by John Sayles
“As far as I know they got a year for all that, unless the surface owner takes a pass on it.”
This is tribal land. Stepping closer, Harleigh sees that the liquid is gone because the liner is ripped in a couple places.
“Somebody’s got to be responsible for this.”
The foreman sighs like Harleigh has ruined his day, and moves off to look at a clipboard left on the front seat of his pickup. When they started on the rez they gave notice before every move, they sent him websites to visit and understand the process better. The access road he’s driven down is almost a half-mile long, and that should be removed as well–
“Got it!” calls the foreman, reading off one of the forms stuck on his clipboard. “Reclamation contractor– Skilldeer Incorporated. It’s an outfit called ArrowFleet.”
Connie finds him out on the new deck that Arne built, drinking a Scotch.
“What’s the occasion?”
“Nothing. Just thinking about places we could go.”
“You know how I feel about flying.”
“I mean places we could drive. See the country.”
“Like for your conferences.”
She sits on his lap. When Fawn isn’t around she loosens up, gets more affectionate. And who knows if Fawn will really get it together to leave–
“Not conferences– that’s just hotels and cities, other reservations with casinos. I mean the country in between.”
She gives him a concerned look. “And just when is this likely to happen?”
“After the next election,” Harleigh tells her. “I think me and the Three Nations are gonna need a vacation from each other.”
BUZZY HAS SEEN MORE hitchhikers in the last two weeks. There were plenty in the first months of the Bakken boom, you’d see them in town later sitting on their duffel bags with hand-lettered cardboard signs, NEED A JOB, and in those days they probably didn’t have to wait more than a few hours before getting an offer. And then, starting a couple months ago, the retreat, the ones who must have spent too much time at the Indian casino and can’t even pop for a bus ticket. But this one is going the wrong direction–
From the way he wears his jeans and his belt, Buzzy has him figured for a Mexican, probably a wet, but way up here who gives a shit?
“You got family up here? Familia?”
“No,” says the man, who is strong-looking, in his thirties. “I am looking for work.”
Buzzy shakes his head, “Getting here a little late for that.”
“I am trying,” says the man, “but it takes me very long to come here. In Tejas there are too many Mexicans.”
Buzzy laughs. “Got that right.”
“So there is not good work. Other places, where they have the oil rig, I am not in the union or I am not somebody’s brother.”
“I know that routine.”
“But I am hearing all the time there is so much work here, so I continue to the north.”
Buzzy nods his head toward a pair of pump jacks, ducking up and down at the side of the highway.
“That’s what’s doing all the work right now, amigo. They pumping like crazy but they left off drilling and fracking some while ago. Hell, this might be my last run, they get serious about that pipeline.”
“But there is still oil.”
“Sure, it’s still down there. What was it– Mac something–”
“Macario.”
“The thing is, Macario, we done too good a job here. Put so much oil and gas on the market the pump price fell to half of what it was when we started. I’m sorry, buddy, but that heifer’s left the barn.”
The man stares out his window silently as they pass an abandoned well head. He seems like he’s barely able to stay awake. Buzzy muscles the wheel, fighting a crosswind, the wind that’s been trying to flip him wheels-up since he came to this prairie.
“There’s a Taco John’s in town that ain’t bad,” he says to the brooding traveller. “Maybe they got something in the kitchen.”
Spartina tapes the boxes shut, identifying the contents on the outside in black Magic Marker. Shipping labels will come later, when the owner sells the lot of it or sets up somewhere else. One whole wall is stacked with boxes, and somebody is supposed to come in the afternoon with tools to disassemble the metal work counters.
When Tina goes out onto the floor she sees that the man is still standing there, just staring at the main street. There is still traffic, oil tankers and a service truck now and then, but nothing like during the fracking. The man has been there at least two hours, Latino-looking, and must be cold now that the wind has really picked up. She steps out to talk to him.
“Hello.”
The man holds his hands up as if surrendering. “I am sorry. I stand in another place.”
“Oh, don’t worry. We’re closing.”
The man looks in through the window, seems to notice for the first time that Havva Javva is empty.
“So early in the day?”
“We’re closing for good. Not enough customers.”
“Ah,” says the lost man. “Entiendo.”
“But I’ve still got one machine hooked up. Would you like some coffee?”
IN THE EARLY MORNING, before the slots have begun to chirp, the man from room 108, the one with the face you can’t quite remember even if you saw it only a moment ago, steps into the little sauna cabinet with only a hotel towel around his waist and new-bought flip-flops on his feet, just beating the well-cement salesman who’s finished his interval training on the recumbent bike, who sits on the bench outside, hand over his heart, feeling it settle down to normal. He starts to get cold after ten minutes, pissed after fifteen.
“Yo, buddy,” he calls, rapping his knuckles lightly on the fiberglass, “you don’t want to fall asleep in there. Won’t be nothing left of you.”
There is no response, and the salesman considers just barging in and crowding the guy out, or pretending there’s a posted time limit and that he’s got a watch on.
“Hey in there?”
Nothing. He waits another few minutes, thinking about heart attacks and his last physical with the specter of Lipitor to add to his arsenal of daily pills, then sees the towel boy, or whatever you call the kid who mopes around the gym and spa.
