Stormy Weather (3 page)

“Yes,” he said. “Get out so I can drive.”

She didn’t know if this was worse or better. She could have driven slowly up to the house, she could have killed the engine and glided silently into their littered front yard. She could still fix everything by herself. And maybe he wanted to steal the car.

“I can drive,” she said.

“You probably can but I am not going to let you.”

Jeanine got out and stood by the driver’s side, and reached in to turn on the ignition coil for him when he jerked the crank around. He seemed very angry.

“You’re not allowed to steal my dad’s car,” she said.

“I know that.”

She stood on the brick street as he angled his long legs inside. He picked up the sack of flour and dropped it on the floor and seated himself at the wheel.

“I can turn the crank,” she said. “I’ll turn it for you if it dies again.”

“Get in,” he said.

They passed the train station and then went in among the oil rigs that had invaded the very town itself, a dark army marching among
the houses and empty lots. The horsehead pumpjacks groaned and sighed with a sound like great warm rocking chairs patiently creaking in the night. With a kind of helpless terror she saw their house and the coal-oil lamp shining in the front window.

“My mother doesn’t care if I drive,” she said.

“I’ll wager she cares if you drive home with your dad passed out in the backseat at one o’clock in the morning.”

Jeanine wiped tears from her eyes, quickly. “They’re going to fight,” she said. “She doesn’t even know he sold our team.”

Ross Everett started to say something and opened his mouth and then cleared his throat and was silent. When they pulled into the front yard she jumped out of the passenger-side door like a small acrobat. She would tell her mother that her father just now went and fell asleep in the back. Her mother came out onto the front porch. Everett climbed out of the passenger side after her and said good evening to her mother and took off his hat and then put it on again. From the next yard a hen made an interrogative, crawling noise and in the remote distance an airplane bored through the night sky. Jeanine gathered up as many of the brown paper packages of groceries as she could.

At the last minute she remembered to jerk the sack of flour from the front. It landed on the gas cock and the sack tore open and flour poured out onto the floorboards. Jeanine turned to her mother, standing at the open door with the lamp in her shaking hand.

“Thank you, Ross,” she said.

“It’s my fault for keeping him out so late,” said Everett.

Her mother nodded. “Jeanine, don’t lie for him,” she said. She put the lamp on the step and walked toward her daughter and took her hand. “Just don’t lie for him.”

T
hey shifted out to the Permian Basin in far West Texas when the big Yates field came in. By 1928 the north-central Texas boom had played out and settled down to the sedate business of production. Wells had been driven in whatever place seemed to show even the least promise, including a dry hole on the old Tolliver farm itself. The Tolliver well had been drilled by a producer named D. H. Sullivan who was known as Dry Hole Sullivan. He just kept on drilling one dry hole after another and nobody knew how he managed to raise capital for his hopeless ventures but there’s a sucker born every minute and most of them have at least some cash to part with in order to buy one one-thousandth of one one-thousandth of the price per barrel that might come from a future or nonexistent oil well and generally these people lived in Chicago or Baltimore or someplace like that.

THEY MOVED INTO
a section house in a town called Monahans. The section house had been left there by the Texas and Pacific Railroad and then afterward used as a chicken house. Then during the strike it was rented out to themselves and another family. They each had a room, and the other family asked them to turn up their radio at night so they could all hear KBST out of Big Springs. Broken eggshells littered the corners. Her father drove a saltwater pumper; the producers injected brine into the formations to keep up the pressure when the oil was pulled out. Then her father took to driving nitroglycerin. He drove a brand-new 1929 Ford half-ton with
EXPLOSIVES
painted down the side in silver letters and in later years Jeanine came to understand that he also delivered bootleg whiskey with this vehicle and got away with it because the various law enforcement agencies did not want to stop him or to get anywhere near him.

There was no wood to burn in their stove in that remote desert. Coal came in with the tankers that roared into Monahans to take on oil; the coal cars were always at the end of the string next to the caboose. Jeanine and her older sister ran down the line of tankers with buckets to collect coal at five cents the bucket. It was a dirty job and they hated it. They stood and watched in the cold desert mornings with other children as the coal was shoveled out in heaps into the back of coal trucks. It had a slick repellent shine to it. The men shoveling it out onto the trucks could see that some of the children had come to pick up fallen pieces. These were children in thin sweaters and busted shoes, with anxious looks on their faces. The men shoveled big scoop-loads down to them and everyone stood back and let them collect it.

