“One day what I was doing, I was taking the pickup to Merida to get some things that had come in that Willy had ordered way back, and ten miles from anywhere I came onto this beat old Dodge pulled way over on the shoulder and this tall pretty girl trying to open the hood. So I pulled over and walked back and I said in my best Texican, her hair being so black, ‘їTiene una problema, Senorita?’ She just spun around and give me the glare and said, ‘Problema? Me? No, I just enjoy standing out here in the hot sun breaking my fingernails on this son of a bitching hood latch.’ And right there it was love at first sight, on my part, not on hers.
“Opened the hood for her and looked in and right there looking back at me is a granddaddy rat, biggest damn thing I ever saw, big as a full-growed possum. We both jumped back, and he ducked down and hid someplace under the engine. I looked around, real careful, and I see he had chewed on the insulation on the wiring to the starter motor. So I had Norma get in and start it while I jumped the contacts with a screwdriver. When it caught and roared, old mister rat he went charging off into the brush. What had happened, she’d stopped to walk over to a formation that looked interesting, and chunked at it with that hammer she’s got at all times, and came back and the car wouldn’t start. Just a click when she turned the key. I led her into town to a garage I’d been before, and we went down the street and sat at a sidewalk place and drank cold Carta Blanca for the half hour it took them to rewire where old rat had chewed. I didn’t find out for a long time how important she was down there, being borrowed by the Mexican government.”
“Hey, it wasn’t all that big and great!” she said. “I had a Mexican friend at Cal Tech, Manny Mateo, and he became an engineer with Pemex, the government oil company. They thought they had a new discovery field just west of Maxcanu, way to the north of the Bay of Campeche, and from the initial geophysical survey work it looked as if it might be a particular kind of formation I’ve had a lot of luck with. So Pemex arranged with Am Dexter to borrow me, and I went down there and we ran two more sets of computer tests and I finally picked a site for the test well, crossed my fingers, and went back to Houston. It took about nine weeks.”
“Did they make a well?” Meyer asked.
She shrugged. “Just barely. It’s a long way from their big fields and their refineries. It’s a discovery well and a new field, but the porosity is bad. It makes the MER pretty low when you are so far from… excuse me, MER is Maximum Efficiency Recovery rate, and they figure it at seventy barrels a day, which would be a two-thousand-dollar-a-day delight in Louisiana but isn’t so great down there. They’ll try again a thousand meters to the north where, according to the core samples, they should hit the formation higher.”
“She talks like that a lot!” Evan said proudly. “Isn’t she something else entire?”
Norma flushed. “All geologists talk funny.”
“I kept after her,” Evan said. “She finished up and went back, so did I. Every time she’d look around, there I was. So along sometime in March she gave up, and we got married in April. Meyer, we sure wish you could have come to the wedding. That was a handsome check you laid on us, but you being there would have been a better present.”
“It would, really,” Norma Lawrence said. “People in this family are always missing ceremonies.” She sounded wistful, and her eyes filled with tears.
Meyer touched her lightly on the arm and said to me, “Remember three years ago when we were in the islands, and I came back and found a threeweek-old telegram about my sister’s funeral?”
“And I was with a crew up in western Canada and didn’t know either, until a week later,” Norma said. “Her friends in Santa Barbara said the church was almost full. She had a lot of love from a lot of people. And gave a lot of love. And she was so damn proud of me.”
She got up abruptly and went over to the window ports and looked out at the marina in the dusk of the year’s second longest daytime. Evan went and put a thick arm around her slender waist, murmuring to her. She leaned her cheek an his shoulder, and soon they both came back to the table.
He poured her some wine and touched glasses with her and said, “Here’s to your never having another gloomy day, Miz Norma.”
We all drank to that. And Evan Lawrence began telling stories of things he’d done. They were disaster stories, all funny, all nicely told. There was the time he had tried out for the University of Texas football squad “as a teeny tiny hundred-and-sixtyfive-pound offensive right tackle, fourth string, and next to those semi-pro freshmen they had on there, I was five foot nothing. Big old boy across from me, looked forty years old, kept ‘slapping my helmet and I kept getting up, thinking, Well, this wasn’t too bad, and then all of a sudden there were voices yelling at me and I came to and I was standing in the shower with my gear on, shoes and all, and everybody mad at me.”
And then there was the time he “got a job with a crazy old rancher just north of Harlingen. Old Mr. Guffey had tried to buy a Japanese stone lantern for his wife’s flower garden and they wanted a hundred dollars for one. Made him so mad he got an import license and imported thirty tons of them. Nine hundred of the forty-pound type and four hundred sixty-pounders. I slept in a shed on his place, and they’d wake me up before dawn to eat a couple pounds of eggs, load lanterns into the pickup, and take off by first sunlight going up and down those crazy little roads, selling stone lanterns. Living expenses plus a ten-dollar commission, payable when the last one was gone. They’s never going to need another Japanese stone garden lantern down in that end of Texas. I got bent over with muscle from lifting them fool things in and out of the pickup. Finished finally and got paid off, went into Brownsville to get the first beer in three months, woke up behind the place with my head in a cardboard box, no money, no boots, no watch. I lay there thinking it was a funny place for a fellow with a B.S. in Business Administration with a major in marketing and a minor in female companionship to spend a rainy night.”
And later on, he said, “Good old friend of mine, he said there was good money to be had traveling with the rodeo. SW a lot of new places, pretty girls, people clapping hands for you and all that. He said I should do the bull riding, because I didn’t have any roping skills or such. First time I stayed on more than three seconds and got me any prize money, the bull he tore up my left hind leg so bad, I was on crutches a month, but they let me take tickets. Prettiest girl I saw there looked like John Chancellor in drag, and she borrowed my old car, totaled it, and walked away without a scratch.”
“Didn’t you ever have a good job, Evan?” she asked him.
“You mean like making lots of money? Oh, hell yes, sweetie. I worked better than a full year in Dallas, selling empty lots and lots with tract houses on them, out in the subdivisions, working for Eagle Realty. Had me a hundred forty thousand in savings, after taxes and living expenses, and this fellow told me that what I had to have, I was making so much, was a shelter. So he sheltered me. What he sold me was a hundred twenty-five thousand Bibles at one dollar each. He was to hold onto them in a warehouse for a year, then start giving twenty-five thousand of them Bibles away to religious and charitable organizations, and on the inside of the Bible it said, plain as day, Retail value seven fifty. What that meant was each year I’d be giving away a hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of Bibles, and half that would come off my tax as a charity deduction. He said it was all legal and I’d be doing a good work. After he was long gone there was a piece in the paper about him. What he was was a Bible salesman, selling fifty-cent Bibles for a dollar each. I went to find the warehouse and look at my Bibles, but the address for the warehouse was pastureland. Honey I made lots of money several times here and there, and what I needed and didn’t have was one smart wife to help me hold onto it long enough to get it spent wisely.”