Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “It’s more balance and focus than strength. I bet she did fine.”

  He puts the drinks on his room tab, having insisted they’d do their own incidentals, and gets up to go. Brent is taking the girls to his favorite sushi place for lunch, and Harleigh has a twinge of wishing he could see Fawn pretending to like raw fish.

  “So we’ll meet you here at seven.”

  “Right after the hula exhibition.”

  More wedding parties arriving, the young Japanese men in their tuxedos looking all alike to him, stepping out of rental limos under the carport, smiling and occasionally making those little half bows to each other. Must be some kind of wedding package. They tried one at the casino, a discounted suite with a hundred dollars’ worth of gaming tokens complimentary to the bride, but it never caught on.

  The sun nails him the minute he steps out from the shade of the hotel tower, and he wonders if walking is such a great idea. There’s a soft breeze and heat isn’t sharp like the Badlands summer, but he’s sweating a bit already. Harleigh hurries past the ABC store on the corner, where they have the killer malasada donuts he shouldn’t even be thinking about, and wades through the tourists with his downtown map in hand.

  This part of the island has been pretty thoroughly colonized. Lots more Japanese, which would have started Granpaw Pete into his reenactment of the Battle of Okinawa, lots of big tall blond Dutch or Germans or Swedes, the usual American white folks, and even a few blacks who look like they just stepped off a golf course. Harleigh turns right on Kalakua Avenue and realizes he’s been here before. Houston? San Francisco? It’s all the same stores that crop up wherever the gold-card crowd stays, some kind of comfort zone for them, like McDonald’s for people with too much money. The idea that shopping is something you might do for fun, like hunting or playing basketball, is still a wonder to him, and he has to smile as he watches the ladies– they are mostly ladies– pop from one air-conditioned boutique to the next with their classily-bagged purchases bouncing against their legs.

  Hey, only a matter of months before Gucci and Hugo Boss hit Yellow Earth.

  The place with too many vowels in its name turns out to be a little hole-in-the-wall up by the canal. Kapuni is already at a table, and starts laughing when he sees Harleigh.

  “What?”

  Kapuni has to push his chair way back to get his belly clear of the table and stand. “You look more kanaka than I do. Welcome, bra.”

  Kapuni gives him a shake and a thump and they sit. There are other Hawaiians, even bigger than Kapuni, and some smaller Asian people at the tables, none of them looking like tourists.

  “Yeah, folks on the street were kind of looking at me.”

  “They think they just saw you hugging a ukulele in one of the hotel shows.”

  Harleigh looks at the menu posted over the service counter. “So is this where you get that poi stuff?”

  “I don’t go near it.” Kapuni pats his belly. “You know what the plastic surgeons take out when they do a liposuction? That’s pretty much what poi is.”

  “With us it’s Cheetos and Coca-Cola. We got fifteen-year-olds with diabetes already.” He can’t tell what half of the stuff listed is. “What should I get?”

  “Can’t go wrong with the basic plate lunch.”

  Harleigh and Kapuni and a couple Lummis from Washington State got good and lost in San Francisco one night, looking for their rental car for a solid hour before they figured out it had been towed. Kapuni declared that his doctor forbade him to walk uphill, and they had a hell of a time getting a taxi that could fit them all.

  “I just walked from the hotel.”

  “Brave man.”

  “I like to see what’s going on– you know– on foot. How do you feel about all this?” Harleigh waves his hand toward the outside.

  “Waikiki? I wish I had a percentage of it.”

  “But, like, culturally.”

  “It’s just not ours anymore. “

  An older lady comes and they order, Harleigh noticing that it’s ’70s R&B on the sound system instead of the Don Ho stuff in the hotel lobby.

  “Tough place to give up,” he says.

  Kapuni shrugs. “We didn’t have the massacres that your outfits on the mainland did, at least not with the white people. Mostly we were killing each other, district against district, island against island, till finally there was kind of an empire under Kamehameha– more like the Aztecs and Incas and that crowd. Only then the first white sailors come with their diseases and then the missionaries, who converted most of the royalty, and then the Americans just decided to take it– it was a steal more than a war.”

  “Same deal with my Three Nations. Not that there haven’t been some battles along the way.”

  “If the timing had been different we might have fought back, like the Maoris.”

  “And now–”

  “We’re five, six percent of the population. Filipinos and Japanese both got at least double that, and there’s haoles-”

  “The white Hawaiians.”

  “If you’re all white, you’re not a Hawaiian,” says Kapuni. “No matter how long your family’s been here. We managed to keep a few nice patches of land, our story is being told a lot better, but we don’t run anything.”

  The lunches come, Harleigh’s kalua pig plate with macaroni salad, rice and cole slaw and Kapuni’s shoyu ahi poke bowl, with a couple cold Longboard Lagers.

  “Looks like real people food.”

  “Can’t beat it.”

  “Where was it that your bunch brought the dancers to the conference?”

  “Seattle.”

  “That was something.”

  “Beautiful women wearing grass and flowers, what’s not to like?”

  “There’s just a vibe here,” says Harleigh, “and I may be way off, but you get the feeling things were never that desperate, just living day to day.”

  “No winter.”

  “For a start.”

  “Pretty good ownership and irrigation systems for farming, always surrounded by edible fish.”

  “So people were fighting–?”

  “Because people fight. Too many kings, too much testosterone, a warrior culture.” Kapuni shrugs. “No going back now. I heard you come into some kind of mineral bonanza.”

  “As a matter of fact I’m here on a business deal.”

  “Don’t tell me there’s oil under us.”

  “No.”

  “Cause that would be the end. I mean there’s days, maybe I been stuck in traffic where the H-1 meets the Pali for an hour, I look over toward what’s left of the Ko’olau Volcano and say ‘Let er rip, baby. Time to let the lava flow and start this sucker over from scratch.’”

