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.He ran to his room, shaking the doublewide again with a slammed door.For a long time, Dwight stared into his bowl, waiting for his heart to thump with less urgency.When he finally scooped out some of the melted vanilla, the sound of his spoon clinking against the bowl reverberated in a house that had gone silent.Quillen gave them a brisk wave the next morning as they pulled up at the ranch.Behind him, the mast on the drilling rig stood at attention, ready to seek the water Dwight had zeroed in on a day earlier.“Thanks for coming,” Quillen said, shaking hands with both of them.Ross pulled back from the man’s grip; it felt like the mouth of a vise closing on his hand.“I tell you, this is gonna be a son of a bitch, trying to dig this out.This ground doesn’t hold up for shit.” Quillen kicked at the dirt.“Happy to help.A day’s pay is a day’s pay,” Dwight said.“Might be more than that, if I have to take another run at it.Hope not.”Ross watched the men in bemusement.Both spread their legs slightly, supporting their torsos with the widened base, like a couple of old football linemen who couldn’t stand up straight anymore.Quillen—Jim was his name, Ross remembered—frowned with nearly every word, as if it caused him pain to speak.Ross’s father reached back and slipped his hand down the back of his jeans, his palm out.A couple of cocks on the walk, they were.“Kid,” Quillen said.Ross, startled, looked up.“Me?”“No, the other kid.Yeah, you.Know how to use a shovel?”“Yeah.”“I’ll give you ten bucks if you keep that hole clear of dirt.”Four hours into the dig, Dwight’s divining paid off.Water surged through the pipe and sprayed down onto them.The fat splashes of muddy water tingled on Ross’s skin, baked pink by the midday sun.“Hot damn!” Quillen said, leaping from his drilling perch.“Newbry, you’re a goddamned well-witchin’ fool.Look at her go!” The gusher burbled out of the top of the mast, stripping caked-on mud from the back of the rig.Dwight looked skyward in an open-mouthed grin.“That’s it?” Ross asked.“Well, no, not yet,” Quillen said.“Gotta run a pump down into her, but that’s sure as shit a water well.”He clapped Dwight on the shoulder, and for the first time, Ross looked at his father with something approaching respect.Ross and the men sat under the awning outside the trailer.Even as dusk galloped hard across the sky, the embers of the day broiled anything that dared venture into the light.A bucket of ice holding a six-pack of Pabst and a few root beers for Ross stood sweating on the ground.“You need a woman’s touch around here, Newbry,” Quillen said, waving his hand at the junked-out cars scattered across what passed for a front yard.“Had one,” Dwight said.Quillen tapped his bottle against Dwight’s, and then against Ross’s root beer.“I hear you, partner.I’ve had my own troubles there, too.Still, if you love pussy, what else are you gonna do?”“Good point.”“I got a cow or two, I guess,” Quillen said, chuckling.“I’ll have to give it some more thought before it comes to that.”Ross tried to conjure a memory of Jill’s face.It was no use.He’d met his father’s wife only a couple of times, and she hadn’t made much of an impression on him.Before he left Fargo, his mom had suggested that things had gone badly out here for Dwight and Jill, and so he hadn’t pushed that line of questioning.Truth was, he figured he had trouble enough on his own without worrying about the two of them.Now it was a moot point as Dwight, unbidden, revealed all.“I knew it was bad from the start, but I stayed in.I kept thinking if I just hung in there, she’d come around, but she never did.”“What do you mean?” Quillen said.“I couldn’t make her happy.She would say, ‘Dwight, you’re just a good ol’ boy, you’ll never amount to anything.’ Well, hell, I’m the guy I was the day she met me.I never told her I’d be anything different than that.So she started going to night school, wanted to become a travel agent.So I went with that.Started going to Billings all the damn time for seminars and stuff.Fine, I said.I went to bed alone a lot of nights.I never complained.And then she comes home one day and says, ‘I’m leaving.’ Just like that.It’s over.”“When was that?” Ross asked.Dwight traced a thumb along the lip of the beer bottle.“Nine weeks ago.”“Bitch,” Quillen said.“At least she didn’t clean you out, the way my second wife did.Three years ago, and I’m barely holding on.Job’s gone to shit.Drilling these wells, trying to stay afloat.”“Mine didn’t do it only because there was nothing to take.”Quillen took a swig, emptying his bottle.“I should have never gotten divorced the first time.I let the best woman I ever had get away.”Ross looked at his father, wanting him to say it and bracing himself for the competing emotions—pride and anger—he knew would come if Dwight did.“Yeah,” Dwight said.“Me, too.”Word quickly got around about the jackpot well up Jordan way, and the next morning, calls started hitting the Newbry house as soon the sun peeked above the eastern horizon.“Hell, yeah, we’re interested,” Dwight said, fielding the first one.“Nah, I’m almost certain he can do it.I know I can.” On the couch, across the room, Quillen sat scratching his belly and nodding his head vigorously at the rumor of work.By mid-morning, Dwight had lined up nine well-digging jobs—nine witching jobs for him—and Quillen had ciphered out the math and figured that if things broke right, he could get them done inside of a month and be home by September
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