The Woman in Oil Fields (3 page)

“Lots of folks. People in the neighborhood. There's some old guys who've lived there twenty, thirty years. They're real unhappy about all the Latins moving in. And the cops are always dropping by, waiting for us to provoke them.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“No, we caught it before it did much damage, but life's getting spooky. Like those fundamentalist freaks blowing up abortion clinics.”

I kissed her forehead. On the wall above her bed, a world map; thumbtacks in every country from which she'd had a lover. “How many have there been?” I asked, pointing up there now.

“I'm not sure. I lost count somewhere down around Bolivia. How're things with Jean?”

“About the same.”

“You could move in with me.”

“I could.”

She yawned. “I don't know why you married that old woman anyway.”

______

Jean was working on a theory that the smallest particles in the brain – which she called “morphemes,” in deference to my dumb grammarian's mind-are trapped fragments of the human psyche, just as matter is a form of trapped light. “Life is electrified activity in which every particle strives to return to pure energy – an unagitated state,” she told me in bed one night. “The easiest way to do this is to attract one's opposite. This movement, of course, dooms each particle to solitude. If it finds its opposite, it dies. As long as it searches, it remains unfulfilled. For every feeling of love there's a feeling of fear. These are physical, palpable things, George, I'm convinced of it. Fear
is
matter. And matter's free when it returns into light.”

“I kind of like the shape it's taken here.” I squeezed her thigh.

She lighted a candle and turned off the lamp. “Do I bore you with my theories?”

“No.”

“One of the worst things about being nearly fifty years old is that life holds few surprises for you.” She cupped herself around my ass. “There's very little I feel excited about anymore. When I latch onto a new idea I tend to get carried away.”

In the mornings she rose early and did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups. On Tuesdays at noon she had an aerobics class. In the evenings she liked to throw a softball around with me in the park. She'd developed a strong arm.

“I'll do everything,” I said in the park one afternoon, returning to my old subject. “Feeding, nurturing –”

“Doesn't track with reality, bucko,” she called back, whacking her mitt. “Babies just naturally go for the mother. We have the milk.”

“It'd be different with an adopted child. They prefer a fuller menu.”

She fired a fastball into my mitt.

“Ow.”

“Even an adopted child would imprint on me. I'm just not willing to do it.”

I watched Mustangs, Impalas, and Gremlins shuttle by on the freeway down the hill from the park. On an overpass someone had painted “War Pigs in Space.” A few miles away, helicopters lowered white stretchers onto the gleaming glass towers of the medical center.

Jean picked up the bat. “You need to decide if you're committed to this marriage before we start talking seriously about adopting a child. Because if we
do
have one, then you run off with your little Leftie, that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I won't get stuck at my age with being a single mother again – Roy's enough.” She tried to hit me a pop fly but the ball sailed over my head. “I told you you'd get tired of me. That day on the golf course, remember? I knew then why you were coming on so strong.”

“I
liked
you.”

“It was the novelty of seeing an old woman who could wear a pair of shorts.”

“Jean –”

“Oh, I have a very clear-eyed view of myself. I have nice legs, but I'm forty-nine years old. You can't hang on to that beautiful young body of yours forever, you know? Golden belly, strong thighs – they're not yours to keep. You don't know what that means yet. Believe me, it's a shock.”

“Let's go get some ice cream.”

“Wake up one morning –”

“Okay? Jean?”

She started to cry.

“For God's sake, you're talking to me the way you talk to Roy,” I said. “I'm just trying to make things smoother here.”

“My breasts sag, George! I have these handles on my hips! I told you that.” She threw the ball in the dirt. “Why didn't you listen to me? Why didn't you leave me alone?”

______

Kelly exhausted and drawn. Another fire at the Casa. They'd lost the whole kitchen and one of the downstairs bathrooms.

“I have to go back there,” she said.

“It's after midnight.”

“Can you stay with the girls?”

