by John Sayles
The guy in the passenger seat turns the dome light on to help see, holds the paper up to it. She has to lean into the open window a bit to get a good look and hears the crunch of gravel behind her. There’s only one word written on the piece of paper and at first it doesn’t make sense.
Gotcha
THE GIRL APPEARS IN her headlights, not totally off the road, and is gone. There was blood. Leia slows and turns– she was going seventy, crazy at night though the roads are so straight– but when she gets back to where she thinks the spot was there is nobody. She stops, gets out, calls.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Are you okay?”
Again no response, but then a sound to the side. It is black night, only the cones of her headlights and the half-dozen distant intense pockets of light where gas flares are lit or all-night crews lay out drilling pads.
The girl steps up to the shoulder, more a presence than something Leia can see yet.
“I don’t know where I am,” she says.
Under the dome light as she sits into the car, Leia can see that the girl has a smudge of dirt on her face, that there’s blood from her nose dried on her lip and staining her blouse.
“You’re hurt.”
“No. I’m all right.” The Native American girl stares out at the nearly featureless prairie. It’s the warmest night they’ve had all month, barely a breeze.
“Where is this?”
“I think it’s called Route 10 here. We’re just west of Hawkeye.” Leia has a good sense of the reservation roads from her initial colony scouting, knows which side of the Missouri she’s on and can skirt around the oilfield traffic most of the way to Yellow Earth.
“I need to go back the other way, then,” says the girl, and even in the dark Leia can tell she’s crying. She slows, turns the car again.
“How did you get out here?”
No response for a long moment. There is a feeling you get from wild-caught animals when you transport them, even when they’re not moving in the cage, not a smell or a sound but a tightness in the air, something ready to snap.
“It’s where they left me.”
What she was afraid of, the first thing that clicked in her head when the girl was caught in her lights.
“I should take you to your hospital.”
“We don’t have one.”
“Then into Yellow Earth.”
“No.”
“–and then to the police.”
“No.”
“You can’t just–”
“My parents– we’re Christians,” says the girl, shaking now. “I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“There–?”
“At the party. It got kind of out of control and nobody was in any shape to drive me so I walked. It’s not much more than a mile.”
“You’ve got bigger problems than trouble with your parents.”
Leia slows down but the girl is silent. Yellow Earth is in the other direction.
“Was it somebody you knew?”
“No. Two men– it was too dark to see.”
Leia turns the car for the third time.
“I’ll take you to the emergency room. I’ll stay with you– we can call your parents from there.”
The girl says nothing, which she takes as acquiescence. Leia feels like if she saw one of them on the road she’d run him over.
“What’s your name?”
“Jolene.”
What the hell, maybe try to change the subject–
“Like the Dolly Parton song.”
“I get to hear it a lot.”
“At least it’s a great song. You could be something else– Clementine.”
“Yeah.”
Driving out here is a little less lonely since the platform crews have come with their powerful work lights and the highways are streaming with trucks all through the night. Leia knows where all the gas stations are, most never closing these days, but there is still all this space to get lost in. And they are still out there, the predators, maybe somewhere near. They are always out there, somewhere, but you can’t live your life thinking about that. Prairie dogs, described in one of the journals as ‘the Chicken McNuggets of the high plains,’ spend a third of their waking day scanning for danger. But even with all the hardtails crowding the town, with all the stares and comments she now gets, Leia has never felt endangered.
Which is just magical thinking.
Leia drives to Mercy. They sit in the car under the parking lot lights and the girl, Jolene, is still shaking, and Leia takes her hand and squeezes it.
“This is a thing,” she says. “A thing that happened to you– like a car accident or a bad flu. The men, they’re gone now and they won’t come back, and the important thing to remember is they don’t own you, they don’t own any little bit of you. You’re the same Jolene who woke up in bed this morning. Really.”
It may be bullshit but that’s the way she would want to feel about it and that’s the best she can do.
“If you have to call the police,” says Jolene, pleading with her eyes, “would you call Mr. Two Strike at the reservation? Cause that’s where it happened, and I, like, used to go to school with his kids.”
Leia walks the girl into the hospital, the reception lights assaulting them and two young men with their faces scraped and bleeding half asleep, still drunk, in two of the plastic chairs waiting for stitches.
The woman behind the glass panel gets Jolene in to be seen right away, and Leia sits as far as she can from the two fighters, air heavy with booze breath for yards around them. She is getting out her phone to call Will’s office when the other one, the one who’s name she should remember but who she always calls Deputy Dipshit, comes into the lobby.
“Another brawl in front of Bazookas,” he says when she tells him what she knows. “I got to talk to those two.”
“But then you’ll deal with her?”
“Sure,” he says, clearly annoyed at the extra work on his shift. “When she comes out from the Doc. Then I spose I could drive her home.”
“I can do that. I don’t think she wants to be alone with a man in a car. Even in the back seat.”
“Suit yourself,” says the deputy, whose name she now remembers is Clayton. “But if she was to a party out there, I’m not sure that story of hers gonna hold water.”
