The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  When she finished the eight-month class, she applied to oil field jobs close to home in Wyoming and Utah. She sent out some 100 applications, but no one contacted her for an interview. One day, her uncle introduced her to a driller who worked up in Williston, North Dakota. She shared with him how many applications she’d sent out, and he told her the only way she’d get hired is if she applied to jobs in Williston because a boom was happening.

  Cindy didn’t want to leave her family—Jennie was 26 and had a three-year-old at home. Elizabeth had two young children, and Ricky had three kids. Elizabeth had also recently come down with pancreatitis and almost died. Cindy didn’t want to work 800 miles away from them. But after more silence from jobs at closer locations, she decided to give Williston a shot. The second application she sent to North Dakota—to work in fracking at Halliburton’s Williston location—resulted in her being called in for an interview.

  She drove to Williston over two days and arrived on a brisk afternoon in late March. She checked into one of the few hotels in town, the Airport International Inn. The next morning, she wore black slacks, a white blouse with a sweater, and wore her long blond hair down with the top half pulled back. She drove to the Halliburton equipment yard on the outskirts of town for her interview. The office was in a portable building, and when she walked in, she immediately felt out of place. The only other people in the waiting area were two guys wearing coveralls splattered with grease and dirt. She walked up to the window and told the receptionist who she was. As she remembered it, one of the guys in the office turned to her and said, “So you’re here for a job interview?” She nodded.

  “Are you going into dispatch or payroll?” he asked.

  “No, I’m here to be a frack hand.”

  He looked surprised. “Do you know what frack is?”

  “Of course I know what frack is,” she said, annoyed. “Why would I apply for a job if I didn’t know what it was?”

  Finally, they called her in. Her interviewer was a woman. One question Cindy remembered the woman asking was, “What do you know about Halliburton?”

  “I know they don’t kill people because they give them better training,” Cindy said. She’d been studying how fracking and directional drilling worked for weeks—her friend who worked as a driller even used straws one night at a restaurant to demonstrate what happened underground. So she explained to her interviewer the exact mechanics of a fracking operation.

  Afterward, the woman said, “We’d like to offer you the position.”

  Cindy was shocked. “Does this mean I’m Halliburton?”

  “Yes, if you’d like to be Halliburton, I’m offering you that opportunity.”

  “Just like that?” Cindy said.

  She nodded.

  Cindy stood up, slid back her chair, and threw up her arms in celebration. “When do I get my coveralls?”

  The woman laughed and told Cindy she would need to come back for training in April. She had two weeks to go back to Utah and pack up her life. They told her she would be the second woman to work on oil wells in Halliburton’s North Dakota yard.

  28. TOM STAKES

  Two nights after Valentine’s Day in 2014, I saw Tom Stakes at the bar called Hard Ride Saloon near his camper. He had exciting news to share. He had heard from his son Jay. Jay was planning to come to Williston.

  “My son’s gonna come up here!” Tom said. “I talked to ’im today and he said, ‘Only about two more weeks, Dad!’” Jay was living in Gainesville, Georgia, but was struggling to find work and thought he’d have better luck in North Dakota. Tom sat up straighter when he talked about his son, like a proud father. “He’s a good man, got real short red hair. Long sideburns. Oh, he’s awesome. He’s an awesome guy, I tell ya. I love ’im. He’s a third- or fourth-degree black belt. He’s gonna come up here. ’Cause I need some help. I’m gettin’ old.” Tom wanted me to talk to his son.

  He called Jay while I was sitting next to him. “Hey, buddy, what you doin’? Yeah? I want you to talk to somebody,” he said as he handed me the phone.

  I said hello and Jay confirmed what Tom told me. He planned to come to Williston to live with his dad. I said I hoped to meet him soon, then handed the phone back to Tom. Jay told Tom he would take a bus up to Williston the next Monday, but he needed more money for the ticket.

  “Okay, I’ll send you the rest,” Tom told him. “I love ya, son. I’m lookin’ forward to seein’ ya again. And if you need any money, you let me know. I’ll send it to ya. There’s a lotta money to be made up here if you get in the right position. Okay, lookin’ forward to it. I love you so much. Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone. He took out his wallet and pulled out pictures of his sons when they were little boys and showed them to me. Then he ordered another beer.

