THE PRIZE by Anna Solomon
The first house stood on a bare patch of dirt between two trees James Seed didn’t recognize, their bark a thick, cracked gray that went black in the deepest crevices, their leaves silvery and round–sized about like beech leaves, he thought, once they’ve shrunk in the fall. An old woman sat on a porch swing. Their first interviewee.
“Perfect,” Noah said. He skidded the Make Noise! van to a stop in the sandy drive, then turned to James. “Pass me the shotgun mic? We’ll want to get the squeak of that swing.”
James surveyed the van floor, looking for the black microphone case. He saw plastic baggies, an open jackknife smeared in peanut butter, lidless Tupperware stained yellow with some terrible spice he’d nearly gagged on, a pile of apple cores Noah and Brooke hadn’t let him toss out the window. Drying upside down was Brooke’s “She-Pee” funnel, which allowed her to go–like Noah–in a jar. Against the back doors loomed the keg of biodiesel, recycled vegetable oil they’d been collecting at Chinese restaurants the whole way out from Maine to South Dakota. The air smelled like clay, and overcooked broccoli.
At last James spotted the case, capsized beneath a box of prunes near one of the wheel wells. He picked it up, handed it to Noah, and awaited further instruction. The old woman was teetering toward them now. She wore a long denim skirt and a denim blouse which puffed at the shoulders, and shook one hand against the air as if guiding an invisible cane. But Noah was busy fumbling at the clasps on the case, and Brooke, in the front passenger seat, was bent over her lap, plugging a second microphone into the recorder. It was omnidirectional, James could see that much, and he ran through Mr. Valento’s microphone lesson from Media class: most omnidirectionals were rugged, required no battery, and were forgiving when it came to recording levels. The con? They couldn’t isolate sounds. That was what the shotgun was for. James wished Noah or Brooke would test him. He’d signed on to be their “intern,” but so far, the entire drive, the only thing they’d asked him to do was look at the atlas.
When the old woman reached the van, she waved and smiled. James guessed that the sun was glaring off the glass–that she couldn’t make out the fact that Noah and Brooke weren’t looking back at her. He opened the door and stepped out, his back popping as he unfolded, then stooped a little, not wanting to make the woman feel short.
“Hello,” she said. “You must be Mr. Goldman.”
James looked behind him. Noah was fitting the shotgun microphone into a windscreen big and black enough it looked like an assault rifle.
“No,” he said, “I’m James Seed. I’m–the assistant.”
The woman reached up for his hand, then Brooke was wedging her microphone between them, shouting, “Mrs. Scanlon! So nice to meet you. Brooke Hartford.”
James hadn’t known Brooke’s last name. He wasn’t surprised it was a Cape Cod heiress sort of name. What surprised him was the way she costumed herself to obscure it. Her yellow hair tangled into nests under her headphones. She wore the same purple t-shirt she’d worn when they left Portland. James had imagined she would at least put on a bra once they started doing interviews, but her breasts were as free and nipply as they’d been the whole trip.
Mrs. Scanlon looked at Brooke in the same warm, skeptical way James’ mother watched the evening news. “Can you hear me in those things?” she asked. She took the microphone and held it close to her lips. “Hello. Hello?”
Brooke laughed and plucked back her microphone. “Oh that’s for us to do, Mrs. Scanlon. All you need to do is relax. Try to forget about the equipment. Why don’t you tell me where we’re standing.”
James watched Mrs. Scanlon’s eyes go small. She was looking at Noah, who’d joined them now with the menacing windscreen. “But can’t you see where we’re standing?” she asked.
“We can see,” Brooke said, “but all our listeners have is sound. We want to give them a sense of what it looks like here.”
Mrs. Scanlon looked to her left, then her right, then started to turn a slow, wobbly circle. There was almost nothing, James thought, to describe. The only moving objects in the landscape were the leaves on the two trees. The house was small, its paint smudged in places like someone had rubbed it with an eraser. Beyond it, brown rows ran to the horizon.
“Well,” the woman began, when at last she’d returned to her starting point, “we’re in Hand County, South Dakota, in the corporation of Ree Heights, population 36. We’re standing in my yard. I’m Elizabeth Jane Scanlon.” She squinted up at James. “How’s that?”
