Free The House of Daniel by Harry Turtledove Page B

game in. So we were bound for the Lone Star State.
    I’d made trips there before. Enid went there every so often. But it’s not like I’d been there a lot. The town’s closer to Kansas. The people are closer to Texas, though: the way they talk and the way they think. Kansas is the start of Yankee country.
    Of course, here I was in the bus with a bunch of guys from Yankee country. Well, they were taking me out of trouble and paying me, too. So I figured I’d worry later about how much I’d let that worry me—if, when later came, I decided it still needed worrying about.
    We crossed into Texas just about when the sun came up. The road swung from west to southwest at the same time we did. The bus’s long, long, long shadow stretched out ahead of us. We chased after it, but we never caught up to it. When you’re chasing shadows, you never do.
    Not long after sunrise, Eddie Lelivelt opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched. Something in his back and something in his neck cracked like oversized knuckles. Aside from that, though, he could’ve been sleeping in a feather bed at the Ritz. He glanced over at me and asked, “You doze any?”
    â€œMaybe a little,” I said.
    â€œYou’ll learn how,” he said. “You’ve got to. We don’t get enough time at the roominghouses and motor lodges where we stay for a fellow to catch up there.”
    â€œYou’re used to it. I’m not, not yet.” We both talked in low voices, to keep from bothering the other guys who went on sawing wood. I looked out the window. It was all prairie, some farms, some cattle ranches—about like what was in the part of Oklahoma we’d just left. “Know where we’re going?”
    â€œPissant town called Pampa,” Eddie answered. I must have stirred or opened my eyes wider or something, on account of he asked me, “You know the place?” He didn’t miss much, Eddie Lelivelt.
    â€œI’ve played there once or twice. You’re right—it’s a pissant town, kind of like Ponca City boiled down to a pint.”
    He nodded. “I thought that was how I remembered it, but I wasn’t sure. I’ve been through too many other places since the last time we stopped there, a couple of years ago. We drew pretty good, though, even if it isn’t a big place, so here we are again.”
    You could tell when you were getting close to Pampa. Instead of crops, oil wells and derricks and tank farms started sprouting on the prairie. Once upon a time, Pampa was a no-account cattle town. They struck oil before the Big Bubble busted, so the smashup hurt them less than a lot of other places. Their downtown is tiny, but the shops in it are new and mostly open.
    They pay the price other ways. The air smells like everybody’s been eating beans for years. There’s soot on the walls. There’s soot on the ground. I laughed when the bus pulled up in front of a roominghouse and stopped. Eddie, he raised an eyebrow at me. “This is where the Enid team stays when we—I mean, they—come here,” I explained.
    â€œOh.” The way he weighed it, he put me in mind of Rod Graver. Well, there was another fella who didn’t miss much. When Eddie chuckled, you knew you’d earned it. “Got you. Yeah, that’s funny.”
    The players woke up as soon as the bus stopped. Rattling and banging didn’t faze ’em. Quiet? That was a different story. They grabbed their stuff—most of ’em had a sight more’n I did—and got down onto the sidewalk. One of ’em looked up at the sun trying to poke through all the stinking crap in the air and said, “Just as pretty as I remembered it.” He held his nose. Yeah, that about summed up Pampa.
    As we started filing into the roominghouse, Harv said, “Eddie, you and Jack’ll get a room by yourselves. You’ll need to climb out of the sack earlier’n