Thalia Read online

  I could listen all night when Jesse got to going back over his life, but the story never lasted long enough, and it always ended with him getting tireder and more sad. He sat on the edge of the cot, stratching his lank, white stomach, and arching his feet to get the boot-stiffness out of them.

  “But, hell,” he said. “You’re big enough to get out and do your own rarin’ and tearin’, without no pattern a mine. Just so you get all the good you can outa seventeen right now, because it sure wears out in a hurry. Or did for me.” Then he leaned back on the cot, still wearing his Levi’s and socks. “What I need is about eight hours on this squeaking cot. Turn out that light for me, will you?”

  I was in such a listening mood that I hated to leave, but I could see Jesse was worn to a nub. I went to the door, and switched off the light. “See you mañana,” he said. “Lord, I’m tired.”

  I guess he had reason to be worn out, but when I went out the door I felt like I wouldn’t ever need to sleep. What little Jesse had said about his running around just made me a little more restless than I usually was, and I was usually crazy with it. I wished I had something wild and exciting to do. But I didn’t have an old wired-up Chevy, and it was too late to go anywhere in the pickup, and if I had taken it and gone there would just have been Thalia to go to, just an empty courthouse square to drive around. I went to the windmill, but instead of climbing up to the platform I got a drink and sat down in the thick cool yard grass, leaning my back against the wooden frame. I thought about the three nights I had got to spend in Fort Worth, the summer before. Granddad had gone down to buy some cattle, and at night he sat in the lobby of the big hotel, talking to another old cowman, and let me do pretty much as I pleased. He thought I was going to picture shows, I guess, but instead I wandered up and down Main Street, that one long street, under the city lights. I went way down to the south end of the street, to where they have the gospel missions and the Mexican picture shows, where the wild-looking people were as thick as crickets under the yellow neon. Pretty soon I discovered that I could slip in the hillbilly bars, into one of the dark booths, and get them to serve me all the beer I wanted. I sat there gripping the cold sweaty bottles and listening to the laughter, the shuffling dancers, the sad hillbilly music. But what I got in Fort Worth was just a taste, just a few mouthfuls of excitement; and leaning against the windmill, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to go back for another swallow or two.

  In a few minutes the back door slammed, and Halmea came across the dark yard, on her way to her little house for the night. She was looking down, and didn’t notice me, so when she got almost to the gate I gave a loud hiss, like a bull snake makes. She jumped and dropped her magazine, then stood there scared to death, twisting her neck around. She saw me then, but she still wasn’t sure about the snake.

  “Deys a snake in dis yard,” she said, not making a move. “I stay right here an’ watch him, and you see can you slip aroun’ easy and get the flashlight an’ de hoe.” I guess she actually thought she had the snake spotted; she never took her eyes off the ground.

  I flopped back in the grass and hissed again, laughing before I finished the hiss. “I might know,” she said. In a few minutes she’d be boiling, but right then she was so relieved she just snatched the magazine and went on out the gate.

  “Ou-la, Halmea,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t get snake off her mind for days. I could just see her, tiptoeing down the path, taking about half an hour to make it to her house. Every time she stopped she’d hear an old bull rattler sliding through the grass. And if she didn’t find him in the grass, she’d look him up in her horoscope.

  When Halmea was out of hearing. I lay back in the long, uncut Bermuda, and wondered about what all Jesse had said. It still made me itch to be off somewhere, with a crowd of laughers and courters and beer drinkers, to go somewhere past Thalia and Wichita and the oil towns and Sno-Cone stands, into country I’d never seen. I was glad Jesse had come: he could open things up. Granddad didn’t talk to me much any more, and anyway, Granddad and I were in such separate times and separate places. I had got where I would rather go to Thalia and goof around on the square than listen to his old-timy stories.

  In a little while the sand ants began to sting my wrists, and I got up. I went around behind the smokehouse to piss. In my grade-school days we had hung carcasses in the smokehouse, beeves and hogs that Granddad and the cowboys butchered on frosty mornings in November. For a while then there would be cracklin’s, and salty smells, and the dogs would be fighting over the pigs’ feet. But now the beeves and hogs were in the locker plant in Thalia, and the smokehouse only held broken lawn mowers and spades and pieces of harness. I heard a dog yapping, stranded somewhere out in coyote country. As I went in the house I noticed the lighting flickering off to the southwest, and saw that the stars were blotted out in that direction. But in June in our part of the country, clouds and lighting were no novelty, and I didn’t pay them any attention.

