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And then I wait.
The screen just sits there, glowing back at me, and the whole room goes impossibly still—the hum of the house, the tick of the baseboard heater, the wind pressin' against the windows like it wants in—all of it falls away until there's nothin' left but my pulse bangin' against the inside of my ribs. I can feel it in my throat. In my temples. In the tips of my fingers where they hover over the phone, shakin' so hard the screen blurs.
The little typing bubbles populate on the screen—three dots, blinkin', disappearin', comin' back—and every second they pulse feels like a whole year of my life bein' subtracted from whatever's left. I watch them the way you'd watch a rattlesnake decidin' whether to strike. Breathless. Frozen. Beggin' for it to just be over.
It takes a whole eternity for his next message to come through. Longer than that. Long enough for me to die, and come back, and die again, and come back worse.
Turn around. I brought you some pie.
CHAPTER 3
The minute I leave Savannah behind, so goes all rationality. The softness she summoned just by bein' next to me disappears and then the only thing left is the rage.
Every step I take in these new boots, on this Ashby dirt, towards the building beyond the trucks, across from the round pen, calls up bits and pieces of this and that. Snippets of words and sentences comin' out of Cash's mouth that day we took a ride out to fix that well pump.
It was the beginning of this arrangement. And by that, I mean his arrangement with me. Not this plan he's cookin'.
That was Eleanor.
Which was what we mostly talked about that day I rode the filly.
Eleanor and her fussiness about things.
How she liked things just right.
How she loved her ducks in a row.
That's exactly how Cash explained it. "She lined up her ducks, Legion. Before she died, she had them formed up like soldiers. And it all played out on paper. She set something’up and when the will got read, that was my inheritance."
I didn't understand that part, he had to explain it like I was slow.
Apparently, about twenty years back, oil had itself a little crash. Now a crash means something different, dependin' on who's askin’, Cash told me. So for Eleanor, who wasn't in the oil business, it wasn't tragic in the least. It was an opportunity.
"See, here's something people don't know, Legion," Cash told me. "Rich people, they don't own things."
When you own somethin', it can be taken away from you. You can get sued over it, taxed on it, or someone could burn it down. Rich people know this. And that's why they let something else own all their shit for them.
The family home belongs to a trust, the trucks and cars belong to the business, the jets and helicopters are leased, and the bank holds the paper on everything else.
When someone comes knockin', looking, there's nothin' to find with their name on it.
This is why they walk through life like nothin' can touch them.
Because nothin' can. That's the thing. They're not wrong.
Where am I goin' with this? Why am I tellin' you this?
Well, the thing is, they didn't eliminate their risk, they just packed it all up inside a shell game.
They still have debt, they just can't be sued over it.
The only thing they can't walk away from is what they owe.
And what they owe is a contract with the bank. And if you're an oil driller, you've got a lot of contracts. You've got one for the mineral lease, one for the rig that drills the hole, one for the casing and pipe that goes down it, one for the frac spread that cracks the rock open, one for the pump jack that brings it up, one for the tanks it sits in, and one for the gathering line that carries it off.
"But here's the thing about oil drilling in the Bakken formation, Legion," Cash said. "It's all mixed up with an ancient salty sea. So when you drill, all that shit—all the oil, all the brine, all the salt—it comes up together because you can't separate it underground. You got to do that up top, put that salt water into trucks, and haul it away so it can get injected back into the ground under the right permit."
At this point in that ride, my eyes were glazin' over and the three-year-old filly was bein' a bitch, so I wasn't in the mood to be schooled about the intricacies of oil. "So fuckin' what?"
