Yellow Earth Read online

  “I’m starting at fifty an acre,” he tells her.

  She laughs. “It’s not your money, Sig.”

  “They hire me cause I’m careful with it.”

  “This rock pays anything like what they hope,” says Ginny, “careful is out the window.”

  “Anybody can wrap up a lease if they throw enough money at it,” says Sig. Ginny worked for Aubrey for a while, buying anything with a fart’s worth of gas beneath it, but apparently there was some personal problem, an attitude adjustment improperly completed, maybe some sloppy ownership research. “To do it and maintain your company’s economic advantage requires a salesman.”

  “And that’s why you’re a legend, Sig,” smiles Ginny, turning back to her Roast Turkey Farmhouse Salad. “Bon appetit.”

  BULLETINS FROM THE BLACK STUFF

  Could the Bakken be the next big play?

  Some very swift moves on the Energy chessboard this week, as Big Oil zeroes in on shale deposits in the Peace Garden State. Advances in stimulation technology make the formations here highly attractive, and the land rush is on!

  With crude at $115.46 a barrel, and auto juice skyrocketing over four dollars a gallon at the nation’s pumps, this may be the time to stop futzing and start fracking.

  Wherever you go, go with all your heart – Confucius

  EVERY DAY THERE ARE more of them. Most only stay five to fifteen minutes, watch the equipment move around, speculate with their neighbors about what exactly is going on. Maybe cause they’re a full week ahead of any of the other rigs being thrown up in the area and right off the highway, and this whole play has been dormant for decades. Plenty of folks here who never seen a drilling operation up close, don’t know that from a safe distance it’s a bit like watching paint dry.

  But today there’s a good two dozen hunkered in and somehow sensing that the real deal is about to kick off. Some are standing and some sitting on the hoods of the cars and pickups they’ve pulled onto the shoulder, not going anywhere till they see an event worth talking about. Upshaw doesn’t pay them much mind till the sheriff’s car pulls up.

  He tells the boys to hold for a minute and climbs the ladder down from the platform. The wind is already a bitch and the locals say it just gets worse. Have to keep that deck clean, keep people from sliding off it. The sheriff steps across the field to the edge of the pad to greet him.

  “Are they any problem?” he says, jerking his head back toward the peanut gallery. “Cause I can move em to the far side of the road.”

  “They’re welcome to stay, it’s totally safe. We don’t even have the blowout preventer on yet.”

  The sheriff frowns at the word ‘blowout.’

  “That like a safety thing?”

  “Yeah, but while we’re just spudding in there’s not enough pressure to need one. We’re working with the wide bit today, get down past your aquifer and establish the surface hole, throw some casing in and cement it.” Back in Texas there’s schoolkids who can recite the whole routine for you. “We’ll let that cement firm up for a day, test it, and if everything’s jake we pop on a BOP and get on with the real drilling.”

  The sheriff nods as if he understood it all. “So they’re not in the way.”

  “Long as they stick clear from the access road. As for danger, if one of these suckers does blow it’ll go up, not sideways.”

  The sheriff tilts his head to see the top of the derrick. “Like a rocket launcher.”

  Upshaw smiles. “Let’s hope not. Anyhow, they want to stick around, we’re just about to break ground on YE Number One.”

  He walks back to the rig and shimmies up the metal rungs, aware that his crew is watching, that they’ve got nicknames for him and think he’s old and grumpy, think that somehow they could run the drill string in and out just fine without him. He felt the same way when he was their age and roughnecking in Oklahoma, just as full of the same shit. He can hear Dizzy’s boombox playing something hyper, like guitars in heat clawing at each other, way up on the monkeyboard.

  “We under arrest?” asks either Ike or Mike, no nameplate on their hardhats like he asked, so impossible to tell them apart.

  Upshaw settles behind his controls. “Just wanted to know when the curtain comes up,” he says, starting to lower the kelly drive. “Let’s not keep em waiting.”

  They’ll go down eight hundred feet before they put the casing in, taking no chances with the water. The bit augers into the flattened prairie dirt and he can hear applause from the road, a little crackling of it over the machine noise. Ike and Mike turn and bow to the onlookers, and then horns are honked and people whistle.

