The Mammoth Book of Westerns

by Jon E. Lewis

  “Hello, boys,” she said. “What are you’ll up to?”

  “Oh, trying to find some meanness,” Bud said. “Say, my name’s Bud Farrow. This is Sonny. Say, I’m going off to Korea tomorrow and sure would like it if you’d sing me another song or two.”

  “Why I sure will, Bud,” she said. “ All my boys was in the service. I can’t sing but one or two, though – I ain’t no regular singer.” She grinned at us and picked up her guitar and went back and sat down.

  “Folks, these next two songs are for the soldier boys,” she said, and that made me feel good because I knew she thought I was in the army too. Only when she got to singing it made me feel pretty bad, because I wasn’t in it and Bud was going off anyway. She sang “Dust on the Bible” and “Peace in the Valley,” and we all clapped big for her, but then the musicians came back and she handed over the guitar and went to draw some beer.

  “Let’s get on,” I said.

  That cold wind hit us right in the face when we stepped out on the street. It felt like it was coming right off the north pole.

  “We ain’t gonna scare up nothing,” Bud said. “Let’s go to the Old Jackson.”

  “I’m game,” I said. “I want off this cold-ass street.”

  We went up and got introduced. Bud’s was a little better looking in the face, but mine was a better size and she was real nice. Her name was Penny. It was a nice place, the Old Jackson – it was warm and had good rugs and about the best beds I ever saw, and nobody gave you any static one way or the other. Only thing, it took a rich man to make it last, and it didn’t seem like no time till we were back out in the street, cold as ever.

  “Well, how do you feel now?” I asked him.

  “Horny,” he said. “ It was worth the money, though.”

  “It’s right at two o’clock,” I said. “ We’ve got two hundred miles to make, we better hit the road.”

  We hit it, and Bud went right to sleep. He always does that coming back from Fort Worth – I seldom seen him fail. One time when he still had his Chevvy he done it when he was driving and rolled us over three times. It didn’t hurt us, but after that I was glad enough to drive and let him sleep. I got to thinking about all the times me and Bud had made that run from Thalia to Fort Worth and back – I guess about a hundred, anyway. We done an awful lot of running around together before we had the fight. Used to, when we were in high school, we’d make it to the Old Jackson about ever three weeks. I wish the damn army had left Bud alone. It was dead enough in Thalia, anyway, without them shipping him off to Korea.

  I never slowed down but one time going home. Just this side of Jacksboro I got to needing to pee and stopped and got out. Bud woke up and needed to too so we both turned our backs to the norther and peed on the highway and then got back in and went on. Bud went right back to sleep. The wind was whipping the old pickup all over the road, and I didn’t make very good time. But I drove through the stop sign in Thalia just before six and got Bud to his rooming house right on the dot.

  “Wake up, Bud,” I said. “We’re home.”

  He looked pretty gloopy, but he got out. I slipped in the house with him and waited while he washed his face and got his army stuff on. He looked a lot different in uniform. He just left most of his other stuff in the room – Old Lady Mullins could put it away if she accidentally found a renter. He put the top up on his Mercury and locked the doors and we went up to the coffee shop and ate some breakfast. Then we drove on over to the drugstore where the bus was supposed to stop, and we waited. We never said much. I knew what Bud was thinking about, but I didn’t have no business mentioning it. The wind was blowing paper sacks and sand and once in awhile a tumbleweed across the empty street.

  “You don’t have to wait if you got some business, Sonny,” Bud said. “I can get in the café out of the wind.”

  “Aw, I got nothing to do this early,” I said. “I might as well see you off. Unless you got something you need to do by yourself.”

  “No, I don’t have nothing,” Bud said.

  Then we seen the Greyhound coming and we got Bud’s duffelbag out of the back and stood there in the wind in front of the pickup, waiting for the bus driver to drink his cup of coffee and get his business done in the drugstore. Bud fished around in his pocket and got out both sets of keys to the Mercury and handed them out to me.

  “Sonny, you better take care of that car for me,” he said. “I was about to go off and forget that. I mean if you don’t mind doing it. I may want you to sell it and I may not, I guess I can write and let you know.”

  “Why I’ll be glad to take care of it, Bud,” I said. “I can put it in my garage. It don’t hurt this old pickup to sit out.”

  I put the keys in my pocket and Bud picked up his duffelbag.

  “I heard it’s pussy for the asking over there,” I said. “I guess that’s one good thing about it.”

  “Maybe so, if you live to enjoy it,” Bud said. “I never did get to ask about you and Laveta.”

  I had to turn my back on the wind before I could answer him – the wind took my breath.

  “Well, I guess it’s too bad you never got to go see her, Bud,” I said. “Her old man made us get the marriage annulled. He never thought I was rich enough for Laveta, or you either. I think she’s going to marry some boy from Dallas.”

  “I knew she would,” Bud said. The wind was so cold it would burn your face, but Bud was looking right into it.

  “I think she would have liked to see you,” I said. “She never liked getting it annulled no better than I did, at first. I guess she might be liking it a little better now. They sent her off to Dallas to that school.”

