ELEVEN

I’d been working with Ollie Marne’s brother-in-law trying to find us a place to live, but there was nothing left to lease in the whole town. So we bought. It was a nice three-bedroom house of sand-colored brick, built back in the 1920s on one of the few shady streets in town. There was nothing special about the house from an architectural standpoint, but it had been centrally air-conditioned the year before, and this was its main selling point as far as we were concerned. Della had left Mona in charge of the office that day, and we were getting moved in on a Saturday morning when Ollie Marne stopped by.

“My man treat you right?” he asked.

“You bet he did. We were lucky to find this place.”

Della had bought three rooms of furniture in Midland the day before, and the delivery men were there unloading it under her direction. I went inside and got Marne and me each a cup of coffee and brought them out on the porch.

“You been playing poker?” he asked.

“Just once,” I told him. “I’ve had my mind on other things.”

He glanced at Della, who’d just bounced out into the driveway in a pair of white tennis shorts and a sleeveless blouse. “Don’t blame you,” he said. He quickly drained the hot brew and looked around with the empty cup in his hand. “Want me to go put this in the sink?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Just set it on the floor. It might be best to stay out of Della’s hair right now.”

“Good thinking. So if you haven’t been playing cards, what have you been up to?”

“Oh, buying a few leases here and there,” I remarked casually.

“Buying oil leases, huh?” He shook his head sadly. “A little guy like me never can afford to get in on nothing like that.”

He’d said it merely as a statement of fact, a bare reciting of what to him was an immutable law of nature, and his voice was free of the resentment such utterances usually carry coming from men of his class. I put my arm around his shoulders and walked him out into the street.

“Ollie, my good man, how would you like a chance to grab a piece of this oil boom?”

He looked up at me and then tilted his head a little to one side in thought. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I’m not. Tell me something.… Do you stay bought?” I asked.

“Usually. Why?”

“I want you to think for a while about where your loyalties really lie, and then we’ll have another talk in a couple of days.”

He turned to face me, his expression as free of deceit as it was of malice. “I can tell you right now,” he said. “They’re with my wife and my kid and my pocketbook. That may sound hard, but that’s the way it is.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t sound hard at all. A man’s got to take care of his own. But what about your friends?”

He shrugged. “I got buddies. I don’t know that I really have any friends, if you get right down to it.”

We were at his car. “Ollie, it may be that you’ve been without a friend too long. I think things are going to be looking up for you from now on.”

I opened the car door for him and patted him on the back. “You think about it and I’ll see you in a few days.”

As he drove away, I saw him look back in the mirror, staring at me as I stood in the middle of the hot, sunny street. A few weeks earlier I’d reeled him in. Now I was about to stuff him and hang him on my wall.

*   *   *

He was back the next Monday. Della was at the office, and I’d risen late and was in the middle of my morning coffee when the doorbell rang.

“I’ve decided that you’re right,” he said as soon as I closed the door behind him. “I need a friend.”

“We all need friends,” I replied sympathetically. I got him seated and poured him a cup of coffee.

“What exactly are we talking about?” he asked.

I brought out my briefcase and spread out the plat of the east end of the Donner Basin. “Right here,” I said, pointing with my pencil. “This is the old Havel farm. Almost nine hundred acres. I’ve got it under lease, and we are just finishing the first well. What I’m going to do is give you two percent of the mineral rights on the lease.”

He gazed at the plat for a moment, then looked up with a puzzled frown on his face. “I don’t get it? Why me? What do I have to do for you on my end?”

I stared squarely into his dark little eyes. “Anything I ask you to do, Ollie. Anything. That’s the price.”

“What do you mean by that? What are you trying to get me into here?”

I shook my head. “Nothing you haven’t already been doing for certain other people in this town, only now you’ll be doing it for me, and you’ll be getting paid decently for it.”

He rubbed his face in thought. Then he reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a small flask. Quickly he poured a shot into his coffee and knocked it down in two fast swigs. He offered me the flask and I shook my head.

“How much money are we talking about?” he asked.

“The well came in over the weekend, and we’ve got three more planned. The geologists are saying now that the whole basin literally floats on a sea of oil. It’ll take a few days to get the casing in this well, and then Brown and Root will take another three or four months to extend the pipeline down here from Odessa. After that the wells go online and you can expect a royalty check that will amount to between eight and twelve hundred dollars a month, every month, just like clockwork. And it will go up as new wells are drilled.”

“Jesus Christ! For that kind of money—” He broke off and stared at me, his eyes big.

“I know,” I said with a nod. “It’s a brand-new Ford every six weeks, if that’s what you want. Or a lot of other nice things for your family.”

“How long will it last?”

“The geologists say twenty years, at least.”

“My kid could go to a good college.”

