Yellow Earth Read online

  ”Mrs. Gatlin?”

  It’s Jolene, one of her favorites even if she’s on the timid side. Francine wonders, if they had been classmates, if she’d have been cool enough to seek Jolene out for a friend, Jolene from the reservation, with clothes that make her look like an apprentice nun, Jolene who’s probably not allowed to stay out late or wear makeup, who’s here because her IQ tests were off the charts and because Elise Donovan who teaches over at the Three Nations school waged a campaign–

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you on your recess.”

  Recess, I love it. As if we mill around and punch each other in the arm a lot, play keep-away with each other’s lunch bags–

  ”What can I do for you?”

  “Uhm, it’s this.” she holds up the old library paperback, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

  “Pretty upsetting, isn’t it?”

  “The thing is, my parents–”

  Jolene’s people are some sort of Christian, hard core, she knows that much. Every now and again in class a subject will come up or a word be spoken and she’ll see the panicked look on the girl’s face– I shouldn’t be hearing this. But hey, if you don’t want your kid exposed to public debate, don’t send them to public school.

  “They saw it.”

  “And?”

  “Uhm– they don’t approve.”

  She assigned it to Jolene thinking it would connect with her background, help her understand how her people got where they are–

  “Have they read it?”

  “No. But they’ve read about it. It’s on a list.”

  It’s on a bunch of lists, most touting it as required reading if you want an introduction to our westward expansion, but belief is belief.

  “You know, honey, there’s nothing in there that’s a challenge to anybody’s religious faith.”

  The panicked look.

  “Faith in country,” says Jolene.

  “Ah.” She is careful not to say, ‘But they’re Indians!’

  She is pretty, Jolene, got the wide cheekbones and the coloring, you could think she was Mexican if the reservation wasn’t just next door. Rides in with the Indian princess Fawn, who probably talks Jolene into writing her papers for her.

  “I mean I read the whole book, like I was supposed to, but now that they know– can I not write the report on it?”

  The girl is not hers to win or to lose. You want to give them something, though, the courage to make up their own mind some day, the sense that knowledge might make their life better, not just more complicated.

  “What did you think of it?”

  Jolene ponders this for a moment. She is a thoughtful girl.

  “I’ve seen some of the movies they made out of the stories in it on TV. Where they never have a real Indian play the chief? I think the stories in the book are more interesting.” She gives a little self-deprecating shrug. “There’s two sides.”

  Tuck only lasted three chapters and tossed the book aside. “Unless we’re ready to give the whole country back,” he said, “why dig all that business up?”

  “All right, Jolene, can you think of any book that’s, you know– germane to what we’ve been studying– that they won’t have a problem with?”

  She shyly produces another well-worn paperback, a Laura Ingalls Wilder called The First Four Years.

  “She and her husband lived in Dakota Territory when they were first married,” she says.

  “So you’ve already read it.”

  “A couple times. I know having babies and just trying to farm is not really history, but–”

  “It most absolutely is history, young lady, and don’t let anybody tell you it’s not. You just have to find a perspective to come at it from, a way of tying it in to the bigger picture.”

  Jolene looks relieved. She’s not going to flunk, or be made fun of–

  “Well, you know how you talked about how the railroads sold people on the idea of settling out here, and how some of it was sort of exaggerated, and at first the people couldn’t sell their crop until they figured out how to mill the bran out of the winter hard red wheat–”

  “You should be teaching this class, Jolene.”

  “I thought I might write how her and her husband had that, like, American Dream you’re always talking about? And how many of those people failed.”

  He bangs things, Tucker. Doors, drawers, anything he puts down. She always knows where he is in the house, punctuating his disappointment with kicks and slams.

  “You mean their crops failed.”

  “Well, yeah, a couple times, and there were fires and she lost a baby.”

  “Did they stop loving each other?”

  Jolene again stops to consider. “From what she says in the book, I don’t think so. But they had to leave the Territory.”

  They could go back to Minnesota, be near his parents’ money. Maybe he’d resent her less if she was unemployed too.

  “Then what you’re saying is that their crops failed, but they didn’t.”

  Francine can tell that this is a totally new concept to Jolene Otis, a little smile playing around her lips.

  “I guess not. Wow.”

  Today I have opened a mind, thinks Francine, at least a tiny bit.

  Then the Lunch Over bell rings and the hordes descend.

  IT CERTAINLY ISN’T VEGAS.

  Of course the structures never look their best in the daytime, no colored lights or mega-screens to pimp them up. This is a particularly unimpressive stand-alone at the side of a dreary stretch of road in a state he was hoping never to have to visit.

  There are machines the minute you enter the lobby, good, but nobody is playing them and one is dark. Fitz’s rule is you fix the damn things right away or get them off the floor. Your drummer overdoses and dies, you get a new drummer, you don’t haul his corpse out onto the stage for everybody to gawk at.

  The girl at the desk is clueless.

  “You said it’s a suite?”

  “For Fitzgerald.”

  More scrutinizing of the reservations, the girl swinging her head back and forth to read.

  “And the name is–?”

  “Fitzgerald. It’s comped, so it might not be in your regular file.”

