by Tom Swyers
Christy handed the salt to his father, and they exchanged glances. Christy’s mouth was open, and his eyes speared David without a blink. David knew Christy’s questioning look from the times he’d misspoken and embarrassed Christy in front of his friends. When Annie was looking away, David did what Christy did to him when he was over the line. He pinched his thumb and index finger and ran them the length his lips, like closing a zipper. Christy nodded in acknowledgment.
One of Annie’s eyebrows was raised; the eye was wide open, but her other eye was squinting. She was processing it all. “You mean, Pete thinks you killed Harold? How could he think that?” she asked.
“Annie, he needs to follow his leads wherever they may go. I’m the only game in town right now, and we can’t help Pete because then it might start and end with me being the prime suspect.” David looked at Annie. She had stopped chewing and stared out the window. David thought she was teetering on the brink of siding with him. She needed something more, and David was only too happy to play a legal card to help her feel comfortable with the idea of not talking to Pete.
“You don’t have to talk with him, you know,” David said. “Remember when you were helping me study for the bar exam, and we talked about the husband-wife confidentiality rule? Anything we say to each other can be held in strict confidence, as long as neither of us waives that right.”
Annie nodded and broke into a smile. David knew she was proud of the role she played in helping him pass the bar exam on the first try. “Okay, I understand now,” she said.
That’s all David needed to hear. It was time to change the subject before doubts crept into Annie’s head. “You know, I can’t get my mind off the name of that beer. Imagine being at a bar and asking for a bottle of Blind Faith.”
Christy laughed with his face in his pancakes, a little too hard and too long for David and Annie’s comfort level. Christy looked up and saw their deadpan faces and stares. “What? I thought what Dad said was funny.”
“Speaking of blind faith, how are the ride-alongs going?” David asked.
With a silver-dollar pancake balanced on his fork, Christy looked up. “What does blind faith have to do with working on an ambulance?”
David cut up his bacon and mixed it with his eggs. “Everything. You don’t have a choice about where you go. I mean, once you get the address, your job is to get there and save people.”
Christy inhaled another pancake and chewed it while he pondered that idea. “The job of a UPS guy is to go to the address and get or deliver a package. What’s the difference?”
David finished chewing before he answered. “A UPS driver doesn’t deliver or pick up from fires or crime scenes. You do.”
Annie took the conversational baton from her husband. “Your father has a point. I’m not sure I like you going to all the bad parts of the city.”
Christy knew where this discussion was headed. It was another safety talk, and he didn’t need or want it. When there’s a single child in the family, safety talks find only one pair of ears, and the frequency and intensity of the talks can be deafening.
The ambulance had become a way for Christy to express his independence. Jumping in a vehicle with a bunch of buddies to cruise to the other side of the tracks would draw a stiff rebuke from the parental units every time. But Christy was going ostensibly to help save people. It was a noble gesture, no matter how they looked at it, even if much of his time was spent witnessing death rather than preventing it. This was a trump card Christy was only too happy to play in the pursuit of freedom.
Christy replied, “Somebody has to rescue these people. We’ve talked about this before. The police clear the area before we go in to treat victims. We’re careful. No need to worry.”
“I don’t understand,” said Annie. “Why do you have to ride along on all the calls? You’re not getting paid. Why can’t you skip calls to the bad parts of the city?”
David knew Annie’s thinking would set Christy off. He wanted their son to be careful, nothing more. The idea that Christy should pick some calls and skip others because his mother said so would smack of being a mama’s boy to the paramedics on duty. David jumped in to head off an argument before it started. “I don’t think that’s practical, Annie. When the call comes in, they have to go. Christy doesn’t have time to figure out if the call is in a bad section.”
“Why don’t you just get a big, fat magic marker and write the word wuss on my forehead, Mom?”
“As your mother, I’m concerned—”
“Hold on you two,” David said. “I think we all agree that you need to be careful—”
“We’re careful, Dad.”
“You said we’re careful. I want you, personally, to be careful. Don’t rely on others to exercise your independence for you. Do you understand the difference?”
Christy sighed. “Yeah, I get it. But Mom, it cuts both ways. Did you tell Dad your news yet?”
David looked at Annie. “Tell me what?”
Annie laid her fork and knife across the edge of her plate, picked up her napkin, and wiped her lips. “I was going to tell you later, but I guess now is as good a time as any. They’ve offered me that job at Corning Elementary, and I want to take it. It sounds like inspiring work.”
David saw Christy’s point. Corning Elementary was near the Port of Albany, not in the best part of the city. If Annie was working in a rough part of town, she couldn’t object to Christy doing the same. It would be like saying that she could handle it while he couldn’t. That argument would fail in the eyes of any teenager.
David wanted to be supportive of Annie. But her new job was a cut in pay. Unknown to her, David had taken on more debt than he could handle in fronting the expenses for the Ben Prior case. He looked at her and saw the smile that he had come to know and love. She was excited about a job for the first time in years. The anticipation in that smile went right to his gut. He told himself that the job was temporary until the teacher returned from maternity leave. He vowed to find some way to tide them over until Annie found something more lucrative or until things turned around for him. But he had a selfish motive, as well, in supporting Annie. If he backed her new job, she was more likely to give him the green light on a trip to North Dakota.
