Yellow Mesquite (5 page)

Why don’t you join the army? Annie Leigh wanted to know, as if reading his mind. You get to wear those neat uniforms and drive all the girls crazy.

No, no, Anna Mae argued. The air force. They have the coolest uniforms.
 

He refused to give in to the sudden rush of emotion, to the misgivings he was having about himself out in the world on his own. Refused to acknowledge the painful knot of love, or homesickness, or whatever it was, that already choked him close to tears. He wished now he had been a better son, been kinder to his sisters.

His dad had very little to say: Feed ’em and take care of ’em and about the time they get big enough to be worth a hoot, they leave. That’s what he said at first, because he always said stuff like that. Out of habit. But when he saw Harley was really leaving out, he got quiet and his face went long, and Harley knew he was taking it under serious consideration. Even the girls got teary and agreed he could have his room back. Just in case.

His dad stood by the cattle guard, squinting toward a tank truck coming in the distance. “That looks like Willie McDonald coming yonder.”
 

“I guess I’d better get across the road here.”

“You take care of yourself now.”

“Yes sir. You too.”
 

They shook hands and Harley picked up the old brown cardboard suitcase tied up with binder twine and stepped across the road. Willie, who was driving for Fraley’s Butane out of Hardwater, brought the truck to a brake-squealing stop. Harley climbed up in the cab and stood the suitcase on end between his knees. He glanced out and saw his dad trudging up the dirt road toward the house, looking back, watching the truck take him away.
 

“What the hell you doing with that suitcase?” Willie wanted to know.

“Leaving out.”
 

“Leaving? Where to?”

“Dallas. I’ll ride into Hardwater if you don’t mind.”

“Dallas. No shit. What’re you gonna do up there in Dallas?”
 

“I’m gonna go to art school.”

“Art school. Huh.” Willie seemed at a loss. He upshifted the truck into third. “Well, shit. Leaving out. I guess this means you won’t be playing no more ball with us.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Willie grinned aside at him, sly. “What about Darlene? What’d she say about you leaving?”
 

Harley stared out the side window, jaw clenched, his silence meant to discourage further talk on the subject.

Willie laughed awkwardly. “Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise, huh?”

The barren country slid past.

Chapter 5

Hitchhike

T
EXAS HIGHWAY 80
ran straight as stretched barbed wire horizon to horizon, a lone house here and there—white dots wrinkling in the July heat between long dry fields and sunburned pastures sprinkled with mesquite and prickly pear. Harley stood alongside the highway, the old cardboard suitcase at his feet. Two hours, and he was no more than fifty miles from home. The smell of hot asphalt irritated his nose. Locusts kept up a steady mono-musical whine.
 

He picked up on a sound in the distance and saw a silvery gleam wavering in the haze—a truck, coming the wrong way. You get you a ride with a trucker, his dad said. They make good time. But so far all the trucks had kept right on going, moaning into the distance. You’re gonna have a rough time catching a ride, Uncle Jay said. Folks won’t stop these days. Too much meanness.

The eighteen-wheeler came closer and the whine of tires on the hot pavement made a steady
whapity-whapity-whapity
on the asphalt ridges. Smoke trailed from its two stacks, whipping back over the sun-dazzled trailer. It blew by, engine yammering, trailing a curdling wake of hot air that washed over him in a smelly blast of oil and diesel exhaust. The truck dwindled into the distance, trembling into the lake-looking mirage on the horizon.

He wondered if maybe he should pray for a ride. Up at the Separation Baptist Church they prayed, mostly for those who were drinking and sinning, and almost always for rain. He himself had prayed over Darlene Delaney. And look what that got him.
 

He heard another sound and, sure enough, it looked to be a car—coming the right direction—skimming in over the horizon, tremulous on the watery plane, wobbling ashore toward him. It was really traveling, rolling out a cloud of dust on either side of the highway that lifted in a fury, then rolled and hung still on the heat, the moan of the engine building to a quavering, high-pitched wail.

The car was still half a mile away when he picked up his suitcase and stuck out his thumb, and he’d hardly got it out there good when the white streak of it screamed past, pulling a blast of hot wind and dust that caught the flat of the suitcase and sucked it along, dragging him with it until he almost fell, the big white whatever-it-was already howling into the distance.

