by Jung Yun
“Fargo, actually. But I grew up listening to this kind of music.”
The fact that they’re both from North Dakota gives them a few minutes of easy small talk. Elinor asks if the old movie theater in downtown Fargo is still in business. Annie asks if she ever ate at the Chuckwagon Buffet in Marlow before it closed down. She waits for the inevitable question about how her family ended up in the state, and is pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t hear it.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer before,” Annie says, glancing at the stack of notebooks on the table.
“I never met a truck driver before this trip to Avery.”
“Get out.” Annie seems shocked. “We’re everywhere, though.”
Elinor doesn’t know what to tell her. She can’t imagine many circumstances, except possibly a variation of the current one, in which she would ever cross paths with a truck driver. Despite her guardedness and discomfort whenever she meets someone new, this is one of the things she appreciates about writing, how it forces her out of her bubble.
The waitress returns and deposits two glasses of ice water on the table. Then she takes out her pad and holds her pen over a blank page, as if to say they can’t occupy a corner booth for just a cup of coffee and some water. Elinor orders the most expensive item on the menu, a large breakfast platter called the All-American. She encourages Annie to order something too—the Standard’s treat—but she declines, probably because a meal is more than she wants to commit to. The waitress sniffs as she collects their menus and moves on to the next table. It’s hard not to interpret the sound as annoyance.
Annie leans forward after she leaves and lowers her voice to a whisper. “That’s Stacey. She’s always in a bad mood.”
“Why’s that?”
She shrugs. “Because of people like us, I guess.”
“Us?”
“You know, the folks camped out in the lot.”
What lengths Elinor would have gone to as a child, what lengths she actually did go to, to feel like she belonged to an “us.” Now the group she’s been swept into, albeit temporarily, is no more wanted in this community than she was, an irony that isn’t lost on her.
“So how long have you been living at Emerald’s?” Elinor asks.
“About four months. Pretty much right when this place opened to the public.”
Physically, Elinor has never felt her age. But now every muscle in her body is sore and tight and miserable, a condition she attributes directly to sleeping in her car. It’s hard to imagine doing this for more than a few nights.
“Yup. You heard that right,” Annie confirms, rubbing the corners of both eyes with her knuckles. “Months.”
She explains that her employer has a contract with a man camp that doesn’t allow women. Instead of finding her another housing situation, Kincannon gives her a monthly stipend. It’s not quite enough to rent a place of her own, but at fifty-five, she thinks she’s too old to live with roommates. Sleeping in her truck allows her to pocket the extra money, so she claims not to mind it anymore. The faster she saves, the faster she can head back to Fargo, where her goal is to open a truck driving school for women. Annie is eager to talk about why a school like this is necessary, and for several long minutes, she goes on to describe what would make hers unique. The things Elinor jots down in her notebook—small classes where female students would feel free to talk and ask questions, a self-defense course to prepare them for life on the road, practicing with licensed female drivers during the permit period instead of men who might bully or harass them—seem like reactions to the difficulties that Annie experienced, rather than changes that will address why she experienced what she did. Even if it were Elinor’s place to comment on this, she wouldn’t. When Annie talks about her school, she seems happy in a way that few people she’s met here are.
“One All-American, over easy, wheat toast,” the waitress interrupts, depositing Elinor’s breakfast on the table.
When she walks off, Elinor asks Annie if the two of them had some sort of falling out. The service has been so gruff from the start, she’s certain the answer will be yes, but Annie just shakes her head.
“Me and her? We barely even know each other. She’s like that with everybody who’s parked in the lot. She treats us all like we’re homeless or something.”
Annie sounds more upset about being snubbed by their waitress than being hazed by the men she went to driving school with. The sudden spike of resentment is noticeable, and strange. The two women are probably about the same age, both working jobs that can’t be easy on their bodies, both dealing with men in the oil patch every day. In an alternate version of reality, Elinor could imagine Annie and Stacey being friends, bound by what they have in common, rather than looking for ways to set themselves apart. She wonders how many of her own passing encounters have turned out like this, opportunities for connection wasted by some combination of judgment and defensiveness, insecurity and shame.
