The Longest Road (42 page)

“How sweet of you,” drawled Crystal. “I do so admire women who don't mind being caught in a mess or at inconvenient times.” She directed a bright smile between Buddy and Laurie. “So nice to meet you children. Jackie's mentioned you innumerable times, wondered how you were getting along. Thank goodness, he finally knows.”

“See you soon,” said Johnny, giving each of them a warm and special smile.

He did. He came to the hotel for breakfast or dinner almost every day, and two or three evenings a week he brought Crystal in for supper. Now that Redwine couldn't bother them without getting in trouble with Johnny, Marilys and Laurie negotiated with the hotel owner to work their regular schedules except for Friday and Saturday evenings, when they played and sang from five till midnight and Sunday when they performed from eleven in the morning till three and from five till eleven. After the weekend cook and waitress were paid, Marilys and Laurie were entitled to a third of the profits. The first Friday, they split five dollars, by Saturday, they divided fifteen, and Sunday had people waiting for tables.

“What say I just pay you ladies ten dollars each a day for your music?” suggested the jowly owner, Ross Marriott. “That way you won't be taking any risks.”

“Oh, we couldn't let you stand to lose money,” said Marilys sweetly, accepting two tens and two fives from his reluctant hand. “This way we'll get exactly what we're worth to you.”

Crystal would sit through their music while she dined, but the couple never lingered. They were always on their way to a movie or dancing at the Blue Light to a band that Crystal especially liked because there was a clarinetist who sounded “just like Benny Goodman,” she said when Laurie stopped by their table. “White-type swing, you know, not like the coon-jazz Duke Ellington and Louie Armstrong play.”

“I'd give an arm to see the day I could play half as well as either one of them,” Johnny said. “They're as great as Mozart or Bach—and a damn sight more people enjoy their music.”

“Don't swear at me, Jackie,” pouted Crystal. “I don't know why you get so worked up when I forget to say ‘Ne-grow.' After all, I was raised in East Texas where we called them—”

“I know what you called them,” cut in Johnny. “But I don't want to hear it.” He got to his feet. “Come on. I've been up since five and I'm sleepy if you're not.”

“If you're not working, you're tired,” she complained. When he still looked grim, she glanced up through her eyelashes and smiled coaxingly as she rose and brushed tapering plum-enameled fingertips across Johnny's mouth. “Don't growl at me, sweetheart. After a nice martini, you won't feel tired at all.”

Oklahoma was a dry state, which only meant that folks who drank bought from bootleggers and carried their own brown-bagged bottles into nightclubs. Because of Way's struggle with alcohol, her own upbringing, and the havoc she had seen caused by heavy drinking in the oil towns, Laurie detested liquor but she didn't see much point in a law that was utterly ignored and that encouraged crime. She was afraid Johnny drank too much and wished Crystal wouldn't urge it on him, but Crystal herself carried a pint silver flask in her purse and poured it into her Cokes.

It hurt so much to see her with him, controlling him with silken twitches and the lure of her body, that Laurie sometimes wished she hadn't met him again if it had to be this way. She ached when he looked weary, which was too much of the time. Still, she lived for the moments when he came in the hotel alone and she could serve him, keep his coffee cup full, and talk with him a little about safe subjects.

Crystal and Redwine weren't safe. “Dub's been like a father to me, a good one,” Johnny had said when explaining how their partnership began. “After I visited my mother—she's married again to a good man and busy raising a second family—the only work I could find that paid better than roughnecking was helping Houston Clay. Don't know if you've heard of him but he's about the best wellshooter in the business exceptin' maybe Tex Thornton.”

“I've heard of Tex Thornton,” Laurie remembered. “He tried to make it rain over by Dalhart the same spring we left Prairieville.”

“Yep. Farmers and ranchers guaranteed three hundred dollars for TNT and nitroglycerin jelly. Tex was going to send the charges up to low-lying clouds by balloons tethered at a certain height. Dalhart was all set to have a big street dance to celebrate. Must have been a couple thousand local folks, reporters, newsreel cameramen, and photographers on hand. Then a humongous dust storm blew in. Everybody scampered to their vehicles 'cept Tex. Since the wind was too high for balloons, he set off sixty charges in the ground. The explosions just kicked more dust up in the air. Poor old Tex didn't try it again.”

