CHAPTER THREE

Miles away, Horace-Wayne Holder stood on the edge of reservation land and surveyed the scrabbly open space before him. He pulled the brim of his cowboy hat down as the wind picked up. Water was low, and there would be a hard winter before spring rains.

Holder was on private ground that bordered a good stretch of the rez. Land now owned by a one-member LLC set up by an anonymous trust Holder had formed to keep his own name off the deed. Land he had purchased quietly from a ranching family whose next generation had moved away for life in some faraway city. Holder had, in fact, been buying up land that spanned the eighteen miles between Dexter Springs and the rez for some time, making sure to scoop up the mineral rights along with it. This was yet another acreage he’d secured along the Kansas-Oklahoma border, not for its surface potential—it was dotted with scrub cedar and pitted with hollows—but for what lay underneath.

If he narrowed his eyes, Holder could practically see the drilling sites, the man camps—what Blackstream Oil called the instant housing for fieldworkers—and the tank farms the company would need. As long as Blackstream could reach an agreement with the tribal council, Holder would get a life-changing payout. Not only from the city of Dexter Springs, for the right to build curb-and-gutter access roads through his land to the oil field in the reservation’s wilderness area; Holder also expected a payout directly from Blackstream in the future, when it inevitably ran the rez dry and set its sights on his land. Sure, everyone in Dexter Springs who kept tabs on city business thought the curb-and-gutter roads were overkill, but why not roll out the red carpet for a company that was going to make them all rich?

Holder smiled.

Of all the obstacles he had met and overcome to get to this point, trouble with a college girl on the rez was not one he had anticipated. He’d suffered through so many lukewarm mugs of tea in stale kitchens while he patted the hands of widows or old farmers considering what to do with their family land. Juggling financing. And refinancing. Running a shell game to make the numbers work. Convincing oil company scouts to at least get permission to drill test wells. Impassioned plans shared behind the mayor’s closed office door. Carefully orchestrated meetings with a reservation official who understood dollar signs.

And now it all came down to this one hitch in his giddyup.

Holder lifted the brim of his Stetson and scratched at his forehead with a thumb.

His stop at Rita’s Roast in Dexter Springs that morning had paid off once again. The old men at their permanent roost under the WILL TRADE GOSSIP FOR COFFEE sign spent their mornings talking about weather, politics and, when the place started to clear out, everybody’s business. What they didn’t know, they guessed. They spun stories based off ties that ran deep and memories that ran long. There’d been an Indian woman in there, they told him, looking for her daughter, who was doing some environmental do-gooder nonsense on the rez. The next time the woman came in, Holder was there to ask her questions: Might even be an endangered species out there? Now, wouldn’t that be something?

He hitched up his Wranglers by his belt, Holder tooled into the leather, and reached through the open window of the truck for his binoculars. He thought of the road access—not just a dirt track, but one of those million-dollar-a-mile projects—that would create a path to a future he’d once thought impossible. It was going to happen on the very spot where he stood, and soon transport trucks would be ferrying oil out of the reservation’s wasteland. That’s how he thought of it, wasteland, not worth the effort it took to walk across it, unless the mineral rights were considered.

Somehow, even after the oil boom of the 1980s, when Oklahoma’s most prosperous decade of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was recorded in numbers—wells drilled, crude pumped—this rich cache had been overlooked. While banks burgeoned and oil companies built towering gold-windowed office buildings in which men in sport coats and polished cowboy boots measured time on Rolex watches, and success in savings and loan assets, the real fortune was yet to be had. It had been right under their feet all along, a lurking marvel hidden on reservation land.

In the eighties it had been impossible to pump oil through ledges of substrate, and it hadn’t even seemed necessary, with the richness of the oil fields the riggers had easily tapped into. But by 1989 Oklahoma’s fortunes had changed. The state’s per capita income fell to eighty percent of the national average, oil rigs were sold for scrap, the few banks that didn’t fail went through a painful recapitalization, and business and personal bankruptcies reached new heights.

Now fracking made it not only possible but extremely feasible to reclaim stubborn crude and lift a man’s circumstances right out of the ashes. Holder was a phoenix, and he’d come to claim what was owed.

As he looked out at the rangy space before him, which he knew abutted the reservation’s wilderness area, he felt something miraculous. A curious joy was taking hold behind the silver of his belt buckle and wrapping around his middle like the worn leather of his belt. It rose effervescent like poured champagne—of which he’d only once had a taste, in Oklahoma City, over a final transfer of deeds—then bubbled up through his chest and into his throat, where it burst forth with a force that surprised him. Holder wasn’t accustomed to laughing. It was as if he’d discovered a copper mine in the Congo: nothing but profit, assuming you could reach a deal with the natives.

The victory, although he shared it with Antell—Blackstream Oil’s man on the ground—and the mayor, who wanted her own piece of the pie, felt like his alone. It would be a reward for the years he’d spent with his grandparents, who had bet and lost the family farm, only to take up life in a Dexter Springs brick duplex with a view of a vacant lot through a meager kitchen window. It was a half life in a half home. His grandmother could stand for hours, spinning a sponge over a sudsy plate. Was she looking at the open horizon and remembering what she’d lost? Or considering his father, who, no longer tied to the land, had left for the city? His mother had been gone already.

Holder’s adolescence was measured in loss: a father scattered, a mother flown, a grandmother curled so far inward she vibrated with anger. A grandfather, freed from hours in the field, working a coffee cup with gossipy old men at the gas station. That was where Holder first heard rumors of an untapped fortune. He spent hours poring over geological records like treasure maps, tracing the oil-filled strata of Paleozoic islands once covered by deep Cambrian ocean. Spent hours in sticky bars to catch geographical rumors from ancient oil-field workers who were now other things: welders, factory men, broken.

Holder had, in some ways, a lot more than when he’d started. He’d learned to make a living. But here lay before him a fortune, the kind that would put his finances in a venerated orbit for generations. Things he’d wanted once—a wife, children, a meager life on his own assemblage of farmland—were no match for this feeling. And he was so close to the finish line.

He lifted the binoculars. This remote edge of the reservation was inhabited primarily by partying teenagers on summer nights and by the occasional lone pickup with its windows fogged. He was taking his shot, and to borrow a phrase from his high school basketball days, he knew it would be nothing but net.

But there was a hitch, wasn’t there? Something that shouldn’t have been a problem at all but over the past few days had become yet one more thing to eliminate.

Horace-Wayne Holder narrowed his eyes and studied the topography through the binoculars. Nothing—no one—would stand in his way, not when he was so close. He glassed the distance, making adjustments until he could clearly see a ridge above a line of trees crowding a dry creek.

The only thing that stood between Holder and his finish line was now hiking across a patchy stretch of land bordering the reservation’s wilderness area.

So, there she was, the final obstacle. Now he just needed to figure out how to make her go away.