The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty

wasn’t the only activity I shared with Jackie. Twice a month that spring we interviewed a small crew of Mexican roughnecks on an oil rig east of Midland. Our English teacher had assigned his students to tape and transcribe conversations with folks from various social classes, then compare their speech patterns. I knew vaguely what “social classes” were, but people were people, I figured, they simply worked different jobs. Back then, I didn’t know the angers and economics attached to those differences. Jackie did – and I think now the story I have to tell is partly one of class.
    As I’ve said, I didn’t know much about Jackie’s background. I knew he wasn’t poor, but he didn’t share my world of privilege. My dad was no Rockefeller but he did work in the deal-making branch of oil; I was protected to the point of naivete from the harsh lives most people lived in the West Texas desert.
    For middle-class speech I taped my own parents. My teacher’s brother owned an independent drilling company. He let Jackie and me and some other kids talk to his workers to complete our assignment. We took a bus to the oil field after school. The Mexicans were all in their twenties, energetic, weathered by sun and gritty wind. Their muscles were fine and tight, like the sinews of the wild green mustang painted on our bass drum at school. Neither Jackie nor I felt completely at ease with the men, but he stood among them with a kind of calm, a rough grace that (I see now) signified a kinship of class. Without knowing it I revealed – in my thick cotton shirt, my Buster Brown shoes, my “proper” stance – the money my father made.
    What we discussed I don’t remember, except that most of the workers had left their families in Mexico and worried about them. I’d heard ranchero music on KCRS late one night – the cheery accordian solos and the polka beats – and wondered if that’s what these men listened to. I tried to find some point of contact with them, but they didn’t seem to know what I was saying. Jackie did most of the talking. His communication, I recall, consisted mostly of a strong, sympathetic silence.
    ______
    One day, as we were walking home from school, Jackie asked me if I’d like to go to his house. “To practice, I mean. Could your mom bring your drums over in the car?”
    â€œSure. We can call the other guys from my place.”
    â€œNo. Let’s just do it ourselves today.”
    He lived in an old neighborhood out by the rodeo grounds. Slatless blue shutters framed the windows; the cracked cement porch was painted red. Behind the house, on a dusty track inside the rodeo arena, three young girls ran horses through an obstacle course built around seven yellow barrels.
    Jackie’s mother looked a little like a barrel herself. Her neck was huge. She wore fuzzy houseshoes and a purple cotton muumuu. Her shoulder-length hair was square-cut and blond. She hefted my bass drum with one arm, picked up the snare with the other, and carried them into the house. “It’s a shame the other boys couldn’t make it,” she said. I looked at Jackie. He toyed with his amp. I understood that he was ashamed of this woman and trusted me to be quiet about her, in a way that he couldn’t trust the others.
    Mrs. Waldrip said she was a songwriter. It turned out, she’d asked Jackie to bring his “little rock band” over to practice a tune she’d composed. “Writing’s really a cinch. They got these rhyming dictionaries, see?” She picked a paperback off an old piano in a corner of the den. “Let’s just look up ‘spoon,’” she said. “Rhymes with ‘June,’ ‘swoon,’ ‘boon.’ Ain’t that a kick?”
    She settled her bulk on the piano bench, sipped a sour-smelling drink from a Smucker’s jar, and taught us her song-mercifully, I’ve