Texaco, Inc. I dropped the car into low, pushed slowly down on the accelerator, and I felt all three hundred fifty horses throb up smoothly through the bottom of my boot. The gravel pinged under the fenders, and I rumbled over the cattle guard onto the main road, then pushed the accelerator to the floor and listened to the tires whine over the soft tar surfacing. My white fences whipped by the windows, clicking like broken sticks against the corner of my eye, and I steered with three fingers at ninety miles an hour around the chuckholes and depressions, biting gently down on my cigar and watching the shadows on the fields race with me toward San Antonio and Houston. Several times when drunk I had driven one hundred and twenty miles an hour at night over the same road, hillbilly and gospel music from Del Rio thundering out of the radio, and the next morning I would sweat through my whiskey hangovers and see yellow flashes of light in my mind, the Cadillac rolling over in the field, the white fence gaping among the shattered boards, and I would be inside, bleeding blackly between the steering wheel and the crushed roof.
But sober I drove with magic in my hands, an air-cooled omnipotence encircling me as the road sucked under the long frame of my automobile.
As I neared Yoakum I unscrewed the cap of my flask and took a drink. The white ranch houses and the barns, the cattle and horses in the fields, the acres of cotton, and the solitary oak trees rolled by me. The sun reflected in a white flash off the hood of the car, and ahead the road seemed to swim in the heat. A thin breeze had started to blow, and dust devils spun along the dry edge of the cornfields. On the top of a slope the blades of a windmill turned into the breeze and began spinning rapidly; then the water sluiced out in a long white spray into the trough. At the edge of town I passed the rows of Negro and Mexican shacks, all alike even though some of them were built decades apart, all weathered gray, the porches collapsing, tar paper nailed in uneven shapes on the roofs, the dirt yards littered with broken toys, tangled wire, dirty children, plastic Clorox bottles, and garbage set out to rot in boxes. In the back, old cars with rusted engines and spiderwebbed windows sat among the weeds, faded overalls and denim shirts hung on the wash lines, and the scrub brush that grew in the gravel along the railroad bed was streaked black by passing locomotives.
I sipped again from the flask and put it in the glove compartment. It was Saturday, and Yoakum was crowded with ranchers and farmers, women in cotton-print dresses, Mexican and Negro field workers, pickup trucks and battered cars, and young boys on the corner in lacquered straw hats and starched blue jeans that were as stiff as cardboard. On Main Street the old high sidewalks had iron tethering rings set in them, and the wood colonnade, built in 1900, extended over the walk from the brick storefronts. Old men in white shirts with clip-on bow ties sat in the shade, spitting tobacco juice on the concrete and looking out at the traffic with their narrow, sunburned faces. At the end of the street was the stucco-and-log jail where my grandfather had locked up Wes Hardin. It was set back in a lot filled with weeds, and the roof and one of the walls had caved in. The broken timbers and powdered stone lay in a heap on the floor, and kids had smashed beer bottles against the bars and had left used contraceptives in the corners. But on one wall you could still read the worn inscription that an inmate had scratched there with a nail in 1880:
I had always wondered if Hack ever worried about Hardin breaking out of prison, or about Hardin’s relatives catching him in the back with a shotgun. But evidently he was never afraid of anything, because when Hardin was released from prison after fourteen years Hack sent him a telegram that read:
Through law school at Baylor I used one of Hack’s.44 Colts as a paperweight. The bluing had worn off the metal, and the mahogany grips were cracked, but the spring and hammer still worked and the heavy cylinder would rotate properly in place when I cocked it. After I started law practice with my brother in Austin, I hung the pistol on my office wall next to a 1925 picture of Hack as an old man, with my father in a white straw hat. I had my law degree and Phi Beta Kappa certificate framed in glass on the wall also; but the gun and Hack’s creased face and long white bobbed hair dominated the office.
