Stormy Weather (24 page)

“Yes. We can get there and back in a day?”

“Yes.”

She got up and threw a window open, the one that looked out over the valley where harmless cottony clouds crept over Blanco Mountain, shadow by shadow, and behind them stars lit themselves. The light made her seem almost transparent. The evening wind swept into the room like a guest from the horizon of tabled hills and rippled the fringes of her bedspread.

She smiled at him and he looked away from her sweet mouth and sunburnt skin. He rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them. Desire
had taken hold of him like a mugger. It was beating him up. Many small evasive plans came to him, of stopping off at the Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Courts near Lubbock, where that transparency would dissolve in his hands. He jiggled his foot.

Jeanine sat down on her bed and started laying the piecings of silk one on top of the other, her long legs knobby at the knee, her hair cut at a pageboy length and curling at the edge of her square jaw.

“I don’t know how to thank you for all this stuff, Ross, shingles and glass and tires.” She turned to her closet and brought out the racing sheet and the saddlecloth folded together. “How about these colors? Dark blue and kind of brick red.”

“That will do.” He took the packet from her. “It looks very good.”

“I thought it would show off his color.”

“It will.” He touched her shoulder. “Walk me to the truck,” he said. “I have a train to catch.”

They walked out to his truck. There was a long silence and both of them rested in the cool night, in the new-minted springtime of Central Texas.

“When will you be back?” she said.

“Two weeks, three weeks. Then when I’ve made my contracts, I’m going to be involved in buying up the June shear crop, getting my shearing crews from one place to another.” He laid the folded racing sheet and saddlecloth on the seat.

She put her hand on his arm. Sometimes he seemed like a large older brother or uncle and other times, like now, in the dry clean darkness there was something so powerfully private and sexual between them. He might touch her body, he would lay himself alongside her. He would hear whatever she had to say. He would bend down and listen with that grave, considering expression on his face and so she said, “Ross, we’re all going in different directions.” She took hold of his white shirtsleeve.

“Who?”

“Us. Us here.”

He thought about it for a while. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder and felt the articulation of bones beneath his hand and the light material of her dress. He looked down at her square face and her long gray eyes. He tightened his hand on her shoulder and then he turned away from his thoughts. He said, “Yes. You’re wondering what will become of this place.” He cleared his throat. “Mayme’s very caught up with that Air Force fellow. And your mother is spending a lot of her time in town.”

Jeanine said, “Yes,” and turned to look at the rising moon, which was a dark yellow sickle lifting over the top of Shinnery Mountain. The old barn had held out against gale winds despite its missing boards. The house seemed white and lofty in the dark, pinioned between the two chimneys. She wondered where they had got the stones. If the house were abandoned once again that would be the end of it. She tried to see forward into the time to come. It seemed they all kept turning into other people, that there was no one germ of self held in reserve against all that shifted and changed and blew at them from some remote source. They had wanted so much to come here, this place where she had walked down in the soft darkness with her father and grandfather to listen to the breathing of the work team. And in not too many years they would all go away.

He turned his back to the door of the truck and leaned against it. He put his arm around her shoulders and she came to him and lay her cheek on his shirt.

“Nobody has to get married, Jeanine,” he said. “You can live here the rest of your life if you wanted.”

“I can’t do it by myself.”

“No.” He thought about it for a moment and then said, “No, not alone.” The rat terrier came softly padding across the lawn. He came near them and ducked his head several times and then sat down and
tucked his tail around his front legs and blinked. “Be good to that dog, Jeanine. He’s begging you.”

“I don’t like him.”

“That’s not the point. He runs off the things that get chickens. He kills rats.”

Jeanine shifted away from his arms and bent down and ran her hand over the little bony skull, and the terrier’s tail whipped back and forth. Ross watched her. The dog sat and stared at them with his ears standing up.

“I guess someday we might have to rent the place out,” she said.

“Renters move,” he said. “Three renters is as bad as a fire. You never know what will happen, sweetheart.”

“Then what?”

“Then you just keep trying.” He bent down and kissed her, lightly. “There’s no alternative.” He opened the car door. “I’ve got three days sitting up in coach looking at me.”

Jeanine held the door handle. “Do you have something to eat?”

