ear.''
"Skeerd?"
"Yes. I'm scared. I'm shaking right this minute."
"I felt ya shakin' when th' cyclome first come."
"Cyclone may miss us, little curly block. Then again, it may hit right
square on top of us. I just want to ask you a question. What if this cyclone
was to reach down with its mean tail and suck away everything we've got here
on this hill? Would you still like your old Papa? Would you still come over
and sit on my lap and hold me this tight around the neck?"
"I'd hug tighter."
"That's all I want to know." He straightened up a little and put both
arms around me so that when the wind blew colder I felt warmer. "Let's let
the wind get harder. Let's let the straw and the feathers fly! Let the old
wind go crazy and pound us over the head! And when the straight winds pass
over and the twisting winds crawl in the air like a rattlesnake in boiling
water, let's you and me holler back at it and laugh it back to where it come
from! Let's stand up on our hind legs, and shake our fists back into the
whole crazy mess, and holler and cuss and rave and laugh and say, 'Old
Cyclone, go ahead! Beat your bloody brains out against my old tough hide!
Rave on! Blow! Beat! Go crazy! Cyclone! You and I are friends! Good old
Cyclone!' "
I jumped up to my feet and hollered, "Blow! Ha! Ha! Blow, wind! Blow!
I'm a Cyclome! Ha! I'm a Cyclome!"
Papa jumped up and danced in the dirt. He circled his pile of tools,
patted me on the head, and laughed out, "Come on, Cyclone, let 'er ripple!"
"Chhaaarrrliee!" Mama's voice cut through all of the laughing and
dancing and the howling of the wind across the whole hill. "Where are you?"
"We're down here fighting with a Cyclone!" "Chasin' storms an' hittin'
'em!" I put in.
"Whhaaattt?"
Papa and me snickered at each other.
"Wrestling a Cyclone!"
"Tell 'er I am, too," I told Papa.
Grandma and Mama walked through the trash blowing in the wind and found
me and Papa patting our hands together and dancing all around the dynamite
and tools. "What on earth has come over you two?"
"Huh?"
"You're crazy!" Grandma looked around her.
The wind was filling the whole sky with a blur of dry grass, tumbling
weeds, and scooting gravel, fine dust, and sailing leaves. Hot rain began to
whip us.
"We're heading for a storm cellar, and you're coming with us. Here's a
raincoat."
"Who will carry this Sawhorse?" Papa asked them.
"I wanta wade th' water!" I said.
"No you won't. I'll carry you myself!" Mama said. "Give him to me!"
Papa joked at Mama. "Put him right up here on my shoulders! Now the raincoat
around him. We'll splash every mudhole dry between here and Oklahoma City!
We're Cyclone Fighters! Did you know that, Nora?"
The wind staggered Papa along the path. Grandma grunted and throwed her
weight against the storm. Mama was buttoning up a slicker and bogging in the
slick clay in the path.
"This rain is like a river cutting loose!" Papa was saying under my
coat. He poked his face out between two buttons and took two steps up and
slid one step back.
At the top of the hill the water was deeper, and in the dear alley the
wind hit us harder.
"Charlie! Help Grandma, there! She's fell down!'' Mama said.
Papa turned around and took Grandma by the hand and pulled her to her
feet. "I'm all right! Now! Head on for the cellar!"
I felt the wind drive against me so hard that I had to hug onto Papa's
neck as tight as I could. The wind hit us again and drove us twenty feet
down the alley in the wrong direction. Papa's shoes went over their tops in
mud and he stood spraddle-legged and panted for air. "You're choking my wind
off! Hold on around my head!"
The wind rolled tubs and spun planks of ripped lumber through the air.
Trash piles and bushel baskets sailed against clothes-line. Barn doors
banged open and shut and splintered into a hundred pieces. Rain shot like a
solid wall of water and Papa braced his feet in the soggy manure, and
yelled, "You all right, Wood?" I told him, "I'm all right! You?"
A wild push of wind whined for a minute like a puppy under a box and
then roared down the alley, squealing like a hundred mad elephants. My coat
ripped apart and turned wrongside out over my head and I grabbed a tight
hold around Papa's forehead. We staggered twenty or thirty more feet down
the alley and fell flat in some deep cow tracks behind a chicken pen.
"Charlie! Are you and Woodrow all right?" I heard Mama yelling down the
alley. I couldn't see ten feet in her direction.
"You take Grandma on to the cellar!" Papa was yelling out from under
the rubber raincoat. "We'll be there in a minute! Go on! Get in!"
