Yellow Mesquite (45 page)

Harley stared, incredulous. Not only could he not ‘beat that,’ he couldn’t even imagine it. He laughed out loud. “You’re not pulling my leg are you?”

“I kid you not. August said it was a graduation present for them little girls.” Mr. Barrow grinned again. “Personally, I think them
little girls
are too growed up for Mickey Mouse.” He paused in thought. “Mighty smart, them little girls. Graduated at mid-term.”

“Well,” Harley said, pensive. “It’s a new world every day, isn’t it?” He made a mental note to get nice graduation presents for his sisters.

“That’s a sure ’nuff fact.” Mr. Barrow looked at his watch, then took two empty tow sacks from the bed of his pickup. “Listen, son, I gotta get a move on. I promised Ima Jean I’d help her take up some old linoleum from off that back mud room. Then we gotta go into town, grocery shopping.”
 

“Looks like you’re taking care of the place here?”

“Aw, yeah, a little bit. I just put some cake out over in the back pasture for the sheep.”
 

“That’s good of you,” Harley said, following as Mr. Barrow carried the empty sacks toward the barn.

“Yer daddy, he done plenty for me.” Mr. Barrow opened a side door into the silage room and placed the empty sacks alongside a dozen or so forty-pound sacks of cottonseed meal pellets—cubes the size of a man’s thumb joint.

Harley moved aside as Mr. Barrow stepped back and closed the barn door.
 

“He’s got him some mighty fine sheep over yonder. Doin’ real good. Course, we didn’t make no crops to speak of, so we’re havin’ to feed again.”

“Mr. Barrow,” Harley said, “I expect to be back within the next couple of months. I’d like to stop in for a hello.” He held out his hand again. “It was good to see you. Please say hi to Mrs. Barrow for me.”

Mr. Barrow shook his hand. “Will do, son. Good to see you, too.” He grinned. “You watch out for them doors now.”

Harley watched as Mr. Barrow drove his old pickup down the two-rutted dirt track, over the cattle guard and onto the blacktop.
 

He felt a strange sense of loss, a kind of emptiness, the outsider having missed something. There was a feeling of belonging that went with the people who lived in this country, something that he no longer felt. It was his own fault, but with his sisters graduating and going off with his mom and dad to Disneyland, their lives seemed normal in some way his never had. He wasn’t jealous; he loved his sisters and his mom and dad, but he felt isolated in some way. He sighed, wondering at the world, at his place in it. He smiled inwardly:
feeling sorry for myself.

A few chickens pecked about out near the barn where the John Deere tractor stood, its power takeoff aligned with the hammer-mill sandwiched between the stack-lot and the barn. He recalled the time he and his dad were grinding sorghum, pulling bundles off the stack, feeding them through the hammer-mill into the silage room, when Harley pulled the snake out of the stack—the one he dreamed about that morphed into Frankie.

Again he was flooded with guilt…walking out on Frankie like that. And now she had as much as told him to get lost.
 

If nothing else, Whitehead had been right about him being a dreamer. From the very beginning he had made Sherylynne out to be somebody she wasn’t. He had loved Sherylynne, but a Sherylynne of his own making. She thought he would make a lot of money—her own failed dream—and when he didn’t, well, there was Whitehead, waiting in the wings.
 

Whitehead had made himself up as well, a caricature, playing the role of the self-made, loudmouthed Texas oil man, doing it so successfully Harley couldn’t visualize him any other way. He doubted Whitehead could either, buried so deeply in his own myth that his true self was lost forever.
 

The whole world was pathetic, himself the most pathetic of all. His own paintings were little more than thinly disguised attempts to remake the world to his own liking. Nobody gave a damn about art. He was a fool: Don Quixote charging windmills with a paintbrush.
 

The wind had gotten up a little, sighing mournfully in the broom weeds. The windmill creaked, the fan blades shuddering against the tie-down. The house itself looked remote, hermetically sealed, closed against him under the flattening winter sky.

Unexpected and against his will, his eyes filled. His lungs convulsed and a sob burst out of him like a hiccup, then another, deep, wracking. He clamped both arms around himself and managed a deep breath, the sobs turning to tear-squeezed laughter—embarrassed at his own idiocy.

