Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  After a trip to northern California, I decided to forgo the American Southwest for another pass through Wyoming on my way back East. I found Polly in Jackson, in the store she’d named. She smiled so big when she saw me that I knew love right then, then and for all time. I think about it when I need to.

  I HAD GOTTEN some sleep, finally, and on the crisp morning that followed I was en route to a well pad. Outside of Midhollow, Pennsylvania, a village in western Holebrook County, DiverCo had been drilling and fracking in an easterly line, with an eye toward connecting every well they dug to a major pipeline running south. It was nice country out there. They had drilled back from the roads and on hilltops surrounded by woods, so the scenery wasn’t entirely blighted. Their service roads dug deep into the slopes, often in wide switchbacks, and the gates shutting the citizenry out were equipped with video surveillance and often were manned by a roughneck guard. The whole area resembled a kind of industrial gated community.

  Sheriff Dally had asked me to meet him at the well pad’s entrance, which was just inside the western border of Wild Thyme Township. He explained that Ben Jackson was getting his head and ear looked at and Hanluain was patrolling the Heights, leaving Lyons to hold down the office. We were paying a visit to this particular crew because of a man named Gerardo Contreras, a maintenance mechanic who fit the description of our John Doe. Contreras hadn’t made it home to Texas for Christmas, and his wife had filed a missing persons report in Elmira, New York, where he had bunked between jobs. The Elmira PD was able to turn him up once, in a roadhouse between Waverly and Elmira known for its drug trade. He’d disappeared again soon after that, and though his family and employers believed Contreras was alive, a DiverCo representative thought of him anyway when Dally asked.

  As we arrived, a worker stepped out from under a canopy and spoke into a walkie-talkie before unlatching the gate and swinging it open for us. The service road was wider than anything in the township, including the paved routes. We curved into the woods on the ridge. Hundreds and hundreds of tree trunks, stripped of their tops and roots, lined the road in stacks twenty high; these had been bulldozed and would probably be pulped, as they were too small for lumber. On our way up we passed three white tractor-trailer cabs in a line heading back down, having dropped off whatever they’d been hauling.

  After wending through the trees, we emerged onto a well pad the size of three football fields, ringed by forest. A mass of tanks, tubes, and storage units filled up much of the space, and out of it rose a rig ninety feet into the sky, painted red and bright blue. The rig and the pad itself were surrounded by a number of pickup trucks, all white, drones in a swarm of white king cabs with out-of-state plates that had descended upon us.

  It took my eyes a moment to get used to the scale before I could pick out the workers, perhaps twenty in blue hard hats I could see scattered about the site. We approached the data van. It was a kind of custom RV with stairs that folded down from a door at midpoint. In the window I could see several men seated at computer stations, the screens of which showed colorful, almost old-fashioned representations of—presumably—what was happening underground. Dally had barely put his foot down on the first step when the storm door opened and an unsmiling man thumped down to greet us, subtly steering us away. He was about fifty, windburned, sporting wraparound sunglasses and a goatee.

  “Bill Huff,” he said, shaking our hands in turn. “Rig manager here. Pleased.”

  Dally and I introduced ourselves.

  “Good to meet you.” The manager had a foghorn voice, probably from years of making it carry over the noise of the rig. “Listen, I know you’re here about something else. Just quick, who would I talk to about trespassing? We’ve been seeing teenagers, people in the trees out next to the pad, on the trails, beer cans . . .”

  Dally turned to me. I said, “Any vandalism? Damage?”

  “No. Not yet. But I’m just a little concerned. Not so much about vandalism.”

  “No?”

  “There are some elements out there determined to prove this”—Huff swung an arm in the direction of the rig—“is bad for the earth. And these elements been known to resort to sabotage so they can be right.”

  “Sabotage.”

  “You know what they do? They loosen fixtures and cut lines to spill fuel from our equipment. They’ve got to; ain’t no other way anyone’s going to find dirty water. Not from our crew, not from the process. I’m only just saying.”

