The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty Page A

around from patch to patch …”
    â€œAre you better off making airplanes?”
    â€œNo.” I squeeze her hand. “Not really. You want the rest of this?”
    â€œTastes like tar.” She says she’s tired. I tell her I’m going to run into town, but I’ll be back this evening. I drive to my apartment and pack a handful of clothes.
    ______
    The girls on Cedar Springs Boulevard don’t want to work for their money. I’ve asked before – every damn night when I first got to town and felt so low. Ten minutes, sixty bucks.
    Before I hit the road I stop at Ojeda’s on Cedar Springs and order a taco. A pug-nosed girl, fourteen or fifteen, in red heels and a black jacket, taps the restaurant window. Long purple nails. I shake my head, ladle salsa onto my plate. “I love you,” she mouths through the glass. I hold up three fingers. “Thirty bucks,” I say. She laughs and moves down the walk, swaying like a dancer.
    I’ve often wondered what caught Bill’s eye in the oil field, when the shanty woman first showed up. A twist of hips, a toss of the head?
    I eat and read the paper. Today Kircheval’s column – June’s favorite – starts, “Years ago, on a tall building in downtown Dallas, the Mobil Oil Company erected a revolving red Pegasus, rearing and about to take flight. The city’s preservation committee protects the sign now because Mobil abandoned the flying horse as its trademark over a decade ago.”
    Kircheval’s sad that few old Dallasites recall the name of the company that lifted the sign onto the building, and fewer still remember the original legend of Pegasus.
    â€œSo many losses,” he goes on. “Like Jack Ruby’s bar – can anyone find its old spot? A few people point out the grassy knoll, but that’s all. No one talks about it. No one talks about the sky we can’t see behind the streetlights.” I imagine him, poor sentimental bastard, sitting at a scratched wooden desk in the newspaper office, surrounded by World War Two press photos of Ernie Pyle (“Now there was a journalist!”).
    â€œHave we forgotten about the Dipper scooping down out of the north?” he asks. “Have we forgotten falling stars and all the things that used to scare us?”
    ______
    I-20 West through Ft. Worth, Abilene, Big Spring, Midland-Odessa, runs – a straight shot – past refineries and rigs. Flames breathe fiercely out of steel-plated towers and drums; around the processing plants the air smells flat, like warm asparagus.
    Last month, on one of my escape-runs, I filled out job applications with Exxon and Area. As much as I’d hate to give myself to Oil, to fasten my gaze on the ground, I realize I’ll need someplace to go when June passes on.
    When I was a kid I wanted to ride the pumps in the fields. They bucked up and down like the wild-maned rodeo broncos I saw on TV, or like coin-operated horses in front of the dime stores Mama used to shop.
    This afternoon thick blue thunderheads mass together in the east. A faint smell of rain mingles with sand in the air. I stop in Abilene for a DQ Dude and some onion rings. The Dairy Queen is overrun with high school majorettes. They’re wearing green and yellow uniforms and hats with plumes. Big, strapping Texas girls: I’m reminded of the picture of my mother when she was a cheerleader.
    Back on the highway I pass the ripped screens of drive-in movie theaters, closed for years. Actors’ faces, wide as tractors, used to kiss and sing here, floating above me like cloud-banks on the horizon.
    The rain lets go as I pass the Big Spring cutoff. Semis swish by me, kicking up spray and dust. I stop for gas, a couple of cold Coors. At Midland I turn west toward New Mexico. Watching my blinker flash green, I realize what I’m doing. All these lonely trips I’ve taken, all the times I’ve strayed from Dallas –