Гасри В.. Bound for glory (engl)

and trembled, and strained every nail and every joint when the mud bucket,
full again, would stick in the bottom of the hole, and the cable would pull
as tight as it possibly could, trying to pull the bucket out. The rig and
derrick would creak and crack, and whole swarms of men would work like ants.
The slush ponds were full of the gray-looking shale and a film of slick oil
reflected the clouds and the sky, and lots of times I'd take a stick and
reach out and fish out some kind of a bird that had mistook the oil pool for
the real sky, and flew into the slush. The whole country was alive with men
working, men running, men sweating, and signs everywhere saying: Men Wanted.
I felt good to think that some day I'd grow up and be a man wanted; but I
was a kid--and I had to go around asking the men for a job; and then hear
them say, "Git th' hell outta here! Too dangerous!"
The first people to hit town was the rig builders, cement men,
carpenters, teamskinners, wild tribes of horse traders and gypsy wagons
loaded full, and wheels breaking down; crooked gamblers, pimps, whores, dope
fiends, and peddlers, stray musicians and street singers, preachers cussing
about love and begging for tips on the street comers, Indians in duty loud
clothes chanting along the sidewalks with their kids crawling and playing in
the filth and grime underfoot. People elbowed up and down the streets like a
flood on the Canadian, and us kids would run and jump right in big middle of
the crowds, and let them just sort of push us along a block or so, and play
like we was floating down stream. Thousands of folks come to town to work,
eat, sleep, celebrate, pray, cry, sing, talk, argue, and fight with the old
settlers.
And this was a pretty mixed-up mess, but it was always three or four
times worse on election day. I used to follow the different speakers around
and see who got beat up for voting for who. I would stay out late at night
to see the election returns come in, and see them count the votes. Lots of
kids stayed out that night. They knew that it wasn't any too safe down on
the streets on account of the men fighting and throwing bottles and
stuff--so we would climb up the cast-iron sewer pipes, up to the tops of
buildings, and we'd watch the votes counted from up there.
A board was all lit up, and the different names of the men that was
running for office was painted on it. One column would be, say, "Frank Smith
for Sheriff," and the next, "John Wilkes." One column would say, "Fist
Fights," and another column would read, "Gangfights." A man would come out
every hour during the night and write: "Precinct Number Two, for Sheriff,
Frank Smith, three votes, Johnny Wilkes, four. Fist fights four. Gangfights,
none."
In another hour he'd come out with his rag and chalk, and write,
"Precinct Number Three just heard from. For Sheriff, Frank Smith, Seven
votes, John Wilkes, Nine; Fist fights: Four. Gangfights, Three." Wilkes won
the Sheriff's office by eleven odd votes. The fights added up: Fist Fights,
Thirteen. Gangfights, Five.
I remember one particular gangfight. The men had banged into one
another and was really going at it. They spent as much time getting up and
down as they had working on their pieces of land for the past three months.
Some swung, missed, and fell. They each brought down two more. Others got
knocked down and only brung down one or so. Others just naturally went down
and stayed down. I got interested in one big old boy from out around Sand
Creek; he was in there for all it was worth, and I wanted to crawl down off
of the building and ooze in a little closer to where he was standing
fighting. I edged through the crowd with fists of all sorts and sizes going
past my head, barely missing, and I got right up


behind him. He took pretty good aim at a cotton farmer from Slick City,
drawed back with his fist, hit me under the chin with his elbow, hit the
cotton farmer from Slick City, on the chin with his fist, knocked me a
double handspring backwards one direction, and the cotton farmer from Slick
City a twin loop the other.
I was down on my hands and knees, and all of the well-known feet in
that county was in the small of my back. Men fell over me, and got mad at me
for tripping them. Every time I started to get up, they would all push in my
direction, and down I'd go again. My head was in the dirt. I had mud in my
teeth, oil in my hair, and water on the brain.
Right after the oil boom got under way, I found me a job walking the
streets and selling newspapers. I stuck my head into every door, not so much
to sell a paper, but to just try to figure out where in the devil so many
loud-yelling people had struck from. The tough kids, one or two of them new
in town, had glommed onto the very best-selling corners, and so I walked
from building to building, because I knew most of the landlords and the
other kids didn't.
Our Main Street was about eight blocks long. And Saturday was the day
that all of the farmers come to town to jump in with the several thousand
rambling, gambling oil field chasers. Folks called them boom chasers. A
great big rolling army of hard-hitting men and their hard-hitting families.
Stores throwed their keys away and stayed open twenty-four hours a day. When
one army jumped out of bed another army jumped in. When one army marched out
of a cafe, another one marched in. As fast as one army went broke at the
slot machines in the girly houses, it was pushed out and another army pushed
in.
I walked into a pool hall and poker room that had big pictures of naked
women hung along the walls. Every table was going with from two to six men
yelling, jumping up and down, whooping around worse than wild Indians,
cussing the jinx and praying to the god of good luck. Cue balls jumped
tables and shot like cannon balls across the hall. Eight tables in line and
a whole pow-wow and war dance going on around each table. "Watch out fer yer
Goddam elbow, there, brother!"
