The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  “So how does this work?” he had asked Jake once. “I mean, if George W. Bush presses speed-dial two on his cell phone does he get you too?”

  “No, Colt, he gets Laura. Or Cheney, probably.”

  “Why don’t I get Cheney?”

  “I hope you’re kidding.”

  Colton made that face.

  “You’re such a freakin’ redneck, you know that?” said Jake.

  “You might be a redneck if,” Colton said, “someone asks to see your ID and you show them your belt buckle. You might be a redneck if…”

  Jake knew this could go on all day. He walked away with his hands over his ears. “I’m not listening to your nonsense, Colt. You’re enough to turn a good man bad.”

  “You might be a redneck if you think ketchup is a vegetable,” shouted Colton.

  “Like the man said, Colt, I’m not listening to you anymore.”

  It was just past four and Jake was driving home from Pinedale to Boulder. If you’d asked him there and then he would have said that, on the whole, things were going surprisingly easily. He was only twenty-three years old, making his way in the oil business. Tonya didn’t have to work, so their two young children were taken care of at home—the way kids should be taken care of. Jake liked his job, he had the weekends off, and worked a regular eight-or nine-hour day instead of those twelve-, eighteen-, twenty-four-hour shifts flow testing, and, as he said, “Not bad for a kid they all said wouldn’t amount to much.”

  Jake’s cell phone rang. Here it was, already dark with that northern winter’s finality, and the snow making crazy tunnels of speed, flying at him along the beams of his headlights, fresh white coming at him from all sides, even, apparently, from some unseen place underground. Jake said, “I’m not answering in this weather,” but then he saw who it was and answered anyway, shouting because reception was always touch-and-go just here. “Colt?”

  “You bolted down?”

  “No, I’m driving. Where are you?”

  “This side of Kemmerer. I got a hitch coming up.”

  “How’s the road down there?”

  “Nothing I ain’t seen before.”

  Jake shook his head. “Man, this is, like, freezing to the other side of the earth.”

  Colt laughed. “Hey, it’s big, beautiful Wyoming.”

  “Yeah, well it sure ain’t Florida.”

  “How’s the family?”

  “Good. Yours?”

  “Good.”

  “Hey, I got to hang up and drive. It’s wild out here.”

  “Keep it on the road.”

  “You too.”

  “Hey Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  But there was silence, that kind of drop-dead silence of a cell phone that’s been bumped out of its range.

  Jake said, “Colt? Colt, you there?” He looked at the screen on his phone. He’d hit the dead spot by the New Fork River. “Freakin’ backwoods,” he told the Upper Green River Valley.

  43

  VALENTINE’S EVENING

  Jake and Tonya

  It’s a perfect house for Jake and Tonya, on the north side of the road from the oil patch—if it weren’t for the way the high plains start off as a bench, they’d be able to see Colton’s red, white, and blue rig from their sitting room. Out back where they plan to build a porch one day, there are views of the Wind River Mountains. There’s a big yard for the kids, a few acres of paddock for the horses, a kennel for Jake’s retrievers, and a chicken coop for the hens. Real estate prices in the Upper Green River Valley have soared since the beginning of this boom. A room in someone’s basement will cost you a thousand dollars a month, the mortgage on a three-bedroom house would set an ordinary man on his ass. But Jake can afford for things to be a bit pricey. And the way he figures it, the cost of housing keeps the riffraff out. Well, except for the meth heads next door with their crummy collection of trailers and broken-down caravans and junked cars, the whole heart-rotted property marked with signs that say private, keep out, and beware of the dog.

  “Sure you got all the air out of that can?” says Tonya.

  “Yeah,” says Jake.

  Tonya frowns. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Tonight Jake and Tonya are up after they’ve put the kids to bed, trying to add to the three months’ store of food they are supposed to have set aside for the end of the world as we know it; “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.” Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have published a whole body of literature on the science and philosophy of food storage. The index of prophetic statements regarding possible plagues for which such storage should be prepared reads like a bad evening of news: war; economic collapse; imminent nuclear fallout; famine.

