CHAPTER ONE
No one was sure where the movement to save the Hendershot Grocery Warehouse started. Everyone had heard the rumors that the old building was going to be razed, everyone was concerned. But it wasn’t until the bulldozers and wrecking balls showed up in the weedy field around the building that the citizens of Agatite took a serious interest in the project.
Hendershot’s Grocery Warehouse was the tallest building in over two hundred miles. It sat on a large, overgrown vacant lot a hundred yards north and slightly east of the parking lot where once had stood the Fort Worth and Denver depot. Built around turn of the century, it also had the distinction of being the only six-story structure of that vintage in the state, maybe the only one in the Southwest. Now just over eight decades old, Hendershot’s was a practical building that boasted no frills, no aesthetics, only grim utilitarian solidity. It was constructed of poured concrete, had yellow adobe brick and fieldstone facings, and was lined on three sides by a huge wooden loading dock that stood six feet off the ground. Some said the joists inside were petrified and that the structure would stand forever. But no authorized person had been inside the building in over twenty years, and even those who spoke the loudest in the attempt to save it had to admit that it had long been an eyesore the whole town would be better off without.
Hugh Rudd first heard about the planned demolition of the building while he was sipping a lime Coke in Central Drugs on a delicious June morning and trying to forget the afternoon before. Then, he had played in what was the final Civic League baseball game of the year. But for him, the season might have continued for a while, and that was not a pleasant thought. He came up to bat with the local championship game on the line, his team down by two runs, one out and the bases loaded. And he had let himself be fisted by an inside curve. The ball bounced once, right to the shortstop for a season-ending double play. He dragged himself home and went to bed early, burdened by the weight of disappointment. Even Coach Kruickshank hadn’t had much to say to him afterward. Nor had Hugh’s father. They had always assumed Hugh would make the high school team, would easily segue from the Civic League at least to the junior varsity even in his freshman year. Now, for the first time, he had his doubts.
The new day, though, turned his mind in new directions, toward new ambitions. Hugh had lined up twenty regular lawn mowing jobs, which should carry him through the remainder of the three months’ vacation and send him to school in the fall on a new Yosemite Mountain Bike. He had spotted it in a catalog and lusted for it since Christmas. He knew he could make more money working for Mr. Hadnought out near Blind Man’s Creek, plowing and mending fence, tending to the old rancher’s stock, but he also knew Mr. Hadnought had a reputation for working his boys from sunup to sundown every day it didn’t rain, even Sundays. At fourteen, Hugh wanted to enjoy his last summer before high school as much as he could, and he figured he could mow four or five lawns a day and make enough to buy the bike and still have some left over for an occasional movie and pocket change. A job in town would permit him to get out to the high school and take some batting practice several times a week, as well. If he was lucky, some of the older boys would be hitting fungo, and he could get in some work that way, also.
“Going to have to blow her up,” Hugh heard one man say from down the counter. “That sucker’s built solid as a brick shithouse, and there ain’t no way in hell they can take her down with a bunch of piddling little old bulldozers. I was in the Seabees, and when it comes to dozer work, I know what I’m talking about.”
Other men sipped their coffee and agreed with nods and murmurs. Hugh squirmed around on the counter stool and tried to hear better. He knew better than to ask a direct question of the men in the drugstore. In the fall, they gathered to discuss the football scores from the Friday night game, and in wintertime, the high school basketball team’s failure to get past district dominated their conversation totally. But in summer, when no one but distant pro baseball players were doing anything worth mentioning, the men found little to argue about. Most of them couldn’t have cared less about baseball, Hugh knew, unless they had a kid or grandkid playing on one of the local teams. Although none was a farmer, they sometimes bewailed the drop in grain or beef prices, something they invariably blamed on the Republicans. Other times, they gave the Democrats trouble for one “goddamn socialist” policy or other they identified. But mostly in the summer they confined themselves to whatever juicy gossip might be handy. Hugh was too canny to listen too obviously, for he knew they didn’t like to think anyone overheard what they said, especially a junior high kid.
“What I don’t see,” George Ferguson, the town’s single independent insurance agent, spoke up, “is why they want to spend money to tear it down in the first place.”
“Goddamn railroad,” Phelps Crane, who ran the Downtown Chevron Gas and Tire Service, swore. “Burlington Goddamn Northern. Ever since they took over the old FW&D, they’ve torn up every goddamn thing they ain’t put out of business. Not a man in this town ain’t been hurt by the Burlington Goddamn Northern.”
Phelps, Hugh recalled his father, Harry Rudd, saying, had worked as a conductor for the Fort Worth and Denver until Burlington Northern exercised its corporate might, bowed to the inevitable in the nation’s love for the automobile and airplane, and ended passenger service. His refusal to accept relocation to all-freight work running out of Tulsa had ended his career, and he had managed the gas and tire station ever since. The truth, Hugh also had heard his father say, was that Burlington had owned the Fort Worth and Denver since the line was organized, and they had kept the passenger line running long after it ceased to show any profit whatsoever, mostly for the sake of the railmen who relied on the train for their livelihood. Such charity was lost on Phelps Crane, though, who told everyone he met how he had been “shucked and ground up” by the railroad, then offered a pension no one could live on.
Another truth about Phelps, Hugh knew, was that he was close to retirement age when the railroad pulled out, and that probably he wouldn’t have worked but two or three more years anyway. Phelps’s local claim to fame was that in 1942 he lied about his age and enlisted in the U.S. Army when he was only fourteen, no older than Hugh, actually. He collected three Purple Hearts and had been decorated for bravery more than any man from that part of Texas. Any time the words “war hero” were mentioned, Hugh and everyone else in town instantly thought of Phelps Crane, although the heavyset, gray-faced, balding man who seemed to wear a perpetual scowl and to hate everyone he didn’t agree with was hard to reconcile with the image of the heroic GI he must have been at one time.
