Yellow earth

By the time the second boom reached Yellow Earth, the slaughter of buffalo had become more harvest than hunt. The great northern herd flowed over the high plains like a huge, mobile lake– the shooters had only to find a suitable vantage on its shore and go to work, feeding long cartridges to their heavy old Sharps or state-of-the-art Remingtons, balancing them on support sticks, lining up the new telescopic sights and piercing the lungs of whichever shaggy beast seemed on the verge of upsetting the ruminant stasis of the group. Men killed fifty, eighty, more than a hundred bison from one stand, able to get off a shot a minute if their targets stayed close, careful to let the rifle barrel cool just enough before culling the next one. A fallen buffalo might be stepped around, sniffed, maybe even hooked momentarily with a young bull’s horns, but the species was so physically powerful and had lived so long without an animal predator of any size that they were not so easily spooked as wild cattle or horses. The calm shooter, moving downwind, always downwind behind the edge of the herd, was far more wary of Indian competitors than of being gored or trampled. Loading, sighting, firing, then looking for the next hulk to be brought down before the last had finished its writhing and kicking in the grass.

In the shooter’s wake came the skinners, at twenty-five cents a hide, hurrying to do their flensing before the blood cooled and the pelt began to stiffen. Drive a wagon rod through the nose of the just-killed beast to anchor it to the ground, cut a circle around the neck, slit down the underside from throat to tail, slit down the insides of the legs to the knees, then tie off the neck hide to your wagon horses hitched with a doubletree and crack the whip. Any wise team of skinners was already cutting while the shooter was still killing ahead of them, cold carcasses requiring painstaking tug-and-slice work with the curved skinning knife, and more opportunity to damage the hide. A troop of gleaners– wolves, coyotes, ravens, magpies– set up vigil just behind the skinners, waiting to feed on the yellow-white fat, the glistening red muscle, the innards suddenly spilt from their thick protection. Less experienced hands labored without a knife, rolling the liberated hides into bundles and lugging them back to wagons and then to the day’s base camp, staking them out gory-side-up to dry in the cold prairie wind till stiff as planks for stacking.

Thick and lustrous winter hides brought the best price, with tongues and tallow taken as well if the Northern Pacific was nearby. Paired wagons, drawn by six yoked oxen, could haul three hundred bundled hides, the freighters often joining in long trains able to circle and provide shelter against Indian attack. There were hide thieves, of course, and occasionally an angry warrior would slash the staked pelts to diminish their value, while territorial disputes were settled at gunpoint. The outfitters, never more than a day’s ride away, did handsomely without risk or gruesome toil. Rifles, primers, ball and bar lead, powder, knives, poisons to keep insects from ruining the hides, horses, mules, oxen, any grub but buffalo meat, tobacco and liquor for consumption or trade– only the most veteran hunters were grub-staked against their season’s profit rather than paying cash.

A parallel industry grew up as the wolves grew fat and lazy gorging on carcasses they had no part in killing, their own winter pelts especially valuable, and laws were passed offering a bounty for their destruction. Wolfers, considered even a cut below the buffalo men, followed the slaughter, their prey gun-shy but vulnerable to poison, a gutted buffalo cow or tender prairie hen laced with just enough strychnine hard to pass up. Coyotes took the bait as well, and smaller predators, and there were stretches of ground left black and glistening with dead ravens as the stink of the rotting buffalo kill clouded the other senses.

Hide towns were thrown up hastily and then moved with the herd, enclosures of sod and stretched leather where anything a louse-infested, tangle-haired, blood-simple buffalo man could desire was for sale. The prices were jacked up as high as the lack of competition would allow, the women available only the most desperate and diseased. And even here, surrounded by bales of green hides stacked for shipment, the men weren’t free of the buffalo gnats, the mosquitos, the greenhead flies, the odor of butchery on a massive scale.

But the real money was made by the furriers in St. Louis and the traders at the railheads, green hides likely to rot into worthlessness if you held out for too fair a price. The tanned winter robes became rugs and winter coats and wall hangings, while the patchier summer hides provided a durable, elastic leather useful for dozens of purposes and purchased in bulk by the British Army.

Meanwhile, the US Army kept patrols on the northern border, driving the herd south to keep it from Sitting Bull’s renegade band in Canada, hoping to starve them back to the reservation, while the Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, and Gros Ventre people had already been diminished in power and territory. By 1882 there were more than five thousand white shooters and skinners in the Montana and Dakota Territories, playing an endgame now, as the other three great herds to the south had already been obliterated. With robes selling at two to five dollars apiece at a time when cow punchers were making a dollar a day and keep, amateurs as well as seasoned buffalo men flocked to this last great slaughter once the railroad had penetrated deep enough to make the summer pelts pay. With the Sioux mostly forced onto reservations, the chief danger was from the temperamental high plains weather, dozens of skin men and thousands of buffalo killed every year in snap blizzards or floods of the unstable Missouri. But the market stayed hungry and the hunt was relentless, increasingly methodical by the end, when the herd was less a vast sea than a dozen isolated eddies, more than a million and a half animals killed in a three-year spree.

When the herd was reduced to a handful of stragglers most of the buffalo men left, off to find other work, none of it paying nearly as well. And once the maggots and flesh beetles were done with what the other scavengers left and wind and sun had bleached them white and dry, the bones were left for a final harvest, stacked into horse-high ricks and carted off by struggling farmers to sell for eight dollars a ton at railhead, to be ground for bone china, carbon for sugar production, phosphates for the soil, and finally all evidence of the great herd was gone, even the annual crop of dried shit that had lit a million campfires, gone from the land forever.

THE TRANSLOCATION, CONSIDERING THE short life span of the average prairie dog, has become another Trojan War, and she, Leia, is Helen. Aggressive staring, tooth chattering, tail flaring, bluff charging, defensive barking, reciprocal sniffing of scent glands– the outcasts of Poker Flats are not giving their territory up without resistance. But her invaders are healthier, more unified, desperate.

Odysseus has kept busy romancing some of the younger females, receptive perhaps because their coterie’s adult males are too closely related– co-submerging with one, then the other, five or six times a day, symbolic nesting grass in his mouth. Ninety-eight percent of copulations occur underground, so she can only gauge his success by the females’ behavior, each now preparing a nursery burrow, laying in dry grass and getting huffy with anyone who approaches. If this isolated bunch has been genetically drifting, new blood will pull them back into the heterogeneous current and perhaps avoid some inbred misfits. Mixed parentage of litters is possible, of course, and Leia imagines the steps to take to be sure, the drawing of blood samples from mother, pups, and potential fathers, sending them off to the lab for PCR amplification and DNA profiling. Nike and Niobe, impregnated back in the old colony, have each set themselves up in abandoned holes, and if not too damaged by hitting the padded extraction chamber at 300mph, should be nearing parturition.

Ajax, despite his advanced years, continues to be the enforcer, greeting each challenger with a display routine complete with anal sniffing, then choosing to fight rather than run. At least one rival has been chased, scarred and churring in submission, to the periphery of the town, and Ajax has come out of a few holes to meticulously lick his feet and rub his face in the grass, a sure sign that he’s just killed and eaten the early litter of a resident female. Very Olympian of him. Lions kill their predecessor’s cubs without cannibalizing them when they take over a pride, but even regular backyard fluffy-tail squirrel females will go for the protein while securing their genetic dominance. It is, in fact, a jungle out there.

The coterie will survive in a modified version. Leia has already recorded two instances of allogrooming between newcomer and resident juveniles, Romeo and Juliet action promising to unite the divided houses, and Hera, the oldest female, is working on a rim crater for her newly dug burrow, piling moist earth all around the opening and jackhammering it to rock-hardness with her nose. It’s possible that the bunch over here started as a ward of the big colony, separated by the highway and the traffic, and that this is a reunion. Leia has checked every day since the move for fresh roadkill, and so far there’s no evidence that any of her animals have tried to cross back to the old homestead. It could be nice for them here– a new start, room to grow. The only real advantage of dense colonization is mass warning and defense against predation, and the downsides– the stress, the constant territorial disputes, the tight-packed vulnerability to epidemic– all discourage big-city living. The grass is patchy here, and though it would derail any claim to a proper field study, she may have to consider provisioning the fledgling coterie, at least for the transition period.

A whining noise causes Leia to turn and look across the highway at the ever-developing fracking pad, a rat’s nest of pipes and tanks and power hookups going in, at least twenty men and a half-dozen pickup trucks swarming over the area, working over and around each other day and night. Industrious little creatures, she thinks, but they’re still varmints.

He made sure to check with Jonesy on the name. This one is younger, sharper suit, and comes bearing blueprints.

“He’s really just a landman,” says the young one, whose name might be Calkins or Dalkins. “He’s the matchmaker and I’m the marriage counselor.”

The young one smiles, what he thinks is pleasantly. Press steps around to his side so he has to turn in the chair, pretends to be pondering.

“All honeymoons end. By now your people have an idea of who’s going to make a killing, who’s going to do fine, and who’s just waiting in traffic or staring at spoil pits.” Dalkins holds up a roll of blueprint. “So it’s a good moment to sweeten the pot.”

“That’s the tat,” smiles the young one. “This is the tit. We have two workforce accommodation centers currently under construction– assembly would be a more accurate term– within your city limits, Mr. Mayor. The Company doesn’t think it fair for you to change the rules on us without warning.”

Will Crowder was in just before, explaining that he’d need at least two more qualified deputies to monitor the clubs all night, that he’s got the whole county to worry about–

Press nods and the Company rep stands to spread the blueprint out on his desk. It looks undecipherable, like they always do to him, but very big.

“Our men work long, hard hours, under a good deal of pressure to produce at speed. When they’re off work, they need a place to unwind. Believe it or not, their first choice would often not be a titty bar.”

The young one is from Texas, and the way he says ‘titty bar’ makes you think of a furry, big-breasted animal.

“A three-story, multiuse recreational center. Gym, saunas, weight-lifting equipment, room for yoga or cardio classes, indoor track– we’ve taken the nature of the weather here into account– and an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement.”

Press thinks of four places, three old warehouses and a failed big box store, that would make a good site.

“For the public. Company employees would have access twenty-four-seven, of course, but the people of Yellow Earth, especially if they’re involved with a program sponsored by your city government, would be encouraged to use the facilities.”

As the rep slides one blueprint on top of the other Press realizes that each is the plan for just one floor. He’s not sure Bismarck has anything as grand.

“We’d leave that up to your discretion, but I’d say any added clause would apply to them as well.”

Press makes his move to the window. The state committee has already felt him out about lieutenant governor this next term, a shoo-in for election but considered a dead-end job. Unless–

“Not only that,” smiles the young one, rolling up his blueprints, “but we’re willing to commit to a healthy percentage of local hire for the construction.”

“Absolutely. We could present it as a special concession you’ve badgered us into.”

“Something you’ve won for the people. The staff, as well, once we’re up and running, will have a lot of positions that could be filled from right here.”

If he’s already gone to Bismarck before the announcement, it will seem like an honor, a memorial. A legacy.

“That’s the beauty of it. The way our contract is structured, we gradually cede ownership of the facility to the city. You end up owning it lock, stock, and barrel.”

And taking on the cost of its operation, thinks Press. But if he’s already gone, that’s the next fella’s lookout.

“It’s a generous and attractive offer,” he says to Hawkins. “I promise to take it up with my board right away.”

It would be terrific for the people in town, especially while they’re not paying for it. Even Jonesy might come around, get her girls in there for winter soccer.

“As far as the specifications of the facility are concerned, I have only one important thing to ask you, Mr. Mayor. Do you people up here play hockey?”

SHE WAITS TILL THE hand is paid out, then taps Cheryl to take over the deal. Nice little posse around the table, the entire floor jumping though it is three o’clock in the morning. She claps her hands and shows them palm-up to the players, the old ritual, then burns a card and slides it into the discard tray.

“My name is Lady,” she announces, “as in Lady Luck. Let’s play some blackjack.”

You try not to lose the momentum of the action when you tap in, in fact you hope to speed it up. The players push chips into their betting circles on the layout and Lady distributes cards from the dealer’s shoe, sweeping them from left hand to right before flipping them face up as she checks the suspects across from her.

“We’ve been up and down,” answers the table-hopper at third base who the dealers call Just Ask Chuck. “You’ve been raking it in.”

Cloyd, the pit boss, has explained that even with all her experience she’ll still have to pool tips with the other dealers, but the more you throw in, the bigger the pot. And losers don’t tip.

“Everybody set?” she asks, scanning the cards in front of the remaining players. Nobody signals for another hit.

She flips a seven up next to her eight already showing, then hits herself again with a nine and goes bust.

She gives him the dazzling smile. “Life is cruel, but blackjack has no memory.”

It is a ten-dollar-minimum, five-hundred-max table, and Chuck is a ten-dollarflat bettor, win or lose, rain or shine. He talks through so many hands without laying a wager and spends so much time kibitzing at other tables that he never has a really bad night.

“So I won with just sixteen?” asks a rig worker who is drunk but not as drunk as the buddy who leans over his shoulder, loudly advising his play.

She matches the stacks of chips in their circles, running a finger over the even tops and proving her empty palm to the Eye in the Sky.

“My mama taught me some manners,” says Drunk. “Done it with a broom handle, but she taught em.”

Bearpaw has just started the all-night shift, the place filled mostly with drillers and mud men and roughnecks, with a sprinkling of local insomniacs and degenerate gamblers. The Drunk brothers are new to her, as is the chain-smoking woman at first base to her left, a scrawny babe in her fifties who Lady files as Wheezy. Next is the Boss Man, a mid-level oil exec who apparently never sleeps and plays a different, complicated system every time he lands at her table, doubling his bet after losses, upping by a quarter after wins, dropping back to minimum every ten hands, whatever. He is a good, steady loser who makes tipping her a single every five hands part of his routine.

On his left are Drunk and Drunker, nice boys but clueless about the game, and then Sitting Bull, a member of one of the tribes that own the casino, who they say hit the jackpot with his oil leases, signing up early for a decent advance and already with four wells pumping on his land. He is a wide-faced, overweight, gloomy kind of guy who parks at whatever table he’s chosen– blackjack, poker, roulette, keno– and doesn’t budge for the session, hence the name. A real George, though, he slides a blue fifty to each dealer as they go on their break. We love Sitting Bull.

Beside him is an Einstein-looking character wearing X-ray specs and constantly looking around at the other tables, at the drinks waitresses coming and going, at nothing at all, often a tell for somebody trying to count cards and nervous about it.

“I don’t believe in insurance,” announces Drunker. “Insurance is for weenies.”

“The dealer shows an ace up,” Just Ask Chuck volunteers before Lady can speak, “and she has a good shot at a BJ–”

“A blackjack, twenty-one. Insurance means you can make a side bet on her cards– half of what you’ve already laid out– that she will have a blackjack. Pays two-to-one so it hedges your bet on your own hand.”

“Even with that ace up, the odds are really long against her nailing it. So for that return–”

She is allowed, encouraged even, to explain basic rules and strategies with new players. The odds and human stupidity more than take care of the House.

“It is more of a hedge. Unless by insurance you mean a policy that covers lightning but nothing else.”

“Pass on what?” injects a friend of theirs, a lost-looking guy a few years older who has been cruising the action at this table and that, one hand in his pocket probably gripping a roll of chips, waiting for Fortune to whisper his name.

“You wouldn’t understand,” says Drunk. “It involves higher mathematics.”

“I mean, since it’s all up to the flip of the card or the roll of the dice, doesn’t it make sense to just put your whole bundle on one play? Get it over, one way or the other?”

“You go test that bright idea out, buddy,” says Drunker. “Come back and tell us how it works out.”

The Lost Guy’s face shuts down then, he turns and heads toward the roulette wheel, determined, but wishing he had an audience for his death-defying leap.

The others have been sufficiently warned and Lady continues the deal. She hits a surprisingly long rocky streak, which includes busting on her third card three times in a row, the Drunks whooping and slapping five and upping their bets each time, a vibe you love to have at your table. After Lady dealt fifty-two hands in her first hour on the job, Cloyd has pretty much let her rock out, hovering near the few times there’s been a beef but letting her work it out on her own. All the players but Chuck, too timid to jump on the streak, are up on the House when Sitting Bull starts to talk.

“The thing is, I got a bad ticker,” he says. He is usually silent, a nice presence, quick with his play decisions, which seem to be based on mood and stamina. “Congestive heart failure. My father had the same thing.”

“They say don’t do this, don’t eat that, get plenty of sleep. If I’m on borrowed time, what do I want to sleep for?”

“I’m with you, buddy,” says Drunker, whose name is Ike. “Sleep is for weenies.”

“Course my sons and daughter, they’re already fighting over the money.” He turns to the players on his right. “I got some wells coming in.”

“Those are excellent sites.” Boss Man constantly rearranges his chips as he plays, as if their arrangement is a mnemonic device for whatever system he’s currently following. “They should produce for quite a while.”

“They don’t like me being here,” says Sitting Bull, tapping his finger for another card. “Think I’m losing their money.”

“Kids will break your heart.” Wheezy lays her cigarette butts parallel to each other in the ashtray, which is in the shape of a bear paw, and then builds a pyramid with them like logs in a fireplace. She smokes Camel no-filters, Lady’s least favorite. “I got a daughter in Phoenix, I never heard from her once that she didn’t need some kind of bailout.”

“In most states, you can disown your children once they’re eighteen,” Chuck observes. “There’s a legal procedure.”

“Worse than them bothering me is them fighting with each other,” says Sitting Bull. “Brothers and sisters shouldn’t do that, not over money.”

“Maybe for white people, but for us– you’re sposed to help each other, look out for your nieces and nephews.”

“It takes a friggin village,” says Wheezy. “And that’s more than having the same zip code.”

“It feels heavy,” says the big man. “It feels like my heart is made of lead and is gonna sink down into my belly.”

“Blackjack,” says Lady, softly. “Sorry folks, the House takes this one.”

They tighten into a kind of crew then, which happens sometimes, Wheezy rasping about her daughter’s hopeless boyfriends and surprising but equally abusive girlfriend, the Drunks, who really are nice boys even loaded to the gills, learning the game, Einstein making bolder and bolder wagers, his stacks of red becoming green as they get deeper into the shoe, as Lady effortlessly deals the hands, collects for the House and makes the payouts before sweeping the cards back up in the order they were dealt and parking them in the discard rack. She begins to think about Leonard, due sometime in the afternoon, the first she’ll have seen him in almost a year.

He won’t have any trouble catching on here, his record clean in Reno and Vegas and Louisiana, despite the longer and longer gaps between his periods of employment. He’s never made a scene on the floor, Lenny, and is pretty much the default model for a stick man– thin, good-looking, speedy and glib. Lenny could talk Just Ask Chuck into a puddle.

As for giving him a second (third? fourth?) chance, it’s tough to scope the odds. It was always streaky between them, from the first sawdust joint they worked together till the last awful meltdown in the parking lot at Foxwoods, blowing hot and cold, the high times so great, so much fun, that even knowing how it inevitably crashes has never kept her away from their game. Cards don’t love you, dice do contortions to put you in the hole, man got a drug habit? Double down.

“Double down,” says Einstein, hitting her with what might be a deep-and-meaningful with his eyes. He’s been laying tens to ride for her every five or six hands, several of them winners, and though Just Ask Chuck always winks and says ‘Gotta keep the dealer sweet’ whenever he steers one of his own pink chips toward her toke box, she feels a message, an agenda, coming off this guy. It’s not like she’s in a party pit wearing Victoria’s Secret and shaking her tits under his nose, and she’s at least a decade older than he is. Is he asking her not to rat him out to the pit boss?

“You’re killing me, handsome,” she says and deals him a six that puts him at eighteen, where he’ll stand.

“Breathe in my direction,” says Chuck to Einstein. “I could use some of that stuff.”

Streaks are intoxicating when they’re not misery, but Lady knows they are only momentary ripples in a flow that is heading down the drain. She can quote you the numbers, and it matters not that half the table beats her seventeen, or that a few weary players will stagger out into the dawn with fattened wallets– she is only a factory hand servicing a machine that milks people for their money.

“Sixteen is tough to hit on, but eight is a good start, and if you play two hands–”

She points to the ceiling. “The One Above records whatever it sees, but it might be too noisy in here to hear your voice.”

