It isn’t clear that Camila has noticed. She is always running off to another meeting or to work, leaving him with a list of things to do and a quick kiss on the cheek. She rolls her eyes at things he says. She rolls over in bed and shuts off the light without touching him. At night, he dreams of a woman with dirty red hair.
A bunch of men with collared shirts and gas company logos printed on their hats lean against the wall. Camila says they’ve bussed in roughnecks from all over the western slope. But the hall is filling up with all sorts of people he didn’t figure to be interested in gas drilling. There’s guys he knows from playing ball, from swapping bulls for his gramps, from the bar, from law enforcement, from his kids’ school. Up in front on stage are the bureaucrats and corporate drones, shifting paper around the table and looking at their watches. And far in the back, standing under a stuffed pronghorn, are the Dunbars, their heads yoked.
While Joyce Marbel signs the petition, he leans in to his wife. “I’m going for coffee.”
She doesn’t look up, keeps on about eighty-acre spacing and the need for a scientific baseline.
Ray passes the table with the donuts and the Styrofoam cups. As he closes the space between himself and the Dunbars, he tries to set a smile on his face that is casual. There’s a flapping in his chest. His thinking is squirrelly. Jackie leans down to her sister and whispers in her ear. Neither of them smiles his way.
“This whole thing is icing on a shit cake, ain’t it?” He looks at Susan, his legs loose. She stares at him with doe eyes. She doesn’t blink. “How’s things up top? Is that one cow still lame in the back leg?”
“She’s doing fine,” says Jackie. She slips her arm through her sister’s arm. “We’re all fine, Ray.”
“Well, good. I’ve wondered about that. About how you all are.”
There is a long pause where no one says a thing. Ray’s insides race. Sue’s hair is prettier than in his dreams. Cleaner. All combed back and tended to.
“How’s your story coming along?” He nods at Sue. She smells like hard soap and sage. “I bet you got some good questions to ask, don’t you?” His hand, acting without his say-so, reaches out and touches her arm.
Sue jumps away, stumbles into her sister. “You can’t do that.”
“I’m sorry, Sue.”
Sue’s eyes go soft and then they go scared, looking at something behind him.
“What are you sorry about, honey?” Camila says behind him. He feels his wife’s body against his side, watches her look at the Dunbars, watches Susan duck her glance to look to him, watches Jackie hold her breath, all of it in slow motion. All three of them look at him.
“Just saying I wish we weren’t here. I wish the gas men didn’t ever come.”
Camila smiles and pats his hand. “Don’t let him fool you. He doesn’t really care about any of this. He just didn’t want to be the only husband of all the ladies on the committee to not show.”
Ray looks blankly at the stuffed pronghorn on the wall.
“How’s your article coming, Susan?” Camila looks Susan over with eagle eyes. “You must be real busy with that.”
“I am. In fact, I see someone I have to talk to.” She nods and starts to move away. “Nice to see you.”
“You know, we don’t have to be friends.” Camila looks Susan up and down. Her laughter is a string of jagged tin cans. Ray puts his hand on her arm to move her away, but when has she ever paid him any mind. “But stay away from my husband.”
Susan’s face turns red. Jackie stiffens.
Ray steers his wife away.
“I thought you were getting coffee.” Camila hisses in his ear. “Where’s your coffee?”
Ray wishes his body were made differently, in a shape where it would be easy to punch his own face.
They sit down without speaking. Camila crosses her arms and sighs. Ray stares at his hands; they rest on his thighs. They’re weak, limp. In another week, the calluses on his palms will be gone, all sign of his time at Dunbars’ will disappear.
The men on stage start the meeting. The gas men, the government men, they talk plans and sunshine. Ray listens without listening. He has heard such talk before. He tucks his hands under his legs.
There had been a day when he was seventeen, when Gramps had seen him and Susan talking before school. You seem yourself with that girl, he’d said later. Ray had shook his head no, Camila already pregnant, the rest of his life already in motion.
