Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Buzzy throws cold water on his face, mashes it dry with pull-down paper towels, and comes out to give the room a better look. Good number of truckers, some eating together, some that look more like salesmen or customer service agents. Road warriors. And then like the name says, there’s families, some traveling and some probably locals from Wherever, Missouri, this is. The big river is just off to the west for a lot of the trip up 29, but you don’t feel it much.

  Buzzy takes his time eating, orders pie for dessert, decides he likes their coffee better than what comes out of the machine at his neighborhood 7-11. The Beast is out there waiting for him, of course, but he’s hoping the tingles will shake out of his fingers before he has to go back to it. He’s forgotten that, and the vibrations in Terry’s rig aren’t near as bad as what he used to put up with, but it won’t let him relax. The waitress is blond and powerful-looking and friendly enough, though she’s always on the move. Now there’s a job he don’t envy. He watches her take the order from three fellas come in together without writing a thing down, and it’s not that short a menu. You figure the minute a table clears out she forgets who was sitting there, like traffic going southbound while you’re going north. You’d have to be a prodigious asshole or have a seizure or something to make an impression when there’s this volume of trade flowing through. Buzzy pays in cash and leaves a nice tip. That’s another thing to get done up there, get his credit situation straightened out. Terry has lent him his Fuelman card for the next three months and that should get him a toehold. Lots of situations, you walk in without plastic and you might as well have ‘Leper’ printed on your T-shirt.

  It is night when he walks out of the restaurant, moths the size of flapjacks flittering under the lights. Buzzy checks the straps again, fires her up, and hooks into the stream of ruby taillights flowing toward the Promised Land.

  There’s cloud cover and maybe rain coming and a crosswind that makes him glad he’s rolling with a low profile. Seen dry van trailers turn into sails in this kind of wind, lift the rig right off the highway. Night is different, especially with no moon or stars, just your headlights burning a tunnel in the black and you powering into it. Even when the lanes are full you’re more alone, more likely to get ambushed by your own thoughts.

  Buzzy tries a couple of his mixes till he settles on one Jessye give him last Christmas– ‘not that you deserve it, you sorry sumbitch’– a lot of different colored people singing about Jesus. After a bit the words, which can sometimes put him to brooding about Ma’s doomed campaign to make good Baptists out of him and Terry, kind of ease back and it’s the feeling in the voices that takes over, they sure can do that, the colored, and Buzzy feels tears running down into his stubble. Shit, he can’t be that tired. He’s met some truckers over the years who grease-gun their faith into every cranny of their lives, but they mostly been guys who fucked up way worse he ever done. Drugs you got to pump in with needles, prison time, violence, all kinds of heavy business. If Jesus really did lift them up he pert near got a hernia doing it. But, Lord, wouldn’t it be nice if it were like in the songs, somebody looking out for you on the highways and byways, a great good place to go to whenever you finish your Last Run. There was one old boy in Lubbock, name of Eugene when he was promoting the gospel, though the tat on the back of his left hand told he’d been known as Pit Bull when he rode with the Bandidos OMG, who did a whole rap about how he passed out after a party one night and woke up with his house afire. How Jesus had spoken to him personally, spoken softly despite the roaring flames and cracking glass, telling him which way to crawl through the blinding smoke and find the open window to safety. How that calm Voice had saved him, and how he, Eugene, who had been freebasing on that night and was probably responsible for the fire, had dedicated the rest of his life to serving his Savior. And he really meant it. But if Eugene hadn’t still been a scary, bullet-headed, no-neck pile of muscle somebody like Buzzy might have asked him why Jesus, while He was at it, hadn’t clued Eugene’s old lady and two kids in on the path out of the inferno. Slipped His mind? Wicked sense of humor? His eye was on the sparrow?

  Still, the singing is great, it lifts him, if that is possible, past the lights of Kansas City, on past Omaha, the traffic thinning out to a few lonely rolling islands following the thread of highway in the black night, Buzzy forgetting his own story, till a hard, gut-wrenching jolt of wind pulls him back.