“Right,” says Drunk, forking two fingers to tap the table, “gotta go to the videotape.”

He matches his green quarter on the second eight. Lady deals an eight and a deuce.

“All right, with what I’m showing, you probably want to stay on the first hand and hit the second.”

“Curveball on the inside corner,” says Drunker, whose eyes have drooped to half-mast as he leans on his friend’s back for support. Lady does Egoscue exercises for her hip every day, but by the end of the ten-hour shifts she’s pulling here–

The Lost Man calls out a loud goodnight to Drunk and Drunker as he passes, making a show of pulling his empty pockets out and letting them hang, a sad little smile on his face.

“When that industrial accident waiting to happen catches up with Schmuck,” says Drunk to Drunker, “I hope I’m not anywhere near him.”

Boss Man taps his watch face. “Four o’clock,” he says, this quitting time obviously in his night’s strict protocol. “I’m done.”

Lady helps him color out, trading his mess of reds, blues and greens for a trio of black hundreds. He does a quick mental calculation and leaves her fifteen for the toke, some percentage of some percentage he’s predetermined. Probably a guy who stares at drilling logs all day, making decisions that can mean millions to the Company.

“It wasn’t the Martingale and it wasn’t the Paroli,” Chuck observes after Boss Man has left the pit. “But the dude sure had some method cooking.”

“Show me one that always works,” Lady smiles, burning a card in the Boss Man’s honor, “and I’ll switch sides of the table.”

“You ever gamble?” asks Wheezy, lighting up the first stick from a new pack. She is an inconsistent player, betting hunches from who knows what planet, and a lousy tipper, but Lady likes her.

They’ve got all blackjack dealers doing one-twenties before a break, so Lady continues to portion out the pasteboards. The tips are better at the poker table, but there are so many games and betting variations now and twice as many smokers. The drinks waitresses, the real lookers who know how to make it seem personal, probably do as well as she does, getting the same minimum base pay but allowed to take cash or chips and never in the position of beating their customers at a hand of cards. You make a living at this racket by making it fun, win or lose, and by keeping the action flowing steadily, mesmerizing them till there is nothing but your table in front of them, with slot noise, voices, the time of day or night all fading from consciousness.

Lady is a pro and can’t think of a job she’d be better at, but she doesn’t need it the way Leonard does. “I’m an adrenaline junkie,” he told her on their first real date, and at that point it was all he was addicted to. This carpet joint will be hopping as long as the oil boom lasts, the colored lights and MIDI cacophony seeming natural when it’s packed with fun-starved roughnecks. She’s spent enough hours with lonely drunks at the one table left open to play in the wee hours to appreciate the energy here. You work the machine like crazy while there’s still money to extract, then you move to the next spot. Lenny will love it, Lenny’s eyes will shine when he steps into the lobby and the dice will tapdance with joy to know he’s arrived. There is no shortage of meth floating around in Yellow Earth and on the reservation, of course, but availability is never the issue. If there was one crystal left in the Nevada desert, Lenny would know where to start sifting sand.

“Willpower is like luck with me, babe,” he’s told her more than once. “It comes and it goes.”

A real player stays a little detached from the game. Keep your guts out of every roll, see the big picture, accept that success and failure are transient and not to be taken to heart. She’ll smile and hug him close when he gets off the little plane, show him how she’s set up the room the casino scored for her, listen to his excited chatter, his stories about the total losers he met in the Program this time, even make plans with him. But she’ll be watching, looking for tells, four feet above it all, like the security cameras recording the conversation of cards and hand signals at the table. When there’s a beef, a question of who’s at fault and how things really went down, you can always roll back the video.

Sitting Bull makes his second two-hundred-dollar bet in a row, a sure sign that he’s getting tired, his heart feeling heavy. He likes to go out firing ballsy wagers no matter what he’s dealt. He’s enough of a whale here to merit limitless RFB, but while he’ll partake of the comped Food and Beverages, he’s never taken them up on the free Room. ‘Only ten minutes from my house,’ he says.

Einstein is laying down black chips as well, not looking at anything but the cards as they come out of the shoe.

“My, you’ve had a lucky night,” says Lady, as unloaded an observation as she can make it.

Again he has her in an eyelock. If he’s counting he’s new at it, and she doubts she’ll say anything to Cloyd during her twenty off. The purse she left in the locker in the break room is made of transparent plastic to make things easier when she goes in and out through security. She started in the business dealing single decks by hand to retired beauticians from Bakersfield, back when half the players still called the game ‘Twenty-One.’ At the last seminar she went to it was conceded that some counters were indeed ‘playing with advantage’ and beating the House, but the interest the phenomenon had brought back to the game, the false hope, had triggered an increase in action that would offset that by millions.

“Your fate is in your own hands,” she says gently. “I’m just the messenger girl.”

“When Lady Luck has smiled upon you,” winks Just Ask Chuck, “you damn well better smile back.”

There is yelling from over by the keno tables then, two men not playing anything standing nose to nose with each other, looking like they need a referee. Lady uses the distraction to pop the shoe open. Sometimes they work in teams, a departing player signaling the count to a newcomer.

“Time for a change,” she says, pulling out the dozen and a half cards left and signaling the local girl, Nicolette, to take a drink order from her players. “This deck wants to go to sleep”

THE ROOFING LADDER is a motherfucker to lug over the fields at night, bulky, noisy, heavy enough that Dickyboy has to keep switching shoulders and stopping to rest. The good thing is that the construction site he’s stolen it from is only two miles from the ramp that Chairman Killdeer keeps calling ‘the marina’ in his newsletters, two miles from the propped-up hulk that hasn’t moved an inch since the dedication ceremony. They had a security light on it the first couple months, which suddenly stopped working when the yacht started being pointed out as the symbol of everything wrong with the current tribal government. So when he finally sees the bulky silhouette against the sky over the lake, he can just sit for a few minutes and get his breath back.

There wasn’t a scene at home, no big dramatic blowout, just more of the same old shit, and he’s had it. There are uncles and aunts to stay with, sure, but they’re all on your case about this and that, and who needs it? He’s done vanishing acts– two weeks, three weeks– before, staying with friends or cousins on the edges of the rez, and nobody called the cops or anything. You show up at school most days of the week, don’t knock out anybody’s brains with a hammer, and you can stay under the radar.

The ladder at full extension is just long enough to reach the deck of the yacht with enough of a lean that he doesn’t worry he’ll fall backwards. Climbing high is a bitch though, would have been easier a year ago before he porked out so much, and he rests halfway up, listening to the coyotes on the other side of the water. It’s getting cold, but once he’s out of the wind–

He gives the ladder a little shake, feeling the ridge hook grab onto something above, resumes his climb up. At the top he’s able to unloose enough boat cover to slide under and in, working the little flashlight out of his pocket to help him figure out what is where. Pulling the ladder up after is a nightmare, clattering and threatening to pull out of his hands when the wind takes it, but he finally gets it up, adjusted to its shortest height and stowed along the rail, hidden from outside view by the huge blue tarp.

On deck under the tarp frame is like being in a tent, the air smelling plasticky and stale, everything with a slight bluish tinge in his flashlight beam. Nothing is locked. Dickyboy enters the cabin, finds the house controls and flicks a map light on, then steps down into what will be the main casino area when it’s all tricked out.

He’ll need to keep selling to have operating funds, and school is still the best place to make connections, so developing a quick and secure boarding and exit system will be the first order of business. A place to stow the ladder out of sight near the marina, a good idea of who bothers to come down here during this season, some kind of peep hole or periscope to clock the outside before he shows himself. Dickyboy finds a room switch, turns the light on. He has to hope the tarp and the anti-sun windows are thick enough that nothing bleeds through. A bar counter, fixed benches, and some loose chairs pushed into one corner, three tables for gambling. He’s disappointed that the slot machines aren’t in yet.

The galley is a reasonable size, easy to get in and out of even with his bulk, and the stovetop comes on right away. He’s learned to cook some things in self-defense, his grandmother’s cooking marginal even when she’s not fucked up on something. Dickyboy kneels on the floor, manages to plug the little refrigerator in, hear the hum that tells him it’s operational. Cold beer if he has Dylan or any of the other few guys he trusts come in to hang. Or maybe this will just stay his own little secret as long as it lasts.

The head is fine for a pee, though he’s clueless as to how the waste system works so he doesn’t flush. Can’t have a pile of your business piling up under the yacht. He feels like Goldilocks in the story, making himself at home in somebody else’s space, a little too big for some of the furniture. Hey, it belongs to the tribe, he imagines himself saying if discovered. I just got here a little early.

Dickyboy finds a fold-out-bed setup in the crew compartment, lights a joint, lies down, and puts his headphones on. He sets his iPod on random, and the first thing it throws at him is Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent knocking out “Crack a Bottle.” The wind outside on the prairie is gone, the rez and the rest of the world around it disappeared, just Dickyboy chilling with his herb and his sounds–

So crack a bottle, let your body waddle,
Don’t act like a snobby model, you just hit the lotto–

HE’S NEVER FOUGHT IN a pit before. In a container once, yeah, but with a pretty good floor laid down, and behind the Hooters in Ocala where the ring was just crime-scene tape stretched tight, and a couple times in a real octagon, though they weren’t sanctioned fights, just smokers like this where the promoter had some money to lay out. But this has been dug for some kind of permanent tank to sit in, almost a perfect thirty-foot square sunk five feet into the ground. Nothing’s been poured yet, so it’s just dirt covered with black plastic on the sides, with big strips of hard matting on the ground, the seams gaffer-taped over. And somewhere, Brent, who put the whole thing together, has found metal bleachers to throw up on all four sides. Add the swords and sandals and we got gladiators.

Scorch sits on the tailgate of one of the ArrowFleet pickups while L. T. smears Vaseline on his face. He’s got mineral oil rubbed everywhere else, slick as a weasel, which is against the rules in sanctioned fights, but Brent said this was “sort of kind of vale tudo rules,” so what the hell. All he knows about the other guy is that he’s big and he’s never been in a pro fight.

“Kick his ass, man!” yells one of the spectators, passing through the jumble of pickups and rental cars on his way to the bleachers.

“Will do.” Scorch waves a gloved hand. Half the crowd are likely to be assholes he’s had to collar at Bazookas, so any support is welcome. In Tampa once, a half dozen buddies of the guy he’d just decked swarmed into the cage and he got a bad cut from somebody’s ring before the rest of the crowd and the meatheads hired for security could drag them out. This deal, down in a hole in the ground, won’t be easy to escape.

Shakes hurries back to them, looking nervously over his shoulder. Shakes is the guiltiest-looking fuck he’s ever met, the kind the public defender takes one glance at and says we’re copping a plea.

“He’s got a belly, but his arms are like legs. Like a pro football lineman, you take the pads off.”

He’s getting three grand just to step in the cage, triple what he’s ever got before, and Brent is supposed to be laying another grand for him to win. He wonders if Brent has checked this other guy out, if he’ll bet against him with his own money. Brent lives at the bottom line.

“I’d ask you to take a dive,” he said this afternoon, not totally kidding, “only it’s two-to-one you get creamed in there.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Every other time he’s fought he’s either seen the guy in action, had a look at somebody’s shaky iPhone video, or at least had an idea of who he’d beaten and lost to. This could be King-fucking-Kong.

L. T. has tricked this thing up, some kind of wall hanging of a grizzly bear glued onto the back of a bathrobe stolen from a fancy hotel.

The thing is it’s cold, the wind never letting up, the spectators in down vests and jackets, restless now, stomping their feet on the bleachers and shouting “Fight, fight, fight, fight!”

Scorch is wearing work boots he bought at the Cenex today, unlaced, to get over the gravel to the pit. They’ve hooked four big work lights to a generator thrumming out in the field a couple hundred yards away, trained down into the hole and poled up high enough that they won’t blind the fighters.

Shouting and cheers as he steps to the edge. There’s an aluminum ladder leading down into the pit. The crowd is stoked, Brent selling beer out of a panel truck for at least an hour now, some guys with hard liquor bottles in hand, passing them around. They overpour at Bazookas, cheap stuff but potent, and figure the more wasted the guys are the more likely to go for extras, to go for a lap dance or stuff a twenty into a girl’s g-string. Scorch can handle it, Vic always says. Vic, who gave him the night off and said if you break your fucking arm you’re fired.

“Gentlemen!” calls Brent, already down in the cage with a cordless mic in hand. “I assume there’s no ladies here.”

“Welcome to the first annual Yellow Earth Invitational Mixed Martials Arts Massacre!”

Another roar. There are at least a thousand of the bloodthirsty pricks crowded around, amazing when you figure there was no advertising, just word of mouth, and the location only revealed this afternoon. Some guy who owns private land on the Indian rez gave Brent permission. Way off the main roads, they stopped at two other lit-up drill pads tonight before they finally found it. And the vibe, right from the minute they pulled up– probably how it felt like when they used to lynch people.

“The management respectfully requests,” says Brent, deepening his voice like the character who does the Caesar’s Palace fights, “that you refrain from throwing objects into the cage.”

Laughter and some hoots. Brent said they’d do five-minute rounds, but he didn’t say how many, which means it’s till there’s a clear winner.

“For our first contest,” calls Brent, strutting around to face all four sides above him, “we have a pair of heavyweight warriors new to the oil patch. In this corner”– he turns toward Scorch– “wearing the– what is that–?”

“In the teal trunks, from Tampa, Florida, at two hundred and twenty pounds-Stanley– the Scorcher– Adamov!”

There is no way to spring into the cage. Scorch kicks the work boots off, turns around and backs down the ladder. A guy immediately yanks it up and trots around to the other side of the pit while Scorch throws his arms in the air and walks a circle around Brent, to cheers and jeers.

“In the opposite corner– from McAlester, Oklahoma– at two hundred and thirty-five pounds– Mike– The Mountain– Mullaaaaaaney!”

The guy is two-fifty if he’s an ounce, and the only thing in fucking McAlester is the state penitentiary. It takes a minute for him to climb down the ladder and turn, most of the gawkers above on their feet and hollering. Big bald-headed hunk of muscle, like if Kimbo Slice was a white guy, and yeah, he’s got the shamrock with the 666 on one arm and A. B. over the SS lightning bolts on the other. No ink on his chest though, which is matted with hair.

Brent motions for them to step close, keeping his own body in between, and the eyeballing begins. The thing is to look right down through the pupils into the guy’s brain tissue, and concentrate on how you’re going to drive the fucker’s nose bone into it.

“Fellas, let’s have a good, clean fight,” says Brent, then looks up to the crowd. “We are rockin in the Bakken! Let’s get it on!” he shouts, and then flips up the hand mic end over end for the ladder guy to catch. Under the roar of anticipation he has a private word with the fighters.

“You boys are getting paid plenty,” he says. “No tapping out. Now take three steps back.”

So that’s the deal. Snap but no tap. I’m going to have to kill this motherfucker or he’ll kill me.

“Bong!” shouts the ladder guy over the mic, and there’s only Scorch Adamov and Mike Mullaney facing each other in an overlit hole in the North Dakota prairie.

Scorch gets on his toes and begins to bounce and sidestep. Fucker this big, that kind of power, you don’t want anything to do with grappling. He throws a few jabs and it’s clear he’s faster, the Aryan Brother barely moving his head to absorb the blows, then lunging to try to grab his arm. Boos as Scorch dances backwards out of the way. He’s had the fundamentals shown to him in the gym a couple times by serious practitioners, but the sport pretty much boils down to kick the shit out of your opponent without getting disqualified. Scorch fakes a jab and hits him with a left overhand, right between the eyes, then throws in a muay thai kick to the side of the knee before backpedalling. Think Bruce Lee, think Jackie Chan. Whap! Whap! Stick and move, stick and move, but the last move backs him up against the wall, no give to it, and Mullaney crowds in, sending an uppercut into his jaw before trying to grab him around the neck, Scorch getting his forearm up just in time to protect his windpipe but crushed in the grip, digging his bare feet into the mat to keep from being thrown, the two of them staggering together this way and that, till the Mountain jerks him off his feet and falls backwards with a heavy smack, Scorch able to get a knee up and pry himself loose, immediately rolling away and scrambling to his feet. The Mountain takes his time, huge arms up for protection, pushing back against the wall to leg himself upright.

Neither of them is a marathon runner, both huffing for air as the crowd calls for mayhem. His best move in the clubs he works at is to step inside the other guy’s defense while he’s still cursing you out and then snap an elbow into his face. No talking down here in the pit.

Scorch exhausts his supply of striker moves, jabbing and running to boos and catcalls as Mullaney closes, closes, closes, taking most of the blows on his forearms, patient, flinging an occasional body shot to the ribs or hips, trying to rush him when the wall is at his back, not bothering with kicks or fancy footwork.

“Bong!” calls the ladder guy, and they separate into opposite corners, no stools there for them to sit on, just catching their breath and staring at each other. Brent comes over as if to check for damage.

Scorch hasn’t ever been pinned in the cage like that, hasn’t been held down that helpless since those shitbirds at the Okeechobee CI when he was waiting for trial, after all their bullshit about white cons got to stick together, dragged him behind the generator in the machine shop and took turns on some teenage ass. The smell of the shop floor, the weight of them.

Scorch bites down on his mouthguard, tasting blood, and runs the possibilities through his head. He beat a Cuban guy in Dade County with a double leg takedown and then some ground and pound, but the dude was a light-heavy at best. The couple straight rights he’s landed haven’t had much effect, so a knockout is unlikely. Got to get him off balance, which means taking some chances–

The crowd yells “Bong!” this time and the Mountain lumbers toward him. Scorch takes a step, pivots and hard-kicks, hoping to hit groin but only smacking a hairy thigh and skipping away. A roar of approval– action is action. Mullaney rushes him and Scorch gets caught against the wall, the Mountain locking hands behind his head for a double collar tie, but Scorch thrusts up hard, butting him under the bloodied eye and trying to slip out, but he is hurled down and has only time to get one knee up before the man falls onto him, throwing short hooks to the head that Scorch mostly catches on his arms until Mullaney pins one of his wrists to the mat and continues to hammer with his left. He hurts but without full leverage or a clean shot at the face it won’t kill him. The big man pounds away till his arm tires, then tries to press the point of his elbow into Scorch’s Adam’s apple, and now it’s just wrestling, Scorch trying to hug close and the Mountain without the technique to even start a submission hold. Scorch has a sweaty, hairy shoulder grinding down on his mouth and nose, hard to catch a breath, and there is booing as it goes on too long, Brent slapping the Mountain on his back till he’s got his attention and pulling them apart to start on their feet again.

Scorch feels dizzy for a moment, all the blood that was trapped up in his head draining out as he stands, but manages to move sideways leaning against the wall till he can get his balance.

The Mountain’s cheek on the bloody side is swollen, maybe broken by the butt, and when he sniffs it brings his lips up over his mouthguard, which has a shark-tooth pattern painted on it. Scorch lowers his hands a bit and steps forward.

If a bar fight lasts more than twenty seconds you’re doing something wrong. The point is to put the asshole down quick and hard and then hope his friends don’t have easy access to anything that shoots bullets. No feeling a man out, no playing with him, no referee, and if you’re lucky, no security camera trained on the floor.

Scorch throws a couple jabs, leaving his left low, and the Mountain throws a tremendous haymaker hook to the side of his head, knocking him stumbling sideways, Scorch milking it a bit by bouncing hard off the wall before he skitters away. He brings the left up too high, jab, jab, and thwap! takes a sidearm hook in the ribs that almost knocks the wind out of him. He can hear the oil workers cheering, can vaguely see through the lights that they are on their feet. He goes flat-footed, bending his knees a bit as if he’s in trouble, circles right, then moves forward again, dropping the left even more. He throws a pussy jab, leaning his head in too far, then ducks back quick as the Mountain throws a killer right hook at his head, the momentum as it misses twisting his whole body enough that Scorch can stomp his heel down on the side of the man’s right knee, sending him to the mat, and the moment Mullaney’s right arm goes stiff to catch his fall, dive on it knee first, rig drivers out on Route 12 able to hear the report as the big bone snaps, a collective Ooooooooh! from the crowd as their bodies wince at the thought of it. Scorch rolls away and hops to his feet, Brent just standing with his hands on his hips and a grin on his face, so he straddles the mound of Mullaney and pistons his elbow to the Mountain’s thick neck, 12 to 6, just the way they say is forbidden in the instructional videos, just the way his Aryan Brother would have done to him if positions were reversed. Mullaney somehow rolls sideways and gets his good arm up to grab Scorch’s face, fingers probing for the eyeballs, till Scorch clamps both hands on his wrist, rises up and drives his knee through that elbow socket as well. Brent has him in a choke hold from behind then, and he lets himself be pulled back as the derrick jockeys whoop and holler and stomp the metal bleachers and yes, throw bottles and cans into the pit.

