Stormy Weather (5 page)

A
t a race outside of Conroe they made the immense sum of fifty dollars. Jeanine began to think of how she could keep a part of it for herself. Her Conroe High School boyfriend had just abandoned her in favor of a girl who was from Conroe and had always been from Conroe. Jeanine did not know why. This was the worst of it. And in other places people had no idea why. On the front page of the Conroe newspaper that morning was a strange photograph of the cold black dust storm of April 1935 that turned the Texas and Kansas plains dark as night and buried entire towns. Nobody knew how to stop them, or why there was a Depression. But Jeanine felt at the moment reasonably safe in Conroe on the humid coast and with twenty-five dollars in bet money.

Smoky Joe ran against a Houston horse named Cherokee Chief.

“Don’t hit him,” Jeanine said to the jockey. “Maybe once. But you don’t get a second.” She bent forward and held up one finger in case
he was deaf or had water in his ears. “One hit is all you get. Okay?” Her body was slim and taut beneath the cotton dress, she had the gestural vocabulary of a mime.

“I know how to ride,” said the boy. “I ain’t taking advice from no girl.”

Jeanine hurried out among the crowd of men to place bets. She wrapped dollar bills around her fingers for each separate bet, she was intent and serious. She was one of the few women in the crowd but she carried herself in this male territory as if she had special privileges. Smoky beat Cherokee chief by a length. Jeanine had clambered up the stock racks of a truck with the agility of a monkey to watch the dark stallion charge past the finish-line flag as if he were running down some enemy and suddenly it was a wonderful day and here she was in her new dress in the aqua print. She jumped down and ran to the horse’s owner to collect her money. He wore a suit and tie and his hat tipped back, he had a new Buick and a drink in his hand. His car radio was on. The announcer was talking about the first overnight transcontinental flights and that Generalissimo Franco was besieging Barcelona.

“Hand it over,” she said. The young man laughed and held it high above his head where she couldn’t reach it.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Jeanine Stoddard,” she said. She took hold of his tie and said in a gangbuster’s voice, “Hand over that money, Pretty Boy, and nobody gets hurt.”

He held it out to her in his closed fist. She unbent his fingers and took the bills, and then stepped forward and kissed him.

She turned into the hot, noisy evening before it faded into dark, before her father came looking for her. Before he found out she had been kissing strange men. The amount of money she gripped in her hand made her nervous. Andrew Jackson’s severe, drawn face stared up from out of the center of the wadded banknotes. She was afraid she
might lose it or it would be stolen, or her father would come lurching out from behind a trailer and demand it from her. Then he would gamble it away on a blanket somewhere. It would end up as a wad in somebody else’s pocket.

Jeanine ducked around the late-model Ford truck and trailer and nearly crashed into a man. Half his face was white and frothy. At first she thought he had a white beard or was foaming at the mouth, and then realized he was shaving. He grasped her arm to stop her.

“Here! You’re going to make me cut my throat,” he said. He shook soap from a straight razor and then let go of her. He looked at himself in the truck’s side mirror and continued shaving.

It was Ross Everett.

He said, “Is this the entire extent of your social life, Jeanine?” he said. “Kissing strange drunks at horse races?”

Jeanine’s face flushed hot. “Mr. Everett. You were spying on me.”

“Well, it was kind of public.” He ran the razor down his cheek and flung off the foam. “I was just standing here shaving.”

“You’re going to tell my father.”

“I expect he’s too goddamned busy.”

Jeanine put out her hand. “Don’t tell him. I mean it.” She kicked one of his tires. “You are going to tell him. Because you are rotten and evil.”

“Don’t tell me he’s developed some fatherly instincts all of a sudden. What would he do about it?”

“He’ll tell my mother.”

“Good.” He stroked the razor down his throat and slung the soap to the ground. He rinsed the blade and folded it. Splashed water onto his face from a basin sitting on the fender, wiped his face on a pink towel. His face was made up of flat planes, a square mouth. “At least you’ve got one functioning parent.”

“Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“All right.” In his trailer, a gray horse shifted and tapped at the
floor planks. “Well, since I just won my race, I’d probably better cut my luck and go.”

“Good.” She walked over to the trailer and peered in through the slats. A gray mare, tidy and clean-legged, shifted around on the floorboards. On the fender was a good racing saddle and a saddlecloth. “What have you got? This is a good-looking horse.”

“Her name is She Kitty.” Ross Everett buttoned up his shirt. “Out of Krazy Kat. I got her when old man Carruthers gave up. They shot all his cattle. He was overstocked.” He wiped at his face with one hand. “You wouldn’t know him. Your dad drags y’all around the world like a gypsy.”

“I know it.”

“You quit school?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve been on the road three days from Comanche and made three races. Bought a horse. Now I have to go to a meeting in Houston and then head home again. My wife puts up with all this and the least I can do is show up shaved.” He pulled a tie around his neck under his collar and tied it. “In all three races this is the first time I’ve seen a young girl running around by herself. If your daddy wanted a boy to be his running buddy he should go hire one.”

She wasn’t his running buddy, she was his daughter, but on the other hand there he was, dancing openly with the woman in the green satin dress in the middle of the afternoon in front of everybody like a fool.

So she said, “He couldn’t keep me away if he tried.”

Everett took out a sack of tobacco and rolled a cigarette, lit it with a silver lighter that flared up several inches. He squinted his eyes against it. “You all still got that Reo Speed Wagon with the trailer?”

“Yes. And I’m going to drive it home.”

“I guess so. You started hauling him home drunk when you were nine.” Smoke from the cigarette ran up his nose. “And so you better do it.” He flicked off the ashes. “I’ll keep my mouth shut this time.”

She found her father at a tailgate. It was a new truck and he was dancing around in the grass to the music of “Dinah” from a car radio. Dancing with the woman in a stained green satin dress and heavy lipstick.

“Well, Jeanine girl. How’s my Pistol?” He was somewhat drunk. “Let’s see what we won.”

The woman said, “Does she always collect your winnings for you?”

“Yeah,” her father said. “She’s my buddy.” He took the thirty-five dollars from Jeanine. She kept fifteen in her pocket and said nothing. He handed her a cold Dr Pepper. “That’s so you don’t tell.”

“You’re cute,” the woman said.

Jeanine ignored her. “I’m going on home, Dad,” she said. She tipped up the ice-cold soda and it tasted like heaven.

“Go on. Tell your mother that I’m dickering about a new horse or something. Make something up. You’re good at making things up.” He laughed and wiped back the lock of dark hair that fell in his face. “I’m going to be gone for two weeks here in a little bit. Up to Central Texas. So I got to stay on her good side.”

She ran to find Smoky Joe and came upon the jockey walking the dark stallion back and forth in the grove of pines, along with other handlers and their horses. Smoky’s veins stood out in his hide like coursing liquid ropes and he was still sucking air hard into his wide nostrils. She threw the soda bottle into the shadows.

“All right, I’ll get him home now.” She took the lead line and patted the stallion’s hot neck. “Ain’t you a rocket?” She held out a five-dollar bill to the jockey.

He snatched at it and jammed the five in his pocket. “I should charge double for riding this goddamned maniac,” he said.

“You’re going to hell for swearing,” she said.

“So’s your old man.”

She led Smoky back to the trailer. He jumped in and turned to
face backward. He always rode backward, he wanted to see anything that might come up on him from behind. When she pulled the headlight knob the interior light came on and shone in her face and when she lifted her head she saw Ross Everett with one boot up on his running board watching her. She leaned out of the window and stuck her tongue out at him. He blew smoke from his nose and lifted a hand.

