by Kim Barnes
When Mason pointed to the Mobil, I slowed and turned in, afraid I’d dent the fender if I pulled too close, but the attendant motioned me forward. While Mason got out and helped clean the windshield, I focused on the flying red horse. Pegasus, I remembered. I had wanted to go to college and become an English teacher, but even if I hadn’t gotten in trouble, my grandfather wouldn’t have let me. Worldly education hardened your heart against God, he said, and filled your head with ideas.
I watched Mason walk back to the Fairlane, tipping a bottle of Dr Pepper still dripping ice, the heat shirring the air between us. His hair grown a little too long, a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his white T-shirt, his jeans riding low on his hips—I felt a lick of lust mixed with guilt, that baby right there inside me.
“Hey, doll.” He slipped in, handed me the soda, and I drank in deep swallows. I toed the accelerator, directing the car away from the attendant, who stood in his billed cap like a soldier at attention.
My stomach pressed against the rub of the steering wheel brought me back to the road. I had been thinking about names and considered the constellations I’d memorized, library book and flashlight held beneath the covers so that my grandfather wouldn’t know that I was studying the stars like a necromancer.
“What about Cassie for a girl?” I asked. “Cassiopeia.”
Mason sucked his teeth. “Boy?”
“Percy? Perseus McPhee.” I signaled left, then changed my mind, kept going.
“Where are you coming up with these names, anyway?” Mason began drumming the car top, singing along with the radio, his voice an easy blend in the low keys as I guided us through the evening streets, taking the long way, air through the windows heavy with the smoke of backyard barbecues.
That night, I woke to the sheets slick and cooling beneath me, the pain gripping my back, the ache in my thighs. At the hospital, while the doctor scraped and pulled then called for his ether, the nun held my shoulders. It was just as well, she said—something had been wrong for the baby to die like that, as though I should feel lucky. “Do you want him baptized?” she asked, but I turned my head away. I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, raw and empty, nothing that I could name. When the doctor told me I could no longer bear children, I thought, This is the punishment my grandfather promised me. This is what I deserve.
When, a few days later, Mason drove me home from the hospital, he circled around, kept the tulip trees between us and the funeral home. He went in ahead, pulled shut the door to the nursery. I’d never see that room again. He set the blue ceramic baby bootie that the nun had given us on the kitchen sill, a small tangle of variegated ivy sprouting from its center.
I quit the cocktail parties, spent my days with the doors and windows closed. When the Chronicle landed on our porch with its stories of race riots, women burning their bras, men burning their draft cards, the flag, burning, I let it lay. When the evening news gave a tally of the weekly body count in Vietnam, I turned it off because I didn’t want to know. I focused on my chores, what I was made for. By the time Mason came home from work, I had the bed tucked tight, the floors scrubbed, the laundry on the line, a brambleberry pie bubbling in the oven. I’d once filled my diary with stories of romance, imagined I might someday be a writer, but what right did I have to dream? Only at night, Mason shooting baskets for hours, the sound of the ball hitting asphalt, bouncing, hitting again, did I allow myself to sit on the couch and read. The Texas sky clouding over, a storm moving in—those seemed the stillest of times, as though I were suspended, hovering outside my own life.
I looked up one evening to see Mason standing there and felt the old fear, my grandfather snatching the book from my hands. But Mason, he sat down beside me, touched my forehead as though I were a child sick with fever, pushed the hair from my face. He smelled like the fields after spring burn. Out the window, I saw the sun not yet set, the days grown longer without me.
“You need more than this,” he said, and pulled me to him. “We got to get you better.”
The next morning, he told me to get dressed, that we were going to town. It seemed like the hardest thing I had ever done. Gordo Cooper had set the record, eight days in orbit, long enough to fly a man to the moon, yet I couldn’t even step out my door. I stood in my slip for a good half hour, staring at the closet, nothing to wear but the schoolgirl’s wool skirt I’d brought with me from Shawnee and a few maternity dresses—the trappings of someone else’s life. I picked out the smock I’d worn to the polka, belted it with a sash, found my one pair of flats and realized I’d been barefoot for weeks. I tied my hair, traced my eyebrows with the burned head of a match, added a little rouge—enough sin, my grandfather would say, to bring on more. He didn’t know his great-grandson was dead. Maybe he never would.
