Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 13

By San Antone I'd run out of bus and food money as well as confidence in dealing with the Texas highway patrol, who believed patching tar on a country road was a cure for almost anything. So I walked five miles of railroad track before I heard a doubleheader coming up the line and took off running along the gravel next to a string of empty flat wheelers, that's boxcars with no springs, my duffle bag banging me in the back, the cars wobbling across the switches and a passenger train on the next track coming up fast, but I worked the door loose, running full-out, flung my duffle on the floor, and crawled up inside the warm smell of grain sacks and straw blowing in the wind and the whistle screaming down the line.

It was near dawn when I woke up, and I knew we were on a trestle because all you could hear was the wheels pinching and squealing on the rails and there wasn't any echo off the ground or the hillsides. The air was cold and smelled like mesquite and blackjack and sage when it's wet, like no one had ever been there before, no gas-driven machines, no drovers fording the river down below, not even Indians in the gorges that snaked down to the bottoms like broken fingers and were cluttered with yellow rocks as big as cars.

There were sand flats in the middle of the river, with pools of water in them that were as red as blood, and dead deer that turkey buzzards had eaten from the topside down so that the skeletons stuck out of the hides and the buzzards used the ribs for a perch. Then we were on a long plateau, inside an electric storm, and I begin to see cattle pens and loading chutes and busted windmills that were wrapped with tumbleweed, adobe houses with collapsed walls way off in the lightning, a single-track dirt road and wood bridge and a state sign that marked the Pecos, where the bottom was nothing but baked clay that would crack and spiderweb under your boots.

The old man, Jude LaRose, told me the name of the town but not how to get to it. That was his way. He drew lines in the dirt, and if you fit between them, he might be generous to you. Otherwise, you didn't exist. The problem was you never knew where the lines were.

I hadn't realized I'd climbed aboard a hotshot, a straight-through that doesn't stop till it reaches its destination. I dropped off on an upgrade, just before another trestle, hit running, and slid all the way down a hill into a wet sand flat flanged with willows that had once been a riverbed and was pocked with horses hooves and deer tracks that were full of rainwater. I walked all day in the rain, crossed fences with warning signs on them in Spanish and English, saw wild horses flowing like shadows down the face of a ridge, worked my way barefoot across a green river with a soap-rock bottom and came out on a dirt readjust as a flatbed truck boomed down with drill pipe and loaded with Mexicans sleeping under a tarp ground through a flooded dip in the road and stopped so the man leaning against the top of the cab with an M-1 carbine could say, "Where you think you goin', man?"

I guess I looked like a drowned cat. I hadn't eaten in two days, and my boots were laced around my neck and the knees were tore out of my britches. He had on a blue raincoat and a straw hat, with water sluicing off the brim, and his beard was silky and black and pointed like a Chinaman's.

"Jude LaRose's place. It's somewhere around here, ain't it?" I said.

"You on it now, man."

"Where's he live at?"

"Why you want to know that?"

"I'm a friend of his. He told me to come out."

He leaned down to the window of the cab and said to the Mexicans inside, "Dice que es amigo del Señor LaRose." They laughed. The ones in back had the tarp pushed up over their heads so they could see me, and two of them were eating refried beans and tortillas they had folded into big squares between their fingers. But they were a different sort, not the kind to laugh at other people.

"You know where his house is at?" I said.

He'd already lost interest. He hit on the roof with his fist, and they drove off in the rain, with the drill pipe flopping off the back of the bed and the Mexicans in back looking out at me from under the tarp.

I found Jude LaRose's town that evening. It was nothing more than a dirt crossroads set in a cup of hills that had gone purple and red in the sunset. It had a shutdown auction barn and slaughterhouse, a dried-out hog feeder lot next to a railroad bed with no track and a wood water tank that had rotted down on itself, and a shingle-front two-story saloon and cafe, where a little black girl was laying out steaks on a mesquite fire in back. The sidewalk was almost higher than the pickups and horses in front of it, iron-stained with the rusted cusps of tethering rings and pooled with the blood of a cougar someone had shot that day and had hung with wire around the neck from the stanchion of an electric Carta Blanca sign that was the same blue as the glow above the hills.

The inside of the saloon had a stamped tin ceiling, card and domino tables in back, a long bar with old-time towel rings and a wall mirror and brass rail and spittoons, and antlers nailed all over the support posts. A dozen cowboys and oil field roughnecks were playing five-card stud and sipping shots with Pearl and Grand Prize on the side.

