“Just you today?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She started to turn but I stopped her. “Hold on a second; I need to tell you something.”
She looked at me expectantly.
“I’m hungry, but I can’t pay. I mean, I can pay you back. I just don’t have any money on me.”
She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Well, that was honest.”
“I was robbed last night by a motorcycle gang.”
Her expression changed. “A motorcycle gang?”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She said, “Four guys, their leader was bald with a long red beard? Had teardrop tattoos?”
For a moment I wondered if they were friends of hers. “You know them?”
“No. They stopped here for dinner last night. They had a lot of money in a bag.”
“A dark-blue bank bag with a zipper?”
She nodded. “Yeah. It was full of cash. Big bills.”
“That was mine.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry.” Then she said, “I’ll be right back.” She walked back into the kitchen and returned a moment later. “Here.” She handed me a hundred-dollar bill.
“What’s this?”
“They left me a hundred-dollar tip.”
“You’re giving it to me?”
“It’s your money,” she said.
I looked at the bill, surprised by the gesture. “Most people wouldn’t do that.”
“How do you know?”
Her reply stumped me. “I guess I don’t.” I looked around. “Is there a bank around here?”
“Not here. There’s one in Conway. It’s not far. About fifteen miles.”
“I’m on foot.”
“Then it’s far.”
I sighed a little. “Could I get some coffee? Now that I have money?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll buy you some breakfast. I think you could use it.” She led me to a table in the corner of the room and handed me a menu.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Brenda.”
“Brenda what?”
“Benson.”
“I have a friend with that last name,” I said. It was the first time I’d called McKay a friend since I’d left him.
“Are you from here?”
“Groom?” she said. “No one is from Groom. They just get stuck here.”
“Thank you again,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” She filled my coffee, then walked away. When she returned with my breakfast, I said, “May I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Can you sit down?”
She glanced back at the door, then said, “Sure.” She sat down at the table across from me. “Ask away.”
“Why did you help me?”
She looked at me quizzically, as if I’d asked her a trick question. “Because you needed help.”
“That might be the most perfect answer ever given to that question.”
She shrugged a little. “What other answer is there?”
“So tell me, how did Brenda Benson get stuck in Groom, Texas?”
“You mean that’s not every little girl’s dream, to be a poor waitress in a dying town in the middle of nowhere?”
I grinned. “I don’t think so.”
She sighed heavily. “I came here with my boyfriend when he got a job in Amarillo. Turns out he had other interests, if you know what I mean. Then I got pregnant, and he vanished. I was relying on him for money. That’s how I got stuck here.”
“No family back home?”
“No family. No home.”
“That hundred dollars you gave back was a big deal, wasn’t it?”
“It was your money.”
“But if it wasn’t . . .”
“It would have helped pay some bills.”
“I thought so,” I said. “So tell me something. If you could go someplace else, where would it be?”
She laughed. “Anyplace away from here.”
“I’m serious.”
She cocked her head. “You’re going to make my dreams come true?”
“Maybe.”
She laughed again. “Okay, I’ll play along. I always wanted to go to Venice. Fall in love with a handsome Italian guy.”
“So you’re a dreamer. I don’t know about the Italian guy, but the rest is doable.”
She shook her head. “It’s a nice fiction. What’s your name?”
“Charles. Charles James.”
“Where are you going, Charles?”
“I’m walking Route 66. I started in Chicago and I’m walking to LA.”
“You’re almost halfway,” she said. “Why are you walking?”
“Call it a pilgrimage.”
“Okay, Pilgrim.” She turned back as an older couple walked in. “I better get back to work before Steve starts yelling at me.”
“Wait, one more thing,” I said. “What would you say if I told you that I was really a multimillionaire who could make your dreams come true?”
She looked at me for a moment, then said, “I’d say you’re a bigger dreamer than I am.” She stood. “Enjoy your breakfast.”
I finished eating, filled my water bottles with ice water from the restaurant’s pitchers, and then got up to go. I waited until Brenda came back out from the kitchen to thank her.
“Are you going to report the crime?” she asked.
“No.”
She nodded as if she understood. “I doubt it would do any good. Be careful out there.”
It took me four and a half hours to reach the town of Conway. It was three in the afternoon when I walked into the bank. My shirt was stained with sweat as I approached the teller. She looked at me uneasily.
I took out my driver’s license. “Hi. I need to transfer some money and get some cash. Could you help me?”
“Do you have a bank order?”
“I have my account number. I’ll have to log in on a computer. It’s an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.”
The woman looked at me skeptically.
“I know I don’t look like I have anything, but I actually have a lot of money. I got robbed last night, just outside of McLean. I just need a computer to wire the money over.”
She hesitated a moment, then said, “All right. Come over here.”
I followed her over to a cubicle, and she sat down in front of a computer. “Your account?”
Only then did I remember that my account numbers were on my smartphone. I had backups on my computer at home, but that was a world away.