I had him and I knew it. I didn’t need to say any more, but I’d been at this kind of thing so long that I had developed a longing for finesse, a desire to do things with a certain élan. An urge to gild the lily, some might say. So I asked about his child. “You keep talking about this kid of yours.… Do you have a picture of him?”

“Her,” he corrected me, and pulled out his wallet. “My daughter.” The photo he showed me was of a remarkably pretty little auburn-haired girl about ten years old whose good looks were marred only by the thick glasses she wore.

“She’s a beauty,” I told him honestly.

“Smart, too,” he said, beaming at the compliment as he returned the photo to his wallet.

“So, do we have an agreement?” I asked.

“How do I know I’ll really be getting what you say I’m getting?”

“We’ll go to Dallas on your next day off, to one of the oldest law firms in the town. Fletcher and Reese. You check them out between now and the time we go. They’ll sign a contract to represent you on this transaction, so they’ll be your lawyers, not mine. Then they’ll look over my paperwork. If it suits them, and it will, they’ll draw up a deed and I’ll sign it. The title to the mineral rights is guaranteed by a title insurance company here in town. You’ve got that and the reputation of the lawyers. So when do you want to go to Dallas?”

He didn’t have to be told that we were going to use an out-of-town lawyer to keep our business private. “We’re working ten days at a stretch with all this new stuff going on here in town,” he said. “I’m not off till a week from tomorrow. How about then?”

“Fine,” I said.

“But why me? What…” His voice trailed off.

“Why you in particular? Because you’re a bagman for Will Scoggins and he’s just about the most corrupt sheriff in West Texas. Which means you know where all the bodies are buried and who’s sticking it to whom at any given time. Also, you can open certain doors for me quickly. To get the same level of services from somebody else I’d have to deal with either Scoggins or the chief of police. They would cost me more, and I couldn’t trust them as much because they have their own rackets going, and they wouldn’t need me nearly as badly as you do. And maybe it’s also because I have a soft spot for pretty little girls with thick glasses whose daddies want enough money to send them to college.”

I paused and let what I’d said sink in. “So are we on for the deal?” I finally asked.

He thought a few more seconds and then nodded with a shrug. “Sure. It’s the only chance I’ll ever get at a thing like this. But the one thing I don’t understand is how you know I’ll deliver my part.”

“Ollie, I want you to look at me and think hard. This is very important, so take your time to decide. Do you really want to try to screw me?”

He stared at my eyes for so long I thought he’d gotten lost in them. Then he gave me a slow shake of his doughy head. “No,” he said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “No, I don’t want to do that, do I?”

I shook my head in time with his and we both sat shaking our heads wisely. We’d had a deep and profound meeting of the minds right then and there on that particular subject, and we were in firm and lasting agreement that Ollie Marne never wanted try to screw me on anything.

“I tell you what, Ollie,” I said, breaking the silence. “You keep up your end and you’re going to find out that Santa Claus really has come to town.”

“You know, I can’t figure you out,” he said as he rose to his feet. “First it was poker, now it’s oil. I wish to hell I knew what you really came to town for. You ain’t here to kill nobody, are you?”

“That’s it!” I said with a goofy grin. “You guessed it! You’re on to me, Ollie. I’m here to shoot a pillar of the community.”

“Huh?”

“Why sure! Killing upstanding citizens is a hobby of mine. I thought everybody knew that.”

His face broke into a big smile and he gave me one of his braying laughs. “Move over, Jack Benny,” he said. “You beat anything I ever heard.”

It seemed like he always left laughing, so I laughed too and gave him the brotherly slap on the back that was getting to be like a lodge ritual. As I stood on the porch and watched him drive away, I reflected that sometimes the best way to lie to a man is to tell him the truth so unconvincingly that he just can’t believe it.

*   *   *

Later that evening I sat reading a newspaper in the armchair in our bedroom. Della came out of the bathroom wearing the silk robe I’d given her, her hair wrapped in a towel. She stood at the foot of the bed with her back to me for a moment, then gave a little wriggle and let the robe fall to the ground, leaving herself naked. She treated me to the rear view of a long, luxurious stretch, then hopped onto the bed to lie facedown, her legs spread so that her ankles were a couple of feet apart. She raised herself on her elbows and looked back over her shoulder at me with an expression that was as old as Satan and as deadly as sin itself. “I thought the sight of my lovely bare carcass might give you some ideas,” she said. “But it looks like you’re going to read that paper all night, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.”

I threw the newspaper aside and walked over to the bed. Shucking off my bathrobe, I stepped out of my pajama bottoms and reached down and grabbed her feet. I flipped her over on her back and crawled up on the bed to loom over her. “Oh, I’ve got all sorts of ideas,” I said. “I just don’t know if a little girl like you is up to them.”

“Try me.…”

We did not go gentle into that good night.