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Bakken Formation

Brian Rodan

    I came to the Bakken Formation, to the oil-patch around Williston, North Dakota, to get a job. I found Kevin. Kevin wants to hurt someone, he wants to hurt me.
    This morning there is a strong, moist sweet smell of French sponge cakes. Lemon, vanilla and butter fragrances fill my nose, freshly baked, warm, hot even, just out of the oven and dusted with powdered sugar. I see two small, curved Madeleine cakes which could rest side-by-side in the palm of my hand. The cakes are visible but I cannot hold them. Wide-open cake-faces emerge in innocent bloom from the half-shell.
    I don’t know if I am awake or asleep but one of those worlds holds the Madeleines and pulls me. I compulsively reach out a handful of wiggling fingers futilely hoping to caress the aroma of warm baked pastries.
    But, my fingers wiggle in the air and they are cold. My hands are cold. My legs, face, nose, stomach and chest are all cold. Then I hear an annoying, tapping, rapping sound quickly repeating loudly and in rapid staccato, metal on metal and metal on glass. And, there is a voice, an angry, pissed-off and pissed-on voice that sounds harsh and tethered to a frozen landscape. “Hello. Hello. Who’s in here?” This tapping sound and the voice also come from one of the two worlds, either from the waking world or the sleeping world, and it is like a razor-sharp fish hook piercing deeply into my body, insidiously working its barbed hook into my flesh.
    I don’t know if the insistent tapping and the tortured calling voice belongs to the waking or dreaming world. But, I know that this hook is dragging the two worlds together, like a grappling hook dragging two ships together into chaotic unavoidable confrontation.
    Julia and Annie are my daughters, 16 and 11 years old. When they were still talking to me, I called them my two Madeleines, with their wide-open young faces emerging from the half-shell formed by their impeccable long straight brown hair that falls below each of their shoulders. Julia and Annie are the sponge cakes who absorbed it all. They were there for my unraveling. They were there when I slapped Marla because she took my vodka from me. They absorbed too much information, too much of the truth. I don’t know if they still have long hair. I doubt that they would even talk to me today. Julia and Annie are back in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania where I left them with Marla, their mother, overlooking the Shopping Mall.
    The world did not end on Friday, December 21, 2012. However, that day and the events leading up to that day were still a catastrophic ending and beginning for me. Much more than a mere calendar coincidence.
    My life must hold a central role in an ancient calendar which is unknown to me. There must be a musty, humid stone vault in the Yucatan which is filled with ingrown tree-roots, poisonous snakes and spiders where my likeness is carved in bas-relief as a permanently screwed victim etched in the stone walls. Surely, it takes divine intervention to screw the pooch so badly that whole epochs of calendared time come to an end so as to be coordinated with my actions and failures. No mere human (and certainly not me) is capable of such a feat without maliciously divine intervention. That was my first hint that I was being accompanied by another, Kevin must also be carved standing over my likeness in bas-relief in that Yucatan vault.
    The Screwage, Friday, December 21, 2012: In the morning, Marla and I performed the last two joint acts of our 29 year marriage by filing bankruptcy and deeding the house back to the bank. In the afternoon, the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas declared Marla’s divorce from me final and granted Marla full custody of the two Madeleines. I could mount no dispute to the findings. In the evening, I packed my few remaining clothes in my 2003 Honda Pilot and left Pennsylvania and the life I had lived there for the last 59 years with no final destination in mind. My two darling Madeleines were not present for the slinking departure of their dismantled father in the night. If they had been present they would not have mourned or shed a tear, they had seen enough of their drunken unemployed dad.
    I ended up here in Williston North Dakota with all my remaining worldly possessions contained within the Pilot. Many of the newcomers to Williston, like me, sleep in their cars because there is nowhere to live and no money to pay for it. Vehicles are the basic measurement of a life. My life has been reduced to a single Pilot-full. Noah had the cubit to measure his Ark and I have the Pilot-full as the unit which measures and defines me. I am better off, by far, than those poor bastards reduced to a Chevy Vega-full, or Nissan Sentra-full or other older or lesser denominations.
