The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Thank you,” I say as she replaces June’s cup on the tray.

  The pills always knock June out. While she sleeps I flip through a stack of Kodak prints my mother sent us last week. Family snapshots. A picture of Mom in her high school cheer-leading outfit; her graduation portrait. June pruning roses in her yard. There aren’t any pictures of Bill. June destroyed them all years ago, when he left.

  An alarm bell rings in the lobby. I go to see what’s happened. Mr. Edwards has tried to escape. He’s rammed open the back door, the ambulance entrance, with his wheelchair. He has an old fedora on his head and a blue sweater draped across his shoulders; otherwise he’s naked. Briefly, I find myself rooting for him but the nurses catch him as he rounds the patio. “Sons of bitches!” he shouts, spurring his chair like a pony.

  At lunch the Soup of the Day smells like mercurochrome. June won’t eat it. I bring her a ham and cheese sandwich from Burger King. She’s lucid and calm. “Where’s your wife, Glen? Didn’t you get married?” she says.

  The question catches me off guard. “No. Well, yes.”

  “Shoot, boy.” She cackles then coughs. “Are you in or out?”

  “We split up about a year ago,” I tell her. “She’s in New Mexico now.” Marge and I only lived together for a few months in a small apartment near Puget Sound. Mom had told June we were married; she wouldn’t have understood the kind of loose arrangement we had.

  “What was the problem?” June asks.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t make enough money to suit her.”

  “What is it you do?”

  “I’m a welder.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Making airplanes.”

  “You want these fries?”

  She holds out her hand. “I never understood why you moved way the hell up there, anyway. What’s wrong with Texas?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with Texas. I just didn’t want to work in the oil fields.” I brush a horsefly off the sandwich paper. “I heard it was pretty out west, so I went.”

  “There’s worse jobs than the oil fields,” June says.

  I laugh. “Sure there are. It’s just –”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, June, it seemed kind of aimless to me. Bill, Bud, even Dad. Moving around from patch to patch …”

  “Are you better off making airplanes?”

  “No.” I squeeze her hand. “Not really. You want the rest of this?”

  “Tastes like tar.” She says she’s tired. I tell her I’m going to run into town, but I’ll be back this evening. I drive to my apartment and pack a handful of clothes.

  ______

  The girls on Cedar Springs Boulevard don’t want to work for their money. I’ve asked before – every damn night when I first got to town and felt so low. Ten minutes, sixty bucks.

  Before I hit the road I stop at Ojeda’s on Cedar Springs and order a taco. A pug-nosed girl, fourteen or fifteen, in red heels and a black jacket, taps the restaurant window. Long purple nails. I shake my head, ladle salsa onto my plate. “I love you,” she mouths through the glass. I hold up three fingers. “Thirty bucks,” I say. She laughs and moves down the walk, swaying like a dancer.

  I’ve often wondered what caught Bill’s eye in the oil field, when the shanty woman first showed up. A twist of hips, a toss of the head?

  I eat and read the paper. Today Kircheval’s column – June’s favorite – starts, “Years ago, on a tall building in downtown Dallas, the Mobil Oil Company erected a revolving red Pegasus, rearing and about to take flight. The city’s preservation committee protects the sign now because Mobil abandoned the flying horse as its trademark over a decade ago.”

  Kircheval’s sad that few old Dallasites recall the name of the company that lifted the sign onto the building, and fewer still remember the original legend of Pegasus.

  “So many losses,” he goes on. “Like Jack Ruby’s bar – can anyone find its old spot? A few people point out the grassy knoll, but that’s all. No one talks about it. No one talks about the sky we can’t see behind the streetlights.” I imagine him, poor sentimental bastard, sitting at a scratched wooden desk in the newspaper office, surrounded by World War Two press photos of Ernie Pyle (“Now there was a journalist!”).

  “Have we forgotten about the Dipper scooping down out of the north?” he asks. “Have we forgotten falling stars and all the things that used to scare us?”

  ______

  I-20 West through Ft. Worth, Abilene, Big Spring, Midland-Odessa, runs – a straight shot – past refineries and rigs. Flames breathe fiercely out of steel-plated towers and drums; around the processing plants the air smells flat, like warm asparagus.

