Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Leia only eats at the diner if her spot is available, in the front left corner, back to the room but able to observe it in the mirror. To cut down on hardtail intrusions she always wears her UC Boulder sweatshirt with the hood up, as if the draft from people coming in the door is bothering her. She has not been hit on this much in her life, and considering the sudden male/female imbalance here and the blunt and primal nature of most approaches, it is not flattering.

  Subject D, front right quadrant

  GC (gesturing with comestibles)

  Body parts employed: Hand, arm, vocal apparatus

  Subject, in between bites, continually waves uneaten portion of double bison burger, dripping copious gouts of house-special BBQ sauce, simultaneously chewing and vocalizing in an insistent monotone, never returning food item to rest on the plate it was delivered upon.

  Subject E, front right quadrant

  N (nodding), C (cutting)

  Body parts employed: Head, neck, hands, wrists, fingers

  Subject nods head in continuous affirmative display, meanwhile manipulating impaling and cutting utensils to divide cooked food item, possibly a ‘chicken fried steak’ (gravy makes specific identification impossible), into smaller and smaller sections.

  It is imperative, of course, to distinguish behaviors from mere states, such as the mindless stupor the guy with the frighteningly large belly at the near end of the counter has lapsed into, staring slack-jawed into space over the remnants of his stuffed pork chop and smashed potatoes, exhausted from his shift perhaps, or merely rendered semi-comatose by the energy-sucking process of digestion. And when assembling an ethnogram it is important to avoid rushing to hypothesis without constant and ever more focused observation. Mental snapshots (or in this technologically enhanced age, video recordings) of a subject’s activity, taken at five-minute intervals, must be compared to the field results of other researchers, must be placed within a broader context, before they may be interpreted as typical of a species. Just because the present customers appear to be a herd of belching, loudmouthed, nut-scratching yahoos (as they appeared to be yesterday and the day before and the day before) does not preclude the possibility that some unnatural setting or circumstance has exerted an undue effect, like caged bonobos at the zoo.

  Leia picks at her Weight Watchers’ Special, which involves cottage cheese and iceberg lettuce, and writes into the scan sample book at five-minute intervals, hoping the appearance of work and concentration will discourage any roughneck able to see beneath the hood in her reflection and ascertain that yes, she possesses human-like features and a vagina. If the hood comes down they always say something about her streaks, having to do with Cruella De Vil or various woodland animals and leading to they are really sexy and would you like to see my truck? It is illogical, perhaps, to wear your hair in a style not commonly seen locally if your purpose is to remain unnoticed, but perhaps it will eventually work like the coloration of the ladybug (Coccinellidae), whose black spots on shiny red carapace and vile taste mitigate against predation. Stay clear of the one with the yellow stripes, she imagines the verdict, she’ll bite your head off.

  But eating alone back in her room or in the rental car has its limits.

  Subject F, front left quadrant

  OO (obscenity overload)

  Body parts employed: Wrist, right index finger, vocal apparatus

  Subject, close but only partially visible, spews a colorful and highly detailed vocal account of recent drill rig interactions using curse words as nouns (‘As if I give a shit’), verbs (‘trying to fuck me where it hurts’), adverbs (‘he’s got to be fucking kidding’), adjectives (‘the cocksucking kelly drive’), what the Catholic clergy label ejaculations (‘Holy fucking shit on a shingle!’), and, when euphoniously desirable, as an expletive infixation (‘For-fucking-get about it’), accompanied by an insistent thrusting forward of the right hand index digit toward his cohort. An EPM (expletives per minute) score of twenty-three was registered, twenty-eight if euphemisms such as ‘Hershey highway’ and ‘choking the monkey’ are included.

  Subject G, front left quadrant

  RG (ruminant grazing)

  Body parts employed: Hands, wrists, fingers, maxillary and mandibular musculature

  Subject relentlessly chews mouthfuls of coleslaw and chicken fingers (anatomically improbable but ubiquitous on regional menus) with an expression of slight perplexity on his face, as if the over-masticated food might provoke a thought or even a response to his cohort’s obscene screed.