L. T. and Shakes have to pull him from under the arms to get him the last two rungs up the ladder, the lamest corner men in history, while Brent squawks something over the mic and walks a little circle around the writhing Mountain, wondering, no doubt, how he’s going to haul the big fuck out of the pit.

“And still unde-fucking-feated champion,” yells Brent as well-wishers and backslapping drunks surround Scorch, a smile on Brent’s mouth but his eyes reading that the prick did bet on Mullaney, “Scorcher– Adamov!!!” Serves him right.

L. T. and Shakes help Scorch stagger, still winded and feeling his cracked ribs like an ice pick in the side, through the bug-eyed, shouting throng. They can hear Brent announcing the next contest.

“That fucker owes me,” growls Scorch, his legs starting to shake. “That fucker owes me something good.”

It’s a suite in a Best Western, he can tell that much right away. A plane outside, landing, so it’s right by the airport. It takes him a minute to get to the little living room, turn the lamp on, find the stationery next to the phone.

He looks to the clock, does the math. It’s too late to call Coral and the kids, even if they’re in Seattle. She’s very formal about the whole deal, likes a pre-call to repeat the ground rules and wipe her feet on him a little bit, remind him who ended up with full custody. He can’t wait till they’re old enough to have their own phones.

And Jewelle is out for the count by now, always saying how dead she is after a shift.

In the dream the blood is being driven by an enormous pumping heart, and he follows it out of the chamber in a tumbling flurry of platelets and red blood cells, the pressure straining the walls of the main arteries, making them bulge, then ripping through the smaller arterioles with a clattering sound and blasting out into the capillaries, and he is in one place and everywhere at once as the tiny vessels overload, circumference inadequate for the volume, endothelial cells suddenly rupturing and the fluid exploding outward into the muscle tissue, the skin flushing a purplish red, flesh torn from the bone, the blood-brain barrier giving way before a flood of leukocytes, and the cerebrum itself swelling, swelling, pushing outward against the thinnest wall of the skull at the temple–

The shale has been responding beautifully, the wells already tapped are in several cases out-producing his calculations. He’s refined the technique a bit, adjusted it to the particular conditions of the play, but can’t imagine why they still need him here. They’ve got plenty of people who can pound combustibles out of the ground with sludge.

In the dream, sometimes he is the heart, forcing the fluid through the vessels, sometimes he is only a tiny molecule swept along in the rush, and sometimes, at the end of the ones that wake him up, he becomes the organism, the man who is being blown apart from within.

Randy turns on the TV, finds a movie, mutes the sound. He sits, naked and sweating, on the couch. The movie looks familiar, something he’s seen before, or maybe just a familiar genre, men in thin black leather jackets killing each other. They say the room service is twenty-four hours now, a sleepy cook downstairs probably watching the same show to keep himself awake, half the lights off till there’s a call.

His father was in a Holiday Inn when the stroke hit him, a divorced mud man with so many wells to service that each assumed he was at another, and it was a full day, Do Not Disturb sign hung on the doorknob, before his body was found. He was a great admirer of room service, or at least pretended to be.

One of the men in leather jackets, who looks like an Eastern European of some sort, has another man’s head stuck in the jaws of a vise, grilling him for information, steadily turning the handle. The pressure is unbearable–

MACARIO CATCHES THE TAXI at the corner of Paseo Colón and the Avenue of Beheaded Saints. When he says he wants to see the border fences the taxista does not hesitate, taking him east on Colón and then right on the ring road named after the assassinated presidential candidate.

There is not much to see. On the Mexican side, a massive cement ramp leading up to fenced-in fábricas, then the golf course, then a low, tree-covered flood plain leading to the Río Bravo and the United States beyond, on the other.

“If there isn’t much rain you can walk across,” says the taxista. “You only get wet a little above the belt. But the current can be strong, so most people pay to be taken across on a raft, and for that the Migra is always watching. Those yanquis have cameras everywhere, even ones that see the heat of your body at night.”

Macario has been trying not to look like an indocumentado, even carrying a second-hand toolbox, with no tools in it, when he goes into the bars where people know things.

“And worse than the yanqui Migra are the Zetas,” adds the driver, singing the song Macario has heard a dozen times since he arrived in Nuevo Laredo. “You try to cross alone, or even in a group without paying their cuota, they kill you. A few come floating down that river every day.”

They turn back in on Avenida Transformación, passing another cluster of the low, whitewashed factory buildings, all behind metal fencing with concertina wire strung across the top of it. But for the lack of gun towers, they look as much like a prison complex as the Centro de Ejecución de Sentencias #2.

The taxista’s warning is the same as he heard from Nacho, the skinny little pollero who made him an offer on the first day here, a teenage boy with nervous, shining eyes, wearing a Tecate cap.

“All my passengers pay me the cuota,” he explained, “and then I pay the ones who own the river before we cross.”

The ones who own the city of Nuevo Laredo, and most of the state of Tamaulipas. Macario had gone to an immigration lawyer on the second day, a man who sighed a lot and told him the United States government did not care if huachicoleros would kill him if he returned home, that the ‘well-founded fear’ they made exemption for was meant to save the victims, hopefully well-educated ones, of governments they were waging quiet wars against.

“You cross with me, I bring you past the first line of the Migra,” said Nacho, disturbingly loud, grinning over the beer Macario had bought him. “Believe it, güey, I’m the best.”

“Yo soy solamente pollero del río. You want to go all the way to Houston on one ride, you need to get on a truck. If there is something illegal moving on a truck, the narcos want it to be their product.”

Macario has spent hours watching the World Trade Bridge, thousands of trucks passing over through Laredo and into the heart of America every day. They must be stopped and searched according to some kind of a system, sniffed by dogs for drugs, but if the narcos use them, most of what they send must get through.

“What do you say, chango, I lead you out of this cagadero and you go get rich in Paradise?”

Macario had smiled and said he wasn’t looking to cross, legally or illegally, but thanked Nacho for the offer. The boy didn’t seem like much more than a ventana, one hired to watch the river with binoculars and report on anything moving. It is a slippery world here so close to the border, some people claiming to be more than they are, others not revealing their claws until it is too late.

“You’re not going to be tan burro to try it on your own, are you? Un aviso, güey, stay off the river unless you’ve got permission, and don’t be hanging around with chapinos and cotrachos.”

The people most obviously here to cross are, in fact, from Guatemala or Honduras, with others from El Salvador and even a few Cubans, who march up to the Migra officers on the bridges and get themselves put into the refugee process.

“You be sitting with those people, doesn’t matter whether on the street, in a bus, even in the shelter where they let the ones who got caught and sent back stay– and before you know it there’s six tipos wearing masks and carrying cuernos de chivo threatening to shoot and pushing you into their van. They take you where don’t anybody care and they line you up and say hand over your money, hand over your cell phone if you got one, hand over that telephone number of your brother back in Huehuetenango or the socio you got waiting up in Tucson. They gonna call your family for some ransom.”

“Then they going to darle chicharón right away instead of later. Créame amigo, when you get up the nerve to go, you look for Nacho.”

They loop around north to the neighborhood of the shelter and Macario pays the driver and gets out. He had hoped to find work here while he was studying the situation, but with the flood of desperate people coming through there is nothing left. Nothing legal.

There is a television set playing at either end of the bar in El Rincón, turned to different channels. Macario sits on the Telemundo side and orders a beer. It is a familiar place, the same neon cerveza logos, the calendars with Aztec maidens showing off their huge chichis, the team photos of local fútbol teams on the wall, Los Tigres del Norte on the jukebox. But where at home the talk would be of work and sports and local politics, here it is assassinations and prison escapes, blood feuds, and the ever-changing tactics of la Migra on the other side of the water. It is a very norteño-looking crowd, all Mexicans as far as he can tell. He avoids the eyes of the ones with the most expensive boots. Too many predators locked in a single cage.

Twice he saw the baby turtles hatch on the beach in the Gulf. Thousands of them crawling out from their sandy nests on the same day, shells still soft and vulnerable, struggling with their little curved flippers across the broad beach to the surf, the sky filled with swooping gaviotas and halcones, the first half-kilometer of the surf boiling with silvery, razor-toothed fish, the beach itself patrolled by gorging dogs and half-wild pigs. Getting through to the open ocean is only a matter of numbers and blind luck.

Macario notices that the drinkers are all looking up at the TV screen and takes a glance, expecting to see Carmen Villalobos or Mónica Spear in something that barely covers their nalgas. Instead it is news footage from his home, San Martín Texmelucan, where a huge black cloud is blowing across the town. A huge black cloud caused by a pipeline explosion, says the newsreader, thought to be the result of huachicoleros attempting to install a hot tap.

“Están buen jodidos,” mutters the man standing behind him, and yes, it looks like the people there are truly fucked– dozens dead, more burned or with ruined lungs.

There are many people in this city, in this Mexico, who have nothing to do with the rateros who have infested it, the ones who have made their deal with the devil and will soon, he hopes, die miserably at the hands of the government or their rivals in crime. These honest people must lock their doors and windows against the tempest roaring outside, praying for a change in the weather. Nuevo Laredo was always a border town, a haven for smugglers, but now it seems less a city than a way station to hell, the place where gringos come to manufacture what is too expensive or too poisonous to make in their own country, the place where the poor of Central America flock to be preyed upon by murderers.

The news camera, in a helicopter over the site of the explosion, is enveloped in black smoke.

It is Nacho, slapping his back and sitting at the empty stool to his left. He immediately turns his back to the bar and scans the crowded room with nervous eyes.

“Cómo no? I deliver my pollos and I come back. Estoy como un espírito, chango, they don’t see me.”

“Listen, amigo,” says Nacho, leaning close, “I got to beg you a favorzote.”

“Not here,” says Nacho, getting up off the stool. “Take a walk with me.”

They walk on Felipe Ángeles, passing the shelter that Macario looked into on his third day here, a roof and a meal for a few days, run by people with good hearts, but now seeming to him more like a corral meant to hold the sheep for the narcos until ready to be slaughtered. Nacho tries to seem carefree, but keeps turning completely around as he talks, making sure nobody is following.

“I cross with a group of ten cotrachos pendejos– you know how they are from down there. This one woman is pregnant, big as a whale, and I’m helping her off the raft on the other side when the pinche Migra step out of the reeds, two of them.”

“I was betrayed, te juro, somebody on this side who has a deal with those cabrones and needs to throw them a couple fish now and then. So they take me to their processing and these idiot hondurehos– I bet it was that pregnant bitch– tell them that I’m the pollero. Which means they charge me with transporting. And this fucking pocho behind the desk, this Garza, sounded like he was born there right in Laredo, he tells me hijo, I will let you go this time, but if you ever come back, transporting or not, you go to federal jail.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” says Macario. “Maybe you’ll live to be twenty.”

“But this is not over. They do all their typing into the computer, they take pictures of me, take my fingerprints with ink, and then this hijo de puta Garza holds me until it’s dark again before he loads me into the van with a mess of indios chapinos who got caught that day and they back it up to the little crack you walk through on foot on the Juárez-Lincoln Bridge.”

“No, I’m completamente jodido, güey, cause that’s where the Zetas have their people waiting after midnight, looking for fresh meat.”

“I was going to, I just didn’t have time before I left with the pollos.”

Nacho looks like he might cry. “This rompehuevos grabs ahold of me right there, the Border Patrol guys are behind their windows watching, probably laughing at me, and I try to explain to him.”

They have come to the corner of Independencia, the boy stopping, looking in all directions before he continues.

“But you do have some, and you do want to cross over. I know a truckero who can drive you all the way to Houston.”

“IT’S CALLED REMEDIATION,” SAYS Rick, like he’s talking to a fucking third-grader. “We’ve got three sites you’ve contracted to clean up, two reserve pits full of cuttings and an oil spill, and your people haven’t gone near them.”

“What”– says Brent, lounging in the Chairman’s office while Harleigh is on his way back from some tribal event– “the real estate values are gonna suffer? This reservation was a fucking eyesore before the first drill spudded in, and that’s what it’s going back to.”

“Harleigh’s a politician, he’s got to say shit like that, and you’re supposed to be covering his ass. If you were doing your job people wouldn’t be complaining about the reserve pit, they’d be looking at a big sign that says ‘Site of Another Successful Energy Extraction– Keep America Strong.’”

If this kid got the job to shut his mother up, it hasn’t worked. She’s been mouthing off in the paper, specifically complaining about ArrowFleet.

“If that’s what it takes to shut people up, sure. You dig down miles underground, pump shit up from there under pressure, there’s bound to be something to show for it.”

“How bout a couple ‘No Swimming Allowed’ notices? Or don’t enough of the people here read?”

Rick doesn’t see the humor in this. “You push the Chairman too far,” he says, “he’ll cut you loose so fast.”

Brent can tell the kid doesn’t like him sitting at Harleigh’s desk. He leans back in the swivel chair, playing with a beautifully fashioned old spearhead.

Once they sense you’re more than willing to take it all the way, they always blink first. It’s what scares all the second-rate characters about Roark in The Fountainhead, it’s what the Objectivist meant when she said that animals survive by adjusting themselves to their surroundings, but men, real men, succeed by adjusting their surroundings to themselves. Brent buzzes Doris, another one scared to look him in the eye.

“Doris,” he says into the chief’s squawk box, “can you get me that number in Idaho? And be sure to let him know the call is coming from Chairman Killdeer’s office.”

IT WAS A CAMARO in a custom-looking shade of gold, California plates, and the man with her could have been as old as thirty. By the time Clemson got himself turned back in their direction on the 2 they were long gone, though he hunted in ever-widening circles for an hour. Then he stopped in at the coffee shop that was the Dakota Diner and before that the Prairie Hen’s Pantry that Don and Evelyn Nussbaum ran forever. Spartina is obviously very well liked there, a good worker, but nobody knew or would tell about the man in the Camaro.

It’s not a fit place for women anymore, Yellow Earth, Clemson thinking of the shacks off base in Biloxi when he was stationed there, how the decent girls had to walk in squadrons and even that didn’t spare them what the GIs had to say. He was young then, with the big war on, and never thought about what the folks in Biloxi thought of the invasion. Some made out pretty good, of course, the ones running the honkytonks and cathouses that weren’t Off Limits for some reason. The army must have known everything that was going on, the army could do anything they wanted in that time, so they must have chosen not to shut it all down. Clemson remembers slot machines in the bus station, in the grocery stores, remembers half the fellas stationed at Keesler losing all their pay in one crooked game or another. And by some miracle he met Nora, survived the war, and took her back up here.

He remembers walking her home after a USO dance, through the worst of it, men calling out to her, women calling out to him, and how none of it seemed to touch her, chatting pleasantly to him in her musical voice. He thought at the time she was the most innocent girl he’d ever met, but later learned Nora had the Southern woman’s skill of seeing without acknowledging. If I do not choose to recognize it, it does not exist.

Jake Wiltorp had mentioned seeing her at the Havva Javva, and he figured she’d tell him sooner or later, and maybe good for her going out to make her own money instead of depending on him to come around on whatever new gadget she had her heart set on. Industrious. And it was a relief to see they don’t make the girls wear some kind of short carhop uniform. If they took a day off his life for every little lie he told his Pa–

He can’t bear the thought of a confrontation, of raising his voice to his Tina. He got the license number though, one of those vanity jobs– SRFZUP– which makes it easy to remember. And Busby Curtis’s boy Tolliver is a deputy now, with access to all that law enforcement computer business–

His father shot a wolf once, back when there were wolves, that was raising hell with the stock. Left it out for the crows and the buzzards, and maybe as a warning for its friends, if it had any.

“You can scare em away,” Pa said, “but they’ll just come skulking back.”

THE MEN ARE MAKING the drum talk. Six of them at the moment, big men sitting around in a circle and striking it in unison, a few with their traditional shirts and feathers on, some just with T-shirts and tractor caps, at least three of them wearing sunglasses, which seems to be accepted now as something like a traditional mask. They are the beating heart of the Powwow. Harleigh remembers as he passes, as he always does, the thrill of the first time Granpaw Pete brought him into the circle. The old man’s leathery hand over his little boy hand over the stick, making the drum talk with the men, raising his thin voice with theirs to chant.

“This, at least,” his grandfather would say each year, “remains unbroken.”

The veterans have put up their flags, Harleigh at the microphone for the solemn moment before he handed it over to Nick Straighthorn, the rodeo announcer they brought over from Bozeman. His job now is to mingle in the stands and in the refreshment area, pressing the flesh, admiring how big the little ones have gotten, fielding compliments and complaints. There is no simple ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ for the Chairman.

He stops in front of the grandstand to watch the Women’s Traditional Dance for a moment, the ladies circled in their shawls and beads, bouncing lightly to the drumbeat, holding themselves like queens, raising their eagle feather fans when an honor beat comes. He knows all of the local women out there, some of them with enough personal tragedy to fill a TV miniseries, but they stand straight and serene, inhabiting the beautifully beaded cloths and buckskins rather than just wearing them, braids glistening and wrapped with ribbons or fur, all pride and elegance. He’d tried to get Fawn interested in taking part, but she was feuding with the daughter of Shirley Plenty Fox, who taught it on the reservation. Or that’s what she said.

Rick McAllen has appeared beside him. Rick has been dogging him with this environmental business, even people with wells already paying off on their land getting into the act, as if you can bring the money up by magic.

A wastewater pipeline had bust over by Wabek, spewing brine over about twenty-three acres, and people were legitimately upset. ‘Metal fatigue,’ said the Company, though they didn’t explain why they didn’t use metal that wasn’t so tired. They’d made good on some fencing to help people keep their stock off the poisoned ground, and were working up a remediation plan.

“Not that bad,” says Rick, “but it’s got to be dealt with. You know the PeteCo-Cloud Number Four?”

“It’s paying out good, got the Christmas tree up, couple tanks, but they left the spoil-pit they dug behind.”

“Four months. There’s some bad-looking sludge in the bottom of it, dead birds and animals by now, and the smell is–”

Ricky follows after him. The job came with sixty grand a year, good pay for a reservation gig, but the kid looks like hell.

“I got two. One where everybody’s got the number, and that I shut down at nine o’clock every night. Then there’s the emergency phone, only the law and a few other people got that number, and it better be an emergency.”

Harleigh puts his hand on Rick’s shoulder. “The people who haven’t struck it rich aren’t happy,” he says. “And they weren’t happy before. Welcome to my world.”

A final shout and drumbeat, the women in the arena stopping as one, holding their spot for a moment as there is applause and people crying out in the three languages and Nick back on the microphone telling folks to show their appreciation. Harleigh uses the moment to disengage from Rick and move on. Rick’s job is to identify problems and deal with them, not to come to him with every sob story about a sick heifer.

He invited some of the Company men to the powwow, give them a taste of Indian culture, and sees a few high up in the stands. The way people are mixed these days they don’t look so out of place, and the couple from Oklahoma might even be some bit Creek or Cherokee by blood. Harleigh climbs up, passing men who look like rig workers in between shifts. Good for them, they can say they’ve really been here.

“Yeah, they put on a good show.” The Antelope Society are out in the middle now, fancy dancing, all swirling feathers and footwork.

“Any big hunt, big move, big battle, we had a dance for it. Get everybody involved, put all our spirit behind it.”

Harleigh smiles. “We had our version of all of that. And like the beadwork you seen on the women– everybody understood the time and effort that went into that, that it wasn’t something you could buy.”

Joe is something like a coordinator for the Company, seeing that the needed personnel and equipment move from well to well in the proper order, that nothing falls through the cracks.

Joe takes eyes away from the dance in the arena. “It hasn’t been filled in?”

