The Woman in Oil Fields (7 page)

“Earl here?” asked Mr. Waldrip.

“Ol' sourpuss is out playing cards.”

“Well, he'll miss the party.” Mr. Waldrip handed her the near-empty bottle of Old Charter.

“Sweetie, we can do better than that.” Joy Weaver pulled two bottles of Jim Beam out of a cabinet underneath a bookshelf.

“We even brought live entertainment,” Mr. Waldrip said, pointing to Jackie and me. “These boys is
hot!”

Jackie scrunched into a chair by the television set. A velvet painting of Christ kissing a child hung above a hound's-tooth couch at the far end of the den. A marionette in a straw sombrero, gripping two silver pistols, dangled from the ceiling next to an ivy plant.

“You kids want a beer?” asked Joy Weaver.

“No,” Jackie said. He seemed about to cry. His face was red.

“Sure, I'll try one,” I said.

“David, get your drums,” said Mrs. Waldrip. “Let's do my song for Joy.”

“You wrote a song?”

“Hell yes, girl, I told you someday I was going to crawl out of this hole and be famous.”

“I always knew it,” Joy said. “I wish I had your talent.”

“I wish I had her time,” said Jackie's father. “Shit,
I
could write a song if all I did was sit home all day.” I didn't know then, and I don't know now, what he did for a living.

“We oughta get Ida to sing. Have you ever heard Ida sing?” Joy said. “She does ‘Bobby McGee' worlds better than that Joplin woman can.”

“Where
is
Ida?” said Mr. Waldrip.

“I think she's back in her room, doing her homework. Ida! Ida Mae! We got company!”

I'd unloaded my drums by now. I stood by the couch, tightening the wing nuts on the hi-hat, testing the tom-tom's tone with the drum key.

A pretty young girl in jeans and a pullover sweater came into the room and sat down. Her brown hair was pulled tight into a ponytail. She had blue eyes.

“Jackie, what grade are you in?” Joy asked.

“Tenth,” he mumbled.

“So's Ida. We oughta get you kids together more often.”

Jackie chewed his guitar pick.

We ran through Mrs. Waldrip's song, then Joy asked us if we knew “Bobby McGee.”

Jackie didn't say anything. Buoyed by the beer I said, “I could fake it.”

“Mother, I don't want to sing,” Ida told Joy.

“Baby, you're so much better than what's-her-name.”

“No I'm not.”

“Gravelly old voice – woman sounds like she's barfing in a cup. You make
sweet
sounds.”

“David, count her into the song,” Mrs. Waldrip said.

I hesitated, hands above the snare, sticks trembling. “No, Mother,” Ida said. She looked directly at me.

“David, one, two, three –”

I tapped out a standard rock beat. Mrs. Waldrip glared at Jackie; he filled in the rhythm. Ida's cheeks turned red.

“She's a
pistol
,” Joy said. “Let's hear it, honey.”

Ida's voice was so heartbreakingly wrong for the tune, I fell in love with her instantly. So did Jackie. We didn't speak about it then or later, but we'd both seen on each other's faces a desire to rescue this girl from her mother, to take her away someplace, somehow, on the back of a wild horse, maybe, where there weren't any parents or rock and roll records.

Ida sang about Bobby's body as though she were in church.

I felt ashamed for her in front of these people. I wanted to sit and hold her hand. Mr. Waldrip had his arm around Joy Weaver.

Ida broke off in the middle of the performance and ran to the kitchen. The Waldrips clapped. “Bravo, bravo,” Joy said. She poured another round of bourbon.

I looked at Jackie. He didn't move. I stood, jammed my sticks into my back jeans pocket, and followed Ida into the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, opening a loaf of bread. “You want a peanut butter sandwich?” she said. Her eyes were wet and her face was still red.

“No thanks.”

Jackie joined us. “You sing real well,” he said.

Ida laughed, but kept her eyes on him. “No, really,” he told her. He looked solemn and calm. Handsome. Sometimes his sullenness made him seem older than he was, centered and important. The impression lasted only a moment, as if he felt it wasn't his place in the world to be so assertive. He fumbled for something else to say.

“These people are nuts,” I said.

Ida leaned away from Jackie. “God,
aren't
they?” She put her hand on my arm and we laughed.