  * * *

  When I called a few months later, Tom said his son still hadn’t made it to Williston. Jay had been asking for more and more money and continued to delay his move to North Dakota. Jay called Tom about once a week to explain why he needed more money for the trip. One time, Jay claimed he bought his bus ticket and would arrive on May 16. But when Tom went to the bus stop to pick him up, he wasn’t there. When Tom called him, Jay’s reason was that he found more work in Georgia and decided to stay. He told Tom he’d need more money to be able to quit the job and travel there.

  “Son, I can’t keep sendin’ ya money. I got bills to pay. It’s hard enough as it is,” Tom told Jay.

  Jay seemed to understand, but then he stopped calling and didn’t return Tom’s calls. Tom hadn’t heard from his son in nearly a month. “I’ve been tryin’ to call him,” Tom said, “but he’s not answerin’. I don’t know what I did. It’s messed up. I tried to help him.” Tom turned to drinking for comfort.

  Construction work, however, was going well for him. Tom Stakes’s boss, Gary Westerman, had taken a liking to him. A few years ago, Westerman had come from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Williston to seek his own fortune after the recession wiped out construction work in Georgia. “This was the only place with work in most of the nation,” said Westerman. “I came up here with just the clothes on my back.” The first day Stakes showed up for a painting job, Westerman could tell he’d had a hard life, but Stakes’s charm and charisma won him over. Stakes also had decent skills as a painter. Westerman wanted to give him a chance. “I’ve had a soft heart for Tom since day one,” he said. After a few months of employing Stakes, Westerman raised Stakes’s pay to $20 an hour. To celebrate the raise, Stakes went to Walmart to buy an $89 mini DVD player and a bottle of vodka.

  On May 29, 2014, Stakes was arrested again. A cop pulled him over because Stakes’s registration had expired back in November. When the police officer ran his plate, the cop saw his DUI license suspension was still active. Stakes’s 11-month probation was scheduled to end a month later, on June 23. The officer charged him with driving on a suspended license and booked him in the local jail for four days. He slept on a metal bunk bed in a small cell with one other man. According to Stakes, everyone he met had been arrested for more serious crimes—murder, rape, assault. This is a bad place, he thought at the time. Why am I here? On the day of his release, he was issued a $350 fine for violating his suspension.

  Afterward, Stakes moved out of the trailer in Alexander and slept in his truck. Work was more sporadic, and he didn’t want to pay $450 in rent to share a trailer anymore. Plus, the weather was warmer. He wouldn’t freeze to death in his truck.

  But by this time, the Williston Police Department had cracked down on overnight parking in the city limits. Few people were able to stay undetected. Stakes’s friend Eddie Bergeson returned to Williston, and Westerman hired Bergeson as well. Stakes and Bergeson found a place to camp on wildlife management land, tucked away in a grove of trees across the Missouri River. Bergeson was happy to be back with his old buddy, but he was concerned about Stakes’s drinking, which had accelerated since Bergeson last saw him. “Before I left, Tom really wasn’t drinkin’ vodka—he was drinkin’ beer,”
he said. “We’d have a few pitchers at the bar. But when I came back, he’d buy a bottle of vodka and it’d last him maybe two days. He was drinkin’ it straight. I was like, ‘At least put some orange juice in that and get some vitamins out of it!’ I worried about him.” After only a few nights in the tent, a ranger came by in the middle of the night, issued each man a $100 ticket for illegal camping, and told them to vacate the area.

  Westerman let Stakes and Bergeson park their vehicles on the RV lot Westerman rented for $50 a week each at a place north of town called Fox Run. Williston now had four RV parks, but Fox Run had become the town’s largest and most disorganized. It was a sprawling dirt field of 300 campers. Every space filled soon after it opened, and there was now a waiting list. Westerman had been lucky to snag such a coveted space. The park was known for having higher crime rates than the other RV parks, however. In the past few years, a camper was stolen, two campers had burned down, a semi truck driver ran into another trailer and nearly killed a nine-year-old boy, a woman’s dead body was found in a pool of blood in one camper, and five registered sex offenders lived there. Essentially, it had become Williston’s shantytown. Unlike some of the other trailer parks, there were few rules or regulations at Fox Run. Many residents added particle-board mudrooms to their trailers, weeds grew around campers, and a large, overflowing dumpster sat at the park’s entrance. One dweller had raised an American flag high above his camper, and it flapped in the wind.

