The Woman in Oil Fields (8 page)

Good for you, I think, watching the old men grimace and cough. Don't let the fire go out. (I swear I've heard – late at night, when only Nurse Simpson's on duty, Nurse Simpson who lets me stay if June's had a hard evening – I swear I've heard the sounds of sexual pleasure, whether from memory – a murmuring in sleep-or actual contact, I can't tell.)

I go to check on June. She's awake now, lying in bed, clutching her box of Kleenex. She's nearly blind; if she pats around on the sheet and can't find her Kleenex she cries. Her hands are tiny and clawlike, tight with arthritis. Sometimes, to exercise or just to pass the hours, she rolls and unrolls a ball of blue yarn.

I ask her if she wants some apple juice.

“Yes,” she says.

I turn the crank at the end of the bed to raise her up; hold the cup, guide the straw into her mouth. Her teeth are gone.

“You tell him to talk to me,” she says.

“Who?” I ask.

“Stubborn old man.” She waves at a chair by the wall. “He's been sitting there all afternoon reading that damn paper and he won't talk to me.” Her voice cracks. “Where's your whore today, old man? Off with someone else?”

I stroke the papery skin of her arms, offer more juice. She's ninety-two years old. Since Bill died she's had two other husbands (divorced one, outlived the other), six grandkids, and three careers (store owner, upholsterer, quilt-maker). But now, near the end of her life, it's this one incident – Bill and the oil field woman – that clogs her mind. She's been jealous for sixty years.

She sips her juice. Her head seems to clear. “Glen?” she says.

“I'm here.”

“Bill's not really sitting in that chair, is he?”

“No, June.”

“He's dead?”

“That's right.”

“When?”

“When did he die? A long time ago – 1962 or '63, I think it was.”

“I remember now. In a drunk tank.”

“Yes.”

Sunlight spreads, first bright then pale, through her peach-colored curtains. An air-conditioning vent above her bed flutters a poster taped loosely to the wall. Last week a Catholic church group, on their regular visit, left these posters in all the rooms: a little girl hugging a kitten. The caption reads, “I Know I'm Special – God Don't Make No Junk.”

“Can I get you something else, June?”

“French fries.”

“All that grease?”

“Get me some goddamn French fries!”

I don't know how she chews the silly things with just her gums, but she does. “All right,” I say. “I'll be back.”

I drive a few blocks to a Burger King. The streets here on the west side're lined with sexy new cigarette ads – enormous, rolling breasts filling billboards. I lift my foot off the gas pedal and coast in my lane, staring, more lonely than horny, at these huge women floating like helium balloons over the start-stop traffic. By the time I return to the rest home the sun's set. The red light from the Coke machine on the patio pours through June's window. She's sitting up in bed, in the near-dark, twining yarn. From the big-screen TV canned laughter echoes down the hall. The curtains rustle, from the air vent. June's squinting, trying to catch the movement. I don't know how much she can see. She shushes me. “That whore is there at the window,” she whispers. I dangle a French fry under her nose. “She's laughing,” June says. “Listen.”

Nurse Simpson pokes her head into the room, says, “How we doing?”

June says, “Bitch.”

“We're fine,” I tell the nurse. “But maybe I'd better stay here tonight.”

She nods. “I'll bring the cot,” she says.

______

I first heard about June's whore late one night in my mother's kitchen. I was twelve. Mother suspected my sixteen-year-old sister was in trouble, smoking dope, driving into dark fields with boys in dirty pants. “When I was her age I could've wound up that way,” Mom said. “It would've been easy. Now your sister.”

“What way do you mean?” I asked.

She told me the story then: “When she was young, your Grandma June was very beautiful. My father's a fortunate man to've touched her. He was an oil worker in the East Texas fields, and not too smart, not too good or bad. At Christmas he drove home to Dallas bringing us store-wrapped gifts, and slept with us in the house. Your grandmother kept him busy with the vegetables for dinner or the furnace or anything else that needed looking after. At night he combed her blond hair and when he got through his hands seemed to take on her fair color and not the deep black they always seemed to be. But that's me, you know, because I know his hands weren't black. He washed the oil off – I never even saw crude oil – but he worked in the fields and I see him now, dark, in my mind.

