Thalia Read online

  We went over, then, and watched old Newt poke around on the heifer. For about five minutes he didn’t do anything but squat in front of her head and look at her, working his lips like he was making conversation. Granddad squatted down beside him. He had taken out his pocketknife and was whittling on the dry stem of a ragweed, shaving off the thin brittle bark. The lines in his face were deep, that morning, like ruts in road, his whiskers snow white against his brown face. He looked at the heifer curiously, but he didn’t seem too disturbed. He had lost a lot of cattle at one time or another in his life, and one dead heifer didn’t discourage him much.

  The heifer was laying on her side, her two top legs sticking out in the air. She was swelled up with bloat, but there was no smell to amount to anything. Hud said she had just died when he found her. She wasn’t cut, or crippled-looking, and there was no swelling on her that could have meant a snakebite.

  Finally Newt stood up and fiddled for his buzzer. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. Beats me. We might look in her stomach.”

  “Now’s when we all need clothespins,” Jesse said, rolling up his shirtsleeves. We moved the heifer like Newt wanted her, and he took a long knife and opened her up. There was stink enough then, but so far as we could tell, it was just work wasted. “Beats me,” Newt buzzed. His old, burnt, freckledly face looked solemn. He left the heifer and walked over to the good shade tree where Lonzo had his bedroll. The rest of us followed him over.

  “Homer,” Newt buzzed. “Homer. Get on the telephone, call up the state vet. He might know.”

  That surprised us all, but it like to floored Granddad. It was the first time anybody had heard Newt Garrett recommend another veterinary; and a state vet on top of that.

  “Why, what in the world?” Granddad said. “Is it all that complicated? I never have much doings with them fellers if I can help it.”

  Newt didn’t back up a step. “Better call,” he said. “Might be something serious. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Homer, better call.”

  “I never figured on havin’ to call in the government,” Granddad said. “I ain’t sure I want to, just for one heifer.” Granddad had got so he would walk a mile rather than involve himself with the government offices, and even so, compared to Hud he thought they were little darlings. Hud plain hated the mention of government. One of the worst things between Hud and Granddad was that Granddad had let him go in the service when he could have kept him out.

  “Play safe,” Newt buzzed. “They may all get sick if you don’t.”

  “What makes you think so?” Granddad said.

  But old Newt had his private stubborn streak, and he wouldn’t volunteer a word. Granddad hummed and hawed with him a little longer, then Newt got mad and stuck his buzzer in his pocket and headed for the pickup. Granddad waved for Jesse and Lonzo to come over.

  “He wants to get to the domino hall,” he said. “Jesse, I guess you better stay out here awhile. I’ll take Lonzo in with me and let him snooze a little. Come on to the pickup and get the water can, so you won’t parch.”

  Jesse went with us to the pickup, and carried the gray metal can back through the weeds. As we were driving away we heard the quick pop of the twenty-two. It was hot in the back of the pickup, and Granddad was just poking along, driving as slow as he could and stay in high gear. Lonzo didn’t care. He took off his hat and let the wind dry his sweaty head. “I got the best end of the deal after all,” he said. “He ain’t gonna kill no buzzards in the daytime. Them cowardly bastards are too smart.”

  2.

  After dinner Halmea filled some empty ice-cream cartons with beans and meat and tea, and I put them in an empty vaccine crate and carried them out to Jesse ahorseback. Some of the tea sloshed out, but I got there with most of what I started with. I was hoping Jesse would be in a talking mood, so I could stay awhile; but it turned out just the opposite. He looked hot and down-in-the-mouth, and acted like he didn’t much want me around. I left him right away, and rode home across the still, weedy pastures, wondering how to spend the afternoon.

  When I got to the lots I loped out to the big tank that stood about half a mile north of the barn. I wanted to water my horse, and check on the bullfrog crop. It was a big, deep tank, with a gravel bottom. There was a nice stand of cottonwoods, and the bank had a good covering of Bermuda grass. Halmea and her colored friends loved to fish in it. There were some nice catfish in it, and a lot of croppie, but about all I ever caught were the little five-inch perch. My life’s ambition was to get Halmea to go in swimming with me some time, but so far she wouldn’t even wade.

