Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that Mike was right. We did need some time away. We did need to have our honeymoon after all.

  My first choice was New York.

  Mike suggested San Francisco.

  Sam and I finally agreed on San Antonio. Once that was settled all that was left was making the time to go there.

  Sam

  1985

  Corrie got it in her head that we needed some kind of vacation. It wasn’t that easy for me to take time off. I didn’t feel really comfortable leaving my business in someone else’s care. But Corrie had been too quiet lately. And after the job fiasco it seemed to be worse. I know she missed the children, who were now in school all day. And in seven years of marriage, Corrie and I had never really gotten away together. We hadn’t gone on a honeymoon or even so much as a weekend getaway without the kids. A little time away from our familiar life wasn’t a bad idea.

  I’d certainly earned some rest and relaxation. The price of Oklahoma crude was down to twenty-six dollars a barrel. Thirty dollars was what it had been a year earlier. But it was some kind of availability glitch. The North Sea reserves and Mexico had come into production at the same time. It was just a temporary unsteadiness in the market. Everyone I talked to was certain that by any estimation that made sense, oil ought to be selling at fifty dollars. There was war all over the Middle East. Two of the world’s biggest suppliers, Iran and Iraq, were locked into battle while their assets went up in smoke. OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, was actually curtailing production. The solution to the inevitable depletion of world oil reserves was no closer than it had been in the seventies crisis. Every economic formula in the world assures you that when supplies get pinched, the price goes up.

  I was counting on that. I still had more work than I had men to handle it. And I was making money. However, I still owed money. Every piece of equipment, every improvement on the technology, had to be purchased with borrowed money. And the interest rates were higher at every renewal of the loans.

  And my expenses were going up as well. The blame for that could be laid at nobody’s feet but mine. Taking on Dad as supervisor had been bad judgment on my part. I guess I’d been blinded by the idea of having a family business, my dad and me working together. It was like I was grasping for some weird Kodak moment.

  But it wasn’t working. Dad wasn’t working. As each day passed it was clearer to me that he wasn’t very interested in actually working. He liked being the boss. He liked showing up at the jobs and pretending to be important. But he didn’t know anything much about the machinery or the extraction processes and didn’t try very hard to find out. He’d worked in the oil fields before he went to prison. But either he’d forgotten everything he ever knew, or he never learned that much. Either way, it didn’t stop him from giving huge amounts of unrequested advice to the guys who did the work. His good-old-boy charm really wore thin among my employees and I lost a couple of really good workers who just got tired of putting up with it. Engine work was hazardous. The last thing a careful man needed was some blowhard running off at the mouth.

  Dad must have known that they left because of him, but he never acknowledged it. By then, of course, I’d learned that he only revealed those things that it was in his best interest to reveal. I’m not saying my father was a liar, just selectively secretive.

  Like the whole truth about his past. The first Thursday of every month he’d borrow my truck to drive to Tulsa to see his parole officer.

  It was months before some niggling thought got through my thick skull to ask, Why would a parole officer from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice be in Tulsa? He wouldn’t. In a couple of quick phone calls I found out that Dad saw his parole officer in Tulsa, because he was on parole from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He’d served only eight years in Texas at Huntsville penitentiary for killing my mother. He was released in 1969, when I was twelve years old.

  There had been times back then when I’d daydream that he’d come by to see me. Not stopping or speaking or interfering with my life. But just sneaking into town to watch me ride my bike or hit a baseball.

  If he did that, I’ll never know, because he never spoke of it. But he could have done it. He could have done it anytime. It is still almost inconceivable to me that all through my teenage years I thought my dad was locked up in a faraway prison. He was, in fact, living most of those years in Yellow Jacket, a town only a hundred miles from Lumkee. He remarried and had two more children. Though he never once mentioned to me that I had two half sisters.

  During that time he had two more run-ins with the law. One involved the sale of stolen property. The other was for a series of hot checks. Each netted him a few months in county jail. I might have driven past him picking trash up alongside the highway in an orange jumpsuit.

  He was finally returned to prison for an incident in a Muskogee nightclub parking lot where he tried to run over his girlfriend with a pickup truck. Only the clumsiness caused by the level of Dad’s intoxication kept the woman from being killed. It was that conviction for which he was now on parole.

  That he hadn’t told me any of this bothered me. That he was inept at the job I’d given him was annoying. The way he seemed to have taken over my life was downright scary.

  I couldn’t share any of my feelings about this with Corrie. She hated Dad and always expected the worst of him. My complaining would have been tantamount to saying that she was right. Maybe she was, but I wasn’t ready to admit that.

  Even if I did, what would that change? Floyd Braydon was my father. We’d been apart nearly all my life. For good or bad, a boy needs a father. After all this time, I wanted mine.

  And there was Nate. I easily forgot all my father’s shortcomings when I watched him with my son. Nate adored his paw-paw and Dad showered the little guy with love, attention, affection. I didn’t see how that could be a bad thing.

  Floyd Braydon was family. Lost family found at last. Corrie couldn’t appreciate that because she’d always had hers close. I couldn’t explain it to her, because I didn’t really understand it myself.

