Yellow earth

“The west! The mighty West!” rhapsodized the oft-wounded Civil War general James Sank Brisbin in 1881, in his The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, explaining how in the former Great American Desert, “The poor professional young man, flying from the over-crowded East and the tyranny of a moneyed aristocracy, finds honor and wealth.”

That book and the earlier Homestead Act helped precipitate a rush that filled the high plains with strivers, the majority of them either foreign-born or first-generation Americans. With pasture land further south and east played out or swarming with nesters, experienced cattlemen as well as ambitious greenhorns like young Theodore Roosevelt came to the Dakotas to build up great herds, which the Northern Pacific Railway, at one point owner of a quarter of the upper state’s land, shipped to market once filled out on free grass. Vast ‘bonanza farms’ were cleared and planted along the Missouri River, some with hundreds of migrant laborers hired for the wheat harvest, while the smaller family operations of Norwegians and ethnic Germans from Russia filled the lands that lay further from easy water.

Dusty processions of cattle, mostly Hereford by blood now, ambled down Broadway in Bismarck. Advances in refrigeration and the highest price-per-pound in decades excited a whirlwind of British investment. Millions of cattle and billions of cow chips festooned the grasslands, and wheat farmers, flush from their own bumper crops, invested in the relatively new technology of barbed wire to keep the beeves out of their fields. Yellow Earth, located near the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, grew from a side-track tent colony beside the just arrived Great Northern Railway to a passenger and freight division point, replete with roundhouse, car repair shop, icehouse, and stockyards capable of holding over a hundred carloads’ worth of livestock, eventually becoming the county seat and trade center. People who walked to the Territory with a bindle over their shoulder or pawned the family heirlooms for a train ticket suddenly owned horses and wagons, ate regularly, and built schools for their children.

The cattle went first, in the Great Blizzard of ’87. After a brutally hot summer, prairie dogs had gone underground early, elk had banded to migrate southward, birds vanished. In early January snow fell, then fell again, then fell again, covering the tallest of the wild forage, and in parts of the state the temperature plummeted to 50 below, the cold locking up water holes and streams that were then buried in more snow. The wind rattled the boards of farmhouses, blew head-high drifts over roads. Unprovisioned by their owners, steers found buildings in the blasting wind and pressed their starving bodies against them for shelter, or wandered into riverbeds and coulees, where they bogged shoulder-deep and were buried. When the weather finally broke for spring, flocks of turkey buzzards circled the sky and blanketed the carcasses of dead animals that covered the land like tiny hillocks, rotting carcasses that choked the streams and rivers, that polluted the water and befouled the air. Some outfits were completely wiped out in the Great Die-Up, most losing nine out of every ten of their stock, and cattlemen left the state in herds.

With the wheat it was a longer, more tantalizing process. Good years and poor, prices sliding up and down, shipping costs eating into whatever bounty advances in agriculture produced, mortgages taken to tide farmers over through seasons of too little water or too many grasshoppers. The death blow came in the Dirty Thirties, when in the western half of the state soil depletion from overuse and severe drought was followed by black blizzards up from Texas that dumped layers of sterile dust on the stubbled fields, blinding horses, short-circuiting tractor engines, and driving people inside for days on end, cloth stuffed in the cracks around doors and windows in a doomed effort to keep the disaster at bay. A perfect storm of misery. Most of July of ’36 was over one hundred degrees, and more than half the people in the state had to grudgingly seek some form of public assistance to survive. Mortgages were foreclosed, farmers were found hanging dead in dust-drifted barns. Yellow Earth bled citizens, some stopping in Fargo, others continuing out of state. And the trains of the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern rolled further westward, carrying young men away to their uncertain futures.

“Now that I look at it,” she says, frowning at her computer screen, “we do have you booked.” She shrugs. “New system, it’s driving everybody crazy.”

From the reception desk Dudley can hear the MIDI noise of the slots. The girl looks kind of Indian, pretty in a plump, youthful way. He tries to avoid looking down at the ubiquitous carpet, a swirly, petit-mal epilepsy trigger of purple and orange.

“That’s right.” If he needs to stay longer he can hack into their system again.

“Dudley Nickles,” she reads off the plastic. “There’s a girl I know in town named Dollarhide.”

He’s supposed to be here incognito, none of the rig managers or field staff aware of his visit till he’s ensconced in their trailers, but there’s no need for disguise. He’s always been like the people caught on Google Earth, faces a featureless smear no matter what activity they’re engaged in. Muddy Duddy, the wags at HQ back in Houston call him, when it’s not Studly Dudley or Nickles and Dimes or just plain The Dud. In five minutes she’ll forget he existed. In a week–

There are so many pickups parked in the lot, she’s learned to use the generic nomenclature. Dudley slides the keys for the rental to her, the license number written on the tab. The girl keyboards it in. Somebody shouts from the casino floor, a winner. He’s been into their slot machine database, tracked the last two weeks of payoffs. No advantage there, somebody who knows their job constantly adjusting the machines. When he was in college he was in a posse that hit casinos, counting blackjack cards– five tech students ambling from table to table to allay suspicion, one or the other retiring to the bathroom for a few minutes at a time, with a set of signals to pass on to the counter taking your place. Two-up, one-up, even, one-down, two-down. That simple, just a statistical hiccup and you had the slightest edge on the house, which meant if you all played without tactical error you’d aggregate between five and ten grand an evening. Twice, the others were asked to leave and Dudley ignored. Like he wasn’t there.

He almost never comes to the scene of the grime. But they’re remodeling in Houston, new computer system, lighting, layout, the whole nine yards, and Boomer said, “Dud, get you a pair of shitkicker boots and pack your GPS, you’re heading to the Bakken.” Then a thump on the back. Boomer thumps him, in passing, once or twice a week. “Like to check an see you’re still there, buddy.”

The girl gives him back his car keys and encodes the entry card for the room, number 108 around the back, as he requested in the hack. The door-lock memory will be battery operated and not connected to the front desk, but it keeps a printable log of time, date, and key code for every entry. Next they’ll monitor when and how often you flush the toilet.

“It’s just through the casino floor on the left,” she says, handing him his Amex and the entry card and pasting on a smile she’s obviously received a memo about. “I hope you have time to enjoy our gymnasium and spa facilities during your stay.”

The room is fine, buffalo roaming on the wall and a view of the parking lot. Dudley opens his suitcase on the stand, pulls out his computer and sets it up on the little desk, uses his smartphone to connect to the internet, bypassing the hotel’s link. He opens the diet cola and Cheetos he bought in the gift shop, hangs his jacket in the closet, brings up the records of all the Company’s drilling operations in the Bakken play.

THE PARTS WHERE YOU’RE strapped to the chair and interrogated make his stomach hurt. Or maybe it’s just the double cheeseburger with bacon settling in. The idea is that you, inside of Alex Mason, are going to be jolted back into memories of Black Ops missions, complete with firefights and hand-to-hand combat. Since I’m here in the chair, thinks Dickyboy, I must not have gotten whacked in any of the flashbacks, though it seems I was probably brainwashed to do some killing for the enemy–

Georgie Price, who graduated last year and manages this shift, lets him play in one of the corner booths as long as he buys something. It’s mostly drive-thru action anyway, the oil workers wanting to grab and go, and he’s finished the burger and fries and is working on his second vanilla shake. With the headset on you only hear the soundtrack from the game, running his xBox 360 onto a little stand-up monitor. Nothing like the flat-screen on the den wall at Dylan’s, but Dylan’s parents have him on lockdown for the week.

Now I’m in what– Cuba? Trying to assassinate this guy with a beard, all the politics flying at you fast and furious if you don’t word up on the game before you start playing it.

The shit hits the fan again and his fingers fly on the controller. He’s playing single-shooter today but has beat every local player he knows and kicked some ass online. The graphics are so much better in this new version, he thinks, blasting away, only he should be smelling cordite and not French fries.

Things get confusing again– did he actually assassinate Fidel Castro or only a look-alike and should he take advantage of his kill-streak reward to call in a chopper gunner to get all these Spetznatz commandos off his back– and for some reason he looks up from the screen and sees Fawn pull into the lot in a baby-blue Miata.

She’s with her posse, Tina Dollarhide and poor Jolene, pushing in through the door with that little strut of hers, look at me, I got the goods, blowing right by him to the counter without a glance. The other two stop so he puts the game on hold.

“Uhm, yeah, there’s a lot of fighting and assassinations.” He looks to Jolene. “But you can set it for less blood and cut out all the cursing if you want.”

As if Jolene might be a gamer. Jolene who is standing here but not really meeting his eye, knowing that everybody knows what happened.

“It’s a story you’re in, and it’s– it’s kind of educational, this one, all this stuff about the Cold War.”

“Like in the ’60s, I think? So far it’s the US and Russia and Cuba, but there’s like this old Nazi who invented Nova 6 nerve gas and has sleeper agents waiting to release it.”

He missed school today, overslept in the boat. He’s told his grandmother he’s staying with his uncle, his uncle that he’s staying with his cousin, and his cousin that he’s staying with Dylan and so far nobody’s thought to call the school and see if he’s showing up.

“That car is the bomb,” he says, looking out to the Miata. “The Chairman must be doing okay for himself.”

They say nice to see you, then get in line to order. Tina is nice for a Yellow Earth girl, no attitude about you being from the rez, and Jolene is the one of her old friends Fawn kept when she transferred out after junior high. Friends might be pushing it some, Jolene probably flattered just to tag along with the Savage Princess and after what happened really glad to stand by somebody who draws all the attention away from her. Fawn will have them sit on the other side of the room, so she can talk loud about how fat he’s gotten.

But he’s got more pressing issues to deal with– chopper down and in flames, the van turned over with machine-gun fire tearing it to shreds, Alex Mason neck-deep in the shit again, got to think fast, how to respond, how to survive– Dickyboy falls back on his old reliable.

PEOPLE ARE A SEPARATE skill. He’s been painting for a long time, feels like he’s got a pretty good handle on it, but whenever he’s done people they’ve been way off on the horizon. Couple little strokes with the tip of the brush, indicate the way they bend to the wind, carry a pail. For a full-face job, a portrait, you’ve got to get the flesh tones right.

Clemson mixes from the dabs of primaries, making little splotches on the palette, storehouses of the shades he thinks he’ll need, referring constantly to the photograph. The snap is from three years ago, with a real camera, not one of these telephone deals, Tina with her feeder calf before the county fair, smiling at the lens with an aerosol can of show foam in her hand. It was the last year she did the 4-H, a three-month-old they’d bought from Wiley Cobb. She’d named it Jonas, after some boy singing group she liked then, and worked with the animal every day.

He mixes the yellow ochre and cadmium red, dulls it down a bit with ultramarine blue. Splotch of orange, splotch of pink, a bunch in between, a blue that looks good with them. Tina was out in the sun a lot in those days, had a bit of a farmer’s tan. Her eyes will be easy, at least the colored part of them, and he’s already thinking about how to do denim up close. It won’t be just like the photograph, it should be more how the picture makes him feel when he looks at it. There are much more recent shots of her, of course, but he doesn’t know that girl nearly as much as he did this one.

She won’t be staying around, he can tell that much. Whether it’s college, which would be good, which would be what her parents wanted, or something else, she’ll be gone next year. His mission is to make sure she doesn’t feel too bad about it, encourage her to leave the nest. He helped with the calf when she asked, but it was supposed to be her project and she took that seriously. Before, when he was doing more with the land, she couldn’t bear to be left out, always full of questions, wanting to hold the other end of things. ‘My shadow,’ he used to call her.

He’s done the fence rails, the barn in the background, putting it in cloud shadow so the red doesn’t overwhelm the frame. With the calf he did the castrating, and after that Tina took over, hauling sacks of feed and buckets of water, getting up early before school, spray washing the animal once a month. The problem when you’ve only got one is that it gets lonely and forgets it’s a cow, and you start treating it like a pet. She’d seen sheep slaughtered at Prairie Packing, but there’s something different when there’s so many, the mind flips a switch and it’s like you’re in a factory. So even with winning best in class at the fair and selling Jonas for a profit if you didn’t count all the hours of work she’d put in, Tina told him it was her last. They’d both looked so good in the arena, Spartina straight and strong, the young beef shaved, scotch-combed, and oiled, thrifty and long-bodied.

Clemson dots a little titanium white into one of the blotches, mixes it in. Oils are great for surface, but it takes a lot of skill to suggest what lies just beneath. The way Tina’s cheeks would glow when she was happy or excited, the special light in her eyes. The shape of her smile in a face yet devoid of creases. Tears drop on the palette and Clemson has to wick them away with a Kleenex. Oil and water don’t mix.

He sits back to look at the empty part of the canvas, the big hole where Tina should be. This is going to be really difficult, he thinks, and decides to start on Jonas.

“GUY JUST ASKED FOR you,” says Shakes, smeared with black from changing tires.

Scorch looks out through the dirty window. Skinny character, leaning against a white Ford Focus and looking around as if there’s anything to see.

Brent bought the garage when he set up the service company, a spot to do whatever repair work was needed on the old dinosaurs he brought up from Texas and overbilled the company for. Plus the long-haulers carrying product always stop here first. He’s okayed Scorch, not officially on the payroll, using it for a pickup spot, which keeps all his commerce away from the club.

The skinny guy looks appropriately intimidated when he gets an eyeful of the tats.

Scorch lays a look on the guy. Shiny black shoes, silky blue shirt, bow tie. Who the fuck wears a bow tie?

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” says Scorch, popping the hood and raising it up. “See if I can do anything for you.”

Narcs have stamina but not much imagination. The plates tell him the car is a rental, the sweat on the character’s forehead as he leans in to stare at the engine says he’s nervous or strung out or both.

“You know, if you just call Enterprise,” says Scorch, playing it out a bit further, “they’ll bring you a new ride and take this one back to their shop.”

“There’s something coming out of the crankcase,” says the skinny guy. “Sort of like black tar.”

Scorch is a bike guy, ride em but don’t fix em, and a car engine to him is just a bunch of metal shit and hoses.

“Yeah, smoking,” says the skinny guy. He looks more like a meth head, but whatever floats your boat–

Tough on all the pilgrims who come in here, have to find a new connection. One of the ArrowFleet haulers rolls in, sounding like shit. A job for the real mechanics.

He could give a phony one, of course, but it doesn’t matter. You just need something to hang on a guy if he’s going to be a regular, going to bring you other customers.

“It’s like this, Lenny. Buy what you think you can afford, and if you don’t like it, don’t come back to me. Caveat emptor.” Brent taught him that phrase and he loves the sound of it. “You want a half a gram?”

“For your protection and mine, Lenny. Lay the cash on the engine block, then go back into our restroom– it’s just past the service desk, go in and play with yourself or whatever for a couple minutes. When you come back out it’ll be in your glove compartment.”

The skinny guy leaves a pile of bank-fresh twenties and goes inside. Scorch slips the money into his shirt pocket, lets the hood down, heads back to his toolbox. He couldn’t name half the shit in it, but from under a ring of washers he pulls out a little envelope with the shit in it, the stuff that’s been coming up baked hard, like a little chip of coal. He’s on his way back to the Focus when Wayne Lee rolls up in his Camaro, shit-eating grin on his face like always.

If he has a boss it’s Vic at the club. With Brent he’s just an independent contractor.

Wayne Lee laughs and drives off and Scorch puts the shit in the glove compartment, goes back inside. He watches the skinny guy come out and sit into the car, check to see that the deal has been completed, then zoom away to wherever he’s going to fire up.

THE CALL CAME IN just after he left the office, Julie on the radio, saying to call his sister for an emergency. He waited in traffic to pull into the Walmart lot, but then the radio again and a wreck out on 1804.

It’s a kid he recognizes from before, the Mustang totaled, the guy driving the water hauler pissed that he’s losing time.

“My brake lights were working fine!” he yells before Will is completely out of the patrol car. “He must have been fucking asleep back there.”

His father, the Colonel, is retired, wings folded, kicking back in Colorado Springs. Plays some golf, hikes twice a week, grumbles about politicians giving away the store. He brags that he’s only five pounds over his weight when he went to the Academy and still operates on military time, rising precisely at 0700 hours.

The kid is sitting on a hummock just off the road, an I-don’t-care look on his face. On another day Will might bother to walk around, kick the weeds for whatever pharmaceuticals he’s dumped.

“I didn’t even hear brakes,” says the glowering trucker. “It was stop-and-go for like fifteen minutes, only this dipshit forgets to stop.” The trucker has already written down his company information, insurance, phone number on a slip of paper. Will looks back to the boy.

He still looks pretty spacey. The Mustang is halfway off the road, hood like an accordion bellows, and the water hauler parked up ahead without much damage visible on the rear.

