Oil Town Overture

At five am I smell coffee through the floorboards. Carter only drinks organic. He set up his own kitchenette down there. I hear the clink of his spoon against his ceramic coffee mug. I hear the shower come on, and after the shower, I hear him speaking on his phone to his wife, Jane. It's still dark outside, and the wind is up. I scatter two scoops of kibble into my dogs' metal bowls. They knock against me trying to get to their food. I crawl back into bed, hoping Carter will slip out into the frosty Wyoming morning without speaking to me. But it is not to be.

"Hey, man," he says just outside my bedroom door. "Can you take me over to Miguel's to drop off my truck?"

"When?"

"I'd like to get it over there this morning so he can get my brakes done before the weekend." Carter is smiling, holding his coffee cup close to his face. It's a one-of-a-kind piece he picked up from the community college's annual art sale.

"Yeah, I'll do it."

I throw back my sheets and pull on my jeans.

Miguel lives by the interstate in his cousin's trailer. An expert mechanic, he is freelancing in the side yard cluttered with old tires and spent cans of starter fluid. He repairs cars at half the price the shops charge. He accepts cash only. I had him do my brakes and belts. I was knocked out by how cheap he was and how quickly he finished. I called friends and invited them in on the deal. Miguel's goal is to save three thousand dollars, then leave the States for Canada. He is undocumented, and there are whispers of raids and detentions sweeping through Wyoming. He has a sister in Medicine Hat. That's where he's headed.

Carter knows many of the people in the trailer court. He greets them in Spanish. He appointed himself as a sort of liaison between the Mexicans and the white guys like me who want cheap labor. I take advantage of the cut-rate prices, but I dislike the entanglements, like earlier this fall when Miguel showed up on my porch with two dozen tamales Carter ordered. There was a taciturn man with Miguel. He wore a white mustache and a silver ring. A black cowboy hat. I assumed he was the man who made the tamales. Carter was nowhere around, so I paid the twenty-five dollars. And I ate one, too, standing alone in the kitchen with both dogs looking up at me. I considered this single tamale a tariff on such interruptions.

________

It's the fall of 2019, and all I want to do is finish the essay I'm working on about my brother. Kenny and I used to ride our bikes down to the James River and walk out on a sun-bleached jetty to cast metal spoons to the migrating striped bass. In the distance you could see the Newport News shipyard rising out of the marsh like Egyptian ruins. I have been thinking about my brother more and more these days. And the way the surf rolled over those mussel bars, and the way clouds of baitfish we called "bunker" used to leap when the striped bass chased them. Or you'd see single bunker terrified, big-eyed, and hiding between the pilings of the old jetty.

My brother wasn't much of a fisherman, but he came along, his dark hair damaged by his career of year-round swimming, his lanky arms. His skin smelled like chlorine. In the essay, we drop our bikes in the sand and wade by the jetty casting like crazy, not catching anything. Kenny's afraid of stepping on blue crabs. He's afraid of stingrays. Jellyfish. We are talking about the James River of thirty years ago, but I bet it's nearly the same, if you were to locate that exact place, that half-moon of sand...