Yellow Mesquite (24 page)

“Alexander Calder?”

“Big red steel outfit. Well, I got me one not all that different and it didn’t cost me diddley squat.”

Harley didn’t say so, but a pump-jack had more in common with the rocketing power of a Mark Di Suvero construction than Calder’s big whimsical toys. He could see it in his mind’s eye, though, that pump-jack out there next to the swimming pool. That pool alone, sprawling around the yard in the shape of a cowboy boot, had offended Mavis. What would she think now, with an old red pump-jack dressing it up? She’d have a fit if she could see some of the things Whitehead had bought these last few months. For some reason Whitehead seemed to feel obligated to keep on buying art objects, even after Mavis’s death, and he didn’t seem to be enlisting the help of his advisers, either. Junky art was creeping over the house like a fungus.

Whitehead drained the last of the wine into his glass.

“There’s brandy,” Harley said.

“Yes,” said Sherylynne. “Let’s have some brandy.”

“Speaking of that political mess they call New Yark, come another three weeks, we’re gonna get that Barry Goldwater in the White House; then we gonna start getting this country back on its feet again.”

“I thought you were a Lyndon Johnson man,” said Harley.

“That Lyndon, he done got too big for his britches, let that White House go to his head.”
 

“There’ll never be another president like Kennedy,” said Sherylynne.

Whitehead laughed. “All the women still think old JFK was the bee’s knees.”

“He did a lot for the arts,” Harley said.

“Art, fart,” Whitehead said dismissively. “This is a country we’re running, not a Sunday sewing circle.”

Harley gave him a sharp look.
 

“You can’t run a country on art. I don’t know why you don’t give up that useless business, anyhow.”

“Useless? You’ve got some high-priced art on your own walls. You think it’s useless, I’ll take it.”

“That was Mavis’s doing. The woman had an eye for investment; I’ll say that.”

“She knew what was good.”

“This piddlin’ with art, that’s for wimmin and faggits. You need to get in the real world, boy.”

Harley felt his blood pressure jump. “You think
you
live in the real world? You can have it.”

Whitehead leaned forward, glaring. “Boy, I got more money in my pocket right now than you’ll ever make in a lifetime!”

“That’s right,” Harley said, hearing himself, losing it. “You’re some kind of moneymaking idiot savant! That’s the only part of your lizard brain that ever developed.”
 

Sherylynne slammed the table with her hand. “Harley Jay!”
 

Whitehead’s chair scraped back as he got to his feet. His complexion had turned the color of raw liver. “
You
callin’
me
a idiot? You, a ne’er-do-well dreamer that don’t have two nickels to rub together?” Whitehead jabbed a finger toward the painting Harley had been working on. “You, who thinks that gobbledygook on the wall there is art?”

Harley leaped to his feet, glaring at Whitehead. “You wouldn’t know art if it slapped you cross-eyed!”

“I know that ain’t art! I know that!
Yeller Mesquite
? Batshit!
 
Ain’t nobody on God’s green earth ever seen a yeller mesquite!”

Harley wheeled around, stormed out through the living room,
 
jerked the front door open, and plowed out into the yard.

Sherylynne rushed out after him. “Harley Jay! Are you crazy?”

He climbed into the Chevy, slammed the door shut, backed out onto the road and drove away, spinning gravel from under the tires.
 

In twenty minutes he arrived at the lease, mostly on autopilot, mentally replaying the scene with Whitehead. He pulled off onto one of the caliche roads and eased along a hundred yards to the pump-jack at the end. He stopped and sat, still trembling. He and Whitehead had had run-ins before, but they had never got to the point of name-calling. Harley wondered if losing Mavis had anything to do with Whitehead’s behavior. He had always made Harley feel second-rate, but he was worse since Mavis died.
 

Harley opened the door and got out. The pump-jacks, their engines putt-putting, nodded up and down across the plains, the smell of crude heavy on the thin night air. He wandered a short distance into the scruffy wilderness, then stopped and studied the night sky. A half-moon rode low in the southwest; the Milky Way trailed a swath of glitter overhead from horizon to horizon, shimmering, as if falling through space in slow motion.
 

