“Every oil town stinks,” Bubber said, “but Blackpatch stinks the worst of them. They say it’s because it’s not only got all the usual stinks of an oil patch, it’s got the stink of all them people who got burnt into the ground. Now they got even more wells on the hill and a fifty-thousand-barrel holding tank up there. Looks like a giant soup can. I sure’s hell wouldn’t want to live down there under it. Mona says the only reason I’m worried is because I’m from Loosiana and naturally scared of hills. Now I ask you boys, how do you argue with a remark like that? I offered to pay whatever it’d cost her to set up in Odessa and she finally said maybe, she’d have to think it over. She likes her independence, she says. Doesn’t want to be beholden, she says. Christ. I love the woman, boys, no lie, but damn if she don’t about make me insane sometimes.”
“Sounds like love, all right,” Buck said, and Russell said he’d drink to that, and everybody laughed.
Then we got down to business.
The first job Bubber had for us was in Wink, some sixty miles away in the neighboring county. We checked out of the Bigsby early the next morning and had breakfast at the Rancho Restaurant across the street. The orange sun was clearing the rooftops behind us as we drove past the city limit sign and onto the Pecos highway. The setting moon looked like a bruised pearl.
We hadn’t been on the road an hour, rolling through the flat and barren scrubland, when a low cloud of strange brown haze began rising directly ahead of us.
“What in the hell’s that?” Russell said.
“Beats me,” Buck said. “Smoke?”
“Maybe,” Russell said.
I said I didn’t think so. I’d never seen smoke that color or in a cloud that shape.
“Well, whatever it is,” Russell said, “it’s coming this way.”
We watched it swelling as we bore toward it. Then Buck said, “Oh, shit.”
Russell said “Sand” at the same time I said “Dust” and we were both right.
We’d been told about such storms and what to do if we got caught in one out on the open road. There was no traffic ahead of us, only a solitary truck far behind. I slowed the car and pulled off the highway, then wheeled into a U-turn across the road and onto the opposite shoulder. I switched off the engine and set the brake and we rolled the windows up tight.
The idea was to have the rear of the car turned toward the wind to protect the radiator and engine from the driving sand, the windshield from flying debris. We looked through the back window at the growing dust cloud, the road disappearing under its advance.
The car lurched with the thump of the wind’s impact and the world around us abruptly dimmed and went obscure. Each gust rocked the Ford on its creaking springs like a railcar riding uneven tracks. The doorjambs whistled. Tumbleweeds caromed off the rear window like headlong drunks. Sand and grit drilled into the glass, hissed against the back of the car, rasped over the roof and fenders. The floorboards quivered under our feet and a fine dust came up through the pedal openings. We couldn’t see at all behind us or even to the other side of the road, could see only a few yards ahead of the car.
“Bubber told me some men who been caught out in a storm like this ended up blind in one or both eyes,” Buck said. “Said he’s heard of some fellas with the bad luck to be passed out drunk on the ground when a sandstorm hit and covered them up and smothered them—buried them alive. Some weren’t found till days or weeks afterward and some were never found at all. He said one guy got caught in one and couldn’t think of what to do except sit down with his back to the wind and hug tight to his knees. By the time it was all over, the only parts of him still showing was the tops of his knees and his head and shoulders. Lost some of the hair off the back of his head, and his ears and the back of his neck were bloody raw. Guy’s still got the scars of it, Bubber says.”
Russell coughed against the rising dust in the car. “Damn me for a liar if I wouldn’t rather go through a hurricane than this,” he said. “Any day.”
A half hour later the worst was over. A dusty wind still held and the sky was still hazed, but the strongest gusts were done with and you could see for a distance down the road. The rear window had been scoured to a pale translucence. We got out and saw that the back end of the car was now of fainter green and rougher finish than before. This region was full of motor vehicles patchworked with portions of bare metal—a phenomenon locally referred to as a West Texas paint job.
We got back in the Ford and I turned it around again and we pressed on.
“All that dust,” Buck said, “reminds me of the fella who goes to the doctor and the doc tells him he ain’t got but a few weeks to live. Fella says, ‘Goddamn, ain’t there nothing you can suggest?’ Doc says, ‘Well, you could go to one of them spas, take you a mud bath every day.’ Fella says, ‘Will that help my condition?’ Doc says, ‘No, but it’ll help you get used to the feel of dirt.’”
For the last two hours before getting into Wink we had to poke along behind a long muletrain of bunkhouses being hauled to an oil company camp at the edge of town. Overall, the town wasn’t much different from the other oil towns we’d seen—as loud and crowded and smelly and dusty, as overrun with ragtowns. Workers coming and going with every change in shift, the cafés and stores doing business round the clock. But Wink had the rare advantage of its own ice plant, and it had a scad of moviehouses. Russell counted six of them as we went down the central street.
We made our way over to E Street and found the house we were looking for and studied it as we drove by. A fading yellow bungalow on the corner of a neighborhood as crowded and noisy as every other. Most boomtown homeowners were raking in cash by renting rooms in their house—or in some cases simply the cots in a room, renting each cot to a different man on every shift. But this house showed none of the frenetic activity of so many of the others. “Looks just like the man told us,” Buck said.
Despite the delays of the sandstorm and the muletrain, we still had plenty of time to kill, so we went to a café and ordered hamburgers and coffee. The place was so jammed we couldn’t converse without shouting. Then we took a walk through the teeming streets.
At the corner of an intersection, we heard a surge of cheering and high laughter from a large crowd gathered in an open lot down the street, so we went to see what was going on. Spectators were bunched on two sides of the lot and hollering exhortations at a dozen men staggering like drunks. Then we drew closer and saw that the men weren’t only drunk but crippled. Every man’s feet twisted in some awkward attitude and his legs in twitching rebellion, some with a leg dragging like a dead weight, all of them trying to navigate toward a rope stretched across the far end of the lot. They listed and stumbled and fell, struggled to their feet and tried to bear toward the rope and went veering off at a tangent and fell again, the crowd roaring at their antics, shouting encouragements. Some careened into the spectators and were shoved back toward the center of the lot and urged to keep trying to reach the rope. There were steady outcries of betting.
“Jakeleg race,” Buck said.
Bubber had told us all about the jakeleg, a disorder of the nervous system brought on by drinking a bad batch of ginger jake—a fiery booze made with Jamaican ginger—and most batches of it were bad. He’d shown us a half-full bottle of the stuff, a meanlooking dark brown, and when he pulled the cork we caught a smell like rotten peppers.
“Christ!” Buck had said. “People drink that?”
“And some ask for more,” Bubber said. “There’s every manner of wicked hooch in the world, boys, and West Texas has a goodly portion of it. You all be careful of what you toast your health with or you might could ruin your health real quick.”