The Year Everything Changed (10 page)

Sam brought her to him in an awkward embrace. She let him hold her until the need to cry had passed. “I’m all right.”

“You’re not—but you will be. You’re the strongest person I know.”

She smiled. “Wow, two compliments in one night.”

He returned the smile. “Make it three—you look sexy as hell in that nightgown.”

She couldn’t remember what she was wearing and looked down at her nightshirt, the one with the faded picture of the Grand Canyon that she couldn’t bring herself to throw away because it had survived enough washings to be the softest and most comfortable one she owned. She put her hand on his thigh. “You want to fool around a little?”

“Nah—” He came forward again and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. “I want to fool around
a lot
.”

She moved to accommodate him, sliding down from her sitting position and opening the covers.

Their lovemaking was familiar and comfortable. There was little they hadn’t tried through the years, keeping what worked and discarding what didn’t. By mutual, unspoken consent, they generally saved the more athletic positions and marathon sessions for romantic getaway weekends or times when one of them felt a need for something more.

Sam was the first and only man she’d ever made love with. She’d looked at other men in a curious, speculative way but never with desire. Instead of turning her on, just thinking about another man’s hand on her breast made her shudder. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand when her girlfriends salivated over Johnny Depp or Hugh Jackman or Colin Firth, just not how they incorporated them into their sexual fantasies.

At times Elizabeth had felt so out of step with her mental monogamy that she’d wondered if she was a sexual eccentric. But then Sam’s hands would cup her breasts the way they were now and his thumbs would sweep across her nipples, leaving them hard and extended, and she would give herself over to feeling instead of thinking. Soon she would become aware of a familiar warmth stealing through her belly, and then a throbbing would start between her legs. At that moment, even if it were within her power to summon a thought about sexual eccentricities, it was beyond her to care.

Chapter Thirteen
Christina

The taxi turned the corner onto Christina’s street, the driver swearing as he slammed on his brakes to keep from hitting an oncoming truck navigating through the carelessly parked cars that lined both sides of the narrow road. “Looks like someone’s having quite a party,” he said.

The throbbing bass of rap music spilled through the open doors and windows of her house. So much for a quiet night and a shoulder to cry on. “Yeah, it looks that way.”

Cars were parked three-deep in the driveway, forcing the driver to stop in the middle of the street. He put his arm across the seat and turned to look at her. “Twenty-two fifty.”

She handed him a twenty and a five and tried not to let him see that it was all she had in her wallet. A stupid point of pride, something she could have easily pulled off if she weren’t so tired, if she just weren’t so worn down with being poor. She’d humiliated herself by asking the clerk at the Hyatt for a refund when she’d decided to come home early. Not only had he pointed out that the room had been paid for by credit card, he’d questioned whether the card was hers.

At least the airline let her change her ticket without too much of a hassle, adding the fee to the credit card on file. First-class was full and she’d had to fly coach, a center seat in a row next to the galley kitchen. A nonfunctioning kitchen, her rumbling stomach reminded her.

Flying to Sacramento first-class had been a mistake. Buying generic brands at the grocery store, secondhand clothes at the thrift shop, and gasoline by the dollar instead of the tank, and stealing flowers from her neighbor’s yards when she wanted to make the table look pretty, had lost its charm.

She liked the respect she’d been given in first-class, liked having a limo waiting when she arrived in Sacramento, and most of all, she liked having people look at her with a mixture of curiosity and awe because they were convinced the treatment made her someone special.

Opening the door and getting out, she flung her backpack over her shoulder. “Keep the change.”

The cloyingly sweet scent of pot swirled around her when she stepped onto the front porch. Instantly furious, she reached for the screen door and flung it open. She’d told Randy a dozen times she didn’t want his friends doing drugs at their house. There was a hard-ass cop with the nose of a bloodhound who patrolled the neighborhood on weekends. He loved busting parties and hauling people off, claiming he was doing it for the old folks who’d been there forever and couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

She strode inside where smoke hung over the living room like a layered brown fog. Half-empty, grease-stained pizza boxes littered the tables and floor. Someone had started a pyramid of beer cans between the kitchen and dining room; another six-pack and it would reach the ceiling. Music throbbed from the oversize speakers that Randy had picked up at a garage sale and that doubled as end tables. The few people still sober enough to carry on a conversation shouted at each other to be heard.

Flinging her backpack behind the sofa, Christina went looking for Randy. She found him in the kitchen with Doug, the sound man for
Illegal Alien
. Randy had an open script in one hand and was waving the other, conducting the rhythm of the discussion. Neither looked as if he’d been partying. Instead, they were high on something more intoxicating to them both—the movie.

Unnoticed, Christina leaned against the wall and watched, picking up bits and pieces of the conversation, enough to let her know they were talking about her and her father’s money.

The song ended. For that brief time before another began, Randy’s words were all that filled the silence. “Now watch the bastard get a second wind.”

Doug laughed and lowered his voice. “Maybe you could get Christina to slip him something.”

Randy tapped him on the chest. “Don’t go there.”

Doug shoved Randy’s hand away. “Shit, man, I wasn’t serious.”

“I don’t care.”

