Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (16 page)

In the process of putting my shoes back on, I slipped into a dream of an upside-down tree in a river; the dream alarmed me, and I decided to just put my head on the desk for several hours. I woke up at three, got in my truck, and headed for home and bed.

I
MET MY
wife Polly some thirteen years ago, hiking in the Wind River Range. After my tour in Somalia was up and I got discharged, I was wandering America with some notion of becoming a mountain man. I’d heard that when they gathered, they gathered in Pinedale, Wyoming. Do-you-know-how-to-skin-griz, pilgrim?, Wyoming. With bear spray and a backpack with my fiddle strapped to the side, I was making for a place deep in the mountains called Scab Creek. I chose the destination in hopes that its name might discourage casual tourists and campers. In my mind, at that time, I was a serious frontier man.

I was two days into my journey, having camped the night before by a small hilltop pond that looked inviting, but was alive with giardia from the cattle that were allowed to graze there part of the year. I’d made it up into the real high country, where the air was cooler and much thinner, the light much more white. I hoped to outrun both cow shit and people. One thing I wanted very much was a freezing-cold mountain lake all to myself, but I knew to be careful. I’d had parasites in Africa, inside and out, and I can tell you it’s nobody’s picnic. A bear or two, I felt, I could handle. Well, I never did see a grizzly but one that trip, prancing in a tributary of the Wind River far below me.

I had been following knife-edge ridges for some time, and had descended into a lodgepole forest so that I could ascend once more into the cold solitary air on the next peak. The climb was tough, over roots and stones, and my head was pulsing from the altitude, which may be why I didn’t hear Polly’s bodhran until I was on the edge of a golden field where she stood, thumping away at the drum in 6/8 time.

I was transfixed by a vision. Her brown hair was back in a bun and she was short and sturdy, all muscle between shorts and hiking boots. I don’t know, you might have seen her out there and thought she was nothing special. And you can tell me it’s no great surprise to find a would-be folk musician on a trail in the Winds. To the young easterner I was at the time, Polly was—forgive me—a handwritten note from God, inviting me into the open air of grace.

She hadn’t noticed me. Stowing my pack off the trail, I produced my fiddle and tuned it quietly. I’m mostly an American fiddler and those tunes are in 4/4 time, but I was able to retrieve a passable “Banish Misfortune” from some corner of my brain, to match her Irish 6/8. The field was bigger than it looked, and there was one boulder between me and Polly, behind which I paused to reconsider. In the end I emerged, keeping a distance of about twenty-five feet. I felt awkward, out of character, but I had committed to the mission. It didn’t take long for her to hear me, just a few years off my life.

Her arm slowed. She cocked her head at the sound of my playing, and stopped drumming entirely. When she turned, eyes wide, I nodded encouragingly at the bodhran hanging in her hand. And then she burst out laughing. She had the brightest, prettiest smile. I hammed it up for a moment, clogging foolishly until I came to a suitable stopping point, then I bowed and said I hoped she would have a nice day, and turned to go.

Of course I found out later that I was nowhere near as far into the Winds as I had thought. I mean, I was pretty far, but not enough to outrun the friendliness that governs the trails up there. Polly had known exactly how far she was; enough that she could hope to practice her new instrument without observation, but not enough that she was completely shocked at another’s presence.

Before long I was perched on a boulder by her tiny tent, eating from a gallon bag of antelope jerky, playing bits of tunes, and talking. Polly was from a small town in Colorado, originally, and lived in Jackson, Wyoming, at that time. She was an outdoors bum of sorts, and worked in an art gallery and gift shop that catered to vacationers and sold lamps made out of elk antlers, and furniture assembled from shellacked, rough-hewn trees. While I was in the 10th Mountain Division, she was in and out of college in Boulder. My trip to Somalia did come up, but there honestly wasn’t that much to say about it. I had missed the fight in Mog. We did our best not to get shot, and to make sure people got fed. It was a blighted place—everything stripped, everything burned out and destroyed. We steered the conversation in more amiable directions, the usual stuff people in their early twenties probably talk about. We’d both read Gary Snyder.

