The Year that Everything Changed

by Georgia Bockoven

  Had there been a day when editors gathered in the newsroom and decided there was only room for one photograph of dancing children in May, or was it simply a matter of times changing the way lives changed?

  Did anyone care?

  Jessie leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and listened to the wind-driven rain hitting his bedroom window. He’d made his twenty-question bargain with Lucy on a whim, never suspecting how serious she’d been or how far she would go to collect until she arrived with a recorder and a box filled with batteries and tapes. At first he’d claimed fatigue and then disinterest; she’d turned away both excuses, telling him a bargain was as good as a promise, knowing he would never renege on a promise.

  He’d finally agreed but balked at her insistence that he begin at the beginning again, retelling the part about leaving home for a second time. As far as he was concerned, once was enough to visit those particular hurts. There wasn’t anything to be gained going there again. But then she’d told him she’d been distracted at the first telling and was sure she’d missed some of the details, and besides, she’d eaten dessert not only that day but several times since. Trading the extra time she’d had to put in at the gym for an hour or two with a recorder seemed only fair.

  What the hell—there was nothing for him in looking forward, he might as well look back. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and put the recorder next to his cheek.

  This second journey into his past was easier than the first. The burden of age and wisdom and hard-won sophistication was shed with careless abandon, like a heavy winter coat at the first sign of spring. It took an hour to retell the beginning, and then, after a break for pills and a cup of coffee, Jessie was back with the recorder and on the road out of Guymon again.

  Jessie’s Story

  Oklahoma looked a lot smaller on the maps I’d studied in the feed store. I’d figured usin’ my thumb and travelin’ due east to Woodward and then dropping south through Watongo I’d get to the Oklahoma City oil fields in a couple of days. I could last that long easy with the food Ma had given me. Whatever else I might need I could get with the five dollars Pa had shoved in my back pocket last thing before he drove away.

  It turned out I wound up walking more than riding. It wasn’t that folks weren’t willing to stop and let me hop on the back of their truck, it was that none of them were going much more than a mile or two down the road. The long haulers I talked to at the gas stations and coffee shops were headed west to California. To a man they told me I was headed in the wrong direction. A couple even invited me to join them, but I told them California didn’t have what I was looking for.

  A hot, dusty, road-weary week went by, and I still hadn’t seen my first oil well. I’d gone slow on the food, not eating till my stomach sent out sounds like the Indian drum Grandma used to call us in from the fields. The piece of ham I’d saved till last spoiled and stunk up the suitcase so bad I couldn’t stop breathing the smell for days. I tossed everything but the stuff I’d tucked into a handkerchief before I torched the house, a shirt and some underwear—the only things I owned that hadn’t been patched or darned three times over—and rolled them in a blanket I stole off a clothesline somewhere between Seiling and Oakwood.

  I kept what little flesh was covering my bones from disappearing by stopping at the back doors of farmhouses and beggin’ for a meal. It didn’t take long to figure out the best times were early morning or a little before noon, when there was something on the stove that could be scooped or ladled or have a corner broken off of and not look like much was missing. When I offered to work for food, as often as not I was given something to make me feel I’d earned what I was given.

  I slept in barns when I could and alongside the road when I couldn’t and never once felt sorry for myself or bellyached I’d been dealt a lousy hand. It didn’t take much lookin’ to see someone worse off. Besides, I was sixteen and free to come and go as I pleased and full of the kind of dreams that made graduating from college seem like coming in second place. I answered to no one, was responsible for nothing, and was convinced I could be or do anything I put my mind to.

  Not that I didn’t stumble a time or two on my glory road. I learned I wasn’t too proud to lick spilled beans off a dirty rock or eat someone else’s leavings at a restaurant. And my pride didn’t get in the way when it came to asking a pretty girl for a handout. I got so good at begging it scared me when I stopped to give it more than a passing thought. I made myself a promise that when it was over it was done. As soon as I reached the oil fields and got a job, I’d starve before I took another dime or bite of food I hadn’t earned.

  I finally hooked up with a real ride about twenty miles outside Oklahoma City. I’d put my thumb out for a truck loaded with pipe, figuring the driver was going somewhere I wanted to be. He took me to the Sudik dairy farm, or at least what had been a farm five years earlier—before the Wild Mary Sudik came roaring out of the ground and blew the cows and people off the land.

  Wild Mary was the biggest thing that had happened in Oklahoma since the land rush—so big, radio stations sent reporters to tell the story to folks listening all over the country. I was eleven, old enough to be caught up in the excitement of a disaster, smart enough not to let on that I was secretly hoping it went on a long time. I asked Pa a hundred questions, most of them starting with why.

  I loved hearing the witnesses tell how the well blew and the escaping gas shot the heavy drill pipes into the air like pieces of straw. It was everything I could do not to cheer when several days later the drama increased dramatically as the wind shifted and sent gas and oil over Oklahoma City. For miles around no one dared light a match to smoke or cook or heat their houses. Even the neighboring wells were stopped for fear a spark would set off a fire.