  Her room, in a private house formerly occupied by elderly cat-lovers, comes with kitchen and bathroom privileges, a parking spot out back, and a view of the now nonstop traffic on the main road through Yellow Earth. The owner insisted, before the boom exploded, on a one-year lease, which he is now trying to break– smaller rooms are now going for three times the rate. Solo field work is often a challenge, with difficulties of language and culture, inclement weather, local mistrust or even sabotage of long-term studies. But this has been a special kind of hell, what was meant to be a year of quiet observation turned into a kind of furtive survival test at the edge of a combat zone, a bait-and-switch no more expected than finding Bobby Fisher (a Nabib tiger snake and particular favorite of her boyfriend’s) coiled in her underwear drawer back in Boulder.

  Then He comes in.

  Pretty much true to pattern, ten of two, heading straight to the counter. The height, the walk, the slightly haunted look, the casual but professional glance around the room.

  Subject H (for Hunk)

  LG (looking good)

  Body parts employed: I can’t get past the eyes.

  Subject sits on counter stool and removes hat before speaking to waitress (97 per cent of other males present eating with lids still affixed, with the logos of college and professional sports teams, heavy equipment manufacturers, or beer brands most common on their crowns). Swivels to observe room after making order, as previously observed, wearing badge but without gun (more often termed ‘pistol’ or ‘sidearm’ by militaristic local hardtails).

  There is always plenty of display in the diner, but so far no overt aggression–punching, biting, clawing, assault with eating utensils– while she has been inside. Maybe he keeps the gun locked in his patrol car, the one she keeps a hopeful eye out for whenever she’s on the road. The one she fantasizes will stop one day as she is watching the coterie, the Sheriff coming over to sit on the hood of her Ford Escape and get to know her.

  It doesn’t seem judgmental, his gaze, or censorious, just a mildly interested inventory of the players in the room, always crowded now with pre- and post-shift workers scarfing down their meals and leaving piles of crumpled cash behind, putting the waitresses through twenty questions and tipping big. Leia’s cyberstalking has come up with only a name– Will Crowder– and so far no wife or children, just some mentions as arresting or investigating officer, some high school sports triumphs further back. He looks to be what she hopes is no more than ten or twelve years older than she is, broad at the shoulder, narrow at the hip, and surprisingly soft-spoken, at least the one time she got close enough to hear.

  His eyes connect with hers in the mirror for a second, no more than that, then move on. He has a pair of sunglasses hung on his shirt pocket but doesn’t wear them in here, hiding nothing.

  The trick with an ethnogram is in dividing up what can be only a partial and possibly random record of behavior into a meaningful pattern, all in an attempt to know the focal organism, to understand how it will likely react in a given situation, to understand its passions and priorities. The most common downfall is, of course, projecting assumed or desired motives onto the individual, what Professor Blake called ‘wishful narrative.’ One must remain alert but detached, observe and record without seeking order or connection.

  But he looks like he might be nice.

  THE WIND OUTSIDE MAKES the aluminum sides of the data monitoring van boom and pop. One of the techs offers Harleigh a pair of earplugs.


  “I’m used to it,” he smiles, holding up a hand.

  “Really, put them in,” says the tech, who has his own already in place. “We haven’t started yet.”

  It feels more like being in Mission Control for a shuttle launch than anything to do with drilling. Hardhats hanging on pegs on the wall while their owners, wearing communications headsets, sit at data screens droning information to the rig hands outside at the valves and connections, Randy Hardacre standing behind to orchestrate the whole deal. Harleigh’s head nearly touches the ceiling as he crowds back into a spot where he hopes he won’t be in the way.

  “Pressure check,” says Randy, and the men at the screens call out numbers for their pump groupings.

