December.

A long time ago I gave up construction and ranch work because I thought I needed to settle down with some steady work. Something without rain days or drought. So, following the advice of a friend, I signed up to be a prison guard. All you need to know about that job is that I spent a lot of time thinking about country I had seen and other country I hoped to see. I would spend my days off driving around looking at country, and wondering if a steady job was worth my soul.

I was climbing into the truck after getting gas when I saw a tall, thin man walking down the street with a decent, but heavily loaded external frame pack and a stuff sack in his arms. I offered him a ride, he threw all his stuff into the bed of the truck, and off we went.

“Where you headed?”

“I was trying to get downtown, there is a shelter I slept at last year.”

“Salvation Army?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Seems like the shelter is on one side of the road, and the store on the other. Last time they gave me a green ticket and I walked across the street and they gave me a coat. That was before I got out to Colorado City and found work on the cotton harvest. I’m hoping something like that will work out this year.”

“Where you coming from?”

“East Texas, Had been working for a feller out there off and on for 26 years now. Good guy to know, hard man to work for. I’ve done quit him four times now, and I think this’ll be the last. Rowdy, what do you do for a living?’

I told him about the prison and the dirt work and the ranch work, and how I order them in my mind. Seems like enough people jabbing at you with sharp sticks will make the easiest job feel like the worst. He told me about meeting another correctional officer out in Colorado City, and how he had ended up there last winter.
“Rowdy, I quit that ol’ boy last year and started out west thinking I could find something to do, but nothing turned up, and so I kept walking west. In the middle of all that walking I got ahold of a bottle of whiskey. I got thinking that if nothing came up for me, I’d just keep on ‘til I got to those badlands where I-10 and I-20 come together, then I’d sit down with my bottle and spend a few days figuring out what the hell to do. You know that country out that way?”

We talked about the Davis Mountains, and as always, I enjoyed the way “Balmorhea” felt on my tongue. He nodded his head when I mentioned it, and went on with his story,

“Well, it took me a little longer than that one bottle to get out there. This lady picked me up outside of Sweetwater; she was taking her son-in-law to work out there at that prison in Colorado City. She knew of a man that needed a hand, so I spent a while out there running a modulator and a boll buggy. Afterwards he threw me a little more work disking and ripping, and brush hogging. Helped his other hands build some fence, couple of tanks, and a windmill. It was good work, just not enough of it to go around for us all, especially for a sixty-year-old man in the middle of a bunch of young men with families to feed.
” I got out to them badlands this last spring. Finally figured that I’d knowed that ol’ boy in east Texas for a good long time now, and maybe I could stand working for him again, so headed back east. ” He paused for a block or so, “Dry country out there.”

“Dry country just about anywhere seems like.”

As we pulled up to the front of the Salvation Army building we shook hands and he spent a few moments asking directions for things around town, and what the country was like south of Abilene. Unlike most people I offer rides to, Sheldon never asked for money; Hell, he didn’t even ask for the ride.

He went inside, and I pulled back onto Butternut with the sour-sweet smell of his sweat still in the truck; wondering why I felt envious of a man who is going to sleep in a homeless shelter that night.