Texasville (26 page)

“I don’t have any money on me but if you’ll get me a motel room I’ll pay you back,” Jacy said. “I don’t think I need to see any more of this town.”

Duane got her a motel room at the Oilpatch Inn. She insisted on keeping Shorty.

“He might bother you,” Duane warned. “He gets kind of frantic when I’m gone too long.”

Jacy smiled, for the first time on the trip. “Are you afraid I’ll woo your dog away from you, honey pie?” she asked.

“Well, it’s a big risk,” Duane said. He smiled and Jacy smiled back. She kicked him lightly with a sandaled foot.

“If you could get me back in love with you you wouldn’t need to spend so much time making deals in ugly towns, would
you?” Jacy said. “I might put my daddy’s fortune at your disposal.”

“But I never had you in love with me,” Duane said. “You had me in love with you, and that was in high school.”

Jacy looked thoughtful. “That’s a good point, Duane,” she said. “Did I have you madly in love?”

“Madly,” he said.

“Would you have given me twelve million in a second, if you’d had it at the time?” she asked.

“In a second,” Duane said.

Jacy seemed to feel tired, despite her long nap.

“I guess I once could summon some pretty mad love,” she said, frowning at the blowing sand. “I hope you won’t be too long. This looks like the kind of place where I could get real depressed.”

“I won’t be over two hours,” Duane said.

Jacy selected two or three magazines from those strewn on the floor of the Mercedes, took her room key from him and grimaced again at the sand.

“Come on, puppy,” she said. “We’re in this together.”

Shorty jumped out of the car and trotted right at her heels, though he did turn once to look guiltily at Duane before following Jacy into the motel.

CHAPTER 37

THE MAN
D
UANE HAD COME TO
O
DESSA TO SEE WAS
named C. L. Sime. CL. was a legendary wildcatter. Unlike most such men he exhibited no interest in his own legend. He had rubbed elbows with all the greats: with Doc Joiner, H. L. Hunt, Getty, Glenn McCarthy. Hundreds of reporters had pursued him and all had been disappointed. C. L. Sime liked to wildcat; he didn’t like to talk.

“Yeah, I knew Hunt,” he said. “Yeah, I knew Sid Richardson.”

The reporters waited hopefully, but C.L. never amplified his remarks. He spent his days smoking and sipping coffee in a small café in downtown Odessa, conducting his business from a pay phone in the bus depot across the street. He dressed like an out-of-work cowboy, coughed a lot, and drove a rusty GMC pickup with a couple of pipe wrenches in the front seat.

Occasionally he would disappear for a few months. Only by a careful reading of the Railroad Commission reports—the monitor of the Texas oil business—could his movements be followed. He had been a partner in the first offshore lease ever
developed. He had been in Alberta five years before the boom. Major oil companies employed men just to scout his movements—two scouts were killed trying to follow his bush plane through a blizzard on his first trip to the North Slope.

No one knew how much money he had, but he had a lot. Billions, some said. A Houston reporter had once established that he had more than two thousand bank accounts, mainly in small-town banks scattered through Texas from Laredo to Dalhart.

Duane had known him for fifteen years, and had been in with him on a few small deals. Though their meetings had all been strictly confined to business, he had the feeling that C. L. Sime liked him. Fortunately their little deals had all been profitable. He might have helped C.L. increase his net worth by a few hundred thousand dollars, over the years.

Mr. Sime was in the bus depot talking on the pay phone. Duane waited on the sidewalk until he finished and came out.

“Howdy, Mr. Sime,” he said.

“Hello, son,” C.L. said. He did not sound enthusiastic, but then he never had. They walked across the street together, ignoring the blowing sand.

“Son, have you got your own teeth?” the old man asked, once they were inside the café.

“All but two,” Duane said.

“Take care of your teeth,” C.L. said. “I didn’t and now I’ve got these goddamn bridges and they’re a misery. This goddamn grit gets under them. I’ve stopped talking unless I’m inside a building. It’s the only way to keep the grit out of my teeth.

“It pays to spend a little more on dentists,” he added, as a decrepit and depressed-looking old waitress brought their coffee.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Duane said.

The old man took off his weathered cowboy hat and hung it on a wooden hatrack. His thin gray hair was combed flat against his scalp, which was freckled in places his hair didn’t cover.

