The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  After dinner we’d play records in my room and talk about the girls in our classes. “Peggy Sue Rittenour is named after the Buddy Holly song,” I told him one night. This fact made her exotic to me. She was the first girl I ever tried to date – though my efforts embarrassed us both. At the spring prom the year

  before, I’d been too shy to ask her to dance. All night I smiled at her from across the dance floor/gym, but I wouldn’t come close. She stood with her circle of friends. One by one they approached me and said, “You’re breaking her heart,” “I hope you’re happy – you’ve made her miserable,” or, “Cretin.”

  I felt as foolish as when I’d dropped my stick.

  Just as I’d worked up my nerve to speak to her, the band announced its final tune. Peggy Sue started to leave. In a panic – I had to make a gesture – I rushed up to her, pulled a quarter from my pocket (all I had) and said grandly, “Here, take this!” It wasn’t until months afterwards that I realized she might’ve been offended.

  “Kissing’s enough,” Jackie said. “That’s all I ever want to do. It gets ugly after that.”

  I wondered how he knew; I’d never seen him talk to a girl. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. What you want to do, and what she wants to do, and would you like to go to a movie tonight, and which one, or would you rather study? It’s complicated.”

  “Yeah,” I said, fearing I’d never get close enough to even smell a girl’s perfume. Dance floor etiquette was already more than I could handle.

  ______

  Music wasn’t the only activity I shared with Jackie. Twice a month that spring we interviewed a small crew of Mexican roughnecks on an oil rig east of Midland. Our English teacher had assigned his students to tape and transcribe conversations with folks from various social classes, then compare their speech patterns. I knew vaguely what “social classes” were, but people were people, I figured, they simply worked different jobs. Back then, I didn’t know the angers and economics attached to those differences. Jackie did – and I think now the story I have to tell is partly one of class.

  As I’ve said, I didn’t know much about Jackie’s background. I knew he wasn’t poor, but he didn’t share my world of privilege. My dad was no Rockefeller but he did work in the deal-making branch of oil; I was protected to the point of naivete from the harsh lives most people lived in the West Texas desert.

  For middle-class speech I taped my own parents. My teacher’s brother owned an independent drilling company. He let Jackie and me and some other kids talk to his workers to complete our assignment. We took a bus to the oil field after school. The Mexicans were all in their twenties, energetic, weathered by sun and gritty wind. Their muscles were fine and tight, like the sinews of the wild green mustang painted on our bass drum at school. Neither Jackie nor I felt completely at ease with the men, but he stood among them with a kind of calm, a rough grace that (I see now) signified a kinship of class. Without knowing it I revealed – in my thick cotton shirt, my Buster Brown shoes, my “proper” stance – the money my father made.

  What we discussed I don’t remember, except that most of the workers had left their families in Mexico and worried about them. I’d heard ranchero music on KCRS late one night – the cheery accordian solos and the polka beats – and wondered if that’s what these men listened to. I tried to find some point of contact with them, but they didn’t seem to know what I was saying. Jackie did most of the talking. His communication, I recall, consisted mostly of a strong, sympathetic silence.

  ______

  One day, as we were walking home from school, Jackie asked me if I’d like to go to his house. “To practice, I mean. Could your mom bring your drums over in the car?”

  “Sure. We can call the other guys from my place.”

  “No. Let’s just do it ourselves today.”

  He lived in an old neighborhood out by the rodeo grounds. Slatless blue shutters framed the windows; the cracked cement porch was painted red. Behind the house, on a dusty track inside the rodeo arena, three young girls ran horses through an obstacle course built around seven yellow barrels.

  Jackie’s mother looked a little like a barrel herself. Her neck was huge. She wore fuzzy houseshoes and a purple cotton muumuu. Her shoulder-length hair was square-cut and blond. She hefted my bass drum with one arm, picked up the snare with the other, and carried them into the house. “It’s a shame the other boys couldn’t make it,” she said. I looked at Jackie. He toyed with his amp. I understood that he was ashamed of this woman and trusted me to be quiet about her, in a way that he couldn’t trust the others.

