Magnolia City (35 page)

Just as they were falling asleep, she whispered to Garret, “I have everything I want now, baby.” She curled up against him and fell into dreams of delicate tendrils brushing against her skin, fern fronds, mosses, and spores. From a dark corner of the room, lurking in the air currents stirred up by the ceiling fan, something with slitted eyes was watching her.

The fur slips off Hetty, and she stands in the high, thatched house that is shaped like a beehive. In the center of the thatched room lies a large bed of skins where, in the dim light, bodies writhe in a ball like mating rattlesnakes. Santa Adiva is making love to all five of her husbands at once. The men’s naked bodies are coppery, tattooed. They gleam with sweat as they work at pleasuring their queen
.
They take turns plowing her, loosening the carved bone pins Hetty threaded so carefully into her hair.

Hetty cannot look away, even though she feels she should. Adiva’s slit gets stretched by the men until it turns into a cleft in the earth. Hetty peers into it . . . dark and cavernous. She smells crude oil and sees the blue-black water seeping up. Orgasmically, the earth shudders, releasing the buried sunlight of centuries. It streams up from miles down and irradiates the high, thatched roof. Swimming up in the beams of light are the ether bodies of animals buried in the sediment long ago. They escape by the billions and dance in the light: the frogs and the salamanders, the anemones and the mollusks, the snails and the lungfish and the wide-winged dragonflies, hooting together a great hymn of sacrifice and calling for Hetty to redeem their deaths.

Then one of the giant scorpions crawls out of the hole and crouches on the floor of the hut. He is ten feet long. Slowly, he rotates until he spots Hetty. She lifts the flap at the door and flees outside. She runs as fast as she can. Hetty reaches the first shotgun house and rips the door open, slamming it behind her. She runs through the room where Pearl lives, through the makeshift kitchen, into the back room, Pick’s room. But he is not there. His clothes are gone; his furniture stripped away. The scorpion stands in the middle of the bare floor, choking the room. Hetty clings to the wall; he flexes his stinger, swings it in the air.

Hetty woke up sweating. Her head felt too heavy to lift, but she could tell it was early morning by the blue light leaking through the curtains. Ada would be in the kitchen, doing chores. Pearl would be rocking Pierce and singing to him. She lifted the phone and gave the operator the number, leaving a message for Pearl to call her back.

A
brinnng-brinnng
woke her up again an hour later. “Nothing but bad to tell!” Pearl’s voice broke with static.

“Is Pierce all right?”

“Oh, the baby’s fine. Say hello to him.”

Hetty heard cooing and shouted, “It’s Mommy” over and over into the receiver.

“He loves playing with the phone,” Pearl said. “You should get him a toy one.”

“I will. Hey—what’s wrong?”

“I was going to wait until you got back.”

Hetty shook Garret’s shoulder. “Honey, something’s wrong. Tell me, Pearl.”

“Oil’s down to ninety cents a barrel.”

“What? That can’t be! Garret, this’ll wake you up,” she said, pushing the receiver to his ear.

I
n the week they’d been gone, Hetty had forgotten how an oil town smells. The minute she stepped off the train in Kilgore, the stench hit her. Rotten eggs being poached in a pit full of grease. A blue haze carried the stink across the traffic clogging Commerce Street, the air echoing with the sounds of hammering and sawing. Pick appeared out of the crowd on the platform, welcoming them back with his warm smiles and handshakes. He swiveled Hetty’s steamer trunk up onto one shoulder as if it weighed nothing, stowing it in the back of the Wichita. The three of them squeezed into the cab, and Pick honked his way into the stream of vehicles. Derricks seemed to be sprouting everywhere. Hetty counted over a dozen in one block of downtown alone.

“There weren’t this many wells here when we left—were there?”

“No, ma’am.” Pick chuckled. “They’s coming up like weeds all over.” He slowed down as he passed Brown’s Drugs and pointed to the eaves that had been chopped off to make room for a rig. Turning onto Main Street, he rounded a corner cluttered with bricks and debris.

“Isn’t that where Horn Brothers’ Furniture Store used to be?” Hetty asked.

“Sure was.”

Garret whistled as he craned his neck to look at the vacant lot. “They’re tearing down buildings to drill wells?”

“Yes, sir, too many. That’s how come crude’s gone down in price, they say.”

“Yeah, but fifteen cents a barrel overnight? Sounds fishy to me,” Garret said.

“How can the price of something go down that fast?” Hetty gritted her teeth.

“Mr. Hillyer, he came over the other day, and he says, you milk too many cows, price of milk’s going to go down.”

The acrid fumes swam into Hetty’s brain, sparking her exasperation. “But don’t they need oil?” she said. “There’s a depression, for God’s sake. I don’t get it!”

“I bet you the Majors are behind this,” Garret said. “They’re trying to fix prices so they can buy it cheaper.”

