Heat and Light (9 page)

“I should get some lunch,” she said, edging toward the door. Mack, who disapproved of pot smoking, might smell it on her clothes.

“Cancer,” said Ronny. “Epilepsy. Asthma. Birth defects.”

“Hold on. That was toxic waste. You're saying fracking causes the same problems?”

Ronny inhaled deeply. “I'm saying it's
possible.
I'm saying, who the fuck knows? I'm saying we should probably find out before we turn the whole state into a gas patch.”

“I'm going now. Nice to meet you.” She waved away the joint Ronny offered. “If I smoke any of that, I'll never find my way home.”

On the outskirts of Oakland she made one more stop: Whole Harvest, the giant natural foods store Ronny viewed, with typical grandiosity, as a competitor. She made two tours of the parking lot before finding a space. At that hour—at every hour—the store was crowded with shoppers: women in suits, in workout tights, in Birkenstocks; a large number of forty-year-old mothers carrying babies in slings. Rena wandered the aisles, studying the inventory. The variety was stunning. A fair number of items (bonito flakes?) she couldn't begin to identify. Her usual store was the Bakerton Food Giant, notable for limp produce and a large selection of prepared Jell-O salads, its deli counter run by friendly women sturdy as loggers, cheerily hefting giant blocks of lunch meat. Rena's own mother had been one of them—twenty years in a smock and hairnet, slicing ring bologna and Dutch loaf.

(What was Dutch loaf, exactly? Rena was tempted to ask the dreadlocked boy who ran the deli counter at Whole Harvest, who almost certainly would not know.)

At the refrigerator case she mulled the offerings. Organic milk
at several price points, from four to five dollars a half gallon. Yet even at those prices, people were buying. She watched a pregnant woman load up on organic yogurt. A scrawny man in running shorts chose a half gallon of skim. Neither looked, to Rena, especially wealthy (as though she'd know what wealth looked like). And yet they were paying extra for organic, fully double the price of conventional milk in a grocery store. In Bakerton such a thing was unimaginable: Friend-Lea had priced itself out of the local market. Virtually all their milk was trucked to Pittsburgh, Altoona, State College. Bakerton shoppers might conceivably choose organic milk, but not at twice the price.

She watched two girls, college age, approach the dairy case hand in hand. They were similarly dressed in boots and pegged jeans, their stringy hair cut into bangs. Lesbians holding hands in public—another thing you didn't see in Bakerton, as foreign as bonito flakes.

She bought a sandwich and ate it at one of the tables at the front of the store, studying the other customers: a black man with extravagant braids; a Chinese mother with small twin daughters; two Muslim women in head scarves talking on cell phones. All would seem exotic in Bakerton, where everyone looked more or less the same.

The lesbians at the dairy case were neither feminine nor masculine. They were just girls. Rena wondered how Mack would see them, Mack who'd never, herself, been a girl.

She drove home feeling vaguely depressed. Unlike Mack, who despised cities, she enjoyed her trips to Pittsburgh. And yet they left her in a somber mood. In cities there were too many options on display, reminders of the many lives you'd never get to live.

Years in, years out, a crash and slow backslide like waves breaking.

Fifty-four was older than she'd ever imagined being, decades lost in a fog of child rearing and farm chores, Rena and Mack like close-planted trees, their roots so braided together that there could
be no untangling them. How and why they'd come together, that long-ago moment of choosing each other, now seemed both distant and unlikely, like a remembered dream. Each had brought to the relationship an incorrigible problem child: Mack's farm. Rena's son. They coupled swiftly and unconditionally, in the fevered certainty of youth. Not understanding then, or for a long time afterward, that no merger was absolute, that the totality of their union was an illusion.

That Friend-Lea Acres would never be Rena's farm.

That Calvin would never be Mack's son.

When she arrived home, Mack—wild-eyed, red-faced—met her at the door with a shotgun.

