Sweet Return

by Anna Jeffrey

  Dalton was touched by her youthful sentimentality. He couldn’t imagine his little brother making up a name for a baby or as the father of a child, but if he’d had a hand in choosing the kid’s name, he must have had some kind of meaningful relationship with this girl. He took out his wallet and wrote his mother’s phone number on the back of his business card, though he would lay money that Mandy knew it. “Just give me a call if you want to go visit my brother. Call any time.”

  He left the Dairy Queen feeling like the wise older brother. And it felt pretty damn good.

  A mile on up the road, he came to his main destination, Huddleston Well Servicing. As he pulled to a stop in front of a flat-roofed metal building, he scanned the surrounding caliche-covered parking area. His high school friend Jay Huddleston had worked here in the family business as a teenager. Today, Dalton saw no trucks parked, so that meant Huddleston’s crews must be out working.

  When Dalton and Jay were teenagers, the company had owned three pulling units that provided maintenance service for existing oil wells. Dalton hadn’t heard or hadn’t been interested in knowing what had happened to Huddleston Well Servicing after he left Hatlow. His focus had been on his own survival.

  Inside the well-servicing company’s office, he met a receptionist at work in stark gray surroundings devoid of luxuries. On a metal table behind her metal desk sat the only decoration—a tiny blue pot with phony daisies perched beside a gold-framed picture of her, a man and two kids. She showed him into her boss’s office.

  A grinning Jay Huddleston, his right hand extended, came from behind a huge metal desk that looked to be military surplus. “Dalton Parker, you hardheaded devil. Come on in here.”

  Dalton shook hands with his old high school friend, noticing he had aged well. Except for silver hair and creases around the mouth, he didn’t look much different from their school days. Dalton hadn’t seen him since then, when they had played football together on Hatlow’s winning team. Dalton had been the quarterback and Huddleston had been an end. An image of Jay suited up and catching a pass flashed from the far recesses of Dalton’s memory. As Dalton recalled, Jay could outrun the wind.

  “Joanna gave you my message, huh?” Jay said.

  “Message?”

  “I told her to tell you to come by. Beer? Coffee? It’s a little early for me for beer, but—”

  “It’s too early for me, too. A cup of coffee will do.”

  Jay yelled to the receptionist to bring a cup of coffee. Then his attention returned to Dalton. “Hey, man, you look good. Haven’t changed a bit.” His expression turned solemn. “Listen, that was too damn bad about Lane. How’s he doing now?”

  “Coming along.”

  Jay shook his head, his thick, dark brows pinching together. “That Lovington highway’s a son of a bitch. But since the DUI laws got tougher, it’s not as bad as it used to be. It used to get a lot of ’em.”

  “Yep. It sure as hell got Earl Cherry,” Dalton replied, revisiting in his mind the irony of Cherry’s only son nearly killing himself on the same long, lonesome highway in the middle of the night.

  “It damn sure did. I forgot about that.”

  “So you followed your dad into the well-servicing business?” Dalton said. “I never knew.”

  “Man, I didn’t have much choice.” Jay gave a good-natured chuckle. “With Shari pregnant, me only eighteen years old and bills to be paid, I had to do something to make a living. I was lucky my dad took pity on me.”

  “Looks like it worked out okay for you.”

  “So far, so good. We got four pulling units and four crews now, and they’re all working. We had some lean years through the bust, but Dad was able to hang on ’til the price of oil started to climb back up a little. A lot of the competition didn’t make it. Me and Dad worked it together for a long time. Then he decided to quit a few years ago and I took over. It’s great having things picking up. People are drilling again, and that means more work for us.”

  “Guess a few dollars more on a barrel of oil is good for everybody, huh?”

  “You know how it is, buddy. The more cake, the more crumbs.”

  The receptionist came in delivering a steaming cup of black coffee and handed it to Dalton. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Have a seat, Dalton.” Jay moved to his chair behind his desk. Dalton sank to a steel armchair in front of the desk and sipped his coffee.

