by John Sayles
Tuck starts toward the stack. If he’d known about this he might have practiced throwing poles in the air. Circus people do stuff like that all the time, with precision, but they rehearse like crazy when there’s no audience.
He’s halfway to the stack when there is a Pop! and he sees a streak of smoke in the air and then WHOOOOOM! an explosion from the top of the stack, a column of flame roaring up twenty, thirty feet, slanting slightly in the wind.
He’s on his knees on the pad, the torch he was carrying having set some weeds on fire, the assholes on the platform hooting with laughter. Tom Hicks holds what looks like a small shotgun, which must have fired the flare that flew over the stack. Tuck stands carefully– nothing bleeding, nothing burnt or even singed, the flare-off lowering but continuing to roar. There goes my entire winter heating supply in twenty seconds, he thinks, up into the atmosphere.
They come down then to slap his back and ask if he shat himself and relive his reaction and help him throw gravel on the torch and the smoldering weeds. Nicky stands facing the flame-throwing stack, hand over his heart.
“I officially declare,” he yells over the roar, “these Olympic Games to be open.”
STAGE FOUR
ABSQUATULATION
“The west! The mighty West!” rhapsodized the oft-wounded Civil War general James Sank Brisbin in 1881, in his The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, explaining how in the former Great American Desert, “The poor professional young man, flying from the over-crowded East and the tyranny of a moneyed aristocracy, finds honor and wealth.”
That book and the earlier Homestead Act helped precipitate a rush that filled the high plains with strivers, the majority of them either foreign-born or first-generation Americans. With pasture land further south and east played out or swarming with nesters, experienced cattlemen as well as ambitious greenhorns like young Theodore Roosevelt came to the Dakotas to build up great herds, which the Northern Pacific Railway, at one point owner of a quarter of the upper state’s land, shipped to market once filled out on free grass. Vast ‘bonanza farms’ were cleared and planted along the Missouri River, some with hundreds of migrant laborers hired for the wheat harvest, while the smaller family operations of Norwegians and ethnic Germans from Russia filled the lands that lay further from easy water.
Dusty processions of cattle, mostly Hereford by blood now, ambled down Broadway in Bismarck. Advances in refrigeration and the highest price-per-pound in decades excited a whirlwind of British investment. Millions of cattle and billions of cow chips festooned the grasslands, and wheat farmers, flush from their own bumper crops, invested in the relatively new technology of barbed wire to keep the beeves out of their fields. Yellow Earth, located near the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, grew from a side-track tent colony beside the just arrived Great Northern Railway to a passenger and freight division point, replete with roundhouse, car repair shop, icehouse, and stockyards capable of holding over a hundred carloads’ worth of livestock, eventually becoming the county seat and trade center. People who walked to the Territory with a bindle over their shoulder or pawned the family heirlooms for a train ticket suddenly owned horses and wagons, ate regularly, and built schools for their children.
The cattle went first, in the Great Blizzard of ’87. After a brutally hot summer, prairie dogs had gone underground early, elk had banded to migrate southward, birds vanished. In early January snow fell, then fell again, then fell again, covering the tallest of the wild forage, and in parts of the state the temperature plummeted to 50 below, the cold locking up water holes and streams that were then buried in more snow. The wind rattled the boards of farmhouses, blew head-high drifts over roads. Unprovisioned by their owners, steers found buildings in the blasting wind and pressed their starving bodies against them for shelter, or wandered into riverbeds and coulees, where they bogged shoulder-deep and were buried. When the weather finally broke for spring, flocks of turkey buzzards circled the sky and blanketed the carcasses of dead animals that covered the land like tiny hillocks, rotting carcasses that choked the streams and rivers, that polluted the water and befouled the air. Some outfits were completely wiped out in the Great Die-Up, most losing nine out of every ten of their stock, and cattlemen left the state in herds.
