the Hot Kid (2005) (2 page)

Well, it began with Narcissa saying she felt like a rabbit stew, or squirrel if that's all was out there. "I thought it was too late in the day," Carlos said, "but took a twenty-gauge and went out in the orchard. The pecans had been harvested, most of 'em, so you could see through the trees good."

"Get to it," Virgil said. "You see this fella out in the pasture driving off your cows."

"On a cutting horse," Carlos said. "You could tell this cowboy knew how to work beef. I got closer and watched him, admiring the way he bunched the animals without wearing himself out. I went back to the house and exchanged the twenty-gauge for a Winchester, then went to the barn and saddled up. She's right over there, the claybank. The sorrel's the one he was riding."

The marshal, the one who talked, said, "You went back to get a rifle without knowing who he was?"

"I knew it wasn't a friend stealing my cows. He's driving them down toward the Deep Fork bottom where a road comes in there. I nudge Suzie out among the cows still grazing, got close enough to call to him
,
'Can I help you?' " Carlos started to smile. "He says, 'Thanks for offering but I'm done here.' I told him he sure was and to get down from his horse. He started to ride away and I fired one past his head to bring him around. I moved closer but kept my distance not knowing what he had under his slicker. By now he sees I'm young, he says, 'I'm picking up cows I bought off your daddy.' I tell him I'm the cow outfit here, my dad grows pecans. All he says is, 'Jesus, quit chasing me, boy, and go on home.' Now he opens his slicker to let me see the six-shooter on his leg. And now way off past him a good two hundred yards, I notice the stock trailer, a man standing there by the load ramp."

"You can make him out," the marshal who did the talking said
,
"from that distance?"

"If he says it," Virgil told the marshal, "then he did."

Carlos waited for the marshals to look at him before saying, "The cowboy starts to ride off and I call to him to wait a second. He reins and looks at me. I told him I'd quit chasing him if he brought my cows back. I said, 'But you try to ride off with my stock I'll shoot you.' "

"You spoke to him like that?" the talker said. "How old are you?"

"Going on sixteen. The same age as my dad when he joined the U
. S
. Marines."

The quiet marshal spoke for the first time. He said, "So this Wally Tarwater rode off on you."

"Yes sir. Once I see he isn't gonna turn my cows, and he's approaching the stock trailer by now, I shot him." Carlos dropped his tone saying, "I meant to wing him, put one in the edge of that yellow slicker . . . I should've stepped down 'stead of firing from the saddle. I sure didn't mean to hit him square. I see the other fella jump in the truck, doesn't care his partner's on the ground. He goes to drive off and tears the ramp from the trailer. It was empty, no cows aboard. What I did was fire at the hood of the truck to stop it and the fella jumped out and ran for the trees."

The talkative marshal spoke up. "You're doing all this shooting from what, two hundred yards?" He glanced toward the Winchester leaning against a pecan tree. "No scope on your rifle?"

"You seem to have trouble with the range," Virgil said to him. "Step out there a good piece and hold up a snake by its tail, a live one. My boy'll shoot its head off for you."

"I believe it," the quiet marshal said.

He brought a card from his vest pocket and handed it between the tips of his fingers to Virgil. He said, "Mr. Webster, I'd be interested to know what your boy sees himself doing in five or six years."

Virgil looked at the card and then handed it to Carlos, meeting his eyes for a second. "You want you can ask him," Virgil said, watching Carlos reading the card that bore the deputy's name, R. A. "Bob" McMahon, and a marshal's star in gold you could feel. "I tell him join the marines and see foreign lands, or get to love pe-cans if you want to stay home." He could see Carlos moving his thumb over the embossed star on the card. "The only thing he's mentioned is maybe getting a job in the oil fields once he finishes high school," Virgil said, looking at his boy.

"Isn't that right?"

Virgil and the marshals waited the few moments before Carlos raised his head to look at his dad.

"I'm sorry--were you speaking to me?"

Later on Virgil was in the living room reading the paper. He heard Carlos come down from upstairs and said, "Will Rogers is appearing at the Hippodrome next week. He talks about current events while he's showing off with his rope. You care to see him? He's funny."