“The reason he’s so rich is because he ain’t tipped a soul in this restaurant since 1941, and that includes me,” the old waitress said.

“Who asked you to butt in?” C.L. asked, without looking at
either the waitress or the coffee. He was looking out the window at the gritty street.

“Nobody, but it’s a free country,” the waitress said.

“The reason I don’t tip is because I don’t like the coffee,” C.L. said. “Anyway, I didn’t hire you, it ain’t my job to pay your salary.”

“If you don’t like this coffee why don’t you take your business somewhere else?” the waitress asked. She was skinny as a plank. Her stockings sagged down her legs.

“I don’t because the phone’s right across the street,” C.L. said. “Besides, I like the atmosphere.”

He grinned faintly, as if he felt his last remark was a clincher, but the old woman was halfway to the kitchen and might not have heard.

“I’ve had more arguments with that old hussy than I would have had if I’d married her,” C.L. said.

He extracted a toothpick from his shirt pocket and began to pick his teeth. He looked at Duane. His eyes were a watery gray and did not seem shrewd.

“Mr. Sime, I want to sell you a half interest in my deep rigs,” Duane said. “I believe the way to get through this recession is to concentrate on shallow oil.”

The old man directed his gaze out the window, as if he could not get enough of the sight of downtown Odessa, though he had had some seventy years in which to scrutinize it.

“Oh, I ain’t interested in hardware, son,” C.L. said. “I’m just interested in production.”

“Quite a bit of production would go with the deal,” Duane said.

The old man thought a minute.

“It’s a funny time to be peddling rigs,” he said. “This town’s nothing but a parking lot for rigs, right now. Pretty soon they’ll have to start parking them over in Midland, I guess. Odessa’s about got all the parked rigs it can hold.”

He paused for a moment, evidently thinking of Midland, twenty-six miles to the east.

“Midland was once a nice town,” he said with a hint of apology for the neighboring community’s decline. “It filt up with them necktie people, though. I never understood the point of
neckties, except that it would make it easier for somebody to hang you. I don’t know why a feller would want to make it easier for somebody to hang him.”

“It sure puzzles me,” Duane said.

The old man was silent for several minutes. He took a sip of his coffee and made a face.

“Worst coffee in West Texas, this right here,” he said.

“It’s not too good,” Duane admitted.

“I been thinking of going to Norway,” Mr. Sime said. “They’re getting quite a bit of production up in Norway, but I don’t know if I’ll go. They’ve got some socialism up there.”

Duane sipped the horrible coffee, which tasted as if it had been made from linoleum chips. He waited. There was absolutely no reason why C. L. Sime should help him, when probably at least a thousand other people had just as much claim on his concern—and his concern, in any case, was clearly sparse. Yet he continued to feel hopeful. He didn’t feel that things were going badly.

“You must not know me very well or you wouldn’t drive all the way out here in a sandstorm, hoping I’d do something stupid,” C.L. said.

“When this thing bottoms out some people will still be in the oil business and a lot of people won’t,” Duane said. “I’d like to be one of the ones who are still in it. I think we’ll live to see oil go up again, and when it does, a cut of my production wouldn’t be a bad thing to have.”

“I’ve got a fair amount of money,” C.L. remarked.

“I know you do, but there’s no such thing as too much,” Duane said.

“You ain’t a necktie person, at least,” the old man remarked. “I doubt you’ll end up in Midland. It was once a nice little town.

“Have you got anything written up?” he asked.

Duane had written a proposition several days before. He had the proposition plus his production records for the last five years in an envelope.

“It ain’t true that I’ve wrote deals on napkins,” the old man said with sudden heat. “I’ve never wrote nothing on no napkin in my life. You couldn’t write much on a napkin, even if you
wanted to. They soak up ink too quick. Then you couldn’t read what you wrote even if you wrote it.”

“My proposition isn’t written on a napkin,” Duane assured him.

“Well, give it to me then,” C.L. said. “I’m sick of this napkin talk.”

Duane handed him the envelope. The old man opened it carefully and looked inside.

“I see you typed it up,” he said. “That’s good. They say I write deals on the backs of envelopes, and that’s another black lie. This napkin and envelope talk gets irritating. That would be no way to run an oil business.”