“That’s wonderful news, Annie.”
“Do you think so? Be honest with me, David.”
Annie’s smiling face glowed, her dimples in full bloom. What else could he say? “I want you to take the job if that’s what you want.”
“I was hoping you’d say that. To tell you the truth, I’m scared. But I’m excited, too.”
David laughed. Annie did not like amusement-park thrill rides, and yet she was willing to hop on an emotional roller-coaster when it came to her career. She obviously needed a change. “That’s to be expected. When do you start?”
“Next week. They need someone fast.”
“Well, that’s great. So both of you need to be careful, then.”
“If you’re going to North Dakota, you need to be careful, too,” Annie said.
David was relieved. She was agreeing to let him go. The mutual-support mechanism of their marriage had come through again. “I’ll be careful, but I doubt the crime rate is as high there as it is in Albany.”
David was right, but he was also barking up the wrong tree. While the Albany violent-crime rate was higher than any city in North Dakota, the on-the-job death rate in North Dakota was the highest of any state in the nation according to the AFL-CIO. And David was going there to work.
THIRTEEN
Early Sunday morning, David was on a red-eye flight aimed at the outer fringes of the United States. He was headed for Williston, North Dakota, in the northwest part of the state, right in the middle of the Bakken-oil patch. The flight was ridiculously expensive. He could have booked a trip to Hawaii for less money. But that’s the price for joining the hordes streaming to the middle of nowhere to prospect for liquid gold, black gold, at the height of a gold rush.
He
had to fly from Albany to Minneapolis to pick up a connecting flight to Williston. That was the only uneventful leg of the whole trip. His flight out of Minneapolis to Williston was delayed. They said it was always late and that he was lucky it wasn’t canceled. They called it a regional jet, but the Bombardier plane David boarded for Williston was more like a long, turbo-propped Conestoga wagon bound for the gold fields.
The seats on the SkyWest commuter ranged four across—two on one side of the aisle; two on the other—and seated fifty. Cramped, jam-packed, smelly, and noisy, it was full of oil workers on their way back to work after spending R&R with their families. Many of them commuted long-distance to North Dakota. The oil-field paychecks went to support their families and pay off debts back home. Almost all of them were men: a sausage fest riding in a sausage-shaped plane. There were very few three-button suits and a lot of gimme caps with logos. It felt like a flying locker room.
David copped a window seat and leaned back half-awake, lulled by the bottomless blackness outside and the roar of the turbos. His thoughts circled back to Christy and Annie at home. He couldn’t tell them how long he would be in North Dakota, but he’d promised to stay in touch.
Suddenly, the plane banked on David’s side. Now he could see the lights of a city in the distance. But this couldn’t be the lights of Williston. That was a city of 45,000 people, where the population had tripled in just a few short years. No, this was the glare of Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, which he had seen from the air just a few short hours ago. For a moment, he panicked—had he gotten on the wrong flight, or had the plane been hijacked? There was no city this big on the way to where he was going. The plane was fifteen minutes from its scheduled landing, and yet this huge city loomed in the distance. He snagged the attention of the flight attendant walking up the aisle.
“Excuse me,” he said, pointing out the window. “Could you tell me what city that is over there?”
The young man smiled and said, “It’s boomtown.”
“Boomtown?”
“That’s what they call Williston, sir.”
“That’s . . . Williston?!”
“Yes.”
“Okay, thank you.”
As the plane went into its approach, he was stunned to recognize the source of the light. It wasn’t coming from houses, buildings, or streetlamps. David couldn’t believe his eyes. The lights were everywhere: fiery, orange plumes in the middle of grain fields, dancing in the wind, shooting for the heavens, trying to sear the belly of the plane as it descended.
The oil companies weren’t harvesting the gases produced from the fracking of crude oil. No, they were simply burning them off. The flares were everywhere, thousands of them, like huge bonfires scattered over the landscape. Nearing the tarmac, he got a close-up view of a few oil workers clustered around one, warming themselves from the crisp fall temperature and winds. The North Dakota plains were on fire.
He leaned back in his seat, clenched his eyes shut, and gripped the armrests. Why am I here again? The reasons that had sounded good back at home weren’t so convincing now. The plane rocked a few times before touching down. At the impact, David opened his eyes. Screaming at the effort, the turbos went into reverse to slow the plane down.
On the ticket, they called it Sloulin Field International Airport—an impressive name that raised David’s expectations. He expected to see a series of gates along with a large, modern terminal. But this airport had none of those amenities. David had a hard time even locating the terminal. The plane pulled up to a brick-and-metal structure, an enlarged Quonset hut. It was a World War II metal barrack shaped like a short loaf of Italian bread.