For too long he has chosen to wait life out. He has believed that nothing is his to change, none of it his to hold. Iraq has been to blame. Camila has been to blame. Being a soldier, being a deputy have been costumes to hide his cowardice. Only up at Dunbars’, only working the land, working with Sue, has he felt like he held the reins to his life.
He looks over his shoulder, through the crowd to where she, brave and serious, writes something in a notebook. He waits for her to look up. He has to make her see.
32
DANNY JAY, THE GAS company’s PR flack, stands up and asks people to take their seats. His manicured goatee sits on his face like a neon sign: I am uptight. It doesn’t matter that I never got a date in high school. Look at my suede boots: I make more money in PR than an entire news desk. He says they plan to reintroduce native plants after they’re done drilling. He holds up bags of seeds. He shows slides of elk and deer grazing near a pump jack.
When the county commissioners speak, they use the term win-win. They’re so obviously in bed with the gas people, they could share a pillow. Susan’s neighbors ask simple questions and are easily satisfied by the argument the gas men have crafted and that the politicians parrot: that this is about jobs and energy versus the environment, that it’s not possible to have all three. They’ve managed to make the truth, that natural gas development has the potential to pollute, controversial.
If she weren’t a reporter, she would say that this controversy is a fiction. That anything is possible; it’s a matter of scale and priorities. But journalists don’t get involved. They have no comment.
In her pocket is a piece of paper with three good questions concerning geology, hydrology, and transmission. They are not, however, the questions she most needs answered.
Ray’s head is bent toward his wife and he nods at whatever she is saying to him. Camila, with her perfect skin, with her tenacity. Susan will always come in second. She will never be the one that matters. This is as it should be. Camila would never consider stealing a husband, especially one with two kids.
Halfway through the meeting, when Camila scoots her chair backward as if she is about to stand, to ask the questions written on her yellow notepad, Susan throws her hand in the air. Danny Jay nods for her to go ahead, to be first for once, and she can only look at Jackie, stunned, and feel for the thin paper in her pocket.
“You got this,” Jackie whispers. She is the most reluctant of wingmen.
Susan takes a deep breath.
“A few weeks after that well on Amick’s place kicked, Divide Creek started bubbling.” Best to play dumb. Let them underestimate you. “Can you explain that to me?”
“Well,” Danny Jay leans forward in his chair. “You heard of Dimethoate? Write it down.”
Always stall by asking a question you already know the answer to.
“Can you spell that?”
“I don’t know how it’s spelled, Susan; you can look it up. It’s a pesticide.”
“What’s a pesticide got to do with gas development?” Sweat pools in her armpits.
“Exactly. From what I understand, pesticides from the fields beside yours ran back into the creek due to some faulty hydro equipment. That’s where you got those bubbles.”
Danny Jay doesn’t have to tell her: a story about pesticides in the water isn’t a story. People lean over the backs of their chairs to stare at her. At last they have found their skepticism and concern. She hasn’t seen many of them since her dad’s funeral, since graduation, since she was someone they thought they knew.
<
br /> “So you’re saying there’s no connection between the blowout at Amick’s place and the bubbles in our creek?” She shifts in her ballet flats. She tugs at her hair. She can’t think of her next question. She needs to ask the right question.
“Ms. Dunbar, you see too many movies.” Danny Jay shows the crowd of sheep his very white teeth. “Come on, now. This is a multi-billion-dollar business; we only get access if the state gives us a permit.” He slaps his pinky ring against the podium. “This company will not risk its reputation with shoddy work. We’re running a top-of-the-line operation here, folks.”
Not everyone in the crowd smiles and nods at Danny Jay. Some people watch with curious eyes, with affection, as if they want to know what she, Susan Dunbar, one of them, will say next. If she looks at Ray and Camila she will sit down, so she doesn’t. She does her very best to look like someone who is good at something. Fake it ’til you make it.
