Where the Sea Used to Be

 

“Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”

—Charles Darwin

 

 

 

THEY MET BEFORE MIDNIGHT AT THE HOUSE OF THE richest man in Mississippi, and left shortly thereafter with a dark leather country doctor’s satchel that was bulging with money, bulging as if trying to breathe, swollen like a dying fish’s gills: they were unable to even shut it all the way. There was no moon. Because one of the dogs was sick they had to drive slowly, and the old man had to urinate every forty minutes. The truck was old, because they did not want to appear conspicuous. They had coffee in Starkville, urinated in Columbus, and crossed over the state line of Alabama at dawn. The sun was orange and promising as they came down through the tall pines; no traffic was on the road yet, and there was smoke in only a few of the chimneys, rising blue and straight. It was October.

“I like to be traveling at this time of day,” Harry told Jack. Harry had slept between stops the entire drive. Soft fog blanketed the lowest meadows; Holsteins and Angus grazed. It had rained in the night, lightly, before their arrival: that smell was in the air. The road was black and narrow and wound down through the heavy trees, and there was greenness in the small meadows that had been cleared by hand, and by mule, the stumps burned. Fieldstones were stacked around the boundaries of the meadows. There were old barns and tool sheds.

“You can rip up those nasty barns and make picture frames of ‘em,” Harry told Jack, and laughed. “People in the city’ll pay money for those things.” He eyed the occasional ancient shed with a steady, labored look as they passed each one, pausing in his heavy breathing, not even hawking phlegm, so that Jack was alarmed into picturing them driving out into the field, hooking up to the porch or a window frame with a rope, and driving off, pulling the scatter of buildings down like dominoes. Stacking the wood in the back of the truck. Driving on, deeper into the heart of Alabama, to enter, to take. Harry was seventy-two, the boss. The peace and freshness of the morning made Jack not mind anything. His life was set before him. The dogs awoke and began tumbling about in the back: jawing, yipping, fighting. The poor one feeling better.

The sun rose over a hill as they reached the Vernon city limits. Harry said he was hungry. They were on an expense account. He ate six eggs and three biscuits. Jack fed and watered the dogs and scratched their ears. Dudley had said the dogs would be as valuable as the satchel. People still thought Dudley could find oil. It was the last hurrah.

The dogs had been purchased late the afternoon before, from the Animal Rescue League, and were along because there was a man who was already working up in north Alabama, a man named Wallis Featherston, who had a dog, and the people whose oil and gas leases he was buying knew, or believed, they could trust a man who loved dogs. Wallis had worked in a menial job for Dudley Estes for several years, but was now on his own, taking small bits and pieces of leases and then selling his ideas to other, larger companies, larger than even Old Dudley—companies that Dudley wanted some day to equal: Shell, Phillips, Texaco—who would go in and buy the remaining leases in the prospect and drill the wells, and Wallis would be able to participate for a percent or two or three. It was said that Wallis was getting his leases very cheaply, because he was country, like the people he was leasing from—bone raw and country, rusty and gravel, a people of cold winters, rainy springs, and hard farming—and Wallis had a dog, which rode around with him everywhere. Wallis had a plane, too: he flew around, looking at things.

So Harry’s and Jack’s boss, Old Dudley, had decided to go with what worked. Old Dudley was sixty years old, a billionaire, and for some reason was chasing this ex-clerk: trying to catch up with his successes in the oil fields. Wallis was twenty-eight, and slept in a field in his sleeping bag, or in the truck, when it rained. He hadn’t participated in a dry hole yet. He’d hit on thirteen straight wells. He had named his dog Dudley.

Jack ordered ham for breakfast. The sausages and hams were good up in these hills. The farmers wore overalls and straw hats and spoke with nasal twists and risings of the language, and still used mules, red championship ones from Tennessee. The country was too tough for tractors. There were also sawmills, a few.

Jack smiled at one of the waitresses. None of the girls were pretty, and they all looked the same, like a hundred plain sisters. He would find one, though, an outsider, passing through, like himself. She would be smitten with the promise of youth and the adventure of his working for Old Dudley. There was a heavy padlocked chain around the satchel. The key to the lock was on a necklace over Jack’s chest. The key against his skin felt like a woman’s hand, sometimes; the heat. It made him dizzy. He wanted to do good, for Dudley. The dogs barked and played, outside. People went to the window and asked what kind they were.

***

Wallis sat out in the field where he camped, with his maps in his lap, checking leases. A landowner in the area, a woman, brought him some lunch: chicken, creamed corn, biscuits, all of it still hot. It was in a straw basket with a cloth over the top. People were discovering the basin: it hadn’t been drilled for over seventy years. The day was bright, and there was newness; you could smell oil in the air, too. No one knew where it was coming from—there were no wells in the area, hunters had never found any seeps along the creeks—but it had the heady smell of live oil, black. Dudley had drilled eight dry holes in the little valley. Wallis loved to lunch there often. He had saved the dog Dudley from being killed by a bird hunter: speechless, furious at the dog’s ineptitude, his inability to point birds, the man had been aiming his gun at the dog when Wallis, out walking, came up on them. Wallis bought the dog for all the money he had in his pocket, a dollar and sixty-seven cents, and named him Dudley, because he couldn’t hunt.

***

“It’s a hot summer,” Wallis said aloud, to himself. Though it was mid-October, it seemed coldness would never come. In the warmth everything tasted good. He shut his eyes. There had to be some trick; he had to be missing something. He was too happy. There was very much the urge to be cautious: to suspect a fall.

He flew: long, lazy circles over towns and woods, flying low and slow: peeling an apple as he flew, sometimes. Looking for the thing, the thing no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love.

***

He sat on the porch of people’s houses, and discussed leisurely the business of finding oil. He scratched his dog’s ears, and talked hunting. He ate dinner; he took their leases, writing a personal check, and became friends with the people. His jeans and shirts were always clean. He didn’t worry about his happiness too much. It was always there. He could count on it. In the years 1902, 1903, and then again in 1917, there had been some wells drilled in the basin. Then nothing for years and years. Now they were coming back. His heart had been broken, like anyone else’s, so very long ago, and unfairly. It didn’t matter now. He didn’t even think of her name anymore. It didn’t even matter, now.

The basin was an ancient, mysterious, buried dry sea: scooped out deep into the old earth more than three hundred million years ago and then filled slowly with sand, from an old ocean, waves lapping at empty shores—an Age of Sharks, thousands of varieties of sharks in the warm waters in those days—hundreds of miles of empty beaches, a few plants, windy days, warmth, no one to see anything, the most mysterious sea that ever was—and then, slowly, the sea had left again, and the dunes, the bays, were covered up by millions and millions of years: swamps first, then deserts, then mountains, then river country, carrying parts of the mountains back down to the same sea, older, farther south...