Poker tables wheeling and dealing. Five or six little oilcloth tables,
five or six mulers, hustlers, lead men, standing around winking and making
signs in back of every table. And behind them, five or six more hard-working
onlookers, laughing and watching five or six of the boys with a new paysack
getting the screws and trimmings put to them. A guy or two slamming in and
out through the back door, picking pints of rotgut liquor out of trash
piles, and sliding them out of their shirts to the boys losing their money
around the tables. "Whitey's gettin' perty well stewed. Gonna bet wild here
in a minute, an' lose his hat."
Along the sides of the walls was mostly where the old and the sick
would come to set for a few hours and keep track of the robbing and the
fights; the old bleary-eyed bar-flies and drunks that rattled in the lungs
with asthma and ТВ and coughed corruption all day and seldom hit a cuspidor
on the floor, I walked around saying, "Paper, mister? Five cents." But kids
like me wasn't allowed on the inside of dives like this, unless we knew the
boss, and then the bouncer kept his eye peeled on me and seen to it that I
kept moving.
"Boys! That gal there on th' Goddam wall has got breasts like a feather
pillow! Nipples like a little red cherry! Th' day I run onto somethin' like
that, I'm gonna give up my good оl' ruff an' rowdy ways! Whoooeee!" "Ya dam
sex-minded roustabout, you, c'mon, it's yore next shot!"
I very seldom sold a paper in the joints like this. The men were too
wild. Too worked up. Too hot under the collar to read a paper and think
about it. The old dice, the cards, the dominoes, the steer men for the pimps
and gamblers, the drinking and climbing the old spitty steps that lead to
the girly houses, maybe the wild spinning of all of these things had the men
whipped up to a fever heat, jumpy, jittery, wild and reckless. A two-hundred
pounder would raise up from a poker table broke, and stumble through the
crowd yelling, "You think I'm down! You think you got me down! You think I'm
drunk! Well, maybe I am drunk. Maybe I am drunk. But I'll tell you low-life
cheating rats one thing for sure! You never did hit an honest days work in
your whole life. You follow the boom towns around! I've seen you! Seen your
faces in a thousand towns. Cards. Dice. Dominoes. Snooker. Pool. Flabbery
ass whores. Rollers. I'm an honest hard-working man! I help put up every oil
field from Wheeler Ridge to Smackover! What the hell have you done? Rob.
Roll, Steal. Beat. Kill. Your kind is coming to a bad end! Do you hear me?
All of you! Listen!"
"Little too much noise there, buddy," a copy would walk up and take the
man by the arm. "Walk along with me till you cool off."
In front of the picture show a handful of old batty electric lights hit
down on a couple of hundred men, women and kids, everybody blocking the
sidewalks, pushing, talking, arguing, and trying to read what was on at the
show. Wax dummies in steel cages showed "The Cruel And Terrible Facts Of The
Two Most Famous Outlaws In The History Of The Human Race, Billy The Kid, and
Jesse James. And Also The Doomed Life Of The Most Famous Lady Outlaw Of All
Time, The One And Only Belle Starr. See Why Crime Does Not Pay On Our
Screen. Today. Adults Fifty Cents. Children Ten Cents. Please Do Not Spit On
The Floor. To Do So May Spread Disease.''
I sauntered along singing out, "Read all about it! Late night paper.
Ten men drowned in a dust storm!"
"Can't read, sonny, sorry, I've got horseshoe nails in my eyes! Ha! Ha!
Ha!" A whole circle of men would bust out laughing at me. And another one
would smile at me and pat me on the head and say, "Here, Sonny Boy. You
ain't nobody's fool. I cain't read yer paper, neither, but here's a dime."
I watched the crowds sweat and mop their faces walking along, the young
boys and girls all dressed up in shirts and dresses as clean as the morning
sky.
"The day of th' comin' of th' Lord is near! Jesus Christ of Nazareth
will come down out of the clouds in all of His purity, all of His glory, and
all of His power! Are you ready, brother and sister? Are you saved and
sanctified and baptized in the spirit of the Holy Ghost? Are your garments
spotless? Is your soul as white as the drifted snow?"
I leaned back against the bank window and listened to the people talk
as they walked along. "Is your snow spotless?" "Souls saved. Two bits a
lick." "I ain't wantin' t' be saved if it makes ye stand around th' street
corners an' rave like a dam maniac!" "Yes, I'm goin' to join th' church one
of these days before I die." "Me too, but I wanta have some fun an' live
first!"
I walked across the street in the dark in front of the drugstore and
found a drunk man coming out. "Hey, mister, wanta good job?"
"Yeah. Where'sh a job at?"
"Sellin' papers. Make a lotta money."
"How'sh it done?"
