by John Sayles
She’s got him hard beneath her now, into a rhythmic, gentle grind, with an eyeline to Scorch on the throne. She gives him a subtle nod, holds up a finger. Should be able to keep him on the edge for another minute–
“They asked me back,” says Tuck, voice a little strained. “The highway department. But what they’re paying–”
“They shouldn’t have let you go.”
Jewelle had been fired from her first job, a little dive in Wasilla with no dressing room and a circular bar around a cockpit where she’d peel her school clothes off and dance in bra and panties for fifteen minutes, having to sit on the floor and tug her jeans back on when the music stopped. The owner, who later did time, wanted her to turn pro and she wouldn’t so he threw her out and things got rough with her mother at home. She was glad to be rid of the place, but getting fired is never good for your ego. Owners are starting to ask her how old she is again, and it’s not because they’re worried she’s not legal.
She swivels again to face him, lifting off it long enough but not too long, and goes back to the slow grind, looking him in the eyes.
“This is getting me really hot,” she says. “Look what you’re doing to me.”
She knows girls who can fake all kinds of things, including some who aren’t really girls, but she’s the only one she knows who can blush on cue. It just takes a little imagination– what if this guy isn’t a pincher or a poker, a squirmer or a humper, a poor deluded soul so goggle-eyed over having a live woman who’s not his wife moving on his lap that he’ll believe anything, but somebody real. Somebody real who wants just her. She can feel the blood coming up her neck and into her face, Tuck out of words now, taking deep breaths and holding them, pretty flushed himself. There are men, probably lots of them out in the oilfields and here in Yellow Earth, who don’t go to strip clubs, who send their money home to their wives or save it hoping to meet somebody special some day, who don’t pay women to fuck them or dance naked for them or lie to them. But Jewelle, pepper spray in her pocket when she leaves the club, is not going to meet those men at Bazookas.
And if she did, what could she say, what could she do, that didn’t feel like part of the racket?
Tuck is just about there when Scorch’s meaty hand clomps onto his shoulder.
“Sorry, folks,” he says, “that’s all she wrote. House rules.”
Jewelle gives the bouncer a hurt look but swings off Tuck and perches on the arm of the chair, placing the palm of her hand on his chest.
“You’re not going to forget me are you?”
Tuck pushes up in the chair to make his erection a bit less obvious. “Can’t imagine how I’d ever do that.”
She kisses him on the cheek. Vic asks for a seven-and-a-half-hour shift and she’s only three into this one. “You’re a lifesaver in this crazy place, Tuck. Don’t be a stranger.”
Then Scorch swings the door open and the floor music crashes in.
“ARE WE GOING TO be rich?”
As after-doing-it questions from Connie go, this is not bad, with not nearly so many landmines to avoid stepping on as ‘Do you really love me?’
“We’re already pretty well off.”
“For the reservation.”
“For the state, hell, maybe for the whole country. I’ll get Doris at the office to run some statistics for you.”
“You know what I mean.”
The trick is to figure out where this is leading and head it off if it’s nowhere good. “We’ll have more money than we do now, sure. Cash money.”
“Like Beverly Hillbillies rich?”
“You want to move to Beverly Hills?”
“Stop.”
“And live next to some Kardashians?”
“Aren’t they like part–”
“That was Cher.” Harleigh starts to sing, softly–
“Half-breed, that’s all I ever heard
Half-breed,
How I grew to hate the word.”
“Stop!”
“You used to like my singing.”
“I used to drink.”
Harleigh has to laugh. Connie’s been sober so long she can joke about it.
She rolls her head on the pillow to look at him. “You think people will resent it?”
“Everybody in the Nation is gonna do well out of this.”
“But not as good as us.”
“Because I took some initiative. I told you, we’re not making it from the oil, we’re making it from the services company. And then the residences when we get them up.”
“Man camps.”
“That’s how you call it if you want to scare people. Like saying ‘Indian reservation.’”
“Lots of strangers in the community.”
“Oh, they’ll keep Danny and his people hopping, all right. Have to coordinate with Crowder, all the other county sheriffs. We got to hope they leave most of their trouble back in Yellow Earth.”
“The bright lights of Yellow Earth.”
“The lights are on their way, I guarantee you. So what you gonna do with your half of the loot?”
Connie punches him in the arm. “There’s things we could do.”
“Like what?”
“You know I want Fawn to go to school.”
“She’s in school.”
Harleigh surrendered and agreed to send her in to Yellow Earth instead of the rez school, not a great political move.
“I mean to college. “
“Where the work will be harder and the temptations that much tougher to resist. Fawn doesn’t want to be in a classroom anymore, honey.”
What Fawn does want, besides to ride around with cute boys and get high, is a lot tougher to nail down.
“Remember when she wanted braces?”
“Because of some character she’d seen on TV. She’s got perfect teeth.” Connie shifts the rest of her body toward him. A mess of coyotes set up their yipping outside, but it’s the wrong season for there to be calves to worry about.
“It’s all legal, right?”
Connie has the worried look now. One of women’s favorite occupations, thinking up troubles that haven’t even started yet.
