Sitting on his front porch facing west, he
watched his pumpjack struggling, a riderless rocking horse, thrusting like a
jilted lover into the earth, hoping for a strike, retracting, hopeless, the
well
returning dust.
His family had drilled for oil since
1920, the crude barely needed coaxing, ready to bubble up
or burst through the derrick like a caged beast. But the well had dried.
He tried fracking to fracture the shale, witching the underground aquifer to loosen the gold, a drone with geothermal compass to ferret his fortune. All failed. Shamans from the Indian reservation asked spirits for guidance. He and his wife Marge even sought help the old-fashioned way, praying in their Pentecostal church, knees at pew, pleading.
“Oh Lord, feed our land. Provide our needs. Use your mighty hands to raise the dead, oil that you have hidden in the reticent crevices of our dry soil. Let the black spew forth, we pray.”
Still the earth withheld the oil
deposited 300 million years earlier in the Permian Basin outside Odessa, Texas,
where pterodactyls and velociraptors compacted into dead organisms. So he sat,
drinking his 4th Bud light, draining it, crushing the can, and
tossing it into his yard to gather with
earlier crushed cans, littering like metallic weeds.
US 87 highway ran north to south a mile from his ranch. He could see cars on the overpass, driving somewhere, anywhere, away from the land. The sun was setting. He sat in the lengthening shadow of the highway's darkening underpass, the earth stealing light.
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