We ate supper at the long table on the sideporch—fried beefsteaks and baked potatoes and buttered rolls, big glasses of iced tea with lemon so tart you could taste it in your nose and sugar so coarse you felt the grains against your teeth. Then Buck and I opened a couple of the quarts of beer and poured a glass for everybody and the cigarettes got passed around and we all sat there sipping and smoking and watching the sun set in a welter of reds and golds and purples.
Belle took a sip of her beer and made a face, then went to the Frigidaire and came back with a bottle of Coke. She was sitting beside me, and as the darkness began to rise around us I felt her leg press against mine. I put my hand on her thigh and looked at her but couldn’t make out her expression in the closing gloom. “Go for a walk?” I said.
“Sure,” she said. I took one of the packs of smokes and said we’d be back in a while.
The moon was risen low, hugely full and saffron yellow, and a cool breeze had kicked up. She took my hand and we strolled up the road to the park. The trees rustled in the easy wind and cast long undulant shadows.
The pool held the moon’s glimmering image. We sat on a shadowed bench and smoked without talking. After a while I put my arm around her and she put her head on my shoulder, and a while after that she turned her face up to me and I kissed her. She moved up and sat on my lap and I stroked her flank and bottom while we kissed some more. I slipped my hands inside her shirt and felt her breast and fingered its tightened nipple. She put her hand over mine and pressed it harder to her. We were using our tongues now and breathing heavily.
“Let’s go to the room,” she said.
On the way back we stopped every few yards and kissed and ran our hands over each other and then started walking again, moving a little faster against the encroaching chill and in our eagerness to get to our bed, laughing and groping at each other as we went. When we came in view of the house we saw the parlor and kitchen windows brightly yellow.
“Looks nice, doesn’t it?” she said. “Like some safe little place way out here in a big nowhere.”
We went in by the front door and headed for our room at the end of the lighted hallway. As we passed the kitchen door, Buck looked at us from the table, where he was cleaning his pistols. Belle waved at him but he only stared blankly and then gave his attention back to the guns. The porch door was open behind him and we heard Russell and Charlie laughing out there.
“What’s with him?” she whispered. I shrugged, not really paying much mind to anything at the moment except her. I steered her into the room with a hand on her ass and she laughed and was already unbuttoning her shirt as I closed the door behind us.
For somebody who claimed to have no experience at it except with a thieving boyfriend in Corsicana and with the sonofabitch who did her when she was drugged, she was pretty adept—and as avid as any woman I’d been with, including Brenda Marie. I’d pulled the bed away from the wall to avoid thumping, but I guess we were pretty loud anyway with our gasping and moaning and rocking so hard the bed’s feet scraped the floor.
When we paused to catch our breath she whispered, “You think they can hear us in the next room?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t care.”
“Me neither,” she said, and pulled me to her.
No telling how long we were at it before finally going to sleep with me spooned against her from behind, but it didn’t seem very long before I woke to a window full of sunlight and the smells of coffee and bacon seeping into the room. The faint strains of a string band came from the radio Charlie had bought for the kitchen.
“Hungry?” Belle murmured, nuzzling my neck. Her hand moved up my thigh and found me rigid. “Merciful heavens, boy, don’t you ever get enough?”
“As if you do,” I said, caressing the smooth swells of her buttocks.
She giggled and kissed my ear and slid a leg over me and mounted up.
After a time we got out of bed and put on our clothes and went into the kitchen. Russell and Charlie were sharing the newspaper. Buck had a road map spread in front of him. Charlie looked up and smiled brightly.
“Well now,” Russell said, “here the slugabeds are—and walking a little bowlegged it appears to me.” He smiled lewdly and tapped his open palm several times with the top of his fist. I gave him the finger.
Belle was blushing. “Morning, you all,” she said and got a pair of mugs from the cabinet and filled them from the coffeepot on the stove. She added cream and sugar to one and handed it to me. Charlie got up and gave her a brief hug around the shoulders and told us to sit down, she’d fix us some bacon and eggs.
Buck’s expression was of put-upon patience. He lit a cigarette and sighed a long stream of smoke. “Like I already told these two,” he said to me, “it’s enough of fun and games. We’re set up now and it’s time to get to work.”
We spent the next two days getting ready, checking maps, tending to the car. We changed the oil, lubricated the joints, replaced the radiator rather than taking a chance on the soldered spot coming open again. On the day we were leaving, Buck said to come in his room for a minute, he had something for me. He dug in his travel bag and took out a Smith & Wesson .38 with a six-inch barrel.
“I got another of these plus the .45,” he said, releasing the cylinder to check the loads, then snapping it back in place. “You can have this one. Bulldog’s okay for indoors, but if we get into an outside scrap you’ll need something more accurate.”
He said it as casually as a fisherman might explain the advantage of one type of reel over another, but the remark reminded me of the mean possibilities in this business and I felt my skin tighten. He handed me the piece and smiled. “Still feel like last summer?”
“Better,” I said. “Probably because I spent nine months thinking I might not ever get to feel it again.”
“Sure you wouldn’t rather get your ass in college and learn how to steal all nice and legal? Lot more profitable.”
“Could be it is,” I said, “but I’ll bet anything it ain’t near as much fun.”
“That’s my guess too,” he said, grinning back at me.
We packed a change of clothes and put our small bags in the car, then sat down with the girls to a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Charlie and Belle put on a show of good spirits, joking about what a relief it would be to have the house to themselves for a while, to be free of our rude male smells and loudness. We didn’t know how long we’d be gone, a few days, maybe longer, depending on what Bubber Vicente might have for us. Now and then—for an instant before she’d snatch up the smile again—I’d catch Belle looking at me the way my mother used to look at my father on the nights before he’d ship out. Like she was trying to memorize his face.
Out at the car the girls gave us each a hug and kiss and we smacked them on the bottom for luck and told them to hold the fort.
The road to Odessa cut through the heart of West Texas oil country—the landscape mostly flat and wholly bleak, the sky hazy with dust and oil fumes, the air acrid with the smells of gas. We drove through more and more oil fields, great black forests of derricks and bobbing pumpjacks. Sometimes we had to shout to hear each other above the pounding drills. The road thickened with the traffic in and out of the fields and from neighboring towns, most of it moving in a big dusty hurry. And then we’d be out in the open country again and the traffic would thin out once more and the main sounds were of the motor’s puttering and the wind flapping through the windows.
We passed through Grandfalls, loud and overcrowded and the dirtiest town any of us had ever seen—until we got to Crane, about thirty miles from Odessa. The streets of Crane were so clogged with cars and transport trucks and mule-drawn wagons we could have crossed the town faster on foot. The clamor made you wince—klaxons blatting, motors racing, transport trucks unloading pipe and heavy equipment with great iron crashings, men communicating in shouts and hollers, music blaring from radios at full volume. Swarms of dreamers chasing after their share of oil money in another town too small to shelter them all. We’d seen a few tent camps on the outskirts of Grandfalls—ragtowns, the boomers called them—but Crane looked like a vast republic of ragtowns and shantyvilles raised from every kind of scrap. Men with pockets crammed with money were living in their trucks, their cars, whole families were residing in packing crates, men bedding in sections of pipe. Privies everywhere, their effluvia thickening the general stench.