The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  But one morning in mid-August, just before Dakota’s first birthday, Melissa comes out into the kitchen with the toddler on her hip and she says, “I ain’t doing this, Colt.”

  Colton props himself up off the sofa. “Ain’t doin’ what, baby?”

  “I can’t do these two weeks on, two weeks off. I can’t do the fighting about it. I can’t do being scared half to death half of every month of every year. You need to quit. We got Dakota and Nathanial now.”

  “I already told you,” said Colton, lying back down, “I’m oil-field trash, baby.”

  “No you ain’t. You’re a lot more besides.”

  “Maybe,” says Colton. “But I’m nothing else that pays the bills.”

  “There’s other work around here.”

  “Not good work.”

  Melissa levels her gaze at Colton. She puts Dakota down and he crawls toward the sofa. “You go back to the rigs and you can stay there.”

  “What?”

  “It’s them or me.”

  “Holy crap,” says Colton, sitting up again.

  “Yup,” says Melissa.

  Dakota pulls himself up on the sofa. “Come here, Koda,” says Colton, pulling the boy onto his lap. He wraps his arms around Dakota’s shoulders and says, “Hey there, cowboy.”

  Dakota squirms to get down and starts to race, on all fours, for the door. Melissa scoops him up. “Which is it?” she says.

  Colton looks at his hands.

  “I don’t want our boys following you out there. Three generations of Bryants on the oil patch is enough. I want our kids doing something different. I want ’em to go to college.”

  “Fine,” says Colton, “but meantime someone’s got to get the freakin’ fuel for rocket scientists or whatever the hell it is you want them to be and that someone might as well be me.”

  “No,” says Melissa.

  “You’re serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “Okay baby, I’ll try it. I’ll try to do ordinary construction or whatever the heck else they got out here for some boy ain’t got no college degree.”

  Melissa smiles and puts the child down. “Okay,” she says.

  39

  COLTON WORKS IN EVANSTON

  But before hunting season was even over, not even two months into his new job, Colton came home from the toolsheds, threw his lunchbox on the counter, and handed the phone to Melissa. “Call my old boss and get me my job back on the rigs,” he said.

  Melissa stared at him.

  “I said I’d give it a try working off the patch. I did and I can’t do it.”

  “You barely gave it a try.”

  “It’s enough for me to know it ain’t my thing,” said Colton.

  Melissa lit a cigarette and squinted at Colton through the smoke.

  “Get me back to the Upper Green,” said Colton. “There’s a rig with my name on it out there.”

  “That’s what I am afraid of,” said Melissa.

  “I didn’t mean it, that way. C’mon. Accidents happen all the time. My boss here is a freakin’ drunk. I’m gonna get in some drunk drivin’ accident with that fool. I’m safer out there on the rigs.”

  “No you ain’t.”

  “It’s overrated,” said Colton. “It’s one of the safest jobs out there. You’re more likely to die in a car wreck. You’re more likely to die of a heart attack. You’re more likely to die of a dog bite.”

  But a week later it came out. On October 29, 2005, in the Upper Green River Valley, on a well site owned by Ultra Petroleum and drilled by Grey Wolf, Dewayne Hughes, a forty-four-year-old father of four from Casper, died when his safety harness became entangled in the rotary head of the top of the drill during a routine cleaning operation. For some minutes, until the rig could be shut down, Dewayne spun with the drill at 45 rpm, inexorably into the earth, the harness pulled so tight against his body that he suffocated. He was four shifts into his third hitch on the oil rig, he had not any previous oil-patch experience, and he had not completed any safety training. Other members of the crew were new to the rig too. The floor hand had worked on the rig for three hitches, the motor hand had been two days on the rig, and the derrick hand had been on the rigs for three months.

  That week’s newspaper was thrown on the top of the coffee table. The death made a small impression on the front page, a couple of inches of type under the heading, “Hand Killed on Ultra Rig.” Colton snatched the paper up and laid it down on the carpet, exposing the real estate pages to the ceiling, “I got to clean my gun,” he said. “It’s hunting season.”

  Melissa lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa. She held a can of Mountain Dew on her lap.

