Suburban Renewal (10 page)

1986

I
t's amazing how one guy, getting up every day and going to work in Lumkee, Oklahoma, doing what he knows he should and playing by the rules, can suddenly have the whole world knocked out from beneath him from millions of miles away and by folks who don't even know that he exists.

It wasn't supposed to happen. Oil prices have always been controlled. In the nineteenth century, they were controlled by the robber barons. In the first half of the twentieth century, by the Texas Railroad Commission. Then OPEC was in charge. Things got scary for a while, but then they settled down. Or rather, they settled up. The price of domestic crude rose to $31.75 in November 1985, the highest price ever recorded. Then something happened. It was crazy and unexpected. Except maybe someone should have expected it. I wish I had.

In the mid 1980s OPEC slowed production to keep the supply of oil low and the price per barrel high. They did not, however, take into account two developing new production areas that were just taking off, Mexico and the North Sea. Neither of these new, abundant oil fields were members of OPEC.

Saudi Arabia, the Goliath of the OPEC nations, began to realize that their limited production policy was being eroded as they were losing market share. Their response was to turn on the spigot. Oil began to flow like water. And for about the same price.

All over the country consumers were jumping for joy. America was back where it should be, living large with gas-guzzling cars and a stock market headed for the stratosphere or what seemed more like the statusphere.

Every day the spot market price of crude was lower. Pumping domestic wells became less and less cost effective. At thirty dollars a barrel people had been getting rich, at fifteen dollars they were getting by. At ten dollars they were getting out. The multinationals were moving their production overseas where wages, regulations and ecodamage were less costly.

The small companies, the ones who were my clients, found their backs were up against a wall. First unable to expand, then unable to keep up their commitments, unable to pay their bills and finally declaring bankruptcy. Over and over my company's name showed up on creditors' list filings.

As quickly as the money had appeared, it was gone. Producing wells were suddenly not cost effective and were shut down. And oil equipment surpluses stood rusting in the countryside. There was so much of it for sale, it didn't pay to even crate it up and transport it to town.

People who owed me money avoided my phone calls. Those who were paid up had no new jobs to offer.

At first I refused to believe it was happening. I would go into work every day expecting things to be
better. Then I'd walk the floor all night, fearing that they were only getting worse.

Even with businesses I knew going belly-up all around me, I convinced myself that it couldn't, it wouldn't happen to me. Many of the independents were run by wild guys, firecrackers, young men who'd stashed their profits in fast cars, expensive boats and fancy mansions. Compared to those guys, I was Joseph P. Suit. I'd kept the operating costs to a minimum, my salary modest, and had plowed all the profits back into the business. I had paid two small dividends to Corrie's brother, but nothing I'd done could have been characterized as lavish or risky.

Still, day by day, the situation worsened. I cut back on everything. I left my car in the garage and walked to work. I tried to schedule my paperwork for the afternoon, so that I didn't need to use the lights in the office. I cut down on toilet paper. I knew I was kidding myself when I yelled at Lauren for putting “more peanut butter than she needed” on her sandwich. It made her cry. And it forced me to admit that the crisis was too big to be solved with some thrifty belt-tightening. If I was going to operate on less money, I'd have to cut down on payroll. I hated to lay off my crews, but I reasoned that the sooner they got out there looking for new jobs, the better chance they might have of finding some. Overnight, every company within two hundred miles had more help than they needed. And the line at the unemployment office got longer and longer.

I couldn't let everybody go. If I got work orders, I had to have a crew to help me fill them. So I kept Dad and three of the older guys. I figured they'd have the least chance to find anything else. And I went out and beat the bushes from morning until night trying to find
paying clients who needed something we could do. Nothing was too small or too far away for me to bid on.

I barely met payroll. I cut wages. It made very little difference.

During all of this, I was so alone. I think it was the first time in my life that I ever really felt that way. I hadn't been the most popular guy in town, but I'd always had a few buddies. All my friends were now in the oil business. Even those who weren't my clients or my competitors couldn't be expected to listen to my fears. And I think they must have felt the same way. All over town, it was like a conspiracy of silence. Guys might talk about the world market or the price of crude, but nobody talked about the stripper wells that were shutting down and the drilling contracts that were canceled.

I was as bad as the rest of them. When I got a question about how Well Service was holding out, I responded with what I knew about operations at Haliburton and Schlumber. I was far too proud, or too scared, to admit aloud that I'd taken a second mortgage on my house and was in negotiations with the IRS.

I was not, of course, accustomed to airing details of my business in public. Corrie had always been my confidant. It was Corrie who had offered her two cents in every plan, brainstormed with me on every new development and listened to every detail of our growth from the miraculous to the mundane.

These days, however, Corrie was not available to me.

Her life had somehow veered off in a different direction. I'm not really sure if she was even aware of how dire things had become. She'd taken Gram's death
very hard. I know they had grown close over the last few years, when she and Lauren were seeing that she got to church. But Corrie's grief was pretty intense. And it had gotten mixed up with her dislike of my dad. Which somehow made the whole thing worse.

By spring, she was a basket case, crying all the time in the garage. The kids were weirded out and scared.

“Why is Mommy so sad?” Lauren asked me one evening when I arrived home late to find the two of them eating cereal for supper in front of the TV.

“I don't know,” I answered.

“I do!” Nate offered, jumping to his feet with his hand raised as if he were in school. “I know, I know!” He was almost seven now, skinny as a rail, but a good-looking kid if you could get past the big excited grin that had several missing front teeth.

“How could
you
know?” Lauren's voice was disdainful.

“Paw-Paw told me,” Nate replied, his voice dripping with superiority. “Mommy cries cause she's ‘one bitch that's permanently on the rag.'”

Lauren's brow furrowed with question. My jaw dropped open in shock.

