by John Sayles
“This is really good, Ma,” says Thora. “Even if it does turn our brains into mush in ten years.”
The boys make zombie faces and noises till Bob gives them a look. He is okay for a white guy, maybe even more into the boys’ ‘appreciating their heritage’ than Thora, who has stated she’d just as soon skip the whole Native American thing if it has to come with a loser mentality.
And somehow Ma always gives her a pass.
“You must have your hands pretty full, Rick,” says Bob, steering elk nuggets to the side of his bowl. “How you bearing up under the invasion?”
Rick pauses a beat, in case Ma wants to fire the first volley, then plunges in.
“The most important thing,” he explains, zeroing in on his brother-in-law, “is to establish the principle, once and for all, that how we handle our land, our water, our mineral wealth, should be our business and nobody else’s. These oil and gas companies have learned to come straight to us without going through the state or the Feds.”
“So you’re the energy czar in these parts.”
Ma is busy sawing away at the bread, thin slabs clunking down on the plate. Hell, you can slice marble in a quarry with the right tools–
“Harleigh Killdeer, our chairman, is more like the czar. I’m the– what would you call the guy who sorted out disputes back in old Russia–?”
“Rasputin,” says Thora. She always creamed him at Jeopardy!, absorbing non-sports-related facts like a sponge and able to spit them back out when prompted.
“As I remember, Rasputin was a pretty negative character. I’d like to think I’m serving the People.”
“Serving them on a plate,” says Ma, buttering five-grain for the boys.
Rick softens his voice, trying to condescend without getting dinnerware thrown at him. “My mother,” he says, “believes the Spirit of the Shale Oil wishes to be left in peace. That if we drive the corporations from our land and stop eating Cocoa Puffs for breakfast the buffalo will frolic once again on the prairie.”
There are two photos of Ma in the living room, one with Joan Baez, who for the longest time he thought was an aunt or a cousin, and another a year later, right after Wounded Knee, belly swollen, about to pop with him, headed for jail.
“My son,” answers Theresa Crow’s Ghost, who in remembrance of treaties broken has refused to sign her name to a document since she made her mark on a marriage license thirty-six years ago, “has not only drunk the oppressors’ Kool-Aid, but has invented a brand-new flavor. It tastes like forgetfulness, with a hint of petroleum.”
Thora smiles at her husband. She has a beautiful smile, pure sunshine, which is how she got away with being ironic so long before it was in fashion. “Way too many Indians,” she says, “and not enough chiefs. No wonder we lost the continent.”
The main course over, Thora gets the boys started on an epic five-hundred-piece puzzle of Custer’s Last Fight she’s brought along– irony again– then retires into the kitchen with Ma and Charlotte to assemble dessert and talk gynecology.
“It’s all done by lease,” Rick explains to Bob the real estate salesman, “so no land actually changes hands. That’s key. People have been doing that for centuries here, renting out pasture land, crop land, taking a toll if folks hunt or fish on their property.”
“But the whatever– tribal entity– has to have some say.”
“We try to lay down some reasonable ground rules, looking out for everybody in the enrollment, even if they’re not lucky enough to be sitting on something the oil people want. Like the Tlingits, or some of those other north coast outfits, they’d have a sachem or a council of elders to regulate the haul when the salmon run started.”
“But salmon return every year.”
“Oil is just a resource, like any other, and when it’s all been pumped out, guess what? We’re still here, the land is untouched or reclaimable, the grass grows, the river flows. But this time the world pays us the going rate for what they take.”
“The going rate is dropping some,” says Bob. “At the pumps on the way here, I couldn’t believe we’re back under–”
The women reemerge, announcing strawberry shortcake.
“Isn’t it supposed to have that white stuff on top?” asks Caleb, frowning at his plate.
“Whipped cream,” offers Rick, who used to get to lick the beater bowl.
“And what’s that full of?” prompts Bob.
“Carcinogens?” ventures Isaac.
“Well, maybe not directly, but definitely a bunch of empty calories. Besides, it masks the taste of the strawberries.”
“You two have picked wild strawberries.” Thora is having the fruit with no shortcake, determined not to blow up the way she did with each of the boys. “With your grandmother?”
“They’re too young to remember,” says Ma.
“Red fingers,” recalls the first one, wiggling his in her face.
“We used to make dye from berries,” says Ma, using what Charlotte, when they are home alone, calls the ‘tribal we.’ “And we made it from some plants and flowers, from certain kinds of soil, from tree bark. You didn’t take color for granted, you had to work for it, you had to plan.”
“We used to do all kinds of stuff the hard way,” says Rick, who only accepted the damn environmental job from Harleigh to make his mother proud of him again, the way he’d enlisted during Desert Storm just to piss her off, and then never got deployed overseas. “We used to sit in earthen bunkers all winter breathing toxic wood smoke and ruining our lungs, and still nearly froze our butts off.”
The kids all laugh at ‘butts,’ as expected. Ma has gone into her trance, shutting down her face, absolutely still.
