"A hundred and eighty-two-Why that particular figure, son?"
"I've been keeping a little black book since I was seven years old. There are one hundred and eighty-two names in it, one for every rotten bastard who's given me a hard time. I've shopped around, and I can get them bumped off for an average price of one thousand dollars."
"Son-" The father shook his head, aghast. "What happened to you? How can you even think of such things?"
"Thinking about it is all that's kept me alive," the kid said. "I can die happy knowing that I'm taking all those bastards to hell with me."
The father decided that it was a good time to give his son the word. The kid listened with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as one accustomed to seeing his dreams washed down the john.
"So we don't own anything, huh? You hocked it all to get the well drilled."
"I'm sorry, yes."
"What about the rig and the tools?"
"All gone. The trucks, our car, everything."
"Goddam," the kid said. "Those one hundred and eighty-two bastards could be dead right now for what this well cost!"
He had a right to be pretty damn sore about it, he felt, but somehow he couldn't be. Somehow, he wanted to howl with laughter, because when you thought about it, you know, it was really funny as hell.
He started to take a drink, and then decided that he didn't want any. He lighted a cigarette, noting wonderingly that he no longer had ulcer pains. He coughed and spat in his handkerchief, and there was no blood in the spit.
"My God," he told his father, and there was awe in his voice. "I'm afraid I'm going to live!"
He and the old man walked out of town together; they couldn't afford anything but the ankle express. With the discovery of oil, Big Spring was already burgeoning into a city. The old man turned and looked back at it from its outskirts, and there was pride in his defeated eyes.
"We did that, son," he said. "You and I. We caused a city to bloom in the wilderness. We've made history."
"We should have stood in bed," the kid said. But then he laughed and gave the old man an affectionate slap in the back. For his physical health was not all that had improved during the past two years.
Out there on the prairies where time had stood still for endless eons, out there where nature loomed large and man was small, he had gotten a new perspective on himself. And his once all-consuming problems had shrunk in size, and he had grown proportionately in the only way that growing matters. Out there he had discovered that a man could be much less and much more than the sum of his moments, and that what had been done could be undone by enduring.
Arm in arm, he and the old man went down the road together, not into the sunset, for that was behind them, but into the dawn or where the dawn would have been if it had been that time of day. They went down the road together, the old man and his kid, the kid became a man, and he got rid of the book with the one hundred and eighty-two names, getting rid of a lot else along with it. And it was the last book he ever compiled of that kind.
21
"That's quite a story, Art," Mitch laughed. "Is that really the way little Big Spring became big Big Spring?"
"You hintin' that I'm a liar?" his friend demanded crustily. And then he also laughed. "Well, that's pretty much the way it happened," he said. "It's a middlin' true story. No story can be gospel true unless you've got all the facts and the time to tell 'em, which is two gots I ain't got. You figure on savin' that bottle for yourself, or passing it like a gent?"
Mitch chuckled and passed the bottle of sour mash. His friend downed an enormous drink of it, without the slightest change of expression, and began rolling a brown-paper cigarette. He was eighty years old, Mitch knew, and he looked a healthy sixty. He was an ex- cowhand, ex-gambler, exrancher and ex-banker. He described his present vocation as gal-chasm' and booze-tastin'.
They were sitting in Mitch's room in the town's leading hotel. The old man could have written a check for the full value of the hotel, and the block it stood in. Yet he pinched out the coal of his cigarette, and put the butt into the pocket of his threadbare shirt.
Mitch had seen many old men do the same thing in these far-out western cities. Men with permanently bowed legs and faces as brown as saddle leather, and fortunes so large they could not even spend the interest on them. They sat around the hotel lobbies in Big Spring and Midland and San Angelo, reading newspapers that other people left behind, squeezing two or three smokes out of the same brown-paper cigarette. But it was not because they were stingy. They had simply grown up in an era and an area where there was little to buy and few opportunities for buying. The same newspaper might be passed around a bunkhouse for months, because a newspaper was a rare thing and something to be treasured. Similarly, a man was careful with his tobacco, for it might be a very long time before he could replenish his supply.
That was why the old men were as they were-because of the way they had lived as younger men. Because they had reversed the usual order of things, learning the value of everything with suitably little regard for its ephemeral, meaningless price.
"Let's see now," said Art Savage, Mitch's friend. "What was we talkin' about before you hid the whiskey and got me all confused?"
"Mrs. Lord," Mitch grinned. "And since when could anyone hide whiskey from you?"
"Don't get smart with me, bub. But about Gidge Lord- Gidge Parton, I always think of her. Used to tomcat around with her a lot before she married Win Lord. A leetle bit younger'n I was but that didn't seem to make her no never mind. Don't know just what might have come of it if Win hadn't edged in on me, because that Gidge was really a lot of gal…"
Savage paused, his faded blue eyes contemplating the past and its might-have-beens. Mitch brought him out of it by passing the whiskey bottle.
"So you haven't seen her in recent years?" he suggested.
"Who the hell says I ain't?" Savage demanded. "Sure, I seen her. Two-three months after she was married, we started gettin' together again. Didn't feel quite right about it in a way; it's always kind of consciencesome triflin' with another man's wife, y'know, and it ain't ever been healthy in Texas. But Gidge wanted to, and with Win boozin' and whoring all the time, I didn't feel too bad about it. We finally broke it up when she got pregnant. Reckon I'd've broke it up before then, if I'd had my ruthers, because a lot of Win's nastiness had rubbed off on her, and she could run him a close second for low-down. What the hell are you grinnin' about, anyways?"
"Me?" Mitch said innocently. "Well, nothing really. It just occurred to me that perhaps you were-"
"Don't you say it!" Savage said grimly. "Don't you dast say it! Anytime I see a thing like Winnie Lord, Jr., coming out of a place I been in, I'll pinch its head off. He's Win's begettin' and don't you ever think he ain't. The spittin' image of him. You ever seen the two of them together at the same age you couldn't have told 'em apart."
Mitch murmured reassuringly. He declared that he had never seriously thought that a fine man like Savage could father such a skunk.
"About these checks, Art. What do you think would be a good approach on them?"
"Sue. Have to pay off in the long run on good paper."