Oil Town
At the end of my road trip, The Hotel California awaited. It sat atop a hill above Poza Rica, Veracruz, a town of industry-not-of-intrigue, as Manuel had described it over the phone. In its flat plain of arid land, oil tankers idled in refinery parking lots of cracked asphalt. Smokestacks and oil rigs imposed themselves on the horizon. Here, as in other similar towns in the States, schools stood next to oil fields where derricks pumped slow and sure. Exhaust towers too near the road burned sulfur into the city sky. None of this bothered me. In fact, under the tutelage of Uncle Stock, I’d learned to see such places as beautiful. They’re opportunities for growth, he’d always said, and for all these wasted years I’d worked for his company, I’d believed him.
As I drove my Buick up the hill, The Hotel California emerged as the twinkling diamond into which this town’s ugliness had been pressurized. I parked next to its tennis courts, which gleamed with freshly painted lines and bright white net cords. Wheeling my suitcase around the back way, I walked beside a bean-shaped pool sparkling with clear water. A fountain trickled into it from a rivulet that ran through a garden of azaleas exploding with color. There was a full bar next to that on the patio where couples in dinner attire were joking with the bartender. It looked like a genuinely pleasant place for the right kind of visitor, which I wasn’t.
In the lobby, a porter dressed in a navy uniform with epaulets approached me with a practiced smile. “Your bag,” he said, and I let him take it. He gestured to the front desk, where the clerk was waiting, smiling at me, too, his smile adorned with a row of white teeth—such oppressive and affected human warmth, after the blessed purity of my long and lonely drive from Denver.
“Good evening, sir,” he said. “Checking in, I presume. Your name, please?”
“Caleb Standard.”
“Mr. Standard, yes. I see your stay is open ended.”
“That’s right.”
“Señor Manuel has a card on file for you, for incidentals. He’s asked me to tell you that you should feel free to order from the bar and restaurant as much as you wish.”
“I appreciate that.”
“He’d like to know if you still plan on meeting him here tomorrow? At 11 am?”
“That’s right.”
“Very good, sir.”
He gave me the key, and the porter followed me onto the elevator and into the room, where he wheeled my suitcase beside the bed and bowed, waiting for me to tip him. He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and handed it to me. “Arrived this afternoon, sir.”
I offered him a twenty-peso note and nodded, apprehensive, and when he left, I studied the handwriting, which looked familiar. A Denver postmark was imprinted over American stamps. Opening the letter, I read:
Caleb,
You must be wondering how I knew where to send this. I’m sorry I snooped to find out, but I promise I’m trying to help. Your uncle still doesn’t know you’re planning on leaving the company, but he’s suspicious. He knows, for example, that you’ve been trying to open your adoption file—I didn’t tell him, he just found out—and he’s taking this as some sign of instability. He knows that you and I talked, but he doesn’t know the full extent of our conversation. He thinks you’re ‘going through something,’ and of course you are. And I get it. And I get why you wouldn’t want to talk to him about any of it, whatever “it” is. I’m writing to let you know that he’s going to initiate a conversation with you when you get back. He doesn’t know where you are or why you’re there (the why part, I don’t know, either), but I can tell that he’s going to try to keep you from leaving—like, with both a carrot and stick kind of approach. Which, as you know, is his way. You feel you need to leave the company, and I want to support you in that, but just know that there will be consequences to that decision—not ones I agree with, but as his new wife, and standing on the outside of the relationship you two have, these are consequences I’m not in a position to keep him from enacting.
I’m so sorry, Caleb. I know this hasn’t been the easiest of lives. I hope I’m doing the right thing in writing you. I’m with you in spirit, even if I’ve only been on the scene for a few short years.
Regrets,
Aunt Cathy
Her reference to my adoption file put me in a sappy, cinematic light: like Blossoms in the Dust, maybe, the 1941 classic with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon as the do-gooding white couple, and myself as one of their impoverished, orphaned, ethnically indeterminate brood. It hadn’t been exactly like that, of course; it had just been Stock and me in my childhood. I tossed the note on the dresser and pulled out my wallet, where I kept the card for the case worker assigned to my file. I dropped it next to Aunt Cathy’s note and used the room’s phone to call for dinner.
***
The next morning, I met Manuel in the lobby, and I saw him before he saw me. He was standing beside a mural of dancing Mayans in the rainforest, tapping a pack of cigarettes against his palm. He looked different that I’d guessed he would, which is to say, he looked like me: not quite dark enough to be considered anything but white—though that surely meant something different for him here than it did for me in the States—and tall enough to command some basic, biological sense of respect. Unlike me, he wore a guayabera and navy pants like he was some sort of Cuban émigré. He looked a good ten years older than me, maybe fifteen, somewhere in his forties.
“Manuel?” I called out, and he turned and nodded and came toward me. He walked like he was tumbling, and I widened my stance as if to catch him if he fell, but this was just his way. When he extended his hand to me, the basic competence of the gesture took me off guard. He smirked at my hesitation before I caught myself and put on my business face.
“There he is, Tom Joad in the flesh,” he said.
“Tom Joad?”
“The Grapes of Wrath. You said you drove here, yes? All the way from Colorado, like you’re embarking on some grand new life!” He laughed.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Yeah, you know. That’s me. Just out here finding myself,” I tried.
He let it go. “My business partner, Adolfo, is outside at a table. Shall we?”
At a four-top beneath a palapa, Adolfo sat wearing a cowboy hat and shades, drinking a Cuba Libre through a straw. When we approached, Manuel called out his name. Adolfo did not rise, greeted us in broken English. A beady-eyed cowboy type dressed in a black blazer and bolo tie, he was sweating through his shirt. He made no effort to hide his greedy smile as he shook my hand. His cheap cologne didn’t cover the fleshy odor of the inside of his hat as he took it off. Right away, he ordered us three tequilas, a stupid smile on his face. He smirked at me as he ordered, like he was letting me in on some sinister plan.