He looked away.
“Okay, Mrs. Scanlon,” said Brooke, “but maybe you can describe the landscape a little? Imagine you’re someone from a big city, or from the mountains or ocean, what would stand out to you?”
“It’s flat?” said Mrs. Scanlon. “There’s no water?”
“Yes.” Noah spoke now, one hand on Brooke’s arm. “It’s flat, and what else? Would you describe it as empty?”
“No. There’s the cottonwoods, and the house. And the road.”
So the trees were called cottonwoods. Based on their scraggly shape, James guessed they were good for burning and not much else. His father wouldn’t bother cutting trees like that, much less hauling them out; he would let them dead-fall under the pines.
“And beyond those things?” asked Noah.
“Fields,” said Mrs. Scanlon. “Alfalfa, mostly, but it’s been droughthy, you can see that. Whole state’s dry as a bone.”
“So there’s a general brown tone to everything, yes?”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Would you mind saying that?”
Mrs. Scanlon raised her forehead, then shrugged and brought her mouth up to Brooke’s microphone. “It’s brown,” she said.
“Whoa!” Brooke jerked away. “Try that again, if you don’t mind– I got distortion. James, could you stand to Mrs. Scanlon’s left? I need a little wind block.”
Again, the old woman looked up at James–her mouth open to something between a smile and confusion, like she couldn’t decide if she needed his help, or he needed hers. His hands shook as he moved to her side. He was hungry. He hadn’t been able to swallow another handful of cashews that morning.
“It’s brown,” Mrs. Scanlon said again, in a near whisper.
“That’s fine,” Noah said. He wrapped an arm around the woman’s thin shoulders, and began walking her toward the house. “When we spoke on the phone, you told me how things have changed out here. Those crop fields, for instance, they used to be native prairie. That’s what we want you to talk about . . .”
James heard little else after that. He stood near them on the porch, but he was barely there. His hunger had erupted, releasing a series of groans–though if the recorder picked them up, Brooke didn’t seem to notice. James saw eggs and potatoes and his father’s filthy coffee which he’d recently begun to like. He thought of ribs. Meatloaf. When Noah placed the shotgun in his hand, James was tasting the doughnuts he’d imagined, waiting for them after the long journey, glistening neatly in a motel lobby display case. But that was before last night, when Noah had pulled onto the shoulder of a two-lane highway, tossed James a tent bag, and hopped a wire fence into a field. Brooke had swung a leg over and looked back. “You coming? What? You don’t think we’d bring shelter only for ourselves, do you?” Then she squatted down, not ten yards from James, close enough he could see the white of her ass, its dark cleft.
He startled when Noah grabbed the shotgun from his fist.
“I’m getting all your hand noise,” Noah hissed. “It’s an extremely sensitive microphone. You need to stay totally still.”
James felt himself nod. He thought of what he’d told his parents about the internship: a radio documentary, he’d said, knowing all they knew of documentaries were the poor-wildlife sagas his father cursed at when he flipped past PBS. Owls, marmots. Mr. Valento nominated me to assist on a documentary. James knew they’d choose to focus on the word “nominated.” He’d never been nominated for anything.
“Mrs. Scanlon,” Noah was saying. “I’m sorry. Please continue. You were talking about how after the ag company bought the land and plowed it up, your children moved away. You were saying, if I remember, that it felt like death. Yes? Can you back up to that thought? And would you mind swinging just a little faster? It sounds great.”
In the next town over, they stopped to restock the groceries. While Noah and Brooke took their cloth bags and searched for a place that sold whole-wheat bread, James ducked into a mini-mart called Common Cents and bought and ate three hotdogs. He bought beef jerky, four Snickers bars, and a jug of Hi-C, and shoved all of it under his seat in the back of the van. Finally, he saw Noah and Brooke trudge across the deserted main street and into Common Cents. It had taken them twenty minutes to realize it was the only store in town. James slouched low in his seat.
Back home, he should have asked more questions. But he’d felt honored–nearly giddy–when Mr. Valento had pulled him aside a month before graduation and told him about the job. It was everything James wanted: to make real radio, to see a place he’d never seen before, and to be paid for it, however meagerly. The payment part would convince his parents, who wanted James to work for the family business, Seed Timber, who couldn’t understand why he’d pass up a job, straight out of high school, with benefits and long-term security.