  Bud set his duffelbag down and rubbed his hands together. “I ain’t over her yet, Sonny,” he said. “After all of this, I ain’t over her yet.”

  “Well, I wish I never had got into it, Bud,” I said. “ I should have just let you’ll make it up.”

  “Aw, didn’t make no difference, he’d of annulled me too,” Bud said. “Only I wouldn’t a hit you with that bottle, maybe. I never intended to do that. I don’t know how come me to do that. Did you’ll get to spend the night?”

  “Naw we never even done that, Bud. They caught us that night, about ten miles from the J.P.’s. Her old man had the Highway Patrol out looking for us.”

  “I done that, anyway,” he said. “She’s a sure sweet girl.”

  The bus driver came out of the drugstore then and Bud picked up his duffelbag with one hand and me and him shook.

  “I enjoyed the visit, Sonny,” Bud said. “Watch after this town. I’ll see you.”

  “Bud, take it easy,” I said. “ I’ll be seeing you.”

  He gave the driver the ticket and got on the bus and it drove away. There wasn’t a car on the street, or a person, just that bus. I knew Bud would put off talking about it as long as he could, he always done things that way. I stood there in front of the pickup in the wind, trying to see. A lot of things happened when me and Bud and Laveta was in high school. There were some dust and paper scraps whirling down the street toward me but when the bus was out of sight it seemed like Bud and Laveta were gone for good and I was standing there by myself, in the wind.

  EDWARD DORN

  C. B. & Q.

  EDWARD DORN (1929–1999) was born in the prairie town of Villa Grove, Illinois, and educated at the University of Illinois and later the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Although Dorn was often grouped with the Black Mountain poets and writers, his work was distinctive in its rooting in blue-collar culture and Wild West myth. His epic poem Gunslinger, his most famous work, was published in four parts between 1968–1975. For the last decades of his life he directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

  IN THE EARLY morning the sun whipped against the plate glass of Tiny’s restaurant, reflecting the opposite side of the narrow dusty street where the printer’s shop, the saloon, another restaurant waved in the quiet morning, in the distorted glas
s. This was Tiny’s place. He was called Tiny for the usual reason. About 6.30 every morning the place was full of construction workers, and an occasional rancher who had been stranded in town the night before. At night, in front, until 8.00, were several railroad section men, with the exception of Sunday night, talking about Denver or Kansas City, or talking in cruel tones about John C. Blain the concessionaire who handled all the meals for the Burlington railroad. But most of the section men, the gandies, stayed close to their bunk cars, in a park of rough square shape and next to the tall thin grain elevator that could be seen for several miles coming from the east, from Belle Fourche, or from the west.

  Back of the restaurant the half desert began. Immediately. There was a banged up incinerator fifty feet out, in the desert of short pieces of barbed wire and rusted tins. Beyond wasn’t a desert, exactly. Sheep, and probably some cattle, grazed there, over on and on past the layers of soft hills. A map shows the open range to extend far into Montana.

  On past Tiny’s restaurant, past the hardware store and a vacant lot with an old ford grown in the rear of it, was the New Morecroft Hotel. Buck stayed there. He had new scars right under his lower lip and over farther down on his left jaw after he had washed with strong hotel soap, more bright scars stood red and looked quite becoming. He had been three days so far without paying so that Simms the thin owner shifted his feet on the linoleum floor when Buck returned to his room in the evening. Outside the low ceilinged lobby, on the front porch, it was quitting time for the construction workers and they hung around while their foreman took the days’ count of everyone’s hours into the small office thrown up with new rough lumber next to the hotel. It was the last building in the block and beyond it was a vacant lot and beyond that were the bunk cars of the gandy crews on a siding leading off to the grain elevator. To the left across the road, the gandy crews stood in bunches or stretched out resting on the lawn. The length of the dirt street was in shade by 5.15.

  Soon after, the rain fell slowly into the street and raised quick pockets of dust. Simms lifted his sharp elbow from the glass show counter where he kept odds and ends, a 1952 calendar, a mail-order catalogue, a dusty carton of aspirins, and moved to the front window where he propped a foot on the ledge and stared with his cheek on his hand at the increasing wind in the poplars outside and the rain that was now hard. The park was empty and the rain drove the small border of willow trees toward the ground. Buck came to the window all washed up and said that them gandies could sure move when they wanted to.

  Outside town, off the highway to Gillette, about four miles to the right was a considerable mound of gravel. Except for a layer of sandy dirt a foot or so thick on the top, the gravel below was of a varying grade. A fleet of ford dump trucks were lined up near the contractor’s shanty and the rain spread roots of light yellow clay over the hoods and down from the cabin tops onto the windshields. The yellow caterpillar sitting in the mouth of the pit threw steam jets up from its hot radiator and from the tin can covering its vertical exhaust pipe. Reed, the contractor, was frying some eggs for his supper, and he sometimes glanced out his window to the river curving around the base of the gravel hill where two of his workers, from South Dakota, had a trailer hidden in the willows. The smoke from their camp stove stayed close to the ground this evening. This was almost the end of the contract. The gravel stockpile out by the highway across the rolling range was lengthening day by day and the regular peaks made by the dumps were growing dark and shiny in the rain. Virgil Reed would pass the stockpile as he turned onto the highway to town and see he would have to hire another driver if he wanted to finish the job before the end of June.

