the Hot Kid (2005) Read Online Free Page B

by now, the driller ten years older. Saturday was their time to get cleaned up before doing the dirty. She still had a wrathful mood on her and told him, "You know you haven't seen Jack in going on five years?"
    "I spent Christmases with you."
    "Twice in that time, two days each. He's a harum-scarum, hell in short pants," Doris said. "I'm through trying to manage him. Emma-GCo y ou haven't hardly ever seen except in pictures, and Mama's driving me crazy. You don't send me train fare right now I'm leaving you. You can come and get your kids you don't even know."
    There, she'd told him.
    Doris said now, "For true? We're rich?"
    "Nine hundred barrels a day out of two wells," Oris said, "and we're about to drill other leases. We had to shoot Emma Number Two with nitro to bust up the rock and she came in angry, almost tore the goddamn rig down. I hired a man's building storage tanks for me." He said to Doris, "You all right? You feel better now?"
    She did, but there was some wrath left and Doris said, "Jack needs his daddy to make him behave. He won't do a thing I tell him."
    "Honey," Oris said, "you're gonna have to hang on there a while longer. I bought us a house on Tulsa's south side, where all the Princes of Petroleum live. Be just another month or so, I'm having the place fixed up."
    She asked him what was wrong with it.
    "The oilman owned it went bust. His wife left him, his second one, and he shot himself in the head, in their bedroom. I'm having it repainted. The house--they had wild parties and broke things." He said , "Honey, the house was put up for auction, the man owing taxes on it. I bought it off the county for twenty-five thousand dollars, cash."
    She had never seen a house that cost twenty-five thousand dollars and asked him what it looked like. He said, "It's Greek Revival, eight years old."
    She said, "I don't know Greek Revival from a teepee."
    He told her it had those Doric columns in front holding up the portico, and she still didn't know what it looked like. He told her there was a dining room could seat twenty people easy. She imagined harvest hands sitting there having noon dinner. He told her it had five bedrooms and four baths, a sleeping porch, a maid's room, three-car garage, a big kitchen that had an icebox with seven doors in it, a swimming pool in the backyard . . . "I almost forgot," Oris said, "and a roller-skating rink on the third floor."
    There was a silence on the phone.
    Oris said, "Honey . . . ?"
    Doris said, "You know I never roller-skated in my life?"
    By the summer of 1916 the Belmonts were in their Tulsa mansion, Oris trying to decide what to do about his girlfriend Nancy Polis, a waitress at the Harvey House restaurant in Sapulpa. He felt they should stop seeing each other now that he was living in Tulsa; but each time he brought it up Nancy would cry and carry on, not acting at all like what she was, a Harvey Girl. It hurt him so much he bought her the home she opened as a boardinghouse for income.
    On a Sunday morning in September Oris sat with his wife on the patio having breakfast while the children played in the swimming pool. Doris was reading the Society section of the paper looking for names she recognized. Oris watched Jack, ten years old, talking to his little sis, Emma, four years younger. He watched Emma jump in the deep end of the swimming pool and now Jack jumped in and Emma was hanging on to him screaming, her tiny voice shrill but nothing new, Emma was always screaming at Jack, telling him to stop it and then yelling for her mama. Doris looked up and said, as she always did, "What's he doing to her now, the poor child." Oris said it looked like they were playing. Doris said, "She wearing her water wings?" Oris said he couldn't tell but imagined so, Emma never going in the water without her life preserver. Doris went back to reading about neighbors and Oris picked up the Sports section. He saw the St. Louis Cardinals were still in last place in the National League, the