Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “I’m plenty lost,” I said, “but I know where I am.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “I’m a geologist. I’m looking for oil.”

  “I ain’t never heard of oil in New Mexico,” she said. She tugged at the sash around her middle, her apron. It dented her.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “What will you have?” she asked.

  I looked at the menu, black marker on whiteboard, set high on the wall behind the counter. “The griddle cakes?”

  She gave a surreptitious sidelong glance back at the window to the kitchen and offered me the faintest shake of her head.

  “Oatmeal?”

  DeLois stared at me without moving.

  “Huevos rancheros?”

  She nodded, then called the order back to the cook.

  “Your name is interesting,” I said.

  “My parents couldn’t decide on Delores or Lois. That’s the story they told me, anyway. Actually, I don’t think they could spell worth a damn and this is what I ended up with. School is a good thing.”

  “I’m Zach.”

  a pocketknife, a tarp

  For whatever reason, the tiny post office that served the few people of Bingham opened at seven thirty in the morning. It was barely light. The restaurant didn’t open until eight, and so I felt not only conspicuous but suspicious sitting in my Jeep. I spread out maps of the central New Mexico region but worked on my own data from my cave in the Canyon, so my time wasn’t being completely wasted. When the cook and DeLois drove in and parked behind the diner, I went inside and had breakfast. DeLois made small talk with me. I learned that the cook’s name was Jorge, though he wanted to be called George. At lunchtime I drove west to San Antonio and sat briefly in my motel room before making the long drive back to the parking lot of the post office, where I sat in my vehicle until it closed at three. That afternoon I toured the dry, desolate, monotonous countryside and wondered just what the hell I was doing way out there in the middle of no place. That night I called Meg and asked after Sarah.

  “She was quiet today,” Meg said. “Where are you?”

  “I need some time. I’m working.”

  “Are you in the Canyon?”

  “I will be soon. There’s a cave here in New Mexico that I’m checking out.” I hated lying. “Does she even realize that I’m not there?”

  There was a long pause. “I can’t say that she does.” It scared Meg to say it. She was not concerned about my feelings but about what it meant about Sarah.

  “There will be days like that,” I said. “I’ll be home soon. I’m sorry I’ve run off.”

  “I’d like to run off too, you know.”

  “When I get back.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  We hung up and I lay back and stared up at the crumbling ceiling. I watched a documentary about bears and fell asleep in my clothes.

  Morning three. While I ate my too-hard-scrambled eggs and sausage patties served on a blue plastic plate I peered through the booth window and saw the red-paper-wrapped package I had mailed from Socorro two days earlier exit the post office. It was carried by a white man with a shock of white hair, of medium build, wearing desert khaki camouflage pants and shirt. He was accompanied by a taller, fatter man, similarly dressed. The second man carried a stack of boxes that he loaded into the back of a Hummer. He then returned to the post office. The first man tore through the red paper and into the box, discovered it empty. When his friend came back with another stack of packages, they had an animated conversation that concluded with the shorter man kicking the box and red paper around the gravel parking area. They got into their huge rig and rolled away to the east.

  I pulled my pages together, left a generous tip, and walked out to my Jeep. I drove east behind them. I saw only a couple of vehicles on the road, most parked off the highway at shabby or even derelict collections of structures. There was enough traffic that my presence was in no way conspicuous or suspicious. Well ahead was the Hummer, easy to spot on this landscape. I saw it turn north toward uneven terrain. I could see from the highway as I passed that the Hummer came to a stop at a chain-link-fence-surrounded compound with a large warehouse and a smaller building. There was an old school bus parked there as well, the rust as prominent as the yellow against the white landscape. It was also easy to see that there was virtually no way for me to approach the compound without becoming immediately and unfortunately conspicuous and suspicious.

  I noted where I was by the mile marker, drove east another mile, and then turned around and headed back to San Antonio.

  That night I called home and received a report on my daughter’s deterioration. It was apparently going well. Irony and humor were something I understood to be a human way of handling tragedy, but I wondered if it was to be experienced alone, whether it was normal to find the funny in misery without an audience. I decided it didn’t matter.

  a pocketknife, a tarp, a map

  The two men, Shock of White Hair and the big guy, walked toward the diner, leaving their Hummer parked beside the post office.

  “Oh, Lord,” DeLois said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “These boys give me the heebie-jeebies.” She looked at me as if for the first time. “Stay away from them.”

  The men eyed my Jeep as they approached, like dogs noticing something out of place. When they entered, they made more noise than a mere two men should have. They sounded like they were coming in from a terrible blizzard, but there was no storm, snow, rain or otherwise, even without the stomping their tan canvas boots. They gave me a sidelong and none-too-friendly glance as they took seats at the counter. I couldn’t hear the questions I saw them putting to DeLois, but she gave me a nervous look that might have been a suggestion for me to leave. I went back to my maps or at least pretended to go back to my maps. I now knew who was sending me the clothes I had ordered, but I didn’t know who was sending me the written messages. One thing was clear: it was neither of these two men.