  I couldn’t answer right away. For the best part of two years I’d been trying to ignore the fact that hydrofracking had followed me home from the West. Seeing it up close again wasn’t easy. I stayed quiet until I could trust myself to speak, looking out at the mass of tubes and tanks sprawled on the flattened hilltop, longer than I wanted. I managed, “You can just call me at the station, bud.”

  Dally looked at me funny, but didn’t step in to soften my response.

  After that, Huff seemed to understand he didn’t have an entirely sympathetic audience. “So, Gerardo Contreras. Wherever he may be. I’ll be happy to tell you what I told the Elmira police.”

  “They didn’t share too much with us,” Dally said, a white lie.

  Huff nodded once. “The first thing to know is, the work is concentrated around periods of drilling. There are long shifts, and we operate twenty-four/seven. Then there’s downtime as the next pad is cleared. Once the wellhead gets put on, that time can be a windfall for some, a pitfall for others.”

  “Right,” said the sheriff, “they’ve got a paycheck, free time, they’re far from home . . .”

  “That’s why we hire the best, but it’s almost as important that we hire family men, men of faith. You know what I mean. We can’t make mistakes.” Huff gestured about him, not at the well pad but at the surrounding woods. I assumed this was for my benefit. “Look around us. We need to leave this perfect. Well, Contreras brought some . . . predilections with him that we didn’t know about when he was hired.”

  “For instance?”

  “This will be in his personnel file, so I don’t mind sharing. Some of the guys have a hard time cordoning off the rest of their lives from the work. They need some help getting through a shift. We had to reprimand Contreras for amphetamine. Can’t imagine where he’d get such a thing, not knowing anybody out here. Must’ve brought it.” At this, he paused to let his implication sink in. “We gave him probation, sudden death if it happened again. Shit, if we have to, we’ll fly out another mechanic rather than have one that’s going to do something we can’t fix.”

  “So, drug use.”

  “Yeah. Alcohol too. There was some other talk, but I’m not sure it’s germane. Shit, I’m sorry I brought it up, it doesn’t seem fair to the man, but . . . we are out here in barracks. And it’s not as if it’s a major metropolitan area. The rare guy will, will . . . start to miss . . . sexual companionship. Maybe too much.”

  “Ah.”

  “That could have been a problem for Contreras. But it’s just talk.”

  We walked slowly along one side of the operation, while Huff gave a vague explanation of the process. I interrupted him.

  “Where’s your pond?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your frack pond.”

  “I see. We ain’t at that stage yet. We’re still drilling. But anyway this lease doesn’t allow—”

  “Good. Where are your compressor stations going?”

  “Again, this particular lease don’t allow that.” Huff made an effort to meet my eyes. “This is safe, Henry. Trust me, I wouldn’t be doing it for fifteen years otherwise.”

  Huff led us to an RV strewn with Styrofoam coffee cups and crumpled napkins. The sheriff and I are both tall, and sitting there in the undersized chairs in the undersized room felt a little like playing house. The rig manager then left to round up a small group of technicians and roughnecks who’d known Contreras best. Dally and I waited. He asked was I all right. I nodded. Then I gave a weak smile for his benefit and said, “This shi
t gives me the creeps.”

  “I can tell. We’re here about John Doe, let’s stick to that.”

  I stood and looked around in the trailer, but all I could see in my mind was the rig reaching to the heavens. “Hey, how’s Jackson?”

  “I’m hoping it’s not a concussion, but it probably is. Direct hit to the base of the skull. The ear is the least of his worries.” Dally continued, almost to himself, “What am I going to do? Down a man, in the middle of all this shit.”

  I shrugged and, when Dally wasn’t looking, checked my own eyes for dilation.

  In the hour that followed we saw five low-level technicians and roughnecks, some white Okies, some Mexican-American, none of them too put out by the questions we asked. Not one knew where Contreras might be. To a man, they seemed to be distancing themselves. As a finale to each interview, we showed a photograph of our John Doe’s face. It was the cleanest photo we had, taken on the examining table, but the kid was still blue and wasted away, missing an eye, with nothing alive about him. You could see the workers stiffen as they looked.

