O Beautiful

by Jung Yun

  “You used to be exotic but approachable,” her agent said.

  “That was your thing,” her manager agreed. “Now we don’t know how to market you.”

  The tattoo effectively ended what she couldn’t. The second biggest decision of her life, second only to leaving Marlow, and she didn’t even really make it.

  Randy cocks his head, giving Elinor a careful once-over. “If you don’t mind me saying, miss, I thought you looked a little green back at the construction site. I just figured you were afraid of heights.”

  “I am. That probably didn’t help.”

  “My fault then,” he replies, so kindly that it almost hurts. “I should have asked if you wanted to go up to the top floor. I’m sorry about that.”

  “No. You’re not the one who needs to apol—”

  “Here.” Shawnalee deposits a glass of ginger ale on the table. “If you two are having lunch, I’m going upstairs to the business office. I’ll be back in half an hour to pick you up, and then we really have to go.”

  He doesn’t appear to be listening. He’s waving at two men sitting on the other side of the dining room. As Shawnalee leaves, Randy gets up from the booth.

  “Excuse me for a minute, will you?” It sounds like he’s asking a question, but he’s gone before she has a chance to reply.

  Elinor watches how the two of them make their way through the busy restaurant. While Randy says hello to everyone he passes, Shawnalee hugs her shoulder bag to her chest, trying not to get jostled as she moves past the diners gathered around the crowded buffet. Elinor takes a sip of ginger ale, which immediately goes down the wrong pipe. She coughs into her fist, mortified by the smell of alcohol still on her breath. It occurs to her that if Shawnalee knew she was hungover, then Randy probably did too. He must have. That’s why he ordered her a coffee as soon as they shook hands. It may even be why he took her to the roof of the new building, to get some fresh air. Unlike his assistant, he just decided to be polite and play along, a thought that makes Elinor feel even worse than she already does. She leans back in the booth and takes another sip, slower this time.

  A waitress comes by with a large stack of buffet plates. She’s an older Native woman, dressed in a uniform the same color as the upholstery. Pinned to her lapel is a name tag that reads MARGO.

  “How many of you are eating?” she asks.

  “Not me, thanks. I think … I think only he is.” She feels guilty for occupying such a large table by herself, so she points at Randy, hoping this will explain whose idea it was to sit here. She watches as the woman’s eyes track across the room and her mouth sinks into a sneer.

  “Well, there goes my tip,” she mutters.

  “What?”

  The waitress slides a single plate onto the table. “Old Randy never tips. Most of the time, I don’t even think he pays.” She pauses and looks Elinor up and down. “You mind me asking who you are?”

  Elinor doesn’t understand in what context she’s asking, so she simply says her name.

  “No, I meant who are you to him. How do you know Randy?”

  She wonders if the waitress is a former girlfriend or wife. There’s a blade edge of something in her voice, but she’s not sure what. “I’m interviewing him for an article I’m writing about the oil patch.”

  Margo chuckles, revealing a fat pink wad of gum parked in her cheek. “Another reporter. Christ. That man is nothing but out for himself, isn’t he?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Margo looks over her shoulder again. Randy now appears to be holding court. A small crowd has gathered around him, everyone smiling, laughing, and slapping each other’s backs as if they’re all in on the joke.

  “You must be like the third or fourth reporter he’s trotted through here in the past month or so.”

  “I guess because he’s an important local fig—”

  “Something I always wonder about you people?” Margo asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “You all know he’s pretty much the biggest crook there is, right?” She pauses, waiting for a reaction, but she seems to understand that Elinor has no idea what she’s talking about. “He’s an elected official, but he owns a business that services oil fields on reservation land. That shouldn’t be allowed. He’s getting all these fat contracts from the same companies he’s supposed to be keeping an eye on. He’s basically dealing himself the best cards.”

  Elinor thinks about the three iPhones laid out on Randy’s desk back at the office. One for personal, one for tribal business, and maybe one for this other business, which she’s only hearing about now. Amateur, she imagines Richard muttering under his breath, the same way he used to whenever he thought her research wasn’t up to par. You don’t even know all the things you don’t know.

  “Did you and Randy have some sort of prior relationship?” she asks. “Is that why you’re telling me this?”

  “You mean like was I his old lady or something?” Margo can barely get the question out before she starts laughing. “Shit. You think I don’t have enough problems without inviting someone like that into my bed? I’m third-generation North Fork. My family’s been screwed over by people with money for at least a hundred years. We’re used to it by now. The only thing that’s different about Randy is that he’s the first Indian to do it.”

  A man in a uniform walks past the booth. He gives the two of them a sideways glance, not quite smiling as he does it. Judging from the way Margo straightens up and lowers her voice, Elinor assumes he’s her manager.

  “Ask around if you don’t believe me,” she says when he’s out of earshot. “But once you run out of people who need old Randy to make money—and there’s a lot of them, I’m not gonna lie—but get past all those minor-league crooks and you’ll see. He wants you to think everybody loves him, but if you still believe that by the time you leave here, then you weren’t really asking the right questions.”

