The Big Run-Off (Holden Burke #1)

Two

She led me down the hall and shut me into an oak-panelled office at the end of the east wing. The man at the other end of the room quickly ended the call he was on and walked his hand out like a prize-winning Pomeranian toward mine. He had a firm grip that pressed against the fine bones of my knuckles, and I could feel all the sun-beaten and age-withered patterns of his dark tan skin pressed with polite urgency against mine. 

'Holden Burke himself,' he greeted, his teeth stretched in a tight and prideful smile. 'Damn am I glad to finally meet you in person. You had one of the best forms I'd ever seen on any field, I'll say for damn sure.' 

I quietly thanked him. 'You're Mr Ramsey?' 

'Mitchell Ramsey. Damn proud to make your acquaintance. Damn proud. Sit down. Please.' 

He released my hand and I felt the rush of the blood spreading back down my fingers. 

Ramsey lit a cigarette and offered me one. I waved him off and sat in one of the brown leather chairs on the forward-facing side of his wide mahogany desk, waiting to see if he had any more 'damns' hiding around anywhere. 

'I'm sorry I didn't tell my housekeeper we had an appointment,' he said. 'She runs my house, but she moralises. I don't have too many staff, you can probably tell. I find them impeding.' 

He was tall, stretching up six-three or four, his mature silvery head and frosted temples hovering precariously beneath the ceiling. He had on a straight white dress shirt opened down from the neck, where I could see the surface of his peppered chest hair beginning to form, and with his sleeves rolled up to his heavy elbows. 

'Warm today,' he said as he took a seat opposite me. 'I can afford heat, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Reminds me of my first developments, out in this small hick outback down a whole day or two from any kind of civilisation. Sun all the time, never any clouds, and at night just the remnants of the heat trapped in the dust and the sand. Had to work all day in that heat, me and my partners, engineering our first wells and and getting our first investors lined up. Wasn't until later, years later, when it gave us enough to move outward. Then offshore. Then international. Then we were finally well-off enough to never have to think about the sun again.' 

'Well, you certainly seem well-off,' I said. 

It was a dumb thing to say, but he smiled and nodded without looking at me. His eyes were off, looking somewhere beyond me, faded somewhere into nostalgia. 

'Well-off—what does that really mean, after all?' Before I could try to answer, he continued, 'Petroleum is the only game in town where you can sell your soul but become a king in the process. You think any king had a soul? Well, they didn't. They could buy new ones whenever they ran out.' 

'How's your new model going?' 

He laughed. 'I haven't needed a new one yet. No, I'm not yet too old to feel like enough life has passed me by, even if I might look it. I'll have to lose a lot more of my money and a lot more of my time before that happens. In the meantime, I'm doing just fine as I am, well-off.' 

I made a polite sound. 'I reckon,' I said. 'I filled my car up on the way over here. I felt like I lost my soul just paying one fifty-three a litre.' 

'Progress,' Ramsey said quickly, as if he was waiting for the oppertunity. 'It may not seem like it, but it spells pure human progress. We started in the fields, all of us, pastoral. Then the industrial revolution shattered the earth and we became a society of manufacturers. Then we manufactured enough and could do nothing but turn into consumers. That's the end game: a civilisation of nothing but pure consumption. What was once the use has now become the value. We don't consume; we interpret. It's all nothing but semiotics now. We take what something means to us, not what it does to us. You understand me?'