The basin and its history lay hidden, and no one ever knew it was there, and the oil and gas from all its lives and warmth were only two thousand feet below the green and growing things of the present. It had been ten thousand feet below, at one time, but erosion and time were stripping back down, coming back closer to it, as if trying to get back to the old beaches, and those times.

The woods were full of pine trees. The hills were steep: they stretched up into the Appalachians, they were the foothills, crumpled, of the Appalachians. The people were terribly wiry and most of them had never seen a beach. Wallis had helped discover the basin’s existence. When he walked through the woods and it was quiet, he tried to imagine the sound the old waves had made: miles and miles of empty beach: nothing there, nor would there be, ever. Doomed, and sealed. A beach missing something, but beautiful. Pine straw beneath his feet.

***

A late night in one of the three little restaurants in Vernon: Harry and Jack, eating again, dessert and coffee, the only ones in the place, save for waitresses: near closing time. Going over some leases to be looked at the next day. The money bag, chained to the table, at their feet.

“Get what you can,” said Harry, eyes merry, leaning forward over his stomach: waiting, for Jack to join in, and finish the singsong phrase he’d made up.

“Can what you get,” said Jack tiredly.

Harry laughed and leaned back. “Poison the rest!” he cried. Tears came to his eyes. Old Dudley’s strategy regarding the newfound basin was less than brilliant, but effective: if they leased everything that was available, then surely some of it would contain oil. Harry thought Wallis’s string of successful wells, of having never participated in a dry hole, was a little dainty, foppish.

“These little pissant two- and three-acre leases,” he growled. “Shit almighty, a man can’t make a living off those things. Shit almighty he can’t even buy groceries on them. He can just barely get his money back, so he can go out and buy another two acres.” They had tied up, for ten years, over a thousand acres belonging to a family called the Stanfords that afternoon—they would probably never drill it—and another hundred and fifty from the Woodvilles, for five years.

Harry ordered another piece of pie. “A man that won’t take a risk on what he believes in, and sink it all on one well—a man like that, who can’t take a big lease, has got a short hooter.”

He cut into the second piece of pie, breathing hard.

***

Wallis lived in the field, had been in the field for three years, since the time he left Old Dudley’s employ, and he liked it: the smells. He rolled his maps out on the hood. Only on the very hardest of freezing nights, or sometimes for a day or two in the middle of a drought-filled summer, would he come into town and get a room at Mrs. Brown’s Motel. He didn’t have much money. There was some good income from the few wells he was in, but he turned it all back into still more leases. Mrs. Brown let him use her typewriter when he was ready to make a lease final. Neither of them ever had money. Mrs. Brown was sixty-five and her husband had been killed in a mugging one night at the motel desk four sad years ago. The car that got away had Illinois plates and they never saw it again. Mrs. Brown had a gas well on her land that Wallis had helped get drilled. The rooms were $16.50 a night, and she let him keep Dudley in his room.

Mrs. Brown was violently cheerful. She lived in the motel office, had a small kitchen and folding sofa bed back there, a television and a coffee maker, and it was almost as if she were waiting for the muggers to return.

“Evening,” Wallis would say, when he came into the office. Bells would jangle over the threshold: a warning signal.

“Right,” Mrs. Brown would say. Grief had made her grim, and she smiled like a skeleton. If she tried to speak even an entire sentence it would dissolve and there would be tears. She had loved her husband beyond what was healthy. Wallis was a little wary, uneasy, sometimes, around Mrs. Brown. But he liked her.

“Cold,” Wallis would say, grinning at her.

“Single digits,” she would say, the lower lip trembling between the two words: the challenging smile, leading with her chin. Daring anyone to say she was not happy. Wallis would become a little too sad to talk to her for very long.

***

Harry and Jack always stayed there. They used up all the hot water when they took their long showers. Anyone staying in the motel could hear Harry’s wet coughs, his violent hacks. Wallis would read with Dudley’s head in his lap, and sometimes his thoughts would drift, and he’d wonder, wonder hard, about Jack: picturing himself—briefly, for a few almost unimaginable seconds—the way one sometimes imagines being in jail—holed up in that room with Harry.

The coughs would burst out into the night: almost exactly when the ringing from the last one had just disappeared, thinned away to nothing, and the beautiful night silence and clarity of Alabama blackness was beginning to build back up—smoke, up in the hills above town, from old chimneys; yellow blazes of window light, comfortably and widely scattered over the hills, some hills larger than others—only then would the next cough, like something expelled, blat out. It was on one of these sleepless nights that Wallis realized Harry was dying.

He tried to picture Dudley, the other Dudley, at the funeral, but could not. He knew that Harry had family. Doubtless they pictured him a hero: gone for weeks at a time, on the great hunt, seeking riches. The wind blew hard over the motel. Dudley slept soundly. Wallis lay on his back with his hands behind his head and listened to Harry cough. He had a little more respect for Jack, but he still couldn’t understand why Jack would take such a job, would work for and with such a man. The wind blew harder. Limbs and branches began to land on the roof, and finally, the sounds of the coughs were carried away, and lost.

Wallis dreamed about what it was like to be out there when the well was tested, and the proof—the oil itself—terrible, powerful, smelling good and very hot, came rushing up the hole: proving that you had been right.

***

The town was too small. He couldn’t avoid them all the time; they ran into each other now and again. Dinner at dusk in the cafeteria with the buffet on Wednesday nights. Tables near each other: Harry speaking across two tables.

“Why’d you leave Dudley, boy?” he asked, pausing with his mouth full. There were field peas and grits and all sorts of things in it. The waitress blanched and left that area of the room. Jack looked down at his plate and clenched his jaws. He wanted girls, oil, money, respect. He’d do anything for it: sell himself to Dudley, live with Harry. He played with his cornbread vaguely, scooted it around on his plate, and leaned slightly forward to hear Wallis better.

“I learned how to find oil,” Wallis said. He could have been saying he had learned how to tie his shoelace. It didn’t hold any intrigue for him, and that puzzled Jack.

Harry was mesmerized by oil, and thought all geologists were witches, shamans, fakes. He could only believe that which was in him.

Jack looked at Wallis and could feel the thing that was different in Wallis, but didn’t know it had a name. There was confusion. Wallis seemed pretty much like a loser to Jack. Wallis would lose, he thought. And yet when he looked at Wallis the chain around Jack’s neck felt heavy: as heavy as if the entire satchel was hanging from it.

Harry paid for Jack’s meal: he told Wallis he’d have to get his own, being competition and all.

The two men laughed, going out the door. Wallis finished his tea.