  When I got upstairs I didn’t feel very sleepy, so I got out From Here to Eternity and read over some of the scenes with Prew and Maggio in the New Congress Hotel. I thought it was about the best book ever to come to our drugstore newsstand, and I kept reading some of the chapters in it over and over. Those parts about the dances in the New Congress reminded me a lot of my nights in Fort Worth; the people in the book seemed a lot like the ones I saw. Then I read the part where the sergeant got her the first time, and put the book back in my suitcase in the closet. I turned off the light and stretched on top of the covers to sleep, smelling the green dewy ranchland through the screen.

  Two

  HUD DIDN’T HAVE TO RUN FROM ANY TORNADO, BUT HE must have got in some kind of a storm because he didn’t come in till six-thirty the next morning. Jesse and I were eating breakfast when we heard the convertible slide up to the back gate. Grandma had been up and ready to go to Temple for two or three hours, and she run into the kitchen to give him an eating out; but Hud looked so red-eyed and wild she just went on back to her room and began to gather up her hatboxes. I finished my breakfast and went down to the barn and drove Granddad’s Lincoln to the house so we could load it. Granny had packed enough stuff for an arctic expedition.

  Jesse and me were admiring the car when she came tapping out the back door, all powdered and painted, wearing a big green hat with a veil on it. She might have been going to the fair she was in such a good humor. Granddad brought out the first load of suitcases, and Jesse and I hurried in and got the rest.

  “Well, I’m ready,” Grandma said. “Where’s Huddie? I don’t intend to wait no longer. If I got to go be cut up I’m ready right now.” Granddad helped her into the car, and stood by the door to try and keep her from jumping out again for some foolishness. Hud came out in about five minutes, fresh-looking enough to have slept for a week. He pitched his canvas army bag in the back seat, and got under the wheel.

  “Now be careful, Scott,” Granddad said, one hand still on the car door. “If you get tired, why, stop and sleep.” He took out his checkbook and fountain pen, and used the hood of the Lincoln for a desk as he wrote out the check. He folded it carefully and handed it across the car seat to Hud.

  “That ought to take care of the hotel and such,” he said. Hud already had the motor running, and for a minute I wished it were me who was driving away. Granddad patted Grandma on the shoulder. “Jewel, you get on back here as soon as you can,” he said. “We’re liable to need you.”

  Grandma was looking straight ahead, impatient to be off. Her eyes were snappy as a bird’s, and she wanted no conversation. “Don’t be ahurryin’ me home,” she said. “You just tend to your ranch. I’m gonna take my time with this operation.”

  “We’re gone,” Hud said, throwing the car in gear. “Watch out for the kids and the cripples, and don’t buy no vaccine factory.” The wheels spun a minute in the thin gravel of the road, and the car jerked away.

  Jesse said he had to go where he could get the leverage on his bowels, and Gran
ddad told me to start loading a few posts in the pickup, so we could fence a little when we got the veterinary business done. I backed the old white pickup up to the post pile, and had loaded about ten or twelve of the smallest cedars I could find when I saw Newt Garrett drive up to the house in his muddy blue De Soto. Granddad was still in the house, so I left the posts to go tell him Newt had come. About the time I got to the back porch, Granddad came out.

  Old Newt was still sitting in his car, with the motor still running. He hated to walk worse than any man in the country, and wouldn’t unless he absolutely had to. He was an old-timer, nearly as old as Granddad. Once he had been a Texas Ranger, and he had enough pension to keep him alive, and enough oil money on top of it to make him about half-rich. He spent most of his time playing moon in the Thalia domino hall, but he still did a little horse-doctoring for the people he liked. He had lost his voice box in a cancer operation, and had to talk by pressing an electric buzzer against his throat. For the last few years he had been so contrary that nobody but Granddad would have anything to do with him, and Granddad just called him in once in a while when some heifer was having a hard time squeezing out her first calf. Granddad shook hands with him through the window of the car.

