BADLANDS - Chapter 1

This is a novel I've been working on, based on a real crime case I covered as a journalist in the Bakken in North Dakota. I won't spoil too much of it, but this is a fiction story first and all the names have been changed. I wanted to make this my own thing and not be beholden to reality. Plus, I also wanted to respect those still alive from the real life events depicted. So here it is.

Chapter 1

Insomnia often gripped Keith Hallock in the earliest hours of the morning. He was prone to getting up and pouring a glass of milk and sitting out on his family's Texas porch and watching the stars, listening to the cicadas. On the morning of May 12^th, 2012, he felt a particular itch in his gut, a churning he usually associated with being sick, but he didn't feel sick. He clutched the glass of ice cold milk in his hands and, in a fit of the insane and inexplicable late night thoughts that sometimes occur, feared he would drop it, but he didn't. He sat on the porch and watched the moon, which was full that night. He felt a powerful urge come over him and he stood up and couldn't turn away from the moon, couldn't even if he'd wanted to. He stood there transfixed. He felt as if his whole life would begin very soon. There wouldn't be any more waiting or false starts, any more droning hours at the auto body shop with his hands covered in grease, any more aimless drunken nights spent wavering in the streets. He felt in that few moments he stared at the moon, coursing through him like a surging river, and then it was gone just as soon as it had come.

He was able to go back to bed after twenty minutes or so, and though he would lie awake for another ten minutes after that tossing and turning, he couldn't recall what had brought on that feeling so powerful. The next day he would walk around as if in a trance. At work he was distracted. His boss, Rex, told him to step it up, people were waiting. People were always impatient. He could see the relieved looks on their faces when their gas was changed or their brake lights fixed or their engines finally wrenched and contorted back into the right form, and that was what he liked about his job – the fact that he could make them happy with something that came so simply to him. He liked the looks on their faces of contained, mediated joy, the relief of not having to do anything else now.

He poured a cup of coffee, black and bitter and lukewarm, but it gave his brain the jolt he needed. It was cheaper than medication so far as his insomnia went. His co-workers jostled and made fun of him for his distraction; called him out on it and told him to either wake up or go home. He shouted at them back and they repeated the same routine they always did. It was comfortable, but growing stale. It was good that he had a routine, but the routine became everything and then it was time to change it, he thought.

But he'd wanted to go to school – he'd had higher aspirations, still had them, even. If not for his mother's illness he would have gone. He wanted to major in engineering, Build cars instead of just fix them. Maybe a few innovations, somewhere down the line – the idea of electric cars had always seemed so cool to him. He remembered playing with remote controlled RV cars as a child, letting the wheels spin and spit gravel and ride the wind, fantasizing that one day he'd be doing the same. He took a RV car apart once and tried to see if he could put it back together. He'd failed, and his father had laughed so hard that he bought him another one just to say he was sorry for the laughing.

In his late teens he'd been a motorcyclist, a stunt man doing flips out at the race track. He remembered being 15 and getting his first dirt bike and rubbing his hands on the shiny chrome exterior, which was red like a fire truck. He remembered feeling like he was flying, feeling closer to the sky than ever. He supposed, between the remote controlled cars of his childhood and the real life dangerous deathmachines of the road when he was a teenager, he loved wheels. He loved the smell of burning rubber when you went fast and the feel of wheels against the road. It was powerful and permanent and made him remember how beautiful it was to feel alive.

That had all ended when, at 20, he'd gone over a hill wrong, too close to the edge, and there'd been a bit of loose dirt and he flipped. When he'd landed, he didn't feel anything for the first few seconds. Then the pain had hit him like a flash fire. It had been white hot pain, the kind of pain he'd never felt before. They had to put metal plates in his leg. He walked with a limp now. It was after that he'd really thought about what else he wanted to do. His dreams of being a racer were done, but he had also loved building things and loved learning. He had always liked knowing new things just to know them. The way you put something together had fascinated him, so he took the job in the body shop.

He supposed it could be worse. That was what everyone always said when they weren't happy, and Keith thought about it and figured it was a bullshit, nothing-consolement. Even if things could be worse, that didn't make things better right now, did it? There were still things missing, things which Keith was searching for. He liked some things about his life – he liked the drinks after work with friends and long walks around the lake with girls he dated from town or who visited from other ones. He liked his father's barbecues and movie nights and the rodeo when it came into town like a hurricane and then left just as quick days later.

He'd tried to get into the University of Texas the year prior, had all his documents lined up and a fresh prospect. A road map, detailing what classes he needed for the engineering degree. He had dreams of a job in the city at some place big. Some lab maybe, where he could make and design brand new cars or bikes instead of fix ones that were old and broken down. But then his parents' house had a pipe leak and flooded and they were living in a motel for three days, and he had given them some of his money to help speed it along. His mother wasn't used to the change. There was no reason for her to stay in some dingy motel. So he gave them some of his savings and put a dent in what he needed to go to college.

That was nine months ago now, and he'd said – his parents echoing him – that he would save up again and go to college later. That was the mantra. It never came to pass. Like so many things in life it got set by the wayside. Maybe sometime soon, he would say, and it would sit there on the back shelf of his mind and stew and never become anything. He let it go and said he'd get back to it and like so many other people, he never did. He didn't feel especially plighted. He was like everyone else in that way. Who ever really chased their dreams all the way? Not everyone could do it.

