by John Sayles
Not that we want them to leave.
“They got machinery,” says A. J. “Let em come and move their road around it.”
“That will cost them money, and you cost them money they will sue you and they will win. Believe me.”
The last time he talked to the Colonel, only two weeks ago, he got to say it. Just under the wire, as it turns out.
“You know, Dad, I always thought it was really cool what you did. Important. It was just never what I wanted to do with my own life.”
A long silence over the phone. “I thought about getting that asthma business expunged,” his father said finally. “Wipe your record clean. But then I’d picture you up at forty thousand feet, trying to suck air out of your oxygen mask with your lungs shut tight.”
At least A. J. doesn’t have the shotgun lying across his knees, the one he keeps in the kitchen utility closet in case of Third World invasion. He’s in the wrong and he knows it, a dangerous combination.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Will says, turning to look out at the pump jacks, bobbing, bobbing, out of sync with each other. “We’ll throw those tractor tires and whatever else you need in the back of your pickup and head down that access road. I’m sure those truckers will lend us a hand when we get there.”
THEY SPEND A HALF hour recording trucks rolling over rumble strips. Press watches them from his office window, the soundman with a machine hung over his shoulder, holding the boom microphone almost to the pavement as they parade by. He calls Jonesy in.
“What are they doing?”
“What does it look like?”
“They came all this way for traffic noise?”
“It’s our traffic noise. That’s what they do, they put authentic sound effects in with the interview, to give you a feeling for the place.”
Phyllis listens to it while she makes dinner, which means he tries to be in a different part of the house. The theme songs alone drive him up a wall, and all the male announcers are named Scott and sound like they went to the same Ivy League universities their fathers went to. Now and then, if that Terry Gross has somebody interesting enough on he’ll listen to a bit, but when the request came in he took a long time before saying yes.
He pulls the city map down, arranges his desk. He knows there’s no visuals, but it makes him feel more confident, like a sea captain flying his colors. Jonesy brings the young woman, the interviewer, in. She’s African American but doesn’t sound like it, probably how she got the radio job, and must be turning some heads here in Yellow Earth.
“How long have you been in office here?”
They’re good at hiding attitude if they have one, about being strangers up here in the high plains. It’s the sixth or maybe seventh interview he’s done, the third with a national outlet, and what’s never said is that if they didn’t think there was something wrong going on they wouldn’t be here. It’s one thing to be the man in the spotlight, trapeze bar in hand, and another to be the geek in the sideshow.
“Halfway through my second term,” he tells her. “So I was here well before the boom.”
The soundman comes up then and clips one of the little body mics on him and another onto the interviewer, whose name is Reese, Reese as a first name, like Prescott. The soundman also has the boom microphone on a pole, and has Press count off a few times to get a level. Jonesy turns the ringer off the phone in the next room.
“We’re talking with mayor Prescott Earle in Yellow Earth, North Dakota,” says Reese in her non-radio voice, then looks up at him, raising her eyebrows. He wonders if she knows she does that, or does it on purpose.
“Let’s get straight into it,” she says. “Talk about the biggest changes, positive and negative, which have come to your city with the fracking.”
The F Word.
“Well, first of all, hydraulic fracturing is only one part of the resource recovery process. There are so many different phases, each with its own procedures and specialists involved, and we have wells in all of these stages, from drilling to stimulation to actual production, in play simultaneously. Our population has increased threefold, with the attendant pressure on infrastructure and social services.”
A mouthful, but when Jonesy wrote it for him she assured him it could be delivered in one breath.
“So is this good or bad?”
“Everything,” he says, “has its price. Development means change, in some cases dislocation. But I can tell you that in purely economic terms, wages here have gone up far more than the cost of living.”
“That’s across the board?”
“Oh, our teachers and other public officials aren’t making any more than they used to, but our service employees and small businessmen are doing very well.”
“And some people have gotten wealthy from selling oil leases.”
Phyllis’s brother, for instance, who has never had a clue how to support a family, has three wells pumping on his formerly worthless thirty-five acres–
“I’m not one of them,” says Press, smiling the smile, “but yes, we’ve had some folks experience quite a windfall.”
“Will those people stay?”
“Too early to tell, but I imagine many of them will be spending our winters in a warmer climate.”
“If you could kind of repeat the question in your answers,” say Reese, “it would be really helpful.”
He always forgets that part. This isn’t a conversation, he reminds himself, but an opportunity to position Yellow Earth, to position himself, in people’s minds. A branding exercise.
“I’ll try to do that.”
“Have you seen an increase in crime?”
“We’ve seen an increase in every statistic related to the population tripling in size overnight.”
“And most of those people are men.”
If you know the answer, he thinks, why ask the question?
“The sort of rapid growth we’ve experienced here presents unique challenges. Housing has been particularly difficult, despite the efforts of the energy companies to put up their own facilities. So many people other than rig workers come along for the carnival.”
“Robberies, drunken driving, rapes?”
We’re a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, he thinks. You have to step over dead bodies on the sidewalks–
“You’d have to speak with our chief of police and county sheriff for those details. I personally notice the change most dramatically at the gas station. There didn’t use to be lines at the pumps.”
