With thanks to Brad Watson.
“Seeing growth and profit opportunities at a time of rising oil prices and a pro-business administration, big energy companies like Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, and Anschutz Exploration are seizing on the federal lands free-for-all, as they collectively buy up tens of thousands of acres of new leases and apply for thousands of permits to drill.”
— Eric Lipton and Hiroko Tabuchi, Driven by Trump Policy Changes, Fracking Booms on Public Lands, New York Times, October 27, 2018.
•
I saw the gold haze in the sky, that night when Thomas and I got away and used his car. The roustabouts light the flare stacks to ease the pressures caused by the gas. They use a flare pen, my husband Danny showed me before. A man shoots a spark at the top of an invisible pile of vapors that rises up from the oil wells. The gas lights up in a bright thin flame, like a feather plume worn by the queen horse in a rodeo show.
I spied the hot blur from the misted window in the backseat. I raised my head while Thomas put his mouth on me. The light flashed into the darkness and I closed my eyes.
•
I met Thomas last winter when I brought Danny his stomach medication and other supplies at the Combs Ranch site, about ten miles away from our home. This was one of the periods when Dan lived at the man camp. The oil field’s a busy place, with lots of workers, lots of machinery: There’s the rig, the makings for the casings, the basefluids, the friction reducers, the sand and iron trucks. Danny pointed them all out and tried to teach me when we first got married and moved to Douglas twelve years back. I paid more attention to the people then. The wives, I mean. The men didn’t mean that much to me.
We’d meet up every weekend those days. One of the girls would bang together a barbecue or a burger night. Us fillies gathered in the kitchen sipping bourbon while the men drank their beers in the backyard. Billie, Rufina, Felicia, Michelle, and I had a fine time of it. We’d get red-faced from the booze and talk nonstop about getting pregnant, or about the little ones that had already been born. I remember the men as young and rambunctious, very brave, excited, but serious when they fretted over their work during nights off.
By the time I brought Danny his gear to Combs Ranch, we had stopped going to the barbecues or burger nights as much. We’d had three children and instead spent our evenings watching TV. Most of the folks that I still knew from before had grown old in what seemed like lickety-split. But business was good, better than it’d been before, because there was more of an opportunity for the company to get under the land. More chances to coax the oil up, Danny said. The fields now spread across Douglas into Fremont, Casper, Gillette, and Riverton, and there were lots of new young folks in town.
“This is Thomas,” Danny said, at the rig site, when I handed him a white paper bag with his pills in it.
I shook the stranger’s hand. He had a long, thin face and dark hair. His eyes were hidden by sunglasses above a broad, crooked mouth. He looked about thirty.
“Hey there, ma’am,” he said. His hand in my hand felt broad and warm and dry.
•
I met Danny when I was eighteen, in Galveston. I’d graduated from high school and worked in an old folks home. I’d had to get a job, but I’d also wanted to get away from my mother, whose problem with Lortab squeezed out of most of the money from her SDI check. At Holden Estates, I cleaned the patients and let them talk at me. At first the old women’s falling-to-pieces bodies gave me the worst fright. I had to hide it. And one or two could get aggressive, not knowing who they were anymore and hitting you. But after a while I got used to it.
Danny was eighteen, too. He’d come to town from out in Salado. He was short but had a nice laugh. And he was a go-getter. He worked as the janitor for the home but he always talked about the future.
“I’m getting out of this place to do oil rigs or construction,” he’d say, mopping the floor and talking a streak while I brushed a patient’s hair or rubbed their legs. “I’ll learn the business and then get investors and start something of my own.”
“I know you could do it,” I’d say. “You have the fire.”
“Sure I do,” he’d say, mopping harder.
One day, he looked right at me, snapping his head up in a hurry.
“Do you really think so?”
I was washing the feet of this staring-into-space old mare with the worst toenails. “Do I really think what, Dan?”
“Do you really think I could have my own business?”
“Sure I do,” I said, scrubbing away.
“Let’s get married,” Danny said, all in a huff and just falling apart from I guess a sudden need to shout out his love.
“Maybe we should go on a date first,” I said, still holding that beast’s feet.
“Okay,” Danny said.
We dated for a while. After about six months, Danny officially asked me to marry him in an Italian restaurant, over spaghetti and wine. In the same conversation he said there was an opening at one of the mountain state oil plays, roughneck work.
