The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (46 page)

Delivery on a new Duesenberg, especially one with as many custom accessories as Jordan had put in for, took some time. Meanwhile he still went about in the old Durant. He hadn't gotten around to giving it to Clarence Bywaters when the news broke one morning that they had brought in a gusher on his neighbor's holdings.

Jordan Terry was not the sort to begrudge another his good fortune. Christ, he had his! He went over and took Clarence Bywaters by the hand and congratulated him. He could not help mentioning his intention to have given him the Durant; but, rather to his irritation, Bywaters thought it was an even better joke than he did. He got fifty dollars' allowance on it (not that he needed the damned fifty dollars, but them that had it never got it by throwing any away) by threatening to cancel the order on his new Duesenberg.

It looked like a Pullman car. And it turned out to use a bit more gas and oil than the Durant. But what the hell! If there was one thing he had plenty of that was it. While he was out burning it up in those twelve big-bore cylinders, back home that little old pump, going steady as the heart in his breast, was bringing up more. And at night while the car rested, and after he himself had been lulled to sleep by that sweet cradlelike rhythm, the pump worked on, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.…

One day the man who maintained the pump, on one of his periodical visits, happened to let drop something which suggested that both Jordan's and his neighbor's wells were drawing upon the same subterranean pool.

“You mean,” cried Jordan with a white face, “you mean that son of a bitch is tapping onto my oil?”

What could he do about it? Nothing! Couldn't he go to law? He had got there first. Didn't a man have no rights? Couldn't they do something? Install a second pump? Replace this one with a bigger, stronger, faster one? Sink a thicker pipe? Christ, wasn't there nothing could be done to stop him, keep ahead of him, get it before he took it all?

But they didn't care, the oilmen. The same company (a Yankee outfit) had drilled both wells, his and his neighbor's. They were getting theirs on both sides of the fence, the sons of bitches. What the hell did they care which of them got more on his royalty check? It was all one and the same to them.

Jordan tried to visualize the lake of oil deep underground. It seemed to have shrunk. It had seemed bigger before, when he had thought of it as lying just under his own thirty acres, than it did now that he must think of it as extending also under his neighbor's forty-odd. Twelve acres more of it that damned Bywaters had than he had! To think there was a time when he could have bought him out at fifteen dollars an acre! A piddling six hundred dollars! Christalmighty, he spent more than that a week now. To be sure, at the time he didn't have six dollars cash money, much less six hundred, and wouldn't have spent it on Clarence Bywaters's forty acres of dust and erosion if he had had. It was enough to bring on heart failure when Jordan recalled that he had countered Bywaters's price by offering to sell out to him at ten an acre.

They had had to drill deeper on his neighbor's land. Did that mean that it was shallower on his side, that his oil was draining downhill into Bywaters's deeper pool? Was he just on the edge of it and Bywaters sitting in the middle? Since they had had to drill deeper that meant that his neighbor had a longer pipe. Jordan pictured the two of them underground, both sucking away, and the level of the pool dropping lower and lower, and suddenly his pipe made a sound like a soda straw makes at the bottom of the glass when the ice-cream soda is all gone. But his neighbor's pipe went on sucking greedily away.

The sound of his neighbor's pump, now that he knew it was pumping
his
oil, was like the steady drip of a leaky faucet: Jordan couldn't not hear it. Rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, all day long and into the night, growing louder and louder, drowning out nearer sounds, including that of his own pump.

Once Jordan's pump stopped. He was lying in bed one night, sweating, tossing, the pounding of his neighbor's pump like a migraine headache, hating his wife for her deep untroubled sleep at his side, when suddenly his pump stopped. That was his own damned heart he heard, his pump had stopped. He leaped out of bed, ignoring his wife's sleepy, questioning whine, and dashed outdoors in his BVD's. It was going. Thank God, it was going. The relief was almost more than Jordan could stand. But wasn't it going slower, weaker? It seemed to be going slower. Had it reached the bottom and was it having to strain to draw up the last little bit? Or was it only that his heart was beating so fast?