It was almost two o’clock and over one hundred degrees when I reached San Antonio. The skyline was rigid in the heat, and on the hills above the city I could see the white stucco homes and red-tiled roofs of the rich with their terraced gardens and mimosa trees. I turned into the Mexican district and drove through blocks of secondhand clothing stores, Baptist missions, finance companies, and pawnshops. Slender pachucos in pegged slacks and maroon shirts buttoned at the cuff, with oiled hair combed back in ducktails, leaned idly against the front of pool halls and wino bars.
I pulled into the Mission Motel, a dirty white building constructed to look like the Alamo. There were arches and small bell towers along an outer wall that faced the street. Cracked earthen jars, containing dead plants, stood in an imitation courtyard in front of the office. The bricks in the courtyard had settled from the rains and Johnson grass grew between the cracks. I took a room that I’d had before, a plaster-of-Paris box with a double bed (an electric, coin-operated vibrating machine built in), a threadworn carpet, walls painted canvas yellow, and a bucket of ice and two thick restaurant glasses placed on the dresser. I cut the seal on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured a glass half full over ice. I sat on the edge of the bed, lit a cigar, and drank the whiskey slowly for five minutes. The red curtains were pulled across the window, but I could still see the hot circle of the sun in the sky. I finished the glass and had another. Then I felt it begin to take me. I had always liked to drink, and I’d found that during the drinking process the best feeling came right before you knew you were drunk, that lucid moment of control and perception when all the doors in your mind spring open and the mysteries suddenly reduce themselves to a simple equation.
I dialed an unlisted number given to me three years ago by R. C. Richardson, a Dallas oilman whom I’d kept out of prison after he defrauded the government of fifty thousand dollars on a farm subsidy. He had written out a ten-thousand-dollar check on my office desk, his huge stomach hanging over his cowboy belt, and handed me his business card with the number penciled on the back.
“I don’t know if lawyers like Mexican chili, but you won’t find none better than this,” he said.
He was crude, but he was right in that it was one of the best call-girl services in Texas — expensive, select, and professional. I always felt that the money and organization must have come from the Mafia in Galveston, because none of the girls or the woman who answered the phone seemed to be afraid that the client might be a cop.
The woman on the phone sounded like a voice from an answering service. There was no inflection, accent, or tonal quality that you could identify with a region or with anyone whom you had ever met. I used to imagine what she might have looked like. She must have answered calls from hundreds of men in motel rooms and empty houses, their voices nervous, slightly drunk, hoarse with embarrassment and passion, cautious in fear of rejection. I wondered if those countless confessions of need and inadequacy had given her a devil’s insight into the respectable world, or if she was merely a mindless drone. I couldn’t identify her with the image of a fat, bleached madam with glass rings on her fingers, who would be altogether too human for the voice over the phone. Finally, I had come to think of her as a hard, asexual spinster, thin and colorless, who must have developed a quiet and cynical sense of power in her ability to manipulate the sex lives of others without any involvement on her part.
As always she was discreet and subtly indirect in asking me what type of girl I wanted and for what services. And as always I made a point of leaving my motel registration name — R. C. Richardson.
I hung up the phone and poured another whiskey over ice. Thirty minutes later the girl arrived in a taxi. She was Mexican, tall, well dressed in expensive clothes, and she had a delicate quality to her carriage. Her black hair was combed over her shoulders, and her white complexion would have been perfect except for two small pits in one cheek. She had high breasts and shoulders, and her legs were well formed against her tight skirt. She smiled at me and I saw that one of her back teeth was missing.
“You want a whiskey and water?” I said.
“It’s too hot now. I’m not supposed to drink in the afternoon, anyway,” she said. She sat in a chair, took a cigarette from her purse, and lit it.
“Have one just the same.” I poured a shot into a second glass.
“It won’t make me do anything extra for you, Mr. Richardson.”
“People in Dallas call me R.C. You can use my name in the Petroleum Club and it’s better than a Diners card.”
“I don’t think you’ll get your money’s worth if you drink much more,” she said.
“Watch. I’m a real gunfighter when I get loaded.”
I stood up and took off my shirt and tie. The whiskey had started to hum in my head.
