Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “Fella’s got emergency room written all over him,” said Diz on the guy’s first tour, and Hightower, the tool-pusher, has told them to take it easy on him till he knows his asshole from the annulus, which might just be never. The pretenders before him all left the field with concussions or mashed fingers or that rash that looked like raw hamburger, as if anybody could be fucking allergic to oil base.

  But they are making hole and Hurry hasn’t screamed at anybody all morning, and it’s neither cooking them on the metal deck or freezing them with that Canadian dick-shriveler wind they know is coming. The hole is a gassy son of a bitch, of course, one nasty kick while going through the top shale layer that had Hightower on site for half a day reading gauges and Gleason throwing kill mud down the hole, but that’s always a sign the well is likely to pay off. You draw your check the same whether it does or not, but nobody likes humping pipe into a disappointment.

  Drilling, even in this soft stuff that cuts so quick, is a pretty relaxed rhythm, entire minutes where there’s nothing weighing a couple tons swinging around trying to decapitate you, time to scratch your nuts or fart or ignore the NO SMOKING signs plastered everywhere. Dizzy has the new worm tending what little is needed with the mud pits, and Hurry won’t invent jobs that don’t need doing like some drillers you could name, while Tulsa keeps all the machinery roaring and screeching. Good rig so far, for one of the better companies. Some of the shit they’ve seen thrown up on this patch looks more like a set for an OSHA disaster tutorial.

  Tuck climbs onto the platform, safety mask pulled down around his neck, blinking and coughing.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to dump it into the hopper all at once?” says Tulsa.

  “Lot of dust.”

  “Which you just huffed into your lungs. You take a shit tonight, it’s gonna come out like a hunk of lead.”

  “What do I do next?”

  Tulsa sighs. This is the fourth roustabout hopeful this month. “You remember where you put that shovel?”

  “I do,” says Tuck. He’s not a kid, with good focus, a willingness to work, and no oilfield skills whatsoever.

  “You remember which end of it you hold onto?”

  Tuck just waits.

  “Follow me– we got some trenches need digging over by the tanks.”

  Mike and Ike are veteran floorhands, pushing twenty-five, not related though constantly taken for brothers. They hire out as a team, were both wide receivers for their high school teams, which met in the state Class 5A quarterfinals in McAlester, both drive ramped-up GTOs and rarely utter a sentence unrelated to pussy or its many permutations.

  “I think we getting close here,” says Mike, eying the few joints of drill pipe left on the rack. “This bitch about to pop.”

  “Bout goddam time,” Ike agrees. “We been givin her the shaft most of a week now.”

  They are blond, still thin and rangy, dancing around each other and swinging the huge orange tongs in place with never a bump or a stumble, chain flying within inches of Ike’s head when Mike throws it singing around the pipe, imperturbable even wet-tripping in a windstorm.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” says Mike, centering the end of the next joint over the mousehole, “but a man gets tired of screwing the same damn patch of ground.”

  Tuck tries to remember to bend his knees as he digs. He dragged the new-bought coveralls around the yard a couple times and had Francine wash them without soap the night before he started, but still looked like a model from a Carhartt catalogue when he reported for work. Three days on the job and they look just like the other hands’ gear, dirt and oil ground into the fibers, hanging wet against his skin. The driller hasn’t let him any closer than the edge of the platform yet, so what he’s learned about what goes on there is off shaky You-Tube videos, but he’s starting to get a handle on circulation. He had no idea of the amount of energy involved with forcing fluid in and out of the hole, water thickened with clay and chemicals and who knows what to cool the drill bit and push the cuttings up the outside of the drill pipe and do more mysterious things while it’s down there, a specialist named Gleason consulting data in the doghouse and sampling what flows out from the shaft to determine just what and how much of it to add, a range from weak tea to brownie mix pumped in from the tanks and something similar flushed out into the mud pits to sit till the cuttings have dropped out, the liquid waiting to be refortified and recycled through the system. New water comes in regularly on tanker trucks, and Tuck is clueless as to where it all comes from or where it goes to live when it’s too fucked up to reuse anymore.

