Hidden America Page 21

  “You know he uses product,” Jason says. “You know he must.”

  “I’m gonna say yeah,” I say, discovering in Jason a kind of fabulous gossip.

  The group hair dye was a way of communicating to Melvis. A way of saying: Your hair is weird. They did it last hitch, hung out in Jason’s room and applied the Nice ’n Easy, and the next day they showed up and paraded by Melvis. “At first he thought it was a compliment,” Jason tells me. “TooDogs had to tell him, ‘Dude, they’re making fun of you.’”

  “Poor Melvis,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, poor Turtle,” Jason says. “He now thinks he’s blond. He’s, like, got a whole rock star thing going with that hair.”

  “It’s not a good color,” I say.

  “It’s a fucking joke color,” Jason says.

  “You have to tell him.”

  “I know. I know.”

  —

  TOODOGS LOVES HIS WIFE SEVERELY. We’re soul mates. We dream together. Sometimes. Not lately. He thinks of her as his anchor, and as the angel who saved his life. Actually, technically, the angel came to her and told her: “He is going to die.” She reported this to him. Shortly after that, TooDogs woke up on the steps of a detox place. He was maybe thirty. He doesn’t remember getting there, only knows he dragged himself there. His drug habit by then was heroin to take the edge off cocaine.

  TooDogs thinks his wife is the only person in this world who really knows him, but then again she doesn’t know him at all. It’s confusing. A big clutter in his head. Lately, he’s been wondering, Was it worth it? He’ll call her, as he does each night, and ask. She’ll say, “You’re thinking too much. Quit it.”

  Lana, his wife, whom he rarely refers to by name, takes care of everything back home in Sterling, about two hours south of Anchorage. A Slope widow, that’s what women like her are called. She raised all four of the kids pretty much on her own. He made it home for each of their births, that part he managed. But not a whole lot else. He thinks he wasn’t a good father. He was never there. He has a lot of regret over that, over thinking the money part was the most important thing. Then sometimes he wonders if they even wanted him there. If she did; if she does. She’s got her life, and he’s got his. He’s scared of his kids being grown now, and he thinks she could fade away. Or lose interest in him. Not really. Because he put everything in her name. The house, everything. So if they get divorced, she can’t take anything from him. Because she’s already got it. That, he thinks, is another weird one.

  It wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, being a Slope worker, it made him a tall man. His wife would meet him at the airport after each hitch, bring the kids. He loved seeing them from the plane, bouncing in the window of the airport. They’d crawl all over him. Torture him with hugs. He’d hive up. Oh, it was all right. It made me feel like a rock star.

  In those early days, when he was still in his twenties, he reunited with his own father, who had taken off when he was a kid. They even worked on the same rig together for a little while. They called his dad Spinner Hawk. They were just starting to gel as adults. It was a chance to get some answers, maybe, to understand some of the bad shit that left him with hives. Maybe his dad saw what was going on back then. But by now his dad was deep into alcohol and drugs. One day, TooDogs got a call. “I’m at the end of my rope,” his dad said. TooDogs tried to get over there, but it was too late. I found him. Oh, yeah. You open the door and you feel life go through you. I knew he was gone. I mean, like, hair standing on end. I felt my hair blowing back. His spirit was bouncing around in there pretty severely. I found him in the bedroom. Shot himself right through the head. So.

  TooDogs started running pretty hard after that. The Slope was safe. To him it was, and is, one of the best lives a guy could have. Things break, you fix them. It’s all hands-on. It’s all workable. Being married is hard. All the touchy-feely. Way hard. I can love, but I have to work at it real hard. Because love is a touching deal. The kind of love on a rig is easier. He thinks he’s probably a better father to the roughnecks than he is to his own kids. I regret leading a double life. I do regret that.

  The worst part about the detox place, where he stayed for thirty days after the angel came, was he had to hug everyone. Every morning, by the coffeepot, they made him go around and hug. The weird thing was he started to like it. I was raw. I was a newborn kid. For the first time in his life, he found the courage to touch people. To this day, he still touches everything. Everything. Like, if he walks by a tree, he has to feel the bark, or even just a mailbox or a big fleshy sunflower. He has to touch.