I was laying at first with my feet in a hole of manurey water, but I
twisted and squirmed and finally got my head above it. "Lemme loose!"
"You keep your head down!" Papa ducked me again in the hole of watery
manure. "Stay where you are!"
"Yer drownin' me in cow manure!" I finally managed to gurgle.
"Keep down there!"
"Papa?"
"Yes. What?" He was choking for air.
"Are you and me still Cyclome Fighters?"
"We lost this first round, didn't we?" Papa laughed under the raincoat
till cellars heard him ten blocks around. "But well make it! Just as soon's
I get a little whiff of fresh air. Well make 'er here in a minute! Won't we,
manure head?"
"Mama an' Grandma's better Cyclome Fighters than we are!" I laughed and
snorted into the slush pool under my nose. "They done got to th' storm
cellar, an' left us in a 'nure hole! Ha!"
Phone wires whistled and went with the wind. Packing boxes from the
stores down in town raised from their alleys and flew above the trees.
Timbers from barns and houses clattered through windows, and cows bawled and
mooed in the yards, tangled their horns in chicken-wire fences and
clotheslines. Soggy dogs streaked and beat it for home. Ditches and streets
turned into rivers and backyards into lakes. Bales of hay splitting apart
blew through the sky like pop-corn sacks. The rain burned hot. Everything in
the world was fighting against everything in the sky. This was the hard
straight pushing that levels the towns before it and lays the path low for
the twisting, sucking, whirling tail of the cyclone to rip to shreds.
Papa wrapped me in the raincoat and hugged me as tight as he could. We
crawled behind a cow barn to duck the wind, but the cow barn screamed like a
woman run down in the streets, tumbled over on its side, and the first whisk
of the wind caught the open underside and booted the whole barn fifty feet
in the air. We fell six feet forward. I hugged around Papa's neck. He turned
me loose with both hands and swung onto a clothesline, slipping his hands
along the wires, pushing off sacks, mops, hay and rubbish of all kinds till
we got to the back of the first house. He edged his way to the next house
and felt along their clothesline. In a minute or two we come to within
fifteen feet of the cellar door where Grandma and Mama had gone with the
neighbors. Papa crawled along the ground, dragging me underneath him.
"Nora! Nora!" Papa banged against the slanting cellar door with his
fists hard enough to compete with the twister. "Let us in! It's Charlie!"
"An' meee!" I let out from under the coat.
The door opened and Papa wedged his shoulder against it. Five or six
neighbor men and women heaved against the door to push it back against the
wind.
I was just as wet as any catfish in any creek ever was or ever will be
when Papa finally got into the cellar.
Mama grabbed me up into her lap where she was setting down on a case of
canned fruit. A lantern or two shot a little gleam of light through the
shadows of ten or fifteen people packed into the cellar.
"Boy! You know, Mama, me an' Papa is really Cyclome Fighters!" I
jabbered off and shook my head around at everybody.
"How's your papa? Charlie! Are you all right?"
"Just wet with cow manure!"
Everybody laughed and hollered under the ground.
"Sing to me," I whispered to Mama.
She had already been rocking me back and forth, humming the tune to an
old song. "What do you want me to sing?"
"That. That song."
"The name of that song is 'The Sherman Cyclone.'"
"Sing that."
And so she sang it:
You could see the storm approaching
And its cloud looked deathlike black
And it was through
Our little city
That it left
Its deathly track.
And I drifted off to sleep thinking about all of the people in the
world that have worked hard and had somebody else come along and take their
life away from them.
The door was opened back and the man in a slicker was saying, "The
worst of it's gone!"
Papa yelled up the steps, "How do things look out there?"
"Pretty bad! Done a lot of damage!" I could see the man's big pair of
rubber boots sogging around in the mudhole by the door. "She passed off to
the south yonder! Hurry out, and you can still see the tail whipping!"
I jumped loose from Mama and slid down off her lap. "I'm a-gonna see it
gitt a-whippin'!" I was talking to Papa and following him out the door.
"Out south yonder. See?" The man pointed. "Still whipping!"
"I see it! I see it! That big ole long whip! I see it!" I waded out
into the holes of water barefooted and squirted mud between my toes. "I hate
you, ol' Cyclome! Git outta here!"
