Nop's Trials

  When her truck’s oil pressure dropped right off the gauge, Penny wasn’t an hour out of Fort Worth, and she switched off and coasted onto the shoulder, her headlights going yellow and dim. She’d been feeling pretty good about her new job and Hope’s third place at the sheepdog trial. The second she opened the hood, she could smell the hot oil.

  Her bad luck that those two stopped. She asked could they send a mechanic back from the next twenty-four hour gas station and the tall one, Marvin, said, “I’m a stranger in this part of Texas, ma’am. Maybe you should come with us and ride back with the mechanic,” and she thought it was okay because she’d seen them with Dickerson. She jumped Hope into the back of their pickup where she could keep an eye on him through the sliding window. A few drops of rain hit the roof.

  “I seen that dog at the show,” the tall one said. “I saw you and him loading cattle. What you get for a dog like that?”

  “Hope’s not for sale. He isn’t fully trained yet.”

  Then the acne-scarred one told her how he’d had a dog in Montana who’d fetch any cow he wanted out of the herd. “Just tell Shep that damned cow’s name, and he’d be off like a shot.”

  The tall one drank from his pint and held it out to Penny.

  “No thanks.”

  “Ain’t no dog can do that, P.T.” the tall one said. “They ain’t so smart as that.”

  “You tell Marvin about those dogs, Little Lady. And don’t you make no liar out of me.” P.T. began to stroke Penny’s leg.

  “Hey,” she said. “Cut that out.”

  “Oh, there’s no harm in it,” he said. “I ain’t mean like Ol’ Marvin.”

  The rain was coming down pretty good and the road sign flicked by quick as a ghost. ENTERING DEL RIO: GREEN RIVER ORDINANCE ENFORCED. “There,” Penny said. “Somebody might be open.”

  “Nobody open until Waco,” Marvin said. “I know some good mechanics in Waco.”

  “I thought you said you were strangers here.”

  “Not me. That was him. I never said nothin’. You sure you don’t want a nip? Might make you friendlier.”

  A Gulf convenience store lighted up. “There’s one,” she said.

  “Too late. We’re past it.”

  In the mirror, the lighted gas station got smaller. Marvin turned the wipers to high. “I kind of like the rain,” he said. “Makes things kind warm and cozylike.”

  “I told you,” Penny said. “Take your hand off me.”

  P.T. kept his hand where it was. In a flat voice he said, “Marvin, you ever meet a girl traveling the circuit by herself wasn’t a whore?”

  “I don’t guess I have. There was that June Lynn gal we picked up outside of Abilene, she said she wasn’t no whore but she took the money when we was done. Remember, you said ten dollars and I said it was worth twenty so we left her a ten and a five and it was my ten.”

  P.T. kneaded Penny’s breast, just went right for it. She slapped his hand and he squeezed and it hurt, it really hurt. “Don’t make it rough on yourself, Little Lady. We get done and we’ll leave you enough to fix that old truck of yours. Never did see a Dodge truck worth a damn anyway.”

  There was something so impersonal about the hand working her breast that it might have been mechanical. It was just a hand, just a breast. “No!” Penny hollered and hauled off and slugged him. Blood spouted out of his nose. He grabbed her wrists but she bucked against his hands and butted at him.

  “Now you just stop that. Marvin, you’re gonna have to help, you want any of this.”

  And Marvin pulled off the road into a picnic area and braked and got his arm around her neck and clamped down until blood spots swam in front of her eyes and P.T.’s voice got dim like it was a long way away. “Oh lookee here,” he said. “She’s got two of ’em.” That’s when her jacket tore.

  With her right hand, she groped behind her head for the sliding window latch and nudged the window partway open and Hope’s furry body mashed her eye into Marvin’s forearm as he burled through. Hope landed on the transmission hump, spun round and his smile was one hundred percent ivory. Hope said something deep in his throat and P.T. snatched his hand back and said, “Christ, lady!”

  Penny’s right eye hurt. She swallowed her yelp because Hope would have misunderstood. “Hope,” she gasped. “Stand!”

  “Don’t get nothin’ started in here,” P.T. said. She heard the muffled click of his door handle.

  “He’ll tear out your damn throat!”

