Red Sky at Morning (9 page)

"Your mother's been terribly worried about you," Jim-bob said. "She's been just frantic." She looked stoned to me, and not frantic at all.

"Who was that driving you home?" she asked. "It looked like someone in a truck."

"A friend of yours," I said. "A man named Romeo Bonino. He says he knows you."

"He's a friend of your father's," she said. "He's a dirty, filthy man. He's an Italian."

"He's bearing up all right under the disgrace," I said.

"Don't you dare be sharp with your mother," Jimbob said, rising to bis feet unsteadily and trying to put a fierce look on his face, which was getting red and puffy. "She's been frantic about your safety."

"Frantic," she echoed, having herself another little old
traguito.

"You're too old to thrash," Jimbob said, "but you deserve a thrashing." It was such an old-fashioned word that I began to laugh, and his face got redder and fatter.

"Thrashing," my mother said. "Frantic, frantic thrashing."

"Mierda de toro,"
I said. I'd been improving my Spanish here and there.

Jimbob thought that one over. "I'm sure that's something vulgar, but I'm proud to say that English is my language."

I said "excuse me" and went into the kitchen. Excilda and I had a bowl of
posole
together, a kind of hominy cooked with hunks of pork and beef and boiled in red chile. She spoke to me in very slow, simple Spanish, so I could get it.

"I know Amadeo and I made a contract with your father," she said, "but there wasn't anything in it about him." She indicated Jimbob with her chin, which is what the people in Sagrado do instead of pointing, which is considered impolite. "He called Amadeo a nigger the other day; Amadeo almost hit him with a shovel. He's giving all the orders around here, and most of the time he doesn't know what he's talking about. I sure wish Mr. Arnold were back."

"I wish I knew what was the matter with my mother," I said. "She's not acting right."

"I know what's the matter with her," Excilda said. "She doesn't like it here and she's drinking all that wine so she can forget she's in Sagrado instead of back in Alabama. She doesn't like this dry air, and she's not going to like the snow when it gets heavy. She's not used to being without her husband. She doesn't like the food I cook, even though everybody says I'm one of the best cooks in the county. She doesn't even like this," she said, indicating the
posole,
which was great.

"And," she continued, "I don't think she likes Catholics."

"Now I don't know about
that,"
I said. "The woman who worked for us in Mobile was a Catholic."

"Then maybe she doesn't like me because I'm Spanish. Her and her family. Jesus, man, my family's been around here for three hundred and fifty years."

"Her family was just a lot of horse thieves, anyway," I said. "She talks about them a lot, but she doesn't let you meet any of them. I think most of them make whiskey and run barefoot."

"Well, if she doesn't like Spanish people she sure came to the wrong part of the country. You're learning Spanish pretty good. Do you like Spanish people?"

"Some of them. There's a couple of guys I don't like any too well. I think one of them wants to kill me. Maybe both of them do. Do you know a guy named Chango Lopez?"

"Is that Maximiliano?"

"That's the one," I said.

"I know his mother and father. He was a wood carver from around Ojo Amargo. A
santero,
you know, he carved little saints out of wood. He works in town now. What's Maximiliano got against you?"

"I don't know. Something about his sister, as I understand it."

Excilda cupped her hands in front of her chest. "The one with these?"

"More like this," I said, cupping my hands and holding them farther out.

"You been playing around with her? If you have, you asked for trouble. Those Lopez people are real back-country, and they get proud sometimes."

"No," I said. "I've never touched her. Chango's just imagining things."

"You have a girl?"

"I thought I did, but now I don't know. She's sore at me about something."

My mother came into the kitchen, weaving slightly. "Thick as thieves," she said. "You two are just thick as thieves. What are you talking about in here?"

"Joshua's just practicing his Spanish on me, Mrs. Arnold," Excilda said. "He speaks it very well for an Anglo, when you consider he hasn't been here very long."

"I wish you wouldn't call my son an Anglo, Excilda. It just doesn't sound very nice."

"Well, whatever he is, he's learning Spanish pretty good. Do you want some dinner? I've got
posole."

"I recommend it," I said. "It'll tear the top of your head off."

"Can't you make anything without chile in it?" my mother said. "Mr. Buel has a delicate stomach."

