Carlton is made for the twenties. He loves this decade already. The hedonism and hope of it.
He looks much the same as he did two years ago—was it only that long ago?—at his mother’s funeral. Perhaps a bit more slim, more assured. He gives the impression—in his dress, his imperial manner, the edge of dissipation in his face—that he is always in the thick of it. He has become a heavy, steady drinker. At this point in his life, alcohol actually confers exhilaration and has not yet become a ritualized summoning of it and then compensation for its nonappearance.
He is, after all, a young man still. Thirty-five years old.
Here he is with the Paramour, as Daisy refers to her.
They stay in the Metropolitan in separate rooms, and Carlton introduces Fitzi to Jerry’s children as his friend and business partner. He has become worldly enough not to be flagrant.
They play Daisy Lou’s test record that night for Carlton and the Paramour.
It arrived a few months earlier and the children were waiting for it. They couldn’t contain themselves as Jerry removed the packaging with great deliberation. Their aunt on a phonograph record! Will it be her real voice? Will we be able to hear it whenever we want to? They pawed at their slow father.
It arrived broken. The children’s faces emptied, all the eagerness blasted away. Francis, the one who had been most excited, broke into frank sobs.
Jerry fixed it with glue but it sounds, the crack, like a schoolmaster’s cruel yardstick.
The children have to explain to Carlton that the voice, running faintly behind the rampant bird whistles, is his sister’s.
Two days after Carlton arrives, he and Jerry and Fitzi take the train east to Lewistown, where they catch the spur north to the Cat Creek field. A long trip over scrub prairie, but the surprising thing is the number of automobiles they see making their way along a muddy track in the distance. A dozen at least, carrying people to see the field.
It is odd, contorted country, shallow hills and gullies dotted with low jack pine, the black tree line of the Musselshell River a mile or so away. They travel over emptiness, the train rumbling into a big silence, as the sun turns red and slowly falls.
On the other side of one last shallow rise, a full-blown little city, bright with lights, sits there under the first stars.
Jerry thinks of a walk he took years ago, during the time when he had to come home from college, his mind paralyzed.
He walked out to the edge of town where it was heavy and lush, full of the roar of frogs and crickets, that thick Midwestern screen of sound. He walked along the path they took, as children, to the pond to swim.
The air that evening made him remember a time when he was very small, almost a baby, digging in the dirt with a large silver spoon in a beam of such gentle warmth that it seemed to melt him to the dirt he sat on. It had touched the back of his neck and moved through his back and through his hands and flashed off the silver spoon and made all the smells mix—the dirt, the sleepy air, the hollyhocks along the porch, his full diaper. That is how the air smelled as he walked in the heavy-lidded evening to the pond.
And then through the trees a flicker, much larger than a firefly, and a distant frail shout. Walking slowly around the last bend, he saw an entire glowing party on the far side of the pond. Carts festooned with lanterns, a half dozen small campfires, a trickle of guitar music, a high-pitched laugh, all of it crisp and dazzling, all of it in some way its own little fire bursting from the fading day. A traveling road show. Gypsies. Vagabonds of some banded and colorful kind. Fairies.
Well, there is something of that at Cat Creek. Derricks as tall as buildings are lit up bright. Fires burn in shallow barrels and the firelit figures of men move among them. Straggly rows of tar-paper shacks throw light from small windows, sounds from open doors.
There is a long building that seems some kind of headquarters. A post office with a frayed flag. The scattered shacks. All of it is lit up and alive and dirty.
Children dart here and there, nocturnal and shadowy. Two women pass by, arm in arm, bright-clothed and languorous. A tall horse with no saddle or bridle wanders among the bustle like a bored constable.
And around and among all this, the clank and groan of moving iron, the sound of oil being pulled from the earth. And beyond the moaning machinery, more derricks, spectral sentinels, blazing on the border between the rowdy little camp and the huge dark night.
Jerry gazes around at it all and feels his blood jump.
He led Carlton and Fitzi around the place, giving an excited little lecture to them on the kinds of equipment these people used; how they kept drilling-depth records, how they classified samples; what kinds of oil they were finding in the area, and what the relative merits of the oil types were. He mentioned his long and detailed talks with McCloud and Stone, and when he did, he could imagine the geologists’ surprise at how much information he had managed to absorb.
Jerry wanted Carlton to know that he, Jerry, had some expertise. That he knew the oil business. That he knew where to put the money Carlton seemed to have. He and Carlton would be partners. Carlton was Jerry’s ticket to the coming boom.
As if on a whim, Carlton buttonholes a young fellow who turns out to be the head of a drilling crew. The fellow invites them to the combination saloon and store and school, and they drink with him and his friends far into the night. Fitzi is directed to a family home that takes overnight guests.
With two drinks in him, Carlton takes charge. He portrays himself as a fellow from back East with some money burning a hole in his pocket, someone looking for a venture; and so they all pay attention to him.
Jerry, of course, knows much more about the field and about oil in general and he asks detailed questions that occasionally cause one of the company men to look at him with surprise. One of them asks if he is a geologist.
