CALICHE Written as an original screenplay. All characters and events depicted are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental. FADE IN: EXT. I-10 WEST OF SAN ANTONIO, LATE AFTERNOON Flat country. The sky takes up two thirds of the frame. In the lower third: blacktop, the white line, and a decade-old Ford F-150 doing a steady seventy-three in the right lane. The land on both sides is scrub and rock and dry grass gone the color of old newspaper. A hawk sits on a power line post and watches the truck pass without moving. COLE DRYDEN (57) drives with both hands on the wheel. He is lean in the way a man gets lean when the last ten years have been mostly work and mostly alone. His face has the settled quality of a person who has stopped arranging it for other people. There are two gray lines at his temples that were not there four years ago. On the passenger seat: a real estate agent's business card. A manila folder of county property tax records, paper-clipped. A water bottle, empty. His phone, face down. Cole does not look at any of it. He drives. A billboard comes into view on the left side of the highway. The billboard reads: VARANO ENERGY. POWERING WEST TEXAS. BUILDING TOMORROW. Cole's lane is the right lane. From the right lane, the billboard is behind his left shoulder. He cannot see it. He drives past. The billboard recedes. The land1