by Bryan Mealer
* * *
On Saturdays, after hauling gravel all week for the Jones boys, Bob took Bobby and Opal to visit his sisters. Fannie had long divorced Abe Jones and now lived on her own. Her sons had bought her a nice house and provided her with plenty of cash, which she liked to hide in strange places around her home. Once, Bob looked up and saw a bouquet of hundred-dollar bills rolled up in the dining-room chandelier.
Like their father, Abe, the Jones boys courted danger. One night after a dance in Stanton, Earl got into a fight with a man who pulled a knife. It was Fannie who ran between them and took the blade in her arm. Were it not for a set of drapes in her backseat, which Earl fashioned into a tourniquet, his mother would have died in the parking lot.
Bob’s sister Allie had remarried, this time to a roughneck named Tom Henson. Unlike her previous husband, Lee Pruitt, Tom was a kind and compassionate man who loved children. Whenever Bobby and his cousins came to visit, Tom would dress up in silly costumes and parade around the house, much to their delight. But Allie still grieved over her son, Orville, who’d been killed in the war. She still kept the door to his bedroom closed, but the kids knew what was inside: Orville’s trunk draped with a flag, along with pictures of him on the wall framed with curtains, like in a church. And they knew about the headache his death had given his mother, one that still greeted her each morning.
Bob’s other sister, Velva, was still married to Tom Henson’s brother, Willie Bob, a cowboy who broke horses on the Jones boys’ ranch. For decades he’d blown the family’s money on whiskey and honky-tonks. But because he was never vicious, his children loved him. For years Velva had accompanied her husband to the bars and dances, but stopped in the mid-forties after she found the Lord. One night my grandmother Opal had taken her and the kids to a revival in Odessa, featuring Opal’s old friend Frank Mack, “once a paralytic and now a flamin’ evangelist.” At the end of Mack’s sermon, Velva and the kids walked to the altar and repeated the sinner’s prayer. That night she told Willie Bob, “I don’t want no more of this life. You do what you want to, but I’m going to church.”
Velva’s relationship with the Lord helped steel her for tragedy. A couple of years after being saved, their boy Jack drowned in a caliche pit. He’d just finished his paper route and ridden his bicycle to the swimming hole, where his friends said he jumped in but never surfaced. After Jack’s body was recovered, one of the boys rode the bike back to the house, clothes and a pair of tennis shoes still tied neatly around the handlebars, just like Jack had left them. That very morning he’d told his mother, “This is gonna be a great summer if Daddy don’t drink.”
At Jack’s funeral, Opal sang “Does Jesus Care?”
Does Jesus care when my way is dark
With a nameless dread and fear?
As the daylight fades into deep night shades,
Does He care enough to be near?
* * *
After two years of living in Odessa, Bob grew fed up, and in 1966 decided it was time to come home. As if looking for an excuse, he convinced himself the Jones boys were cheating him. He’d pore over his ledger each night and conclude that the number of paid loads versus money in his pocket did not jibe. He grumbled about it daily, fumed and bristled when he sat down for his supper. Then one afternoon at work he finally exploded, dumped both beds right there at the job site, then announced to his driver, “We’re going to the house!” There, he instructed Opal and Bobby to start packing their things. He hauled their belongings back to Big Spring in the dump truck.
But the town had changed by the time they returned, or at least the family had. Marriage, careers, and the steady clip of time had dislodged roots and scattered them like tumbleweed. Preston and Norma Lou were living in Odessa, and Fred, Doris, and Iris were all gone. Others had settled in far-flung oil towns and returned only for holidays with their children, who had to be reminded of the names of family.
The death of Clem had served as just another blow to the fracturing alignment. They still gathered at Cora’s for Sunday lunch, but the house was quieter now. The table seemed more in proportion with the room, and before sitting down to eat, the Oh Heavenly Fathers were raised by whomever. After the dishes were cleared, they still gathered in the living room to sing, but their songs now carried a hollowness in the middle that only reminded them of the precious octaves no longer in the choir. Everything felt different, like a strained reenactment of better days.
