Andrew Fedorov is Drifter’s editor-in-chief.

We’re bombing down the Wyoming highway, going well over a hundred. The six-foot-seven, tattoo-encrusted pirate spinning the wheel next to me keeps breaking open shooters. I come in for all the different flavors too. Cotton candy, blueberry, banana split, all undercut by the grain alcohol drip. The pickup shudders under the force of speed. I’m scared; belligerently, drunkenly confident. That confidence is all his. It’s infectious. He beams out the front windshield, eyes aflame with inhuman excitement. He’s humming to the tune of the truck, rumbling at gasoline velocity.

We swerve from lane to lane, not weaving, just intimidating everyone aside. Sunset is coming, we’re nowhere close to stopping. He turns up a country song. I watch flatlands disappear, mountains rise. Half an hour earlier, he’d found me with my thumb outstretched, dancing on the edge of an oil town. He’d roared past the fast food spots, the overfilled hotels, and the empty, monied nothingness. I’d felt like I had to get away from New York to clear my head, so I bounced around land art and ghost towns in the Nevada and Utah deserts and thumbed up to the forests of Montana and Wyoming. Now, I was hitching down to report a story about a treasure hunter who’d drowned near Colorado Springs as part of a Santa Fe art dealer’s tribute to the American Dream.

“Where you coming from?” I ask, snapping back to the pickup.

“Four months in the fields by myself,” he says. “That’s why I was so happy to see you. You’re the first fucking person I’ve seen. Haven’t talked to anyone in all that time. Drink?” he asks and fishes for a couple shooters from the pile in back, handing me one and holding one for himself. The other reason he stopped, he says, was ‘cause he’d done some hitchhiking too. “Man, I've been all over the world. These oil companies, they send you everywhere. They got me early. They got me when I was still a kid, when I was finishing up high school. I was just a good old country boy, then the oil men came. I was a good student, good at math and science anyway, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. They said, ‘we’ll not only pay for you to study, we’ll pay you $100,000 a year just to go to school, and when you get out we’ll give you $20,000 a week, as long as you find that sweet oil.’ I was a dumb country kid, but not dumb enough to say no to that.”

It took a moment to notice the desperate luxury of his clothes: Crumpled dress shirt hanging loose over a half-soiled tank top, LV belt ‘round unwashed jeans, Gucci sunglasses on a rugged face, Audemars Piguet strapped to an oversized wrist. I’m pretty sure I helped fact-check the fashion pages he’s aping.

“After four years, I get out and they ask me where I want to work. I met this girl while I was at school in Austin, so I tell them Texas. They put me in a field and I start making this crazy money. Soon I buy us a house, we get married, but she’s bored. So I put her through medical school. Now she’s a doctor. I see her every couple of months, and she wants me home more, but at least now she’s got work at the hospital. One day, she tells me we’re going to have a kid. I’m out in the fields when he’s born, but when I come home it’s incredible. Those two weeks are the best. I tell my wife, ‘Next time I get back we’re going to the Bahamas.’ Then I go off. For those four months, I think of nothing but my boy. When I’m cooking rice, I think about how I’ll show him how to put the dandelions from the fields into the pot with the rice, someday. When I’m out for a walk, I think about how I’ll show him all this. When I get back, she tells me she’s leaving me. She’s in love with some doctor at the hospital. ‘I put you in that hospital,’ I tell her and think of the other ways I could have put her in the hospital. But fuck it, I say. Let her be happy. I tell the oil company, ‘Send me anywhere. I don’t care.’ They have contracts everywhere, and all of them need geologists. So they send me everywhere, and I see the world. I don’t see my kid much though.”

“Fuck, man,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. They send me all over. They send me to Saudi Arabia, all over South America, they send me to Johannesburg. But I get bored in the fields, so I buy a boat. When I get a couple weeks off, I have my boat brought out to me wherever I’m at and I go sailing. The sea’s as lonely as the fields, but it’s different. I don’t feel stuck. I feel free and I let myself drift whichever way the wind blows. Last year, I’m out on my boat, off Africa, and I’m cooking up some real nice steaks, real expensive. And I’m whistling a good tune to myself, when I hear this ruckus outside. I know there’s not supposed to be any kinda ruckus out there, so I step out. This little boat putters up. There’s a bunch of guys holding some rickety looking guns in there. But they look surprised. You can tell I’m not who they were expecting on this boat. I lift my shirt a little bit, real casual, and show them my gun.”

“Do you need a separate license to have a gun out there?” I ask, ever the checker.

“Nah, it’s international waters, doesn’t fucking matter. Anyway, they’re looking at me, big old country boy, lots of tattoos. You can tell this isn’t how they thought this would go. They don’t want to fuck with me, but you can see a stupid kind of courage building up in them. I jump in before it becomes anything. ‘You boys pirates?’ I ask. One of them breaks his daze long enough to say, ‘Yes. We want your ship.’ I don’t miss a beat. ‘Yeah, alright,’ I tell them. ‘You can have the ship, but I’m cooking some dinner here. It’d be a shame for these steaks to go to waste. Why don’t y’all come aboard, we can eat, and then you can have the ship.’ So they do. We eat and we get good and drunk. We have a good time. At the end of the night, when they’re headed back to their own little boat, they turn around and tell me, ‘You’re alright.’ Then they start up their motor and putter off into the night.”

We’re running low on gas. We pull into a gas station and my mind wanders as he pumps gas and aggressively catcalls girls with a sedan at a neighboring pump. He grumbles about the lack of response as he climbs back in and we’re off again.

“I’ve been out here for the last while. First time I’ve been in the US in a long time,” he says as we speed down the highway. “Not a lot of good sailing in that part of Wyoming. So I sat in my trailer — I live in a trailer most of the time when I’m in the fields — and stared at these clear stars. I bought a powerful bike and took it around quiet back roads to see how fast it’d go, missed a trick and took a spill. If I’m being honest, I was pretty drunk. Don’t remember it too well. Probably a good thing. Luckily, I was next to a house and they got me to a hospital pretty quick. Otherwise, I’d be dead right now. Look at my face, it’s pretty much back to normal. Would you believe it was reconstructed only two weeks ago? The scars are almost gone. Money gives you superpowers, man. If you got money, pain doesn’t mean much for long.”

“I don’t know if I’d want that kind of money. Seems like, on balance, it’s not making your life better,” I say, really feeling the liquor.

“Once you have it, it’s hard to give up.”

“Does it make you happier?”

“Are you gonna say no to $20,000 a week? Fuck no!”

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Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu