The Convict and Other Stories

“Hey, Hack. You keeping your arm in shape for next year?” He looked into the truck, his eyes full of light and curiosity.

“I throw a few every evening against a target on my uncle’s barn.”

“This man’s a mean motor scooter on the mound,” he said to Juanita. “He’s got a Carl Hubbell screwball that wipes the letters off a batter.”

“Yeah, I’m so good I dusted three guys in our district game.”

“That don’t matter. Those guys thought sheep-dip didn’t stink till you put their noses in it.”

“I’ll have better control next season. Look, we’ll see you later, Ben.”

“Sure. Take it easy, Hack.”

A minute later he backed his car around to leave the lot, and I saw the white oval faces of two people looking out the back window at us. He burned out onto the highway in a scorch of gravel.

A week later Johnny Mack Brown was still playing at the theater in town, so I took Juanita to the double feature at the drive-in. I parked the pickup to the side of the concession stand, and when t

he lot darkened I put my arm around her shoulders. Her eyes were still on the screen, but when I lowered my head against hers she turned her face up at me with her lips parted. She laid her wrist on the back of my neck when we kissed and brushed her lips sideways on my mouth. I put my face in her hair and could smell the soap and baby powder on her shoulders.

The cab of the pickup had not been designed for romance. The floor stick, even jammed into reverse, stuck up between us like a convent wall, and our elbows and knees banged against the dashboard, the windows, the door handles, and the gun rack. By intermission I had another problem, too: what we used to call the hot rocks, a thick ache in the genitals that made you think someone had poured concrete in your fly. Usually the only way to get rid of it, besides the most obvious way, was to get out and lift the truck bumper. This went on all the time back on neckers’ row, but I waited for the intermission and just sat quietly behind the steering wheel for five minutes and then headed for the concession stand.

That was a mistake.

When I went into the men’s room—a hot, fetid place that reeked of disinfectant and urinated beer, with an exhaust fan on one wall—a dozen high school boys were inside, leaning over the troughs and passing around a bottle of sloe gin in a paper sack. Someone was throwing up in the toilet cubicle. The room was almost silent while I waited for my turn at the trough.

“Hey, Hack, who’s that girl in your truck?”

“Just a friend.”

“Is she a Mexican?” It was the same boy, and his question was almost innocent.

“It’s none of your damn business what she is.”

There was no sound except the dirty noise of the exhaust fan. Then, from a tall kid in cowboy boots, blue jeans, an immaculate white T-shirt, and a straw hat, who leaned against the wall with one foot propped behind him:

“Is it true that Mexican fur burger tastes like jalapeño?”

A left-handed pitcher has certain advantages on the mound, but so does a left-handed fistfighter, because your opponent instinctively watches your right hand as the area of potential damage. I swung upward from my left side and caught him on the mouth and knocked his head into the cinder-block wall. When he wrenched his head straight again, his fists already flying out at me, I saw the blood in his teeth like a smear of food dye. We fought all over the room (someone shot the bolt on the door so the manager couldn’t get in), careening against bodies and troughs and trash cans, and I got him twice more in the face and once so hard in the throat that spittle flew from his mouth, but his arms were longer than mine and he clubbed me into a corner between the toilet cubicle and the wall and I couldn’t get my elbows back to swing. His fists, white and ridged with bone, seemed to appear and explode against my face so fast that for a moment I thought someone else was swinging with him.

But the other person turned out to be the manager, who had broken the doorjamb and was pulling the tall boy off me.

The boy relaxed his arms and caught his breath.

“The next time you bring a greaser to the drive-in, you better be able to take it,” he said.

I wanted to hit him again, but I was finished. I walked out into the parking lot past groups of people who stared at my torn and blood-streaked clothes and the long strip of damp toilet paper that was stuck to one of my loafers. I got into the pickup and slammed the door. Juanita’s mouth opened and her fingers jerked up toward her face.

“Forget it,” I said. I started the engine and bounced out into the aisle, then I heard glass snap and heavy iron smash against the rear fender. I had forgotten to remove the speaker and had torn the pipe and concrete base right out of the ground, which was all right, but I had also broken off the top half of Uncle Sidney’s window.

Uncle Sidney started attending the meetings of the Growers’ Association. They met on Tuesday nights at the Baptist church, and if you drove by and saw the pickups parked in the grove of oak trees, the fireflies sparkling in the summer dark, and the heads of men through the lighted windows, you thought only that a church meeting was going on and a group trip to Dallas or a new building was being planned. But beyond the noise of the cicadas they were talking about the Mexican farmworkers’ union and communists, their minds melding together in fear, their vocabulary finding words that were as foreign to their world as peasants’ revolutions in Russia.

“Why do you have to go there?” I said to Uncle Sid. He was sitting on the porch step in his shiny suit with the trousers tucked inside his boots. The fire of his hand-rolled, brown-streaked cigarette was no more than a quarter inch from his lips.

“Why shouldn’t I go there?”

“Because they’re dumb people.”

“Well, there is a couple that was probably playing with their knobs when God passed out the brains. But sometimes you got to stick together, Satchel-ass. If these Mexicans are serious about a strike, they can do us some real harm.”