Me and BillyRay - Long hair and Ladies

            Well anyhow, after we left Abuela's house we went on where we was headed, and that almost didn't turn out so good.  It was a different company, they checked, said we was to young to work there. The old lady was nice, said they'd hire us right away if we come back when we was eighteen.  She was kind of crusty but she was kind about it, it weren't nothing personal.  Said she hated to turn us down being as how we wanted to work what with all the long haired hippies around wouldn't do a days work to save their life.  I didn't say nothing to that, neither did BillyRay.  Long haired hippies was a kind of people we'd only seen on television in them days, we didn't know anything to say.

It would have all been for nothing if it hadn't been for the old Indian man working at the gate.  You remember I said how about the only good luck we had was meeting some of God’s secret agents?  He just might have been one of ‘em allowing for what happened because of him.

He saw us go in, he saw us come back out.  I guess he could tell by how we was walking we didn’t get hired.  We was pretty disappointed.  We had the truck and the money from Abuela and not just a whole lot more.  What was worse we had not one idea between us what to do next. 

            Billy sits himself down on the back bumper.  "Damnation," he says.  "This is a situation."  He'd taken to saying that when he didn't know what to do, I think he was kind of proud of the word.

            "Well," says I, "don't think these folks want us making camp to wait on our birthdays.  Let's rumble up the road a bit, find us a café and ask around.  There's got to be something."  We hadn't had breakfast yet, it was still way early.  Done found out being there early is a good thing when you're a-lookin' for work.

            So back in the truck we got and out the gate we went.  When we pulled in they gave us this big orange sign to put in the window, it was for visitors and so of course we had to stop to give them their sign back.  I handed the sign to the old Indian man and he took it, but he stayed leaning on the truck to talk.

            "You boys to young, ain't ya," he said.  "Well, if I was a man in your predicament I know what I'd do."

            "What's that," I asked, wondering if he was gonna tell us to go home.  He didn't tell us to go home, he told of another job working on the Oklahoma side of the river just almost due north of where we was in Texas.  Said they didn't pay quite as good as his company but they paid as good as they could being as how most of the fellows was working the Texas side and they was short of manpower.  He didn't say so, but he winked, he was telling us they might not check so close.  I said thanks, and winked back.  He smiled and went back in the shack to wait on the next folks to pull up.

            "Well, now that has some hope to it,"  Billy says as we pulled away. He was already unfolding his map.

            "Yes it do," I said, and pulled in with a bunch of semi trucks loaded with rebar waiting their turn to get unloaded.  It's hard to read a map when you're bouncing around. There was almost three miles of company gravel before you got back to the highway.  It were a huge job they was building.

            "How much gas we got?" Billy asked after a bit.

            I hit the key, looked at the gauge.  "Tank and a half,"  I said.

            Billy looked at the map one more time, started folding it back up neat.  Maps is something special to Billy, he's good with 'em.  Some folks tear up a road map pretty quick, but not Billy.  He had a route picked out where we could get across the river without being on the interstate where the truck just gulps gas tryin' not to get run over by the Cadillac's. "Let's roll," he says.  "Drive easy and the back tank won't be far off full when we get there."

            I drove easy, coasting when I could, lettin’ the speed fall goin’ up the hills, and just like Billy said I’d just switched tanks when we pulled into town.  By then it was lunch time.  We’d skipped breakfast to drive so the first thing we were looking for was food.  It weren’t hard to find, every little town has one or two cafes.  This town had two, right across the road from each other, we pulled into the one on our side.

            It was kind of old, you could tell just by lookin’ it had seen a lot of life go by but it had a good feel to it.  You know what I mean, sometimes you walk in someplace and it feels like home.  It was one of those places.  The gal running the register said hi to us as we come through the door, looked us over pretty close.  It weren’t that big a town, I suspect she was trying to remember if she’d seen us before.  Of course she hadn’t, we’d never been there before, so while we was waiting on our food she walked the coffee pot around getting to us last so she could stop and talk a bit.

            “You boys from around here?” she asked.

            “Nah,” says Billy, “we’re from up Montana way.”

            “So what has you so far from home? Out adventuring?” she says, looking at me.

            Now I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it was close enough to true so I grinned and said “yup, we’re out adventuring.”  I kind of liked the idea, really.

            “How in the name of Noah’s pet whale did you wind up here?” she asks.  “This place ain’t barely on the map.”

