The Son

Chapter Thirty-five. Jeannie McCullough

They heard it before they saw it, but when it finally appeared over the trees, it was clumsy and ponderous and not much to look at and most wished they had not taken off work. The sheriff and his men backed everyone out of the way, and, when it was safe, the helicopter dropped through the air until it settled in the dirt next to Hollis Frazier’s spinach field.

A tall man with a big nose uncurled himself from the machine and, once the dusty crowd had formed around him, stood on a wooden box and began to speak. Someone else distributed peaches from the Hill Country. The man insisted that Coke Stevenson was giving away the state to big ranchers and northern oilmen, with nothing left over for the workingman. It occurred to her that she would have been nervous to speak in front of four hundred strangers, but it was plain he was not nervous, he was enjoying it, and he turned his megaphone on a group of people at the outskirts of the crowd and urged them to come in and hear him. Bullshit Johnson, they called him.

Watching him shake hands with all the shorter men around him, she knew Phineas was right. She had met Coke Stevenson, a nice man who did not particularly care what your opinion was. He had his own moral compass; a do-gooder, the sort of man you hoped your children would become. The man she saw in front of her was so happy in the crowd, so happy to be watched and paid attention to, there could not be room inside him for anything else. There wasn’t an oilman in the state who didn’t back him.

“I have something for the future senator,” she told the aide, hoping he would notice this flattery.

He didn’t. He looked her over and said, “You can give it to me.” He was sweating in his black suit, a northerner, with thick plastic glasses, a man no one had ever liked, who was beginning to come into his own. It was a look she would take for granted among people who worked in Washington.

The man took her envelope and she thought of his boss and she thought of Coke Stevenson, and then she thought about what Phineas had told her before she sat down to write the checks. The problem with most people is they don’t give enough. They all want to be ambassador, but when it comes to giving money they think a hundred bucks is plenty and are surprised when they never hear back. In her envelope were four checks for five thousand dollars each. One from herself, one from their lawyer Milton Bryce, one from their foreman Sullivan, and one from a vaquero named Rodriguez. Sullivan and Rodriguez made less than five thousand a year put together; she’d had the money deposited in their accounts the previous day. Any one of the checks would have bought a new Cadillac and the aide read each one carefully, making sure they were properly filled out. Then he led her over and whispered something to his boss.

Johnson’s face lit up; he was a natural. He nudged a few people and the crowd parted, big ears, big nose, bushy eyebrows, he towered over everyone else.

“You must be Phineas’s niece.” He hadn’t stopped smiling since he landed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, he has spoken about you often and I am pleased to meet you. Tell him I miss those fishing trips.”

“Yessir,” she said again.

Someone was grabbing at his sleeve.

He grinned at her. “Back to work. But I will be seeing you again, young lady.”

After the congressman was back in the helicopter, the aide found her and said: “Since you’re at your limit, next time pay cash. It’s going to be a tight race and we need all the help we can get.” He handed her a peach.

She considered it as she walked back to the car. It was runty and bruised, barely fit for hog feed, and dozens more just like it lay scattered in the dirt.

WHEN WAS THAT? Forty-seven or — eight. She couldn’t remember exactly. To say he was elected was not exactly accurate. Though at least Box 13 had come from Jim Wells County, not Webb or Dimmit. Those years had blurred together. They’d gotten enough wells sunk on the ranch to start a capital flow, then agreed there ought to be no more drilling there. She and Hank had bought a house in Houston. Rented a small office. Then a bigger one. Then they bought a bigger house. The way the economy was going it was impossible to lose money no matter what you did.

In the three years she and Hank had been together, she had expected they might settle into a pattern, boring but stable, they would begin to track like tires settled into ruts. But that had not happened. Their lives were changing too quickly, their business growing five- or tenfold each year, it was hers as much as Hank’s. She was not surprised at her own abilities, which she had always taken for granted, but his, which seemed to have no limit, and she was beginning to wonder if he might surpass her — a thought that was liberating and disturbing at the same time. She’d never considered that she might be looked after, that she might have a normal life and not have to worry so much.

Most of the men she’d known were fools like her father and brothers, their lives shaped by a willful ignorance they mistook for pride. That ignorance guided every moment of their existence and until now, she had never doubted that she saw more clearly, more honestly, than any man she had ever met, with the exception of the Colonel and perhaps Phineas. And now there was Hank.