Phelps also was known to Hugh—through his father’s occasional remark to his mother—as a man familiar with heavy drink. This morning, Hugh noticed as he had many mornings, a small flask appeared over Phelps’s coffee cup, flashed quickly, and then was stored deeply in the faded bib overalls he always wore. Hugh shook his head. To him and most of his friends, Phelps Crane was something of a joke.
“Say they want to build a new wye,” Harvey Turnbull, the former Seabee and one of the three barbers in town, put in while he fetched the coffee pot from the Serve Yourself table and splashed refills all ’round.
“Don’t need a new goddamn wye,” Phelps shouted at Harvey as if it were Harvey who had thought of it. “Never turned nothing around here, anyway. If they wanted to turn around here, why’d they tear down the goddamn roundhouse? Answer me that one.”
“That old roundhouse was falling down,” George said softly. “It was dangerous with kids playing in it all the time.”
“Well, the goddamn depot wasn’t falling down,” Phelps whined. “They come in here and bulldozed it in the dead of night.”
“It wasn’t ‘the dead of night’ ” Harvey corrected. “It was broad daylight. Fellow in a hardhat come right in here of a morning and asked if we could direct him to the depot. Next thing we know, it’s gone. You know that, Phelps. Hell, you’re the one told him where it was.”
“Well, if I’d of known what he was going to do,” Phelps grumbled, “I’d of kicked his ass around the block for drill. Wasn’t nothing but that goddamn Ronald Reagan done that. Prissy little dipshit son of a bitch. ‘Trickle down economics,’ my sweet ass. Only thing got ‘trickled’ on ’round here was our shoes.”
The men murmured their agreement with that assessment. Like everyone else in town, Hugh knew that every town up and down West Texas’s Highway 287 had suffered from the loss of the railroads. The decline had started in the late sixties and continued steadily for the next twenty years. There were a dozen such small cities between Fort Worth and Amarillo, county seats mostly. Mr. Diamond, Hugh’s history teacher, said they had been deliberately spaced almost precisely thirty miles apart, the approximate maximum a steam locomotive could travel without needing more water. Some of these towns were actually built by the railroad companies, and in the first half of the century, they flourished.
But diesel locomotives didn’t require water, and nobody took a train where they could fly or drive themselves, anymore. Freight now moved through without stopping. Only the local mill kept the local switching crews working, Hugh had heard his father say, and every day more and more of their plaster and wallboard product was moved out by eighteen-wheeler. By and large, the local yards were being used only as a transfer and switching point. In time, some said, even that wouldn’t be required. In time, his father said, freight-by-rail would become a thing of the past.
Hugh knew that the days of the railroad as a local industry were over. It was a reality he had practically grown up with. A generation before, boys his age couldn’t wait until they turned eighteen so they could go to work for the Burlington Northern. Now, it wasn’t even an option. The depot was torn down the year he was born, and he was aware of its existence only because of the broad blacktopped area off Main Street at the north end of the business district that everyone identified as the “depot parking lot.” The railroad had never mattered to him one way or another. Hugh had no ambition to work for the railroad. He was planning to play professional ball. Or go to college.
He drained his lime Coke and got up to leave.
“Tell you one goddamn thing,” Phelps was saying as Hugh departed the cool air-conditioned atmosphere of the drugstore, “I don’t think we ought to let a bunch of goddamn Chicago lawyers tell us what we can have in our own goddamn town.”
By the time Hugh had mown his fourth lawn of the day and had serious second thoughts about signing on with Mr. Hadnought, he had forgotten all about the drugstore conversation. His main worry was how much it was going to cost him to buy a new mower to replace the old family rattletrap that kept stalling and stopping every time he made a turn. The last thing on his mind was the Hendershot Grocery Warehouse.
Hugh used his next two weeks’ earnings to put up a down payment on a new self-propelled Grassmaster, and he calculated it would take him the rest of June and some good portion of July to acquit the debt, even if he took on four or five more lawns a week. He had no time at all for lime Cokes and casual eavesdropping in the drugstore, but one night at supper, his parents took up the topic of the Hendershot Grocery Warehouse.
“They tried to organize a committee to save it,” Harry Rudd explained to Hugh’s mother, Edith, as she served fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “But there’s nothing they can do. The building sits right on Burlington Northern property. They can’t stop them from doing what they want.”
“What about getting it declared a historical monument?” Edith asked as she poured the iced tea. “I mean, they did that with the hotel.”
“I think somebody’s already tried that. Not time, now.” Harry bit into a leg. “Even if there was, doubt they could do it. There’s nothing really historical about the building itself. Could I have some gravy? It might have some architectural significance, but to most people, it looks exactly like half the old buildings in half the towns up and down the highway around here. I don’t think it ever had any historical importance. I mean, it was just a business, a warehouse. Nothing ever happened there except that Old Man Hendershot made a fortune before he left his wife and ran off with that waitress from Chillicothe.”
“Harry,” Edith warned with a nod toward Hugh. His father coughed, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and went on in an indifferent tone. “Where’re the biscuits? Main thing is that they can’t really do anything to stop it. Word is a bunch of folks went to Judge Parker, but he couldn’t find any grounds to grant an injunction. So I guess they’ll just tear it down. Are we having any vegetables?”