“Subbed to do the clean-up. Your outfit with Brent there, the body-builder character. What’s it– ArrowFleet.”

It’s the third job he’s heard of left undone. And then the Parker brothers saying they quit because they hadn’t been paid for a couple hauls–

“We subbed everything we could on the reservation to you. Keep it in the family.”

They are pretty good old boys, the Company crowd, but are dead serious about their business.

“Well then, I got to get on somebody’s tail, don’t I? Thanks for clearing that up.”

The reservation is big enough to have regions, and Joe must mean the Looks for Water family, who hold mineral rights on a big area up at the top but can’t stop fighting with each other long enough to settle on a lease agreement. Marjo-rie is the only intelligent one in the whole outfit but tends to have her head stuck in the latest conspiracy theory.

“Last I heard there was a brother they thought was dead, showed up from California wanting to claim his acreage. I’d say your best bet is to offer just what their closest neighbors got.”

“I think enough would want to make a deal if you could get them all into the same room without a fatality.”

“I don’t want to be in that room. Don’t you have some kind of mediation panel–”

“The old days, there’d be elders, there’d be the community and people would be shamed into getting right. Might not be a word spoken. But these days–” Harleigh shakes his head. “And the money bug has bit, which doesn’t make it any easier.”

“No, he’s well thought-of. Son and daughter-in-law were hit by a truck on the highway.”

There has been an increase in traffic fatalities, a few involving oil service vehicles.

Harleigh shrugs. “Philosophical. Like some of our traditionalists, don’t like to see Mother Earth tore up. But here people are a lot hungrier.”

Joe cocks his head, getting up his nerve to ask something. They’re shy about the Indian stuff, so much bad feeling in the past.

“If you could turn back the clock,” says Joe, nodding toward the Antelope Society men whirling in the arena, “go back to those buffalo days, would you do it?”

It’s something he’s thought about. He loves to hunt and fish, but when he’s come home empty-handed there’s still always something from the fridge to put on the table. And you don’t have to worry about the Sioux raiding anymore, or starving if the snow is too deep for too long–

“Sure,” says Harleigh. “From what I can tell, that was a good life.” He indicates the performers and the spectators around them. “All this week people been getting ready for the powwow, they feel good. But lots of days they get up, and there’s nothing they look forward to. No purpose. Buffalo days, everybody had a purpose. Even the kids were expected to pull their weight, were eager to get involved and earn people’s respect.”

“Then we’ll meet up there in the Happy Hunting Ground, buddy,” he winks. “Bring your own toilet paper.”

Harleigh meets and greets with a half-dozen other little gatherings of spectators then, enrolled members mostly, some of them even thanking him for his efforts in bringing the oil. A few have hit the jackpot, hundreds of thousands in the bank and still pumping, while others are guessing at how the tribal-lease money will shake down. He’s hoping to come up with some projects that benefit everybody– not the hospital, the Feds still owe them that– but improvements the tribes can use. If you start to divide the money up into cash payments to the enrollment it can get messy. Why are you giving cash to a person everybody knows has a drug addiction, why should the members who’ve already struck it big be included in the People’s Pool profits, can you qualify for membership if you haven’t been living here for years, maybe for generations? At the big conferences he hears about membership purges in other tribes, people calling each other out, some even surrendering to the cold percentages of DNA tests. The Three Nations, like many others, have a long tradition of intermarriage and adoption. Was Quanah Parker a Comanche? Was John Ross a Cherokee? Can his cousin Nils, who looks like that Swedish guy Rocky had to fight in one of the sequels, qualify just because he’s one-sixteenth and has been the pipe-bearer of the Kit Fox Society for twenty years? Things used to be so bad that the joke was ‘Who would ever pretend to be an Indian?,’ but first the Dawes Allotment and now this oil boom have attracted some pretty marginal types and pretenders.

Danny Two Strike is motioning to him from the edge of the arena, where groups are assembling for the Grass Dance. Danny is in his police uniform but with some of his military buttons and badges hung in front. He doesn’t look like he’s celebrating.

Harleigh throws up his hands and lets Danny lead him under the bleachers. The drums have a strange echo here, the steady beat less certain, jumpier.

“Well, in the last week three different people, all of them enrolled members, have come to me complaining they were fired for asking your co-owner for their paycheck.”

“You know I went out of my way to make as many TERO hires as possible, and some of those people–”

“They say they’re owed for services rendered. Two, three weeks in a couple cases, one guy who filled his truck with diesel for a haul and was never reimbursed.”

“They say your co-owner has surrounded himself with a bunch of hard cases and the workers are afraid to stand up for themselves.”

“Trucking is a rough business to begin with, Danny, and you throw in the shifts these guys are working, the pharmaceuticals they may be taking to stay in the game– I’d want a few muscle men backing me up.”

“Every one of the fellas who come to me said the same thing. ‘Somebody’s gonna get killed.’”

He hasn’t seen Brent in that command mode ever, but can imagine his Cross-Fit training kicking in. Steroids? Those are supposed to affect your moods–

Harleigh shrugs. “You’ve met him. Charming, a real go-getter. Like a Navy SEAL without the weapons system.”

The last time he went by the shop it was hard to see who exactly was running the day-to-day– trucks coming in and out, lots of guys just hanging around, Brent on the phone yelling about what sounded like a lease-flipping deal he was trying to finance. Harleigh just gave him a wave and left a note about the oil socks piling up on his property.

“My father and his family, even my older brothers when they were little,” he says, “used to ride here for the powwow every year. The ladies would come later in a wagon. But the men, they’d have their ceremony at home in Makoti and mount up, ride all night. People be waking up in their tents– it was army surplus tents in those days– and our men would ride in, bare chested, sitting tall without a saddle. The women there already would all drop whatever they were doing and step out to raise up a cry.”

They listen for a moment, standing among the candy wrappers and plastic soda bottles that have been dropped though the bleacher seats, imagining the dancers, imagining the swaying of the grass.

“Just a blanket and a hawser. At night, whether there was a moon or no. When only the spirits are supposed to be out.”

“Just cause things get easier,” says Danny, “doesn’t mean they’re better.”

IT TAKES A LITTLE while to jockey around the drive-thru line, which hooks out to the shoulder of the main road, and get into the crowded parking lot. The Golden Arches have extended their hours, like all the other fast-food joints in town, and Wayne Lee is glad to see it is as mobbed inside as outside. Fargo is already standing in line to order.

“Throw a double cheeseburger onto whatever you’re getting,” says Wayne Lee, handing him a five, “and one of those chocolate sludgy shakes.”

He takes the strap of the backpack from Fargo, swings it over his shoulder as he heads for the men’s room. The more people crammed into a place the less they pay attention to anyone else. There’s no line for the bathroom, three guys inside pissing, one stall open– perfect.

Wayne Lee locks the stall door, sits and starts opening compartments in the backpack. The bulk of it is weed, pressed together in a lump the size of a basketball. Mexican maybe, anything better than what they try to grow up here. He opens bottles and packets and takes inventory. Some coke powder for the old-school party hounds, meth in pills and crystal, anabolic steroids, Ecstasy, and a little taste of crack. He repacks, steps out and washes his hands, checking his hair in the mirror.

By the time he hits the floor again, backpack slung casually over one shoulder, their order is ready. He and Fargo take their trays out to the picnic tables out front, alone with the truck exhaust and the wind.

“Last stop was Denver,” says Fargo, a bearded, red-eyed character who smells like an ashtray.

“Ah– the knights of the highway lead a glamorous life.” Wayne Lee slips the envelope with the money under Fargo’s tray, unwraps his double cheeseburger.

Wayne Lee indicates the crawl of pickups and water haulers on the street before them. “What’s not to like?”

Wayne Lee hesitates. He’s been thinking about Tina all day, the girl telling him she’s ready to really get into it. Tina, who would never sleep if you gave her two hours in Denver.

Fargo is opening ketchup packets, ready to deal with his mountain of fries. “Last trip.”

“No, but Brent says no more deliveries, so why should I run all the way up here?”

“Shit if I know. He got that service company with the chief, I heard he’s fronting for oil leases on the reservation, maybe he don’t want to risk it for some side money.”

First Brent taking him off the long runs, now this. Brent said nothing to him this morning, just that he’d be out of town till late and that Bunny was still in California.

“Could be,” says Wayne Lee. “But what if I fronted the money, made it worth your while?”

Fargo leans forward, serious. “I would think twice before making a move like that, my friend. You know Brent.”

BRENT HAS TO WALK away from the noise of the backhoes till he can hear Tillerman’s voice on the cell phone, stepping through high grass. Dollarhide’s property, he thinks with satisfaction. The old fart doesn’t want to let them build an access road through his worthless cow pasture, fuck him, we’ll run it along the edge, meticulously surveyed. Brent looks to the Dollarhide farmhouse, just a hundred yards up the rise.

“Just had to find another spot. These oil wells start paying off, they make a lot of noise.”

Actually, the pumping is one of the quietest phases of the operation, but Tillerman is just a coupon-clipper in fucking Idaho and wouldn’t know.

Always better to do these things in person. He’s read how Lyndon Johnson used to back senators against the walls of Congress, hang an arm around their necks, and steer them in the direction he wanted.

“What it is, Hal, we’re closing one door and opening another. The Mandan 27 well–”

“–that you were one of the many investors in, has attracted somebody who wants to shout for the whole package. You can understand how when we bring a production company in they’d prefer to be doing business with only one entity, one set of paperwork to deal with when the royalties have to be paid.”

The Russians don’t want anybody else on the lease, that’s a dealbreaker, and without them he’s only got eighty-five percent of a sure thing.

“Which is convenient,” says Brent, stepping around a dried-up cow pie, “because it puts you in first position for an even better deal. Due to my privileged position here on the reservation, which I might add is the result of a substantial amount of diplomacy and cash outlay on my part, I am able to offer you–”

“You have my money in the bank,” says Tillerman flatly. “Papers have been signed.”

“Look, contracts are rewritten up here every day. It’s a fluid situation.”

“I own thirty percent of Mandan 27. You have guaranteed it will be drilled within six months. If you’ve got anything different to tell me, my lawyer should hear it first.”

“I’m trying to help you here, Hal. These opportunities open and close so quickly–”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. The Russians need to hear by Friday, saying they might buy a hockey team instead, and it won’t be long before the word escapes that not every inch of the reservation has oil under it.

There is a pause on the other end. Brent turns and watches his machinery scrape out a new access road, waits to hear which way Hal will break.

“The first one who utters the word ‘lawyer’ is making the threat, Hal. I’m offering you the same deal, possibly a much better deal, or to wire your money back right now. Your alternative, to be honest, I wouldn’t wish on an enemy, much less a business associate.”

“His name is Andrew Wertheimer,” says Hal. “Nicholson, Bridges, Bodine, and Wertheimer. I’ll e-mail you his contact information.”

The thing is, he’s got everything tied up in this deal. If the Russians come in it’s a massive score, but if it falls apart–

Clemson Dollarhide steps out of the farmhouse, looking down at the phalanx of backhoes reshaping the landscape at the very edge of his property. Another asshole who won’t listen to reason. Brent makes a pistol with his thumb and forefinger, points it up at the old man.

Her grandfather is at his easel, head back the way he holds it for focus, able to see fine without glasses even at his age. So he knows about her job. Tough it out.

He holds the brush halfway down on the handle, arm extended. “You shouldn’t be relying on other people for rides. I’m going to teach you how to drive, get you something cheap but roadworthy, and I need to know when you’re free.”

For years he’s let her take the wheel close to home, even showed her how to change a tire and watched while she went through the whole process.

“It’s a rite of passage,” he says, “and an important proof of identification.”

Fawn has had a fake ID since she was fourteen, but Fawn is the first to do everything. ‘Indian princess by day,’ she likes to say, ‘international woman of mystery by night.’

“I’ll tell you what,” she says, hanging up her jacket and coming around behind him. “You take me into town for some pointers, like that parallel parking thing? And then I’ll sign up for the road test.”

He knows something else, she can feel it, but doesn’t want to fight it out in the open any more than she does. He was always been there for her, like daylight in the morning.

“That sounds fair,” he says quietly. Schedules change, and there are the imaginary Science Club meetings she can skip if Wayne Lee wants to see her. He’s been quieter lately, worried about something, and she hopes it’s not her.

There is something wrong on the canvas. The usual prairie-scape is there, this one featuring snowdrifts interspersed with open patches of stubble, Herefords clustered facing into the wind at the lower left. But there is a new element, dark and angular against the winter field and the light gray sky, one, two, three, four, five, painted in careful technical detail and perspective–

THE DAY MAN ON the desk at Killdeer City makes him wait in the lobby. He’s picked up so many nicknames in the time he’s been here that you forget who calls you what.

“If Wayne Lee doesn’t ring a bell,” he tells the day man, “try Surfer Dude.”

Scorch comes into the lobby about ten minutes later, looking like he just woke up.

They sit alone in the little visiting parlor, like it’s a sorority house in the 1950s.

He gives Scorch four boxes, each about the size of a deck of cards, that hold the steroids in their punch-through sheets. Scorch looks like he’s a user, though the muscle could just be from access to prison iron. Brent, on the other hand, brags about his reliance on gym candy when trying to bulk up, and has the sudden mood swings to prove it.

“You can’t be nervous and deal,” says Scorch, who only moves roids out here and is a vulture on drug use in the bathrooms at Bazookas. A time and a place for everything.

“Not nervous, just cautious. Listen, you heard anything from Brent about– you know– a change of plans, a change of product?”

“Oh, couple things I heard, maybe he’s planning to phase out distribution.”

“Or maybe he just got himself a new boy,” says Scorch, giving him the deadeye and tucking the boxes of pills away.

“Dude owes me big time,” smiles Wayne Lee, shaking his head. “Did you hear he’s been speculating in leases?”

THERE IS ONLY A tiny bit of Rabbit peeking out from underneath the stickers. Along with various political candidates and their running mates are the simple classics– Red Power, Proud to be Hidatsa, a peeling Free Leonard Peltier, the new-agey The Earth Does Not Belong to Us, We Belong to the Earth– and a nice one he hasn’t noticed before, My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys. Marjorie Looks for Water is leaning against her old VW, parked just behind his patrol car, her eyes huge behind the thick lenses and that expectant smile on her face, when Danny steps out.

She nods back toward the Fetterjohns’ trailer. “Any clues on who stole the Arctic Cat?”

Marjorie has jiggered some contraption that she keeps in the Rabbit, able to monitor the department’s radio calls.

He looks at her car. What isn’t stickered is pitted with rust. “You’re back on the road?”

“That’s for full reinstatement. I’ve got restricted status back– no highway or night driving, already set my appointment at the clinic.”

“You understand the responsibility? If it was only your own safety at stake–”

She has tonic-clonic seizures with no warning signs and has almost bitten through her tongue twice.

From all evidence, Marjorie doesn’t sleep. When he pulls a graveyard shift there is always a light on at her little house, and he’s stopped in for coffee and conspiracy theories more than once.

“The thing is, Chief, I’ve been noticing how thin you’ve been spread with all these new people coming in, and I thought you might want to reconsider.”

She is one of the few who call him ‘Chief,’ though that is his department title.

“You passed the written test three times, and flunked pretty much every part of the physical.”

“When the Sioux attacked us,” she says, up there with Teresa Crow’s Ghost for historical trivia, “did the People ask if you had 20/20 vision?”

When she ran Indian Country Tours, Marjorie had led people into the wrong chamber of a cave looking for pictographs, then had her flashlight batteries die–

“That’s called an auditory hallucination, Marjorie. I wouldn’t brag about it.”

“Your support and encouragement is an inspiration to the entire department.”

Marjorie is addicted to America’s Most Wanted and Cops. She is a constant blogger on Websleuths.com and chat partner of the people still wondering who killed the Black Dahlia. And if she could see past her nose and didn’t fall down in eye-rolling, bone-wracking convulsions at inconvenient moments, Danny would love to have her on the force.

She runs an online catalogue, shipping Native handicrafts off to German people who are gaga about Indians.

Marjorie lives with her mother, who carries a cell phone with the ambulance service on speed-dial in case the epilepsy strikes at home. So far Mrs. Looks For Water has only used it to report sightings of her son, gone missing in Vietnam forty years ago, on television.

“Good, that’s good. And really, I’m sorry there’s nothing to be done about the job.”

Marjorie has been known to persist, to plant herself in his office or block his path back into the patrol car.

“I don’t have moods anymore, Chief. I am the eagle that never comes to earth. Floating above it all, observing.”

Marjorie is not a snitch, exactly, but she does get around, does listen to the gossip, and has a forensic slant on life.

“Oh– Dickyboy Burdette isn’t missing, whatever his grandmother might have told you. He just doesn’t come home very often.”

“All the time. He goes to school. You can’t be missing if you attend class.”

“She’ll forget. And then I see things left on the land, piles of them, puddles of them, in places where they shouldn’t be.”

“The drilling stuff is not my beat. Take that up with Ricky McAllen. Or the Chairman.”

Danny opens the door of the patrol car to hear the radio. It’s only Patty at the mic, singing. She leaves the Vox switched on sometimes.

Danny sits into the patrol car. Marjorie is lonely and always ready to lay a recent unsolved murder on you, but tells such a good story you get caught up in it and time goes by–

J. C. Carter is a white guy, real piece of work, married to one of the Dozier girls who came up from Standing Rock. Put her in the hospital in Bismarck once.

“Very loud noises. Somebody might need a talking to before he commits a capital crime.”

She is looking at him intensely, Marjorie, those magnified eyes signaling that this is dead serious.

She might tell him if she knew, even if it was a relative, which considering some of Marjorie’s relatives is entirely possible.

She shrugs. “Whole lot more of that floating around the rez these days. As you know.”

Danny nods, shuts the door but rolls the window down. “I’ll get over there and see what I can do,” he says. “Thanks, Marjorie.”

He drives toward the lake. J. C. spends a lot of time lifting cold ones at Lonnie’s out in the county, but he might be home, and if not his ride is easy to spot. A jet-black Ram pickup with rocket-flame detailing on the sides and the single bumper sticker, red letters over the silhouette of an automatic pistol.

THEY SIT ON A blanket on the open tailgate of his pickup, Will off duty for once, looking out at the flare-offs dotting the black night, the white-and-ruby stream of highway traffic in the distance.

“Mostly old folks left around here,” he says, “till the shale oil people come.”

“I thought about leaving a bunch of times, but I never had– you know– like a definite plan.”

Leia hears the high, electric pyeeeeew of a nighthawk. “So you turned to crime-fighting.”

“To do the job right,” says Will, “you got to read people. Which is the part that interests me.”

“For a journal that five hundred people read. Or are supposed to read. And so far I’ve only recorded behavior that’s already been documented.”

“And away from people.” She smiles. “Which I suppose is good for society.”

“My assistant, this girl Brandi? I thought she ran out because Yellow Earth was getting so weird, or she hated the fieldwork. Then I realized it was living with me.”

“She wanted to have kids and a house and all right away, and I– it didn’t feel right in my gut. So she gave up on me.”

The nighthawk buzzes again, cruising for moths. There were buffalo here, she thinks, and the people who followed them, and agriculture of some sort along the river. But now–

“The last time? Fella who’s got a car lot. He’ll clear a couple hundred grand this year.”

“My parents’ day,” says Will, “especially when they were younger, there was more of a center to things. Even out here where there’s so much space between people. There was church, folks belonged to things that brought them together, they had to pitch in when there was weather.”

“I think that’s all gone to the internet. You’re not on Facebook, are you?”

He laughs softly. “People are in my face all day and half the night, I don’t need any more what do you call it– networking–”

They sit there for a long spell, bugs and birds and the distant traffic providing a soft blanket of sound, and Leia begins to watch herself as she always does, semi-pathetic biology geek out in the middle of nowhere with a guy who’s probably figuring the odds are good, but the goods are odd-

“THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH your work, it’s just bullshit from Houston.”

“And believe me, they don’t want to know.” He’s in Hurry Upshaw’s little shack on the deck, the tour already started outside, stands of pipe being craned into the slot for the day’s drilling. “What it is, the insurance people are all over them about fatalities up here, so they say nobody without at least two years’ experience.”

“Fatalities?” He hasn’t heard anything, not on the news, not from the guys, who are joyful purveyors of gossip.

