1.
MEDORA, NORTH DAKOTA, is the gayest town in the West. Cowboys with prairie-hardened thighs amble down Main Street, their bright buckles glint in the noonday light; freshly pulled saltwater taffy shines in the candy store; lovers, a feathered boa wrapped around their shoulders and dressed in fishnet stockings or buckskin, pose for sepia-toned old-time photographs; near the entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park is the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame—all those men wrapped in chaps grit their teeth for the camera, a pad of tobacco tucked into their lower lips. All that barbed wire; all that sage perfuming the layered bentonite bluffs of southwestern North Dakota’s badlands.
Across the railroad tracks and over the Little Missouri River is the Chateau de Mores, the historic home of the Marquis de Morès, a French entrepreneur and aristocrat who built this town (named for his wife, Medora von Hoffmann) in the 1880s to use it as a hub for the newly made refrigerated railroad cars bound with cattle for the Chicago markets.
It was a bust.
But in the town’s first few years, the marquis built a twenty-eight-room chateau—considered rustic by aristocratic standards—at a time when most people in what was then the Dakota Territory lived in sod houses or tar-paper shacks.
Uphill from the chateau is the Medora cemetery, where there are gravestones for William W. “Six-Shooter Slim” Kunkel; French Baby; Baby from Hotel; “Farmer” Young—Cowboy Who Owned Two Acres of Land; William Riley Luffcey—his gravestone reads “Killed in an argument on June 26, 1883. Marquis de Mores had purchased land for his cattle, then closed old hunting trails. A dispute ensued. The Marquis was tried and acquitted three times. Many years later another man confessed to the killing. His identity has never been disclosed due to his family’s wishes.” There’s also a grave for The Man the Bank Fell On—meaning, a riverbank fell and killed a man no one knew.
Farther uphill, past the cemetery, is the crown jewel of the region, the Medora Musical, whose high-kicking cowboys twirl and yip as they sing across a star-spangled musical revue—Theodore Roosevelt, his storming of San Juan Hill; the founding of Medora; Harold Schafer, the philanthropist who helped rebuild Medora as a type of company town, and the man who originally made his fortune by creating Mr. Bubble; horses; shootouts; damsels in distress.
One of my first memories is of the Medora Musical. At four, I remember sitting in the open-air Burning Hills Amphitheatre, watching black pigs hop along on their hind hooves. Later in the show—as with every show I’ve seen there since—children were asked to come onstage as a bright-toothed blond woman, clad in a cowgirl hat and fringed shirt, wailed away on “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
Each year, the musical hosts ask veterans to stand as they sing the Armed Forces Medley. At the end of the show, by which time you’re spinning inside a whirlwind of red, white, and blue, Theodore Roosevelt appears in a spotlight, riding his trusty steed, in some type of phantasmagoria from yesteryear.
It is here, in this tourist town of a little over one hundred year-round residents that, at the age of twenty-six, I had my first summer fling.
2.
AT THE HEIGHT of the Bakken oil boom, in 2014, I took a job with a North Dakota nonprofit to interview landowners impacted by the oil development transforming the region into what was then the second-largest oil play on the continent. Throughout May and into August, I was tasked to get seventy-five interviews that would help the nonprofit build a case against the fossil-fuel industry—its mismanagement of wells, its pipeline spills, its harm to local agriculture. I was based in Dickinson, in the southern tip of the boom region, renting a basement room from a professor. This town contained nearly 16,000 people when I left for college in 2006—now it hovered somewhere near 40,000. There were more bars, more hotels, more grocery stores, and a newly built YMCA complete with indoor waterslides.
Of the seventy-five people I was commissioned to interview, only nine came through. Men and women were scared to go on record (who could blame them?) and speak out against the industry that was flooding the state with money.
I did talk with a retired couple who had sold their home on the scoria-strewn north shore of Lake Sakakawea after pumpjacks, the metal structures that rock up and down, pulling oil from deep underground, began to keep them up at night, moving some two hundred miles away from the boom to the small, south-central North Dakota pothole-prairie town of Napoleon. The large steel-blue elevators along their new community’s railroad tracks were the tallest structures for miles. Along Main Avenue were the Napoleon Floral and Trophy Haus, Weigel Hardware, Del’s SuperValu, and in a small building the local newspaper, the Napoleon Homestead.
Back in the northwest corner of the state, I spoke with Brenda Jorgenson, a tall egret of a woman with long silver-brown hair. Brenda showed me water samples from her tap in varying shades of gray and black—the same tap that had supplied the water she used to brew the coffee she offered me.
I met with a pair of sisters who cried when they told me that godwits, the small balls of brown-buff feathers with long upturned bills, no longer nested near their home. They wondered: if it wasn’t safe for the birds, was it safe for them?
When interview after interview fell through, whether it was because of needing to get the crop in, some family emergency, or the simple “I’ve changed my mind,” I began to escape from Dickinson, a town clanging with iron and semis, to Medora, the Wild West tourist trap thirty miles to the west.
EARLY IN THE MORNING I would zip out of Dickinson and dive deep into the craggy badlands. I clambered up Camels Hump Butte, a loamy lump near Beach, the closest town to the Montana border, where there was authentic Chinese food. I hiked up Bullion Butte, a mammoth butte over a mile wide, or I’d shoot up the steep incline of Teepee Butte, scrambling to climb the gloopy clay sides, praying to get a solid grip to reach the top, where a welded iron cross stained with bird shit was secure in the soil. Atop the buttes, I gazed around the mottled wash of silver sage, a landscape that time and water and fire and ice whittled into physical poetry. Now, that landscape was being broken by steel, fracking fluid, and explosives—all blowing up an ancient seabed nearly two miles underground.
