Generations in Agony...Texas: Chapter Nineteen

19) The Big Nothing…

Agonites that were in the know during the late fifties could recall when the boys from NASA came to scout the desolate area northwest of town that everyone knew as ‘The Big Nothing’. Supposedly, the terrain was similar enough to what scientists believed the surface of the moon, possibly even Mars were like. Thus, after a few months of poking around up there, the NASA boys left and were never heard of again.

At the time, however, the town had a sudden boom of growth; some store fronts were painted, repairs were made on Main Street, and talk of a new water tower were put into place; but the vote never went through; it was tabled and still sat in a forgotten pile of papers in the town offices.

Solo felt this area was perfect for his needs: getting rid of another body. So far, it had been a busy week, with two killers dispatched. Keeping the Doc alive was proving to be a real chore. He had hardly had much time with CiCi, and she was still asking Solo about where he was all the time.

As he had figured, this one had been harder to deal with. Solo assumed that the killer would come to town with a little more caution that his associate had. None-the-less, once Solo had him out in The Big Nothing, it had come down to a quick end. The hit man had jumped out of his car with a gun in his hand; his face looked furious. “Where the fuck are you…”

Solo fired and hit him in the chest, but he was off a little with his aim, tearing through a lung and knocking the guy down, but still alive, for the moment. Getting out of the Buick, Solo walked cautiously over, his .45 aimed at the man’s head. Still, the killer was not about to go quietly; he pulled up fast and got off a shot before Solo could put a slug into his head. Solo’s aim from eight feet away was perfect; the skull popped open, the contents of it spilled over a scattering of ants.

But Solo was hit as well…

The seeping gunshot wound in his side was problematic. He kept tabs on his blood loss as he dragged the dead killer out into the scrub and covered him with a few tumbleweeds. Animals would soon be at it anyway, Solo figured. Best to let nature take its course.

He grunted as he hooked his towrope to the front tie rods of the Ford rental. There was a nice, deep gulch just a couple of miles away that would hide the rental, probably for a long time, he figured. As grandfather had taught him, he tied several tumbleweeds to the rear bumper of the Ford, this would help hide the tracks once the evening winds picked up and began to sift the sands of the desert.

*

The office was nearly empty. Carla Speck looked up as the door opened and Solo Rivera stepped in quietly. He looked a little gray around the edges of his dark face. “Hello again, Mr. Rivera.”

“I need to see the Doctor, is he in?”

“Of course, he’s with a patient. Would you like to set an appointment?”

Solo grimaced. It was then that Carla noticed that he was holding his side; a slight flash of red under his palm told her he was bleeding. She stood at once and very calmly directed him to the hallway, where she led him to an empty exam room. When she was sure no one would hear, she paused with her hand on the doorknob. “I can take a quick look at that wound, Solo. At least until Thurmond can get free.”

He nodded. There was no argument in his look. He was obviously in pain. Carla brought him in the room and paused as the phone rang back in the lobby. “I’ll be right back. Please take your shirt off.”

Alone in the exam room, Solo slowly took off his shirt and then carefully peeled away the wad of toilet paper he had stuck over the wound. He could clearly tell it was a clean entry and exit, but it was bleeding pretty badly, and it hurt like hell. Blood began to run down over his belt. He moved to a cabinet-lined counter along one wall and opened a glass jar full of gauze pads. His bloody hand left smears on the glass as he grabbed several pads and blotted. “Shit…”

Carla came back in and saw what he was doing. “Here, let me take that. You just sit here on the table.”

Solo obeyed, feeling too weak to say anything.

Thurmond walked in a moment later. “Carla, I need…” He stopped talking as soon as he saw Solo and the bloody gauze that was piling up from Carla’s attention to the wound. “What have we got?”

“I need to speak with the Doctor alone, ma’am,” Solo said, sounding very apologetic.

“It’s okay, Carla,” Thurmond’s hand pressed between her shoulders. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Okay,” she stood up and turned. “I’ll go pull his file and—”

“No need, we’ll be keeping this off of the file, for now.” Thurmond gave no explanation.

“Alright then, will you need anything else, Doctor?”

“No, please close the door on your way out.”

Carla backed out of the room and pulled the door shut. As it closed, she saw Solo Rivera’s eyes; they looked pleading as she shut the door.
*

It was so hot that Charlie was a little surprised to see so many guys at the field. All the Apache kids, as well as nine or ten of the Mexican boys were already tossing the ball and shagging flies. He saw none of the Mulligans, not that he was surprised. In this heat, playing baseball would be too much work for that bunch, or they were just off stealing cars up in San Antonio again.

