The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  Wes put his T-shirt over Jessie’s mouth and said, “Breathe, baby, breathe.”

  “No! No! No! No! No! No!” Jessie started screaming.

  Henrietta started moving back and forth on the seat, as if she wanted to pace but there wasn’t enough room.

  “No! No! No! No! No! No!” my daughter shrieked.

  “You’re all right! You’re all right!” I yelled.

  “Here you go, oh, my sweet sugar,” Wes crooned. “Oh, my sweet sugar.”

  Crack! Crack!

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Maybe some tires going, exploding,” Wes said.

  “I don’t think they’re ours,” I said. I had no idea. Maybe they were.

  We moved up Pearson, slow, slow. We got onto Skyway. The whole universe had turned into a place of red sky and pine trees swaying like demons dancing. Through the hot, hot windshield—the heat blew off the dashboard in waves and threw itself off the side windows—we could see walls of flames tearing up from Tacos El Paraiso and Bill’s Auto Repair. We crossed Vista Way and saw that Noonan, Gump & Penzer had long orange rockets of fire shooting up from its roof and out its windows.

  Wes turned his head to look at his old office burning. Then he looked forward again.

  Jessie went quiet. Henrietta crouched down and did not move. We were all of us silent but breathing like animals.

  “I’m sorry about the safe,” Wes said. He started crying.

  “Just make sure my kid doesn’t get dead, you old buzzard,” I said.

  “Of course it’s all for you. You’re my dear son’s wife,” he said, sobbing, while clutching onto my daughter. “Everything I have is for you and Jessie. The money, the gold, the stocks, the car, the house—”

  I kept my eyes on the road ahead. A wave of red-gold flame and sparks curled across the sky and earth ahead of us. Any minute now it’ll be clearing, I told myself. Any minute, we can get away. Far off, I did see the sky brighten briefly and then go dark again. It brightened once more, then darkened out. Dark, then darker. Then bright once more. Then dark.

  “It’s going to be good, don’t worry, don’t scare her,” I said, my whole mouth like sandpaper.

  “Tell me you forgive me,” he wept.

  I watched the hellfire sweep across the trees to our right and kept my foot steady on the gas.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I forgive you, you Custer-loving bastard,” I lied.

  I could hear the howling, eating sound of the fire. On the horizon, that tiny, pale clear spot opened in the sky again and flickered. The red underworld rose up to heaven, exploded in the pines, and whirled above us like naked stars. The pale spot of clear sky continued glimmering ahead, though, and I aimed for it, without praying and filled with something less like faith than a blind keeping-on. And what I hoped was not my last thought was, what a Native woman’s got to put up with in this goddam life doesn’t stop until the minute that she dies.*

  Faulting the Trump administration for its failure to consider climate change late Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the auction of federal land in Wyoming for oil and gas drilling.

  U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras said that, while the Bureau of Land Management had summarized potential impacts of climate change, it failed to provide the information necessary to understand the level of climate impact from oil and gas leases. . . .

  Barbara Gottlieb with Physicians for Social Responsibility meanwhile said the organization was “proud” to have joined the lawsuit. “Fracking contributes to the destruction of a livable climate for all of us. It also endangers the health of people living near wells, pipelines, compressor stations and other fracking infrastructure,” Gottlieb said in an email. “We can’t keep disregarding the harm that comes from extracting and burning oil and gas. We already face a climate health emergency. The impacts are just too great.”

  BRITAIN EAKIN, “Judge Cites Climate Change in Block of Wyoming Drilling,” Courthouse News Service, March 20, 2019, https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-cites-climate-change-in-block-to-wyoming-drilling/

  Abundance

  With thanks to Brad Watson

  I SAW THE GOLD HAZE in the sky, that night when Thomas and I got away and used his car. The roustabouts light the flare stacks to ease the pressures caused by the gas. They use a flare pen. My husband, Danny, showed me before. A man shoots a spark at the top of an invisible pile of vapors that rises up from the oil wells. The gas lights up in a bright thin flame, like a feather plume worn by the queen horse in a rodeo show.

