South of Heaven (2 page)

T
hey tell me that things haven’t changed much in Far West Texas in the last forty years. It was a wild and lonely land to begin with; it had been so since the world was young. And when man had gotten what he could from it, it went back to the wildness and loneliness. Or so I’m told, at least. I can’t say, of my own knowledge, having had no reason to go back that way, and maybe a few for not going back. So all I can tell you is what it was like that morning some forty years ago, when I was twenty-one or thereabouts.

The town was named after a place in Russia, as many towns in West and Far West Texas are. The geologists discovered that they were all part of the Permian Basin, which the drillers had first tapped in Russia, so they were given Russian names. Or sometimes Persian—like Iran—since its underlying rock structure was also Permian Basin.

It, the town, wasn’t like any other town you ever saw. There was no pattern to it. The streets, if you could call them streets, ran every whichway. The buildings—wooden, unpainted, wobbly-looking from the unceasing wind—seemed to have been dropped down wherever their builders took a notion. There’d be two or three huddled together in a row, kind of leaning into each other for support. Then, maybe a couple of hundred yards away, there’d be another building and, sitting cater-cornered to it by fifty or sixty feet, a half-dozen more.

All in all, the town probably covered a couple of square miles, with perhaps a hundred buildings—cot-houses, stores, restaurants, barbershops and so on. All but three of the businesses—a general store, a restaurant and a garage—were closed down now. Many of them would go back into operation with the first payday on the pipeline, and for as long as the camp remained close to town. But right now it was as desolate a place as you’d ever see.

The wind was blowing as it always did—soughing and whining like a weary giant. Even early in the morning and with everything dew-wet, dust devils were dancing across the prairie, marching up and down the crazy-quilt streets like long lines of dirty clothes. It was very quiet, so quiet that seemingly you could have heard a sage hen drop an egg in her nest. And then way off to the southeast, coming from the direction of Matacora, the county seat, I heard the sound of a car.

It was coming on fast, and the racket told me what it was—a T-Ford with a patent gearshift and a high-speed head. You saw quite a few of them in the oilfields in the days before the Model-A and the V-8. By the time I was passing the first empty buildings, it was right behind me.

It roared past, almost hiding me and it in its dust. Then, the brakes slammed on and it skidded, ploughing up still more dust, and it backed up to where I was and stopped.

There was a big star painted on its side. The man who climbed over the door and came toward me was also wearing a star—a deputy sheriff’s badge.

He was one of those square-built guys, with practically no neck and not much more forehead. His name was Bud Lassen, and I’d seen him and others like him in quite a few places out here, wherever there was a large influx of transient labor. It may sound melodramatic to call them hired guns, but that’s what they were.

The local authorities weren’t set up to handle large groups of men. Anyway, the locals were usually pretty nice people, and they didn’t want to dirty up their reputations. So men like Bud Lassen were deputized for a few weeks or months, and they did whatever was necessary and a lot more besides. Because they
liked
giving people a hard time. They liked having the whip hand over men who were usually too overworked and underfed to strike back.

Lassen put himself in front of me, one hand on the butt of his forty-five, the thumb of the other looped through his gun belt. He looked me over, hard-eyed, from head to foot, teetering back and forth on the heels of his boots.

At last, he said, “What’s your name, bo?”

“You know my name, Bud,” I said, acting a lot braver than I felt. “You sure as heck ought to know it, anyway.”

“Don’t be smart with me, punk!”

“The Oklahoma Construction Company,” I said. “A high-line job out of Odessa. You tried to shake me and Four Trey Whitey down. Guess you were too dumb to know that Four Trey wouldn’t have operated without talking things over with the sheriff.”

He stared at me, the red spreading down his bull neck and up into his thick, pock-marked face. He nodded very slowly, as much as to say he remembered me all right. Which he certainly should have since I’d helped to get him run out of Odessa.

“Tommy Burwell,” he said. “You sweatin’ the line, Tommy?”

I said, sure. I was waiting for the line to open. “What else would I be doing out here?”