  DeLois came over and topped off my coffee, left me without saying a word, but her apology hung in the air.

  The shorter of the men cleared his throat loudly, swiveled on his stool, got up, and walked over to my booth.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “Fine. Kind of you to ask.”

  He looked back at his heavy partner, then gave me a quizzical look, a half smile. “You’re not from around here.”

  I resisted the obvious sarcasm, opted for “No, I’m not.” I looked him in the eye. “My name is Wells.”

  Another look back at the counter.

  “Jeff,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you.” I did not offer to shake his hand. The sleight went unregarded.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Breakfast.”

  “Wells,” he said. “What are you doing in Bingham?”

  “Looking for oil.”

  He thought I was joking at first, was about to complain to me or his pal, then looked at my maps. “Oil,” he said. “Here in New Mexico?”

  “I’m looking. I’m a geologist.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I’m not allowed to tell you that,” I said.

  “You’re not, eh?”

  “Part of my contract. My employers would rather not have people know they’re looking into the ground. I’m sure you can understand that.” My heart was racing.

  Jeff signaled for his buddy to come join us. They sat across from me in the booth. They looked slightly comical, all fatigued up like that. Still, they scared me, and I was fairly certain they could see that. “Wells, this is Roger.”

  I nodded.

  “Wells here is looking for oil,” Jeff said. He pulled a cigarette from a pack and put it between his lips. “Here in New Mexico, if you can believe that.” He lit the cigarette, blew smoke up toward the ceiling.

  “No smoking,” DeLois said from behind the counter.
>
  Jeff paid her no attention.

  “Oil,” Roger said, as if to prove he could speak.

  “Why do you think there’s oil around here?” Jeff asked.

  “Some surface features from satellite images,” I said.

  “Where?” Roger asked.

  I said nothing, finished my coffee. “I’m looking at a lot of places. Groundwork takes a lot of time.”

  “There ain’t no oil in New Mexico,” Jeff said.

  “There ain’t no discovered oil in New Mexico.”

  “So, how’s it going?”

  I smiled and pulled together my maps.

  Jeff stopped me. “Where looks good?”

  I had a brief staring competition with him, then folded. I pointed to a spot on the map, their compound. “Around here from the satellite imagery, but I need to check the area out. Right behind the post office over there looked interesting at first but not anymore.”

  “Right here?” Jeff asked, his dirty index nail tapping the map.

  “Yes.”

  Jeff looked at Roger. Roger looked at the map. It took the big man a while to realize what Jeff was telling him.

  “There’s an alluvial field there, and that makes it hard to read the surface. So much washing away of the sediment.” I was talking out of my ass, more or less. “Since there are no extant fields here, I can read the biostratigraphy of the sites. It just seems to me that, given the oil in similar zones in Texas, there should be similar productive capability here.” I looked at their glazed-over eyes. “Sorry to bore you with this.”

  “How does it work?” Jeff asked.

  “What?”

  “Suppose someone found oil on my land—would it be mine?”

  I laughed. “Hell no. You might own the land, but you don’t own what’s under it. A company that finds it has the right to come in and take it.”

  “What the fuck?” Roger said.

  “What if we found it?” Jeff asked.

  “If you found it on your land and managed to take it out, then it would be yours to sell. Same with gas.”

  “So, if some company found it, I wouldn’t get nothing?”

  “You would get a lot,” I told him. “The oil company would have to pay you to be on your land, to move across your place to get to the product. There are formulae for figuring the payments.”

  “How do you find the oil?” Jeff asked.

  “I went to school for eight years to learn that,” I said. “If I tell you, then what good am I? I’m just saying.”

  Jeff nodded.

  “I’d better get to work.” I put money down for DeLois. “Gentlemen.” They did not detect the irony.

  a pocketknife, a tarp, a map, a compass

  I was supposed to be a petroleum geologist looking for oil out in the desert, so I went out into the desert and looked for oil. I pretended to search for oil. I parked myself on a desolate spot within fairly easy eyeshot of the camouflage brothers’ compound. The tarbush and acacia weren’t thick enough to offer shade even if they had been taller. I had come with some diagnostic instruments from my department at the university. Some core-sampling tools and an electronic sniffer. I didn’t know how to operate the sniffer and had my doubts, as did many others, about whether the thing actually worked at all. None of that mattered, of course. I would not have been able to find oil if I was standing knee-deep in it. A light drizzle fell, and I looked up to see some clouds clumping together in the southwest. The compound was quiet. The Hummer was there, parked by the bus, but I didn’t see anybody moving around. Then, as I was about to leave, I saw a woman walk, slump shouldered, from the house to the warehouse. I thought a lot about my daughter while out here too, about how much I missed her, about how insane it was that I was out here in the middle of no place up to God knew what. I thought about work, about how the importance of it had faded through the years. What did I ever think I would learn or discover? Did I ever believe it mattered? And I thought about Hilary Gill. I imagined that one might see her work through to publication. That was what one might do.