            “Mostly looking for work.  Heard there was a big construction job here.”

            She nodded.  “Yea, they’re building quite a contraption down by the river.  Bringing all kinds of folks to town.  I suspect if you want work you won’t have to look long to find some.”    She kind of half smiled at us and took herself back to the window to get our burgers.  Long and short of it was that was how we met Ellen, and it was Ellen got us a job.  She done more than that before all was said and done but the first thing she done was get us work.

These two fellows come in a bit later, it was easy to see they wasn’t locals.  It was easy to see they liked Ellen and she liked them.  They was all joking and flirting, you know, just kind of playing, but I seen Ellen kind of nod in our direction just before she took their order and that was all it took.  They must have thought pretty high of her opinion because before they left they come over to our table and asked if we was looking for work.  We said we was and that was that.  They asked us what we knew how to do, we told ‘em, and we was hired.

It wasn’t the kind of work we thought we’d get, but hey, it was a good job.  We was officially mechanics helpers but what we really was was grease monkeys.  Our company worked for the big company keeping their machinery running, trucks and tractors and the big compressors what have an engine big as any pickup.   They give us a list of machines to keep track of and a truck all set up for that kind of work and all we had to do was keep track of which machine was where and how hard it was working so we could change the oil on time and keep it greased proper according to this other big book that lived in the cab.  It was an easy job, we’d both been doing that kind of work on the farm from way back.  It ain’t hard to tell if a machine is working happy, we’d make notes and give them to the master mechanic and after a bit he started paying attention to our notes, even told us thanks for keeping an ear out for his babies.  I kind of got the idea the last guys who had our job really didn’t give a damn.

Another good thing was since our machines was scattered all over the place we got to go pretty much everywhere and got to know all the foremen ‘cause we’d have to ask if it was ok to work on this machine or that for an hour.  I’m sure they all knew we was really to young, but hey, we grinned and got after it and did a good job and they all looked the other way for us.  We was getting paid as good as working for the big company and we was totally faithful. It took a month to get everything caught up, the last guys had been lazy and worse he wrote down fake numbers, but anyway, we got everything back where it was supposed to be.  It was a good job.

Well, that was the job.  We worked eight to five, and sometimes a few hours on Saturday but not all the time.  We had money in our pockets and the future was looking good. 

            Since we was both gainfully employed we rented us an apartment.  Well, we took over one some other fellows had rented, we was to young to sign.  They got hired on down in Texas and was leaving the state, they didn’t care about the lease being as how the sheriff wouldn’t know where they was anyway.  It didn’t matter, we had money and we paid the rent right on time so no one give a damn.

            Of course all we had for furniture at first was what the other fellows left so we had to go buy beds and some dishes and kitchen stuff but we was making good money so it didn’t take long and we had as much as we could load on the truck.  

After another week or two we run into something we hadn’t had to deal with yet.  We run into boredom.  Now boredom ain’t something so very common where we come from, usually you was working to hard to be bored.  There’s always something on the place needing attention.  But we wasn’t living on the land anymore, we was living in town and that was a brand new thing for us.  Soon enough we had to much time and not enough to fill it.

Well, for a pair of country boys come to town you know how that was gonna work out.  We didn’t know nothing to do except go to the movies but there weren’t even a movie in the town.  So we ended up going with the other guys when they’d go to the bar.  Of course we had to sneak in, we was still way to young to be legal.  But we got in a lot on account so many of the guys knew us from us driving around on their jobs.  They’d all yell howdy and the guys at the door generally didn’t check our ID’s unless the sheriff had his nose out of joint or something.  Anyhow, let me tell you it didn’t take all that long and we was getting quite an education.

Knowin' what you know about us it shouldn't be hard for you to figure the first thing we was gettin' educated about was women.  Go figure.  Let me tell you now the other fellows made a big deal about up and driving fifty miles to where there was this bar where you had to pay money to get in 'cause the girls bringing your beer didn't wear a shirt.  They didn't wear much by way of pants either, but none of 'em wore a shirt. 

It was an eye opener now the first couple of times we went.  They was all different sizes and shapes and colors and they was all pretty accordin' to their kind.  About all me and Billy did at first was try not to stare to much.  I think the girls all knew right off we wasn't used to such a place, they was all real nice to us and we done our best to be nice right back.