  I unsaddled, and decided to give it another try. She was in the living room, flopped on the satin-covered divan that was Grandma’s pride and joy. She was laying on her stomach, humming and filing her fingernails.

  “Let’s go swimmin’,” I said. “The tank’s like bath water.”

  “I ain’t no paddler,” she said, barely looking up. She had kicked her red sandals off, and they lay on the living room rug, about ten yards apart.

  “You could be,” I said. “With feet like yours.”

  “Sheew, my feet’s just barely do to walk on. We might go fishin’ though.”

  “Too much trouble,” I said. “I’d have to scrounge up bait.”

  Then she sat up, pushing her heavy, kinked black hair off her forehead, tucking some behind her ears. “Let’s do go fishin’,” she said. “I been in dis house too long. We got some liver fo’ bait.”

  I hadn’t thought of the liver, but I knew I wasn’t going to sit around pulling out those worthless perch all afternoon, when all I really wanted was to see Halmea in the water. At least I wanted a chance to duck her a time or two.

  “It’s too windy to fish,” I said. “Don’t be so scared of the water.”

  She looked surprised, and then she gave me the slow grin. She had on a loose floppy dress, and her breasts rolled against it like cantaloupes when she sat up. “Sheew,” she said, grinning. “Me scared a watah?” Then she fell back suddenly on the satin couch and haw-hawed, the deep careless laughter coming clear up from her guts it sounded like. “I got yo’ number,” she said.

  “You got my nothin’,” I said. “I just thought you might like to swim awhile, you look so bored.”

  “Who you foolin’?” she said. “Honey, it ain’t Halmea.” She laughed as if the funniest thing possible had just occurred to her. It was the laughing fit of her life, I guess, and she had to wipe the tears out of her eyes and off her cheeks. “Sugah, you plain as day,” she said. “You don’ want no fishin’.” And she picked a copy of Life magazine off the floor and began to look through it, still laughing her rich, teasing laugh. I couldn’t even get her interested in fishing, after that. “Go on, Mistah Tightpants,” she said, giggling.

  Finally I gave it up and went outside. Granddad had been after me for a week to cut the goat-heads in the chicken yard, so I sharpened my shovel and went at it. I worked like a demon, and in thirty minutes or so I had cut about ten thousand and only had a million or two to go. Halmea came out of the house, on the way to her little shack. She leaned on the chicken-yard fence a minute, grinning, the wind blowing her floppy dress against her legs.

  “Can’t you find no bait?” she said. She laughed and went on down the trail, and I got after the goat-heads, the sweat running down my face and into my eyes.

  3.

  Granddad had gone to Thalia, to see about the vet. When he came back he was silent and blue, and in spite of all we could say he went out and stood a turn watching the heifer. “You drive,” he said to me, after supper. “I’m going out an’ spell Jesse awhile.” So I drove the pickup through the late, dusky pastures, and he looked out of the window at the bunches of cattle as we passed them. He didn’t say two words. The sun had about thirty minutes to go when I parked the pickup on the ridge and we got out. That time of day the prairie smelled rich to me, stingy and sappy and green.

  Jesse was stretched out on Lonzo’s bedroll, resting. The buzzar
ds were in some low mesquite trees, two or three hundred yards away.

  “Why, I can stay out here tonight,” Jesse said, surprised to see us.

  “No, you go in an’ eat an’ rest awhile,” Granddad said. He walked over and looked solemnly down at the heifer. The green flies were buzzing and crawling in the open gut. Granddad had on a Levi’s jacket against the night cool, and his mashed-up brown Stetson was pulled down over his forehead. “The other vet’s comin’ in the morning,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be done with this before much longer.”

  Jesse and I went on back to the pickup, and I drove us home across the darkening pastures. Jesse was in a better humor than he had been that afternoon, and I hit him up to go to the picture show. He was agreeable, so while he ate cold supper for the second night in a row I went to the bunkhouse and routed Lonzo out. He had flopped down asleep the minute he got through the door, without even taking off his Levi’s or his heavy khaki shirt, and of course he was lathered in his own sweat. I got him awake enough to convince him he wanted to go with us, and he dripped a little shower water on his head and put on some fresh clothes. He was still drugged and gloopy, and didn’t say a word. We went out and set on the fender of the pickup, where it was cooler, and in a minute Jesse came out of the house and stopped to light his after-supper cigarette.

