The Longest Road (28 page)

Buddy's teacher greeted him and Billy with a smile as if she'd been waiting for them and was glad they'd finally come. She was young with a merry laugh and soft brown eyes. Miss Larson, the slender, gray-eyed seventh-grade teacher, didn't act delighted to have two latecomers in her room that was already crowded full of one-armed desks, but she wasn't mean about it, either, and when the janitor brought their desks, she told him to put them next to each other.

“So long as you don't whisper or carry on,” she warned. “My father was a railroad man so I know all about new schools. If it turns out you're behind in some subjects, let me know so I can work with you after school.”

The playground hierarchy wasn't much different from Prairieville. Grades had recess at different times. Only younger children lined up for the slides and swings or bumped each other off the teeter-totters, or swung across the jungle-gym bars by their hands. When the eighth grade boys made for the ball diamond and the girls strolled off in pairs or collected in giggling bunches, Laurie and Catharine walked together—and what a difference
together
made.

“I just hated my last school,” Laurie said, burning to remember how new shoes, anklets, and the pretty dress Rosalie made hadn't saved her from scorn. “It was a one-room country school and everyone could see when you had to go to the privy. The girls were mean and snooty and the landlord's son—well, he said nasty things to me and the teacher didn't even seem to notice.”

Catharine bobbed her head. “Country schools are the worst, where the other kids know each other. Towns are better, especially close to an oil field where there's your own kind. You can kind of ignore the town kids.” She shrugged philosophically. “When I start new, I watch and try to find a girl I think I'd like, one who doesn't have a lot of friends. Then I just go up to her and say something nice about her hair or dress or whatever fits.”

“Isn't that hard?”

“Sure. But it's not as hard as hanging around by yourself.” Catharine sighed. “The worst part is when you really, really like someone and have to move. I've had friends I missed so much that I didn't try to find one at the next school.” Her face scrunched up and she blinked. “But after a while, a new girl would come in and if I could tell she was lonely, I couldn't help being nice. I guess it's better to care about people than not to, even if it hurts to lose them.”

“Oh, yes! There was a man we only knew one day, but it was a bad day. He sang us songs and made us laugh and gave me his harmonica. I never will forget him.”

“Was he good-looking?”

Startled, Laurie thought, trying to summon up Morrigan's dark face, his smiling mouth, the green-gray eyes. “I don't know. But if he was in a room of handsome men, he's the man you'd notice.”

The bell shrilled. “Darn it!” said Laurie. “I meant to get to the rest room before the bell rang. Now I'll have to wait till all the boys are through.”

Using the boys' rest room turned out to be her worst problem at Black Spring Elementary. As Catharine had said, it was easier to be new in a school attended by a shifting majority made up of oil-field children. Of the thirty-two children in Laurie's class, only twelve were from town or nearby farms and ranches. Among them, there was a definite pecking order from the biggest rancher's and doctor's daughters and the banker's son down to farm workers' kids and several from town whose mothers were raising them alone by taking in laundry or doing housework for the few families that could afford it.

The oil-field kids didn't fit the niches. They lived in shacks, tents, or boxcars and didn't own their homes or have more furniture or belongings than they could load in or onto a car or truck. Still, those dusty wayfaring mud- and oil-splashed vehicles included late-model Chryslers, Packards, Lincolns, and Studebakers as well as Pontiacs, Dodges, Chevys, and Fords. The children either bought lunch in the cafeteria or carried light-bread sandwiches, cookies, and fruit in their lunch pails or sacks. Only the poorest farm kids hid out with their cornbread and molasses or fried side meat. Laurie wished she could offer them some of her nice lunch but she knew from experience that they'd rather no one noticed what they were eating.

Some of the Sludge Town boys wore belt pants just like the richer local boys, and most of the girls' dresses were as nice as anyone's outside of those the doctor's wife bought for their daughter in fancy Dallas stores. It aggravated Laurie that she had to stay in overalls when, once Buddy had the clothes he needed and Way was outfitted, she could have afforded a few pretty dresses.

