Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  She catches up with him, looking a little embarrassed, after the period bell has rung, kids scuttling down the hallway like fracked energy molecules. She’d said the big thank-you and had the kids applaud– nice old-school touch– back in the classroom.

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you– you know– not in front of the students.”

  He’s been more cautious the last few years, a little more upfront about what the contract is and isn’t. In the early days the guys called him Randy Heartbreaker and he supposes he deserved it, a couple bad parting scenes, one stalker who luckily was not computer literate and lost track of him quickly. You’re there to open up an oilfield, two years max, and then move on. That’s the deal. It helps that most of the assignments are located in the armpits of the universe– Coral certainly didn’t show any interest in following him to Yellow Earth, North Dakota. He thought El Paso was funky back in his UTEP college days, but this–

  “My husband Tucker?” she says apologetically. “He’s been out of work a long time– business venture that didn’t pan out. Can you think of any–”

  “I’m not in HR, and– quite honestly– the people around me are all highly trained technicians.”

  “Of course.”

  No, she’s not after your telephone number. Hubby needs a gig.

  “Is he in fairly good shape?”

  “He jogs. Or he used to a lot, before he– it’s depressing, being without a job for so long.”

  “Well, the work is very physical, but once the rigs start going up he could make the rounds. They’re always looking out for”– no, don’t say raw meat– “for hard workers. But it’s not for everybody.”

  The smile again, the cobalt blue eyes. He knows they sell contacts that color, but hers look like the real thing.

  “I’ll tell him. And thanks for your honesty– you know– with the class.”

  He smiles back, not so much catch-and-release but look-and-forget-about-it.

  “When we’re up and pumping have them come out for a guided tour.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  And then I’ll be gone.

  THEY DO THE INTERVIEWS in the Veteran’s Hall. It was a five-and-dime that closed down in the ’70s, now with a large front room for receptions and speakers, the walls armored with patriotic mementos, with the bar and pool tables through a door in the back. Tuck notices that every other job applicant steps back there to compare notes and lift a few instead of returning to the street. The military has somehow managed to do its business without him, too young for Vietnam, where his father served in the First Signal Brigade, and otherwise engaged during the First Gulf. Butch Bjornson, two folding chairs ahead of him in the waiting line along the wall, was in that one, and Tuck wonders how collecting for deployment-related chronic fatigue syndrome is going to sit with the Company personnel scouts.

  “This is all for show, you know,” Hollister Ekdahl, a seat after him, leans in to mutter. “They’re gonna bring all their own people up from Texas. Just don’t want the natives to get too restless.”

  “No, these operations, when they do them, are so big,” explains Tuck, who spent the night researching the Company online, “there’s all kinds of jobs where you don’t need experience. Why ship somebody in when we’re right here, hungry for work?”

  They were living in Rapid, just getting by, when Francine got the teaching post in Yellow Earth. Otherwise, what, are you kidding? Tuck poked around for a few months, nothing that paid enough to justify taking orders and punching a clock, then borrowed money from his dad and took over the diner on 11th. Good location, some diehard regulars– the folks who had it before just wanted to retire. He was full of ideas. Redid the décor, added some new wrinkles to the menu, replaced the greening hamburger photos in the window with ’50s-style painting and lettering, hired a brace of teenage and young-wife waitresses to flirt with. It was fun at first, playing the proprietor, called over to explain the new dishes as if they were something exotic, trying to be avuncular yet firm with the parade of clueless kitchen staff. But finally huevos rancheros did not find favor with the locals, content to eat drive-through Egg-Mc-fucking-Muffins and Triple-Bypass Burgers from the chains, the diehards probably moving their morning gabfest to here at the Vets for all he knew. And a month ago it was either ask Francine to borrow money from her father or cut bait. So the fella who bought it cheap just stepped in the shit with this oil boom coming, now remodeling the place into a cutesy coffee joint that will be a goldmine if he keeps the girls in tight T-shirts hopping and the retired farmers from parking their carcasses there all day.

