Desmond tried to swallow, but it felt like he had a mouth full of sawdust. “Found it,” he said with a cough.

“So you stole.”

“No. I found it—”

“If you found it, then it belongs to someone—someone you stole it from. Put it on the back of the truck. I’ll take it to town and return it to its rightful owner tomorrow.”

“I own it,” Desmond said, anger overtaking his fear. “I bought it.”

“Bought it,” his uncle said, acting impressed. “With what money?” he spat.

Desmond looked away.

“You answer me when I ask you a question, boy. What money?”

“The money I saved.”

“Saved?” His uncle was mad now. “No. You bought it with money you stole—from me. I gave you that money to put food in your ungrateful little mouth. You were supposed to give me back whatever was left. You kept it for yourself and bought a little play toy.”

Desmond grew quiet, let his uncle go on about how soft and useless he was. The tirade lasted nearly two weeks, until his uncle was set to go back to work. Instead of placing some money on the counter, he told Desmond to pack a bag.

“Time to show you the real world.”

The real world Orville Hughes intended to show him was a camp outside a rig just north of the Oklahoma-Texas border. He put Desmond to work: cleaning outhouses, washing clothes, peeling potatoes, and doing anything the roughnecks didn’t want to do. It was hard work, but it wasn’t dangerous work. His uncle said he was too weak to be a real roughneck. He’d probably always be too soft, the man told him.

The workers were shaped like barrels, with muscular arms that hung at an angle, never straight down. They reminded him of the robot on Lost in Space, a program Desmond watched when his uncle was away. But unlike the robot, these men were constantly covered with oil. Their every other word was an obscenity. The stories about prostitutes and their lewd jokes never ended. They worked twelve hours on, twelve hours off, constantly drank coffee when they were awake, and never smoked near the rigs. There was a small TV with bunny ears covered in foil, and they fought about it after every shift. Baseball was usually on, and there was always a card game in one of the tents.

Exactly one man out of the entire group read in his off-hours. Desmond befriended him, and he was nice enough to pass Desmond the book he had been reading, which he recommended highly.

Try as he might, Desmond couldn’t get into the novel, which was about people hunting for a Russian submarine.