Edith bustled efficiently around the kitchen, and he stopped shoveling food into his mouth long enough to watch her. She seemed almost to glide from stove to countertop to refrigerator to table, her arms laden with steaming bowls and platters. Her face always wore a determined smile, and her total concentration seemed to dwell on the multiple tasks at hand. Somehow, though, she kept up a running conversation with her husband and even reached down to straighten Hugh’s napkin on his knee as she swept by.
“It’s an eyesore anyway.” Edith was finally seated and was trying to stir her potatoes sufficiently to generate enough heat to melt the pat of margarine she had placed on top. Now she rose, went to the stove, and brought over a bowl of green beans. They were stone cold, but Harry didn’t seem to notice as he spooned them onto his plate.
Sometimes, Hugh thought, it was almost comical the way his mother behaved. She often reminded him of the television-perfect mothers he saw on the rerun cable TV channels. But Donna Reed and June Cleaver were different. It wasn’t that they always were dressed up in heels and pearls and had perfect hair. It was something about the way they did things, as if household chores were second nature to them, not a delicate balancing act between perfection and utter failure.
Edith Rudd’s house wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t exactly a disaster area, either. She took a lot of pride in how clean she kept everything, and Hugh was seldom in greater trouble than when he left a wet towel on the bathroom floor or forgot to rinse out a milk glass. But then, Hugh was almost never in any trouble anyway. That, too, was something that Edith Rudd bragged about.
Still, his mother’s suppertime routine bothered Hugh. But if his father noticed, he never mentioned it. He just ate his supper and talked to her as if she were sitting across from him, relaxed and comfortably eating her meal right along with him, something she almost never got to do.
Hugh was aware that his father’s one true passion was good food. Harry asked for very little from life, he always said. But one thing he insisted on was a “good supper.” That meant a full meal every night, “and none of that low-fat bran crap and raw fish, either,” Harry good-naturedly chided Edith. “A working man needs real food, and if it’s bad for me, so much the better.” She did what she could for his arteries and heart by substituting margarine for butter and frozen yogurt for ice cream and by using low-cal salad dressings. But Harry refused whole wheat bread, and he wouldn’t touch lite mayonnaise.
“And it’s probably a firetrap,” Edith went on, reseating herself. “It’s all grown up with weeds and probably has snakes all around it.” She stirred her cold food around a bit, then pushed her plate away slightly. “We’re better off with it gone.”
“Dangerous place, all right.” Harry cleaned his plate with a masterful stroke of his fork that removed the last of the green beans and potatoes at once. “Is there any pie?”
“Kids play in there, I hear.” Edith rose and moved to the sideboard where a fresh peach pie awaited her knife. “You never play in there, do you, Hugh?” she asked.
“No’m,” Hugh muttered around a mouthful of chicken. He resented her notion that he still “played” at all.
“Well, see that you don’t,” she said automatically without hearing him. “It’s still a shame to see it go. It’s kind of a landmark, I guess. A reminder to a lot of folks of the way the town used to be.” She cut the pie, and steam rose out of it.
“I’ll get the ice cream,” Harry said.
“When do they start?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.” He placed a carton of frozen yogurt in front of her. “It ought to be quite a show.”
“You stay away from there,” she said as she spooned the white confection onto the pie. “It’s likely to be dangerous.”
“Yes’m,” Hugh responded. He had already decided that the Smiths, Hendersons, and Tallwaters could wait one day to have their grass cut. He was planning to be downtown at first light.
The demolition crew contracted by the railroad had arrived the evening before, and they spent the first two hours of daylight off-loading their yellow Caterpillar bulldozers and arranging a huge crane with a wrecking ball on the back of a flatbed semi-trailer. Within a few hours, the high Johnson grass and scraggly mesquite trees that filled the vacant lot around the warehouse were beaten down under the wheels of the vehicles. A travel trailer sat off to one side.
A small, angry crowd gathered on the site of the old Fort Worth and Denver Depot and glared at the workers about a hundred yards below them. The vanished depot’s parking lot and the double set of railroad tracks that still ran parallel to it marked the unofficial northern boundary of the small town’s business district. On the other side of the tracks, an overgrown vacant lot flattened out and spread about a hundred yards down a steep slope, terminating along the southern wall of the old Hendershot building and its loading docks.
Because of the difference in elevation between the downtown area and the Hendershot building, the workers had to look up to see the crowd, who gathered behind a line of old wooden pylons that ran parallel to the near tracks and was joined by a single strand of cable running from pylon to pylon. The barrier terminated at the eastern easement to Main Street, directly across from another abandoned building, a red-bricked Railway Express Office.
For years, long before the razing of the depot, the parking lot had been an unofficial turn-around for vehicles circling and seeking an opening in the slant parking spaces of the three blocks of the downtown area. When downtown was crowded, the drill was to circle the depot parking lot in a broad U-turn, then scout the west side of Main as far as the courthouse square. Then, if no spaces were open, to go around the square and try the east side as far as the depot parking lot, where the process would begin again.
Today, though, too many people were gathered in the old parking lot to permit even a kid on a bicycle to make a U-turn. More folks wandered down as the sun warmed the early morning air. The work crew knew nothing of the town’s hostility toward the project and only waved and offered large, friendly smiles.
Hugh arrived at seven in the company of Tommy Quisenberry, a smallish boy his own age who had been fired by Mr. Hadnought the day before. They had met on their bicycles near the old water tower just west of his house and pedaled slowly off while Tommy explained the circumstances of his sudden unemployment.
“Said I had to take too many shits,” Tommy confessed to Hugh as their bikes raced parallel toward the downtown blocks. “Said I was spending more time squatting off by the fence line than I was plowing.” He grinned sheepishly. “I guess I was, too.”
