Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  He’s gotten good at that, making me feel guilty–

  “I know how to drive, Granpa.”

  For years he’s let her take the wheel close to home, even showed her how to change a tire and watched while she went through the whole process.

  “You got to get your license. When you go off to college–”

  “Most of them you can’t have a car your freshman year.”

  “It’s a rite of passage,” he says, “and an important proof of identification.”

  Fawn has had a fake ID since she was fourteen, but Fawn is the first to do everything. ‘Indian princess by day,’ she likes to say, ‘international woman of mystery by night.’

  And Fawn is pregnant, or at least thinks she is.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she says, hanging up her jacket and coming around behind him. “You take me into town for some pointers, like that parallel parking thing? And then I’ll sign up for the road test.”

  He knows something else, she can feel it, but doesn’t want to fight it out in the open any more than she does. He was always been there for her, like daylight in the morning.

  “That sounds fair,” he says quietly. Schedules change, and there are the imaginary Science Club meetings she can skip if Wayne Lee wants to see her. He’s been quieter lately, worried about something, and she hopes it’s not her.

  “How was work today?”

  “Oh, you know. Caffeine for the troops.”

  There is something wrong on the canvas. The usual prairie-scape is there, this one featuring snowdrifts interspersed with open patches of stubble, Herefords clustered facing into the wind at the lower left. But there is a new element, dark and angular against the winter field and the light gray sky, one, two, three, four, five, painted in careful technical detail and perspective–

  Oil rigs.

  THE DAY MAN ON the desk at Killdeer City makes him wait in the lobby. He’s picked up so many nicknames in the time he’s been here that you forget who calls you what.

  “If Wayne Lee doesn’t ring a bell,” he tells the day man, “try Surfer Dude.”

  Scorch comes into the lobby about ten minutes later, looking like he just woke up.

  “This couldn’t wait?”

  They sit alone in the little visiting parlor, like it’s a sorority house in the 1950s.

  “My job is to distribute,” says Wayne Lee. “Not to sit on it.”

  He gives Scorch four boxes, each about the size of a deck of cards, that hold the steroids in their punch-through sheets. Scorch looks like he’s a user, though the muscle could just be from access to prison iron. Brent, on the other hand, brags about his reliance on gym candy when trying to bulk up, and has the sudden mood swings to prove it.

  “You can’t be nervous and deal,” says Scorch, who only moves roids out here and is a vulture on drug use in the bathrooms at Bazookas. A time and a place for everything.

  “Not nervous, just cautious. Listen, you heard anything from Brent about– you know– a change of plans, a change of product?”

  “Why would he tell me that?”

  “Well, he invited you up here.”

  “Same as you. What’s your worry?”

  “Oh, couple things I heard, maybe he’s planning to phase out distribution.”

  “Or maybe he just got himself a new boy,” says Scorch, giving him the deadeye and tucking the boxes of pills away.

  “Dude owes me big time,” smiles Wayne Lee, shaking his head. “Did you hear he’s been speculating in leases?”

  THERE IS ONLY A tiny bit of Rabbit peeking out from underneath the stickers. Along with various political candidates and their running mates are the simple classics– Red Power, Proud to be Hidatsa, a peeling Free Leonard Peltier, the new-agey The Earth Does Not Belong to Us, We Belong to the Earth– and a nice one he hasn’t noticed before, My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys. Marjorie Looks for Water is leaning against her old VW, parked just behind his patrol car, her eyes huge behind the thick lenses and that expectant smile on her face, when Danny steps out.

  She nods back toward the Fetterjohns’ trailer. “Any clues on who stole the Arctic Cat?”

  Marjorie has jiggered some contraption that she keeps in the Rabbit, able to monitor the department’s radio calls.

  “Not until the first snowfall.”

  “Probably kids. What idiot steals a snowmobile in July?”

  He looks at her car. What isn’t stickered is pitted with rust. “You’re back on the road?”

  “It’s been three months.”

  “I thought it was six.”

  “That’s for full reinstatement. I’ve got restricted status back– no highway or night driving, already set my appointment at the clinic.”

  “You understand the responsibility? If it was only your own safety at stake–”

  She has tonic-clonic seizures with no warning signs and has almost bitten through her tongue twice.

  “I plan my routes,” she smiles. “I take my meds.”

  “What have they got you on?”

  “Carbatrol.”

  “Dizziness, drowsiness, nausea–”

  Marjorie’s smile widens. “Do I look drowsy to you?”

  From all evidence, Marjorie doesn’t sleep. When he pulls a graveyard shift there is always a light on at her little house, and he’s stopped in for coffee and conspiracy theories more than once.

  “The thing is, Chief, I’ve been noticing how thin you’ve been spread with all these new people coming in, and I thought you might want to reconsider.”

  She is one of the few who call him ‘Chief,’ though that is his department title.

  “As a patrolman. Patrolperson.”

  “I passed the test three times.”

  “You passed the written test three times, and flunked pretty much every part of the physical.”

  “When the Sioux attacked us,” she says, up there with Teresa Crow’s Ghost for historical trivia, “did the People ask if you had 20/20 vision?”

