Site Fidelity

by Claire Boyles

  “Maybe something like, we can't even imagine now, you know?” Dustin was a talker. “Like in Back to the Future, when Doc stuffs garbage into his DeLorean to make gas. That's what I'm doing in my thirties, man. Stacks of bills. No more of this raping the earth and shit.”

  “You've got vision,” Joe said, surprised by his own sincerity, by how invested he was starting to feel in Dustin's success. “That'll take you far. That and saving. You're making plenty of money up here for community college.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Dustin said, joking, and then the color drained from his face. “Nah, man, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about your . . . I wasn't thinking.”

  Joe shrugged it off. He was old enough to have helped his mother, a legal secretary, lug a typewriter home so she could work nights. He'd used clunky DOS desktops in high school, had bought a laptop for the business that had failed, and now, as water hauler, somehow all he needed was a pocket-sized phone. When the drilling was done and this whole thing busted, maybe he'd find himself begging a millionaire Dustin for a job. The world got harder to recognize the longer he lived in it, and only sometimes did that have to do, directly, with the loss of DJ.

  “All I meant, dude,” Dustin said, “is that I don't necessarily want to be like you when I'm your age. Fifteen years, for me? I'm gonna have a family, my own business, a fucking BMW. I'm going to work clean. No more dirt and shit all over my clothes.” Joe felt gut-punched, humiliated. Still, he hoped he would see Dustin do better than he'd done for himself, even if it shamed his own life some. Maybe it wasn't his place to feel that for Dustin. Then again, maybe Dustin was a fine place for all his feelings to land. Okay, Dad.

  THEY PULLED INTO THE man camp, exhausted. Dustin had picked up Joe's habit of ladling soup into a mug, drinking it on the walk from the cafeteria to the bunk, collapsing into as much sleep as possible before they were back to switching tanks in the wind-howl and the swirling dust devils. Today, Joe sat for a few minutes, ate his mac and cheese with a real fork. He pulled up CNN to check the headlines but got distracted by sponsored links and ended up on YouTube, watching something called a Whizbang chicken plucker a farmer had built out of an old washing machine. The farmer fired up the motor, shot a garden hose into the basket, and dropped in a beheaded, bled-out bird. Feathers and water splashed into the air for a minute, and the bird emerged totally bare, like a rubber chicken from an old slapstick gag. The farmer, all enthusiasm, raved about the speed and quality of the pluck. Joe almost laughed out loud.

  It was then he noticed Stone, a few tables over, working on a crossword, brow furrowed. When Joe sat down across from him, Stone seemed exasperated. “Any guesses about a suffix suggesting noodles?”

  The metal eraser casing of each of the pencils poking out of the top of Stone's shirt pocket was empty and bent. An old Stetson sat on the table next to him. Joe wondered why Stone, who seemed to have been cultivating this cowboy professor look for years, neglected to use a pocket protector. The bottom seam of his shirt pocket was marked and stained with lead. “Try -aroni?”

  Stone paused, then attacked the page with a gum eraser. “Right,” he said, “but that means these two down answers can't be right. Anyway, you got an answer for me?”

  Joe felt his hands start to shake, hid them in his jacket pocket. “I could use some details about the offer.”

  Stone put the paper down. His eyebrows, gray, bushy caterpillars, crawled toward his hairline. “Significant salary increase, with bonuses. Stock options. Nice private office in our Greeley headquarters. I hear it's got a mountain view and everything. Company truck. Relocation paid, though looking at the, well, simplicity of your situation here, we may be able to swap out the moving expenses for a down payment toward a house. You keep your benefits.”

  “When would I start?”

  “Two weeks to get yourself settled down there, and then you're on the job.”