“I’ve got four thousand gallons of shock absorber in that tank. Didn’t feel a jolt.”

He’s called Julie to send the wrecker. Traffic is slowed but moving around the Mustang, and Tolliver will be here in a minute to wave people through, cut down on the gawk time. He hands the trucker his license back.

There was a heart thing a couple years back, the Colonel ordering them not to call it an attack, that hastened his retirement. He didn’t love teaching, even if it was for the next generation of birdmen. He liked to say there was flying and then there was garbage time.

There’s no airbag in a car that old, but he doesn’t see any dents in the kid. The boy takes a couple steps, shrugs his shoulders.

With alcohol you want to do the test on site, but the other possibilities hang in the blood longer. He hears the siren approaching. Tolliver loves the siren. Will guides Dylan into the back seat, throws the flasher on, gives a bwoop for the civilian drivers to make room and turns between them to head back toward town, stopping to roll his window down and call to the deputy.

Will puts his own siren on then, driving mostly on the shoulder to pass the inbound stuff.

The kid shrugs again but Will sees him check out the mile marker as they pass it. Stuff in a ziplock bag somewhere in the field probably and he’ll get a ride back out when he can to try to find it.

“DWI while on probation, you’re going to lose your license, Dylan. Might be some criminal charges, depending. You could do yourself a favor.”

“Whoever is selling to you is in deep shit, and if we find out you’ve been selling–”

Will can’t remember much about the first couple bases they lived on, all stateside. Then the Colonel, only a captain then, was transferred to Minot to fly B-52s for the Strategic Air Command. ‘Part of the triad of national defense,’ he used to say. The marriage blew apart pretty soon after that, and his mother moved them to Lignite and got back into teaching in Yellow Earth, Will and his sister ensconced in their first completely civilian housing. Every weekend he was shuttled over to the base, the Colonel grilling him in math and science, encouraging him to develop a good technical understanding despite his low opinion of the ‘rocket geeks’ who shared the real estate. And there was the assumption, always, that like father like son, and talk of the senator who would vouch for Will when it came time to apply for the Academy.

“Our holding cell is pretty basic,” he tells the boy. “A bench, a sink, common toilet. No TV.”

Dylan squirms to pull his phone from his pocket, flips it open. “I got no bars out here.”

Will remembers from the first time that the father was a lawyer and drove up in a black Lexus.

“We have a complaint from ArrowFleet,” she says. “Trying to service a well over in–”

With Julie he doesn’t bother with all the ‘10-4’ stuff unless the deputies are involved. Don’t want them to get too relaxed.

His mother sparred with the Colonel for a while, then surrendered Will to military school in Virginia for two years. But the asthma and the discipline problems gave him an out. He hated wearing a uniform, hated taking orders all the time, and unlike his father had never stayed up nights staring at the heavens and dreaming of flight. His sister at least leaves the ground a few times a week now, though stewardess is more of a waitressing job than being master of the skies. The asthma, which involved prescriptions of bronchodilators and corticosteroids and one scary trip to the emergency room, was the equivalent of losing an eye for anyone who wanted to be a pilot.

“That’s all I knew at your age, but it’s a start. I’m not a career counselor, but I’d advise against the drug-dealer option. The people who make it in that field are real go-getters. Entrepreneurial skills. And you”– he glances into the rearview mirror– “don’t strike me as the self-starter type.”

So back to Yellow Earth High, were he stayed out of trouble, played sports just for fun, and had no problems with his breathing. Thinking about it, he began to suspect it was the uniform itself, a fabric he was allergic to, but kept this idea to himself.

“How’s school?” the Colonel would say on his visits, Sundays only now because there were games on Saturdays. It clearly pained him to see Will in civilian clothes. The Colonel would take Will around to introduce him to support personnel on the base, vital to the defense effort but clearly lesser creatures than the men who slipped the surly bonds of Earth. He remembers watching the Colonel endure a barrage of insults from a pair of fighter pilots, all implying that being a jockey on what they called a Big Ugly Fat Fucker was something akin to driving a bus, until he shut them down with a reminder of the superior destructive potential of his payload, quoting Oppenheimer.

If it wasn’t the Academy, the Colonel really didn’t care where or if Will went to college, so he tried UND for a couple years, majoring in Psych, till even the in-state tuition seemed like a waste.

Payton is in the office and takes Dylan for the urine test. Will calls his sister.

The Colonel had a little Cessna Skycatcher, flew it up to Sloulin Field once and took Will for a steak at the El Rancho Hotel restaurant. ‘Your basic transportation,’ he called it, but went up a couple times a week just to look around.

She isn’t crying. As a girl she was both off the Colonel’s hook and beneath his radar.

“Some finish, huh?” she says. “The guys he was with say he’d just sunk a putt, bent over to pick up the ball, said ‘Oh no,’ and that was it.”

“That boy sure had to pee. Two days for the verdict. I called the mother to come take him to Mercy– he could be all fucked up internally and not feel it.”

“He’s in the system, reckless driving and probation violation for the moment. Took his license away for safekeeping.”

There was dope in the high school back in the ’90s, and Will smoked his share of it, though he never reached full pothead status. Locally grown stuff as far as he knew, not very potent, and none of the heavier drugs they saw on the news or in cop shows. There were amphetamines and even coke in Yellow Earth and on the reservation before the shale oil hit, but nothing like now, the Stupid Behavior Index shooting up within a week of the invasion.

He counts three pump jacks on Wiley Cobb’s property, visible from the 2, one of them with a stack spewing flame next to it. He turns up the bumpy access road, still just Caterpillar tracks, onto the Niles place. A quarter mile in he comes to a huge rust farm of a tractor, an old Massey Ferguson that A. J. has parked across the road and pulled the front wheels off of. Hell of a lot of work just to make a point.

There are two ArrowFleet fuel tankers waiting to get in and one waiting to get out.

“The first time he left the wheels on and we rolled it,” says one of the truckers. “We go in that field after this rain, tank empty or full, we’ll get bogged down for sure.”

Even in the patrol car it’s pretty hairy, one hummock after another and sinkholes in between. Picked the perfect spot for a blockade.

The Colonel was still just young enough to be allowed to fly missions in Desert Storm, nothing he would go into detail about, and remained tight-lipped about the fact that Will did not enlist. But he was married to Sheila then, a bad idea, and trying to start a construction business, a worse one. Liking to work with tools and knowing how to make a reasonable bid and control a half-dozen employees were clearly distinct aspects of the trade, and at the time Yellow Earth was in something of a building slump. The marriage ended without children or any terrible fireworks, and three years of nail-gunning for Gunnar Bjornson’s roofing outfit got him square with the vendors in town. His mother had remarried and moved to California and he was thinking of following to check it out, when old Sam Kearny, who’d had the job for as long as anyone could remember, announced he was packing it in.

The guys on his crew used to call Will ‘the sheriff’ when he’d walk on site, because he wouldn’t let them fudge on the building codes and made them clean up the work space every night.

So it was kind of a joke when Lou Josephson from the Democrats asked him to throw his name in, embarrassing to leave a slot empty on the ballot even if Sam’s long-time deputy was a shoo-in. Though Sam was mysteriously noncommittal on the subject.

Will didn’t campaign much, standing up at rallies to say a few words, the newcomer at the bottom of the ticket. But he read up on the job, even went to talk to Sam about what he thought the position should be.

And then the long-time deputy’s wife sued for divorce, citing years of physical abuse, with one post-beating photograph that garnered a slew of hits on the Web.

“You look good,” said the Colonel the first time he saw Will in the uniform, a cotton/synthetic blend that didn’t even make him sniffle. “You look like you mean business.”

And once Will got used to the idea he found that he actually liked it, liked having a window into people’s lives, even if two times out of three they weren’t exactly thrilled to see him drive up.

A. J. Niles, in fact, looks markedly unenthusiastic about his presence. A. J. has pulled a chair out onto his porch and is looking beyond Will to a pair of jacks bobbing up and down on his front forty, pumping crude oil that will add nothing to his personal worth.

“It’s my land,” he says. “I can leave my equipment wherever I want to.”

“Mineral rights include access. You want the Company guy out here with a court order?”

“If you’ve got some modifications to the law, some restrictions to unbridled commerce to suggest, I’m sure your elected representatives would love to hear them.”

The last time he talked with Press Earle the mayor told him it was mostly complaints now, how could the city, how could the state let these oil people ride roughshod over everything?

“They got machinery,” says A. J. “Let em come and move their road around it.”

“That will cost them money, and you cost them money they will sue you and they will win. Believe me.”

The last time he talked to the Colonel, only two weeks ago, he got to say it. Just under the wire, as it turns out.

“You know, Dad, I always thought it was really cool what you did. Important. It was just never what I wanted to do with my own life.”

A long silence over the phone. “I thought about getting that asthma business expunged,” his father said finally. “Wipe your record clean. But then I’d picture you up at forty thousand feet, trying to suck air out of your oxygen mask with your lungs shut tight.”

At least A. J. doesn’t have the shotgun lying across his knees, the one he keeps in the kitchen utility closet in case of Third World invasion. He’s in the wrong and he knows it, a dangerous combination.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Will says, turning to look out at the pump jacks, bobbing, bobbing, out of sync with each other. “We’ll throw those tractor tires and whatever else you need in the back of your pickup and head down that access road. I’m sure those truckers will lend us a hand when we get there.”

THEY SPEND A HALF hour recording trucks rolling over rumble strips. Press watches them from his office window, the soundman with a machine hung over his shoulder, holding the boom microphone almost to the pavement as they parade by. He calls Jonesy in.

“It’s our traffic noise. That’s what they do, they put authentic sound effects in with the interview, to give you a feeling for the place.”

Phyllis listens to it while she makes dinner, which means he tries to be in a different part of the house. The theme songs alone drive him up a wall, and all the male announcers are named Scott and sound like they went to the same Ivy League universities their fathers went to. Now and then, if that Terry Gross has somebody interesting enough on he’ll listen to a bit, but when the request came in he took a long time before saying yes.

He pulls the city map down, arranges his desk. He knows there’s no visuals, but it makes him feel more confident, like a sea captain flying his colors. Jonesy brings the young woman, the interviewer, in. She’s African American but doesn’t sound like it, probably how she got the radio job, and must be turning some heads here in Yellow Earth.

They’re good at hiding attitude if they have one, about being strangers up here in the high plains. It’s the sixth or maybe seventh interview he’s done, the third with a national outlet, and what’s never said is that if they didn’t think there was something wrong going on they wouldn’t be here. It’s one thing to be the man in the spotlight, trapeze bar in hand, and another to be the geek in the sideshow.

“Halfway through my second term,” he tells her. “So I was here well before the boom.”

The soundman comes up then and clips one of the little body mics on him and another onto the interviewer, whose name is Reese, Reese as a first name, like Prescott. The soundman also has the boom microphone on a pole, and has Press count off a few times to get a level. Jonesy turns the ringer off the phone in the next room.

“We’re talking with mayor Prescott Earle in Yellow Earth, North Dakota,” says Reese in her non-radio voice, then looks up at him, raising her eyebrows. He wonders if she knows she does that, or does it on purpose.

“Let’s get straight into it,” she says. “Talk about the biggest changes, positive and negative, which have come to your city with the fracking.”

“Well, first of all, hydraulic fracturing is only one part of the resource recovery process. There are so many different phases, each with its own procedures and specialists involved, and we have wells in all of these stages, from drilling to stimulation to actual production, in play simultaneously. Our population has increased threefold, with the attendant pressure on infrastructure and social services.”

A mouthful, but when Jonesy wrote it for him she assured him it could be delivered in one breath.

“Everything,” he says, “has its price. Development means change, in some cases dislocation. But I can tell you that in purely economic terms, wages here have gone up far more than the cost of living.”

“Oh, our teachers and other public officials aren’t making any more than they used to, but our service employees and small businessmen are doing very well.”

Phyllis’s brother, for instance, who has never had a clue how to support a family, has three wells pumping on his formerly worthless thirty-five acres–

“I’m not one of them,” says Press, smiling the smile, “but yes, we’ve had some folks experience quite a windfall.”

“Too early to tell, but I imagine many of them will be spending our winters in a warmer climate.”

“If you could kind of repeat the question in your answers,” say Reese, “it would be really helpful.”

He always forgets that part. This isn’t a conversation, he reminds himself, but an opportunity to position Yellow Earth, to position himself, in people’s minds. A branding exercise.

“We’ve seen an increase in every statistic related to the population tripling in size overnight.”

“The sort of rapid growth we’ve experienced here presents unique challenges. Housing has been particularly difficult, despite the efforts of the energy companies to put up their own facilities. So many people other than rig workers come along for the carnival.”

We’re a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, he thinks. You have to step over dead bodies on the sidewalks–

“You’d have to speak with our chief of police and county sheriff for those details. I personally notice the change most dramatically at the gas station. There didn’t use to be lines at the pumps.”

It has slacked off quite a bit lately, and Phyllis says it’s the same at the Albertsons. But you don’t want to spread the rumor that it’s about to bust–

“It’s so personal– there is no average resident of our city. The complaints are mostly about traffic and noise, but then there are some shared benefits. We have a new sports facility, built hand in hand with the energy companies, about to open. Everybody’s water bill has gone down.”

Gone down because the county has been selling water at inflated rates to the oil companies. And about to shoot up again now that the companies say they’re done fracking for the moment and won’t be needing so much–

They have their story written no matter what you say, just fishing for sound bites that fit the plot line.

“You should talk to my assistant,” he says, indicating the door that separates their offices. “She’ll have a better perspective on that issue. She works with girls.”

And is capable of tearing you a new one if you get out of line. Jonesy has been keeping him up on the environmental impact, on the downtown crime wave, on the companies overstepping their mandate here and there, on the mood of the people who will still be here to vote when most of it goes away.

“If you had to work the scoreboard,” says Reese, smiling for the first time, “Big Oil versus Yellow Earth, how do you think the match is going so far?”

“I don’t accept the idea that we’re in adversarial positions,” Press answers. Now the Democrats, of all people, have also gotten in touch to see if he wants to drop the Independent act and run for lieutenant governor in 2012. No thank you, and I wouldn’t care to throw myself off the top of the State Capitol Building, highest structure in North Dakota, either. “But if you see it as a contest between our city and a potentially disastrous natural phenomenon, like a tornado or a tidal wave–”

This feels like the punch line, the bit they’re likely to actually use in their piece–

They’re setting up in the next room, taking his advice to interview Jonesy, when he approaches with a slip of city hall stationery.

“My wife is such a huge fan,” he says to the black girl. “Could I trouble you for an autograph?”

DUD IS CERTAIN HE’S seen the same girl do her routine in one of the strip mall clubs in Houston. That hard hat, the tool belt that comes off first and has all the naughty battery-operated necessities in it. Who would have thought Makita made one of those? He lays a twenty on the bar counter, leans in very close to the girl sitting beside him– she’s a woman, actually, still a babe but no kid– to be heard over the throbbing music.

“I don’t need more liquor, I don’t want a lap dance, but one of these is yours anytime to want to come over and rest your feet for a few minutes without the floor supervisor busting your chops. Tell the other girls there’s more where that came from.”

He had played poker with live bodies, a couple of the players with some game, one poor old Indian guy who was too drunk, or maybe too rich, to keep track of how much he was bleeding. There were computer poker machines behind them with intent acolytes pushing the buttons, an abomination even if you can hack them. “I own your soul,” said Boomer to a commodities guy he fleeced the one night Dudley was invited to the big boys’ game. Dudley pretended to be intimidated by the stakes and walked away with a wad of Other People’s Money. He is known as a quiet, conservative player, just a fill-in at the table between the titans who’ve come to do battle. ‘Dud does awright for himself,’ say the good old boys, ‘but he don’t ever clean up.’

True if you don’t make a per annum tally, which none of the good steady losers bother to do. Last year he took over eight thousand dollars off Dippy Beauregard and nearly seventeen grand from Hump Phillips. Not their souls exactly, but there is real satisfaction watching their faces, discreetly, while you rake in their green stuff. It helps to pile your winnings neatly, blushing a little at the anal accountant jokes, and palm some of it off the table during the night.

“Did she use to work in Houston?” he asks, nodding at the now upside-down pole dancer in the mirror.

“Don’t see why not,” says Jewelle. “It’s a popular stop on the circuit. Wherever she’s from, the bitch stole my routine.”

