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hundred irrigated acres set aside for vegetables and melons and cantaloupes, and through a long, sloping valley that fanned into a bluff above the river, deer and Spanish bulls mixed in together, belly-deep in grass.
Every fence had a posted sign on it, and for those who couldn't read, animals and stray wetbacks, Jude's foreman had nailed dead crows or gutted and salted coyotes to the cedar posts.
The lights in the main house went on at 4 a.m., when Mrs. LaRose, a black-haired German lady with red cheeks and big arms Jude had brought back from the war, read her Book of Mormon at the kitchen table, then walked down to the open-air shed by the bunkhouse and fired the wood cook stove.
By 7 a.m. my first day I was wearing bradded work gloves and a hard hat and steel-toe boots and wrestling the drill bit on the floor of an oil rig right above the Rio Grande, the drill motor roaring, tongs clanging, the chain whipping on the pipe, and drilling mud and salt water flooding out of the hole like we'd punched into an underground lake.
After a week Jude walked down to my cottage and stood in the doorway with Buford, who was just seven years old then and the miniature of his daddy in short pants.
"You got any questions about how things run?" he said.
"No, sir."
He nodded. "You sure about that?"
"I'm getting along real fine. I like it here."
"That's good." He turned and looked off at the sun on the hills. His eyes were close-set, almost violet, like they were painted with eye shadow. "Sometimes the Mexican boys talk. They forget what it was like down in the bean field in Chihuahua."
"I don't pay it no mind."
"Pay what no mind?"
"They talk in Spanish. So I don't waste my time listening."
"I see." He cupped his hand on Buford's head. "I want you to take him to work in the tomato field tomorrow."
"I'm supposed to be on the rig."
"I want Buford to start learning work habits. Come up to the house and get him at six."
"Yes, sir, if that's what you want."
"My foreman said you asked about the wages the Mexican boys were making."
"I guess I don't recall it," I said.
He studied the side of my face, all the time his fingers rubbing a little circle in Buford's hair.
"Next time you bring your questions to me," he said.
I looked at the floor and tried not to let him see the swallow in my throat.
You didn't have to roughneck long in Jude's oil patch to find out what was going on. You could hear the trucks at night, grinding across the riverbed. Jude's foreman had moved all the cattle to the upper pasture and dropped the fences along the riverbank so the trucks could cross when the moon was down and catch the dirt road that wound into the ranch next door, where another oil man, a bigger one than Jude, was running the same kind of economics.
A white man got two dollars an hour on the floor of a rig and two twenty-seven up on the monkey board. Wetbacks would do it for four bits and their beans. They'd drill into pay sands with no blowout preventers on the wellhead; work on doodlebug crews in an electric storm, out on a bald prairie, with dynamite and primers and nitro caps in the truck, all those boys strung out along a three-hundred-foot steel tape, handling steel chaining pins and a range pole that might as well have been a lightning rod. I had a suspicion it made for a religious moment.
I saw boys on the rig pinch their fingers off with pipe chains, get their forearms snapped like sticks by the tongs, and find out they weren't taking anything back to Mexico for it but a handshake.
The ranch next door was even worse. I heard a perforating gun blew up and killed a wet on the rig floor. A deputy sheriff helped bury him in a mesquite grove, and an hour later the floor was hosed down and pipe was singing down the hole.
That's not all of it, either. Jude and some of his friends had a special crew of higher-paid wets and white boys who'd been in Huntsville and on the pea farm at Sugarland that were slant drilling, which is when you drill at an angle into somebody else's pool or maybe a company storage sand and you pay off whoever is supposed to be watching the pressure gauges. They'd siphon it out like soda through a straw, cap the well, call it a duster, and be down in Saucillo, drinking Dos X's and mescal before the Texaco Company knew they'd been robbed blind.
I had no complaint, though. Jude paid me a white person's wage, whether I was clanging pipe or watching over Buford in the field. He was a cute little guy in his short pants and cowboy hat. We'd hitch a mule to the tomato sled, set four baskets on it, and pick down one row and up the other, and I'd always let him drive the mule and see how far he could fling the tomatoes that had gotten soft.
The second month I was there, Buford and me started pulling melons at the back end of the field, where a black family lived in a shack by a grove of dried-up mesquite trees. Jude rode his horse out in the field and stretched in the saddle and leaned his arms on the pommel and pushed his hat up on his brow with his thumb. Buford was slapping the reins on the mule's butt and gee-hawing him in a circle at the end of the row.
"How's he doing?" Jude said.
