THE MAN CAMP WAS the biggest town for god knows how many North Dakota miles, built to be torn down like fucking LEGOs when the Bakken ran dry and the whole thing busted, which everyone knew it would. The bust was a sure thing, but the timing was anyone's guess, and guessing was everyone's favorite topic. Joe knew exactly as much about the oil field as he needed to do his job, which wasn't much, but he joined in with his own loud predictions, debated whether the proper unit was months, years, decades. He was doing it now, this morning, over strong coffee and crisp cafeteria bacon, until Dustin called bullshit.
"Dude. Put the crystal ball away already," he said, his mouth full of Froot Loops from the self-serve cereal hopper. "You don't know and it don't matter. We work until the work runs out. Then we can fear the reaper."
Joe pictured Will Ferrell and a cowbell, wondered if this was a reference he and Dustin shared. Dustin was barely twenty-one, fresh out of his parents' house, the biggest disappointment of his life so far an unsuccessful search for a steady girlfriend. Every break he got, Dustin went home to his mother's chili and cinnamon rolls, to beers with his high school buddies.
"You mean face the reaper. At the end, you face him."
In the cafeteria, Dustin flashed a smile, revealing the benefits of teenage orthodontics. "What I mean, Joe, is YOLO."
"Yoyo?" Joe was messing with him now. He knew what YOLO meant, felt the oppressive truth of YOLO like spiders crawling on his skin.
Dustin's hair stuck up at odd angles, and Joe fought an urge to pat the kid on the head, make him look more presentable. Through the thin plastic wall that separated their bedrooms, the kid sounded like a sixty-year-old man. Dustin's smoker's hack, exacerbated by a nasty bronchitis he'd picked up somewhere, had woken Joe multiple times. Joe found himself stealing the kid's cigarettes, tossing them into trash cans at random gas stations. It was how he would have handled it with his own son, if his own son had grown up to be a smoker, but DJ hadn't gotten the chance to grow up at all. Joe felt his hands burn and tingle, then, and before the feeling could spread to his chest, to the raw mess of his heart, he closed his eyes, willed himself to stop thinking about it. It was like closing a set of blinds to hide a wildfire blazing outside the window. Temporary relief, false, but relief all the same.
Joe had been in the man camp for about a year, and he had to admit it lived up to the promises of the recruiter he had spoken to back in Colorado, who had sold a comfortable life (Amenities like you wouldn't believe! Better than home! Hassle-free!) and the chance to make his fortune driving water trucks for the rigs. It was Joe's nature to doubt all salesmen, but in spite of his low expectations about this part of his compensation package, it was an improvement over his first gig back in Colorado. Room and board had been free there, too, a giant double-wide provided by the company stuffed with eleven other guys, bunk beds lined up like army barracks, slopped Stagg chili and Dorito powder in the shared kitchen, the smell of burnt coffee and weed and the never-ending trash can overflow, their sense of decency dropping off the same cliff as their privacy.
Joe hadn't been back to Greeley since he'd left, had decided to avoid location-based triggers that might evoke memory—his lovely wife, pregnant, laughing as a thick milkshake mustache dripped down her chin at JB's Drive In. "Say it five times fast!" Mandy had insisted, and they'd both tried it, giggling like fools, over and over. Marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache marshmallow milkshake mustache. Or years later, at the junkyard off Highway 34, the one with the observation tower he'd paid a buck to climb with DJ so the boy could marvel at the view of the Rockies on the western horizon. Mandy's minivan, the car he had spent so many days off working on, had been hauled there after the wreck, was there still, he imagined, crumpled, rusting in the cruel sun. She'd driven off a bridge into the South Platte River. Witnesses reported a sudden jerky swerve, a loss of control, enough momentum to half break, half jump the crumbling concrete barrier, but there had been no sightings of what, if anything, had been blocking the road. They'd managed to pull an unconscious Mandy out in time, but DJ was already gone.
Joe asked for extra shifts instead of weeks off, and his supervisor was more than happy to shave his breaks. He killed the rare empty day playing Gran Turismo on an ancient PlayStation 2, taking breaks on the smokers' plaza. The gas rigs were a new world—unceasing, unstoppable—and working eighty, ninety hours each week had made him the small fortune he needed to pay for Mandy's care in a long-term care facility back in Greeley, where she lived now.
"We're not sure she'll ever fully recover," the nurses had told him, and he'd nodded, mute. Of course she wouldn't, and neither would he. He loved her, still he loved her, imagined her with him on the rig, an angel on his shoulder. The things he couldn't forgive he just had to bear, but Mandy was an exception—he could neither forgive her nor bear seeing her. He'd broken his own heart and left town, the condition of Mandy's heart in the capable hands of the facility staff.