There are men at headquarters and elsewhere throughout the Company’s far-flung empire who are afraid of him, at least the ones who know he’s an actual person and not just a concept. The Determinator, some call him, the guy who figures out if your job is necessary, or if one employee can handle the work presently done by three, or if you’re too high on the pay scale and should be replaced by somebody younger, hungrier, cheaper. ‘Don’t fuck with the Determinator,’ they joke, and leave him pretty much alone. Boomer and the others above him are good business heads but not facile with the numbers technology, and at times he feels like an overpaid IT scrub. Well, not that overpaid.

“Some of the girls just spin around on it and wiggle their stuff, but you– it was like a real dance.”

“If there was a disco in Yellow Earth,” she says, “you could take me to it.”

She bumps against him playfully. “I bet you’re not that bad. You just have to let go.”

“Anyway,” says Jewelle, “you ride that pole a couple hours a night, it takes some of the hop out of you. Like you figure those Indians that used to do their rain dances, for like a ritual? Then they start doing them for tour buses, three, four times a day, and it’s not the same thing.”

“Business-wise? Sure.” She shrugs. “Though the rent’s high and it’s– you know– kind of an Alaska Pipeline vibe.”

She grins a nonprofessional grin. “They’re just men away from home, the ones that claim a home. You from Houston?”

Enigmatic is always better than the real you. All of these girls have club names, have to for security and mental health purposes, and have a doctored story to tell if you want to pay to hear it.

Jewelle smiles again and gets up from her stool, putting her hand on his shoulder for support. A little touch is nice, even if you’ve bought it. He had a female barber once, did the little palm-vibrator thing on his neck at the end of the cut, always made him hum in appreciation.

“If you’re still around, Mr. In Transit, I might come park myself here some a bit later.”

AMERICANS MELT CHEESE ON everything. Gaspar has told him that the plates with cheese on them won’t come clean just going through the lavavajillas, hot and powerful as it is, and have to be scrubbed first. But it seems like two out of every three plates that come back have some sort of cheese stuck on them, baked on in the case of the onion soup, and have to sit for a moment in the soapy water sink with the pot pie bowls before Macario can even get busy with the scrubbing sponges. The cooks are shouting for sauté pans so he tackles those first, then blasts a rack Orestes the Guatemalan has filled with plates with the spray hose before pushing it into the machine to get hammered with scalding water for a half a minute, time to scrub one soup pot, then hustling around to pull the rack out and roll it to the Haitian, whose name is Dauphin, who will dry the glasses and stack everything back at the bussing stations. Macario is sweating already, a half hour into the shift, wearing a black trash bag like a poncho the way the others do, relying on his years of fútbol to dodge around bodies and equipment and stay in the rhythm of the cleanup galley.

There is nothing in Mexico, he muses, that stains a plate as thoroughly as blueberry pie.

“Adelante, muchachos!” shouts Gaspar over the attack of the dishwasher and the sharp banging of metal and ceramic. “A toda velocidad!”

Gaspar is the senior man on the crew, the one who ran into Macario in City Park and told him there was an opening at the restaurant.

“Gringo comfor’ food,” he said in English. “Lotsa burger, macaroni y queso.”

Reuben, the fry cook, brings in real corn tortillas and makes them tacos for the staff meal, which half the time they eat standing up. The job pays seven-fifty an hour, twenty-five cents more than the minimum wage, and so far Macario has not been able to wire anything home. When he ran out of money in San Antonio he got on a patio-laying crew that paid a little bit better, but had to put in for the house they were all sharing and his share of gas for the van that got them to jobs and to eat and to buy new work shoes after the old ones got ruined fording the river when he saw the Migra set up checking identification on the bridge, and to share a couple beers with the muchachos every week–

A busboy, one of the new hires, thumps a plastic tub loaded with dinner dishes onto the counter and Macario is on it, scraping uneaten food into the trash with a chunk of garlic bread. They don’t wear gloves, which tire your fingers and make you drop things, and he’s gotten used to his hands being burned and being as wrinkled as raisins by the end of a shift. Orestes is grabbing the plates from Macario as soon as he can clear them, the three lavaplatos immediately dealing with whatever is in front of them rather than breaking the job into stations, all without words except for Gaspar’s shouts of encouragement.

The huge, rumbling and hissing dishwasher that everything in the galley revolves around is made by a company called Jackson, and Gaspar treats it like a monster that must be fed to keep it tame. All the restaurant ceramics are white, and it has begun to please Macario more than he can account for to see them coming out of Yaxon only slightly wet and gleaming, like the milk bottles used to illustrate a pure soul in the catecismo he was given to study in church as a boy. When he worked on the oil platforms you could spray till you ran out of water and the deck would never really come clean.

It is a Saturday night, voices of the diners surging through whenever a bus-boy butts through the swinging door, and there is no letup in the flood of dirty dishes and utensils, nothing but the immediate task that needs to be done or everything will back up and there will be a meltdown. Sometimes he imagines they are the firemen on an old locomotive, shoveling coal to fuel the boiler to make the steam to keep the engine speeding ahead, and sometimes it’s a war and they are feeding artillery shells as fast as they can to ward off a charging enemy, and sometimes it’s just Macario sweating his culo off supplying clean plates to overfed gringos and making just enough to keep his own head above the water.

Gaspar has a phone, and twice now he’s been able to borrow it to call Nilda in Yucatán, telling her he’s doing all he can, that he hasn’t forgotten them, the little one almost too shy to say hello. Nilda has heard that the huachicoleros came by their old house a couple times, and then somebody just moved in, usurpadores, probably given permission by the gangsters in return for some service they provided, some little risk they took. You can’t fight these things face-to-face and hope to survive.

Gaspar bangs a heavy ladle against the rim of the trashcan to get his attention. About to overflow. Macario pushes a sprayed rack into the washer, hurries to deal with the garbage.

Howie, the blond kid who works in the cold room prepping chops and ribs, is listening to the radio as usual, one of those news-and-talk shows that Macario will listen to to see how his English is coming along. He thinks he hears the name of the place he is supposed to be going.

It is cool outside behind the restaurant, a nice change even with the smell of the day’s refuse from the dumpster. Denver is a spread-out city, lots of different neighborhoods, and once he found Federal Boulevard it seemed a lot like San Antonio, only harder to breathe. He’s spent the rest of his life at sea level.

You have to be careful with the trash bags, which might have broken glass in them, and be sure to get your legs underneath when you heave them over the side of the dumpster. On really slow nights they’ll come out here to smoke and talk, leaving only one man on duty inside. Orestes had a hard time of it, robbed and beaten by pandilleros on his way up through Mexico, but Dauphin’s stories are worse. He is Haitian but born in the Dominican Republic, and seems never to have known a moment of peace.

Macario has only had to run once, in San Antonio, from a parking lot where dozens of the indocumentados would gather every morning to wait for men driving pickups or vans with a day’s work to offer. A pair of cruisers sped into the lot with lights flashing and sirens whooping and everybody tore away in their own direction, Macario able to get a look back and see that the officers weren’t even getting out of their cars, just making a display to watch everybody panic.

The same show is on Howie’s radio and he hears the name again. Yellow Earth. Tierra Amarilla, he thinks, and makes a picture of it in his head, kind of a desert with yellow sand and a forest of oil derricks in every direction. It is the mayor of the city speaking, and if he understands what the man is saying there is so much drilling going on there the workers can’t find a place to sleep.

The cleanup galley slaps him in the face like a wave. Orestes has put a new trash liner in the garbage and is scraping plates into it, Gaspar is spraying a rack, and Orestes is elbow-deep in the sink, scrubbing cheese.

“Yaxon está asfixiando!” shouts Gaspar over the racket and the dishwasher is indeed choking, Macario scooping a slimy handful of blasted scraps from the food drain in the machine, squishing over the rubber mat below to toss it in the bin. He gets paid on Friday. It’s time to go north, he thinks. A la Tierra Amarilla.

AT LEAST NOBODY SHE has ever known is likely to come to the Yellow Earth Walmart and see her behind a cash register. When she tried to explain the relocation of the coterie and the intent of her paper on the phone there was a long silence, then Dr. Paulsen said, “So that’s finished.” The stipend withdrawn, no invitation to come back and launch something related in a less environmentally challenged area. Then coming in here, a PC sin but everywhere else was out of milk again and black coffee makes her stomach raw, and she saw the sign advertising seventeen-fifty an hour and did the math. Put in forty, fifty hours a week, which they’re begging for with the hiring crisis, and it comes out much better than she was making as a prairie dog peeper.

Only a temporary position, she told Will. Two months left on the apartment lease, it would be wasteful to just pack up and go.

She sees the Native American girl, Jolene, two checkout aisles away, paying for supersized containers of cleaning products and trying not to meet eyes. Fine, thinks Leia, I’m just a reminder of something she should try to forget. But as the girl wheels her purchases out she gives a little nod, blushing.

An older woman stands before her with two identical sets of headphones in her hands.

“They’re on sale, but it says ‘One per customer’ and my husband’s not here.”

“We listen to books on tape,” the woman continues, “but he’s Ross McDonald and I’m Philippa Gregory.”

THE TRAILERS ARE ALL the same, dirty floor, cheap laptop on a metal desk next to the mud engineer’s blender, paperwork covering the desktop and walls, which are rattling, buffeted by the wind that hasn’t let up all day. And the hydraulics noise, the thumping, groaning, grinding of the big animal above and below them, as constant as the boops and beeps at the casino hotel but with weightier consequences, tons of force being thrown into a narrow fissure in the earth. The fracker– Hardaway? Hardacre? Hardass?– runs through the usual litany.

“There’s service companies and there’s service companies,” he explains, his attention still half focused on the sounds outside, monitoring the rhythm of the pumping like a cardiologist with a heart patient in crisis. “A few we’ve got to use because Houston set them up, just as a firewall in case something goes wrong.”

Dudley did the heavy lifting on the actuarial numbers back in the early 2000s, setting levels of restitution– first offer, second offer, final offer, sue us and stand in line– and establishing the prevention versus compensation variances. Deciding what you’ve really got to get right the first time, when it’s a lot cheaper to pay the fine, and when to stonewall and go to court. Just patterns of numbers, nickels and dimes.

“Then there’s outfits you’re expected to deal with for political reasons, like they’re connected to the honchos at the reservation here, which is a case of don’t expect to get what you pay for.”

“No, I get my wells drilled and fracked out and my people off the platform in one piece. But what’s left behind– that’s somebody else’s lookout.”

Dudley glances at the daily logs from Hardwhatever’s three wells currently in process. Nothing out of line with what he’s seen from the other site managers he surprised this morning with his Company card– Boomer said it ought to say ‘007, License to Drill.’ Fracking is a complex process, constantly becoming more refined but rarely any cheaper. When gas was over four dollars a gallon at the pump it was like printing money, but now–

“Anything you can send back to the Company, ideas for operational improvements from what you’re learned here?”

The trailer gives a booming, violent shake, the long wall warping in then popping out, Dudley worried for a bad instant that the well has blown up till he sees from the manager’s face that it is just the wind.

“Tell them to find a deposit under someplace that grows palm trees,” says Hard-water. “With a quiet hotel with decent room service and no damn hurricanes.”

SHE FEELS IT VIBRATING in her shirt pocket, hurries through the men calling out Excuse me, Miss, and Hey Honey, to the back room. She’s started to associate his voice with the coffee fumes, or maybe she’s just been thinking about him a lot. It’s been two days since he called.

“Oh, couple moves I’ve had to make, should play out good in the next couple days.”

“You know– just cause you don’t hear from me a couple days doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you.”

Spartina grabs two bags of roast, hustles back to the floor. She knows you’re not supposed to, like, lose yourself to a man and all that, but it’s hard to think about anything else. She finds herself drifting off in class or here at work, replaying moments between them, the way he looks at her and touches her, or worrying that it’s going to end. Or that he’s got other girls. He could have, he’s so good-looking, and there’s no way she could know unless it was like another girl in her high school, which is pretty unlikely. She can’t imagine any one of them he would go for. Some days she can’t imagine why he’s at all interested in her, it can’t just be sex cause she’s not so good at it yet and he could get that somewhere else. Well, maybe not in Yellow Earth, where there’s so few women compared to men right now, but like in Bismarck or Minot. Sometimes she just starts thinking about his car–

A guy in a quilted vest and a Mack truck hat with a bulldog on it, looking up at her from his table.

“You gonna pour that coffee, or just stand there lookin good with it in your hand?”

Scorch sees them every night at Bazookas, chins up, eyes hard, looking for a fight. But if you fight in a bar or strip club you’re asking for it to be stopped, to be pulled away by a half-dozen volunteer referees. You want to beat the guy down without a court date at the end of it, show off for your friends. Even the guys who did that kid out in front of the club, all of them drunk as skunks, seemed surprised when six hard shots with a hunk of plumbing sent him to the morgue and them to the joint. Amateurs.

The minute he sees Wayne Lee’s pimped Camaro rolling up he tosses the keys to the wrecker to Shakes and tells him to go on a beer run, even though the cooler is still half full. Shakes has too much imagination for this.

“Wait out here,” he says to L. T., not the brightest bulb, but able to follow a simple instruction.

Wayne Lee still has that idiot grin plastered on his face, even with all the bad blood between him and Brent.

“Hey, it’s the pit bull himself,” he cracks, leaving his keys in the Camaro. “Bust any good skulls lately?”

It’s the dead hour between shifts, just getting dark, and Brent has given most of his gravel haulers the evening off.

“Brent’s running late– he called to say it’ll be ten, fifteen minutes,” says Scorch, not taking the bait. “But he’s got the paperwork ready for you to sign in the back.”

Wayne Lee has been whining louder than usual lately, appointing himself spokesman for all the other bellyachers on the payroll, like he’s the fucking shop steward or something, and too stupid to sniff out that Scorch is taking over the trade. And now this idea that he’s going to jump over to work for Phil Enterlodge and take half the drivers with him.

“I always wonder,” kids Wayne Lee as they walk between trucks to the back, “why they call it a ‘bouncer.’ That guy you threw out last night sure didn’t bounce.”

Wayne Lee is one of those characters who wants everybody to like him, even if they don’t. There’s three guys Scorch knows of who are stepping the powdered goods down and reselling them, fucking with the quality of the brand, and some asshole from Bakersfield who’s set up shop out at one of the man camps, and Wayne Lee is all like, ‘Free market, dude, there’s room for everybody.’

“I consider my job sort of an escort service,” says Scorch. “Only I escort people out of clubs instead of into them.”

Wayne Lee laughs and then steps a couple feet into the back office, looking down at the oily tarp spread out on the floor.

“What’s this for?” he says and then Scorch hits him, using both hands to swing the thirty-six-inch cast-iron pipe wrench, a good twenty pounds of heft to it, and there is a sound like a pumpkin landing on the sidewalk from a third floor window and Wayne Lee falls straight, tiiiiimberrrrr! onto his face in the center of the plastic tarp. If it was an Olympic event Scorch would get a ten on every card.

“L. T.!” he calls, wiping the wrench handle down with an oily rag and tossing it on top of the body.

By the time L. T. joins him Scorch has it all rolled up like a burrito, ends tucked in.

“Bend your knees when you lift,” he says to Scorch, hunkering down to get a grip. “Watch that lower back.”

SHE’S WAITING BY LEIA’S car in the parking lot, mostly empty as the store lights go off.

There is a shuttle bus that goes around town and even out into the boonies a ways, but the girl could have caught that an hour ago.

“You know that?” Leia hits the button on the keys to unlock the doors. She’s kept the same rental even though they’ve jacked the rates up again.

“My ride to school used to pass you on the way in,” she says. “You were usually busy looking through your binoculars.”

Jolene slides in next to her, pulling the bag of cleaning stuff onto her lap. Leia eases the car out of the lot. It isn’t that far away–

I’ve been outed, thinks Leia. The internet must be buzzing with it– “Wildlife Girl Surrenders Career, Dignity to Chain Retailer.”

“Not exactly,” she says. “The study was ended. Sometimes when your data are compromised–” She shrugs. “The world of science was not holding its breath.”

Leia squeezes her way into the eastbound flow between two rumbling trucks, considering the question. “I do. I like figuring out how the animals interact, how they deal with challenges. But that kind of knowledge doesn’t turn into money if it’s not like a domesticated food animal, so getting grants is pretty iffy.”

“Happened to have nobody major hogging the field when I started in on them. I’ve observed other species– when I wasn’t too much older than you I spent a summer in Madagascar, following lemurs around.”

“The rarer species are up in the Madagascar rainforest,” she tells the girl, “what’s left of it. We wrote our sightings in grease pencil on these laminated pads because it was so damp that paper would just dissolve.”

They drive in silence for what seems a long time then, oncoming headlights washing over the girl’s face.

Leia understands what she means, but you can’t just agree. “I work with twenty, twenty-five people at the store. Say four, five hundred shoppers wandered through on my shift. I’d be surprised if one percent even know you exist.”

