literature

Colors

/ Rowdy / 4 Comments

I.

Ezekiel —though he only thought of himself as “Zeke”— was a quiet and serious ten-year-old who was excited to learn he was allowed a free ride into the country once a day.  Zeke lived exactly one mile from his elementary school, which meant he was allowed to ride the school bus. He usually walked to school, but one rainy day he took the bus for the first time, and learned a secret: Though his house was the closest drop off from the school on the bus route, the driver drove the morning route one direction and the afternoon route in the opposite direction. This meant Zeke’s ride was either five minutes or nearly two hours.

The bus’s route made a large loop south of town, past the cotton and wheat fields, down into the canyon with its hardwood trees. In the fall, the flameleaf sumacs would be a riot of yellow, orange, and red against the dark green of the junipers on the slopes. In winter, the green of the winter wheat on the red dirt always fascinated Zeke. By the time spring came, he was always ready for the agarita, sand plum and cottonwood blossoms. Zeke spent the seasons watching a march of new colors as each plant bloomed, matured, and died. The late afternoon sun always felt good on his face through the window.

Halfway through the year, the bus driver would flip the route, which made Zeke’s house the first pickup in the morning, and Zeke would sometimes awake in the dark to be able to see the sunrise from the edge of the canyon. Some of the country he knew, remembering sitting next to his father on the bench seat of the blade as he maintained the county roads, at least before his father got fired for being drunk and unreliable. Some of the other country was new to Zeke, and he drank up the scenery like a man dying of thirst.

 He nearly got banned from the bus system when he decided to see a different bit of country by getting on a different bus. He planned on riding the full loop and then walking home from the bus barn. It was a pretty ride through country Zeke had not seen before, but it was the one route where the driver parked the bus at home, since he lived at the end of the route in the middle of the country. Zeke was surprised when the driver shut down the bus at a house in the middle of nowhere, as was the driver when he heard Zeke call from the back of the bus. The driver’s surprise quickly turned to anger as Zeke explained the situation, and the driver cursed not so under his breath all the way back to town.

The next day Zeke was called out of class to a meeting with the bus driver, bus barn supervisor, and Mr. Adams, the principal. Mr. Adams gestured for Zeke to sit down and began,
“Zeke, we couldn’t get ahold of your parents to be here. Do you know where they’re at?”

“No sir, but I guess my dad is at work, and my mom might be out mowing yards to help with bill money,” Zeke replied. Mr. Adams and the bus barn supervisor exchanged glances, and Mr. Adams continued,

“Well, I don’t guess we need them here for this anyway. Son, the bus system isn’t your personal tour guide service. Mr. Kemp had to spend expensive gas and his personal time to drive you back into town, and then all that time and gas to get back home to his own family. It wasn’t fair to him for you to decide to take a joy ride, and he’d like to see you kicked off the bus schedule since you live so close to school anyway.”

Zeke was panicked. He had already learned to not give the world tears when he could help it, but Zeke couldn’t stop the burning feeling coming into his eyes. He blinked a dozen times, swallowed, and sobbed, “Please, please don’t do that. I didn’t know the busses didn’t all go back to the barn. I just wanted to see the country. I like it out there. Please.”

Mr. Adams sighed, looked at his watch, and then to the other adults, “I don’t think we can kick him off the bus, based on the home situation. I’ll find something appropriate to settle this once I get ahold of his parents; y’all go on back to work while Zeke and I try to get his mom on the phone.”

After the others had left, Mr. Adams said to Zeke, “I don’t care if you take the long way home every day. I understand, I grew up out that way. I don’t even care if you take one of the other busses every now and then. I’ll fix it with the bus supervisor. But let the driver know before you get on, and don’t ever get on Mr. Kemp’s bus again, or we will ban you from the busses.

When the story made the rounds at school later in the day, a classmate called him stupid, poor, and lazy for wanting to sit on a bus all afternoon or get up so early when he could just walk home in a few minutes, and even more so for getting on the wrong bus.  Even if there had been something worth going home to, getting a free ride once a day into the country seemed too good to pass up.] 