Dustin stuffed his pockets with sausage biscuits and filled his thermos with coffee. Joe grabbed sack lunches for them both. "You look like shit," Joe said. "Sure you don't need a day?"
Dustin shrugged. "The cough is a real bitch at night, but it gets better in the daytime."
Joe nodded. It was the same with his dreams. In the bright light of day he didn't imagine DJ's fading struggle against his seat belt, the river current flowing through his hair, through his lungs. In the bright light of day, he didn't stop to wonder whether Mandy had a real accident or whether she'd meant to drive into that river.
WINDBLOWN GRIT SCOURED HIS face and tapped against the buildings, which bowed slightly in the heaviest gusts. Joe was happy for the long shift ahead of him, happy to be free from his dreams. Gravel crunched under his boots, louder for the 5 a.m. silence around him. The men seemed quieter at night, presumably due to the human habits of their lives before the camp, but there were always men coming in and men heading out, a twenty-four-hour stream of going to work and getting off work, sleeping and waking, being indoors and being outdoors. Even now there were guys watching The Godfather in the rec room, guys lifting weights in the fitness area, guys walking to the bunks, hoods pulled over their heads to shield them from the relentless prairie wind. The lens coating on his sunglasses was scraped and scratched nearly off from the grit that pelted him as he worked.
He and Dustin were set to ride together, and once Joe got the kid talking his own mind could drift away on the conversational current—he could nod, hum a few times, offer occasional low-stakes advice on Dustin's low-stakes twenty-one-year-old life, call it a day well lived. At the truck, Dustin paused. "Give me a minute, will you? I forgot I need new laces."
Joe shrugged. The kid was lucky the camp store was open this early. The store didn't carry much—boot laces, work gloves, cigarettes, Twinkies. Joe sat on the back bumper and looked at the sky. The camp lights were no match for the bright splashes of starlight—Joe had never before been able to see the distant sparkle of the cosmos so clearly. There had always been too much light right in front of him, light that tethered him to the moment. His mind wandered up and into the expanse, so that when the man approached, Joe startled.
The man smiled, held out his hand. "Ben Stone. Company recruiter. You're Joe Baker?"
Stone was a grizzled old guy, mid-seventies maybe, a paper copy of the Tribune under one arm and a set of pencils, actual lead pencils, the kind that needed to be sharpened in one of those rotary sharpeners from grade school, in the front pocket of his shirt. A little old for the rigs themselves, Stone had arrived a week ago for a site visit. Dustin had heard he was retired from some high school in Bismarck, a history teacher, and he looked the part.
Joe shook Stone's hand. "Good to meet you." Joe cleared his throat to shake the sleep from his voice. "You out from Bismarck?"
"Yep. Turned me loose into the field for a few days. I have to say, I was expecting worse. The food is really quite good, though I would never tell my wife that. Quieter than I thought it would be—I pictured it like something from a Steinbeck novel. Not quite Grapes of Wrath because, no family, you know? But maybe Cannery Row."
Joe laughed. Steinbeck was the only author he'd actually liked in high school English. "Not near enough alcohol for that. Too many rules."
"It's some kind of frog hunting, I guess." Stone shrugged. "I've seen your file. Community college. Associate's but no bachelor's. Former land surveyor. How'd you end up here?"
Joe never knew how much to share. He thought of Mandy as he'd last seen her, in a wheelchair in the assisted living recreation room, a blanket on her lap, her hair greasy and stringy, staring out the window at the red pop of house finches against the spruce outside. Her eyes neutral until she saw him, then a speechless glare that drilled him with hate, with blame. Her silent accusations had reacted with the secret doubts he kept buried, and one thing he knew for sure—Mandy's depression had eaten at the heart of their family life for years, and he, for all those years, had been resentful instead of compassionate. "Turns out hauling water pays better than surveys, at least once the recession hit. I needed the money."
"You still have family back in Colorado?"
How much of his life were people prepared to take in response to such pleasantries? "My wife is in assisted living. She doesn't really . . .?she has a brain injury."
"I'm sorry to hear that." Stone had what Mandy would have called kind eyes, and Joe was surprised by the older man's sincerity, and then was surprised by his surprise, by how long it had been since he had believed in anyone else's honesty.
"Here's the thing, Joe. We need an advance land guy back there in Weld County. Someone to secure easements from property owners, convince them to allow us to get the seismic testing done, reassure them that they won't start being able to light their water faucets on fire. Company likes to promote from within, we need someone who knows the area, and you seem to stand right out. You interested?"
Joe let out a low whistle. "When do you need to know?"
"Soon." Stone smiled. "You could do a lot worse than this, you know."