A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal

in local banks, and made a pile during the boom; he built refineries on the Arkansas and completed the Booker Tower in 1926. The penthouse was intended to impress and flatter clients from out of state. I even found a priceless newspaper clipping, from a 1926 edition of something called the
Chicago Herald-Examiner
, that included a photograph of our very bed, in black-and-white.
    The building still housed Booker Petroleum. Today Adrienne’s aunt Lydie, the same one who had gone to my college and whose garage Adrienne had burned down, worked downstairs, occupying the president’s office. But we never saw her; we lived upstairs in a kind of elysium, or afterlife. In a cloud.
    “Let’s go down,” I once said to Adrienne.
    “What?”
    “Just wander the halls,” I said.
    “Oh no,” she said. Adrienne wanted nothing to do with Booker Petroleum. To the point that she revered it. It was a polished edifice, a memorial to the past. Gracefully acknowledged, and never to be desecrated—a reason to keep up appearances, at most. I don’t think Adrienne really imagined her aunt did much, down there. There was no itch: Booker Petroleum tempted Adrienne neither as a lever of power, nor a source of resentment, nor even as a possible fate.
    To a kid growing up in Tulsa in the 1980s, oil did seem very abstract. Every September, entering the fairgrounds, I passed between the legs of the Golden Driller, a statue who stood four stories tall, his concrete hand resting on a decommissioned oil derrick, his cartoonish boot the size of a small Japanese car. And I remembered that every Christmas my Galveston grandmother would sit me down so we could look at the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog together. She had no sense of envy; she wanted to instill in me a sense of awe—I remember best the children’s pages at the back of the book: an actual floating pirate ship for children, or preassembled Legos made into a life-sized knight and a dragon. But this was nothing compared to the stories my grandmother told about the boom times. Apparently in the sixties Neiman Marcus had his-and-her pontoon planes you could order, baby blue and pink, as if you were going to barrel into the sky like lovebirds the day you struck oil.
    The oil refineries always occupied the opposite bank of the river. No one had ever explained to me how they worked—they were just a snake pit of detail that I pored over as a teenager standing with my bike on the pedestrian bridge, wondering what was important. I remembered an issue of
National Geographic
my dad kept, from the ’78 oil crisis. Tulsa was on the cover, an aerial photograph of the refineries, lit up like a metropolis at night. In bright spots you could see the petroleum works illuminated, leaving dark reaches, I assumed the oil drums, in reserve. But I didn’t know.
    Adrienne showed me a videotape of her one parent—Rod Booker. “He lives in Rhode Island,” she told me. In the video, Rod comes out a screen door, and stands in profile while it slaps behind him. He’s a big bearded man wearing rolled-up khaki pants and an XXL black T-shirt. You can’t tell what he’s looking at: he seems to be looking away out of shyness, and when he finally turns and confronts the camera, it’s like he’s trying to stare it down almost. And it stays on him.
    Then he turns again, and the camera pans and follows him down to the surf.
    “That was my first movie.”
    Adrienne had wheedled a video camera out of her father when he left Tulsa. She was twelve years old and promised she would “use it to come visit him.”
    “Are you going there at all this summer?” I asked.
    “I only went there that once.”
    I was a little shocked. Soon I requested the video again.
    “Why do you want to keep watching the Rod video?”
    “Boys have this thing about the girl’s father.”
    She snorted.
    Adrienne had never been anybody’s daughter: Her biological mother, a Frenchwoman who spent American grad school on New England sailboats,