"I guess," Carlos said, then told his dad he didn't feel so good. Virgil lowered the newspaper to look at his boy. He said, "You took a man's life today." And thought of a time in Cuba behind an overturned oxcart looking down the barrel of a Krag rifle pressed to his cheek, wanting the first one coming toward him riding hard--his friend being chased by the three behind him--to get out of the way, get the hell out of his line of fire, and he did, swerved his mount, and Virgil put his sights on the first one coming behind him and fired, felt the Krag kick against his shoulder and saw the horse tumble headfirst on top of the rider, threw the bolt and put his sights on the second one, bam, took the rider out of his saddle, threw the bolt and aimed at the third one coming like a racehorse, the rider firing a revolver as fast as he could thumb the hammer, a brave man set on riding him down, twent
y
yards between them when Virgil blew him out of his saddle and the horse ran past the overturned oxcart. He'd killed three men in less than ten seconds.

He said to Carlos, "You didn't tell me, did you look at him lying there?"

"I got down to close his eyes."

Virgil had taken the boots off the third one he killed, exchanged them for the sandals he'd worn in the Spanish prison, the Morro. He said, "Looking at him made you think, huh?"

"It did. I wondered why he didn't believe I'd shoot."

"He saw you as a kid on a horse."

"He knew stealing cows could get him shot or sent to prison, but it's what he chose to do."

"You didn't feel any sympathy for the man?"

"Yeah, I felt if he'd listened he wouldn't be lying there dead."

The room was silent. Now Virgil asked, "How come you didn't shoot the other one?"

"There weren't any cows on the trailer," Carlos said, "else I might've."

It was his son's quiet tone that made Virgil realize, My Lord, but this boy's got a hard bark on him.

Chapter
2

Jack Belmont was eighteen years old in 1925, the time he got the idea of blackmailing his dad.

This was the year the Mayo Hotel opened in Tulsa, six hundred rooms with bath, circulating ice water that came out of the faucet. They knew Jack at the Mayo and never said anything about his stopping by to get a bottle of booze off the bellboy. It cost him more this way, but was easier than dealing with bootleggers. Drive up in his Ford Coupe and honk the horn, tell the doorman to go get Cyrus. That was the old colored bellboy's name. Sometimes Jack went inside to hang around the lobby or the Terrace Room, see what was going on. It was how he found out this was where his dad, Oris Belmont, kept his girlfriend when she came to visit, at the Mayo. The girlfriend being what the blackmail was about.

Her name was Nancy Polis from Sapulpa, a boomtown in the Glenn Pool grid, barely ten miles from Tulsa.

Jack believed his dad must visit her when he went out to the oil field and stayed the night. He figured his dad was worth ten million or so by now, except it wasn't all sitting in the bank; it was invested in different things like a refinery, a car lot, a tank farm, and a trucking line. It was boom or bust in the oil business, the reason Oris Belmont spread hi
s
money around, and why Jack wasn't sure how much to ask for blackmailing him. He chose a number that sounded good and entered the dad's private study at home, fixed the way Oris wanted it: steer horns over the fireplace, photos of men posing by oil derricks, also miniature rigs, little metal derricks on the mantel, on bookshelves, one used as a doorstop. Jack walked up to the big teakwood desk and sat down in soft leather across from Oris, the dad.

"I don't want to take up your time," Jack said. "What I'd like you to do is put me on your payroll. I'm thinking ten thousand a month and I won't bother you no more."

Eighteen years old and talking like that.

Oris set his desk pen in its holder and gave this good-looking, useless boy who favored his mother his full attention.

"You aren't saying you're going to work, are you?"

"I'll come by once a month," Jack said, "on payday."

Oris said, "Oh, I see," easing back in his chair, "this is a shakedown. All right, I pay you more'n the president of the Exchange National Bank makes . . . or what?"

"I know about your girlfriend," Jack said.

The dad said, "Is that right?"