It was possible, James knew, that Mr. Valento had said more, and that James had blocked it out. Maybe he’d told James that the documentary team operated out of a rolling granola heap, and that their plan was to drive two thousand miles without stopping at a gas station or other commercial establishment. Maybe, if James had listened more closely, he would have understood that Noah and Brooke were not in fact strangers, that he’d met them before, in other guises: they were the men who’d come through the county last year, lobbying to turn half of Maine’s woods into a national park, saying what people lost in timber, they’d make up in tourism; they were the scientists who’d shut down half the state’s paper mills because of some chemical found in a dead eagle that wasn’t even near a discharge pipe; they were the summer-town cops, paid to keep things tidy, the cop who’d pulled James’ father over for driving the wrong way around one of the little traffic circles built to save small children and dogs, so that James had woke in the passenger seat to his father shouting, “I can’t make it around some fancy rotary, I’ve got a trailer hitched to the back of this thing! Since when are real people not welcome in this place?”
James chewed a piece of jerky. Noah had called him to talk “details.” They’d talked at some length. And yet James could only recall one sentence: “I hear you’re the best radio student at the school.” He’d been stupid, to take Noah seriously, to be gulled in by that, like a fly by sap. Yet here he was, stuck, barely helping make a documentary called, “The Loss of the Great Middle: the Death of America’s Grasslands.” And today was just the beginning. Their ultimate destination was a town called Faith, where a man Noah called “The Prize” lived. Noah spoke of The Prize like a normal man might talk about a woman, his face flushed, his eyes damp. This was a rancher, he explained, who “epitomized” everything that had gone wrong with American agriculture: he’d raised eco-friendly cattle on native prairie all his life, only to be suckered by grain companies willing to pay him more to plow up his grass for corn and soy. He would be, Noah liked to fawn, the “heart” of their story.
The van door slid open. James dropped his jerky.
Brooke smiled. “You okay?”
He nodded. She looked small behind the grocery bags piled in her arms. James felt the day’s heat rush into the van, felt his mouth suddenly parched, felt himself staring at the four gallon-jugs of water gripped in Noah’s right hand.
“There’s more in the store,” Noah said. “You could help.”
Again, James nodded. But as he moved to get out, Brooke put a bag in his way.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. James saw her eyeing the stash under his seat. She turned to Noah. “There’s only two more bags. Why don’t you just grab them?”
When Noah was gone, she said, “He’s a serious man. Don’t take it personally. He’s just passionate about his work. He’s not mad or mean, he’s just serious.” She spoke fervently, but she was looking down again, at James’s food.
He reached under his seat and grabbed a Snickers.
“Oh no.” Brooke grabbed a fistful of her tangled hair. Her face pinked. “I haven’t had a candy bar in forever.”
James pushed it toward her. “They’re just going to melt.” Already he could feel the chocolate slipping under the wrapper.
Once Brooke took hold of the candy bar, she moved quickly, teething open the wrapper, taking half the thing in her mouth at once. She chewed fiercely, looking toward the store, then Noah appeared and she swallowed the rest in one gulp and James knew–how many times had his mother caught him in the kitchen cabinets between meals?–he knew how food felt, unchewed, knocking around your throat.
They visited three more houses that day, each one shabbier than the last. There were hanging gutters, wounded paint, scrums of mutt dogs circling nothing. And everywhere, rising out of the flatness, were the cottonwood trees, leaves belly up, two or three or sometimes four in a row. They’d been planted to block the wind, according to one man who hadn’t left his house in three years; his brother had sold it and the land to a golf magnate, but the man refused to go–refused, it seemed, to get up from his kitchen table. James heard the room’s bareness echo in the man’s voice, and wondered why Brooke and Noah didn’t open a window to soften the sound. Later, when they stopped to talk to three young Indians buying lottery tickets in a dime-store shack, he wondered the same thing: why not ask them to step outside, away from those hollow wood walls? Then there was the couple living in a trailer behind the auto parts store they managed (“for a multi-national chain, yes?” Noah prodded) whose voices were lapped by the groan of the store’s ventilation system.
