The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  Like Claire before she left, they’re not sure what to think of my place. Of necessity (I didn’t, and don’t, have much money) the design suggests frustration, dead ends, lack of fulfillment. Made with materials found at various county dumps – bed frames, soup cans, rusted pipes, drilling bits, aluminum foil, TV antennae, tractor tires, a ship’s compass, engine blocks, fans, filters from washers and dryers, busted chunks of billboard – the buildings are both functional and full of surprise. The telescope sits in a cinder-block room, round, two-and-a-half meters high. Stones with filed edges. On top, a white pyramid (easier to construct, using loblolly pine, than the more traditional dome).

  The optic tube is irrigation pipe taken from a fallow field. Scraped clean. Mounted on a tripod. Carefully, I’ve calibrated the distance between primary and reflecting mirrors, ground glass like cornmeal on a stone, and balanced the whole assembly with milk cartons full of cement.

  A base, in these fractious days, from which to view the world.

  Sometimes now on hot afternoons a group of five or six young men, angry at not finding work, sit in front of their house trailers, drinking beer. At a certain point in their shared misery they break out automatic pistols (easy to purchase in Texas) and use my pyramid for target practice. I’ve been patient, hunkering down inside, protecting the telescope. It maddens them that I won’t show myself. They know I’m here. “Come out, you son of a bitch!” they shout.

  Bullets rip through the pyramid’s peak.

  Lately I’ve been fighting back, disconnecting their car batteries while the men are asleep, short-circuiting the wires so the mobile home park goes dark. Moonlight on the Airstreams, no wind, whole families bereft of air conditioning trundle out onto the ground – undershirts, nighties, coolers of beer. They take up awkward positions in rickety lawn chairs and try to sleep. I’m sympathetic; they were misinformed. “Lucrative Sun Belt, shit,” they say. But they’ll have to leave my pyramid alone.

  ______

  Total lunar eclipse. Temperature in the forties. Slowly, a red shadow moves across the craters, spreading like a cherry stain.

  In the fields, grass stirs. Animals nuzzle each other for warmth.

  When the shadow recedes, and the moon resumes its stare, cows, milk-thick, greet the day royally before learning it is false.

  ______

  What’s your view like, C? Here, at this time of year, the sky is most receptive when you wake to it in the middle of the night. It’s as if a fog has cleared. The constellations have abandoned the positions they held when you first went to bed, the night is chillier, quieter. Giddy now with a plucky, pleasant wind.

  Oh, the deep satisfactions of the amateur astronomer: groggy as you pull on your socks, then two or three shirts (for it is cold, very cold, and that’s just the way you want it). Wrapping a wool blanket around your shoulders, fixing instant coffee, consulting the atlas. The book smells of last night’s dust. It lies heavily in your lap, weighted with mystery: the grainy, cobbled path of the Milky Way, the amoeba-shaped Magellanic Clouds, the star-names in swirling script.

  Then you push open the pyramid doors.

  A puff of wind. Skin tightens. Genitals recede into the corduroy folds of your pants, coffee turns flat and cold all at once.

  But the sky is swimmingly active; it draws you out as powerfully as a sea’s undertow.

  With shivering hands you open the atlas on the floor, hold its pages with the thermos, and flick on the flashlight. M 20, the Trifid Nebula, is the object of your search tonight. Once you’ve located it in the book, you must turn off the light and wait for your vision to adjust to the dark. The freezing touch of the telescope’s eyepiece startles you. Jittery stars, settling down now …

  Nothing.

  The pages of the atlas are white, the sky is black. The contrast confuses your ability to calculate angles of position. After several more attempts with the ‘scope, you find and center the prize: a blue, crablike cusp of cloud with a pink tinge at the top. Stars golden all around it. By now, the seams of your pants have frozen. They catch the hairs on your thighs. Goosebumps cover your skin. You have good character. You understand discipline. You are mathematically precise and full of bad coffee.

  Dedicated.

  An amateur.