  “Get any rain?” he asked. That was always the first question.

  Newt took out his buzzer and stuck it to his throat. “Sprinkle,” he said. “Late last night. Nuff to wash the dust off my chickens.” Newt was a funny old fart anyway, and the dry way he buzzed out his words tickled me to death.

  “Kill your motor and get out,” Granddad said. “We’ll go in my pickup. I don’t believe we could get across them roads in that car.”

  Jesse came up about that time, and when Newt finally got out, Granddad introduced him. Newt shook his hand, and then pointed at the De Soto.

  “Ain’t no automobile,” he said. “See. It’s a slide. It ain’t no higher than a slide.” He got his bag of instruments out of the back seat and started for the barn.

  Jesse and I tagged them down the trail and got in the back of the pickup, on my twelve little cedars. Just as Granddad was about to drive off he remembered Lonzo, out there without any breakfast, and he drove back up to the house and sent me in to fix a plate.

  The minute Grandma left the house Halmea must have unplugged the living room radio and carried it to the kitchen. When I came in the back door, it was on the cabinet, blaring rock ’n’ roll, and Halmea was putting on a dance all by herself.

  “Listen at it,” she said, slapping her hands together and slide-stepping in front of the sink. The song was “Honeylove,” and the loud honky saxophone practically curled the wallpaper. If Granddad hadn’t been a shade deaf he would have heard it from the pickup. But old juicy Halmea just grinned and snapped her fingers at me and went on dancing. Then she got tickled at me or at herself or something and giggled till she could barely keep from falling over. Finally the song stopped, but even then she kept on shuffling a little to a tune of her own.

  “Cut it off,” I said. “Fix me a plate for Lonzo right quick. Granddad’s waitin’.”

  She already had a plate in her hands, and was crossing to the icebox. “Dat Mistah Bannon,” she said. “Dat man hurry himself too much. He ain’t got no slowdown to him, whut’s de trouble.”

  “He’s made it eighty-two years without relaxing,” I said. “Couldn’t you get any hillbilly this morning?”

  “I ain’t dancin’ no hillbilly,” she said, piling cold roast and sausage and boiled eggs on the plate. “I’m just dancin’ dancin’, dis mornin’.” When she had a good pile, she covered the plate with aluminum foil and set it on the cabinet for me. I started for the door, but she stopped me. “Mistah Lonzo needs some coffee,” she said. The radio had started up a Fats Domino song, and she was slow-dancing across the room with the percolator.

  “If you drop that coffee your ass is mud,” I said. Then I almost dropped it myself, corking the Thermos. When I went out the screen door I could hear her bare feet slapping the linoleum as she went on with her lonesome, happy dance.

  Newt was sitting with his voice box in his hand, so I knew Granddad had been getting a lot of dry conversation. I handed Newt the lunch to hold, and climbed in the back. Jesse sat with his back against the cab, smoking a cigarette and looking glum. I told him about Halmea cutting up, but it didn’t make much impression on him. “Some girl,” he said. Watching him, as Granddad crept along down the feed road, I thought what a strange man Jesse was. In no time he could turn so gloomy and sad it made you uncomfortable to be around him. He looked out across the pastures with a disappointed expression on his face. When we came to the gate leading into the west pasture I jumped out to open it, but it was a hard gate, and he had to come and help me hook it shut.

  We had to go about four or five miles across the big pasture to get to where the heifer was. I sat back against the endgate, enjoying the clear blue sweep of sky, and the early, grassy smell of the range. Finally Granddad stopped the pickup on top of a little ridge, and we got out. Newt looked kinda contrary. He was so famous for his laziness that I wondered how far Granddad could get him to walk, especially across the wet pastures. It was later than it should have been, and getting hot.

  “She’s over this way a little piece,” Granddad said. “I better not try and drive any farther. Can you walk it?”

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” Newt buzzed. “Go ahead.” Jesse and I followed them, not feeling very useful.

  “We might as well astayed an’ fenced,” Jesse said. “I don’t know what help we’ll be here.”

