Land Run. Mark Graham

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      “What?”

      “Mr. Watson, we have been trying to get a hold of you for weeks. I’m Cort Johnson, and I need to inform you that you are grossly overdue on your construction loans with Sooner National. We need payment of—”

      “Who is this?”

      “Cort John—”

      “Tell your boss that I’ll get it to him. I got a new deal he’s gonna like.”

      Rusty hung up and tossed the phone to the passenger seat of his truck. He was offended that he was just a name on some no-name list. He was better than that, generated more revenue than that.

      The road took over the trip. Plans for the day abandoned now. He just drove with some sense of restlessness. Rusty found himself doing this more than ever. He would just drive as he did in high school when it was just important to be out of the house. Where you went never mattered, just away.

      The morning’s lie came back to him after a time. There was no deal, no ready salvation with which to impress the bank. As he lingered on the lie he told, it seemed real to him or was becoming less fabrication and more like a possibility. Thinking back, he realized it didn’t even feel like a lie when he said it. It had been a long time since ideas came on him like this, in this way. That compelling muse that made him see what wasn’t there. Rusty pulled the truck over in a place strangely new to him. He had driven past these fields a thousand times but today could not help but stop for a closer look. The land took on shape little by little as he walked closer to the fence line. The last light of day seemed to hang a little longer and brighter as if just for him, for this revelation. Rusty closed his eyes tightly for a time and then slowly released them from captivity with great anticipation.

      The clubhouse had columns, tall, thick ones. There was a circular drive filled with fresh flowers of every color. The long drive was perfectly laid brown brick. Plush, green carpets of grass rolled out before him, and house upon house filled the scene, each custom and strikingly different. All the right trees remained and the wrong trees vanished from his view, as did acres of ugly woods as his mind now peered over the land as if in flight. Eighteen holes zigzagged between perfect island strips of the tallest trees. Rusty almost smiled.

      Business was bad. Rusty only had two half-completed spec homes out in the middle of nowhere near the county line. One buyer backed out, and interest rates were on their way up again. He had been in this same spot once before, but it was a challenge then. This time was different; he was different. He didn’t much care if he got paid or even met payroll. But now he had this new dream. He had to have that land and would divert whatever funds were needed. Rusty was going for broke the way he had during the condo craze of the eighties but without the baggage of weighty concerns of debtors and workers. Thinking back, he wasted many late nights bending his wife’s ear about other people’s families. No more.

      There were just a few calls to be made this morning, and the rest of the day would be spent at the future site. The obsession had begun in him with unusual urgency. The core of Rusty’s thinking now was this new property. Also, he thought, this is news and she needs to know. He had the perfect impersonal purpose, a task to discuss, and would try to get his wife’s number again.

      “Rusty, hon, I just can’t right now. She needs some time. I’m sure—”

      “Yeah.” Rusty cut his mother-in-law off and hung up.

      The foreman at the worksite had called Rusty to tell him of the progress over the weekend. The man was new. Lately, there was always someone new working for him. Rusty cut him off as well and didn’t even get a kick out of what he was about to give the man.

      “Here’s the thing. I’m about to get real busy across county. I’m not going to be able to track this job. Can you handle it?”

      “What do you mean?” he asked.

      “I mean you need to supervise this. Just make the date before they start the mortgage, and you get a twenty-percent increase. You find some buyers, and you get another twenty of the sale. Deal?”

      “But…yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Mr. Watson.”

      By midday, Rusty was back at the new land site and became one with his Blackberry. In just a day, he managed to shed all his track homes and nearly felt excited about it. The afternoon sun warmed him into sitting down against a large, lone pecan tree atop an almost-hill. Rusty ran through the checklist on his clipboard again, looking to this: sell the vision to two core investors, and timeline the project with a rough cost estimate. Most everything Rusty did he did with a compelling sense of urgency, but not to create something, as he had in the old days. Today, work was just another thing God used to steal time from him—time he could have had from his boy. He hated every second of work now with the same passion with which he had once loved it. Now he felt within himself in a way he never had before. He felt an extra kind of power in his heart, in his mind. He sensed a freedom and an attending hardness growing in him. But it was a darker, focused kind of freedom that presented untold strength. Deadlines could be shortened, payroll reduced, books altered as needed. His mind opened to cutting corners, corners he had never acknowledged existed. The call finally came.

      “Hey, partner,” his lawyer, Frank Howard, said.

      “What do you got?”

      “Okay. Well, you hit the jackpot. I don’t know how you do it. This whole quarter-section parcel is owned by a young man named Elijah Montgomery. He is like ninety years young and abandoned the place years ago.”

      “Look. Okay. What do I need?”

      “You name this one, Rusty. He’s got no kin. None. And he has no need of it, I am sure. It’s gonna go for a song, my man.”

      “Ten per acre?”

      “No way. Let’s start with five thousand. Good with you?”

      “Yeah.” Rusty answered and hung up. He wondered for a moment how Frank could learn so much so quickly. But he was the best land man Rusty knew, and corners were all that man Frank could see.

      The early rain stopped short the morning Rusty started his truck to head to meet the banker. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he was confident that the clerk would get onboard. Rusty intended on being late and entering the meeting on his terms. He used to think of these moments as serious future-making battles, but today he was painting by the numbers. He had been making too much of a big deal about them. Bankers were just people wanting to turn a profit but needing extra confidence. He fought so many years to buck the caricature of the shyster developer, but this morning he would embrace the perception. He would fill their need and be the confidence man. He had played the original and authentic, fair-minded man so long that the counterfeit was easy for him to spot. And now, with this last deal, he would take on the mantle better than he had seen his former competitors doing. He knew these guys better than themselves. And bankers, he knew, were no different. He was going to impress and dazzle, and then when the time was right, he would suddenly lay prostrate to the mercy of the money-giver, a moment when the pride of a man, a banker, inclines toward sublime benevolence. Rusty well-knew the irresistible drug of mercy. It was always a seemingly act of the СКАЧАТЬ