“And the hits just keep on rollin'!” I crooned. Ida cracked up. She was so pretty. Jackie smiled. I could tell I'd hurt him by saying his folks were nuts. He'd trusted me not to say a word about them, ever.

Jackie and I didn't see Ida again after that night, but clearly, in his mind, I'd won her. My parents were angry when the Waldrips dropped me off at one A.M., banging and clattering my drums, and waking the neighbors. They wouldn't let me go to Jackie's house anymore; eventually, he stopped coming to rehearsals after school. Without him, the rest of the “Crystals” lost interest.

I went alone to finish our English project. The workers wouldn't talk to me as easily as they had with Jackie. I asked them about mariachi music and “La Paloma,” one of my favorite Mexican songs. I told them I was a drummer. They stood in a nervous circle, spat tobacco in the sand, and looked at me as though I were a wolf.

Jackie never mentioned the project. I turned in the transcripts and we both got a C, with a note from the teacher, “This seems incomplete.” For weeks afterwards, I felt bad about the workers, writing their stories when they so clearly didn't want me to. Eventually I understood that my real regret was Jackie. I hadn't meant to be cruel about his folks – just as I hadn't planned to anger Peggy Sue with my quarter – but I'd wanted Ida's attention. I hadn't fully realized, until that night, how similar love and betrayal were, and how capable I was of both.

Months later, I heard from my father that most of the oil workers were undocumented. They'd been arrested and deported, and the drilling company closed.

______

In the next two years I saw Jackie only at marching practice. I'd wave to him from across the field. He'd nod, clutching his French horn like a shield. I never learned anything more about his parents, or what it was like for him at home. I joined another rock group in town and we earned a little money playing dances and parties. At the senior prom Jackie appeared with a date who looked remarkably like Ida Mae Weaver (it wasn't her). My band had been hired for the gig, and at the break Jackie told me, “You sound strong. Your wrists are a little stiff – seems to me you're not as limber as you used to be – but you're cooking.”

I thought we might be friends again, but we were still so young, we believed we were exempt from time. Neither of us made another gesture, and when I left for college a few months later I lost track of him.

Several years after that, at a high school reunion, someone said they thought Jackie Waldrip was a wildcatter down around McCamey, but no one knew for sure. I drove by his old house when the reunion was over. The rodeo grounds and all the horses were gone. So were the shutters on the windows. A welder's truck was parked in the drive.

I sat in my car, remembering Jackie and Ida. In a way I'd abandoned them when I'd gone off to school, used my father's connections to position myself in life.

I hoped Ida Mae had prospered, but that night in her house, I hadn't glimpsed any reason to think she would. Options were scarce for a working-class woman in Odessa, Texas.

Two boys were wrestling now in Jackie's old yard, laughing, throwing grass. I recalled my twin ambitions of becoming a rock star, of losing myself in endless romantic affairs. They'd diminished, then disappeared, like the Pride of the Mustangs rounding a corner at the far end of a street.

I started my car and pulled away, watching the boys in my rearview, and with their image in my mind I can say now as I couldn't then: I loved Jackie. His absence from my life haunts me as Ida Mae did, though I'm also convinced that, given the time and place of our growing up, and our backgrounds, it was inevitable that we'd vanish from each other.

As for Ida – for years, even after I'd married, she was my physical model for the ideal woman, until, with time, her face became harder and harder to recall with any accuracy.

Yesterday, when Philip found my drums, he seemed reverential – toward the strange equipment, me. Here was a side of his dad he'd never known. But his awe soon passed. “I'm gonna be on MTV!” he shouted. He whacked the cymbals and the snare, drowning out the story I'd started to tell him about a pretty young girl I met one night, and the beat went on all day.