“You better get the manager,” he says. “I think there’s somebody in trouble in there.”
The boy, an overweight Indian kid who probably can’t even fit on the recumbent bike, doesn’t want to peek inside either and goes to find somebody above his pay grade. The salesman walks in place. Not good to stiffen up and get cold after the intervals, but he has to see this out. Finally a manager type, white guy with worries, appears and calls at the door several times. No answer.
“You saw him go in?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been right here?”
“Yes.”
The manager considers for a moment, then pushes the door open.
No nondescript man. No towel, no flip-flops. A puddle of water on the floor.
THEY’RE ON RESERVATION LAND, the patrol car left at the side of the road ten minutes ago. There is some slope to the land here as they get close to the lake, what might be called dells back in Minnesota. The lupines and coneflowers are up by now and there are bright yellow meadowlarks flapping up from the ground as they walk, red-legged grasshoppers clicking like castanets and flicking away to clear a path for them a couple footfalls ahead.
“Hell, it would be great if people didn’t need me, didn’t need somebody to do my job. But as long as people are the way they are, there’s got to be somebody serve as– you know.”
“A referee.”
“Sure. You could call it that.”
“To uphold the law.”
Will frowns, points up a slope to the left. “The law is just a tool you use to get it done. The job, to me, the point of it all, is that people respect each other.”
“You think you can enforce that?”
Will has promised her som
ething, some surprise, but he says she has to be patient. She can wait hours, maybe days for rodents to emerge from their holes, but with people she expects service or entertainment and pretty damn quick. It is not her favorite trait, and Will does not cut to the chase.
“When somebody’s really out of line, when somebody’s really getting screwed, sure, we can usually step in and at least stop it from going further. But the things I see now”– he shakes his head, truly upset– “like there’s no center anymore. No moral code.”
He’s not a church guy, that has been established, and he doesn’t seem to be afraid of gays or blacks or Indians taking over the country, but there is this Boy Scout part of him that is endearing and makes Leia worry at the same time.
“My prairie dogs,” she says, “are pretty hard-wired for behavior, and that includes some really awful stuff.”
“We’re people, not critters,” says Will. “We ought to be able to do better than that.”
Leia has a slightly sick feeling, worried that this spot they’re headed for is where he takes women for the Big Kiss-Off, someplace where if they scream or cry the scene won’t have an audience–
“Here we go.”
She sees the lake spread out below them now, looking beautiful and somewhat man-made at the same time. They start to descend toward it.
“Beaver Creek Bay,” says Will. “Good fishing spot.”
She has told him about applying for the Animal Control job, how she was informed they were looking for a long-term resident to fill it, told him she has given her notice at Walmart. He nodded and didn’t ask why she was still in Yellow Earth, then, and they haven’t discussed it since. He has another two years on his term as sheriff. She has been to his apartment, relieved to find he owns and reads books, mostly history and not exclusively about war. They’ve had a rendezvous in Bismarck, where he did business at the state penitentiary and joined her at an old downtown place that served enormous slabs of meat. He does not harbor snakes or reptiles of any species.
They come to a rock outcropping just above the steep earthen bank and sit, watching the water.
“Place I used to come to think,” he says.
“It’s pretty.” The bay curves enough that they can’t see across to the yacht that is still sitting on shore, the one that people have been making jokes about. A little breeze kicks up, no moan to it. When they make her Queen of the Universe her first act will be to turn that fucking wind off for a while, give people’s heads a rest. There are no boats on the water, no motor sounds, no drilling.
“I suppose you’ve been wondering–” she starts, and he puts a finger to his lips.
He points.
There are three of them, though it is hard to distinguish at first from the liquid, graceful weaving of their long bodies in the water. They make a complicated wake, go under, come back up, one with its belly to the sky.
“Oh my.”
“There’s a bunch come down from Canada to live along the Red River,” says Will, almost whispering, “on the border with Minnesota. But this far west, in this lake– not since the beaver were trapped out.”
“Plenty for them to eat.”
“Oh yeah– suckers, carp, a lot of nice slow fish. And look at the size of them.”
The otters are all roughly the same size, maybe three feet long including the powerful tail, which is thicker than their hind legs, swirling and twisting and looping backwards under the water, then sliding along with their flat heads barely above the waterline.
“They can stay under for eight minutes,” says Leia.
“You’ve studied them?”
“No, but they’re– they’re pretty fascinating. The social groupings are relatively anarchic, their territories overlap, they commandeer other mammals’ burrows–”
“I never seen more than these three, and only started seeing them last spring.”
They are long and lithe, pelts glistening as they roll and intertwine, one occasionally racing away only to yo-yo back and snake playfully around the other two.
“I’d love to know how they got here, hopping rivers and streams– did they do it in one big odyssey or did it take a couple generations, drifting west?”
“Somebody ought to do a study.”
That might, she thinks, in his Andy of Mayberry roundabout manner, be Will’s version of an invitation.
“So what do you think?”
He is looking at her rather than the otters, which in their aquatic nearsightedness must have heard rather then seen them and are now flowing three abreast toward the bank, little noses tilted, testing the air.
“I think I’m in love.”
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