“But everybody who does know who I am, who live here, knows about it. People at the police and the hospital talk, one person tells another.”

Jolene considers. “A boy named Quentin died of cancer. And Dickyboy Burdette’s father committed suicide.”

“In not too long your story will be a long time ago. We think everybody’s paying attention, but we’re barely on most people’s radar.”

Leia nods. Her own short-of-penetration incident during undergrad never made it into her phone calls home. Her parents were paranoid enough without giving them something real to chew on.

Another silence. Leia’s freshman roommate did a lot of whatever was available on campus and would come back wrecked and too freaked to be alone. Long, arrhythmic conversations about God, boys, bands, whether she looked fat or just voluptuous. Silence is fine, silence should be respected.

“So how do you do it?” Jolene asks her when they are beyond the traffic and cutting into the night alone. “How do you just pick up and go somewhere you’ve never been before, where you don’t know anybody?”

What now– three, four major moves? Active dislike of where she’s from has played a part, general cluelessness–

“I can’t say I’ve done it very well,” she tells the girl, “but I’ve done it. There’s good things and bad things. At first, or maybe even for a long time, you feel shy and lonely. But on the other hand, if nobody knows you, knows your history, you can totally reinvent yourself.”

“No, but– let’s say you can emphasize an aspect of your personality you really like, and just jettison anything that embarrasses you.”

“Uhm– I have had my moments. Kind of made a stand– this is who I am, deal with it– and that I feel good about.”

Leia pulls to the side of the road, jockeys the car around so her low beams spread over the field.

“Too many predators out at night,” she says softly. They aren’t too far from where the girl was attacked, which makes sense if she was walking home. “So they’re diurnal under normal conditions. But of course conditions haven’t been exactly normal up here for quite a while.”

It is flattering in a way, a kid, a thoughtful kid like this one, asking you questions about stuff that counts.

“There’s possibly-cool guys everywhere. Few and far between, sure, but if you get lucky–”

“I am testing a hypothesis,” she says. “And most of those don’t work out. But you always learn something by seeing it through.”

Jolene nods, looks at the empty field. Behind them, on the other side of the road, sits an oil derrick with a few lights here and there but no workers on it, towering over the section where the whole town used to be. No activity, no pumping, no noise– Leia wonders what the deal is.

“Maybe,” says Leia. “But they’re not, honey. That’s the sad thing. Not even from each other.”

HE TAKES HER OUT of town and onto the Indian reservation, parking in a spot where they can look out on a lake. Like always he doesn’t like to talk till they get there, which is fine with Jewelle, who needs the time for her face to wake up. She must look like hell.

“Weird-looking lake,” she says. The Hummer has a huge windshield to see through.

“Oh. Is that what it is. I could tell there’s something wrong with it– like a guy who colors his hair.”

Randy Hardacre, or ‘Heartacher,’ as the girls at work tease her now that they know, smiles. “Digging myself in pretty deep here.”

“–really early in the morning. So this must be where you tell me you’re married.”

“No, I am extremely divorced. As a matter of fact, I think my ex-wife used the same product. L’Oréal.”

“Naw, just– this whole circus, the leases, the drilling, the fracking, depends on international price per barrel.”

“Forty-two gallons, and we’re over a hundred ten dollars a barrel right now. But there was some thought that OPEC would jack their prices up.”

“The Company likes to get everybody from different stages of the process together in a room, give our opinions, tell our stories, then one or two guys who weren’t even there will make a gut-guess on what to do next. But their asses have officially been covered if it comes up at a stockholder meeting. ‘After exploring all options– ’”

There are no ducks on the lake. Maybe it is too windy or too cold for them, maybe there’re all in Florida, but the lake would look a lot better with ducks on it. What there is is a very big, very white boat, like a yacht on steroids, sitting propped up on dry land just across the water.

“It’s the twenty-first century. I got my job in the oil business cause I’m good at computers.”

“Not as people. They’re like– I don’t know– like a herd of cattle sometimes, and sometimes like lions and tigers, in the cage with the guy with the whip and the chair.”

She can’t imagine Randy in the club any more than she can imagine herself on a real oil platform in her tool belt and hardhat outfit.

She’s socked away a bundle since she’s come up here, and unlike these idiot roughnecks she’s not going to spend it on pretend sex with strangers.

He doesn’t say I’ll call you every day, or would you like to come to Houston with me and forget about the dancing, or any of the other things that might change her life. He’s the best man she’s met up here, the best one she’s met in a long while, but when the music stops the ride is over.

Across the wind-whipped water, a figure pops out from under the tarp on the boat and clumsily maneuvers a ladder to the ground.

He is fast, good-looking, and wired in to the job. There’s never much hedging at his table and he’s a wizard with the proposition bets, so the action flies along, lots of chips down on the come out roll, an easy fifteen to twenty more rolls an hour than any other stickman on the floor.

Lady is on her break, watching him wield the stick. She’s never worked the craps table, too many bets to keep track of, too many hyper bettors at your elbows, not her rhythm. But Lenny was born for it, eyes everywhere at once, stick changing hands on the roll, the patter inexhaustible–

“Jimmy Hicks from the sticks, rolls the dice and wins on six. That’s six, six, six, wasn’t sleazy, it came easy.”

The casino hired him on sight, had him in harness the minute his background check cleared. He looks good in the uniform, has already made friends with all the dealers and the boxmen, and the high-octane players are drawn to his table like moths to a flame.

“Mr. Natural, pass line wins.” He offers the bowl to the next shooter. “Pick your bones, Jones,” he says, and then when the dice are being shaken, “Hands high, let ‘em fly!”

They try to work the same shift in order to see more of each other, but it’s not always possible. And at least here there’s only the one casino– in Reno and Vegas she’d never hear the door creak till the dawn’s early light. Lenny is breaking in a new dealer tonight, gently, working instructions and reminders into his spiel without embarrassing the kid, controlling the vibe of the table.

He never bends to mop the dice around, moving only from the elbows out, but the rocks never sit still for long–

He was a little distant the first couple days, distracted, just getting the feel of the town, of the vast, underpopulated reservation, the silent lake and the raucous casino. And then she came back from work one night and he was the old Lenny, the old good Lenny, smiling and relaxed and full of plans.

He’s in the same groove now, acknowledging each player with eye contact, urging them along, goosing the volume on a hot roll, coaxing the tough bets from the vets who know the odds–

“Little Joe from Kokomo, tell your daddy what you know! That’s four the hard way, folks, shooter rolls again.”

The thing is, he’s never been good to live with when he’s straight. Even totally cleaned out, not sick, he stays anxious, not really with you. Something is missing and they both know it. They’ve talked it to death, with and without the drug counselors, but a junkie is always a junkie. ‘I wish I was addicted to brake fluid,’ he always jokes, ‘so I could stop whenever I wanted.’

With both of them working, the expense won’t be overwhelming. This new habit is so much better than the crystal, the highs and lows less extreme, no temper tantrums, and he’s willing to eat at least one full meal a day. He claims to just be a dip-and-dab man instead of carrying a King Kong habit, and she has only found him unconscious once, getting the lecture when she drove him to the ER at Mercy. “If I still got a pulse, baby,” he told her, “just let me dream.”

“Hard ten, the ladies’ friend, no one wins unless they spend. Dice are in the middle, folks.”

Lady looks into the too-bright eyes of the players glued to the rail. Adrenaline freaks, all of them, hooked on the tumbling cubes, the colored chips, the noise, Leonard’s play-by-play chatter–

When he is in the Zone like this he can skip sleep, food, trips to the bathroom. Now and then, at a certain stage of the downslide, they’ll make love. ‘Want to make sure I can feel it, Lady,’ he tells her. ‘Even if I’m starting to get ragged.’ She hopes whatever connection he’s made here is a safe one, but has learned not to ask. There should be enough shit floating around that it’s not too expensive, decent quality. She’s learned to tell when he’s gotten something laced with another drug, too speedy or talking in slo-mo. He’s always been shy of needles, sensible about the health issues and the wear and tear on his veins. So the apartment is full of beeswax candles and aluminum foil, she keeps the cardboard tubes when the toilet paper is gone–

Lady turns to head for the break room. Lenny and his posse at the craps table will always want more. Need more. And you can have more, you can, but you have to pay the price. Not right away, maybe, but it will catch up to you. This whole crazy oil field, this drilling, pumping, this rush of money and people, cannot stay in the air forever. Gravity exists. The House always wins.

“Up pops the devil!” calls Leonard, raking snake eyes off the rail. “Shooter goes down.”

THE MOUNTAIN LION IS looking a little scruffy. Not that they aren’t scruffy out in Nature– dirty, scarred-up, hide full of ticks– but most stuffed animals get a makeover before they’re put out in public. Ruby wonders if this one was actually killed on the reservation and when that might have been. If it was in the last two years the thing would have tire marks from an oil truck on it.

Harleigh, on the other hand, has his look totally together as he stands at the lectern behind the big cat. Hat pushed back on his head so you can see his eyes, fringed buckskin jacket over a red cowboy shirt, silver and turquoise flashing from his fingers.

“The Three Nations,” he says, “is the leader in tribal oil produced in the continental United States.”

There’s always a little wonder at the Alaskan tribes holding out for their own nomenclature, just because they came late to the party and are sitting on an ocean of the black stuff. Alaska Natives. Hard to imagine a place with more brutal winters than here.

“And we’ve only just gotten started!” Harleigh crows, and there is clapping and whistling and stomping of the feet. The Events Center is filled mostly with oil people and wannabe oil people, and then the enrolled members who’ve signed leases and want to get rich, or in a few cases, richer.

“There’s a family,” Harleigh tells them, voice dropping into the tale-swapping frequency, “in the Middle East called the Sauds. A family that’s got their own country, which with all the troubles over there, never seems to get invaded by anybody. Their sovereignty remains unviolated. Now why is that?”

In three corners of the Events Center there are mock-ups of the traditional dwellings of the three tribes, little kids allowed to go in and play inside them during the Christmas shows and winter powwows. Newly added, to the far left and far right, are facsimiles of early twentieth- and early twenty-first-century oil derricks, each with Do Not Lean or Climb signs on them.

“Is it because they have a large and expensively maintained military? Oh, they do– they bought over sixty billion dollars’ worth of weaponry from our government and solved their unemployment troubles by keeping a hell of a lot of men in the field. They bought that army, they bought that sovereignty with oil. Their freedom and self-determination comes by the barrel!”

More applause and a few shouts. Ruby has never heard the Saudis get this much love.

“It doesn’t matter what you think of their culture, it doesn’t matter what you think of their politics, when folks think of Saudi Arabia a big sign starts flashing that says ‘Hands Off’!”

She sees Rodney Pierce, who had one of the first frack jobs come in on his acreage, jump to his feet and throw a fist in the air. Rodney saw combat somewhere, Panama maybe, and has a collection of sexist T-shirts, though today he’s opted for a simple ‘Drill Her Deep and Pump Her Hard’ over an American flag.

“Oil and gas extraction on the reservation,” says Harleigh, looking around as if he could actually see individuals with the hall darkened and the spotlight trained at him, “is not only supplying America with its energy needs, but it is forging a new and more respected status for our tribes– not a poor cousin, not a ward of the state, but a strong and self-governing nation within a nation!”

The oilmen, the Texans and Okies and pipeline people from Alaska, are applauding harder than anybody. Harleigh is hosting this expo for them, with the same lure of fewer rules and tax-free operations that bring the casino people here, or the firecracker peddlers in states where they’re restricted, or the outlaws and cattle rustlers who used Indian Territory for their personal free-trade zone, thumbing their noses at Hanging Judge Parker. Ruby can hear the digital cacophony of the slot machines from the back of the hall, the Events Center connected to the casino by a short walkway, not only for comfort in the hard, wind-whipping winter months but so people never have the fun parlor out of their minds. To the oilmen it must sound like money falling into the coffers-Harleigh should have taped some oil-pump thumping and played it here to get their blood up even more.

“We live in a corporate climate,” Harleigh tells them. “There are businesses with more financial resources than most of the countries in the world, with more employees than most armed forces, with more power”– he does a nice dramatic pause here, looking around the hall, letting this sink in to the enrolled members present– “than most of the outfits making trouble on the nightly news. What I have tried to do in my capacity as Chairman is let the world know that the Three Nations are in the game, that we are open for business!”

More people stand to applaud now, believers in the gospel he is preaching. Ruby’s Aunt Earline got caught up with the evangelicals for a while and took her to a couple mass revivals in Santa Fe. There was the same near-ecstatic vibe in the room, the same sense of belonging to something big together, Aunt Earline shaking and testifying even though most of it was in Spanish, which she didn’t speak. Like a Burning Man concert with bad music. And Harleigh eats it up, loves to hear the amens hollered out. He had only nodded to Ruby when they passed backstage before, caution in his eyes now. She has sent him a half-dozen self-serving letters, detailing her concerns about his oil service activities, his executive measures taken without council deliberation, his drift into what might be considered influence peddling. Her concerns and cautions are on record, held in duplicate, in a volume thick enough to legally cover her ass. She has put feelers out, mostly to southern and southwestern tribes, discreetly letting it be known that she is open to a move. You want to leave before the ship is obviously sinking, when the feces might be already launched in the air but have yet to contact the whirring blades.

“What I have tried to insure,” Harleigh adds, “is that the resources go out to where they’re needed, but the money stays here!”

The thing is, he’s the best she’s lawyered for. The most dynamic, the hardest working, the best sense of the world away from the reservation. But whenever she’s tried to put the brakes on, to counsel a little restraint, a little caution, he looks at her like the enemy. She wonders if mob lawyers ever suggest to their clients that abstaining from future murders might be a wise legal strategy–

“We got some videos, we got some numbers for you all to chew on now,” Harleigh smiles, “and after the reception you’re welcome to cross over to the casino and try to win some of that lease bonus money back.”

“But I just wanted to welcome you to our third annual exposition here, and to remind you all that a rising tide lifts all boats. We’re partners in this adventure, folks, and here’s hoping for good long run.”

The applause is genuine. Fall out of a plane without a parachute and you can tell yourself that skydiving is a blast, right up until you hit the ground.

Florida, maybe. See what the Muskogees and Miccosukees are up to. Give all those parkas and thermal underwear to the women’s shelter.

Harleigh is shaking hands by the side of the stage while the documentary he commissioned, made by a kid who grew up on the rez and got into advertising in Minneapolis, plays on the big screen. He sees Danny Two Strike waiting, and it isn’t to congratulate him.

“Tall, skinny surfer-looking dude, drives that pimped-up Camaro.” “You seen him?

On the screen there is a montage of all the things that depend on oil and gas energy.

“We found his car in Yellow Earth. Fella across the street says it’s been sitting there since late September.”

The shot where they caught a dozen antelope grazing right up by a pumping wellhead is playing now. Nature can take a punch and roll with it.

“These kind of fellas come and go. Out at my man camp you find their rooms cleaned out– not a trace, no notice they were moving on.”

“The last anybody saw of him,” says Danny Two Strike, standing in front of the stuffed grizzly that, legend has it, was the last killed in the state, “he told Phil Enterlodge he was coming to work for him, that he just had to stop by your garage to get his back pay and hand in his company gas card.”

“Only met the guy twice. Nice enough kid, maybe a little wild. Heard he raced motorcycles in California.”

Danny does not look happy. “Well, these people are coming to poke around. They’ve contacted a few enrolled members, got their own website.”

“Might as well look into that little Jon Benet killing while they’re at it. And the Kennedy assassination.”

“You send them all to me, Danny. Anything I can do to help, get it over with. How bout you, everything running smooth in the enforcement sector?”

“Yeah, housing’s a bear right now. I might be able to swing a discount out at Killdeer City.”

“Cops come with families. Coming here shouldn’t be like a tour of duty in Afghanistan.”

“We shop around, find the best deal on some decent apartments, and offer free housing with the job.”

It’s the hidden expenses that kill you, thinks Harleigh. Mr. and Mrs. America, sticking the nozzle into their vehicles, got no idea what you got to go through to fill that pump.

He and Brent and Wayne Lee went hunting a few times, Wayne Lee telling racing stories and talking motors with him. Up for fun, but not a total flake. Spent a lot of time at the casino, maybe got in over his head, but if it’s money trouble you’d think he could have just sold that ritzy muscle car to one of these roughnecks. A mystery.

Harleigh steps back out so he can see the video better, him up there talking about the boom with two dozen of his best Herefords grazing in the background.

