At thirteen, Desmond started high school. Thanks to his time on the rigs, he was big and broad-shouldered, with arms like a thoroughbred’s legs. He was still a loner at school. He didn’t fit in with any of the groups, and he had stopped trying years ago. He was stronger than the farm boys and varsity football players and smarter than the kids who lived in town, whose parents owned the shops and had gone to college. Thanks to the library system, he knew more about history than most of his teachers. And there was a lot of math on the rigs. It wasn’t calculus, but he picked that up quickly. He could attend half the year and pass all the tests. School became like visiting a prison camp on a foreign planet. People gossiped constantly. Football dominated everything. Everyone was always looking forward to the big game. Desmond only looked forward to his next book arriving—and his and Orville’s next job. The locations fascinated him. Louisiana and South Texas were colorful worlds all to themselves.
He cut school more and more. When the teachers began complaining, Orville visited the principal and explained that he needed his nephew’s help on the rigs and that the boy would pass all his tests. An agreement was made, and from then on, Desmond attended only enough to pass a few standard tests that would appease the school board if anyone came looking.
Desmond and Orville’s relationship wasn’t like father and son. They weren’t exactly friends. They were more like drifters in the old westerns Orville watched, bound together by some shared need, on a quest, in search of something or someone, though whom or what they were searching for was never clear. They went from town to town, each town like an episode in the show, a new bad guy to best or a mystery to solve. The mystery was always how long it would take to drill the oil well, whether they’d hit oil, and whether they’d survive the days after the tour, what Orville called “blowing off steam.”
For Orville, that usually entailed holing up in the nearest town for a week, drinking himself to sleep at the local bar, gambling, and running women. He fought a lot too. After a certain point, he would fight the first guy who said a cross word to him. Military veterans were the only ones he wouldn’t take a swing at, and their wives were the only ones he wouldn’t take home. He didn’t like other men doing it either; that was always cause for a fight—fights that inevitably drew Desmond in, no matter how hard he tried to stay out of them. Eventually, he fell in beside his uncle the moment they started. The fights ended faster that way.
Desmond got pretty good at sizing a man up, knew who would be trouble, who would run, and when they should run. He developed a sort of sixth sense about whether he needed the beer bottle or the pool cue he was holding, or if his fists would do. He didn’t like fighting with a knife, but he learned to take them from others. They had a few run-ins with the law, but Orville always had a good story and a few hundred dollars for the bar owner to cover the damage. Desmond nearly always had a bruised rib, a smashed finger, a broken knuckle, a black eye, or a healing cut; pain became commonplace to him, and so did their weird life, living by Orville’s twisted code.
In the hotels, they drank and listened to songs by Robert Earl Keen, The Highwaymen, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Johnny Cash until dawn. They sobered up a few days before their next job, and didn’t take a drink while they were working. It was too dangerous. That was part of the code too.
Desmond finally understood why his uncle had hated him so much when he’d first arrived. This was the life that Desmond had kept the man from, and Orville was finally getting back to it. That made him happy, and Desmond got some relief at home. They even went hunting together every now and then.
The weeks he worked became almost therapeutic. When they were on the rigs, it was almost non-stop action, some of it dangerous. It was hard work, the kind that kept you from thinking too much. When he was working, he didn’t think about his family, or Charlotte, or Agnes, or anything else. When he was off work, the whiskey and beer made the thoughts go away. It was the only thing that worked—except for books. That became his life: the rigs, drinking, and reading.
His graduation in the spring of 1995 was a non-event for him. His life changed very little—except now he no longer had to take the tests. Other kids were going off to college or to Oklahoma City to get a job, or they started working full-time with their family. Desmond wanted desperately to escape, to start fresh somewhere. But he needed money to do that, so he began saving every penny he could. By January of 1996, the dented coffee can he kept in his mattress held $2,685. It was the sum total of every dollar to his name, and he was about to spend it on a device he hoped would change his life—and allow him to leave Oklahoma and the rigs behind for good.
Chapter 48
There were always two people outside Desmond’s cell: one working the laptop with the slide show, asking questions, another typing and filming him.
He had concluded that enlisting the help of one of the interrogators was his only chance of escape. The cell was well designed and constructed; brute force wouldn’t free him. His first step was developing a profile of the captor he would turn. He had set about searching for any weaknesses or strongly held beliefs he could exploit, but thus far, his attempts to extract such information had fallen on deaf ears. He sensed Conner’s hand in prohibiting the interrogators from speaking with him. None of them ever answered his personal questions. In fact, they became nervous when he addressed them personally—more nervous than they already were. And with each failed attempt, he felt his chances of escape slipping away.
He had taken note of several terms that had struck him as vaguely familiar: “Do you remember the Zeno Society?” they had asked.
“No.”
“The Order of Citium?”
He lied again. He did know the term, but he didn’t know how or what it meant.