"Nancy Polis. I know all about your putting her up at the Mayo when she comes to visit. I know you always come in through that outside entrance to the barbershop in the basement and have a drink before you go up to her room, always the same one. I know you and your oil friends have blocks of ice in the urinals, and you bet on who can make the deepest hole pissing on 'em, and you never win."

"Who told you all this?"

"One of the bellboys."

Chapter
18

"The one gets whiskey for you?" Jack hesitated. "A different one. I told him to keep an eye out and call me when she comes in the hotel. I've seen her in the lobby and recognized her right away."

"What's all this information cost you?"

"Couple of bucks. Dollar for her name and address, how she registers. A girl in the office told the bellboy you pay the bill whenever she stays, usually every other Friday through the weekend. I know you met her when you were living in Sapulpa those years we never saw you."

The dad said, "You're sure of that, huh?"

"I know you bought her a house, set her up."

The dad's droopy mustache gave him a tired look staring across the desk, the way Jack saw the dad whenever he thought of him. The big mustache, the suit and tie, and that tired look, rich as he was.

"Let's see," the dad said, "you were five when I came out here to work."

"You left us I was four years old."

"Well, I know you were ten when I bought this house. Fifteen in 1921, the time you took my pistol and shot that colored boy."

Jack looked at him surprised. "Everybody was shooting niggers, the race riot was going on. I didn't kill him, did I?"

"That whole neighborhood of Greenwood burned down--"

"Niggerville," Jack said. "Was the Knights of Liberty started the fires. I know I told you back then I never struck a match."

"What I'm trying to recall," the dad said, "the first time you were arrested."

"For shooting out streetlights."

"And assault. You got picked up for getting that little girl drunk and raping her. Carmel Rossi?"

Jack started shaking his head saying she wasn't any little girl. "You'
d
seen the titties on her you'd of known she was grown up. She dropped the charge, didn't she?"

"I paid her daddy what he makes in a month."

"She had her panties hanging over a bush before I ever touched her. Was my word against hers."

"Her daddy still works for me," Oris said. "Builds storage tanks, the big ones, hold fifty-five and eighty thousand barrels of crude. How'd you like to work for him, clean out tanks? Get in there in the fumes and shovel out that bottom sludge. Start there and we work you up to your ten thousand a month."

"Everything I got into," Jack said, sitting low in the leather chair, comfortable, "either I didn't start it or it was a misunderstanding."

"How about getting caught with the Mexican reefer? What didn't the police understand about it?"

Jack grinned at the dad.

"You ever try it?"

See what the dad had to say to that.

Nothing. He said, "I don't know what's wrong with you. You're a nice-looking boy, wear a clean shirt every day, keep your hair combed . . . Where'd you get your ugly disposition? Your mama blames me for not being around, so then I feel guilty and give you things, a car, whatever you want. You get in trouble, I get you out. Well, now you've moved on to extortion in your life of crime. What're we talking about here? I pay what you want or you're telling everybody I have a girlfriend? Jesus Christ, you know how many girlfriends there are in Tulsa? Set up with their own place? Hell, I keep mine in Sapulpa. Is that the deal, you're threatening to tell on me?"

"I tell Mama," Jack said, "see how you like her knowing."

Now he was getting the cold stare again, Jack ready to pick up the metal derrick from the corner of the desk if Oris came at him. Be self-defense. But the dad didn't move. He said, "You think your mama doesn't know about her?"

Shit. Jack hadn't thought of that.

Still, Oris could be bluffing.

"All right," Jack said, "I'll tell her I know about it, too. And I'll see if I can get Emma to understand you're screwing this oil camp whore."

He thought it would set Oris off, get him yelling--the idea of his little Emma hearing such a thing, even though she had no sense of things. The dad stayed calm across the desk and it surprised Jack, the bugger staring, but holding on like that.

When Oris did speak the dad's voice seemed different, delivering a judgment now with no more to say about it.

"You tell your mother she'll hate you for knowing it and never be able to look at your face again. She'll tell me you have to leave and I won't hesitate. I'll throw you out of the house." He didn't refer to Emma. But then gave him a choice, still his dad saying, "Is that what you want?"

