STAGE TWO

STIMULATION

 

The first boom hugged close to the superhighway of the era, the Missouri River. Frenchmen came west from the Great Lakes, or, in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company, down from the north, while a Scotsman working for the Spanish paddled and portaged from the south with his entourage. Empires were staked, proxy wars waged, tribal alliances fought for or purchased in pursuit of the fortune promised from the slaughter of flat-tailed rodents.

The Native people had lived beside the animals for years, fishing the ponds they dammed, studying their industry, taking a certain number of them each year to roast in the skin and feast upon, favoring the tender meat of the tail. But when it was explained by the advance men of the great northwest companies that the pelt alone was currency to acquire guns, powder, knives, axes, kettles, objects of utility and beautification, their harvest intensified, the competition to control the supply and movement of skins suddenly fevered and violent.

In a common method of extraction, young men would climb out over the snow-covered dams to the mounded houses, so similar in shape to the earthen huts of the people the French called the ‘underground Sioux,’ and chop into them from above, killing any winter-plewed adults they found hibernating there, while other men walked the banks, stomping the ground to discover the hollow escape washes dug underneath by the beavers. Drowning or a hard knock on the skull, so as not to damage the fur, were the preferred methods of killing.

With the goad of competitive trade and the fear of nearby enemies being suddenly able to outgun them, hunters now began to skin the creatures and leave the carcasses for scavengers, the kits often killed or left to starve as collateral damage, and it became common to see a beaver missing one of its paws, twisted or chewed off to escape the metal traps that increasingly replaced the deadfalls and surrounds of the Native people. River traffic increased exponentially, some tribes setting up tolls, while easy firewood and edible game receded further and further from the banks.

A number of lucrative support industries flourished during the boom–suppliers of canoes, pirogues, keelboats, traps, guns and powder, trade goods, liquor, women. Certain of the river villages became known for commerce, gambling and prostitution, with the attendant murders, domestic violence, disease, and increase in infants born blind. Some investors from across the great ocean became wealthy in the trade, and a few of the shrewder, or luckier, beaver men on the ground were rewarded for their risk and effort. But more common was the experience of the coureur de bois who braved treacherous rivers, hostile tribes, blizzards, near-starvation, and the rigors of daily life far beyond the sound of church bells, only to return home with a string of canoes piled high with bales of pelts and discover that during his years of absence, fashion had changed in Europe and the price of felted beaver sunk so low the skins barely merited the shipping cost. More than once, in an attempt to counter a surplus and the resulting trade inflation, warehouses in the eastern port towns were ordered emptied, bales of pelts coated with pitch and set fire to, years of bloody striving gone up in acrid flame, the smoke and nauseating odor hanging over the inhabitants for days.

News of fashion, war, and shifts in economy traveled slowly in those days, and so the bust was not abrupt. The trapping around the tributaries of the big river steadily played out, unattended dams deteriorating and ponds draining to leave spongy meadows and bogs, the trade activity moving steadily northward and westward, till in the area later known as Yellow Earth, it was a rare, rare event to stand at dusk and witness the wake of a beaver spreading across the smooth water’s surface.

NINE THOUSAND FEET DOWN, making hole a joint at a time and hoping the weather holds out, warm enough still that only Hurry Upshaw, the driller, and the latest worm, Tuck or Buck or Schmuck– take your pick– are wearing heavy stuff under their rig togs. They’re not into the lower layer of the shale yet so it’s quick drilling, not much more than twenty minutes till the kelly drive is nearly to the deck and it’s time to add to the string, Hurry shutting the mud pumps down and winching the drive up as Ike squeegees sludge off the outside of the pipe with a rolled towel till the kelly-saver sub is clear, Mike steering the breakout tong over to clamp on and kicking in the heavy slips to hold the string steady in the hole and Hurry spins the rotary table to break the connection before lifting the kelly clear for Ike to walk it over to the joint waiting in the mousehole, Mike quickly swabbing dope on pipe threads before Ike clamps the makeup tong on the mousehole pipe and Mike sets the chain, wrapping it just below the box of the joint. Ike guides and Hurry stabs the kelly-saver sub pin into the box, lets a bit of weight press down as Mike throws the chain, whipping around the sub to be immediately pulled taut and the connection torqued solid with cat-line and tongs. Mike and Ike back away with their tools as Hurry hoists the kelly assembly and new joint up into the derrick till the bottom end hangs clear, Ike waltzing it over to the standing pipe and the connection dance is repeated, thread dope, tongs, and chain, the satisfying scrunch of married steel and then Hurry sends the string down again till the kelly bushing is jimmied solid into the rotary table and the bit meets strata and the mud pumps thrum back to life–drilling ahead. Tulsa, the motorman, is helping with cleanup and the hoisting of the next joint from the V-door down into the mousehole, which somebody more competent than the local hire Pluck or Fuck would be doing instead of off dumping hundred-pound sacks of bentonite into the mud flow.

“Fella’s got emergency room written all over him,” said Diz on the guy’s first tour, and Hightower, the tool-pusher, has told them to take it easy on him till he knows his asshole from the annulus, which might just be never. The pretenders before him all left the field with concussions or mashed fingers or that rash that looked like raw hamburger, as if anybody could be fucking allergic to oil base.

But they are making hole and Hurry hasn’t screamed at anybody all morning, and it’s neither cooking them on the metal deck or freezing them with that Canadian dick-shriveler wind they know is coming. The hole is a gassy son of a bitch, of course, one nasty kick while going through the top shale layer that had Hightower on site for half a day reading gauges and Gleason throwing kill mud down the hole, but that’s always a sign the well is likely to pay off. You draw your check the same whether it does or not, but nobody likes humping pipe into a disappointment.

Drilling, even in this soft stuff that cuts so quick, is a pretty relaxed rhythm, entire minutes where there’s nothing weighing a couple tons swinging around trying to decapitate you, time to scratch your nuts or fart or ignore the NO SMOKING signs plastered everywhere. Dizzy has the new worm tending what little is needed with the mud pits, and Hurry won’t invent jobs that don’t need doing like some drillers you could name, while Tulsa keeps all the machinery roaring and screeching. Good rig so far, for one of the better companies. Some of the shit they’ve seen thrown up on this patch looks more like a set for an OSHA disaster tutorial.

Tuck climbs onto the platform, safety mask pulled down around his neck, blinking and coughing.

“Didn’t I tell you not to dump it into the hopper all at once?” says Tulsa.

“Lot of dust.”

“Which you just huffed into your lungs. You take a shit tonight, it’s gonna come out like a hunk of lead.”

“What do I do next?”

Tulsa sighs. This is the fourth roustabout hopeful this month. “You remember where you put that shovel?”

“I do,” says Tuck. He’s not a kid, with good focus, a willingness to work, and no oilfield skills whatsoever.

“You remember which end of it you hold onto?”

Tuck just waits.

“Follow me– we got some trenches need digging over by the tanks.”

Mike and Ike are veteran floorhands, pushing twenty-five, not related though constantly taken for brothers. They hire out as a team, were both wide receivers for their high school teams, which met in the state Class 5A quarterfinals in McAlester, both drive ramped-up GTOs and rarely utter a sentence unrelated to pussy or its many permutations.

“I think we getting close here,” says Mike, eying the few joints of drill pipe left on the rack. “This bitch about to pop.”

“Bout goddam time,” Ike agrees. “We been givin her the shaft most of a week now.”

They are blond, still thin and rangy, dancing around each other and swinging the huge orange tongs in place with never a bump or a stumble, chain flying within inches of Ike’s head when Mike throws it singing around the pipe, imperturbable even wet-tripping in a windstorm.

“Not that I’m complaining,” says Mike, centering the end of the next joint over the mousehole, “but a man gets tired of screwing the same damn patch of ground.”

Tuck tries to remember to bend his knees as he digs. He dragged the new-bought coveralls around the yard a couple times and had Francine wash them without soap the night before he started, but still looked like a model from a Carhartt catalogue when he reported for work. Three days on the job and they look just like the other hands’ gear, dirt and oil ground into the fibers, hanging wet against his skin. The driller hasn’t let him any closer than the edge of the platform yet, so what he’s learned about what goes on there is off shaky You-Tube videos, but he’s starting to get a handle on circulation. He had no idea of the amount of energy involved with forcing fluid in and out of the hole, water thickened with clay and chemicals and who knows what to cool the drill bit and push the cuttings up the outside of the drill pipe and do more mysterious things while it’s down there, a specialist named Gleason consulting data in the doghouse and sampling what flows out from the shaft to determine just what and how much of it to add, a range from weak tea to brownie mix pumped in from the tanks and something similar flushed out into the mud pits to sit till the cuttings have dropped out, the liquid waiting to be refortified and recycled through the system. New water comes in regularly on tanker trucks, and Tuck is clueless as to where it all comes from or where it goes to live when it’s too fucked up to reuse anymore.

Somebody else’s problem.

Tuck’s problem is getting through the tour without wrenching any part of his body so bad he can’t show up the next morning. He’s tried going to bed extra early, lying there trying to discover a joint that doesn’t ache, but even with decent sleep seven-to-seven is a long day, the sheer relentless noise of the whole operation like an assault on his soul.

Tuck stabs and lifts, stabs and lifts, not sure what the ditch he’s digging from here to there is supposed to drain and it’s clear any question he asks at this point will be considered a dumb one. “Pay attention, do what you’re told, and stay the fuck out of the way,” was the extent of his orientation from Hightower, and he is doing his best to follow that advice. Hell, if he was dropped into Francine’s classroom and told to explain North Dakota history he’d be just as lost– every job takes some breaking in. But these oil-patch characters are like a cult, got their own language, their own sense of humor, know what to do before it needs doing. The pay, if he can stick for a month and be taken on as a full-time hand, is through the roof, and he’s never seen guys hungrier for extra hours.

“Food sucks, nothing to fuck, nothing to do,” one of the twin deckhands, Ike or Mike, immune to the charms of Yellow Earth, told him. “If you ain’t asleep you might as well be getting paid.”

Upshaw flushes the hole and shuts the pumps off at something over ten thousand feet and confers with Hightower in the doghouse, the bit cooling to await their decision. Time for lunch. Mike and Ike, Tulsa, Dizzy and the new guy sit on a stack of planking by the pre-mix tank, eating what they’ve brought. The Okies both have steak and cheese sandwiches prepped at the man camp where they’re staying, and decide to fill the worm in on the big picture, passing the baton so quickly that Tuck loses track, if he ever really had it, of which is Ike and which is Mike.

“Your average toolpusher got a lot of decisions to make.”

“There’s finesse involved in the process.”

“–cause out here stimulation happens after drilling–”

“–so you start with your entrance-hole diameter–”

“–which best be able to accommodate the gauge of your tubular–”

“–and then you’d better evaluate the downhole environment–”

“–particularly important if it’s gonna be a deflocculation–”

“–and keep an open mind while you’re still just spudding in, cause the deeper you go, the tighter it gets.”

“–so you just keep screwing away at that bore hole–”

“–controlling your rate of penetration–”

“–unless you’re off dumping into a Golden Throat hopper–”

“–which is a whole nother job description.”

“Always sure to have your BOP–”

“–that’s a blowout preventer–”

“–linked into the process. Don’t wanna spritz off before it’s time–”

“–well-site fluids sloppin all over the place–”

“–and then when you’re coming out the hole–”

“–you’re gonna know, see, whether this deal is gonna proceed to pump–”

“–or it’s just another P and A–”

“–that’s Plugged and Abandoned.”

“Any questions?”

Tuck waits an appropriate beat, deadpan, then asks the difference between a mousehole and a rathole, and they begin to hope he makes it through the week without permanent bodily injury.

Hurry Upshaw comes out from the doghouse to holler that they’ll stop drilling at this depth and send the diagnostics down, so the whole string has to come up.

“Here’s where we find out,” says Ike or Mike to the new guy, “whether we gonna fuck this bitch sideways or not.”

Tripping out. Pipe is flying out of the hole, Ike and Mike twisting off three-joint stands that Dizzy, safety-strapped up in the crow’s nest eighty feet from the rig floor, plucks from the elevators suspended from the top drive and tucks into the monkeyboard fingers, the new man guiding the bottom end, twelve thousand pounds of steel tightly racked into the stand as the string comes up, up, up, Diz leaning out from his belly-buster cable, jerking his head in rhythm to Anthrax blasting from his boombox hung from a derrick strut and loving it, top of the world, a real-life Spiderman pulling down thirty-five smackers an hour. Hurry is an artist with the draw-works and you can’t hear him curse or yell up here, even without the music going, Mike and Ike are double-teaming the connections, and from the top you can see Tulsa over fixing a shale shaker and the north-south highway and two sorry-ass farmhouses and at least eight other rigs in various stages scattered around the horizon. The Bakken is rockin’.

The sky above and the mud below, thinks Dizzy. Rack em up and keep the fluids coming. Hurry Upshaw makes more money and gets to push the buttons and yank the levers, but drillers have to stick with the hole pretty much 24/7 and answer to the toolpusher and the Company and deal with flakes like himself who get off on the circus-act part of the job. Dizzy has only ridden the Geronimo cable down once, during a mandatory safety drill, but it was so much fun he’s tempted to quit the derrick that way all the time. They hit a couple doglegs coming up, something shifted inside the hole that snags a joint, but nothing that doesn’t hoist free. There is a kind of music to the procedure, a rhythm, and it’s always a little bit sad to have to return to Earth. The top of the stack is only swaying a little bit in the wind today, no clouds in sight, and he can’t think of a place he’d rather be. Down time is tough, though, nothing but scruffy deckhands with deep voices shuffling around you in the cafeterias and public rooms, the awkward calls to home, the generic high-plains-nothing of a town if you do bother to drive in. Girls waving their titties at him just make him lonelier, and you don’t want to strap into that derrick climber still wrecked from the night before. But tripping out in decent weather is as good as it gets.

The stands stack up one by one and the sun dips, getting dark earlier now, just a few fingers above the horizon when the cable outfit arrives and starts unloading their gear. Tuck is running on fumes by the time the bottom hole assembly finally comes up, Mike and Ike pulling the drill bit and collar off the bottom of the last stand, barely space left for it in the rack. He teeters on his feet, not comprehending at first as Mike and Ike pass him to leave the platform, as Dizzy starts his descent from the crow’s nest, that this tour is over. He’s survived again. Other men clang up the metal stairs as he wanders toward them and he feels a sudden pang of jealousy.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” shouts Hurry Upshaw to the arriving crew. “Do not fuck up my hole.”

RUBY WISHES IT WASN’T in the Three Nations’ office. Even the casino would have been better, and maybe more appropriate, given the way she feels about Skiles. But as many times as she’s explained to the Chairman how important it is to keep reservation business and his new private venture absolutely separate, he insisted on the signing being on his home court.

“If he was bringing more cash to the table, I might feel different,” Harleigh told her this morning with a wink. “But as it is, a little reminder that we’re not exactly equal partners in this thing isn’t a bad idea.”

She’s laid all the paperwork out on the desk, called Rick McAllen, who is a notary, in from the next room. Two new pens, one black ink, the other blue. The Chairman loves a ceremony, but thank God he hasn’t insisted a photographer be there to immortalize the occasion.

“Articles of Organization, then Operating Agreement, then your Application for Name Registration,” she says. “Three copies each.”

The LLC is Skilldeer, and they’ve chosen ArrowFleet for a trade name. Nice moniker, and Harleigh has proudly showed her the logo. She at least got him to go the limited liability route instead of a straight partnership, convinced him that no, she couldn’t be registered agent for the company, and they’d have to hire a third party off the rez. Tougher to get him to agree to personally pay for her hours on this, twice having to threaten to stand down as counsel for the Nations. “We need a firewall here,” she told him, “cause this has got conflict of interest written all over it.”

Not that the Chairman hasn’t thrown his own money into the tribal pot a few times when the Feds have been slow with payments, not that he hasn’t finally appointed and hired good people to run the casino. It’s just that he doesn’t think white people have to put up with regulations too, that this is all some special form of harassment.

“Lookit all this, Brent,” he says to Skiles, eying the stacks of forms. “Like they heard we got hoop dancers over here and want to see how many they can make us jump through.”

Skiles is wearing what look like expensive workout clothes and is squeezing a tennis ball as if to crush it, constantly switching it from one hand to the other.

“They want that tax money, Chairman. Lord forbid we make a dollar and they don’t get their thirty cents of it.”

Harleigh won’t have to deal with the S-corporation rules at tax time, and if something goes wrong, his ranch, or whatever you call his setup there, and other personal property can’t be attached. It’s all gone so fast she’s only had time to make sure there really is such a person as Brent Skiles, who indeed had a service company in Texas and owns some trucks. She thought of asking Danny to get one of his county sheriff cohorts to do a background check, but it seemed a little aggressive. Just cause she doesn’t like the guy–

Rick is just behind the new partners, crimping next to their signatures with his notary seal.

“Ought to work with one of these,” says Skiles, wiggling the tennis ball. “Does wonders for your grip.”

“His grip is just fine,” says the Chairman. “All that practice pinching pennies.”

Ricky is a CPA and did accounting for the Nations, stepping in twice a day to warn about overruns, before Harleigh shifted him over to Environmental.

There will be a few on the council to wrinkle their noses over this. Rick’s mom, Teresa Crow’s Ghost, for sure, Danny, maybe one of the others not sitting on a deposit. Most of the drivers for ArrowFleet will be enrolled members, of course, and they’ll gas up on the reservation, saving a bit of sales tax. ‘I preach entrepreneurship every damn day of the week,’ the Chairman has told her, ‘the least I can do is provide a good example.’ And yes, the white companies out there wouldn’t blink to cut the same corners. Business is business.

“These go to the secretary of state for processing,” Ruby tells them. “But as soon as your DBA comes through you can at least start making bids.”

Two of the companies drilling on reservation land have already promised to subcontract ArrowFleet for some of their hauling, and she’ll have to ask one of the others to please hire someone else, Phil Enterlodge maybe, to keep up the pretense that there’s competition. The Chairman will never withhold a permit because a driller won’t book his drivers, she’s sure of that, but Skiles makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She’s never run into a wolf in the wild, even back home when she was a girl, but she imagines you get the same edgy feeling.

Harleigh signs his declaration of personal assets, turns to shake with his new partner. Skiles stuffs the tennis ball into the pocket of his track pants and pumps the Chairman’s hand.

“ArrowFleet is on the road!” he crows. “Let’s make history, buddy.”

SUBJECT A, REAR QUADRANT

OB/D (ogling behavior, demonstrative)

Body parts employed: Torso, head, facial features, hands

On departure of acne-scarred but passably nubile teenage waitress, Subject tilts head sideways in exaggerated manner, eyes fixed on hindquarters of aforementioned overworked service person, attempting to bug them out in imitation of gawking cartoon wolf, lips forming the tight circle of a ‘W’ (as in ‘Wowser!’) while flexing both hands forward, fingers and thumb slightly curled as if to cup her callipygian wonders within them to administer a hearty squeeze. Enacted in conscious display for the benefit of Subject’s cohorts.

Subject B, rear quadrant

MG (moronic guffaw)

Body parts employed: Lungs, diaphragm, glottis

Reacting to cohort’s gesture, Subject makes loud, plosive, braying vocalization accompanied by expulsion of minute droplets of popular mass-produced hops beverage that spray well beyond subject grouping to next table, eliciting AS (annoyance stares) from several males.

Subject C, rear quadrant

GF (genital fondling)

Body parts employed: Left hand, package, facial features

Also regarding barely legal hashhouse underling’s posterior, Subject reaches below to briefly palpate entrousered penis and testicles, while narrowing eyes and pursing lips in a ‘wincing’ expression, meant to indicate lustful appreciation rather than pain or discomfort.

Leia only eats at the diner if her spot is available, in the front left corner, back to the room but able to observe it in the mirror. To cut down on hardtail intrusions she always wears her UC Boulder sweatshirt with the hood up, as if the draft from people coming in the door is bothering her. She has not been hit on this much in her life, and considering the sudden male/female imbalance here and the blunt and primal nature of most approaches, it is not flattering.

Subject D, front right quadrant

GC (gesturing with comestibles)

Body parts employed: Hand, arm, vocal apparatus

Subject, in between bites, continually waves uneaten portion of double bison burger, dripping copious gouts of house-special BBQ sauce, simultaneously chewing and vocalizing in an insistent monotone, never returning food item to rest on the plate it was delivered upon.

Subject E, front right quadrant

N (nodding), C (cutting)

Body parts employed: Head, neck, hands, wrists, fingers

Subject nods head in continuous affirmative display, meanwhile manipulating impaling and cutting utensils to divide cooked food item, possibly a ‘chicken fried steak’ (gravy makes specific identification impossible), into smaller and smaller sections.

It is imperative, of course, to distinguish behaviors from mere states, such as the mindless stupor the guy with the frighteningly large belly at the near end of the counter has lapsed into, staring slack-jawed into space over the remnants of his stuffed pork chop and smashed potatoes, exhausted from his shift perhaps, or merely rendered semi-comatose by the energy-sucking process of digestion. And when assembling an ethnogram it is important to avoid rushing to hypothesis without constant and ever more focused observation. Mental snapshots (or in this technologically enhanced age, video recordings) of a subject’s activity, taken at five-minute intervals, must be compared to the field results of other researchers, must be placed within a broader context, before they may be interpreted as typical of a species. Just because the present customers appear to be a herd of belching, loudmouthed, nut-scratching yahoos (as they appeared to be yesterday and the day before and the day before) does not preclude the possibility that some unnatural setting or circumstance has exerted an undue effect, like caged bonobos at the zoo.

Leia picks at her Weight Watchers’ Special, which involves cottage cheese and iceberg lettuce, and writes into the scan sample book at five-minute intervals, hoping the appearance of work and concentration will discourage any roughneck able to see beneath the hood in her reflection and ascertain that yes, she possesses human-like features and a vagina. If the hood comes down they always say something about her streaks, having to do with Cruella De Vil or various woodland animals and leading to they are really sexy and would you like to see my truck? It is illogical, perhaps, to wear your hair in a style not commonly seen locally if your purpose is to remain unnoticed, but perhaps it will eventually work like the coloration of the ladybug (Coccinellidae), whose black spots on shiny red carapace and vile taste mitigate against predation. Stay clear of the one with the yellow stripes, she imagines the verdict, she’ll bite your head off.