He stood blinking in the after-silence, dust slow-settling about him.
 

Minutes later he was still thinking about it, thinking that maybe this had been a sign, and what the sign said was that he’d better stop wasting God’s time with little stuff like asking for a ride, when he heard it again—a distant hum like a mosquito, and he looked up to see another car shimmying in from the horizon, just like the other one. In ten seconds flat, the sound tuned up from mosquito to dive-bomber.
 

Harley picked up his suitcase and was considering whether to stick out his thumb or make a run for the barbed-wire fence when the sound of the engine changed—just dropped a note, and then a different sound as the brakes began to squall; then it let off, cooling, then on again, the tires shrilling, a blue haze of smoke whipping out over the pavement behind, and he saw it was a brand-new ’59 Cadillac Seville Eldorado, its big chrome bumper tilted forward, skimming the asphalt, the high rocketed tailfins knifing through the sky; and then it let off again and he saw a man leaning forward, glaring through the windshield at him, and then the brakes were on again, hard, smoke wrapping around the whitewalls, firing straight up off the pavement behind, and the man was already leaning across the seat, opening the door and waving him in as the car humped up to a stop, its tailfins hiking up before it fell back on its springs with a great heaving groan. “Getingoddamnitgetin!” And two fierce eagle eyes in a smear of sunburned face snapped at him, and he was already jumping in after his suitcase before he even had time to consider whether it was a good idea or not—jumped right in through the smell of burning brakes and rubber just as though he was in every bit as big a hurry as this fellow—though he already knew he wasn’t, because they were peeling out with the tires screaming, an octave higher now, and the door slammed itself shut and he was pressed back into the seat, trying to wrestle his suitcase over into the back, the Caddy’s front end pointing up, the tailfins hunkered down behind, the telephone poles blinking past like fence posts as the great screaming beast kicked herself out of passing gear at eighty-five, the speedometer ticking right on down.

The driver sprawled behind the wheel, his right arm laid across the top of the seat, and just the fingers of his left hand on the wheel above his lap, as casually as if he were at home laid back in his favorite easy chair.
 

Harley had never seen any money to speak of, but now that he saw it, it was plain as a rooster in a yard full of hens; and it wasn’t just the black Cadillac with its white leather seats, or the man’s hand-tooled boots, or even the dark pin-striped suit jacket folded on the seat between them with the Neiman Marcus label showing. It was in the man’s attitude. It didn’t just speak money, but power. It was in the way he spread out behind the wheel with his head thrown back, whipping across the country like he owned the whole wide-open business, reveling in the space with that clay-cracked grin, and only the glitter in his alert yellow eyes suggesting that he reveled and enjoyed because he
dominated
, leading Harley to suspect that if the man had any misgivings at all it was only that he couldn’t spread himself out over the whole, entire state of Texas…but what the heck, he just about had that licked too, once he managed to get the rest of that fine leather boot in that big four-barrel carburetor.

“Wendell Whitehead,” the man said, offering his hand like a slab of burned beef.

“Glad to meet you. Harley Jay Buchanan.” He shook Mr. Whitehead’s hand, firm, like he’d been taught.

Whitehead settled back. “Well, Harley Jay Buchanan, what the hell you doing standing around out there in all that goddamn heat?”

Harley glanced out at the countryside blurring past. “Trying to catch a ride.”

Whitehead’s eagle eyes flickered at him, the lines in his face crinkling into a grin. “Well, I guess it’s a good thang I stopped then, ain’t it. I wasn’t sure but what you was just standing around out there getting yourself a suntan. A-har-ah-har-har,” he laughed, a big booming sound like a barrel rolling down a staircase.

Harley grinned and felt himself redden. “I sure appreciate you picking me up.”

“You see another car go by? A white Caddy?”

“I saw something go by”—Harley glanced out—“white, flying low, just like us.”

Whitehead straightened. His eagle eyes lit up. “That right? Hot damn. How long ago?”

“I dunno…maybe five minutes…”

“By god a’mighty. That ain’t too bad. Not bad at all.”

“Why? Y’all racing?”

