Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “Little of both,” says Dickyboy, “if that’s cool with you.”

  “You know the password?”

  “Fuck no,” mutters Dylan, who smoked a J behind the wheel on the way over.

  “That’s it! Step inside, step inside.”

  The music is cranked way up and kids are shouting over it and there’s a good chunk of the junior and senior class there, heads, drinkers, straight arrows, almost as many girls as boys, which is an improvement over the last time. Dicky-boy has on the hunting vest he just bought, the pockets have pockets, while Dylan, on probation, serves as the bank.

  “Yo, Dickyboy, where you been hanging?” the guys shout when they see him, or “Here comes trouble!” or just “Yo, you got anything?”

  The bathrooms are all taken, girls mostly, going in two and three at a time, so he sets up in the kitchen, using the little island counter to deal out product and getting bumped every time someone passes to grab a beer from the fridge.

  “It’s the walking drugstore,” says Armand Fox, yanking a pair of cans off the plastic rings. “Looks like you’ve expanded.”

  They never liked each other, him and Armand, even if they were on teams together back when Dickyboy was into sports. Everybody’s buzzing about the big comeback, Armand hitting three three-pointers in a row, so he’s strutting even when he’s standing still.

  “If you break your own scoring record this year,” says Dickyboy, “will they have to put an asterisk on it?”

  Armand is a senior and should have graduated in ’09, but was notably absent from the ceremony.

  “Says the guy who comes to school for the free lunch.”

  Dylan doesn’t look so good. He’s one of the few white guys here and was nervous about coming, and has the asthma thing on top of it. He says smoking dope helps him breathe, but it’s really hot in here with all the bodies, and his forehead is all sweaty.

  “Any scholarship offers?”

  Armand just glares at him and pushes out to the front room.

  “Football player?” asks Dylan.

  “Basketball. No jump, no D, but he hits nothing but net. If we lived in Pygmy-land he’d be a superstar.”

  The kids around him seem pretty psyched to see each other without adults present, the ones least comfortable with a simple conversation getting the most wrecked. Katy Perry is singing “Teenage Dream,” Dylan bouncing up and down in time with the beat, a couple making out in the pantry with the door not totally closed–

  Fawn steps in, looking bored and miserable.

  Somehow Fawn manages to go to Yellow Earth and still keep her Three Na tions friends. She’s wearing something that really shows her legs off and is looking different somehow–

  “Dickyboy in the kitchen,” she shouts over the song, “what a surprise.”

  “You on a field trip? Visit the natives in their habitat?”

  “Somebody told me you went missing, and I said, ‘What could Dickyboy possibly hide behind?’”

  “You’re looking pretty chunky yourself.” That’s it, she has a belly. Fawn who used to look like a runway girl on a TV fashion show.

  “You’re such a flatterer.”

  This always happens to them, like chemicals that shouldn’t be mixed together. And what’s this– the beginning of actual tears?

  Something neutral, maybe call a truce, derail the usual fight.

  “How you been?”

  “Busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  He’s heard rumors, but people make up crazy shit, especially about people who leave them to go to Yellow Earth or anywhere else off the reservation. A kind of jealousy maybe, or just imaginations in overdrive.

  “Oh, driving around,” says Fawn, looking away from him. “Trying to stay cool. I got my own car now.”

  Of course she does. Word is her stepfather has got people throwing money at him to let them do business on tribal property.

  “What kind?”

  “You wouldn’t fit in it,” she says, and moves back to the main party.

  “Bee-yitch,” says Dylan.

  “Yeah, she needs a stepladder to climb on her own ego, Fawn.”

  If he’d known she was going to be here he wouldn’t have come. Their worlds are totally separate now, no reason to give a shit, but there isn’t anybody else on the planet who can make him feel worse.

  “Yo– you got anything?”

