Lunch two days later for Lucas meant bologna and catsup white bread sandwiches with his family around their kitchen table before his big heat ride.
Laura was home after working a half-day shift.
Mom and Dad didn’t talk about much before he went back to work.
He rode his bike to the Mallettes’ house. The aluminum ladder lay flat in the driveway. Still-sealed cans of white paint sat beside the house’s scraped wall.
A screen door creaked. Mrs. Mallette yelled: “Neal’s not here, Lucas! Phoned that something came up. You’re supposed to take the rest of the day off.”
Lucas waved. Pedaled away like he knew where he was going.
Marin was a million miles away on a ranch. Kurt’s camp in the mountains didn’t get out for weeks. Wayne was helping out his dad at the rebuilding hardware store. If Lucas went home, he’d have to keep out of Mom’s sight.
“Idle hands are the devil’s tools,” she’d quote from Gramma Meg.
Or she’d storm into his bedroom where he’d be happily imagining in his chair. She’d—kind of like a joke—shout: “Quit thinking on my time!”
You gotta go somewhere, Lucas told himself. The only breeze was the whoosh he made.
Lucas turned the corner at the Methodist church.
Across the street, Mrs. Sweeny lifted the red flag on her mailbox. Saw him.
“You! The Ross boy! I got something for you!”
Stop. He had to stop. “Yes, ma’am?”
She fished an envelope from her mailbox. Scraped off its stamp. “Waste not, want not. Now you can personally take this where it has to go.”
“But I’m on my way to—”
“Are you going where your mother wants or are you looking for trouble?”
Lucas knew Mrs. Sweeny had a phone. ‘Hello? Lucas’s mom?’
Lucas sighed. “What is it you want me to do?”
“What you’re supposed to. Supposed to help your kin. And your elders. Won’t be no trouble for you to pedal out to your Uncle Orville’s shop.”
“That’s way west of town along the highway and—”
“And you got to do what you got to do. Just like the rest of us. Unless you’re special, in which case, why, pardon me: I didn’t know Megan Conner’s people up and got special.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good. Tell your Uncle Orville now that I know he’s not a thief. I appreciate what he thinks. I prayed on it. Wrote those letters in that envelope like we talked about. And I’m going to sign that other deal my lawyer worked out for us.”
“Ma’am, I don’t understand what—”
“You just tell Orville that Mrs. Sweeny’s gonna get what’s hers. Finally.”
She told Lucas to drink from her garden hose so he wouldn’t parch out.
When he turned on that water, she said he might as well give her marigolds and peonies a good dose. The crone disappeared behind her shut door.
He rode through town. Biked past the Tastee Freeze and crossed over the highway to pedal with the flow of traffic. Passed the sign that read CITY LIMITS. Biked and biked more. Crossed the highway to a gravel road leading across a flat stretch of prairie that held a distant Quonset building that looked like a giant metal tube. Pedaled past a peeling black and white sign: DIXON DRILLING.
Off to his left waited two flatbed trucks with wrinkled tires. Stacks of long pipes made windbreaks for a buildup of tumbleweeds. He smelled grease and gas. Saw Uncle Orville’s blue pickup parked by the Quonset’s open door.
But where is everybody? thought Lucas as he climbed off his bike. Once when he’d been riding with the Conner sisters, Aunt Iona brought mail out here to her husband. Then, this place had been a beehive with men loading trucks, revving engines. Now all Lucas heard was one hammer banging Ding! Ding! Ding!
Lucas rolled his bike into the Quonset’s shaded cavern where metal walls trembled every time a bull of a man hammered a steel rod cinched in a vise.
Between sledgehammer strokes, Lucas yelled: “Hi, Uncle Orville!”
The big man stared at the flush-faced boy in the sweat-soaked T-shirt.
“Lucas! You bike all the way out here? Get some water in you!”
Lucas followed the big man to an iron sink. Water gushed out of the spigot. His uncle made him drink gulps. “Now stick your head under there.”
Arctic water rushed over Lucas’s baked skull. Felt wonderful.
He shut off the water. Put his glasses back on.
His uncle pointed at a small bathroom. “Now go pee. Get the flow going.”
And oh did he flow.
Looked around as he came out of the bathroom.
Coffin-sized clothes lockers filled this rear wall of the Quonset. A folding chair leaned against the lockers near a cluttered desk and a torn office chair.
“Why’d you come out here?” asked Uncle Orville.
Lucas handed him Mrs. Sweeny’s envelope. Said she wanted Uncle Orville told yes to a deal. But Lucas didn’t say anything about anybody being a thief.
