He grabbed her and lunged aside, and they went sprawling in the weeds. She caught his finger and bent it back. “
Damn
,” he muttered, and let go, clutching his hand. Darlene dashed out of the weeds with the toad, grabbed the razor blade off the butcher paper and slit a thin line down its underbelly from neck to tail. She held the toad toward him at arm’s length, its mouth gaping as it raked the air with its clawed feet.
Harley stumbled back against the windmill post.
“There ain’t nothing else you can do but kill it,” she whispered fiercely, “and that ain’t the same.” With a long, underhanded sweep, she pitched the squirming toad high in the air, end over end, some twenty feet out into the broom weeds with their thin stems and flat tops.
He stared at the spot where the horny toad had disappeared under the groundcover.
Darlene’s gaze followed his, then back. The expression on her face changed suddenly. “I don’t know what made me do that…” Her eyes brimmed with tears, fingers pinching at the hem of her T-shirt.
“Why don’t y’all come on in now and have a sandwich.”
He spun around to see his mother holding the screen door open.
“I made some nice pimiento-cheese sandwiches with pork and beans and cantaloupe.” His mother blotted one temple with the back of her hand. “It’s so hot out here. I don’t know why y’all don’t play in the house. Well, come on now, before the ice melts in your tea.” She started back inside, but stopped. “Harley Jay, where’s your shirt?”
“Uh, it got tore up.”
“Tore up?” She frowned. “I declare, if you ain’t the worst on clothes I ever seen. I don’t see—” She was about to go on when her gaze shifted. She tilted her head. “Darlene…are you crying?” She stepped down into the yard and let the screen door shut behind. “Hon, what’s the matter?”
Darlene lowered her face, shook her head.
“Tell me. What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“He…he touched me,” Darlene said, hugging herself.
His mother went pale. “Harley…what…what on earth is she saying?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he said, barely able to breathe. “See, we was wrestling over…wrestling over this toad and she had it and I was trying to get it and…and…it was a accident.”
His mother’s gaze bore down on him, an expression of shocked disbelief. She looked again at Darlene. “Is that true? You were wrestling? An accident?”
Darlene shrugged weakly. “Kinda, I guess. We was wrestling, and—”
“She was hiding that toad between her legs, and I was just trying to get it. And…and that’s what happened.”
Darlene sniffed and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand.
His mother stared, one to the other. “I want you to listen to me. You two, you’re getting too old to be wrestling like that. See what happens? I don’t want any more of it. Do you understand me? Both of you?”
“It was a accident,” he mumbled.
“I’m not saying it was or wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t want you two playing like that anymore. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
His mom looked them over again, each in turn. “Y’all come on in now. Darlene, you stay in the house with me until your mother comes.” She gave him another look, then took Darlene by the hand and gentled her up the step into the kitchen.
THAT NIGHT
, long after the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, he slipped out of bed and turned the light on above the little table where he did his homework. He took the drawings of the toad out of the drawer and spread them over the tabletop. They were among the best he had ever done. He tore them into tiny pieces and fed them into his trash basket.
He had hardly gotten back into bed when he heard the old International truck pull up out front, and then his daddy entering the house—home from taking all but two milk cows to the Fort Worth stockyard.
WIND WHINED IN
the windowpanes, fluttering the paper shade in the first light. The windmill squealed out back, sucker rods bump-thumping against the well casing.
Harley lay still, listening to the sizzling and scraping, the clinking and clanking of his mother making breakfast, smelling the pork frying and the biscuits baking and the coffee boiling, watching her shadow flicker across the sharp slit of light under his door.
Out back, the screen door groaned and the wood door bumped open, and his daddy’s boots stomped over the sill. Then the screen slammed, the spring whanging, and the wood door jarred shut.
Harley heard their voices, low and flat, and then a chair scraped and the floor groaned, and his door burst open and the light and the suddenness jarred his senses, even against the tightness of his stomach, and his daddy said, “Time to hit it,” just like he always did. Not harsh but not gentle either.
