The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (40 page)

“You are! Oh, goodie! Who, if I may ask?”

“Just do as you're told and you'll see. Elgin, give me the key to the truck. I've got lots of running around to do. That tourist camp that just went broke out east of town: there's where I bet you can pick up some beds and things at a bargain.”

“Now just a minute,” said Elgin. “Just whoa right where you're at, Mrs. Floyd. I see now what you're up to. Well, you can just stop before you go a step further. No, sir, I ain't taking in no boarders.”

“Oh, Papa, hush,” said Geraldine.

“Take in boarders? People like us, that may be millionaires any day now? No, sir. Not if I know anything about it. You hear me, Sybil? Here's where I set my foot down.”

“Careful you don't set it where it's liable to get stepped on, hon. Now when you get back from the store, Geraldine, take and start in on them attic rooms with the broom and the dust mop. When you get done up there—”

“What!” Elgin snorted. “You think anybody will pay to sleep up there in that dusty, hot old attic?”

“No. I think they'll pay to sleep in our rooms while we sleep in that dusty, hot old attic.”

With half the family's savings Sybil Floyd bought, in addition to the beds and bedclothes, a second cow to add to the one she already milked, a secondhand cream separator, a bigger churn. To her flock of layers she added another four dozen. She bought pullets to raise for fryers. She laid in stores of staple goods. When Elgin saw all the things she had bought he cried, “You talk about me spending money before we've seen it!”

But the geologists and engineers, suntanned men in whipcord riding breeches, lace boots, and suede-leather jackets, who came out in a big dusty misused expensive passenger car to survey the Floyd place, had sampled Sybil's cooking and their praises gave her confidence in herself. “When they strike oil, Elgin, honey,” said she, “I want you to spend the money just as fast as you can lay your hands on it. All this is just in case they don't. Now on your feet! I've got another job for you. Get your hammer and saw and follow me. You'll need your pick and shovel, too. A one-holer ain't going to do when there are fifteen of us staying in this house.”

Roughnecks, they were called—they gloried in the name. And they looked the part: hard-working, hard-living, coarse, rowdy men. Seeing Geraldine in their midst—a dozen men who had knocked about the world, many of them unmarried, others used to living apart from their wives—Sybil wondered what she had done. Suddenly Sybil's little girl was a big girl. She grew three inches overnight, rounded out as though she had just freshened with milk. The added height was owing to the high-heeled shoes which she would not change for more comfortable ones even when waiting on table. As yet the crewmen were too interested in their food to notice the girl whom their coming had made a woman of. Observing this, Sybil hoped to keep them well behaved by keeping them well fed.

Fine specimens of men they were—muscular, real men—big men for a big job of work. Dirty! They would come clomping in to dinner at noon looking as if they had struck oil already, only a circle of white around their eyes, black with grime, machine oil, axle grease. To wash themselves up before supper they required a hundred gallons of water boiled in drums in the back yard, blackened two dozen towels daily. And how they did eat! Geraldine was kept going at a steady run from the kitchen to the table and back. Platters of fried steaks, pans of biscuits, stacks of hoecakes vanished in a trice. For Sybil, even without other reason, it was hard to remember to be cautious as she heaped up those platters of food. Keeping a boardinghouse was new to her; in her older and more congenial role as housewife and occasional hostess it flattered her vanity to see men relish her cooking so.

Her boarders spoke of the countless boardinghouses which in the course of their footloose lives they had known, heaping scorn upon the grasping and cheating tribe of professional boarding-house keepers. Not only to Sybil's face but among themselves at table they declared loudly that none could compare with her. Hearing this out in the kitchen, Sybil felt ashamed of her impulse to stint them, and taking from the pantry the cutlets or the chops intended for tomorrow's supper, and rousing the fire with a shake of the ash hopper, she refilled the four big skillets just beginning to cease to sputter on the range.