Chapter 48

San Angelo

H
E DROVE BACK
through Separation. At Highpoint he eased the car off onto the shoulder opposite the lone service station behind the point of the Y where 153 and 70 split. He sat for a moment, thinking.

The last he’d heard, Darlene and Billy Wayne were divorced and she was living in San Angelo. That was a few years ago and she might well have remarried by now. Once again he recalled the moonlight glinting on the ankle chain in Billy Wayne’s car. She’d worn that same chain to Uncle Jay’s funeral.

Contemplating what he was thinking about doing, what he had already done—leaving Frankie, attacking Whitehead, raising hell all over Lake Charles with Sherylynne—the ear-ringing, dreamy unreality of it all, he wondered if he might be losing his mind. He looked at his watch: 9:15 a.m.
 

He pulled across the road to the service station—a little boxy building of native rock, two gas pumps out front. The attendant, a thin turkey-necked man in overalls and a billed Texaco cap, came out. He hesitated when he saw Harley’s face, grinned a little, then cleaned his windshield while the tank filled. There was a pay phone on the wall inside next to the restroom. He got Darlene’s number from long-distance information and had the operator charge the call to his home phone.
 

A roommate answered, a bubbly girl who introduced herself as Fran. “Darlene;s still asleep,” she said, “but I’ll wake her.” Before he could protest, the line went silent. It remained silent so long he had begun to think she had hung up when a sleepy voice said, “H’lo?”
 

“Darlene. Hi. It’s Harley. Sorry to wake you.”

“Who?”

“Harley. Harley Buchanan.” He forced a short laugh. “You still asleep?”

“Harley?”

“Surely you haven’t forgotten me already?”

“Harley Jay… Where in the world are you?”

“Highpoint, up on the Divide.”

“Really?”

“What’s going on with you? Are you working?”

“Ma Bell. Yes, but I’m off. Long weekend. You know, shift work.”

“You feel like having company? I thought we might go grab a bite to eat or whatever.”

“Harley Jay, that’d just tickle me plumb to death!”

“Good. I got your phone number from the operator. I guess you’d better give me your address.”

After he wrote down her address and said good-bye, he stood for a minute, wondering just what the hell he was doing. What he should do was drive back to Hardwater, get a motel room, sleep a good ten hours or so, and head back to New York.
 

IT WAS ROUGHLY
fifty miles south from Highpoint to San Angelo. His watch read 9:45 a.m. By the time he arrived, the ice had disappeared. It was warming up. He asked directions and found her house, a small Arts and Crafts job with an outsized front porch in a working-class neighborhood. An old Dodge pickup and a newer Nissan sat in the graveled driveway. He parked in the street next to the curb. The yard was bare, a few patches of dry grass rattling in the wind. His stomach clutched up, his mind went swimmy. He had no idea who Darlene was anymore or what he was doing here.

He got out, went up the walkway and up the steps onto the semi-enclosed porch. The entrance door was on the left. In a window on the right, he glimpsed a movement of curtains behind open venetian blinds. He knocked and heard muffled voices inside. Presently the door opened and a trim young woman with short blonde hair, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, stood smiling at him. Her smile faded, eyes widening, seeing his wrecked face.
 

“Fran? Hi, I’m Harley. Sorry if I scared you. I’m not as bad as I look.”

She held out her hand and they shook. “Come on in. Darlene’ll be right out.” Fran stood back, studying him with a bemused smile. “Here. Sit down here,” she said, gesturing at a vinyl-covered recliner. “Can I get you something to drink? How ’bout a cold Lone Star?”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

“Looks like you ran into a door,” she said with an easy smile, a little gap between her front teeth.
 

He grinned. “That ain’t all.”

Fran laughed again. “Sit. I’ll be right back.”
 

He sat in the recliner, looking about at the room—make-do furniture, but clean, orderly. He felt disoriented, transported from his loft to some never-never land.
 

“Darlene’s told me so much about you, I feel like I know you already,” Fran said, bringing in the beer and a glass.
 

So, Darlene had spoken of him.
 

“Well, he said, “there’s no telling what she told.”
 

“I’d have a beer with you but I’m meeting my friend Mark. We’re going to breakfast.” She looked at her watch. “What do you do, what kinda work?”