  We got in, and I drove down the dark dirt road to the highway, swung on, and gigged the old pickup for all it was worth toward the lights of Thalia. Lonzo sat next to me, still half-asleep. One minute the town lights would be just ahead of us, bright against the dark sky, and the next minute we’d hit a little dip and they would fall out of sight. There was just the lights and the highway and off to the west a few stars overhead.

  “Lonesome old night,” Jesse said. I glanced over at him, and the tired lines of his face were softened and hidden by the dim light from the dashboard. A big lonesomeness hung over Jesse all right. “Better slow down,” he said. “You’ll run plumb through town before you can stop.”

  But I roared on into Thalia, fifty miles an hour right up to the square. I slowed down a little and circled it, parked in front of the lightbulbs and cardboard posters of the picture show. The pickup rolled against the curb hard enough to shake Lonzo out of his drunken stupor, and we got out and went in. When I was a kid in grade school Thalia had had two picture shows, but in those days the oil-field activity was big, and Thalia was a wild, wet sort of half boom town. Pretty soon the oil production fell off and the oil people took their cars and their dirty scrappy kids down the road to another field. The people who stayed voted to close the beer joints then, and after that there wasn’t any place to go at night except the picture shows and the all-night trucker’s café. A year or two later one of the shows closed up and they started using the billboards to run advertising for the one that hung on. That night there was an old picture playing, Streets of Laredo, with Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette. We all got popcorn and sat down to watch the previews. By the time the main show came on, Lonzo was wide awake and full of sass.

  “Look at that silver mounted saddle,” he said, snickering. “You couldn’t lift that bastard on a horse with a goddamn crane.”

  “I met Gene Autry once,” Jesse whispered. “Two years ago at the rodeo in Houston. Seemed like a strange man.”

  I don’t know how he would be at the rodeo, but in the picture he was his chubby fat self, knocking the bad guys over like dominoes. Between Lonzo’s snickering, and the little kids chasing themselves up and down the aisle, I could barely hear the picture. When Streets of Laredo was over they had one of those silly comedies where you were supposed to sing along with the bouncing golf ball. Lonzo wanted to sing with it, but he couldn’t read fast enough to keep up with the ball, and everybody in the show got to laughing at him. I poked him in the ribs to make him quit, but he clipped me under the chin with his elbow, not noticing, and I had to sit and hold my breath for a minute, till my teeth stopped rattling. I kept forgetting how strong Lonzo was. Finally there was a newsreel showing the New York Yankees trotting across a baseball field in Florida, and it was time for the previews to start around again.

  We left the show and drove down to the drive-in so I could get a hamburger. Lonzo had missed his supper, so he got three. I offered to buy Jesse a root beer or something, but he just sat and smoked. I went up and put a quarter in the outdoor jukebox, played “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I’m in the Jail-house Now,” and we all sat and listened while the hamburgers cooked.

  “What do kids do for fun around here?” Jesse asked, watching the carhop hurrying around between the cars. She was making up to a carload of roughnecks, fixing to go out on the night’s tower.

  “Whatever there is,” I said.

  “What the hell is there?” Lonzo said. “About a dime’s worth is all I can see.”

  Actually we didn’t do an awful lot. There was the pool hall, the snooker and eight-ball tables. But most of the time we just rode around and talked, or hunted up girls to court. Once in a while we drove to the county line and bought some beer.

  “I guess kids out here have to make their own,” Jesse said. “It ain’t that way in the cities, what I’ve seen.”

  “Lonnie oughta go to Oklahoma,” Lonzo said. “Hell, we had some big times up there when I was growing up. All the girls put out.”

  “Put you out, you mean,” Jesse said. He flipped his cigarette out the window. “But I guess this ain’t so bad. Many a one grew up with less.”

  “Hell, they grew up in the wrong state if they did,” Lonzo said. “They oughta tried Oklahoma.”