***

There was a pretty girl in town. Her name was Sara. She’d lived in the valley all her life: lived it above the oil. She was twenty, and she wanted to go places. Sara looked at the money truck a long time when it rumbled down the roads, raising dust—the odd young man with the necklace driving it, the old man riding at his side, and in the back, the two hounds they never seemed to pay any attention to—but also, she laughed at it, after it had passed her by. They had already drilled on her land. Harry Reeves’s old puppeteer, Dudley, had drilled on her parents’ land—a German family, the Geohegans were tremendous landholders, owning more than eight thousand acres—and the well had been dry. They drove past her every time now. She went down to see Wallis: everyone knew where he camped. This in the summer. Her hair was soft.

“How many wells have you drilled?” she asked him. He was sitting on the wing of the plane, looking at his notes. Wallis knew who she was, and where she was from, and about her parents’ well. He was surprised their well had been a dry hole, and he believed, knew, that the rest of the land beneath their lease held oil. He considered the nuances of revenge. He bit into an apple. She boldly handed him a piece of cheese she had brought, like a student having come for a good grade—she held it out as far as she could, for him to take. He accepted it, sliced it with his knife, looked up at her with the sun behind her. He handed her a piece back. He did not have enough money to lease all of the Geohegan’s land. He had found too much oil, this time. He did not know her name, only who she was.

“Thirteen,” said Wallis. He decided to keep it quiet, about the oil beneath her. To wait until he could afford to drill the whole thing. To sting Dudley. It would be a big well: the biggest in the county, the most the old sea could give.

“Thirteen?” she said, softly. Her hair was blond, down in a braid. She wore a light blue dress. There were faint freckles on her nose. Thirteen wells did not seem like a lot.

“I’ve never drilled a dry hole,” Wallis said. It was funny, he thought, for him to say that. It made the apple taste bad.

He reached into his truck and pulled out a thermos: shared some warm water with her. She brushed her hair back, as if the wind was in it, and watched him. Lamar County, in the state of Alabama. There were bears in her woods. Her parents raised chickens, and had many cattle. It was unbelievable that he had a plane. She didn’t think she’d look at the money truck, not anymore.

He had mapping to do that day. She stood back and watched him take off, bumping down the long field; when he was hazy in the distance, the plane left the ground. She shielded her eyes. He disappeared over the hill.

***

Dudley, in the warm cockpit, lifted his head and looked at Wallis steadily as the plane flew, gaining altitude. He could tell what was coming.

When they were far above the earth, Wallis banked the plane and then rose into a steep climbing stall, pointing the plane straight at the sun, as he did every day, at least once: the propeller’s revolutions becoming weaker and softer, more futile, as the engine strained against the pull of the rocks and mountains and rivers below it: the persistent, wavering squall of the stall horn: hard shuddering, and then the plane, five thousand feet up by now, peeled off to the side, unable to go any higher at that steep a pitch. The nose was pulled abruptly down, as if following an anchor tossed from the window, and the plane went into a spinning dive, like a ride at the fair, straight at the ground, which was visible far below in patches through the clouds. Pencils and erasers and dust flew past their ears, the press of force on their bodies. Dudley was strapped in, as always. His long ears hung out at right angles, as if in space.

When the last clouds were cleared, Wallis pushed the yoke in sharply, about half its length, and pressed one rudder pedal in, to stop the spinning. The plane pulled smoothly out of the dive, and flew flat and straight. Things that were stuck to the ceiling rained back down again. They were going to live. Wallis could do other things with an airplane, too. He did it to stay sharp—so that when there was a thunderhead or wind shear or he got trapped between trees and a power line, too near a radio antenna’s guy wires, he would be able to get out: would have the ability to get out.

Farmers and others below who saw him, practicing far out over the larger, wooded hills that rolled up, folding, into the Appalachians like waves of forest, said he was witching: that there was a device or machine in the nose of his plane that could smell oil. Whenever he passed over a large stretch of it, it pulled the plane down toward it, into a dive.

To the country people thereabouts, Wallis was a hero, and risking his life for them. On slow evenings when no other customers were around, he ate free at some of the restaurants. They began to feel badly, sometimes, taking the money from Harry Reeves and Jack: bargaining, dickering. Wishing maybe they could lease to Wallis.

People waved at Wallis and Dudley when they saw them driving, and yet he remained a mystery, unlike other things in the country. Their lives were simple and straight and filled with the work and the talk about crops and the grocery store, and ever, pleasurably, hatefully, always with emotion, the weather; but he was outside these things.

“He’s got to be that way,” an old man said, spitting, when they talked about him at the gas station. “He’s looking for the hardest thing to find in the world. Shit, it’s buried: it’s invisible.”

Heads nodding. They looked up at the sky. He was looking for the invisible thing. He could see things they couldn’t.

***

Another time, in a restaurant: breakfast, the three of them in the same room. Early, foggy. He looked at Jack when Jack turned slightly away from him, checking out, paying the cashier. There was no way on earth Jack could like Harry, or even tolerate him, or the man Dudley either. It was obvious, even to Wallis, who rarely watched people, that Jack was being a fake, a turd, a brown nose, for some later motive. Everyone knew, Wallis thought, that it was better to belong to yourself and have one acre in a drilling well than to belong to another man, even if that man had a hundred, a thousand wells, or the whole county. This had to be common knowledge, a fact of existence, didn’t it? How could one breathe and not know this?

Jack was looking back at Wallis. Wallis realized this but could not turn away. His mouth was slightly open, even: staring. He looked and looked at Jack, frowning with his eyes, trying to get a handle on it but unable to, trying to see beyond, like the old ocean he could see from the sky... but not this. “Damn,” Jack said, and turned away, shaking his head, and left the restaurant, behind Harry, who was carrying the satchel. Wallis watched him go; he gave them a minute to be gone before leaving himself: woodsmoke, when he stepped outside, and the smell of bacon. He rolled his collar up. It felt good to be alone, and in the crisp air.

Later that day, flying, coming down through some clouds, he forgot to pull the carburetor heat switch. The plane looked different to him, and the mountains as well. He had to put down in a field, and when he did, the ground felt different, too. His legs were shaky. He called Dudley and they walked a little ways off from the plane and he lay down in the middle of the field in the sun on his back and closed his eyes, and felt wind, sun, the ground below him. He lay with his back to the ground as a wrestler would, pinning it: he thought what a short distance two thousand feet was, and tried to imagine the oil beneath him, straining to get out, but was unable to. The sun confused him, with its warmth, and brightness. He dozed through the rest of the afternoon. His life meant something. He was his own man, belonged to no one: he had never drilled a dry hole, and he had saved a dog from being killed. There was a balance sheet, and as long as one did not go below zero, it seemed a victory: like continuous, enduring victory.

