“The circumstances.”
“What do you mean, circumstances?”
“Hot pants, cold heart.”
I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, on account of what was running through my head—not about her, but the church, and the singing I’d done, and the crazy twenty-four hours I’d had, with jokes, and a little liquor, but mostly guys slapping me on the back, telling me I was swell. I guess that sounds silly, that a little of that kind of thing could take me so high, but not to somebody that spent two years on the road, and divided the world with the rats. It meant so much to me I kept going back over every little thing that had happened, and thinking what I might have said, swell gags that would have made everybody laugh. Around about daybreak I must have dropped off, because what woke me was the sound of voices downstairs, men’s voices, pitched low, and the smell of coffee. Then, just after sunlight began to shine in the room, there were footsteps outside, the roll of a garage door, and the sound of a car. It was out on the road before the door slammed shut. I lay there, inhaling the cool air from outside, and feeling good, I could smell the morning in it, like I could when I was a kid. And then all of a sudden my heart began to pump, because I knew why that was: what a summer of food, drink, and sleep couldn’t quite do, a little sociability had. It was back, what I’d worked for, hoped for, prayed for. I wasn’t a thing any more, I was a man.
Then hammers began going in my head. There hadn’t been any woman’s voice down there, and that meant she was still in bed, on the other side of the partition from me, not ten feet away. I knew I had to get out of there. I jumped up, dived in the bathroom, and shaved. I stepped in the shower, turned on the warm water, and let it splash over me. The back of the shower was black marble, and I could see reflections in it. Then it seemed to me they moved. I turned and caught my breath. She had on red shoes, red cap, and red enamel on her fingernails, but the rest was pure copper. If that was all, I think I might still have thrown her out. But she closed her eyes, and her lashes lay out on her cheek, like an angel in some old painting. I folded her in my arms.
20
THE MEXICANS WERE STILL playing cards that night when I went in the bunkhouse, and they didn’t even look up when I walked by. I sat watching them, and pretty soon a boy came in, son of a driver, and said Holtz wanted to see me. I went over to his house and he wanted to know what I had on next day. I said spraying as usual, and he said let it go. That time of year it wasn’t so important, and he’d put the Mexicans to leveling road for a while. I, he said, was to stand by a ditch-digging machine that was coming in, to put in a trench for pipe that was to be run over to a field where new trees would be put in whenever the nursery could deliver. “We’ve been digging our own ditches, but on a long one like this, I’ve decided to find out if it wouldn’t be cheaper to hire this fellow and his machine. I’ve got him by the day, though, and that’s where the catch comes in. If he’s broke down half the time, he’ll cost us more, time the job is done, than all the Mexicans I can hire. I want you there. The main trouble with those machines is they’re just one jam of toggle plates, and spite of hell they get fouled up with mud. Take a tank cart with a hand pump, and the first sign of trouble, clean him off. Keep him washed, and maybe we’ll get the goddam thing dug some time between now and Christmas.”
“Christmas? Three days ought to do it.”
“Then fine, take it away.”
I went back to the bunk, found the Saturday Evening Post under my pillow, opened it up to the story I’d started two days before, began reading where I’d left off. It seemed funny, here I’d had the most terrific week end of my life, anyway in the things it had done to me, after what I’d been through, and nobody even knew I’d been away. Everything was so much like it had been that I think I’d have wondered if I’d been away too, if it wasn’t for this thing drilling in the back of my head, this sense of shame over the fine way Branch had treated me and the lousy way I’d paid him back. All during the next three days, out there with Stelliger, the guy with the ditching machine, listening to him brag about how well he’s done with this thing and his bulldozer and his tractor and his shovel and his truck, I kept wishing I could have back the day that had changed everything, and yet knowing I couldn’t have resisted it, once the chance came to me. And I kept dreading Thursday night, when I knew Mr. Branch would be over, propositioning me about rehearsal that night, so we could work up something for Sunday that would be really good. And sure enough, right after supper there he was, over by the store, waving at me with a little grin on his face, and coming over. He apologized at the way he’d run out on me Monday, but said he knew of course his wife would get me home all right. Then he went back over it the swell time we’d had. He said Mr. White had been especially impressed with me, and not to be surprised if something was arranged for me, maybe with the same little independent refinery that backed up right behind Mrs. Branch’s property. I said swell, and wished he would go. Little by little he got around to it, and I could hear myself saying it in a shifty, two-bit way that I hated: that we were awfully busy that week, and I didn’t see how I could possibly help him out with the choir—but some other time, sure, some other time. He swallowed two or three times, and looked away quick. He was like most other hard-rock men, shy on the inside as a young girl, and I stood there with my hat off to him for it, and yet not able to say so.
