The Woman in Oil Fields (6 page)

“The sticks must oppose each other,” he said. “The right one straight, the left one held like a fork. Tension and opposition are what give the music fire. Like the act of passion, do you understand?”

I said I did, a little.

I'd joined the junior high marching band, the Pride of the Mustangs. We wore green and white uniforms and hats with plumes. We marched in parades through the city.

“Where was this?” Philip asked. “In Texas?”

“Yes.” Midland, Texas. Twenty years and half-a-country away from me now.

I remember, in the ninth grade, in the big Thanksgiving Day parade, I dropped my left stick as the band turned a corner on Main Street. I couldn't stop to pick it up – the trombonists were right behind me with their dangerous slides. Elephants and horses and shitting zebras followed our fat little twirlers, marching steadily in broken rows. For several blocks, until the parade was over, I kicked the stick ahead of me.

The marching snare, strapped to my left leg, pounded my right knee whenever I high-stepped: black and blue for the sake of the beat. Mr. Webber, the band director, drilled us after school on a practice football field, yelling at us through a cardboard megaphone whenever someone made a mistake, rehearsing us for hours in sun or wind or rain. From him, I learned the most I'll ever know about self-discipline.

But in those days, when I was just a little older than Philip is now, I wasn't interested in discipline. I yearned for girls and a life of rock and roll – until the chilly night, one winter, I fell in love playing “Me and Bobby McGee” behind a sad young lady named Ida Mae Weaver.

It happened this way. I had a friend named Jackie Waldrip. He played French horn in the Pride of the Mustangs but his hero was Jimi Hendrix, and he'd bought an old Gibson guitar at a yard sale. When marching season was over, we practiced Beatles tunes in my garage after school. Jackie knew a couple of other guitarists, whose names I've forgotten now, and we formed a “pop quartet” – that's what the fan-zines called the boy-groups who were topping the charts of the day. Psychedelia was at its peak then – this was '67-We called ourselves “Crystal Creation.” I drew an exploding diamond on a piece of poster board and taped it to the front of my bass drum.

Jackie was a quiet kid with a sorrowful demeanor, even when he smiled. His brown hair looked like pigeon feathers, plucked and scattered. Musically, he was much more gifted than the rest of the “Crystals,” but he always deferred to the bass player on arrangements. I thought the bass player was a moron. He knew zip about song structure and didn't even
own
any Beatles albums. Jackie adjusted to my pace even when I rushed a phrase. He looked up to me, though with his skills and gravity of presence, he should've been the leader.

My mother brought us iced tea and Mars bars whenever we took a break. “You sound real good, boys,” she'd say, trying to hide her smile.

We always rehearsed in my garage because it was large and new. My father was an oil man – which is what I've since become, running pipe up to Alaska out of Portland, Oregon – and we had a nicer home than most of my friends. Jackie never talked about his parents. I hadn't been to his house. I got the idea that his folks embarrassed him somehow, or maybe they were sick or something.

Often he'd stay for dinner after the other “Crystals” had left. Baked squash was his favorite food. That's one of my strongest memories about Jackie Waldrip – I don't know why. “He could eat a pound of this stuff,” my mother told me. “Don't they feed him at home?”

After dinner we'd play records in my room and talk about the girls in our classes. “Peggy Sue Rittenour is named after the Buddy Holly song,” I told him one night. This fact made her exotic to me. She was the first girl I ever tried to date – though my efforts embarrassed us both. At the spring prom the year

before, I'd been too shy to ask her to dance. All night I smiled at her from across the dance floor/gym, but I wouldn't come close. She stood with her circle of friends. One by one they approached me and said, “You're breaking her heart,” “I hope you're happy – you've made her miserable,” or, “Cretin.”

I felt as foolish as when I'd dropped my stick.

Just as I'd worked up my nerve to speak to her, the band announced its final tune. Peggy Sue started to leave. In a panic – I had to make a gesture – I rushed up to her, pulled a quarter from my pocket (all I had) and said grandly, “Here, take this!” It wasn't until months afterwards that I realized she might've been offended.

“Kissing's enough,” Jackie said. “That's all I ever want to do. It gets ugly after that.”