"You gimme a nickel apiece fer these twenty papers. You walk up an'
down th' streets yellin' about th' headlines. Then you sell all of th'
papers, see, an' you git yer money all back."
"Ish that th' truth? Here'sh a doller. Gimme th' papersh. Shay. What
doesh th' headlines shay?"
'' 'Corn liquor found to be good medicine!' "
"Corn likker ish found t' be good medishin."
"Yeah. Got that?"
"Yesh. But, hell fire, shonny, if I wash t' holler that, th'
bootleggersh would kill me."
"Why would they kill ya?"
"Cause. Jusht would. Ever'body'd quit drinkin' 'fore mornin'!"
"Just holler, 'Paper! Latest tissue!'"
" 'Latest tissue!' Okay! Here I go! Mucha 'blige.'' And he walked off
down the street yelling, "Papersh! Latest tissue!"
I spent sixty cents for twenty more papers at the drugstore. "Listen,"
the paper man was telling me, "th' sheriff is gettin' mighty sore at you.
Every night there's three or four drunks walkin' up and down th' streets
with about twenty papers yelling out some goofy headline!"
"Business is business."
I hopped up on top of a big high load of oil-field pipe and rode along
listening to the teamskinner rave and cuss. He didn't even know I was on his
load. I looked up the street and seen twenty other wagons oozing along in
the dark with men cracking their twenty-foot leather reins like shotguns in
the night, knocking blisters on the hips of their tired horses. Cars,
buggies and wagons full of people waiting their chance to pull out between
the big wagons loaded down with machinery.
So this is my old Okemah. All of this fast pushing and loud talking and
cussing. Yonder's twenty men piling onto the bed of a big truck waving their
gloves and lunch pails in the air and yelling, "Trot out yer oil field that
needs buildin'!" "See ya later, wimmen, when I git my bank roll!" "You be
careful out there on that night shift in that timber!" a woman called out at
her man. "I'll take care of myself!" Men riding along by the truckloads.
Pounding each other on the backs, swaying and talking so fast and so loud
you could hear them for a mile and a quarter.
I like all of this crowd running and working and making a racket. Old
Okemah is getting built up. Yonder's a crowd around a fist fight in front of
the pawnshop. Papa beat a man up there at that cafe last night for charging
him ninety cents for a forty-cent steak.
I never did think I'd see no such a mob on the streets of this town.
The whole air is just sort of full of a roar and a buzz and a feeling that
runs up and down your back and makes the roots of your hair tingle. Like
electricity of some kind.
Yonder is the bus caller. "It's a fine ride in a fine roller! Th'
quickest, easiest, most comfortable way to the fields! Get your bus tickets
here to all points! Sand Springs. Slick City. Oilton. Bow Legs. Coyote Hill.
Cromwell. Bearden. A big easy ride with a whiskey driver!"
"You write 'em up! An' sign 'em up! Best wages paid!
Hey, men! It's men wanted here! Skilled and unskilled! Killed and
unkilled! Brain jobs! Desk jobs! Settin'-down jobs! Jobs standing up! Jobs
bending over! Jobs for the drunk men, jobs for the sober! Oil field workers
wanted! You sign a card and hit it hard! Pay and a half for overtime! Double
on Sunday! Right here! Fifteen thousand men wanted! Roughnecks! Roustabouts!
Tong buckers! Boiler men! Dirt movers! Horse and mule drivers! Let's go!
Men! Work cards right here!"
There was old Riley the auctioneer standing in front of his hiring
office, pointing in at the door with a walking cane. Gangs of men pushing in
and out, signing up for field work. "Rig builders! It's carpenters! We need
your manly strength, your broad shoulders, and your big broad smiles, men,
to get this oil field built! Anything from nail drivers, screw drivers,
truck drivers, to slave drivers! Wimmen! Drive your husbands here! Yes,
madame, we'll sober him up, wash him up, clean him up, feed him up, fill him
up, rest him up, build him up, and straighten him up! You'll have a big fat
bank roll and a new man when we send him back off of this job! Write your
name and win your fame! Men wanted!"
An old timer was preaching from the other side in front of a grocery
store, "These here dem wild boom chasers is tearin' our whole town down!
They don't no more pay 'tention to th' law than if we didn't have laws!"
"You're a damned old liar! You old miserly crab!" a lady yelled out
from the crowd around him. "We're a-buildin' this town up ten dozen times
more'n you ever could of! We do more actual work in a minute than you do
settin' on yore rear a year!"
"If you wuzn't a lady, I'd resent that!"
"Don't let that hold you back, brother!" She knocked four or five
toughs out of her way getting to him. "As far as these laws go, who made
them up? You! And three or four more about like you! We come to this town to
work an' build up an oil field an' make it worth something! Maybe these boys
are a little wild and woolly. You've got to be to work like we work, an'
travel like we travel, an' live like we live!"
