Heat and Light (4 page)

Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Dakota. Wherever the Whip drilled, an entire industry followed: Logistix. Diamond Energy. Creek. He won by outrunning them.

Now is the time to leverage our first-mover advantage.

This morning he'll propose a major expansion, an aggressive strike into West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the mighty Marcellus. (Later, God and governor willing, New York will be ripe for the picking. But that's a conversation for another day.) For months his landmen have been signing leases. The Next Big Play.

We're on the verge of a new inflection point.
Eyes closed, the Whip visualizes himself striding to the podium, the crowd applauding madly, rising to its feet. The front-and-center seats reserved, always, for his board of directors. Three are longtime cronies of his stepfather, family friends the Whip thinks of, collectively, as the Old Boys. The Old Boys vote as a block, their loyalty indisputable: if he wanted to send a drill rig to Mars, the Old Boys would be present at the launch. The rest of the board is a crapshoot. Pooch McClure can sometimes be bullied, Tuck Winans bribed into submission; but the others are beyond his reach. Floyd Whitty, the chair, has been a trial from day one—a hasty choice, brought on to fill an unexpected vacancy (the old chair's ill-timed mental breakdown, after an unusually brutal IRS audit). After a full year at his post, Floyd has yet to grasp the Whip's management style. Once in a while he'll listen to reason; but not always. With Floyd, you can never be sure.

Drilling a horizontal well in Pennsylvania costs three million dollars.

By his engineers' last count, six thousand wells are waiting to be drilled.

He runs a comb through his wet hair—a Whip trademark, shaggy blond and permanently windblown, as though he's just back from a regatta. In an industry run by crew cuts—bankers and ranchers, ex-military, Southern Baptists—it is an unorthodox look. But like every detail of his appearance, it is calculated for effect.

We are on the verge of a new inflection point.

He will speak directly to the point of dynamism—located front and center, in the vicinity of Floyd Whitty's groin.

In stocking feet, the Whip paces. He fires off a text message to Quentin Tanner, his new communications director:
locked and loaded!!!

The same well could be drilled for two million in Texas, with
its good weather and smiling regulators, its unorganized labor and friendly tax code.

As always, Tanner responds promptly. He is an odd duck, precise, conscientious. Even his texts sound formal:
Your adoring public awaits.
To the shareholders he is a cipher, soft-spoken and persnickety, a pasty beanpole in a dark suit.
That fruity fella,
the Old Boys call him.

The Whip protests—
nah, Quint's all right—
but in his heart he isn't sure. Tanner has never mentioned a girlfriend. Then again, he's never mentioned parents or siblings, friends or neighbors, a favorite sports team, a church, a dog. Such ordinary things; why make a secret of them? Why refuse to be a person like anyone else? This deliberate mysteriousness strikes the Whip as unnatural, though maybe it's normal in Connecticut or Massachusetts, where Tanner comes from. The small states with all the colleges. The land of Pilgrims and Division Three football, covered half the year in snow.

In his severe dark suits he seems to have stepped out of a painting, some long-dead Dutchman who's lost his hat.

At its next meeting, in three short weeks, the board will vote on the proposed expansion. Even with the Old Boys in his corner, and possibly Tuck Winans, the Whip takes nothing for granted. Floyd Whitty's support is key.

The point of dynamism coincides, always, with the Whip's own interests—a pattern observed over the years by certain of his wives and girlfriends, or by their therapists.

The Whip texts back:
time hack???
Tickled, still, by, this new way of communicating, learned from his preteen daughter. The immediacy of it delights him, a giddy throwback to the walkie-talkies of his youth.

Tanner's response comes instantly.
Showtime in ten.

The Whip frowns. The word
showtime
troubles him. Maybe the
Old Boys are right; maybe Tanner is a gay. Though in Connecticut or Massachusetts, how could you tell?

He replies:
roger that—armed and ready!!!
His fondness for military lingo is another trademark. Though not himself a veteran, he considers it his birthright, his only inheritance from his actual father.

He has trouble discerning who is homosexual. Movie and TV actors all seem gay to him.

New socks and underwear are the cheapest kind of renewal. A fresh pair of socks puts a bounce in his step.

“I'LL HAND IT TO YOU, WHIP.
That was some song and dance.”

The hotel bar is quiet at this hour, the workday ended, the shareholders speeding off in all directions, toward home in its various incarnations: wives and children, mistresses, other bars. In short, an optimal moment to pour a drink down the throat of Floyd Whitty, a conversation long in coming. The Whip has done his homework. He knows what there is to know about Floyd's assets and liabilities, ex-wives and children, habits and allegiances; his tastes in liquor, women, and cigars.