I traded the screech of oil tankers blasting along two-lane highways and the bright blaze of burning flares for the bustling madness of Medora’s summer tourist season: droves of cotton-candy-fueled families in flip-flops desperate to see lumbering bison or hear the yips of the black-tailed prairie dog towns that dot Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Children walked the hot pavement of Medora, smacking on their saltwater taffy.
Drenched after a morning of hiking, I’d sit at a mahogany bar in Medora, where I’d be waited on by a bevy of bartenders from Taiwan, eastern Europe, or South America—teens and twentysomethings spending their summer serving plump RV owners French fries and bison burgers.
The global flare of Medora is fueled by the reality that Medora is, essentially, owned by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. Droves of young internationals, desperate for a taste of the mythic American West, arrive in one of the most remote regions of the country only to realize that this isn’t Arches, Zion, Olympic, or even Yellowstone. In fact, Medora is more akin to the celluloid mystique of an Old West movie. It’s a semiarid sagebrush steppe of rattlesnakes and pronghorn antelope—a wash of brown barely containing any trees, with one gas station and no train depot. An oasis where daily temperatures burn to over 100 degrees.
After my morning saunters up buttes, I’d crave a frosty pint of beer and fleischkuekle—the local German-from-Russia meat patty, wrapped in dough, and deep fried, served with a pickle spear and French fries on the side. In Boots, I’d eavesdrop on conversations, listening to moms and dads tick off another national park on their list.
Early in the summer I’d installed Grindr, an app with profiles of gay men that tells the user how far away the nearest gay man is from their phone. On previous visits to family in Bismarck, nearly two hours to the east, Grindr would list a smattering of brave souls in the state capital city but then list only, perhaps, a handful of men over one hundred miles away. North Dakota, Grindr confirmed, was no place for gay men.
Except in summer.
As I kept my phone close to my chest, man after international man populated my screen. Medora, as it turned out, was a gay Mecca. Profiles of men from Chile—their washboard torsos and that sultry line cleaving down their chest—flooded my screen. I took another sip of my cold beer.
And then a curly-haired bartender asked me if I was doing all right, if I wanted anything to eat. He had arctic eyes, a welcoming grin. I turned my phone over and set it down on the bar.
With interviews falling through left and right, my days suddenly were free to see the bartender, whose name I now knew was Jakub. Eventually, I drove sixty miles every other day to see him.
He had an easy laugh and confided in me that he was studying oil painting back home in Poland. When I asked why he was spending his summer working in Medora, he said he thought he’d be able to take weekend trips around the region.
“But Americans don’t believe in trains,” he said. I found out in the month he had been in Medora he hadn’t left—and Medora takes all of ten minutes to circumnavigate on foot.
When I offered to drive Jakub through the badlands, or farther, when his or my schedules allowed, he smiled. He’d love that.
On Jakub’s days off we climbed Pretty Butte, where you could throw a football into Montana. We packed lunches of tomato sandwiches, cucumbers, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and coffee. Atop the sage-speckled butte, Jakub pulled out a small canvas and paints and took off his shirt, his golden skin darkening in the sun, the tips of his hair lightening. I brought a notebook to write in, slipped under the silver sage, and curled in the shade to nap.
Some days we’d watch the mantles of clouds build, the sky brewing lavender, then indigo, the clouds miles high, swelling with the weight of summer rain.
Jakub began joining me on my quest to visit North Dakota’s eighteen so-called Extraordinary Places—a group of man-made or geological formations proposed by Wayne Stenjhem, the state’s attorney general, as worthy of special protections—namely, that no pump jack could be developed within two miles of the site.
The bill passed, but stripped of any enforcement provisions, so it was the law in name only. In reality, oil development could creep in as close as the extraction companies liked.
Still, it was my goal to visit each site, such as the Elkhorn Ranch, now known as the Cradle of Conservation, where Theodore Roosevelt lived in the 1880s; White Butte, at 3507 feet, the state’s highest point; and neighboring Black Butte, the state’s second-highest point, which was more difficult to climb because of the large boulders scattered around its summit.
On each journey Jakub would paint and I would write, and, on each field trip we’d do our creative work inching closer and closer, until our shoulders touched. I’d look over at him: he was focused on his painting—the shape of a line, matching the right pigment with the shade of sage—only ever revealing a slight smile. I let him lead because I didn’t know how to be coy with men, how to be flirtatious in a fractured land.
ONE DAY, WE DROVE the Custer Trail south and east of Medora, a gravel-road romp that follows Custer’s path through the badlands before he had the worst day of his life at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Jakub rolled down his window and stuck his head out. His curls whipped about like lush brown waves; his mouth was wide open.
“I love it here,” he said.
I laughed and shook my hand.
“Don’t you?” he asked when he pulled his head back into the car.
He reached over and placed his hand on my thigh.
I took one hand off the steering wheel, kept my eye on the road, and squeezed his hand. It was supple.
Jakub threaded his fingers through mine.
WE PULLED OFF the road at Tracy Mountain, a low-level butte riddled with quartz.
When the sun strikes just right, the south-facing slope of bentonite shines like a mirror.
We parked the car, left a note with my name, number, and a message to the landowner, telling them we were just there to hike. I left a twenty-dollar bill as a sign of our good intentions. At every Extraordinary Place my money was always there when we returned.
At the base of Tracy Mountain is a decapitated pumpjack, the horse-head top rusting on the ground. When the oil dried up in the 1970s, after the second oil boom, the Southwestern Production Corporation abandoned its wells. From decades of neglect, coupled with freezing winters and scorching summers, pumpjack and oil drums had rusted and broken down, a type of postmodern fossil in a landscape filled with actual dinosaur bones.
I pointed out Custer’s wagon tracks as we got closer to Tracy Mountain. Rumor had it, I told Jakub, that the area was named after an ex-Confederate soldier who escaped there to avoid being tried for war crimes, using the butte—which is really what Tracy Mountain is—as a lookout post.
