O Beautiful

by Jung Yun

  The man on Elinor’s left, the one who’s been watching the fishing tournament, chuckles after Bud leaves, banging the door shut behind him. “Jesus Christ. I thought he’d never go home. Another boilermaker over here, Mitch.”

  Elinor would like another too, but it’s hard to justify it, not unless she can get something in exchange for her time. She looks at the man, who’s wearing a shirt with a Blackwell Trucking logo. “You know that guy?” she asks quietly.

  “We’re not friends, if that’s what you mean. He’s just always hanging around.”

  “He’s kind of a character, isn’t he?”

  “He’s kind of an asshole, that’s what he is. I just try to play dead until he leaves.” He turns and blinks at her dopily, his eyes baggy from a lack of sleep. “You did a pretty good job of playing dead yourself.”

  Elinor has had plenty of practice. The irony of her bar crawling days was that she went out seeking attention, collecting it like shiny gold coins, but she didn’t care for the conversations that came with it. Now, when men try to approach her, she usually responds with indifference or pretends that she can’t hear. If that doesn’t work, she’ll try feigning drunkenness or claiming that she doesn’t speak English, a tactic she’s not particularly proud of, but she’s learned that “no, thank you” and “not interested” sometimes aren’t enough. The man sitting next to her, however, clearly isn’t the persistent or aggressive type. He’s already staring at the television again.

  “I’m writing an article about Avery for a magazine. Would you mind answering some questions for me if I bought your next round?”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Just general ones—what it’s like to live and work in the oil patch, how the boom has affected you, things like that.”

  He gives her a careful once-over and then shrugs. “Alright, but you don’t have to buy me anything as long as you don’t make me drink alone.” He waves Mitch over again, ordering a second boilermaker for Elinor. She realizes he was paying a little attention to her after all, but chose to leave her be, which she appreciates.

  “So how long have you lived in Avery?” Elinor asks.

  “About six months.”

  She nods, encouraging him to continue.

  “Before that, I lived in Oregon for fifty-two years. That’s basically my whole life, except the four I spent in the army.”

  The man, whose name is Steve, doesn’t look like he’s fifty-six years old. He looks much older, like someone who should be nearing retirement, fishing for bass like the people on TV.

  “And what do you do for work around here?”

  “I haul sand. Bottoms up.”

  He raises his glass of whiskey at her and she raises hers at him. They drink and bang their empties on the bar at the same time, the sound loud and hollow and oddly satisfying. It occurs to her that she should stop getting boilermakers because now she’s stuck with another pint of beer in addition to the one she’s barely made a dent in. She takes a good long drink of the watery pilsner, trying to hurry the end of the glass along.

  12

  Steve tells her a story that every other man in the Bakken probably knows. In 2008, he lost his job as a warehouse supervisor. That was the first domino to fall. Then the others went down in rapid succession. He got behind on his car payments and credit cards. His adjustable-rate mortgage, which seemed like such a good deal at 1.75 percent, hit the five-year mark and ballooned to 8 percent. He cashed out his IRA, which left him with a tax bill he couldn’t repay. Then he borrowed money from relatives and emptied out his daughter’s college tuition account. When there was no one left to borrow from and the only people who ever called were creditors, Steve decided he had to do something more drastic than send out job applications that never resulted in a single interview. With four hundred dollars in his pocket, he drove to North Dakota, where he found work in less than a week. Now he makes over $100,000 a year hauling for Blackwell, more than he and his wife used to make combined back in Oregon. The only downside is that he hasn’t been able to visit his family, not once since he left.

  “I’m the oldest guy on the crew, but the lowest guy on the totem pole,” he explains, finishing off his second beer. “Since I was the last one hired, I have to take what my boss gives me. Holidays, third shifts, doubles, it doesn’t matter. And I can’t complain either because there’s at least a hundred guys arriving in town every day who’d jump at a job like this, you know—with housing and time and a half coming out your ears. They’re young guys too. They could probably drive all night on a single Red Bull.”

  “Have you ever considered moving your family here?”

  “Here?” He snorts. “What’s here? I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment in Avery, much less buy one of those new tract houses they’re slapping together and charging a fortune for. Plus, the camp that Blackwell’s got me in doesn’t allow women or children, not that I’d ever let my family live in a situation like that, even if they did. So my options are renting an RV and letting my wife and daughter sit in a tin can while I go to work, or just calling home every night.”

  As far as housing goes, Steve actually ranks among the fortunate. His employer-provided room is at one of the better-run man camps just outside Avery. Elinor has a tour scheduled at a sister facility run by the same company later this week. Unlike many newcomers, Steve isn’t living out of his car or trailer in a parking lot somewhere, dodging cops and tow trucks now that there’s a town-wide ban on overnight street parking. She’s beginning to understand why the housing shortage makes it hard to move to Avery with a wife or a girlfriend, much less kids. She scrawls a possibility in her notebook. Housing insecurity → gender imbalance?

  “You want to see a picture of my family?” Steve asks. He doesn’t wait for a response before opening his wallet to a photo of him, flanked by his wife and daughter at Mount Rushmore.