“Then how do you explain why we could light the water on fire? Pesticides don’t account for that. And how do you explain why your company is willing to deliver us drinking water, if you have no culpability?”
There is a murmur in the crowd. Jackie stands very close to Susan, puts her arm on her back.
“There are more than thirty-two hundred wells in this county, most drilled in the last five years. I understand that there are plans to drill ten thousand more.” Susan’s voice cracks. “Industry documents say as much as 30 percent of frack fluid remains underground after a well has been fracked. Can you tell me where you think all of those chemicals go? Isn’t it possible, based on recharge, that it might be frack fluid in our creek?”
A few of the guys standing against the wall start booing. “Sit your sweet ass down, Dunbar,” someone yells from the back. Someone else yells, “That’s enough with the language.” Camila looks at Susan like she’s doing something funny, not in a ha-ha way, but a weird way. Susan tucks her hands under her armpits. Jackie raises her hand, she tries to say something, but Danny Jay won’t look at them. He opens his PowerPoint to answer not one of her questions, but to talk about their commitment to environmental stewardship.
All Susan’s thoughts run off. There goes one, and another, flung beyond her grasp. She wipes the sweat off her face with a napkin, but it pills and she picks at the balled-up wads of paper on her cheeks.
Ray stands up, his chair scraping behind him. He is leaving. He doesn’t care and he is leaving. There’s no point to Susan’s article. There never was a point, an important point anyways.
“I don’t hear you answering her, Danny.” Ray, his voice soft, interrupts Danny as he’s talking about elk migration. Ray’s jaw clenches. His face looks boiled.
Susan forgets to breathe. She flattens her back against the wall.
“Give me a minute, Stark.” Danny Jay holds up his hands like Ray is trying to shoot. “I’m getting to that.”
“Nope. Answer her now.” Ray pounds his fist on the back of the empty metal chair in front of him. “The truth would be nice.”
No one boos at Ray. No one tells him to shut up. A deputy sheriff is not the same as an unmarried, fake reporter. The crowd looks at Danny Jay and Danny Jay scratches his shoulder, his elbow. Ray doesn’t sit down. The only sound in the room is Susan’s heartbeat.
Danny Jay sighs. “Listen, folks. We’re providing water to the Dunbars because we want to be good neighbors, and when we hear about people in trouble, we do what we can.”
“That’s a line,” Ray says quietly. He looks at his hands and pauses, then lifts his head. “Far as I can make out, you got yourself a golden goose, and it just laid a bunch of goose shit.”
“Mr. Stark, please sit down.” County Commissioner Lomax adjusts his bolo tie. “You’re disrupting things, son.”
Ray looks around the room, his back straightening. “The Dunbars have had it rough. You all know that. They deserve an answer.”
Ray has never been so beautiful. Susan wants to touch the wrinkled skin at the corner of his eye, his hip, his red ear that looks so very hot, the cuff of his maroon pocket T-shirt. Jackie squeezes Susan’s arm. There’s a murmur in the crowd—not the whole group, but maybe half, nod.
“I’d remind you that you’re a public employee.” Lomax frowns. “You’re out of turn.”
Ray pauses. Camila tugs at the hem of his shirt. He nods and takes his seat. Camila leans over and kisses him on the mouth. And Ray rests his arm on the back of his wife’s chair, and they hold hands for the rest of the meeting, and he never once turns around. When Camila stands up and presents her moratorium idea, she doesn’t sweat. She is eloquent, her accent unnoticeable.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jackie whispers in Susan’s ear. “You don’t need to watch this.”
“No. It’s good for me.” She pinches the inside of her left arm until she can’t feel anything.
Number of people in the room: 104. Average length of public comment: six minutes. How many times Danny Jay touches his goatee: nineteen. The ways that Ray shows how much he loves his wife: too many to count. The point of trying to make anything different than how it has always been: zero.