2
The fall of Raymond Tollett … a town mourns its king …
For Raymond Tollett and Cosden Petroleum, the 1960s opened with a surge of expansion. In 1960, Cosden began licensing its plastics technology overseas—first to Sinclair and Koppers, then to Naphtachimie in France. Within a few years engineers were flying from Big Spring to Japan, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy, China, and Czechoslovakia to open new refineries. And since only 3 percent of a barrel of oil could be used for petrochemicals, the company operated over a thousand filling stations nationwide to market its gasoline.
Tollett, now twenty years at the helm, had taken the $6 million company and increased its earnings to $83 million. Each year brought new innovations, dreamed up by his scrappy team of engineers tinkering in the middle of nowhere, their zeal for the company and its president resembling that of a sports team. What people at Cosden loved most was their underdog status, which drove bigger companies crazy. And thus, it was only a matter of time before the big boys came for a piece.
Out in New York, J. Peter Grace was fascinated by Cosden. He was president of W. R. Grace and Company, which his grandfather—former New York City mayor William Russell Grace, who accepted the Statue of Liberty from France—had founded in the 1850s as a shipping firm. When J. Peter took over in 1945, he began branching into chemicals, and by the mid-fifties had snatched up companies across the country. He started pursuing Cosden in 1956, smitten by its vast supply of crude, pipeline, and chemical capacity. Grace proposed a merger, but Tollett and his directors declined. Another attempt failed in 1959. Finally, in January of the following year, Grace staged a takeover by purchasing 51.9 percent of the company’s common stock, making Cosden a subsidiary.
At first, it proved a convenient arrangement. Tollett remained president and the company kept its name. Better, with oil prices at a momentary low, the security that Grace provided guaranteed expansion. A new product line was introduced, and Grace even built a fertilizer plant across the street that further bolstered Cosden’s portfolio.
But the two men clashed. According to executives, Grace wanted to plunder the employee pension plan, which Tollett had put into a trust that couldn’t be touched. The sluggish market eventually put a damper on what Grace originally thought he could make off the refinery. Fed up and occupied by more lucrative ventures, Grace sold its controlling shares in April 1963—and with it, Tollett’s claim on his prized Jewel of the West.
The buyer was American Petrofina, the U.S. operator of the mammoth Belgian oil company, which laid down $90 million for the entire outfit. All existing shares, including Tollett’s, were liquidated. The old stockholders, who’d met each year at the Cosden Country Club over T-bones and tumblers of whiskey, gathered one last time on the top floor of the Petroleum Building to await the final sale. Nearly two thousand miles away in Jersey City, a team of lawyers gathered signatures and it was done. “We have just been informed that the closing has been completed,” the chairman in Big Spring announced, after hanging up the telephone. “This meeting is adjourned.”
And with that, the Herald reported, “last rites had been pronounced over the old patriarch.”
A new enterprise, the Cosden Oil and Chemical Company, rose in its place. Employees were guaranteed their jobs for at least a year, after which there were no promises. At first, Tollett refused to sign the letter of intent that fixed the sale, then reluctantly agreed. The new owners asked him to stay on as president and director, but with largely diminished powers—as a glorified manager who answered to New York and Brussels.<
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Instead of giving his decision, he hopped on a plane to Kenya, far off the radar, where he could think in peace. He took a long safari, spent days walking the beach in Mombasa, and contemplated what he’d lost and what there was left to gain.
At fifty-six years old, he was already a rich man. Personal oil dealings, plus his salary, had left him a millionaire, and the sale of his Cosden shares had netted him even greater wealth.
But years of stress had worsened his drinking. His benders now lasted weeks instead of days, and within the past year, he’d hospitalized himself on several occasions to get sober. His executives were exasperated, worried that his habit was dulling his famously tactical mind. He forgot things easily and moved a bit slower. Worse, he was showing up drunk at the refinery on Sundays and palling around with the men. Come Monday, the union boss was pulling out his hair from all the promises Tollett had made to everyone. The drinking had become a corporate liability.