The big man grinned as he tossed the envelope on his desk.
“She’s so cheap she makes a kid carry her load. Come on. We’ll throw your bike in the pickup. Ride you home so—”
A car crunched to a stop outside on the gravel road. A car door slammed. An invisible man shouted: “Orville! You in there?”
Uncle Orville propelled Lucas to the shop’s back wall. Swung open a locker. “Get the hell in there and don’t make a God-damn peep!”
Lucas scrambled into the locker. Metal walls pinched his shoulders. He scrunched. Couldn’t sit down. Swore to himself that he wasn’t scared.
Uncle Orville leaned the folding chair so it propped the locker door open.
“There you are!” called out the visitor—Lucas’s ex-neighbor Mr. Falk. “What are you doing?”
Uncle Orville replied: “Catching up on paperwork.”
Lucas heard a desk drawer open and close.
“But it’s hot as hell out here,” said Uncle Orville. “We should go into town and grab a cold beer. Talk there. You drive on ahead. I’ll—”
“You know people shouldn’t see us together, though when the dust clears, why, me and the wife sure want to have you and yours over for dinner.”
Lucas shrank as small as he could. Took slow, quiet breaths.
Falk said: “Fine place you got here. A real working stiff’s palace.”
Uncle Orville said nothing, but Lucas imagined his uncle’s blockish face going as hard as hammered steel. He smelled oil, the metal walls pressing him.
Falk said: “I’m dying to know. Did you make up with old lady Sweeny?”
“Must have. She got word to me that she’s gonna sign your deal.”
“Hot damn yes!”
“So we’re done here now. We—”
“I still don’t know why she had to talk to you. I proved to her that McDewel couldn’t have slanted her land.”
“We don’t need to talk about this now. I got work to do. You do, too. You should probably get ready so things can move quick once you call her.”
“You should never be too eager. You got to know how to play things.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you relax? I’m on top of everything.”
“So let’s have a beer to celebrate. We can meet in Shelby. Nobody’ll see us.”
“You’re acting squirrely all of a sudden. When a man’s partner is anxious to walk him out the door, a man’s got to wonder.”
“I just want to finish up here and get the hell out of the heat an’ to home.”
“Home isn’t exactly where guys like us like to go, now is it.” Falk laughed. “But you’re right about the damn heat. Take a load off your feet. Relax.”
Through his shaft of light, Lucas saw a hand, a man’s arm in a white shirt, a fancy watch with a gold trinket. The hand pulled the folding chair away.
The locker door clicked shut.
Only a high-up slotted grill of sunlight and fresh air connected Lucas’s metal coffin of darkness to the outside world.
Uncle Orville grunted. “Guess we gotta go through it quick and get it done.”
Falk said: “I still don’t know why she had to talk to you.”
“She only trusts Jesus whispers and the right kind of people from around here. She figured that since it turns out I’m not a thief, maybe she can trust me.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth. She called me up to her house to clear up her thinking I worked for a thief who slanted her land. So I let her know that the numbers you showed her were the numbers McDewel logged to the well I drilled next to her parcel.”
“She ask you anything else?”
“After she got that from me, she let out there was a deal on her table. Asked if I thought she should lease her land for drilling. I told her it was free money, whether they found oil there or not, and only a fool turns down free money.”
“Does she know I own a chunk of the leasing company?”
“Not from me.”
The locker’s metal walls are getting slick. Pushing in.
“Good. As her lawyer, I advised her that Kaimin Oil’s contract is solid. Didn’t tell her it was a lowball fee, but if we can wrap this up tight, she won’t have time to shop it around and find out. And believe me, that’s an ironclad contract.”
“You’re gonna have to hammer one more bolt to it.”
“Huh?”
“When me and her were talking, the idea came up that I know the oil field her land sits on. She’s worried that I might hustle up a drilling deal on her neighbor’s place. Suck up oil there before it could soak over to her well. She doesn’t want to take that chance. Wants to tie me up—and pay me back for branding me a thief all these years. ‘Atone for her misunderstanding,’ she said. You know her: she likes to write letters, so she penned up letters of agreement between her and me that say if there’s any oil drilling done on her land, I gotta be the driller who does it.”
“What letters? I’m her lawyer and she never showed me—”
“Oh, I got ’em. I figure she’ll show you her signed copy, same as mine.”
Heavy silence and air getting heavy.
“You sly wildcatting son-of-a-bitch! You got her to… Our deal was… You know I’m gonna take care of you for helping out!”