But eating alone back in her room or in the rental car has its limits.

Subject F, front left quadrant

OO (obscenity overload)

Body parts employed: Wrist, right index finger, vocal apparatus

Subject, close but only partially visible, spews a colorful and highly detailed vocal account of recent drill rig interactions using curse words as nouns (‘As if I give a shit’), verbs (‘trying to fuck me where it hurts’), adverbs (‘he’s got to be fucking kidding’), adjectives (‘the cocksucking kelly drive’), what the Catholic clergy label ejaculations (‘Holy fucking shit on a shingle!’), and, when euphoniously desirable, as an expletive infixation (‘For-fucking-get about it’), accompanied by an insistent thrusting forward of the right hand index digit toward his cohort. An EPM (expletives per minute) score of twenty-three was registered, twenty-eight if euphemisms such as ‘Hershey highway’ and ‘choking the monkey’ are included.

Subject G, front left quadrant

RG (ruminant grazing)

Body parts employed: Hands, wrists, fingers, maxillary and mandibular musculature

Subject relentlessly chews mouthfuls of coleslaw and chicken fingers (anatomically improbable but ubiquitous on regional menus) with an expression of slight perplexity on his face, as if the over-masticated food might provoke a thought or even a response to his cohort’s obscene screed.

Her room, in a private house formerly occupied by elderly cat-lovers, comes with kitchen and bathroom privileges, a parking spot out back, and a view of the now nonstop traffic on the main road through Yellow Earth. The owner insisted, before the boom exploded, on a one-year lease, which he is now trying to break– smaller rooms are now going for three times the rate. Solo field work is often a challenge, with difficulties of language and culture, inclement weather, local mistrust or even sabotage of long-term studies. But this has been a special kind of hell, what was meant to be a year of quiet observation turned into a kind of furtive survival test at the edge of a combat zone, a bait-and-switch no more expected than finding Bobby Fisher (a Nabib tiger snake and particular favorite of her boyfriend’s) coiled in her underwear drawer back in Boulder.

Then He comes in.

Pretty much true to pattern, ten of two, heading straight to the counter. The height, the walk, the slightly haunted look, the casual but professional glance around the room.

Subject H (for Hunk)

LG (looking good)

Body parts employed: I can’t get past the eyes.

Subject sits on counter stool and removes hat before speaking to waitress (97 per cent of other males present eating with lids still affixed, with the logos of college and professional sports teams, heavy equipment manufacturers, or beer brands most common on their crowns). Swivels to observe room after making order, as previously observed, wearing badge but without gun (more often termed ‘pistol’ or ‘sidearm’ by militaristic local hardtails).

There is always plenty of display in the diner, but so far no overt aggression–punching, biting, clawing, assault with eating utensils– while she has been inside. Maybe he keeps the gun locked in his patrol car, the one she keeps a hopeful eye out for whenever she’s on the road. The one she fantasizes will stop one day as she is watching the coterie, the Sheriff coming over to sit on the hood of her Ford Escape and get to know her.

It doesn’t seem judgmental, his gaze, or censorious, just a mildly interested inventory of the players in the room, always crowded now with pre- and post-shift workers scarfing down their meals and leaving piles of crumpled cash behind, putting the waitresses through twenty questions and tipping big. Leia’s cyberstalking has come up with only a name– Will Crowder– and so far no wife or children, just some mentions as arresting or investigating officer, some high school sports triumphs further back. He looks to be what she hopes is no more than ten or twelve years older than she is, broad at the shoulder, narrow at the hip, and surprisingly soft-spoken, at least the one time she got close enough to hear.

His eyes connect with hers in the mirror for a second, no more than that, then move on. He has a pair of sunglasses hung on his shirt pocket but doesn’t wear them in here, hiding nothing.

The trick with an ethnogram is in dividing up what can be only a partial and possibly random record of behavior into a meaningful pattern, all in an attempt to know the focal organism, to understand how it will likely react in a given situation, to understand its passions and priorities. The most common downfall is, of course, projecting assumed or desired motives onto the individual, what Professor Blake called ‘wishful narrative.’ One must remain alert but detached, observe and record without seeking order or connection.

But he looks like he might be nice.

THE WIND OUTSIDE MAKES the aluminum sides of the data monitoring van boom and pop. One of the techs offers Harleigh a pair of earplugs.

“I’m used to it,” he smiles, holding up a hand.

“Really, put them in,” says the tech, who has his own already in place. “We haven’t started yet.”

It feels more like being in Mission Control for a shuttle launch than anything to do with drilling. Hardhats hanging on pegs on the wall while their owners, wearing communications headsets, sit at data screens droning information to the rig hands outside at the valves and connections, Randy Hardacre standing behind to orchestrate the whole deal. Harleigh’s head nearly touches the ceiling as he crowds back into a spot where he hopes he won’t be in the way.

“Pressure check,” says Randy, and the men at the screens call out numbers for their pump groupings.

Harleigh has been watching the frack spread come together, unavoidable, as it lies between his house and the tribal office in New Center. It was fun to see the progress as the drilling rig was assembled, Harleigh invited to say a few words before they spudded in the first rez well, using the extra-wide bit to cut into the soft ground. The working of the drill string was pretty much what he’d seen in movies– roughnecks building stands of pipe then lowering them into the hole, cranes swinging more pipe around, no way to know if it was going a hundred feet down or two thousand. Then– it seemed like it happened during lunch one day– the rig was gone. Nothing much happened for a week, Harleigh seeing a coyote sniffing around the pad, and then the new armada arriving, first to widen the flat area around the hole, then the positioning of the tanks, and then the water trucks, a steady rumbling procession of them that backed up onto Route 23 from time to time.

Today the spread reminds Harleigh of the painting he has of bull bison standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle to defend their cows and calves from a pack of wolves, only these big beasts are all facing inward toward the wellhead. Dozens of frack pumpers with only inches between them, clustered in a row and backed up to the rear of an identical group, hoses snaking between them. Chemical storage tanks, sand trucks, frack blenders, a phalanx of water tankers, the monitoring van sitting in the lee of some serious tonnage in case something blows loose when the pumpers throw down in unison. Driving up and seeing it he felt like there had to be a rocket somewhere, ready to be blasted off to Mars.

Randy Hardacre frowns at something he is watching on one of the screens.

“Okay, back off, everybody. Bring them down.” He points to a readout. “We’ve got to swap this one out, Larry.”

Larry gets talking with his people outside, and the other techs sit back to wait for the valve to be replaced. The geologist comes over to Harleigh. Harleigh has read all the literature, feels like he’s got a pretty good handle on the process, but must look like he needs some reassuring.

“We’ve got a hell of a lot of protection between your aquifer and our operation here,” says Randy. “Surface casing– that’s steel pipe encased in cement–then production casing inside of that, a couple different diameters with more cement around them.”

“Kind of like a fella wearing three condoms.”

Randy smiles. “And for the same reason. To prevent the migration of fluids.”

“Don’t want any of that. So when you pump the water down–”

“It’s more like a kind of goo by the time we mix everything in to send it down. But yeah, we’ll go through four, five million gallons of water just on this well.”

“And when it comes back up?”

Harleigh has walked around the lined pit they dug for the drilling mud, wondering how long the sludge or whatever will sit there, whether birds will want to land on it or not.

“Well, we recycle it as much as possible. But eventually– ever work in a fast-food joint? You can only dip so many fries into that grease before it gets brown and funky, then you got to throw it out and start with a fresh batch.”

“And what you throw away–”

“We don’t throw anything, not since the mid-’80s. We’ll produce something near a barrel of brine water for every barrel of oil we pull out of here. In Pennsylvania we used to ship it to Ohio, but unless our friends up here in Canada want it–”

“Not likely.”

“It’ll sit in the spoil pond here till we can truck it or pipe it to an injection well.”

“Those Class II jobs that cause all the earthquakes.”

Hardacre gives him a tight smile.

“Seismically not very likely here. You don’t have the granite substrata where it can cause trouble.”

Harleigh shrugs. “Folks keep asking me if something’s going to blow up.”

“Sorry, nothing we do is that dramatic.”

Larry calls over to say they’re ready for a new pressure check, and Hardacre returns to the row of computers.

Harleigh has gone over the injection sites he okayed on the rez with the EPA and the state people and Teresa Crow’s Ghost’s posse, with her son Rick right there, flipping the charts for him. Doesn’t look like anything can go wrong if the Company can just get the stuff there without any spills, but you’d think the reservation ground was Teresa’s backside and anything you put on it or poked into it capable of making her jump. None of the founding spirits– First Coyote or Lone Man or Woman-Who-Never-Dies– bothered to make any electrical power or diesel fuel, but people act like it just magically exists for them to use. The wind, okay, that was set up back in the First Times, but you still got to throw up a row of those giant pinwheel things and run a lot of cable to get anything out of it.

“Let’s bring the pressure up,” says Hardacre to his techs, “nice and easy.”

A noise that is not the prairie wind starts to build then, and Harleigh pushes the rubber plugs into his ears. It grows and grows till it’s like the world’s biggest helicopter has landed on the roof, cranking its rotors and shaking the planet. Randy bends down, pointing to readouts on the various screens, talking close to the ears of the technicians. Then the noise begins to back off, retreating to a constant but bearable level.

“That’s it?” Harleigh says, aware that he is nearly shouting. Hardacre smiles.

“First step. We just cracked that section, now we send in the proppant– we’re using sand on this job, but sometimes it’s little pieces of ceramic.”

“The cracks are only that big?”

“Yeah, but there’s a huge network of them by now. We go back along our horizontal drill shaft, close off a section, blow holes in the pipe for the frack gel to go out and the oil to come back in, working our way back to the vertical hole. The smaller the area we’re hitting, the more pressure we can put on it.”

The racket is building up again, and Randy mimes to Harleigh to cover his ears with his hands. The lady at the clinic in Bismarck who tested his ears said hearing loss at his age was mostly due to shooting guns, listening to rock music, and being around loud machinery. Well now I got all three he thinks as he presses his palms to his ears. He has a picture in his head of the fracturing gel racing down the vertical pipe like a giant fist in an old Popeye cartoon, making a quick undercut loop when it hits the angled tubing and speeds horizontally into WHAM! a block of black shale that shatters like ice under a sledgehammer. And then starts to bleed, oily black blood seeping through every spidery crack until it fills the pipe and starts to rise toward the surface. He’ll ask the Company if they have a cartoon like that he could show to the schoolkids and the worrywarts, one that is clear about just how far under the surface, how far beneath any of their USDW– underground sources of drinking water– the whole operation is.

Granpaw Pete used to tell the creation story about how the First People lived underground and sent somebody up top to take a peek and see how nice it was, but only half of them made the choice to come up and live on top– ‘so remember you got plenty of kin percolating beneath your feet.’ Pete was one of the Storytellers and always had a posse of anthropology students following him around with tape recorders. He said he was at the very last okipa ceremony, remembering torchlight in a big earth lodge and men hanging from cords wedged behind their chest muscles. Or maybe he’d just heard about it. He had a way of looking through you that could give you goosebumps, and was said to have dreamed the flooding of the good land thirty years before the Army Corps of Engineers made it happen.

There is a moaning outside, a wail louder and mournfuller than any he’s ever heard the mighty prairie wind give out. It’s the pumper turbines all going full tilt at once, thinks Harleigh.

Or it’s Granpaw Pete.

“IT’S NOT LIKE I won the lottery, dude,” says Brent. “It is a fucking lottery. There’s just over four hundred elk licenses this year and like twelve thousand guys applying, plus if you’ve struck out before, your name shows up more times– the more years you signed up and whiffed, the better your chances.”

“But you nail it on your first try.” Wayne Lee drives the Camaro like he always does, like it’s a fucking stock car race.

“Not only that, I got an ‘any elk’ tag. Two-thirds of the guys who scored have to whack something without antlers.”

There’s a light rain and some wind, typical funky Dakota weather, but the forecast has it clearing up. Wayne Lee already has the orange vest over his camo outfit.

“So this Okie from Muskogee–”

“He’s from Drumright, west of Tulsa, and he’s looking to stick a dozen wells on the rez.”

“And you want the service contract.”

“At the least,” says Brent. It’s been a bitch setting this all up, feelers out to ranchers in the E 2 unit, non-resident permits for Mutt Miller just in case they run into a game warden with a hard-on, salting the mine far enough ahead of time. He needs Wayne Lee for a buffer, make it all seem like guys just out having fun. “What I want is for Mutt to go away convinced that nothing happens unless I put in the word with Killdeer.”

“So he depends on you.”

“So he sweetens the pot a little. Maybe puts me in for a percentage of one or two of the wells.”

“He’d go for that?”

“Hey, when I told him I got an elk tag he was the one who hinted he’d like to be the trigger man.”

“Not a stranger to a little larceny.”

“More of an old-fashioned wildcatter than a corporate type. You’ll like him.”

Mutt Miller is parked by the post office across from the Catholic church in Grassy Butte, pretty much all there is to the town. Wayne Lee swings in and honks lightly, pausing a moment for Mutt to get back into his crystal red Caddy DTS and follow them to the ranch.

“Give the guy a break,” Brent says to Wayne Lee. “Keep it under eighty.”

“My only problem with this state is not enough curves.” Wayne Lee glances at the speedometer, probably for the second time in his life. “That and the weather and the food and that there’s nothing to do and not enough women.”

“You ever been to Oklahoma?”

“Arrested in Okie City for a bar fight.”

“Maybe keep that one under your hat.”

They swing over and up past Medicine Hole, then hook left onto Gap Road. The rain stops, and by the time they pull off by the east gate into Jesse Gilmore’s place there’s a bit of early-morning sun peeking through the clouds.

Mutt looks like a catalog ad, wearing Bone Collector camos new-bought from Scheel’s in Bismarck, silver hair curling out from under an Oklahoma Thunder gimme cap. He looks like some actor Brent can’t remember the name of, played a lot of generals.

“Fellas.”

“Looks like a good day for it, Mutt. This is my buddy, Wayne Lee.”

The men shake hands and Mutt pops his trunk open with the remote on his key ring.

“What you pack for me, Brent?”

“Remington 700 with a Leupold variable scope,” says Brent, lifting the case out of the bed of the pickup. “Shoots a thirty-ought-six.”

“So I’ll be good for what distance?”

“It’s a tack-driver from way out, but I wouldn’t try anything past four hundred yards. Tracking wounded elk is an acquired taste.”

“That you never acquired.”

“Exactly.” Growing up, Brent always had the Marines in the back of his mind, but his second state jail felony nixed that option before he got properly motivated to sign up. He’s read the Corps training manuals though, put himself through an equivalent to Basic without the top sergeant growling in his ear, and feels like he could do pretty well anywhere you dropped him on the globe with a canteen, decent rifle, and K-bar knife. Mutt, on the other hand, brags about shooting wolves from a helicopter up in Alaska.

“Pull your tailgate, down, Wayne Lee,” the old boy says, “I need to show you fellas something.”

It is a muzzleloader, a Knight Mountaineer, that he lays out with great reverence.

“Damn,” says Wayne Lee, “we’re heading out with Jeremiah Johnson!”

“He used an old Hawken, and this here’s an inline job.” Mutt spreads all the loading gear out on a blanket. “I’d like to do it traditional, flintlock or cap-and-ball, but those old grizzly hunters had too many misfires.”

“Inline or not, we’ll have to get awful close to put a bull elk on the ground with black powder,” says Brent, as if getting close will be a problem.

“That’s the sport of it,” says Mutt, tamping powder down the barrel with the rod. “It’s all about the stalking.”

He pushes the bullet into a sabot and rams it down, makes sure the safety is screwed out. The cap will go in at the last moment, so you can carry it loaded. Mutt pulls some Saran Wrap over the muzzle and fastens it down with a rubber band. “In case it rains again.”

“Keep your powder dry,” says Wayne Lee, who has never hunted in his life.

“Keep your powder dry and your nose to the wind,” sings Mutt.

The idea is for Brent to carry the center-fire rifle and Mutt his muzzleloader, pretending that he and Wayne are only along with Brent as spotters. They both hang binoculars over their necks while Brent unlocks the gate and pulls it open.

“Gentlemen,” he says, “let’s go harvest a monster.”

“Harvest, hell.” Mutt carries the Knight without a sling. “I’monna kill the sum– bitch.”

Jesse Gilmore has provided Brent with a map of the property, a hundred twenty acres of it okayed for hunt-through. Brent has planned for a bit of hill and dale that will bring them to lunchtime before he heads straight to the spot where the animals are supposed to be hanging. He’s got dinner reservations at the hotel in Yellow Earth and does enough cross-country in his workout.

“Rancher says we’ll need to go in a ways before there’s likely to be any action, so it won’t be silent running right yet.”

The game people schedule a couple informational meetings for tag winners, public invited, and he met Jesse there, bearded dude with a help-I’m-drowning look in his eye. The spread belongs to his parents, who are in Florida for the winter, and it turns out he got paranoid about flyovers while doing prescription drugs one night and burnt down his own patch of home-grown and quite a bit of innocent ground cover while he was at it. Happy, then, to take product rather than cash for the whole setup.

“You try for a tag too, young man?” Mutt asks Wayne Lee.

“No sir. Only way I’d ever get an elk is to chase one over a cliff on my dirt bike.”

“Not very sporting.”

“Try it some time. There’s never a good high cliff around when you need one.”

“You work with Brent?”

Wayne Lee nods. “Dispatch vehicles, fill in as a driver when needed.”

“You look like you’re in good shape. Rig workers make a lot more than drivers.”

“Skating up on that platform in a seventy-mile-an-hour gale with a half-dozen pieces of equipment that can knock your brains out swinging around.”

The oilman smiles. “It can get a little hairy, now and then. That’s the fun of it. I done some roughnecking when I was your age.”

“And still got all your arms and legs.”

“Been electrocuted twice, which I don’t recommend, but other than that it was an excellent learning experience.”

They come over a rise and see a stand of trees ahead, a creek running behind them. Jesse warned that there’d be some beef cattle wandering around, not cold enough yet for them all to be gathered at the pens, and so far a couple rabbits and a pheasant have flushed out ahead of them. It all looks pretty much the same in every direction, flattish and yellow-brown, and Brent understands why Jesse might want to alter his consciousness on a regular basis. He said he’d been married and living in Rapid, but that had turned into a real disaster and he needed a little porch time to get his head together. Weed smokers always have a plan– the fuzzier the better.

“Brent asked the chief about hunting on his reservation,” says Wayne Lee, opening his end of the pitch. “But they only get two tags a season. Can you imagine that? All those Indians– Native Americans, whatever– and only two of them allowed to bag an elk.”

“Wapiti,” says Mutt, putting the accent on the first syllable. “The proper name is wapiti, from the Shawnee word for ‘white butt.’”

“And you don’t have em in Oklahoma.”

“We’re lousy with elk. Indians too.”

“No shit. I thought you’d just have a lot of jackrabbits, like Texas.”

“We even got a couple mountains, you look hard enough.” Mutt calls up to Brent, who is playing the pathfinder today. “You ask the chief about that thing I mentioned?”

“He said it’s under consideration.”

“A moody bunch, those redskins,” says Wayne Lee, trying to help out. “But Brent plays the chief like a violin.”

“I’m a quarter Cherokee myself.”

Wayne Lee stops to look Mutt over. “Yeah? Which quarter?”

Mutt laughs. The great thing about Wayne Lee is that he seems like more of a lightweight than he really is. At least when he’s straight.

“The thing with Killdeer is he doesn’t like to be pushed,” says Brent. “You can bring him around, but it takes some finessing.”

“My outfit’s got a whole pile of finesse sitting in the bank.”

Brent’s turn to laugh. He’s right about this guy– not afraid to push the envelope here and there.

“The thing about elected officials,” he says, “whether you’re talking Washington DC or the Three Nations, is they always got to have deniability. So maybe it’s a favor that gets done for a third party who the official owes for something else, and the chain of evidence is impossible to establish.”

“You been watching cop shows.”

“I been working at the edge of oil and gas for a number of years. Seen how laws get passed, how other laws get enforced selectively.”

“I’m sure we’re gonna be able to work something out.”

Which means Mutt has talked as much business as he wants to for the day.

“What’s the biggest thing you ever put down?” asks Wayne Lee, picking up the vibe.

“Brahma bull,” says Mutt. “Must of gone two thousand pounds easy.”

“He got a disease or what?”

“Broken leg. A little rodeo at Guthrie, I was buddies with the vet, and he give me the honors. Got a thick skull, your brahma, so I put one through his eye.”

“How was the rider?”

Mutt considers as he strolls with the muzzleloader held low. “Well– we didn’t have to shoot him.”

Mutt, it turns out, is not in terrific stalking shape, so Brent calls lunch a half hour earlier than he planned. The trick to the white hunter thing is to give the client the feel of a chase even if the trophy is a cripple that never wanders from the same half-acre patch of terrain. He’s stopped several times in good downwind positions to have them glass the surroundings, started to whisper and signal instead of talking out loud. They sit on a shelf of rock on top of a middling ridge, the sun countering the nip of the wind, and eat the sandwiches Wayne Lee bought at the Supervalu in Watford City. Mutt drinks two beers and takes his boots off.

“Haven’t had time to break these in,” he says. “Left all my usual gear back home.”

“I lived in Colorado, I used to break in new boots for other people. Had my flyer on the info wall at REI.”

Mutt looks at Wayne Lee’s feet. “What are you–?”

“An eleven. But I could go a size smaller or two bigger, just pull on more pairs of socks.”

“Pay worth the blisters?”

“Not bad, considering you just go about whatever you were up to anyway. And it was easier on the nerves than my previous employment.”

“Which was–?”

“Pharmaceutical escort service.”

“He means a drug mule,” says Brent.

“I had a regular truck run going from McAllen to Monterrey and back. Took on some extra cargo.”

“He was young and stupid,” Brent interjects, not wanting Wayne Lee to get bragging on their shared history. “Now he’s just stupid.”

“The thing is, I was never uptight crossing the border. But making the pickup and paying off– damn. Lots of crazy pistoleros down there, looking for an easy score. You ever been?”