Noah kept saying, “You think these folks have it bad? Just wait until we get to Faith.”
That night in the van, after he saw Brooke and Noah’s tent go dark, James hung a flashlight from the rearview mirror and played back the tapes. He heard that he’d been right: the voices sounded either tinny or washed out. He booted up Noah’s laptop and uploaded the housebound man, then fiddled with the equalizers until the man’s voice got less harsh. “Rounding out the edges,” was how Mr. Valento described this assignment, for which he’d given James the first A of his life. Next, James cut out the long pauses between words, where the man sounded distracted or tired, and finally, he toned down the smacking of his dentures.
It was near dawn when James finished. When he turned off the flashlight, he found he could see for miles: to the west, the leftover bruise of night, to the east, a narrow rim of pink, as though the ground oozed Pepto-Bismol. The only sound was a high, constant chirring, some insect or frog he’d never heard back home, and the strange air, too, not only warm-hot but moving sideways, steady and dry. James felt jittery from his work. He’d done a good job, he was sure of it. He climbed forward into Brooke’s seat and kicked against the glove compartment to recline. He’d watched Brooke do this when she wanted to nap, her upper body falling flat next to his seat in the back. She squeezed her face tight then released it, squeezed and released, until she looked emptied out, and under her shirt, her breasts fell to the sides, smooth and wide like moorings at high tide, when only the very tops were visible.
He couldn’t sleep. The computer’s hum buzzed in his head, the digital editing program crept its way across his eyelids–the scissor icon, the volume tool–his fingers twitched to move across the keyboard.
James switched the flashlight back on, found the atlas, and opened it to South Dakota, where he found Faith, a small town west of the Missouri. He flipped to the mileage chart, located Portland and Rapid City, and brought his fingers together: 2029. Subtracting a couple hundred for not making it all the way to Rapid City, Faith was still further than his parents had ever been. Even the kids James knew who were starting college–none of them were leaving New England.
James turned off the flashlight and lay back. He heard nothing but the frogs or insects or whatever they were. He thought of pests he’d heard of that didn’t live in Maine–stinkbugs, blister beetles, chiggers–and he tried the names out on his tongue, and their strangeness, he had to admit, thrilled him.
When he woke, the van was grumbling again, nosing up and down the small dips of a dirt road. James knew the sensation immediately, and for a moment, he thought he was lying in the back of his father’s truck, swaddled in a wool blanket next to Lonnie Hitchens, the smell of their fathers’ coffee and cigarette smoke streaming out the cab window above their heads, young boys on their way to fish. Then he opened his eyes and saw Brooke’s denim-clad thigh.
“I’m sorry,” he said, bolting upright. “I didn’t mean to take your seat.”
“It’s fine by me.” Brooke laughed. “I like watching you drool.”
James wiped his hand across his mouth. His armpits were soaked.
“Glad you decided to join us,” said Noah, nudging a jug of water toward James. “We’re going to need you to hold a mic boom on this next one.”
James nodded and drank and his hope from the night before came rushing back. He had held a microphone boom only once, but it wasn’t difficult; it was almost like operating the extended fly swatters his mother made out of dowels and rubber bands. He stole a glance back at Brooke–she would not kill flies, he guessed–and saw sweet crusts at the corners of her eyes.
“I was thinking,” he began, “I–I was playing around with the tapes last night–”
“You what?” Noah’s voice shot high.
“I was just making the voices a little smoother. Less echoey, and not such long pauses–”
“Who asked you to touch the tapes?”
“Noah.” Brooke looked at James. “What exactly did you do?”
“I loaded it onto the hard drive–”
“Okay. See?” She leaned forward to kiss Noah on the neck. “See? No damage done.”
“Look,” Noah said. “I appreciate you wanting to help, but the tapes–they’re not your job. This project is about the death of the prairie and the people. We want to make people hear this, to make them give money and push lawmakers for change. We’re looking for echoes, see? We want a sense of the emptiness that pervades this place. And we’re not doing digital. We’ll be mixing everything old school, reel-to-reel. It’s truer to the material that way.” Noah leaned his head toward James and lowered his voice. “These people are living in a different time, see?”
