Chapter One
MANY YEARS AGO, knocking around the American West was quite a gig. Think of running alongside a boxcar, your heart bursting in your chest, slinging your duffel and your guitar inside and jumping in after them, and then two hours later descending the Grand Divide, your head dizzy from the thin air, grizzly bears loping alongside the grain cars. The side-door Pullman didn’t cost a cent, and what a show it was: an orange moon above a Kansas wheat field; the iridescent spray of wheel lines; the roar of a stream at the bottom of a canyon; the squeak of an irrigation valve at sunset; the cold smell of water seeping through a walnut orchard at evening tide.
Colorado had strange laws back then. Hitchhiking or hopping a freight could cost you six months in the can or on the hard road. The consequence was that bums and migrants riding a hotshot into Denver could get into the state but not out, so Larimer Street was overflowing with panhandlers and derelicts pissing and sleeping in alleyways and under the bridges on the Platte. In the spring of ’62, I swung off a flat-wheeler at the Denver city limits and slept two nights in the Sally, then took a Greyhound bus down to Trinidad and hired on with a big dairy and produce farm that provided cabins and community showers and a dining hall for the workers. The owner was Mr. Jude Lowry.
Know why migrants are migrants? There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Anonymity is a given; migrants come with the dust and go with the wind. Mortality disappears with a cold bottle of beer in a juke joint. I had nonalcoholic blackouts back then, and because of the life I had chosen, I didn’t mind. In fact, the migrant way of life seemed created especially for people like me.
Late in August, Mr. Lowry put me in charge of the flatbed and the trailer it towed, and told me to round up Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams and start hauling our last crop of tomatoes down to the packing house in Trinidad, which would take us three trips. The air was heavy with the odor of insecticide and the harrows busting up the soil and the scattered chunks of ruined melons that looked like red emeralds in the sunlight. But there was another phenomenon at work also, a purple haze in the lee of the mountains, one that smelled of the desert and the end of the season, as though the land wanted to reclaim itself and drive us from its midst.
I FIRED UP THE flatbed and, with Spud in the passenger seat and Cotton behind the cab, headed down the dirt road for the highway, the knob on the floor shift jiggling in my palm.
Spud’s face was as coarse as a lampshade and pocked with ringworm scars, his head shaped like an Idaho potato. He always wore a wilted fedora low on his brow, and cut his own hair to save money for brothels. He had been on his own since he was eleven years old. One mile down the road, he unscrewed the cap on a canteen and filled a jelly jar half-full with dago red. “Want a slug?”
I gave him a look.
“Mind if I do?” he said.
“Mr. Lowry entrusted us with his truck.”
“A passenger drinking in the truck don’t hurt the truck, Aaron.”
“Do whatever you want, Spud.”
He poured the wine carefully back into the canteen, shaking out the last drop. “Why are you so weird, Aaron? I mean deeply, brain-impaired weird?”
I drove with one hand, the breeze warm on my face, the sky piled with plum-colored clouds above the mountains, backdropped by a molten sun.
“You not gonna say anything?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“I know where there’s a jenny barn.”
“A what?” I said.
“In Kentucky that’s what we call a whorehouse. In this particular one, the señoritas sing in your ear if you tip them.”
I nodded and turned on the radio. Someone had broken off the aerial. I clicked off the radio, my gaze straight ahead. The slopes of the mountains were deep in shadow now, the smell of the sage as dense as perfume.
“Silence is rude, Aaron,” Spud said. “Actually, an act of aggression.”
“In what way?”
“It’s like telling people they’ve done something wrong. Or they’re stupid and not worth talking to.”
“You’re a good fellow, Spud.”
He squeezed his package as though he were in pain. “I guess I’ll have to get married again. My last wife hit me upside the head with a skillet and threw me down a fire escape. She was the only one who loved me. My other two were meaner than a bucket of goat piss on a radiator.”
Cotton had unrolled his sleeping bag between two stacks of tomato crates and was reading a Classics Illustrated comic book, his head propped up on a pillow that had no cover on it. His hair was silver and grew to his shoulders, his left eye as white and slick as the skin on a hard-boiled egg. He said during the liberation of Rome, he chased Waffen-SS miles through the catacombs to a chamber under the Vatican Obelisk. There were three levels in the catacombs, and the third level, where the
MANY YEARS AGO, knocking around the American West was quite a gig. Think of running alongside a boxcar, your heart bursting in your chest, slinging your duffel and your guitar inside and jumping in after them, and then two hours later descending the Grand Divide, your head dizzy from the thin air, grizzly bears loping alongside the grain cars. The side-door Pullman didn’t cost a cent, and what a show it was: an orange moon above a Kansas wheat field; the iridescent spray of wheel lines; the roar of a stream at the bottom of a canyon; the squeak of an irrigation valve at sunset; the cold smell of water seeping through a walnut orchard at evening tide.