  ______

  Last night I reread your letters: “No more selfish pursuits.” “The individual doesn’t matter.” “The group is all that counts.”

  Claire, consider: Do my buildings make sense by themselves? Can the atlas put its own information to use? No. Without me – my poor, individuated consciousness – there is no correlation between one thing and another. No rain leaking through the roof. No spider in the corner. No one to lift the flashlight.

  ______

  “I’ve discovered that, for most men, politics is a matter of ideology,” Claire writes. “For women it’s the body. We’re trained since we’re young to use our physical selves. Naturally it’s our asses (and not just our thoughts) we lay on the line.”

  ______

  12/8/87. Good news, Claire, I have found a job. Four nights a week now, for five dollars and twenty cents an hour, I change the light bulbs at the Chemtex Refinery in Baytown. Six thousand, four-hundred ninety-nine light bulbs on fourteen smokestacks, twelve storage tanks, two distillation towers, two cokers, one hydrocracker, eight security gates. At ten o’clock, carrying boxes of fresh supplies, I pace the parking lots searching for burnt-out bulbs. Flames curl from metal kilns; puddles of gasoline and rust reflect the fire and bright filaments. Sulfur, steam, hydrocarbons, nickel, and vanadium mix with gas, skunks, dill-weed, sunflowers, and rubber to produce an odor at once sour and sweet. Tonight, climbing the steel hull of the cat cracker, I can see the refinery flames, blue then white then gold, mirrored in the bay waters lapping in from the Gulf. Leaning forward on the ladder, I unscrew a bulb and replace it with another. Flat, metallic air burns the back of my mouth. Hundreds of petrochemical plants surround the bay, their flares like signal fires from distant camps. Rusted ships, broken barges, abandoned loading cranes stand in the shallow water.

  From here my pyramid is indistinct, a white smudge lightly shaded by tangles of mesquite. To the south, and to the west, Houston, Galveston, and their suburbs.

  ______

  Christmas eve, light snow: Clinging to the cat cracker, balancing my box of bulbs, I reread with amazement Claire’s latest letter: “Our group is changing its tactics, becoming more aggressive – which matches my personal growth,” she writes. “Today I learned about persuasion. Azziz showed me what to do. First, you pack about a kilo of Cosmopolitan B explosive into a round metal container and build a wooden box around it. Leave a square hole at the top so you can insert the detonator and the fuse. If you want to make it waterproof, you can wrap it in a couple of plastic garbage bags. Secure it with chicken wire – an irregular shape, like it’s an old rock lying in the road. Spread some wet cement on it, sprinkle a few pebbles here and there, a little grass and dirt. And that’s it. You can rig it to a regular twelve-volt car battery. We’ll use it in a march we’ve planned for next week. Set it off in the street, to disrupt traffic.”

  The bulb by which I’m reading goes out with a pop. I replace it with a sixty-watt. Headlights snake around the rim of the Gulf, then bunch together at sharp bends and bridges.

  Exxon, Arco, Mobil, Shell, Phillips – each plant is a city, self-contained: pulsing, blinking, shimmering in the black bay, lighting the smooth steel bellies of the 747s overhead.

  Claire continues, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my new buddies, Will. They’re not much different from the folks I met in the Peace Corps – dedicated to genuine social change. I’ve learned, though, that in this part of the world, violence is often the only way to get ‘official’ attention. So we’ve radicalized our methods. For all its good will, the Peace Corps will never make a dent in oppression. Nothing short of cataclysm is ever going to help the poor over here. I see that now.

  “My colleagues
have known these things all along. They aren’t crazies, as most Americans think. They’re intellectuals of the highest order, very serious and honest, well-read.

