The Longest Road (24 page)

“Do you have a Truck-Inn here, Mr. Redwine?” Buddy asked hopefully.

“Too much competition.” The man grinned at Buddy's remembering to use the name Way had coined. “This has been a big cattle and timber center ever since the railroad came through in the eighties. I like to find a place where there's plenty of traffic and not much choice for travelers. Put good food, good beds, and gas and repair service in one place and you can make a mint without being fancy the way you'd have to here.”

They got the morning's flat tires patched at a gas station, where they used the rest rooms and got soft drinks. Laurie wished mightily to see the museum but she was resolved not to ask Mr. Redwine for any favors. If he knew you wanted something, she was sure he'd use that to get you to do things, like a dog does tricks for a bone. She wasn't going to be his dog. That was why she hadn't come right out and asked him what he'd meant about her becoming a musician.

The sights to the left and the right quickly made her forget her disappointment. Cinder cones; a gigantic gash in sandstone that was a solid rainbow of shadings from yellow to a brownish red the color of dried blood; far to the south the rim of what Mr. Redwine called Meteor Crater. Laurie shuddered at the notion of what sounded like a giant cannonball from space plunging into the earth with such force. She preferred to look the other way, where clouds and the slanting afternoon sun deepened every shade of crimson, violet, gold, and amethyst on distant buttes.

La Posada, the Winslow Harvey House, was a handsome Spanish-style building that awed Laurie, and she longed for just a peek inside. They passed it to eat at a roadside diner while the afternoon's flats were being patched.

“Can I buy your sandwich, Mr. Redwine?” Way asked.

Redwine gave him a tough glance from those cat's eyes. “No need,” he said curtly, but he didn't offer to buy their sandwiches, either. “Make it snappy. Want to get to Holbrook before dark.”

They got stuck twice in the sand of the Little Colorado River crossing and had to dig out to the tune of Mr. Redwine's cussing. As they neared Holbrook, the setting sun dyed sandstone ledges and mesas every hue of vermilion and purple.

“You can get the background painted before supper, Wayburn.” Mr. Redwine pulled in behind a gas station–café and nodded at the sign above the pumps. “Then you can finish up before noon.”

Way stared at the mesas, hazed purple now, fading into the distance. “Guess there's no rush. We're not fixed for campin' out in this high country. More cars are headin' for Californy than the other way. Might take us a while to hitch a ride, there bein' the three of us.”

“Asking for a free night in a cabin?”

“Reckon I know better'n that. We'll pay.”

Laurie tugged at his sleeve. “Way! We can't afford—”

“Sure we can,” he promised jauntily. “Bound to be some more painting jobs around town.” He cocked a bland smile at his employer. “Why, I bet just as soon as that other gas station–café sees your new sign, Mr. Redwine, they're goin' to want one, too. Not to mention that tourist court on the edge of town.”

“Trying to squeeze me?” growled Redwine.

“Tryin' to look out for my family.”

The sun was down but Mr. Redwine's eyes caught light from somewhere and glowed pale orange. Way met his stare. After a long moment, Redwine shrugged. “We'll talk about it after you finish my sign, Wayburn. Dump your stuff in that last cabin and do the background coat before supper.”

Without looking back, he strode into the café. As soon as Way had gone to the garage, Laurie turned to her brother. “Buddy, if Mr. Redwine's going to act mean, we don't have to sing in his place. Let's get cleaned up and go see if that restaurant down the road won't let us sing and play for their customers.”

“They've got a big neon cowboy sign,” said Buddy. “I bet they'd like our Sierry Petes song.”

“I bet they will. Now hop in the tub and don't leave a ring.”

Laurie shook their overalls out the window to jar loose as much dust as possible and got out clean shirts. When they stopped at the garage to tell Way where they were going, he frowned. “Why don't you go ahead and have your supper, kids? You must be plumb wore out. No need to go about this singin' like it was a have-to rain-or-shine job.”

“How long will this take you, Way?” asked Laurie.

He was still scrubbing dirt and flaking paint off the metal. “Oh, maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

“We'll come back then and we'll eat together.”