He was terrified of going below that zero: of belonging to someone else. It seemed that everything bad would follow from that. You would catch emphysema. You would have to wear a chain around your neck. You would have sold yourself, and by the very act of doing it once—though he was sure those who did it told themselves otherwise, that it was only for a little while—you would never, ever be able to buy yourself back. Because there wouldn’t be anything left to buy. Not even if you went a little fraction of an inch below that zero. The sea would move in: the old times would be buried.

He fed Dudley, scratched his ears, ate apples in the sunlight and in the plane as he flew, and held on for dear life.

***

He and Jack and Harry were somehow yet again in the same restaurant at the same time, even though it was north of town several miles. Bad luck, thought Wallis, the third time in a month, but also he was not much concerned. He had leased twenty-seven acres in section 13 that day, for a tenth of what it usually cost: that was how he’d been able to afford such a large tract of land. The reason he had gotten it so cheaply was that Old Dudley had drilled a well there several years ago, and had thought it dry, and had plugged it. Wallis had never owned twenty-seven acres in a prospect before. He became near-dizzy at the thought of it. And it would be fun, too, to embarrass Old Dudley, to go in and drill a place that Dudley had left, and find oil. The statement would be stark and obvious: Dudley could not find oil on that twenty-seven acres; Wallis could; therefore Wallis was a better geologist.

He didn’t need to be nice to Dudley. He would try hard to stay away from the very natural feeling of revenge because he knew it was a trap, like going below the zero—he had found so much oil for Old Dudley, when he worked for him, unrewarded—and it would cut Wallis up, and beat him, even if it did sound fun and good—questing for vengeance—but neither did Wallis have to be nice to him. If revenge happened, it happened. It was good. He could belch in Old Dudley’s company if he wished and not excuse himself. He had escaped Old Dudley, and his life mattered.

The salt and pepper shakers on the tables seemed to have significance and clarity. He watched Jack and Harry muddle along through the buffet: pausing, asking questions of the chef, frowning, rubbing their chins: reaching slowly and hesitantly for this dish and that: pie, beans, chicken—leaning over and reaching as if controlled by strings from above. The air tasted like spring water to Wallis. He got a bowl of oatmeal, a piece of cold melon, and a Coke. He sat at the far end of the restaurant, his back to them—and their backs to his—and ate. The melon was fresh; the oatmeal was hot.

He left a tip and walked out the door. It was good to be able to just take four steps and be out the door: not having to turn around, look back, or pass by them. He drove out to the field with the windows down and took his sleeping bag out and unrolled it on the ground and got in it.

The stars were like Christmas. The night was cold. The twenty-seven acres on his lease application in the glove box made his toes want to dance around in the bottom of the sleeping bag. He supposed that he was getting close to revenge and that was different from flying around eating apples and looking for oil, but also there was the wild and primal goodness of the feeling, visceral, of having scored a killing punch. Something about it made him want to do it again, and maybe again and again. He lay awake for a very long time, pleased with himself, and was enormously happy. The stars seemed to encourage him. As if they were on his side.

***

It got much colder. New Year’s Eve saw zero; the next day, twelve below, and windy. Sara and Wallis lay in their bed by the window at the Brown Motel with the lights off and the curtains open. Dudley slept at the foot of the bed: the three of them conspiring to make a beautiful steady breathing. There were stars, more than ever. Wallis held her tightly. They watched the stars for a while, and then she rolled over on top of him and made love to him. She looked at his face the whole time. Blankets covered them; the room was cold. The bed rocked, steadily; Dudley stirred, in his sleep, once. She was imagining that she was atop one of the pumping jacks that went down with the rods and then came back up with a rushing swab of oil. In cold weather the oil sometimes steamed.

He tried very hard to love her. He felt that it was time for him to be in love. That he needed to be in love.

After, he closed his eyes and pulled her to him, and she put her head up under his chin. He would find love. And they, he and Sara, would find the Big Well. Somehow he would get the money together to drill it himself—not paying for 1 percent, or 3 percent, but the whole 100 percent, start to middle to finish—he did like that idea—and then he would try. There would be a house in the woods, with Dudley the hound that couldn’t hunt, and they’d have a child, and Wallis would work very hard at loving her the way he thought it should be, the pure way, the way he found oil. If only he could love her the way he looked for oil: it would be perfect. He’d try.

Around midnight, a fierce, jagged coughing began. The sounds traveled through the cinder blocks from about three rooms down. Wallis listened to the sound of Old Dudley running a young man and an old one down to their deaths. Sara awoke, not knowing where she was, reaching for a lamp.

“What’s that?”

“Harry and Jack,” he said.

“Is there oil on my land?” she said, suddenly. She had his shoulders in her hands: she was over him again. He looked away, at the dark wall, and listened to Harry’s coughs. It sounded as if he were standing upright now, waddle-pacing the room; an old death stagger, Wallis imagined—Jack probably with his head under both pillows. It was very possible that Wallis couldn’t love anyone: could only work, and work. He knew there were people like that.

“Maybe,” he said, getting up angrily, leaving her grasp and pulling on a pair of underwear: Dudley rising, startled, at his heels, not knowing this routine, but with him. Wallis and Dudley went quickly out the door, and barefooted, shivering violently already from the weather’s strength, Wallis hurried across the gravel, reached Harry’s door, and began kicking it. There wasn’t any moon. The wind carried the thumps of his kicks quickly off. A light came on: Jack’s face through the crack of the door, the chain beneath his chin like the chin strap on a football helmet.

Wallis put his face in the wedge of light so that he was an inch away from Jack’s startled eyes.

“Shut that shit up or kill the old man,” he said. Dudley growled and raised his hackles: he stood as big as a wolf.

“I... I... I’m sorry,” Jack said.

“It keeps Mrs. Brown awake,” Wallis said. He didn’t say anything else, just stood there. Jack could see the squareness and hardness of his teeth, and the thing that was in the bottom of him, in the bottom, far bottom, of everyone.

“We’ll... he’ll stop,” Jack said.

“I’m going to cut his throat out, tonight, if he doesn’t,” Wallis hissed. “I’ll either come through the door or the window. There’ll be blood all over the sheets.”

He walked hurriedly back to his room, and barely made it before he could walk no farther. Sara cried out loudly when he got in bed; it was as if a block of ice had been slid in with her.

“Yes there’s oil under your land,” he said. He was shuddering as if seized by a current.

She came back to him: moved back in closer, held his coolness, tentatively, then all the way: pulled him to her yet again.

“Oh, baby,” she said, with her eyes shut.

“Oh, baby,” he repeated: trying it out.

He was numb. He warmed slowly.

