This Is What I Want (5 page)

THE MAYOR

Nowhere else did John Swarthbeck feel at home the way he did in the inner room of his Main Street office, a shame because only a few of the six hundred or so people in town had ever visited the temperature-controlled sanctum. Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme
—on vinyl, the very copy Swarthbeck’s own father had given him back in ’65—made the rounds as he tallied the cases. One hundred four prime bottles of River City Select, his one-of-a-kind, homemade hooch, sat waiting for delivery this weekend into waiting hands. And Swarthbeck would, of course, hold back five bottles for his own use, to bestow upon those friends, old and new, who tickled his fancy over the next couple of days.

Tonight, though, he fondled his usual glass of port as he wound down his business. He lifted it in a toast to the framed-and-mounted centerfold of Jenny McCarthy from the June 1994
Playboy
, which hung over the desk. He’d paid 125 clams for that at a brothel in Nevada, and so on price alone it was deserving of a place of honor. It stood, too, as a symbol of class, as Swarthbeck was inclined to define it. These kids today can see any number of vulgarities with a quickie Internet search. Miss McCarthy represented a better era and a more respectful time. It pained him to say that honor and respect were mighty hard to come by these days, and getting harder all the time.

Take that mouthy dame from the newspaper. She’d come sniffing back around, seeking him out after the trip up Telegraph Hill with Sam Kelvig. She said she wanted to let the mayor know that she’d just been messing with him, asking those questions about the bear cub and the moonshine.

“Like I didn’t know that,” he told Jenny. He bit the end of his pen, then got back to his figures. He’d been bottling the stuff all year to meet the demand of Jamboree, with its private parties and inevitable drunken trysts. Even now, the still pushed forth his product. Thanksgiving and December were never too far away, bringing another spike in demand and more cash to feather Swarthbeck’s bed.

“God bless Sammy Kelvig,” he said as he toasted Miss McCarthy again. The punctilious peckerwood could grate on a guy, but he’d made this Jamboree business a boon by turning it into a foot-tapping, body-swaying, beer-guzzling, rock-band-intensive tribute to town history. Sam Kelvig had a vision and he implemented it, and John Swarthbeck would by God make his annual nut on this event alone. Not bad for a guy with little more than some sugar-beet byproduct, yeast, water straight from city services, and a length of copper tubing.

That girl had some nerve,
Swarthbeck thought, ping-ponging back to Wanda Perkins. Somebody in town had done some gum-flapping, or the reporter was sourced up better than he was inclined to give her credit for. The thing was, he knew that no paperwork could come running back to his door. The forest service guys had been content to take the cub back—impressed, even, that the mayor had done such a good job of fattening him up, and for Swarthbeck it had been a relief, as he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do when the cub became a full-on bear, with appetites beyond his ability to sate. The cub had ended up in the sanctuary in Rapid City, disingenuously if accurately billed as an orphan, and Swarthbeck had even made a couple of pilgrimages out to see him.
Now where was the harm in that?
he wondered. As for the hooch, the feds had made the boundaries—and the considerable running room between them—perfectly clear: don’t embarrass us by selling the stuff out in the open, and we won’t come back to town and bust your still, embarrass you in front of your people, and throw your ass in the pen. Swarthbeck had found those terms agreeable indeed.

The reporter had said Watford City was her next stop; she was going to dig into the way oil money had changed downtown and transformed a town built on agriculture. A “renaissance,” she called it. Five-dollar words aside, Swarthbeck had to think it didn’t amount to more than slapping fancy siding on a rattrap of a house.
Watford,
he sniffed.
You couldn’t pay me enough
. “Well,” he’d told her, “be sure to come on back for Jamboree. We’ll show you a good time.” And she’d said she wouldn’t miss it, that she’d be back Saturday with Larry Grubbs. Swarthbeck figured he could get on her good side yet.

The mayor checked his figures one last time. Finding them satisfactory, he capped his pen, gave Jenny McCarthy a little squeeze where it counted, silenced John Coltrane for the night, and wheeled the dolly holding cases of spirits toward the door and into his office proper, where they would wait for placement with their rightful owners.

Swarthbeck drove into the sullen blue of night, up Telegraph Hill and toward his place. The old farm lay three miles due southwest of town, set off the road a piece and given shelter by a cottonwood windbreak. He ciphered out some quick math in his head to put recent events in perspective. Martha had run off thirty-one months ago now, chugging hard toward three years, and the mayor found himself caught between amazement that he’d survived the breach and consternation that he still didn’t understand exactly what had happened. She’d never been afraid of him, which made her something of an anomaly in town. She said she was going, and she promptly did so, leaving precious little time for Swarthbeck to say anything of value. Her point had been that she didn’t want this anymore, and didn’t want him for sure. That she was now living in Grand Forks and going to college, at her well-curated age, was proof enough of both contentions. His point had been that he could fix anything. He was wrong about that, he often reminded himself now. You can’t fix that which insists it isn’t broken.