Polly was easy to be around and some of the time we didn’t feel the need to talk at all. Here we were in a spectacular place, a place new to me, and I felt new myself. She had never known me as bashful, or boring, or poor or unworthy. I had just returned from a place of despair and starvation, and was ready to be free and have my fill of everything light and good—it was hard to imagine leaving her giant smile or the tiny gold stud that glinted on the left side of her nose.

I don’t think she got tired of me, but she did seem glad when someone else she knew from Jackson approached us from farther down the trail. A tall, skinny guy named Will with circular glasses and a mop of hair under a purple bandanna. He seemed nice. I was immediately jealous, and told myself get used to it, Henry, because you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life. It got worse when Will took out one of those backpacker guitars that never stays in tune, and wanted to play. But I could see the idea made Polly happy, so we thumped through a few 1-4-5 folk songs before I packed it up, claiming a need to reach a particular distance before setting up my camp.

“Okay,” Polly said slowly, “maybe we’ll see you on the way out.” She made no attempt to stop me other than—she’d later inform me—a look, a “smoldering” look. I caught it but didn’t, you know?

In a way I was glad because, had I lingered into the evening, she’d inevitably have worried for her safety with a stranger, a veteran and a vagabond. That was the romantic way I saw myself. Best to leave her with earnest, kindly Will and press on. As I hiked out of that field, my heart was bursting so far out of proportion that I had to laugh to keep from crying. I walked it off, or so I thought. Hours later I collapsed on a windswept summit above a cold mountain lake with just enough light left to put up my tent. Some perverse impulse made me stay in that spot a day longer than I had planned without enough food, just so it would be even less likely I’d see her again on my way out. I was surrounded by vast beauty and the smell of my own chickenshit.

After a trip to northern California, I decided to forgo the American Southwest for another pass through Wyoming on my way back East. I found Polly in Jackson, in the store she’d named. She smiled so big when she saw me that I knew love right then, then and for all time. I think about it when I need to.

I HAD GOTTEN
some sleep, finally, and on the crisp morning that followed I was en route to a well pad. Outside of Midhollow, Pennsylvania, a village in western Holebrook County, DiverCo had been drilling and fracking in an easterly line, with an eye toward connecting every well they dug to a major pipeline running south. It was nice country out there. They had drilled back from the roads and on hilltops surrounded by woods, so the scenery wasn’t entirely blighted. Their service roads dug deep into the slopes, often in wide switchbacks, and the gates shutting the citizenry out were equipped with video surveillance and often were manned by a roughneck guard. The whole area resembled a kind of industrial gated community.

Sheriff Dally had asked me to meet him at the well pad’s entrance, which was just inside the western border of Wild Thyme Township. He explained that Ben Jackson was getting his head and ear looked at and Hanluain was patrolling the Heights, leaving Lyons to hold down the office. We were paying a visit to this particular crew because of a man named Gerardo Contreras, a maintenance mechanic who fit the description of our John Doe. Contreras hadn’t made it home to Texas for Christmas, and his wife had filed a missing persons report in Elmira, New York, where he had bunked between jobs. The Elmira PD was able to turn him up once, in a roadhouse between Waverly and Elmira known for its drug trade. He’d disappeared again soon after that, and though his family and employers believed Contreras was alive, a DiverCo representative thought of him anyway when Dally asked.

As we arrived, a worker stepped out from under a canopy and spoke into a walkie-talkie before unlatching the gate and swinging it open for us. The service road was wider than anything in the township, including the paved routes. We curved into the woods on the ridge. Hundreds and hundreds of tree trunks, stripped of their tops and roots, lined the road in stacks twenty high; these had been bulldozed and would probably be pulped, as they were too small for lumber. On our way up we passed three white tractor-trailer cabs in a line heading back down, having dropped off whatever they’d been hauling.

After wending through the trees, we emerged onto a well pad the size of three football fields, ringed by forest. A mass of tanks, tubes, and storage units filled up much of the space, and out of it rose a rig ninety feet into the sky, painted red and bright blue. The rig and the pad itself were surrounded by a number of pickup trucks, all white, drones in a swarm of white king cabs with out-of-state plates that had descended upon us.