So we got hitched and moved just outside Douglas.
•
There’s a bird here that some folks fuss about. It’s a brown and white puff ball with fancy feathers. The bird makes this little burbly coo. I used to hear the creatures’ call more when Danny and I were kids starting out here. These birds don’t like people very much and so they hightail from the new rig sites popping up. The flare stacks from the oil fields make the sky bright all over our neighborhood, at every hour. Birds can get confused and fly toward the shine in the sky. Some of them get burned up in the fire.
They’re called sage grouse, and they’re in the news all the time. Years back, I once spied a little group of them when I was walking the edges of the neighborhood, around a sagebrush patch about half a mile from my house. The males looked so strange and walked so funny that I researched them on the web.
I like the sage grouse on account of their courting. They romance each other in these places called leks. Little hideaways out in the brush. The males put on the most ridiculous shows. After a while, you see how it’s beautiful. The critters have a boop pi pooo doo sort of cluck, and they fan out their back feathers, which are like peacock feathers, but dark brown. After that, they pump out their breasts, which have long white pockets. When the male sage grouse bares its chest, the pockets open up and show a yellow color, beneath. Like they’re revealing their hearts.
The little brown hens peck at worms in the dirt and just eyeball them, patiently selecting their suitors.
•
I saw Thomas for the second time at the Safeway, over on East Richards. About a month had passed since that day on the field. I spotted him right away, by the steaks. We have some strapping men here in Douglas. Even so, his shoulders cut quite a figure.
“Mrs. Wojcik,” he said. He mispronounced it Wajik.
“Good morning,” I said. I pretended I’d forgotten his name.
“Thomas, ma’am,” he said. He smiled with that thin crooked mouth. “Thomas Esposito.”
“Esposito,” I said, starting to laugh for no reason. “What is that?”
“It’s Mexican, ma’am.”
“Mexican, my goodness,” I said, laughing some more. “Where you from?”
He laughed too. “Buffalo.”
I stood him ten years. I looked at his hard, lined face, brown and tight around the bones. When I saw his long body, it made me feel the weight of the extra flesh on my thighs and the lower part of my belly. My eyes have sunk in a little since when I was younger. But my worrying about my looks didn’t stop a pocket in my chest from opening up. Fool woman, fool girl.
“Call me Linda,” I said.
Thomas smiled at me with a dirty, easy kindliness, as if he’d just taken my hand and led me to bed. “Why, isn’t that a pretty name?” he said.
•
It’s beautiful country out here, once you get past the houses and trailers, the rigs and the pits. The winter snows shoot you in the face like shrapnel but land soft on the trees and fill the streets like sweet smoke. Once the sun comes, the green hills ripple out, covered with tiny purple and yellow flowers. There’s cows and horses and deer out in the remoter areas. Still, there’s more rigs around Douglas now than when we first moved here, and more strangers, too. The federal government used to have a no-sir attitude on oil and gas companies leasing the land beneath the surface, but the opportunity opened up with the new times we’re in.
Some of the plains have been torn up to make way for the wells. I see the white scars cutting through the grasslands where I used to take our eldest when she was just a baby, to see the lambs. Now the lambs are gone and the rigs make a high grinding sound as they pump up the oil while the men scramble around and shout.
But if you keep driving south, you can still find yourself a lonely field, where you can listen to the quiet and the birds. You take your sweater off and feel the air on your arms. After the long pale winter you can feel your body sipping at the sunlight.
•
Dan and my girls and I went to church the Sunday after I saw Thomas at the Safeway. We’ve got Carmen, who’s five, and Lila, who’s six, and Samantha, who’s eight. Carmen is blonde and has a delicate stomach, like her father. Samantha and Lila are redheaded, like Dan’s mother, Sue, who passed away eight years back from cancer.
Dan never got his own business, but he made foreman, so now he can come and go from the man camp. He’d slept at home the night before, and Sunday morning dressed up in his black suit with the bolo and his good brown boots. I put Carmen in her pink lace. Samantha and Lila wanted to wear the same thing, matching purple dresses I’d made them for Christmas. I wore a brown dress with brown leather pumps and my hair tied back with a green ribbon.
