Roughnecks

by James J. Patterson

  “Ma’am,” Zak couldn’t think. As he leaned in all he could see was her feet, which were bare, bone white, her toenails yellow and long. He wanted to say something in defense of the old man. He couldn’t believe how miserable and wrong about him she was. “Jesse’s one of the most respected…”

  “Respected? Jesse? You shut yer lyin’, fuckin’ mouth! And you show a little respect for those who know better’n you. Nothin’ any of you cocksuckers sez is worth a fuck. Do you know that? Hmmm? Who really, I ask you, has any respect, for a dried-up old man who’s pissed his life away? Huh? You? Well, now, there’s an accomplishment. Did Jesse earn your respect? My, how lucky we all are. An’ you came all the way here from shitville to tell us? My, my. Listen here. If he really worked all them years, where’s ’is pension? Hmmm? Where’s ’is savings? Look at us. Look at this piece of shit hole we live in. This is what you and yer goddamned bullshit comes to!” She was getting to him, she could tell and with this realization she gained confidence, momentum, and strength. She wanted to twist the knife. Yes. What she was saying was reaching this one. It felt too good. His face had fallen. Yes. He was listening. Really listening. To the truth. Her truth. The only truth allowed in this house!

  Zak took a cautionary step backward, and Lenny inched the chair closer.

  Her loose limbs suddenly found life, strength, and a bony arm reached out and her long fingers gripped his shirt collar and pulled him down till his ear was at her lips.

  “Tell me somethin’, arsehole, what kind of a job calls itself roughneck? Have you ever given that a thought? Hmmm?” He could feel the Moisture from her rotten lungs spraying his inner ear. “Huh? Answer me that!” she hissed. And here she slipped back into that matronly sympathetic tone one might save for a sick child. Releasing her grip on his collar, her slippery hand slinking back under her filthy blanket. “It’d be like having a job callin’ itself loser, or hooligan, whoremaster, or grave robber. Fuck you,” she said sweetly, as though saying “there, there.” “Roughneck!” she suddenly spat, full venom returning. “That’s a laugh’n a half!”

  Then she wagged her head in a mock impersonation of a youthful, prideful man, “‘Lookit me, honey, I’m a roughneck!’” A youthful prideful man turned inside out. “‘Yes sir-ee. No one can tell me where t’go or what t’do! I’m a roughneck. We’re goin’ places, sugar! We’re makin’ money!! So’s we can git outta here!!! You’n me, baaaby!!!!’” This last she hissed so loudly it sent her into a full-tilt blue-faced coughing fit.

  “Mom,” Lenny broke in, sounding truly frightened.

  “Shut up! You goddamned useless tit! Yer as bad or worse’n any of’m,” and returning her attention to Zak, she cut to the chase. “Listen, mister, you get yer fuckin’ ass outta here and down the road, and you tell yer worthless roughneck friends that Jesse Lancaster has twisted off, once and for all, an’ he ain’t never comin’ back, understand? Now fuck off! And don’t you, nor any of yer kind, ever come around here no more.” She coughed several times more right in Zak’s face, her black eyes locked on his, her face turning red and her eyes filling with water. She spat whatever it was she coughed up at Zak’s feet, hitting his steel toe with a thwack. And then she looked up at him with a yearning doleful pitiable expression, as though she expected him, or wanted him, to hit her. And when he didn’t, she smiled.

  Zak staggered from the house. He gulped fresh air as he dragged the toe of his boot on the grass. He was disgusted and angry with himself for listening to her for so long. When he got to the Jeep, he rummaged through the back for a paper towel and, holding his breath, wiped the bloody mucus off his shoe and tossed the paper onto the drive. When he backed out of the drive, he nearly hit a car coming down the street, stomping on the brakes just in time.

  Lenny’s sullen face peered after him through the living room shade as Zak roared away.