  A few weeks after he moved to Fox Run, Stakes called me. He sounded hysterical. He wasn’t making much sense, but said his truck had been stolen.

  I asked him to slow down, take a deep breath, and explain what happened.

  A few days before, Westerman had driven him to work, and Stakes had a strange feeling that something was wrong. When he went to a truck stop to buy a sausage breakfast biscuit and milk, the total at the cash register came to $6.66. The man in line behind him said, “Oh, no, you better head home. Somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to you today.” Stakes laughed, but the feeling didn’t go away. He felt anxious for the rest of the workday and took extra caution when walking around the construction site. When he and Westerman returned to the RV park that evening, Stakes’s truck was gone. His neighbor had seen a man drive off with it, and Stakes thought the physical description sounded like an old roommate. He called him, but no one answered.

  Stakes didn’t want to involve the police—he’d been in enough trouble with the cops. He also figured his old roommate was long gone by now, probably in another state. Stakes felt there was nothing he could do.

  Stakes sounded dejected on the phone. He wanted to give up and leave Williston. He was done with this place, he said. He wanted to be with his sons again but still couldn’t reach either of them. “I wanna leave, but I can’t make 20 bucks an hour anywhere else in the country,” he told me. “I’m gonna pay off my tickets, buy a van, work through the summer, and get the hell outta here.”

  Stakes drank heavily the night after his truck was stolen. Since Stakes no longer had a car to stay in, Westerman let him sleep on an old mattress in his van. When the men went downtown to do laundry at Bubba’s Bubbles, Stakes walked across the street to Williston Brewing Company and went on a drinking binge. Stakes said he ordered a prime rib and a couple Long Island iced teas and gulped them down. Westerman told him to rest up and take the next day off.

  “I’ll do better tomorrow, I promise,” Stakes told him.

  But the next day, Stakes wasn’t much better. Westerman could smell alcohol on him and worried he was drunk at work. He knew Stakes was an alcoholic, but Westerman also liked to drink. He’d even share a drink with Stakes after work sometimes. Westerman said he didn’t care what Stakes did at night, but he’d send Stakes home for the day if he smelled alcohol on him at work. That day, Westerman kept a close watch on Stakes to make sure he was getting the job done right. They were remodeling Pierce Auto Body and putting new tin on the outside walls, which required a lot of hammering and precision. Other bosses might have fired Stakes, but Westerman wanted to give him another chance. Westerman drove him back and forth to work every day and stopped by the gas station if Stakes wanted cigarettes or a bite to eat. Stakes wouldn’t stop talking about the theft of his truck. Stakes later admitted that he owed his old roommate money, and he may have stolen the truck as collateral. But whatever the reason, Stakes felt lost without a vehicle. He retreated to Westerman’s van every evening after work and stayed there until morning.

  Soon Westerman needed his van back to store tools, and Stakes had to find another place to stay. Bergeson was also tired of living in his car. They discovered that Westerman’s neighbor had an empty trailer on the other edge of Fox Run. The man offered to sell it to Stakes for $2,500, to be paid in $200 increments. The lot rent was an additional $800 a month, so Bergeson agreed to be Stakes’s roommate and pay $400 toward rent.

  I visited Stakes and Bergeson a few days after they moved in. Their trailer, a Nomad Century from the 1970s or 1980s, was at the edge of the park, overlooking Love’s gas station and not far from where I had lived the previous summer. The trailer had particle board strapped to the side to keep the pipes from freezing in winter. With temperatures regularly dropping to minus 20 degrees during winter months, noninsulated pipes could freeze and burst within 10 minutes. Two-by-fours had been laid on the ground to keep the mud and dust at bay. Debris was scattered about—a discarded cooler, empty Natural Ice beer boxes, a metal chair. As I drove through the camp, a group of children rode bicycles in the dirt and played with toy guns.