When I tied the ribbon through my braid, I got a very clear picture in my head of Thomas. I saw him leaning back against the meat counter in the supermarket, how his yellow shirt pulled against his shoulders. This vision made me twirl the ribbon around the wrong side of my head and I had to fix it twice.
We got to First Baptist a little late and sat toward the back, shuffling and rustling in the quiet. My old friend Billie saw us sneaking in and gave us a wink.
“God sees all your sins and still loves you, remember that,” Pastor Bill was saying. He was the younger one, in his twenties, and I couldn’t take him very serious. “You just give the Lord your sins and he will wash them away. He gave you this land, and he gave you your loved ones, and he gave you his Son’s very life, too, which is the most precious of all gifts in the world.”
I nodded in my seat and let Carmen cling onto me. It was true that God had done his part for my family, because we weren’t wanting. And I like the idea of Jesus’s terrible love filling you up, from the bottom of your feet all the way to the top. But I’ll admit I’m not much for that hellfire. I take what works for me and I leave the rest.
Pastor Bill started quoting from Corinthians: “And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”
“Amen, amen,” we said.
When we got home, I made us all a big lunch. I did the last of the preparations in the kitchen, looking out the open window at the smoke from the flare stacks drifting through the air. The well boys are supposed to push steam into the stacks to keep it cleaner, but that doesn’t always get done. I closed the window while, out in the dining room, I could hear Dan cracking jokes with the girls.
“What’s a cross between a wild turkey and a mosquito?”
“Tell us!” the girls wailed.
“A turkito.”
I came in with the steak platters to see my daughters laughing and laughing, squeezing their forks in their fists and clamping down their eyes.
Samantha and Lila gobbled up the food, seared T-bones made with wild rice and a nice tomato sauce topping. Danny and Carmen just picked. I sat across from them at the table and studied Dan. He’s thinner now than when he was a boy, and he has a few blue burst veins in his left cheek. Samantha and Lila favor him and Carmen favors me.
“Doesn’t Mama look nice today?” Dan said, looking at me and poking at his potatoes. “And these fine T’s, honey, what’s the special occasion?”
“I just thought you’d like something nice,” I said, touching the ribbon in my hair.
I had a secret little flame pluming up in my body, which lit me up like a Chinese lantern. It had already started. My mind kept wandering, even there at the table.
“Who wants dessert? Peach cobbler.”
•
Once Danny became foreman we paid down our four bedroom house and rebuilt the roof. We bought an extra car. In the early days I had an almost crazy fear of going broke because of my mother’s mistakes, but I haven’t felt like that for a long time, now.
I’d seen women lose their minds before. I’d pitied them. I’d watched Felicia Jenkins tear up her marriage to Hans with a guitar-playing trucker she’d run across at the Waterhole. I’d seen Michelle Enders break up her family, losing her husband Greg and her two sons for a bow-legged waiter she met at the Flagstaff Café. I got a real close up view to the wages of sin, and I’d hug my daughters and want no part of it. The women’s natures seemed to hit them when they turned forty-five, a little later, and it brought them to ruination.
That winter I met Thomas I was only forty-one years old.
•
Billie Moorehead and her husband Karl threw Billie a fiftieth birthday party that winter. Karl had worked with Danny for twenty years and Billie and I had been girls together back in the early 2000s with Michelle and Rufina and Felicia. I wouldn’t say that I have anything like a best friend anymore, but Billie and I used to be close. She’s a large, powerful woman, with a crisp set of strawberry curls and very wide hips and long full breasts that are a real comfort to lean on.
“What doesn’t kill me makes me weaker,” she’d joke after a couple drinks. She’d lost a baby and had three miscarriages before hitting thirty-three. By her big five-oh, she’d laid her mother, father, two aunts, and a brother to rest. But she’d had five children, four boys and a girl, all of them grown now and working the derricks or in oil administration. And Billie had stuck it out with her man Karl, who stood her fifteen years, and had gone wrinkled and patchworked with scars since his problems with skin cancer.
When Dan and I came in through her door that night Billie ran around with liquor bottles for top-ups and trays filled with the mini quiches you can heat up in the microwave. Karl was out back with the grill, getting help with the burgers from their sons. Billie handed me a bourbon and smacked me a quick kiss on the cheek. She gave me a hard little look and said, “Why, didn’t you get dressed up for old me!”