Colorado had strange laws back then. Hitchhiking or hopping a freight could cost you six months in the can or on the hard road. The consequence was that bums and migrants riding a hotshot into Denver could get into the state but not out, so Larimer Street was overflowing with panhandlers and derelicts pissing and sleeping in alleyways and under the bridges on the Platte. In the spring of ’62, I swung off a flat-wheeler at the Denver city limits and slept two nights in the Sally, then took a Greyhound bus down to Trinidad and hired on with a big dairy and produce farm that provided cabins and community showers and a dining hall for the workers. The owner was Mr. Jude Lowry.
Know why migrants are migrants? There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Anonymity is a given; migrants come with the dust and go with the wind. Mortality disappears with a cold bottle of beer in a juke joint. I had nonalcoholic blackouts back then, and because of the life I had chosen, I didn’t mind. In fact, the migrant way of life seemed created especially for people like me.
Late in August, Mr. Lowry put me in charge of the flatbed and the trailer it towed, and told me to round up Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams and start hauling our last crop of tomatoes down to the packing house in Trinidad, which would take us three trips. The air was heavy with the odor of insecticide and the harrows busting up the soil and the scattered chunks of ruined melons that looked like red emeralds in the sunlight. But there was another phenomenon at work also, a purple haze in the lee of the mountains, one that smelled of the desert and the end of the season, as though the land wanted to reclaim itself and drive us from its midst.
I FIRED UP THE flatbed and, with Spud in the passenger seat and Cotton behind the cab, headed down the dirt road for the highway, the knob on the floor shift jiggling in my palm.
Spud’s face was as coarse as a lampshade and pocked with ringworm scars, his head shaped like an Idaho potato. He always wore a wilted fedora low on his brow, and cut his own hair to save money for brothels. He had been on his own since he was eleven years old. One mile down the road, he unscrewed the cap on a canteen and filled a jelly jar half-full with dago red. “Want a slug?”
I gave him a look.
“Mind if I do?” he said.
“Mr. Lowry entrusted us with his truck.”
“A passenger drinking in the truck don’t hurt the truck, Aaron.”
“Do whatever you want, Spud.”
He poured the wine carefully back into the canteen, shaking out the last drop. “Why are you so weird, Aaron? I mean deeply, brain-impaired weird?”
I drove with one hand, the breeze warm on my face, the sky piled with plum-colored clouds above the mountains, backdropped by a molten sun.
“You not gonna say anything?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“I know where there’s a jenny barn.”
“A what?” I said.
“In Kentucky that’s what we call a whorehouse. In this particular one, the señoritas sing in your ear if you tip them.”
I nodded and turned on the radio. Someone had broken off the aerial. I clicked off the radio, my gaze straight ahead. The slopes of the mountains were deep in shadow now, the smell of the sage as dense as perfume.
“Silence is rude, Aaron,” Spud said. “Actually, an act of aggression.”
“In what way?”
“It’s like telling people they’ve done something wrong. Or they’re stupid and not worth talking to.”
“You’re a good fellow, Spud.”
He squeezed his package as though he were in pain. “I guess I’ll have to get married again. My last wife hit me upside the head with a skillet and threw me down a fire escape. She was the only one who loved me. My other two were meaner than a bucket of goat piss on a radiator.”
Cotton had unrolled his sleeping bag between two stacks of tomato crates and was reading a Classics Illustrated comic book, his head propped up on a pillow that had no cover on it. His hair was silver and grew to his shoulders, his left eye as white and slick as the skin on a hard-boiled egg. He said during the liberation of Rome, he chased Waffen-SS miles through the catacombs to a chamber under the Vatican Obelisk. There were three levels in the catacombs, and the third level, where the SS had fled, was full of water that had been dripping there for almost two thousand years. He said he had a grease gun and killed every SS in the chamber, the same one where the bones and dust of Saint Paul and Saint Peter lay inside two stone coffins.
Spud saw me looking at Cotton in the rearview mirror. “You believe that war story of his?”
“About the Nazis in the catacombs?”
“Wherever.”
“Yeah, I believe him,” I said.
“How come you’re so certain?”
“Because Cotton doesn’t care what people think of him one way or another.”
“Did you really study journalism at the University of Missouri?”
“Yep.”
“Why are you doing this shit?”
“It’s a good life.”
He looked at the countryside flying by the window. “I know what you mean. I love slopping pigs and milking cows before breakfast, and chopping cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see. You’re a laugh riot, Aaron.”
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