I looked over at Jakub. He rolled his eyes.
“Yes, I know who George Armstrong Custer is,” he said.
He bent over, examining the wagon tracks, and touched the ground.
“This place never heals,” he said.
It’s true—there’s a reason the bluffs and buttes “look like how Poe sounds,” as Roosevelt wrote in his diary. Warped, gnarly, bare.
Roughly sixty-five million years ago, North Dakota was a warm, swampy ecosystem of fish and dinosaurs. What is now Wyoming was an active volcano region, spewing ash into the air and swamps. Carried by ancient waterways, the ash and sediment from the forming Rocky Mountains settled, pressed into sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, limestone, and shale.
About a million years ago North America was in the midst of a long ice age with glaciers cruising south from Canada, pressing and reshaping riverways. What are now the badlands faced a new force of erosion: the Little Missouri River. The river carved away the soft layers of earth, which created clusters of towering hoodoos. Ancient plants transfigured into coal seams.
I told Jakub the history of Custer’s presence in the region, how he was described as effeminate, an apparent dandy who wore purple velvet riding gloves. We looked at each other and sniggered. Then I mentioned how Custer trimmed his long yellow locks before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, temporarily confusing the Indians as to whether he was even there.
“Custer,” I said, “supposedly kept a pet bobcat in the basement.”
Jakub rolled his eyes. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” He laughed.
As sweat began to slide down our backs, we scrambled up the rock escarpment of Tracy Mountain. Clay and rock gave way under our weight. Jakub and I stopped partway up the slope and shared a swig of water. I pointed out other Extraordinary Places in view: Bullion, White, and Black Buttes. I fanned my hand between Black and Bullion, telling Jakub that, somewhere there, out of sight, was the columnar junipers, a collection of vertical shrubs that sweetened that pocket of the badlands.
“Some of the gays at work want to camp there. They call it Burning Coal Vein. We should go,” he said.
I agreed. But, privately, I worried about a mini-gay-pride parade in southwestern North Dakota. What if other people were at the campground? What if there were oil-field workers or ranchers who heard there was a smattering of sissies camping at the columnar junipers? My worry about who I was—am—at home made me nervous.
“You know,” I said to Jakub as we continued to the top of Tracy Mountain, “the name Burning Coal Vein is because the black layers of lignite coal get struck by lightning, catch fire, and smolder for centuries and become”—I bent over and reached toward the ground—“this bright scoria rock.”
Jakub turned around, smiled, and stepped toward me. He held my chin in his hands and kissed my lips.
I sighed, then realized where I was, and I pulled away.
“What?” he asked.
“We’re in North Dakota. We can’t do that here. We could get fucking killed. What if someone’s watching us?”
“No one’s watching us. Look.”
I scanned the vast horizon.
He grabbed my chin and kissed me again. “We can’t even see a car for miles.”
I shook my head.
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re the first boy who’s kissed me in public at home.”
He guffawed, turned toward me, and swung his arm wide. “You call this ‘public’?”
He stepped close and kissed me again, this time more passionately.
3.
WHEN I LIVED in the Bakken oil boom that summer, I broke a promise to myself once, the one rule I had: Do not go out and drink alone in boomtowns.
For weeks I had felt relatively safe in Dickinson—shopping during the day at Cashwise Foods and going to the new gym. My friends, all professors at the state university in town, took me out for drinks at Rusty’s Bar, a dingy downtown dive with a jukebox in the back and karaoke every other Tuesday. It was clear that this was the unnamed gay bar in the region.
My shoulders relaxed, I breathed deeper. For a moment, it felt like an oasis in what locals at the time now called the Saudi Arabia of the Prairie.
Weeks later, while my landlords were out of town, I, with my newfound confidence, went to a bar called Burning Saddles.
It was past nine. There were two big-screen televisions behind the bar. One played soccer, the other the Twins’ baseball game. Off to the side, men were playing pool.
I didn’t stay long, spoke to only the bartender, who had a purple-yellow bruise blossoming under her eye. She smiled at me.
I ordered two IPAs, feeling awkward at a bar where no one talked. The buzz of the TVs in the background and the sharp crack of billiard balls were the only sounds around the bar. After I finished my second frothy beer, I paid my tab and left.
When I stepped out into the cool June night, suddenly I flew. I crashed against a brick wall. My glasses fell off my face. A knee cracked against my forehead.
A man yelled, “Faggot.”
I clutched my eye. With my other hand I scrambled and found my glasses. The sharp sting of burnt rubber flared in my nostrils as a white truck sped away.
The bartender rushed out of the door and asked if I was okay. She crouched by me and said that no one had left the bar after me. I slumped against the cold brick wall. She sat beside me and held my hand. I was sweating and, slowly, caught my breath.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“You have to let me call the police.”
“No, no, I don’t want any trouble,” I said, and slowly wobbled onto my feet. I held my forehead. It burned.
ON MY DRIVE BACK to my room, I rubbed my eye and felt ashamed. I walked through the door, flicked on the lights to the house, walked into the kitchen, and grabbed a dishcloth. I opened the freezer and pulled out an ice cube tray, twisted it, and plopped the small cubes into the cloth. I started thinking in a type of conspiracy-theory-fueled delirium. Maybe someone in the bar texted a buddy, I thought as I held the pack of ice against my eye and forehead, telling him to wait outside for a small redheaded man. That seemed improbable.
But now it also felt possible.
A FEW DAYS LATER, with the first black eye of my life, I swung west out of Dickinson, shot into Medora, and snagged Jakub. It was a quiet Wednesday morning—the sun had just peaked over the bluffs when I pulled off the highway and drove into town. A few groggy families were up, wrapped in sweatshirts, having coffee at their campsites. I turned off the main road, rumbled across the railroad tracks, and turned into the Elkhorn Quarters, a barracks-type living arrangement, where Jakub was staying for the summer.
