The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (15 page)

“You don’t hold political meetings in a bunkhouse. The people listening to you think Karl Marx has a brother named Harpo.”

He worked on his cigarette until he finally got it rolled and licked down and twisted on both ends. He lit it with a paper match and flicked the blackened match out the door and watched the country go by. I wanted to push him out the door.

“What do those hills put you in mind of?” he asked.

“Big piles of dirt and rock and dry grass that I wish would catch on fire.”

“It’s beautiful. Except there’s something out here that wants to kill you.”

“Like what?”

“It.”

“What’s
it
?”

“Everything,” he said. He picked up his guitar and formed an E chord and drew his thumb across the strings. “Sheridan coming up. Listen to that whistle blow.”

We got hired with a bunch of Mexican wets on a street corner not far from the old cattle pens north of town and went to work for a feed grower and horse breeder who was also a cowboy actor out in Hollywood and went by the name of Clint Wakefield. Except Wakefield didn’t really run the ranch. The straw boss did; he was a southerner like us by the name of Tyler Keats. He’d been a bull rider on the circuit, until he got overly ambitious one night and tied himself down with a suicide wrap and got all his sticks broken. You could hear Tyler creak when he walked, which is not to say he was lacking in smarts. It took special talents to be a straw boss in those days; the straw boss had to make a bunch of misfits who hated authority do what he said without turning them into enemies with lots of ways of getting even. Think of an open gate and dry lightning at nightfall and three hundred head of Herefords highballing for Dixie through somebody’s wheat field.

Our third week on the job the hay baler starting clanking like a Coca-Cola bottle in a garbage disposal unit. Without anybody telling him, Buddy hung his hat and shirt on a cottonwood branch and climbed under the baler with a monkey wrench and went to work.

Ten minutes later Buddy crawled back out, a big grin on his face, the baler as good as new. Tyler kept studying Buddy the way a cautious man does when somebody smarter than he is shows up in the workplace. Buddy was putting his shirt back on, his skin as tan and smooth as river clay. Tyler was looking at the scar that ran from Buddy’s armpit to his kidney, like a long strip of welted rubber. “Was you in Korea?” Tyler said.

“This scar? Got it up at Calgary, one second from the buzzer and seven seconds after being fool enough to climb on a cross-wired bull by the name of Red Whisky.”

“You got bull-hooked?”

“Hooked, sunfished till I was split up the middle, stirrup-drug, stove-in, flung into the boards, and kicked twice in the head when I fell down in the chute.”

“Mr. Wakefield needs six colts green broke. They’ve never been on a lunge line. You’ll have to start from scratch.”

“I like bucking bales just fine,” Buddy said.

Tyler took a folded circular from his back pocket and fitted on his spectacles and tilted it away from the sunlight’s glare. “You two boys walk with me into the shade. I cain’t hardly read out here in the bright,” he said.

I could feel my stomach churning. We followed him to the dry creek bed where two big cottonwoods were growing out of the bank, lint blowing off the limbs like dandelions powdering. The breeze was warm, the kind that made you want to go to sleep and not think about all the trouble that was always waiting for you over the horizon. The circular was ruffling in Tyler’s hand. “This come in the mail yesterday,” he said. “There’s a drawing of a man named Robert James Elgin on here. The drawing looks a whole lot like you.”

“I go by ‘Buddy,’ and I don’t think that’s my likeness at all.”

“Glad you told me that, because this circular says ‘Buddy’ is the alias of this fellow Robert James Elgin. His traveling companion is named R. B. Ruger. It says here these two fellows are organizers for a Communist union.”

“I cain’t necessarily say I was ever a Communist, Tyler, but I can say without equivocation that I have always been in the red,” Buddy said.

Tyler glanced up at the cottonwood leaves fluttering against the sky, his eyelids jittering. “Equivocation, huh? That’s a mouthful. Here’s what’s
not
on the circular. I don’t care if you guys are from Mars as long as y’all do your job. Right now your job is green breaking them horses. Is your friend any good at it?”

“I’m real good at it,” I said.

“Nobody asked you,” Tyler said.

I always said I never had to seek humility; it always found me.

“What’s in it for us?” Buddy asked.

