Bust – Terrain.org

Driving anywhere here was just a patchwork of highways and on-ramps and exits and service roads and telephone wires punctuated with little black birds during the one month of the year that it felt like anything close to fall. Each day was splatter on the windshield, the sound of humming, the sight of flat earth: expanse and loneliness. The sky opened itself up again and again to small oil towns passing by in a blink or a wink, or maybe something more like a twitch of a memory. The lane lines blurred into a single streak of yellow, and there was nothing on the horizon except for soft whispers of grass and the pumpjacks. Dottie’s dad had always said those hunks of metal were out there bobbing for apples—the way they dropped their heads towards the earth, churned over the soil, and hoped they’d root up that prized, black liquid so ancient it must’ve originated in the book of Genesis.

Dottie made the drive to town every day or two. She tried to leave by late morning to avoid the lines of semis heading east to Austin, with full tanks sloshing behind the tired drivers at the wheels. She was programmed to avoid them. She’d watched the jaws of life tear apart car doors for someone too late to appreciate them. She knew wreckage. She had seen enough Fords up in flames—was familiar with the sound of combustion.

She turned onto the I-20 service road and drove past the old Rolls Royce dealership outside the Midland airport. Its doors closed two decades ago, and dandelions crept up through the cracks in the empty, concrete lot. Dottie took a left and a left and a right at the Albertsons, and then she rolled in slowly to the first window of the Boomtown Babes Espresso drive-through; the shop was barely bigger than the bed of her own truck. Its paneling was bubblegum pink—the brightest color in the basin. Cans of Red Bull lined the back wall. A cartoon blonde swung from an oil rig across the shop’s façade. The window always blinked with a neon “The Gals are OPEN” sign. It had stood for ten years at the center point between Midland and Odessa.

“Well, now. My god. If it isn’t Dottie, back from vacation,” the girl at the window declared as she adjusted her bra.

Dottie smiled. “Lacey, you know I’d hardly call Houston a vacation. Too much money talk.” She reached into her back pocket to grab a small fold of cash held together by a paperclip. “I’ll take the usual.”

Lacey turned and yelled out Dottie’s order to the girls working the kitchen. Dottie’d often wondered about health code violations here. It seemed like someone would’ve checked in on the safety of a bunch of young women pouring scalding milk so close to their collarbones, their cleavage, their bare middles. But the ladies held their own. It was Lacey, after all, who’d first introduced Dottie to life down here, who’d showed her how to flash a smile that was more friendly than flirty, who’d been there when Dottie was down and needed to build herself back up. And plus, it was the men on the rigs who suffered far worse burns than hot coffee in these parts. And the men liked to forget about far-away wives at the shop. And the men did tip well—when they could tip. The sheriff’s own daughter worked the window on weekends. The coffee shop seemed to be one of the only places in town still bringing in business, anyways.

“You get things sorted out down there?” Lacey asked as she passed the coffee and banana muffin through the car window.

“Still a work in progress, I guess. Seem to need the old man’s signature on a few things. How you holding up here?”

“Nothin’ like it used to be. Almost makes me want to pull the kids from school and head back to Lubbock with my folks.”

“Well, you know you’ve got my business,” Dottie left a $20 on the counter and rolled up her window as Lacey yelled something about her money being no good there. She tucked the bill close to her left breast.

The roads tangled like a bird’s nest in front of Dottie as she turned out of the parking lot. She liked to drive with her window open—to hear the constant whirr of tires beneath her. She never listened to the radio in the car, instead letting her thoughts float up and attach themselves to the tops of cedar elms lining the highway. She wasn’t one to linger too long, and she liked the idea of letting her worst thoughts soak into the leaves like carbon dioxide, travel through corked cells of branches and trunk, and seep into the roots married to the loamy soil. She’d always assumed that was how people out here moved past anything: by taking little pieces of themselves and sequestering them into the ground.

Dottie dropped her chin to consider her chest. Something about facing the breasts of the only other women she saw each week left her questioning her own body. It was a place she didn’t let herself go too often. Growing up, she’d seen herself as pretty. Blonde hair, fake lashes, pom-poms in hand like every other girl at Trinity Christian. Proud of a full chest. Proud of a high kick. She’d done a year at Tech on a full merit scholarship. But she dropped out after a hazing incident in a fraternity basement, a string of accusations, a cracked and broken memory.

Her father was able to get her a job in the basin managing her uncle’s man camp. And without her mother around to protest, Dottie drove herself south. It was a good enough gig, and far enough away from home. Free lodging, lots of responsibility, and a bustle when she started—with natural gas production on the rise. Her uncle let her take on any new project she wanted. Money was rolling in, and he was too preoccupied with his drinking to notice any changes she made to the place anyways.