“Yes.” He slid into the seat and she shut the door. “A lot.” There was a cardboard box beside him on the seat. Probably full of hardboiled eggs and biscuits and other things that would crumble all over his coach seat. He was going to meet the Yankee capitalists of the Rhode Island mills with his worn suit and a box full of homemade food and a Stetson hat. “Good-bye, Jeanine.”

When his taillights had disappeared she walked down to the barn in the dark with Biggety at her heels. She circled the barn and checked the hens shut up in the stall behind chicken wire. They would do this every night. It was to show Biggety that she was on his side and between them they would guard against predators and change and mischance. Then she sat for a long time on the veranda, listening to the familiar dark.

C
ap and the men lived like trolls in the engine shed. They set up a table made of a cable spool and they put a coal-oil lamp in the middle and sat around it on empty wooden liquor boxes and dynamite boxes. They cooked on their tiny cast-iron stove and slept on the floor. One late, hot evening George Lacey drove in and walked in the door of the engine shed and said good evening and sat down with them.

“I’m snooping,” he said. He reached for a deck of cards. “And looking for something to do of an evening.” He shuffled the cards. “I’ll deal you a hand.”

“I don’t play,” said the captain. He lay back on his bedroll, on the floor beside the stove, with a candle stuck in a sardine can. “I quit.”

“Quit what?”

“Shooting dice and playing poker. I don’t wager.” The wind sang in disjointed hoots at the edge of the tin roof and Captain
Crowninshield squinted at the Magnolia field connections foreman in the dim light.

“Well what do you do for entertainment, Mr. Crowninshield?”

“I’m reading a book.”

“What’s it about?” Lacey spun the cards out from man to man and laid a handful of pennies on the table.

“It’s a detective in Los Angeles that’s mixed up with fast women and gangsters.”

“Leave him read,” said Andy. “You just have to leave him read.”

The driller figured Lacey was going to ask him when they were going to give it up. All the core samples were dry as fossils and no sign of sand. In fact Andy had pulled up a sample with a strange birdlike skeleton in it, like a print, something beached in a waterless limestone sea. Both Andy and Otto laid down their cards and yawned until their jaws cracked.

“You play dominoes?” said Lacey.

“Hell yes.” Crowninshield emptied a box of black dominoes out onto the cable spool.

“You got the old well log?” said Lacey. “From when they drilled here before?”

Crowninshield tried to think what business George Lacey had in this wildcat well, and thought for a moment. He should just ask him. When they had reached three thousand feet, Captain Crowninshield asked the shabby producer if he still had the old well log from fifteen years ago, and the producer said he probably did, that he might be able to find it somewhere in his papers. Tells you what kind of outfit Beatty-Orviel was. And he did find it, the long thin strip of paper with mysterious seismograph markings on it, and in some parts the markings were thick with spikes and in others they were so tight as to form a solid bar. Crowninshield had stuffed it into a cardboard box somewhere, he wasn’t sure where. But he left his dominoes and went searching through his piles of papers in the Carnation box. He found
it. He flipped through the log by the light of the kerosene lamp. Ran his finger down the jittering black lines indicating strata.

“What does that tell you?” Lacey said. He scraped up his pennies and put them in his coat pocket.

Andy and Otto lay in their blankets beside the stove and snored.

Crowninshield said, “Not much. In the five years since they drilled here, there’s been a lot of oil pulled out of the field. All over the Woodbine field. Lot of oil, lot of gas.”

“I know it,” said Lacey.

Crowninshield sat down again and shoved the well log at Lacey.

“It means the pressure in the entire field is reduced. The law says now if you hit salt water you got to pump it back in, keep the pressure up. They learned that in the big East Texas strike. In ’31. They haven’t been pumping back salt water like they should, law or no law. So when the pressure changes, gets lower, that means the oil all over the field has probably shifted. It ain’t in the same places it was when they first drilled this hole here, fifteen years ago. So everbody’s guessing.”

“There’s two wells over at Apache where they hit salt water,” said Mr. Lacey. “They’re just letting them blow.” He set up his dominoes.

“I know it.”

“I personally don’t think it ever stops shifting,” said Lacey. “It is my personal theory that something is making more of it down there. Making it all the time.”

The wind sliced through the leaky sills and blew a spider across the floor. It trod with sticky legs across the remains of a shepherd’s pie.

“What’s your interest in this, George?” Crowninshield set up his own line of dominoes.

