The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

“Are you asking me for a date?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “I should tell you,” she said. “I have two children from a previous marriage.”

  “I love children.”

  “Is there anything you should tell me?”

  I slipped a napkin over my left hand but she’d already seen the ring. “I don’t know,” I said. “Like what?”

  ______

  “When are you going to work today?” Jean said.

  “As soon as I get ready. Need anything at the store? I can stop off on my way home.”

  “Some Q-Tips. And a new ledger. We have to do the bills tonight.”

  “I wanted to stop by the lumberyard this evening.”

  “What lumberyard?”

  “On 59. They’re having a sale.”

  “What do you need lumber for?”

  “I may want to build something.”

  She smoothed my thick blond hair and looked at me sadly.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “You’re not going to build anything.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “You always say you want to build something. You never do.”

  “Well, now I am.”

  “You have to pick bill night to finally get started?”

  “No. It’s just that they’re having this sale –”

  “Every time I ask you to do something, George, you’ve got some idiot plan in the works.”

  “The problem is, you don’t take me seriously.”

  She laughed. “No, because your job involves going out every night and getting drunk.”

  “I’m doing research at those clubs. The blues are a dying tradition.”

  “If I ask you just this once to stay home with me tonight and help me with the bills, will you do it?”

  “The sale’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “George, I need to go over the Amex receipts with you. You have to be here, okay?”

  The ogre’s endless demands: “Pick the vermin out of my hair.”

  ______

  When the idea first occurred to me to customize a car I was sitting in the Elm Street Blues Club listening to a local zydeco band and splitting pitchers of Old Milwaukee with two guys I’d just met. We wrapped our arms around each other. “I’mone learn to play the pie-anny and join up with one of these-here bands,” said the fellow on my left. He poked his red nose in my ear. “Make me a million bucks. Buy a brewery. And some beef.”

  “Hell, I’m going to build a piano,” I said.

  The other fellow was not a practiced scoundrel. I never did find out what brought him to the club that night in his three-piece Hart Schaffner & Marx, or why he felt compelled to join us in our joyful dissolution, but there he was, moon-eyed and slurry. He said, “I’m twenty-five years old, did you know that? It’s a fact. And I’m going to tell you something. If I haven’t made a million by the time I’m thirty I’m going to put a bullet through my head.”

  “There you go,” said Red-Nose.

  “And I’ll tell you something else. I’m going to take as many people with me as I can.” He made a pistol with his fingers and started picking off the couples on the dance floor. I poured him another glass.

  “Get me a fancy car, or maybe an air-conditioned bus, painted up so’s it glows in the dark,” Red-Nose said. “Play ever’ toilet in the South.”

  “That’s it,” said the Suit. “A custom-made Eldorado and an Uzi.” He twirled in his chair, made a screeching sound like tires and aimed his arms at the band. “Chuka-chuka-chuka,” he said.

  I went home drunk, woke Jean up and told her I’d had a vision of zinc-plated hubcaps.

  “But those souped-up things are awful.”

  “It’s folk art,” I said.

  Pots, pans, a dozen eggs. Cajun food always sobered me up before going to bed, especially if I concocted a major mess, got to flinging spices around the kitchen. I pulled a red snapper out of the freezer, defrosted it in the microwave, dipped it in flour and milk along with a medium-sized soft-shell crab. Oregano, basil, cayenne pepper. A little Tabasco.

  Usually in these late-night gourmet sessions, to keep myself alert, I mentally ran through as many blues labels as I could: Arhoolie out of El Cerrito (later from Berkeley), Alligator in Chicago, Memphis’s famous Sun. Howlin’ Wolf; Son Seals; Clifton Chenier, King of the Louisiana Bayous. But tonight I kept picturing the car. I melted a pat of butter and saw in its golden bubbles shiny push-button door locks.

