Thalia Page 8

  I did. I went to my room, but it was a long time that night before I went to sleep. I read a little of From Here to Eternity, and then lay on my bed wide awake in the darkness, my head full of old sights and half-dreams, some nice and some uneasy. I remembered something Hud had told me once about my daddy: how he had killed my real grandmother. Hud said a snake had crawled up on the cellar, and Daddy shot at it and the bullet ricocheted off and hit Grandmother in the head. Granddad was off in the pasture, and she died under the sycamore tree before he got home. I never had the nerve to ask Granddad about it. But I knew that the ranch wasn’t as cheerful as it had been. Hud and Granddad had too many bad arguments, and now there was the cattle disease and all that to worry about. Sometimes reading about Karen Holmes would make me wonder about the army, but I didn’t think I would feel like Prew did about it, and I didn’t intend to go off the deep end in that direction. Then there was Jesse’s gloom and Halmea’s crying and a lot of things that didn’t look good.

  Sometime late at night Hud came roaring in in his Ford. He stopped it under the shade trees by the back fence. His radio was on good and loud, and from where I lay I could hear Carl Smith singing “The Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Hud switched the radio off in the middle of a line, and went on singing it himself. He sounded like he had whisky in his voice. I raised on my elbows and watched him stand by the water house cleaning his boots. It was Hud’s one good habit, cleaning his boots every time he wore them.

  I don’t remember seeing him go into the house at all: he may have cleaned them all night. I dozed off about that time, and I dreamed that Granddad and I were out together, riding in the early morning. The sun was just up, and the breeze cool on us as we rode across the high country. We stopped our horses on the edge of a hill, a high, steep hill, maybe it was the cap rock, and rested, our legs across the horses’ necks. There below us was Texas, green and brown and graying in the sun, spread wide under the clear spread of sky like the opening scene in a big Western movie. There were rolling hills in the north, and cattle grazing here and there, and strings of horses under the shade trees. Then above us the little gray clouds began to slip away toward the north like coyotes in the pastures. We could see creeks winding across the flats, dark green oak trees growing along their banks. The green waving acres of mesquite spread out and away from us to the south and east. I saw the highways cutting through the bright unshaded towns, and I kept expecting Granddad to say something to me. But he was relaxed, looking across the land. Finally he swung his feet into the stirrups and we rode down together into the valley toward some ranch I couldn’t see, the Llano Estacado or the old Matador. . . .

  Six

  THE NEXT MORNING GRANDDAD WOKE ME UP TO SEE IF I wanted to go into Wichita with him, to a cattle sale. He had bought some milk cows from a man the week before, and had agreed to get them at the sale. Now that the quarantine was on he couldn’t bring them on the ranch, but Hank Hutch had agreed to buy them if Granddad would haul them to his place. I jumped into some clean Levi’s and got down to breakfast in a hurry, but it was hurry wasted. Hud decided out of contrariness that he wanted to go, and while we were waiting for him to change clothes Grandma got in a preserving mood. The upshot of it was that we all ended up working in the garden till almost ten o’clock, bosses, hired hands, and all. She even had Hud out picking peas in his floosy pants. When we left she and Halmea had a wagonload of produce to put up.

  It was past dinnertime, still and hot as could be, when we got to the auction barn. I had planned on stopping off in Wichita and seeing a picture show, but Granddad vetoed that. He said he might not stay long, and he didn’t want to have to hunt me up. He was looking tired and depressed, like he wasn’t feeling very gay. I figured Hud would give him hell about the cattle and the vets on the way in, but Hud didn’t. When we got to the sale Granddad went off to prowl among the pens, looking for the man who had the milk cows, and Hud got with some of his gambling cronies and disappeared into the beer joint next door. I was left by myself to watch the sale, like I knew I’d be.