  There are two folding tables set up, two interviewers, and you bring up the form you’ve filled out. The guy Tuck draws, curly hair and glasses, barely looks up as he scans the employment and health history.

  “No oilfield experience?”

  “No.” Tuck is about to say ‘No sir’ but the guy might be younger than he is and it rankles. He hasn’t been out with his hat in his hand for years. In fact, maybe the hat would have been a good idea– the guys like Butch wearing UND or John Deere caps look a lot more roughnecky than he feels at present.

  “Commercial license?”

  “No. But I could get one easy enough.”

  Tuck doesn’t know if this is true, but they should know he’s ready, willing, and able.

  “Construction?”

  “Oh sure. Bit of this and a bit of that.”

  Francine despairs of his lack of handiness around the house, but he has held the other end of the two-by-four more than once, run a power saw, nailed in nails. They must have some kind of training for new people.

  The curly-haired guy frowns and turns the form over to scan the other side, and Tuck glances back to the waiting men. Quite a few older than him, even. The state has been losing population, with cattle easier to raise away from the wind and weather you get up here, no industry to speak of, and the fact finally sinking in that farming this bleak prairie is a sucker’s game. If it wasn’t for Francine’s job–

  “We’ll give you a call,” says the interviewer, setting his form on top of the pile of those who’ve been patronized ahead of him, “if anything comes up.”

  Tuck stands, takes a step toward the back, then reconsiders and heads for the street. It’s ten in the morning. If he’s not just going back into bed like yesterday, what he needs is coffee.

  IT’S A TOWN THAT she considered when she first got to Yellow Earth, on Route 1 just south of Bonetrail, at least a hundred animals, with the mounds starting about a football field’s distance back from the county road, no drilling apparent on the horizon yet. The shooters are set up just in from the shoulder, and Leia is pulling up in front of their van before she can think of a reason why.

  They have a card table laid out with ammunition and other hunter stuff she can’t identify, with the taller one standing to look through a telescope-looking deal on a tripod and the one in the desert camouflage and earmuff headset sitting on a camp stool with his rifle propped on some sort of fold-out support to steady the barrel.

  Camo Guy fires and Leia sees something fly in the air out in the colony.

  “Nailed im,” says the Spotter, extra loud to be heard through his buddy’s ear baffles. “Judges’d give you an eight for altitude.”

  “Only an eight?” says the Camo Guy, still sighting through his scope.

  “It flew but it stayed pretty intact.”

  The Spotter notices Leia’s shadow on the ground next to him and turns.

  “Hey, we got a spectator!”

  The Camo Guy glances over without shifting from his firing position. “If she’s a game warden give her the rap.”

  “We got permission from the rancher,” says the Spotter, not lowering his volume. “Course he oughta pay us for every rodent we whack.”

  “Whack em and stack em!” cries Camo Guy, looking through the scope and panning the rifle slightly. “Got another one.”

  He fires and there is a distant geyser of sand. />
  “Shit.”

  “I’m not a warden,” she says. “Just curious.”

  Spotter lights up. “Well you come to right place,” he says. “I’m just a weekend hobby shooter, but L. T. here is a killing machine.”

  Another shot. “Took his head off!”

  “But what were you aiming at?”

  “Cut me some slack, Jack. Crosswind’s already dicking with me.”

  Spotter turns back to Leia. “It’s best to shoot early in the day,” he explains. “Wind picks up, you want more fps– that’s your bullet speed– to compensate, and these Super Explosives we’re shooting will start to come apart.”

  He senses her lack of comprehension.

  “The jacket’s a lot thinner, so the twist starts throwing off bits of metal.”

  “They don’t just stay down in their holes?”

  “You mean the p-dogs?” He points a finger at her. “Good question. Lemme show you.”

  He bends to look through the telescope thing, panning it, adjusting a knob, then calls out to Camo Guy. “Two o’clock, three hundred fifteen yards– we got a cluster!”

