Yellow Mesquite (23 page)

The younger woman, Mrs. Mussette, came toward Harley, Mavis’s sister at her elbow. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’m Frankie Mussette. Are you Mister Buchanan?”

“Please, call me Harley.” He shifted Leah to his left arm and briefly took Frankie’s gloved hand. “Mavis mentioned you often.”

“Harley, this is Maude, Mavis’s sister.”

“I’m pleased to finally meet you,” he said, shaking her hand in turn. “Sorry it had to be under these circumstances. This is my wife, Sherylynne. Sherylynne, Mrs. Mussette and Mavis’s sister, Maude.”
 

Sherylynne, clearly uncomfortable, shook Frankie’s hand.
 

“How nice to meet you,” Frankie said. Her eyes softened on Leah. “What a beautiful child.”
 

“Thank you,” Sherylynne said.

“Mavis was so fond of you,” Frankie said to Harley.

“She was about the best person I ever met,” he said.

The others were conversing among themselves, commenting on the plaque and the two monuments. Wesley Earl, Maxine, Lupe, and Álvaro had quietly slipped away. Harley spotted them walking toward their respective houses down back.

Mrs. Mussette’s business card appeared in her black-gloved hand. “My card. I’m afraid we must be going, but if we can help you with anything, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to call.”

Harley accepted the card. “That’s very nice of you. I— We appreciate it.”

He watched as the five women filed out through the gate toward the limos, chauffeurs waiting alongside.

THE TWENTY-SECOND
of November and the quality of the light was changing, a thin, cool edge to the glare.
 

The pumps were gassed and greased. He had thieved the tanks, run the sediments and entered the results in his logbook. The transport trucks had come and gone. Stringy red clouds followed the sun down to the western horizon as he turned the pickup onto Chaparral. He brought the truck to a stop under the big mesquite alongside the house, took his lunch bucket up from the floorboard and climbed out.

Sherylynne met him at the door, eyes big, tearful.
 

He came to a stop.

“Kennedy’s dead.”

He stared. “What?”

“The president. He’s been shot.”

Impossible. But he saw it was true.

“It’s all on TV.”

“When did it happen?”

“Hurry,” she said, urging him into the house. “Look.” On the TV he stared at Walter Cronkite speaking in low, reverential tones.

“I was at the clinic and one of the nurses heard it on the radio. She brought the radio up front and everybody heard. It happened in Dallas. They got a man that killed a policeman in the picture show right after. They think he did it.”

“They don’t think it’s a plot, do they? By the Russians or anything?”
 

Sherylynne paled. He saw that a Russian invasion hadn’t occurred to her.

He said, “I guess if it was, we’d know it by now.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they were gonna attack us, they’d have already done it in all the confusion.”

Sherylynne looked out the window as though she expected Russians to come pouring over the horizon any minute. “They swore in Lyndon Johnson. He’s president now.”

“Well, see there?”

“See there what?”

“Things are under control, not as confusing as it might look.”
 

Sherylynne’s eyes welled up again, the freckles dark across her nose. “He’s dead. Kennedy’s dead.”

Harley put his arm around her.
Assassinated
. It sounded like something you heard about in third-world countries.

He and Sherylynne sat in front of the TV all evening.
 

Governor John Connally had been hit, but was still alive. The man they caught in the movie theater was Lee Harvey Oswald, and it looked as if he was the man who had killed J. D. Tippit, the police officer. No one seemed to know any more than that. They ran it over and over and every time it was a shock. Then they’d analyze it all again.

It was late when he and Sherylynne finally shut the TV off and went to bed.
 

“That old car’s not running too good,” Sherylynne said.

“Yeah? How so?”

“Every time I stop, it dies.”

“Um. Prob’ly just needs the idling set up. It run okay on the road?”

“Yes. Only when I stop.”

“I’ll take it tomorrow and leave you the pickup.”

“Wendell offered us that Corvette again.”

“We’re not taking that Corvette.”

“I don’t see why not. It just sits out there, not doing anybody any good.”

“He gave us that pickup to use. That’s enough.”

“That’s a company truck. Got his name all over it.”

“Got his name all over that Corvette, too.”