  So instead, I took her on a nice week-long getaway to south Texas. It was still cool and brisk in Lumkee. But in San Antonio it was already like summer. I anticipated a couple of quiet strolls along the Riverwalk, sipping champagne together from a balcony overlooking the moonlit water and retiring to the pleasures of a lust-filled bed at La Mansion Del Rio.

  That wasn’t exactly how it turned out.

  Our first indication was the incredible traffic snarl we encountered as we exited the highway into downtown. Orange cones and barricades were all over the place. Every detour we took led to another detour. I’m sure I must have circled the entire city at least twice before I finally made my way to the hotel entrance.

  The doorman hurried out to help me with the bags from the trunk of our shiny new Volvo. I tipped him generously and placed my hand against the small of Corrie’s back, ushering her through the doorways of the street entrance.

  I felt great. I felt important. I was a well-dressed businessman with a luxury car, walking into an expensive hotel with a very fine-looking blonde on my arm.

  The blonde was, of course, my wife, but she didn’t look much like the woman I had married. Corrie had trimmed up since the kids were born. She worked out every day. She’d had her pretty chestnut hair lightened and permed into a huge explosion of gold ringlets all over her head. She’d also started wearing a lot more makeup and it made her look really different. The change came from some woman-seminar thing she described as “having her colors done.” I didn’t quite understand it, but she told me that she’d turned out to be a summer which, apparently, was a surprise to her. Knowing that helped her decide what she should wear.

  For myself, deciding what to wear was usually based on what happened to be hanging in the closet when I was getting dressed. Though that was changing, too. Corrie assured me that I was a True Autumn, whatever that means. What it meant to me was that all my fa
vorite shirts disappeared and new stuff in yellows, greens and browns appeared in their place.

  “You didn’t even leave me one white shirt!” I complained at the time.

  Corrie shook her head. “Autumns don’t wear white, ivory is white for an autumn.”

  So she got me a couple of shirts in ivory. They looked white to me. I was wearing one that day.

  Inside the lobby of the hotel, the noise and hubbub ceased immediately. The place was cool, dark and pretty much deserted.

  “Where is everybody?” Corrie asked me, in a whisper.

  I shrugged. “It’s an exclusive hotel,” I told her. “Maybe it’s so exclusive, nobody comes here.”

  We walked over to the check-in counter. It looked empty, but as we got closer we could hear the click of plastic computer keys from behind the desk. I glanced over to see a clean-cut young guy, his eyes entranced on a brightly colored CRT as he put a little mustached cartoon character through his paces.

  “Excuse me,” I said, clearing my throat.

  The guy jumped up, so startled he knocked his chair over.

  “Sorry,” he said, embarrassed as he tried to recover his composure. “Super Mario.” He pointed at the computer screen. “I kind of get lost in it.”

  Corrie was smiling at him, sympathetic.

  “We want to check in,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “Are you sure?”

  “We have reservations.”

  “Really? Okay. You’ve come to watch the move? It’s going to be totally awesome.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. “We’re just here for the six nights,” I told him. “When I called I asked for a view of the river.”

  The kid laughed. “Hope you brought binoculars.”

  “What does that mean?” I was getting annoyed and apparently the guy could hear it in my voice. He immediately stood taller and his tone became serious.

  “There’s no water in this stretch of the river,” he said. “They’ve drained it out.”

  We stood staring mutely at him for a moment and then beside me Corrie laughed.

  “April fool! Right?” she said. “You’re early, the first is Monday.”

  The young man shook his head. “No, the river’s really empty. They drained out the loop portion of the river, the part that runs by here. Some kind of safety deal for the move.”

  “What move?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Would I be asking if I did?”

  “They’re moving the Fairmont Hotel, the whole building. It’s this old three-story brick building. They’ve like wrapped these steel cables around it and put it up on wheels and they’re moving it west from Bowie and Commerce Street around the corner and down on South Alamo to Nueva.”

  He was pointing as if giving directions.

  “That’s four city blocks, three ninety-degree turns and a bridge crossing,” he told us. “It’s the largest building ever to be moved. It is sure to make the Guinness Book of World Records.”

  “Really,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.

  “My dad says it’ll never make it. Anyway, that’s why we haven’t got so many tourists this weekend,” he continued. “Lots of places have closed up. And the river is just this big muddy ditch.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Within a few minutes we were standing together on the balcony of our very luxurious hotel room staring down at a big muddy ditch.

  I was angry and disappointed. Guests were supposed to have been warned when making reservations. Somehow someone had slipped up and here we were, slated for our first romantic escape to what looked very much like a noisy, busy construction zone.

  Corrie took the whole thing in stride. She was once more the sparkling teenage girl that I’d dated in high school.

  “Come on,” she urged, wrapping her arm around my waist. “Let’s look at the whole thing as an adventure. And we’ve got a front-row seat.”

