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Henry gripped the receiver to his ear, loath to let go. “Well. This must be costing you a small fortune, sir.”
“I’ll rob a bank.”
“No need. Miss Vanessi refuses to marry a pauper.”
“Tell Miss Vanessi ‘I do.’”
“I will tell her, sir. I most certainly will tell her.”
By the next afternoon, Henry had the money he’d asked for, along with fifty dollars more that David had thrown in from his own pocket. Henry held the bills to his chest as if they were David himself.
“We have enough to buy a car now,” Henry announced.
They found someone eager to sell a 1925 Model T Roadster Pickup, and Henry arranged to meet the seller—a heavyset, balding man whose nose was peeling from a terrible sunburn—in front of Western Union.
“She’s a real beaut,” the man said in a thick drawl.
Henry kicked the tires and frowned slightly. “I’d be willing to take this one off your hands for fifty dollars.”
“Now, see here! This cost me nearly two-hun’erd eighty-five new!”
“Oh, come now. That’s nothing now that you’re rolling in oil money. Besides, an important fella like you can’t be seen driving this old heap,” Henry said.
The man removed his fedora to scratch his head. “I’ll let her go for one-fifty.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Ninety-five!”
“Sold!”
“I would’ve gone as high as a hundred twenty,” Henry told Memphis and Bill after the sale was final. “But now we’ve got twenty-five dollars left over. That should see us to Nebraska, with a motel room to boot.”
The ground gave a deep rumble. Whoops and hollers erupted in the fields.
“What is it?” Memphis asked.
“The future,” a man answered.
A derrick had hit its payload. The earth belched up its hidden riches a hundred feet into the air, blocking the blue sky. New crude showered down like rain on the rejoicing roughnecks who bathed in it, smearing one another’s faces with its promise.
Memphis’s pen hovered above the page in his notebook. And then he wrote.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.
A hundred feet high and climbing, a geysering
A misering of liberty
Deep in the soil,
the oil of us
lies
blood of the nation, black as
night