“Yessir,” Harley said, wondering why his daddy hadn’t come at him with the belt for touching Darlene. He scrambled out of bed, pulling on his Levi’s and the stiff-ironed khaki shirt and worn-out tennis shoes. Was it possible his mother hadn’t said anything? He combed his hair back and went out through the kitchen, glancing sideways at his daddy spearing slices of tenderloin, swiping it through the red-eye gravy, snapping it off the fork.
His mother had set out plates for the twins, though they were never up this early except during the school year. She gave him a reassuring smile as he passed through. “Morning, Harley Jay.”
“Morning.” He glanced again at his daddy and went out the back door toward the barn.
Wind sighed through the broom weeds. He thought of the toad somewhere there among the weeds, the thin hairline slit in its underbelly, wondering if it was deep enough to have killed it.
He took a leak behind the barn where the two remaining cows stood flat and gray against the dawn, crunching on the bundled sorghum his daddy had thrown over earlier from the stack-lot. He thought how he might draw such flat shapes, showing what something was without detail. When he finished, he buttoned up and headed back to the house. Wind fluttered his shirt, hummed in the windmill.
In the kitchen, he poured hot water from the kettle into the enameled pan, added a little cold from the bucket and washed up for breakfast. His plate was already made with scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, red-eye gravy and fried strips of tenderloin. His mother poured him half a cup of coffee, poured herself some and took her place.
They ate in silence, the mood subservient to that of his daddy. Harley watched him without seeming to watch, apprehensive glances, little more than a blink of an eye from a lowered face.
His daddy finished, dumped his knife and fork on his plate with a clatter, shoved his chair back and went out. The screen door slammed after him.
Harley hurried.
“Don’t swallow your food whole,” his mother said.
By the time he got out to the tractors, his daddy was working the lever on one of the guns, pumping grease into the little metal nipples on the disk harrow behind the Farmall Regular.
“I already gassed ’em,” his daddy said, not looking up from where he knelt under the Regular’s toolbar. “You get that old Twelve greased.”
Harley grabbed the other grease gun from off the five-gallon can and slid down under the Twelve’s toolbar. He had made many drawings of the farm machinery, always impressed by their massive power—the big buzzard-wing sweeps, the steel disks, how they tore up the earth.
His daddy finished, put his grease gun away and went up alongside the Regular, where he set the magneto, the spark and the gas. Then he went to the front, fit the crank in and gave it a sharp twist. The tractor coughed a puff of smoke out the stack. The second time it fired and died. His dad went around and set the spark back some and this time it fired right up, rattling rich and throaty, shattering the stillness of the soft tangerine light, the sun beginning to wobble up behind the long, dark horizon.
Harley sneaked a look at his daddy, saw the little light there in his eyes, and figured it was about as near to joy as he could get. That was something he would never be able to paint. But he tried to imagine it, what the light would show behind his eyes.
His daddy turned toward him. “You about through there?”
“Yessir. Just finishing up.”
“Okay now. You watch that old harrow. You cut them wheels too short, that toolbar’ll catch on them old knobby tires and it’ll pick that sucker up and land it right on your back. So you watch it, hear?”
“Yessir.”
Harley greased the last fitting on the harrow and turned to slide out from under the toolbar.
He stopped.
The horny toad dragged its great black-bloated belly through the dirt, its wide mouth gaping, watching him with its little slit eyes.
Harley stared in turn, unable to swallow. It was fifty yards back to where the horny toad had disappeared yesterday into the broom weeds.
Harley eased from under the toolbar on the opposite side, went to the fencerow and picked up a heavy rock in both hands. He brought it back, lifted it above his head with effort, and brought it down on the toad with all his strength. A muffled plop and yellow pus shot into the dirt from underneath.
His daddy turned, frowning. “What’re you doing there?”
“Nothing.”
“You stop that fooling around and get that tractor moving.”