Tollett knew his days as a magic man were limited, if not already gone, just as they’d run out on Joshua Cosden himself. If there was any legacy left to build on, he concluded, it was repaying the town for all they’d given to him.
He returned to Big Spring and resumed his job, but without a contract. “I’ll serve from term to term at the pleasure of the directors of American Petrofina Incorporated,” he wrote in his monthly column. As for his reasons for staying in Big Spring, he said, “It just so happens that I like the people.”
He bolstered his Siblings Foundation, named in honor of his children, which gave grants to “people of all creeds and colors” to start small businesses and pay college tuition. And he aggressively raised money for other Big Spring charities, such as the United Fund, which funneled money to over a dozen local groups. For this particular campaign, Tollett expected each of his clients, from truck contractors to caterers, to donate their share.
This was something Homer had discovered personally several years earlier while working as dispatcher at Steere Tank Lines, whose trucks hauled gasoline out of Cosden. One afternoon he picked up the telephone to find Tollett on the other end.
“If I don’t have a check for the United Fund on my desk by five o’clock this afternoon, no Steere trucks are entering my refinery,” he said, then hung up the phone. Homer scrambled to get the check and arrived with minutes to spare.
Waiting for him at the gate was Tollett, who’d invited the Herald.
“This,” he told the reporter, slapping Homer on the back, “is what I mean about a company doing its part.”
With Tollett, everybody won.
* * *
In 1964, Tollett was pushing hard for a bond election to expand the school district, which he’d championed for over twenty years. Shortly before the vote, he appeared on the local television station KWAB (which he had helped bring to town) to drum up support for the cause. But by the time the cameras rolled, Tollett was so drunk he could barely get through the segment.
As his drinking became more public, so did other sins. He was cavalier with his mistresses, bringing them into the Petroleum Building, where he pampered them in his top-floor suite. He brought them to the airport, where he ordered his pilot to fly them around town so they could carouse. Many people witnessed this behavior: employees, members of his church, and friends of his wife, and it both incited their disapproval and saddened them. Around this time Tollett also began leaving hundred-dollar tips under his plate in restaurants.
Meanwhile, up on Hillside Drive, Iris drank in bitter isolation, save for a few lovers herself. The infidelity cut both ways but always seemed to cut her the deepest. “Everyone in town talks about me,” she told a friend, and she wasn’t wrong.
People concluded the only reason Iris and Raymond stayed married was to destroy one another. Explosive fights at the home sometimes brought the police. But the officers remembered the policeman’s ball that Mr. T. threw down at the club for them and their wives, with all the food and dancing they could stand. They issued a gentle warning and the boss apologized for making them come out so late. “Just a little misunderstanding,” he told them. “Just a little too much to drink.” The door would close and a tired voice on the other side would tell little Ann to go back to bed.
A terrible fight erupted one evening over dinner. Iris’s niece Judi was seated at the table, and so were the kids. At one point Iris said she was leaving, jumped up, and stormed out the door, then Raymond did the same. But he reached his car first, and when Iris made the mistake of crossing behind him on the way to hers, he backed up.
The car knocked her down and rolled over her leg, snapping her femur in half. Her niece heard the commotion and ran outside with the kids. They found Iris pinned beneath the tire, screaming, while Raymond stumbled into the house to call an ambulance.
Doctors installed a steel rod in Iris’s leg, but not before spending an hour picking the gravel out of her skin. The paper reported the incident as “a mishap at the family home” and gave the gossip mill a delectable feast. Raymond told the police, “I must’ve hit the accelerator instead of the brake.”
* * *
In order to shield the children from their drinking, the Tolletts sent them to boarding school. Ray Jr. began attending New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell in 1963, with Jason Blake following two years later. After junior high, Ann went away to a Baptist academy in San Marcos, Texas. Each month, their father would fly out for a visit, or else send the Heron to fetch them.