“A lady has invested in this well that…” He paused. “Somebody I know.”

“Hmmm.”

“Jack Stoddard’s widow.”

“Hmmm.” Crowninshield wiped his hand over his bald head. “I knew Jack Stoddard. The less said the better.”

Andy sat up in his blanket and said, “Judas priest, when is that wind going to quit?” He flopped down again.

“I’ll bring some tow sacks you can stuff under those sills,” said Lacey. He folded up the well log.

Otto turned in his blankets and said, in the strangled, low tone that comes out of a dream, “The wages of sin is death.” Then he kicked his feet out straight and began to snore.

“So are the wages of virtue.” Crowninshield considered his dominoes. “And wages is plural.”

T
arrant’s streets were full on a hot Saturday evening. Jeanine and Milton each paid for their own tickets to the Lyric Theater to see
Bringing Up Baby
, where large overhead fans sucked out the stale air. It made Jeanine feel as if her hair was standing on end. The Movietone News shorts zoomed over a globe that looked as if it were made of plaster but the audience sat and ate popcorn and were entranced with the illusion of being in outer space and regarding their home planet at a distance. Then the newsreel brought them back to earth. There was Mussolini in a uniform and high boots and then the prime minister of Finland. They both seemed of equal importance simply because they were walking and talking through the grainy atmosphere of newsreel films. Then sports. People like Babe Didrikson and Lou Gehrig did not seem to have any stories about them, Jeanine thought; they were sort of human sporting goods.

Dust sifted beneath the double doors and past the concession
stand and then drained down the carpeted aisles and settled at the edge of the proscenium. Amelia Earhart had disappeared in the Pacific and the search had finally been given up. King George was perfectly happy now that his weak and silly brother was married to an American divorcée, and the newest bathing suits were demonstrated on a California beach. Jeanine never saw moving pictures from one month to the next and so was completely absorbed. Milton watched her and laughed when she was so moved by the opening scene of
Bringing Up Baby
that she paused with popcorn halfway to her open mouth to watch Cary Grant, the paleontologist, fit bones onto a brontosaurus skeleton. Katharine Hepburn was impossibly bold and outspoken. Jeanine sank down in her seat in seizures of laughter. She clutched her red-and-white-striped box of popcorn with both hands. Other people in the theater were calling out
Hey shut it up
and
Pipe down
.

“They snatched m-m-my idea,” said Milton. “Dinosaur skeletons! J-jeanine, they are thieves, shameless thieves!”

“What dinosaur idea?”

“You and I st-standing in the Fairy dinosaur tracks, hunting d-d-down the leaping tyrannosaurus…”

Their voices were loud and people called out,
Pipe down, hey, go outside!

Jeanine whispered, “Into a lost world, I get to wear a kind of suede bathing suit and a rock necklace. You wear one of those jungle hats.”

“Yes, yes!”

And at the end Katharine Hepburn, who was a society girl, and Cary Grant, who was a paleontologist, fell in love after one day of insanity, and leopards, and being jailed. It seemed perfectly logical. Jeanine was completely caught up in the hypnotic sequences, the beautiful interiors. It seized her mind.

They walked out onto Main Street, and as they stood on the curb all the streetlights came on. People on the sidewalks glanced up into
the electric glare and then went on in the warm night air, as if they were people on a stage set. The Movietone News and the soft brilliance of the black-and-white film dazed her and she could not shift her mind away from it. Tarrant’s main street seemed like some kind of background to Jeanine, a street full of people hired to wander around, to dance to a jukebox in the drugstore across the street, an empty wagon coming down the street, driven by an actor posing as a tired man who had sold all his produce at the Saturday farmers’ market. So was she, she was some kind of a body in a crowd scene. She was to stay all night with Betty and go to the MacComber House the next day for volunteer work with the Red Cross. Now she and Betty were going to act in some movie scene about aspiring secretaries who roomed together and traded lipsticks.

She took hold of his shirtsleeve. “I feel like an extra, Milton,” she said. “Help me, help me, my mind is stuck in that movie.”

