Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “What I have tried to insure,” Harleigh adds, “is that the resources go out to where they’re needed, but the money stays here!”

  The thing is, he’s the best she’s lawyered for. The most dynamic, the hardest working, the best sense of the world away from the reservation. But whenever she’s tried to put the brakes on, to counsel a little restraint, a little caution, he looks at her like the enemy. She wonders if mob lawyers ever suggest to their clients that abstaining from future murders might be a wise legal strategy–

  “We got some videos, we got some numbers for you all to chew on now,” Harleigh smiles, “and after the reception you’re welcome to cross over to the casino and try to win some of that lease bonus money back.”

  Laughter at this.

  “But I just wanted to welcome you to our third annual exposition here, and to remind you all that a rising tide lifts all boats. We’re partners in this adventure, folks, and here’s hoping for good long run.”

  The applause is genuine. Fall out of a plane without a parachute and you can tell yourself that skydiving is a blast, right up until you hit the ground.

  Florida, maybe. See what the Muskogees and Miccosukees are up to. Give all those parkas and thermal underwear to the women’s shelter.

  Harleigh is shaking hands by the side of the stage while the documentary he commissioned, made by a kid who grew up on the rez and got into advertising in Minneapolis, plays on the big screen. He sees Danny Two Strike waiting, and it isn’t to congratulate him.

  “Tell me what.”

  “You know Brent’s boy Wayne?”

  “Wayne Lee Hickey.”

  “Right.”

  “Tall, skinny surfer-looking dude, drives that pimped-up Camaro.” “You seen him?

  “You know that me and Brent are not–”

  “The partnership is dissolved, yeah. Have you seen Wayne?”

  “Can’t remember the last time.”

  “He’s missing.”

  “You mean he left.”

  “His mother hasn’t heard from him in three months.”

  Harleigh smiles. “If I see him I’ll tell him to phone his mama.”

  “She’s working up a search party, coming here.”

  On the screen there is a montage of all the things that depend on oil and gas energy.

  “I don’t get it. You send his plate number to the state police?”

  “We found his car in Yellow Earth. Fella across the street says it’s been sitting there since late September.”

  The shot where they caught a dozen antelope grazing right up by a pumping wellhead is playing now. Nature can take a punch and roll with it.

  “These kind of fellas come and go. Out at my man camp you find their rooms cleaned out– not a trace, no notice they were moving on.”

  “The last anybody saw of him,” says Danny Two Strike, standing in front of the stuffed grizzly that, legend has it, was the last killed in the state, “he told Phil Enterlodge he was coming to work for him, that he just had to stop by your garage to get his back pay and hand in his company gas card.”

  “Only met the guy twice. Nice enough kid, maybe a little wild. Heard he raced motorcycles in California.”

  “And you don’t know of any bad blood between him and Brent?”

  “Asshole buddies, the last I knew of it.”

  Danny does not look happy. “Well, these people are coming to poke around. They’ve contacted a few enrolled members, got their own website.”

  “Might as well look into that little Jon Benet killing while they’re at it. And the Kennedy assassination.”

  “Meaning Marjorie Looks for Water.”

  “As I said.”

  “So there’s gonna be some press.”

  “You send them all to me, Danny. Anything I can do to help, get it over with. How bout you, everything running smooth in the enforcement sector?”

  “Oh– nothing wrong ten more paid officers wouldn’t help.”

  “I thought we approved–”

  “The pay’s not enough if they don’t already live here, Harleigh.”

  “Yeah, housing’s a bear right now. I might be able to swing a discount out at Killdeer City.”

  “Cops come with families. Coming here shouldn’t be like a tour of duty in Afghanistan.”

  “So you’re suggesting–”

  “We shop around, find the best deal on some decent apartments, and offer free housing with the job.”

  It’s the hidden expenses that kill you, thinks Harleigh. Mr. and Mrs. America, sticking the nozzle into their vehicles, got no idea what you got to go through to fill that pump.

  “Next council meeting,” he tells Danny. “We’ll take it up.”

