Death's Sweet Song

The blue Buick pulled off the highway about fifty yards past the station. I could see the driver looking back at the cabins, and there was a woman beside him in the front seat. They sat there for two or three minutes while the man made up his mind, and finally the Buick began backing up and stopped in front of the gas pumps.

“Fill her up?” I said.

“All right.” He opened the door and got out. “What we're looking for,” he said, “is a place to stay for the night. Do you have a vacancy?”

“Sure thing.”

There were five cabins behind the station and they were all vacant, Most of them would remain vacant, even during the tourist season. That's the kind of place it was. I wondered about that while I put gas into his car. Here was a tourist with a new car, wearing expensive clothes, so why should he want to put up in a rat trap like mine when there were first-class AAA motels all along the highway?

He must have read my mind.

“Engine trouble,” he said. “Nothing serious, but I thought I'd better get a mechanic to look at it.”

“Oh. Your best bet is to go back to town and talk to the people at the Buick agency.”

He smiled pleasantly. “That's what I was thinking.”

He was a pretty good-sized guy, and you could see that he kept in condition. His face was burned to the color of old leather, and I guessed he was the type that spent a lot of time on a golf course, or maybe a tennis court. We talked a little about the weather and how hot it was, and then I hung up the hose and went to work on the windshield. That was when I got my first good look at the woman. And she just about took my breath away.

At first I thought she was asleep. She sat there with her eyes closed, her face completely expressionless. Her hair was blonde and short, and her skin was pale, almost white. She wore tan shorts and a white T shirt. The tan shorts looked almost black against that skin of hers. As I was finishing with the windshield, she opened her eyes. For just an instant we stared at each other through the glass, and then she smiled the smallest smile in the world and curled up slowly like a well-fed cat.

“Will you check the oil?” the man said.

I added a quart of oil. Then we went inside the station and he signed the register: “Mr. & Mrs. Karl Sheldon,
St. Louis
,
Mo.
”

“You want me to call the Buick agency for you?” I asked.

He smiled again. “Don't bother. I can drive it back to town all right. Anyway, I'd like to freshen up a bit.”

I put them in Number 2 cabin, right next to the one I kept for myself. I went around every morning and put the cabins in shape, but it would take more than clean sheets and a few licks with a mop to make them look like anything. They were all just alike, bedroom, bath, kitchenette—lumpy beds, peeling dressers, cracked linoleum on the floors. But I hadn't realized how shabby they really were before I saw the look on that blonde's face.

“Really, Karl! It seems to me—”

“It's just for a little while.” And he looked at me, almost apologetically. “Don't bother with the luggage. I'll bring it in after a while.”

That was a dismissal, so I went back to the station.

The thermometer on the east side of the wash rack had reached an even hundred. I opened a bottle of Coke and stood in the doorway, watching the endless stream of traffic rushing by on the highway. License tags from everywhere—
Nebraska
,
California
,
Illinois
.... Where do tourists go, anyway, in such a hell of a hurry? What difference does it make? I thought, with a taste of bitterness. They're not going to stop here!

And who could blame them? No air-conditioning, no fancy lunchroom, no AAA sign hanging out. Why
 
should
 
anybody want to stop at a place like this?

That started me thinking about Karl Sheldon and that blonde"” wife of his. Now, if I could afford a wife like that, you wouldn't catch me putting up in a fire trap like this, not by a long shot. Sheldon seemed like a nice guy, but apparently he wasn't very smart. A woman like that was meant to have nothing but the best. Several times that afternoon I caught my imagination beginning to get the best of me. That white skin; I'd never seen anything just like it before. I was almost glad when a customer came by and left a flat for me to fix; it gave me something else to think about.

Around five o'clock Ike Abrams, my part-time helper, came on duty, and a few minutes later Sheldon backed his Buick out of the carport and headed toward town.

“I see you've rented one of the cabins,” Ike said. “Maybe the tourist business is beginning to hit its stride.”

“I hope so. Say, did you notice anything wrong with the way that Buick was running?” “It sounded fine to me.”

Ike may not be the smartest man in the world, but he's as good a shade-tree mechanic as you'll find. When he doesn't hear something wrong with an engine, then there's nothing wrong with it. That started me thinking again. Now, why would Sheldon bother to hand me that cock-and-bull story about car trouble? And even if it was true, why would he wait until five o'clock to get started for a garage that would already be closed for the day?

Well, a man had his own set of reasons for everything, and it was none of my business, anyway. I was just glad that a cabin was rented.

After a while I checked the cash register with Ike, turned the station over to him, and headed toward my own cabin to get cleaned up for my usual date with Beth Langford. I could hear the shower running in Number 2 cabin, and I stopped for a moment and listened, thinking about that blonde. You'd better hold on to that imagination of yours, I thought.

My own cabin was like a farmer's oven at harvest time. The sleazy marquisette curtains hung limp and still at the open windows. No hint of a breeze. Through the sagging screen door I could see the glistening ribbon of Highway 66, and beyond it the shimmering, sun-blasted monotony of
Oklahoma
prairie. It hurt your eyes, just looking at it.

I tried to tell myself that the tourist business was just getting started, as Ike had said, and pretty soon I'd be renting the cabins every night and the money would begin rolling in.

It was a pipe dream. And I knew it.

I kicked my shoes off and lay across the scorching bed, and in no time at all I was cursing myself for ever getting into the business in the first place. The heat was getting me down. I was going to be late for my date with Beth, but that didn't seem to matter.

