The Longest Road (36 page)

“My pap hunted buffler out of here till they was gone,” he said, blinking watery, pale eyes. “Then he scouted for the army till the Comanches was all penned up in Oklahoma, and then he hauled freight and went to ranchin'. Got pushed off his land by the Circle X, a big English-owned outfit that moved in and took over. So he freighted full time till he married my ma and moved in to Abilene to run her daddy's store. I was born out here, though, and it's where I aim to die if'n they don't make it into a state park and run off the folks that's left—ain't more'n a hunderd and thirty-forty people.”

“You ever see any buffalo?” Buddy asked. “Wild ones?”

“Sure, son.” The old eyes blinked and looked far away. “Even shot a big bull when I wasn't much older'n you. Had to prop the rifle on some rocks to do it, use all my bullets. I was kinda sick when he finally caved in on his knees and went down, wished I hadn't ever started, 'specially since he was the last one ever seen around here.”

Accepting another cup of coffee and filling it to the brim with Eagle Brand, he cackled. “Wish Pap could know the Circle X is deep in trouble. On account of the drouth, ranchers been sellin' off so much stock the price is low, and what with the depression, folks can't afford to buy much beef, anyhow. So the government's bought the best cows at twenty dollars a head to ship to better grazing lands, bought and shipped more to slaughterhouses, and I hear about twenty-five hunderd head of culls are goin' to be shot by the federal inspector right out by the pens.”

Laurie's stomach roiled and she scattered the rest of her doughnut for the birds. “Anyhow,” she said, trying to find something good about it, “lots of people ought to get beef for the rest of the winter.”

The old man shook his head. “Them cow's cain't be eat, sonny. The whole idee is to raise the price on what beef gets to market. I hear the Circle X's givin' its neighbors the hides for helpin' to drag the carcasses off to a little canyon by the pens. They'll heap 'em there and keep a fire goin' on top till there's nothin' left but bones.”

Seeming nothing but loosely connected bones himself, he got to his feet. “Thanks kindly for the coffee and doughnut, folks. Good luck on the road. The pens are pretty close to it. You'll likely see the slaughter.”

They heard the bark of the rifle before they saw the penned cattle. Dead ones were being dragged by cowboys on horses to where men were skinning them. The skinned bodies were hauled to a ravine and tumbled over into it. Not all of them, though.

“That federal inspector must be pretty decent,” Marilys said. “He's paying so much attention to the shooting that he can't see how all those folks from town and around are loading quarters and sides of beef in their flivvers and trucks and wagons.”

Laurie was glad some poor people were going to have food because of the killing but she was glad when the sound of the rifle faded. She didn't think she'd ever eat beef again.

19

Albany, Cisco, Brownwood, Eastland, Ranger, Weatherford. Farmers clumped in brogans, ranchers, and cowboys strode along in high-heeled boots, and oil workers wore laced boots if they could afford them.

No Way-signs, as they had started calling them. The Ford developed coughing fits so they stayed in Ranger three days, singing noons and evenings to pay for a good used carburetor.

“This was the wildest boomtown since Spindletop,” their mechanic told them. “My dad came to work in the field back in 1919, when it put out over twenty-two million barrels. Must've been fifty thousand people here, most livin' in tents like us.” He wiped his greasy hands on a rag and banged down the hood. “Ten years later, Ranger was only makin' something over two million, barrels. But we've still got a producin' field, which is more than lots of towns do once the big boom's over.”

They paid him and left town, the Ford purring as contentedly as a cat with a full belly of warm milk. When Weatherford had no Way-signs, either, they held a council. “We can try the East Texas oil towns,” said Marilys. “We can swing up to Burkburnett and the Panhandle. Or we can head for the fields in the Permian Basin. Got any ‘druthers'?”

“You're the driver,” said Laurie. Buddy nodded.

None of them said what they must all have been thinking: that Dub was in Black Spring by now and could have the law after them; that Way might have swapped his Russian sable paintbrushes for some whiskey—that there might not be any new Way-signs.

“Let's try west,” said Marilys.