  Elinor leans in for a better look. Somewhere, she knows there’s a picture of her family just like this, posing under the four presidents like every other tourist. Her father refused to put it in an album or frame because of the thumb—a big orange blotch on the upper left corner, partially obscuring George Washington’s head. Ed lamented it for years, frustrated that the stranger he’d entrusted his camera to had been so careless. Still, it was the rare family photo that captured all of them smiling and looking in the same direction, seemingly happy to be together.

  That was the summer they hitched up the trailer and went to South Dakota, touring the Badlands and the Black Hills for the first time. Fresh from a promotion and pay bump to technical sergeant, Ed sprang for extras that he typically wouldn’t. Walking tours through underground caverns glittering with fool’s gold. Paddleboat rides in Custer State Park. Tickets to Reptile Gardens, where his favorite trick was hissing in Nami’s ear while she examined the snakes and lizards. No matter how many times he snuck up on her, Nami would jump and chase him around the reptile cages, a sight that made Elinor and her sister laugh until they cried. It was a relief to see their parents enjoying each other’s company for a change.

  At home, Ed often worried out loud about Nami’s inability to make friends with the other wives on the base. He had no patience for her protests about the way they treated her, like an afterthought at best, an alien at worst. Ed was an engineer by training, someone who believed that every problem could be fixed. If Nami complained that no one talked to her at a holiday party, he told her to keep working on her English. If she mentioned that the Korean food she brought to a potluck went untouched, he suggested learning more “American” recipes instead. Fitting in required effort, he insisted, as if the fault for Nami’s isolation was solely her own. Elinor wasn’t sure what she disliked more: the way her parents bickered and argued about the people around them, or the long hours and occasional days after an argument when they barely spoke at all. It was obvious that living in Marlow made them both unhappy—so much so that she often begged her father to hitch up the trailer again and take them somewhere
else.

  “So … are you alright?” Steve asks.

  She sets his wallet on the bar, embarrassed that she picked it up in the first place. “Sorry. I was just thinking about all the road trips we used to take when I was a kid.”

  “You been to Mount Rushmore?”

  She nods.

  “Where else did you go?”

  She’s tempted to ask where didn’t they go? Ed’s parents believed in taking one good family vacation a year, no matter how lean the times. He made it a priority to carry on the tradition, playing the role of tour guide for his own family every summer. Elinor rattles off the places that first come to mind—Teddy Roosevelt National Park, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, the Grand Tetons, Devils Tower, Pikes Peak. Steve adds a “yup” after all the sights he’s also visited, which is most of them.

  “You know, this is the longest my wife and I have ever been apart since we got married. Thirty-eight years we’ve been together—can you believe that?” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s hard going from that to being alone all the time, to being lonely.” He snaps his wallet shut. “Do me a favor, will you? Don’t write that I was getting all sentimental or anything that makes me sound stupid, okay?”

  “I wouldn’t,” she says, although she’s touched by the sight of someone who misses his family so much. She needed to meet a man like Steve, a good one.

  Earlier that evening, before Richard called, she was thinking about husbands, the kind she often saw on the news. When a woman went missing, when a woman turned up dead, the husband was almost always to blame. She wants to know how the police decided that Leanne Lowell’s husband had nothing to do with her disappearance. She wants to know why he never looked sufficiently distraught on TV. There were video clips of him online doing the things that people in his situation usually do: begging for his wife’s safe return, announcing a reward for information leading to her recovery, thanking all the volunteers who helped the police search. She watched every video she could find, replaying them multiple times, and not once did Shane Foster seem upset.

  When her mother ran off, there were four long days when no one knew what had happened to her. Elinor, who was twelve at the time, still remembers how terrified her father looked during this period, like he was staring into a funnel cloud, waiting for the tornado that would eventually carry their town off into the sky. “My wife is gone. My wife!” he’d shout at anyone who would listen—the police, his relatives, the random coworkers who called to check in. Ed never referred to her by name during these conversations. Even back then, Elinor noticed. Nami was just his wife, the quiet beauty he’d brought back from Korea for the purposes of taking care of his home and family. After he received her letter, telling him she no longer wanted to be married, the terror of those days settled deep into his skin, twisting his expression into a permanent state of rage. This is what bothers her about Leanne’s husband. A man in his situation—he should have been wearing it on his face.

  “So, how long do you think you’ll stay in Avery?” she asks.

  The question seems to depress him. “God, I hope not much longer.” Steve pauses, scratching at a sticker from an apple or banana that someone stuck to the bar. “Actually, don’t put that in there either. My boss doesn’t strike me as someone who can read the back of a box of cereal, but just in case, it’s probably better to say that I’ll stay as long as I’ve got a good job.… Between you and me though, I’m hoping another nine months, maybe a year at the most.”

  “Even though the money’s good here?”