“I agree,” Duane said.

“I think I’m going up to Norway and see how I make out with that socialism,” the old man said. “They’re making good production up there. I like the way you typed this up. I’ll look it over and ring you on the phone when I get back.”

“Thanks, Mr. Sime,” Duane said.

CHAPTER 38

JACY CAME TO THE DOOR OF THE MOTEL ROOM
wrapped in a towel. Her hair was pinned on top of her head and the TV was on. The room contained two beds—Shorty was stretched out on one of them, warily watching a game show. Jacy walked back to the TV and turned the sound down.

“I had it turned up to drown out the wind,” she said.

A room-service tray containing a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk sat on the floor by her bed.

Jacy got back in the bed and put the tray on her lap.

“I figure a grilled cheese sandwich is safe even in Odessa,” she said. “Did you make your deal?”

“I didn’t get turned down,” Duane said. “I can think hopeful thoughts for two or three weeks, at least. That’s something.”

“Yes,” Jacy said, her voice dropping. She looked at the sandwich in her hand and put it back on the tray. She stared at the television, frowning a little, as if trying to force herself to concentrate on something.

Duane felt awkward. He felt he had said something wrong. Jacy picked up her sandwich and took a listless bite. She
chewed it slowly, as if even that small effort took more energy than she had to spare. But then her appetite appeared to revive and she ate half the sandwich and drank all the milk.

“Want the other half?” she asked.

Duane shook his head.

“Here, puppy,” Jacy said, tossing the other half to Shorty. Never shy in the face of food, Shorty ate it in a gulp. Jacy offered Duane the slice of pickle on her plate.

“I could pay you back that pickle I stole from your boat,” she said. “Who would have thought an opportunity to do that would come so soon?”

“Not me,” Duane said.

Jacy switched her attention to the TV. A plump young couple had just won a motorboat, a new station wagon, a dishwasher and a dining-room set. They beamed with happiness. The young wife was wearing very bright red lipstick.

“Do you think they’re happy?” Jacy asked.

Duane glanced at the TV. The young couple seemed ecstatic. The plump young wife kept saying “Oh, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” The host, a dapper man in his sixties, offered them a chance to say hello to their families, which they did rather timidly.

“They just won a pile of stuff,” Duane said. “They might be happy.”

“That’s a junky dining-room set, but do you think they know that?” Jacy asked.

Duane looked again.

“It sort of looks like our dining-room set,” he said. “Or our breakfast-room set. I keep forgetting we have a dining room. We only use it twice a year.”

“Christmas and Thanksgiving?” Jacy asked.

Duane nodded.

“Do you think they have a nice home life?” Jacy asked.

Duane’s mind was back in the coffee shop with C. L. Sime. He wondered if the old man was sitting reading his proposition and pausing occasionally to bicker with the waitress. He found himself hoping that C.L. would like what he read so much that he would call and make him the loan before he even went to Norway. After all, Duane had offered him a quarter of his production
for five years. It might strike a billionaire as a very fair offer.

Attempts to read C. L. Sime’s mind from halfway across Odessa made it difficult for him to analyze the home life of the beaming young couple who had just won the motorboat.

“She might be a good cook,” he ventured.

“You’re not trying,” Jacy said. “You don’t even care about them. I don’t think she’s a good cook. I bet they eat frozen pizzas half the time. They look like big pizza eaters to me.”

“I’m too far in debt to care about anything but getting out,” Duane admitted.

“That’s not what Karla thinks,” Jacy said. “Karla thinks you get fucked about every five minutes. Do you?”

“No,” Duane said.

Jacy was still intent on the game show. “I wonder about little couples like that,” she said. “They look silly but maybe they’re great in the sack. I’ve had silly-looking men who were great in the sack.”

Shorty stood up and began to lick the crumbs of the grilled cheese sandwich off the bedspread.

“Do you think she goes down on him?” Jacy asked, still looking at the TV.

Duane found that it was a strain to get his imagination even to undress the young couple who had just won all the goodies. His imagination was reluctant to take them as far as oral sex, or any sex. They were dressed in their Sunday finery—in the case of the young man, a green suit—and the jump from their Sunday finery to oral sex was a bigger jump than his mind was willing to make.