And Carlton picks it up in true Carlton form. My geologist, he says, with a small knowing nudge in Jerry’s ribs. My field man, he says. Carlton has appropriated the place. He buys drinks, makes jokes, alludes to itchy money and city friends. By the time they stagger off to a dormitory, exhausted and drunk, Carlton is calling the men by their first names, their nicknames. See ya, Ross! Remember what we talked about, Red!
Jerry feels as if he has missed something—some part of the conversation, the exchange. As if some kind of transaction occurred before his unseeing eyes. They have talked through the evening about where the next drilling will be. What kind of capital an independent guy needs to raise to drill. What kinds of syndicates are being formed and how they are looking for investors. All of this Jerry understands.
There was a quart jar of oil on the table and someone brought up the subject of viscosity, and Jerry was able to illuminate the table on that score. He understands viscosity.
What he doesn’t understand is how Carlton can still make him feel so furious; so bleary and unreal. How Carlton can, in a few strokes, seem to gulp up Jerry’s life; take it over; drown it.
On his cot, Carlton already snoring beside him, Jerry takes long deep breaths. I choose to ignore him, he thinks. I choose to let his voice fade, his presence. I give him up. I give up my own poison, let it drip out the ends of my fingers, and think instead about that jar of oil. About the way it slides back and forth, the essence of richness. The emollient of the ages. The balm of Gilead. He hears the thick dark river before he sinks into it, and it is his river and it carries him wherever he wants to go.
12
SHE CAME awake the way that country did after the bad years.
Jerry arrived from his office one day and found Vivian sitting on the front step, shelling peas with a neighbor. She looked up and, for the first time in months, seemed rested and alive. There was a slight crackle to her—a look on her face that was hard to read. Part humorous, part relieved, part angry. She was fully present.
Sometime during the summer, her cough had finally disappeared and the color had come back to her face. Tip, the baby, was amiable and a sleeper, and
perhaps that was part of the reason.
Also, she had begun to go to mass at dawn several mornings a week, and maybe that had something to do with her new energy. It was a mystery to Jerry, the sight of his wife’s back in the early morning, her solitary walk to the little church. He sipped coffee and watched her out the window in the limpid morning light. He tried to imagine what she prayed for, what she got.
What did he really know about her? What did she tell the priest in that dark box? What did she feel on her tongue when she took the host? He would never really know—only that something in it seemed to lighten her, to relieve her of herself.
On the day he found her shelling peas and giving him that crackly here-I-am look, they had a long argument about Carlton.
“Carlton is a hustler and a con man,” Vivian said, two points of red appearing on her cheeks. “And his scheme to get land out from under the Indians is despicable. After those hard years they went through, the same way anyone went through them? To make them loans they won’t repay?”
“It’s money,” Jerry said. “They don’t have to take the money.”
“It’s a trick,” Vivian snapped. “It is playing on their hopes in order to take everything they have left. Carlton and his high-roller friends!” She spit the words out. “How can you be part of anything like that?”
It went on for some time. And though Jerry felt the vehemence in his own voice, his impatience with her swift and easy sentiments, he felt relief running beneath their sharp voices. Relief. They were exchanging something.
He agreed to detach himself from Carlton’s loan scheme. Carlton could handle his own loans if he felt compelled to make them. Carlton would not be part of their life.
That evening, she showed him a letter from her brother George in Seattle. The letter said that his hours had been cut back at the print shop and they would have to move to a smaller place. A flat. That he was having some trouble with his eyes and prospects weren’t as bright in Seattle as they had seemed.
She showed Jerry the letter with no comment and put it on the sideboard, where she cast worried looks at it from time to time.
She was awake. The children picked up on her mood and argued roundly with each other, fervently, and were sent to bed. All day, the house had been louder, janglier, and Jerry was so lightened by it all that he had to take a long walk before sleep.
He walked the paths of little Cut Bank, dark between the scattered houses. There was a fitful warm wind. He thought about the night he and Vivian and George ate their picnic on the prairie, the stakes of their homesteads fresh in the ground. How the brother and sister, children of a widowed mother clear back in Cleveland, had seemed orphaned in some way. They had four brothers and sisters back East, but Vivian and George were the only wanderers, the only ones who left. A sister once referred to them as Hansel and Gretel, and the others picked it up.
Jerry knew a few details like that, but little more. His wife and her brother seemed cut off, set adrift, in some manner even more irrevocable than his own break from his childhood home.
Maybe that was the source of the great quiet that could sometimes overtake Vivian—that she felt herself to have no other home than Cut Bank. No place to go back to, should she want to. Maybe the fact that she had adventured, had taken a large chance, was also the source of her exuberance when it appeared. Her flashes of generosity and wit and anger. Her ability to laugh until the tears appeared in her eyes.
After supper, her fingers impatiently repinning a strand of hair, she ventures one more comment. “Carlton,” she says, jabbing the hairpin, “is a horse’s…”
Maudie wanders into the kitchen, wanting milk.
“Is a horse’s,” Vivian says, “head.”
And she and Jerry both burst into laughs because of the clumsy feint, and then because the image makes them remember the night Vivian refused to sit on the head of a horse that was fallen and tangled in its own harness.