Monica and Kate were wide awake. I made some hot chocolate.

“Where's Mommy going?” Kate said. “She has to take care of some business.”

“George, remember that pony we saw at the stable? With the brown spots on his back?”

“No, honey, I wasn't there.”

“Yes you were.”

“Your mother took you to the stable by herself.”

“No she didn't.”

“Did so.” Monica shoved her sister.

“Snotty snotty snotty.”

“That's enough, you two.”

Kate grabbed my hand. “Remember his bulgy eye, George? Was his eye sticky?”

“I don't know, Kate. Probably.”

She tugged my fingers.

“Yes, honey, what is it?” I said.

“Mommy says you live with another lady.”

“That's right.”

“Why?”

“Because she's my friend.”

“Better friends than us?”

“I've known her longer than you,” I explained.

“My robot can turn into a truck. Want to see?”

“Okay.”

“I don't like her,” Kate said.

“You don't know her.”

“When are you gonna live with us?”

“I don't know.”

“I'll help you clean your room,” Kate said.

“Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate that.” I kissed her cheek.

“George?”

“Yes, Kate?”

“This lady?”

“Her name is. Jean.”

“She's like a grandmother, isn't she?”

“What has your mother been telling you?”

“She says she's about a hundred and fifty years old.”

“Not yet.”

Kate sat on her foot. “Does she really have wrinkles on her butt?”

______

Late one night three plainclothesmen arrested two Salvadoran women at Casa Romero and charged them with selling amphetamines.

“They were diet pills,” Kelly told me afterward. “Laxatives. It's a war of nerves. They're trying to crack us bit by bit. They've subpoenaed our files.”

“You've got nothing to hide.”

“Harry, one of the volunteers here at the house …”

“What?” I said.

“He made a couple of border runs.”

“Jesus. Illegals?”

She nodded.

“You told me –”

“I know, but these were desperate people.”

“How many trips did he make?”

“Three.”

“The INS'll have a field day.”

“I'll need you to babysit from time to time, but I think we'd better cool it, George, until things blow over. I don't want you getting mixed up in all this.”

“Kelly –”

“I mean it.”

She was always firm when it came to her plans. I knew I couldn't change her mind. I'd miss spending afternoons at the Casa. The place looked like a take-out barbecue joint – had, in fact, been a restaurant. A Pepsi-Cola bottle cap painted on the side of the house was starting to peel, smoky in the shade of four white oaks. Red cedar picnic tables sat in the front yard next to a gravel drive. Newspapers and old fliers, wrapped in rubber bands, nestled in the high, wet grass. It was homey.

One day at the shelter I'd talked to a thin Latin woman with dark scars on her arms. “Who did this to you?” I said.

“The
Guardia Civil
in San Salvador.”

“Why?”

“They took my husband. I was passing his picture around in church.”

The beige hall carpet smelled of cat pee and vomit. Wallpaper hung in strips, an old-fashioned dial telephone sat on a cardboard box in the corner.

I pulled a notebook out of my pocket. The woman rocked back and forth on the floor. “Tell me,” I said.

“The men in masks, they force you to worship their whips, their fists. They give them names,” she said. “‘The Enforcer,' ‘The Lollipop.'” She rubbed her arms. “After many beatings these words are the only ones left in your head. Your own name has been taken away from you. You've betrayed the names of your family and friends. Water hurts, light hurts, clothing hurts. But the hardest pain is not when they hit you. It's when they make you stand for many hours.” She squeezed her legs. “Alone, in a room. You begin to hate your feet.”

Water trickled through a pipe inside the wall. “The body – its own enemy?” I scribbled. I recalled, as a kid, painting the fireplugs at my father's refinery: the soreness that stayed for weeks in my back and arms, the weight of sitting and walking.

Insults to the body
.

The woman closed her eyes. The hatred and suspicions that characterize put-downs had begun to hit too close to home. I thanked her for speaking to me.