It has slacked off quite a bit lately, and Phyllis says it’s the same at the Albertsons. But you don’t want to spread the rumor that it’s about to bust–
“Do you think the average– Yellow Earther? Yellow Earthling?–
” “Resident of Yellow Earth.”
“Do you think they view all this as a positive or a negative experience?”
“It’s so personal– there is no average resident of our city. The complaints are mostly about traffic and noise, but then there are some shared benefits. We have a new sports facility, built hand in hand with the energy companies, about to open. Everybody’s water bill has gone down.”
Gone down because the county has been selling water at inflated rates to the oil companies. And about to shoot up again now that the companies say they’re done fracking for the moment and won’t be needing so much–
“Do you think– can I call this an invasion?”
“We’ve had a rapid influx of activity.”
“How do you think it’s affected the women in your community?”
They have their story written no matter what you say, just fishing for sound bites that fit the plot line.
“You should talk to my assistant,” he says, indicating the door that separates their offices. “She’ll have a better perspective on that issue. She works with girls.”
And is capable of tearing you a new one if you get out of line. Jonesy has been keeping him up on the environmental impact, on the downtown crime wave,
on the companies overstepping their mandate here and there, on the mood of the people who will still be here to vote when most of it goes away.
Because it will go away.
“If you had to work the scoreboard,” says Reese, smiling for the first time, “Big Oil versus Yellow Earth, how do you think the match is going so far?”
“I don’t accept the idea that we’re in adversarial positions,” Press answers. Now the Democrats, of all people, have also gotten in touch to see if he wants to drop the Independent act and run for lieutenant governor in 2012. No thank you, and I wouldn’t care to throw myself off the top of the State Capitol Building, highest structure in North Dakota, either. “But if you see it as a contest between our city and a potentially disastrous natural phenomenon, like a tornado or a tidal wave–”
This feels like the punch line, the bit they’re likely to actually use in their piece–
“–I’d say we’ve fought it to a draw.”
They’re setting up in the next room, taking his advice to interview Jonesy, when he approaches with a slip of city hall stationery.
“My wife is such a huge fan,” he says to the black girl. “Could I trouble you for an autograph?”
DUD IS CERTAIN HE’S seen the same girl do her routine in one of the strip mall clubs in Houston. That hard hat, the tool belt that comes off first and has all the naughty battery-operated necessities in it. Who would have thought Makita made one of those? He lays a twenty on the bar counter, leans in very close to the girl sitting beside him– she’s a woman, actually, still a babe but no kid– to be heard over the throbbing music.
“Here’s the deal– was it Janelle?”
“Jewelle.”
“I don’t need more liquor, I don’t want a lap dance, but one of these is yours anytime to want to come over and rest your feet for a few minutes without the floor supervisor busting your chops. Tell the other girls there’s more where that came from.”
“You’re a generous man.”
“Just redistributing a little wealth. Good night at the casino.”
He had played poker with live bodies, a couple of the players with some game, one poor old Indian guy who was too drunk, or maybe too rich, to keep track of how much he was bleeding. There were computer poker machines behind them with intent acolytes pushing the buttons, an abomination even if you can hack them. “I own your soul,” said Boomer to a commodities guy he fleeced the one night Dudley was invited to the big boys’ game. Dudley pretended to be intimidated by the stakes and walked away with a wad of Other People’s Money. He is known as a quiet, conservative player, just a fill-in at the table between the titans who’ve come to do battle. ‘Dud does awright for himself,’ say the good old boys, ‘but he don’t ever clean up.’
True if you don’t make a per annum tally, which none of the good steady losers bother to do. Last year he took over eight thousand dollars off Dippy Beauregard and nearly seventeen grand from Hump Phillips. Not their souls exactly, but there is real satisfaction watching their faces, discreetly, while you rake in their green stuff. It helps to pile your winnings neatly, blushing a little at the anal accountant jokes, and palm some of it off the table during the night.
“Did she use to work in Houston?” he asks, nodding at the now upside-down pole dancer in the mirror.
“Don’t see why not,” says Jewelle. “It’s a popular stop on the circuit. Wherever she’s from, the bitch stole my routine.”
There are men at headquarters and elsewhere throughout the Company’s far-flung empire who are afraid of him, at least the ones who know he’s an actual person and not just a concept. The Determinator, some call him, the guy who figures out if your job is necessary, or if one employee can handle the work presently done by three, or if you’re too high on the pay scale and should be replaced by somebody younger, hungrier, cheaper. ‘Don’t fuck with the Determinator,’ they joke, and leave him pretty much alone. Boomer and the others above him are good business heads but not facile with the numbers technology, and at times he feels like an overpaid IT scrub. Well, not that overpaid.
“I liked your routine.”
“Thank you.”
“Some of the girls just spin around on it and wiggle their stuff, but you– it was like a real dance.”
“Thanks. I used to love to dance.”
“And you don’t any more?”
“If there was a disco in Yellow Earth,” she says, “you could take me to it.”
