Philipp Meyer - The Son

JOHNSON LOST BY a few hundred votes. But he became senator anyway and Jeannie began to expect his calls. He called on the Murchisons, on Cullen, Brown, and Hunt. There were very few oilmen he did not call on. Sam Rayburn was House Speaker; Rayburn and Johnson were the only thing keeping the Yankees from overturning the depletion allowance and as they would later need Congress to be Republican, the oilmen of the time needed Johnson and Rayburn in charge, they needed the House to remain Democratic, and they gave generously to keep it that way.

They were all gone now: Hank, Johnson, Rayburn, Coke Stevenson, Murchison, Cullen, and Hunt… soon she would join them. She supposed she ought to be happy: nearly everyone she had ever known had passed over to the other side. But she was not happy at all. She was going into a darkness from which she would not return. That others had gone before her did not make any difference.

She was not a good Christian; that was the problem. The true believers all had their motives, things they had wanted, but not gotten in this world — money, happiness, a second chance — but she had those things or did not need them and had always known that the greatest of her gifts was her ability to see things just as they were. To see the difference between her desires and reality. And the reality was that her life would end just like Hank’s. She would not see him again: what made him Hank had stopped existing the moment he died. They now said that even the tunnel of light was just a trick of the neurons. There was only the body. She hoped she would be proved wrong, but she doubted it.

She looked around at the ancient carved furniture and the high cold ceiling and the logs burning without any heat. It might be a sort of purgatory. She would not mind that, remaining like this forever, reliving pleasant memories. She closed her eyes and she was in Washington visiting Jonas. There was someone he wanted her to meet and they had spent the afternoon on his boat in the Chesapeake Bay.

Her legs were tan, not a vein to be seen. She was wearing a white-and-yellow sundress and sitting in a wooden Chris-Craft; Jonas was driving and the man, pale and thin-haired and going pink from the sun, was flirting with her. A pleasant feeling. Not something she would have indulged back home, but here on the bay, under a sky that was blue but not hot, on the water that was clean and cool, she did not mind it.

It was the first time she’d been away from her children in over a year. Though she sensed she was carrying one inside her. Benjamin, probably. She was not showing — the pleasant man had no idea. He was short, soft in the gut, the opposite of Hank, but he was funny and she found him attractive. Though it might have simply been that she was treated better; women still had their place here, but it was not quite as small as in Texas. A Yankee might forget to hold the door, but he might also forget (or pretend to forget) that he was your superior. She began to imagine a life.

Then something passed between the man and Jonas and then he turned to her and was not smiling.

“I hate to get down to business, Jeannie, but I fear our friend the driver”—he indicated Jonas—“has some pressing business back in the city.”

She shrugged as if she didn’t care, though she would have been content to spend the entire day out on the water, away from her children and the telephone.

“What do you know about Mohammad Mosaddegh?” he said.

“I know we should have been more careful of him.”

“What if I told you that he is not long for the throne?”

As he allowed her to process this she realized she might say any number of things. She decided to say nothing. She was glad Hank was not with her.

“Anglo-Iranian will get back some of what they lost,” he continued, “but it won’t be like before. Times have changed.”

She sipped her drink.

“The majors will get the biggest piece, but right now we’re trying to assemble a coalition of the willing. We need good people who have resources available immediately.”

“Because it won’t look good if you give it all to the majors.”

“That is correct,” he said. “And this is America. We like to look out for the little guy.” He went back to looking over the water. “Nice day, isn’t it?”

She knew that Hank would have pressed the man for numbers, for percentages, but that was not the right approach; she simply had to agree and to trust in this man and in Jonas.

“We’ll take as much as you can give us,” she said. She considered asking him what the time frame might be, but that would be even worse than asking for the size of the piece. She felt another wave of relief that Hank was not with her.

“You know Sedco?”

“I know Bill Clement.”

“Get with him when you get back to Texas. Tell him I sent you.”

Jonas turned the boat toward Annapolis; Jeannie and the man went on talking about other things. Their knees brushed, then brushed again. She expected he might ask her for a drink when they reached the dock, decided she would turn him down, but was hurt when he didn’t. Of course it was for the best. She called Hank from her hotel and told him in a coded manner that they ought to free up as much cash as possible. They were both used to calls like that, they both knew better than to ask for details over a telephone.

By then it had been clear for decades that the future was overseas. The first well drilled in Iraq, in 1927, when it was still called Mesopotamia, had come in at ninety-five thousand barrels a day. A big Texas well, even then, produced five hundred, maybe a thousand, and everyone knew it was only a matter of time. The Persian Gulf was where the real oil was. If that well in Iraq had come in ten or twelve years earlier, the Ottoman Empire would not have collapsed. The world would be an entirely different place.

By the 1950s, domestic drilling was a tough business. It cost a fortune, the wells produced less, and once you found the oil, there was no guarantee you’d be allowed to remove it from the ground. The government was planning a war with Russia and they wanted plenty of domestic oil in storage if that happened. The best way to store oil was to leave it where you found it. Strategic reserves, they called it. Good for the government, bad for the oilmen.

There was no good answer. The hot oil days of the ’30s — filling tankers at night and running them over the border to avoid production quotas — were long over. You had to go overseas. All over the old Ottoman Empire, you could pull oil out of the ground for pennies a barrel. There wasn’t much infrastructure yet, but that was just a matter of time.

When I am in my office I leave the door open so that I might hear the faintest noise of her footsteps around the house. If I hear someone on the stairs I walk casually down the hall to see whom it might be, heart rushing… but it is generally Consuela or her daughter.

Have not been out to pastures in several days. Told Sullivan I was buried in paperwork. Since then have been inventing tasks for myself so I can remain in the house.

When I do hear footsteps I rush for my door. If she is not in the west hallway (I am at the end of the east hallway, on the other side of the staircase) I will walk to the middle, hoping to catch her on the stairs or in the foyer below. Then I will stand, pretending to investigate the stained-glass window I have been looking at for thirty years, as from this vantage I can see anyone who passes the main entryway or goes from one side of the house to the other.

María’s footsteps are easily discerned from the vaqueros’ but I am constantly fooled by the light feet of Consuela and her daughter Flores. And by Miranda and Lupe Jimenez. If they see me, they look away — they all now suspect I have designs on them, though in fact I am hoping they are someone else.