by John Sayles
She’s come unpainted to the event, no lipstick, no eyeliner, her press-on nails in the little box in the club dressing room, a BOOMTOWN, USA cap over her pinned-up hair. She’s been to these in other towns, tries to never miss it, a community event where you don’t feel like such an outsider. It’s great to see so many kids– they’re off to school before she wakes up, not very evident on the wide, vehicle-rumbling streets of Yellow Earth. Still making them here, and many of these families look like they have nothing to do with drilling or fracking. The stands start to fill, a tall, nice-looking guy maybe close to her age, on his own, squeezing in next to her.
“Almost showtime,” he says and smiles.
It starts with a single spotlight beam going straight up, then the “Star-Spangled Banner” comes on the PA system and people stand and take their hats off and many put their hands over their hearts as they sing along. A cheer when it’s over, everybody settling back down, and Pop! a wiggly white trail streaking upward that Bam! bursts into a round, perfectly symmetrical ball of glowing green fragments. Another cheer.
She finds herself smiling as the barrage continues, leaning back shoulder to shoulder with the guy, who she can see, in the flash of the bigger, brighter explosions, is smiling as well.
“What makes the colors?” she asks nobody in particular.
“Metal salts, metal oxides,” says the tall guy. “They’re coating the little stars that are mixed in with the gunpowder for the second explosion, and when they’re heated up by the blast, depending on what metal it is, they glow a certain color.”
Jewelle gives him a look. “Are you a rocket scientist?”
He laughs. “Just a glorified rock jock. But I was fascinated by these things when I was a kid.”
“So what was that one?”
“Yellow Chrysanthemum is probably sodium nitrate.”
“That’s what that kind is called?”
“They’re named after the shapes they make as they spread out, and a lot are named after flowers or trees. That– that one’s a Willow, see how they curve out then weep down.”
“Gold and silver.”
“Let’s see– red is strontium, green is barium, copper burns blue. Then if you combine them you can get other shades, just like with mixing paint.”
They watch in silence for a minute, the crowd oohing and aaahing the effects in the sky. They are addictive, of course, and you just want more and more.
“You said there’s two explosions.”
“One– that kind of dull thump before it shoots up– is powder in the bottom of the rocket, which is sitting in a mortar, which is just a narrow tube pointed up. That powder is on a short fuse, but a longer fuse gets lit at the same time, which reaches the second ball of powder and the stars around it at a certain height, which makes the explosion we see. Pretty simple technology– people have been doing it for centuries.”
“But you’ve got to be careful to make them right, to shoot them at the right angle.”
“Oh, sure. A show like this is a lot of work.”
“But just to be pretty.”
“And awesome.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
They watch as the fireworks fill the sky, the man telling her which is the Diadem and the Peony and the Palm and the Crossette and the Cake, which is just a mass of many Roman candles all at once. Then suddenly there is a towering oil rig before them, outlined by golden lights.
“And finally, on this Fourth of July,” says a deep male voice over the PA system, “we’d like to celebrate a special form of Independence– the independence from foreign oil!”
With that there is a gusher of fireworks shooting up and spilling outward from the top of the derrick, building to a red, white and blue climax, the smell of gunpowder smoke in the air, the audience cheering solidly for the full five minutes of the eruption.
He walks her to the parking lot. His name is Randy and he’s a geologist.
“Any hint that there’s hydrocarbons lurking under the ground,” he says, “they send me in to see how much and how deep. Then they have me stick around a while to develop the resource.”
“So you travel a lot.”
“Up to a half a million frequent-flyer miles. If I ever get a chance to go somewhere not for work, it’ll be for free.”
“They keep you busy.”
“Are you from around here?” he asks, a cautious note creeping into his voice.
“No.”
“Well, busy is good. If it’s not a national holiday there’s not a hell of a lot to do.”
“No kidding.”
“I mean for the young guys there’s bars, a couple of those strip clubs downtown– Buzungas.”
“Bazookas,” she says. “I work there.”
Not a hiccup of hesitation. “Yeah? Waitress? Dancer? Owner?”
“I dance.”
“Good money?”
She holds her arms out. “Here I am in Yellow Earth.”
“What kind of shift do you pull?”
“Little bit under eight. But it’s pretty intense.”
“I can imagine.”
“You’ve never been there?”
He shrugs. “Not my kind of deal. You want me to come see you work?”
She doesn’t have to think about it. “No.”
He laughs. Very good-looking guy, and not nearly as– as hungry as most she meets.
“It’s not like I’m ashamed of it or anything, I just– it’s nice not to have to be her all the time.”
He nods. “So you ever get a night off?”
“Sundays. And every once in a while I take a mental health day. I do a week or two here, move on to a club in Bozeman or Billings, then come back. They don’t seem to have gotten bored with me yet.”
“I never thought of that.”
“What’s it– familiarity breeds contempt? Like if tonight they kept sending up the same exact rocket, the same pattern and color time after time. You’d clear the stands pretty quick.”
They have come to her car.
