“That’s all right, Floyd. I just wanted to ask R.J. what the circulation is at The Courier.”
R.J. grinned. “Beats me. Tarman asked me to sell ads. Merchants know The Courier is on its last legs. They wouldn’t embarrass me by asking about circulation. The big outfits like Bob’s Furniture and Farley’s Hardware do television.”
“Thanks, R.J. Good to see you, Floyd. I’ll let you guys get on down to the creek.”
Hillary walked to the car in the glaring sunshine. Last legs? Her job at the paper had been her long-term plan. Her heart was beating hard. She’d been so furious and bull-headed-proud at the time of the divorce that she’d given up too much to her ex. She had to have this job.
She got in her Civic and turned on the air conditioning. Tarman was shortsighted in his vision for the paper. Why was he letting it drift into the ditch? That would be a big story: Editor Kills His Own Paper.
She didn’t really know his story except that he had been divorced in the late 80s. She wasn’t dumb enough to push him on the circulation numbers. But if The Courier really went under, she and poor old Duffy would be out on the street.
Being a divorced mother living outside of town, Hillary’s personal life was now contained in a small orbit: care for her ten-year-old daughter, maintain a small farmhouse, and go to work. When she was married, she and Robert had a social life with other couples. But now, any activities outside the home were planned to the taste of a ten-year-old. At least her evenings were available to write up her stories. And with no husband to talk to, she was free to scheme about her still-modest career.
The next morning she entered the gummy interior of Mr. Tarman’s nicotine den. “I have a proposition for you, Mr. Tarman.”
He looked surprised. She hadn’t knocked.
“I believe my idea for a column will raise the number of subscriptions. We both know that number is inching down. If, after my column has run for six weeks, that downward trend has ceased, I get to keep going.”
“Hold on now.”
“It wouldn’t be my writing.”
“What?”
“It would be an opportunity for your readers to send in—”
“We’ve got an advice column already. Dear Amy. A chance for readers to lay out the pathetic details of their love lives.”
“No, this is a chance to express themselves about their town. ‘Cadillac Voices.’ This would give readers a bit of a stake in the paper. They could contribute pieces of local history. Information that only they have because it’s been passed down in their family.”
Tarman leaned back and chewed on his cigar. “You know what you’re going to get—a lot of illiterate yammering, and then we’ll have to discontinue the column and a few readers will be pissed and cancel their subscriptions.”
Tarman sat up straighter. “I started this paper over forty years ago. It was going to inform opinions, get people talking about local and state issues, raise the level of conversation!” His nostrils flared and he stared straight ahead. “Oh, it was going to be a big asset to the community until everybody got their news from television and then everybody got their news from computers. Besides, you don’t want to know what’s out there. A lot of empty-headed, knee-jerk spewing that people will pass off as their opinions. I know this town, kiddo.”
“But we have experts here. People over at the community college. There are more PhDs over there than you’d think. This could tap into what they have to offer. Believe me. If they wrote it, they will want to read it and have their colleagues read it. They’ll put it on their resumés, for godsake.”
“You’ll have to insist on a word limit if you get those people involved.”
“Let’s try it. What have we got to lose? People will be proud to see their piece in their hometown paper.”
“And fix all the spelling and grammar in the rest. Maybe some old-timers could give us some history we could use as filler.”
“What could be great is hearing from young people about their jobs or students talking about their classes. Newcomers, what are their first impressions? Are we as friendly a town as our advertising says we are?”
Tarman hissed a long sigh. “I’m warning you, this is going bring in a load of crap.”
“Okay. We’ll see. I’ll write a short piece announcing it.” She smiled.
“Hold on now. We’ll see if we get anything the first time.”
Three weeks later Hillary had made her selection for the first Voice. She threw a headline on it and carried it into Mr. Tarman’s office.
WHEN IT WAS REALLY DRY
People in Cadillac keep complaining about the weather. This ain’t dry, what you see here today. When an old-time Oklahoman says things were dry, he is talking about saplings keeling over and blowing away, the hot night wind sweeping away the earth around the hairlike roots of your hand-watered tomato plants, and the earth cracking open. The young don’t know about the old days when the dead grass could cut your bare feet.
