The Woman in Oil Fields Read online

  Two boys were wrestling now in Jackie’s old yard, laughing, throwing grass. I recalled my twin ambitions of becoming a rock star, of losing myself in endless romantic affairs. They’d diminished, then disappeared, like the Pride of the Mustangs rounding a corner at the far end of a street.

  I started my car and pulled away, watching the boys in my rearview, and with their image in my mind I can say now as I couldn’t then: I loved Jackie. His absence from my life haunts me as Ida Mae did, though I’m also convinced that, given the time and place of our growing up, and our backgrounds, it was inevitable that we’d vanish from each other.

  As for Ida – for years, even after I’d married, she was my physical model for the ideal woman, until, with time, her face became harder and harder to recall with any accuracy.

  Yesterday, when Philip found my drums, he seemed reverential – toward the strange equipment, me. Here was a side of his dad he’d never known. But his awe soon passed. “I’m gonna be on MTV!” he shouted. He whacked the cymbals and the snare, drowning out the story I’d started to tell him about a pretty young girl I met one night, and the beat went on all day.

  THE WOMAN IN THE OIL FIELD

  On the west side of Dallas my grandmother, no longer beautiful, sits in a wheelchair in a Catholic nursing home. Her room is across the hall from a bathroom and there is one old man – like her, a resident of the place – who forgets to shut the door when he goes to use the john. My grandmother shouts at him and he looks up, startled; the nurses come to clean his urine off the floor. In a rage he steps into my grandmother’s room but before he can say anything she raises her voice. “What are you sleeping with that shanty woman for?” she yells. She’s confused him with my grandfather Bill, who (family legend has it) ran off with a prostitute, an “oil field woman,” in the thirties. “She teases me,” my grandmother says to the old man. “She comes to me at night and tells me I won’t ever sleep with you again. Then she ties my bed to a gelding and he runs me around a field, fast and dizzy, and the whole time she’s laughing. In the mornings when the women here bathe me she’s outside my window and I try to hide my body but they won’t let me. They want to show her what I’ve become. Do you want her to laugh at me? Am I repulsive to you now?” The nurses smile because she’s mistaken the man, but she has a story to understand and it’s the same one I heard in my mother’s kitchen twenty years ago. Lately, on these hot summer Friday afternoons, trying to convince Grandma June that her husband Bill is dead, I’ve remembered the story and learned new ways to tell it. When I’m older and not the same man, I know I’ll find another way, then another, until I’ve resolved it for myself.

  ______

  I stop in and see June, regular as a city bus, on Monday and Friday mornings, and stay most of the day. Sometimes she knows I’m here, sometimes she doesn’t. I’ve been back in Dallas now, out of work, for eight and a half months, ever since Boeing’s Seattle plant laid me off with ninety-nine other machinists. When I called last fall to tell my folks about the pink slip, my mom said I should head back south. “It’d be a blessing if you could ease June’s final days,” she said. “I can’t go to Dallas each time she gets to feeling blue – Exxon’s bringing in a new well near Oklahoma City and they’ve got your father looking after it. Mother’s asking for me but your daddy needs me here,” she said. “Stay with her, Glen. We’ll cover your expenses.”

  I thought it over for a day, then figured what the hell-beats hanging in the Seattle rain looking for jobs. Besides, though we’d never spent much time together, I’d always liked June. She was a straight talker. So I threw a pack of clothes into my Chevy and fastened a set of chains to my tires. I rumbled up the Rockies, dipped into the desert, and wound up in Texas again.