As he pulled his bike up and leaned it against the old bleachers, he saw the girl from the other night at Lutz’s. She was leaning over her knees about halfway up the seats, her eyes were pouring over the pages of a book. Charlie felt his stomach flip around, as if he had just gone down the first big hill on a scary roller coaster. When the girl looked up and saw him, he froze in his tracks with his mouth hanging open. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Charlie managed to answer. He gulped. His mouth felt incredibly dry.

Unsure what to do or say, he took his glove off the handlebars and nodded at her. She smiled back, then turned her eyes back to the pages of the book. As he walked out to the pitcher’s mound, he wanted badly to know just what she was reading.
“Hey, Charlie’s here!” One of the Mexican kids yelled from the outfield. “Let’s bat around, you guys!”

He warmed up a little, then let the others, one by one, step up to the plate and take batting practice. Despite the lack of an organized team, these kids all seemed to enjoy working on their game just as if they were practicing in a real league. Charlie kept his pitches on the easy side, allowing them the chance to get their swing down and make contact, mostly so the guys in the field could actually catch flies or run down grounders. Pretty soon, the sounds of baseballs popping off of bats and smacking into gloves echoed around the fairgrounds. Everyone got five swings, and they had to run bases on the last—if they put the ball into play.

Every time he made his windup, Charlie could not help but glance over at the girl, just to see if she was looking. A couple times, he caught her staring at him; she would quickly return to the book once she saw him looking back. When she was looking, his pitches got a little wild; one almost hit Ray Castilla in the ear. “Hey, Speck, watch it, man!”

“Sorry, Ray…”

The afternoon wore on; the sun grew more intense, bumping the mercury well past one hundred ten degrees. The boys had salt stains showing through their tee shirts and no one took off their hat. A constant stream of boys kept using the water spigot, guzzling and wetting down their hair. Finally, when everyone was fully exhausted, they all squatted under the tin roof of the decrepit old dugout. Charlie squeezed in, but kept his eyes on the girl up in the bleachers, still reading her book.

“Anybody know her?” Charlie asked in a low voice.

“Los Petrolla…” Miguel Gomez, the shortstop said. When Charlie’s face told him that he had no idea what he was talking about, the kid added: “She is Oil Patch. Her father, I think…”

“Ah…” Charlie sighed. The other kids chuckled at his discomfort.

“You like that one, huh, Charlie?” Timothy ‘Red Foot’ Longsky, one of the six or seven Apache kids asked him.

“Sheeze, I dunno.”

All the other boys giggled at him. They thought his accent funny. Charlie already knew that. He had even tried to adapt a bit of a Texas drawl to his voice, but had yet to master it, especially when he was not thinking about it before hand.

As they sat and cooled in the shade, the girl got up and stepped off the bleachers. She squinted into the dugout briefly, with her book shielding her eyes. “You guys are pretty good. See ya…” She turned and walked toward the road.
The boys all sat there dumbstruck. Not too many white girls had ever spoken to any of them. They turned and looked at Charlie. “You should go walk her home, man.” Julio, the catcher told him with a grin.

Everyone started to push him out from under the tin roof. Charlie stepped out and put his glove into the front basket of the bike, then shoved the kickstand up and turned it around. Summoning all of his nerve, he pushed the bike along and caught up with the girl, who was almost to the road when she turned at the sound of his rattling bike. “Oh, hi…” She smiled at him and tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. “…again, I guess,” she added.

“Hi…” was all Charlie could manage. His knees were getting rubbery; his head felt very light. “…is it okay if I walk with you?”

“I don’t mind,” she told him. “I’m Sam.”

The name stunned Charlie even more than the fact that he was actually talking to her. “I’m Charlie, Charlie Speck.”

She giggled at him. “I know. Everyone here knows who you are, Charlie.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“You saved Jesus and that little girl. The whole town still talks about it.”
“Oh, that…yeah, I guess so. Didn’t think that made people know about me, though.”

“You are a really good pitcher.”

“Thanks. You like baseball?”

“No, I love baseball. I wish they let girls play. My daddy, he played for a bit, never got out of the minor leagues. He works the Oil Patch now.” Her speech was accented, but not as heavily as most that Charlie had encountered around Agony. Sam sounded…like she had spent a lot of time reading, practicing her speech. She hardly dragged any of her words, and always put her ‘g’s at the end, when required for proper enunciation. And, the sound of her voice was so appealing that Charlie found himself wanting to hear more words come from her pretty lips. “Who’s your favorite pitcher?” She asked him.

“Oh, ah…I’m a Cub fan, so I guess I’d have to go with either Jenkins or Niekro. Jenks can really throw some heat. He’s going to get over two hundred strikeouts this season, I bet.”

“Cubs, huh? You don’t like the Astros?”