As a kid I remember watching a river of red Jello melt into the pool of oleo on my supper plate. The heat was still there at bedtime and no air conditioning. Mama would sponge us off and salt us with talcum powder, which would turn to pasty rings around our sweaty little necks. Heat stayed all night, so the adults in the family would give up on sleep and sit on the screened porch murmuring to each other through the night about the 1930’s droughts when farmers were forced to feed milk cows on Russian thistles and soapweed, when a cloud of grasshoppers came down to eat the young wheat, followed by a plague of black widow spiders and marauding rabbits. I heard them say the Agriculture Department in Washington told men to pile the dust back on their fields to hold the moisture. I heard them say women used a cup of water to wash a whole day’s dishes.
George Huston
Cadillac resident since 1951
Mr. Tarman stared at the essay long after he’d had time to read it. “Who’s this George Huston?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Do you think he made it up about the spiders and the rabbits?”
“I checked with the University Archives down in Norman. It’s all true.”
“We forget so much,” Tarman sighed and rested his cigar on the edge of his desk. “I mean as a people. We forget what our grandfathers—”
“Your folks were pioneers?”
“People now think it’s romantic!” Mr. Tarman’s usually impassive face twisted. “Romantic—that dugout living, eating possum, all those hungry, barefoot years, attending a one-room schoolhouse. Oh, how wonderful they were, everybody says—ignorant, plain ignorant of what life could be like under a tyrant of a schoolmaster whose cane went unchallenged by anyone.”
“But you weren’t alive back then.”
“The 30s were what hardened my parents, who nearly starved in the Oklahoma Panhandle—gaunt-eyed, sway-backed, ragged children of bull-headed parents holding onto the worthless claim they’d inherited. Desperate children who grew up to be tyrants themselves.” Tarman’s eyes flashed, angry, indignant. “People forget, dammit, what this guy is talking about.” The editor thumped hard on the sheet of paper on his desk. “Everybody wants to believe a hard life builds character. Sometimes it just makes you mean. People talk like Oklahoma history was all one big rodeo, bootstraps, Wild Bill Hickok stealing the charter from Guthrie, riding hell-for-leather, making Oklahoma City the Capitol. That’s us, the Sooner State, thieves and cheaters and—” He cut himself off and looked at Hillary as though she’d suddenly appeared. He stared back down at the piece she’d handed him. “You’re not going to get another one like this,” he murmured.
“No, of course not. Who knows what’s out there.”
After six weeks of publishing a weekly Voice, Hillary asked Mr. Tarman about the circulation.
He frowned. “Had some calls from new subscribers.”
“But we need a number, a baseline from which to keep up with what’s working and what isn’t.”
His frown deepened. “
No one’s cancelled.”
“No one has cancelled in six weeks? Is that unusual?”
Tarman looked with pained eyes at the ceiling. He was softly panting through parted lips. This newspaper, perhaps all he had in his nicotine-stained life, had been dying. Hillary realized he probably hadn’t let himself check on the circulation count in a long time. He couldn’t have given her a number. His face darkened, straining, aching not to show emotion over the possible revival of his youthful dream.
§
THE AMERICAN MIND
2011
Judianne McCall was 432 pages into Moby Dick when she stopped to rest her neck—nearly 35 years old and just now reading what she should have been given in high school. Mrs. Peevy at the library had looked at her through goggle-thick lenses to say, “Reading Melville will teach you about the American mind.” Judianne took that as a promise, and she had to admit when she had this big heavy book open on the screened-in porch, her tattered little dictionary close at hand, she felt smarter. And not so lonely. Moby Dick, all about water and whales and boats, was a real stretch for an Oklahoma girl in 2011.