The clouds in the west rolled away to the south and the sun struck down
like a clear Sunday morning across town. Screen doors slammed and cellar
doors swung open. People walked out in little lines like the Lord had rung a
dinner bell. A high wind still whipped across the town. Wet hunks of trash
waved on telephone poles and wires. Scattered hay and junk of every calibre
covered the ground for as far as my eyes could travel. Kids tore out looking
for treasures. Boys and girls loped across yards and pointed and screamed at
the barns and houses wrecked. Ladies in cotton dresses splashed across
little roads to kiss each other. I watched for a block or two around and
listened to some people laugh and some people cry.
Mama walked along in front of Grandma. She didn't say much. "I'm
anxious to see over the rim of that hill," she told us "What's over it?" I
asked her.
"Nora! Grandma! Hurry up!" Papa waved from the alley where we bad been
blown off of our feet in the storm. "Here comes Roy and Clara!"
"Roy and Clara!" Grandma hustled up a little faster. "Where have they
been during all of this?"
"In th' school cellar, I suppose." Mama looked up the alley and seen
them splashing mudholes dry coming toward us.
"Why did ya stay in that ol' school cellar?" I bawled them out when
they walked up. "Me an' Papa had a fight with a cyclome twister all by
ourselfs! Ya!"
"Nora." Papa talked the quietest I had ever heard him. "Grandma. Come
here. Look. Look at the house."
We walked in a little bunch to the top rim of the hill. He pointed down
the clay path we had come up to the cellar. The sun made everything as clear
as a crystal. The air had been thrashed and had a good bath in the rain.
There we saw our old London House. Papa almost whispered, "What's left of
it."
The London House stood there without a roof. It looked like a fort that
had lost a hard battle. Rock walls partly caved in by flying wreckage and by
the push of the twister. Our back screen door jerked off of its hinges and
wrapped around the trunk of my walnut tree.
Papa got to the back door first and busted into the kitchen.
"Hello, kitchen." Mama shook her head and looked all around. "Well,
we've got a nice large sky for a roof, anyway." She saw very little of her
own furniture in the kitchen. Every single window glass was gone. Water and
mud on the floor come above our shoe tops. She turned around and picked me
up and lifted me up on the eating table, telling me, "You stay up here,
little waterbug."
"I wanta wade in th' water!" I was setting on the edge of the table
kicking my bare feet at the water in the floor. "I wanta git my feet wet!"
"There's all kinds of glass and sharp things on this floor. You might
cut your feet. Just look at that cupboard!" Mama waded across the kitchen.
The cupboard was face down and half under water. Dishes smashed in a
thousand pieces laid all around. Joints of stove pipe, brooms, mops, flour
sacks half full, aprons, coats, and pots, and pans, hay, weeds, roots, bark,
bowls with a few bites of food still in them. She pointed to a big blue
speckled pot and said, "Mister Cyclone didn't wash my pots any too clean."
"You don't seem to care much." Papa was nervous and breathing hard. He
sloshed all around the room, touching everything with his fingers and
caressing the mess of wet trash like it was a prize-winning bull, sick and
down with the colic. "Jesus! Look at everything! Look! This is the last
straw. This is our good-bye!"
"Good-bye to what?" Mama kept her eyes looking around over the house.
"What?"
Clara backed up to the eating table. "Hey, Woodblock," she said, "climb
up on my back. I'll take you for a horseback ride to the front room!''
"You children hadn't ought to be joking and playing around, not at a
time like this!" Papa cried and the tears wet his face like a baby.
"Gitty up!" I kicked Clara easy with my heels and waved my hands in the
air above her head. "Swim this big ol' kinoodlin' river! Gitty up!" I hugged
on around her neck as tight as I could while she pitched a few times and
splashed her feet in the water. Then I yelled back, "C'mon, Papa! Let's swim
th' big river, an' fight th' mean ol' hoodlum leeegion!"
"I'm coming to help fight! Wait for me!" Mama cut in splashing the
water ahead of us. She jumped up and down and splattered slush and wet flour
and mud and sooty water all over her dress and two feet or three up on the
rock walls of the kitchen. "Splash across the river! Whoopie! Splash across
the quicksand! Here we come! All of us movie stars, to fight the crooks and
stealers! Whoopie!"
"Ha! Ha! Look at Mama fightin'!" I hollered at everybody.
"Mama's a good Cyclone Fighter, too, ha?" Clara was laughing and
kicking slushy filth all over the place. "Come on, Papa! We got to go and
keep fighting this cyclone!''
Mama slid her feet through the water, sending long ripples and waves
busting against the walls. "Charlie, come on here! Look at this next room!"
