Yellow Earth Read online

  There had been a quick oil boom-and-bust in the ’80s, the Arabs monkeying with the prices, and another one way back in the early ’50s, when the first well up in Tioga come in. Some people made out pretty good, but not many of those were enrolled with the Three Nations.

  “They got whole new ways of bringing it up, Danny. If we play this right.”

  “Drilling is drilling. They cut roads, they use water.”

  “And we make sure they pay as they go.”

  Danny does not look mollified. Danny got a chip on his shoulder and his favorite word is ‘no.’

  “The council gonna vote on this?”

  Danny and old Teresa Crow’s Ghost and some of the others think you can beat them with Spirit, that you can just be true to the land and it will take care of you. Good luck with that.

  “We’ll take it up,” says Harleigh, starting back toward the Mustang, “when I decide to call a meeting.”

  By the time he gets there Will Crowder has pulled up and gotten out of his patrol car. There’s four counties that overlap with the reservation, which is bigger than Rhode Island but only got a few thousand people living on it. Will is the sheriff that bothers to come on the most. Some of the others, if it’s a white perp and not a big deal, just call and say we’re too busy, let im go.

  “We meet again.”

  Harleigh shrugs, jerks his head back toward Danny, following. “Roadside powwow.”

  He leaves Will to deal with the white boy and opens the passenger door to his pickup, calling to Fawn.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Can you give Dickyboy a ride?”

  “In the back.”

  The kids get in and Harleigh patches out, thinking about the cruise idea. Be a nice wrinkle, especially with the rush that’s likely to be coming soon.

  “Slick truck,” says Dickyboy. Harleigh has the Sierra Denali out today, with the wood trim and premium leather and, most important to Connie, heated front seats.

  “Thank you.”

  Dickyboy is a good kid, smart, but has let himself get fat like so many of them. Don’t burn many calories playing video games at the casino arcade.

  Fawn checks her cellphone before speaking, still not looking him in the eye. “You mad?”

  “I can’t believe he pulled you over for that piddly shit.”

  “Dylan was going ninety.”

  Harleigh gives her a look, holds it for a moment.

  “Dylan.”

  “He figures he can get away with anything on the rez.”

  “He might be right. But if I go into one of their towns and roll through a stop sign.”

  “You don’t ever roll through stop signs–”

  It’s true. Fawn goes on about how ‘strict’ he is, but really it’s discipline. Harleigh does two hundred crunches a day. Harleigh doesn’t eat fry bread. Harleigh could still out-rebound half the players on the high school varsity. “He didn’t try to outrun Danny, did he?”

  “No. We just saw the lights flashing and I told him if he got me in trouble you’d come after him.”

  Harleigh has to smile. Fawn is a hot number and knows it, dresses sexy, lots of eye makeup, and generally knows how to work the system. If she just wouldn’t antagonize her mother on purpose. He looks past her to the lake. Not much moving out there, this time of year.

  The view if you’re cruising on the water is pretty, but nothing exotic. Maybe if the boat had a glass bottom, he thinks, and you could see those houses that we lost. Underwater Indians, it could be, View the Lost Civilization. But of course tourists would want arrowheads and earth lodges, not some old truck farms. Luxury fishing tournaments, though, sure, and The World’s Only Truly Floating Crap Game. He’ll have to talk with the casino people about it.

  “You know, smoking weed doesn’t make you smarter,” he says to Fawn and her friend, because he knows he’s expected to say something. “It just makes you think you are.”

  “THE PICTURE THAT HAUNTS me,” says Mr. Wiley Cobb, sitting on a crate in his barn with a tractor transmission taken apart and laid out in front of him on a tarp, “is my livestock mired in one of those oil slicks. Drowning in it.”

  There’s nowhere convenient for Sig to spread his papers, so he is leaning against stacked hay bales in a neighborly fashion, hoping there aren’t any bugs crawling onto him. “You mean like the La Brea tar pits.”

  Cobb grins. “We had that illustration– covered two pages– in some book back at school. Biology? Earth science? Big hairy animals stuck in the goo.”

