Sleep No More

Chapter 2

Waters stopped at his office to pick up his maps and briefcase on his way home from the cemetery, and he said nothing to Lily about his side trip when he arrived. He sat at the kitchen table with Annelise, studying the maps that he hoped described the underlying structure around the well he would log tonight. While he rechecked every step of his geology, Annelise did second-grade math problems across the table. Now and then she would laugh at his “serious face,” and he would laugh with her. The two shared an original turn of mind, and also a conspiratorial sense of humor that sometimes excluded Lily. Waters wondered if these similarities were attributable to genetics or socialization. Lily had been trained as an accountant, and her math skills were formidable, but Annelise’s mind seemed to run along its own quirky track, as her father’s did, and Lily herself often pointed this out.

While Waters and Annelise worked, Lily sat in the alcove where she paid the household bills, typing a letter to the Department of the Interior, yet another skirmish in her campaign to add Linton Hill to the National Register. Waters admired her tenacity, but he didn’t much care whether they got a brass plaque to mount beside the front door or not. He’d bought Linton Hill because he liked it, not as a badge of the quasi-feudal status that much of the moneyed class in Natchez seemed to cherish.

At 8:30 they went upstairs to put Annelise to bed. Waters walked back down first, but he waited for Lily at the foot of the steps, as was his custom. He had no illusions about what would happen next. She gave him a stiff hug-without eye contact-then headed back to the alcove to finish her letter.

He stood alone in the foyer as he had countless nights before, wondering what to do next. Most nights he would go out to the old slave quarters that was his home office and work at his computer, pressing down the frustration that had been building in him for more years than he wanted to think about. Frustration had been a profitable motivator for him. Using it, he had in his spare time developed geological mapping software that earned him seventy thousand dollars a year in royalties. This brought him a sense of accomplishment, but it did nothing to resolve his basic problem.

Tonight he did not feel like writing computer code. Nor did he want to telephone any investors, as he had promised his partner he would do. Seeing Eve Sumner that afternoon had deeply aroused him, even if he’d been mistaken about what she said. The energy humming in him now was almost impossible to contain, and he wanted to release it with his wife. Not the best motivation for marital sex, perhaps, but it was reality. Yet he knew there would be no release tonight. Not in any satisfactory way. There hadn’t been for the past four years. And suddenly-without emotional fanfare of any kind-Waters knew that he could no longer endure that situation. The wall of forbearance he had so painstakingly constructed was finally giving way.

He left the foyer and walked through the back door to the patio, but he did not go to the slave quarters. He stood in the cool of the night, looking at the old cistern pump and reflecting how he and Lily had come to this impasse. Looking back, the sequence of events seemed to have the weight of inevitability. Annelise had been born in 1995, after a normal pregnancy and delivery. The next year, they tried again, and Lily immediately got pregnant. Then, in her fourth month, she miscarried. It happened at a party, and the night at the hospital was a long and difficult one. The fetus had been male, and this hit Lily hard, as she’d been set on naming the child after her father, who was gravely ill at the time. Three months after the miscarriage, her father died. Depression set in with a melancholy vengeance, and Lily went on Zoloft. They continued to have occasional sex, but the passion had gone out of her. Waters told himself this was a side effect of the drug, and Lily’s doctor agreed. After two difficult years, she announced she was ready to try again. She got off the drug, began to exercise and eat well, and they started making love every night. Three weeks later, she was pregnant.

All seemed fine until a lab test revealed that Lily’s blood had developed antibodies to the fetus’s blood. Lily was Rh-negative, the baby Rh-positive, and because of the severity of their incompatibility, Lily’s blood would soon begin destroying the baby’s blood at a dangerously rapid rate. Carrying Annelise had sensitized Lily to Rh-positive blood, but it was in subsequent pregnancies that the disease blossomed to its destructive potential, growing worse each time. An injection of a drug called RhoGAM was supposed to prevent Rh disease in later pregnancies, but for some unknown reason, it had not.