The Majors—a term of scorn Hetty had heard other drillers use to describe the big conglomerates like Humble and Texaco. She thought of Splendora and wondered if Chief had anything to do with rigging the price of oil. Or maybe it was John D. Rockefeller. Didn’t Lamar say he owned half of Humble? She wanted to blame somebody for this! “That’s what the Majors always do. And it’s not fair to men like you, honey. We finally get our big break, and they’re trying to take it away from us.”

“They can’t hurt us,” Garret said, pulling out a notepad and scribbling figures on it. “Look at this. I can still pay back the consortium in two months. Then we drill again,” he said, his eyes checking and rechecking the columns of numbers.

It was easy to forget about the price of oil once they got back home and found spring scattering itself over the floor of the pine forests. Rugs of red clover unfurled across the meadows, while long runners of evening primrose paved the side of every road along with pink and yellow buttercups. Other colors began to lace themselves through the deep evergreen of the pines, the light green of budding hickory trees, and the broad handspans of oak.

Pearl and Ada busied themselves in the cool mornings putting in a spring garden, while Hetty caught up on her laundry, hanging the clothes out on the barbed wire fences where they dried quickly in the bright sunny afternoons. Pierce crawled around in the meadow, calling to her. She barely had time to feed him and change his diapers, much less play with him. There was so much to do. He had to content himself with his new toy telephone, which tinkled and talked to him when he pumped the receiver. At night, she and Garret fell asleep to the kind of chirping Hetty associated with crickets.

Every couple of days, their trucker, Mr. Smackover, roared down the creek bank in his muddy Ford tanker, uncoiling his hose while Pick cranked up a centrifugal pump to milk out the eight hundred barrels of oil that had collected in the iron udder of the holding tank. He was their best source of news, reporting what price the Majors were paying for crude on any given day. Garret drove over to the neighboring farm one afternoon and tried to buy mineral leases from Clay and Wavie Goss, but they said they were holding out for the best offer.

By the next week, Hetty had settled into a routine she planned to follow for two months, based on Garret’s revised budget. The family was in the middle of lunch one day when a timid tapping on the door drew Garret out of his chair to answer it. From the table where she fed Pierce, Hetty could look through two doorways and see Pick out in the noon sun, squinting, shirtless, sweat giving his black skin the luster of her onyx earrings. Garret gestured for him to come in. He shook his head.

“What is it, Pick?” Garret asked.

“I thought you should know right off, Mr. Garret. Smack just left. Says the majors ain’t paying ninety cents no more.”

“Oh, shit!” Garret spat out after swallowing a mouthful of food. “What’s it down to now, eighty?”

“No, sir.” Pick took a deep breath.

“Eighty-five, seventy-five?”

“No, sir.”

“What then?”

Pick took a step backward. “He say . . . fifty cent is all.”

Garret slammed the door, then opened it again. Pick stood in the brightness, flinching. “I don’t believe you! You’re lying!”

Hetty felt her lunch turn over in her stomach.

“No, sir. He say.”

“I don’t believe it. It’s oil field rumors!” Garret slammed the door in Pick’s face and stomped back into the bedroom. “I’ll be damned if it’s fifty cents.” Hetty could hear bangs and thumps as more doors were slammed and objects were thrown. She tensed for the sound of breaking glass. Garret strode out with a leather jacket on, keys clenched in his fist.

“Where are you going? Aren’t you going to finish lunch?”

“Tulsa’s. I’ve got to find out the truth. This has got to be a rumor!” When he slammed the door behind him this time, Pierce started to bawl.

Hetty put the baby down for his nap later in the day and went to look for her husband. She found the Auburn slid to a stop in the sand beside the derrick. Footsteps led across the creek bank and the bridge toward the doghouse. She found Garret slumped there in the gloom, a fruit jar of corn whiskey in one hand, a half-smoked Camel in the other. Butts littered the dirt floor.

“Should you be smoking so close to the well?”

He crushed the cigarette under his boot then reflexively fired up another.

“So it’s true?”

“Yeah.”

She sat down on a barrel and pried out one of his Camels. They smoked in silence for a while. Hetty was able to draw the truth out of him in bits and pieces as he used the whiskey to blur the bloody edge of his rage. It seemed that in cracking open the sluice gates of the world’s largest field, the boomers were inundating oil markets all over with a crude so rich in gasoline content it was driving prices down around the globe. Like any treasure, it lost its value when it became so abundant.

“But I don’t understand that,” Hetty said. “If there’s too much oil, why don’t they just store it and use it later? It’s not going to spoil or anything.”

“They’re saying it’s not worth much anymore.”

“But how can they? The oil hasn’t changed. This is East Tex we’re talking about—the sweetest oil on earth. How can it suddenly be worthless?”

“Goddamn if I know. Because somebody says it is. Probably Chief Rusk. I saw a whole convoy of Splendora trucks in town.”

“I’m afraid it’s not Chief this time.”

Garret cast her a baleful glance.

