The Convict and Other Stories

  When Uncle Sidney was serious about something, it came out in a subtle, intense, and unexpected way that embedded itself under the skin like a thorn. One day two summers earlier I had been hunting jackrabbits on his place with his Winchester .22 automatic and I hadn’t had a shot all afternoon. I just wanted to shoot something, anything, and hear the snap of the rifle and smell the cordite in the hot air. A solitary dove flew from a grove of blackjacks, and I led her with the rifle and let off three quick shots. The third one snipped her head off right at the shoulders. It was an incredible shot. I carried her in my pocket back to the house and showed her to Uncle Sidney, the fact that I had killed a dove two months out of season far from my mind.

  “You think that’s slick, do you?” he said. “Are you going to feed her young in the nest? Are you going to be there when their hunger sounds bring a fox down on them? You put my rifle in the rack and don’t touch it again.”

  I pulled the pickup truck into the yard and cut the engine, but the cylinders continued to fire with post-ignition for another fifteen seconds. The pickup was actually a wreck without two inches of the original paint on it in one place and with the World War II gas-rationing stickers still on the cracked windshield even though it was 1947. I walked around behind the house and took the chain off the windmill, undressed, and began pulling the ticks off my body in the jet of water that pumped out of the pipe over the trough. Some of the ticks that had been on me since early morning had worked their heads deep into the skin and were as big as pennies with my blood. I shivered each time I dug one out with my fingernails and popped it in a red spray.

  “I’ll be goddamn go-to-hell if it ain’t ole Satchel-ass,” Uncle Sidney said from the back porch.

  Sidney’s battered straw hat, curled up at the brim and slanted sideways on his head, and his cowboy boots, which were worn down at the heels, always made him look like he was rocking when he walked. He was all angles: elbows stuck out as though they were about to cave a rib cage, knees askew from the direction of his boots, a quizzically turned head, a crooked smile. His skin was burned and cracked by the sun, and he had a grip and calluses that could shale the edge off of old brick. He had ridden in rodeos when he was younger and had been slammed into the boards so many times by Brahmas that every bone in him popped when he got out of a chair.

  I chained the blades on the windmill and started into the house to finish my bath in the tub.

  “Can I use the pickup tonight?” I said.

  “Sure. But you don’t look too happy about wherever it is you’re going.”

  “It’s that damn Mr. Willis.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “He didn’t do anything to me. He fired Billy Haskel.”

  “Was Billy drinking in the field again?”

  “It was the way he did it. He treated him like a child.”

  “Billy’s a grown man. He can take care of himself.”

  “That’s just it. Billy was fighting the Japs while Mr. Willis was cleaning up selling to the government.”

  “Satch, what you done in last Saturday’s ball game ain’t worth piss on a rock.”

  An hour later I was driving down the blacktop in the mauve-colored evening, my hair combed back wet, the smell of the fields blowing cool in my face. Rain clouds hung like bruised fruit on the horizon, and the crack of dying sun on the edge of the land sent long shafts of spinning light across the sky. The breeze bent the corn along the tops of the stalks, and jackrabbits sat in the short grass by the side of the road with their ears turned up in vees. Dead and salted crows had been nailed to the cedar fence posts to keep the live ones out of the field, and their feathers fluttered like a bad afterthought.

  I didn’t understand the feeling I had, but it was like both fear and guilt and at the same time neither one. I had never thought of myself as being afraid of other people, but maybe that was because I had never been in a situation when I had had to be afraid. Now people whom I had never thought about came into my mind: boys at school who never called Mexicans anything but pepper-bellies; the café owner who would turn a Mexican around in the door before he could even reach the serving counter; the theater manager who was suddenly sold out of tickets when anyone with skin darker than a suntan came to his box office.

  I saw her sitting in a swing on her front porch. She wore a white blouse with a round collar and a full flower-print skirt, and she had put a red hibiscus in her hair. She closed the truck door, and we banged over the ruts and drove out on the highway toward the root-beer stand.

  “I talked with my father about Billy Haskel,” she said. “He’s an organizer for the pickers. He’s going to try to get him on in another field.”

  “Your father’s in that?”

  “Yes. Why?” She turned her head at me, and the wind blew her hair across her cheek.

  “Nothing. I just heard some things the growers say about it.”

  “What do they say?”

  “I don’t know, they’re communists, stuff like that.”

  “My father’s not a communist. None of them are.”

  “I don’t care about that kind of stuff, Juanita.”

  “Your uncle is a grower.”

  “He’s nothing like Mr. Willis, or some of the others. He doesn’t hire wetbacks and he wouldn’t fire somebody for drinking in the field.”

  Up ahead we saw the lights of the root-beer stand and the cars and pickups with metal trays on the windows parked in the gravel under the canvas awning.

  “Are we going inside?” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Let’s get it in the truck.”

  “Sure, if you want to.”

  “Hack, you don’t have to take me here. We can just go for a drive.”

  “What’s the big deal about a root-beer stand? I should have asked you to the show, except they’re still playing Johnny Mack Brown.”

  “You don’t have to prove something for me. I know you’re a good person.”

  “Don’t talk like that. We’re just getting some root beer.”

