He was a hell of a guy, Clevis was—big, sloppy, about six feet three and a good 230 pounds, with a heavy stomach above his belt that kept his shirttails free and flapping, and he was smart. There were people who thought he was stupid because he talked slow, but they didn’t know him. They hadn’t seen him tune a car or heard him recite an hour’s worth of dirty limericks in the Holt Tavern. I had known him since high school; he was usually on the outside fringe of things in school because he was so big and so slow and also because he had to work all the time, but sometime during our freshman year he decided that I was one of his friends, and that was all right with me. As for his family, Old Man Stouffer was a gandy dancer for the railroad. That is, on those days toward the end of the week when the old man was sober enough to work anywhere, and his mother, a fat little German immigrant, did wash for people in town and bore a string of babies. Clevis was the oldest of eleven kids. They all came to school in a flatbed truck.
When Clevis started to work for me I moved him into the house in much the same way that my dad had done with his crony Ellis Burns in the 1920s. We had the place to ourselves: my mother by that time had already spread herself into that new brick home in town with the rose carpets and the flowered coach. After a two-weeks’ honeymoon at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver she had come back to Holt and had begun her continuing tenure as Mrs. Cox, allowing Wilbur to go on shaking hands with folks at his life-insurance office and to drink coffee with the boys when he felt thirsty, but he damn well better be home by six o’clock every evening and squire her to church every Sunday. That apparently was satisfactory with Wilbur, and things were not unsatisfactory for Clevis and me. We worked pretty steady at keeping the ranch going and at making a profit for Edith. By the end of the first year, though, we had something of a problem: the house looked and smelled like a buffalo wallow, and there were enough empty beer cans accumulated at the back door to tin at least three sides of a big barn.
“By God,” Clevis said one morning. He was standing in the kitchen doorway holding his boots in one hand, looking like a great big sleepy kid who had just wakened from a dream that made him mad. “Listen,” he said. “Now this here is getting serious.”
“What is?” I said.
“This.” He held his boots up. “I can’t even find my goddamn dirty socks that I took off last night. Are you wearing them?”
“Hell, no. They wouldn’t fit me.”
“Well, by God, something’s got to be done about this. I can’t work without no socks.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Yeah,” he said. “One.”