“Got enough Mexicans back home. Seems like everywhere there used to be a Chinese restaurant now it’s Burritoville. Stuff don’t agree with me like the chop suey did.”

“Too spicy?”

“Binds me up. Alla that cheese.”

“They go a lot lighter on the cheese south of the border.”

“I’ll trust your word on that.”

Mutt looks all around, nothing moving but weeds in the wind. “It ain’t pretty,” he says, “but there sure is a lot of it.”

“You should check out Teddy Roosevelt Park while you’re up here,” says Brent. “Got some variety to the landscape.”

“But no hunting.”

“Oh, there’s a load of elk get shot over there, just not by hunters. The staff and a few volunteers culled a couple hundred out of the herd, a lot of them females and juveniles, just a couple weeks ago. Ecological balance or some shit like that.”

“Park rangers shooting wapiti.”

“They get used to tourists so they’re not people-shy. You can walk up and shoot most of them from a couple yards away.”

“Execution style.”

“I guess the meat goes to charities, once its been checked for the wasting disease.”

“Probably the healthiest thing those people eat all year,” says Mutt. “I saw a fella at the Cenex in Tioga the other day, Native guy, trade his food stamps in for Pringles and Little Debbie Donut Sticks.”

“The white man killed their buffalo,” says Wayne Lee, his face solemn, “but at least he brought them reconstituted potato flakes.”

Mutt goes to take a leak then, and Brent scoots closer to strategize.

“Should be only fifteen, twenty minutes from here,” he says, keeping his voice low. “I got no idea if this guy can shoot or he expects to take the elk out with his breath, so be ready for anything. If you see the herd with your glass give me the nod so I can be the first to spot it.”

“Brent Skiles, master of the bush.”

“That’s the idea. He wants to negotiate with the game, he’s got to go through me.”

Mutt comes back then, face a little red from the beer or the pissing, and picks up the Knight.

“Onward, gentlemen,” he announces. “I hear the call of the wild.”

Technically it’s against NDGF rules to provision or bait anything you’re hunting, but they cut a lot of slack to private property owners. Jesse says he’s been laying out elk candy for two weeks, and sure enough, there’s a small herd in front of the gappy thicket of trees right where he made the X on the map.

Brent comes to a sudden halt, claiming to have a ‘feeling’ before he lays out on his belly with the field glasses to his eyes. Mutt is already putting the cap into the muzzleloader, screwing the safety to off, as if they’re only seconds away from the moment of truth.

“Check em out,” Brent whispers, handing the binoculars over. He exchanges a look with Wayne Lee while Mutt scans the herd.

“I see three bulls,” says Mutt, louder than he probably should. “Awful nice racks on them.”

“There’s a six-by-six looks to be in charge. That’s who we want to go for.”

Mutt brings the binoculars down. “You bring a caller?”

“Nope, but Wayne Lee does a pretty good cow-in-estrus.”

Mutt grins.

“Bugling won’t do us much good when they’re on their feed like that. We’ll just keep low and work our way closer.”

Wayne Lee carries the muzzleloader, giving Mutt both hands to steady himself with, managing to get his head low while his butt remains stuck up in the air. They ease from clumps of bunchgrass to a sprouting of chokecherry bushes, laying down to glass the spot and be sure the herd hasn’t moved. Mutt has begun to sweat and breathe hard, and Brent wonders if his heart is okay. They’re two football fields away when the cover gives out, nothing a chipmunk could hide behind left between them and the browsing animals. Wayne Lee looks like he’s gotten excited about the hunt, golden eyes big and shiny, always up for anything that feels like you shouldn’t be doing it. The whispering helps.

“We can try to move around to the left and risk spooking them,” Brent whispers, “to get you a shot with the Knight. Or we can stay back here and hit him with the Remington.”

The muzzleloader has iron sights on it, Daniel Boone style, and Brent doubts Mutt can hit anything past fifty yards. Mutt adjusts his binoculars, takes another gander.

“It looks awful far away. Even for the Remington.”

All hat and no cattle, as his cellmate in the Hightower Unit used to say. Brent guesses that Mutt is more exhausted than nervous, that it’s been a long, long while since he’s had to climb up on a drilling platform.

“Tell you what,” he says. “See that mess of chokecherry over there? High enough for you to get up on one knee for a good shot. We’ll move over there and dig in while Wayne Lee works around to the other side of those woods, make a little noise– just a little– and see if he can goose that herd a little closer to us.”

“You gonna be shooting in my direction?” Wayne Lee is fearless to the point of stupidity, but this is not his world.

“Find yourself a nice thick hunk of elm and stay behind it.”

Wayne Lee moves off first, and Brent is relieved to see he’s taken the muzzleloader with him, not just to keep it from getting underfoot but because Mutt packed enough black powder in it to re-sink the Maine and he doesn’t want to be anywhere near when it goes off. He carries the Remington and Mutt follows him, on hands and knees, to the edge of the little cluster of chokecherry, growing about four feet high but insubstantial enough to see through easily.

“Get the feel of this baby,” Brent says, making sure the safety is on and giving the Remington to Mutt. Mutt brings it up, points it at the herd, squints through the sight.

“My guy is blocked by a couple of the young skinheads.”

“If Wayne Lee can flush them, he’ll come clear.”

“He’s sure taller than the other sumbitches.”

The big bull is raking his antlers against the bark of a tree, the sound coming, faintly, after the sight of it, like dialogue in a dubbed kung fu movie. Mutt is breathing shallow and fast through his mouth, and Brent wonders what he’s killed besides a crippled rodeo bull at point-blank range.

“The Plains Indians,” he says, hoping to calm the man, “would bury themselves in whatever the ground cover was and wait from sunup till sundown for their game, if that’s what it took.”

Mutt’s shoulders relax a little. Better if he shoots and misses than if he hits it where it can’t kill. Days getting short this time of year, tracking will be shit pretty soon.

“Must have had their cell phones on vibrate.”

Still in a good mood. Tranquilizers in the elk bait, thinks Brent, that’s what we needed here.

Mutt, waiting comfortably on one knee, has just laid the rifle carefully on the ground beside him when there is a distant explosion and the herd scatters. They are in ten different places, all of them out of range if not out of sight, by the time Brent gets the field glasses up.

“What the fuck?”

Then Wayne Lee steps out from the woods and waves his hat. Not in triumph.

It is another huge bull, tongue out, head skewed sideways with its antlers jammed against the bole of a tree, hair at the base of its neck column slick with blood.

“I was just coming in here,” says Wayne Lee, his voice still a little shaky, “and I run right into it. Like, it could have gored me with those prongs.”

“You were walking with your finger on the trigger.” Brent has the Remington in hand now, making sure Mutt doesn’t shoot his idiot friend with it.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then how did it get there?”

Wayne Lee looks like he’s trying to recreate the moment in his head. “Self-defense?”

“I shouldn’t have left the safety off,” says Mutt. It is a statement, not an apology.

Brent tears the appropriate month and day from the tag provided with his license and fixes it to an antler with the rubber band holding the remnants of blasted Saran Wrap at the tip of the muzzleloader. He thinks he can see black powder burns on the huge animal’s chest. Make a note not to do any armed bank robberies with Wayne Lee Hickey.

“There’s still pretty much light– you think those other ones went far away?” Wayne Lee knows he has fucked the pooch six ways from Sunday and is wearing his best innocent-little-boy look.

“You know why they call it a once-in-a-lifetime license?”

“Oh. Right.”

“It doesn’t refer to the elk’s lifetime,” adds Mutt, who has squatted down to look in the glazed eye, tilting his head this way and that like he’s searching for his reflection.

“What do we do now?” Wayne Lee staring at the dead bull with something like awe. Like he might have to bury it.

“Mutt and I,” says Brent, standing up, “are going to walk the ten minutes to the ranch house and have a drink or three. While you,” and here he unsheathes his Outdoor Edge skinner and hands it to Wayne Lee, “are going to stay here with the kill.”

Wayne Lee looks at the knife in his hand. “You want me to, like, gut it or something?”

“Just sit here with it. If a pack of coyotes or a bear shows up, use that to cut your throat.”

MOST OF THE OILFIELD songs are country, which don’t do a thing for your dick. Even when the lyrics are racy, it feels like that top button is always snapped, like it hurts to have those words come out of the same mouth that honors God and Mama and the Red, White, and Blue. Even rockabilly, which has some backbeat to it, doesn’t work on the pole. And most of these young ones out on the rigs now are metalheads anyway– if sound was drugs they’d be blasting meth into their ears all day long.

She’s hot, can’t stop, up on stage doing shots

Theory of a Deadman on the attack, Jewelle goes up and down the chrome like a squirrel in heat, what Unique calls the aerobic part of her act, as the mud men and valve jockeys and tool pushers up at the rack whoop and wave paper money in the air.

Grab her ass, actin tough
Mess with her, she’ll fuck you up

The trickiest thing about the outfit was figuring out how to keep the hard-hat from falling off when you’re hanging upside down. She’s simplified the routine over the years, though guys down from Wasilla say the marital aids on the tool belt are still a legend. Jewelle leaps into a front hook spin, then slides down, down, down into a wide-leg squat that becomes a split, showing them almost everything.

You know what she is, no doubt about it
She’s a bad bad girlfriend

She slow-motion dives onto the floor now, dragging her crotch like it’s on fire and she has to rub out the flames and it hurts so good. They have the nipple law here in North Dakota, meaning only the little bump itself has to stay hidden. Jewelle uses a pair of butterfly bandages, careful to make an X and not a cross, on each, and they come off easy with a little baby oil and don’t cause a rash. She leaves the one-dollar offerings lying for now and crawls forward for titty tips– the regulars know to flash the denominations so she can see them before she’ll go squeezing anything between her boobies. There are so many men in the club these days it’s gotten pretty competitive, and she’ll panther-slink right on past a line of fivers to trap a twenty or a fifty. There hasn’t been any cheating yet, like that awful month back in Anchorage when the good three-color printers hit town and guys thought it was funny to stuff counterfeit bills in your panties. Jewelle loves the feeling of the bass line throbbing up through the boards when she slithers across the stage, easing her into the Zone that makes the whole deal bearable, at least for her twenty minutes out front. The strobe lights are good too, with what’s staring up at you never something you want to take a long, cold look at, and the free-form nature of her pole routine, songs in different tempos–never putting her couple dozen moves together in exactly the same way– keeps it in the moment instead of seeming canned. Until it’s time to collect the tips she doesn’t really focus her eyes at all, trying for what Mr. Tanaka at the dojo calls mushin, willing the drillers and Vic and Unique and Oxana and Yellow Earth and all the huge, gouging machines out there on the high prairie away and just becoming the music and the movement. Leaving the state of North Dakota for the state of No Mind.

But the final crawl is prelude to the next hour’s action and you have to pay attention. Tuck’s sweet, dopey, just-shaven face is the last thing Jewelle sees as her music fades, pushing her elbows in to hold her breasts around his fingers for an extra long moment and giving him The Look before backing away with the twenty on board. Tuck is the gentleman in mind when Vic added ‘A Gentlemen’s Club’ on the awning and spiffed up the VIP Room, promising the kind of hassle-to-profit ratio you’re always hoping for whether you date or keep it all in the club.

Jewelle casually sweeps up her singles, smiling and greeting some of the rack rabbits as Eddie comes up on the sound system, asking for the boys to show her a little more love. Whoops, applause, some more grudging Washingtons thrown in her path. DJs are a new wrinkle Vic has added since the Bakken patch started to really percolate, replacing the need to slip your own CD in the player behind the bar and hustle to beat your music to the stage. But now Eddie can cross-fade songs, cutting them short when there are lots of laps waiting for a workout, and any guy who brings a stopwatch into a club will have his ticket punched. Jewelle dumps the tips, loose and uncounted, into her lunchbox, snaps it shut and pushes into her floor shoes. Sultana is on now, one of the new girls, who is paying Vic well over a hundred a night just to work his spot and still kicking a piece of her lap dance revenue back into the staff pool. No complaints though, not with the place running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, with a seemingly inexhaustible flow of oil workers dying to spill their pay for a little gab and grind.

He usually hangs back for a while, Tuck, while she does two or three table dances, monitoring the action from a distance but not in a creepy way. Some guys just like to watch, okay for the house with cover charge and drinks, but nobody a girl should waste her time on. Tuck just takes his time.

“I’m all yours, darling,” says a hefty guy with a walrus mustache, spreading his arms out wide. Jewelle gives him The Smile.

“What’s your name, handsome?”

“Chester.”

“I’ve had my eye on you, Chester. Grab the loops and we’ll get it on.”

Vic has put these handles that come off of health club machines onto all the chairs, something for the boys to hold onto while their zippers are getting polished, and keeping the really little ones from sliding out from under you.

Sultana’s music is way too techno to keep up with, so Jewelle leaves out the dance part of the deal and just begins to writhe, snakelike, rubbing her tits and belly against his front fat till his damn Bucking Bronco belt buckle pops out from his gut roll and she has to retreat, twisting around to ride em cowboy with her cheeks a while before finishing with the butt shiver she learned from Marvelous Marvella in Reno. Sultana’s songs top out around two and a half minutes, so even though Chester gives her a swat on the backside as she hops off, it’s a good quick twenty. She passes on a table of gesturing guys who’ve just climbed off the deck without changing, like she’s going to park her bare bottom on their sweat, dirt, and oil, and instead throws an arm from behind around the neck of a guy in geek glasses, who looks like he reads seismic charts all day, sitting with another guy who could be his twin. She pushes her bumpers up so one rests on each of his shoulders and whispers hot into his ear.

“Give a girl a ride?”

“How much is it?”

He’s pushed his chair out from the table to make room, so she’s been invited.

“Twenty for a song.”

“With this stuff I can’t tell where one stops and the next starts.”

She swings around and mounts him, sliding her fingers gently down his arms and placing his hands on the seat loops. “Neither can I, honey. I’ll just go till you make me tingle.”

She starts moving and before she can ask the ride his name, his twin, bending his head sideways to get a better view, pipes up.

“I had one in Houston,” he says, “biggest rack you ever seen. I think they were real, too. Some kind of Mexican.”

“This one’s nice,” says her guy.

Sometimes it’s shyness, sometimes they’re just rude, but fine, you don’t have to come up with any patter.

“Andy says that in Toronto you can touch them wherever you want.”

“For like, the same amount?”

“Yeah, but it’s– you know– Canadian money.”

Jewelle wriggles close and hits his lenses with hot breath, steaming them up.

“I can’t see.”

“Yeah, but do you feel this, baby?”

“And then in Mexico,” the twin continues, “like in TJ? They’re all for sale.”

“Andy worked in Mexico?”

“Nah, just a weekend trip. If I had my choice, I’d go to Thailand.”

“No tits to speak of, those girls.”

“But they know how to treat a man. I had one of those massages once, like just rubbing the muscles without any extras, and it got me so hard I nearly lifted off the table.”

“A cultural thing. Like trained to be subservient.”

“Yeah. I had one in Oklahoma once, from somewhere else over there, Southeast Asia, said she came off one out of every three dances.”

“All night long?”

“That’s what she told me. She had those nipple piercings– kinda scary– and tattoos everywhere.”

“You don’t have any tats,” says her guy, pushing his crotch up.

“I’m an ink virgin,” she says leaning back. There’s talk of building a sport complex here in Yellow Earth but for now she has to do her ab crunches in the tiny living room of the rental house, with Unique and Misty stepping over her to get to the kitchenette. Jewelle got here early enough in the boom to snag a motel room, but then one of the maids got a look at her work gear and ratted to the management, some kind of Christians, and they put her out. Like suitcases crammed with her stuff and out in the street. The house is expensive and too small for the three of them but you can park behind it so guys who scope out your car have a harder time stalking.

She braces her hands on his shoulders and does a belly-dancer roll. “Plus the drawings are so beautiful these days, I could never make my mind up.”

She’s the only dancer here who doesn’t have at least a tramp stamp or a little something on the ankle. She went overboard on her first implant and has downsized since then, wincing in sympathy every time Unique lets her DDs spill out, what the criminal who owned the first club she ever worked in used to call ‘sweater meat.’ That shit catches up with you, healthwise, and right now only her knees are a problem. Somewhere else she might go for a skateboarder theme and work some kneepads into the act, but guys here can’t get enough of the oil worker stuff. “Here’s a gal who’s set off more gushers than ExxonMobil–” Eddie shouts for the intro, and they holler and stamp their feet. “Got to push a lot of pipe to make Miss Jewelle pay off!”

“I hear they just got a new batch next door,” says the twin, and Jewelle decides the song is over, leaning close to thank her guy and pluck a twenty from the wad in his shirt pocket. Another girl might have had something smart to say, but snappy comebacks to clueless guys never make you anything extra. Tuck is waiting for her.

“Miss Jewelle,” he always says, obviously liking the sound of it, “you think I could tempt you into the other room?”

She takes his arm, leans up against him. “Aw, baby, I thought you’d never ask.”

There’s an art to bringing a good payer like Tuck along. It’s all fantasy, of course, even in hard-core porn you’ve got your space vixens and horny genies and love-potion plots, but in the VIP Room the fantasy is that it’s real, that only state laws, cruel fate, and a wide-awake bouncer are preventing your perfect union.

Tuck shells out the entry fee and leads her through the beaded curtain, holding her hand, then Scorch, buzzed from the floor, opens the soundproof door. It was a storage room for liquor when Jewelle first hit town, but now it’s another little world, low lights, slower, softer music and plushy chairs with plenty of room to maneuver. Jewelle is one of the girls who will come back here during the few slack times to douse the upholstery with anti-bacterial spray, and Vic will throw the black light on a couple times a night to check for suspicious stains. Lady Pamela, who roomed at the house till her tricks started showing up there, bragged about pushing the envelope when Otto was on duty, snoozing, but she’s over at Teasers now, and Vic has switched from red pleather to black velour on their work platforms.

“I’ve missed you,” says Jewelle. Tuck is up to twice a week already, but it’s Wednesday and she’s wriggled on so many clients between visits it seems like a long time.

“Me too,” he says, sitting on the chair furthest from Scorch’s throne. The other love seat is unoccupied, which Jewelle prefers. Some of the girls think it’s a contest, outmoaning you and shooting looks to your client, and the illusion of privacy just gets harder to maintain.

Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” is playing as she climbs aboard, Tuck wearing some kind of loose jersey pants he must have bought online because they sure don’t sell them next to the Iron Boy rack in Yellow Earth. The client is learning– save her butt some wear and tear and get himself a closer rub. Amazing how many of these guys, titty bar veterans all, still come in with their Levis and trucker’s caps and wonder why they’re not feeling the magic.

Jewelle starts to move, slow and easy, and her bottom is telling her this boy isn’t wearing underwear.

“You happy to see me?”

He smiles. “Always and forever.”

“Rough week so far?”

“I seem to be getting the hang of it. Only got chewed out three times today.”

“Those rigs are noisy,” she says, slowly swinging her head to brush her hair across his chest and throat. “People have to yell to be heard.”

“They haven’t fired me yet.”

Tuck is a local who’s caught on with a drilling crew, dumping big sacks of different stuff into the mix they send down the pipe, and wants to be accepted by the old hands. She’s never asked, but he feels married, and she hopes he leaves his ring in a good safe place.

“You’re too cute to fire.”

She pushes up high enough to let the side of her bare breast slip along his shaved cheek, almost accidentally. These long VIP sessions you have to deal it out slow, build some tension. Uncle Marvin, the only thing she ever knew to call him, back in Anchorage, used to do a running commentary on the state of his erection, with a nonstop flow of faster-slower, lighter-harder, that’s it, that’s it, no, over to the left a bit– but Uncle Marvin was good for a cool twenty thousand a year if you were “his girl.”

“Aw, that feels nice.”

“Feels nice for me too, baby.”

The track switches to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” which a lot of the younger girls like. Jewelle turns so her face is down by his knees, just moving her ass in front of his face for a bit. He’s hard already, probably got a rubber rolled on in the men’s room. What’s that Boy Scout motto– Be Prepared? If he is married, his wife probably still does the laundry.

He is more than a bit of a Boy Scout, Tuck, waiting out in front to walk her to her car when her shift was over– you know, just to be sure you’re safe– till she told him it was absolutely forbidden and he might get her fired.

Jewelle twists around, shoulders on his knees, her legs over his shoulders, and rubs her bottom up and down his chest. He’s taking deep breaths now.

“You talk to Jasmine over the weekend?”

It takes her a beat too long to remember that Jasmine is the daughter she’s told him she’s supporting, back with grandma in a FEMA trailer in Ketchikan. Some of them want to be gallant, to help save you from ruin.

“There was something messed up with the Skype,” she says. “I could hear her but I couldn’t see her.”

“That’s tough.”

She tries to remember what grade she said Jasmine is in now. It’s either Jasmine or Jocelyn, and she’s grown over the years, must be nearly out of junior high, since part of the story is getting pregnant when she was fifteen.

Which she did, but that’s real life.

“You must be saving some good money, working here.”

Some idiot reporter came through and talked to a girl, high on whatever, who claimed to be making three grand a night dancing in Yellow Earth, when even the full-service gals don’t make half that. It hit the wire services and for a couple weeks the tips really suffered, guys busting their nuts on the platforms unhappy to be outearned by somebody shaking their moneymaker in a nice warm club.

“I got to pay a flat fee to work here,” she lies, “tipouts to the bartenders and bouncers, and you wouldn’t believe the rent they’re charging in town.” She spins around and leans against him back to belly, whispers hot in his ear. “But when you come in I love my work.”

She’s got him hard beneath her now, into a rhythmic, gentle grind, with an eyeline to Scorch on the throne. She gives him a subtle nod, holds up a finger. Should be able to keep him on the edge for another minute–

“They asked me back,” says Tuck, voice a little strained. “The highway department. But what they’re paying–”

“They shouldn’t have let you go.”

Jewelle had been fired from her first job, a little dive in Wasilla with no dressing room and a circular bar around a cockpit where she’d peel her school clothes off and dance in bra and panties for fifteen minutes, having to sit on the floor and tug her jeans back on when the music stopped. The owner, who later did time, wanted her to turn pro and she wouldn’t so he threw her out and things got rough with her mother at home. She was glad to be rid of the place, but getting fired is never good for your ego. Owners are starting to ask her how old she is again, and it’s not because they’re worried she’s not legal.