Charlie shrugged. “They’re too new. And, I just don’t know about playing games inside.”

It was Sam’s turn to giggle. “None of the other teams would play down in Houston. It’s too hot, and they had so many mosquitoes. So, they built the Astrodome.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Sure,” Sam smiled and nodded. “I got to go to the first game ever played there. Saw Mickey Mantel hit the first home run. It’s a great place.”

“Wow, that must’ve been something. My dad used to play for the Cubs.”

“I know,” Sam said, to Charlie’s complete surprise. “He got hurt, right?”

“Yeah,” Charlie sounded dejected. “But, we used to go to all the games after that. We kept tickets right on the third base line, just past the bag.”

“Foul ball territory.”

“Yeah…” For a few moments, Charlie was back in Wrigley with his father. Then, before he could get too emotional, he made himself come back to the moment. “…we used to have a lot of fun there.”

“Have you met many kids our age yet?” She asked.

“No, other than the guys at the field. I know the Mulligans…but, I don’t hang around with them much anymore.”

“They scare me.” Sam said.

“To tell the truth, they scare me too. You should see their place.”

“I don’t know that I want to.”

“You’re not missing anything important, let me tell you.”

“I haven’t met anybody yet. We came after school got out. My dad and I.”

“And, your mom?”

Sam cast her eyes at the pavement. “They’re divorced. She left us, really. Ran away with some man she met when my daddy was working off shore.”

“That must’ve been hard.”

“Not as hard as loosing your father, I would think.”

Charlie could not think of any way to respond, so he kept quiet. They walked on in silence, for the most part. Then Sam broke into another topic: “Do you like to read?”

“Sure.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Gosh, you name it, I’ve either read it, or it’s on my list.”

Sam held up her book: ‘The Last Picture Show’. “This is a really good one. It’s about a little Texas town, sort of like this one, I guess.”

“Never heard of that one. You really like it?”

Sam nodded. “It’s a very tender story, but it’s a hard one too. I really like the way the author brings his characters to life.”

Charlie had never met, much less spoken, to another human, male or female, his own age that could speak of a book in such a way. “How do you mean, hard? It’s hard to read?”

“Oh, no. I meant that…well, you know how a good Western book is? Like a Louis L’Amore?”

“Sure.”

“Well, this guy makes The West feel different, if that makes any sense.”

Charlie chuckled. “I’ve noticed that myself, just coming here. It is nothing like I thought, at least from all the books and movies.”

“Exactly. He takes the romance out of it. Plus, it has a lot of sex in it, too.”

Charlie’s jaw nearly hit the pavement. He had never spoken about sex in the open before; much less with a girl, for goodness sake. He could feel his face going red.

“I guess I mean that it’s a very real feeling book. That’s what I think, anyhow.”

“I’ll have to read it sometime.”

“You can have my copy when I finish.”

“Oh, well, thanks, Sam.”

“Is this your street?” Sam pointed to the street sign. A strong breeze kicked up and sent dust scattering around them; both of them closed their eyes and turned their heads away.

“Yeah, that’s it. Where’s your’s?”

“Oh, we live down where all those trailers are parked. We live like turtles, I suppose. We carry our house with us. Makes it easier when we have to move on to another patch.”

“What’s that like?” Charlie started pushing his bike again, ignoring his street and going on with Sam. Although it was not said aloud, he intended to see her home. It somehow felt like the right thing to do, after all.

“What, moving around all the time? Never staying anywhere long enough to make any real friends? It’s…lame.”

“Sheeze, and here I thought it was so terrible just moving down here from Chicago. At least we plan to stay a while.”

“Oil Patch towns are pretty much all the same, Charlie. You see one, you’ve seen them all. I’ve been in nine different schools in the past three years, ever since we left Houston.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, big wow.”

Charlie walked her all the way to her trailer, a slightly worn-looking AirStream. It was covered in dust, like everything else around. There was an awning that pulled out from the side and covered a few lawn chairs and a rusty grill. The old truck he had seen the other night was not in sight.

“This is us. Thank you for walking with me, Charlie.”

“You’re welcome, Sam. It was nice to meet you.” He turned his bike and started to walk back. Then he turned and saw her still standing there watching him leave. “Hey, is Sam your real name, or is it short for something else?”

She giggled. “My real name is not one I like to tell anybody. I don’t even let daddy use it, much. Just call me Sam.”

“Okay, see ya.”

“See ya, Charlie…”

He walked on, turning and looking back every twenty steps or so. Each time, she was still standing there watching him. Her brown hair blowing in the dusty breeze, her pretty eyes squinting in the lingering white sun. Charlie thought that she made that miserable-looking trailer park appear beautiful. All of a sudden, life in Agony felt much better.
*