Читать книгу Bad Dad - Alice Shane - Страница 15

He walked briskly down Carter Street which was lined with mobile homes. The sidewalks were narrow, with barely enough space to navigate. There were no trees. Most of the front lawns had sparse little patches of yellowish grass, bleached by the hot South Carolina sun.

The parched front lawns reminded Danny of the terrain on his father’s ranch in Wyoming that had been converted to gas wells. The soil there was dry from seasonal droughts – 1500 acres with patches of sagebrush and deep gullies that once were streams and ponds, where lizards and rabbits scampered about, rattlers slumbered under rocks, and antelopes chomped on sagebrush.

Back then, when he was still a kid, his father had just earned his pilot’s license. Lester had flown the two of them to Wyoming in a single engine Cessna – before his parents’ divorce, before Mary Lou, before Charlie. They landed at the Casper airport where a van packed with camping equipment and food supplies waited. They drove toward the Fuller Energy ranch near Pinedale, hoisted a tent and camped on a section of the property where, from a distance, flares from huge gas drilling rigs could be seen on the horizon.

Those days were idyllic, Danny reflected nostalgically. Having his father to himself for weeks at a time, away from his mother’s unpredictable moods was a rare, special experience. Lester taught him how to use a rifle, set up a tent, prepare food over an open fire. He drove Danny around where gas wells were being drilled, introduced him to rig operators, geologists and hydraulics engineers, and talked to him about the importance of responsibility and hard work.

“You’re going to inherit a substantial fortune one of these days – but that doesn’t mean you won’t be expected to work hard and be productive,” Dad told him one night around the camp fire after they had consumed steaks, corn on the cob and brownies.

Danny now wondered if he would inherit anything from his father. Would Margo grab everything? Would his father leave him a token sum, just enough to placate him and no more? He bristled at the thought of all that wealth, unavailable to him, with Margo the primary beneficiary. He was tired of being poor. He longed for the good life, the life he left behind.

Well, it wasn’t such a bad idea, Mary Lou contacting Dad, he thought. Maybe the old boy will come across with some moolah after all.