  Mrs. Waldrip said she was a songwriter. It turned out, she’d asked Jackie to bring his “little rock band” over to practice a tune she’d composed. “Writing’s really a cinch. They got these rhyming dictionaries, see?” She picked a paperback off an old piano in a corner of the den. “Let’s just look up ‘spoon,’” she said. “Rhymes with ‘June,’ ‘swoon,’ ‘boon.’ Ain’t that a kick?”

  She settled her bulk on the piano bench, sipped a sour-smelling drink from a Smucker’s jar, and taught us her song-mercifully, I’ve forgotten it. We sat there all afternoon, improvising what she called the chorus.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’’ Mrs. Waldrip said when we were done. The room had grown dark. She’d had several drinks. “I know a man over in Odessa who owns a recording studio. For eight bucks an hour you can rent it. He’ll produce a demo tape for us – hell, we sound good, just the three of us, don’t we? Who needs a bass-line? We’ll make us a demo and send it around to all the record companies, won’t that be wonderful? Which label does Bobbie Gentry sing for? This song’ d be perfect for her.”

  “I’d better call my mom now,” I said.

  Jackie wouldn’t look at me.

  The next day, on the oil field bus, he apologized. “She wants to practice again with you and me.”

  “What about the ‘Crystals’?”

  “When we do the demo, she’ll get this record-business out of her system.’’

  “We’re not really going to record her song?” I said.

  Jackie shrugged. From the bus windows we saw the horselike men hoist heavy pipes through bright steel rigging toward the sky. Jackie watched intently. Over and over the men squatted, lifted, heaved, and tugged until I felt certain their bodies would break.

  ______

  I don’t recall how many weeks passed before Mrs. Waldrip phoned my mother to ask if she could “borrow” me for the evening. I hadn’t told Mom anything about her. I knew if my folks learned how much she drank, they wouldn’t let me see Jackie again.

  Around six o’clock one evening the Waldrips pulled into our driveway in a red Chevy wagon. I’d never seen Jackie’s father: a small man – or rather, a tall stooped man, twisted by whatever tools he used at work. Tiny broken veins formed faint kaleido-scopes on his cheeks. He shook my hand. “David,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Yessir.”

  We loaded my drums in the rear of the wagon. Mrs. Waldrip promised my mother they’d have me back by ten at the latest. My mother was excited. I think she thought her son was about to become famous.

  Jackie was subdued. He held his hands in his lap. “Hi,” I said, sliding into the seat beside him. He nodded.

  Odessa lay twenty miles west of Midland, on Highway 80. Oil rigs and mobile home parks cluttered the tumbleweed-desert on either side of the road. We passed the Texan Drive-In, which showed X-rated movies. The marquee read Fly Down Inside. The sun had just set – orange streaked the sky near the sandy, fiat horizon – and the feature had begun. The screen partially faced the highway; from the corner of my eye I could see a naked thigh the size of a diesel truck.

  Mr. Waldrip stopped at Pinkie’s Liquor and bought two bottles of Old Charter and some paper cups. He toasted his wife twice before we even left the parking lot.

  Jackie looked out the window, at fences and cows.

  Odessa was a blue-collar town – people
there manufactured drilling equipment for the oil patch – whereas Midland was a banking center. I remember my father saying Odessa was a filthy city, full of toughs, bums, and thieves. He said he’d never live there.

  The Waldrips, on the other hand, looked and felt more at home once we entered the “Big O.” “I just love the Big O,” said Jackie’s mother.

  Ace Records, the recording studio – a square, cinder-block building which I’m sure no longer stands – was located on a narrow corner, under a giant sign for Salem cigarettes. A red light glowed above the door. The place was locked tight.

  Mrs. Waldrip insisted that I pull my drums out of the car and set them on the sidewalk.

  “Honey, why don’t we wait’ll the man comes and opens the door?” asked Jackie’s father.

  “He’ll be here any minute.” She pinched Jackie’s arm. “You ready to go?” He shrugged. “Gonna cut us a hit!” She poured herself some whiskey. “Top forty, coast to coast.”

  A gust of wind blew my crash cymbal over. It clattered on the sidewalk, frightening a cat from under a car across the street.