“I don’t know where she gets off either, thinking she’s so much better than us,” Annie grumbles. “It’s not like we’re really homeless. I probably make at least five times what she does.”
Elinor isn’t sure what Annie’s salary has to do with anything, except that it seems to make her feel superior.
“Some of the nicest, most decent people I’ve ever met are living out in that lot. He’s a good example right there.” She motions toward the window at Travis, who’s smoking in front of the diner with a woman who isn’t Lisa. “That kid helped me change a flat in the rain one night. He got totally soaked too, and we barely even knew each other back then. He just stopped because he saw all these people speeding by, not giving me an inch.”
She’s not sure how to reconcile this description of Travis with the version she saw last night. She can still see him leaning forward in his seat, glowering at the mention of his girlfriend stripping for other men, and then screaming at her to go choke on her dinner. Elinor must be frowning when she thinks about this because suddenly Annie is leaning forward, looking almost offended.
“What? You don’t like Travis?”
“No, no,” she says quickly. “I don’t know him well enough to like or dislike him … I saw him lose his temper yesterday, that’s all.”
“Well, the kid’s got a temper for sure. But show me a guy who doesn’t, right?”
38
Travis’s chosen form of apology appears to be providing Elinor with not just one woman to talk to, but a steady stream of them. After she finishes her conversation with Annie, he brings in a wire line operator named Lorraine, followed by a dispatcher who goes by Honey, and then another dispatcher who declines to give her name after she learns how large the Standard’s readership is.
“Batshit ex-husband,” she explains apologetically.
Somehow, Travis always seems to know when the interviews are wrapping up. Just as she’s saying her thank-yous and goodbyes, he reappears in the diner, trailed by another tentative-looking woman he rounded up from the lot. He slips in and out without saying more than a quiet word or two, usually an exchange of first names. And he doesn’t ask if there are certain types of female oil workers that Elinor needs to talk to, or if she even wants to talk to more. He just rightly assumes that she does and continues leading them in. Elinor is both grateful and stunned. She hoped he might introduce her to the couple that Lisa mentioned, which he does at one point, but she never imagined he’d go this far out of his way to help.
The hours pass quickly in conversation. From her windowed corner booth, Elinor notices the volume of traffic pick up on the interstate and the sun rising to ever higher points in the sky. She goes from offering to buy the women breakfast to encouraging them to order lunch. No one ever takes advantage of her invitation to have a full meal, preferring instead to politely pick at muffins and coffee or french fries and Coke. Elinor continues ordering more food than she actually wants to eat—an extra side of bacon for her All-American Breakfast, a triple decker turkey club with fries,
a garden salad, a slice of lemon meringue pie, a root beer float—sensitive to the fact that she’s been monopolizing the same table for hours, but she has nowhere else to go.
Some of the women, she likes—usually the sharp-tongued and quick-witted ones who are easy conversationalists, eager to have a new person to chat with. Others are harder to warm to, not that warming is the point. Elinor can tell that a number of them are sitting down with her simply as a favor to Travis or Lisa, not out of a genuine desire to discuss their experiences or be part of an article. These are the ones she has to prod for substance, trying to get past their terse or vague answers. Donna describes her work as a tank welder as “hard,” then “stressful,” and finally “dangerous.” The closest she comes to opening up is when she talks about her four-year-old son, who’s staying with her parents in Wisconsin. She’s quick to add that she Skypes with him every Sunday night, as if she feels accused of something that Elinor neither thought nor said.
The women she meets are oil field veterans and relative newcomers to the industry; old and young; married, single, or “it’s complicated.” The single ones, she notices, choose not to date. Many of them laugh at the thought of even trying to, citing some combination of time or energy.
