by Jung Yun
Being underestimated wasn’t a new experience for her. Teachers and professors were often surprised to discover that she wrote well. They made no effort to hide it either, as if they’d already sized her up and decided what she could and couldn’t do. The first time Mr. Bender finished reading one of her essays in high school, he set the pages down, looking utterly perplexed. Then he called her sentences “beautiful,” a compliment that eventually came to mean more to her than being regarded as beautiful. One required effort and intellect. The other was just an accident of genetics. While she was grateful that her parents’ genes had combined in their particular way, allowing her to make a living for all those years, by the time she quit modeling, she was desperate to be good at doing something, rather than simply being something.
Elinor tosses her pillow on the floor. Even if she wanted to go back to sleep, she couldn’t. If you think about it continues to ring in her ears. It was such a slyly worded insult, suggesting that the writer hadn’t already thought about what they were doing, that they were somehow incapable of thought. Although Kathryn used this preamble on everyone, Elinor was especially sensitive to it. Her late-in-life college degree, combined with her unfamiliarity with all the books and theories and thinkers that her classmates discussed so freely, formed a delicate Achilles’ heel, one that she masked with introversion and weed. More than once, Richard reported overhearing some of her classmates describe her as “cold” or “standoffish,” which seemed to amuse him to no end.
Before getting out of bed, she deletes the voice mail and blocks Kathryn’s number with a firm press of the button. It feels satisfying at first, to have an assignment that her former classmate is so eager to talk about. But as the morning goes on, she grows more and more agitated at the thought of Kathryn’s relentless careerism, her pushy white sense of privilege. Elinor would be too embarrassed to reach out to someone who clearly didn’t want to hear from her, who hadn’t even attempted to return her previous messages. But Kathryn, being Kathryn, always felt free to knock on every door, certain that the person standing on the other side would be willing to let her in.
By the time Elinor arrives at the Bluebird Diner for her first meeting of the day, she’s still irritated about the call and sleep deprived because of her next-door neighbors, who thunked around at all hours of the night. Her mood worsens when she sees her nine o’clock standing in the diner’s parking lot with a toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth like a cigarette. He makes no effort to hide the fact that he’s scanning her from head to toe, his expression both appreciative and delighted.
“You must be the student that Mr. Hall sent in his place.” He shakes her hand, holding it in both of his. “He told me you were pretty, but, my God, aren’t you stunning?”
Elinor introduces herself and smiles through a locked jaw, wondering what else he and Richard talked about and why a stranger would repeat something like this. She reminds herself that Harry is in his sixties, possibly even his early seventies. He belongs to a generation of men who still think it’s charming to comment on a woman’s appearance. She’s never sure what to do about people like him, people who seem reasonably well-meaning but whose understanding of the rules is so different from her own.
“I’m his former student,” she says, emphasizing the word former. “Thanks for meeting me, Mr. Bergum.”
“Oh, please. Call me Harry.”
According to her file, Harald Olaf Bergum III has a long list of nicknames. In addition to Harry, he’s known as the king of Avery, the unofficial mayor, the luckiest son of a bitch alive, and the richest man in town. In a state that’s minting millionaires faster than any other in the country, this isn’t particularly extraordinary, except that Bergum was the first local to make truly big money in oil—$28 million and counting last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Elinor assumed he’d show up looking the part, with nicely tailored clothes and a foreign sports car, maybe even a pert young assistant in tow. But her image of showy new wealth was all wrong. Harry is dressed in a brown plaid button-up shirt, faded jeans, and old work boots with mismatched laces. He looks like a down-on-his-luck farmer leaning up against his rusty Ford F-350, not a multimillionaire, and certainly not the man responsible for what “modern-day Avery” is, another name that people apparently call him, though not in a complimentary way.