  Shawnalee returns to the table, breathing as if she ran all the way to the restaurant from wherever she came. It hasn’t even been ten minutes yet.

  “Margo,” she says with a nod.

  “Shawnalee.” Margo nods back.

  It’s an odd greeting, both friendly and tense at the same time. It’s obvious they know each other but prefer to keep their distance, although it doesn’t seem like there’s any real enmity between them. The two women simply exchange a word and a look, as if they both know what the score is.

  “Where is he?”

  Elinor turns her head for a split second and motions with her chin. By the time she turns back, Margo has already moved on to the next table.

  Shawnalee scans the dining room for Randy. When the two of them make eye contact, she raises her cell phone in the air and shakes it as if she wants him to look at his. As he returns to their table, he keeps his head bent low over his screen, his thumb scrolling down, down, down. Elinor moves toward the center of the booth, expecting the two of them to slide in on either side of her, but they remain standing, staring at their phones, which she can hear now. They’re both vibrating with activity, as if they’re getting the same messages.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m sorry. We should … we need to get going. Something’s come up,” Randy says, still staring at his screen, appearing troubled for the first time since they met. “But feel free to stay as long as you like and enjoy your meal.”

  Shawnalee is already leaving, backing out of the restaurant one impatient step at a time. When Randy catches up to her, she turns and they both walk away as if they’re racing toward something. Elinor wonders if anyone else just saw what she did, but the other diners seem happily unaware. This is the answer to Randy’s question, the one she avoided earlier. Writing had always been her way of making sense of the world and all the things she didn’t understand.

  Elinor rummages through her wallet and puts a ten-dollar bill on the table. It’s probably three or four times more than the cost of her soda, but it feels like the tip Margo deserves.<
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  29

  Randy’s truck is heading west on Highway 12. Elinor struggles to follow; the thin red needle of her speedometer bounces dangerously close to ninety-five. She’s no longer keeping a safe distance to avoid being spotted, as she was when they first left Kittery. At this point, she’s just trying not to fall behind. If Randy or Shawnalee are aware that she’s been trailing them for nearly ten minutes, her presence is probably the least of their concerns. Several miles away, there’s a twisting black pillar of smoke rising in the air, a sign that something is wrong. Something is burning.

  Along the shoulder of the road, parked cars begin to appear. At first, there’s only a scattering of them, but the farther she drives, the more congested it gets. Dozens of people are standing outside their vehicles, taking videos with their phones or shielding their eyes from the sun as they stare off into the distance. Slowly, she starts to let up on the gas. The futility of what she’s doing has been wearing on her for a while. Elinor has no idea how far Randy is going or what she intends do if she catches up, although he’s actually not the person she wants to talk to again. It’s Shawnalee. For miles, she’s been thinking through how best to apologize for her lateness, her dishonesty, her general ignorance of what Mahua women have to endure. But her list of offenses is long and the gap between their vehicles too wide, so she eventually decides to pull over.

  The smell of burning rubber hits her as soon as she gets out of the car. The fumes are so acrid, even from a distance, it’s difficult to breathe. Her entire body resists it. Her eyes start to tear up and her throat constricts, pinhole small to defend against the air. She covers her nose and mouth with both hands, but only manages a few steps before she stumbles and has to lean against the bug-splattered grille for support.

  “Jesus. What is that?” she asks a man walking past. She’s so light-headed, her question barely makes sense. She could be referring to the smoke or the smell or both.

  “Rig blew up,” the man says, not breaking his stride as he continues along the shoulder, aiming his phone at the fire.

  Elinor realizes that what she’s smelling isn’t burning rubber but burning crude oil, and the wind is blowing the fumes right at her. She pushes herself away from the hood of the car, dusting off the crusty bug carcasses now stuck to her hands. She covers her nose and mouth again as she walks up the road toward a small crowd. Standing in the shade of a bread delivery truck, there’s an elderly couple chatting with the driver. She’s about to ask if they know how serious the fire is when she overhears the husband.

  “I bet they just lost a couple million bucks right there,” he says, scratching his sunburned neck.

  His wife shakes her head. Around her shoulders, she’s clutching a ratty old sweater, even though the midday heat is stifling. “Oh, you don’t know.”

  “But you weren’t even looking. I saw it blow up.”

  “I saw it too,” the bread truck driver interjects. “It was one big fireball.” He raises his hands to his chest, opening and closing them like a magician conjuring something out of thin air. “Kaboom!”

  The wife ignores him. “We should get going now,” she says to her husband. “We got a car full of groceries that I need to put away before everything spoils.”

  “But don’t you want to see what happens?”

  “You know what’s going to happen,” she snaps. “They’ll put out the fire and that’ll be that. Same as always. We don’t need to watch them do it. Come on now, you want all that meat we just bought to go to waste?”

  The couple head back to their car as three little boys streak past, the last of them shouting, “I’m gonna get you!” None of them appears to be having trouble breathing. In fact, they’re carrying on as if they’re at a playground, seemingly unsupervised by an adult. Elinor lowers her hand from her face and takes a shallow breath. It’s still not easy, but it’s not as hard as it was just minutes before, and the thought of this is alarming—how quickly the body can adapt to something so toxic.

