He returned to his seat heavy with too much food, and as they made their way down the coast he tried not to sleep, he sat enjoying the bright green of the hilly pastures and the fat livestock. There were new calves everywhere, and a bull mounting a cow not a hundred feet from the train brought embarrassed giggles down the length of the car.
It was dusk as they approached the outskirts of L.A., too overcast to see the great letters marking the Hollywood Hills, but the nearer lights of the small towns swept by clear enough, picking out homelier neighborhoods, small businesses, and little wooden cottages tucked among tall Victorian homes. He tried to read the cheap dime novel he’d brought, but now he kept envisioning, at every scene he read, a crueler way to handle the action, a colder and more sadistic turn that the writer should have thought of himself.
Approaching the L.A. station, the train edged slowly through what seemed miles of lighted freight yard. As soon as they came to a halt and the conductor stepped aside, Lee swung out of his seat and down the steps, carrying his few belongings. Inside the station he ignored the crowds that pushed around him as he walked the length of the big building trying to ease his aching legs, trying to come fully awake, after sitting too long on the train.
He had a long layover here. He asked questions, found the gate where he’d board, found a wooden bench to himself, and at last he spread out his papers, and settled in. He’d be glad when he hit Blythe. Right now, he never wanted to see another train. Not as a passenger, shut in with a bunch of strangers, and not with evenone whining kid. He lay down on the bench trying to sleep, trying to ignore the noise of people hurrying around him, but he had slept too much on the train. Restless, he read for a while, in the poor light, and then rose and paced the station again, trying to make the hours go faster. And then at last, tired out, he found another bench, lay down again covered with his papers and coat, lay waiting for morning, waiting for his train to Blythe.
9
Lee jerked awake as the train’s couplings shifted, he could feel the engine straining as it began the heavy pull up Banning Pass, the passenger car rocking in the sharp wind that swept down between the mountains. He was glad to have left L.A. behind him and San Bernardino, too—he had stayed on the train during that two-hour layover there, hadn’t swung off to report to his parole officer as his printed instructions told him to do, he hadn’t felt like it. If the PO wanted to see him he could find him in Blythe, at work as his release plan told him to do. He had boarded the train to Blythe bleary-eyed and stiff after sleeping on that hard wooden bench most of the night; even a sprung prison cot would have been luxury. Breakfast had been a dry sandwich in the train station, at a little booth where the giggling shopkeeper must have had those dried-up ham-and-cheese treats stashed for a week or more.
As the train strained rising up the pass he looked out below him, down at the vast apple orchards, miles of green trees marching in straight formation across the high desert. Rising from his seat, he moved stiffly out to the vestibule, stood in the fresh wind smelling the heady scent of apple blossoms, the sweetness making him think again of Lucita, of old passions never fulfilled. One time, they’d been rodeoing, he and Jake and Lucita, not riding but just as spectators, just for the hell of it, sitting on a fenceat Salinas watching the bull riding, but ready to swing off the rail fast if the Brahma turned in their direction. When the bull did head for them Lucita swung off but she caught her heel and nearly fell. They both grabbed her, pulled her up, but it was Lee she clung to. He’d felt her excitement, clinging close, both of them rising to the same urge—until she looked up, saw Jake’s expression, and she pulled away from Lee straightening her vest and hat. She was so beautiful. Long, dark hair down over her shoulders, so slim in her leather vest, her pale silk shirtand well-fitting jeans, the silver jewelry at her throat and wrists exotic and cool against her deep tan. When Jake turned away, her dark Latin eyes were hot on Lee once more.
That look still made him wonder, sometimes. What if they had pursued what they felt, what if she had married him instead of Jake? What would life have been like? He thought for a while about that, Lucita in bed with him, his hands on her, the two of them in a little cabin just big enough to turn around in, cozy and isolated.
But how would he have made a living for her? Not farming, like Jake. Maybe breaking colts, or general ranch work—but that would have gotten them nowhere. Lucita slaving away in a primitive ranch kitchen, her long beautiful hands roughened, her dark eyes filling with disappointment when he didn’t ever make more than the meager subsistence of a ranch hand. Her disappointment and anger when he began to yearn for the open road again, when he began to hanker for real money, when his thieving ways took hold again: the discouragement in her eyes, her bitter disappointment as she saw her own dreams wither.
But was her life any better with Jake? What had Jake given her, that Lee couldn’t have if he’d settled down, if he’d abandoned his footloose drifting, as Jake had? Jake was ranch foreman, he made a good living, they had a nice house, saddle horses, he drove a new truck, and he’d written to Lee that Lucita had help in the kitchen, help with the housework when she wanted it.
Lee could have given her that, if he’d settled down and changed his ways. If he hadn’t been so hotheaded, sohardheaded in what he thought he wanted. The train strained harder hauling up toward the summit, the apple orchards behind and below him now, down on the flats, but he could still smell their sweet scent on the fitful breeze that twisted up the mountain. Just at the top, the engine paused, the train hung there a moment and then heaved itself over, gathering speed until its tail of cars thundered down again, fast. All the green was left behind now. Ahead, down the mountain, the vast desert stretched away, a flat table of pale dry sand and raw rock, parched and faded where no water could reach it.
But then far ahead a line appeared sharply dividing the land: on the near side, the flat pale desert. Far beyond, a vast green garden of lush farm crops, brilliant green, melons, vegetables, the feathery green of date groves, hundreds of acres divided by the concrete aqueducts that carried water from the Colorado, water as precious as gold to bring alive the fields that fed half the state and more, some folks said—water the farmers fought over, their battles growing ever more violent. Water rights meant money, big money, inviting every legal and political grab, every scam a man could imagine.
When gusts of hot wind began to swirl up from the desert, spewing sand in Lee’s face, he returned to his seat. Already the car was growing hot; it grew hotter still as they approached Indio. Off against the mountains he could see what must be Palm Springs, a little resort town patched onto the desert, its tall hedges and high rock walls hiding large vacation homes, he could see just their sprawling rooftops, and flashes of blue that would be swimming pools, oases for the rich. Beyond Palm Springs rose the dry mountains, their peaks incongruously capped with white, with snow that would remain all year, aloof and cold, high above the burning desert.
It was well past noon when the train pounded into Indio, the altered rhythm woke him, the train’s slowing pace, the clang of metal on metal as they bucked over the crisscross tracks, then row after row of dusty freight cars. The temperature, by the big thermometer above the station platform, was a hundred and ten. Facing an hour layover, tired of stale sandwiches and of the stale smell of old food and sweaty passengers, Lee rose. Hanging on to the overhead rail, he followed the conductor, heading for the door. When they pulled up in the center of town he swung off the train, stood waiting to cross the fast highway that served as Indio’s main street. Farm trucks loaded with baled hay and crated produce roared past him farting the smell of diesel. Across the highway an irrigation ditch seethed with fast-running water from the Colorado. Beyond this was a line of shops, a few restaurants, a couple of pawnshops. A reefer truck was pulled over to the side idling, the driver hammer-thumping its tires checking the air pressure that built up in the hot desert. In the bed of a rusted pickup, four migrant workers sat eating bread from torn wrappers. A stalled station wagon sat blowing steam from its radiator, two mattresses tied to its roof, its interior crowded with smear-faced little kids. Diesel fumes from the trucks started him coughing, and when he tried to cross the highway between them he misjudged his distance and had to leap back.