The Son (45 page)

“What,” she said.

“I thought you would never speak to me, that’s all.”

“Why would he have sent us down here together?”

“I think the main reason was I am willing to work cheap.”

“He is not stupid,” she said.

“Oh, he is definitely not stupid. I have no doubt about that.”

“I mean he likes you. He does not like many people.”

“Huh.”

“And maybe because we’re both orphans.”

“I’d never thought of it that way.”

“Really?”

“No,” he said.

It was quiet.

“It’s up to you how you’re going to feel about that stuff,” he said. “People have it a lot worse.”

“You don’t really like me,” she said.

“You’re right. I can’t tell if I like you or not.”

She pushed him.

“You look nice in the sun.”

“I feel nice,” she said. She had taken her dress off again. The sun was nothing but spots on the other side of her eyelids. “I could lie here forever.”

T
HEY MADE LOVE
again that night and then went off to their bedrooms on opposite sides of the house. She did not want Flores suspecting anything, though why this concerned her, she wasn’t sure, she lay there and felt slightly guilty, again wondering if she’d made a mistake.

But when morning came her first thought was of him, of why he was not in bed with her, and she hugged her pillow toward her and lay half on top of it, then kissed it, imagining it was his neck. Then she got a strange feeling. She wondered if she ought to stay home today. To lock herself in her room and not come out . . . it was an extravagance, something she might use up, she should not waste it all at once. Yes, it was certain, she should not see him. It would not do to get used to him.

Time was passing and she realized that he must be waiting for her downstairs; she got a nervous excited feeling and made herself up quickly and hurried to meet him.

They ate breakfast slowly, both struggling for things to talk about while staring intensely at Flores’s back and willing her to leave as soon as possible. Finally Jeannie had told her, in what she hoped was an innocent voice (though it was not, it could not be), that she and Hank would clean up.

When Flores was gone they pulled each other’s clothes off in the pantry, they tried it first standing up, but it was not satisfying and finally she was on the floor, among the bags of beans and flour, she felt a brief cold flash as if her father was seeing and judging her and then she decided she would do as she pleased.

S
IX MONTHS LATER
the first drilling rig was up and running. After all the shot testing, Hank decided the best place to start was in one of the old Garcia pastures. He insisted (disgustingly, she thought at first, then endearingly) on putting the samples of rock into his mouth; he plucked them right from the shale shaker. They were starting to taste like oil, he claimed, and if she wanted to learn the business, she would have to learn how it tasted. He offered her a crumbly piece of limestone from several thousand feet below the earth. It was wet with drilling mud, she smelled it, it was sulfurous and disgusting. She touched it to her tongue and wanted to gag immediately; it did taste like oil, but it tasted like other things as well, like something bitter or rotten, it had been in the damp earth for eighty or a hundred million years.

Near the end of the day the big Cummins diesel had suddenly changed pitch, the drill string gave a little hop and then dropped into the hole and then the derrick, the entire steel superstructure above them, gave a loud groan as if suddenly burdened.

“Not good,” Hank said.

The engine was running with less strain, it was quieter, but the hands were suddenly moving with purpose. There was a movement high in the derrick; the derrickman had come off the monkey board; he was half jumping, half sliding down the ladder. He brushed past her, running down the stairs toward the mud pits; a short time later, the mud motor got louder.

Nothing seemed to have changed but everyone was running around like a circus. It was amusing. She leaned back against the railing.

The piperacker and tongman were cutting sacks of yellow barite powder and dumping them into the mud pits; the derrickman was pumping mud from the reserve.

Now she could see a change: the return mud pipe, which had been flowing smoothly out onto the shale shaker all day, began to burp and sputter. The drilling mud was what kept the drill string in the hole; the drilling mud was the only thing keeping gas from blowing out of the wellbore.

She began to get nervous. A minute later there was a popping noise and mud blew out over the top of the traveling block. There was a sulfur smell and Hank pointed at her and said: “Get out of here.”