“Fella they medevacced out just passed in the hospital,” says Upshaw. “Fell off the damn platform while he was hosing it down.”

“I’ve had three different qualified hands approach me since you came on, Gatlin, but you were doing fine and they were gonna expect higher pay. You can’t take it personal.”

“Company owns a good percentage of what’s drilling here if you look through all the dummy operations. Tell you what, though–”

“You track this character down, tell him I’ll vouch for you. He got one or two wells going in, what I hear, and he’s not too particular about who he hires.”

“Meaning he don’t pay but half of what we do, so his outfit’s likely to have some folks still trying to make the Big Show. I worked for him when I was coming up– you learn damn quick.”

“Try Buster’s. Most likely spot he’ll park himself when he’s off work.”

Tuck takes the name from the driller. Worth a try, though it sounds kind of fly-by-night.

“I want to thank you for the opportunity here,” he says, and Upshaw waves it off.

“You got any damn brains you’ll find something else to do,” he grins. “Good luck to you.”

Tuck hurries off the platform, Mike and Ike too busy wrestling pipe to see him go.

As he remembers, there isn’t any vodka in the house, so he surrenders himself to the slow-moving procession into Yellow Earth. Like being in a wagon train, he thinks, but with diesel exhaust.

Econo Liquor is obviously having a hard time keeping the shelves stocked, but he scores a bottle of Stoli and some tonic. He’s on 11th heading back to the 2 when he sees her.

She’s in the Arby’s parking lot, standing by a blue Chevy Malibu with the driver’s-side door sporting rust-colored primer. He makes a left at the light and is the object of much horn blowing till he can scoot across lanes to turn into the empty drive-thru lane. He eases around to the lot, near empty but for a few early-bird employees and Jewelle. He parks in a far corner, adjusting his rearview mirror to get a better angle on her.

She’s wearing a parka and what look like bowling shoes– Francine would know the name of them. Her hair blows around her face in the wind. A couple times at Bazookas she had sparkles in her hair, silver sparkles in golden hair, and he had to do a careful clothes check in the men’s, lit as bright as a hospital operating room, after their dance.

If he was to get out and accidentally bump into her, what a coincidence, gee, they’re not open yet? He feels like their relationship is partly based on him being a rig worker, that and strapping on the healthy paycheck before he walks into the club. But there is definitely some chemistry, something beyond the dancer and client roles they’ve been playing–

He has his seatbelt off and the door half open when the gleaming black Hummer muscles into the lot. It has some mud-spatter around the hubs, looking like a search-and-destroy vehicle from another planet, dark-tinted windows obscuring whoever is at the wheel. She smiles, gets into the passenger side, and the machine rushes away.

VIC TURNS THE NEON off so it won’t be in the photographs. There have been national reporters wandering through town, grabbing a few quick quotes. ‘Boom-town Blues,’ all that. Bazookas is a good handle, catchy, and he may want to use it somewhere else.

From where he’s standing with his back up against the club wall, the kid’s head looks like it’s part of the sidewalk, stuck there with drying blood. Scorch is next to him, while Oxana, who was behind the bar while the assailants were still on the floor, is talking to the sheriff, blue lights strobing on them from the patrol cars.

Scorch has his yard face on, even though he’s in the clear on this one. “When I bounced those assholes, I should have bounced them harder.”

“Whatever you do, there’s always that chance.” Vic taps his hip. “Still got some lead in there, ricochet. We booted some character in Fairbanks, real pain in the ass, he drives home shitfaced, manages not to run into a moose or off the road, gets his automatic, drives back, head clearing up now but not enough to stop him from emptying a clip into the joint from the doorway. It’s me and a couple of the staff, doling out the tip pool.”

“He waited till a bargirl left, elbowed his way in. We were just sitting around, easy target.”

The night deputy, Clayton, throws some plastic over the kid on the sidewalk and clears a path through the crowd that has poured out of both clubs once the news spread. Teasers has had a half-dozen fights, but this had to happen with guys from his spot. The murder weapon is still on the ground between four orange traffic cones, a bloody three-foot length of metal pipe with a hexagonal nut the size of a grapefruit threaded onto the end of it. A couple EMTs step in with a stretcher, looking for a place that’s not all bloody to lay it down, but there isn’t one, and their feet are already sticky with it.

“Guy comes in with friends, already loaded to the gills,” says Vic, “and I give Oxana the eye, so she never quite gets to his drink order in the crowd. Makes himself obnoxious to everybody sitting there, louder than the music, which is saying something, and ends up pinning the kid on the ground there against the counter. Kid probably called him out for the douchebag that he was. Then Stanley here, my head of security, escorted him from the premises, followed by two of his posse.” Vic looks to Scorch. “I don’t believe any blows were exchanged.”

“I had his arm behind his back, stayed with him till his friends had him calmed down, cut him loose.”

“My height,” says Scorch, “maybe two hundred, two fifteen on the scale– he’s got a half keg where the six pack should be– two-day stubble, brown eyes, still got his lace-up work boots on and a T-shirt that says ‘Pump Till it Squirts.’”

The EMTs have gloves on, trying to get all of the kid’s shattered head onto the stretcher now, the crowd oohing and aaahing. Vic has seen guys pretty messed up who survived somehow, but this one is a goner.

Vic nods. Tomorrow is payday and he’ll lose a fortune, but this kind of thing gets the church ladies riled up and the mayor might cave and pull their license altogether.

The sheriff steps away then, helping his deputy herd the rubberneckers out of the way. One of the regulars, a local who Jewelle has got a lock on, looking in pretty bad shape himself, crosses over to join them.

There are fight bars, of course, where a nose-buster or two every evening serves as the floor show, but the money is not worth the aggravation. He’d hoped the tone had been elevated a bit when he hired a DJ, plushed up the seating.

“Got plenty of trouble now,” says Scorch. “Done screwed the pooch to death”

WHEN HE COMES IN late from his rounds with the boys he sleeps on the sofa. “Don’t want to wake a fellow worker up,” he says, but Francine figures it’s so she can’t gauge the liquor on his breath. She bowls with the other teachers on Wednesdays and they have a couple drinks, loosen up, but you have to imagine another level for oil workers. This won’t last, this frenetic drilling, and she can’t imagine Tuck wanting to follow the rigs to the next strike, or whatever it’s called in that world.

And the money is great, good for Tuck to be contributing again, making a lot more than she does. Not that that should matter so much. He’s never been the macho type, considering himself more of a thinker, a spotter of trends and connoisseur of opportunities. Like the stock market, where he’s got most of what’s left of his inherited money tied up, no rainmakers in the portfolio yet, but some promising long shots. Francine has learned to think of it as a pastime of Tuck’s, like betting on the NFL games, rather than real money they’d be able to spend if he cashed in.

He’s left his shoes in the kitchen, considerate when she’s such a light sleeper, but they’re big and in the way right now. And stuck to the floor with something.

In fact there are tracks, half a heel on one side and the whole shoeprint on the other, leading backwards to the driveway. She peels a shoe up with a crackly sound, something he stepped in last night–

THE TRUCK COMES DOWN Los Mayas in the Bellavista neighborhood an hour after dark, stops halfway down the deserted street. The rear doors are unlocked. Macario and Nacho haul themselves in, wriggle their way around what Macario thinks are huge industrial heaters mounted on wooden pallets, till they can crouch out of sight. It is very dark.

They hear the clunk of the rear doors being locked from the outside, then in a moment the truck starts to move. It is not long, maybe twenty minutes, before the truck stops again, the engine turned off. Macario quickly opens the jar he’s brought, dabs liquid on the metal around them. There is the biting smell of kerosene. The rear doors are thrown open, they hear voices and see flashlight beams against the back wall of the trailer where they are squeezed behind the machinery. He has given Nacho six thousand pesos to pay to the truckero, but that is no guarantee against betrayal.

A dog whines. The yanqui Customs people, Macario thinks with relief, the dogs sniffing for mota or humans and smelling only kerosene.

“We’re crossing the bridge, chango,” Nacho says to him in the dark. “Right under their noses.”

It is very hard to judge time without light, with only the engine rumble and the drone of the highway beneath you. The yanqui highway. I am a message in a bottle, thinks Macario, adrift in the great ocean, at the mercy of currents and the pull of the moon. He called Nilda this morning, his voice floating into space, then caroming off a satellite back down to Xichulub, then the reply making the same journey. Nilda’s sister, the computer voice informed him, was not available at the moment.

The girls will look different the next time he sees them, if he sees them, and little Azalea will have no memory of her father. Macario can tell from the rhythm of his breathing that Nacho is sleeping, exhausted.

“Pan o plomo?” the narcos are reported to have said to the chief of police of Nuevo Laredo. Bread or lead? Apparently he gave the wrong answer and was assassinated only hours after he was sworn into office. Bread or lead. Those should not be the only choices, to accept the narcos’ world, their money, to do their bidding like a frightened dog or end up encobijado, rolled in a plastic tarp and sealed with tape. Macario hopes this oilfield in the far north of el norte will be better, even with the shadow of la Migra always looming above. He could make enough money to build them a house in Yucatán, or even bring his family up–

It is dangerous to think too far ahead. All that matters at the moment is to get himself out of the back of this truck and into the big sea of the United States.

Macario is not sure if he sleeps or not. It is never comfortable, his body bent around the metal heaters, the kerosene smell lingering. A coffin, he thinks, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. I’ve been buried before I’m dead.

“Some,” Macario tells him. “There were gringos on the oil rig. And I watch their television shows.”

“It’s no joke. I don’t know anybody up here, I don’t who the gangs are, who’s in charge. I don’t know how to do anything.”

“They’ll take one look,” says Nacho in the dark, “and think puro mojado, this guy doesn’t belong here, and throw me into their federal prison.”

“There are thousands of people who look just like you in their cities. Believe me.”

“If you pay what the Zetas demand,” says Nacho wistfully, “you never really make enough. You eat, but you’re still nothing compared to them.”

“güey, I was not born in a mansion. I’m not some fresa who takes tennis lessons and goes to una academia privada. Anything I get, I have to rip it from the world.”

“Take your time when we get out,” counsels Macario. “Look around, see what’s here, don’t start ripping things right away.”

When the truck finally stops and the rear doors are opened there is a tentative dawn in the yanqui sky outside.

“Fuera!” calls the truckero. Macario does not like the tone in his voice.

They wriggle out past the heaters and let themselves down, legs cramped and unsteady, onto the ground. There is nothing but flat, scrubby plain around them and the truckero, holding a shotgun.

“There’s a checkpoint just south of the next town,” he says. “You’ll have to walk around it.”

“This is as far as you go with me,” says the man. “Dump out what you’re carrying and turn your pockets inside out.”

They’ve turned off the highway onto a dirt road. The man with the shotgun is nervous, his face frozen in a scowl. Unless he is truly stupid, thinks Macario, he won’t kill them here, his tire tracks like fingerprints in the sand.

“I already paid you!” cries Nacho as he empties his plastic sack onto the ground. The truckero kicks at what falls out, eyes Macario’s few clothes and bottles of water. He takes the roll of pesos from Macario’s hand.

“Pick up your things and start walking,” he says, indicating the direction with the barrel of the shotgun.

An amateur, thinks Macario as he gathers his belongings, hearing the truck grind gears as it turns around. He still has the yanqui bills in his shoe.

“Hijo de la chingada!” Nacho spits as the truck rolls past them on its way back to the highway, Macario memorizing the license number to tell to the Border Patrol if he is caught by them today.

“We can’t walk along the pinche highway,” says Nacho, turning to look at the nothingness that surrounds them.

Macario points to the faint strip of clearing, only a few feet wide, that runs for miles in a straight line in either direction. “There’s an oil pipeline buried under there. It will go parallel to the big road all the way to a refinery, or maybe right to a city.”

They walk, Nacho cursing the truckero and all his ancestors, the sun still mercifully low in the sky. In less than an hour they see what must be buildings off to the left.

Nacho glares at the little bumps of civilization in the distance, shakes his head. “Let’s get it over with. I don’t want to die in this pinche desierto.”

It is very early, not much moving in the little town when they arrive, looking like refugees. From the sign next to the huge statue of a rattlesnake, it seems the place is called Freer.

They sit to drink the last plastic bottle of Macario’s water on the concrete steps of the statue’s base. The cascabél is poised to strike, head erect, rattles in the air.

“What kind of people,” Macario responds, “wear a tattoo of Jesús Malverde on their skin?”

“Or San Judas Tadeo, or la Santa Muerte, or any of the other narco-saints?”

Macario points to the metal cut-out in the shape of the state of Texas on a pole beside them. “That sign says there is a rodeo de cascabéles here. A rattlesnake round-up.”

“You fucked yourself there. If I want to go back I just turn myself in. But they’ve got you in their computers for transporting– you’ll have to sneak back in to your own country, and when you do the Zetas will be waiting.”

They continue down the highway, passing a tire store and a pair of motels. They are between two low stores with empty parking lots, one called Dollar Value and the other called Family Dollar, when a pair of old cars pull up beside them. The driver of the second one, a güero about the same age as Nacho, calls to them in English through his open window.

“San Antonio,” grins the blond boy, pointing ahead. “Straight north from here.”

“Igual,” says Macario, making the thumbs-up gesture the gringos on the rig always used when it was too loud to hear.

“The way it works,” says the blond boy, “is my buddy up there rides ahead, and if the Border Patrol has thrown up a spot check he calls me.” The blond boy has a cell phone resting on his thigh. “That means you get out, wherever we are, no refund. Comprendo?”

“Two-fifty each, Americano,” says the boy, his eyes moving to Nacho, who has backed into the Family Dollar parking lot to watch. “And that’s only because we were going there anyway.”

“Is okay,” says Macario, and waves for Nacho to come over. He starts to get in next to the güero, but the boy pushes a button and there is the click of the door lock.

Macario is not sure he understands. The boy makes a gesture with his fingers, rubbing them together, and speaks very slowly.

“Ah, por supuesto,” says Macario. These are just boys in cars, the ones you see in their television shows, lovers of speed and girls and Coca Cola. He and Nacho will not be left murdered in the desert by these two. He steps back from the car, smiling at the güero.

Comeback of the Century – North Dakota.

Since the Pashas of Petroleum have encamped in the Bakken oil field, the former Gateway to Manitoba can now boast a paltry 3% jobless rate, the lowest in the country (in Williams County it is under 1%), enormous growth in population and personal income, strong housing and construction markets, and an enviable state budget surplus. Thousands of residents have become millionaires from oil and gas revenues, and there’s more to come!

This month we count nearly eighty new rigs in the mix, many of the wells nearing completion.

With crude holding at $95.70 a barrel and gasoline back up to a respectable $3.67 ($3.90 for diesel) we’re bullish on the Bakken!

O when I die
Please bury me low
So I can hear
The petroleum flow–

EVERYTHING IS NEW. EVERYTHING in the kitchen– pots and pans, set of plates and glasses, microwave, even the stove and dishwasher look like they’re right out of the box. Only the blender has a film on it, Wayne Lee saying that his man Brent makes himself protein shakes. Tina feels a little weird to be here, knowing what she does from Fawn, but Wayne Lee said it was chill, his man Brent gone for the day and always running an open house. The wife is gone too– whether it’s about-to-divorce gone or just out-of-town gone is not clear– and Tina wonders if she was the one who chose the colors, who picked out the appliances online or in catalogues. There is only beer and energy bars in the fridge, so it’s probably been a while since she was here.

Nothing at home is new. Her grandfather eats shredded wheat from a chipped bowl every morning, and the furniture was old when her parents were still alive. He plays music, old croony love songs with lots of orchestra behind the singers, on a record player where you have to place the needle by hand.

Wayne Lee said he wanted her first time to be somewhere nicer than a Days Inn. It was nice, better than she expected, though he smelled a little like McDonalds and she smelled like Colombian Roast. She insisted they change the sheets after, and they finally found some, still in plastic, from a place called Pottery Barn.

“Look what’s happening to me,” Wayne Lee had said, “just looking at you.” And it was pretty amazing, like his thing had a life of its own.

It went slow and then fast and then slow again for a bit and then really fast till it was over. He was nice and lay around playing with her braid for a long time after.

“Never sleep with somebody you don’t want to wake up with,” he said, meant as a compliment, she thinks, but kind of like he was giving her advice on how to go out and deal with other guys. And then he saw the fancy digital clock and said he needed to make some business calls.

None of the rooms look like anybody has been in them, a house waiting for its people. Fawn said there are colored lights, but it’s still daytime. Tina supposes that if she had a lot of money she wouldn’t build a house but would travel, see different places and find out what the people who lived in them are like. She knows this Brent and his wife went to Hawaii, which is part of the United States but like another world. And if you really had a lot of money you’d fly first class, where stewardesses bring you drinks and bake you cookies.

It’s like a big deal at school, girls kind of bragging, but she’s not going to tell anybody. Keep it hers. Hers and Wayne Lee’s. He doesn’t seem like he’ll talk about it either, even to his man Brent, though you can’t be sure. He used the rubber at the end, which if Fawn wasn’t such a nitwit she would have insisted on. Tina has seen the guy, Brent, around town more than a few times, driving his Corvette. Not her type, with all that muscle, but Fawn says he’s ‘dynamic.’ She thought only cars and planes and speedy boats could be that, like ‘hydrodynamic,’ but everybody’s got their own taste.

When she saw the backpack she had the sudden thought that they were going to camp out and do it in a tent, but that was just her being a little panicky when she got into his car. She’d been a mess pouring coffee all afternoon, knowing this was The Day and she signed herself up for it. She tries to think now about what comes next, but draws a blank. A lot of people, not her grandfather but a lot of people, seem to be living that way since the boom started, making crazy money, buying things, partying, trying not to think about tomorrow.

‘If you never hope for anything, you’re rarely disappointed,’ her grandfather says. ‘But then you’re a pretty dull character.’

Mrs. Gatlin says she should go out of state for college, and Mr. Reidy, her guidance counselor, says her grades and SATs could get her a scholarship somewhere. She already feels more confident about going. Wayne Lee, who has been all over the place, wants to be with her, she’s not a virgin anymore, and she’s had a real job.

She turns into a room with lots of big leather-covered chairs, with an entertainment center that has more units than she can guess the functions of, with posters of almost-naked women looking at you with puffy lips from the walls. A room with the smell of marijuana she recognizes from parties at Dylan’s house and a glass-faced display case full of guns.

There are pistols, the sleek kind you see in James Bond movies, and rifles of different kinds, some with beautiful wood and metal and others looking like high-tech plastic. There are a couple of things that must be machine guns, or whatever the ones the Navy SEALs or school shooters use are called, that can kill a whole classroom in the blink of an eye.

She hears Wayne Lee moving toward her, finishing up a conversation on the phone. This is a ‘man cave,’ like what they joke about on TV, and suddenly she feels like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. Not supposed to be there.

Wayne Lee steps in, pocketing his phone, his mind a million miles away. He looks at her, then at the guns in the display case.

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “My man Brent is way into this stuff.”

THE ONLY THING HE and Fawn really don’t agree about is the radio. He’s a Nirvana and Chili Peppers guy, and she likes rap of all things, black guys rhyming about their dicks and their hos and their money and how they’d like to fuck the police up. Maybe it’s an Indian thing. So no radio, which makes it a long drive with her in a mood.

A legitimate clinic, you’d need the parent’s permission, and that ditzy mother of hers would already be picking out baby clothes. If this guy that the buddy of his buddy recommended is as good as advertised, there won’t be any medical issues. And Fawn is such a slick little operator, a natural talent, that they’ll never know. Best for everybody, give a young girl her childhood back, all that shit. He’s at least not taking her across state lines or into Canada.

With Bunny the first time she went to this Asian woman, vouched for by Planned Parenthood, diploma on the wall, the whole deal. A few questions and then, “Well, if that’s what you’ve decided,” and bingo, case closed. The second one she lost on her own, just one of those things, and started to get mopey about it. Children were never a clause in their agreement, not portable enough, not resilient. He’s read where with some nomadic people, the women fuck all they want but only get pregnant when they stay put for a while.

But Bunny is moping back in California and Fawn is sitting next to him, hair blowing in the wind as they eat up highway heading to Dr. Fixit.

