Behind the stands the noise of the livestock show made a heated tangle of incoherent sounds; the noise and confusion of men grappling with prize sheep and goats, a very small girl speaking in sweet tones to an overheated rabbit in a cage, two boys riding double on a cow pony, the noise of horses and cattle being unloaded from trailers, engines starting up. Jeanine felt in the distance, far beyond the visible horizon, a bass sound of gathering wind and the knotted heart of a storm that could have been weather or maybe it was the life she saw opening in front of her.
Maybe she should begin her sentences with Tell Me, instead of How Is. Such as, tell me about your new foal, the red mare, and the ringtailed cats, about how you shot horses. Tell me what the cook, Jugs, said about something. She had ten dollars in her purse, saved out of the household money. Maybe instead of saying Tell Me she should say Don’t Tell. She had been raised in a household of sisters and an absent father and the thing that had drawn them together into talk, spilled talk unreeling late into the night, was secrets.
She leaned closer to Innis and said, “Don’t tell your dad.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Then he glanced at her. “Don’t tell my dad what?”
“I’m going down to the shedrow and find a bet.” She settled her hat firmly on her head.
“Yes, ma’am.” He thought about it and then unknotted his hands. “Dang! I want to come too.”
“No. You got to stay here and hold the fort. I’m going to leave my purse, and with this crowd, it could get stolen.” She took out the ten dollars from her purse and set the purse on the bleacher seat. “Your dad is going to look up here and if we’re both gone he won’t know what to think.”
“Well dang,” he said. “Ma’am.”
“And don’t tell him unless he asks. You don’t have to lie.”
Innis thought about it for a long time. Then he made a sort of gesture with his right hand, an offhand drift toward her purse with a curled forefinger.
“You go on and make your bet,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on that purse.” When she hurried off down the bleacher’s wide concrete steps he folded his arms and sat back and surveyed the crowd like a Pinkerton man.
JEANINE WALKED ALONG the shedrow confidently and saw a man she knew, Tom Baker, from Seguin.
“Anybody taking bets?” she said. Baker lifted his hat and smiled. “Right here they are, little lady.”
“Who are you running, Tom?”
“Soldier Boy. Out of Gonzales Joe Bailey.”
Baker and a man from Abilene and two men from the King ranch were amused by her, and smiled, and asked who she was putting her money on and she said Smoky Joe Hancock. Ross Everett was running him to qualify and she had five dollars that said he would break twenty-three seconds and five that he would daylight Soldier Boy out of the gate. Baker and the King ranch man took her bets, and she ran back up the bleacher steps to find Innis.
At the starting gate Smoky Joe was being backed in. All the gates shut in a sharp clang and he snaked his head to one side with his teeth showing in a white row like piano keys. The horse next to him screamed and tossed his head in a feeble, apologetic warning. Smoky’s narrow little jockey said, “Here! Here now!”
And so Smoky straightened out again and cocked his ears toward the track because he was satisfied with the other horse’s weak reaction. He wanted to run badly, not even to win, but to beat up and humiliate the other horses in the gates around him. Ross Everett climbed up on the rear bars behind Smoky’s starting gate and pulled off his belt.
“Ross, don’t hit him,” said the jockey. “Come on, don’t hit him.” His red and navy-blue silks shone in the dulled sunlight.
Ross said, “The son of a bitch is going to qualify or I’ll shoot him and drag him out to the pasture for the coyotes.”
“He’ll rear,” said the jockey. “He’ll bash my brains out in this gate.”
At the end of the line of gates an old man stepped up on a steel ladder and laid his hand on a heavy metal lever. When he pulled it down it would throw all the gates open. The other horses heard the ringing footsteps and began to dance. Smoky threw his head from side to side against the bit and slavered at the horses on both sides of him. He did not understand about the noise of the man’s footsteps.
Ross Everett watched the old man place himself on the top rung and pull the lever. All the gates clanged open and he brought the belt and buckle down on Smoky Joe’s rear end with all his strength. The dark stallion bolted straight out of the open gate and left a length of daylight between himself and Soldier Boy. Smoky Joe ran toward the magic, otherworldly feeling that would overcome him in a short distance, where the other horses would fall behind him and disappear, shamed. Tenths of seconds splintered and broke up into fragments like sparks from cedar fires, they floated in his wake and burnt the eyes and nostrils of his enemies.
He had never had such clean ground underfoot, it was as level and unmarked as the first day of the world and he broke through the invisible line of the photo finish beam so far ahead of the others that the track steward lost sight of him.
The track steward saw only the horses bunched up five lengths behind Smoky and declared the foremost among them the winner. This was a horse from San Angelo named Yellow Buck. A man stood at the rail with a stopwatch held high in one hand and facing the steward. He was yelling. It was the banker from Abilene with the yellow bow tie and a derby who had wanted to buy Smoky. A lot of people were yelling and Jeanine scrambled up to stand on her bleacher seat to look at the time. The electric clock said 22.9. Smoky Joe was pitching his way around the unused far side of the track, trying to throw his jockey into the rails. Another man raced up the bleacher steps toward the steward’s tower.
