The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  Still, in a small town like Evanston, it didn’t take long for the bailiffs to catch up with Colton and explain to him that good intentions are the way straight to hell, or at least straight to a cell-bed in the city lockup. Kaylee had always told her children, “You land in jail and you better not call me.” So Colton sat on his hands for a night but in the end he phoned his mother and of course she bailed him out and Colton was a pawning fool to pay her back—he pawned his DVD and his gun collection, his cowboy boots, and half of everything else he owned—and he told Cody that he was very sorry to leave him at a time like this, when Cody was so obviously close to the big buckle, but he had to give up rodeo running and start being a man.

  And the day after that Colton signed up for the safety talk and the piss test and he signed the piece of paper saying he’d read the manual about this, that, and whatever else and he went out on the rigs down in Utah where Bill and Preston were drilling and he worked as many hours and as fast as they’d let him to make it up and jumping around like a frog on a hot rock is how he slipped one day a year into it and broke his foot, which is how patterns repeat, kind of, because Colton’s grandfather (Bill’s father) had broken his foot on a rig near Riverton pretty near fifty years earlier, which was how Bill came to be born in a hospital just down the corridor from where his father lay with his foot in a cast. Except back in those days the drilling companies didn’t have any kind of safety policy to speak of, so as soon as he could walk again, old man Bryant was back on the rigs.

  Whereas Colton…Well, he wasn’t fired exactly, but the drilling company was getting pretty paranoid about their accident record in these careful days and boys falling off rigs weren’t how they like to report things. And Colton, like his father and his brother and every other roughneck on these patches, was nothing more than a part-time laborer, so once his foot was healed he was a no-time laborer. Jake was in the Upper Green River Valley by then, working on the new gas fields as a flow tester, so Colton packed up and moved up north to work with Jake almost exactly where he and Cody had been camping that magical night after the Pinedale Rodeo when Colton had wished on star after falling star that he would grow up to be exactly like his father.

  21

  ANATOMY OF AN OIL PATCH

  Upper Green River Valley

  It’s hard to explain how many different ways of being on an oil patch there are because until you’ve worked out on the patch for a while, the various positions sound unintelligible, like the navigational waters on the sea might sound to someone who has never been a sailor—drilling location NWSE Section 35, Township 32 N, Range 109W, for example, would mean that a rig was about twenty miles southeast of Pinedale, Wyoming, but how would you know that without learning it in your bones and blood?

  And the names of the various parts of the rigs are like a ship too, mysterious to the layperson—stabbing basket, draw works, beaver slide, drilling floor, v-door, cellar. And the rigs are manned like ships, in back-to-back twelve-hour shifts by roughnecks, five or six per crew, serious in boiler suits and military-looking boots and hard hats and safety glasses as if the thing might sink unless its drill is being driven relentlessly into the ground.

  Roughneck positions sound like characters in a deck of tarot cards: the tool pusher, the floor hand, the derrick hand, the driller, the motor hand, the directional driller, the chain hand. These men—mostly men, the very occasional woman—who appear as tiny dots against the great swell of land and the massive intrusion of a rig, look brave and competent and powerfully equipped. And yet, with the big sky thrown around their heads and with such an unwilling earth beneath their feet (you can hear the ground’s reluctance to be drilled from a mile off )—even with God and the president of the United States on their sides—it’s hard to see how they can possibly win whatever fight it is they’ve taken on.

  And beyond the rigs there are roustabouts, who service the rigs and wells and keep the oil field running. And beyond the oil patch itself are the CEOs and managers, PR men and politicians, who negotiate and strategize in offices and back rooms far from the noise and rotten-egg smell of the real work. And all the time, the inconvenient biology of human bodies creating logistical and law enforcement challenges for the communities that host the oil-field workers—food and porta-potties, beds and trailers, drugs and sex—because the humans involved in the process of oil drilling aren’t always robotic extensions of their drill bits.