“Oh, this is just one of my old standbys,” I said about my outfit. I gave her a wrapped present of White Shoulders Cologne and Body Wash, but my head was swiveling around the room as I peered at the partygoers. There was Hans with his new wife, Lupita. There was single Greg. There was Philip Peterson, Rufina’s quiet and broody Southern husband.
Billie laughed and clucked at my chest. I’d put on a short dress made of slinky nylon and propped up my breasts with the aid of a fancy bra I’d fished out of the back of my drawers.
“Coming into your own,” she said, nudging me with her big hip. “Well, good for you. Drink up, lady danger.”
That’s when I saw Thomas at the end of the room, talking to Rufina, a scraggly little sunburnt bugeater who’d already had too much to swill and laughed like a hyena at whatever he said. Billie tracked my eyes and nodded.
“Bambi is cute, and I’ll bet he tastes even better,” she whispered into my ear, so I could smell the bourbon.
Thomas turned his head and saw me. He looked straight at me and smiled.
“Oops,” Billie said. “That boy’s getting an eyeful of you in that dress tonight.”
Thomas untied himself from Rufina and came striding over.
“Hey there, Linda,” he said.
“Hello Thomas,” I said.
“I see you two have met,” Billie said, her voice shifting gears into a lower speed.
“How’d those steaks work out?” Thomas asked me, leaning up on the wall and crossing his legs while drinking a beer.
“I know my way around a steak,” I said, laughing again like I had at the supermarket.
“I’ll bet you do!” Thomas reached out and clinked his beer with my glass. “I’ll bet you know your way around a lot of things.”
I stuck out my chin. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a compliment, ma’am. You look like a capable woman.”
“A capable woman?” I laughed some more. “Billie, does that sound like a compliment to you?”
But when I turned to nudge her I saw Billie had walked away, to the back where Karl and her kids manned the burgers.
I drank my bourbon and then had another, and another. Thomas kept topping me up.
“Where’d you come from, Linda?” Thomas said. “California, I’ll bet. Or New York.”
“Why you say that?”
Thomas lowered his voice. “Those movie star curves, if you don’t mind me saying.”
I went very serious and still, my heart smashing its way through the lake of liquor I’d guzzled down. “Now, you shouldn’t talk to me like that. I’m a married woman.”
“I won’t talk like that if you don’t want me to,” he said.
But I did want him to, I did.
“Don’t fuck up,” Billie hissed at me later that night as Dan and I weaved our way out the door.
•
I didn’t see Thomas for a while then, more than four months. The men got busy again with assembling a new rig in Rolling Hills, about a hundred miles south. All the males just disappeared from town. Dan would come home on Friday nights and stay until Sundays. He got sick for about three weeks, though, having his stomach trouble. Carmen had the same thing. I’d run back and forth between them, toting ginger ale and wet towels and Prevacid. Carmen cried a lot after she threw up, and to make her feel better, I’d play “Speechless” from Aladdin on my phone. Dan waved away the soda and the soup, but he gripped onto my arm in a silent thank you. Him never suspecting any of my treacherous feelings.
Finally, Carmen and Dan got better.
“Come here, kitten,” Danny said, one night in March. He smiled at me from the bed and I saw the blue veins in his cheek like the neon star that decorates the Waterhole’s back bar. “Come here, my little kitty cat.”
I laid down while Dan patted me and kissed me on my neck, trying to be a husband to me. The doctors in Douglas had said that that the stomach issue was probably allergies, though one female doctor in Laramie, a specialist, got interested when we told her about living so close to the oil fields. She thought it might be something to do with toxins or the flare stacks. I’d had a few years of panicking about health issues but the Douglas medicals said that there was no proof that stacks or drilling really hurt anybody. Even so, I’d talked to Dan about quitting and moving but he wouldn’t hear about it.
“A person has to recognize the good when it shows up, and hold on to it,” he said.
So I didn’t worry about toxins on the night when my husband felt well enough to pinch me and cuddle. Carmen had moved back to her bedroom with her sisters, playing with her dollies and getting angry at Samantha and Lila for leaving her out of their games. Dan rolled on top of me and I looked up at the ceiling, where I saw Thomas’s face as if it’d been painted there. I pictured Thomas’s chest, and his fist-hard muscles. I came up with scenarios where I’d gone to the man camp under the cover of night and surprised him in his bunk. I fast-forwarded to where he had me bent over and scratching at him. I wanted him to pull my hair and to say nasty things to me. Danny and I’d been married for over twenty-three years, and as far as I knew, he’d never gotten into a tangle with another woman. He’d done everything for us.