Clara rode me on her back once around the whole front room. Sofa upside
down in the middle of the floor, its hair and springs scattered for fifty
feet out the south window. Papers, envelopes, pencils floated on top of the
water on the floor. The big easy chair in the corner was dropped on its side
like a fighter stopped in his tracks. Big square sandrocks from the tops of
the four walls had crashed through the upper ceiling and smashed Mama's
sewing machine against the wall. Spools of colored thread bobbed around on
top of the water like barrels and cables on the ocean.
''It didn't miss anything." Grandma looked the room over. ''I know an
Indian, Billy Bear, that swears a cyclone stole his best work horse while he
was plowing his field. He walked home mad and swearing at the world. And
when he got borne, he found the cyclone had been so good as to leave the
harness, $6.50, and a gallon crock jug of whiskey on his front doorstep!"
Everybody busted out laughing, but Papa kept quiet. "Nora, I can't
stand this any longer!" he yelled out all at once. "This funny business!
This tee-heeing. This joking! Why do all of you have to turn against me like
a pack of hounds? Isn't this, this wrecked home, this home turned into a
pile of slush and filth, this home wiped out, isn't this enough to bring you
to your senses?"
"Yes," Mama was talking low and quiet, "it has brought me to my
senses."
"You don't seem to be sorry to see the place go!"
"I'm glad." Mama stood in her tracks and breathed the fresh air down
deep in her lungs. "Yes, I feel like a new baby."
"Hey, ever'body! Ever'body! C'mere!" I walked out a bare window and
stood on the ground pointing up into the air.
"What is it?" Mama was the only one to follow me out into the yard.
"What are you pointing at?"
"Mister Cyclome broke th' top outta my walnut tree!"
"That's the one you got hung up in." Mama patted me on the head. "I
think old Mister Cyclone broke the top out of that walnut tree so you won't
get hung up there any more!"
And I held onto Mama's hand, looking at her gold wedding ring, and
telling her, "Ha! I think ol' Mister Cyclome tore down this ol' mean Lon'on
House ta keep it from hurtin' my mama!"
Chapter VI
BOOMCHASERS
We picked up and moved across town to a lot better house in a nice
neighborhood on North Ninth Street, and Papa got to buying and selling all
kinds of lands and property and making good money.
People had been slinking around corners and ducking behind bushes,
whispering and talking, and running like wild to swap and trade for
land--because tests had showed that there was a whole big ocean of oil
laying under our country. And then, one day, almost out of a clear sky, it
broke. A car shot dust in the air along the Ozark Trail. A man piled out and
waved his hands up and down Main Street running for the land office. "Oil!
She's blowed 'er top! Gusher!" And then, before long--there was a black hot
fever hit our town-- and it brought with it several whole armies, each
running the streets, and each hollering, "Oil! Flipped 'er lid! Gusher!"
They found more oil around town along the river and the creek bottoms,
and oil derricks jumped up like new groves of tall timber. Thick and black
and flying with steam, in the pastures, and above the trees, and standing in
the slushy mud of the boggy rivers, and on the rocky sides of the useless
hills, oil derricks, the wood legs and braces gummed and soaked with dusty
black blood.
Pretty soon the creeks around Okemah was filled with black scum, and
the rivers flowed with it, so that it looked like a stream of
rainbow-colored gold drifting hot along the waters. The oily film looked
pretty from the river banks and from on the bridges, and I was a right young
kid, but I remember how it came in whirls and currents, and swelled up as it
slid along down the river. It reflected every color when the sun hit just
right on it, and in the hot dry weather that is called Dog Days the fumes
rose up and you could smell them for miles and miles in every direction. It
was something big and it sort of give you a good feeling. You felt like it
was bringing some work, and some trade, and some money to everybody, and
that people everywhere, even way back up in the Eastern States was using
that oil and that gas.
Oil laid tight and close on the top of the water, and the fish couldn't
get the air they needed. They died by the wagon loads along the banks. The
weeds turned gray and tan, and never growed there any more. The tender weeds
and grass went away and all that you could see for several feet around the
edge of the oily water hole was the red dirt. The tough iron weeds and the
hard woodbrush stayed longer. They were there for several years, dead, just
standing there like they was trying to hold their breath and tough it out
till the river would get pure again, and the oil would go, and things could
breathe again. But the oil didn't go. It stayed. The grass and the trees and
the tanglewood died. The wild grape vine shriveled up and its tree died, and
the farmers pulled it down.