“The woman who took him from us wasn't beautiful like your grandmother but she slept in the shanties by the fields and sooner or later he found her, like they all did I suppose, all the men who worked in the East Texas fields. It wasn't uncommon to see women strapping on their shoes at night and heading for the fields because there was money to make and they knew it. So he found her sooner or later. If he came home at Christmas he didn't work around the house anymore. Then he didn't come at all and he was with her, we knew. My brother Bud was old enough to take care of us now so he said, ‘Don't worry,' but I knew he'd be lost, like Daddy. The fields were the only place for him to go.”

One night, driving home for the weekend, Bud ran his car off the road two miles south of a rig he'd been roughnecking. He never regained consciousness, Mother said.

“Did he ever see your father?” I asked her.

“No, and he didn't meet a woman of his own. He wasn't the type to take up with that sort, and anyway we'd heard the shanty woman was dead by now, killed by some old boy who didn't want to pay for her. They found her half-burned in the Mayberry Field, dress off, doused with gas.”

“Whatever happened to Grandfather Bill?” I asked.

“We heard about him, sick and dying, in a Kilgore clinic years later.” My mother rubbed her throat; she'd gone dry. As in many family stories, the initial point had been lost in the telling. I never understood her fear about becoming the kind of woman she'd described. Maybe she'd been tempted to follow the oil workers herself when she was young, to raise money for June who'd had to scramble for cash after Bill disappeared. In fact, my mother didn't leave home until she met my father – who also eventually wound up in the fields. (My sister, more level-headed than Mother ever gave her credit for being, turned out fine. She's married now and living in Houston.)

That night, twenty years ago, sitting with me in her kitchen, my mother laughed sadly. “I don't know what's so damned attractive about the oil fields, but every man in my life has been drawn to them.”

I remember thinking, Not me. I won't be trapped by that hard-packed Texas ground.

“Bud was such a good kid,” she said. “There was no need for it, no need for it at all … when he ran his car off the road, people said the marks looked like he'd swerved to miss something, but there weren't any tracks in the dirt.”

At twelve, I was already familiar enough with my mother's grim tales to know they usually ended in guilt or remorse. I knew what Bud had swerved to miss on the road that night. I knew why Mother worried about my father when he worked late. The oil field woman would haunt my family from now on.

My father's a quiet man, and shy, and even if the shanties still stood during his wildcatting days he wouldn't have gone to them for the world. But the Mayberry Woman, as she was known in the fields, came to the oil workers now, the way she'd come to Bud and stood like fog in the middle of the road. She didn't say why she came. Maybe she was looking for her money, though what could it mean to her now?

In 1963 my father moved up in the small oil company he worked for. He stopped going to the fields. He bought an air-conditioner and a new car for us, and paid off the mortgage on June's Dallas home. In the evenings we watched television. Dad said the country would never recover from Oswald's rifle in the window. No one told me stories at night to put me to bed. My mother fretted about my sister, my father read the paper. In time, I began to realize it was up to me: I'd been given a version of a story, though I was too young to know how to tell it.

______

For a long time the story stayed inside me. When I was a little older (but still too young to know how to begin) I scared myself with it. Watching meteors one dusk in a mesquite-ridden field I had the sense that the Mayberry Woman was just behind a bush. I wouldn't go to her. A few yards away, on the highway, diesel trucks signaled one another with their horns. I hoped she'd know the drivers were stronger men than I was, full of hard little pills to keep them awake. They'd give her more of whatever it was she was looking for than I could. Presently a jeep loaded with Mexican boys pulled up to the edge of the field. The sky had turned coal black. A spotlight in the back of the jeep flashed on and the boys fired at cottontail rabbits cowering in the mesquite. I sank into myself. The shots didn't come my way. As they hunted the boys sang a story of their own:

La pena y Ia que no es pena; ay llorona
Todo es pena para mi
.