  I spied the hot blur from the misted window in the back seat. I raised my head while Thomas put his mouth on me. The light flashed into the darkness, and I closed my eyes.

  I met Thomas last winter when I brought Danny his stomach medication and other supplies at the Combs Ranch site, about ten miles away from our home. This was one of the periods when Dan lived at the man camp. The oil field’s a busy place, with lots of workers, lots of machinery: there’s the rig, the makings for the casings, the base fluids, the friction reducers, the sand and iron trucks. Danny tried to teach me about it all when we first got married and moved to Douglas twelve years back. I paid more attention to the people then. The wives, I mean. The men didn’t mean that much to me.

  We’d meet up every weekend in those days. One of the girls would bang together a barbeque or a burger night. We fillies gathered in the kitchen sipping bourbon while the men drank their beers in the backyard. Billie, Rufina, Felicia, Michelle, and I had a fine time of it. We’d get red-faced from the booze and talk nonstop about getting pregnant or about the little ones that had already been born. I remember the men as young and rambunctious, very brave, excited, but serious when they fretted over their work during nights off.

  By the time I brought Danny his gear to Combs Ranch, we had stopped going to the barbeques or burger nights as much. We’d had three children and instead spent our evenings watching TV. Most of the folks that I still knew from before had grown old in what seemed like lickety-split. But business was good, better than it’d been before, because there was more of an opportunity for the company to get under the land. More chances to coax the oil up, Danny said. The fields now spread across Douglas into Fremont, Casper, Gillette, and Riverton, and there were lots of new young tuffs coming to town.

  “This is Thomas,” Danny said, at the rig site, when I handed him a white paper bag with his pills in it.

  I shook the stranger’s hand. He had a long, thin face and dark hair. His eyes were hidden by sunglasses, and he had a broad, crooked mouth. He looked about thirty.

  “Hey there, ma’am,” he said. His hand in my hand felt broad and warm and dry.

  I met Danny when I was eighteen, in Galveston. I’d graduated from high school and worked in an old folks’ home. I’d had to get a job, but I’d also wanted to get away from my mother, whose problem with Lortab squeezed out most of the money from her SDI check. At Holden Estates, I cleaned the patients and let them talk at me. At first the old women’s falling-to-pieces bodies gave me the worst fright. I had to hide it. And one or two could get aggressive, not knowing who they were anymore and hitting you. But after a while I got used to it.

  Danny was eighteen too. He’d come to town from Salado. He was short but had a nice laugh. And he was a go-getter. He worked as the janitor for the home, but he always talked about the future.

  “I’m getting out of this place to do oil rigs or construction,” he’d say, mopping the floor and talking a streak while I brushed a patient’s hair or rubbed their legs. “I’ll learn the business and then get investors and start something of my own.”

  “I know you could do it,” I’d say. “You have the fire.”

  “Sure I do,” he’d say, mopping harder.

  One day, he looked right at me, snapping his head up in a hurry.

  “Do you really think so?”

  I was washing the feet of this staring-into-space old mare with the worst toenails. “Do I really think what,
Dan?”

  “Do you really think I could have my own business?”

  “Sure I do,” I said, scrubbing away.

  “Let’s get married,” Danny said, all in a huff and just falling apart from I guess a sudden need to shout out his love.

  “Maybe we should go on a date first,” I said, still holding that beast’s feet.

  “Okay,” Danny said.

  We dated for a while. After about six months, Danny officially asked me to marry him in an Italian restaurant, over spaghetti and wine. In the same conversation he said there was an opening at one of the mountain state oil plays, roughneck work.

  So we got hitched and moved just outside Douglas.

  There’s a bird here that some folks fuss about. It’s a brown-and-white puff ball with fancy feathers. The bird makes this little burbly coo. I used to hear the creatures’ call more when Danny and I were kids starting out here. These birds don’t like people very much, and so they hightail from the new rig sites popping up. The flare stacks from the oil fields make the sky bright all over our neighborhood, at every hour. Birds can get confused and fly toward the shine in the sky. Some of them get burned up in the fire.

