Gila Bend
Arizona

For nigh onto 20 years Bill Henry had a night man named William Nugent working at his Texaco on the west end of town.  There were numerous complaints on William moving so slowly and his arrogant rejoinder.. "If you don't like this speed you sure won't like my other one."  Bill was asked once why he kept William on with so many complaints coming in.  Bill responded, "Well -- William is never late, never sick, and never short in the cash register.  Besides that he only asks for one slow night off a week, and it takes two men to take his place even then."  

It used to be that William liked to work the night shifts with a big iron strapped to his hip.  "There ain't nobody going to rob me.  I'll turn this gun on them so fast it will make their heads swim."  William was the kind of man to do it too.  His idea of a good house pet was a half tamed wild cat that didn't take no sass off nobody, man or cat.

But, sure enough there came a night when three men jumped William, took his gun away, took all his cash, and left him tied up hand and foot behind the cash register. 

The robbery took place about three or four in the morning.  In a matter of minutes Bill Henry had a crew searching all of Gila Bend for those three men.  They were captured somewhere around daylight with all the cash still in their pockets.  Every penny William had taken in was accounted for.  William quit wearing the big iron on his hip after that.  "I'll tell you what," he told everyone in town the next day.  "You just think you know WHAT you'll do when three men pull guns on you at the same time."  Last I heard William and Sarah had moved to Oklahoma.

Back in the forties and fifties Gila Bend had an abundance of three things... scorpions, rattlesnakes and Gila Monsters.  Mel Fuentes was my going buddy at that time.  His mother lived off to the west of town but still in town.  The desert was just on the other side of her yard.  One day I was helping Mel fill up gopher holes in his mother's yard using sand from the desert when I noticed the sand in the shovel was squirming.  

I set the shovel down and we studied it for about twenty seconds.  We couldn't see what was doing the squirming so we got a magnifying glass from his mother's sewing kit.  There, plain to see, were hundreds of baby scorpions, squirming in the sand.  We put the sand back where we found it and used dirt from the civilized side of the house from then on.  But if anybody ever wants to raise scorpions, Gila Bend is the place to do it.

Mel was the champion horseshoe player of Gila Bend back in those days.  We partnered on numerous occasions when he began dating my sweet little sister-in-law.  It was me an him against her an my wife.  Them two might have gone on and gotten married, but I was never one to LET anyone beat me.  Cathi got so mad at us for winning all the time that it ended up with her going home to Mama and me and Mel going off to hunt rattlesnakes for a week so he could get over his loss.

There were so many rattlesnakes back then on the road to Painted Rock that cars went that way in the fall just to hear them pop.  Just before you get to the dam at Painted Rock there was a ranch known far and wide as DenDor, or maybe it was DenDora -- I've heard it both ways.  Bill Bates was the head cowboy there back then.  The boss came down from Phoenix to visit him and ended up spending the night. About ten or so he needed some relief so Bill flipped on the outside light and told him which way the bathroom was.  "Watch out for the snakes though."

"What kind of snakes?" asked the boss.

"I don't know," Bill replied.  Helen shook her head too.  "I've never thought to ask them."

The boss stepped out on the porch and took off for the bathroom.  Seconds later he was pounding on the door to be let back in and his pants were wet.  "I don't know what kind of snakes them are either, but ALL of them are BIG!"

Bill Bates could cook better than any man I ever met.  After he quit the Gila Ready Mix crew him and Helen headed to Fort Smith Arkansas where he started up a Mexican Restaurant.  Bill loved to fish, and most of all he loved to fish in Mexico.  He had a place down at Puerto Penasco.  U.S. citizens could not own property down there but Bill had friends everywhere you looked and he could speak Spanish just like a native.  His boat was named Miss Kim and he pulled it with a long wheel-based Chevy pickup that had a big six engine in it.  

There would be times you came into Bill's station and he would be walking the floor, glancing out the window about every three steps, saying nothing.  Sammy was straw boss there then and he'd say, "Golly Bill.  You want me to wash your boat?"