  “There’s only one place to look.”

  “Then it should be in there.”

  The girl frowns. “The manager’s on his break.”

  As if the world stops.

  “Are all your suites booked?”

  Again swinging the head. “No.”

  “Then book me into one,” says Fitz, the drive even longer than he had imagined and his back killing him, “and we’ll sort the rest out later.”

  “Welcome to Bearpaw!” she shouts when he is almost out of earshot.

  From the lobby to the rooms you have to walk through the casino, good again, but somehow it lacks that ‘hot damn, we’re here’ feeling. It’s the usual Friedman-style layout, a maze of gleaming slots on a carpet with a squiggly, color-clash design under a low ceiling like a giant, futuristic Tiffany lamp. A bluish glow predominating, but capable of switching to red at night. Maybe twenty people scattered at the machines, half of them sitting at slant tops, the combined boops and beeps and MIDI theme songs sounding a little anemic in the big room. He hopes this is considered way off-hours. He hears a cheesy roll-up as he passes a middle-aged woman hitting for maybe twenty dollars on Lady Godiva, quarters rattling down as the machine pays out. The woman’s expression does not change, her face dappled with LED light as she waits with finger poised to continue play. You need these people, the hard-core slot feeders, need lots of them. They usually have two, maybe three machines they’ve bonded with and on crowded nights wait jealously till one of their favorites is unoccupied. Or just turn around and go home.

  The suite is pretty standard, with a view of the lake. Fitz never reads the online babble, the gushers and the haters, before he consults on a spot. Especially with casinos there’s the sore-loser factor, a
nd then the posts stay up forever. Things can change for better or worse. More often for the worse.

  Fitz finds his way to the Bison Room, following the bearpaw marks on the floor. There is the general manager, young guy, who has some kind of jock name, Thump or Bump, something like that, and he remembers the white guy, Purdy, chief operating officer of the casino, from one of the mid-sized spots in Oklahoma, Cherokees maybe. And then there is the tribal chairman, who looks like who you’d hire for a poster of the twenty-first-century Indian– tall, handsome, got the slightly graying ponytail and a belt buckle big as a dinner plate.

  “Harleigh Killdeer,” says the Chairman, rearranging the bones in Fitz’s shaking hand. “Appreciate you coming up to see us.”

  They are paying him to be here, but it’s nice to be appreciated, even if it doesn’t last much past his first observation. People pay you to consult, they deserve truth with the varnish off.

  “This our GM, Swat Gilchrist, and COO, Tom Purdy.”

  Swat, that was it. Baseball player, or maybe a boxer, though his face is unmarked. Another poster-boy Indian.

  “The steaks are legendary in here,” says Purdy, who must have screwed the pooch pretty bad to end up at this remote outpost, or maybe they bought him away with a big bump in salary.

  “You feed a lion one of those slabs,” says Fitz, nodding toward a wall placard proudly featuring something bloody and four inches thick, with a ball of herbed butter sitting on top of it, “he’d sleep for a week. Any bison on this menu?”

  “You know, we usually have it, but our supplier has been awful spotty, so we have to run it as a special.”

  Fitz orders the walleye, imagining the omega-3s like little miners ready to go hack away at the plaque the doctor tells him is clogging his arteries, and notices that the other men just stick to Starters. He’s never actually seen a Pheasant Popper, but likes the idea.

  “What we’re looking at,” says the Chairman once the waiter has left, “is a sudden influx. You’ve probably seen it in your bailiwick when a new field opens up.”

  “What stage are you at now?”

  “Leases are still closing, a half-dozen outfits have just begun the conventional drilling.”

  “The lull before the shitstorm.”

  “And we’d like to be prepared for it.”

  “You had a chance to look around?” asks the COO.

  “Enough.”

  “What’d you think?”

  Any operator willing to ask him that in front of his employers deserves it with both barrels. On the reality TV show this is where they’d cut to a close-up of the guy’s face as the sweat beads start to pop out.

  “First thing, you need to teach your people to smile.”

  “My people,” the Chairman jumps in, choosing to read this as an ethnic generalization, “smile plenty when they want to.”

  The great thing about being the pro in the room, the Answer Man, is you don’t have to tiptoe.

  “But that’s not the job, is it?” he says. “The job is to make the guests, the players who are going to leave all their money behind, feel good about it. Saying no with a smile is usually better than saying yes like you could give a shit one way or the other.”

  “We can work on that,” concedes the operator.

  Fitz jerks his head back toward the casino. “When the oil workers get here, you’ll want to stay open twenty-four-seven for a bit instead of just doing it Fridays and Saturdays. Look at your expenses, look at your profits, see if it makes sense.”

  “That means lots of new hires,” says Swat, who is sitting back in his seat like he owns the place, a show-me look on his puss.

  “Exactly. And whether they come from your enrollment or not, they’ve got to be well-trained and well-paid– a step higher than you’re paying at the present. Once the thing really hits, even the burger chains will be struggling to keep people behind the counter, the local contractors will lose their best workers, the gas stations– they want to stay in business, they’ll have to step up to the plate and so will you.”