“Then pass the word, Tommy. Tell your junglebird buddies I’ll just be waitin’ for ’em to start some trouble in town. Tell ’em the first bastard that pulls anything will get his skull parted.”

“Tell them yourself,” I said. “There’s six hundred of ’em jungled-up along the creek bank, and I know they’d be tickled to death to see a nice guy like you.”

“And here’s some more news for you,” he went on, as though he hadn’t heard me. “I’m singing on with the line in a few days—special guard. And what I said about startin’ trouble goes double for then.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “You won’t be wearing a badge.”

His eyes flickered. I weaved and tried to step back. But his gun was already out of its holster, upraised to slam me on the side of the head. I threw my hands up to protect myself. He laughed with a grunting sound, and the gun barrel whipped into my guts.

I went down on my knees, doubled over. By the time I could straighten up, he was clear over the other side of town, stopping in front of the general store and post office.

I managed to get to my feet. I patted and rubbed the soreness a little and then I went on toward the Greek restaurant.

I’d taken a lot more than a punch in the stomach before and I reckoned I probably would again. So I wasn’t particularly upset by what had happened or frightened by the possibility of something worse. I didn’t have enough imagination to be scared, I suppose. Enough imagination or experience. Young people just can’t believe that they’re ever going to die—everyone else is, but not them. They can’t believe that they won’t survive anything that’s thrown at them.

When you’re twenty-one, what you believe is that somehow you’re going to be a famous ballplayer or lawyer or writer or something that will make you a million dollars, and that you’ll marry a beautiful wife and live in a beautiful house, and, well, never mind. And never mind how you’re going to do it. You just are, and that’s that.

Still, a hard crack with a gun barrel can have a sobering effect even on a twenty-one-year-old, and mine had taken quite a little of the perkiness out of me. I took a long look at myself, trudging along in the dust, with my hat brim turned up front and back and my belly burning with before-breakfast booze. And the picture wasn’t a nice one at all. There was nothing romantic or dashing about it. I was a drifter, a day laborer, a tinhorn gambler—a man wasting his life in a wasteland. That’s what I was now. That’s what I’d be in another twenty-one years if I lived that long, unless I started changing my ways fast.

I told myself that I would. The telling made me feel better, sort of removing the need, you know, to actually do anything.

I began to whistle, planning what I’d have for breakfast, planning how I’d spend my five dollars. Because, of course, I was going to blow it. That was what money was for, and there was always more where the first came from. Always and always.

There is no end to always when you’re twenty-one.

I began to walk in time with my whistling. Sort of marching in time to it. Marching onward and upward to some vague but lofty goal. Or so I saw myself that long-ago morning.

What I was actually heading into was the big middle of the biggest mess of my thoroughly messed-up life.

I
suppose most of us aim a lot higher than the place we actually hit. Most of us mean to do better than we wind up doing. I know I did, anyway. In the beginning, that is.

I worked hard in school and I got better than good grades. The teachers at the consolidated high school in my native Oklahoma had pointed me toward college and put out feelers for scholarships. My grandparents—my only living kin—had done everything they could to help me, wanting for me what they had never had for themselves. Everyone was pulling for me, and I was doing plenty of pulling on my own. According to the high school yearbook, I was the student most likely to succeed. And no one could have convinced anyone that I wasn’t.

Then, when I was just short of sixteen, my grandparents blew themselves up, and everything else seemed to blow up right along with them.

My grandma and grandpa, God bless them, sharecropped sixty acres of the world’s sorriest land. Stab a stick down anywhere, and you’d hit rock after about eighteen inches. They needed a new privy, and, since you couldn’t dig in the rock, grandpa got half a box of dyna from the landlord’s store. He was used to working with it; so was I and so was grandma. You live on a rocky farm long enough and you don’t think much more of a stick of dynamite than you do of a stick of candy.

I was about a half mile away, coming home from school, when I heard the explosion. And even that far away I could hear grandma scream. It seemed like I ran forever before I got to where she and grandpa were; and by then—well, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to remember what they looked like. Because what it was, wasn’t people.

