Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

Jonesy is Wikipedia with legs. Maybe three or four years older than he is, blushes if you make her speak in public, but capable of tearing you a new one over the phone. Every mayor should have one.

  “You got that list of what we need?”

  She hands him a printout. “First column what we need, second column what would be nice to have.”

  Unless Planning and Zoning jump the corral they should be in pretty good shape when things start popping. State might help with traffic, but they’re pretty slow on the draw, so the phone calls will keep rolling in. How long it took Mrs. X to drive to the Walmart. The trick is not to get suckered into one fixed contract with these operations, just keep the communication open, let them know that ground given can always be taken away.

  “He’s here, you know.” Jonesy taking off her reading glasses to look up at him. “Sitting in the lobby. I said you were talking to somebody from the EPA.”

  Press grins. “Throw a scare into them.”

  “You did actually have a conversation with them a month ago, with a Richard Cosgrove,” says Jonesy. “In case he inquires.”

  Richard Cosgrove. Dick Cosgrove. Remembering names has become the toughest part of the job. When he’s got Brewster running interference for him at a function, Brewster whose hard drive is not cluttered with thirty-five years of politics, names come easy.

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Johannsen,” says Brewster at volume, three feet in front of him, and then it all comes back. The four sons, including the one they tried to get into West Point who’s in Canada now, working for their rail system, and dear departed Soren, who used to raise prize bulls–

  Dick Cosgrove, EPA.

  “What have I got, five minutes–?”

  “He didn’t seem to be in a hurry.”

  “Give me two and send him in.”

  Press steps back into his office and crosses to the window. The east-west stuff has already started to pass right under his nose, the state highway making a dogleg around city hall, sixteen-wheelers stopped at the lights, spewing exhaust. The old timers are already complaining about how busy it’s gotten, the same ones who want him to attract business, like there’s a– what– hormone? Some smell you could set off and they all come running. Well it’s been here all along, right under their feet. He crosses to pull the street map down, poses in front of it, choosing a concerned but confident frown. He hears Jonesy behind him.

  “Here’s Mr. Rushmore for you, Mayor.”

  Press turns as if interrupted from deep thought to face a guy who looks like he should be selling Hoovers to ’50s housewives.

  Find out what people want and make them think you’re going to give it to them. It’s always easier with the office holders if a couple of them are personally sitting on a mineral deposit, but neither the mayor nor any of the committee members are big landowners. A couple of the guys with businesses will do well– the hardware guy, the one with the diner, at least till the big chains can throw some competition up. But Sig gets the impression that Prescott Earle is less interested in cash than credit.

  “It looks like you folks will be staying awhile.”

  Apparently Earle is not going to sit down behind his desk, so Sig gets comfortable as he can on the arm of the leatherette chair. “That’s our hope. The initial outlay is so expensive, you need wells that keep producing year after year.”

  “Any idea of the population numbers we’re looking at? I know it won’t be families coming in at first.”

  “It’s not so much how many workers we’ll employ,” Sig tells him, “it’s how fast they show up. Expect a bit of shock and awe from your constituents.”

  “The trucks.”

  “All our company-owned tractor-trailers have ECMs– that’s a speed governor– in their engines for highway use. And if they pick up a ticket in town, we make sure they pay it.” No need to get into the subcontractors.

  “It’s the volume.”

  “We’ll be happy to consult with you about alternate routes wherever practical, or even some kind of loop around town if state funding can be tapped. But today I’m only authorized to talk to you about where we’re going to put all our people.”

  “Workforce Temporary Housing,” says the Mayor, planted in front of the wall map of the town as if posing for a campaign photo.

  “‘Temporary’ might be quite some time if we’re lucky. And you’ve presently only got a couple hundred units available, I figure, counting your private-home folks willing to take on boarders– that’ll disappear in no time.”

  “So you’ll want to build.”

  “Build is too grand a word for it. We have access to integrated housing systems that are extremely portable.”

  “Not trailers.”

  “No wheels on these babies.” Sig points past the mayor to the map. “You’re fortunate to have so much unoccupied space here in Yellow Earth.”

  Western towns tend to be on the airy side in general, but this burg has clearly had some hard times, six or seven warehouses that look to have been barren since the first Bush, empty lots sprouting weeds–

  “I have to warn you we have some pretty strict ordinances on the books. And I was just chatting with my friend Dick Mosgrave at the EPA.”

  “Costs and benefits,” says Sig, holding up a hand. The main drag looks like any godawful commercial strip in America, then some decent old wooden houses with actual trees growing next to them, the railroad tracks and the flood plain of the Missouri to the south of town– not a candidate for heritage preservation. “People in your area, in your city, are going to benefit, at least financially, a great deal from my company’s activities. But of course there will be some inconveniences, and some allowances will have to be made. Once you prime the pump of private enterprise–”

  “We can’t just roll over.”

  You can, of course, and it’s been done even in states where nobody wears cowboy hats or eats crawfish. But nobody wants to admit that’s what the deal is.

  “One of the positive reports I’ve been able to relay to headquarters, Mayor, is that Yellow Earth has a highly functioning local government. Most of our headaches come from people who don’t have their act together.”

