by John Sayles
She throws the Camaro into reverse, does a quick 180 and is back on the highway. Fawn has never kept a secret for more than five minutes in her life. But then, for whatever reason, Tina thinks of the intersecting circles they use to demonstrate sets and subsets in math. Her grandfather lives so far removed from any loop as to be out of the equation. Her heartbeat begins to decelerate–
“They must have come to take a look at that boat,” says Wayne Lee, grinning.
IT ISN’T THE CLEANEST fraternity house he’s ever been in. Getting out of Yellow Earth was extra impossible this morning, the water-truckers wise to the side roads by now, the dirt one he tried to duck them on almost impassable in the downpour, so he’s late. Gene, who he wishes he could hire to absorb malcontents at the office, is already at the cleared table working motor skills with four of the more tractable residents when Prescott comes in.
“You missed breakfast, Mayor,” says the counselor. “Justin’s got kitchen duty.”
This is a big deal, his son pitching in at the group home. The years of therapy and specialists, breakthroughs and regressions, from that first ‘severely affected’ diagnosis at the Ann Carlsen Center to the decision to place Justin here in Minot, have led to this triumph.
Kitchen duty.
The squat little Hispanic woman who cooks the first two meals nods to him, scouring egg from a giant skillet in the sink.
“Good morning, Justin,” he calls, putting some cheer in his voice.
Justin looks at him, goes back to organizing the breakfast plates. This too is progress, after the early years where they thought he might be deaf, the long period where eye contact was received as intrusion if not threat.
The Home has a set of Fiestaware in all the colors, and Justin first rinses the plates in like-hued pairs before slipping them into the dishwasher in the same order. He has a dramatically negative response to odd numbers, to imbalance, so the counselors set an extra, unoccupied place at the table whenever the diners come out short of even.
“I was in the neighborhood,” says Press, sitting in a chair out of the way, “and thought I’d drop by to see how you’re making out.”
Phyllis comes twice a week and Prescott every other Saturday. He tells her it’s so Justin gets more visits, but really it’s that the way she talks to him like he’s still four years old is impossible to be around.
“You’re looking good. Like you’re getting outside a bit.”
Justin is not a fan of the great outdoors, too many uncontrollable stimuli, but the counselors take them out en masse if it’s not pouring like today. Justin is clean-shaven as always, doing it himself these days with the electric razor Press bought him, right half of his face, then the left. He wears the same outfit he settled on as a boy– tan chinos, solid-color blue shirt buttoned to the neck, white socks and Hushpuppy loafers. Once Justin had finally stopped growing, a couple years ago, Phyllis bought ten pairs of the shoes in case Hush Puppy should ever go out of business or discontinue the style.
He looks normal.
“I got murdered in traffic getting out of town. This drilling thing– you wouldn’t recognize downtown these days.”
Or approve, physical change one of the many banes of Justin’s existence. Phyllis has kept up the rocketship wallpaper in his room for the always stressful holiday visits, has kept several pairs of chinos and a half-dozen blue shirts hanging in his closet. Once she tried to teach him to play checkers, but he kept snatching the jumped pieces and putting them back where they started. The set lies on top of his dresser in his room here, black discs on red squares, red on black, symmetrical. He likes the pattern.
“So good luck to me, trying to ride herd on all these new people,” he says as Justin begins to separate knives from forks, forks from spoons. “You can push things through the council, you can meet with the Company reps and make as much noise as you want, but finally the law says folks are allowed to make their private deals. That’s the free market, that’s America.”
He’s not sure if the cook understands any English, and wonders for a moment if she might be somewhere on the spectrum as well. She goes up on her toes to hang the huge skillet to dry on a wall hook, then leaves the room.
“I like to tell the hotheads who come in to holler about some little regulation we’ve passed that steps on their toes, nibbles at their profit, to think of what would happen if those NFL teams took the field and there was no rules, no refs? Just get the ball and put it over the goal line, the hell with out of bounds, holding, illegal blocks and tackles, all that concussion protocol. There’d be fatalities is what, and the beer companies sure as hell wouldn’t be buying millions of dollars worth of commercial time to peddle suds during the slaughter. I mean, what would happen to the game?”
Justin begins to load the segregated silverware into the washer. One of his favorite things at home was putting all the loose change into those paper bank wrappers. If there weren’t machines to do it at the mint he’d have a job.
“So it’s kind of like that old Dick Feller song– ‘Making the Best of a Bad Situation.’”
Prescott listens to country in his car, Phyllis to fucking Jimmy Buffett in the house, and Justin to nothing, till a friend of theirs bought him a little folding-case record player, already an antique, and a stack of 45s. Out of all those records he locked onto “Yellow Submarine,” playing it over and over, the yellow and orange swirls on the label going round and round on the turntable. The one attempt to interest him in the flip side, “Eleanor Rigby,” induced Justin’s noise, somewhere between a grunt and a cry, and a bout of spastic wrist-flapping.
