The Convict and Other Stories

The Convict

UNCLE SIDNEY AND THE MEXICANS

Billy Haskel and I were picking tomatoes in the same row, dropping them by the handful in the baskets on the mule-drawn wood sled, when the crop duster came in low over the line of trees by the river and began spraying the field next to us.

“The wind’s going to drift it right across us,” Billy Haskel said. “Turn away from it and hold your breath.”

Billy Haskel was white, but he made his living as a picker just like the Mexicans did. The only other white pickers in the field were a couple of high school kids like myself. People said Billy had been in the South Pacific during the war, and that was why he wasn’t right in the head and drank all the time. He kept a pint of wine in the bib of his overalls, and when we completed a row he’d kneel down below the level of the tomato bushes as though he were going to take a leak and raise the bottle high enough for

two deep swallows. By midafternoon, when the sun was white and scalding, the heat and wine would take him and he would talk in the lyrics from hillbilly songs.

My woman has gone

To the wild side of life

Where the wine and whiskey flow,

And now my little boy

Calls another man Daddy.

But this morning he was still sober and his mind was on the dust.

“The grower tells you it don’t hurt you to breathe it. That ain’t true. It works in your lungs like little sparks. They make holes in you so the air goes out in your chest and don’t come back out your windpipe. You ain’t listening to me, are you?”

“Sure I was.”

“You got your mind on Juanita over there. I don’t blame you. If I hadn’t got old I’d be looking at her, too.”

I was watching her, sometimes without even knowing it. She was picking ahead of us three rows over, and her brown legs and the fold of her midriff where she had tied back her denim shirt under her breasts were always in the corner of my eye. Her hands and arms were dusty, and when she tried to push the damp hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, she left a gray wet streak on her forehead. Sometimes when I was picking even in the row with her I saw her look at her shirtfront to see if it was buttoned all the way.

I wanted to talk with her, to say something natural and casual as I picked along beside her, but when I planned the words they seemed stupid and embarrassing. I knew she wanted me to talk with her, too, because sometimes she spoke to Billy Haskel when he was working between us, but it was as though she were aiming through him at me. If only I could be as relaxed and easy as Billy was, I thought, even though he did talk in disjointed song lyrics.

It was raining hard Saturday morning, and we had to wait two hours on the crew bus before we could go into the field. Billy was in a hungover stupor from Friday night, and he must have slept in his clothes because they smelled of stale beer and I saw talcum powder from the poolroom on his sleeves. He stared sleepily out the window at the raindrops and started to pull on a pint bottle of urine-yellow muscatel. By the time the sky cleared he had finished it and started on a short dog, a thirty-nine-cent bottle he bought for a dollar from a Mexican on the bus.

He was in great shape the rest of the morning. While we were bent over the tomatoes, he appointed himself driver of the sled and monitor of our work. He must have recited every lyric ever sung on the Grand Ole Opry. When we passed close to a clump of live oaks, he started to eye the tomatoes in the baskets and the trunks of the trees.

“Some of these ’maters has already got soft. Not even good for canning,” he said. “Do you know I tried out for Waco before the war? I probably could have made it if I hadn’t got drafted.”

Then he let fly with a tomato and nailed an oak tree dead center in a shower of red pulp.

The preacher, Mr. Willis, saw him from across the field. I watched him walk slowly across the rows toward where we were picking, his back erect, his ironed dark blue overalls and cork sun helmet like a uniform. Mr. Willis had a church just outside of Yoakum and was also on the town council. My uncle Sidney said that Mr. Willis made sure no evangelist got a permit to hold a revival anywhere in the county so that all the Baptist soul saving would be done in one church house only.

I bent into the tomatoes, but I could feel him standing behind me.

“Is Billy been drinking in the field again?” he said.

“Sir?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, is there, Hack? Did you see Billy with a bottle this morning?”

“I wasn’t paying him much mind.”