by John Sayles
Gaspar has a phone, and twice now he’s been able to borrow it to call Nilda in Yucatán, telling her he’s doing all he can, that he hasn’t forgotten them, the little one almost too shy to say hello. Nilda has heard that the huachicoleros came by their old house a couple times, and then somebody just moved in, usurpadores, probably given permission by the gangsters in return for some service they provided, some little risk they took. You can’t fight these things face-to-face and hope to survive.
Gaspar bangs a heavy ladle against the rim of the trashcan to get his attention. About to overflow. Macario pushes a sprayed rack into the washer, hurries to deal with the garbage.
Howie, the blond kid who works in the cold room prepping chops and ribs, is listening to the radio as usual, one of those news-and-talk shows that Macario will listen to to see how his English is coming along. He thinks he hears the name of the place he is supposed to be going.
It is cool outside behind the restaurant, a nice change even with the smell of the day’s refuse from the dumpster. Denver is a spread-out city, lots of different neighborhoods, and once he found Federal Boulevard it seemed a lot like San Antonio, only harder to breathe. He’s spent the rest of his life at sea level.
You have to be careful with the trash bags, which might have broken glass in them, and be sure to get your legs underneath when you heave them over the side of the dumpster. On really slow nights they’ll come out here to smoke and talk, leaving only one man on duty inside. Orestes had a hard time of it, robbed and beaten by pandilleros on his way up through Mexico, but Dauphin’s stories are worse. He is Haitian but born in the Dominican Republic, and seems never to have known a moment of peace.
“This is the best,” he tells them. “Until I am captured.”
Macario has only had to run once, in San Antonio, from a parking lot where dozens of the indocumentados would gather every morning to wait for men driving pickups or vans with a day’s work to offer. A pair of cruisers sped into the lot with lights flashing and sirens whooping and everybody tore away in their own direction, Macario able to get a look back and see that the officers weren’t even getting out of their cars, just making a display to watch everybody panic.
The same show is on Howie’s radio and he hears the name again. Yellow Earth. Tierra Amarilla, he thinks, and makes a picture of it in his head, kind of a desert with yellow sand and a forest of oil derricks in every direction. It is the mayor of the city speaking, and if he understands what the man is saying there is so much drilling going on there the workers can’t find a place to sleep.
The cleanup galley slaps him in the face like a wave. Orestes has put a new trash liner in the garbage and is scraping plates into it, Gaspar is spraying a rack, and Orestes is elbow-deep in the sink, scrubbing cheese.
“Yaxon está asfixiando!” shouts Gaspar over the racket and the dishwasher is indeed choking, Macario scooping a slimy handful of blasted scraps from the food drain in the machine, squishing over the rubber mat below to toss it in the bin. He gets paid on Friday. It’s time to go north, he thinks. A la Tierra Amarilla.
AT LEAST NOBODY SHE has ever known is likely to come to the Yellow Earth Walmart and see her behind a cash register. When she tried to explain the relocation of the coterie and the intent of her paper on the phone there was a long silence, then Dr. Paulsen said, “So that’s finished.” The stipend withdrawn, no invitation to come back and launch something related in a less environmentally challenged area. Then coming in here, a PC sin but everywhere else was out of milk again and black coffee makes her stomach raw, and she saw the sign advertising seventeen-fifty an hour and did the math. Put in forty, fifty hours a week, which they’re begging for with the hiring crisis, and it comes out much better than she was making as a prairie dog peeper.
Only a temporary position, she told Will. Two months left on the apartment lease, it would be wasteful to just pack up and go.
She sees the Native American girl, Jolene, two checkout aisles away, paying for supersized containers of cleaning products and trying not to meet eyes. Fine, thinks Leia, I’m just a reminder of something she should try to forget. But as the girl wheels her purchases out she gives a little nod, blushing.
“Is it okay if I get one for my husband?”
An older woman stands before her with two identical sets of headphones in her hands.
“Pardon?”
“They’re on sale, but it says ‘One per customer’ and my husband’s not here.”
Leia is sure there’s a store policy, but doesn’t see a supervisor near.
“We listen to books on tape,” the woman continues, “but he’s Ross McDonald and I’m Philippa Gregory.”
“Does your husband ever come in here?”
“Oh, all the time.”
“Then he’s a customer,” says Leia, and discounts the headphones.
THE TRAILERS ARE ALL the same, dirty floor, cheap laptop on a metal desk next to the mud engineer’s blender, paperwork covering the desktop and walls, which are rattling, buffeted by the wind that hasn’t let up all day. And the hydraulics noise, the thumping, groaning, grinding of the big animal above and below them, as constant as the boops and beeps at the casino hotel but with weightier consequences, tons of force being thrown into a narrow fissure in the earth. The fracker– Hardaway? Hardacre? Hardass?– runs through the usual litany.
“There’s service companies and there’s service companies,” he explains, his attention still half focused on the sounds outside, monitoring the rhythm of the pumping like a cardiologist with a heart patient in crisis. “A few we’ve got to use because Houston set them up, just as a firewall in case something goes wrong.”
