The Hot Kid

by Elmore Leonard

  What puzzled Oris were the dry holes. There weren’t more than twenty in the entire eight thousand acres of wells and two of them were his. What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas—a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day—to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital. Now he sank Emma No. 1, named for his baby girl he’d seen twice in the past four years, and sweet crude came up and came up like there’d never be an end to it.

  Oris’s wife was from Eaton, Indiana, where they’d met while he was working for wages in the Trenton Field. Oris and Doris—he told her they were meant to be joined in marriage. The time came to hook up with her uncle in Oklahoma, Doris was ready to have their third child—three counting Oris Jr., who’d died in infancy of diphtheria. So Doris and their little boy Jack stayed in Eaton with her widowed mother and delivered Emma while Oris was drilling the dusters.

  When Emma No. 1 came in, bless her heart, Oris left the boardinghouse where he’d been staying and moved to the St. James Hotel in Sapulpa. He waited until he’d drilled Emma No. 2 and she was flowing before he phoned Doris.

  Oris said, “Honey? Guess what?”

  Doris said, “If your holes are still dry I’m leaving you. I’m walking out of here and Mama can have the kids. She’s raising ’em anyway, spoiling ’em rotten. Says Emma’s gonna be a nervous stability ’cause I don’t know how to nurse her, I’m not patient enough. How can I be, her hanging over my shoulder. She talks to Emma, tells her, ‘Suck on the titty, Little Bitty,’ what she calls her. ‘That’s it, suck on it hard, get all that mookey.’”

  Oris said, “Honey? Listen to me a minute, will you? We’re becoming rich as I speak.”

  Doris wasn’t finished but paused to hear that much. She was a farm girl, skin and bones all her life, but was strong from working; she had a cute face, good teeth, read magazines and was always respectful of her husband. Saturdays she used to shave him and trim his hair and his big droopy mustache. Then she’d strop the razor and shave her legs and under her arms, the driller twisting his mouth to one side and then the other watching every stroke and getting a boner. Doris was thirty-four by now, the driller ten years older. Saturday was their time to get cleaned up before doing the dirty. She still had a wrathful mood on her and told him, “You know you haven’t seen Jack in going on five years?”

  “I spent Christmases with you.”

  “Twice in that time, two days each. He’s a harum-scarum, hell in short pants,” Doris said. “I’m through trying to manage him. Emma—you haven’t hardly ever seen except in pictures, and Mama’s driving me crazy. You don’t send me train fare right now I’m leaving you. You can come and get your kids you don’t even know.”

  There, she’d told him.

  Doris said now, “For true? We’re rich?”

  “Nine hundred barrels a day out of two wells,” Oris said, “and we’re about to drill other leases. We had to shoot Emma Number Two with nitro to bust up the rock and she came in angry, almost tore the goddamn rig down. I hired a man’s building storage tanks for me.” He said to Doris, “You all right? You feel better now?”

  She did, but there was some wrath left and Doris said, “Jack needs his daddy to make him behave. He won’t do a thing I tell him.”

  “Honey,” Oris said, “you’re gonna have to hang on there a while longer. I bought us a house on Tulsa’s south side, where all the Princes of Petroleum live. Be just another month or so, I’m having the place fixed up.”

  She asked him what was wrong with it.

  “The oilman owned it went bust. His wife left him, his second one, and he shot himself in the head, in their bedroom. I’m having it repainted. The house—they had wild parties and broke things.” He said, “Honey, the house was put up for auction, the man owing taxes on it. I bought it off the county for twenty-five thousand dollars, cash.”

  She had never seen a house that cost twenty-five thousand dollars and asked him what it looked like. He said, “It’s Greek Revival, eight years old.”

  She said, “I don’t know Greek Revival from a teepee.”

  He told her it had those Doric columns in front holding up the portico, and she still didn’t know what it looked like.

  He told her there was a dining room could seat twenty people easy. She imagined harvest hands sitting there having noon dinner. He told her it had five bedrooms and four baths, a sleeping porch, a maid’s room, three-car garage, a big kitchen that had an icebox with seven doors in it, a swimming pool in the backyard…“I almost forgot,” Oris said, “and a roller-skating rink on the third floor.”