  Hope muttered and drops of drool landed on Marvin’s pant leg. P.T. slung his door open and rolled out but Hope kept his eyes on Marvin.

  Penny squinted through her left eye. “I should set him on you, tinhorn.”

  “Don’t you do nothin’ rash. A man-bitin’ dog, you know what’s gonna happen to that dog. They come put a bullet in that dog, you know how that goes. Dog ain’t allowed to bite no man.”

  P.T. was dancing in front of the truck. “Put that bastard out of there.”

  When Penny tumbled out of the truck, she landed wrong and twisted her ankle and she called Hope and he came to her side, light and quick as a threat. She hobbled backward as P.T. scurried back in, slammed the door, and slapped the doorlock down. He fumbled through the glove compartment until he uncovered a big old pistol, which he pointed through the window. “Get away from that mutt,” he said.

  “Hope, get behind,” and the dog faded behind her legs. Penny said, “If you shoot him, you’ll have to shoot me. You ready for that?”

  For a moment she thought P.T. was mad enough to do it. She backed onto the highway and when a car came along, she waved her arms frantically, but it whooshed by.

  “That’s how it went,” Penny told Deputy Blanchard. “After they drove off the rain got worse. I know some of those trucks saw me too, but maybe they didn’t want to pick up a dog. We walked down that road for hours.”

  The dog sneezed and rubbed his paws over his nose. Dwight said, “We’ll type up a statement for you to sign and get some pictures of your injuries so we can prove assault when we get those two in court.”

  “I don’t want a photograph of me lookin’ like this.”

  Dwight Blanchard stole a glance at his watch. “Ma’am, don’t you want them fellows caught? You heard ’em say it. You aren’t the first woman they done this to.”

  “You won’t catch them,” she said, that flat. “So there’s no reason for me to have pictures made so some of your deputies can pull ’em out on a Saturday night and make jokes about how awful I look.”

  For the first time, Julio lifted his head from his mopping. “They not do this, I think,” he said. “Nobody laughs about victims.”

  “I’m no victim!”

  Dwight Blanchard mumbled, “Yes, ma’am,” and reached behind him for the phone. “This Dickerson, fellow—how could I get hold of him?”

  “Dickerson Land and Cattle, Salina, Kansas. Big man, rodeo belt buckle, chocolate-colored hat.”

  Dwight told the answering machine who he was and please call back in connection with a criminal investigation. To Penny he said, “You’ll have to go through the ID books.”

  Hope lay at Penny Burkeholder’s feet and felt every involuntary shiver that rippled through her. Hope smelled her cold exhaustion, knew when her head nodded forward, jerked upright again. She said, “I’d like to use your phone, please. I’ve got a job waiting for me down near Lampasas and I got to tell them I broke down.”

  “This is Oren Wright,” the telephone said. “We’re lambing now and I’m out in the barn …”

  There were six scrapbook-size books on the long table, full of men’s faces, old, young, none of them looking happy to be there. Some held their number placards fastidiously, some like they had a threat at their elbow, some bluffed it out. Though they could rape and kill, they looked like little boys. “Can I have a dry blanket, please?” Penny asked.

  Julio went out for a platter of refried beans, rice, and tortillas in bean gravy. He brought her two small cups of tea a
nd explained the Antler didn’t have any large cups. The tea warmed her right down to her toes and she pushed the clumsy books aside to put food into her stomach with a flimsy plastic fork.

  Deputy Blanchard brought her duffle bag and the news that Roy, the mechanic, had towed her truck in and was going to tear into it. “He doesn’t think it’s the oil pump,” he said.

  Dwight went home. Julio answered the phone and said the Sheriff was in Fort Worth and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night—” the Sheriff’s showin’ those miniature horses of his.” Penny Burkeholder went to the women’s room down the hall and changed into her work clothes: pale blue panties, worn Wrangler blue jeans, bra, and a flannel overshirt. She ran a comb through her hair. In the mirror she saw the gray face of a sexless, crazy woman. “Ah,” she said, “the heck with it.”

  After nine, the courthouse filled up and people came in and out of the office for this or that. Penny turned each page in the big books. She ran her finger over the faces so she wouldn’t lose where she’d been.

