commented without looking around at the woman. ?Sure looks like a strange one all right.?
The woman smiled, then went on with her own version. ?Son of one of ow-ah so-called doctors of divinity,? she said. ?Over at Vand-a-bilt School uh Divinity. Name of Bert Poole. The boy. And he?s slightly off. Slightly
Says Mayor Horn has sold out his people, now isn?t that the most ridiculous ? Sold out to whom, I?d like to know? ??
Thomas Berryman shrugged his shoulders. He started to walk off with
and a few schedules rolled up in his hand.
?Oh, I thank you for these,? he smiled and waved back like Tom the Baker. ?Very good work here. Wish you lots of luck, too.?
Claude, Texas, June 29, 30
Retired circuit judge Tom Berryman?s house is twenty-one ramshackle rooms on the road to Amarillo, Texas.
It?s a pink stucco house with green tile. Surrounded by unkempt hedgerows gleaming with large yellow roses, it sits lonely at the center of fifty thousand acres. There?s a swimming pool, but it?s deep in weeds, and looks more like a ruined garden than a pool.
The whole area is ugly, almost supernaturally ugly and sad.
In need of rest, however?at least a day?s good rest; in need of a Mexican visa in the name of William Keresty, Thomas Berryman went to Texas. He took a Braniff jet, and then, because he?d sometimes fantasized the scene, he rented a limousine and drove home in the twenty-two foot Lincoln.
Since his 1963 stroke in Austin, old Tom Berryman had been confined to a wheelchair. Each morning, Sergeant Ames would push him out among the twisted vines and monstrous sunflowers of his garden. There, the retired Texas Ranger would talk and read, and the wasted judge would only occasionally nod or open his puffy mouth to smile or curse. More often than not he?d just think about dying in the military hospital in Austin.
When old Tom Berryman got especially tired, his head would hang back as if he was finally dead. So it was that Young Tom popped in on him completely out of the blue (that blue being the high Texas sky). Young Tom was carrying about thirty shiny magazines that the old man knew must be for him.
As Berryman came up from the garages, he was struck with the arresting thought that his father was a stone on wheels; a two-wheeled boulder; a rolling tombstone. The old man was situated in the garden, and Sergeant Ames was sporadically putting a Lucky Strike down into his mouth.
Berryman passed beside a bawling cow in the garden. Slapped at its big swinging tail. Wondered if Ames ever struck out at his father. Struck out at the very idea of the old judge reduced to such wreckage.
Judge Berryman brightened immediately as his son appeared in an upside-down scene of pear trees and sunflowers and sky. Ames was so excited he spilled lemonade on his trousers.
?Lo Thomas,? his father managed with great effort. But he was up at attention, his hands were fluttering, and he was smiling. For some reason, decoration perhaps, Sergeant Ames had allowed a Wild Bill Hickok mustache to grow around his father?s lip. It was stiff and dead-looking.
?I brought the
and these books for Bob to read to you,? Berryman spoke very slowly.
Then he dipped down and hugged the old man, let him feel the strength and life in his arms. The judge?s shirt smelled punky, like babies? clothes.
Young Tom rose and fiddled around with the paper. ?So what do you think of Johnny Connally?? He avoided his father?s eyes.
?Boy?s doing al-right, Tom.? The judge grinned wider and wider, even pausing in the slow speech. ?Al-right for himself, I?d say.?
Neglected for the moment, the old ranger had poured everyone iced-tea glasses of lemonade. ?Hey Tom, watch this,? he said with a boy?s grin. And to prove that he was fit as ever (Berryman later guessed), the old man swooped up a garden toad and ate it.
After he and Sergeant Ames had spoon-fed his father an imprudent but satisfying dinner of frijoles and red peppers, and after the old man had won a bid for some B & B before bed, Berryman took the limousine out on Ranch Road 3.
Mesmerized behind the wheel, he just let the unmended fences, and the loose ponies and cows, work on his mind. He let the mesquite and prickly pear, and the pearl-white pools of alkaline water do their dirty work.
Inside the dust bowl of a little desert valley, Thomas Berryman eased down barefoot on the Lincoln?s accelerator. Warm air rushed in through all the windows. Texarkana roadmaps whipped around the back windowsill. The striped red line of the speedometer moved over 100 and a safety device buzzed. The radio blared. Merle Haggard, then Tammy Wynette, then Ferlin Husky, all three plaintive and usual. But the limousine, with its speedometer marked for 120, would run no faster than 101.
Driving that way, stuck at 101, Berryman remembered being stuck at 84 in a black Ford pickup. Running through irrigation ditches. Running over bushes head-on. Missing a cow, and soft, instant death. Killing a chicken.
He remembered Ben Toy drinking warm beer and singing corny Mexican love songs. And coyote balls hanging from the Ford?s rearview mirror. And snuggling up with girlfriends and watching bullbats swoop over sad shallow ponds.
Country living was a turned crock of shit, he thought.
Over a bumpy half-mile stretch, he pulled the big car off the dirt road. He got out and went around to the trunk for his rifle. He?d wrapped it in a horse blanket. It, too, smelled of dung.
He set the gun on the car roof, then sat on the fender fishing shells out of his pockets. These too he set on the roof. He slowly loaded the rifle as a peach-colored sun half-blinded him and made him think of sunstroke. The word, ?sunstroke.?