I wanted this to be a surprise and hadn’t told him I was coming to town. I called his phone three times before he answered.
“I want to take you to the Elkhorn Ranch,” I said. “I’ve packed some lunches and snacks in case we get hungry. There’s some coffee in a thermos.”
“What? Where are you?” he asked through a yawn.
“I’m outside,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m here. Just throw something on. You can sleep in the car if you want.”
A few minutes later Jakub stumbled out the door. He feigned a smile and shook his head.
“Should I bring anything with?” he asked.
“Your paints?”
“That’s okay. I’ll just savor the time with you,” he said as he swaggered over, wrapped his arms around me, and leaned in for a kiss.
“Christ—go brush your teeth,” I said, laughing and pulling away from him.
“Oh, what, honey, you don’t like how I smell?” He smiled, opened his mouth, and breathed at me.
I fanned him away.
“Thank god I have some gum for you in the car,” I said. “Get in.”
Now the sun shined across the beige- and strawberry-streaked bluffs. Ahead, in the Little Missouri River bottom, Jakub spotted an obstinacy of bison ambling down the riverbank. The forecast for the day was hot—into the nineties, clear sky, in a landscape with little shade. We drove onto the interstate and sped west.
At Beach, I turned off the interstate and headed north. As I drove, one hand on the wheel, while Jakub quietly sipped some coffee, the radio cut in and out. Jakub reached over and turned it off and then slid his hand over mine. I half looked at him, keeping one eye on the road. He stared straight ahead, lightly gripping my hand, and I turned both eyes back onto the road. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him smile as he slowly sipped his steaming coffee.
A FEW MILES LATER I ripped off the highway and onto a gravel road.
“Whoa! Where are we going?” asked Jakub.
“You’ll see,” I said, smiling.
Orange clouds of dust kicked up behind us as we sped between cleaved bentonite bluffs.
A large red semi barreled toward us in the distance and, as we passed each other, barely pulled over. A cloud of dust washed over my car. In the blur, it sounded like a shotgun had gone off. A rock hit the windshield.
“Son of a bitch,” I mumbled.
“No chip, though,” said Jakub. He rubbed the spot where the rock hit.
We kept driving. As we continued, we passed a few fracking sites.
“You can tell they’re new—new to this boom,” I said, “because that’s a fresh scoria roadway. See how bright orange and red it is. It isn’t faded dull orange like others.”
Jakub nodded.
A large flare next to the well site flashed like the Wicked Witch of the West’s fireball in The Wizard of Oz.
We drove on, winding and bending deeper into the badlands on the narrow road.
By now Jakub had taken his hand off mine.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just a little ways ahead. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Minutes later I turned off the main fracking road and shot down between two brown bluffs. Small patches of silver sage lined the roadway. A car from Massachusetts passed us. I kept my hand on the steering wheel but lifted my fingers up to wave at the driver.
“How’d you know him?” asked Jakub.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Then why’d you wave at him?”
I turned toward Jakub and smiled.
“It’s the nice thing to do.”
He shook his head.
A minute later we arrived at the trailhead in the Little Missouri River bottom.
“All right,” I said. “We’re here.”
“Where?” he asked.
“The Elkhorn Ranch. Teddy Roosevelt’s hideout after his wife and mom died in the same house on the same day,” I said. “Can you believe it, it was Valentine’s Day, 1884.”
“Christ.”
Ahead of us the stippled bluffs cut against the large wash of sky. Tallgrass swayed in what little breeze there was.
When we got out of the car, grabbing the two backpacks and bottles of water, the back of my neck was already beginning to sweat.
“Look,” said Jakub as we began to walk the trail, heading toward the cottonwoods in the river bottom. “There’s a flare up there.”
No other car was parked at the trailhead, so I reached out and took Jakub’s hand in mine as we began to walk the cut-grass path. Jakub held out his free hand over the florets.
“I love how they feel,” he said. “Just like cat’s fur.”
“Do you have a cat?” I asked him.
“My mom does—he’s named Gnojek.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Dipshit.”
AS WE CROSSED the threshold into the cottonwood trees, there was a slight reprieve from the heat. A few starlings sang above us. Every now and then the cry of a pheasant broke the silence. There was still a trace of dew on the short grass near the base of the tree trunks. We stepped out of the thicket, into a shorn patch of grass lined with six large stones.
“Here we are,” I said to Jakub.
“Where?”
“The Elkhorn Ranch,” I said, spreading my arms.
“Where is it?” he asked.
I laughed and pointed at the stones.
“Wow,” he said, gently shoving himself into my shoulder. “Impressive.”
He rested his chin on my shoulder.
I turned my head, looked down my nose, and raised my eyebrows.
Jakub kissed me.
“Okay, Mr. Unimpressed,” I said. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“I didn’t bring my suit,” Jakub said.
“I know.” I smiled and winked at him. “C’mon, let’s go.”
We left the Elkhorn Ranch and walked east toward the Little Missouri River.
“Now be careful,” I said as we got to the bank’s edge.
We sat down in the grass and scooted toward the steep edge. I pressed my feet into the soft dirt as I gripped some grass. I slid down the dusty bank and dirt clung to my legs.
“There’s a spot down farther that looks easier,” I said to Jakub. “I’ll walk in the water and meet you down there.”
BY THE TIME I reached him, Jakub was sunning himself on a small soft sandbar, his backpack and pile of clothes next to him. I let out a laugh.
“What?” He furrowed his brow.
“It’s just you’re nearly as white as I am, at least down there,” I said as I reached him, set down my bag, and began to strip.
I reached out my hand, grabbed his, and hauled Jakub onto his feet. We stepped into the water. A wave of goose bumps washed over my body.
“Not too cold, is it?” asked Jakub.
I shook my head.
“No, not too bad.”
