Me and BillyRay, well, when we started out we never had much luck. Folks all said we was to dumb to have luck. But that’s not the truth. We was innocent, and we was naïve, but we wasn't really dumb. But it took us a long time to learn the words for what we started out being.
Jobs was hard to keep. We'd work, really hard, but it always seemed the job ran out for us before it ran out for everyone else. So we spent a lot of time in the old truck my daddy left to me travelin' to the next job. That old truck took us all the way from Montana, where we was born, all the way down to Mississippi, and then half way back. Billy, he was seventeen. Me, I was just sixteen, just barely had my license. We told everyone we was eighteen so we could work. Most of the time nobody really looked. We're both pretty big, and if we didn't have much of nothing else we had muscles, and calluses on our hands.
Calluses is what you get when you grow up where we did. In southern Montana right there by the Idaho border the only thing there really is is plenty of room. People is scarce, and spread pretty far apart. Everybody looks pretty much the same too, white people who don't even think about being white cause there's no other color to make you notice what color you are. But there's a lot of sky, and mountains to the west that glow sometimes, and you don't have to go to church to find God you just stop whatever it is you happen to be doing, setting fence or doctoring cattle or whatever, and look and you can see God. So you really don't ever have to think a whole lot about him, because he's pretty much always there.
But that’s in Montana. Some of the places we ended up stopping I don’t think God really likes. But then, sometimes God has folks working for him the preacher man wouldn’t believe, not if the good Lord told him so himself. And maybe, just maybe because me and BillyRay was so innocent when we started out, maybe that was why about the only good luck we ever really had was to meet a couple of them. I’d like to tell of a few of those folks, because I know no one else ever will. That’s probably the way they’d want it anyway, being as how they're secret agents and all, so I’m gonna change their names, and describe them just a little different than they really was, so as to keep their privacy.
Of Hope and Shovels
We was in Oklahoma, up north near Ponca City. It was the first part of July and hot, good lord we thought it was hot. We hadn't been very far south yet, not really, so it felt hotter than it should have. All day long we'd been shoveling mud from the bottom of this ditch trying to get it cleaned out. It didn't seem like we was making much headway, and we was tired and discouraged. There was us, and two old men from Mexico who'd started from the other end of the ditch. Just the four of us, and that ditch must have been half a mile long, and eight foot deep. No one could figure out why they dug such a thing, and then just left it to get muddy every time it rained. Anyhow, there was generally four grunts down in the bottom keeping the mud shoveled out. It came break time, and that water can didn't look near big enough.
We found a shady spot, and since the boss was way down at the other end of the job we weren't in any big hurry to get back to shoveling the mud from one place to another. Jose, the old Mexican man, he took himself a big gulp of water and let it run down his chin and onto his shirt. You couldn't tell, we was all soaked through with sweat anyway.
"Aye yi yi," Jose said. "It gonna be a hot summer. You boys, you gonna stay the summer?"
"Don't know yet," BillyRay answered, wiping his face with the tail of his shirt. "I suspect we'll stay a while, anyway. Got to have money for the road. Gas ain't free."
"Gas ain't free, food ain't free, nothing is free. Man got to work his whole life away," the other Mexican said. He didn't sound happy, he never sounded happy. The whole time we worked with him he was always just sorta sour. Jose now, he always seemed happy, no matter what was going on.
Anyhow, I hadn't said anything yet, I was nursing on the water and wishing for rain. It couldn't get no muddier, but it might get cooler. I was looking at the sky, at puffy teaser clouds that never did anything, and wishing.
Jose, he saw me looking up, and he laughed. "Them clouds, them are shovelin' clouds. They don't make rain."
"Well, don’t hurt to hope," I said.
"Hope, hope. Hope is good thing," Jose said, and filled his cup again. "But hope, it gets broke easy. You got to be careful with hope."
That made sense to me, sort of, but Billy cut in. "Now just how in the hell is a man supposed to be careful with hope," he asked, turning around to look at Jose. Billy is always doing that, trying to get folks to talkin'.
Jose grinned. “Boy, you is young if you don’t know that.”
Now that, that really got Billy going. We was young, but he didn’t like to be reminded of it. “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean,” he said, and sorta puffed up while he said it.
Jose laughed, and splashed some water on his head. “You ain’t never had a broken hope a-pokin you in the heart?” he asked, and right then I seen his eyes change. After a while you get to where you can sorta recognize it, you know either God or the Devil is gonna tell you something, and you got to be wise to tell ‘em apart sometimes, but that was the first time I’d ever seen such a thing and I didn’t know what to make of it.
I don't know, maybe Billy did know what he was a looking at, but somehow I kind of doubt it. He reared back a bit, and he was looking surprised. Jose didn't pay him no mind, he just pulled out this little sack of tobacco and started rollin' himself a smoke.
"Hope, hope a thing ain't got no time to it," Jose was saying, getting his smoke rolled up good and tight. He licked it down, and looked at me. "You say you hope it rains? You say that, you wait a bit, it will rain for you. But you say, you say you hope it rains today without a looking at the sky first, and then you ain't got no hope, all you got is a busted hope gonna make it even hotter." He lit his smoke, leaned back and took a big pull, let it run out his mouth and up his nose. When he sat back up he was looking at Billy real tight. "You be careful with hope by not letting it get broke bumping into a bigger hope. Me, I hope it rain like Noah never saw, but I hope it don't rain like that till after they get this ditch filled, cause me, even more than I hope it rains I hope we gets done with shoveling mud pretty damn soon."
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