The Good Hand

WILLISTON IS ROUGHLY four miles across at its widest point—from the Walmart to the Amtrak station. It looks like any ailing midwestern town … during the Carter administration. Fast-food restaurants, two-star motels, car dealerships, and box stores, depressing just to list, line the approach as I pilot my SUV down Route 2’s “Million Dollar Way.”

The city’s downtown, with a movie theater proclaiming “Our Screen Talks,” has a certain rustic charm. It is all but deserted … wide, flat streets, a coffee shop, a bus stop, a bookstore, and a billboard with the Ten Commandments displayed just outside the two topless bars at the foot of town—the perfect place for an insecure god to rage against greed and sex and killing. A traveling stripper and journalist, Susan Elizabeth Shepard, would later write of Williston that it was less than a town, “something closer to a military base or the world’s saddest campground.” She was right. I drive in circles. These first days the roads tangle in my mind like a plate of spaghetti.

I GRAB A SEAT at the counter in Gramma Sharon’s Family Restaurant. I make small talk with a plump waitress, eat chicken fried steak smothered in gravy and covered by two over-easy eggs, and drink cup after cup of hot, flat coffee. I text Missoula Buck. He tells me of a company that is hiring and gives me the name of the receptionist.

I wish him luck on his own job search. Then I drive to the library. Cars and trucks stuffed with clothes and bedding sit in front of signs that read NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. I walk past a man snoring openmouthed in the back of a hatchback before heading inside.

Big-boned white men sit alone at scattered tables like lonesome rhinoceroses, poring over job applications and hunting-and-pecking online forms. I loiter, researching job leads on the internet for as long as I can stand it. On my way out, I stop in front of a large display by the exit. It features rows of photographs—mug shots of dour, slack-jawed men staring at the camera: local sex offenders, their names printed beneath their pictures. A few years of felon-friendly, no-questions-asked hiring by oil companies has gifted Williston, North Dakota, with the highest concentration of rapists and child molesters in the nation.

I wouldn’t know the numbers until later, but the crime rate in Williston was four times the nation’s average. Since the start of the boom, assaults had skyrocketed times twelve while thefts had quintupled. Reports of rape had increased sixfold.

The playground outside the library is built to look like an oil lease with a teeter-totter shaped like a pump jack. The small park on which the playground sits was, not long before, the site of a tent city, a migrant encampment before the city evicted the squatters. Now it is empty. I sit on a bench. There is something that I can’t quite put my finger on—an unsettled feeling. My hackles are raised. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I feel it in the hollow of my stomach—something is “off.”

After I left the family farm, I spent ten years in Baltimore City. By the time I got to Williston, I’d had a gun drawn on me twice, once by a teenager and once by a kid not old enough to be called a teenager. I’d been in other thorny situations as well, and the unsettled notion I experience in Williston is something I can only compare to the anxious feeling I got taking a wrong turn off South Bentalou Street in Pigtown at dusk, or standing alone at a bus stop with a broken light, drunk one night south of North Avenue, watching two figures approach me in the dark. In Baltimore, a place more famous for its crime than its crabs, this feeling was isolated to pockets, limited to certain locations, situations, and times of day; in Williston, if my stomach is right—and I trust my gut—it is everywhere.

A drifter shits on the floor at the rec center. A knife fight breaks out in a man camp. A bouncer at a local club discharges his firearm to break up a fistfight. A man is gunned down and killed on the street outside a strip club called Heartbreakers. An eighty-four-year-old woman is raped in her home. A twenty-two-year-old man is raped in his truck. Prostitution rings, Mexican cartels, methamphetamine and heroin traffickers have descended upon northwest North Dakota. Like me they are following the money.

“I wouldn’t say it’s out of control,” Williston’s mayor tells a reporter from CNBC. “But we’re very close to that.”

Sleeping in my Chevy—in these first unknowable days—I’m particularly exposed, and every barfly and truck stop cashier I meet has an opinion as to where I should park. Not on Main Street: “You’ll get your windows busted out by the drunks.” Not too far off Main Street: “A lot of creepers around.”

