Jungle Rules (63 page)

With the letter in hand to show the Chevrolet dealer, Tommy’s dad drove to Amarillo and ordered the truck. Then with the money his son had sent home all year, to help out with the bills at the ranch, his dad paid for the vehicle in advance. That way the boy could not argue with his father, and had to either take the pickup or park it.

McKay’s parents, his cousin Bill, his aunt and uncle, and his ninety-one-year-old grandmother all drove from Dumas, down U.S. Highway 287, through Amarillo, Childress, Wichita Falls, and Fort Worth to the international airport in Dallas the day before Tommy’s plane landed. The crowd gathered around Granny McKay, who sat in a wheelchair, and
greeted their Marine as he walked down the ramp from the plane in the fancy, new Dallas-Fort Worth air terminal.

When all of them got their hugs in on the boy, and wiped their eyes, Tommy’s dad handed him the keys hanging on a ball chain with a clear plastic tag encasing a small, new-vehicle identification card, and on the owner’s line of the yellow slip of stiff paper inside the plastic carrier it read Thomas Gaylord McKay.

Dressed in his green serge uniform with his rows of ribbons pinned above his glistening silver rifle and pistol shooting badges, silver bars shining on his collar and blouse’s epaulettes, his football player’s physique bulging against the fabric, the look of her son took his mother’s breath away.

“Stand right there!” she ordered her young man. “Daddy, get that Kodak out and take a picture of this boy! I swear if he ain’t the prettiest thing I ever did see. My Lord! He looks awfully smart in that uniform. Tommy, won’t you wear that to church for us Sunday?”

“Mama, I got out of the Marine Corps so I didn’t have to put this uniform on anymore, and now you want me to wear it to church?” McKay said, frowning at his mother. She always did love to show off her good-looking son, especially at the First Baptist Church of Dumas, Texas, a place where even in July of 1968 people appreciated a man in a Marine Corps uniform.

He finally agreed to her begging, and he dressed for the last time in his green serge uniform, for his mother, so she could show him off at church. People at the First Baptist Church of Dumas took pictures of the young man. Old veterans there slapped him on the back and talked about landing at Normandy and Iwo Jima. High school girls who knew of Tommy McKay as the star Demon of Dumas’s football team, and now a Marine lieutenant with medals, all swooned and giggled when he caught them staring at him.

The preacher had the young veteran stand up in the congregation, and he openly thanked the lad for serving his country. Vietnam War protesters were never welcome in Dumas, Texas. However, at the Dallas airport, while getting his baggage on the newfangled carousel where suitcases came falling down a metal slide and landed on the big metal turntable, some people did shout rude remarks at him. Big-city people with no sense, his dad called them, and told Tommy to never mind the idiots. They all smoked dope and were probably Communists, too.

That’s how homecoming went for T. D. McKay. Flashcubes popping and family hugging him, his mama in love with how her son looked, and his father, who had gone to war himself twenty-five years earlier, just glad to have his boy home alive.

Mid-August temperatures in West Texas boiled the tops out of most thermometers. One place outside Big Spring, where he stopped to buy gas, the big dial in the shade of the filling station awning read 114 degrees. T. D. drank a Coke and bought two more that he set in a little Styrofoam ice chest he kept on the front seat in which his mother had put a plastic bowl full of fried chicken and several dill pickles sliced in quarters, so the boy would not die of hunger on the eight-hour trip from Dumas down to the Lyle Langtree Ranch near Fort Stockton, Texas, where Jimmy Sanchez’s mother, two sisters, and three brothers still lived.

He turned off the pavement a few minutes past four o’clock, and finally at ten minutes before five, he saw the sprawling brown stucco and stone ranch headquarters and below it the white stucco house with the wide, stone-faced front porch and white shingled roof where Jimmy’s family lived.