  A surplus of wheat and out-of-season produce on sale a week earlier at Faler’s General Store on the outskirts of Pinedale—“All the Civilization You Need”—have prompted Tonya to stock up and get up to date with her disaster preparedness. She’d been boiling and peeling all afternoon and the kitchen has a metallic, blood smell to it. Tears of condensation run down the walls by the stove. The Valentine’s roses Jake has bought her are already hanging their heads, as if in tropical exhaustion.

  But Jake doesn’t have his heart into it tonight—neither the end of the world, nor the canning—and he’s ticking Tonya off with his attitude. He keeps going to the window.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. What’s wrong with you?”

  Tonya shakes her head. “Holy cow,” she says. “Hand me those tomatoes.”

  “They’re not ready.”

  “What does a tomato have to do to be ready for the dark?”

  “Do you want exploding tomatoes?”

  “Would you just hand them to me? I know what I’m doing.”

  “Here,” says Jake.

  “You’re making me edgy,” says Tonya.

  Jake goes to the window again. “At least it’s stopped trying to pull the rigs out of the ground,” he says.

  “Is it still snowing?”

  “Nope.”

  And then, at 9:45 p.m., there was a sound that came through the walls of the house, like the wind picking up again, a high howling noise, but it rose and fell so that Tonya puts down the jar she is labeling and she wipes her hands on the apron. “Ambulance?” she asks. “Cops? What’s going on?”

  She goes to the window and stands next to Jake, both of them with their hands cupped against the pane. They watch police cars coming out of the pale nothingness between Pinedale and here, ghostly creatures streaking with their urgent blue/red/white lights in panic mode against the white-winter night.

  “Maybe they’ve come to get the crackheads,” says Jake.

  “Dream on,” says Tonya. The cop cars sail right on past the subdivision with Jake and Tonya’s house and the little methamphetamine triangle next door and keep going out onto the desert. “See, I told you.”

  Then an ambulance, flashing red like a heartbeat monitor onto the white end of the snowstorm, comes rushing past as best it can on the snow-packed roads, following the cops. Then another police car wailing down the lonely white road.

  “Must have been an accident on the rigs,” says Jake.

  “Must be,” says Tonya.

  “Holy crap,” says Jake. “I hate that.”

  “C’mon,” says Tonya. “You’ve got an early start. Let’s finish up and get to bed.”

  They are cleaning up the kitchen when they hear the helicopter.

  Jake looks up. “Somebody got it bad,” he says.

  “Flying on a night like this. Must be serious.”

  “I told you.” Jake scratches the back of his neck. “I told you,” he says.

  “Told me what?”

  “I dunno. Nothing.”

  44

  FREE FALL

  By nine o’clock the storm had taken a corner in the mountains and there was a pause in the weather. The plains looked refreshed by the recent snow, moon-g
lowing under the winter sky. It was ten degrees, the wind barely thinking about it. The men started the shift by taking some drilling survey measurements and Colton was sent under the drilling floor to find a power source for the survey equipment but he came back up to find that the men were looking for a twenty-four-inch wrench to attach the survey equipment. At that moment the well was fresh, only 324 feet deep.

  At around 9:10 Colton was walking around the catwalk for at least the second time in a space of ten or twenty minutes. It has been supposed that he was going to get the wrench. As usual, there should have been rails. As usual, Colton should have been wearing a harness. As usual, there weren’t and he wasn’t and this isn’t recreational exposure. So here’s Colton without a chance to catch himself, slipping through the mouse hole into the cellar, and who knows when the blow comes but at that moment, the great plains become a dark sea and everything that Colton was, is swallowed up in its waves.

  His hard hat and the twenty-four-inch wrench land next to his body.