  Since it’s nothing new, there is a name for the depression and lawlessness that comes to communities that have been blessed with the dubious gift of nearby mineral wealth: Gillette syndrome. The psychologist ElDean Kohrs coined the term in the 1970s and popularized it in a paper entitled “Social Consequences of Boom Growth in Wyoming,” in which he describes the ills then being visited upon the coal town of Gillette, Wyoming. A boomtown, he explained, experiences an increase in crime, drug use, alcoholism, violence, and cost of living, and a decrease in just about everything good except, arguably, money.

  But identifying your history doesn’t stop you from repeating it, so if you were to look at a map of Wyoming, circa 2007, and if that map showed all the mineral leases in the state as a red dot, the map would show up as if drenched in blood. And to stanch the flow of carelessness, they have had to build a new fifty-bed jail, a new courthouse, a new drug rehab center in the Upper Green River Valley. Who else to cater to all the new methamphetamine addicts, speeding to stay on top of twelve-, eighteen-, twenty-hour shifts, or speeding to keep the stillness of the high plains from stalling them to death? And still you can’t police the panic of a boom from rotting the soul out of a place because somewhere in the throes of an energy boom isn’t so different from a person in the throes of addiction: there’s the denial that things are out of control; there’s the sleeplessness and moral carelessness, and the fact that you know that you’re doing something that isn’t good for you, but you just can’t stop.

  Oil company representatives attend oil and gas lease auctions in Cheyenne once every two or three months. The successful bidder, the oil company (Ultra Petroleum, say, or Exxon), then hires a drilling company (Nabors or Patterson-UTI, for example) to drill a well fifteen thousand feet into the ground. After that the oil companies hire hydraulic fracturing crews (Halliburton or Schlumberger) to detonate explosions under the ground, which releases the gas, which the oil companies then pipe out of this oil patch to (in this case) California, mostly.

  Clusters of metal signs swing in the wind next to gravel road junctions all over the high plains of Wyoming, making a squeaking, lonesome noise, like children’s swings in an empty playground. The signs give the name of the drilling company and the rigs’ numbers so that roustabouts and hotshotters (people who rush spare parts to rigs so that the drilling never has to stop), ambulance crews or the sheriff, drug testers or porta-potty cleaners can easily find their way to a particular location—Patterson-UTI 455 would mean that a well is being drilled by Patterson-UTI on rig 455.

  A single well location scrapes up about seven acres of earth and sagebrush to accommodate a rig, flowback pit, the trailers and vehicles. Then there are compressor stations the size of two or three football fields that condense the gas so that it can be piped out of state, and of course roads must be built across the high plains. And man camps erected to shelter the oil-field workers in their twelve hours away from the rig—rows and rows of trailers with single beds in tiny cubicles lined up across the sage like a kind of high-altitude, open-air prison or army camp.

  Taken from the air, this spread of wells across the state translates as if the high plains are experiencing contagious balding, clumps of ground cover falling out and vaporizing. And what is done out here is indelible. You can still see, as if their wheels creaked to the coast only yesterday, where wagons crossed here in the 1870s. And now, on top of the Oregon Trail (sometimes directly on top of it), here is our new history of panic and greed, of loss and carelessness, etched like an accusation for the future to read. One scar over another. Wound upon wo
und.

  Picture an oil patch, then, such as the one created on the high plains of the Upper Green River Valley below the witnessing bulk of the Wind River Mountains and spilling onto the foothills of the Wyoming Range. It is a rolling sea of sage, scraped up and graveled over, humming with machinery and engines, and men and women in hard hats made insignificant by the proximity of the rigs, hundreds of feet high. This oil patch is an accident of politics and war, high fuel prices and Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of wells in the Gulf. It’s a place of repetitive, machine-powered tedium, a methodical siege interspersed with quick, sometimes fatal violence. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in blowing sideways ice and snow or the cremating heat of summer, the drilling goes on and on and on spinning through the earth. All through the fall and spring migration of antelope and mule deer, all through the sage grouse mating season, all through the haying season, nonstop through the dead of winter. Steady as a heartbeat. Unstoppable. Mandated.