  They’re called sage grouse, and they’re in the news all the time. Years back, I once spied a little family of them when I was walking the edges of the neighborhood, around a sagebrush patch about half a mile away from my house. The males looked so strange and walked so funny that I researched them on the web.

  I like the sage grouse on account of their courting. They romance each other in these places called leks. Little hideaways out in the brush. The males put on the most ridiculous show. After a while, you see how it’s beautiful. The critters have a boop pi pooo doo sort of cluck, and they fan out their back feathers, which are like peacock feathers but dark brown. After that, they pump out their breasts, which have long white pockets. When the male sage grouse bares its chest, the pockets open up and show a yellow color beneath. Like they’re revealing their hearts.

  The little brown hens peck at worms in the dirt and just eyeball them, patiently selecting their suitors.

  I saw Thomas a second time, at the Safeway, over on East Richards. About a month had passed since that day on the field. I spotted him right away, by the steaks. We have some strapping men here in Douglas. Even so, his shoulders cut quite a figure.

  “Mrs. Wojcik,” he said. He mispronounced it Wajik.

  “Good morning,” I said. I pretended I’d forgotten his name.

  “Thomas, ma’am,” he said. He smiled with that thin crooked mouth. “Thomas Esposito.”

  “Esposito,” I said, starting to laugh for no reason. “What is that?”

  “It’s Mexican, ma’am.”

  “Mexican, my goodness,” I said, laughing some more. “Where you from?”

  He laughed too. “Buffalo.”

  I stood him ten years. I looked at his hard, lined face, brown and tight around the bones. When I saw his long body, it made me feel the weight of the extra flesh on my thighs and the lower part of my belly. My eyes have sunk in a little since when I was younger. But my worrying about my looks didn’t stop a pocket in my chest from opening up. Fool woman, fool girl.

  “Call me Linda,” I said.

  Thomas smiled at me with a dirty, easy kindliness, as if he’d just taken my hand and led me to bed. “Why, isn’t that a pretty name?” he said.

  It’s beautiful country out here, once you get past the houses and trailers, the rigs and the pits. The winter snows shoot you in the face like shrapnel but land soft on the trees and fill the streets like sweet smoke. Once the sun comes, the green hills ripple out, covered with tiny purple and yellow flowers. There’s cows and horses and deer out in the remoter areas. Still, there’s more rigs around Douglas now than when we first moved here, and more strangers too. The federal government used to have a no-sir attitude on oil and gas companies leasing the land beneath the surface, but the opportunity opened up with the new times we’re in.

  Some of the plains have been torn up to make way for the wells. I see the white scars cutting through the grasslands where I used to take our eldest when she was just a baby, to see the lambs. Now the lambs are gone, and the rigs make a high grinding sound as they pump up the oil while the men scramble around and shout.

  But if you keep driving south, you can still find yourself a lonely field, where you can listen to the quiet and the birds. You take your sweater off and feel the air on your arms. After the long, pale winter you can feel your body sipping at the sunlight.

  Dan and my girls and I went to church the Sunday after I saw Thomas at the Safeway. We’ve got Carmen, who is five, and Lila, who’s six, and Samantha, who’s eight. Carmen is blond and has a delicate stomach, like her father. Samantha and Lila are redheaded, like Dan’s mother, Sue, who passed away eight years back from cancer.

  Dan never got his own business, but he made foreman, so now he can come and go from the man camp. He’d slept at home the night before, and Sunday morning dressed up in his black suit with the bolo and his good brown boots. I put Carmen in her pink lace. Samantha and Lila wanted to wear the same thing, matching purple dresses I’d made them for Christmas last year. I wore a brown dress with brown leather pumps and my hair tied back with a green ribbon.