Most of the boys she’d known at Tech ended up working the rigs. At first, she’d tried to avoid them, but she eventually realized they didn’t remember her face at all. Even the couple guys from that basement night who boarded on her property didn’t recognize Dottie. And when she took over as owner—on account of her uncle’s vegetative state from a head-on with an oil tanker going 90 down 285—the men just started calling her “ma’am.” Dottie sort of preferred it that way. Preferred to be looked past by the sweating men, their hands slicked black from nights on the rigs. Preferred to no longer think of herself as a woman.

News had always flown fast in their town, but when Dottie’s faults became the punchline of jokes at his favorite bar, his only option was to send her away.

She left any consideration of her body drifting towards the earth behind her when she pulled into the parking lot of Eden Lodging. She walked into the main office, set her muffin down on the counter, and logged onto her email.

As Dottie scoured her inbox for booking requests, the furniture in the office began to vibrate. Her desk rumbled, and she slowly looked towards the doorframe, waiting to see if the shocks would grow larger. Tremors these days were more frequent than when Dottie’d first moved down, but never large enough to stand beneath something more structurally sound than the shaky ceiling tiles she’d installed herself. The short quake ceased, the desk grew still, and she looked back to her screen.

Dottie pulled up the camp’s bank account. Not in the red, yet. But getting close. Getting close to calling up her old man and asking for help like she’d done in ’03 when they’d all thought the wells were dry. She knew he could raise money in a pinch, with his connections in Dallas, but he believed in failure as growth. He’d as soon watch her starve and shrivel away from the heat of the Permian sun than bail the business out again. He was still ashamed that she was a college dropout, after all. Still blamed her for his own embarrassment when she lost her scholarship, when she was kicked off the Raiders cheer squad, when stories circulated about things she’d done in a basement on campus. News had always flown fast in their town, but when Dottie’s faults became the punchline of jokes at his favorite bar, his only option was to send her away. More than a decade back, and it was something he’d never let go.

Someone knocked on the open office door. Dottie looked up at Hunter, standing in the frame.

“Hey, ma’am—you got a minute?” He held a worn, Texans cap in his hands and stared down at the floor.

“Always. Whadya need?”

“Well… I’m, uh. Well, it’s a plumbin’ issue,” he raised his eyes to meet hers. Dottie could see how pale he was, even beneath his sunburn.

“Alright, let’s have a look and see if we can fix it ourselves,” she stood, grabbed her keys, and followed Hunter to his dorm.

There had to have been an entire case of Rolling Rock scattered around the room. Some cans crushed flat, others stuck to the top of the dresser. The single sheet on the bed was bunched into a wet wad of what Dottie hoped was sweat.

“Sorry for the mess. The quake earlier… it, you know, knocked some stuff around,” Hunter said as he opened the bathroom door.

Dottie spent the better part of her afternoon scrubbing vomit off the walls. Some spots on the floor were so dark and greasy, she was sure they were splotches of oil. The bathtub was still full of melting ice, and there were a few stray cans bobbing in the murky water. Little black hairs stuck to the sink. Soiled clothes bunched in the corner. The smell of something rotting. A woman’s thong. Dottie tried not to fill in the gaps.

She finished up, avoiding any eye contact on her way out. She responded, “Don’t worry about it,” when Hunter murmured some form of a thank-you and an excuse about a low tolerance and sun poisoning. At least he’d had the decency to ask for her help between rig shifts, when things were slow out front. She dropped the mop and bucket in the hallway utility closet on her way down the dorm hall.

Dottie walked outside, hoping the fresh air would clear her head. She was met with the kind of dead heat that makes you aware of your own body’s slow decay. She crossed the parking lot to her small home attached to Eden’s back entrance, and slipped into the yard through the side gate. The oak in the yard was starting to lose its leaves, but only on account of the change in the sun’s angles—nothing to do with temperature. It was just as hot today as it had been in the middle of summer. Fall in the Permian always felt especially apocalyptic. The dark tangle of bare branches mirrored the pumpjacks themselves—the weaker limbs bobbing up and down with the wind, the grid of wood so intricately wound, they must be man-made.

In the privacy of her own yard, behind her six-foot fence, Dottie allowed herself to smell her sweat, to feel her sore forearms, to breathe. It’d been 14 years now: cleaning up after these men. She’d heard many of them talk about wives and daughters; she’d seen just as many forget about their families back north or east. Her fingertips carried their secrets, their messes. Their waste, their desire for a richer future. She looked down at her unwashed hands—something else not part of her own body. They could have still been caked in shit, or covered in a film of slippery crude, and she wouldn’t’ve known the difference. They belonged to this world outside of her self. Dottie turned them over, examined the map of her palms—the tangle of lines like a mess of twigs collected for a nest.