There really was not much at home for Zeke to hurry for. A rundown trailer with holes in the floor and daylight between the windowsill and the wall of his room. Depending on the season, it was either cooler or warmer on the bus anyway.  When Zeke’s father was actually working, he would be gone until dark. If he had recently dragged up from a job, he would be at his desk in his “office.” The desk was simply a piece of old plywood laid across two surplus filing cabinets in the corner of the living room. There was a particle board divider to hide his father from most of the room. He would spend hours at the makeshift desk, watching a tiny television, or using a legal pad to dream into ink the life he wished he had instead of being a drunk disabled vet with a wife and kid he really didn’t have much interest in. When his father had company over, he would sit outside the “office” in Zeke’s mother’s chair, and tell his friends lies to continue dreaming the life he would rather have had. Once Zeke had found an old, ragged pronghorn shoulder mount laying by a dumpster and dragged it home. The next day, his father hung it on the living room wall in the rundown trailer. The next weekend he was telling his friends he killed it “years ago up in panhandle” and had finally brought it out of storage. Zeke indignantly piped up to tell them it was his, found fair and square, but before Zeke could say more than a word, his father ordered him out of the room to get everyone another beer.  Zeke’s mother might either be doing side jobs or in her bedroom, lost in her thoughts. Zeke was never really sure what those thoughts were, but they usually made his mom sad.

So, it didn’t really matter if Zeke got home at 3:30 or 5:30. No one really noticed. At least not most days.

II.

The fad at the time was game called thief. Zeke was never sure how it started, but if one student was going to borrow a piece of paper from another, he would say, “Hey, let me steal a piece of paper from you.” Later it became a series of pranks where one kid would steal another kid’s pencil and then later give it back. It was started by the cool kids, the popular kids, the kids whose families were slightly richer than the rest. Then one day in science class, Johnny Allen and Brett Farmer asked Zeke to try to steal Jennifer’s box of crayons. Jennifer was Johnny’s fraternal twin, and they never missed an opportunity to get something over on the other. Zeke was excited to finally be a part of something, and he eagerly agreed. Zeke watched Jennifer got up to go sharpen her pencil, and he carefully slid the crayon box out of her desk. The crayon box was Crayola brand. One of the big boxes with 120 crayons with the sharpener in the back. Colors like burnt sienna, shamrock, cornflower; it felt heavy in Zeke’s hands as he slipped it into his backpack next to his Ben Franklin 8 pack of dull colored crayons.

Zeke thought the plan was to later give Jennifer’s crayons to Johnny, but there was never an opportunity to hand them off. So it came to pass that at the end of the day, Zeke was sitting in his homeroom when the crayons still in his bag when the guidance counselor came in and whispered Mrs. Reagan’s ear. Mrs. Reagan stood up and said, “Okay, class, someone has stolen something, and we need to find out where it is. We’re going to go through your bags and then we’re going to search your lockers. After that, you’re free to go for the day.”

 Zeke panicked, and just knew they were talking about him. As they began searching the bags, Zeke was able to slip to his locker located on the far wall and slip the crayons into his locker. After they finished searching bags, they began on the lockers, and likewise, while the guidance counselor and Mrs. Reagan were busy with other lockers, he was able to slide the crayons out of the locker and into his bag. The teacher and guidance counselor were clearly stymied. They knew they’d find it in that room, but they released everybody, and Zeke pedaled his bike home scared and unsure what had just happened. It was supposed to be a game. He knew he had no business with those expensive crayons, and he knew he would never be able to explain things. So, Zeke dumped them in a wooded area behind his house before coming home. At home, his mother was waiting at the door.

“Zeke, let me see your bag.”

Zeke handed the bag over. He wondered if he had ever really been part of the prank, or if had been the subject of it as his mother searched through his bag and came up dry. She excused herself into the living room to make a phone call and told Zeke to go to his room.