  Memories appeared at the worst times. Here was DJ stumbling on the rocks on a foothills hike, red dirt scuffed into shoes that flashed neon lights when he stepped on them. DJ on the top of a rock he'd labored to climb, his arms spread wide, spinning slowly, the joy of accomplishment streaming from somewhere near his tiny boy heart, ribboning into the big sky, combining, in the end, with the placid cumulus clouds above. Here were the ways Mandy's joy had morphed into brooding darkness, her maddening silences broken only by the blare of the TV. Here was the flare and release of his own anger as he grabbed her shoulders and yelled, “Pull it together, Mandy. Jesus. Do something. Do anything. If you can't be happy with this, make a fucking change.”

  Joe could almost picture Mandy's eyes rolling, then boring straight into him, each one its own kind of drill rig. He could almost hear her laugh out loud, as though she were with him in the man camp cafeteria, saying, That's right, jackass. Not so easy to take your own advice, is it?

  Joe tried to swallow the lump out of his throat. He appreciated Stone's patience. The man just sat there as Joe struggled to pull himself together. “Can I sleep on it?”

  Stone nodded, went back to his crossword puzzle.

  BACK AT HIS BUNK, Joe used the Jack-and-Jill bathroom he and Dustin shared. Drifting into sleep, he wondered how many of the other guys knew that term, a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, from their lives at home with their wives or girlfriends. He wondered if knowing it made them as lonely as it made him. He woke to a film of dust and tears crusting his eyes nearly shut, and when he cleaned his ears after his shower, the swab came out blackened and greasy. The bunks were small, a single bed, a closet with drawers inside, a small counter/desk with a mirror above it, something Mandy would have called a vanity. In the middle, there was just enough space for one man to stand up. Visitors were naturally discouraged by the tightness of the space. Women, drugs, and alcohol weren't allowed in the rooms at all.

  Joe went outside into the afterglow of a spent sunset. The evening was calm, the wind settled. Dustin sat in a plastic deck chair nursing a bottle of chocolate milk, texting. He didn't look up when Joe sat down, his fingers nearly blurring across the touch screen of his phone. Joe hated the kid's distractibility, the assumption that the human in front of you, face-to-face, should wait in favor of the human on the other end of the digital world.

  “I think someone was in my room when we were gone,” Dustin said. “It just looked . . . I don't know, like someone was in there.”

  “Spot inspection, probably,” Joe said. “You didn't have any contraband, did you?” After the mess of the trailer in Greeley, Joe was grateful to have his own room, understood that he had traded privacy for convenience here in the camp. He accepted it as a condition of employment.

  “They got no right to go through my room. It's in like . . . the Constitution or some shit.”

  Joe shrugged. “It's in your contract. Besides, it's not like your parents never searched your room, lurked on your Facebook, read your texts. You're too young for privacy.”

  Dustin's jaw dropped. Joe could almost see him searching his memories for examples of this exact kind of injustice. “That's fucked up, man. I mean, I thought I lost a dime bag once, but maybe my dad just took it and didn't have the balls to say anything, you know?” The kid, betrayed, looked even younger than normal.

  Joe felt like such an ass, sowing the seeds of discontent between this kid and what was probably his perfectly well-meaning, loving father. It was exactly this contrariness, this need to point out flaws to others, that had driven Mandy crazy. “Like your mother,” she had said. “Just like her. Knock it off, will you?” And he had tried, he had, was still trying, really, but he never saw it until after the fact, when the razor-sharp effect of his bullshit had hit the people around him. When the wound was already inflicted, and he had no idea how to stop the bleeding.

  “Stone wants to make me a land man back in Greeley.” Joe needed to talk to someone, and Dustin, unbelievably, had become the only person in the world who'd listen.

&nb
sp; “That's where your wife is, right? And it's money?” Dustin shrugged. “I guess I don't know why it's even a question.”

  “She might not want me,” Joe said. He felt the truth of it press his shoulders toward the prairie ground, as though the man camp would absorb him easily, hide everything that terrified him, hide the ways he himself was terrifying. “She might be better off.”

  Dustin was back to tapping on his phone screen, no eye contact. “Sounds like you don't know for sure what she wants.”

