The Woman in Oil Fields (2 page)

“Try Alphaset over on Richmond,” I said. “They do bulk printing. They can probably get it out for you right away.”

The following Wednesday at lunchtime I joined her on the street. Eight young to middle-aged women marched behind her in a circle, carrying placards:
U.S. OUT OF NICARAGUA, HANDS OFF EL SALVADOR, NO PASARAN.
Kelly, wearing a jeans skirt and a green blouse embossed with yellow parrot figures, handed newsletters to businessmen and women on their way to City Hall. “Get the hell out of here and stop disturbing the peace,” a man told her. Kelly smiled. Conviction, controlled anger – a peppery combination, and it made me feel hot in my shirt.

She handed me a newsletter.

“Give me a stack. I'll help you pass them out.”

Didn't miss a beat. “All right. You can work the crowd over there by the reflecting pool.”

Four mounted policemen had cordoned off half a block for the small demonstration. “Whenever the Right Wingers march – the Klan or the anti-abortionists – the cops face the crowd so no one'll harm the marchers,” Kelly told me later. “When
we
take to the streets they watch
us
, looking for excuses to break us up.” Two men with long zoom lenses stood by a row of parking meters, aiming their cameras at us.

I offered a leaflet to a briefcase man. “Care for an update on Central America?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

This happened three or four times. It was my fault; I couldn't keep the smile on my face. I understood their annoyance: who likes solicitors? Once, I was standing in line at the Astrodome waiting to buy tickets to an Astros-Padres game. A militant farmer shoved a pamphlet into my hand. “If you eat you're involved in agriculture,” he explained.

“If you throw up,” I said, “you're no longer involved.”

He snatched back the pamphlet he'd handed me.

“Commie bitches!” a man yelled now from the steps of City Hall.

Kelly kept her friends in line – they wanted to tackle him, tear him apart, ship him in a CARE package under cover of night to a tiny island nation porous with recent democracy, yellow fever, and bent silver coins, massive market fluctuations and tsetse flies in the major export.

______

“So what does a folklorist do besides ask nosy questions and stick tape recorders in people's faces?” Kelly asked once the newsletters were gone. We were sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the courthouse.

“What makes you think we stick tape recorders in people's faces?”

“I took a class as an undergraduate.”

“Not true. We're very benign. Not a peep as we go about our business.”

“Which is?”

“Watching.”

“Is that why you showed up today?”

“No. I wanted to help.”

“What do you watch?” She crossed her stunning legs.

“Anything anyone does. The way you're sitting right now. The way we're talking. Culture's always changing. Folklorists try to capture traditions before they disappear.”

“Like from old people, you mean?”

“Sometimes.” I put sugar in my coffee.

“It's a bit anal retentive, isn't it? Regressive?”

“No, you learn all sorts of amazing things.”

“Like what?”

“There are two kinds of old people.”

“Oh?” She smiled.

“Sure. There's the well-informed old person, good as any library. Then there's the talker. The talker may not be accurate, but the way he says what he says and the strength of his beliefs often tell more about the culture than any set of facts.”

“When you get old you'll be a talker, right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You came here to meet me, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any interest in Central America? I mean
really?”

“Of course.” I ordered more cream. “They were taking pictures out there today –”

She waved her hand. “I've been photographed picketing the American Embassy in Managua. My file's a mile long.”

In '85, when this conversation took place, Nicaragua was the Left's cause célèbre-flying into a war zone a sign of status, like owning a compact disc player or a VCR. It's astonishing to me how quickly the Sandinistas (and the American Left, for that matter) dropped out of U.S. news, swallowed by the fires of Eastern Europe and a leaky local economy, but back then everyone I knew had a strong opinion about them, one way or another. President Reagan even suggested they might attack America, starting with the little town of Harlingen at Texas's southern tip (there's nothing
in
Harlingen to occupy, except a couple of damned old Dairy Qeens, maybe).

“This your first protest?” Kelly asked.

I nodded.

“Was it worth it?”