“Well,” started Manuel, “if you don’t mind, Mr. Sta—”
“Please—Caleb,” I said.
“I’d like to begin by giving you a quick overview of our company and where we’re coming from. I first saw a need for PetroPuro when I was—”
Adolfo interrupted him. He pulled at Manuel’s elbow and whispered to him in Spanish. Manuel tried to resist, but Adolfo kept at it. He looked at Manuel, then gestured toward me.
“Pardon me, Caleb,” said Manuel. “Adolfo would like to know a bit more about you. Of course, he’s read your file, and I apologize for asking, but—”
“You must tell me your story!” the old man managed in a mangled English.
Manuel rolled his eyes. I understood. Often, the worst part of this business was the people. “Sure thing,” I said, and had to keep from launching into the diatribe I’d rehearsed to myself a thousand times as if it were a movie script: It’s the end of the summer and I’m standing in a brick courtyard of rich donors to a museum listening to a jazz trio—jazz trio, because that’s what organizations who invite people with money to their event expect, although if they had any sense of who really had the money, they’d be playing 80s metal—but as it is, I’m listening to a jazz trio beneath a garden of live oaks strung with white lights that reach up to the highest branches. The song is “In a Sentimental Mood,” the appetizers are crab puffs and mini-quiches, and I’m talking with a white investor in a black cocktail dress. Candles in paper bags line the pathways that lead one way to an historic home and the other down to the parking lot where my brand new black, Nissan Z, the one Stock advised me against because he thought it might be wise “for someone who looked like me to be driving a car like that,” but that I bought anyway, is coiled and waiting to speed me away from this bullshit, up and away into the mountainside, where I’ll look down, happily alone, at the Denver skyline twinkling in the vast, black plain. Now, you’d think this couldn’t get any better, but I’m not enjoying myself because all I can think about, because of my stupid-ass, absurdly well-paying job, are the following things: the bricks of the courtyard beneath my feet are likely a blend of clay and shale, the shale being a by-product of refining oil. The crab puffs and mini quiches were cooked on a stove powered by gas. The candles in bags, the paraffin in their wax is a by-product of refining oil. My Nissan Z, which is basically the same, mid-life-crisis car that Stock bought for himself twenty years ago when I was a kid but that he can’t bear to see me own, it runs on gasoline, and the state highway that will take me back to my house is made of asphalt, a by-product of refining oil. The museum’s biggest donor is an oil company—in fact, it’s an oil company owned by a man that I once watched Stock dismantle in a TV interview about the role of the industry in promoting alternate sources of energy—and as the bass player gives spine to the crusty jazz standard, all I can think about is how his strings are probably made of a polymer blend that is, as you might guess, a by-product of refining oil—and, as an aside, I’m clocking the fact that, as a preface to this insane life, I was made to take piano lessons as a five-year-old like I’d be the next Duke Ellington, when what I really wanted was to play basketball, a thing I was naturally good at, but that Stock didn’t deem “relevant to my development” beyond childhood. Gas, asphalt, plastic, polymers, selling them: for years now, these have been my concerns, and I can’t stop thinking of what Stock told me when I was just a kid: the world’s a pretty cold place, and the only way you get any meaning out of it is by what you make of it through your own eyes. And if all you’re seeing every day are the byproducts of the energy everyone else uses for living? The energy that your so-called family uses to mold you into the person they want you to be? Well, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
Instead, I gave Adolfo my standard spiel about CleanSlick, Uncle Stock’s waste oil re-refinement company. I narrated numbers of barrels we processed per month. My track record in attracting clientele to long-term contracts. “Plus, I’m born and bred with the stuff,” I added. “My uncle was a VP for Exxon. I grew up on his stories of oil and women, whisky and drilling.” This was bullshit, and they knew it. I waited, and Manuel translated. I could make out the words for women and whisky by when Adolfo laughed. The table fell quiet. Adolfo interjected a joke about whores and laughed and then sipped his tequila like tea.
Lunch carried on that way. Steaks came. We ate them. Booze came. We drank it. Behind Adolfo, a family of three, a young mother and father and their newborn, splashed in the pool. I admired how Manuel handled Adolfo’s crass behavior. He knew when to give his partner a laugh, when to include him at just the moment the old man was feeling left out, when to look at me and grimace in apology. Through Adolfo’s insane asides, Manuel asked me legitimate questions, the kind many American executives would’ve overlooked. He listened to my answers with quiet eyes. He didn’t rush his replies. When he spoke, he did so with precise authority. He was giving this project the whole of his being, asking all the right, tedious questions. Caught up in the feel-good empathy of our drunken conversation, I proposed not only to consult, but also to provide trained personnel from CleanSlick in exchange for a small cut of PetroPuro’s profit. Dumbfounded, Manuel said it sounded promising. Adolfo perked up as Manuel translated. We shook on it like Bush and Blair after a private talk on Iraq, neither entirely sure what had just happened. As we walked back to the lobby, he said he looked forward to our work together and told me he’d be at a bar called La Herradura later, if I wanted to join him. “To celebrate our future partnership!” he said, and I worried for a moment that I’d gone too far. But then, I’d watched Stock reach beyond his authority plenty of times, and where had it gotten him? Only ever to a place with more money. Only ever to a place with more.
*****
Blake Sanz’s collection of stories, The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, was selected by Brandon Taylor as the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His prose has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ecotone, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