  “Well,” said Colton, “my dad always told me there’s just a couple of things a man has to take care of in his life; his gun and his wife…Well, I guess more than a couple, ’cos then there’s his kids and his nieces and nephews and his horse, his pickup truck and his boots and his saddle, his sisters, his mom. I mean, there’s a whole heap o’ things a man has to take care of, but you can tell a lot about a man by how he takes care of his gun.”

  “And his wife,” said Melissa.

  “Right,” said Colton. “And everything else. Man, it’s no wonder my dad’s so thin. You burn off your feed just thinkin’ about it.”

  Melissa smiled.

  Colton called Nathanial over to the newspaper. He broke his gun into pieces and lay it out for the boy to see. Then he got his gun oil and some mutton cloth and gave a piece of clean cloth to his son. “Okay kid,” he said. “Ain’t no point havin’ a gun if it ain’t taken care of and the same applies to everything else in this life.”

  Nathanial sat up on his knees and his face went all tight and serious.

  “Difference is,” said Colton looking down the broken barrel of his gun, “between you and me, you just have to take care of your mom and your baby brother. Me, I got the whole darned planet on my shoulders.”

  Melissa smiled again and shook her head, blowing smoke at Colton. “He’s just being a drama cowboy as usual,” she told her son. “Truth be told, it’s the women who carry the weight of the world.”

  “Wanna fight about it?” said Colton.

  “Only if you fetch me another Mountain Dew.”

  Colton laughed, “He-he-he.”

  40

  MINUS THIRTY-FIVE

  It’s been a cold month or two in the Upper Green River Valley since Colton’s been back on the rigs. Down to minus thirty-five and the conditions are enough to break a man’s soul, let alone a steel cable or a metal bolt. And still the rigs are expected to bore down into the hardened earth, relentlessly. Colton is back around Evanston from a hitch in the Upper Green River Valley for six days. He and Tony take a day to drive to Rock Springs for Christmas shopping.

  Colton says, “Another roughneck on our patch just got nailed out there this week.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yeah.”

  This latest one—a drill hand on a Cyclone rig for Ultra Petroleum—had been doing it twenty-five years. But they say the fast line sheave was wore out like a piece of dental floss. They say the traveling block, hook, and elevators—the whole lot—all came crashing down onto the floor and that the whole rig shook for fifteen minutes afterward. They say the drill hand was one of those who liked to do a little meth to keep awake and then a little pot to smooth out the high and on top of that the rig was falling to pieces. That’ll be enough to do ’er and it was bad luck anyway. All the other hands made it into the doghouse, except the drill hand, who got caught with one leg in the door. He was sliced open from the base of his neck to the seat of his pants and the tool hand went into shock on the spot because the guy died right at his feet, and he had already lost his only brother, killed on a rig.

  “Holy crap,” says Colton, “it’s been cold out there.”

  “Yep,” says Tony.

  “I think it’s gonna be the death of me,” says Colton.

  “The cold?”

&n
bsp; “No, the rigs,” says Colton. He stuffs a wad of chew into his lip. He looks out the window at the way the world is flat-lit in dreary winter grey. The wind is making scallops out of the lie of the land, coating fences and trees with a fragile blanket of rime, threading ice into the heart of the world. There’s a herd of horses as still as crusted statues on the desert. On days like this, the ground is nothing more than the impression of heaviness beneath your feet, the sound of your tires gripping slick nothing. “Sonofa,” says Colton and spits into an empty Mountain Dew bottle. All the radio stations have nothing on but Christmas tunes, like a nervous complaint.

  Tony puts in Sara Evans. “That’s better,” says Colton. “Freakin’ ‘Jingle Bells’ gonna be the death of me.”

  Tony laughs and looks at his brother-in-law. “What isn’t gonna be the death of you, Colt?”

  Colton spits. “He-he-he,” he says.