  For a while it was enjoyable. There was a little row of padded seats around the auction ring. They were for the privileged buyers to use, the men who represented big feed lots and packing concerns. They were a mean, crooked lot to my way of thinking but they were fun to watch. They sat around in gray shirts and $10 straw hats looking proud of themselves. They talked and cussed and guzzled the cold beer the waitresses kept packing in from the stockyards café; but in spite of all the chatter they never missed an animal that came through the ring, and nine times out of ten it was one of them that made the buy. The auctioneer was auction-talking in a steady stream, leaning over the rail with a microphone in his hand, his pearl-buttoned shirt sweated through. Behind the big buyers, wooden grandstands sloped up to the ceiling. The little men sat on them, the small ranchers, talking stock to one another and the dirt farmers in yellow flat-brimmed hats and blue overalls come in maybe to sell a milk-pen calf. I saw a big operator wall around the ring, a beer bottle in one hand and a little snap-tail whip in the other. He had on white pigskin gloves, and he stopped all the way around the packer’s ring to slap people on the back and interrupt their conversations. The cattle poured through the ring in ones and twos and tens, ever color and ever kind, the loud song-talk of the auctioneer meeting them when they came in and following them as they went out.

  After I had been watching nearly an hour and a half—plenty long enough to have seen a good show, anyway—I saw Hud walk up and slip his arm around one of the waitresses. He patted her about belly level, almost making her drop a tray of beer bottles. When she saw who it was she just laughed and slipped on by him. He spotted me and came over.

  “Homer seen you?” he asked.

  “Not since we got here,” I said.

  “He’s ready for you to load them milk cows,” Hud said. He pushed his straw hat off his sweaty forehead. “Good milk cows,” he said. “We oughta keep ’em and let the fuckin’ government go to hell. Get ’em at chute number five. I got to see a feller right quick.”

  I went out into the dusty heat of the parking lot, to the pickup. The door handle was so hot I had to put my gloves on to open it, and the cab was like an oven. I drove around to the loading chutes, hoping not to have to wait, but a farmer in a new International was getting him a few scrawny Brown Swiss at the chute I was supposed to use. I sat in the cab, broiling in my own juice for fifteen minutes, while he got his business done.

  As soon as he left, I backed up. While I was fixing my endgates a kid a little younger than me came walking up the chute. He just looked like a city high-school kid, ducktails and flowery shirt, but he had a piece of rubber hose in his hand, like the yard men used.

  “You want some cattle?” he said. “We’ll load ’em for you. That’s all we do, load cattle.” Old Andy, the regular loader, came up right behind him, and I told them both who I was and what I was after.

  “I know ’em,” Andy said. “Come in here last night from Cache, Oklahoma.” He slouched back down the dusty alleyway after the cows, but the kid never moved.

  “I’m Marlet,” he said. “I coulda gone and got ’em. I knew where they was as good as Andy.” He swung the piece of water hose back and forth. “Shit,” he said, “I been working in these yards ever time I get a day off, helpin’ ’em load cattle. I don’t care whether they pay me or not, I still come an’ help.”

  “Damn, why?” I said. “You couldn’t get me out in this heat and dust to work for nothin’.”

  He slapped the board fence with his hose. “I don’t mind it hot,” he said. “We used to live on a farm an’ work all the time, till Ma and Pa separated. Then we moved up here. I work for the Dr. Pepper bottlin’ company ever day ’cept Sundays and Tuesdays.”

  “Do you have a horse?” he asked, looking at me closely out of his marbly black eyes. He asked like I was guilty of something bad. I told him I had three, all of them no-count.

  “Someday I’m goin’ to,” he said. “I’ll come ov
er here an’ chase ever one of these cattle out of the pens, ever fuckin’ one. They make wienie sausage out of ’em, did you know that?”

  About that time the three Jersey cows came up the chute, with Andy following them. I got behind the endgate out of sight, but Marlet stood right where he was, right in the way. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, and he just stood there looking at the cows. Of course they turned back down the chute, and Andy had to jump around like crazy to keep them from going by him.

  “Goddamnit kid, you’re in the way,” Andy yelled, waving his punch pole at Marlet. The kid didn’t look at Andy at all, but he climbed up on the fence, and the cows came running up the plank and into the pickup. As the last one went underneath him he reached down and hit her as hard as he could with the piece of hose.

  “I like to hear it pop,” he said, the cigarette still between his lips. “Did you know they make wieners out of ’em?” He sat on the fence, cooler than I was, while I fastened the endgate and hooked the chain behind it.