“I’m too tired.” Cherri chuckles. “Just too fucking tired.”
Whenever she asks about the men they work with, the mood usually shifts. Elinor notices a fair amount of fidgeting and broken eye contact, a sudden caginess that usually wasn’t there before. A few of the women feel so good about the money they’re earning, they claim they can ignore the harassment they’re often subjected to, while others can barely describe the conditions they work under without pausing to collect themselves. A handful look at Elinor, mystified when she asks about harassment, having never experienced it at all.
“If the other girls you’re talking to are having trouble with that,” a tool pusher named Andrea says, “they’re inviting it in some way. They may not know it, but they are.” Andrea has been nothing but pleasant during their time together. Still, Elinor hears Kathryn’s voice, as crisp and clear as day. This is why we all hated you.
“Why do you think they’re inviting it?”
Andrea’s big green eyes widen, as if she can’t imagine why she’s being asked. “Well, because I certainly don’t have problems like that.”
Theories and rumors and opinions abound, sometimes conflicting with and canceling each other out. The boom won’t last for much longer. The boom is here to stay. Women can earn as much as men in the Bakken. Men get paid more here for the exact same work, no different than it was back home. Avery feels safe. Avery feels like the Wild West. The housing market collapse was caused by Russia. The housing market collapse was caused by China. The housing market collapse was caused by the banks.
Noticeably, two common threads connect every woman she talks to. They all came to the Bakken to find opportunities that they couldn’t find elsewhere. And they’re all angry about things that feel out of their control. Sandy’s eldest son refuses to go to rehab, even though she can finally afford to help him pay. Elena, who was born in Mexico, is often mistaken for Native American and complains about having to put up with white people who can’t tell brown from red, “people too stupid to even know why they hate me.” Joanne asks if she’s off-the-record three times before discussing her boss, the manager of a water depot who makes at least one comment about blow jobs every time she works a shift.
Out of all the women she talks to, Rae and Dana, an interracial couple, have been in the Bakken the longest, going on two and a half years in July. Elinor expects their issues to be somewhat different from each other’s, but they both steadfastly agree: they hate what passes for funny here. If their coworkers aren’t cracking jokes about gays and lesbians, then they’re joking about Blacks or Indians or Jews. Dana says the guys on her crew often thump her on the back and compliment her for being one of the few Black people they know with a sense of humor. But their jokes are vile, so vile that Dana often goes to bed thinking about them at night. She wonders out loud if she should say something to their boss, and then answers herself in the next breath. If she complains, her coworkers will start calling her “sensitive,” which will only make things worse, so she simply laughs along with them, all the while raging inside. Elinor understands what this feels like; she’s been doing it for most of her life. It’s a weight, but not the kind she carries on her shoulders, which almost makes it sound noble. Instead, she drags hers around like a net, catching more and more refuse in its wake.
Shortly after lunchtime, the interviews end almost as abruptly as they began. When Elinor finishes talking to a woman named Rhonda, Travis walks over with his fists shoved into his pockets and tells her that he can’t find anyone else. He seems embarrassed and apologetic—about last night or the number of volunteers, she’s not sure. Either way, there’s no need. She never expected to do so many interviews in one sitting.
“Thank you, Travis. This was the most productive day I’ve had si—”
He shakes his head. “You don’t have to thank me. Lisa said you needed help and I didn’t mind helping.”
“But you spent all morning doing this. I don’t know how—”
Travis waves her off, clearly uncomfortable with appreciation, much less praise. “Alright, well, I’m glad it went good for you. I gotta take off now. Good luck with”—he gestures toward her table—“whatever it is you’re doing here.”
As he turns to leave, he almost bumps into Stacey, who sidesteps him with an eye roll and a sigh. The part of Elinor that wonders if she misjudged Travis wishes he’d just stand still for a second and let her thank him properly, but he’s gone already, as quickly as he left the night before. Stacey stops at her booth, examining the nearly untouched turkey sandwich that she delivered at least two interviews ago.