But the small Texas town was becoming constricting. Keith would look at the reedy, dusty streets and the churchgoing ladies and the parks full of children of people he'd went to high school with and the bars full of mechanics and construction guys, and he'd think it all felt so damned small. He felt like his life was a series of half-starts and false-starts and nothing ever got done. He was happy with what he had, but he wanted more, anyway, because everyone always wanted more. In his darker moments, Keith Hallock felt like everything he had was a hand-me-down and the world was very close to passing him by, and somewhere in those moments, those infinite brief second-long spaces of time, the seed to want change grew in him.

TJ Harvey texted Keith at 4 p.m. as the day was tapering off and the customers had trickled down to a slow drip, just a few hangers-on waiting for their oil to be changed or their tires filled up with new air. Keith had nothing to do because the other mechanics were handling everything right now. He sat back against the cement wall of the garage and texted back that yes, he would meet TJ at the Buck's Inn in an hour. TJ got back to him immediately, with a smiley face and a cool, see you there.

TJ Harvey was his best friend and had been since middle school. TJ was a burlier kid, a rowdier one back then. He supposed TJ appealed to the side of him that needed someone who could say fuck it and just do and say what he wanted. TJ had been a football player in school as long as Keith could remember and had a football player's confidence. He had also biked for a few years, had started the same time as Keith did, but quit after Keith's accident out of respect, he said – his heart hadn't been in it anymore.

Since he was 19 and a high school dropout, TJ had driven a truck for his father's company, Harvey Trucking, hauling construction equipment from town to town in the southern United States. He would be gone a few days a week and come back with fresh hickeys and a new story of another girl, another dark bar room, another fuck between hotel room sheets.

TJ had been in and out of their smalltown home since they graduated high school in 2002. He had left for Nevada the first time back then for a longer-term construction job and that had been the longest he and Keith had gone without staying in touch. He returned three years after that and said he'd been in prison for a spell and now he had a blemish on his record for something involving a firearm. He wouldn't elaborate any more than that, and Keith didn't ask. It wasn't his business.

Keith walked to the Inn after work; an old fashioned British style pub with a dive bar and wooden tables and chairs and a permanent population of old headbangers with big guts and leather jackets now faded and worn, so regular it was as if they were glued there. A jukebox constantly spewed the classic radio hits from the Beatles and the Stones and Zeppelin and Hendrix, a low hum and a pleasant melodic drawl, serving as a backdrop for the increasingly drunken ramblings and musings as the night went on, and there was a dartboard on the wall and a pinball machine in the corner near the window that flashed and blinked and emitted cheery, cartoony sound effects.

TJ was sitting at the table back against the wall, clad in his usual tight white T-shirt and dark jeans, looking as he usually did like he'd just come off a bodybuilding session, everything about him seeming to swell and pulse when he moved, demanding attention from anyone around him. Everything about TJ had always been large and flashy and loud and attention-grabbing. He wouldn't settle for anything less, and Keith sometimes thought TJ feared he'd evaporate if he wasn't the center of any room he walked into, and so he was constantly brash and crude and quick with an insult or a joke. Anything to keep him in peoples' sight.

The two didn't greet each other with words, but with a fist bump as was their custom. Keith went to the bar and got a Miller High Life, foamy and fizzing. He sat across from TJ. TJ said he wanted to run something past Keith, an idea; one of TJ's famous ideas, Keith thought sardonically. He said sure, he'd listen to what TJ had to say. Behind them, a group of guys lumbered into the bar and sat themselves at the table closest to TJ and Keith, talking loudly about some woman at work who had done them wrong, had swindled them out of cash or something similar. The waiter behind the bar came over and served them a pitcher of bright yellow beer fizzing and foaming.

TJ leaned forward with that electric, crackling kind of lightning in his eyes and the grin on his face that always reminded Keith of a coyote; all teeth bared and he had an idea he was ready to pounce on like prey.

“Yeah, man, look,” he was saying, keeping his voice low and hushed as if someone else in the bar could eavesdrop and steal his idea. “My dad's business is kinda shit right now. But I heard about this thing up in North Dakota. It's booming up there. Shit's going crazy, man.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith had seen a few news articles about it from the business journals his father devoured every month. For the last several months, more oil had been found in North Dakota than there had been in decades. It gushed from the ground, virile shining black gold, and now everyone was flocking there to mine and extract it from the carcass of the earth. Halliburton and Nuverra and Nostra and MBI – they were the new gods of the land out there and the state, Keith had read, was completely changed. It was fascinating stuff, though he hadn't honestly dedicated more than a brief moment here and there to read about it.

“It'll be good, man,” TJ said. “You and me. I want you up there with me. We'll run a business up there.”