“So if I could get in touch with you somehow, you think you could plan a mental health night and have dinner with me in one of the area’s many one-star restaurants?”
She smiles. “That could be arranged.” She digs out one of her business cards. What the hell, he knows where she works.
He reads it. “Jew-elle.”
“You just say ‘Jewel,’ like diamonds and rubies and all that.”
“There should be a firework named Jewel,” he says, smiling and backing away, the Ferris wheel still spinning its lights behind him.
It must have been at least an hour, she thinks, while creeping along in the line of cars leaving the fairgrounds, and I didn’t tell a single lie.
THE CAR IS STILL following. Macario is tempted to just pull over here on the highway, where there are other cars and people to witness whatever they do, but witnesses won’t stop these people. He could try to outrun them, get to the office, but his Ram complains if you push it over 95 kilometers, and even if he made it they’ll be there after work, there tomorrow and the next day, like the weather.
Macario pulls off the highway onto the north road, his usual route to work, and the car follows. It is the same silver Lincoln that parked just across the field from him and the crew the last three days at the rupture site, the thin man leaning casually against it, smiling and waving whenever he caught Macario looking over. The area was a mess, the dirt over and around the pipeline soaked with gasoline, the hot tap done quickly and crudely. Just closing the line down till the tap could be welded shut cost the company a fortune, with removal of polluted earth and reburying of the pipeline yet to be done.
The huachicolero was wearing sunglasses and a canary yellow polo shirt with a gold-trimmed piteado belt, grinning like the proud father at a wedding.
“You know, somebody stealing from the gas line, the guy behind it is probably just over there,” Macario said to the federal in charge of the site on the first day of the repair.
“Keep your eyes to yourself,” said the capitán, pointedly not turning toward the road, “and don’t stir up shit.”
He’d always been aware of the dangers on the offshore rig in the Sonda de Campeche, all the moving parts that could kill or cripple a deckhand, the strong winds that could blow you off the platform, the possibility of a blowout. Nilda begged him to ask for a transfer, less pay maybe but safer, and when Celestina was born he agreed. What could threaten a mere pipeline mechanic?
The Lincoln pulls alongside and the chupaducto in the sunglasses signals for him to pull over. In the movies there are tricks to avoid this, cars and trucks that can fly through the air in slow motion, that can roll over and over and land on their tires and drive away at high speed. But this is San Martín Texmelucan and not the movies.
“Come sit with me,” says the man in the back seat. “We need to talk.”
Macario leaves his camioneta on the shoulder of the road and gets in beside the man and they drive away. Maybe Jorge or Hector or another one of his crew will pass the Ram and wonder what the story is. The one behind the wheel, who is young with a complicated design shaved into his short hair, keeps his eyes on the road ahead.
“It seems you are very good at your job, Señor Paredes.”
Macario watches the news. The war that President Calderón has made on the narcos is going badly. The biggest groups, especially the Zetas, have been striking back, and not just against the army and the police. Massacres at drug rehabilitation clinics, civilians gunned down at parties in Juárez and Torreón, mass graves found in old mine shafts and on remote ranches– but so far it has been relatively peaceful here in the state of Puebla.
“I try my best,” says Macario.
“You’re too modest. We’ve read your employee evaluation. Your superiors at the Company have nothing but praise for your skill, for your industry.”
Don Pánfilo, the territorial supervisor, rides now with a guardaespaldas at all times, a man who wears sunglasses like this one and carries a pistol where you can see it. The narcos in Chiapas have made a specialty of kidnapping Pemex employees, mostly managers, but that is for ransom. Pipeline mechanics are not taken because they have wealthy relatives or because the government fuel monopoly cannot function without them.
“What did you think of the grifo you plugged up the other day?”
Sometimes the bodies are found with a simple bullet to the back of the head, the victims forced to kneel, knowing what is about to happen. Others, when an example must be made, are found hacked to pieces by machetes or dismembered with chainsaws, in places where screams can’t be heard or will not be reported. Others are not found at all, buried forever or dissolved in chemicals.
“It was very poorly done,” says Macario carefully.
“Exactly. A butcher was sent to do the work of a surgeon. So much combustible wasted, and so much damage to the environment.”
Gasoline, ready to pump or pour into an automobile tank, flows from the refineries on the coast through miles of pipeline in Puebla on its way to Mexico City. Not all of it arrives. Macario has seen camionetas loaded with square, plastic five-gallon containers of gasoline at the tianguis in Huejotzingo, has seen farmers selling it on the side of the road at a fraction of the government price.
“What would help us a great deal,” continues the huachicolero, “is more accurate information about the system. When the ductos will be charged with fuel, when it will be flushed or shut down. You can imagine how anxious it makes someone with little experience cutting into a pipe when they don’t know what lies within. When a single spark at the wrong moment–”
The man snaps his fingers.
The farmers usually do the digging on their own property, a shallow trench for the hose that leads to the trailero or reservoir, and down at least three feet to the pipeline itself. A narrow-diameter tap can milk the line slowly enough to escape detection by the pressure monitors but fill an eleven-thousand-gallon tanker in three days. One gang has learned to cut two holes, one to extract gasoline quickly and the other to pump in the same amount of creek water, fooling the monitors and ruining the quality of the fuel downstream.