With the wheat it was a longer, more tantalizing process. Good years and poor, prices sliding up and down, shipping costs eating into whatever bounty advances in agriculture produced, mortgages taken to tide farmers over through seasons of too little water or too many grasshoppers. The death blow came in the Dirty Thirties, when in the western half of the state soil depletion from overuse and severe drought was followed by black blizzards up from Texas that dumped layers of sterile dust on the stubbled fields, blinding horses, short-circuiting tractor engines, and driving people inside for days on end, cloth stuffed in the cracks around doors and windows in a doomed effort to keep the disaster at bay. A perfect storm of misery. Most of July of ’36 was over one hundred degrees, and more than half the people in the state had to grudgingly seek some form of public assistance to survive. Mortgages were foreclosed, farmers were found hanging dead in dust-drifted barns. Yellow Earth bled citizens, some stopping in Fargo, others continuing out of state. And the trains of the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern rolled further westward, carrying young men away to their uncertain futures.
THE GIRL SEEMS SURPRISED.
“Now that I look at it,” she says, frowning at her computer screen, “we do have you booked.” She shrugs. “New system, it’s driving everybody crazy.”
From the reception desk Dudley can hear the MIDI noise of the slots. The girl looks kind of Indian, pretty in a plump, youthful way. He tries to avoid looking down at the ubiquitous carpet, a swirly, petit-mal epilepsy trigger of purple and orange.
“Just the one week?”
“That’s right.” If he needs to stay longer he can hack into their system again.
“May I see a credit card for incidentals?”
He gives her the Amex, which charges through the Company. At least for now.
“Dudley Nickles,” she reads off the plastic. “There’s a girl I know in town named Dollarhide.”
“And you probably listen to Johnny Cash.”
“My grandfather does.”
He’s supposed to be here incognito, none of the rig managers or field staff aware of his visit till he’s ensconced in their trailers, but there’s no need for disguise. He’s always been like the people caught on Google Earth, faces a featureless smear no matter what activity they’re engaged in. Muddy Duddy, the wags at HQ back in Houston call him, when it’s not Studly Dudley or Nickles and Dimes or just plain The Dud. In five minutes she’ll forget he existed. In a week–
“You have a vehicle?”
There are so many pickups parked in the lot, she’s learned to use the generic nomenclature. Dudley slides the keys for the rental to her, the license number written on the tab. The girl keyboards it in. Somebody shouts from the casino floor, a winner. He’s been into their slot machine database, tracked the last two weeks of payoffs. No advantage there, somebody who knows their job constantly adjusting the machines. When he was in college he was in a posse that hit casinos, counting blackjack cards– five tech students ambling from table to table to allay suspicion, one or the other retiring to the bathroom for a few minutes at a time, with a set of signals to pass on to the counter taking your place. Two-up, one-up, even, one-down, two-down. That simple, just a statistical hiccup and you had the slightest edge on the house, which meant if you all played without tactical error you’d aggregate between five and ten grand an evening. Twice, the others were asked to leave and Dudley ignored. Like he wasn’t there.
He almost never comes to the scene of the grime. But they’re remodeling in Houston, new computer system, lighting, layout, the whole nine yards, and Boomer said, “Dud, get you a pair of shitkicker boots and pack your GPS, you’re heading to the Bakken.” Then a thump on the back. Boomer thumps him,
in passing, once or twice a week. “Like to check an see you’re still there, buddy.”
The girl gives him back his car keys and encodes the entry card for the room, number 108 around the back, as he requested in the hack. The door-lock memory will be battery operated and not connected to the front desk, but it keeps a printable log of time, date, and key code for every entry. Next they’ll monitor when and how often you flush the toilet.
“It’s just through the casino floor on the left,” she says, handing him his Amex and the entry card and pasting on a smile she’s obviously received a memo about. “I hope you have time to enjoy our gymnasium and spa facilities during your stay.”
And be sure to drop a bundle in the betting parlor.