  Buck would not go near the post office. And he always waited around for some time before he asked Simms if he had any mail that day. A letter from the gang at Papy’s tavern in Wichita came yesterday but it only mentioned his wife and kid in Mississippi and nothing about the accident. When the car crashed at the red light intersection in Wichita Buck threw out of the car and was in K.C. the next morning. He got drunk that day and saw lots of old acquaintances who worked with him in Nebraska and others he didn’t know but who knew those he did, from Denver to Omaha. It was hot that day in Daddy’s tavern in Kansas City. The three piece band smiled as they sat sweating on the little band box between the two toilet doors. The heavily built man with the curly hair stood on his crutches by Buck’s stool and bent his neck to hear the talk about the guitar and drum. Max was one half Cherokee and Buck thought he had known Max. Max was sure. And when Buck found out Max had nine dollars and a ride to Wyoming on the Burlington that afternoon at 4.00 he went across the street to the gandy hiring hall and hired in too. When he got back to Daddy’s Max was in with a tiny old woman who had already got three dollars away from Max. Buck sat brooding in the booth under the band box and once in a while glared at Max. He snapped hard language across to the bar and asked Max if he was indian. Max weaved slowly and smiled at the little woman who pulled on his flannel shirt. He smiled into the crowd and said he was indian from way back and old Buck was going with him anytime now to Wyoming. At the last minute Buck jerked away from old Sheila and had a cab on the curb outside Daddy’s.

  Max sat upright and stared all night, across the aisle from Buck, out the window. The train drove through the darkness up the Kansas line to Nebraska. In the station at Kansas City they had only given their names to the man at the gate with a list. In the car there were no white tabs on the windowshades by their seats. They rode free to the job in Wyoming. At Grand Island, Nebraska Max got off the train and went into a restaurant back of the depot. He thought he might go back to Daddy’s. Sheila was there every day he bet. Since coming from Illinois with the man who took dogs to a hospital there, he hadn’t been with a woman. In the still waiting car Buck opened his eyes. He blinked when he felt his swollen lips were tighter this morning than they had been since the accident. He licked them and wandered through the car and down the steps to the platform to look for Max. Max must have five dollars left, unless he buys too much to eat. Buck found him in the restaurant with some of the other travelers to Wyoming. Buck ordered a cup of coffee and said to Max that they might not have to gandy if there was other work there, maybe on a ranch or road work. Max thought if he didn’t like the setup, the looks of things when they got there he might shove on to Oregon, he had an uncle who was a foreman in a mill at Klamuth. They came back through the depot just as the train moved off toward the border.

  It was unusual to arrive on Friday afternoon because there was no work Saturday or Sunday. Buck swung up into the dining car and took the last seat for dinner, away from Max who was avoiding his eyes now that he had determined to go back to Daddy’s to drink beer with old Sheila. And late in the evening Max blinded the first passenger back east. It was on Monday morning that Buck decided he wouldn’t work on the section. He ate their cold fried potatoes for two days.

  Virgil Reed came along the pavement into town, through the increasing waves of rain, between the ditches on either side and broken weeds and long grass that had been earlier in the spring burned by the hot winds pouring in from the south-east. He had shaved after finishing his supper and there were still wet nicks on his neck below his chin and he dabbed them with his handkerchief from time to time. He knew that his new catskinner was a man that would work, he knew how to push the gravel. With Boyd the matter was simple: if you are a small man, you have to use your hands and feet to move. All day on the dusty cat he had crammed the accelerator to the floor and ground into the earth, with his visor cap pulled down tight on his forehead he had ground the blade into the earth, let it up and down quickly and infuriated the truck drivers by spilling over onto their road under the gravel loader. With the engine roaring all around the small hills that surrounded the pit, the shattering engine in command of all the air and Boyd was in command of the engine, back and forth across the opening to the pit he pressed the large, dirty, yellow caterpillar and acknowledged no one’s presence until the end of the day, when soon after t
he rain started on the hot metal covering the engine, he told Reed about the defective left brake. Reed said he would see to it.

  Now Reed rounded the corner into the town, past the tight groups of willows, past the deserted filling station, went the length of the street and stopped in front of the New Morecroft Hotel. Through the glass he could see Buck standing with Simms. Buck suddenly faced Simms with his hands out of his pockets and nodding several times said some words and turned to go. Out on the porch Reed met him and they started back down the street toward Pages’ saloon.

  In Pages’ Boyd was at the bar. It was nearly dark outside. The rain along the muddy street had slackened to a fine quiet regularity. The rain was quieter throughout the whole town. Up on the hill outside town on the highway to the east, in the filling station-grocery store where Buck was running up a small grocery bill, and saving credit stamps against a large red ornamental lamp with a white meandering shade for his mama, and beyond that, was a small opening in the grainy clouds, weak light from the sun as it went down in the north-west in back of the hill.