South of Heaven Read online

  We went down to the jungle and passed the word. By dusk about fifty men were piled on the big flatbed truck, sitting around its edges with their legs hanging off. Higby had hired on the cook from the Greek’s restaurant, and he rode in the back of the pickup with Four Trey and me, sitting on his working-stiff’s bindle and carrying his knives and cleavers in a dish towel.

  As we drove out of town ahead of the truck, I looked around for Carol. But there was no sign of her or her homemade house-car. And I was relieved in a way and sort of sad in another. Sorry that I wouldn’t ever be seeing her again. I’d never had much to do with girls—nothing at all, to tell the truth. It seemed a shame to be losing one, the only one I could have cared about, before I ever got to know her.

  We were about a mile from camp when the truck began to honk wildly, flashing its lights. Four Trey banged on the roof of the pickup and shouted to Higby. Without slacking speed, the pickup wheeled around on the prairie, and went back to where the truck had stopped.

  A man had been killed. He had been sitting near the rear of the flatbed, and apparently a wheel had caught his dangling feet, snatching him from the truck and slamming him down against the rocky earth.

  Higby glanced at the body; looked quickly away with a sadly bitter curse. “Dammit to hell, anyway. Anyone know the poor devil?”

  Someone said the man’s name was Bones, but someone else said it wasn’t his real name. He was just called that because he was so thin. No one knew who he was. On a pipeline hardly anyone ever knew who anyone else was. Pipeliners didn’t have names or homes or families.

  Higby stooped down and went through the dead man’s pockets as well as he could, under the circumstances. There was nothing in them except some matches and a practically empty sack of Bull Durham. No wallet, no letters. No Social Security card, naturally, since this was before the days of Social Security.

  Higby straightened, rubbing his hands against his trousers. He turned to the timekeeper, a prissy owlish-looking guy with gold-rimmed spectacles. His name was Depew, and he wore a hairline moustache and store-new khakis.

  “I’ll phone a report into Matacora tomorrow,” Higby told him. “You can put that in your job log. Meanwhile, we’ll have to get him buried.”

  Depew frowned importantly, pursing his lips. “We can’t assume any funeral expenses, Higby. Riding on the truck was his own choice. He wouldn’t have been an employee until he reached camp.”

  Higby stared at him wonderingly. “Why, you silly son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You stupid snotnosed bastard!” His voice was soft but it cut like a whip. “Do you know what the temperature was today? Do you know how far it is to the nearest undertaker? To the nearest public cemetery? To the nearest place where anyone gives a good goddam what happens to the body of a poor devil like this? DO YOU? WELL DO YOU, YOU STINKING LITTLE SHITBIRD?”

  He yelled out the last part, almost blasting the timekeeper from his feet. Depew turned white and put a trembling hand to his mouth. He could hardly believe what was happening, I imagine. After all, he was an important man—not just a timekeeper but the timekeeper—the chief representative of the banks.

  “N-now…now, really, Higby,” he stammered. “I resent.…”

  “Screw your resentment!” Higby snapped. “And put a mister in front of my name, hereafter! Make it loud and clear, get me?” He turned away from Depew, glanced around the circle of men until his eyes fell on us. “Four Trey, I can’t order you to, but.…”

  “You don’t have to,” Four Trey said. “Just give us an hour and some mucksticks, and Tommy and I’ll bury him.”

  “Good”—Higby’s smile warmed us. “I’ll remember it. But won’t you need some dyna?”

  Four Trey said we wouldn’t; we’d just look around until we found soft dirt. Higby nodded approvingly, and we got picks and shovels from the pickup. Then everyone loaded up again and drove away, leaving Four Trey and me with the body.

  We poked around with the picks for a few minutes until we found a patch of rock-free prairie. Inside of a half hour we had buried Bones or whatever his name was, mounding over the grave with rock to keep out the varmints.

  Four Trey leaned on his pick, resting, looking down thoughtfully at the grave, then raising his eyes to me.

