“Vegas?”
“Do they have fireworks in Vegas? That’s if they have fireworks in Vegas. Yeah they do, every night, don’t they?”
“I imagine,” she said.
So for Colton and Melissa’s first date, Colton and Jake stood at the bottom of Jake’s garden and let loose with four hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks the sound and size of bombs like they planned to win the war. Colton was showing off for Melissa, of course, holding on to the cannons until the last possible moment and almost setting himself off with them. And then it was Jake’s turn and Colton said, “Come on, you pussy, hold on to it,” and by the time Jake let go, it was too late and the shell went off at an odd trajectory, shot off the neighbor’s roof, skidded over the top of their garage, and smacked into a cop car. Colton rocked back on his heels and laughed and his head was thrown back and his hands dangling by his sides, “He-he-he!”
“Holy crap, it’s a lady cop,” said Jake. He looked at Colton. “They’re the worst.”
“He-he-he,” laughed Colton. “What kinda bird doesn’t fly?”
Melissa put out her cigarette. “Oh no,” she said.
“A jailbird,” said Colton. “He-he-he.”
And then there she was, serious as a heart attack and arms cocked like cormorant wings over a gun and cuffs, the lady cop. “Did you intend to shoot me?”
Colton said, “Evening, ma’am. No, ma’am.”
For a good ten minutes the lady cop read them the book, on and on she went, and Colton just hit her with those cornflower blue eyes of his and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” and “Most definitely sorry, ma’am,” and finally you could see the lady cop get soft and her shoulders relaxed. She said, “You never let this happen again.”
“Never, ma’am,” said Colton, and he shot her a smile to light up the sky.
She shook her head. “You should be careful what you do with those eyes,” she said. “Someone might get hurt.” And then she was gone, back to her car.
“Holy crap,” said Jake. “Did she just say that?”
“Say what?” said Colton.
Melissa looked at Colton like she was seeing him for the first time. “Holy cow,” she said.
28
DRIVING ALL DAY
Wyoming/Utah/Arizona
Melissa herself can’t put her finger on why she woke up one day, a month after the night of the fireworks, and decided to pack up Nathanial and everything she owned, which was barely enough to fill the trunk of her car, and drive out of Evanston, more or less straight south until the landscape looked entirely different, all empty and red and low, like all the earth was being swept toward the Grand Canyon and no Wyoming chill in the air, the kind you get as the sun sets. She didn’t tell Colton, or any of her friends, that she was going, because she didn’t have time and she didn’t know herself that she was leaving until she was already gone.
Nathanial was still in his pajamas when she buckled him into his car seat. He started crying. “Cowboy up, cupcake,” she told him.
“Why?” he said. “Where we going?”
“I don’t know,” said Melissa, lighting a cigarette and pulling out into the road. “I don’t honest-to-God know.”
It didn’t make it any easier when, halfway to Camp Verde, Arizona, Melissa recognized that what she was running away from was a dead man. The living you can press into corners, see with your eyes, touch with your fingers, so if you’re cunning and quick, you can always run away from the living, but the dead are always with us and from them there is no escape. Then she was crying and Nathanial started up again and Melissa was saying over and over, “I’m sorry, cupcake. I’m so sorry.”
But it was too late to turn back by then. They were halfway to somewhere else and they’d already burned the gas it took to get there. And then, once they got there, there was nothing much to keep them in Camp Verde, Arizona, and there was everything to turn around for—the beginning of free-falling in love with Colton and the support of her friends and the familiarity of Evanston—but Melissa had pulled into town with a drop and a half left in the tank and it was dark and her choices weren’t looking so multitudinous. She spent her last thirty-five dollars on a room for the night and the next morning she found a place to put Nathanial during the day and she found a minimum-wage job as a clerk in a gas station.
So it went for a couple of months. By the time she had paid for babysitting and rent, and gas and diapers and baby food, there was nothing left for her to eat. So she lived off Mountain Dew and cigarettes, the combination of which, in sufficient quantities, can stave off everything from despair to hunger in fifteen-minute increments. And every night she curled up with Nathanial in his dinosaur pajamas and she sang, “But Momma kept the Bible read and Daddy kept our family fed.” And when Nathanial was breathing steady, his even breath against her neck, Melissa cried herself to sleep.
29
PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING
Upper Green River Valley
By about now, Jake was getting ready to move on from flow testing. He’d been offered a job making decent pay selling service supplies to wells. And with Jake gone, and with three years between the fall off the rigs that broke his foot and a fresh start, there was really nothing else keeping Colton at the flare pits because he’d been ready to move back onto the rigs from the day he left, so he reapplied for a drilling job with a company other than the one that had laid him off.
It had turned cold the day Colton drove up to Casper in the heart of Wyoming’s oil and gas country, fall laid a frigid breath over the filtered sun. It was the hunting season of Colton’s twenty-third year and the scented wind off the mountains and the bittersweet smell of turning aspen leaves made him itch to be up at the snowline tracking elk into deadfall. He drove with one arm out of the window, wound down, the better so he could get a faceful of Wyoming air. He had the old Neil Diamond CD on the soundtrack and the last of the summer’s geese were veeing south. Colton stuffed a wad of chew in his lip and hummed along.