  Last month, on one of my escape-runs, I filled out job applications with Exxon and Area. As much as I’d hate to give myself to Oil, to fasten my gaze on the ground, I realize I’ll need someplace to go when June passes on.

  When I was a kid I wanted to ride the pumps in the fields. They bucked up and down like the wild-maned rodeo broncos I saw on TV, or like coin-operated horses in front of the dime stores Mama used to shop.

  This afternoon thick blue thunderheads mass together in the east. A faint smell of rain mingles with sand in the air. I stop in Abilene for a DQ Dude and some onion rings. The Dairy Queen is overrun with high school majorettes. They’re wearing green and yellow uniforms and hats with plumes. Big, strapping Texas girls: I’m reminded of the picture of my mother when she was a cheerleader.

  Back on the highway I pass the ripped screens of drive-in movie theaters, closed for years. Actors’ faces, wide as tractors, used to kiss and sing here, floating above me like cloud-banks on the horizon.

  The rain lets go as I pass the Big Spring cutoff. Semis swish by me, kicking up spray and dust. I stop for gas, a couple of cold Coors. At Midland I turn west toward New Mexico. Watching my blinker flash green, I realize what I’m doing. All these lonely trips I’ve taken, all the times I’ve strayed from Dallas – practice runs. For thousands of miles, back and forth through veils of Texas dust, I’ve been working up my nerve.

  Marge and I haven’t spoken in nearly a year, since she took up with Calvin Reynolds. Cal’s an old Boeing buddy of mine, an engineer. After the big layoffs in Seattle he got a job at one of the labs in Los Alamos, and talked Marge into going with him. By then she and I were pretty well finished anyway.

  The beer’s made me sleepy so I check into a cinder-block motel – The Rayola – just outside of Monahans. A rusty sign above the office door shows a cowboy in pajamas and a night-cap sitting up in bed, still wearing his boots, twirling a lariat.

  For a while I sit smoking, staring at David Letterman and the tan brick wall of my room. I drop ashes into a motel glass. It was wrapped in clear plastic when I first picked it up, but now I notice a lipstick stain on its rim. I lie awake, listening to rain wash the streets and tap my curtained window.

  ______

  West of Odessa there used to be a meteor crater. I remember seeing it as a kid: a rock bowl, perfectly smooth, carved deep into the planet. Now it’s filled nearly to the lip with dirt and old hamburger wrappers. The oil boom’s over in this part of Texas – the parks are overgrown, the rigs’re left standing just for show. Ghost towns. Most of the fields are depleted. If you pump oil out of the earth too fast, my father told me once, the salt domes under the soil will collapse, and sinkholes open in the land, spreading through weeded lots, rippling under highways, shattering concrete. In the past, whole communities have disappeared, he said. Swing sets, dress shops, signs.

  ______

  Roswell, New Mexico. I push open the phone booth door, slip a quarter out of my pocket. Jet planes hurtle across the sky, into or out of a nearby Air Force base. From the booth I watch their vapor trails and wonder if I welded any of that sun-warmed metal.

  For a moment, as I grip the receiver, I want to free myself like a hawk, like a flying horse, from the ground’s heavy pull.

  Cal answers the phone. I haven’t thought of what to say
to him, so I just ask for Marge.

  “Glen?” he says.

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  He takes a breath. He doesn’t know what to say either. “Hold on a minute,” he tells me. “I’ll see if she’s here.”

  I watch a man in a car dealership across the street from the booth try to sell a young couple a used Toyota.

  Marge comes on the line with a fake cheery voice. “Glen! How the hell are you?”

  “Okay.” I tell her about June. “I’m living in Dallas now.”

  “So you’re sightseeing?”

  “I thought I’d come see you. I miss you.”

  “Oh,” she says. I can picture her lips – the way they pucker when she talks. I can picture the kind of dress she’s wearing, baggy and bright. Every day I’ve seen her in my mind the way June glimpses, everywhere she looks, the woman in the oil field. “I don’t know, Glen, it’s kind of a loopy time around here – Cal’s daughter Lynn is coming for a visit tomorrow. I’m kind of nervous, you know, we’ve never met before. There’s some good movies in town we can take her to. And we’ve stocked up on Spaghetti-Os. She loves Spaghetti-Os.”