  He is working on being touched, but really, he’s not optimistic.

  He didn’t use health insurance to pay for detox. He figured it wouldn’t stick if someone else paid for it. He drained his retirement account, like $100,000, all of it in hundreds, put it in Baggies. He went to the dealers he owed, counted out more than $60,000. “Ignorant, ignorant, ignorant,” he said with each bill. He had to feel the money leave his hands to make everything stick.

  He has been sober ever since, not a drop of anything in like eighteen years. He still feels like a piece of crap for having been a junkie. He’s less angry now than when he first came out of detox. When it got real bad, he would go to the rig with a sledgehammer and pound on the iron, just beat until he couldn’t beat no more, then sit down and ponder.

  He has never hit a person out of anger, or madness, or whatever twisted shit causes people to beat on innocent people. It has to, he thinks, be a sickness or something that makes someone constantly beat on a little kid. There has to be forgiveness and forgetting. Forgetting.

  Howard Hughes couldn’t be touched. It’s a for-instance. It’s okay. It isn’t, but it is. The violence led me to become a better person. I’m trying to justify it.

  You can’t dwell on the past. You can’t get anything back. No, all you can do is improve yourself. Make yourself into a better person. He wants that severely. Severely. It’s what he works hardest on. Pretty much constantly.

  For years he worked out on the ice, wildcatting. Bait boxes on sleds, dragged fifty miles out on the ice. He’d build the camp, build the rig, drill the exploration wells, wouldn’t leave until the ice started melting. He’d be gone sometimes from like November through May. He loved it. That sounds crazy, but he loved it, minus 50, minus 70. He would just stand there and think: Mother Nature at her finest. If he went outside with his hair wet, he could snap it off.

  He discovered humility out there. He would stand in the cold and look up at the stars and say, Okay, I am a tiny piece of nothing down here on a vast frozen sea.

  Life on Oooguruk, compared with wildcatting, is practically vacation. Two weeks on, two weeks off, a camp like this? It’s luxury living. It gives him more time at home. It’s hard to adjust to all that time at home. He has a shelf in a closet. He puts his shaving kit on the shelf. He has one drawer. He has a Harley, a four-wheeler, a snowmobile, a fishing boat, a couple trucks. It’s hard to be a human being. That’s why he likes mechanical stuff.

  His one son, Ray J., started roughnecking. TooDogs gives him advice. “Buy all your toys first,” he tells Ray J. “Your relaxation, get that lined up first.”

  With oil prices the way they are, the money in drilling is crazy, crazier than ever. A toolpusher like TooDogs could go anywhere in the world. There’s a rig in Kazakhstan that wants him, another in Calgary, another in Sydney. It would mean long hitches again, being away for months at a time.

  The thing about his wife is, if she would say, “Stay home,” he would. He ran it by her a few times. That’s what he told her, “All’s you have to do is give me the nod.” But she didn’t. She has this wave she gives him at the end of his fourteen days at home. “See ya!” He knows she’s kidding. He knows she is. It’s funny, he thinks. Am I lonely? No. Am I? Yeah. It could go a lot of ways. I could be lonely, but then I get covere
d up with family and I break out in hives. Some things a guy needs to work on.

  —

  CHARLIE, THE GUY WHO BUILDS the ice roads, is out there widening them. A warming trend—we are up to minus 20—can mean a blow is coming. A phase-three blow, the most severe, means you can’t see ten feet in front of you. Nobody goes anywhere during a phase three, which can last a week or more. No one is allowed to work—if there’s an accident, they won’t be able to get you out of here—so guys sit around and watch movies and curse the ennui.

  “There’s a good chance we’ll get stuck here for a few days,” TooDogs says to me.

  I make the point that getting stuck has been a theme this hitch.

  “It’s not always like this,” he says.

  Jason comes in carrying the masterpiece he has finally finished: the bracket to hold the computer monitor at eye level for Andy.

  “Ta-dum,” he says. It’s a thick iron chain, each link welded together to form an S shape.