Christina felt a peculiar mix of gratitude and affection for Randy. She started toward him to tell him so but came to an abrupt halt when she heard what came next.

“If she hears that kind of trash talk I’m sunk. As it is, I figure I’m going to have to marry the bitch to get anything out of this.”

Doug’s jaw dropped. “You’re going to marry her? Jesus—there’s got to be another way.”

The speakers crackled a half-second warning before shooting a staccato bass that rattled the windows and ricocheted off the walls. Randy’s reply was lost in the echo, but not the laughter or the high-five that followed.

Love was never as easy or straightforward as Christina wanted it to be. Too often its line was capriciously drawn, the heart pulled one way, the mind another. But not this time. She might, given enough time, be able to forgive a man who abandoned her, but never one who betrayed her.

Christina pulled the plug on the CD player, went to the light switch, and flipped it several times. “Party’s over. Get out—and take your shit with you. What I find gets flushed.”

“Hey, not so fast.” Randy came at her from behind and grabbed her around the waist. To the others he said, “Give us a minute. It’s cool.”

“Let me go,” Christina said.

Instead he pulled her closer, nestling his chin into her neck. “Hey, Doug, take care of things in here. Christina and I need to talk.”

She brought her heel down on his foot.

“Fuck—what’d you do that for?”

“I said I want everyone out,” she shouted. She turned to Doug. “That means you, too, you son of a bitch.” Picking up a purse from the end of the sofa, she flung it toward the door, looked for another, and did the same thing. No one challenged her, no one even looked at her. “And don’t come back,” she shouted. “I never want to see any of you again.”

“Fine by me, bitch,” a girl’s voice answered.

“Fuck you,” a guy said, starting a chorus of fuck you’s.

Christina stood in the middle of the room and watched them go. When she turned to look at Randy, he was glaring at her.

“Are you nuts?” he asked, his anger palpable.

“You, too, Randy. Get out.”

“You can’t throw me out of my own house.”

“It’s not your house. If you recall, it’s my name on the lease and my paycheck paying the rent.”

He grabbed her arm and when she tried to pull away, squeezed until she cried out and stopped struggling. “What the fuck is going on with you? You leave all happy and come back a flaming psycho.”

Instead of answering, she launched an offensive. “What’s with the party, Randy? You said it wouldn’t happen again. As a matter of fact, you promised.”

He let her go and sat on the sofa arm. “I was celebrating. What’s wrong with that?”

“Why were you celebrating? Did something happen that I don’t know about?”

He reached for her. She slapped his hands away. “The movie, baby,” he said. “What else?”

“The movie or the money?”

“Right now it’s pretty much the same thing.”

“There isn’t any money,” she said. “That’s what my father wanted to tell me.”

Randy’s expression went from confusion to disbelief to anger. He started to run his hands through his hair, stopped, and held the sides of his head. After several seconds he walked toward the kitchen, then turned and came back. “He’s lying. We’ll get a lawyer. We’ll sue. He can’t cut you off—you’re his daughter, his own flesh and blood.”

“It won’t do any good—
there isn’t any money
.”

“Oh yeah? Then how did he pay for that first-class ticket?”

She surprised herself with how quickly she came up with an answer. “He’s running up his charge cards. He says it’s a return on the twenty-two percent interest they’ve been collecting from him all these years.”

Randy groaned. “That fucker. I was counting on him.”

“He’s going to feel awful when he finds out what he did to you.”

“Don’t push me, Christina.”

“And I suppose this means you’re not going to dedicate the film to him or give him producer credit?”

“I’m tired of your smart-ass mouth.” He glared at her. “And I’m tired of you.”

“Go ahead, break my heart.”

“I’m leaving—but not because you want me to.”

She laughed. “Whatever it takes.”

She remembered too late that Randy could handle just about anything—but not someone laughing at him. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him double his fist. He’d never hit her, so her mind stumbled over the warning. Too late she brought her hands up to defend herself. His knuckles connected with her jaw in a head-snapping blow. Shards of pain shot through her cheek, across her eye, and into her scalp. Her world went from blinding white to red to black. She struggled to stay upright, reaching for something to hold on to but finding only air. Her foot caught on the worn sisal rug and she went down.

Randy crouched beside her. “It’s over between us, Christina. But not because you say so. I only stayed for the movie.” He cupped her jaw and squeezed. She cried out in pain. “Report this or come after me in any way, and I’ll make your life hell. I’ll tie you up so tight in the Tucson courts that you’ll never get to L.A.”

She tried to answer, tried to tell him she wasn’t scared and that he could go to hell, but her mouth wouldn’t work. Pain washed over her in crimson waves. She fought closing her eyes, knowing she needed help and that she was on her own to find it.

Chapter Fourteen
Jessie

Jessie turned the micro recorder over in his hand, flipping it between his fingers the way he would a silver dollar. It was May 1, a day the newspapers used to carry a picture of kids dancing around a May pole, the girls with ribbons in their hair, the boys in short pants. Now it was Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, that was celebrated. The kids in the picture were Mexican, the girls in brightly colored dresses, the boys wearing sombreros as big as umbrellas.

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 little 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.