I tried to forgive Buddy and forgive myself for what had happened in Wyoming, but unfortunately the conscience doesn’t work like that. We’d bailed on Bernadine. But how could I make it right? If we went back there, Buddy could end up in prison as a syndicalist, a man who had the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Then something hit me, the way it does sometimes when you least expect your thoughts to clear. Buddy and I were standing on ladders, deep inside the boughs of a cherry tree, the lake winking at us from down the slope, the sun spangling through the leaves, and I blinked once, then once again, and realized I’d been taken over the hurdles. “How’d those guys know you were a union organizer?” I said.
“I guess they have their ways.”
“No, they don’t. They’re dumb. The only one who knew was Tyler Keats. I didn’t make Tyler for a fink.”
“Search me. I’m done thinking about it,” he said. His eyes were fixed on his work, his fingers picking the cherry stems clean of the branch, which was the only way cherries can go to market.
“They told you they were going to send you to the pen as a Communist agitator, but you never asked where they got their information?” I said.
“I don’t rightly recall, R.B. How about giving it a rest?”
“It wasn’t you they were going to send up the road. It was me.”
“What difference does it make? They were holding all the cards.”
“Somebody called down to Texas and found out I’m an escapee.”
He climbed back down his ladder, his canvas bucket brimming with cherries, his shoulders as wide and stiff as an ax handle. “Clint Wakefield raped Bernadine,” he said. “They got us out of town so we couldn’t give evidence against him. The real issue is Wakefield’s reputation. The guy is a western hero. He knows guys like us cain’t send him to the pen, but we could smear his name, so he got us out of sight and out of mind.”
“Where is she?”
“Probably at work. What is she going to do? Stop living? Quit fretting on what you cain’t change.”
“Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”
“Because you’re a hardhead. Because you would have stayed in Sheridan for no purpose and ended up in a joint like Huntsville Pen.”
I stepped down from my ladder and followed him to the water can the labor contractor kept on the tailgate of his truck. The wind was cool in the sunshine, the lines of sweat drying on Buddy’s face. He filled two paper cups with water from the can and handed one to me, his gaze never meeting mine. I could tell there was something he hadn’t told me.
“Wakefield is right on the other side of the mountain, over on Swan Lake. He’s got a cottage there,” he said. “They’re shooting a western at the foot of Swan Peak.”
“You’re making this up,” I said.
“Here’s the rest of it. I talked to Bernadine. I mailed her some money for a bus ticket. She’ll be here tomorrow. I thought you might like that.”
I didn’t know what to say to her when she got off the bus, and I didn’t try. I think Bernadine was one of those people who didn’t expect a lot from the world. It was Saturday and there was a dance and cookout up by the motel where a lot of the pickers stayed during cherry season. We drank wine out of fruit jars and ate potato salad and barbecue pork and pinto beans and homemade ice cream a church group brought. The moon came up big and yellow over the mountains and you could see fireflies lighting in the aspens and birch trees down by the water. Buddy got his old Stella twelve-string from the motel and sat in with the country band, and started playing one Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston song after another. I guess I should have known what he was thinking about. Buddy came out of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky and would be a radical and labor agitator till somebody put pennies on his eyes. No matter what the circumstances, there was always a vinyl record playing in Buddy’s head, over and over again, and the lyrics weren’t written by Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell.
About 9:30, when the summer light at the top of the sky began to fade into the density and color of a bruise, I picked up Bernadine’s hand under the picnic table and curled my fingers in hers. “I’m sorry for leaving you behind in Sheridan,” I said.
“You couldn’t have changed anything. Nobody there is going to stand up to Clint Wakefield.”
In my mind I kept seeing the things he had probably done to her. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask how bad she had been hurt, or how, or where, or if she was suffering now. “Did you talk to any cops?” I said.
“His lawyer called me a liar. When I left the sheriff’s department, I looked back through the window and saw the deputies I’d talked to. Clint Wakefield was with them. The three of them were laughing.”
“I’m going to make him pay for what he did.”
She took her hand from mine. “Not on my account you won’t.”
“In Gatesville Training School I saw boys killed for a whole lot less. I know where there are unmarked graves. Things happened there that I don’t ever talk about. If Clint Wakefield was a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in Gatesville.”
I saw the fatigue in her face, and realized I was making her relive not only the assault on her body but the theft of her soul. The air had turned cold, and the candles burning in the jelly jars were flickering and about to go out. I took off my denim jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “We got you your own room at the motel,” I said. “It’s a dollar and a half a day, but it’s right nice.”
“What’s that song Buddy’s singing?”
“‘Union Maid.’”
“Songs like that get people in trouble,” she said.
“You bet they do.”
“Why does he sing them?”
I shook my head as though I didn’t know. But that wasn’t the case. I knew. Buddy was going to spit in the soup for all of us. And he wasn’t through with Clint Wakefield by a long shot.