  “What’s yours– 20/100?”

  “With corrective lenses it’s–”

  “And do I remember something about limited peripheral acuity?”

  When she ran Indian Country Tours, Marjorie had led people into the wrong chamber of a cave looking for pictographs, then had her flashlight batteries die–

  “I hear things that other people don’t.”

  “That’s called an auditory hallucination, Marjorie. I wouldn’t brag about it.”

  “But you need help.”

  “Your support and encouragement is an inspiration to the entire department.”

  Marjorie is addicted to America’s Most Wanted and Cops. She is a constant blogger on Websleuths.com and chat partner of the people still wondering who killed the Black Dahlia. And if she could see past her nose and didn’t fall down in eye-rolling, bone-wracking convulsions at inconvenient moments, Danny would love to have her on the force.

  “How’s the new business going?”

  “Schrecklich.”

  “And that’s–?”

  “Terrific.”

  She runs an online catalogue, shipping Native handicrafts off to German people who are gaga about Indians.

  “And your mother?”

  “Hanging in there.”

  Marjorie lives with her mother, who carries a cell phone with the ambulance service on speed-dial in case the epilepsy strikes at home. So far Mrs. Looks For Water has only used it to report sightings of her son, gone missing in Vietnam forty years ago, on television.

  “Good, that’s good. And really, I’m sorry there’s nothing to be done about the job.”

  “Just thought I’d try.”

  “You’re taking it really well.”

  Marjorie has been known to persist, to plant herself in his office or block his path back into the patrol car.

  “That’s the Carbatrol. For me it might as well be Prozac.”

  “So your moods–”

  “I don’t have moods anymore, Chief. I a
m the eagle that never comes to earth. Floating above it all, observing.”

  “Through your corrective lenses.”

  “I see things,” she says. “See things on the reservation.”

  Marjorie is not a snitch, exactly, but she does get around, does listen to the gossip, and has a forensic slant on life.

  “Such as?”

  “Oh– Dickyboy Burdette isn’t missing, whatever his grandmother might have told you. He just doesn’t come home very often.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “All the time. He goes to school. You can’t be missing if you attend class.”

  “Mystery solved. I’ll tell his grandmother.”

  “She’ll forget. And then I see things left on the land, piles of them, puddles of them, in places where they shouldn’t be.”

  “The drilling stuff is not my beat. Take that up with Ricky McAllen. Or the Chairman.”

  “The Chairman’s got his hands full. Business problems, family problems.”

  Danny opens the door of the patrol car to hear the radio. It’s only Patty at the mic, singing. She leaves the Vox switched on sometimes.

  “Terrific voice,” says Marjorie. “She’s in my church choir.”

  Danny sits into the patrol car. Marjorie is lonely and always ready to lay a recent unsolved murder on you, but tells such a good story you get caught up in it and time goes by–

  “I really do hear things, Chief.”

  Another offering. Danny picks up the cue.

  “What do you hear?”

  “Noises. Loud voices, banging, slaps and weeping. From the Carter place.”

  J. C. Carter is a white guy, real piece of work, married to one of the Dozier girls who came up from Standing Rock. Put her in the hospital in Bismarck once.

  “They’re at least two miles down the road from you.”

  “Very loud noises. Somebody might need a talking to before he commits a capital crime.”

  She is looking at him intensely, Marjorie, those magnified eyes signaling that this is dead serious.

  “He drinking again?”

  “Amphetamines.”

  “That he gets from who?”

  She might tell him if she knew, even if it was a relative, which considering some of Marjorie’s relatives is entirely possible.

  She shrugs. “Whole lot more of that floating around the rez these days. As you know.”

  Danny nods, shuts the door but rolls the window down. “I’ll get over there and see what I can do,” he says. “Thanks, Marjorie.”

  He drives toward the lake. J. C. spends a lot of time lifting cold ones at Lonnie’s out in the county, but he might be home, and if not his ride is easy to spot. A jet-black Ram pickup with rocket-flame detailing on the sides and the single bumper sticker, red letters over the silhouette of an automatic pistol.

  JUST KEEP HONKING– I’M RELOADING.

  THEY SIT ON A blanket on the open tailgate of his pickup, Will off duty for once, looking out at the flare-offs dotting the black night, the white-and-ruby stream of highway traffic in the distance.

  “Mostly old folks left around here,” he says, “till the shale oil people come.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “I thought about leaving a bunch of times, but I never had– you know– like a definite plan.”

  Leia hears the high, electric pyeeeeew of a nighthawk. “So you turned to crime-fighting.”

  “To do the job right,” says Will, “you got to read people. Which is the part that interests me.”

  “Hell of a lot more useful than what I do.”

  “You contribute to scientific knowledge.”

  “For a journal that five hundred people read. Or are supposed to read. And so far I’ve only recorded behavior that’s already been documented.”

  “You get to work outdoors.”

  “And away from people.” She smiles. “Which I suppose is good for society.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “My assistant, this girl Brandi? I thought she ran out because Yellow Earth was getting so weird, or she hated the fieldwork. Then I realized it was living with me.”

  “That couldn’t be so awful.”

  She realizes she is leaning against him.

