Man Camp
THE MAN CAMP WAS the biggest town for god knows how many North Dakota miles, built to be torn down like fucking LEGOs when the Bakken ran dry and the whole thing busted, which everyone knew it would. The bust was a sure thing, but the timing was anyone's guess, and guessing was everyone's favorite topic. Joe knew exactly as much about the oil field as he needed to do his job, which wasn't much, but he joined in with his own loud predictions, debated whether the proper unit was months, years, decades. He was doing it now, this morning, over strong coffee and crisp cafeteria bacon, until Dustin called bullshit.
“Dude. Put the crystal ball away already,” he said, his mouth full of Froot Loops from the self-serve cereal hopper. “You don't know and it don't matter. We work until the work runs out. Then we can fear the reaper.”
Joe pictured Will Ferrell and a cowbell, wondered if this was a reference he and Dustin shared. Dustin was barely twenty-one, fresh out of his parents' house, the biggest disappointment of his life so far an unsuccessful search for a steady girlfriend. Every break he got, Dustin went home to his mother's chili and cinnamon rolls, to beers with his high school buddies.
“You mean face the reaper. At the end, you face him.”
In the cafeteria, Dustin flashed a smile, revealing the benefits of teenage orthodontics. “What I mean, Joe, is YOLO.”
“Yoyo?” Joe was messing with him now. He knew what YOLO meant, felt the oppressive truth of YOLO like spiders crawling on his skin.
Dustin's hair stuck up at odd angles, and Joe fought an urge to pat the kid on the head, make him look more presentable. Through the thin plastic wall that separated their bedrooms, the kid sounded like a sixty-year-old man. Dustin's smoker's hack, exacerbated by a nasty bronchitis he'd picked up somewhere, had woken Joe multiple times. Joe found himself stealing the kid's cigarettes, tossing them into trash cans at random gas stations. It was how he would have handled it with his own son, if his own son had grown up to be a smoker, but DJ hadn't gotten the chance to grow up at all. Joe felt his hands burn and tingle, then, and before the feeling could spread to his chest, to the raw mess of his heart, he closed his eyes, willed himself to stop thinking about it. It was like closing a set of blinds to hide a wildfire blazing outside the window. Temporary relief, false, but relief all the same.
Joe had been in the man camp for about a year, and he had to admit it lived up to the promises of the recruiter he had spoken to back in Colorado, who had sold a comfortable life (Amenities like you wouldn't believe! Better than home! Hassle-free!) and the chance to make his fortune driving water trucks for the rigs. It was Joe's nature to doubt all salesmen, but in spite of his low expectations about this part of his compensation package, it was an improvement over his first gig back in Colorado. Room and board had been free there, too, a giant double-wide provided by the company stuffed with eleven other guys, bunk beds lined up like army barracks, slopped Stagg chili and Dorito powder in the shared kitchen, the smell of burnt coffee and weed and the never-ending trash can overflow, their sense of decency dropping off the same cliff as their privacy.
Joe hadn't been back to Greeley since he'd left, had decided to avoid location-based triggers that might evoke memory—his lovely wife, pregnant, laughing as a thick milkshake mustache dripped down her chin at JB's Drive In. “Say it five times fast!” Mandy had insisted, and they'd both tried it, giggling like fools, over and over. Marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache. Or years later, at the junkyard off Highway 34, the one with the observation tower he'd paid a buck to climb with DJ so the boy could marvel at the view of the Rockies on the western horizon. Mandy's minivan, the car he had spent so many days off working on, had been hauled there after the wreck, was there still, he imagined, crumpled, rusting in the cruel sun. She'd driven off a bridge into the South Platte River. Witnesses reported a sudden jerky swerve, a loss of control, enough momentum to half break, half jump the crumbling concrete barrier, but there had been no sightings of what, if anything, had been blocking the road. They'd managed to pull an unconscious Mandy out in time, but DJ was already gone.
Joe asked for extra shifts instead of weeks off, and his supervisor was more than happy to shave his breaks. He killed the rare empty day playing Gran Turismo on an ancient PlayStation 2, taking breaks on the smokers' plaza. The gas rigs were a new world—unceasing, unstoppable—and working eighty, ninety hours each week had made him the small fortune he needed to pay for Mandy's care in a long-term care facility back in Greeley, where she lived now.
