by Greg Iles
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 che
cks 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 mor
e 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.