______

I followed Kelly's wishes and stayed away from the Casa. Most days I worked at the press or just drove around. One afternoon I went to the Shamrock Six, Houston's worst movie theater, and bought a ticket to a movie called
Hollywood Student Hookers
. I never knew, in advance, what was playing at the Shamrock, or what time the films started. I came to watch the audience: predominantly black, several generations bunched together in the seats – Great-grandad in the middle, Mom and Dad, festive kids spilling ice on the floor. Everyone talked to the screen.

“Don't go
in
there you fool, he waitin' for you!”

“Now
you gonna get it.”

“Yo ass be grass.”

A circus of insults.'

Hollywood Student Hookers
had been playing for half an hour. I took a sticky seat. A woman shot a man in the face.

“I
tol'
you, sucker,” someone yelled at the screen.

I sat through two showings of the film, greatly enjoying the crowd. Afterwards I swung by Prince's for shakes to take to the girls.

Twice a week I babysat Monica and Kate while Kelly tutored her English students. One day I took them to the “Orange Show” on Houston's east side. That retired postman I'd interviewed had built a monument there to his favorite fruit, using scraps, pieces of farm equipment, and masonry tile. Winding metal staircases, red umbrellas, Texas flags. Stages for music and puppets. I loved to see the girls in my car, the way they sank into the seats like little dolls. Before we'd got in the Beast for this trip, Monica had cut the side of her foot on a sliver of glass in the street. Kleenex and tears.

“George, I'm bleeding on my shoe.”

“It's all right, honey. Press down with the Kleenex.”

Kate shot passing cars with a straw. “Our daddy was supposed to call us last night but he didn't,” she said. She liked to comb the Chrysler's goatskin seats.

“George, I can't walk!”

“When we get there we'll get you a piece of ice to put on it.”

Ten minutes later she was running up and down the metal stairs. It was late afternoon, with a full moon low in the sky.

Watching the puppets, Kate leaned her small body against my back, resting her head on my shoulder, asking questions about the action onstage.

“What's that clown doing?”

“Reading.”

“Reading what?”

“A letter from someone very far away.”

“Farther than the end of the street?”

“Yes.”

“Farther away than the moon?”

“Just about.”

“Oh,” she said, twisting around into my arms. “When will my daddy call?”

“I don't know, Kate.” Kelly's ex was a traffic engineer in San Diego.

“I go see him in the summer.”

“I know.”

“We go swimming.” She crawled off my lap. I showed her the evening star.

______

In the next three weeks, fourteen Salvadorans, eight Mexicans, and a Guatemalan boy were arrested at the Casa, on charges ranging from burglary and smuggling to possession of illegal substances. Casa Romero was ordered closed, its furniture impounded. Deportation proceedings began against nine of the Latins.

“I'm going to Arizona,” Kelly told me one day soon after.

“What's in Arizona?”

“Harry has some friends there who're setting up a shelter. Desert community. Sympathetic to the cause.”

I touched her knee. “Are there freeways in Arizona? I'm not happy unless I'm on a freeway.”

“I know.” She smiled sadly.

“You're sure?”

“Yes. I want to do this.”

“I'll miss you,” I told her, stunned.

“Me too.” She tried not to cry. “You're a real good talker, George.”

______

Driving through the barrios, gazing at graffiti on old city walls:
U.S. OUT OF GUATEMALA, U.S. OUT OF WESTERN EUROPE, U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.

A kid on a bike shot me the finger, out of the blue. I laughed. How could I leave this place, this seething gumbo of spicy, bad behavior? Houston was more than just the city in which I lived. It was a spot whose intricate culture, whose social codes I'd cracked.

I called Kelly from a pay phone and told her I'd live on Fritos if she left. “I'll waste away …”

“You're being deliberately cruel,” she said. “Come with me.”

“What would
I
do in Arizona?”

“Open another press. Write books. I don't know, George.”