The drilling companies had taken over a hotel in the middle of Casper. Colton filed into the lobby where tables were set up like the army signing up boys to be soldiers. He joined all the other potential recruits filling in a questionnaire of yes-or-no questions. Are you able to work away from home for extended periods? Are you able to withstand an all-weather, outdoor job that is very demanding physically? Are you able to work a significant amount of overtime? Are you able to work weekends and holidays? Colton colored in all the circles next to the line that said yes.
“Heck, yes,” he said.
The piss test was the next thing he had to do. He showed the tester the skin of his stomach—lifted his shirt, opened the waistband of his pants—to prove that he wasn’t carrying clean urine into the cubicle taped to his body in a condom or in some kind of prosthetic device. (The Whizzinator comes with synthetic, dehydrated urine and is available in white, tan, Hispanic, brown, and black. According to the manufacturers and the testimony of scores of satisfied customers, it has the look and feel of a real penis.) The cubicle didn’t have a faucet or a sink. There was no water in the lavatory. Nor was there much in the way of privacy. Colton pissed in a sterile catcher and handed it to a woman in a lab coat.
“Name?”
“Colton H. Bryant.”
“Date of birth?”
“June 10, 1980.”
“Okay.”
“Do I have a job?” he asked.
“That’s not for me to say,” said the woman. She was bored, overweight, and overdue for a cigarette break. She checked the label on Colton’s jar and made a mark on the piece of paper taped to the clipboard.
Colton said, “You wouldn’t think it would be so difficult to be oil-field trash.”
The woman looked up and found herself on the receiving end of the most startling blue eyes she had ever seen in her life. “You like hard, dirty work?”
“Love it.”
The woman was smiling now. “Boiling hot or freezing cold and a
wind, always blowing sideways, day and night?” she asked.
“Love it,” said Colton again.
“Oh yeah?”
“Heck, yeah.”
The woman lowered her clipboard and cocked her hip at him.
“Third generation on the rigs,” said Colton.
“You’re a Wyoming boy then?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Colton. “That blowing sideways wind, she’s my theme song.”
The woman laughed. “One of our crazy-assed cowboys,” she said.
“That’s right, ma’am.”
“You boys sure keep this damn country running.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“No,” said the woman, “thank you.”
“He-he-he,” said Colton.
“Oh well,” she said. “If your test comes back clean and you’re half alive in every other way, then yeah, they’re not so picky. Sure, I would say you’ve got yourself a job.”
Colton put his arm over the woman’s plump shoulders. “Whee-haw.”
“All I’ll say,” said the woman frowning down at her clipboard, “is get yourself home alive at the end of each hitch.” She cleared her throat and looked up. “I bet you have someone waiting for you, don’t you?”
“Not yet,” said Colton. “But I will. Sure I will.”
The woman watched the young man leave the building. A tall boy with wide shoulders and funny half-dancing gait, like he favored his left foot perhaps, and as if his arms and legs were attached to the sky by strings. Then automatic doors opened to the grey world outside and the boy stepped out in the parking lot and the wind picked up a ground blizzard and swallowed him up in it. And then there was another recruit in front of her and a fresh jar of urine to be processed. She sighed.
“Name?” she asked.
A day later, on October 17, 2003, Colton was hired as a floor hand for Patterson-UTI, drilling for natural gas in the Upper Green River Valley. He was given the company’s New Short Service Employee Orientation, the quicker to get boys out of the classroom and onto the rig. But even obsessive training—tongs-use training, scrubbing training, swinging-pipe training, blood-borne pathogens, hazard communication, fall protection, confined-spaces instruction, respirators training, lockout/tag out, forklift training—won’t stop an accident, because although everyone talks about safety, no one means it as much as they mean money. Whatever they say, what they really mean is, “Safety, safety, safety, have a slice of pizza. Safety, safety, safety, have a doughnut. Safety, safety, safety, now go out there and get as much gas out of the ground as quickly as you can and make us all rich as shit without killing yourself.”
It’s a good bet, Colton was halfway out of his chair and halfway onto the rig before he even heard the last bit.
30
DRIVING ALL DAY AND NIGHT
Wyoming/Utah/Arizona
They say Wyoming is like a small town with a really long main street. That is why, for all its appearance of emptiness and live-and-let-live ethos, the state has a small town’s propensity for taking care of its own. You have only to see the notice in a post office announcing an illness or death to see what it is to live in a small-town state—the casseroles and meatloaves and cakes and the people bringing in your hay, feeding your horses. It’s enough to restore your belief in humanity.
The flip side of this small-town state is its habit of breeding vicious gossip and for paranoia and for neighbors shooting neighbors or family unloading into family over something that happened so long ago that no one can really remember all the details now. And love-hate, bittersweet opinionated is as easy as taking ownership of the wind—everybody does it, without even realizing it. And everyone knows everyone else’s business, and what they don’t know about someone else’s business, they’ll fabricate. So it didn’t take long for it to get back to Colton, via Ruth, via goodness only knows who, that Melissa was living off Mountain Dew and cigarettes in Camp Verde, Arizona, and that she was unhappy and that she wished she’d never left Wyoming. And also that she’d been asking about Colton.
