Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  It is October 1929 and Corrine’s father is home for lunch. A man who generally hates idle conversation—nattering, he calls it—today he can hardly stop talking for long enough to chew his sandwich. The Penn’s well has come in, a surface blowout so powerful that pieces of drill pipe, caliche, and rock were blown fifty feet into the air. The well blew at nine o’clock that morning, and it is still spewing crude oil. Who knows how many barrels are flowing across the desert? The drill operator has no idea when he’ll be able to cap it. This here’s a historic day, Prestige tells Corrine and her grandmother, Viola Tillman. This is going to put Odessa on the map.

  Corrine and Viola are already gathering up their hats and gloves when Prestige shakes his head and stuffs the last of his fried egg sandwich into his mouth. An oil well ain’t no place for little girls or—he looks at Viola—old ladies. Y’all stay home. I mean it.

  Corrine is tall for her age, but she still has to sit all the way at the edge of the driver’s to reach the starter pedal on her father’s Model T. They careen across the Llano Estacado, the little girl and old woman bouncing madly on the car seat while some of Prestige’s Herefords look on, their jaws working, working. The Penn’s Well is still a mile away when the sky turns black and the ground beneath the car starts to tremble. The air fills with so much debris they have to cover their mouths with handkerchiefs. Lord help us all, Viola says.

  As it falls back to earth, the oil spills out across the land and covers everything in its path—the purple sage and the blue grama grass that Viola loves, the bluestems and buffalo grasses that come nearly to Corrine’s waist. A prairie dog family stands some thirty yards from the growing hole in the ground, their faces lifted as they bark at one another. A small female scutters to the edge of a burrow and peers inside, and Corrine imagines every hidey hole and den within five miles filled with confused little creatures who will never know what hit them. But the fifty or so men and boys who stand around the site aren’t looking at the grass or the critters, or the earth. They are looking at the sky, their faces rapt. It’s going to kill every living thing, Viola says.

  Corrine frowns and sniffs the air while her grandmother sags against the passenger door. Viola’s face is pale, her eyes cloudy. She coughs and holds her hand over her mouth and nose. That smell, she says. It’s like every cow in West Texas farted at the same time. And our trees, she cries, spotting now a stand of young pecan trees in the direct path of a river of oil. What about them?

  But it’s going to put West Texas on the map, Corrine says, and Daddy says this land’s not worth a tinker’s damn anyway. Viola Tillman stares at her granddaughter as if she has never seen her before in her life. The Llano Estacado might not be good for anything except stars and space and quiet, the winter songbirds and the sharp smell of post cedars, after even a little rain, but she loves it. Together, the old woman and little girl have steered their horses through dry arroyos and creosote forests, then sat quietly and watched a family of javelina forage through a patch of prickly pear. Together, they found and named the largest tree on their property—Galloping Ghost, for the shaggy bark that resembles Red Grange’s raccoon coat. Now Viola’s face is the color of cold embers, and her hands are trembling. Take me home, she tells her granddaughter.

  Yes, ma’am, Corrine says.

  Can you drive me back to Georgia?

  In three months Viola will be dead and by then, her granddaughter will have seen enough of an oil boom to loathe every one of them for the rest of her life.

  For three days the Penn’s well spews an uncontrolled stream of crude oil into the air. A house-sized pool forms in a matter of hours and then quickly breaches the sides, destroying everything in its path. More than thirty thousand barrels of oil spill out across the earth before the men get control of the well. And when they finally do, the men stand on the slick platform, their hands and faces stained black. They shout and shake hands and slap each other on the back. We capped her, they tell each other. We got her.

  * * *

  Since Potter died, Corrine knows the night sky the way she knew the contours of his face. Tonight on Larkspur Lane, the crescent moon crawls toward the center of the sky where it will remain for an hour or two before starting its long slide toward the western edge of the earth. Only a smattering of stars remains—The night boils with eleven stars—and the bars have been closed for two hours. The street is dark, except for Mary Rose’s house, which is lit up like a drilling platform in the middle of a black sea.

