“Sam shoved the butt of the rifle between his arm and his ribs. His eyes, as they moved down to the lever, caught a glimpse of the reflection in the window. His loose white shirt clung to his skin. Stained in black and frayed at the corners in splotches of a deep red. Thin, fleshy tendrils leaked maroon as the stains sprawled in odd fashion downward. In a clean motion, his hand—colored dark and matted with layer after layer of dirt, grime, blood, and oil—cycled the action open. The round ejected out, clinking as it danced across the metal workbench. Glints of light cut the air. He repeated the movement. Three more rounds were ejected from the rifle. Each bullet he used was deducted from his pay. ”
Samuel Ward, the protagonist of The Oakmont Project novel, is an aging farmhand caught between family, work, and a massive California wildfire crawling it’s way north out of Arizona.
Sam grew up in a working class family where poverty was known, but not understood. No matter how hard his parents worked, they remained poor. His father, a veteran of the Iraqi War, fell hard into the bottle—a result of his time fighting in the Middle East, living in the rural Oakmont Valley, and the hardships he himself endured as a child. His father’s alcoholism eventually translated to violence. Knowing if she did not leave them that she would eventually end up dead, Sam’s mother fled in the dead of night. His father and the violence that would come after a night of drinking was now his problem to deal with.
As an adult, we find Sam cold and isolated from the town of Oakmont. Even now he cannot forgive them for turning a blind eye to him when he was a child and would show up to school with a broken nose or a fat lip. Instead, he only confides in his wife, Isadora Ward, vowing never to be anything like the man who raised him.
Following the wildfires which decimate the surrounding Valley, Sam must confront his demons and come to terms with those who pretended to care, but cast their gaze away from the bloodied child.