When he awoke in the morning, he felt thicker, heavier, and later in the day realized it was because he was now carrying two things, anger and revenge. Logic, and having worked for Dudley—having seen everything done the wrong way—told him that the angrier he got at not being able to fall in love with Sara, the less likely it was that it would happen—but he had exploded at Jack and Harry, and now, walking, he felt as if it—anger, and pride—was building up again. He felt as if he were oil, far below the ground, trapped in a thin layer of rock. He felt that when the drilling bit did hit his formation, and pierced the very top of it, he would come out: blowing, all of it, a fire, a roar. That he would burn down whatever it was that had touched him, and diluted him. Dizzy, he bent down and scratched Dudley’s ears. The day was clear and cold: the light was pretty. He knew that you could only do one thing well: to do it the right and best way. There could be nothing else. His boss was too good at making money, whether off of other people’s woes or not, to be a good geologist. Wallis was too good at what he did, feeling what used to be, to make money. He knew about the old ocean. He could see it, and felt he had lived on it. He had its number.

He wondered if he could even drill a dry hole: if he could stop wanting to find oil.

He wondered if she was worth it.

***

She came driving up just as he was climbing in the plane that afternoon—jeans, tennis shoes, a heavy old blue sweater, and a parka: her hair, in the sun. She hugged him, standing under the high wing of the plane to do so. Her face felt cool and smooth, like he imagined love was supposed to. She smelled good, and he wanted her.

Surely, thought Wallis, if love was not capable for him with this girl, then it could not exist, for him.

He took her up. He was jittery: flushed, as when he first realized he was tracking oil. (When he actually found it, pinpointed it, mapped, and contained it, he was cool—it was anticlimactic, by that point—but the first scent—the turn of the head, the question—that was the rush.)

She took her parka off. She took her shirt off. The sun was warm in the cockpit.

“Show me you’re a very good pilot,” she said, laughing. It happened to everyone: it could happen to anyone. It was the most common thing in the world. She had come out to see him.

A mile above the earth they made slow, graceful love: he let her hold the yoke and work the pedals some as they flew. It alarmed him, a little, to not be able to see in front of him. It did feel good. He closed his eyes for as long as he dared. When she began to cry out he took the yoke and began to climb slowly into the sun.

***

She wanted to fly over her parents’ farm. She wanted to drop her bra into the woods, to see if she could find it. She didn’t wear underwear.

“What will happen if it hits someone?” she asked.

“It’ll kill them,” he said, truthfully. She was poised at the window, ready to open it, holding the bra in one hand like a thing soiled. She looked at him, surprised, and then laughed: the thought of it. And now the excitement: the risk. Quickly she shoved the window open—the fast suck of wind—and tossed the bra out. He watched her watch it go. Her back was still bare and had goose pimples. Her waist was narrow, with faint gold hairs at the base of her back. Totally engrossed, she watched the bra get smaller and smaller. He banked into a tight holding turn, like water spiraling around in a drain, so that she could keep watching. He had found love, his first time out, since the last time. It was no different from anything else in the world, he decided.

Harry and Jack, with binoculars, on a hill deep in the woods, the highest point in the county, watched them circle.

“He just threw something out,” Jack said.

“It’s a marker,” Harry said. He began to cough: bending over. He straightened up. “I’ve seen ‘em do it a million times.” He turned to Jack in earnest: believing himself, almost, as he went along. “It’s for when the woods are too thick or dense to survey. He’s marking where the oil is. They do it in Texas all the time.”

Jack watched them circle, and nodded. They would try to find the marker.

***

The Fellowship Church of Vernon gave Wallis a lease for seventeen acres. Wallis wrote to a serviceman in Germany about another sixty-eight acres: a quiet, simple letter, explaining what he was about, what he wanted to do—to go in and drill where Dudley had missed. He got the lease for free. He began to go back and search all of Old Dudley’s plugged wells. About half of them seemed, to him, to be good. He took Sara with him often. They climbed to two miles in the plane. She wanted to laugh and cry both: there was so much to be seen. They climbed to three miles, until the engine faltered and their heads felt light and it was hard to breathe—Dudley on the floor, head under his paws, confused—and looked briefly, when there were no clouds, at the big roll of Appalachians: it was easy to see where the sea had ended. The area below them was, quite obviously, the old beach. Beaches. A hundred miles of it, curving and snaking all around, like a serpent, like a thing still, even that day, alive: it seemed to move as they watched it.

Haze, and the sweep of earth curving away over the edge, its lovely roundness: they had left the earth. Three minutes, four minutes, for as long as they dared—five—the sky a rich heavy purple, a color never seen except at that altitude—and then the slow ride down, both of them suddenly aware of the frailty of the little plane; the lightness, and thinness, of the wings, light canvas wrapped around a hollow aluminum frame. The thinness of the thing that kept them aloft.

***

“When he crashes, we go in and top his leases,” said Harry. The plane had disappeared from view, even to the plastic drug-store binoculars. “We pay the landowners, beforehand, to lease to us, exclusively, the first day his leases run out.”

Jack nodded. It was what he was being taught. The leases were for three years. Harry and Jack tied up the land with five-year leases, but for some reason Wallis never asked for more than three years. Jack counted: both he and Wallis would be thirty-four in three years. He looked at Harry’s face, the open mouth—a wetness of saliva rimming his lips, perpetually hungry—as Harry looked heavenward through the binoculars, and was jealous that Wallis owned his own leases. The richest man in the state of Mississippi, the king of the poorest state in the union, was using them to chase a poor young pilot in love across the county, to learn what he was doing. It made Wallis seem like the holder of some kind of magic. It made Old Dudley’s terrible money and power seem less.

***

Wallis started to work late into the nights at the courthouse. He got a key from the probate judge so that he could lock up when he was through: midnight, 1 A.M. A peanut butter sandwich for supper, around 7:00, the great ledgers open like biblical testaments, showing years and years of dizzying history; mortgages, leases, foreclosures, dry holes, and producers. He chewed his sandwich slowly, and read them, looked in all the right books. Dudley sat up on top of the counter and watched him, and waited patiently. Wallis was looking for all the leases on old wells that Old Dudley had plugged without testing. He was going to stop looking for oil, purely, and restrict himself to looking only for oil beneath places where Old Dudley had missed it. It would be like slapping his face with gloves: satisfying.

It had been a new feeling for him the other day, an unexpected one, taking the twenty-seven-acre lease that Old Dudley had dropped several years ago. It was a surprise, and wonderful and new, much as flying and loving had been for Sara. He wanted to do it some more. In fact, it was all he wanted to do.

Sara came up to the courthouse with him once, sat on the counter with Dudley and drank a beer, swinging her legs, and watched, but it was far too slow for her.

When he could no longer keep his eyes open, he would call to his dog Dudley, who would leap down from the counter, and he would shut off the lights and lock up and drive back out to the pasture. Sometimes he would build a little fire and fix some coffee and go over what he had found. It was a lonely life. Dudley would sit and watch him and wait for whatever was going to happen next. Some nights there was the sound of coyotes: geese; owls, too. The air was fresh.

