Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  Eddie kissed Colette’s forehead good-bye. Her cheeks were scarlet and Eddie told her, “When you walk outta here, and you and I know you will, you make sure they find me wherever I am. I’ll be your date to the first dance.” No one but Eddie and Colette believed Colette would live long enough for that to happen. Eddie said, “It’s a miracle that I’m standing here. Don’t forget that . . . when . . .” Eddie choked up. He tapped the brace that encased her withered leg. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  Eddie wiped the tears out of his eyes; found Suzy, his favorite nurse; thanked her and the other nurses; and said good-bye. They snuck him food he’d likely starve without. Two men saw him off, both aged early from TB, one in a wheelchair, the other a maintenance man employed at the hospital. The maintenance man warned, “Don’t stray off them highways, boy: desperate men in them fields.”

  From the wheelchair, the patient jabbed a gnarled finger. “And keep to your own self.”

  Eddie had taught the chair-bound patient how to play chess and helped the maintenance man fix the hospital’s boiler so the state wouldn’t fire him. The maintenance man was a tireless supporter of the American Workers Party. His health would fail him before he could attend his first American Communist Party convention in Madison Square Garden. The chair-bound chess player was a Great War veteran, a member of the American Legion, and an ardent believer that only fascism would save our democracy from the criminal subterfuge of Roosevelt and his Communists.

  Eddie was the moderator. He confided to both men, “As God is my witness, gentlemen, I don’t see how you’ll get on without me.”

  “Don’t need no damn boy talkin’ to me like that,” said the chair-bound chess player.

  Eddie smiled to where the swelling had been the worst and raised his hands. “Guess we’ll settle it fightin’, then. Winner takes the nurses to the dance.”

  “The hell you say,” said the maintenance man. “Suzy’d make pie outta you.”

  Eddie patted each man’s shoulders and turned for the door. Both grimaced, mumbling confusion at why anyone with sense would leave a roof and food. The chess player rasped at Eddie leaving, “And keep your money in your shoe if you got any.”

  Eddie limped ranch roads north toward Fort Worth, hitching rides in the powdery all-day twilight. At the Highway 77 intersection, he bit into the first of today’s bread, catching a miracle ride on a Standard Oil tank truck before he finished chewing. The driver made Gainesville at midnight. The town was dark from beginning to end and that’s where the driver dropped Eddie, just south of the Red River Bridge. Seventy miles had taken all day. This close to Oklahoma, the air had heavy grit, drier, more parched. Eddie drank jar water that didn’t help. The northbound Rock Island rumbled in from the dark, slowed for the bridge, and blew its whistle. A score of hard knockers scrambled from the trestles, elbowing and cursing Eddie out of the way. Eddie was too beat up to contest them for a space. Instead, he found shelter in an empty hay barn on the southern bank of the river.

  Eddie woke with the sunrise, cold, hungry, and aching everywhere. Two families now shared the barn; one had a small pull wagon with a wheel gone. A hollow-eyed little boy sat at the heel of Eddie’s boots; the boy cowed, staring through his eyebrows, but didn’t speak. Eddie didn’t, either. The boy extended his trembling left hand, palm up.

  Eddie’s stomach growled.

  The boy used his other hand to hold up the arm.

  “Where ya from?”

  The boy’s arm began to droop. Eddie smiled, kept yesterday’s uneaten bread ration, and gave the boy all the food he had for today and tomorrow. “You share with your sister, okay?”

  The boy scooped the food and froze when Eddie patted his head. The boy’s father and mother pretended not to see.

  Across the river, leery chalk-colored men walked Oklahoma’s two-lane highway in greater numbers, bedrolls on their backs, dirty kerchiefs tied across their mouths and noses. Each mile that Eddie walked, the dust stole more of the landscape. By mile ten, the wilted wheat, corn, and cotton were gone, smothered beneath the gray drifts and foot-deep blanket. By noon, he began to pass half-buried fence lines and empty farmhouses smothered to their rooflines.