  Somebody else’s problem.

  Tuck’s problem is getting through the tour without wrenching any part of his body so bad he can’t show up the next morning. He’s tried going to bed extra early, lying there trying to discover a joint that doesn’t ache, but even with decent sleep seven-to-seven is a long day, the sheer relentless noise of the whole operation like an assault on his soul.

  Tuck stabs and lifts, stabs and lifts, not sure what the ditch he’s digging from here to there is supposed to drain and it’s clear any question he asks at this point will be considered a dumb one. “Pay attention, do what you’re told, and stay the fuck out of the way,” was the extent of his orientation from Hightower, and he is doing his best to follow that advice. Hell, if he was dropped into Francine’s classroom and told to explain North Dakota history he’d be just as lost– every job takes some breaking in. But these oil-patch characters are like a cult, got their own language, their own sense of humor, know what to do before it needs doing. The pay, if he can stick for a month and be taken on as a full-time hand, is through the roof, and he’s never seen guys hungrier for extra hours.

  “Food sucks, nothing to fuck, nothing to do,” one of the twin deckhands, Ike or Mike, immune to the charms of Yellow Earth, told him. “If you ain’t asleep you might as well be getting paid.”

  Upshaw flushes the hole and shuts the pumps off at something over ten thousand feet and confers with Hightower in the doghouse, the bit cooling to await their decision. Time for lunch. Mike and Ike, Tulsa, Dizzy and the new guy sit on a stack of planking by the pre-mix tank, eating what they’ve brought. The Okies both have steak and cheese sandwiches prepped at the man camp where they’re staying, and decide to fill the worm in on the big picture, passing the baton so quickly that Tuck loses track, if he ever really had it, of which is Ike and which is Mike.

  “Your average toolpusher got a lot of decisions to make.”

  “There’s finesse involved in the process.”

  “–cause out here stimulation happens after drilling–”

  “–so you start with your entrance-hole diameter–”

  “–which best be able to accommodate the gauge of your tubular–”

  “–and then you’d better evaluate the downhole environment–”

  “–particularly important if it’s gonna be a deflocculation–”

  “–and keep an open mind while you’re still just spudding in, cause the deeper you go, the tighter it gets.”

  “–so you just keep screwing away at that bore hole–”

  “–controlling your rate of penetration–”

  “–unless you’re off dumping into a Golden Throat hopper–”

  “–which is a whole nother job description.”

  “Always sure to have your BOP–”

  “–that’s a blowout preventer–”

  “–linked into the process. Don’t wanna spritz off before it’s time–”

  “–well-site fluids sloppin all over the place–”

  “–and then when you’re coming out the hole–”

  “–you’re gonna know, see, whether this deal is gonna proceed to pump–”

  “–or it’s just another P and A–”

  “–that’s Plugged and Abandoned.”

  “Any questions?”

  Tuck waits an appropriate beat, deadpan, then asks the difference between a mousehole and a rathole, and they begi
n to hope he makes it through the week without permanent bodily injury.

  Hurry Upshaw comes out from the doghouse to holler that they’ll stop drilling at this depth and send the diagnostics down, so the whole string has to come up.

  “Here’s where we find out,” says Ike or Mike to the new guy, “whether we gonna fuck this bitch sideways or not.”

  Tripping out. Pipe is flying out of the hole, Ike and Mike twisting off three-joint stands that Dizzy, safety-strapped up in the crow’s nest eighty feet from the rig floor, plucks from the elevators suspended from the top drive and tucks into the monkeyboard fingers, the new man guiding the bottom end, twelve thousand pounds of steel tightly racked into the stand as the string comes up, up, up, Diz leaning out from his belly-buster cable, jerking his head in rhythm to Anthrax blasting from his boombox hung from a derrick strut and loving it, top of the world, a real-life Spiderman pulling down thirty-five smackers an hour. Hurry is an artist with the draw-works and you can’t hear him curse or yell up here, even without the music going, Mike and Ike are double-teaming the connections, and from the top you can see Tulsa over fixing a shale shaker and the north-south highway and two sorry-ass farmhouses and at least eight other rigs in various stages scattered around the horizon. The Bakken is rockin’.