***

They flew more and more: everywhere. They did it five hundred feet above the ground: they went lower. They skimmed along over the tops of trees: scattering birds, doves in roost. Sara got to be a fair pilot.

“Can you find oil down on the coast?” she asked him.

Wallis grinned, shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Just up here.” His greatness was limited. He thought later how it was odd that he had never asked himself that question. There had never been a desire to look anywhere else. Why would a man want to go into a country he was not familiar with, knew nothing about?

***

He showed her stalls: spins: figure eights. She was delighted, one day, when he rolled. He started leaving Dudley in the truck. More aerobatics, less mapping. Dudley drilled a well on one of Wallis’s prospects, one that Wallis had been able to edge into by buying two acres at the edge of it. They went out to visit the well: Sara, her hair long and clean, static against her sweater, flushed, elsewhere in her mind: having just flown.

***

Old Dudley was out at the well, which was very unusual: Wallis had never seen him on a location, as long as he’d known him. There was word that he hadn’t been out to one in ten years. Harry and Jack knew nothing about geology, and were off eating or leasing. Wallis noticed Old Dudley watching him, at times, rather than the progress of the well itself. It was just a little pissant well, one whose outcome could mean nothing, one way or the other, to Old Dudley. He had his chauffeur and stretch limousine, both of which had been flown over from England. Red mud from the thick hills shrouded the limousine’s brilliant blackness.

Wallis noticed Dudley still watching him, smiled, gave a little wave, then smiled wider. He was free.

Dudley smiled, gave his little embarrassed half-nod—a tip of the head, almost like a bird beginning to feed—when he recognized Wallis, in jeans and boots—Dudley had on a black business suit and an overcoat. Wallis felt good that Old Dudley was acknowledging, and curious about, Wallis’s freedom. He could read Old Dudley, had learned him like a fascinating book: had studied the locations where he had drilled and knew why he did things—and he was confused, then, when Old Dudley turned his look to Sara and almost smiled, as if relieved at something. As if Old Dudley knew some sly and childish secret which he would not tell Wallis but would keep to himself, and be made happy by it. He turned and began walking, with his chauffeur, over to the well: roughnecks up on the derrick floor, looking down, shirtless, muddy, ragged: a few of them wrestling with the drill pipe. A clear blue sky, a warming day.

Wallis’s dog bolted: a blur at the edge of the cleared location was a rabbit.

“Yo! Dudley! Get back here!” Wallis shouted. Old Dudley’s shoulders stooped, and he half-turned: an expression of genuine surprise, and then disappointment, to see that Wallis was running after a dog. He turned back around and continued walking. The well turned out to be oil: not a pissant well at all, but the largest discovery ever found in the basin.

Old Dudley had the chauffeur stop by Wallis and Sara’s truck on the way out: the dog, muddy, bounding happily around in the back of the truck, barking at Old Dudley and at the strange long car. Old Dudley rolled his window down so that he could speak to Wallis.

“Maybe we should plug this well?” Dudley looked different: more intense, more predatory—a way that Wallis had never seen him. Wallis leaned slightly closer, curious: never afraid, though the sense of power around Dudley was thick and heavy, malignant, like a bad odor.

“I beg your pardon?” The well had metered out at twelve hundred barrels per day.

Old Dudley chuckled. “I mean, that’s a lot of oil: we don’t want to glut the market. Perhaps we should wait until prices are more worth our while.” Dudley’s father had been a farmer, and poor all his life: poorer than Wallis. This time Old Dudley didn’t chuckle, and looked straight at Wallis, but Wallis was free. Wallis shrugged, held up his hands. It truly did not matter.

“Why not?” Wallis said. “It’s your well.”

Old Dudley’s face was leaning a little too far out: the anger, if it had been that, had to come back in. He looked tricked, betrayed.

“I mean, for twenty or thirty years,” he said. But he was not good at threats, at cruelty. He was only good at making money.

Wallis smiled, shrugged.

Old Dudley watched him for a minute, unable to believe it was sincere, but then he did: the girl, the dog, the old truck. He smiled at Wallis, no longer angry, but thoughtful, nodded to Sara—the tip of an imaginary hat, it seemed—and even glanced at the dog, as he was being driven off, after the window had rolled back up. The well began selling oil that afternoon.

***

On the drive home, Old Dudley thought about purity, and even intensity: how it once had been for him, when he was young and when it truly didn’t matter whether a well was shut in, rather than hooked on line, after being discovered: how finding it, rather than selling the oil, had been the only important thing. He was a businessman now, but had been a scientist, in school, and had been impressed with the knowledge that purity could never last, that nothing could ever last: that everything was changing, always. He had made his choice early and had not bothered to waste the energy—for it would have been wasted—trying to preserve the purity. He was sixty and had fifteen or twenty years of life left, and what he was interested in now, after so many years, what he was wishing, was that he had retained a bit of it after all, and its intensity, because he had all the success he needed.

Though he had seen Wallis’s leasing activity, on the scouting reports, and was alarmed, slightly, at what it looked like he was doing. As if even his success—not physically, but emotionally—might be spirited from him.

He thought that Wallis would fall back: that he would lose his purity, too.

Dudley had hundreds of employees to think about and hundreds of business concerns, most of them larger and many of them more critical and pressing than what had over the years gotten to be a sideline, his oil activity, particularly in the Black Warrior Basin; but on the drive home, it was Wallis, and purity, and Wallis’s truck, dog, and girl that he thought about: thumb and forefinger holding his chin: tenement houses, ragged, scraggly winter cotton remains, and drooping telephone lines whizzing past. Tinted windows: conditioned air. An old black woman in an apron, coming out onto her porch and staring as his limousine passed. The chauffeur, so far up in front of him that an intercom was necessary to communicate. He looked away from the chauffeur, back out the window again, at the delta, and thought about Wallis. He knew that he couldn’t have picked a better girl to do it, but also Wallis was no fool, was finding oil, was on to something, and still had the dog and truck.

***

Harry Reeves died on a Sunday afternoon, while driving the money truck: a grim picture it made, him collapsed over the wheel, his heart finally too squeezed by the excess of his flesh. The truck continued to thunder down the mountain along Little Hell’s Creek Road making for town—Jack grabbed the wheel, trying simultaneously to pull Harry’s deadness away from it—and when Jack put his foot in the vicinity of the brake, jabbing empty space, he got tangled up with Harry’s dead legs, and the polyester double-knit. The truck glanced the curb and rolled, spilling dogs, Harry, the spare tire, lug wrench, and the money satchel outside of town: Jack held on to the steering wheel and stayed in the truck.

