overhead, a lone turkey buzzard coasted on the thermals.
 

As he drew near, he saw that the house was unusual for West Texas, a white stucco job with orange terracotta tiles on the roof and scrolled ironwork in the arched windows. Two smaller houses stood three hundred yards back. A white two-railed fence linked them to a barn and outbuildings. A Mexican man was painting the fence where it connected to the far side of what looked like a four-port garage. A glassed-in terrarium was squeezed in between the garage and the main house, the terrarium fronted by an L-shaped swimming pool.

Parked in the circular drive in front, at odds with the garages, were a pickup, a red Corvette, and a Mercedes. A sprinkler waved sheets of water back and forth over sculpted ribbons of grass curbed among graveled islands of cacti, sage and other plants he didn’t recognize.
 

A big black Doberman came loping toward him, head down, hackles bristling. Harley stopped. The dog stopped, teeth bared, red-eyed, growling low in his throat. Then another sound, a high wail coming from the house. A man he recognized as Mr. Whitehead burst out onto the portico. Whitehead stared for a moment, then slammed out into the yard like a drunk, bent forward, one hand shading his eyes at Harley.

“Mr. Whitehead?”

Whitehead took a few steps, hesitant, squinting.

“That dog bite?”

“Paladin!” Whitehead shouted.

“Boy, that’s some dog,” Harley said, standing perfectly still.

Whitehead stepped forward and caught the dog’s collar without taking his eyes from Harley. “What can I do for you, young feller?” Mr. Whitehead had the same sandy-red hair and the same yellow eyes, but he didn’t seem as fierce as Harley recalled.

“I guess you don’t remember me, but I’m looking for a job.”

“Got no jobs right now.”