Waters and Lily began commuting a hundred miles to University Hospital in Jackson to treat mother and fetus, with an exhausting round of amniocentesis and finally an intrauterine transfusion to get fresh blood into the struggling baby. This miraculous procedure worked, but it bought them only weeks. More transfusions would be required, possibly as many as five if the baby was to survive to term. The next time Lily climbed onto the table for an ultrasound exam, the doctor looked at the computer screen, listened to the baby’s heartbeat, then put down the ultrasound wand and met Waters’s eyes with somber significance. Waters’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked. “What’s the matter?”

The doctor took her upper arm and squeezed, then spoke in the most compassionate voice John Waters had ever heard from the mouth of a man. “Lily, you’re going to lose the baby.”

She went rigid on the examination table. The doctor looked stricken. He knew how much emotion she had invested in that child. Another pregnancy was medically out of the question.

“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “How do you know?” Then her face drained of color. “You mean…he’s dead now? Now?”

The doctor looked at Waters as though for help, but Waters had no idea what emergency procedures might exist. He did know they were in one of those situations for which physicians are not adequately trained in medical school.

“The fetal heartbeat is decelerating now,” the doctor said. “The baby is already in hydrops.”

“What’s that?” Lily asked in a shaky voice.

“Heart failure.”

She began to hyperventilate. Waters squeezed her hand, feeling a wild helplessness in his chest. He was more afraid for Lily than for the baby.

“Do something!” Lily shrieked at the stunned doctor. She turned to her husband. “Do something!”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the doctor said in a soft voice that told Waters the man was relearning a terrible lesson about the limits of his profession.

Lily stared at the fuzzy image on the monitor, her eyes showing more white than color. “Don’t just sit there, damn you! Do something! Deliver him right now!”

“He can’t survive outside of you, Lily. His lungs aren’t developed. And he can’t survive inside either. I’m sorry.”

“Take-him-OUT!”

In the four years since that day, Waters had not allowed himself to think about what happened after that-not more than once or twice, anyway. Lily’s mother had been reading a magazine in the hall outside, and she burst in when Lily began to scream. The doctor did his best to explain what was happening, and Lily’s mother tried everything she knew to comfort her daughter. But in the ten minutes it took Waters’s unborn child’s heart to stop, his wife’s soul cracked at the core. The sight unmanned him, and it still could now, if he allowed the memory its full resonance. This was how he had survived the past four years without sexual intimacy: by never quite blocking out the horror of that day. His wife had been wounded as severely as a soldier shot through the chest, even if the wound didn’t show, and it was his duty to live with the consequences.

The ring of the telephone sounded faintly through the French doors. After about a minute, Waters heard Lily call his name. He went inside and picked up the den extension.

“Hello?”

“Goddamn, John Boy!”

Nobody but Cole Smith got away with calling Waters that, and Cole sounded like he already had a load of scotch in him.

“Where are you?” asked Waters.

“I’ve got Billy Guidraux and Mr. Hill Tauzin with me in my Lincoln Confidential. We’re ten miles south of Jackson Point. You think this land yacht can make it all the way to the rig?”

“It hasn’t rained for a few days. You shouldn’t have any trouble. If you do get stuck, you’ll be close enough for Dooley’s boys to drag you in.” Dooley’s boys were the crew working the bulldozers at the well location.

“That’s what I figured. When are you coming down?”

Waters didn’t answer immediately. Normally, he would wait until the tool pusher called and said they had reached total depth and were bringing the drill bit out of the hole before he drove out to the rig location. That way he didn’t have to spend much time doing things he didn’t like. On logging nights-the last few anyway-Cole usually talked a lot of crap while the investors stood around giving Waters nervous glances, wishing the only geologist in the bunch would give them some additional hope that their dollars had not been wasted on this deal. But tonight Waters didn’t want to sit in the silent house, waiting.

“I’m leaving now,” he told Cole.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole exulted. “The Rock Man is breaking precedent, boys. It’s a sign. You must have a special feeling about this one, son.”