“Brent,” she says, looking moonily out at the prairie flying by, “if we like– if we were going to keep it, what names do you like?”

“Okay. For a boy, Rocket. It’s already cool, and for nicknames you get Rock, Rocky, Rockabilly.”

“Even better. Kind of sexy, kind of mysterious, but like, don’t fuck with me. Another good boy name would be Armageddon.”

The girl gives him an appraising look, as if deciding whether this is true or not.

Brent flexes a bicep, keeping the other hand on the wheel. “Like to see him try.”

She’s quiet for a long time then, which gives him time to think about the Hal Tillerman problem. Gotta get that piano off my back.

“Darlin,” he says, patting her on the knee, “you weren’t new on the day you were born.”

The place could be more impressive. Stuck alone out where the suburbs become the country, decent-looking woodpile under the carport, a mailbox that looks like a cardinal, an old satellite dish with dead leaves in the bowl, a snowmobile up on cinderblocks.

“So what, you’re gonna blow up like a blimp, go through a day or two of agony and then play mommy to little Fallujah?”

They say you’re supposed to count to ten, but it’s never worked, just giving him a moment to decide which to fuck up first, the teeth or the eyes. He looks to the sky. It’s getting late.

“I’m going to take a very short walk, and when I come back I hope you’ll have made the right decision.”

He heads down the steep driveway and hooks around onto the country road. He can see Fawn sitting in his Vette. She isn’t moving.

He pulls out his phone and the number Scorch gave him, punches it in. The guy answers on the third ring.

“This is the man in North Dakota,” says Brent, turning his back on Fawn and the doctor’s house. “I believe our mutual friend told you I might be calling.”

“Right. You understand I don’t perform the service itself. I’m a middleman.”

Could be a nice little scam, he thinks. Anybody contracting a murder probably lacks the stones to get physical themselves, so if you take the half up front and don’t deliver, what are they gonna do? Call a cop? Out you on Craigslist?

A pause. Brent wonders how much he’ll have to pay Dr. Fixit up there for services not rendered.

“Not a word,” he says as he slams back into the car. “One fucking syllable out of you and you walk back to the reservation.” He jams his Uplift Mofo Party Plan disc into the slot, cranks it up loud, and peels out for Yellow Earth.

THERE AREN’T ANY MANDANS on the Mandan Braves this year. Lots of German names from the people who built Bismarck up, one black kid at forward who can jam. The Three Nations Warriors have their hands full, playing on the road against a bigger school, less height and no point-machine since Ziggy White Elk graduated. Good ball-movement, though, with the coach, Ed Munger, sixth man on the team Harleigh captained back when they went to the state semis. Ed always puts together a killer defense, zone or man-to-man, the kids flying back and calling out the switches. It won’t be embarrassing.

They’re only down four, halfway through the second quarter, when he comes in, looking for an open seat on the visitors’ side. The only one left is next to Claude LaMere, whose grandson is on the JVs.

“We better shoot damn good,” says Claude, eyes not leaving the gym floor, “cause we won’t get an offensive rebound off this bunch.”

“I got stuck behind a convoy of tank trucks, coming and going so there’s no chance to pass,” says Harleigh, wondering why he’s explaining himself. The job description doesn’t include attendance at every minute of every tribal sporting event. “JVs win?”

“Got massacred. Couldn’t buy a bucket, then they started with the turnovers.”

Harleigh settles in, watches the back and forth. No mental mistakes from the Warriors, just the lack of size and superstar. The game has changed a hell of a lot since his day, no more calling out a play and making three good passes before you think about scoring, no more weave, and now you got high-schoolers jamming the ball, which had been outlawed while Kareem was in college, all the white dinosaur coaches afraid they were losing their game. They lost it, and saw it replaced by something much more fluid, more improvised, more acrobatic.

The Fox kid, related to all the Foxes over at Mandaree, has a classic jump shot, beautiful backspin as he sinks one with his toe on the three-point line. Too bad he’s short and slow.

Claude is a good mechanic, fix anything on your car that’s not a computerized unit, lives by the lake at Sanish.

“Can’t say I have.” The Chairman is never off the clock, which he supposes is the biggest negative of the job. But Claude is not a squawker, so if there’s something wrong–

“We hired a company.” Actually, the job went to ArrowFleet when Brent said it could be done by his people on the cheap.

“I look out at the road from my shop every day. Never seen any water truck.”

It was a no-bid contract, over a half-million dollars, that he ran through the council without a vote.

And yes, Brent is sitting over behind the Braves’ bench, glad-handing with a white fella in a turquoise cowboy shirt. Claude must have looked up the contract, learned what the numbers were. People see six digits, they get excited, not figuring in just how many hundreds of miles of dirt road there are on the reservation.

But you never want them to think you been caught off guard. “Well, that’s convenient, idn’t it?”

He’s been chasing after Brent for a week, trying to cut him loose, and was hoping to do it quick and professional and private. A ‘just business’ kind of thing.

“Wind blows west, the dust settles on Old Man Good Iron’s pasture,” says Claude, “and his milkers turn their noses up. He wanted me to fix up some concrete speed bumps, slow them oil trucks down.”

“That’s what I told him. Oil folks have paid off the right people, they can do anything they want on the rez.”

The half ends with the Fox kid just missing a buzzer-beater from midcourt, the Warriors down eight. Harleigh is careful to walk around the court and not on it with his new boots, waving to Coach Munger, who is limbering up for his halftime chalk-throwing.

Brent lowers his voice and takes Harleigh’s arm, steering him further from the refreshment counter, moving down the hallway by the vice principal’s office.

“Texas beef money, wants to get into oil without making a fuss about it. I’m brokering a lease on Shorty Winstead’s acres.”

“But it’s surrounded by reservation land, and my man’s been burned by the PC police a couple times– built a strip mall on sacred land or something– so I’ve promised him I can get you to smooth things over with the neighbors.”

“He doesn’t know that.” Brent looks like he just ate the whole pie. “I figure to throw maybe ten percent of my end your way. I’ll just bring you over for a quick intro before the second half, shake your head about what wildasses the folks parked around the lease can be, but how you know how to talk to them.”

“If you think fifteen is right, I can go for that. This is basically a no-show job.”

Brent’s face doesn’t change but something in the air between them does, Harleigh feeling an icy ripple up the back of his neck.

“I already talked to Ruby, she got the paperwork with your wife in progress.”

Harleigh lowers his voice, hoping Brent will take the cue, people looking down the hall at them. “Everything is in her name. It’ll be a fair split, profits and liabilities, don’t worry. I just can’t have my position with the tribes hooked up to your service company any more, can’t having you using me like a tire iron to jack open the door to Indian Country.”

Brent’s color is different now, like something terrible is rising up to bust out of him.

Harleigh heads back down the hall to the crowd buying sodas and candy and Cheetos, stuff he didn’t allow when he ran the rez high school. He’d had to cut bait a couple times back then, firing relatives, passing a friend up for a janitor job, and it was never easy dropping the bomb and walking away. But this is the first time he’s been scared to look behind.

Fawn steps out from the gaggle of her old rez girlfriends clustered by the stairs.

Fawn doesn’t come to Warriors events anymore, and this is an away game. He wonders how she got here.

She looks upset about something, something more than him suddenly appearing on what used to be her turf.

“I’m covered,” she says, and flicks her reddened eyes to Brent as he walks by, the buzzer from the gym blatting to call the crowd back in. “I’m going to a party after.”

“She’s your girlfriend,” says Fawn, rebounding with that little wicked smile that always makes him hope she’s listened to Connie’s birth control lectures. “Deal with it.”

HITCH AND DENNY HAVE thrown plastic dropcloths, the cheap ones you get at Walmart, over any of the furniture that can stain. They pulled this off once before when their parents went to an Herbalife conference in Fargo, and this is a weekend trip up to Regina to visit some of their mother’s Lakota relatives. The house is pretty isolated to start with, and they’ve told everyone to park around back where they won’t attract attention from the road.

“The wide and the narrow!” Hitch calls out when Dickyboy lands with Dylan. “Come to party or just making a delivery?”

It’s not like they put out invitations, word just travels and whoever shows up shows up. Dickyboy made the last party, chugging a ceremonial Red Bull at dawn and pitching in with the frenetic cleanup drive the boys insisted on, a half-dozen survivors still there and just sober enough to put the house back in order.

The music is cranked way up and kids are shouting over it and there’s a good chunk of the junior and senior class there, heads, drinkers, straight arrows, almost as many girls as boys, which is an improvement over the last time. Dicky-boy has on the hunting vest he just bought, the pockets have pockets, while Dylan, on probation, serves as the bank.

“Yo, Dickyboy, where you been hanging?” the guys shout when they see him, or “Here comes trouble!” or just “Yo, you got anything?”

The bathrooms are all taken, girls mostly, going in two and three at a time, so he sets up in the kitchen, using the little island counter to deal out product and getting bumped every time someone passes to grab a beer from the fridge.

“It’s the walking drugstore,” says Armand Fox, yanking a pair of cans off the plastic rings. “Looks like you’ve expanded.”

They never liked each other, him and Armand, even if they were on teams together back when Dickyboy was into sports. Everybody’s buzzing about the big comeback, Armand hitting three three-pointers in a row, so he’s strutting even when he’s standing still.

“If you break your own scoring record this year,” says Dickyboy, “will they have to put an asterisk on it?”

Armand is a senior and should have graduated in ’09, but was notably absent from the ceremony.

Dylan doesn’t look so good. He’s one of the few white guys here and was nervous about coming, and has the asthma thing on top of it. He says smoking dope helps him breathe, but it’s really hot in here with all the bodies, and his forehead is all sweaty.

“Basketball. No jump, no D, but he hits nothing but net. If we lived in Pygmy-land he’d be a superstar.”

The kids around him seem pretty psyched to see each other without adults present, the ones least comfortable with a simple conversation getting the most wrecked. Katy Perry is singing “Teenage Dream,” Dylan bouncing up and down in time with the beat, a couple making out in the pantry with the door not totally closed–

Somehow Fawn manages to go to Yellow Earth and still keep her Three Na tions friends. She’s wearing something that really shows her legs off and is looking different somehow–

“Somebody told me you went missing, and I said, ‘What could Dickyboy possibly hide behind?’”

“You’re looking pretty chunky yourself.” That’s it, she has a belly. Fawn who used to look like a runway girl on a TV fashion show.

This always happens to them, like chemicals that shouldn’t be mixed together. And what’s this– the beginning of actual tears?

He’s heard rumors, but people make up crazy shit, especially about people who leave them to go to Yellow Earth or anywhere else off the reservation. A kind of jealousy maybe, or just imaginations in overdrive.

“Oh, driving around,” says Fawn, looking away from him. “Trying to stay cool. I got my own car now.”

Of course she does. Word is her stepfather has got people throwing money at him to let them do business on tribal property.

If he’d known she was going to be here he wouldn’t have come. Their worlds are totally separate now, no reason to give a shit, but there isn’t anybody else on the planet who can make him feel worse.

They do a little business, nothing hard core, and then Dickyboy tells Dylan to chill for a minute, maybe go out back and light up another stick, while he cruises the party. Mostly he doesn’t want to seem like some leper who gets stuck in the kitchen and never circulates, the guy who DJs the songs but never gets out to dance.

There’s more thrashing than dancing going on now, Alice in Chains wailing “Man in the Box,” and there’s most of the guys chummed together on one side of the room and Fawn at the center of a bunch of the girls in another and then some pairs going at it in various stages. Jolene tugs his arm.

“Yeah,” he says, “kicking somebody in the nuts and then running off must be traumatic.”

Jolene’s another one going to school in Yellow Earth, a real Braniac, but even in the summer this is way past her bedtime.

In the sixth grade they were the last ones standing at the school spelling bee. He was really into school then, got good grades, but there was always Jolene Otis, and nobody did better than her.

He digs into one of the hunting vest pockets and comes out with a small yellow pill, holds it in his palm in front of her face.

“That’s the word. Ecstasy. You spelled it with two c’s instead of two s’s.”

“Never been an Ecstasy addict in the history of the world. Not even rats and monkeys.”

“You may not want anything, Jolene, but you definitely need something. You’re here because Fawn snapped the whip and you were too afraid of her to say no, so now you’re hanging onto me because it keeps you from looking alone and constipated.”

“The point is to change your consciousness. Our people been doing that for centuries–”

“Got some in my other pocket if you want to try it. Can be tough on the stomach, though. Whereas this”– he presses the yellow pill into her hand– “has virtually no side effects, unless you’re wearing braces or need to get to sleep right away.”

She doesn’t give him the pill back, looking into his eyes. Really cute girl if she’d smile once in a while.

It’s something he doesn’t like to think about a lot. The best thing about smoke, at least the stuff he and Dylan have been getting from the bouncer, is the way it puts you in a hazy, no worries place, where even breakfast is too much future to deal with.

She’s still looking at him, and it prompts another memory, a poem they had to stand up and trade verses on in class, Jolene barely able to muster the volume to be heard.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me. ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’”

Dylan is waving from the doorway to the kitchen, maybe another customer or some problem. Dickyboy starts away, turning back to call to Jolene.

IT’S BAD ENOUGH TO have to wear a rubber. But these assholes, the ones who come in here and next door at Teasers, don’t even get to take their pants off. Otto has the door and Scorch is floating in the big room for a couple hours, just letting his presence, his existence, be known to the mob. It’s as much for the girls as for the customers, and if they try to pull any of their bullshit likely to lose Vic his license Scorch will be on them like white on rice. Zeena, executing a chopper on the pole as “American Woman” thumps out, has been coming in all jacked up, maybe even getting high in the dressing room toilet, and he has already had to lay a hot word in her ear. And Tuesday night she had her fingers inside her performance panties on stage, a big hit with the drillers but a definite no-no if anybody from the state is checking up. Zeena slithers down the pole head first and crawls on hands and knees to the edge of the stage so the front row boys can slip fives and singles in between her knockers– the hundred-and-first of a hundred-and-one uses for silicone.

I mean if you want to get off, just bring up Backpage.com on your phone and book a party. Horton Hires a Ho. But all this other business, suckers getting milked for more cash every step of the way– Teasers is the perfect name for it.

Oxana and Chelsea are working the bar, all smiles and no bullshit, pouring the liquids and harvesting the green, watering the drinks of the ones who’ve already had enough, and always aware of where the floor man is if somebody needs to be shown the door. There are three or four of the girls out doing table dances, taxi meters running in their heads as they grind for gold, and Brent is at a table in the corner, getting into something with Wayne Lee Hickey.

“My man Scorch!” Wayne Lee calls out when he spots him, like they’re friends or something. “Sheriff of the Pussy Posse.”

“We had a guy who claimed to be a health inspector in the other day,” Scorch says, leaning down so they can hear him over Lenny Kravitz. “Five o’clock but we already got girls working, the guy spent twenty seconds checking out the toilets and two hours gaping at the T and A. Mostly the A– cat was definitely a back-door man.”

“Like I was just saying to Wayne Lee here,” says Brent, deadpan, “eatin beaver is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

“Surfer Dude whining again?” Wayne Lee has maybe never been to a beach in his life but looks like he belongs there, wearing those fruity shorts and with a smear of white sunblock on his nose. Type of guy who wouldn’t last a day in the joint, like throwing a bleeding baby into a shark tank. Whereas Brent, the cons would have to take their time making book on Brent, and by then he’d be running the tier.

“You’re not gonna share the wealth with your people,” says Wayne Lee, gazing off across the smoky floor to the red-lit stage, where Zeena is picking up twenties with her snatch, “don’t go rubbing it in their noses.”

Scorch’s deal with Vic is he gets paid with cash straight from the bank, virgin stuff with the wrappers still on that hasn’t ever been wedged in anybody’s crevices.

“What this overpaid brainfuck doesn’t get is that flashing the bling is part of my job. Like hanging shiners on a fishhook. Christ, renting that fucking Vette by the week nearly busted me. But I landed the Chairman.”

Brent has put up what by local standards is a mansion, just outside of Yellow Earth, paying, or maybe just promising, a fortune in overtime to get it finished before the fucking Dakota winter kicks in again.

“You think the landmen who do leases for the Company come on with please, baby, please? No fucking way. They lay those full-color brochures on them, the Company is in Texas, the Company is in Alaska, the Company is in Kuwait, the Company is in outer fucking space, and if you want to join our exclusive club and get filthy rich just sign on the dotted line. How do I pull investors in without I look like a high roller myself?”

Brent trades a look with Scorch and shakes his head. “And Vic Barboni here is running a dance academy.”

Scorch sees Fontayne, plastered to a beefy pipe-pusher’s lap, giving him the eye.

The thing is, Fontayne thinks she’s done and Burger Boy wants more mileage for his money.

“Better let her loose,” he says with a smile, the friendly one, not the don’t-fuck-with-me one. “You get to play with them but you don’t get to keep them.”

Scorch claps his hands over his ears. Zeena is done now, taking prisoners on the floor, while Nurse Betty wipes down the pole, wearing the latex disposable gloves that are the first to come off in her routine.

“I’m not here to mediate financial transactions,” he says. “Please unhand the young lady.”

You try to keep it on a joking level, boys together being naughty, unless somebody really pushes your buttons and you need to fuck their face up.

“Unless it’s your thing, I seen her unload on a guy’s lap once. Not the wet spot he was hoping for.”

The guy lets go and Fontayne is gone like a shot. Time is money to these girls, they got a number in their head for every hour they spend on the floor, and while the guy might have been only thirty seconds short of his Promised Land, something like a smoke detector was shrieking in her head.

Scorch gives the sap a light pat on the shoulder. “Women,” he says, “you can’t live with em and you can’t drown em in a bathtub.”

He sees L. T. and Shakes at the bar then, L. T. arranging empty shot glasses into a double row formation, ready for review. My entourage, thinks Scorch, heading over, with three quarters of a brain between the two of them.

“There is no sex in the Champagne Room!” quotes Shakes loudly as Scorch slaloms through the crowd to the pair.

“You could get a disease just breathing the air in that joint.” “Shakes got booted for propositioning a stripper.”

“This bouncer with, like, metal teeth– Russian guy, I think– come over to lean on me, so’s I told him how you and me were tight, Scorch.” Shakes is really lit up, face flushed, eyes bright. “He wasn’t impressed.”

There is a shout as Betty puts her stethoscope chest piece on some guy’s crotch to listen for a heartbeat.

L. T. gets off his barstool, teetering a bit, breath that could strip paint off a battleship hull. “And we have decided that the skanks in this establishment, despite its employment of our good buddy Scorch, are cold-hearted and mercenary.”

“Plus none of them will take a check,” says Shakes, standing and almost falling into Scorch. They are always broke, no matter how much work he and Brent throw them, and usually unable to remember what they spent it on.

“No, they’ll cut off your dicks and nail em to a telephone pole. Neither of you is in any shape to drive.”

“He’ll brake,” says Shakes, leaning on L. T. for balance as they start away, “I’ll steer.”

If they’re lucky they’ll skid into a ditch before they get into real trouble.

It is Bo, signaling that it’s time to change the guard in the Lounge. Betty is down to her white hospital hose and nurse’s hat as he passes the stage. You only see that gear in porno movies now, the real ones at the clinic where he goes for his Hep C cleanout wearing those pajamas with patterns off of Kleenex boxes on them.

A drunk leaning on the wall by the door to the VIP Lounge is singing along, somehow getting the simple lyrics to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” wrong.

The music inside is always mellower, lower volume, Donna Summer having vocal orgasms, and even some stuff in French. The light, what there is of it, is a kind of rosy pink, and Nora Jones is on the system, soft-edged even with the thump of Def Leppard’s bass line hammering through from the big room.

Scorch sits on the upholstered chair in the little niche the guys call the Throne, visible but not intrusive, just meant as a reminder to everybody that Willy better stay under wraps. Sasha has her big Ukrainian butt parked on a guy who has his eyes closed, her back to him, hands on knees for leverage as she gives his crotch rocket a generous grind. Scorch hopes he won’t start moaning– he hates it when they moan. And Jewelle is straddling one of her regulars, local guy who works mud on the rigs, moving her ass in circles, rubbing her breasts against his face and whispering what she’d love to do if things were different into his ear.