The rocks and brush, the buffalo grass, thistle, and prickly pear were vividly clear in the spectral light. A whippoorwill cried out in the distance. Scrub mesquite and sagebrush played tricks on his mind in the eerie light. He was torn between keeping one eye on the night sky and one on the ground for rattlesnakes.

He stopped abruptly. A chill swept through him as an earthbound shadow slipped through the brush ahead.
 

The wolf.
 

He wanted to turn tail and run like hell… But common sense told him there was no way he could ever outrun a wolf. And besides, wolves were not known for attacking people—according to the book, anyway. Unless they were rabid. Or starved.
 

The wolf stepped into the open not fifty yards away and stood, head high, looking at him. Harley hunkered down, squatting on his heels. His heart pounded. He tried not to look at the wolf in a direct, confrontational way, but watched from his peripheral vision. The wolf hopped a few steps to one side, then a few steps to the other, watching him in turn.
 

It was odd that the wolf was alone. Wolves usually ran in packs, or at least in pairs. Maybe this one was flawed in some way, banished from the group, prowling alone the vast shadowland of the lunar night. The wolf had about it an otherworldly presence, and Harley understood why Native Americans assigned to them powers of the supernatural. He could imagine a spirit from the other side presenting itself to him in the form of this wolf. Uncle Jay, or Mavis; this wolf, bold and fearless and mysterious.
Audacious
was the word the encyclopedia used, though that reminded Harley more of Sidney than Uncle Jay or Mavis. With a jolt, he felt certain that Sidney was dead. He paused, paralyzed by the mysteries of existence. He took a deep breath, told himself he was strung out, his imagination running amok.
 

Then, slowly, released of fear, he knelt and made a long, low howling sound: “Ay-oooooooooooo.”
 

The wolf pricked up its ears. It loped off some distance, then stopped, watching him.
 

“Ay-oooooooooo,” Harley howled. The sound rose and fell across the long, night-shadowed country.
 

The wolf bolted.
 

Harley leaped to his feet. “Ay-oooooooooo.”
 

The wolf stopped. It looked at Harley. It turned again and raced into the night, a specter flickering through the scrub, disappearing into the far boundaries of his vision. The wolf, little more than a glimmer of gray streaking through the brush, circled and returned. It stopped, poised again in the clearing. Watching him. Head high.
 

“Ay-ooooooooo,” Harley howled.
 

The wolf dashed off to one side and stopped.
 

Harley ran to the opposite side and stopped as well.
 

The wolf darted back across the clearing in the direction it had come.
 

Harley ran parallel with the wolf, his own night shadow chasing through the scrub.

Chapter 27

Breakaway

H
E DROVE INTO
the yard just before daybreak. The pickup was gone. He entered the darkened house and turned on the light. Dirty dishes were still on the table from the night before, fish bones on the plates, vegetable scraps jelled in their own sauce. But Sherylynne’s and Leah’s clothes were still in the closet and there was no note, so it was with a sigh of relief that he concluded they weren’t
that
gone.
 

He put coffee on and ran hot water in the sink, scraped out the dishes and put them in to soak. After wiping down the table and countertop, he made himself a fried-egg sandwich on toast with a slice of sweet onion and took it with the coffeepot out to the backyard.

Daylight broke on a cloudless sky. He sat in one of the aluminum lawn chairs, drank the coffee and ate the sandwich. The Odessa skyline—a thin gray ribbon—was visible beyond a distant scattering of trailer houses and oilfield equipment. A few pump-jacks nodded in the middle distance.

He was on a second cup of coffee when he saw the pickup coming down the graveled road, trailing a cloud of caliche dust. The truck slowed, the dust catching up and drifting past as the truck turned in. Then he couldn’t see because of the house. He heard the engine go dead and the truck door opened and banged shut. Sherylynne came straight through the house and out the back with Leah on her arm. She let the screen door slam, then stopped, looking at him, an air of indecision weighed with hostility. He took a sip of coffee.

“Where did you go last night?” she demanded. Leah bounced on her arm and made happy noises at him.
 

“Out.”

