the Hot Kid (2005) Read Online Free Page A

the dad's voice seemed different, delivering a judgment now with no more to say about it.
    "You tell your mother she'll hate you for knowing it and never be able to look at your face again. She'll tell me you have to leave and I won't hesitate. I'll throw you out of the house." He didn't refer to Emma. But then gave him a choice, still his dad saying, "Is that what you want?"
    Oris Belmont was another wildcatter story.
    Glenn Pool had twelve hundred wells piped and flowing to refineries by the time Oris came to Oklahoma to join his wife's Uncle Alex in Sapulpa. Alex Roney, known in the field as Stub, held mineral leases on Creek Indian land, a scattering of half-sections he'd bought for three dollars an acre before the area came into its boom. By the time it did, Stub was broke, had no means of drilling a discovery well. He was drunk the day he highjacked a tank truck of crude, was caught stuc k hub-deep in mud and spent the next four years doing his time at McAlester. Stub got his release and called Oris Belmont. Oris arrived from Indiana with a load of salvaged drilling tools, pipe, casing, a pair of steam boilers, sixteen hundred dollars he'd scraped together and twenty years of oil stain under his fingernails. They drilled two dry holes, Stub No. 1 and No. 2, and the old uncle's luck ran out on him. They were looking to take the No. 2 derrick apart, Stub up on the runaround, the catwalk that circled the derrick sixty or so feet up. He hadn't yet hooked his safety belt to the structure, and when he lost his hold he fell sixty feet to the drilling floor, his final breath smelling of corn whiskey. Oris had been afraid the old uncle might fall or have something fall on his head. What puzzled Oris were the dry holes. There weren't more than twenty in the entire eight thousand acres of wells and two of them were his. What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas--a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they'd of had one day--to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital. Now he sank Emma No. 1, named for his baby girl he'd seen twice in the past four years, and sweet crude came up and came up like there'd never be an end to it.
    Oris's wife was from Eaton, Indiana, where they'd met while he was working for wages in the Trenton Field. Oris and Doris--he told her they were meant to be joined in marriage. The time came to hook up with her uncle in Oklahoma, Doris was ready to have their third child--three counting Oris Jr., who'd died in infancy of diphtheria. So Doris and their little boy Jack stayed in Eaton with her widowed mother and delivered Emma while Oris was drilling the dusters. When Emma No. 1 came in, bless her heart, Oris left the boarding-house where he'd been staying and moved to the St. James Hotel in Sapulpa. He waited until he'd drilled Emma No. 2 and she was flowing before he phoned Doris. Oris said, "Honey? Guess what?"
    Doris said, "If your holes are still dry I'm leaving you. I'm walking out of here and Mama can have the kids. She's raising 'em anyway, spoilin g 'em rotten. Says Emma's gonna be a nervous stability 'cause I don't know how to nurse her, I'm not patient enough. How can I be, her hanging over my shoulder. She talks to Emma, tells her, 'Suck on the titty, Little Bitty,' what she calls her. 'That's it, suck on it hard, get all that mookey.' "
    Oris said, "Honey? Listen to me a minute, will you? We're becoming rich as I speak."
    Doris wasn't finished but paused to hear that much. She was a farm girl, skin and bones all her life, but was strong from working; she had a cute face, good teeth, read magazines and was always respectful of her husband. Saturdays she used to shave him and trim his hair and his big droopy mustache. Then she'd strop the razor and shave her legs and under her arms, the driller twisting his mouth to one side and then the other watching every stroke and getting a boner. Doris was thirty-four