    In Williston, North Dakota, references to supernatural intervention in my life or Mayan calendaring coincidences are not helpful when seeking employment, or hoping to retain recently obtained and tentatively held employment, such as my current circumstances. There is more nourishment and succor, though succor is a word I have never used before but it fits here as I suckle at the breast of my precipitous destruction, to refer to the events leading up to and occurring on Friday, December 21, 2012 as the “Screwage.” Many of those events were self-imposed and self-created but were still part of the Screwage all the same regardless of the cause.
    In conversation these days I try to avoid, as much as possible, references to my past. However, when seeking employment, such as my job interview with Arne Stumpp my current 26 year old boss, referring to my past as the “Screwage” was, for reasons unknown to me, better received and more quickly explained. There is a simple, easily understood directness to “Screwage” a basic human archetype. Arne Stumpp must have a gloomy streak in his temperament despite his rosy outward demeanor.
    The rapping, tapping, annoying repetitive sounds of metal on metal and metal on glass returns again. This time even louder and more insistent. Then, I hear a person walking outside my car, outside my Pilot-full. There are footsteps crunching on the snow and slush which had frozen into craggy solid shapes in the January night-time temperatures. I hear footsteps crunch through hollow air pockets in the shallow frozen puddles around the car.
    Again, I hear the pissed-off insistent voice, now at the same time as the tapping. “Hello. Hello. Who’s in there? I know you’re in there.”
    I open my eyes to see a big cloud of my breath freezing in the air in front of my face. It is January in Williston and it is cold, really cold, inside the Pilot. Arne said it would be minus 9 degrees last night, outside. It was at least that cold. The next night I’ll keep the engine running and waste the gas to keep the heater on.
    Blue-green mercury vapor light fills the inside of my Honda Pilot from the overhead light posts hanging over the convenience store parking lot. Blue-green vapor light filters in the windows and creates blue-green fractals through the ice crystals of my breath which is frozen on the inside of the car windows. But, not everything is blue-green, I also see a wash of natural light through the fractals in the windows. It must be morning, 7 or 7:30.
    I am inside my sleeping bag in back of my Honda, with all the rear seats folded down. This is my bedroom. I am wearing most of the clothes that I still own: two t-shirts, two sweatshirts, gloves, long underwear and pants. I’m still cold. But, this time the cold feels deeper and more threatening than just cold temperature alone. There is something more coldly threatening in the voice, in the tapping and the icy footsteps of this person walking around outside my Honda Pilot. This feels like a real-life awake experience but I can’t tell whether I am awake or asleep and dreaming.
    I hear crunching in front of the car then a sound, a faint thump against the front bumper, in front of the hood. I sit up in my sleeping bag spread out in the back of the Pilot. An ambiguous shadow moves across the frozen fractals in the front windshield. Then there is a sound at the front bumper like someone pulled apart the plug that runs from the overhead parking light post to the plug in my engine block heater. I search around beside my sleeping bag for the broom stick I keep there as protection.
    I am afraid that Kevin is walking around outside my Pilot. Kevin wants to hurt someone. I have never met Kevin, not the real person. But, I have seen and felt the effects of his rage, his anger, his compulsions. He lives in the Mancamps built outside Williston. Kevin is 23 years old, although he might be older, like me. He was unemployed for 3 years before he came to Williston, like me. Kevin has no family. He is lonely.
    Kevin has worked in the Williston oil-patch driving truck for the rigs for 3 years. Kevin is making money. He has saved $52,000. Frustrated and unhappy, he wants to do something, anything other than working.
    Mancamps are not what I thought they’d be. Identical 12" by 12" sleeping modules and cafeteria modules are bolted together like lego blocks into tic-tac-toe grids which seem to bleed out of the wheat fields outside town. Worker shifts in the oil patch are 24/7 and change constantly and so there are no predictable patterns of human traffic or activity. A handful of women live in the Mancamps but they are sequestered and never seen. The absence of women, and the balance to the social contract which women provide, is an unspoken emptiness.
    Drinking, drugs, or fighting get residents kicked out of the Mancamps and that will return the offender to living and sleeping in his car. Because no one wants to return to sleeping in their car, there is no conflict, not even an appearance of conflict, in the Mancamps.