“Why?”

“We’re getting kicked.”

Then he stopped paying attention to her again. She was not sure if he was treating her like a girl. She decided she would not be treated any differently. She stayed where she was. She would never learn this if she went running off every time things got complicated.

“Get off the rig,” he said again, but she didn’t. He declutched the drill string and dropped the rams. More drilling mud blew out over the traveling block, spattering her dress and shoes.

“Get the fuck off the rig, Jeannie.” He shoved her roughly to the edge of the stairs. She looked back at him and finally went down. He was ignoring her again. She sat on a rock a few yards away. She was scared, though she was not sure of what. On the other hand if something happened . . . it was fine. She would be there with him.

After ten or fifteen minutes, the burping stopped. Mud began to flow into the pits again. The men began to laugh and the way they were clapping each other on the back, all talking very fast and grinning uncontrollably, she knew they had all been afraid. There were hundreds of empty Baroid sacks blowing around in the wind.

Hank waved to the motorman to shut the engine down and the hands all sat by the doghouse. One of them lit a cigarette, but Hank reached over and plucked it out of his mouth and crushed the ash carefully into the dirt.

“Maybe we can hold off on that cowboy shit, you think?”

The man nodded.

Then he turned to Jeannie: “Next time I ask you to leave, you leave.”

“How am I going to learn if I leave when things go wrong?” she said.

“You would not have learned anything. This would have been a fireball they would have seen from town.”

The roughnecks were slumped on a bench in the doghouse. The derrickman was pacing back and forth, cursing the mud pumps.

“What about the rams?” she said.

“Sometimes the gas is coming up no matter what. You can do everything perfect but you can’t always stop it.”

After that she did not want to be away from him. If he was on a well that blew out, she would be on it as well. She would not be alone again.

Chapter Thirty-three

Diaries of Peter McCullough

J
UNE 25, 1917

Tonight she found me in my office. I had given her one of the trucks to take to Carrizo, half expecting she would never return.

“Did I scare you?”

“A little,” I said. I realized I had indeed been expecting her to disappear, which had made me feel both relieved and depressed.

She looked around. “All these books. And you sleep here?”

I nodded.

“Because of me?”

“I got in the habit before my wife left,” I told her, which was not entirely a lie.

She took a seat on the sofa. “Look at me,” she said, holding out her hands. “I’m like a dead person. I can’t stand to even look in the mirror.”

“You just need to eat and rest.”

“I can’t stay that long,” she said.

“I already told you I don’t mind.”

“But I do.”

It was quiet and she looked around again.

“How old are you?”

“I am eleven years younger than you are,” she said. “Though I now look older.”

“You are still very pretty.” It was not true, not really, and yet all the blood went to my face. If it is possible to make an improvement in four days, she had. Her skin was no longer dry, her lips less cracked, her hair washed and shining. But she didn’t appear to notice my compliment.

“You know I imagined telling you all these things for years now, but when I see it hurts you, I feel guilty. Then I am angry at myself for feeling guilty. And yet the past two nights, I have slept very well here. Which also makes me feel guilty. I guess I am the coward after all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“You’re not in a position to judge.”

She continued to look around the room, at all my books, floor to ceiling, and her eyes got soft again but I could not help the feeling she was not long for this earth; I had seen dead people with more weight to their bodies.

“There are many farmers here now?”

“Yes.”

“And the other Mexican families? The ones who were here?”

“Some of them went to Michigan to work. Some disappeared. Some are dead.”

She asked which ones. I opened my journal and told her what I had written, though I mostly knew it from memory.

Killed in the riots: Llewellyn and Morena Pierce, Custodio and Adriana Morales, Fulgencio Ypina, Sandro Viejo, Eduardo Guzman, Adrian and Alba Quireno, all four of the Gonzalo Gomezes, all ten of the Rosario Sotos except the two youngest, who were adopted by the Herreras.

