Heat and Light (2 page)

T
he first truck comes in springtime, a brand-new Dodge Ram with Texas plates. It trawls the township roads north of Bakerton, country lanes paved with red dog, piecrust roads that have never appeared on a map. The roads dip and weave for inscrutable reasons, disused mine trails, scarred and narrowed like the arteries of the very old. The driver, Bobby Frame, is as young as he looks, barely thirty, a big husky kid who might have played high school football. Up and down the Dutch Road, he is welcomed warmly—at the Fettersons', the Nortons', the Kiplers', Marlys Beale's.

Are you some kind of a salesman?
he is asked at Friend-Lea Acres, the Mackey dairy farm.

No, ma'am. Just the opposite,
Bobby says.

At Cob Krug's trailer, his first knock goes unanswered. When he knocks a second time, Cob rolls to the door in his wheelchair, brandishing a shotgun. Bobby never returns.

He bunks at the Days Inn on Colonel Drake Highway, room 211, the windows east-facing for an early start. Mornings he appears at the county courthouse as soon as it opens, clean-shaven, hair damp from his shower. He has a way with the clerk, a middle-aged lady who mothers and flatters him. Bobby hands her a printed list and waits for her to bring the books, the official record of who owns what.

His approach is always the same.
Beautiful property you've got
here
. (This while removing his sunglasses, his eyes level blue and earnest in the morning glare.) Except for Cob Krug, folks listen as a matter of courtesy, after he shows his business card and explains why he came.

His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth. Older than coal, older even than these mountains. It has an imperial name, the Marcellus. Deep in the bedrock of Saxon County, a sea of riches is waiting to be tapped.

Natural gas?
The words repeated with some hesitation, the first lesson in a foreign language—vowels and consonants in odd permutations, awkward in the mouth. Those who know the local lore make immediate connections. There is a mountain spring, secret but famous, that bubbles for no reason. In the woods north of Deer Run, at a spot called the Huffs, heady vapors seep through the rocks. The Huffs are popular for underage drinking. Teenagers pretend to, or perhaps really do, get high on the fumes.

Buried treasure,
says Bobby, feeling the poetry. The Marcellus Shale is Nature's safe-deposit box, its treasures locked away like insurance for the future. Now, at last, American ingenuity has found the key.

We drill a half mile down. Then we turn the bit sideways. We can drill for miles like that, right under your property. We're so far down you'll never know we're there.

You want to buy my land?
the farmers ask, gobsmacked. As though Bobby has demanded a lung or a kidney, a piece of themselves God can't replace.

Not buy. Just lease it. You can keep on farming it like usual. You get a bonus up front, twenty-five

(later
one hundred

five hundred

one thousand
)

an acre. Once we start drilling, you get a percent.

Again and again, the same response:
What do I have to do?
Reminding him, always, that they are farmers—lives of servitude, unrelenting effort.

There's nothing to do,
he says with a grandson's smile.
Sign the papers and wait for the check.

RURAL PENNSYLVANIA DOESN'T FASCINATE THE WORLD,
not generally. But cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Bore it, strip it, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need.

Bakerton understands this in its bones—a town named for a mining company, Baker Brothers, and not the other way around. Chester and Elias Baker threw the first shovel, bought up the farmland, and hired the men—Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Croats—who arrived in large numbers by wagon or train. The men slept in camps and, later, company houses. Their wives washed black coveralls and had babies, bought groceries with company scrip. The babies grew up, worked, married, were drafted. The lucky ones came back to mine coal. Union wages meant Fords and Chryslers, split-level houses. On Susquehanna Avenue, shops opened. The new public high school had an Olympic-size swimming pool.

When the mines failed, the reverse happened, like a film run backward.
FOR SALE
signs dotted the avenues. One by one the storefronts went dark. The miners, too, were extinguished, black lung or heart attacks or simple old age—never mind now, they are all equally dead. The children and grandchildren moved away, forgot everything. Only the widows remain. They will, if asked, point out the old mine roads, the clearings where tipples once stood: Baker One, Baker Four, Baker Seven, Baker Twelve.