They was all older than us of course, some of ‘em had kids of their own. Long and short of it was that pretty quick the girls, well, I guess they just sort of adopted us or something being as how they knowed we was really to young to be there.  They took us back to their table by the back door to sit with them.  Truth was that was so we could duck out quick if the sheriff were to show up and they could say our glass was theirs.  So we got to really talk to ‘em when they was on break and after we got to know ‘em a bit it got to where if you said something to make them laugh they might give you a hug, not trying to be mean or nothing, just a hug, and after a while more we come to understand that working there in that bar without a shirt weren’t no different for them than us working out in the field without a shirt in the summertime.  Pretty soon it weren’t no big deal to us.

Well, it weren’t no big deal to us but it was to a few of the fellows.  Most of the fellows just looked and laughed, they liked looking ‘cause like I said they was all real pretty and they all come to work looking as pretty as they could, but there was a few out of every bunch who would get all studded up and try to talk this girl or that into going home with ‘em.  It never worked, but they always tried.  What made me kind of mad was they was the ones would always call the girl mean names later when the other fellows would razz ‘em for bothering her while she worked.  The girls really didn’t like them, and neither did we.

So that’s how it happened that me and BillyRay got to have us a reputation as ladies men, and yea we took some guff from the guys but it was all good natured, I’m pretty sure they all knew what was really going on.  A bit after that I got to have another kind of reputation as well. 

It was maybe three months after we got there that the longhairs showed up on the job.  They was from back east and they was union men, welders and pipe fitters come to build the big boilers.  They didn’t use our company, they took care of their own gear so it took a while before we heard the longhairs among ‘em wasn’t really hippies, they was just out of the army and not real happy about where the army sent ‘em and what they had to do when they got there so they was growing their hair long as a way to tell anyone who looked at ‘em what they really thought.  Nobody had any trouble with ‘em on the job, they worked by themselves most of the time and they was always polite.  It weren’t a week before they was driving to the tittie bar like everyone else.  That’s what the guys all called it, the tittie bar.

There weren’t no trouble for ‘em on the job but the tittie bar was a different thing.  They went to the tittie bar for the same reason the other guys did, to have a beer and listen to music and look at the pretty girls but you could tell right off they wasn’t really the same kind of guys.  Some of ‘em had hair longer than some of girls and well, some of ‘em if you watched ‘em close sometimes they’d start staring at nothing and their hands might shake and then something would happen and they’d jump a little.  It weren’t hard to see they was out of the army but the army wasn’t really out of them. 

The girls, well, they watched the guys close ‘cause it was part of their job and they was always extra nice to the ones who had that stare thing happen to them.  They was veterans, they got special treatment ‘cause most of the girls really was kind hearted and that’s how the fight that ended up costing us that job got started.  It happened one night when this one longhaired fellow had it happen to him so bad for a while we was all wondering if he was gonna wake back up.

He was just sittin’ there kind of propped up in the back corner by the girl’s table where we was sitting, he looked like he was too tired and should have stayed home to sleep.  So when he nods off for a bit nobody thought nothin’ of it.  Amy, that was the girl waiting his table, she moved his beer back where it wouldn’t get spilled and sort of shook her head lookin’ down on him and I tell you it were a gentle look on her face.  Amy was one of the girls who had a kid of her own, it weren’t nothing to see that was her momma look.  His buddy was sittin’ across from him and he nods a thank you to Amy and she shrugs and smiles like to say it’s just part of her job.

So he sits there snoozing for a bit and then he sits up and gets a hand on his beer but he don’t take a drink, that stare thing got him before he could.  I was watchin’ him when it happened and I tell you it scared me the way his eyes done.  His buddy seen it happen too and his face is instant worried.  I figured he’d snap back pretty quick but he don’t, that stare just kept going further and further away and pretty soon his face is starting to change too.  Next thing I know he got tears on his cheeks and his eyes, his eyes looked like he was lookin’ down into hell and cryin’ for what he see’d there.

Well about that point Amy is coming back from another table where four assholes has been giving her a hard time and she sees him too.  She gets right in front of him, not to close but right in front and she squats down where he has to be lookin’ her right in the face and she’s talking to him trying to get him to see her but he don’t, it were obvious he weren’t seeing a pretty woman with care on her face he was still looking down into hell. 

It stayed just like that for maybe a minute, him lookin’ down into hell and Amy tryin’ her best to get between him and that hell. If you was to have been lookin’ at her right then and kind of let your eyes go fuzzy you’d have seen her wings, I’m still pretty sure she was really an angel on account of the glow around her. It was kindness pure as could be what she was doing. But that was when some of that hell he was a lookin’ at broke loose in the tittie bar.