  It’s nearly nine-thirty by the time the floor hand sees Colton down there, but the light is terrible and the noise from the drilling is drowning out his voice. “Colton!”

  Colton is lying like a comma, a pause, against the cellar floor.

  “Colton! What you doing down there?”

  Colton doesn’t respond.

  “Holy crap,” says the floor hand and hurries up to the drilling floor. “Colton’s hurt! I think Colton’s hurt.”

  The drill hand looks at his watch. “Oh shit,” he says. “What’d he do?”

  “Man, he ain’t moving, he’s in the cellar.”

  “How’d he get there?”

  “By the looks of it, he fell. He ain’t moving.”

  “He ain’t moving?”

  “He ain’t responding at all.”

  “Oh shit, oh shit,” says the drill hand and he’s almost in free fall himself, running down the stairs to the rig and then below that into the rig’s cellar where the cold is metallic in its density.

  45

  JAKE DRIVING ALL DAY

  Jake woke up at three the next morning to get to work. He took a quick shower and looked out the window. The storm from last night had come back with fat, quick flakes, a driving snow, in a hurry to cover itself up. Then the phone rang and Jake said, “What the heck? Who can that be at this freakin’ hour?” He picked the receiver up, “Hello?”

  “Jake?”

  “Yep?”

  “Jake, it’s Shad.”

  “Who?”

  “Merinda Bryant’s boyfriend.”

  Jake felt the blood rushing from his neck. “What’s happened? Who’s been hurt?” he asked.

  “It’s Colton.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He fell off a rig last night.”

  “Holy crap,” said Jake. “Oh please God, holy crap. Is it…Is it?”

  “He’s in the hospital here in Salt Lake. They life-flighted him down last night.”

  Jake felt the floor rush away from him and his knees buckled to catch up with it.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah,” said Jake, “I heard the chopper.”

  “It’s not good, Jake.”

  “I guess not,” said Jake. He held the receiver away from his mouth and retched.

  “The family felt you would want to be here.”

  Jake wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Jake? Jake, you there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m here. I’ll be there.”

  “He’s hanging on but not for much longer.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Jake crawled to the bathroom and held himself over the toilet for a few minutes.

  They drove straight through, from about three-thirty in the morning until noon. The snow was piling down so fast that the road kept shifting shapes under their wheels, but just this side of Big Piney they got behind a snowplow spraying up a tunnel of road behind the crashing rasp of its blade.

  “Holy crap,” said Jake. “Thank you, Heavenly Father.”

  Tonya closed her eyes. In the back, the children slept in their car seats, wrapped up in blankets and tucked under pillows. Jake was crouched up over the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the rear lights of the plow. In this way, they make it through La Barge and past Names Hill where just about everyone from the plains Indians to early explorers to roughnecks from this latest boom have stopped on their way through here to engrave pictures or their names on the red cliffs on the west side of the Green River.

  They followed the snowplow through Kemmerer and by now it was getting light. “Okay,” said Jake. “We’re gonna be okay.”

  Tonya said, “You want me to drive?”

  “I’m fine,” said Jake. And then he started crying. “Holy freakin’ cow.”

  “He’s gonna make it,” said Tonya.

  “Holy Father,” said Jake, “please don’t take him yet. Please, oh holy cow, please.”

  46

  PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING

  By midmorning the safety officer from Patterson-UTI had arrived at the hospital in Salt Lake City. Kaylee, Bill, Tabby, Tony, Merinda, Shad, Preston, his wife Mandi, and Melissa were all sitting in the waiting room next to the intensive care unit. They had not been allowed to see Colton yet—the doctor had said that they needed to try and stabilize the boy first. The family looked up when the stranger walked in. He introduced himself as the Patterson safety hand and then he said, “I can’t believe it. I’ve been up twenty-four hours with another accident and now I got to deal with this bullshit.”

  Bill unfolded himself and stood between the safety hand and Kaylee.