They learned about the crash of 1929 at the salt well. Jeanine had heard about the salt well and wanted to go see it and one day she said she would go by herself if the others didn’t want to come with
her, she would walk along the highway and out into the desert alone. She was not afraid of the empty spaces. She wasn’t afraid to skip school either and she wasn’t afraid of a whipping, since all their mother did was wave a homemade flyswatter at them. Jeanine was eleven now, she had developed a square face and a firm jaw and long gray eyes and dishwater blond hair. She and Mayme and another girl picked up stray pieces of coal that had fallen from the coal cars as they walked. They carried flour bags to collect it. They walked out into the immense flat stretch of the Permian Basin where it stretched without variation like a single note played on a wind instrument, on and on without end. The sunlight shone stark and unforgiving on the twisted brush. The blackbrush and creosote were short and drawn up into wired armatures with brief, hardened leaves.

They came to the derrick and a wellhead that was gushing salt water. The brine was ancient fossil seawater from two thousand feet below, it spouted into the air like a plume and all around it, the engine shed and the derrick itself and an abandoned car and pieces of rope and broken bailers, tin cans, crushed pipe, severed bolts, loops of cable, all were coated with crystallized salt. The fine crystals gleamed like minute gems and every piece of discarded trash shone like the jewels of the Romanovs.

Beside the well was a 1927 touring car with a lot of seismographic equipment, but it was turned off and the geophone needles were dead on their pegs. A man sat in the car with a radio on, and a man in chaps sat beside him. The man in the chaps took off his broad hat and wiped his head with a bandana. The salt water roared.

“Jesus Christ, they’re going down like ninepins.” The men bent forward to the crackling radio. “U.S. Steel and all of them.”

They said hello to the seismograph man and he said, Good day, girls. Mayme asked what was it that they were listening to on the radio.

“The stock market has crashed,” said the seismograph man. He
turned up the volume. The announcer said that Montgomery Ward was falling from 83 to 50 and Radio was hurtling down headlong from 68 to 44. “Are any of you heavily invested in stocks or bonds?”

Jeanine said no, they were not.

“Good. If you do, put your money in oil.”

“All right,” said Jeanine, brightly.

Mayme said, “He’s kidding you, wise up.” They talked in this way because they were very young and had seen various movie stars in films, the starlets who were cynical and smart and tossed their heads at everything. They said wise up, and tell it to your old man, and made the fashionable gestures of shrugging and lifting their chins. The girls stood by the car with black hands, holding their coal, listening.

IT WAS IN
June of 1931 that the Lou Della Crim came in outside of Longview, near the Louisiana border. The Lou Della roared up in a gusher that took the drilling pipe out with it and threw the twenty-foot, two-hundred-pound joints of pipe into the air like jackstraws. The blowout of oil hurled a three-cone roller drill bit the size of an alligator a full two hundred yards. Men ran for their lives. It cost a crew ten days’ labor to shut it down. They had hit the biggest oil pool in the history of the world and it was sweet, high-gravity oil so pure you could almost pour it straight into your gas tank, it was the color of honey. The wildcatter who drilled the discovery well reached the oil-bearing strata with an ancient cable-tool rig and a decrepit wooden derrick and secondhand equipment. The driller and his crew were so broke they were throwing old tires into the steam engine for fuel.

“There’s going to be some wild times out there,” her father said. “They hit it at only fifteen hundred feet, Liz. It’s coming in at nearly twenty-two thousand barrels a day.”

Jeanine came to stand by him at the table and peered carefully at the exclamatory headlines of the
Longview Daily News
. She was shell
ing peas. Strands of desert wind sang at the top of the stovepipe and her mother read a Hardy Boys book,
The Great Airport Mystery
, aloud to Bea, on the other side of the table.

“Those boys are going to need some pipe hauled,” Jeanine said. She tossed a handful of fresh peas into her mouth. Her low, boyish voice made her father laugh so hard he dropped the paper.

“Listen to the girl,” he said. “Ain’t she a pistol.”

AND SO THEY
left the Permian Basin with great hopes, the summer when Jeanine had just turned thirteen and Mayme was fifteen and Bea was six. Their father bought a Reo Speed Wagon flatbed, and on this they loaded all their possessions and left the desert for East Texas. Jack and Elizabeth and Bea rode in the cab and Mayme and Jeanine rode on the flatbed with their trunks and boxes. They spent six days on the road and had eleven flats. Her father poured Karo syrup into the front tires and it made the inner tubes hold out longer. The terrible drought of the early 1930s had reduced Central and North Texas to a country of hardpan and drift and abandoned farms. They saw other people headed east along with them, loaded with mattresses and chickens and children and washboards tied to the tops of Tin Lizzies, all of them journeying toward the East Texas strike where there was work to be had.