  On Monday evenings now, when I leave June asleep, I hit the road and don’t turn around until Friday. Six hundred, eight hundred miles a week just to get away from the sickrooms, the musty medicine smells of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home. Tumbleweeds blow across the highways, in all the little towns of West Texas. I remember these towns from my childhood, but I can’t tell them apart anymore now that the damn franchises’ve moved in everywhere. Dairy Queens and Motel Sixes. HBO and Showtime blaring in people’s houses, through the windows. On Friday afternoons, back in Dallas, I tell June I’ve sat with her all week. She doesn’t know the difference if I’m here or away. “You remember yesterday?” I ask. “I read you the newspaper?” She has a favorite daily column, “The Winds of Time,” by this local hack historian, Larry Kircheval. His articles always start, “Whatever happened to –?” and tell the story of some boring old building or once-important citizen. He irritates the hell out of me, really bares his heart when he writes – “Look at me, how much I know, how much I feel about the past” – but June eats it up. I read her his stuff whenever I’m here. On Saturday mornings my folks call from Oklahoma City and say they’ve tried to reach me all week at my Dallas apartment – an efficiency with only a table and a single bed (“All we can afford for you right now,” Dad says). “We must’ve just missed each other,” I tell them. “I go out for ice cream a lot. It’s turning hot here now …”

  ______

  This afternoon two irritable old men, bound to their wheelchairs with thick silk straps, sit in the lobby of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home in front of the big-screen TV. An old cop movie in black-and-white: leering killers, screaming women. The actor’s faces, flattened and pale against the lime green wall behind the screen, remind me of old photographs I’ve seen in the memory books here, on nightstands beside the beds.

  A slow ceiling fan swirls dust motes across the lobby floor. Brown summer horseflies light on the old men’s cotton sleeves. They’re wearing yellow pajamas – standard Parkview dress – and leather slippers. They don’t like each other: I can see that. Both are new arrivals here, never met before today, but while the movie hums at high volume these two guys’re giving each other the glare. June’s asleep; I’ve stepped into the lobby to stretch my legs, to get a Coke from the patio machine out front. As I’m sorting dimes I hear one old bird rasp at the other, “You son of a bitch,” and suddenly they’re both throwing punches. The rubber wheels of their chairs squeal against each other and scuff the red tile floor. These fellows’re too weak to really hurt each other, but the nurses panic and glide them toward separate corners of the room. “Mr. Davis! Mr. Edwards!” shouts one of the nurse’s aides. On the television screen a masked burglar jimmies a window.

  Good for you, I think, watching the old men grimace and cough. Don’t let the fire go out. (I swear I’ve heard – late at night, when only Nurse Simpson’s on duty, Nurse Simpson who lets me stay if June’s had a hard evening – I swear I’ve heard the sounds of sexual pleasure, whether from memory – a murmuring in sleep-or actual contact, I can’t tell.)

  I go to check on June. She’s awake now, lying in bed, clutching her box of Kleenex. She’s nearly blind; if she pats around on the sheet and can’t find her Kleenex she cries. Her hands are tiny and clawlike, tight with arthritis. Sometimes, to exercise or just to pass the hours, she rolls and unrolls a ball of blue yarn.

  I ask her if she wants some apple juice.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I turn the crank at the end of the bed to raise her up; hold the cup, guide the straw into her mouth. Her teeth are gone.

  “You tell him to talk to me,” she says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Stubborn old man.” She waves at a chair by the wall. “He’s been sitting there all afternoon reading that damn paper and he won’t talk to me.” Her voice cracks. “Where’s your whore today, old man? Off with someone else?”

  I stroke the papery skin of her arms, offer more juice. She’s ninety-two years old. Since Bill died she’s had two other husbands (divorced one, outlived the other), six grandkids, and three careers (store owner, upholsterer, quilt-maker). But now, near the end of her life, it’s this one incident – Bill and the oil field woman – that clogs her mind. She’s been jealous
for sixty years.

  She sips her juice. Her head seems to clear. “Glen?” she says.

  “I’m here.”

  “Bill’s not really sitting in that chair, is he?”

  “No, June.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When?”

  “When did he die? A long time ago – 1962 or ’63, I think it was.”

  “I remember now. In a drunk tank.”

  “Yes.”

  Sunlight spreads, first bright then pale, through her peach-colored curtains. An air-conditioning vent above her bed flutters a poster taped loosely to the wall. Last week a Catholic church group, on their regular visit, left these posters in all the rooms: a little girl hugging a kitten. The caption reads, “I Know I’m Special – God Don’t Make No Junk.”