BUZZY HAS NO IDEA who or if anybody is waiting to unload at the next site, just directions how to get there, east on 20 toward the Indian reservation. He signs the invoice, climbs into the cab, touches the glow-in-the-dark Jesus he picked up with a supply of beef jerky at the Cenex, and swings the rig away from the well and over the Caterpillar bumps of the outfit’s access road. He’s asked to have a tailboard put on too, but the guys in the shop just laugh and make jokes about wearing a rubber on top of your rubber. Of course none of them ever crushed a family to death with a breakaway tumble of pipe.

There is an art, when taking a beating, of directing the blows where they’ll do the least damage. Tuck had a few lessons in this when he was young and stupid and prone to revealing that fact in badass bars, and has never forgotten the basics.

“You don’t sit and have a few with the boys, you’re not one of the boys,” he explains to Francine, who is circling him at the breakfast table with his toast still in her hand. “You’re not one of the boys, you don’t get work. It’s that simple.”

“How do you think I got on this new rig? I was in the club, and I met the guy who runs the day-to-day, the toolpusher.”

Elbows over the kidneys if you think it’s coming there next, otherwise protect your head and keep your balls tucked in–

It is true about meeting Nub Hammond there, and it was at the bar, not in the back room–

“Absolutely. Only an idiot would charge his lap dances on a credit card when he’s got a joint account with his wife. I’m sure you’re a cash customer.”

She’d been asleep, or pretending to be, when he came in last night, so the first warning of the onslaught was her blasting her protein shake in the blender before he was awake, a willful breach of protocol. Then the sullen stare, the kidnapping of his toast before he could get his hands on it, the one-word opening volley, uttered with heartfelt contempt–

“The things we go through together on the job,” says Tuck, adding a strain of weariness to his voice, “you don’t want to carry them straight home.”

She frisbees the toast across the room. This is bad– Francine is not a thrower or a smasher– and all you can hope for in the situation is that they get tired or distracted–

“Yesterday the hole starts talking”– Tuck continues– “that’s gas building up in the borehole, too much pressure coming from underneath, and it can– well, you don’t want to think about the worst-case scenario, you just keep drilling, cause the real pressure is coming from the Company, which has got millions of dollars invested in that hole and not a bit of profit pumped out of it yet.”

“We take the necessary precautions, sure, but the pressure– it’s the same principle that makes volcanoes go off.”

“If it’s that dangerous I want you to quit. I’ve still got my job, which I’m going to be late for.”

“I’m late too,” he says but doesn’t stand. You show signs of life, the slightest movement, they’ll kick you harder–

“That was just temporary– Nub threw some saltwater down the pipe, got it stable. We’ll probably be back at it when my tour starts.”

Francine stops pacing, fixing him in her headlights across the table. “How much does that kind of thing cost, anyway? Do you pay by the minute, by the results–”

“Oh fuck it!” She turns away from him and is halfway out the door. “I don’t want to know!”

The door is slammed, hard, and Tuck sits for a moment, listening. He hears the Camry engine fire up, tires crunching gravel. He finds the toast on the floor, throws it in the bin under the sink, grabs a microwave burrito from the fridge, which will have to do for lunch. No matter what they’ve been up to the night before, the hands are never late for work.

There are no signs of fury having been vented on his pickup, a controversial purchase his second week on the rigs, but no way he was pulling up in Francine’s sister’s Honda Civic. It is a battered Tacoma with some good miles left in it.

“You start slapping bumper stickers on that thing,” joked Francine, scowling at it that first evening in the driveway, “I’m filing for a divorce.”

The 20 is a fucking nightmare, even worse than usual. You can’t call it rush hour cause nothing’s moving that fast, but a lot of shifts, not just on the rigs, are beginning now, adding to the usual stream of water and equipment haulers. Nothing to do but hold your place in line and wait it out, hope the other hands, or even Nub, are stuck in the same mess. It is a thrown-together crew, guys spun off, like him, from outfits broken up or able to replace them with more experienced hands. Nicky, the derrickman, is just twenty, a high-school dropout from Odessa, and Grunt, whose real name he hasn’t been able to learn yet, is a vet from the various Gulf wars, a fact conjectured from his tats and not from his occasional monosyllables. Nub, who grew up in the Alaska fields and has done every other job on a rig, is managing two wells a mile apart from each other and seems a little over his head, arriving on the platform every day with a worried-sounding “How we doin, fellas?” before hovering over the shoulder of the driller, Kelsey, for an hour or so. Kelsey wears a sushi-chef headband and a biker moustache, Tuck feeling some days like he’s on the deck of a pirate ship. But before yesterday’s gas farts they were making hole like crazy, well ahead of the curve and cruising for a bonus. And Tom Hicks, the motorman, has promised to show him how to throw chain–

Your Hole is Our Goal says the sticker on the tailgate of the Dodge Ram inching forward ahead of him. Fucking Butch Bjornson, who he hardly knows, has got to see him in Bazookas and have a wife who teaches with Francine. He can say, when it comes to the showdown tonight, that no, he’s not having an affair, because that’s not the nature of his relationship with Jewelle, not exactly. Explaining to her exactly what it is– that’s not going to happen.

Buzzy turns off on the parallel road to the north– 40th, 43rd, they’ve got it numbered like Tulsa or Okie City, even though there’s nothing but prairie. Lucky for him the next drill site is up this way because the 20 is a nightmare right now, crawling along, and he’s feeling like he should stop and check the straps on the load. It’s only been what, fifteen, twenty minutes, but it was awful bumpy coming out from that last site and pipe likes to shift–

The truck shudders as if hit by a wave, Buzzy’s eyes immediately darting to the side mirror but the load is all there, the pyramid holding its shape, and then a spiral of black smoke expands upward just ahead, a fireball spilling out from the middle of it. Not the rig he’s headed for, but close, only a quarter mile ahead. A slap of sudden heat through his open window, the smell of burning oil. He eases off the road, leaves the engine running, hops down and begins to sprint toward the blowout.

The first man is naked but for his underpants and his work boots, which are smoking, and is running along the shoulder of the road. Buzzy thinks it is the man’s gloves hanging from his fingers in strings, then realizes it’s his skin.

“They’re over there, they’re over there!” screams the man, whose bare skin is livid red, waving an arm back toward the burning rig and then continuing to run.

Buzzy hits the superheated wall of air and is driven back, circling the blazing deck, only a few twisted struts of derrick left, till he first smells then comes upon the second man, lying on his back in the hayfield. This man is naked as well, skin bubbled like overfried chicken, all hair singed away, but somehow still alive.

“The derrickman is dead!” the second man shouts. “The derrickman is dead! Find Kelsey!”

Buzzy doesn’t know who this is, but keeps working his way around the tower of fire till he sees a pickup bumping over the field from the road. Two guys in oil-drenched coveralls jump out.

“The derrickman is dead,” he tells them, “and there’s a guy named Kelsey you got to find.”

Buzzy runs back to his truck, calls in the explosion, able to pinpoint the exact location for them. He realizes he is shaking, rolls up the window against the smoke, which is starting to blow parallel to the ground as the wind picks up. He can see the two deckhands, probably just coming home from their shift, carrying the man in the hayfield toward their pickup. He looks in the mirror, sees that his load is still there, realizes he’ll be in the way. He pulls back onto the road and moves ahead in second gear, scanning the shoulders for the running man.

Tuck hears the boom, sees the smoke, and has to pull over like everybody else to let the fire trucks and ambulance by, but it’s another half hour before he passes the flashing patrol cars at the turnoff and can see that it’s Gorbus 327, his rig. He tilts the rearview mirror to keep it in sight as he drives away with the rest of the eastbound flow, all feeling gone from his hands and feet. “It’s all computers and gauges now,” Nub told him that first night in Bazookas, shouting over the throb of Jewelle’s set. “The day of the old-fashioned gusher is gone, my friend, and the world is a poorer place.”

Will is first on the scene, sealing the access except for responders, till Tolliver shows up to take over traffic and he can move to the site. He’s cleaned up after a couple of head-ons back when you could actually speed on the highway around Yellow Earth, stepped in on a suicide six days dead in a locked apartment, but never seen anything like the two fellas the EMTs slide off the pickup bed and into the ambulance. The one who is burnt black is holding the cell phone of one of the deckhands who brought them out to the road, talking to his wife in another state.

“It ain’t nothing, darling,” he says. “Just a little sheet time and a lot of insurance forms. I love you.”

“This is the manager,” says Danny Two Strike, leading over a wiry, sweating man in his forties by the arm. “Name is Hammond.”

“The well was static,” says the toolpusher, before Will can ask him anything. “I went through every reading before we started up again.”

“Not at the moment, no. I’m kind of doing double duty, supervising this site and another one Fossilco owns down the road.”

“They’re indemnified,” says Hammond quickly. “I work for EnDak Oil Services, which is a subcontractor.”

“Just a kick, you know, gas pressure below gets too strong and it comes up the well bore.”

The toolpusher shakes his head. “I never seen nothing like this, in all my years.”

“Oh, Jeez, I got em written down somewhere in the doghouse, but that’s gone. Uhm– Barry Kelsey is my driller, then Grunt, whose real name is Jerome something– I seen both of them go into the ambulance– they found Tom Hicks wandering around up the road. Then Nicky Metaxes, he’s the derrickman.” Hammond shakes his head. “If he was up top you won’t find much of him left. Oh, shit, and the new guy, general helper, who knows where he was when it blew. Tucker something, local guy.”

“That’s him. They should look in the mud tanks, there’s shit blown all over creation here.”

“Nub!” calls a young guy in a jacket and tie, running up with a cell phone in hand. “I got Houston!”

“Corporate needs to talk to you, now. The shock of this thing, you got to get in the right frame of mind.”

Hammond takes the phone and steps away, mostly listening, saying, “I understand, I understand,” every now and then. The young guy in the suit stands between him and Will.

“He’ll finish his statement, whatever it is you were doing, when Legal gets here.”

Will sees one of the firemen holding up a blackened safety helmet. The fire is out now, but the smell of burnt oil sours the air and there are brush fires still smoldering in the field on the periphery of the drilling pad. “It isn’t a criminal investigation yet,” he says to the company flack, stepping past to go to his car. “I’m just getting a body count.”

Tolliver hasn’t managed to screw anything up too badly when Will gets back to the main road and shuts himself into the car. Bearer of bad tidings is his least favorite aspect of the job.

“Francine Gatlin please– you’d better call her out of her classroom. Yes it is, but try not to alarm her.”

The Colonel told him that in combat a wing commander had to write to the family of every flyer who got killed, and how in a hot war like Vietnam there were some who suffered nervous breakdowns.

“Francine? Will Crowder here. I’m over at the well Tuck’s been working on? I’m so sorry, but I got some awful bad news for you.”

Jewelle is walking back from the Albertsons with a sack of groceries when she sees him sitting outside her apartment on the hood of his car. She has her street gear on, exercise pants and a hooded sweatshirt, no makeup, what she thinks of as the pole-dancer protection program. He looks at her with moony eyes.

“Oh no,” she says, stopping short. “You can’t do this. You’ll get me fired.”

It isn’t true, of course, she’d have to strangle a customer or three before Vic would even consider letting her go, but it’s a line the sane ones usually respond to. He looks shaken up, like there’s been a death in the family or he’s about to propose marriage to her.

The groceries weigh a ton but she keeps them out in front of her. This one, Tuck, has been a steady payer and pretty much of a gentleman, but when they snap you got to walk careful.

“I should have been. I got caught in traffic and was late. They were all burned.”

“That’s awful, honey,” she says, sidestepping very casually toward the door, keys already in her hand like always, “but it sounds to me like you just dodged a bullet. Somebody up there is looking out for you.”

Most of the drillers’ stories are either bad boss or near-death-and-dismemberment tales, drawled through a curtain of Jack Daniels as the club is ready to close. They’ve never made her want to trade jobs with a roughneck.

“It makes you think, something like this,” says Tuck. “About your life. About the decisions you make.”

Oh Lord, he is gonna propose, she thinks, and backs up the three steps and tries to get the key started in the slot behind her back. “What you want to do,” she says, as kindly older-sister as she can muster, “is go home and take a long shower and then just lie down. You’re in shock, honey, and you need to just chill till your head clears.”

Nobody at the club would ever give out her address, so he must have followed her here at some point, spent who knows how many nights parked outside, running the heater in his pickup and fantasies through his head. No matter how you play it, the job sticks to you.

Comes a time when you’ve got to cut bait and paddle on, no matter how much income you leave behind. “Well that’s just a wrong turn, darlin,” says Jewelle, feeling the lock click open behind her. “You ain’t thinking straight.”

Tuck is halfway home when he hears the sirens again and he realizes where they’ll take them, dead or alive, and that he should be there. That whatever this is, the part he’s been playing in it isn’t over yet. They aren’t friends, really, despite the long tours on the rig and some serious bar time together, they’re more like-what– brothers in arms? He turns for the hospital, brake linings complaining like they do whenever he hangs a left. Kirk at the dealership was bragging how he couldn’t get pickups in fast enough, wrecks or not. Better to sell it now, he thinks, than put any money into maintenance.

Francine is in the lobby out front arguing with the implacable emergency room gorgon when Cindy Liu comes down and says to buzz her in. Cindy has something blue and official on, not like the nurses at the clinic, whose uniforms make you think they tend to pre-school children.

“There’s three in intensive care, none of them is Tuck,” Cindy tells her in the elevator. “But we have a body.”

“We’ll send over to his office.” Cindy walks her into the cafeteria, sits her down and brings her some hot tea. “What I heard, they’re still out at the site, searching the area.”

“You just sit here, and when I get any more information I’ll tell you right away. I’ll call Goldschmidt for the X-rays.”

Francine sits and watches herself from a place a little above and behind, watches herself watching the other family members and staff scattered around the cafeteria. She was here earlier in the year, one of her former students dying of leukemia, and she had been struck by how nothing else– race, gender, class, age– separated people more than the Land of the Well and the Land of the Sick. As sad as she felt seeing Quentin that day, the whole while she kept thinking, ‘This is not my tragedy.’

“You’re welcome to wait here, Mr. Gatlin,” drones the woman in the booth, looking at something on her PalmPilot or whatever they’re called now, Francine has one, “but the doctors are obviously engaged at the moment. When any information becomes public, you will have access to it.”

When he turns there is a young guy in a suit who he doesn’t recognize blocking his way.

“I saw the– you know, I was close, so I heard the explosion, saw the fire, but they blocked off the access road before I got there.”

The young guy nods like this is the last piece of a puzzle. “Okay, Gatlin,” he says, “you’re going to be debriefed about the condition of the well, asked your opinion of things. People from OSHA will be here within the hour. I need you to seriously consider one thing– do you desire to have a future in oil and gas recovery?”

He is thinking no, no I don’t, when the elevator behind the glass door opens and Francine comes out into the lobby. He pulls away from the young guy in the suit. When Francine sees him she begins to weep, her body shaking, and he crosses to hold onto her. This may be it, he thinks. This may be the day his real life begins.

This month saw a record of 36,100,722 barrels of oil produced from the Bakken and Three Rivers formations, though an atmosphere of caution has taken hold as several of the new rigs, over a hundred started just in April, have ceased drilling or been stacked till the numbers improve. What’s going on out there?

We’re back on the rollercoaster with crude, the benchmarks dropping from June’s $105 per barrel to a shaky $59, lowest in years.

Meanwhile, US average gas prices have declined $1.44 per gallon (39%) since reaching a respectable $3.70 in August. The current $2.51 at the pump is the lowest since way back in ’09.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. – Ayn Rand

Vic reads the notice, short and sweet. It was a terrific run, the most he’s ever cleared, even if he never fell in love with the town. Or it with him.

Crowder considers for a moment, shakes his head. “With the present county supervisors, forget it. One’s Church of God, two are up for election this cycle.”

The sheriff smiles. “Honestly, it might be better to have a bullshit-magnet or two downtown instead of the trouble being spread all around, but this isn’t Las Vegas.”

Vic goes inside and harvests his couple of cash stashes. A few of the items might be salable on eBay, the lighting is all rental, and he’ll pack his lucky disco ball for the road. In the Old West the first saloons at any bonanza site were in tents, only growing wooden walls if the ore held out. He’s got the books spread out on the bar counter when Scorch pokes his head in from the side, letting himself in.

Vic separates the bills from the stack, hands them to Scorch. “Know where you’re heading?”

“Away,” says the bouncer, and leaves. Vic hears his motorcycle, a new acquisition, roar to life and trail off past the train station.

