Read Online The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty - Free Book Online Page B

around a field, fast and dizzy, and the whole time she’s laughing. In the mornings when the women here bathe me she’s outside my window and I try to hide my body but they won’t let me. They want to show her what I’ve become. Do you want her to laugh at me? Am I repulsive to you now?” The nurses smile because she’s mistaken the man, but she has a story to understand and it’s the same one I heard in my mother’s kitchen twenty years ago. Lately, on these hot summer Friday afternoons, trying to convince Grandma June that her husband Bill is dead, I’ve remembered the story and learned new ways to tell it. When I’m older and not the same man, I know I’ll find another way, then another, until I’ve resolved it for myself.
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    I stop in and see June, regular as a city bus, on Monday and Friday mornings, and stay most of the day. Sometimes she knows I’m here, sometimes she doesn’t. I’ve been back in Dallas now, out of work, for eight and a half months, ever since Boeing’s Seattle plant laid me off with ninety-nine other machinists. When I called last fall to tell my folks about the pink slip, my mom said I should head back south. “It’d be a blessing if you could ease June’s final days,” she said. “I can’t go to Dallas each time she gets to feeling blue – Exxon’s bringing in a new well near Oklahoma City and they’ve got your father looking after it. Mother’s asking for me but your daddy needs me here,” she said. “Stay with her, Glen. We’ll cover your expenses.”
    I thought it over for a day, then figured what the hell-beats hanging in the Seattle rain looking for jobs. Besides, though we’d never spent much time together, I’d always liked June. She was a straight talker. So I threw a pack of clothes into my Chevy and fastened a set of chains to my tires. I rumbled up the Rockies, dipped into the desert, and wound up in Texas again.
    On Monday evenings now, when I leave June asleep, I hit the road and don’t turn around until Friday. Six hundred, eight hundred miles a week just to get away from the sickrooms, the musty medicine smells of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home. Tumbleweeds blow across the highways, in all the little towns of West Texas. I remember these towns from my childhood, but I can’t tell them apart anymore now that the damn franchises’ve moved in everywhere. Dairy Queens and Motel Sixes. HBO and Showtime blaring in people’s houses, through the windows. On Friday afternoons, back in Dallas, I tell June I’ve sat with her all week. She doesn’t know the difference if I’m here or away. “You remember yesterday?” I ask. “I read you the newspaper?” She has a favorite daily column, “The Winds of Time,” by this local hack historian, Larry Kircheval. His articles always start, “Whatever happened to –?” and tell the story of some boring old building or once-important citizen. He irritates the hell out of me, really bares his heart when he writes – “Look at me , how much I know, how much I feel about the past” – but June eats it up. I read her his stuff whenever I’m here. On Saturday mornings my folks call from Oklahoma City and say they’ve tried to reach me all week at my Dallas apartment – an efficiency with only a table and a single bed (“All we can afford for you right now,” Dad says). “We must’ve just missed each other,” I tell them. “I go out for ice cream a lot. It’s turning hot here now …”
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    This afternoon two irritable old men, bound to their wheelchairs with thick silk straps, sit in the lobby of the Parkview Manor Nursing Home in front of the big-screen TV. An old cop movie in black-and-white: leering killers, screaming women. The actor’s faces, flattened and pale against the lime green wall