The Bluebird Diner is almost full, but the hostess says she’s been keeping Harry’s usual table open for him. As soon as he and Elinor sit down, food they didn’t order begins to arrive. Mugs of coffee and a platter of pancakes, a side order of bacon, glasses of fruit juice—orange and apple, a small bowl of butter pats wrapped in shiny gold foil. After the tabletop has all but disappeared underneath the food and Elinor’s recording equipment, the waitress slides an egg white omelet, a stack of dry toast, and a pale side of fruit salad in front of Harry. From her apron pocket, she hands him a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of calling ahead and ordering for us.” He dots his omelet with drops of Tabasco, making a shape that looks like the letter H. “The menu’s like an encyclopedia here. It takes forever to go through it, so it’s just easier this way. You like pancakes, don’t you?”
There’s nothing she can possibly say in response to this now except yes. She tips the syrup container gently over her stack and a thin amber liquid gushes out, pooling around the edges of the plate. She tries not to look at Harry’s omelet, which she would have preferred.
“The Bluebird’s famous for its pancakes. I used to get them all the time, but I had a little—what do you call it?—a little cardiac incident a few months ago, so my doctor’s got me on this low-fat, low-sugar, low-something else diet that I can’t stand.” He pauses. “Low salt. That’s it. That’s the third one.”
Elinor takes a bite of her pancake. All she tastes is syrup, the artificial kind that’s nothing but sugar and food dye. She checks the red light on her recorder to make sure it’s turned on. “So, I noticed there’s already quite a few articles written about you.” This is something she should have asked Richard when he called—why did he want to talk to someone who’d been profiled in so many other outlets? What more did he hope to get out of him? The questions Richard drafted for the interview weren’t particularly probing. Even if they were, she still wouldn’t use them.
“Why do you think people are so interested in your story?”
Harry looks over his shoulder, scanning the diner to see who’s sitting behind them. Then he turns back to her with a wink. “I’ve been in the oil business in the Bakken since 1971. I made my money in mineral rights, back when mineral rights were a joke. You know what those are, right?”
“Technically, but it might help to hear you explain them.”
“Well”—he beams, clearly enjoying the opportunity to hold forth—“in North Dakota, people can sever the surface rights from the mineral rights on their property, meaning that someone can own the land and the right to use it for farming or grazing or whatever they like, while someone else can own the right to everything below the surface. So back in the seventies, my grandpa died and left me some money, and I got it into my head that I should start buying up people’s mineral rights. I was a geology major at Avery State—kind of a disappointment to my parents since they thought I’d study agriculture—but I read a book in one of my classes that said shale deposits were rich in crude oil. Everybody knew Avery was built on a giant slab of shale. The problem was, nobody could figure out how to blast through it to get the oil.” He generously butters a piece of toast and then stops, no doubt remembering the rules of his diet. He flips the toast over to the plain side, as if what he can’t see won’t hurt him. “I said to myself, nobody’s figured this out yet, ‘yet’ being the key word there, so I started going to the courthouse after school and figuring out which families still had their mineral rights. Then I knocked on their doors and asked if they wanted to lease them to me. I didn’t have to offer much because mineral rights were basica
lly worthless back in the seventies. It’s not like it is now, when the people who held out can demand big signing bonuses and higher royalty rates and usually get them.” He takes a bite of his toast and chews it thoughtfully, unaware of the crumbs suspended in his snow-white mustache and beard.
“Nobody really understood what I was doing in the beginning. They kept saying, ‘You mean I can keep my land and grow whatever I want without having to answer to you or anybody else?’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly right.’ They just couldn’t get it through their heads that all I wanted was everything under the surface, including the right to poke around. This was long before anyone knew what fracking or horizontal drilling were, so most people just kind of laughed and took my money, figuring there’d never be a way to tap what was stuck in the shale. Now, of course, if Exxon or Kodiak or whoever wants to drill on land that my company holds the rights to, I’m the one they have to pay.”
Elinor politely takes notes even though she’s familiar with most of this story. She read it in one or more of the profiles about Harry that she found in the file. This is what she was afraid of, that he’d simply rehash the things he said before, assuming she either wouldn’t notice or care. “Let me rephrase the question,” she says gently. “You’ve already talked with a couple of writers about what you did leading up to the boom. Now I’m curious to know why you think people find your story so interesting, because they really do, you know.”