He was hardly out of sight than there came the pop of a horn from the trees near the shop, and lights blinking on and off at me. I went over and she was at the wheel of her car. “I was looking for you, and then he drove up, and I had to get out of sight, quick. What did he want?”
“Choir.”
“And he came clear over here?”
“What do you want?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ve no place to take you.”
“I have, Jack, as it happens. Nothing but a cottage by the sea, or in plain English a beach shack. But a place—I can take you.”
I tried to tell her to go, that I was ashamed of what we had done, that I was through with her. No words came. Next thing I knew I was in the car with her and we were rolling through the trees. She kept on down 101 to a road that turned right, then ran over to the Long Beach traffic circle. From there she ran on down below Seal Beach. When she came to a concrete apron drifted over with sand, she turned in. We got out and she opened a garage door, got back in, ran the car inside, got out and closed the garage door. We climbed over the dune, that bulges up at that point in a way to make it look like the sea is higher than the road. On the other side of it were shacks. We turned into a little cement walk, she got a key out of her handbag, and opened a shack door. When we stepped inside it was stuffy, like it hadn’t been opened for some time. But after the wind from the sea it felt warm, and we were in each other’s arms, her mouth pressed hot against mine, almost before we shut the door. We stayed an hour. Then we had to leave, so she could take me to the ranch, drive home herself, and still be able to say she had been to a picture show. “... Which one? Do you happen to know?”
“I saw it this afternoon.”
“On purpose? So you could be with me?”
“Yes, of course.”
That went on all fall and through the winter. It was one of those southern California Januaries where it’s spring right after New Year’s, and when she began picking me up Sundays as well as Thursday nights, she’d put on a red bathing suit and go splashing out in the surf. That made me nervous, because it was one more thing to make people take notice of us, but at least, peeping at her through the window while she was out there, it did give me a chance to get some kind of an idea what she looked like. That may sound funny, but getting a glimpse now and a flash then, mostly at night when we were both so nervous we could hardly draw our breath, I still thought of her mostly as a whisper in the dark. Well, she looked like some college girl in her little red trunks, red shoes, red hat, and red halter, and now that the sunburn was wearing off, she didn’t have so much of that coppery Aztec
look. And her eyes, now they didn’t show up so funny, were more human too, and sometimes, specially when she’d keep looking at me while I was doing something around the place, soft, and warm, and pretty. And yet, right in the middle of them, was a light that never quite left them, and that was hard, and meant to take whatever it wanted, no matter who got hurt. She made it plain, morning, noon, and night, that she was taking me. I made it plain she wasn’t and we had a couple of fights about what a tramp she was. Once, when she came to the ranch, I refused to get in the car with her, and she stayed out there, by the shop, with her lights on and her elbow on the horn, till Holtz called an officer, and it wasn’t till he got there that she drove off. The other time I beat it out of the beach shack before she was dressed, and took half the night thumbing my way to the ranch. Both those times I missed her bad, every way there was but the right way. When she showed up after those fights, each time on a Thursday night, I was so glad I was ashamed of myself. “Listen, you big lug, I lie awake thinking about you. I—yen for you. You’re in my hair.”