“Now I really, really know it.”
“Those letters might not be legally binding. You two aren’t lawyers.”
“Yeah, but if we get to arguing about that out in the open, who knows what’s going to come out as legal and what’s not.”
Slow, thought Lucas. If I just breathe very, very slowly…
“She’s getting a paid-each-month lease! If it wasn’t for this deal, she’d keep getting nothing and you wouldn’t be getting a ton of work!”
“I’ll do the drilling work, fair and square.”
Lucas heard Falk take a deep breath.
“We’re all businessmen here,” said Falk. “We’ll make a provision that ironclads you as the driller. Only fair. This is the perfect deal for all of us. Me and my old law partners in Missoula have a big investment in this.”
“Good for you,” said Uncle Orville.
“Good for everybody. Even old lady Sweeny. All you and your men gotta do is work your job. Drill until you hit the gushers. Leave the thinking to me.”
“If that’s the way you want it.”
“That’s the way it is. Hell, if it wasn’t for me thinking, we wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s a fact,” said Orville. “But now we each got work to—”
“There I was,” said Falk. “Sitting in front of a coffee cup in the Chat & Chew. I heard somebody laugh about Mrs. Sweeny and her slanted land.”
Spy. Just think about being a spy. Not getting tighter, burning in here.
“When I heard that,” said Falk, “I reeled her in as a client because I saw it in a flash: What if your ex-boss never slanted her land and all that oil she thought he stole was still there?
“I got damn dusty in the back rooms of the courthouse looking up lease records and checking them against the production reports on file with the Oil & Gas Commission.
“Then like the French say, voila: the well drilled next to her property, the well you worked back in high school, that well came in with oil—but not so much that it was off-average with other wells in that field.
“Which means McDewel couldn’t have slanted her. If he’d been stealing from her, the volume of that would have shown up in the reports through the Oil & Commission. His oil plus her oil would have equaled a great well, but that well you worked on logged in as average, so he wasn’t robbing her. Numbers don’t lie.”
“No, lying is a lawyer’s job.”
Somewhere far away, Lucas heard Falk laugh.
“Lawyers don’t lie, we make motions. As long as you keep moving, what is and what ain’t don’t matter.”
“So you say. You’re the smart city guy who came to town. I’m the dumb country wildcatter.”
“Not as dumb as anybody figured. But from now on, let me do the thinking. Why, one time down in Missoula, I had this tort action that was going to…”
“LUCAS!”
What? Hot. Sticky. Legs cramped. Uncle Orville lifting me out of the locker.
“Come on, Lucas! You OK? You’re OK, right? You’re OK.”
“Must have fell asleep.”
“Yeah! That’s what you did. You fell asleep. But you’re OK now, right?”
Lucas nodded. Blinked. Pushed his glasses back up his nose. Looked around the Quonset. “Where’s Mr. Falk?”
“Mr. Big Wheel finally rolled away. Come on. Let’s go soak your head.”
They did. Uncle Orville made him drink more water. Wash his arms. Lucas swore to Uncle Orville that he felt fine. Uncle Orville loaded the bike into the back of his blue pickup. Kept one eye on Lucas and the other on the highway as they motored to town. Dry hot air blew on Lucas’s face from the open window.
Uncle Orville steered the pickup into the drive-up lane at the Tastee Freeze. A high school girl passed Lucas a large Coke through the drive-up window. Orville paid the girl with a silver dollar. Put the three quarters in change on the dashboard. Drove away.
He parked the pickup in front of Lucas’s house. Shut off the engine. Lit a cigarette. Asked his nephew beside him: “What do you figure that was about?”
Lucas gave the safest answer he could. “You and Mr. Falk’s business.”
“You got that right. But what do you think about it? You’re a smart kid, Lucas. Tell me what was going on before you… fell asleep.”
“I don’t want to get in trouble!”
“Me either. So we best put all our cards on the table, right?”
July’s late afternoon sun beat down on the pickup that held them.
Lucas swallowed. Whispered:
“Are you… Did you and Mr. Falk snooker Mrs. Sweeny?”
Uncle Orville laughed out cigarette smoke. “Snooker: that’s a funny word.”
“I’m just a kid!”
“Maybe, but you know that Falk, me, and Mrs. Sweeny are dancing in some deal about drilling for oil. You worried that your Uncle Orville is a crook?”
Lucas couldn’t say anything. Shrugged.
“Answer me this,” said the big man crammed behind the wheel of a pickup truck. “If there’s nothing to steal, can you be a thief?”