Since she’d been gone, he’d taken to sleeping in the office more than he did at home, catching his showers and his breakfast at the truck stop. He didn’t see much reason to do it any other way. He’d let the fields go fallow, and he didn’t have any livestock unless you counted the barn cats, which seemed to be doing just fine, multiplying and replenishing without his involvement in their greater well-being.

Tonight, though, he yearned for a proper bed and a proper sleep. Come Friday evening, from the supper on through the weekend, he had hands to shake and babies to kiss and deals to close.

At the turnoff, he crossed the small bridge over the creek and made his way toward the darkened house.

The New York Times
,
Saturday, August 1, 2015

The physical manifestations of oil’s influence in the region are clear. On the 12-mile stretch of highway between Sidney, the seat of Richland County in Montana, and Grandview one can see upward of a dozen clusters of single-wide mobile homes and fifth-wheel trailers, the shelter for oil-field workers who can’t find more traditional housing in town. And while there is a surfeit of work available in the region, it is work that requires some initial qualification, a message that doesn’t necessarily get passed on before desperate people make their way to the area.

“They find out that they won’t get hired because they have a criminal record, or they can’t pass a drug test,” Sidney mayor Brad Shulman says. “Meanwhile, they’ve used their last dollar to get here, and now they’re our problem.”

And a problem they can be. Sidney has doubled its police personnel on the second and third shifts, when workaday citizens tuck into bed but the rig workers—overwhelmingly male and young and single—are most active. In Grandview, the town council recently hired a new police chief, Adair Underwood, who came to the small town from the sheriff’s office in Cass County, North Dakota. In a bit of irony, Underwood, 34, said she was drawn to Grandview for the challenge of getting its criminal problems under control after 12 years in the much more sedate—and much more populous—Fargo area.

FRIDAY

THE CHIEF

Adair Underwood figured nobody had it better than she did. Here, in her police cruiser on a tree-shrouded corner of Clancy Park, she could watch, unseen, as most of Grandview breathed in peaceful slumber. The trucks moving through town at all hours provided steady fodder when she got bored, and she found a perverse delight in pulling the drivers over for riding their compression brakes or failing to heed the thirty-mile-per-hour limit through the heart of town. Chief Underwood always fancied herself a sociable sort, and depending on how much guff she got from the detained drivers, she’d let a fair number of those old boys go on with just a warning. Give her a little lip, and she could fill the city coffers right quick with a violation or two. Good cop, bad cop. Whatever she needed to be, whenever she needed to be.

Her well-guarded view on this night came with another advantage, one particularly germane to her present attentions. If anybody was up to no good—say, stealing a dog for pit fights out in the fields, as the current rumor held—they’d be hard-pressed to get out of town without her seeing the attempt. The challenges of law enforcement here on the state line, with a mishmash of federal, county, and tribal land nearby, were legion, and frankly she had enough to do with only one deputy and one officer, and a town that lived bigger than its size would suggest. Still, she longed to tear into a piece of the big action. If somebody was sneaking into Grandview and stealing dogs, especially with such a nefarious purpose as pit fights, she would find out and bring the weight of her office raining down. Any vehicle that crossed her vision with out-of-county or out-of-state license plates tonight was subject to suspicion.

She’d given her two underlings, Joe LaMer and Phil Sakota, the night off. They were family men, for one, and in a few hours they would be pressed to the limits of their service, along with a cadre of officers from Billings and Glendive whom the city had hired as security for Jamboree. LaMer, her deputy, would still be awake, she knew. They’d taken to trading the late shift and the responsibility for keeping each other engaged in the work.

Quiet
, she wrote in a text message. She was careful to use her personal phone. Back home in Fargo, she’d seen a colleague’s life turned inside out by her work emails slipping into the public realm. Adair had no stomach for that.

The reply came back quick, as if Joe had been waiting for her to open the conduit.
Enjoy.

What do you think of this dog business?
she wrote back.
Real thing or no?

Dunno.

She liked LaMer. Maybe too much. He was rough around the edges and two college degrees behind her, but he had an earthy wisdom about him and about this place that Adair didn’t yet know as well as she would like. She smiled at the simple reply. He made her laugh.

It’s just the one report
, she rapped back.
And that Chihuahua is older than Yoda. Maybe it just wandered off somewhere and died.

Mebbe.

Adair grimaced. She didn’t care for texting shorthand.

Now came another message.
WTF is Yoda?

She opened her mouth, a squawked “What?” escaping it.

Are you a real person?
she typed.

Seriously.

OK,
she wrote,
that’s it. You’re ORDERED to report for a viewing of the first three
Star Wars
movies. Popcorn is mandatory.

LOL. I was a farm kid. I didn’t go to movies.

And you’re not allowed to talk to me again until you’ve absorbed them.

K. It’s a date.

She came to a hard stop, looking at the words and the particular way they had been arranged. Once, twice, a third time. It was, of course, a pie-in-the-sky proposition. They never had the same hours off, for one. She hadn’t even unpacked the DVD player yet, for two. Julie LaMer, for three. And yet on a still night in Grandview, the last one Adair could count on seeing for a while, she felt as though she could indulge the fantasy for just a bit before practicality had to be given deference.

