“How old were you when you joined the Marines?” she asked, interviewer style.
“Oh, I was about nineteen,” he said. “It was summer, and I’d just graduated from high school. I’d played football for the Waxahachie Indians, but I hurt my knee when we was playin’ the Italy Gladiators, so I didn’t get a college scholarship. I was plan-nin’ to go to Texas A&M anyhow, but Daddy was goin’ bankrupt. So I made a deal with the Marine recruiter to get electrician trainin’ if I joined up. Guess it worked out pretty well for me, though I near got myself killed once or twice down in the Gulf, defusing Iraqi booby traps at the Kuwaiti oil rigs and around Ol’ Saddam’s hidey-hole in Baghdad.”
“Your father had problems in the oil business?” she asked, remembering the stories she had heard of the high rollers. She hadn’t seen much evidence of Big Oil since coming here. Despite what one might think from the old Dallas TV series reruns, she had learned that most of what remained of the Texas oil industry was concentrated in Houston, while the Dallas-Fort Worth economy was driven primarily by aerospace, biotechnology, banking, and insurance.
“Daddy was an independent Oil Man, a wildcatter,” said Whitey. “He did pretty well for a while. Did lots of drilling. Had him a fine cable-tool rig on the back of a truck.”
“You mean you can drill for oil from the back of a truck?” asked Alice. “I thought it took a big steel tower and massive machinery.”
“Well,” Whitey said defensively, “it was a pretty big truck. You see, he wasn’t runnin’ one of those giant oil companies. My daddy was a wildcatter.”
“How does that work, being a wildcatter?” Alice asked.
“Well, he’d buy hisself an oil lease on some land. Where it looked like there might be some oil? Then he’d round up some investors. They’s folks in the East and in California that just love to put their money into the oil bidness. ‘Investing in our Energy Future’ they call it. It’s one of them tax shelter things. Daddy’d take the money and hire himself some roughnecks and go out and drill for the black gold. Can take a year or so to drill a well, and of course they’s lotsa expenses while the drillin’s goin’ on. He never had much of the investment money left by the time the well was done. So when it came in a dry hole, he’d just have to send out the telegrams to his partners telling that they’d had some bad luck. After that, he’d go out and buy another lease and line up some more investors.”
Alice looked across at him penetratingly. “It sounds like an interesting life,” she said. “His, uh, living expenses were paid from the invested funds?”
He turned to her with a look of indignation. “No, ma’am! He wouldn’t take nothin’ for himself from the expense money for drillin’ the well. Daddy was an honest bidnessman, not a damn crook! Only money he got was his standard salary, just like it always said in the investor’s prospectus.”
“How much of a salary did he get?” she asked.
“Hardly nothin’, ma’am. Just two or three thousand a week. Real piddlin’, compared to what the big Oil Men pull down.”
Alice raised her eyebrows. She didn’t need a calculator to understand that Whitey’s father had been paying himself around $150,000 a year for bringing in dry holes. “So what went wrong, Whitey?” she asked. “It sounds as if your father had a permanent livelihood. Surely he couldn’t have run out of dry holes.”
He turned toward her again with a look of narrow-eyed suspicion. Then he said slowly, “As a matter of fact, Miss Alice, runnin’ out of dry holes is exactly what my daddy did do. Y’ see, he struck oil with his little rig. He drilled right into this great big old salt dome that nobody had even suspected was down there. It came in a real gusher, squirted oil fifty feet in the air. The black crude was all over the damn place. Daddy like to never got the smell outta his Cadillac.”
“Your father struck oil?” She glanced at him to see if he was making a joke, but his expression conveyed despair, not humor. “Surely that must have brought him much more money than he’d have made from drilling another dry hole.”
“Of course it did,” he said. “Millions. Trouble is, my daddy’s way of handlin’ money had always been to spend it all. So that’s what he did. Gave hisself a big raise in salary for bringing in a gusher. Bought his bidness some more cars and trucks and a jet airplane. Bought hisself a big house in Highland Park in Dallas and another in River Oaks in Houston. He’d fly me and Grandma over to Vegas or Reno once in a while; he made lotsa friends there. Had him a hell of a time, just like one’a them big Oil Men.”
“Sounds very nice,” said Alice without enthusiasm. She never enjoyed hearing about other people doing stupid things.
“Trouble was, the damn investors expected to be paid. That’d never happened to Daddy before. Always before he’d send them the telegrams tellin’ about the dry hole, and that’d be the end of it. But this time they wanted more than telegrams. They wanted their money, and they sicced their fancy New York lawyers on to him.
“Skinned my daddy good, they did. He had to file for bankruptcy. They took his cars, his jet plane, his houses, his boat. They took away the red Corvette he’d bought me. They took every damn thing but my grandma’s house, the one next to where you live? They even took away his drillin’ rig, so he couldn’t even drill no more wells to pay ’em back. I was a senior at Waxahachie High when it all hit the fan. I was plannin’ to go to A&M and study petroleum geology and help Daddy in the bidness when I graduated. But I decided to join the Marines instead. Some people thought it was real funny when we lost our money.”
Alice nodded. “Small towns can be cruel,” she said.
“My daddy never recovered,” Whitey continued. “By the time I was back from the Persian Gulf, he’d got himself drunk as a skunk and killed himself in a car wreck.” Whitey’s voice sounded constricted. “Guess it was just as well,” he said finally. “Ain’t no wildcatters left in the oil bidness anymore anyhow. My daddy was the last of ’em. Texas is pretty much out of oil, at least oil that can be got out of the ground for less than you can sell it for.”
They were both silent for a while. Then ahead on the right she saw what looked like the stone walls of a medieval city, with many-colored pennants fluttering from the peaked watchtowers and battlements. There was a parking lot beside the place filled with cars, and she could see people, some in bright costumes, walking in and out of the arched sally ports. “What in the world is that?” she asked.
“Oh,” said Whitey and laughed. “That’s the Scarborough Faire. It’s kinda hard to explain, but they have all these buildings made of plaster and plywood that are made to look like real old castles and things. Like in the Middle Ages? Every year about this time they have a sort of medieval folk festival that lasts all of the month of June. They get actors who pretend to be medieval characters, and they have archery matches and jousts and sword fights and things. They have pony rides for the kids. They sing and dance and roast pigs and have a great time. Folks come from all over the state to go to the Scarborough Faire. Some say they like it better than the big Texas State Fair in Dallas.”
As they passed the Scarborough Faire, Alice shook her head in wonder. What a lovely setting. It wasn’t at all what she would have expected to find along a rural Texas highway. And it was marvelous for her purposes. She could just see the giant mutant fire ants doing battle with medieval knights in armor. She would write the scene tonight.
Whitey pointed to the large building looming on the horizon. “That there’s the Ellis County Courthouse. Have you had a chance to look at it yet, Miss Alice?”