The room is fine, buffalo roaming on the wall and a view of the parking lot. Dudley opens his suitcase on the stand, pulls out his computer and sets it up on the little desk, uses his smartphone to connect to the internet, bypassing the hotel’s link. He opens the diet cola and Cheetos he bought in the gift shop, hangs his jacket in the closet, brings up the records of all the Company’s drilling operations in the Bakken play.
Locked and loaded.
THE PARTS WHERE YOU’RE strapped to the chair and interrogated make his stomach hurt. Or maybe it’s just the double cheeseburger with bacon settling in. The idea is that you, inside of Alex Mason, are going to be jolted back into memories of Black Ops missions, complete with firefights and hand-to-hand combat. Since I’m here in the chair, thinks Dickyboy, I must not have gotten whacked in any of the flashbacks, though it seems I was probably brainwashed to do some killing for the enemy–
Georgie Price, who graduated last year and manages this shift, lets him play in one of the corner booths as long as he buys something. It’s mostly drive-thru action anyway, the oil workers wanting to grab and go, and he’s finished the burger and fries and is working on his second vanilla shake. With the headset on you only hear the soundtrack from the game, running his xBox 360 onto a little stand-up monitor. Nothing like the flat-screen on the den wall at Dylan’s, but Dylan’s parents have him on lockdown for the week.
Which kind of puts a dent in the old financial outlook.
Now I’m in what– Cuba? Trying to assassinate this guy with a beard, all the politics flying at you fast and furious if you don’t word up on the game before you start playing it.
The shit hits the fan again and his fingers fly on the controller. He’s playing single-shooter today but has beat every local player he knows and kicked some ass online. The graphics are so much better in this new version, he thinks, blasting away, only he should be smelling cordite and not French fries.
Things get confusing again– did he actually assassinate Fidel Castro or only a look-alike and should he take advantage of his kill-streak reward to call in a chopper gunner to get all these Spetznatz commandos off his back– and for some reason he looks up from the screen and sees Fawn pull into the lot in a baby-blue Miata.
She’s with her posse, Tina Dollarhide and poor Jolene, pushing in through the door with that little strut of hers, look at me, I got the goods, blowing right by him to the counter without a glance. The other two stop so he puts the game on hold.
Tina says something and he realizes he’s still got the headset on.
“Grand Theft Auto?” she repeats when he’s snatched them off.
“Call of Duty.”
“That’s like, really violent, right?”
“Uhm, yeah, there’s a lot of fighting and assassinations.” He looks to Jolene. “But you can set it for less blood and cut out all the cursing if you want.”
As if Jolene might be a gamer. Jolene who is standing here but not really meeting his eye, knowing that everybody knows what happened.
“You get points for how many people you kill?”
“It’s a story you’re in, and it’s– it’s kind of educational, this one, all this stuff about the Cold War.”
“Which was?”
“Like in the ’60s, I think? So far it’s the US and Russia and Cuba, but there’s like this old Nazi who invented Nova 6 nerve gas and has sleeper agents waiting to release it.”
“This really happened?”
“No, not exactly. It’s like alternative history.”
“Uh-huh.”
He missed school today, overslept in the boat. He’s told his grandmother he’s staying with his uncle, his uncle that he’s staying with his cousin, and his cousin that he’s staying with Dylan and so far nobody’s thought to call the school and see if he’s showing up.
Not that anybody’s likely to care one way or the other.
“That car is the bomb,” he says, looking out to the Miata. “The Chairman must be doing okay for himself.”
Tina makes a face. “It wasn’t him. It was that guy.”
Dickyboy knows who ‘that guy’ is. Very hot topic in the cafeteria.
“Well, wheels are wheels.”
They say nice to see you, then get in line to order. Tina is nice for a Yellow Earth girl, no attitude about you being from the rez, and Jolene is the one of her old friends Fawn kept when she transferred out after junior high. Friends might be pushing it some, Jolene probably flattered just to tag along with the Savage Princess and after what happened really glad to stand by somebody who draws all the attention away from her. Fawn will have them sit on the other side of the room, so she can talk loud about how fat he’s gotten.
Fawn who is looking really puffy now.
