by Jung Yun
“My editor, Lydia—you’ll learn a lot from her, by the way, she’s always the sharpest person in the room—I think she’s a little nervous about how green you are,” he said. “But I told her I’d turn over all my research to you. Plus, she liked the idea of assigning the piece to someone who’s from the area. You know, someone who has a good sense of the before and after. What do you think, El?”
Absent from their conversation were the niceties that people usually exchange after falling out of touch for a while. How are you? What have you been working on? Are you seeing anyone these days? She was relieved about that. Niceties weren’t typically his way, not unless he was angling to get her into bed. Their conversation was brief and purposeful; professional, even. He asked if she wanted the assignment. She said that she did.
Standing at the front desk, Elinor struggles with how to boil all of this down for Hannah, who’s staring at her expectantly, still waiting for an answer to her question.
“My mentor,” she says, trying the word on for size. “He recommended me for the job.”
It’s a reasonably truthful answer, devoid of any details about her relationship with Richard, which had been complicated, particularly at the end.
“I’d love to have a mentor,” Hannah says. “Maybe before you leave here, I’ll convince you to be mine.”
Elinor manages a tired smile. Richard liked oral sex; he liked it in his office, under a long wooden writing desk that had supposedly belonged to Joseph Pulitzer.
“Maybe,” she says, aware that she has absolutely no business mentoring anyone.
4
A large hand waves through the closing elevator doors, forcing them to reopen. It’s the man who was arguing with his wife about their anniversary, dragging what appears to be a giant metal toolbox on wheels. He smells like he’s been chain-smoking ever since he got off the phone. Elinor glances at her watch. The last time she lit up, it was outside the American terminal at LaGuardia, standing next to several gray-faced smokers on an exiled stretch of sidewalk. That was over fifteen hours ago, possibly a new record for her. She unzips the outer pocket of her bag to see how many cigarettes she has left in her crumpled pack. About ten, minus a few that broke. When she zips the pocket closed, she notices the man looking at her, his thin lips curled upward. She knows the difference between a look and a look, and this is one of the latter. Gone is the pained expression on his face, the one that actually made her feel sorry for him earlier. In its place is a strange, almost sleazy grin. So much for your anniversary, she thinks. She’s relieved when the elevator dings and spits him out on the second floor, allowing her to ride up the rest of the way by herself.
When the doors open again, she steps out onto the landing and finds a cleaning woman crouched beside an overflowing trash can. Plastic shopping bags filled with garbage, greasy pizza boxes, flattened twenty-four packs of Coors Light, and empty Colt 45 bottles have been piled up next to it. The woman’s dark hair hangs in her face as she shoves everything into a bag, the extra-large black kind used by contractors. She’s either too distracted or agitated to return the nod of greeting that Elinor offers as she walks past.
“Cerdos sucios,” the woman mutters under her breath.
Elinor rarely crosses paths with Spanish speakers in her home state, native speakers especially. But cerdos, she’s almost certain, is Spanish for “pigs.” She tries to summon what little remains of her college Spanish classes to translate the rest. Dirty pigs? Disgusting pigs? Regardless of the adjective, Elinor agrees with the noun. It looks like a frat house on this floor, not a hotel.
Room 315 is at the far end of the hall. As she inserts her key card into the lock and turns the handle, she braces herself for disappointment, possibly even disgust, at the conditions that await her behind the door. She’s relieved to find that the state of the hallways doesn’t extend to her suite, which is neat and spacious, with a queen-size bed on one side and a kitchenette and sitting area on the other. Although the olive green and gold upholstery is badly in need of an update, the room is actually larger than her studio in New York. The view is marginally better too. The window overlooks the rear parking lot, and when Elinor cranes her neck at just the right angle, she can see her car, half on the grass and half on the pavement, the angle more diagonal than straight.
“Parked like an asshole,” her father would say.
Her skin feels slick and oily, on the verge of breaking out, so she goes to the bathroom and scrubs her face with soap. The vanity light is a soft, pleasing white, so different from the harsh blue fluorescent in the plane, where she washed her face last. The man, the plane. All of it comes rushing at her again. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and tells herself to stop it. There’s no use thinking about him now. Even if she called the police, even if the police believed her, what would she say? I think a man assaulted me, but I’m not sure. Years ago, she went to the police when she was very sure, but it hardly mattered. She’s not about to invite that kind of scrutiny again. She returns to the outer room, looking for something to busy herself with. She hangs up her clothes, sets out her toiletries, makes a mental list of all the things she meant to bring, but didn’t. Lotion, lip balm, tampons, socks. None of this keeps her occupied for long, so she fills a Styrofoam cup with water and lights a cigarette. There’s a sign on the desk that specifically forbids this in red block letters, but smoking is a distraction too, one of the best.
