In a Dumas bar long ago a drunk’d been shoved down and couldn’t get up. Just kept calling out from where he lay heaped in a corner, under the punching bag you paid to punch. Man of my caliber, man of my caliber, he’d kept pathetically calling.
What a dope that guy was. He’d quit trying. That was his sin. A person could do anything if he put his mind to it. That drunk’d be lying under that punching bag forever at that rate.
A guy had to fight.
So, you were a fighter, I said.
My charge lay there deciding whether to engage with this figment of his imagination.
Was and am, sister, he said.
Despite his disbelief in my reality his mind reflexively tumbled forth, seeking to demonstrate that he was and always had been a fighter:
At Michigan, freshman year, he’d been taking some guff. About his height. Also, was considered a Wyoming hick. Who, his classmates joked, must play a mean banjo.
He’d felt like packing it in, going home.
Well, here’s how that deal’d worked out:
Summer before college, he’d worked in the oil patch. Near Gillette. So, when field camp rolled around after junior year, he knew a thing or two. About the rigs. It could get scary. Some of the fellows got rattled. By the heat, by the noise. They’d turn to him: K.J., am I doing this right? Am I about to get hurt like this? About to get my arm yanked off by that chain right there? I feel like I maybe am.
So from a short little Wyoming hick nobody he’d become a wiry bantam rooster of an expert moving low and fast among his bigger, less-experienced, citified classmates, snapping out brisk orders, which they (who previously, some of them, used to do that condescending thing he hated of ruffling his hair like he was a little boy) now obeyed unquestioningly.
Some dunce would be joking around, doing a comedy routine off the radio, not paying attention, about to get himself sucked into a gearbox, and he’d grab that bozo by the arm and yank him over somewhere safe and hiss a few harsh words into his ear there and give him a brotherly pop on the hard hat. Back in town that night the guy whose bacon he’d saved would buy his beers, by way of thanks.
Suddenly he was cock of the walk.
Like that.
Because he hadn’t just flopped down and taken it.
A tank. His wife had once called him that. He rolled right over whatever life put in front of him. He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as high as a guy could go. If he did say so himself. Hired and fired, restructured whole divisions, traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.
Did that frog have any idea how much motor fuel it took? For the U.S. to have one normal year, like we just now had? One hundred and fifty billion gallons. One. Hundred. Fifty.Billion.Try to work your head around that, Pierre. If you can. Get hold of a gas container. Of the type used to gas up a lawnmower. Get hold ofa lotof them. By the time I’m done, you’ll wish you were in the gas-can business. Ha ha. Line ’em up side by side. To get to a hundred fifty billion gallons? That line of cans is going to need to goaround the world.Wait: not just once, not twice: athousandtimes. And somebody has to go out there andfindthe stuff. Right? Get it out of the ground, process it, deliver it. Was that easy? It was not. Take it from someone who’d actuallydoneit. Otherwise, what? Did the frog want to startrationing? Was that the notion? Rationing fuel? Who was going to run that deal? Some vast international bureaucracy? Feel good about that, Jacques? Think that’s going to be an efficient process? (Been to the U.N. lately? The post office?) And guess who’d get hurt the most? If the handwringers get their way, brought the whole deal to a halt. The poor. That’s who. Those who have the least. What’s the tide that lifts all boats? Continual growth. Is continual growth a given?
It. Is. Not.
Any idiot knows that.
So: don’t rush off half-cocked. That’s all he was saying, all he’d ever said. Let’s not leap off a cliff about it. What’s the rush? Consider the timeline. Cogitate on the complexity of the overall system. Consider Lao-tzu: “Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish—don’t overdo it.” Or, next thing you know, some know-nothing from Washington’s in your bedroom, assessing how well you’re putting on your socks.
Let’s keep researching, keep investigating. Even if theHysteria Brigade’s correct, twenty years isn’t going to make a diddly bit of difference.
Weren’t these the same jackasses who’d predicted a coming ice age?
Put that in your cheese-smelling pipe and smoke it.
Mon frère.
He was a fighter, yes, goddamn it.
When the going got tough, the tough got going.
And the going was getting tough just now. Yessir. He was sick. Maybe I’d heard about that? Maybe I’d gotten that goddamn memo? He was starting to lose it. He’d started seeing things. Crazy things.
Such as? I said and smiled.
It’s hooey, he said.