Kip waits until the bartender brings their drinks. It's dunking day for Floyd, time to surrender to his personal Lord and Savior. Time for Floyd to come to Jesus.

“I need your support, buddy. Fish or cut bait.”

Floyd gulps his bourbon and branch, half the glass in one go. “Weak,” he says. “Listen, I know you got to spend money to make money. My question is the pace of it. Maybe stick our toe in before you dive us in headfirst.”

Kip nods solemnly. “Floyd, I see your point.” He excels at this part—the ego-soothing concessions, the pose of reasonableness. “But those leases are already bought and paid for. We got 'em cheap, but they weren't free. And we don't make a dime back till we start drilling.”

“I know it.” Floyd sighs audibly, the sad music of paternal disappointment, a sound that fills Kip with despair. “Though you might a thought of that before you went crazy signing them. If you don't mind my saying.”

This gets Kip's back up. “Well, I guess I could have waited around for Logistix or Creek to get the same idea. Of course, then we say sayonara to twenty-five an acre.” He drinks deeply. “Trust me on that one, Floyd. You weren't around for the Haynesville.”

“I wadn't. But I heard.” The Louisiana operation had devolved into a cattle auction, the project idling for years while the cagy Cajun landowners comparison shopped, everyone holding out for a better deal. “Still and all. Three million a well is some tab. Where's all that money going?”

Floyd sits back glowering as Kip explains the ways Pennsylvania isn't Texas. Well-boring is tricky in the freeze months. Winding mountain roads are lousy for truck traffic; God only knows how many will have to be widened or repaved. The one-horse towns are short on motel rooms and apartments. Thousands of roustabouts will need somewhere to sleep.

The old cheapskate nearly inhales his drink. “You mean to tell me we're paying for that, too?”

“Logistix did it up in Dakota. Prefab bunkhouses, two hundred beds apiece.”

“You're kidding me. We're in the real estate bidness now?”

“There's an outfit in New Jersey that'll truck them in. A week to ship it, ten days to put it together. You got your bunkhouse inside a month. It's something to see.” There is more, much more, he could say, having witnessed with his own eyes the raw miracle—the semis hauling huge sections of wall and roof, the twenty-man crew assembling the pieces right on site, basement, subfloor, plumbing, electrics, a geometry so intricate no human mind could have dreamed it. Watching, Kip felt his eyes fill. The spectacle moved him in ways he had no words for. He blessed the new century and its wonders,
understanding it to be a rare moment in history, like the building of the Pyramids or the founding of Texas—an era of risk and prospect, an age when men are gods.

Floyd's eyes narrow. “And all this is included in the price tag? That three million a well.”

“The worker housing is extra. But think what we saved—”

“On those leases. I heard you the first ten times.” Floyd rises. “All right, then. You made your case, Whip. Let me study on it.”

He drains his glass and puts on his hat.

With Floyd gone, gravity shifts abruptly. Kip becomes aware, again, of his surroundings, the point of dynamism darting around the room like a june bug. When did Amy Rubin come into the bar? Possibly she's been there all along, reading
Time
magazine at a corner table, a highball glass at her elbow, an immense leather pocketbook on the chair opposite, like a stand-in dinner date. She is small and dark-haired, with the round, delicate features of a silent film actress, an archaic sort of prettiness to which women no longer aspire: porcelain skin, a rosebud mouth. Kip watches her turn a page and hold it at arm's length, and feels a hot pang of recognition. Despite his wife's nagging, he is offended at the very idea of reading glasses. To wear them even at home seems a capitulation. He studies restaurant menus ahead of time, on the Internet, to avoid public embarrassment. He wonders, now, if anyone is fooled.

Kip ambles toward her table. He's worked with geologists for half his life—rumpled, whiskery men, palpably uncomfortable in polite society, like farm animals brought indoors. The female version, by all rights, should be ugly as homemade sin. But Amy Rubin is attractive, for her age anyway. He's never dated or married a woman old enough to need reading glasses.

“Everything all right here? You look like you seen a ghost.”

She sets down
Time
and stares as though she can't quite place him. Come off it, lady, he thinks. This is my company. You're here on my dime.

He extends his hand. “Kip Oliphant. Happy to meet you, Miss Rubin. Is it Miss?”

“Doctor. Or Amy is fine.”

Old maid, he guesses, and not happy about it. “Amy, I want to thank you for coming all the way down here. You were a big help to us.”