  The jury is still out, but it never hurts to get them thinking they’re a vital part of the team. The mayor has lifted his chin, waiting for something specific to bat around.

  “This is going to be a process,” says Sig, “and I’ve found it’s always good policy to show the public some of the workings of that process.”

  “You mean press releases.”

  “Maybe,” says Sig, cocking his head to study the mayor, “and I’m just iffing here, maybe we could make a proposal, then you make a counterproposal that is slightly less generous, slightly more restrictive, then we could gradually come to an agreement, all in the public eye.”

  “Open hearings.”

  “Open for the edification and– let’s call it pacification of the public’s worries.”

  “Chill them out.”

  “–but with the end result previously agreed upon.”

  Prescott Earle takes a moment to chew on this one.

  “You mean we make a private deal?”

  Phrasing is everything in these preliminary bouts. Nobody wants to get filthy rich anymore, they want ‘wealth’ to manage. Nobody is just plain honest, they’re ‘transparent’–

  “We make an agreement away from the noise and anxiety that our particular kind of invasion can engender. You and your committee will have what’s in the best interests of the town in mind, of course, and we’ll have our side of the story to represent. But standards are set, tolerances, guidelines. A mutually beneficial agreement. Then we publicly make a much more aggressive proposal, you people shoot it down, then we go back and forth a few volleys before we settle on what we’ve already agreed to. Your constituents are reassured that their mayor is holding the line for them, but the result is something guaranteed to be fair and reasonable.”

  Sig stands before the mayor can yea or nay
the proposal, his hand out. He’s not the detail man on housing, just there to plant the seeds. “It’s going to be a wild ride, Mayor, but we want to be sure you’re the one in the driver’s seat.”

  When the door closes behind him it’s clear the secretary has heard it all.

  “So this is shale oil,” she says. It sounds like an accusation.

  You never want to alienate the secretaries. With a keystroke they can put you at the end of the line, and half the time they’ve got a better sense of the big picture than their bosses.

  “And quite a bit of it, if we’re fortunate.”

  “I grew up in Rock Springs.”

  “The Green River formation. Before I got into the business.”

  “I was fourteen when it hit.”

  “Mid-’70s.”

  She has taken her glasses off to look at him. Wyoming gal, maybe a barrel racer or calf roper– some kind of jock, certainly, from the squads of sturdy-thighed girls on the wall behind her.

  “We had the crowd who built the Jim Bridger plant.”

  “The mighty mountain man.”

  “That was PP&G. Then we had Bechtel throwing up housing, and the soda ash people, and finally the shale oil came and went.”

  “It’s still there. We have new technologies.”

  “Our sewage backed up and two of my friends got strung out on cocaine.”

  Not slipping any junk pitches past this one. Sig nods and raps his knuckles on her desk. “The very purpose of my visit. Never too early to start planning.”

  “You want to put man camps in town.”

  It isn’t hostile, exactly, just a little I-know-who-you-are.

  “Some of our employees do bring their families.”

  “I remember trailers out in the middle of nowhere.”

  Wyoming Gal clearly knows it’s time to head for high ground, while her boss still thinks he can surf the wave. Not so easy to tell people their town is being kidnapped.

  “There will be quite a bit of that. But the men will come into town one way or the other. If they already dwell here you won’t have them on the highways.”

  “Under the influence.”

  “I imagine you have your local over-indulgers.” Keep the tone pleasant but don’t give ground. “We’re discussing a matter of scale.”

  “Do you imagine,” she asks, “that the other companies will want the same sort of concessions you’ll be asking from Mayor Earle?”

  “The good ones will.” He gives her the hundred-watt smile and makes for the exit. In the old movies men had hats to put on when they left a room, a period to dot at the end of their final word. “You have to remember, I’m just the advance man for all this.”

  The secretary puts her glasses on and goes back to her keyboarding, muttering behind his back in French.

  “Après moi, le déluge.”

  IT SMELLS LIKE COFFEE, which you’d figure, and there is a lot of noise from out front. On Friends and the other TV shows coffee shops always have a nice even buzz, sort of like the cafeteria at school but with more of the boys and girls sitting together. This sounds like what Tina imagines goes on in the boys’ locker room, shouting and joking and hard laughter and all male voices.

  “Spartina,” says the manager, reading off the form she’s filled out with her official information, Annie’s cell number for a contact, “you understand that this is a part-time position?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The manager graduated from Yellow Earth High maybe two years ago, a red-haired boy with something wrong with the way he walks. KENNY, it says on the nameplate pinned over his shirt pocket.

  “We won’t be paying in to pension or welfare or any of that.”

  She only got her Social Security number yesterday, after the big hunt for her birth certificate without Granpa Clemson knowing. What her parents were thinking of with ‘Spartina’ is anybody’s guess, the best the internet can give her is that it’s a kind of grass that grows in saltwater marshes. It’s what Granpa still calls her when he’s mad at her or disappointed. Like if he knew she was getting this job–

  The idea is that she’ll do the 3 to 5 part of Annie’s shift so Annie can keep running the school paper but still put some money away for college. Annie choked on her SATs and is worried she won’t get any financial aid, even though she’s always nailed down straight As.