“Why?” Hugh asked. “You sick?”
“It’s my mom,” Tommy said, casting his eyes downward. “She won’t cook any meat anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, she says we have to ‘eat right.’ She says my dad’s cholesterol is too high, and we have to become vegetarians.”
“Vegetarians?” Hugh was dumbfounded. He thought all vegetarians were some kind of religious nuts.
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “No meat. I mean, not even chicken. No meat at all. Just vegetables. It’s driving us all nuts, especially Dad. But Mom’s stubborn. She won’t budge. She won’t let us eat ‘anything that has a face,’ she says. It’s horrible.”
Hugh tried to imagine his father’s reaction to such a thing. It wasn’t possible. Harry lived for a good cut of meat, especially steak, cooked bloody and rare.
“Anyhow, it’s giving all of us the runs. Mom says that’ll go away after a while, but I don’t know. Seems I’m farting as much as I’m shitting, and half the time I can’t tell the difference before it happens.” Tommy shook his head. “Old Man Hadnought’s probably right. My ass was so sore all the time, I couldn’t walk. But it doesn’t matter. I’m glad to be through with the son of a bitch, even if it means I’m broke. Didn’t have time to spend any money anyway.”
Hugh breathed a silent prayer of thanks that his mother never got such crazy ideas. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can set up a practice schedule. Get some BP in.”
Tommy’s face adopted a serious expression for a moment, and he nodded. He and Hugh had been teammates since tee ball. Tommy was a quick second baseman and a fast runner, but he had never been much of a hitter. “Yeah. Maybe we can talk Coach Kruickshank into throwing us some. If he’s ever sober,” he added and laughed.
Their bikes swung into the downtown blocks, and they saw the growing crowd down by the tracks.
“Jesus,” Tommy breathed aloud, “I haven’t seen so many people since the fire.”
A fire had broken out in Gilbert’s Auto Parts Store two years before. Half a block of buildings had burned before the six fire departments from neighboring towns that came in to assist the local unit could bring it under control. Hugh chiefly remembered it as the first time in his life he had stayed out all night.
Just as Hugh and Tommy parked their bikes and moved in closer, Phelps Crane climbed up onto a small three-step ladder and started yelling at the two dozen men who made a knot around him. His face was red, and Hugh could see veins roping across his forehead.
“Can’t you people see what they’re doing?” Phelps cried. He pointed toward the distant roar of the bulldozers, which were gearing up and grinding through the head-high weeds down around the building. “They’re tearing down the whole town! Bit by bit! Pretty soon, they’ll be coming right into your homes! Taking your jobs! They took mine, and I ain’t the only one. It’s a plot! I’m telling you, it’s a goddamn plot! We got to stop ’em. Somehow, some way, we’ve got to.”
“Hey, Phelps,” somebody in the crowd yelled. “You serve drinks after the sermon or just before?” Everyone laughed, and Phelps waited one angry beat, then climbed down, folded his ladder under his arm, and stalked angrily off toward his station.
Mostly the crowd was quiet after that, but in dribs and drabs more townspeople drifted up and joined the small gathering. The bulldozers and trucks moved into position, and soon they had knocked down the big wooden loading docks on the front and near side of the building. After workers secured the huge, rotting planks with chain, the tractors pulled them away toward a front loader, which picked them up and dumped them into the back of a truck to be hauled off.
“They’re goddamn neat about it,” George Ferguson remarked as men came in after the front loader to pick up loose boards and scraps that had fallen loose from larger pieces.
“Hell, yes,” Harvey Turnbull agreed. “Pretty soon we won’t even know it was there.”
“Just like the depot,” a woman piped up.
“Just like the depot,” Harvey and George agreed together. They had a Thermos of coffee and some cups with them, and they replenished their drinks and lit cigarettes and looked around vaguely for something to sit on before resting again on their heels and continuing to watch the demolition. People were shading their eyes against the new sun, and dust from the bulldozers and trucks began to waft up through the rapidly heating air toward the crowd.
“It ain’t like the depot at all,” a calm voice suddenly spoke up from right behind Hugh. He jumped, startled. It had been a while since anyone had spoken, and for a moment Hugh had the feeling that there was a ghost standing right on his shoulder.
Harvey and George turned and looked curiously at the speaker, but then their eyes recorded the face, and they exchanged a grimace, turned around, and resumed drinking their coffee and smoking.
“It ain’t,” the voice said again, and Hugh stepped away and looked around.
An old man stood blinking into the dusty sunlight. He had on patched dungarees and ancient, cracked workboots. A plaid shirt draped down from a pinched neck and bloused over his waistband, and a pair of faded red suspenders hitched them up and seemed to prevent the shirt from taking off with the breeze. He had a battered fedora on his head. There were moth holes in it, and the band was stained from salty sweat.
“It’s a whole ’nother thing,” he said. “That depot was new-fangled. Made of Mescan bricks, it was. Wouldn’t of stood by itself ’nother ten years without some major work. But old Hendershot’s. That’s a whole different tune. Them fellers’ll learn that, by and by.”
More people casually glanced back toward the old man, but as soon as they identified him, they turned away with disgust on their faces. No one but Hugh was paying any attention to him. Even Tommy had wandered off toward the edge of the crowd and was trying to talk to Mavis Patterson, a girl from their class.
The old man squinted down at Hugh, his only visible audience. “I’m telling you, boy,” he said, “you can stand here and watch them dozers till pigs get wings, but you ain’t going to see ’em bring down ol’ Hendershot’s with some piddling little ol’ tractor. Going to take dynamite, and that might not do her. That’s a good building. Take more’n that bunch of peckerwoods brought to take her down.”