They cut across the highway. The red neon cowboy topped a bucking bronco on top of the whitewashed adobe building. A buzz of laughter and voices grew almost deafening as Laurie pushed open the door. The room was full of tables and the tables were full of people. Three waitresses hurried in and out of the swinging doors, skillfully levering their trays past heads and shoulders. Each time the kitchen doors opened, tantalizing aromas floated out but Laurie was so abashed that she'd lost her hunger.

This was a real restaurant, not a café for truckers who were glad of any diversion. These well-dressed people were tourists or town folks who wouldn't understand or like her music. Had Laurie been alone, she'd have bolted but she didn't want Buddy to guess her fears.

A chunky, gray-haired man behind the cash register was watching them. As she forced herself to approach him, he came out from behind the counter with its display of candy, gum, and postcards. “If you kids are hungry,” he said in a low-pitched tone that still seemed echoing loud, “go around to the back and I'll tell one of the girls to feed you.”

He thought they were begging! Flushing hotly, Laurie dug her harmonica from her pocket. “We-we'll be having supper across the road, mister. But—well, sometimes folks seem to like hearing us sing and play.”

“I won't have anyone panhandling my customers.” The big man's voice sounded louder than ever.

“We don't panhandle!” Laurie flashed, defending Morrigan and his songs and whatever talent she and Buddy possessed. “You just listen to one song, mister, and see if you don't think we're good enough to sing in your place.”

She set the harmonica to her lips and launched into the rollicking gallop of “The Sierry Petes.” Buddy, wide brown eyes fixed on her, sang in his high, sweet boy's voice the bibulous exploits of Sandy Bob and Buster Jigg. By the time the devil came prancing down the trail, the crowd was listening, and when he was finally branded and got a knot tied in his tail, there was thunderous applause.

“Say, Jed,” called a prosperous-looking gentleman in a suede jacket and polished boots. “Let's scoot tables till those boys can stand in the middle and we can hear 'em better.”

Jed, the gray-haired man, scanned his customers. “That suit all of you?”

“Tickles us plumb to death,” drawled another man in boots, who rose to move his table.

Jed lowered his head to speak in Laurie's ear. “Okay, you can go ahead and sing but don't you stop and stare around between numbers like you expect money. Quit as soon as folks start talking like they'd rather do that than listen. I'll give you a dollar when you leave. Reckon we'll get enough extra pie and coffee orders to afford that.”

The man in the suede jacket ordered root beer for them and taught them the haunting, wistful “Colorado Trail” when they had, to considerable applause, done all the cowboy songs Buddy knew. By then it was time to join Way. Laurie guessed these folks could put up with one Dust Bowl song so she moved into “So Long, It's Been Good to Know You.”

As she and Buddy started for the door, the man in suede put a dollar in Buddy's overall bib. Someone else thrust a dollar in Laurie's. These were joined by half dollars, quarters, and more bills—no dimes or nickels.

Jed stepped out from behind the cash register. “Maybe you ought to give
me
a dollar,” he said wryly. “But you didn't hint for anything and a deal's a deal.” He gave Laurie another bill as the door swung open. “You boys going to be in town a while?”

“No, they're not.” W. S. Redwine loomed against the door. “We're traveling east tomorrow.” He gave a curt nod and held the door, following Laurie and Buddy outside.

“What's the big idea?” he demanded, striding across the highway. “You damned ungrateful little devils! I got a good notion to let all of you hunt other beds tonight.”

“Then you won't get your sign,” said Laurie, speaking up boldly though his anger scared her. “We've got money to rent another cabin. And we went across the street because if you're not giving us a room tomorrow night there's no reason to try to help your business.”

“Your granddad's in the café,” growled Redwine. “Come along in here and let's get some things settled.”

“We've got to wash our hands first,” said Laurie.

When she and Buddy entered the café, Redwine didn't even glance at them but finished what he was telling Way. “—so you might as well ride with me to Texas and do signs for my places there. When you're finished with that, you can get work easy in Black Spring, what with the oil boom.” His gaze flickered toward Laurie. “There's a school. That's where the boys ought to be.”

School? To go to school you had to have a home, even if it was a shack or a tarp stretched from a car to a post. You had to have a
place
, if only for a little while: Way's dark eyes searched Laurie's face.

“What do you think, kiddos?”

“Texas is where we want to go,” said Laurie.

