I

The well began pumping at three o'clock in the morning, and Jack Haskell did not know it at first, because he was sleeping on a cot in the operator's shack with the collar of his jacket pulled over his ears and the Oklahoma wind rattling the window frames like a man trying to get in. When he did wake, it was because of a sound that he had not heard in six months - the steady, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a pumpjack moving up and down, up and down, pumping crude oil from the earth into the storage tank.

He sat up on the cot and turned on the lantern and looked out the window. The derrick was moving. The arm was going up and down with the patient rhythm of a mechanical heartbeat, and the storage tank beside it was filling with black oil that smelled like the inside of a geological dream.

Jack Haskell was twenty-nine years old and he had spent his entire adult life working on oil wells in Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico, and he had seen a lot of dry holes. He knew what a dead well sounded like - silence, or worse, the occasional gasp of a formation that had one last pocket of gas and then nothing. This was not a dead well. This was a well that was alive.

He pulled on his boots and walked outside into the Oklahoma night, which was cold and clear and smelled like oil and prairie grass. The stars were out in a way that only happens on the flat plains, where there are no buildings to block the sky and no lights to wash it out. Jack stood in the gravel and looked at the derrick moving up and down and felt the same feeling he had felt when he was seven years old and his father had taken him to the creek behind their farmhouse and caught a fish with his bare hands - a feeling of pure, unmediated contact with the world, as if for one moment the world and the person standing in it had the same frequency and were speaking the same language.

The well was on a lease near Pawhuska, and it was Jack's job to operate it. He was the night shift operator, which meant he slept in the shack and came out every four hours to check the pressure readings and make adjustments and make sure the equipment was running smoothly. The well had been dry for four months. The lease owner, a man named Harrington who lived in Tulsa and did not trust men who slept in shacks, had threatened to pull the equipment. Jack had begged him to wait. He had stayed late one night, tinkering with the valves out of habit rather than hope, and something had shifted. The pressure had climbed. The pump had started. The well was producing.

Jack's world changed in a way that felt almost mundane. He went home on his day off and told his wife Helen that the well was pumping, and she looked at him with the tired eyes of a woman who had spent ten years working double shifts at a diner in Tulsa and had learned to hope only in small, manageable amounts. Jack told her the well was pumping, and she nodded and said that was good, and they went to bed, and the next morning Helen came home from work and found a letter in the mailbox from the oil company saying that the well had been producing at forty barrels a day and that Jack's share of the royalties was going to be deposited in his account on the first of the month.

It was not a large amount - maybe two hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in 1932 but not enough to change a life in a single day. But it was steady. It was predictable. It was the kind of money that came from the earth itself, not from anyone's generosity or cruelty. Jack felt something he had not felt in years - a feeling that he could not name, because he had never been taught the vocabulary for anything other than survival.

II

Jack reinvested everything. That was the pattern - he struck oil on one lease, used the royalties to buy leases on dry land, and those leases turned out to be wrong about being dry. He bought a lease near Bartlesville that his friends told him was worthless. It produced sixty barrels a day. He bought a lease near Enid that a geologist told him had no potential. It produced eighty barrels a day.

Within ten years, Jack Haskell was not a driller. He was a petroleum magnate. His company, Haskell Oil, had operations across Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and it employed two hundred men who drilled and pumped and refined and transported the crude oil that powered the American economy.

Jack bought a house in Tulsa's most exclusive neighborhood - a brick house on a street lined with oak trees and wrought-iron gates. He bought it because Helen wanted it, and Helen wanting things had always been the closest thing Jack had to a moral compass. The house had six bedrooms and a library and a kitchen that was bigger than the apartment they had lived in for fifteen years. Helen moved into it with a kind of fierce determination, as if she were trying to prove that she deserved it. Their daughter, Mary, went to private school and came home speaking a language that Jack did not understand - words like curriculum and extracurricular and scholarship, which were words that existed in the world of private schools and not in the world of oil rigs and pumpjacks and shacks that smelled like crude oil and prairie grass.

Jack hired managers to run his operations. He learned to read financial reports. He went to business meetings in suits that made him feel like a stranger. The suits were made by a tailor in Tulsa who measured Jack's shoulders and chest and waist and nodded at the results, as if they were a puzzle that the tailor had solved but Jack had not been told was a puzzle. The suits fit well, but they did not fit Jack. They fit the idea of Jack Haskell, the petroleum magnate, but they did not fit the man who had spent his life wearing work clothes and smelling like oil and prairie grass and sleeping in shacks on dry wells.