  “Awesome,” Andy tells him. “I’m so glad we waited for the decorative version.” Applause goes around the doghouse, and the installation begins at once. “Whoa, what are you doing there, cowboy?” Andy says when Jason nearly knocks over the monitor. Andy holds the monitor. Brain offers to help snake the wires, lies on his belly, but can’t quite reach. TooDogs pushes Brain’s butt with his foot, inching him forward while helping Andy balance the monitor. Jason drills the hole standing on Brain’s back to reach, while Turtle reaches around and, using TooDog’s arm as a brace, hands Jason the screws.

  “Okay, now nobody laugh!” TooDogs says.

  And so they do. Jason is the first to tip, then the others. They could be college kids setting up their first dorm, or they could be boys building a fort; it could be any snapshot of brotherhood, of love’s incorruptibility.

  Nothing is going right. Normally, it takes about 30 days to drill a well. Nearly 2 weeks into 33 and there’s no end in sight. Seven hours of jarring freed the drill that night I sat in my bait box listening, but then the next day, or night, or maybe day, the MWD, the tool that sends the signal that tells them which way to turn, abruptly lost its pulse. They lost thirty-six hours to that calamity, about $300,000 to the company. They pulled it up out of the earth, thousands of feet up, and found three small rocks lodged in the mechanical parts of the tool, freezing it up. How did the rocks get in there?

  Rod was upset. He sat the crew down in the conference room, put the three rocks on the table. “Hopefully, we’re not pumping rocks in our sweeps!” he bellowed.

  Stubbs, who is in charge of the mud pits, wondered if it was his fault, looked down. Zack, who is in charge of Stubbs, sat there furious. They keep clean pits! TooDogs sat there thumping his fingers while Rod vented. He could see Zack seething. That kid took pride in his work. That kid had come far. Kids! It’s not their fault they come here so inexperienced. Not like in his day, when you grew up playing with nuts and bolts. These kids start out here and they don’t know which way the fucking drill bit turns. TooDogs has to teach, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. “It’s just like a beer bottle,” he’ll say to them. And they’re, like, “I don’t use a screw top, I drink premium.” He’ll think, Jiminy Christmas. He’ll start even more basic. “Your focal point is these,” he’ll say, showing his hands and his feet. “Make sure these don’t get broke.” He builds from there. He’ll take one guy’s spot, like a pipe racker, and have him stand back and watch. Then he’ll let the guy do it, step back, and critique him. It had been a lot of work, growing this crew. A lot.

  “Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s not working!” Rod went on in the conference room. “Obviously it’s not working! Them rocks cost us a lot of money! A lot of time!” He was sort of making the same point over and over, sort of losing the guys with each repeat.

  “Look, we’re not smoking anyone here,” TooDogs said, interrupting Rod.

  Rod looked at him. Well, yes, he was smoking someone. Or he was trying to. There was a pause, a tilting of heads, two parents trying to get their act together. “A lesson learned,” TooDogs said. “Everyone step it up. Take the time you need to do your job right, all the way, full-on, nobody cutting corners on nothing. That’s for everybody in this room.”

  “A lesson learned,” Rod said, retreating.

  The next day they hit gas. Gas is not a workable deal. The gas units in the well were spiking dangerously above 1,500 units. They had to quit drilling, increase mud weight to keep the gas contained, but not too much, so as to avoid fracturing the formation, but enough to control the gas, which could, if it got out of control, blow up the island.

  Nothing is going right. It won’t matter for long. They will all leave soon, if the blow doesn’t come, and a new crew will come, and the problems will continue, or not continue, the drill will go on turning, or not turning, until they come back in two weeks and continue drilling, or not. This hole, the next hole, the next hole, pick the rig up and move it to another oil field, another set of holes, there is no finishing, never an ending, on a rig.

  —

  ONE EVENING IN THE DINING HALL, there appears the beauty of prime rib. Prime rib means: Sunday. It’s a Slope-wide tradition in every dining hall, every camp. It is about the only certain time marker. Sunday gets people thinking of Wednesday, change-out day, going home. Prime rib has a way of reminding people of time again, of something on the horizon.