“You got a job with a shooter?” Laurie prompted.

“Sure did. Kind of enjoyed the way other trucks and cars cleared the road when they saw me comin' with those torpedoes fastened in my racks. I learned to mix the soup and pour it in the shells and Clay showed me how to send those babies down—showed me the way to run if gas or oil pushes one back up, too, you bet! He had a trailer—let me share it and we each bought half of what groceries we cooked, so I was able to sock most of my pay in the bank.” He chuckled. “Sure, I know you can't trust 'em but I trust 'em more than I trust me! Saved till I could buy a Fort Worth spudder—you know, the drilling rig that starts a hole, spuds it in. Doesn't use a derrick to raise and lower the tools and drill, just has a mast, but you can move it around with a truck and it'll drill a shallow well.”

He'd gone wild-catting with Gary MacIntosh, a driller friend who was willing to work for a share in any oil they found. Over in Kiowa County, they found some prairie where they liked the way the creeks and ridges ran and talked a farmer into letting them drill on his land for no payment unless they hit oil.

“Brought in three nice little forty-barrel-a-day wells, all at less than five hundred feet,” said Johnny. “We didn't have trouble getting leases then but the nearest pipeline was fifty miles away so we couldn't sell our oil. Dub was in Hobart opening up a new Truck-Inn. He heard about our wells, bought us a steak, and after we talked a while, he said he'd put in the pipeline. That's how we got to be pardners, two years ago.” He frowned slightly. “After about six months, Mac asked if I wanted to buy him out. He and Dub were always crossin' horns, and anyhow, Mac wanted his own company. He's done pretty well down in the Permian Basin. I got what you might call custody of the spudder. Use it for luck to spud in new holes. Besides, if the oil's ever all gone, I can dig water wells with it.”

Redwine, thank goodness, was in Oklahoma City, Amarillo, or Black Spring most of the time, or making lightning appraisal raids on his Truck-Inns and other businesses. It was a great relief not to have to hide from him. Now that it didn't matter if Grandpa Field knew where they were, Laurie took a few days off work and, laden with gifts, rode the train to visit Rosalie.

How strange, to get off in the town where Rosalie had treated them to ice cream, movies, and hamburgers—where a thirteen-year-old girl and her younger brother had clambered into a freight car to go find their father.

Her heart contracting with pain, Laurie again saw the raw mound beneath the eucalyptus tree outside Eden. Would Mama's red-letter Bible still exist in its small grave over Daddy's heart? Had the Model T faithfully carried Mary Halsell and her family from job to job or had it broken down and been abandoned? Had those people Daddy had shared with, for whose baby he had died, ever found a home? If the Halsells had written Laurie in care of Rosalie, there was no way Rosalie could send a letter on. Laurie wished she knew how the Halsells had fared. If they were doing well, it would make her and Buddy feel their father hadn't died for nothing, and besides, he had thought a lot of that family.

Laurie had never ridden in a taxi, but she hired one at the station, agreeing on a price. She hadn't written that she was coming just in case Grandpa Field could think of some way to cause her trouble and she heartily wished she didn't have to see him at all.

The tarpaper shack looked forlorn as ever, sand blown away from the block foundations, but the loam of the fields was striped with the fresh new green of young corn and cotton, and the climbing rose by the front door had branched out, no longer struggling for life, but luxuriantly affirming it.

The hounds ran out—Were they the same ones? The driver got out to unload Laurie s gift-packed suitcases. “Want me to wait, ma'am?”

Rosalie stepped out, gold hoop earrings catching the light, shading her eyes in the nooning sun. “No, thanks,” said Laurie. “I'll be staying a few days.” She ran toward Rosalie, whose stare turned to disbelief and then to joy as she sprang from the step and held out her arms.