“Something wrong with it?” she asks.
“No, it’s fine.” Elinor tries to straighten up the mess she’s made of her table. She stacks her notebooks in a pile and slides her belongings away from the carafe in Stacey’s hand, the spout of which is tipping closer to her laptop than she’d like. “It’s just hard to talk and eat at the same time.”
Stacey nods. “You all done now?”
“I think so. You need the booth? I can clear out if you—”
“No, you’re fine where you are. The rush is winding down anyway.”
After the first few interviews, Stacey took a noticeable interest in Elinor’s work, delivering plates of food slowly, often in multiple trips, and circling around to offer more coffee refills than necessary. Sometimes, when she had no other customers to tend to, she simply hovered nearby and listened in. They haven’t had a chance to discuss what Elinor’s been doing all morning, but she imagines that Stacey has put it together by now.
“Those girls really know how to complain, don’t they?”
After so much eavesdropping, Elinor assumed that some sort of question was coming, but not this one. “What do you mean?”
“You think they’d be happy, making as much money as they are, living out in the lot for free. But every time I walked by, all I heard was them complaining about one thing or another.”
A customer asks for ketchup. Stacey leaves without excusing herself, gives the man a bottle, and then delivers two plates of eggs waiting in the pass. When she returns to Elinor, she picks up their conversation as if she never left.
“It’s like the Indians on the reservation. ‘Oh, my water supply’s getting polluted,’” she says in an exaggerated whine, grimacing in a particularly ugly way as she says it. “‘Oh, there’s too many outsiders coming on our land.’ I just get sick to death of listening to people complain. If you don’t like it here, then leave, I want to tell them. If your boss is chasing you around the desk, then get yourself another boss. Life is pretty simple if you choose not to make it hard.”
It’s clear that Stacey has thought about this before, that the line isn’t coming to her spontaneously. More so than t
he substance though, it’s the sentiment that gives Elinor pause. Stacey is angry too, but in a way that makes her incapable of empathy, only judgment. Elinor wonders if she’s inching toward the very same edge, if she stepped over it already and didn’t even notice. Before she gets a chance to follow up, the man who asked for ketchup says he needs hot sauce. Then a pair of men ask for menus. Despite her interest in the interviews, when Stacey returns, she declines to be interviewed herself.
“I don’t care if you sit here and do your work. You, I don’t mind. But I like to keep my private thoughts private.”
This hardly seems true, but Elinor doesn’t urge her to reconsider. She’s overwhelmed by the volume of material she has to transcribe now. After Stacey moves on, she reviews her notes, paging through the women she spoke to in reverse order, going all the way back to Amy Mueller, arguably the angriest of them all, with two wells in her backyard that she didn’t want, a dead husband, and also possibly a dead niece by marriage. Elinor takes advantage of the diner’s Wi-Fi to see if she can finally track down Mrs. Mueller’s nephew. Predictably, there’s no public listing for Shane Foster in Avery. And there are too many Shane Fosters listed in the I states. Thirty-four of them in Indiana alone, plus hundreds more on Facebook and Twitter. She clicks around for a while, finding all the wrong Shanes, before returning to her scribble of notes. There was someone else that Mrs. Mueller suggested she talk to, another woman, but she can’t make out the name slanting off the edge of the page. She puts on her headphones and finds the interview on her computer, scanning the recording backward and forward until she cues up the right section.
“You should go over there and talk to her, if you get a chance,” Mrs. Mueller says, sounding as irascible as Elinor remembers. “Her name’s Louise Eddy, E-d-d-y. She’s got four EnerGia wells on her property. Four! You’d get a kick out of talking to her, I bet.”
Elinor replays this part again, turning the volume up to drown out the diner’s ambient noise. For the first time, she notices the mischievous lift in Mrs. Mueller’s voice at the end of her sentence, as if she was smiling at the thought of bringing Elinor and Louise Eddy together.