  They do a little business, nothing hard core, and then Dickyboy tells Dylan to chill for a minute, maybe go out back and light up another stick, while he cruises the party. Mostly he doesn’t want to seem like some leper who gets stuck in the kitchen and never circulates, the guy who DJs the songs but never gets out to dance.

  There’s more thrashing than dancing going on now, Alice in Chains wailing “Man in the Box,” and there’s most of the guys chummed together on one side of the room and Fawn at the center of a bunch of the girls in another and then some pairs going at it in various stages. Jolene tugs his arm.

  Jolene?

  “That really upset Fawn,” she shouts into his ear.

  “Yeah,” he says, “kicking somebody in the nuts and then running off must be traumatic.”

  Jolene’s another one going to school in Yellow Earth, a real Braniac, but even in the summer this is way past her bedtime.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, Jolene nowhere near as prickly as Fawn.

  “What?”

  “I said what are you doing here?”

  “They’re my cousins.”

  She means Hitch and Denny.

  “They’re not my cousins.”

  “So?”

  “But you’re my like– what– second cousin? So how can–?”

  “Different sides of the family.”

  She looks a little scared, Jolene, and hasn’t let go of his arm.

  “Do you remember the word?” he asks.

  “What word?”

  In the sixth grade they were the last ones standing at the school spelling bee. He was really into school then, got good grades, but there was always Jolene Otis, and nobody did better than her.

  “The word I blew you away with.”

  A hint of memory comes into her eyes. “Oh– you mean the spelling.”

  He digs into one of the hunting vest pockets and comes out with a small yellow pill, holds it in his palm in front of her face.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s the word. Ecstasy. You spelled it with two c’s instead of two s’s.”

  Jolene frowns, looks at the pill.

  “That’s Ecstasy?”

  “Yup.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Oh– chills you out. Makes you feel good.”

  “And then you’re like an addict.”

  “Never been an Ecstasy addict in the history of the world. Not even rats and monkeys.”

  “And you want to sell it to me?”

  “Free sample.”

  “I don’t need anything.”

  “You may not want anything, Jolene, but you definitely need something. You’re here because Fawn snapped the whip and you were too afraid of her to say no, so now you’re hanging onto me because it keeps you from looking alone and constipated.”

  She lets go of his arm.

  “It’s good for constipation too?”

  He has to smile. He has never, ever heard Jolene make a wisecrack before.

  “Have you had a beer?”

  “I don’t like beer.”

  “The point is to change your consciousness. Our people been doing that for centuries–”

  “That’s peyote.”

  “Got some in my other pocket if you want to try it. Can be tough on the stomach, though. Whereas this”– he presses the yellow pill into her hand– “has virtually no side effects, unless you’re wearing braces or need to get to sleep right away.”

  She doesn’t give him the pill back, looking into his eyes. Really cute girl if she’d smile once in a while.

  “Wha
t’s gonna happen to you, Dickyboy?”

  It’s something he doesn’t like to think about a lot. The best thing about smoke, at least the stuff he and Dylan have been getting from the bouncer, is the way it puts you in a hazy, no worries place, where even breakfast is too much future to deal with.

  She’s still looking at him, and it prompts another memory, a poem they had to stand up and trade verses on in class, Jolene barely able to muster the volume to be heard.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me. ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’”

  Dylan is waving from the doorway to the kitchen, maybe another customer or some problem. Dickyboy starts away, turning back to call to Jolene.

  “But thank you for asking.”

  IT’S BAD ENOUGH TO have to wear a rubber. But these assholes, the ones who come in here and next door at Teasers, don’t even get to take their pants off. Otto has the door and Scorch is floating in the big room for a couple hours, just letting his presence, his existence, be known to the mob. It’s as much for the girls as for the customers, and if they try to pull any of their bullshit likely to lose Vic his license Scorch will be on them like white on rice. Zeena, executing a chopper on the pole as “American Woman” thumps out, has been coming in all jacked up, maybe even getting high in the dressing room toilet, and he has already had to lay a hot word in her ear. And Tuesday night she had her fingers inside her performance panties on stage, a big hit with the drillers but a definite no-no if anybody from the state is checking up. Zeena slithers down the pole head first and crawls on hands and knees to the edge of the stage so the front row boys can slip fives and singles in between her knockers– the hundred-and-first of a hundred-and-one uses for silicone.