“Where do we go?” asked Jeanine. She was hurrying down the steps behind Innis as fast as she could in her high heels. “Will he get a plate?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Innis. “Listen.”
The steward had so many men yelling at him to check the film that when he did and realized Smoky had been five lengths ahead, he simply threw the film out the observation post window and somebody caught it and carried it to Ross Everett.
“Does he want me to autograph it?” Everett said. He laughed and handed it to a boy and gave the boy a dime and said to carry it back to the steward and tell him to make a copy for Everett. The PA system coughed and said there was a correction, that Smoky Joe Hancock had won in 22.9 seconds. There were low whistles. Smoky had won on two different bets; he had broken 23 seconds and he’d daylighted Soldier Boy out of the gate.
Innis took off his hat and brushed it, set it back on his head.
“I’ve got to lead him into the winner’s circle, Miss Jeanine.”
“Oh good for you!” Jeanine said. Innis was clearing his throat and tucking in his shirt. This was to be his first public appearance other than reciting Kipling’s “Tommy” at the end-of-the-year school program. She said, “Go look for your dad. I’ll go this way.”
Innis said Yes, ma’am and went around the end of the bleachers toward the place where they were unsaddling the horses. Jeanine walked quickly back toward the jockeys’ rooms and saw Tom Baker standing with the man in the yellow bow tie. Baker shook his head ruefully and opened his wallet and handed her two ten-dollar bills. A jockey slouched by, near to fainting with heat and anorexia, carrying his saddlecloth and racing saddle.
The King ranch man lifted his hat. “Do I get a kiss? Loser’s privilege.”
“In your dreams,” said Jeanine and jammed the money in her purse. They lifted their hats again and watched her walk away. One of them sang Hold tight, baby, hold tight.
She walked quickly toward the winner’s circle. She stepped through old dried horse manure; the twenty dollars meant luxuries for herself. Her mother’s oil money had paid all the back taxes, and she had bought an electric fan for the kitchen and a kerosene refrigerator. The sweaty wadded bills in her hand could now be spent on a bathtub and perfumed soap. She had to figure out how to tell her moth
er she came by it.
In the winner’s circle Jeanine turned in the wind in her new summer dress. She held out her hand to Smoky Joe. He was staring around, looking for other horses, the lowly geldings, a stallion to challenge, the sweet and lovely mares. Jeanine patted him on the neck and laughed with delight. He was the brave horse that lived in a trash yard, the thin underfed horse that ran his heart out on the brush tracks, and she did not remember the hard times but only his springing step and his courage and his bright, irrepressible gallantry. She said, “Ain’t you a rocket?”
Innis held up the championship silver plate and a man took his picture with his face glowing in the hot air. Ross put his hand on Jeanine’s shoulder and said, “Another one, please. Send me a copy and the bill.”
The sparkling silver plate ran its reflection of the intense sun across the crowd. Ross stood beside her wearing a summer jacket and tie, lace-up cordovan shoes and his good Stetson. She felt his hand on her elbow, it steadied her. The brim of her hat made flying motions in the breeze. It was a breeze that seemed to come out of the mouth of a furnace.
“Dad?”
“Yes.” Ross turned to his son and when he did his full attention was on the boy. He faced his son in a direct manner with his hands clasped behind his back, and in the intense sun his face was dark under the shadow of his hat.
“Do you want me to load him?” Innis stood holding the halter line, and his hand was on Smoky’s shoulder. He was an undersize replica of his father and he could not stop smiling in the joy of a clean win and a silver plate.
“No, not right now. Get him back in the stall.” He reached out to take the boy’s hat from his head and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Go stick your head in the horse tank, son. You’re overheated.” The boy’s face was alight with unspoiled pleasure. Ross put his son’s hat back on his head and tapped the crown. “You and Jugs take him to a stall. Y’all are staying the night here. It would be too dark by the time you got him home. Me and Jeanine are going on. I have to get her back.” He turned to Jeanine. “Word gets around,” he said.
“It was only a ten-dollar bet,” she said. She kept her voice low. “It’s bathtub money.” She smiled up at him and thought of a bathtub full of cool water.
“You were ruined for a normal life.”
“No I wasn’t!” She fanned herself with the race program. “I’m more normal than anybody. More than Mayme.”
He nodded. “The purse was two thousand.”
“Oh my God, you didn’t tell me!”
“It would have been too nerve-wracking,” he said. “My nerves were wracked enough as it was.” He took off his hat and wiped his forehead and put it back on. “Let’s get you a cold drink and get home.”
They waded through the hot sand toward the run-out, and she took hold of his arm to keep her balance. She was proud of him and proud to be seen with him. From the perspective of Baker and the man from the King ranch, who were both lounging in the shade of the run-out, she and Ross would seem to be wavering in the heat distortion. Her hand on his coat sleeve for balance, shifting closer and then slipping away, unsure, her hat shimmering in planes, holding on to his sleeve with an iron grip.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Ross and Jeanine drove out onto Highway 84 south of Lubbock, into the flat country. The earth was the color of brick and cream. An increasing wind ruffled the roadside dust. The daylight dimmed to a faint gray. There was nothing to see but distant oil rigs, the braced, orthodontic structures of the expansion joints, and the small variations of slope and erosion dotted with blackbrush, and as they drove long flatbeds loaded with oil field equipment appeared on the diminishing black line of the highway and the drivers waved as they passed.