Rock Man. Rock. Waters hated the nicknames, but many geologists got saddled with them, and there was nothing he could do about it when his partner was drunk. He recalled a time when Cole had kept his cards close to his vest, but Cole had held his liquor a lot better back then. Or perhaps he was just drinking more these days. For all the pressure the EPA investigation had put on Waters, it had bled pounds out of his partner.

“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he said in a clipped voice.

Before he could ring off, he heard coarse laughter fill the Continental, and then Cole’s voice dropped to half-volume.

“What you think, John? Can you tell me anything?”

“At this point you know as much as I do. It’s there or it’s not. And it’s-”

“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished wearily. “Shit, you’re no fun.” His voice suddenly returned to its normal pitch. “Loosen up, Rock. Get on down here and have a Glenmorangie with us.”

Waters clicked off, then gathered his maps, logs, and briefcase. He kissed Lily on the top of the head as she worked, but her only response was a preoccupied shrug.

He went out to the Land Cruiser and cranked it to life.

Waters was four miles from the location when the rig appeared out of the night like an alien ship that had landed in the dark beside the greatest river on the continent. The steel tower stood ninety feet tall, its giant struts dotted with blue-white lights. Below the derrick was the metal substructure, where shirtless men in hard hats worked with chains that could rip them in half in one careless second. The ground below the deck was a sea of mud and planking, with hydraulic hoses snaking everywhere and the doghouse-the driller’s portable office-standing nearby. Unearthly light bathed the whole location, and the bellow of pumps and generators rolled over the sandbar and the mile-wide river like Patton’s tanks approaching the Rhine.

Something leaped in Waters’s chest as he neared the tower. This was his forty-sixth well, but the old thrill had not faded with time. That drilling rig was a tangible symbol of his will. At one time there were seventy oil companies in Natchez. Now there were seven. That simple statistic described more heartache and broken dreams than you could tell in words; it summed up the decline of a town. Adversity was a way of life in the oil business, but the last eight years had been particularly harsh. Only the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.

He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflecting off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up-or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.

Drilling a well represented different things to different people. Even for Waters, who had pored over countless maps and miles of logs, who had mapped the hidden sands, it meant different things. First was the science. There was oil seven thousand feet below this land, but there was no easy way to find out exactly where. Not even with the priceless technology available to Exxon or Oxy Petroleum. In the end, someone still had to punch a hole through numberless layers of earth, sand, shale, limestone, and lignite, down to the soft sands that sometimes trapped the migrating oil that sixty million years ago was the surface life of the planet. And knowing where to punch that hole…well, that was a life’s work.

In the 1940s and ’50s, it hadn’t been so hard. Oil was abundant in Adams County, and quite a few fellows with more balls than brains had simply put together some money, drilled in a spot they “had a feeling about,” and hit the jackpot. But those days were gone. Adams County now had more holes in it than a grandmother’s pincushion, and the big fields had all been found as surely as they were now playing out-or so went the conventional wisdom. Waters and a few others believed there were one or two significant fields left. Not big by Saudi standards, or even by offshore U.S. standards, but still containing enough reserves to make a Mississippi boy more money than he could ever spend in one lifetime. Enough to take care of one’s heirs and assigns into perpetuity, as the lawyers said. But those fields, if they existed, would not be easy to find. No rank wildcatter was going to park his F-150 to take a leak in a soybean field, suddenly yell, This here’s the spot! with near-religious zeal, and hit the big one. It would take a scientist like Waters, and that was one of the things that kept him going.

Another motivator was simpler but a little embarrassing to admit: the boyhood thrill of the treasure hunt. Because at some point the science ended and you went with your gut; you slapped an X on a paper map and you by God went out to dig up something that had been waiting for you since dinosaurs roamed the planet. Other guys were trying to find the same treasure, with the same tools, and some of those guys were all right and some were pirates as surely as the ones who roamed the Spanish Main.