  The familiar ring of Marge’s voice makes me prickly and hot, but her cool tone – she’s closing me out even as she’s drawing me back in – infuriates. I rub the booth glass with the flat of my thumb, pressing harder with each long stroke.

  Lenny, Jack, Cal: she sang the names like a nursery rhyme the night I heard I was fired. I came home weary from the plant, ready to pick a fight, got drunk, asked her who she’d been sleeping with since we’d moved in together. We both knew how matters stood. “What about you?” she said.

  Shirley, Florence, Joy …

  I thought I was ready for whatever hard things Marge had to tell me that night, but you’re never really prepared for the full, fat weight of jealousy.

  “Anyway, I hope your grandma gets better,” she tells me now on the phone.

  “She won’t get better. She’s old,” I say.

  “Right.”

  “You still don’t listen, baby.”

  “Glen –”

  “Did you keep that little T-shirt, the one I bought you on the coast? With the whales on it? I bet Cal likes it, right?”

  “Glen, don’t start.”

  “Okay. So …”

  “I better go. Cal’ll need his lunch.”

  “Fuck him,” I say.

  “I’m going to go now, Glen.”

  “You too.” I hang up the phone. The sound barrier cracks. Jets thunder over the desert.

  ______

  On Friday afternoon the rest home is quiet. Water trickles inside a brown plastic air-conditioner wedged into a window by the back door where the ambulance came again this morning. Mr. Davis.

  The nurses play Hearts or Spades at the main desk in the lobby.

  June’s been sleeping. Now she blinks her eyes. “Glen?”

  “I’m here, June.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “By your bed. All afternoon.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “No.” She sits up. I fluff her pillows. “Do you have the paper?” she asks. “Read me old what’s-his-name.”

  Today Kircheval shares with his readers the complete history of Ft. Worth’s sewage system. I glance at the column, hesitate, then say, “He’s not in the paper today, June. Must be on vacation.”

  “I need a story,” she says. “Expect me to lie here all day, just worrying and waiting for that woman to show, with nothing else on my mind –”

  “I’ve got a story, June.” I pull my chair up close to the bed. “A better story than Kircheval could tell. Want to hear it?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I think it’s about …” I stare at the poster on her wall, the little girl hugging the kitten. I feel silly that a gooey scene like this can move me, the way Kircheval touches a nerve in June, but it does. “I think it’s about redemption.”

  June licks her dry lips. “I don’t like religious stories.”

  “No no, this isn’t like that.” I get her a glass of water. “This one’s about a woman in an oil field, but she was a good woman, June, not like the ladies you’ve heard of.”

  “A good woman?”

  “A very good woman. Men came to her –”

  “Bet they did.”

  “– and she’d turn them away. Said, ‘You got a wife and kids back home. Don’t mess with that.’”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “She’d bring folks together again, folks who’d lied to each other and said hurtful things. Told the ladies at home, ‘Your man’s brave in the fields, works hard all day, so don’t you badmouth him for not being around.’ And she’d tell the men stories of their women, how they sacrificed raising the children, but how nice and bright they all were, how much they all missed him, and the men’ d smile and watch oil gush out of the ground –”

  “Damned old oil, ruined everybody’s life …,” June says.

  “No, June, the oil was good. Built factories and schools … this lady I’m telling you about, the Mayberry Woman they called her –”

  “Mayberry? That ain’t the story.”

  “It is, June.”

  “She was a bad woman. Awful old bitch.”

  “No, she was good. Listen. Listen. She used to bathe in oil, in a solid gold tub with these lion-claw feet made of brass, see? Rubbed thick crude on her arms like she was lathering in riches. Then she bottled up her fortune and shared it with everyone in Texas, men and women both.”

  June’s breathing evenly now. Her hands lie still on her tissues.

  “See, it’s all right, June,” I say. “It’s always been all right, if you remember it this way.”