  Spotter steps to the side and waves Leia forward. “Take a look.”

  “I see em,” says Camo Guy. “Here comes a cluster-fucker.”

  Leia just has her eyes to the lens, three juveniles and an adult female in and around the crosshairs, when the rifle barks and one of the juveniles is lifted spinning in the air, intestines flying raggedly from its little body, landing in the dry grass several yards beyond the mound.

  “Helicopter!” cries Camo Guy. “More to come!”

  The remaining prairie dogs freeze for a moment, either stunned or unable to comprehend their cohort suddenly disappearing, then the adult and one of the juveniles turn to touch mouths–

  Another rifle bark and the female explodes in a red mist, the bloody rag of her remains tumbling backwards. The other two whirl in place, alert, but don’t retreat into the burrow opening. Leia steps back from the rangefinder.

  “She blew up.”

  “Just 50-grain Hornadys, real fur-friendly, easy to find. There’s other loads might give you even more splatter but they’re more expensive.”

  “If it doesn’t splatter,” calls Camo Guy, finger easing onto the trigger again, “it doesn’t matter”

  He fires and another juvenile flies into the air, the only survivor finally scurrying underground.

  “So do you, like, go out and collect the bodies?”

  Camo Guy laughs, lifting the rifle, which is also camouflaged in Desert Tan and looks more like a machine than something Daniel Boone would carry, to change out a black metal box on the bottom of it.

  “You hear that, Shakes? She wants to know if we collect our trophies.”

  “There’s not enough left to stuff or tack up on the wall,” says the spotter, Shakes, with a shrug.

  “Scavengers’ll take care of em sooner or later,” adds L. T. “Might have to spit out a couple bullet fragments. Hell, I shot one last week, biggish son of a gun, and you could see daylight through the hole I drilled. Like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.”

  “Except with blood.”

  “So this is not considered overkill.”

  She sees something change in the Spotter’s eyes. “You understand, Miss, that these are pests. Like as not they got the plague.”

  “And tearing them apart is part of the fun of it.”

  The toothy smile loses some of its wattage.

  “You don’t shoot.”

  “Never took it up.”

  Shakes steps to the card table and lifts the rifle leaning against it. “This is just an old Savage Model 12 my wife give me when I turned forty,” he says, propping it on his hip, “while Lyle is operating something more than a varmint rifle. I find em with the Leupold laser tech and he uses the mil dots in his Bushnell to zero in. But even with the optics, at this distance it takes a degree of skill.”

  “They don’t even run into their holes.”

  “Not unless a hawk flies over.” Camo Guy, L. T., is back in shooting position. “Dumb little fuckers.”

  Shakes is staring at her, eyes traveling up to the streak in her hair. “You wouldn’t be a vegetarian, would you?”

  “Let them eat kale!” calls L. T.

  “No.”

  “Animal rights activist?”

  “No.”

  “I asked a liberal once,” calls L. T., eye back on his scope, “‘What is it with you people, ignorance or apathy?’ He said ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’”

  “What I don’t get,” says Leia, “is the fun in it.”

  Shakes makes a face. “Hey, whatever brings you out from under your rock.”

  He holds the rifle out toward her. “You like to try?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Afraid you’ll like it?”

  “I’ve run over a couple on the highway,” she says. “Didn’t do anything for me.”

  “But that’s an accident. There’s no marksmanship.”

  “So shoot targets.”

  “I do. But it’s not hunting.”

  “I always think of hunting, you got to go find something in the woods or up in the mountains.” Her father would come home from a weekend stalking deer with beer farts, wet clothes and no trophy. “Something that can run away or charge at you.”

  “Hunters are the greatest conservation group in history.”

  “Like the ones who gathered to kill the last flock of passenger pigeons.”

  “If they’d known–”

  “They knew. It was advertised in the newspapers, ‘Last chance to shoot a passenger pigeon.’ That was the attraction.”