  I had to wait for Granddad and Hud, so I pulled the pickup over in the shade of the auction barn and opened both the doors. I was going to lay down in the seat, but Marlet came and got in on the other side. He still had his hose.

  “The police told me not to go with no more girls,” he said. “They said they could put me in jail if I did. It’s about to strangle me.” He looked at me with such a serious expression on his face that I felt like I had to at least turn and face him. I really wished he would go back to the lots, so he’d be in Andy’s way instead of in mine.

  “I got a theory,” he said. “I didn’t get it from nowhere, not from no Nazis or no Communists or nobody. It says it’s all right to get it. It’s what God wants you to do.” He leaned forward in the seat, thinking about his theory. “I’m going to make a song about it and get it on the radio,” he said. “That’s the way to get rich. It goes: ‘It ain’t no siiinn to geet iiiiit . . . !’” Then he lowered his voice. “I never got it but seven times,” he said. “There used to be a whorehouse on Ohio, but the politicians closed it down for the elections.” He tapped me on the knee, his eyes like black marbles. “I never got it from a blue-eyed woman once,” he said. “Ever time from a brown-eyed woman. Ain’t that terrible? I mean, you know?” Then he went on. “I used to go with a girl named Rosalind Chatteau, but now she won’t let me go with her. I was over at my cousin’s house the other day and he had three women there. They ever one had brown eyes.” He looked around at the chutes, where Andy was yelling at some cattle. I thought he was going to jump out and go help, but he changed his mind. “You know what sugar dibetus is?” he asked. I nodded that I did. “I got that,” he said. “There’s three kinds of insulin you got to take. They get me so messed up it’s about to strangle me.”

  He stopped talking, and we sat in the hot, noisy loading yard for about five minutes, not saying anything. He took the same unlit cigarette from his shirt pocket and put it between his lips. “Ma cleans over at the hide-an-renderin’ plant,” he said. “We live over there.” Suddenly he got out of the cab and stood looking at the chutes, popping the water hose against his leg. “You-all have a ranch?” he asked.

  When I said yes, he shook his head as if he’d known it all along. “I wish we did,” he said. He took a couple of steps toward the pens, and then came back and looked up at me. “Take it easy,” he said. “Or any way you can get it.”

  I thought he was the strangest kid I’d ever met. I sat there thinking about him and his strangling, until finally Granddad and Hud came out of the auction barn. Hud came around to the driver’s side and motioned for me to scoot over. His face was wet with sweat. “Look at them shittin’ Jerseys,” he said. “Let’s get out of this oven.” I scooted over in the middle, where it was hottest, wishing the long drive home was over.

  We were going right into the sun all the way. In the distance I could see the heat waves rising off the brown, burning land, and there was always a watery patch of mirage on the pavement ahead of us. With three people jammed into the cab, it was blistering; the sun was just dropping level with the windshield. The cloudless sky was still pale with heat. Granddad was inspecting the sales slip on the cows when he got in; he folded it carefully and tucked it into his billfold. His mind seemed to be on something far away.

  “I wish you’d a cut loose from fifty more dollars and got tinted glass in this buggy,” Hud said. “I’m fryin’ in my own grease.”

  “Tinted glass wouldn’t help,” Granddad said. “Besides, I might not a had it to cut loose from.”

  “Oh, but you did,” Hud said. “Fifty times fifty.”

  Granddad said nothing to that, and Hud fell silent as we drove through the big ranch country. The rush of air through the little window whipped the black locks of hair on his forehead back and forth. He nor Granddad neither one seemed in a bad arguing mood, but sitting there between them, I began to feel uncomfortable, like I was riding a horse along a high slippery ledge when it was raining. One splash of words in the wrong place and I didn’t know where we’d be. For the first time, then, I noticed how much fresher and more powerful Hud looked than Granddad. Granddad was tough and steady, but he was looking awful tired and old.

  “I saw you talking on the telephone for a good long while,” Hud said. “Talkin’ to the vet?”

  “I talked to him,” Granddad said. “But I didn’t get a whole lot of information out of him.”

  “Hell, did you expect to?” Hud asked. “When a government son of a bitch wants you to know something he’ll call you, or else send you a telegram.”