O
n the west side of Dallas my grandmother, no longer beautiful, sits in a wheelchair in a Catholic nursing home. Her room is across the hall from a bathroom and there is one old man – like her, a resident of the place – who forgets to shut the door when he goes to use the john. My grandmother shouts at him and he looks up, startled; the nurses come to clean his urine off the floor. In a rage he steps into my grandmother's room but before he can say anything she raises her voice. “What are you sleeping with that shanty woman for?” she yells. She's confused him with my grandfather Bill, who (family legend has it) ran off with a prostitute, an “oil field woman,” in the thirties. “She teases me,” my grandmother says to the old man. “She comes to me at night and tells me I won't ever sleep with you again. Then she ties my bed to a gelding and he runs me around a field, fast and dizzy, and the whole time she's laughing. In the mornings when the women here bathe me she's outside my window and I try to hide my body but they won't let me. They want to show her what I've become. Do you want her to laugh at me? Am I repulsive to you now?” The nurses smile because she's mistaken the man, but she has a story to understand and it's the same one I heard in my mother's kitchen twenty years ago. Lately, on these hot summer Friday afternoons, trying to convince Grandma June that her husband Bill is dead, I've remembered the story and learned new ways to tell it. When I'm older and not the same man, I know I'll find another way, then another, until I've resolved it for myself.

______

I stop in and see June, regular as a city bus, on Monday and Friday mornings, and stay most of the day. Sometimes she knows I'm here, sometimes she doesn't. I've been back in Dallas now, out of work, for eight and a half months, ever since Boeing's Seattle plant laid me off with ninety-nine other machinists. When I called last fall to tell my folks about the pink slip, my mom said I should head back south. “It'd be a blessing if you could ease June's final days,” she said. “I can't go to Dallas each time she gets to feeling blue – Exxon's bringing in a new well near Oklahoma City and they've got your father looking after it. Mother's asking for me but your daddy needs me here,” she said. “Stay with her, Glen. We'll cover your expenses.”

I thought it over for a day, then figured what the hell-beats hanging in the Seattle rain looking for jobs. Besides, though we'd never spent much time together, I'd always liked June. She was a straight talker. So I threw a pack of clothes into my Chevy and fastened a set of chains to my tires. I rumbled up the Rockies, dipped into the desert, and wound up in Texas again.

On Monday evenings now, when I leave June asleep, I hit the road and don't turn around until Friday. Six hundred, eight hundred miles a week just to get away from the sickrooms, the musty medicine smells of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home. Tumbleweeds blow across the highways, in all the little towns of West Texas. I remember these towns from my childhood, but I can't tell them apart anymore now that the damn franchises've moved in everywhere. Dairy Queens and Motel Sixes. HBO and Showtime blaring in people's houses, through the windows. On Friday afternoons, back in Dallas, I tell June I've sat with her all week. She doesn't know the difference if I'm here or away. “You remember yesterday?” I ask. “I read you the newspaper?” She has a favorite daily column, “The Winds of Time,” by this local hack historian, Larry Kircheval. His articles always start, “Whatever happened to –?” and tell the story of some boring old building or once-important citizen. He irritates the hell out of me, really bares his heart when he writes – “Look at
me
, how much I know, how much I
feel
about the past” – but June eats it up. I read her his stuff whenever I'm here. On Saturday mornings my folks call from Oklahoma City and say they've tried to reach me all week at my Dallas apartment – an efficiency with only a table and a single bed (“All we can afford for you right now,” Dad says). “We must've just missed each other,” I tell them. “I go out for ice cream a lot. It's turning hot here now …”

______

This afternoon two irritable old men, bound to their wheelchairs with thick silk straps, sit in the lobby of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home in front of the big-screen TV. An old cop movie in black-and-white: leering killers, screaming women. The actor's faces, flattened and pale against the lime green wall behind the screen, remind me of old photographs I've seen in the memory books here, on nightstands beside the beds.

A slow ceiling fan swirls dust motes across the lobby floor. Brown summer horseflies light on the old men's cotton sleeves. They're wearing yellow pajamas – standard Parkview dress – and leather slippers. They don't like each other: I can see that. Both are new arrivals here, never met before today, but while the movie hums at high volume these two guys're giving each other the glare. June's asleep; I've stepped into the lobby to stretch my legs, to get a Coke from the patio machine out front. As I'm sorting dimes I hear one old bird rasp at the other, “You son of a bitch,” and suddenly they're both throwing punches. The rubber wheels of their chairs squeal against each other and scuff the red tile floor. These fellows're too weak to really hurt each other, but the nurses panic and glide them toward separate corners of the room. “Mr. Davis! Mr. Edwards!” shouts one of the nurse's aides. On the television screen a masked burglar jimmies a window.