“We're not sure she'll ever fully recover,” the nurses had told him, and he'd nodded, mute. Of course she wouldn't, and neither would he. He loved her, still he loved her, imagined her with him on the rig, an angel on his shoulder. The things he couldn't forgive he just had to bear, but Mandy was an exception—he could neither forgive her nor bear seeing her. He'd broken his own heart and left town, the condition of Mandy's heart in the capable hands of the facility staff.
Dustin stuffed his pockets with sausage biscuits and filled his thermos with coffee. Joe grabbed sack lunches for them both. “You look like shit,” Joe said. “Sure you don't need a day?”
Dustin shrugged. “The cough is a real bitch at night, but it gets better in the daytime.”
Joe nodded. It was the same with his dreams. In the bright light of day he didn't imagine DJ's fading struggle against his seat belt, the river current flowing through his hair, through his lungs. In the bright light of day, he didn't stop to wonder whether Mandy had a real accident or whether she'd meant to drive into that river.
WINDBLOWN GRIT SCOURED HIS face and tapped against the buildings, which bowed slightly in the heaviest gusts. Joe was happy for the long shift ahead of him, happy to be free from his dreams. Gravel crunched under his boots, louder for the 5 a.m. silence around him. The men seemed quieter at night, presumably due to the human habits of their lives before the camp, but there were always men coming in and men heading out, a twenty-four-hour stream of going to work and getting off work, sleeping and waking, being indoors and being outdoors. Even now there were guys watching The Godfather in the rec room, guys lifting weights in the fitness area, guys walking to the bunks, hoods pulled over their heads to shield them from the relentless prairie wind. The lens coating on his sunglasses was scraped and scratched nearly off from the grit that pelted him as he worked.
He and Dustin were set to ride together, and once Joe got the kid talking his own mind could drift away on the conversational current—he could nod, hum a few times, offer occasional low-stakes advice on Dustin's low-stakes twenty-one-year-old life, call it a day well lived. At the truck, Dustin paused. “Give me a minute, will you? I forgot I need new laces.”
Joe shrugged. The kid was lucky the camp store was open this early. The store didn't carry much—boot laces, work gloves, cigarettes, Twinkies. Joe sat on the back bumper and looked at the sky. The camp lights were no match for the bright splashes of starlight—Joe had never before been able to see the distant sparkle of the cosmos so clearly. There had always been too much light right in front of him, light that tethered him to the moment. His mind wandered up and into the expanse, so that when the man approached, Joe startled.
The man smiled, held out his hand. “Ben Stone. Company recruiter. You're Joe Baker?”
Stone was a grizzled old guy, mid-seventies maybe, a paper copy of the Tribune under one arm and a set of pencils, actual lead pencils, the kind that needed to be sharpened in one of those rotary sharpeners from grade school, in the front pocket of his shirt. A little old for the rigs themselves, Stone had arrived a week ago for a site visit. Dustin had heard he was retired from some high school in Bismarck, a history teacher, and he looked the part.
Joe shook Stone's hand. “Good to meet you.” Joe cleared his throat to shake the sleep from his voice. “You out from Bismarck?”
“Yep. Turned me loose into the field
for a few days. I have to say, I was expecting worse. The food is really quite good, though I would never tell my wife that. Quieter than I thought it would be—I pictured it like something from a Steinbeck novel. Not quite Grapes of Wrath because, no family, you know? But maybe Cannery Row.”
Joe laughed. Steinbeck was the only author he'd actually liked in high school English. “Not near enough alcohol for that. Too many rules.”
“It's some kind of frog hunting, I guess.” Stone shrugged. “I've seen your file. Community college. Associate's but no bachelor's. Former land surveyor. How'd you end up here?”