  “Well, Tommy. Can you think of anything appropriate to the occasion? A few nice words for a guy who probably never heard any?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “I heard some words said over a guy out in the Panhandle, but I can’t say they were real nice.”

  “Let’s see.”

  “Well, all right,” I said. “Here it is:”

  Save your breath, and hold your water.

  He’s only gone where all of us gotter.

  Four Trey raised his brows at me. He said that he could see what I meant—whatever that meant.

  We moved away from the grave, lighting up cigarettes. The soughing wind turned cool, and the moon climbed up out of a distant hedge of Spanish bayonets, the giant cacti, and down in the Pecos bottoms a bobcat screamed in pointless fury. Far far away, yet clearly visible in the silvery moonlight, two wolves trotted up over a rise in the prairie, haunched down side by side and howled tragic complaints to the heavens.

  A little shiver ran up my spine. Four Trey stomped out his cigarette butt, idly asking me how many boes I’d run into out here that I knew.

  I said I thought I knew most of the six hundred. “I don’t mean I know them well, but I’ve probably run into them on other jobs.”

  “Just probably, right? You’d have to talk to them a while, get close to them, before you were sure.”

  “Well, yeah, sure,” I said. “Boes look a lot alike after they’ve jungled up for a while. When they get bearded out, and their clothes get ragged and dirty, it’s pretty hard to tell one from another.”

  “Yes,” Four Trey said, “yes, it is, Tommy. In other words, you might not recognize a man until you sat down next to him—on a flatbed truck, shall we say?”

  “Huh?” I said. “Are you saying that…that…?”

  “Mmm, no,” Four Trey hesitated. “I don’t think I’d go so far as to say it. Merely to point out the possibility that what appeared to be an accident wasn’t. Because those flatbeds were designed to carry men, and I just don’t see how a man could catch his foot in the wheel.”

  I said I thought I could see how. If the truck went down in a rut on one side, and if the guy slid out to the edge, and if they hit a bad jolt—all at the same time, kind of. “That’s a lot of ifs,” I admitted. “But, well, why would anyone want to kill a bo like Bones?”

  “The answer is in your question, Tommy. What was Bones like? Who was he? What was his background?” Four Trey shook his head. “Offhand, however, I’d say he was killed because he recognized someone who couldn’t afford to be recognized. If he was killed, that is, and I’m by no means sure that he was.”

  I laughed a trifle nervously. “You sounded pretty sure a moment ago. Maybe you should tell Higby what you suspect.”

  Four Trey said firmly that he guessed he maybe shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t either. “I’ll tell you about Frank Higby,” he went on. “Frank’s got a line to build. He has to eat line, sleep line, think line, and he can’t be bothered with anything else. He wouldn’t cover up a murder, of course, but he sure as hell wouldn’t go looking for one either. And he wouldn’t be exactly fond of a guy who did it for him.”

  I nodded and said I supposed he was right, but he made Higby sound pretty callous. Four Trey yawned and said that life was a pretty callous proposition when you got right down to it. The callousness was more subtle on the upper levels; you knifed a man by cutting off his credit or pulling a slick double-cross. Down in the dirt where we were, you simply knifed him.

  He lighted another cigarette, slid a glance at me in the glow of the match. His expression changed, and he laughed softly, giving me an amiable nudge in the ribs.

  “Aah, for God’s sake, Tommy. I haven’t got you upset, have I?”

  �
��Oh, no, of course not,” I said. “What the hell anyway?”

  “What the hell?” he agreed. “We were tired and hungry and thirsty and we had some time to kill. So I’ve been tossing the bull around. I was just talking, understand? I didn’t mean anything by it, and you aren’t to think anything of it.”

  “Sure,” I said, relieved. “You really think it was an accident, then?”

  “Didn’t I just say so?” he said.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. But, of course, he hadn’t said that at all.

  7

  A long while passed, and no one came to pick us up. Finally, we gathered up our tools and started into camp on foot. But we hadn’t gone very far before Higby came roaring up the trail in the pickup. He was late because dust had clogged the car’s carburetor—he blamed it on Depew’s driving. He looked more tired than we felt as we rode into the camp, now lit up like a carnival with lanterns.