  Harleigh has been watching the frack spread come together, unavoidable, as it lies between his house and the tribal office in New Center. It was fun to see the progress as the drilling rig was assembled, Harleigh invited to say a few words before they spudded in the first rez well, using the extra-wide bit to cut into the soft ground. The working of the drill string was pretty much what he’d seen in movies– roughnecks building stands of pipe then lowering them into the hole, cranes swinging more pipe around, no way to know if it was going a hundred feet down or two thousand. Then– it seemed like it happened during lunch one day– the rig was gone. Nothing much happened for a week, Harleigh seeing a coyote sniffing around the pad, and then the new armada arriving, first to widen the flat area around the hole, then the positioning of the tanks, and then the water trucks, a steady rumbling procession of them that backed up onto Route 23 from time to time.

  Today the spread reminds Harleigh of the painting he has of bull bison standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle to defend their cows and calves from a pack of wolves, only these big beasts are all facing inward toward the wellhead. Dozens of frack pumpers with only inches between them, clustered in a row and backed up to the rear of an identical group, hoses snaking between them. Chemical storage tanks, sand trucks, frack blenders, a phalanx of water tankers, the monitoring van sitting in the lee of some serious tonnage in case something blows loose when the pumpers throw down in unison. Driving up and seeing it he felt like there had to be a rocket somewhere, ready to be blasted off to Mars.

  Randy Hardacre frowns at something he is watching on one of the screens.

  “Okay, back off, everybody. Bring them down.” He points to a readout. “We’ve got to swap this one out, Larry.”

  Larry gets talking with his people outside, and the other techs sit back to wait for the valve to be replaced. The geologist comes over to Harleigh. Harleigh has read all the literature, feels like he’s got a pretty good handle on the process, but must look like he needs some reassuring.

  “We’ve got a hell of a lot of protection between your aquifer and our operation here,” says Randy. “Surface casing– that’s steel pipe encased in cement–then production casing inside of that, a couple different diameters with more cement around them.”

  “Kind of like a fella wearing three condoms.”

  Randy smiles. “And for the same reason. To prevent the migration of fluids.”

  “Don’t want any of that. So when you pump the water down–”

  “It’s more like a kind of goo by the time we mix everything in to send it down. But yeah, we’ll go through four, five million gallons of water just on this well.”

  “And when it comes back up?”

  Harleigh has walked around the lined pit they dug for the drilling mud, wondering how long the sludge or whatever will sit there, whether birds will want to land on it or not.

  “Well, we recycle it as much as possible. But eventually– ever work in a fast-food joint? You can only dip so many fries into that grease before it gets brown and funky, then you got to throw it out and start with a fresh batch.”

  “And what you throw away–”

  “We don’t throw anything, not since the mid-’80s. We’ll produce something near a barrel of brine water for every barrel of oil we pull out of here. In Pennsylvania we used to ship it to Ohio, but unless our friends up here in Canada want it–”

  “Not likely.”

  “It’ll sit in the spoil pond here till we can truck it or pipe it to an injection well.”

  “Those Class II jobs that cause all the earthquakes.”

  Hardacre gives him a tight smile.

  “Seismically not very likely here. You don’t have the granite substrata where it can cause trouble.”

  Harleigh shrugs. “Folks keep asking me if something’s going to blow up.”

  “Sorry, nothing we do is that dramatic.”

  Larry calls over to say they’re ready for a new pressure check, and Hardacre returns to the row of computers.

  Harleigh has gone over the injection sites he okayed on the rez with the EPA and the state people and Teresa Crow’s Ghost’s posse, with her son Rick right there, flipping the charts for him. Doesn’t look like anything can go wrong if the Company can just get the stuff there without any spills, but you’d think the reservation ground was Teresa’s backside and anything you put on it or poked into it capable of making her jump. None of the founding spirits– First Coyote or Lone Man or Woman-Who-Never-Dies– bothered to make any electrical power or diesel fuel, but people act like it just magically exists for them to use. The wind, okay, that was set up back in the First Times, but you still got to throw up a row of those giant pinwheel things and run a lot of cable to get anything out of it.