They were courting. The horse ran away with the buggy and turned it over and got itself all tangled in the tack. Not injured badly, just fallen and knotted up.
Jerry and Vivian ran up to it. Some bit of bad wisdom came upon Jerry, the town fellow, and he drew himself up and pointed at the animal. “Sit on its head while I get this harness off,” he ordered her. “That is what you do. Sit on its head so it can’t see.”
“I will not sit on that animal’s head,” Vivian replied, quite calmly. “That is not what a person does in a situation of this sort.”
And she walked off a ways to watch Jerry dart at the fallen horse, pull a strap, pull another, dart away, until finally the sweaty animal shook itself to its feet and loped off to town, three miles away.
“It is not what a person does…” Jerry mimicked her gently, in a high voice. And she pushed at him, then took his arm, and the two of them walked back to town in the night, very slowly, happily dragging the sweaty harness.
The day after their argument about Carlton, a Canadian offered Jerry a decent price for their homesteads. Jerry invested the money in property north of Shelby, near the area where the geologists were now scouting around, and resold it a few weeks later for $3,000.
That evening before dinner, he handed the entire amount to Vivian and told her it was hers. They could move to Seattle right away. They could stay and see what this country was going to do. The decision, he said, was hers.
She gave him a long, unreadable look and put the money in a sock, far back in a drawer. She did not talk about it. For three days, she said nothing.
On the afternoon of the third day, she sent Francis and Maudie out to play and bundled the baby into the big buggy. She negotiated the rutted paths to Jerry’s office, parked the buggy, retrieved the baby, and went inside. She wore her best hat.
Jerry greeted her quizzically, shoved his papers aside, and invited her to sit. She removed two packets of money from her pocketbook. One had a letter around it, which she unfolded and slid across the desk. The letter was to her brother George. It said she was sending him a money order for $500, to use however he wanted. It was a no-interest loan, repayable at his convenience. She and Jerry were having a run of luck, the letter said, and they could afford the loan and were happy to do it. The tone of the letter was light and easy.
She gave the rest of the money to Jerry and suggested he get it into the bank. She suggested that they might want to invest some of it in land, since the land game—she used those very words—seemed to be picking up.
He knew, the moment she said it, exactly what he would buy. The geologist Campbell was drilling holes all over the place, north of Shelby. Campbell was after something. He had a hunch.
Jerry would buy two farms he knew about. He would resell them, reserving the mineral interests, which he’d lease to Campbell or one of the others who were sinking money and drill bits into that land. He’d reserve twelve or fifteen percent for himself. Who knew when someone was going to hit? Who knew which day a millionaire would be born?
He took the money from Vivian and pretended to adjust the little cap on the baby’s head, because he felt overwhelmed and without words. He looked at his wife. There was a sheen of moisture on her broad forehead. She brushed her fingers along her hairline, smoothed her grave eyebrows, tipped her head at him as if she’d just asked a long question.
13
THEY DRIVE north and east from Cut Bank, the roads following section lines—four miles, then a right angle, four miles, another ninety-degree turn—and so they zigzag their way across the countryside. The day is rain-washed and smells young. The sky is the color of flax.
The Ford keeps threatening to slide off the drying road, has done it more than once already, so Jerry and Skiff Norgaard have mud-caked shoes, mud on their pants, flecks of mud on the sleeves of their stiff white shirts. The women, Vivian and Alice, wear their motoring costumes—large, light-colored coats, men’s hats with veils drawn down against the assault of flying dirt. The men wear goggles.
Alice and Skiff are a rather s
olemn couple most times—young and blond, with straight Norwegian mouths and hair, a slow way of talking—but today they seem given, both of them, to shouts, even laughter.
A hawk wheels above them. Two hawks. They wheel above the bullet pops of the auto as it creeps across thirty-five empty miles on that wayward, hard-cornered road, the laughter and shouts of its riders floating up through the blue.
The countryside from Cut Bank moves in long flat undulations for ten miles, say, as the hawks fly, and then you’re at the shoreline of an ancient sea, and the prairie drops down to the floor. Where the oil is—Campbell’s discovery well and the others now, the derricks popping up all over the countryside. At one of those derricks, a young couple will be married today, and that’s where the Ford is aimed.
The ocean. A sea. Its floor. Covered with glacial debris and then soil and scrub grass, true; but a real ocean floor it now seems to Jerry, and to Vivian too, with the heartbreaking shell marks of clams pressed into the sandstone. Seashells scattered through the sediments of the Sweetgrass Arch. And in the traps, in the deformations, in the folds and the faults—yes it is possible, yes it is true!—the now and future richness of big-time oil.
They have launched themselves off the rim, the shoreline. Lots of smoke from the brake, a sashaying motion of the car, small screams. The gumbo is tacky on its surface, there is a little grab; but a few inches down it’s still grease. Their movement is headlong, too fast for comfort, because the road takes a hard left at the bottom, a hard corner north. Miss the corner and you end up, in twenty or thirty yards, at a fence and some outbuildings belonging to a bachelor farmer named Wally Swenson.
More than a few drivers have plowed through the fence. Swenson has a big wooden sign tacked to it with a yellow arrow pointing left, as if anyone might wonder.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 13