Keith took a longer swig of beer. He thought about it and moved the beer on his tongue as he swallowed. Outside it was beginning to get dark. Keith's wallet was thin and he wouldn't be paid for another two weeks. He thought about the money in North Dakota. He'd read some things about the boom up there, though never in detail. He knew the oil found up there was through the roof and everyone wanted a piece of it. He knew TJ wasn't exaggerating about the money – it was certainly more than Keith could make here as a mechanic, and TJ knew it; that was why he was leering at Keith now with that 'I got you' stare, that wily, cocksure grin. Keith thought of the university he'd been out to see a year and a half ago, which he'd had such grand plans of attending. He thought about the long halls and the beautiful women carrying books and the sense of purpose, drive and knowledge he'd felt just standing there in that university's lobby, A/C hitting him and him feeling like he'd entered an oasis after a long stretch of desert.

He told TJ maybe. He said he'd think about it.

TJ grinned. “Good man. I'm still in the planning stages on this. But I trust you.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better,” Keith said. “The fact that you trust me. I feel like my life has meaning now, man. Thank you.”

TJ let out a harsh bark of a laugh. “Go fuck yourself, Stumpy. You ain't shit.”

“Oh, that's a low blow,” Keith said, taking a long swig of beer and laughing. TJ could be an asshole, but he was funny. He made jokes that were bawdy and offensive, directed like barbs at everyone around him, and you just rolled with it, because that was the kind of atmosphere he created. He was like the sun, and everything orbited around him. He existed in his own universe that he himself had created, mostly because no other universe would have him the way he was.

TJ said, “Man, I'll tell you. It's good to just shoot the shit after work. Been such a damned long week.”

“You know it.” Keith drank his beer.

“It just kills me that I'm still working for my dad,” TJ said. “I mean, I love the man. He's my flesh and blood! But I want to strike out on my own, man. That's why I'm doing this.”

Keith nodded. “I know, man. Yeah. You think you'd be good at it?”

TJ shrugged. “I don't think I'd be bad. I think I could learn. I always had a natural, like, knack for running things. I did take a few business classes at the community college.”

Keith laughed and said, “Dude, I hope you go for it. And thanks, man, for thinking of me on this.”

TJ raised his drink and gave another cocky grin – his only real gesture of thanks, Keith knew. They both took a drink and the night began to swim away from them. They would go back to TJ's place, where he had a bag of good weed he bought from a dealer in Nashville the week prior, and they smoked it while watching reruns of Chuck Norris movies on TV and laughing until one of TJ's neighbors told them to shut up, banging on the wall and screaming at them that he had to work in the morning. TJ turned the TV up louder.

The main reason Keith was apprehensive about leaving for North Dakota was because he knew TJ's tendency for making big, grand plans that didn't always align with what Keith thought was the right way to do things. Much of the time his ideas could be termed as illegal, or at the very least, amoral. In their younger years he had always come up with schemes – to get girls or to get money or to get something. It was always about the getting for TJ. TJ would drive Keith to the mall and they'd sit in the food court and lie to girls, tell them they were older and they could buy them beer. It almost never worked. Girls laughed at them with their tiny, barely visible mustaches and their wild tall tales.

TJ also tended to snatch things off the shelves at convenience stores and Walmarts when they'd walk around – just little things like notebooks and lightbulbs and whatever else he needed or wanted at the time. TJ told Keith this was because Walmarts and convenience stores were tools of the oppressive force that lorded over them. He said he was fighting back against the notion that they had to respect big corporations who only wanted to suck dry the marrow of the soul. Keith never knew what he was talking about. It sounded to Keith like TJ was just ranting.

So he thought about all of the things he didn't like about TJ that evening as he went home, and he wondered if this was the kind of man he wanted to go into business with.

His parents' home was the same home he'd always known; a one-story, two-bedroom deal with a living room with plush, antique couches surrounding a glass coffee table and a TV that was old enough to show static and a kind of yellowy tint, but Keith's parents wouldn't replace it. Why spend boatloads of money on something when the one they had worked perfectly fine, they asked. Keith had given up trying to entice them on the wonders of modern technology.

He ate dinner with them once or twice a week and they talked about the world. His father had always loved rousing political talk, maybe too much. He was a quiet man at heart, but some things got him going and you could see the fire light up his face and then spread to his whole body like a lantern glow. He talked about the country like it was going to hell and all that could save it was strong conservative leadership – as if it were some raft in a storm. He didn't like the Republican candidate this year, Mitt Romney, much, though. Romney, according to Teddy Hallock, was too pampered and too weak by half. He'd never be able to unify anyone.

His mother just agreed with his father. Keith usually had something to say, but tonight he was distracted, and they noticed halfway through dinner. He had a mouthful of his mother's scalloped potatoes he was chewing and he swallowed them, then told his parents about North Dakota. He told them he was seriously considering it. He told them TJ Harvey really seemed to have a good thing going. He tried to convince himself that it wasn't a crazy idea. His parents didn't do much to encourage him. They told him they'd never liked TJ and it sounded like trouble. His father said TJ Harvey was a kind of lawless, rugged guy. He wouldn't do business with TJ if he knew him today, his father said.

His mother said she remembered TJ as a kid. She said she remembered him playing in their backyard, and she pointed there. Keith looked and remembered himself and TJ in the backyard playing soccer or baseball and talking about what they believed the world to be like. He didn't remember what either of them had said. As children the whole world seemed to be wide open and boundless with possibility, so rich with wonder and the unknown, with fiction and fact blending like Puree style. They talked about their favorite movies and comic books like they were gospel. They had no grasp on what was real and sometimes that was very nostalgic to Keith, in that innocuous, what-were-we-thinking way. He missed the freedom from inhibitions.

He said goodbye to his parents outside in the dark with crickets chirping and buzzing around them, the lights of the other houses and cars in the distance providing some illumination so he could see their faces. They had stood here countless times before and now as they were older it seemed like all those times were converging, layering on top of one another, all the years in their homogeny. Things had to change, Keith thought standing there and then again in the car driving away, because otherwise, how would he continue to appreciate the things he had? He felt like he had to make a change. He could feel North Dakota calling to him now, a place he had no mental image of but could picture perfectly in an abstract way.

He knew he had to go there. Now he just had to figure out how to say it to everyone he'd known all his life.

The drive over to the Cozy Coffee Shack in the morning before work was long and dry. The town stretched before them in long rows of hack medical and law offices and fast food chains and Starbucks where there were once food chains and coffee shops indigenous. This was a town that had been eaten alive, he thought. The corporatization of America, nothing but rows and rows of the same interchangeable places everyone could go in every town.

The Cozy Coffee Shack was a roomy little place and every inch taken up by something. They made use of their space. It was the only indie coffee house on this side of town. Everything was brown and soft and warm looking – the couches and the oak chairs and the coffee mugs steaming with that nectar everyone couldn't live without. Regulars sat lounging on the couches with touch-screen iPads and tablets, and people in collars and slacks with laptop bags slung over their shoulders got to-go cups and muffins and scones in paper bags. The Cozy Coffee Shack was green to the core. They didn't waste plastic. It was the new way of things.

At the counter was Stacy Lemmons, skinny and brunette, with librarian-style horn-rimmed glasses, wearing as she always did sweaters too big for her and jeans and slip-on shoes. She looked constantly like she'd just gotten out of bed; hair tousled as if brushed in a hurry, sweater hanging a bit lopsided. She wore a forest-green apron and a little hat to signify she worked there. She had been his friend for most of his whole life, since before either of them had hit puberty and things changed up and got so weird for them both in ways they never spoke of; those unspoken, wordless truths that went back through generations of men and women.

“I'm real sorry,” she said, and she looked at him with the kind of big, lean-on-me look he'd never known what the hell to do with.

“Sorry about what?”

“You know,” she said, “just that you're not doing so well. I wish I could do or say something. That's what friends are for, right?”

“Oh yeah. I really appreciate that.” It sounded so fucking fake to him, really. He hated that he couldn't sound more grateful. Stacy had a motherlike aura around her that Keith had always found welcoming. It was an intrinsic, natural thing, an attitude about her more than anything she did – she was just the kind of person who, through how well she listened and the kind words she said, made you feel welcome. So Stacy, as it went, was well liked.

“It's not your fault,” Keith said.

“I didn't say it was. I just said I was sorry. Kind of a sympathetic thing, no?” She punched him softly in the arm. “Gotta learn to take some help once in a while, buddy.”

He smiled wryly at her. “I get you. Okay, so thanks. You always help me out.”

“Got that right,” she said.

She was saying how their little group, they who hung out at the race track, hadn't been the same since he left.

“We all miss you,” she was saying. “You ought to come out again sometime.”

Keith nodded. “Yeah, yeah. I should. I miss all the guys.”

He didn't, really, not all the time – he didn't want to watch Seth continue to improve his bike racing craft. Seth, who hadn't hit that snag. Seth, who didn't have a metal plate in his leg now. He wasn't sure Seth wanted him there either – some reminder of the life that he'd once had, of what could happen at any time – the cruel hand of fate.

“How is everybody?” he asked.

There was a small smile dancing in her eyes. She'd always been so communal, so about friendship. She loved bringing people together. She said, “They're good, yeah. Evan's getting married in September. Darby and Alice are both doing real good. Alice won a competition the other week, got a bit of money out of it.”

Keith nodded, surprised how much it made him smile to hear about his old crew, the race track guys and gals, they who toiled under the Texas sun on screaming bikes and tried to touch the sky. He didn't tell her about North Dakota yet, not feeling he had found the words to. He felt all nervous and shaky like the awkward adolescent he'd once been when he thought about telling her. He remembered being 13 and trying to ask her to the homecoming dance, and it hadn't felt right at all, and she giggled when she told him no and then had to say sorry. This felt like that in a way, but worse; more severe.

Keith went out to the race track on a Saturday at 10 a.m., and the air was clear and crisp and the sun was bright but not intrusive. Some of his old friends sat on the bleachers, drinking water and Coke, and Evan Richards and Seth Paulsen were out on their bikes speeding down the tracks, trails of dirt kicked up behind them, the sound of the motors like a symphony. He knew Evan and Seth by the patches on their jackets, and the two men couldn't have been more different. Evan wore an American flag, a patriot to the end, and a bunch of patches for bands like Korn and Nirvana and Kid Rock. He was a conservative and had disdain for where the world was heading, had an anger welling inside him for the changing times. He'd been in jail a few times for fighting and DUIs, and Keith remembered hearing that he'd once had ties to a local skinhead group, though he hadn't seen evidence of that in the time he'd known Evan. Evan raced because he needed an outlet.