No one else was around. He got out, amongst the broken glass and hissing. One dog was dead, curled up in the wrong shape, and Harry was stretched out like a dead actor. The other dog was injured and was trying to reach around and lick its hind leg, or bite it—and like the last person on earth, with a raw and stinging patch on his forehead, Jack began walking in circles about the truck gathering up all of Dudley’s money: some of it caught in tufts of grass, tumbling across the road, some blown up against Harry, like seaweed against a whale’s carcass... Two thousand feet above the darkness of what was underground, a sealed, Paleozoic ocean, a silent beach, two hundred and fifty million years of silence, oil, and above it all he walked, picking up money. He wondered if he would get fired. It hadn’t been his fault: it had been Harry who had wrecked the truck. He wondered what he would do for a living if he lost his job. The richest man in Mississippi: he was working for the richest man in Mississippi.

***

Wallis was having fried chicken at the Geohegans’ when he heard the news. The operator had called to tell Mrs. Geohegan: the mountain phone had a shrill clang that shook the thin walls of the house. He looked out the window to the large pasture and motionless cattle, the wooded creek, and out farther into blue haze and treetops. The chicken was good. The gravy was rich, and had pepper in it. He and Sara and Dudley had played tag out in the yard before lunch. He paused, digesting what he was hearing of the conversation between Mrs. Geohegan and the operator, tasting the food, and was relieved to feel sorrow, and a stillness, like being in the woods alone in the late afternoon. He had been worried by his quest for vengeance, and was hoping—knowing that Harry would die—that when he did, the news would not please him.

It was colder than usual for March under the stars that night. Looking up from his place on his sleeping bag, and with his hands behind his head, he dreamed he was on the beach, the old beach, the one he knew better than anyone else and was born 250 million years too late to see, to know, to walk on—to skip across, barefooted, splashing in the shallows. Warm tidal channels, back dunes, sea oats... He thought about what he would do if he did not look for oil. He tried faithfully to think of Sara’s kisses: of her eyes looking up at him when he talked about oil... the shine in them was similar to the shine of her hair. It bothered him that he could not fall in love with her. Perhaps if he could find one more oil well, a big one, the biggest ever... there had to be release in it, eventually.

He was trapped into succeeding, he thought. Maybe if he drilled a dry hole he could be normal.

***

He went to the funeral. Jack’s dog was bandaged, looking silly, sitting in the cab of a new blue truck: watching the funeral with a bandage around its waist and head. Wallis went over to the rolled-down window and stuck his head in, let the dog lick it. Jack came over and asked if Wallis could do him a favor: if he could take care of the dog...

“Yes,” said Wallis, without looking up. He watched the dog lick his hand. The dog was desperate to be loved. The dog was desperate to love. He thought about Old Dudley coming out to test that well. He thought about a prospect in the east portion of the county. The sun and windiness of spring was making him feel light and drawn away from where he was standing. It seemed that every day he could see the old beach more and more clearly: where the dunes were, which would hold oil and which wouldn’t, long after they had been buried and forgotten: what the waves had looked like, what the view down the beach had been—the long, straight stretches, and too, the bends, and deep parts offshore... He was the only inhabitant in that world, and it was a beach before men, and he liked it: he felt... loved. As if the beach had chosen him, for its loneliness. How could he drill a dry hole, when he knew the old empty beach so well?

He flew. The trees and creeks, cemeteries and hills that cloaked those ancient buried beaches didn’t bother him. He was seeing his old land. He now only made weak, stabbing attempts at loving Sara. She flew with him: they loved, and afterward, he was looking out the window again; sometimes, and without guilt, he would look out even as it was going on, the love. She wanted to go to Atlanta one weekend, having never been, and he took her. It didn’t matter. He found three more wells: small, small interests, but they belonged to him.

She wanted to go to New Orleans, and they stayed in a room high up over the city, a room that smelled of rich times and with mirrors on the ceiling above the bed. He felt detached, far from his shore. At night they walked down to the river, where it went into the sea. A cool breeze lifted off it and came at them. This was his old ocean, cowardly, on the retreat now: some three hundred miles south of where it had once been, in its greatness, inland, when it was brave: the ocean’s great advance northward into a place and country it had never been before, and might never return to. He looked out at the river, going into the Gulf, and tried to feel close to it, knowing it was the same... but it wasn’t. It didn’t have that bravery his had had, so long ago. She looked at him questioningly, and took his arm, and they went to eat. She was starting to fall in love with him.

***

She moved in with him: they bought a cabin, on land up above the field where he used to sleep. The austere and churchgoing hillspeople bent the rules for them: Wallis was becoming a champion, and some things seemed right. When he went out to get into his plane, there were often people standing around it, a lot of children, watching, waiting: wanting to know where he was going, that day. What part of the country he was going to check.

When he took leases and did courthouse work—the news had spread that he could find oil in places where Old Dudley had missed it—there were businessmen, undertakers, and monstrous insurance salesmen, seeds of bad earth, leeches who followed him: like puppies, like gulls over a field being furrowed, they tracked him, anticipated, and battled savagely and wretchedly for the small pieces that, like Wallis, they could afford: two acres, fifteen acres, one acre. They used him, and then sat back smiling, and waited, hopefully, for a well to be drilled on their lease. Not understanding, not knowing where the oil was: but knowing that he knew.

He made four more wells the next month: twenty in a row. No one had ever made more than four in a row.

***

Sara still wanted Wallis to drill on her land.

“I can’t afford to take your parents’ lease,” he said, “and with that much land, it’s unfair to consider a free lease, even if they would give it. I can’t drill it, not yet, not now.” He was getting better at the lovemaking: he seemed to be growing into it. He brought her things when she was in the bathtub: a cool wet washcloth to press to her forehead; a mint; a stick of gum. He was surprised to find that he liked to watch her chew gum.

“But there is oil under my land, right?” she asked. Pausing, washing under an arm.

“Right,” he said. “A lot of it.”

He wanted to touch her face, but drew back. The bathroom seemed empty: hollow. A thing was missing.

***

The twenty-first well, gas, from the very borehole of a well from which Dudley had walked away, three years ago: much gas. A ring for her finger—not wedding, just friendship—but it felt good, when he held that hand. Woodpeckers hammering in the woods above their house. The scold of a blue jay. His picture was in a newspaper, then two magazines. He kissed her in the day, without once wanting to undress her.

***

Old Dudley heard they were living together and was pleased. A little.