  Eddie bought canned beans from a shack store near Davis and was advised to get off the road before nightfall. He did, spending the night shivering in the dried stock pond of an abandoned pasture north of Fort Cobb near Route 66, the road to California. For the first time, Eddie realized he heard no birds. There were men’s voices, though, angry voices that carried from the vehicle camp he’d passed at dusk.

  Two men appeared above him. They were a hundred yards west of his hiding place on the California road’s shoulder. One man yelled, “Howdy,” while the other man ran back down the road toward the vehicle camp.

  Highwaymen. Men with hook knives and little sympathy. Likely they’d been hunting him since he’d passed their camp. Better to leave now, before full sunrise, so he wouldn’t have to fight, not that he could in this condition.

  Day Three. The fence lines Eddie walked were drifted ten feet thick and over the post tops. The piled dust and tumbleweed thatch were creating their own desert. High ground or low, two-lane or one, the smothered, lifeless landscape never changed. It was as if God had incinerated some other part of the world and dropped the ashes here. You couldn’t kill a land any deader than this, not with gasoline, bombs, or the plague that had wiped out half of Europe. Western Oklahoma was just . . . gone, in its place a silent, barren, windswept graveyard.

  Eddie arrived late that evening, pausing at the junction that led to the Owen family farm. He’d known it would be bad, but seeing his home in the colorless moonlight, it was obvious the farm was beaten to its limits. The barn he’d helped his father build, the machinery they’d run, the posts and wire they’d set and strung, all had finally succumbed to the battle. His baby brother, Howard, and little sister, Lois, ran to the road, coughing and churning great clouds of dust, grinning like it was Christmas snow. They shouted, “Eddie! Eddie!” and hugged both sides of him home every step.

  His mother and father stood on the porch, kerchiefs tied across their faces, chins up but leaning on each other. Eddie walked toward the two strongest people he had ever known, he and his siblings shuffling through the dust, through a wasteland of family work and dreams. Eddie began to cry. He stopped and turned away, wiping mud streaks from his face. He was twenty-two. He had fifty-nine dollars left.

  Inside at the table his mom tried to hide her concern for his condition. “You’re fit, Eddie?”

  “Ah, Mom, worry not.” Eddie stroked her hair, no longer soft, and tried not to look out the window. The window had oiled rags stuffed in every edge. “Be back on top of it in no time. Same with all of us.”

  She coughed and said, “That’s my boy.”

  Mildred-Mae coughed through dinner, too, and never stopped wiping dust off the table. Eddie noticed they all coughed. Out in the panhandle, young and old were dying of the “dust pneumonia”—coughing first, then a fever spike, then . . . funerals.

  Newt wanted to know about Texas, the derrick explosion, the drilling business, the conditions in general; were there jobs for good engineers yet? For a farmer like him, willing to work at anything? For anyone? His mother wanted to know if Eddie had a girlfriend, if he ate properly in the hospital, was he going to church, when did the doctors say he’d be healthy again, and did anyone in Texas see an end to all this dismay?

  Eddie delivered all the false hope he’d manufactured on the trip home along with the last of the drilling company’s hospital money. He recuperated for six days, helping the family work hard at repairs that wouldn’t slow or stop the inevitable. They did not discuss politics—communism, fascism—or California as an answer, but California was where the family was going, where they had to go.

  Unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time, Eddie read his mother’s saved Amarillo Globes for the news that hadn’t made it to the oilfield or hospital. The reports were grim. Millions
continued to starve in the frozen, postrevolution, postwar Soviet Union. Their leader, Joseph Stalin, was “purging” his party’s “Fascist traitors” and blaming Germany for repeated attempts to subvert the workers’ revolution. Eddie’s four years of history and political science had depicted Germany as decimated by the Great War, then plagued by rampant inflation. The Globe reports said Germany was once again plagued, this time by maniacal Fascist politicians, dangerous men bent upon rearmament and the expulsion of “all Communists and undesirables.” In contrast, as Eddie read his mother’s more recent Globes, they reported that Germany was actually on the improve, a “Nazi economic miracle,” the reporter called it.

  Eddie had read and heard both opinions before. Sometimes in the same day.

