Philipp Meyer - The Son

“I have something for the future senator,” she told the aide, hoping he would notice this flattery.

He didn’t. He looked her over and said, “You can give it to me.” He was sweating in his black suit, a northerner, with thick plastic glasses, a man no one had ever liked, who was beginning to come into his own. It was a look she would take for granted among people who worked in Washington.

The man took her envelope and she thought of his boss and she thought of Coke Stevenson, and then she thought about what Phineas had told her before she sat down to write the checks. The problem with most people is they don’t give enough. They all want to be ambassador, but when it comes to giving money they think a hundred bucks is plenty and are surprised when they never hear back. In her envelope were four checks for five thousand dollars each. One from herself, one from their lawyer Milton Bryce, one from their foreman Sullivan, and one from a vaquero named Rodriguez. Sullivan and Rodriguez made less than five thousand a year put together; she’d had the money deposited in their accounts the previous day. Any one of the checks would have bought a new Cadillac and the aide read each one carefully, making sure they were properly filled out. Then he led her over and whispered something to his boss.

Johnson’s face lit up; he was a natural. He nudged a few people and the crowd parted, big ears, big nose, bushy eyebrows, he towered over everyone else.

“You must be Phineas’s niece.” He hadn’t stopped smiling since he landed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, he has spoken about you often and I am pleased to meet you. Tell him I miss those fishing trips.”

“Yessir,” she said again.

Someone was grabbing at his sleeve.

He grinned at her. “Back to work. But I will be seeing you again, young lady.”

After the congressman was back in the helicopter, the aide found her and said: “Since you’re at your limit, next time pay cash. It’s going to be a tight race and we need all the help we can get.” He handed her a peach.

She considered it as she walked back to the car. It was runty and bruised, barely fit for hog feed, and dozens more just like it lay scattered in the dirt.

WHEN WAS THAT? Forty-seven or — eight. She couldn’t remember exactly. To say he was elected was not exactly accurate. Though at least Box 13 had come from Jim Wells County, not Webb or Dimmit. Those years had blurred together. They’d gotten enough wells sunk on the ranch to start a capital flow, then agreed there ought to be no more drilling there. She and Hank had bought a house in Houston. Rented a small office. Then a bigger one. Then they bought a bigger house. The way the economy was going it was impossible to lose money no matter what you did.

In the three years she and Hank had been together, she had expected they might settle into a pattern, boring but stable, they would begin to track like tires settled into ruts. But that had not happened. Their lives were changing too quickly, their business growing five- or tenfold each year, it was hers as much as Hank’s. She was not surprised at her own abilities, which she had always taken for granted, but his, which seemed to have no limit, and she was beginning to wonder if he might surpass her — a thought that was liberating and disturbing at the same time. She’d never considered that she might be looked after, that she might have a normal life and not have to worry so much.

Most of the men she’d known were fools like her father and brothers, their lives shaped by a willful ignorance they mistook for pride. That ignorance guided every moment of their existence and until now, she had never doubted that she saw more clearly, more honestly, than any man she had ever met, with the exception of the Colonel and perhaps Phineas. And now there was Hank.

Though he was not perfect. He had no patience for things he found foolish, even if those things were important to others. There was a coldness about him that was almost northern. That awful writer from New York had come to visit and she had not wanted to meet the woman alone, but Hank had made sure he was out of town. Jeannie, meanwhile, had stupidly agreed to meet the writer at the ranch, an eight-hour drive from Houston — they didn’t own a real plane yet — instead of insisting on meeting at the office. The woman was writing a big novel about Texas; she had already seen the Klebergs and the Reynoldses and had just come from the opening of Glenn McCarthy’s hotel. And she had won the Pulitzer Prize; it seemed a good idea to be in her favor.

They sat down for an early supper; Jeannie instructed the maids to put out the good plates and silver. She noticed the woman appraising those things, she was taking in everything, like a poor relation about to come into an inheritance. She was tall and gangly as a teenager but her hair was gray and frizzy like birds had made a nest of it, and like many northerners, her confidence was out of step with her appearance.

“You’re the millionaire teenager.”

“I’m twenty-two,” she said.

“But you got the money when you were a teenager.”

“That’s true,” said Jeannie. “Though I never thought of that as being of any consequence.”

“Oh, it is,” said the writer. “It most certainly is.” Then she added: “How very Texan.”

She could not tell if this was meant as a compliment.

“Were you very lonely out here?”

“I have a husband now,” said Jeannie, “and most of us don’t live on our land anymore. We’re all city people now.” She wished Hank was with her; he would know the proper way to deal with this woman; she worried she would end up saying something she did not mean.

“The house is decorated unusually for this area,” said the writer.

Jeannie shrugged.

“Very tastefully, I’d say. It looks as if it’s been here forever.”

She shrugged again. She was not going to feed the woman any more gossip. “My great-grandfather was a brilliant man.”

The woman nodded. Jeannie could not understand what was so important about her. Even her hat was ridiculous. Everything about her screamed she was from somewhere else, she was obsessed with how much money and land all the families had, with whatever dirt might be scraped up on them.

The maids brought supper out. Jeannie had considered carefully what ought to be served and, after ruling out anything elaborate that might imply she was seeking the woman’s approval, had decided on fajitas.

Flores was a good cook; she’d rubbed the steak with salt and hot pepper, charred it over mesquite, and served it with heaping sides of guacamole and salsa and fresh tortillas.

When they finished, the hands were getting in from the pastures and taking their places at the long table behind the main house. Flores began to carry out their meal, chatting with them in Spanish. The author watched through the window.

“Do you want me to introduce you?” said Jeannie. “Those are the people who do the work these days.”

“I don’t think I speak their language, darling. But I do think I’ll go out for a cigarette.”

“I need to freshen up,” said Jeannie.

When she returned from the toilet, she found the writer standing next to the window in the dining room, a strange look on her face. “Jeannie,” she said, indicating the vaqueros with her chin, “they are eating the same thing we did.”

THE WOMAN’S BOOK had come out and later was made into a movie starring James Dean. It was one long exaggeration. It made everyone look like clowns, as if they had stumbled dumbly into wealth, as if the state was nothing but backwoods tycoons without two brain cells to rub together.

And yet most of the oilmen had liked it. They began to invent over-the-top mannerisms, throwing silver coins out of the windows of their limousines, taking twenty-thousand-dollar baths in champagne. Maybe it was no different from any other time. The frontier was not yet settled when Buffalo Bill began his shows and the Colonel always complained about the moment his cowboys began to read novels about other cowboys; they had lost track of which was more true, the books or their own lives.