  More than her words, her image and the stench of that place, that corner of hell, kept coming back quick as he could chase it away. He parked around the corner from the City Bar and tried to get a grip. He checked himself in the mirror. His glasses were crooked. His hair was dirty. His eyes had a strange off-center look. Like he was insane. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands until his knuckles turned white. He closed his eyes and put his forehead to the steering wheel. He desperately tried to think of something else, faraway places where people either didn’t care or actually believed that the oil and gas they burned in their cute little cars and cozy little houses arrived by magic in the middle of the night, requiring only sufficient funds in one’s account at the end of the month to keep it coming. He wanted to be anywhere they might have done away with or surpassed this ugly stage of human development. He wanted to be anywhere but Watford City, North Dakota. He wanted to wear nice clothes. To see people meet and greet. He wanted to listen in on conversations about books, or art, or money, or sporting events. But even if he could transport himself to a place like that he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. Not with these clothes, this hair, this face, these eyes.

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON. A warm beam of sunlight passed down the street chased by a cold dark cloud. Pickup trucks and cars jerked and nudged impatiently by. Engines revved. Voices mingled. A din was rising all around him not unlike the constant harangue of a drilling platform. And everyone looked just like him. Worn, dirty, tired, and more than a little crazy.

  An elderly woman walked slowly up the street. She had a pleasant face and new blue beauty parlor hair. She wore a well-cared-for beige winter coat. In one hand she carried a small handbag. In her other hand she carried her mail. She stopped at the curb and, tucking her letters under her arm, she opened her purse and, as she waited for the traffic to clear, she touched up her lipstick. She did it perfectly, without having to see herself in a mirror. She put her lipstick back in her purse and crossed the street with a measured, confident step. A pickup truck glided to a stop a respectful distance from her, allowing her to pass without having to break her proprietary stride. At the other side of the street another woman stepped out of a shop door and they had a brief and amiable chat.

  Once at home she would put on a pot of tea and sit at an old family coffee table and read her mail. Her house would be clean and quiet with finely polished oak and cedar furnishings. A miniature Big Ben on the mantle over the fireplace would chime on the quarter hour while its smooth swinging brass pendulum counted off the seconds. Handmade lace doilies would rest on the worn arms of comfy chairs in the living room. On a bureau or a wall would be a framed black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged man wearing a benign smile. Somewhere else, Jesus, brown-skinned with long hair and fine gentle features, staring up toward heaven. In her backyard, the soil from her summer garden would be turned. In the pantry would be jars of tomatoes and delicious things for winter broths and stews. In just a little while it would be time for her to start supper.

  “MARTY!” CYNTHIA SHRIEKED WHEN SHE saw Zak through the window in the door. He could hear her footsteps hurrying off to find her husband. Zak shook his head. Why, he wondered, did she have to get Marty to open the door instead of opening it herself? He still felt shaky over his encounter with Mrs. Lancaster and in this hypersensitive state wasn’t in the mood for any more weirdness. He suddenly wished he had gone somewhere else.

  “Hey.” Marty pulled open the door, turned and humped back into the kitchen where he had a bunch of tools spread out on the floor. He lay down on his back and resumed fixing something under the sink, grunting and huffing. He was doing a job. Cynthia stood there clutching her hands in front of her, blushing and smiling. “I’ll be dun wit dis in a sec,” Marty said, and went back to wrenching on a pipe. “Git yerself a beer.”

  For an awkward few moments Zak sat with Cynthia in the living room. There was a velvet landscape on the paneled wall over a velvet-covered couch. The TV was on so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  “Nice to have Marty home, huh?” Zak shouted.

  �
�Yes, but I hate it when he works. He’s gone so long. It’s scary here. Things get broke.”

  “Yeah,” Zak sympathized. “Has the sink been broke long?” He heard himself starting to talk like her and shuddered quietly.

  “And the phone rings. I don’t answer.”

  He nodded matter-of-factly. Well, of course not.

  “’Less I knowed it’s Marty. We got a special signal.” She frowned, wondering if she hadn’t just betrayed her man by telling Zak their secret. “He gets so upset when things go wrong. The sink got broke too.”

  Zak shook his head, unable to think of a thing to say. He drank his beer.

  Mercifully, Marty strolled in with a beer and plopped himself down in his La-Z-Boy recliner. He grabbed the remote from its place on the arm of the chair and turned down the sound. “So Zak, what’re you up to?”

  “I don’t know. I had nothing to do up there in Scobey so I thought I’d come down here and see if maybe I could scare up a hand or two for George.”