It was a real big state, the biggest, and there were lots of oil fields, but wasn't there a chance of someday meeting up with Morrigan? Wherever he was would feel like home—she wouldn't have bad dreams—even if it was along the road beneath a cottonwood the way it had been last time, that magic, never-to-be-forgotten time when Mama talked God into sending an angel.

Sun and shadows crimsoned the Painted Desert, hazed it in every tint of blue, purple, and gray, or drenched the white and yellow with stark brilliance. Dead rainbow trunks and stobs of the Petrified Forest twisted or sprawled from warped masses of hardened red clay. Buttes, lava flows, earth gashed with oxblood or leached dull gray. Reservations and trading posts, Gallup, New Mexico, Grants.

Redwine didn't own any truck stops in this state so they drove right through the night. Laurie had already discovered one interesting habit of W.S.'s. Heading downhill, he'd speed up, then throw in the clutch and coast in neutral as long as he could. “Saves gas,” he said, but she thought what he relished was getting a free ride where most people didn't.

Just as stingily, he saved sleep. He wouldn't let Way spell him. Dozing as she sat in the corner of the backseat and cuddled Buddy, who was stretched out with his head in her lap, Laurie roused when the car stopped and Mr. Redwine turned off the lights. He sort of wrapped his arms across the wheel and rested on them. Laurie drowsed off again so she didn't know how long he had napped when she woke to the sound and movement of the car. That happened several times before dawn, when they ate at Los Lunas and headed north for the mountains and Santa Fe.

“Be glad when they straighten the highway,” Redwine grumbled. “When they run it through Albuquerque like they're talking, they'll cut off ninety miles.”

Santa Fe! The name—all Spanish names—enchanted Laurie, and so did the adobe buildings with pole ends sticking out of the upper walls. The golden-brown walls were smoothed as if with loving hands and looked as if they'd curve like bodies to fit the people who lived in them. They weren't hard and unchangeable like wood or stone or brick. Laurie yearned to look at the jewelry, moccasins, pottery, and other things the Indians had spread on blankets along the streets but of course she couldn't ask.

Mexican food in Las Vegas that afternoon, a bowl of steaming chili that night in Tucumcari. It was morning but still dark when they stopped at a string of cabins and a truck center with a neon sign that glared at them:
WELCOME TO TEXAS—GOOD FOOD—GOOD BEDS—GOOD GAS
. From the opposite side, it proclaimed:
LAST CHANCE AT TEXAS PRICES
.

W. S. Redwine got out and stretched, his blocky shoulders looking solid as granite, his legs like pillars in the sand. “It's good business to rake in money off 66.” He yawned heavily and his thin seam of a mouth stretched in a grin. “West Texas is my stomping ground, though, where I've really sunk my money. Pile out. When you wake up in the morning, Wayburn, you can start my sign. There'll be fourteen of them to do between here and Black Spring—hotel and café signs, too.”

Lifting a metal box from under the seat, Redwine got out a huge ring of keys, each shaped differently but with no other means of identification. He selected one, opened the café, and got a key from one of the nails spaced on a board beneath the cash register.

“Last cabin,” he told Way, before, without knocking, he went through a door marked
PRIVATE
.

“Dub!” came a woman's voice. The woman was surprised for certain, but whether glad or sad, Laurie couldn't guess.

W. S. Redwine and his party drove through the Llano Estacado, the high, wind-scourged Staked Plains, perhaps named for the yuccas spiking lance-straight from the seared earth, yuccas much larger than those Laurie remembered from the Oklahoma Panhandle. Dust had blown here, too, especially where the prairie sod had been broken to farm. Dunes banked against buildings, heaped around yuccas, half-buried fence posts.

Most of the flivvers and trucks they met were headed the other way, mattresses and chairs roped to the top, suitcases and boxes tied to the running boards, kids stuffed in amongst the bedding and household gear. Laurie ached every time they passed a family with a broken-down vehicle but there was no use asking Redwine to stop. He even seemed to drive faster past these stranded folks, churning up more dust. If I ever have a car, she thought, I'll carry extra innertubes and tires and food and water and I'll always stop. Meanwhile all she could do was pray someone like Morrigan—well, not like him, for no one could be—but someone kind and cheerful would come along and get each family on its road again.