It took my eyes a moment to get used to the scale before I could pick out the workers, perhaps twenty in blue hard hats I could see scattered about the site. We approached the data van. It was a kind of custom RV with stairs that folded down from a door at midpoint. In the window I could see several men seated at computer stations, the screens of which showed colorful, almost old-fashioned representations of—presumably—what was happening underground. Dally had barely put his foot down on the first step when the storm door opened and an unsmiling man thumped down to greet us, subtly steering us away. He was about fifty, windburned, sporting wraparound sunglasses and a goatee.

“Bill Huff,” he said, shaking our hands in turn. “Rig manager here. Pleased.”

Dally and I introduced ourselves.

“Good to meet you.” The manager had a foghorn voice, probably from years of making it carry over the noise of the rig. “Listen, I know you’re here about something else. Just quick, who would I talk to about trespassing? We’ve been seeing teenagers, people in the trees out next to the pad, on the trails, beer cans . . .”

Dally turned to me. I said, “Any vandalism? Damage?”

“No. Not yet. But I’m just a little concerned. Not so much about vandalism.”

“No?”

“There are some elements out there determined to prove this”—Huff swung an arm in the direction of the rig—“is bad for the earth. And these elements been known to resort to sabotage so they can be right.”

“Sabotage.”

“You know what they do? They loosen fixtures and cut lines to spill fuel from our equipment. They’ve got to; ain’t no other way anyone’s going to find dirty water. Not from our crew, not from the process. I’m only just saying.”

I couldn’t answer right away. For the best part of two years I’d been trying to ignore the fact that hydrofracking had followed me home from the West. Seeing it up close again wasn’t easy. I stayed quiet until I could trust myself to speak, looking out at the mass of tubes and tanks sprawled on the flattened hilltop, longer than I wanted. I managed, “You can just call me at the station, bud.”

Dally looked at me funny, but didn’t step in to soften my response.

After that, Huff seemed to understand he didn’t have an entirely sympathetic audience. “So, Gerardo Contreras. Wherever he may be. I’ll be happy to tell you what I told the Elmira police.”

“They didn’t share too much with us,” Dally said, a white lie.

Huff nodded once. “The first thing to know is, the work is concentrated around periods of drilling. There are long shifts, and we operate twenty-four/seven. Then there’s downtime as the next pad is cleared. Once the wellhead gets put on, that time can be a windfall for some, a pitfall for others.”

“Right,” said the sheriff, “they’ve got a paycheck, free time, they’re far from home . . .”

“That’s why we hire the best, but it’s almost as important that we hire family men, men of faith. You know what I mean. We can’t make mistakes.” Huff gestured about him, not at the well pad but at the surrounding woods. I assumed this was for my benefit. “Look around us. We need to leave this perfect. Well, Contreras brought some . . . predilections with him that we didn’t know about when he was hired.”

“For instance?”

“This will be in his personnel file, so I don’t mind sharing. Some of the guys have a hard time cordoning off the rest of their lives from the work. They need some help getting through a shift. We had to reprimand Contreras for amphetamine. Can’t imagine where he’d get such a thing, not knowing anybody out here. Must’ve brought it.” At this, he paused to let his implication sink in. “We gave him probation, sudden death if it happened again. Shit, if we have to, we’ll fly out another mechanic rather than have one that’s going to do something we can’t fix.”

“So, drug use.”

“Yeah. Alcohol too. There was some other talk, but I’m not sure it’s germane. Shit, I’m sorry I brought it up, it doesn’t seem fair to the man, but . . . we are out here in barracks. And it’s not as if it’s a major metropolitan area. The rare guy will, will . . . start to miss . . . sexual companionship. Maybe too much.”

“Ah.”

“That could have been a problem for Contreras. But it’s just talk.”

We walked slowly along one side of the operation, while Huff gave a vague explanation of the process. I interrupted him.

“Where’s your pond?”

“Pardon?”

“Your frack pond.”

“I see. We ain’t at that stage yet. We’re still drilling. But anyway this lease doesn’t allow—”

“Good. Where are your compressor stations going?”

“Again, this particular lease don’t allow that.” Huff made an effort to meet my eyes. “This is safe, Henry. Trust me, I wouldn’t be doing it for fifteen years otherwise.”