•
Thomas sent me a text, in late April.
How you doing Mrs. Im just checking on u – Thomas.
How’d you get this number?! I wrote back, scared.
It’s on the web baby all I had to do was type ur name in
Don’t you call me baby, I tapped out, laughing in my bathroom.
But ur such a pretty baby I can’t help it.
•
I got these romantic notions in my head then. I started looking for the sage grouse nests, their leks. I wanted to see the males puff out so that the yellow hot spot opened up on their breasts. I wanted to see the little brown hens pecking daintily in the dirt as if nothing was going on.
I’d do my aerobic walking around the empty areas that still remained, after dinnertime until dusk. I’d peer into the frosted patches of brush that hadn’t been dug up. The skies would flush bright, then go dark, bright, then go dark. Those flare stacks beat like a heart in the weather. There used to be small flocks of grouse around here, like I said, back maybe seven years ago. But now I couldn’t see any birds. I told myself that it was still too cold, and I hoped that they’d just tucked themselves deeper in the snow.
•
A week after I got Thomas’s message, while I was on my way back from the grocery, Samantha called me from the house and said Carmen had passed out in the living room. I raced home practically fainting and found Carmen sitting up on the floor by the sofa, looking drained.
“Let’s go, Nugget,” I said.
I called Billie, who said she’d look after the girls. I took Carmen straight to the ER, where we did a long round of tests. My daughter looked wrong under the lights, too white and thin, and I was sure they’d find cancer. I leaned over her bed and kissed her hands and prayed. I couldn’t remember any prayer but that one Pastor Bill had gone on about in the winter, the one where God blesses you with all that you need. I said, God, you give me what I need, which is this child to not be dying. It took some time to get the results, hours and hours, but they didn’t come up anything, so I guess Corinthians worked.
“Some kids just come out delicate,” the nurse said.
We came home around two in the morning. I put Carmen to bed while her sisters hovered at the doorway and then disappeared. Billie went to the kitchen and made coffee.
“I don’t like being sick,” Carmen said, and fell right asleep.
Billie and I went to the living room and held the hot coffee cups in our hands. It had started snowing outside.
“How you doing?” Billie asked.
“Like shit on a shoe,” I said.
Billie sipped her coffee and gave me a plain-dealing look. “Cause of the kid, or cause something else?”
“What are you talking about?” I said, but I didn’t meet her eyes.
“I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” she said after a second or two.
“I’ve had a night of it, girl, give me some rest.”
“Tell you anyway.”
“I suppose you will.”
“Don’t do it, and if you already did, make your penance and get right,” she said.
“Go home, Billie,” I said.
“You think it ain’t been hard for me with Karl and the cancer? And him getting to be an old man? And my losing those babies? You think I haven’t had some dick come sniffing around? You want to wind up like Felicia and Michelle? Get right. Get right. Your daughter’s in there. Get right.”
“Go home,” I said.
•
The thing about sin is that it doesn’t feel like anything wrong. It feels like the right thing, that you should be doing this. The earth gives its gifts. You’re one of God’s children, and what you’re meant to do is bask in that abundance. Even when you look at the scars on the hill or the kid being sick or your tits pushed up friendly in a dress, you’re in a state of grace. You move past the place of virtue and evil to a station where there’s nothing but your own good reasons.
Two nights later Thomas and I curled up in the back seat of his Mazda and I felt blessings rain down on my skin. I never, never, never felt my whole body open up like a wild bird’s.
“What about when I do this?” Thomas whispered at me. It was muggy in the car from the heater and our breath. I stared hard into Thomas’s eyes, which look nearly black in the nighttime. But when the flares went off, they turned brandy colored.
“Do that, yeah,” I said.
“What about if I get down under here like this?”
“Yes, do that,” I gasped.
The shame could come later. The disaster, too. I leaned back and opened my mouth. The sky flashed gold, and the sky flashed red, and the mysteries released from the wells and spread.
•••
Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. Abundance will appear in her forthcoming collection, Americas, which will be published by the University of Nevada Press in August 2020.