South of Heaven (16 page)

He went out, gripping his pick handle like a ball bat.

I sagged down on my cot and buried my aching head in my hands. Baffled, wondering, the sickishness spreading from my stomach to my heart. I didn’t know what to make of things. All that I could think of was that everything was getting to be too damned much! It had been too damned much from the moment I set foot in camp; hell,
even
before that!

I’d been slugged, I’d been jailed, I’d been fired. I’d almost been blown up, and jackhammered loose from my guts, and baked with pipe-dope and mormon-boarded to death. Everything that could be done to a man had been dished out to me from trying to bury me alive on down, and…and…!

And you showed ’em Tommy Burwell! You took it all and laughed at ’em and asked ’em where their men folks were. But enough is enough, by God! Enough is a plain big plenty! So if they try to hand you any more—just one more thing…!

“Heard about Four Trey, huh? Well, I could have warned you, Tommy.” Wingy Warfield sat down in front of me, nodding his head wisely. “I been around since they spudded wells with rag line and a spring-pole, an’ there ain’t nothin’ I couldn’t tell you about Four Trey Whitey ’r anyone else. Why.…”

I raised my head from my hands and looked at him.

“Wingy,” I said, “you better get long-gone from me.”

“I know, I know how you feel, Tommy. You thought he was your friend, an’ a fella’s got to stick up for his friends. But I could tell you he wasn’t no friend to no one! You know how I know? Well.…”

“Beat it,” I said. “Wingy, if you don’t get out of here…!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Tommy. I’ll tell you God’s truth. All the time you thought he was your friend, he…he, uh.…”

His voice trailed away as I stood up and lifted the end of my cot. I began unscrewing the heavy leg, and he licked his lips nervously.

“Uh, Tommy, what was you studyin’ to do?”

“You got a bray like a jackass,” I said, “so I figure maybe you are one. An’ the only way you can get through to a mulejack is to hot his butt. You hot his butt real good with a club, an’ he stops brayin’ and starts listening. An’ I’m going to have a first-rate hotting-club in just about a second!”

That second was about an hour longer than he needed.

He whipped out of there so fast that the breeze almost blew the lantern out.

S
o I became head powder monkey of the big line, maybe the last of the big lines, from furthest Far West Texas to Port Arthur on the Gulf. We were just bending the third week of the job, and I was the head shooter. Blasting a trail through a world where no man had gone before.

In the beginning, I worked in behind the jackhammers or we worked together. Then, we hit so much rock that it was better to have it cracked up a little for the hammers. So I moved out in front, cutting trail with rock-drill and Dyna and that cute black hat she wore, leading the long way to the Gulf.

Sometimes when the fire was in the hole, and I was taking distance from the blast, I’d look back down the line behind me. And it seemed like as long as I looked I could never look enough. There was so much to see, so much that would never be seen again.
Pasó por aquí
—passed by here. And then no more.

Men and machines, stretching endlessly into the distance. Men and machines, only a thin almost invisible rivulet at first, a tiny thing lost in the horizon. It seemed to come up out of the ground like a puny spring, back there at the start; a near-nothingness amidst nothing. And then slowly it grew larger, the men and machines grew larger, and the sound of them grew greater; the rivulet became a river, and its thunderous surging shook the earth.

The long thin line of burnt-black men, their shovels glinting as they caught the sun….

The yellow-painted generators, peering down into the ditch, periodically breaking into fits of chugging and coughing as though startled by their surroundings.…

The mammoth ditchers rocking to and fro, grunting and quavering like fat old ladies.…

The jackhammers jouncing and jigging as they pounded the hard rock.…

The razzle-dazzle of sparks raining upward where welders’ torches pencilled fire against the pipe….

A lot of ’em would drag up, I reckoned. Paid off with money or the ditch for a grave.
Pasó por aquí
—and then no more.

But it was something to see, something to remember. The men and the machines—dying, smashing up, wearing out—but always moving forward. Creeping through a wild and lonely world toward Port Arthur on the Gulf.

I kid you not when I tell you the powder still scared hell out of me. My grandparents, the only parents I’d ever known, had gone to heaven in little pieces, and a thing like that you never get over. But being scared doesn’t need to paralyze a man, unless he lets it. Being scared is about the best way I know of being healthy.

Dyna was a touchy girl, but she was absolutely predictable. You knew how she had to be treated, and as long as you treated her exactly that way you got along fine. But never slight her, or it’d be the last time you did. Never let your mind wander when she demanded your attention.

Dyna was a good girl, but jealous, and any two-timing would get you killed. So I was scared of her and glad that I was. We got along, Dyna and I did, despite me having the world’s dumbest helper.