In truth, the keynote had gone on longer than necessary. With the lights dimmed for her PowerPoint presentation, more than one shareholder had seized the opportunity for a nap. It had taken all Kip's self-control to avoid hollering:
Wake up, boys! She's coming to the good part.
And sure enough, in the end, the number roused them. It would have roused a corpse. The number was so staggeringly large that the room gasped audibly. Rubin had upped her estimate. The Marcellus Shale held more gas than anyone had imagined: by her calculations, a mind-blowing
fifty trillion cubic feet.

Now she glares at Kip like he called her a sonofabitch. “I'm a scientist. I'm always happy to talk about my research.”

“Let me buy you a drink. It's the least I can do.” He grins. “In a year or two, you'll a bought me another ranch.”

She flinches as though he slapped her.

“Thanks, but I can't.” She stands, stuffing
Time
into her giant pocketbook. “I have a plane to catch.”

T
he town is named for its coal mines. The prison guard is named for his father. Both feel the weight of their naming, the ancestral burden: congenital defects, secondhand hopes. Condemned, like all namesakes, to carry another's history, the bloopers and missteps, the lost promise. The concessions of age, its bitter surrenders; the rare and fleeting moments of grace.

At Deer Run Correctional Institute, on a Friday morning in May, Richard Devlin Jr. walks the length of F Block, making his rounds.

“A man needs privacy,” Hops says from behind the sheet. “I've explained this before.”

The sheet—bleach-smelling, washed thin—is stretched across the front-facing bars of his cell. It's a stunt he's pulled before, though never on Devlin's watch.

Devlin waits, his arms crossed. From somewhere behind him, an odd noise—a metallic chinking, like the tap of an ice pick—echoes through the corridor.

“I'm talking about a human right. A basic need like food and shelter. I'm getting aggravated.”

The prison is named for the road it sits on—years ago, a winding country lane scattered with red dog, bordered by forest and traveled mainly in buck season. Smoothly paved now, and widened, a fourlane highway the COs call Roadkill Run.

Devlin says, “I don't make the rules.”

Hops steps closer to the sheet and speaks in a low voice. “Tell me one thing. You got a door on the bedroom at home? The baffroom?”

“This isn't about me.” Devlin, too, lowers his voice. There is a certain intimacy to speaking through the sheet. They are emboldened by its presence, like a Hasidic couple making love.

What the hell is that noise?

“You got a wife, boss? You let her see you on the crapper?”

Devlin is practiced at deflecting such questions. In his ten years at Deer Run, he has never spoken of Shelby or the kids, never once. “Sorry, Hops. Didn't know you had a wife in here.”

From the next cell comes a stifled laugh. “Give it up, man,” someone calls.

“All right, fine. You win, boss.” Hops pulls down the sheet with a flourish. He is older than Devlin, by decades possibly. Or possibly not: his brown skin is unwrinkled, his braids more black than gray. His cheekbones are dotted with freckles that looked painted on, round as pencil erasers and nearly as large.

The chinking gets louder, as though somewhere on the cell block, a secret operation—salt mining, the carving of festive ice sculptures—is taking place.

“Thanks, Hops. I appreciate it.” It's a lesson Devlin learned long ago: the inmates respond to simple courtesy, like anyone else. And yet few of the COs bother with
pleas
e
and
thank you
. The reality, which he'd been slow to understand, is that not everyone wants peace. Some guys—most, maybe—are in it for the fight.

Ignoring his sciatica—also inherited, another gift from his father—he continues on his rounds. At the end of the row he finds the source of the noise: Charles Polley, known as Cholley, clipping his toenails. Offill, his cell mate, picks idly at a guitar.

“Devlin? I thought Schrey was on today.” Offill eyes with displeasure the flying shards of toenail.

“Tonight. I'll tell him you missed him.”

Phil Schrey is a recent hire. Like most new COs he came in with a swagger, a pose the men saw through instantly. Naturally they pushed back, which only made him swing harder. It's a common mistake, but the smart rookie figures it out eventually. Schrey is not smart.

Cholley moves on to his left foot, a calculated hit on the big toe. A sliver of nail shoots across the room.

Offill brushes it away. “Fuck, man. How many toes you got?”

Devlin continues on his rounds. In the next cell Weems lies on his bunk reading a dog-eared paperback. Weems is always reading. In the afternoons he works in the prison library, and comes back with an armload of books.

What are you reading?
Devlin would ask anyone else; but Weems doesn't welcome conversation. He is a local kid, possibly the quietest inmate Devlin has ever encountered. It's hard to imagine him doing any of what's in his jacket, all meth-related. More and more, Deer Run seems overrun with meth heads, skinny, wasted men with stubbed teeth like jack-o'-lanterns. Weems looks better than most of them; he looks perfectly normal. A guy you wouldn't look at twice if he passed you on the street.