For about fifteen minutes I lay there with the sweat rolling over my ribs. Pretty soon that old feeling of frustration began gnawing at me, that nameless anger that I knew so well began sinking its claws in my guts.

I wondered if Karl Sheldon appreciated the woman he had. I wondered if he appreciated that car of his, the money in his wallet, the way he could afford to live. By God, I thought, I would appreciate them if I had them!

There had been a time when I was going to have such things. There had been a time when I was going to take the world apart and put it together again just the way I wanted it.

But it didn't work out like that. Nothing worked out the way I planned it. Even now I could feel this tourist-court business falling down around my shoulders. Another failure, Hooper; but you ought to be used to it by now.

I never got used to it. Every time I went under, something inside me got harder, that anger got hotter. One of these days, I thought, I'm going to do it!

But not today.

I lay there, groggy and listless in the heat, “not caring a damn whether or not I ever got up, whether I ever kept my date with Beth Langford. Finally I did get up and stripped and got under the shower. The cold water jarred me, made me feel a little better. I pulled on some clean slacks and a fresh shirt and got out of that cabin before the heat could get another hold on me. Mrs. Sheldon was sitting on the steps of Number 2.

“Is it always this hot in
Oklahoma
?” she said.

“In July it is. It usually cools off, though, when the sun goes down.”

She shrugged faintly, as though she didn't believe me. A white pique skirt-and-halter outfit had taken over for the shorts and T shirt, but the effect was about the same. Sitting in front of that cabin, she looked crisp and fresh, as out of place as caviar in an Army mess kit.

“This is quite a place you have here,” she said dryly. “Do you own it?”

“Me and the bank.”

She smiled. It was an expression that came slowly, and you didn't realize that it was there at all until it hit you. Then she stretched those white legs out in front of her and lay back with her elbows on the top step. I must have been staring pretty hard, but she didn't seem to notice.

“Were you ever a fighter?” she asked.

It seemed like a funny question. “I was never a boxer, if that's what you mean.”

“You've got the build for it.”

I didn't know what to say to that. It made me uncomfortable, the way she looked at me, and I wondered if she was laughing at me. About that time I saw Sheldon's Buick turn off the highway and decided it was time I got away from there.

When I got back to the station I saw that Ike had washed down the driveway and swept the office—things I never remembered to do. “If I'm not back by ten o'clock,” I said, “go ahead and lock up.” I left my keys with him, then got into my '47 Chevy and headed for town.

When you take 66 into Creston, your first impression is that it's a pretty good-sized place. The first things you see are the oil-well supply houses, big sprawling buildings and sheds, long rows of powerful cementing trucks, pumpers, testing and drilling equipment. Acres of buildings and acres of trucks, millions of dollars' worth of equipment. It's pretty impressive the first time you see it.

Right next to the railroad are the grain elevators, great towering cement columns standing solid and proud like lonesome skyscrapers in the middle of the prairie. And then there's the big overpass at the railroad. You cross the overpass and drop down on the other side and you're in Creston.

You take one look at the town and feel cheated.

You'd been led to expect great things and here you are right in the middle of another one-horse prairie town. I'd lived here all my life, knocking out four years in the Army, and I never failed to be disappointed when I looked at it. It was a fairly clean town, as prairie towns go, once you moved away from the cluster of produce and feed companies that huddled around the grain elevators. Coming down the town side of the overpass, you could see it all. The straight, treeless streets. The frame houses and parched lawns. The new, raw-looking high school, the cement tennis courts, the white afterthought of a steeple on the Baptist church.

It was my home. A place where eight thousand people, more or less, lived, loved, hated, worshiped, spawned. I knew everybody and everybody knew me, and that's the kind of arrangement you can get pretty sick of after a while.

For a minute I thought I'd drive around to the family house and say hello to my dad, but I stopped at a drive-in instead and had a beer. At that moment, with the bank breathing on my neck, I didn't feel up to lying about how good business was and how much money I was making. And I didn't want Dad asking if Beth Langford and I had set the date yet. He didn't know it, and Beth didn't know it, but there wasn't going to be any date. That's one thing I was sure of.

The carhop, the sister of a guy I had known in high school, brought me the beer.

“How's the tourist business, Joe?”—“Fine. Just fine.”

What a joke! I thought. They always asked the same question and I always gave the same answer, lying in my teeth. But, at times like this, there was always one comforting thought in the back of my mind—this tourist business was purely a temporary arrangement. A breather, a stopover on the way to something big.

If they thought I was going to stay bogged down in Creston the rest of my life, they were crazy. There was a limit to the number of craps a man could throw, no matter how unlucky he was. Sooner or later his luck had to change, and I could feel it in my bones that my turn was about to come up.

I had a theory about this business of getting ahead in the world. Once, at least once, in every man's life there comes a chance to make a killing, a chance to lift himself out of the dung heap. I'd seen it happen too many times. I'd seen oil-field roughnecks become millionaires, betting their hard-earned cash on good structures that the big companies had missed on. I'd seen two-bit land men become big shots overnight.

There is no mystery about how one man gets to be a big shot while the man right beside him remains a bum all his life. One man saw the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it appeared, recognized it for what it was, grabbed it.

There's no mystery about it at all. The only two requirements are plenty of patience and a world of guts. And this is the way it works:

Herb Carter was a small-time land man for a big-time oil company. His job was to go out and lease up land that the company wanted, land that had been proved either by existing producing wells, or by geophysical exploration—proved at a cost of maybe a million dollars to the company. It happened that Herb had a friend who was the chief engineer for an exploration company, and this was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Herb didn't miss. From his friend Herb got the exact location of the prize structure and leased the land for himself.