by John Sayles
The skinny guy looks appropriately intimidated when he gets an eyeful of the tats.
“I help you?”
“You’re Scorch?”
“That’s right. What seems to be the problem?”
This, nodding toward the car.
“I was told that you could– like– hook me up.”
Scorch lays a look on the guy. Shiny black shoes, silky blue shirt, bow tie. Who the fuck wears a bow tie?
“How exactly did you get my name?”
“You know, people say things.”
“I need a name.”
The Indian casino maybe. There’s like a uniform they wear–
“Doyle.”
Doyle is at the casino, tends bar in the lounge. Bingo.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” says Scorch, popping the hood and raising it up. “See if I can do anything for you.”
Narcs have stamina but not much imagination. The plates tell him the car is a rental, the sweat on the character’s forehead as he leans in to stare at the engine says he’s nervous or strung out or both.
“You know, if you just call Enterprise,” says Scorch, playing it out a bit further, “they’ll bring you a new ride and take this one back to their shop.”
“There’s something coming out of the crankcase,” says the skinny guy. “Sort of like black tar.”
Very cute.
Scorch is a bike guy, ride em but don’t fix em, and a car engine to him is just a bunch of metal shit and hoses.
“Smoking?”
“Yeah, smoking,” says the skinny guy. He looks more like a meth head, but whatever floats your boat–
“Chasing the dragon, are we?”
“Can you hook me up or not?”
Tough on all the pilgrims who come in here, have to find a new connection. One of the ArrowFleet haulers rolls in, sounding like shit. A job for the real mechanics.
“How much are we talking about?”
Shiny shoes, silky shirt, bow tie– must be a dealer. One dealer to another.
“Uhm– it depends on how much it goes for.”
“Hundred-twenty a gram.”
A quick calculation. Casino dealers can sling numbers with anybody.
“How do I know it’s worth that? The quality?”
“What’s your name?”
He could give a phony one, of course, but it doesn’t matter. You just need something to hang on a guy if he’s going to be a regular, going to bring you other customers.
“Lenny.”
“It’s like this, Lenny. Buy what you think you can afford, and if you don’t like it, don’t come back to me. Caveat emptor.” Brent taught him that phrase and he loves the sound of it. “You want a half a gram?”
“I don’t want to keep coming down here.”
As if they’ll start selling it at the Albertsons.
“So?”
“I’ll take two.”
Scorch gives him a quick pat down. Nothing under the silky shirt.
“Jesus.”
“For your protection and mine, Lenny. Lay the cash on the engine block, then go back into our restroom– it’s just past the service desk, go in and play with yourself or whatever for a couple minutes. When you come back out it’ll be in your glove compartment.”
The skinny guy leaves a pile of bank-fresh twenties and goes inside. Scorch slips the money into his shirt pocket, lets the hood down, heads back to his toolbox. He couldn’t name half the shit in it, but from under a ring of washers he pulls out a little envelope with the shit in it, the stuff that’s been coming up baked hard, like a little chip of coal. He’s on his way back to the Focus when Wayne Lee rolls up in his Camaro, shit-eating grin on his face like always.
“Yo, Mr. Badwrench!” he calls. “Good to see you minding the store.”
“You making a run?”
“Just looking for your boss.”
If he has a boss it’s Vic at the club. With Brent he’s just an independent contractor.
“Haven’t seen him all day. Don’t know if he’ll be in.”
“Well tell him I stopped by. We need to parley.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Maybe you’d like to referee.”
Scorch holds up his hands. “Leave me out of it.”
Wayne Lee laughs and drives off and Scorch puts the shit in the glove compartment, goes back inside. He watches the skinny guy come out and sit into the car, check to see that the deal has been completed, then zoom away to wherever he’s going to fire up.
The beauty of simple commerce, thinks Scorch. Buy low, sell high.
THE CALL CAME IN just after he left the office, Julie on the radio, saying to call his sister for an emergency. He waited in traffic to pull into the Walmart lot, but then the radio again and a wreck out on 1804.
It’s a kid he recognizes from before, the Mustang totaled, the guy driving the water hauler pissed that he’s losing time.
“My brake lights were working fine!” he yells before Will is completely out of the patrol car. “He must have been fucking asleep back there.”
His father, the Colonel, is retired, wings folded, kicking back in Colorado Springs. Plays some golf, hikes twice a week, grumbles about politicians giving away the store. He brags that he’s only five pounds over his weight when he went to the Academy and still operates on military time, rising precisely at 0700 hours.
The kid is sitting on a hummock just off the road, an I-don’t-care look on his face. On another day Will might bother to walk around, kick the weeds for whatever pharmaceuticals he’s dumped.
“You hurt?” he asks the boy, who just shakes his head.
“Want to tell me what happened?”
“I rear-ended the dude.”
“I didn’t even hear brakes,” says the glowering trucker. “It was stop-and-go for like fifteen minutes, only this dipshit forgets to stop.” The trucker has already written down his company information, insurance, phone number on a slip of paper. Will looks back to the boy.
“I must have just spaced out.”
He still looks pretty spacey. The Mustang is halfway off the road, hood like an accordion bellows, and the water hauler parked up ahead without much damage visible on the rear.
