19
The Friday before Labor Day I got paid, quite a lot for a ranch hand, as I’d made extra by working three or four Sundays getting Holtz’s trucks in shape, and that night I went in to Whittier and got stuff I needed, shirts and things like that. Next day they didn’t work, and I lay around and read magazines. Then after lunch I thought if I didn’t go somewhere I’d go nuts and around one o’clock I started out. I hitched a ride to 101, and a couple of hundred yards from our entrance was a bus stop. I walked down there and stood around watching people buy fruit from a little stand off to one side. Pretty soon here came a guy with a box of tomatoes, staggering toward a coupe that was standing there. He was a big guy, burned brown as terra-cotta pipe, with kind of a twinkle in his eye, like carrying tomatoes wasn’t exactly in his line, but he’d do the best he could with it as long as he had them. He had trouble with the door, and I yanked it open and slipped inside and took his box and shoved it up on the ledge behind the seat so it wouldn’t fall but at the same time he’d have plenty of room. “Well, thanks, that helps a lot.”
“Kind of left-handed, loading stuff in a car.”
“Give you a lift, maybe?”
“Well — depends on which way you’re going.” It depended on which way I was going too, but that was something I hadn’t got around to yet. But I heard my mouth tell him: “I’m headed for the border.”
“Oh — Tia Juana?”
“I believe they call it that.”
“In that case, if you want to ride with me over to 101, I think you’d do better on the busses than here. I mean, over there, there are more of them. You got to get to San Diego first anyhow, and the through cars all go down the coast, or anyway most of them do. And in Long Beach you’ll have more luck.”
“Isn’t this 101?”
“The other’s alternate.”
“You got two?”
“California. We do it big.”
He grinned and I laughed and he climbed in and we started. As we rode he talked. He’d been over to Whittier, he said, to arrange with the photographer to be at his church the next night, to take pictures of the surprise party they were giving the rector in celebration of his tenth anniversary. He didn’t hide it any he was annoyed with the rest of them for not postponing it a week on account of the Labor Day week end. “I have charge of the music, you see, and what they don’t realize is that all summer I’ve been running with pick-up singers, kids and visiting firemen and whoever I could find, while our regular choir members are away to the mountains or some place and nobody due back till next week. The trouble I’ve had to round them up I’d hate to tell you.”
“You a musician?”
“Hell, no. Oil’s my business. Been at it thirty years, ever since I was twelve years old. Kind of a roving wildcat, I guess you’d call me, anyway till I put down a well for a lady that had a property and then married her. After that I settled down, if you can call it settling down to try and manage the little end of some of the worst made deals ever seen in the field. But it’s all I know, so I do it. That and the choir. No, I’m no musician, but I found out something funny about them a long time ago. They know all there is to know about music, except music. I mean, they can yiddle their fiddle or tootle their tooter or bear on their beartone so long as somebody tells them what they yiddle or tootle or bear down on. But to pick out something themselves, and get it in the right key, and learn it, and sing it, why, that would be a little too original for them. So when I went in the choir I began doing some of those things myself, and next thing I knew I was in charge of it all. I just about know two flats from three sharps, but if you sit down and learn it by heart you can teach it to them well enough, and if I do say it myself, when we’ve got everybody present and our things rehearsed up, we’ve got as nice a little choir as you’re going to hear in some time.”
I said I’d been a boy soprano when I was young, so of course that made us buddies, and we talked along pretty sociable. I kind of wished he’d talk more about oil and less about choir, but at that I kind of liked him. We came in sight of the sea, the first I’d seen of the Pacific Ocean, and he stopped to let me take a gander at it. Then he went on and pretty soon turned into a place that seemed to be his, and said he had to make a couple of phone calls, but then we’d go. He parked in front of the house, and I could hear him in there talking, but there seemed to be quite a lot of it, so I got out and took a stretch. It was a pretty place, a white frame house with a garage out back, tall trees around it, and lawn clear out to the road, maybe a hundred yards of it. Pretty soon he came out and said a guy was going to call him back, but it wouldn’t be long. I said he should take his time. Pretty soon I could hear him at the piano, going over some kind of church music that sounded familiar, but he played so bad I couldn’t place it. But then pretty soon I had it: a Dudley Buck Te Deum I’d sung a hundred times. I hummed it under my breath, and it seemed funny that the whole melody part was too high for me, though once I had stepped into it like it was nothing at all. But when he came to a bass solo it was just right and I rolled it out: “The glorious company of the apostles praise Thee!” Well, if I’d set off a pack of firecrackers out there I couldn’t have got action sooner. He was at the door in a second, looking all around, and then, at last, at me. “Was that you?”
“Just helping out.”
“Holy smoke, what a voice!”
“No, just a barroom buzzo.”
“But it’s great! Say, you said boy soprano, but you never said a word about what your voice changed to. Look, that sounded like the Metropolitan Opera.”
I explained a little about singing to him, how easy it is for a fourflusher to sing a few notes so they sound like a million dollars and really not be any good at all. Nothing I could say made any impression on him. So far as he was concerned, somebody by the name of John Charles Chaliapin had fallen out of the sky and hit him over the head, and he wasn’t going to have it any different. “Well, all right. If you think it’s good, who am I to argue about it? Once I got five hundred dollars a week for it, and if you insist, we’ll agree it’s worth a thousand now.”
“Well—”
“Yeah?”
“Never mind.”
What he meant, I didn’t need any mind reader to tell me, was that I should sing in his choir the next night, and why not? I had nothing to do, and it had been quite some time since anybody had admired me, unless it was Holtz, for the way I fixed flats. “However, if you really believe all this, and feel your choir could use me over the week end, we might waive the question of pay, and—”
“Would you? Would you?”
We shook hands and told names. His was Branch, it turned out, Jim Branch. He took me inside, and next thing I knew he’d shaken up a drink, a housekeeper was serving sandwiches in the big living room, he was playing me some new Pinza records he had, I was singing along with them, and he was as excited as a kid with a new puppy. Then pretty soon we seemed to have a party going on, with six or eight or a dozen of his friends, all sunburned like he was, all looking like they’d get more fun out of a nice pile driver than a grand-opera record, but all pretty good guys, willing to humor him along. He was about as bad on the piano as he could get and still hit a few notes, but we had some Maine Stein Song and Vagabond King and Mandalay, and I threw in plenty of winks with it, so nobody got the idea it was to be taken seriously. And then all of a sudden, off in a corner by itself, I see a gimlet eye drilling me through and I almost went through the floor. Because to me that spelled Las Vegas and trouble. I kept on yodeling, but began thinking fast. And the more I thought the less I knew what to do, because if I slipped outside and tried to beat it, he wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t pick up the telephone, and then there’d be a patrol car, pulling up beside me with cops. If I stayed, at least I’d know what was going on. So I bellowed some Old Man River and they clapped and yelled for more, but pretty soon he lurched over in front of me, took a sip of his drink, and said: “Y’ call y’self Dillon?”