"I suppose I can cook some hamburgers," Excilda said, sighing.

"You just do that little thing," my mother said.

So Excilda did that little thing, and my mother and Jimbob ate hamburgers which they were probably too loaded to taste, and exclaimed over good, wholesome American cooking which was so simple that even a Mexican could manage it.

Parker got his father's car the next evening, which was Friday, and we made dates with the Cloyd girls. After I asked Velva Mae if she'd like to see a movie, and then assured her that the automobile was ours for the night, she made me describe it carefully. It was a dark blue 1939 Plymouth sedan with fuzzy gray upholstery and a six-cylinder engine. Parker told me that Venery Ann was just as inquisitive. The girls were really making a date with the car, and letting us go along like a pair of little brothers. Never, not before or since, have I known girls who were so carried away by the internal-combustion engine.

My mother hadn't been showing much interest in what I did or where I went recently, but when she saw me putting on a tie she got curious.

"A tie!" she said. "I'm so happy you're beginning to care about how you look again. You've been going everywhere in blue jeans for so long I suspected you'd forgotten how to dress."

"Your mother's quite right," Jimbob put in. "You've been looking terribly tatty recently. Practically sharecrop-perish."

"I know," I said humbly. "I've been letting myself go. But this girl is different. This just isn't the sort of girl you can wear blue jeans with."

"Of good family?" my mother asked.

"Well, I don't know about that. Rich, though."

"Old money?" said Jimbob, "or new money?"

"Banking," I said, making it up as I went along. "The oldest bank in West Texas. Rancher's National of Amarillo."

"Oh, yes," Jimbob said.

"Also insurance. You know; Panhandle Life Assurance. A billion something in policies."

"A fine old firm," he said, looking only a little puzzled.

"And ranching, of course. That's where it all came from. The Circle Bar Four. The longhorn and Guernsey cross-breed. I forget what they call it, but the steers are resistant to heat and mosquitoes and give nothing but T-bones. I think they had a big contract with the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis was a great fancier of Mr. Cloyd's beef."

"Of course," Jimbob said. "Cloyd. That's old . . ."

"Chester Cloyd," I said. "He started the ranch. His grandson Felix runs the business now. I mean, the empire."

"You mean you're going out with Felix Cloyd's daughter? Well, I must say I'm truly impressed. It's certainly a fine old family. I believe my father used to do business with them."

"What's this young lady's first name?" my mother asked me, brightening up.

"Amanda Sue," I said. "I call her Susie."

"Imagine that!"

Parker's car came into the driveway, and I said goodnight and went out through the kitchen. Excilda was mashing red chiles through a sieve, and peering through the window, trying to identify the car. "Who are you going with tonight?" she asked.

"A girl named Cloyd," I told her. "You know her family too?"

"I know everybody's family around here. That one's about the worst there is."

"You'd better not tell anybody."

"You'd better not come back here with the crabs," she said.

Parker had his hair slicked with water, and had made a little wave in the front of it. He'd also had a haircut, and his ears stuck out. The car smelled like fish.

"Daddy went and used his own car this morning," he said. "The Game Department has this truck, but Daddy likes his own car. He carried four thousand rainbow fry up to the Pecos, and then hit a rock by Cañón Seco. The goddamn fish sloshed all over the back seat, and he had to spend an hour picking them up by hand."

"It smells pretty strong," I said. "Will the girls mind?"

"Shoot, they'll ride on top of sacks of wet horseshit if they can do it in a car. Hey, you got boots on?"

"No, why? Are we going hiking?"

"You better go back in the house and get a pair of boots or galoshes or something, if you don't want to ruin your shoes. Just get 'em. You'll see why."

I went back inside and got my knee-high rubber fishing boots, and came back to the car. "Just sling 'em in back," Parker said. "You'll need 'em."

We drove west through town, past the Plaza and out across some arroyos to where the street lights stopped and the houses leaned sideways, or had the melted look that adobe gets even in a dry country, when every little rain washes part of the walls away. None of the streets were paved; nobody in this part of town paid any taxes, so they didn't get any paving. In the part of town I lived in, everybody paid taxes, high ones, but the streets weren't paved there because the residents thought asphalt would destroy the charm. They were right; it would. It would destroy the dust, too.