Hugh caught himself staring at the man, then, embarrassed, glanced off and started to turn away.
“What’s your name, boy?” the man asked.
“Hugh. Hugh Rudd.”
“Jonas Wilson.” The man stuck out a gnarled hand and smiled.
Hugh was stunned by the sight of the paw thrust out toward him. It was scarred and battered, as if it had been broken in a vise. Scabbed-over sores ran across the back where the skin was papery, and large blue veins stuck out and seemed to pulse right before his eyes. No finger was straight or properly aligned. In fact, the third and fourth fingers were minus their ends. Yellow tusks of fingernail grew right out of the stumps, reminding Hugh of granite boulders he had seen embedded in the orange soil of the Wichita Mountains.
The second stunning thought that froze the boy was the man’s name, for it immediately identified him as the town loony, the town drunk, the town pervert, the town “stay away from him or he’ll get you” boogeyman about whom he had been warned every since he was old enough to leave the house without the company of one of his parents.
Jonas Wilson. The name caused giggles in groups of kids and occasioned nightmares when one awoke by an open window late at night. Jonas Wilson murdered children. He carried them out to the boxcar he lived in five miles from the city limits. They disappeared forever. He buried them in his garden—the size and success of which were grudgingly admired throughout the county—cut them up and fed them to the gray mongrel dog that accompanied him wherever he went. He always carried a tow sack over his shoulder, a butcher knife in his pocket, and when the sack bulged full, it was a safe bet it had the remains of some lost child in it.
Those were the stories, some of them, anyway. Hugh’s eyes got large in spite of his efforts to control them. He had seen Wilson only at a distance. Because his boxcar was on the side of the road on the way to the mill where Harry Rudd worked, Hugh passed by it when he rode out with his father to check on something that required an off-duty foreman’s attention. Sometimes, they passed the old man himself, trudging along with his head down, usually pulling a child’s little red wagon or carrying his infamous tow sack over his hulking shoulders. Hugh often wondered how many of the stories about the old man were true. Wilson never lifted his head, waved, or tried to flag a ride, no matter how laden the wagon or sack or how bad the weather. He just lowered his battered hat against the draft of the car when it passed, gestured to the large gray dog, and moved on. The boxcar itself was nothing more than a shack with a stove pipe sticking out of the top. Aside from the oversized garden, it was surrounded with old car parts, mattress springs, and other junk, and the whole abode was encircled by a rickety barbed wire fence.
Passing the man or his place always made Hugh shudder, and it almost always caused his father to remind him never to go anywhere around “the crazy old coot.”
“Just stay away from him,” Harry Rudd automatically warned. “He’s no damn good, and we’d all be better off if he’d just go away.”
Now, however, Hugh stood staring at Jonas Wilson’s hand, which was thrust out right toward the center of his chest. He no longer believed the childish stories about kids being carried off and fed to the old man’s dog, but all the warnings and taboos concerning Jonas Wilson froze his arms to his side, caused him to look at the ground in a mixture of fear and embarrassment.
“That’s okay, son,” Jonas Wilson said and dropped his hand. “When you get to feeling like it, we can shake and howdy. We’ve traded names. That’s more’n most folks in this town’ll do.”
Hugh looked up at the old man to apologize. Somehow, he decided that his training in gentlemanly behavior took priority over his father’s cautions. Anyway, both parents had always warned him against being rude, even to a colored man or a Mexican. And Jonas Wilson seemed polite enough. He was about to speak and offer to shake hands, but Wilson was no longer paying any attention to him. The old man’s eyes were directed beyond him and down the grade toward the ongoing demolition project.
Hugh moved away through the crowd. The bulldozers had completed their work with the loading docks, and now they were shutting down. Crews were battering away at the huge, wooden double doors on the front of the building, preparing to enter and begin removing any other impediments to efficient destruction.
The work went on steadily, and Hugh went over to one of the wooden pylons that marked the barrier between the parking lot and the railroad track and perched there. Tommy soon came up and joined him.
“They’re saying they’ll be done before dark,” Tommy leaned on the rusty cable. A green stench rose to Hugh’s nostrils, and he turned away in disgust.
“Jesus?” he said. “Smells like something crawled up inside you and died.”
“Beans,” Tommy smiled grimly. “That and turnip greens. We had a mess of those last night, too. Makes a stink, doesn’t it? Works on me all day long. Really, I think it was that more than anything that got me fired. Old Man Hadnought said he couldn’t come near me without wanting to puke. Other kids, too.” Tommy studied his sneakers and rubbed his eyes. “It’s embarrassing, Hugh. It really is. But I can’t help it. It won’t stop if I don’t get some meat to eat from somewhere. My mom won’t even let us have tuna fish.”
Tommy passed more gas and offered his friend a sick smile. Hugh stepped back, breathing through his mouth and fanning the air between them.
“Jesus, it makes my eyes water!”
“I can’t help it, Hugh. Say,” Tommy smiled, “what’re you having for supper, tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Hugh muttered. The thought of Tommy sitting around their table and farting through supper made his breakfast cereal revolt in his stomach.
“Well, if there’s going to be meat, count me in. Maybe I can come over once a week or so. That’ll help. We’re going to the Grand Canyon later this summer. I’ll bring you a T-shirt or something if you can help me out.”
