Philipp Meyer - The Son

“Shall we get lunch? Or can you handle a little more business?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Good. Tell me what you know about the depletion allowance.”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Of course. That’s what your father knows about it as well. The depletion allowance is one of the things that makes the oil business as far from the cattle business as the North Pole is from the South. At the moment, it says that if you drill for oil, you can write twenty-seven point five percent of your proceeds off as a loss.”

“Because you spent money to drill the wells?”

“That is certainly what we tell the newspapers, though in general we have already written off about sixty percent of those costs as intangibles. The depletion allowance is something entirely different. Every year a well produces oil, even though it is putting money into your pocket, it is simultaneously reducing your tax burden.”

“You’re making a profit, but calling it a loss.”

She could see this pleased him.

“It sounds dishonest,” she added.

“It is the opposite. It is the law of the United States.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing. The law was put there for a reason. People will raise cattle even though they will lose money doing it — you do not need to incentivize the cattle business. Oil, on the other hand, is expensive to find and even more expensive to get out of the ground. It is an enormously risky enterprise. And so if the government wants us to find oil, it must encourage us to do so.”

“So we should drill.”

“Of course we should drill. How your father can still be thinking about cows is a mystery. Every bit of profit we made in the old days was based on overstocking, on using up a thousand years of grass in a decade. The way we used to fill those pastures, it was like those file cabinets there, touching on both sides, it was mining for grass. But, as you must know from listening to me this long, facts are boring, especially to men like your father. Because what does every coonass wildcatter do when he makes his first million? He buys a ranch and stocks it with Herefords, in the same way he acquires a Packard or a beautiful wife. Though he does not expect any of them to be profitable investments.

“In the meantime, the rest of us have no choice but to exist in the present. I’m getting calls from the secretary of the navy, who is telling me he does not want a single production control in place. He wants drilling, drilling, and more drilling — the only thing we have over the Germans is our oil — they are building a pipeline from here to New Jersey, where all the refineries are, and they want every goddamn drop we have.”

He was looking out the window; he was talking again but she could not follow the thread — it was more taxes — and she was beginning to feel sick, she could not bring this up to her father, it was out of the question. This war won’t last forever , that was what her father was always saying, things will go back to the way they were. She wondered what it must be like to be her father, taking himself so seriously, imagining himself a kind of royalty, though from a country no one had heard of. Of course, in his defense, people had lately begun to agree with him. The Colonel had been dead long enough that her father was now interesting to reporters; they would visit and he would tell them the Colonel’s stories, jumbled together with his own, the time he and the Colonel had charged a house full of Mexican horse thieves during the bandit wars of 1915. It was said he had once shot a man in cold blood.

Regardless, her father was part of a dying breed, for better or worse, most of the old-time ranching families had gone bankrupt. Most people now lived in cities — she could still not get her head around that one — the days of the frontier were gone, long gone, though there were those who preferred not to admit it. As for her father, with his heavy face, his big hands, he had finally become what he had hoped for since childhood, the representative of a bygone era, an emissary from a lost time. That he himself had not lived during this time was irrelevant — he would take the reporters out to the corrals and put on a show, rope and cut for them, he had begun to keep older, gentler horses just for visitors, which would have been unthinkable in the old days, because horses cost money and they were for work, not play.

An automobile horn on the street brought her back. Phineas was still talking.

“… even if most of the Hill Country still doesn’t have electricity, even if one does encounter the occasional bucktoothed child on a donkey, this war has dragged the rest of the world into the modern age. The Polish cavalry smashed itself against German tanks, every cannibal in the South Pacific has now seen a Zero, and if there was doubt in any mind that the era of the horse was over, that question is now settled.”

She nodded. It was obvious even to her.

“Jeannie,” he said, “it will not be long before we look back on this time and think we barely used any oil at all. Which is why we need to get some wells sunk on that land. I am tired of lending your father money.”

THE NEXT DAY she took the train home. It stopped for a long time in San Antonio, the air still, the sun beating against the car. She lay against the window, trying to breathe slowly, thinking of cool things, the stock tank, the spring at the casa mayor. There were soldiers everywhere, Mexicans sweating through their uniforms, heads hanging numbly, sweat pooling, their only hope that the train might move again, they were like steers on their way to Fort Worth. Thousands had been abandoned to the Japanese, who were cutting off their heads with swords. Though MacArthur himself had escaped. A little too proudly, she thought.

She searched their faces but they were all looking down. The walking dead. How many were not even men yet? She was tired of being alone, she imagined her father’s angry face, I gave it to a soldier , the great burden carried away. Clint and Paul had gone to a house in Carrizo. Her father had known about it beforehand. But I am not allowed.

When she was younger and found her father working in his study she would sit next to his chair and read, or hang around his neck and look over his shoulder, and finally he would turn and silently give her a kiss, the signal to leave him alone.

That was all he had. A hug and a kiss. Though he would kiss a horse as well, give months to understanding it, more than his own daughter.

Phineas was just using her, that was true, but he had always made time for her, even when she was young; she must have been tiresome and yet he’d made a point of teaching her things. To her father, she was just in the way. An inconvenience. A thing that might have been a son.

It was all an exaggeration, it was not the entire truth, but it made her furious, the nights she’d spent alone in the house, her father and brothers in the pastures. Things had improved since Clint and Paul left, but still. He loves you , she thought, but he prefers not to think about you . What did he prefer? Horses. Cows. Women, perhaps, though if so she hadn’t heard about it. She decided if she ever had children, she would not leave them alone for a single minute.

“I won’t have children anyway,” she said out loud.

The Negro porter in the doorway looked up, then looked away, embarrassed. The train began to move. She wondered what she would say to her father.

WHEN SHE WAS sixteen she had kissed one of the vaqueros, out in the stables he was supposed to be cleaning; they had stood there for ten minutes, she could feel his tongue move lightly inside her mouth. She spent the whole night thinking about him, his cheekbones and soft eyelashes, but when she went to see him the next day, he would not let her near. A week later he was gone. She knew they had not been seen; it was as if her father had merely sensed it — as if he had sensed something was making her happy — and ruined it.