 The next day, another fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Purslane called Zeke aside, and interviewed him,

“Zeke, I know you stole those crayons. And you’re going tell me where they are. I know you’re guilty, and you will not eat lunch in this school until I get those crayons.”

Even at ten, it wasn’t lost upon Zeke that Mrs. Purslane was Johnny and Jennifer’s aunt. He thought about trying to explain that it was just a game and that something went wrong, but he could tell Mrs. Purslane was not interested. So finally, he admitted he had stolen the crayons. He tried to explain what happened, and indeed, Mrs. Purslane was not interested in listening to him. More calls were made, and Zeke was released to go home to retrieve the crayons. Spring in Texas is hot, and that year was dry like most years. The crayons had melted and ruined in the sun. Zeke’s father, who couldn’t afford to buy crayons of that style for his own son, was forced to spend money on those crayons for somebody else’s kid. It also wasn’t lost on Zeke that though there was never money for the good school supplies, there was always money for the bar tab.

Zeke’s father was furious. He tore into Zeke with a belt screaming,

“You little thief, You dirty little thief!”

 Zeke tried to explain to his father, but again, the adults were all past the age of silly childhood games. And it wasn’t any surprise to anyone that a white trash poor kid would try to steal the best crayons from a member of one of the good families in town. It wasn’t even a surprise to the white trash’s father.

Zeke was given the punishment of staying after school each day until he filled ten five-gallon buckets full of rocks from the dry and dusty playground.


On the first day, Zeke began filling his bucket, but even at 10 years old, He could feel the injustice of things. While he knew he had stolen those crayons, he also knew that it was supposed to be just a game. He had never intended to keep them, but based on nothing but Johnny or Brett’s word, Zeke was convicted in the eyes of everyone. Zeke had never tasted this amount of unfairness before, and it was bitter his mouth. So, Zeke began to mill around the playground, kicking at rocks instead of picking them up. Finally at five in the afternoon, the principal, Mr. Adams, came out and saw Zeke had but part of one of ten buckets filled up.

“Zeke, you’re not going get out of this. We’ll continue as long as it takes. Come back tomorrow and you’ll start again.”

 This went on for the rest of the week, Zeke picking up a few rocks, and sitting out in the sun until it was time for the principal to go home. Finally, on the next Friday, after two weeks, Mr. Adams came out around half past four to where Zeke was sitting on the sidewalk and sat down next to Zeke. He eyed the greenish-blue buckle shaped bruise peeking out from the child’s shirt, over his kidney.

“You get that bruise paying for other kid’s crayons?”

“Sir?”

“Zeke, did your daddy give you that bruise for stealing those crayons?”
Zeke knew better than to go telling the truth, even if it was what he wanted to do,

“No sir, I was playing with my belt and accidently hit myself.”

Mr. Adams doubted Zeke had a belt buckle bigger than his fist, but all he could do was to sigh.

“Son, you owe us 10 buckets of rocks. I can’t get you out of this one You’ll pay us 10 buckets of rocks. Why won’t you pick ’em up?”

Zeke tried to explain what happened with the prank, and Mr. Adams actually listened. He thought about it for a while, chewing on the corner of his mustache.

“Zeke, that doesn’t change the fact you still owe us 10 buckets of rocks. I understand the unfairness of it all though. Come on, let’s you and I get these rocks picked up so you can get home.”

The rest of the afternoon, and nearly to dark, the principal of the school and Zeke collected ten buckets of rocks and dumped them in a pile by the fourth-grade door. It didn’t make it right, but it somewhat balanced Zeke’s first taste of the facts of a small town with a tiny bit of understanding. And he never forgot either.

Dry Country

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

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.

Homesteads

/ Rowdy / 1 Comment

I.
Ray’s little spread was a few miles from mine in that patch of sand shinnery country in Jones county. Like many Texans of his age, Ray grew up on a ranch, left to make a living, and then returned to the land for the lifestyle when he could afford it. He would graze a little wheat in the winter, cut and sell hay in the summer. His wife had a little kitchen garden and chickens in the yard. The last dry winter I ran goats, it was his hay that kept them fed. I remember leaning against my truck, talking about nothing with him while we watched the early December sunset through his post oaks. It was one of those small moments that brimmed with perfectness.