  The boys in the yard had loaded the drill pipe for him, like always, looked fine to the eye, never a problem before. And he always made sure to check the cinch straps whenever he stopped, ratchet the slack off and keep the load bundled tight, only he was long-hauling on a schedule and hadn’t stopped yet when it happened. It was night, like this, not too much moving when the engine changed tone and he felt a little surge forward and then sparks and flame in the mirrors as near half of the eighteen-thousand tons of drill pipe he was carrying slid back onto the family in the VW Golf who’d just drifted in behind him. He got his rig off to the side and ran back and there was nothing to do for it but keep his back to the burning wreck and try to roll pipe off the road before anybody else crashed. He spent a night shaking in jail, and then there was people in uniforms grilling him till Terry come up to take over the rig and had a friend drive him back home. The TV at the truck stop where the friend stopped for a break showed photos of the family– Vince was the father, just home from the Gulf War, Natalie was the wife, and Melissa and Kimberly were the girls. Lawsuits like crazy, but none of them touched Buzzy, he didn’t even have his license suspended. Relatives went after the service company, where the real money was. The boys in the yard got fired, then hired on somewhere else within the week. The pipe got rounded up and delivered where it was meant to go. Buzzy had a hard time swallowing for a year or two.

  Precious Lord, take my hand

  Lead me on, let me stand–

  You want to believe that it’s just a thing that happened, an accident, and not part of who you are. You want to believe that nothing like that will ever happen again, at least not to you. But it’s never going to leave, it’s riding with him now, and all the dope in the world couldn’t chase it away. And that cocky kid who was before the pipe come loose won’t ever be again.

  When the mix is over he lets the night just be for a while, no soundtrack to try to fill it up. Somehow, creeping up on Sioux City, he starts trying to do the math about how much oil you got to burn through to put in a well to drill for more oil. How many truckloads of whatever, each trip burning diesel to and from, how much to drive the drill assembly a mile or two underground, how much do those gangs of pumper trucks they need for the fracturing guzzle, then all the trucks to break it down and move the pieces to the next pad. And how the whole deal rests on it– electricity, transportation, plastic the computers are made from, heat for the dumbasses who live up in the cold places. You work around the oil patch for most of your life and it seems like there’s nothing but that, that it’s always been and always will be. But then you figure all them cowboys that come before Henry Ford and how people still lived a full life, at least to them it seemed so. And what was it– horses and grass? Squeeze a little grease out of a chunk of whale and run a lantern at night? Shit must of fallen off wagons back then, too, logs maybe, and killed people. But it wasn’t so explosive. The Old Man did a whole demonstration for him and Terry and Jessye once, like he was the redneck Science Guy, on how it was only just a series of controlled explosions that moved the pistons that cranked the engine that made the machine roll forward. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom– a whole damn war going on in there just to drive around the block. Whereas horses are just born to run, natural, they like it so much they’ll do it with a tobacco-spitting hunk of cowboy and fifty pounds of Spanish leather piled on their backs.

  Not that Buzzy ever rode a horse.

  The night stretches on into South Dakota and Buzzy is really feeling it, taking deep breaths and popping his eyes and starting to talk to himself some. He’s never nodded off at the wheel a
nd he’s not about to goddam start on this trip. The energy drink don’t seem to be doing much for him, so he decides to think on something raw to get the adrenaline pumping, and that always leads to Tara Beth.