I wondered how he knew; I'd never seen him talk to a girl. “What do you mean?”

“You know. What
you
want to do, and what
she
wants to do, and would you like to go to a movie tonight, and which one, or would you rather study? It's complicated.”

“Yeah,” I said, fearing I'd never get close enough to even smell a girl's perfume. Dance floor etiquette was already more than I could handle.

______

Music wasn't the only activity I shared with Jackie. Twice a month that spring we interviewed a small crew of Mexican roughnecks on an oil rig east of Midland. Our English teacher had assigned his students to tape and transcribe conversations with folks from various social classes, then compare their speech patterns. I knew vaguely what “social classes” were, but people were people, I figured, they simply worked different jobs. Back then, I didn't know the angers and economics attached to those differences. Jackie did – and I think now the story I have to tell is partly one of class.

As I've said, I didn't know much about Jackie's background. I knew he wasn't poor, but he didn't share my world of privilege. My dad was no Rockefeller but he
did
work in the deal-making branch of oil; I was protected to the point of naivete from the harsh lives most people lived in the West Texas desert.

For middle-class speech I taped my own parents. My teacher's brother owned an independent drilling company. He let Jackie and me and some other kids talk to his workers to complete our assignment. We took a bus to the oil field after school. The Mexicans were all in their twenties, energetic, weathered by sun and gritty wind. Their muscles were fine and tight, like the sinews of the wild green mustang painted on our bass drum at school. Neither Jackie nor I felt completely at ease with the men, but he stood among them with a kind of calm, a rough grace that (I see now) signified a kinship of class. Without knowing it I revealed – in my thick cotton shirt, my Buster Brown shoes, my “proper” stance – the money my father made.

What we discussed I don't remember, except that most of the workers had left their families in Mexico and worried about them. I'd heard ranchero music on KCRS late one night – the cheery accordian solos and the polka beats – and wondered if that's what these men listened to. I tried to find some point of contact with them, but they didn't seem to know what I was saying. Jackie did most of the talking. His communication, I recall, consisted mostly of a strong, sympathetic silence.

______

One day, as we were walking home from school, Jackie asked me if I'd like to go to his house. “To practice, I mean. Could your mom bring your drums over in the car?”

“Sure. We can call the other guys from my place.”

“No. Let's just do it ourselves today.”

He lived in an old neighborhood out by the rodeo grounds. Slatless blue shutters framed the windows; the cracked cement porch was painted red. Behind the house, on a dusty track inside the rodeo arena, three young girls ran horses through an obstacle course built around seven yellow barrels.

Jackie's mother looked a little like a barrel herself. Her neck was huge. She wore fuzzy houseshoes and a purple cotton muumuu. Her shoulder-length hair was square-cut and blond. She hefted my bass drum with one arm, picked up the snare with the other, and carried them into the house. “It's a shame the other boys couldn't make it,” she said. I looked at Jackie. He toyed with his amp. I understood that he was ashamed of this woman and trusted me to be quiet about her, in a way that he couldn't trust the others.

Mrs. Waldrip said she was a songwriter. It turned out, she'd asked Jackie to bring his “little rock band” over to practice a tune she'd composed. “Writing's really a cinch. They got these rhyming dictionaries, see?” She picked a paperback off an old piano in a corner of the den. “Let's just look up ‘spoon,'” she said. “Rhymes with ‘June,' ‘swoon,' ‘boon.' Ain't that a kick?”

She settled her bulk on the piano bench, sipped a sour-smelling drink from a Smucker's jar, and taught us her song-mercifully, I've forgotten it. We sat there all afternoon, improvising what she called the chorus.

“I'll tell you what I'll do,'' Mrs. Waldrip said when we were done. The room had grown dark. She'd had several drinks. “I know a man over in Odessa who owns a recording studio. For eight bucks an hour you can rent it. He'll produce a demo tape for us – hell, we sound good, just the three of us, don't we? Who needs a bass-line? We'll make us a demo and send it around to all the record companies, won't that be wonderful? Which label does Bobbie Gentry sing for? This song' d be perfect for her.”

“I'd better call my mom now,” I said.

Jackie wouldn't look at me.