I laid down on the load of pipe and stretched my feet out and looked up
where the stars was. My ears still heard the babbling, yelping, swushing
along the streets, wheels rolling, horses straining, kids chasing and babies
screaming. The big trucks tooted their horns in the dark. I wanted to ride
there with my eyes closed, listening. I wanted to ride past the picture
show, gambling hall, whore house, drug store, church house, court house, and
the jail house and just listen to old Okemah growing up.
Okemah. She's a going, blowing oil boom town.
In the summer I played with other kids in the gang house. Our gang
house was built by a week's hard work of about a dozen kids of most every
sort, size, color, brand, trade mark, and style. It started when an old lady
told us a big long story, all about the howls and laughs you could hear if
you went very close to the old haunted house of the Bolewares. So I figured
my whole gang had ought to go spend a night in the old haunted house. I
rounded up about the whole dozen and over we went after it got dark. Nothing
but a stray goat come across the yard and some bats flew in and out of a few
broke windows. Right then we decided to haunt the house our own selves, and
we all moaned and groaned and tromped around in the dark, choking and
gurgling like we was being lynched, and stomping down with all of our weight
on the loose boards of the floor and the attic.
Next, one of us got the bright idea of carrying the loose boards across
town to an old sawed-down peach orchard on a side of the schoolhouse hill,
and put up a gang house to haunt. Every night we'd sneak out from home after
supper, some of us going to bed, creeping out from under covers and out of
windows to get away from our folks. Howls and screams from the Boleware
house caused neighbors to lock and bar their doors and windows; women stayed
in houses in bunches and sewed or knitted all night. As we kept haunting the
old house, rent come down to less than half what it had been on this street.
Dogs hung along under porches and whined with their tails pulled up real
tight between their hind legs. And then nothing but the very worst old
rotten boards were left on the outside of the house, and we'd hauled away
all of the nice inside boards. They went up like a big toadstool on
schoolhouse hill, and neighbors wondered what the hell. Last of all, we
wrote a sign with dim paint that we hung on the front side of the old
Boleware hull: "Haunted House. Stay Out." I heard two ladies walk past it a
month or so later and read the sign. My ears was like an old hound dog's,
and I heard one lady say, "See the sign on the front? 'Haunted House. Stay
Out'?" The other one said, "That landlord is a smart man. Doing that to
scare the kids away." And I thought, "Bull."
Pretty soon we had a regular early Oklahoma township a-going right
there on the lot around that old gang house. It was our City Hall, mail box,
court house, jail, picture show, saloon, gambling hall, church, land office,
restaurant, hotel and general store.
That shack was busier than our town depot. Each kid had a bin. In that
bin he kept his junk, whatever that might run into. Most of the kids would
take a gunny sack and go "junking'' about twice or three times a week. They
would come carrying in big sacks full of rubber inner tubes, brass faucets,
copper wire, light brass gadgets, aluminum pots and pans beat up into a
tight little ball. Thе city junk man bought them. That was money in our
pocket. We packed those sacks more than we did school books. We also
gathered up scrap iron, lead, zinc, rags, bottles, hoofs, horns, and old
bones, and you could put your own stuff in your own bin without being afraid
of somebody a-stealing it. We thought it was a mighty bad thing to steal
something somebody else had already stolen.
We had gang money made out of sheets of paper. Every time you brung in
a certain amount of junk, it was judged to be worth so much. You could go to
the bank and the banker would hand you out a school tablet or two cut up in
squares like dollar bills, and a few fancy marks around the edge, and signed
by the captain of the gang. Fifty cents worth of junk was worth Five
Thousand Dollars. You could cash your gang money in any time you wanted to,
and pack your junk down to the city junk yard and sell it for real money.
A kid named Bud run the gambling wheel. It was an old lopsided bicycle
wheel that he had found in the dumps and tried to even up. He paid you ten
to one if you called off the right spoke it would stop on. But there was
sixty spokes.
We rode stick horses, and some of the kids had nine, and all of the
nags named according to how fast they could run. Like if you was riding Old
Bay Tom, and Rex took in after you with a red handkerchief tied over his
face, why you'd switch horses right in the big middle of the road--and get
off of Old Bay Tom, and yell, "Giddyap, Lightnin'!"
We made horse-wrangling trips to the river and back, and gathered the
best of our stick horses, the long, keen straight and springy ones with lots
of fiery sap in them, and worth several hundred dollars each in gang money.