She swivels again to face him, lifting off it long enough but not too long, and goes back to the slow grind, looking him in the eyes.

“This is getting me really hot,” she says. “Look what you’re doing to me.”

She knows girls who can fake all kinds of things, including some who aren’t really girls, but she’s the only one she knows who can blush on cue. It just takes a little imagination– what if this guy isn’t a pincher or a poker, a squirmer or a humper, a poor deluded soul so goggle-eyed over having a live woman who’s not his wife moving on his lap that he’ll believe anything, but somebody real. Somebody real who wants just her. She can feel the blood coming up her neck and into her face, Tuck out of words now, taking deep breaths and holding them, pretty flushed himself. There are men, probably lots of them out in the oilfields and here in Yellow Earth, who don’t go to strip clubs, who send their money home to their wives or save it hoping to meet somebody special some day, who don’t pay women to fuck them or dance naked for them or lie to them. But Jewelle, pepper spray in her pocket when she leaves the club, is not going to meet those men at Bazookas.

And if she did, what could she say, what could she do, that didn’t feel like part of the racket?

Tuck is just about there when Scorch’s meaty hand clomps onto his shoulder.

“Sorry, folks,” he says, “that’s all she wrote. House rules.”

Jewelle gives the bouncer a hurt look but swings off Tuck and perches on the arm of the chair, placing the palm of her hand on his chest.

“You’re not going to forget me are you?”

Tuck pushes up in the chair to make his erection a bit less obvious. “Can’t imagine how I’d ever do that.”

She kisses him on the cheek. Vic asks for a seven-and-a-half-hour shift and she’s only three into this one. “You’re a lifesaver in this crazy place, Tuck. Don’t be a stranger.”

Then Scorch swings the door open and the floor music crashes in.

“ARE WE GOING TO be rich?”

As after-doing-it questions from Connie go, this is not bad, with not nearly so many landmines to avoid stepping on as ‘Do you really love me?’

“We’re already pretty well off.”

“For the reservation.”

“For the state, hell, maybe for the whole country. I’ll get Doris at the office to run some statistics for you.”

“You know what I mean.”

The trick is to figure out where this is leading and head it off if it’s nowhere good. “We’ll have more money than we do now, sure. Cash money.”

“Like Beverly Hillbillies rich?”

“You want to move to Beverly Hills?”

“Stop.”

“And live next to some Kardashians?”

“Aren’t they like part–”

“That was Cher.” Harleigh starts to sing, softly–

“Half-breed, that’s all I ever heard
Half-breed,
How I grew to hate the word.”

“Stop!”

“You used to like my singing.”

“I used to drink.”

Harleigh has to laugh. Connie’s been sober so long she can joke about it.

She rolls her head on the pillow to look at him. “You think people will resent it?”

“Everybody in the Nation is gonna do well out of this.”

“But not as good as us.”

“Because I took some initiative. I told you, we’re not making it from the oil, we’re making it from the services company. And then the residences when we get them up.”

“Man camps.”

“That’s how you call it if you want to scare people. Like saying ‘Indian reservation.’”

“Lots of strangers in the community.”

“Oh, they’ll keep Danny and his people hopping, all right. Have to coordinate with Crowder, all the other county sheriffs. We got to hope they leave most of their trouble back in Yellow Earth.”

“The bright lights of Yellow Earth.”

“The lights are on their way, I guarantee you. So what you gonna do with your half of the loot?”

Connie punches him in the arm. “There’s things we could do.”

“Like what?”

“You know I want Fawn to go to school.”

“She’s in school.”

Harleigh surrendered and agreed to send her in to Yellow Earth instead of the rez school, not a great political move.

“I mean to college. “

“Where the work will be harder and the temptations that much tougher to resist. Fawn doesn’t want to be in a classroom anymore, honey.”

What Fawn does want, besides to ride around with cute boys and get high, is a lot tougher to nail down.

“Remember when she wanted braces?”

“Because of some character she’d seen on TV. She’s got perfect teeth.” Connie shifts the rest of her body toward him. A mess of coyotes set up their yipping outside, but it’s the wrong season for there to be calves to worry about.

“It’s all legal, right?”

Connie has the worried look now. One of women’s favorite occupations, thinking up troubles that haven’t even started yet.

“I got a Yale-educated lawyer says everything’s fine.”

“Lawyers go to jail.”

“Not less they get greedy and go into politics they don’t. As an enrolled member of the Three Nations I have the right to run any enterprise that is–”

“But you got an in with the Company.”

“I should hope so. That’s called business, honey. Ask Mr. Cheney.”

“Isn’t he in jail?”

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

“I thought he was supposed to be.”

“You’re getting him mixed up with that Watergate deal, honey. Look, anybody else on the rez wants to get into oil services, I’ll be only too happy to–”

“Like Phil Enterlodge.”

“I haven’t done one thing to block Phil doing business.”

“But you got all the Company jobs.”

“Because Brent and me got our act together.”

“And the Company figures to keep the Chairman of the Three Nations happy.”

You can’t say it’s not true, but if they didn’t deliver, the Company would drop them like a hot rock. You look at the big picture, how much the Nations will be taking in from the leases– anything he makes on the side is peanuts.

“They’ll be so much business,” he tells his wife, “Phil’s gonna do fine.”

Also true, but the look doesn’t leave her face. Connie won Miss Three Nations back when, but had to give it up after the driving drunk and without a license. As if Nora Hejdstrom who got the crown was any Girl Scout.

“I saw the boat today,” says Connie, looking up at the ceiling now. “Ship, whatever you call it. What’s it gonna be named?”

“I was hoping to call it the Hot Streak, but somebody told me you’re not supposed to change the name of a vessel once it’s been christened. Bad luck, which we definitely don’t want tied to a floating casino.”

“It looks funny.”

“That’s cause only half of it’s here, Connie. The top will be shipped up separate and then they’ll put it together.”

“By your service company with Brent?”

“No, boat people that do it all the time. ArrowFleet is just gonna haul oil stuff around on trucks, do cleanup. I’m more worried about the legal end of the Class III permissions than if it’s gonna fit together and float or not.”

“If you’re gambling, what’s it matter whether you’re on land or water?”

“Jurisdiction. Get more than a mile out to sea in most countries and you can break out the dice.”

“And if you lose real bad I suppose you can take a dive and swim for the bottom.”

He laughs. “Not at our casino, honey. ‘Everyone’s A Winner.’”

“That is so not true.”

“Well at least I’m a winner. I got you.”

She eats that stuff up, Connie, knows he means it, but you got to deal it out a little bit at a time.

“So what’s it called?”

“What?”

“Your little ocean liner there. What name did it come with?”

They’ll have to make a story about it in the literature, explain the superstition, maybe even give it a romantic past of some sort. Reclusive zillionaire sort of a thing.

“Savage Princess,” says Harleigh, shifting his arm, which has fallen asleep under her. “It’s called the Savage Princess.”

IF THEY WANTED TO chanrge rent for the parking lot, something reasonable, most guys would be willing to pay. Ten dollars a night, even twenty, whatever. I mean here it is, it’s just empty otherwise, and they keep the floodlights on in any case. And the guys have been good about it, clearing out at least a half hour before opening time in the morning. Attention Walmart shoppers–

Buzzy has gotten used to the lights, used to rigs rumbling in and out all night. Plug the bunk warmer into the cigarette lighter, crawl into the rack and take off whatever you’re going to take off inside the sleeping bag, make sure the cell is powered up and within easy reach. Levi, in the Peterbilt he usually parks next to, got one of those diesel-fired cab heaters cost near a thousand bucks, got extra insulation, even got a cable TV hookup, but he’s from Green Bay where the weather is shit all the time. Like up here. Wind gets going at night it doesn’t just whistle, it shrieks, and it’s only getting colder.

Two bars on the phone, not bad, and he’s set the ring tone full volume. Three or four service outfits jobbing him in now, never know who’s going to call or when. Take this load here, drop that one off there. The GPS helps some but there’s not exactly addresses to aim at out in the fields, more like just roads with numbers and a derrick or feed silo now and then for a landmark. West Texas can be that way, roads so straight and featureless you got to fight not to zone out and drift off into the chaparral. Used to be if you slept in your truck in winter you were idling the engine to keep warm, burning up fuel and smoking up whatever lot you were parked in. Now these rigs with ‘hotel accommodations’–

Of course there’s a sight of difference between real sleep and just having your eyes closed while your mind keeps jamming gears. Tomorrow he ought to go inside the store– they must have some kind of stationery section– and get him a notebook, start writing down when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up. You want to average eight– okay, maybe seven– hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour day, or what’s that– fifty-six in a week? But laying in the bunk with the phone by your head, itching to ring–

Vern the night guy taps on his window and Buzzy rolls it down.

“Sorry to bother you,” says Vern, who’s getting the same Walmart minimum as the inside workers and has some asbestos damage in his lungs, “but I seen you weren’t quite tucked in yet.”

“No problem.”

“How’d you do today?”

“Fair. Traffic’s getting worse, and I get paid by the load, not by the hour.”

“Tell me about it. My twenty minutes ride into work has come to be forty. And then prices going up, everything but gas.”

“Hey, we can always drive down to Bismarck, right?”

The merchants got you over a barrel here, and if Buzzy wasn’t making crazy money it would piss him off. What the fuck, everybody gets healthy–

“I got bad news.” Vern has got that hollow-eyed look, gets out of breath just crunching across the snow from the store to the rigs in the lot.

“They gonna start charging us?”

“It’s over.”

At first he thinks Vern means the drilling, but that’s crazy, the amount of pipe and waste he’s been hauling, there’s no end to it in sight.

“They made a decision– I’m going to have to start clearing the lot at ten.”

“Who made a decision?”

“I figure it must have been the store and the city together. Worried about liability.”

“But we just park here and go to sleep.”

“Maybe the folks who rent rooms in town put some pressure on it.”

“They’re all filled up! That’s why most of us are here.”

Vern holds his arms out in a gesture of resignation.

“Where they expect us to go?”

“Any place you can find where it don’t bother nobody. You got the whole county.”

Good spots to coop are a hot topic in the diners and take-out places, but most are either full-up crowded or there’s signs been posted by the time you check them out.

“I heard about some guy got jacked out on Route 15.”

Vern nods sadly. “Yeah, there been some robberies. Mostly equipment when nobody’s around, but, you know, get a herd this size you’re gonna attract some wolves. Might be what the store is worried about.”

Buzzy looks out the other window. Maybe two dozen rigs, some pickups, couple passenger cars– an average night. Makes the place seem friendlier when it’s closed, less abandoned.

“When’s the order take effect?”

“You got till Monday. Tell you the truth, I’m gonna miss you fellas. Not much to do here nights.”

The other great thing about the lot here is the easy walk to Little Caesar’s or Doc Holiday’s Roadhouse. Pizza is the best workday food, easy to eat a slice at a time while you’re driving, and sit-down meals are a luxury, usually grabbed while the loading is in progress. When the weather’s not too bad he tries to roll with the windows down, suck some of the French fry smell out of the cab.

“If I was younger, and healthy,” says Vern, looking off toward the main drag, the usual nighttime parade crawling through town, “I’d be out with you boys, raking it in. I worked on the big dam, you know.”

Buzzy knows, he’s heard the story a couple times now, but an actual conversation up here is too rare a thing to get picky about.

“Just a pick and shovel man, wasn’t married yet, living from payday to payday. Jesus, we had some times.”

“I’m trying to hold onto a few bucks.”

“That’s the way to do it. If I’d socked away a bit more from them gravy days I’d be sittin in a lawn chair down in Florida somewhere instead of freezing my butt in this parking lot.”

Buzzy tries to make a deposit every couple days, with a surprising number of his jobs paid in cash, and a couple times it’s been clear he’s actually doing the work one of the regular outfits has contracted for and are just too busy to cover. Don’t want to be carrying a wad of the green stuff if you get hijacked–

Vern sighs, taps the side of the truck. “Well, I got to go spread the word. When you run into any of your brothers of the road, let em know.”

“Bye, Vern. Take it easy.”

There are some spaces up by the Fuel Stop north on the Canada road. There are warehouses you can tuck in behind at night, got security lights, though he’s been rousted from these more than once. There are motels, some of them thrown up in the last couple months and little more than shipping crates with water and power.

Or he could just forget about sleep.

DANNY TWO STRIKE LIKES to cross the Missouri at Washburn, then take the smaller roads that follow the river down, easing through Mandan on the west bank to the Fort. He rarely has business in Bismarck, and there’s nothing much to see from the highway unless corporate food and hotel chains fanning past give you a sense of warmth and well being. He remembers the first time they drove from the rez all the way to Fargo with the kids, Tavaughn being so excited to see a Pizza Hut– “Hey, there’s another one!”– and having to explain what a franchise was and just how off the beaten path they lived. He passes the refinery, then the little stretch of residential on Collins Avenue, aware of the river even when it’s not visible. He wonders if it might be something magnetic, like how geese migrate, because you can blindfold him, spin him around a dozen times and even if he can’t stand straight when you stop he can point where the river is, east, west, north or south, ever since he was a little kid. The Storytellers probably have one to explain that, or can make one up.

The guy at the park entrance takes a look at his car, what he’s got on as a uniform, and waves him through. Works with nearly everybody but the FBI. A tour of the fort is just leaving the visitor center, white-haired geezers and their wives eager to see the house General Custer and his Libby lived in before he left for the Little Big Horn. Danny did the whole thing on a field trip in junior high, mooning around an excitingly stacked period laundress who explained everyday life at Fort Abraham Lincoln, then teaming up with Nate Flies Away to torture one of the young docents dressed as a Seventh Cavalryman.

“My father took your brother’s scalp,” Nate said to the play soldier, who couldn’t have been more that twenty. “I’ll sell it back to you for five bucks.”

Nate, who pulled what they called a Dying While Intoxicated in the tenth grade, after he stole a Department of Transportation pickup and tried to make it do a hundred.

The woman behind the counter says Winona is at On-a-Slant Village with a school group.

He wouldn’t mind living in the Custers’ house– big covered porch, spacious kitchen, buffalo head over the fireplace– a replica (or so they guessed) built by dollar-a-day CCC workers during the Depression. He wonders if there were any Sioux or Cheyenne on the crew.

There are six of the earth lodges where there used to be close to ninety, looking like giant prairie dog mounds from a distance. Danny can see the Heart River, just about to join the Missouri, through the trees. There’s not a soul on the village plaza, but smoke rises from the center hole of the biggest of the mounds, and he guesses his ex has brought her captives in there.

“On-a-Slant Village, or Miti-ba-wa-esh,” says Winona, whose pronunciation of Mandan always bit the big one, from inside, “was the southernmost of several villages on the banks of the Missouri River, beginning in the late sixteenth century.”

Danny has to duck slightly as he steps through the tunnel of tree boles that form the entrance. There is a cook fire crackling low on the center of the floor, scores of elementary school kids and a few teachers sitting on benches facing Winona, who explains from a low wooden platform. Danny is relieved to see she’s not wearing buckskin.

“By the time the first white trappers and traders arrived, over a thousand people lived here– hunting, fishing, farming, making valuable pottery, curing and decorating animal skins. This was a busy, successful commercial river town, like St. Louis or Cincinnati in later days, set behind a protective moat and palisade and built on a gentle slope leading to the highway of water just to the east.”

Danny eases behind a support column, back in the shadows beyond the fire and away from the sunlight spilling through the entrance.

“These lodges were mostly built by the women, placing layers of willow branches, grass and soil on a frame of cottonwood logs, providing protection from the elements in all seasons. Cool in the summer, warm, if you kept the fire blazing”– she indicates the paltry little effort on the floor– “throughout the harsh Dakota winters. In each of the smaller lodges around us perhaps a dozen people lived together, most of them closely related, while a lodge of this size might be used for village meetings or ceremonies.”

Winona is Upper Yanktonai and not Mandan, something she never let him forget. The passionate nomads of the plains, not some bunch of sell-out river traders who burrowed in the ground. You people, she used to say, when something she didn’t like went down on the rez or with his family. As if Standing Rock, or particularly her hometown of Cannon Ball, was America’s Model Community.

“It was a happy, productive existence. But in 1871,” says Winona, lowering her voice, “something appeared that destroyed that life and led to the demise of On-a-Slant Village. Does anybody know what it was?”

“White people?” pipes a little blond girl with Princess Leia braids coiled around her ears.

Winona smiles. “Well, they had something to do with it, but I’m talking about a deadly disease– smallpox. Who here has had a smallpox vaccination?”

Several of the little kids look on their shoulders and arms as if to check, and most raise their hands.

“Well, back in 1871 on the upper Missouri River, smallpox vaccination was virtually unknown. Follow me and I’ll tell you what happened.”

Danny catches up to her, striding ahead of her flock, halfway to the next lodge.

“Excuse me, Miss.”

She is not surprised to see him. He took her call in the car this morning on the way to a domestic, too pressed for time to strategize long distance. Danny isn’t happy to leave his staff to deal with the usual mess, but it’s a rare day that Winona will admit the kids might need a father.

“I just started this tour.”

Winona was an RN at Medcenter One until a month ago, when Shaneekwah’s rashes and allergies got so bad that she decided she must be bringing bugs home from the hospital and quit. This can’t pay as much.

“Give me the short version, then. You’re worried about Tavaughn.”

“He quit the Rodeo Club.”

“It was probably pretty lame. Bismarck.”

“He quit it for Thespians. That’s like–”

“–a drama club, so what?”

“He’s almost the only boy in it.”

“Better odds if you’re a horny adolescent.”

“The boy who got all the leads last year before he graduated, Jerome? He was like that guy on Hollywood Squares, the one in the middle box with the snarky comments.”

“You’re saying our son is going to grow up to be Paul Lynde.”

Winona looks back to be sure the fourth graders and their minders are not too close. “You know what I’m saying. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

This is typical Winona. With her half-German and his half-Irish the kids came out light enough that she decided to give them names belonging to inner-city hoop stars with a chance at the pros if they avoid getting shot in a drive-by, ‘just to be sure people don’t think they’re white,’ and then moves to fucking Bismarck, where she can barely make the rent even with what he sends above the court mandate, so Tavaughn can go to the best high school in the state. Who tells white people they’re condescending, while correcting the grammar of everybody, especially his family members, on the rez. And he’s supposed to be psychic about which way she’s going to break on every issue, like that’s the way anybody but an idiot would feel.

“If there’s nothing wrong with it, what’s the problem?”

“Don’t you want to know?”

He doesn’t especially like the idea. Some of the behavior, not the sex part, which he really doesn’t want to think about, but the acting out in public, all that phony behavior–

“Okay, if he wasn’t a celebrity,” he says as they stop by the next earth lodge, “Paul Lynde would have had his nose busted on a regular basis.”

“He’s home by three– Thespians doesn’t meet on Mondays.”

He’s never actually been in the house when Winona was present, just dropping in when allowed in her absence or waiting in the car outside to pick them up.

“Okay– I’ll check it out.”

“Smallpox,” Winona intones, turning to face the muddle of children as they catch up to her, “sometimes known as the Red Plague, is a communicable disease that can cause blindness, scarring, deformity, and death.”

He has to go back up to Mandan and cross the river on the Interstate to get over to Bismarck. It is a capital city without a skyline, much easier to drive through than Yellow Earth these days, and he only gets lost once before finding the little house. Tavaughn is on the floor watching a video with lots of screeching cars when Danny steps in without knocking.

“Surprise,” he says, smiling more than he feels like so it doesn’t seem like a bust. Tavaughn puts the road warriors on mute and sits up.

“Something wrong?”

“Naw. I was just, you know– in town.”

“Cool.”

Danny sits on the couch, which feels uneven, and looks at the screen.

“Is this Two or Three?”

“It’s the fourth one they’ve made but it’s the sequel to the first one.”

“So– faster and furiouser.”

“They just whacked Letty.”

“The Latino girl.”

“Yeah.”

Danny nods. He doesn’t follow movies much, but hears the plots to the mainstream stuff from Jimmy his deputy who keeps saying ‘and then– and then–’ like an eight-year-old, continuing even when Danny pretends to be looking at paperwork.

“School going okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“Where’s Neek?”

“Girl Scouts.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. Keep up.”

“She’s what– making lanyards?”

“Who knows what they do over there. Not my world.”

“So she wears the uniform and all that.”

“Mostly just T-shirts now. They do good deeds and build their leadership skills.”

Shaneekwah was born only a little before Danny and Winona split up for the final time, and has always been shy with him. He should have fought more at the custody thing, but Winona cornered him outside.

“Think really hard,” she said, “about how you’d get through a day on your own with a four-year-old and an infant to keep alive.”

He wasn’t seeing anybody then, not that any of the women he was vaguely interested in would want to take on child care as part of a relationship, and couldn’t imagine the day she was proposing. Neek gives him shy, yes-and-no answers on the phone once a week.

“How’s her skin?”

“Pretty good. She’s on meds.”

He reads the names of the medications on the doctor’s bills, looks them up online. Some of it is pretty scary.

“You still roping and riding?”

“Uh– no, I quit that.”

“Oh. So a sport–?”

“Nope. Season’s already half over.”

“So you got time on your hands.”

The bald-headed guy is holding somebody out the window by their feet, threatening to drop him.

“I’m doing drama.”

“You mean like plays?”

It’s good to have the TV on, somewhere for their eyes to go. His old man would take him fishing and tell him stuff, the two of them watching the lines on the water, now and then reeling in and recasting–

“We do one full-length play and one musical.”

Danny tries not to frown. Tavaughn is as off-key a croaker as he is, which leaves dancing in the chorus–

“So you’re into that?”

Tavaughn turns to look at him. “I know it’s weird, but I like the idea of– like–being other people.”

“In the traditions,” says Danny, hoping to reassure him, “when you take on the spirit of an animal for a ceremony–”

“It’s not like hopping around inside a dead buffalo– not that that’s not cool for, you know, when you’re doing like a roots thing and all. In a play you’re playing a person who’s not you, even though you’ve figured out where he’s coming from, and the audience gets to watch that person in action.”

“No car crashes in it though.”