One of the four assholes from the table Amy just left gets up and he’s headed for the pisser and just rude as can be he makes it a point to bump into Amy and damn near knocks her over.  The guy’s buddy jumps up real fast, he been watchin’ Amy and it’s pretty obvious he thinks real high of what she’s been trying to do for his buddy and now he’s pissed. 

The asshole, he puffs up and looks at Amy whose looking ice daggers back and says “You can keep your goddamn crybaby hippies.” 

That were the wrong thing to say.  The guys buddy, he pushes him away from Amy and gets in front of him.  He says “you ain’t smart enough to have a clue how much reason that man has,” and now he’s totally pissed and ready to fight.  And all this while the guy is still staring and Amy she’s back on her feet backpedaling towards the bar  yelling for the bouncers.

So the asshole backs up a couple of steps and looks the guy over.  He ain’t all that big but he ain’t small and just by looking you could tell he were tough and he were mad.  So the asshole backs up a couple of more steps and I’m thinking maybe they ain’t gonna fight.  Then this other asshole from the table who really is kind of big, bigger than the guy’s buddy, comes up on him from behind.  He grabs him by surprise and throws him about ten feet, about the time the fellow has his boots back on the floor the big dude hits him and lays him over the pool table on his back trying to get a grip on his throat.

Well, that just weren’t right, not two on one and hit from behind and all.  There was this big push broom leaning up against the wall where I was sitting so I grabs up that broom and I charged the whole situation, I rammed that broom square into the back of the big guys knees.  Well, that knocked his legs loose and he’s starting down, the fellow on the pool table gets a hand loose and punches him good and solid in the face and right on down he goes, bounces on his butt and then rolls away.  The first asshole, he’s headed back now and the fellow is just then getting stood back up so I took the broom and swung it low and fast, hooked it behind his knees and yanked real hard.  His legs come loose and he goes down, whacks his head on the pool table and he’s down hard, he ain’t moving. 

The fellow, he looks at me and says “thanks kid, now get the hell outa’ here,” and he turns around to see that the big asshole is back on his feet with blood pouring out of his nose and the other two are standing beside him.  His situation ain’t looking real good cause now it’s three to one.  And all this while his buddy is still staring.

Well, he backs up a couple of steps and pushes me back, pushes me hard, I kinda bounced where the broom had been.  He looks the situation over and it ain’t getting no better so he takes a real deep breath and yells “yeow! this way Marine!” at the top of his lungs.  Across the bar about half a dozen guys stand up looking to see what’s going on and that was when his buddy finally, finally broke that stare and woke up.

He woke up, took one look and screamed like a panther.  He come out of that chair like a lightning bolt and I swear he was level to the floor when his boots hit the big asshole in the chest.  I heard bones break.  The other two, they try and grab him but they ain’t having no luck at that, he’s moving way to fast and then the first fellow is on them and now it’s a fair fight.  Them half a dozen guys who stood up when he yelled?  Well, they’re headed our way but the assholes had friends too and they was all fighting before they got very far.

That was about all I got to see of the fight ‘cause that was when Amy and three or four other girls grabs up me and BillyRay and hustles us all out the back door, we just had to wait it out.  From what I heard later it was one hell of a fight, tore the place up pretty bad but everyone said the longhairs really got the better of it in spite of being way outnumbered.  Turned out a dozen of the assholes was down but all the longhairs was still on their feet and holding the middle of the bar when the sheriffs got there.   But that didn’t surprise me much, like I said they wasn’t really hippies, they was all pretty much just back from the war and didn’t want to look like they had when they was in the army.  We didn’t meet no real hippies until later, but that’s a different story.

I done the right thing but it cost us our job.  It were a big fight, to big to ignore so of course the sheriffs had to figure out who started it and why to see if there was any laws broke beyond just tearing up the bar and owing for fixing what got broke.  Well, I was part of the story but none of the longhairs knew my name so the way it come back to me was they just told the law about the underage kid who worked as a grease monkey who took a broom to the situation so it could be a fair fight. 

They didn’t mean to do us no harm, but it got back to the boss and he called us in and said he had to let us go or he could get in real big trouble because we was to young.  He said he hated to do it ‘cause we was the best hands he’d had in that job for a long time, he give us our wages and then another months worth in cash for having to turn us loose for what were not our fault.  We told him thank you and said we hated to leave being as how we really liked working for him.  We had no gripe with him, it were the law not his idea.