  Danny nods and goes out through the back.

  He and Brent and Wayne Lee went hunting a few times, Wayne Lee telling racing stories and talking motors with him. Up for fun, but not a total flake. Spent a lot of time at the casino, maybe got in over his head, but if it’s money trouble you’d think he could have just sold that ritzy muscle car to one of these roughnecks. A mystery.

  Harleigh steps back out so he can see the video better, him up there talking about the boom with two dozen of his best Herefords grazing in the background.

  It’s his favorite part.

  BUZZY HAS NO IDEA who or if anybody is waiting to unload at the next site, just directions how to get there, east on 20 toward the Indian reservation. He signs the invoice, climbs into the cab, touches the glow-in-the-dark Jesus he picked up with a supply of beef jerky at the Cenex, and swings the rig away from the well and over the Caterpillar bumps of the outfit’s access road. He’s asked to have a tailboard put on too, but the guys in the shop just laugh and make jokes about wearing a rubber on top of your rubber. Of course none of them ever crushed a family to death with a breakaway tumble of pipe.

  There is an art, when taking a beating, of directing the blows where they’ll do the least damage. Tuck had a few lessons in this when he was young and stupid and prone to revealing that fact in badass bars, and has never forgotten the basics.

  “You don’t sit and have a few with the boys, you’re not one of the boys,” he explains to Francine, who is circling him at the breakfast table with his toast still in her hand. “You’re not one of the boys, you don’t get work. It’s that simple.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “How do you think I got on this new rig? I was in the club, and I met the guy who runs the day-to-day, the toolpusher.”

  “Who also had some pole dancer rubbing her fanny in his face.”

  Elbows over the kidneys if you think it’s coming there next, otherwise protect your head and keep your balls tucked in–

  “Oh come on, Francine.”

  It is true about meeting Nub Hammond there, and it was at the bar, not in the back room–

  “According to Butch Bjornson–”

  “Butch Bjornson is an idiot.”

  “Absolutely. Only an idiot would charge his lap dances on a credit card when he’s got a joint account with his wife. I’m sure you’re a cash customer.”

  She’d been asleep, or pretending to be, when he came in last night, so the first warning of the onslaught was her blasting her protein shake in the blender before he was awake, a willful breach of protocol. Then the sullen stare, the kidnapping of his toast before he could get his hands on it, the one-word opening volley, uttered with heartfelt contempt–

  “Bazookas.”

  “The things we go through together on the job,” says Tuck, adding a strain of weariness to his voice, “you don’t want to carry them straight home.”

  “You’re not in fucking Fallujah fighting the rebels!”

  She frisbees the toast across the room. This is bad– Francine is not a thrower or a smasher– and all you can hope for in the situation is that they get tired or distracted–

  “Yesterday the hole starts talking”– Tuck continues– “that’s gas building up in the borehole, too much pressure coming from undern
eath, and it can– well, you don’t want to think about the worst-case scenario, you just keep drilling, cause the real pressure is coming from the Company, which has got millions of dollars invested in that hole and not a bit of profit pumped out of it yet.”

  “You’re saying it’s dangerous.”

  “We take the necessary precautions, sure, but the pressure– it’s the same principle that makes volcanoes go off.”

  “If it’s that dangerous I want you to quit. I’ve still got my job, which I’m going to be late for.”

  “I’m late too,” he says but doesn’t stand. You show signs of life, the slightest movement, they’ll kick you harder–

  “I thought you said they shut it down.”

  “That was just temporary– Nub threw some saltwater down the pipe, got it stable. We’ll probably be back at it when my tour starts.”

  Francine stops pacing, fixing him in her headlights across the table. “How much does that kind of thing cost, anyway? Do you pay by the minute, by the results–”

  “Francine–”

  “Oh fuck it!” She turns away from him and is halfway out the door. “I don’t want to know!”

  The door is slammed, hard, and Tuck sits for a moment, listening. He hears the Camry engine fire up, tires crunching gravel. He finds the toast on the floor, throws it in the bin under the sink, grabs a microwave burrito from the fridge, which will have to do for lunch. No matter what they’ve been up to the night before, the hands are never late for work.