  “I think about you real often, Dalton. Every time somebody brings up that game with Denver City your senior year, I can still see you running the length of the whole damn field for the winning touchdown. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure,” Dalton said, recalling it only in dim snatches. Having trekked through many foreign countries where mere survival was the gut-wrenching daily goal and having lived in Los Angeles for many years, where the aim was frequently the same, if in a different way, Dalton no longer related to how wrapped up West Texans were in high school football.

  “My oldest boy’s a football player,” Jay said. “He’s working for me when he ain’t practicing or playing. He’s a damn fine ballplayer, Dalton. You oughtta see him. Got some colleges sniffing around, so I might not be able to keep him. Even the army’s after him. Anyway, me and Shari are real proud of him.”

  Dalton nodded, accepting that some things in this part of the world might never change. Years had passed since the last time he had spent an afternoon or an evening watching football, though during his years in Hatlow, the game and the team had been one of the few parts of life he enjoyed. He no longer considered himself a team player, and he didn’t do much for outside entertainment.

  “You oughtta come around and meet him. I tell him all the time about when you and me played together. I still got that picture somebody made of us in our uniforms that day down in Denver City.”

  “No shit?” Dalton grinned, but now he wanted to get to the point of why he came.

  As if Jay had read what was going on in Dalton’s head, he said, “What can I do for you, Dalton? Something tells me you didn’t come to see me just for old time’s sake.”

  Guilt poked Dalton. Even when he had visited Hatlow the few times in the past, he had made no attempt to look up high school friends. “I’ve got some questions about well drilling,” he said.

  “Ask away. What I can’t tell you, I guarantee my dad can.”

  Dalton braced his elbows on the chair arms and leaned forward, holding his coffee cup. “I meant to discuss this with my mother, but she took ill before I got the chance. When I was just a kid, someone drilled a well on our place. I remember all the activity, but I never knew who did the work. And I can’t remember the location.”

  Jay shook his head. “Man, I wouldn’t know about that. I would’ve been a kid, too. As for where it was, if it was a dry hole, the operator probably plugged it and abandoned the lease. If your mom can remember roughly where it was, you might find it with a metal detector. Something should still be in the ground.”

  “Where can I get reliable information? I’d like to talk to whoever did the drilling if he’s still around.”

  “I guess you’d start with the Railroad Commission. They’re the king-shit in the oil business in Texas. See what kind of records they’ve got. A lot of the time, they don’t have much, especially from that long ago.”

  Dalton already knew that much. Just this morning before going to the courthouse, he’d had a lengthy phone conversation with the Texas Railroad Commission and learned that the well had been drilled in 1977, the year of Lane’s birth. Dalton was eight years old. No wonder he recalled few of the details about the oil well.

  “Or you could ask my dad,” Jay was saying. “He knows damn near every oil well that’s been drilled in Wacker County like it’s a personal friend.”

  “How can I reach him?”

  Jay laughed. “You could step out the back door here and yell at him. He lives in that trailer house behind the workshop. Let me get him over here.”

  Jay got to his feet and walked o
ut of the office, his boot heels clunking against the gray tile floor. Dalton heard the scrunch of a metal door opening, heard Jay call out to his dad. In a few beats, Jay returned and took his seat behind the desk again. “He’ll be over here in a minute.”

  While they waited for Jim Huddleston, Dalton thought of how comfortable and at home he felt in Jay’s company. Other than his buddies in the Marine Corps, he hadn’t had close male friends. But in high school, Jay had been the best. It didn’t feel as if nearly twenty years lay between them. “So your son must be seventeen or eighteen now.”

  “Seventeen. He’s a good kid, but he’s got the whole household tore up right now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I guess he’s a horny little fart. I caught him in an embarrassing way with one of the cheerleaders. Shari nearly had a cow. Now we’ve got one of those hard-learning sessions going on. My wife’s scared he’ll do something stupid and screw up the rest of his life. You remember Shari, don’t you?”