  So maybe she took the ‘in sickness and in health’ part to just mean the flu now and then, cause she sure bailed quick when he needed her support. And no, things weren’t a hundred percent before the accident, but compared to most guys he can think of he was a bargain. Didn’t slip around on her, if he come home drunk he just fell out on the couch without a fuss, paid the rent on time. But there was always some idea in her head, maybe from TV or the movies, of how it was supposed to be, and to that he couldn’t measure up. Always had that less-than-expected attitude, even when he’d take her out some place. And it wasn’t like she’d turned down any millionaires or People magazine Ten Sexiest Men to go with him. After a short while together they got to be Is That All There Is? on her side of the bed and This Is Life, Darlin, Get Used to It on his, and never moved off their positions. He could tell that being married was important to her, to how she felt about herself and how she was around her friends. It just didn’t have to be to him. And then one morning he comes home, fucked up, sure, but he never spent the whole night out before, not once, and there’s half the furniture and appliances gone, must’ve rented a damn U-Haul, and it’s written on the back of a shopping list she never got to the store for. I mean, five years of marriage, use a fucking clean piece of paper. You Know Why, it said. Goodbye, that’s all she wrote. She’d even took all the photographs and the video of their wedding party, like erasing that any of it ever happened. They’re always talking about feelings, women, but you got to have ESP or something to pick up on their moods, and when it comes down to the crunch they can cut you dead without a twinge of emotion. Let your guard down, show a little weakness, and they’re gone with the wind.

  Buzzy grabs one of his mixes at random and jams it into the slot, cranking the volume up as loud as he can stand. But it’s just noise, cause the only song he wants to hear, the only true one, is another from the Old Man’s era, Johnny Paycheck before he shot that fella and made his trip up the river–

  Take this job and shove it

  I ain’t workin here no more

  My woman left home and took all the things

  I been workin for

  Buzzy grinds through to daybreak, crosses the ND line and cuts west on I-94, and suddenly he’s got company. More flatbeds hauling casing. Three lowboys carrying thumper trucks with their extra wide tires. Thirty-ton winch trucks, tankers, a convoy with various pieces of drill rig dealt out between them, little knuckle boom cranes and their big brothers, coil-tubing trucks, fracking-pump trucks with their huge rusty muffler units mounted on top and Kenworths and Peterbilts and Freightliners and old beat-up Macks and by the time they all take the US 83 exit at Bismarck it’s a goddam army on the move, Buzzy getting his third wind from the energy of it all around him, till they slow to a crawl on the four-lane and he realizes he’s already late to the party. Just look at all these people. Twenty miles short of the Three Nations rez he sees a new painted sign for Gil’s Park ‘N Snooze by the side of the road, but it looks to be only some open space in a field, behind a row of storage containers with cots lined up in them. Be sleeping in the rig for a spell. Buzzy cranks his window down and calls across to the white-bearded character driving the drop-deck semi in the next lane.

  “Hey Buddy– it always like this?”

  “This time of day, sure. You new?”

  “Started up from Houston yesterday morning.”

  The old man lifts his Drill, Baby, Drill cap in salute. “Sonny,” he smiles, “welcome to the Wild West.”

  HARLEIGH PUMPS HIS OWN, then goes in to palaver with Chuck for a minute. Everybody’s business, personal and professional, gets hashed over at the station, so a visit here is basically a campaign stop.

  “Mr. Chairman! How they treating you?”

  Chuck is tall and amiable and has been here so long you can forget he’s not enrolled, not any part anything Native. He sells all the usual convenience store junk, accepts food stamps, and carried rifles till Elmer Reese killed his ex-wife with one he’d bought here.

  “I got a feeling we’re on a winning streak, Chuck.”

  Harleigh pays the amount on the pump in cash, adding some buffalo jerky to the tab. His new theory is that chewing it in the day will tire his jaw enough to keep him from grinding his teeth at night. His dentist in Yellow Earth, Dr. Goldschmidt, says if it works he’ll publish a paper in the ivory drillers’ medical review.

  “Yeah, I heard you’re about to be an oil baron.”

  “Not me personally, but it is about to get pretty lively around here.”

  “I seen some dozers and whatnot go by.”

  “Making pads for the drill rigs. You want to start the whole process absolutely level.”

  “So nothing rolls off the platform.”

  Harleigh smiles. Chuck comes to the open meetings even though he doesn’t have a vote, takes an interest. After the Elmer Reese thing he joined up with the Domestic Violence ladies, helping at the shelter.

