“I got this from a lady friend of mine. Take a peek.”
The pup could have walked right off a Buster Brown promotion in a shoe-store window — chunky as a fireplug, his brown eyes as round and big as quarters, his stub of a tail swishing against the box.
I picked him up and breathed his clean puppy smell and felt his tongue on my face. “He looks just like Tige.”
“I declare, you and him make quite a pair.”
Two weeks went by, then Wake Island fell and supposedly a Japanese submarine fired artillery shells into a California oil field. Some of the Mexicans went away on their own, single men who hopped a freight or women without children looking for work as cooks and cleaning maids. A half dozen stayed with us, including the woman with the infant. Her name was Maria; her child’s was Jesus. Her husband had died of a snake bite in Coahuila, just before they crossed the river into Texas.
As we entered the new year, Grandfather incrementally gave jobs to the remaining Mexicans so their visibility would grow a little each day, until a passerby might think they had always been with us, patching the barn roof, washing clothes on the porch, burning tumbleweeds in the ditches, harrowing a field for the spring. I don’t know what he paid them. I’m sure it wasn’t much, if anything, for he had very little money. But the Mexicans didn’t seem to mind. My mother bought baby clothes for Jesus and started teaching Maria English. Toward the end of January Mother received a postcard from my father. He said he was returning to Houston and hoped she and I would rejoin him in our little ivy-covered brick bungalow on Hawthorne Street.
“We’re going home, aren’t we, Mother?” I said.
“I suspect,” she said. “Directly, anyway.”
“What’s directly mean?”
“It means directly.”
She twisted her fingers idly in my hair, her gaze just this side of madness.
Two days later we drove to town with Grandfather. He had never learned to drive a car and always looked upon a ride in a car as a treat. We parked at the open market by the train depot and got out. I had forgotten my bad experience with Mr. Watts, as though it were a bad dream that fell apart in the daylight. A locomotive with a caboose and only two passenger cars on it had pulled into the station, the engine hissing steam. Mother was browsing through some open-air clothes racks and Grandfather was buying a piece of cactus candy from a booth when we saw Mr. Watts ten feet away, eating caramel corn from a paper sack while he watched us.
“Good morning,” he said. He was wearing a black suit with a silver shirt and a vest and a string tie. “A friend of yours on the train would like to say hello.”
“Tell him to get off the train and do it,” Grandfather replied.
“Maybe him and some others don’t want to draw attention.”
The shades were drawn on all the passenger windows in the train. “They’re celebrities?” Grandfather said.
“Maybe one of them was there when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow got it,” Mr. Watts said. “Know who that might be?”
“You’re talking about Frank Hamer?”
“He didn’t give his name. He just said he knowed you.”
“Which car is he in?”
“The second behind the engine.”
Grandfather took me by the hand and we walked past the caboose to the first passenger car. It was the dark green of an olive. “Let’s see what’s going on, Buster Brown.” He swung me up on the steel steps.
The passenger seats had been removed from the car and replaced with benches, a pickle barrel, and a table that had smoked fish and several half-empty bottles of Hires root beer on it. There was a potbelly stove in one corner. Five men in suits and slouch or cowboy hats were sitting on the benches. Two of them wore mustaches. All of them were unshaved and looked like they had slept in their clothes. All of them were armed.
“One of you wanted to see me?” Grandfather said.
A tall man stood up. His mustache was jet-black and drooped to his collar. “I always wanted to meet you. I heard you slept with the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid.” He grinned.
“You must have me mixed up with somebody else,” Grandfather said. “Number two, I got my grandson with me.”
“Excuse me,” the man said.
“Y’all Pinkertons?” Grandfather said.
“Friends of the railroad.”
“One of y’all saw Bonnie and Clyde get it?”
“I did,” said the same man.
Grandfather studied his face. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “I know every man who was there.”
“I got pictures. But I won’t argue.”
“What do you fellows want?”
“We think there’s some Chinamen coming through here with the wetbacks. Except they’re not Chinamen.”
“They’re Japs?” Grandfather said. My hand was still inside his. It felt hard and moist and callused and yet gentle.
“Would that surprise you?” the tall man said.
“Stay clear of me. That includes my family and workers.”
“We don’t call the shots. The railroad is going to be carrying a lot of soldiers through here.”
“I understand that and I don’t need to hear any more,” Grandfather said. “You got my message.”
“You really knew the Sundance Kid?”
“Yes, I did. He was a moron who breathed through his mouth a lot. Are y’all going to make trouble for me?”
“That’s up to you, Mr. Holland.”
“Son, you don’t know what trouble is,” Grandfather said.
One of the other men set his Hires root beer on the table. In the silence the sound made my face jerk.
I was too little to understand adult cruelty. Like most children, I thought adults possessed all the power they needed and hence had no reason to be cruel. So I was not equipped to comprehend the events that happened three days later when Mr. Watts’s Model T drove up the dry streambed, followed by a big khaki-colored truck with a canvas top on the back.
Mr. Watts and the man with the mustache got out by the barn. The truck made a circle into the field behind the windmill and herded three Mexican men toward the house. No, I didn’t say that right. The men hung their heads and walked with the docility of animals going up a slaughter chute. Maria was squeezing out the wash with a hand-crank roller on the back porch, her baby in a bassinet made from an orange crate. Three of the men from the train car jumped off the back of the truck, rifles in their hands. Mother came out the screen door wearing a man’s suit coat, her face disjointed, the way it did before one of her spells came on.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
“The Mexican woman and the child are illegals,” a man with a chin beard said.
“You have no proof of that.”
“We don’t need it, lady.”
“Don’t you dare put your hand on her,” Mother said. “Did you hear me?”
“Ma’am, don’t mix in it or we’ll have to take you too.”
“That’s what you think,” she said.
“Step back, please,” the man said.
“Hold on there, Ed,” Mr. Watts called, walking toward us. “I’ll handle this.”
“You will handle nothing,” Mother said.
“Get your father out here,” Mr. Watts said.
“He’s in town,” she said. “If he was here, you’d be dead.”
“Well, we’ll have to do our job without him, won’t we, Wynona?”
“You will not address me by my first name.”
Mr. Watts turned to the other men. “Load them up, the female and the baby first. Search the barn and the loft. Look in the outhouse as well, and then in the main house.”