“It’s more than that,” I said. “There’s nothing like it.”
“Nothing?” She rubbed her blonde sex against my belly and made a low growl.
“Almost nothing,” I said, and laughed with her.
On the following evening we were in Blackpatch. The place was as isolated as Bubber had said—and smelled even worse, like an open grave soaked in oil and giving off gas. The nearest town was Rankin, thirteen miles away as the crow flies, but the country directly between them was too rugged and too cut up with gullies and draws to lay any kind of road, and so to get to Rankin from Blackpatch you had to drive eighteen winding miles west on a dusty junction road to the Iraan highway and then go north another eleven miles.
Bubber had said there was one other route into and out of Blackpatch, if you didn’t mind taking a chance on busting a wheel or snapping an axle. An old mule trace the copper mine had used for packing ore out to the railroad. It twisted and turned for almost twenty miles from Blackpatch out to the rail tracks flanking the Big Lake highway, emerging at a spot about thirteen miles east of Rankin with a rusted water tower and a dilapidated loading platform. Hardly anybody ever used that trail anymore, Bubber said. He’d taken it once and it was the roughest drive he’d ever made. He’d braved it in broad daylight and it took him two hours to cover the twenty miles—not counting the time it took to fix the two flats he had on the way. “I’d have to be more damn desperate than I can imagine to drive on that sonofabitch again,” Bubber said.
We’d arrived at sundown. Derricks everywhere. Pumpjacks steadily dipping like monstrous primeval birds at their feed. The old copper-mine hill stood a hundred yards or so to the east of town and the holding tank on top of it was cast in the dying red light of day. It really did look like an enormous soup can. Jagged gullies ran like black scars down the hill and right to the edge of town. The town itself was composed of four short blocks to north and south, three longer ones to east and west, and included a sizable shantyville of tents on its west side. Every building was either a store, a place of entertainment, an eatery, a hotel or a boardinghouse. Most men lived in the ragtown or in their vehicles. There wasn’t a private house in Blackpatch. Mona’s girls lived in the rooms where they worked, and Mona herself kept a room at the Wellhead Hotel.
The junction road passed through the tent colony and ran directly onto the main street. We crawled along in the heavy traffic, the cafés and juke joints and pool halls all roaring with music. According to Bubber, about six hundred people lived here now—all of them men except for a couple of dozen wives, even fewer daughters, and Mona’s girls—and it sounded like they were all yelling at once to make themselves heard above the music and the incessant pounding of the drills. Drunks staggered in the streets and sidewalks, doing the hurricane walk, as we called it in New Orleans. Bubber said the local police force was paid for by the oil company. It consisted of a sheriff and two deputies and they pretty much let the workers take their fun as they pleased—mostly drinking and gambling and fighting each other, and sporting at Mona’s place. The cops intervened only in matters of flagrant robbery, deadly violence, or undue property damage.
We saw a pair of men grappling in an alley, each with a headlock on the other and stumbling around like jakeleg dancers, a small crowd looking on and laughing, most pedestrians simply passing by without paying the combatants much notice. We drove around and around until we finally found an alleyway niche to park the car in.
Buck kept the briefcase with the Wink money on his lap while we ate a supper of fried chicken in still one more clamorous café, and then we went over to the Wildcat Dance Club and introduced ourselves to Mona Holiday. She wasn’t exactly as Bubber had painted her. For one thing, she looked older than I’d expected—a few years older than Bubber, I would’ve guessed. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was, in a rough-edged, bottle-blonde sort of way. But she had some hard wear on her and it showed around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth, in the slack skin of her neck. But a man in love is blind to such minor flaws, of course, so none of us was all that surprised to find she was a shade less breathtaking in the actual flesh than Bubber’s description.
But she was every bit as pleasant and gracious as he’d said. She’d heard about Buck and Russell from Bubber, and she seemed truly pleased to make our acquaintance. She ushered us into her nicely appointed downstairs office and poured us all a drink—Jamaican rum, the real stuff, smuggled in by way of Mexico. We all touched glasses and she said, “Here’s yours.”
When Buck told her about the jakeleg race we’d seen in Wink, she made a disapproving face and said, “Isn’t it terrible, the spectacles some people find amusing?” She said we didn’t have to worry about being poisoned by the hooch in Blackpatch, it was some of the best moonshine to be had in West Texas. She was personal friends with Gus Scroggins—the bootlegger who brought Blackpatch its hooch from a sizable distillery in El Paso—and she would vouch for the excellence of the stuff, though she generally stayed with the factory-bottled product herself.
Bubber had told us she wouldn’t ask us our business and she didn’t. It was one more reason she fared so well—men knew she kept to her business and wouldn’t pry into theirs. She had a reputation for asking no questions and telling no tales. But neither did she ever grant a man a hump on the house or even on the cuff. It was strictly pay before play in her place. Special friends of Bubber, however, she would give a cut rate—two dollars, rather than the standard four. Were any of us, she asked with a smile, inclined to go upstairs and take advantage of this bargain?
Buck checked his watch, arched his brow, looked at Russell and me in turn, and we grinned back at him.
An hour later we were in her backroom speakeasy, ensconced at a nice corner table with a good view of the rest of the room, sipping at our labeled rum and telling each other of the girls we’d had.
Buck said the redhead he’d chosen had looked a little shocked when he dropped his pants and she got her first look at Mr. Stub.
“I say, ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ and look down at myself like I got no idea. ‘Oh that,’ I say. ‘Well, see, I borrowed some money from the bank the other day and they insisted on the most valuable thing I owned for collateral.’ That’s all it took to set her at ease. Had us so much fun it ought to be illegal.”
He wanted to hear about the pretty girl I’d picked out—brown hair and green eyes, tits shaped like pears. He’d almost selected her for himself before deciding on the redhead. When I said she’d been a lot of fun—which was true—he said he wished we had more time, he’d go back in there and have a go with her himself.
Russell said he’d enjoyed the little half-Mexican girl he’d picked. “A man’s got to have himself some variety, it’s only natural. But I’ll tell you what—truth be told, I ain’t found another woman yet as much fun as Charlie when she drops her underpants.”
I kept it to myself but I was glad to hear him say that, because in the middle of sporting with the pear-tits girl, I’d had the fleeting thought I’d rather be doing it with Belle. I’d enjoyed myself with the girl, but thinking of Belle while I was at it had left me feeling a little edgy for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Russell’s remark clarified things and set me at ease. He preferred putting it to Charlie but that didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of others—and why should it? Damn right.
“Of course Charlie’s more fun,” Buck said. “She don’t charge you two dollars a throw.”
Russell laughed. “By Jesus, that must be it.” He looked at me and winked. “Man’s got a point, huh, kid?”