“Your account?” the woman repeated.
“I don’t know it,” I said, raking my hand back through my hair. “The numbers were on my phone. They stole that too.”
She paused. For the first time she looked like she might believe me. “Is there someone you can call?”
I breathed out slowly. “No. There isn’t.” I shook my head, then stood, my head spinning at the reality of my situation. “I’m sorry to waste your time.” I grabbed my pack and walked out of the bank. By the grace of a poor waitress, I had a hundred dollars to live on, but besides that I had no way, without coming out, to get any more money.
I stopped at the grocery store and, breaking my hundred-dollar bill, bought a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. I grabbed a plastic knife from their deli, refilled my water bottles from a drinking fountain, and then went out behind the store to a soft patch of grass and laid down against my pack. I was stuck. My trek was doomed. And I hadn’t even made it halfway to Santa Monica and my Monica.
Chapter Thirty
My road has taken an unexpected detour.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
The next morning I started walking before sunrise, as much to avoid humanity as the sun. Without a watch I wasn’t really sure what time it was, but I suspected that it was around four a.m.
I knew that I wasn’t far from Amarillo, which might now be the last city on my walk. The thought angered me. I couldn’t beli
eve that I had come this far only to fail.
An hour later, as I entered the Amarillo city limits, I could make out a group of a dozen or more people congregated under a streetlamp next to the curb of a 7-Eleven.
With the exception of an occasional truck driver, I had seen no one that morning, so a group of people just standing in the street looked almost surreal; like a mirage.
As I got closer, I could see that the people were all Hispanic. I counted about a dozen men and three women. I guessed they were migrant workers, waiting to be picked up by a local farm.
I felt a kinship with these people. Not just because they were most likely Mexican like me but because they were pickers and toilers. They were my people. My paternal great-grandfather was a Mexican sharecropper, my grandfather was a migrant worker, and even if my father had run from migrant work, he had still spent his life working the ground. Even I had for a time.
I had one other thing in common with them. I needed money.
One of the men looked up at me as I approached. “Buenos días, amigo.”
“Días or noches?”
He grinned. “You looking for work, amigo?” He spoke English with only a slight accent. The rest of the group looked at us.
“Maybe. Where’s work?”
“In Plainview.”
“Where’s Plainview?”
“It is about an hour from here. The farm trucks will pick us up soon.”
“What does it pay?” I asked, walking closer.
The man was near my age, with thick black hair. He wore a dirty long-sleeved shirt.
“Eight dollars an hour and a place to stay.”
Eight dollars an hour. Working the stage, I’d make more than eight dollars a second on a bad day. Actually, double that. But I wasn’t on the stage anymore.
“You speak good English.”
“So do you.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Eddie.”
I extended my hand. “Nice to meet you, Eddie.” We shook.
Just then two Ford pickup trucks, one white, one metallic black, pulled up alongside the curb. I knew the kind of trucks they were because I was with McKay when he purchased one to pull his boat. Ford F-450 Crew Cab. They cost more than most luxury cars. McKay’s cost nearly eighty thousand.
A tall, well-fed man got out of the driver’s side of the second truck, dully eyeing us. He shouted, “C’mon, move it.” He let down his truck’s tailgate, then walked to the other truck and let down its tailgate as well.
There was room inside the double cab for at least four more, but I didn’t expect that the people behind the tinted glass would be inviting anyone in.
“Let’s go,” Eddie said to me. He climbed into the bed of the second truck, moving all the way to the front against the cab. He looked back at me. “Are you coming, amigo?”
I looked at him for a moment. “Sure. Why not?” I walked over, put my pack in, and climbed in after it.
The farmer shut the tailgate and got back into his truck. He honked, and both trucks pulled out into the road.
I looked around at my new associates. There were eight of us. Everyone sat quietly, most with their heads down to catch some sleep, their hair fluttering in the cool Texas air. Their hard, dark faces bore the strain of ten thousand hours under the sun.
We sat close, our bodies pressed together, not because the bed was crowded but because it was cold. In spite of Texas’s infamous summer heat, it still dropped into the low sixties at night and with the wind chill factor, it felt more like fifty.
“What’s your name?” Eddie asked, fiddling with the zipper on his jacket.
“Charles.”
“Charles. That is a gringo name. What is your last name?”
I almost said James but stopped myself. “Gonzales.”
“Gonzales. That is one of our names.”
“Have you been to Plainview before?” I asked.
“Yes. I came last year too.”
“What are we harvesting?” I asked.
“We are not harvesting. We are pulling weeds.”
“Why don’t they just use weed spray?”
“That is what they want to do. It is cheaper. But this is a new kind of weed. It has grown too strong for the poison they give it. Now they must pull it by hand.”
“A genetic mutation,” I said.
He looked at me blankly, then went back to fiddling with his coat zipper. After a few more unsuccessful tries at repairing it he looked back up at me. “Where are you coming from?”
“Chicago.”