“Yessir.”
Harley set the spark and the gas and then went around front. He stood humped over, holding to the crank. A moment passed; then he let go, went to the fencerow again and began to gag.
His daddy looked up. “Hey…what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
His daddy studied him. “You sick?”
“No sir.”
“Then how come you throwing up like that?”
“I ain’t. I’m fine.”
Another moment. Then, softer: “No, you better get on back to the house. Lay down awhile. Hear?”
Harley shook his head, spat out the taste of bile, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Wordless, he returned to the tractor. He took hold of the crank, gave it a sharp turn and it fired right up. He climbed up on the iron seat and knew without looking that his daddy was still watching as he shoved the clutch in, pulled the notched gas lever out two-thirds of its length, and nudged the shifter into gear between his knees.
Chapter 2
Fastball
T
HE JULY SUN
beat down,
blinding off the windshields of cars and pickups parked behind the backstop at home plate. Dust kicked up from the ball field hung lazily on the heat before settling. Sweaty Separation fans meandered up and down the first-base line yelling encouragement and advice, while Blackwell fans claimed the territory behind third and home.
Seventeen-year-old Harley stood at his position just off first, watching Billy Wayne Hinchley on the mound, winding up for a pitch. Billy Wayne Hinchley was the new boy in town. He was short, his head too big for his body and his nose too big for his head even. There were pockmarks on his face and his eyes were little. Little and beady bright. His mouth was little too, and he had a way of talking out of the corner, grinning up one side until the greasy hank of hair hanging across his forehead caught in the corner, like a hook. That was Billy Wayne Hinchley, and there was no reason in the world for the girls to be acting so crazy over him.
Harley didn’t like the way Billy Wayne talked about the girls, the way he talked
to
them, bordering on the obscene. That in itself might whet their curiosity, regardless of their disapproval. Some of the boys thought it was funny, but in spite of his own raging hormones, he treated the girls with respect. His mother said you either looked up to people or down on them. It was all in respect. Too, he resented the way Billy Wayne had blown into town, acting right off like he was cock-of-the-walk. He supposed he was jealous, but he still didn’t see any reason the girls found Billy Wayne so interesting.
One thing Harley had to say for Billy Wayne: He could pitch a baseball. Separation scraped together a team each summer and played similar teams all the way up into the Texas Panhandle. It wasn’t just kids; grown men came in from the farms and ranches and oilfields. They were well into the season when Billy Wayne Hinchley showed up, but he tried out and damned if he couldn’t throw that ball like a pro. He could hit, too, which pitchers weren’t usually known to do. So Separation was moving up fast, from seventh to third in what was unofficially known as the “Prickly Pear League.”
And here they were, tied three and three with Blackwell in the bottom of the ninth, Blackwell’s Jimmy Phillips at bat, two outs and a man on second. Billy Wayne came out of his windup, the Separation crowd yelling and carrying on as Phillips took an embarrassing swing at Billy Wayne’s slider. Strike two.
Harley’s gaze wandered past the backstop, beyond the cars and pickups to the café and Travis’s general store wrinkling in the heat among a half dozen little shoe-box houses down across the school grounds on the other side of the highway. It was high time he hit that road, got off to Dallas. But then there was Darlene Delaney.
He looked aside to where she sat with three other girls in Billy Wayne’s ’55 Chevy. They drank Cokes they had brought up from the café, and fanned themselves with magazines, and now and then they’d get out and parade around in front of the cars, laughing and giggling for the benefit of whoever cared to watch—and more than one were willing to watch these girls bursting out all over, jiggling up and down the sidelines in their light summer dresses, tanned arms and legs swinging.
Things had gone well with him and Darlene for a while now. They had been to the musical at Travis’s general store two Saturday nights in a row, and Darlene had ridden to the Highland ball game with him the week before. That night he had given her a gold ankle chain with a little heart on it. That chain had cost him the last of his going-away money.