The story was similar to mine: an airy woman, damp with sweat and talcum and cheap perfume, walked the streets of a Mexican town, touching the faces of children, seducing men from the taverns, lying with them in the back seats of rusted cars.

The hunters laughed and didn't even want the dead rabbits. I imagined that, years from now, after they'd forgotten this night, they'd remember the story they were singing.
La Llorona
was more embedded in their minds than the spotlight and the guns, and I felt a kind of kinship with them.

______

This morning I overhear two nurses in the hall, whispering about me. One says, “It's awful the way he leaves his grandma each week, then sneaks back and tells her he's been here the whole time.”

“She doesn't know one way or the other. Her poor old noodle just comes and goes,” the second woman says.

“Still, he oughtn't to lie to her that way.”

Last night a woman died in the room next to June's. It was the first time I'd ever heard a death rattle. Her last breaths came gurgling out of her throat like water draining in a sink. Nurse Simpson cleared her out of her bed, an ambulance pulled up outside the building's back entrance, and that was it.

Now June's clutching and unclutching a Kleenex in her hand. I open the curtains to let in the light. The two nurses who've been whispering enter the room with a pill cart. Tiny color snapshots of all the Parkview residents have been arranged in rows on the tray, next to little paper cups full of capsules and pills. Orange, red, yellow, green. One of the nurses finds June's photo, picks up her cup. Her pills are gray. “Get those things away from me,” June says, covering her mouth with the Kleenex.

“Junie, now, be a good girl –”

“Trying to poison me with that crap.”

The nurse forces the pills into June's mouth with quick sips of juice. “Ought to try to walk a little today,” she says, squeezing June's feet. “Work your legs some.”

“I walked for ninety years. Leave me alone,” June says.

The nurse's white blouse is spotted with large yellow stains. Someone's breakfast. She gives me a hurried look, and I know she's the one who disapproves of me.

“Thank you,” I say as she replaces June's cup on the tray.

The pills always knock June out. While she sleeps I flip through a stack of Kodak prints my mother sent us last week. Family snapshots. A picture of Mom in her high school cheer-leading outfit; her graduation portrait. June pruning roses in her yard. There aren't any pictures of Bill. June destroyed them all years ago, when he left.

An alarm bell rings in the lobby. I go to see what's happened. Mr. Edwards has tried to escape. He's rammed open the back door, the ambulance entrance, with his wheelchair. He has an old fedora on his head and a blue sweater draped across his shoulders; otherwise he's naked. Briefly, I find myself rooting for him but the nurses catch him as he rounds the patio. “Sons of bitches!” he shouts, spurring his chair like a pony.

At lunch the Soup of the Day smells like mercurochrome. June won't eat it. I bring her a ham and cheese sandwich from Burger King. She's lucid and calm. “Where's your wife, Glen? Didn't you get married?” she says.

The question catches me off guard. “No. Well, yes.”

“Shoot, boy.” She cackles then coughs. “Are you in or out?”

“We split up about a year ago,” I tell her. “She's in New Mexico now.” Marge and I only lived together for a few months in a small apartment near Puget Sound. Mom had told June we were married; she wouldn't have understood the kind of loose arrangement we had.

“What was the problem?” June asks.

“I don't know. I didn't make enough money to suit her.”

“What is it you do?”

“I'm a welder.”

“That's right, that's right. Making airplanes.”

“You want these fries?”

She holds out her hand. “I never understood why you moved way the hell up there, anyway. What's wrong with Texas?”

“Nothing's wrong with Texas. I just didn't want to work in the oil fields.” I brush a horsefly off the sandwich paper. “I heard it was pretty out west, so I went.”

“There's worse jobs than the oil fields,” June says.

I laugh. “Sure there are. It's just –”

“What?”

“I don't know, June, it seemed kind of aimless to me. Bill, Bud, even Dad. Moving around from patch to patch …”

“Are you better off making airplanes?”

“No.” I squeeze her hand. “Not really. You want the rest of this?”