The next day, on the oil field bus, he apologized. “She wants to practice again with you and me.”

“What about the ‘Crystals'?”

“When we do the demo, she'll get this record-business out of her system.''

“We're not really going to record her song?” I said.

Jackie shrugged. From the bus windows we saw the horselike men hoist heavy pipes through bright steel rigging toward the sky. Jackie watched intently. Over and over the men squatted, lifted, heaved, and tugged until I felt certain their bodies would break.

______

I don't recall how many weeks passed before Mrs. Waldrip phoned my mother to ask if she could “borrow” me for the evening. I hadn't told Mom anything about her. I knew if my folks learned how much she drank, they wouldn't let me see Jackie again.

Around six o'clock one evening the Waldrips pulled into our driveway in a red Chevy wagon. I'd never seen Jackie's father: a small man – or rather, a tall stooped man, twisted by whatever tools he used at work. Tiny broken veins formed faint kaleido-scopes on his cheeks. He shook my hand. “David,” he said. “I've heard a lot about you.”

“Yessir.”

We loaded my drums in the rear of the wagon. Mrs. Waldrip promised my mother they'd have me back by ten at the latest. My mother was excited. I think she thought her son was about to become famous.

Jackie was subdued. He held his hands in his lap. “Hi,” I said, sliding into the seat beside him. He nodded.

Odessa lay twenty miles west of Midland, on Highway 80. Oil rigs and mobile home parks cluttered the tumbleweed-desert on either side of the road. We passed the Texan Drive-In, which showed X-rated movies. The marquee read
Fly Down Inside
. The sun had just set – orange streaked the sky near the sandy, fiat horizon – and the feature had begun. The screen partially faced the highway; from the corner of my eye I could see a naked thigh the size of a diesel truck.

Mr. Waldrip stopped at Pinkie's Liquor and bought two bottles of Old Charter and some paper cups. He toasted his wife twice before we even left the parking lot.

Jackie looked out the window, at fences and cows.

Odessa was a blue-collar town – people there manufactured drilling equipment for the oil patch – whereas Midland was a banking center. I remember my father saying Odessa was a filthy city, full of toughs, bums, and thieves. He said he'd never live there.

The Waldrips, on the other hand, looked and felt more at home once we entered the “Big O.” “I just love the Big O,” said Jackie's mother.

Ace Records, the recording studio – a square, cinder-block building which I'm sure no longer stands – was located on a narrow corner, under a giant sign for Salem cigarettes. A red light glowed above the door. The place was locked tight.

Mrs. Waldrip insisted that I pull my drums out of the car and set them on the sidewalk.

“Honey, why don't we wait'll the man comes and opens the door?” asked Jackie's father.

“He'll be here any minute.” She pinched Jackie's arm. “You ready to go?” He shrugged. “Gonna cut us a hit!” She poured herself some whiskey. “Top forty, coast to coast.”

A gust of wind blew my crash cymbal over. It clattered on the sidewalk, frightening a cat from under a car across the street.

Handbills and hamburger wrappers blew against the Waldrip's red wagon. We waited for thirty minutes.

“Son of a bitch said he'd meet us here at seven-thirty,” Jackie's mother said.

“When did you talk to him last?” her husband asked. He'd opened the second bottle of bourbon.

“Just this morning.”

We waited another half hour.

“Screw it,” said Jackie's father.

“But I want to sing my song!”

“Another night, honey. Let's go see the Weavers.” He put his arm around his wife's shoulders and led her to the car. Jackie and I lifted my drums into the back seat. “Big baby,” he whispered.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

We drove through neighborhoods where the lawns weren't mowed, where people left strings of Christmas lights in their eaves all year.

“Who are the Weavers?” I whispered to Jackie.

He shrugged.

Mr. Waldrip stopped the car in front of a small Spanish-style home made of brown brick. A power line buzzed overhead. A water tower, shiny in the moonlight, stood at the end of the street.

Joy Weaver, a thin woman with dark, stiff skin, hugged Jackie's parents in the doorway. “I'll be durned, look what the cat dragged in,” she said. Her light blond hair reminded me of the fiberglass insulation in the heating unit my father had in stalled last week at home.