Fled during or after the riots: the Alberto Gomezes, the Claudio Lopezes, the Janeros, the Sapinosos, the Urracas, the Ximenes, the Romeros, the Reyes, Domingo Lopez, unrelated to Claudio, Antonio Guzman, unrelated to Eduardo (killed), Vera Florez, the Vera Cruzes, the Delgados, the Urrabazes.

“There may have been others I have not heard about.”

“Well, you wrote them down,” she said. “That is something.”

“There are more,” I said.

The ones who had moved to Detroit for work: the Adora Ortizes, the Ricardo Gomezes, the Vargases, the Gilberto Guzmans, the Mendezes, the Herreras (including the two daughters of Rosario Soto), the Riveras, Freddy Ramirez and his family.

“Do you own all our land,” she said, “or was it split with the Reynoldses and Midkiffs?”

“Just us. And some farmers from the North.” Which was true, but also a lie, and I was sorry I’d said it.

“For taxes, I guess.”

“They said your father was in arrears.”

“He was not. Obviously.”

I looked out the window.

“There is so much anger in me,” she said, “that I sometimes cannot understand how I still breathe.”

J
ULY 1, 1917

María Garcia has been here ten days. According to Consuela, when I am gone she wanders the house or sits on the gallery staring out over the land that used to be her family’s or plays the piano that used to be my mother’s. When I come back from the pastures she is usually playing the piano—she seems to know it is a kind of present for me.

After supper I find her in the library. We both like the same places in the house—the library, the parlor, the west side of the gallery. The small protected places where you can see a long way, or hear if someone is coming.

When I ask about her plans she says she would like to continue to eat, and when she is done eating she will make other plans. She is already looking better, gaining weight, the years dropping off.

“When it becomes inconvenient,” she tells me, “I’ll be on my way.”

I don’t tell her it is already inconvenient, that my father has already demanded that she leave. “Where would you go?”

She shrugs.

Then I say, “How’s old Mexico these days?” as if I don’t know the answer.

“They pick you up on the street, or when you are coming out of the movies, or from a cantina, and say here is a gun, you are now a Zapatista or a Carrancista or a Villista, depending on who catches you. If you protest, or if they find out you were on another side, they kill you.”

“You must have friends from university?”

“That was fifteen years ago. And most of them left when things got bad.”

“Michigan?” I regret saying it immediately.

“Those are not my people.” But she shrugs and I can see she forgives me.

I look at the light coming in on her hair, which shines, and the line of her neck, where there is the faintest hint of sweat. It occurs to me that she has very nice skin. She leans back into the stream of air from the fan, kicks her foot up and down, looking at the slipper on it, which she must have gotten somewhere in the house.

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

J
ULY 2, 1917

Went to see my father to discuss the matter further. The drillers have run out of coal for their boiler and the silence is a relief. Forgot what silence sounded like.

The Colonel was sitting in the shade on the gallery of his house, which is more like a jacal. It does not have nearly the view of the main house, but it is in a copse of oaks, with a live stream running past it, and is ten degrees cooler than any other place on the ranch. He still sleeps in a brush arbor at night (though he has run an electric wire and keeps his Crocker fan blowing) and refuses to use an indoor toilet, preferring to squat in the bushes. Walking around his house is a bit like walking through a minefield.

“This heat,” he said. “We should have bought on the Llano.”

It was 110 at the big house, 100 at his jacal.

“We’d have to shovel snow,” I said.

“That is the problem with having a family. Take a man like Goodnight, does whatever the hell he wants, moved himself right up to Palo Duro when the Comanches left.”

“Charles Goodnight has a family. A wife, anyway.”

He looked at me.

“Molly.”

“Well, he never talks about them.” Then he changed the subject: “There is a man coming here in the next few weeks, name of Snowball. He’s a Negro I knew from the old days. He may be here awhile.”

I cleared my throat and said: “There is also the matter of this Garcia girl.”

“She is not as good-looking as her mother. I will say that for her.”

“She is pretty enough.”

“I want her making dust as soon as possible.”