  Higby took us to the main high-pressure tent, the only one with a floor and screens, and had us marked down for three hours’ work. We got our badges at the same time, then went over to one of the long tables sitting out on the prairie—a table made out of planks laid on sawhorses—and washed with river water and laundry soap.

  Everyone else had been fed sometime before. The cook and his seconds and flunkeys were now busy cleaning up and doing what they could to prepare for six o’clock breakfast. Ordinarily, since they worked on straight salary instead of hourly wages, you couldn’t have got a cup of coffee from ’em if you’d held a gun to their heads. But the cook knew me and he knew about us burying Bones—“a victim of capitalist brutality”—so he fixed us up fine.

  Coffee with a big slug of Jamaica ginger in it (jake is almost pure alcohol). Then a whole platter of canned roast beef with hashed-brown potatoes and canned peaches and warmed-over biscuits. I ate and ate, only stopping because I was afraid of getting sick. Four Trey had finished ahead of me, so we carried our dishes back into the kitchen tent, thanked the cook and went out into the starlit night.

  A heavyset old guy with a shaved head and only one arm was fussing around at the wash benches. Laying out bars of laundry soap and rinsing basins and so on. Four Trey nudged me, pointing to him.

  “I see Wingy Warfield’s made camp boss again.”

  “With his voice, how could he miss?” I laughed.

  Being camp boss isn’t nearly so important as it sounds. In fact, it isn’t important at all, since it doesn’t involve much but waking the stiffs in the morning and keeping the camp grounds in reasonable order. Wingy—all one-armed men are called Wingy—knew this as well as anyone, but he put on more airs than a line boss.

  He saw Four Trey and me watching him and he puffed himself up and strutted over to us. “I’m givin’ you fair warning,” he said in a voice like a foghorn. “The first bo I catch droppin’ his pants within a hundred yards of camp can go get his time!”

  “We’ll watch it, Wingy,” Four Trey nodded soberly. “Fact is, Tommy and I are starting to blast slop pits and latrines the first thing in the morning.”

  “Well, all right,” Wingy Warfield roared, glaring from one to the other of us. “But what I said still goes!”

  He turned and strutted away, importantly. Four Trey and I lighted up cigarettes.

  Warfield was a boomer—a guy who made the boom camps. There was a joke going around that the places had been named for him, like the town of Son-of-a-bitch, for example, which was nothing but one big whorehouse with an annex for gambling and which had the short-term—very short-term—reputation of being the toughest town in the world. The Rangers moved in after less than a month and chopped it to pieces with axes. When they did, they found more than a dozen bodies buried under the floors.

  “Well, Tommy…” Four Trey squinted up at the sky, taking a deep breath of the cool clean air. “Maybe we’d better put a button on the day, hmm?”

  “Maybe we had,” I said. “It’s been a long one.”

  He caught his hat brim, fore and aft, and crimped it upward. Casually, I did the same with mine. We said good night and he sauntered away, disappearing inside one of the twenty long sleeping tents. I waited until I saw which one he chose, then I entered one several tents away.

  That was the way you had to operate if you wanted to get along with Four Trey Whitey. He didn’t want anyone moving in on him, as the saying is, and he had some pretty funny ideas about what moving in meant. I mean, it took a lot of territory where he was concerned, and you had to lean over backwards to avoid it.

  The only other person in my tent was an old pappy guy, which is what they call any old man on a pipeline. I put him down as a crumb-boss, and I turned out to be right. A crumb, in the oil fields, is a louse. The joke is that the old men who take care of the tents are secretly the bosses of the lice, telling them who to bite and so on.

  He gave me a cross, suspicious look, as old men do sometimes. Because they’re afraid of you, I suppose, until you make them know they don’t have to be. He said I was to pick out my cot, and be danged sure I didn’t mess up any of the others. And I said, of course, I’d do just that.

  “Mind if I take one back by the rear flap?” I asked. “I like lots of air.”

