Texas Summer (5 page)

C.K. laughed. “Well, they try to shut down the Paradise Bar might cause a lotta trouble. Maybe more than they be ready to handle. Anyhow, why would they want to do that?”

“Why?” Harold seemed surprised. “Because of all the fightin’ an’ killin’ that goes on in there, that’s why.”

C.K. gave him a sad, quizzical look. “You been in the Paradise Bar, Hal — you ain’t never seen no fightin’ or killin’ in there, has you?”

“No,” Harold had to admit, though he was quick to add with firm conviction, “but I’ve heard plenty.”

C.K. nodded. “Uh-huh. Well now they is a big difference, you see, between what a man hear an’ what be true. The sooner you learn that, the smarter you be.”

They walked on, not speaking, until they reached the last stretch of fence between them and the house. C.K. put his foot on the bottom strand of barbed wire, while lifting the one above it with his hand. “There you is, my man,” he said lightly, standing to the side.

Harold stepped through, then held it from the other side for C.K. “What’ll we do with that stuff when it’s dried out, C.K.?”

C.K. shrugged, kicked at a rock, then thrust his hands into his pockets.

“Shoot,” he said, sounding a little like Harold, “ah reckon we find some kinda use for it.” And he smiled, quite openly, at the challenging prospect.

VI

H
AROLD SAT OUT
on the back steps, in the full blazing heat of the Texas summer, knees up, and propping in between them his old single-load twenty-gauge shotgun. While he steadied and squeezed the butt in one hand, the other, with careful unbroken slowness, wrapped a long piece of friction tape around and around the stock — for beginning at the toe of the butt and stretching up about five inches was a thin dry crack in the old wood.

His mother came out, down off the back porch, carrying a blue-gray chipped enameled basin heaped with twists of wet half-wrung clothes.

“You be careful with that old gun,” she said, with a slight frown. “Your daddy know you got it out?”

“He
told
me to get it out,” Harold said, his nasal twang making him sound querulous. “Heck, I wanted to use his twelve-gauge double.”

“Stop saying ‘heck’ and ‘dang’ so much,” she replied softly, almost absently, it being perhaps the ten-thousandth time she’d said it. “Twelve years old is too young to use a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“Aw I shoot it all the time, you know that.”

“Not unless you’re with a grown-up, you don’t.”

“Well, that ain’t exactly my fault, is it?”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t’ — you and Lawrence goin’ huntin’?”

“Aw just fool around, I guess.”

“Where at?”

“I dunno...out around Hampton, I reckon.”

“You wantta be careful out there, with the planes comin’ in and all.”

He looked at her in surprise. “They done closed that part of it down, didn’t you know that?”

“There’s private planes still come in there...”

“If there is, I never seen ’em.”

“Well, you wantta be careful anyway with that Lawrence — is he still crazy as ever?”

“Aw he’s awright.”

“How you going to get into town?”

“Gonna ride in with Les Newgate.”

“Les goin’ in?” his mother asked, through the clothespins in her mouth, not thinking.

“Naw,” said Harold, “that’s how come I’m gettin’ a ride with him...cause he ain’t goin’ in! Ha-ha-ha!”

“Now don’t be smart,” she said without effort, then started back inside, “and you shouldn’t be sittin’ here bareheaded in the hot sun, you’ll get a stroke.”

Big Lawrence lived in the nearest town — Alvarado, population seven hundred and dwindling — six miles away. Just outside town, Les Newgate slowed the pickup and pulled over, so that he and Harold could see how they were setting up tents and booths for the Big Red Onion. This was the county’s grandest annual event. Officially, it was named the Johnson County Old Settlers’ Reunion, but the children, being unable or unwilling to pronounce it, had begun, as far back as living memory, to call it the Big Red Onion, and the grown-ups had eventually gone along.

“Wal,” said Les, “looks like they settin’ up the Onion,” and he spat a long stream of Red Man chaw from the bulge in his cheek.

“Yep,” said Harold.

“I reckon we’ll go,” said Les, “take the kids over anyhow. Leastways little Billy Bob — he’s still young enough to enjoy it. Your granddaddy gonna fiddle this year?”

The Onion featured a livestock-and-produce exhibition, a carnival of rides and games of chance, a midway of concessions featuring oddities of nature — animal and human — dancing girls, and a small-scale rodeo. But the crowning event, for adults anyway, was the Old Fiddlers’ Contest, which drew competitors from all over the Southwest — a contest which Harold’s grandfather always entered and frequently won.

“I don’t rightly know,” said Harold. “They ask him if he wanted to be in it, or be a judge. Reckon it’s ’cause his ’thritis is actin’ up — that’s what Momma says.”

“I won a five-dollar bet on him last year,” said Les.

