There was only one old man there that day, and he grinned what teeth he had at me. “I seen him hit that sucker,” he said, and pointed to a window in the side of the aluminum building to show me the exact spot where he had stood. “Damn. Bud’s still got the punch, ain’t he?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Appears he does.”
By the time I crossed back to the garage, a police car pulled up alongside Apollo Red’s golden chariot. There with a young policeman on the passenger side, an older hand I recognized behind the wheel. He had once pulled me in for throwing water balloons. I nodded at him, like an experienced criminal acknowledging a foe.
The one on the passenger side, the younger one, got out as Dad came wandering out of the shop. Dad leaned against the hood of Red’s car, which bore part of Red’s shirt on the broken hood ornament like some sort of surrender flag. I came over and stood by Dad.
The young cop said, “Mr. Collins. There’s been a complaint that you hit a man here.”
“Hard as I could,” Dad said.
“He has a broken jaw and is at the hospital and is a little confused.”
“He was confused when he got here,” Dad said.
The young cop nodded. “Well, sir, why’d you do it?”
“Threatened me.”
“How?”
“Tried to hit me?”
“Did he?”
“Too slow.”
The young cop computed this, said, “Sir, you have to come with us downtown. There’s been a complaint. His girlfriend filed it.”
“I don’t think so,” Dad said.
“You don’t think what?” said the young cop.
“I don’t think I’m coming.”
The older cop behind the steering wheel leaned across the seat, and said through the open door, “Bud, you really got to come.”
Dad turned his head in that curious dog way. “That you, Clyde?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know me,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir,” Clyde said.
“You know I’m not coming.”
Clyde cleared his throat. “We’re supposed to bring you in.”
“Folks make plans.”
The young cop, feeling the drift of things, stepped back and put his hand on his gun.
Dad reached out and gently pushed me away from him.
The older cop said, “Dean. Get back in the car.”
Dean stood there with his hand on the butt of his revolver. He was sweating. The cop cap on his head seemed too big all of a sudden. I noted that the distance between him and Dad was not a lot different from the distance between Dad and Apollo Red when he had leaped forward and hit him.
“Dean,” Clyde said. “Get back in the car.”
After a long moment, Dean uncoiled and moved his hand from the gun.
Dad had not so much as changed his expression.
Dean got back in the car and closed the door.
They drove away and never came back.
Next day, when Dad went back to work, Red’s car was gone, and about two weeks later the woman who owned the Buick came in and paid him all she owed, saying only, “How much?”
I was there that day, having dropped by to go to dinner with Dad again. The woman was a nice-looking blonde with a lot of hairspray on her hair; it formed a little blue cloud around her head when the sunlight hit it. I wanted to ask her if Apollo Red knew his own name and still remembered how to drive a car. I knew for sure he wasn’t the one who had come for it. Apollo Red had descended, and would not be ascending for quite some time.
“It was the carburetor this time,” Dad told her. “You might ought to think on getting some tires, too. These are may-pops.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lady.
Dad gave her the keys.
As she was slipping behind the wheel of her car, starting it up, Dad said, “Come on back, it gives you any trouble.”
11.
Coach Whip
“But you don’t know anything happened to them,” Chance said.
“I think I do.”
“It did, baby girl,” Leonard said. “Those were the times. In East Texas, you were expected to take one side or another, and if you were black you knew your place, and if you were white you were worried about your place. That’s how it was. Not that everyone stuck to that, thank goodness. Me and Hap here, we ought to have hated one another, but we didn’t, and we bearded the lions in their dens so much, it’s amazing we have survived.”
“Yeah, some people never learn that things aren’t as they appear to be, or they aren’t as they should be. I got a lesson in that when I was little. I guess you can call it a true story with a parable attached. My dad was responsible for the latter part.”
When I was young, my dad’s job played out, so we decided to drive from East Texas to Arizona, where some of our family lived. They said there were jobs there, and Dad needed a job, so away we went.
It was hot on the road in that old, black car of ours, and there wasn’t any air-conditioning in it, so we had the windows rolled down to bring in the breeze. I loved it when we drove at night. I would lie on my back and stuff my pillow behind my head and watch the stars through the back window. The air would blow in so that the inside of the car was quite cool. I’d pull a blanket over me and dream that I was in a space ship flying amongst the stars. I had my dog with me, my faithful space hound Blackie, who was small and fuzzy with a heart like a water buffalo. He would snuggle close to me, the wind fluttering his ears, and we would soon be asleep.
I loved that dream, and sometimes now, when I can’t sleep, I have the same one. That I have had a great adventure, and that I’m recovering in my little space craft the size of my bed, and I have my battle-ready friend at the controls. Sometimes in my dreams the battle-ready friend is my fine redheaded woman, Brett, and she’s dressed like Dale Arden from Flash Gordon, and she is guiding us carefully through the solar system in our swift space/bed machine. Sometimes it is an unknown driver, a comrade in arms. I feel safe and it helps me sleep.
But back then I was just a kid, and I never felt safer than when I was with my parents, especially my father who could bend coins with his hands and crush an apple in his palm, expand his chest and break belts, or bend metal bars, so he was at the controls, sliding our little black space ship through the infinite blackness, sprinkled with stars.