“Not this one.”

You don’t just come out and ask this shit. He’d leave it where it is, only Winona will call him later and expect a detailed analysis.

“How things back home?”

He loves it that Tavaughn still thinks of the reservation as home. He’s spent more years here than he did up there–

”Oh, pretty bad. The usual.”

“People making money on that drilling?”

“A few that made the right deal or got lucky, sure. Not that it’s made them any smarter about how to spend it. And the money that trickles down to everybody else– well, we’ve got our hands full.”

A couple of the boys Tavaughn would be hanging with if he’d stayed are in real trouble. Dickyboy Burdette is still showing up at school but his grandmother says he almost never comes home, the Menke brothers are heading for prison and none too soon–

“I play a guy named John Proctor.”

“Who’s that?”

“He’s a farmer back in pilgrim days and people start accusing him and his wife of being like Satan-worshipers and witches.”

“Wow.”

“It’s the lead character.”

“Hey, congratulations. So, witch hunt, I take it this is not the musical.”

“Later in the year. We’re doing Legally Blonde.”

“You won’t be getting the lead in that.”

Tavaughn at least got the raven hair, which he still wears down to his shoulders.

“I might just do tech. Lighting and props.”

Danny makes a snipping gesture. “You gonna cut it?”

Tavaughn shrugs. “Probably. I’ll wait till the performances though. There’s hardly any other Indian guys at Century, and the hair is like a chick magnet.”

Danny has to smile. Love to catch Winona so far off base once in a while. Chick magnet.

“You got anybody special?”

“Not this week.”

Cocky son of a bitch.

“You go to the football games?”

“Sure, everybody does.”

The Century Patriots have a quarterback, Wentz, who can throw it all over the lot. “I might come down for a game.”

“Great.”

“And your show– you’ll send me the dates and all?”

“I’ll forward you the stuff from our website.”

Danny is fully online now, Marjorie Looks for Water coming over to the office and getting everybody up to speed once Harleigh got the rez wired.

“Terrific.” Danny stands up. “I better push off now, get back to the crime wave.”

“Good to see you.”

“Gimme five.”

They slap hands, Tavaughn not getting up from the floor.

“And say hi to your sister.”

“Will do.”

He’s halfway down the steps when the mayhem resumes inside, gunfire and screeching brakes. He’ll have to tell Ruby that his son got the lead in the school play.

USUALLY WITH A LAUNCHING you want the boat to be in the water, but who can wait?

Rick has told Harleigh a dozen times that there would be a hell of a lot more people coming if it wasn’t so cold, but Harleigh got so jazzed when he came down and saw the thing put back together there was no holding him back. So it’s maybe three hundred bundled up around the presentation space, the mammoth yacht and the near-frozen lake beyond it as a backdrop. Noreen Birdbear is doing her celebrated hoop dance– she’s won competitions– and no matter how many times he’s seen it the mechanics of the thing are too quick for him to follow. Rick loses track at a dozen of the bright red plastic hoops, spinning, flying, rolling, Noreen flicking them with her feet up from the ground and into the ever-shifting combinations, a horse and rider now shape-shifting into a sea creature then spreading into a butterfly that becomes an eagle, the drum and chant steady while Noreen crow-hops around the circle the tribe members have left open. He recognizes the reporter from Bismarck, one from the Yellow Earth giveaway and the woman from Indian Country Today in the crowd. Harleigh will try to spin this all to the positive and Rick will try to back him up, but if they talk to some of the downers here– like his mother, standing with arms crossed and frowning past the swirling hoops like her gaze could set the Savage Princess on fire– it’s going to be another controversy.

How exactly it became Rick’s job to get the damn thing here overland is a mystery, you’d think if it’s going to be a casino operation they’d be the ones to do the scutwork. It’s only passed through two states from Lake Superior to here, but each has its own regulations for transport, speed limits, road access limits, insurance requirements, permit schedules and deadlines, tolls and tariffs, generating a rat’s nest of paperwork and a least a dozen phone calls a day, not to mention the emergency drive to Bemidji to argue the extra-wide procession out from the clutches of an overzealous highway patrol lieutenant. Of course the boat was too tall, or whatever the nautical term is, even on the lowest lowboy trailer, to fit beneath many of the overpasses on the route. The people who sold it to the tribe took care of removing the superstructure and the ‘flying bridge’ and radar gear, the stuff that sticks up at the very top, and shipping it on a second crawling, gas-swilling rig, but the crew they sent here to get it shipshape again arrived at the casino hotel two days before the boat and proceeded to act like sailors on shore leave. At least the casino boys were the ones who had to clean up after them.

Noreen finishes to well-earned applause inside a kind of giant ball she’s woven from the hoops, then somehow she’s got them all hanging from her arms like coils of electrical cable and is skipping out of the circle. Now it’s Storyteller, who coached Rick’s baseball team in junior high, taking the podium.

The microphone setup is working fine, and Storyteller can speak in his easy, familiar manner, like he’s home with his feet up on his Barcalounger recliner, a Bud Lite in hand, filling you in on which lures the bass are biting.

“At one time,” he says, “long, long ago, the People lived underground.”

It was Rick’s favorite thing as a kid, when his mother would sit by his bed at night and tell him the stories. Stories not just from the local tribes but ones she’d heard all over the country while doing her political work. Most were traditional creation stories or why Coyote sticks his tail beneath his legs or Raven stole the morning, but sometimes there would be battle stories as well, the Indian side of the movies you saw on TV where Charles Bronson played Blue Buffalo of the Sioux or Captain Jack in the Modoc war. The tales didn’t all make sense, totem animals never known for cold calculation, but the lights were out and his mother’s voice was deep and soft and he’d nod off to sleep feeling safe because you can’t ever fall when you live on the back of the Turtle.

“It was dark underground, but there was just enough to eat, and people wondered about the many vines that hung down from overhead. One day there was a pinpoint of light from above– one of the vines had broken through to the earth-plain and was letting a thread of sun penetrate into their world.”

Rick sees Harleigh standing to one side of the yacht, hands on hips assessing the crowd, and drifts in his direction.

“There was much debate among the People, as always”– a laugh of recognition at this– “but one young brave became weary of the talk, and began to climb the vine that was letting the light through, his bow and arrows lashed to his back in case there were monsters to deal with above.”

It is a truly beautiful thing, the boat, a ninety-six-foot Hargrave, sparkling white double-decker hull, two thick bars of anti-UV-ray-tinted observation glass running fore and aft, the giant craft looking sleek and speedy even up on the chunky wooden blocks.

“When the young man crawled through the opening to the earth-plain, it took his eyes a long while to adjust to the blinding light– which was only the warm sun above. When he could see well, he discovered that he stood on the bank of a mighty, swift-running river. And then a monster came running toward him, a big-headed shaggy monster, which he brought down with a swift and perfect shot from his bow and arrow.”

Harleigh looks disappointed with the turnout.

“I can’t believe we can’t at least slide it into the water.”

“The Coast Guard.”

“We’re not operating the yacht casino, we’re not sailing it, we’d just whack it with champagne, slide it into the water and then tie it to the dock.”

“The dock we haven’t gotten permission to build yet. And then have to haul it out again the minute the ice starts forming.”

Last year he’d had to talk Harleigh out of the idea to ignore Daylight Savings Time on the rez. People here have enough difficulty showing up on time as it is, he’d argued, without confusing them even more.

“I still don’t see how the Coast Guard gets involved. We’re not a coast.”

Coast Guard are a minor nuisance compared to the Army Corps of Engineers, who oversee all water access and have been busting his balls about the proposed dock–

“The young man was very hungry from all his climbing,” says Storyteller. “So he cut meat from the shaggy monster, which he decided to call ptí-i– buffalo. It was the best thing he’d ever eaten.”

“I explained to you how once a boat gets to that size–”

“But we’re not taking it off reservation land.”

“The lake,” says Rick, knowing that Harleigh is fully aware of this, “and the river it is part of are controlled by the Feds. As long as we keep the boat on shore we can do whatever we want with it.” He sees his mother approaching, braces himself for the cold front.

“So the young man climbed back down the vine, always easier on the descent, bringing a robe made of the monster’s hide, and told the People about the wonders he’d experienced. There were many more hours of debate, but finally it was decided that the People would migrate up to this bright, warm world above, to fish in the mighty river, to chase and kill and eat the shaggy monster.”

“Hello, Teresa. Beautiful day for it, no?”

Harleigh has mastered the art of greeting his enemies with a smile. Rick has been working on it, but his face or his voice always betray him. His mother doesn’t even meet his eye, homing in on the council chairman.

“How much did it cost?”

“They’re really excited about the upside at the casino,” says Harleigh. “Besides the gambling, it will be available for rentals– a party boat kind of thing– weddings, business retreats, birthdays for rich kids– for a thousand a day. Seats a hundred fifty, plus standing room in the bow and stern and up on the top deck–”

“How much?”

The figure, if she ever gets it out of Harleigh, will not include the shipping, taking the top off and sticking it back on, the operating costs, the salaries of the certified skippers they’ll have to hire–

“Next financial report, it’ll all be laid out for you. We had kind of a time-sensitive bargain situation, so I had to make a move.”

The only bargain Rick knows about is that the owner threw in the dry-dock blocks for free. For two and a half million it was a small gesture.

“So the young man led the way, and one by one the People began to climb the vine up to the new world. A couple dozen of them had made it to the earth-plain and were marveling at the winding river and the warm sun and the huge herds of the shaggy monsters whose meat would feed you and whose hides would keep you warm, when a very large lady, a little too fond of her fry-bread–”

A big laugh here, the audience imagining the woman trying to climb–

“–tried to make it to the earth-plain, and the vine snapped and sent her hurtling back into the underground. There was no other way up, and from that day our People have been divided, a few here on the surface, never forgetting those many left behind under the ground.”

Warm applause, Storyteller saying a few good luck blessings in the three languages, and Harleigh uses the opening to hurry away from Rick and his mother.

Rick has been aboard the boat, all shiny surfaces, tidily arranged cook space and bathrooms, everything smelling new though it’s been in service on Lake Superior for at least two years. He wishes every member of the tribe could come aboard and take a cruise, sit in the cushy leather seats and look out the high-tech windows and think, ‘We deserve this, this is ours.’ As his mother always says, the important battle is for hearts and minds–

“The government and the Army Corps of Engineers took our river away from us,” says Harleigh from the platform, his voice rolling outward with microphone-amplified echo. He lifts an arm to indicate the massive white vessel behind him. “And now we are taking it back.”

Enthusiastic applause, though Rick sees that some, maybe one out of ten, are not clapping at all. ‘They don’t trust anything that’s new,’ Harleigh is always saying, ‘and don’t trust a word you say unless you hire two white men in suits to come out and back you up.’

Teresa Crow’s Ghost sighs. “Oh my people, my people,” she mutters, and walks away without acknowledging the presence of her son.

THEY NEED TO OUTLINE the town before they can destroy it. GPS for location, setting boundaries with the ‘total station theodolite’ (sexy-looking surveyors’ equipment), then going old-school to hustle around with wooden stakes and yellow tape. The p-dogs pop up to watch from time to time, and Leia records their man-warning chitter from across the highway despite the traffic rolling in between. For what– evidence? To present to whom?

In some states there are volunteer relocators, out with a water truck, pushing soap suds into holes till the dogs splutter up (Jeff used to call it ‘fracking for Sciuridae’), mostly soft-hearted suburban moms who greet the refugees with towels and eye drops and often have a dozen or so back home digging up their yards and making the neighbors nervous. But not up here. At school her thesis advisor was a major ferret-head, vital in the eleventh-hour conservation of the species, and Leia was in thrall to him for a couple years. A man with a cause, not too old, good cheekbones, not that anything unprofessional happened despite her efforts to emit the appropriate pheromones. Professor Chad had a source for the live prairie dogs that Leia and his other student minions would toss into the preconditioning enclosure and then take notes as the long, lithe apprentice ferrets darted out of their burrows or PVC pipe snuggeries to streak after them, pinning the befuddled creatures against the wood and chicken-wire walls, rolling around and breaking free, rolling around and breaking free, until they either succeeded in clamping the dog’s windpipe shut long enough to suffocate it and drag it down into the burrow to feed on, or give up. More than a few times a rookie ferret, bred and raised in a university cage, would throw in the towel, retreat to lick its wounds, and at least one was killed by desperate bites from a p-dog while Leia and the rest of the team watched. Weeping and the gnashing of teeth in Ferretopia. She preferred the days when no live prey was available and she’d stroll in with several sections of sliced rat, dangling by the tails, calling till the young ferrets popped their little periscope heads out to snatch-and-go with their dinner.

The worst were the days she was instructed to jam a live p-dog right down into the ferret holes, the quick and violent yelping and thumping and wet tearing sounds that followed making her nauseous. Jeff always went sarcastic when she’d complain about it.

“It’s a jungle out there, Babe,” he’d say. “Deal with it.”

Of course Jeff was in Herpetology, one of a half-dozen grad students her friend Melanie called the Slithers, and hand-fed an inexhaustible supply of wriggling white mice to his various snake and lizard test subjects on a precise schedule.

“You feel so bad for the poor little ground squirrels,” he would say, accurate as to subfamily but condescending nonetheless, “why don’t you study them?”

It had been a revelation to her, the one valuable thing to come out of the relationship, which ended with a screaming fight in their tent on a department field trip, attacking not only each other but each other’s doctoral species, with Jeff labeling both the ferrets and prairie dogs as ‘flea-ridden varmints’ and Leia responding that ‘at least they’re homeothermic!,’ an observation that Jeff chose to take personally. It was at night during a wild thunderstorm, and they were stuck silently fuming at opposite ends of the air mattress, backs to each other, till the sun rose gently over the Rockies.

It has something to do with the shale oil, she knows, this marking, this vast yellow-taped rectangle that encompasses her target coterie and perhaps a dozen others. ‘Destruction of habitat’ is always cited as the principal cause of the sinking numbers of the prairie dog, for the near-extinction of the black-footed ferret, and she chose this spot because it seemed too remote, too firmly in the back-of-beyond, to ever be encroached upon by human endeavor. Rodential academics love to cite the vast Texas colony that lasted nearly into the twentieth century, a kind of Aztec Empire of the Cynomys that covered twenty-five thousand square miles and held more than four hundred million individual p-dogs. How many ferrets and eagles and swift foxes and coyotes must have feasted off that mass! You think you people dig holes in the ground, she mentally beams across to the Company men still pacing around the doomed colony, try to match that.

Iphigenia gives a nervous chirk and the dogs are suddenly up and alert. They spend over a third of their above-ground time scanning for predators, which must be incredibly stressful. No wonder the females are sexually receptive for only a half a day each year, and the males rarely live more than three years. Not tonight, honey, I’m worried something is going to eat me.

Whatever set them off seems to be a false alarm, and a half dozen perform the ‘all clear’ jump-yip in unison, leaping straight up and sprawling to the dirt like a line of demented cheerleaders. Leia has a stuffed badger back at the apartment, along with a kite that looks exactly like a hawk when flown, which she used in the early days of the study to elicit and record warning calls. Each was eventually permanently rejected as a threat by the coterie, who would jump-yip only minutes after she deployed them. You can fool some of the prairie dogs some of the time–

This is one of the days she misses Brandi. Not the greatest assistant, bit of a space-shot, constantly implying they were in some field biologist version of Heart of Darkness, but lots of times you just need another pair of hands, somebody to hold the subject’s front end securely in a cloth wrap while you perform some operation on the back end. ‘Too weird here, can’t hack it’ was the extent of the note she left on Leia’s observation pad, her few belongings gone from the apartment, although she didn’t clean out the half-eaten Weight Watchers easy meals in the fridge. Leia knows she should have informed the department to demand a new assistant or even pulled the plug on the study, but somehow the die seemed cast and she has gotten used to going it alone.

“So if this is the Congo,” she asked Brandi at the Applebee’s one night, “I’m like what– the guy who goes down the river and observes and narrates–”

“No, that’s Marlowe,” said Brandi over her fettucine Alfredo with a side of parmesan. “You’re Kurtz.”

The Company men are taking pictures of their handiwork when the Eradicator pulls up beside her in his death machine. He is a little bowlegged guy wearing jeans with mud-caked knees and a T-shirt and ball cap that both bear the logo– a skulking, coarse-haired Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus, originally native to northern China) with a thick red X drawn over it.

Everybody hates rats.

He steps over to Leia with a tentative half-smile on his face, eyes flicking up to check out the streaks in her hair.

“Humane Society?” he asks. “PETA? ASPCA?”

“I’m a scientist,” says Leia, though lately she feels more like a crank or a stalker, one of those humorless zealots who send death threats to animal-testing labs. SCUMCUB, she thinks, the Society for Cutting Up Men who Cut Up Bunnies.

“Oh.” He seems confused. “Geologist?”

“Biology,” she says, nodding across the road toward the colony.

It takes a moment for it to register. “You study prairie dogs?”

Worse than that, she thinks– I used to live with a guy who kept pet snakes in his clothes drawer and named them after famous chess masters.

“I have a grant,” says Leia, feeling she might be about to be ordered to move on.

“Wow.” He looks at her with mild awe, as if he’s never beheld a grantee in the flesh before. She is emboldened.

“You ride horses?”

She realizes the bowlegs have prompted the question, blatant profiling, but lets it stand.

“Not much lately,” says the Eradicator, whose hat also bears a sewn-on tag announcing that his Christian name is Jerry. “But when I was a kid, yeah.”

“You ever have a horse break a leg in a dog-hole?”

“No.”

“You ever hear of it?”

He actually tilts up the back of his hat so he can scratch his head. Leia wonders if there were Nazis running the death camps as friendly and folksy as this Jerry.

“It’s a story you always hear, yeah, but I can’t say as I recollect anybody I knew that lost a horse– or any cattle.”

“Cause the ranchers all claim–”

“Well, back when there was a lot more prairie dogs and a lot more horse traffic, people riding fast after buffalos and whatnot, I’ll bet it was quite a problem.”

Leia nods, points across to the Company men finishing up. “What’s the deal over there?”

“That’s for a platform. Drilling platform. They’ll level all that off.”

“With, like, a bulldozer–”

“Right. And the thing is, there’s some kind of regulation that they can’t just plow your animals under.”

“They’re not mine.”

“–can’t bury em alive, so we got to come and gas em first.” He holds his arms out, looking a bit embarrassed. “Crazy, huh?”

“Gas.”

Jerry nods. “We started out with carbon monoxide pellets, but with that you got to stand over it with a leaf blower to keep the gas down in the hole long enough to do the job. Hated that. Even with the ear protectors on I’s pert near deaf when I come home at night. And then the time you got to spend per kill– it just don’t add up. So this time of year we’ll hope for a little precipitation and go with the aluminum phosphide.”

“Which makes them bleed internally.”

“No, that’s Rozol. Nasty stuff– your predators and scavengers eat the varmints when they come out to die, and then they got problems with their coagulation. Like a chain reaction. Naw, this stuff just turns to gas when exposed to moisture, goes for their lungs.”

“Effective.”

“If you’re thorough, plug up all the holes with newspaper as soon as you toss it down, yeah. Something special about this bunch?”

He is looking through the stream of passing pickups and eighteen-wheelers toward the yellow-taped rectangle around the hodgepodge of mounds, hands in his pockets. How to explain the implacable courage of Ajax, the Machiavellian sexual strategies of Odysseus, Niobe’s strange fixation with the one-eyed Iphigenia, without sounding like a crackpot?

“It’s my study group,” she says. “You observe a specific coterie over time, through the cycles of mating, of birth and death, contraction and expansion of territory, and begin to understand their behavior.”

Jerry nods. “I’m like hooked on Animal Planet, watch it with my kids all the time. Pretty heavy for them when that fella Steve bought the farm.”

Leia finds herself nodding in sympathy. In grad school they’d all developed vocal impressions of the Crocodile Hunter, tried to inject a bit of excitement into the most wearisome lab chores by describing them in a breathless Australian accent.

“So once they’re all gassed, you– what?”

“We come by a couple days later, pick up the ones that have wandered out of their holes– they tend to be pretty out of it, you can walk right up to them– and then the earth machines move in. I’ve mostly cleared for golf courses and shopping malls before, but this oil boom has got us hopping.”

He looks her over again, eyes sympathetic. “Today I just come to scope it out, so we got a little bit to wait before– you know– the pellets go in.”

“But no stay of execution from the governor.”

It is not the most generous grant one could hope for, nothing compared to what the ferret crowd gets or what private donors throw at the whale and dolphin savers, but it is hers and she’s made her stand out here on the high plains. The Journal tends to look askance at papers submitted that end with “And then they all got run over by a truck.” If only it was the very last passenger pigeon, or some lovable furry critter Pixar had just made a movie about–

“I’m not really sposed to do this,” says Jerry, handing her a business card from his pocket, “but there’s this guy.”

BURROW BUSTERS EXCAVATION SERVICE it says, with a cartoon of a cute p-dog in a work outfit and safety glasses holding some kind of vacuum hose.

“What he does is suck em out of their burrows, pretty much in one piece. Where they go next is up to you.”

Earlier in the day she had examined the failed Poker Flats colony behind them, virtually a prairie dog ghost town now, with scat and nose prints around only a handful of the burrows and most others caved in or with cobwebs across the entrance. She studies the card–

”You know this person?”

Jerry shrugs. “My brother Jett,” he says. “He’s always walked his own road.”

“THEY’RE LIKE GOING NOWHERE.”

Fawn always has the nicest clothes, stuff from Bismarck or even Minneapolis, stuff she sends away for, but she’ll go to the Walmart with them and try on outfits she wouldn’t be caught dead in.

“Unless it’s like, the army? They get to go places then, wherever they’re sent, but they almost always come back to the rez and they’re the same sorry-ass guys but with new tattoos.”

“There’s other tribes, aren’t there?” Tina is fascinated with the reservation stuff, but cool about it. And she has a thing about yellow, which she shouldn’t wear, not with her so pale. Fawn can pull it off, with her skin it looks great on Fawn, but she wears mostly whites and patterns you can tell come from somewhere else.

“You meet really good-looking guys at the powwows,” says Fawn, turning to check her butt out in the mirror. The jeans she walked in with fit like a second skin, and these look cheap on her. “But that’s like a part they’re playing– old-time Indians. Nobody lives like that anymore.”