  Several emergency vehicles drive by with their lights on and sirens wailing. During the quiet pauses in between, Elinor overhears fragments of nearby conversations, surprised by their casual, occasionally indifferent tone.

  “Well, that’s what they get for being greedy.”

  “You know those companies barely train all those boys they keep hiring. It’s no wonder—”

  “Whose land is that? Good luck trying to squeeze a dollar of insurance money out of whoever owns that well.”

  “I wonder if it’ll blow again? I want to get a video this time.”

  To her, the fire looks serious. But serious is apparently relative here, which shouldn’t surprise her as much as it does. All the OSHA stats and public safety articles she read described these oil fields as some of the world’s most dangerous places to work. Maybe that’s why everyone gathered along the road seems unfazed by what they’re seeing, why they talk about the fire like it’s something that’s happening to a company rather than to a community, to people. How different this is from her childhood when an extended cast of characters banded around her father, trying to help him transition to single parenthood after Nami left. Although their offers of casseroles and school pickups often came with the worst kind of pity—thinly veiled and highly critical of her mother—Elinor was still aware of a deep-seated desire to lend a hand to Ed, whose abandonment returned him to a state of being one of the community’s own. She doesn’t recognize anything resembling that neighborly sense of care or concern now, and she wonders how a change like this is measured. What kind of stat or metric registers this kind of loss?

  A large metal chunk of the rig crashes to the ground and a murmur travels through the crowd, rolling toward her like a wave. The smoke continues to rise even higher and darker than it did before while the wind plays a curious trick of the eye. The fire and several nearby flares look like they’re all tilting at the same angle. Elinor pats herself down, grabbing her phone out of her back pocket. She snaps a few pictures, rising on tiptoes to avoid the heads of the people in front of her, but every image she takes is blurry, either because the air is so hazy or she’s high on fumes. Elinor decides to double back to her car. Her head is throbbing violently now, adding to the misery of an already miserable hangover. She doubts she can have a productive conversation in this state and feels too sick to even try.

  The combination of rubberneckers, emergency vehicles, and road construction brings traffic to a near halt. Eventually, the police arrive to let more ambulances and fire trucks through. After ten minutes of inching along, making hardly any progress at all, Elinor’s phone vibrates. She glances at the 212 area code from New York and almost chokes out a laugh. Of course this would be the moment when Richard finally contacts her, when she’s hungover, trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and there’s an oil well burning down in the distance. She considers not picking up and just letting the call go to voice mail, but she no longer wants the anticipation of it hanging over her head.

  “Hello,” she says, not giving herself a chance to second-guess.

  Richard doesn’t respond. Elinor pulls the phone away from her ear and checks the screen, wondering if he hung up, but the call is still connected.

  “Hello?” she repeats.

  “Yes, hi. Hi. I’m sorry, I didn’t expect anyone to answer.” It’s a woman’s voice. Thin and distant, and there’s a baby crying in the background. Elinor doesn’t know anyone who has a baby. “Could you give me a second.…” There’s a loud clunk, like the phone is being moved from one ear to another, making the baby’s cries sound slightly more distant than they did before. “I swear she wasn’t fussing a second ago. She just started when you picked up.”

  “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

  “It’s Kathryn. Kathryn Tasso, from school?”

  The end of her sentence lifts into a question, as if it would ever be possible to forget her. Elinor is confused for a moment. She has a very clear memory of blocking Kathryn’s number earlier this week. She m
ust have switched to another line, dogged as she is. Elinor is tempted to hang up and block this one too. She’d braced herself to talk to Richard. Now her chest finally expands, filling with air.

  “Yes, I remember you,” Elinor says, so sharply that the now-whimpering baby is the only sound she hears for a while.

  “Well … I’m so glad to finally connect. I’ve tried calling and emailing a couple of times, but I wasn’t sure I had the right contact info. How are you? How have you been?”

  The sound of Kathryn’s voice—so pleasant now, so free of the condescension that always marked it before—infuriates Elinor. It should be harder than this for people to wipe the slate clean.

  “I haven’t returned your messages because I’ve been busy. Also, I have to say…” She considers her mother, how she never got to tell people off, not even when they deserved it. Such delicate little birds. Such thin, fragile necks. What could it possibly matter now? “I’m not really sure why you think you can just call me up for a favor like this.” She remembers the way Kathryn used to whisper under her breath whenever she said anything in class, how she’d cut her off midsentence when she was struggling to make a point. Perhaps she wasn’t always talking about her or talking down to her, but it felt like she was. To remind Kathryn of her transgressions would be to admit how much she’s still affected by them, which Elinor is unwilling to do. But thinking about them again raises the specter of all her old insecurities. It was hard to go back to school at her age, to be surrounded by younger and better-educated classmates, to transition out of a career that always made people assume she was dumb. It was hard, and then Kathryn made it even harder.