“Well, I’m the one has to be seen driving around in that old wreck of ours. It’s embarrassing.”

“People give you something, then they assume a position of superiority. They feel free to start telling you what to do.”

They were silent for a while.
 

“What did Whitehead say about the assassination?” Harley asked.

“He knows John Connally. Did you know he knows John Connally?”

“Yeah. What did he say about it? Whitehead?”

“He said, ‘It’s that Meskin son of a bitch, Castro.’”

Again they lay in silence.

“Castro, huh?”

FOUR DAYS
THE
news matched the weather: gray and dismal. Dignitaries from around the world had filed into the White House to pay their respects. Evidence was piling up against Oswald. According to the news, a school psychiatrist’s report once stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was a potentially dangerous schizophrenic. His mother reported that he was a good boy. Live TV showed detectives bringing Oswald out of the elevator. They were ushering him through a crowd of reporters and onlookers when a man stepped into view and fired a shot. Oswald buckled down from sight. Everything was a jumble, everyone yelling, Oswald’s been shot! Oswald’s been shot! They said it was undoubtedly the most astonishing sequence ever filmed live to a television audience.

TUESDAY DAWNED CHILLY
and windy-wet. He drove out to the lease, the radio on. It was all assassination talk.

One of the donkey engines was dead, and when he tried to fire it up, a clanking sounded inside the engine housing. A connecting rod had come loose. He’d have to call help out from Odessa for that.

He started back to the truck, but stopped, seeing movement in the thin brush a hundred yards away. A glimpse of gray; then a wolf trotted into the open and stopped, head lifted, alert. A slow prickle chilled the back of Harley’s neck as he and the wolf looked at each other across open ground. The wolf’s stance was regal, wind ruffling the tufts of thick hair around its neck. The wolf looked back in the direction from which it had come. It looked again at him, then continued on it way, watching with sharp yellow eyes until it passed from sight beyond a stringy line of shin oak. Harley went weak in the wake of an adrenaline charge.

SHERYLYNNE HAD
HIS
dinner warm in the oven. He washed up. She had a bowl of ice cream while he ate. He told her about seeing the wolf. She thought it was probably a dog. After dinner he looked up “wolf” in an old 1940s set of
The Book of Knowledge
he’d picked up at a garage sale in Midland for five bucks. In volume II, pages 597 to 598, it said of the wolf:
 

It is nothing to him that some of
 

his line have been won to service
 

with human beings. He remains
 

a splendid and terrible savage. His
 

place is assured in the scheme of
 

nature by reason of his audacity,
 

his cunning, his ability to meet
 

adversity and changing conditions….

Later, after Leah was put to bed, he made drawings of Sherylynne as she watched TV. It was the first time in several days he had made drawings. It was the first time in four days there was anything other than assassination news on television.

Chapter 26

Yellow Mesquite

H
ARLEY LOOKED ON
as if from a distance as Whitehead sat hunched over his plate, raking rice dressing into the spoon with his table knife in a continuous shoveling motion. “God a'mighty, if this ain’t better’n anything I ever ate. Boy, Harley Jay, you got the best damn cook in the whole state a Texas right here!”

Sherylynne glowed.
 

“He’s giving that dirty rice a fit, isn’t he?” Harley said, only halfheartedly trying to stifle the resentment he felt.

“That’s not dirty rice; that’s rice dressing,” Sherylynne said curtly.
 

In spite of his mood, Harley thought she looked beautiful in her new dress; a dark russet in color with gold trim, it fell from her high, belted waist to her sandaled feet, adding a note of Egyptian-like elegance to her gangly grace. Her hair was swept up in back, pinned with an ivory comb. Candlelight glinted on the tiny rubies in her earlobes.

“Dirty rice, rice dressing, by god, I think I’ll have me some more.” Whitehead scooped it steaming onto his plate—fluffy rice with ground pork, oysters, and chicken livers seasoned with minced onions, garlic, peppers and celery. Sherylynne complained that the oysters were out of a can and not freshly shucked, as they would have been back in Vinton, Louisiana.