Her hands were the first thing she’d seen when she woke up that morning at Tech. They’d covered her eyes as if to black out the sun. Now, sitting atop the roots pushing through the shallow earth of her yard, Dottie took those same hands, unbuttoned the top of her jeans, and snuck them between her legs, let them rest on her crotch. Just to have these two parts of her body feel close to each other. She wondered if her opening should know the things her hands had touched—the dirt beneath nails, the calloused palms, the scars across her knuckles. But she didn’t part her lips. Hadn’t in a decade. Couldn’t bring herself to go into herself. Wouldn’t open. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against bark. The earth rumbled. But Dottie knew it was just the oil tankers moving across highway on the other side of the fenceline.

He’d taken the meeting, charged her $500, and told her she was lucky to have the support of a strong-minded businessman in her life…

She still had time to shower. She turned the water to cold and washed off another wasted afternoon. As she stood in front of the mirror to dry off, Dottie avoided her own eyes. She traced her gaze across the water droplets still clinging to her skin, and she chased them with her towel. She never really looked at herself fully naked—only flashes of breast, and the rest. But she did love the way skin slicked with water felt like it encased her in a film of something protective. Once dry, Dottie noticed her cracks. Tight. Dehydrated. Pores so large that anything—dirt, air, words—might force itself into her, and push out her crude insides by way of her mouth, or elsewhere.

She pulled her hair into a braid, and headed back to the office.

“Coffee?” Dottie offered up to the stream of men filing out of their rooms and through the front hall.

“N’thanks ma’am,” a youngish-looking man responded. Dottie thought his name was something like Johnny or Bobby. He was one of the newest batch, inexperienced. His eyes were bright, his beard patchy. He must have just turned 18. Maybe he’d dropped out of high school once he was eligible for rig work. Or maybe he was saving up for college—though, not much to save these days with an oil and gas group folding every three months.

“We’re heading to the shop in town before this evening’s shift,” he said with a grin fighting its way onto his face. He tried to force it off by readjusting the brim of his cap.

“Well, be good to Lacey and the rest of the gals,” Dottie called after him, as he climbed into the bed of one of the dozens of Fords parked in the lot.

She wondered how many more trips to the coffee shop it would take before this boy lost interest in the novelty of the women there. She hoped he had been tipping them well with his first taste of real wages. She hoped he learned their names. She hoped he looked them in their eyes. But she also knew the boys grew tired at some point during their stints living at the camp and working for Exxon or El Paso Gas or whatever other company had reserved room blocks at Eden. By their third or fourth stint in the Permian, they all eventually stayed in their rooms. They trashed their own spaces, too tired to drink at the bars in town. They wanted the convenience of the free coffee she put out every evening for the men heading to the night shift. They were the ones that needed the jolt the most—working by the light of headlamps and the moon, monitoring the pressure valves, maintaining the balance between air and water and silt, pushing that primal, black oil through even the driest cracks in the earth.

Dottie placed the pot back on the heater, knowing there was about an hour between the time the night shift headed out and the day workers came back. Sometimes the morning shifters took a cup before calling their families back home. She waited for them to track their dust through the doors, drop a howdy, and dip into their air-conditioned rooms. The man camp she ran was one of the last with complimentary coffee, with working Wi-Fi, with central air that never broke down.

Eden Lodging had tripled its profit in her first two years working for her uncle. Dottie’d cared about what the rooms were like. How the beds creaked at night. Where the leaks ran, where the rattlers hid, where the men needed a minute of cool after hours in dead sun. She’d installed blackout curtains for the ones that slept during the day. She’d made this place livable. By the time of her uncle’s accident, it was clear that the fracking boom wasn’t the only reason behind the business’s success, and the family thought it made sense for Dottie to temporarily take over after the tanker crash. Temporary turned to permanent, and she’d been running the business for the year and a half since. Although nothing was in her name while her uncle was still breathing. And her father was his next of kin anyways, was in charge of all assets, was the money behind Eden. Wasn’t one to let a woman acquire full control, even now that their vacancy was at a record high.  

Just the week before, Dottie’d let her last remaining employee go, leaving her as the only one managing the business, running the books, cleaning the rooms. The banks in Houston had no power to grant her a loan without her father present. She’d even met with a lawyer to see if she could make a case for herself. He’d taken the meeting, charged her $500, and told her she was lucky to have the support of a strong-minded businessman in her life—that times were tough, and they were only getting tougher in the basin.

“Evenin’ ma’am,” one of the men now filing through the door said. The day shifts had ended, and the group of them wore sweat-stained shirts and boots brushed with red clay. They tracked the outside into Eden’s main office, and the dirt trembled off the toe boxes of their shoes, kissed the tile as it settled to the ground.