  “I been to the place itself. Pretty impressive. They got a whole wall covered with nothing but hundreds of skulls of the dire wolf.”

  “What’s a dire wolf?”

  “Something we’re awful glad went extinct and we don’t have to worry about it any more.”

  The farmer laughs. He’ll be closable, this one, neither suspicious nor overeager, just needs a little groundation on the realities.

  “If you don’t have oil slicks on your property now, Mr. Cobb, I’m afraid we won’t be able to supply any. The hydrocarbons we’re talking about are bound up in shale rock, and we’re guessing that the principal strata are near two miles down from the surface.”

  “Two miles.”

  That always impresses them.

  “To get to it, first we’ll have to drill vertical, way, way down, and then go sideways.”

  “But when it comes up–”

  “We don’t have gushers anymore, Mr. Cobb. The process is a lot more like twisting the water out of a wet towel than jabbing a knife into an aerosol can. And that oil turns into money– the last thing we want to do is go around spilling it in the dirt.”

  “So my well–”

  “Your water well is just a little pinprick in the earth compared to what we’ll be digging, and believe me, the production folks don’t want a thing to do with it. The only water coming up will be what they’ve pumped down there themselves, drilling mud it’s called, and it keeps the bit from overheating, brings the cuttings back to the surface so the bore doesn’t clog up.”

  “I’ve heard about gas.”

  “Oh, they’ll be gas too, but that’s expected, that’s a good thing. We’ll either flame that sucker off real quick or bottle it and add what it’s worth to your royalty. Most of your shale plays mostly produce gas, but what you’re sitting on, Mr. Cobb, is unique.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” says Cobb, standing and rubbing his butt to underline the joke.

  Sig chuckles. “You know what puts the most bad gas, the climate-killing stuff, in the atmosphere?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pig farts. Cattle burps. You find a way to capture the methane that comes off a medium-sized herd in one week and we could heat every building in your little town over there for a winter.”

  “So it’s all the cows’ fault.”

  “Not all. If we could get the Chinese to stop burning coal and buy more of our product it would do some real good.”

  You have to step careful out here with the global warming idea, some of the locals equating a belief in it with Satanism and the Red Menace.

  “They don’t have oil?”

  “They’re perched on some awful rich strata, don’t worry about the Chinese. Only their technology tends to lag a couple centuries behind ours. Thing is, a collateral benefit of this find up here will be our government getting to tell those desert sheiks to go take a hike.”

  Cobb strolls over to his well-stocked, immaculately organized tool bench. “So you’re saying that it’s my patriotic duty to sign up with you?”

  “All I’m saying is you got a tremendous opportunity here, Mr. Cobb, while it lasts.”

  “The oil gonna go away?”

  “There are a bunch of factors that go into the Company’s decision to bother with alternate-source energy– which is what your rock way down there represents– or not. Worldwide price fluctuations, changes in environmental regulations, competing oil sources, and– well, have you heard of
the Rule of Capture?”

  “That’s a law?”

  “As solid as shale rock is, Mr. Cobb. The oil and gas molecules can migrate– otherwise we couldn’t harvest them.”

  “You’re saying they’ve got a way of draining my–”

  “I’m not a geologist or an extraction expert, Mr. Cobb, only a lowly landman. I deal in acreage and potential. And to tell you the truth, the Company keeps me on an awful short leash. You’ve heard today’s offer, and I promise you it will hold until midnight, no matter what I hear from Houston.”

  “In that case, Houston,” says the skinny, balding character in his sixties who appears in the open barn doorway, “we have a problem.”

  Cobb does not seem thrilled to see him. “This is my neighbor, A, J. Niles. He got the spread that runs over by the tribal lands.”

  “Ah. I’ve spoken, very briefly, with Mr. Niles on the phone.”

  “I saw your car parked out front, figured it was you.”

  It’s a Ford Fusion rental. Up here you definitely want to go American-made. Not too luxe or they resent you for a profiteer, not too modest or they figure the Company is cheap and will lowball them.

  Niles steps in toward Wiley Cobb. “You get a Pugh clause in there?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly, but without one they can screw you.”

