Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “Monopoly.”

  “Played a lot of Monopoly in the hospital, when I was doing my sheet time between stompings. Learnt I wasn’t cut out for the real estate bidness. Not like the fellas who put up these little boomtowns– four or five of em dumped alongside the road we cut between the dam site and 83. They’d have three, four of us fellas in each unit, somebody opened a little store, there was a bar they threw up from lumber off the barns about to go under, dance hall.”

  “My grandparents lost their place,” says Danny.

  “Hell, it was what, nine outta ten people on the rez had to pick up and move, we seen em leaving with what they could carry.”

  “Any Indians on the crew?”

  “Couple fellas, maybe– drivers, pick-and-shovel men.” Cory shakes his head. “The cabins was just bare inside– you got a frame and a mattress, little stove to make coffee on if you had your own pot, no housekeeping or any of the services that come with this here deal. Pay was good, though, and Jesus, we had fun on our off time. Wasn’t but one of those cabins with the TV antennae and nothing to watch back then, so it was card games and races.”

  “Races.”

  “Anything that had wheels and we got keys to or could hotwire, we’d race it. You fellas are too young to remember what a steam shovel is.”

  “I had a children’s book,” says Danny. “My mother read that to me most every night so’s I’d shut up and nod off.”

  “Well the trick to racing one is not to tip it over on the turns. We’re racing in muck, see, so you get a nice sideslip on the turns.”

  “Don’t suppose the law was ever called out there,” says Will.

  “Wasn’t nobody to bother but each other, and we kind of policed ourselves. When there was fights, you’d just let the loser lie there, rest up a bit, and somebody’d throw a bucket of water on him if he had his shift coming up.”

  “You must of worked on ranches before, lived in a bunkhouse.”

  “More than a few. And I’ll tell you one thing– this here,” says Cory as they step into the gym, “you can live here for months and never come up on the radar. Don’t need to talk to nobody, you can stick your headphones on, lay back in your room and look at two thousand channels’ worth of nonsense, sleep till you go out for another twelve. Try that on a ranch and the boys are like to take a branding iron to your tender parts.”

  The gym is the same white box as the lobby and Wifi café, all the machines and benches taken, even at six in the morning. Will lingers beside a stocky, over-muscled guy bench pressing what looks like four hundred pounds of free weight several times.

  “Who’s the girl?” he asks Danny, as if it’s just conversation.

  “Jolene Otis. Religious family, goes to school in Yellow Earth now, I never heard nothing bad about her.”

  “How she doing?”

  “Bout like what you’d imagine. Word leaked out awful fast, and her boy cousins– she got a truckload of cousins, couple of em hosted the party she was at– they’re out looking nasty and talking about gelding somebody. I had to have a talk.”

  The lifter makes a final Whoo!, thrusting the loaded bar up and racking it, staring past Will to the ceiling, then sits up, grabs his towel, and steps quickly out the door that leads behind the structure.

  Will looks to Danny. Danny taps his lip and the side of his neck– the man had a Fu Manchu moustache and a three-color tat of a screaming skull on fire on the left side of his neck.

  “Don’t think she’d have missed that,” he says.

  “Call him Scorch,” says Cory. “Works for the chief’s outfit.”

  “ArrowFleet?”

  Cory nods.

  “He works at Bazookas too,” says Will. “Bouncer.”

  “Know his real name? Scorch?”

  “It’ll be in the data up at the desk,” Cory volunteers.

  “He’s not one of our perps from tonight,” says Danny.

  “Probably not.” Will stares at the bench the man was laying back on, black vinyl still slick with his sweat. “But I’ll guarantee you he’s doing something we should run him in for.”

  THEY’RE EACH TUGGING AT one side of a suitcase, the pink carry-on with a butterfly pattern he bought Fawn for the Hawaii trip.

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “You’re not stopping me!”

  “I can have him arrested.”

  “For what? It was consensual.”

  “Where did you learn that word?”