The first thing Mason did was to drive me to the Sonic for lunch. He held my hand while the carhop skated out and took our order.
“You look real nice, Gin,” Mason said.
I straightened my sash, kept my eyes down. “It’s not much,” I said.
“It doesn’t take much. You’re always beautiful.” He pulled me to his shoulder, let his burger get cold while I cried, then drove me to Foley’s, sat and watched while I tried on dresses, blouses, a new kind of stretch pants, the saleswomen clucking. By the time we got home, I had a wardrobe, a word I’d never spoken before. I used every hanger we owned. We made love standing up in the kitchen, me in my shiny patent leathers. Shameless, I thought, but who was there to see? Any remnant of belief I might have had in an all-knowing God was gone.
Mason had me sit down while he scrambled some eggs. I watched as he cut my toast into triangles, thought how he wasn’t like any man I’d ever known, then raised my eyes to the ivy that had grown and tacked itself to the wall above the sink. I’d started to pull it free once, but I couldn’t bear the noise of it ripping, the rusty imprint of its rooting like dabs of dried blood. Every time I started to feel happy, the world came back to knock me down like happiness was something I had to pay for.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I said. I didn’t know if I meant in that house or in Houston. Maybe I meant my own life. “I wish we could leave this all behind.”
Mason didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. My dead mother’s voice was already in my head: Be careful what you wish for.
The next day, Mason came home lit up like a firecracker. His supervisor had recommended him to an Aramco recruiter. “Drilling foreman,” he said. “Double my salary, maybe more, tax-free. All we have to do is move to Arabia.”
I couldn’t hear what he was telling me, so he said it again. “Saudi Arabia, a place called Abqaiq, all fenced and guarded. Everything we want, just like living in a country club.” He sat me down, had me imagine: our own home, private swimming pool, golf course, movie theater, the best doctors money could buy—and all of it paid for by the Arabian American Oil Company. “When we get back, we’ll have enough money to buy you all the new clothes you want.” He held my shoulders, bent a little to look into my eyes. “Nice house, big diamond ring, that’s what you want, isn’t it, Gin?” I tried to remember if I had ever wanted such things. He gave me a squeeze, a little shake as though he needed to get something out of me. “I don’t want to be just scraping by for the rest of my life,” he said. “I was on my way somewhere. I need to feel that again.”
I rested my ear against his chest, felt his heart pounding fast, already racing ahead.
Over the next few weeks, what we couldn’t sell, we gave away. When Mason carried the bassinet out the door, free to a derrickman whose wife was expecting their third, I watched through the kitchen window, gave the ivy a little more water. Maybe the next wife would find it there, let it grow. Maybe she’d think it too much trouble and tear it free, planning wallpaper, a double coat of eggshell enamel.
I packed all the clothes I owned, my new pair of shoes, my mother’s old boots. “Best to leave the books at home,” Mason said, but I folded Gone with the Wind in
to my sweater anyway. Valentine’s Day, 1967, the redbuds near bursting, I boarded the first plane of my life, smart in my new Jantzen suit. Other passengers arranged their blankets and pillows, settling in for the flight to New York. Behind us, several rows of women chatted and laughed.
Mason motioned to the back. “Aramco wives being shipped over. You could be with them instead of me.”
I stole a glance to where they giggled like schoolgirls, then turned and rested my head on Mason’s shoulder. I’d never been comfortable in the company of women, unsure of what they expected of me. With men, at least, I knew.
Mason pulled my knuckles to his lips, kissed them twice. “For luck,” he said. I clutched his hand a little tighter, smelled the aftershave he’d slapped on the back of his neck where the barber had clipped him too close. “I look like a farm boy,” he had said, fingering the line where his tan met the pale stripe of skin. “That’s because you are,” I answered, and he had grown quiet, as though that were a part of himself he wanted to forget.