“I know you did,” said Harold.

Les shifted into low, and they started pulling away. “Hard for a man to do his best,” he said, “when his hand stiffens up.”

“I reckon.”

“An’ I’ll tell you somethin’ else too,” said Les with genial authority. “Your granddad ain’t one who likes to come in no second or third place.”

“I know it,” said Harold, looking straight ahead.

Harold reached Big Lawrence’s house by way of his neighbor’s backyard. Stepping through an open place in the fence two houses before, and cutting across, he could hear Lawrence on at the house and he saw his shadow, dark there behind the window screen.

“Ka-
pow!
Ka-
pow!
Ka-
pow!
” was what he heard Big Lawrence say.

An ordinary bedroom, Texas schoolboy motif — guns, sports trophies, boxing gloves, animal skins (all small except for the deer) nailed to the wall, and photographs of ballplayers. Sitting on the bed was Big Lawrence — a raw-boned fullback type — and all down around his feet the scattered white patches lay, fallen each like a poisoned cactus-bloom, every other center oil-dark, he cleaning his rifle: .243 Savage.

Across one end of the bed, flat on his stomach, looking at an old comic book, was Crazy Ralph Wilton, while Tommy Sellers sat on the floor, back flat to the wall. Tommy Sellers was an all-county shortstop; he had baseball and glove in his lap, and every so often he would flip the baseball up and twirl it over his fingers like an electric top.

As Harold came in and sat down, on the arm of a stuffed misshapen mohair chair, Lawrence looked up, laughing. Most of the time Lawrence’s laugh was coarse and, in a curious way, bitter.

“Well, goddam if it ain’t old Harold!” he said, affecting an even more pronounced Texas drawl than he actually had, perhaps because of a western movie they had seen together a few nights before.

Somewhere, next door, a radio was playing loudly — Saturday-morning cowboy music from station WRR in downtown Big D Dallas.

Crazy Ralph looked from Harold to Lawrence, and back. “You gonna do it again today?” he asked, grinning with a kind of demented slyness.

Lawrence glared at him. “You jest shut your dang hole ’bout that, Ralph.”

“
Are
you, Harold?” he repeated, still wild-eyed and grinning. “Y’all gonna do it?”

On the floor, next to the wall, the baseball spun twisting across Tommy Sellers’s knuckles like a trained rat.

“I told you to shut your A-fuckin’ hole,” said Lawrence grimly, slamming the bolt home and slapping it hard. Then he looked at Harold. “Let’s head out.”

Harold started to get up, but before he could, Lawrence turned around on the bed and leaned heavily against Ralph’s legs, sighting the rifle out over the backyard. There, across the yard, sitting about three feet out from the back fence, all crouched with feet drawn under, was a cat — a black cat, rounded, large, and unblinking in the high morning sun. Big Lawrence squeezed one out on the empty chamber. “Ka-pow!” he said, and brought the gun down, laughing. “Goddam! Right in the eye!” He raised up, and taking some shells from his shirt pocket, loaded the rifle; then he quickly threw out the shells, working the action in a jerky, eccentric manner, causing the shells to fly all over the bed. One of them went above the comic book in Ralph’s hand and hit the bridge of his nose. The other boys laughed, but Crazy Ralph muttered something, rubbing his nose, and flipped the shell back over into the rest of them next to Lawrence’s leg, as he might have done playing marbles — and Big Lawrence flinched.

“You crazy bastard!” said Lawrence, and then he reached over, picked up the shell and threw it as hard as he could against the wall behind Ralph Wilton’s head, making him duck. They left the shell where it fell on the floor behind the bed. Ralph didn’t speak, just kept turning the pages of the comic book, while Lawrence sat there staring hard at the book in front of Ralph’s eyes.

Then Lawrence reloaded the gun and drew another bead out the window. The black cat was still sitting there, head on toward the muzzle, when Lawrence moved the safety with his thumb. Next door someone turned the radio up a little more, but here in the small room, the explosion was loud. The comic book jumped in Crazy Ralph’s hand like it had been jerked by a wire. “God
dam
it!” he said, but he didn’t look around, just shifted a little, as if settling to the book again.

Harold rested his elbow on the windowsill and looked out across the yard. The cat hardly seemed to have moved — only to have been pushed back hard toward the fence, head down, feet drawn under, eyes staring straight at the house as though hypnotized.

And in the screen now, next to a hole made in opening the screen from the outside, was another, perfectly round, flanged out instead of in, worn suddenly, by the passing of the bullet, all bright silver at the edge.

Big Lawrence and Harold walked a dirt road along one side of the old abandoned Hampton Airport. It was an unbelievably hot, dry day.