  This is the prick the Three Nations chief warned him about, the one who cut him off on the phone. This will be fun, but Sig chooses to hold onto his ace for another moment.

  “He talk to you about access?”

  “You mean the road.”

  “You sign up, they can stick a road wherever on your property they want. Dozens of roads.”

  “That is all negotiable,” says Sig, calmly, crossing his arms to wait out the onslaught.

  “And water– they can suck up all your water and pump it down the well for this fracturing business.”

  “Not without consent and compensation.”

  “Me personally,” says A. J. Niles, “I’monna sit on my acres till the price shoots up. Hell, this salesman right here’ll be back offering ten, twenty times what he wants you to sign for now.”

  Wiley Cobb looks impressed. Sig raises his hand, waves it gently.

  “May I ask– what acres are those?”

  Niles gives him a pitying look. Love to play poker with this asshole. “A hundred fifteen of em, snug up against the rez over there.”

  “Ah. And you bought this property from Jim Willis.”

  “I did.”

  Sig tries to make his frown of concern seem genuine and not ironic. “So I’m guessing that Mr. Willis didn’t tell you that when he bought the land from a Mr.–was it Liedecker?”

  “Fritzy Liedecker,” says Cobb, helpfully.

  “He didn’t tell you that Mr. Liedecker had retained the mineral rights?”

  Sig would love a snap of Niles’s face right now to use as a screen-saver.

  “Liedecker died three years ago.”

  “Aw– I’m sorry to hear that. To pass on without enjoying such a windfall.”

  Niles is beginning to thrash now, the shore suddenly impossibly far away.

  “You’re sure of–”

  “I’ll have to get back to the county courthouse, see if there’s anything recorded on where I might locate his heirs.”

  “His girl Darlene lives in Rapid now,” says Cobb, a fount of information. Niles looks like he wants to strangle his neighbor. “That’s his oldest. Then there’s Bud, who went to Minneapolis.”

  “But they can’t let you drill if I don’t–”

  “See, that’s the rights part of mineral rights. Mr. Liedecker was a man of some foresight, thinking about his children’s future. Grandchildren?”

  “Darlene got three, for sure,” Cobb offers eagerly. “Bud, I haven’t kept up with.”

  There’s no point in burning them worse than you have to. Leaving a bad taste. The state has got some language down for surface owners– notice of drilling ops, damage and disruption– and this guy will be a real pill, but that’s for the hardasses who come after Sig. He lays his best look of commiseration on A. J. Shit-outta-luck Niles.

  “I’monna put in a word, Mr. Niles, if it works out with the heirs, keep the operation and whatever access they need to build to get to it as far off from your home– I assume you got a lovely house there– as they possibly can. And you might consider renting a patch of your surface land out for a man camp or a trailer park. Be a shame not to profit some little bit with all your neighbors getting fat from this deal.”

  Sig pats Cobb on the arm on his way out. “You think my proposal over, Mr. Cobb, and I’ll do my best to swing by later this evening before I have to go back.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  A. J. Niles has changed color, choking down too much to be able to interfere any more.

  “Got some folks in Oklahoma I got to see, bright and early. Some soon-to-be-very-wealthy folks.”

  HE DOESN’T LIKE TO look at Connie when she’s ripshit angry. Her eyes get too big and her jaw comes out and she brings her shoulders up like she’s set to paste you one. And Fawn is just playing her, raising her voice but relaxed through it all.

  “If I don’t hang out with my friends,” she tells her mother, “there’s nothing to do.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to do some of your school work.”

  “Says Miss Dropout of 1999.”

  “Fawn,” ventures Harleigh, then wishes he hadn’t, the look they both give him able to singe hair off a hog.

  “How bout this,” Fawn continues, “how bout I don’t take rides with anybody if I can have my own car?”

  Connie makes a noise halfway between a snort and a yelp.

  “Because you’re so responsible, like you showed today.”

  “He bought you one.”

  Fawn is able, even happy to call him Harleigh, or even, in formal situations, ‘my stepfather,’ but when the feathers are flying it’s always ‘him.’

  “I have a driver’s license.”

  “After you flunked the test twice. In a place where you got to drive for twenty miles to find something to hit.”

