The Convict and Other Stories

“I never go there.”

“So tonight’s a good time to start.”

“All right.”

That easy, I thought. Why didn’t I do it before? But maybe I knew, and if I didn’t, Mr. Willis was just about to tell me.

After he gave me my check he asked me to walk to his car with him before I got on the bus.

“During the summer a boy can get away from his regular friends and make other friends that don’t have anything to do with his life. Do you know what I mean?” he said.

“Maybe I don’t want to know what you mean, Mr. Willis.”

“Your father is a university teacher. I don’t think he’d like what you’re doing.”

My face felt dead and flat, as though it had been stung with his open hand.

“I’m not going to talk with you anymore. I’m going to get on the bus now,” I said.

“All right, but you remember this, Hack—a redbird doesn’t sit on a blackbird’s nest.”

I stepped onto the bus and pulled the folding doors closed behind me. Mr. Willis’s face slipped by the windows as we headed down the dusty lane. Somebody was already sitting next to Juanita, and I was glad because I was so angry I couldn’t have talked to anyone.

We got to the produce market in Yoakum, Juanita gave me her address (a street name belonging to a vague part of town with clapboard houses and dirt yards), and I drove Uncle Sidney’s pickup out to his house in the country.

My mother was dead and my father was teaching southern history for the summer at the university in Austin, and so I lived with my uncle Sidney. He raised tomatoes, melons, beans, corn, and squash, and anything he planted grew better and bigger than any other crop in the county. He always had the fattest turkeys and best-fed Angus and Brahmas, and each year his preserves won a couple of prizes at the county fair.

But he was also the most profane man I ever knew. When provoked he could use obscenities in combinations that made people’s heads reel. My father said Uncle Sidney used to drink a lot when he was younger, and when he got drunk in a beer joint in Yoakum or Cuero, it would take six policemen to put him in jail. He had been a marine in the trenches during World War I and had brought tuberculosis home with him and over the years had had two relapses because he smoked constantly. He rolled cigarettes out of five-cent Bull Durham bags, but he would roll only two or three cigarettes before he threw the bag away and opened another one. So there were Bull Durham sacks all over the farm, stained brown with the rain and running into the soil.

When Uncle Sidney was serious about something, it came out in a subtle, intense, and unexpected way that embedded itself under the skin like a thorn. One day two summers earlier I had been hunting jackrabbits on his place with his Winchester .22 automatic and I hadn’t had a shot all afternoon. I just wanted to shoot something, anything, and hear the snap of the rifle and smell the cordite in the hot air. A solitary dove flew from a grove of blackjacks, and I led her with the rifle and let off three quick shots. The third one snipped her head off right at the shoulders. It was an incredible shot. I carried her in my pocket back to the house and showed her to Uncle Sidney, the fact that I had killed a dove two months out of season far from my mind.

“You think that’s slick, do you?” he said. “Are you going to feed her young in the nest? Are you going to be there when their hunger sounds bring a fox down on them? You put my rifle in the rack and don’t touch it again.”

I pulled the pickup truck into the yard and cut the engine, but the cylinders continued to fire with post-ignition for another fifteen seconds. The pickup was actually a wreck without two inches of the original paint on it in one place and with the World War II gas-rationing stickers still on the cracked windshield even though it was 1947. I walked around behind the house and took the chain off the windmill, undressed, and began pulling the ticks off my body in the jet of water that pumped out of the pipe over the trough. Some of the ticks that had been on me since early morning had worked their heads deep into the skin and were as big as pennies with my blood. I shivered each time I dug one out with my fingernails and popped it in a red spray.

“I’ll be goddamn go-to-hell if it ain’t ole Satchel-ass,” Uncle Sidney said from the back porch.

Sidney’s battered straw hat, curled up at the brim and slanted sideways on his head, and his cowboy boots, which were worn down at the heels, always made him look like he was rocking when he walked. He was all angles: elbows stuck out as though they were about to cave a rib cage, knees askew from the direction of his boots, a quizzically turned head, a crooked smile. His skin was burned and cracked by the sun, and he had a grip and calluses that could shale the edge off of old brick. He had ridden in rodeos when he was younger and had been slammed into the boards so many times by Brahmas that every bone in him popped when he got out of a chair.

I chained the blades on the windmill and started into the house to finish my bath in the tub.

“Can I use the pickup tonight?” I said.

“Sure. But you don’t look too happy about wherever it is you’re going.”

“It’s that damn Mr. Willis.”

“What did he do to you?”

“He didn’t do anything to me. He fired Billy Haskel.”

“Was Billy drinking in the field again?”

“It was the way he did it. He treated him like a child.”

“Billy’s a grown man. He can take care of himself.”

“That’s just it. Billy was fighting the Japs while Mr. Willis was cleaning up selling to the government.”