  I watched as a dually pickup arrived. The men unloaded boxes and big bags and took them into the warehouse. Nothing seemed terribly heavy, and it was clear that they were laughing and joking the whole time.

  I packed up, wondering as I did it if I was technically pretending to pack up. I drove down the hill and stopped at the northern fence of the compound, got out, and paced the ground there. The windowless (at least on my side) warehouse was not as large as I had thought, a hundred feet long at best and perhaps half as wide. The corrugated roof and sides were in need of repair and paint. I felt so terribly lonely out there, so lonely that feeling began to fascinate me.

  I heard an engine, not big like the Hummer’s or what the bus must have contained, a two-stroke perhaps. When I looked up, I saw a three-wheeled ATV coming toward me on the other side of the fence. It was Jeff and his white hair. Behind him I saw Roger and another man standing outside the door of the house.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Jeff said. He was wearing a sidearm.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Jeff, right?”

  “Finding anything?”

  I shrugged. “This your place?”

  “Yep.”

  “Just inside the fence?”

  “Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Where are you staying? You camped out someplace?”

  I didn’t answer. “Frankly, you guys scare me. The camo, the gun. The way you looked at me in the diner.”

  “We’re harmless,” he said, not sounding at all harmless. “So, you finding anything out here?”

  “Would you mind if I took some readings inside your fence? Around that wash.” I pointed to the drainage. The deep rut ran a jagged course parallel to the big building.

  “You can do that.” He paused, looked back at the house. “If you find something, you tell me first, right? This is my property, so you tell me before the oil company, right?”

  I sighed as if making a decision. “If I find anything promising, I will be sure to tell you first.”

  “Gate’s over here.”

  Two men I hadn’t seen before rolled open the gate while Jeff watched. He didn’t introduce them to me but climbed into the passenger seat of my Jeep.

  “I’ll ride with you,” he said.

  “You don’t want your trike?”

  He laughed, not a real laugh.

  “What kind of business you got here?” I asked as we drove past the warehouse.

  “Storage.”

  “No trucks?”

  “They’re all out.” He didn’t like the questions. “So, what looks so promising over here?” He pointed to the hills and finally to his own land.

  I stopped the vehicle and we got out. I walked to the wash and he followed. I bent down and picked up a couple of rocks, tossed one away, and handed the other to him. “That’s a diatom,” I said. “A microfossil.”

  He examined the rock. I was hoping his hobby was not rock collecting or that he didn’t have an interest in gems.

  “Microfossils are the skeletons of tiny plants and animals from when this was an ocean. They are strewn throughout the layers. They give me an idea of the rock layers. I need to search around and catalog all the different kinds I can find. I’ll also be using some other equipment to measure soil density and trace presence of hydrocarbon.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s boring,” I said. “It’s tedious.”

  “That’s what you spent all those years in school for?” he said.

  “I don’t like it when you put it that way,” I said. “So, it’s okay if I set up?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  a pocketknife, a tarp, a map, a compass, a shovel

  As I had in the hills, I set myself up as if to take readings, make notes, survey. What I actually did was read an airport science-fiction novel, go through my own work, think about my daughter, and drink water. I did this until I had to urinate. It was then that I
made my way to the warehouse. They had given up watching me, so I looked for a door. My heart was racing. I ignored the instinct and desire to look about to see if I was being observed. My story was I needed a toilet. I found a door, grabbed the knob, turned it. It was unlocked. I walked inside. There were perhaps twelve or fifteen women opening boxes, folding clothes, packing boxes. Only one of the women looked at or cared to look my way. She gave me a double take, perhaps because she hadn’t seen my face before or perhaps because my face was brown like hers. She looked away suddenly just as I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to find Roger.

  “Whatcha doin’?” he asked. He sounded like a cartoon character.

  “Looking for a john,” I said, casually.

  “Ain’t no bathroom in here. Why didn’t you just pee outside?”

  “Who said I had to pee?”

  He laughed. Poop jokes always make kids laugh. “Come on,” he said, and he led me out of the warehouse and toward the house. He pointed to a couple of portable toilets set beside the house. “Take your pick.”

  “Great, thanks.”

  Jeff was stepping out of the house as I was stepping into the john.

  “He needed to take a dump,” Roger said. “He didn’t see nothing.”

  Once the door to the awful-smelling booth was closed, I couldn’t hear anything else. I sat in there long enough to be believable. When I exited, Jeff was waiting.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked.

  “This is awkward,” I said. “What if I told you I think there’s oil? Then you’d start drilling and it would all be yours. Where would that leave my employers? Or me, for that matter?”

  “What if I just wanted to drill a hole in my land for the fun of it?”

  “That would cost you a lot of money and time, and you’d have to know how to do it. You could probably discover some igneous rocks at two thousand feet in your test drill, but what would that tell you? This is not just a business, it’s science. It’s not like looking for gold in a creek.”

  “What if I hired you?”

  “You don’t even know me. I don’t know you. I’m getting paid now.”