“How deep does it get?” he asked as we waded into the middle of the small river.
“It doesn’t,” I said, sitting down. “We’ll have to float.”
Jakub sat down next to me. We looked downstream, our shoulders rubbing against each other. Muddy water washing against our backs. We pushed up and off the silty river bottom and began to float. Jakub held out his hand. I gripped it. We began to swirl gently downstream on our backs.
LATE THAT MORNING we sidled up to a long bar for lunch in Watford City. The small 1300-person town that I knew growing up had, by some estimates, now exploded to over 10,000 people. In the wheat fields and hills beyond Watford City, man-camps dotted the prairie—such military-style housing had cropped up to accommodate the booming population of oil-field workers coming from around the country and world. New gas stations, new grocery stories, new restaurants, houses, and hotels all sprouted up in town.
The lunch rush hadn’t showed up yet by the time Jakub and I arrived in the bar. There was one man nursing a beer at the end. When we sat, I glanced over at him and nodded.
“Don’t do that,” said a waitress with lowlights and highlights. Her name tag said Tammy.
“I’m sorry?” I asked.
“Don’t look at him,” she said behind a plastered-on smile. “He won’t like that. He was in the other week”—she turned her back against the man so he couldn’t watch her talk—“and picked up one of those high-top stools and threw it at another wildcatter.”
Jakub leaned on the bar.
“Should we get a booth?”
“No—but what’ll y’all have to drink?” Tammy asked in a chipper tone. “If you move, he’ll know I said something and then we’ll have trouble.”
Jakub and I took the large plastic menus from her, crinkled them open, saying we’d each have a water, and hid from the man at the end of the bar.
“How do you feel about this?” Jakub asked through gritted teeth.
“Like we’re at Disney World,” I said, sarcastically.
Jakub laughed.
Tammy shot over toward us with sweaty glasses of water.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?” asked Jakub as he put down his menu.
Tammy flung her hair. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the man slowly take a sip of his beer and drill his eyes into the back of Tammy’s head.
“Don’t laugh. Try to not talk as much as possible. Keep this simple and we’ll be okay.”
The man cleared his throat. Tammy turned and looked at him. She smiled.
“All done, Hank?”
“No. I want another,” Hank said and leaned back on his barstool. He cleared his throat, looked over at the television playing a ballgame, and rubbed his salt-and-pepper stubble hair.
Jakub placed his hand on my thigh. I swatted it away and quickly flicked my head.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “Not here.”
Tammy delivered Hank’s beer and came over to us.
“You boys know what you want?” she asked in a bright voice.
We did, and Jakub ordered each of us a beer. When they arrived, we slowly sipped from our frosted pints and stared straight ahead at the mirror wall lined with whiskey, vodka, and gin.
I put my feet up on the brass bar rail and rolled my ankles forward and back. I cupped my beer with both hands, watched the small bubbles rise as the beads of dew on the outside of the glass fell.
Hank drank his beer fast, let out a loud sigh, savoring his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, and slammed a fifty down.
“Keep the change, darlin’,” he yelled at Tammy, though she was only five feet away from him, rinsing off plates before sending them back through the small window, into the kitchen for dishwashing.
“Take care, Hank,” said Tammy. Her eyes stayed on him.
He pushed off from the bar and rocked back on his stool before turning to the side and sliding off and hopping down on the floor. He was wearing steel-toed boots and looked over at Jakub and me.
“Queers,” he grunted.
Jakub turned. I quickly gripped his thigh and slowly lifted my beer with my other hand.
Hank moseyed out the entryway.
SUDDENLY, AS IF out of thin air, Jakub’s burger and my chicken Thai salad arrived. Now we could take the full measure of Tammy. Her nails were lacquered in white, tipped with a strip of black. A bright silver cross hung down from her neck and, for better or worse, I glanced at her breasts. She wore a deep merlot lipstick that complemented her dusty eyeshadow and had large white teeth. Now, she came over to us and rested her elbows on the bar.
“How long have you two been together?”
“What?” asked Jakub, pulling the burger away from his first bite.
I sat back on my barstool.
“Oh, c’mon, I love the gays. My hubby and I moved here from Vegas, and we miss going to drag shows and finding glitter you know where”—she winked—“later at night.”
My eyes snapped wide.
Tammy looked between us.
“Oh, c’mon, sweethearts, it’s clear as crystal you’re queer as the day is long. I mean look at you”—she stuck her nose out at Jakub—“you must moisturize three times a day. And you,” she said to me, “your vocal fry makes any chain-smoking queen jealous.”
I poked at my salad and shook my head.
“You don’t have anything to worry about now that that crusty old fuck, Hank, is out of here. No one will come in until about five and you sweet things just give me a holler if you need anything.”
But Tammy didn’t give us a chance. After Jakub’s second chomp on his burger, as the juice slid down his chin, Tammy zipped back over to us.
“You know, my husband and I have been here for seven years. Well—he’s been here for eight and I stayed back home in Vegas to have our baby. Sam’s a bit older than me, has a grown son up here workin’ in the boom with him, drilling holes, shootin’ shit into the ground. I had the baby and waited a few months while Sam found us a house here in Watford. He and his son were livin’ in one of those man-camps outside of town—y’all see that on your way in?”
Jakub nodded as he held his burger by the side of his face. I grabbed my beer and slowly sipped as Tammy sped through her life history.
“Goddam kids here in Watford call my son a foreigner in first grade. ‘You’re not from here. We’ve been here for generations.’ Those little shits cluck like hens and little Henry comes home in tears some days during the school year.”
Jakub frowned.
Tammy stepped back, flung her hands wide, and continued her sermon.
“I mean, you all,” she said, pointing at us, “know what it’s like to be oppressed.”
Jakub and I looked at each other.