I jig-trotted the seven miles back from the river, with a big bundle of wild
broomtail Indian ponies tied up on both arms; and there was always such a
showing and swapping and training of horses on the side of that hill as
would outclass any horse-trading lot in the State of Oklahoma. A kid buying
a horse would first, of course, want him broke to saddle; and there was four
or five kids that made their whole living by busting bad ponies at ten
dollars a head. Two or three kids grabbed the horse's head and blinded his
eves while the rider mounted to the saddle, and then would holler, "Fan
`im!" The rider and the horse broke away, bucked and jumped all over the
place, beating the weeds to a frazzle, snorting, and nickering, and humping
into the air. Founding and spurring the bronco, the


kid frogged over sticker patches, whammed through can piles, flounced
down the hillside and sidestepped rocks and roots and stumps. Since a horse
was worth more if he was a wild one to break, the buyer would tip you an
extra fifty or maybe even a hundred, if you showed all of the other kids
that this was the snuffiest horse in the whole history of the hill. With
always two or three or four hoss tamers out there busting a mount at the
same time, you can just picture in your own mind how our hill looked--each
kid trying and straining every gut to out-buck, and out-nicker, and out-ride
the others. And then, to make a horse really in the dollar-a-year class, you
had to ride him till he quit bucking, and then run him through all of his
gaits; through the hard ones and easy ones, running as fast as he could
tear, till he slowed into a fast rough gallop, and then down to a slow easy
lope, pace him down the foot path, single-foot across the gang house yard,
fox trot up to the door, and then walk as nice and as easy as an old member
of the family till he was tied at the hitch rack, eating apples and sugar
out of everybody's hand.
And then you got your pay-off and somebody was the proud owner of
another pureblood. And not only did the horse get a good proud name, and
pedigree, and papers, but every little habit, onery streak, nervous spell,
and fear, along with all of his likes and dislikes, was known by his owner,
and there struck up between that stick horse and that kid a friendship,
partnership, and love. Lots of kids had rode their horses, talked their
troubles, winnings and losings, sick spells, and streaks of good luck, over
and over a thousand times--for two or three years.
In a patch of big high weeds, near the gang house, was an old oat
binder. We used it one hour for an airplane, and the next for a submarine.
The World War was on over in France, and the Americans had gone in. We
played war, war, war. We shot down weeds and trampled them into the dust,
and we licked the same weed army every day. We grabbed up sticks, and waded
out into the high weeds, fighting them hand to hand, cussing, sweating,
hacking them down. They surrendered every few minutes. Then they'd do
something mean to us again, and we'd get out and frail them back into the
notion of surrendering all over again. We'd walk up and grab each individual
weed by the coat collar, throw off his helmet, search him for Lugers, chuck
away his rifle, and say, "Surren'er?"
"Surrender!"
In the fall, when our school started, the kids got more excited about
fighting than about books. New kids had to fight to find their place on the
grounds, and the old bullies had new fights to settle who was still who.
Fights had a funny way of always ringing me in. If it was between two kids
that I didn't even know, whoever won, some smart aleck kids would holler,
"Yeah, yeah, I bet ya cain't lick оl' Woody Guthrie." And before long I'd be
somewhere out across the playgrounds whaling away and getting whaled, mostly
over something I didn't know a thing about. I went around with some part of
me puffed up all of the time, and the other parts just going down.
There was four of us that more or less respected each other, because we
was the fightingest four around there, not because we wanted to fight, not
because we was brave, or had it in for anybody, but just because the kids in
school had us picked out to entertain them with our broke fists and noses,
and they would carry tales and lies and cuss words back and forth like a
messenger service just to keep the old fires going and the pot boiling and
the skin a-flying.
But Big Jim Robins and Little Jim Whitt was the only two of the
round-town four that fought amongst their selves.
They beat half of the weed patches back into a cloud of hot, white,
cement-looking dust, every school season, and the kids would all gang up and
foller Big Jim and Little Jim home every afternoon when school was out, just
to get them to fighting, which wasn't a hard job, since they never could
agree just who'd got the best of it. Big Jim was a head taller than Little
Jim. I was about the same size as Little Jim. Big Jim was red-headed,
speckle-faced, snaggle-toothed, and broad through the shoulders, with great
big flat feet. His hands was like hog quarters, and his arms was six inches
longer than anybody else's in school, and he walked around in a hunch,
slouched down careless, and he picked up snipes. He was the big Luis Firpo
around that schoolhouse, and depended alone on his main strength and
awkwardness to keep him in the Round Town Four Fist Fighting Association.
His dad was a carpenter, his brother a grocery man. But Big Jim was the
toast of the town, the natural-born comic, the loud-mouth insulter, and
yelled at everybody that come along. His great big size scared the living
daylights right out of most of the little kids. When it come to a fight, Big
Jim seldom won, but he roared so loud, snorted so big, and kicked up so much
dust and fine splinters that the kids would holler and laugh, and cheer for
him, because wherever Big Jim had a fight, there you saw a complete
two-feature show with two comedies and short subjects added on.
Little Jim was mostly the opposite. Light whitish hair that looked like
frog fuzz, a slim, scary face and eyes that blinked and batted at everything
that rustled in the wind. He was famous for going around dirty and slouchy,
and when the kids would tease him, he would blow between his teeth like a
train starting, and kick back dirt with his toes. Little Jim was quiet when
he was left alone, and would walk ten blocks out of his way to keep out of a
fight; but the kids liked to watch him sneer and blow, and so they headed
him off across vacant lots, and pushed him into fights.