This past holds no interest for Bobby Frame, though he owes his success to it—the distant memory of boom times, the ghost of
prosperity that lingers in the town. Here, grand promises are met without skepticism. The landowners are churchgoers, people of faith. The agnostics—there are a few—need only look to history: Bakerton has been favored before, tapped by Industry's magic wand.

He lives a nomad's life, which is not for everyone. Four shale plays in six years: Barnett, Haynesville, Fayetteville, Marcellus. He is a star at the company, Dark Elephant Energy. Twice a year they fly him back to Houston and turn him loose at a training seminar.
This could be you someday,
the new recruits are told, and take notes.

If he's made sacrifices along the way—girlfriends who sent him packing, the college degree he didn't finish and now doesn't need. If he missed his high school reunion, family birthdays and holidays, weddings and funerals of people he loves. If regret can singe him without warning as he lies awake listening to motel noises, distant televisions, the ice machine down the hall. If all these things, so be it. In daylight the phantoms dissipate. He appears at the courthouse at eight-thirty promptly, his mind clear for the mission.

Beautiful property you've got here.

The new recruits take notes.

This Monday morning a trainee shadows him, Josh Wilkie from Boulder, Colorado. Bobby's had trainees before and appreciates the company. He's grown used to, but still dislikes, eating alone.

They meet in the Days Inn lobby and scan the breakfast buffet, which comes free with the room. Bobby selects a miniature box of cereal, a container of yogurt the size of a shot glass, four hard-boiled eggs, a paper bowl and plastic spoon.

“Once and done, that's the ideal. Two is okay, though. Two you can live with. Three visits, you're wasting your time. Still frozen inside.” He tears open a Lender's bagel and lays it flat on the toaster. “Always. You have to put it through twice.”

They watch the bagel's progress through the toaster, a horizontal grill that moves like a conveyor belt. A silvery scrape as it shoots
out the bottom of the toaster. Hot in his hands as he returns it to the grill.

Late morning is best, Bobby explains, after the early chores. “Sometimes you get a wife, and you have to come back later to talk to the husband. That's not bad, to get the wife alone.”

Josh Wilkie grins unwholesomely.

“Don't laugh. They're the decision makers, a lot of times. Get the wife on board, and you're home free.” He thinks of Mrs. Mackey, the stubborn little woman who waved him off her porch as though swatting a fly.
Are you some kind of a salesman?

“Get in, get out. It's that simple.” It's the secret to his own success: on a good day he can get three leases signed before lunchtime. Five is his personal record. “Don't get hung up on the details. These people care about two things: what's in it for them, and how soon.”

They set out for the courthouse, Josh riding shotgun, a curly-haired boy in need of a shave. He wears homemade bracelets on one wrist, woven from colored yarn. “Twenty-three,” he says when Bobby asks. “I graduated last year.” His degree is in horse crap, in Bobby's firm opinion. Also known as Recreation and Leisure Management.

“Resorts,” Josh explains. “Health clubs, that kind of thing.”

Horse crap.

“No kidding. How'd you settle on that?”

“I like to ski, you know? I'm great on skis. I've been skiing since I could walk.” He is bright-eyed and pleased with himself, waiting to be praised

Bobby thinks, That is so impressive. Seriously, man: in the oil and gas business, skiing will be your secret weapon. It's almost an unfair advantage, when you think about it.

“No kidding,” he says again.

The Saxon County courthouse sits at the center of town, three stories high and rambling, with tall columns in front. For a back
woods county it is an impressive structure—built a century ago, early in the coal boom. Today a third of it goes unused.

Bobby leads Josh Wilkie through the metal detector and up a creaking staircase—dark wood, the steps covered in linoleum streaked to look like marble. At the end of the corridor is the Registry of Deeds. The lights are on, the door propped open. The Seth Thomas clock above the counter reads 8:40. The clerk is not at her desk.

For a moment Bobby is confused. Then he sees the well-dressed man waiting on the bench. There is a sudden buzzing in his ears, like a distant alarm.

The sharp dresser gets to his feet. “Looks like I beat you to it.”

Bobby feels a little queasy. He breaks out his salesman's smile. “Darling!” he says—breathlessly, like an ingénue in an old movie.