I hear the same advice everywhere I go: “Be careful out there.” They say it like it doesn’t matter how careful I am. It gets weird fast: “Cartels have taken over the entire second floor of the Vegas Hotel. They’re trafficking whores,” a man tells me at Applebee’s. “Three men are ass raped every day in this fuckin’ town, I swear to God. I’m ex-police, I know!” It is strange as a man to hear that I should never leave my drink unattended at a bar, but I will hear it constantly in Williston. Someone is going to put something in it. They will. Don’t leave it here. Take it to the bathroom with you. Seriously. Stories of man-on-man rape permeate the honky-tonks and dives—everybody has heard from somebody that they knew a guy who found a guy waking up in a parking lot with his pants around his ankles, bleeding from his asshole. Years later, I’ll relay this experience to a girlfriend. “Now you know what it’s like to be a woman,” she’ll tell me, her eyes flashing angrily. I’ll nearly fall out of my chair.

In Williston, it is hard to separate the facts from the fiction. But the hyperbole has a way of creeping under your skin worse than the reporting does, and even without the exaggerations, all you have to do is take a look around. Testosterone-fueled young men are working fourteen-hour shifts at jobs that can kill them in a town without friends or family. It only makes sense that the dangerous work of the day spills past sunset as parentless white boys roar through the night in F-250s with no girls to fuck, but plenty of guys to fuck up.

“Just watch your back,” a bartender warns me. “And keep your truck locked.”

Night falls slowly in North Dakota. The sun lingers on the horizon until 9:30 p.m. in early June, and darkness doesn’t come until well past ten. I look for a place to park the Blazer so I can sleep, cruising the suburban-like web of streets off Main.

I watch the lights in the houses flick on and then off as night grows ever longer. When it is very dark, I step out of my vehicle and shut the driver’s door very quietly. I walk around to the back, drop the tailgate, crawl inside, and pull off my boots. I think of the families in the houses—husbands, wives, and children: they have jobs to work, classes to attend, property they’ve obtained, and lives to protect. I got none of that. I’m unloosed. Free, I guess. Alone, for certain. And my bladder is full. I piss into an empty bottle, but I have to stop myself before my urine fills past the brim. Tightening my muscles, I struggle to hold in my piss and not spill the bottle on myself as I screw the top back on and rummage around my camping gear for a second bottle. I fill that one up, too. With two bottles of hot piss at my feet, I lie on my back and close my eyes.

I’ve been crashing in my vehicle for over a week now. Fuck this, I think, I need a real place to sleep.

THE FLOP

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The front room of the townhouse is dirty, and the shades are drawn. Rumpled sheets and blankets cover the couch, and an unmade mattress lies on the floor next to the front door. A third sleeping space has been thrown together against the opposite wall. Chewed dog toys and frayed, dirty rugs cover the carpeted floor. A large-screen TV blasts light and sound. People on a reality show stare out from the screen, bitching.

“Here’s the place,” says Champ. A beer fits in his hand as if his hand had been built around it. He takes a swallow. “New York! Fucking New York!” he bellows. “Where in New York you from? Brooklyn! Fucking Brooklyn. That wins you big points. I’m from Jersey.”

A bald guy wearing a work uniform and a squiggle as a frown sits on the couch watching TV. “This is Frank,” Champ says. “He’s not happy with me, bringing another guy in.”

Frank looks at me and blinks. His face is smooth like a baby’s and his eyebrows are such a light blond color that they disappear against his pale brow. I blink back at him.

“’Sup?” says Frank.

Champ plants his feet in the middle of the townhouse living room. He’s in his midthirties, but the way he commands space makes him feel older. He has the build of a bulldog, square with broad shoulders, thick arms, and a big belly. He cocks his head to the side and addresses the bald guy. “Hey, I know it’s tight. We just gotta do what we gotta do.”

He turns back to me and shrugs. “It’s better than sleeping in your fucking car, bro.”

Champ moves through the living room. His bright orange hair is spiky, cut short enough to expose the sunburn on his scalp. He wears no shirt, and his face, neck, and left arm are painted red in a classic trucker’s tan. His shorts hang low under his belly, exposing the tops of his hips. We walk past a toilet in a laundry room and into the small kitchen. Junk mail, magazines, and clothes cover the dirty table.

“Frank is from the Philippines or some shit,” he says. “The other guy works third shift. We call him Jesus.” Champ pronounces the hard J and continues, “He’s a black guy from Africa. Upstairs I got a couple Jamaicans and a mother and her son.”

We step out the back door into a small yard with a picnic table, a gas grill, and a hot tub. Champ stops. He spins around and squares up.