  “Drink beer, drink whiskey, chase women, go out in the woods and kill stuff” is how one of the guys describes his time home after leaving the Slope.

  “Keep yourself alive, that’s it.”

  “Yup.”

  “Instead of trying to fit everything into a weekend and feeling like hell till the middle of the week, we get to spread it out.”

  “That’s where we’re lucky.”

  “Yup.”

  When he goes home, Turtle’s plan-forward is to buy a new motorcycle, his third. (He will drive it out of the dealership in Wasilla and immediately get a speeding ticket.) Kung Fu is going to visit his dad in Sacramento—a somewhat scary notion, seeing as Sacramento is where he was fixing to locate Lords of Liberty Motorcycle Militia, his strip club/meth lab. A lot of memories there. (He will end up back in jail with his face bashed in but, proudly, not his teeth.) Stubbs has no big plans except for helping Angela, his fiancée and the first woman who didn’t steal his money, take care of the seven mentally disturbed people in their home. “They have disorderments,” Stubbs tells me. “They think they see shit. You try to make them happy.” Other than that, Stubbs will hang out at Go Cash Bingo, where no alcohol is served and where he plays seventy-two cards for $14. (He will continue an eight-month losing streak.) Andy plans some quality time with his fiancée, who is game for anything and who will most definitely come with him to hang out with Jason at Humpy’s bar, where, hopefully, the waitress wearing a harness carrying Jell-O shots will offer to suck and blow, which Jason will more than gladly partake of, many times over. “Suck me! Blow me! On your knees!” Jason will get more than roaring drunk, and so will Andy, but Andy will hold it better. (Andy will plan a bachelor party, a weekend of gambling and topless girls in Vegas. Jason will announce his intention to attend the party, and his wife will abruptly file for divorce.)

  TooDogs doesn’t know. He’s eager to leave but not eager to go home. The Slope is the only place he feels he has any control. “It’s good to have that, good for a person to have a place he can go to feel safe. But what a fucked-up place to feel safe.”

  The king salmon aren’t in yet, so he won’t take out his boat. Lately he’s been staying an extra night in Anchorage, to de-tune before driving home. He likes to shop. He loves to shop. He likes to people-watch. His daughter is graduating high school, and he’ll go to her graduation and clap. Pretty soon there will be a free bedroom in his house, and he dreams of turning it into a man cave. He’s picturing tongue-and-groove, probably
like a herringbone pattern? Abstract shapes. He’s thinking a desk. A stereo. Probably a couch. Plus his knickknacks, a collection of animal skulls, a collection of crystal balls.

  —

  THE MAIN THING everyone cares about, ever since prime rib, is the blow. Getting stuck on the island. But the blow doesn’t come. The night before change-out, duffel bags get piled in the hallway by the mudroom, symbols of freedom. My flight out of Deadhorse is earlier than the others’; the van driver tells me to be ready at 4:30 a.m.

  TooDogs gets up early to say good-bye. “I figured I might as well come out,” he says. He offers to carry my stuff. “Looks like you’re free,” he says, standing in the mudroom.

  “Looks like you are, too,” I tell him.

  He says it’s no big deal. He says it’s all workable. “I’m a machine,” he says. “It’s what I am.”

  I have learned not to argue. He sits with me while I wait for the van driver. The mudroom is utterly quiet this time of day, no one in here banging locker doors or kicking off boots. Just the buzz of fluorescent lights overhead and the faint sound of TooDogs thumping his fingers on the bench. He’s already dressed for his day of travel, wearing clean blue Carhartts, same HUNT HARD cap.

  “A loving family is way better than anything you can create up here,” he says finally. “I did make that clear, right?”

  I tell him I think so. I tell him there’s a kind of love up here, too, though.

  “I’m talking about a real family,” he says. “You know what I mean. Gawd, woman.”

  “All right.”

  “But I can only handle this one,” he says. “Does that make any sense? It’s not a bad thing. It’s kind of sad. But not.”

  I look at him, nod. He’s clean-shaven for the first time I’ve seen, the stubble noticeably absent. He trimmed his mustache.

  “What time did you get up?” I ask. “You’re all clean.”