From San Angelo, they drove through slopes covered with oak, cedar, and mesquite. “We'd better get a new name,” Marilys worried. She frowned and sighed. “I guess we really ought to trade in the Ford but it runs so well with the new carburetor, I plain hate to take a chance on getting a lemon.”

Buddy thrust out his lower lip. “I liked being a Tumbleweed.”

“It's a dandy name,” Marilys agreed. “Maybe we can use it again sometime if Dub loses interest in us—he could do that if he ran across someone he'd like for a son—or when you're grownup.”

“Grown up!” echoed Laurie.

“That's only five years,” comforted Marilys.

“But we can't—
can't
—stay on the road all that time, changing our names, changing trucks!” Laurie wailed. “If we find Way—”

“Only difference that'd make is he could be accused of kidnapping, too.”

“That's wicked!
We
chose him for our family! We sure didn't pick W. S. Redwine.”

Marilys patted Laurie's knee. “I know, honey. It's not right. It's not fair. But W.S. got to your grandpa, hired himself a smart lawyer, and to be fair to the judge, being adopted by Dub would seem to be real good luck for you kids.”

Laurie shuddered. “It'd be about the worst thing I can imagine!”

Marilys shot her an anxious look. “He never—bothered you, did he?”

Remembering how Way had warned her and Buddy about men like that jocker on the train, Laurie flushed and shook her head. “No. He hardly even touched me. But he tried to make me sing songs he wanted, he the same as killed his own boy, I bet he had something to do with Way's getting drunk, and—and when I'm around him, I feel like he was sitting on my chest.”

Buddy giggled. “If he was, you'd be one smashed patootie!”

They all laughed and Marilys said, “Why don't you pick out our next name, Buddy?”

He wrinkled his brow and thought a long time. “How about the Roadsters?”

“We're not cars,” objected Laurie.

“No, but we're on the road.”

“Why not?” chuckled Marilys.

At Texon, oil derricks reared in all directions and pipelines stretched across earth soaked and crusted with overflows from slush pits. McCamey was a few wooden stores surrounded by shacks, derricks, and red storage tanks. Every sign here looked as old as the town.

Red tanks accompanied the highway for a time through land that rolled like a bumpy carpet of sage, mesquite, and all kinds of cactus. Then the tanks stopped. The Ford crossed the Pecos River and climbed to a high tableland that was lonesome as God, stretching to dreamlike far-off azure ranges that faded into the sky. This wasn't the desolation of the Dust Bowl where crops had once flourished. This country belonged now, as it always had, to eagles, hawks, rattlesnakes, and their skittering prey. Sun and the tang of sage purified the air till it almost hurt human lungs accustomed to civilized poisons.

Fort Stockton's limestone and red stucco courthouse dominated a sprawl of adobe and stone houses and the ruins of the old fort. The stone guardhouse was inside the park, where springs gushed and a sign recorded that Comanche Springs had been a watering place for Indians on their annual autumn forays into Mexico. The army post was established in 1859. Gold rushers stopped here to rest on their way to California, and later, the stage line to San Diego.

But Way had not.

North against a bitter wind through thousands of acres irrigated by springs. Pecos's old cowtown buildings were jostled by new ones raised by oil and irrigated farming. A norther howled down with gusting wind and snow that made travel out of the question. All day, the hotel filled up with travelers refuging from the storm.

“Nothin' between here and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence and that's blown down,” several of them said, repeating the old saying as if they'd just made it up while they stamped off snow. When the Roadsters played that noon and night, it turned into a party, with those who knew the words singing to the music and a lanky, sandy-haired cowboy borrowing the guitar and nasally chanting songs Laurie had never heard before, “Strawberry Roan,” “Bad Brahma Bull,” “The Hills of Mexico,” “Zebra Dun,” and one about the Colorado Trail that was so haunting and lovely that she asked him to play it again.

Weep all you little rains,

Wail, winds, wail—

All along, along, along

The Colorado Trail.

The storm moved out that night. Next morning, the sun dazzled off the whiteness blanketing the plains to the sky's blue rim. By noon, big supply trucks had cleared the highway and the Roadsters were in Big Spring by night.

“We haven't seen any Way-signs since Ranger,” Buddy lamented. “If he's stopped painting 'em, how'll we know where he's been?”