  Dalton had no memory of the girls he himself had known and dated at eighteen, much less the girl Jay married. With most of his existence back then having been unpleasant, he had made a diligent effort to forget all of it. His philosophy of continuing to forge ahead had been formed at an early age. That was all that had enabled him to live through growing up amid the unfathomable relationship between his mother and her husband. What he did recall with clarity was that at that time he had recognized a turning point and made some adult decisions.

  “Cody won’t talk about it to his mother,” Jay was saying, “but he and I are hashing it out.”

  Dalton chuckled at Jay’s remarks, then sipped his coffee.

  “Me and Shari got four boys,” Jay went on. “They’re all pistols. They’re all athletes except the youngest. I think he’s gonna be a musician.”

  Dalton didn’t miss seeing Jay Huddleston’s pride in his children. He couldn’t imagine himself with kids, but it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant thought. He could damn sure do a better job at parenting than his own parents had done. From out of nowhere, he wondered how Lane felt about having a child.

  Soon Jim Huddleston came into the office. Dalton rose as Jay introduced them. “I remember you,” the slender older man said, extending his right hand.

  Dalton took his hand. “Yes, sir?”

  “You were the best quarterback Hatlow’s ever had. Where’d you disappear to, son?”

  Dalton smiled at another reference to high school football and released the man’s hand. “Here and there. I left here for the military.”

  “Dalton wants to know about a well that was drilled on his folks’ place, Dad,” Jay said.

  “Oh, yes. Lemme see.” Frowning, he looked down at the floor. “Seventy-seven or seventy-eight, I believe it was. As I recall, it was oversold.”

  “Oversold?” Dalton asked, unfamiliar with oil industry jargon.

  “That’s when an operator sells more shares to investors than a well’s production will support,” Jay put in. “If the well turns out to be a producer, the operator’s got his tit in a wringer. He wouldn’t dare complete it. If the investors found out what he done, they might have his hide. Or the SEC might come calling. So to save his neck, the operator just tells everybody it was a dry hole, plugs it and takes his profit from overselling.”

  “Is that better than getting the oil?” Dalton asked, knowing it was a naive question.

  Jay’s dad’s head shook. “Lord, no. A man could make more money off the well production, but at that point, it’s too late. Poor ol’ boy’s got hisself backed into a corner. That kind of stuff used to happen pretty often when there was a lot of drilling around here.”

  Dalton hid his amazement that investors could be so easily fleeced. The woman he had spoken to at the Texas Railroad Commission had mentioned none of this. “That isn’t legal, right?”

  Jay and his dad both laughed.

  “Hell, no, it ain’t legal,” the older man said. “But most of the time, nobody never knew nothing about it, least of all a landowner or the folks who put up the money for the well. You can’t see down in the ground, you see, so all they got to go on is the operator’s word. They didn’t used to have all the science they got now. Back in those days, most of those high-rollers willing to invest in a wildcat oil well knew it was a high-risk deal from the git-go. Hell, they were primed to swallow a dry-hole story.”

  Now that he thought about it, maybe Dalton wasn’t surprised. Though he knew little about the oil business, he knew enough about life to know that where there was as much money floating around anywhere as there was in the oil industry, creative crooks abounded. “So does anyone know what happened on my mom’s place? I mean, if it was a dry hole, that’s one thing, but if it wasn’t and there was fraud—”

  “I think the operator who drilled it is dead now,” Jim Huddleston said, “so I guess it don’t hurt to talk about him. He come from down at Odessa. As I recall, it was a pretty good well. What is it you’re wanting, Dalton?”

  “I want someone to drill on Mom’s place. Christ, with the price of oil now, there must be some new activity. I’m trying to get a feel for the possibility of finding oil.”

  “Oh, there’s new activity, to be sure. Reentering some old wells that were plugged, drilling some new ones. They’ve got all kinds of new techniques now for detecting and getting that crude out of the ground.”

  “I know a dependable man down in Denver City, Dalton,” Jay said. “I don’t know what he’s up to, far as digging new wells goes. I heard he stacked his rig last year, but—”

  “Stacked his rig?” Another term with which Dalton was unfamiliar.

