82 Desire

Maybe, he thought.
    Maybe, maybe, maybe.
    More likely it was just that he was there. Both his brothers had the sense to stay out of the house, and so did his mother, most of the time—she baby-sat for relatives and volunteered for projects at the church. So Ray was the only one home to hit, until he finally got his license and started going to the library or a friend’s house.
    Anyway, he got no encouragement.
    But he did well and he found Cille and he had a whole shitload of ambition. He not only wanted to be rich, he wanted to be filthy rich.
    Texas-rich.
    He majored in business and went to work for United Oil for a while. It was just coincidence he got that job—but oil suited him down to a T. He got sent out to Plaquemines Parish, where the whole countryside is crisscrossed with canals built only for the convenience of drilling—an ecological travesty. Even he could see it. But it was done fifty years ago or more and not his problem anyhow.
    His problem was to figure out what to do with mature oil fields that weren’t producing like they used to—that were no longer profitable for a huge company like United, whose interests increasingly lay offshore, where the bucks were so big you couldn’t count the zeros.
    One thing you could do was find small companies to sell the leases to. Another thing you could do—if you were smart and had endless ambition and absolutely no sense of reality—was start up your own small company and buy one yourself.
    Only you couldn’t do that without a wife who dropped from heaven. Fortunately Ray had one. And now Cille had gone back to work and was supporting the whole family.
    He had met her at a party in New Orleans, when he first started working for United. At that time, to say he was insecure was like saying the ocean was slightly damp. But he was tall and had broad shoulders—attributes Lucille had mentioned a few hundred times since—and he had a seersucker suit and a bow tie.
    Cille said he reminded her of Gregory Peck that night—a little hunched over to disguise his height, a little “diffident,” as she called it. Terrified, he called it.
    He could remember standing on one foot and then the other, holding a glass that had sweated all over his napkin, so that he had a cold, soggy mess in his hand, and trying to talk to somebody’s wife, when Cille fell from heaven. Or, more properly, when she floated up to him, actually to the woman he was talking to, but it felt so good to be in her presence it didn’t even matter.
    She had one of those distinctly Southern faces that just look sympathetic. Her hair was some soft color—blondish-brown, maybe (later, it was quite blond, and later still, when the money ran out, it turned soft-colored again, but a different soft). It was long, parted in the middle, and, even in an age when women ironed their hair to straighten it, it was wavy. Or that was how he remembered it these days.
    Everything about her had seemed soft and accepting. Her minidress was soft purple—lilac or lavender or something—but he barely noticed. Mostly, he noticed the sympathy in her face, the way she seemed to want to make him comfortable rather than banter or flirt or argue or try to impress him with long, boring anecdotes of which she was the heroine.
    He made her talk, though, about her dogs (she had two golden retrievers) and about her job (she was a nurse) and about her ambition—she wanted to establish a foundation to “fight for medical rights for the elderly.” He had to laugh when she talked about fighting—her eyes got flashy and intense, her cheeks got red (and presumably hot), and she breathed more quickly. It only made him want to protect her.
    He didn’t realize until their first date—three days later because that was the soonest she was free—that she was barely five feet tall.
    Sometimes these days, at dinner in their hideous breakfast nook, she talked again about her foundation—something she hadn’t done for years. Poverty seemed to bring out the kindest, most generous side of her.
    And at the moment he had such contempt for himself he could barely stand to look at her. The assholes had outwitted him again.
    He knew what they were—he owed his present plight and that of his family to their deception and greed. But if you’d taken him before a grand jury and asked him to swear on the Bible, he’d have said they wouldn’t kill anyone. This was a Fortune 500 company, for Christ’s sake—these weren’t the kind of