“I’m not so high up as to be responsible for this kind of information,” says Macario. “I only go where they send me.”
“But you have access to it,” smiles the huachicolero. “You can easily find out. The way that we can find out that you have a beautiful wife named Nilda and two little daughters, who have just traveled to visit relatives in DF.”
Macario feels the fury rise up in him, tries to control his face. At first he was a supporter of Calderón’s war. Put them in jail, execute them all if you have to, and do the nation a great service. But then it became clear that this was like trying to cut out your own cancerous lung– the operation would kill the patient.
“What do you want from me?”
“Information, as I’ve said. Then, perhaps, some technical advice so we can avoid these environmental hazards. And equipment,” says the man. He taps the driver and they make a lazy U-turn to head back toward the abandoned Ram. Macario feels his stomach muscles loosen. “If you and your crew could leave certain items behind after your next few repair jobs, it would be very useful. You can help us prepare a list.”
TOME SUS PRECAUCIONES! the safety sign on the Number 12 rig in Campeche advised, greeting them every shift when they stepped out onto the drilling platform. Macario has been thinking ahead for years, often the encargado, the foreman, always conscious of whatever could go wrong, wanting those first moments of crisis control to be based on planning and not panic.
“You haven’t asked what your reward for this assistance will be,” says the man behind the sunglasses.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” says Macario. There is no bargaining with these people of course, any more than there is with Pemex or with the petrolero union. It is beyond your control. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”
“No,” says the huachicolero, still smiling. “You wouldn’t.”
They leave him by his pickup.
“People call me Flaco,” says the man from his open window just before they pull away. “You can check with Colonel Estrada for my credentials.”
It is no secret that they have allies in the government, in the military, in the police. The Zetas are supposed to have been founded by former elite troops, trained in weapons and combat. It does not pay to stir shit up.
Macario drives to work, arms shaky as he holds the wheel. There will likely be someone watching him at work, sure to report if he doesn’t show up.
It is an unexceptional day. Much of the pipeline is cleaned and monitored by what the yanquis call ‘pigs,’ launched at a special entry and then driven the length of the system by the pressure of the flow, so he and the crew have only some routine valve inspection to do, out by San Matías. Jorge is a lover of narcocorridos, and sings them loudly as he drives the van–
I lift my bazooka
To all who defy me
A soldier of fortune
A stranger to pity
I toss away women
And burn through my money
The cops all respect me
Or fall to my fury
–Jorge who has certainly never lifted a bazooka to his shoulder or so much as cursed a police officer to his face, but comes from Sinaloa and grew up with the songs, with the culture–
A fast car, a gunfight
Is all that I live for
I take what I want and
I pay you in bullets
People think that the politicos are the biggest thieves of all, and nobody, especially its employees, loves Pemex. Milking gas isn’t like helping to sell drugs.
“Qué tal su casa?” asks Hector, who put the windows into the first floor of Macario’s casa de sueño, his dream house, and is always hungry for extra work. “When is that second story going up?”
“Maybe in a couple months,” Macario tells him. “We may be coming
into a bit of money.” You never know who might be working for them, if only as a pair of ears, a passer-on of chisme from the job. “Nilda’s aunt in DF can take her and the girls while the walls are going up.”
All the dream houses have rebar poking through their flat roofs, an unfinished house taxed less than a finished one. If they were ever to add another floor, the plan since he was on the drill rig in the Gulf, there would be rebar sticking up from that as well.
“But only if prices go down,” he lies. “When you fill your tank these days you drain your pockets.”
Gas is up to eight pesos for a liter of Magna now, one of the reasons the roadside vendedores are doing so well.
Hector laughs. “Tell Don Pánfilo,” he says. “Maybe he can put in a word with the Company.”
Nobody follows him on the north road back to the highway. He makes the turn for the airport. It was just a matter of time, he thinks. The house will just sit there, like a thousand other casas de sueño whose owners are doing their dreaming up in the United States. He’ll have to leave the old Ram, of course, and all the clothes he wasn’t able to stash in the big toolbox in the pickup bed behind him. Nobody will report him missing for a few days.
TOME SUS PRECAUTIONES! They may have watched Nilda and the girls board the bus to DF, but he doubts if they had anyone at the huge terminal there to see her transfer to the one heading for Mérida, then Chixulub beyond it. When he turns onto the Cholula-Puebla road he calls her sister’s number on his cellphone.
“Quién es?” Nilda’s sister has only had a phone for a short while, and feels invaded when it rings.
“Habla Macario” he says. “Está Nilda?”
A pause, muffled voices, then his wife on the phone.
“Hola, querido.”
“It’s happened,” he says simply. “I’m on my way out.”
A long silence as she absorbs the meaning of this.
“They threatened you?”
“With all courtesy.”
“You can’t work anything out?”
“Nilda,” he says, realizing he may not see her or the girls for a very long time, “once you play along, they own you. Do you want that?”