two conditions. First, you had to take 640 acres. Second, it had to be settled, meaning a permanent, habitable structure of some kind had to be erected on the property. This explained both the numerous roads traversing the desert, as well as the seemingly random placement of cinderblock buildings scattered across the desert like mausoleums or funeral mounds built to commemorate desolation itself. When the brief oil rush was on in the 1920s, there had been lots of consolidation. Wealthy speculators would swoop in and buy 640 acre tracts by the dozen. Then, as the oil dwindled, the land was impossible to sell and the owners simply walked away. There were some properties that hadn’t had their taxes paid since the early 1940s. But the county never foreclosed. The government didn’t want the land either.
At one point, Eli’s grandfather had acquired ten square miles of desert and erected nearly twenty reasonably good wells, and life was good clear into the late 60s. When Eli’s grandfather died peacefully of a heart attack on a beach in Hawaii, Eli’s father took over, and the slow, steady decline in the family’s fortune began. Not that it had anything to do with his father, it was just the way things were. Profits were poured into additional wells, all of which were either dry to begin with or soon went dry. By the time the writing was on the wall, it was too late to escape. The family house had been sold, most of the property mortgaged, and most of the rights to the wells that still produced had been doled out to various creditors. When Eli’s father finally drove his beat up Cadillac off the Pacific Coast Highway in a drunken stupor, just south of Point Lobos—killing himself and his wife—Eli was left with an estate consisting of a rusty doublewide on forty acres of hardpan desert, another two hundred acres further out in the middle of nowhere, and the pouch of personal effects the coroner had mailed him containing his mother’s jewelry and his old man’s last two hundred bucks in limp, weathered twenties. Two hundred dollars, a smashed Cadillac, and a pile of shit rusting on a bunch of land the county wouldn’t even repossess for back taxes. The sum total of three generations of hard work.
So at twenty-four, Eli took a job at Southern Petroleum’s Monarch station, where oil from the remaining active wells in the area was dumped into the pipeline and shipped down to Long Beach. It was a steady paycheck in a town that got cheaper to live in every year, but everyone who worked there knew it was only a matter of time before Monarch closed and Nickelback deteriorated back into the wild desert. The oil was running out everywhere. People who had made money were quitting while they were still ahead. And the people who had lost money only had so much more to lose.
The abandoned oil claims made the whole area perfect for people who were hiding from something or had something to hide from others. The dispersed and decrepit buildings were now home to all manner of criminals and outlaws. Those who didn’t have a job at the refinery were either retired, living off of some kind of disability, or making crystal meth in a makeshift lab in a shack behind their house. The whole county only had one sheriff and three deputies, barely enough to have one cop on duty around the clock.
Eli stood in the dirt, perfectly still. He’d been trying to get out of Nickelback his entire life. When the family was desperately clinging to the last of the oil wells, he stayed around to help the old man work them, and to protect his mother from his drunken tirades. When they died, he spent nearly a year trying to make it work himself, and then took the job at Monarch. He told himself he’d work until he could save up enough to leave. Five years went by and he’d saved nothing, but he’d tricked himself into thinking he was happy with the way things were. And then, on a Friday morning, two weeks after his thirtieth birthday, he and Eddie, and fifty others, got told that that was their last day on the job. He’d felt cheated ever since. Screwed out of his twenties by fate, bad luck, and an oil company that couldn’t give a shit about him or anyone else.