“O.K., then. I can say the same.”
“You mean you love me, Jack?”
“I didn’t say so. Don’t get so excited. Yen.”
“How’d you like to go to hell?”
“On my way.”
“Jack—no!”
“Then watch how you talk.”
“All right, yen. But a lot? Yen, yen, yen?”
“Yeah, and yen.”
All that time, as I say, she kept looking at me, and I guess I liked it, anyway at first, but then I could see it wasn’t all yen. I’d ask her what it was about, and she’d laugh. But then one afternoon, when we were making a Sunday of it at the beach, she said: “Jack, wouldn’t that be funny if I’d been making the same mistake I made once in a poker game?”
“So you’re a gambler too?”
“I’ve done a good many things.”
“And what was this mistake?”
“I drew to a straight and filled a flush.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You sure?”
“Unless, holy smoke, it was a straight flush.”
“I found that out, when I was getting ready to throw up my hand. A flush wouldn’t have been one-two-three with what was against me. But then I looked again, and saw I had filled a flush and a straight.”
“Did you clean up?”
“Twenty-seven bucks.”
“And what’s that got to do with me?”
“When I drew you, I fell for your beauty.”
“My dimples. I remember.”
“But these last few weeks I’ve been noticing a look in your eye. And I’ve been listening to you talk. Especially about those big dynamos and things you studied in college. And I’ve been wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t have fallen for your brains. I decided, quite some time ago, that a smart dame would keep romance and business separate. I married business, and I guess it works—pretty well. I play around with romance, and I know that works—damned well. Do you hear me, Jack?”
“O.K., but what’s the rest of it?”
“I said it works damned well. What do you say?”
“So does a stink bomb.”
“That’s not nice.”
“Neither is it. Even if it does work.”
It was an hour, I guess, before she decided to go on. Then: “I’m trying to say, if you’d stop insulting me every minute, I had a hunch. Some weeks ago. Like the one I woke up to in the poker game. That maybe you’re a straight and also a flush—beauty and brains all in the same package. I mean, if you tried, you could make the business go damned well, too.”
“Meaning, on husbands, you want to switch?”
“Well?”
“No.”
“Jack, I’m sorry, but for me pretty well isn’t well enough. It has to be damned well or I’m not interested. For three years now that jerk has been trying to sell me something just as good. Telling me I shouldn’t get excited. That I should take it easy. That I should wait. That things are bound to get better.
And I’ve listened to him. Owning property that should make me rich, that could mean something if it was handled right, I’ve stood by and watched it go from bad to worse, until it’s a mess. My wells are pumping less all the time, and in a few years they’re going dry. And yet I have to keep this miserable shack, when with smart work I could have a real place at Pebble Beach, all because a damned jerk—”
“That jerk is a swell guy.”
“A jerk is a jerk.”
“If he says wait, I’d bet waiting does it.”
“I want what I want when I want it!”
“Who sang that was a basso named—”
“Shut up... You going to spray fruit all your life?”
“I didn’t start my life spraying fruit, and I don’t expect to end it that way. But just at the moment, until I see where I’m coming out, I’m doing it. I booted the beans into the fire just once too often, I’m sorry to say, and the way I paid for it I hope you never find out, because I’m not going to tell you. But at that, compared with the onion-hoeing I see most of them doing, and the lousy grand operas some of them are singing, and all the other stuff that’s being done by guys too proud to spray fruit and too dumb to do anything else, my job suits me fine.”
“Jack, I’m talking about big things.”
“You’re not talking about anything that I can hear.”
Now I was myself again, quite a few things had come back, and one of them was the twist in me that made me blow my top when somebody was trying to make me do something I didn’t want to do. And I was finding out things about cold heart. As long as it’s a toy, it can be as childish as anybody, and roar, or kick slippers through the window, or whatever. But when it really sees something it wants, it can wheedle, wait, and watch you for the right time, the right night, and the right place. She let me run down, and when it got dark lit the grate, so we sat there in the blue light from the gas. Then she made coffee and opened some chili con carne. When I said it was time we got started back to the ranch, she got up meek as pie, handed me my tie, and helped me on with my coat. I’d got some new clothes, and she said they looked swell.