  We hung up our elegant nightlife clothes and changed into jeans and T-shirts—the uniform of mud observers everywhere. With the enthusiasm of children we left our room and headed in the direction of all the activity, just three blocks from the hotel. Onlookers flocked the area. It was a friendly, festive atmosphere.

  The building had been jacked up and loaded on steel girders that formed a 280-ton-chassis. It was hooked up to three cranes and seven loaded dump-trucks. Having arrived late, we missed the start of the trek, but we were quickly filled in on what we’d missed by those who’d seen it all.

  “The move of the hotel was blessed by the bishop,” a woman told us.

  “A rabbi and a preacher prayed over it, too,” a nearby cowboy added.

  “They’ve started late,” another fellow told us. “They were worried about rain.”

  I finally found a place for Corrie and me to sit down near the edge of the sidewalk on Bowie Street. She was as happy and wide-eyed as a little girl at a parade. Immediately, she made friends with everybody within shouting distance of us. She held people’s babies, listened to their stories. I fully expected all these strangers to show up on next year’s Christmas card list. Two men sitting near her turned out to be employees of a Minnesota transport company who’d been sent down to observe the move.

  They, at least, had some interesting observations on the engineering of the event.

  “It didn’t crack much when they jacked it up,” one explained to me. “That’s really harder on the building than the actual travel distance.”

  “The real question here is the bridge,” his co-worker related. “Bridges are designed with a certain amount of give. Without flexibility they can’t withstand temperature changes and the natural motion of the earth. But flexibility is a negative with this much weight. They are still shoring it up. If it won’t hold, they lose the hotel, the bridge, the road and a whole section of the river. It will be tens of millions of dollars in cleanup.”

  He said the last with such enthusiasm, it was almost as if he relished the thought. I suppose it was like the lure of the auto race. You didn’t really want anyone to crash, still the danger of it was part of what drew you there.

  The comparison of a car race, however, was tenuous. As the hours passed, the rows of tires beneath the seventy-nine-year-old hotel barely rolled around and took long breaks between revolutions. We sat in the sunshine watching it move along the pavement at a snail’s pace. It had all the thrill and excitement of watching paint dry.

  The conservation society sold T-shirts and lemonade. I purchased both for myself and Corrie.

  She was playing Frisbee with some teenage kids and their dog. She fit right in, looking to be as young as they were. Even with the rough start to our marriage and two kids. Things were now going great. And Corrie was the major part of that. She made the whole family thing work as well as it did. And she managed it without acquiring so much as a line on her face. I knew guys in the oil business who dumped their wives to get an expensive piece of eye candy that made them look more successful. I was lucky to have a great mom for my kids who was a looker as well.

  My thoughts along this line were interrupted when a middle-aged Hispanic woman approached me carrying a big red-and-white cooler.

  “Is that beer you’ve got there?” I asked her.

  “No sir,” she answered. “These are homemade tamales.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “The ladies of our church are selling them,” she said. “Three dollars a dozen.”

  I was hungry, and at three dollars, even if they were terrible, it wasn’t much of a loss.

  “Give me a dozen,” I told her, reaching into my hip pocket for my wallet. She set the cooler on the grass and opened it to hand me a brown paper bag.

  “We make the best tamales in San Antonio,” she assured me as I paid her.

  “What’s your secret?” I asked her.

  She laughed and pointed to her temple. “Cabeza,” she said.

  I assumed she was referring to her own brilliance.

  Smiling, I than
ked her and opened my little brown bag. I’d eaten tamales before. They came in cans and they were wrapped in thin white paper. You removed the paper, smothered them in ketchup and they weren’t half bad.

  The contents of my brown paper sack did not in any way resemble what I’d previously eaten. For one thing, they were not nearly as wet. They were warm and wrapped in corn shucks, and though I looked through the sack, there was no ketchup to be found.

  I unfolded one of the corn shucks and took a bite. I cannot describe that first taste. It was perfection. The texture was smooth, but not pasty. The filling was not too spicy, almost sweet but not exactly. It didn’t compete with the breading, but complemented it. I savored the flavor with pleasure that had to be verbalized.

  “Mmm.”

  I chewed slowly, holding back, trying to prolong the pleasure as if it were sex instead of food.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Tamales,” I told her. “Try these. They are the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

  Corrie sat cross-legged beside me and I handed her one. She brought it up to her lips. When she bit into it her eyes closed in near ecstasy.

  “This is fantastic,” she agreed. “Where did you get these?”

  “That woman with the cooler was selling them.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Corrie said. “This is too good just to be food.”

  Our romantic weekend had not turned out exactly as we’d expected, but clearly we had both fallen in love.

  Corrie

  1986

  When things start to go downhill, sometimes they just career faster and faster until they are shattered to bits. That’s what it was like that year. The bad news began on a cold, snowy morning in January. It was hardly dawn. I was lying in bed, snuggling down beneath the warmth of the comforter. I could hear Sam moving around the bathroom, getting dressed for work. Beside me the phone rang.

  Sam opened the door.

  “Whoever it is,” he called out, “tell them I’ve already got a job ahead of them this morning, but get their name and say that I’ll get there as soon as I can.”