So it’s a Monday morning and we’re out of work again.  We go down to the café where Ellen works to sit and think and figure.  Well, it ain’t hard to see we ain’t gonna get no more work around there, we was gonna have to move on.  Of course Ellen had heard about the fight, it was Ellen told me about how it turned out, she was friends with one of the sheriffs.

When we was paying out Ellen up and asks “you boys gonna stay at home tonight?”

BillyRay he answers yea, most likely.  Even if we’d wanted to drive so far we couldn’t go to the tittie bar again, not without the other guys and we didn’t want to even try and go to any of the other bars ‘cause who knew where the assholes might be and we was pretty sure they’d be pretty mad at us.  So yea, we was gonna be at home packing up and getting ready to pull out in the morning.  Ellen just nods.  I didn’t notice it at the time but she must have been thinking.

Come that evening came a knock on our door and that was a total surprise because no one had ever knocked on that door before, not while we was living there.  So I gets up and goes to answer the door and yes, it were Ellen, but that weren’t the biggest surprise.  Ellen walks in the door like she lives there and right behind Ellen come Amy holding her baby!  It knocked me backwards, I had no earthly idea they even knowed each other much less that Amy was Ellen’s daughter.

BillyRay comes around the corner to see what’s going on and Ellen pins him down flat with a look.  She says “BillyRay, grab your coat, you’re coming with me.”  Billy don’t even argue, that’s way away from normal for him he just gets this goofy look on his face and does just what she says.  Amy hands her baby to it’s grandma and just like that, it ain’t been hardly a full minute they is all out the door and it’s just Amy and me.

Well, I’m standing there just dumbfounded.  I couldn’t think of nothing to say, what to do, didn’t have not one idea what was going on or why, didn’t have no idea why Amy was standing there with a look on her face that was part momma and part totally something else entirely.  And then she done the damndest thing ever.  She takes her shirt off!  Right there in the middle of my living room she just takes her shirt right off and tosses it aside.  Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

She starts walking up to me kind of slow and I’m thinking maybe I should back up but I couldn’t figure no good reason to.  I mean, what the hell, she hadn’t been a wearing a shirt the first time I met her.  So she walks up and stands right in front of me real close and I finally gets my mouth to work and I asks her why.  Amy, she smiles at me and says “because I like you.”  And then she starts unbuttoning my shirt! 

I’m sure you know what happened later but before that we spent a long time sitting on the couch the other guys left that we left for the next guys just being comfortable together, and yea, Amy is a comfortable woman to be with.  She’s a real comfortable woman, or maybe angel, it didn’t matter to me right then.  She was warm and soft and damn she smelled good and when she’d touch you that glow would jump off her onto you and it would tickle and tingle.

So we talked about all kinds of things, about her daddy and my daddy and how we growed up, talked about her baby and my daddy dying and how me and BillyRay ended up traveling to end up there in her town and all sorts of stuff.

 It come to pass that I asked her how it was it seemed she already knew about that stare thing that got the one fellow so bad.  Amy, she looks up at me and there’s hurting in eyes and I wished I hadn’t asked.  That was when she started telling of her baby’s daddy, how he’d been in the army and in the war and how the first time he came home that stare thing would get him and how it got so bad for both of them he finally had to go back.  He went back and he got killed which was why Amy was working at the tittie bar in the first place. 

Well, it were a sad story, it really were and my heart went out to her over how she could know that and still work in that tittie bar and see them other fellows who’d get that same stare.  So I kind of picked her up, turned a cuddle into a hug but when I went to put her down she wouldn’t let me.  She hangs onto my neck and stays hugged up close and whispers in my ear “you remind me of him so much, you’re so much like him before he went to ‘Nam, you really are,” she said and that was when the other things really got started.

I ain’t gonna say no more about that night, just that it was total sweetness and before it was over the angel part of Amy taught me some things that landed way deep in my soul.  Them things went a long, long way towards keeping me and BillyRay safe later.  You see she showed me what it feels like in your heart to have a lady’s love when she give it free from her heart, and knowin’ that went a long way towards knowin’ how to know when what they was sayin’ was love and what they was a meaning is anything under the sun except love.  Down the road we could’ve been tripped up bad more than once if she hadn’t shared me that.