  The well ran wild for eleven days, roaring so loud the men working to shut it down wore ear plugs or went deaf. Oil covered the land and choked the waterways. Later, I heard somewhere that more than a quarter-million gallons of the stuff was recovered from creeks and ponds and yards. I never heard anyone come up with a reasonable guess at how much was lost.

  And there I was, standing in the middle of where it had all happened, gawking up at derricks pulling black gold out of the ground and making men rich. I stood on the edge of that man-made forest and let the smell and feel and sound of it work its way into my mind and take over my soul. Goose bumps stood up on my arms like rows of mountains; the hair at the back of my neck bristled like a brush. Here was my future, my fortune—and there was no one to tell me different.

  A month later I had money to stuff in my shoe, but not enough extra to get me inside a rooming house. I worked a day or two at a time, doing whatever needed to be done at one well and then moving on to the next. There wasn’t much call for unskilled labor when men who’d been working the oil fields all their lives were standing around with their hands in their pockets.

  A couple of times a week when I was coming or going from town to the fields I would run into Clyde Stephens, the driver who’d given me a ride to the Mary Sudick. He’d stop and pick me up and ask how things were going.

  One day I was jawing about the cold setting in and not having a place to stay or money to pay for it when he offered me the best advice I ever got.

  “If you want to make money at something, you got to be willing to shoot your dog or skip your mama’s funeral if that’s what it takes to be first in line. You came to the wrong place, kid. All anyone around here is gonna let you do is pick up the scraps.”

  “Last I heard my mama was feelin’ fine. And I ain’t got a dog—but I’ll shoot one of yours if you tell me where I oughta be.”

  “You got to go where the wildcatters are. Pick one of ’em you think looks lucky and desperate and then offer to work for food and a place to sleep till they see you’re worth more. Then tell ’em you don’t want cash money, but that you’ll work for a piece of the well when it comes in. You don’t have much to offer so don’t go askin’ for much right off. Even just a litt
le bit will get you started on where you want to go.”

  “Where do I find this desperate kind of wildcatter?” Everywhere he’d been the wells were run by big companies.

  “Jesus H. Christ, boy, you got to do some of this on your own.”

  I saw a hole as big as a tire coming up in the road and grabbed hold of the seat and door handle to ride it out. Still, my head hit the top of the cab and cracked my neck. “I don’t want to be telling you your business, but it seems your truck might last a little longer if you slowed down once in a while.”

  “Can’t. I got ten more deliveries today. Then I’m leavin’ town.”

  He was telling me something I was too slow to figure out.

  Finally he tossed me a disgusted look. “Ain’t you even gonna ask me where I’m goin’?”

  “Didn’t figure it was my business.”

  “I hear there’s some interesting things going on down to Yokum County.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “East Texas, south of Lubbock, right next to New Mexico.”

  “That’s a long drive—three, four hundred miles at least. Seems to me you could get closer to the front of the line if you had someone to help drive.”

  Clyde smiled. “Took you long enough.”

  I had Clyde take me by the creek where I’d set up camp so I could retrieve my belongings I’d hidden in the bushes. We drove straight through and arrived while the celebrating was still going on for a wildcat discovery well they called Ruth E. Bennett.

  I couldn’t find a desperate wildcatter who didn’t laugh at the notion I was worth so much as a barrel of his oil, so I hired on with the Denver Producing and Refining Company. The next morning I told Clyde I’d see him that night. We didn’t run into each other again for nearly a month. Winter was setting in hard, and the crew I was on worked sunup to sundown, then fell into beds set up in tents not a hundred yards from the drilling. We had a Chinese man who cooked for us and a Mexican woman who did the wash. Saturday nights a white whore who called herself Marilyn came by. She stayed three hours, no more, then her boyfriend hauled her out of the tent and took her to the next camp. I got in line a couple of times, but worked it so I never got close enough to drop my drawers.

  I was three months past my sixteenth birthday and still a virgin, a fact I worked hard to keep from the rest of the crew. They must have figured it out somehow because that Christmas I got a present that set my head spinning harder than the bottle of whiskey Clyde and me had shared for Thanksgiving. Her name was Wynona. She was Marilyn’s friend and there to help out for the holidays. Somewhere between Christmas and New Year I fell in love. Clyde laughed when I told him. He said Wynona was old enough to be my ma. Even if it was true, I didn’t care.

  That last night, the one where she told me she was movin’ on, I broke down like a baby, begging her not to go, promising things I had no way of delivering, trying to talk her into staying.

  “You been good to me, Jessie,” she said, my head resting between her full breasts. “I’ll remember you—and that’s sayin’ something.” She sat up and perched on the side of the bed.

  The tent was small and freezing cold, the only heat coming from a cast-iron stove that leaked as much smoke inside as it drew out. Light came from a lantern hanging off a pole in the corner. I knew that once the sun set what happened inside Wynona’s tent was about as private as peeing off the porch, but not even that slowed me down.