Though he was not perfect. He had no patience for things he found foolish, even if those things were important to others. There was a coldness about him that was almost northern. That awful writer from New York had come to visit and she had not wanted to meet the woman alone, but Hank had made sure he was out of town. Jeannie, meanwhile, had stupidly agreed to meet the writer at the ranch, an eight-hour drive from Houston — they didn’t own a real plane yet — instead of insisting on meeting at the office. The woman was writing a big novel about Texas; she had already seen the Klebergs and the Reynoldses and had just come from the opening of Glenn McCarthy’s hotel. And she had won the Pulitzer Prize; it seemed a good idea to be in her favor.

They sat down for an early supper; Jeannie instructed the maids to put out the good plates and silver. She noticed the woman appraising those things, she was taking in everything, like a poor relation about to come into an inheritance. She was tall and gangly as a teenager but her hair was gray and frizzy like birds had made a nest of it, and like many northerners, her confidence was out of step with her appearance.

“You’re the millionaire teenager.”

“I’m twenty-two,” she said.

“But you got the money when you were a teenager.”

“That’s true,” said Jeannie. “Though I never thought of that as being of any consequence.”

“Oh, it is,” said the writer. “It most certainly is.” Then she added: “How very Texan.”

She could not tell if this was meant as a compliment.

“Were you very lonely out here?”

“I have a husband now,” said Jeannie, “and most of us don’t live on our land anymore. We’re all city people now.” She wished Hank was with her; he would know the proper way to deal with this woman; she worried she would end up saying something she did not mean.

“The house is decorated unusually for this area,” said the writer.

Jeannie shrugged.

“Very tastefully, I’d say. It looks as if it’s been here forever.”

She shrugged again. She was not going to feed the woman any more gossip. “My great-grandfather was a brilliant man.”

The woman nodded. Jeannie could not understand what was so important about her. Even her hat was ridiculous. Everything about her screamed she was from somewhere else, she was obsessed with how much money and land all the families had, with whatever dirt might be scraped up on them.

The maids brought supper out. Jeannie had considered carefully what ought to be served and, after ruling out anything elaborate that might imply she was seeking the woman’s approval, had decided on fajitas.

Flores was a good cook; she’d rubbed the steak with salt and hot pepper, charred it over mesquite, and served it with heaping sides of guacamole and salsa and fresh tortillas.

When they finished, the hands were getting in from the pastures and taking their places at the long table behind the main house. Flores began to carry out their meal, chatting with them in Spanish. The author watched through the window.

“Do you want me to introduce you?” said Jeannie. “Those are the people who do the work these days.”

“I don’t think I speak their language, darling. But I do think I’ll go out for a cigarette.”

“I need to freshen up,” said Jeannie.

When she returned from the toilet, she found the writer standing next to the window in the dining room, a strange look on her face. “Jeannie,” she said, indicating the vaqueros with her chin, “they are eating the same thing we did.”

THE WOMAN’S BOOK had come out and later was made into a movie starring James Dean. It was one long exaggeration. It made everyone look like clowns, as if they had stumbled dumbly into wealth, as if the state was nothing but backwoods tycoons without two brain cells to rub together.

And yet most of the oilmen had liked it. They began to invent over-the-top mannerisms, throwing silver coins out of the windows of their limousines, taking twenty-thousand-dollar baths in champagne. Maybe it was no different from any other time. The frontier was not yet settled when Buffalo Bill began his shows and the Colonel always complained about the moment his cowboys began to read novels about other cowboys; they had lost track of which was more true, the books or their own lives.

JOHNSON LOST BY a few hundred votes. But he became senator anyway and Jeannie began to expect his calls. He called on the Murchisons, on Cullen, Brown, and Hunt. There were very few oilmen he did not call on. Sam Rayburn was House Speaker; Rayburn and Johnson were the only thing keeping the Yankees from overturning the depletion allowance and as they would later need Congress to be Republican, the oilmen of the time needed Johnson and Rayburn in charge, they needed the House to remain Democratic, and they gave generously to keep it that way.

They were all gone now: Hank, Johnson, Rayburn, Coke Stevenson, Murchison, Cullen, and Hunt… soon she would join them. She supposed she ought to be happy: nearly everyone she had ever known had passed over to the other side. But she was not happy at all. She was going into a darkness from which she would not return. That others had gone before her did not make any difference.