“This part of the world is oppression. We’re just trying to make a decent living, come back from that recession, save some for retirement. But then you got these old cusses that come in off the fracking rigs that get blitzed out of their mind, haven’t screwed anyone in months, raging and all testosterone flying around. The boss here says he’s going to start having us close at eleven p.m. Nothing good happens in this place after ten p.m. I told you what old Hank did the other week—well, that ain’t the worst of it. You don’t want to cross that parking lot out there after dark. It’s good you boys are here during the day.”
Jakub slowly nodded and feigned a smile.
“Dammit, Tammy,” Tammy said to herself. “I’m yapping your ears off and lettin’ your food get cold. You sweeties sit tight, I’m gettin’ y’all another round on me. Those beers must be warm and now your food’s cold. Ya doing okay with that burger, sweet pea?” she asked and leaned in toward Jakub.
Jakub nodded.
“Yes, it’s good, thank you.”
“He’s a real nice one, isn’t he,” she said,throwing a wink at me.
Jakub leaned back, giggled, and wrapped his arm around the back of my chair as Tammy grabbed our pint glasses, whipped her hair as she twirled away from us, and made her way back to the line of draft taps.
WE FINISHED OUR BEERS and paid our tab. Tammy came around from the back of the bar and flung open her arms.
Jakub raised his eyebrows.
“It’s just so nice to have some homos here instead of oil workers,” she squealed as she wrapped her arms around me.
I held my arms at my side as she squeezed me like an accordion.
“Thanks,” I choked out.
Jakub held up his hand as she let go of me and shimmied toward him.
“Poland. We don’t hug,” he said. “But thank you for a lovely time.”
We turned and exited the bar and held our hands above our brows to shield the sun. In the parking lot Hank, the man who was in the bar when we had arrived, rested against the back of his truck. I grabbed Jakub’s T-shirt and pulled him in the opposite direction.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “We’ll take our time and come back in a bit.”
“What—it’ll be fine,” said Jakub.
“It might not be,” I said. “And I don’t want to find out if it isn’t.”
We walked down the street, away from the bar, as trucks and tankers rumbled past. Ahead, at the one stoplight in town, a three-way intersection next to a gas station, semis snaked miles toward the horizon, hauling water, oil, and fracking waste to god knows where on god knows what time schedule. Every now and then a honk broke through the gunning of gears and gas, the sharp sting of diesel puffing out from the semis as they shifted and rolled down the highway. Jakub and I kept walking along the sidewalk, and I shoved my hands in my pockets as I looked out at the horizon.
EARLIER IN THE SUMMER, I had met my parents in a restaurant in Dickinson. I had let them know I was living there for the summer, that I was working, and that maybe we should have lunch.
We met in a 1950s throwback restaurant—an old gas pump was at the entrance, some tin Route 66 signs hung from the wall, a fishtail fender jutted from the wall.
As soon as we sat down, I asked the waitress for a gin and tonic. Dad looked over at me—it was barely afternoon.
The waitress said, “I’m afraid we don’t serve hard liquor here anymore, sir, due to the oil workers.”
I ordered a beer. I needed something to temper my anxiety.
The waitress placed three large plastic menus in front of us, smiled, and left us. Mom, Dad, and I snapped open our menus and hid our faces. I took in slow breaths. Four years into my exile, a stiff silence flowed between us.
We put in our orders—burgers for Dad and me, a taco salad for Mom.
When the waitress left, Mom began to cry. She ran a finger under her glasses to wipe her tears.
Months before, I had sent my parents a letter outlining my pain—my suicide attempt, my continued suicidal ideation, how my being gay wasn’t a big deal. How, if they went to counseling and learned to accept me for who I was, I would be ready to rebuild our relationship.
I never heard back.
When I told Tanya that I had sent them this letter, she said she had heard.
“Dad read it,” she said, “and then threw it away. He didn’t want Mom to see it.”
I didn’t know why my mother was crying in Dickinson.
But that’s not quite true. In the nearly four years since my parents learned I was gay, I had distanced myself from them. I had gone to therapy while I was a student at Hamline and learned that it was okay to set boundaries.
I texted them only on their birthdays.
Whenever one of their names flashed on my screen, my body lurched. I was late for my student loans. When was I going to be done with school. Why wasn’t I coming home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July. Merry Christmas. When was I getting a job. Happy birthday.
The texts were electric surges through my body.
WHEN MY BEER ARRIVED, I gulped, hard, wiping the foam from my upper lip. I ordered another one and Dad looked over at me.
We were the only people in the restaurant.
“Did you ever think, Mom, that there are other gay people here?”
“Keep your voice down,” Dad said.
“Did you really think the ‘right woman’ never came down the driveway?” I continued.
The waitress returned, set down my beer, feigned a smile, and quickly left.
I chugged my second beer hard, too, and shook my head. Dad and I both looked out the window at the traffic zipping by on I-94—him in his typical black Harley-Davidson shirt with Harley-Davidson hat, me in my polo and Chacos.
I shook my head.
Mom let out a sniffle and continued to dab at her eye.
WHEN OUR FOOD ARRIVED, Dad slid his credit card over to the waitress.
We ate in silence.
When the waitress returned, she told us to have a nice day.
WE LEFT THE RESTAURANT and walked into the parking lot. Heat rose from the pavement as we went to our separate cars.
“Bye,” I said.
Their car doors slammed shut.
It was my last time seeing my parents for years.
WEEKS AFTER my and Jakub’s trip to Watford, a group of his gay coworkers announced that they would be gathering at the columnar junipers.
Junipers grow in southwestern North Dakota because of sulfur. For centuries the region was used as a rendezvous point for Native Americans, explorers, and pioneers because, when struck by lightning, coal seams lit and smoldered, in some cases for centuries, creating the conditions for juniper trees to take root and shoot skyward.