A week later we had moved to the orchards higher up on the lake, close to Bigfork. The cherries were so red they were almost black, and our crew picked truckloads of them from first light until shadows covered the trees and made it hard to pick the cherry and the stem cleanly from the limb. Bernadine and Buddy and I worked as a team, and would talk to each other inside the leafy thickness of the tree, like kids playing on a summer day rather than adults working at a job. I couldn’t help noticing that Bernadine paid a lot of attention when Buddy talked, even though the subject matter seemed to roam all over creation, from the Garden of Eden to Jesus and Joe Hill and ancient highways in Montana he said primitive people had used even before the Indians showed up.
“There’re two or three roads under the lake,” he said. “If you look carefully along the banks, you can see the worn places in the rocks where people rode over them with carts that had wooden wheels. They were probably going to the glaciers, right across the lake, where all those buttercups are.”
“How do you know all this?” Bernadine asked.
“You trust what your eye tells you and then you have to believe in things you cain’t see,” he said.
“Believe what?” she said.
“That all these things happened and are still happening. We just cain’t see them. Maybe those ancient people are still living out their lives all around us.”
There was no question about the expression on Bernadine’s face. She was looking at Buddy in a way she had never looked at me. I wanted to climb down my ladder and dump my bucket in one of the boxes on the flatbed and keep walking all the way back to the motel, or maybe just head on up the road to British Columbia.
“You’re kind of quiet, R.B.,” he said.
“The conversation is obviously over my head. Excuse me. I got a crick in my neck,” I said.
When I walked to the truck, the pair of them were buried from the waist up in the cherry tree, talking like they already knew what the other one was going to say, like they could talk on and on now that they didn’t have to stop and explain themselves to a third party. I felt a spasm in my innards that made
my eyes cross.
There was nothing unusual about Buddy organizing farm workers, but it was unusual for him to try it with the cherry pickers, particularly in the orchards along Flathead Lake in a remote area like northwestern Montana. The cherry harvest was a one-shot deal that offered at best only a few weeks’ employment, and the people who did it were a strange mix—drifters like us, wetbacks, college kids, Romanian Gypsies, and white families from Oklahoma and Arkansas who weren’t interested in politics or unions.
The most successful attempts at union organizing always took place within shouting distance of a metropolitan area. Union people organized in the San Joaquin Valley, but they operated out of San Francisco or sometimes Fresno or Bakersfield. The fort was never far away. Did you ever hear of anybody organizing cotton pickers in Mississippi? Why didn’t they? There was no fort. The labor organizers’ life expectancy would have been about five minutes.
Buddy started by distributing leaflets in a bar where a lot of the pickers hung out. The bartender told him to lose the leaflets or hit the bricks. “No problem. Give me a shot and a Grain Belt back, will you?” Buddy said. “Did you know Clint Wakefield was making a movie over on Swan Lake?”
The bartender didn’t reply. He had cavernous eyes and the hands of a man who had pulled the green chain or boomed down fat ponderosa logs on a semi or dug postholes in twenty-below weather. His eyes seemed to smoke when he stared back into Buddy’s face.
“It’s a fact,” Buddy said. “I know Mr. Wakefield personally. He’s looking for a saloon to shoot a couple of scenes in.”
“Wonder why he didn’t mention it when he was in here,” the bartender said. His eyes drifted to the front window. “That’s him, across the street, signing autographs. Why don’t you say hello?”
Buddy and I walked outside into the evening shadows and the coolness of the wind blowing off Flathead Lake. The mountains that loomed over the water had turned dark against the sun and looked edged with fire on the peaks. Clint Wakefield was standing by his 1946 woody, wearing a white western-cut suit and hand-tooled boots and a black vaquero hat that had small white balls hanging from the edges of the brim. I was glad Bernadine was down at the drugstore and in all probability had not seen him. I could only imagine what she would feel looking at the man who had raped her. My own feelings were such that I could barely deal with them. It was like looking at somebody you saw in your dreams but who disappeared at daylight and was not quite real. But here he was, flesh and blood, standing on the same street, breathing the same air we did, people gathering around him like flowers around a toadstool. His trousers were hitched up so you could see the thickness of his penis against his leg. He signed autographs with a grin at the corner of his mouth but glanced at his watch like he had to get on the road in the next few seconds. Even in the gloaming of the day, his eyes were blue orbs that had the brilliance of silk when they settled on a young girl’s face. I had to clear my mouth and spit.
I began to see things that I thought I had left at Gatesville, things I believed were not a part of my life anymore and that were not me and that had been imposed by mistake on my boyhood. I saw myself walking into a concrete latrine in my skivvies, a shoe-polish handle outfitted with a sharpened nail file gripped tightly in my palm, the sound of a flushing toilet as loud as Niagara Falls.
“You got any ideas?” I said.
“I think I’ll get in line,” Buddy said. “I’ve never gotten the autograph of a famous person.”
I couldn’t move. I kept staring at Clint Wakefield, who was no more than 30 feet away from me, my pulse jumping in my throat like a crippled moth. I thought he recognized me, then realized he was squinting into the last rays of the sun and probably couldn’t see past the glare. When it was Buddy’s turn to get an autograph, I stepped forward so Wakefield would see us both at the same time. I heard Buddy say, “Would you write ‘To my pal Bobby James,’ please, sir? Actually the full name is Bobby James Elgin of Pikeville, Kentucky.”