  “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

  “Says the high school girl who’s got herself knocked up.”

  Fawn lets go and Connie almost falls to the floor with the suitcase. Fawn looks to Harleigh.

  “Can you get her off my back?”

  “She’s your mother.”

  This observation has never worked before and it doesn’t work again.

  “Call 911,” Connie orders him.

  “Connie.”

  “Call Danny Two Strike, call whoever is in charge of statutary rape.”

  “It’s statutory, Mom.”

  The look of exasperation from Connie, on cue. “Where does she get this stuff?”

  “Television, most likely. We’re not having anybody arrested.”

  “Just because he’s your partner–”

  “My ex-partner.”

  “You brought those people into our lives.”

  “And you thought it was a pretty good deal. You and Bunny out on your shopping binges, thick as thieves.”

  “While her husband is fucking my daughter!”

  Now Fawn pretends to be shocked. “Are you gonna let her talk to me that way?”

  “You two just simmer down.” He is standing in the doorway to Fawn’s bedroom, the avenue of retreat unimpeded behind him. “Where, exactly, do you plan on going?”

  Fawn thrusts her jaw out the way she does when she’s out of ammunition. “Texas or California. Or Florida. He hasn’t made up his mind.”

  “Brent has responsibilities here. Contracts to honor.”

  “Bunny owns the companies.”

  “Bunny,” says Harleigh softly, “is the girl in the car ad who sits on the hood in a short dress and smiles. She doesn’t know diddly about the oil service business.”

  It was never more than a tease with Bunny, he thinks, or he never pushed it any further between them, and is now mightily relieved that he didn’t.

  “And Brent is the guy in the beer ads hanging out with his meathead buddies,” says Connie. “What’s he know about helping a young girl pregnant with her first baby?”

  Fawn mutters, having wondered the same thing. “He doesn’t even like beer. He drinks Bacardi cocktails.”

  “Well excuse me,” says Connie, tossing the suitcase back on the bed. “I had him mixed up with a lowlife who can’t keep his hands off of underaged girls.”

  “He bought me a car!”

  “You don’t have a drivers’ license!”

  “I’ll get one!”

  Harleigh takes a half step forward. Boxing refs must face this all the time, how to separate the opponents without getting pasted.

  “That belly gets any bigger,” says Connie, pointing, “you won’t be able to reach the pedals.”

  Fawn is just starting to show, Harleigh thinking it was all pizza and Coke till she hit them with the news.

  “You knew, didn’t you,” Fawn accuses, narrowing her eyes at him. “That’s why you fired Brent.”

  “Brent was never my employee, we were partners. I dissolved the partnership.”

  “Because of him and me.”

  “Because he’s not an honest man.”

  She only hesitates for a beat. “And you are?”

  And that’s when Connie slaps her.

  They both start to cry then and Harleigh slips in between.

  “Okay, you two– time out. Connie, this isn’t a thing about you as a mother, it’s just how life is these days. Fawn– I love you and I will consider this baby my grandchild.�
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  Connie runs out then. They both listen for a crash, but she is too upset to assault the ceramics, not even slamming the door to their bedroom.

  “You’d better go to her.”

  “In a minute. You sit.”

  Fawn sits, her biggest worry with Harleigh settled now, her defenses coming down. He sits beside her, considering his options. Picking a fight with Brent and then shooting him is his favorite at the moment, but he’s sure Ruby, back in his corner now that he’s left ArrowFleet, would advise against it. Connie pulled this same routine when she was Fawn’s age and ended up stranded in a motel room in Kalispell, going into labor.

  “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do,” he says as gently as he can, “but I don’t trust him.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “The more I know about him, the more I worry for you. You know you can call me, any time of the day or night, no explanations necessary.”

  “Your emergency number.”

  “And I will come and get you. Texas, California, Florida.”

  “We’re gonna be fine. We’re in love.”

  Harleigh sighs, looks at the walls– Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, some skinny boy singer from the Idol show with his shirt pulled open. He’d been sorry to see the Little Mermaid go.