  Steve shrugs. “A lot of guys who come to the Bakken, they crapped out everywhere else and this is kind of their last chance at making something of themselves. That guy who was in here before? Bud? He’s a good example. I think he’s got at least two or three ex-wives and a bunch of near-grown children, but if he was on fire, it doesn’t sound like any of them would bother handing him a glass of water. That’s how much he screwed up. It’s not like that with me though. I’ve got a family and a home I want to get back to, so the second I have enough money to pay off our debts and put a little extra aside, I’m gone. I’d rather be middle-class in Oregon than rich in this hellhole.” He glances at the clock hanging above the top shelf of the bar. It has a green football field for a face and a ball swinging back and forth instead of a pendulum. “Speaking of, I better get going. I’ve got a double starting in the morning.”

  It’s just after midnight, longer than Elinor intended to be out. She still has Alan Denny’s interview to transcribe, and now these notes too, but she doesn’t regret the time she spent here. It feels good to finally have an interview of her own under her belt. She flips through her notes, making sure there’s nothing she wants to follow up on before he leaves.

  “Would you mind giving me your phone number?” She turns to a blank page. “I probably won’t need to contact you again, but a fact-checker might.”

  Steve massages the palm of his hand before taking the pencil. The numbers he scrawls are large and arthritic. He crosses out something that looks like an eight and starts again, making a shaky three. Mitch watches them with interest, the same way he’s been watching them for the past hour.

  “Can I settle up over here?” Steve waves two twenties at him.

  “Oh, no. Let me.”

  Mitch walks over and takes Steve’s money even though Elinor is holding out her card. She doesn’t understand why he’s been so unpleasant to her all night. Bartenders are usually much friendlier toward her, male ones especially. She frowns at him, not caring if he catches her reflection in the mirror. Perhaps it’s the light or the angle he’s standing at, but for the first time, Elinor notices Mitch’s resemblance to one of the football players on the wall. As he makes change at the register, she glances back and forth between him and the photos, all of which are of him, she realizes. The mural outside the entrance—that was him too.

  Steve must notice her noticing because he points at a headshot of a clean-shaven young man in a maroon jersey. “Mitch played for Montana when he was in college. Number thirty-nine, defensive end. The great Mitch Swift. His dad dedicated this whole place to him.” His phone starts to vibrate on the bar and a woman’s smiling face appears on the screen. He picks up immediately. “Oh, hi, honey. I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier. You’ll never guess—I’ve been talking to a reporter.” He slides off his stool and waves goodbye.

  She’s not certain what to make of Mitch’s expression once they’re alone. He doesn’t seem proud now that she knows what he used to be, like most ex–football players would. He also doesn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed to be tending bar in a place that was clearly designed as a shrine to what he used to be, but no longer is. If anything, he just looks worried.

  “So, you planning on coming back here again?” he asks.

  “Why? Would you actually want me to?”

  She meant this as a lighthearted jab—something to counteract this strange, unfriendly man’s mood. But Mitch doesn’t even crack a smile.

  “We don’t get a lot of women in here,” he says. “It’s a sports bar, you know.”

  She glances around. The guys who were playing pool when she arrived are gone now. Bud and Steve too. He’s served a total of five people, including her, during the past hour and a half. “Maybe you’d have more customers if more women came around.”

  “Yeah, well…” He pauses. “I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  She’s bewildered at first, as if he just told a joke that sailed straight over her head. But then she realizes he’s serious. Thousands of itinerant men in this town and he thinks she’s the one who’s going to cause problems for him. She grabs her card from the bar and walks out as her cheeks begin to bloom with the heat of an unpleasant teenage memory. Her father used to call her trouble. Just like your mother, he said. Trouble, whore, slut, bitch.

  13

  In the morning, there’s a voice mail waiting for her. Elinor assumes it’s from her sister again, but when she pla
ys it back, all she hears is static—a long, crackling stretch that makes her think the entire message might be nothing more than noise.

  “Do you hear that annoying buzz?” An unfamiliar woman’s voice cuts in. “Sorry. I’m not sure if you’re getting it on your end. Anyway, Alumni Affairs gave me your number, so I thought I’d try calling too, in case you’re using a different email address these days. Please get back to me when you can? I’d really appreciate it. Cheers.”

  It’s the “cheers” that helps Elinor identify the caller, more so than her voice or the mention of an alumni office. Kathryn Tasso always signed off her emails and said goodbye this way in grad school, an odd affectation given that she wasn’t English and she didn’t drink. Elinor turns on the light above her bed and scrolls through her recent calls to see when the message arrived. 5:50 a.m. Even if Kathryn had assumed they were both on East Coast time, she called at 6:50—too early to contact anyone except a family member or very close friend.

  Elinor covers her face with a pillow, trying to block out the irritating memory of “if you think about it,” a phrase Kathryn often said in class before critiquing someone’s work in progress.

  If you think about it, that angle’s already been done before.

  If you think about it, you’re framing this from management’s perspective, not the union’s.

  If you think about it, the nurse was the only person who actually made that piece interesting.

  It wasn’t that Elinor minded her classmates’ feedback. She understood that that was what they were supposed to do—help each other see and write their stories better. But she still found it grating, the way Kathryn always commented on her drafts like an authority figure rather than just another student. There was also something about her tone, a cross between astonishment and disappointment, as if she’d been expecting or even hoping that Elinor’s work would be terrible.