“For God's sake!” Rena cried. “What's the matter with you?”

Mack put down the gun. “Sorry, baby. I thought they came back.”

“
What?
Who?”

And Mack showed her what was left of the shitsack, the reeking mess at their back door.

FROM THE POLICE STATION
Rena goes straight to the hospital. The Emergency Room is quiet, the waiting room empty except for a mother and child. A pregnant nurse named Steph Mulraney is doing intakes. She hands Rena a clipboard.

“Urgent stomachache. Emergency queasiness.” Steph is reliably grumpy about this kind of thing, Bakerton's poor and uninsured treating the ER as their own personal family doctor. It's true, of course: they see a dozen colds and earaches for every heart attack.

Rena glances at the paperwork. The stomachache, unusually, has Blue Cross. Her father works for the Department of Corrections, which means a top-drawer policy paid for by the state. Rena notes this with interest. Then she notices the child's name.

“Olivia Devlin. This is my neighbors' kid.”

“Yep. She's a regular customer.” Steph sits back in her chair, hands folded across her belly, a woman so often pregnant that it
seems her natural state. “The mother is kind of a nutcase. We call her Chicken Little. You know: the sky is falling.”

In the waiting room Rena calls Olivia's name. “I live up the road from you,” she tells Mrs. Devlin, who looks not the slightest bit familiar. Who looks, in fact, too young to be anyone's mother, though in Bakerton this is not unusual. Her clothing—a skirt and high heels, careful makeup—makes her seem even younger, like a child playing dress-up. Olivia is a pretty little girl, a corn silk blonde. Her pale skin seems nearly transparent. A blue vein is visible at her temple.

Rena leads them to an exam room. “How are you feeling, honey?”

“She vomited twice this morning,” Mrs. Devlin says.

Rena takes the child's vitals. Height, four feet one-half inch. Weight, forty-nine pounds. “Small for age seven.”

“She's in the thirty-third percentile. I was the same way. I guess she takes after me.” Mrs. Devlin rattles off Olivia's symptoms: daily stomachaches, frequent nausea. “I know for a fact she has food allergies. Dairy products, peppers, tomatoes, and wheat, for sure. And maybe eggs and corn. She needs a complete GI workup.”

“Wow,” says Rena. “Are you a nurse?”

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Devlin flushes dramatically but seems pleased by the question. “I used to work at Saxon Manor, in Medical Records. Now I'm just a mom.”

“All right, Mom. The doctor will be right with you.” Rena gets to her feet. “Dr. Stusick is out this week. Dr. Finney is on tonight.”

“I know. I called ahead.” Mrs. Devlin hands over a folded sheet of paper, a fact sheet printed from a website. “I did some research. This is exactly what she needs.”

“Reglan? Yikes, that's a pretty heavy-duty drug for a seven-year-old.” Rena ticks off the commonest side effects—diarrhea, constipation, drowsiness. “It's basically a last resort.”

“That's what Dr. Stusick said.” Mrs. Devlin smooths Olivia's hair. “But I've already changed her diet. I don't know what else to try.”

“Let's see what Dr. Finney has to say.” Rena hands back the paper. “Has he seen Olivia before?”

“No, but I remember him from Saxon Manor.” Mrs. Devlin leans forward confidentially. “I always thought I'd go back to school and get my RN. Then I had kids and, you know.”

“I know,” Rena says.

Back at the desk, Steph is eating a candy bar. “How'd it go with Chicken Little?”

Rena hesitates. Years ago, when Calvin was small, she herself had been a Chicken Little—like any nursing student with a young child, alert to ominous symptoms, hideously aware of all that could go wrong. Steph, pregnant with her fifth, is by necessity a different kind of mother. If she ran to the doctor every time one had a stomachache, she would do nothing else.

“She's a little—intense. But Olivia is tiny, malnourished probably. Which makes sense, if she can't keep her food down. Honestly, I'd be worried, too.”