Waters’s Land Cruiser jounced over a couple of broken two-by-fours, and then he turned into the open area of the location. Parking some distance from the other vehicles, he got out with his briefcase and map tube and began walking toward the silver Lincoln parked beside the Schlumberger logging truck. The car’s interior light illuminated three figures: two in the front seat, one in back. Cole Smith sat behind the wheel. Once he spotted Waters, the Continental’s doors would burst open with an exhalation of beer and whiskey, and the circus would begin. As Waters walked, he breathed in the conflicting odors of river water, mud, kudzu, pipe dope, and diesel fuel. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, but it fired the senses if you knew what it added up to.

Suddenly, the driver’s door of the Lincoln flew open, and the vehicle rose on its shocks as Cole Smith climbed out wearing khaki pants, a Polo button-down, and a Houston Astros baseball cap. Cole had been an athlete in college, but in the years since, he had ballooned up to 250 pounds. He carried the weight well; some women still thought him handsome. But when you studied his face, you saw his health fading fast. The alcohol had taken its toll, and there was a dark light in his eyes, a hunted look that had not been there five years ago. Once only infectious optimism had shone from those eyes, an irresistible force that persuaded levelheaded men to take risks they would never have dreamed of in the sober light of rational thought. But something-or a slow accretion of somethings-had changed that.

“Here’s the Rock Man, boys!” Cole cried, clapping a beefy hand on Waters’s shoulder. “Here’s the witch doctor!”

These must be the mullets, Waters thought, as the two visiting big shots followed Cole out of the Lincoln. As a rule, he never used derogatory slang for investors, but these two looked like they might deserve it. There had been a time when he and Cole allowed only good friends to buy into their wells, but the business had gotten too tough to be picky. These days, he relied on Cole to find the money to finance their wells, and Cole’s sources were too numerous-and sometimes too nebulous-to think about. The oil business attracted all kinds of investors, from dentists to mafiosi to billionaires. All shared a dream of easy money, and that was what separated them (and Cole Smith) from Waters. Still, Waters shook hands with them-two dark-haired men in their fifties with Cajun accents and squinting eyes-and committed their first names to memory, if only for the night.

“Everybody’s feeling good,” Cole said, his mouth fixed in a grin. “How do you feel, John Boy?”

Waters forced himself not to wince. “It’s a good play. That’s why we’re here.”

“What’s the upside?” asked one of the Cajuns-Billy.

“Well, as we outlined in the prospectus-”

“Oh, hell,” Cole cut in. “You know we always go conservative in those things. We’re logging this baby in a few hours, Rock. What’s the biggest it could go?”

This was the wrong kind of talk to have in front of investors, but Waters kept his poker face. In two hours they could all be looking at the log of a dry hole, and the anger and disappointment the investors felt would be directly proportional to the degree their hopes had been raised.

“If we come in high,” he said cautiously, referring to the geologic structure, “the reserves could be significant. This isn’t a close-in deal. We’re after something no one’s found before.”

“Damn right,” said Cole. “Going for big game tonight. We’re gunning for the bull elephant.”

He leaned into the Lincoln’s door and pulled a Styrofoam cup off the dash, took a slug from it.

“What’s the upside?” insisted Billy. “No shit. Cole says it could go five million barrels.”

Waters felt his stomach clench. He wanted to smack Cole in the mouth. Five million barrels was the absolute outside of the envelope, if everything drilled out exactly right. The odds of that happening were one in a hundred. “That’s probably a little generous,” he said, meeting Billy’s eye.

“Generous, my ass,” Cole said quickly. “Our Steel Creek field was three million, and John was predicting one-point-five, tops.” He poked Waters in the chest. “But Rock knew all along.”

“So you said,” growled Billy, his eyes on Waters.

“The statistics say one out of twenty-nine,” said Cole. “That’s the odds of hitting a well around here. John’s drilled forty-six prospects, and he’s hit seventeen wells. He’s the goddamn Mark McGwire of the oil business.”

“So you said.” Billy was measuring Waters like a boxer preparing for a fight. “Five million barrels is a hundred and fifty million bucks at thirty-dollar oil. We like the sound of that.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Waters said, his eyes on Cole. “I need to talk to the engineer. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”

He walked up the steps of the Schlumberger truck, a massive blue vehicle packed to the walls with computers, CRTs, printers, and racked equipment. Schlumberger rotated engineers in and out of town pretty often-most of them Yankees-but the man at the console tonight had worked several of Waters’s wells.