Two cigarettes later, she checks her email and finds a message from Damon, a friend whose wealthy boyfriend recently kicked him out and cut him off. Damon had some modest success in the nineties doing catalog work for the Gap and Levi’s. Now he’s broke, couch surfing, and getting by on temp jobs that he’s barely qualified to do. He keeps a flip phone around for his staffing agency to contact him, but he pays by the minute and text, so he prefers to email instead. Would I be in your way if I stayed through the weekend? he asks. Last time, I swear. The question confuses her. The night before she left for Avery, she thought she mentioned being out of town until the end of June, although in retrospect, it’s not hard to believe that one or both of them forgot what they talked about. After finishing off a cheese pizza and three bottles of wine, they fell asleep without setting an alarm, resulting in the mad scramble to pack when she jolted awake at noon. BTW, have you seen my sleeping pills? I’m pretty sure I left them in your bathroom. So it wasn’t even her Restoril, she thinks. He must have placed his bottle on the shelf with her toiletries, which she added to her bag with one clean sweep of her forearm. Elinor types out a quick reply. As penance for taking his pills, she encourages him to stay through the end of the month.
Halfway through her in-box, she sees a name that she hasn’t thought about in a while. Kathryn Tasso. Although the two of them took several classes together in grad school, they weren’t friends or even friendly, then or now. Kathryn was a former college lacrosse all-star who played on two US national teams. After a brief coaching stint, she retired from the sport in her late twenties to pursue a degree in journalism. Elinor thought it might be worthwhile to get to know her, given the fact that they’d both aged out of their first careers and were trying to launch their second. But Kathryn was aloof and condescending, with an athlete’s sense of competition that didn’t transfer well to grad school. She treated her classmates like rivals, particularly the women, and the more dismissive she was, the greater her perception of threat. For reasons that Elinor never fully understood, Kathryn seemed deeply threatened by her.
There were other women in their program who were likelier targets for her aggression, women who had graduated from Ivy League universities or already had impressive writing credits to their name. Elinor had delayed college until her midthirties, opting to work and make money while she could still book jobs. By the time she started grad school, she was thirty-nine years old and accustomed to being treated like an oddity in the classroom. Distance, however, was different from outright disdain, and Kathryn often went out of her way to make her feel lik
e she didn’t belong. Her gaggle of friends—nervous women who always seemed relieved to be on Kathryn’s side rather than in her crosshairs—followed suit, sometimes with contrite, embarrassed looks for taking part in such pettiness. The email neither acknowledges Kathryn’s past behavior nor offers any apology for it. How are you? it simply begins. It’s been a long time. I was wondering if the two of us could arrange to talk on the phone at some point. Complicated topic, kind of hard to “discuss” by email.
She assumes that Kathryn heard about the article she’s writing. She just doesn’t know how. She’s not in touch with any of their classmates, in person or online, although the longer she thinks about it, the more obvious it is. Richard was most likely the source. She can easily imagine him boasting to a colleague about helping a former student land a major, potentially career-altering assignment. It wouldn’t take long for that kind of news to travel through the alumni grapevine. Kathryn probably wants to ask what it’s like to write for the Standard, perhaps even ingratiate herself to get a foot in the door. In school, she was always the first to arrive at networking events and alumni mixers, the first to raise her hand during Q and A sessions with famous authors. That was the kind of person she used to be, the kind of person she probably still is. Elinor deletes the email, wondering if Kathryn really expects her to reply and, if so, where she gets the nerve.
In the next room, someone turns on the shower and begins to cough, alternating between hacking and throat clearing for several minutes. She’s no stranger to ambient noise—her upstairs neighbor in New York started exercising at all hours of the day and night shortly after her divorce—but the sound transfer is noticeably worse here. She switches on the television, trying to drown out the commotion with a morning talk show.
“One day at a time, sweet Jesus,” the man sings, his voice an unexpectedly sweet alto once he’s done coughing. “That’s all I’m asking from you.”
She turns up the TV and continues scrolling through her in-box until she finds what she was looking for, the message in which Richard shared the link to his voluminous research file, giving her access to all his work to date. At his suggestion, Elinor read through the contents before leaving New York, which took the better part of a week. The file, simply titled “Bakken,” contains over a hundred articles about the western Dakotas, all written through a different lens—history, business, geology, sociology, public health, popular culture. It also includes census figures, environmental studies, historical photos, news clippings, crime stats, oil industry reports, and the schedule of interviews he’d set up before turning the piece over to her—interviews he strongly encouraged her to follow through with since she had yet to develop any sources of her own. For her benefit, she suspects, Richard also included brief bios of the interviewees—Avery’s town manager, the head of a nearby Native American tribe, a woman whose husband sold off their mineral rights, among others.
I contacted everyone and let them know you’d be coming instead, his email says.
The contents of the file confirm something she’s always wondered about him. He actually follows his own advice. In grad school, he was forever reminding Elinor and her classmates to cast the net of research wide, to learn as much as possible about a subject before deciding what the story was. Students revered and reviled him for pointing out that what they wanted to write about might not be the thing that deserved to be written about.
Whenever Elinor goes through the file, she can’t help but feel conflicted, swinging from one extreme to another. Sometimes she thinks Richard did her a genuine kindness, sharing months’ worth of research that he didn’t want to go to waste, research that she should be grateful for. But then she finds the instructions and reminders he left for her—brief missives scribbled in the margins of his scanned notes or tacked onto the ends of his lists—and she wonders if the file is his way of exerting control over her, as if she’s still his student, someone without a mind of her own. While she appreciates the fact that he recommended her for this assignment, she worries that Richard thinks she’s just going to do his bidding here.