Sherylynne shifted Leah to her other arm and cleared her throat. “Out where?”

He nodded toward the empty distance. “Out there.”
 

She glanced across the plains, then back, flushed beneath her freckles.
 

“On the lease,” he added. After the wolf disappeared, he had climbed into the backseat of the old Chevy and slept a bit.

“Harley, I’m worried about you, acting out like you did last night.”

“I couldn’t take it any more.
 
Every time I turn around, there he is, bad-mouthing me, telling me I’m a worthless ne’er-do-well, while he’s mister big-shot moneybags.”

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have him over so much.”

He set his empty cup on the iron table alongside his chair, then went over and took Leah. She rocked in his arms, slobbered her little mouth on his face, making her own brand of cheerful conversation. “Da-da,” she said suddenly. “Da-da.”
 

Harley stopped in surprised. “Did you hear that?” He knew, of course, that she would be learning to talk, but “Da-da…” Tears came to his eyes.

Sherylynne had paused too, startled. “Well, I’ll be…”
 

“Da-da,” Harley repeated. “The kid’s a genius!”

He circled his finger over her belly button. “Here comes a widdle-biddy-buzzy-bee. Bzzzzz.” She giggled and grabbed at his hand.

Sherylynne studied him for what seemed like a full minute. “Harley,” she said finally, “we have a little money, not as much as you’d hoped, but enough to get you enrolled in school. I think you should go on to New York.”

He paused in surprise.

“You could make a go of it up there by yourself,” she said.

“You mean, leave you and Leah here?”
 

“Just till you get settled. Then you can send for us.”

“Sherylynne, you know I won’t do that.”

“I talked it up to Wendell last night. He said me’n Leah could stay here till you get settled. He even said you could have your job back if it didn’t work out.”

“He said that?”

She managed a thin smile. “He doesn’t think you’ll last two weeks.”

“I wouldn’t go back to work for him if he had the only job in ten thousand miles.”

“Harley Jay, he’s just trying to be nice.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t need him
being nice
. I’ve told you that.”

“I’m hoping you’ll get back to being your old self after a little while in New York.”

He realized that, like Whitehead, she too thought he’d soon fizzle in New York. Nevertheless, he felt a little glow of excitement at the thought of it. He looked at Sherylynne again, his whole being warming with love and appreciation. And guilt, too. Life couldn’t be easy for her out here in the middle of nowhere, chasing around after a baby all day. He would make a go of it—for her if nothing else.
 

She made a small, forlorn smile. “Well, you look awfully cheerful all of a sudden.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a stick in the mud. ”

“You weren’t so glum when Mavis was alive.”

“When I went to see her in the hospital, she said she was sorry she helped keep me here. She said,
 
‘Don’t you listen to anybody. Just go.’”

Sherylynne tilted a look at him, a surprised, mildly stricken expression. “She said that?”

“Her exact words.”

“Well, that’s kinda odd. I thought she was my friend, too.”

“No, no. She wasn’t blaming you. She said it was her fault I hadn’t already gone.”

“What in the world made her say that?”

“She didn’t want us to leave. After Buddy blew himself up, she was lonely. She tried to make us into her own kids. We both know that. You said it yourself.”

“You, she did. Mavis would’ve treated you like a son if you’d’ve let her. She really wanted you to have that car.”

“That’s not the point.”

“She really did say for you to go ahead to New York?”

“Her very words.”

Sherylynne took in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Well, you’re never going to be satisfied if you don’t.”

He said nothing.
 

Leah was beginning to be cross. He switched arms and cradled her and rocked gently back and forth. He already missed her and Sherylynne, and he hadn’t even left. But this was it. He was really going.

Sherylynne picked up the empty coffeepot and his cup and took everything inside. After a moment she came and stood behind the screen door. “So, where were you last night, really?”

“I told you. Out on the lease.”

“All night? All by yourself? What in the world were you doing?”

Harley grinned. “Chasing around with Sidney, howling at the moon.”

Sherylynne gazed a long moment through the screen, a faint bemused smile. “See there? You are. Crazier by the day.” She said it like it was a joke she didn’t quite get.