One day it was Trades Day, with sermons on the streets, singers in the
saloons, and plotters and politicians lying on every corner. The town was
alive, booming with the mixed voices of Negro farmers, the broke-down,
hungry, dirt farmers, and the talking of the Indians that sometimes took on
a high note, when some buck pointed away out yonder with his hand, and made
a big curving motion, so that you could tell that he was talking about the
whole country, the whole thing, the whole problem and, probably, the whole
people. The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats,
whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money. Everybody
stood around with a long string of red tickets, for one of the merchants was
aiming to give a new buggy away. It was a-standing out yonder in the middle
of the street right where everybody could see her set there in the dusty sun
and try her best to shine a little. Kids of all three colors, and an
occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens,
took in after cur dogs, dumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped
down on the sidewalk with a brand-new pair of shoes on. Ice cream cones was
waving around up and down the streets.
Down about the middle part of town, Big Jim and Little Jim was playing
marbles on a flat, dusty place by the side of the drug store. Already they
had attracted a couple of hundred folks down there to see the big Dominecker
Rooster and the right little Game Cock commence kicking the pants off of
each other.
The crowd mumbled, laughed, roared, and talked, some taking sides with
Big Jim, and some with Little Jim. It was a game of agates up. Agates up was
about as high as you could get in Okfuskee County politics without being an
adult.
Little Jim was shooting, Big Jim watching him like a hawk, and both
hollered every five seconds, "Dobbs!" "Venture Dubbs!" "You go ta hell, you
bastard, you!"
When the fight started, even the few idle wanderers who had tried for
the buggy soon come running down the street to see what was going on. They
spied the big noisy crowd, and they knew it must be an awful good fight. The
dust flew, and the skin, too, and you could see Big Jim's red head bobbing
and weaving in the middle of the crowd. He was taking long haymaker swings
at Little Jim's blond, silken-haired head, and hitting about once out of
every nine swings. Little Jim was faster and surer. He laid it into Big Jim
like a young mule kicking a clumsy old cow, and his fists seldom hit out
without landing in the neighborhood of Big Jim's nose.
He hit straight. But time was passing. Months rolling by. Big Jim was
getting bigger and bigger. He had completely outgrown Little Jim. Head and
shoulders he raised up above his little opponent, and lumbered down like
thunder and slow lightning, crushing when he landed a blow. Little Jim
fought faster. He fought much better. Barefooted in the hot dirty ring, he
pranced around, punching the big hulk of Big Jim, but just naturally not
doing one ounce of damage. He fought long. He got tired. Dust choked him
down. It choked Big Jim and the whole crowd, but Big Jim wasn't having to
spend his energy. It looked as if he couldn't decide what he wanted to do,
so he just made his hands sail around in the air to put on a show for the
people. But after a while, he wore Little Jim down, and gave him the best
beating that he had ever laid onto anybody. He brought blood running out of
Little Jim's nose, thumped his head and ears till they swelled and stung.
Beat his cheeks till you could see blue spots and red bruises. Little Jim
Whitt lost his standing in the fist-fighting game that day, right then and
there.
The town went wild. A decision had been reached. Little Jim had lost.
Two other fights as to which kid had won started out in the crowd among men
betting. But Big Jim was the stud buzzard in our town that day.
The school kids yelled when the fight was over. Their voices hummed so
fast that it sounded like a chant, like a wave swelling out across the
ocean.
"Where's Woody?" "Betcha cain't lick оl' Woody!" "Woody ain't here!
Where's Woody? He was down here in town early this mornin'--he's gone!"
Kids took out down the road like traveling preachers, by ones and twos,
and the others lit out through streets and alleys like a couple of dozen
little Paul Reveres. Grown men even strolled off up the hill to hunt me up,
and to give Big Jim time to rest up, and to rig us into a fist fight. Bets
mounted high. The crowd moved around like a big bunch of bugs on top of a
hole of water. It always stayed together, but it moved.
I was across town. I was up on Main Street, climbing the rafters and
braces of a big sign just across the street from the jail house. When a
couple of kids seen me climbing up on top of that signboard, they hollered,
"Hey, here he is! Here he is! Here's Woody! Bring on Big Jim!"
Oklahoma has had runs. Land runs and whiskey runs. But that crowd took
out in such a hard run up that hill that they jammed the streets where they
crossed, shoved each other down the boardwalks, skint their shins on the
concrete curbs, tore off the wooden corner posts of grocery stores, pushed
over stacks of chicken coops, turned the chickens loose, made the feathers
fly, slipped and fell across sacks of horse and mule feed, crawled over
wagons and buggies parked in the road, made the hay fly, lost their kids,
dropped plugs of tobacco, laughed, yelled, whooped, and caused teams to
break and run away.