  I saw some of my buddies over in another car, and I wished for a minute that I had left Lonzo and Jesse at home. If I had been by myself I might have got with the other boys and scared up something. I figured I’d try it the next chance I got. We got the hamburgers, and all the songs played, so we drove on back to the ranch. We flipped to see who would go out and replace Granddad, and Lonzo lost. He drove off, and Jesse and I stood a minute at the yard gate.

  “Enjoyed the picture,” he said, “but say, listen. When you get to wantin’ to go make whoopee on your own, just say so and me and Lonzo’ll catch up on our sleep. I don’t like to see nobody in a cramp.” He was quiet a minute, and then he went on. “I remember when I was about nineteen,” he said. “I had been on my own, and I had to go back and start helpin’ Dad. We had a cotton patch in Throckmorton County, right next to the highway that run in to Fort Worth an’ Dallas and no tellin’ where-all. I spent all my time following a couple a work mules around that field, and all day long folks would whiz by in their cars, going places I wanted to go. Don’t think I wouldn’t a given that whole run-down piece a land to a jumped in one a them cars and gone whizzing by some other pore bastard that had to work. I never could stand to be cramped up after that. I hate to see anybody in a cramp.” He patted me on the shoulder, and strolled off through the darkness to the bunkhouse. I felt tired out. I went to my room and flipped through an old magazine or two, but when I saw the lights of Granddad’s pickup coming along the prairie road, I pitched the magazines down and went to sleep.

  Three

  I HEARD GRANDDAD’S STEPS ON THE STAIRS OUTSIDE MY door as I turned over. He came in and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Lonnie boy,” he said. “Breakfast time.” Then he went out of the gray room, and I knew that getting up was my responsibility. It looked misty outside, and I lay on a minute, my face nuzzled into the cool pillow. Then I heard the faraway slam of the screen door as Halmea came in to cook breakfast, and in a minute I heard “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” the early theme song, coming from the kitchen radio. Jesse and Granddad were talking, standing on the porch just below me. When I heard them I swung my feet to the bare piny smoothness of the floor.

  The light in the yard was timid yet, but I could see the heavy glisten of dew on the Bermuda grass, and smell the dampness of the gray range in the early breeze. While I was buttoning my stiff clean khaki shirt I heard the raspy voice of the radio announcer, brin
ging the five o’clock news. I put on my socks and went downstairs to the bathroom, my boots in my hand. I didn’t feel woke up at all, and I remembered one bad morning when I had come downstairs with my eyes half-shut and got into the kitchen closet by mistake and pissed sleepily on the brooms.

  When I came into the kitchen Halmea was standing by the stove, flipping grease over the eggs she was frying. She had on a clean blue dress, and looked too cheerful to fool with.

  “Wish I could sleep till dinnah like you does,” she said.

  “Fry your eggs,” I said, dragging a package of Post Toasties from the cabinet. Granddad and Jesse were already sitting at the table, eating eggs and bacon and sipping coffee from their saucers. I missed Lonzo, and remembered he was out on the range again. I poured milk over my Post Toasties, and began to read the advertising bullshit on the back of the box. I had read it a hundred times, but there was nothing else handy. By the time I got to biscuits and syrup Granddad and Jesse had carried their plates to the sink and gone out, and I had to sop up my sorghum in a hurry and follow them.

  When I stepped off the back porch the sun was just coming up, striking all kinds of colors against the low mossy clouds that still hung in the west. My regular job was to scatter hay for the horses, so while Granddad and Jesse milked I climbed up in the high loft and kicked down a few dusty bales. By the time I had them in the racks the two full milk buckets were waiting to be carried to the house and strained. The milk was hot, and the foam on top fizzed a little as I lugged the buckets to the back porch. Halmea came out and helped me fix the cheesecloth on the blue milk strainer, and I slowly poured the two bucketfuls through. When I got back to the lots Granddad and Jesse were at the big water trough, trying to unstop a faucet. I went over, but I was just in the way.

  “I believe here comes our man,” Jesse said, looking up. A black Chevrolet was bumping down the rough road toward the barn; there were two men in the front seat.