The Possibility of Lions by Marta Maretich

Author:Marta Maretich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936846160
Publisher: Gemma Open Door

EIGHT

Bill McCall now had a job managing an oil lease on the west side of the valley. It was a small outfit that ran out of a single trailer. One day when she had things to do in the Safariland office, Irene suggested that he take Mercy and Stephen out to see where he worked.

It was a long drive in the cab of Bill’s white pickup, the two children buckled into a single seatbelt on the hard seat because Irene insisted. They set off early in the morning. Bill had on his yellow hardhat and his black Red Wing shoes and the children wore shorts and identical blue flip-flops, one size apart. By the time they reached the city limits, the sun coming through the windshield was burning their bare thighs. The truck had no air conditioning or radio because it was a company truck. Bill drove with one hand on the wheel, one arm hanging out the open window. He worked a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, thinking his own thoughts.

The trailer was parked in the middle of the oil fields, in a yard fenced with chain-link. It had a couple of big gray desks in it, some green filing cabinets and a pair of shiny black telephones. No one else worked there but Bill. The only window looked out on a view of a pumpjack rocking up and down against a background of white sky. Beyond, there were more of them scattered across the dry, sandy hills. From a distance they looked like horses bucking in slow motion. Close up, they looked like what they were: pumps. You could hear the hum and click of the mechanism, the buzz of the cables moving over the winch.

“Are they drilling for oil?” Stephen asked.

“Dirty water,” Bill said. “The wells you can see are all tapped out.”

Bill didn’t seem to know what to do with Mercy and Stephen once they were there. He made a call while the children sat on the empty desk, kicking their heels against the aluminum sides until they produced a sound like thunder. For a while, Bill took no notice: he was half deaf, Irene said, from being shelled on Guadalcanal. Finally he heard the noise they were making and shouted at them to keep quiet. When he got off the phone he said they had to drive to another part of the lease, where his workers were drilling.

A swamp cooler kept the inside of the trailer tolerable, but the minute they stepped outside, the heat pressed in around their bodies. It pounded down from the sky, bounced off the aluminum sides of the trailer and radiated back up from the packed earth of the yard. They could feel it through the thin rubber soles of their flip-flips and on the backs of their calves. Mercy put her hand on the top of her head. Her hair felt like a smooth, hot skillet. She turned around and went back to the steps of the trailer.

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