“And your stepfather won’t let you date other kinds of guys– like white guys?” Tina rarely tries things on if she’s not buying, and after the iPod and the Nokia smartphone she won’t be buying again for a couple paychecks. While Jolene–well, this is her chance to wear clothes her parents will never allow.

“He never put it exactly that way, but he’s like Mr. Red Power, Red Pride, so I gotta figure–”

“He knows you hang with Dylan,” says Jolene.

“Dylan is so wasted all the time, nothing you do with him could be considered a date. These are probably made in China.”

“Or Turkey, or Portugal.” Jolene was part of a sneaker boycott when she was in junior high back on the rez, and always has some product or other on her shit list. Jolene takes a lot of flak for being so serious, but she’s cute and can be fun and is really loyal.

“Hey, they’re called No Boundaries. Could be from anywhere.”

“Are there any sweat shops on Indian reservations?” Tina again.

Fawn laughs. “Sweat lodges, but no sweat shops. Not that I know of.”

“So the boyfriend thing,” says Jolene, getting back to the subject. She’s not allowed to date, kept on a really short leash.

“Well, my stepdad was cool with Dickyboy back in junior high. Before he puffed up.”

“He’s a good guy, Dickyboy. And he used to be– you know.”

“He never met a carbohydrate he didn’t like. Sure, his family’s a mess, but that doesn’t mean you have to stuff yourself.” Fawn is wearing her striped top from Aeropostale, which they don’t have one yet in Yellow Earth. There was some talk about a new mall being built, but since most of the new people are oil guys it probably wouldn’t have any good stores.

“So if the rez boys are all losers and you can’t date white boys,” Tina continues, checking the time on her new cellphone, “how come we barely see you anymore?”

Fawn looks around, sees Marjorie Looks for Water squinting through her glasses at sweaters a couple rows over in the plus sizes, then gives them her wicked grin and crooks a finger. “Step into my office.”

They got kicked out of the dressing room once before here, the lady saying there was a rule against three at a time but looking at them like they were lesbians or something, and Fawn keeps her voice low as she steps out of the tagged jeans and wriggles back into her own.

“There’s this guy– he’s like, older.”

“An oil worker?”

“Not exactly. He’s my stepfather’s partner.”

An appropriate moment of awe.

“The guy with the Vette,” says Tina, not totally believing it.

“The married guy with the Vette,” says Jolene, already set to boycott him.

“Married to Dumb Bunny. Brent says that’s basically over, they’re like business associates now.”

“If she’s so dumb, how can she be–”

“There’s certain things he can’t have in his name. My stepfather’s always doing the same kind of stuff. It’s standard practice.”

“And you’re like– what?” asks Jolene. Jolene who is so cute but has definitely not had a boyfriend.

“Like everything. He’s a grown man, he’s gonna what– hold hands?”

Spartina definitely is not telling them about her and Wayne Lee. Not just that they haven’t gotten that far yet, but it seems too much like bragging, showing off.

“You’re like, being careful.”

“As careful as you can be, under the circumstances. I mean, like try to get birth control on the rez or in Yellow Earth without everybody in the world knowing it.”

“So he uses–”

“Pretty much always.” The wicked grin again. “But there have been a couple panty-twisters.”

Fawn’s mother gets Cosmopolitan, which Fawn shows to her friends so they can squeal over the sex articles.

“So is he getting a divorce or something?”

“He says it’s complicated. Like he’s having this whole new house built, but it’s in her name.”

“Sounds like you should be careful.” Sometimes they call Jolene the Fire Marshal because she is the first to tell you what could go wrong or what’s already gone wrong or what went wrong in the past. Her parents are Pentecostals, but she never mentions Jesus as her special pal or tells her friends they’re going to Hell or anything, so it’s hard to know if she’s a hardcore believer or not. They’ve never asked and she’s never told.

“We’re in love,” says Fawn, and suddenly Tina feels sick to her stomach.

THEY MEET AT HARRY the Greek’s on the way east out of New Center. Danny never could stomach lamb till the place opened, but the gyros here are killer. Ruby comes in after him and they do their usual friendly but businesslike hello, the chief counsel and financial adviser for the tribes and the head of the reservation police getting together to compare notes. Part of Ruby’s campaign ‘not to get mired down here.’

“Jurisdiction,” he says after they’ve ordered. “The usual nightmare.”

“You want the council to pass an ordinance?”

“If it would help. We got all these oil company guys living on the reservation now.”

“Renting from enrolled members who need the income.”

“Want the income.”

“Same thing.”

They smile at each other. Ruby intimidates people here without trying– Eastern law school, always with a full deck of facts and figures to lay on the table, her self-confidence. But Danny likes how smart she is, likes that what you get from her is a competitive spirit and not just attitude. He’s had enough attitude for a lifetime from Winona, who was born with a chip on her shoulder that had nothing to do with being Dakota.

“One way or another,” says Danny, “I think the word has spread that I can’t touch these guys cause they’re white, and the county sheriffs around us are too overwhelmed by the invasion to drive out to the reservation.”

“The drillers are all white?”

“All the ones I’ve seen. Good-ole-boy kind of thing.”

Ruby nods, considering. “When they had the Indian Territory it was the same deal– tribal police could only go after Native-on-Native crime. So every rustler, train robber, and bootlegger from the surrounding states moved in, spread a little money around so they’d be warned whenever a federal marshal with a stack of writs in his saddlebags rode through.”

“The Wild West.”

“And you’ve got one hand tied behind your back.”

“Sometimes it feels like both of them are tied. Will Crowder makes an effort to cooperate, but he’s got Yellow Earth to cover.”

“I hear they got a strip club now.”

“Two of them.”

Ruby raises an eyebrow.

“So I hear.”

“Any trouble at Bearpaw?”

“You know, for whatever reason, they’re pretty well-behaved over there.”

“Too busy having their pockets emptied.”

Danny shrugs. “The whole gambling thing is a mystery to me. You got money to burn, get yourself an ex-wife and two kids.”

“Poor baby.”

He’s never seen her in traditional dress, but Ruby is the most Indian-looking woman he’s ever known, a poster girl for Red Pride. And the business suits look great on her. Pocahontas in pinstripes.

“How’s life with Harleigh?”

She takes a moment to answer, scanning the room. A couple drillers who have discovered the place, a tourist couple being amazed by the food, Harry behind the counter.

“Between you and me,” she says, measuring off an inch with her thumb and forefinger, “the shit is this close to the fan.”

“That bad?”

“I advise, I issue warnings, I cite conflicts of interest. But he’s a– you know.”

“He’s Harleigh.”

“I would have voted for him if I was enrolled here. Looking to the future, dresses the part, talks a great game.”

“Are we talking criminal behavior?”

She shakes her head. “Not even illegal unless you apply standards that nobody else is operating by. But whenever somebody takes the role of advocate for his people and owns a private business affected by the decisions he makes for them–”

“That partner of his–”

“Golden Boy. Don’t get me started on him. These days Harleigh keeps me totally in the dark about what goes on inside of ArrowFleet.”

“Probably a good thing.”

“And you’ve seen some of the mess the drilling people are leaving around.”

“That’s supposed to be Ricky McAllen’s turf.”

“Ricky only does what Harleigh lets him, you know that.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Honestly? I’m going to get out before any of it sticks to me.”

The waitress sets their food down, asks if they want refills on the drinks. Danny has lost his appetite.

“And go where?” he asks when the girl walks away.

“Somewhere they’ve got enough money to warrant looking after, where the politics are reasonable.”

“In Indian Country? Come on.”

“I said reasonable, not perfect. Here I’m afraid all the time.”

“Of going to jail?”

Ruby leans a little closer, lowers her voice. “I put the nix on this deal Brent Skiles wanted to do– a leasing scheme run through the tribe that would mostly benefit him. I insisted it go up in front of the council and told them– Harleigh and Brent– that I’d have to voice my legal reservations. The way the guy looked at me– if he had superpowers I’d be a pile of smoldering ash.”

“And now you’re scared that–”

“I read a thing where certain people can be in a room with a psychopath and just sense it, not a word spoken.”

“Psychopath, wow.”

“My skin gets all tingly when he walks into a room.”

“You know, the same thing happens to me when I see you.”

She smiles. You should have a license to carry a smile like that around.

“Anyway, I can’t stay here.”

“You want me to talk to him? Brent?”

“You mean lean on him?”

“Just as a, you know, person. My badge doesn’t mean anything to him.”

Again the smile. “Except you get to pack a pistol. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would.”

She looks at him then like she might cry. “Eat something. It’ll get cold.”

“Yes, Mom.”

They eat their gyros and fries, silent for a little bit. There is not a lot of drama with Ruby, and she seems to like him for what he is. Winona had been all scalding or freezing, either fierce love or violent retribution– if Winona had tangled with a character like Brent Skiles there’d be blood by now.

“So what about us?”

Ruby sits back. “You could come with me.”

“To wherever.”

“Yes. That’s an invitation.”

The idea of it makes him sweat. He doesn’t even really like to go to Yellow Earth or Bismarck– the idea of starting from scratch on a reservation where he’s a stranger, a nobody, not even an enrolled member, no history, no family–

“Think about it, okay?”

“I will.”

“The thing to get out of your head,” says Ruby Pino, “is the idea that you’re irreplaceable. You might be good at what you do, great at it even, but if you take a powder tomorrow, life will go on. Believe me, none of the places I’ve left has disappeared from the map.”

He can’t think of who on his staff is ready to step up and take over the job. But then he’s not exactly got the reservation under control–

“Can I come over tonight?”

The council gave her the old Lundgren house as part of the inducement to take the position. He parks a couple blocks away behind the post office and walks around to her back door.

Ruby smiles. “You had better.”

THERE’S NO ART IN the council room. Most of the walls in the other tribal spaces are covered with the stuff, heroic history pictures or traditional symbols and designs. A Lakota woman up from Standing Rock did a lot of it, beautiful work, and it’s good for people not to forget what came before.

“I think we should talk about the People’s Fund,” says Teresa Crow’s Ghost.

“It’s not on the agenda.” Doris takes the minutes on a legal pad and doesn’t like to have to erase or cross anything out. A computer has been suggested, but she claims ‘it’s too easy for things to disappear’ on the machines.

“I make a motion to discuss the People’s Fund,” sighs Teresa.

“Second,” says Harleigh. Might as well get it out. “All in favor?”

He raises his hand even before Teresa and the others follow.

“I’m hearing complaints,” says Teresa, “that the money isn’t being distributed. And rumors that it’s being invested in some risky oil venture.”

Eyes swivel to Harleigh and Norman Ross, the treasurer.

“Not much risk in oil these days,” says Harleigh. “Not from where we’re sitting. Not if you got half a brain.”

“So it’s true?”

“The money is sitting in escrow, Teresa. It can’t be touched without an amendment to our bylaws. But if you think you could double or triple it real quick, we’re all ears.”

“How come there hasn’t been a disbursement?”

He shrugs. “Weather’s still holding. I figure when the winter really hits, people got heating, car problems to deal with, Christmas– five hundred to a thousand bucks’ll look pretty good then.”

“That’s what it comes out to?”

“Right now it’s about eight-fifty if we include nonresident enrollees. Interest we’re making is ahead of the cost of living increases, and there’s wells left to be dug on reservation land.”

“So it should go up?”

“Absolutely. Maybe we ought to release a statement every couple months, let folks know where we stand.”

“It would keep the rumors down a bit.”

Always good to have something he and Teresa agree on. She has stayed militant, whatever that means if you’re not actually carrying a rifle, and is generally impossible to please.

“Doris, could you put a statement together? Norman can give you the exact numbers.”

“And the disbursement will be?”

“Let’s say second week of December. Next item?”

Doris scans down her list. “A petition to the council– request for closed hearing.”

“Bring it on.”

Harleigh has called the meeting because he’s got a bundle of leases for approval, always best held for the end when the council members are tired and don’t want to hear any more details.

Doris opens the door and Phil Enterlodge steps in.

This won’t be good.

“What can we do for you?”

Phil won’t look him in the eye, instead standing at the far end of the oval table and addressing the other six on the council.

“I am here regretfully,” he says, voice a little strained, “on a matter that brings me against the Chairman.”

Nobody says a word. They know Phil Enterlodge was his partner in the little gravel trucking business before the oil, that they’d split over Phil thinking he did all the work, and that he’s had his own outfit for a couple years now, struggling to get by.

“I believe that Mr. Killdeer is in violation of conflict-of-interest rules.”

They’d been friends once, and Phil was lawyer for the tribes before Harleigh hired Ruby Pino away from the Puyallups.

“And what might those be, Phil?” At least get the man to look you in the eye.

“Using your elected position to–”

“There is no rule prohibiting a council person from engaging in a business.”

“I bid on the same service contracts you do.”

“Which is your right in a free market.”

“I beat your rate by five, ten percent all the time.”

“Good for you.”

“My people got more experience, more local knowledge than yours.”

“You’re getting colder, Phil.”

“And I get squat. Oil people won’t go near my outfit cause of yours.”

“Competition, Phil.”

“Because they know that if they don’t hire your bunch their leases will be held up.”

“I have never, ever interfered with a lease to bring more business to my company.”

“Well they Goddamn well think you do!”

For a guy with a law degree, Phil never really saw the big picture. “I can’t control people’s perceptions,” Harleigh says softly.

“But you don’t do anything to change them, do you? And you’re happy to rake in the dough.”

“Tell me where something illegal has been–”

“It may not be illegal, but it is absolutely unethical!”

Harleigh turns to the secretary. “Remind me, Doris, do we have an ethics board?”

“No, sir, we don’t.”

“Well you have a code,” says Phil. “I got a copy right here.”

“Does it say who is meant to adjudicate any alleged violations?”

“If it’s not the council I don’t know who it is.”

“Neither do I.” Harleigh looks to the other council members. “I make a motion that the council, at our next meeting, consider the formation of an ethics committee.”

“Second,” Norman calls out. Always good to keep a rubber stamp nearby.

“All in favor”– hands go up. “Motion passes unanimously.” He looks to Phil. “We thank you for your time.”

After the meeting, leases approved with only a little opposition from Teresa, he asks Doris to find him a copy of the ethics code.

“I’ve got one in my desk,” she says.

“When was it written?”

“Ethics for Tribal Officials, 1936.” Doris has an incredible memory for facts but not much imagination. “To think they needed them way back then.”

THE DOG-SUCKER ARRIVES ABOUT an hour before the killing at the back of the colony begins. A yellow truck, the kind that used to come to clean out their sewer back in Minnetonka. The driver hops out and strides over to Leia with his hand out, grinning. His ball cap has a prairie dog wearing a safety helmet on it.

“Jett Tutweiler,” he announces. “And you’re the Wildlife Girl.”

“Behaviorist. I’ve got a grant.”

He keeps smiling. “Right. So how many of the little buggers are we talking about?”

“The sample is two dozen, but I’d like to pull as many as we can, give them some neighbors.”

Only a few of the p-dogs have stuck their noses out to see her this close, the coterie reappearing to forage a couple days back after the three weeks of snow and zero-degree temperatures. They don’t hibernate, just hunker down in the burrows and live off their stored fat, and the very old and the very young often don’t make it through the season. Leia has the cages piled at the edge of the highway, a housing chart prepared to minimize the potential for fights between cellmates. She points to the first hole.

“I thought we’d start here and work our way to the end.”

“Sounds like a plan,” says Jett, who manages to be bouncy even when he’s not moving. “I’ll pull the rig over.”

The traffic, a steady day-and-night rumble of pickups and sixteen-wheelers, has not altered the behavior within the colony, and Leia has had to cross the highway to observe with a clear field of vision, the p-dogs gradually ignoring, possibly even expecting, her presence. Odysseus has filched some out-of-coterie nookie, mating with a couple bimbos from the west side during their annual half-day of estrus, and if persistence is a genetic trait it will be well represented in future generations. She’s lost only one of the sample, Clytemnestra, to a ferruginous hawk that lugged her just twenty yards before landing and proceeding to pull her guts out, the other dogs pretty much burrow-bound for the rest of the afternoon.

The truck rolls up beside the first hole and Jett bounds out to deploy the thick, green hose coiled at the side.

“I got a four-inch gauge here,” he says, wiggling and pushing the hose down the hole, “which might seem a bit narrow for some of the fat ones, but if they can squeeze into these holes, they can fit through my extractor.”

“It doesn’t hurt them?”

The hose bows as if it’s gone as deep as it can. “Not too bad, usually. They’ll be going two-fifty, three hundred miles per hour when the hose spits em out, but I got the chamber all padded up with foam. You see them NASCAR fellas these days, they hit the rail going who knows how fast, and like as not they bounce right off. Beats the hell out of a couple hay bales.”

He flips a switch on the side of the truck and it begins to thrum noisily, the volume steadily increasing till the hose twitches and there is a dull thud, like an old softball hitting a brick wall, from within the side of the truck. Jett waits till there is another twitch and thud, then another. He listens, wiggles the hose a bit more, then switches the machine off.

“You got you a couple.”

Leia pulls on her rubber gloves, brings up a cage. Jett opens a little hatch next to the hose port.

“You gonna have to just reach in and feel around some, but they ain’t too lively right after.”

“Stunned.”

“I figure them people say they were taken up in alien spaceships,” says Jett, “feel about the same way.”

It is Demeter, Psyche, and little Daedulus, no cuts, only Psyche seeming a little out of it once deposited in the cage. ‘The Effects of Extraction-Induced Concussion on Cynomys ludovicianus,’ thinks Leia, with before-and-after MRI readouts of their little walnut brains and her photo on the cover of the Journal. Careers have been made on less.

“What do people usually do with them after they’re, you know– sucked out?”

“Varies.” Jett is jockeying the hose down into the next hole. “I’m of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell persuasion, unless folks feel a need to let me in on it.”

She had a story about an out-of-state habitat already set up and waiting for the evacuees, and is relieved not to have to tell it. She figures she’ll wait till after he’s gone to start with the translocation.

“Some folks that just don’t want them zapped– like by the fella who pumps propane and oxygen down the holes, lights it with this remote spark-plug thing–”

“Crispy critters.”

Jett turns from his work to smile at her. “Yeah, it ain’t pretty to think about. Anyhow, there’s folks who leave it up to me as to the disposal. Disposition?”

“The fate of the dogs.”

“Right. I got a Japanese fella, buys the pups for twenty-five dollars a head, probably makes a killing over there selling them for pets.”

“The Japanese are seriously into cute.”

“And then with the grown-up ones, there’s these folks who breed this kind of weasely thing.”

“Black-footed ferret.”

“That one. Which is like endangered so’s they got to throw a live prairie dog in with em every once in a while.”

“They like it better than thawed rat.”

Jett has the hose jammed down another hole. “Whatever. Watch your ears.”

He flips the switch and the huge vacuum groans, transporting another dog into the padded chamber.

It is perhaps the worst time of year to be doing this, the breeding cycle incomplete, several of the females pregnant, the animals reduced in bulk from scanty winter feed, predators extra hungry and on the prowl. A few of the females haven’t come into estrus yet, and strange surroundings plus conflict with new neighbors might just hit the ‘off’ switch. This could be the prairie dog Trail of Tears–

“This is a deep one,” says Jett, switching holes and dealing more hose off the spool. “I’m already down six, seven feet.”

“They’ll go deep, sometimes. There will be two, three, maybe even four entrances to a burrow and nobody’s got exclusive rights to it.”

“Kinda like a hippie commune.”

She doesn’t want to get into the infanticide and cannibalism, which disgusts most people outside the field, which disgusted her when she first learned about it. Marauding mothers killing and eating their own sisters, cousins, grandchildren, gaining protein and possibly, in the briefly bereaved neighbor, recruiting a future nursemaid for their own pups once they first emerge at six weeks. What happens underground stays underground–

“I always figure there must be a few stuck between in the tunnels that get left behind,” says Jett. “But so far I gotten no complaints.”

“There’s a couple individuals I need.” The extracted animals seem fine, testing the limits of their cages, Echo even nibbling the grass that sticks up through the bottom wire. “You need a certain number of mature adults to start breeding again, or the coterie won’t be viable.”

Jett nods. “Like in the Bible, where you start with just Adam and Eve, and then get Cain and Abel– but who was their wives?”

“Laverne and Shirley.”

Jett grins and scratches the back of his head the exact way his brother does.

“Yeah, but where did they come from?”

It is not quick work, Jett placing and pulling the hose, having to move the truck every few withdrawals, and they’ve only accounted for half the coterie and a few outliers when the Eradicator eases off the highway, bumping over the hummocky ground past them, the brothers, who she realizes now must be twins, waving almost shyly to each other in passing. Jerry parks at the extreme rear of the colony and begins to sow his death pellets, sealing holes with wads of wetted newspaper, with a teenaged boy, maybe his son, to help with the task.

“Rained last night,” mutters Jett, wrestling the hose into a particularly dog-legged hole, “you got me just in time.”

“Did you two ever work together?”

“Oh, we had a lawn-mowing operation when we were in high school. People couldn’t tell us apart or thought there was just one, used to call us ‘Jimmy.’ Made us some money, but when you got different philosophies of life”– Jett gets the hose past the obstruction, pushes it down till it’s snug– “it don’t profit none to force the issue. We get along fine Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas.”

Odysseus is hard to get ahold of once he’s in the chamber, shrinking back into the far corner beyond her reach, and Leia has to ask Jett for help. He pulls on a work glove from a back pocket, sticks his arm in up to the shoulder, makes a pensive face as he fishes around. Odysseus is bicycling his rear legs when he’s pulled out into the daylight.

“Lively little feller.”

“Odysseus.”

“You got names for em.”

“Easier to remember than B-13, B-14.” Leia takes him from Jett, places him in an empty cage. “You see the dye markings.”

“That must of took you a while.”

“Field work can be labor-intensive. You need a lot of patience.”

“So you, what– hang out and watch what they do?”

“Observe, record, analyze.”

“And when they go down in their burrows?”

“You wait for them to come up.”

Jett mulls this over, the boredom factor of the job striking him as it does most people outside the field.

“Could you get like a small camera down there?”