  Mixed into the yellowed stack of Globes were recent editorials someone had torn from the Tulsa World and the Kansas City Star and sent to his mom. In the clippings, the newspaper editors admonished a number of world leaders for haranguing their hungry populations with incendiary speeches that demanded territory from their neighbors as an answer for empty bellies and what the newspapermen termed “incompetent leadership.” A stated example was Italy had invaded a defenseless Ethiopia with France’s concurrence. The editorials complained that not two decades had passed and the lessons learned in the trenches and mustard-gas battlefields of the Great War had been forgotten.

  Eddie sensed there was more in the editorials than he’d actually read and reread for an answer. The newspapers mirrored the Walter Winchell radio broadcasts about the USA—soup kitchens and labor riots up north, drought down south and out west that Eddie didn’t need a newspaper editor to see. The world was awash in bad news and blame. And had been—according to most of the newspapers and his professors at OU—since the Great Depression had begun the decade. Between the lines, the editors seemed to be saying there was worse on the way. Anonymous members of the banking and Wall Street communities were quoted in the Globe as saying how unfortunate it was that the assassination attempt on President Roosevelt had been unsuccessful. Eddie had to read that twice to believe it was in print. The same was true of the most recent “Prohibition” editorial lamenting its repeal.

  Eddie shook his head. Hell, the only good news he’d heard in the last two years was the repeal of Prohibition—the Eighteenth Amendment that had outlawed alcohol was finally dead after fourteen years of forced temperance and tommy-gun headlines. At least now those without hope could drink, and any dog in this fight would be one more than most folks had. Eddie frowned. Except in Oklahoma and North Texas. Demonstrating the God-fearing tenacity that had sustained them thus far, Eddie’s fellow citizens had chosen not to see alcohol as medicine. Their counties were to remain dry and heavily patrolled against the demon in the brown bottle. And according to the Amarillo Globe, that choice, however righteous and farsighted, was creating jobs that even in the Dust Bowl had no place.

  More men than ever, the editorial said, some desperate, some who just lacked respect for the law, were becoming bootleggers, gangsters with the same violent flair as those Prohibition gangs who had serviced Chicago and New York. Eddie thought of Thurman Deets and his chalk beer. The driller had family in the illegal liquor business, had introduced Eddie to a thin, kind of frail fellow with three pistols and a dry sense of humor that didn’t quite hide all the violence behind the words.

  Eddie’s mother coughed in the next room, dry and ragged. Eddie cringed. His mother coughed again. Was that God talking? Everyone in this dusty farmhouse is going to die? Eddie sat up bolt straight. Die right here or on the road to California? Eddie winced at hip pain, then stood fast onto the cold floor and straightened. Or . . . or was God saying that Eddie’s family shouldn’t have to die, here or in California’s migrant camps?

  Eddie blinked at the dark, then at the wall between him and his mom’s ragged cough. I’m fit enough to drive—but am I willing to break the law? Risk prison? Die in a hail of FBI bullets? The Barrow gang had been shot dead, as had John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and almost every other outlaw or bank robber the Great Depression had birthed.

  But even if I am willing to break the law and risk prison, I’d have to know someone who had that kind of job, then convince him to give it to me instead of fifty other fellows in the same situation. And a job like that requires none of the skills I worked three jobs and four years to acquire.

  Yeah, but it is money. Eddie’s mom coughed again; a muffled sob followed, then his father’s reassuring voice. Eddie glanced out a window that overlooked nothing but moonless dead and dark. Does God owe the Owen family one? Eddie waited for a discount revelation, “a burning bush,” the glory shouters would’ve called it. His mother coughed again. The farmhouse went silent, only the wood walls creaking against the sixteen-penny nails.

  Eddie stood still in the cold, silently asking for an answer, silently explaining to his parents a decision they could never hear out loud and would never accept. Hard times did not break a man’s faith in God or family, his father would’ve said, faith in God and family were often all a man had. Grip both tight, go to work the next day in a coal mine or wheat field, and go an hour early. A man won ’cause he didn’t quit what he believed.