  “The job is basically like being a bartender– mixing drinks, running the register, bussing tables– only there’s no alcohol involved.”

  Kenny is sweating, looking nervously toward the noise out front. He hasn’t made full eye contact the whole interview, even though he is standing and she is sitting, the both of them crammed in among stacked bags of coffee beans and roasting and steaming equipment that has yet to be uncrated.

  “The main thing is to be fast. These guys are in a hurry, they got their jobs to get to, and they’re not, like, patient.”

  It was some kind of birth defect thing, his funny walk, not an accident. Made it kind of uncomfortable to watch him struggle down the hall, him having to throw the one leg forward instead of just stepping.

  “And while you’re still like, probationary, we’ll pay Annie and she’ll pay you.”

  Annie says she’s getting fifteen dollars an hour, which is pretty good when you figure a year ago there were lots of grown men in town who couldn’t find anything for minimum.

  “How long will I be on trial?”

  “If you don’t quit in the first week you’re pretty much home free,” says the manager.

  “Kenny!” somebody shouts, a woman’s voice. “We need you!”

  “So are we good?”

  Kenny kind of sneaks a glance at her as he says it. Maybe he’s shy. Shy with girls.

  “When would I start?”

  “Uhm, do you think you could stay and help out now for a bit? We’ll call it training and then tomorrow you’ll start getting paid.”

  It will take some careful storytelling with her grandfather, but pretty soon she’ll have the iPod and the phone and won’t have to do everything through Annie.

  “No problem.”

  Tina stands and realizes she is a head taller than Kenny. He finds a blue apron with the logo on it hanging from a hook, hands it to her.

  “Welcome to Havva Javva.”

  THEY’RE IN THE COMMUNITY center, more than the usual suspects watching from metal folding chairs as Harleigh struts in front of the screen, microphone and laser-pointer in hand. Teresa, uneasy, drifts at the back of the room. She’s seen the maps before, knows every bitter fact, but wonders where he is going with this.

  “Our original lands,” says Harleigh, swooping three big circles over the map with the glowing red dot. “Overlapping– sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, always shifting with the patterns of weather and game, yielding to the river whenever it needed to adjust its course.”

  Another slide comes up, an irregular red patch against the tranquil green of states, territories and countries.

  “In 1870 this southern part of our lands is taken by presidential executive order, and the reservation is established. This isn’t punishment for anything, just the federal government doing whatever it wanted to do. They put the Indian Agency in the old fort.”

  The view changes and Harleigh turns to his audience. Teresa can see that he’s loaded the house with his supporters, something new on the docket he must need approval for.

  “And let us remember that while this is taking place, several of our men are risking their lives, guiding General Custer in the Black Hills and into the Little Big Horn country. It always pays to cooperate.”

  Chuckles from the history buffs in the crowd.

  They always tell about the scouts who went with Custer, and about Sakakawea and her baby, and the men who left the rez to fight in Cuba or the Philippines or France or Germany or the Persian Gulf or wherever the government needed bodies at the moment, but they never include Teresa Crow’s Ghost on the list. Or Ted Drags Wolf or Leon Bender, who went
with her to fight at Wounded Knee and got there too late to sneak past the FBI agents and vigilantes, who were arrested at a gas station in Kadoka and were shuffled from jail to jail for over a year before the vaguely worded subversion charges were finally dropped. The first time she explained it all to Ricky, who must have been ten or eleven, he looked at her like she was a crazy woman.

  “You thought you were gonna, like, what? Beat the US government?”

  “Anything we’ve still got today that’s good,” she told him, “came because we stood up then.”

  “We don’t negotiate with terrorists, Mom,” he said, shaking his head. Ricky’s father had already made tracks to become a career Marine, who still never writes or calls his son but casts a very long shadow.

  The red dot wiggles on a spot next to the old river. “In 1884 the Indian Agent decides that living in Like-A-Fishhook Village, where the Three Nations first came together for protection and the strength of numbers after the great smallpox wasting, was interfering with our ‘progress.’ He had our cabins and earth lodges burned to persuade us to move up the river and start farming like the white man farms. Within two years the Village was abandoned.”

  She sees Ricky in the front row. He’s been dodging her on the phone, and the one time she got him at home he put the little ones on to say hello to their grandma, as if they don’t stay with her three times a week. Teresa can read her boy like a book, and he had that ‘I know you don’t approve but I’m doing it anyway’ look when he passed, coming into the meeting. Send him all the way to Grand Forks for an education and he comes back spouting consumerist homilies like a corporate shill.

  “Eighteen ninety-one,” says Harleigh over the microphone. “The Dawes Allotment Act goes into effect. The Nations can no longer own the land communally, but must assign hundred-sixty-acre lots to individual male heads of household and eighty-acre lots to unmarried males. And somehow, in the switchover, we give up two-thirds of the original reservation area.” The red patch suddenly shrinks as a new slide appears. “Furthermore, these allotted lands can now be sold to white speculators or settlers, and worse, they are subject to taxes that are manipulated, leading to foreclosures.”