The menu was on a chalkboard over the bar. The bartender wore a red chin beard, and his eyes were hollowed deep in his face and his arms were as thick as hams. A fat black woman set a platter of barbecue sandwiches in the service window and rang a bell. The bread was gold and brown with butter and grill marks and soft in the center from the barbecue sauce that had soaked through. The bartender put four bottles of Pearl on the tray and carried it to the card table.

"How much is just the lima bean soup without the sandwich?" I asked. I had to keep my hands flat on the bar when I said it, too, because there was a wood bowl full of crackers and pickles right at the end of my fingers.

"Twenty cents," he said.

"How much for just a cup?"

"Where you from, boy?"

" Louisiana."

"Go around back and I'll tell the nigger to fix you something."

"I ain't ask for a handout."

He pulled up his apron, took a lighter out of his blue jeans, and lit a cigarette. He smoked it and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He picked up the bowl of crackers and pickles and set it on the counter behind him with the bottles of whiskey and rum and tequila.

"You cain't hang around here," he said.

It had started to rain again, and I could see the water dripping off the Carta Blanca sign on the face of the dead cougar. Its eyes were seamed shut, like it had gone to sleep. A man opened the front door and the rain blew across the floor.

"How far is it to the LaRose house?" I said.

"What you want out there?"

"Mr. LaRose told me to come out."

The cigarette smoke trailed out of the side of his mouth. A shadow had come into his face, like a man who's caught between fear and suspicion and anger at himself and an even greater fear you'll see all these things going on inside him.

He walked down the duckboards and used the phone on the counter. When he put the receiver back down his eyes wouldn't stay fixed on mine.

"Mr. LaRose says for you to order up. He'll be along when it quits raining," he said. He set the bowl of pickles and crackers back in front of me, then pried off the top of a Barge's root beer on a wall opener and set it next to the bowl.

"How about a steak and eggs and those stewed tomatoes?" I said.

"Anything else?"

"How about some fried potatoes?"

"What else?"

"How come a Mexican would carry a M-1 carbine on a pipe truck?" I asked.

He leaned on the bar. I could smell soap and sweat in his clothes. "Where you seen it?" he asked.

"Coming north of the river."

"You ever heard of no God or law west of the Pecos?"

"No."

"It means you see wets, you forget it."

"I don't understand."

"It's a subject you'd best carry on the end of a shit fork," he said.

An hour later the sky was empty and dry and pale behind the hills and you could see the sage for miles when Jude LaRose pulled up next to the sidewalk in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon, leaned over and popped open the passenger door and looked at me from under the brim of his Stetson with those blue eyes you didn't eyer forget. He was a handsome man in every respect-tall, with a flat stomach, his gray hair cropped GI, his skin sun-browned the shade of a cured tobacco leaf-but I never saw beautiful eyes like that on a man before or since. They were the dark blue you see in patches of water down in the Keys, when the day's hot and bright before a storm and a cloud of perfect blue darkness floats across the reef, and you almost think you can dip your hand into the color and rub it on your skin, like you would ink, but for some reason, down below that perfect piece of color, down in those coral canyons, you know a school of hammerheads are shredding the bonito into pink thread.

I sat down next to him, with my duffle between my legs, and closed the door. The seats were made from rolled yellow leather, and the light from the mahogany dashboard shone on the leather and reflected up in Jude's face.

"They want you?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"You know what I mean."

"There're ain't any warrant."

"What was it?"

"A man whipped me with his belt behind Provost's saloon. Another man held me while he done it."

"What else?"

"I caught him later that night. When he was by himself. It worked out different this time."

He unsnapped the button on his shirt pocket and took a Camel out and fitted it in his mouth without ever letting go of my eyes.

"You're not lying about the warrant, are you?" he said.

"I wouldn't lie about something like that."

"What would you lie about?"

"Sir?"

When we drove away I saw the little black girl who had been laying steaks on the mesquite fire run out from the side of the building and wave at the station wagon.

That night I slept on a bare mattress on the floor of a stucco cottage full of garden tools behind the main house. I dreamed I was on a flat-wheeler freight, high up on a trestle above a canyon, and the trestle's supports were folding under the train's weight and the wheels were squealing on the rail as they gushed sparks and fought to gain traction.

The main house was three-story purple brick, with white balconies and widow's walks and poplar trees planted as windbreaks around the yard. There was a bunkhouse with a tar paper roof for the fieldhands, rows of feeder lots and corrugated water tanks and windmills for the livestock, a red barn full of baled hay you could stuff a blimp in, a green pasture with hot fences for Jude's thoroughbreds, a scrap yard that was a museum of steam tractors and Model T flatbed trucks, a hundred irrigated acres set aside for vegetables and melons and cantaloupes, and through a long, sloping valley that fanned into a bluff above the river, deer and Spanish bulls mixed in together, belly-deep in grass.

