Take the money. Don’t be careless with it. Respect it, invest it, and take care of it, and it will take care of you. I’ve been saving it my whole life. After you came to live with me, I got a little more serious about not spending every last cent I earned. The rest is the proceeds from your family’s ranch in Australia, which I have preserved in its entirety.

I hope you leave and go far away from this place. There’s nothing here for a mind like yours.

People often say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s bullshit. Some events a person just can’t recover from. They don’t make you stronger, they make you weaker, no matter how hard you try to cover it up or how strong you try to act. That happened to me when I was 25. It doesn’t matter what it was. Don’t go trying to find out. It’s water under the bridge. When you came to live with me, I was well on my way to drinking myself to death. Probably would have been in the grave within a few years if the rigs didn’t get me first. I told the woman on the phone that I was in no shape to care for you. I figured it was more dangerous here than wherever they would take you. But she wouldn’t listen. She sent you on anyway. I’m glad she did. For my sake. Caring for you saved me. Changed me. After what happened to you, I thought you would do what I did, shrivel up and die inside. But you didn’t. There’s a fight inside you that’s stronger than anyone I’ve ever met. Not on a rig, or in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, or on the streets of London when the bombs were falling.

This world broke me. I found my peace at the bottom of a bottle. Drinking was my crutch. Don’t let it be yours. Don’t take the road I took. Drinking and drugs only make you forget for a while, dig you deeper in the hole. Don’t depend on them, Desmond. Get yourself clean. Leave the drinking behind. Quit the rigs for good. I don’t know where in this world you belong, but it’s not here. Live a life that makes you proud. As the years pass, it will be the wind in your sails. Regrets will sink you.

Orville

Desmond folded up the letter and watched the fire burn down until the flames receded into the pit. Sitting in that field in Oklahoma, he made a promise to himself: he would stop drinking for good. And he would do as Orville had suggested: he would leave this place and never come back. He knew where he had to go.