“I got a Yale-educated lawyer says everything’s fine.”
“Lawyers go to jail.”
“Not less they get greedy and go into politics they don’t. As an enrolled member of the Three Nations I have the right to run any enterprise that is–”
“But you got an in with the Company.”
“I should hope so. That’s called business, honey. Ask Mr. Cheney.”
“Isn’t he in jail?”
“Not that I’ve heard of.”
“I thought he was supposed to be.”
“You’re getting him mixed up with that Watergate deal, honey. Look, anybody else on the rez wants to get into oil services, I’ll be only too happy to–”
“Like Phil Enterlodge.”
“I haven’t done one thing to block Phil doing business.”
“But you got all the Company jobs.”
“Because Brent and me got our act together.”
“And the Company figures to keep the Chairman of the Three Nations happy.”
You can’t say it’s not true, but if they didn’t deliver, the Company would drop them like a hot rock. You look at the big picture, how much the Nations will be taking in from the leases– anything he makes on the side is peanuts.
“They’ll be so much business,” he tells his wife, “Phil’s gonna do fine.”
Also true, but the look doesn’t leave her face. Connie won Miss Three Nations back when, but had to give it up after the driving drunk and without a license. As if Nora Hejdstrom who got the crown was any Girl Scout.
“I saw the boat today,” says Connie, looking up at the ceiling now. “Ship, whatever you call it. What’s it gonna be named?”
“I was hoping to call it the Hot Streak, but somebody told me you’re not supposed to change the name of a vessel once it’s been christened. Bad luck, which
we definitely don’t want tied to a floating casino.”
“It looks funny.”
“That’s cause only half of it’s here, Connie. The top will be shipped up separate and then they’ll put it together.”
“By your service company with Brent?”
“No, boat people that do it all the time. ArrowFleet is just gonna haul oil stuff around on trucks, do cleanup. I’m more worried about the legal end of the Class III permissions than if it’s gonna fit together and float or not.”
“If you’re gambling, what’s it matter whether you’re on land or water?”
“Jurisdiction. Get more than a mile out to sea in most countries and you can break out the dice.”
“And if you lose real bad I suppose you can take a dive and swim for the bottom.”
He laughs. “Not at our casino, honey. ‘Everyone’s A Winner.’”
“That is so not true.”
“Well at least I’m a winner. I got you.”
She eats that stuff up, Connie, knows he means it, but you got to deal it out a little bit at a time.
“So what’s it called?”
“What?”
“Your little ocean liner there. What name did it come with?”
They’ll have to make a story about it in the literature, explain the superstition, maybe even give it a romantic past of some sort. Reclusive zillionaire sort of a thing.
“Savage Princess,” says Harleigh, shifting his arm, which has fallen asleep under her. “It’s called the Savage Princess.”
IF THEY WANTED TO chanrge rent for the parking lot, something reasonable, most guys would be willing to pay. Ten dollars a night, even twenty, whatever. I mean here it is, it’s just empty otherwise, and they keep the floodlights on in any case. And the guys have been good about it, clearing out at least a half hour before opening time in the morning. Attention Walmart shoppers–
Buzzy has gotten used to the lights, used to rigs rumbling in and out all night. Plug the bunk warmer into the cigarette lighter, crawl into the rack and take off whatever you’re going to take off inside the sleeping bag, make sure the cell is powered up and within easy reach. Levi, in the Peterbilt he usually parks next to, got one of those diesel-fired cab heaters cost near a thousand bucks, got extra insulation, even got a cable TV hookup, but he’s from Green Bay where the weather is shit all the time. Like up here. Wind gets going at night it doesn’t just whistle, it shrieks, and it’s only getting colder.
Two bars on the phone, not bad, and he’s set the ring tone full volume. Three or four service outfits jobbing him in now, never know who’s going to call or when. Take this load here, drop that one off there. The GPS helps some but there’s not exactly addresses to aim at out in the fields, more like just roads with numbers and a derrick or feed silo now and then for a landmark. West Texas can be that way, roads so straight and featureless you got to fight not to zone out and drift off into the chaparral. Used to be if you slept in your truck in winter you were idling the engine to keep warm, burning up fuel and smoking up whatever lot you were parked in. Now these rigs with ‘hotel accommodations’–
Of course there’s a sight of difference between real sleep and just having your eyes closed while your mind keeps jamming gears. Tomorrow he ought to go inside the store– they must have some kind of stationery section– and get him a notebook, start writing down when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up. You want to average eight– okay, maybe seven– hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour day, or what’s that– fifty-six in a week? But laying in the bunk with the phone by your head, itching to ring–
Vern the night guy taps on his window and Buzzy rolls it down.
“Sorry to bother you,” says Vern, who’s getting the same Walmart minimum as the inside workers and has some asbestos damage in his lungs, “but I seen you weren’t quite tucked in yet.”
“No problem.”
“How’d you do today?”
“Fair. Traffic’s getting worse, and I get paid by the load, not by the hour.”
“Tell me about it. My twenty minutes ride into work has come to be forty. And then prices going up, everything but gas.”