Harry shoots his lower lip out, nodding as he considers the question. She can tell how much he enjoys thinking about himself in this way. Behind him, a man slides into a seat at the counter and swivels toward their table, trying to listen in. Elinor doesn’t particularly care for Harry’s oversized ego or his obvious regard for the sound of his own voice. She could tell him that they have a visitor so he doesn’t embarrass himself, but she decides against it, curious to see what he says.
“I suppose because it’s the American Dream, right? People want to believe they can work hard and get rich and make a nice life for themselves. That’s the leap of faith that brought my ancestors to this state in the 1800s. It’s the same leap that’s still bringing people here from all over the world.” He continues to nod, as if he’s convincing himself the more he talks. “I’ve got this Mexican kid working for me. His parents are illegals, but he was born in California. A real hard worker, probably the hardest worker I’ve ever met, but he just wasn’t getting ahead picking fruit, you know? So this crazy kid, he hears about the boom and decides to hop a bus to Avery in the dead of winter.” He pauses, chuckling at the thought. “Can you believe that? Nineteen years old, didn’t know a soul in North Dakota, didn’t even own a proper coat when he got here. Anyway, I thought he had an honest face when I first met him, so I gave him a crappy job and he did it well, so I gave him a less crappy job that paid more money. I’ve promoted him at least three or four times, I think, and believe it or not, this Mexican kid who’s barely old enough to buy beer helped his parents put a down payment on a house somewhere in California. He’s also paying for his little sister to go to community college. So … to answer your question, I guess Americans just enjoy a good story about people who chip away at a dream and then have something to show for it. Doesn’t really matter how big the size of the fortune is.”
She might like Harry’s story more if he’d stopped calling his employee “the Mexican kid” and used his actual name, just once. The man at the counter who’s been eavesdropping clearly doesn’t like the story either. He rolls his eyes in such an exaggerated circle, Elinor can’t help but stare. Harry, who must notice that he’s lost his audience, turns around in his seat and stares with her.
“You got something you want to say to me, Ned?”
The man scowls. “Nice that your little friend is making so much money. You could have hired one of my boys to work for you instead, but no, you didn’t think they were good enough, did you?”
“Everybody knows your boys have DUIs, Ned. They can’t drive. What good are guys on a drill site who can’t drive?” Harry seems to catch himself sounding impatient and exasperated. He turns back to Elinor, smiling weakly. “As you can probably imagine, a boom this big is bound to kick up a fair amount of hard feelings because some people are getting rich”—he says the words pointedly—“and some people aren’t. But that’s not my fault. I made the wells possible. I helped bring good jobs here. The rest is up to the individual.”
The man at the counter gets up from his seat. “High and mighty Harry can do no wrong,” he says, loud enough to turn heads. “Never mind that he brought the wells and the jobs, but he also brought the oil trash and the crime and everything else that’s ruining this town.”
14
For several long minutes after Ned leaves the diner, Harry eats in distracted silence, stabbing chunks of melon with his fork. Elinor recognizes the lit match of embarrassment when she sees it. She knows how easily it can turn into something else. Despite the sickly-sweet taste of her pancakes, she finishes off the rest of the stack, sensing that it should be Harry, not her, who speaks first.
“Now do you see what I have to put up with?” he finally asks.
She pushes away her empty plate, still slick with excess syrup. “Does that happen a lot? People getting upset with you personally?”
“You better believe it. Every time I walk outside my door these days, someone wants to pin this whole goddamn mess on me.”
The “mess” that Harry’s referring to is the town. Since the boom started, every quality of life indicator has taken a hit—crime, pollution, traffic, overcrowding, noise. But Harry, being Harry, has a theory about all of this. People like Ned, they’re not pissed off because Avery is supposedly changing for the worse. They’re pissed off because they feel left out of the good parts of the change. If they were making money, buying back their farms, riding around in shiny new trucks like everyone else, they might not be so quick to find fault with the boom or the people who are coming here in droves to be a part of it. Harry offers his best quote of the morning when he says it’s hard to be happy for others with nothing in your hands.