  On and on and on.

  22

  FLOW TESTING

  Upper Green River Valley

  Colton is damn near bored to death flow testing because flow testing is what comes once the rig has already drilled the hole and moved on. Flow testing means a lot of sitting around in a trailer on location—twelve, eighteen hours at a time, however long it takes is how long it takes—staring out the window at the over-world of an oil patch while Halliburton or Schlumberger blow up the underworld to get at the gas. And then the frac crews’ explosions, which shake the windows in the ranch houses on the edge of the oil field, release a pocket of gas and suddenly it’s all fireballs and action stations for the flow testing crews. Colton likes that part of it. He just doesn’t like the hours and hours of waiting in between. And most of all he doesn’t like flow testing because flow testing isn’t drilling. And working on a rig is all Colton wants to do, because that’s the only way he can get to be exactly like Bill.

  Colton’s on the edge of the flare pit now stamping out a few flames that have escaped. The high plains burn dryly, sending up the scent of scorched sage, powerfully minty. In the flare pit, the fire measures the width of a small house and is taller than a man. Colton’s a small dancing figure in its glare, like some kind of spirit-man, worshipping. Jake looks at him and Colton’s wild, ancient-looking dance. “Holy crap, Colt,” Jake says.

  “Whee-haw,” says Colton leaping on top of the stray fingers of fire. He waggles his hips and spins in a circle and the flames lick his boots.

  But he gets the fire put out and the flow testing crew gets the pipe sealed off to harness that particular pocket of gas, and then it’s back to waiting again while the frac crew blows up another layer of earth, blasting fine particles of sand deep into the fractures they create to prop open the tiny, tight chambers that hold the gas. And Colton is bored again.

  So with his first couple of paychecks, Colton buys an entertainment center the size of a small Radio Shack showroom. The way Jake tells it, they pull up to the location one day and Colton says, “Hold on, boys, just need to get myself situated.” And he’s got a full-size television with a twenty-seven-inch screen, a home entertainment unit, a luggage bag full of games and DVDs, every version of Game Boy known to man, the full-size steering device to go with it, Nintendo, Pokémon, Shrek, Toy Story, you name it. Colton says, “Man I ain’t afraid of much, but I’m scared to death of boredom.”

  Then the flare pit goes up in a fireball and the flow testing crew piles out with Colton up in the lead and he’s laughing, “He-he-he.”

  “What you got now?” says Jake.

  “Marshmallows,” says Colton, emptying out one pocket and showing Jake half a bag. “For roasting.”

  “For the love of crap, Colt.”

  “And a hot dog,” says Colton, pulling a bag out of the other pocket.

  “Are you freakin’ kiddin’ me?”

  “Don’t knock it till you tried it.”

  “You ain’t thinking of roasting those on gas?”

  “Yep.”

  “Man, it’s pretty nasty stuff,” says Jake, although he says this with the tenderness of a trainer for a promising if unpredictable horse because Jake loves gas as intimately as if it were something living, with a mind of its own. He knows how it behaves underground. He understands gas above ground too, the way it ignites in the flare pit, how it is compressed and piped out of here down to Opal and from there to California. He can tell a high-producing well from one that will disappoint and he knows good gas from the kind that can turn nasty on a person. Before Colton started working with him, Jake was hit once by a faceful of sour gas that knocked him flat on his back and shut out his lights for a few moments and that would have been the end for Jake, except that he was following the buddy system and a coworker pulled him clear of the flume.

  He tells Colton now, “This gas can most certainly be horrible.”

  But Colton is determined. “Come on, it’s just fire.” He has a hot dog on the end of one fork and a marshmallow on the end of another. “Here,” he says to Jake, “have the first bite. How bad can it be? Go on, eat it. I made it for you.”