  A long-faced quiet deputy typed Penny Burkeholder’s statement and had her sign it. At eleven-thirty, Jack Dickerson called. No, he didn’t know any cowboys Marvin or P.T.

  “You know how it is at the Fort Worth Stock Show. There must be ten thousand people in those barns on show night and half of them are cowboys, or hope to be. What’s this P.T. supposed to have done?”

  “We’d just like to talk to him, Mr. Dickerson.”

  “Well, if you could tell me some more, maybe I could narrow it down. I don’t come to the whole show, you know, just the Chianina show. I had a Reserve Champion Female this year, and if I was the judge, she was head and shoulders over the Grand. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. Kent Morell, of the M Bar spread outside Houston. There’s no better judge of livestock than old Kent and he said my heifer was twice the animal the Grand was. What you say P.T. done?”

  “Assault, he—”

  “And how big a fella was he? Did he wear a Texas hat? What shape was it?

  The deputy covered the phone to ask.

  Penny said that P.T. had a black hat, down in front and back, you know, like a bull rider.

  Jack Dickerson was awful sorry he couldn’t help but there were so many cowboys and a man couldn’t be expected to remember them all, but if he thought of anything he’d surely call. “I surely hope nobody got hurt?”

  “She fought ’em off. She had a dog.”

  “Well now, that’s nice. If she thinks of anything more about those fellas tried to rape her, you call me.”

  “Who are they?” Penny asked.

  “He doesn’t remember. You know how many people go through the barns at that show.”

  “He was talking to them like he knew them. I wouldn’t have got in their truck if they didn’t know Dickerson.”

  When Penny stood up, all the color drained out of her face and she took a sideways step to catch her balance. “Hey, you okay? You want me to call the Rescue Squad?”

  Penny shook her head. “I want to find out about my truck.”

  Roy Mack’s garage was right beside his doublewide, after the road turns to dirt just before it crosses the Brazos.

  The road changed from tan to black in Roy’s drive from all the crankcase oil he’d put down there to kill the dust, and the rain glistened iridescent as peacock tails in puddles beside the road.

  Penny told Hope to stay in the police car and picked her way around the puddles to where her truck waited, hood up, under a tree. A tremendous limb supported a heavy block and tackle. Behind the road, the brush had grown up taller than a man. You could just see the snout of a Pontiac X37 glaring from the weeds and there was a big baker’s van back in the cattails. The wrecker was about as shiny as it could get. ROY’S TOY, that’s what the bug screen said, and this must be Roy coming toward her, bandy-legged, lank-haired in oily blue jeans and rolled-over cowboy boots. “This yours?” he asked without preamble. “Real trucks them old Dodges, torque won’t quit. Now you take that old three eighteen and put a four speed behind it and it’ll pull grannie’s teeth, I got to tell you …”

  “It is the oil pump isn’t it?”

  “Nope. And Lordy, just count the leaves in those rear springs; you could haul four ton back there without bottoming out. I believe you owe me fifty dollars for the tow. That’s less’n you’d pay in Waco.”

  Penny counted through her thin sheaf of bills. “I got a check here for three hundred fifty dollars from the Southeastern Livestock Exposition—that’s the Fort Worth Stock Show. It’s prize money. Me and Hope won third place in the sheepdog trial there. When you can come third against Bud Boudreau and Herbert Holmes, you’ve done something. I don’t have a bank account. I’m on the road for the present.” She extended the check but he backed away from it. “Look, it’s perfectly good and it’ll cover the towing and the repairs and—”

  “Maybe so, maybe not.”

  “I haven’t got but forty-five dollars cash. What do you mean, maybe not?” Out in the brush were the dim shapes of other one-time-vehicles, presently refuges for small animals. “It’s got to be the oil pump. I’m sure if you put a new oil pump in it I can get going again.”

  Wordlessly Roy bent and dragged the oil pan out from where it had laid since he unbolted it. He fished around in the muck until he came up with a slick slim arc of metal, about three inches long. “Broke ring,” he said.

  “Just the one?”

  “I haven’t puzzled that but it don’t matter, you got to replace them all. Ring sets aren’t much, your money’s in the time it takes to get at ’em. Easiest way is to pull the whole motor, work on it out here in the air.”

