Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“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.”