“How’s it going, Pete?” Waters handed the engineer a surveyor’s plat showing the well location and name.

A bookish young man with John Lennon glasses looked up, smiled, and answered in a northern accent. “The tool is calibrated. Just waiting to hit total depth.”

“Cole been up here yet?”

The engineer rolled his eyes. “He’s talking a pretty big game. You feel good about this one?”

“It’s a solid play. But it’s definitely a wildcat. It could shale out.”

“God knows that’s right. Happens to the best of them.”

Waters grabbed a walkie-talkie off the desk and clipped it to his belt. “I’m going up to look at the rig. Holler if you need anything, or if Cole gets to be too much of a pain in the ass.”

Pete grinned. “I’ll do that.”

Waters stood by the river on a patch of gray sand, watching a string of barges plow upstream in the darkness. The spotlight of the pushboat played across the surface of the river like the eye of a military patrol boat, and for good reason. There were sandbars out there that could turn that ordered line of barges into a lethal group of runaways floating downriver with nothing to slow them down but bridge pilings or other vessels.

The spotlight swung past him, then back, and he raised his hand in greeting. The light hung there a minute, then moved on. Waters smiled. The man behind that light was working through the night, just as he was, and that gave him a feeling of kinship. The same kinship he felt with the men working the rig behind him. He had made a point of speaking to the driller and crew when he went up to the rig’s floor. Then he got a Coke from an ice chest on one of the workmen’s trucks. The driller said Cole had brought crawfish and smoked salmon, but Waters didn’t want to spend any more time with Billy and the other mullet than he had to. It was times like this-waiting out the last few hours when the chips could fall either way-that he sometimes questioned his choice of career. And that kind of thinking led to other questions, some better left unasked. But tonight the voice that asked those questions would not stay silent.

Waters had never planned to return to his hometown, much less enter the oil business. Nor had he planned to go to Ole Miss. He’d worked hard in high school, done well on his college boards, and received a full academic scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines, the most prestigious school of geology in the United States. But his father was dead, his mother had not remarried, and his brother was in the ninth grade. Henry Waters had not expected to die young, and so had not left enough insurance. Checks from his oil wells had been steady, but they wouldn’t last forever, and the price of oil had already begun to drop. With all this in mind, Waters turned down Colorado and went to Ole Miss.

While his old friends drank, gambled, and chased sorority girls, Waters studied. Summers, he flew to Alaska and worked the pipeline. That was the best pay he could find, and his family soon needed it. His father’s wells depleted rapidly, and the checks got steadily smaller. After the madness with Mallory peaked, he transferred to Colorado for his senior year. There he met Sara Valdes, the woman with whom he would spend the next few years of his life. Sara was a vulcanologist who pursued her work with a single-minded passion that carried her to some of the most isolated and beautiful spots in the world. Waters began dabbling in her specialty just to be near her, and soon they were traveling the world together, doing graduate research. He spent nearly three years scuba diving beneath volcanoes to study marine ecosystems that lived off the heat of magma, and camping on pumice slopes to study active craters. In Argentina, they’d stumbled upon a meteorite of unusual composition and structure. In Ecuador, he found the frozen remains of a small mammoth dating back fifty thousand years. It was probably the nostalgic haze of selective memory, but he could not remember once being bored during those years.

Then his mother fell ill. His brother was in college, and Waters saw no alternative but to go home and take care of her. Sara Valdes loved him deeply, but she was not about to move to Mississippi, where the last volcanic activity occurred two hundred million years before she was born. That move was the start of the life Waters now lived. He’d been back in Natchez less than a month when Cole Smith-his old roommate and now a lawyer-asked if he thought he could find some oil. Since he had to do something for money, Waters set about mapping the region with a vengeance. Three months later, he was sure he had a cod-lock cinch. Cole sold the prospect in two weeks, and they prepared to make their first million dollars.