Jewelle, looking over the guy’s shoulder, catches Scorch’s eye and then crosses hers, still crooning in the man’s ear. Jewelle is a real pro– no bullshit, good earner, and since she came up to No Man’s Land here right away when he called, Vic doesn’t charge her to work in the club. He gets cover charge for the guys who come to see her, of course, and a bump whenever she steers one into the Lounge, of which she is the undisputed queen, but for the rest she’s on her own. Class the joint up a bit. And Vic knows she’ll never tell the other girls, just like she won’t rat out the ones who are making dates for later or providing happy endings when Otto, who is also working days on one of Brent’s trucks, is on duty in the Lounge. Once Otto’s on the throne, chin down on his chest copping Zs, a girl could give him a BJ and he wouldn’t wake up.

The pink My Little Pony lunchbox that Jewelle keeps her dance tips and lap revenue in sits on the floor by the chair she cohabits with her regular, though it is her only little-girl touch, unlike Araceli, who claims to be from Panama and does the full plaid skirt and knee socks routine. Araceli has a regular, a headquarters honcho from the look of him, who monopolizes her twice a week and only pays with plastic. Either the guy is not married or he’s laying it on the Company. Maybe that’s what Wayne Lee is pouting about, thinks Scorch, Brent won’t give him an expense account for transporting product and moving it among the drillers and Yellow Earthlings.

“Oooh, baby,” Sasha gasps, working her buns and checking the paint job on her nails. Vic has a thing about nails, even inspecting them a couple times a week. Rules about how long the glue-ons can be, advice about what colors glow best under the black light. “Ooooh baby!”

Thing is, up here a real pro like Jewelle can knock down as much in a year as one of these oil platform monkeys, even the best of them, and she doesn’t have to wrestle drill pipe twelve hours as day. Scorch pointed the fact out to her one night and she nodded toward one of her regulars, who they called Pizza Face because of the permanent rash on his mug.

“You’re right, Stanley,” she said, somehow knowing his birth name. “Why don’t you go sit on his dick for a while?”

The door opens and “La Tortura” pounds in, Araceli’s favorite number, and Bo is waving for help. There is a camera in the ceiling, Vic glancing at the monitor once in a blue moon but there for inspection and insurance, and Scorch never worries about leaving when Jewelle is working the room. The moaner has his head thrown back like he’s had a heart attack, and now the local sap is whispering into Jewelle’s ear.

“I could of handled it myself,” says Bo as they step out into the big room, “only the guy ast for you personal.”

Brent has Wayne Lee face down on the table, both arms pinned behind his back, leaning down to shout over the music.

Only a few of the customers have interrupted their schoolgirl-banging fantasies to look over at the disturbance, Araceli with her plaid dress hiked over her hips and slowly peeling her lace panties down, various assholes shouting “Olé!” and “Más, más! The whole enchilada!”

“I’m done with you, fucker,” shouts Wayne Lee, breath bubbling the puddled beer his face is pressed into. “You are fuckin history, man, and you come after me I’ll fuck you where you live!”

Brent gives one of Wayne Lee’s wrists a quick twist and he cries out, legs buckling a bit. Scorch taps Brent on the shoulder, moving to where he can be seen.

“Nice and gentle,” Brent says, jaw out but voice steady. “But I don’t want him bouncing back in here tonight.”

A huge cheer. Araceli does a thing where she pulls the panties off, then drapes them over the face of one of the front row boys, a souvenir. Must buy the things in job lots.

Scorch takes one of Wayne Lee’s wrists and gets a tight grip at the back of his neck, Brent easing away.

He lets Wayne Lee straighten up as he steers him through the crowd, keeping the arm twisted behind, ready to put him to the floor if he balks. But Wayne Lee seems resigned, even eager to leave.

“Believe that shit?” he mutters. “Going off like that in front of the whole world.”

Otto gives him a look when they come out the side door, and Scorch shakes his head no. Under control.

Brent said he wrestled, hundred ninety-five pounds, and used to wipe the mat with guys.

“What you got to do, my man, is settle up and get outa Dodge. I mean way out. Shouldn’t be hard to put this shithole in the rearview mirror.”

They are out on the main drag, the usual late night parade of big rigs and pickups rolling in each direction, some kind of techno music and strobe-light effect leaking out from the front of Teasers. Give you an epileptic fit working in that place.

“How many people you think Brent is in the process of ripping off as we speak? It’s what he does, man, you heard him brag about it.”

He sees Wayne Lee’s tricked-up Camaro ahead, parked in the light spill of an all-night drugstore that wasn’t there last week.

“Tell me about it. I been in county lockups that were way more fun. But you’re not gonna be stupid and antagonize the guy anymore, right? Cause Brent don’t play that.”

Wayne Lee pulls his keys from his pocket and stands looking out at the ugly mile-long strip, neon and sodium vapor lights and vehicle headlights streaming east and west, as if it might be something to fight and die for. Money is being made flushing oil out of the ground and money is being made getting guys’ dicks hard and shit, money is being made, good money, selling razor blades and toothpaste at boomtown prices, but there’s not a thing or a person that Scorch would care to spend it on as far as the eye can see.

“Brent don’t own Yellow Earth,” says Wayne Lee Hickey, “and he ain’t the king of me.”

THE APARTMENT, WITHOUT BRANDI to fill it up, is the biggest space she’s ever had to herself. She doesn’t have to throw anything on to go to the bathroom. She doesn’t have to do her dishes right away. She can play whatever music she likes, keep the lights on late at night if she’s working, floss while she’s watching TV without grossing anybody out. It’s an ideal situation to go mental in.

Leia runs her paper through spell-check, though the program is unfamiliar with some of the scientific terms and leaves them highlighted. It is a bit more of a plea bargain than a thesis and proofs, the computer thesaurus not much help in alternative ways to say ‘invites more study.’ The gist of it is that so many species are under pressure from modern industry and human habitation that there is no objectively ‘natural state’ to investigate, that the norm from which group behavior deviates is not the community but the refugee camp.

In other words, bullshit elegantly stated. She was much sought-after in grad school for her ability to synthesize, to flesh out a malnourished thesis with layers of verbiage, to express somewhat wobbly ideas in academese and transform them into insights.

It’s the community part of the p-dogs that interests her, and if their habitat hadn’t been blitzed she might have found some things out. Is it only a multitude of individuals obeying their selfish genes, hard-wired with a limited repertory of interactive gambits, or do they consider the group before they act? Is Odysseus really cunning or just testosterone-imbalanced? What is the trigger that makes them feel there’s too many of us or too few of us and then do something about it? Are they afraid even when they’re underground?

There wasn’t any moping when they were translocated, she’s got that much in the paper, something like the old coterie up and running within days. Ants are pretty much ruled by what they can smell, to the point where they are easily fooled by parasites. With thousands to choose from, how does a dog tell one hole from another? With a bad head cold are they more likely to get lost? What would a single individual, male or female, dropped out somewhere there wasn’t another prairie dog for hundreds of miles, do?

Leia looks at the last two days’ dishes and decides she will definitely wash them tomorrow morning. Not that she’s inviting him over, her visible conduct is unusual enough in this place without inviting him into her lair, but she doesn’t want to walk the windy streets of Yellow Earth feeling like a secret slattern. A creature with an untidy nest. Just as there are actions and behaviors to attract a mate, there must be prairie dog turn-offs. Fleas, which would definitely put her off, don’t happen to be among them, but there must be something a gal in heat can do that will drive away the horniest p-male. And with humans, who knows? One look at the playlist on her iPod and he might run screaming–

She thinks of the solo mammals– some predators, some large ungulates, house cats– maybe meeting up with somebody cospecific for a few minutes a year, fulfilling their genetic imperative, and then back on their own. Do they feel alone? Is any one of her study subjects out in the fledgling colony, surrounded by hundreds of near-clones, even the slightest bit alienated? Not with the program? Or do the others sense that kind of thing right away and terminate the imposter?

She can’t read the paper one more time, it is what it is. Her finger hovers over SEND, then takes the plunge.

It doesn’t require physical proximity anymore, she knows. There are coteries of people who play Scrabble online, of people who root for the Golden Gophers, of people who love to watch specially built cars scream around a track again and again and again. And for a while she believed her coterie was the savants who studied animal behavior, who discussed cadre dynamics and pair bonding and published incisive dissertations that increased the store of human knowledge. As soon as her e-mailed offering, her plea for leniency, is read, she’ll be cast out from that secular sodality, and then what? Dwell in the Land of Nod, to the East of Eden?

Leia gets up, finds her shoes. The circulation in the apartment has never been any good. Stale thoughts hang in the air, depression clings to the walls like mold. What she needs, thinks Leia, what will recharge her failing batteries, is to get out and watch some methane pollute the atmosphere.

IT’S NOT LIKE YOU can dance to that stuff. Some of the guys thrash around if they’re wasted enough, but you might as well be playing football in a closet. And what does rap have to do with anything out here? Ludacris? Or for that matter, Megadeth? Really?

There is enough moon that Jolene doesn’t wish she had a flashlight. At least the road home hasn’t been taken over by oil traffic yet, though there’s a story that a pipeline will come through here. She can see their lights moving way over on the 12, a steady stream in both directions, night and day, and four different wellheads in between where they’re flaring the gas off. She’s done this walk in the dark plenty of times, not much more than two miles, but tonight there’s the feeling hanging over it, the bad vibe thing, which started even before she swallowed the pill.

Boys will take over a party if there’s too much to drink or somebody’s got leapers to pass around, and then it’s time to leave. She wanted to pull Fawn out with her but Fawn and Dickyboy were going at it, what’s she been up to, why is she so distant, and it was a temptation to just step in and say forget about her, don’t you know she’s doing it with a married guy who works with her stepfather? I mean, Dickyboy is Jolene’s friend too, sort of, his grandmother used to leave him at her house when they were little so she could go to her job in Yellow Earth, but Fawn and her are like supposed to be friends forever and you don’t betray a confidence. Loyalty comes first, even if sticking with Fawn is a lot of work sometimes. Not just because Fawn has money to spend and she doesn’t– Fawn is really generous when she thinks of it and doesn’t rank people on how they dress or what they can drive. I mean Dickyboy was always in like the world’s oldest pair of sneakers till he went into business and could afford to pimp up a bit. And in junior high Fawn stayed true to Dickyboy even when Armand Fox was after her, and he gets his picture in the newspaper three times a week and might be going places if he can ever graduate. Or Lyle Cunningham, whose family has two wells on their property and owns everything the Apple Corporation ever invented– Fawn wouldn’t even let him give her a ride on his ATV.

Jolene has a shivery feeling but it’s not that cold and there’s no wind tonight. Something terrible is going to happen, she just knows it, knew it even before the pill and before they played “Check My Brain” at full volume for the third time. The whatever that Dickyboy gave her, said it was Ecstasy, hasn’t helped any. He’s a walking pharmacy these days, and she swallowed the mildest-sounding thing he offered, just to get him off her back. Made her feel kind of rubbery and took the edge off the thrash music, but it sure didn’t make her feel good.

What Dickyboy should be looking for is a drug that will help him lose some weight. Not that Fawn was ever into jocks that much, but her stepfather looks like he could still play ball and this Brent guy pumps iron and Dickyboy just keeps getting wider. Hard to get your arms around him to dance, if anybody danced anymore, and there wasn’t a boy at the party you could really get excited about unless you had like a death wish.

She goes over the story in her head, the one she’ll tell her parents about Fawn’s new car breaking down and nobody stopping to help them for an hour. She hopes the whatever doesn’t show, make her eyes look funny or something. They always threaten to pull her out of Yellow Earth, and facing a senior year back at Three Nations is not appealing.

When she was eight there was a tornado, and she remembers her mother talking outside to a friend with the sky changing behind her, clouds like cow’s udders bulging down toward the ground, and she started to cry. She didn’t even know what a tornado was yet or the word for it, but the feeling in the air before it hit made her sick and scared inside. Something terrible going to happen. And if it’s going to happen at the party I don’t want to be there to see it.

Jolene hears something– senses it more than hears it– moving parallel to her at the side of the road. Something walking? Maybe it’s just the pill she swallowed, gives you hallucinations. These are definitely not running shoes she’s got on, so it would be better if it’s not real.

Yellow eyes. Stopped to stare at her. Jolene stops to stare back. Maybe twenty feet away, yellow eyes, unblinking. And then, maybe it’s the pill putting weird ideas in her head, she hops into one of the routines, shouting as loud as she can–

The yellow eyes disappear. She tried out for the cheerleaders, made the squad, then her parents found out and she had to tell Miss Rumbauer she’d wasted everybody’s time. It was a coyote, probably, which are never a problem unless you’re run over by a truck and left alone at the side of the road and there’s more than one of them. Or that’s what people say.

It’s supposed to be ‘beaten,’ according to Miss Rumbauer, but that’s a tough rhyme to make and you want the last syllable to be a plosive. Cheerleading is basically really dumb but it would have been fun to go on road trips with the girls and you jump around and yell and work up a sweat without all the competitive thing that’s on the playing field. I win, you lose. Armand Fox is a nice enough guy, but when the Warriors lose he kicks chairs and punches metal lockers and sits alone in the cafeteria the next day, and when they win it’s like he’s bouncing off the walls, more amped than the meth heads at the party tonight, and who wants to deal with all that up and down? “It evens you out,” Dickyboy said about the pill she finally swallowed, as if she needs a drug to do that. This Brent guy, the one time she met him, looked like a Ken doll with lifter muscles and starting to lose his hair on top, definitely not her type, and she’s sure a lot of Fawn’s interest is the drama of the whole deal. Married man, sneaking around, like something you’d see on Glee or one of those reality shows that seem so fakey. Fawn would seriously love to have a camera crew follow her around, the way she screams at her mother even when Jolene is in the room and then five minutes later they’re sitting on the bed looking at catalogs together. Coming from a family where people speak in tongues and believe the Final Judgment is just around the corner, Jolene figures why would you want more drama. An old married guy? Really?

The headlights from behind throw her shadow across the road, then the car passes and pulls over a little bit ahead. She doesn’t recognize the car, but if it’s somebody from the party she’ll turn down a ride. Never know what somebody might be high on.

The guy in the passenger seat unfolds a piece of paper. “Can you tell if this address makes any sense?”

Addresses are tricky on the reservation. Unless it’s in one of the towns, people mostly end up telling you the biggest nearest road and then start talking about landmarks. She steps up to read and the guy over in the driver’s seat gets out, maybe to go urinate. She can smell beer in the air, really strong– maybe the Ecstasy gives you super-sensitive smelling abilities. Maybe she’ll be a mutant from now on, like the kids in the X-Men movies.

The guy in the passenger seat turns the dome light on to help see, holds the paper up to it. She has to lean into the open window a bit to get a good look and hears the crunch of gravel behind her. There’s only one word written on the piece of paper and at first it doesn’t make sense.

THE GIRL APPEARS IN her headlights, not totally off the road, and is gone. There was blood. Leia slows and turns– she was going seventy, crazy at night though the roads are so straight– but when she gets back to where she thinks the spot was there is nobody. She stops, gets out, calls.

Again no response, but then a sound to the side. It is black night, only the cones of her headlights and the half-dozen distant intense pockets of light where gas flares are lit or all-night crews lay out drilling pads.

The girl steps up to the shoulder, more a presence than something Leia can see yet.

Under the dome light as she sits into the car, Leia can see that the girl has a smudge of dirt on her face, that there’s blood from her nose dried on her lip and staining her blouse.

“No. I’m all right.” The Native American girl stares out at the nearly featureless prairie. It’s the warmest night they’ve had all month, barely a breeze.

“I think it’s called Route 10 here. We’re just west of Hawkeye.” Leia has a good sense of the reservation roads from her initial colony scouting, knows which side of the Missouri she’s on and can skirt around the oilfield traffic most of the way to Yellow Earth.

“I need to go back the other way, then,” says the girl, and even in the dark Leia can tell she’s crying. She slows, turns the car again.

No response for a long moment. There is a feeling you get from wild-caught animals when you transport them, even when they’re not moving in the cage, not a smell or a sound but a tightness in the air, something ready to snap.

What she was afraid of, the first thing that clicked in her head when the girl was caught in her lights.

“My parents– we’re Christians,” says the girl, shaking now. “I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“At the party. It got kind of out of control and nobody was in any shape to drive me so I walked. It’s not much more than a mile.”

“I’ll take you to the emergency room. I’ll stay with you– we can call your parents from there.”

The girl says nothing, which she takes as acquiescence. Leia feels like if she saw one of them on the road she’d run him over.

Driving out here is a little less lonely since the platform crews have come with their powerful work lights and the highways are streaming with trucks all through the night. Leia knows where all the gas stations are, most never closing these days, but there is still all this space to get lost in. And they are still out there, the predators, maybe somewhere near. They are always out there, somewhere, but you can’t live your life thinking about that. Prairie dogs, described in one of the journals as ‘the Chicken McNuggets of the high plains,’ spend a third of their waking day scanning for danger. But even with all the hardtails crowding the town, with all the stares and comments she now gets, Leia has never felt endangered.

Leia drives to Mercy. They sit in the car under the parking lot lights and the girl, Jolene, is still shaking, and Leia takes her hand and squeezes it.

“This is a thing,” she says. “A thing that happened to you– like a car accident or a bad flu. The men, they’re gone now and they won’t come back, and the important thing to remember is they don’t own you, they don’t own any little bit of you. You’re the same Jolene who woke up in bed this morning. Really.”

It may be bullshit but that’s the way she would want to feel about it and that’s the best she can do.

“If you have to call the police,” says Jolene, pleading with her eyes, “would you call Mr. Two Strike at the reservation? Cause that’s where it happened, and I, like, used to go to school with his kids.”

Leia walks the girl into the hospital, the reception lights assaulting them and two young men with their faces scraped and bleeding half asleep, still drunk, in two of the plastic chairs waiting for stitches.

The woman behind the glass panel gets Jolene in to be seen right away, and Leia sits as far as she can from the two fighters, air heavy with booze breath for yards around them. She is getting out her phone to call Will’s office when the other one, the one who’s name she should remember but who she always calls Deputy Dipshit, comes into the lobby.

“Another brawl in front of Bazookas,” he says when she tells him what she knows. “I got to talk to those two.”

“Sure,” he says, clearly annoyed at the extra work on his shift. “When she comes out from the Doc. Then I spose I could drive her home.”

“I can do that. I don’t think she wants to be alone with a man in a car. Even in the back seat.”

“Suit yourself,” says the deputy, whose name she now remembers is Clayton. “But if she was to a party out there, I’m not sure that story of hers gonna hold water.”

Hitting the deputy is not an option, and Will has explained that with what the county is able to pay you’re not going to get the brightest lights to join the sheriff’s department.

“Is Sheriff Crowder on duty?” She hopes he takes it as a vote of no confidence in his abilities.

“Just driving, thinking.” And if you had a decent fucking radio station, I’d have been listening to that.

He moves away to rouse the fighters and write down the answers to his questions on a small notepad, then goes in to the emergency room to find Jolene. She hopes the doctor is thorough and at least kind. She gets the number for the reservation police, and the dispatcher says the chief will meet them at Jolene’s house. The fighters nod off again, and the receptionist behind the glass calls her over.

“Her mom and dad are pretty religious.” The receptionist is in her fifties, dyed blonde with a smoker’s rasp. “They believe in that thing where all the good people suddenly disappear?”

“Yeah. Her mom told me at sewing how the airlines have to have either the pilot or the co-pilot who’s a sinner, or at least a nonbeliever, or the insurance won’t cover them.”

“Just cause it’s the Rapture it don’t mean the ones that’s left won’t sue. And if both your pilots disappear–”

“Anyhow, if she comes home and has to tell them that story– well, they’re probly the type that think wickedness comes from within.”

Since Brandi bugged out there is the other bed in the apartment. Hell, I could just adopt her–

“Maybe I could go in with her, if she wants. Help her through the story. Be like a– like a buffer.”

The receptionist winks at her. People still wink here, like in Frank Capra movies.

“Evenin, Sheriff,” says Cory Stufflebean, who Will has never seen under anything but a Stetson. “Your red brother’s already inside.”

He hits the buzzer and the gate slides open. “I’ll join you in the lobby.”