The sun rose higher in the morning sky, and the temperature went up accordingly. Sweat began to break out on faces, and as handkerchiefs dampened, so did enthusiasm for watching the slow process of destruction of Hendershot’s Grocery Warehouse. Tommy finally gave in and joined those departing with a caution to call him if the Rudd household was planning to enjoy some kind of meat that night. He looked so hopeless that Hugh decided to check with his mother and see if he could. Edith Rudd was a great cook, and there were always leftovers.
Eventually, the crowd thinned down to only a handful of men who stood leaning against the pylons or their cars, smoking and watching the crews move in and out of the big, yellow building. Now and then a worker would lean out of a window while he tried to pry off a board or chip away at a piece of brick. Hugh noticed that the pieces being thrown out of windows or carried out the big front doors became smaller and smaller. Eventually work seemed to stop all together.
“Broke for dinner.” Jonas Wilson’s voice came up behind Hugh and made him jump all over again.
“Jesus!” he spun around and swore at the old man. “Stop doing that! Just because I’m shorter than you, you don’t have to sneak up on me.”
Wilson leaned back on his heels and studied the young man. Hugh’s blond hair stuck out of a New York Yankees baseball hat, and his white Red Sox T-shirt was damp with sweat. Freckles covered his nose, and his ears were slightly too large for his head, but he was already the picture of the handsome young man he would become. He had a slim but muscular athlete’s build, strong arms, and clear blue eyes.
“You ought’n’t to swear at an ol’ man, like that,” Wilson said calmly. “You might give me a heart attack. Wouldn’t it be a shame for the last thing a mortal’s ears should hear to be a blasphemy?”
Hugh’s eyes fell to his shoes again. An adult’s admonishment, even that of an adult such as Jonas Wilson, must be acknowledged. “Sorry,” he muttered. “You just scared me, that’s all.”
“Seems like I do that pretty good,” Wilson declared with a chuckle, and Hugh looked up.
The old man’s face was splotched with brown spots and skin cancers. His gray eyes were rheumy as they peered out from under bushy, white eyebrows, and lines creased both cheeks from the crow’s feet on his temples all the way down to the wattles of his neck. He needed a shave, but beneath the white whiskers, Hugh could see a strong chin beneath a mouth lined with clean, white teeth. He was thin, Hugh observed as he studied the loose skin around his neck, but his shoulders were broad, and he stood squarely in broken-down workboots, his feet solidly planted on the blacktop of the parking lot.
“Didn’t get very far this morning,” Wilson observed generally. “They’ll find out what a job they took on this afternoon.” He lifted his ragged fedora, revealing a full shock of white, sweat-washed hair, and studied the sun. “They’ll be off for a hour or more. What say we have us a bite?”
Hugh looked around. Almost everyone had drifted off by now. He wanted to escape, but he didn’t know how. He thought of just walking off, but somehow, he couldn’t do it.
“I’m not very hungry,” he said.
“Not hungry? Big boy like you?” Wilson scoffed. “Shoot, boy. When I was your age, I’d eat half a cow, hide and all, for supper and have the bark off a cedar post for dessert. C’mon, they’s a spot of shade over by the hotel. We’ll be back in time for the matinee.”
Hugh was confused, and he stood where he was. Images of being grabbed and hauled off in the tow sack that bulged over the old man’s back swam before his eyes. Jonas Wilson moved off toward the street and then turned.
“C’mon, boy,” he waved and spoke gruffly. “I ain’t made that many offers like this, and I don’t take kindly to being turned down.” Hugh felt as if his sneakers were melted into the blacktop of the parking lot. He couldn’t move. “I said, ‘C’mon,” Wilson barked suddenly. “Ain’t much going to happen to you in the shade of a chinaberry tree.”
Hugh found himself moving, trailing after Jonas Wilson across the bricks of Main Street, down the old roadbed of the Fort Worth and Denver switching track that ran between the northernmost building of downtown and the abandoned Railway Express Office. Beyond that, a block and a half away, was the town’s old hotel. He thought of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, of Fagan in Oliver Twist. He didn’t want to go, but he couldn’t help himself. Jonas Wilson called, and he followed.
“You like ’mater sandwiches, or you prefer crookneck?” Jonas Wilson asked as they approached the overgrown chinaberry tree that grew haphazardly out of the weedy grass in the vacant lot next to the hotel. Two decades before, when the owners went bankrupt, the city obtained the property for back taxes. Ten years later, during the national Bicentennial celebration, the county historical society was given charge of it, and they found federal funds to restore the building to its former splendor in an attempt to make it a tourist attraction.
The plan was to convert the ground floor into a series of shops and stores and then rent out the rooms upstairs for high prices to rich tourists heading back and forth from the Metroplex to ski country in Colorado. But money for remodeling proved inadequate, then somehow ran out completely. Now, except for a skimpy gift shop and tourist information center, there was no commerce going on in the three-story, whitewashed stucco building. The rooms upstairs remained untouched, as they’d been at the moment the establishment’s role as a bona fide hotel ended years before.
The caretaker, Milton Kruickshank, coached Hugh’s Civic League baseball team, and at the end of every season—which always ended in mid-June, as he never seemed to have a team that could win a championship—he stayed so beer drunk that he couldn’t work up the energy to mow the grass more than once a month. He also ran the gift shop and handed out maps and brochures to the five or six tourists a week who wandered lost or waited for car repairs at one of the downtown garages. In exchange, he was furnished with a small salary and a room on the hotel’s ground floor.
“I don’t know,” Hugh muttered as they stepped over the curb and worked through the weeds and sunflowers to a matted-down spot directly under the tree.
“Well, it’s a simple enough question,” Wilson stopped and sat down, folding his legs under him. Hugh heard the old man’s knees crack when he bent them, but his wrinkled face betrayed no discomfort. “You like homegrown ’maters?”