Rena settles in at the desk. Like many afternoons, the ER is quiet, and she finds herself wishing for patients—nothing too serious or scary; a sprain or splinter, a broken bone maybe. Her shift stretches endlessly before her. Back at the farm, a hundred chores need her attention. It's worse than ridiculous—it's a kind of torture—to sit here for hours with nothing to do.

Steph hands her an admission sheet. “Was this your patient? Monday afternoon.”

Rena hands it back. “Not mine. I was out getting tires.” She'd used up a precious sick day sitting in a tire shop in Altoona. “I had to get all new ones.”

“They couldn't patch them?”

“I didn't want to risk it. That's all I need, to get a flat on the way to Pittsburgh.”

“I can't believe you drive there. That traffic scares the crap out of me.”

Mack says the same thing,
Rena could have answered but didn't. It's the way normal people make conversation, something she isn't able to do.

Hours pass. Steph takes her dinner break. Mrs. Devlin and Olivia leave with a prescription for Reglan. Rena sees a roofer who fell from a ladder and dislocated his shoulder; a case of weeping eczema; a four-year-old boy with multiple bee stings, wailing like an air raid siren. Around nine o'clock the change will happen: people becoming their nighttime selves, the colds and stomachaches giving way to different kinds of impairments. The car crashes and bar fights; the wives with fresh bruises and questionable stories. Nearly everyone will seem drunk and disoriented. The change is most apparent on weekends, though lately Thursday is not so different from Friday. More and more, people treat it the same way, as though having worked four days entitles them to celebrate. Thursday is now the start of the weekend, with all the deliberate foolishness that entails.

She watches the clock. Steph returns from the cafeteria with a chocolate cupcake on a plate. “For later,” she says.

Rena gathers up her purse and sweater. The cafeteria is notoriously freezing, the one part of the hospital where the air-conditioning works too well.

“I'd skip the lasagna if I were you,” says Steph. “I'm already regretting it.”

At that moment two men burst through the automatic doors. Rena smells them before she sees them—a chemical smell, intensely sweet and not entirely unpleasant. The odor puts her in mind of the old Cambria Confection plant, defunct now, whose specialty, a marshmallow candy bar rolled in peanuts, had been a favorite of her son's. Years ago, she drove past the factory every evening on her way to the community college. Even with the windows closed, the marshmallow smell had seeped into her car.

The men approach the desk. “My buddy needs a doctor,” says the older one, a short muscle-bound guy with a barrel chest.

The younger one—chubby, dark-skinned—looks soaking wet.

Steph sets down her cupcake. “Go. I'll take this.”

Later, Rena will replay the moment a hundred times, thinking
It should have been me.
But it was Steph who took the patient to an exam room, stripped off his sodden clothes, and stuffed them into plastic bags.

At the time Rena knows none of this. But when she returns from the cafeteria twenty minutes later, Steph's chair is empty. The chocolate cupcake sits untouched on the desk.

T
he camp sulks at the edge of town, plainly visible from the highway, a cluster of squat barracks fenced off with chain-link. The grounds are paved with macadam. Armed security guards man the gate. Inside the fence are two large dormitories; a third building holds a Laundromat, cafeteria, and gym. The compound resembles, from a distance, a maximum-security community college—an enlightened institution for lepers or convicted killers, men guilty of, or infected with, something lethally bad.

Denny Tilsit is the camp manager, a job he'd wish on no one, though he's done it twice before, in Wyoming and Dakota.
Welcome to nowhere,
he tells the new arrivals, and rattles off the rules. No drugs or drinking, no firearms, no females on the premises. They think he's kidding about that last one, until they get a look around and understand the rule is unnecessary. No female would be caught dead here.

Each dormitory sleeps two hundred. A bedroom is the size of a gas-station restroom, with a cable TV bolted to the ceiling, a narrow bed, and a desk. Each pair of rooms is joined by a shared bathroom—an arrangement known elsewhere as a
jack and jill,
though in the all-male camp it's more like a
jack and jack,
a joke Denny has stopped making. Here you don't even joke about guys jacking each other. The men are sensitive about that kind of thing.