Jakub’s coworkers picked an obscure Tuesday in July, one when they were sure the eight-site campground would be empty. Seven of them were going in the midafternoon to stake a claim to each site, and Jakub and I would come after his afternoon shift at Boots.
When I picked him up, he feigned a smile—it was a slow day and he had two sets of customers who said they wanted an American waiter. Jakub lowered his head and tried to look away. I reached out and held him by the shoulders.
“We don’t have to go camping. We can go another time. I know you’ve had a rough day.”
He shook his head and said no. He had taken the next day off and had been looking forward to this trip for weeks.
We went to his barracks, where he changed, washed his face and the back of his neck, and grabbed his backpack. We got into my car and barreled into the badlands.
As we snaked our way between the buttes, we rolled down the windows, waved at whoever we passed. Jakub propped his feet up on the dashboard.
“It’s so beautiful here,” he said, “but some people are mean.”
I took my eyes off the road and looked over at him.
“Not you,” he said, his arm hanging out the window, rolling up and down like a wave. “Just other people. And North Dakotans eat shitty food.”
We laughed.
BEFORE WE ARRIVED at the campground, I stopped the car at a patch of ponderosa pines.
“Let’s smell them,” I said, opening my door. Jakub asked me why we would want to smell trees. “C’mon, just give it a try.” I winked at him.
We bounded up a slope, dusted with crisp pine needles. We picked the same tree, its ruby, papery bark veined with black char.
“The trees need fire to scatter their seeds,” I said as I pressed my nose against the bark and inhaled. “Try it.”
Jakub pressed his nose against the tree and inhaled. He smiled. His eyes widened. “It smells like vanilla. Oh my god, that’s lovely.”
We smelled more trees—vanilla, coffee, burnt caramel. While we both pressed our noses to the last one, Jakub wrapped his arms around the trunk, wiggled his fingers back and forth, and wanted to hold hands. When we locked, he peeked around the trunk, pulled me in, and kissed me. He looked me up and down. “Now you smell like vanilla.”
WE ARRIVED AT the campsite to shirtless gays cackling. They were around a small, smoky fire, nestled next to one another in nylon camping chairs. It was around six o’clock and one of the guys, Roberto, gathered larger sticks to build up the fire. We were having brats for supper.
I hadn’t met the gays, as Jakub called them, not really—only in passing, or when Jakub would point one out on our drives out of Medora to climb buttes. This, now, was the most international gathering—much less the largest gathering of gays—I had ever been a part of in North Dakota. Jakub from Poland, Roberto from Italy, a pair of men from the Czech Republic, a man from Chile, one from Latvia, another from Spain, and another from Hungary.
As we stepped out of the car, a wave of catcalls rolled toward us. “Oh, look at the lovebirds!” the Spaniard, Carlos, squealed as he spun, wrapped his arms around himself, and made loud kissing and moaning noises. “You’re just in time for dinner.”
I looked at Jakub and flushed red.
“They’re harmless,” he whispered.
As the brats crackled, Roberto asked if anyone wanted his bun toasted. A roar rolled across the sage steppe.
“You can toast my buns anytime,” Carlos said as he lifted his leg up and smacked his ass.
I kept my eyes on the entrance to the campground and gave a hollow chuckle at each flirtatious joke. I couldn’t shake the notion of where we were.
“What’s wrong?” Jakub whispered.
I waved him off. “How about I go grab that wine we brought?” I asked for everyone else to hear.
“Oh, Jakub, you got a good man,” sassed Carlos. “You better not let him go—he drives you around, you ‘make your art together,’ he brings you wine. I need a man like him.”
I RETURNED FROM the car with two bottles of Côte du Rhône in one hand and blue Solo cups in the other.
“We’re glad to know you’re a liberal,” Roberto said, pointing at the cups. “Thank god you didn’t bring those red ones.”
As twilight sank across the stippled scoria buttes, the nine of us sat in a circle around the fire. The sky fired fuchsia, then orange, then husk and lavender before simmering into a sweep of stars.
LATER, I HEARD SOMETHING. I bolted up from my chair. Jakub’s hand pressed on my thigh.
“Someone’s coming,” I said.
Earlier in the evening some of the boys had strapped on high heels, others had smeared their faces in foundation and rouge, doing a type of improv, rugged Wild West drag show.
Headlights appeared down the road.
“Put on your shirts,” I said.
Roberto hurled packages of facial wipes around the circle, the boys scrubbed as if to rub their skin off their faces.
It was a truck—a large truck, rumbling toward the campground.
I felt my jeans tighten as Jakub’s hand gripped me harder.
“It’ll be fine,” I said over and over. “If it comes to it, I’ll talk to whoever it is.”
“Carlos,” whispered Roberto, “take off your fucking heels, you idiot.”
Carlos whipped off his shoes and flung them under a sage bush.
The truck passed the first few campsites. The tents some of the boys set up were flooded with light. I breathed deeply. The headlights circled the top of the hill.
“Jakub, fill everyone’s glass with wine, try to look natural,” I said as I kicked at the ground, crammed my hands into my pockets, looked down at my feet. The truck’s light now climbed my legs.
When the truck got to me, it stopped. I could see a gun rack in the back. The driver, a middle-aged man, leaned over and rolled down his window.
“Howdy,” said a booming voice from the dark cave of the truck.
“How’s it going?” I stiffened and asked, in my best Dakota twang, walking to the window, resting my forearms on the cold door.
Only one rifle. But I couldn’t see if there was anything on his hip or in the glove box. The cab smelled like cigarettes and bourbon.
“You boys having a good night?”
“Sure are. Just out here for a bachelor party. Visiting from Center.”
“Center? No shit! I used to go to Center.” The man let go of the wheel, shifted toward me, his arm on the back of his bench seat. Tufts of silver hair shot out from his cowboy hat. He had a packet of cigarettes in his breast pocket. I couldn’t tell if he reached for something as he shifted to look at me. “Lot of big-ass girls I used to date in Center back in the day.”