The country near the Louisiana border was heavy and green, pine trees sagged under drapes of Virginia creeper vine that had turned the color of rust in the fall air. They came to the town of Arp. Under the black-on-white arp sign a redheaded woman with a flock of guinea hens pecking at her feet sold boiled peanuts from a two-gallon pail. The peanuts tumbled in the smoking water. They were the color of snuff and looked like eyes gone bad. Jeanine and Mayme tried to make Bea eat them to see if it would kill her or not. Bea was, at that time, an obedient and amiable child.

Arp was where the railhead lay, a town of stacked casing pipe and barrels of drilling fluid, piles of cable and whipstocks and food supplies. The trains off-loaded equipment and canned goods and then took on the high-grade East Texas crude into tanker cars. The field had developed so fast there weren’t even enough pipelines. Trucks churned their wheels in the scarlet mud, hauling material to the drill sites throughout Rusk and Gregg counties. Locomotives came through at the rate of thirty a day, fifteen going north and fifteen south. There was almost no housing to be had. A city of tents had grown up around nearly every town in the area, and people lived among the forests of pine like an army of cheerful refugees. Boxcars and tankers arrived behind their engines, screaming out of the pine forests, down the unsteady roadbeds. Boxcars that said
INTERNATIONAL AND GREAT NORTHERN, TEXAS AND PACIFIC, GULF COAST AND RIO GRANDE
. Trains became the sound of Jeanine’s memories of East Texas, the steam engines with their hoarse and violent and distant singing.

Her mother said they would not live in a tent even though Jeanine and her older sister were about to say they wanted to live in a tent more than anything. They imagined looking at the crashing loud oil strike world from under the ballooning fabric, it would be just their own family together under canvas. But their mother said if there was no house for them, she was leaving. She would take the girls and go home, back to the Tolliver farm, and he could make his own way as best he could. Elizabeth Tolliver Stoddard made a dramatic gesture toward throwing the skillet in a cardboard box and folding up Mayme’s overalls. Jack Stoddard reached out to touch Jeanine’s hair and said,
No, Liz, I couldn’t make it without all of you. I’ll find us something. Don’t go, Liz.

They were lucky to get part of a house in on the north side of Longview. It was a farmhouse whose farm had been devoured by the oil fields and the tents and the little board-and-batten rent houses. It
had been added onto many times; the old farmhouse was a confusing jumble of rooms and closed-in porches and windowless additions. Over everything the thin hundred-foot East Texas pines bent in the wind and sang.

They had three rooms in the back, looking out onto the well and the hard-packed dirt of the yard. There were at least three other families in the house but it seemed like more than that because there were so many children running rampant in the day and the night. Some people from Illinois on the second floor screamed at one another about whether or not a one-dollar bill the wife had received for three hens and all their chicks was counterfeit. Another family consisted of a set of parents and two ratlike boys with wide bare feet who attacked each other with chinaberry shooters and screamed and pretended to die. Jeanine helped to unpack; the girls would sleep in one room and their parents in another and they would eat and talk and cook and listen to the radio in the third. They stuck the stovepipe out a window. The sisters called it the Crazy House.

After school they ran down to the railroad tracks and placed things on the rails for trains to run over; sometimes a penny, although pennies were precious. The trains did peculiar things to metal; nails flattened and shone, hairpins turned to steel ribbons. Men in tattered clothes jumped out of the freight cars and ran for the trackside weeds, there were so many of them that the railroad police just stood back and watched them and let them go. They were men who had seen the economic structure of the nation suddenly disintegrate without warning, and they felt they had become citizens of some strange country without knowing it. It was a nation they no longer knew. A wasteland without law or order, and they had taken to traveling through this wasteland almost like tourists.

But there was work in the East Texas oil fields. Jeanine’s father drove loads from the railhead out to the field at ten dollars a load, and then fifteen dollars and then twenty dollars as the drilling became
more intense and the immensity of the oil strike became apparent. The excitement of it gave him a merry, lunatic air. At one drill site, gas came up out of the mud of the slush pit in bubbles the size of baseballs. Jack Stoddard and the crew amused themselves while he waited for his load by throwing matches at the bubbles and watching them explode. He told Liz and the girls it wouldn’t be long before they had them their racehorse. He stopped drinking. He said he did not have a drinking problem, the problem was the hangovers. So he moved on to gambling instead and lost money stone-cold sober.

While they lived in the Crazy House their Tolliver grandparents died within days of each other from pneumonia that many people said was caused by the dust, and Uncle Reid ran off and left Aunt Lillian and cousin Betty. He went north somewhere, maybe to the Oklahoma field, and nobody ever heard from him again. Jeanine realized people you love could disappear. This opened a hole in her universe, some illusory backdrop had torn away and beyond this an unlit waste and she could not see into it. She had a difficult time putting this into words to herself and so she sat with her fists against her eyes as they drove back to Central Texas, looking at the sparks against the dark of her eyelids.