The rutted road needed a good bulldozing at the bottom of the draw he had to cross to get to the houses. He slowed his new truck to a crawl, but still the rocks jumped underneath, and banged against the frame and the oil pan. Once up the other side, he pulled to the side and got out of the truck and crawled on his knees and looked for oil or transmission fluid leaks. Nothing wet. Just dust. He worried too much, fearful of a scratch on the paint.

Near the house he saw the old windmill that he and Jimmy had fixed before they shipped out to Vietnam, Tommy going just a week ahead of Jimmy. It spun in the stiff, hot breeze and kept a trickle of water overflowing from the holding tank where a dozen white-face heifers had flopped after taking their fill. The small herd of young cows looked at the blue-and-white pickup as it eased past them and drove on up the hill to the white stucco house where a gang of people, all smiling, stood inside a wire-mesh fence tied to steel oil well pipe that emerged out of a low concrete and stone wall.

Beyond the house, on the low hills covered in soapweed and sage, Tommy saw a whirlwind towering in the distance, sweeping across the dry country, churning up the white dust into a column that must have gone a thousand feet in the air. He and Jimmy had ridden horses across those hills, chasing Lyle Langtree’s cattle to a set of pens where the three younger Sanchez brothers and two more ranch hands waited to cut and brand the strays that the Diamond-L crew had missed working in the spring roundup.

Everyplace he looked, Tommy saw reminders of what he and Jimmy had done here. Too few summers and not nearly enough Christmases. McKay could have used a lot more time with his best friend, riding and romping on this place he loved.

As he rumbled over the cattle guard and passed under the archway that connected the front gate to the exterior welded-pipe fence line that surrounded the Sanchez home and ranch headquarters compound, Tommy noticed a new brand painted on the metal arch by the Diamond-L. A J-barS brand. Something new since he went to Vietnam.

McKay had not even shut down his rumbling engine before the three Sanchez boys and one of their two sisters had pulled open both doors and clambered inside, taking a look at the next-year’s model Chevy.

“Aw, she’s a beaut, Tommy!” Henry Sanchez, the brother next to Jimmy in age, said as he jumped in the truck. He would graduate from the University of Texas next spring, just ahead of Marguerite, the younger of the two girls, named for her mother. She stood by the driver’s side and smiled, lowering her eyes, showing her shyness. Hector, the next younger brother, had finished his freshman year at Texas and now felt himself a man as a sophomore. José would finish high school this year, at Fort Stockton, where he played football. Maria Sanchez-Ochoa, the elder daughter, was the only sibling of Jimmy’s not home to greet his best friend. She taught elementary school in Dexter, New Mexico, where her husband, Robert Ochoa, worked as the New Mexico State University extension agent, helping Pecos Valley farmers develop more efficient ways of cultivating and growing alfalfa and feedlot cattle.

She had sent her love and kisses to Tommy McKay, though, and Marguerite Sanchez told him over and over how badly Maria wanted to be there to see him.

“Maybe she and Roberto will drive down here this weekend,” the mother said, walking Tommy to the house while the boys carried his suitcase. “You will stay through the weekend. You must, you know. Señor Lyle told the boys to butcher one of the steer calves and make a big barbecue in your honor. Many of our neighbors will come, and most of the people from church, too. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I know you will stay if you know all the trouble they have gone to, and what they have planned.”

“Oh, I can do that, for you, Mama,” Tommy said, and then gave the Mexican woman a long and tearful hug.

Tears now streamed from her face, too. They stood on the porch both looking at each other, and not able to speak, because they knew it would mean talking about Jimmy, and that hurt too much right now. So they hugged some more and wept.

“It makes me feel so good that you call me Mama, too, like my Jimmy,” she finally said, still holding her arms around Tommy’s neck. “I hope your own mother will not mind it.”

Tommy said nothing, because he did not tell his mother that years ago he had begun calling Mrs. Sanchez Mama, too. Everyone there at the Diamond-L Ranch called her Mama, and he felt uncomfortable calling her anything else. Only Señor Lyle called her Marguerite, and sometimes he even called her Mama Sanchez.