  “I tell you what,” said the safety hand. “I’m gonna take a nap in the car and when I come back we can discuss this situation.”

  Bill nodded.

  The safety officer walked out.

  Tony looked at Shad. “Did you hear that?” he said.

  “What the heck?” Shad said.

  Tabby started crying.

  Tony put his arm over her shoulder. “Take it easy, baby. Take it easy.”

  An hour later the safety officer returned. “Okay,” he said, “I’ve talked to the bosses and here’s what the company’s gonna do for you. The company’s gonna get a hotel room for you. If the boy dies, we can help with the funeral, but we got to get blood and urine outta him and test for drugs. He comes up hot for anything and you ain’t getting nothing.”

  Melissa looked up.

  “It’s okay, girl,” said Bill.

  “Well then,” said the safety hand.

  “He’s not dead,” Melissa cried. “Why are you talking about funerals?”

  Bill put his hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “It’s okay, girl,” he said, “we’ll take care of it.”

  Melissa shook her head. “Colton’s not dead!”

  “Boys,” said Bill, looking around the room at Preston, Tony, and Shad. The men rose to their feet. Bill nodded at the safety officer. “I think we’d better discuss this outside,” he said.

  The safety hand looked from Bill to the boys and back to Bill. “Fair enough.”

  “If you see the doctor,” said Bill to Kaylee, “send him down to the lobby.”

  The four men followed Bill out of the waiting room, into the pastel-wallpapered halls of the hospital, their footfalls muted by grey carpet tile squares. Down in the lobby, Bill squared himself in front of the safety hand. He leaned back on the heels of his cowboy boots and crossed his arms. “That boy,” he said, “is in about the roughest shape a body can be in. He ain’t breathin’ alone, he ain’t pissin’ alone, and he sure as heck don’t have clean blood right now. He’s hot for morphine and stimulants and I don’t even know what else. Now if you take a piss test and scrape some blood outta what little is left in his veins he’s gonna fail the test, isn’t he?”

  “Well,” said the safety officer, “then I guess he won’t get worker’s comp.”

  Tony flipped open a notebook and started to write.

  “And anot
her thing,” said Bill. “As his wife says, our boy ain’t dead yet so I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from mentioning funerals.”

  The safety hand passed a nervous hand over his lips.

  Then there was a long silence, uncomfortable for everyone perhaps except Bill, who had always found silence the easiest place to be. The safety officer glanced at the door once or twice and every time he did Bill shifted slightly.

  Eventually the doctor came down. “I understand there was some request for a drug test,” he said.

  “That’s right,” said the safety hand.

  “I specifically do not grant you the permission to do any such thing,” he said.

  Bill nodded and uncrossed his arms. “Thanks, Doc,” he said. He looked at Preston, Shad, and Tony. “Okay boys, that’s all.” He nodded, turned on his heels, and made his way back to the waiting room.

  47

  TOUGH ANGEL

  By noon Jake and Tonya had arrived with Jake’s parents. The doctor talked to the family and told them that Colton was as comfortable as he could ever be, but that there was nothing more that anyone could do for him. He’d never breathe on his own again. He’d never walk or talk again.

  “What does that mean?” said Melissa. “Does that mean he’s…?”

  The doctor sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and shook his head.

  Melissa sank onto the floor and covered her head with her hands. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.”

  Shortly after that, the nurse came out into the waiting room and sat in one of the empty chairs. Tabby noticed she was wearing a fresh tunic, but there was blood on the cuff of her trousers. “I want to warn you,” she said, “he’s in pretty bad shape. You need to prepare yourself. When he fell off the rig, he must have hit his head on something on the way down. There’s a hole above his eye.” The nurse swallowed and shook her head. “I’m so sorry. It’s a”—she made a fist and showed the family—“it’s a big hole.” She took a deep breath. “And he’s pretty beaten up. I mean he’s black and blue and swollen. You just need to know this before you see him.”