  The sky above and the mud below, thinks Dizzy. Rack em up and keep the fluids coming. Hurry Upshaw makes more money and gets to push the buttons and yank the levers, but drillers have to stick with the hole pretty much 24/7 and answer to the toolpusher and the Company and deal with flakes like himself who get off on the circus-act part of the job. Dizzy has only ridden the Geronimo cable down once, during a mandatory safety drill, but it was so much fun he’s tempted to quit the derrick that way all the time. They hit a couple doglegs coming up, something shifted inside the hole that snags a joint, but nothing that doesn’t hoist free. There is a kind of music to the procedure, a rhythm, and it’s always a little bit sad to have to return to Earth. The top of the stack is only swaying a little bit in the wind today, no clouds in sight, and he can’t think of a place he’d rather be. Down time is tough, though, nothing but scruffy deckhands with deep voices shuffling around you in the cafeterias and public rooms, the awkward calls to home, the generic high-plains-nothing of a town if you do bother to drive in. Girls waving their titties at him just make him lonelier, and you don’t want to strap into that derrick climber still wrecked from the night before. But tripping out in decent weather is as good as it gets.

  The stands stack up one by one and the sun dips, getting dark earlier now, just a few fingers above the horizon when the cable outfit arrives and starts unloading their gear. Tuck is running on fumes by the time the bottom hole assembly finally comes up, Mike and Ike pulling the drill bit and collar off the bottom of the last stand, barely space left for it in the rack. He teeters on his feet, not comprehending at first as Mike and Ike pass him to leave the platform, as Dizzy starts his descent from the crow’s nest, that this tour is over. He’s survived again. Other men clang up the metal stairs as he wanders toward them and he feels a sudden pang of jealousy.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” shouts Hurry Upshaw to the arriving crew. “Do not fuck up my hole.”

  RUBY WISHES IT WASN’T in the Three Nations’ office. Even the casino would have been better, and maybe more appropriate, given the way she feels about Skiles. But as many times as she’s explained to the Chairman how important it is to keep reservation business and his new private venture absolutely separate, he insisted on the signing being on his home court.

  “If he was bringing more cash to the table, I might feel different,” Harleigh told her this morning with a wink. “But as it is, a little reminder that we’re not exactly equal partners in this thing isn’t a bad idea.”

  She’s laid all the paperwork out on the desk, called Rick McAllen, who is a notary, in from the next room. Two new pens, one black ink, the other blue. The Chairman loves a ceremony, but thank God he hasn’t insisted a photographer be there to immortalize the occasion.

  “Articles of Organization, then Operating Agreement, then your Application for Name Registration,” she says. “Three copies each.”

  The LLC is Skilldeer, and they’ve chosen ArrowFleet for a trade name. Nice moniker, and Harleigh has proudly showed her the logo. She at least got him to go the limited liability route instead of a straight partnership, convinced him that no, she couldn’t be registered agent for the company, and they’d have to hire a third party off the rez. Tougher to get him to agree to personally pay for her hours on this, twice having to threaten to stand down as counsel for the Nations. “We need a firewall here,” she told him, “cause this has got conflict of interest written all over it.”

  Not that the Chairman hasn’t thrown his own money into the tribal pot a few times when the Feds have been slow with payments, not that he hasn’t finally appointed and hired good people to run the casino. It’s just that he doesn’t think white people have to put up with regulations too, that this is all some special form of harassment.