At night we would stop at tourist courts, as they were called then, the forerunners of modern motels, and we would spend the night. Sometimes we didn’t have the money, and we slept in the car, but if my dad could find day work, and it was easier in some ways to find it then than now, he would be able to make enough to buy us food and a place to stay for the night and put gas in the car. He also had his shotgun with him, and there were a few times when we stopped along the way and he went out into the woods to hunt squirrels, which after shooting he cleaned quickly and expertly with a pocket knife, then we cooked the meat on a hot plate in tourist court rooms. My dog ate the scraps of our meals.
Once in a town in Arizona we made a wrong turn and ended up in a downtown parade. I don’t know what it was for, perhaps a local celebration, but once we were in the parade with floats and other cars and young ladies in truck beds wearing bathing suits and waving at the crowd, we couldn’t get out. Every time my dad tried to turn out of the parade there seemed to be a policeman there with a whistle and gestures pointing him back into position. We rode like members of the parade, our windows down, my little dog rearing up and looking out one of them, barking. Somewhere along the line, when no policeman was around and there was a clear exit, Dad broke for it and drove us away from the parade and back on track. I missed the parade. It was a fun thing to have happen.
We drove during the day looking for work, and the sun beat down and the wind blew through the windows. I had no idea we were poor and were sort of doing our own Joad moment on the road. My parents picked vegetables and fruit and cotton on the way, day laborers. Sometimes if the work was good
we would stay a few days and build up our cash supply. I helped do some of the work since no one was keeping children from working, but all I remember about that was trying to pick cotton and getting so hot I ended up with heat exhaustion and had to lay out under a tree in the shade for most of the day, sipping water from what we called a jug that had once been an old pickle jar.
When we arrived at our relatives’ home, we stayed with them for a few days while my dad found work somewhere. Perhaps it was mechanic work, more likely some kind of farm work as a field hand. I remember him doing both along the way, and after we arrived, he went daily to some job or another, came home at night tired and hungry.
We ended up renting a ramshackle place not far from where the relatives lived. It was a house that had settled down until it touched the ground. The porch itself lay flat against the dirt and the wooden steps in front of it stood higher. We never used those, and finally my dad pried them apart with a crow bar and moved the wood away from the porch. That way all we had to do was step about two inches higher than the ground. There was a chicken coop there, and if we cared for the chickens, it cost us less, so therefore we cared for the chickens. I remember my mother in the dirt yard calling, “Chick, chick, chick, here chick, chick.”
This mass of chickens would come darting and clucking out of the open hen house and into the yard, where my mother stood with a pail of dried corn, tossing it to them by the handfuls, as they came pecking at it across the sun-hardened ground.
We ate a lot of pinto beans and cornbread. On Sunday we went to our better-off relatives for Sunday dinner. Dinner is what folks call lunch these days. We called the late meal supper. At the relatives we had fried chicken and biscuits, and all manner of delights, including homemade apple pie. Everything was home grown and homemade. One night I remember us being so in need of food my mother cooked up some of the hen scratch, as she called it, meaning the thick corn kernels used as chicken feed, and we ate that. I don’t remember it tasting too bad. She cooked it the consistency of mush, and that’s what she called it as well. Mush. When I was growing up, when we had more money to buy cornmeal, she made me that for breakfast, pouring milk onto it and stirring butter in.
As I said, the place we rented came with a chicken house and chickens, and part of our rent was gathering eggs for the owner, and being allowed to keep some. We were also allowed to eat some of the chickens, and besides the Sunday dinner of fried chicken we had at the relatives’ house, once a week we ate one or two of the chickens, ones that weren’t good layers, or older roosters who were past their time. New chicks were being born constantly and they grew swiftly. My dad, when he killed chickens, wrung their necks. He would grasp one by the head, sometimes one in each hand, clamp tight, and with a twist and a swinging motion, break their necks. Sometimes he could pop the heads completely off, and other times the necks stretched out long and they looked like short hoses with chicken bodies swinging on them. He would toss the chicken on the ground, and dead, or near death, it would get up and run around. This happened sometimes when you chopped a chicken’s head off, hence the phrase run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It was terrifying to see either a headless chicken, or a neck wrung chicken with its dangling neck and head, running about until it finally fell over.
Me and my dog Blackie went out to collect eggs in the hen house, and there was a chicken snake in it. We surprised one another. I lifted up a hen’s ass to grab an egg for Mom to cook for my breakfast, and found the snake curled beneath the hen. Me and the snake were traumatized, and when the chicken realized that somehow from below the snake had found its way into her nest and was under her ass, she too was traumatized. She leaped off her perch and went batting her wings around the chicken house and squawking wildly, stirring up all the other chickens, causing a cacophony of squawks. The snake lay still in the nest, its body swollen with eggs. Sulfur and cayenne pepper mixtures, moth balls, and other things of that sort, were placed around the outside of the hen house, as they were supposed to discourage snakes, but the chicken snake had ignored them. To it, a keep out sign would have been about as efficient.