  Must be a bunch of leaseholders, thinks Upshaw, or life here is awful damn slow.

  HE’S LOOKING IN THE rear view mirror again. Clink Roberts, who broke him in on the rigs, always said ‘What’s happening, what’s bound to get you into trouble, is always in front of you, and that’s where you got to keep your head.’ But that was before, and now even though he’s barely over the speed limit and got the road near to himself, he can’t help but look behind.

  Buzzy swings off the bypass onto I-35 north of Dallas and eases into the passing lane. He loves to roll as long as he possibly can without shifting gears, going with the flow, and if he’s going to make this run without sleep it won’t hurt to play a couple mind games to keep him on his toes. It’s been a long time. When Terry packed it in and deeded him the truck he wasn’t sure at first, all that bad karma waiting at the wheel, but where else can he pull down the kind of money they say is just calling out his name up there?

  “Goodbye hemorrhoids, goodbye kidney stones, goodbye huffing diesel eighteen hours a day,” said Terry, who is on his second wife and for some reason wants to keep her. “You take this sumbitch and get up there, send me a couple grand every month till we’re even.”

  Terry had a little hotshot rig he run around Houston with, oil fields, construction, whatever, and then got the Big Truck Fever and borrowed enough to move on up to this Western Star 4900. And no sooner had it on the road when his butthole decided to quit the business.

  “I’m not talking the itchy ones, just remind you they’re with you mile after mile,” he’ll tell near-strangers if they hold still long enough, “these little bastards hurt. Doc said they could lead to complications, and that’s one part of my body I don’t want complicated.”

  He tried cushions, he tried ointments, he tried twisting one way or another till his back started to spasm, but there wasn’t nothing for it but to get off the road.

  “So it’s up to you, Bro,” he said when he showed up at the door dangling the keys. “Whatever you went through before, that was none of your fault, and the thing to do is jump on back into the saddle.”

  So he’s Waking Up with the Wolf in the northbound lane, Lisa playing lots of Reba this morning, which is fine with Buzzy even if she is a holdover from the Old Man’s generation, him and Terry getting a nightly dose of Reba and Dolly and Merle and Hank Junior while the Old Man emptied his toolbox tinkering with that quagmire of a pickup truck, popping rebuilt engines in and out of it like it was ever gonna be more than something you’d run to the dump with. He’d crank up the radio, only part of the heap that still worked good, wrestle with the plugs and valves for a couple hours and then slam the hood down, crank her up, and go out ‘to put some juice back in the battery’ when really it was out to Dusty’s Place, and the only juice he’d allow past his tonsils come from the tequila fruit. And then home in the deep dark, caterwauling the same damn song–

  I’d like to settle down, but they won’t let me

  A fugitive must be a rolling stone

  –when the Old Man was near the most settled man you’d ever want to meet, forty years in the same house, same job, same Punch and Judy marriage. Ate pork chops on Monday, goddammit, and don’t put it out of order.

  “Only good thing about boot camp,” he’d always say, “you knew when the fucking horn was going to blow.”

  Whatever it was h
e done in Vietnam, and even Ma never heard more than the tip of it, it kept him nailed down snug in West Texas the rest of his life.

  Tim McGraw, who the Old Man said he could tolerate, sings that “It Felt Good on My Lips.” PLX will get you out of Texas and through a good deal of Oklahoma, where you can pick up XXY, and after that Buzzy will go with his mix tapes. He can’t deal with the CB chatter unless there’s weather or some slowdown to reckon with, and those endless Louis L’Amour stories Terry used to listen to would just put him to sleep. Got to stay alert the whole way, even if ‘alert’ hadn’t helped any when his load started sliding.

  Buzzy drinks coffee, still hot out of the thermos, and powers through what’s left of the Lone Star State. You got to watch your fluids, know which ones will stick and which run right through you or you’ll be stopping to tap your bladder every damn hour. Terry had one of these plastic deals, something like a vacuum cleaner hose with a little tank attached, but since he rolled alone you still had to get your Johnson out, do your business, and tuck it back in while shifting gears and staying on the road. Pretty much the definition of Unsafe at Any Speed. The trick is to watch your intake and develop stamina. Before the accident Buzzy was an iron man, only stop to take on fuel or change loads. ‘If you ain’t in a hurry,’ Clink used to say when he was racing around the oil fields, ‘you sure as hell ain’t making any bread.’