From that time on the rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, instead of lulling Jordan to sleep at night, kept him awake, listening, afraid it was going to stop, uncertain whether it was his own he was hearing or his neighbor's. He had to give up rocking in his rocking chair: the noise it made interfered with his listening. He sat very still, listening. He was afraid to go off for a ride in his car for fear his pump might stop while he was gone. Sometimes at night, when at last out of exhaustion he dropped off and momentarily ceased to hear the fevered rhythm of his own pulse drumming in his ear against his twisted and sweaty pillow, he awoke with a jerk, sure that his pump had stopped, that it was the other that he heard, and at such times as he bolted up in the darkness his heart gasped and gurgled as if it had drawn up the very last drop.

The bills for his new style of living began pouring in, bills of a size to take your breath away, in numbers like germs. Debts Jordan had always had, money to pay them with never before. The one was real, the other just paper, something in a bank. He lectured his wife and daughters on their extravagance. He reminded them how well they had always got by before without jewels and permanent waves. How much money a rich man needed!

Meanwhile that s.o.b. next door was really living high. Burning up the road in a Graham roadster. A blowout every weekend. Delivery vans from Ardmore and Oklahoma City pulling up to the door all day long. And his womenfolks going around bundled up in furs when it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, looking like an escaped zoo. He was not economizing. Whenever they met, Bywaters gave him such a glad hand and such a big fat possum-eating grin that the conviction grew on Jordan's mind that his neighbor was laughing at him. If Bywaters knew—and how could he not know?—that they were both pumping out of the same pool, it never fazed him. Which could only mean that he somehow knew he was getting the lion's share.

Jordan was not the only one to notice those fur coats, those delivery vans. Complaining that they were tackier now than when they were poor, his wife and daughters whined at him from morn till night. Clarence Bywaters now, his wife and daughters were dressed as women in their position ought to be. Were the Bywaters any better off than they were? And they would catalog the finery which Mrs. Bywaters and each of the Bywaters girls had worn to church that morning. As if Jordan hadn't seen! As if it wasn't him who was paying for every stitch of all those gladrags! How could he afford to deck out his own women when it was him who was outfitting Bywaters's like four grand duchesses?

Often poor Jordan chewed the bitter cud of that moment when his neighbor had offered to sell out to him. The scene was vivid in his mind. He saw Bywaters's furrowed brow, saw him stroke his stubbly chin, saw his head shake, heard him say, “It's a dog's life. Crops burning up. Soil all blown away. Cotton selling for nothing. If I could just raise the money I'd leave tomorrow. You know anybody that'll give me fifteen an acre?” Jordan had laughed. Oh, how he wished he had it to do over again! Surely he could have raised six hundred dollars if he had only tried. He could have borrowed that on his own place. It already had a first lien on it, but he could have got a second. Oh, why had he let that golden opportunity slip? Then all seventy-two acres of that lake of oil would have been his, both those pumps his alone. These days to lay his hands on six hundred dollars all he had to do was reach in his pocket. He saw himself doing so. He saw Bywaters's face break into a grateful smile, felt the grateful pressure of his hand. His heart melted with pity for his neighbor, poor son of a bitch, and with the warmth of its own generosity. “California, here I come!” said Bywaters, hope shining like a rainbow through the tears brimming in his eyes. “Best of luck, ol' hoss,” Jordan said. “I'll miss you.” From this dream he was awakened by the throb of his neighbor's pump.

To wash the bitter taste from his mouth Jordan would take a pull at the bottle, drinking red whiskey now instead of white, his sole extravagance. Presently, despite himself, he would slip into another reverie. Rocking faster and faster as the figures mounted, he would calculate how much ahead he would be if his neighbor's pump was to break down, be out of commission for a week, ten days, two weeks. A month. Two months! Three! By then he was rocking so fast that when he caught himself and slowed down he was out of breath and panting, in a sweat. All he had succeeded in doing was in figuring how much his neighbor was making every minute. Then he would feel the hairs on the nape of his neck rise up and tingle as though someone was watching him.

Then Jordan knew he was in for it, and his heart seized with dread. For any misfortune wished upon another is a boomerang, it circles back and hits you. A man can't think one mean thought, not even in a whisper, not even alone in a dark room at night or down in a cave deep in the earth, without Him hearing it and visiting it right back on you. Once a thought has been thought there is no calling it back. It goes out on the air like the radio waves, with the thinker's name all over it. He gets a whiff and says, “Who made that bad smell?” He looks down, right at you, and grabs you by the scruff of the neck and rubs your nose in your own mess.