  “But it’s dead, right?”

  “Dormant. Like my sex life at the moment.”

  Harleigh lifts his beer bottle to toast. “May we rise again.”

  “And again and again,” says Kapuni, clinking his bottle against Harleigh’s. “To the survivors.”

  By the time he gets back to the hotel, damp and beer-dozy, Connie is ready for action.

  “We’ve only got four days here,” she says. “I can’t believe I missed half of one.”

  “You needed to sleep.”

  She’s wearing a dress that she looks great in that he’s never seen before, probably bought it for the trip, and has the guidebook open.

  “I want to see this Iolani Palace.”

  “I need a nap.”

  Connie watches him peel his shirt off. “You’re leaving me alone?”

  “What caught up to you just caught up to me. Remember we got dinner downstairs.”

  “So what am I sposed to do?”

  He lays the laminated downtown map over her guidebook, points to Kalakua. “Bear left out of the hotel, you can look at all the stuff we’ll be able to afford a year from now.”

  “I don’t want to shop without Fawn.”

  “She’s not back?”

  “They went out somewhere. Her and
your partners in crime.”

  Harleigh gives her a look and steps back into the bathroom for a cool-off shower. “They give a tour of this hotel every couple hours. Lots of famous people stayed here.”

  “Elvis Presley?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Connie appears at the door just as he’s about to turn the water on.

  “None of this is real, is it?” she says. “It’s all just Disneyland.”

  The dream is one of those that keeps building on itself, one section opening up to another. There is a part of it that is him and Bunny underwater, only they can breathe there and twine together like river otters, and then there’s a battle, which he later figures comes from the big mural on a wall they passed of Hawaiian warriors chasing their enemies off a cliff, with Brent all greased-up and tattooed and being the chief in charge of the slaughter, and then it’s back home on the lake only it’s black and shiny and he’s running from dogs and mounted killers through the prairie grass, dogs yipping behind him as he sprints naked and bleeding and finds an opening in the earth to dive into and listen to them thunder past, safe for a moment till he realizes he’s in the crawlspace beneath some old house, some busted farmer’s lone outpost and the weeds that are growing up are growing up right through his body, which is only bones now with a little bit of blackened flesh attached, like after you chew through a plate of ribs.

  And then it’s time to wake the hell up.

  The restaurant downstairs is supposed to be the only five-star joint in Hawaii, which leads to a lot of jokes about how the only place with a star in Yellow Earth is the Texaco station out on 2 that went out of business but never took their sign down.

  Everybody is dressed up, with the women looking like a million bucks and Harleigh in what Connie calls his cattle baron outfit, drinking mai tais just to go along. The second one tastes pretty good. The room is nut brown with beautiful cane chairs and lots of carved panels and waiters in brown jackets and blue ties, their table overlooking the bay, with a line of torches alongside the edge of the beach. No Hawaiian shirts in here.

  “When they tapped into the deep stuff in the Eagle Ford,” says Brent, who has been telling old Texas wildcat stories, “oil was at ten dollars a barrel, gas under two bucks for a thousand cubic feet, and I’m working my tail off and still losing money.”

  “It was a nightmare,” Bunny adds. The table isn’t that small but somehow her leg is pushed up against Harleigh’s.

  “Then the prices start to shoot up, but I’ve got these service contracts, right, that I went into long-term so’s I could be sure to keep my people working. Lesson Number One– you got to stay as lean and mean as you can. We were out there running this equipment– some of it was like museum pieces, there was so much demand– and we’re still tied to our old rates.”

  “But you honored your agreements.”

  “Yeah, and the dinosaurs kept lugging their carcasses around when there wasn’t enough to feed them.”

  The menu is in both French and English, with a Menu Dégustation to start off and lots of little side dishes like squid ink sausage that Harleigh wouldn’t eat on a bet. He’s learned what abalone is and sniffed at Fawn’s caviar and ordered the duck, figuring there’s only so much you can do to a quacker in a restaurant kitchen.

  “You can learn a hell of a lot from the animal kingdom,” says Brent.

  “My stepfather,” says Fawn, who sits by Brent, looking five years older than she is and drinking some complicated cocktail without the rum, “is a big deal in the Speckled Eagle Clan.”

  “Right, right, your people have been doing it for centuries. And what it boils down to, whether it’s sports, business, whatever, is survival of the fittest.”

  “Dog eat dog.”

  “More like big dog eats little dog’s bowl of Purina.”

  They laugh. The waiter comes with another round of drinks, Harleigh not so sure he finished his last one. He’s always had this idea that the white people do so well because they figure to do it alone. No clan, no tribe to back them up, to share and share alike, just that hot focused eye on the prize all the time and let the slackers fall by the wayside. Hell of a way to live, but it’s how the game is run these days.

  “You’ve got to be opportunistic,” Brent continues. “Look for your opening. A wolf pack doesn’t just charge after a herd, they follow around the edges, pick their spot.”

  “Pick the right victim,” says Connie.

  “You’ve got it, you’ve got it. That’s why it’s so important that we’re setting ArrowFleet up at the very beginning of this Dakota play. When oil doubled and gas tripled in Texas, if I could have adjusted my prices to it, when there were operators begging for trucks–” Brent shakes his head. “Not that I didn’t make a killing, but it could have been a massacre.”

  They came up with the name together, Arrow for Harleigh’s connection with the Nations and Fleet for the idea that they’d be quick and efficient with their remuda of haulers and specialty vehicles. Brent has already showed him the logo he worked up on a computer program, and Harleigh can’t wait to see it rolling by on the side of one of their trucks.

  Brent raises his drink for a toast and the others follow suit.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “to the victors.”

  STAGE TWO

  STIMULATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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