He was always making talk instead of keeping his mind on his job. Sometimes, it looked like, he didn’t have any mind to keep on it. A hundred times I told him how to tamp his shots down, and he’d do it the same damned way every time. Like he was tickling rattlesnakes with a short feather. Then, when the shots got buried, he’d hang back and wait for me to dig ’em out.

Finally, he buried Dyna for the second time in a morning, and that was just one time too many. So while he was hanging back and sort of scuffling his feet and mumbling that he was sorry, I picked up a rock drill and motioned him over to me.

“You got a choice,” I said. “You can either dig this drill out of your tail or you can dig those shots out of the ground.”

He told me I could screw it; he’d set in on another job or drag-up. I told him he could go suck hind titty from a tumblebug, but not until he got those shots out. So we had a few more words, and I had to bust him a couple of times, but then he saw it my way.

I was sitting back out of range while he uncovered the shots when Higby drove up and asked me what the trouble was. I explained that there wasn’t any trouble; I was just trying to teach the guy a lesson. Higby said he guessed it was the only way.

“Want to get rid of him, Tommy? Say the word, and I’ll give you another helper.”

“Aw, naw, he’ll make it all right,” I said. “He’s not a bad kid as kids go these days.”

“Kid? Kids must have grown a lot older since the last time I looked.”

“That’s it exactly,” I said. “They get older but they don’t get any smarter. Why, I’ll tell you, Mr. Higby.…”

I broke off because he’d all of a sudden got a bad fit of coughing and had to turn his head. After a moment or two, he turned back around, his face red from coughing.

“Uh, yes, Tommy? You were saying?”

“I was saying I don’t know what’s going to become of the world,” I said. “But, by God, I fear for it, with this new generation of kids that’s coming along! Now, back in my day.…”

Higby started coughing again. He drove away coughing, waving me so-long over his shoulder instead of saying it.

I’d decided I liked Higby. I still didn’t know whether he was a crook or not, but I knew he was a man and I liked him.

Somehow, I found out that I didn’t know a lot about a lot of things I’d once known all about. Not so long ago, I’d felt that I had to know everything about everything and I was afraid to admit that I didn’t. But now it didn’t seem to matter. Being ignorant isn’t the same as being stupid, and I knew I could learn when it was time to.

There was all the difference in the world between being head powder monkey and an assistant. The difference of responsibility. Time and money and life itself was being bet on me, on the belief that I would blow clean ditch with no costly delays and without endangering lives. Living up to that responsibility kept my days so crowded that they seemed more like weeks than days, even though they rushed by. Living up to responsibility gave me confidence that I had never had before.

I
knew
that I was worthwhile. Knowing it, I no longer had to try to keep proving it.

Sometimes, riding into camp at night, I would stand up on the jolting flatbed and look off across the prairie to where Carol was or where I thought she would be; occasionally, if I had gauged things correctly, getting a glimpse of her and her camp down in a little hollow as it had been before. I would stand there in the late afternoon sunlight, rocking and swaying with the truck, my hat brim cocked up front and back and my bare torso gleaming brown through the gray powder of rock dust, and over the rolling expanse of sage and short-grass, I would send her a message. Telling her to sit tight and take it easy. Telling her that I would work things out some way, and there wasn’t athing for her to worry about.

I knew that I
would
work them out, too. She was my responsibility, so I’d do it.

No, I didn’t know how.
How
was jumping the gun, and before I could get to it I had to know something else. At one time—only a short time before—I wouldn’t have bothered with it. But now, at last, I was thinking, looking at a problem from all sides before I jumped in and tried to solve it. Now I was being responsible. So I knew I had to know the
why
of things or I’d never live to get to the
how.

There was no way that I could see that the Long gang could pull their robbery. Rightly or wrongly, however, Longie believed that there was a way. But
if
there was, he himself had practically admitted that it would require no more than one or two of his men.

It seemed to me that he should have been glad of this. The fewer men required the easier the job. But he wasn’t glad. He was alarmed.
Why?

Longie seemed virtually convinced that Four Trey had deliberately misled him into bringing his entire gang for the robbery instead of the one or two that were needed.
Why?
What could Four Trey have gained by such a deception?

To move back a little bit, what had been Four Trey’s motive in acting as fingerman for the gang?
Why
had he wanted the robbery? Any cut he could get from it would be far less than he would make by working and gambling. So,
why…why,
when he never needed money…?

Well, yoú see? The answer to one question was the answer to several.