A dormitory packed with two hundred men, you'd expect it to smell bad. It does, but not the way you'd think. The corridors
reek of pesticide and newness, the manufactured smell of trash bags, cheap lawn furniture, Tupperware, balloons. If anyone asked, Denny would explain that the walls are made of plastic, a special polymer that resists mold and warping. The pesticide odor is self-explanatory. But nobody asks.

A name,
DAYBREAK
,
is emblazoned across the towels and sheets, the comforter and pillowcase. Have no doubt who owns that bath mat. Never forget where and whose you are.

Day or night, the corridors are quiet. Always someone is sleeping. The men keep exotic hours. Shifts start at noon, at midnight, at 4:00
P.M.,
at dawn. The cafeteria, which never closes, serves bacon and eggs at all hours. It's always breakfast time for someone.

Daybreak LLC is a subsidiary of Darco Energy. The company logo, a stylized sunrise, appears on napkins and dinner plates.

In the hallway outside the cafeteria are four public computers, for the middle-aged and elderly. All the young guys bring their own. The shared computers are used for video chats with wives and children; for checking weather and sports scores; for compulsive bouts of online poker. For porn, though, you'd have to finish yourself off in private. They're not ideal for porn.

The cafeteria smells of chicken nuggets, twenty-four/seven. Other foods are served, hamburgers and pizza, but the nugget smell dominates. Exhaust fans blow it into the blacktop courtyard; intake fans suck it into the bedrooms. The fans run constantly, a loud rush of air like the camp's own weather, its sirocco and mistral. The wind carries the camp's chronic halitosis: plastic and pesticides, chicken nuggets and cigarettes.

A girl in California cavorts before a webcam, at least she says it's California. It could be Saskatoon or Gary, Indiana, any place with tanning beds.

No jills in the camp, no jills whatsoever. A secretary helps Denny in the front office, a local woman named Brenda Hoff. She
is fifty and squat as a dishwasher; her eyes bulge froggily. Brenda Hoff is not sexy, has never heard of sexy. Still the men find excuses to stop by the office, an anthropology lesson, as though Brenda Hoff is, quite literally, the last woman on earth.

It could be Riga or Bangkok or Mexico City. Any place with board-certified plastic surgeons, or their unlicensed equivalent.

The game room has a pool table, couches, and another TV, in case you get tired of watching your own. Men sit talking and smoking. The new arrivals watch baseball; the veterans have given up on baseball. They are men who'd rather be sleeping, insomniacs winding down from their shifts.

The middle-aged and elderly finish themselves off in private.

The Laundromat smells of chicken nuggets and detergent, the twenty-pound boxes of soap powder the camp provides.

IN TOWN THERE ARE WHISPERS,
unholy rumors. The security guards speak with southern accents. The supply vans have out-of-state plates.

The camp is full of illegal Mexicans, army deserters, Afghan terrorists from Gitmo. Armed marshals escort the prisoners to work. The chain-link fence hums with high-voltage current. The security guards have orders to shoot on sight.

The camp is a hotbed of drugs and prostitution. Local girls are scouted for this purpose, recruited and hired by Brenda Hoff. Girls arrive by the half dozen, at all hours, crowded into a Mercedes: a six-pack of prostitutes, provocatively dressed.

The men are white separatists, mercenaries, paramilitary. The camp is protected by its own militia, the fence built to keep the world out. The men's needs are serviced by licensed contractors. Supply vans come and go. The camp's trash is carted away to a secret incinerator. Even its shit is proprietary: the toilets drain into a private septic system somewhere on the grounds.

The prostitutes are kept in a bunker beneath the building. This explains why they are never seen.

