It would serve her right, with all her worrying about his wildcatting, about the danger and the money. About the time he spent in the oil fields with drilling crews. About the house triple-mortgaged against the hope that the fluid mass below would come up oil, not muddy water. He would show her, dying on the back deck with two producing wells. Or would she show him? His brain was fogged and the question seemed hard.

“Mah-wee!”

It was colder now, he was sure, and he rolled himself around his wrist, protecting it. It was too gruesome to show her. Best to have an open wound she could bandage, not this thing protruding. He looked at his good hand in the dim light from the window, the fingers curling together against his will, and he forced them around the stirrer. He pressed his damaged wrist against his body to aid his grip, grimacing with rubber mouth at the pain. And then he pulled, whiting out the space behind his eyes in a bright momentary burst, until he held the bloody, splintered thing in his hand, triumphant.

“Hah!” he said.

His wrist began to bleed faster now, in warm, dark jets, the way oil came up from the ground in his dreams. He’d been right to leave the thing in, but was too tired to chastise himself. You were supposed to leave it in. His head was lower than his chest—was that good?—and he felt the blood pool below his Adam’s apple and drip toward the newly sanded, newly painted, newly fouled-up deck. He wondered who would repaint it if she didn’t find him now.