Joe never knew how much to share. He thought of Mandy as he'd last seen her, in a wheelchair in the assisted living recreation room, a blanket on her lap, her hair greasy and stringy, staring out the window at the red pop of house finches against the spruce outside. Her eyes neutral until she saw him, then a speechless glare that drilled him with hate, with blame. Her silent accusations had reacted with the secret doubts he kept buried, and one thing he knew for sure—Mandy's depression had eaten at the heart of their family life for years, and he, for all those years, had been resentful instead of compassionate. “Turns out hauling water pays better than surveys, at least once the recession hit. I needed the money.”
“You still have family back in Colorado?”
How much of his life were people prepared to take in response to such pleasantries? “My wife is in assisted living. She doesn't really . . . she has a brain injury.”
“I'm sorry to hear that.” Stone had what Mandy would have called kind eyes, and Joe was surprised by the older man's sincerity, and then was surprised by his surprise, by how long it had been since he had believed in anyone else's honesty.
“Here's the thing, Joe. We need an advance land guy back there in Weld County. Someone to secure easements from property owners, convince them to allow us to get the seismic testing done, reassure them that they won't start being able to light their water faucets on fire. Company likes to promote from within, we need someone who knows the area, and you seem to stand right out. You interested?”
Joe let out a low whistle. “When do you need to know?”
“Soon.” Stone smiled. “You could do a lot worse than this, you know.”
He knew. He nodded, watched Stone pass Dustin as the kid rushed toward the truck, boots unlaced, shrugging into an insulated work jacket. He let the prairie wind rage against his skin until his nose ran, until tears pooled in the corner of his eyes.
“Hey! You met the guy. Who is he?” Dustin was breathless from rushing.
“Recruiter.” Joe pictured Stone in a solid brick library surrounded by century-old oak trees, reading East of Eden. How did a guy like that end up in the oil field, still wearing a jacket with leather-patched elbows? It didn't make sense.
“He offer you something good? Something closer to home?” Dustin rubbed his jaw like he'd taken a hard punch. “Take me with you, man. I have to get back there. My girl is not into this long-distance thing.”
Joe shook his head. “I'd been married for two years by the time I was your age.” Mandy was barely marriage legal, but after a whirlwind month of dating she had filled up all his empty spaces. He'd never felt so full of anything. He wondered what the justice of the peace must have thought—impulsive teenage lovers, reckless, broke. Mandy had worn a purple satin dress from her senior prom, braided ditch sunflowers into her hair, slipped her shoes off in the courthouse hallway.
“Married? Where's your ring?”
Joe rubbed his ring finger with his thumb. “Too much it could catch on up here.”
“How come you never go home then? Come on, Joe. We been working together for too long for you not to have mentioned a wife.”
“A wife and a son. She had an accident, needs assisted living back in Greeley. My boy didn't make it.”
Dustin gasped. The kid's eyes were welling, and Joe was struck by the gesture, Dustin's emotions laid bare between them, as though there was nothing to fear in turning them loose. Emotion did not reconcile easily with life in the man camp. Dustin was just like he'd been at that age, so full of cocky absolute certainty that the way he lived or ate or thought was the one right way to do any of those things. Dustin hadn't lived long enough to fuck it all up, to fail at important things. He couldn't realize how much of life was the luck, good or bad, that flowed out of the crap choices you made before the stakes were clear, before you knew how to properly care for the things you held dear.
In Joe's dreams, memory held hands with the imaginary, intertwined like fingers, and a withered, ghost-like Mandy pointed at him, scowling, so accusatory, so suddenly lucid, and then it was Joe, not Mandy, who had driven the Caravan off the bridge, and he was frozen, unable to flee, guilt shining from his skin in visible rays. Sometimes it was DJ, all curls and bounce and innocence, scrambling around the riverbank rocks, asking incessantly if Joe wanted to try a different fly, and Joe felt ashamed of the annoyance he had felt toward his son in that past moment, regret flooding his present-day self. Sometimes a twisted gas rig leaked poison into a burning river, and it was Joe's own limp, lifeless body, not DJ's, trapped under the currents.
“How old was he, your son?” Dustin had wiped his eyes, the moment hardening between them.
Joe shook his head. It was already too much. He hadn't talked about it to anyone at the man camp, and nobody had asked. Part of what made it work, all that lonely, was an unspoken prohibition against curiosity. The men didn't pick at each other's scabs. “Time to roll, kid.”