F Block is black, white, Hispanic. Except for Weems, they are city hoodlums from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; men who'd never heard of Saxon County until the Department of Corrections sent them here. Deer Run is medium security, a designation that means nothing. Violent offenders, dope fiends, gangbangers, smash-and-grabbers: virtually anyone can land here, for virtually any reason. For no reason at all, if a judge decrees it so.

Next door Wanda sits barefoot on her bunk, rubbing lotion into her bare feet. She wears the same prison blues as everyone else, with a few modifications: shirttails knotted above her navel, waistband rolled down to her hips. Her eyes are circled with black liner, her lips painted frosty pink.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she calls. It's impossible to sneak up on her; she is gifted with superhuman hearing and eyesight.

“You heard me coming.”

“Honey, I hear them all coming.” Her other superpower is the ability to make anything sound sexual. The COs find this disconcerting. Her simple presence provokes them, her languorous movements, her odd falsetto voice. Despite the bright makeup, the eyebrows plucked thin and arched into half circles, it is altogether too easy to see how she looked as a man: the clefted chin, the heavy jaw. Some—Schrey, for example—persist in calling her Juan.
Still got his prick, don't he?
It's a question Devlin can't answer, and wouldn't; something he'd rather not think about.

They chat for a few minutes, the Pirates losing to Cleveland, the summery weather. It's a basic lesson of the job, how anything can become normal. Compared with some of them, Wanda is a pleasure—no beefs, no attitude.

“You hear about that boy in the balloon? Out west somewhere. They had the radio on in the kitchen.” Wanda works the early shift, prepping for breakfast. Devlin can see, across her forehead, the faint red line left by her hairnet.

“He went to some air show with his parents and stowed away on a hot air balloon. He out there floating all by hisself.”

“Still?” says Devlin.

“What kind of mother, is my question.”

“You can't watch them every minute.”

“True that.” The arched eyebrows give her a startled look, as though she's seen everything and decided, in the interest of efficiency, to remain surprised.

By the standards of the world she is not an attractive woman. Not a woman at all, in point of fact; and yet Devlin looks forward to seeing her each morning, a realization that unsettled him at first. Her bright face is a relief from the drab functionality of the prison, its unrelenting maleness. Though not technically a woman, she is womanlike; and he would rather look at women than men.

She rubs the lotion into her hands, her elbows. “The dishwasher
is broken. We was scrubbing pots for a solid hour. You think I'm kidding.” She shows him her fingernails, the red polish chipped in places.

It's unclear who smuggles in her makeup. Every few months, her sister comes from Philadelphia for a visit. Strictly speaking, the cosmetics are contraband, though Devlin is willing to look the other way. For another CO, it might be reason enough to toss her cell. Wanda is a kind of inkblot test for the COs. The decent ones treat her kindly. For the shitbirds—Schrey, Ianello, Poblocki on a bad day—she is an easy target.

Late in the day, from a certain angle, her face looks shadowed, mustache and sideburns coming in.

“Okay, Wanda. I need to shove off. Don't forget, there's a fire drill later.”

“Wait, wait.” She approaches the bars. “Boss, I need to ax you a question.”

“Hit me.”

“It's a delicate matter. Come here, I won't bite.” She smiles, showing her gold tooth. “Unless you like that sort of thing.”

Devlin approaches the bars.

“Officer Devlin, you have always treated me with respect. I appreciate that. These other ones, don't get me started.” Wanda lowers her voice. “I am in a situation. Somebody stole my pills.”

He catches a whiff of her vanilla-scented lotion, the same kind his wife uses. “You're not on the med list.”

“You know what I mean.”

Unhappily, he does. It's common knowledge that Mulraney supplies Wanda with birth control pills, to meet the mysterious hormonal needs of a man who wants to be a woman. What Wanda gives him in return is conjectured, but not known.

“It's the middle of my cycle. I can't be skipping pills. There are consequences.” Intelligence in her eyes, a basic awareness: Wanda, a man in lipstick and false eyelashes, is saner than most.

Devlin speaks in a low voice. “How long have they been missing?” The question itself shows poor judgment. By acknowledging that the pills exist, he has already compromised himself.

“Since yesterday. Somebody came in here while I was at work.” At this distance, despite the makeup, she looks neither masculine nor feminine. Viewed up close, Devlin thinks, everyone is just a person.

“And you're sure they're gone? You couldn't have misplaced them somewhere?”