“Huh? But… Mr. Falk said the numbers prove—”
“Numbers are just numbers. They aren’t what’s what. Numbers that get written don’t have to be real numbers for that well or for any slanting that well did. They might be numbers of oil counted off another slant far away.”
“But if that… I don’t…”
“If Mrs. Sweeny had no oil, then how could anyone steal it from her?”
“How could anybody know she never had any oil to steal?”
Orville ground out his cigarette on the pickup door. Tossed the butt outside to the street where Mother Nature would take care of it. Told his nephew:
“You could work for somebody who tried to steal from her, slanted her, but found out there was nothing there to take.”
“But Mr. Falk thinks—”
“Let him think what he wants. Guy like me should leave the thinking to him. I’m just along to get paid to do the job he thought up. Mrs. Sweeny, she’ll get paid for what he thought up too.
“So,” said his uncle, “if anybody’s getting snookered… It ain’t me. Ain’t you. Ain’t even Mrs. Sweeny. And the man whose idea it was to snooker… Since he’s in charge, you could figure what he gets is what he earned.”
Uncle Orville frowned.
“Did Mrs. Sweeny pay you for busting your butt for her in this heat?”
“No.”
“Figures.” Uncle Orville dropped the three shiny quarters off the dashboard into Lucas’s hand. “Shame a tight-ass like her’ll come out ahead on this.”
Lucas stared at the pieces of silver on his palm.
“You earned it,” said Orville. “You give a man what he earns.”
“I didn’t ask for it!”
“So it’s your luck.” Uncle Orville sighed. “You want to tell your folks how you helped out, go ahead. Just be sure you get it right. And keep it in our family.” The big man nodded toward the hospital across the street. “Look there.”
Lucas whirled. “That’s your car.”
“Likely, your Aunt Iona’s visiting Gramma Meg. Do me a favor? Go over there, tell her I’m fixin’ to need dinner early.”
They unloaded his bike. Lucas wheeled it to its place by the garage. Uncle Orville drove away. Lucas found no one home. Walked across the street to the hospital. On the way, he glanced at the house where Mr. Falk once lived.
And smiled.
Wipe that grin off your face! Lucas told himself as the elevator doors slid open to let him out on the second floor of the nursing home.
Old-people smell welcomed Lucas. No one sat at the nurses’ station.
A plaintive wail sliced the hallway air: “I-o-na. Ber-yl.”
From around the corner came Gramma Meg’s voice: “Come closer. Please!”
Lucas hurried into Gramma Meg’s room in time to see his aunts Iona and Beryl draw close to the white-haired woman lying in the bed against the wall.
Lucas spotted his mom rearranging framed photographs on the cramped room’s chest of drawers as her two sisters leaned closer to Gramma Meg.
Who whimpered: “Beryl… Iona…”
“What’s wrong, Ma?” said Beryl. “We’re right—”
Wham!
Gramma Meg grabbed Beryl and Iona by their wrists. Her expression went from pitiful sorrow to pure glee as her two daughters fought her lumberjack grip.
“Gotcha!” yelled Gramma.
Beryl and Iona twisted and jerked and pulled.
Gramma Meg shook her daughters like they were rag dolls.
“For Christ’s sakes, Cora!” Beryl yelled to Lucas’s mom. “Do something!”
Mom said: “Like what?”
Restraining bolts held this hospital bed on wheels to the wall. The women’s battle banged the bed against that plaster. The bolts pinged free.
The hospital bed flew away from the wall.
Iona and Beryl tumbled over the bed’s side rail. Fell on top of their mother. Rode the runaway bed as it careened across the room. Cora/Mom yelped as the runaway bed crashed her into the bureau, knocked over the framed photographs.
For a moment, there was silence.
A bolt fell out from its ripped hole in the wall. Tinkled on the tile floor.
Iona whispered: “Oh shit, not again.”
“You girls climb off of me,” said Gramma Meg, as proper as could be. “Getting in bed with your mother. Aren’t you a little old for this?”
Iona and Beryl slid off the bed. Rearranged their clothing as Mom joined them to glare at the white-haired grandmother who lay propped on her pillows, serenely staring back at her children with eyes that twinkled.
Beryl snapped: “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Felt like it. Doing something makes you feel like somebody.”
“That makes about as much sense as flying pigs,” said Mom.
“Or flying monkeys? Don’t worry, you’ll get it someday. What good is this world of pain if you can’t get a little laugh?”
Beryl said: “You broke the bed. Pulled it right out of the wall.”
“Wasn’t just me.”