Which was all Colton needed to know, true or untrue.
He didn’t even sleep on it. He left Evanston at two in the afternoon in his white F150—“My knight in a white Ford,” Melissa called him afterward—and he drove six hours, clear through Utah, and when he got to Page, Arizona, it was eight at night. By then, Colton was all hopped up on chew and Mountain Dew and he needed gas. So he filled up and then found somewhere that would serve him a sit-down meal. He ordered a double burger and fries from a waitress at a joint where neither the plants nor the utensils were plastic and he phoned Melissa from a phone booth outside. Fall was coming fast, but it was still warm here, the asphalt smelling of lost summer and the air burnt with cigarette smoke and oil and old, shredded rubber.
“M’issa?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on my way to Camp Verde,” said Colton, forgetting everything that he had been rehearsing for the last six hours. “To fetch you home.”
“What?”
Colton looked at the sun and made a quick calculation in his head. “I’ll be there by midnight, I reckon,” he said. “Another four hours should do her.”
“Colton, what are you talking about?”
“M’issa, how about you marry me?”
There was a very long pause.
“I’ll take Nate as my own son.” His own voice sounded long and lonely going down the wire. “M’issa, you there?” Colton tapped the receiver. “M’issa?”
“Holy cow, Colton Bryant,” said Melissa, “are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind?”
“No, I ain’t,” said Colton. “You can’t live off Mountain Dew and cigarettes for the rest of your life.”
There was another long silence.
“I got me a job drilling in the Upper Green,” said Colton. “I’m back on the rigs. It’s real money M’issa, sixty grand a year if I work overtime. But you got to come back with me now. I’ve got another hitch coming up in a couple of days.”
More silence.
“I’ll take care of you, you’ll see.”
Melissa still didn’t say anything.
“I’m not much of a one for fighting. But I’d knock a man on his ass if you needed me to. I really would.”
Still nothing.
“I’ll teach Nate to ride and hunt. It’s never too early to get a boy on a horse. He can use Cocoa. She’s quiet as an angel now.”
The sun beat long rays across the tarmac into Colton’s eyes. He turned his back to it and waited until he couldn’t stand it for another moment, then he said, “I’ll take that as a yes, then.”
Melissa shut her eyes against the sensation that her chest would burst. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Colton H. Bryant, you can take that as a yes.”
Colton hung up. “Whee-haw,” he said softly.
At that moment, the waitress of the burger joint looked out of the window at the parking lot and saw her customer with the bright blue eyes in his cowboy boots and Levi’s and a black ball cap with the words western petroleum written in orange letters across it doing some kind of crazy dance all around the phone booth, like his arms and legs were attached to the sky by strings. When Colton came back inside to get his meal, she said, “You win the lottery out there or something?”
Colton was squirting the better part of a bottle of ketchup onto his plate. “Or something,” he said, grinning. “Yes, ma’am, I most certainly did, ma’am. I just did a whole lot better than won the lottery.”
31
MARRIED
Evanston, Wyoming
They were married a month later in the courthouse in Evanston on November 10, 2003, a dirty, cold day, piles of grey snow banked up on the winter-dreary lawns around town. Someone in the courtroom—a receptionist perhaps, or the security guard—took photographs that show Melissa, tiny and dark-haired and smiling next to Colton, who is wearing a pressed white shirt, a clean pair of beige jeans, one of Bill’s saddle-bronc belt buckles, and cowboy boots
. He’s slicked his hair down for the event, but tufts of it have escaped the comb and are poking up in rebellious spikes. He is grinning goofily, which makes him look even younger than his twenty-three years and five months. After the wedding, Colton and Melissa went to the Sinclair station where Tonya was working as a clerk and Jake was using his week off from the wells to hang out with her.
“Hi kids,” said Colton, still with the goofy grin pasted all over his face.
Jake looked up to see Colton citified up and spit and polished. “Colt, what they do to you?”
Colton grinned wider and squeezed Melissa’s hand. “Guess what we just went and did?”
Jake and Tony looked at each other.
“Well?” said Colton, hopping from one foot to the other.
“You just went and got married,” said Jake.
“Hey, how’d you know?”
“Lucky guess, I guess,” said Jake.
“We wanted you to be the first to know,” said Colton.
“Why didn’t you invite us?” said Jake.
“We didn’t invite anyone.”
“No one?”
“Nope.”
“Holy cow,” said Jake, “you didn’t invite your mom and dad?”
“Nope.”
“Have you at least told ’em?”
“Nope,” said Colton.
“Holy cow, Colt, you’d better go and tell her right now. And Lord have mercy, she’s gonna want to tan some hide.” And then Jake thought about Merinda and Tabby and he said, “And your sisters are gonna want a piece of your hide too.”
Melissa’s smile wavered a bit.
“They’ll find out soon enough,” said Colt, putting his arm around Melissa’s shoulders. “Mind over matter, kids, mind over matter.” Then he said, “Come on, let’s go out and get us some Chinese food. I’m starving and I’m paying, so let’s eat.”
The Legend of Colton H Bryant Page 11