  Joe used the toe of his boot to trace a line in the dust in front of his chair. He closed his eyes, leaned back against the trailer wall, and was surprised to find not a memory but a possible future. Mandy and Dustin and Joe together at JB's Drive In, the three of them laughing over milkshakes. Joe saying to Dustin, You're lucky she likes you, and Dustin throwing up both hands, Of course she likes me, I'm charming as hell, and Mandy laughing, taking Joe's hand. Nobody resurrected, everybody still alive, broken, together.

  “If I had it to do over again,” Joe said, “I'd do it different.”

  Dustin cleared his throat. “My girl down there says I'm wasting time doing this. Like I should come home and just get on with it already. Maybe she's right about that for both of us.”

  Joe looked out into the distance, searching for the line where land met sky. “There might be a way I can convince Stone to let you come with me. Tell him we make a good team. Batman and Robin or something.”

  Dustin shook his head. “I like you just fine, Joe, but I'm nobody's Robin. Still, I'd appreciate a good word, if it gets me back home.”

  He got out his own phone and offered it to Dustin. “You ever heard of a Whizbang chicken plucker? Maybe that's how you can make your millions. Impress this girl.”

  Dustin laughed, delighted, as feathers flew on the phone screen. “Funny, jackass.”

  JOE WATCHED THE LIGHT fade, the stars appear and twinkle. He'd find Stone in the morning, start making the arrangements. He pictured Mandy next to an open window, a cacophony of colorful birds in the burr oaks and spruce. Mandy's smile deep in her brown eyes. Mandy angelic, the sunset streaking beams of light around her. He'd grab what luck was offering here, ride it as far into the future as possible, hope his life held strong against the pressure.

  Flood Stories

  IN 1976, WHEN THE Big Thompson River swelled with monsoon rain and flooded the canyon, my mother, Beth, carried me to safety, climbing first up a steep mountain slope and then into a giant ponderosa pine, despite the way her mud-heavy shoes lost purchase on the rain-slick bark, despite the pitch on her fingers and in her hair. I was one year old, wrapped in a hand-stitched baby quilt she tied around herself as a sling. I squalled all night. The storm clouds obscured the moon, the night was black save for lightning, which, in its flashing, lit the churning river and the debris—some empty cars, some full of bodies, propane tanks, punctured, hissing fumes, trees as thick as the one we were perched in. Each flash of lightning revealed some new scene of horror, one Mom could see but I couldn't, and still I was the one who was crying. Mom has told this story, again and again, to me or in front of me, all of my life. “You never were easy to settle,” she says. “Nothing I did ever contented you, not even saving your life.”

  Yesterday, when I told her about the job I'd been offered at the state Parks and Wildlife office in Denver, full benefits, my own office, twice my current salary, she added, “Nothing contents you now, either.” Then she took her cocktail glass and her cigarette out to the porch and sat there while the sun set, a worn blanket draped across her shrinking frame, her thinning hair a halo of static electricity. Mom is only sixty-five, but she is shrinking into herself, her heart congested, failing. She is aging fast and angry. I think all the time about the things I know but Mom doesn't, that I have a baby growing in my womb, a girl, I am nearly certain, her father a one-night stand I couldn't possibly locate now. That if I want that job, any job better than the one I have now, manning the entry station to Rocky Mountain National Park, I have to take it before I start to show. I think about the things we both know but won't say out loud. That this canyon she half raised me in has nothing that either of us needs: no doctors, no jobs. That she should lay off the cigarettes and gin, go for more walks, eat more kale. I should do all these things too, though I don't smoke the way she does anyhow. Medical instructions for the end of life and the beginning of it are surprisingly similar.

  I poured a glass of cranberry juice, no vodka, and sat next to her on the porch. I'd been living for years in this cabin along the Big Thompson River. My grandfather rebuilt it after the '76 flood, and I moved in after college. When Mom retired, last year, she moved in with me, which feels similar to childhood, but harder to bear after years of adult living.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “We could have a fine time in Denver. All that art. Poetry readings. Street festivals.” Hospitals. First responders.