Summers weren’t left to chance. Ann left for Western Life Camp in northern New Mexico, while the boys attended Camp Silver Spruce, in the mountains outside Durango. Once they got older, Tollett insisted the boys travel abroad, but always on their own. Each of their trips was carefully detailed in the morning Herald.
* * *
Kept out of the society pages, but known throughout town, were the trips Tollett was taking to dry out—spates of voluntary detox that were becoming more and more frequent. For years, Raymond had relied on his friend Dr. Bennett to help recover. But after Bennett’s sudden death in 1958, Tollett’s benders became uglier, and to get sober, he turned himself over to Bennett’s old partner, Dr. Clyde Thomas, the refinery’s chief physician and surgeon.
Dr. Thomas practiced out of Hall-Bennett Memorial Hospital, where my aunt Zelda worked as a secretary. As soon as Tollett arrived, Dr. Thomas sent for two bottles of scotch and began the slow withdrawal, then remained at the hospital around the clock. To ease the shakes and prevent seizures, he administered heavy doses of benzodiazepine, usually Librium or Valium. For Tollett, the treatments could be anguishing, marked by fevers and violent hallucinations. But after about a week, he always resurfaced on the other end, donned one of his custom suits, then drove back to the refinery and made it rain.
“Such a brilliant mind,” Dr. Thomas once said. “And yet we’ll never know what it’s truly capable of doing.”
* * *
On May 22, 1968, the evening Herald delivered shocking news. After nearly thirty years at the helm, Tollett was stepping down at the refinery, effective immediately. The paper was working off a press release handed down from American Petrofina. But as everyone suspected, the Belgians had simply grown tired of Tollett’s drinking and sent word to sever ties. “Ray can make a better deal drunk than sober” is what they used to say, but Petrofina was too tidy an enterprise for loose cannons, regardless of their accuracy.
The story ran on the front page, top of the fold, along with a photo from a small, awkward reception thrown together at the Petroleum Building. In it, Tollett embraces the hands of Paul Meek, his second in command, who would take over the reins. Meek himself appears agitated. The look from Tollett, whose face is puffy and tired, is one of crushing surrender.
There was no sendoff at the refinery where his people labored, no opportunity to wave his hat under the lights while they bade him farewell. His only parting words, quoted in a later story, were aimed at them: “Of all the sins that may be counted against me, I do hope that I am never
guilty of or accused of being ungrateful.”
By the end of the summer, Tollett had opened a law practice with a local attorney, John Burgess, and hung his shingle on the fourth floor of the Permian Building. He still lunched at the Hotel Settles and held court on the downtown sidewalks, where people stopped to greet him. Impeccably dressed and radiating that same old magic, he never forgot a name.
For the better part of a year he put on a good face. He still visited old employees in the hospital and showed up to their funerals. But the life of a country lawyer was akin to death itself. His past threw an inescapable shadow. And for an alcoholic, the town itself must have loomed like a giant trigger—the company offices two blocks away, the clang clang clang of the Cosden filling station across the street, and every building he’d ever entered.
People told stories about Tollett’s last few months, hushed ones that weren’t meant for repeating. Like the time one of his former engineers found him passed out in his car on Main Street and had to drive him home. Or the night he fell down in Herman’s new restaurant, before God and all of Big Spring, and couldn’t get up. Not a fork moved as he lay on the floor. Herman finally ran over and helped him to his feet, then called a cab. The driver knew exactly where to go—they all did. Each time he fell down, the town was there to pick him up, to carry him home atop their able shoulders.
But then, one time they turned around and he was gone. On October 25, 1969, Tollett checked himself into the Starlite Village Hospital and Clinic, a rehab facility located in the Texas Hill Country. Perhaps he needed to get away from the old triggers, to dry out in a place where it might finally stick. Nobody knows exactly why he chose that place.
But the doctors at Starlite dried him out too fast. Two days into his treatment, away from the round-the-clock care of his trusted physician, Tollett went into convulsions and died. He was sixty-one years old.
