The Woman in Oil Fields Read Online Free PDF

give you a lesson in eight ball.”
    I rubbed my eyes. Stood. Swayed. Jean would wonder where I was if I didn’t phone soon. “All right,” I said. Mike put a quarter in the table and the balls fell out: a thunderous boom.
    â€œYou break,” Mike said.
    â€œSure.”
    We squared off across the room. Too much beer. The table swirled. Solids, stripes, slats in the floor, golden bottles, canned laughter from the television speaker. Mike shuffled his feet, waiting for me to start. “George?” he said. I chalked my cue, gazed at the tip. Bright blue dust rose into the air, shimmied, filtered down onto the smooth green table-carpet .
    I remembered telling the girls stories at night to get them to sleep. I remembered sitting with them on the porch at Casa Romero talking to a young Salvadoran woman. Above us, cicadas caromed off the eaves. “They get in,” the woman said, proud of her English, “when you open the door.” I remembered trick-or-treating – Monica dressed as Madonna, singing “Like a Virgin,” Kate wearing an Albert Einstein mask. She gripped my hand. “It was the scariest one in the store,” she said.

A SSAILABLE C HARACTER
    S ix months before my daughter Jessie was born I found a Japanese Bobtail crouched under the still-warm engine of a red Ford Galaxy. I’m partial to just-parked cars – the soft ticking of their motors as they cool, the waves of heat, the freshly pressured rubber hoses. On any given night I can spot the warmest, snuggest automobile in my neighborhood and nearly always find a cat there, purring, trying to force its way up inside the transmission. The night I found Meckie I was roaming the streets of Bowling Green, Ohio, looking for cats with more than five toes on each foot. My wife Susan was finishing her political science degree at a local university; I was teaching a high school biology class and researching a mutant gene called polydactyl, which can produce as many as eight toes per paw. For some reason, 15 percent of the cats in Boston, Massachusetts have extra toes. While Susan huffed and groaned with the weight of her pregnancy I furiously wrote grant proposals for funding to Boston and to Nova Scotia, where evidence suggests the odd gene may have originated.
    The wind gets spooky in Bowling Green in late October. It carries a chill from Lake Erie and a scent of oil and steam, but brackish somehow, as if from sunken ships. I was always hungry in those days: since the middle of her second month Susan had refused to shop or cook. She’d developed a taste for pickled okra, a particular brand from Texas. She sat in front of the television taking little bites out of the jar, tossing the hard stem ends into a shoebox she’d set by her chair for that purpose. I didn’t mind quick trips to the store or kitchen duty, but I didn’t keep a regular schedule. Most evenings I’d just heat some frozen eggrolls for dinner. “If you’re going out, bring home a bottle of peanut oil,” Susan called one night as I left the house with my pockets full of cat chow. “Or some Cheez Whiz. I’d I like to try it on my okra.”
    I walked to a nearby corner grocery and saw the red Galaxy parked in front. I’d never been beneath a Galaxy. Spitfires were my favorite – a good seven inches between the engine block and the ground. Delta 88s weren’t bad, either. I heard a plaintive whine and bent to look. A black and white kitten. She didn’t want to leave the metal’s warmth; she’d backed herself up to the right front tire and was sharpening her claws on the axle. I lay beneath the bumper with her, cozy, out of the wind. The owner of the car came out and chased us both down the road.
    On the way home the kitten slapped my ankles, snagging one of my socks. I named her Meckie after Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera . Her claws were like blades. Susan cried because I’d