  “You’re just jealous cause I have friends.”

  “When did you get to be such an asshole?”

  It isn’t meant as a question.

  The thing is, they’re more like sisters than mother and daughter, Connie’s mom taking Fawn for several of the early years when Connie wasn’t so together. They argue about borrowing each other’s clothes now and even like a lot of the same bands. They’re both traffic-stoppers and know how to get what they want out of men. Connie has to skate extra careful in the don’t-get-pregnant-yet conversation cause it can sound like having Fawn so young ruined her life, which it didn’t. Staying with Joey Drags Wolf would have, but he had the common decency to get himself incarcerated before he could cause any more trouble.

  “Everybody,” says Fawn, fixing her mother with a look but careful not to move any closer, “says I take after you.”

  “You are grounded, young lady.”

  “Fine.”

  So Fawn goes off to her room to sulk and complain about her miserable parents to her friends on her personal cell phone. Harleigh guilted one of the big providers into setting the rez up with broadband just last year, and so far the response has been mixed, though everybody under twenty-five is hooked on it. Connie turns to look at him.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t much help.”

  “Just here to back you up, darlin. We already had some words in the car.”

  “The way she talks to me.”

  “You never said nothing like that to your mother?”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Harleigh steps in to kiss her on the cheek and pivot for the door. Get your footwork right and there’s nobody can block you. “I got trouble at the pens.”

  He’s a good ten yards from the house before he
hears whatever she picked up this time crash against the wall. Connie never breaks anything she likes, which is a useful hint around birthdays and anniversaries. And for some reason she resents him stepping out to deal with council business but won’t object if it’s for the animals.

  Harleigh leases two hundred fifty acres from the Three Nations and runs cattle, grows some hay and alfalfa. The mineral rights stay with the People, but he can put up any kind of business he wants on the leased land and the profits are all his. There’s some non-enrolled who lease land as well, whites from Yellow Earth or other towns on the periphery, but Harleigh has put a cap on that without making too much noise in the council. No use in revealing the master plan till it’s well on its way to working.

  Arne is waiting next to one of the wind fences with a couple two-year-olds that aren’t thriving.

  “You want to take a look at their shit?” Arne is Norwegian on one side, like a lot of folks in the enrollment, but got the Arikara genes.

  “Just tell me about it.”

  “Watery, kinda green. Stuck some fresh hay under their noses but they barely sniffed it.”

  “Gut worm, most likely.”

  “They had it when they’s calves.”

  “What we use then?”

  “The pour-on stuff. Worked pretty good.”

  Harleigh sighs. You cut corners, sometimes you get away with it, but if you don’t–

  “Give em the drench, then. Worms get used to the same meds, they’ll never go away.”

  Albendazole. The name of the main worming ingredient. You can bet the original cowboys pushing longhorns up from Texas didn’t need a damn chemistry degree.

  “And be sure to keep their heads down when you give it, put that tube–”

  “Right down the esophagus.” Arne is a real find, steady, got a feel for the animals, and a hell of a worker. He drives Fawn and the Otis girl into the Yellow Earth high school every morning, picks them up when they can’t find some pot-head fellow student to do it.

  “Yeah. And then when the new grass comes up, start em over by Bachelor Hill, not so many old pats laying around to breed the larvae.”

  Cattle are basically machines– grass in, gas and cow flops out, milk or meat depending on what you breed them for. Long list of what can go wrong with them, of course, but most of it fixable, and a cow will put up with a good deal of discomfort– having a tube jammed down its gullet on a regular basis, for instance– without much fuss. Horses can be stubborn or flighty, but if they’re real bad you just get rid of them. Crowbait. But with people, in this modern world, each one you got to handle in a different way, and even that depends on the situation. Harleigh has seen former chairmen of the Three Nations who spent all their time trying not to make enemies, and they never got a damn thing done. Others got too far ahead of the accepted opinion, even if their ideas weren’t bad, and got voted out real quick. But folks want a leader, they’re herd animals at heart, and if you put up a strong enough front, put your ass out on the line for them, they’ll follow you anywhere.