“Two dollars more a day than what y’all are making now. You can have your own room up at the barn. You don’t smoke in or near the building and you don’t come back drunk from town. You muck the stalls and sweep the floor every day and you eat in the bunkhouse.”

Buddy waited on me to say something, but I didn’t. I liked Wyoming and figured Tyler was more bark than bite and not a bad guy to work for; also, a two-dollar daily wage increase in those days wasn’t something you were casual about. But I didn’t like what was on that circular. I wasn’t a Communist and neither was Buddy. “What are you going to do if we turn you down?” I said.

“Not a thing. But I ain’t Mr. Wakefield. Communists are the stink on shit in Hollywood, in case you haven’t heard.”

Buddy picked a leaf off the cottonwood and bit a piece out of it and spat it off the tip of his tongue. “We’ll move in this evening,” he said. “Because I didn’t get this scar in Korea doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. The only Communists I ever knew were shooting at me. You can tell that to Mr. Wakefield or anybody else who wants to know.”

But Tyler had already gotten what he wanted and wasn’t listening. “One other thing: the trainer I just run off brought a woman back from town,” he said. “The only man who gets to bump uglies on this ranch is Mr. Wakefield.”

“Wish I could be a Hollywood cowboy,” Buddy said.

“I was at Kasserine Pass, son,” Tyler said. “Don’t smart-mouth me.”

We moved into the room at the end of the stalls in the barn. Tucked into the corner of the mirror above the sink was a business card with Clint Wakefield’s name on it. Buddy looked at it and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

“What’d you do that for?” I asked.

“I never had a souvenir from a famous person.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought it was a bad omen.

By midsummer the first shaft of morning sunlight in West Texas can be like a wet switch whipped across your skin. A sunrise in Wyoming was never like that. The light was soft and filtered inside the barn where we slept, the air cool and smelling of sage and wood smoke and bacon frying in the cookhouse. You could get lost in the great blue immensity of the dawn and forget there was any such thing as evil or that someplace down the road you had to die. I’d skim the dust and bits of hay off the horse tank and unhook the chain on the windmill and step back when the blades rattled to life and water gushed out of the pipe as cold as melt off a glacier. There was a string of pink mesas in the east, and sometimes above them I could see electricity forking out of a thunderhead and striking the earth, like tiny gold wires, and I’d wonder if Indian spirits still lived out there on the edge of the white man’s world.

I didn’t want to ever leave the ranch owned by the cowboy actor. But whenever I got a feeling like that about a place or a situation or the people around me, I’d get scared, because every time I loved something I knew I was fixing to lose it. I saw my dog snatched up by the tail of a tornado. I was in dust storms that sounded like locomotive engines grinding across the hardpan; I saw the sky turn black at noon while people all over town nailed wet burlap over their windows. I saw baptized Christians burn colored people out of a town in Oklahoma for no reason.

I saw a kid take off from a road gang outside Sugar Land Pen and run barefoot along the train track and catch a flatcar on the fly and hang on the rods all the way to Beaumont, the tracks and gravel and stink of creosote whizzing by 18 inches from his face.

I pretended to Buddy I didn’t know what “it” was, and I guess that made me a hypocrite. The truth was, people like us didn’t belong anywhere, and “it” was out there waiting for us.

On a July evening in Sheridan the sky could be as green as the ocean, the saloon windows lit with Grain Belt neon signs, the voice of Kitty Wells singing from the Wurlitzer “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

The War Bonnet was in the middle of the block, right by the town square, and had a long footrailed bar and a dance floor and card tables and an elevated bandstand and Christmas decorations that never came down. There was also a steak-and-spuds café in front where a mulatto girl worked a two-chair shoeshine stand by herself and never lacked for customers. She called herself Bernadine, and if you asked her what her last name was, she’d reply, “Who says I got one?”

She was light-colored and had hair that was jet black and gold on the tips and she wore it in a big Afro that seemed to sparkle when she went to work on your feet. She wore big hoop earrings and oversized Levi’s and Roman sandals and snap-button shirts printed with flowers, and when she got busy she was a flat-out pleasure to watch. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was and how much I admired the way she carried herself; I wanted to tell her I understood what it was like to be different and on your own and clinging to the ragged edges of just getting by. Saying those kinds of things to a beautiful girl was not my strong suit.