  But while we waited for the waitress to walk out to the pickup, my hands were damp on the steering wheel and I was conscious of the conversations and the glow of cigarettes in the cars around us. The waitress in red-and-white uniform set the tray on the window and looked at me for the order, then her eyes went past my face into Juanita’s.

  “What, say it again,” she said.

  “Two root beers. One root beer and then another one on the same tray,” I said.

  The waitress went away and then looked back over her shoulder at us.

  “Don’t be sarcastic with her,” Juanita said.

  “I know that girl. She’s got tractor oil in her head.”

  After the waitress brought our root beers, I picked up one of the heavy ice-filmed mugs and handed it to Juanita. When I reached back for mine, I saw a boy from my baseball team walking past the window toward the restroom.

  “Hey, Hack. You keeping your arm in shape for next year?” He looked into the truck, his eyes full of light and curiosity.

  “I throw a few every evening against a target on my uncle’s barn.”

  “This man’s a mean motor scooter on the mound,” he said to Juanita. “He’s got a Carl Hubbell screwball that wipes the letters off a batter.”

  “Yeah, I’m so good I dusted three guys in our district game.”

  “That don’t matter. Those guys thought sheep-dip didn’t stink till you put their noses in it.”

  “I’ll have better control next season. Look, we’ll see you later, Ben.”

  “Sure. Take it easy, Hack.”

  A minute later he backed his car around to leave the lot, and I saw the white oval faces of two people looking out the back window at us. He burned out onto the highway in a scorch of gravel.

  A week later Johnny Mack Brown was still playing at the theater in town, so I took Juanita to the double feature at the drive-in. I parked the pickup to the side of the concession stand, and when t
he lot darkened I put my arm around her shoulders. Her eyes were still on the screen, but when I lowered my head against hers she turned her face up at me with her lips parted. She laid her wrist on the back of my neck when we kissed and brushed her lips sideways on my mouth. I put my face in her hair and could smell the soap and baby powder on her shoulders.

  The cab of the pickup had not been designed for romance. The floor stick, even jammed into reverse, stuck up between us like a convent wall, and our elbows and knees banged against the dashboard, the windows, the door handles, and the gun rack. By intermission I had another problem, too: what we used to call the hot rocks, a thick ache in the genitals that made you think someone had poured concrete in your fly. Usually the only way to get rid of it, besides the most obvious way, was to get out and lift the truck bumper. This went on all the time back on neckers’ row, but I waited for the intermission and just sat quietly behind the steering wheel for five minutes and then headed for the concession stand.

  That was a mistake.

  When I went into the men’s room—a hot, fetid place that reeked of disinfectant and urinated beer, with an exhaust fan on one wall—a dozen high school boys were inside, leaning over the troughs and passing around a bottle of sloe gin in a paper sack. Someone was throwing up in the toilet cubicle. The room was almost silent while I waited for my turn at the trough.

  “Hey, Hack, who’s that girl in your truck?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Is she a Mexican?” It was the same boy, and his question was almost innocent.

  “It’s none of your damn business what she is.”

  There was no sound except the dirty noise of the exhaust fan. Then, from a tall kid in cowboy boots, blue jeans, an immaculate white T-shirt, and a straw hat, who leaned against the wall with one foot propped behind him:

  “Is it true that Mexican fur burger tastes like jalapeño?”

  A left-handed pitcher has certain advantages on the mound, but so does a left-handed fistfighter, because your opponent instinctively watches your right hand as the area of potential damage. I swung upward from my left side and caught him on the mouth and knocked his head into the cinder-block wall. When he wrenched his head straight again, his fists already flying out at me, I saw the blood in his teeth like a smear of food dye. We fought all over the room (someone shot the bolt on the door so the manager couldn’t get in), careening against bodies and troughs and trash cans, and I got him twice more in the face and once so hard in the throat that spittle flew from his mouth, but his arms were longer than mine and he clubbed me into a corner between the toilet cubicle and the wall and I couldn’t get my elbows back to swing. His fists, white and ridged with bone, seemed to appear and explode against my face so fast that for a moment I thought someone else was swinging with him.

  But the other person turned out to be the manager, who had broken the doorjamb and was pulling the tall boy off me.

  The boy relaxed his arms and caught his breath.

  “The next time you bring a greaser to the drive-in, you better be able to take it,” he said.

  I wanted to hit him again, but I was finished. I walked out into the parking lot past groups of people who stared at my torn and blood-streaked clothes and the long strip of damp toilet paper that was stuck to one of my loafers. I got into the pickup and slammed the door. Juanita’s mouth opened and her fingers jerked up toward her face.

  “Forget it,” I said. I started the engine and bounced out into the aisle, then I heard glass snap and heavy iron smash against the rear fender. I had forgotten to remove the speaker and had torn the pipe and concrete base right out of the ground, which was all right, but I had also broken off the top half of Uncle Sidney’s window.