Gavin came home around 9:00 p.m. She was shredding potatoes at the kitchen counter. This kitchen, in what would soon be called their old house, was shined up in that sweet, storybook way she’d loved when they first got married—a sampler with their names in a heart, a row of canisters with darling little girls painted on them, the daisy wallpaper. She felt more at home here than she’d ever feel in that stainless steel bowling alley the architect called a kitchen.
Gavin dropped his sport coat on a chair and scratched his formerly perfect belly. At times like this, his blond hair hanging in his eyes, his grin gone a little loopy, he was just a simple creature waiting to be fed. And she was just the girl to do it. “Hungry?” she asked.
He slid his fingers under the hair at the back of her neck and lifted the red curls. His whiskey breath against her neck arrived with a kiss so tender she wasn’t sure his lips had touched. The shiver stiffened her titties on the way down. Gavin had what Grandma called “the touch,” and Judianne had married him for that, though, naturally, everybody thought it was the money. She turned and took his hand to kiss his palm. Yep, an expensive perfume on his fingers. The florist. A flash of heat made her eyes sting. She swallowed.
“Sometimes,” she began in a dreamy voice, “I think about not being here at all when you come home.”
The hand which had lifted the hair now gently cupped the back of her neck, fingers and thumb pressing. “I sure would miss my little redneck,” he whispered in her ear. “Have to call out the dogs. Right?”
“Right,” she twisted away and inhaled.
“If I don’t eat something soon—” he said.
“These here are ready to go.” She dumped the potatoes in the hot Crisco, where they squawked and gobbled. “Did ya have a nice day?”
He leaned against the edge of the counter top and folded his arms. “Yeah, Judith, you know how I love the law.” If his daddy hadn’t sent over something more exciting, he’d probably spent the day making out wills. He hated other people’s wills. She shook the skillet. Her name never had been Judith.
“You know, hon,” she said and arranged his potatoes on a platter to keep warm in the oven, “I can’t help but say it one more time. You could make a killing on that new place once it’s finished.”
He didn’t say anything, just shook his head, chin riding slowly from shoulder to shoulder. She set a plate, knife and fork, a glass of beer, and a bottle of A-1 sauce on the kitchen table. “We could sell it and then build that cabin we used to dream about up in Colorado on the side of a mountain.”
He sat down. “Look, kid, Cadillac is our town. Anywhere else we’d be outsiders, people with no influence. We’ve talked about this.”
She ran the hot water hard, letting the whoosh and the steam rise around her face as she stared into the skillet. She always liked something to be humming when he was home, the radio or the air conditioner, some kind of sound to float her mind on. She’d been up to the site of the new house—so many glass walls staring her own self back at her—curly red hair flying around the face of a skinny little woman in blue jeans and T-shirt who looked real straight for someone who felt kinda bent. “You are the cutest little thing I ever saw,” Gavin always said whenever she asked why he married her. “And I’m gonna give you the world.” But it wasn’t going to be the world. It was going to be Cadillac—the most stuck-up town in Oklahoma.
Suddenly, aware Gavin had said something, she looked up. On the counter the raw steak lay on the red-soaked meat paper, the juice running onto the floor. She scooped up the steak and held it limp across her palm. “A what?” she asked.
“A housewarming. The boys are almost finished with the interior. We can move in another few weeks. We ought to have a great big party. Champagne, the works. You get the food lined up, and I’ll take care of making sure the yard looks good. And we’re gonna need all new furniture for the downstairs.”
“Our house ain’t no country club.” She rubbed the blood off the floor with paper towel.
“Come on, everybody in town is dying to get inside and see the twenty-foot ceiling in the living room and go up top to look through my telescope at the stars. There’s nothing like it anywhere around. Real architectural design—volcanic rock, glass and redwood. The fire marshal told me he can smell the resin from Main Street.”
She dropped the steak on the broiler pan, so hot it cracked like a bullet. One of his women gave him this housewarming idea, another plan to show Judianne up as a hick. Who could like a town where the health of children didn’t figure in city planning. Where absolutely everybody either belonged to the country club or wished they did. And it wasn’t really a club, like friends having fun. Even the women, dressed up and smelling sweet, faced off at each other in the ladies’ room like sluts at some honky-tonk. Janet Fullenweider, who knew very well Judianne had cleaned for Gavin’s mother when she was in high school, pulled her lips over her big teeth to ask, “Judianne, honey, how’d you and Gavin ever meet?” What kind of town was this to raise a child in?