. . .

A couple years later, my goats were sold, I was busy juggling full time school and work schedules, and I hadn’t talked to Ray in months. Coming home from town, I came around a curve on FM 600 to find a car wheels up in the ditch. Mrs. Oliver, one of my coworkers from the prison, was kneeling a dozen yards from the wreck doing CPR on someone. As I ran up, I could see it was Ray’s wife. Ray was still hanging upside down in the car, his door bent, and seat belt jammed. Mrs. Oliver and I traded out between CPR and lying under the back of the car, trying to keep Ray calm through the shattered rear window. He kept asking about his wife and for a knife to cut himself free from the belt. We lied to him about not having a knife to keep him immobilized until help could arrive to cut the car open and stabilize his hurt neck. We also lied to him about his wife, saying we were working on her, and that she was alive. We were working on her, but after being ejected from the car when it rolled, there was no resistance when I pressed on her chest and her lips were cool on mine as I tried to breathe my life into her. We kept it up until the helicopter landed, but Mrs. Oliver and I both knew before we heard the news that night what the outcome would be.

. . .

Ray came home from the hospital a couple weeks later to an empty bed and a new home health care aid. He lived in the house for a while, but his fields remained empty, and I rarely saw him off the porch after that. Eventually he moved to live with his children in town, and a year or two later Ray was dead. His kids eventually sold Ray’s place.

II.

The plains are littered with abandoned houses from Abilene through to Saskatoon. Driving through the extant ruins of homesteads on the plains, you’ll find a falling down house, or a stone chimney surrounded by a few trees with a few deer or a covey of quail staring out from the kochia and Russian thistle that choke out all native vegetation. If you relax your eyes a little, you can see the memories of kids running through the now rusted and torn screen door, laundry on fallen down lines, and the gleaming red paint on the tractor that’s not moved since before you were born.

If your interests turn to that sort of thing, you begin trying to guess when each place was abandoned. Tiny satellite dishes from the 21st century or large satellite dishes from the 80s, large television antennae hanging on a roof, or even better, a radio aerial strung between the house and an outbuilding tell part of the story. Steel or wood windmills tell another part of it. Wind chargers that look like a car alternator with a fan attached really dial in the timeline. If you’re bold enough to stop and stand amid the memories and dreams of others, glancing at the discarded bottles and trash tell you even more of the story. Smooth bottom glass bottles that never rode a conveyor belt puts you back before the 1950s; no seams on the bottle lips pushes it back before the 1920s. Kicking old oil cans out of the ground lets you see printing protected from the sun. Looking out over the prairie while listening to the wind, you see the promise and allure of living in that beautiful country and hurt a little for the family that had to leave it.

If you can narrow down the “when,” you can hazard a broad guess to the “why” the homestead was abandoned. Some look livable, having not been too many years since the kids took part in the rural to urban drain, the parents or grandparents dying or retiring to town. Other homesteads are fading back into the prairie, the victim of the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s, the late 80s drought, the drought in the ‘50s, the drought and dust bowl of the 30s, the drought in the 1880s. Those are the just ones we can still see. Countless dugouts are long gone. We also know the Wichita and other tribes, even including Puebloans, farmed on the great plains, and it is thought droughts between 1200 – 1400 AD are what pushed the plains cultures to be the hunters we think of today. The bones of those native homesteads are out there too, they’re just more difficult to see.

The plains are covered with these reminders that is possible to work hard every day, pour your heart and self into a dream, make no large mistakes according to the thinking of your time, but still fail. The rain didn’t fall when it should have. The markets crashing a world away from your homestead, and your banker’s poor choice ruined both him and you. Cancer steals the best years of your life while the medical-insurance system steals your savings and your family’s future earnings. Swerving to avoid a truck in your lane kills your wife, lames you, and leaves you to die slowly from broken dreams. None of this is an excuse to not try, to not work hard, or to not strive for self-sufficiency. But, it should be a reminder to reach out instead of looking down when others are watching the weeds grow up through their dreams.

