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betrayal were, and how capable I was of both.
    Months later, I heard from my father that most of the oil workers were undocumented. They’d been arrested and deported, and the drilling company closed.
    ______
    In the next two years I saw Jackie only at marching practice. I’d wave to him from across the field. He’d nod, clutching his French horn like a shield. I never learned anything more about his parents, or what it was like for him at home. I joined another rock group in town and we earned a little money playing dances and parties. At the senior prom Jackie appeared with a date who looked remarkably like Ida Mae Weaver (it wasn’t her). My band had been hired for the gig, and at the break Jackie told me, “You sound strong. Your wrists are a little stiff – seems to me you’re not as limber as you used to be – but you’re cooking.”
    I thought we might be friends again, but we were still so young, we believed we were exempt from time. Neither of us made another gesture, and when I left for college a few months later I lost track of him.
    Several years after that, at a high school reunion, someone said they thought Jackie Waldrip was a wildcatter down around McCamey, but no one knew for sure. I drove by his old house when the reunion was over. The rodeo grounds and all the horses were gone. So were the shutters on the windows. A welder’s truck was parked in the drive.
    I sat in my car, remembering Jackie and Ida. In a way I’d abandoned them when I’d gone off to school, used my father’s connections to position myself in life.
    I hoped Ida Mae had prospered, but that night in her house, I hadn’t glimpsed any reason to think she would. Options were scarce for a working-class woman in Odessa, Texas.
    Two boys were wrestling now in Jackie’s old yard, laughing, throwing grass. I recalled my twin ambitions of becoming a rock star, of losing myself in endless romantic affairs. They’d diminished, then disappeared, like the Pride of the Mustangs rounding a corner at the far end of a street.
    I started my car and pulled away, watching the boys in my rearview, and with their image in my mind I can say now as I couldn’t then: I loved Jackie. His absence from my life haunts me as Ida Mae did, though I’m also convinced that, given the time and place of our growing up, and our backgrounds, it was inevitable that we’d vanish from each other.
    As for Ida – for years, even after I’d married, she was my physical model for the ideal woman, until, with time, her face became harder and harder to recall with any accuracy.
    Yesterday, when Philip found my drums, he seemed reverential – toward the strange equipment, me. Here was a side of his dad he’d never known. But his awe soon passed. “I’m gonna be on MTV!” he shouted. He whacked the cymbals and the snare, drowning out the story I’d started to tell him about a pretty young girl I met one night, and the beat went on all day.

T HE W OMAN IN THE O IL F IELD
    O n the west side of Dallas my grandmother, no longer beautiful, sits in a wheelchair in a Catholic nursing home. Her room is across the hall from a bathroom and there is one old man – like her, a resident of the place – who forgets to shut the door when he goes to use the john. My grandmother shouts at him and he looks up, startled; the nurses come to clean his urine off the floor. In a rage he steps into my grandmother’s room but before he can say anything she raises her voice. “What are you sleeping with that shanty woman for?” she yells. She’s confused him with my grandfather Bill, who (family legend has it) ran off with a prostitute, an “oil field woman,” in the thirties. “She teases me,” my grandmother says to the old man. “She comes to me at night and tells me I won’t ever sleep with you again. Then she ties my bed to a gelding and he runs me