James thought of the summer-town cop leaning in the window, telling James’s father that commercial trucks were supposed to stick to the main roads, and his father jumping from the truck, raising his arms to the sky. “What if I’m trimming trees for some lawn here, huh? What about that?” The fact that this was a lie didn’t stop him from pushing himself up under the cop’s face, which only made him look more ridiculous.
“Yeah,” James said. “I get what you’re saying. These people are so backward, they might as well be dead.”
For an instant, Noah’s eyebrows bunched. He licked his lips and looked uncomfortable, then he shifted into a lower gear–for something to do, James could tell. Noah laughed. “You’re funny,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known it, but you’re funny.”
James could feel Brooke’s eyes on him. The van grunted, straining against the gear, but he said nothing about the RPM needle poking its way into the red. He had to survive another week, at least. Out the window, the flatness was stubborn as granite.
The next time they stopped for food, James bought a 12-pack of Dr. Pepper and did not apologize for the space it took up. He sat and drank. He got out when they got out. He held what they handed him, barely. He heard the high school counselor say what she always said when one teacher or another–everyone but Mr. Valento–sent James to her office. “Opting out again, Mr. Seed?”
On the fourth day, Brooke turned around and asked if James had called his parents yet. It was a dishonest question–she knew he hadn’t–and so he said yes. In the next town, she made Noah pull into a gas station. “Call your mother, James. I promised her you’d call at least once.”
Brooke’s face looked suddenly older, her hair nearly white in the sun streaming through the windshield. James wondered when she and his mother had spoken. Had his mother called him Jamesy?
“Oh!” His mother’s voice sounded close through the handset– closer than it should, he thought, with nearly two thousand miles between them. He turned his back to the van. “I’ve told everyone,” she was saying. “We can’t wait to see your name on the screen.”
James opened his mouth, then closed it. It made no sense to remind her it was radio when he knew he didn’t want her hearing the thing, anyway. How would he introduce it? Here’s the story. It mocks everything you are.
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Sure.”
“Have you seen Mt. Rushmore yet?”
She’d asked him to bring back a souvenir of the presidential heads. But Mount Rushmore, on the map, was a small red square near Rapid City, in among a forested green patch called the Black Hills–all of it way past Faith.
“Not yet,” James said. The hot breeze grabbed at his hair.
“Your father’s at the office, otherwise I’d put him on.”
“Tell him everything’s fine.” James didn’t want to think about his father in the tin-roofed office building, sitting, as James sometimes found him, in his own dead father’s chair, facing the empty wall behind the desk.
“Look, honey, keep having fun. When you come back, we’ll celebrate with a big supper. You can show us pictures.”
“Okay.”
James didn’t tell her he hadn’t used the disposable camera she’d given him. He didn’t say that the cottonwoods were the only beautiful things in South Dakota, and that even they were not as beautiful as birch. He didn’t tell her that the grass didn’t ripple like it did in her idea of it, that the air blew so steadily eastward that the grass simply pointed that way, too, leaning and straight, and that there was a chirring sound he couldn’t stand anymore, it was worse than peepers, it was like having a fever, like looking at his bedroom walls and seeing the pine knots become figures and chase each other. He didn’t explain that his job was to buy batteries, carry gear, and block wind. That they’d hired him to be a mute giant–and that for this, he had to give them credit, because it was the one thing, as his mother knew, that James had always been good at.
They crossed the Missouri later that day. The water was brown, and on the far side, the land swelled into waves, its surface gnawed and gray like elephant hide.
“Faith, fifty miles!” Brooke pointed at a highway sign.
“The Prize,” Noah said. “Ahhhh. We’ll start with him at the top, how he plows up his grass, plants all the crops, and none of it works, it’s all genetically fucked seeds that are engineered to grow in dry terrain but of course they don’t. Then–” Noah swept his arm across the windshield–“we’ll bring him back at the end. How he’s got nothing but insurance payments now. How long it takes to get back to native grasses. All in this voice of his, like his mouth is full of pebbles. Can’t you hear it?”
Brooke nodded and looked back at James, who raised his Dr. Pepper and drank.