  Welcome to the Sooner State. Buzzy is not so sure about the whole idea of Oklahoma. They taught in school how once it was the Indian Territory, and he figures they could have let the Indians keep it as long as they picked it up and moved it, all 236 miles to the Kansas line, somewhere else. That one time he tried to get a drink in the state on a Sunday they stared at him like he had an antler growing from his forehead. And it looks like something you’d stick the poor Indians with, just flat and scrub and nothingness, like the most pitiful stretches of Texas and nothing but. They got all those tornados here because the wind gets so fucking bored it needs to spin in circles just to stay awake. Carrie Underwood now, who escaped from somewhere around here to get on American Idol and onto Terry’s garage wall in her cowboy hat, prairie skirt, and boots, warbling her “Cowboy Casanova.” Girl sounds like she looks, which is not always the case. Buzzy’s sister Jessye sounds like a goddam country angel when she sings but looks like a Russian lady shotputter. On steroids. The Old Man always moaned how he didn’t get no football players for boys, and he sure didn’t get any cheerleader in Jessye. Only one with brains in the family though, got into UT and kicked butt. Sang in some outlaw chick kind of group, too, popular in the Austin clubs, covering Patsy Cline and dressing like biker sluts. She got more tattoos than Buzzy now, which they don’t seem to mind at the heart clinic.

  “In my day,” the Old Man said when she come home with the first bit of ink on her, a pretty tramp stamp with some Oriental writing around it, “a woman with a tattoo was either in the circus or peddling her ass.”

  “In your day,” Jessye come back at him, which she could do like nobody else, “tats only come in one color, Varicose Blue, and it was either ‘Mom,’ that anchor offa Popeye’s forearm, or ‘Property of Hell’s Angels.’”

  A guy in a Trans Am comes up fast from behind and Buzzy eases over to let him go by. Nobody on my tail today, no matter how many times I checked the damn straps. Just let me worry about what lays up ahead.

  It would have to be drill pipe for his first trip back. It is half the damn work available, true, but it’s back there now like a loaded rifle, and if he’d been carrying still Buzzy would be hammering his lungs with Camels, one after the other. The long haul drivers, when they talk, got their opinion of what the worst load is, with swinging beef, HAZMATS, and anything you got to put a tarp over always high on the list. Buzzy moved a house once, creeping extra-wide down the highway with Terry blinking away behind him in his Chevy, and it near drove him crazy. Everybody and his mother in law piled up on your tail, looking for a spot to pass, people honking. Should of hired a damn ox team to pull it.

  Drill pipe is the worst.

  Buzzy has been operating behind the dashboard since he’s fourteen, before beer, before girls, before he had to shave, goddammit. Just head out of Floydada, what direction don’t matter, and blow some air, run down some roadkill, keep that ribbon of highway flying under your wheels. Didn’t nobody in the world but Americans drive for the hell of it like that, except maybe some oil sheiks and they do it in Beamers or solid gold Caddys or some such shit, and they sure as hell don’t run listening to Toby Keith singing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.”

  Another damn Sooner.

  He passes a string of extra-longs hauling those wind turbine blades, well over a hundred foot, look like something out of a Star Wars movie. Trying to put us all out of business with that wind and solar, and you got to wish them luck. Hell, if I could just leave this rig outside for a couple days, soak up the sun, then drag a battleship halfway across the country with it– good Lord. Owner-operators be happy to say fuck you, Mr. Texaco, and keep the difference in their pockets. And then if they could work on some kind of electromagnetic ray that would vaporize all the weigh stations–

  By the time Buzzy has put the Okies in his rear view mirror he’s got his first mix tape in, which is all duets, guys and gals, Lee Ann and George, Trisha and Garth, Conway and Loretta, Rodney and Emmylou, George and Tammy, Johnny Cash and Pam Tillis and that Allison Krauss with whoever’s waiting next in the hallway. He’s even got the Nancy Sinatra one about Jackson that the Old Man used to quote when he’d give Ma a hard time, only Buzzy has never been to a Jackson yet worth running off to, starting with the one in Mississippi. The voices run together nice, and with so many of the women singing about what a dog their last man was, it’s good to have a guy on the track to get his licks in too.