After she served the steak and potatoes, she poured herself a shot of whiskey and sat on the kitchen stool beside the counter, looking down at her bare toes. “Gavin? Don’t you think it’s time I stopped taking the pill?”
“Where’d you buy this steak?”
“Is it tough?”
“It sure as hell is.”
She sipped her whiskey. Did Gavin understand the American mind? He was the smartest man she’d ever met, a lawyer. He said he’d read Moby Dick in high school, but he’d never sit still that long for anybody else’s ideas.
He finished every scrap of food on his plate and reached into the kitchen drawer for the measuring tape and drafting pad. As she watched, he began to measure the height of his lap from the floor. He jotted notes for the architect. “You know, Jude, this desk has got to be one and three-quarter inches higher than standard.”
“Really?”
He stretched out his arm and held one end of the measuring tape in his teeth. “What do you think,” he asked pointing to one of his drawings, “these shelves at my eye level?”
“Gonna have the chair contoured to fit your balls, Gavin?”
He gave her a sidelong glare. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”
What was wrong with her, she decided as she stared at the bedroom ceiling, was that something was leaking into her brain. Something dark and oozy like a slug dragging a shiny track of dread across her thoughts, making her feel she ought to speak up before it was too late. But she didn’t know what to do, so she just made trouble for herself, like tonight.
Seated on the screened-in porch, she laid her pen on the little metal table and studied the thirty-seventh invitation she’d written today. Cadillac was a big town, not fancy, just spread out, especially now that the county had expanded the orphanage into a children’s prison out on the highway and the community college was gett
ing bigger and hiring real professors. She rubbed her neck. Writing these things out by hand was a whole lot easier than ordering them printed from Mr. Helander, who’d look over his glasses like she didn’t even know how to spell. Ishmael, the boy telling the story in Moby Dick, said he’d rather be friends with Queequeg, the ignorant, pagan harpooner than with Christians who offered nothing but “hollow courtesy.”
She looked at one of the invitations, the furls and curlicues of her elegant script, the only nice thing her grandmother had to pass on to her. She pressed the stiff card to her heart. Grandmother Virginia, raised without a father on a dried up farm in the ’30s, rest her soul, told her to find a friend to marry. How was it people decided the way they were going to be married? Gavin’s parents sure didn’t act like friends. They just slid along on top of life, as though they were moving across crusted snow, never breaking through. Mr. McCall let his wife spend money like water. Mrs. McCall laughed off his mean remarks. They bought new stuff when they were bored, traveled separately when they were angry. Dodging and weaving. It worked. Nobody in town saw anything over at their house but a real sweet couple.
She picked up her pen. What she wanted to do was read Moby Dick. She’d left the crew of the Pequod in a terrible fix—an awful storm coming up and some mysterious aliens on board. But she needed to work on the party. Luckily, Gavin’s mother had made her a list.
She’d let Gavin tell her they couldn’t have a baby until he’d finished law school, passed the bar, established himself as a lawyer, and they had a bigger house. And they couldn’t move to Colorado during the lifetime of his grandfather, an old man Gavin never visited. After the grandfather died, Gavin started building the new house. As she darted from her car to the bakery, the liquor store, and the farm supply for kerosene for the torches, she imagined herself building a big bonfire. She’d soak all Gavin’s fancy suits with kerosene and use them as kindling. All that redwood, hundreds of yards of drapes. It’d go up with a terrific whump.
And yet, damn, this morning he’d wiped away all her nervousness about the party. “Poor little redneck. Don’t you know whatever way we do this housewarming will be the way everybody will do things in Cadillac after this.” She hadn’t cared what he was saying because he held her as gently as a bird, rocking. She would never give this up. Her own marriage, like the whale, was what Melville would call inscrutable.
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