Yellow Mesquite (4 page)

“Aw, shoot,” Frog whined. “Y’all ain’t gonna fight?”

“They’re both skeered of each other.”

“Shoot, I wouldn’t fight that Billy Wayne,” Frog said. “That pecker, he could beat you to death with that thing.”

Harley walked down the earthen dam toward the old red pickup. He heard Frog and Willie McDonald coming behind. By the time he opened his door Frog was climbing up in the cab on the passenger side, Willie McDonald in back. Bender would go with his brother and the others back to Blackwell.

The pickup rattled over the cattle guard at the end of the lake road. Frog cocked his head at Harley. “You ain’t too crazy about old Billy Wayne, are you.”

“I haven’t thought about him much one way or the other.”

Frog regarded him, one eye asquint. “Well, you’re sure as hell thinking about something.”

“I was thinking I ought not to have pushed this old pickup like that. That’s what I was thinking.”

Chapter 3

All That Glitters

O
NE OF THE
new calves
had broken through the fence and got over into old man Barrow’s place. By the time Harley got the calf in and fixed the fence, then did the milking and fed the stock and got washed up and dressed, it was after dark. His thirteen-year-old sisters were fussing because they were going to miss all the good stuff—which meant sitting around the café, drinking Cokes and giggling with their girlfriends.
 

A large crowd had already gathered when he arrived, sisters in tow. Pickups and cars were parked at random, some on the business side of the street, but mostly across the highway on the school grounds, all the way down past the gymnasium.
 

Harley eased the pickup through the crowd milling about from below the café up to Travis Malone’s store, where the musicians had set up on a flatbed truck. It looked like the whole county had turned out for Travis’s Saturday-night musical.

Up on the flatbed Floyd Lewis had his steel guitar plugged in and Durl Jackson was on the mandolin. Early Gibbs took two whining bounces off his fiddle with the rosined bow, dragging into the opening of Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues.”

Harley gave Anna Mae and Annie Leigh each a dollar and let them out at the café.
 

“Don’t y’all be going off anywhere,” he said, then drove on down and found a place to park near old one-eyed Enoch’s mechanic shop. He walked back, nodding hello to friends and acquaintances.

Some of the Blackwell bunch had shown up, and there were a few people from Highland he knew. There were a lot of people he didn’t know as well and it was strange seeing this strip of pavement, normally so empty, now looking like a carnival. Harley supposed word of Travis Malone’s Saturday-night musical was spreading.
 

Travis had two little boys passing out flyers advertising merchandise in his store, which could be bought in Hardwater twenty miles north for a lot less. Then Travis would have a drawing and give away some stuff. Mostly people used the musical as an occasion to get together and gossip about who was doing what, what kind of a year it was for the crops, and what the politicians were doing down there in Austin to ruin the state of Texas, all with a little background music by some talented home boys.
 

Last Sunday there had been a little fuss at the Baptist church because it was said somebody had been seen dancing. The community, just over three hundred, was pretty evenly divided between the Baptists, the Methodists and to a lesser extent the Church of Christ. One of the few things all three agreed on was that that sort of thing had to be stopped before it got started. Travis, so as not to offend anybody, had taped signs to the windows of the flatbed: P
LEASE
—
N
O
D
ANCING
.

Harley glanced in the café’s picture window in passing and saw the twins in the corner booth surrounded by their girlfriends. Uncle Jay sat at the counter talking to one-eyed Enoch Engleson and Jeff Ricketts.

Harley ran into Rosie, a spindly little woman with red hai r and freckles. Year-round, Rosie wore overalls and khaki shirts, and sometimes he chopped cotton with her in the summer.

“Hi, Rosie. You seen Darlene?”
 

“I thought I seen her earlier,” she said in her reedy little voice, eyes sparkling with mischief. “I think she was with one of those old boys from Blackwell.”

Harley grinned. “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”

“Hey, Harley.”
 

It was Willie McDonald standing near the gas pumps with Hunter Simpson.

Rosie patted Harley’s arm. “You go on now. I see that old boy with Darlene, I’ll tell him you’re gonna kick his butt.”