Oris Belmont was another wildcatter story.

Glenn Pool had twelve hundred wells piped and flowing to refineries by the time Oris came to Oklahoma to join his wife's Uncle Alex in Sapulpa. Alex Roney, known in the field as Stub, held mineral leases on Creek Indian land, a scattering of half-sections he'd bought for three dollars an acre before the area came into its boom. By the time it did, Stub was broke, had no means of drilling a discovery well. He was drunk the day he highjacked a tank truck of crude, was caught stuc
k
hub-deep in mud and spent the next four years doing his time at McAlester. Stub got his release and called Oris Belmont. Oris arrived from Indiana with a load of salvaged drilling tools, pipe, casing, a pair of steam boilers, sixteen hundred dollars he'd scraped together and twenty years of oil stain under his fingernails. They drilled two dry holes, Stub No. 1 and No. 2, and the old uncle's luck ran out on him. They were looking to take the No. 2 derrick apart, Stub up on the runaround, the catwalk that circled the derrick sixty or so feet up. He hadn't yet hooked his safety belt to the structure, and when he lost his hold he fell sixty feet to the drilling floor, his final breath smelling of corn whiskey. Oris had been afraid the old uncle might fall or have something fall on his head. What puzzled Oris were the dry holes. There weren't more than twenty in the entire eight thousand acres of wells and two of them were his. What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas--a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they'd of had one day--to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital. Now he sank Emma No. 1, named for his baby girl he'd seen twice in the past four years, and sweet crude came up and came up like there'd never be an end to it.

Oris's wife was from Eaton, Indiana, where they'd met while he was working for wages in the Trenton Field. Oris and Doris--he told her they were meant to be joined in marriage. The time came to hook up with her uncle in Oklahoma, Doris was ready to have their third child--three counting Oris Jr., who'd died in infancy of diphtheria. So Doris and their little boy Jack stayed in Eaton with her widowed mother and delivered Emma while Oris was drilling the dusters. When Emma No. 1 came in, bless her heart, Oris left the boarding-house where he'd been staying and moved to the St. James Hotel in Sapulpa. He waited until he'd drilled Emma No. 2 and she was flowing before he phoned Doris. Oris said, "Honey? Guess what?"

Doris said, "If your holes are still dry I'm leaving you. I'm walking out of here and Mama can have the kids. She's raising 'em anyway, spoilin
g
'em rotten. Says Emma's gonna be a nervous stability 'cause I don't know how to nurse her, I'm not patient enough. How can I be, her hanging over my shoulder. She talks to Emma, tells her, 'Suck on the titty, Little Bitty,' what she calls her. 'That's it, suck on it hard, get all that mookey.' "

Oris said, "Honey? Listen to me a minute, will you? We're becoming rich as I speak."

Doris wasn't finished but paused to hear that much. She was a farm girl, skin and bones all her life, but was strong from working; she had a cute face, good teeth, read magazines and was always respectful of her husband. Saturdays she used to shave him and trim his hair and his big droopy mustache. Then she'd strop the razor and shave her legs and under her arms, the driller twisting his mouth to one side and then the other watching every stroke and getting a boner. Doris was thirty-four by now, the driller ten years older. Saturday was their time to get cleaned up before doing the dirty. She still had a wrathful mood on her and told him, "You know you haven't seen Jack in going on five years?"

"I spent Christmases with you."

"Twice in that time, two days each. He's a harum-scarum, hell in short pants," Doris said. "I'm through trying to manage him. Emma-GCo
y
ou haven't hardly ever seen except in pictures, and Mama's driving me crazy. You don't send me train fare right now I'm leaving you. You can come and get your kids you don't even know."

There, she'd told him.

Doris said now, "For true? We're rich?"

"Nine hundred barrels a day out of two wells," Oris said, "and we're about to drill other leases. We had to shoot Emma Number Two with nitro to bust up the rock and she came in angry, almost tore the goddamn rig down. I hired a man's building storage tanks for me." He said to Doris, "You all right? You feel better now?"

