This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “You cared for him, didn’t you?”

  “Mom, I love him.”

  In the cracking of his voice, in the plaintive way he said it, the curiosities fell away and the commonalities moved forward, and Patricia thought that maybe she understood her son in a way she hadn’t before. She’d seen heartbreak. She knew it. She’d endured a slow-motion unfurling of it these past several years with Sam, as active, pulsing love took a secondary position to expedient need and the narcoleptic inertia of the day-to-day. Viewed in abstractions, love is the same thing for everybody. It thrills the same way, and devastates with bloodless efficiency.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am.”

  “I know.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  He sniffed. “No. I just need time and distance. That’s the only cure.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too.”

  She made her move. She stood and she went around the table, coming up behind him. She dropped her chin onto his shoulder and draped him with her arms, and then he was all hers again, a full-grown, whiskered man who was still her little boy. She nuzzled him, the way she would do when he was a toddler, and she would gather him up and say, in that teasing singsong voice, “Be my baby.”

  He covered her hands with his, and they swayed together, and the house swaddled them in silence.

  The New York Times, Saturday, August 1, 2015

  To be sure, maintaining control in Grandview is a more daunting task than it is in most towns of its size. While most of the active drilling in the area known as the Bakken occurs on the North Dakota side of the line, the border town sees the spillover effect. While much of the money goes home with the rig workers—wherever home happens to be—the latent need for a good time often plays out in Grandview’s streets.

  “They spend their money here,” said Sam Kelvig, who owns the Farm and Feed store in town and is a member of the school board and the town council. He’s lived in Grandview his entire life, except for four years spent at the University of Montana. “That’s good, as far as it goes. But things are out of balance, too. If you’re offering a basic sort of salary, like I do, you can just about forget it when there’s oil money just across the border. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on the businesses that have been here a long time. They can’t keep help.

  “But it’s more than that. If you’ve got a family living in a fifth wheel on some rented piece of land, we get those kids in our schools, but we don’t get the tax base that goes along with it. The state will give us a certain amount of money per pupil, but it still puts pressure on the system. Something’s going to have to change.”

  Mr. Kelvig is also the director of the town’s annual celebration known simply as Jamboree. During the third weekend in July, as the town’s inhabitants swelled in number to more than 1,800, tensions between some of the townsfolk and the roughnecks living across the border reportedly spilled over into a downtown brawl. Though there were no official arrests—indeed, the Grandview Police Department still uses a paper ticketing system and has no database of crime information—several residents said the issue was that the oil workers had been committing criminal acts for sport, including the killing of a woman’s dog. Police Chief Underwood referred all questions about the so-called man camp to the McKenzie County (N.D.) Sheriff’s Office, which declined to comment.

  Chief Underwood also declined to go into specifics about the incident downtown.

  “There was some scuffling,” she said. “It was a misunderstanding that flared up, and we got the situation under control. Alcohol, a big crowd, and loud music can be an explosive combination if you’re not prepared for the possibilities, but we were. If I had to write a ticket every time somebody took umbrage with someone else in a bar, I wouldn’t have time for anything else.”

  SATURDAY

  THE CHIEF

  Adair knew what she saw first: Roger Simons came out of the Sloane Hotel itching for a fight, and he got one from the first roughneck he met on the sidewalk. Simons got in a shot—at seventy-three, the old fool should have known better, but he was a hard piece of iron—and the roughneck, Joel Branford, got in the next three before Adair made it across the street and wrestled Simons to the ground while one of the officers up from Billings took down Branford.

  But she heard later from Officer Sakota that it had started a few minutes earlier down at the Double Musky, with Carl Pollard squaring off against a nineteen-year-old rig hand who shouldn’t have even been inside the ropes. Once Adair dealt with more pressing matters, she figured she’d try to deconstruct where the kid got in and who should have stopped him. But that could wait.

  Simons, bloody-mouthed, and Branford sat now before her in her cramped office, with Pollard and another eight men in zip-cuffs out in the hallway waiting to be interrogated, and Adair could feel a doozy of a headache coming on.

  She was getting nowhere with this crew. Simons, who ran about a hundred head of cattle west of town, kept yammering on about “atrocities” and “no-accounts,” and Adair figured he meant Mina’s dog specifically and the oil culture in general, but damned if she could get Simons to say that directly, as he was already neck-deep in a bottle and fading fast. And Branford still had spittle around his mouth from his own outburst there in the office, having turned in the molded plastic chair and kicked at the rancher, swearing so violently and colorfully that Adair had simply tipped his chair over, spilling him to the floor and setting Simons into a round of old-man cackles.

  “You going to shut the hell up for a minute?” Adair said to Branford as she pulled him and the chair up. His hands were behind the back of the chair, cuffed tight.

  “Fuck you,” Branford said, and she dumped him again.

  “You fucking bitch!”

  “Keep talking, kid. You’re just ringing up a bigger bill.”

  That launched Simons into a fresh round of laughter, but Adair short-circuited it by asking him if he wanted to join his friend on the floor.

  “You wouldn’t,” he slurred.

  “Try me.”

