by Jung Yun
“When construction’s finished, people who live on this side of the reservation will have one centralized location for everything, absolutely everything! Social services, veteran’s services, a health station … Imagine the convenience! You’ll be able to pay a fine in one building, get your kidney dialysis in another, and then pick up your food package before you leave.”
The life that Randy just described—in debt to the tribe, in need of dialysis, dependent on a monthly box of government peanut butter and shelf-stable milk—seems like a sad one, no matter how new or modern the buildings that house these services are. But perhaps he’s just a realist. Randy is two years into his third elected term in office, voted in by a landslide each time. He knows his people. He knows how some of them have to live.
A few minutes into the conversation, Shawnalee returns from the kitchenette. “Here,” she says, depositing a Styrofoam cup on the desk.
Elinor thanks her and takes a sip of the inky coffee, which is clearly instant. She can feel the grit of undissolved crystals on her tongue. The taste is unpleasant but the caffeine momentarily revives her. “And how would you like me to address you, miss?”
Randy seems taken aback by the question. “Oh, this is Shawnalee Turner Whitebush. She’s my assistant, my jack-of-all trades. Jill-of-all trades, actually. She won’t say much while you’re here. She just keeps me organized so I always know where I’m going.”
Shawnalee flicks her eyes up at the ceiling and quickly looks away. Elinor wonders if he’s accurately describing her duties or obliquely telling his young assistant to keep quiet during the interview. Whatever annoyance she just saw, it’s gone before she knows it. Randy continues talking about the boom, how it’s transforming the reservation one family at a time. Even in her addled state, it doesn’t take long to understand that the chairman of the Mahua Nation is pro-oil. It also takes only a brief sweep of his person to see that he’s probably profited from it in some complicated way. He’s wearing a two-tone gold watch that she’s almost certain is a Rolex and an enormous ring on his right pinky with a square-cut diamond in the center, as large as the diamonds she sees on newly engaged women after bonus season on Wall Street. Within arm’s reach, Randy has three newer model iPhones in different-colored cases. She imagines one is for personal, the other for tribal business, and the other, she’s not sure what.
“The old office,” he continues, “wasn’t much bigger than three of these trailers put together, and it had black mold everywhere. Black mold! The stuff that gets in your lungs. And that’s just what we had to live with because there wasn’t any money to fix it, to really fix it the way it needed to be fixed. So every six months or so, a couple of volunteers would open all the windows and clean the walls with bleach, just so it wouldn’t take over the place, but it always came back. That’s why we moved out here to this trailer during construction. Usually, somebody from Indian Affairs would be like, ‘Hell, no. There’s not any budget for that.’ But because of all the oil money we’re bringing in, we don’t have to settle, which is how we always lived before, settling for whatever we got, settling for ‘good enough’ or ‘better than nothing’ because that’s all we had.”
Elinor is taking notes as fast as she can, her hand cramping as she scribbles. She doesn’t have the wherewithal to summarize or abbreviate like she usually does. Her brain simply can’t process more than it already is. Instead, she writes with a slavish fidelity, which she realizes must look odd to Randy, or perhaps oddly complimentary. When she finishes taking down his last sentence, she notices that he’s staring at her notebook, smiling.
“You want a tour of the new office building?” he asks. And then, without waiting for an answer, he turns to an unsmiling Shawnalee and says, “Come on. Let’s give her the grand tour.”
27
The hard hat she’s wearing is too big for her. She has to hold it up with two fingers so it doesn’t slide down over her eyes. Despite this, it’s not her hat that she’s most preoccupied by. It’s Randy’s. He has a bright orange one with the words THE CHAIRMAN printed on the front and back in oversize, boldface letters. It’s an odd choice for someone who claims not to stand on ceremony.