  “You're not a city kid, Lottie. You'd miss these mountains too much.”

  “I'm thirty-two, Mom. I'm not any kind of kid. We need the city and the money right now.” I will miss this cabin, which feels like mine even though we share it, though it's Mom's name on the property deed. She's right about that much. The river runs fast and high enough with the June rise to block the noise of the highway that runs on the other side of it. The rock wall of the canyon against the road turns pink-golden in the waning hours of the day, the tops of pines that line the steep mountain incline on our side of the river catch the sunset light and burn like torches. Each night, the cabin grows dark with the canyon bottom, though the sun's waning light shines in the sky above us. The tree that saved both our lives still flourishes on the steep slope nearby. Dad hated this cabin, or so Mom says, which is why he and my brother Andy weren't here the night of the flood. The fact that Dad hated the cabin makes Mom love it more, I think, out of spite.

  Between us was Mom's stack of books, a few heady sociopolitical nonfiction titles, Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry. She'd been a librarian in Loveland for forty years. Mom named me Charlotte because she loves the Brontës, loves everything dark and gothic. She'd wanted to name Andy Heathcliff but Dad put his foot down, I guess. She's locally famous for the passionate one-woman pro-beet sugar, anti-chemical sweetener campaign she ran from behind her library desk through the eighties and beyond. Mom would stamp due dates on copies of Hop on Pop, on Hatchet, on Farmer Boy and say to the children, or their mothers, or whoever would listen, “You can't believe the commercials. Just because it's all NutraSweet all the time doesn't mean it's actually healthy for you. Causes cancer, the doctors say, and it's putting the mill under besides.”

  Mom is proud of her reputation as a tough old bird, an upstanding citizen. I know it because she says it out loud. It was her most adamant lesson for Andy and me: guard your reputations, cultivate the goodwill and admiration of others, use this as currency for any number of favors, a rich array of possible rewards. Mom is at least as proud of her reputation as she is of me, I'm sure of it.

  “Can you drive me to Walgreens this weekend?” Mom's doctors have advised against her getting behind the wheel. “My prescriptions will be ready on Friday.”

  “I'll just stop on my way home from work.”

  “I'd rather come with you.”

  “Yeah, but then I have to drive all the way here to get you, and then all the way back.” Mom has this thing now where she browses. She reads greeting cards she doesn't plan to buy. She considers the sizes and shapes of Tupperware containers that won't fit in our full-to-bursting cabinets. She tests outrageous lipstick colors on her wrist. It's like entering a drugstore black hole, time itself suspended.

  Mom pursed her lips and nodded. She didn't say anything else, but I know she's not letting it go, either. I picture Mom adding a stone to the disappointing daughter jar she carries in her heart. Mom keeps track, and if I'm honest, I do too, my grudges like magnets. The more I carry, the more I collect.<
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  The wind set the tops of the trees swaying, but where we were, below, it was gentle, soft against the skin, scented with pine pitch and river water.

  “In Denver there are Walgreens everywhere. Maybe even walking distance,” I said.

  “What makes you think I'm coming with you?” she asked.

  “If I go,” I said, “you can't stay up here alone.”

  “Like hell I can't.”

  She's wrong about that, in denial about her ever-shrinking independence, just like she's wrong that nothing contents me. Living with Mom in the canyon would be perfectly fine except that I can't seem to be a grown-up with her around. Every time I think I'm acting responsibly, Mom makes me feel like I'm chasing the river mist. She's wrong about who I am, but so confidently that I get to doubting myself. What she will say when she finds out I am knocked up by a stranger, I don't know. I feel like I've lost an old fight with her. I imagine her nodding, unsurprised, saying, I always told you that's who you were.

  “I'm turning in,” she said.

  “It's barely dark.”

  “Doctors say rest. I'm resting.” Mom's voice had an edge. She's especially irritable since the diagnosis. Irritability is not a symptom of congestive heart failure. I looked it up. I guess I wanted to confirm that she could help it, if she wanted to, all her special meanness.