by Greg Iles
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 hi
s 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.”
Chapter 3
By the time Waters saw Eve Sumner again, he had nearly convinced himself that the strangeness of their initial encounter had been a distortion of his imagination. Their second meeting was as unexpected as the first, the occasion a party for a duke and duchess of the Mardi Gras krewe to which Waters and Lily belonged. Like New Orleans, Natchez had celebrated Fat Tuesday in the nineteenth century, and the tradition had been revived in the second half of the twentieth. Mardi Gras parties were not of a scale comparable to those of Natchez’s greatest tradition, the Spring Pilgrimage, but they compensated for this by being less staid and generally more fun. Waters and Lily attended only two or three a year, and this accounted for Waters not knowing Eve Sumner was a member.
The party was held at Dunleith, the premier mansion of the city. If any single building personified the antebellum South as it existed in the minds of Yankees, Dunleith did. Standing majestically on forty landscaped acres and flanked by outbuildings styled after Gothic castles, this colossal Greek Revival mansion took away the breath of travelers who’d circled the globe to study architecture. At night its massive white columns were lit by fluorescent beams, and as Waters and Lily pulled up the private driveway in Lily’s Acura, he saw a line of cars awaiting valets at the broad front steps.
