Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“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.”

Tarrant’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.”