"What does Mr. Cloyd do?" I asked Parker, who wasn't talking much because he had to drive his father's car very carefully around chug holes and sleeping dogs.

"Do? Shoot, old Black John don't do anything," Parker said. "He's a sewer."

"What do you mean, a sewer?"

"I mean that's all he does. He sues people."

"Oh."

"He's got something wrong with his spine, and he can make his backbone pop out of place whenever he wants, like it was doublejointed. It makes a hell of a big lump, like a baseball. When he's getting short of money, and that's most of the time, because he don't do regular work, he bumps up against some moving vehicle and then falls down and lies there moanin' and raising seventeen kinds of hell. He generally picks on cars or trucks that have some kind of company sticker on the side, because he figures they got more insurance than just people."

"Isn't that called fraud? Don't they ever catch up with him?"

"Well, yes, I suppose they do. He moves around the country a lot, Velva Mae told me, and he's pulled it three times already here in Sagrado. He got five thousand from Wormser's Dry Goods when he let their panel truck bump him, and about the same amount from the State Corporation Commission. He's in the middle of a deal with Big Pepe's Lumber Company right now."

"That sounds like a pretty good way to make a living, if you have the backbone for it," I said. "I'm looking forward to meeting him."

"He's in kind of a bad frame of mind right now, from this last thing with Big Pepe," Parker said. "The thing was, he got himself in position for the lumber track to sideswipe him down at the corner of Wilson and San Policarpio, but the driver made too sharp a turn. Old Cloyd threw his back out all right—he does it by turning his shoulders one way and his hips another—but as he was goin' down a piece of Ponderosa pine two-by-four slid off the truck bed and caught him right in the thigh. Busted his leg all to hell, and now he's really hurtin'. He's workin' a suit for ten thousand now, but the pain in his leg's so bad he can't get any fun out of it."

Parker pulled the car off the road, onto a dark shoulder that seemed to be mud and sand, mixed, and turned off the engine. "Get your boots on," he advised me. "We're gonna have to slog for a while."

Between us and the light from the Cloyds' house was a hundred yards of what looked like Alabama swamp. The ground was mushy and covered with water and high grass and weeds, and I could see the dark shapes of cottonwoods and poplars. Parker led the way with a flashlight, and I sloshed after him.

"I didn't know there was this much water around Sagrado," I said. "The Sagrado River's been dry since I got here."

"This is a
cienega,"
Parker said. "It's some kind of underground spring, but it's not good for anything but making the ground wet. Costs a fortune to drain it or pump it off, and Cloyd isn't about to spend money for things like that."

"Does the whole family have to walk through this stuff to get to their house? You'd think they'd build a duck-walk or something." Parker said Cloyd would rather swim than build something useful.

A door opened in the house ahead of us, and I could see someone standing in the yellow rectangle of light. "It's Parker!" Parker yelled quickly. "Don't go shootin'!"

"Get offa my proppitty, you goddamn weasel!" Mr. Cloyd yelled back, in a voice like a trawler scraping a dock.

"There goes the evening," I said, and turned around to head back to the car.

"Don't pay any attention to him," Parker whispered. "He always says something like that. It's his way of welcoming people."

"You dirty little polecat son of a bitch," Cloyd hollered. "You take one more step and I'll blow a big hole right through you. Who's that you got with you? I'll blow a big hole right through him, too."

"It's just me and a friend, Mr. Cloyd. We came to pick up the girls and go to a show."

"You try to put one finger on my girls and I'll pour kerosene down your britches and light the match myself. Is that boy a Mexican?"

"No, sir, Mr. Cloyd. He's not a Mexican."

"I don't want no Mexicans playing around with my girls. This is a proud family."

The house was on land slightly higher and dryer than the
cienega,
and as we walked up to the front steps I could see that Cloyd wore a beard, a big crushed black hat and a dirty union suit, and carried a heavy 12-gauge double. The right leg of his long johns was split to make room for the cast, which stretched from his waist to his foot. Velva Mae and Venery Ann were standing behind him, almost hidden by his bulk, peeking at us.