  On Saturdays I sat in an unnamed cafe near the Ship Channel swilling Monte Alban from a bottle. Worms curled in the golden tequila, tugs moaned at the mouth of the bay. Dock-hands wiped their fingers on the cotton stuffing spilling out of the booth seats, and happily greeted one another: “Asshole!” “Pigdip!”

  A couple of Hispanics from the refinery smoothed the way for me with old pros, young lions, and members of the gangs. With their help I built one of the classiest low-riders in the city: crushed-velours dash, red silk roses wrapped around the tape player, velvet Virgin of Guadalupe in the back window. In the trunk, beveled mirrors, strobe lights, color postcards of the Astrodome, a fully stocked wet bar. A selection of magazines for my friends: Time, Outlaw Biker, Architectural Digest. Hydraulic pumps in the rear, lowered suspension in front. Tru-Spokes, “French-In” antenna.

  Following Mexican custom I paid a priest from Maria de los Angeles Church in southwest Houston to christen the “Anti-Chrysler” (the odometer was stuck on 666,666). He flicked Holy Water from a cup onto the red vinyl roof.

  “Excuse me, Father.” I wiped a stray drop off the hood. “I just Simonized that.”

  The car would bring me closer to ethnic understanding, I thought: a passkey to the barrios. Or maybe I was just showing off. In every part of Latin Houston I proudly displayed the Beast. In the northeast above Canal Street, Mexican families had opened groceries, barbacoas, funeral homes. The smell of smoked fajitas, lime-soaked onions, and fresh tomatoes drifted past grassy yellow tool sheds and mixed with the aroma of coffee roasting at the Maxwell House plant over on Harrisburg. Even the wealthy families here lived poorly, ashamed of ostentation. Their Caribbean cousins rented modest brick homes in south Houston, near Martin Luther King Boulevard. I drove the Beast through these neighborhoods early one evening and made a lot of friends. Parched lawns, naked kids chasing the Paletas del Oasis, the Popsicle man whose tin-fendered truck played “Georgia on My Mind.” Most of the Dominicans worked for Macon and Davis, on the nuclear plant north of town. On Sunday afternoons the men (full round faces, high cheekbones, coffee-colored skin) sat among saints and ceramic animals in their living rooms cheering Jose Cruz. “He’s rounding second, rounding third . In the kitchen, sausage and plantains, barefooted women chopping pineapples, whispering about the tigres, the “bad men” who demanded protection money from families in the neighborhood.

  Koreans were now running most of the old Cuban markets, I noticed. The Cubans, getting poorer, were probably migrating to another part of town, but that wouldn’t be clear for another couple of years.

  Eighty to ninety thousand Salvadoran refugees lived wherever they could, anonymously in the suburbs or at shelters in Montrose and the Heights, partially gentrified neighborhoods where Kelly taught English twice a week.

  “How’d you get involved with Latin refugees?” I asked her one night.

  “Well, you can hardly grow up in Texas and not be aware of Hispanics. I’ve always loved the people, even back when I was a little girl. They have the most appealing, handsome faces.”

  On Wednesdays she worked late at Casa Romero, the largest of the shelters. I’d fix dinner for her daughters: Monica, seven, Kate, five.

  One night Monica pulled a deposit slip out of a drawer and drew an animal on it. “George, guess what this is.”

  “An ostrich.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t guess, sweetie.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “Are those legs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

&nb
sp; “A zebra.”

  “No!”

  I put the cauliflower in the oven.

  “Guess, George.”

  “Monica, I’m trying to make dinner.”

  “Guess!”

  “Okay, give me a hint.”

  “It lives in the water and has fins and long legs.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s like a beaver.”

  “I give up.”

  “It’s a beaver!” She laughed.

  “Beavers don’t have fins.”

  “Yes they do.”

  ______

  “Did you tuck the girls in?”

  “Yeah. Kate’s full of energy this evening.” I stroked Kelly’s breast.

  “Wears me out.”

  “Are you sleepy?”