  There are no signs of fury having been vented on his pickup, a controversial purchase his second week on the rigs, but no way he was pulling up in Francine’s sister’s Honda Civic. It is a battered Tacoma with some good miles left in it.

  “You start slapping bumper stickers on that thing,” joked Francine, scowling at it that first evening in the driveway, “I’m filing for a divorce.”

  The 20 is a fucking nightmare, even worse than usual. You can’t call it rush hour cause nothing’s moving that fast, but a lot of shifts, not just on the rigs, are beginning now, adding to the usual stream of water and equipment haulers. Nothing to do but hold your place in line and wait it out, hope the other hands, or even Nub, are stuck in the same mess. It is a thrown-together crew, guys spun off, like him, from outfits broken up or able to replace them with more experienced hands. Nicky, the derrickman, is just twenty, a high-school dropout from Odessa, and Grunt, whose real name he hasn’t been able to learn yet, is a vet from the various Gulf wars, a fact conjectured from his tats and not from his occasional monosyllables. Nub, who grew up in the Alaska fields and has done every other job on a rig, is managing two wells a mile apart from each other and seems a little over his head, arriving on the platform every day with a worried-sounding “How we doin, fellas?” before hovering over the shoulder of the driller, Kelsey, for an hour or so. Kelsey wears a sushi-chef headband and a biker moustache, Tuck feeling some days like he’s on the deck of a pirate ship. But before yesterday’s gas farts they were making hole like crazy, well ahead of the curve and cruising for a bonus. And Tom Hicks, the motorman, has promised to show him how to throw chain–

  Your Hole is Our Goal says the sticker on the tailgate of the Dodge Ram inching forward ahead of him. Fucking Butch Bjornson, who he hardly knows, has got to see him in Bazookas and have a wife who teaches with Francine. He can say, when it comes to the showdown tonight, that no, he’s not having an affair, because that’s not the nature of his relationship with Jewelle, not exactly. Explaining to her exactly what it is– that’s not going to happen.

  Buzzy turns off on the parallel road to the north– 40th, 43rd, they’ve got it numbered like Tulsa or Okie City, even though there’s nothing but prairie. Lucky for him the next drill site is up this way because the 20 is a nightmare right now, crawling along, and he’s feeling like he should stop and check the straps on the load. It’s only been what, fifteen, twenty minutes, but it was awful bumpy coming out from that last site and pipe likes to shift–

  The truck shudders as if hit by a wave, Buzzy’s eyes immediately darting to the side mirror but the load is all there, the pyramid holding its shape, and then a spiral of black smoke expands upward just ahead, a fireball spilling out from the middle of it. Not the rig he’s headed for, but close, only a quarter mile ahead. A slap of sudden heat through his open window, the smell of burning oil. He eases off the road, leaves the engine running, hops down and begins to sprint toward the blowout.

  The first man is naked but for his underpants and his work boots, which are smoking, and is running along the shoulder of the road. Buzzy thinks it is the man’s gloves hanging from his fingers in strings, then realizes it’s his skin.

  “They’re over there, they’re over there!” screams the man, whose bare skin is livid red, waving an arm back toward the burning rig and then continuing to run.

  Buzzy hits the superheated wall of air and is driven back, circling the blazing deck, only a few twisted struts of derrick left, till he first smells then comes upon the second man, lying on his back in the hayfield. This man is naked as well, skin bubbled like overfried chicken, all hair singed away, but somehow still alive.

  “The derrickman is dead!” the second man shouts. “The derrickman is dead! Find Kelsey!”

  Buzzy doesn’t know who this is, but keeps working his way around the tower of fire till he sees a pickup bumping over the field from the road. Two guys in oil-drenched coveralls jump out.

  “You call it in?”

  Buzzy feels like an idiot. “I left my phone in the cab.”

  “Well get it and call 911! We’ll do what we can.”

