The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  The Woman in the Oil Field

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1996 Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Some of the stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications: “Low Rider” in the NewYorker; “Assailable Character” in Ontario Review; “The Woman in the Oil Field” in CutBank; “Four A.M.” in Gulf Coast; “Almost Barcelona” in New Texas ‘93 and the Gettysburg Review; ‘While the Light Lasts” in NewVirginia Review; “Akhmatova’s Notebook: 1940” in Southwest Review; and “The Observatory” in Folio.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following:

  Excerpt from “The Rum Tum Tugger” in Old Possum’s Book if Practical Cat, copyright 1939 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt

  Brace & Company; and quotations from Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage by Amanda Haight, copyright 1976, reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-72-0

  eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For

  MARSHALL TERRY

  with gratitude and love;s

  and in memory of

  DONALD BARTHELME

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  Low Rider

  Assailable Character

  Mustangs

  The Woman in the Oil Field

  TWO

  Four A.M.

  Paint Us a Picture

  Almost Barcelona

  While the Light Lasts

  THREE

  Akhmatova’s Notebook: 1940

  The Observatory

  one

  LOW RIDER

  My name is George Palmer and my interest is insults. When I mentioned this to my wife on the day we met (she admitted later she disliked me at first) she said, “How come your parents didn’t have any children?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s an insult,” said Jean. “Don’t you get it?”

  Lady, you have a fine personality, I thought, but not for a human being.

  Actually, my field is insult strategies – social codes by which one group of people distinguishes itself at the expense of another. In Chaucer’s day, for example, peasants told long humorous tales ridiculing landowners and lords. One of the most popular stories concerns a peasant commanded by an ogre to put his sheep to pasture. The peasant feigns stupidity and, by cutting off the sheep’s tails and planting them in a field (as though the animals were head down in the dirt), pretends to bury the ogre’s herd in the ground. The ogre believes his sheep have been slaughtered; the peasant sells the herd at market. With similar tricks he destroys the ogre’s property, rapes the ogre’s wife, and mutilates the monster himself. I told Jean, “I’ve got a good bedtime story in case we decide to have kids.”

  I’m rich. Oil money. Something Jean doesn’t joke about. In 1941 my father and an Irish pal of his founded Ferguson-Palmer Oil in Midland-Odessa. Thirty thousand acres, wells producing three hundred to twelve thousand barrels a day. In ’52 my father left exploration, bought the company’s refineries, and moved to Houston where I was born. Our home was dominated by a ceiling-to-floor aquarium. A dark hallway led from the copper-paneled kitchen into a vast room, gently curved, the walls of which were made of three-inch glass. Muted blue light, languorous plants, soft living petals of purple and green. In recreating the Permian Period, when West Texas’s major oil deposits formed, my father installed plastic brachiopods inside the tank and surrounded them with bass, catfish, rainbow trout. The room was his showpiece, his refuge from lawyers and accountants. When my parents were in bed I’d tiptoe down the hall, settle on a blanket in the flashing blue light, and let stripes of silver, orange and pink lull me to sleep.

  As I watched the refinery workers from my father’s office, my early awareness of insults grew. In front of the window he’d placed a bare table, a fence between him and the poisonous spires below. As a kid I crawled beneath the table, pressed my nose to the glass, and saw the men in hard hats stuck like spiders among the Xs, Rs, and Os of the pipes. One would raise his fist, another grab his crotch. Bare asses were proffered. Shouting, shooting the finger. One afternoon I noticed a young Chicano slapping the left side of his face with the palm of his right hand. The gesture, meaningless to me, was having an extraordinary effect on another worker, who danced precariously on a catwalk thirty feet aboveground and threw his lunch sack into the air with rage. Years later I learned that the cara dura, indicating cheekiness or undue provocation, was a common put-down among Latins.

  In thirty-two years of production, Palmer Refining logged over a hundred and seventy-five thousand Man–Safe Hours. “Our hydrocrackers are as tight as battleships,” my father told me. Each section of the plant, roughly three hundred square meters of intersecting pipe, was color-coded according to steps in the refining process (red meant distilling, yellow purifying, etc.). State law required seven fireplugs painted the appropriate color in each section. Sulfur and carbon, concentrated invisibly in the air, chipped holes in the parking lot, the workers’ skin, and the paint, which had to be reapplied to the plugs every sixteen days: my first summer job. In my hard hat and jeans, turning orange, red, then blue, I inhaled Lucite and steam until my nose ached. At the end of the day the workers bought me Lone Star longnecks and cold ham sandwiches. In the smoke and dusky light of the bar they reveled in being offensive. Their leathery arms snapped up in gestures of anger and fun, but my body was so sore from the day’s work I couldn’t enjoy the jokes. The waitress traded amiable insults with the man behind the bar (“Hey Numbnuts, I need a sloe screw.” “Have to wait, Babe, till the end of my shift”) but I didn’t catch them all. I’d become aware of hearing – just as at the plant, sniffing its awful fumes, I was always conscious of breathing – and my head buzzed with pain. I swore I’d never work for my father again.