Rosalie still smelled of spice and roses and her body was firm, though it might have been a trifle fuller. “Oh, honey, it was sweet of you to send that money all these years but I'd have swapped it all for a look at you!” She held Laurie back and laughed delightedly. “Here you are tall as me! Same eyes but your face fits 'em now and your hair's darkened till it's more the shade of buckwheat honey than pulled taffy. Oh, I wish your mama and daddy could see how nice you've grown up! Come in and tell me what you never put in your letters.” She gasped and snapped her fingers. Rosalie could do that. “Good gracious, speaking of letters, I have some here for you! From that Mary Halsell who wrote and told me about Ed and that you kids had been there and were fine.” She went in the bedroom, rummaged in a drawer, and returned with four envelopes. “The last one just came a few weeks ago,” she said, handing them to Laurie.

Laurie started with it. A twenty-dollar bill, a ten, and a five fell out. “This pays out the Model T,” Mary Halsell wrote. “With five dollars' interest. I never can thank you enough for letting us keep that flivver. It got us from one picking job to another till Bob died. A man at that last camp knew a preacher in town who gave Bob a funeral and helped me find steady work in a laundry so we could settle down and the kids could stay in school. Tom's a good man and we got married last year. Now I've got a good job in a defense plant so things are looking better than they have in a long time except I'll always miss Bob and I'm sure scared of that awful war and hoping Jimmy won't have to go. I've never heard from you, Laurie. I hope you kids don't hold a grudge for your daddy's getting drowned. I think of him every time I hug Robbie because he wouldn't be here if Ed hadn't gone in after him. If you get this, please, please, let me hear from you.” It was signed, “With love and thanks, Mary Halsell Weeks.”

“What's the matter, honey?” asked Rosalie.

Laurie couldn't speak and her eyes were brimming. She handed the letter to Rosalie and opened the others. The first contained three dollars and was mailed two months after Daddy's death. The second held four dollars sent six months later, and the third, mailed early in 1937, contained nine dollars. With each payment was a letter in Mary's neat penmanship, telling where they were, how they were getting along, and asking for news of Buddy and Laurie.

“I—I'm so glad the family's doing all right,” Laurie said when she could speak. “That makes me feel better about Daddy. They paid off the flivver, too.”

“Mrs. Halsell sounded nice in that letter she wrote about Ed and this is sure a sweet one. Glad she's found her a good man.” Rosalie handed back the last envelope. “Gracious, I've got to finish getting dinner. Your grandpa and the kids'll be in for dinner pretty quick.”

“Aren't the kids in school?”

“Billy and Ernie and Belle are out to help with the crop work,” Rosalie said. “I talked Ev'rett into finishin' eighth grade but he didn't want to go into town to high school and of course your grandpa can't see any use in a farm boy gettin' an education.”

“Does Ev'rett want to stay on the farm?” As if she'd never been away, Laurie started setting the table, finding the dishes in a glass-doored cabinet Rosalie had finally got. The table had a blue-checked oilcloth and there was a new red-brown tile linoleum on the floor. The biggest changes, though, were piped water to the sink, electric light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a big white refrigerator. The old cast-iron range still ruled supreme but was flanked by a gas cookstove that would certainly keep the house cooler in the summer.

“Ev'rett's sick and tired of the farm, 'specially since it's not ours.” Rosalie sighed. “If his pa won't let him work the wheat harvest this year, and keep some of his money, I reckon the boy'll just take off. Can't blame him.”

Working around farm machinery was at least as dangerous as the oil patch. “I've got a friend who could probably hire him on as a roustabout,” Laurie said. “He could live with us. Shall I talk to Ev'rett about it?”

“I'd a sight rather he was with you than off with a threshin' crew.” Rosalie brightened. “Sure, ask him, but not in front of his pa or the boys. They'd want to come, and they're too young. All right, honey, before the gang comes bustin' in, tell me where you've been and what you're doing.”

While they got dinner, Rosalie listened with head shakings, widened eyes, and laughter. “I could see why you wanted to find your pa,” she said. “But when I found your note in the truck and knew you were gone, I prayed harder than I ever prayed in my life that the pair of you would be all right. Sure a good thing you fell in with that nice Way Kirkendall.” Rosalie dabbed at a tear. “I'm glad he and Marilys got married. But that mean old W. S. Redwine—I sure hope he won't cause you any more trouble.”

“Oh,” chuckled Laurie, “Morrigan makes him a better son to brag on than I ever could have even if I'd been a boy and wanted the job. I don't see Redwine very often. When I do, he acts like he never laid eyes on me before.”