“You hitchhiked from Chicago?”
“I walked.”
He studied me as if he were deciding whether I was telling the truth or not. “That is a long walk, gringo. Where are you walking to?”
“California.”
“There is much work in California. Much to harvest.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-One
There are too many self-proclaimed “social warriors” whose primary reason for raising their hand is not to lift the poor but to strike the rich.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Plainview, Texas, was about seventy-five miles directly south of Amarillo. As we approached the town, I spotted a municipal water tower that read, “Welcome to Rustwater.”
I turned to Eddie. “I thought we were going to Plainview.”
“This is Plainview,” Eddie said.
“Why does the water tower say ‘Rustwater’?”
“Many years ago they made a movie here. The movie people painted the water tower for the movie, but they never painted it back.”
The sky had turned a slightly paler shade of twilight as we passed the PLAINVIEW city sign with its accompanying Rotary and Lions club monikers. A mile later the truck pulled up to a convenience store.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“We buy food and drinks,” Eddie said.
The store was already crowded with migrant workers, most buying coffee and energy drinks—liquid energy to get them through the day. I bought a couple of sodas, a peanut candy bar, and a bag of jerky, then returned to the truck. I think that I was still in disbelief that I’d even come.
Eddie came out a few minutes after me carrying two large bags of groceries. Sitting in the pickup bed, he brought out a bag of chicharrones—fried pig rinds. He opened the bag, releasing a pungent odor. He put one in his mouth and crunched loudly, then tilted the bag forward to offer me some.
“My dad used to eat these,” I said, taking a rind.
“They are good for you,” Eddie said. “They are muy protein.”
Eddie ate a few more, then said, “Gringo, do you know a famous person is from Plainview?”
“No,” I said. “Who?”
“Jimmy Dean.”
“You mean James Dean, the actor?”
He shook his head. “Jimmy Dean.”
“You mean, the guy who makes sausage?”
“Yes.”
I laughed. “How do you know who Jimmy Dean is?”
“I like his sausage.”
The driver of our truck honked and several men frantically came running out of the store and climbed back in the trucks. The trucks pulled back out onto the road.
A few minutes later we drove by a darkened metal warehouse that looked to have been turned into a restaurant. A large hand-painted sign with Christmas lights around the border read Taqueria Perlita’s.
“Perlita’s,” Eddie said, nodding approvingly. “Her tamales and chili verde is muy bueno.”
“That’s really her name?”
“Sí. Maybe after we make some money we will go there for dinner.”
The farm and its two thousand acres of cotton fields were about ten minutes from our grocery stop. Our trucks pulled up alongside two others, perpendicular to the fledgling cotton plants. The same man who had herded us into the trucks in Amarillo jumped out of the truck and shouted, “Everybody out,” even though mo
st of the workers were already on the ground. No one bothered to drop the tailgates but jumped down over the sides of the trucks onto the rutted dirt.
“I can leave my pack here?” I asked.
“Sí.”
I followed Eddie as the group moved toward a short man holding a notepad. The man wore a light, fluorescent yellow-green vinyl vest that made him look like a crossing guard. He had a cigarette clamped between his front teeth.
“Where are we going?” I asked Eddie.
“We must sign in with the crew leader. That is how we get paid. You have not done this before?”
“No.”
He grinned. “I hope it does not kill you, gringo.”
The sun was just beginning to emerge above the cotton as the workers formed a line in front of the crew leader. The man was white with reddish auburn hair and sunburned cheeks. When it was my turn, I stepped up to him. He had a badge that read CURTIS. I didn’t know if it was a first or last name. I had a feeling it didn’t matter. He looked me over and, blowing out a puff of smoke through clenched teeth, put his pen to his sheet. “Cómo te llamas?”
“My name is Charles Gonzales,” I answered.
He looked up at me. “You speak English.”
“I’m American,” I said.
“Congratulations,” he said snidely. “You pulled pigweed before?”
“I used to be in landscape architecture.”
He chortled. “We got us a Frank Lloyd Wright,” he said, shaking his head with derision. “Landscape architecture. You pulled pigweed or not?”
“No.”
“It ain’t rocket science. Some of the roots, you’re gonna have to hoe ’em out. Then put ’em in bags. Don’t shake the plant. The seeds spread. That’s why we burn ’em.” He wrote my name down on his list. “Frank Gonzales.” I wasn’t sure whether he’d actually mixed up my name or he was still mocking me for my landscape-architecture comment. “Pay is eight dollars an hour. We pay at the end of each shift. Grab a hoe and some bags and get to work.” As I turned away from him I heard him mutter, “Landscape architecture.”
I walked over to the edge of the field where Eddie was waiting for me with two hoes and a pair of yellow faux-leather gloves. We walked out into the tilled soil of the cotton field. The cotton plants were not yet waist high and the viral weed had all but taken them over. I attempted to pull a weed by hand and realized this was going to be a lot tougher than I’d realized.