    A pervasive smell of temporary-ness and hollow-ness infuses the halls, the sleeping modules and the cafeterias, everywhere and everything is empty and hollow, even the residents. An eerie quiet is everywhere. In the hallways and in the cafeterias people speak as little as possible and use low and muffled tones when they do speak. Mancamps are boring, banal, dull and monotonous. They are ascetic monasteries where people go for additional hollowing and to deny the flesh even more. And, if I am lucky, really lucky, then I will get to live in a Mancamp some day, instead of my Honda Pilot. The Madeleines are gone now, pushed away by the frozen images and sounds walking around my car.
    Kevin wanders the sullen and barren halls of the tic-tac-toe grid of the Mancamps between his work shifts, 2 am or 2 pm are each the same to him. Sometimes the walls of his bedroom unit close in too much on him or the video games bore him and he is forced to walk the hollowed-out halls of his Mancamp empty and alone.
    I came to know Kevin for the first time on the evening of the Screwage, when I left in my Pilot-full for parts unknown. I just didn’t know it was him. There was no name attached, it was just a feeling that I had. Driving into the unknown and unknowable. Chased into a corner with no escape. That was my introduction to what I later called Kevin. I hoped that Kevin would stay in Pennsylvania. But, he followed me to Williston.
    I have been in Williston since Christmas, looking for a job and living in my Honda Pilot. Jobs don’t come easy, even in Williston, for 59 year old guys from Pennsylvania who had been unemployed for 3 years. Two weeks ago I was at a job interview with Arne Stumpp at the North Plains Tavern in Williston. When Arne told me to meet him at a bar for the job interview I knew he wasn’t serious about hiring me. I lied to Arne, telling him I was in my 20s, not pushing 60.
    Before going into the North Plains for the job interview with Arne I sat in my car surveying my Pilot-full of possessions. I knew, without checking, that there was $162 left from the cash I took from Marla, one last gesture for her to discover on December 22. There were no credit cards, the bankruptcy took those away. Besides, it was warm in the bar and maybe Arne will pay for some fries or a meal before the interview is over.
    Arne was sitting at the end of the bar and, as he predicted in our phone call, he was the only person in the whole place wearing a tie. It didn’t look like Arne intended to stay long.
    When I introduced myself, Arne could not hide his disappointment at seeing a graying, fat, 59 year old. Almost immediately after shaking my hand he checked his phone, for the time, for messages, for any possible excuse to cut the job interview short. I had to move fast since it was obvious I would not be getting a meal or fries with this interview.
    “I know how to make money for you. I call him Kevin. He lives in the Mancamps. He’s here, he has money and you can sell to him,” I said to Arne. I hated myself for saying this, for acknowledging Kevin’s existence to Arne or that Kevin might help me. I was afraid of Kevin, afraid of what he would do to the Madeleines. But, my statement got Arne’s attention. And, as I was hoping, it got me the job, at least for a while. Everything is temporary on some level. $750 a week for research about Kevin, it was a start.
    After that interview, the Madeleines had disappeared. No matter how hard I tried to conjure up the blooming wide-open faces of Julia and Annie emerging from the half-shell I could see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. They were gone, until this morning.
    And then the Madeleines were driven off again by the visitor in the ice and snow around my car, the beast from the stone vault who stalks me. I will not let them be chased away again. So, I wrap my sleeping bag tightly around my chest to brace against the cold, holding my stubby broomstick in my hand for protection.
    I open the door to respond to the tapping and wrapping and calling from outside my Pilot. A heavy freeze, its whiteness visible in the morning air, covers the parking lot. There is a person at the door, buried in a large parka. Only a small oval of face is visible surrounded by a hood drawn tightly round. The person is shuffling from foot-to-foot in a jog to warm against the cold.
    “I’m the clerk at this store. You are parked in our lot. You can’t park here overnight or use our electricity for the engine block heater. It’s not allowed. If I let you, we’d have fifty people here. I’ll get fired if I let you stay.”
    But I told him it was ok. I showed him the stained napkin that his boss gave me with permission to stay. After seeing my napkin lease the convenience store clerk left me alone.
    It wasn’t Kevin, this time. He would be back tonight. I will call the Madeleines on the phone at Arne’s office today and they will hang up on me. Then, I will call again tomorrow. I will not let them go, the beast in the stone vault will not win.

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