A
t the time when Jack Stoddard was felled by sour gas, few men were required to wear gas masks on the rigs. It was impossible to wear the bulky gear and get work done because it was hard to see or talk and your own breath fogged up in your faceplate. The occurrence of hydrogen sulfide gas is capricious and unpredictable. H
₂
S is often precipitated out of the oil itself and gathers in half-filled tanks, seeps into low places beneath the rigs, suddenly appears along with the sweet gas without warning. H
₂
S knocks people unconscious at 300 parts per million, and at 600 ppm it is fatal within seconds. It has a distinctive taint of rotten eggs, but the gas also has the peculiar quality of destroying the sense of smell after the first inhalation, as if designed by the devil himself to draw the unsuspecting into the odorless world of brain injury and death.

Two other freight haulers brought Jack Stoddard home in the back of a truck, in a warm September rain straight off the Gulf of
Mexico. He was laid out on a stack of blankets somebody had scooped up from the engine shack; he was covered with a slicker and awash in rainwater. His face and hands had the obscure, blue color of someone with cyanide poisoning, and although he was not conscious he floundered with vague shifting movements. Jeanine and Mayme told Bea to stop crying, he was going to be all right.

He lay on the bed with blood running from his nose and ears. A young company doctor folded his bag together and said in a thin tenor voice that Mr. Stoddard should avoid any strenuous activity for the next month or so, and he could not say one way or the other whether Mr. Stoddard would ever regain his ability to drive a truck. The effects might show up in the lungs, but on the other hand, did they know whether or not somebody hit him over the head? The doctor bent down and looked into Jack Stoddard’s eyes and said, “Did? Somebody? Hit? You? Over the head?” He was a tidy young doctor. With a quiet and efficient gesture wiped up the blood trickling from Jack Stoddard’s ear and said this was the result of a concussion of some kind, not sour gas. It was impossible to get the company to pay the medical bills because Mr. Stoddard was a contract worker and not a Shell employee.

Jeanine and her sisters watched as her father sat up straight in the bed and stared at them as if they were strangers. People completely unknown to him were gathered together in this small rent house with the ancient wallpaper and the lamp beside the bed in the gloom of the torrents washing down the windowpane, the iron bedframe and torn quilts. His two oldest daughters about to leave home, oddly grown to adults. A person wonders how it happens. His wife sitting with her head in her hands like somebody’s mother from the last century. She lifted her head and smiled at him.

“You’re going to be all right, Jack,” she said.

“I know it,” he said. “As soon as I get that horse in training.”

The young doctor said, “Mr. Stoddard, do you know what day it is?”

“It’s the day they asked me to fish out a wrench from the tank. One of those tanks. They thought it was a joke. That’s what day it is.” Jack Stoddard ran his hands over his blue face. He seemed to be checking to see if it was still there, on the front of his head.

A long pause. Then the doctor said, “Who is the president?”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he said. “I voted for him.” He fell back onto the pillows. “Tell these people to get out of here.”

Their mother sat in the bedroom with him, reading aloud from newspapers or magazines, playing the radio. She was trying to reawaken him and make his brain work. He stared at the wallpaper and occasionally turned to look at his wife as if she were an intrusive busybody, a neighbor he knew only faintly.

Smoky Joe had been turned out into one of the sweeping coastal pastures where red cattle grazed and egrets in formal white garb tiptoed behind each cow with grave, worried gestures, darting their heads one way and then the other. Jack Stoddard had been offered three hundred dollars for him by Ross Everett, but her father had refused to sell for no reason other than the pleasure of saying no. Smoky Joe tore up the grass with great fervor. He was always hungry. From time to time Smoky charged forward into a long gallop across the pasture, scattering the domestic cows, running for the hell of it. He was now four years old and neglected, hairy, unshod, and only knew human beings as occasional visitors with food. He should have been sold long ago.