  At breakfast, Eddie held his mom’s hand and smiled into his father’s proud but wilted brown eyes. Then lied to the people he loved most. Eddie told his father there was a man he’d met on the rig, a man who owed him a favor; the man had work near Fort Worth, with automobiles. Eddie felt his mom’s grip tighten on his hand. His father’s eyes didn’t blink. Newt studied his son. A year ago, Eddie would have had to defend the decision to his father’s protective questions—who was the man? What was his history? How would he pay? But not in 1935; the dust had erased the luxury of protection.

  Eddie added his best grin, said not to worry, there’d be no going to California. He kissed his mom Mildred-Mae good-bye, hugged Newt, Lois, and Howard, and three days later talked his way into the only job that paid oilfield wages and could be done sitting. Driving a very fast car for one very dangerous man:

  Lester “Benny” Binion.

  March, 1936

  Tonight, Eddie was using both lanes of the Jacksboro Highway, the real Thunder Road if you lived in North Texas, his boss’s turf for the foreseeable future until Benny would kill two rivals and move west to open the legendary Horseshoe in Las Vegas, Nevada. Eddie was doing ninety in Benny’s fresh-off-the-lot 1936 Lincoln V-12 Zephyr Sedan, risking a twenty-year prison sentence for the second time this month, like he did every month. The Lincoln was full, packed with forty cases of bonded Canadian whiskey headed for the blue-blood Petroleum Club in Oklahoma City.

  It was early 1936 and while not a good year, it was for sure better than 1935’s hospital bed and fear for his family. There’d been no letup in the dust-bowl weather, and everything Eddie’s conscience had warned him about this rumrunner life had been true. Benny Binion’s ten dollar bills kept the Owen farm away from the bank and the family together, but Eddie’s Phi Beta Kappa key still couldn’t open an office door or start a car, and the Colt .45 nervous in Eddie’s belt could do both.

  Eddie jiggled the custom Motorola radio, attempting to tune in Tommy Duncan’s voice, decided two hands were more useful on the Lincoln’s wheel, and quit jiggling. Eddie’s headlights split just enough dust and dark that he mashed the brakes before rear-ending the stalled Buick Roadmaster and the two dusty citizens arguing behind the trunk. All four of their hands were visible in his headlights and empty, and all punching each other with a drinking man’s late-night precision. Eddie stepped one work boot out onto the cold concrete, drew the Colt he forgot to cock, and finally fired two rounds in the air. He and the men cringed at the first shot and the men staggered apart at the second.

  Probably not highwaymen.

  Eddie leaned into his best Cushing accent: “Forty of them assholes from Dallas headed this way, fellas. I’d be home protecting my property if I had any.”

  Both men hitched suspenders and stuffed at tattered s
hirttails. “Dallas assholes” in North Texas meant the federal law. Eddie tipped the short-brimmed fedora favored by schoolteachers and the deceased Clyde Barrow, slid into the Lincoln, hit first gear like he meant it, and squealed around the Buick. He sincerely hoped the boys would move before they added to the Jacksboro’s every-weekend death toll.

  The next twenty miles required fifteen minutes and a fair amount of steering to avoid withered tumbleweeds and herds of jackrabbits waiting for their chance to die. A last-second swerve missed the fender of a lightless, slow-moving Model T tied together with cords and hope. In the far-off night-covered nothing to Eddie’s right, specs of light glimmered. Another three miles and the road bent right. The glimmer became neon. Blue, red, and green tubes lit the eaves of a low-roofed roadhouse set back deep from the road and semisurrounded by cheap transportation: Pappy Kirkwood’s Four Deuces. A man with money could gamble there, and legal, too, because Pappy lived in the back—in Texas it was legal to gamble in your house. Pappy’s house was big by Depression standards, held three hundred, had five bars and twelve tables, ten poker and two dice. Pappy also seemed to know a number of women who wore makeup and would dance with a stranger. Sally Rand in particular. And on a weeknight when she wasn’t headlining in Fort Worth, Sally was known to hold court at the back bar, smiling her way through the pocketbooks of oilfield gentlemen and occasionally a roughneck’s affections. Eddie slowed and considered stopping to see if Miss Rand was in and if he was sufficiently mended to dance. He’d lack money to spend, but Miss Rand had smiled at him last month just beyond Pappy’s front door like that might not matter.