Our second Saturday night in Sheridan I got up my courage and said, “What time you get off, Miss Bernadine?”

“Late,” she said.

She touched my boot to tell me she was finished.

“That’s Clint Wakefield at the bar. I break horses for him,” I said.

She gazed through the swinging doors that gave onto the saloon. In the background Bob Wills’s orchestra was playing “Faded Love” on the jukebox.

“I can introduce you if you want,” I said.

“He’s gonna put me in the movies?”

“Yeah, that could happen. You’d have to ask him, though. He doesn’t confide in me about everything.”

“Watch yourself getting down, cowboy,” she said.

I not only felt my cheeks flaming, I felt ashamed all the way through the bottoms of my feet. The truth was I’d hardly exchanged five words with Clint Wakefield. I wasn’t even sure he knew I existed. Most of the time he had one expression, a big grin. Actors train themselves never to blink. Their eyelids are stitched to their foreheads so they can stare into your face until you swallow and look away and feel like spit on the sidewalk. If you put those lidless blue eyes together with a big grin, you’ve pretty much got Clint Wakefield. He was leaning against the bar, wearing a white silk shirt embroidered with roses, his striped Western-cut britches hitched way up on his hips, his gold curls hanging from under a felt hat that was as white as Christmas snow. His wife was sitting at a table by herself. She was stone deaf and always had a startled look on her face. A couple of the guys in the bunkhouse said the ranch belonged to her and that Mr. Wakefield married her before his career took off. They also said he told dirty jokes in front of her, and the ranch hands had to choose between laughing and being disrespectful to her or offending him.

“Make any headway out there?” he asked.

“Sir?” I said.

“If I needed to change my luck, she’s the one I’d do it with.”

I could feel my throat drying up, a vein tightening in my temple. I looked through the window at the greenness of the sky and wanted to be out on the elevated sidewalk, the breeze on my face, the lighthearted noises of the street in my ears. “I’m not rightly sure what you mean.”

“That’s my restored 1946 Ford woody out there. Here’s the keys. Take the shoeshine gal for a spin. Bring her out to the ranch if you like.”

“Tyler said no female visitors.”

“Tyler’s a good man but a prude at heart. Your last name is Ruger? Like the gun?”

I tried to look back into his eyes without blinking, but I couldn’t. “I didn’t realize you knew my name.”

“You carry your gun with you?”

“I’m just a guy who bucks bales and stays broke most of the time, Mr. Clint.”

“I was watching you in the corral yesterday. You were working a filly on the lunge line. You never used the whip.”

“You do it right, you don’t need one.”

He dropped the car keys in my shirt pocket. “I can always tell a pro,” he said. “Bring your girlfriend on out and pay Tyler no mind. I think he pissed most of his brains in the toilet a long time ago.”

I wished I’d given Mr. Wakefield back his keys and caught a ride to the ranch with the Mexicans, like Buddy did. At 2 A.M. I was drinking coffee at the counter in the café and watching Bernadine put away her rags and shoe polish and brushes and lock the drawers on her stand.

“Mr. Wakefield let me borrow his car. I think he used it in a movie,” I said. “It’s got a Merc engine in it that’s all chrome.”

“You’re saying you want to take me home?”

“Maybe we could go out on the Powder River. The Indians say there’s fish under the banks that don’t have eyes.”

“I can’t wait to see that.”

“Mr. Wakefield said we could go out to the ranch if you like.”

“Is this your pick-up line?”

I scratched the side of my face. “I thought we’d get some bread and throw it along the edge of the current to see if the story about those blind fish is true. Fish have a strong sense of smell. Even if they’re blind.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a mess?”

“Actually, quite a few people have.”

She arched her neck and massaged a muscle, her eyes closed, her hair glistening as bright as dew on blackberries. “What part of the South you from, hon?”

“Who says that’s where I’m from?”

“I thought that peckerwood accent might be a clue.”

“The West and the South are not the same thing. I happen to be from Dalhart, Texas. That’s where wind was invented.”

Her eyes smiled at me. The owner had just turned off the beer signs in the windows and you could see Mr. Wakefield’s station wagon parked at the curb, the wood panels gleaming, the maroon paint job on the fenders and the boot for the spare tire hand-waxed and rippling with light under the streetlamp. “How fast can it go?” she said.