I peered out the small window of the plane, saw the gray Gulf of Mexico falling away. Our layover in New York I remember only as a dim hotel room filled with the noise of the bar below, Aramco and Bechtel men laying in a last good drunk before hitting the dry desert. A short stop in Montreal, where we took on more passengers, and then the ocean crossing.
It was like a dream, flying through that night. I remember Mason held in a white pool of light, studying his book of Arabic phrases, and then people leaving their seats, gathering in the aisles to smoke and drink until the plane took on the feel of a flying lounge, Johnny Rivers piping through the speakers. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I did. When Mason lifted the shade, we were landing in Amsterdam, the sun spreading across the horizon like paint spilled from a can. A stop in Athens to refuel, and then on to Beirut, where we left the jet and boarded a four-engine prop scoured shiny by sand.
“From here, it’s the milk run to Dhahran,” Mason said. “Six countries in three days—not bad for a couple of Okies from Shawnee.” He still looked crisp in his new Arrow shirt, but I felt woozy, my cheeks flushed.
We crossed into Arabia and followed the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, leapfrogging along, scattering herds of camels from the water wells Aramco had drilled, landing on oiled strips to unload geologists, small engines, and crates of eggs that were replaced by bundles of letters, trunks, and packages, grinning American golfers carrying their clubs, a single Arab in gold rings and flowing robes. When the plane abruptly banked, sending everything that wasn’t strapped or bolted to the lee of the fuselage, I screamed and grabbed for Mason’s arm. The Arab man smiled. “It is only the wind,” he said simply, as though it were the answer to any number of things, and I felt myself blush. I wanted to tell him what I knew of wind—the tornadoes tipping from the yellowing sky, hot gales that sapped the sweet from the corn. How my grandfather would strip an ear, scrape a few kernels with his teeth. “Could be worse,” he’d say. He remembered the powder-dry soil, the roof-high drifts, his own family’s house buried in the till of once-fertile fields. I looked out the window, saw the dunes undulating for miles. Like the sand, that dust was everywhere, sifted into the cavities and creases of everything living and dead, and I understood how it was that the Okies and Texans might find the desert familiar, the suffocating heat a manageable thing.
The Tapline ran before us like an ink-dark tattoo, broken only by mounds of sand bridging the routes of nomadic migration. In the distance, a vast pool of light, the sun, and the sea that melded with the sky to a single canvas. And then I saw the flares. Mason had told me that even the astronauts could see them from space, giant flames burning off gas at the wellheads. The Dhahran Airport appeared like a white cathedral: pillars, arches like wings, control tower shaped like a minaret. All that light flowing in. We stepped off the plane, and it was like opening an oven. A furnace blast. A heat you had to lean into or be knocked down.
I stood stunned by the hours we’d lost in flight until Mason took my arm and steered me across the tarmac. Inside, I watched the Arab official search through my clothes while a clutch of women cloaked in black silently waited to board. The Saudi man who accompanied them, dressed in a fine-cut suit and white head scarf, sat placidly, intent upon the activity my luggage elicited. The customs official took one look at the cover of my book—Scarlett and Rhett in an ardent embrace—handed it to an attendant, and clapped the suitcase closed before flourishing a stick of chalk between us and marking my bags with bold checks. When I started to protest, Mason tapped my elbow, shook his head.
The company driver who waited for us outside of customs stood with his hands folded, calm as a monk, as though the weight of his garments didn’t bother him a bit. Red-and-white-checked head scarf secured with a black leather cord, a creamy ankle-length nightshirt that buttoned from neck to hem—he must be suffocating, I thought, and remembered how my mother had wrapped me in sheets to break fever.
“Peace be upon you.” His took off his dark glasses, and his eyes wrinkled at the corners as he shook our hands. “I am Abdullah al-Jahni. Welcome among friends.”
“And upon you peace.” Mason motioned me forward. “This is my wife, Mrs. Virginia McPhee.”