They were following the old Burlington Northern tracks and in the distance a train called out. It was coming toward them and it went past with a rush of dust and Russian thistles dried out to barbed wads flying away from the cowcatcher on both sides. Jeanine turned the window wing toward her face and closed her eyes against the blast and her hair streamed out away from her forehead.
“I’m taking you to dinner in Abilene.”
Jeanine stuck out her lower lip. “I didn’t know we were going to dinner in Abilene.”
“I know it.”
“Why didn’t Innis come too?”
“Because I want to talk to you.” He leaned back in the seat and pulled his tie loose. They passed a struggling, backfiring bus with peeling paint and missing windows, with children hanging out the window frames and trunks lashed to the top. Their tires sang on the blacktop. A flock of rosy finches, gathering for the fall migration, flashed at the windshield and then tilted away. She thought, not yet, not yet. She felt tears burning her eyelids in the hot wind and she wiped them away with the heel of her hand. The wind roared at the open windows.
“I’m not the person you want to be talking to,” she said. “You need somebody more cheerful.”
“You have a bright, cheerful, and sunny nature, Jeanine. Happiness is your middle name. You spread joy and cheer wherever you go. Secretly inside you are the Bluebonnet Molasses girl.”
“No I’m not.”
He said, “I want you to marry me. What objections would you have to marrying me?” He stared straight ahead from under the brim of his hat. His hand was dropped easy and relaxed over the top of the steering wheel.
She twisted around on the seat. She loved the old Tolliver house. It was their own house with pale mint green walls and the family graveyard. If she left, it would be a door shut behind her. Someday she would marry somebody, after all, and open another door to her husband and to other lives that devolved one inside the other in an infinite progression of lives. But not yet. And still Jeanine felt she could turn to Ross and put her arms around him and that only with him would her restlessness unwind itself. With him her interior drought would be over. She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and then turned her face to the hot wind again.
He opened and closed his hard fist. He did not look at her.
“You don’t know what to do with your mind, Jeanine,” he said. “I’m the only man that can save you. I’ll marry you and keep you out at the ranch and you can occupy yourself with four-hundred-pound calves at branding and screwworm caustic and Smoky Joe and fighting with the cook. The fun will never end.”
“What a life,” Jeanine said. She smiled at him. “Being a ranch wife. When does a person get to enjoy themselves?”
“In bed,” he said. “In the hot hours of the night, sweetheart.”
“I knew that’s where this was going.”
“I would guess that you are seeing somebody else.”
“It’s not serious.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just fun.” She wiped her eyes on the hem of her skirt.
“And I’m not.”
“Ross, you are a very serious man.”
She thought about Innis and what was fair to him and what was not. There were two men to think about. The boy made this all so much more important. She sat back again in the narrow seat and put her hand over her eyes. “It’s just that I have worked so hard for that place. We saved it. We got out of the oil fields and saved it.” She dropped her hand in her lap and turned the horse ring around and around on her little finger. She shut her hand up into a fist. “I want my own house.”
“Ah, Jeanine.” He took a deep breath.
“What?”
“Whatever you want, darling, you want it so badly.”
The wind had built up and was pushing the car toward the right, and loose, dried vegetation bowled along the verge, and she could feel that the temperature had dropped. Behind them, from the northwest, a solid front was rolling down over the flat country. Ross glanced in his rearview mirror, and then fixed his eyes on it. He frowned.
“What the hell is that?” he said. Behind them all through the empty countryside the stiff blackbrush and stripped cotton stalks and the desert willow were bent over and whipping. Jeanine di
d not notice it or what he had said. She was thinking of something else. She said, “You could take up work as a rodeo clown, Ross. That would fix you being too serious.”
“Yes, well, I am being serious here for the moment, Jeanine. Turn around and look out the back.”
Jeanine turned to look out the back window. “Oh God, Ross, it’s a dust storm.” A heavy, solid avalanche of darkness was moving toward them with its vaporous head vanishing in the upper atmosphere. It was a toppling great mountain on the loose, boiling at its front edge.
“I see it.”
Jeanine instinctively pulled her hat down around her ears. She said, “It’s come out of nowhere.”
The wind lifted sheer curtains of sand and flung them along the highway and they seethed like discontented spirits.
“It’s come down out of Colorado.”
They were approaching a town called Libertyville. The sign said there were fifty people there but it looked like no one had lived there for the last ten years nor would they ever live there again. A small concrete bridge took them over a dry ravine with a sign that said it was the double mountain fork of the brazos. They came upon a lay-by in the railroad tracks and a water tank where trains took on water and the water tank spout lunged back and forth in the wind. Jeanine turned again to look out the back window. The front of the dust storm was solid, it seemed to be made of a thick substance like Bakelite, and it was swallowing up the landscape as it rolled toward them.
Stormy Weather Page 29