“You're interested in different cultures,” I said. “I think you should come with me some night to hear the blues. I know the best clubs – black joints you can't get in if you're white. But they know me.”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

“I guess I am.”

“I should tell you,” she said. “I have two children from a previous marriage.”

“I love children.”

“Is there anything you should tell me?”

I slipped a napkin over my left hand but she'd already seen the ring. “I don't know,” I said. “Like what?”

______

“When are you going to work today?” Jean said.

“As soon as I get ready. Need anything at the store? I can stop off on my way home.”

“Some Q-Tips. And a new ledger. We have to do the bills tonight.”

“I wanted to stop by the lumberyard this evening.”

“What lumberyard?”

“On 59. They're having a sale.”

“What do you need lumber for?”

“I may want to build something.”

She smoothed my thick blond hair and looked at me sadly.

“What is it?” I said.

“You're not going to build anything.”

“Yes I am.”

“You always say you want to build something. You never do.”

“Well, now I am.”

“You have to pick bill night to finally get started?”

“No. It's just that they're having this sale –”

“Every time I ask you to do something, George, you've got some idiot plan in the works.”

“The problem is, you don't take me seriously.”

She laughed. “No, because your job involves going out every night and getting drunk.”

“I'm doing research at those clubs. The blues are a dying tradition.”

“If I ask you just this once to stay home with me tonight and help me with the bills, will you do it?”

“The sale'll be over tomorrow.”

“George, I need to go over the Amex receipts with you. You have to be here, okay?”

The ogre's endless demands: “Pick the vermin out of my hair.”

______

When the idea first occurred to me to customize a car I was sitting in the Elm Street Blues Club listening to a local zydeco band and splitting pitchers of Old Milwaukee with two guys I'd just met. We wrapped our arms around each other. “I'mone learn to play the pie-anny and join up with one of these-here bands,” said the fellow on my left. He poked his red nose in my ear. “Make me a million bucks. Buy a brewery. And some beef.”

“Hell, I'm going to
build
a piano,” I said.

The other fellow was not a practiced scoundrel. I never did find out what brought him to the club that night in his three-piece Hart Schaffner & Marx, or why he felt compelled to join us in our joyful dissolution, but there he was, moon-eyed and slurry. He said, “I'm twenty-five years old, did you know that? It's a fact. And I'm going to tell you something. If I haven't made a million by the time I'm thirty I'm going to put a bullet through my head.”

“There you go,” said Red-Nose.

“And I'll tell you something else. I'm going to take as many people with me as I can.” He made a pistol with his fingers and started picking off the couples on the dance floor. I poured him another glass.

“Get me a fancy car, or maybe an air-conditioned bus, painted up so's it glows in the dark,” Red-Nose said. “Play ever' toilet in the South.”

“That's it,” said the Suit. “A custom-made Eldorado and an Uzi.” He twirled in his chair, made a screeching sound like tires and aimed his arms at the band. “Chuka-chuka-chuka,” he said.

I went home drunk, woke Jean up and told her I'd had a vision of zinc-plated hubcaps.

“But those souped-up things are awful.”

“It's folk art,” I said.

Pots, pans, a dozen eggs. Cajun food always sobered me up before going to bed, especially if I concocted a major mess, got to flinging spices around the kitchen. I pulled a red snapper out of the freezer, defrosted it in the microwave, dipped it in flour and milk along with a medium-sized soft-shell crab. Oregano, basil, cayenne pepper. A little Tabasco.

Usually in these late-night gourmet sessions, to keep myself alert, I mentally ran through as many blues labels as I could: Arhoolie out of El Cerrito (later from Berkeley), Alligator in Chicago, Memphis's famous Sun. Howlin' Wolf; Son Seals; Clifton Chenier, King of the Louisiana Bayous. But tonight I kept picturing the car. I melted a pat of butter and saw in its golden bubbles shiny push-button door locks.