  Corrine hears Jon Ledbetter before she sees him. His hatchback peels out from the stop sign at the corner of Custer and Eighth, then comes flying around the sharp curve. His windows are open and the music is turned all the way up, Kris Kristofferson’s wrecked baritone shaking the car speakers half to death. A glass of iced tea sweats a dark ring on the concrete porch. Corrine’s too old to sit on the ground for this long with her legs crossed, and she nearly breaks the glass when she struggles to stand up so she can walk across the street and tell Jon Ledbetter to turn down his goddamn radio.

  She is halfway there when Jon turns the music down, and the street is again silent. Mary Rose’s face appears briefly in the window, the kitchen light turning her pale hair white. She stands there for a few seconds, then leans forward and draws the curtain. Corrine’s leg is still half asleep, and she is feeling every bit of the bourbon she added to her iced tea, but she eventually makes it across the street, where Jon sits in the driver’s seat with his hands on the steering wheel, a sad song playing on the radio.

  Corrine hardly knows this young neighbor, Suzanne’s husband, who is always working, always driving out to the plant in the middle of the night after the whistle has gone off, but she recognizes the cant of his shoulders and the stains on his hands. Potter looked like this sometimes, in the weeks and months after he returned from the war.

  When she walks up to the car, she is careful not to touch him. Keeping her voice low, she asks if he would like to come sit down on her porch for a little while, maybe have a glass of ice water or a stiff drink. She’s got this same album and she’ll put it on, if Jon thinks he’d like to hear it again.

  * * *

  The great postwar boom is just getting under way, and the war is far enough behind them that people have started to look forward to things. Corrine and Potter stroll hand in hand through the new car lot on Eighth Street. They kick a few tires and take a couple of test drives then pay cash for a new Dodge truck, and they could not be more pleased with themselves. It is a beautiful machine, a new-model Pilothouse, flathead straight-six. Potter talks Corrine into spending the extra money for the long bed, so they can go for long drives and lie back there, and look up at the Milky Way.

  * * *

  The minute Corrine starts to show, the principal sends her home with a handshake and a jar of his wife’s locally famous chow-chow. What in the hell am I going to do at home for the next six months, she cries in the school secretary’s office, knit booties? The secretary has seen this before. Her own children have been out of the house for ten years, and while she loves them to pieces, she still wakes up every morning and thanks God she doesn’t have to make anybody’s lunch or help them find their homework. Honey, she says, you’re going to be out for more than six months.

  Baby Alice cries every night from midnight to three. Potter and Corrine don’t know why, and they can’t make it stop. They are so tired that Potter develops a tic in his left eye and starts hearing things that aren’t there. Corrine cries and then hates herself for crying because until she became a mother, she never cried, never, never, never.

  * * *

  Nights like this, Corrine tells Jon, she can hardly stand to be anywhere in her house. Not the living room or kitchen, certainly not the bedroom. She can’t move any damned thing—not the stack of TV Guides sitting next to his chair, or the towel that still hangs on his hook in the bathroom. She can still see the mark on the carpet from the snuff can she spent forty years bitching about. She can still see the imprint of hi
s thumb on his old steering wheel cover and the gentle impression of his body on their mattress. His shoes are everywhere. She can’t change the television station.

  Would Jon like a drink? Because she sure would.

  Jon picks up a small book of poems she left on the porch. He holds it carefully with his thumb and forefinger, as if it might go off in his hand. Live or Die. He laughs. Is that a serious question?

  Hell, yes, she says. Would you like a cigarette?