  I mean if you want to get off, just bring up Backpage.com on your phone and book a party. Horton Hires a Ho. But all this other business, suckers getting milked for more cash every step of the way– Teasers is the perfect name for it.

  Oxana and Chelsea are working the bar, all smiles and no bullshit, pouring the liquids and harvesting the green, watering the drinks of the ones who’ve already had enough, and always aware of where the floor man is if somebody needs to be shown the door. There are three or four of the girls out doing table dances, taxi meters running in their heads as they grind for gold, and Brent is at a table in the corner, getting into something with Wayne Lee Hickey.

  “My man Scorch!” Wayne Lee calls out when he spots him, like they’re friends or something. “Sheriff of the Pussy Posse.”

  Scorch nods to Brent, whose jaw is out the way it gets when he’s pissed.

  Brent nods back. “Whassup?”

  “We had a guy who claimed to be a health inspector in the other day,” Scorch says, leaning down so they can hear him over Lenny Kravitz. “Five o’clock but we already got girls working, the guy spent twenty seconds checking out the toilets and two hours gaping at the T and A. Mostly the A– cat was definitely a back-door man.”

  “Like I was just saying to Wayne Lee here,” says Brent, deadpan, “eatin beaver is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

  “Surfer Dude whining again?” Wayne Lee has maybe never been to a beach in his life but looks like he belongs there, wearing those fruity shorts and with a smear of white sunblock on his nose. Type of guy who wouldn’t last a day in the joint, like throwing a bleeding baby into a shark tank. Whereas Brent, the cons would have to take their time making book on Brent, and by then he’d be running the tier.

  “You’re not gonna share the wealth with your people,” says Wayne Lee, gazing off across the smoky floor to the red-lit stage, where Zeena is picking up twenties with her snatch, “don’t go rubbing it in their noses.”

  Scorch’s deal with Vic is he gets paid with cash straight from the bank, virgin stuff with the wrappers still on that hasn’t ever been wedged in anybody’s crevices.

  “What this overpaid brainfuck doesn’t get is that flashing the bling is part of my job. Like hanging shiners on a fishhook. Christ, renting that fucking Vette by the week nearly busted me. But I landed the Chairman.”

  “And now you own that ride. And that house with all the toys in it–”

  Brent has put up what by local standards is a mansion, just outside of Yellow Earth, paying, or maybe just promising, a fortune in overtime to get it finished before the fucking Dakota winter kicks in again.

  “You think the landmen who do leases for the Company come on with please, baby, please? No fucking way. They lay those full-color brochures on them, the Company is in Texas, the Company is in Alaska, the Company is in Kuwait, the Company is in outer fucking space, and if you want to join our exclusive club and get filthy rich just sign on the dotted line. How do I pull investors in without I look like a high roller myself?”

  “I thought we were running an oil service company.”

  Brent trades a look with Scorch and shakes his head. “And Vic Barboni here is running a dance academy.”

  Scorch sees Fontayne, plastered to a beefy pipe-pusher’s lap, giving him the eye.

  “I’ll have to leave you gentlemen,” he says. “Enjoy the show.”

  The thing is, Fontayne thinks she’s done and Burger Boy wants more mileage for his money.

  “Better let her loose,” he says with a smile, the friendly one, not the don’t-fuck-with-me one. “You get to play with them but you don’t get to keep them.”

  “Hey, for forty bucks–”

  Scorch claps his hands over his ears. Zeena is done now, taking prisoners on the floor, while Nurse Betty wipes down the pole, wearing the latex disposable gloves that are the first to come off in her routine.

  “I’m not here to mediate financial transactions,” he says. “Please unhand the young lady.”