As a young man

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

I.

You rise in the dark just as your trailer house room is becoming cool enough to sleep, the hot summer night breeze feeling cool on your sweat. As you fry an egg for breakfast, the radio says it is 84 degrees. Ice in the water jug, a pickle in the lunch bucket against the heat cramps, and out to the truck to pick up Luis.

Later, sometime between false and real dawn, you lean against the bed of your truck, enjoying the cool of the metal, looking up at Orion in the sky. Luis and Anthony talk quietly about sports while you just listen, trying to soak up the coolness from the truck, storing it for the day. Eventually, as Orion fades away, you can begin to see the cotton plants in the field. Picking an eyeful of rows, you take your hoe and begin walking across the field. Near the field edges you hoe up Johnson grass, but as you move to the middle of the field it is mostly careless weed. You don’t know that in the coming years you’ll have latin names for carless weed. You only know the farmer is paying you a quarter under minimum wage to walk up and down his field to kill it. A half mile later you are on the other end of the field, and you move down to pick up another eyeful of rows to tend on your way back up the field. The more rows you can cover, the fewer miles walked. By now, the sun is fully over the horizon and the little bit of cool on the breeze is gone. The wind is picking up, but you know it will feel hot and coarse across the salt on your skin.

This is how you spend the first part of the day, leaving footprints in the soft red dirt as you trudge back and forth across the field. You spend the day hoeing weeds, composing stories in your head, thinking about all the jobs you could have while watching the heat mirages and dust devils in the distance. You wonder how far you would get if you took the term “chopping cotton” literally and spent the day hoeing up the cotton plants instead of the weeds. It would be slow going; would Luis and Anthony only notice what you were doing because you were falling behind? How many rows could you kill before the famer drove by and noticed? Sometime just before lunch, a small dust devil swirls through, snatching the large straw hat from Luis’ head and throws it down the field towards you. Your legs are heavy and tired as you jog to get it.

Eventually the first part of the day is over, the three of you load up in your truck, and it is back into town for a midday nap. You eat cold fried chicken for lunch, and since the trailer house is too hot for rest, you rinse off with a cold shower and lay in the shade on the back porch to read and nap. A couple hours spent in other worlds gets your mind right. You get up to go to Polly’s for a glass of tea before going back out to the field for the late afternoon bout of cotton chopping.

At the restaurant, you wave to your farmer who is sitting in the corner with his tea and cronies while you sit there with Luis, drinking sweet tea, waiting for the rest of the day to start. You don’t realize it yet, but you are always waiting for something. For the weather to cool down. For the weather to warm up. For the next construction job to start. For the time to be right to go to college. For there to be a cool place to sleep. For life to start. You’re dragged out of waiting to hear the man paying you four dollars an hour under the table tell his cronies that a good Christian man always pays his fair share. Last week you heard him say he couldn’t understand how a man could stand to be on welfare, and he just wouldn’t do it, and it was a shame his tax dollars went to it.

. . .

The air conditioner in your truck was broken a decade before it was yours, so on the way back to the barn, you hold your hand out feeling the wind while you look over the fields rushing by. You notice Luis has taken a piece of old shoestring and tied it to his hat to save it from the wind. In the field, the sun has canted towards the west, and it is more difficult to get started than it was in the morning. You stretch your legs while leaning against the hot truck bed, grab the file to refresh the edge on your hoe, and then it is back to walking up and down the rows until there isn’t enough light to see. You don’t mind the walking so much. You also live in your head for a lot of the time, so for hours at a time even the boredom doesn’t drag you down too much. But you’re still waiting for something while you imagine what the country looked like before the prairie was plowed into contour lines. You still want to throw down your hoe and go somewhere else just for the sake of the going. Just as you truly lose the light, you get back in the truck to take Luis home. Another day and another forty dollars. Tomorrow is Friday, so you’ll present yourself at the back door —never the front door— of the farmhouse for the $200 due you for the week.