So it was bound to happen. Try as he might to unwish the wish that his neighbor's pump might fail, Jordan went right on wishing it. So it was only a matter of time until his own broke down. Really. Not just a false alarm. And who knew for how long? Two weeks? Not likely! He had wished three months against Bywaters.

As is so often the case in such matters, for all his anxiety, Jordan was unaware of it when it befell. He had lain awake that night listening so intently to the hateful sound of his neighbor's pump that he didn't not hear his. Or maybe he fondly imagined that it was Bywaters's which had stopped, permitting him to fall asleep at last. The silence awoke him early next morning: steady, throbbing silence, and, in the background, Bywaters's pump going double time. He went out on the porch and looked. The beam hung down as if it had been pole-axed.

Jordan called the Company, his wife called the doctor. Keep him in bed and away from drink, the doctor advised; but he was no sooner gone than Jordan was out on the front porch rocking nervously and drinking steadily as he awaited the repairmen. It was midmorning before they showed up, nearly noon before the one sent for the replacement part got back.

“Have her going for you again in no time now, Colonel,” they said.

But they fiddled and laid down their tools to talk and roll and smoke cigarettes and dawdled in the shade over their lunch and started looking at their watches half an hour before quitting time, and by then Bywaters's pump was going in jig time. So was Jordan in his rocker, until all of a sudden he came to a dead stop. He was still warm when they got to him but it was as if rigor mortis had set in while he was still alive. They had to pry him loose from that chair, and getting him into his coffin was like straightening a bent nail.

There is nothing on earth as dry as a handful of red Oklahoma dirt, though deeper down may lie an ocean of black gold. They crumbled their handfuls over Jordan Terry and shook their heads. A crying shame, said Jordan's lifelong friend and neighbor Clarence Bywaters as they were leaving the graveyard, a crying shame the poor son of a bitch had only lived to enjoy his wealth such a little while.

A Voice from the Woods

“S
SH
! L
ISTEN
,” says my wife. “You hear? Listen.”

“What?” says my mother.

“Hear what?” say I.

“Ssh! There. Hear it? An owl. Hooting in the daytime.”

Then I do hear: a soft hollow note, like someone blowing across the lip of a jug:
hoo-oo, hoo-hoo-hoo; hoo-oo, hoo-hoo-hoo …

A ghostly sound, defying location, seeming in successive calls to come out of the woods from all points of the compass. Near at hand one moment, far away and faint the next, barely audible, the echo of an echo. It is not an owl. Yet it cannot be what it is. Not here. So far from home. It comes again, this time seeming to sound not outside me but inside myself, like my own name uttered in a once-familiar, long-dead voice, and my mother says, “Owl? That's no owl. Why, it's a—”

“A mourning dove!” say I.

It is the sound, the solitary sound, save for the occasional buzz, like an unheeded alarm clock, of a locust, of the long hot somnolent summer afternoons of my Texas boyhood, when the cotton fields shimmered white-hot and in the black shade of the pecan trees bordering the fields the Negro pickers lay napping on their sacks and I alone of all the world was astir, out with my air rifle hunting doves I never killed, gray elusive ghosts I never could locate. I would mark one down as it settled in a tree (I remember the finicking way they had of alighting, as if afraid of soiling their feet), and would sneak there and stand listening, looking up into the branches until I grew dizzy and confused. I would give up and move on, and at my back the bird would come crashing out of the branches sounding its other note, a pained squeak, and wobble away in drunken flight and alight in another tree and resume its plaint. They favored cedars, at least in my memory, and cedars in turn favored burial grounds, so that I think of the dove's whispered dirge as the voice of that funereal tree. It would be one of those breathless afternoons when the sun cooked the resin from the trunks of pines and sweet-gums and the air was heavy, almost soporific with the scent. Heat waves throbbed behind the eyes. The fields were empty, desolate. High overhead a buzzard wheeled. The world seemed to have died, and in the silence the dove crooned its ceaseless inconsolable lament:
hoo-oo, hoo-hoo-hoo; hoo-oo, hoo-hoo-hoo …