From behind her desk, Dottie nodded back and motioned to the pot of coffee that the men already knew was hot and strong. One of them poured into a branded mug. He spilled some over the rim and down the apple tree etched into the ceramic as a small quake came up from the floor. A single shock. Black liquid running down his hands, the man laughed and said, “Devil beneath us really givin’ it back today.”

Dottie offered her own laugh in return and then looked at her feet, grounded. Nobody else said a word, nothing else shook from the ground, and the men left.

As she lifted her eyes, Dottie’s reflection in the black screen of her laptop looked back at her: tired, older, creases on her face like fault lines. Her phone rang, and she picked it up, watching herself say, “Hi Dad.”

“Fix up a room for me tomorrow. I’ll be down around five. Need to sort out your vacancy issue. Think I’ll stay a few weeks.”

His voice echoed in her head. She watched her lips remain closed.

“Dottie.”

“Got it.”

Dottie stood. She left her phone on the desk, grabbed her keys, locked the office door, and walked to her pickup.

The sun sat low on the prairie, and as she rolled along the road, the rigs off the highway thinned out, and only the pumpjacks disturbed the horizon.

She started the ignition and put the car in reverse, but she sat still, foot on the break, unsure of where exactly she was going. She thought about what errands she needed to run before her father came. Stock his fridge, maybe. Pick up a six-pack of Shiner. She could use more cleaning supplies after Hunter’s mess, but she’d get by with diluting the bleach a bit longer. It wasn’t dire, yet. Maybe Lacey would still be finishing up at the shop. Dottie could use a longer conversation with her friend, with the only other person in town who knew her father as something else than the owner of Eden.

She released her foot from the break and let the tires slowly crunch backwards across the gravel lot. She headed to Boomtown.

She fixed her eyes on the lane dividers, barely looked up, and eased her back deeper into the worn seat. The old leather was familiar. It wrapped around her, held her, and she wrapped her hands around the wheel; holding, being held. The world outside her car blended into two bands of land and sky. The dealership lot flashed behind her as quickly as it appeared. She missed the exit to the Albertsons. And then she rolled past the coffee shop—without even looking up to see if it was busy. Only when she checked behind her did she see the empty lot and the neon “open” sign, growing small in her rearview mirror. She kept driving.

Taking the exit towards Pecos, Dottie merged onto I-20 going southwest with no plan in mind. It was dusk, and the road was still busy with the exchange of day and night. She shifted her gaze to the oncoming headlights pointing directly at her own hands holding the wheel. They steered her to the 285 junction, and she headed due south. The sun sat low on the prairie, and as she rolled along the road, the rigs off the highway thinned out, and only the pumpjacks disturbed the horizon.

Dottie must have driven for two more hours, thoughtless, with no trees to catch anything breaking out of her head as she spun towards desert, inched towards the Rio Grande. Her body took over, and her mind fell deeper into nothingness. She felt the rhythm of rubber turning over concrete, the rush of air from passing semis. With each deep breath, her foot grew heavy on the gas; she picked up speed. She drifted.

A flash of brights. A long horn.

Dottie swerved back to her lane, looked at her white knuckles clutching the wheel, felt her heartbeat in her stomach. She threw on her hazards and turned off at the next exit.

Now the only car on the desert road, the only person in an expanse of flatness, Dottie pulled over. She killed the ignition, stepped out into moonlight, and ducked beneath the barbed wire fence that lined the side of the road. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she walked towards the shadow of a single, rusted pumpjack. It clanked and sighed as its metal elbow churned over and over like it must have been doing for decades now. The sound was familiar, and she felt the need to sit beneath the mass of steel. She trudged through sage and cacti, making sure to avoid stepping directly on the larger bulbs. A soft cloud of sandy dirt stirred around her feet.

Not 20 yards shy of the pumpjack, Dottie’s body began to vibrate. She stopped and waited for the rumble to cease; it grew. Back on the road, the car alarm went off. Ahead of her, the jack head creaked to an oxidized stop. Dottie dropped to the ground, laid flat, and pressed her palms into the earth. She could make out only a sliver of moon through the dust rising around her and the haze of pollution above her. Fixing her eyes on that crescent of light, she let herself be in her body, let her body be in the ground, let the ground quake and quake and quake. Pulses of energy ran down the Balcones Fault—charged with years of brackish water, chemicals, a man’s hand forcing everything out from beneath the soil.

With each throb of Dottie’s core, the tangled web of fault lines below opened themselves. Their stores of carbon dioxide percolated upwards, seeped into the space where earth met air. Dottie inhaled.

Hannah Smith is a writer from Dallas, Texas. Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Header photo by P.V.R.M, courtesy Shutterstock.