  “I’m afraid I am. Long day. We had a fire at the Casa.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Found some rags in the basement. Kerosene.”

  “Who’d want to burn the place?”

  “Lots of folks. People in the neighborhood. There’s some old guys who’ve lived there twenty, thirty years. They’re real unhappy about all the Latins moving in. And the cops are always dropping by, waiting for us to provoke them.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “No, we caught it before it did much damage, but life’s getting spooky. Like those fundamentalist freaks blowing up abortion clinics.”

  I kissed her forehead. On the wall above her bed, a world map; thumbtacks in every country from which she’d had a lover. “How many have there been?” I asked, pointing up there now.

  “I’m not sure. I lost count somewhere down around Bolivia. How’re things with Jean?”

  “About the same.”

  “You could move in with me.”

  “I could.”

  She yawned. “I don’t know why you married that old woman anyway.”

  ______

  Jean was working on a theory that the smallest particles in the brain – which she called “morphemes,” in deference to my dumb grammarian’s mind-are trapped fragments of the human psyche, just as matter is a form of trapped light. “Life is electrified activity in which every particle strives to return to pure energy – an unagitated state,” she told me in bed one night. “The easiest way to do this is to attract one’s opposite. This movement, of course, dooms each particle to solitude. If it finds its opposite, it dies. As long as it searches, it remains unfulfilled. For every feeling of love there’s a feeling of fear. These are physical, palpable things, George, I’m convinced of it. Fear is matter. And matter’s free when it returns into light.”

  “I kind of like the shape it’s taken here.” I squeezed her thigh.

  She lighted a candle and turned off the lamp. “Do I bore you with my theories?”

  “No.”

  “One of the worst things about being nearly fifty years old is that life holds few surprises for you.” She cupped herself around my ass. “There’s very little I feel excited about anymore. When I latch onto a new idea I tend to get carried away.”

  In the mornings she rose early and did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups. On Tuesdays at noon she had an aerobics class. In the evenings she liked to throw a softball around with me in the park. She’d developed a strong arm.

  “I’ll do everything,” I said in the park one afternoon, returning to my old subject. “Feeding, nurturing –”

  “Doesn’t track with reality, bucko,” she called back, whacking her mitt. “Babies just naturally go for the mother. We have the milk.”

  “It’d be different with an adopted child. They prefer a fuller menu.”

  She fired a fastball into my mitt.

  “Ow.”

  “Even an adopted child would imprint on me. I’m just not willing to do it.”

  I watched Mustangs, Impalas, and Gremlins shuttle by on the freeway down the hill from the park. On an overpass someone had painted “War Pigs in Space.” A few miles away, helicopters lowered white stretchers onto the gleaming glass towers of the medical center.

  Jean picked up the bat. “You need to decide if you’re committed to this marriage before we start talking seriously about adopting a child. Because if we do have one, then you run off with your little Leftie, that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I won’t get stuck at my age with being a single mother again – Roy’s enough.” She tried to hit me a pop fly but the ball sailed over my head. “I told you you’d get tired of me. That day on the golf course, remember? I knew then why you were coming on so strong.”

  “I liked you.”

  “It was the novelty of seeing an old woman who could wear a pair of shorts.”

  “Jean –”

  “Oh, I have a very clear-eyed view of myself. I have nice legs, but I’m forty-nine years old. You can’t hang on to that beautiful young body of yours forever, you know? Golden belly, strong thighs – they’re not yours to keep. You don’t know what that means yet. Believe me, it’s a shock.”

  “Let’s go get some ice cream.”

  “Wake up one morning –”

  “Okay? Jean?”

  She started to cry.

  “For God’s sake, you’re talking to me the way you talk to Roy,” I said. “I’m just trying to make things smoother here.”

  “My breasts sag, George! I have these handles on my hips! I told you that.” She threw the ball in the dirt. “Why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you leave me alone?”

  ______

  Kelly exhausted and drawn. Another fire at the Casa. They’d lost the whole kitchen and one of the downstairs bathrooms.