  “You ever married?”

  “Once, long time ago,” he says. “It didn’t take.”

  “Incompatible.”

  “She wanted to have kids and a house and all right away, and I– it didn’t feel right in my gut. So she gave up on me.”

  “Got to listen to your gut.”

  The nighthawk buzzes again, cruising for moths. There were buffalo here, she thinks, and the people who followed them, and agriculture of some sort along the river. But now–

  “You’ll stick out this boom?”

  “Seems like I ought to. I mean, people voted for me.”

  “Who lost?”

  “The last time? Fella who’s got a car lot. He’ll clear a couple hundred grand this year.”

  “And I should have gone into geology. More money in rocks than in rodents.”

  “My parents’ day,” says Will, “especially when they were younger, there was more of a center to things. Even out here where there’s so much space between people. There was church, folks belonged to things that brought them together, they had to pitch in when there was weather.”

  “Community.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I think that’s all gone to the internet. You’re not on Facebook, are you?”

  He laughs softly. “People are in my face all day and half the night, I don’t need any more what do you call it– networking–”

  “I’ll be quiet then.”

  They sit there for a long spell, bugs and birds and the distant traffic providing a soft blanket of sound, and Leia begins to watch herself as she always does, semi-pathetic biology geek out in the middle of nowhere with a guy who’s probably figuring the odds are good, but the goods are odd-

  Then he turns her face to his, and irony surrenders to passion.

  “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH your work, it’s just bullshit from Houston.”

  “They don’t know I exist,” says Tuck.

  “And believe me, they don’t want to know.” He’s in Hurry Upshaw’s little shack on the deck, the tour already started outside, stands of pipe being craned into the slot for the day’s drilling. “What it is, the insurance people are all over them about fatalities up here, so they say nobody without at least two years’ experience.”

  “Fatalities?” He hasn’t heard anything, not on the news, not from the guys, who are joyful purveyors of gossip.

  “Fella they medevacced out just passed in the hospital,” says Upshaw. “Fell off the damn platform while he was hosing it down.”

  “They really think they can find that many experienced hands?”

  “I’ve had three different qualified hands approach me since you came on, Gatlin, but you were doing fine and they were gonna expect higher pay. You can’t take it personal.”

  “But this is just the one company–”

  “Company owns a good percentage of what’s drilling here if you look through all the dummy operations. Tell you what, though–”

  Upshaw scribbles on the back of yesterday’s depth printout–

  “You track this character down, tell him I’ll vouch for you. He got one or two wells going in, what I hear, and he’s not too particular about who he hires.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he don’t pay but half of what we do, so his outfit’s likely to have some folks still trying to make the Big Show. I worked for him when I was coming up– you learn damn quick.”

  “Any idea where I could–”

  “Try Buster’s. Most likely spot he’ll park himself when he’s off work.”

  Tuck takes the name from the driller. Worth a try, though it sounds kind of fly-by-night.

  “I want to thank you for the opportunity here,” he says, and Upshaw waves it off.r />
  “You got any damn brains you’ll find something else to do,” he grins. “Good luck to you.”

  Tuck hurries off the platform, Mike and Ike too busy wrestling pipe to see him go.

  As he remembers, there isn’t any vodka in the house, so he surrenders himself to the slow-moving procession into Yellow Earth. Like being in a wagon train, he thinks, but with diesel exhaust.

  Econo Liquor is obviously having a hard time keeping the shelves stocked, but he scores a bottle of Stoli and some tonic. He’s on 11th heading back to the 2 when he sees her.

  She’s in the Arby’s parking lot, standing by a blue Chevy Malibu with the driver’s-side door sporting rust-colored primer. He makes a left at the light and is the object of much horn blowing till he can scoot across lanes to turn into the empty drive-thru lane. He eases around to the lot, near empty but for a few early-bird employees and Jewelle. He parks in a far corner, adjusting his rearview mirror to get a better angle on her.

  She’s wearing a parka and what look like bowling shoes– Francine would know the name of them. Her hair blows around her face in the wind. A couple times at Bazookas she had sparkles in her hair, silver sparkles in golden hair, and he had to do a careful clothes check in the men’s, lit as bright as a hospital operating room, after their dance.

  It looks like she’s waiting for somebody.

  If he was to get out and accidentally bump into her, what a coincidence, gee, they’re not open yet? He feels like their relationship is partly based on him being a rig worker, that and strapping on the healthy paycheck before he walks into the club. But there is definitely some chemistry, something beyond the dancer and client roles they’ve been playing–

  He has his seatbelt off and the door half open when the gleaming black Hummer muscles into the lot. It has some mud-spatter around the hubs, looking like a search-and-destroy vehicle from another planet, dark-tinted windows obscuring whoever is at the wheel. She smiles, gets into the passenger side, and the machine rushes away.

  It’s only nine o’clock, thinks Tuck. What more can they hit me with today?

  VIC TURNS THE NEON off so it won’t be in the photographs. There have been national reporters wandering through town, grabbing a few quick quotes. ‘Boom-town Blues,’ all that. Bazookas is a good handle, catchy, and he may want to use it somewhere else.