IT IS BACKBREAKING WORK,
punishing to the body. There are no soft jobs on a drill rig. A mud motor weighs six hundred pounds. The hoisting system uses steel rope. The men yank and drag and push and pull. Twelve hours a day they hump and heave. Some work injured, numbed by painkillers. After twelve hours they'd rather sleep than drink or eat or talk to their families. With a few youthful exceptions, they would rather sleep than fuck.

They are well paid, naturally. A high school dropout can earn six figures if he is strong and willing. If nothing goes very wrong.

Now sleeping is the Bravo crew—the first tour, or most of it: Mickey Phipps the tool pusher, Vince Legrand the derrick man, the roughnecks Brando and Jorge. Their rig manager, who makes more money, has decamped to the Days Inn. For months Herc was a vibrant complainer—the thin towels and acrid coffee, the nugget smell. The public service announcements on every flat surface, framed posters of drill rigs, the company slogan:
S.A.F.E. (STAY ACCIDENT FREE EVERYDAY) DRILLING.

It's not even English,
he'd grumble.
What kind of pidgin language is that?

No one else comments on the posters. They grouse about the food, their knees and backs. Except for Mickey Phipps, who is Christian, they complain about the dearth of women—even Brando, who is known to have solved that problem. For him, for all of them, horniness is a conversation starter, a neutral topic like baseball. They spend half their time working, half exactly: seven days a week, twelve-hour shifts. When the shift ends, second tour comes to relieve them. The drilling literally never stops.

Who has time for baseball, with its long season? For the spectator, it is a demanding sport.

They work two weeks straight, then pack their bags. The camp is
for on-duty workers only. Other men need those beds. The company runs a free shuttle to the Pittsburgh airport, where Mickey Phipps catches a flight to Houston. The others keep the local bartenders busy, and find somewhere to sleep off their liquor—in a woman's bed if they're lucky, on Herc's floor at the Days Inn if they're not.

Brando is always lucky.

Back at the camp, Denny Tilsit guards the schedule. It's his own private nightmare, summarized on a detailed spreadsheet: room numbers, arrivals and departures, cleaning crews in and out. When the men return, others will have slept in their beds, watched their televisions, shaved at their sinks. To Herc, the rig manager, it's another argument in favor of the Days Inn.

What does he care?
says Jorge.
They clean the room so good I can't tell the difference.

It's four-thirty in the morning, and the men assemble sack lunches in the pantry behind the kitchen. The camp provides bread and cold cuts for this purpose, industrial-size jars of mustard and mayonnaise.

Seriously, man. They change the sheets and shit. What does he care?

Jorge is twenty-four and caffeinated, unbothered by waking in the dark. The others are silent and irritable. Brando lights a cigarette. Vince Legrand swallows Motrin for his back.

Mickey Phipps, who is Christian, does not comment. The truth, he knows, is harder and simpler: Herc doesn't want to leave Pennsylvania every two weeks, doesn't want to fly back to his wife in Texas. He's happy right where he is, or not happy. Anyway, he doesn't want to go home.

THE MORNING IS DIM AND MOONLESS.
First tour starts at five. A convoy of pickup trucks rolls down Number Nine Road, past a few scattered houses, still dark at this hour. Up and down the Dutch Road, dogs begin to bark.

The drill site, Fetterson 2H, glows in the distance, lit up like a sta
dium at night. Herc's company truck is already there, parked behind the operator's trailer; a magnetic sign—
STREAM SOLUTIONS
—stuck to the driver-side door. He sits on the hood drinking coffee from a Days Inn cup. Jorge and Legrand park on either side.

In the trailer they gear up—safety goggles, hard hats—and climb the hundredsome-odd stairs. The rig floor is a platform suspended in midair, at the height of a three-story building. As he does each morning, Jorge reads aloud:
DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE. WARNING HIGH NOISE LEVEL HEARING PROTECTION REQUIRED.