  “Can I get you something else, June?”

  “French fries.”

  “All that grease?”

  “Get me some goddamn French fries!”

  I don’t know how she chews the silly things with just her gums, but she does. “All right,” I say. “I’ll be back.”

  I drive a few blocks to a Burger King. The streets here on the west side’re lined with sexy new cigarette ads – enormous, rolling breasts filling billboards. I lift my foot off the gas pedal and coast in my lane, staring, more lonely than horny, at these huge women floating like helium balloons over the start-stop traffic. By the time I return to the rest home the sun’s set. The red light from the Coke machine on the patio pours through June’s window. She’s sitting up in bed, in the near-dark, twining yarn. From the big-screen TV canned laughter echoes down the hall. The curtains rustle, from the air vent. June’s squinting, trying to catch the movement. I don’t know how much she can see. She shushes me. “That whore is there at the window,” she whispers. I dangle a French fry under her nose. “She’s laughing,” June says. “Listen.”

  Nurse Simpson pokes her head into the room, says, “How we doing?”

  June says, “Bitch.”

  “We’re fine,” I tell the nurse. “But maybe I’d better stay here tonight.”

  She nods. “I’ll bring the cot,” she says.

  ______

  I first heard about June’s whore late one night in my mother’s kitchen. I was twelve. Mother suspected my sixteen-year-old sister was in trouble, smoking dope, driving into dark fields with boys in dirty pants. “When I was her age I could’ve wound up that way,” Mom said. “It would’ve been easy. Now your sister.”

  “What way do you mean?” I asked.

  She told me the story then: “When she was young, your Grandma June was very beautiful. My father’s a fortunate man to’ve touched her. He was an oil worker in the East Texas fields, and not too smart, not too good or bad. At Christmas he drove home to Dallas bringing us store-wrapped gifts, and slept with us in the house. Your grandmother kept him busy with the vegetables for dinner or the furnace or anything else that needed looking after. At night he combed her blond hair and when he got through his hands seemed to take on her fair color and not the deep black they always seemed to be. But that’s me, you know, because I know his hands weren’t black. He washed the oil off – I never even saw crude oil – but he worked in the fields and I see him now, dark, in my mind.

  “The woman who took him from us wasn’t beautiful like your grandmother but she slept in the shanties by the fields and sooner or later he found her, like they all did I suppose, all the men who worked in the East Texas fields. It wasn’t uncommon to see women strapping on their shoes at night and heading for the fields because there was money to make and they knew it. So he found her sooner or later. If he came home at Christmas he didn’t work around the house anymore. Then he didn’t come at all and he was with her, we knew. My brother Bud was old enough to take care of us now so he said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but I knew he’d be lost, like Daddy. The fields were the only place for him to go.”

  One night, driving home for the weekend, Bud ran his car off the road two miles south of a rig he’d been roughnecking. He never regained consciousness, Mother said.

  “Did he ever see your father?” I asked her.

  “No, and he didn’t meet a woman of his own. He wasn’t the type to take up with that sort, and anyway we’d heard the shanty woman was dead by now, killed by some old boy who didn’t want to pay for her. They found her half-burned in the Mayberry Field, dress off, doused with gas.”

  “Whatever happened to Grandfather Bill?” I asked.

  “We heard about him, sick and dying, in a Kilgore clinic years later.” My mother rubbed her throat; she’d gone dry. As in many family stories, the initial point had been lost in the telling. I never understood her fear about becoming the kind of woman she’d described. Maybe she’d been tempted to follow the oil workers herself when she was young, to raise money for June who’d had to scramble for cash after Bill disappeared. In fact, my mother didn’t leave home until she met my father – who also eventually wound up in the fields. (My sister, more level-headed than Mother ever gave her credit for being, turned out fine. She’s married now and living in Houston.)

  That night, twenty years ago, sitting with me in her kitchen, my mother laughed sadly. “I don’t know what’s so damned attractive about the oil fields, but every man in my life has been drawn to them.”

  I remember thinking, Not me. I won’t be trapped by that hard-packed Texas ground.