“I guess we won't,” Marilys said.

Nothing in Sweetwater, nothing new in Abilene. They struck south. Ballinger, Paint Rock, Eden, Menard. Towns ran together in Laurie's mind. Texas was such a big state! Fredericksburg, Boerne, San Marcos, Austin, down to Laredo, up to the East Texas oil fields and towns, where they had to buy “new” tires and get the engine worked on. Back west across the northern rim of the state to the Panhandle, Pampa, Borger, Canadian, Perryton, swing down to Burkburnett; one of the roughest of the boom camps but calmed down considerably, though wells still pumped in the middle of town.

There, about the last place they could look in Texas, was a tourist court with a sign painted in Way's distinctive flowing style:
SWEET DREAMS CABINS—YOU
'
LL THINK YOU
'
RE HOME TILL WE BRING YOU YOUR MORNING COFFEE
! Nobody but Way could have painted that steaming cup so that you almost smelled it.

“Kirkendall's your brother?” asked the owner, a paunchy, thin-haired man whose false teeth didn't fit. “Well, he paints a nice sign, and could've got more jobs here like I told him, but the last I saw of him he was hitchin' a ride north.”

Burkburnett was right on the border. North was across the Red River into Oklahoma. Marilys swallowed but her eyes stayed lit up. “When was that?”

“Oh, must have been five-six days ago.” The man clicked his teeth disapprovingly. “His clothes were stickin' out of holes in his old cardboard suitcase but instead of gettin' a new one, he had him a jug of booze. Hope you can get him straightened out, ma'am.”

“You bet we will, mister, if we can just catch up to him.”

Once back in the truck, they all looked at each other. “He's not far ahead,” said Marilys.

“But he's across the river,” Laurie objected. “He's in Oklahoma.”

Marilys started the truck. “So that's where we'll go.”

“But that's across the state line!” Fear tightened Laurie's throat and she caught her friend's arm. “Marilys, they could send you to the electric chair!”

“They've got to catch me first.” Marilys laughed and threw back her head so that her dark hair caught waves of sun. “Anyhow, I know things Dub wouldn't like to have out in public. He won't want me to go on trial.”

She couldn't talk if she was dead. Would Dub go that far? It was too late to worry. They were crossing the bridge.

Farmers were plowing, some with tractors, some with horses, turning up brown-red soil the color of their own skin, though sometimes Laurie glimpsed a weathered white face. “Do you know what kind of Indians they are?” she asked Marilys. Morrigan would know. Was he still in Oklahoma? Could they possibly meet up with him again?

“I think they're Comanches,” Marilys said. “Kiowas and Apaches, too, I think.”

“Apaches!” Buddy shrieked and watched as if hoping a man in overalls following his plow would suddenly change into a loin-clothed warrior with lance and bow.

“I thought Apaches were farther west,” Laurie puzzled. “In Arizona.”

“A lot are, I think.” Marilys frowned in an effort to remember. “I'm not real sure, but it seems I've heard these Oklahoma Apaches—their parents and grandparents, of course, not the ones you see—were shipped to Florida with Geronimo after he surrendered. They got sick in the east. Finally the government sent them to the Comanche Reservation. The officer in charge got them started at raising cattle and they built up a real fine herd and learned to farm. Geronimo was an old man when he died up near Fort Sill. Not long after that, sometime before the Great War, the government decided the Apaches weren't prisoners of war anymore and let them decide if they wanted to take up land allotments here in Oklahoma or go live on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Some went there. Others stayed here.”

“How come there are still reservations in New Mexico and Arizona but there aren't any here?” Laurie wondered.

Marilys shrugged. “Oklahoma has good fanning land and lots of oil. Even after every Indian got a one hundred sixty-acre allotment, there was lots of reservation land left to open up to white homesteaders. You look around the country, honey. The only reservations left are on land white people don't think is worth anything.”

And land they had coveted, like the Dust Bowl, was dead now, dead as powdered buffalo bones. But this land they passed through now alternated fields with rolling hills that were covered with buffalo grass foraged by cattle that had wintered better than most they'd seen in Texas.