  Uncle Sidney started attending the meetings of the Growers’ Association. They met on Tuesday nights at the Baptist church, and if you drove by and saw the pickups parked in the grove of oak trees, the fireflies sparkling in the summer dark, and the heads of men through the lighted windows, you thought only that a church meeting was going on and a group trip to Dallas or a new building was being planned. But beyond the noise of the cicadas they were talking about the Mexican farmworkers’ union and communists, their minds melding together in fear, their vocabulary finding words that were as foreign to their world as peasants’ revolutions in Russia.

  “Why do you have to go there?” I said to Uncle Sid. He was sitting on the porch step in his shiny suit with the trousers tucked inside his boots. The fire of his hand-rolled, brown-streaked cigarette was no more than a quarter inch from his lips.

  “Why shouldn’t I go there?”

  “Because they’re dumb people.”

  “Well, there is a couple that was probably playing with their knobs when God passed out the brains. But sometimes you got to stick together, Satchel-ass. If these Mexicans are serious about a strike, they can do us some real harm.”

  I watched him drive down the road in the dusty twilight, past the pond where under the surface the late sun was trapped in a red ball as motionless and dead as my heart.

  But I should have had more faith in Uncle Sid. I should have known he was too angular to fit very long with a bunch like the Growers’ Association. The next Tuesday night, when I had gotten Juanita to come over for dinner, he came back from the meeting so mad that you could have lighted a kitchen match by touching it to his face.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “That little whipsnip of a preacher stood up in front of the meeting and said I was working a couple of Mexicans that was communists. And anybody that kept communists on his payroll after he knew about them might just stand some looking into himself. Then a couple other of them mealymouth sons of bitches turned around and looked at me and said maybe every grower ought to make out a list of who was working for him.”

  “Mr. Willis likes to put a finger in your eye if he can.”

  “Juanita, I got to hire on six more men next week. You ask your daddy to send me a half dozen of them union Mexicans or nigras or whatever they are. I don’t bargain on wages, I pay by the piece, but they’ll get more than they will from the likes of that preacher. Just make sure your daddy gets me six hard workers that ain’t welcomed nowhere.”

  It was a strange collection that showed up at the house the next week: two old men, a boy, a one-armed man, a Negro, and Billy Haskel.

  “When did you get in the union, Billy?” Uncle Sid said.

  “I figured it wouldn’t do no harm. I ain’t worked nowhere since Mr. Willis run me off.”

  “Is that you, José? I thought you were in the pen.”

  “They let me out.”

  “Well, all right, boys. You can pick up your baskets at the barn. Come back to the house at noon for your lunch.”

  Uncle Sid watched them walk across the lot, his hat tilted sideways on his head.

  “Damn, is that the bunch that’s got people spraying in their britches all over the county?” he said.

  Two nights later it was hot and breathless, and dry lightning was flashing on the horizon. I kept waking up every hour, caught between bad dreams and the hot silence of the house. Toward morning I felt the heat begin to go out of the air, and as my eyes closed with real sleep, I saw the lightning patterns flicker on the wallpaper. Then something in my sleep told me that the color was wrong—the cobalt white had been replaced by red and yellow, and there was a smell of rubber burning.

  I heard Uncle Sidney walk from his bedroom to the gun rack in the kitchen and then open the front screen door.

  “What is it?” I said, pulling on my Levi’s.

  “Look there. It was done by somebody with experience. They nailed strips of tires along the wood to give it extra heat.”

  The cross was fifteen feet high and burning brightly from top to bottom. Strings of smoke rose from the crosspiece like dirty handkerchiefs, and in the distance I saw a flatbed truck roaring down the dirt road toward the blacktop.

  Uncle Sid shaved, put on a fresh pair of overalls, and sat down at
the kitchen table with a coffee cup and notepad.

  “What are you doing?” I said. Outside, the light had climbed into the sky, and I could hear a breeze rattle the windmill blades.

  “Making out a list of genuine sons of bitches and possible sons of bitches. While I’m doing this, Satch, see if Billy Haskel’s here yet, and you and him put that cross in the back of the pickup. It probably won’t fit, so get a boomer chain out of the barn.”

  Billy and I loaded up the charred cross and propped the top end against the cab and stretched a chain across the shaft. I hooked on a boomer and locked it down tight.

  “The sheriff ain’t going to be too happy when your uncle drops this smelly thing in his office,” Billy said.

  Uncle Sidney walked out of the house with his notepad in his shirt pocket. He had on his new short-brim Stetson hat, a cigarette twisted in the side of his mouth. His knees rose against his stiff overalls.

  “What are we doing?” I said.

  “Cutting a notch in their butts. You boys hop in.”

  We drove out to Mr. Willis’s farm and saw him in the field not far from the road. He tried to ignore us at first by looking in the other direction, but Uncle Sidney began blowing on the horn until every picker in the rows had stopped and was staring past Mr. Willis at us. His face was tight when he walked over to us.

  “Somebody left this in my front yard last night and I want it to get back to the right place,” Uncle Sidney said. “You reckon I ought to leave it here?”

  “I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t blame you for lying. It ain’t easy to sit in your own shit.”

  “You can leave my property, Mr. Holland.”

  “I will, in just a minute. But first, my nephew tells me you beat Billy Haskel here out of a day’s wage. Now, Billy’s a poor man and I think you ought to dip down in your billfold, Preacher.”