Whack the bottom of the ketchup bottle. One, two, three–
“But now we have oil and gas heat, we have cars that can drive us all the way from St. Paul, we have X-ray machines,” he adds, looking at his mother, a breast cancer survivor thanks to modern medicine, “instead of bark poultices and spirit chants. We have Nintendo–”
The boys look to their father, who shrugs, equally uncool–
“–and various other computer games that engage the mind and sharpen the reflexes. We have antibiotics. The world moves on,” he says, his voice gaining power the way Harleigh’s does at this point in the stump speech, “and if we have the courage, the will to move on with it, the sky is the limit.”
Ma sits back then and looks at him, hands folded in her lap, conceding this round for the sake of familial harmony.
“When Harleigh steps down or gets kicked out,” says Thora, pointing a forked strawberry at him, “you ought to take over this mess.”
WAYNE LEE HAS BEEN places, even foreign ones. Spartina has been to Fargo to visit an aunt and three times to the capital for school activity trips. Wayne Lee has done things, many of them daring, some even illegal. He has given her a picture of himself on a surfboard.
“That’s the point break at Rincón,” he told her. “What a day. Perfect sets, not too many barneys in the water, we were really killing it.”
Spartina has never seen the ocean. There is a ski resort just over in Mandan, but she’s never even been on a snowboard.
It takes them a while to get off of the 2, the main road through town always clogged with trucks now. Her grandfather complains about the noise from the rumble strips they’ve put in, but he’d complain more if the drivers blew through as fast as they’d like to. There are lines of cars and pickups stretching out from the lots of all the chain restaurants– Taco John, Arby’s, the Chinese buffets, Grandma Sharon’s Family Café–
“Most of these dudes,” says Wayne Lee as he turns his Camaro off onto Broadway heading east, “just cruise till they find the shortest line.”
“We get men who come in with take-out sacks and stick them on the floor to eat out of while they drink coffee,” says Tina.
“They’re just there to check out you and your fellow Java Janes. They’d drink carbolic acid to stare at a nice set of legs.”
“Our coffee is better.”
“Might be, but that’s not the attraction. Órale, putas,” he remarks as they pass a pair of bundled-up, short, dark girls talking on the sidewalk.
“What?”
“Working girls. They come up from Central America, follow the rigs.”
“You mean like streetwalkers?”
“If you had streets here to walk without being blown away by the wind, maybe, but it’s mostly online hookups now. I could show you how to make a date on that new phone of yours.”
Tina giggles. “I don’t want to make a date.”
“There’s even a special app you could download.”
“That’s really gross.”
“Human nature, darlin. Been going on since the caveman times.” Wayne Lee is wearing a Cabela’s cap and a down vest that are both kind of golden, to go with the Camaro and with his eyes. He shaves every day, unlike most of the oil workers who look like bikers or hillbillies with family feuds. She feels safe with him. Things have gotten intense in town– her grandfather says it’s thirty thousand new men who’ve showed up, an easy hundred to every woman– and just this afternoon at work a trucker with a beard like Noah in the church pageant offered to buy the panties she was wearing.
“What you want to do,” teased Wayne Lee when she told him, “is buy up a couple three new pairs, take the tags off and keep them in your locker or whatever you got in the back room there at work. Just wink and say you’ll have to go to the bathroom, then come back and slip him one of those you never wore. Easy money, and it takes the personal aspect out of the transaction.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“What do panties cost, anyway? The frilly ones? You want to think about your profit margin.”
She could never talk so easy about sex with any of the boys at school, and so far there’s been no– no pressure from Wayne Lee. He just seems to like being with her, being seen with her.
“Total ego trip,” he says. “Any guy steering you around looks like a winner.”
They’ve finally oiled the dirt road that runs past Jolene’s house, promising to pave it on the Company nickel to make up for all the wear and tear, but that hasn’t happened yet. The sheriff’s car, silver with blue and yellow stripes, is idling on the shoulder. Tina turns her face away as they pass.
“On the scout for outlaws,” says Wayne Lee, smiling. “Plenty of those in the mix here these days.”
He says he works for an oil service company but somehow is always free to see her, before school, after work, whenever she’s available. He took her out to Lonnie’s Roadhouse once, a half-dozen violently tattooed guys greeting him with complicated handshakes and checking her out. He apologized afterwards.
“Not the right room for you,” he said.
She’s had to tell some tales to her grandfather, has invented a school club she says she belongs to, surprised by how easy it’s gotten to lie to him. There’s barely a boy in her senior class he’d approve of, of course, much less somebody older and out in the world already. He does a lot of painting in the winter and early spring, shut in by the weather, big rectangles of the prairie the way it used to look. She’ll find him sitting at the easel with his eyes closed, not dozing but seeing, remembering.
“The cattle we had when I was a kid were more this color,” he’ll say, pointing to a small herd of brushstrokes he’s laid down near the horizon, “before everybody switched to the more commercial breeds.”
When they cross onto reservation land Wayne Lee pulls over and they switch seats. When Granpa still had the tractor and her legs were long enough to reach the pedals he let her drive it, so stick shift is second nature.
“Try to keep it under a hundred,” says Wayne Lee as she pulls back onto the road. There’s isn’t a thing moving in any direction but a pair of hawks that might as well be painted in the sky, hovering nearly stationary over the field ahead, hoping to get lucky.