What they made was a dry hole.

Waters learned a hard lesson from that first failure, but the next morning he went back to his maps. He studied substructure for four months almost without sleep. And this time, he swore to Cole, he had it. It took Cole five months to sell that second prospect-split between sixty investors. Cole and Waters could barely afford to keep small shares for themselves. But at 4:00 A.M. in the middle of dense Franklin County woods, they hit twenty-nine feet of pay sand-a likely four million barrels of reserves-and one of the last big fields discovered in the area. After that, they couldn’t put prospects together fast enough. Waters kept finding oil, and the money rolled in like a green tide. Even after the oil industry crashed in 1986, Cole somehow continued to sell deals, and Waters kept finding oil.

It was around this time that Lily Anderson graduated from SMU’s Cox School of Business and returned to Natchez. A CPA, she planned to stay in town only long enough to help her father straighten out some tax troubles, but after she and Waters started seeing each other, she decided to stay a bit longer. Smart, quick-witted, and attractive, Lily kept Waters from slipping into the mild depressions he sometimes felt at a life that, despite the money, seemed significantly smaller than the one he’d left behind. But there were other compensations. His mother’s health improved, and his brother graduated cum laude from LSU. When Lily expressed restlessness that their relationship seemed stalled, Waters took a hard look at his life-the old dreams and the new realities-and decided that he had not been born to roam the world in search of scientific adventure. He had built something in Natchez, a thriving company his father would have been proud of, and that-he told himself-was good enough. It was time to be fair to Lily.

“What the hell are you doing down here by yourself in the mud?”

Cole’s voice was slurred from too much scotch. Waters heard him push through some weeds, then stop to keep his shoes out of the gumbo mud that bordered the river here. There’d been a time when Cole wore steel-toed Red Wings out to the locations, just like Waters. Now he wore the same Guccis or Cole Haans he sported at the office. Waters turned to face him.

“Have you lost your mind?”

Cole’s eyes looked cloudy. “What do you mean?”

“You told them five million barrels?”

“You said yourself it could go that high.”

Waters’s frustration boiled over. “That’s you and me! In the office! That’s blue-sky dreaming. The outside of the goddamn envelope.”

“We’ve hit it before.” Cole’s eyes narrowed with resentment. “Look, I handle the investors. You have to trust me about what makes them tick. It’s the romance of it, John. They’re just like women that way.”

“You’ve obviously forgotten how women get when they’re disappointed. You’d better start trimming their expectations a little.”

Worry wrinkled Cole’s fleshy face. “You don’t think we’re gonna hit?”

“You said it yourself: one out of twenty-nine.”

“That’s factoring in all the assholes who don’t know what they’re doing. You’re one out of three, John.”

Waters felt a hot rush of self-consciousness at this admission of the degree to which everyone’s fortunes depended on him. “We can’t ever rely on that.”

“But I always have.” Cole smiled crookedly. “And you’ve never let me down, partner.”

“We’ve hit the last two we drilled. That ought to tell you adversity can’t be far away.”

Cole blinked like a fighter realizing that he has underestimated his opponent. A little clarity had burned through the scotch at last. Even in his inebriated state, Cole knew that fate was always out there waiting to hand you an ass-whipping.

“Who are those guys, anyway?” asked Waters. “The mullets.”

“South Louisiana guys, I told you. I’ve hunted with them a few times. They got some land leased south of town this season. Paid thirty an acre.”

“You don’t hunt anymore.”

“Not without a damn good reason.” Cole grinned suddenly, his old bravado back in a flash. “You know deer season’s my favorite time of year. While all the husbands are in the woods chasing the elusive whitetail, I’m back in town chasing the married hot tail.”

Waters had heard this too many times to laugh. “Look, I know you want me up there. But I’d just as soon not spend much time with those guys. Okay?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Investors like having the witch doctor around while they’re waiting to log. Tones up the party. Unless it’s a dry hole. Then nobody will want to see your ass.” Cole grinned again. “Least of all me.”

Waters started to walk up out of the mud, but more words came almost before he realized he was speaking.