  “Yeah? What for? Dat’s Rusty’s fuckin’ job. You should be pushin’ tools on dat fuckin’ rig,” Marty rocked back and forth, agitated, edged. “Dat’s Rusty’s gottdamned job!” he shook his head.

  “Well,” Zak shrugged, “I just came from Jesse’s place, whew, have you ever met that wife of his?”

  “Nope. He always told us to stay away. I hear she’s fuckin’ nuts or somethin’.”

  “Well, I wish someone had warned me. Goddamn, that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” They were unimpressed, and Zak didn’t feel up to doing an impression sufficient to make them understand what had just happened to him. He wasn’t sure himself.

  They walked into town and stopped at the diner. Four things were on the menu: Fried chicken, fried liver and onions, fried steak, and fried fish. All entrées came with French fried potatoes and canned or frozen vegetables. Zak ordered the liver, just because it was nasty, and he felt nasty. It occurred to him that back East he always ordered at a restaurant things he wouldn’t have at home. He’d go out to eat for something special. Here, in the heart of cattle and produce land, this is what there was to eat. No wonder everybody’s having heart attacks, he grumbled. The liver was delicious. It was appalling.

  All evening, Marty talked on and on about who was who and what was what, but all Zak could see and hear was Mrs. Jesse Lancaster. He tried to see her as a young beautiful woman. As a lonely wife with a man who worked away from home. As a mother. And every path, each scenario, led her to this, a wounded soul, a bitter vindictive heap of decaying flesh. And yet, still, with the end so clearly near, with all her resources either gone or broken or spoiled, the battle was still mightily engaged. There would be no surrender, not to the bitter end. He could see the scars she inflicted on Jesse and Lenny as tribute for the pain she felt they had inflicted on her. Lenny, tethered to his mother’s disappointment, distrust, and loathing, fulfilling her prophesies by his subconscious incapacity to live up to his father’s expectations. Her revenge.

  There is no justice here. Zak wondered to himself if the very idea of justice wasn’t a masculine thing—if men invented justice, a twisted rational with which they skewered the inequities of existence in their favor, and if women invented revenge, a quid pro quo where at least each doggie got its day. A masculine/feminine point/counterpoint built right into the spiral double helix, DNA, the law of opposites, the Way of the World.

  Or maybe not.

  Zak listened to the beefy beef-eaters all around him and this grotesque surrealism of American frontier images began to paint themselves in distorted lines and blending colors. A frontier that had never represented itself as anything but a bleak, barren, and dangerous place. And yet, somehow capable of containing and sustaining a fantastic illusion, superimposed over a more permanent landscape, the sole purpose of which is to mask the fact that all we, mankind, have done is channel our savageries in varying degrees of intensity and purpose. But through that painful effort, savagery becomes civil, and that is a process which can uplift a semiconscious being to a more perfect sentience. It was a lesson of the frontier. Any frontier. That things begin somewhere. But what an effort, and what pain. So much sacrifice for so little gain. And it didn’t sit any better with Zachary Harper than the greasy meal he packed away there in the Watford City Diner, Watford City, North Dakota, United States of America, AD 1979.

  THE TOWN WAS FULL TO overflowing, there would be no place to stay tonight. Zak accepted Marty’s offer of hospitality, although he would have preferred heading for the PDQ Club, hearing a band, raising hell, and taking his chances. Instead, he stretched out on the couch in his sleeping bag.

  Cynthia went to the back of the house to the laundry room and selected a stuffed animal from her collection to sleep with her and Marty that night. She giggled and laughed like a child as Marty held the nose of the big blue elephant around the corner to wish Zak a goodnight.

  As the darkness enveloped him, as the sounds of the house died down, Zak lay awake thinking of the lady with the blue hair he had seen crossing the street that day and fantasized about being an ex-roughneck, older, her gardener and handyman, sleeping on a cot in a warm space, in a room she had fixed up just for him, out by the garage.

  XIV

  The next morning Zak awoke before dawn. The room was stuffy and dark. A clock somewhere ticked loudly. He was restless and most definitely wanted off that couch and out of that house. He sat up, pulled on his boots and, in the kitchen, found a paper towel and a pen and wrote a makeshift thank you note before letting himself out the kitchen door. Frost had settled on the lawns of Watford City. The Jeep roared to life, echoing through the quiet neighborhood, and Zak smiled devilishly as he escaped into town, wondering how many dreams he was interrupting and how many had merely incorporated his loud roar and rumble into their predawn vagaries.