I know this. I was through with that hen house, never went back into one until I was in my early teens. And even then, I was nervous. Snakes are something country people grow up with, and fear of them is hard-wired into our brain, and more often than not, for no real reason.
I remember seeing a sidewinder moving along a hot, red sand path near where we were staying back then, slipping along in that peculiar S fashion they have. The manner of locomotion itself terrified me. Just didn’t seem right. Snakes back home could be scary, and we had rattlers too, and the sidewinder is a rattler, but the ones back home didn’t move like that. Not only could they scare you and bite you, they moved creepy.
Not far from where we were was an old quarry. I’m not sure what they had mined there, but it was played out by this time. It was a big place and it was full of water. I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near it, but its mystery drew me to it as simply and profoundly as the proverbial moth to a flame. I would sneak off from time to time and go there. I would stand on the edge of it and stare at the still water. My older cousins would come over and they would go swimming in it, but I wouldn’t. It was too deep. And besides, I couldn’t swim. My father had lost a friend in the Sabine River once, when he was a kid. He and his buddy got pulled into a whirlpool. My dad was able to swim out, as he was strong even as a child, but his friend was pulled into the suck hole and drowned. He never forgot it, of course, and that story stuck with me, and my mother was afraid of water, electricity, gas, just about everything, including snakes, so you can bet I had my fears, especially back then. I’ve made a point over the years to either get rid of all of them, or to find a way to confront them. One of those fears was that great quarry full of water. Still, I was drawn to it, to stand near the edge of it and look out at the water and wonder at the depths of it; the fear of falling into it had a hypnotic draw.
I hated being there in that Arizona heat, out there in a place that made me feel blue, the air so dry it made my skin itch. I don’t like places where there isn’t greenery, and I don’t enjoy seeing for long distances. Empty expanses make me sad. East Texas had lots of tall trees and water, creeks and ponds, and man-made lakes. I don’t know how much of that I understood back then, but I knew this wasn’t where I had been living, and I didn’t care for it.
It was still bright and hot and the sun was just beginning to dip. I stood on the edge of the quarry and watched the water in it turning purple with shadow. Blackie wasn’t with me. For some reason he had stayed back at the house. The heat maybe. Or maybe I had ditched him on purpose. It was hard to sneak off and go some place I wasn’t supposed to be because he would actually run back to the house barking, and my mother, who would figure out I was where I wasn’t supposed to be, would come after me. I loved my dog, but he was a snitch.
Kids, including my two cousins, swam in the quarry. There was a path where the rocks had tumbled down and some of the older kids and my cousins would skinny dip. I didn’t know any of them, and it made me nervous to see them going down there, stripping off their clothes, boys and girls, and I kept thinking they might want to pull my pants down and throw me in. I was very modest in those days, and still am when it gets right down to it, and I had a fear not only of that, but that they would throw me into the water and make me swim, which I couldn’t. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did. Actually, I don’t think they even noticed me. I remember watching the kids swim for a while, amazed at their white skin in the darkening water.
Eventually they climbed out, dressed and went home, and I watched them go along the far side of the quarry, then I started home. The sun dipped even more and the sky bled over the earth and gathered up in the handful of scrub trees along the way home. I walked swiftly, wanting to be home before the sun went down and my mother started calling for me. I had already pushed my time, and my guess was she thought I was still in the yard playing.
/> The path was red and sun-bleak. There were some mountains in the distance, and the mountains held the shadows to them like possessions, and the darkness in their crags and crannies gave me a feeling of unease that is impossible to explain.
I was really missing those East Texas trees and all the creeks and ponds and sandy trails. When the sun went down in East Texas the woods and the greenery turned emerald, and the shadows between the trees were mysterious and lovely. This place turned red and sad and the shadows began to look like oil stains.
I walked along the hardened dirt road with red sand on either side, and even at the dying of the day, it made everything hot. It was so hot I could feel it through my tennis shoes. I still remember that. I remember that in East Texas as well, but there always seemed there was shade to be had, and when it was night the ground cooled quickly. There is much that is embraced and loved about dry heat compared to humidity, but when I sweat I know I’m hot, and I don’t keep moving about and end up falling out. The East Texas sweat cools me when I find shade and be still, but in that dry heat of Arizona I think I’m fine until I’m not.
Bake or fry, when you get right down to it, doesn’t matter, I suppose.
In time I came to where there was dead grass growing on either side of the trail. The grass was the color of crackers and there was no wind to move it, but I saw that in one spot it was moving, rustling ever so gently. I stopped and looked. I didn’t see anything at first. The grass stopped swaying. A moment later it began to move again, and a dark head rose up from the grass.
The head swayed first to one side and then the other, and there was a little forked tongue that came out of its mouth, blue-looking, and it snapped at the red-shaded air, and then the head went down and the grass began to move again. It was coming right for me.
I came unstuck and started running, sure I would get away from the snake quickly, but when I looked back I saw it coming along the trail now, moving briskly, squirming its way after me, all three or four feet of it, its head lifted like a periscope as it moved speedily along.
Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade Page 13