“I can’t learn anything out here,” she says. “It’s all just straight lines.”
“This isn’t a driving lesson, it’s so I can look at you instead of the road.”
He says these things, Wayne Lee, that make her blush, and she can tell he means them.
“That’s it, darlin, pedal to the metal. Even if we get pulled over, my man Brent got plenty juice with the chief.”
His man Brent has been seeing Fawn, she knows, having sex with her somewhere while his wife is still in the picture. Wayne Lee has never suggested double dating.
It is fun to drive fast, drive fast in a car that was built for it, low and powerful and beautiful inside and out, with a heater that not only works but barely makes a whisper. Tina hits ninety and keeps it there, telephone poles whizzing by, Wayne Lee smiling slightly as he watches her.
“You think any more on what we talked about the last time?”
“Which was–?”
“You going to college.”
“You’re just like my guidance counselor.”
“I seriously doubt that. When do you start applying?”
“Pretty soon. It’s expensive, though. Some of the schools, the ones that are hard to get in? Just to file a application it costs like–”
“All the more reason to give it some real thought.”
“You didn’t go to college.”
“And I’m a pretty shady character. Any desire to join the military?”
“No.”
“Hustle for the Mormons in Tahiti?”
“We’re not Mormon.”
“Then what other ticket you got to get out of Yellow Earth?”
“It isn’t so bad.”
“Cause you never been anywhere better.”
“My grandfather wants me to go to school.”
“Maybe just down the road in Bismarck.”
“Anywhere that I want to go. That I can get into.”
“Well, good for him then.”
She slows and makes the turn for the lake.
“You’ll do fine wherever you go, Spartina, so make it count.”
She likes it when he says her full name, which used to embarrass her when Granpa said it in front of people, sounding old-fashioned and weird.
“Get yourself into one of those big outfits, kids from everywhere on the map. I used to hang on the UC campuses, it’s like the United friggin Nations.”
“You were taking classes–”
“Selling weed.”
She keeps her eyes on the road. He laughs.
“You can’t turn me in cause I already done the time for it.”
“You were in jail?”
He shrugs. “County farm. Had to get in with the Aryan Brotherhood cause of the whole gang thing out there. You think those characters we met at Lonnie’s were scary.”
“How long were you in?”
“Less than a year, seemed like twenty. Prison time, it’s like every hour is dragging a two-hundred-pound sack of shit behind it. In the work rooms they stillhad like the old clocks with the hands.”
“Analog.”
“Yeah, those. Watching that minute hand climb to the top like it’s friggin Mount Everest.”
“But you like California.”
He grins. “Hey, me and the Beach Boys.”
And then he serenades her with “Wish They All Could Be North Dakota Girls,” making up lyrics, till they get to the boat ramp.
The cruiser, or whatever you call it, is still sitting there up on supports, tarped over.
“The floating clip joint,” says Wayne Lee. “Except it’s not floating.”
“You don’t like boats?”
“Hobie Cat, sloop, Sunfish, sign me up. I rode in a Rough Rider cigarette boat with some Colombian dudes once, all it needed was wings to take off and fly. That thing”– nods toward the Savage Princess– “is just a toy meant for a very big bathtub.”
He undoes his seatbelt then, which is her cue to do the same. She loves the way he looks at her when they break to breathe, like he can’t believe sh
e’s really there with him. The rest, the surprising tongue, him touching her more intimately every visit together, his breath hot on her neck, gives her what Fawn always calls ‘tingles in the weewee,’ and this time he slips his fingers into the panties the trucker in Havva Javva wanted to buy, and after he makes her way more than tingle, another surprise, she realizes they’ve fogged themselves in with heavy breathing.
“Engine,” he says. “Defroster.”
He watches her turn the car on, work the heater knobs, and she knows she’s blushing again.
“You’re almost there, darling.”
“There.”
“Ready for the whole deal. But you’ve got to tell me.”
He’s never said he’ll come visit her if she goes to college, or how long he’ll be in town, or anything about them together beyond the next time he messages her on her phone. But his willingness to wait for her–
“There was a way the Indians– maybe not these around here, but some Indians– used to catch eagles. Like for the feathers? A guy would have himself mostly buried, laying on his back, out where they’d seen eagles hunting, and after he was all camouflaged up they’d stake down a live rabbit or prairie chicken right over his chest. He’d spend a day, maybe two, laying out like that, watching the hawks and the buzzards and shouting them away if they got too close, waiting, got to know that rabbit pretty good. Finally, some big old beautiful bald eagle would swoop down and wham!”
Wayne Lee snaps his arms tight around her.
“The Indian would just fold that big bird in, hug it to death, and they figured not only was it good for the feathers, which carried a lot of power in their ceremonies, but some of that eagle’s spirit passed into the man.”
Wayne Lee’s defroster works pretty well, front windshield first, then the sides and rear. When their condensation is nearly gone Tina sees that a car has pulled up next to them while they were making out, a red, sporty car with Fawn laughing in the passenger seat and Wayne Lee’s muscle-bound man Brent, smirking and giving them a thumbs-up, behind the wheel.