“With a light on it? Sure. But that would monitor only one spot in a whole network of tunnels. Like a security camera stuck in the drainpipe of your sink.”

“Not gonna get great ratings from the home audience.”

“So we have to assume a lot from their behavior when they’re up top.”

“And the rest of it is in the dark.”

“We figure they sniff each other out, make noises. This bunch”– she indicates the holes around them, numbered stakes pulled from the ones they’ve already vacuumed– “have a special call for when they see me.”

“They know who you are?”

“Same person, same clothes– I’ve recorded it. I set up to observe at daybreak and it’s like ‘There she is again.’”

“Wow.” Jett turns the motor on and almost immediately there is a snick in the hose and a thap, slightly off-key, in the chamber. He flicks the switch, the noise dying, a frown on his face.

“Didn’t like the sound of that.”

Jett moves to the passenger side of the truck, digs under the seat.

“Not strictly my business, but this bunch doesn’t have the plague or anything, do they?”

“No. I’ve been lucky. The fleas around here– that’s what spreads it– don’t seem to have been infected. But it’ll wipe out a whole colony in no time.”

“Don’t tell my brother, he’ll have it in a bottle.”

Jett comes out with a long, pirate-looking telescope and some equally long salad tongs, as well as a flashlight, which he hands to Leia.

“Gonna need your help.”

He props the trap door open with the telescope and Leia kneels to point the flashlight beam into the padded chamber. Jett bends to look through the telescope, swiveling it left and right, then reaches in with the salad tongs.

“Not exactly brain surgery,” he says, probing with the tongs, “but I’ve gotten the hang of it with practice.”

He seems to grab onto something with the tongs, pulling the telescope out to drop it on the ground and taking a few deep breaths as he looks at Leia.

“You take that flashlight and clear over to the far side of this patch. I’m gonna have to move quick.”

Leia backs away, turning the flashlight off and watching him. When she stops twenty feet away Jett gives out something like a board-smashing karate yell and whips the tongs out of the chamber, flicking them hard past the rear of the truck. It is a moment before Leia can distinguish the wrist-thick rattlesnake wrapped around the tongs, the serpent quickly uncoiling itself to flow straight and fast into the nearest empty hole. Jett is laughing.

“Rabbits, gophers, field mice, salamanders– they might be pissed off when you pull em out, but none of them’s gonna lay a killer bite on you. But rattlers.” He shakes his head. “You wonder do they kill whatever prairie dogs are in the holes they claim or make some kind of deal with em?”

Leia retrieves the salad tongs. “My next grant proposal– ‘Viper/Ground Squirrel Cohabitation– Predation or Symbiosis?’”

Jett looks at her, smiling, but not the what planet did this geek come from? kind of smile.

“So you get paid for this study or whatever?”

“There’s a living stipend included in the grant.”

“That pays for rent in Yellow Earth?”

“It did before the boom started.”

“Yeah.” Jett looks back to where his brother is methodically poisoning burrows. “A rising tide lifts all boats– except for the ones it sinks.”

She has often wondered about the possibility of a group consciousness, a mammalian version of what goes on in an ant colony or beehive, a kind of knowing shared by all the town residents and somehow passed from generation to generation. How long has this outfit been here? Since before the first humans arrived? The insect jocks posit that you can consider the whole colony as a single organism, individual ants something like cells with discrete functions and communication paths to other cells. And this colony, this organism that may have existed for thousands of years, is being eradicated. Does it know? Do those dogs still below sense that something incomprehensible is happening? That the end is near? And if she takes a cutting and transplants it, has she saved the colony or created something new, some monster of intervention, freaks in a zoo without walls? The department will certainly be inclined to throw her data out, to censure her misuse of scarce funding and her anthropomorphic meddling with life in the raw. She can shift her focus to the effects of translocation, of course, compile data on digging behavior and survivorship. One of her favorite words– “Mom, Dad, I’m taking a course in survivorship.” A real study would have an elaborate preparation, the new host site carefully vetted and modified, wildlife officials notified. But this drilling is like a prairie fire, and you have to save what you can–

It will smell something like garlic when the pellets begin to react to the moisture in the holes, phosphine gas filling the tunnels and chambers quickly, the animals breathing it in, their lungs immediately edematous, rib cages pulsing as they struggle for air, mitochondria beginning to break down throughout the body, their hearts losing function–

“You have any favorites?”

The question brings Leia back to the task at hand, three-quarters of her cages filled to capacity, the late-winter sun already starting to sink, a stiff wind picking up.

“There’s a certain– detachment– required if you’re going to do real science,” she says. “It’s not like they’re your pets.”

“We raised cattle, beef cattle.” Jett is forcing the hose down the next burrow. “Both me and Jerry did the whole 4-H deal with calves. Looked after their feed, cleaned their stalls, kept track of their weight gain. Mine was Ren and his was Stimpy.”

“Excellent cow names.”

“And we showed em at the big state fair in Minot. You groom em, right, make sure there’s no cowflop hanging from their behinds when you lead them into the ring, you even got this stuff they use in theater to color people’s hair, Streak N’ Tips?”

“You put makeup on your calves?”

“Sometimes they’ll have like a spot that don’t look so good, more like a patch of scrofula than a regular marking– anyway, Ren won the blue ribbon even though Jerry had worked a lot harder raising Stimpy.”

“A point of some contention.”

Jett nods. “And then they grew up and joined the rest of the herd and we sold em to get et at the Ponderosa Steak House.”

“Could you recognize them when they matured?”

“Oh sure. The markings are all a bit different. Not like your critters here, got to paint code numbers to tell em apart.”

The oil workers, when they are togged out in their hardhats and safety vests, look pretty clone-like to Leia, and they’ve displayed a predictably narrow range in their mating behavior so far. And then there’s Jett and Jerry, identical except for the species of rodent featured on their ball caps–

The sheriff’s department car comes by then, slowing on the dirt shoulder of the highway, Himself looking out behind the authority-figure sunglasses and then hitting the gas and taking off with a whoop of siren, flasher strobing above as he kicks up dust blasting past the stream of inbound traffic.

“Will Crowder,” says Jett over the sound of the sucking machine. “Good fella.”

Will. She was going to cyberstalk him some more tonight, look again for any consumer reviews–

“The sheriff.”

“Not on this side of the road. You did check in with Harleigh, didn’t you?”

“Harleigh.”

“The big honcho of the Three Nations. This is his land.”

“Oh– sure.”

She has assumed that nobody could protest removing animals about to be poisoned from land about to be fracked.

“I don’t think they got like a prairie dog clan or totem or whatever, but Indians can be touchy about whatever’s on the rez property.”

She knows that one of the tribe’s foundation stories begins with them living underground, that their traditional houses resembled prairie dog mounds–

Another thump, Ajax, if she has her dogholes straight.

Jerry and his assistant are coming closer, mass murder quicker than rescue.

“They have problems with their teeth.”

“Pardon?”

He has to shout as the motor begins to whine, perhaps something too wide stuck in the hose. “Their teeth. I been told that afterwards, from the crash when they shoot in or getting a dislocated jaw or whatever, some of em get problems with their teeth. You’ll want to look into that.”

Leia has a set of ring pliers to pry their mouths open and caliper the cusps of their molars, the best way to verify age.

“I’ll do that,” she says, a bit put out that Sheriff Will didn’t stop to investigate, “and send you the dentist bill.”

“BLACK HILLS GOLD,” SAYS Jolene facing the class, just barely loud enough for Francine to hear her in the rear. Public speaking is a skill no longer taught separately at the high school, but one she considers important enough to impose on her students.

“The Black Hills of South Dakota were originally the hunting ground of the Native American, principally those who used to be called the Sioux.”

It is a constant effort keeping up with tribal nomenclature, as the Chippewa become the Ojibway become the Anishinaabe (and even then some bands in Canada are still using the old terms). Francine is not old enough to remember when colored people stopped being Negroes and became black, but was around when they started morphing into ‘people of color,’ an inclusive but sometimes confusing category. There aren’t enough of them here in Yellow Earth to pose much of an issue, though, and the few Native people she knows well are likely to use ‘Indians’ a lot, as in ‘they got some real crazy Indians down on Standing Rock.’

“The Treaty of Laramie, in 1868,” continues Jolene, “between the United States and those Sioux who submitted to negotiations, gave them the legal right to the Territory in perpetuity. But white Americans persisted in sneaking into the area to search for gold. In 1875, in Deadwood Gulch, they found it.”

The assignment was structured like a debate– Resolved: Fracking Is Both Necessary and Beneficial– but the students were told to write out their arguments first. There are some success stories in the school, two of her fourth period students bound for out-of-state colleges with no student loan hassle thanks to oil-lease royalties flowing in. Fifty thousand dollars a month was one figure she’s heard in the faculty lounge. Most of the others have not been affected so dramatically, and have chosen the direct approach to Francine’s challenge, quoting their parents or articles about what’s happening in town in the Sky News. But Jolene has written a cautionary tale.

“Thousands of miners flocked to the new town of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, to seek their fortunes, not knowing or caring that they were trespassing on somebody else’s land.”

You don’t expect original research at this level, or even much original thinking. But something is revealed, some cogitation experienced in what they choose to lift from Wikipedia, by how they shape or try to rephrase it. Antonia Kjarstad, the oldest member of the faculty, says it used to be the Encyclopedia Britannica, available in the library and possessed, in all its bulky authority, by some of the more well-to-do families.

“The spearhead of the invasion was led by General George Armstrong Custer, who guided over a thousand soldiers, scientists and fortune seekers onto the Sioux land under the pretense of exploration and scientific inquiry. By 1876 miners had claimed land beside all the streams and creeks, practicing a form of mineral exploitation called ‘placer mining,’ in which the power of the rushing water is used to move and separate heavier gold flakes and pebbles from bottom gravel. We now know how damaging this is to the environment, as the sluicing diverts natural flow patterns and dumps huge deposits of sediment downstream, putting tremendous stress on both invertebrate and fish populations.”

Francine loves the fervor of the few true tree-huggers in her classes, their indignation at the crimes against the planet committed by their parents and everybody else who came before them. They are a minority here, surrounded by job-starved Middle Americans, which only adds to the romance of their position. She even has two vegans in her third-period class this year, in a state where beef is a religion.

“More geologically sophisticated miners searched for the sources of this washed-down placer gold, eventually discovering the hard rock deposits near what is now the town of Lead. The first of these bonanza mines, called the Homestake, supplied over a tenth of the gold in the world for the next century.”

She hopes that ‘geographically sophisticated’ comes straight from Jolene and not some Wiki contributor. She is a quiet girl, never volunteers in class, but does her reading and aces the tests. One of the few Native kids in the school, one of the ones you hope gets away and doesn’t come back.

“But as the gold was now ore-bound in solid rock, crushing mills had to be built to separate and concentrate the valuable metal, a process called ‘free milling,’ and then the concentrate was treated with mercury to further purify it. The discarded rock, or tailings, were often dumped carelessly near to the rivers and streams that supplied the power to run the mill, leaching mercury and arsenic, devastatingly toxic to human, animal, and plant life, into the water system.”

The boom has been a godsend for Tucker, of course, and not just the paycheck. He was sleeping later and later after the diner failed and he had to sell out, then the layoff from the highway department–

‘Hi– I’m Francine’s anchor,’ he’d introduce himself to new people, only half kidding.

He still grumbles some about the long hours, about his sore muscles, even about the ‘bar time’ he feels he has to spend at night to remain one of the team, but always with an undercurrent of pride, a man out in the world doing a tough job.

“But what of the original owners of the land? Their efforts to resist the encroachment of these destructive profiteers led to a series of armed conflicts, with the only major victory for the Native Americans being, ironically, the defeat and annihilation of General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry troop at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.”

Most of the students have their glazed, receiving-distant-channels look on– Dylan Foster has his head down in his arms, sleeping or stoned as usual– but a few of the boys, including Kent Buckley, who is up next, are stiff and scowling at this interpretation of events. Francine assigned no sides in the debate, just posed the resolution, hoping for some democracy-in-action fireworks. Jolene plows on in her near-monotone, eager to be off the stage.

“Chlorination and smelting, two even more resource-intensive techniques, were brought to bear in the 1890s, and a pervasive culture of lawlessness, perhaps brought on by the numerical imbalance between male and female participants in the gold rush, characterized the era. Stagecoach robberies, lynchings, senseless murders, rapes, and prostitution went hand in hand with the get-rich-quick hopes of the boomtown immigrants, a legacy of blood and misery that perhaps outweighed the tons of shining gold that were eventually ripped from the bowels of the earth. I’m told there is a popular television series currently running that documents these events”– and here Jolene looks to her teacher apologetically– “but we don’t get HBO.”

How much misery, thinks Francine, stepping forward to smile at the girl, outweighs a ton?

“That was excellent, Jolene. We have to think about the similarities between our present situation and previous sudden-wealth scenarios. Kent, could you share your thoughts with us?”

Kent, wearing his camo vest and army-green cargo pants for the occasion, jumps up and takes his place at the front of the class, nearly hip-checking Jolene as they pass. Kent is one of the influx of new kids, generally a really interesting bunch, and one of the few whose father is actually on the rigs, as a toolpusher. Mr. Buckley has rapidly gotten himself on the Board of Education, a constant decrier of government waste and curricular subversion.

“Okay,” says Kent, not looking at his paper, “let’s start with this– a single NASCAR entrant who finishes all five hundred laps is going to need at least a hundred gallons of gas for the race. What’s the MPG on that, Dexter?”

Dexter, who the kids call Intel, doesn’t look up from the Desert Storm tank he’s been drawing.

“Five miles per gallon,” he says. “A lot less than a Prius.”

Most of the students wake up enough to laugh.

“So then figure an F-16 jet fighter that flies from San Diego to Houston like that”– he snaps his fingers– “gets less than one mile per gallon.”

Jolene is sitting with her head lowered now, having had her say with no interest in a fight.

“We’re not gonna run those babies on switchgrass.”

IT IS HARD TO find a gap in the traffic even at night. Leia totters across the highway with the last of the bulky cages, four p-dogs crouching silently within it, a pipe-hauler honking as it catches her in the headlights, then makes her way across the stubble on the far side to where she left her flashlight as a beacon. She’s breathing hard as she lays the cage on the ground next to the others, tossing a handful of oat clusters in through the wire. She hopes the livetraps are coyote-proof, as the coterie will be out here all night at the edge of Poker Flats, at least able to smell and hear each other. Jerry said the earthmover will come at sunrise to plow over the colony ground, and the animals left there, dead or dying, will be buried.

The wind has died down some, and Leia pulls her hood down and sits by Odysseus, in with Nike and Medea and one of the female juveniles. The sky is clear and jet black, the stars especially bright. Trucks rumble past and there is scuffling from the cage as Odysseus and Medea, ghostly white in the moonlight, kiss and cuddle. Leia shivers, staring at the river of lights on the highway, as alone in the world as she’s ever felt.

THORA AND BOB DON’T come up from St. Paul that often, so Rick has to make an appearance with the family. When his father was still with them there was a rule– no politics at the table. That was for out by the shed, like smoking. Ma never obeyed it, of course, but at least there was somebody to call a timeout, somebody to change the subject.

Thora is pregnant again, and Ma gets Thora’s two and his two busy trying to lasso the lawn furniture out back, whooping heard whenever there is a successful toss. Ma says she had to rope horses and calves before she went off to Carleton and got radicalized. Her father, who was council chairman for a while, ran cattle before and after the dam was bullied in, and in all the old photos looks like a cowboy with a sunburn.

“I suppose any money is better than none,” says Bob, who is seriously white and sells Minnesota lakeside properties to people with second homes, and insisted his boys, Caleb and Isaac, go to something called a ‘progressive’ school, where they get evaluations instead of grades, “but all this truck traffic has got to wear on your nerves.”

“They take whatever they can turn into money,” says Ma, grinding pepper into the stew, “and leave behind the poison.”

It would be easiest to just let her go unchallenged, let her chant the old refrains that have gotten the People nowhere.

“Truck exhaust,” says Bob. His parents were Bible thumpers of some stripe, Church of Holiness, maybe, and though Bob has ‘transcended all that,’ he dresses like a Christian missionary out ringing doorbells.

“Truck exhaust, frack water, oil spills, flare-off gas, venereal disease,” says Ma. It doesn’t look like there will be anything to dip in the stew gravy, Ma’s revelation about the insidious Fry Bread Plot, the white devils’ sly campaign of genocide-by-carbohydrate coming to her just before last Thanksgiving. And cornbread is out till the Super Valu carries something other than Indian Head meal.

“That’s a new one on me,” Rick ventures. “I wasn’t aware that drill pipe carried venereal disease.”

“The men who bring it here do. I talked to Angeline who works for the Health Service? She says there’s been a spike in the incidence.”

It was the first sex talk he ever received, Ma on the warpath about old-time fur trappers giving the Ree women syphilis and babies being born blind. Put him off the idea of copulation for nearly a week.

“Teenage pregnancy?” asks Thora, who miscarried when she was sixteen, leaving her free to finish high school, get a scholarship, and meet Bob.

“Don’t think those numbers can get any worse.”

Ma doesn’t care about marriage, as she is eager to tell you, just good relationships and responsible parents, both of them. When Thora was done mourning– she was only four months gone with the pregnancy when she lost it– Ma gave her the lecture about being ready to bring a life into the world, and she took it to heart. Ma’s talks on the subject with Ricky were more like feminist cautionary lectures, with the only positive result a supply of several packets of condoms in the eleventh grade, great for display with the guys though they never saw action.

“Is this like a traditional recipe?” ventures Bob.

“My mother made it, if that’s what you mean. Probably got it from Betty Crocker.” Ma can deadpan white people better than anybody he knows, keep them guessing, and it used to be something he liked about her. She did go through a Native Cooking phase, hitting on the hunters for whatever their wives refused to skin and gut, but it went unappreciated. His father liked hot dogs, chili, macaroni and cheese, what he called Real American Food. He’d go on about how the People had always eaten what was most available, what was in season.

And hot dogs are never out of season.’

Hard to say if him putting ketchup on everything Ma cooked was truly just a matter of taste or an act of aggression, but Rick and Thora would meet eyes when he’d whack the Heinz bottle with the heel of his hand, Ma freezing still in her seat, face blank, till he laid it aside, as if psychically absenting herself from the scene of the sacrilege. But it was his non-activism that really split them apart.

‘Bunch of born-again Indians acting out,’ he’d say. ‘Only going to bring the damn federal government down on our heads again.’

He made a distinction between the federal government and the Marines, his stories conveying a grudging kind of pride at having survived all the chickenshit of Basic and the soul-killing Asian war that followed. How he and Ma, who’d proudly been arrested at least three times for protesting what he was up to over there, ever got past hello was never explained in detail.

‘The reservation is like a greasy spoon diner,’ he’d wink. ‘Not too many choices on the menu.’

He’d say it to tease Ma, but it was pretty much true, and when Thora got over not being a teen mother she took a good look around at the possibilities and was soon in a freshman dorm three states away.

“Some people must have hit the jackpot though,” she says now, laying out forks and knives. “The ones with clear title to their land.”

“The Hansens, the Micklejohns,” says Ma, tossing the salad. “Grover Drags Wolf. They’ll be cash-rich till they burn through it. Dusty and Ray Wyatt have picked up and moved to California.”

“It’s the Wheel of Fortune!” Rick intones in an announcer’s voice.

Ma doesn’t look at him, ladling stew into bowls. “Who wants to sell out their neighbors, their People? When you make money that way, it isn’t real.”

“Funny,” says Rick, “the stores around here all seem to accept it.”

“Call the kids in,” Ma tells Charlotte, who as usual has been keeping her head low and her opinions to herself. “We’re ready to eat.”

Isaac comes in with a rope around Caleb, then his own girls, wired to see their older, off-the-rez cousins, and they sit at the table. Bob mutters some New Age kind of grace thing, not so transcended as he thinks.

“I baked some five-grain bread,” says Ma, indicating a tan brick on the table. “Ricky can slice it if you want some.”

With a chainsaw, he thinks, remembering the last encounter with Ma’s healthful baking efforts. Bob is staring warily at the bowl of stew in front of him.

“Mrs. Crow’s Ghost,” he asks, “does this have elk in it?”

“That’s the meat. Fresh killed.”

“But the wasting disease–”

“Colorado, maybe, but not up here. And it’s most likely to be found in the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils, lymph nodes.”

The cousins make retching noises till Thora tells them to stop. She and Bob don’t let them eat processed sugar. At home they have a juicer that reduces carrots, apples, celery, whatever, into an almost-drinkable pulp, making a sound like a drilling rig in labor. Bob holds a chunk of the elk on the end of his fork, hesitating to do the wild thing.

“Really, Bob,” Ma reassures him. “I talk to the fish-and-game people all the time, I buy organic when it’s available, I’ve even had the tap water here checked twice.”

Their father would smack the ketchup bottle even when the stuff poured out freely on the first tilt.

“There’s been no problem with the water,” says Rick, an edge in his voice. “Not here, not in Yellow Earth, not anywhere in the formation. The shale is too deep here, and we never had coal mining shafts crossing underground at all levels like in Pennsylvania.”

“When we drove in last night the flare-offs were blazing all around us. It was pretty if you didn’t– you know– think about it too much.” Thora always tried to be the peacemaker, though Rick knew their father already had one foot out the door.

Rick remembers using the construction site for the casino like a jungle gym, trying to hurdle the yellow caution tape and cracking up laughing when one of the guys would tangle in it and go down, remembers never quite succeeding in their mission impossible to steal a nail gun when nobody was looking. Kids are indestructible, he thinks, because they know so little.

There wasn’t a big fight or an official divorce announcement, just their father packing to leave for the logistics base in Barstow and Ma staying in the house till the car was gone.

“You’ll hear from me when you least expect it,” he winked, which was true enough, until even expectation died. Rick laid a lot of blame on Ma for a while, at that age where whatever your parents do is purposely designed to ruin your life, but she was never easy to put on the defensive.

‘Just concentrate on what kind of man you’re going to be,’ she’d tell him in the middle of one of his sullen accusations. ‘Think about what you can do for the People.’

Ma is like the nagging conscience of the Three Nations, and tends to make people, enrolled members especially, feel like they haven’t done enough. ‘Your mom is a real powerhouse,’ people used to say, kindly leaving out the ‘how can you stand it?’ part.