  There was a silence on the phone.

  Oris said, “Honey…?”

  Doris said, “You know I never roller-skated in my life?”

  By the summer of 1916 the Belmonts were in their Tulsa mansion, Oris trying to decide what to do about his girlfriend Nancy Polis, a waitress at the Harvey House restaurant in Sapulpa. He felt they should stop seeing each other now that he was living in Tulsa; but each time he brought it up Nancy would cry and carry on, not acting at all like what she was, a Harvey Girl. It hurt him so much he bought her the home she opened as a boardinghouse for income.

  On a Sunday morning in September Oris sat with his wife on the patio having breakfast while the children played in the swimming pool. Doris was reading the Society section of the paper looking for names she recognized. Oris watched Jack, ten years old, talking to his little sis, Emma, four years younger. He watched Emma jump in the deep end of the swimming pool and now Jack jumped in and Emma was hanging on to him screaming, her tiny voice shrill but nothing new, Emma was always screaming at Jack, telling him to stop it and then yelling for her mama. Doris looked up and said, as she always did, “What’s he doing to her now, the poor child.” Oris said it looked like they were playing. Doris said, “She wearing her water wings?” Oris said he couldn’t tell but imagined so, Emma never going in the water without her life preserver. Doris went back to reading about neighbors and Oris picked up the Sports section. He saw the St. Louis Cardinals were still in last place in the National League, the Brooklyn Robins, goddamn it, in first, two and a half games ahead of Philly. Oris looked toward the pool again. Jack was sitting in a canvas chair wearing a pair of smoked glasses too big for his young face. Emma was nowhere in sight. Oris called out, “Jack, where’s your sister?” Doris put down her paper.

  Oris would see the next part clearly anytime he thought about it: Jack on his feet now looking at the pool, then seeing her under water and diving in to save her life.

  She wasn’t breathing when they pulled her out. Oris didn’t know what to do. Doris did, she went crazy screaming and crying, asking God why He took their little girl. Sunday their doctor, who lived nearby in Maple Ridge, was home. He came right away and said, “How long has it been?” And, “Why aren’t you giving her artificial respiration?”

  Oris remembered Jack talking to her, Emma nodding and then jumping in the pool, not wearing her water wings, and screaming trying to hold on to Jack. Oris believed his little girl was unconscious for almost fifteen minutes before the doctor forced her to breathe again and they took her, stretched out on the backseat of the La Salle, to the hospital.

  The lack of oxygen to her brain for that long meant it no longer worked the way it should. She couldn’t walk. She sat in her wheelchair and stared, or crawled around the roller-skating rink upstairs scrubbing the floor with her dolls, or throwing them or beating the floor with her babies until they came apart and there were pieces of dolls all over the roller rink the Belmonts never used.

  Jack talked his mother out of having the swimming pool broken up and planted over. He would catch his dad staring at him and the ten-year-old would say, “I tried to save her, didn’t I?”

  Eight years later the smart-aleck, useless kid was trying to blackmail him. It was time to hand Jack over to Joe Rossi at the tank farm, the daddy of Carmel, the girl Jack swore up an
d down he hadn’t raped.

  Joe Rossi had dug coal in the mines near Krebs, south of here. He served a few years at McAlester as a prison guard before the Glenn Pool boom came on and moved his family to Tulsa to find work in oil that paid a living wage. Mr. Belmont first had him digging earthen pits, big holes in the ground, someplace quick to store crude gushing out of the wells. Next thing he was setting wood tanks over the field before going to steel plates, setting tanks as high as three-story buildings, some holding eighty thousand barrels of crude before pumping it off to a refinery. Joe Rossi was making a hundred dollars a week now running the tank farm and bossing the hard cases working for him. Tankies all drank their wages, saw themselves as the toughest boys on the lease and looked for excuses to start fights. Joe Rossi had fists the size of mallets and used them on payday to stay in charge, hammer anybody told him to go fuck himself, or some such thing. He didn’t mind their getting drunk, but would not take their lip.

  Mr. Belmont said put the boy on the worst job there. Rossi said that was tank cleaning. He said, “You think it’s what you want him to do? The only thing liable to kill a man quicker is shooting nitro.”