  Handbills and hamburger wrappers blew against the Waldrip’s red wagon. We waited for thirty minutes.

  “Son of a bitch said he’d meet us here at seven-thirty,” Jackie’s mother said.

  “When did you talk to him last?” her husband asked. He’d opened the second bottle of bourbon.

  “Just this morning.”

  We waited another half hour.

  “Screw it,” said Jackie’s father.

  “But I want to sing my song!”

  “Another night, honey. Let’s go see the Weavers.” He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and led her to the car. Jackie and I lifted my drums into the back seat. “Big baby,” he whispered.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  We drove through neighborhoods where the lawns weren’t mowed, where people left strings of Christmas lights in their eaves all year.

  “Who are the Weavers?” I whispered to Jackie.

  He shrugged.

  Mr. Waldrip stopped the car in front of a small Spanish-style home made of brown brick. A power line buzzed overhead. A water tower, shiny in the moonlight, stood at the end of the street.

  Joy Weaver, a thin woman with dark, stiff skin, hugged Jackie’s parents in the doorway. “I’ll be durned, look what the cat dragged in,” she said. Her light blond hair reminded me of the fiberglass insulation in the heating unit my father had in stalled last week at home.

  “Earl here?” asked Mr. Waldrip.

  “Ol’ sourpuss is out playing cards.”

  “Well, he’ll miss the party.” Mr. Waldrip handed her the near-empty bottle of Old Charter.

  “Sweetie, we can do better than that.” Joy Weaver pulled two bottles of Jim Beam out of a cabinet underneath a bookshelf.

  “We even brought live entertainment,” Mr. Waldrip said, pointing to Jackie and me. “These boys is hot!”

  Jackie scrunched into a chair by the television set. A velvet painting of Christ kissing a child hung above a hound’s-tooth couch at the far end of the den. A marionette in a straw sombrero, gripping two silver pistols, dangled from the ceiling next to an ivy plant.

  “You kids want a beer?” asked Joy Weaver.

  “No,” Jackie said. He seemed about to cry. His face was red.

  “Sure, I’ll try one,” I said.

  “David, get your drums,” said Mrs. Waldrip. “Let’s do my song for Joy.”

  “You wrote a song?”

  “Hell yes, girl, I told you someday I was going to crawl out of this hole and be famous.”

  “I always knew it,” Joy said. “I wish I had your talent.”

  “I wish I had her time,” said Jackie’s father. “Shit, I could write a song if all I did was sit home all day.” I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, what he did for a living.

  “We oughta get Ida to sing. Have you ever heard Ida sing?” Joy said. “She does ‘Bobby McGee’ worlds better than that Joplin woman can.”

  “Where is Ida?” said Mr. Waldrip.

  “I think she’s back in her room, doing her homework. Ida! Ida Mae! We got company!”

  I’d unloaded my drums by now. I stood by the couch, tightening the wing nuts on the hi-hat, testing the tom-tom’s tone with the drum key.

  A pretty young girl in jeans and a pullover sweater came into the room and sat down. Her brown hair was pulled tight into a ponytail. She had blue eyes.

  “Jackie, what grade are you in?” Joy asked.

  “Tenth,” he mumbled.

  “So’s Ida. We oughta get you kids together more often.”

  Jackie chewed his guitar pick.

  We ran through Mrs. Waldrip’s song, then Joy asked us if we knew “Bobby McGee.”

  Jackie didn’t say anything. Buoyed by the beer I said, “I could fake it.”

  “Mother, I don’t want to sing,” Ida told Joy.

  “Baby, you’re so much better than what’s-her-name.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Gravelly old voice – woman sounds like she’s barfing in a cup. You make sweet sounds.”

  “David, count her into the song,” Mrs. Waldrip said.

  I hesitated, hands above the snare, sticks trembling. “No, Mother,” Ida said. She looked directly at me.

  “David, one, two, three –”

  I tapped out a standard rock beat. Mrs. Waldrip glared at Jackie; he filled in the rhythm. Ida’s cheeks turned red.

  “She’s a pistol,” Joy said. “Let’s hear it, honey.”

