The first thing to disappear was the back wheel. Not all at once. Not with a dramatic crack or a Hollywood splash.
It sank slowly, almost politely, into the black Missouri mud behind the old Red Hollow Bridge, as if the earth had been waiting fifty years for something expensive enough to swallow. The $1.8 million drilling rig had been crawling across the temporary access road since sunrise, escorted by three pickup trucks, two engineers in white hard hats, a county inspector with a clipboard, and a line of annoyed drivers backed up along Route 17. By 9:40 that morning, the rig was supposed to be across the creek and parked on the far ridge, where Keller Energy planned to begin surveying for a natural gas line.
By 9:52, it was stuck. By 10:15, it was sinking. By noon, every man with a college degree on the site had said the same sentence in a different way.