Seth had a bunch of dragons on his jacket, drawn by an illustrator friend of his. Seth had never been loyal to anyone or anything. He was a fierce competitor, and loved winning, whether at drinking games or racing. He got his high from competition, from challenge. He had never been one to idle, and while he was nice in person and pleasant to be around when the games were over, he had always been a cold son of a bitch in the games. He played like he had something to lose, and it irritated people. A lot of people around town would tell you Seth was a son of a bitch and they didn't like him. But Keith wasn't one to discriminate without reason, and Seth had been good to him.

Watching the two men race, standing out there behind the bleacher, Keith thought maybe you had to be a bit crazy to race on bikes, to risk whatever happened. Keith wondered why he'd done it. He stood there and didn't quite remember, but he did know he missed it.

Then Alice Phelan saw him and beckoned him over. Alice, a stocky girl with curly black hair and bright electric blue eyes, was a racer herself. She sat with Pete Stockton, Leigh Ann Townshend, Darby Rollins and Stacy, the four of them playing a card game and sweating. Keith sat on the edge of the bleachers and they all greeted him as if he hadn't been gone near eight months.

“You ain't racing today?” Keith asked, cocking an eyebrow at Alice.

“Bad hangover,” she said. “I'd rather not right now. Had a hard enough time driving the fuck down here, man.”

Keith nodded. “I know the struggle.”

Leigh Ann Townshend, whose father ran the Ford auto dealership, said, “Haven't seen you out much, man.”

“Yeah, yeah, I been busy,” Keith said.

“Too busy for us? Bullshit,” Pete Stockton said. Pete was tall and gangly with a spatter of freckles and hair the color of straw. He was a hard drinker and his mouth got ahead of his brain. There were a lot of guys like him in town – scrappy, energetic guys bouncing off the walls, they were so bored; but with no money or means to leave like would be good for them. So they stayed and they got drunk and they fought and ran their mouths. It was the way of things.

Alice Phelan invited him to play cards and so he did. They sat and played cards and sweated. Leigh Ann asked Keith if he missed biking. He looked out at the race track and felt the dust on his skin and remembered what it felt like to run up a big ramp and feel the wind and feel weightless, leaving the world, an exhilarating blast.

He said, “Yeah, yeah. It was a good run, you know.”

“We were all just crushed when the accident happened,” Darby said, Darby being the kind of person often given to displays of overt sympathy. She posted Facebook updates whenever a tragedy happened, full of sad-faced emojis and hash-tagged RIPs. She had always been pretty, though. Keith dated her for a few weeks in high school and now, as it went in little towns, they just saw each other all the time.

The day drawled on. Seth and Evan would get off their bikes and josh Keith about whether he wanted to come out and join them, and he would laugh, genuinely, and tell them to fuck right off. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy seeing his old friends – he did – but when he left he didn't feel anything but a notion of closure. He felt as if everything he could have done with them, and that it was time to move on. This made him a little sad, he admitted, because they were good people, and it had been a good run while it lasted.

The bong was tall and teal-colored, see-through, with pictures of fish on it. TJ said he'd gotten it from the flea market out by the highway, the shady one where you could buy guns illegally and find all kinds of stuff that had probably been stolen. The weed had come from a dealer friend of TJ's he only identified as Skunk. TJ knew a lot of these guys, and Keith never knew where he met them. It seemed like they just grew out of the ground, sprouting like shrubs from the bare earth. They took hits from the bong and the smoke filled the room. They were way out in the country in TJ's grandpa's trailer. TJ's grandpa had passed earlier that year and he inherited the trailer. An old Steven Seagal movie played on TV.

Keith told TJ about the old gang out at the race track. He told him they'd been the same as always, but that it hadn't felt like home, that Keith had mostly just felt out of place now.

“Fuck them,” TJ was saying. “Those guys were always dicks. You know?”

“They're cool, man,” Keith said.

“All they ever did was judge me. They were never cool. Bunch of fake posers, you ask me.”

Keith shook his head. “Hey, whatever, man.”

They sat and watched the movie, the sounds of explosions and car chases filling the little tin shack trailer as sure as the smoke from the bong.

TJ took a big hit off the bong. He said, “You know, come election season, this right here could be legal as fuck. We wouldn't have to come hang way the fuck out here to smoke.”

Keith laughed. “Maybe, yeah. But what are the chances of that? All the old farts 'round these parts – you think they'd go for it?”

TJ said, “That's why we gotta mobilize, dude. We get everybody we know, they won't have a chance. We'll win and we'll be buyin' weed and whatever the fuck, right over at Walmart. They can get their dentures and diarrhea meds same time we buy our Mary Jane.”

Keith had to laugh at that, too. He'd bristled at what TJ had said about the race track gang, but TJ was too funny to just ignore. He always got Keith laughing, in spite of anything else going on. The two had sat in the back of classes at 12, laughing the same way they were now. Teachers had scolded them, their parents had thought them rambunctious, spiraling out of control. None of that had mattered then and it didn't matter now.

TJ was leaning forward. “For real, though. It's all about control. Mobilizing. We tell em what we want, and we take it. We just throw up our hands, though, and we got dick. Nothing. Nothing happens if we just go, oh well, shrug your shoulders, let it go.”

Keith took a hit off the bong, felt the smoke in his head, but he didn't feel high. Now he felt down to earth and everything felt hard and immediate. “What are we talking about here, man?”