  * * *

  All she and Potter talk about is money and the baby. Nights, they have fallen into the habit of lying in bed while they argue about everything that’s pissing them off. She is going out of her mind staying at home all the time. He is working sixty hours a week and can’t understand why Corrine doesn’t see how lucky she is that she doesn’t have to. She has discovered that she was completely unprepared for how boring motherhood is. He thinks caring for Alice and the house ought to be enough for her. Why doesn’t she find some other young mothers or go to the church meetings, or something? Corrine snorts and rolls her eyes. Well, that will take care of at least two hours in every day, she says. All this fiddle-faddle about women staying home with their babies, if they can possibly afford to do it, is a three-foot-tall heap of Grade-A bullshit. Potter says he can’t imagine what he’ll say to the fellas if his wife goes to work. Corrine couldn’t give two shits what the fellas think. They roll over and face their separate walls. And so it goes.

  * * *

  The shipping operator lost his balance, Jon tells Corrine. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he had a fight with his wife before he left for work, or one of the kids was sick, or some unpaid bill was keeping him up nights. Maybe he was working a double because a man called in sick and the shipping operator had been around long enough to know oil booms don’t last forever. When it came to overtime, he had a simple philosophy. Get it while you can.

  Maybe it is as simple as this: he slipped, he fell. Because this was a job the shipping operator had done a hundred times before, and he could do it with his eyes closed, this routine check on a row of tankers parked next to the loading dock at the olefin plant, this last step before they began filling the tanks with liquid ethylene to ship to California. He was already standing on the top rung of the steel ladder, the other men told Jon, when an engineer far down the line gave the go-ahead to add an extra car, and the slack action from the coupling caused the small jolt that shook the shipping operator’s hands and feet loose and sent him rolling beneath the train. And on any other day, he might have been able to scramble away from the heavy wheels before they rolled across his thighs. Might have. But thinking about it wears Jon out, and it doesn’t matter now, not to this man who died tonight on Jon’s watch. It is my job to keep them safe, he tells Corrine.

  * * *

  Alice is six months old, and she doesn’t sleep. Corrine stands under a hot shower and leans against the wall, knocking her head against the tile just hard enough to make it hurt. She doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t sleep.

  * * *

  Their new truck drives like a dream, Potter tells her, even as he fights to loosen up the gearstick. And would she just listen to this radio! This is called high fidelity! He spins the volume knob all the way to the right. When Hank Williams and his Drifting Cowboys come on, he smacks the steering wheel and whoops. I been in the doghouse so doggone long, that when I get a kiss I think that something’s wrong— Potter falls silent.

  Mm-hmm, says Corrine.

  When they get home, she sends him to the store for something and lets Alice cry in her crib for a few minutes. She calls the principal at the high school. There’s a boom on, she tells him, and I’m thinking y’all might need some help down there. Corrine is right, enrollment has doubled and they are desperate for an English teacher. What does Potter think about her returning to work? the secretary wants to know. Maybe Corrine could ask him to give the principal a call?

  They don’t fuck for months—months!—and it is Potter’s fault. He has let himself go, in her opinion. After the baby came, Corrine must have walked five hundred miles to get her figure back. Living on iceberg lettuce and apples when what she really wanted was a steak and a baked potato with all the fixins. Smoking a cigarette when she might have preferred a candy bar. But Potter is a different story. He put on a few pounds during the pregnancy—thirty, to be exact—from all those nights lying in bed, sharing a dish of Blue Bell ice cream while Alice tried to punch her way through Corrine’s belly. He still enjoys a bowl every evening, brings it right into their bedroom and climbs into bed with it.

  And she blames the baby. Corrine loves Alice with a ferocity that shook her to the core in the days and weeks after the nurses allowed them to bring her home. That anybody would let them leave the hospital with something as fragile and important as a baby—this alone had seemed both miraculous and deeply reckless to Corrine and Potter—but as far as Corrine is concerned, there is an unbroken line of cause and effect between her daughter’s birth and the fact that she can’t get laid. She misses Potter holding her by the hips and looking up at her, misses his finger running along the spot of red that appears on her neck when she comes, the way it deepens and grows and covers her chin and her cheeks.

  The baby is in bed and they are sitting in their chairs, listening to Bob Wills on the radio. Corrine is trying to read a book, but she is always listening for the baby. That’s something I used to do, she thinks, read books. I used to memorize poems and bring myself to tears when I recited them. I used to walk out the door and go for a long drive anytime I wanted. I used to bring home my own paycheck.