  Stakes welcomed me in and I sat on a ratty couch across from him. Bergeson was away taking a shower—the trailer had no running water, so Bergeson typically showered by filling up an empty vodka bottle and pouring water over his head. Stakes preferred to walk to the shower house on the other side of the park. “He’s a big boy, he sweats a lot,” Stakes said of Bergeson. “That’s his bed,” he said, pointing to the couch I sat on. “But he ain’t happy here. I don’t think he’s gonna make it much longer. Pro’lly head to Texas or Mississippi.”

  I asked him why Bergeson wasn’t happy.

  “What’s to love?” Stakes said. “There’s nothin’ here. Jus’ dirt. He come from North Carolina; I come from Georgia. There’s mountains and beautiful trees. There ain’t nothin’ out here. It’s a dirty trailer park and there are no trees. The only thing that’s out here is jobs. That’s it.”

  Stakes had given up on the idea of leaving at the end of summer. He wanted to save up money before he left. So far, he’d only saved a few hundred dollars.

  Stakes wore jeans and an oversized T-shirt with holes in the neck. His long hair had been chopped off—his mustache and beard were trimmed short, making his big ears stick out. He showed off his new look. “My boss said, ‘Tom, you gotta clean up a little bit. I don’t want customers thinking you’re a homeless bum. You can’t work for me if you look like that.’ I said, ‘All right, all right.’ So I got a haircut last week. I felt naked. I was never gonna cut it off but I thought, well, I guess I gotta change,” Stakes said, then coughed and hacked for a long moment. Instead of clearing his throat with water, he grabbed a half-gallon plastic bottle of Silver Wolf Vodka and gulped some down.

  The trailer smelled of cigarettes, dust, booze, and stale A/C air. The fan for the A/C whirred above us, and dishes were piled up in the sink next to empty plastic Mountain Dew bottles and a jug of Red Diamond Sweet Tea. Stained curtains hung haphazardly on the camper’s windows, which were lined with duct tape to prevent air and dust from entering. A bath towel was fastened over one window to keep the light out.

  Stakes sat in an orange 1970s armchair. He held up the vodka bottle and offered me some. I declined. “It’s my drug of choice,” he said, taking a swig. Stakes still hadn’t heard from his son. And work was once again drying up. He was in between jobs. A month ago, he was making $800 a week, but he’d only worked one eight-hour shift this week, earning him $160. The week before, he made $460, and two
weeks ago, $370. “Sometimes I got a thousand bucks in my pocket, sometimes I don’t,” he said. Most of his earnings went to rent and booze.

  Stakes said the trailer’s owner had wanted to sell it because his wife had killed herself inside. He pointed to the couch I was sitting on. “His wife sat right there, and when he got out of bed she had a gun in her hand. BAM!” Stakes yelled, and I jumped. “Killed herself right there.” I followed his finger to the spot he pointed at above the couch, and sure enough, there was a bullet hole in the wall. I felt nauseous and sat closer to the edge of the couch, wanting to be as far away from the gruesome scene as possible.

  “We got her dead ghost runnin’ around here somewhere,” Stakes said. “But she ain’t bothered me yet.”

  Stakes’s roommate, Bergeson, barged through the camper’s rickety door. His thick belly could barely fit through the narrow entrance. Bergeson’s skin was a deep copper after too many hours in the sun, and his hair resembled a mullet. He wore white plastic sunglasses on his head and a beaded choker around his thick neck.

  “There he is!” Stakes said. “You look like a new man!”

  “I don’t look any better but I feel a hell of a lot better,” Bergeson said, his voice gruff and scratchy. He warned us that a storm was coming in tonight from eastern Montana, bringing hail and 70-mile-an-hour winds.

  “Oh, shit,” Stakes said, sounding more excited than concerned. “Want to go out tonight and have a beer?”

  Bergeson leaned back, resting his hand on the rusted kitchen sink. “I don’t know. We went out last night.”

  “Well, hell, this is a new day!” Stakes said. He wanted to go to a local bar called Cattails for karaoke night. Stakes’s old hangout, KK’s Korner bar, had closed soon after Shorty died. “You sang two songs last night. Oh, man, I loved it.”