Free Sentimental Journey by Jill Barnett

necessities.”
    “Oh.” She nodded knowingly. “A tank.”
    She heard him fold the map, then felt him shift and tuck it in his pocket.
    “We won’t be needing a tank to get out, sweetheart. By tomorrow we’ll be in Gibraltar , and before you know it, you’ll be home again.”
    “You’re wrong, Captain. I’m not your sweetheart. I’m not anyone’s sweetheart.”
    Sabri shifted the gears into overdrive. The truck screeched too fast into another turn. She leaned her head back against the cab and whispered, “I just hope that’s the only thing you’re wrong about.”

PART FOUR
     
    TEXAS
     

“WITH PLENTY OF MONEY
AND
YOU”
     
    ACME
, TEXAS , 1932
     
    Red Walker lay in the brown stubble of a wheat field, his hands clasped behind his head and his bare feet in the warm dirt. He sucked on a couple of Sen-Sens and stared up at a big, blue Texas sky.
    Everything was big in Texas .
    His granddaddy Ross told him that a good hundred times.
    “Everything’s big in Texas ,” he would say in a booming voice that always ended with a crooked white grin that was bigger than any other Red had ever seen. He had a knobby, tanned, old farmer’s face; it was a face that was much kinder, but butt-ugly when you compared it to his daughter’s. Red’s mama, Dina Rae, was a real beauty.
    His granddaddy told Red a farmer’s story, about how years before, in the days when you still dug a well with sweat and a shovel and a prayer, you could ride through the fields on horseback and that dadgummed wheat was shoulder-high.
    Now it was the absolute Bible-swearin’ truth that most Texans could tell a tale as tall as a silo. They sort of figured any fool could tell the truth, but it took some sense to tell a good lie. His granddaddy was no exception, so Red never knew whether to believe him or not. If someone pulled your leg that often, well then, you’d better not believe them ’less you want to spend most of your life walking funny.
    A few years later his granddaddy died on a soft summer morning, the kind of day that made you believe the angels just came right down from heaven and lifted him up there, like he’d always said they would.
    In a will hand-scrawled on the back of an old wheat contract, he left a small wooden box to Red. Inside it were mother-of-pearl cuff links, a pocket knife with a real bone handle, and a few old photographs. Nestled into the south corner was a knuckle-sized hunk of real turquoise his granddaddy had carried in his pocket for some fifty-odd years, rubbing it with his fingers so “it took the worry right out of your head.” That worrying stone was smooth as spit.
    After that day, on the wall above Red’s narrow bed, just where the last coat of green paint was chipping through to thirty-year-old yellow, was a small, square, jagged-edged photograph of his granddaddy. He was wearing that big old straw hat he wore every single day but Sunday for as long as anyone could remember, and he was riding good old Pete—a brute of a Morgan—through a golden field of wheat that was as tall as God.
    Everything’s big in Texas .
    That old man was right as rain, Red thought, lying there in the field and glancing at everything around him. Out back of his own daddy’s filling station, just past the big round sign with its red Texaco star, there stood a row of pecan trees nigh on thirty feet high. In July, when the no-degree Texas sun beat down and burned the breath clean out of your mouth, those trees were the only slip of shade for ten square miles.
    You could see their thick green crowns all the way from the front steps of Christ Baptist Church , and those rugged trunks were harder than hell to climb barefoot. But a single one of those fourth-generation trees could throw down enough sun burnt nuts to feed icebox cookies and pecan pie to half of Wilbarger County .
    Red took out a thin red-paper Sen-Sen packet from the patched pocket of his denim overalls, flicked open the flap with one thumb in the city-slick