“Tomatoes?” Hugh said. “Yeah, I guess,” he nodded.
“You like crookneck squash?”
“I don’t know.” Hugh looked confused. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Yeller squash,” Wilson explained. “Some folks call it ‘summer squash.’ Though I’d have to allow it’s Yankees that do that, mostly.”
“We eat summer squash,” Hugh confessed, remembering that he didn’t much care for it.
“Your folks Yankees?” Wilson asked, digging into his tow sack.
Hugh kept a nervous eye on the old man’s movements. “My mom’s from St. Louis,” he said. “Or she was born there. She was in the military. Or Granddad was. The navy. They moved around a lot. All over the world. You know—”
Hugh’s voice stopped and evaporated into raw breath. The first item Wilson removed from the sack was a long, black-bladed butcher knife. The carbon-steel edge was outlined by silver-honed sharpness. He could almost feel it slicing through his throat.
“Never was at sea,” Wilson said casually. “Fact is, I only saw the ocean once, and that was just the Gulf of Mexico. Down to Galveston. Went down for a longshoreman’s walkout. Had a heck of a storm. Hurricane of some kind. Durndest thing I ever seen. Biggest, too. Makes a twister look like a spring shower. That was back in ’35. Or ’36. I forget.”
He put the knife down on his leg and reached into the sack and brought forth a small stack of wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches.
“Now they all got mustard on ’em,” he apologized while he arranged the sandwiches on the grass before him. “Even the ’maters. I don’t like it near as good as mayonnaise, but mayonnaise sours in the heat. Gives you the bellyache. Might even kill you. Heck of a note, ain’t it? In cool weather you can use mayonnaise—which is the best thing with ’maters, crookneck, and the like—but them things ain’t growed up in the wintertime.” He pushed the sandwiches around with the blade of his knife. “You go right on ahead and take your pick. You’re company.”
Hugh reached out for one of the squash sandwiches. The knife flashed, and he jerked back his hand in a panic. When he looked, however, he saw that Wilson had brought it toward his own hand with the dull side down.
“Now, durn it,” he frowned. “Don’t you go taking crookneck ’less that’s what you want.”
“That’s fine,” Hugh said, realizing with regret that he was whispering. “I like it okay.”
“Well, ‘okay’ just ain’t good enough.” Wilson said. “Take a ’mater, or a pepper, onion, and beet pickle. Them’s the best with mustard anyhow.”
“I don’t think I’d like an onion sandwich,” Hugh said.
“Well, you ain’t tasted one of mine.” Wilson frowned. Then he brightened. “Tell you what. I was going to cut ’em in two anyhow. Let’s have half of one, half of the other. What’d you say?”
Hugh nodded, and Wilson smiled and sliced the sandwiches in two.
They were good, Hugh had to admit when he bit into the squash sandwich. The small, yellow gourd was crisp under his teeth, and the mustard enhanced the flavor perfectly. The bread was homemade. Thick and crusty, it seemed to melt in his mouth while he chewed.
Finally, as he bit into the tomato sandwich, he decided that this was the best noon meal he had ever had. At home, his mother would be sitting down to a can of Campbell’s or a tuna sandwich. He wondered what she would think about his eating sandwiches of squash and tomato. She probably had never heard of such a thing.
“This is really good,” Hugh said after wiping his mouth on his T-shirt’s tail. “I mean it. I never ate a sandwich like these before.”
“Secret’s in the vegetables,” Wilson said while he chewed. “Got to be fresh. Right out of the garden. These was growing last night. Picked ’em just after the moon set. That’s best, Indians always said. They done that with wild onions, berries, herbs, and such, and that’s what they said.”
“The bread’s the best part.”
“Bread’s easy, if you got the starter. That there’s sourdough. I’ve had that starter for years. Got it from a ol’ boy who used to chuck for the Matador Ranch.”
“You worked on a ranch?” Hugh’s mind suddenly filled with movie images.
“Worked on a ranch, railroad, farm, and factory. Drilled for oil, water, and gas. Went prospecting once down to Mexico. All that ’fore I was growed up, or durn near it. Done a little of everything, I guess.” He smiled and folded the wax paper into neat squares, which he thrust into the sack. “Played piano in a fancy house once.” He held up his abused hands. “Can’t do that no more.” He laughed. “What I like best is carpentering. Halfway good at that.”
Wilson wiped the knife blade on the grass and then on his stained dungarees and thrust it into the sack, exchanging it for a small brown paper sack. “You take a smoke?” he asked, reaching into his pocket.
“Sure.” Hugh’s voice quaked with uncertainty. His father smoked in between bouts of trying to quit. Even his mother took a cigarette from time to time, especially when they were all at home alone watching TV or after something had upset her “too much to think,” as she put it. But he had been threatened with the most unimaginable punishments if he even looked at a cigarette seriously.
Wilson’s eyes focused vaguely on the boy. “You don’t smoke, do you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No,” Hugh admitted. “I never have.”
“Well, if you want, you can try.”
“I’d like to try.”
“If you don’t like it, don’t do it no more. I’ve always believed a man needs to try things, see if they work for him. Smoke’s always been a friend of mine. Stayed with me when shorter strings run out. Stayed with me longer’n any man or woman I ever knew or had dealings with. It’s there when I need it, don’t bother me when I don’t.”
“I’d like to try,” Hugh repeated softly.
Wilson nodded and pulled a sack of Bull Durham from his shirt pocket. Hugh was taken aback. He expected to see a pack of Camels such as his father smoked. He was unprepared for home rolled.
