Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  In the movies, men leap from rooftop to rooftop, dodge between machine-gun bullets, vanquish their enemies in huge, flaming explosions that may knock them over from behind but never burn or kill them. But this is not the movies, only life in México.

  “I miss you already,” says Nilda.

  “Igualmente. You know what to do.”

  They’ve never had that much in the bank, living from paycheck to paycheck, and Macario cashed the last couple with the cambio service in Tlaxcala, giving Nilda most of it and converting the rest into yanqui dollars. He’s got those folded in one work boot and ten thousand Mexican pesos folded in the other, which should be enough for the flight and what comes after.

  “They’re giving away money up there,” his cousin Félix, just back from the States, is telling anybody who will listen. “All you need is two legs and a strong back. But for an experienced petrolero like you, híjole, you could make a fortune.”

  He’s found it on the map, way up near their border with Canada. He’ll need some warmer clothes when he gets there.

  Macario is not the only man in the Puebla airport carrying a canvas duffel bag, looking like he just got off work. They take cash at the Aerolitoral counter, and he shows the driver’s license of his friend Rogelio, killed in a fall on the rig four years ago, as ID.

  “To Nuevo Laredo,” he says. “One way.”

  IT’S HALF PAST TWO in the afternoon and the Three-Mile is already packed. Leia’s stomach does a flip in the parking lot, the usual convention of Rams, Tundras, Tacomas and Ford 150s, the sound of some hat act twanging about his little gal leaking out through the door and a set of longhorns– could be plastic, no, they’re real– hung over the entrance. I will not crap out again. I will not go back to the apartment.

  The ones that look at her, and most of them do as she makes her way to the empty stool at the end of the bar counter, shoot their eyes quickly from her butt (wearing ranger pants, who can tell?) to her chest (no tits to speak of) to her hair (what?). The reaction to her new white streaks ranges from wow, that’s really different– different the local version of ‘weird’– to look out, darlin, you got a skunk on your head.

  “What’ll it be, honey?”

  The bartender looks like she sculpts tree stumps with a chainsaw for a hobby, incredibly defined delts with barbed wire loops inked around her biceps.

  “Your draft–?”

  The bartender steps back to give Leia a look at the pump handles– all the mass-market stuff, and why would she expect otherwise.

  “Blue Moon, I guess.”

  “Got it.”

  The jukebox switches to a woman with a nice voice and a tale of woe. Look out, darlin, you got a polecat for a husband. The first contestant approaches, early forties maybe, definitely balding under the oilfield services cap, STU sewn over the pocket of his tan work shirt.

  “Hey there,” he beams. “I’m Stu.”

  “I never would have guessed.” If she’s lucky he’ll split before she has to get into her own name.

  “What you drinking?”

  “Uhm– beer? Blue Moon.”

  “That’s just Coors you know. They say it’s Belgian but it’s made with all their other stuff.”

  “How can anything be considered ‘just Coors’?”

  A moment for this to register. “You’re yanking my chain, right?”

  There is a point, Jeff used to say, where irony ceases to be a form of humor and becomes a personality disorder. Just because she described him to her friends as ‘serpentine.’

  “You work in the oil business, Stu?”

  “Twenty-two years and counting. If they’re pumping, I’m jumping.”

  “Mud geologist?”

  He looks offended. “Oh no. I work for a living. Rig mechanic– I mostly test and maintain BOPs.”

  “Big Old Pumps.”

  He grins. On a dentist’s color chart his teeth would be Tobacco Road. “Blowout preventers. Make sure the boys don’t go sky-high.”

  The bartender leaves her beer in a glass with a slice of orange in it. Classy.

  “You’ve got an important job, then. Shouldn’t you be out somewhere, like, preventing a blowout?”

  “In between calls.” He nods to the crowd of men and the few women, who are mostly dressed for work and probably drivers of some sort. “Oil is a twenty-four-hour business, you grab your R and R when and where you can.”

  “Where’s the best place you ever worked?”