  “Figure this– let’s say when you start drilling down you’re a quarter-inch off plumb,” Harleigh explains, indicating a diagonal with his hand. “Now you go down two miles.”

  “That far?”

  “Sure, if that’s where your hydrocarbons are hiding out. Imagine how far that wrong angle has taken you from your target.”

  Chuck pauses, trying to do the math in his head. “You might be off the rez altogether, tapping into somebody else’s oil.”

  “They done a good deal of that on purpose, back in the old wildcatting days. Slant drilling. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, did I suck up all your oil? How careless of me.’”

  “Must have been some uneasy neighbors.”

  “Believe it. Lots of little wars were fought. But nowadays they send a tool down the hole, it’s like the GPS on your phone, tells you the exact angle your drill pipe is set at.”

  “So you go straight down.”

  Chuck gets busy opening boxes of cigarettes with a cutter. He’s good about not selling them to minors, most of the vendors on the rez are, but the kids got much worse habits than tobacco. Just in the rack in front of the checkout counter there’s enough sugar and grease to stop an elephant’s heart.

  “You go straight down till you penetrate the shale layer,” says Harleigh, “and then you start to deviate your angle, inch by inch, till you’re moving horizontal through the rock.”

  “That part is tough to imagine.” Chuck arranges packs and cartons on the shelf behind his counter. Harleigh’s father burned his lungs out smoking Old Golds, which you don’t see around much anymore. His father would quote the catch phrases while he lit up– ‘Made by a tobacco man, not a medicine man’ and ‘It’s a treat, not a treatment’– and swore he needed them to ‘get the gunk out’ from his lungs. His lungs which failed him so young.

  “I mean I get it how a plumber’s snake can bend sideways in the trap under a sink,” says Chuck. “But that far beneath the ground–”

  “It’s not just pipes and pumps anymore, Chuck, it’s science. Space-age stuff. Once they gone as far horizontal as they want in a couple different directions, they hit that shale with a jolt of water at high pressure– it’s got two miles’ worth of weight piled up behind it to start with– and it makes these cracks in the rock, where the oil bleeds out and runs back into the pipe.”

  “No wonder I’m pumping it for four dollars a gallon.”

  “Oh, it’ll go down some, Chuck, once we start rolling. But never so much it won’t pay to drill here.”

  “So I should be getting ready for a lot more traffic.”

  “You’ll get a workout,” says Harleigh as he exits, with his jerky in his shirt pocket, “just keeping your beer cooler filled.”

  There is a white fella at the pumps with a two-gallon plastic gas container he’s just filled, staring out at the empty prairie. Har
leigh doesn’t see another vehicle anywhere.

  “You hitch to get here?”

  The fella turns– late twenties, buff, starting to bald a little but has got his hair short enough you don’t notice it so much.

  “Walked.”

  “Filling stations can be few and far between out here.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Which way you parked?”

  The young man points west and Harleigh nods to his pickup. “Get in,” he says. “I’ll run you over.”

  So Brent Skiles, that’s his name, puts the jug of gas in the bed and they take off across the rez, Harleigh knocking ten miles per hour off his usual speed so the kid doesn’t get the wrong idea.

  “I feel like an idiot. Not only do I run out of gas, but I leave my cell phone at the motel so I can’t call my wife to come get me.”

  “Vacation?”

  “No, actually, we’re up here scouting business opportunities, and I thought I’d take a look at your three tribes here.”

  They pass some of the little, low government housing, concrete rectangles with the usual debris of life spread out on the yards around them.

  “How you like it so far?”

  “People been awfully friendly. I expected they’d be– I don’t know– like more– “

  “Hostile?”

  Brent grins. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it?”

  “I’d venture that historically, unless you were a Sioux warrior who made a wrong turn somewhere, this is one of the least hostile communities you’d ever stumble across in North America. Not many places you get three different tribes, different languages, different cultures, can manage to iron things out enough to function as a united front.”