Hitting the deputy is not an option, and Will has explained that with what the county is able to pay you’re not going to get the brightest lights to join the sheriff’s department.
“Is Sheriff Crowder on duty?” She hopes he takes it as a vote of no confidence in his abilities.
“Off the clock. What were you doing out on the rez?”
“Just driving, thinking.” And if you had a decent fucking radio station, I’d have been listening to that.
“Lucky you come along, then.”
He moves away to rouse the fighters and write down the answers to his questions on a small notepad, then goes in to the emergency room to find Jolene. She hopes the doctor is thorough and at least kind. She gets the number for the reservation police, and the dispatcher says the chief will meet them at Jolene’s house. The fighters nod off again, and the receptionist behind the glass calls her over.
“Her mom and dad are pretty religious.” The receptionist is in her fifties, dyed blonde with a smoker’s rasp. “They believe in that thing where all the good people suddenly disappear?”
“The Rapture.”
“Yeah. Her mom told me at sewing how the airlines have to have either the pilot or the co-pilot who’s a sinner, or at least a nonbeliever, or the insurance won’t cover them.”
“Because–?”
“Just cause it’s the Rapture it don’t mean the ones that’s left won’t sue. And if both your pilots disappear–”
“I never thought of that.”
“Anyhow, if she comes home and has to tell them that story– well, they’re probly the type that think wickedness comes from within.”
/> “She’s their daughter.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to tell them what she’s got to. Not alone.”
Since Brandi bugged out there is the other bed in the apartment. Hell, I could just adopt her–
“Maybe I could go in with her, if she wants. Help her through the story. Be like a– like a buffer.”
The receptionist winks at her. People still wink here, like in Frank Capra movies.
“You’re an angel.”
WILL RECOGNIZES THE GUARD at the gate of the man camp.
“Evenin, Sheriff,” says Cory Stufflebean, who Will has never seen under anything but a Stetson. “Your red brother’s already inside.”
He hits the buzzer and the gate slides open. “I’ll join you in the lobby.”
Back in Yellow Earth the main camp is three stories of stacked ISO containers with doors and windows cut into them, what the long-time town folks are calling ‘the Pile.’ This one, called Killdeer City after the council chairman of the rez, is six rows of long, trailer-like structures behind some security fencing, dumped on a flat spot in some patchy grazing land. He parks next to Danny Two Strike’s patrol car among the collection of mud-spattered pickups and gleaming muscle cars in the front lot, and heads for the admin building entrance, with Cory hurrying herky-jerky to catch up with him.
“How’s that leg doing?”
Cory stops and bends to rap his shin hard with his knuckles. “Terrific, now that I swapped it out. Plastic and titanium, like a jet fighter.”
“They took it off?”
“Just under the knee. The sumbitch was hurting me so bad I decided the hell with it.”
Cory was a bronc-riding champion in the ’50s before he got trapped under a ride at the Wildhorse Stampede, the animal twisting and kicking even after it slammed sideways into the arena dirt. Will has brought Cory in for D&D a dozen times over the years but thought he’d left the area.
“You look good in the uniform.”
“Bull turds I do.” The old man taps a code on a keypad to open the front door for them. “I look like that bank guard in the movies, the one that always gets kilt reaching for his pistol.”
“They pay pretty good?”
“Better than anything else I could handle. My sponsor hooked me up here.”
“AA?”
“Yeah, the old-time religion. Doctor said how there wasn’t any space-age replacement for a liver, so I hung up my drinking spurs.”
“Good for you.”
They step into the lobby area, just an unmanned reception desk and a couple long brown-leather couches, a lame instrumental of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” oozing out from somewhere.
“Tell you the truth, Will, I feel like hammered shit. But I spose it’s better than being dead.”
Danny stands up from one of the couches, his hat in his hand. “Morning, Will.”
“Early morning.”
“Thanks for coming out.”
“No problem. We got an assault?”
Danny nods his head. “One of our girls and two fellas sound like they’re probably white. She was walking home from a house party at her cousins’, the two stopped by her in their car to ask directions, then one pulled her inside and they took off. Left her out in the boonies about four hours ago, banged up pretty bad. She wandered around till that Wildlife Girl come along, doing who knows what out here, and–”
“Clayton filled me in on it when I came on.”
“You got Clayton on nights?”
Will shrugs. “He’d make more hauling gravel, but he likes to carry a gun.” He looks around the lobby. It feels more like a display room than anything real, with Harleigh’s arrow logo on the wall behind the reception desk. “What are we doing here?”
“Show him the card.”
Cory pulls a plastic card out of his shirt pocket, hands it to Will.
“You swipe this little bugger to get in through the gate, use it like a credit card at the convenience store on site, gets you into the gym, the rec room, the Wifi café.”
“The girl saw one of these on the dashboard of the car,” says Danny.
Will nods, hands the card back to Cory. “Description of the car?”