On Saturdays I sat in an unnamed cafe near the Ship Channel swilling Monte Alban from a bottle. Worms curled in the golden tequila, tugs moaned at the mouth of the bay. Dock-hands wiped their fingers on the cotton stuffing spilling out of the booth seats, and happily greeted one another: “Asshole!” “Pigdip!”

A couple of Hispanics from the refinery smoothed the way for me with old pros, young lions, and members of the gangs. With their help I built one of the classiest low-riders in the city: crushed-velours dash, red silk roses wrapped around the tape player, velvet Virgin of Guadalupe in the back window. In the trunk, beveled mirrors, strobe lights, color postcards of the Astrodome, a fully stocked wet bar. A selection of magazines for my friends:
Time, Outlaw Biker, Architectural Digest
. Hydraulic pumps in the rear, lowered suspension in front. Tru-Spokes, “French-In” antenna.

Following Mexican custom I paid a priest from Maria de los Angeles Church in southwest Houston to christen the “Anti-Chrysler” (the odometer was stuck on 666,666). He flicked Holy Water from a cup onto the red vinyl roof.

“Excuse me, Father.” I wiped a stray drop off the hood. “I just Simonized that.”

The car would bring me closer to ethnic understanding, I thought: a passkey to the barrios. Or maybe I was just showing off. In every part of Latin Houston I proudly displayed the Beast. In the northeast above Canal Street, Mexican families had opened groceries,
barbacoas
, funeral homes. The smell of smoked fajitas, lime-soaked onions, and fresh tomatoes drifted past grassy yellow tool sheds and mixed with the aroma of coffee roasting at the Maxwell House plant over on Harrisburg. Even the wealthy families here lived poorly, ashamed of ostentation. Their Caribbean cousins rented modest brick homes in south Houston, near Martin Luther King Boulevard. I drove the Beast through these neighborhoods early one evening and made a lot of friends. Parched lawns, naked kids chasing the Paletas del Oasis, the Popsicle man whose tin-fendered truck played “Georgia on My Mind.” Most of the Dominicans worked for Macon and Davis, on the nuclear plant north of town. On Sunday afternoons the men (full round faces, high cheekbones, coffee-colored skin) sat among saints and ceramic animals in their living rooms cheering Jose Cruz.
“He's rounding second, rounding third
. In the kitchen, sausage and plantains, barefooted women chopping pineapples, whispering about the
tigres
, the “bad men” who demanded protection money from families in the neighborhood.

Koreans were now running most of the old Cuban markets, I noticed. The Cubans, getting poorer, were probably migrating to another part of town, but that wouldn't be clear for another couple of years.

Eighty to ninety thousand Salvadoran refugees lived wherever they could, anonymously in the suburbs or at shelters in Montrose and the Heights, partially gentrified neighborhoods where Kelly taught English twice a week.

“How'd you get involved with Latin refugees?” I asked her one night.

“Well, you can hardly grow up in Texas and not be aware of Hispanics. I've always loved the people, even back when I was a little girl. They have the most appealing, handsome faces.”

On Wednesdays she worked late at Casa Romero, the largest of the shelters. I'd fix dinner for her daughters: Monica, seven, Kate, five.

One night Monica pulled a deposit slip out of a drawer and drew an animal on it. “George, guess what this is.”

“An ostrich.”

“No.”

“I can't guess, sweetie.”

“Yes you can.”

“Are those legs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A zebra.”

“No!”

I put the cauliflower in the oven.

“Guess, George.”

“Monica
, I'm trying to make dinner.”

“Guess!”

“Okay, give me a hint.”

“It lives in the water and has fins and long legs.”

“I don't know.”

“It's like a beaver.”

“I give up.”

“It's a beaver!” She laughed.

“Beavers don't have fins.”

“Yes they do.”

______

“Did you tuck the girls in?”

“Yeah. Kate's full of energy this evening.” I stroked Kelly's breast.

“Wears me out.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“I'm afraid I am. Long day. We had a fire at the Casa.”

“You're kidding.”

“Found some rags in the basement. Kerosene.”

“Who'd want to burn the place?”