Like I said, I was getting closer and closer to the top of that
sign-board, and when I heard that big crowd coming up the steep street
raising so much cain, I didn't know what the devil was going to happen. They
was yelling my name, and running full blast. I hit the top of the signboard,
and throwed one leg across, just as the crowd scraped a coat of old paint
off of the corner of the court house, crowding past it, to gather all around
the signboard and yell all kinds of things, like: "Come on down! Lick Big
Jim!" "Little Jim just got beat up!" "Whataya say, boy? Coward?" "Git 'im,
Yallerback!" "Come on down offa there! You ain't no dam eagle!"
Well, I just hunkered over and made myself right real comfortable and
set up there. I knew then what it was all about. Just another one of them
dam fool fights all rigged up and fixed up before you know what it's all
about. I knew how tired Big Jim must be. Just had one fight. Now they wanted
to sic him onto me and see another one. I must of killed a full five minutes
just setting up there. They tried every kind of a trick to get me down. Kids
and men dumb halfway up to where I was. They lured me and baited me. They
promised me dimes. But I didn't come down. Then they fell back onto the one
and only dare that I couldn't stand. They yelled, "Old man Charlie Guthrie's
a fighter! Old Charlie Guthrie would come down to fight!"


Something inside of me went out and something come in. I set there
about two or three seconds, my face went sort of blank, and I gritted my
teeth; and then I slid down off of the frame of the sign, and dumb like a
monkey down through the braces, and the crowd was in an uproar.
The crowd got around me. There was so much noise I couldn't do nothing.
It was just some kind of a roaring ocean rising and falling in my head. I
couldn't see Jim. It was too crowded. I saw every kind of a face but that
big speckled one. The crowd squared off, and they cleared out the usual
three-foot hole in the middle, which was big enough for two kids to knock
off twenty-five square foot of hair and hide in. I couldn't see Jim.
Something hit me right square between the horns. It was a big outfit of
some kind, a team of wild bay mares, or a wagon load of cotton seed--anyway,
it knocked me blind. I shook my head, but I couldn't see. After a minute it
hit me again, Kkkkkkkeeeeeeebblllllooooooom!!!!!!
Sometimes, you know, when you're fighting, it's a funny thing, one lick
will knock you blind, and the next one will knock you to where you can see
again. I could see Big Jim right there in front of me. I was tired and my
head was like a bread pan full of dry dough. I was sick. Couldn't get my
breath good. My face was all numb. I never had been hit that hard, I didn't
know how to fight this way. But I was in a good spot to learn. I didn't know
of but one way to beat Big Jim. I knew that he was tired. He was big and he
was slow. But many more of them piledrivers, and I'd be slower than that.
I'd been still. Big Jim couldn't fight a running fight. I was bigger than
Little Jim, by a pound or two, but not near as big as Big Jim. I had to bust
loose with everything that I ever had or ever hoped to borrow. I had to beat
my fists to pieces over his big red head. I didn't know why. Just had to.
Jim had busted me twice in the face. He didn't know why. Just done it.
I started. I started walking, swinging, ducking, dodging. I couldn't
even quit, not one split second. He wasn't used to that kind of fighting.
Kids usually danced and wasted a little time. Some of them waste all of the
time. I had fought that way some, it was all right then, but it wouldn't
work now. I kept my fists sailing to and from Jim's head without even a
letup. It was a fistic sweatshop. And with low pay. I wasn't mad at Jim. I
was mad at this kind of stuff. Mad at the men that started the fight. At the
kids that had been taught to yell for it. At the women that gossiped about
it, and spread lies about it. I hated fighting my home-town kids. I was
throwing my fists at Big Jim, but I was really fighting these crazy notions
that folks get and keep in their heads.
Jim was going backwards. He didn't have time to haul off and wind up.
He didn't have time to get his big feet to working. He just didn't have time
to do anything. He rained big haymakers down across my back and over my
head, and it was like beating me up with a fire hose. I wasn't doing so good
myself. I fired away like sixty. I got in close, inside Jim's big arms,
inside his reach, and fought like a wild dog drunk on slaughterhouse blood.
I only wanted it to be over.
Jim was stumbling backwards trying to get balanced long enough to break
my whole body with one of his fire-engine arms and fists, but it didn't
work. He stumbled over a wagon tongue. He got up and fell over it again. He
raised up and fell back against the front wheel, and braced his self by
holding onto the spokes.
He was just standing there using one arm to sort of wave and push me
aside with, but I couldn't let him stand there and get his breath and get
the dust wiped out of his eyes, and get rested up. Then he would take good
aim and knock my head to rolling down Main Street. I hit him as fast as I
could and as hard. I really didn't think I had that much power. He caved in
a couple of times, and he laid back against the wagon wheel. He propped his
big shoulders up against the rim. He couldn't fall. He plowed into my face.
I felt it turn numb. My whole jaw was just hanging there. It didn't know
why. All at once and for no good reason that the crowd could see, Big Jim
stopped fighting, he held up both hands. He quit.
I said, "Ya done?"
Jim said, "--can't go."
"Gotta 'nuff?"
"--reckon so--gotta stop."