Abdullah reached out, gave my hand a warm, single shake. I had imagined Arab men as either rough and brutish or courtly and cosseted, draped in the robes of a prince, but Abdullah was neither. He seemed a few years older than Mason, his face not as handsome but somehow more interesting, as though I might study it for a long time and discover something new each second. I took in his angular profile and steeply sloped nose, his thin mustache and carefully groomed beard that followed the line of his jaw, his wide mouth full of impossibly white teeth, but it was his eyes, half-lidded and deeply set, that intrigued me. His gaze moved from me to Mason to the baggage handlers and beyond in fluid and precise observation, as though he were committing each detail to memory or guarding himself against surprise. He led us to a dun-colored Land Cruiser that might once have been green, where he instructed the airport workers on the loading of our luggage. When he stepped off the curb, he gathered his skirts like a woman, and I realized that I was staring. He opened the door so that I could climb into the backseat, Mason in front. I lifted my nose to the cracked window as we passed a series of raw buildings and rough settlements before heading southwest, deeper into the desert. What I smelled was almost nothing. I opened my mouth to taste it, and a memory came to me. Fourth of July, a church potluck and fireworks over the creek, and it was my job to sit on the ice-cream maker as my grandfather cranked, my patience helped along by the chipped knobs of salted ice that I sucked and savored like candy.
The land humped and flattened, broken by bunches of yellowing grass plowed through with sand. The dry streambeds bristled with spring flowers, their oranges and purples and reds like the burst of fireworks. Even now, I don’t know how to describe the sudden emptiness that crowded in once we left the airport. No trees, no mountains, just the horizon ribboned with clouds that seemed to smoke right off the desert floor and into the sapphire sky. The minimal traffic—a black Jeep, a large white donkey laden with palm fronds, a few people on foot—seemed oblivious to the rules of the road: no sidewalks, no lanes, no limits. I braced myself against the seat as Abdullah veered to miss a rattletrap pickup, men packing the bed, balanced on the bumpers, clinging to any handhold. He never slowed, just kept a steady speed to pull us out of the sand and back onto the road.
“I thought Texas drivers were bad,” Mason said.
“Better than an American driving a camel.” Abdullah grinned. “Truly, that is sad.”
I noted the way the men sat the humped animals, some with one leg crooked like they were riding sidesaddle, others kneeling astride or straddling with their ankles crossed at the camel’s neck. They urged their mounts faster by lifting their arms, shaking the reins until the animals broke into a jarring canter, and I wondered how they kept their seats. Other camels roamed free like cattle on open rang
e, their colors the colors of the desert: bone, buff, and straw. Flies rose thick off a road-killed carcass—a young camel left to rot, Abdullah told us, because it hadn’t been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law and was therefore haram—forbidden—and could not be eaten.
Mason and Abdullah began an easy conversation about the hierarchies of the Saudi royalty, future drilling sites, and new machinery, and I relaxed back, happy to be left to my study until I saw a wavering dark line in the distance that seemed to loom large, then small, like a film out of focus. I squinted but couldn’t tell how far away we were—a half mile? Five? It was as though the desert existed in two dimensions and nothing in my vision was true. I sat forward and pointed.
“What is that?” I asked Abdullah.
“Bedu,” Abdullah answered. “People of the tent. With the new opportunities, there are fewer of us who remain in the desert.”
As we drew closer, I peered at the caravan, the men in their robes and white scarves, daggers belted at their waists, the women in long colorful skirts, their hair, faces, and shoulders draped in black, balancing baskets and buckets on top of their heads. Young girls herded the long-eared goats, laughing and calling freely. I could see how thin they were, the children’s bones showing through, the adults short and wiry, yet compared to the somber group in the airport, they seemed jaunty as a band of Gypsies.
“Where are they going?” I asked Abdullah.
His chuckle, low and easy, made me feel happy. “Farther,” he said.
A few miles more and a maze of geometric houses broke the soft sand swells—Dammam, Abdullah told us, new homes for Saudi workers, part of the Aramco housing program that allowed purchase through loans and payroll deduction.
“A company town,” Mason observed.
“Some might say that the entire country is a company town,” Abdullah said.
I scooted forward, took in the warm smell of his woody cologne. “Where do you live?” I asked.