He’s never actually been run out of town before. When the Katrina cleanup slowed down in New Orleans it was time to move on, and sometimes it’s been competition, too many clubs, too many girls offering it to the same pool of pussy hounds. In Michigan there was an offer of partnership from some wise guys he didn’t want anything to do with, but they were happy to take the club off his hands for a reasonable bump, and tossed one of their clueless nephews the keys to the kingdom. The laws changed on him in a couple other spots, less contact, more enforcement, and he chose to move on. It is a gypsy trade. Shirleen, when they were still married and partners, would put on Connie Francis belting “Where the Boys Are” once a night and peel while she lip-synched to it. ‘Our theme song,’ she called it.

There is a rattle at the rear door, which he’s neglected to unlock. He’ll have to start calling the girls, the bar staff, everybody.

It’s Jewelle, not due back on stage till Friday, in her schlubby street outfit.

“The usual suspects. What’s with the traffic? There’s like space between the sixteen-wheelers.”

Vic shrugs. “Orders from headquarters. Had a bunch of guys coming in before their two weeks off, been told to go home and not to come back.”

“Nope. Shut us down as of an hour ago. Yellow Earth just developed moral compunctions.”

She looks around the club, always sobering under the ugly lights. “Where does that leave me?”

Vic slips the rest of the cash into the zipper compartment under his jacket, closes the ledger. Plenty of time for that now.

THE MOTHER ACTS LIKE they’re all in a conspiracy together. Blonde and scrawny, with a tattoo that says ELVIS in script on the back of her right hand.

“He texts me,” she says. “Even when he’d be down in Mexico, I’d hear from him once, maybe twice a week.”

“I can understand why you’re concerned.” Harleigh has moved his chair out from behind his desk, the mother sitting across from him with their knees almost touching, the daughter and Marjorie Looks for Water, who is hosting them on the reservation, standing behind. “You been in contact with our chief of–”

“We just came from there. He showed me all the reports– who’s been killed or arrested in the state.”

I’m not hiding him under my desk, lady. If your kid doesn’t want to communicate with you, it’s none of my–

“I met your son a couple times,” says Harleigh. “A very– personable young man.”

He’s heard this from Danny Two Strike, heard it from a couple of the drivers, but it didn’t sound so different from any of the other times Brent lit into an employee.

“The oil business, Ma’am, has a bit of the Wild West to it. Lots of men without women, competing with each other for economic survival. Tempers flare up.”

“You’ll have to get a court order for that, be accompanied by law enforcement.”

“Absolutely.” Though the partnership is dissolved, Brent still has a lease on Harleigh’s garage, good through the end of the year.

He thinks of Alice Looks for Water, Marjorie’s mom, whose boy Jimmy went to Vietnam and didn’t come back, flying that black MIA-POW flag for the next thirty years and still convinced he’s Out There, alive somewhere.

“What you might try,” and here he locks eyes with Marjorie for a moment, who is a responsible person even if she spends too much time making friends on the internet and wants to play girl detective, “is to speak with Brent’s wife. Her name is Bunny, and she knew– knows– your son too, and might be able to clear a few things up.”

“That’s a letter of introduction from me, requesting that folks cooperate with you, answer questions, whatever, and the other is a rough map of the reservation with both the man camps– those are residences for visiting workers– and the well sites marked on it. I have to warn you,” he says, indicating the world outside his window, “that we’re talking about four thousand square miles.”

The mother nods, mollified if not satisfied, and stands up. From what little time he spent with Wayne Lee he could tell he was the daredevil type, always up for an adventure. Odds are he’s shacked up in a motel room over in Montana, telling lies to some pretty lady he met.

“What do you think happened?” asks the mother. There is something so past-tense about it, like she knows the answer and is just testing him, that it gives Harleigh a bit of a chill.

“What I think, what I hope,” says Harleigh, “is that your boy has just got distracted by something, forgot about calling his momma.”

The mother leaves without thank you or goodbye, Marjorie giving him a little wave as she steps out last. He pops his cell phone out, speed-dials Rick McAllen as Doris appears in the doorway.

“Hey buddy, what’s shakin? Listen, I been fielding some complaints, and this is embarrassing, but it’s about something on my land.”

“Is that right,” says Rick flatly on the other end. In fact most of the complaints he’s been fielding have to do with Rick handing people his emergency phone number. Like he’s not being paid a bundle to catch a little flak.

“Yeah, kind of slipped past me. Somebody’s been dumping those oil socks– you know, the filters–”

“Right, right, it can build up in there. Well there’s a bunch of them been dumped out behind my grazing property, and I just got word we might be having another camera outfit–”

“Well this is a national outfit, Attack of the Frack Monster kind of stuff.”

“So I guess you’d like me to send a crew to pick them up.” Ricky is a sulker. And always the voice of doom– this thing spilled, that thing’s in violation, another doesn’t have its permits yet, they’re burning methane off in the air, like anybody but the eco-freaks and the soreheads think you can make an omelet without busting a few eggs.

“Yes, Ricky, since you’re Mr. EPA around here, I would like that, and today would be a good time. Yesterday would have been better, but I just got the word on this.”

“I’ll send some fellas over.” Grudgingly though, like it’s a big favor and not his job. And fucking Brent, who contracted to haul the fucking things to the hazardous waste site, had better fucking stay missing.

Doris, hearing all this, is wearing her bearer-of-bad-tidings look. Harleigh terminates the call.

THE VOLUNTEERS HAVE COME through. Everywhere they drive there are flyers tacked up, in the man camp lobbies, on the corkboards in the drill site trailers, in every bar in Yellow Earth and its environs, at the Pool-N-Pong and the lobby of the new recreation center, at the diners and fast food places.

–above the photo Mrs. Hickey sent, Wayne Lee smiling at the camera in a motorcycle racing outfit, his helmet under his arm, and then the phone numbers and e-mail addresses to contact. Nice-looking boy, like an actor on a TV show if his hair was shorter, and Marjorie is sorry she never got to meet him.

“So much room to get lost in.” Mrs. Hickey is staring out the window at the prairie again, brooding. This time of year, no wildflowers out, the cattle mostly in at their winter feed lots, it is pretty bleak. And then with the wind, rocking the car sideways now and then as they travel west on 23.

“E-mails, telephones, all that stuff,” says Marjorie, resigned to tuck in between water trucks and go their speed, “make you forget how big the world is.”

She hopes it’s only an observation and not a criticism of her driving. There’s just as many trucks in the opposite lane, coming into the rez, and weaving in and out to pass won’t get you anywhere.

“They had him on Ritalin,” says the sister from the back seat. “Or else he’d be bouncing off the walls in school.”

The sister still has her arms folded across her chest like she has since she got here. Either she thinks this is a waste of time or is jealous of Wayne Lee getting all the attention. “She likes girls,” Mrs. Hickey muttered the first minute they had alone, as if this explained everything.

The trailer is just off the highway and Marjorie pulls over. There’s an ATV parked out front, same model as what the Cunningham kid has got, only with nice-looking Indian Power and Fueled by Frybread stickers on it. Marjorie hasn’t heard about anybody in Dickyboy’s family getting an oil lease.

She probably bangs on the door too hard, but the TV is on real loud inside, a game show playing, probably cranked up to compete with the constant rumble of trucks going by. Olivia Burdette answers, wearing a sweatshirt for some sports team, a big wolf head on the front of it. She looks puzzled to see them.

Marjorie’s mom used to go to the bingo with Olivia, said she could handle five cards at once and smoked a pack of Luckies before the night was over.

Olivia scowls at Mrs. Hickey, trying to place her and coming up with nothing. Dickyboy is her grandson, living with her on and off since his father checked out and his mother Ella had the breakdown.

There’s a shed out back that’s been patched with different materials over the years, and a metal DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the door knob. Marjorie gets one of her twinges and signals for Mrs. Hickey and the sister to hang back.

With the oil money and whatnot floating around, there’s more guns than ever on the rez, and as her heartthrob Steve Earle sings, a pistol is the devil’s right hand. She doesn’t knock, but calls out loud.

“Come on, Dickyboy, it’s just me and his family here. No cops, no problem.”

Another long moment and then he opens the door. He looks too wide to fit through it, the whites of his eyes tinted red, not a happy boy.

“This is Wayne Lee’s mother and his sister”– what was her name again?– “Patty. He’s gone missing.”

He was a nice boy, smart, and she babysat him regular on bingo nights. Glued together plastic battleships.

“I’m not interested in whatever you’re up to,” she says, holding his eyes with hers. “It’s just everybody says that you and that Dylan Foster who was in the accident were hanging around with him. Riding in that Camaro.”

He’s just a little younger than Jimmy was when he left, Marjorie only nine then and riding in to Yellow Earth to see him get the pictures taken in his dress uniform. So handsome. He said Parris Island wasn’t so bad, just a lot of screaming and pushups, and you only did one tour, 365 days, where the fighting was. And then he got on the bus and they never saw him again.

Dickyboy shrugs again. Drop sixty, seventy pounds and lose that sullen look and he’d be good-looking.

“When he had something,” says Dickyboy, practicing his hard-eyes for the day the police come to see him, “he’d share it or sell it.”

He looks away then. He used to go with the Chairman’s stepdaughter, Fawn, back in junior high, and there’s rumors about her, but none involving Wayne Lee Hickey.

With True Crime you never know what little bit of evidence will be the key. You build the picture, try to get into people’s heads, follow your hunches. It was embarrassing the one time she contacted America’s Most Wanted and it turned out to be somebody else when they caught him, but Mr. Glaser at the finance company really did look like the guy from New Jersey who killed his whole family, or at least what the face-artist had guessed he’d look like twenty years later. And he did give her a creepy feeling, like they say certain people get when they’re in the room with a genuine psychopath.

“Anybody you can think of,” she asks, Mrs. Hickey standing just behind her now to hear better, “who might have wanted to do Wayne Lee harm?”

“Naw,” says Dickyboy, flicking a glance of what might be sympathy to the mother. “He was a cool dude.”

SPARTINA, WHICH IS HER whole name, is not in, so they are sitting with Clemson Dollarhide. Her uncle Brewster has grazing scenes by the same painter up on his rec room wall– you can’t miss the style. Each one in this room has got a different breed in the distance– Angus against dry yellow grass over here, Charolais white on a green hill over there, a huge herd of Herefords spread out over the fireplace mantel. He’s asked them to come in and sit, old-school polite and formal, and takes his time getting into his chair.

“I never had the pleasure of meeting your son,” he says to Mrs. Hickey. “But I’ve heard some about him.”

“Your daughter knows him?” The sister now, Pat, getting bolder as the long day wears her mother down.

“That’s what I understand. She’s still at school. Fashion Club, I believe.”

Something tense here, Marjorie thinks. The way he’s sitting, and it isn’t just arthritis.

“We had”– and here the old man looks up as if searching for a word– “we had a discussion. Some might call it a heated discussion.”

“Because it isn’t appropriate for a young lady of her age to be spending time with somebody his age.”

“As a matter of fact,” says Mr. Dollarhide, “I’ve been looking for your son myself.”

Mrs. Hickey is just staring holes into the man. It’s clear that in her mind her son has never been guilty of a single thing, not even the felonies he did time for back home.

“No. And I already told Crowder I had my rifle in the back seat, but that was just a precaution.”

Marjorie turns to Mrs. Hickey and Pat. “Sheriff Crowder is in charge over to Yellow Earth,” she says. “We talk to him tomorrow.”

“If he is missing,” says Mr. Dollarhide, “it’s because he has chosen to absquatulate.”

In the True Crime books sometimes the perpetrators are very bold, almost daring the detectives to come after them. But Marjorie isn’t feeling a killer vibe in here.

“I want to talk to this granddaughter,” says Mrs. Hickey, eyes hard and fixed on Clemson.

He’s still a suspect, for sure, but not likely to give anything up that he doesn’t want to. The paper has done a couple articles about his fight with the state over right of way for the oil people, got drilling operations on properties all around him that have to loop way around his land to get to the highway. Acting as his own lawyer and not doing a bad job of it, from what she can tell. Good for old people to have a hobby.

THEY MEET IN GINGER’S Café across the street from the Yellow Earth Cinema, which is featuring The Expendables. That’s me, thinks Danny Two Strike, pulling up to the curb. A tired action hero trudging toward one more payday.

“You fellas planning a bust?” asks the waitress who pours their coffee, a local woman in her forties.

“If you don’t have real milk instead of that damn whitener,” says Will, “it might be this place.”

“So,” says Danny, sitting back, “I say it’s fifty-fifty he’s in Mexico, drinking margaritas and waiting for the whole thing to blow over.”

“Could be. With some of the characters Skiles has got hanging around him, if he was mad at me I’d want to blow town.”

“Good point. I brought Clem Dollarhide in for a talk, but there was nothing there.”

“If we ever find the guy,” says Will, “I can try to bust him for it. But she’s all worried and weepy about him disappearing, so I don’t expect any cooperation.”

“Stand in line. But through the wonders of subcontracting, I can’t get much of anything on him. Jim Wilson from the Bureau is looking into his financial dealings, but those boys take forever.”

“It isn’t a record, it’s a double album,” says Will. “Fraud, robbery, assault, jumping bail a couple times, credit card theft.”

“Two convictions. Did county time in Texas. The officer I talked to there says they were readying a drug indictment when he left. The thing is, most of his business here is in his wife’s name. Some tax deal.”

Both of them have had bad guys waltz out of their jurisdictions due to insufficient evidence, both have guys just as bad still infecting their turf. It would be nice to take one off the board.

Will digs into his turkey burger, checking out the street through the window. Danny knows the reflex, in or out of uniform– whatever is going on is my business. He tries to remember back before he put his antennae out, before he noticed every out-of-state license plate or trailer with a funny smell coming out of it. He’s only been shot once, by the wife in a domestic he was breaking up, who claimed she was trying to hit her boyfriend but they both knew that was bullshit. The guy put her in the hospital again just last week, jaw wired shut, the wife just shaking her head with oxycontin eyes when Danny asked her to testify.

“So tell me,” says Will, still gazing out the window, “you ever been in a relationship with somebody from a totally different world?”

“It took me a couple years to figure out I was never going to be invited to join her club.”

“Honorary member, sure, I was willing to go that far. But her club was her personality, not her, like, tribal affiliation.”

Try to keep a secret on the fucking reservation. Danny has only had one call from Ruby since she left to work for the Lummis, lots of complaining about the weather, saying how him coming there would improve her mood a hundred percent. Totem poles in the drizzling rain– it depresses him just thinking about it.

“Her people and mine never even met in the old days, much less warred against each other,” says Danny, “but mostly she’s a lot more educated than me.”

Will frowns, shakes his head slightly. “I figure you should be willing to meet someone halfway. But halfway between Yellow Earth and New Center is different than halfway between here and China.”

Will had been a basketball, football, and baseball standout in high school, not quite Division 1 material but a force to deal with.

“Right. The older you get, the less flexible you are. So if something feels good right now, I wouldn’t overthink it.”

Danny can see that the man is serious, seriously asking his opinion. “Have you ever thought about who you’d be,” he asks, “if you moved away from here?”

SPARTINA WAITS TILL THE car is out of sight, till her grandfather stops walking around, obviously upset by the visit. She came in through the back, quiet as usual, and heard the last part of it. Something has happened. Something bad. And she’s sure it has to do with the guy he worked for, that Brent who got Fawn pregnant and then wanted her to have it fixed.

Tina takes her shoes off and pads past her grandfather, who doesn’t hear so well anymore, and into the kitchen. She knows if she uses her cell phone there will immediately be a record of who it is, but maybe from a landline–

She uses the old rotary in the kitchen, the dial loudly clicking as it rolls back into position. Once Fawn came over and made fun of it, saying with a phone like that the whole house should be in black and white. The dispatcher answers.

“Sheriff Crowder, please?” she says, pressing her mouth close to the receiver. “It’s personal.”

The woman says he’s not in but can connect him if this is his sister again. Tina says it is and there is a little wait.

“Brent Skiles who owns the truck company?” she says. “He’s got guns in his house. Like army guns that can’t be legal, lots of them.”

THEY DON’T TALK ON the way back, Mrs. Hickey staring out at the empty plain again. Marjorie remembers when the Google Earth thing became available and she found Khe Sanh in Vietnam on it and went to the satellite view, zooming down in to check out the area where Jimmy disappeared. He was on a patrol ‘outside the wire,’ the Marines said. And they took fire and some were killed and wounded and when it was all over Jimmy wasn’t accounted for. And sure, maybe like her mother always says, he could have been hit on the head and got amnesia and be a prisoner there with no idea who he is, but all Marjorie thought staring at the different splotches of green, like a whole country of camouflage cloth, was how are you going to find a set of dogtags in all that?

There’s still not an affordable room to be had in Yellow Earth or Watford City, so the Hickeys are staying with her, Mrs. Hickey on the foldout and Pat on an air mattress on the floor. If she’d let Chairman Killdeer know this he probably would have found something better, but he’s got an agenda of his own and it was clear Mrs. Hickey didn’t trust him.