“Maybe the idea that I ever had control of it, even before the oil, is just kidding myself. I mean what with crazy national politics, mass media, even the damn weather like today– you can’t strong-arm that stuff on a city government level. So this tidal wave that’s hit us, well, maybe here in Minot they were a bit more prepared, been dealing with all those men from the Air Force base for years, but it’s just swept over us. The best I can hope for is to maintain a little decorum within the city limits, try to hit the Company people up for something that’ll still be there when it all washes away. And believe me, there’s never a boom without there’s a bust. Gonna be a hell of a mess to clean up when they’re gone.”
Justin measures dishwasher soap exactly to the line in the plastic cup, pours it into the compartment, closes the door and hits the proper buttons. He’ll stand before it now, watching the digital timer count down thirty-five minutes till the symmetrically arranged load is done, then pull everything out in his preferred order and put it away. When he was little and you took something from him, that damn Beatles record for instance, he would make his noise and keep staring at the spot where it had been, just staring for five or ten minutes. Prescott has had time to understand the logic of his son’s mind. This is what I can handle, this much and no more will not terrify me. His own life as mayor is such a minefield of decisions to make, situational hats to put on, performances private and public. His own life is exhilarating and unpredictable and will put him in an early grave.
You come here because you should, because you’re the father, not because the young man acknowledges you or desires your company. Sometimes when Phyllis left them home alone together Press would give Justin a roll of bubble wrap and leave him in the next room, able to concentrate on work or watch a TV show with the constant pop, pop, pop reassuring him that the boy was safe and content. He’d take it away and hide it when he heard Phyllis in the driveway, Justin left staring at his own hands, thumbs poised to press the next plastic bubble.
“Anyhow,” he says rising, “it’s great to see you doing so well.”
He knows not to try to hug his son. That had been the hardest for Phyllis, a baby who struggled to disengage from her arms, his indifference or aggression as a little boy. Justin would throw things, not at anybody or anything, but throw them, and hard.
“Your Mom will be by on Tuesday.”
Prescott leaves the sack of toiletr
ies with Gene and runs through the rain to his car. The other day counselor, Maurice, is out with a couple of the hardier residents making a wall of white-jacketed sandbags around the yard. Press has to set the wipers full speed and turn his headlights on, the sky darker now than when he left Yellow Earth. By the time he crosses the 16th Street bridge the Souris is flowing near up to the concrete, men in yellow-striped vests pulling barricade sections from a van, ready to block it off.
There’s going to be a flood.
BULLETINS FROM THE BLACK STUFF
Everything’s coming up hydrocarbons!
The Bakken boom’s up to 4,697,000 barrels of oil this month, an all-time high, with sixty new rigs spudding in and now over a thousand wells producing.
Crude oil prices are rising, rising, rising from February’s low of $35 for Texas Intermediate to a more-than healthy $79.89 per barrel. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling processes continue to be refined, which forecasts increased efficiency and $$$$$ for investors.
Regular gasoline holds at $2.64 at the pumps, but Americans are heading back to the highways.
Carpe oleum!
THERE’S NOTHING BENEATH THE surface.
That’s what Brent says, and with all the oil people he talks to, including some of the scientists, he should know. So it’s theirs for a song, fourteen acres, and he wants the house put up on the highest spot, though it’s hard to tell where that might be.
Bunny follows him and the builder, who has come over from Montana or he’d cost more, as they make a circuit around the staked footprint of the house. They’re moving fast, Brent so excited these days, she’s never seen him more full of life, enjoying his success, and she’s listening hard to throw in a little caution if his ideas start spiraling out of control.
Just a little caution.
“The thing is,” he says, “I need this to be more than a house. It needs to be a statement.”
He’s said that to her a dozen times, though never explaining exactly what statement it will be. The builder is saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh” a lot and nodding his head, but it’s clear he’s just waiting for Brent to get to something specific, something that can be turned into boards and stone and glass, which is when she’ll get to throw in her plea for some normal spaces. Brent has read that book about the crazy architect so many times he probably thinks he could sit down right now and whip off a blueprint for something that would amaze people, that they’d drive for miles to see and take pictures of. But of course he said the whole point was to give them some privacy.
“Like living in a fishbowl,” he keeps saying. “No, not a fishbowl, a shark tank. People pressing their noses against the glass, hoping to see you get eaten.”
The glass is a big deal with him.
“You know the glass, like on a really loaded town car, where the passenger can see out but people on the street can’t see in.”
“Tinted,” says the builder. “Tinted and polarized.”
“But you can get it for big windows.”
“Sure, if you want to pop for it. All of these things you’re saying, customized features, are going to run you more.”
“I want a lot of it. So we’re not getting stared at, but every way you look, there’s a view.”
Of what? thinks Bunny. They’re not near the river or the lake or the city or any other houses, and all she can see if she turns a full circle is a couple oil derricks in the distance.
“It does cut down on the brightness of what you’ll see outside. Which in the summer won’t necessarily be a bad thing.”
“I want a carport attached here,” says Brent, pointing to a spot on the string that stretches between the stakes. “With room for three vehicles.”