Once the conversation picks back up again, Elinor asks if Ned had any mineral rights to sell. Harry looks around the diner again and lowers his voice to a whisper. Off-the-record, he explains that Ned’s family never had much, least of all property. Instead, what passed down from one generation to the next was a history of drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, and incarceration. A healthy dose of goddamn ignorance too, he adds.
Despite the obvious ill will between them, Harry is surprisingly capable of empathizing with Ned. He imagines out loud what it must be like for him to see strangers prospering in a way that his family probably never will. He suspects it doesn’t help that many of these strangers are Black and brown, a sentiment he knows is shared by a handful of longtime residents who apparently complain about a certain “element” taking over the area. When Elinor mentions the random attacks on men of color after Leanne Lowell went missing, Harry shakes his head, offering nothing more than a mumbled “goddamn bigots” directed at his lap. For several minutes, he goes out of his way to convince her that most people in Avery aren’t like this; he’s certainly not like this. He tells her that his company hires “the rainbow” and refers to himself as “color-blind.” While he didn’t vote for Barack Obama—he’s never voted for a Democrat in his entire life—he’s not one of those people who wanted to move to Canada right after he was elected either. It makes her uneasy, the way Harry insists that he’s open-minded in the same breath that he invokes a stereotype about how hard-working Asians are.
“You and your family probably had to put up with folks like Ned, right?” Harry asks. “Every community has a couple of bad apples.”
She shrugs as she flips to a clean page of her notebook. He’s not the person she wants to discuss this with.
“The thing that Ned just doesn’t get is that no one’s entitled to anything in this country. Success isn’t a handout; it has to be earne
d. And you know who understands this best, at least in my opinion? Immigrants like you,” he says matter-of-factly. When she explains that she was born in North Dakota, not even two hours away, he adds, “The kids of immigrants too. I bet you had to work really hard to get where you are today. And look at you now, writing for a famous magazine in New York.”
Elinor isn’t the success that Harry thinks she is. She had a decent run as a working model. But now she’s a barely working writer. Before Richard called, she’d been using a website to find freelance assignments, usually pieces of a thousand words or less on random topics—food, wellness, community events. None of them ever paid more than a few hundred dollars, which was starting to become a problem. Ever since she went back to school, she’d been living off the money she earned from modeling, trying to stretch out her savings for as long as possible. But now she has a year, maybe eighteen months at the most, before there’s nothing left. The ever-diminishing balance is like a timer ticking down in the background of her days. Although she tries not to think about it, the awareness that she has to make something out of the rest of her life is never too far from the surface. Elinor is forty-two years old and has never held an office job before. Her typing skills are hunt and peck, at best. She’s not entirely sure what spreadsheets are for, much less how to use them. In her weakest moments, she imagines her worst-case scenario, which is ending up like her friend, Damon. A faded beauty temping in gray, cubicled offices around the city, fucking up office work that he dislikes too much to learn. The idea has started to keep her up at night.
Her article for the Standard has to be great. It has to be better than the best thing she’s ever written. But she can’t shake the feeling that Richard has pitched her down the wrong path, and a story about the boom creating a schism between insiders and outsiders is just too simplistic for the mess that Avery really is. Something much bigger is happening here. Something potentially more frightening. It’s unusual for her to second-guess Richard’s professional judgment, which she’s always admired. Although she’s not proud of this fact, it’s still a fact that she stayed in their relationship much longer than she should have because it afforded her certain opportunities to learn. Now she finds herself wanting to scrap his concept in favor of one she can barely explain. She wonders if Lydia would be amenable to letting her pursue a different line of thinking, or at least follow the tenuous threads she’s been collecting to see where they lead. After all, Richard’s not here. He’s not the one sitting with this man who keeps talking and talking at her as if they’re simpatico when she knows that they’re not.