  That shut the old fool up.

  Adair dragged a hand through her nest of hair. She figured she could bid farewell to sleep tonight. She and her hired officers had cinched things up tight when the guys from the man camp started showing up just after nine p.m., and the grumbling discontent at the interlopers was more or less quelled for the next few hours. A couple of townies got mouthy and were shown the exit. LaMer and his crew chased down the little irritations that they’d all expected going in—mostly kids trying to get behind the ropes, including one group that made off with a case of beer, a few once-a-year drinkers who couldn’t hold their liquor, and the vomitorium created by the millennials. Adair herself had escorted Alfonso Medeiros out of the Double Musky because he was panhandling patrons in the casino. She walked him over to the taco truck and tried to give him back to Dea, who asked her to put him in the cab and let him sleep it off. Poor Dea. She really loved him, and when he could manage sobriety, Adair had to admit, Alfonso was pretty easy to like.

  “All right,” she said, “if you guys don’t want to cooperate, you can cool your heels in the cell.” She yelled for Officer Sakota, who peeked his head inside the doorway.

  “These two in the cage,” she said. “Make sure they can’t get at each other. And bring me Pollard and the guy he was tangling with.”

  She fell in behind Officer Sakota and the two men as he escorted them down the hall. When they turned right toward the cell, she bore left, into the restroom, and closed the door. She flipped the switch, and the translucent lights flickered on.

  “You look like hell,” she said, gazing at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bagged out again, her skin ashen. Adair never wore makeup on the job—too distracting, too much a reminder that she was somehow different fro
m the men with whom she worked and, more directly, supervised—but she couldn’t help but think a little color would be helpful. When Jamboree is over, she told herself, you’re going to take two days and just sleep. Let Joe and Phil handle it. Two days, nothing but sleep, and then you’re back and better than ever.

  She splashed water on her face, toweled off, then looked again. Better? Marginally.

  When things had gotten hairy, just past midnight and about a half hour before the band was to shut it down and last call would go out, everything happened fast. Adair counted herself lucky that she happened to be watching the door of the Sloane when Simons came stumbling out. She was on the opposite sidewalk, by the Oasis, and she didn’t like the looks of the old rancher. That set her feet to moving, and sure enough, the old fart threw a spastic right hand that caught Branford square. That’s when she heard the Billings officer—Gilluly—yell out her name. She made eye contact with him and pointed at herself, then Simons, and Gilluly nodded and made tracks for Branford. Good teamwork. She’d have to remember to send a commendation to Gilluly’s commanding officer.

  In patching it all together there at the sink, the next thing she remembered was the yelling, up and down the main drag. Once she got Simons under control, she looked up the sidewalk toward the Double Musky. Six deputies had six men on the ground, in various states of submission. She rotated her weight atop Simons—“Jesus Christ,” he’d said, “are you a brick shithouse?”—and saw that LaMer and Sakota had two guys down in front of Pete’s Café. Holy hell, she remembered thinking. The whole joint lost its mind at once.

  Once they’d collected the guys, they’d marched them up the street like a regiment, into the station. Adair had told LaMer to take active charge of the street along with the rent-a-cops. In another half hour, he could send everybody home for the night and shut down the works, at least until tomorrow rolled around.

  “We OK?” she’d said, in a moment when it was just her and Joe.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Star Wars,” he’d said, and then he grinned, and damned if she hadn’t felt all of a sudden like she was ablaze from the crotch up.

  Adair splashed more water on her face. “Don’t go losing focus now,” she told the reflection.

  She shut off the light and stepped back into the hall. Officer Sakota was waiting for her.

  “Carl and that other guy are in there,” he said.

  “Thanks, Phil.”

  “You OK, Adair?” He looked at her funny.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Sakota averted his eyes from her gaze. “Nothing. Just making sure. You look a little flush.”

  She clapped him on the arm. “I’m good. I promise. Long night, getting longer.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Adair moved along, reminding herself to breathe, and chasing herself off the kind of thoughts that would get her in trouble. A big chore, that.

  “Carl Pollard,” she said as she approached the door to her office, “didn’t we talk just a few hours ago about keeping your nose clean?”

  THE MAYOR

  Upstairs at the hotel, Eldrick Sloane’s infernal voice pulled Swarthbeck’s attention out of the card game. And that was too bad, because Swarthbeck had Tut Everly right where he wanted him, stuck in that hard space between a winning hand and Tut’s own grandiose sense of self.

  “Mayor, Adair and one of them deputies got two guys on the ground,” Eldrick said, his voice coming out in a scratchy cough developed in those years before Montana went all pussy and banned smoking in its bars.

  “Unless she’s fucking them, Eldrick, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  “It’s Roger Simons. Don’t know the other one.”

  “In that case, I take it back,” Swarthbeck said. “I don’t want to see anybody fuck that old canker sore.”

  The other players, Lael Rostrom and Gale Grinich, guffawed. They could afford to—they’d dumped their cards. Not Tut Everly. He kept going, and now he was going to pay, and he wasn’t laughing.