“I’m a painter.” He set the glass aside and took a sip from the bottle.

“Oh. That’s nice. What do you paint? Houses?”

“Pictures. Like you hang on the wall.”

Fran looked at him, quizzical. “Pitchers? What kinda pitchers?”

“It’s hard to describe. I’ve been called an Abstract Symbolist, whatever that is.”

“Sounds modern. My sister paints. She had some pitchers in the lobby of the Cactus Hotel once. She paints windmills. Bluebonnets and stuff.”

“Good. Good for her. How about you? What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m drawing right now.”

“Drawing?”

“Unemployment. I got laid off from Woolworth.” Fran tilted her head at him, a sly smile. “You and Darlene, y’all were sweethearts growing up, right?”

“Seems like a long time ago.”
 

A door bumped open in the hallway and Darlene sashayed out, flushed, smiling—Darlene with the big oval eyes glistening over high cheekbones, face framed in shoulder-length brown hair. He wasn’t sure if the surge of emotion he felt was for the old Darlene he once loved, or a brain jolt at her getup—jean shorts so short the bottoms of the front pockets were visible, the top button a good two inches below her navel. Her legs were long and lean, her stomach flatted below the tails of a white shirt knotted under her breasts.
     

“Harley Jay––” she began, arms outstretched, then she stopped, her expression falling. “Harley Jay…what in the world happened to your face?”

Fran lifted one eyebrow. “Ran into a door. He just told me. Huh. Imagine that.”

“Accident,” he mumbled. More disoriented than ever. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he took her by the hand and pulled her to him. He kissed her lightly, careful of his nose, briefly tasting the velvety warmth of her lips, the sweet aftertaste of bubble gum. He released her and stood back. “Boy, Darlene, don’t you look fine.”
 

Head tilted, she took hold of his shoulders and held him at arms length. “Sheew, Harley Jay, you look just like a little old raccoon with those black eyes. Your nose, is it broke?”
 

“It’s fine. Just a little tender.”

“I’m gonna go now,” Fran said. “It was nice meeting you, Harley.”

“You too, Fran.”

Fran stopped in the doorway, looked at him, then at Darlene. “I like him,” she said simply, and closed the door after herself.

Silence fell over the room now that they were alone. It was difficult not to stare at Darlene, her legs, her short-shorts clinging to her pelvic bones, her concave stomach…
 

“Nice roommate,” he said, hearing the car start up outside.

“Well, isn’t this something!” Darlene said. “You, right here. Last I heard, you was in New Yark or somewhere.”

“Still am.”

She gave him a curious look. “You down here looking for work?”

“No, I went to Louisiana to see my daughter. I dropped by to see the folks, but they weren’t home.”

“What happened to your face, really?”

“Had a wreck, broke my nose on the steering wheel.”

“Well, Harley Jay, if you ain’t a sight!”

“Want to go grab a bite of breakfast?”
 

“We could. Sure.”

In another half hour they were seated in a booth in a greasy spoon called The Wheel and Deal.

“So what would you like to do?” Darlene asked.

“Hey, this is your town. What do you suggest?”
 

“Shoot, I’m off till Wednesday night, graveyard shift.” She gave him her old narrow-eyed, half-amused, half-serious look. “You’re not out here runnin’ around on your wife, are you?”

He was momentarily taken aback. “That’s over with. Been over a long time.”

Darlene didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Well, of course she got the baby?”

He felt his spirits fading. “For the time being, yes.”

She studied him further, as if making up her mind about something. “Okay,” she said, brightening. “We ought to do something, celebrate getting together again.”

“I’m for it,” he said, making an effort to shake off the sudden pall of depression. “Hey, you’re the one knows this town.”

“Shoot, there’s not much to do around here…except… Harley Jay, how much time you got?”

“How much do you need?” He couldn’t shake the dreamy, disoriented feeling.

“You wanna go to Mexico?”
 

He sobered a little. “Mexico?”

“It’s a lot of fun over there.”

“Mexico? Today?”

“Villa Acuña, right the other side of Del Rio. I went over there in a pickup with some railroaders from Hardwater once, and we just had the best time ever”—she laughed—“ ’cept Pete got drunk and throwed up all over hisself, and we made him ride in back all the way home.”