She had already put a largemouth bass on each of their plates, the fish flecked with paprika, garnished with parsley and lemon slices. She made glazed carrots in a lemon-butter sauce and green beans with almond slivers. This was more than a meal in itself, but Sherylynne had to have that rice dressing; any
real
meal called for at least one Cajun dish. It was in her bones as surely as her French blood.

Leah, just over two now, sat in her high chair at the corner between Harley and Sherylynne. They picked fish from the bones and mushed up the soft white meat on her plate. Leah bounced in the chair, laughing and making baby sounds, stuffing food in her mouth and ears. When she had finished and was starting to get cranky, Sherylynne picked her up and wiped her hands and face with a warm washcloth. “Past your bedtime, little lady.” Leah laughed and patted her face.

Whitehead glowed. “Lord god, ain’t she the purtiest thang you ever laid eyes on.”
 

“Harley has good news,” Sherylynne said.
 

Harley looked at her, quizzical.

“He’s going to New York,” she said, smiling, watching him closely for a reaction.

“Batshit,” Whitehead said. “He’s always going to New York.”

“Only this time he’s really going,” Sherylynne said.
 

Harley hadn’t moved, watching her in surprise.

Whitehead grinned. “Boy, Harley Jay, I can tell you one thang: You ain’t gonna find nothing like this to eat in New Yark. You get off up there, you gonna flat starve to death. I got me a little hamburger up there once, me’n Mavis, and it wasn’t nothing but a little old patty a-bleedin’ on a biscuit, no lettis, no t’maters, no onions. Just a little old patty ’bout this big.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger the size of a half dollar. “You gonna flat starve to death.”

“If they can live on it, so can I.”

“But see, they ain’t used to no better. They don’t miss what they ain’t never had. I can tell you right now you ain’t gonna find nothing like this, and if you did it’d cost you a arm and a leg.”

“Everybody in town can’t be rich. There’s got to be places for ordinary people.”

“Ordinary people? In New Yark City? Hah! They
ain’t
no ordinary people in New Yark City! And what there is, they live in them high-rises stacked on top of each other like a buncha damn chicken coops. I don’t know what would possess anybody to want to leave a clean, wide-open country like this and go live in a hole like that.”

Harley was aware of Sherylynne smiling at him across the table—an intimate,
conspiratorial
smile that moved him close to tears.
 

Leah was beginning to be cross. Sherylynne stood, spoke softly to her, then carried her back into their bedroom.
 

A bit giddy, Harley poured another round of wine.
 

“The first advice you ever gave me, was, ‘get on up there to New York City and jump flatfooted right in the middle of it.’ Your exact words.”

“And that ain’t the worst of it, neither. Them high-rises, they’re mostly guva’mint projects. That means we’re paying for ’em. Socialism, that’s what this country’s comin’ to. Listen, boy, they ain’t no free lunches and they ain’t no free high-rises, neither. New Yark’ll be wantin’ to borrow money from us ’fore you know it.”

Sherylynne returned, having overheard the last of the conversation. “Us?” she said to Whitehead, taking up her wine glass.

“Texas. We’re supportin’ half the Newnited States already.”

Harley grinned. “I can’t say about that, but I can tell you this: New York City, that’s the center of the art world these days.”

“Paris, France,” said Whitehead. “That’s where all them artist are.”

“Not in the last fifty years they’re not. New York’s where it’s happening.”

“You wanna see some real art, come lookit what I had hauled out to the house today.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You know that old pump-jack I had in that toolshed out behind that number three crackin’ unit? Well, that was my first pumpin’ well. I finagled old T. W. Mosier outta that Norstrom lease, and then I worked a percentage deal with Chester Dupree for some equipment. That old pump was a piece a junk, but by god, I got me a fortune started with it. Yes-sir-ree, started me a fortune with it!”

Sherylynne watched Whitehead, rapt, always fascinated by the stories of how he had made himself out of nothing.

“That the sculpture?” Harley asked. “That old pump-jack?”

“Had it sandblasted and painted fire-engine red. Then I had ’em haul it out to the house, set it up out there in the yard right next to the swimmin’ pool. I seen a big iron piece not much different in Houston last week. Some welder by the name of Calder put it together.”