  Shakes holds his hands up as if surrendering. “Don’t look at me, I wasn’t there.”

  “Look who’s come up to join the party,” says L. T., and fires. “Nicked him pretty good.”

  Leia looks back through the rangefinder. The juvenile is lying on its back, rear legs twitching spastically.

  “You gonna finish it?”

  “Ammo’s not that cheap. He’ll die soon enough.” L. T. is scanning through the scope again.

  “It’s not like they’re endangered.”

  “Borderline,” she says to Shakes. “And they’re a cornerstone species. If they get scarce a lot of other creatures go hungry.”

  “Well I just laid out a buffet for them other creatures.” L. T. fires again. “Prairie dog on a cracker.”

  She pans the rangefinder. The little town is in full swing, prairie dogs grazing, grooming, kissing, display-fighting as if no danger was present. Maybe they’re right, she thinks, maybe any creature so clueless doesn’t deserve to survive. If the lesson of the Dust Bowl wasn’t enough, the acidification of the oceans, carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere, the melting of the ice caps– the planet will survive, even thrive, if they all disappear tomorrow.

  “I spose it is a little bit more like bowling than going after mountain goats in the Rockies,” says Shakes, fucking with her now and enjoying it. “But some days you just got to kill something.”

  BRENT IS A BIG thinker, always has been. And willing to take the headaches that come with it, willing to take the risks. It was Brent who pushed Wayne Lee along from misdemeanor to felony status, Brent who counseled him to get something beyond a quick thrill from his transgressions.

  But Yellow Earth?

  They’re in some kind of coffee place, not one of the big chains but trying to look like it, that’s been thrown together in the last week or two. Trucks lumber down the main street, which is also the highway, just outside the window, while an annoying bell tinkles every few seconds as somebody steps in or out. Mostly in. He gave up on the line at the Walmart earlier in the day, and forget about the drive-thru lanes at the couple fast food places. The town doesn’t have enough service people, goods, motels, anything, to deal with what’s hit them. The barista girls behind the counter are still consulting a laminated drink chart on the wall to fill anything but the simplest ord
er, and there are locals, farmer-looking characters in down vests and crew cuts sitting behind their overpriced cups of joe and looking around with a kind of amused bewilderment, like they’re at the freak tent of some old-time carnival.

  Cute girls, though.

  “There’s thousands of dollars,” says Brent, swirling his Mochaccino Motherfucker or whatever it is in the bottom of the plastic cup, “hundreds of thousands, wandering around up here looking for somebody’s pocket to jump into. Idiots are making fortunes, and we’re not idiots.”

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  “Here is only where the money lives, where you make your killing. Where you spend it is your business.”

  “So you want me to drive for you.”

  “Some of that, yeah, some back and forth grinding the gears. I mostly got tribe members on the regular payroll, but you can do my special delivery business.”

  “And I get paid.”

  “More than you ever made running a truck in your life. Guys who got their CDL-B license a week ago are set to bring down eighty grand in a year.”

  The taller one, definitely. Wayne Lee likes the way she moves. There’s a word for it–

  “That’s just your base salary, of course.” Brent looks around the noisy, packed room, standees crowded at the counter and just inside the door, nobody paying attention to them. “You remember in Texas how we had that problem with cash.”

  “Not showing enough legitimate income.”

  “I got this company with the chief– the Chairman– of the tribes up here, minimum regs, dozens of contracts, and people too busy drilling and raking in the moolah to look at the books.”

  “Where would I live?”

  “I’ll find you a place. And then you’ll be making runs to El Paso and back.”

  “For product.”

  Again Brent glances around. He’s starting to lose some hair but has kept up with the Mr. Universe routine, almost busting out of the T-shirt he’s wearing.

  “What we’ve still got in inventory down there won’t last a week in this zoo. You’ll have to resupply.”

  “And on this end?”

  “I’ll get you started with oilfield contacts and then– hey, you’re good at making friends. It’s a customer-service job, dude, and nobody does it better than you.”