  The last man Huff brought in was another maintenance mechanic, a little Okie guy with a blond mustache and skin the color of tomato soup. Vernon Yeager. He wore bright red coveralls. Sitting, Yeager smiled with evident discomfort and little warmth, revealing a snaggletooth. It took a couple attempts to explain that I was Wild Thyme municipal police, and the sheriff was the sheriff, and that neither one of us worked for the other. Yeager’s eyes darted back and forth between us, as if waiting for some trap to be sprung. He maintained eager body language and a defensive grin through the usual series of questions: How well do you know Contreras, did you see him much outside of work, when was the last you saw him, do you know where he is. I sat back and listened as Yeager answered in polite Okie cadences, putting his h’s before his w’s and not telling us anything. Dally laid a head shot of the corpse on the little plastic table between us and Yeager, and slid it across. The roughneck’s smile became vague, then uncomfortable, and then disappeared as he looked down at the photograph, then quickly back up at us.

  “You saying he’s dead?”

  “Take a close look, please,” the sheriff said. “Sorry about it, don’t want to upset you.”

  Yeager took another look. “I . . . it ain’t Gerry. Can’t be.”

  I cleared my throat and smiled kindly. “You’re saying that because you want it to be true, or . . . ?”

  “No, no. I mean, the face is . . . messed up. I can’t tell.” Yeager looked trapped. He turned and appealed to me. “Look, what in hell’s going on?”

  “We just want to know is this Contreras,” Dally said. “In your opinion. It’s nothing to do with you, right?”

  “Right.” Yeager peered out the window to the sky, as if looking for aid, and back to the photo. “I don’t think so. Hope it ain’t.”

  “Okay. You let us know if you hear from him.” We each gave him a business card, same as we gave the others, and he put his hard hat back on and left.

  Dally and I stayed put in the RV, discussing the men we’d seen. The first four had given us nothing, but the strength of Vernon Yeager’s reaction had tripped wires for both of us. As we left the RV, the rig manager Huff had been waiting for us. He caught our eyes and nodded once, almost not at all.

  Leading us back to our vehicles, he thanked us for coming and said, “So please let us know what you turn up. I’d hate to think it’s Gerry. I’ll be honest, he wasn’t my favorite, but he was one of my guys.”

  We thanked him, said we might be back, and left.

  Since Dally was going to be in the township that morning, he had scheduled a stop at Camp Branchwater as well. Pete Dale, the owner, had arranged for Barry Nolan to show us around, and we were already late.

  The camp was spread over the crest of a ridge and down a grassy slope to a small private lake surrounded by forest. In my youth, I’d always heard that since the lake was so lightly fished, the bass and steelheads with which it was stocked grew to legendary sizes, with only pike and muskellunges and the odd eagle keeping them honest. That afternoon as I stood on the crescent drive in front of the camp’s main office, gazing at the stretch of lake visible through the trees below, I had a flash of recall: me and my sister, dirty kids in the summertime, staring from the hemlocks at the far side of the lake as campers in gray uniform T-shirts practiced fly-fishing casts. Though the camp forbade it, we two little Robin Hoods had planned to bait-fish an easy breakfast before the sun was over the trees, but we hadn’t been early enough. It was my first time seeing fly-fishing, and I remembered thinking someone ought to tell those boys they were making things too easy on the fish.

  Now the camp was empty: no boys shouting, none of the loudspeaker announcements you hear wafting over the hills in summertime. Nolan stood in the driveway beside a four-seat gator with an open trunk in the back. The sheriff and I parked one behind the other and got out.

  “Sorry, Nolan,” said the sheriff. “Tied up elsewhere, you can imagine.”

  “It’s all right.” He started to get in the vehicle’s driver’s seat, then stopped. “Just missed another shift, that’s all,” he said.

  “We’ll write you a note,” I said, and gave him a look that the sheriff couldn’t see.

  “Forget it, don’t worry. So, what do you want to see?”

  We took muddy paths through cedar-shake cabins and barns sided in hemlock, the ATV skidding on the turns, the sheriff riding shotgun and me in the back. Behind me in the bed, loose hand tools and a charred grate for cooking over a campfire bounced, clinking. Every now and then we crossed the remnants of a snowmobile trail.