Wanda looks meaningfully around the cell, ten feet square. There is a chair, a desk, a toilet, a bed.

Devlin says, “I'll see what I can do.”

THE REST OF HIS TOUR IS UNEVENTFUL
—no missing, no hang-ups. He has encountered both before and certainly will again, a thought he beats back each morning as he crosses the sally port into the low-slung bunker—overheated, fluorescent lit, a building that smells of its floors.

The men speak their own language, which only sounds like English.
Inmate
is what a CO calls you.
Prisoner
is what you call yourself.
Convict
is a term of respect, reserved for old-timers. A convict doesn't lie or game or cop or snitch. A convict settles beefs honorably, and holds his mud.

He has seen their papers, all of them. Cholley held up a department store on Christmas Eve. Offill has been down four separate times, for every offense imaginable—most recently, shooting a man in a meth beef. The last judge, smarter than most, gave him twenty years.

A
ding
is a head case, an inmate who acts crazy. They're all crazy, but most can dial it down when they need to. Not so the dings.

Hops was nabbed in Montgomery County for armed robbery, a Wawa convenience store. When a beat cop spotted him Hops gave chase, and took a bullet in the hip—causing, forever after, the trademark hitch in his step.

A ding's outburst can land him in the Ding Wing.

Wanda was pulled over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a tricked-out Pontiac Sunbird, registered in the name Andre Tibbs. “My boyfriend,” she told the arresting officer—who, after she failed the Breathalyzer, had probable cause to pop the trunk.

Andre Tibbs was a big man. The medical examiner testified that he'd been bludgeoned in his sleep—250 pounds of deadweight, by the time Wanda crammed him into the trunk.

I am in a situation.
Four hundred angry men locked up in cages, exactly one pair of breasts in sight. Yes, Wanda: you are in a situation.

Long ago the job seemed exciting, part of the larger something. If you'd watched enough television; if you came of age in a basement rec room, sprawled on shag carpet, gorging on cop shows and private detectives—Kojak and Columbo, Rockford and McMillan, gruff, charming men known by their last names. If you'd absorbed, along the way, the underlying lesson: that crime is the essential human experience, the most compelling and significant. That fighting crime is how heroes are made.

This is how a person becomes a prison guard.

At 7:50 the loudspeaker crackles: ten-minute movement. The dings shuffle downstairs to the med line.

The real mystery is where Mulraney gets the pills to begin with. Steals them from his wife, the COs joke, and maybe it's true. Steph Mulraney is pregnant for the fifth time. Sooner or later, the punch line goes, she'll figure out why.

After the movement, Devlin runs showers. A temporary procedure, supposedly, put in place after a series of incidents. Mainly it's been a success, though the COs still grouse about it. (
What next, we hold their dicks when they piss?
) The complaints are inevitable, wholly predictable—at Deer Run, any new policy is guaranteed to provoke a shitstorm. This is true no matter how effortless the change, how obviously necessary, how small.

Today half his inmates are on the shower list. At each cell he
radios the control room; Gary Rizzo buzzes open the door; and Devlin walks the guy to the shower. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. You imagine growing up to be Rockford or Columbo, and end up walking guys to the john.

The dings wait in line for their ding biscuits.

Wanda is booking whammers. Devlin is sure of it, though he's never witnessed one in progress.

You COs are off the hook,
Hops said to him once.
What kind of fool come to the joint on purpose?

Unless he sees one in progress, no action is required.

He understands, too late, that guarding prisoners isn't crime-fighting. It's crime-cleanup. The COs are janitors of the system, curators of its waste.

It isn't a forever thing. That's what you tell yourself. Like Wanda, he has served ten years.

He has never witnessed one in progress, which is all that matters. It is the CO's first lesson, the difference between what you know is happening and what you actually see. At least once each shift, Devlin puts somebody on notice:
Don't make me see it.
The inmates understand it is a matter of respect.

They are the smartest people he's ever met, and the dumbest. With one or two exceptions they are rash, impulsive, prone to flashes of anger and acts of monumental stupidity: the fistfight, the verbal threat, the ding fit. Yet they are inventive in ways regular citizens would never imagine, a creeping intelligence that can still dazzle him, a twisted kind of genius. Until Mulraney shut him down, Cholley ran a clandestine snack bar out of his cell, specializing in what he called a
chi chi:
nacho chips from the vending machine, crushed and mixed with water. The whole mess cooked right in the bag, on a steaming radiator—a salty orange-colored pancake with the distinctive Doritos flavor,
a zesty blend of spices and cheese.
Out in the world, he'd be a celebrity chef with his own TV show.