“What do you know about Eve Sumner?”

Cole looked nonplussed. “The real estate chick?”

“Yeah.”

“What about her? I thought you didn’t want to know about any of my adventures.”

“You’ve slept with her?”

“What do you think? She ain’t no prude, and she looks like two million bucks. Besides, she likes married guys. Fewer complications.”

“Is she-” Waters dropped the thought. “Never mind.”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about hooking up with her. Not Ward Cleaver himself.”

“No. She just came on to me a little, and I was curious.”

“Yeah? Watch out, then. She’s a hell of a lay, but too twisted for me. She’s a sly one. Always looking for advantage. Reminds me a little of me. I like my women a little more…pliable.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Hey, though, Evie does this thing with her-”

Waters stopped him with an upraised hand. “Don’t tell me, okay? I don’t need to know.”

Cole snickered. “You don’t know if you need to know or not until I tell you what she does.”

“I think I can live without that knowledge.”

“Okay, fine. Now come on up here and hang out with the great unwashed, okay?”

“I will, if you lay off the scotch. I’m looking for two million barrels, but this baby could shale out in a heartbeat.”

The levity that ruminating over sex with Eve Sumner had brought Cole vanished from his face. He stepped out of the grass and into the mud, his Guccis sinking ankle deep as he marched to within a foot of Waters.

“Listen to me, partner,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more negative waves, okay? Especially not around the mullets.”

Negative waves? “Hey, I’m just telling it like it is.”

Cole laid a heavy hand on Waters’s shoulder and squeezed. “That kind of honesty’s for the classroom and the confessional. This is sales, Rock. You’re not so far up the ivory tower that you’ve forgotten that.”

“Cole, what the hell is going on? Something feels wrong about this.”

The big man smiled a beatific smile. “Nothing’s wrong, John Boy. Nothing a few million barrels of crude won’t fix.” He leaned in as close as a lover and spoke with quiet earnestness, his breath a fog of scotch. “We need this one, partner. I need it.”

Waters shook his shoulder free. “You know there’s no way to-”

Cole waved him off and walked up out of the mud. “Don’t be long. We’re gonna be celebrating in a couple of hours.”

Waters turned back to the dark river, his gut hollow with foreboding, his mind roiling with images of two women, neither of whom was his wife.

Claustrophobic. That’s how it felt in the Schlumberger truck, where Waters sat in the glow of a CRT with Cole and the money men and the engineer crowded around him. The driller stood on the metal steps in the door, some roughnecks lined up behind him. Everyone wanted to know whether the work they had done was for a reason or not, and interest in the outcome-and the risk riding on it-increased with proximity to John Waters.

He watched the paper log scroll out of the printer like a cardiologist reading an EKG. The logging tool had been lowered down the bore hole to total depth and was now being slowly pulled up, electrically reading the properties of the fluids in the geologic formations around it as it rose. Waters’s predictions were being proved or negated with every foot of rise, and soon he would know whether the potentially oil-bearing sand was where he’d predicted or not, and if so, whether or not it held oil.

Cole’s face looked red and swollen, his eyes almost bulging, and Waters sensed that his partner’s blood pressure was dangerously high. The tension slowly wound itself to an almost unbearable pitch, but Waters shut it out: the dripping sweat, the grunts and curses, white knuckles, taut faces. He was waiting for a moment none of the others had known and never would. There was a point when you didn’t know what you needed to know and another when you did, the sliver of time between those two states not quantifiable, during which the human brain, trained by evolution to search for patterns and by rigorous education to interpret them, read the data as voraciously as any Neanderthal had searched the savannah for game. The slightest tick of the needle could trigger your instinct, and even before the actual data emerged from the machine the knowledge was there in your medulla, as sweet as the moment you plunged into a woman or as terrible as the ache of metastatic cancer in your belly. Fate’s hand was revealed, and it was all over but the bullshittin’ and spittin’, as Waters’s father had so often put it.

“I missed it,” Waters said in a flat voice.

“What?” someone whispered.