“Sorry. I’ve got a black belt in dancing. People get hurt.”
She bumps against him playfully. “I bet you’re not that bad. You just have to let go.”
“You have no idea. People call 911.”
“Anyway,” says Jewelle, “you ride that pole a couple hours a night, it takes some of the hop out of you. Like you figure those Indians that used to do their rain dances, for like a ritual? Then they start doing them for tour buses, three, four times a day, and it’s not the same thing.”
“Going through the motions.”
“And you never get the love back.”
“But you’re doing good here?”
“Business-wise? Sure.” She shrugs. “Though the rent’s high and it’s– you know– kind of an Alaska Pipeline vibe.”
“Hairy mountain men lacking the social graces.”
She grins a nonprofessional grin. “They’re just men away from home, the ones that claim a home. You from Houston?”
“Used to be. Right now I’m in transit.”
“From where to where?”
Enigmatic is always better than the real you. All of these girls have club names, have to for security and mental health purposes, and have a doctored story to tell if you want to pay to hear it.
“Oh,” says Dudley, “from this barstool to the rest of my life.”
Jewelle smiles again and gets up from her stool, putting her hand on his shoulder for support. A little touch is nice, even if you’ve bought it. He had a female barber once, did the little palm-vibrator thing on his neck at the end of the cut, always made him hum in appreciation.
“If you’re still around, Mr. In Transit, I might come park myself here some a bit later.”
Then Jewelle is gone and so is the twenty.
AMERICANS MELT CHEESE ON everything. Gaspar has told him that the plates with cheese on them won’t come clean just going through the lavavajillas, hot and powerful as it is, and have to be scrubbed first. But it seems like two out of every three plates that come back have some sort of cheese stuck on them, baked on in the case of the onion soup, and have to sit for a moment in the soapy water sink with the pot pie bowls before Macario can even get busy with the scrubbing sponges. The cooks are shouting for sauté pans so he tackles those first, then blasts a rack Orestes the Guatemalan has filled with plates with the spray hose before pushing it into the machine to get hammered with scalding water for a half a minute, time to scrub one soup pot, then hustling around to pull the rack out and roll it to the Haitian, whose name is Dauphin, who will dry the glasses and stack everything back at the bussing stations. Macario is sweating already, a half hour into the shift, wearing a black trash bag like a poncho the way the others do, relying on his years of fútbol to dodge around bodies and equipment and stay in the rhythm of the cleanup galley.
There is nothing in Mexico, he muses, that stains a plate as thoroughly as blueberry pie.
“Adelante, muchachos!” shouts Gaspar over the attack of the dishwasher and the sharp banging of metal and ceramic. “A toda velocidad!”
Gaspar is the senior man on the crew, the one who ran into Macario in City Park and told him there was an opening at the restaurant.
“Gringo comfor’ food,” he said in English. “Lotsa burger, macaroni y queso.”
Reuben, the fry cook, brings in real corn tortillas and makes them tacos for the staff meal, which half the time they eat standing up. The job pays seven-fifty an hour, twenty-five cents more than the minimum wage, and so far Macario has not been able to wire anythin
g home. When he ran out of money in San Antonio he got on a patio-laying crew that paid a little bit better, but had to put in for the house they were all sharing and his share of gas for the van that got them to jobs and to eat and to buy new work shoes after the old ones got ruined fording the river when he saw the Migra set up checking identification on the bridge, and to share a couple beers with the muchachos every week–
A busboy, one of the new hires, thumps a plastic tub loaded with dinner dishes onto the counter and Macario is on it, scraping uneaten food into the trash with a chunk of garlic bread. They don’t wear gloves, which tire your fingers and make you drop things, and he’s gotten used to his hands being burned and being as wrinkled as raisins by the end of a shift. Orestes is grabbing the plates from Macario as soon as he can clear them, the three lavaplatos immediately dealing with whatever is in front of them rather than breaking the job into stations, all without words except for Gaspar’s shouts of encouragement.
“Rápido, rápido!” he cries. “El Yaxon getting hungry!”
The huge, rumbling and hissing dishwasher that everything in the galley revolves around is made by a company called Jackson, and Gaspar treats it like a monster that must be fed to keep it tame. All the restaurant ceramics are white, and it has begun to please Macario more than he can account for to see them coming out of Yaxon only slightly wet and gleaming, like the milk bottles used to illustrate a pure soul in the catecismo he was given to study in church as a boy. When he worked on the oil platforms you could spray till you ran out of water and the deck would never really come clean.
It is a Saturday night, voices of the diners surging through whenever a bus-boy butts through the swinging door, and there is no letup in the flood of dirty dishes and utensils, nothing but the immediate task that needs to be done or everything will back up and there will be a meltdown. Sometimes he imagines they are the firemen on an old locomotive, shoveling coal to fuel the boiler to make the steam to keep the engine speeding ahead, and sometimes it’s a war and they are feeding artillery shells as fast as they can to ward off a charging enemy, and sometimes it’s just Macario sweating his culo off supplying clean plates to overfed gringos and making just enough to keep his own head above the water.