For the drilling crew the day's work began at seven, for Sybil at five. First she split kindling, brought in stovewood, and started the fire. Then she milked the cows, separated the cream and churned butter, collected the eggs. She kneaded dough and stamped out biscuits and when the range was roaring and hopping on its feet and the heat in the kitchen enough to singe your brows, she made breakfast. For each man four fried eggs. Bacon and sausage and fried ham, grits and red gravy, fried potatoes, coffee by the gallon. Breakfast finished, the table cleared, the dishes washed and dried and the table reset, it was time to begin making dinner. There were peas by the bushel to shell and potatoes by the bushel to peel, roasting ears to shuck in stacks like cordwood. There were chickens to kill and pluck and draw, fish to scale, meat to grind. After dinner a dash in the truck into town to shop for the next day while at home Geraldine made the beds and swept, then back in time to scrub and wring and hang out the bedsheets and the towels and iron and start the pies and cakes baking for supper and slice the peaches or the strawberries for ice cream and set Elgin to cranking the freezer. By bedtime Sybil's face was bright red from standing over the range and peering into the oven door, the skin drawn taut, her eyes glazed; and lying beneath the eaves in the attic where the heat made the kitchen seem cool, she passed out murmuring her assent to Elgin's latest plan for where they would go and what they would buy when the money started pouring in.

Elgin could do nothing for hanging around the works all day. All that activity was just too engrossing for a man to tear himself away. To go alone down to the field while all that was going on, to follow behind the mule breaking the stubborn soil beneath a broiling sun while visions of ease filled his mind—Sybil hadn't the heart to nag him. To the tapping of the carpenters' hammers the derrick rose skywards in diminishing X's. The heavy gear was brought in, unloaded from the great tractor trailers, and maneuvered into place. The generator hummed to life, the drilling rig clattered and clanked, the earth shuddered. At night there was a report of their progress: a hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand. A thousand feet! As far as out to the chicken house and back down through that stiff red earth which to have to open one foot of with a plow strained a man's back. Elgin's vocabulary blossomed. He spoke of faults, of lignite, of casings, and when they began to break, of diamond-head drilling bits.

Encouraged by their loud and constant praise, Sybil regaled her boarders with more and more tasty and elaborate dishes. The competent-looking and noisy bustle going on outside, the table talk, rich in the jargon of oil, which reached her out in the kitchen, Elgin's enthusiasm, all combined to lull her prudence asleep. The profit she might expect to make from her enterprise came to seem trifling when compared with the fortune she soon might have. To wish to profit from those who were working so hard on her behalf seemed mean. Sybil ceased to consider the crew as paying boarders and began to consider them her guests. Before long in her off moments she was darning their socks, patching their pants, mending and sewing buttons on their shirts: making for the boys a home away from home. To save, she scrimped the family. She and Elgin and Geraldine ate in the kitchen after the men had finished and were sitting around the parlor listening to the battery-set radio which Sybil had provided for their evening entertainment.

By the end of the first month they were down to fifteen hundred feet and the string, as they called it, was drawn out for a test sample. This indicated the kind of soil associated with oil. Elgin was elated and Sybil also was cheered. She had been sobered to learn when the bills from the butcher and the grocer came in that her expenses exceeded her income and that to make up the difference she would have to make a further withdrawal from the family savings account.

They were down to twenty-one hundred feet when one evening just as the men were starting in on second helpings at the table the world exploded and caught fire. The noise was as though the earth were a balloon and a pin had been stuck in it. On the site of the derrick a column of fire too bright to be looked at shot from the ground up to heaven.

“We've struck gas!” groaned the foreman.

“We've struck,” said Elgin in tones of awe, “Hell.”

A telegram was sent off to the company's head office. Next day a black motorcycle, its noise silenced by the roar of the fire, stopped at the gate in a puff of dust and the driver dismounted.

He looked like a man-sized bug, shiny black, with big yellow bug's eyes sticking out beyond the sides of his head. He wore an aviator's black leather helmet strapped underneath the chin, the immense wraparound goggles, seated on sponge-rubber padding, made of amber glass, reflecting the light like the multicellular eyes of a fly seen under a microscope. He wore a black leather bow tie and a leather jacket with, counting those on the elbows, a dozen zipper pockets, fringed leather gauntlets, black pants as tight as a coat of lacquer, and knee-high black puttees with chrome buckles. Dividing his thorax from his abdomen was a waist no bigger around than a dirt dauber's enclosed in a black kidney belt studded with cat's-eyes in hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades.