“No fights,” he says, making direct eye contact. “It’s okay to drink, have a couple beers, but no fights. We had an altercation a few nights ago between Frank and Jesus, but mostly everybody gets along. It’s cramped, guys are tired—they had an altercation. I was out of town, so Rickie had to deal with it. This is Rickie. She’s my girlfriend.” A woman in her midtwenties with a pretty, round face framed by black bangs sits at the picnic table, sipping a Budweiser. She gives me a smile.

Champ continues, “I had to go home to Jersey for a funeral, and they had an altercation. I came back. I said, ‘Do you fucking guys wanna leave, because I’ll throw you out right the fuck now?’ They both said, ‘No.’” He shrugs. “There’s nowhere to stay here, especially this cheap. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.”

He looks directly in my eyes and points at my chest. “No smoking meth,” he says. “No cooking meth. You can roll a joint, but don’t smoke it in the house. It’s okay to drink, but don’t start any fights. And no racial shit. Okay? We all got to get along here. The Jamaican guys upstairs, they’re really working out. They keep to themselves. No problem with them. I can never remember their names. This guy and his mom, they got Parkinson’s or something. So don’t be freaked out. They’re all twitchy.”

“They’ve got Tourette’s or something,” Rickie says.

Champ says, “They’re real nice people.” Then, sideways, “Church people, you know?” He shrugs. “We’ve got a lot of people here. Everybody does their best.”

He walks me upstairs and shows me a small, stained bathroom—toiletries all around the sink, towels on the floor, mildew in the tub. There are three upstairs bedrooms in the townhouse. Champ and Rickie stay in the biggest room, facing the street, the mother and her son share the second bedroom, and the Jamaicans crash in the back.

I follow Champ back out to the patio and take a seat at the table with him and Rickie. Rickie asks me if I want beer or water. I take her up on the water. I know I look ragged. I can see it reflected in her eyes—the slight look of concern, the trace of maternal kindness. At first Champ and Rickie were sussing me out for danger, but they can see I’m not that. We talk about New York. “You get big points for that,” Champ says, his broad, sunburned face turned toward me, “for being from the East Coast.”

“I haven’t seen too many of us out here,” I tell him.

“We’re a long way from home, buddy.” I am 1,826 miles from home. With the exception of a cousin in Iowa, the closest person I know lives in Boulder, Colorado. One friend within a thousand miles. My experience of this circumstance vacillates wildly between an exhilarated sense of freedom, a true American road lust, and a fear so stark I feel it coil around my bones and watch it age me in every mirror I pass. This is as alone as I have ever been in my life.

Champ continues, “Rent is four fifty. It’s midmonth. So if you wanna move in tonight, it’ll be three hundred. No lease, no deposit, we’ll set you up in the living room.”

The oil boom has driven up the price of everything; but by far, the most expensive thing in town is housing. There are simply not enough places to stay. Rent in northwest North Dakota in June of 2013 is higher than rent in Manhattan. It will soon surpass San Francisco to become the costliest in the nation. One-bedroom apartments cost over $2,000 monthly. Single rooms in shared apartments cost over $1,000 a month. Some postings advertise women-only rooms for as low as $500 a month with sex as an implicit part of the deal, which is obviously out of the question for me. I had been scanning ads every day, and I’d found exactly one space I could afford.

“I don’t see that I have too many options,” I tell Champ.

“It’s better than sleeping in your vehicle,” he tells me again.

I have been sleeping in my Chevy for ten days. I thought I’d get used to it, but instead it was costing me money, wearing down my health and my nerves. I was eating out for every meal, fatty junk food mostly, and with nowhere to go at night, I was drinking too much, spending too much money on booze in an attempt to calm the nerves and sleep. I’d been washing up at truck stops, and I was growing more disheveled each day, a little less washed, a little more walleyed. I had just begun searching for work, and I knew if I was viewed the way I was starting to feel, it would be game over. Like desperate men don’t get laid, poor men don’t get hired.

I tell Champ I will take the place. I give him $300 in cash, and he handwrites me a receipt. “What’s your last name?” he asks.

I had introduced myself as Mike. I tell him my last name is “Smith” and he stops writing. He twists his neck to the side and I see the trust race from his eyes. “Are you on the run? You’re not a fucking fugitive, are you? We had one of them once. I don’t want any—”

I laugh. “If you want,” I tell him, “I can show you my ID.”

“No”—he puts his hand up and ends the conversation—“I don’t.”

He finishes writing out the receipt and hands it to me. “Well, you’re one of us now.”

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