  “Texas. The best place, period. I can’t imagine a better one. Where you from?”

  “Minnesota. The Land of a Thousand Lakes.”

  “They don’t drill there.” He says it with heartfelt pity.

  “Not that I know of, not for oil.”

  He is trying to lean on the bar close to her, but the guy at the next stool is an extra-wide load and isn’t giving up any territory. Stu eyes the beer as she takes a sip.

  “How’s that?”

  “Oh– kind of Belgian tasting. Maybe they import the bubbles.”

  He leans as close as he can. “You ever have a Jägerbomb?”

  Even on Spring Break in South Padre Island this would get you eliminated from the competition.

  “No, but I’ve cleaned up after people who drink them.”

  “I don’t mean when you drop the shot in a beer, this is when you drop it in Red Bull.”

  “So you can keep throwing up all night long.”

  He gives out with a smiling wheeze. “Yanking my chain.”

  Leia swivels on her stool to look past Stu and He is there, alone at a table, watching the floor with a bottle of Budweiser Not-Lite in hand but obviously thinking about something else. Perhaps about this unusual young woman he’s been dying to meet–

  Stu says something she doesn’t register.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said I can take you somewhere much better than this dump.”

  She feels for them, she really does. A lifetime of selling yourself door to door to women who are interested in somebody or they wouldn’t be there but not interested in you, stuck now in a town with a gender imbalance of epic proportions and when finally a nondiseased, nonprofessional, possibly receptive female wanders onto your territory she turns out to be a little snot of a varmint-chronicler from a nondrilling state.

  “This bar happens to belong to my father,” she says, standing, “and I can’t imagine a better one. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go speak with my parole officer.”

  She feels for them, but Nature is cruel.

  He locks onto her halfway across the floor and watches her all the way to the table.

  “The Wildlife Girl.”

  Standing over his table, glass of beer in hand, wishing there was a hard-wired bit of display behavior, a pheromone she could release, to substitute for whatever dialogue she can come up with.

  Don’t be a smartass, don’t be a smartass, don’t be a smartass–

  “Is that what people are calling me?”

  “You’re legend.” He half-stands, indicates the table. “Please– sit.”

  She obeys, sliding his hat to one side to make room for the beer. He cocks his head sideways to study her. Here it comes about the streaks–

  “So– Swedish or Norwegian?”

  “Guess.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Leia Nilsson.”

  “So Swedish–”

  “Actually, I’m a bit of both. Scandinavian half-breed.”

  “And Leia–”

  “Yeah, my parents were Star Wars freaks. It could have been Padmé or Shmi.”

  “Leia’s a real name.”

  “And you’re Will.”

  Just a tiny stroke of surprise, which he struggles to keep off his face–

  “Or should I call you Sheriff, or Sir, or Officer–?”

  “Will is fine.”

  Got that done. She nods toward the scrum of oilworkers. “Looking for a suspect?”

  He smiles. Good smile. “They�
��ve had a few dustups in here, and Bud– that’s the fella owns the place– asked me to come by.”

  “Push through the swinging doors, peacemaker on your hip.”

  He shrugs. “If I just sit back here quiet for a while they don’t even have to look at me. There’s a current or something, like with a herd of elk or buffalo when there’s a wolf nearby– well, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

  Her turn to smile. “I would. So you don’t want to scatter the herd.“

  “And spoil Bud’s business.”

  “–just keep them from locking horns with each other.”

  “Do your critters lock horns? Or whatever they got up there.”

  “Sure. It’s a battleground.”

  “Prairie dogs.”

  “You used to shoot them, right?”

  He considers, shrugs. “Couple, right after I got my first .22. Didn’t much see the point of it.”

  “So you moved on to– what–?”

  “Targets. Mostly pop bottles off of fence posts.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “Some, not too far away. Little town called Lignite.”

  “Low-grade coal.”

  “Way back. Mostly farming in my day, but my father was in the Air Force. My mother taught school. I been back in Yellow Earth about five years.”