“Watch me, and do as I do,” Wilson said, handing him a thin paper and dabbing a measure of loose tobacco on top of it.
Hugh’s fingers inexpertly followed Wilson’s movements, but when the old man had a perfectly rolled tube sitting on his chapped lips, the boy’s efforts lay uselessly in his hand.
“Try it again, and this time don’t try to force it. Secret to a good smoke is not to force it.”
Hugh worked through the process once more, and this time he proudly lifted a completed product for display, only to drop it onto the grass in astonishment. Jonas Wilson had removed a pint bottle of bourbon from the small brown sack and was tilting it back and allowing his large Adam’s apple to pump it into him.
After two swallows, the old man looked at Hugh.
“Ain’t going to offer you a drink of whiskey,” he said, corking the bottle, thrusting it back into the sack. “Lot of folks ’round here’d like to see me hang just for giving you a sandwich and a smoke.”
Hugh scooped up the cigarette and accepted a light from a kitchen match scooped in Wilson’s hand.
“Don’t nigger-lip it,” he said as Hugh sucked in the smoke and coughed violently. “It ain’t your mama’s titty.”
“Mr. Wilson,” Hugh coughed again when he tried to speak. The smoke seared his throat and lungs and burned like dry fire.
“Don’t call me ‘Mr. Wilson.’ Last man called me ‘mister’ died ’fore your daddy was out of diapers.”
“What should I call you?” Hugh took another drag. It went down easier than the first.
“Call me ‘Jonas,’ ” he said with a nod. “ ‘Mister’ is a title of respect. I got a notion you don’t respect me. Not yet, anyhow. What you want to ask me?”
“I thought you always had a dog with you.”
“Dog? Oh, you mean Goodlett.”
“Goodlett?” It was the name of a near-ghost town fifteen miles to the west.
“That’s where I found her. Just a pup. Some son of a buck put her out by the road to die, and I come along and just took her up. Been with me near ten years.”
“Where is she?” Hugh sucked in another drag. His head swam with a light, not altogether unpleasant sensation.
Wilson’s dark eyes sparked momentarily. “She’s ’round here. Put out that smoke. Never take it all the way down to the nub. That’ll give you the cancer.”
Hugh ground the butt under his sneakers. He made up his mind to find a way to buy more makings and practice as soon as he could. He wondered what Tommy and the other guys would think. He knew what his mother would think—if she caught him.
“I’ll call her, but you got to do as I say. She’s a mean little bitch when she wants to be. Bitch dog’s the best dog there is, but you got to handle ’em right. Now get up and stand real still.”
Wilson got up on his knees. Hugh stood and looked across the street to the Goodrich Auto Store and the backs of buildings on Main Street. He saw no dog anywhere. A shrill whistle came from Wilson’s lips between his chopped-off fingers.
As if she were a hallucination, the dog rose from beside the concrete curb directly across from the chinaberry tree. Hugh’s eyes blinked several times as what he thought was merely a ripple in the gray curb rose and moved across the street and entered the grass. Her dirty gray color gave her a perfect camouflage against the concrete curb.
“Don’t move, no matter what,” Wilson warned him. She slipped through the grass and weeds to the tiny area where they had eaten.
Goodlett came silently through the grass and froze when she realized that Wilson was not alone. A throaty growl began deep in her throat as she stalked close to the quaking boy.
“Goodlett,” Wilson ordered in a deep voice. “Okay.” He pointed to Hugh and then to himself and repeated the command. “Okay.”
The dog moved close to Hugh and sniffed his sneakers and legs. Her nose moved up to his crotch, and then as Hugh gasped, almost yelled in alarm, she rose on her back feet and placed her paws on his chest. He looked deep into her eyes, which he saw were dark yellow, felt her hot breath on his throat. Her growl continued to rumble deep inside her.
“Okay, Goodlett,” Wilson ordered again. “Get down.”
After a long moment, she dropped back on her paws, and with one more quick sniff, she went over, squatted, and watered the base of the chinaberry tree.
“It’s okay, now,” Wilson said. “You can move. She’s real partial to me, and she’s jealous as any redheaded woman you ever seen. Like to killed this ol’ boy who come up to the house when his car broke down.”
Hugh didn’t feel like sitting down. Sweat covered him, and his hands felt waxy.
“That’s some dog,” he said. Goodlett lifted her head and inspected his voice, then lay down next to Wilson’s feet.
“She’ll do,” Wilson said. “More trouble’n she’s worth is the truth. Won’t let me keep chickens. Kills ’em every time.”
From the direction of the tracks, they heard the engines of the bulldozers starting up.
“Well.” Wilson cinched up his tow sack. “They’re starting up again.” A smile appeared beneath the whiskery wrinkles. It was as if he knew something no one else was aware of. “Reckon we’d best mosey back over and catch the afternoon show.”
“Thanks for the sandwich, Mr., uh . . . Jonas.” Hugh looked down again. “And the smoke.”
Wilson smiled broadly. “My pleasure . . .” he started, but suddenly Hugh, without knowing why he was making the motion, thrust out his right hand. Goodlett looked up at it, decided no harm was meant, and put her head down on her paws once more. Wilson stared at the boy’s outthrust fingers. “We’ll do it again, tomorrow.” He left his hands at his side.
“But they’ll be done by tomorrow,” Hugh protested. His hand was still thrust out, and he flushed, dropped it. Wilson taught him what that sort of rejection felt like. It wasn’t good.
“Oh, no, boy.” Wilson grinned and hefted his sack. “They’re a long ways from being done with Hendershot’s Grocery Warehouse.”