He wandered over to Willie and Hunt. “How come you’re not up there with your guitar?” he said to Hunt.

Hunt glared at the truck. “I ain’t getting up there with no damn ’lectric.”

“’Lectric?”

“That ain’t real music, that damn ’lectric shit. That’s just racket. I ain’t getting up there and playing along with no damn racket.”

Willie grinned. “Hunt’s a purist about his music.”
 

Harley grinned in turn. “Well, I’m gonna get a Coke. Anybody?”

“No, thanks,” they said in unison.
 

He ran across Mrs. Delaney near the post office, music twanging out over the lazily meandering crowd.
 

“Well, Harley Jay, how you doing?”

“Good, thanks. You?”

“Your mama here?”

“Daddy’s back’s outta whack, so they stayed home.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. A bad back ain’t nothing to take lightly.”

“No.”

“Well, you tell them I asked about ’em.”

“Darlene’s here, isn’t she?”

“Said she was meeting you, but I lost track of her. Lands, you know Darlene.”

Harley went into the café. Enoch and Jeff had left, so he took a stool alongside Uncle Jay at the counter. Darlene would show up soon enough. He winked at his sisters and the gang of little girls in the corner booth. They giggled and fell against one another, except his sisters, who rolled their eyes and tried to act like they didn’t know him.
 

“How you doing, Uncle Jay?”

“Tolerable. You?”

“Want a Coke?”

“No, thanks.”

Uncle Jay was really his great-uncle, his granddad’s brother. He wore high-topped shoes and a high-crowned flat-brimmed hat, which he took off indoors, exposing a white forehead above his sunburned face. His khaki shirts were buttoned at the collar and sometimes he carried a hand-carved cane with a handle of Mexican silver, not that he particularly needed it, but like others of his generation, the remaining few, he seemed to have remained fixed in the time of his youth.

“How’s Aunt Julie?”
 

“She’s fit.”

The music drifted in through the screen door: “I could waltz across Texas with you…” whining above the chirping girls and the hum of the big fan high on the back wall.

“How about yourself?” Uncle Jay said.

“Me? I’m fine.”
 

Uncle Jay frowned and worked his cigar to the other side of his mouth. The cigar resembled the dark stubs of his two missing fingers. He lost those fingers to frostbite one night when he was a young man after his horse threw him in an ice storm. He dragged himself home over two miles with a broken leg, but lost the fingers. God’s punishment, he claimed, for biting off a Mexican’s thumb in a fistfight.
 

Bernadine, the waitress, came up on the other side of the counter. “Y’all all set down here?”

“How about a Coke here, and a couple a those El Producto’s for Uncle Jay.”
 

Uncle Jay took the stub of cigar out of his mouth and looked at it. “Plenty a good cigar left here.”

Bernadine took the box from the shelf behind and set it on the counter.
 

“Harley,” she said, “what happened out on that ball field today, anyhow?” Bernadine was a bony little woman with thinning white hair, a pink scalp showing through. She drew her eyebrows in great black arcs and wore scarlet-red lipstick that found its way into the little wrinkly cracks fanning out from her mouth like an explosion. More than once he had longed to paint her.

“Catching up on my sleep,” he said.

“I declare, y’all boys was doing real good up till that. Then, hot damn, turn down the covers, it’s too wet to plow.”

Harley nodded.

“That Billy Wayne Hinchley, he’s something, ain’t he? Ever see anybody could throw a ball like that? Shoot, he oughta be a pro if you ask me.”

“Yeah, he’s real good.” Harley took two cigars from the box, placed them before Uncle Jay and laid a dollar on the counter.

“He fanned that Elmer Keggs just like that,” Bernadine said, snapping her fingers in the air.
 

“He’s good.”

She set the El Productos back on the shelf and picked up the dollar. “Yes-sir-ee, things began to liven up around here when that Billy Wayne Hinchley come to town.”
 

“Bernadine,” Uncle Jay said, “get me a refill on this coffee, will you, please?”

“Sure, Jay. You want a piece of pie with it? We got some real good homemade pecan pie.”

“Just coffee.”

“Take out for the coffee too,” Harley said.
 

Bernadine put his change on the counter and went back to get the coffeepot.