“Can I get out of here?” asks the trucker.
“You don’t feel any twinges in your back or your neck?”
“I’ve got four thousand gallons of shock absorber in that tank. Didn’t feel a jolt.”
He’s called Julie to send the wrecker. Traffic is slowed but moving around the Mustang, and Tolliver will be here in a minute to wave people through, cut down on the gawk time. He hands the trucker his license back.
“You can go ahead.”
There was a heart thing a couple years back, the Colonel ordering them not to call it an attack, that hastened his retirement. He didn’t love teaching, even if it was for the next generation of birdmen. He liked to say there was flying and then there was garbage time.
Being home with the wife and kids was not flying.
“Stand up.”
The boy stands, not too shaky.
“You’re sure you aren’t hurt?”
There’s no airbag in a car that old, but he doesn’t see any dents in the kid. The boy takes a couple steps, shrugs his shoulders.
“Not even sore.”
“Let me smell your breath.”
The kid opens his mouth wide to send out a blast.
“Arby’s?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Okay, Jason.”
“Dylan.”
“Right, Dylan. I’ll take you back to the department office.”
With alcohol you want to do the test on site, but the other possibilities hang in the blood longer. He hears the siren approaching. Tolliver loves the siren. Will guides Dylan into the back seat, throws the flasher on, gives a bwoop for the civilian drivers to make room and turns between them to head back toward town, stopping to roll his window down and call to the deputy.<
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“Give the car a shakedown when you get a chance.”
Will puts his own siren on then, driving mostly on the shoulder to pass the inbound stuff.
“He won’t find anything,” says Dylan.
“You never know. People sample their own product, they get sloppy.”
The kid shrugs again but Will sees him check out the mile marker as they pass it. Stuff in a ziplock bag somewhere in the field probably and he’ll get a ride back out when he can to try to find it.
“DWI while on probation, you’re going to lose your license, Dylan. Might be some criminal charges, depending. You could do yourself a favor.”
“Not interested.”
“Whoever is selling to you is in deep shit, and if we find out you’ve been selling–”
The boy closes his eyes and puts his head back against the seat.
Will can’t remember much about the first couple bases they lived on, all stateside. Then the Colonel, only a captain then, was transferred to Minot to fly B-52s for the Strategic Air Command. ‘Part of the triad of national defense,’ he used to say. The marriage blew apart pretty soon after that, and his mother moved them to Lignite and got back into teaching in Yellow Earth, Will and his sister ensconced in their first completely civilian housing. Every weekend he was shuttled over to the base, the Colonel grilling him in math and science, encouraging him to develop a good technical understanding despite his low opinion of the ‘rocket geeks’ who shared the real estate. And there was the assumption, always, that like father like son, and talk of the senator who would vouch for Will when it came time to apply for the Academy.
“You got your cell phone?”
“Yup.” Without opening his eyes.
“You want to call your parents?”
“Not especially.”
“Our holding cell is pretty basic,” he tells the boy. “A bench, a sink, common toilet. No TV.”
Dylan squirms to pull his phone from his pocket, flips it open. “I got no bars out here.”
“You can call them when we get to the office.”
Will remembers from the first time that the father was a lawyer and drove up in a black Lexus.
Julie is on the radio again.
“We have a complaint from ArrowFleet,” she says. “Trying to service a well over in–”
“A. J. Niles?”
“Obstructing access.”
“I’ll drop this one off and swing out there.”
With Julie he doesn’t bother with all the ‘10-4’ stuff unless the deputies are involved. Don’t want them to get too relaxed.
His mother sparred with the Colonel for a while, then surrendered Will to military school in Virginia for two years. But the asthma and the discipline problems gave him an out. He hated wearing a uniform, hated taking orders all the time, and unlike his father had never stayed up nights staring at the heavens and dreaming of flight. His sister at least leaves the ground a few times a week now, though stewardess is more of a waitressing job than being master of the skies. The asthma, which involved prescriptions of bronchodilators and corticosteroids and one scary trip to the emergency room, was the equivalent of losing an eye for anyone who wanted to be a pilot.
Which he didn’t.
“Any idea what you’d like to do with your life?”
The boy opens his eyes again, thinks.
“I know things I don’t want to do.”
“That’s all I knew at your age, but it’s a start. I’m not a career counselor, but I’d advise against the drug-dealer option. The people who make it in that field are real go-getters. Entrepreneurial skills. And you”– he glances into the rearview mirror– “don’t strike me as the self-starter type.”
Dylan has nothing to say.
So back to Yellow Earth High, were he stayed out of trouble, played sports just for fun, and had no problems with his breathing. Thinking about it, he began to suspect it was the uniform itself, a fabric he was allergic to, but kept this idea to himself.
“How’s school?” the Colonel would say on his visits, Sundays only now because there were games on Saturdays. It clearly pained him to see Will in civilian clothes. The Colonel would take Will around to introduce him to support personnel on the base, vital to the defense effort but clearly lesser creatures than the men who slipped the surly bonds of Earth. He remembers watching the Colonel endure a barrage of insults from a pair of fighter pilots, all implying that being a jockey on what they called a Big Ugly Fat Fucker was something akin to driving a bus, until he shut them down with a reminder of the superior destructive potential of his payload, quoting Oppenheimer.