But he’s got more pressing issues to deal with– chopper down and in flames, the van turned over with machine-gun fire tearing it to shreds, Alex Mason neck-deep in the shit again, got to think fast, how to respond, how to survive– Dickyboy falls back on his old reliable.
Dragon’s Breath rounds.
PEOPLE ARE A SEPARATE skill. He’s been painting for a long time, feels like he’s got a pretty good handle on it, but whenever he’s done people they’ve been way off on the horizon. Couple little strokes with the tip of the brush, indicate the way they bend to the wind, carry a pail. For a full-face job, a portrait, you’ve got to get the flesh tones right.
Which he’s never tried before.
Clemson mixes from the dabs of primaries, making little splotches on the palette, storehouses of the shades he thinks he’ll need, referring constantly to the photograph. The snap is from three years ago, with a real camera, not one of these telephone deals, Tina with her feeder calf before the county fair, smiling at the lens with an aerosol can of show foam in her hand. It was the last year she did the 4-H, a three-month-old they’d bought from Wiley Cobb. She’d named it Jonas, after some boy singing group she liked then, and worked with the animal every day.
He mixes the yellow ochre and cadmium red, dulls it down a bit with ultramarine blue. Splotch of orange, splotch of pink, a bunch in between, a blue that looks good with them. Tina was out in the sun a lot in those days, had a bit of a farmer’s tan. Her eyes will be easy, at least the colored part of them, and he’s already thinking about how to do denim up close. It won’t be just like the photograph, it should be more how the picture makes him feel when he looks at it. There are much more recent shots of her, of course, but he doesn’t know that girl nearly as much as he did this one.
He tried to paint his wife once, from memory, and never got too far.
She won’t be staying around, he can tell that much. Whether it’s college, which would be good, which would be what her parents wanted, or something else, she’ll be gone next year. His mission is to make sure she doesn’t feel too bad about it, encourage her to leave the nest. He helped with the calf when she asked, but it was supposed to be her project and she took that seriously. Before, when he was doing more with the land, she couldn’t bear to be left out, always full of questions, wanting to hold the other end of things. ‘My shadow,’ he used to call her.
He’s done the fence rails, the barn in the background, putting it in cloud shadow so the red doesn’t overwhelm the frame. With the calf he did the cast
rating, and after that Tina took over, hauling sacks of feed and buckets of water, getting up early before school, spray washing the animal once a month. The problem when you’ve only got one is that it gets lonely and forgets it’s a cow, and you start treating it like a pet. She’d seen sheep slaughtered at Prairie Packing, but there’s something different when there’s so many, the mind flips a switch and it’s like you’re in a factory. So even with winning best in class at the fair and selling Jonas for a profit if you didn’t count all the hours of work she’d put in, Tina told him it was her last. They’d both looked so good in the arena, Spartina straight and strong, the young beef shaved, scotch-combed, and oiled, thrifty and long-bodied.
Clemson dots a little titanium white into one of the blotches, mixes it in. Oils are great for surface, but it takes a lot of skill to suggest what lies just beneath. The way Tina’s cheeks would glow when she was happy or excited, the special light in her eyes. The shape of her smile in a face yet devoid of creases. Tears drop on the palette and Clemson has to wick them away with a Kleenex. Oil and water don’t mix.
He sits back to look at the empty part of the canvas, the big hole where Tina should be. This is going to be really difficult, he thinks, and decides to start on Jonas.
Cattle are easy.
“GUY JUST ASKED FOR you,” says Shakes, smeared with black from changing tires.
Scorch looks out through the dirty window. Skinny character, leaning against a white Ford Focus and looking around as if there’s anything to see.
“I’ll check him out.”
Brent bought the garage when he set up the service company, a spot to do whatever repair work was needed on the old dinosaurs he brought up from Texas and overbilled the company for. Plus the long-haulers carrying product always stop here first. He’s okayed Scorch, not officially on the payroll, using it for a pickup spot, which keeps all his commerce away from the club.