“What’s a box of shells like that cost?” Lawrence asked, and when Harold told him, Lawrence said: “Sure, but for how many shells?”

At crossroads, the corner of a field, a place where on some Sundays certain people who made model airplanes came to try them, they found, all taped together, five or six shiny old dry-cell batteries as might be used for starting just such small engines.

Harold pulled these batteries apart while they walked on, slower now beneath the terrible sun, and when Lawrence wanted to see if he could hit one of them in the air with the shotgun, they agreed to trade off, three rifle cartridges for one shotgun shell.

Harold pitched one of the batteries up, but Lawrence wasn’t ready. “Wait’ll I say ‘Pull,’” he told Harold.

He stood to one side then, holding the shotgun across his chest as he might have seen done on a TV program about skeet shooting.

“Okay, now...Pull!”

Lawrence missed the first one, said that Harold was throwing too hard.

Harold tossed another, gently, lobbing it into the sun, glinting end over gleaming end, a small meteor in slow motion, suddenly jumping with the explosion, this same silver thing, as caught up in a hot air jet, but with the explosion, coughing out its black insides.

“Dead bird,” said Big Lawrence.

Harold laughed. “I reckon it is,” he said softly.

Once across the field, away from the airport, they turned up the railroad track. And now they walked very slowly, straight into the firelike sun, mirrored a high blinding silver in the rails that lay for five miles unbending, flat against the shapeless waste, ascending, stretching ablaze to the sun itself — so that seen from afar, as quite small, they could have appeared as innocent children, to walk eternally between two columns of dancing light.

At one place, Lawrence stopped, laid his rifle alongside the tracks, knelt, and pressed his ear against one of the rails. Harold watched him, and Big Lawrence grinned shrewdly up from the rail. “You wantta try it here?” he said.

Harold frowned down at the tracks. “How could we?”

“There’s a way,” said Lawrence, grinning and nodding.

Harold kicked uncertainly at the rocks between the wooden ties. “Shoot...,” he muttered.

“You scared to try it here?” Lawrence asked, sly and secret.

“There’s not enough room,” said Harold. “It wouldn’t go over us.”

Lawrence got to his feet, brushed his hands, and picked up the rifle. “Okay, we’ll do it down at the trestle,” he said, and they walked on.

With the rifle they took some long shots at the dead glass disks on a signal tower far up the track, but nothing happened. When they were closer though, one of the signals suddenly swung up wildly alight, a burning color. Lawrence was about to take a shot at it when they heard the train behind them.

They slid down an embankment, through the bull nettle and bluebonnets, to walk a path along the bottom. When the freight train reached them, they turned to watch it go by, and as one of the boxcars passed, Big Lawrence, holding the rifle against his hip, pumped five or six rounds into the side of it. Against the thundering noise of the train, the muted shots had no apparent connection with the violent way the blood-red wood of the boxcar door burst out angling and splintered off all pine-white.

As they walked on, Lawrence looked at Harold, grinned, and said: “Don’t reckon there was any hoboes in it, do you?” And Harold laughed.

Then they reached the trestle — a rickety-looking wooden structure, like scaffolding, propped over a narrow chalk-rock gully. They walked across it, balancing on the rails.

“Maybe there won’t be another one today,” said Harold when they reached the other side.

Lawrence nodded grimly. “There’ll be another one,” he said. “Let’s wait down at the hole.”

Harold followed Lawrence along the culvert and down into the creek hollow. They walked it in file, Lawrence ahead, stepping around tall slaky rocks that pitched up abruptly from the hot shale. Heat came out of this dry stone, sharp as acid, wavering up in black lines. Then at a bend before them was the water hole, small now and stagnant, and they turned off to climb the bank in order to reach it from the other side. Harold was in front now, and as they came over the rise, he saw the rabbit first. Standing between two oak stumps ten feet in front of them, standing up like a miniature kangaroo, ears winced back, looking away, toward the railroad track. Then Lawrence saw it too, and tried to motion Harold off with one hand, bringing his rifle up quick with the other.

The sound came as one, but within one spurting circle of explosion, the two explosions were distinct.

“Goddam,” said Lawrence, frowning. He walked slowly toward the stumps, then looked at Harold before he picked up the rabbit. “
Goddam it!
” he said through clenched teeth.

One side of the rabbit, from the stomach down, looked as though it had been pushed through a meat grinder.

“You must be crazy,” Lawrence said. “Why didn’t you let me git ’im, goddam it? I could’ve got him in the
head!
”

He dropped the rabbit across one of the stumps and stood scowling down at it.

Harold picked up the rabbit, studied it. “Sure tore hell out of it, didn’t it?” he said.

Lawrence spat and turned away. Harold watched him for a minute walking down toward the water hole; then he draped the rabbit across the stump and followed.