  “What do you think of the invasion?”

  He looks past her to the men, the volume of their talk and laughter nearly drowning out the jukebox.

  “One on one they’re mostly all right, but the numbers–”

  “You get to hire more deputies?”

  “One. And he’s like to quit on me.”

  “You’re overwhelmed.”

  He sighs. “Fights, stolen vehicles, nastier drugs and what folks do when they’re whacked out on em, prostitution.”

  “I haven’t seen any prostitutes.”

  “It’s pretty much all phone hookups now.”

  “So you don’t prosecute.”

  “It’s against the law, sure, and they don’t pay their taxes, which is a federal beef, but mostly it’s what comes along with the trade. Like an atmosphere.”

  “Of lawlessness.”

  “You could say that.” He sits back, considers her. “So you come in here to meet-and-greet or just to observe and take notes?”

  Whoops. Attitude must be showing–

  “Observe, I guess, and then I remembered–”

  “They’re the hawks and you’re the field mouse.”

  “You could say that.”

  She finishes the beer and he doesn’t jump to pour another one down her, instead looking all around the crowded room. “Roughnecks come in all colors,” he says. “And the world won’t function without them.”

  “A cornerstone species.”

  Will smiles. “They show up on time, do their job, the rest is mostly none of our business.”

  “Is that the royal we?”

  “The Company we.”

  “Same thing.”

  Then he does that thing where they look in your eyes, like they’ve actually met somebody whose name they’ll remember.

  “So how’s your– flock? Network?”

  “Coterie. Smaller than a colony or a town.”

  “How they doing?”

  “Oh, not too bad, thanks. You probably noticed I had to move them over.”

  “Off of reservation land onto A. J. Niles’s ranch.”

  “He’s complained?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s noticed.”

  “If he’d noticed,” says Will, “he would have shot you already.”

  Leia gives him a tight smile. The first naturalists had it easy, blasting whatever bird or mammal they took a fancy to and having it stuffed to draw or sell to a museum later, dodging the occasional arrow, no institutions to bow to–

  “So putting new prairie dogs on somebody’s land is, like–”

  “Like pissing in his well. If he doesn’t see you do it, he probably won’t notice.”

  “I’m there every day.”

  “If A. J. comes by and stops, just tell him they were already there and you’re studying them for a statewide eradication program. But no more cages.”

  “You didn’t stop me.”

  “Nobody complained and I wanted to see how it turned out.”

  No wedding ring. He hasn’t once mentioned his ex–

  “Thanks.”

  He turns away for a moment, pondering something, then looks back into her eyes.

  “And making an arrest is a terrible introduction to someone you want to meet.” He cocks his head again, evaluating. “Whatever that is with your hair looks really cool.”

  Contact.

  STAGE THREE

  EXTRACTION

  By the time the second boom reached Yellow Earth, the slaughter of buffalo had become more harvest than hunt. The great northern herd flowed over the high plains like a huge, mobile lake– the shooters had only to find a suitable vantage on its shore and go to work, feeding long cartridges to their heavy old Sharps or state-of-the-art Remingtons, balancing them on support sticks, lining up the new telescopic sights and piercing the lungs of whichever shaggy beast seemed on the verge of upsetting the ruminant stasis of the group. Men killed fifty, eighty, more than a hundred bison from one stand, able to get off a shot a minute if their targets stayed close, careful to let the rifle barrel cool just enough before culling the next one. A fallen buffalo might be stepped around, sniffed, maybe even hooked momentarily with a young bull’s horns, but the species was so physically powerful and had lived so long without an animal predator of any size that they were not so easily spooked as wild cattle or horses. The calm shooter, moving downwind, always downwind behind the edge of the herd, was far more wary of Indian competitors than of being gored or trampled. Loading, sighting, firing, then looking for the next hulk to be brought down before the last had finished its writhing and kicking in the grass.