  “I want him cleaning tanks,” Mr. Belmont said, and hung up the phone.

  Rossi told Norm Dilworth, a boy he’d brought here from McAlester after he’d done his time, told him to show Jack Belmont the work and stay close to him. Joe Rossi didn’t trust himself to go near Mr. Belmont’s son—not after what he did to his little girl Carmel, the youngest of his seven kids, fifteen years old this past July 16, the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Rossi was afraid if the boy got smart with him he’d crack his head open with a maul and shove him in the muck.

  Rossi said to Norm Dilworth, not much older than Jack Belmont, “He’s the boss’s son. His daddy wants him to learn the oil business.”

  Norm said, “Cleaning out tanks? Christ Almighty, he could die in there.”

  “I don’t think his daddy’d mind,” Rossi said. “He’s a bad kid. You knew plenty like him at McAlester, only they weren’t the sons of millionaires.”

  The two boys were lanky and looked like they could run. Jack and Norm stood smoking cigarets waiting for the setter crew to unbolt a steel plate from the bottom part of the tank that rose a good thirty feet above them, pried it free and used a truck with a chain to drag the plate out of the way. Now a thick black muck was oozing out of the opening to spread in the weeds. They could smell gas fumes coming from inside the tank.

  Norm Dilworth said, “Put out your cigaret,” stubbing his on the sole of a shoe and slipping the butt in his shirt pocket. Jack took another puff before he flicked his cigaret away. Jack was wearing a new pair of Pioneer bib overalls bought yesterday, complaining to the dad at the store with him they were too full in the legs. The dad bought him four pair, a buck ten each, and a pair of work shoes for three eighty-five. Norm Dilworth had on work clothes that would never look clean again but were worn out from washing, suspenders holding up his pants. He wore a hat so old and dirty you couldn’t tell the shade of felt, set on the back of his head. Jack wouldn’t wear a hat less he had on a suit. His brown hair was combed back and plastered down, taking on a shine in the sunlight.

  “That bottom sediment’s what we clean out,” Norm said. “Wade inside with shovels and rakes made of wood—no metal that could cause a spark—and slosh it out the opening. You last all day you can make seven-fifty. Only if they’s gas fumes like in this’n? You can’t stay in there more’n ten minutes at a time. You have to come out to breathe. They’s some companies tell you, ‘Well, you only worked half your time,’ and take out for it. You say, ‘Yeah, well, the other time I was using to breathe.’ It don’t matter, they take breathing time out of your wage. Except Mr. Rossi, he pays a straight six bits an hour. You have to come out, he lets you come out. See, you don’t want to get weak in there from the fumes. I mean it, you fall in the sludge, you’re done. You keep slipping and sliding, you’re choking on the gas and can’t help but fall in the muck. It’s like knee-deep in there, the sediment, and nobody’s suppose to help you, try and pull you out, ’cause you could pull them in and you’re both gone.”

  Jack stared at the black ooze edging toward them while Norm was staring at Jack. Norm said, “I never seen bibs that narrow in the legs. Where you buy a pair like that?”

  Jack was watching the sediment coming closer and closer. “I thought the pants were too roomy. I had one of the maids take ’em in.” He said, “So this Joe Rossi is fair, huh? I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s over in the shack,” Norm said. “He wrote to me at McAlester saying he’d have a job waiting for me when I got my release. So I come here and the next thing I know I got married.”

  Jack was looking at him now, this hick in his worn-out work clothes. “You were in prison, huh?”

  “Year and a day for stealing cars, the first time.”

  “Now you clean tanks for six bits an hour? But you don’t have to?”

  “Shit, I can make forty dollars a week.”

  “What’d you do with the cars you swiped?”

  “Sold ’em. I kept a Dodge to run bootleg till I almost got caught.”

  Jack was getting a better feeling about this hick who knew how to steal cars and run whiskey. “You ever think about getting back into crime?”

