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commenced, the bit punched into a geological dome that sprayed salt water and a stench like rotten eggs high above the swamp. When the air cleared, Oliver Wellstone was convinced his dreams of wealth had come to naught. Then the ground under his feet rumbled and shook, and a geyser of sweet black crude exploded out of the wellhead and showered down on his head like a gift from a divine hand. He peered up at the heavens, his mouth open, his arms extended, his face running with oil. If there was such a thing as secular baptism, Oliver Wellstone had just experienced it.
    Ten years later, he owned six producing fields in Louisiana and Texas, three ranches, a string of canneries, and an Austin radio station.
    He bought a home in Houston’s River Oaks, a metropolitan oasis of trees and high-banked green lawns and palatial estates where success was a given and the problems of the poor and the disenfranchised were the manufactured concerns of political leftists. Unfortunately for Oliver and his family, financial equality in River Oaks did not necessarily translate into social acceptance.
    Wildcatters like H. L. Hunt and Glenn McCarthy and Bob Smith may have respected him, but his peckerwood accent and fifth-grade education trailed with him like cultural odium wherever he went. The fact that his wife’s face could make a train turn onto a dirt road didn’t help matters, either. At formal dinners Oliver stuffed his napkin inside his collar and sawed his steak like a man cutting up a rubber tire, then ate it with his fork in his left hand, dunking each bite in obscene amounts of ketchup. A columnist in the Houston Post said his head looked like a grinning alabaster bowling ball. He had a phobia about catching communicable diseases, washed his hands constantly, and on cold days wore two flannel shirts under his suit coat and refused to take off his hat indoors. Every day of his life he ate a Vienna-sausage-and-mayonnaise sandwich for lunch and walked eight blocks to his office rather than put money in a parking meter. At any café he frequented, he loaded up on free toothpicks at the cashier’s counter. When Oliver and his wife applied for membership in one of Houston’s most exclusive country clubs, their application was denied.
    That was when Oliver returned to his holy-roller roots, in the same way a man returns to a homely girlfriend whose arms are open and whose heart makes no judgments. Pentecostals speaking in tongues and writhing in the spirit or dipping their arms in boxes of snakes might seem bizarre to some, but tent crowds all across Texas recognized Oliver as one of their own. When Oliver gave witness, there was rapture and sweetness in their faces. No one there was overly concerned about stories of Oliver’s involvement with slant drilling or stolen seismograph reports or, in one instance, pouring lye in the eyes of a competitor. If he was challenged by a fellow believer about the contradiction between his philanthropy and the sources of his wealth, Oliver’s response was simple: “There is nothing the devil hates worse than seeing his own money used against him. Let the church roll on!”
    But Oliver’s sons turned out to be nothing like him. What they were is much more difficult to describe than what they were not.
     
    ONE WEEK HAD come and gone since Molly had backed Albert’s pickup into the Wellstone limo. Then another week passed, and I heard nothing more about either the accident or the murder of the two university students. Perhaps in part that was because I avoided watching the news, hoping I could slip back into the loveliness of the season, the mist in the trees at sunrise, the smell of horses and wood smoke on the wind, the summer light hanging in the sky until ten P.M.
    Fond and foolish thoughts.
    Saturday night a downpour drenched the valley and knocked trees over on power lines and washed streams of gravel down the hillsides. During the storm, for reasons I can’t explain, I dreamed of the