  Wynona wrapped herself in the Indian blanket at the foot of the bed. “It’s time you got a move on, Jessie. George and me is pullin’ out early in the morning and headin’ for home. My kids ain’t seen me in so long I’m thinkin’ they forgot what I look like.”

  The woman I loved was a mother. And married. I grabbed my pants and shoved my legs in them. “What kind of a man is George that he lets other men sleep with his wife? And him standing no more than fifty yards down the road? If I was your husband—”

  Wynona laughed. “George ain’t my husband. He’s just someone I hired to take care of me on the road.”

  “But you said you had kids.”

  She looked deeply into my eyes. “How old are you?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “You’re a sweet boy, Jessie.” She handed me my shirt. “But you got a lot of learnin’ to do before you’re a man.”

  “You don’t need George. I could protect you.” My legs should have carried me outside. Instead they buckled and I was sitting on the bed again.

  Wynona put her hand under my chin and brought it up until I was looking at her. “Do you know about women who like other women?” she asked gently.

  I didn’t, but pretended I did.

  “I’m one of them. As much as I like you, Jessie, I could never love you. Not the way you want to be loved.”

  It was funny the way I could feel my heart breaking and at the same time knew I was going to be all right.

  Jessie stopped when he saw Rhona at the doorway. She’d been working for him almost as long as he’d been in Sacramento and nothing, not even coming in on him when it must look as if he were having a conversation with his hand, fazed her.

  “Sorry about interrupting,” she said. “But it’s time for your pills.”

  “You’re not interrupting anything,” Jessie told her. He pressed the off button and tossed the recorder on the table. “I’m through with this nonsense.” No one wanted to hear the ramblings of an old man revisiting his youth. Not really. Lucy was simply taking care of him the only way she knew how, giving him something to do to fill the hours and days, making them seem as if they had purpose.

  Rhona handed him the pills and a glass of water. A month ago he could swallow them all at once. Now he took them one at a time and slowly. “My uncle was in the oil business,” she said. Jessie finished the water and handed her the glass. “He was a wildcatter, mostly in South America. My father used to talk about all the money he made.” She smiled sagely. “My mother told me he spent a whole lot more.”

  “It comes with the territory.”

  “Not with you.”

  “I’ve only been steady the last twenty years. Before that I was up and down as often as the stock market.”

  She let out a snort. “Well, I wish you’d let those people on Wall Street know how you finally figured it out.”

  Now it was Jessie’s turn to smile. “There’s nothing mysterious about it—you quit while you’re ahead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rachel

  Rachel pulled into the parking lot at the soccer field with the scoreboard showing two minutes into the second half. Mothers and a scattering of fathers were gathered on the sidelines, some pacing, most sitting in folding chairs. She opened the door but couldn’t get out of the car.

  She’d accepted how hard it would be to face these people—they were the ones who’d watched the affair between Jeff and Sandy develop during practice while she was at work. They’d witnessed the sidelong glances, the intimate smiles, the growing familiarity, but had chosen not to say anything when they saw her at the weekend games. She knew she was being unfair. She knew it was wrong to allow herself to think one of them could have taken Jeff aside and asked him if he knew what he was doing, what he was risking, and stopped the affair before it happened. It was shifting blame when Jeff and only Jeff was responsible. Still, she couldn’t get past wondering if it was so wrong to think one of them might have cared enough to step in with a warning.

  How did she know they hadn’t?

  The anger and bravado she’d counted on to get her through this first encounter were buried under a blanket of humiliation. What insane ego trip had gripped her when she’d suggested exchanging the kids at Cassidy’s soccer game? What in-your-face-friggin’ point was she looking to prove that she hadn’t already proven when she moved out and had her lawyer contact Jeff for a formal financial support request?

  If she hadn’t promised Cassidy she would be there, if she hadn’t already missed the last three games because
she’d been too humiliated to face the knowing looks of the other parents, she’d leave now. But this was the second to last game of the season, and she’d promised.

  She didn’t leave. Instead she watched the game leaning against the car feeling a twinge of guilt whenever she saw Cassidy scan the sidelines looking for her. The game ended in a three-three tie. The teams lined up in the center of the field to run past each other, their hands in the air for cursory high-fives. Mothers and fathers gathered chairs and bags and blankets while the coach reviewed the game with their daughters, led them in a final cheer, and handed out snacks.

  Cassidy stood apart from the other girls searching the parents on the opposite side of the field. Someone offered her a drink; she shook her head. John danced around her in a five-year-old brother’s bid for attention; she ignored him. Jeff came up to Cassidy and put his hand on her shoulder, inadvertently blocking her view; she moved to look around him. At last she spotted Rachel.

  Plainly puzzled at finding her mother in the parking lot, she offered a tentative wave. Rachel smiled and returned the wave. Once discovered, she had to do something, to join them, or at least meet them halfway.

  She couldn’t; her feet simply wouldn’t move in that direction. When had she become such a coward?

  Jeff turned, saw her, and immediately seemed to understand. He reached for John with one hand, the athletic bag with the other, and started toward her. Cassidy ran ahead.