The grin never left the corner of Wakefield’s mouth when he wrote on the back of the leaflet Buddy had given him. He didn’t speak when he handed it back to Buddy, either. Maybe his eyes lingered two seconds on Buddy and then on me, but that was it. Who or what we were and the damage he had done to us either didn’t register on him or wasn’t worth remembering.
I put my hands in my pockets and followed Buddy back across the street and stepped up on the high sidewalk in front of the saloon. Down the street I could see Bernadine coming out of the drugstore. “Let’s get her out of here,” Buddy said. “Did you hear me? Stop looking at Wakefield.”
I wanted to say, I aim to fix him proper. I wanted to show people what it’s like to carry a stone bruise in your soul. I wanted to give him a little piece of Gatesville, Texas.
I felt Buddy’s fingers bite into my upper arm. “You get rid of those thoughts, R.B.,” he said. “You’re my bud, right? We don’t let others take power away from us.”
Bernadine was walking toward us, her dress swirling around her knees in the wind, proud of the new silver belt she had notched tight around her waist.
No, we just take away our best friend’s girl, I thought.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Not a dadburn thing,” I replied.
That night Buddy did something that I thought was deeply weird, even for him. He sat down at the small table in our motel room and studied the inscription Wakefield had written on the back of Buddy’s leaflet, then took out his wallet and removed the business card he had found tucked into the mirror above the lavatory in Wakefield’s barn. He started writing on the back of the business card, then realized I was watching him. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.
Two days later we started seeing new pickers on the job. All of them were white and looked like hard cases; a Gypsy said they were from the stockade down in Sanders County, working off their sentences at a dollar and a half a day. That night we saw a new ’53 Ford parked across the two-lane from our motel. Dried mud was splattered on the fenders and tags, and two guys in suits and fedoras were sitting in the front seat, smoking cigarettes. Buddy came away from the window and turned out the light.
“Goons?” I said.
“No, feds.”
“How do you know?”
“County cops don’t have vehicles like that. Climb out the back window and get Bernadine and stay gone for a while. I’ll handle it.”
“We’ll handle it together.”
“You’re an interstate fugitive. Maybe these guys have already found your jacket. They can put you on a train to Huntsville.”
I tried to hide my fear by clearing my throat, but I felt like somebody had just dipped his hand in my chest and squeezed my heart into a ball of red gelatin. “Well, what’s stopping them, then?” I said. “Let them do whatever they damn want.”
“Your thinking powers are questionable, R.B., but nobody can say you’re not stand-up. Before those guys knock on the door, I want to know what’s been eating you. I thought you’d be happy when Bernadine arrived.”
“She likes you more than she likes me.”
“That’s not my perception.”
“You see things out there in the world other people don’t. So does she. Y’all are a natural fit. It’s just kind of hard for me to accept that.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“She believes in stuff about primitive people eating flowers instead of killing animals and the wind singing in the grass and something called the Book of Ezra, whatever the hell that is.”
“That sounds like you talking instead of her.”
“I just repeat the kind of stuff you and other crazy people talk about. Mastodons and sea monsters and cave people throwing rocks at each other and such. You ought to listen to yourself. You put me in mind of somebody living in a comic book.”
“Bernadine didn’t tell me any of this, R.B. She told it to you. You sure she’s right in the head?”
I didn
’t know what to say.
The knock on the door shook the wall.
The agent who entered the room didn’t bother to remove his hat or give his name; he smiled instead, as though that was enough. He was so tall he had to stoop under the frame. He had long fingers and knobby wrists and small teeth and no color in his lips, unless you wanted to call gray a color. He opened the flap on a government ID and closed it quickly and returned it to his coat pocket.
“Could I see that again?” Buddy said.
“No,” the agent said. “You must be Elgin.”
“That’s me,” Buddy said. “Why’s the other guy standing outside?”
“He’s got a fresh-air fetish. He doesn’t like places that smell like a locker room. You know what the McCarran Act is?”
“Something a senator down in Nevada put together to keep working people in their place?” Buddy said.
“No, more like a law that requires representatives of the Communist Party to register as such.”
“Then I guess I’m not your huckleberry. Sorry you had to drive out here for nothing.”
“Who are you?” the agent said to me.
“R. B. Ruger.”
“Wait outside.”
“This is my room.”
“It was your room. It’s mine now.” He smiled again.
I sat down on the side of the bed. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay.”
The agent opened the bathroom door and looked inside, then looked in the closet.
“When did you start rousting guys like us?” Buddy asked.
“You’re like a bad penny, Mr. Elgin. Your name keeps going across my desk. We don’t have labor problems here. I think you’d like Seattle or Portland this time of year. Or even Salt Lake City. Or did something happen in Salt Lake City?”
“Yeah, Joe Hill got shot by a firing squad,” I said.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 14