If Four Trey’s motive wasn’t money, as it obviously wasn’t, then it could only be one other thing. Revenge. That accounted for Longie’s suspicions, his alarm. Four Trey had gotten the whole gang here, because he meant to take revenge against them all. He had no faith in Texas justice, with the pardon-selling Parkers in power, so—

But wait a minute! Why did Four Trey have a grudge against everyone in the gang?
How could he have when he didn’t know who they were?
And, of course, he didn’t. No one did, outside the gang itself. He would know who they were when they all came together for the robbery or their getaway, but until then…And how would that change anything? To have a grudge against them, all of them, he would have had to know them beforehand. So, why, since that wasn’t possible…?

Night after night, I lay in my bunk and puzzled over the riddle. Probing its contradictory parts until I was worn out and fell asleep. Repeatedly coming up with an answer that was no answer.

Four Trey hadn’t been willing to let the law settle with the gang. He’d meant to do it himself, and there was only one way he could do that.

By killing them! Killing a minimum of a dozen men, practically all of them strangers to him!

It didn’t make sense…did it? Or if there was logic to it, if he did hate them that much, then why had he suddenly abandoned the plan—as he had to in dragging-up and leaving camp?

Or had he had to? Wasn’t that merely a necessary part of the plan?

The Longs had wanted to know why he’d brought them all here for a job when no more than two would be needed. He couldn’t tell them why, so he’d had to leave, and—

And…?

I didn’t know, but I knew I was coming close to knowing. The
why
of his grudge. The
why
of his killing men he didn’t know. The
why
of his apparent dropping of a plan he had been determined to carry out.

I was thinking,
really
thinking, for the first time in my life, and I could feel myself drawing closer to the answer. And finally I reached it—almost.

It was during my second week as head-shooter. I’d come in from work too dirty and sweaty for ordinary washing, so after supper I walked down to the Pecos for a bath. The river roughly paralleled the line for much of its distance, and it was only about a mile away at this point. I worked my way through the scrub-growth along the bank, then paused at its edge to look down into the stream bed.

In this season, the Pecos was more a series of pools than a river; ponds of various sizes, with only a narrow film of water running over the stretches of gravel and sand between them. Now, in the cool shade of evening, animals and birds were clustered around the pools, coming and going from them in a peaceful and orderly procession.

I saw a wolf, two coyotes, three of the big woodcats who considered the river their own happy home; more rabbits and quail and pheasant than I could count. Sometimes there was just a little teeth-snapping when a bathing bird wing-splashed water on a drinking animal. But it was just a warning, nothing more. This was the end of the day, and everyone had fought and fed enough, and now was the time of truce. Up and down river, as far as I could see, they stood drinking side by side—the natural enemies, so-called—and I watched and kind of wondered if there were any natural enemies, or whether there was ever any enemy anywhere but hunger.

I hated to disturb them, but I couldn’t stay there indefinitely, so I went on down the bank and began to bathe in the nearest pool. Some of the birds made a fuss about it, screeching and batting at me with their wings. The animals moved leisurely away to another watering place. Hardly looking at me after the first deceptively lazy glance, apparently sizing me up as a party to the general truce.

I still reckon it as the nicest compliment I’ve ever had.

When I had washed good, I sauntered naked up the sandy shore, letting the sun dry my body. It was nice to walk there, with all the life around me and none of it afraid, and I went further than I intended to. So at last, I saw it—something up against the shelving bank of the river. I hunkered down in front of it, my pulse beginning to pound with excitement.

Gray ashes. The remnants of a tiny fire. A recent one apparently, since the ashes were unlumped with dew. I sifted them through my hand and came up with something else. A tiny shred of wood shaving. And probing through the surrounding bushes, I found what it had come from.

A piece of board, the kind that boxes are made of. Just what kind I couldn’t say, since it had been pretty well shaved for fire.

I sniffed it, and I still wasn’t sure. There was a very faint odor of dynamite, but it was likely that it came from me.

I put the piece of wood back in the bushes and glanced around casually. Pecos River water was drinkable if you didn’t mind a few wiggle-tails. As for food, well, there was all that a man could want for the taking. He could live here forever, and as long as he kept his fire small and his eyes open, no one would know it.

I went back downstream to where I’d left my clothes. I dressed slowly, wondering what my next step should be, finally deciding that there was no next step to be taken here.

He didn’t want to be found. That being the case, it wasn’t likely that I could find him even if I tried, and there would have been no point to it, anyway. He was too determined. He wouldn’t have gone to these lengths if he hadn’t been dead-set on going ahead.

Yet—I went back up the riverbank and headed for camp—yet it wasn’t like him to do what he apparently intended to do. He just didn’t care enough, you know? He wouldn’t let himself care. And when a man’s like that, when he just doesn’t give a damn, how can he get sore enough to kill?