“It's like that, eh?” Dustin shrugged. “All right, Joe. I'm always just waiting on you.”
THE SHIFT WENT BY. The drilling rig had left the site the week before, and the injector, after a minor repair, was put back to work. There was a bit of tension with the flare until it was clear that all was working the way it should. Dustin was a sloppy worker—leaving tools at various job sites, half-assing the cleanup, half-assing most things. He cut corners. Today, it was a connection to the water tank that leaked gallons before Joe caught it, prairie dirt becoming prairie mud all over the men's boots.
Joe caught Dustin by the jacket sleeve. “You got to take some pride in what you do.”
“Pride,” Dustin laughed, shaking his head like it was some kind of joke, but Joe noticed that he doubled back, tightened things up, that the work he did the rest of the day was focused, beyond reproach.
He thought about Stone's offer, and suddenly he wanted more than anything to unlock the unlikely chimes of Mandy's laughter, see her smile at the cheerful tittering of house finches, the smell of spruce through the open window. Rig life and marriage were the same. During boom times, everyone made bets about when the bust would happen, and during the bust, it was hard to believe there would ever be another boom. He wished he could scare his past self into the moment, like Marley to Scrooge, make his past self kinder in the face of Mandy's sinking sadness. Joe as the ghost of his own empty future. Joe lost.
Joe forced himself to give the job his attention. I'll get just as sloppy as Dustin. All of the site activity was hidden from view by giant water tanks. It was an unspoken rule that the rigs should be hidden as much as possible—not, of course, that the company had anything to hide. In this case, Joe wondered whose view they were worrying about, as this particular site was so remote they hadn't seen any sign of humanity since they turned off the state highway miles back. The truck convoys hauling water were one of the most visible things for local people to object to . . . so much traffic on once-sleepy rural roads. But he knew it would be worse if the entire drilling process was so tangible. What the public could see, the flare burning off the emissions, the giant drill rig, the twenty-four-hour spotlights, was upsetting enough, but the invisible turmoil underneath it all—underground explosives, chemical soup, toxic gases—was far more frightening.
His mother's face had been that same kind of façade—a mask of false serenity,
her anger at being left to raise Joe alone always simmering somewhere beneath it. He'd realized too late, after he left home too, how heartbreakingly lonely the eerie calm of the house must have been for her. He remembered himself, a frightened ten-year-old, asking her about the erections he had started getting on a regular basis. During math class. On the school bus. Riding his bike. His father years gone by then, he'd had no one else to ask.
“What's happening? Am I okay?” His mother had been scrubbing dishes with a sour-smelling sponge. Her yellow rubber-gloved hand had slowed only for a moment, her grip almost imperceptibly tightening.
“Of course you're okay,” she had said, refusing eye contact. “Just don't think about it and it will go away.”
Joe returned to that advice over and over again, a simple truth around which he organized his life. It was what had drawn him to trade the plains of Colorado for the North Dakota prairie, to ignore completely the earnest urgings of the social worker at Mandy's facility to “re-engage with society.” He was working to master his thoughts, to disengage from complex moral conflict. This job was the only luck he'd had in the past few years. He knew the company had saved his ass, saved the asses of any number of other men who had been laid off from jobs in construction, in landscaping, in mortgage lending, for God's sake, during the recession. He didn't want to dwell on the environmental impacts, the political bickering, and certainly not on Mandy, or on DJ.
And then the shift was over and he and Dustin were back in the truck, the empty Dakota road spread out ahead of them, surrounded by prairie. Rough-legged hawks perched on the ranch fence posts, stark against the open country. At thirty-eight, Joe often felt like an old man, in camp and on-site, surrounded by green, disillusioned millennial boys who'd believed they'd make their fortunes as pro football stars or white rappers, who'd paid just enough attention in high school to graduate. They'd leveraged those diplomas into jobs on the rigs with training and good pay—pay that, for the most part, the young guys took for granted, felt they somehow deserved. Dustin was different from most in that he could see beyond the moment. Dustin's plan, Joe knew, was a degree in alternative energy from the community college, a future entrepreneur masquerading as an oil patch roughneck.
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