I’m not sure how it happened. But I suppose a charge misfired on them. They waited a while, making sure that it wasn’t going to explode. Then, they started to put a new cap and fuse on it. And then, then just when they were bending over it…

Don’t tell me Dyna’s a good girl, that it isn’t dangerous. I know better.

As I say, I was just short of sixteen at the time of the accident; in another month, I’d have graduated from high school. But I didn’t wait around to do it. I knew what happened to sixteen-year-olds who didn’t have kinfolk, and I didn’t want any part of it.

I went down and hid in the weeds along the railroad right-of-way. I caught the first freight train that was traveling slow enough to catch and I kept right on going.

The wheat harvest all the way to Canada. The stoop crops in California. The apples in Washington and Oregon. The potatoes in Nebraska and Idaho and Colorado. And then the oil fields and the big construction jobs through the Midwest and West and Far West. I’d made plenty of money to finish my education—college and anything else I wanted. I’d made plenty, and peed it all off.

A couple of years ago, Four Trey Whitey and I had worked almost six months steady, and, what with gambling, I came off the job with around six thousand dollars. And the Lord only knows how much Whitey had. So we went into high livin’ Dallas and got a suite at the biggest hotel in town, and then we got drunk. And stayed that way.

Just booze—no women. Whitey was impotent, I think, so it wouldn’t have been polite for me to suggest women. I probably wouldn’t have, anyway, since I’d been raised a strict Baptist, and when you drink like we did you don’t think much about sex.

At the end of the month we were both broke, and I was having the d.t.’s. But Four Trey managed to get me into the county hospital alcoholic ward before he left town. That was his way; nice and considerate up to a point, but not taking anyone to raise. He’d work with you or go on a party with you, but he was a loner—a guy who didn’t want anyone hanging on him. And he could get awfully damned sharp if you got in his way. So.…

So here I was again, trudging the red dust of another God-forsaken town, starting out on another job in the wilderness. And telling myself that this time it would be different, that I would be different.

I was walking past the deserted hotel when I heard the sound of voices, sort of mumbling and singing, and I stooped down and looked under the porch. Three boes were under it, sprawled around a big old-fashioned chamber pot and sipping from its contents.

I figured, correctly, that they’d stolen the pot out of the hotel and what they had in it was anti-freeze mixed with water from the Pecos. But I called to them, kidding.

“You boys getting pretty hard up drinking pee, aren’t you?”

They whooped and hollered. “Best you ever tasted, Tommy. Come an’ join us.”

I said thanks, but I guessed not. “Bud Lassen’s in town. Maybe you’d better play it kind of low.”

They all said what Bud Lassen could do to himself, and what they’d do to him. “Hey, listen, Tommy. I got a new joke about pipeliners.”

It wasn’t new. I’d probably heard it a hundred times—a kind of dirty dialect joke. But I listened to humor them:

“Mammy, mammy! Big bunch o’ pipeliners comin’!”

“Hush yo’ mouf, gal! Them pipeliners screws each other an’ does their own washing.”

“That’s rich,” I said. “Very funny. Well, you boys be good.”

I hurried on before they could stop me, and their singing trailed down the street.

An old Dodge panel truck was parked a couple of doors down from the Greek’s restaurant. A panel truck fixed up like a housecar, with windows cut into the sides and the top knocked out and hooped over with canvas to make it higher. The rear tire was flat, and a kid in jeans and jumper and a stocking cap was trying to pry it off the rim. He couldn’t do it, because he hadn’t let all the air out of it. Which made him a pretty dumb kid in my book.

I spoke to him, pointing out what he had to do. But he was hunkered down with his back to me, and his stocking cap apparently kept him from hearing. So I put my foot out and toed him in the butt.

There was a wild shriek. He rose straight up in the air, and his stocking cap flew off, and—and it wasn’t a he. It was a girl.

And was she ever mad! And was she ever pretty! And was she ever built!