***

Once, on a farm far back in the hills, farther than he had ever been before—a glint of sun, on a lake, late in the afternoon, had pulled him there: the plane peeling away, flying him there in short minutes—so far back up into the hills that perhaps it was not even his sea he was feeling—and he touched down, and got out, and walked around for the whole day, feeling something and seeing things but not knowing what was going on. And Jack, in the new money truck, saw him go down, and drove out in that direction, drove all morning, and found where his plane had landed—a gravel road, wide—and Jack went all up and down the side roads, with the satchel, leasing for pennies from people who had never even seen a drilling rig. And Wallis was unable to get even a few small leases before Jack and Old Dudley got all of them. A well was drilled, and it was dry.

Wallis did not leave his territory anymore. He stayed on the ground he knew. And Jack decried him, told all, proud of nothing.

“He was going to lease it, but I stepped in and took the leases before he could, and it was dry. He was going to drill a dry hole.”

***

Old Dudley drove up one summer day in the limousine. The sun had suddenly come out about an hour earlier, as if turned on by a switch. Sara fixed him coffee. Old Dudley had a proposition: he wanted Wallis to come back to work for him. Wallis had to think about it overnight before saying no.

Sara didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what was right, what was wrong. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted the well drilled anymore. Old Dudley could have done it in an instant.

Sara’s mother came out one day and brought them chicken. Dudley the hound had dug a place out on the side of the cabin where he would curl up and lie down. Sara petted his back, scratched his ears. He played with the other dog, who was healed. The light on their coats and in their eyes was startling, up on the hill, back in the trees, coming down through the leaves. When he drove home in the truck, in the evenings, if he was going back to the courthouse, he would have supper first. Sara would listen for his plane in the afternoons. It did not make sense, but she could hear it even before the dogs could.

***

Two more of Old Dudley’s old failures turned into successes for Wallis: one a small well, the other a rushing oil well. He took more leases with the money. He bought Sara a dress that looked beautiful on her.

***

Old Dudley bought Jack a plane. It amused the townspeople. They started giving their leases to Wallis for free: if he would only drill on them. Old Dudley turned sixty-two. He hired a man who was fifty-five to work for him: a geologist, to do the same thing that Wallis was doing, only on larger, fancier maps: scribing his interpretations of the world below onto linen maps with fine calligraphic pens. In the fall, Wallis drilled another well. It was the thirty-fourth well that he had been involved in, but this one, finally, was all his. There was so much gas when he drilled into it that it blew the drill pipe out of the hole, caught on fire, and burned the rig down: a man was killed. Everyone came from miles around to watch the rig burn down. The glow had been visible in eight counties. The earth had trembled and shuddered as the gas blew. Old Dudley came in and leased around him and began making smaller, weaker wells. Wallis didn’t have any money again.

Sara kissed him, the night it happened, held him with the lights off, and thought about her parents’ farm. She hadn’t ever had money before. No one in the county had. She didn’t know if money mattered or not.

Jack flew, clumsily, nervously, and dropped flaggings out the window, randomly, trying to make it appear he knew what he was doing, remembering Harry Reeves’s wisdom. Shakily, he told Old Dudley that he thought he had it figured, that he thought he knew where they should drill. He’d seen a creek, water bubbling out of a spring: it had to be a fault. They had a rig on it the next week: it made a good little oil well. Jack bought a suit and a gold pocketwatch and watch chain. Even though Old Dudley didn’t wear one.

When it rained, Wallis worked in the courthouse, or drove: looked at the trees, and the way they grew. But it wasn’t as clear. He couldn’t see it all at once. There was no money for a while, only leases, and he paid debts with the dollars coming in from his fractions in his good wells.

“I don’t mind being poor,” Sara said one evening, mending a shirt. “But I don’t want to have any chickens around the house. Every family in this county has chickens, damn it, leaving feathers and bad smells underfoot, and I don’t like the sound they make, either.” She stamped her foot. There had been no talk of chickens ever before—Wallis didn’t want any chickens, either—and he was surprised. It had been five weeks since the rig burned.

“If ever there was a sound of being poor, it’s the cackle of chickens,” she said. Her parents had always had chickens around the house, even after they were not poor anymore. She was very near tears. He got up and put his hand on her forehead, and stroked her hair.

“No chickens,” he said, cheerfully. “All right! No chickens!”

She had to laugh, to keep from crying. He made her laugh often. She had thought she wanted to go places.

She didn’t ask him about her parents’ land anymore. She thought, sometimes, about the mirrors in New Orleans—everything reversed from the way it really felt.

***

They played games.

“I want to learn how to swim,” she said.

He smiled. “When I drill again, next time, and hit, we’ll build a swimming pool inside the cabin. We’ll heat it. It’ll be right next to the kitchen, and we’ll add on a room for it.”

“I can come straight in from grocery shopping in the winter, set the groceries down on the table, slip out of my clothes, walk down some steps, and dive into the water,” she said.

“Nekkid,” said Wallis.

“There’ll be steam coming up off the water,” she said.

They smiled. She tried to picture him working for Old Dudley, as he had, for six years, but could not. They laughed, and joked about Jack flying the little plane. He was clumsy. He bounced the plane like a basketball, on landings. He got lost, often, and all the various towns in the area had at one time or another seen him flying a circle around their water tower, sometimes several times in the same day, trying to find out where he was.

Old Dudley was trying to go back and re-lease all his old acreage, just as a blanket policy: to halt the embarrassment. But there was too much of it, and many people wouldn’t lease, to him or to anyone, until they had talked with Wallis: to see if he wanted the lease first, even for a lower price. They didn’t want Dudley to drill any more dry holes on their land. The money truck had lost almost all of its charm except to the absolute and very poorest, most desperate few.

Jack wrote a lot of checks for Dudley’s leases. There was no longer a need to wear the key on a chain around his neck. But he kept it there anyway, out of habit, and for power.

Springs were beautiful. It rained, and shimmered hot, too, in the summers. Eventually, as Wallis paid more attention to Sara, he drilled a few dry holes. Old Dudley grew aged and feeble, lost his teeth and went into a nursing home: his lawyers declared him incapable and took his business away, gave it to his children. And one day Jack crashed while he was out looking: still dropping white handkerchiefs out the window of the plane, still pretending to see. Wallis and Sara got married in the field. Mrs. Brown died, and the motel closed up, became vacant: weeds, vines. Wallis drilled; Wallis leased. He held on for dear life, to two things, not one—himself and another human being—and did not let go, and never went under zero, not for a day, not for an hour.

Sometimes they would fly down to the coast, near Mobile, land the plane on a lonely stretch of beach, and get out and walk along the shore, in winter: no one else out. He would lean slightly forward, listening to the slow, steady lapping of waves dying into the shore. He would hold Sara’s hand. If she tried to speak while he was listening, imagining, he would raise a finger to his lips. The only reason he could have two passions rather than one was because he had never ruined the first. It hadn’t ever been sold, when asked for. She watched him watch the beach, the ocean, and considered his success.