  “Well…,” he gave me a cautious look. “Well, I guess that’ll be all right.”

  He actually had nothing to say about where I slept. But he was scared and old, and, well, what the hell? “It’s strictly up to you,” I said. “After all, you’re the boss, and you’ve got the stroke in this tent.”

  He broke into a big smile. It was as nice a smile as I’ve ever seen, even if it didn’t have any teeth in it. “Sure, it’s all right!” he said. “Bunk down anywhere you want to, son, and if you need any extra blankets or anything, you just let me know!”

  I went down the grassy aisle between the twin rows of cots to the rear of the tent. I stretched out on an end cot, putting my hands under my head and easing my shoes off. Lying in a bed, or rather a cot with a mattress on it, for the first time in weeks felt good. Too good. When you haven’t been used to it, comfort can be uncomfortable.

  After a while I sat up, and the crumb boss stopped fooling around up front, doing things that didn’t need to be done, and came back to where I was. We talked; rather, he talked and I listened. I guess it had been a long time since anyone was interested in anything he had to say, and he needed to talk. It didn’t tell me much about him that I hadn’t already surmised. You saw quite a few old pappy guys, and it was virtually the same story with all of them.

  No homes. No families. Or none that cared what happened to them. Anywhere else, they’d have been in a poorhouse or an old folks’ home, since there were no old-age pensions at the time. Out here, they could usually pick up some kind of job on the big construction projects. Nothing important, of course, nothing that required any real effort, but something that did have to be done.

  They worked during the warm months, the summer and spring and fall—the only times there were jobs for them. In the winter they stayed in the bleak, God-awful oil towns. Bunking in the dingy half-canvas cothouses—rag houses, they were called—or holing up three or four to a room in the rickety unpainted hotels. They seldom had more than enough money to barely squeak by until spring. Spring sometimes found them too old and weak to work, and they gradually starved to death. But that didn’t happen very often. This was a young man’s country—a country for healthy young men. There was little available in the way of medical facilities, and old men sicken easily. And when they took sick here, they died.

  It wasn’t much to look forward to, dying when you were too old and sick to work. But maybe living isn’t either.

  We said good night, the crumb boss and I. He went back up front, blew out the lantern and went to bed. And I still couldn’t relax.

  I took off all my clothes, and it was a little better that way with the cool breeze washing over me. But it wasn’t good enough for sleep. I’d missed my bath that day, not getting down to the Pecos as I usually did, and I felt all pric
kly and sticky.

  Finally, after a lot of tossing around, I put my shoes back on—just my shoes, nothing else—and went out the rear flap of the tent.

  It was a nice night, just cool enough without being cold. The moon streamed through a canyon of clouds, painting a path across the sage and chaparral. I sauntered down it, feeling like I sometimes did at night in these far-out places. As though everything was mine, the whole world, and that I was the only person in it.

  I kept walking, not for any reason except that I felt like it and it was a nice night. Then, when I’d probably walked a half mile or so, I suddenly came to a stop.

  I was looking down into a wash, a draw in the prairie. An old panel truck was parked in it, a truck made over into a housecar.

  I stood staring at it, not at all sure of what I was seeing—that it really was Carol’s. Half-thinking that I’d gone to sleep back there in the tent and that this was a dream, I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

  Just as she came around the side of the truck.

  She was as naked as I was, wearing nothing but her shoes. We stood looking at each other, and it all seemed perfectly natural that we should be like this. Just the two of us standing naked in our own private world. Then, she called my name softly, “Tommy,” and held her arms out to me.

  And I went down to her.

  I picked her up and kissed her, the first girl I’d ever really kissed. I carried her to the truck and lifted her inside. And climbed in after her.

  8

  Back in camp that night, again stretched out on my bunk, I thought of countless things I should have asked her. One very important thing in particular. And it seemed incredible that I’d asked her nothing at all, that we’d hardly talked at all. Yet on the other hand it seemed natural enough, exactly the way it should have been. And basically I guess it was.