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I hadn't realized I'd climbed aboard a hotshot, a straight-through that doesn't stop till it reaches its destination. I dropped off on an upgrade, just before another trestle, hit running, and slid all the way down a hill into a wet sand flat flanged with willows that had once been a riverbed and was pocked with horses hooves and deer tracks that were full of rainwater. I walked all day in the rain, crossed fences with warning signs on them in Spanish and English, saw wild horses flowing like shadows down the face of a ridge, worked my way barefoot across a green river with a soap-rock bottom and came out on a dirt readjust as a flatbed truck boomed down with drill pipe and
loaded with Mexicans sleeping under a tarp ground through a flooded dip in the road and stopped so the man leaning against the top of the cab with an M-1 carbine could say, "Where you think you goin', man?"
I guess I looked like a drowned cat. I hadn't eaten in two days, and my boots were laced around my neck and the knees were tore out of my britches. He had on a blue raincoat and a straw hat, with water sluicing off the brim, and his beard was silky and black and pointed like a Chinaman's.
"Jude LaRose's place. It's somewhere around here, ain't it?" I said.
"You on it now, man."
"Where's he live at?"
"Why you want to know that?"
"I'm a friend of his. He told me to come out."
He leaned down to the window of the cab and said to the Mexicans inside, "Dice que es amigo del Señor LaRose." They laughed. The ones in back had the tarp pushed up over their heads so they could see me, and two of them were eating refried beans and tortillas they had folded into big squares between their fingers. But they were a different sort, not the kind to laugh at other people.
"You know where his house is at?" I said.
He'd already lost interest. He hit on the roof with his fist, and they drove off in the rain, with the drill pipe flopping off the back of the bed and the Mexicans in back looking out at me from under the tarp.
I found Jude LaRose's town that evening. It was nothing more than a dirt crossroads set in a cup of hills that had gone purple and red in the sunset. It had a shutdown auction barn and slaughterhouse, a dried-out hog feeder lot next to a railroad bed with no track and a wood water tank that had rotted down on itself, and a shingle-front two-story saloon and cafe, where a little black girl was laying out steaks on a mesquite fire in back. The sidewalk was almost higher than the pickups and horses in front of it, iron-stained with the rusted cusps of tethering rings and pooled with the blood of a cougar someone had shot that day and had hung with wire around the neck from the stanchion of an electric Carta Blanca sign that was the same blue as the glow above the hills.
The inside of the saloon had a stamped tin ceiling, card and domino tables in back, a long bar with old-time towel rings and a wall mirror and brass rail and spittoons, and antlers nailed all over the support posts. A dozen cowboys and oil field roughnecks were playing five-card stud and sipping shots with Pearl and Grand Prize on the side.
The menu was on a chalkboard over the bar. The bartender wore a red chin beard, and his eyes were hollowed deep in his face and his arms were as thick as hams. A fat black woman set a platter of barbecue sandwiches in the service window and rang a bell. The bread was gold and brown with butter and grill marks and soft in the center from the barbecue sauce that had soaked through. The bartender put four bottles of Pearl on the tray and carried it to the card table.
"How much is just the lima bean soup without the sandwich?" I asked. I had to keep my hands flat on the bar when I said it, too, because there was a wood bowl full of crackers and pickles right at the end of my fingers.
"Twenty cents," he said.
"How much for just a cup?"
"Where you from, boy?"
"Louisiana."
"Go around back and I'll tell the nigger to fix you something."
"I ain't ask for a handout."
He pulled up his apron, took a lighter out of his blue jeans, and lit a cigarette. He smoked it and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He picked up the bowl of crackers and pickles and set it on the counter behind him with the bottles of whiskey and rum and tequila.
"You cain't hang around here," he said.
It had started to rain again, and I could see the water dripping off the Carta Blanca sign on the face of the dead cougar. Its eyes were seamed shut, like it had gone to sleep. A man opened the front door and the rain blew across the floor.
"How far is it to the LaRose house?" I said.
"What you want out there?"
"Mr. LaRose told me to come out."
The cigarette smoke trailed out of the side of his mouth. A shadow had come into his face, like a man who's caught between fear and suspicion and anger at himself and an even greater fear you'll see all these things going on inside him.
He walked down the duckboards and used the phone on the counter. When he put the receiver back down his eyes wouldn't stay fixed on mine.
"Mr. LaRose says for you to order up. He'll be along when it quits raining," he said. He set the bowl of pickles and crackers back in front of me, then pried off the top of a Barge's root beer on a wall opener and set it next to the bowl.