Marjorie keeps to Dollarhide’s dirt road as long as it goes, not an oilfield truck in sight, then has to join the parade, squeezing in behind a crude-oil-hauling armada heading east. The buffalo grass on the road shoulders, usually impossible to kill, is looking bad, suffocating under a layer of dust. And up on a rise to the left are three coyotes, sitting, looking at something down on the other side. You don’t often see that many together in the daytime.

IT ISN’T EXACTLY A vision quest. For starters, it was never really a woman’s tradition, and Teresa is not planning to cut off a joint of her little finger, or any other part of her body, to offer the Spirits. But she needs guidance, some indication of what to do, which way to turn.

It takes her an hour to find a place where there are no drill rigs visible, a little bowl made by some rock outcroppings. The old places, the holy places her father told her about, are mostly under the lake now.

Teresa sits on a flat spot on one of the rocks. She’s been fasting for two days but has brought a thermos of water. It’s a bit warmer in here, out of the wind, and the sky above is clear in patches. She doesn’t try to conjure anything, just kick back and free associate, see what comes.

A certain amount of it was metaphor of course, recognizing traits in the animals– swiftness, strength, stealth, persistence– that you admired and then tried to emulate. Probably why so many sports teams are named after predators. If your life was ruled by the availability of game, the cycles of weather, your observation of those things went beyond practicality. Science and religion were one.

But another part had to be that you did it in isolation, you as an individual were touched by a greater power, a power that found you worthy of visitation. The Christians are always praying for Jesus to come into their lives, to talk to them, to sign on as their Personal Savior. As much as the People depended on each other to survive and lived on top of each other in earthen huts, as much as it takes a village and all that, there was always a hunger for individuality, to sing your own unique song. You had it both ways. When you came back from your quest there was a shaman of some sort to help you interpret the vision, and your family and your tribe were eager to take you back in and to learn how you had changed, what they should call you now.

The Spirits have lost interest in us, thinks Teresa Crow’s Ghost, and we belong to nothing.

She can hear machine noise on the wind now. It isn’t traffic– she’s too far in from the highway– so it must be one of the oil rigs, or the pipes with gas burning up from them day and night, or even the pump jacks, bobbing up and down, up and down. The Earth has been stabbed and is bleeding, she thinks, there’s a metaphor for you. But stabbing and bleeding was no rarity in the old life, and the problem can’t be just a matter of scale. There is no ceremony to this taking, no more than there is at a slaughterhouse when the cattle are run through it. Cattlemen talk about the worth of the ‘carcass’ that will be left, while the animals are still growing. With the buffalo each bull, cow, or calf was a manifestation, a gift from the greater spirit of Buffalo, and the hunt was celebrated with dances before and after. Now there are only commodities.

When buffalo cross her mind the image is of the patchy old bull in the petting zoo in Fargo, the first live one she ever saw, an animal that seemed embarrassed to have its picture taken with small children perched behind its hump. She closes her eyes and other images come, more recent ones, trucks and other heavy equipment rumbling and growling, afraid of nothing on earth or in the sky. Consuming. Consuming. Teresa begins to sing one of the river songs, softly, the words simple but the melody always making her want to cry.

You can’t go backwards in time. Even if you could, there are negative things, role expectations, the whole Crips-versus-Bloods aspect of tribal warfare, that she is glad are over. Young men don’t have to kill an enemy to gain status, to impress the young women anymore. Not that they don’t enlist in the military, but that’s something that happens far away. There was a sense of being part of a whole then, of your destiny being attached, being an important part of that, of the People–

Teresa opens her eyes to see Danny Two Strike, in his badge and uniform, standing a few feet away from her.

Danny is one of the success stories, a pretty wild kid who straightened out, has stayed to give something back.

“White guy who went missing a while back, used to work for ArrowFleet. Marjorie is all over it, she’s hosting the guy’s family.”

Danny shrugs, looks around. “I was trying to think of a place not in sight of any of the drilling operations.”

He sits by her on the rock. “Yeah. We used to come up here to get out of the wind, smoke weed.”

He smiles. “Anyhow, we’re finding all kinds of stuff lying around that shouldn’t be there, but so far no bodies.”

“Would you share that information? So I can bring it up at the next council meeting?”

Danny is too polite to ask her what she’s doing here. A good boy, such a shame his marriage didn’t work out–

“Sure. You know more about the environmental stuff than me, but it just doesn’t look right, what they leave behind.”

Danny laughs. “I wonder what it’s like for those people– I mean the real people, not just the oil sheiks driving Rolls-Royces around the desert. I hear nobody has to work, they bring in people from Egypt and the Philippines.”

Danny stands, brushes off the seat of his pants. “Well– I’ll leave you to it.”

“Take care, Danny. I hope you find– you know. I hope he’s alive somewhere.”

A turkey buzzard floats overhead. If she stays here a while, doesn’t move, there will be a half-dozen in no time, circling lower and lower to see if she’s ready to be picked at.

Teresa begins to sing again, a song about the grass, and the animals that will come to eat it.

THE OLD EKSTROM PLACE has been empty for thirty years, but the probate is tangled enough that it hasn’t been torn down. What had been a mowed yard around it is overrun now with spurge, Canada thistle, yellow foxtail. The composition board tacked over the missing widows has begun to curl apart, tall weeds have grown up through the cracks in the porch planks and several hundred bats fly out of the top story every night until mid-November. You can’t see the house from the highway, which was only a wagon trail when the first Ekstrom in the county built it. The structure has begun to lean heavily to the west, as if it wants to lie down.

The coyotes come down the hill cautiously, the lead one, patchy and yellow-brown, whining a little. The dead smell is stronger every day, cutting through the other, the reek of oil. The coyotes come to within a few yards of the big gap that has rotted under the porch, and sit again, heads low, the tips of their tails wiggling like fishing lures.

There are toadstools growing in the dark of the crawlspace beneath the old house, and critters, the rodents growing curious about the smell from what is wrapped in the oil-splotched plastic tarp. A tiny bar of light reaches it once a day through holes in the roof, second floor, and ground floor, all lining up for a few minutes every afternoon, the tarp shining blue where it isn’t stained, and then the Earth keeps rolling and it returns to darkness.

DICKYBOY IS REHEATING THE pizza in the galley oven when he hears the car door slam. He’d had a vision of Timmy Coates who delivers for the Hut bringing it all the way out to the yacht, climbing up the roofing ladder with the box balanced in one hand. He’d be a legend for at least a week, the balls of it, and then probably in jail. As it was, having Timmy meet him at the casino with the hot pie after work will be good for a day or two of gossip at school. He’s been mostly using the oven to thaw and heat frozen dinners, as cooking on the stovetop presents a venting problem sooner or later with the boat cover laying over everything. He finds his flashlight and steps out on the deck, bending under the rain-puddled tarp, sagging with the weight between frame supports, moving to the side of the boat facing land rather than water. He wiggles into his observation post, taking up the binoculars he stole from the Sportsman’s Warehouse and scanning around. He’s studied the yacht from the ground enough to know that you’d have to be accidentally looking directly at the spot where he’s loosened the boat cover to notice the slight bump the binoculars make, and has watched plenty of people drive up to check out the Savage Princess without them knowing it.

It’s Brent Skiles, standing next to his red Corvette, looking pissed about something. From this height you can see he’s really starting to lose his hair on top.

With Dylan off the road, Wayne Lee missing, and the Bazookas bouncer gone with the wind, an alteration of income flow was inevitable. They’re hiring pretty much anybody in the enrollment who can breathe over at Bearpaw, and as long as he can call himself Spa Attendant instead of Towel Boy he’s resigned to work for only three bucks an hour over minimum.

It’s only a minute or so when Fawn’s stepfather pulls up in his Denali and gets out, standing to talk to Skiles over the hood of the Vette.

“Negative on that. There’s people who might assume that we’re still– “

“Yeah, I saw the paperwork you sent over, the notice in that excuse for a newspaper you got here. If we weren’t so busy I’d have the boys change the logo on the trucks.”

“No can do, Chief. You know how it works– somebody signs an oil lease, the driller gets access, hires service companies at their discretion. We got contracts to fulfill.”

“Hey, dude worked for me for a while, then he didn’t. Happens a hundred times a day up here.”

“I’ve got his relatives stumbling around out in the fields, plastering the reservation with his photo.”

The binoculars make the two men look like they’re right on top of each other, like one could reach out and strangle the other, even with the car between them. Puffs of frozen breath come out of their mouths as they speak.

“Wayne Lee was missing when he was here, missing a shitload load of brain cells. The dude lacked focus. Look, he probably just got bored, or got some local chick pregnant, and he bugged out.”

“You should keep in mind,” he says evenly, “that loose talk is kind of like an oil spill. Sticks to whoever and whatever is close to it.”

“You see,” says Skiles, “it’s a matter of loyalty. What Wayne Lee and people like him don’t understand is that once you’re in, you’re in, balls and all. Or else you got to face the consequences.”

It is all Dickyboy can do to keep from grabbing the flare gun he found in the cabin and taking a shot at the fucker. Not that Chairman Killdeer is like a daddy to him, or like he was anything but Fawn’s practice partner for making out in the eight grade, but you fuck with the Nations–

“Relatives are out looking for him, huh? That’s unfortunate. So much space out here to get lost in.”

Harleigh Killdeer stands thinking for a minute, then seems to look straight up at Dickyboy. Dickyboy holds the binoculars steady, doesn’t budge. The council chairman walks to the yacht, reaches up to lay a hand on the hull.

EVERY ONCE IN A while they need an attitude correction. Remind them how things stand. Bunny has been on the ride long enough, you’d think she’d know the rules by now. The idea of waltzing back from a shopping binge in Jackson Hole, barely laying her credit card trophies on the floor before she’s on his case, screaming at him. Screaming. Brent flexes his hand on the steering wheel, knuckles starting to swell. He should have brought the arnica along, but she’d already made him late to leave.

He’ll zip across the top of the rez, get his head together, then turn north through Minot and across the border. And please give me no shit about getting into your second-string country, as if I want to go to fucking Winnipeg. The Russian insisted, maybe got some border issues of his own that keep him out of the States, and a face-to-face means he’s close to taking the plunge. Big chunk of change, looking for somewhere legitimate to park it.

He did remember the copy of his birth certificate, folded in the glove compartment, in case they actually patrol that crossing. It will be his second foreign country, if you count Tijuana as part of Mexico and not just Duty Free for sleazebags.

Brent eases off, coasting down under eighty, sees that he’ll need gas. Chuck’s, where he ambushed the Chairman that first time, is up ahead.

He made her try to wiggle all her teeth, make sure nothing was loosened, and got her one of the ice packs he uses for his knees, wrapped in a towel. And she apologized, even if she didn’t exactly have her heart in it. Good to have a business trip though– go to your separate corners, let her start to miss you, wonder if you’ll ever come back–

He pulls into the pumps. Premium, he always puts Premium in the Vette, is down to three-forty a gallon, which even here on the rez seems low. A guy with a limp steps out.

The man flips open the compartment, twists the gas cap off. “Nothing but the best for this baby, huh?”

“I would imagine he’s doing just fine. Sitting on a beach somewhere in Florida. Retired.”

“That’s what I thought,” says the man, watching the numbers on the pump roll. It’s the old-fashioned kind, no digital readouts. “Volume is way off from when I checked it out last year.”

Brent has set up a dummy corporation, bought Chuck’s main competitor on the south side of the rez. The ArrowFleet trucks all fuel up there, you dicker with the numbers a little and it’s good on both sides of the equation. Only an idiot can’t make a killing during an oil boom.

“Thanks, but I got to roll,” says Brent, handing the man cash. He’s been paying cash whenever possible these days, leaving as few tracks as possible. Like spraying yourself with scent elimination before you go hunting.

“Good luck, here,” he says to the man as he fires the Vette up. “Bound to pick up again, any day now.”

The Vette is running smooth. Decent mechanic, way over in Fargo, has a nice touch with engines. Since he bought it from the lease company it’s behaved pretty well, but high-performance machines need even more attention than moody women. Can’t solve a carburetor imbalance with a love tap.

Shadows, which means mostly telephone pole shadows out here, are getting long. He’ll miss dinner, which is fine, feeling a little thick lately, get up to the hotel there and take a shower, go over his plan of attack. Get up early, do an hour in their gym, clean up, and meet the Russian for breakfast. This is the game-changer. This is Showtime.

He’s thinking about the case he’ll present to the Russian when he passes the patrol car, different markings than the Yellow Earth units he sees all the time. Going what– ninety at least. Shit.

He could take the chance that the cop, whatever they’re called out here, didn’t get his plate number, but the Vette stands out like red meat on white carpet and with the chief on the warpath– better to take it and roll with the punch. He slows to sixty-five. If he can’t catch up to that he’s not trying.

Brent pulls over the minute he sees the flasher in his rearview mirror, steps out of the car and waits, pulling his license out. Make it quick and simple.

The patrol car stops a car length behind and the prick at the wheel leaves him standing there for at least five minutes. Psychological warfare, like he’s calling your plate number in to higher authorities. When he gets out it’s an Indian about the Chief’s age, in good shape, wears his hair cut short.

“I know, I know,” says Brent, holding his license out. “I’m sorry. When there’s nobody on the road you start to space out.”

“Nobody but a couple hundred trucks,” says the rez cop, who from the plastic shield on his uniform is their chief of police. Brent has heard his name, maybe even had Harleigh point him out–

“You know I’ve driven across here a bunch of times with your Chairman, and he always goes–”

“I know who you are,” says the cop. “And Harleigh holds it to five over the limit.”

“So I’m not totally straight on how this jurisdiction thing works,” says Brent. You have to push back a little bit or they’ll steamroller you. “You can give me a speeding ticket?”

The chief of reservation police glances up at him. “You plan to set foot on this reservation again? Drive on it?”

“You want to be careful out here,” says the officer, tearing off forms and handing him the carbon copy. “We got a lot of drunken white men on the road these days.”

He keeps it under seventy-five till he’s off the rez. That kind of petty shit, harassment when you can’t strike back, always knocks his chi down some, leaves him feeling deflated. There is a moment where he wants to just keep driving east, fuck Winnipeg, fuck the Russian, it’s all too fucking complicated. Cherkov is the guy’s name, sounds like jerk-off. Which is what the whole meeting might turn out to be, the Soviets are famous for that.

It’s the flame-off stacks that bring him back up, now that it’s dark enough to really see the gas burning against the sky. There are so many of them now, more light than this prairie has ever seen at night. How the Objectivist would have loved this, the way she loved all of man’s great transformative endeavors, his industry, his skyscrapers. It’s like driving over the top of a birthday cake with all the candles lit, he thinks, and gooses the Vette up to eighty.

DUDLEY HAD ONE MORE scotch than usual at the club, but his head is clear enough to make the report. His machine comes on without a noise. He’s got a spot bandage over the video eye and retaliatory malware to protect his keystrokes from being monitored. You sneak into other people’s systems, you have to assume some of them might try to do the same.

The mission is straightforward, the health and future of the Company at stake. Dudley has studied complexity theory, he’s written code for predictive models used throughout the industry, but this one is simple mathematics. Oh, he’ll throw in the usual graphs and color charts, coat it in fiduciary obfuscation, but in the wrap-up paragraph the guillotine will have to drop. Crude had been hanging at ninety-five dollars a barrel for a good while but now has started to drop and will keep dropping as long as there’s so much oil and gas flooding the market, so at eight cents lower than the present rate it makes no sense to keep hydraulically fracturing wells in the Bakken. Nickels and dimes. Keep pumping whatever is producing already, fine, but pull your equipment out of anything you’re still drilling or stimulating and walk away. Frackus interruptus.

Dudley breaks his report into three sections and sends them delayed release, the first section to land in Houston the day after tomorrow, more to come. By the time they’re reading the inevitable conclusion he’ll be lost in the ether.

He developed the Ultimate Determinator over the last two years, the screen output enough to send even the nosiest office mates retreating from his carrel, and he’s been able to test it out on a couple of Mexican roustabouts who died on the job in the Permian. It quickly became clear that their names and social security numbers were fake, and in the interest of avoiding insurance payouts to family, Dudley was given the case. Once he teased out their real identities, he set the Program to erasing them. One had a credit card in Mexico, and the first run-through obliterated over twenty-four thousand pesos’ worth of debt, then computer records of his marriage, his two parking violations in Odessa, his fatal last hours in the emergency room. There is lots of paper still in Mexico, of course, so he still exists on the yellowing books and in the hearts and minds of his loved ones. The other worker, who he remembers was named Jesús, had managed to live most of his life untouched by the web, a nonperson to government agencies, to law enforcement, Nigerian pyramid schemers and online retailers. Jesús did not rise again three days after he was buried– in fact the little bit of encoded data he’d accumulated in his brief span (he was, by the coroner’s estimate, in his early twenties) was expunged forever.