She did, but there was some wrath left and Doris said, "Jack needs his daddy to make him behave. He won't do a thing I tell him."

"Honey," Oris said, "you're gonna have to hang on there a while longer. I bought us a house on Tulsa's south side, where all the Princes of Petroleum live. Be just another month or so, I'm having the place fixed up."

She asked him what was wrong with it.

"The oilman owned it went bust. His wife left him, his second one, and he shot himself in the head, in their bedroom. I'm having it repainted. The house--they had wild parties and broke things." He said
,
"Honey, the house was put up for auction, the man owing taxes on it. I bought it off the county for twenty-five thousand dollars, cash."

She had never seen a house that cost twenty-five thousand dollars and asked him what it looked like. He said, "It's Greek Revival, eight years old."

She said, "I don't know Greek Revival from a teepee."

He told her it had those Doric columns in front holding up the portico, and she still didn't know what it looked like. He told her there was a dining room could seat twenty people easy. She imagined harvest hands sitting there having noon dinner. He told her it had five bedrooms and four baths, a sleeping porch, a maid's room, three-car garage, a big kitchen that had an icebox with seven doors in it, a swimming pool in the backyard . . . "I almost forgot," Oris said, "and a roller-skating rink on the third floor."

There was a silence on the phone.

Oris said, "Honey . . . ?"

Doris said, "You know I never roller-skated in my life?"

By the summer of 1916 the Belmonts were in their Tulsa mansion, Oris trying to decide what to do about his girlfriend Nancy Polis, a waitress at the Harvey House restaurant in Sapulpa. He felt they should stop seeing each other now that he was living in Tulsa; but each time he brought it up Nancy would cry and carry on, not acting at all like what she was, a Harvey Girl. It hurt him so much he bought her the home she opened as a boardinghouse for income.

On a Sunday morning in September Oris sat with his wife on the patio having breakfast while the children played in the swimming pool. Doris was reading the Society section of the paper looking for names she recognized. Oris watched Jack, ten years old, talking to his little sis, Emma, four years younger. He watched Emma jump in the deep end of the swimming pool and now Jack jumped in and Emma was hanging on to him screaming, her tiny voice shrill but nothing new, Emma was always screaming at Jack, telling him to stop it and then yelling for her mama. Doris looked up and said, as she always did, "What's he doing to her now, the poor child." Oris said it looked like they were playing. Doris said, "She wearing her water wings?" Oris said he couldn't tell but imagined so, Emma never going in the water without her life preserver. Doris went back to reading about neighbors and Oris picked up the Sports section. He saw the St. Louis Cardinals were still in last place in the National League, the Brooklyn Robins, goddamn it, i
n
first, two and a half games ahead of Philly. Oris looked toward the pool again. Jack was sitting in a canvas chair wearing a pair of smoked glasses too big for his young face. Emma was nowhere in sight. Oris called out, "Jack, where's your sister?" Doris put down her paper. Oris would see the next part clearly anytime he thought about it: Jack on his feet now looking at the pool, then seeing her under water and diving in to save her life.

She wasn't breathing when they pulled her out. Oris didn't know what to do. Doris did, she went crazy screaming and crying, asking God why He took their little girl. Sunday their doctor, who lived nearby in Maple Ridge, was home. He came right away and said, "How long has it been?" And, "Why aren't you giving her artificial respiration?"

Oris remembered Jack talking to her, Emma nodding and then jumping in the pool, not wearing her water wings, and screaming trying to hold on to Jack. Oris believed his little girl was unconscious for almost fifteen minutes before the doctor forced her to breathe again and they took her, stretched out on the backseat of the La Salle, to the hospital. The lack of oxygen to her brain for that long meant it no longer worked the way it should. She couldn't walk. She sat in her wheelchair and stared, or crawled around the roller-skating rink upstairs scrubbing the floor with her dolls, or throwing them or beating the floor with her babies until they came apart and there were pieces of dolls all over the roller rink the Belmonts never used.