She made the best of it by picking out some beautiful plaid flannel shirts that felt soft as a kitten's ear. She also bought a warm wool jacket, green and brown tweed lined with gold satin. These purchases and things for cooking and housekeeping took all their savings except for what Buddy hoarded, but that was all right because Way earned enough cash for their daily needs and she and Buddy were singing and playing again, just on Friday and Saturday nights since Buddy had to study hard to catch up the third-grade work he'd missed and Laurie was helping Catharine with her lessons.

Because it was just down the street, they started in the Black Gold Cafe their first Friday night in town, but on Saturday night, W. S. Redwine came in and drank cup after cup of coffee, yellow eyes brooding, face like a squared rock. The oil-field men from drillers and producers to tank-builders and pipeline layers applauded each song, shouted for more, and stuffed bills in Laurie's and Buddy's pockets as they left, but Redwine's eyes pressed on Laurie till her mouth went dry and her lips and fingers turned awkward.

Nodding to Buddy, fixing her gaze on a dark man in stained khakis who reminded her a little bit of Morrigan, she launched into what had become their ending number. As Buddy's voice trailed away with “I've got to be drifting along,” the shouts and clapping literally shook the flimsy building.

Laurie smiled and bowed to the audience, though she was filled with unreasonable panic. “Let's get out of here,” she muttered to Buddy. Grabbing his arm, she tugged him toward the door, but the way was blocked with men who wanted to thank them for the music and give them some money.

Redwine didn't hurry. Some of the other men were taller but there was a weight about him that caused an uneasiness as if a mountain were moving. When Laurie and Buddy finally made it out the door, he loomed beside them.

“When you didn't show up to play at the Truck-Inn or Redwine House, I figured you needed your evenings to study. That was okay. But then I heard you played here last night. How come, Larry?”

His voice was hurt. That shook Laurie more than anger. He
had
brought them all the way from California and, according to his lights, he'd been good to them. “The Truck-Inn's on the other side of town and the hotel's a mile away.” It was a perfectly good excuse. Why did it sound lame?

“Clem can pick you up and drive you home.”

“That's a lot of trouble.”

“He's paid for trouble.”

Buddy said, “I don't think we'd make as much in the hotel, Mr. Redwine. These oil-field guys—they act like they're not happy till they've got rid of their money.”

“How much did you take in tonight?”

“We haven't counted.”

“Well, count it up. I'll guarantee you that much.”

“Guar—guaran—what?” asked Buddy.

“If my patrons don't give you whatever you got tonight, I'll make up the difference.”

There was no way to refuse. On the following Friday, Clem picked them up at six-thirty, right after supper, and brought them home around nine. Mr. Redwine had never needed to make up the guarantee of twenty-three dollars. An auburn-haired lady in a clinging black dress and shiny, high-heeled, patent leather sandals had been playing the piano in the Redwine House when Laurie and Buddy ventured in that first night. People were talking so loud above the lady's soft, dreamy music that Laurie thought it must be wretched to make music against so much noise. She was sure she and Buddy wouldn't be able to perform in such circumstances and was about to retreat when the woman brought down her hands in a crash that hushed the diners.

While they were momentarily quiet, she rose, swept out her skirt in a curtsy so exaggerated that it looked like mockery, and walked to the children with a graceful sway that drew more attention than her music had. Intensely blue eyes scanned the pair. Her eyelids were smudged with purple and tiny creases rayed from the corners of her eyes that had such long lashes they couldn't be real. She was a pretty, pretty lady and she smelled like roses. Laurie was glad when she smiled and said, “I'm Marilys and you're Larry and Buddy.”

Standing behind them, a manicured hand resting on a shoulder of each, Marilys spoke into the lull her crescendo had demanded. “Ladies and gentlemen! Thanks for your kind attention. The management of the Redwine House is honored to present Buddy and Larry Field in their first professional engagement! Years from now, you can say you heard them at the beginning. Most of their songs weren't written by a single person but were passed around and added to and changed—they grew from this country. Here they are—The Field Brothers!”