Every fence had a posted sign on it, and for those who couldn't read, animals and stray wetbacks, Jude's foreman had nailed dead crows or gutted and salted coyotes to the cedar posts.

The lights in the main house went on at 4 a.m., when Mrs. LaRose, a black-haired German lady with red cheeks and big arms Jude had brought back from the war, read her Book of Mormon at the kitchen table, then walked down to the open-air shed by the bunkhouse and fired the wood cook stove.

By 7 a.m. my first day I was wearing bradded work gloves and a hard hat and steel-toe boots and wrestling the drill bit on the floor of an oil rig right above the Rio Grande, the drill motor roaring, tongs clanging, the chain whipping on the pipe, and drilling mud and salt water flooding out of the hole like we'd punched into an underground lake.

After a week Jude walked down to my cottage and stood in the doorway with Buford, who was just seven years old then and the miniature of his daddy in short pants.

"You got any questions about how things run?" he said.

"No, sir."

He nodded. "You sure about that?"

"I'm getting along real fine. I like it here."

"That's good." He turned and looked off at the sun on the hills. His eyes were close-set, almost violet, like they were painted with eye shadow. "Sometimes the Mexican boys talk. They forget what it was like down in the bean field in Chihuahua."

"I don't pay it no mind."

"Pay what no mind?"

"They talk in Spanish. So I don't waste my time listening."

"I see." He cupped his hand on Buford's head. "I want you to take him to work in the tomato field tomorrow."

"I'm supposed to be on the rig."

"I want Buford to start learning work habits. Come up to the house and get him at six."

"Yes, sir, if that's what you want."

"My foreman said you asked about the wages the Mexican boys were making."

"I guess I don't recall it," I said.

He studied the side of my face, all the time his fingers rubbing a little circle in Buford's hair.

"Next time you bring your questions to me," he said.

I looked at the floor and tried not to let him see the swallow in my throat.

You didn't have to roughneck long in Jude's oil patch to find out what was going on. You could hear the trucks at night, grinding across the riverbed. Jude's foreman had moved all the cattle to the upper pasture and dropped the fences along the riverbank so the trucks could cross when the moon was down and catch the dirt road that wound into the ranch next door, where another oil man, a bigger one than Jude, was running the same kind of economics.

A white man got two dollars an hour on the floor of a rig and two twenty-seven up on the monkey board. Wetbacks would do it for four bits and their beans. They'd drill into pay sands with no blowout preventers on the wellhead; work on doodlebug crews in an electric storm, out on a bald prairie, with dynamite and primers and nitro caps in the truck, all those boys strung out along a three-hundred-foot steel tape, handling steel chaining pins and a range pole that might as well have been a lightning rod. I had a suspicion it made for a religious moment.

I saw boys on the rig pinch their fingers off with pipe chains, get their forearms snapped like sticks by the tongs, and find out they weren't taking anything back to Mexico for it but a handshake.

The ranch next door was even worse. I heard a perforating gun blew up and killed a wet on the rig floor. A deputy sheriff helped bury him in a mesquite grove, and an hour later the floor was hosed down and pipe was singing down the hole.

That's not all of it, either. Jude and some of his friends had a special crew of higher-paid wets and white boys who'd been in Huntsville and on the pea farm at Sugarland that were slant drilling, which is when you drill at an angle into somebody else's pool or maybe a company storage sand and you pay off whoever is supposed to be watching the pressure gauges. They'd siphon it out like soda through a straw, cap the well, call it a duster, and be down in Saucillo, drinking Dos X's and mescal before the Texaco Company knew they'd been robbed blind.

I had no complaint, though. Jude paid me a white person's wage, whether I was clanging pipe or watching over Buford in the field. He was a cute little guy in his short pants and cowboy hat. We'd hitch a mule to the tomato sled, set four baskets on it, and pick down one row and up the other, and I'd always let him drive the mule and see how far he could fling the tomatoes that had gotten soft.

The second month I was there, Buford and me started pulling melons at the back end of the field, where a black family lived in a shack by a grove of dried-up mesquite trees. Jude rode his horse out in the field and stretched in the saddle and leaned his arms on the pommel and pushed his hat up on his brow with his thumb. Buford was slapping the reins on the mule's butt and gee-hawing him in a circle at the end of the row.

"How's he doing?" Jude said.

"He's a worker," I said.

"That's good." He looked over at the black family's shack. A little girl was playing with a doll on the gallery. "Y'all been working straight through?"

"Yes, sir, haven't missed a beat," I said.

"I don't want him playing with anybody back here."

I tried to keep my focus on Buford and the sled at the end of the row, let the words pass, like it wasn't really important I hear them.