  “The derrickman is dead,” he tells them, “and there’s a guy named Kelsey you got to find.”

  “Go!”

  Buzzy runs back to his truck, calls in the explosion, able to pinpoint the exact location for them. He realizes he is shaking, rolls up the window against the smoke, which is starting to blow parallel to the ground as the wind picks up. He can see the two deckhands, probably just coming home from their shift, carrying the man in the hayfield toward their pickup. He looks in the mirror, sees that his load is still there, realizes he’ll be in the way. He pulls back onto the road and moves ahead in second gear, scanning the shoulders for the running man.

  Tuck hears the boom, sees the smoke, and has to pull over like everybody else to let the fire trucks and ambulance by, but it’s another half hour before he passes the flashing patrol cars at the turnoff and can see that it’s Gorbus 327, his rig. He tilts the rearview mirror to keep it in sight as he drives away with the rest of the eastbound flow, all feeling gone from his hands and feet. “It’s all computers and gauges now,” Nub told him that first night in Bazookas, shouting over the throb of Jewelle’s set. “The day of the old-fashioned gusher is gone, my friend, and the world is a poorer place.”

  Will is first on the scene, sealing the access except for responders, till Tolliver shows up to take over traffic and he can move to the site. He’s cleaned up after a couple of head-ons back when you could actually speed on the highway around Yellow Earth, stepped in on a suicide six days dead in a locked apartment, but never seen anything like the two fellas the EMTs slide off the pickup bed and into the ambulance. The one who is burnt black is holding the cell phone of one of the deckhands who brought them out to the road, talking to his wife in another state.

  “It ain’t nothing, darling,” he says. “Just a little sheet time and a lot of insurance forms. I love you.”

  From the look of him he’ll be gone before sundown.

  “This is the manager,” says Danny Two Strike, leading over a wiry, sweating man in his forties by the arm. “Name is Hammond.”

  “The well was static,” says the toolpusher, before Will can ask him anything. “I went through every reading before we started up again.”

  “You were here for the blast?”

  “Not at the moment, no. I’m kind of doing double duty, supervising this site and another one Fossilco owns down the roa
d.”

  “That’s the company? Fossilco?”

  “They’re indemnified,” says Hammond quickly. “I work for EnDak Oil Services, which is a subcontractor.”

  “And what do you figure happened?”

  “Just a kick, you know, gas pressure below gets too strong and it comes up the well bore.”

  “This happens a lot?”

  “It happens now and again, but we always have a blowout preventer.”

  “Which didn’t work today.”

  The toolpusher shakes his head. “I never seen nothing like this, in all my years.”

  “Can you give me the names of your crew members?”

  “Oh, Jeez, I got em written down somewhere in the doghouse, but that’s gone. Uhm– Barry Kelsey is my driller, then Grunt, whose real name is Jerome something– I seen both of them go into the ambulance– they found Tom Hicks wandering around up the road. Then Nicky Metaxes, he’s the derrickman.” Hammond shakes his head. “If he was up top you won’t find much of him left. Oh, shit, and the new guy, general helper, who knows where he was when it blew. Tucker something, local guy.”

  “Not Tuck Gatlin?”

  “That’s him. They should look in the mud tanks, there’s shit blown all over creation here.”

  “Nub!” calls a young guy in a jacket and tie, running up with a cell phone in hand. “I got Houston!”

  Hammond looks confused. “What?”

  “Corporate needs to talk to you, now. The shock of this thing, you got to get in the right frame of mind.”

  Hammond takes the phone and steps away, mostly listening, saying, “I understand, I understand,” every now and then. The young guy in the suit stands between him and Will.

  “He’ll finish his statement, whatever it is you were doing, when Legal gets here.”

  Will sees one of the firemen holding up a blackened safety helmet. The fire is out now, but the smell of burnt oil sours the air and there are brush fires still smoldering in the field on the periphery of the drilling pad. “It isn’t a criminal investigation yet,” he says to the company flack, stepping past to go to his car. “I’m just getting a body count.”