Rolling Nowhere by Ted Conover

Author:Ted Conover [Conover, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780670603190
Google: dCm8AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Viking Press
Published: 1984-01-01T16:59:10+00:00

“Sonny, open this up for me, wouldya?” asked the old cowboy, handing me a new jar of instant coffee.

“Sure, Pete.” I bent forward from my seat on an old couch with a cardboard canopy and met his outstretched hand halfway. It was the right hand, swathed in gauze now dirty with campfire dust and pus.

Pistol Pete settled back onto the long automobile seat suspended between two large cans next to the campfire, where he had spent the morning. It sagged but was still the best seat in the house. The ground wasn’t too far away, after all.

“Can’t twist with it no more,” he said, looking at the swollen hand. It was an explanation, not a complaint.

The top came loose easily for me, and I passed the jar back. “So why don’t you get it fixed up?” I asked. “You said the migrant office gave you a check for drugs, right?”

“Yes, dammit, and I also said I spent it! Don’t you remember that?” asked Pete, annoyed. It was the kind of admission you don’t want to make someone repeat.

Pete took a pair of pliers and removed a can black with soot from the fire. He poured some boiling water into a smaller can for coffee. Then he took a dog-eared Western novel from his hip pocket, put on his glasses, squinted shut one eye to compensate for the missing lens, and resumed reading.

It was the scene I had walked in on two days before. Pete, evidently absorbed, had started when his partner’s dog announced my presence. Then his rumpled cowboy hat tilted back, revealing light-blue eyes and several day’s growth of white whiskers. His round, wrinkled face might have been cherubic fifty years ago. Though it was a warm day, he wore an old down parka, dotted with tape where it had ripped. His pants, double-knit slacks instead of the cowboy jeans I would have expected from a ranch hand, were extra long. This, Pete assured me later, was so that he could tie the bottoms shut around his boots when driving a tractor, to keep out insects.

I would also learn the hand had been injured a week earlier in Sandpoint, in the Idaho panhandle, where Pete had offered to help a motorist with engine trouble. The driver had turned on the ignition at the wrong time, catching Pete’s hand in the fan belt. Pete’s nonchalance about the episode amazed me; back in civilization such an injury would have required immediate treatment and daily care, and perhaps provoked a lawsuit. To Pete, it was simply an annoyance. He just wished it would go away.

“ ’Lo, BB,” said Pete.

“Hiya, BB,” I said, raising my eyes to watch the tall, dark tramp, a plastic bag full of crushed aluminum cans over his shoulder, drop down along the path from the road to the jungle. He was dark, partly because of his dirty clothes: old brown jeans, soiled sneakers, and an insulated denim jacket with slits cut in the front for pockets. And he was dark because of the shade cast over his face by the visor on his cap.

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