The signs are Herc's pet peeve, one his crew has picked up on. There are signs on the railings and catwalk and V-door, signs in the trailers, the doghouse, the john.

NOTICE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

AVISO SOLAMENTA PERSONAL AUTORIZADO

It's a petty complaint; Herc knows this. He understands that his irritation is out of all proportion, and yet he can't help himself. The signs offend him personally: the bright colors, the capital letters. The repetition in English and Spanish, as in the educational television his kids watched when they were small.

By six the sun is up, the air warming. The Bravo crew is tripping pipe. According to procedure it takes five men to change a drill bit, five men to pull the drill string from the hole. The actual truth is somewhat different. Three joints of drilling pipe weigh more than a pickup truck, and yet the floor hands, Brando and Jorge, do all the lifting. This is true of racking pipe, true of most things. A drill rig is a hierarchy like the rest of the world.

The trip goes smoothly, it would seem to the only observers, the darting barn swallows, the numberless gnats rising in clouds. Seen from above, the men are larger than birds and bugs, but only a bit larger. A drill rig isn't scaled for humans. Like a sailor on an aircraft carrier, a roughneck crossing the catwalk looks aphid-size.

Legrand leans out from the monkey board and throws a line around the pipe.

The roughnecks are both strong: Brando tall and wiry, Jorge low and heavy. It takes all their combined force to swing the kelly over the rat hole and unhook the swivel bale from the hook. They attach the elevator to the pipe and step back, panting, like boxers at the bell.

While they catch their breath, Mickey steps into the booth and grabs the joystick. The hoisting system kicks in, raising the pipe from the hole. One, two, three joints clear the opening. Then another scramble as Brando and Jorge set the slips. With tongs and a spinning wrench, they break off three joints' worth. A hundred feet above their heads, Legrand fits the top end into the fingerboard. A satisfying clank as they drop the pipe in the mast.

The trip completed, Herc calls a coffee break. The men are feeling conversational. Like women in a beauty parlor they stand around yakking. Brando ignores their chitchat, tedious shit about Mickey's kids, a caper involving Legrand and a waitress in the next town over. There's always a waitress in the next town over. Figments, possibly, of Legrand's drunken imagination, this army of waitresses no one has ever seen.

There are ten times more signs than there used to be, though only Herc has been around long enough to note the difference. This rig, brand-new, is particularly rich in reading material. New OSHA regulations? A punishing lawsuit, more costly than previous lawsuits?

WARNING NO ENTRY WITHOUT SUPERVISOR

DANGER PINCH POINT

Herc has yet to see a sign that tells the simple truth: of all the calamities that can happen on a drill rig, falling is the likeliest. The easiest way to kill yourself is simply missing a step. He has seen up close what a three-story fall can do to a body. He'd do anything to wipe that picture from his mind.

DANGER

AVISO

PELIGRO

It's a truth most people never have to learn, that the human body is simply a bag of blood.

THEY END THE DAY
at the loud end of the bar, with mugs of Iron City. After ten months in Pennsylvania they've developed a taste for it. Herc, who spent the afternoon at the Emergency Room with Jorge, orders a shot to catch up.

The Commercial is packed for a Thursday, every seat taken. Men stand three-deep around the bar waiting for drinks. Brando glares at the bartender, who pretends not to see him. “What, U.S. currency's no good here?”

The guy pulls one Iron City, then another. He slides them down the bar to where the locals sit, two greasers in ball caps staring at the TV screen.

“Who is this shithead?” says Brando, loud enough for the bartender to hear.

“Oh, he's all right,” says Herc, though there's no mistaking the attitude. “He don't know us, is all.” The owner, a surly old cuss, is no friendlier—never a smile or a
Hey, how you doin?
—but at least he's quick with a drink.

“He's the old coot's son,” says Legrand, who could use a shower himself. Even in the dim light his ponytail looks lank and greasy, his face flushed with booze and a week's sunburn. “I think he's some kind of a cop.”