  “I reckon that’s right,” Granddad said. “He said they were watching the test animals pretty close, but hadn’t nothin’ showed up yet. I guess it’ll be a few days yet before we know anything.”

  Hud took a toothpick out of his pocket and began to pick his teeth as he drove. I couldn’t figure why he was keeping so quiet about it all, and I guess Granddad couldn’t either.

  “What’s your idea on all this, Scott?” he asked. “What do you think we’ll have to do?”

  “Why I don’t know nothin’,” Hud said, grinning suddenly. “You’re the boss, you must be the one who knows if anybody does. I just work from the shoulders down, myself.” We had heard that line of talk a thousand times, and Granddad just waited it out.

  “I agreed to the long quarantine,” he said. “Don’t you reckon that’ll satisfy ’em?”

  Hud spit his toothpick out the window. “Shit,” he said, “they don’t need you to agree to nothin’. They’re the law. They’d just as soon do something you didn’t agree to. You can agree with ’em till shit quits stinkin’ for all the good it’ll do you.”

  “These fellers ain’t that bad,” Granddad said, his eyes squinted almost shut against the direct light of the sun. “You ain’t met these fellers. The boss seems to be as nice as he can be.”

  “I’m just here drivin’,” Hud said. “Just workin’ with my hands.”

  “Goddamnit, now, I’m asking you,” Granddad said. “You been adyin’ to be asked. Do you think they’d come in an’ liquidate?”

  Hud took his eyes off the road and looked at Granddad; he wasn’t grinning any more. “Hell yes, they’ll liquidate,” he said. “But let me tell you something. Don’t be abotherin’ to ask me now. You done missed the time for that. You missed about fifteen years.”

  Granddad sighed. “Now what the hell do you want?” he asked. “I don’t doubt I treated you hard, and I don’t doubt I made some mistakes. A man don’t always do what’s right. But that was over an’ done with years ago. It ain’t got nothin’ to do with this.”

  “You just think it ain’t,” Hud said. “It may be over, but it ain’t done with by a long shot. Not none of it.” Hud was talking slow, and watching the road, but the words he said came spurting out in the close cab like blood from a chicken’s neck. “You’re too old to know what I want,” he said. “You always were. Not only too old, but too blind an’ stingy an’ contrary.” Granddad listened
without changing his face or saying a word. “You never thought I wanted more than you was a mind to give, did you?” Hud said. “You let that bronc fall on you an’ mash you up so you thought you was goin’ to die, and you got Ma to nurse you, an’ she thought the same thing, an’ you ended up marryin’ her. Then you got well an’ found out she wasn’t such a bargain, and I was just part of it, just another muscle-head for you to boss around. You thought I oughta drive that goddamn feed wagon for you, instead of goin’ to college. Yeah. You held on tight then, but you sure let me go in a hurry when the draft board started lookin’ for somebody to go do the fightin’. But hell, you were Wild Horse Homer Bannon in them days, an’ anything you did was right. I even thought you was right myself, the most of the time. Why, I used to think you was a regular god. I don’t know more.”

  Granddad seemed to have quit listening to him. “It ain’t hard to look behind you an’ see mistakes,” he said, after a minute. “This here’s a different day, an’ I don’t see what drivin’ that feed wagon has got to do with this hoof-an’-mouth. But I guess if they try an’ liquidate we can hold’ em off some way, lawyers maybe.” He looked out the window.

  Hud looked over at him and laughed his hard, slapping laughter. “Lawyers my ass,” he said. “Fuck a bunch a lawyers. Now you asked me, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d get on the telephone tonight and sell ever breed cow you got. They ain’t got no chain on you yet, and we could ship the old bitches out before you finish them tests.”

  We both looked over at him like we thought he was crazy, but I knew he wasn’t. He just always came out with the first scheme that popped into his head, however crazy-sounding it was.

  “You mean try an’ pass this shittin’ stuff off on some old boy who wouldn’t know what he was getting’?” Granddad said. “I’d have to be a whole lot worse off than I am to do that.”

  “Hell, no,” Hud said. “Sell ’em to someone stupid enough to buy ’em knowing what the situation was. There’s a many of ’em dumb enough to do it, just on the gamble.”