“Shaled out.” Waters clenched his jaw and took the hit, accepting his failure as the price of courage. “It happens.”

“What the fuck?” muttered Billy, the sullen-faced Cajun. “What happens? You sayin’ there’s no oil?”

Waters expected Cole to reply, but he heard nothing. He took his gaze away from the log tape long enough to see that the redness in his partner’s face had vanished. Cole was as pale as a fish’s belly now, his chin quivering.

“What the fuck, Smith?” bellowed Billy. Cole wasn’t “Cole” anymore. The Cajun glared at Waters. “What about show? Gotta be some goddamn show, right?”

Waters shook his head. “Show” was the presence of oil in a sand stratum, but usually not enough to justify “running pipe,” or completing the well to the point of production. After wells were logged, debates frequently arose over whether pipe should be set or not. Some people wanted to set pipe on marginal wells to be able to boast that they had made a well. Waters was thankful there would be none of that.

“This ain’t right,” said the other Cajun, silent up till now.

Waters focused on the log. This ain’t right? What the hell was that supposed to mean? This was the way it worked. Every prospective well was an educated guess, nothing more. Had Cole not made that clear to them? Was this the first well they’d ever invested in?

Cole gave a little shudder that only Waters noticed. Then he straightened up with his old bravado and said, “Fate hammered our ass, boys. Let’s give the man some room to do his paperwork.”

“Hammered…my ass,” said Billy. “I got money tied up in this well!”

Waters thought he heard the Schlumberger engineer snort.

“You got something to say, bookworm?” snarled the Cajun.

The engineer looked like he did, but he was working for Waters and Cole and would not speak without their leave.

Waters expected Cole to manhandle the whining mullets right out of the truck, but for some reason, Cole didn’t look up to the task. Waters hesitated a moment, then dropped the log and stood up. At six foot one, he rose above both investors, and in the closeness of the truck, he stood well into their space.

“We gave it our best shot,” he said quietly. “But we missed it. I’ll lose more money today than either of you, and-”

“That’s shit,” said Billy. “You guys take a free ride on our money, and keep the override too.”

“I don’t get carried,” Waters said, his palms tingling with potential violence. “I keep the major interest in every well. If it’s a duster, I take it right in the wallet. So if you guys don’t want to do anything but whine about what you lost, your partner needs to unass that chair and you go back to the car and drown your sorrows in scotch.”

Billy looked like he wanted to knife Waters in the gut. Cole was staring at his partner as if he’d just watched a transformation of supernatural proportions. Rather than retaliate against Waters, Billy grabbed Cole’s arm and growled, “This ain’t over, Smith. Bet your ass on that. Now get out there and drive us back to town!”

Billy stomped down the steps of the truck, followed by his stone-faced companion, but Cole stayed behind.

“Been a long time since I seen you do something like that, Rock,” he said. “I enjoyed it, but…Well, no use talking now.”

Waters looked curiously at his old friend, but there was no time to delve into the morass of Cole’s private life. He held out his hand, and Cole shook it with the iron grip he’d always had.

“We’ll hit the next one,” Waters said with confidence. “That’s how it always goes, isn’t it?”

Cole tried to smile, but the effect was more like a grimace. And though he hadn’t spoken, Waters was almost sure he’d heard a thought passing through Cole’s mind: I hope there is a next one….

“I gotta drive those assholes back,” Cole said softly. “What a ride that’ll be.”

“You’ve handled worse.”

Cole seemed to weigh this idea in his mind. Then he laughed darkly, shook hands with the engineer, and climbed down the steps into the night. Waters picked up the log and reread the tale of his failure.

“Those guys really bugged me,” said the engineer, speaking at last.

“Me too, Pete.” Waters sensed that the Schlumberger man wanted to say more. He looked up and waited.

“I think Cole was scared when he left,” Pete said, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Fear is an emotion Cole Smith never had to deal with,” Waters said with a forced smile.

Pete looked relieved.

But as Waters looked back at the log, he thought, I think he was scared too. After a few minutes, he got up and went to the door, then looked back and gave his final order.

“Rig down.”