"You understand what I'm saying?" Jude said.

"Yes, sir. You're pretty clear."

"You bothered by what I'm telling you?"

"That's the little girl who works with her mom at the cafe, ain't it?"

"Don't look at something else when you talk to me, Jerry Joe."

I raised my eyes up to his. He looked cut out of black cloth against the sun. My eyes burned in the heat and dust.

"It's time the boy learns the difference, that's all," he said.

"I'm not here to argue, Mr. Jude."

"You may intend to be polite, Jerry Joe. But don't ever address a white man as a person of color would."

Jude knew how to take your skin off with an emery wheel.

I liked Mrs. LaRose. She cooked big breakfasts of eggs and smokehouse ham and refried beans and grits for all the hands and was always baking pies for the evening meal. But she seemed to have a blind spot when it came to Jude. Maybe it was because he was a war hero and her father died in one of Hitler's ovens and Jude brought her here from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus. What I mean is, he wasn't above a Saturday night trip down into Mexico with his foreman, a man who'd been accused of stealing thoroughbred semen from a ranch he worked over in Presidio. One Sunday morning, when the foreman was still drunk from the night before and we were driving out to the rig, he said, "Y'all sure must grow 'em randy where you're from."

"Beg your pardon?" I said.

"Bringing back a German heifer ain't kept Jude from milking a couple at a time through the fence."

Later, he caught me alone in the pipe yard. He was quiet a long time, cleaning his nails with a penknife, still breathing a fog of tequila and nicotine. The he told me I'd better get a whole lot of gone between me and the ranch if I ever repeated what he'd said.

Don't misunderstand, I looked up to Jude in lots of ways. He told me how scared he'd been when they flew into German ack-ack. He said it was like a big box of torn black cotton, and there was no way to fly over or around or under it. They'd just have to sit there with their sweat freezing in their hair while the plane shook and bounced like it was breaking up on a rock road. Right after Dresden a piece of shrapnel the size and shape of a twisted teaspoon sliced through his flight jacket and rib cage so he could actually put his hand inside and touch the bones.

I blame myself for what happened next.

Buford and me were hoeing weeds in the string beans at the end of the field, when this old Mexican hooked one wheel of the pump truck off the edge of the irrigation ditch and dropped the whole thing down on the axle. I left Buford alone and got the jack and some boards out of the cab, and the old man and me snugged them under the frame and started jacking the wheel up till we could rock it forward and get all four wheels on dirt again. Then I looked through the square of light under the truck and saw Buford across the field, playing under a shade tree with the little black girl just as Jude came down the road in his station wagon.

I felt foolish, maybe cowardly, too, for a reason I couldn't explain, lying on my belly, half under the truck, while Jude got out of his station wagon and walked toward his son with a look that made Buford's face go white.

He pulled Buford by his hand up on the black family's gallery, went right through their door with no more thought than he would in kicking open a gate on a hog lot, and a minute later came back outside with one of the little girl's dresses wadded up in his hand.

First, he whipped Buford's bare legs with a switch, then pulled the dress down over his head and made him stand on a grapefruit crate out in the middle of the field, with all the Mexicans bent down in the rows, pretending they didn't see it.

I knew I was next.

He drove out to where the pump truck was still hanging on the jack, and stared out the car window at me like I was some dumb animal he knew would never measure up.

"You didn't mind your priorities. What you see yonder is the cost of it," he said.

"Then you should have took it out on me."

"Don't be a hypocrite on top of it. If you had any guts, you'd have spoken up before I whipped him."

I could feel my eyes watering, the words quivering in my mouth. "I think you're a sonofabitch, Jude."

"He's a LaRose. That's something you won't ever understand, Jerry Joe. You come from white trash, so it's not your fault. But you've got a chance to change your life here. Don't waste it."

He dropped the transmission in first gear, his face as empty of feeling as a skillet, and left me standing in the weeds, the dust from his tires pluming in a big cinnamon cloud behind his car.

I'd like to tell you I drug up that night, but I didn't. Jude's words burned in my cheeks just like a slap, like only he knew, of all the people in the world, who I really was.

It's funny how you can become the reflection you see in the eyes of a man you admire and hate at the same time. The family went back to Louisiana in the fall, and I stayed on and slant drilled, brought wets across the river, killed wild horses for a dog food company, and fell in love every Saturday night down in Chihuahua. Those boys from Huntsville pen and the pea farm at Sugarland didn't have anything on me.

When he died of lung cancer ten years later, I thought I'd go to the funeral and finally make my peace with him. I made it as far as the door, where two guys told me Mr. LaRose had left instructions the service was to be attended only by family members.

Ole Jude really knew how to do it.