It's a bit of shtick that never gets old, at least for Bobby. This time it's for the benefit of Josh Wilkie, who stares at them, frowning.

“When did you roll into town?” says Bobby.

“Just last night. Rex Darling.” He offers Josh Wilkie his hand.

The kid breaks into a goofy grin. “You guys know each other.”

Bobby ignores him. He's had it with this kid, whom he blames for their disadvantage. They lost precious minutes at the Days Inn waiting for Josh's coffee: the urn ran empty, and the attendant took her time brewing a second pot. Having none himself, Bobby is severe about other people's vices—coffee, cigarettes, a drink to unwind. Needs that become the master of the man, dictating the architecture of his day.

He has never been on skis in his life.

Darling claps Bobby's shoulder. “I knew this joker in the Haynesville.”
The Haynesville,
not
Louisiana,
the state of no interest beyond its shale play. Their two companies had done battle there, and a little horse-trading, swapping leases back and forth.

“Here you go.” An unfamiliar clerk, a man, hands Darling a record book. Bobby glances sidelong at its spine.

“All right, then,” says Darling. “You fellas have a good day.”

He takes the book to a corner table and begins scribbling.

The clerk turns to Bobby, eyes him blankly like the stranger he is.

THEY ROLL ALONG NUMBER NINE ROAD,
an old mining trail that intersects with the Dutch Road.

“How often do you shave?” Bobby asks.

Josh rubs at his chin. “Couple times a week.”

“Not anymore. Now it's every day.” There's more Bobby could say—
Grow up already. It's a sign of respect, numbnuts—
but he keeps quiet.

They turn onto the Dutch Road, past Jim Norton's pine forest. Carl Neugebauer's southern pasture sits at the top of the hill. Bobby signed both properties last week. “With Kipler to the east, that's six hundred acres, altogether,” he tells Josh.

“Wow. Wow. That's amazing.” The kid studies the topo map spread across his lap, and locates each property with his finger. “Kipler, Norton, and—Neugebauer. What's in between, though? It's a big one. Parcel one-twelve.”

There is an awkward silence.

“That's Mackey. Dairy farmers. They need some time to think it over.” Bobby keeps his eyes on the road. Both times Mrs. Mackey saw him coming and met him on the front porch. He hasn't, so far, made it into the house.

Quickly he changes the subject. Richard Devlin Jr. owns sixty acres. By all appearances, he's just sitting on it. Bobby drives slowly along the southern edge of the property. There is a newish suburban-type ranch house—prefab, from the looks of it—and behind it, a patch of neatly mown grass. Beyond lie acres of deciduous forest, a creek in need of dredging, a sloping pasture overrun with kudzu.

They pull into the gravel driveway. Up close the house looks naked, not a shrub or a tree around it, as though it dropped out of the sky. No porch, not even a sidewalk, just a single-story crack
erbox wrapped in aluminum siding. Bobby knocks and waits. He hears voices inside, television noises. The door is opened by a young wife in a pink quilted bathrobe.

“Can I help you?” She looks younger than Bobby, older than Josh Wilkie but just barely—blond hair in a ponytail, glasses sliding down her nose.

“Mrs. Devlin?” Bobby introduces himself and Josh, whom he calls
my associate.
“I'm sorry to bother you so early.”

In fact it's already ten in the morning, the sun blazing overhead. Mrs. Devlin doesn't keep farmers' hours. She squints in the bright light. “Oh, that's all right. Come on in.”

The room is sparsely furnished in a way Bobby has seen before, the peculiar poverty of couples with young children. There is a couch, a giant television, and not much else. In one corner sits a plastic laundry basket filled with plastic toys. Mrs. Devlin leads them into the kitchen. Behind her back Josh gives Bobby a wink. It's easy to imagine slapping him, his stubbly face reddening. Bobby can hear it already, the seamy way Josh will tell the story
—Just out of the shower. She came to the door in her bathrobe—
and is irritated in advance.

The kitchen is sunny and airless, smelling of breakfast—toast crumbs on the counter, greasy dishes in the sink. At the table a girl child, three or four years old, eats saltines off a plastic plate.