Danny shrugs. “A four-door something. I sat with her and flipped through our auto look-book, but she couldn’t even give me a color. Not a pickup, not a van.”
“She saw their faces?”
Danny sighs, pulls out his notepad, flips to the page he wants.
“White male, slender and strong, dark hair, one- or two-day stubble, noticeable gold crown on what is probably his upper left bicuspid, probably chews tobacco– no visible tattoos. Wearing a monocolor hooded sweatshirt, khaki pants. Second perp is older, heavy-set, brown-to-black hair which is thinning, wearing jeans and a maroon windbreaker, belt with a heavy belt buckle, black grit under his fingernails.”
“That’s it?”
“It was dark and they pushed a bag that’d probably had some kind of fast food in it over her face. She smelled fries and onions.”
They both look to Cory, who shakes his head.
“We got four-fifty, five hundred hardtails in here at any one time, coming and going. You coulda just described a third of em.”
“You got a camera on the parking lot entrance?”
“Live feed so’s we can get a look, but it don’t record.”
“Damn.” Will looks to Danny.
“I figure we take a little walk-through,” says Danny, “see if two badges makes anybody flinch. If we flush anything out and they’re white, I got you to make the arrest. If nothing pops, then I’ll sit with Cory and go through ID photos on their database.”
Will nods to Cory. “You’re the Man.”
The old cowboy leads, access card in his hand. “I can take you into all the public spaces,” he says. “The residences, you’re gonna need a warrant.”
“Is that what they call them, residences?”
“Jack-and-Jill rooms– you got a bed unit with a storage drawer under it, half-fridge, microwave, sink, flat-screen TV, share a toilet with the fella next door. Couple feet bigger all around than your county lockup, Will. Plus they got cable.”
They leave the lobby and walk down a narrow chute to the next structure.
“Temperature drops and the wind gets howlin, you can access pert near all the amenities without stepping outside. Mostly fellas come here to sleep.”
They step into the dining hall, a low-ceilinged quadruple-wide with a cafeteria-style food line and a few dozen plastic tables scattered around. Fifteen or twenty men, all white, eat at or lounge around the tables, a few with their music hooked up to their heads.
“Our tenants are all pretty much of the Caucasian persuasion,” says Cory. “There’s a few Mexicans working the mud jobs and low end on construction crews, but they can’t afford it out here. And then your folks, Danny, they got their own homes or relatives to stay with nearby.”
Cory waits by the tray of lemon squares at the end of the chow line while the two lawmen stroll around the room, one on either side of every occupied table, looking into eyes. Mostly the men don’t respond, too exhausted or disinterested to do more than look up, though a few nod. Lots of tats, some notable beer bellies, guys with sunburned necks and forearms, and you could run a small engine on what they got jammed under their fingernails. They rejoin Cory, passing the insistently humming bank of food vending machines and heading through the security door to walk down the next connective chute.
“You’re right. It is a bit nicer than the county lockup,” says Will to Cory.
“Yeah, them bars tend to fuck up your ambience.” Cory says it with the French pronunciation. “This is more like that assisted living I was in over to Spring-brook, probly use the same kit to put it together. ‘Panelized Flat Pack Structures.’”
“Listen to you.”
“Working the graveyard out here,” says Cory, “you got plenty time to peruse the brochures. This here’s a ‘portable modular housing fa
cility custom-built to the locale, workforce size, and other needs unique to your project.’”
“Nicer than the government housing on the rez,” says Danny. “Nicer than what half the people out here living in.”
“Harleigh get out here much?” asks Will.
“I only seen the chief once,” Cory grins. “Come out for some photographs, shake a few hands. Manager is a fella who does these all over the country. Runs it like one of them corporate feed lots, but he knows his bidness.”
They step into the Wifi café then, a white-walled little box with three men sitting at the row of six computers, their faces washed by the bluish glow of the screens. One of the men is Skyping, talking to his kids in a thick Texas accent.
“I don’t see no oil bein pumped,” he says. “Just drill the holes and leave em for the frack boys. But without your Daddy and his friends there wouldn’t be no gas for Momma’s Explorer– well, darlin, then you shouldn’t spill. Momma got to keep her eye on the road.”
Danny cruises along the backs of the computers, getting a good look, then nods and they enter the next chute.
“I lived in one of these deals once,” says Cory. “Back when they built the dam.”
“You’re that old?”
“Son, I’m two years older than dirt. Broke my hip the first time, so I’se off the circuit for a spell, and I chewed down enough aspirins to get through the interview without whimpering too bad, and they put me on a bulldozer. Rode it for two years and it never throwed me once.”
“This is when?”
The light is harder in the chutes, and all from above, the broken vessels in Cory’s nose looking purple.
“I started pushing dirt in ’49, but went back to the rodeo before they finished it. There was a couple towns sprung up– Pick City’s still there, but I was out in what they called Silver City. Wunt no silver there ever, far as I know, just put up a couple rows of these little boxy things converted from grain bins– called em ‘cabins’– shaped like the plastic houses in that board game.”