He stood back and blinked at her from behind his thick glasses. “I see. Well, Jenny, the way you can tell if you’re an extra or not is if they p-p-pay you.” He grasped her hand and strode on down the street. They were to go to his apartment over the shoe store and see his radio. He said it was not as seductive as going up to see his etchings but his radio appealed to the mind and not the sweaty, lugubrious body. Milton led her through the crowded street. It still seemed to her they were all people on a stage or a movie set, speaking dialogue. They went up some back stairs in the alley behind the shoe shop and he suggested that he and she escape the fictional world of Tarrant, Texas, the picturesque but desiccated cattle herds of Palo Pinto County, the starving cotton farmers in their costumes of rags, and go to the big city. He said he was smitten with her, devastated, his heart was being crushed like foil in her small, elegant hands and she said for him to give it a rest but she laughed and held his arm.

His apartment was one room with a bathroom over the shoe store, next to Betty’s little room. Long panels of typewritten pages were
pasted to the walls. Wires came through the window and fed themselves into the back of a huge radio. His clothes, what there were of them, were flung over a cot and a pair of shoes turned up with socks spilling out of them, as if they were crawling out and about to begin speaking in tongues. In the corner was a wooden crate of cabbages and potatoes. An icebox dripped. The hot night air poured in through the open window.

He pulled out a chair for her. “I get free ice,” he said. “I get free milk and formal wear from the f-f-funeral home, and fifteen dollars a week. These riches can all be yours if you pledge your troth to mine.”

“What’s a troth?” said Jeanine.

“They bear l-l-live young and lurk under bridges.” He then turned to the big Philco console radio and held his hand out to it. “Jeanine, this is Philco console radio. Philco, this is Jeanine Stoddard.”

“Charmed,” she said. “Crushed, devastated. Slaughtered.” She sat down and crossed her feet at the ankles.

“I sold the family cow for that thing. L-1-look, Jeanine.” He turned the fan toward her and the long strips of newspaper copy fluttered. He gestured out the window. She got up and came to lean out the window frame beside him. “I’ve strung antenna wire in a
hu-u-u-u-uge
c-circle, from the top of the saddle store to the peanut-shelling outfit, warehouse, whatever the hell they call it, to the harness-making place and b-b-back here. I can get anywhere, I can get goddamned
Mars
.” He turned the radio on. A glow appeared from behind its fabric front panel. “It’s on KMOX, St. Louis,” he said. “Listen. NBC.” He sang along with the tones; bong,
bong
, bong. The announcer’s voice came on.
In twenty minutes we will have a report from H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn has spent the last eight days in Munich reporting on these momentous events, barely taking time to eat or sleep.
Milton sat down in a chair beside her and his hair seemed to spike up in yet wilder shocks of internal electricity, his excitement made his glasses sparkle. “J-Jeanine, Jenny, come to Chicago with me. This is a proposal. We
could guh-get married. Lots of people get married. You and I could marry one another, shamelessly, openly. Scandalize everybody.”

“Stop it,” said Jeanine, but she was laughing. “I like where I am.”

“But then we would move back! I promise. Little boys on the st-street would say ‘That’s Jeanine and Milton, used to live in Chi-Chicago!’” He jumped up. Big-band music came through the speaker. “But this is the modern world, Jeanine. Modern! Moving forward, p-pretty soon nobody will be from anywhere. Archaic ties. Ancient tribal deadwood.” He turned down the volume. “I have a favorite d-d-dish, here, saved it just for you.” She bent forward in the chair to watch him unscrew a jar of preserved blackberries, fling them in a dish, crush two peppermint candy canes with a hammer and sweep the crushings into the bowl. Then he took an ice pick and hewed mightily at a block of ice in the icebox and threw in cool, glittering pieces.

They bent over the single bowl with two spoons on his scarred and rickety table while the fan blasted them with hot air.

“You propose to everybody,” said Jeanine. She reached for a dishtowel and wiped her lips.

“No, n-no,” he said. “Just two or three in the past month. A m-month has fled past me during which t-time I have proposed nothin’ to nobody, not nohow.” He bent forward and kissed her. His breath was fragrant with mint and blackberries. “If I could ever get over my stutter I would duh-drop all this cynicism. It’s flat and shallow isn’t it? It’s the fashion.” He dipped into the bowl again. “Just through these copper wires, imagine, the voice and, uh, words have more power and import than they ever have in human history.” He waved his spoon. Jeanine stopped eating the mint and blackberries and listened. “
Never
has the human language been so imp-p-portant and that’s because far away things are now reaching out t-t-t-to us, we aren’t protected anymore here behind the Continental shelf. We can saturate people with words. They believe them. It’s lovely. I want to do that. Come with me to Chicago, Jenny. Sweet Jenny.”