TJ's eyes lit up like Christmas lights. “The oilfields. North Dakota.”

“I see.”

“My dad, he can get us the capital. He'll lend me his trucks, he's got more than a few. He's getting old, but we can carry the torch for him. He'll support me.”

“Man, I dunno.” Keith looked out the window and saw how alone they were, and how little he could do to divert this conversation. He'd thought about North Dakota though. It was alluring, he admitted – especially the thought of all that money. He'd be rolling in it, if he went out there.

“Just think about it, man, alright?” TJ asked, clapping a hand on Keith's shoulder, which actually sort of hurt – TJ never exactly knowing his own strength. Keith said he would. They turned their attention to the movie, but Keith couldn't stop thinking about North Dakota – about rolling plains, oil wells, long sunsets and lots of money. He had always been one to fixate on things, his mother had once told him – always one to take an idea and just run with it until he couldn't no more.

He got the text from Stacy when he was eating lunch the next day at work. He was sitting at the greasy old plastic table in the break room, a bite full of turkey sandwich in his mouth, when the message popped up: Hey Keith, listen, I'm really sorry to bother you...

She told him in that text that her ex-boyfriend, a 'roid freak named Todd who she'd broken up with months ago, had been showing up at her apartment and just waiting outside. Like some kind of silent sentinel or guard, except he was becoming a threat. She sensed it every time she had to walk past him, she told Keith – she sensed it like some awful stench radiating off him. A woman could tell, she told him – women had built-in douchebag sensors, were her actual words. She'd said the same thing about TJ Harvey multiple times.

So, she was wondering – could he come by and try to scare Todd off?

Keith texted Stacy that he'd come by at 4:30 when he got off work.

Stacy lived in the nice apartments downtown. She worked as a junior therapist at one of the clinics, and so she could afford a place with a window looking out over Lake Margaret. He saw Todd as soon as he arrived – sitting in his black monster truck, sleeveless shirt, bulging biceps, his head shaved like a skinhead, eyes set dead ahead, still as a monolith.

Keith walked right past him and made sure Todd saw him.

He walked up the stairs and knocked on Stacy's door. She opened the door a crack, saw it was him and let him in. Once the door was closed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself into him, a real full-bodied hug, and he could hear her sighing with relief. She pulled back and he missed the feel of her against him for just a split second. “Thank God you're here,” she said.

He said, “Yeah, of course. What's going on?”

She sighed again and said, “Okay, so I broke up with him like, four months ago now. I didn't see him around for a while, so I figured it's okay, you know? But he won't quit texting me. He just keeps texting me these nasty things, and the last day or so it's been threats, like he's going to make me pay. I don't want to have to go fill out some form with the cops, some sort of restraining order? Because those things never work. It'll just make him madder. I'm hoping we can just resolve the whole thing without the law being involved."

Keith cast his eyes out and saw the guy sitting there, not even looking at the apartment, just sitting there staunch and unmoving. “I see,” he said.

“I'd really, really like it if you could try and make him go away,” she said. “I'll cook you dinner later or something. Please.”

Keith said, “It's cool. I'll see what I can do.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She seemed to relax a little, though her eyes were still so wide and saucer-like and full of worry and empathy. Keith thought it must be exhausting to care as much as Stacy always seemed to. He thought about the guy outside and thought you'd have to be a psychopath to act this way to someone like Stacy, or, hell, really any woman. They didn't deserve that kind of treatment, Keith thought.

He said, “I'll be back in a few minutes.” He crossed the apartment to the door and opened it and went downstairs. He felt an odd sense of equilibrium, a purpose which he didn't always feel. He supposed he liked helping people. Or maybe it was just that, in that moment, going down those stairs with the wind in his hair and seeing what he was going to do, he felt he could die and it would be so simple. He didn't want to die, true – but he also didn't want to die with uncertainty. He felt like too many people could never see exactly what their path was. Keith could now.

He approached the truck. The guy in it, Todd, turned and looked at Keith with annoyed eyes, goading Keith to say something. Keith hated him already. He'd known guys like this before – gym rats who lived there and thought they were wise to the streets, thought they could push other people around and that the world was theirs for the taking, like muscles granted authority. Keith always wanted to tell these guys that it wasn't the Cro-Magnon age anymore, and that society lived by different rules now.

Keith said, “Hey, man, Stacy wants you to back off.”

“How do you know that?” He asked, his face suddenly twisted into something inquisitive and pleading, and Keith had to admit he was good.

“She told me, man,” Keith said. “You're scaring her. You need to back off right now.”

Todd opened the truck door and stepped out, towering over Keith, who was no slouch in height himself. Todd looked like a mountain of a man. Broad shoulders, a tree-trunk neck, biceps the size of footballs.

“Or else what?” Todd asked. “Think you need to stay outta this, man. Ain't your business.”

“Oh, it is now,” Keith said. “She's a friend of mine. I'd appreciate it if you'd let this go. Just get back in the truck and drive away, and we won't have to get the cops involved.”

Todd arched his eyebrow as if to say you serious? He looked up at the apartment. The curtains were drawn and if Keith didn't know better he'd say it was dormant.

Keith said, “Come on, man.”