  Ida’s voice was so heartbreakingly wrong for the tune, I fell in love with her instantly. So did Jackie. We didn’t speak about it then or later, but we’d both seen on each other’s faces a desire to rescue this girl from her mother, to take her away someplace, somehow, on the back of a wild horse, maybe, where there weren’t any parents or rock and roll records.

  Ida sang about Bobby’s body as though she were in church.

  I felt ashamed for her in front of these people. I wanted to sit and hold her hand. Mr. Waldrip had his arm around Joy Weaver.

  Ida broke off in the middle of the performance and ran to the kitchen. The Waldrips clapped. “Bravo, bravo,” Joy said. She poured another round of bourbon.

  I looked at Jackie. He didn’t move. I stood, jammed my sticks into my back jeans pocket, and followed Ida into the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, opening a loaf of bread. “You want a peanut butter sandwich?” she said. Her eyes were wet and her face was still red.

  “No thanks.”

  Jackie joined us. “You sing real well,” he said.

  Ida laughed, but kept her eyes on him. “No, really,” he told her. He looked solemn and calm. Handsome. Sometimes his sullenness made him seem older than he was, centered and important. The impression lasted only a moment, as if he felt it wasn’t his place in the world to be so assertive. He fumbled for something else to say.

  “These people are nuts,” I said.

  Ida leaned away from Jackie. “God, aren’t they?” She put her hand on my arm and we laughed.

  “And the hits just keep on rollin’!” I crooned. Ida cracked up. She was so pretty. Jackie smiled. I could tell I’d hurt him by saying his folks were nuts. He’d trusted me not to say a word about them, ever.

  Jackie and I didn’t see Ida again after that night, but clearly, in his mind, I’d won her. My parents were angry when the Waldrips dropped me off at one A.M., banging and clattering my drums, and waking the neighbors. They wouldn’t let me go to Jackie’s house anymore; eventually, he stopped coming to rehearsals after school. Without him, the rest of the “Crystals” lost interest.

  I went alone to finish our English project. The workers wouldn’t talk to me as easily as they had with Jackie. I asked them about mariachi music and “La Paloma,” one of my favorite Mexican songs. I told them I was a drummer. They stood in a nervous circle, spat tobacco in the sand, and looked at me as though I were
a wolf.

  Jackie never mentioned the project. I turned in the transcripts and we both got a C, with a note from the teacher, “This seems incomplete.” For weeks afterwards, I felt bad about the workers, writing their stories when they so clearly didn’t want me to. Eventually I understood that my real regret was Jackie. I hadn’t meant to be cruel about his folks – just as I hadn’t planned to anger Peggy Sue with my quarter – but I’d wanted Ida’s attention. I hadn’t fully realized, until that night, how similar love and betrayal were, and how capable I was of both.

  Months later, I heard from my father that most of the oil workers were undocumented. They’d been arrested and deported, and the drilling company closed.

  ______

  In the next two years I saw Jackie only at marching practice. I’d wave to him from across the field. He’d nod, clutching his French horn like a shield. I never learned anything more about his parents, or what it was like for him at home. I joined another rock group in town and we earned a little money playing dances and parties. At the senior prom Jackie appeared with a date who looked remarkably like Ida Mae Weaver (it wasn’t her). My band had been hired for the gig, and at the break Jackie told me, “You sound strong. Your wrists are a little stiff – seems to me you’re not as limber as you used to be – but you’re cooking.”

  I thought we might be friends again, but we were still so young, we believed we were exempt from time. Neither of us made another gesture, and when I left for college a few months later I lost track of him.

  Several years after that, at a high school reunion, someone said they thought Jackie Waldrip was a wildcatter down around McCamey, but no one knew for sure. I drove by his old house when the reunion was over. The rodeo grounds and all the horses were gone. So were the shutters on the windows. A welder’s truck was parked in the drive.

  I sat in my car, remembering Jackie and Ida. In a way I’d abandoned them when I’d gone off to school, used my father’s connections to position myself in life.

  I hoped Ida Mae had prospered, but that night in her house, I hadn’t glimpsed any reason to think she would. Options were scarce for a working-class woman in Odessa, Texas.