  “What kind of ride did he buy you?”

  “It’s an M-thing.”

  “Miata?”

  “Mazda Miata. Baby blue.”

  Baby blue has always been Fawn’s color.

  “It’s really cute.”

  Harleigh nods. “Son of a bitch knows his automobiles.”

  MAKE YOUR OWN BOX, be your own trainer. There must be an AA meeting here in Yellow Earth, and various other Loser Lobbies, but forget about CrossFit. The people who hadn’t left here before the oil came were the ones with no initiative, the ones too clueless to move.

  Brent is on the treadmill to start, already pushing his lactate threshold, and thinking about what to do about Wayne Lee. “Never think of your enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them,” said the Objectivist, and it’s true, worrying about the people in your way can be a suckhole. He adjusts the slant on the mill to max, digs in. The Workout of the Day he’s chosen is all attack, with ninety-second recovery periods in between. There’s the slacker thing with Wayne Lee, of course, always willing to go with the flow, but that is just borderline laziness. And there’s a new element, a petulance, like Brent owes him something. He tries to bring his knees all the way up to his chest, quads screaming, and imagines the Crusader armies. Basically a Christian biker gang, in it for the rape and pillage and the bragging rights back home if you make it there in one piece. None of this ‘team member’ shit, though they were all aware of a certain power in sheer numbers. Overrun the sons of bitches before they get the second arrow out of the quiver. The machine beeps and he steps off the tread before it stops rolling.

  Ninety seconds. Shake out the quads, couple deep breaths.

  The hero in your soul. She talks about that a lot. Listen to what he really wants, don’t accept compromises, don’t let himself down. Bunny, right now, is a compromise. Have to deal with that situation, unless she’s willing to read the writing on the wall and do the right thing. All the legal tangle, ownership, paper signing, all that weight they tie on to try to handicap you, will be fine. She knows what’s at stake, knows the consequences if she doesn’t hold up her end.

  Not a dumb Bunny.

  Power cleans now. The architect, just a contractor with an attitude really, wondered why the basement room had to be so high. So I don’t smash these weights through the ceiling, numbnuts. You don’t push, you don’t lift, you give gravity a good hard shot in the ass.

  Right into the Bulgarian split squats, no breather in between. He’s started designing his own WODs instead of finding them online, each meant to punish a different muscle group. If you’re not infuriated at least two or three times during your workout, you might as well hang it up.

  Break now. The chief has turned chickenshit, listening to the whiners in his tribe. She had a few bombshells for the red man, too, “They fought to live like animals, and had no rights to the land,” something like that. Which, if you don’t get all romantic about it, is pretty much true. Let them try to live on beef jerky some winter, they think it was so wonderful.

  Buffalo jerky.

  He only got the book because he’d been outbid on the Victoria’s Secret catalog that had been smuggled in. “It’s like science fiction,” said Hummer from the second tier, who rented it to him. “Only more complicated.”

  At first it was slow going, some babe who owned a railroad, and he kept waiting for this Atlas character to show up. Then the ideas kicked in. Things started to make sense, and not just in the book. It was a new way of seeing the world. He was already hitting the iron at Walkaround, just out of boredom, but once he was into the book he started being disciplined about it, setting goals. Looking around on the yard you could see it in the eyes, in the attitude– the ones who ran the joint, who would run the world if they’d take the shackles off, and the extra baggage. From now on I carry nobody.

  Wall ball shots, getting into a rhythm with the medicine ball, nobody in the house to freak out with the impact. Throw it like you mean it, like the point is to put a hole in the wall. He practiced sending the vibes out– do not fuck with me– and they must have gotten the message. He did his own time and read the big book three times, cover to cover. The picture of her on the back wasn’t impressive, little dumpy Russian woman, but she was into some righteous theories. No complaints, no excuses– the next go-round he was going to rock the joint. I’m tougher than the smart ones and smarter than the tough ones, and I know how simple it all should be.