With or without the personalized hat, everyone on the construction site seems to know him already. He slaps backs and shakes hands as he passes, asking guys about their girlfriends and what they did last weekend and whether they finally bought the truck they’ve had their eye on. He reminds her of Richard working the crowd at a party, but even more effortless, which she didn’t think was possible. All activity comes to a halt as he nears, which is a relief. The noise level on the site is punishing. Her ill-fitting hard hat only serves to amplify it. She continues pushing up on the edge every few seconds until Shawnalee sighs and grabs the hat from her head. With two quick tugs of the plastic strap inside, she adjusts the fit and offers it back to her. She doesn’t say “you’re welcome” when Elinor tries to thank her.
At the tallest of the six buildings, the three of them climb aboard a large temporary construction elevator, operated by a young man who introduces himself as Denton Lemarie. He and Randy talk amiably as the platform rises, seemingly unbothered by the rickety metallic noises coming from the elevator’s hydraulics or the thin walls separating them from certain death below. Elinor stands in the corner, making herself as small as possible. She tries not to watch as they climb, higher and higher, but she can’t help herself. Her rental car, parked in the lot below, shrinks to the size of a postage stamp; the road she drove along thins to the width of a twig.
At one point, she glances over at Shawnalee, who seems as uncomfortable as she is. Worry lines punctuate her mouth and dimple the space between her eyebrows. Elinor wonders how old she is—twenty-five? Maybe thirty, at most? Too young for lines that deep. When their eyes meet, Elinor offers her a weak smile. Shawnalee quickly looks away and Elinor wonders what’s wrong with her, what happened during her short lifetime that made her so hard. She wishes she could get her alone for a few minutes, without Randy and his likable but outsize personality taking up all the available oxygen.
The elevator stops on the eighth floor, and Denton—whom Randy is already referring to amiably as “Dent”—slides open the accordion doors and lets them off.
“You be sure to give me a call, okay?” Randy tucks his business card into the young man’s shirt pocket.
“I will, thanks. You all be careful up here—it’s windy today.”
Randy steps off the platform, crossing a three-inch gap between the elevator and the building. Elinor closes her eyes and takes a deep breath as she follows.
“Any guesses how much that boy is making an hour?” he asks when she catches up.
She shakes her head, nauseous again.
“Twenty-six dollars.”
“That’s good, right?”
“A couple years ago, it’d be unheard of. Completely unheard of for a Mahua boy, not even twenty years old yet, making that kind of money. But he’s reliable, from what I hear. That’s why I told him to call me. He could do better than construction, better than twenty-six bucks an hour. Can you believe that?” He shakes his head, chuckling. “Unemployment on the reservation used to be around forty percent before the boom. Now there’s more jobs than people, so it’s the workers who have the advantage for once, not the other way around.”
Elinor trails after Randy and Shawnalee as they walk near the edge of the roof. There’s no barrier to keep them from falling off, not even a thin stretch of hazard tape. She wishes they’d move closer to the center, safe from the gusting wind. Randy, however, seems too excited to register any sense of danger. He keeps pointing at things as they pass. A huge battery of oil tanks, a half-dozen rigs, construction sites, a road-widening project. Farther off in the distance is Avery, which Elinor hasn’t seen from this perspective before. It’s an ugly sprawl of development, tallest in the center with two extensions on each side that resemble arms. It’s not quite a mid-rise city yet, but it will be soon, which is shocki
ng—the possibility that what used to be a small town might be an actual city one day, that oil did all of this.
“For once,” Randy says with an air of satisfaction, “for once, my people aren’t being left behind.”
There are details that complicate the story he’s telling. Everything she’s read suggests that the problems people complain about in Avery are exponentially worse here. Violent crime on the reservation is up; meth and heroin arrests are up; domestic violence incidents, sexual assaults, overdoses—every indicator is up, probably because every indicator on the North Fork was up, long before the boom even began. Elinor wonders if the oil field jobs are really worth all the trouble they bring and whether the Mahua can even get the highest-paying ones, or if they simply have more access to the jobs that white men used to consider “good.” Despite reports of companies offering lower royalties and signing bonuses for leases on the reservation, she suspects that Randy is too much of a cheerleader for oil to give her a straight answer. Still, she knows she has to try.