  ______

  As a graduate student at Indiana University, the center of folklore studies in America, I edited a small quarterly called Heartland Folktales and dreamed of starting a press of my own someday. My mother, an education coordinator at the Houston Police Academy, supported my decision. “Do what you want,” she told me one morning. “You’re rich. What are you worried about?” I’d been out of school for a month, and had come to ask her advice. She was relaxing on the police firing range between classes, pumping .38-caliber shells into the heart of a cardboard man. “You give a gun to a nineteen-year-old cop, send him to a one-room apartment in the middle of the night to stop a fist-fight between a man and a woman, both drunk, who don’t speak his language – that’s worry. You, you’re worth two, maybe three million dollars. What’s the problem?”

  Jean, a plasma physicist, forty-nine years old (and fifteen years my senior) always agreed: “I don’t understand the point of your work, George, but if it makes you happy go ahead.” Roy, her seventeen-year-old by a previous marriage, stayed in the basement spelling Able, Baker, Charlie into his ham radio, eating chili and drinking beer. I was free to edit manuscripts and to write essays on folk art for my Texas Republic Press, established in 1982 when my father gave me ten th
ousand dollars.

  In the hair-curling humidity of Houston’s hot afternoons I gladly went about my fieldwork. With a Sony portable cassette recorder whirring in my shirt I interviewed a retired postal worker who’d spent the last twenty-five years of his life erecting a monument to the orange. I talked to a woman who made plaster trees, lodging in their branches painted angels, Adam and Eve. I hung around with people on the margins of society, families visited by poverty and neglect: where folk art begins. I spent a lot of time watching kids. I think children have always lived in America’s margins. As Germaine Greer says, “Drinking and flirting, the principal expressions of adult festivity, are both inhibited by the presence of children.” Kids’ folk art, I began to see, includes astonishing insult strategies, as in their rhyming games (“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” etc.). Each morning I watched a redheaded boy named Steven, the youngest of the children in our neighborhood, scream as the older girls teased him:

  Doctor Doctor can you tell

  What will make poor Steven well

  He is sick and going to die

  That will make poor Lisa cry

  Lisa Lisa don’t you cry

  He’ll get better by and by

  When he’s well he’ll dress in blue

  That’s the sign he’ll marry you.

  Lisa was Steven’s next-door neighbor, and nothing humiliated him more than having his name linked with hers, especially in singsong. The kids also established links through metaphor and simile: “Steven eats like a pig.”

  And direct statement: “Your father’s a filthy plumber.”

  “Well, your dad’s a midget Kung Fu spy!”

  After lunch they often played leapfrog, with Steven as “It.” He bent down and the girls jumped over him. The oldest girl, a skinny brunette of about thirteen who seemed to be in charge, was the first to jump; as she did so she tweaked Steven’s ear. On the second pass she pulled his hair. Next time around she gave him a little kick, and so on. If any of the other girls failed to follow the leader she had to be “It.” I recognized the game as “Gentle Jack,” first noted in Edmund Routledge’s Every Boy’s Book, published in London in 1868.

  “Possible topic,” I scribbled in my notebook. “Steven, dismantlement of. His ego, his standing in the group … Playmates taking out on him what they often experience at hands of adults?” The game, I noticed, had a strong verbal component, to justify the physical abuse: “You’re a turd, Steven. Your mother’s a mouse.”

  “Components of insult run deep, poss. in all lives & encounters,” my notes went on. “Purpose of folk art to remind us? Purp. of children?”

  ______

  “I’m too old to raise another child,” Jean insisted.

  “It’s still possible, though, isn’t it?” I asked her one evening.

  “You mean technically? Are all my cylinders still firing? Sure. But I’ve done the mother bit. This fall I’m on the tenure committee, the curriculum committee, the executive committee. Our peer review process for getting grants is breaking down in favor of congressional lobbying, and that’s a fight we don’t want to lose. I don’t have time, George, not even for Roy. And you’re out every night, God knows where, at your blues clubs or whatever. I don’t think we’d be ideal parents.”

  She charged me with fostering an adolescent view of the world. “That’s the trouble with poor little rich boys – sit around and dream, dream, dream. Sex, romance, the perfect little family. Daily life, George. It’s stronger than anything. Dirty dishes, filling the car with gas, insurance bills, shopping for dinner.” She kissed my ear. “Stronger, even, than all those eager pictures in your lovely young head.”

  In the fall of ’85, when she found out I was having an affair, she tore me out of every photograph we had of us together. “This is the vilest of your insults,” she said.

  “I’ve fallen in love. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Well, then.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d like to stay.”

  “With me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop seeing her.”

  “I’ll try.”