He removed the helmet, disclosing a head as hairless as a hard-boiled egg and of the same whiteness. He had neither eyebrows nor lashes nor trace of beard: all had been burnt away. His features were fixed, rigid, expressionless; only the eyes, beneath their lashless lids, moved. A weathered china doll decorating the grave of a long-dead child was what he reminded Geraldine of.

Judging from appearances he was ageless, but according to the crewmen he was no more than twenty-five. And it would surprise them all if he ever lived to see thirty. In that boy's trade few grew old. If he didn't kill himself on that motorcycle first he would either be burnt up or blown up one day.

What on earth would anybody do it for then? Sybil asked.

Some for the money, others because they were too dumb to know any better, Speed here because he was drawn to flame like a moth and because he loved explosives. For what he was about to do, which in actual work time would amount to maybe half a day, he would be paid two hundred dollars at the least. He, however, though at twenty-five his burns had left him hardly any original skin of his own for further grafts, and though he had one elbow stiffened in a permanent half-bend, was missing a finger on one hand and the thumb on the other, and wore a silver plate in his skull the size of a tea saucer—he would probably have done it without pay. He was an artist—and every bit as temperamental; not with a brush nor with mallet and chisel: an artist in dynamite.

“Well, I just hope he don't blow hisself up here,” said Sybil.

“I hope not too,” said Geraldine.

“I'd sooner not have the oil than for anything like that to happen,” said Sybil.

“Poor little old burnt bashed-up thing!” said Geraldine.

He refused Sybil's offer to fix him a bite to eat. Unfortunately she did not have in the house any RC Cola and Tom's Toasted Peanuts, which according to the crewmen was what he lived on. If she had known he was coming she would have gotten some.

In his fire-fighting suit, a padded and quilted asbestos coverall as white as his road costume was black, as bulky as the other was sleek, Speed looked more than ever like a bug, this time one wrapped in its cocoon. Again great goggles, these of brown isinglass like the windowpane of a stove, covered his eyes. In this outfit, it soaked with water, he was going to approach the fire carrying a charge of dynamite fused to go off within seconds and drop it down the hole. When told this, and that it was the only way to put out the fire, Sybil said, “Then let it burn.” Elgin seconded her. He had decided, he said, that he didn't care any more whether he struck oil.

“You may not,” the foreman said, “but we got money down that hole.”

From the parlor window Sybil and Geraldine watched up to the point where, carrying his bundle of sticks of dynamite with its sputtering short fuse, Speed got near enough to the blaze to be forced to crawl on his hands and knees. One, two, mother and daughter both passed out. When they came to the fire was out. The gas capped, the crewmen were piping it to the adjacent field. From the escape pipe, ten feet high, it issued with the hiss of five hundred blowtorches. Such was its force that when it was ignited the base of the flame was twenty feet above the opening of the pipe. The flame itself stood six stories tall, pointed and shaped like a blade. The even pressure kept it ever the same. Not even the wind off those Oklahoma plains could sway it.

“How long you reckon it will take to burn itself out?” asked Elgin.

“Got 'em down south Texas been going like that forty years,” said the foreman.

Speed reappeared in his road costume. The women went out to bid him good-by, Sybil offering up to the time he stomped the starter pedal to fix him a bite to eat, a sandwich for the road, he again with that look of slight nausea in his eyes which the mention of food brought on. He disappeared behind his goggles. He stomped the starter pedal and the cycle roared to life. He lifted his gauntleted hand in a brief farewell.

“Wait! I'm coming with you!” Geraldine yelled. “Can I?”

His reply exceeded in length everything else he had said since his arrival put together. “Hold on you can. Ast for no sidecar. One em thangs on go no fastern a kiddycar.”

“Geraldine!” Sybil shrieked. “Get down off of that thing this minute!”

“Mama, you'll have to just manage the best you can without me,” said Geraldine, straddling the saddle seat, her skirt three quarters of the way up her thighs, her arms hugging that narrow waist encased in its jeweled kidney belt. “Good-by. Tell Papa good-by. I'll write when I get a chance.”