“Are there any downsides to all this development? Like the crime, maybe?”
He stops walking and looks over his shoulder at her, smiling. “You know much about policing on reservations, miss?”
“No,” she admits. “Probably not as much as I should.”
“Well, we have about a million acres of land on the North Fork and not enough tribal police to cover them all, never have. And because this is sovereign land, our police and your police are different. Outsiders commit crimes here, but our police can’t touch them. So let’s say a Mahua girl gets raped on the reservation by a white man, which we know happens from time to time. Because he’s white, the tribal courts don’t have any authority and the Feds tend not to prioritize the cases involving us. So sure, there’s more crime because there’s more people. That’s just simple math. But the complicated math—the geometry, the calculus, whatever it is that you folks study—the complicated math is that the systems around here were broken long before the boom started. They’ve been broken pretty much since the days of Columbus.”
Elinor nods, hoping her recorder caught all that despite the wind. She pushes the hair out of her face and continues following Randy and Shawnalee, mentally replaying the words “our police and your police” and “whatever it is that you that folks study.” She doesn’t feel any whiter than he is; she never has. But it’s obvious that Randy doesn’t think about her in terms of how they’re similar. Only how they’re different. She can’t fault him for this, not when she’s guilty of doing the same thing. All those years she lived in Marlow, she was either teasing the Mahua girls like her white classmates or looking right past them as if they didn’t exist.
At the far edge of the building, he stops and raises his arms out in front of him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
The land is desertlike, as if it’s been cleared of anything green or living. What’s left is a devastated landscape, dotted with amber flares that stretch all the way from Kittery to the horizon. Elinor doesn’t see any beauty here, but she’s not Randy. She can’t judge what looks like opportunity to him. She turns around in a circle, stopping when she notices a sprawling building with a slate-gray roof—bigger than any other building in the area except the one they’re standing on.
“That’s our casino,” Randy says. “You want to head over there for some lunch? They’ve got the best buffet in the area.”
It’s just past noon, according to Elinor’s watch. She doesn’t know if she can hold down solid food right now, but she’s only halfway through Richard’s list of questions. Given what it took to get here, she might as well ask them all.
“If you have time, sure.”
“But you have all those contracts to sign,” Shawnalee says. “And then that conference call at two.”
Randy waves her off. “Doesn’t take more than a few minutes to sign contracts. Besides, if we’re giving our visitor here the full tour, we can’t skip the casino.”
They return to the ground level of the building, passing the same commotion they walked through earlier. A trio of men call Randy over, so he excuses himself and leaves Elinor and Shawnalee in a corner, watching someone wield a metal sander that shoots sparks through the air.
“So…” Elinor says, but her voice is drowned out by someone else using a table saw. She starts again, almost shouting now. “How long have you been working with Randy?”
“Going on five years,” Shawnalee shouts back.
“He seems to rely on you a lot.”
Shawnalee says nothing. It’s unclear if she even heard.
Randy’s comment about incidents of rape on the reservation reminds her that Leanne was last seen here. It’s not a great leap to imagine that something like this probably happened to her too. She knows that her disappearance has no place in the article, but she can’t help herself. She feels the need to ask.
“A couple years ago, there was a woman from Avery who went missing while she was out running. Some witnesses said they saw her here, on the reservation. Do you happen to remember that case?”
“Is this for the interview, or are you just making small talk?”
The man with the saw stops sanding, and suddenly Elinor can hear her thoughts again. However curt and unpleasant Shawnalee has been since her arrival, she’s still surprised by her reaction to the question.
“I was just curious … Small talk, I guess.”