  You try to keep it on a joking level, boys together being naughty, unless somebody really pushes your buttons and you need to fuck their face up.

  “Besides, I gotta weewee,” says Fontayne, which might even be true.

  Burger Boy frowns, still with the death grip on her thighs.

  “Unless it’s your thing, I seen her unload on a guy’s lap once. Not the wet spot he was hoping for.”

  The guy lets go and Fontayne is gone like a shot. Time is money to these girls, they got a number in their head for every hour they spend on the floor, and while the guy might have been only thirty seconds short of his Promised Land, something like a smoke detector was shrieking in her head.

  Scorch gives the sap a light pat on the shoulder. “Women,” he says, “you can’t live with em and you can’t drown em in a bathtub.”

  He sees L. T. and Shakes at the bar then, L. T. arranging empty shot glasses into a double row formation, ready for review. My entourage, thinks Scorch, heading over, with three quarters of a brain between the two of them.

  “There is no sex in the Champagne Room!” quotes Shakes loudly as Scorch slaloms through the crowd to the pair.

  “We don’t have a Champagne Room. It’s called the VIP Lounge.”

  “Next door,” says L. T.

  “You went in Teasers?”

  “What, your feelings are hurt?”

  “You could get a disease just breathing the air in that joint.” “Shakes got booted for propositioning a stripper.”

  “That’s what they’re there for.”

  “Perhaps his language was overly explicit.”

  “This bouncer with, like, metal teeth– Russian guy, I think– come over to lean on me, so’s I told him how you and me were tight, Scorch.” Shakes is really lit up, face flushed, eyes bright. “He wasn’t impressed.”

  “I understand. Anybody with you for a friend must be a real sack of shit.”

  There is a shout as Betty puts her stethoscope chest piece on some guy’s crotch to listen for a heartbeat.

  L. T. gets off his barstool, teetering a bit, breath that could strip paint off a battleship hull. “And we have decided that the skanks in this establishment, despite its employment of our good buddy Scorch, are cold-
hearted and mercenary.”

  “Plus none of them will take a check,” says Shakes, standing and almost falling into Scorch. They are always broke, no matter how much work he and Brent throw them, and usually unable to remember what they spent it on.

  “Therefore we have decided to embark on a squaw hunt out on the rez.”

  “You watch what you say out there.”

  “What, they gonna lift our scalps?”

  “No, they’ll cut off your dicks and nail em to a telephone pole. Neither of you is in any shape to drive.”

  “He’ll brake,” says Shakes, leaning on L. T. for balance as they start away, “I’ll steer.”

  If they’re lucky they’ll skid into a ditch before they get into real trouble.

  “Yo, Scorch!”

  It is Bo, signaling that it’s time to change the guard in the Lounge. Betty is down to her white hospital hose and nurse’s hat as he passes the stage. You only see that gear in porno movies now, the real ones at the clinic where he goes for his Hep C cleanout wearing those pajamas with patterns off of Kleenex boxes on them.

  A drunk leaning on the wall by the door to the VIP Lounge is singing along, somehow getting the simple lyrics to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” wrong.

  The music inside is always mellower, lower volume, Donna Summer having vocal orgasms, and even some stuff in French. The light, what there is of it, is a kind of rosy pink, and Nora Jones is on the system, soft-edged even with the thump of Def Leppard’s bass line hammering through from the big room.

  Scorch sits on the upholstered chair in the little niche the guys call the Throne, visible but not intrusive, just meant as a reminder to everybody that Willy better stay under wraps. Sasha has her big Ukrainian butt parked on a guy who has his eyes closed, her back to him, hands on knees for leverage as she gives his crotch rocket a generous grind. Scorch hopes he won’t start moaning– he hates it when they moan. And Jewelle is straddling one of her regulars, local guy who works mud on the rigs, moving her ass in circles, rubbing her breasts against his face and whispering what she’d love to do if things were different into his ear.