“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
If it wasn’t the Academy, the Colonel really didn’t care where or if Will went to college, so he tried UND for a couple years, majoring in Psych, till even the in-state tuition seemed like a waste.
Payton is in the office and takes Dylan for the urine test. Will calls his sister.
“The Colonel’s gone,” she says.
He is not surprised.
“Heart?”
“A stroke, this morning on the golf course.”
“At least he wasn’t behind the controls.”
The Colonel had a little Cessna Skycatcher, flew it up to Sloulin Field once and took Will for a steak at the El Rancho Hotel restaurant. ‘Your basic transportation,’ he called it, but went up a couple times a week just to look around.
“Can you get down? I’m hitching a flight to Denver.”
“Yeah. I’ll see you at his house.”
She isn’t crying. As a girl she was both off the Colonel’s hook and beneath his radar.
“Some finish, huh?” she says. “The guys he was with say he’d just sunk a putt, bent over to pick up the ball, said ‘Oh no,’ and that was it.”
Will sees Payton on the way out.
“That boy sure had to pee. Two days for the verdict. I called the mother to come take him to Mercy– he could be all fucked up internally and not feel it.”
“You book him?”
“He’s in the system, reckless driving and probation violation for the moment. Took his license away for safekeeping.”
There was dope in the high school back in the ’90s, and Will smoked his share of it, though he never reached full pothead status. Locally grown stuff as far as he knew, not very potent, and none of the heavier drugs they saw on the news or in cop shows. There were amphetamines and even coke in Yellow Earth and on the reservation before the shale oil hit, but nothing like now, the Stupid Behavior Index shooting up within a week of the invasion.
He counts three pump jacks on Wiley Cobb’s property, visible from the 2, one of them with a stack spewing flame next to it. He turns up the bumpy access road, still just Caterpillar tracks, onto the Niles place. A quarter mile in he comes to a huge rust farm of a tractor, an old Massey Ferguson that A. J. has parked across the road and pulled the front wheels off of. Hell of a lot of work just to make a point.
There are two ArrowFleet fuel tankers waiting to get in and one waiting to get out.
“The first time he left the wheels on and we rolled it,” says one of the truckers. “We go in that field after this rain, tank empty or full, we’ll get bogged down for sure.”
Even in the patrol car it’s pretty hairy, one hummock after another and sinkholes in between. Picked the perfect spot for a blockade.
The Colonel was still just young enough to be allowed to fly missions in Desert Storm, nothing he would go into detail about, and remained tight-lipped about the fact that Will did not enlist. But he was married to Sheila then, a bad idea, and trying to start a construction business, a worse one. Liking to work with tools and knowing how to make a reasonable bid and control a half-dozen employees were clearly distinct aspects of the trade, and at the time Yellow Earth was in something of a building slump. The marriage ended without children or any terrible fireworks, and three years of nail-gunning for Gunnar Bjornson’s roofing outfit got him square with the ven
dors in town. His mother had remarried and moved to California and he was thinking of following to check it out, when old Sam Kearny, who’d had the job for as long as anyone could remember, announced he was packing it in.
The guys on his crew used to call Will ‘the sheriff’ when he’d walk on site, because he wouldn’t let them fudge on the building codes and made them clean up the work space every night.
“Watch it, here comes the sheriff!”
So it was kind of a joke when Lou Josephson from the Democrats asked him to throw his name in, embarrassing to leave a slot empty on the ballot even if Sam’s long-time deputy was a shoo-in. Though Sam was mysteriously noncommittal on the subject.
“Let the boys run,” he said.
Will didn’t campaign much, standing up at rallies to say a few words, the newcomer at the bottom of the ticket. But he read up on the job, even went to talk to Sam about what he thought the position should be.
And then the long-time deputy’s wife sued for divorce, citing years of physical abuse, with one post-beating photograph that garnered a slew of hits on the Web.
“You look good,” said the Colonel the first time he saw Will in the uniform, a cotton/synthetic blend that didn’t even make him sniffle. “You look like you mean business.”
And once Will got used to the idea he found that he actually liked it, liked having a window into people’s lives, even if two times out of three they weren’t exactly thrilled to see him drive up.
A. J. Niles, in fact, looks markedly unenthusiastic about his presence. A. J. has pulled a chair out onto his porch and is looking beyond Will to a pair of jacks bobbing up and down on his front forty, pumping crude oil that will add nothing to his personal worth.
“It’s my land,” he says. “I can leave my equipment wherever I want to.”
“We’ve been over this before, A. J.”
“I own the surface. The tractor is on the surface.”
“Mineral rights include access. You want the Company guy out here with a court order?”
“It shouldn’t be legal.”
“If you’ve got some modifications to the law, some restrictions to unbridled commerce to suggest, I’m sure your elected representatives would love to hear them.”
The last time he talked with Press Earle the mayor told him it was mostly complaints now, how could the city, how could the state let these oil people ride roughshod over everything?