He turns to stare at her, angry, not with her but with the amorphous robber baron named bureaucracy. “When the Shaws lost their farm to the government, they moved in here. The government siphons off all their water for its crops, leaving the Shaws with nothing but a lump of dust. They try to make their new land as good as their old. They nurture it, they tend it, they try to make it live. It repays them by blowing away.” Another cloud of dust billows by.

He inserts the key in a big chrome lock, twists the lock free and opens the shed’s door.

Inside is an object covered with a large gray tarp. T.K. pulls off the tarp to expose a sleek red car.

“Very nice,” Sarah says, trying without much success to keep the disappointment out of her voice. She had expected T.K.’s secret expense to be something more exotic than a car. “Like one you would see in a museum.”

“See that storage tank in the corner. I keep it filled with gasoline. Sixty gallons. Costs me almost as much to fill that tank as it did to buy the car in the first place. If I wanted to, I could drive this car right now, right out of here, right down the road and away.”

“If the environmental agencies would give you a permit. Which would never happen.”

“You’re so practical. Here, slide in.” He opens the passenger door. “I never worry about a permit out here. I grease the local sheriff, bribe a nosy neighbor or two, and away I go, the first Tuesday of every month. Next time I take it out, you’re more than welcome to ride along.”

“What kind of a car is this?” she inquires.

“It’s called a Porsche. This model is a 911T. It has six horizontally opposed cylinders, all covered with light alloy cylinder heads. It has V-patterned overhead valves and a forged eight-main-bearing crankshaft. Its SAE net horsepower rating is 129. It was probably the most efficient sports car ever built.”

Sarah plainly doesn’t understand any of what he said. “So this is where all your money goes. On running this car.”

“A good percentage of it, but not all.” T.K. slips behind the wheel. “My folks lived about seventy miles from here. Just outside the town of Armona. We rented our farm from a wealthy family in Sacramento until we finally scraped up enough to buy it outright. I grew up on it. I was born on that farm. My mother and father both died there. Within two weeks of each other. They’re both buried out back of the farmhouse, under an old fir tree.

“I was in my first season with the Prospectors when it happened. First they died. Then not a month later the government started up its agricultural combine and confiscated my farm and my parent’s graves along with it.