  PART TWO

  41

  THE DAY BEFORE VALENTINE’S DAY

  Evanston, Wyoming

  The day before Valentine’s Day 2006 near Evanston, Wyoming, the sky had come down to meet the earth in such a way that everything was a sameness of grey-white and boundaries were nowhere. Snow blew sideways, out of the northwest, so that it hissed against the siding. Colton heard the weather before he moved. He pictured horses out there, backs to the wind, tails under bellies. He knew without needing to see it, the way trees would be winter-brittle barely holding on to the earth, the way freeze-dried livestock would be pressed up against the bruise of willows in the creek bottom. He understood the ridges up above town would be scoured bald, snow veined thinly between tufts of tough grass. Colton swung his legs out of bed and scratched the back of his neck, already thinking of the drive north to the Upper Green River Valley on roads like this.

  He went through to the kitchen, cracked a Mountain Dew, and drank it like it saved lives, folded a piece of bread over a slice of cold ham and swallowed it down with the rest of the soda. The clock on the microwave said not yet seven. It was still night out there. Colton zipped himself into coveralls, pushed his feet into his work boots. He pulled a baseball cap onto his head—black with the words western petroleum in orange-and-white letters across the front, the peak tunneled just so, tight against his head, so it couldn’t blow off. He put on his fleece-lined work gloves and opened the door to outside. The wind caught him on the face like the flat side of a two-by-four and took his breath out of his lungs. It was weather with a violence, like hell had been ordered in, everything on the edge of its frozen limit. He stamped his way out into the dark, snowflakes landing on the porch like Styrofoam bubbles, too frozen to be sticky.

  The neighborhood was starting to take shape against the dawn. The playset Colton had set up for Nathanial and Dakota swinging crazy in the storm like ghost children maddened with the endlessness of being dead; the dog kennels over the road crouched low against the weather like igloos; the horses’ shelter next door singing against gravity, the tires on its roofing sheets the only thing between them and cartwheeling free, and the neighbors’ dogs were shouting wa-wah-wah-wah, as if it would make any difference to say the same thing over and over.

  Colton seared this place into memory, loving it. Then he went inside, peeled out of his work clothes, and made bacon and pancakes. At seven-thirty Melissa came out of the bedroom with the kids, one on each hip. She put the kids down. Dakota was just learning to run in that bowlegged sailor way of babies, leaning against the tilt of the earth’s orbit. Nathanial ran up to Colton. “Pancakes!” he shouted, excited.

  “Why the pancakes?” asked Melissa, lighting a cigarette.

  “Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day,” said Colton.

  She frowned and blew smoke into the kitchen. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said.

  Colton took the boys to daycare at nine, Dakota curled up in the crook of his elbow, not wanting to let go. “Hey boy,” said Colton. “Koda?” He put the child down. “Hey, son.” He held the child’s chin in the vee between thumb and forefinger. “You take her easy, you hear?” And then to Nathanial: “You’re the man of the house while I’m gone, okay?”

  Nathanial wrapped himself around Colton’s leg. “Can I come with you? I want to come with you, Daddy.”

  “Where’s the hair on your chin, son?”

  “I got hair on my chin! I got hair on my chin!” Nathanial started to cry.

  “Hey Nate-ate, cowboy up now.” Colton felt tears coming. He cleared his throat. “Nate, I got to go.” He unfolded and walked back out into the sideways snow, hand up alongside his cheek against the sting of the wind, stamping, as if angrily.

  Colton went home and took a nap for a few hours, powering up for the drive north and a two-week shift of all night on the rig. When he woke up, he lay for a few moments in the grey-dark room and paid attention to his gut feeling, the way another man might check his body for aches and pains. Then he sat up and took off his wedding ring. He put it on Melissa’s bedside table along with his wallet, peeling out a fifty that he stuffed into his pocket.

  Half an hour later Colton was on his way driving north in his white Ford F150. There was an empty gun rack behind his head, money stashed between the seats, between the console and the seat, behind the visor, in the glove box—his flat-tire money. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was on the player, but Colton’s mind was not on the music. Not seven miles into the trip, just this side of Carter, he pulled a U-turn in the road, and drove an hour out of his way, back to Evanston to reckon with Melissa where she worked—a stuffed dog, a dozen long-stemmed roses, and a box of chocolates from Wal-Mart. “I love you,” he told her. “We’ll get her figured out. Okay?”