  “At thirty-eight, I’m the oldest member of the group. Sometimes the women are as bad as the men – they pamper me, as though I’m arthritic or senile or something. They’re all in their twenties. A few teenagers – some with kids. I ask them, ‘Where are the old ones?’ ‘Ours is no occupation for drooling old fools who’re settled in their ways,’ they say. I argue but they don’t listen. I understand that my value to them is largely symbolic: a citizen of the world’s most privileged nation who’s ‘seen the light’ and thrown her lot in with the poor. They don’t expect me to be useful in any practical way. But I intend to be. I can use my symbolic nature to trigger change. All I need is a plan, an explosive public event. Last night I figured one out …”

  ______

  C? Are you kidding me?

  My hand trembles. Her letter rattles. I read the line again.

  Martyr.

  The word, like the thought it embodies, intimidates, is somehow unmodern. She writes, “I want to draw the world’s attention – I mean the damned television audience – to the needs of displaced women and children. If I have to die to do that, well okay.”

  A couple of cans of kerosene, she says. Matches or a lighter, she says, “on a day when there’s no other story to distract the three major networks.”

  C. C. C.

  A complete lack of irony, if not guile. No regard for personal limitations, or the vast indifference of nations. Masochistic. Why am I attracted (have always been attracted) to this side of you? In anyone else it would seem dogmatic, belligerant, foolish.

  In myths – remember the stories I read you? – heroes and martyrs walk among the stars. The night sky is filled with those who’ve triumphed or failed, spectacularly: men, women, and animals who used the planet before us – who bequeathed to us the misery of making choices.

  ______

  The first time we made love, Claire asked me to hold her hands above her head, as if they were bound, in bed. Afterwards she was angry at me for complying. I was only trying to please you, I said. Tell me what you want.

  ______

  Sometimes I invite Dalene out to the observatory – she’s the Chemtex secretary I mentioned in my last letter. Early twenties, very cute, blond hair hiding her face.

  I show her Mars and the moon. When we make love, her expressions of pleasure are loud and prolonged.

  I’ve told her all about you. “If you don’t mind me saying so, this Claire lady sounds like a loon,” she says. She takes my hand. “Stick with me, William. You’re much better off.”

  Of course she can’t figure me out the way you always did. “You don’t ever go into town?” she asks.

  “Just to the post office and the bank.”

  “Too dangerous? Too big?”

  “I had to look away.”

  I open the pyramid doors: Houston, twenty-six miles to the south. Streets circling one another, no tangents. It looks like the failure of knowledge.

  ______

  Gunshots. A wildcatter (I surmise this from his gleaming steel hard hat), drunk and unemployed, sits in a lawn chair in front of his mobile home, a1mmg a pistol at my pyramid. Wood-chips fly all around me. I crouch behind the ‘scope.

  ______

  1/8/88. Claire: yesterday, a man named Macon and a man named Leeds asked me about you. I thought you should know. Twice a month I catch a ride into Houston with one of the Chemtex drivers, to deposit my paycheck at Texas Commerce Bank downtown. Macon and Leeds – local FBI – met me in the lobby. I agreed to talk to them when my business was done.

  I’d expected them. I knew they’d been reading our letters.

  They drove me in a black car to a nearby Ramada Inn. A room on the second floor. From the window I could see a piano propped on a yellow pole in front of a music store.

  Bears and Vikings on TV. Macon handed me a beer. “Do you know Ms. Dillon’s whereabouts?” he began.

  “No.” I sat on the bed.

  “You’ve written to her.”

  “I write back using her postmark, but by then she’s usually moved on,” I said. “I have no idea whether she gets my notes.”

  “She left the Peace Corps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know when, exactly?”

  “No.”

  He glanced at a bio sheet on me. “Unemployed for eight months … now you work at Chemtex for what … five bucks an hour?”

  “Five-twenty. I’ve offered her a small amount for travel expenses, if that’s –”

  Macon waved his hand. “You’re not under investigation here, Mr. Keller. We just want to keep track of her. She wrote you first last July, care of your parents. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your parents forwarded the letter out to your …”

  “It’s an observatory,” I said.

  “You live there now?”

  “Right.”

  Leeds poured himself a Heineken. He and Macon, stocky men, both wore dark brown suits, thick, though the weather was warm.