Todd turned and scowled. He said, “Fuck you,” and jabbed a thick finger at Keith. “Fuck this. Bitch doesn't want me out here? Fine. Fucking whore.” Then he got back in his truck and started the ignition – a monstrous, revving sound – and then he was speeding off, a trail of black smoke where he'd been. Keith coughed in the dust and the exhaust and looked up at the window, where Stacy was peeking out from behind the curtain, just a crack in the otherwise closed window. He gave her a thumbs up.

The day bled into the evening and the skies turned a slate-gray. Keith stayed at Stacy's house and as promised, she cooked dinner for him. She stood in the kitchen and cooked Shepard's Pie and black bean rice. They were both drinking beers. Stacy wore an apron with a floral pattern on it and tropical, bright colors. He felt at ease. She had thanked him a dozen times and he kept telling her it was no big deal.

“Really, though,” she said. “I can't even tell you how much I appreciate it. You just hear such awful stories on the news, of these women who have these fucking psycho-stalker ex-boyfriends...it's just so scary to me.”

“You should call the cops if he comes back,” Keith said. “I don't know what I could do against that dude in a fight.” He drank his beer. It was fizzy on his tongue and went down cool.

She turned and looked at him. “Oh, come on. You could take him.”

“Oh yeah. I'm a regular MMA champ. Especially with the screws in my leg that I can barely even run on. I think I got knocked down a few weight classes just 'cause of the leg thing. I'd be fighting little kids or women.”

“You could kick him with it,” she said, a mischievous, childlike grin coming over her. He let out a big laugh. Suddenly she was seven years old again and they were just friends who lived across the street from each other in a sunny suburb. He remembered pushing her down the street in a wagon and his father shouting at them to stop, they might get hurt, there could be a car coming. He remembered sitting across from her in the back of her mom's station wagon, both of them eating ice cream from Baskin Robbins.

He didn't know where the nostalgia had come from. He just suddenly felt like he could be leaving everything behind very soon.

He said, “Hey, you mind I ask you something?”

“Sure, what's up?”

“TJ floated an idea past me the other day,” he said. “He's thinking about going up to the oilfields in North Dakota. He wants to start a trucking business up there, like his dad's got here, and he wanted me to go with him.”

She had stopped stirring and looked at him now completely serious. She said, “TJ asked you?”

Her dislike of TJ had been well documented. She had been in his life first, when they were so damned young, and TJ had entered his life in middle school and changed everything, become the brotherly figure he'd never had. She had told him over the years that he had changed when he met TJ. There was an element to it, he thought, of jealousy. She had said TJ was not a good guy, she could just feel it, but she stayed a friend, however warily. Through all his arrests for DUIs or marijuana, Keith had felt her disapproving gaze.

“I dunno about that,” she was saying. “I mean, do you really want to go?”

“I mean, the money sounds good,” he said, shrugging. “I don't really know about going all the way up there. I mean, I wanted to get out, sure – but North Dakota?”

“I just don't trust TJ,” she said. “I know, I know – I've said it before. But he's just...he's not a trustworthy guy, man.”

Keith said, “He's good to me. But I appreciate the concern.”

She made an exaggerated sigh. “You're too nice,” she said.

She served the Shepard's Pie and the rice, steaming hot and aromatic, and they sat together. She smiled at him from across the table. “If you do end up going, I'll understand. Just don't forget about us little people back here, 'kay?”

“Heaven forbid the thought,” he said, and they raised their beer bottles and toasted.

TJ was gone for three days in North Dakota, he would tell Keith that night by text. He said he couldn't give much details yet, but that he was working out a place of business and talking with potential partners. Keith was at home by that point, surfing Youtube, and his phone would light up every ten or fifteen minutes as TJ relayed the news. The last thing TJ said was that he had met a woman there. He'd talked her up in a bar and they slept together. Her name, he told Keith, was Jackie. She was a hot strawberry-blonde. She knew the oil trade because her father was in the market, and she wanted to help TJ out, too.

“It's the best of both worlds,” he texted Keith. “She's a business partner who gives good head.”

Keith felt like he was witnessing a real-time HBO drama. He told TJ that was great, he couldn't wait to meet her.

TJ told him he'd be back on Friday, two days from now, and he'd bring her with him.

Like clockwork, TJ did return that Friday. His coming was heralded by a storm. The skies were blacker than they had been all month and clouds hung swollen and fat like a pregnant woman's belly, and around 3 p.m. they exploded, the rain coming furious and fast and heavy. TJ asked Keith to meet him and his girl Jackie at the Inn, and Keith looked out the window and thought if we don't all drown in this flood.

But there was no flood. After the last customer had taken her beat up PT Cruiser out of the auto shop, and after Reg at the cashier closed things out, they all scattered. Keith washed his face in the bathroom and made sure his hands were free of that oil-smell. Then he went to the Inn, where the bar was empty save for TJ and the buxom blonde, clad in a sleeveless white shirt and jean-shorts so short they might as well have been panties. The two of them sat at the very back of the bar. There was something different about TJ, Keith thought, but then figured it was just the dim lighting, flickering as the storm raged.

Jackie shook his hand. Despite her garish attire, she had a demure manner and spoke in a soft voice, choosing her words in a way that suggested to Keith she was educated well. She had a margarita and he and TJ drank Coronas.