  The parking lot fills with noise. A Catholic youth group – eight ten-year-old girls with their mothers – bursts into the nursing home, giggling and shouting. The girls are carrying bunny rabbits – “fuzzy little friends for our friends here at the home,” one says. They dump the rabbits into the laps of three or four women in wheelchairs. “Is it Easter?” a deaf old woman asks.

  “No,” the tallest mother says. She seems to be in charge. “We thought you’d like to pet them.”

  “Is it Christmas?”

  Mr. Edwards glares at the bunnies as though he’d like to kill them.

  I offer to wheel June into the lobby so she can feel the soft fur, but she doesn’t want to. She smells like the sweet roll she had for breakfast. The air from her window cools us, rattles the newspaper; its sections lie scattered in a chair.

  Her eyes cloud up, like marbles. I can see her mind’s about to gallop off to the East Texas fields. She sleeps for a while. I sit and wonder where to head next Friday. New Mexico’s out. West Texas has changed. Kansas, maybe, up through Oklahoma. Boomer Sooner …

  When June wakes she tries to convince me that the shanty woman has murdered Bill and buried him here at the home.

  “Where?” I say.

  “On the patio. By the Coke machine.”

  “Would you like Nurse Simpson to check for you?”

  “Bitch won’t tell me.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was sleeping with him, too.”

  “Nurse Simpson? I don’t think she’s Bill’s type.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” June says. “They’re all his type.”

  She pounds around on the sheet for her Kleenex. When I give her the box she won’t let go of my hand. The room’s grown dark. Outside, sparrows squabble with a blue jay for space in a flowering plum tree.

  “I should’ve killed him myself,” June mutters. “Day he told me he’s leaving …”

  Her hand begins to tremble in mine. “Shhh,” I say.

  “Don’t shush me, old man. Just get out of this house.”

  She tries to shove me away. In the shadows I watch her face and think none of us ever recovers from the first time we listen to someone else’s sadness. We spend
our lives refuting or repeating, trying to come to terms with the tales we’ve heard.

  June looks at me. She pulls a wad of Kleenex from her box. “She’s out there,” she says, knotting the tissues. “She’s out there waiting for me.”

  I say, “I know, June. But we don’t have to go to her just yet.” I smooth her hair and tell her again my story of the woman in the oil field.

  Two

  FOUR A.M.

  He rises at 4:43. Worried, worried. From his freezer he pulls an El Patio cheese and onion enchilada dinner with rice and refried beans. Since turning fifty he’s had this meal each morning for breakfast: a quick-starter with after-burn to get him through the day. He reads the ingredients on the box. Zinc oxide, maltodextrin, sodium acid pyrophosphate, thiamine mononitrate, apocarotenal. These horrors are bound to kill him. He frowns, then happily preheats the oven, anticipating the sloppy, searing taste.

  In the hallway he passes framed photos of his family on the walls. His grandfather, in the simpler first half of the century, only had to worry about a tree and that old swaybacked mule in his East Texas field, he thinks. Lucky man.

  On his desk, official pleas from UNICEF, Amnesty International, PEN, the Union of Concerned Scientists to lend his famous name to their needs. He does, daily.

  The oven timer rings. He cracks the seal on a bottle of cheap white wine, pours a tad in a coffee cup, lights a Camel, peppers his steaming enchiladas. It is 5:3o. In the streets below his apartment window, buses lurch through the first green light of day, hunting the briefcase crowd, joggers in bright yellow shorts chase the chilly fur of their breath. He admires these adventurers who keep the city running, and on time. He toasts them with his vinegary wine.

  This dawn, his task seems sadder than usual. I’m weary. Have I lost another step? Damn booze. But of course he’ll stick till the end. Silence must be prodded at every turn – both the moral imagination and the cozy, known universe stretch thereby – so he lifts his pen and pokes reticence right in the belly, spilling a bundle of words.

  First, a letter to General Wojciech Jaruzelski calling for an end to martial law, the release of imprisoned artists, educators, labor leaders and students, and a speedy restoration of basic human rights in Poland. He signs his name under the auspices of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, which has asked for his participation in this matter.