The Convict and Other Stories

“Go ahead.”

“Sometimes you look real happy when you watch us play. Then you look real sad. Is it because we mess up or something?”

“My son was killed three years ago at Khe Sanh.”

“Was it in a car accident?”

The professor smiled and turned the boy’s cap sideways.

“No,” he said.

In the silence the boy looked straight ahead, his eyelids blinking.

“Hey,” he said, and took a folded leaflet out of his back pocket. “Did you hear about these Cheerio yo-yo contests they’re going to have in front of the drugstore? They’re giving away maple-leaf badges and sweaters and all kinds of crap.”

“Partner, you’re looking at the guy who wrote the book on Cheerio yo-yo contests. I think we’d just better toggle on over to the drugstore and buy us a couple of those babies.”

They walked off through the trees toward the street. In the dappled light they looked out of step with their own shadows.

HACK

From where he sat in his straight-back wicker chair on the front porch, he could dimly see the green river and the sloping hills and the oak trees on the crests. But his pale blue eyes, frosted with cataracts, really

didn’t need to see them. He could smell the land, the water, and the trees in the hot July wind, and sometimes when he slipped into memory again, he could even smell the herds of cattle moving seventy years ago to the rail pens in San Antonio. He was ninety-four today, or at least that was what they told him, and it had been years since he had stopped caring about losing his sight. Memory and the lucid, bright dreams of sleep provided everything he needed.

His son Jack had dressed him in his low-topped brown boots, his Oshman’s western suit, a soft shirt buttoned at the throat, and the pearl John B. Stetson that he always wore when he sat on the front porch. The flower boxes on the railing were filled with showers of purple and white petunias, and Jack had hung twists of red and white bunting all over the latticework. When Hack, the old man, looked at the colored paper, he became confused about the reason for the party. Was it July the Fourth or really his birthday? They often lied to him or even made up stories about him. They said he did things he hadn’t. Only moments ago he heard them talking about him through the screen. They talked about him as though he were a deaf or a drunk man who couldn’t hear.

He found the whiskey under the cupboard and set the bed on fire with his pipe. He would have been burnt up if my nigras hadn’t seen the smoke.

The wind blew across the tall yellow grass in the field below the house and bent the limbs of the pin-oak tree in the Holland family cemetery. The whitewashed markers were dappled with shadow and light, and as the vision of the cemetery slipped with him into sleep, he smelled the hot, drowsy odor of wild poppies in the wind.

His sleep took him many places, where all the people and towns and the elemental sweep of Texas were unchanged. Each dream brought it back into focus, without distortion, as though he had stepped away from it just a moment before: the drunken New Year’s party with the other Texas Rangers in the El Paso saloon and bordello where John Wesley Hardin was killed in 1895; racing his horse into the Rio Grande in a shower of mud and water, the reins in his teeth, while he fired one shot after another from his Winchester carbine at three Mexican rustlers headed for home; and the beautiful childlike faces of the Mexican girls who groaned under him after he came back from a raid on Pancho Villa’s troops.

He heard more pickup trucks and cars banging up the corrugated road to the front lot, then the voices of people who passed him on the porch and let the screen slam behind them. Someone threw a pair of socks partly wrapped in white tissue paper and ribbon into his lap. The voices inside were like a whiskey hum in his head in the hot shade of the porch, senseless and too many to understand. He heard the screen slam again, the wood boards bend with someone’s weight close to him, and he looked into the face of his son-in-law, the history professor at the University in Austin, who was leaning over as though he were trying to see around something. It was a stupid face, one that went with a tape recorder and a half pint of Jim Beam and patronizing questions.

“How are you, Hack? I gave Jack a little bottle of red-eye for you.”

“Bring it out on the porch.” His words were full of phlegm and still caught somewhere in afternoon sleep.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” the son-in-law said slowly, smiling, his eyes grinning with wrinkles at his wife. “Jack says you’ve already raised too much hell this week.”

“Give me a cigarette,” Hack said.

“The doctor says you’re supposed to stay off smoking tobacco, Hack. Maybe I can get you a twist to chew on from inside.”

Hack looked away at the yellow haze on the fields, the burst of red blood drops in the tomato acreage, and thought he could smell the poppies again in the wind.

“Bonnie says you told her you knew Frank Dalton. Is that true?” the son-in-law said.

“I knew Frank and I knew Bob Dalton, too.”

“Grandpa, you’ve got it mixed up,” Bonnie, his daughter, said. “It was Wesley Hardin you locked in jail over in Yoakum. You never knew the Daltons.”

“There was eight of them rode into the lot. Emmett and Bob and Frank was in front. They wanted water from the well for their horses, and Bob Dalton had a brace of pistols hung over his pommel. They was shot all over the street in Coffeyville, Kansas, two months later.”

“Are you sure that’s not just a story, Hack?” the son-in-law said.

“You’re a fool,” Hack said.