  Tut was a degenerate gambler. That was bad enough. He was also as predictable as a John Wayne flick. The mayor had already whittled a grand out of him on earlier hands. Now, before the flop on this one, Tut had come hard with a thousand-dollar bet, and Swarthbeck figured he had double queens. Poor Tut. He always got a boner for those broads, and they gave him blue balls more often than not.

  “Mayor!”

  “Jesus, Eldrick, what is it?” Swarthbeck appreciated the discretion the Sloane’s owner provided for the weekly poker game, not to mention the quiet financial backing of some other projects (not entirely altruistic, Swarthbeck would be quick to point out, as Eldrick Sloane got a 30 percent return while averting the attendant risk). Eldrick had even been downright understanding about the loss of the hooch—a lot more understanding than some of the folks who’d come to town counting on a bottle or five. But even with those good graces considered, Swarthbeck had a limit to how much irritation he was willing to brook.

  “They’re taking some more people out.”

  “So what?” Swarthbeck said. “That’s what happens every year. A few knuckleheads get out of line, and they’re escorted out. Easy-peasy.”

  “OK, smart guy,” Sloane said.

  “You didn’t have that big a breakfast, Eldrick. Watch yourself now.”

  “You ever see ten guys lined up like a damn drill team and marched into the police station?”

  The mayor put down the corners of his hole cards. “Hang on just a second,” he said to Tut, who looked like he’d welcome the respite. Breathe while you can, old friend, Swarthbeck thought. The whirlwind is still rising.

  Swarthbeck joined Eldrick at the window. Sure enough, Adair had the station door open, and puppy-dog Officer Phil Sakota had the braying herd funneled toward it.

  “That,” the mayor said, “is unusual.”

  “I told you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, OK, Eldrick.” Swarthbeck headed back to the table.

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  The mayor took his seat again. “I’m going to win this hand, then I’m going to have a few words with Mr. Everly here, then I’m going to go downstairs and shoot the bull, and then I might just walk over and see what Chief Underwood has going on. Will that be satisfactory?”

  Eldrick, grim-faced, just nodded.

  “And get away from that window,” Swarthbeck said. “I don’t want a play-by-play.”

  The mayor turned out to be a man of his word. The flop didn’t help Tut, but Swarthbeck got the king to go with his king and ace in the hole. Tut had to stay with the bet because he’d bitten off too much, so he tried to chase the mayor off by shoving in everything. Swarthbeck, with stack enough to play, called. At that point, he figured, he had a moral obligation to separate Everly from his money. At the turn came a five that didn’t do anyone any good. Then the river flowed, a useless seven, and Swarthbeck pulled down Tut Everly’s everything, and the game promptly broke up. In the hallway outside, after Eldrick and the others had hoofed it downstairs, Swarthbeck cornered Everly against the wall, alternately sprayed in green and white dots from the big sign outside, and he set down the consequences.

  “That’s fifty grand you’re into me for, Tut,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Three thousand tonight, and the rest—”

  “I know, John.”

  “I can’t carry you anymore.” Here, Swarthbeck moved closer. He liked Tut Everly; he really did. He hated to see it come to this, but he wasn’t about to argue with natural selection. “You understand?”

  Everly nodded.

  “Can you get it?”

  Everly wouldn’t look at him. “Not by Monday.”

  “That’s the date, Tut. You agreed to it.”

  “I know. But I can’t.”

&nb
sp; Swarthbeck inched in again, until he was breathing in Everly’s ear. He spoke in a whisper. “So you go home tonight and you decide what you’re going to tell Marian. You don’t tell her tonight. I don’t want her down here tomorrow, crying to me about what you’ve done. But you’re going to have to tell her. You follow?”

  Everly nodded again. Finally, he looked up at Swarthbeck. His eyes were full.

  “My kids, John.”

  Swarthbeck pulled back and gripped his old friend by the shoulders.

  “You should have thought of them before now,” he said. “Listen, bud. Is Miles Community College that bad?”

  On the street, the mayor found Joe LaMer and got the lowdown. Three or four skirmishes, all of them apparently related to accusations over the dead dog.

  “Good Christ,” Swarthbeck said. “Why didn’t she just throw them out?”

  “She wants to make a statement, John.”

  The mayor mopped his brow. “Yeah, and here’s what that statement is: come to Jamboree and land in jail. Doesn’t exactly look good on a billboard, does it?”

  LaMer shrugged. “She’s hardheaded. She’s smart, too.”

  “There’s smart and then there’s wise. This isn’t wise.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” LaMer said. “She’s pissed about the cleanup this morning.”

  “Big deal. Let her go dig around in the Billings landfill if she’s so interested.”

  Swarthbeck waved LaMer off so the deputy could make sure folks headed for bed, or wherever the next party was. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here and all that. The mayor crossed the street, littered with plastic cups and Indian taco wrappers, and let himself into the police station.

  He spotted Roger Simons sitting in the cage. Other men sat on the floor outside it, all of them bound with zip-cuffs.

  “Hey, Rog, heard you got your ass kicked by a girl.” Simons looked up and mouthed a sarcastic laugh. Blood stained his teeth.