  But Kelly and I continued to meet. She’d walked into the press office one afternoon with a newsletter, Update: Central America. “The Refugees: Who Are They?” the headline read.

  “Can you print a thousand copies of this?”

  “We’re not set up for that kind of work,” I told her. She rubbed her long white neck.

  This Woman: Who Is She? I thought.

  “Sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”

  She represented the Central American Task Force, she explained, a group of citizens (“mainly women – men don’t seem as interested”) concerned about the violence raging then in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and U.S. intervention in those countries – these were the high Reagan years. The Task Force shipped school supplies to San Salvador and seeds to Managua. They planned to leaflet every Wednesday in front of City Hall.

  “Try Alphaset over on Richmond,” I said. “They do bulk printing. They can probably get it out for you right away.”

  The following Wednesday at lunchtime I joined her on the street. Eight young to middle-aged women marched behind her in a circle, carrying placards: U.S. OUT OF NICARAGUA, HANDS OFF EL SALVADOR, NO PASARAN. Kelly, wearing a jeans skirt and a green blouse embossed with yellow parrot figures, handed newsletters to businessmen and women on their way to City Hall. “Get the hell out of here and stop disturbing the peace,” a man told her. Kelly smiled. Conviction, controlled anger – a peppery combination, and it made me feel hot in my shirt.

  She handed me a newsletter.

  “Give me a stack. I’ll help you pass them out.”

  Didn’t miss a beat. “All right. You can work the crowd over there by the reflecting pool.”

  Four mounted policemen had cordoned off half a block for the small demonstration. “Whenever the Right Wingers march – the Klan or the anti-abortionists – the cops face the crowd so no one’ll harm the marchers,” Kelly told me later. “When we take to the streets they watch us, looking for excuses to break us up.” Two men with long zoom lenses stood by a row of parking meters, aiming their cameras at us.

  I offered a leaflet to a briefcase man. “Care for an update on Central America?”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  This happened three or four times. It was my fault; I couldn’t keep the smile on my face. I understood their annoyance: who likes solicitors? Once, I was standing in line at the Astrodome waiting to buy tickets to an Astros-Padres game. A militant farmer shoved a pamphlet into my hand. “If you eat you’re involved in agriculture,” he explained.

  “If you throw up,” I said, “you’re no longer involved.”

  He snatched back the pamphlet he’d handed me.

  “Commie bitches!” a man yelled now from the steps of City Hall.

  Kelly kept her friends in line – they wanted to tackle him, tear him apart, ship him in a CARE package under cover of night to a tiny island nation porous with recent democracy, yellow fever, and bent silver coins, massive market fluctuations and tsetse flies in the major export.

  ______

  “So what does a folklorist do besides ask nosy questions and stick tape recorders in people’s faces?” Kelly asked once the newsletters were gone. We were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the courthouse.

  “What makes you think we stick tape recorders in people’s faces?”

  “I took a class as an undergraduate.”

  “Not true. We’re very benign. Not a peep as we go about our business.”

  “Which is?”

  “Watching.”

  “Is that why you showed up today?”

  “No. I wanted to help.”

  “What do you watch?” She crossed her stunning legs.

  “Anything anyone does. The way you’re sitting right now. The way we’re talking. Culture’s always changing. Folklorists try to capture traditions before they disappear.”

  “Like
from old people, you mean?”

  “Sometimes.” I put sugar in my coffee.

  “It’s a bit anal retentive, isn’t it? Regressive?”

  “No, you learn all sorts of amazing things.”

  “Like what?”

  “There are two kinds of old people.”

  “Oh?” She smiled.

  “Sure. There’s the well-informed old person, good as any library. Then there’s the talker. The talker may not be accurate, but the way he says what he says and the strength of his beliefs often tell more about the culture than any set of facts.”

  “When you get old you’ll be a talker, right?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You came here to meet me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any interest in Central America? I mean really?”

  “Of course.” I ordered more cream. “They were taking pictures out there today –”

  She waved her hand. “I’ve been photographed picketing the American Embassy in Managua. My file’s a mile long.”

  In ’85, when this conversation took place, Nicaragua was the Left’s cause célèbre-flying into a war zone a sign of status, like owning a compact disc player or a VCR. It’s astonishing to me how quickly the Sandinistas (and the American Left, for that matter) dropped out of U.S. news, swallowed by the fires of Eastern Europe and a leaky local economy, but back then everyone I knew had a strong opinion about them, one way or another. President Reagan even suggested they might attack America, starting with the little town of Harlingen at Texas’s southern tip (there’s nothing in Harlingen to occupy, except a couple of damned old Dairy Qeens, maybe).

  “This your first protest?” Kelly asked.

  I nodded.

  “Was it worth it?”

  “You’re interested in different cultures,” I said. “I think you should come with me some night to hear the blues. I know the best clubs – black joints you can’t get in if you’re white. But they know me.”