The crowd hollered and jumped and screeched like a bunch of maniacs.
"Big Jim's hollered calf-rope!"
"He's all in an' down!"
"Downed 'im three times!"
"Whoopee!"
"Tough titty!"
Jim let his body sink down a little bit, rubbed his hair and forehead
with one hand and propped his self up on the wheel with the other. He set
there for a few minutes, but the crowd wouldn't let him rest. I stepped in
close beside him and said once more to make double sure, "Gotta 'nuff, Red?"
"I said I had ta quit. I'll see you later--"
"I don't want it ta be later. I want it ta be settled right here once
an' fer all. I don't want it ta hafta take place ever' Goddam day. You wanta
go some more------er say, let this be th' end of it fer me an' you both?"
"All right--this ends it."
Poor old Jim was fagged completely out, and so was I. "I'm--I've gotta
'nuff," he said.
And I sort of whispered in his ear, "So've I."
Men handed me dimes. Others slipped me two-bits pieces. I got over a
dollar. I run down the street to where Jim was walking along. He looked bad.
I said, "Ice-cream cone, Jim?"
"Naww. You git yore own self one."
"How 'bout you one, too?"
"Naww."
"'C'mon. T' hell with all of 'em. We ain't mad at nobody-- nobody but
them dam guys that keeps us a-fightin' amongst ourselfs."
"Bastards."
"Cream cone, Jim?"
"Yeahhh--might."
What kind did he want.
"Strawberry," he told me, "how much ya git?"
"Lemme see, dollar, fifteen, twenty-five."
He handed me a dime. This wasn't a new thing. We done it everytime we'd
fought before. Split up the money or part of it. He'd raked in a dollar and
a half.
"How much ya got now?" Jim asked me.
"Dollar thirty-five."
"I gotta nickel more'n you."
" 'At's all right."
He held the new-looking buffalo nickel out in the palm of his hand and
the sun hit down against it, and Jim was setting down and thinking on the
ground.
"Know who I'm gonna give that exter nickel to?"
"Huh uh." I shook my head.
"Little Jim."
The fire whistle moaned out across the town like a panther moaning in a
canyon. Dogs whined and run tucktail. The whistle kept blowing and every
time it went low and high I counted the wards on my fingers so I would know
which part of town to run to and see the fire.
That's a funny fire whistle. It just keeps blowing. Okemah hasn't got
that many wards. It's still blowing. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen times.
Looks like everybody is running up South Third Street there. Wagons.
Cars. Buggies. People on horseback. I'll run with this bunch of kids coming
here. "Hey! Where's th' fire at?"
'Foller us!"
"We'll show ya!"
"I don't see no flare in th' sky!"
"It ain't here in town! Look over south yonder, way out of town. See
all of that red?"
"Oil field fire?"
"Yeah! Whole town!"
"Which one?"
"Cromwell! We can see it when we hit th' top of th' hill there!"
Several hundred people crowded up the hill talking and gasping, short
of wind. Little bunches of men and women trotted along and talked. Horses
snorted and jumped all over the road. Dogs barked at weeds and pieces of
paper blowing in the dark. All along in under the locust trees people tore
as hard as they could run.
"There she is!" I heard some guy talking and pointing.
"Whew! Plain as day! That's a mean-lookin' fire!" I was saying to some
kids along the top of the hill.
"Seventeen miles away."
"Flames jumpin' up higher th'n th' tops of th' trees!"
"I know how high them trees is!"
"Me too. I been there a lot of times!"
"Yeah, me, too. I go a-swimmin' right in this side of there all th'
time. Them Cromwell kids is really tough. Wonder how much of th' town's on
fire?"
"Plenty of it," a man was saying.
"Five or six houses all at once, huh?"
"About a hunder houses all at once," the man said.
"Them old flames is really clawin' and' scratchin', ain't they?"
Another man talked up.
"I know a lot of people are clawing and scratching, trying to get out
of there."
"Them little old tar-paper shacks burn up just like paper!'' an Indian
kid was saying.
I walked along the hill listening to the people talk.
"Is it th' oil wells er th' houses?"
"Some of both, I would guess."
"I reckon there are already a couple of hundred people on their way
from Okemah out there to help fight the fire."
"I hope there is. That's a bad blaze."
"Spreading all in through the timber there. Lots of folks losing their
houses in that fire tonight."
"All of their belongings."
"But th' people!" A lady spoke out. "It's the' little kids, an' th'
mothers, an' people sleepin' and sick people in bed, an' everything else in
those shacktowns. I've got a feeling that lots of people are just caught
like moths in a bonfire."
I laid down on the grass and listened to folks talk for an hour or so.
Then, by families, and little bunches, and one at a time, they took their
last long look at the flames and turned around walking and talking and going
home to bed.
I laid there by myself for about another hour. Cromwell was one of the
biggest oil field towns in the whole country. I've seen the boxcar shacks
stripped over with tar paper lots of times, the oak trees and the sandy land