  When I tied the ribbon through my braid, I got a very clear picture in my head of Thomas. I saw him leaning back against the meat counter in the supermarket, how his yellow T-shirt pulled against his shoulders. This vision made me twirl the ribbon around the wrong side of my head, and I had to fix it twice.

  We got to First Baptist a little late and sat toward the back, shuffling and rustling in the quiet. My old friend Billie saw us sneaking in and gave us a wink.

  “God sees all your sins and still loves you, remember that,” Pastor Bill was saying. He was the younger one, in his twenties, and I couldn’t take him very serious. “You just give the Lord your sins, and he will wash them away. He gave you this land, and he gave you your loved ones, and he gave you his Son’s very life too, which is the most precious of all gifts in the world.”

  I nodded in my seat and let Carmen cling onto me. It was true that God had done his part for my family, because we weren’t wanting. And I like the idea of Jesus’s terrible love filling you up, from the bottom of your feet all the way to the top. But I’ll admit I’m not much for that hellfire. I take what works for me, and I leave the rest.

  Pastor Bill started quoting from Corinthians: “And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”

  “Amen, amen,” we said.

  When we got home, I made us all a big lunch. I did the last of the preparations in the kitchen, looking out the open window at the smoke from the flare stacks drifting through the air. The well boys are supposed to push steam into the stacks to keep it cleaner, but that doesn’t always get done. I closed the window, while out in the dining room, I could hear Dan cracking jokes with the girls.

  “What’s a cross between a wild turkey and a mosquito?”

  “Tell us!” the girls wailed.

  “A turkito.”

  I came in with the steak platters to see my daughters laughing and laughing, squeezing their forks in their fists and clamping down their eyes.

  Samantha and Lila gobbled up the food, seared T-bones made with wild rice and a nice tomato sauce topping. Danny and Carmen just picked. I sat across from them at the table and studied Dan. He’s thinner now than when he was a boy, and he has a few blue burst veins in his left cheek. Samantha and Lila favor him, and Carmen favors me.

  “Doesn’t Mama look nice today?” Dan said, looking at me and poking at his potatoes. “And these fine T’s, honey, what’s the special occasion?”

  “I just thought you’d like something nice,” I said, touching the ribbon in my hair.

  I had a secret little flame pluming up in my body, which lit me up like a Chinese lantern. It had already started. My mi
nd kept wandering, even there at the table.

  “Who wants dessert? Peach cobbler.”

  Once Danny became foreman, we paid down our four-bedroom house and rebuilt the roof. We bought an extra car. In the early days I had an almost crazy fear of going broke because of my mother’s mistakes, but I haven’t felt like that for a long time now.

  I’d seen women lose their minds before. I pitied them. I’d watched Felicia Jenkins tear up her marriage to Hans with a guitar-playing trucker she’d run across at the Waterhole. I’d seen Michelle Enders break up her family, losing her husband, Greg, and her two sons for a bowlegged waiter she met at the Flagstaff Café. I got a real close-up view to the wages of sin, and I’d hug my daughters and want no part of it. The women’s natures seemed to hit them when they turned forty-five, a little later, and it brought them to ruination.

  That winter I met Thomas I was only forty-one years old.

  Billie Moorehead and her husband, Karl, threw Billie a fiftieth birthday party that June. Karl had worked with Danny for twenty years, and Billie and I had been girls together back in the early 2000s with Michelle and Rufina and Felicia. I wouldn’t say that I have anything like a best friend anymore, but Billie and I used to be close. She’s a large, powerful woman, with a crisp set of strawberry curls and very wide hips and long full breasts that are a real comfort to lean on.

  “What doesn’t kill me makes me weaker,” she’d joke after a couple drinks. She’d lost a baby and had three miscarriages before hitting thirty-three. By her big five-oh, she’d laid her mother, father, two aunts, and a brother to rest. But she’d had five children, four boys and a girl, all of them grown now and working the derricks or in oil administration. And Billie had stuck it out with her man, Karl, who stood her fifteen years and had gone wrinkled and patchworked with scars since his problems with skin cancer.