“This is really good, Ma,” says Thora. “Even if it does turn our brains into mush in ten years.”

The boys make zombie faces and noises till Bob gives them a look. He is okay for a white guy, maybe even more into the boys’ ‘appreciating their heritage’ than Thora, who has stated she’d just as soon skip the whole Native American thing if it has to come with a loser mentality.

And somehow Ma always gives her a pass.

“You must have your hands pretty full, Rick,” says Bob, steering elk nuggets to the side of his bowl. “How you bearing up under the invasion?”

Rick pauses a beat, in case Ma wants to fire the first volley, then plunges in.

“The most important thing,” he explains, zeroing in on his brother-in-law, “is to establish the principle, once and for all, that how we handle our land, our water, our mineral wealth, should be our business and nobody else’s. These oil and gas companies have learned to come straight to us without going through the state or the Feds.”

“So you’re the energy czar in these parts.”

Ma is busy sawing away at the bread, thin slabs clunking down on the plate. Hell, you can slice marble in a quarry with the right tools–

“Harleigh Killdeer, our chairman, is more like the czar. I’m the– what would you call the guy who sorted out disputes back in old Russia–?”

“Rasputin,” says Thora. She always creamed him at Jeopardy!, absorbing non-sports-related facts like a sponge and able to spit them back out when prompted.

“As I remember, Rasputin was a pretty negative character. I’d like to think I’m serving the People.”

“Serving them on a plate,” says Ma, buttering five-grain for the boys.

Rick softens his voice, trying to condescend without getting dinnerware thrown at him. “My mother,” he says, “believes the Spirit of the Shale Oil wishes to be left in peace. That if we drive the corporations from our land and stop eating Cocoa Puffs for breakfast the buffalo will frolic once again on the prairie.”

There are two photos of Ma in the living room, one with Joan Baez, who for the longest time he thought was an aunt or a cousin, and another a year later, right after Wounded Knee, belly swollen, about to pop with him, headed for jail.

“My son,” answers Theresa Crow’s Ghost, who in remembrance of treaties broken has refused to sign her name to a document since she made her mark on a marriage license thirty-six years ago, “has not only drunk the oppressors’ Kool-Aid, but has invented a brand-new flavor. It tastes like forgetfulness, with a hint of petroleum.”

Thora smiles at her husband. She has a beautiful smile, pure sunshine, which is how she got away with being ironic so long before it was in fashion. “Way too many Indians,” she says, “and not enough chiefs. No wonder we lost the continent.”

The main course over, Thora gets the boys started on an epic five-hundred-piece puzzle of Custer’s Last Fight she’s brought along– irony again– then retires into the kitchen with Ma and Charlotte to assemble dessert and talk gynecology.

“It’s all done by lease,” Rick explains to Bob the real estate salesman, “so no land actually changes hands. That’s key. People have been doing that for centuries here, renting out pasture land, crop land, taking a toll if folks hunt or fish on their property.”

“But the whatever– tribal entity– has to have some say.”

“We try to lay down some reasonable ground rules, looking out for everybody in the enrollment, even if they’re not lucky enough to be sitting on something the oil people want. Like the Tlingits, or some of those other north coast outfits, they’d have a sachem or a council of elders to regulate the haul when the salmon run started.”

“But salmon return every year.”

“Oil is just a resource, like any other, and when it’s all been pumped out, guess what? We’re still here, the land is untouched or reclaimable, the grass grows, the river flows. But this time the world pays us the going rate for what they take.”

“The going rate is dropping some,” says Bob. “At the pumps on the way here, I couldn’t believe we’re back under–”

The women reemerge, announcing strawberry shortcake.

“Isn’t it supposed to have that white stuff on top?” asks Caleb, frowning at his plate.

“Whipped cream,” offers Rick, who used to get to lick the beater bowl.

“And what’s that full of?” prompts Bob.

“Carcinogens?” ventures Isaac.

“Well, maybe not directly, but definitely a bunch of empty calories. Besides, it masks the taste of the strawberries.”

“You two have picked wild strawberries.” Thora is having the fruit with no shortcake, determined not to blow up the way she did with each of the boys. “With your grandmother?”

“They’re too young to remember,” says Ma.

“Red fingers,” recalls the first one, wiggling his in her face.

“We used to make dye from berries,” says Ma, using what Charlotte, when they are home alone, calls the ‘tribal we.’ “And we made it from some plants and flowers, from certain kinds of soil, from tree bark. You didn’t take color for granted, you had to work for it, you had to plan.”

“We used to do all kinds of stuff the hard way,” says Rick, who only accepted the damn environmental job from Harleigh to make his mother proud of him again, the way he’d enlisted during Desert Storm just to piss her off, and then never got deployed overseas. “We used to sit in earthen bunkers all winter breathing toxic wood smoke and ruining our lungs, and still nearly froze our butts off.”

The kids all laugh at ‘butts,’ as expected. Ma has gone into her trance, shutting down her face, absolutely still.

Whack the bottom of the ketchup bottle. One, two, three–

“But now we have oil and gas heat, we have cars that can drive us all the way from St. Paul, we have X-ray machines,” he adds, looking at his mother, a breast cancer survivor thanks to modern medicine, “instead of bark poultices and spirit chants. We have Nintendo–”

The boys look to their father, who shrugs, equally uncool–

“–and various other computer games that engage the mind and sharpen the reflexes. We have antibiotics. The world moves on,” he says, his voice gaining power the way Harleigh’s does at this point in the stump speech, “and if we have the courage, the will to move on with it, the sky is the limit.”

Ma sits back then and looks at him, hands folded in her lap, conceding this round for the sake of familial harmony.

“When Harleigh steps down or gets kicked out,” says Thora, pointing a forked strawberry at him, “you ought to take over this mess.”

WAYNE LEE HAS BEEN places, even foreign ones. Spartina has been to Fargo to visit an aunt and three times to the capital for school activity trips. Wayne Lee has done things, many of them daring, some even illegal. He has given her a picture of himself on a surfboard.

“That’s the point break at Rincón,” he told her. “What a day. Perfect sets, not too many barneys in the water, we were really killing it.”

Spartina has never seen the ocean. There is a ski resort just over in Mandan, but she’s never even been on a snowboard.

It takes them a while to get off of the 2, the main road through town always clogged with trucks now. Her grandfather complains about the noise from the rumble strips they’ve put in, but he’d complain more if the drivers blew through as fast as they’d like to. There are lines of cars and pickups stretching out from the lots of all the chain restaurants– Taco John, Arby’s, the Chinese buffets, Grandma Sharon’s Family Café–

“Most of these dudes,” says Wayne Lee as he turns his Camaro off onto Broadway heading east, “just cruise till they find the shortest line.”

“We get men who come in with take-out sacks and stick them on the floor to eat out of while they drink coffee,” says Tina.

“They’re just there to check out you and your fellow Java Janes. They’d drink carbolic acid to stare at a nice set of legs.”

“Our coffee is better.”

“Might be, but that’s not the attraction. Órale, putas,” he remarks as they pass a pair of bundled-up, short, dark girls talking on the sidewalk.

“What?”

“Working girls. They come up from Central America, follow the rigs.”

“You mean like streetwalkers?”

“If you had streets here to walk without being blown away by the wind, maybe, but it’s mostly online hookups now. I could show you how to make a date on that new phone of yours.”

Tina giggles. “I don’t want to make a date.”

“There’s even a special app you could download.”

“That’s really gross.”

“Human nature, darlin. Been going on since the caveman times.” Wayne Lee is wearing a Cabela’s cap and a down vest that are both kind of golden, to go with the Camaro and with his eyes. He shaves every day, unlike most of the oil workers who look like bikers or hillbillies with family feuds. She feels safe with him. Things have gotten intense in town– her grandfather says it’s thirty thousand new men who’ve showed up, an easy hundred to every woman– and just this afternoon at work a trucker with a beard like Noah in the church pageant offered to buy the panties she was wearing.

“What you want to do,” teased Wayne Lee when she told him, “is buy up a couple three new pairs, take the tags off and keep them in your locker or whatever you got in the back room there at work. Just wink and say you’ll have to go to the bathroom, then come back and slip him one of those you never wore. Easy money, and it takes the personal aspect out of the transaction.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“What do panties cost, anyway? The frilly ones? You want to think about your profit margin.”

She could never talk so easy about sex with any of the boys at school, and so far there’s been no– no pressure from Wayne Lee. He just seems to like being with her, being seen with her.

“Total ego trip,” he says. “Any guy steering you around looks like a winner.”

They’ve finally oiled the dirt road that runs past Jolene’s house, promising to pave it on the Company nickel to make up for all the wear and tear, but that hasn’t happened yet. The sheriff’s car, silver with blue and yellow stripes, is idling on the shoulder. Tina turns her face away as they pass.

“On the scout for outlaws,” says Wayne Lee, smiling. “Plenty of those in the mix here these days.”

He says he works for an oil service company but somehow is always free to see her, before school, after work, whenever she’s available. He took her out to Lonnie’s Roadhouse once, a half-dozen violently tattooed guys greeting him with complicated handshakes and checking her out. He apologized afterwards.

“Not the right room for you,” he said.

She’s had to tell some tales to her grandfather, has invented a school club she says she belongs to, surprised by how easy it’s gotten to lie to him. There’s barely a boy in her senior class he’d approve of, of course, much less somebody older and out in the world already. He does a lot of painting in the winter and early spring, shut in by the weather, big rectangles of the prairie the way it used to look. She’ll find him sitting at the easel with his eyes closed, not dozing but seeing, remembering.

“The cattle we had when I was a kid were more this color,” he’ll say, pointing to a small herd of brushstrokes he’s laid down near the horizon, “before everybody switched to the more commercial breeds.”

When they cross onto reservation land Wayne Lee pulls over and they switch seats. When Granpa still had the tractor and her legs were long enough to reach the pedals he let her drive it, so stick shift is second nature.

“Try to keep it under a hundred,” says Wayne Lee as she pulls back onto the road. There’s isn’t a thing moving in any direction but a pair of hawks that might as well be painted in the sky, hovering nearly stationary over the field ahead, hoping to get lucky.

“I can’t learn anything out here,” she says. “It’s all just straight lines.”

“This isn’t a driving lesson, it’s so I can look at you instead of the road.”

He says these things, Wayne Lee, that make her blush, and she can tell he means them.

“That’s it, darlin, pedal to the metal. Even if we get pulled over, my man Brent got plenty juice with the chief.”

His man Brent has been seeing Fawn, she knows, having sex with her somewhere while his wife is still in the picture. Wayne Lee has never suggested double dating.

It is fun to drive fast, drive fast in a car that was built for it, low and powerful and beautiful inside and out, with a heater that not only works but barely makes a whisper. Tina hits ninety and keeps it there, telephone poles whizzing by, Wayne Lee smiling slightly as he watches her.

“You think any more on what we talked about the last time?”

“Which was–?”

“You going to college.”

“You’re just like my guidance counselor.”

“I seriously doubt that. When do you start applying?”

“Pretty soon. It’s expensive, though. Some of the schools, the ones that are hard to get in? Just to file a application it costs like–”

“All the more reason to give it some real thought.”

“You didn’t go to college.”

“And I’m a pretty shady character. Any desire to join the military?”

“No.”

“Hustle for the Mormons in Tahiti?”

“We’re not Mormon.”

“Then what other ticket you got to get out of Yellow Earth?”

“It isn’t so bad.”

“Cause you never been anywhere better.”

“My grandfather wants me to go to school.”

“Maybe just down the road in Bismarck.”

“Anywhere that I want to go. That I can get into.”

“Well, good for him then.”

She slows and makes the turn for the lake.

“You’ll do fine wherever you go, Spartina, so make it count.”

She likes it when he says her full name, which used to embarrass her when Granpa said it in front of people, sounding old-fashioned and weird.

“Get yourself into one of those big outfits, kids from everywhere on the map. I used to hang on the UC campuses, it’s like the United friggin Nations.”

“You were taking classes–”

“Selling weed.”

She keeps her eyes on the road. He laughs.

“You can’t turn me in cause I already done the time for it.”

“You were in jail?”

He shrugs. “County farm. Had to get in with the Aryan Brotherhood cause of the whole gang thing out there. You think those characters we met at Lonnie’s were scary.”

“How long were you in?”

“Less than a year, seemed like twenty. Prison time, it’s like every hour is dragging a two-hundred-pound sack of shit behind it. In the work rooms they stillhad like the old clocks with the hands.”

“Analog.”

“Yeah, those. Watching that minute hand climb to the top like it’s friggin Mount Everest.”

“But you like California.”

He grins. “Hey, me and the Beach Boys.”

And then he serenades her with “Wish They All Could Be North Dakota Girls,” making up lyrics, till they get to the boat ramp.

The cruiser, or whatever you call it, is still sitting there up on supports, tarped over.

“The floating clip joint,” says Wayne Lee. “Except it’s not floating.”

“You don’t like boats?”

“Hobie Cat, sloop, Sunfish, sign me up. I rode in a Rough Rider cigarette boat with some Colombian dudes once, all it needed was wings to take off and fly. That thing”– nods toward the Savage Princess– “is just a toy meant for a very big bathtub.”

He undoes his seatbelt then, which is her cue to do the same. She loves the way he looks at her when they break to breathe, like he can’t believe she’s really there with him. The rest, the surprising tongue, him touching her more intimately every visit together, his breath hot on her neck, gives her what Fawn always calls ‘tingles in the weewee,’ and this time he slips his fingers into the panties the trucker in Havva Javva wanted to buy, and after he makes her way more than tingle, another surprise, she realizes they’ve fogged themselves in with heavy breathing.

“Engine,” he says. “Defroster.”

He watches her turn the car on, work the heater knobs, and she knows she’s blushing again.

“You’re almost there, darling.”

“There.”

“Ready for the whole deal. But you’ve got to tell me.”

He’s never said he’ll come visit her if she goes to college, or how long he’ll be in town, or anything about them together beyond the next time he messages her on her phone. But his willingness to wait for her–

“There was a way the Indians– maybe not these around here, but some Indians– used to catch eagles. Like for the feathers? A guy would have himself mostly buried, laying on his back, out where they’d seen eagles hunting, and after he was all camouflaged up they’d stake down a live rabbit or prairie chicken right over his chest. He’d spend a day, maybe two, laying out like that, watching the hawks and the buzzards and shouting them away if they got too close, waiting, got to know that rabbit pretty good. Finally, some big old beautiful bald eagle would swoop down and wham!”

Wayne Lee snaps his arms tight around her.

“The Indian would just fold that big bird in, hug it to death, and they figured not only was it good for the feathers, which carried a lot of power in their ceremonies, but some of that eagle’s spirit passed into the man.”

Wayne Lee’s defroster works pretty well, front windshield first, then the sides and rear. When their condensation is nearly gone Tina sees that a car has pulled up next to them while they were making out, a red, sporty car with Fawn laughing in the passenger seat and Wayne Lee’s muscle-bound man Brent, smirking and giving them a thumbs-up, behind the wheel.

She throws the Camaro into reverse, does a quick 180 and is back on the highway. Fawn has never kept a secret for more than five minutes in her life. But then, for whatever reason, Tina thinks of the intersecting circles they use to demonstrate sets and subsets in math. Her grandfather lives so far removed from any loop as to be out of the equation. Her heartbeat begins to decelerate–

“They must have come to take a look at that boat,” says Wayne Lee, grinning.

IT ISN’T THE CLEANEST fraternity house he’s ever been in. Getting out of Yellow Earth was extra impossible this morning, the water-truckers wise to the side roads by now, the dirt one he tried to duck them on almost impassable in the downpour, so he’s late. Gene, who he wishes he could hire to absorb malcontents at the office, is already at the cleared table working motor skills with four of the more tractable residents when Prescott comes in.

“You missed breakfast, Mayor,” says the counselor. “Justin’s got kitchen duty.”

This is a big deal, his son pitching in at the group home. The years of therapy and specialists, breakthroughs and regressions, from that first ‘severely affected’ diagnosis at the Ann Carlsen Center to the decision to place Justin here in Minot, have led to this triumph.

Kitchen duty.

The squat little Hispanic woman who cooks the first two meals nods to him, scouring egg from a giant skillet in the sink.

“Good morning, Justin,” he calls, putting some cheer in his voice.

Justin looks at him, goes back to organizing the breakfast plates. This too is progress, after the early years where they thought he might be deaf, the long period where eye contact was received as intrusion if not threat.

The Home has a set of Fiestaware in all the colors, and Justin first rinses the plates in like-hued pairs before slipping them into the dishwasher in the same order. He has a dramatically negative response to odd numbers, to imbalance, so the counselors set an extra, unoccupied place at the table whenever the diners come out short of even.

“I was in the neighborhood,” says Press, sitting in a chair out of the way, “and thought I’d drop by to see how you’re making out.”

Phyllis comes twice a week and Prescott every other Saturday. He tells her it’s so Justin gets more visits, but really it’s that the way she talks to him like he’s still four years old is impossible to be around.

“You’re looking good. Like you’re getting outside a bit.”

Justin is not a fan of the great outdoors, too many uncontrollable stimuli, but the counselors take them out en masse if it’s not pouring like today. Justin is clean-shaven as always, doing it himself these days with the electric razor Press bought him, right half of his face, then the left. He wears the same outfit he settled on as a boy– tan chinos, solid-color blue shirt buttoned to the neck, white socks and Hushpuppy loafers. Once Justin had finally stopped growing, a couple years ago, Phyllis bought ten pairs of the shoes in case Hush Puppy should ever go out of business or discontinue the style.

He looks normal.

“I got murdered in traffic getting out of town. This drilling thing– you wouldn’t recognize downtown these days.”

Or approve, physical change one of the many banes of Justin’s existence. Phyllis has kept up the rocketship wallpaper in his room for the always stressful holiday visits, has kept several pairs of chinos and a half-dozen blue shirts hanging in his closet. Once she tried to teach him to play checkers, but he kept snatching the jumped pieces and putting them back where they started. The set lies on top of his dresser in his room here, black discs on red squares, red on black, symmetrical. He likes the pattern.

“So good luck to me, trying to ride herd on all these new people,” he says as Justin begins to separate knives from forks, forks from spoons. “You can push things through the council, you can meet with the Company reps and make as much noise as you want, but finally the law says folks are allowed to make their private deals. That’s the free market, that’s America.”

He’s not sure if the cook understands any English, and wonders for a moment if she might be somewhere on the spectrum as well. She goes up on her toes to hang the huge skillet to dry on a wall hook, then leaves the room.

“I like to tell the hotheads who come in to holler about some little regulation we’ve passed that steps on their toes, nibbles at their profit, to think of what would happen if those NFL teams took the field and there was no rules, no refs? Just get the ball and put it over the goal line, the hell with out of bounds, holding, illegal blocks and tackles, all that concussion protocol. There’d be fatalities is what, and the beer companies sure as hell wouldn’t be buying millions of dollars worth of commercial time to peddle suds during the slaughter. I mean, what would happen to the game?”

Justin begins to load the segregated silverware into the washer. One of his favorite things at home was putting all the loose change into those paper bank wrappers. If there weren’t machines to do it at the mint he’d have a job.

“So it’s kind of like that old Dick Feller song– ‘Making the Best of a Bad Situation.’”

Prescott listens to country in his car, Phyllis to fucking Jimmy Buffett in the house, and Justin to nothing, till a friend of theirs bought him a little folding-case record player, already an antique, and a stack of 45s. Out of all those records he locked onto “Yellow Submarine,” playing it over and over, the yellow and orange swirls on the label going round and round on the turntable. The one attempt to interest him in the flip side, “Eleanor Rigby,” induced Justin’s noise, somewhere between a grunt and a cry, and a bout of spastic wrist-flapping.

“Maybe the idea that I ever had control of it, even before the oil, is just kidding myself. I mean what with crazy national politics, mass media, even the damn weather like today– you can’t strong-arm that stuff on a city government level. So this tidal wave that’s hit us, well, maybe here in Minot they were a bit more prepared, been dealing with all those men from the Air Force base for years, but it’s just swept over us. The best I can hope for is to maintain a little decorum within the city limits, try to hit the Company people up for something that’ll still be there when it all washes away. And believe me, there’s never a boom without there’s a bust. Gonna be a hell of a mess to clean up when they’re gone.”

Justin measures dishwasher soap exactly to the line in the plastic cup, pours it into the compartment, closes the door and hits the proper buttons. He’ll stand before it now, watching the digital timer count down thirty-five minutes till the symmetrically arranged load is done, then pull everything out in his preferred order and put it away. When he was little and you took something from him, that damn Beatles record for instance, he would make his noise and keep staring at the spot where it had been, just staring for five or ten minutes. Prescott has had time to understand the logic of his son’s mind. This is what I can handle, this much and no more will not terrify me. His own life as mayor is such a minefield of decisions to make, situational hats to put on, performances private and public. His own life is exhilarating and unpredictable and will put him in an early grave.

You come here because you should, because you’re the father, not because the young man acknowledges you or desires your company. Sometimes when Phyllis left them home alone together Press would give Justin a roll of bubble wrap and leave him in the next room, able to concentrate on work or watch a TV show with the constant pop, pop, pop reassuring him that the boy was safe and content. He’d take it away and hide it when he heard Phyllis in the driveway, Justin left staring at his own hands, thumbs poised to press the next plastic bubble.

“Anyhow,” he says rising, “it’s great to see you doing so well.”

He knows not to try to hug his son. That had been the hardest for Phyllis, a baby who struggled to disengage from her arms, his indifference or aggression as a little boy. Justin would throw things, not at anybody or anything, but throw them, and hard.

“Your Mom will be by on Tuesday.”

Prescott leaves the sack of toiletries with Gene and runs through the rain to his car. The other day counselor, Maurice, is out with a couple of the hardier residents making a wall of white-jacketed sandbags around the yard. Press has to set the wipers full speed and turn his headlights on, the sky darker now than when he left Yellow Earth. By the time he crosses the 16th Street bridge the Souris is flowing near up to the concrete, men in yellow-striped vests pulling barricade sections from a van, ready to block it off.

There’s going to be a flood.