  “Bud was such a good kid,” she said. “There was no need for it, no need for it at all … when he ran his car off the road, people said the marks looked like he’d swerved to miss something, but there weren’t any tracks in the dirt.”

  At twelve, I was already familiar enough with my mother’s grim tales to know they usually ended in guilt or remorse. I knew what Bud had swerved to miss on the road that night. I knew why Mother worried about my father when he worked late. The oil field woman would haunt my family from now on.

  My father’s a quiet man, and shy, and even if the shanties still stood during his wildcatting days he wouldn’t have gone to them for the world. But the Mayberry Woman, as she was known in the fields, came to the oil workers now, the way she’d come to Bud and stood like fog in the middle of the road. She didn’t say why she came. Maybe she was looking for her money, though what could it mean to her now?

  In 1963 my father moved up in the small oil company he worked for. He stopped going to the fields. He bought an air-conditioner and a new car for us, and paid off the mortgage on June’s Dallas home. In the evenings we watched television. Dad said the country would never recover from Oswald’s rifle in the window. No one told me stories at night to put me to bed. My mother fretted about my sister, my father read the paper. In time, I began to realize it was up to me: I’d been given a version of a story, though I was too young to know how to tell it.

  ______

  For a long time the story stayed inside me. When I was a little older (but still too young to know how to begin) I scared myself with it. Watching meteors one dusk in a mesquite-ridden field I had the sense that the Mayberry Woman was just behind a bush. I wouldn’t go to her. A few yards away, on the highway, diesel trucks signaled one another with their horns. I hoped she’d know the drivers were stronger men than I was, full of hard little pills to keep them awake. They’d give her more of whatever it was she was looking for than I could. Presently a jeep loaded with Mexican boys pulled up to the edge of the field. The sky had turned coal black. A spotlight in the back of the jeep flashed on and the boys fired at cottontail rabbits cowering in the mesquite. I sank into myself. The shots didn’t come my way. As they hunted the boys sang a story of their own:

  La pena y Ia que no es pena; ay llorona

  Todo es pena para mi.

  The story was similar to mine: an airy woman, damp with sweat and talcum and cheap perfume, walked the streets of a Mexican town, touching the faces of children, seducing men from the taverns, lying with them in the back seats of rusted cars.

&nb
sp; The hunters laughed and didn’t even want the dead rabbits. I imagined that, years from now, after they’d forgotten this night, they’d remember the story they were singing. La Llorona was more embedded in their minds than the spotlight and the guns, and I felt a kind of kinship with them.

  ______

  This morning I overhear two nurses in the hall, whispering about me. One says, “It’s awful the way he leaves his grandma each week, then sneaks back and tells her he’s been here the whole time.”

  “She doesn’t know one way or the other. Her poor old noodle just comes and goes,” the second woman says.

  “Still, he oughtn’t to lie to her that way.”

  Last night a woman died in the room next to June’s. It was the first time I’d ever heard a death rattle. Her last breaths came gurgling out of her throat like water draining in a sink. Nurse Simpson cleared her out of her bed, an ambulance pulled up outside the building’s back entrance, and that was it.

  Now June’s clutching and unclutching a Kleenex in her hand. I open the curtains to let in the light. The two nurses who’ve been whispering enter the room with a pill cart. Tiny color snapshots of all the Parkview residents have been arranged in rows on the tray, next to little paper cups full of capsules and pills. Orange, red, yellow, green. One of the nurses finds June’s photo, picks up her cup. Her pills are gray. “Get those things away from me,” June says, covering her mouth with the Kleenex.

  “Junie, now, be a good girl –”

  “Trying to poison me with that crap.”

  The nurse forces the pills into June’s mouth with quick sips of juice. “Ought to try to walk a little today,” she says, squeezing June’s feet. “Work your legs some.”

  “I walked for ninety years. Leave me alone,” June says.

  The nurse’s white blouse is spotted with large yellow stains. Someone’s breakfast. She gives me a hurried look, and I know she’s the one who disapproves of me.