But those were entities with friends and relatives unlikely to mount sophisticated cybersearches. Dudley, virtually friendless, distant to all his relatives, still has the Company, the federal government and the leechlike coterie of creditors and their client preference databanks to deal with. He pictures Ahab, pinioned to the submerging albino leviathan by his own lines and harpoons, dragged to a watery death.

If you can devise a program to discover every appearance of an individual in the great e-Book of Life, you can design one to wipe out that individual’s million coded footprints. Locked systems must be breached, of course, most with elaborate systems of protection and the ability to detect– Who? What? A program that will scour the universe for any sign of its creator for a few more months, then delete itself, a virus with a genetically coded end date.

The rental car’s continued absence will trip no warning at Enterprise, their paperwork revealing a credit card that no longer exists, that, when searched for, never existed. If found, without a license plate and with the VIN number removed, the gray Kia Rio will be only a mystery with an interior unsullied by blood or fingerprints, should anyone bother to check. The hotel will have no record of his visit, maids and desk personnel unable to describe his face if asked, only Caucasian, average this, average that. There will be a bit of a tail to the story of course, the computer record of the Company’s attempts to find him, to know how much he stole– no, that’s not the proper word. The breadth of the golden parachute he incrementally awarded himself during his years of service, web transactions overseen by only one privileged employee.

Records of Dudley’s past interactions with the recorded world flash on the screen, then dissolve. He feels lighter already. Nobody can live in this modern world, they say, on a cash basis, no matter how much of it they’ve got stashed away. It will be intriguing to try.

MAKEUP CAN ONLY DO so much. The woman is young, not yet thirty, and looks like she’s been using this much base since she was in high school, but the evidence tends to ripen after a day. Right there along the left side of her jaw, and the way she holds her arm so close to her body. There they are on the bench together, less than six feet between them, the only people in the station at this hour.

“Is that what they call it?” The woman glances at her ticket. “Yes, I am.”

The woman, a natural blonde, at least from this distance, indicates the pile of magazines in her lap. “I’m prepared.”

Jewelle doesn’t recognize her, but Teasers had gone to open booking in the last year, girls from all over the map swarming the place to try their luck on the floor. Like the Gold Rush, thinks Jewelle, when everyone and his sister showed up with a shovel and a tin pan.

“That must take so much core strength. I’ve seen it in movies, where the men talk and there’s girls snaking around on it in the background.”

“It’s kind of like acting in a movie. Julia Roberts or whoever knows the monster isn’t really going to step on her.”

“They can alter your personality,” she says. “Or maybe he’s just a mean son of a bitch.”

“Oh no, I’m not. Trains are like– like under his radar? He’d never think of me leaving this way.”

“No, but there’s a lawyer there I’ve got to see.” She holds up the magazine on the top of her pile, last month’s People. “He shows up in these all the time, doing big celebrity divorces.”

“I was born Donna, but nobody calls me that anymore, unless it’s for a motel booking or a credit card thing.”

“Maybe later,” says Roberta. “It hurts some to open and close my mouth.”

“Oh no, it’s fine, it’s good. I didn’t get a chance to meet too many women here.”

“It gave up the ghost yesterday. And the prices are still so jacked up here it makes no sense to buy another one.”

“If you’re Catholic, it’s where they keep you till your sins are worn away enough by time or by people praying for you that you’re allowed into Heaven. I’ve done my time in Yellow Earth.”

THEY DON’T GET TO use the Blackhawk Dynamic Entry Ram. Or the Flashbang grenade or the tear gas, or any of the other cop gear Tolliver is so impressed by. Will feels like an idiot standing in the brand-new house in a Kevlar vest, he and Jim Wilson from the Bureau facing the pregnant girl with her bare feet tucked under her on the huge brown leather couch. She was watching a video on the giant flat-screen TV when they charged in, Tolliver no doubt bummed that the front door was unlocked, and she held her arms up like it was a stagecoach robbery in an old Western. The video is still playing with the sound muted, something about teen vampires warring with teen werewolves.

“I’m not sure you can arrest me,” says the girl, who is wearing short shorts and a T-shirt with the logo of a band Will has never heard of printed on it. “I’m an enrolled member of the–”

“The federal government has jurisdiction here, young lady,” says Jim Wilson, carefully placing his helmet with the bulletproof visor on an end table, “and nobody is being arrested yet.”

“You’re Fawn,” says Will, finally placing her. “Harleigh Killdeer is your stepfather.”

“That’s right.” Behind her the teen werewolves, in their human form, are running through dense forest with incredible speed.

Jim Wilson does not look happy. “Would you state your relationship with Brent Skiles?”

“Friend of the family? He– they– him and Bunny– said I could come by and hang out.”

At the other end of the room, Tolliver, who always has his nose stuck in Guns and Ammo back at the office, is identifying the weapons in the arsenal as the ATF officer removes them from the cabinet.

“A Glock 34,” he says, “an AMT AutoMag III, an old Desert Eagle, Beretta 92– that’s a classic– Walther PK380, Smith & Wesson 1911–”

“No. I mean Bunny is sposed to be in Jackson Hole, and Brent, Mr. Skiles, he’s always real busy.”

“Semiautomatic Mossberg 930 Watchdog Shotgun, chamber holds eight rounds,” Will hears Tolliver say. “Pump-Action Winchester Defender–”

“Have you ever fired any of these weapons?” asks Jim Wilson, nodding back toward the case.

“I never even held one. People shouldn’t own guns, unless they’re like– you know– to shoot snakes or whatever. If you have to be where there’s a lot of snakes.” “Have you ever seen Mr. Skiles firing them?”

“I guess. He dropped me here about an hour ago, but he didn’t say where he was going.”

“Stag Model 3 Highlander AR 15– see the camo?” the deputy is saying. “That retro-looking thing is a Henry Big Boy, then a Remington 700, that’s just a hunting rifle–”

Will sits down on the far end of the couch, new leather squeaking under him. The girl is a little scared and a little excited.

“So I’m assuming that Brent– Mr. Skiles– is going to give you a ride home.” He’s heard the rumors.

“I’m going to give you a ride home instead,” he says. “Let’s get your stuff together.”

“Mossberg 715T” says Tolliver, eyes gleaming, as they pass him and the ATF officer, “Steyr M1–”

They watch cop shows, forensics shows. Half the kids he hauls in are playing roles they’ve seen on TV.

“The trouble he’s in doesn’t have anything to do with you. But you’ll have to testify, and if you tell the absolute truth you’ll come out fine.”

“They’ll be under Bunny’s name, you know,” she says. “The guns. That’s how they work their business.”

They’d found a stash of Dianabol in the little exercise room, might be an old prescription, might not, but nothing else indictable. The gun charge will keep him in the state till the killing in Idaho can be investigated, and maybe the Hickey boy’s body will turn up.

HE COULD HAVE SWORN there was a workover rig there just yesterday. Harleigh pulls the Denali off the road, crosses the mucky field to the edge of the drill pad. One of the workmen throwing equipment into the rear of a box truck acknowledges him with a nod.

“Never got to be one,” says the man, who has SARGE stitched on the front of his coveralls.

Sarge heaves something metal and bulky onto the pile already in the truck, shrugs. “Got a bad reading, decided it wouldn’t produce, who knows? We just move shit from one place to the next.”

Only the collar of the annulus is still poking up above the surface, the gravel around it strewn with beams and struts, with equipment Harleigh couldn’t name if you paid him.

Another guy, whose empty hands indicate he is probably the foreman, steps over. “It’s been capped.” “I don’t see any.”

“Probably bridge plugs and cement, and if we’re here the top plug has been tapped to be sure it’ll hold. Plugged and abandoned. We’re part of ‘abandoned.’”

“They’re supposed to put it back the way it was– pull out the gravel and any drilling fluid left behind, regrade to the original contour, reseed.”

“As far as I know they got a year for all that, unless the surface owner takes a pass on it.”

This is tribal land. Stepping closer, Harleigh sees that the liquid is gone because the liner is ripped in a couple places.

The foreman sighs like Harleigh has ruined his day, and moves off to look at a clipboard left on the front seat of his pickup. When they started on the rez they gave notice before every move, they sent him websites to visit and understand the process better. The access road he’s driven down is almost a half-mile long, and that should be removed as well–

“Got it!” calls the foreman, reading off one of the forms stuck on his clipboard. “Reclamation contractor– Skilldeer Incorporated. It’s an outfit called ArrowFleet.”

She sits on his lap. When Fawn isn’t around she loosens up, gets more affectionate. And who knows if Fawn will really get it together to leave–

“Not conferences– that’s just hotels and cities, other reservations with casinos. I mean the country in between.”

“After the next election,” Harleigh tells her. “I think me and the Three Nations are gonna need a vacation from each other.”

BUZZY HAS SEEN MORE hitchhikers in the last two weeks. There were plenty in the first months of the Bakken boom, you’d see them in town later sitting on their duffel bags with hand-lettered cardboard signs, NEED A JOB, and in those days they probably didn’t have to wait more than a few hours before getting an offer. And then, starting a couple months ago, the retreat, the ones who must have spent too much time at the Indian casino and can’t even pop for a bus ticket. But this one is going the wrong direction–

From the way he wears his jeans and his belt, Buzzy has him figured for a Mexican, probably a wet, but way up here who gives a shit?

“No,” says the man, who is strong-looking, in his thirties. “I am looking for work.”

“I am trying,” says the man, “but it takes me very long to come here. In Tejas there are too many Mexicans.”

“So there is not good work. Other places, where they have the oil rig, I am not in the union or I am not somebody’s brother.”

“But I am hearing all the time there is so much work here, so I continue to the north.”

Buzzy nods his head toward a pair of pump jacks, ducking up and down at the side of the highway.

“That’s what’s doing all the work right now, amigo. They pumping like crazy but they left off drilling and fracking some while ago. Hell, this might be my last run, they get serious about that pipeline.”

“The thing is, Macario, we done too good a job here. Put so much oil and gas on the market the pump price fell to half of what it was when we started. I’m sorry, buddy, but that heifer’s left the barn.”

The man stares out his window silently as they pass an abandoned well head. He seems like he’s barely able to stay awake. Buzzy muscles the wheel, fighting a crosswind, the wind that’s been trying to flip him wheels-up since he came to this prairie.

“There’s a Taco John’s in town that ain’t bad,” he says to the brooding traveller. “Maybe they got something in the kitchen.”

Spartina tapes the boxes shut, identifying the contents on the outside in black Magic Marker. Shipping labels will come later, when the owner sells the lot of it or sets up somewhere else. One whole wall is stacked with boxes, and somebody is supposed to come in the afternoon with tools to disassemble the metal work counters.

When Tina goes out onto the floor she sees that the man is still standing there, just staring at the main street. There is still traffic, oil tankers and a service truck now and then, but nothing like during the fracking. The man has been there at least two hours, Latino-looking, and must be cold now that the wind has really picked up. She steps out to talk to him.

The man holds his hands up as if surrendering. “I am sorry. I stand in another place.”

The man looks in through the window, seems to notice for the first time that Havva Javva is empty.

IN THE EARLY MORNING, before the slots have begun to chirp, the man from room 108, the one with the face you can’t quite remember even if you saw it only a moment ago, steps into the little sauna cabinet with only a hotel towel around his waist and new-bought flip-flops on his feet, just beating the well-cement salesman who’s finished his interval training on the recumbent bike, who sits on the bench outside, hand over his heart, feeling it settle down to normal. He starts to get cold after ten minutes, pissed after fifteen.

“Yo, buddy,” he calls, rapping his knuckles lightly on the fiberglass, “you don’t want to fall asleep in there. Won’t be nothing left of you.”

There is no response, and the salesman considers just barging in and crowding the guy out, or pretending there’s a posted time limit and that he’s got a watch on.

Nothing. He waits another few minutes, thinking about heart attacks and his last physical with the specter of Lipitor to add to his arsenal of daily pills, then sees the towel boy, or whatever you call the kid who mopes around the gym and spa.

“You better get the manager,” he says. “I think there’s somebody in trouble in there.”

The boy, an overweight Indian kid who probably can’t even fit on the recumbent bike, doesn’t want to peek inside either and goes to find somebody above his pay grade. The salesman walks in place. Not good to stiffen up and get cold after the intervals, but he has to see this out. Finally a manager type, white guy with worries, appears and calls at the door several times. No answer.

THEY’RE ON RESERVATION LAND, the patrol car left at the side of the road ten minutes ago. There is some slope to the land here as they get close to the lake, what might be called dells back in Minnesota. The lupines and coneflowers are up by now and there are bright yellow meadowlarks flapping up from the ground as they walk, red-legged grasshoppers clicking like castanets and flicking away to clear a path for them a couple footfalls ahead.

“Hell, it would be great if people didn’t need me, didn’t need somebody to do my job. But as long as people are the way they are, there’s got to be somebody serve as– you know.”

Will frowns, points up a slope to the left. “The law is just a tool you use to get it done. The job, to me, the point of it all, is that people respect each other.”

Will has promised her something, some surprise, but he says she has to be patient. She can wait hours, maybe days for rodents to emerge from their holes, but with people she expects service or entertainment and pretty damn quick. It is not her favorite trait, and Will does not cut to the chase.

“When somebody’s really out of line, when somebody’s really getting screwed, sure, we can usually step in and at least stop it from going further. But the things I see now”– he shakes his head, truly upset– “like there’s no center anymore. No moral code.”

He’s not a church guy, that has been established, and he doesn’t seem to be afraid of gays or blacks or Indians taking over the country, but there is this Boy Scout part of him that is endearing and makes Leia worry at the same time.

“My prairie dogs,” she says, “are pretty hard-wired for behavior, and that includes some really awful stuff.”

“We’re people, not critters,” says Will. “We ought to be able to do better than that.”

Leia has a slightly sick feeling, worried that this spot they’re headed for is where he takes women for the Big Kiss-Off, someplace where if they scream or cry the scene won’t have an audience–

She sees the lake spread out below them now, looking beautiful and somewhat man-made at the same time. They start to descend toward it.

She has told him about applying for the Animal Control job, how she was informed they were looking for a long-term resident to fill it, told him she has given her notice at Walmart. He nodded and didn’t ask why she was still in Yellow Earth, then, and they haven’t discussed it since. He has another two years on his term as sheriff. She has been to his apartment, relieved to find he owns and reads books, mostly history and not exclusively about war. They’ve had a rendezvous in Bismarck, where he did business at the state penitentiary and joined her at an old downtown place that served enormous slabs of meat. He does not harbor snakes or reptiles of any species.

They come to a rock outcropping just above the steep earthen bank and sit, watching the water.

“It’s pretty.” The bay curves enough that they can’t see across to the yacht that is still sitting on shore, the one that people have been making jokes about. A little breeze kicks up, no moan to it. When they make her Queen of the Universe her first act will be to turn that fucking wind off for a while, give people’s heads a rest. There are no boats on the water, no motor sounds, no drilling.

“I suppose you’ve been wondering–” she starts, and he puts a finger to his lips.

There are three of them, though it is hard to distinguish at first from the liquid, graceful weaving of their long bodies in the water. They make a complicated wake, go under, come back up, one with its belly to the sky.

“There’s a bunch come down from Canada to live along the Red River,” says Will, almost whispering, “on the border with Minnesota. But this far west, in this lake– not since the beaver were trapped out.”

“Oh yeah– suckers, carp, a lot of nice slow fish. And look at the size of them.”

The otters are all roughly the same size, maybe three feet long including the powerful tail, which is thicker than their hind legs, swirling and twisting and looping backwards under the water, then sliding along with their flat heads barely above the waterline.

“No, but they’re– they’re pretty fascinating. The social groupings are relatively anarchic, their territories overlap, they commandeer other mammals’ burrows–”

“I never seen more than these three, and only started seeing them last spring.”

They are long and lithe, pelts glistening as they roll and intertwine, one occasionally racing away only to yo-yo back and snake playfully around the other two.

“I’d love to know how they got here, hopping rivers and streams– did they do it in one big odyssey or did it take a couple generations, drifting west?”

That might, she thinks, in his Andy of Mayberry roundabout manner, be Will’s version of an invitation.

He is looking at her rather than the otters, which in their aquatic nearsightedness must have heard rather then seen them and are now flowing three abreast toward the bank, little noses tilted, testing the air.