TJ said, “So, look. Jackie here? Her dad's a big farmer out there. They found oil on his land, and now the whole place's just fucking crawling with oil guys and everything. She said that's the area to start in.”

Jackie nodded. Looking at her, Keith found something unsettling about her – just something sly, he thought, in the curve of her smile, the reserved way she carried herself that seemed sort of fake. He told himself he was imagining that. He said it was great that TJ was making some gains.

Then TJ asked what Keith had thought of absentmindedly in the days prior as “the million dollar question”; he looked at Keith and asked if Keith was in, if he was going to come along and stake out with them in North Dakota. Keith had mulled over it as if it were something not happening to him, analyzing the pros and the cons like some sort of literature report in grade school. On the plus side, he'd get the money he wanted, maybe all he'd ever need, like going to the army if he could actually do that with a gimp leg. On the minus side, though – did he want to leave all of his familiar things behind? The auto body shop with its low hum of motors and engines and mechanical, steel clanking? The Inn with its classic rock and cheap, fizzy beer? His parents and their barbecues and their rousing political talks?

Stacy Lemmons, and her warm kitchen, her tasty dinners, her wry, goading grin and her funny little quips?

He had thought about these things for days. He recalled all the things his father said to him growing up, back when he was young and his father's hair hadn't yet greyed, about chasing one's dreams and losing all the games you never play and every other cliché, and Keith thought this was what those cliches were made for. He was at a crossroads. And, really, he had made up his mind a long time ago. Everything else had just been mind games. The stuff of a distracted brain playing around with ideas that were decided long ago.

And he couldn't stop the words coming: “Yeah. Yeah, I'm in. Fuck yeah.”

“My man,” TJ said, letting out a bark of a laugh and reaching across the table, clapping Keith on the shoulder with his big, rock-hard hand. They proceeded to start drinking more. Jackie, for her slender build, could put away a lot. She kept up with the two of them like a pro, Keith thought. They sat at the table and downed shots of whiskey and beers and talked about the promise of the Bakken. She told them it was like nothing they'd ever seen up there, guys with more money than they could count, the whole place thriving like a living, beating organism, the disgusting depraved wealth of a lifetime.

Keith paused her at that point. He said, “That can't possibly last forever, can it?”

She giggled – a high, girlish sound, and TJ pulled her closer to him. Outside the storm was raging and clattering against the building. She said, “Well, let's hope it lasts a long time, right?”

Keith had to laugh, surprised at the answer. “Uh, I guess so,” he said.

TJ bought him a beer. He said, “C'mon, man, now's not the time for that. Now is the time for celebration!”

Keith agreed. They were in a bar, after all, and now truly was not the time to debate business. He drank down another beer in just a few minutes, and he felt his head swim. TJ called over one of the girls at the bar, and she sat with them and talked about nothings and laughed with them. Keith would pull her to him and feel her curves, and then she was sitting on his lap. He kept putting down money and she would get her friends to pour them drinks. The laughter would become a chorus. The noise replaced the silence.

He woke up with his mouth drier than the desert and his head shaking like a small tremor. He was on the floor of what he discerned to be TJ's apartment. He was in a sleeping bag and he was shirtless. Looking through his phone, he saw he'd taken pictures with the girl from the bar – his hand on her tit, her laughing and smiling, then him with his arm around her waist, her kissing his cheek. He didn't remember a damned thing.

He got up and put on his shirt and shoes and walked out. The Texas morning was blue-grey and the air was cool. He walked to the bus stop and sat there and waited for one, which came within the half hour. He ate breakfast at the Sunrise Cafe, got scrambled eggs and two slices of bacon and coffee. His head cleared and he remembered he should be at work in thirty minutes. He didn't really feel like going, his head fuzzy, his body sluggish.

So, he thought.

He guessed he was done, then. He'd known it in his heart for some time. He could feel the Bakken calling, that great vast cutthroat land of money and oil and blood and sweat. He knew it didn't matter what he did or thought, because deep down, in that primal sense, it was already done, had been done since TJ first told him about it, was ingrained deep in his blood like a cancer. There was nothing else to be said.

He would try to convey this to his parents. His mother just smiled, told him she got it, and continued helping load his bags into his pickup truck. His father would look stern and old and would pull him aside. Keith, he'd say, I'll tell ya', just be careful out there. It's a rough and tumble world and I hope you're ready for it, though I'm not too worried 'cause I know you're smart. But as 'yer father, I feel like I gotta say it anyway, just don't take anyone's shit and do good for what we taught ya your whole life.

Keith said, okay, Dad, I will. I love you guys.

Keith's father, who was rarely prone to displays of emotion, wrapped Keith in a rough, quick hug, patting his back too hard to compensate for hugging him at all, as he'd been raised never to hug another man, not even his own son. He said, “Love you, son.”

His mother would come over and hug him, too, and when Keith drove away with them in his rearview mirror, he thought about how he'd finally spend time at home after a long school semester. It would always seem so fucking refreshing to be able to kick back and not worry about school. He hadn't gone to college, but now, with this – he imagined it would be so good to come back soon, revisit all his old haunts through new eyes, sleep in the town he'd been born in.