“Nobody, Tammy,” Lyle answered, and for the first time in my life I heard something in his voice that was not warmth. “There is no one out there. That valve is on a timer. It opens every Saturday at noon. It has done so for years.” I looked at the tank battery, at the second valve turning slowly under the white sky, and at the half rusted pipe that ran from it across the prairie toward a low grove of mesquite. A timer did not make a pipe sweat. Rudy had been right about everything. “Lyle,” I said, “when did you start leaving the valves on a timer?” He did not answer, and the line went quiet, and then it went dead.
Brody had already gone to the truck. I watched him trot across the caliche with his father page of readings in his fist, and I realized he meant to drive us out of there, and I also realized he would not make it to the gate. A long cloud of dust was rising on the county road, north of us, a pickup coming fast. Lyle had told me three hours away, and he had lied, and he had been parked in sight of the lease since sunrise. “Brody,” I called, “get down.” He dropped behind the tank pad just as the truck swung in at the gate and slid to a stop across our only road.
Lyle got out. He stood beside his door in his good boots and his ironed shirt and looked at me across a hundred yards of flat dirt, a lean, tanned man of fifty eight with the face of a church deacon. He did not carry a gun. He carried a clipboard, as he always did, a habit of thirty years, and he held it against his chest. “Tammy,” he called, “I want you and the boy to go home. You should not be on this lease. It is not safe. The valves have been leaking, and there is gas in the air.” He took a step toward us. “Come away from the tanks.”
A wristwatch battery can keep better time for a dead man than the company that buried him.
I took out my phone. I held it up, so he could see it, and I said, in a clear voice, “Lyle, I have been recording since you called me.” He stopped. The color left his face a little at a time, like tea draining from a cup. “And I have a friend at the Railroad Commission who is on her way,” I added, which was not true, but Brody, beside me, nodded as if it were. “Rudy kept the readings. The monitor sounded twice, forty minutes before he died. Somebody opened that valve, Lyle. Somebody who knew he was standing beside the tank.” Lyle closed his eyes.
“It was never meant to kill him,” he said. His voice was thick and small. “We were tapping the line. Craig and I. Twenty barrels a night, from the lease to a tanker truck on the county road. Crude is crude. No one misses it. Rudy found the bypass in July, and he told me to shut it down, or he would go to the commission. I begged him to wait until the end of the quarter.” He pressed the clipboard to his stomach. “That afternoon I opened the second valve to vent the line, and I did not know he was at the tank.”
“You knew,” Brody said. It was the first thing he had spoken. He stepped out from behind the pad, a tall young man in the jacket of his father, with a jaw set like granite. “The gas alarm went off twice. You were standing at the switch box with a radio. You heard him calling for help.” Lyle opened his mouth. He found no words, and I saw, with a lurch of grief, that my son was right. The man I had married had stood forty yards away and listened to his friend die. He had gone home and cooked brisket on the following Sunday.
There was a rush of engines on the county road. Not one truck but five, a convoy of white pickups with the star of the Texas Railroad Commission on the doors, followed by two black state cruisers and a Midland sheriff car. The woman I had invented turned out to exist. She was an investigator named Ana Salinas, small and fierce, who had been quietly tracking an oil theft ring for fourteen months, and who had received a call from Brody that morning on the drive out. She climbed from her truck with a clipboard of her own and asked Lyle, politely, to put his down.
He did. He laid the clipboard on the hood of his pickup and walked toward her with his hands open, and the deputies closed around him without a word. The tapping rig was found in an underground vault three hundred feet from the pad, with a pump, a meter, and a hose long enough to reach the road. Craig Eller, the second partner, was arrested at a truck stop outside Odessa. Lyle was convicted of murder and received a sentence of life. I attended every day of the trial, in a black dress, and never once looked at his wedding ring.
The marriage was annulled in a single afternoon. I moved back to the little house on Cotton Street where Rudy and I had raised Brody, and I took my first name off the mailbox of Lyle and put Rudy back on. Brody quit the field crew. He enrolled at Odessa College in the safety program, and he told me, over scrambled eggs, that he meant to become an inspector, to be the man who looks at the monitors and reads them honestly.
He wears the wristwatch now. I had the jeweler replace the battery, and engrave on the back, in small neat letters, five words: Someone opened the valve again. It seemed an odd choice at first. But Brody said it reminds him why he goes to work. On the first night of his first inspection, he called me from the lease, at ten at night, and I heard the wind and the faint metallic song of the pumpjacks in the dark. “Mom,” he said, “every monitor on this pad is working.” I sat down on the porch step, and I wept with joy.