Uncle Jay took the cigar out of his mouth and frowned at it. “She ain’t a mean woman. Just ignert.”

Bernadine brought the coffeepot and refilled Uncle Jay’s cup. “Here go, Jay. That’s real hot now.”

The girls had their heads together in the corner booth, whispering among themselves; then they fell back, squealing and giggling.
 

Harley looked at Uncle Jay… Something out of fit here all of a sudden, an uneasy feeling that had been creeping up on him without his hardly knowing it. He stood off the stool, took a dollar out of his wallet, laid it on the counter and turned to the door.
 

“Hey, you done already paid,” Bernadine called after him.

“Son…”

“Well, what’s eatin’
him
?” he heard Bernadine say as the screen door twanged shut behind.
 

He leaned for a moment against one of the café’s porch supports. The tops of cars and pickups wavered like a slow-rolling sea, all the way across the highway and the school grounds beyond. Faces loomed out from the crowd, smiling, speaking, but he hardly saw them. He went up past the flatbed where Travis was giving away a set of cheap dishes and crossed the highway into the darkness on the other side. He picked his way, zigzagging through the cars and trucks up to the schoolhouse. Then he doubled back by the flagpole toward the gymnasium, scanning the cars.
 

Just when he decided the red Chevy was nowhere about, he spotted it off to itself down beyond the gymnasium, parked behind the backstop at the ball field.
 

Whiny country music carried on the night air. Crickets sawed out their own grainy medleys from secret hiding. Harley walked up to within ten feet of the Chevy. He squatted on his heels. With relief he saw there was only open moonlight across the tops of the seats.
 

Then, movement.
 

The silhouette of a naked leg rose, wavered, bumped against the dash. Moonlight glinted on the ankle chain.

Chapter 4

Leaving Out

H
ARLEY LEFT
SEPARATION
, Texas, on Sunday morning before church. He would have left Saturday night, but there wasn’t much use in trying to hitchhike your way out of the middle of nowhere at that hour.

His dad walked with him the two hundred yards down the dirt road from the house to the county blacktop.
 

“I don’t know what give you this going-away itch all of a sudden,” he said. A thin, hollow-chested man, he wore a straw Panama and a wide tie with flying geese painted on it, but no jacket because of the heat. At the road he stood near the mailbox, bony shoulders drawn up, hands stuffed in the pockets of his Sunday pants.
 

When Harley said nothing by reply, his dad mumbled that he was sure enough sorry he didn’t have any money to give him.
 

“It’s okay. I already had twenty dollars, and borrowed another twenty-five from Uncle Jay.”

“Well, all right, but you be sure and send it right back soon as you get it.”

“That old brood sow of mine, you can have her if you’ll sell the pigs for me.”
 

His dad cocked his head in an attitude of indignation. “Son, you know I wouldn’t take your sow.”

“Well, I can’t very well take her to Dallas.”
 

His dad gave him a quick look to see if he was being smart before a little grin broke across his face. “I’ll send you the money.”
 

“How about paying Uncle Jay back for me?”

“Good. I’ll send you what’s left.”
 

Harley looked back up the dirt track toward the house with its stack-lot and falling-down cowsheds. The windmill was still in the gathering heat. A long field of drought-withered sorghum reached to the horizon behind. It was the same little unpainted house as always, but something about it looked different this morning. Some comfort he was reluctant to leave.

His mother would be watching out the kitchen window, tears in her eyes and a prayer in her heart. He recalled her a short time earlier, standing at the ironing board, placing his neatly folded shirts in the old cardboard suitcase while his twin sisters argued over who was getting his room. His mother had always ironed his jeans and white shirts, and she wasn’t about to let him go off and leave home—if he just had to leave, and he told her he did—looking second-class. Harley, she said, at least you’re not leaving like some of them other boys, following the wheat harvest, or going off to Alaska to work on one of them fishing boats. No, sir. Her boy was going away looking good. Her boy was gonna be something.

He hadn’t told her about Darlene, or how he’d flipped a coin to see whether he was going away to “be something,” or whether he was going to join the French Foreign Legion so he could just go ahead and get killed and be done with it.