  “Let’s bring the pressure up,” says Hardacre to his techs, “nice and easy.”

  A noise that is not the prairie wind starts to build then, and Harleigh pushes the rubber plugs into his ears. It grows and grows till it’s like the world’s biggest helicopter has landed on the roof, cranking its rotors and shaking the planet. Randy bends down, pointing to readouts on the various screens, talking close to the ears of the technicians. Then the noise begins to back off, retreating to a constant but bearable level.

  “That’s it?” Harleigh says, aware that he is nearly shouting. Hardacre smiles.

  “First step. We just cracked that section, now we send in the proppant– we’re using sand on this job, but sometimes it’s little pieces of ceramic.”

  “The cracks are only that big?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a huge network of them by now. We go back along our horizontal drill shaft, close off a section, blow holes in the pipe for the frack gel to go out and the oil to come back in, working our way back to the vertical hole. The smaller the area we’re hitting, the more pressure we can put on it.”

  The racket is building up again, and Randy mimes to Harleigh to cover his ears with his hands. The lady at the clinic in Bismarck who tested his ears said hearing loss at his age was mostly due to shooting guns, listening to rock music, and being around loud machinery. Well now I got all three he thinks as he presses his palms to his ears. He has a picture in his head of the fracturing gel racing down the vertical pipe like a giant fist in an old Popeye cartoon, making a quick undercut loop when it hits the angled tubing and speeds horizontally into WHAM! a block of black shale that shatters like ice under a sledgehammer. And then starts to bleed, oily black blood seeping through every spidery crack until it fills the pipe and starts to rise toward the surface. He’ll ask the Company if they have a cartoon like that he could show to the schoolkids and the worrywarts, one that is clear about just how far under the surface, how far beneath any of their USDW– underground sources of drinking water– the whole operation is.

  Granpaw Pete used to tell the creation story about how the First People lived underground and sent somebody up top to take a peek and see how nice it was, but only half of them made the choice to come up and live on top– ‘so remember you got plenty of kin percolating beneath your feet.’ Pete was one of the Storytellers and always had a posse of anthropology students following him around with tape recorders. He said he was at the very last okipa ceremony, remembering torchlight in a big earth lodge and men hanging from cords wedged be
hind their chest muscles. Or maybe he’d just heard about it. He had a way of looking through you that could give you goosebumps, and was said to have dreamed the flooding of the good land thirty years before the Army Corps of Engineers made it happen.

  There is a moaning outside, a wail louder and mournfuller than any he’s ever heard the mighty prairie wind give out. It’s the pumper turbines all going full tilt at once, thinks Harleigh.

  Or it’s Granpaw Pete.

  “IT’S NOT LIKE I won the lottery, dude,” says Brent. “It is a fucking lottery. There’s just over four hundred elk licenses this year and like twelve thousand guys applying, plus if you’ve struck out before, your name shows up more times– the more years you signed up and whiffed, the better your chances.”

  “But you nail it on your first try.” Wayne Lee drives the Camaro like he always does, like it’s a fucking stock car race.

  “Not only that, I got an ‘any elk’ tag. Two-thirds of the guys who scored have to whack something without antlers.”

  There’s a light rain and some wind, typical funky Dakota weather, but the forecast has it clearing up. Wayne Lee already has the orange vest over his camo outfit.

  “So this Okie from Muskogee–”

  “He’s from Drumright, west of Tulsa, and he’s looking to stick a dozen wells on the rez.”

  “And you want the service contract.”

  “At the least,” says Brent. It’s been a bitch setting this all up, feelers out to ranchers in the E 2 unit, non-resident permits for Mutt Miller just in case they run into a game warden with a hard-on, salting the mine far enough ahead of time. He needs Wayne Lee for a buffer, make it all seem like guys just out having fun. “What I want is for Mutt to go away convinced that nothing happens unless I put in the word with Killdeer.”

  “So he depends on you.”

  “So he sweetens the pot a little. Maybe puts me in for a percentage of one or two of the wells.”