  “Lookit all this, Brent,” he says to Skiles, eying the stacks of forms. “Like they heard we got hoop dancers over here and want to see how many they can make us jump through.”

  Skiles is wearing what look like expensive workout clothes and is squeezing a tennis ball as if to crush it, constantly switching it from one hand to the other.

  “They want that tax money, Chairman. Lord forbid we make a dollar and they don’t get their thirty cents of it.”

  Harleigh won’t have to deal with the S-corporation rules at tax time, and if something goes wrong, his ranch, or whatever you call his setup there, and other personal property can’t be attached. It’s all gone so fast she’s only had time to make sure there really is such a person as Brent Skiles, who indeed had a service company in Texas and owns some trucks. She thought of asking Danny to get one of his county sheriff cohorts to do a background check, but it seemed a little aggressive. Just cause she doesn’t like the guy–

  Rick is just behind the new partners, crimping next to their signatures with his notary seal.

  “Ought to work with one of these,” says Skiles, wiggling the tennis ball. “Does wonders for your grip.”

  “His grip is just fine,” says the Chairman. “All that practice pinching pennies.”

  Ricky is a CPA and did accounting for the Nations, stepping in twice a day to warn about overruns, before Harleigh shifted him over to Environmental.

  There will be a few on the council to wrinkle their noses over this. Rick’s mom, Teresa Crow’s Ghost, for sure, Danny, maybe one of the others not sitting on a deposit. Most of the drivers for ArrowFleet will be enrolled members, of course, and they’ll gas up on the reservation, saving a bit of sales tax. ‘I preach entrepreneurship every damn day of the week,’ the Chairman has told her, ‘the least I can do is provide a good example.’ And yes, the white companies out there wouldn’t blink to cut the same corners. Business is business.

  “These go to the secretary of state for processing,” Ruby tells them. “But as soon as your DBA comes through you can at least start making bids.”

  Two of the companies drilling on reservation land have already promised to subcontract ArrowFleet for some of their hauling, and she’ll have to ask one of the others to please hire someone else, Phil Enterlodge maybe, to keep up the pretense that there’s competition. The Chairman will never withhold a permit because a driller won’t book his drivers, she’s sure of that, but Skiles makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She’s never run into a wolf in the wild, even back home when she was a girl, but she imagines you get the same edgy feeling.

  Harleigh signs his declaration of personal assets, turns to shake with his new partner. Skiles stuffs the tennis ball into the pocket of his track pants and pumps the Chairman’s hand.

  “ArrowFleet is on the road!” he crows. “Let’s make history, buddy.”

  SUBJECT A, REAR QUADRANT

  OB/D (ogling behavior, demonstrativ
e)

  Body parts employed: Torso, head, facial features, hands

  On departure of acne-scarred but passably nubile teenage waitress, Subject tilts head sideways in exaggerated manner, eyes fixed on hindquarters of aforementioned overworked service person, attempting to bug them out in imitation of gawking cartoon wolf, lips forming the tight circle of a ‘W’ (as in ‘Wowser!’) while flexing both hands forward, fingers and thumb slightly curled as if to cup her callipygian wonders within them to administer a hearty squeeze. Enacted in conscious display for the benefit of Subject’s cohorts.

  Subject B, rear quadrant

  MG (moronic guffaw)

  Body parts employed: Lungs, diaphragm, glottis

  Reacting to cohort’s gesture, Subject makes loud, plosive, braying vocalization accompanied by expulsion of minute droplets of popular mass-produced hops beverage that spray well beyond subject grouping to next table, eliciting AS (annoyance stares) from several males.

  Subject C, rear quadrant

  GF (genital fondling)

  Body parts employed: Left hand, package, facial features

  Also regarding barely legal hashhouse underling’s posterior, Subject reaches below to briefly palpate entrousered penis and testicles, while narrowing eyes and pursing lips in a ‘wincing’ expression, meant to indicate lustful appreciation rather than pain or discomfort.