  “I have to go back there,” she said.

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “Can you stay with the girls?”

  Monica and Kate were wide awake. I made some hot chocolate.

  “Where’s Mommy going?” Kate said. “She has to take care of some business.”

  “George, remember that pony we saw at the stable? With the brown spots on his back?”

  “No, honey, I wasn’t there.”

  “Yes you were.”

  “Your mother took you to the stable by herself.”

  “No she didn’t.”

  “Did so.” Monica shoved her sister.

  “Snotty snotty snotty.”

  “That’s enough, you two.”

  Kate grabbed my hand. “Remember his bulgy eye, George? Was his eye sticky?”

  “I don’t know, Kate. Probably.”

  She tugged my fingers.

  “Yes, honey, what is it?” I said.

  “Mommy says you live with another lady.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s my friend.”

  “Better friends than us?”

  “I’ve known her longer than you,” I explained.

  “My robot can turn into a truck. Want to see?”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t like her,” Kate said.

  “You don’t know her.”

  “When are you gonna live with us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll help you clean your room,” Kate said.

  “Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate that.” I kissed her cheek.

  “George?”

  “Yes, Kate?”

  “This lady?”

  “Her name is. Jean.”

  “She’s like a grandmother, isn’t she?”

  “What has your mother been telling you?”

  “She says she’s about a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “Not yet.”

  Kate sat on her foot. “Does she really have wrinkles on her butt?”

  ______

  Late one night three plainclothesmen arrested two Salvadoran women at Casa Romero and charged them with selling amphetamines.

  “They were diet pills,” Kelly told me afterward. “Laxatives. It’s a war of nerves. They’re trying to crack us bit by bit. They’ve subpoenaed our files.”

 
“You’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Harry, one of the volunteers here at the house …”

  “What?” I said.

  “He made a couple of border runs.”

  “Jesus. Illegals?”

  She nodded.

  “You told me –”

  “I know, but these were desperate people.”

  “How many trips did he make?”

  “Three.”

  “The INS’ll have a field day.”

  “I’ll need you to babysit from time to time, but I think we’d better cool it, George, until things blow over. I don’t want you getting mixed up in all this.”

  “Kelly –”

  “I mean it.”

  She was always firm when it came to her plans. I knew I couldn’t change her mind. I’d miss spending afternoons at the Casa. The place looked like a take-out barbecue joint – had, in fact, been a restaurant. A Pepsi-Cola bottle cap painted on the side of the house was starting to peel, smoky in the shade of four white oaks. Red cedar picnic tables sat in the front yard next to a gravel drive. Newspapers and old fliers, wrapped in rubber bands, nestled in the high, wet grass. It was homey.

  One day at the shelter I’d talked to a thin Latin woman with dark scars on her arms. “Who did this to you?” I said.

  “The Guardia Civil in San Salvador.”

  “Why?”

  “They took my husband. I was passing his picture around in church.”

  The beige hall carpet smelled of cat pee and vomit. Wallpaper hung in strips, an old-fashioned dial telephone sat on a cardboard box in the corner.

  I pulled a notebook out of my pocket. The woman rocked back and forth on the floor. “Tell me,” I said.

  “The men in masks, they force you to worship their whips, their fists. They give them names,” she said. “‘The Enforcer,’ ‘The Lollipop.’” She rubbed her arms. “After many beatings these words are the only ones left in your head. Your own name has been taken away from you. You’ve betrayed the names of your family and friends. Water hurts, light hurts, clothing hurts. But the hardest pain is not when they hit you. It’s when they make you stand for many hours.” She squeezed her legs. “Alone, in a room. You begin to hate your feet.”

  Water trickled through a pipe inside the wall. “The body – its own enemy?” I scribbled. I recalled, as a kid, painting the fireplugs at my father’s refinery: the soreness that stayed for weeks in my back and arms, the weight of sitting and walking.