  “I kinda miss running wild and free,” Norm said, “but I’ve known Mr. Rossi from when he was a screw over at the prison. He’s always been fair with me. Another thing about working for him, he won’t use ’lectric lights when you’re in the tank. The vents on the roof don’t give enough light, he’ll put batt’rey-powered spots up there. See, ’lectric lights, you got to worry about a current leak. Over at Seminole one time, they go in, switch on the light and she sparked. Seven men in there, the whole tank went up afire and you heard the seven of ’em scream like one person, this awful, bloodcurdling scream and like that”—Norm snapped his fingers—“they’re dead. They’s any kind of spark in there you’re fried. Pull you out looking like a strip of bacon.”

  Jack said, “We the only ones working here?”

  “A crew’ll be coming,” Norm said, and looked over at the shack where Rossi had his office, no one there yet.

  Jack moved along the edge of the sediment to the opening and ducked his head to look in at a dim cavern, spooky in there, poles holding up the roof, the floor thick with sediment. He began to cough and walked back clearing his throat and blinking his eyes from the fumes.

  Norm said, “See what I mean?”

  “I’m not going in there,” Jack said. “I got an idea I like better than getting burned alive. I’m thinking of how me and you can make a hundred thousand dollars and not even get our shoes dirty.” He had the hick squinting at him now with sort of a grin on his face. “You’re the guy I been looking for,” Jack said, “somebody’s not afraid to break a law now and then.”

  Norm quit grinning. “What kind of crime you have in mind?”

  “Kidnap my old man’s girlfriend. Tell him a hundred thousand or he’ll never see her again.”

  Norm said, “Jesus Christ, you mean it, don’t you?”

  Jack nodded toward his Ford Coupé parked off the dirt road by some trucks loaded with used sheets of metal. He said, “Go on get in my car over there. You won’t ever have to clean another tank long as you live.”

  Norm Dilworth looked toward the car and Jack pulled a pack of cigarets and his silver lighter from the overalls that felt stiff on him. Norm looked back to see him lighting the cigaret and yelled out, “No!” and said Jesus Christ, no a few more times, looking toward Rossi’s office, looking at Jack puffing on the butt before he flicked it to arch into the stream of sludge.

  Fire flashed and spread over the ooze out on the ground—they were both running now—the fire wooshing into the tank to ignite the gas and there was a boom inside, an explosion that buckled steel plates, blew the roof off the tank and rolled black oil smoke into the sky.

  Oris Belmont saw it fro
m his office window high up in the Exchange National Bank Building, his NMD Oil & Gas Company occupying the whole floor. The explosion from eight miles away turned Oris in his swivel chair to see that ugly black stain in the sky, rising where his tank farm would be. He thought of his son walking out of the house this morning in his new overalls; Oris remembering the legs looked funny. In nine years there had never been an accident at the farm, not even by the hand of God like a tank struck by lightning, not until the day Jack showed up for work. Oris wasn’t sure what to feel about the situation. He waited for the phone to ring.

  Rossi came on to ask him, “Can you see it?”

  “A full tank,” Oris said, “there’d be way more smoke.”

  “It’s one your boy was to work in.”

  Oris waited.

  “He set fire to the sediment,” Rossi said, “and drove off in his car with another tankie, I guess through for the day. If it’s okay with you, I’d as soon you didn’t send him back here.”

  Oris felt relief. He did, his boy off to work for the first time in his life was alive. It calmed him till he began to wonder, But now what?

  Jack had no trouble getting Nancy Polis out of her boardinghouse and in the car, the woman not even bothering to put on a hat but did grab her purse. She had seen the smoke and believed Jack telling her Mr. Belmont had been hurt in the explosion and sent him to get her. Mr. Belmont wanting her to see he was alive before going to the hospital in Tulsa, as his wife was likely to show up there. No, he wasn’t hurt too bad, just some cuts that’d have to be sewed up, maybe a broken leg set, if it was broke. Jack told her he worked for Mr. Belmont in the office; he’d put on overalls today as they were going out to the lease, explaining this to Nancy Polis squeezed between him and Norm Dilworth in the car on the way to Norm’s house.

  It was toward Kiefer in a stand of pines back of the rail yard. Nancy didn’t ask why Oris would be waiting in this workingman’s house of upright weathered boards, a porch roof in front, a privy in back where a girl was hanging wash. Jack asked Norm who she was. Norm said his wife, and Jack said to bring her in the house.