Dudley did the heavy lifting on the actuarial numbers back in the early 2000s, setting levels of restitution– first offer, second offer, final offer, sue us and stand in line– and establishing the prevention versus compensation variances. Deciding what you’ve really got to get right the first time, when it’s a lot cheaper to pay the fine, and when to stonewall and go to court. Just patterns of numbers, nickels and dimes.
“Then there’s outfits you’re expected to deal with for political reasons, like they’re connected to the honchos at the reservation here, which is a case of don’t expect to get what you pay for.”
“To the point of physical danger?”
“No, I get my wells drilled and fracked out and my people off the platform in one piece. But what’s left behind– that’s somebody else’s lookout.”
Dudley glances at the daily logs from Hardwhatever’s three wells currently in process. Nothing out of line with what he’s seen from the other site managers he surprised this morning with his Company card– Boomer said it ought to say ‘007, License to Drill.’ Fracking is a complex process, constantly becoming more refined but rarely any cheaper. When gas was over four dollars a gallon at the pump it was like printing money, but now–
“Anything you can send back to the Company, ideas for operational improvements from what you’re learned here?”
The trailer gives a booming, violent shake, the long wall warping in then popping out, Dudley worried for a bad instant that the well has blown up till he sees from the manager’s face that it is just the wind.
“Tell them to find a deposit under someplace that grows palm trees,” says Hard-water. “With a quiet hotel with decent room service and no damn hurricanes.”
SHE FEELS IT VIBRATING in her shirt pocket, hurries through the men calling out Excuse me, Miss, and Hey Honey, to the back room. She’s started to associate his voice with the coffee fumes, or maybe she’s just been thinking about him a lot. It’s been two days since he called.
“Hello.”
“You’re at work, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, I know they keep you hopping, but I had to hear your voice.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Oh, couple moves I’ve had to make, should play out good in the next couple days.”
“Where are
you?”
“On my way out to the rez, settle a little business. When you get off?”
“Five.”
“I swing by?”
“Okay– you know–”
“Yeah, wait on the parallel block so the snitches don’t see us.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You know– just cause you don’t hear from me a couple days doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you.”
“I know.”
“I can smell the java through the phone. You’d better go.”
“I love you.”
A pause then. He’s driving, maybe has to pay attention to the road.
“We’ll talk about that at five.”
Spartina grabs two bags of roast, hustles back to the floor. She knows you’re not supposed to, like, lose yourself to a man and all that, but it’s hard to think about anything else. She finds herself drifting off in class or here at work, replaying moments between them, the way he looks at her and touches her, or worrying that it’s going to end. Or that he’s got other girls. He could have, he’s so good-looking, and there’s no way she could know unless it was like another girl in her high school, which is pretty unlikely. She can’t imagine any one of them he would go for. Some days she can’t imagine why he’s at all interested in her, it can’t just be sex cause she’s not so good at it yet and he could get that somewhere else. Well, maybe not in Yellow Earth, where there’s so few women compared to men right now, but like in Bismarck or Minot. Sometimes she just starts thinking about his car–
“Hey Honey.”
A guy in a quilted vest and a Mack truck hat with a bulldog on it, looking up at her from his table.
“You gonna pour that coffee, or just stand there lookin good with it in your hand?”
VERY FEW CAN CLOSE the deal.
Scorch sees them every night at Bazookas, chins up, eyes hard, looking for a fight. But if you fight in a bar or strip club you’re asking for it to be stopped, to be pulled away by a half-dozen volunteer referees. You want to beat the guy down without a court date at the end of it, show off for your friends. Even the guys who did that kid out in front of the club, all of them drunk as skunks, seemed surprised when six hard shots with a hunk of plumbing sent him to the morgue and them to the joint. Amateurs.
The minute he sees Wayne Lee’s pimped Camaro rolling up he tosses the keys to the wrecker to Shakes and tells him to go on a beer run, even though the cooler is still half full. Shakes has too much imagination for this.
“Wait out here,” he says to L. T., not the brightest bulb, but able to follow a simple instruction.
Wayne Lee still has that idiot grin plastered on his face, even with all the bad blood between him and Brent.
“Hey, it’s the pit bull himself,” he cracks, leaving his keys in the Camaro. “Bust any good skulls lately?”
It’s the dead hour between shifts, just getting dark, and Brent has given most of his gravel haulers the evening off.
“Brent’s running late– he called to say it’ll be ten, fifteen minutes,” says Scorch, not taking the bait. “But he’s got the paperwork ready for you to sign in the back.”
Wayne Lee has been whining louder than usual lately, appointing himself spokesman for all the other bellyachers on the payroll, like he’s the fucking shop steward or something, and too stupid to sniff out that Scorch is taking over the trade. And now this idea that he’s going to jump over to work for Phil Enterlodge and take half the drivers with him.
“I always wonder,” kids Wayne Lee as they walk between trucks to the back, “why they call it a ‘bouncer.’ That guy you threw out last night sure didn’t bounce.”
Wayne Lee is one of those characters who wants everybody to like him, even if they don’t. There’s three guys Scorch knows of who are stepping the powdered goods down and reselling them, fucking with the quality of the brand, and some asshole from Bakersfield who’s set up shop out at one of the man camps, and Wayne Lee is all like, ‘Free market, dude, there’s room for everybody.’