  “Quit drilling. He might’ve retired. But I can put you in touch with him.” Jay glanced at his watch. “He might be in his shop today. I don’t know if you remember, but it’s just twenty-two miles down to Denver City.” He walked behind his desk, opened his center drawer and pulled out a business card. He handed it across the desk. “Skeeter Vance is the guy’s name. Good man. And honest. Tell him I told you to call him.”

  Dalton took the card and looked at the name. “I could get down there today. Hey, thanks.”

  “Glad to help you out. How long you gonna stay in Hatlow?”

  “Mom’s got pneumonia, so it looks like I’m gonna be around a little longer than I first thought.”

  “Damn, that’s too bad. I knew she was sick back in the spring. Hope she gets okay. I was going to say, if you’re looking for some social life, some of us are getting together over at the state line Wednesday night for Shari’s birthday. Remember the Rusty Spur?”

  “A little. I was never there much, but I—”

  “Come on over and have a beer with us. Shari’s gonna be thirty-six. I don’t know if we’re celebrating or mourning, but a bunch of us are gonna be there.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Dalton said, glancing at his watch. He said good-bye and started for Denver City and a conversation that could alter the future of the Lazy P.

  Chapter 15

  While he drove to Denver City, Dalton chewed on the information he had picked up from the Huddlestons about oil wells. His mother and Cherry had been screwed over by some slick oilman? And never known the difference? If Earl Cherry had been the only victim, Dalton might have found that humorous, but thinking about some asshole ripping off his mother was another story.

  He soon came to Denver City. The town had been larger than Hatlow in his youth, but now it appeared to be just one more crumbling West Texas oil and farming town that had lost 50 percent of its population and 95 percent of its life.

  He had no trouble locating Skeeter Vance’s shop. It was right on the highway. Vance was a jolly, square-built man a foot shorter than Dalton and maybe ten years older. A fringe of white hair poked out around the edges of a cap showing a SKEETER’S DRILLING logo. The man had freckles, blond eyelashes and no-color eyes, which made Dalton think he had been a redhead in his youth. He had a strong handshake and Dalton liked him at once.
He usually did like a man who wasn’t afraid to shake hands.

  “Jay Huddleston told me to come see you,” Dalton told him.

  “He called me a little bit ago. Said you want a well dug.”

  “I’m thinking about it. On my mom’s place up in Hatlow.”

  Vance lifted off his cap and scratched his head. “I’ve stacked my rigs, but if Jay sends somebody to me, I usually try to oblige. Let’s go on in my office and you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Dalton followed him into an office that looked to be a converted mobile home. The office was clean and well kept, nothing like Dalton had expected to see. That, too, spoke well of Vance.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Vance said. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” When Vance moved to his desk chair, Dalton seated himself in front of the desk. “Look, I need to get back up to Hatlow before night comes. I’ll get right to the point.” Dalton explained the old oil well and what Jim Huddleston had told him had probably happened to it.

  “How old’s the hole?” Vance asked.

  “Thirty years.”

  “Oo-whee,” Vance said, “I’m not fond of entering a well that old. Here’s what can happen. First off, even if you find it, if it was a crooked deal, you don’t know what they might’ve throwed down that hole when they abandoned it. If I got down there with my equipment and ran into junk, we could lose the hole. Worse yet, I could lose my equipment. That could cost you and me both a ton of money. Forty, fifty thousand dollars. For nothing.”

  “What if you drilled a new well alongside it?” Dalton asked. “Can you do that? If there was oil in one place, shouldn’t there be some nearby? I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on geologists and scientists.”

  “You’re paying for this hole?”

  “It’s my nickel,” Dalton answered. “If I decide to do it, that is.”

  “Sure, you can go alongside it. Just move over a hundred feet or so.”

  “And you might or might not hit oil.”

  Vance broke into a chuckle, his face showing a huge grin. “Well, son, that’s the nature of wildcattin’ for oil. It’s a high-stakes gamble if there ever was one.”