“Hey, we can always drive down to Bismarck, right?”
The merchants got you over a barrel here, and if Buzzy wasn’t making crazy money it would piss him off. What the fuck, everybody gets healthy–
“I got bad news.” Vern has got that hollow-eyed look, gets out of breath just crunching across the snow from the store to the rigs in the lot.
“They gonna start charging us?”
“It’s over.”
At first he thinks Vern means the drilling, but that’s crazy, the amount of pipe and waste he’s been hauling, there’s no end to it in sight.
“They made a decision– I’m going to have to start clearing the lot at ten.”
“Who made a decision?”
“I figure it must have been the store and the city together. Worried about liability.”
“But we just park here and go to sleep.”
“Maybe the folks who rent rooms in town put some pressure on it.”
“They’re all filled up! That’s why most of us are here.”
Vern holds his arms out in a gesture of resignation.
“Where they expect us to go?”
“Any place you can find where it don’t bother nobody. You got the whole county.”
Good spots to coop are a hot topic in the diners and take-out places, but most are either full-up crowded or there’s signs been posted by the time you check them out.
“I heard about some guy got jacked out on Route 15.”
Vern nods sadly. “Yeah, there been some robberies. Mostly equipment when nobody’s around, but, you know, get a herd this size you’re gonna attract some wolves. Might be what the store is worried about.”
Buzzy looks out the other window. Maybe two dozen rigs, some pickups, couple passenger cars– an average night. Makes the place seem friendlier when it’s closed, less abandoned.
“When’s the order take effect?”
“You got till Monday. Tell you the truth, I’m gonna miss you fellas. Not much to do here nights.”
The other great thing about the lot here is the easy walk to Little Caesar’s or Doc Holiday’s Roadhouse. Pizza is the best workday food, easy to eat a slice at a time while you’re driving, and sit-down meals are a luxury, usually grabbed while the loading is in progress. When the weather’s not too bad he tries to roll with the windows down, suck some of the French fry smell out of the cab.
“If I was younger, and healthy,” says Vern, looking off toward the main drag, the usual nighttime parade crawling through town, “I’d be out with you boys, raking it in. I worked on the big dam, you know.”
Buzzy knows, he’s heard the story a couple times now, but an actual conversation up here is too rare a thing to get picky about.
“Just a pick and shovel man, wasn’t married yet, living from payday to payday. Jesus, we had some times.”
“I’m trying to hold onto a few bucks.”
“That’s the way to do it. If I’d socked away a bit more from them gravy days I’d be sittin in a lawn chair down in Florida somewhere instead of freezing my butt in this parking lot.”
Buzzy tries to make a deposit every couple days, with a surprising number of his jobs paid in cash, and a couple times it’s been clear he’s actually doing the work one of the regular outfits has contracted for and are just too busy to cover. Don’t want to be carrying a wad of the green stuff if you get hijacked–
Vern sighs, taps the side of the truck. “Well, I got to go spread the word. When you run into any of your brothers of the road, let em know.”
“Bye, Vern. Take it easy.”
There are some spaces up by the Fuel Stop north on the Canada road. There are warehouses you can tuck in behind at night, got security lights, though he’s been rousted from these more than once. There are motels, some of them thrown up in the last couple months and little more t
han shipping crates with water and power.
Or he could just forget about sleep.
DANNY TWO STRIKE LIKES to cross the Missouri at Washburn, then take the smaller roads that follow the river down, easing through Mandan on the west bank to the Fort. He rarely has business in Bismarck, and there’s nothing much to see from the highway unless corporate food and hotel chains fanning past give you a sense of warmth and well being. He remembers the first time they drove from the rez all the way to Fargo with the kids, Tavaughn being so excited to see a Pizza Hut– “Hey, there’s another one!”– and having to explain what a franchise was and just how off the beaten path they lived. He passes the refinery, then the little stretch of residential on Collins Avenue, aware of the river even when it’s not visible. He wonders if it might be something magnetic, like how geese migrate, because you can blindfold him, spin him around a dozen times and even if he can’t stand straight when you stop he can point where the river is, east, west, north or south, ever since he was a little kid. The Storytellers probably have one to explain that, or can make one up.
The guy at the park entrance takes a look at his car, what he’s got on as a uniform, and waves him through. Works with nearly everybody but the FBI. A tour of the fort is just leaving the visitor center, white-haired geezers and their wives eager to see the house General Custer and his Libby lived in before he left for the Little Big Horn. Danny did the whole thing on a field trip in junior high, mooning around an excitingly stacked period laundress who explained everyday life at Fort Abraham Lincoln, then teaming up with Nate Flies Away to torture one of the young docents dressed as a Seventh Cavalryman.
“My father took your brother’s scalp,” Nate said to the play soldier, who couldn’t have been more that twenty. “I’ll sell it back to you for five bucks.”
Nate, who pulled what they called a Dying While Intoxicated in the tenth grade, after he stole a Department of Transportation pickup and tried to make it do a hundred.
The woman behind the counter says Winona is at On-a-Slant Village with a school group.