After the steward opened the door and dropped the stairs to the plane, David and the rest of the passengers found themselves crossing the tarmac on a long walkway marked by pairs of bright-orange hazard cones that funneled passengers to the terminal. At 7:00 a.m., dawn was starting to brighten the horizon, but the stars were still visible along with a crescent moon. The Stars and Stripes snapped in the stiff breeze blowing unimpeded from the buttes that guarded the Missouri River to the south. That wind ripped right through David, making it seem colder than the thirty degrees Fahrenheit temperature that the pilot had announced after landing. David put down his carry-on bag and zipped up his parka.
Inside, the curved roof enclosed a space that was packed full of passengers, all looking like they’d rather be somewhere else. A man sat in an orange-plastic bucket chair with his arms crossed, asleep. Men seated around him stared blankly into space. There were loads of men standing in lines with their hands shoved in their pockets. This bustling international airport looked like a frat party that didn’t draw any women and had run out of beer.
David searched for the luggage carousels, then realized there weren’t any. Workers just piled the luggage inside the door for passengers to claim. Since the ground crew wasn’t even close to unloading David’s plane, he went to find the Hertz car-rental counter. There was no counter, but he did see a line forming outside of a conference room that was marked with the Hertz logo. So David figured that was as good a place to stand as any.
While the sluggish line inched forward, David texted Annie and Christy to tell them he’d arrived safely. When he finally reached the Hertz representative, she told him they didn’t have his reserved car available any longer. He had a choice between a lime-green Chevrolet Spark and walking. There was no public transportation. He accepted the Spark, claimed his bags, and headed out the front door. It had been more than three hours since the plane landed.
While he’d lived in Manhattan, David had taught himself how to walk with eyes on the back of his head. It was a survival skill; he had to be aware of everything going on 360 degrees, and he couldn’t let his guard down for a second. He could revert to this situational radar at the drop of a hat. Unfamiliar places triggered this sixth sense, and Williston wasn’t just unfamiliar—it was a different world to him. He had the feeling he was being watched—maybe even followed—since he got off the plane.
He wasn’t totally sure, but it felt like he was on to something. Maybe it was just the new environment that was throwing off his senses. But as he walked to the Hertz parking lot, he was casually looking over his shoulder. Cars and pickup trucks surrounded the terminal on all sides. There were lines to get in and out of the airport property. The parking lot was so packed that people had parked illegally on the side of the road, in ditches, or in fields adjoining the lots. Tire tracks crisscrossed everywhere in the frozen mud.
Deep in the parking lot, surrounded by Ford F-150s and beat-up Jeeps, David found his Chevy Spark. It was not just a subcompact car. This vehicle looked like a minivan that had shrunk in the laundry. He loaded his luggage in the back seat and crawled behind the wheel. Turning the engine on, he cranked the heater on full blast, then took his place in line to exit the airport.
His first stop was to pick up some food and sundries. The Walmart Supercenter in Williston was one of the top-grossing Walmart stores in the nation. It was 10:35 a.m. when he pulled in. The huge parking lot was fairly empty. David mentally patted himself on the back for hitting the store before the crowds swarmed it. But he was wrong. He was too early. It was closed. The sign on the automatic doors announced that blue laws in North Dakota prohibited stores from opening before noon on a Sunday.
David looked around the huge parking lot. Down in one far corner there was a large congregation of RVs and campers, mostly older models, some of them practically on life support. David had read about this phenomenon. The Walmart campground was full of oil workers who couldn’t find a place to live or afford the housing costs that came with the oil boom.
With some time to kill, he walked over to inspect what looked like some sheds for sale along the edge of the parking lot, halfway down toward the encampment. Drawing near, he read the sign on the outside of one. It wasn’t a shed but rather a mobile housing unit, one that could be moved by a forklift. He took his gloves off and picked up a sales brochure from a
display in front of a unit. They were eight-by-ten-foot cubes, insulated for year-round living. Each had two bunks, two porthole-size windows, a combination heater and air conditioner, a small closet, a foldout table, a college-dormitory-size refrigerator, a TV and a microwave, all for the low, low everyday price of $25,000. Quite a price tag for living the good life in a shipping container, minus a shower and a toilet.
Suddenly, a man in the camp started yelling at another who was dressed like some sort of security guard. The guard had a stack of yellow leaflets in one hand, and David could see copies of the leaflet under the windshield wipers of the vehicles. David walked down the line of housing units, closer to the men.
“What do you mean we have to go?” the man screamed.
“I understand you’re upset,” the guard said. “But I got my orders to get you guys out within twenty-four hours.”
“In every Walmart in America, you can stay as long as you want. Why not here?”
“We’ve got too many health and safety issues here, especially with winter coming on strong.”
“I do all of my shopping at Walmart. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“I’m sorry. If it were up to me, I’d let you stay.”
“Fuck Walmart . . .”
The wind gusted and almost froze David’s ears off. He put on his hood and couldn’t hear the men any longer. He headed back to his car, closer to the store. There was a group of people waiting outside the entrance. But it was fifteen minutes before the doors opened. He approached them. There was a temporary yellow fence in front of the store entrance to keep the mass of people from pressing up against the glass doors. There was a woman in the back of the group. He walked up and stood beside her, three feet away.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” he asked, looking at her shivering.