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Ms. Dillon?” Leeds asked me.

  “Friends. We’re friends.”

  “Are you in love with her? Forgive me for being so personal …”

  “I was.”

  “Is she in love with you?”

  “I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

  Macon walked to the window and watched the freeway traffic. “It’s indiscreet of her to write you. Why would she write you?”

  “We spent a lot of time together.”

  “Was she content-I mean, generally?”

  “She chain-smoked – kind of nervous,” I said.

  “Employed?”

  “Cashiering, mostly. At bookstores, restaurants.”

  “Any violent tendencies that you were aware of at the time?”

  “No.”

  “What did she say about her plans when she left?” Leeds asked.

  “She didn’t have any.”

  He checked a page in a folder. “It says here that your father – a realtor in town? – owns the land you live on, is that correct, Mr. Keller?”

  “It’s been in my family for years,” I said.

  “What do you do out there, with the telescope and all?”

  “I look.”

  “At what?”

  “Things that move. Things that don’t.”

  “William – may I call you William?” Macon said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “William, of course you realize what this is all about.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’m wondering if you know that eight different law enforcement agencies worldwide, including the FBI, suspect Ms. Dillon’s foreign comrades of first-degree murder, in connection with an October ninth bombing in Tunis?”

  Murder? I shivered. C. C. C.

  “Do you think Ms. Dillon could ever be involved in –”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Claire?

  “All right, William,” Macon said. He buttoned his coat. “That’s all. We’ll be in touch.”

  They’ll be watching me, C. Reading my letters to you – do you receive my letters? Five so far – six, including this one. Before I close, let me add, at the risk of attracting prying eyes, that as of eight o’clock this evening, a six-hundred-foot ground cable extends from my fuse box to the edge of the Big Thicket. The limbs of the pines have been wired in honor of your recent resolve. The moment you strike the match (wherever you are – Greece, Turkey, the Middle East – whatever you may have done) I’ll throw a switch and a burst of red light will bounce off the water in the bay. In its brilliance the display will eclipse the mercury vapor lights of Houston (one hundred and sixty-five thousand in the downtown area alone), Galveston, Baytown – as far away as Huntsville. The famous prison rodeo held there each year will be suspended until the furious Brahma bulls re
gain their sight. Planes will be dazzled in the sky.

  Admittedly, the meaning of my gesture (love, grief) will be missed. Despite its public nature, mine is a private act.

  So, in a way, is yours.

  ______

  What are the thoughts of a person about to be set on fire?

  When people still believed in Hell, the sight of flames must have startled them even more than it frightens us now.

  Do people still believe in Hell? Do you?

  Where will the event take place? At what time of day? Will you light your own match or will Azziz do it for you?

  Broad outpourings of sympathy the hoped-for result, once the horror has passed.

  ______

  One night I woke to find Claire weeping into her pillow. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She said she’d felt impure since her pregnancy. “I want to be loved.”

  I combed her hair with my hands. “You are, you are,” I said.

  She sat up and wiped her face. “Did you know that in certain parts of the world, parents believe that babies who don’t survive their infancy automatically become angels?” she asked me. A waitress named Linda, an active Pentecostal who worked with C at the restaurant, had been lending us spiritual guidebooks ever since the miscarriage. “Angel Princes of the Altitudes, Angels of the Hours of Days and Nights. They’re universally worshipped.”

  “Let it go, Claire. Please, sweetie, we’ve been through this. It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “Maybe it’s all for the best. I know it’s hard to see that now, but money’s tight-”

  She rose and tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook. On it she scribbled angel-names. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Love spell. It’s in one of Linda’s books.” She laughed – “it’s just a game” – then taped the page to the cinder-block wall above my pillow. The paper clung loosely to the stone, threatening to fall. “You won’t be able to sleep now without thinking of me.”

  “I’m thinking of you, honey. You’re in my bed.”

  “But I don’t know where your mind is.”