33
AGAIN, JACKIE TOUCHES THE unsigned lease agreement stuffed into her back jeans pocket. It’s too long and it juts under her shirt, scratching her bare skin.
When Susan said they were going to the Elks Lodge, she’d handed her a phone message from Tim—he needed to speak with Jackie, he’d be at the Skyline after seven—and rolled her eyes. As if to say, we’re in this together. Jackie hadn’t said anything about the contract, due in four days.
If it weren’t for the contract, it would’ve been Jackie, not Ray, who had yelled at the jerks who yelled at Susan. If it weren’t for the contract, Jackie might have asked her own questions. She reminds herself what she has told herself before: signing the contract is pragmatic. Signing the contract offers them a seat at the table, a bargaining chip. Such phrases, she knows, are what her sister would call clichés. Such phrases, she sees now, expose a lack of intellectual curiosity.
The room is stuffy and hot. An industry geologist talks about projections without citing any data. He doesn’t offer a single scientific explanation. Susan asked a series of good questions and they, those men up there, Tim’s colleagues, they shut her down.
She scans the crowded room, looking for one person that she can relate to. The people who used to be her age, the ones she knew in high school listen quietly, kids on their laps, to what the men on stage have to say. Beside them are their parents and grandparents, whose faces are weather-beaten, tight at the eyes. Whiskey and dust and sun have pickled the worst in all of them. The stuffed pronghorn and elk and lynx and coyote and hawk mounted on the wall stare at Jackie with their glass eyes. You’re not better than any of them, the eyes say. You’re just the same.
She had brought the contract to the meeting hopeful that after hearing what the gas people had to say, the drive home would be the right moment to remind Susan that leasing their minerals would allow Susan to have whatever life she might like. It would, Jackie had thought, be the right moment to present the gas lease as an alternative to selling the ranch. The faulty thinking of such an argument is now obvious. The wood-paneled walls and pea-green floor fold up around her.
Her sister, the only person she has left, stands to her side, smelling like onions, which is to say she smells like fear. And Jackie has done nothing, she has said nothing. Throughout all the weeks she has stolen away from her sister, from the ranch, to review research on purkinje cells, she has not spent one minute researching the possible public health or environmental impacts of oil and gas development.
She pulls the contract from her pocket and hands it to Susan. “Here. Take this,” she whispers, the men in the front still droning on. “I don’t want this anymore. I feel gross that I ever did.”
Susie doesn’t smile. She doesn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” Jackie says. “I thought it would help.”
Susan nods and takes
the contract. She folds it behind her notebook. People in the back row turn and stare at the two of them whispering against the wall.
“Your landman know about this yet?” Susan keeps her eyes on the presenter; she talks out of the side of her mouth.
“I’ll tell him tonight.”
“He’s waiting for you, isn’t he? Just leave me the truck.”
Jackie nods to herself and exhales. “I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“If you mean it about the contract, you should tell Tim. Go on, get out of here.” Jackie isn’t sure what is more unsettling, to see Susan act so much like her old self, or the fact that she is relieved to be told what to do. She kisses her sister on the cheek and walks through the crowd until she finds the exit sign and leaves.
She finds Tim at the back of the Skyline, his knee bouncing up and down under the table. In his right hand is a white business-sized envelope and he’s tapping its edge against his beer.
“Why weren’t you at the meeting,” asks Jackie, sitting down across the table.
“I couldn’t go. I couldn’t do it, not today.”
“I want to tell you something and I don’t want you to interrupt me. I’ve been thinking about it on the walk over here from the Elks’.”
“You’ve got my attention.” He continues to bounce his knees under the table like crazy, shaking the glass and the last inch of beer inside of it.
“First of all, I want to thank you for everything. The water deliveries and the contract itself have been a very big deal for me and I appreciate it. More than you could know. But the thing is I only have one blood relative left who means anything to me and the people in that meeting, the people you work with, they were dicks to her.”
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