  “You think the oil workers will gamble in the daytime?” The Chairman now, who’s got a authentic-looking arrowhead for a clasp on his string tie.

  “These fellas will shower up, crash for a few hours, then be ready to party hearty, no matter what shift they’re on. And forget about free drinks on the floor,” the operator’s eyes lighting up at this, “they’ll come to you well lubricated.”

  “We were thinking more poker.”

  “They can play poker with each other at the bunkhouse, man camp, whatever. Here you got the lights, the noise, the machines. You might want to swap out for some of the more babe-centric themes, the more boobs the better– your biggest rival is going to be the titty bars in Yellow Earth.”

  “There aren’t any t–”

  “Don’t blink, there will be. What’s your RTP on the slots?”

  Swat seems to be the numbers guy. “Between seventy-five and eighty percent.”

  “That’s awful tight.”

  “And it’s a long, long ride,” he smiles, “to the next casino.”

  Fitz nods. Like a lot of the Indian spots they have more jobs than they can fill from the enrollment, but the place is so far from the beaten path that attracting competent people–

  “We’ve got over six hundred machines,” says the Chairman, hopefully.

  “And you could do with a lot fewer of the old three-reel jobs. These kids from the rigs, a lot of them are online gamers already, they like to multi-task. Throw a lot of bonuses and jackpot levels and animation at them, they eat that shit up. Five, six, seven reels, lots of scatter symbols and multiple playlines. Put your cheap slots and sitdowns in the corners for your first- and fifteenth-of-the-month regulars, let em dole out their government checks a nickel at a time like always without getting in the way.”

  “Blackjack?”

  “Blackjack and craps, sure, if you’ve got dealers who can run a good crisp game. Keno if you don’t take up too much space with it. Remember, this whole place should feel like it’s on amphetamines, without the side effects. It’s got to be magic.”

  There are people who really understand the odds, understand how it works, and still enjoy gambling, or ‘gaming,’ as the Industry likes you to call it now. But Fitz is not one of them. For the rest it’s just magical thinking, which is to be encouraged. In his floor-boss days Fitz explained to folks many, many times how an eighty-three-percent Return To Player rate does not mean they are guaranteed to get eighty-three-percent of their money back from the machine. They’ll get more or less, usually less, and some lucky sucker, and don’t get me wrong, it might be you, will walk off with the bulk of it. If you knew you could feed that flashing bastard for three hours and at the end be sure to walk away with exactly what you put in, guaranteed, why would you bother? But that’s just rational, and as successful politicians and Vegas casino owners know, rational doesn’t hold a lot of interest for most people. They’d rather have their betting systems or favorite colors or lucky machines or some other angle, and God love em if they think it’s fun while they empty their pockets. Most pathetic are the streak-chasers, no matter what the game, but drawn like moths to a flame by the roulette wheel. Every time they slap a chip on a number they’re asking ‘Do you love me, Jesus?’

  And Jesus lets the ball stop where it will.

  “So basically you’re saying keep doing what we’re doing,” says the Swat kid, “but do it a lot better.”

  The dynamic of this situation is clear to Fitz– Swat a little sore to have his mastery of the situation questioned, the COO just trying to put up decent numbers and not let the place slide into grunge, and the Chairman with a half-dozen other agendas. Not unfamiliar at the rez casinos, with jobs to give out, anti-gaming Christians to mollify, social programs hungry for funding, and old grudges dying hard. Whereas in Vegas or Reno it’s simple– separate the players from their money in the most entertaining and cost-effective method possible. This Harleigh has go
t a mission, you can tell, while his GM and operator wish he’d leave more money in the business instead of getting visionary with it and placating the tribe members.

  “The thing is, we don’t want to lose our regular folks,” says the operator. “Down-staters, people who drive in from Montana.”

  “Never complain about a crowd on your floor.”

  “True.”

  “But you might have to raise your rack rates in the lodge. Housing’s gonna be a bear if there’s nothing more to Yellow Earth and your New Center than I’ve seen, and you don’t want the drill jockeys living here. Or sleeping in the parking lot– keep your security people on that.”

  “And what about the yacht?” says the Chairman.

  Fitz looks out to the lake. Nothing but a little fishing dock and empty water. “You’ve got a yacht?”

  “On order,” grins the Chairman. This is obviously his baby, and just as obviously a point of contention between him and the other two. “Ninety-six-footer, one of those two-story jobs.”

  They are famous for magical thinking themselves, of course, the Indians. Just sing this and dance that and give up the white man’s hootch and before you know it the buffalo will be back, and not just on the menu. But most of the people Fitz has dealt with on the casino end of the tribal government have been fairly grounded, dollars-and-cents types. Harleigh’s got an evangelical gleam in his eye.

  “Capacity?”

  “I figure we convert the bedrooms into casino space, we could get a hundred fifty head in there.”

  Both Swat and Purdy look away.

  “You want to run gambling on it?”

  So this is it, an ass-covering operation. When anybody kicks at a council meeting he can say ‘we consulted with an expert in the field.’ The Chairman doesn’t want advice, he wants absolution.

  “Sure,” says Harleigh, showing his perfect teeth. “Just for the Players’ Club members at first, then if it catches on–”