  “No, I will not.”

  Colton says, “Okay then, your loss.” He takes a bite. His face changes and he spits. “Sonofa! That’s the nastiest-tasting hot dog I’ve ever had in my life.”

  Jake starts laughing. “Maybe you need a little ketchup with that.”

  “I’m not kidding. Here, you try some.”

  Jake shakes his head. “No way,” he says. “I’m fine.”

  Colton jumps on his friend. “You are not fine. You will have some hot dog.” And he has Jake in a headlock and he’s squashing the hotdog into Jake’s mouth. Jake’s spitting and squirming about and Colton’s laughing, “He-he-he.” And then they’re told to stop foolin’, there’s work to be done and this is serious business.

  “Serious business,” says Colton, smacking the top of Jake’s head.

  Jake kicks Colton in the pants. “Retard!”

  “Pussy!” says Colton.

  23

  THE ASTRO LOUNGE

  Rock Springs

  They’d just come off a twenty-hour shift and there wasn’t another well for them to look at for at least a couple of days. Jake had packed the night before and he was out of bed before dawn to drive down to Colorado for a night or two for the only reason any man would ever drive all day after thirty-six hours of almost no sleep—a woman. He was standing in the white light of the refrigerator contemplating his breakfast choices, which were limited to soda and a few hardened Pop-Tarts.

  “Hey,” said Colton.

  “What you doin’ up?”

  Colton scratched the back of his head and opened a can of Mountain Dew. “I heard you. Just thought I’d better tell you to keep ’er on the road.”

  “Sure.”

  Colton cleared his throat. He was twenty-two and although he’d had his heart broken a couple of times, there was no serious evidence to suggest that he was particularly lucky with the women. The trouble with girls and Colton was that they were much more likely to adopt him as a brother than invite him into their beds. He said, “I guess she’s pretty.”

  “Sure she is,” said Jake, walking outside.

  “The air feels good,” said Colton, following him.

  “Don’t die of boredom,” Jake said.

  “If I should die before I wake,” said Colton.

  “Feed Jake,” said Jake.

  “Are you sure you don’t need me to drive down with you?” asked Colton.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Even if I don’t drive like a retard?”

  “Even then.”

  “You could sleep while I drive.”

  “I don’t need to sleep.”

  “Okay.” Colton sat down outside the trailer in his pajama bottoms and he watched Jake drive away. “Mind over matter,” he said to Jake’s brake lights. The sun was firing up across the horizon and the plains were just waking up, mountain bluebirds chasing each o
ther around the sage, a few pronghorns melting away from the highway. The Wind River Mountains stared down at the great wells in the high plains and between the two was a thin slice of soil, where cattlemen fought life on real terms, half crazy for the love of cows and for a tough life. Looking at the slow progress of black cows against the pale green plains made Colton think of moving cattle with Cocoa. And thinking of Cocoa made Colton homesick. He sighed and stuffed a wad of chew into his lower lip.

  Now, at noon, Colton was folded over a video game, bare-chested in a pair of boxer shorts with a mini-fan aimed right into his face. The midsummer heat seemed to be breeding with itself to create baby pockets of heat that crawled under the skin and got behind the eyes. They were predicting a high of ninety today, which was nothing, in the scheme of a national heatwave, but without air-conditioning and with all those bodies piled in next to one another, the rented double-wide trailer felt downright soupy. The television said it was 118 degrees in Phoenix; 117 somewhere in South Dakota. In California, they said, 163 people and 25,000 cattle had died from the heat and chickens and turkeys were cooking in their own skins, 700,000 roasted to death so far. Fifteen pets had died. The governor of California ordered every state-owned fairground to operate as a cooling center. Energy prices went up and up and there were blackouts and brownouts because there wasn’t—nor will there ever be—enough natural gas to pipe to California from the whole of the Upper Green River Valley, or in the whole world, to cool that kind of heat.