  We waded through a patch or two of high prairie weeds, getting our Levi’s damp almost to the knees. It had come the heaviest dew I’d nearly ever seen. We topped a little rise and saw Lonzo sitting under a big mesquite tree about fifty yards away. He was asleep, a twenty-two rifle laying across his lap. The carcass of the heifer lay about twenty or thirty yards to the south of him, and there must have been fifty buzzards sitting in the trees around it. As we came in sight one of the buzzards flopped to the ground, and began a slow, cautious waddle toward the heifer. The others stayed in the trees, nodding their scabby bald heads now and then, and raising their wings.

  Lonzo woke up when he heard us coming, and he tried to pretend he had just been possuming, to get the buzzards to come down. He began to shoot, working the little pump-action gun as fast as he could, six or eight shots before he ran out of bullets. Most of the shots kicked up grass stems and little puffs of dirt on one side of the bird or the other, but at least one shot hit him and knocked a wad of tar-colored feathers from his back. He took off anyway, rose gradually, turned and flew right over us, not more than fifteen feet high. I could almost have jumped up and grabbed his scaly feet. All the other buzzards rose too, taking off from the limbs like springboard divers; only they sprung upward into the air, and swirled up to where they looked like flies against the blue pane of sky.

  Lonzo stood up and began to reload his twenty-two. He was a tall, lank, gangly boy from Oklahoma who had been working for Granddad nearly two years. He claimed the only thing he’d ever got enough of his whole life was work, and that when it came to food or pussy or beer he always came out on the short end. He was easily satisfied, though, and if he couldn’t get any of those other things, he would settle for lots of sleep.

  “Look at them cowardly sonsabitches,” he said, waving the gun at the buzzards. Newt stepped behind Granddad when he did that. He thought Lonzo was crazy and dangerous.

  “Would you look at them chickenshits,” Lonzo went on, his Adam’s apple jerking in his thin neck. “You couldn’t keep ’em scared off with artillery.” It surprised some people that Granddad kept Lonzo on, because he didn’t know beans about cowboying, and didn’t show much talent for learning. Hud said right off that Lonzo only knew how to talk and eat and fuck and fist-fight and chop cotton, and that the only thing he was a top hand at was eating. “See there,” he said, pointing to where three buzzards lay dead on the ground. “Pretty good shootin’ for a twen
ty-two. I’ll get some more if they ever settle down.”

  “Easy now,” Jesse said. “Leave a few to keep the country clean.”

  I handed Lonzo his plate and Thermos, and he started over to his bedroll to eat, but Newt stopped him. Newt had been eying the dead buzzards, and he got his talk-piece out.

  “Broke the law,” he said. He really thought he was putting Lonzo in his place. “Big fine for killing buzzards.”

  Lonzo had picked a hard-fried egg off the plate and was gobbling it down, the twenty-two dangling carelessly from the crook of his arm. He had his mouth full when Newt buzzed, and he took his time answering.

  “No shit?” he said finally. He got a kick out of Newt. “Is there really a law like that?”

  “Oh yes,” Newt buzzed. “Oh yes.”

  Lonzo squatted on his heels and chewed another egg. “Well,” he said, “I was raised in Oklahoma. Up there they don’t have as many foolish laws as they do other places.” He looked up and grinned at Newt. “I had an old boy tell me once, he was a highway patrolman, that the law was meant to be interpurted in a leenent manner. That’s what I try to do, myself. Sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.” He laughed at himself, or at Newt, and uncorked the Thermos of coffee. Newt acted insulted and went over to the carcass, where Granddad was. Lonzo poured hot coffee into the Thermos cup, the smoke rising from the glass rim of the bottle. He winked and blew on the coffee to cool it. “Looks to me like them boys in Austin oughta have something better to do than make laws about a lot of goddamn buzzards. Don’t it look that way to you?” He took the three last pieces of sausage in his hand and slung the paper plate over his shoulder into the mesquite. Then he ate the sausages in about three bites. “I had to hump to keep them bastards off,” he said. “I finally propped my flashlight so it shone right on the heifer, an’ whenever one stepped into the light, I let him have it.” He stood up, picking his teeth with his thumbnail.