They had moved from Conroe to Wharton. It was in Wharton they heard King Edward was going to marry Wallis Simpson. Mayme couldn’t believe it. They had acquired an old Emerson radio and several neighbors came over to sit in their small kitchen with its kerosene stove to listen. It was an intense evening. In the distance they could hear the noise of the big water pumps, as the rice fields were flooded. Their father lay quietly in the back room regarding the wall, which had been plastered over with newspapers. Maybe he was reading the
advertisements. Elizabeth had just that morning spent fifty cents out of their stock of coins to buy beans and potatoes and lard, and the potatoes were frying as they listened to the fading newscast.

Jeanine shifted from station to station to find a clear reception and finally got a Shreveport station. The king said it was impossible to carry the heavy duty of responsibility and to discharge his duties as king as he should wish to do, without the help and support of the woman he loved. Jeanine was on the king’s side but Mayme said what did he ever see in a skinny parasite like Mrs. Simpson and their mother said there wasn’t much to choose between them. There was something frightening about it. A man abdicating a throne for an arid woman, men in general surrendering to loss, to an absence of rain, air, money, love, kingdoms.

In Wharton they had found another rental house near the Colorado River. The river was dark red and alluvial and not many miles away it poured into the Gulf. The house was full of junked farm equipment and stacked paper bags that had held Paris Green arsenate for killing boll weevils. They worked for two days to clear it. Five blocks away a Hooverville had grown up on the banks of the river and at night there was the glow of fires and shouting and sometimes singing.

Mayme had acquired a boyfriend in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company, his name was Robert Faringham. He continued to write her even when they moved to Wharton, down to the gas country where new gas wells were being drilled by independent operators. Jeanine’s father said there were all kinds of opportunities for a man who had connections. Humble was going to start up a cracking plant not too far away, to refine the wet gas and wring hydrocarbons from it. Engineers and the chemists would toss up molecules of methane and propane and butylene in a dazzling display of new modern technology, they would make aviation gas and synthetic rubber and nylon stockings and plastic telephones and cow
feed from it, everything but candy kisses. He was going to leave off freighting and somehow find the means to study pipe fitting. There was good money in it. To Jeanine this meant they would go and live in some graceful country house and there would be green fields for Smoky Joe, and passionflower vines, and silence. But now he walked with careful deliberate steps around the house staring at things. He put a match to a piece of old telephone cord to see if it would burn. Elizabeth took it away from him and stamped on it and hid the matches.

Bea said, “Jeanine, were you and Mayme talking last night about leaving?”

Jeanine said, “We were, but we’re not now. Since Daddy’s got brain failure. Somebody’s got to stay and help Mother get him in a strait-jacket.” She closed her hands around a chair back. This throttled life had to end sometime, it had to.

“Where were you going to go?”

Mayme said, “We were going to get an apartment back in Conroe. Stay there in one place. But Robert can just write me here.” The rain fell all over Wharton and the Colorado River ran as dark as wine. “I’m twenty-one, Bea. Jeanine’s twenty. We’re old maids.” Not too far away the river spilled out into the Gulf in tangled red currents. “Looks like we’re going to stay that way.”

“Would you have just left me here?” said Bea. “With them arguing and fighting all the time?”

The two older sisters glanced at each other.

“It’s all right, Bea,” said Mayme. “We aren’t going to leave with Daddy like this. It’s all right.”

“You would have too,” said Bea. “You would have gone and left me here.”

Jeanine said, “Nah. We’d have kidnapped you.”

They did not notice her bowed head and her heart burning in anguish. She would have been deserted. It was possible that her
sisters did not love her except in the most dutiful and perfunctory way. They didn’t even read her stories. Her pretty young teacher at the Wharton Elementary had just printed up one of her stories on the mimeograph machine and had tacked it up on the bulletin board. She had so much admired Bea’s tale of the orphan girl and the abandoned puppy. Bea was sure that nothing good would ever happen to her except in books. When she was sitting on the back steps one evening a half-grown cat came out of the collapsing shed behind the house and sat down and mewed at her. Bea took him up gratefully and named him Prince Albert.

There was no money. They had to wait it out. They ate corn bread and grits, salt pork and cane syrup and told themselves things would get better after Jack got well. They cooked on a little kerosene stove that stank of fuel. They walked holes in their shoes looking for jobs, any job, but men with families to support wanted those same jobs and nobody would hire a single girl, even to pop the popcorn in a movie theater or sweep up at the barbershop. Fifteen million able-bodied men were out of work. Jeanine and Mayme made do. They could not face the social stigma of going on relief. They joined other women and children scavenging for soda bottles along the roadsides and lived on what was left of their father’s last paycheck. They were adrift. So were millions of others and no one could figure out why the economy had ceased to function, not even the banker J. P. Morgan. He said as much on the radio.

They tiptoed around the house so as not to disturb their father and then went out into the streets of Wharton to look in the shop windows, and stand under the great live oaks and their Spanish moss by the river. They walked by the transients and the bums in the Hooverville. It was like visiting a zoo.

Then, finally, Mayme got temporary work at the cotton gin writing labels for the bales and shared her five dollars with Bea and Jeanine. She treated them to a movie; sword hacking and high seas
in
Captain Blood
.

Silently Jeanine made herself a dress from material she bought at one of the Wharton dry-goods stores. Nobody else would buy it so it was cheap. Nobody wanted it because it was printed in black-and-white tiger stripes. But she had seen a picture of a tiger-stripe pattern in a secondhand
Good Housekeeping
magazine and it didn’t look too garish. She would black her shoes with stove polish to match. The package of material thumped on the table.

“Shhhhh!”

She cleared the table of the fruit jar full of knives and forks and slid the scissors through the crepe. She sewed it by hand. The Singer would raise the dead with its creaking treadle. They kept the radio low.

Hitler marched into the Rhineland and made all other political parties illegal in Germany. He invaded when the crops were ripe in the fields; tanks plowed through the rye and oats and wheat and any human beings who stood in their way. Jeanine’s father listened to the news broadcasts with his hands in his lap, nodding, saying We’d better not get into this. Stay out of it is what I say.

AT NIGHT BEA
sat with her striped cat at the kitchen table with her schoolbooks and her reading. The cat was not content unless he was with her and at night he slept on her head with a roaring purr. Her teacher had given her a book of poetry,
The Family Album of Favorite Poems
. She sat in front of the coal-oil lamp and read. Books contained speech without noise, human voices that spoke as loudly and as freely as they wished without being told to hush, hush. Mayme wrote to her young man in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company. The letter was very long. Her pen made loud scratching noises. Jack Stoddard developed a strange, haughty air and spent the hot evenings sitting by the door, looking at something out in the night. He stared at his still-handsome face
in the mirror on the back porch and shaved himself with slow strokes. He sat at the table in silence leafing through the women’s underwear section of the Sears Roebuck catalog until Jeanine took it away from him to use in the outhouse.

Bea came in from the girls’ bedroom with Prince Albert in her arms and her journal tucked beneath her elbow. The striped cat jumped down onto the kitchen floor and then into Jack Stoddard’s lap. Bea watched with an open mouth as her father snatched Albert up by the scruff of the neck, the fur wadded in his fist, and drew back and punched the cat directly on his nose. Bea threw down the journal and screamed. Albert made a gasping, snorting sound. Jack released him. He laughed when the cat thrashed in snakelike motions on the floor as if its back were broken. Albert gained his balance somehow and fled, weaving, toward the door and their father kept on laughing.

Elizabeth came running in from the back porch, asking what was the matter in a controlled voice. Jeanine threw open the kitchen window. Albert bolted through it.

BEA SAT IN
the old shed for hours that hot September night calling over and over in a sweet, enticing voice. Finally Albert crept out of a corner toward her. His nose and mouth were crusted with dried blood. He crawled into her lap and blinked up at her with furtive glances, as if he were begging for forgiveness. Bea held him and told him she would protect him and that pretty soon her father would have a brain hemorrhage and die. Bea stared into the dark of the shed and felt they were all in mortal danger and that nobody cared and they were alone on the earth.