But when we got to the Long Beach traffic circle, instead of cutting inland she kept on through Long Beach, and pretty soon turned to the right, into a small narrow street. And then all of a sudden we were in oil, with the reek of it everywhere and derricks all around us, thick as trees. “You like that smell, Jack?”
“Would anybody?”
“You would. For one thing it speaks to your damned machinist’s soul. And for another thing you’ve got brains enough to know it comes from the guts of the earth, and turns wheels and things, and is important.”
“It’s pretty terrific.”
“Couldn’t you say so?”
“I could, if it wasn’t a build-up.”
“For what?”
“The big switcheroo.”
“You’re damned right it is.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“I generally get what I go after.”
There are no street lights in an oil field, and we rolled along pretty slow, through gray tanks, gray pipes, gray pumps, and gray steam. But then, ahead of us, was a string of lights going straight up, in the air, and when we got nearer I could see they were hanging from a derrick. “Now I’m excited, Jack. That’s a new well going down.”
“They work on Sunday?”
“Sunday, Monday, every day, three shifts twenty-four hours around the clock. They have to keep going. If they didn’t, if they broke it off for any length of time, the cuttings would settle in the mud, they’d have to clean out their hole, and they’d lose hours and hours.”
“Mud? What’s that for?”
“It’s pumped through the drill.”
“Oh, to cool it.”
“And carry away the cuttings from the formation. It’s pumped out then.”
“Didn’t they ever try water?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if I could think of it they could think of it. Maybe water’s too thin to carry all that sand and grit and shale away with it.”
“Yes, I think that was the trouble.”
When we got near she cut over, straight across lots, and then we could see the drill crew, five or six of them, in slickers and hard composition hats, all around the rotary table, that was turning in the middle of the derrick floor, a few feet above ground level. They waved her back, but she kept looking them over, and pretty soon spotted one she knew, and spoke to him. He recognized her and said something to the driller, who craned around at us from the levers he had hold of, that were connected with a big drum that had cable spooled on it, and regulated the feed to the bit. He nodded and waved us over and we got out and climbed up there. “We’re putting on a new drill in a couple of minutes, if you want to see it done. I’d stand over by that rathole if I was you. We’re setting pipe on the other side.”
The rathole was an open pipe, sunk down in the ground, that they drop the Kelly in, as they call it, when they’re changing bits. We stood over there, and sure enough, they began coming up with the pipe. A guy went up to what they call the fourble board, that platform you see, about two thirds the way up on all oil derricks, and the guys on the ground began pulling out pipe. The traveling blocks would go up with a stand of pipe, and grab it with a tongs. Then with what they call a cathead they’d break the joint, spin it out with the rotary table, and when it was free, lift it out with a spring hook. Then the derrick man, the one on the fourble board, would guide it behind the fingerboard, as they call it, a rack that holds the pipe, one stand beside the other, as they take it out. Then another section of four would come up, and another and another. So fast I could hardly believe it, they had that pipe out, four thousand feet of it, by my figuring, a new bit on, and the pipe going down in the hole again. The bit was one I’d never seen, though I’d read about it. It had three pinions, with teeth in them, that rolled around and cut the rock, and in the middle of them was a hole that the mud circulated through, to pump out drill cuttings between drill pipe and casing. It made the bit I had smithed up, for the road quarry that time, look like something used by Indians ten thousand years B.C. She explained it all to me, as well as she could, and as soon as the rotary table was going again, so they were making hole, the driller came over and explained it, and in between, the roughnecks explained it. Everybody explained it, and I couldn’t help eating it up. I could have stayed there all night.