As the van moved further west, the hills grew. They spread out taller and wider, like elbows, then fists, then knees were punching through. Cows straggled along the broad summits, accompanied sometimes by lone, tangled, stunty forms that looked like apple trees which had lost their orchard. The only structures James saw were in the low places between the hills, half-collapsed shacks next to creeks furred with weeds and cottonwoods that looked sick with thirst. In the flattest stretches, corn grew, squeezed into long, narrow rows that curved and wound to accommodate the hills. The parched leaves did not bend, but buckled at hard angles. Behind the van, east was an endless cloud of dust.
The first view of the rancher’s house, just before the van dove toward it, was nearly aerial. It was large, James saw, with multiple wings, a garage, and a paved, circular driveway like the ones in suburban sitcoms.
He said, “They don’t look so hard up to me.”
Noah’s eyes were sudden and black in the rearview mirror, then just as quickly gone. He stretched his arm across the back of Brooke’s seat.
“Maybe it just proves the point more,” said Brooke. “Before the grass was gone, they must have been thriving.”
Up close, the house looked even nicer: bright white siding and a fanning brick stoop, white curtains parted symmetrically, a large lawn contained by a miniature white fence. A slate path was lined with tiny figurines: a buffalo, Indians, horses, a dog. James had seen houses in Maine that tried to look as picture-perfect as this, but none that achieved such a convincing effect, where you could so easily imagine the people who lived inside: a clean, efficient woman and a man who took his boots off in the mud room without being asked.
He followed Noah and Brooke up the path, holding the battery pack for the recorder that was already running in Brooke’s hand. Noah angled the microphone at the door, which opened before he knocked.
Before them stood a lean man in a crisp button-down and jeans. The shirt’s buttons were made of pearl, and his top front teeth, when he smiled, were gold.
“Jack Lawson,” he said, holding out his hand.
They each shook it and introduced themselves. The man reminded James of his grandfather. Clint Eastwood eyes, kind and mocking and manly at once. The type of man you couldn’t imagine having a father or a son, who seemed to dominate a century by just standing there.
“My wife’s put on coffee. Come in.”
His voice, like Noah had said, was full of rocks. He led them down a carpeted hallway, pointing out various watercolors on the way– another horse, a burbling river, more Indians, in full war dress–until they stepped into a bright kitchen where a small woman in an apron was setting cups and saucers on the table. She looked up without stopping, and in her brief smile, James saw that she had none of her husband’s ease. She spoke fast–“We’re so pleased you’ve come all this way”–then poured the coffee and directed them to sit.
Noah faced his palm up, as if directing traffic. “Thank you,” he said, “but we don’t drink coffee.”
The rancher laughed. “Is that right. Is that something political or you just don’t like the taste?”
“I drink it,” James said, and he took a big gulp to demonstrate. It was lighter than his father’s, but there was the same smoky aftertaste, the bitter heat as he exhaled.
“Of course you do.” The rancher winked and took a long swig from his own cup, then licked his lips and turned back to Noah. “I want to start by showing you some maps.”
“That’s a nice idea, Mr. Lawson, but we might be better off touring around first. Your descriptions will be fresher that way. Why don’t we go take a look at some of the fields you’ve planted?”
“I haven’t planted anything,” said the rancher.
Noah gave the man a sly, conspiratorial look, as if there was a joke between them. “But you told me about your transition from grass to crops.”
“Well sure now, that’s happening–but not on my land. I’m a rancher, sir, not a farmer.” Mr. Lawson reached for Noah’s untouched cup, raised it to his mouth, and drained it with one tilt of his hand.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Noah said. “Brooke, stop recording. I have notes from our phone conversation, I can show you where I wrote–”
“I’m sure I never said I was a farmer. I may be getting on, but I’m right in the head.”
Brooke stammered, “Oh, sir, no one’s suggesting–”
Mrs. Lawson’s cup leapt off its saucer. “Oh dear,” she cried, jumping up from the table. The spilt coffee ran straight for James. She returned with a fistful of paper towels, which she dropped in his lap. “I’m so sorry, dear. Yes. Now don’t you kids worry about Mr. Lawson not being a farmer. He’s got plenty to say. He’s been so looking forward to this, you know.”