  In town all was quiet as well. Morning towers hadn’t gotten off work yet, and as he drove down Main he chuckled to think that this was probably the only quiet time of day, those hours when the evening tower crews had had their fill of food and booze and before morning tower crews came roaring through town looking for the same thing. His sense of relief at leaving Marty’s was suddenly upon him and, instead of going to the City Park, which had taken on the character of a gypsy camp, he found a dirt road west of town, past the little hospital and the schoolyard, and drove up onto a hilly overlook and sat there waiting for the sun to come up. He slept deeply, if for only forty-five minutes, but long enough to wake up feeling fresh.

  “Zakko!” Freddy Fifer hollered when he saw Zak approaching through the trailer park, bottle of whiskey in a brown bag he rested on his shoulder like a musket.

  Freddy was camped out in a big lawnchair under an awning that stretched out from his trailer door. It was an Indian summer day, probably the last day of the year that would be comfortable outside, and everyone was busy either partying or getting ready for the harsh weather that was just around the bend. Freddy was already juiced. He had a big box of beer at his side and his cast, which extended from above the knee to his toes, rested on a neatly folded blanket.

  “Zakko and Franzetti! Zachary Dackary Dickary Doo! Haa ha haa!” Freddy bellowed in a great big voice. As Zak approached, laughing, Freddy dug into the beer box with a big chubby mitt and tossed a beer out to Zak, which he caught with his left hand. “Better get with it there, partner!” Freddy laughed. Zak sat down Indian style next to Freddy and popped the beer. Before they spoke another word, Freddy tilted his can back and, after chugging the rest of its contents, smacked his lips with a satisfied gasp and then gracefully tossed it up, basketball style, onto the canopy where it landed with a clang among several dozen others. “Skyhook!” he smiled and dove into the box to fetch another. Once they were on equal terms with fresh new beers, they were ready for a visit. Freddy was clearly something of a hero with the hundreds of roughnecks coming and going and they moved around him like some kind of
monument.

  “Christ! I think I know who you mean!” Freddy said in genuine horror, interrupting Zak’s account of what had taken place at Jesse’s the day before. “I’ve seen that spooky bitch at the clinic! She sets there and waits and gives ya the hairy eyeball like she’s got a big ol’ butcher knife under that blanket an’ any second she’s gonna get up outta that chair and start hackin’ ’er way in to see the doctor. Scary shit! Not good. Uhhuhuhuh,” he shuddered, his fat jowls rippling comedically. “You shoulda walloped that crazy ol’ cunt when you had the chance!” In seconds he had Zak laughing so hard he wondered why in the world he hadn’t stopped to see Freddy the first minute he hit town.

  “I’m okay now, Zak,” Freddy suddenly became serious when it was time to fill Zak in on the status of his leg. His big fat smile fell, and the flesh around his mouth got loose and watery like a frightened child. “But brother, this has been rough. All sorts of problems. The docs in Williston sent me down to the hospital in Rapid City and they said not only did I have all them breaks but there’s what they call a spiral fracture running all the way up. The nerves are nuts. One day she’s numb all over, the next there’s like burning everywhere. Most days she just aches like hell. Then, shit, I’ll be feeling like a million bucks and suddenly Whhooosh! I’ll get a pain that’s sharper’n a razor blade that sends me clear through the roof! I’m goin’ in again in a few days so they can check on the new knee. Then after months of healing, I get months of some kind of therapy. They rebuilt the knee, reset the breaks, put pins in, pikes, screwplates, a total reconstruction job. I’m gonna be down and out quite some time and not looking forward to it. But hey!” he brightened, and from under his lawnchair he pulled a big plastic bag half full of urine with a tube that hung down and disappeared under the blanket on his lap. “Ain’t this the greatest fuckin’ thing you’ve ever seen? I never have to get up to piss! I can just drink beer all day! A nurse over at Rapid rigged it up for me. Said astronauts and drivers use’m on long hauls. It’s like a rubber. Fuckin’ great!” Then lowering his voice, his eyebrows dashing upward, he said, “she put it right on my dick for me!”