Sam steps out of his dented gray Civic and watches the dust plume and then settle across his tennis shoes. His car is splattered with grasshoppers, their spiny legs and pulpous insides smeared across the windshield, hanging from the grill. Sam wishes his wife had come with him. Maybe then she’d have agreed to keep the ranch. Except nothing looks how he remembers.

Squinting into the sun, everything is faded. The grass is sparse, ready to snap. The house is wilted, wood planks fissured, paint peeling and bleached a sallow white. There was more life here when Sam and his brothers ran across the fields, dug fossils from the arroyos, listened to Grandpa’s voice echo off the Caprock’s cliff walls.

Sam walks towards the ranch house through stiff grass and around the lawyer’s hulking Dodge Ram. Sweat drips into his eyes. At least the air still smells the same, still strong with the rotten-egg stench of oil wells. A stranger would think the land is simple. Smells without undertones. Colors in a narrow line: tans and browns, rusty reds and grassy yellows. A stranger would say they’ve found nature’s stoic heart, a land for quiet men.

Except Grandpa had never been quiet. He had a shotgun voice and a graveled laugh. He told gargantuan tales about kingdoms of sharks and about Mary Justice who snuck away to kiss a boy on the last day of school and ended up locked in the janitor’s closet. No one found her until her bones tumbled out with the mops that next Fall. Grandpa said if you went to the school late at night, you could still hear her screaming.

There’s no school now. On his way to the ranch, Sam drove through what was left of the town, never more than a dot on the West Texas map. A post office, a general store, a schoolhouse — all turned skeletal from neglect. When Sam arrived at the school, he thought it had survived. Then he realized only the walls still stood, the roof gone, the inside charcoaled. Outside, the playground slumped into the dirt, the merry-go-round fallen from its base, the monkey bars rusted and missing rungs.

Sam reaches for the ranch house’s copper door knob, gray-green and coarse to the touch. He hasn’t been here in twenty years, not since his parents moved the family to Virginia. On their final morning there, after a midnight storm, Sam and his brothers followed Grandpa down to an arroyo, white rocks sprouting from the mud. “A dollar for every shark tooth you find,” Grandpa said, lowering himself into the shade of the Caprock’s wall, the cliff stretching high above.

Sam and his brothers scooped up handfuls of the heavy mud, pulling out anything black and pointed and sticking it in an old snuff tin. Grandpa told them the whole world was once a sea and the sharks had built huge cities where all the animals flourished. But they angered the sun by hiding beneath the waves, so the sun dried up the oceans, leaving the world as we know it today. The Caprock was the old city wall of an underwater kingdom. The teeth were all that remained of the sharks.

“My grandpa always preferred the sun,” Sam says as he steps inside the darkened ranch house, the afternoon light following him, shining through a mist of dust.

“I would have met you at a restaurant,” the lawyer says, rising from a wicker chair, the only piece of furniture that remains in the living room. Sweat beads along the lawyer’s brow and runs down the sides of puffy pink face.

“This works,” Sam says and takes the papers out of the lawyer’s fat hands. He spreads the forms across the Formica table in the kitchen, puts his initials where the tags tell him to. He pauses at the line for his final signature.

“This is still my Grandpa’s ranch,” he says.

The lawyer wipes the beads of sweat off his upper lip. “We’ve discussed this.”

Sam holds the lawyer’s pen, light between his fingers. He wishes he’d brought a more substantial pen, something that would weigh down his hand, force the ink to the page. “Have you been out to the school?” he asks the lawyer.

“I’m just down from Lubbock.”

“Did you know it used to be haunted?”

The lawyer straightens a little, rubs the folds of his neck. “Lot of stories from around here, I’m sure.”

“It lost its roof. What do you make of that?”

The lawyer shrugs. “I’d say you’re lucky to find a buyer in a town without a school.”

“That so?”

“Yes sir.” The lawyer leans in. “Didn’t you tell me you needed the money?”

Sweat pools along Sam’s lower back. Outside, a scrub-jay caws, its song a sharp bleat. Sam thinks of his wife, wishes she’d come along, wishes she could have seen this place. Even at its end. She might have liked it.

He lowers the pen to the paper. Signs his name.

The lawyer pats Sam on the shoulder and snatches up the papers. He nods once before walking out of the house

Sam waits until the rumble of the lawyer’s truck fades and then he moves away from the table. He wanders through the house. The bedrooms are bare. The kitchen cupboards are open and empty. The sun cuts bright lines down the wall where the plaster has come away. Sam wonders where the old snuff tin went, full of a dozen shark teeth, black points like thin arrowheads. He lowers himself into the wicker chair. The sweat drips down his cheeks.