Lucas said the fight between Jeff and Esmeralda actually started at the rig, on the night tower, when Jeff showed up late for work, then sassed the driller and later got careless and almost cost another floorman his life.
Imagine an environment filled with the roar of a drill motor, the singing of cables, chains whipping off pipe, hoists and huge steel tongs swinging in the air, drilling mud welling out of the hole over your steel-toed boots, the heat of flood lamps burning your skin. The night sky blooms with dry lightning, and the constant, deafening noise eats at your senses. It’s a dangerous environment. But it’s also one that’s monotonous and mind-deadening. For just a moment, you daydream.
The tongs swung into the man next to Jeff and knocked him all the way across the platform. His bright orange hard hat rolled into the darkness like a tiddlywink. The driller shut off the engine. When the injured man sat up, his arm hung loosely from his shoulder, and the back of his wrist quivered uncontrollably on the floor. He looked stupidly at the others as though he didn’t know who he was. A piece of canvas flapped in the silence.
After the injured floorman was driven to the hospital, Jeff put his bradded gloves back on and waited for the derrick man, high up on the monkey board, to unrack a section of pipe and send it down with the hoist. Then he realized the driller and the rest of the crew were looking at him, waiting for something.
“You made three mistakes in one night, Jeff. See the timekeeper for your drag-up check,” the driller said.
“I apologize for messing up
. I just haven’t been feeling too good,” Jeff said.
“Ain’t everybody cut out for it. Heck, if I had your looks, I’d go out to Hollywood. Anyway, take it easy, kid,” the driller said.
A moment later Jeff was standing out in the darkness, beyond the circle of light and noise that oil field people called the night tower, watching what were now his ex-co-workers wrestle the drill bit, hose the drilling mud off the platform floor, and go about their routine as though he had never been there.
At breakfast with Lucas and Esmeralda in Lucas’s kitchen, Jeff went over the incident on the platform floor again and again, analyzing what went wrong, rethinking what he should have told the driller, wondering if in fact the accident was his fault or if he had simply been made a scapegoat because he had sassed the driller earlier.
“Roughnecks get run off all the time. That’s part of the life out there, Jeffro. It ain’t no big deal,” Lucas said.
“That’s right, Jeff. There’s a lot of work in San Antone now,” Esmeralda said.
“Like doing what?” he asked.
“The restaurant where I work. They need an assistant manager,” she answered.
His face was dull with fatigue, but a residual sense of annoyance, like a black insect feeding, seemed to glimmer in his eye.
“We can drive down there this morning. I need to stop at the washateria and go to the Wal-Mart, anyway. Cholo needs me to buy him some underwear,” she said.
“You think I’m going to spend my morning shopping for your brother’s underwear?” Jeff said.
“Hon, you had a bad night. Now lighten up,” she said, and rested her palm on his arm.
He turned his face away from both Esmeralda and Lucas and stared out the rusted screen at a piece of guttering swinging in the wind and the yard that was matted with dandelions.
Later in the morning Lucas turned on the electric fan in the back bedroom and went to sleep. He was awakened in the thick, yellow heat of the afternoon by quarrelsome voices out in the trailer, insults hurled like a slap, a table knocked over, perhaps, dishes clattering to the floor.
“The problem is not a stupid job on an oil derrick. You take me to lounges where it’s dark. We go to restaurants where nobody knows you. You don’t like being with me in the daylight,” Esmeralda shouted.
Jeff burst through the door into the yard, with no shirt or shoes on, and got behind the wheel of his convertible. Then realized he had left his keys inside. He put his head down on his arms and started to weep. Esmeralda walked outside in a pair of blue-jean cutoffs and a halter, her face suddenly filled with pity, and stroked his hair and the back of his neck. Then the two of them went back into the trailer, their arms around each other’s waist, and stayed there until sunset.
Lucas was off that night and had planned to go into town. But Jeff and Esmeralda came to his door, their faces glowing with the promise of the summer evening, as though none of the day’s events held claim on their lives. Jeff took the last toke off a roach, held the hit in his lungs, then let the smoke drift lazily off his lips into the wind. He was dressed in a tailored beige sports coat and dark blue slacks. She was wearing a pink organdy dress, hoop earrings, lavender pumps, and cherry-red lipstick. Jeff’s necktie dangled from his coat pocket, almost as though he wished to demonstrate his indifference to decorum.
“You’re going to dinner with us at Post Oaks Country Club,” Jeff said.
“I appreciate it, but that’s a little rich for my blood. Say, if y’all are holding, I got to ask you not to bring it on my property. I don’t mean no offense,” Lucas said.
“That was the last of my stash, Lucas, my boy. Hey, you’re not going to hurt our feelings, are you?” Jeff said.
To its members Deaf Smith’s country club wasn’t simply an oasis of wealth in the middle of south-central Texas; it was the architectural expression of a cultural ideal in an era given over to vulgarity, urban ruin, and eastern liberals who destroyed standards and enfranchised an underclass made up of modern Visigoths.
The gardens and circular drive planted with oaks, the blinding-white columned entrance, the sun-bladed, turquoise pool shaped like a huge shamrock, the flagstone terrace dotted with potted palms, these were all lovely to look at but were only symbols of the club’s luxury and exclusivity; its uniqueness lay in its tradition, one that went back to the early 1940s, when dance orchestras played Glen Miller’s compositions on the terrace and worries over ration stamps and the war in Europe and the South Pacific were as unthreatening as the distant drone of a Flying Fortress on a training flight in a magenta sky.
The late fall might fill the trees with the smells of autumnal gases, and the shamrock-shaped pool might be drained and scrubbed with bleach and covered with canvas in winter, but mutability and death seemed to hold no sway once one entered the geographical confines of the club, which extended from the impenetrable hedges by the road, across the fairways sprayed weekly with liquid nitrogen, to the bluffs that overlooked the lazy, green bend of the river. The balls, the graduation parties, the conviviality of the bar and card room on the ninth tee, the candlelight dinners on the terrace, were part of the world’s grandeur, given to those who had worked for and deserved them, and did not have to be defended. The red leaves blowing out of a hardwood tree in November were no more an indication of one’s mortality than the aging and transient nature of the staff who, when they disappeared, were quickly replaced by others whose similarity to their predecessors hardly signaled a transition had taken place.
Lucas and Jeff and Esmeralda sat in the front seat of Jeff’s convertible, their hair blowing in the wind as they drove out of the western end of the county into green, sloping hills and evening shadows breaking across the road. But Jeff did not want to go straight to Post Oaks Country Club. He pulled into a blue-collar bar above the river, one with takeout windows and an open-air dance pavilion and a jukebox in back.