  “How often do you patrol here?” The sheriff shouted over the diesel engine.

  “I take a turn around every couple days. Nothing ever happens.”

  “The snowmobile tracks, they yours?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  We took a wooded trail that wound around the lake, and ended up back in front of the main building, where we’d started.

  “Listen,” said Dally, “I hope that’s all we’ll need.” I could tell he was eager to get back and discuss Contreras and what we’d learned on the well pad.

  “Anything else, let me know.”

  We left Nolan sitting in his ATV and raced to town.

  BACK AT THE courthouse we didn’t have much time to debrief. Kevin Dunigan was waiting in the hall with Paul Wendell, a silver-haired lawyer specializing in real estate and divorce. In the past year Wendell had done brisk business as a go-between for the gas companies. The pair didn’t get two words out before Dally asked them to wait a moment. We left them in the hall and stepped into the department. Krista handed the sheriff a while-you-were-out telephone message from one of the county’s judges. He looked at the message in his hand, then in the direction of the hall, and muttered a curse. He disappeared into his office. Before long, Dally quietly asked Krista to bring Dunigan and his lawyer in. They each nodded to me as they passed, and there was a look of triumph on Kevin’s face.

  I kicked around the department for a while, leaning on Krista’s counter and chatting with her, Lyons, and Ben Jackson, who had returned to the office against the doctor’s instructions. It took maybe ten minutes before Kevin, Wendell, and the sheriff emerged. Dally told them, “We’ll bring him on out to your car, just go ahead and sit tight in the back lot. He’ll be out.” When the other two left he said, “Hope to Christ the reporters are gone.”

  “Springing the old man?” Deputy Jackson asked.

  Dally seemed put out. “They got me on the six-hour rule. He’s released to Kevin and Carly’s supervision, and he’s to submit himself to a physical and mental health evaluation sometime in the near future. Down in Scranton, most likely.”

  “Sheriff,” I said, “the guy didn’t kill anyone. And he’s sure not going on the run.”

  “Yeah, I know what you think, Henry. Well, let’s keep an eye on him out there, all right?”

  In five minutes, I watched as Aub plo
dded stoop-shouldered down the hall, still wearing the same set of work clothes his distant cousins had bought him two days earlier, flanked by Dally and Lyons. Dally placed a gentle hand on Aub’s arm, and was brushed off.

  IN DALLY’S OFFICE the sheriff, Jackson, and I sat down to talk about the well pad. We raised the possibility of sending for Contreras’s wife to identify the corpse—it’d have to be in person, as the facial features were so degraded that just seeing a photo risked a false positive—or to give us something of her husband’s to match DNA with. We decided against it then, not being far enough along yet to inflict the kind of pain those requests would cause. The sheriff said he’d ask Elmira PD to beat the bushes for Contreras again.

  And we’d both smelled something on Vernon Yeager, but Dally felt we couldn’t put screws to him without knowing for sure Contreras was our JD. Deputy Jackson disagreed.

  “There’s nothing stopping you,” he said. “For all we know and for all he knows, that is Contreras. Act as if it is. You may get nothing. You may get something Elmira can use.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Let him stew for a while, maybe, then ask him to come in. He was a nervous little son of a bitch.”

  “Some people naturally are,” I said. “But I agree, he’s got a quality about him. He in the system somewhere, I wonder?” Sometimes you can spot a man who has done time. There were obvious hardcases, and converts holding to strict beliefs to keep from being swept back into their old lives, and garrulous types whose eagerness to please masks a kind of corrosion deep down. Yeager struck me as belonging to the final category.

  Krista called one of Dally’s FBI contacts, who did a review of Oklahoma and Texas for us, turning up nothing there. He did find a grand larceny conviction in Arkansas, for which Vernon Yeager had done a year in the Texarkana Correction Center. He’d stolen electronics from the dock of a big-box store, in broad daylight, right under a security camera. I could see the effect this news had on the sheriff. To me, it seemed like the crime of a stupid man who maybe had a habit to feed. Not nothing, but not murder, either.