  A little Volvo zips off the entrance ramp and disappears up his butt. Always wanted a bumper sticker that said ‘If You Can’t See My Mirrors, Dipshit, I Can’t See You.’ Buzzy speeds up till he can spot the clueless sumbitch, then passes a couple more civilians to put some distance between them. If you’re not a hemorrhoid, get off my ass.

  Thing is, you got to really drive the rig, stay with it, not sit there watching the phone poles strobe by like it’s a damn video game. Sure, you can get by for hours with your mind on automatic pilot, but when a situation pops up you’ll be too slow to deal with it. He decides to stay north through Topeka and come on to KC from the west. He tears into the first of his PowerBars and washes it down with Nitro2Go, which he’s grown to like the taste of. Back in the day, he was a coffee and amphetamine man, jacked up to the eyeballs and then crashing between jobs, then staying on that same diet after the accident when there weren’t any more jobs. Wonder he never got popped for DUI. Blew the marriage, blew the house, got his nose rearranged a few times in bar fights, but never was on the wrong patch of road at the wrong time. Not that he’d been sensible enough to worry too much about it. It wasn’t for the Program and Terry staying in his corner through it all, he’d still be sitting in the Loser Locker feeling sorry for himself and abusing whatever substance came to hand. Buzzy’s back is starting to complain and he decides he’ll hold out till the Farris truck stop on I-29 outside of St. Joe. Good to have something to aim for.

  It is so easy to slip into a hole, and so damn hard to dig yourself out. The Old Man, he found a cozy spot about halfway down and just stayed there, while other fellas Buzzy come up with– well, there’s more than a few dead or lost for good. Seems like things that used to just come natural are now actual work, like how an old rig can’t make the grade anymore. Like the Old Man at the end, laboring just to get another breath. Like how Buzzy can’t remember a ten-, twelve-hour stretch on the road seeming like such a death sentence before.

  But here he is, how many wasted years later, back on the move with a load of pipe on his flatbed, like God or whoever it is in charge of the whole deal saying, ‘Here you go, son. You get another shot at it. Sorry for the interruption.’
All right then, one solid year with his nose to it, maybe two if the play holds up, and he’ll be back in the game for good. Sober will be tough, hell, it’s tough already, but you figure that’s a nice hunk of change not left on a bar counter or going up your nasal cavities. And money, real money like this promises to be, changes everything, thank you very much Cyndi Lauper. The women, God love em, pretend it’s not such a big thing in how they look at you, but just you stop bringing it home and see how long they stick. Get ahead a little ways, Buzzy figures, and he’ll have something righteous to roll around town in, and it won’t be a goddam pickup truck. Get his teeth fixed, maybe lose a few pounds, pimp up his look a bit, you never know what might happen. Maybe get Terry up with him, start their own field services outfit, let some other chumps do the driving and the scut work. Just got to keep your hand upon the throttle and your eye upon the rail.

  It’s still bright enough that they haven’t turned the lights on over the pumps when he pulls off the interstate. The kid fills his tanks up while Buzzy checks the cinch straps, ratcheting them to where they won’t budge anymore, then tucks it in near the back of the lot, avoiding the stock haulers, and strolls to the Big Rigs Family Restaurant.

  They got George Jones coming out of the system when he walks in, low brick walls separating the table areas, lots of flowers, the real ones that come out of the ground, and it’s near full so he sits at the end of the counter. Good deal of Mexican stuff, which he doesn’t trust north of San Antonio, on the menu since he was last in here and the place had a different name. Buzzy orders quick, chicken fried steak, baked potato, salad with the blue cheese to give it some heft, and heads for the Men’s. He arranges himself on the throne, closes his eyes, and there’s still road flying at him. George is piped in here too, mooning over some woman who’s got the wanders. These places by the interstate never close, just change people all day and all night, like Vegas without the gambling. Sometimes, long-hauling in the dead hours, you pull off the highway attracted by their lights, find a couple human beings rattling around inside who’ll look you in the eye, and it’ll near make you weep.