She nodded sadly. “Lamar told me at dinner. He’s going to start major drilling.”

“Christ! That’s all I need—Lamar breathing down my neck.”

“It’s not fair!”

“I know. This is what they did to my dad.”

“Who did
what
to your dad? You’ve never talked much about Termite.”

“They killed him. And now they’re trying to kill me,” he said, staring dumbly off into the treetops.

During the month of April, Garret’s quota of Camels rose from a pack and a half a day to over four. He chain-smoked feverishly as he watched oil prices sink faster than a fishtailed drill bit hitting soft sandstone. Fifty cents the second week, forty cents the third week, thirty cents the fourth week until, by May Day, the unthinkable happened. Prices bottomed out at fifteen cents a barrel.

Hetty could see his head reeling with each new drop as he revised the terms of the contract on paper: at forty cents three more months to pay off the consortium, at thirty cents, six more months. When the scale hit its lowest point, he couldn’t bring himself to do the math, knowing they were probably looking at a year or more of debt and delays. He spent a lot of time out in the doghouse.

Hetty’s daily routine pulled her through: preparing meals, feeding the baby, and helping Pearl boil diapers in a big iron pot outdoors. The chores allowed her to keep reality slightly out of focus in her mind, looking to the day when oil prices would start to rise again. This was only a temporary setback, she told herself—but when she tried to picture her penthouse back in Houston it receded further and further away in her mind’s eye, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Surely it can’t get any worse,” Hetty joked one night at supper, trying to cheer her husband up. “If it goes down anymore, we’ll be paying
them
to haul the stuff away.” Garret didn’t laugh.

They had just gotten up for breakfast one morning the next week, when they spotted Ada tramping down the hill from the farmhouse, her face grim. Garret skivvied on some overalls, but Hetty stepped out into the blue dawn in her nightgown. The grass was soaked with dew.

“This here,” Ada croaked, holding a paper away from her as if contaminated, “come last night. Why is it addressed to me?”

Garret took the document from her and opened it. Hetty leaned over his shoulder to read. It was a proration order from the Railroad Commission of Texas. They had divided the oil field up into sections and set a pro rata for each well to try and bring prices back up. The quota for the Ada Hillyer Number One was two hundred barrels a day, half its usual production. A clause at the bottom warned that anyone caught defying the order would be fined one thousand dollars daily for each day of noncompliance.

Hetty stepped away in the wet grass while Garret read it again, his jaw set. It didn’t take her long to do the math in her head. At fifteen cents a barrel, their current production of four hundred barrels would yield over a thousand a month to pay Cleveland’s consortium, which meant they had some hope of paying him off this year. But at half that, it could take two years or longer. Hetty started to shiver in the morning mist. Cold crept into her bare feet. She glanced past Garret at the shotgun house, so stunted and crude, sitting crookedly on its cement blocks. It was all they had; all they were likely to have for some time.
Now we’re living like shanty Irish,
she couldn’t help but think. Perhaps if she painted it, planted some flowers . . .

Garret handed the paper back to Ada, and they all stood staring at it in her hand, their faces ashen in the gray light.

Mr. Smackover sat as close to their kitchen table as his big belly would allow. He was a ruddy, balding man with rough, swollen hands and a voice like a rasp filing down a pine plank. He had tracked mud in on his boots. Hetty slid a plate of hot biscuits his way and opened a jar of honey. He sliced one immediately and spread it with a thick layer of Ada’s fresh-churned yellow butter. Garret had invited Smack in because he had a scheme for skirting the proration order. Hetty dipped a biscuit in milk and started spoon-feeding Pierce while she listened to Smack’s husky words scratching the air. “What you say—y’all got a problem with bootlegging?”

Garret bellowed.

“Smack, you’re looking at one of the original Tequila Kings right here,” Hetty said and told him a little about their adventures running Mexican hooch down in the brush country.

“I ain’t talking about whiskey. I mean”—he lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper—“oil, running hot oil.”

Garret jumped out of his chair. “Is there a way to do that?”

“I done started. Found me a teapot up in Gladewater pays six cents a barrel, no questions asked.”

“What’s a teapot?” Hetty asked.

“One of them refineries that skims off the white gasoline from the crude. You know, Eastex—that stuff you can buy so cheap at gas stations around here.”

“Six cents a barrel?” Hetty’s eyes locked into Garret’s, both their brains tabulating the same sums.

“It’s better than nothing,” Smack said, gulping down more biscuit. “I got mouths to feed just like y’all.” He nodded toward Pierce in his high chair.

“It’s a deal!” Garret grabbed Smack’s thick hand and squeezed it.

“Long as
you
pump the oil it is.”

Hetty yanked their hands apart. “Then it isn’t. I’ve already watched Pearl lose her husband to jail. I’m not losing mine.”

“But we have to do this, honey. It’ll keep us afloat till prices come back up.”

Both men watched her as she steamed black coffee into her cup. “I don’t want you doing the pumping, Mac.”