Valentine(47)

And this, too, is part of Corrine’s routine: Every night after nine o’clock, when it finally gets dark out, she sits in Potter’s truck with the keys in the ignition and the garage door closed. For an hour or longer, she stays out there, wishing she had the nerve. When she goes back into the house, she leaves the keys in the ignition. She fixes another drink, lights another cigarette, and heads to the front porch. Nearly five months since Potter passed—and oh how she hates that word, passed, as if he just drove a little too far into the desert, as if he would soon realize his mistake, and turn around, and come back to her.

Alice calls every Sunday and talks about coming down to check on her. She wishes Corrine would think about moving to Alaska. I’m worried sick about you, she tells her mother in late July.

If I come live in Alaska, will you come to my funeral?

Mother, that is so unfair. You have no idea what my life is like up here.

But Corrine is not going to let this go for a long time, maybe even years. Guess not. Bye-bye, honey.

*

Every August for the nearly thirty years she taught English, in an overheated classroom filled with farm boys and cheerleaders and roughneck wannabes reeking of aftershave, Corrine would spot the name of at least one misfit or dreamer on her fall roster. In a good year, there might be two or three of them—the outcasts and weirdoes, the cellists and geniuses and acne-ridden tuba players, the poets, the boys whose asthma precluded a high school football career and the girls who hadn’t learned to hide their smarts. Stories save lives, Corrine said to those students. To the rest of them she said, I’ll wake you when it’s over.

While a box fan, together with the small, cell-like window that she cracked open every morning, labored heroically to clear the sweat and bubblegum and malice out of the classroom air, Corrine let her gaze wander, gauging the reactions of her various misfits. Invariably, some little shit would pop his gum or belch, or fart, but one or two of those kids would remember her words forever. They would graduate and get the hell out of Dodge, sending her letters from UT or Tech or the army and once, from India. And for most of Corrine’s teaching career, that had been enough. When I say stories, she told those tormented souls, I also mean poems and hymns, birdsong and wind in the trees. I mean the hue and cry, the call and response, and the silence in between. I mean memory. So hang on to that, next time someone’s beating the shit out of you after school.

Stories can save your life. This, Corrine still believes, even if she hasn’t been able to focus on a book since Potter died. And memory wanders, sometimes a capful of wind on a treeless plain, sometimes a twister in late spring. Nights, she sits on the front porch and lets those stories keep her alive for a little while longer.

There have been plenty of months and years in Corrine’s life so unremarkable or so unpleasant that she can call to mind almost nothing about them. She does not, for example, remember the birth of her daughter in the winter of 1946, or much about the month afterward, but she remembers every detail of September 25, 1945, the day Potter came home from Japan, intact, if you didn’t count the night terrors and his new aversion to flying. Three years in the cockpit of a B-29 was plenty, he told Corrine, I won’t ever step foot in another airplane. It’s been five months since Potter died, and his voice is still as sharp and clear to Corrine as a crack of thunder.

*

He is home on a three-day leave and they have made love for the first time in the back seat of her daddy’s Ford. The two of them sit facing each other, grinning and bloody and sore as hell. Well, that was just terrible, Corrine says. Potter laughs and promises her something better, next time around. He kisses her freckled shoulder and begins to sing. What a beautiful thought I am thinking, concerning that great speckled bird . . . and to know my name is written in her holy book.

*

Corrine is ten years old and sitting in the front row at her grandmother’s funeral. When her father starts crying so hard he has to hand off the eulogy to the minister, she finally understands the enormity of their loss.

She is eleven and watching a calf being born for the first time, all unsteady legs and pitiful bawls, and she thinks how much her granny would have loved seeing this.

She is twelve and her daddy comes home from a rig with a bottle of moonshine and two fingers missing. Don’t cry, baby girl, he tells her. I didn’t even need those two fingers. Now if it were these—he holds up his other hand and waggles his fingers, and they both fall out laughing, but she is remembering what her grandmother said the first time they saw an oil well come in. Lord, help us all.

She is twenty-eight years old and a foreman calls to tell her there has been an explosion at the Stanton well. She drives to the hospital with Alice sleeping next to her on the front seat, convinced Potter is already dead, trying to figure out how the hell she is going to move through this life without him. But there he is, sitting up in bed with a shit-eating grin on his face. Ugly flash burns stain his face and neck. Honey, he says, I fell off the platform right before it blew. And the smile dies on his face. Some of the other guys didn’t, though.

It is October 1929 and Corrine’s father is home for lunch. A man who generally hates idle conversation—nattering, he calls it—today he can hardly stop talking for long enough to chew his sandwich. The Penn’s well has come in, a surface blowout so powerful that pieces of drill pipe, caliche, and rock were blown fifty feet into the air. The well blew at nine o’clock that morning, and it is still spewing crude oil. Who knows how many barrels are flowing across the desert? The drill operator has no idea when he’ll be able to cap it. This here’s a historic day, Prestige tells Corrine and her grandmother, Viola Tillman. This is going to put Odessa on the map.