  “How much?”

  He scratched his head with the tip of the broken ring. “I don’t want to tell you no lies. If it’s just one ring and it never scored the cylinder and the pistons are still good and you can reuse the bearings, you’re looking at most of that three-hundred-fifty-dollar check. But if it scored the cylinder walls or damaged a piston it’d come to more’n the truck is worth. Me, I hate to tear down a motor and not replace the bearings anyway. New rings, bearings, and the towing. I guess I could take that check.”

  Penny set her neat small name on the endorsements line. She said, “I got no way of getting around.”

  “Lady, I don’t normally keep ring sets for a 1966 Dodge 318 V8 here where I can reach for ’em.”

  “I got a job waiting for me outside Lampasas. They’re lambing now and need an extra hand. Hundred fifty a week and a place to stay and feed for me and my dog.”

  “You can catch a Trailways in Waco.”

  “You can’t take a dog on a bus.”

  Roy shrugged. “Put the dog in the pound. Jobs are scarcer than dogs.”

  “When I broke down I was just a hundred and thirty miles to Lampasas. I guess we can hitchhike.”

  That afternoon, Penny looked through pictures, she’d had no idea there were so many. Julio signaled to Penny to pick up the phone.

  “This is Oren Wright,” the voice said. “You in the sheriff’s office?” The voice was young, but tired.

  “Hi,” Penny said. “I broke down. I busted a ring outside Meridian. I got my truck towed into town, but it’ll be a while before they get to it.”

  “Uh-huh. Lost a set of triplets this morning, dead when I got out there. Mother hadn’t even cleaned them off. I was countin’ on you bein’ here this mornin’ so I let my part-timers take the day off.” There was a long, long pause. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s hard to think straight when I been awake so long. Okay. Tomorrow morning I’ll fetch you, I’ll come myself, or I’ll send one of the hands. Be on the steps of the courthouse at seven.”

  Two scrapbooks left. The pictures had quit being men. They were splotches and lines, numbers and shadows. It was 4:30 P.M. when she called it quits. Penny stood and stretched. Her back hurt, her eye hurt, the nape of her neck hurt. Hope stood and stretched too. He yawned. It was getting dark outside. Julio had gone home at three
and his replacement, a darker Mexican, hadn’t said two words. Brisk heels clicked by in the hall.

  When Deputy Blanchard came back on at six, Penny asked him if he’d give her a lift to a motel and he said there was only Brice’s and he’d see if they had vacancies.

  Brice’s didn’t take dogs. They didn’t allow any liquor in their rooms either but the deputy kept that information to himself.

  “Why don’t they allow dogs? Hope is well behaved, never makes a mess or anything.”

  “You hungry?”

  He took her out to the Antler Cafe, Penny ate chicken fried steak and Dwight had two cups of weak coffee. Penny asked the waitress for a half pound of hamburger meat for her dog and took it outside on a paper plate and set it down for Hope. Hope waited until she went back inside before he wolfed it down. He didn’t like for anyone to watch him eat.

  Dwight said, “I’m sorry about the motel. There’s nobody in the jail. It’s free and it’s clean.”

  The jail was upstairs in the courthouse. Dwight Blanchard piled two thin cotton mattresses on a lower bunk and covered the faded blue ticking with another army blanket. “We don’t have pillow cases, I’m afraid.”

  Penny sat on the bunk, on the very end of it.

  “If we pick up anybody, drunk or anything, I’ll tell the jailer to put them in the far cell. Look, I’m sorry.” He swung the door back and forth to show it wasn’t locked. “You want anything, just come outside and ask. Anything, coffee or anything.”

  The windows were covered with wire mesh, painted and repainted so half their thickness was paint. The wall was splotched where the jailers had painted over graffiti. Outside, a pickup truck paused before making the turn. Two young lovers pressed together on the driver’s side. No one ever sits quite that close again.

  At Penny’s feet Hope lay with his dark head on his paws. Penny said, “Hope, I don’t know how long I can go on.”

  Hope raised his big head. His eyes were pools of light. “It is not thy fault,” Hope said.

  “Fat lot of comfort you are.”