“You’re going to some school for elocution,” she said. “In Chicago.”

He nodded and put one hand to his mouth, briefly. “Learn to speak at will. You don’t know…” He paused and his eyes had a watery brightness. “What a weight it is. Like every w-w-word is weighted or ch-chained.” He took up a triangular piece of ice in the bowl of his spoon. “I have a talent, Jeanine. A g-gift, and it is languishing in chains. So unfair!” He breathed out a long breath and swallowed. “It’s so unfair. And I don’t know why.” He wiped his forehead and then became himself again. “We could make p-plans,” he said. “Plots. I like plotting better than p-planning.”

“You don’t have any money, Milton,” she said. “Are you going to go to school in Chicago on cabbages?”

“Wait and see,” he said. “Juuu-just wait.” He spooned up the last bite, deep purple berries and syrup and bits of candy cane, and put it to her lips and she swallowed it. “Move in town,” he said. “B-b-beautiful Jeanine, of the gray eyes. Town is b-better. Even your cousin has running water. Even I have running water. Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I said I just loved being out there, would that sound crazy?”

“Yes. Everybody wants to get off the d-d-damn farm, Jeanine.”

They sat together on his cot and listened to Kaltenborn’s report from Munich. Jeanine closed her eyes and lay back with Milton’s arm over her shoulder. They were trading countries with one another, chopping off pieces here and there and handing them around. She thought about moving into town. And then to a bigger town, the excitement of Chicago or St. Louis. They were all moving someplace else anyway, weren’t they? This thought made her heart constrict, briefly, and an image came into her mind of the old house empty once again. She could hear the sound of a T&P freight going through Tarrant, such a small place in the middle of Central Texas with the power plant on the Leon River and the farm and ranch stores, the town swimming
pool and the doctor with his cactus growing in the front yard and the hotel where oil leases were sold and marriages betrayed, the rodeo grounds swirling with dust. And beyond the electric lights, the dark hills. Radio waves passed through all these things and were invisible as speech. The Tolliver house and the town of Tarrant suddenly seemed unimportant and common. Jeanine found herself in an anxious dream, walking behind several black-and-white people who were dressed in glossy stylish clothes; she was saying something that nobody was listening to. They would not listen to her. She and Milton were slumped against each other and sound asleep when Betty hammered on the door, yelling for them to wake up.

JEANINE WADDED HERSELF
up on Betty’s couch in a nightgown. Betty’s face was hot and sweaty, she twisted up her hair and said she’d been smooching with Si, and then they got into an argument, right there in the China Moon dance palace, and then they made up and the smooching went on unabated until she tore herself away and ran up the stairs to find Jeanine and Milton asleep and the big Philco radio blasting out Hawaiian dance music. Betty was covered in a yellow nightgown as big as a parachute. Her dark Stoddard hair snarled up in a tangle of pin curls. Lights from a passing car washed across the ceiling and the music of a radio from somewhere down at street level came to them. Betty frowned at her fingernails. She reached for an emery board on her nightstand. “Come on, Jeanine, go to work somewhere in Fort Worth. You could get a good job somewhere. Buy some nice clothes, you could be a receptionist. You could go to work in a flower shop or Montgomery Ward. There’s decent jobs around.”

“I couldn’t stand it,” said Jeanine. The thought of dressing up every day and living in a town and hurrying to please people was enough to freeze her blood. She could never manage to please people and es
pecially not for five dollars a week. “I like to dress in rags and make chicken coops. I’m my own boss.”

Betty didn’t laugh. “Get a dull stupid job,” she said. “Like me. And go out dancing or something in the evenings. Ross Everett is very
serious
about you.” Betty got up and poked in her little cupboard and found a waxed-paper sleeve of Saltines and jumped back in her bed and threw some to Jeanine. “Ross’d just
love
you in a playsuit. Can’t you just
picture
yourself spraying cows with tick dip and wearing a playsuit?” They ate Saltines and scattered crumbs on the sheets.

“I like being at our place. I don’t want a playsuit. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me?” Jeanine found she had dribbled cracker crumbs into the neck of her nightgown and she tried to slap them away. “Why am I eating these things?”