  See it, want it, get it.

  Walk up the wall for handstand pushups, that great rush. Hard to lose your focus, all that blood in your brain, and focus is the whole story from this point on. All the rest of it, the trucking scam, the product, is just for operating cash, just what you need to show to sit at the Big Table. But you get a piece of an oil lease or two–

  He steps out and lets the blood redistribute.

  “The smallest minority on earth is the individual,” she said somewhere. So people who fuck with the rights of the individual can’t pretend they aren’t racists. Or something like that. You get to the Big Table the stakes are higher, the risk greater, but when you win, you get to leave all the others behind, the ones who cling, the ones who can’t hack it. Scorch is a bad man in his own little world, takes care of business, but he doesn’t have the imagination to play on that level, doesn’t have the vision. But when you need shit done and no questions about it–

  Box jumps. Get your plyometrics in gear, engage the abs. The floor is a sizzling hot griddle, don’t let your feet burn. Once you’re there, an accepted player, they can’t touch you. How much money do these Wall Street characters, these greenmailers and corporate raiders steal in a year, and if they’re caught, do they ever do time? No fucking way. Because the little lawmakers and their enforcement goons know the secret– you take those people down, it all comes down. The whole system. Because they need you, need whoever is willing to stick their neck out and make a move, dig a hole, build a skyscraper, give them something to tie down with regulations and taxes so it doesn’t lift off the ground and fly.

  Brent sits in the rowing machine, imagines himself a half boat-length ahead of a competitor, begins to pull. Faster. Harder. Think of other men’s envy as rocket fuel, let it charge you up. He thinks about making it with Fawn down here. She’s still pliable, even if she’s a little spoiled, and he can make her into whatever he wants. A matter of focus, a matter of will. He begins to pull away from the other boat. If he’d been into tats, there was one of the Objectivist’s quotes he’d have on his chest, maybe backwards so he could read it in the mirror every morning.

  “The question isn’t who’s going to let me– it’s who’s going to stop me.”


  IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE a tradition.

  “Rookies always light the first flare stack,” Nicky the derrickman told him, rummaging around for a length of PVC pipe the right length and diameter. “It’s like an initiation.”

  Tuck has only been with the new outfit a week, nice enough guys but a little slapdash compared to Upshaw’s crew. Nothing he can put his finger on, just that they seem like they’re racing to catch up, not to get ahead. They’ve been making hole like crazy, though, at least till the gas started coming up, surprising since they’re only into the first shale layer and nothing’s been fracked yet. Just some natural pockets, says Kelsey, the driller, something that has to be vented and burned off before they can go deeper. So Tuck is squatting with his back to the wind, running through safety matches, trying to get the damn rags to catch fire.

  He’d feel more confident if Nub, who’s supposed to be supervising all this, wasn’t at his other well, or if the other guys weren’t all up on the platform, hugging close to something big to duck behind. Grunt told him to stay on the edge of the pad, fine, and to approach from the far side, away from the ground pipes that send the gas to the stack, in case of leaks. In case of leaks, he thinks, I am toast. He’s maybe three hundred feet back from it, just a big steel pipe sticking straight up, fifteen feet or so from the ground. The idea is to throw the pole up like a baton, end over end, so the lit end passes over the gas blowing out of the stack–

  There will be a much bigger one eventually, says Kelsey, thirty, forty feet high, with an electrical sparking device built onto it. But that’s for the production boys, weeks after this crew has finished drilling and moved on to a new well. Just part of the macho routine, thinks Tuck, proving yourself under fire.

  The ball of gas-soaked rags catches. He stands and waves to the platform, holding the payload as far from his body as he can, flames whipping in the wind.

  Then there is the noise they told him about, a loud rushing as the gas is released, a bit like an airplane engine revving up if you’ve got a seat right over the wing. He thought it would hiss. “If there’s too much nitrogen and not enough methane,” Nicky told him, “she might not even light.”