The Negro sharecroppers went out with their bread balls and liver for
bait. You saw them setting around the banks and on the tangled drifts, in
the middle of the day, or along about sundown--great big bunches of Negro
farmers trying to get a nibble. They worked hard. But the oil had come, and
it looked like the fish had gone. It had been an even swap.
Trains whistled into our town a hundred coaches long. Men drove their
heavy wagons by the score down to pull up alongside of the cars, and skidded
the big engines, the thick-painted, new and shiny machinery, and some old
and rusty machines from other oil fields. They unloaded the railroad cars,
and loaded and tugged a blue jillion different kinds of funny-looking
gadgets out into the fields. And then it seemed like all on one day, the
solid-tired trucks come into the country, making such a roar that it made
your back teeth rattle. Everybody was holding down one awful hard job and
two or three ordinary ones.
People told jokes:
Birds flew into town by the big long clouds, lasting two or three hours
at a time, because it was rumored around up in the sky that you could wallow
in the dust of the oiled roads and it would kill all kinds of flees and body
lice.
Dogs cured their mange, or else got it worse. Oil on their hair made
them hotter in hot weather and colder in cold weather.
Ants dug their holes deeper, but wouldn't talk any secrets about the
oil formation under the ground.
Snakes and lizards complained that wiggling through so many oil pools
made the hot sun blister their backs worse. But on the other hand they could
slide on their belly through the grass a lot easier. So it come out about
even.
Oil was more than gold ever was or ever will be, because you can't make
any hair salve or perfume, TNT, or roofing material or drive a car with just
gold. You sap`t pipe that gold back East and run them big factories, either.
The religion of the oil field, guys said, was to get all you can, and
spend all you can as quick as you can, and then end up in the can.
I'd go down to the yards and climb around over the cars loaded down
with more tools. And the sun was peppering down on all of the steel so hot,
it kept me prancing along the loads like a football player running. I heard
the tough men cuss and swear and learned more good cuss words to use to get
work done.
My head was full of pictures like a movie--different from movies I'd
been sneaking into. The faked ones about outlaws, rich girls, playboys,
cowboys and Indians, and shooting scrapes, killings, and a pretty man
kissing a pretty girl on a pretty spot on a pretty day. It takes a lot more
guts, I thought, to work and heave and cuss and sweat and laugh and talk
like the oil field workers. Every man gritted every tooth in his head, and
stretched every muscle in his whole body--not trying to get rich or rare
back and loaf, because I'd hear one beller out, "Okay, you dam guys, hit 'er
up, or else git down out of a workin' man's way, an' let me put in a Goddam
oil field!"
A block and tackle man showed me how to lift all kinds of heavy stuff
with the double pulleys, "Ride 'em down! Grab 'em down! When th'
chain goes 'round, somethin's leavin' th' ground!" There was a twenty-foot
slush bucket used for getting mud and slush out of the hole, and it looked
so heavy in a railroad car that you never could lift it out; but you'd hear
a man on a handle of a crank yell out, 'Tong bucker, tong bucker! Mister
hooker man! Grab a root, boy! Grab a root!" The man on the hooks would yell
back, "Gimme slack! Gimme slack!" Some of the cable men would guide the big
hook over to the hooker man and yell out, "Give 'im slack! Give 'im slack!"
"Take it back! Take it back! Won't do one thing you don't like!" "Take yer
slack! Bring it back!" "Ridin' with ya! Got yer grab!" "Got my grab!" "Grab
a root an' growl! Grab a root an' growl!" "Take yore grab! Take 'er home!"
The men took in all of the slack on the chain or cable and it would get as
tight as a fiddle string, and the joint of bailing bucket would raise up off
of the floor of the car and one man would yell, "She was a good gal, but she
lost her footin'!"
I piled on top a wagon every day and set on a gunny sack stuck full of
hay, by the side of a teamskinner that told me all kinds of tales and yarns
about the other ten dozen oil fields he, personally, had put down. I picked
up five or ten books full of the cuss words the mule drivers use to talk to
each other, which are somewhat worse than the ones they use to cuss their
teams into pulling harder.
Out in the fields, I walked from derrick to derrick through the trees,
and hung around each place till the driller or the tool dresser would spot
me and yell, "Git th' hell outta here, son! Too dangerous!" The bull wheels
spun and the cable unrolled as they dropped the mud buckets down into the
hole; the boiler shot steam and danced on its foundation; the derrick shook
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 TV 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 ol' 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