"I'll be packed by the time you're done," Bill would respond.  Before the hour was out Bill would be headed for Mexico.  

Back then air conditioning was not standard equipment on most cars and Gila Bend service stations were doing a thriving business selling car coolers.  There were two kinds.  One kind fit on the passenger side window with a little cord dangling inside that you pulled to get the pad wet.  A sculpted opening to the front funneled wind through the moist pad and made some people think they were cooler off.  This kind sold for $19.95 installed and paid a $1.00 commission.  The other kind fit over the drive line hump ahead of the front seat.  It was electric and most of them had three speeds.  They were designed to be plugged into the cigarette lighter unit.  If a car didn't have a cigarette lighter there was an adapter set to make one.  An internal pump kept water circulating on the pads.  Bill would throw in a free bag of ice to anyone that bought one for $49.95.  The ice cost Bill fifty cents a bag and the Merrit Brothers delivered it to him for free from their ice house. Bill always bought just enough coolers to get them through the summer months because they were so bulky to store. 

One summer he misjudged because of milder weather than expected and as fall approached he still had more than twenty units left.  It was a good time to go fishing in Mexico.  The last thing Bill told Sammy before he left was, "That cooler man will be through here any day now.  Don't buy any, I don't care what kind of offer he makes you." 

Bill had been buying them for $12 each because he bought so many of them at one time.  The cooler man showed up and saw there were still 20 of them left.  "That's bad," he said.  "But I'll tell you what, I'll sell this truckload to you for only $3 each cash money."

When Bill came back from Mexico there were coolers stacked to the ceiling in the office, two deep.  Bill stared at them for about 5 minutes without saying a word.  Then he went into the backroom to wash his hands.  There wasn't room enough to get in because there were so many more boxes full of coolers in there.  Bill came back into the office and stared at Sammy.  His eyes strayed over to the boxes of coolers.  "Golly Sam.  Did he GIVE them to you?"

***

There was one annual event that brought money fluttering into Gila Bend.  This was the migration of monarchs into Mexico.  When they came it would be in a swath about one mile wide and butterflies so thick it was a major calamity to hit it.  The service stations on the east end of town would be selling radiator screens left and right, after blowing the butterflies out of the radiator.  No one ever told the tourists that would be the last patch of butterflies they saw for 298 miles, the exact distance back then to San Diego.

The Town of Gila Bend had a Volunteer Fire Department with Bill Henry as the chief.  With a live cigar stuck in his mouth and both hands on the hose Bill Henry was ready for any fire that dared to show its face within a radius of thirty miles. Bill Bates was part of the team too and he drove what was called "The Ambulance." It was cunningly disguised as a little Ford station wagon.  Seems like it had been painted red at one time.

Being a top cowboy for so many years, Bill could do a right fair shake of medical emergency work if it had to be done.  He delivered several babies on the way in to the hospital that I know of.  Even when limbs were missing from farm and ranch hands Bill never lost his cool with a live one.

Unfortunately, Bill was frequently pressed into service to haul dead ones to Phoenix too though.  That never bothered him much, but one night he drove the little ambulance into the station where I was working and the smell of a ripe one he was hauling in to the coroner in Phoenix just about knocked me over.  Bill had to get out and pump the gas himself because I was way over on the other side of the island.  I wouldn't even take his money.  "Just get out of here."

The guy had been dead for weeks and somehow the coyotes didn't like the smell of him so they left him alone.  Bill said (later) he had to scrape the crumbling pieces of the body up into a bag to haul him away and there was no possible way he could keep that ripe smell from getting on him.  Then once he was in the ambulance there was no way of keeping out of the smell either.  For weeks after that run Bill would suddenly turn white, leap to his feet and rush to the bathroom.  When he came back his hands would be so raw they almost bled, and his eyes were streaming.  Bill Bates was my hero -- but after that run I never again wanted to ride along in his footsteps.