Lucas helped his aunts push the bed back into its official position.
Gramma put her arms up like she was on a roller coaster. “Wee!”
Mom told Lucas to crawl around on the floor and find the bolts.
Gramma wanted to buzz for the nurse, complain about shoddy nursing home walls, but Mom told the room: “We don’t need any more trouble.”
“I’ll go make sure the coast is clear,” said Iona.
Beryl snorted as her sister fled the room. “Is that what you’re going to do?”
Gotta tell Iona what Uncle Orville said, thought Lucas.
He told Mom: “I can’t find the fourth bolt. I’ll go help Aunt Iona.”
He found her smoking in the dining room.
And talking to three old people in chairs: a wispy woman who wore a pink sweater over her nightgown, two liver-spotted men—one with teeth.
Iona was saying: “You remember me, don’t you, Sue? Orville and I lived around the corner from you after we got married.”
Wispy woman Sue’s head bobbed like a sparrow pecking for food.
“So, how’s it going?” said Iona, taking a drag on her sneaked cigarette.
The wispy woman bobbed her head.
“Look,” Iona told Lucas. “They use dish towels to tie ’em in the chairs.”
Belts of twisted white cloth circled the laps of the three senior citizens.
“Tying people up sure as hell ain’t right,” said Iona.
Took a last drag on her cigarette. Walked over to the ashtray stand near the couch and buried the butt in the sand. Craned her neck to look down first one corridor, then the other. Stared at the empty nurses’ station.
Hurried back to her nephew, leaned close to whisper: “Lucas! Get down there on the floor and crawl around behind the chairs and untie them!”
“I can’t do that!”
“You already got your jeans dirty crawling around on Gramma’s floor. You know it ain’t right that they’re all tied up. Let’s just let ’em walk around a little.”
“We’ll get in trouble!”
“We’re already there, so we might as well do some good while we’re at it.”
“Why can’t we just untie the top knots?”
“Hell, kid, I gotta keep lookout, and if you’re crawling under the chairs, nobody’s likely to see you.” Her laugh was quick and quiet. “Come on. It’ll be fun. Better ’n going back there to let Gramma knock us around.”
So while Iona guarded the dining room entrance, Lucas got down on his back to crawl under the chairs looped with knotted dishtowels.
By the time Lucas crawled out from under the last chair, wispy Sue was shuffling away. Lucas pushed himself off the tile floor. Grabbed a hand reaching toward him. The hand was thin. Frail. Lucas’s pull launched the old man with teeth straight out of his chair. He steadied himself. Careened toward the light from the window at the end of the long hall.
“Atta boy, Mr. Pellet!” said Aunt Iona. “You’re doing great.”
Wispy Sue shuffled into the kitchen nook.
The liberated toothless old man stood wobbling by his chair. His eyes filled with other horizons. White tape on his shirt above his heart read: Cody.
Elevator doors whirred open, and out marched polar bear Nurse Kesey.
Who took the scene in with wide-eyed horror.
“Well, hi there!” said Iona. “Want a Lifesaver?”
Nurse Kesey bustled past Aunt Iona to the swaying toothless old man.
“Cody!” Nurse Kesey wrapped her paws gently around his arms.
Lucas helped the nurse lower the staring man into his chair.
“Cody,” she told him. “It’s OK. Everything’s OK. You’re right here.”
No he’s not, thought Lucas, but he said nothing.
“Oh my God, Sue: put that down!” The nurse charged into the kitchen nook. Plucked the bread knife from the wispy woman’s fluttering hand. Led Sue out of the nook as fast as the wispy woman’s shuffling slippers could go.
“Where’s Mr. Pellet?” yelled the nurse.
“We’ll help you look,” said Iona. “Hey, Beryl! Cora! We need some help. Mr. Pellet’s gone a-walking.”
“Yeah,” muttered Nurse Kesey. “And how the hell did he manage that.”
“Ain’t these old folks something, though.” Iona turned to face her sisters Beryl and Cora hurrying to her from Gramma Meg’s room. “And if anybody done anything, why, had to be just trying to do a good thing for folks who deserve it.”
“You Conners are nothing but trouble!” snapped Nurse Kesey.
Beryl glared at Iona. “You told her about the bed?”
Mom beckoned for her son to come a-running. “Lucas has to go home!”
She swept him away from everyone else to ride the sinking elevator.
They stared at their blurred reflections in the sealed silver doors.
His mom told those images, told him, told herself and the whole damn world: “I just want to make it all safe for you kids. Why can’t it all be like that?”