“This ain’t Tyler,” the man said.
“No,” Jane said. “I was just explaining to my cousin Jack here, that he had us jump off the train too soon. Right, Jack?”
“Sure,” I said.
“If this is your cousin,” the man said, “who’s the little one?”
“I ain’t that little,” Tony said. “I’m young.”
“That’s my brother, Tony,” Jane said.
“Uh-huh,” said the man. “Well now, I got an idea for you. You can take it or leave it, but I figure on your way to your rich inheritance, you might be in need of money, ’cause Tyler, that’s still a good twelve, fifteen miles away as the crow flies. And since you ain’t no crows, maybe for you three it’s twenty-five walking by the highway, if you don’t get a ride. You might want to take yourself a break for a while if you need some pocket money, and a job might be something you’d consider.”
“We don’t need a job,” Jane said.
As much as I didn’t like eating beans, I had noted that when we opened our bags, we were down to one can of beans per bag. There were two bags and three of us. We did have some cooking gear, flashlights, and the like, but you couldn’t eat that.
I said, “What kind of job?”
“Fieldwork,” he said.
I had done plenty of that, and so had Jane and Tony. It was our background.
“I don’t want any fieldwork,” Jane said.
“You’ve done it before,” I said.
“Which is why I don’t want any more of it.”
“There’s better things than picking peas,” said the man, “but that’s what I got, and I’m offering a dollar a day for each of you for an honest day’s work.”
“Tony ain’t nothing but a kid,” I said.
“Kids working all over this country,” he said. “What makes him any different?”
“That’s hard work for a kid for a dollar a day,” I said.
“That’s hard work for anyone for a dollar a day,” Jane said.
The man took his boot off the bench and straightened his hat like he needed to adjust it for the wind, but there wasn’t any.
“Considering you’ve done this kind of work before,” the man said, “if I can take your word for it—”
“You can,” I said.
“Then I’ll give you each a dollar fifty a day.”
“That’s not any better,” Jane said.
“There’s plenty that would take the dollar,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jane said. “Where are they?”
“They’ll show up.”
“Then let them,” Jane said.
The man pursed his lips, took off his hat, ran his fingers along the sweatband inside it, wiped his fingers on his pants, and put his hat back on.
“Here’s the deal,” he said, “and this is the last of it. I’ll give you two dollars a day for a day’s work. I don’t pay the colored but seventy-five cents, and some of the whites a dollar. But you three look healthy enough, and I need someone that can work a full day. Maybe the boy here I’ll have to give less. But you two can put a full day in, I can tell by looking at you.”
“Two dollars, huh?” Jane said.
“What I said. Again, colored don’t get but seventy-five cents and most whites only a dollar, so that’s good money.”
“That’s not fair,” Jane said.
“Ain’t nobody said a darn thing about it being fair. Take it or leave it.”
I looked at Jane. I knew she had about three or four dollars left in her pocket. It was okay money for twenty-five miles, but not okay money for once we got there. Who knew how long we’d have to look for Strangler, or if we’d ever find him? She studied my face for a moment, sighed, turned, and looked at Tony. He nodded.
She turned back to the man, said, “All right. We’ll do it. But I want you to know, the way you’re treating those colored people is not fair, and I don’t like it.”
“Say you don’t?”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” he said. “It’s good to know where the hired help stands.”
34
“I’m Big Bill Brady,” he said. “And now you work for me. I can give you a ride to the fields in my car, unless your limousine is about to show.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Jane said. “You’ll often be wrong. And as for a ride, why would we need a ride to the fields and it about to be dark? There’s no pea picking can be done when it gets dark.”
“ ’Cause I got barracks for my workers,” he said. “This is a big first-class operation. I sell peas to the canning factory over in Lindale.”
“Barracks?” I said. “You mean a place to sleep?”
“Yep. It’s tidy and it’s got a roof on it, and I serve three meals a day. I got sixteen workers, not counting you three.”
A man came walking along the street then, a tall skinny fellow. He tipped his hat at us, said, “Hello, Bill,” and kept walking.
“How far is this place from here?” Jane said.
“It’s a ways,” he said. “You couldn’t walk it. It’s down in the bottoms. Rich land. It’ll grow any seed dropped in it, and grow it big. Thing is, I want at least five days work if you come on. Five days, you’ll have ten dollars a piece, and you won’t be out for a place to stay, or have to sleep under a tree, and you’ll have meals you won’t have to pay for”—he nodded at our cans on the bench—“and it won’t be beans out of a can. My wife cooks pretty good meals. You’ll eat and sleep in the barracks, but you’ll work a good, long full day for your money and your upkeep.”
“End of those five days,” Jane said, “you’ll bring us back?”
“I will. End of that day, after you’ve had a nice supper, I’ll drive you back into town and let you out right here at this bench. Then you can go your own way. But I need the workers, and my guess is even if you do have a fortune waiting for you on the other end, it’s still a good many miles, and you got to depend on a ride to catch, and you’ll still need some money till you get there. Who knows, the inheritance might fall through. Another relative with better connections might come out of the woodwork. A tricky lawyer, a crooked judge or law official. I’ve seen it happen.”
I knew he knew we didn’t have any inheritance coming, and that he was just buttering us up a little, but he was darn good at it, and I began to think I ought to have some concerns for the inheritance we didn’t have coming.
“It’s a deal, then,” Jane said, “providing Jack and Tony agree.”
We agreed.
“All right, then,” Big Bill Brady said. “Get in the car.”
It probably wasn’t smart for us to get in a car with someone we didn’t know, and I’d be the first to admit that that is a true consideration. But there was things he had on his side. An offer of money for work. A fellow passed him on the street and knowed him enough to say hello, and would recognize us if our bodies turned up in the pea patch. And there was another thing: what he said about those barracks and square meals was right appealing. I was hungry and tuckered out.
Still, I put my hand in my pocket and got hold of my pocketknife so I could pull it out and pop it open. I kept it there while I sat in the front seat of the car and Jane and Tony sat in the back. I glanced back at Jane, saw she’d pulled one of those cans of beans out of one of our bags, and she had it held in her hand in such a way that I knew if the man up front got to acting funny, she’d bring it down on his head like a ton of bricks.
She grinned at me.
Turning back in the seat, I started watching where we were going. I wanted to have my bearings, have some idea of where we were going to end up, and some idea of how to come back the way we had gone.