Brent likes people to see the Corvette, which is a beautiful thing, but now that he’s bought it hates to leave it out under the weather. What the other two things in the carport are going to be he hasn’t told her. She’d love a Miata, and has said so, but Brent says house first, then we’ll deal with transportation.
“The pictures you’d showed me, Mr. Skiles,” says the builder, “require materials not easily available up here, require lumber that’s not in standard lengths, require some real skill in construction.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m not going to be able to hire local framers, a bunch of kids to throw the usual box up.”
“Of course not.”
“And bringing in more skilled carpenters is going to add to the–”
“Fifteen miles down the road,” says her husband, pointing, “there’s a man camp on the reservation, I put all my out-of-state drivers in there, cheap, cheap, cheap, but they got a food court twenty-four-seven, they got cable.”
“That could work.”
If only once it’s done it could be picked up and carried to someplace else, someplace wonderful, Monterey on the California coast maybe. Brent says the oil business is here to stay, that this will be their base to make trips from, like when they went to Hawaii. But that he’s going to work it so a lot of the expense gets written over to the company, he’ll have a room that’s just his office, and that staying in the hotel with the prices raised up the way they are is stupid. And after the years of barely unpacking before they had to move on, this, whatever it turns into, will be a real home.
“A house, a real house, should say something about the person who lives in it,” says Brent. He’s got that tone in his voice that means a lecture, that means just be quiet and listen. “And most houses do, in a way, they say ‘A loser lives here’ or ‘Somebody on government assistance lives here’ or ‘A man with zero taste and imagination had this stack of shit thrown up.’ But when any of them out there look this way”– he says, waving his arm to indicate the prairie dogs and the coyotes and maybe an actual person standing on top of one of those derricks– “it’s going to blow their minds a little. ‘Is that a fort, is that a castle, is that a mansion transported here from the future?’ Whoever lives in that place, whoever had it built, is something out of the ordinary.”
“We’ll need an architect,” says the builder, “or at least a qualified draftsman, to draw up the plans.”
“And somebody to do that computer thing,” adds Brent, “so I can see it 3-D, move around inside a bit.”
“That can be arranged.”
“The important word here is speed. You see those rigs going up on the way? Those boys don’t stand around with their hands in their pockets, they hit the ground running, build the rig, then move on to the next one.”
“You can pull anything off if you’re willing to pay,” says the builder. Bunny can tell he’s still feeling Brent out, wondering if he’s for real or not. Brent is the realest person he’ll ever meet.
“You come to a crossroads between speed and expense, my friend, you take the superhighway. These big oil outfits, once they commit to a play, they throw everything they got into it. The companies that try to sneak in on the cheap, that want to hedge their bets, they end up with zip.”
Brent does the money things and has her sign the papers. He’s explained to her how to make debt work for you, how once you owe a vendor a certain amount they have to give you more credit in hopes of eventually getting paid at least some of what they’re owed, how everybody smart does business this way, including the federal government. He didn’t go to college but he’s studied it, studied it in the real world, and if it weren’t for some freaky bad breaks– things nobody could have foreseen– they’d have made their pile of fuck-you money years ago.
“Have you ever built a gymnasium?”
“You mean like with a basketball court and all that?”
“More like a heavy-duty health club. I’ll get you some photographs.”
“Sure. But the special equipment– weight machines and all that–”
“Those I’ll order myself, you just have to worry about the specs on the box. Any big worries?”
The builder looks around. They rode in in his pickup, Brent leaving the Vette at the
side of the road, what seemed like a quarter mile away.
“Oh, power, water, cable hookup,” sighs the builder. “You see where we are.”
“Impossible?”
He shrugs. “Expensive.”
Brent grins. “That’s how they get you. ‘Oh, come in and link up with us, be part of our system, it’s so convenient.’ You think the people who settled this region came here to join what was already established? No way. They were running away from that life.”
Running away from something, thinks Bunny. Refugees. Or maybe their wagons broke down–
Brent steps back and looks at the empty space above the land with nothing under it, smiling, as if the house is already there. She loves it when he’s on an upswing like this, when she doesn’t have to hide or tiptoe around, like the air around him is likely to electrocute her. If this oil thing can just keep growing, if the music can never stop–
“Before any great thing is made, any great deed is done,” he says, that voice coming back, “somebody, some individual, has to see it in their head. To have a vision, not of what already is, but what can be.”
He stands there looking at the vision of what will be for so long that she can see the builder is getting uncomfortable, not sure if he should break into the reverie or not. Bunny raises her hand slightly to get his attention.
“Uhm– could I talk to you– about the kitchen?”
IT’S A FAIRGROUNDS LIKE any other, Ferris wheel, a few rides emitting heavy metal music and screams, food and drink stands. The 4th is on a Sunday this year, so Jewelle has the night off, wandering among the crowd under the lights, happy to be in a place with so many other females. She has an Italian sausage sandwich with peppers and a limeade, half a sugar-dusted zeppole, and moves to get a good bleacher seat for the fireworks. They had some at the little speedway the other night after the stock car races, but she was working, plucking scraps of red, white and blue clothing off her body and flinging it out at drunken, hollering oil workers.