“What!”

Both kids immediately stilled at the tone of my voice.

I reined in my temper, but not my disapproval. “Don't you ever let me hear you talking about your mother that way,” I scolded him.

Nate was wide-eyed. “What way?” he asked. “It's what Paw-Paw said.”

I didn't doubt for a minute that was true.

“Your grandfather is who he is,” I told Nate. “But you are
my
son and you will show respect to your
mother or I'll take this belt off and whip your tail with it.”

Nate stared at me in disbelief. I'd never spanked the children. I wasn't opposed to it. Gram had gotten my attention more than once with granddad's old razor strop. And I thought it had probably done some good. But Corrie didn't think corporal punishment was necessary and she always managed, more or less, to make the children behave without it.

I wasn't sure this was the best time to change that system. So I stormed out of the front room before the little guy could make some inappropriate comeback that would force me to follow up my words with action.

I went to the phone to call Corrie's mother. We were drowning and we needed help.

Fortunately for me, it was Doc Maynard who answered the phone. I was able to describe what was going on in our house and he responded like a medical professional.

“She needs to be on some antidepressants,” the old man told me. “I'll call Dr. Kotsopoulos tomorrow and get him to see her. Try not to worry, Sam,” he told me. “Half the wives in town are on them these days.”

By May, when my loan payment came due, it felt like I was living with a Stepford wife. Corrie went about her days, doing what she was supposed to be doing. She cooked now, and cleaned, and the kids were back to having hot meals and help with homework. She puttered about, humming and smiling. But when I tried to talk her about what was going on, she waved my words away.

“Do whatever you think best, Sam,” she told me. “I'm sure everything will be fine.”

I did not have that confidence.

Since I'd already renegotiated a second mortgage on our house, and we didn't have that much equity in it, anyway, I decided that I was going to have to liquify our remaining assets. I tried to sell the Volvo. I stuck a sign on the windshield and placed an ad in the classifieds. I didn't even get one phone call. So I drove it up to the Volvo dealership in south Tulsa to see what they'd offer me. The manager just shook his head.

“I've got thirty repossessions coming in,” he told me. “We're shipping them east for half of what they would have brought on this lot last year. Nobody here is buying, around here everybody is selling.”

I drove home, forlorn.

I went to talk with Dad. He was, after all, the crew supervisor, my closest relative and the person I spent the most time with these days.

I drove out to Cherry Dale's double-wide set on the lot next to her parents' bungalow. The place was nicely kept up with attractive faux-wood metal sheeting around the skirt and a decklike front porch with a comfortable cushioned glider surrounded by pots of bright blooming flowers.

Dad had pretty much moved in with Cherry Dale. He still kept some of his stuff at Gram's house, but he'd never really lived there.

“It gives me the creeps,” he admitted to me once. “The damn place smells like that old woman. I've smoked a dozen cigars in the living room and left a stringer of fish to rot in the kitchen sink, but I still can't get the stench of her out of the place.”

I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about. But I'd grown up there. It was my childhood home. Of course it would feel differently to me. I knocked on the
front door of the mobile home. I didn't see my dad's pickup, but Cherry Dale's blue Firebird was parked under the carport.

I heard movement inside, but there was no immediate answer to my knock. I tried again.

Clearly somebody was home. I thought maybe they'd been in the shower and were getting dressed. I was patient, but eventually knocked on the door a third time, more vigorously.

Reluctantly it opened a few inches. Cherry Dale was on the other side.

“Hi, Sam,” she said. “Floyd's not here. He's gone to the beer joint, I think.”

She was forcing me to look through the narrow slot of the doorway. Her face was in shadow, but something was wrong.

“You're not at work today?”

“No, I'm not feeling very well,” she said. “Didn't think I'd go in today.”

I wondered idly who ran the place when she wasn't there. As far as I knew, her fitness center had always been a one-woman show. But she didn't seem particularly eager to talk.

“Well, I'll try to catch Dad downtown,” I told her, and turned to walk away. Just as I reached the step, I turned and waved. “Hope you get to feeling better.”

The perspective from the step was different, and for one instant I caught a glimpse of her face looking dark and swollen. The sight stopped me in my tracks. Abruptly the door shut and she was gone.

Thoughtful, concerned, I started back across the porch to knock on the door again but thought the better of it. Instead I made my way to the car and drove down to the beer joint. Sure enough, Dad's pickup was
parked in front. I angled the Volvo in beside it and went inside.

There was a pretty good crowd in the place. More than I would have expected on a weekday afternoon. I'd sent my crew home because I didn't have anything for them to do. I suppose other employers might have done the same.

Dad was sitting near the doorway on a stool at the bar. His back was to me and there was a bottle of Bud in front of him. He was in the middle of one of his long, drawn-out stories about a lazy drunk and his complaining wife. He dragged through every line with an accentuated accent and deep baritone drawl. Every eye in the room was focused on him. His good looks and perfect smile made him stand out in every crowd, but with that wonderful charm added, he just drew people to him. It was a charisma that I envied. Like the rest of the patrons in the bar, I waited patiently for the punch line. It was as raunchy as expected.

I walked up and slapped him on the back.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Do you want to buy me a beer?”

He grinned at me. “You're the boss, you should be buying for me.”

I shrugged and shook my head before calling out to the bartender to bring me two. I settled down on the stool next to Dad.

“I was just at Cherry Dale's,” I told him. “What's wrong with her? She looks awful.”

Dad didn't answer immediately, instead he took another swallow of beer.

“Car wreck,” he said finally.

“Car wreck?”

“Nothing messes up your face like a car wreck,”
Dad said. “Even a little fender-bender can make you look like hell.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” I said. “Wow, that's too bad. She didn't say anything about it. Was anybody else hurt?”