I already drafted questions for all the interviews I scheduled, his email continues. You should feel free to use them.
By now, she knows him well enough to read between the lines, however casually phrased. When Richard writes “feel free to use them,” what he really means is “use them.”
5
Her first interview is at town hall at 4 p.m., leaving nearly six hours to kill. Room service is one of her guilty pleasures, but the man who picks up the phone at the front desk chuckles when she asks if they have it. After a long shower, she leaves the hotel in search of a place to eat and regrets her decision to drive almost immediately. In addition to losing her makeshift parking space, the main road—known as Highway 12 outside of town and Main Street within the town limits—is bumper-to-bumper in both directions, making it difficult to turn around or even turn left. She sits in traffic, idling behind a maroon pickup truck with Montana plates and too many bumper stickers: KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY GUNS, SPAY AND NEUTER LIBERALS, MCCAIN 2008, ROMNEY 2012. She glances at other plates as she passes and spots vehicles from Texas, Oklahoma, California, Nevada, Florida, Wyoming, and Louisiana. Fifteen minutes later, and she’s only seen two cars from North Dakota.
This is the problem, as she understands it—thousands of itinerant oil workers from recession-ravaged parts of the country, descending upon a town of four thousand that was unprepared to take them in. It doesn’t require a degree in city planning to figure out why housing is at a premium, why traffic is so bad, why everything is under construction all at once. On the side of a Wells Fargo branch, someone has spray-painted the word FUBAR in giant, drippy gold letters, and she pulls the long-lost definition out of a pocket of memory she didn’t know she had. Fucked up beyond all recognition, which seems about right.
The longer she sits in traffic, the more light-headed she feels. She can’t remember the last time she ate and worries it was the pizza she had with Damon two nights ago. Elinor scans the storefronts as she inches past, ready to stop at the first sight of food. Everywhere she looks, long lines have assembled. At the barber shop, the bank, the pharmacy. The lines snake out of doors and clutter up sidewalks. Some even wrap around corners. Unlike the button-down shirt and khaki-clad men staying at her hotel, the men queued up here look like actual roughnecks, either in search of work or between shifts. They’re unshaven, unkempt, and tired. White, Black, and brown, all mixed together. A handful of Asians too. She continues along Main, aware at some point that she’s never seen more diverse crowds of people anywhere in the state. Before she has a chance to reflect on how surreal this is, a car pulls out of a space in front of a small doughnut shop. She turns sharply into it with a crank of her wheel, even though doughnuts aren’t the kind of food she really wants right now. Judging from the relative emptiness of the store compared to its neighbors, no one else wants them either.
The teenage boy working behind the counter at the Donut Hut appears to be very, very stoned. His eyes are bloodshot and heavy lidded; and when the oscillating fan in the corner blows at his back, Elinor catches the unmistakable, skunky smell of weed. She orders the special—two plain doughnuts and a cup of coffee for $1.99—and asks for a receipt so she can get reimbursed, something people apparently never do because the boy’s mouth twists with confusion. He lowers his head, frowning at all the keys on the register until he spots the one he wants and presses it with more force than necessary.
Elinor pockets the receipt and takes her order to the small counter where two old men are sitting. The men look like retired farmers—retired, because she doesn’t think they’d be in town at this hour if they were still working—and farmers, judging from their worn plaid shirts and dingy, sweat-stained hats, one with a logo for Monsanto, the other for John Deere. She sits down a few stools away from them, her stomach growling with hunger and fluttering with nerves. It’s difficult for her to start conversations with strangers. It always makes h
er feel like she’s intruding, the same way she feels when strangers approach her. It’s also the complete opposite of how she used to make a living, which a photographer once described as “being quiet and looking pretty.”
“Good afternoon,” she says, instantly embarrassed by her stiff, formal greeting.
The two men look up from their coffee, startled almost. The one with the thick gray mustache actually turns around to see if she’s talking to someone else, even though they’re the only three customers in the shop.
“Well, good morning,” he says.
“Yes, you’re right. Morning. I guess I’m a little out of it from flying.”
All one of them needs to do is ask where she flew in from, but the old men simply look at each other and then back down at their half-eaten doughnuts. She takes a bite of her own. The texture is dry and dusty, at least a day old.
The bell on the door rings as a mother with two little girls walks in. The boy hops off his stool and waits to take their order, chewing absentmindedly on his black leather necklace. Elinor decides to try one more time.
“Could either of you recommend a place to get lunch around here? Maybe somewhere that won’t have a long wait?”
The men look at her blankly, as if she’s speaking in tongues. Elinor glances at her arms, wondering if her tattoos are visible through her thin black cardigan. People are sometimes put off by them, elderly people in particular. But the wrinkled sweater she found balled up in the bottom of her bag is finely knit and opaque. The tattoos aren’t to blame for the reception she’s getting.