  In the shooter’s wake came the skinners, at twenty-five cents a hide, hurrying to do their flensing before the blood cooled and the pelt began to stiffen. Drive a wagon rod through the nose of the just-killed beast to anchor it to the ground, cut a circle around the neck, slit down the underside from throat to tail, slit down the insides of the legs to the knees, then tie off the neck hide to your wagon horses hitched with a doubletree and crack the whip. Any wise team of skinners was already cutting while the shooter was still killing ahead of them, cold carcasses requiring painstaking tug-and-slice work with the curved skinning knife, and more opportunity to damage the hide. A troop of gleaners– wolves, coyotes, ravens, magpies– set up vigil just behind the skinners, waiting to feed on the yellow-white fat, the glistening red muscle, the innards suddenly spilt from their thick protection. Less experienced hands labored without a knife, rolling the liberated hides into bundles and lugging them back to wagons and then to the day’s base camp, staking them out gory-side-up to dry in the cold prairie wind till stiff as planks for stacking.

  Thick and lustrous winter hides brought the best price, with tongues and tallow taken as well if the Northern Pacific was nearby. Paired wagons, drawn by six yoked oxen, could haul three hundred bundled hides, the freighters often joining in long trains able to circle and provide shelter against Indian attack. There were hide thieves, of course, and occasionally an angry warrior would slash the staked pelts to diminish their value, while territorial disputes were settled at gunpoint. The outfitters, never more than a day’s ride away, did handsomely without risk or gruesome toil. Rifles, primers, ball and bar lead, powder, knives, poisons to keep insects from ruining the hides, horses, mules, oxen, any grub but buffalo meat, tobacco and liquor for consumption or trade– only the most veteran hunters were grub-staked against their season’s profit rather than paying cash.

  A parallel industry grew up as the wolves grew fat and lazy gorging on carcasses they had no part in killing, their own winter pelts especially valuable, and laws were passed offering a boun
ty for their destruction. Wolfers, considered even a cut below the buffalo men, followed the slaughter, their prey gun-shy but vulnerable to poison, a gutted buffalo cow or tender prairie hen laced with just enough strychnine hard to pass up. Coyotes took the bait as well, and smaller predators, and there were stretches of ground left black and glistening with dead ravens as the stink of the rotting buffalo kill clouded the other senses.

  Hide towns were thrown up hastily and then moved with the herd, enclosures of sod and stretched leather where anything a louse-infested, tangle-haired, blood-simple buffalo man could desire was for sale. The prices were jacked up as high as the lack of competition would allow, the women available only the most desperate and diseased. And even here, surrounded by bales of green hides stacked for shipment, the men weren’t free of the buffalo gnats, the mosquitos, the greenhead flies, the odor of butchery on a massive scale.

  But the real money was made by the furriers in St. Louis and the traders at the railheads, green hides likely to rot into worthlessness if you held out for too fair a price. The tanned winter robes became rugs and winter coats and wall hangings, while the patchier summer hides provided a durable, elastic leather useful for dozens of purposes and purchased in bulk by the British Army.

  Meanwhile, the US Army kept patrols on the northern border, driving the herd south to keep it from Sitting Bull’s renegade band in Canada, hoping to starve them back to the reservation, while the Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, and Gros Ventre people had already been diminished in power and territory. By 1882 there were more than five thousand white shooters and skinners in the Montana and Dakota Territories, playing an endgame now, as the other three great herds to the south had already been obliterated. With robes selling at two to five dollars apiece at a time when cow punchers were making a dollar a day and keep, amateurs as well as seasoned buffalo men flocked to this last great slaughter once the railroad had penetrated deep enough to make the summer pelts pay. With the Sioux mostly forced onto reservations, the chief danger was from the temperamental high plains weather, dozens of skin men and thousands of buffalo killed every year in snap blizzards or floods of the unstable Missouri. But the market stayed hungry and the hunt was relentless, increasingly methodical by the end, when the herd was less a vast sea than a dozen isolated eddies, more than a million and a half animals killed in a three-year spree.