Helen tried to keep up with the demands of wealth. She attended charity galas and country club lunches and meetings of the Tulsa Women's Auxiliary. She wore dresses that cost more than Jack had made in a month during the Depression years, and she carried herself with the kind of grace that comes from knowing that the world is finally giving her what she deserves. Jack watched her at these events from the corners of rooms, in suits that did not fit, feeling like a man who had wandered into a play he had not auditioned for.

Mary went to private school and came home with friends whose fathers were doctors and lawyers and bankers - men who had jobs that Jack could not understand and who spoke about their work in language that was clean and abstract and removed from the physical reality of the earth. Jack would listen to these boys talk about their fathers' practices - tax law, corporate litigation, mergers and acquisitions - and he would feel a distance open up between him and his daughter that was wider than any canyon and deeper than any oil well.

Jack's father had died working a rig when Jack was fourteen. He had fallen from a ladder and broken his neck, and the company had paid Jack's mother fifty dollars and a condolence letter on company letterhead. Jack felt nothing when he thought about his father now. He felt nothing at all, which was itself a feeling - a feeling of absence, of emotional flatness, of a man who had achieved everything he had been told to achieve and found that the achievement was empty.

III

The turning point was not dramatic. There was no sudden disaster, no scandal, no dramatic confrontation. There was a series of small moments that accumulated into something unbearable.

Jack sat in a boardroom in the Haskell Oil tower and realized that he had not made a decision based on instinct alone in five years. Every decision was backed by a report, backed by a consultant, backed by a committee. He was no longer a man who worked with his hands and his gut and his eyes. He was a man who read spreadsheets and listened to presentations and signed documents that had been prepared by men who were younger than him and smarter than him and who spoke a language that Jack had never learned.

He read a contract for forty pages and could not find the one number that mattered. He had spent his life reading the earth - looking at the rock formations and the soil and the vegetation and knowing, in his bones, where the oil was. Now he was reading contracts, and the numbers were abstract and the language was legal and the one number that mattered was hidden in a clause on page thirty-two that had been written by a lawyer who understood the language but not the meaning.

Helen told him, at dinner one evening, that Mary called another man Dad. The man was Helen's second husband - they had married five years earlier, in a small ceremony that Jack had attended because he did not know how to do anything else. He sat at the end of the table and listened to his daughter talk about her future and her plans and her dreams, and he realized that he did not know what any of them were. He had never asked her. He had never thought to ask.

Jack attended the opening of a new refinery that his company had built on land his grandfather had once farmed. The workers looked at him with a mixture of fear and respect that reminded him of the old days, when a man knew what his hands could do and what the world required of those hands. He nodded at the workers and they nodded back, and for a moment he felt something like connection, like recognition, like a man who understood the language his hands spoke.

He went back to his empty house in the expensive neighborhood and stood in the kitchen and could not remember the last time he had cooked a meal. He opened a cupboard and looked at the pots and pans - expensive, imported, useless - and he did not know why he owned them. They were not his pots and pans. They were the pots and pans of a man who cooked meals, and Jack Haskell had not cooked a meal in ten years.

He sat at his desk in the Haskell Oil tower - the tallest building in Tulsa, if memory served - and looked at the financial reports stacked neatly beside his fountain pen, which cost more than his father had made in a lifetime, and he did not open them. He just sat. The phone rang. He let it ring.

IV

The final scene. Jack is alone in his office in the Haskell Oil tower on a late afternoon in November. The sun slants through the floor-to-ceiling windows and catches the dust motes that hang in the air like tiny, insignificant stars. He could sell the building. He could sell the company. He could call Helen and tell her he wants to go back to the rigs. He does none of these things.

He sits at his desk, which cost more than his father made in a lifetime, and looks at the financial reports stacked neatly beside his fountain pen. He does not open them. He just sits. The phone rings. He lets it ring.

Outside, the Oklahoma wind is blowing, and the oil fields stretch to the horizon, and the pumpjacks are moving up and down, up and down, like the mechanical heartbeats of a country that runs on crude oil and the labor of men whose names will never appear in the financial pages of the newspaper.

Jack Haskell, King of Nothing, sits in the tallest building in Tulsa, waiting for something to happen that he knows will not. He does not know why he owns anything. He does not know why he is here. He does not know who he is. He only knows that he is sitting in a room that is too large and a house that is too empty and a life that is too successful, and that the man who used to sleep in a shack on a dry well and smell like oil and prairie grass and feel the earth speaking to him through his hands is a man who no longer exists.

The phone stops ringing. The sun dips below the horizon. The pumpjacks keep moving. And Jack Haskell sits in the tallest building in Tulsa, king of nothing, and waits for the dark to come, which it always does, in Oklahoma and everywhere else.

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