She was not a good Christian; that was the problem. The true believers all had their motives, things they had wanted, but not gotten in this world — money, happiness, a second chance — but she had those things or did not need them and had always known that the greatest of her gifts was her ability to see things just as they were. To see the difference between her desires and reality. And the reality was that her life would end just like Hank’s. She would not see him again: what made him Hank had stopped existing the moment he died. They now said that even the tunnel of light was just a trick of the neurons. There was only the body. She hoped she would be proved wrong, but she doubted it.

She looked around at the ancient carved furniture and the high cold ceiling and the logs burning without any heat. It might be a sort of purgatory. She would not mind that, remaining like this forever, reliving pleasant memories. She closed her eyes and she was in Washington visiting Jonas. There was someone he wanted her to meet and they had spent the afternoon on his boat in the Chesapeake Bay.

Her legs were tan, not a vein to be seen. She was wearing a white-and-yellow sundress and sitting in a wooden Chris-Craft; Jonas was driving and the man, pale and thin-haired and going pink from the sun, was flirting with her. A pleasant feeling. Not something she would have indulged back home, but here on the bay, under a sky that was blue but not hot, on the water that was clean and cool, she did not mind it.

It was the first time she’d been away from her children in over a year. Though she sensed she was carrying one inside her. Benjamin, probably. She was not showing — the pleasant man had no idea. He was short, soft in the gut, the opposite of Hank, but he was funny and she found him attractive. Though it might have simply been that she was treated better; women still had their place here, but it was not quite as small as in Texas. A Yankee might forget to hold the door, but he might also forget (or pretend to forget) that he was your superior. She began to imagine a life.

Then something passed between the man and Jonas and then he turned to her and was not smiling.

“I hate to get down to business, Jeannie, but I fear our friend the driver”—he indicated Jonas—“has some pressing business back in the city.”

She shrugged as if she didn’t care, though she would have been content to spend the entire day out on the water, away from her children and the telephone.

“What do you know about Mohammad Mosaddegh?” he said.

“I know we should have been more careful of him.”

“What if I told you that he is not long for the throne?”

As he allowed her to process this she realized she might say any number of things. She decided to say nothing. She was glad Hank was not with her.

“Anglo-Iranian will get back some of what they lost,” he continued, “but it won’t be like before. Times have changed.”

She sipped her drink.

“The majors will get the biggest piece, but right now we’re trying to assemble a coalition of the willing. We need good people who have resources available immediately.”

“Because it won’t look good if you give it all to the majors.”

“That is correct,” he said. “And this is America. We like to look out for the little guy.” He went back to looking over the water. “Nice day, isn’t it?”

She knew that Hank would have pressed the man for numbers, for percentages, but that was not the right approach; she simply had to agree and to trust in this man and in Jonas.

“We’ll take as much as you can give us,” she said. She considered asking him what the time frame might be, but that would be even worse than asking for the size of the piece. She felt another wave of relief that Hank was not with her.

“You know Sedco?”

“I know Bill Clement.”

“Get with him when you get back to Texas. Tell him I sent you.”

Jonas turned the boat toward Annapolis; Jeannie and the man went on talking about other things. Their knees brushed, then brushed again. She expected he might ask her for a drink when they reached the dock, decided she would turn him down, but was hurt when he didn’t. Of course it was for the best. She called Hank from her hotel and told him in a coded manner that they ought to free up as much cash as possible. They were both used to calls like that, they both knew better than to ask for details over a telephone.

By then it had been clear for decades that the future was overseas. The first well drilled in Iraq, in 1927, when it was still called Mesopotamia, had come in at ninety-five thousand barrels a day. A big Texas well, even then, produced five hundred, maybe a thousand, and everyone knew it was only a matter of time. The Persian Gulf was where the real oil was. If that well in Iraq had come in ten or twelve years earlier, the Ottoman Empire would not have collapsed. The world would be an entirely different place.

By the 1950s, domestic drilling was a tough business. It cost a fortune, the wells produced less, and once you found the oil, there was no guarantee you’d be allowed to remove it from the ground. The government was planning a war with Russia and they wanted plenty of domestic oil in storage if that happened. The best way to store oil was to leave it where you found it. Strategic reserves, they called it. Good for the government, bad for the oilmen.

There was no good answer. The hot oil days of the ’30s — filling tankers at night and running them over the border to avoid production quotas — were long over. You had to go overseas. All over the old Ottoman Empire, you could pull oil out of the ground for pennies a barrel. There wasn’t much infrastructure yet, but that was just a matter of time.