Back in Yellow Earth the main camp is three stories of stacked ISO containers with doors and windows cut into them, what the long-time town folks are calling ‘the Pile.’ This one, called Killdeer City after the council chairman of the rez, is six rows of long, trailer-like structures behind some security fencing, dumped on a flat spot in some patchy grazing land. He parks next to Danny Two Strike’s patrol car among the collection of mud-spattered pickups and gleaming muscle cars in the front lot, and heads for the admin building entrance, with Cory hurrying herky-jerky to catch up with him.

Cory stops and bends to rap his shin hard with his knuckles. “Terrific, now that I swapped it out. Plastic and titanium, like a jet fighter.”

“Just under the knee. The sumbitch was hurting me so bad I decided the hell with it.”

Cory was a bronc-riding champion in the ’50s before he got trapped under a ride at the Wildhorse Stampede, the animal twisting and kicking even after it slammed sideways into the arena dirt. Will has brought Cory in for D&D a dozen times over the years but thought he’d left the area.

“Bull turds I do.” The old man taps a code on a keypad to open the front door for them. “I look like that bank guard in the movies, the one that always gets kilt reaching for his pistol.”

“Yeah, the old-time religion. Doctor said how there wasn’t any space-age replacement for a liver, so I hung up my drinking spurs.”

They step into the lobby area, just an unmanned reception desk and a couple long brown-leather couches, a lame instrumental of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” oozing out from somewhere.

“Tell you the truth, Will, I feel like hammered shit. But I spose it’s better than being dead.”

Danny stands up from one of the couches, his hat in his hand. “Morning, Will.”

Danny nods his head. “One of our girls and two fellas sound like they’re probably white. She was walking home from a house party at her cousins’, the two stopped by her in their car to ask directions, then one pulled her inside and they took off. Left her out in the boonies about four hours ago, banged up pretty bad. She wandered around till that Wildlife Girl come along, doing who knows what out here, and–”

Will shrugs. “He’d make more hauling gravel, but he likes to carry a gun.” He looks around the lobby. It feels more like a display room than anything real, with Harleigh’s arrow logo on the wall behind the reception desk. “What are we doing here?”

“You swipe this little bugger to get in through the gate, use it like a credit card at the convenience store on site, gets you into the gym, the rec room, the Wifi café.”

Danny shrugs. “A four-door something. I sat with her and flipped through our auto look-book, but she couldn’t even give me a color. Not a pickup, not a van.”

“White male, slender and strong, dark hair, one- or two-day stubble, noticeable gold crown on what is probably his upper left bicuspid, probably chews tobacco– no visible tattoos. Wearing a monocolor hooded sweatshirt, khaki pants. Second perp is older, heavy-set, brown-to-black hair which is thinning, wearing jeans and a maroon windbreaker, belt with a heavy belt buckle, black grit under his fingernails.”

“It was dark and they pushed a bag that’d probably had some kind of fast food in it over her face. She smelled fries and onions.”

“We got four-fifty, five hundred hardtails in here at any one time, coming and going. You coulda just described a third of em.”

“I figure we take a little walk-through,” says Danny, “see if two badges makes anybody flinch. If we flush anything out and they’re white, I got you to make the arrest. If nothing pops, then I’ll sit with Cory and go through ID photos on their database.”

The old cowboy leads, access card in his hand. “I can take you into all the public spaces,” he says. “The residences, you’re gonna need a warrant.”

“Jack-and-Jill rooms– you got a bed unit with a storage drawer under it, half-fridge, microwave, sink, flat-screen TV, share a toilet with the fella next door. Couple feet bigger all around than your county lockup, Will. Plus they got cable.”

“Temperature drops and the wind gets howlin, you can access pert near all the amenities without stepping outside. Mostly fellas come here to sleep.”

They step into the dining hall, a low-ceilinged quadruple-wide with a cafeteria-style food line and a few dozen plastic tables scattered around. Fifteen or twenty men, all white, eat at or lounge around the tables, a few with their music hooked up to their heads.

“Our tenants are all pretty much of the Caucasian persuasion,” says Cory. “There’s a few Mexicans working the mud jobs and low end on construction crews, but they can’t afford it out here. And then your folks, Danny, they got their own homes or relatives to stay with nearby.”

Cory waits by the tray of lemon squares at the end of the chow line while the two lawmen stroll around the room, one on either side of every occupied table, looking into eyes. Mostly the men don’t respond, too exhausted or disinterested to do more than look up, though a few nod. Lots of tats, some notable beer bellies, guys with sunburned necks and forearms, and you could run a small engine on what they got jammed under their fingernails. They rejoin Cory, passing the insistently humming bank of food vending machines and heading through the security door to walk down the next connective chute.

“You’re right. It is a bit nicer than the county lockup,” says Will to Cory.

“Yeah, them bars tend to fuck up your ambience.” Cory says it with the French pronunciation. “This is more like that assisted living I was in over to Spring-brook, probly use the same kit to put it together. ‘Panelized Flat Pack Structures.’”

“Working the graveyard out here,” says Cory, “you got plenty time to peruse the brochures. This here’s a ‘portable modular housing facility custom-built to the locale, workforce size, and other needs unique to your project.’”

“Nicer than the government housing on the rez,” says Danny. “Nicer than what half the people out here living in.”

“I only seen the chief once,” Cory grins. “Come out for some photographs, shake a few hands. Manager is a fella who does these all over the country. Runs it like one of them corporate feed lots, but he knows his bidness.”

They step into the Wifi café then, a white-walled little box with three men sitting at the row of six computers, their faces washed by the bluish glow of the screens. One of the men is Skyping, talking to his kids in a thick Texas accent.

“I don’t see no oil bein pumped,” he says. “Just drill the holes and leave em for the frack boys. But without your Daddy and his friends there wouldn’t be no gas for Momma’s Explorer– well, darlin, then you shouldn’t spill. Momma got to keep her eye on the road.”

Danny cruises along the backs of the computers, getting a good look, then nods and they enter the next chute.

“I lived in one of these deals once,” says Cory. “Back when they built the dam.”

“Son, I’m two years older than dirt. Broke my hip the first time, so I’se off the circuit for a spell, and I chewed down enough aspirins to get through the interview without whimpering too bad, and they put me on a bulldozer. Rode it for two years and it never throwed me once.”

The light is harder in the chutes, and all from above, the broken vessels in Cory’s nose looking purple.

“I started pushing dirt in ’49, but went back to the rodeo before they finished it. There was a couple towns sprung up– Pick City’s still there, but I was out in what they called Silver City. Wunt no silver there ever, far as I know, just put up a couple rows of these little boxy things converted from grain bins– called em ‘cabins’– shaped like the plastic houses in that board game.”

“Played a lot of Monopoly in the hospital, when I was doing my sheet time between stompings. Learnt I wasn’t cut out for the real estate bidness. Not like the fellas who put up these little boomtowns– four or five of em dumped alongside the road we cut between the dam site and 83. They’d have three, four of us fellas in each unit, somebody opened a little store, there was a bar they threw up from lumber off the barns about to go under, dance hall.”

“Hell, it was what, nine outta ten people on the rez had to pick up and move, we seen em leaving with what they could carry.”

“Couple fellas, maybe– drivers, pick-and-shovel men.” Cory shakes his head. “The cabins was just bare inside– you got a frame and a mattress, little stove to make coffee on if you had your own pot, no housekeeping or any of the services that come with this here deal. Pay was good, though, and Jesus, we had fun on our off time. Wasn’t but one of those cabins with the TV antennae and nothing to watch back then, so it was card games and races.”

“Anything that had wheels and we got keys to or could hotwire, we’d race it. You fellas are too young to remember what a steam shovel is.”

“I had a children’s book,” says Danny. “My mother read that to me most every night so’s I’d shut up and nod off.”

“Well the trick to racing one is not to tip it over on the turns. We’re racing in muck, see, so you get a nice sideslip on the turns.”

“Wasn’t nobody to bother but each other, and we kind of policed ourselves. When there was fights, you’d just let the loser lie there, rest up a bit, and somebody’d throw a bucket of water on him if he had his shift coming up.”

“More than a few. And I’ll tell you one thing– this here,” says Cory as they step into the gym, “you can live here for months and never come up on the radar. Don’t need to talk to nobody, you can stick your headphones on, lay back in your room and look at two thousand channels’ worth of nonsense, sleep till you go out for another twelve. Try that on a ranch and the boys are like to take a branding iron to your tender parts.”

The gym is the same white box as the lobby and Wifi café, all the machines and benches taken, even at six in the morning. Will lingers beside a stocky, over-muscled guy bench pressing what looks like four hundred pounds of free weight several times.

“Jolene Otis. Religious family, goes to school in Yellow Earth now, I never heard nothing bad about her.”

“Bout like what you’d imagine. Word leaked out awful fast, and her boy cousins– she got a truckload of cousins, couple of em hosted the party she was at– they’re out looking nasty and talking about gelding somebody. I had to have a talk.”

The lifter makes a final Whoo!, thrusting the loaded bar up and racking it, staring past Will to the ceiling, then sits up, grabs his towel, and steps quickly out the door that leads behind the structure.

Will looks to Danny. Danny taps his lip and the side of his neck– the man had a Fu Manchu moustache and a three-color tat of a screaming skull on fire on the left side of his neck.

“Probably not.” Will stares at the bench the man was laying back on, black vinyl still slick with his sweat. “But I’ll guarantee you he’s doing something we should run him in for.”

THEY’RE EACH TUGGING AT one side of a suitcase, the pink carry-on with a butterfly pattern he bought Fawn for the Hawaii trip.

Fawn lets go and Connie almost falls to the floor with the suitcase. Fawn looks to Harleigh.

The look of exasperation from Connie, on cue. “Where does she get this stuff?”

“And you thought it was a pretty good deal. You and Bunny out on your shopping binges, thick as thieves.”

Now Fawn pretends to be shocked. “Are you gonna let her talk to me that way?”

“You two just simmer down.” He is standing in the doorway to Fawn’s bedroom, the avenue of retreat unimpeded behind him. “Where, exactly, do you plan on going?”

Fawn thrusts her jaw out the way she does when she’s out of ammunition. “Texas or California. Or Florida. He hasn’t made up his mind.”

“Bunny,” says Harleigh softly, “is the girl in the car ad who sits on the hood in a short dress and smiles. She doesn’t know diddly about the oil service business.”

It was never more than a tease with Bunny, he thinks, or he never pushed it any further between them, and is now mightily relieved that he didn’t.

“And Brent is the guy in the beer ads hanging out with his meathead buddies,” says Connie. “What’s he know about helping a young girl pregnant with her first baby?”

Fawn mutters, having wondered the same thing. “He doesn’t even like beer. He drinks Bacardi cocktails.”

“Well excuse me,” says Connie, tossing the suitcase back on the bed. “I had him mixed up with a lowlife who can’t keep his hands off of underaged girls.”

Harleigh takes a half step forward. Boxing refs must face this all the time, how to separate the opponents without getting pasted.

“That belly gets any bigger,” says Connie, pointing, “you won’t be able to reach the pedals.”

Fawn is just starting to show, Harleigh thinking it was all pizza and Coke till she hit them with the news.

“You knew, didn’t you,” Fawn accuses, narrowing her eyes at him. “That’s why you fired Brent.”

“Brent was never my employee, we were partners. I dissolved the partnership.”

“Okay, you two– time out. Connie, this isn’t a thing about you as a mother, it’s just how life is these days. Fawn– I love you and I will consider this baby my grandchild.”

Connie runs out then. They both listen for a crash, but she is too upset to assault the ceramics, not even slamming the door to their bedroom.

Fawn sits, her biggest worry with Harleigh settled now, her defenses coming down. He sits beside her, considering his options. Picking a fight with Brent and then shooting him is his favorite at the moment, but he’s sure Ruby, back in his corner now that he’s left ArrowFleet, would advise against it. Connie pulled this same routine when she was Fawn’s age and ended up stranded in a motel room in Kalispell, going into labor.

“You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do,” he says as gently as he can, “but I don’t trust him.”

“The more I know about him, the more I worry for you. You know you can call me, any time of the day or night, no explanations necessary.”

Harleigh sighs, looks at the walls– Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, some skinny boy singer from the Idol show with his shirt pulled open. He’d been sorry to see the Little Mermaid go.

MAKE YOUR OWN BOX, be your own trainer. There must be an AA meeting here in Yellow Earth, and various other Loser Lobbies, but forget about CrossFit. The people who hadn’t left here before the oil came were the ones with no initiative, the ones too clueless to move.

Brent is on the treadmill to start, already pushing his lactate threshold, and thinking about what to do about Wayne Lee. “Never think of your enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them,” said the Objectivist, and it’s true, worrying about the people in your way can be a suckhole. He adjusts the slant on the mill to max, digs in. The Workout of the Day he’s chosen is all attack, with ninety-second recovery periods in between. There’s the slacker thing with Wayne Lee, of course, always willing to go with the flow, but that is just borderline laziness. And there’s a new element, a petulance, like Brent owes him something. He tries to bring his knees all the way up to his chest, quads screaming, and imagines the Crusader armies. Basically a Christian biker gang, in it for the rape and pillage and the bragging rights back home if you make it there in one piece. None of this ‘team member’ shit, though they were all aware of a certain power in sheer numbers. Overrun the sons of bitches before they get the second arrow out of the quiver. The machine beeps and he steps off the tread before it stops rolling.

The hero in your soul. She talks about that a lot. Listen to what he really wants, don’t accept compromises, don’t let himself down. Bunny, right now, is a compromise. Have to deal with that situation, unless she’s willing to read the writing on the wall and do the right thing. All the legal tangle, ownership, paper signing, all that weight they tie on to try to handicap you, will be fine. She knows what’s at stake, knows the consequences if she doesn’t hold up her end.

Power cleans now. The architect, just a contractor with an attitude really, wondered why the basement room had to be so high. So I don’t smash these weights through the ceiling, numbnuts. You don’t push, you don’t lift, you give gravity a good hard shot in the ass.

Right into the Bulgarian split squats, no breather in between. He’s started designing his own WODs instead of finding them online, each meant to punish a different muscle group. If you’re not infuriated at least two or three times during your workout, you might as well hang it up.

Break now. The chief has turned chickenshit, listening to the whiners in his tribe. She had a few bombshells for the red man, too, “They fought to live like animals, and had no rights to the land,” something like that. Which, if you don’t get all romantic about it, is pretty much true. Let them try to live on beef jerky some winter, they think it was so wonderful.

He only got the book because he’d been outbid on the Victoria’s Secret catalog that had been smuggled in. “It’s like science fiction,” said Hummer from the second tier, who rented it to him. “Only more complicated.”

At first it was slow going, some babe who owned a railroad, and he kept waiting for this Atlas character to show up. Then the ideas kicked in. Things started to make sense, and not just in the book. It was a new way of seeing the world. He was already hitting the iron at Walkaround, just out of boredom, but once he was into the book he started being disciplined about it, setting goals. Looking around on the yard you could see it in the eyes, in the attitude– the ones who ran the joint, who would run the world if they’d take the shackles off, and the extra baggage. From now on I carry nobody.

Wall ball shots, getting into a rhythm with the medicine ball, nobody in the house to freak out with the impact. Throw it like you mean it, like the point is to put a hole in the wall. He practiced sending the vibes out– do not fuck with me– and they must have gotten the message. He did his own time and read the big book three times, cover to cover. The picture of her on the back wasn’t impressive, little dumpy Russian woman, but she was into some righteous theories. No complaints, no excuses– the next go-round he was going to rock the joint. I’m tougher than the smart ones and smarter than the tough ones, and I know how simple it all should be.

Walk up the wall for handstand pushups, that great rush. Hard to lose your focus, all that blood in your brain, and focus is the whole story from this point on. All the rest of it, the trucking scam, the product, is just for operating cash, just what you need to show to sit at the Big Table. But you get a piece of an oil lease or two–

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual,” she said somewhere. So people who fuck with the rights of the individual can’t pretend they aren’t racists. Or something like that. You get to the Big Table the stakes are higher, the risk greater, but when you win, you get to leave all the others behind, the ones who cling, the ones who can’t hack it. Scorch is a bad man in his own little world, takes care of business, but he doesn’t have the imagination to play on that level, doesn’t have the vision. But when you need shit done and no questions about it–

Box jumps. Get your plyometrics in gear, engage the abs. The floor is a sizzling hot griddle, don’t let your feet burn. Once you’re there, an accepted player, they can’t touch you. How much money do these Wall Street characters, these greenmailers and corporate raiders steal in a year, and if they’re caught, do they ever do time? No fucking way. Because the little lawmakers and their enforcement goons know the secret– you take those people down, it all comes down. The whole system. Because they need you, need whoever is willing to stick their neck out and make a move, dig a hole, build a skyscraper, give them something to tie down with regulations and taxes so it doesn’t lift off the ground and fly.

Brent sits in the rowing machine, imagines himself a half boat-length ahead of a competitor, begins to pull. Faster. Harder. Think of other men’s envy as rocket fuel, let it charge you up. He thinks about making it with Fawn down here. She’s still pliable, even if she’s a little spoiled, and he can make her into whatever he wants. A matter of focus, a matter of will. He begins to pull away from the other boat. If he’d been into tats, there was one of the Objectivist’s quotes he’d have on his chest, maybe backwards so he could read it in the mirror every morning.

“The question isn’t who’s going to let me– it’s who’s going to stop me.”

“Rookies always light the first flare stack,” Nicky the derrickman told him, rummaging around for a length of PVC pipe the right length and diameter. “It’s like an initiation.”

Tuck has only been with the new outfit a week, nice enough guys but a little slapdash compared to Upshaw’s crew. Nothing he can put his finger on, just that they seem like they’re racing to catch up, not to get ahead. They’ve been making hole like crazy, though, at least till the gas started coming up, surprising since they’re only into the first shale layer and nothing’s been fracked yet. Just some natural pockets, says Kelsey, the driller, something that has to be vented and burned off before they can go deeper. So Tuck is squatting with his back to the wind, running through safety matches, trying to get the damn rags to catch fire.

He’d feel more confident if Nub, who’s supposed to be supervising all this, wasn’t at his other well, or if the other guys weren’t all up on the platform, hugging close to something big to duck behind. Grunt told him to stay on the edge of the pad, fine, and to approach from the far side, away from the ground pipes that send the gas to the stack, in case of leaks. In case of leaks, he thinks, I am toast. He’s maybe three hundred feet back from it, just a big steel pipe sticking straight up, fifteen feet or so from the ground. The idea is to throw the pole up like a baton, end over end, so the lit end passes over the gas blowing out of the stack–

There will be a much bigger one eventually, says Kelsey, thirty, forty feet high, with an electrical sparking device built onto it. But that’s for the production boys, weeks after this crew has finished drilling and moved on to a new well. Just part of the macho routine, thinks Tuck, proving yourself under fire.

The ball of gas-soaked rags catches. He stands and waves to the platform, holding the payload as far from his body as he can, flames whipping in the wind.

Then there is the noise they told him about, a loud rushing as the gas is released, a bit like an airplane engine revving up if you’ve got a seat right over the wing. He thought it would hiss. “If there’s too much nitrogen and not enough methane,” Nicky told him, “she might not even light.”

Tuck starts toward the stack. If he’d known about this he might have practiced throwing poles in the air. Circus people do stuff like that all the time, with precision, but they rehearse like crazy when there’s no audience.

He’s halfway to the stack when there is a Pop! and he sees a streak of smoke in the air and then WHOOOOOM! an explosion from the top of the stack, a column of flame roaring up twenty, thirty feet, slanting slightly in the wind.

He’s on his knees on the pad, the torch he was carrying having set some weeds on fire, the assholes on the platform hooting with laughter. Tom Hicks holds what looks like a small shotgun, which must have fired the flare that flew over the stack. Tuck stands carefully– nothing bleeding, nothing burnt or even singed, the flare-off lowering but continuing to roar. There goes my entire winter heating supply in twenty seconds, he thinks, up into the atmosphere.

They come down then to slap his back and ask if he shat himself and relive his reaction and help him throw gravel on the torch and the smoldering weeds. Nicky stands facing the flame-throwing stack, hand over his heart.

“I officially declare,” he yells over the roar, “these Olympic Games to be open.”