  Melissa’s shoulders went soft. She smiled, holding the stuffed animal around its neck. “Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late.”

  “You’ll bring us some meatloaf to the man camp?”

  “Of course.”

  “And when I get back we’ll go fishin’ in the dark.”

  “Oh, get out with you.” She pressed her lips together and looked away.

  “I’m gone,” said Colton with a cockeyed grin, and he half danced, half bounced back out into the weather, shaking his hands up by his ears like he was getting rid of the nuisance that was himself.

  “Be careful out there,” said Melissa.

  Colton got back onto the road and hoped nothing would be blown closed. Out east, on I-80 between Cheyenne and Laramie, there were news reports that tractor-trailers had been flipped onto their sides, SUVs trapped on the highway were being blown across the ice from a standstill. Colton picked an imaginary line for the edge of the road, set himself steady at fifty, and in this way he drove north all the way to Big Piney.

  42

  CUMBERLAND CEMETERY

  Between Evanston and Kemmerer, there are windmills on Highway 189 that follow the traffic here, waving ponderously, and then they disappear off the face of the earth, their slow-swinging arms like dinosaurs engaged in some thoughtful farewell dance. Then after that, there’s nothing but snow-blown hills and strands of barbed wire and a railway line until a BP sign that says private property violators will be prosecuted and behind the sign the whole of the rest of the United States from here to the Pacific Ocean.

  Within a few hundred feet of the BP notice there’s an old white picket fence with a gate, and above that a sign saying CUMBERLAND CEMETERY in metal letters against the sky. The cemetery is the burial grounds for two old coal-mining towns originally called Little Muddy but later renamed Cumberland I and Cumberland II. Many of the miners in Cumberland were survivors of the Ludlow massacre of April 20, 1914, when two women, twelve children, and six miners were gunned down in their tent colony at Ludlow, Colorado, by the Colorado National Guard in response to the Colorado Coal Strike. So they came north for a better life and all that’s left of Cumberland I and II and that awful ache of bad luck that the miners brought with them is this little graveyard.

  Most of the graves inside the tiny cemetery have small white wooden crosse
s, and whatever names they possess have been worn off by wind and weather, knocked sideways by cattle and sheep. Some of the scoured headstones have some names you can read, though, etched in what looks like a child’s unschooled hand. And then the heartsore realization comes that these are all children’s graves, barely a few months old many of them, pressed into the earth at the turn of the first quarter of the last century, some of the dates on the stones reversible, as if the children came to earth with one foot still in the spirit world so that the journey back would be all too easy:

  Lovean Wilde 1926–1926

  Baby Anderson Nov 16, 1927–Nov 16, 1927

  Grace Blacker 1915–1915

  Baby Son of Geo. & Mary Blacker

  Bernice Tremelling 1915–1917

  John G. Faddis Oct 1909–Dec 1909

  Ferrell Wilde Jr. 1924–1924

  William Blacker 1900–1917

  Henry T. Blacker Oct 18, 1910–May 13, 1913

  Mae Tremelling Jun 28, 1914–Jun 19, 1916

  Daniel McWilliams 1913–1913

  Thelma D. Patterson Feb 19, 1904–Feb 21, 1906

  And still the graves pile tiny hump next to tiny hump. Did the wind snatch all these children up? Drought? Influenza? Poisoned air or water? There is no other sign that anyone lived here once. There is nothing like a church, a bar, or even the foundations of a church or bar. There is no sign that there were owners of these children. And beyond the cemetery fence nothing but ancient slabs of cow manure, rock-hard pebbles from sheep, and a high, lonely wind off the ridge. The sound underfoot is like the pitiless crunch you hear on old made-for-television Westerns—either crusty snow or flinty soil, nothing soft or lullaby here.

  Just beyond the Cumberland Cemetery, something made Colton think to call Jake. Maybe it was all those names on all those wind-worn headstones with no one to remember who was lost. Colton kept an eye on the road, one hand on the wheel, and waved his cell phone around to see how many bars he had. He hit speed-dial two.