Noah and Brooke eyed each other across the table, then Brooke straightened and smiled. “All right, then. Why don’t you tell us what it is you thought we were here to talk about?”
The rancher laid his palms against his chest, then puffed them out. He said, “I want to talk about the damn Indians.”
Brooke’s grin wilted. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Mrs. Lawson scurried off again toward the sink. James watched the coffee work its way toward him, pause at the table’s edge, drip off.
“That’s what I’m showing you the maps for. I want to show you where they’ve taken my land. Where the government’s given them what’s mine.”
“I’m sorry,” Noah said, “but we’re not here to talk–the point of our project isn’t to blame one group.”
“Who are you going to blame, then?”
No one answered.
“Because these Indians, as far as I’m concerned–and I’ve been around here quite some while, mind you–these long-hairs are the ones ruining this place. It doesn’t happen all at once; they do it long and slow so it grows on you gradual. Small and small and small and if you take it, they keep coming. Like two months ago, a tribe fellow pulls up here with some D.C. man, hands me a map with a wavy red line drawn through one of my pastures. Wavy like they were being generous, like they were giving me little bitties of my land back. Like it wasn’t mine in the first place.”
“So let me get this straight,” Noah said. “You lied to get us–”
“Hear me out. They’re going to expand that reservation til they reach Idaho. Like they were born everywhere. That’s what they’ve pulled over on Washington D.C. To take an instance, there’s a drought now, you’ve seen it, hasn’t rained in weeks, the whole ground’s flying up you just walk on it, like a Dust Bowl come again, and you live out here you know when the cricks are this low you got to leave them alone, you got to let something die–it’s the law, sure, but it’s just common sense–but how about Cloud Man or Fancy Tree? What. They get to suck it dry if they want, call it ceremony but they don’t have to say what’s what. Secret as the toll booth they set up every few months out on the highway, just a shack drug out from a field, try to charge every tourist headed for Rushmore, until the sheriff drives out and tells them to take it away. Doesn’t shoot them. Doesn’t do nothing like he wants, cause he knows good as me that Washington’s watching. So you want to talk about this place dying, right?”
Noah was standing now. “I didn’t–”
“Rur-aah-lity dying. That’s what you said.” White spittle cornered the man’s lips. He shook a finger at Noah’s waist, not bothering to look up. “You want to talk about this place dying, you got to learn about the Indians and I can show you, I got the wavy red line, and I can show you it’s them the ones digging up for crop, make more off the government that way, or else they’re grazing bison again, like they’re back before man civilized this land, call it leaner and sell it premium with a Chief sticker on the front and the same people who think I’m the one killing the Indians, those suckers buy it. But I’m telling you bison’s born angry, tastes angry, and don’t even get me started on them not bothering with fencing. Each time they move my property line it’s up to me to put up the wires, and the fact is, I do. Who wants buffalo running out your cattle? I was not raised to lose my property.”
The man looked at James, who realized he was the only one still sitting. Noah and Brooke were standing in the doorway, his face white, hers red. They, too, were staring at James, and for one dizzy moment, he felt certain that everyone was waiting for him. A decision. But what? He knew the man sounded like a racist, but James could understand what he was saying. His whole life he’d heard a version of the same thing, if you just substituted Boston Greenpeacers for the Indians.
James felt a tug in his hand. The cord from Brooke’s recorder was straining at the battery pack, and he remembered–of course–they were just waiting for him to move. He imagined yanking out the cord, tossing the wires to the floor. But Brooke and Noah looked stunned enough. And they were James’s ride home. Maybe the rancher had said he’d planted crops. Or maybe Noah had heard wrong. James knew how this could happen, how you heard what you wanted to hear. He didn’t dare look at the rancher as he gathered the soggy towels in one hand, battery pack in the other, and joined Noah and Brooke by the door.
“Please.” Mrs. Lawson was in front of them, hands prayer-clasped under her chin. “Please don’t leave before you hear him through. He’s a good man. He needs someone to listen. Please,” she said, as Brooke and Noah, then James, backed down the hall and out the door onto the stoop. “You’ve got to believe him.”