“Yep, boy, we’re racing, all right. Least we supposed to be. That son of a bitch R.T.” Whitehead grinned and his eyes narrowed with a glitter. “But we gonna beat his ass yet.”

Harley grinned too. This wasn’t somebody you ran into every day here, this Mr. Wendell Whitehead cocked back in the seat big as all get-out, breezing along cool as a cucumber with the speedometer sticking straight down past a hundred, saying “We gonna beat his ass yet.”

“Where y’all racing from?” Harley asked.

“Big Sprang.”

“Sheew-ee. Where you racing to?”

“Dallas.”

“Dallas—” Harley broke off. It was another hundred and fifty miles to Dallas. He glanced about the car, aware of the fine vibrations working up over his legs from the floorboard. He briefly visualized his own funeral, his mother and Darlene Delaney weeping inconsolably over his casket, friends and relatives shaking their heads, wiping their eyes and muttering sorrowfully among themselves:
Poor boy, killed in a high-speed car race on the way to Dallas with a crazy man.

“You think it’ll hold together?” Harley said of the car.

“Got just as good a chance as his. Son of a bitch can’t take it, I don’t want it anyhow.” He glanced at Harley. “Had me one a them Rolls-Royces, you know? Supposed to be a fine automobile? Horse shit! Ain’t worth a popcorn fart. Can’t drive a car a hunnert miles a hour all day long, I don’t want it.” Whitehead grinned. “Where you going, anyhow?”

“Me? Dallas. I’m going to Dallas too.”

“W’hell, boy, that’s good. I won’t hafta buy you a ticket and send you back along here somewhere.”

“What?”

“You don’t expect me to lose time letting you out, do you? God a’mighty, just picking you up maybe done cost me five thousand dollars.” Whitehead laughed his big har-har
laugh.

Harley felt the blood draining from his head.

Whitehead waved him off. “Boy, don’t worry ’bout it. I spent more’n that for breakfast once, and for a buncha damn Yankees at that.”

Harley stared at the center stripe snaking toward them from the horizon, the occasional car or truck that loomed up before them, quickly disappearing into the distance behind. He was aware of the faint moans shivering through the body structure—but now it seemed they weren’t going so fast after all.
Five thousand dollars?
 

“But…why’d you pick me up?”
 

“Thought you was my own boy. He run off here while back, and you look just like him. Least at a distance you do. How old’re you, anyhow?”

 
“Seventeen.”

 
“Yep. Same as Buddy. I swear, you could be his twin brother.”

 
“I’m sorry you lost time picking me up.”

 
Whitehead waved his hand through the air. “Forget it. It don’t mean nothin’, least not the money. Anythang bothers me a-tall it’s having to listen to old R.T. hoo-rawin’ me about it the rest a my natural life, the son of a bitch.”

 
They blew through Cisco, slowing some, and old men stopped whittling and turned stiffly from where they sat on benches in the shade on the town square, and though they blinked by too fast for Harley to gather their expressions, he imagined their displeasure by their sudden, stiff attitudes. The Cadillac breezed through Eastland and then Ranger, squat stucco houses flickering by on either side, trash sucking up behind.

Harley commented how it was a marvel they weren’t stopped. “Don’t you ever get any tickets?”

“Yep, got a few. But the way I figure it, a man wants to dance, he’s gotta be willing to pay the fiddler.”

The fear Harley felt breezing across the country at over a hundred miles an hour began to ease. In fact, he began to feel pretty good here in this big black Cadillac with this Mr. Whitehead.

“What kinda bidness you got in Big D?” Whitehead asked.

“Me? I’m going to art school. Get me a job and go to art school.”

“Art school? In Dallas?”

“Yeah… What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. ’Cept I ain’t never heard a no art school in Dallas. What’s the name of it?”

“I dunno. I figured I’d find one when I get there.”

“You— Aw, good god a’mighty. You kids’re all just alike. Never plan nothin’ past the end of your nose.”

“Well, I figure there’s gotta be some good art schools in a big town like that.”

“Maybe. But I ain’t never heard of ’em.”

They rode in silence. Why would this Whitehead have any reason to know about art schools in Dallas, anyway?

“Well, there may not be any,” Harley said, “but if there’s anything at all, it’s more’n was back home.”

“Where you from, son?”