Well there’s not room for Wayne Lee Hickey.
“I consider my job sort of an escort service,” says Scorch. “Only I escort people out of clubs instead of into them.”
Wayne Lee laughs and then steps a couple feet into the back office, looking down at the oily tarp spread out on the floor.
“What’s this for?” he says and then Scorch hits him, using both hands to swing the thirty-six-inch cast-iron pipe wrench, a good twenty pounds of heft to it, and there is a sound like a pumpkin landing on the sidewalk from a third floor window and Wayne Lee falls straight, tiiiiimberrrrr! onto his face in the center of the plastic tarp. If it was an Olympic event Scorch would get a ten on every card.
“L. T.!” he calls, wiping the wrench handle down with an oily rag and tossing it on top of the body.
By the time L. T. joins him Scorch has it all rolled up like a burrito, ends tucked in.
“Help me put this in the back of that Camaro. We’re going for a drive.”
And L. T., God love him, doesn’t blink an eye.
“Bend your knees when you lift,” he says to Scorch, hunkering down to get a grip. “Watch that lower back.”
SHE’S WAITING BY LEIA’S car in the parking lot, mostly empty as the store lights go off.
“Could you give me a ride?” she asks in a little voice.
Or should I just swallow water and swim for the bottom?
“Okay– uhm– where to?”
“Home?”
There is a shuttle bus that goes around town and even out into the boonies a ways, but the girl could have caught that an hour ago.
“I think I remember the way–”
“Just a couple miles past where your critters are.”
“You know that?” Leia hits the button on the keys to unlock the doors. She’s kept the same rental even though they’ve jacked the rates up again.
“My ride to school used to pass you on the way in,” she says. “You were usually busy looking through your binoculars.”
Jolene slides in next to her, pulling the bag of cleaning stuff onto her lap. Leia eases the car out of the lot. It isn’t that far away–
“Did you get fired?”
I’ve been outed, thinks Leia. The internet must be buzzing with it– “Wildlife Girl Surrenders Career, Dignity to Chain Retailer.”
“Not exactly,” she says. “The study was ended. Sometimes when your data are compromised–” She shrugs. “The world of science was not holding its breath.”
“But you like it.”
Leia squeezes her way into the eastbound flow between two rumbling trucks, considering the question. “I do. I like figuring out how the animals interact, how they deal with challenges. But that kind of knowledge doesn’t turn into money if it’s not like a domesticated food animal, so getting grants is pretty iffy.”
“And prairie dogs–”
“Happened to have nobody major hogging the field when I started in on them. I’ve observed other species– when I wasn’t too much older than you I spent a summer in Madagascar, following lemurs around.”
“Prosimians,” says Jolene.
Leia gives her a look.
“That have great big eyes? I remember some pictures from a biology book.”
Leia turns off on the county road, still busy but not bumper to bumper.
“The rarer species are up in the Madagascar rainforest,” she tells the girl, “what’s left of it. We wrote our sightings in grease pencil on these laminated pads because it was so damp that paper would just dissolve.”
“Is that in Africa?”
“Just off the coast of Mozambique, in the Indian Ocean.”
They drive in silence for what seems a long time then, oncoming headlights washing over the girl’s face.
“Everybody knows,” she says finally. “About me.”
Leia understands what she means, but you can’t just agree. “I work with twenty, twenty-five people at the store. Say four, five h
undred shoppers wandered through on my shift. I’d be surprised if one percent even know you exist.”
“But everybody who does know who I am, who live here, knows about it. People at the police and the hospital talk, one person tells another.”
“Do you know any other kids who’ve had bad things happen to them?”
Jolene considers. “A boy named Quentin died of cancer. And Dickyboy Burdette’s father committed suicide.”
“But is that who Dickyboy is? Just ‘the kid whose dad killed himself’?”
“No. It was a long time ago, but he’s still kind of a mess.”
“In not too long your story will be a long time ago. We think everybody’s paying attention, but we’re barely on most people’s radar.”
“I guess.” She doesn’t sound convinced.
“How’s it been with your parents?”
“They had me pray with them.”
“Did that help?”
“No.”
Leia nods. Her own short-of-penetration incident during undergrad never made it into her phone calls home. Her parents were paranoid enough without giving them something real to chew on.
Another silence. Leia’s freshman roommate did a lot of whatever was available on campus and would come back wrecked and too freaked to be alone. Long, arrhythmic conversations about God, boys, bands, whether she looked fat or just voluptuous. Silence is fine, silence should be respected.
“So how do you do it?” Jolene asks her when they are beyond the traffic and cutting into the night alone. “How do you just pick up and go somewhere you’ve never been before, where you don’t know anybody?”
What now– three, four major moves? Active dislike of where she’s from has played a part, general cluelessness–
“I can’t say I’ve done it very well,” she tells the girl, “but I’ve done it. There’s good things and bad things. At first, or maybe even for a long time, you feel shy and lonely. But on the other hand, if nobody knows you, knows your history, you can totally reinvent yourself.”