“Mrs. Lawson,” said Brooke. Her words trembled and James looked up, but her face wasn’t angry like Noah’s. It was filled with the same sadness he’d seen on his mother so many times, and there it was on Mrs. Lawson, too, a desperation that couldn’t be fixed. It occurred to him that he couldn’t remember ever standing so near two grown women talking, and the intimacy he felt between them–as if it was their secret business to keep men from hating each other, from hating themselves–made him ashamed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lawson. I realize the governmental policies may be unfair, and that’s certainly part of what we’re exploring, but we’re not here to propagate bigoted notions like the ones your husband seems set on talking about. I’m sorry,” she said again, but now her voice had regained itself–for Noah’s benefit, he guessed–so that she no longer sounded genuine, and Mrs. Lawson looked like she might cry.
His father had been up in the cop’s face when a woman appeared out of a nearby house and said, “Hey. Look. I chair the watch group that petitioned for these circles, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say this was a mistake.” She smiled sweetly at James’s father, then at the cop. “It’s very disorienting, driving through here for the first time. Why don’t we just drop it?”
But it wasn’t a mistake, James had wanted to say. His father knew exactly what he was doing, driving his trailer the wrong way. And yet his father had nodded, looking grateful and cowed–and now it seemed to James that Brooke was not the cop at all, she was that woman, the woman who created the traffic circles but pardons you, who owns the cop but protects you. Who thinks you’ll let her be everything at once, and she’s right.
And now she was walking behind Noah toward the van and James was following on his cord.
“Dust Bowl my ass,” Noah said. “We’ll show them a fucking dust bowl.”
But the van would not start. Noah pulled out the choke, pumped the gas, shook the dashboard. He tried it all again. The engine made no sound.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck. Fuck.”
“Maybe we need oil?” Brooke suggested.
“I filled it yesterday.” Noah jiggled the stick shift violently. “Of all the fucking places.”
“Right now,” Brooke said, “I really wish we had Triple A.”
“It’s an industry front group, for Christ’s sake–”
“I know, I know, I’m just saying.”
“Besides, we’d have to go inside to make the call, anyway.”
All three of them looked up at the towering, dead-brown horizon.
“What about the battery?” Brooke asked. “The ultra-lite drains quickly, right?”
“We’ve been driving, recharging it. Why the hell would it be drained?”
Brooke pointed at a light on the dash. “The rear door’s open.”
“And who was the last one to shut it?”
No one needed to say anything to recall Noah, just before they reached the house, running back to the van to grab an extra tape.
“Fuck.” Noah let his head fall onto the steering wheel.
James squeezed the coffee-logged towels. He felt the paper beginning to shred. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “It could have happened to anyone.”
Brooke shook Noah lightly on the shoulder. “He’s right, hon.”
“There’s no way.” Noah spoke into the vinyl center of the wheel. “There’s no way I’m asking that asshole for a jump.”
“I’ll ask,” James said. “I don’t mind. I know this guy.”
Almost imperceptibly, Noah nodded. “Thank you,” Brooke mouthed.
But outside the van, standing alone in the hot sun on the Lawsons’ path, James felt his burst of chivalry falter. Mrs. Lawson had shut the door, and the house, closed up again with its gleaming curtains and flat-top hedges, looked as it had when they’d arrived. James thought of the saying about tree-fall in the forest, how maybe it didn’t happen if no one was around to hear it. It seemed possible that Mr. and Mrs. Lawson’s life had already gone back to being the television show it had resembled, that already he and Brooke and Noah did not exist for them. He looked back at the van. Brooke and Noah were watching. James lifted the Lawsons’ knocker, shaped like the sun, and brought it down–too gently, he knew, and he remembered his grandfather’s tests when they’d go visiting the old man’s friends and he’d make James keep knocking until someone came to the door. “Scared, son? Think it’s going to bite? Look at you, you’re big enough to make anything think twice. Harder now.” James lifted the knocker again– whatever chirred was chirring louder, filling his ears, his head, and he felt their eyes on his back and the bowl of hills surrounding him and he was suddenly overwhelmed by the absence of trees, no cottonwoods even, no cover of any kind.
Anna Solomon’s stories have appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, and Shenandoah.