  Potter is working a crossword. He sets down the pencil and watches his wife for a few minutes. Hey, he says softly, can I ask you something, Corie?

  Hmm. Maybe.

  What do you need?

  What do I need?

  Yeah. What do you need, Corrine, to be happy with me and Alice?

  She doesn’t hesitate. I need to go back to work, Potter.

  Honey, you work, taking care of Alice and me.

  Yes, I do. I’d prefer to teach English to a classroom full of hormonal rednecks.

  I’m afraid teaching will be too much for you.

  The second the words are out of his mouth, Potter wishes he could have them back. And sure enough, Corrine comes out with her guns a’blazing. Potter, are you shitting me? Are you shitting me right about now? I’ll tell you what I need, Potter. I need for people to stop talking to me like I’ve become a bona fide idiot since I had a baby. I need for the good ladies of Odessa to stop advising me that what I really ought to do is get cracking on another baby. Ha! She slams her book closed and holds it over her head, and it occurs to Potter that she is going to lean over and hit him with it.

  I need to go back to teaching, Corrine says, because I happen to like holding a room full of teenagers hostage while I read Miss Willa Cather’s My Antonia out loud to them. Let somebody else come over here and make goo-goo eyes at Alice for eight hours every day—every day, Potter, and why don’t you think about that for a minute, if you never once left work, what that might be like?

  You were a great teacher, he says, but who is going to watch Alice?

  I am a great teacher.

  They sit and listen to the clock tick. A neighbor’s dog barks. In the kitchen, their new icebox switches on, a steady hum that reaches every corner of the house. He will wish until the day he dies that he hadn’t said it, but Potter has the best of intentions when he sets his crossword on the end table and walks over to sit on the carpet next to his wife’s chair, when he wonders aloud, How soon is too soon to start thinking about another baby?

  * * *

  Alice is her first thought in the morning, her last before she falls asleep for a few hours at night, and all the hours in between. She is a flash of lightning and its aftermath, a fire bearing down on a copse of juniper and mesquite. She is love, and Corrine is completely unprepared for it. Here is a person who is, and must always be, what the who
le world was made for, and without whom that same world becomes unimaginable. If something happens to Alice, if she gets sick, if there is an accident, if a rattlesnake crawls into the backyard while Alice is out there on her blanket—it is enough to drive a woman straight into the arms of the nearest church or, in Corrine’s case, the bookmobile that somebody parked last week on the empty lot less than a block from their new house.

  * * *

  It is also Jon’s job to drive over to the shipping operator’s house in the middle of the night and knock on the front door and stand on the porch until the man’s wife comes to the door. She didn’t want to wake up the kids, he tells Corrine, so he sat with her on the couch while they waited for her sister to arrive. He kept his hands folded in his lap and his fingernails hidden. Back at the plant, he had showered and put on the clean shirt he keeps in his locker. But blood is pernicious and when he sat down on the man’s couch, he could see it under his fingernails and in the wrinkles of his knuckles. The man’s wife asked some questions and he told some lies—it was over quickly, he didn’t suffer, he never knew what happened. Jon watched the man’s wife cross her hands one over the other and push them hard against her mouth. Here’s one true thing he could tell her: He wasn’t alone when it happened, and he wasn’t alone when he died. Jon was there, pressing his hands against the man’s face, telling him that everything was going to be okay.

  * * *

  Alice is already walking when they decide to take the truck out on the highway, open up the engine, and see what it can do. Potter calls his father-in-law and asks if he will take the baby for the night. He has heard good things about the mountains up near Salt Flat, he tells Corrine. There is some camping up that way, but they ought to go now before spring comes and it’s too hot.

  Potter airs his old army tent out in the backyard and checks the seams while Alice wobbles in and out of the heavy canvas flap, singing her only complete sentence. What about me? What about me?