once more and the main sounds were of the motor’s puttering and the wind flapping through the windows.
We passed through Grandfalls, loud and overcrowded and the dirtiest town any of us had ever seen—until we got to Crane, about thirty miles from Odessa. The streets of Crane were so clogged with cars and transport trucks and mule-drawn wagons we could have crossed the town faster on foot. The clamor made you wince—klaxons blatting, motors racing, transport trucks unloading pipe and heavy equipment with great iron crashings, men communicating in shouts and hollers, music blaring from radios at full volume. Swarms of dreamers chasing after their share of oil money in another town too small to shelter them all. We’d seen a few tent camps on the outskirts of Grandfalls—ragtowns, the boomers called them—but Crane looked like a vast republic of ragtowns and shantyvilles raised from every kind of scrap. Men with pockets crammed with money were living in their trucks, their cars, whole families were residing in packing crates, men bedding in sections of pipe. Privies everywhere, their effluvia thickening the general stench.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” I yelled, “the noise or the stink!”
“I know it!” Buck hollered. Then took a deep breath and added, “But you catch that one sweet smell mixed in there with all them stinks?”
“
“You don’t detect that aroma?” Russell said. He inhaled more deeply of the foul air. “Money, son. Money.”
The main street was chockablock with stores selling everything from tools to tents to workclothes, with groceries and drugstores and cafes, hotels and boardinghouses and fleabag flops, moviehouses, barbershops, bathhouses, pool halls and dime-a-dance joints. Every place had a sign proclaiming it was open twenty-four hours a day. A line of people stood at a truck that was selling water at a dollar a gallon.
“Whoo!” Buck said. “Ain’t this something? I bet you there’s a dozen high-stakes games going on this minute all over this town.”
“They say this Crane is nice as a church compared to some of the other boomtowns out here,” Russell said. “But godawmighty, looks like mostly clip joints to me.”
“Remember that dime-a-dance place we went to in East Texas a coupla months back?” Buck said. “Talk about clip joints.”
“Was it ever,” Russell said. “Some dances didn’t last even a minute before the band switched to a different number and you had to give the girl another ticket or get off the floor. You could go through a dollar’s worth of dance tickets in less than ten minutes.”
“Bunch of damn thieves,” Buck said.
“They had a preacher on about every corner,” Russell said, “hustling for handouts and threatening you with hellfire if you didn’t pony up—like that one there!”
He pointed to a man in black standing on a wooden crate and shaking a Bible above his head as he harangued passersby, few of whom even glanced at him. There was a large bucket at his feet, and painted on it was “$ for Jesus.”
“Dollars for himself, more like it,” Buck said. “I wouldn’t reckon Jesus needs anybody to hustle money for him.”
Cars were parked two deep along the street. We saw an unattended car being pushed out of the way so the car it was blocking against the curb could get out—and then the pushed car was abandoned in the street, one more obstacle for the tangle of traffic to negotiate.
Crane was only a few blocks long but it took us almost an hour to get through it. Finally we were clear of the town and out past the traffic of its northern oil fields and breezing through the open country toward Odessa.
“Well, like the monkey said when he got his tail caught in the lawn mower,” Buck said, “it won’t be long now.”
Bubber had left word with the desk man of the Bigsby that he’d be at Earl’s Cafe on 1st Street if anybody came looking for him, so that’s where we went. The cafe was large and jammed with oil workers, every booth and table full, every counter stool occupied. Raucous with loud conversation and laughter, the clash of dishware, music from a radio turned up high. Bubber wasn’t in sight, so Buck asked one of the harried waitresses if she knew him and where he might be. The waitress narrowed her eyes and wanted to know who was asking. Buck told her and she said to hold on a minute, then disappeared through a hallway door flanking the entrance to the kitchen. She came back shortly and said to go all the way down the hall and tell the fella sitting by a door there who we were.
We did—and the man let us into a speakeasy with tables and chairs, a bar running the length of the back wall. Even at this early-afternoon hour the place was loud and nearly packed. The dance floor full of couples swaying to “The Birth of the Blues” coming out of a radio behind the bar.
“Well, godawmighty damn, lookee who’s here!” A dark-bearded man heaved his large bulk off a bar stool and came toward us with a wide smile and arms outstretched. He gave Buck and Russell in turn a big hug and they all cursed each other amiably and smacked each other’s backs.
Buck introduced me and Bubber Vicente said, “Your
The man he’d been sitting with was his partner, Earl Cue, a good name for him, so skinny he looked like a pool stick with a pompadour. He had the most badly pitted face I’d ever seen. “It’s like his face caught fire and somebody put it out with an ice pick” is how Russell later described it. But he was friendly enough and set us up with drinks at a corner table against the back wall.
They caught each other up a little on their doings since they’d last been together in New Orleans. We were eager to hear about the jobs Bubber had for us, but he’d got onto the subject of Mona Holiday, whom he’d met a few weeks ago and who at first sight had become the love of his life. She was beautiful, she was smart, she had a great sense of humor, she had tits round and sweet as cantaloupes. Plus, she had a sharp head for business and ran one of the most profitable whorehouses in West Texas.
“Trouble is,” Bubber said, “her cathouse is in Blackpatch, about sixty-five miles southways. If it wasn’t for going to see her once or twice a week, I wouldn’t be caught dead in that place. Wait’ll you get a load of it—one of the jobs I got you boys is in Blackpatch. It’s way the hell in nowhere. But that’s why Mona’s house does so good, see? Them boys in Blackpatch don’t have much choice about where to get laid.”
But she also did so well, he said, because the Wildcat Dance Club—a tidy two-story smack in the center of town—was one of the cleanest houses in Texas. She had her girls examined once a week by a doctor who kept an office in an upstairs room of the place. If a girl didn’t pass muster, out she went. “Not a dirtyleg in the house,” Bubber said, his voice proud. “Man who gets laid at Mona’s can rest assured he won’t pick up a nail.”
Despite Mona’s prosperity in Blackpatch, he had been trying to talk her into moving her business to Odessa. It wasn’t only that he wanted her living closer to him, but that he believed Blackpatch was just too damn dangerous a place to live. It had been called Copper Hill way back when there was a mine there, though the hill it was named for wasn’t but forty feet high. The mine had pretty soon played out, however, and it wasn’t till about five years ago that a wildcatter tried his luck there and struck it rich. Then three years ago—before Mona got there and when the place still had fewer than a dozen buildings and but a single street—one of the gas wells blew up and the whole town caught on fire. When it was all over, fifty-one of the 135 souls who’d lived there were dead and dozens of the survivors had been badly burned. There hadn’t been anything left of the town of Copper Hill but a bare black patch of sand. But there was still a hell of a lot of oil under that hill, and not a month after the fire they struck a new gusher. A new town sprang up on the sludgy ashes of the old one and they called it Blackpatch.
“Every oil town stinks,” Bubber said, “but Blackpatch stinks the worst of them. They say it’s because it’s not only got all the usual stinks of an oil patch, it’s got the stink of all them people who got burnt into the ground. Now they got even more wells on the hill
“Sounds like love, all right,” Buck said, and Russell said he’d drink to that, and everybody laughed.