“Oh, you mean my grandmas?” I said. The man got the joke and roared. His gut bounced as he smacked the southwestern woven blanket that draped across the bench seats. I chuckled and rubbed my finger back and forth on the truck door. I glanced at his side mirror and saw the gaggle of gays slowly sipping wine from their Solo cups. The fire snapped.
“Bachelor party, huh? Sounds fun.” He turned, hoisted his arm across the seat, and looked out his back window. He grunted as he twisted to look back at the boys. His shirt stretched and I could get a better look at him. In his other breast pocket was a pack of snus; a buck knife glinted along his leather belt. There were sweat stains under his arm. Now I caught the sharp, sweet smell of onions.
“We’re having a good time,” I said, as I slowly looked back at the boys.
“Hey,” said the man as he pointed at the group, “why’s that one in those short shorts?”
“Oh, him,” I said, pointing at Carlos, who took a deep pull from his Solo cup. “Well, he’s the bachelor. We stole him away from his fiancée, and well, you won’t believe this”—I looked back at the man, leaned in, and lowered my voice—“he and his bride-to-be were, well, you know. . . .” I nodded.
“No shit,” snorted the man.
“And here comes our happy crew and breaks up the fun! By the time we were on the interstate, he realized he put on her damn shorts!” I walloped the site of the rusty truck door.
I looked back at the boys, who pretended to laugh. The man picked up a bourbon bottle from beneath the bench seat.
“Well, shit,” he said as he uncorked the bottle and took a pull. “She must have been one of those big girls for him to wear those—and, shit, look—” the man yelled, his finger now pointing at Carlos as he handed me the bottle. “He still has her lipstick on!”
“No shit!” I laughed as I took a pretend-pull from the bottle.
Everyone now glared at Carlos.
“Well, I don’t mean to stop the fun. Congratulations!” shouted the man as he waved at Carlos.
I handed the bottle back.
“Take care,” said the man as he rolled up his window.
“You, too,” I said.
The truck began to pull away and bucked down the gravel road. I watched those red taillights until I couldn’t see them anymore. I let out a deep breath.
When I returned to the fire circle, only the wood crackled. I sat down next to Jakub, who filled my cup with more wine. We all sat there, looked into the fire, sipping, staring. The flames shivered. In a trance, we all sat silently as, every now and then, we heard a pheasant cluck. A coyote cried in the distance.
4.
AS THE SWELTERING HEAT of July turned to the humid nights of August, I refused to acknowledge that Jakub would be leaving soon for Poland and I would be going to Iowa, back to school for another graduate degree. A quiet sadness entered our relationship—on our hikes Jakub painted less, I wrote fewer words. He’d smear his burnt sienna, yellow ocher, and indigo across his palette. If we sat apart, I’d sometimes hear him tap the blunt end of his brush against the hard back of his canvas. Sometimes we’d sit atop a butte and hold hands, the smell of sage the only thing between us.
A person is laid bare in the badlands. Eons of erosion carve the world down into its basic element: dust. There is no hiding here, even from ourselves.
When we’d watch the sun sizzle and slide below the horizon, I’d often weep, my face turning into Jakub’s shoulder, him staring ahead, his hand around my head. He’d press his mouth toward my ear and make a gentle swishing sound like the switchgrass. I’d heave, grip his knee, and spread out farther on the ground, turning my head toward the setting sun, rest my head in his lap, and begin to rub his leg. For a while, all we did was breathe and watch the light lower.
NEARLY IN MID-AUGUST, Jakub and I drove in silence from Medora to the Bismarck airport, past the shelterbelts bookending gleaming fields of wheat, the lemon-colored fields of canola. Jakub kept looking out his window, south toward the dusky buttes. The only time he laughed or made any noise at all on our way to the airport was when we passed Salem Sue, the “world’s largest Holstein cow,” atop the one hill west of New Salem, a small town of two gas stations just off the interstate. We held hands.
Eventually, in Mandan, we passed a waterslide park and heard children shrieking as they shot water into the air as they sped down the slides, before crossing the wide Missouri River. Pontoons parked on coffee-colored sandbars. Seagulls flew near people in swimsuits picnicking along the riverbank. We crossed into the cottonwood river bottom of Bismarck and passed the Riverwood Golf Course.
“When I was little, I thought this looked like a perfect place for dinosaurs,” I said.
Jakub only squeezed my hand.
We hit a red light. I tapped my fingers across the steering wheel. Tears welled in my eyes.
We passed Kirkwood Mall, and I mentioned that there must have been a sale at the sporting goods store because of all the cars. Then we turned south and passed the blocky Wachter Middle School and ranch-style houses.
“My cousins went to school there,” I said.
Jakub kept looking out his window.
We curved past the last stoplight in town, turned left, and drove into the small, single-terminal airport.
Jakub kissed me quickly in the car before we stepped out. I popped the trunk. He gathered his bags.
I had a coal burning in my throat—couldn’t catch my voice—and turned my head to the side.
“I have something for you,” he said.
He pulled out a mason jar and cradled it in front of his chest.
I looked at it and smiled. Small sprigs of silver sage filled the jar.
“I thought you’d like it,” he said, blinking back tears.
I nodded my head quickly. My lip quivered.
We hugged. My hands gripped the back of his shirt.
We let go of each other.
Jakub picked up his bags.
I watched him walk through the automatic doors.
He didn’t look back at me.
I walked around to the driver’s side, slid into my seat, blasted out of the loading zone of the airport, and barreled south out of Bismarck, driving to the bluff high above the Missouri at the University of Mary. I parked my car, walked around to the back of the bluff, sat, and grabbed a bunch of stiff prairie grass. I clenched it. The brown buttes across the river were in faded relief.
I opened the jar, held it to my nose, and inhaled the sweet smell of sage.