Shawnalee’s eyes flick toward at the ceiling, the same way they did earlier when she could barely manage to contain her irritation. “Listen,” she says sharply, “when Randy comes back, I think you should tell him you changed your mind about lunch.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t need to spend any more time with you than we already have.”
Despite the rough start, Elinor thought the interview with Randy was going fine. Well, even. But now the hostility she’s felt all morning from Shawnalee has finally broken out of its lower register. “I don’t understand. I apologized for being late—”
“God, you must think we’re so stupid.”
“What? What are you even talking about?”
“Car trouble.” Shawnalee laughs, but it’s obvious that she’s not laughing at the thought of something funny. “You know I’ve lived on this reservation my entire life, right?”
A workman passes, carrying a long metal beam that forces both of them to step back. Elinor doesn’t know why she’s asking.
“And?”
“And you don’t seem to understand how many people around here drink themselves to death. But I do, so I can tell when someone’s hungover, okay? You still have last night’s liquor on your breath. And now you come stumbling in, two hours late, asking about what? The one white lady from Avery who went missing like two years ago? Do you even know how many Mahua women we’ve lost?”
Randy returns from his conversation with some newfound bounce in his step. “Alright.” He claps his hands loudly, rubbing them together. “So who’s hungry?” He’s happy about something, so happy that he starts toward the exit without them, not noticing how slow Elinor and Shawnalee are to follow.
28
The River Bend is an older casino, originally built in the mid-nineties. Now the tribe is expanding the facilities. Adding a section for more one- and five-dollar slots. Adding another section for private card games. The 210-bed hotel is booked solid through Christmas, so they can’t update any of the guest rooms yet, but they will, they will, Randy says, as if to remind himself of one more thing that needs to happen on his watch. He explains all of this as they walk through the casino’s main floor, with its colorful lights and sounds coming from every direction. Bells, trills, music. The clatter of coins, both real and fake. Elinor tries to keep up and pay attention, but the only words she can really hear are Shawnalee’s. God, you must think we’re so stupid. She’s still trying to figure out how to excuse herself from lunch, but she worries that she’ll offend Randy, who doesn’t seem like the type to take yes, then
no for an answer.
The restaurant at the casino is called the Golden Fork. Long before they reach its double doors, signs tacked to stanchions advertise the $8.99 lunch buffet as the best deal in the Bakken. Although there’s a line at the entrance, Randy sweeps right past it, winking at the pretty young hostess as he heads toward the only empty booth in the dining room, a horseshoe-shaped one that could seat a group at least twice their size. Elinor rubs her eyes. The carpets and seat cushions are all done up in swirling gold paisley, a pattern that’s hard to look at for long. The smell of the food and the brightness of the overhead fluorescents make her want to crawl out on all fours, and just the thought of this shames her, amplifying the words that she’s already hearing on a loop. God, you must think we’re so stupid.
The truth, she decides, is probably better than any excuse.
“I’m so sorry, but I’m not feeling well. I think, maybe, I should go back to my hotel…”
“Well, sit down.” Randy all but pushes her into the booth and slides in beside her. “Sit down if you’re not feeling good. Shawnalee, go get her a Coke from that soda machine over there, will you? Actually, get her a ginger ale instead.”
She doesn’t want to see the expression on Shawnalee’s face as she’s once again dispatched for a beverage on her behalf. She stares at her hands, which are resting on the table, her fingers interlaced to prevent them from shaking. She’s too old to be this hungover, too old to not remember large swaths of the night before. The last time she felt this bad, she woke up with a tattoo on her left forearm. Five inches tall by four inches wide, itchy and inflamed because she’d torn off the plastic wrap while she slept. Absolutely no memory of getting the work done. No memory of the pain, even. By that point, Elinor had been circling the drain of her modeling career for a while, booking those embarrassing jobs for the sewing pattern company that paid too well to turn down. At first, she assumed that someone could just airbrush the tattoo out in post-production, but it wasn’t that simple. People looked at her differently because of it.