“You split the room with Henry, just like before, when you came here with Jimmy, only it’s Henry in there now,” Mama Sanchez said, leading Tommy through the house to one of the three big bedrooms. “With everyone here all at once, we have to sleep two people in a room. Before, when the boys were much younger, they could all sleep together. Now you’re men, so men need more space than boys.”

“
Hola,
Marguerite,” Tommy said, turning around and seeing the younger sister walking quietly behind him, still smiling. Her creamy, tan skin glowed in contrast to her jet black hair and dark brown eyes. She had high cheekbones like her mother, and a beautiful, slightly upturned nose that gave her almost a pixie look. The girl stood only five feet tall, if that, and wore pumps with a good lift in the heels so she didn’t appear so short. However, Tommy liked her smallness because it became her quiet and gentle personality.

Maria, on the other hand, stood a full two inches taller than her mother, and had the anger of a lioness that exploded easily. Like Jimmy, she sought to achieve greatness by addressing the best of her talents to the people with the least. It made perfect sense to Tommy that she would marry an extension agent after graduating at the top of her class at Texas, and going to teach school in a rural classroom with mostly Hispanic children whose parents came to America one night when they waded across the Rio Grande.

“
Hola,
Thomas, Marguerite answered, and smiled her perfect teeth at him. All of the Sanchez children had perfect teeth. They hardly saw a dentist, yet even the mother had perfect teeth, strong enough to chew through screen wire.

Most of Tommy’s molars held large fillings, caused from too many sweets as a lad and not enough time over the sink with a toothbrush in his mouth. Jimmy, on the other hand, always liked having a toothpick or matchstick in his mouth. Once in a while he chewed a stick of Spearmint chewing gum, but he seemed to always prefer a small piece of wood.

“We must go see Señor Lyle pronto,” Mama Sanchez said, and looked at her daughter, frowning and shaking her head, as though the girl were bothering their guest. Tommy noticed the gesture, and then smiled and took Marguerite’s hand.

“I sure would like you to come, too, if Mama doesn’t mind,” McKay said, and caused the young woman’s face to flush deep red.

“If Mama does not mind, I would like that, too,” Marguerite said, still holding Tommy’s hand.

“Oh, I suppose,” Mama Sanchez said, and then smiled at the attraction that both of the two young people seemed to have sparked toward each other. “Marguerite, you know how bad Señor Lyle can talk, so do not be offended if he says too much. You know he is old, and men of his time think different than men today.”

“Yes, Mama, I know Mister Langtree can say awful things,” Marguerite said, and then walked alongside Tommy McKay and her mother as they crossed the broad patio behind the ranch headquarters and entered the big house through the sliding glass doors.

The old man sat inside, feeling the cool breezes off the air conditioner as he reclined in a wooden rocking chair draped with a red-and-blue Navajo blanket. He had his hats hanging on a set of deer antlers just inside the door. Just like Tommy’s father, his favorite one hung on the outside of the rack, nearest the door, handy to grab. The tattered gray Stetson had a sweat stain that reached halfway up the crown and halfway out the brim, with its nose rolled almost to a point and polished slick from years of handling.

His bald head was pink and pale, surrounded by snow-white hair. From the tops of his ears downward, the skin on his neck and face shone a dark tan color, weathered tough from a lifetime of outdoor work. Tommy thought how his father looked the same way but had twenty-five years less time on his watch.

Old Lyle Langtree took his first breath of life on this ranch eighty-two years ago, when his mother gave birth to him in a dugout cabin with a sagebrush and dirt roof that his parents had hacked into the ground the winter before his birth in 1886. They carried water in wooden barrels, hauled twice a week in a wagon they drove fourteen miles each way, until Lyle’s father managed to hand-dig a well deep enough to finally strike a trickle of ground water outside their dugout. Although rank with gypsum, leaving white chalk in their clothes, they survived on it until a driller came along with a cable-tool rig and put down a decent, deep well that sprang fresh water even in the driest summers.