More warmhearted clapping than you'd have expected from such a well-dressed, well-fed bunch. As at the Black Gold Cafe, there were many more men than women. The women at Black Gold were the wives of the oil-field workers, or maybe not their wives, and the life had aged them, faded and dried their hair and skin, left them fat or scrawny.

These women were different. Their hair was carefully bobbed or waved, their complexions looked unnaturally fair and rosy, their clothes must come from Dallas at least, and jewels glittered from throats, wrists, ears, and fingers. Quite a few of the men wore rings or tie clasps that sparkled against their dark suits but others wore the required coats over khakis that added the smell of oil and sweat and maleness to the ladies' perfume.

At the back of the room, shadowed by their distance from the gleaming crystal-pendanted chandelier, three nicely dressed but unspectacular couples shared a table. The men's faces were baked a few shades darker than their women's, and even in the dim light, their eyes wrinkled at the edges as if staring through sun at a distant range. By chance, the eyes of the five people Laurie could see were varied shades of the prairie sky—mist gray, dark gray, smoky blue, light blue, and a color in between.

Ranch folks. Hanging on through the oil boom, maybe surviving from royalties they got when it was pumped from their land. The ones on this land before them, wandering Comanches, had long been banished. According to Morrigan, most of them ranched or farmed in southwestern Oklahoma—also part of their once vast nomadic domain that stretched from northern Kansas to Mexico, where they had raided for decades in the autumn at the time fearfully known to Mexicans as the Comanche Moon.

Laurie didn't know any songs of the Comanches but a tune came to her, of wind soughing through the rain-freshened September grass, of rolling plains with purple mountains crouched on the horizon, of cantering horses with wind bannering their manes and tails. Laurie heard women and children laughing, smelled their cook fires, heard a lover playing on his flute to his maiden. They passed with immense herds of buffalo beyond her sight, passed with the waving bluestem and grama and rose-rippling buffalo grass.

She played that song, a wild, lonely wind song of fading hoofbeats, and then, though it wasn't an Indian song but was at least about them, she played the start of “Pretty Redwing” and Buddy cleared his throat, fixed his eyes on her, and sang.

“That was for the Comanches,” she said when the clapping subsided. “Now for the cowboys.”

Some of the ranchers joined in on the choruses of “Old Chisholm Trail.” “Streets of Laredo,” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Laurie told how Gail Gardner had written “Sierry Petes” on a train bound for Washington during the Great War. It was a new song, apparently, to these folks, but they chuckled and cheered the devil's discomfiture.

Redwine came in and took a small table in the back. Laurie felt her spine ridging like a cat's arched back but she didn't change the program. She moved to the songs she and Buddy knew best, songs that gave voice to what had happened to them, to Daddy, the Halsells, and Way and millions all over the Dust Bowl. These diners in the Redwine House might not like to hear them and Redwine would probably demand that she play popular songs like “The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round” or “Beer Barrel Polka.” She'd just tell him if she couldn't play what she wanted to in his hotel, she'd go back to the Black Gold.

“A young musician named Woody Guthrie was living north of Amarillo when that worst dust storm hit last April,” she said. Her voice stuck in her throat but she thought about Mama and Daddy and Morrigan and she spoke strong. “Woody wrote this song, ‘Dust Bowl Disaster' about it. I learned it and some of the others you'll hear from Johnny Morrigan.”

No one left, in fact no one left all evening except reluctantly when folks were waiting at the door for a table. As the diners passed Laurie and Buddy, they smiled and nodded thanks. There was a crystal bowl on the piano and it gradually filled with crisp or crumpled bills.

When Laurie and Buddy got tired, Marilys played while they slipped out in the hall and savored the fizzy ginger ale the waitress brought them.

“Marilys plays better than anyone we've heard on the radio,” Laurie said, scowling as the buzz of voices and laughter blurred the music. “It makes me mad that those people don't listen to her.”

“Maybe she just sort of comes with their dinners,” Buddy ventured.

Laurie snorted. “They listened to us.”

“We're new. Maybe when they've heard us a few times, they won't pay us any better attention.”