She closed her eyes, and she imagined things she would never have to admit to, and she smiled deliciously.

The sound came first, an awful, thunderous noise that jerked Adair out of her reverie. The discombobulating nature of it, and the thump in her chest from the sheer power of the concussion, seemed to slow everything down. Adair felt as though she were underwater and moving at half speed, as she looked first to the street to see if there had been a crash, then to the main stretch downtown, and finally skyward, where she saw the fireball snap off the propulsive stem pushing it into the sky. Once free from its tether, the massive orb made one last upward surge and then dissipated into flickering embers heading back the way they had come.

“Jesus Pete,” Adair said as she gunned the car to life and tore out onto the highway, laying down a rubber scratch on the asphalt. She mashed the accelerator to the floor, and the car responded as designed, shooting like a bullet across the straightaway. She stormed past the Sloane Hotel downtown before she realized she hadn’t hit her lights, but that was of little import now. She slid her cruiser into an angled stop at the mayor’s office—or what remained of it, anyway—and got out, urging back those who had already emerged from their homes across the street.

“What in
the
hell?” LaMer came running up to her, in a white T-shirt, sweatpants, and rubber flip-flops, his holster and gun strapped to his hip. From the lurching of his chest, she figured he’d covered the three blocks from his house in sprinter’s time.

“We gotta keep people away from it,” she said, retreating to her cruiser to dig out the bullhorn.

“That’s the fucking mayor’s office,” LaMer said. “He in there?”

Adair took three steps toward him, eyes locked on his. “How should I know? Damnit, Joe, get them back.”

Folks were streaming from their homes now. Gawkers, yes, but also people who tugged at Adair, asking what they could do to help. She didn’t know. Amid all the jostling, she took a moment to trace what remained of the building. The flattop roof was gone, blown clean off, and she now saw the trails of shattered masonry that spread out from the site like tendrils, and the collateral damage to nearby cars and windows. The back wall was blown out, too, and inside the remaining structure a blaze gobbled up the remnants.

Adair did a quick inventory of the adjacent buildings and found them intact, if a little beaten up cosmetically. The pregnant question, of course, was the one she couldn’t answer just yet: What the hell had caused this? If it was a gas leak, she feared the chaos might just be starting.

She scanned the crowd, now in the dozens, she reckoned, and saw that LaMer and a few helpers had managed to push everybody back.

“Joe!” she called to him.

He moved off the line of humanity and trotted back to her. “Yeah?”

“You got your cell handy?”

“Sure.”

“Better call the Sidney Fire Department,” she said. “I don’t think the volunteers are going to be able to handle this.”

LaMer placed the call, and Adair went back to alternating her attention between the growing throng and the devastation in front of her, until she found the eyes of someone she’d come to trust in her short tenure. Sam Kelvig, standing on the periphery, gestured to her, asking if he could approach. She waved him in.

“He’s not in there, I don’t think,” Kelvig told her. “I don’t see his truck.”

“What happened?” She didn’t expect him to answer, but it was the only question that seemed worth asking.

Kelvig shrugged. “Welcome to Grandview, Adair.”

“Listen,” she said, deflecting things back to business. “Do you mind running out to his place and checking? I’d sure hate to be wrong about this, you know what I mean?” Swarthbeck was prone to dumping his truck wherever he found purchase for an evening, be it in the back of the Double Musky or in some lonely widow’s driveway. It didn’t mean he hadn’t made his way back here. If a body extraction was in the offing . . . Adair shook her head.
One thing at a time, girl
.

Sam nodded at her and offered a little half smile that she decided was an apology of sorts for his cheekiness.
Good enough
.

LaMer tugged at her shirtsleeve, and Adair turned to him. “On their way,” he said.

“OK, thanks.”

LaMer went back to crowd control, and Adair leaned against the hood of her cruiser to wait and worry. She took a long toke off the night air, a flavor reminiscent of campfire filling her senses. She was no expert, but she didn’t think she could detect a hint of gas. The pros would be on the scene soon, and they’d know.

She reached back and pulled the scrunchie from her dirty-blonde hair, taking care to hold tight to the base of her ponytail. She pulled the hair taut and slipped the rubber band back into place.

Off to her right, standing on the sidewalk outside the Country Basket, a group of teenagers, maybe five or six of them, broke into song: “Disco Inferno.”

Adair looked at them, a bunch of skinny kids, linking pinkies and swaying to the chorus, and then she turned back to the fire, which seemed to be dying out on its own. The cinder block walls of the mayor’s office were splashed with black where the flames had licked at them.

Now the kids moved on to “Burning Down the House,” and Adair couldn’t help but smile. Smart kids, queuing up songs that predated them, even predated her. She envied them for their carefree ways. Adair had a feeling she wasn’t going to get off so easy where this was concerned.

“Quiet night,” she said, under her breath. “My ass.”