Joe returned to that advice over and over again, a simple truth around which he organized his life. It was what had drawn him to trade the plains of Colorado for the North Dakota prairie, to ignore completely the earnest urgings of the social worker at Mandy's facility to “re-engage with society.” He was working to master his thoughts, to disengage from complex moral conflict. This job was the only luck he'd had in the past few years. He knew the company had saved his ass, saved the asses of any number of other men who had been laid off from jobs in construction, in landscaping, in mortgage lending, for God's sake, during the recession. He didn't want to dwell on the environmental impacts, the political bickering, and certainly not on Mandy, or on DJ.

And then the shift was over and he and Dustin were back in the truck, the empty Dakota road spread out ahead of them, surrounded by prairie. Rough-legged hawks perched on the ranch fence posts, stark against the open country. At thirty-eight, Joe often felt like an old man, in camp and on-site, surrounded by green, disillusioned millennial boys who'd believed they'd make their fortunes as pro football stars or white rappers, who'd paid just enough attention in high school to graduate. They'd leveraged those diplomas into jobs on the rigs with training and good pay—pay that, for the most part, the young guys took for granted, felt they somehow deserved. Dustin was different from most in that he could see beyond the moment. Dustin's plan, Joe knew, was a degree in alternative energy from the community college, a future entrepreneur masquerading as an oil patch roughneck.

“Maybe something like, we can't even imagine now, you know?” Dustin was a talker. “Like in Back to the Future, when Doc stuffs garbage into his DeLorean to make gas. That's what I'm doing in my thirties, man. Stacks of bills. No more of this raping the earth and shit.”

“You've got vision,” Joe said, surprised by his own sincerity, by how invested he was starting to feel in Dustin's success. “That'll take you far. That and saving. You're making plenty of money up here for community college.”

“Okay, Dad,” Dustin said, joking, and then the color drained from his face. “Nah, man, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about your . . . I wasn't thinking.”

Joe shrugged it off. He was old enough to have helped his mother, a legal secretary, lug a typewriter home so she could work nights. He'd used clunky DOS desktops in high school, had bought a laptop for the business that had failed, and now, as water hauler, somehow all he needed was a pocket-sized phone. When the drilling was done and this whole thing busted, maybe he'd find himself begging a millionaire Dustin for a job. The world got harder to recognize the longer he lived in it, and only sometimes did that have to do, directly, with the loss of DJ.