Prairie Vision

We’ll herd the loved ones from the tents to a low fence to present a live feed of the mine courtesy of Prairie Vision, the TV station I own or, rather, used to own. I had to step aside due to a perceived conflict of interest when I got elected governor. My adviser Eddie held that some suspicious SOBs might say a state politician shouldn’t also run the only regional news outlet. Nuts to Eddie. Luckily, the good folks at Prairie Vision (our tagline: “Prairie Vision: See Further”) still do what I like. Eddie’s always trying to smooth my edges, though what he doesn’t understand is that people want a hard-liner. My appeal lies in my sure- footed climb from nothing to a pile of money. That’s what put me in the governor’s mansion, despite my brown skin, my Hispanic last name. The mighty dollar matters more than anything, and that’s the bottom line. It’s fair, somehow. Pure. My brother, Manny, never understood, and I wish he would have. Things could have turned out differently for him.

As my wife, Jennie, and I and Eddie and a few other staffers pull up in our bulletproof SUV, I see the rescuers have slapped up the state flag on a bluff behind us. I’m in navy because it tones down the redness in my cheeks. Eddie said to wear black for gravitas, but on my big day I don’t figure to look like a goddamned undertaker, like I should be pass- ing out mints to mourners blubbering on each other’s coat sleeves. I’ll grasp this tragedy by the short hairs. I’m wearing cowboy boots to show I’m like everybody. Not my ostrich or lizard, but plain cow leather, the pair I had Eddie wear for a while so the toes turn up. You can’t fake that sort of authenticity.

Jennie’s in something boring, a shell-pink suit cut high so it de-emphasizes her cans, and flats as a nod to the rocky terrain. She looks womanly, maternal even. You’d never guess she used to be a ring girl for a pro–wrestling league down in Wichita.

I’m delighted at how sexy everything is. The rescuers hustle around in hard hats like little penis caps. The dirt around the hole is in shades of flesh: red, beige, and tan. The hole itself gapes wide for the rescue capsule. Even folks who don’t care for human drama and the possibility of live televised death enjoy pornography.

I take my place for the photo op in front of the state flag, which features a field being plowed by a team of oxen. Our state motto flaps above it: Ad astra per aspera, to the stars through difficulties, which I wanted to change to Ad terra per aspera, to the earth through difficul- ties, but Eddie said no one would get it. I said, Hell yes, they would. They could Google it like I did.

I don a gold hard hat. Everyone else’s is yellow. Strapped at my side is my pistol, a Desert Eagle with a special pavé inlay across the barrel that reads “The Guv.” It was gifted to me by some fellows in a citizens’ rights organization, in appreciation of recent loosenings of open-carry restrictions I’d shepherded through the state senate. Sweat pours down my calves into my cowboy boots. It won’t show. My face is hot in the sun. I don’t squint.

I stop by the loved ones’ tents. There was a memo about grooming, and I’m glad to see salon staff has buffed and polished, hosed down and trimmed the loved ones. The plan is to invite three of the most photo- genic folks for each miner past the barricades, right up to the mouth, where the joyous reunion will be documented by Prairie Vision. Why this insistence on excellent personal appearance? Pride. A bunch of the miners are Latino. If they look great, that can only help me. I want the broadcast to set coastal elites back on their heels, show that we Midwest- erners are just like them, albeit slightly more slow tongued and doughy. My state has gotten some bad press lately, what with the school shooting and then the revelation of the diary of the young killer with his piss-poor grammar and punctuation. Some see it as an indictment of my tiny little cuts to K–12, but that savings allowed us to repave I-70 from Topeka to KC. A smoother ride you’ll never find, even if you aren’t cruising in a big SUV like I am. That brought out the grumps too. Why, they moaned, does the governor have a whole fleet of SUVs? Shouldn’t he pick something more environmentally friendly? So I added to the stable a truly massive pickup with biodiesel, which gets 42 MPG on our delightfully fresh highways.

Now I pose with my foot on the lip of the hole. I tell myself, “Hope, seriousness, dignity.” The mine smell drifts up—wet limestone and dirt.

It rocks me forward on my toes. Good vibes from that pit, like I’ll find what I want.

I always reckoned those trapped miners were alive. Call it a sixth sense for the soil. After my years underground, I’ve got a direct line through the roots of the tallgrass and sunflowers that dot the prairie. Through the rich glacial soil deposits that make us such an ag powerhouse, down into the bedrock.

I figured that folks would tune in. Though I look like a young man, I was already in my teens when Baby Jessica tumbled down that old well in Texas. The flashing ambulance lights and strained voices of the news crews wondering if the little darling would live through her ordeal: that slow pageantry left its mark. Never did I think I’d have the opportunity to administer my own tragedy. Administer in the sense of supervise. I had nothing to do with getting those boys stuck down there.

The mine is mine, too. Did I mention that? I invested in top-of- the-line safety and security. Don’t know what happened. It’s enough to make a lesser man cry sabotage, start wondering about recent gang activity in the area. La Cuchilla out of Wichita, specifically.

That mine makes up a not insubstantial part of my fortune. After I bought it, I set to work looking for a use for its halite. Salt is cheap. But then I considered how this was the only mine of its kind in the whole country, and how the salt was a beautiful mint green due to chromium impurities, very distinctive, and thus, Flint Hills Artisanal Salt was born. Chefs love fancy shit, so I sell it to them for twenty times the price of your standard table salt. The previous mine owners were Hollywood dudes who used it for the storage of classic film reels, rent- ing it out to studios at a very tidy price per square foot. I kept that up when I bought them out. Apparently, while salt eats away the miners’ throats, it has the opposite effect on film, preserving it in perpetuity. My trapped men had been digging out further passages because the cur- rent ones were full of Shirley Temple and Rin Tin Tin, Myrna Loy and William Powell. Funny to think of all those stars under a wheat field.

The Prairie Vision cameras zoom in on the spot where miners’ faces will emerge. Guess how many people will watch this broadcast? About fifteen billion worldwide. Take off just one of those zeros, and that’s about how many dollars I’ve got. More than a couple. But what matters are all those eyes on the poor miners’ every move, the first stumble toward the light. I would gladly give each viewer a shiny quarter to encourage him to watch. That goes for foreigners too. I know they like a show just as much as Kansans do, or Arkansans.

Of course, I couldn’t put my hands on so many quarters at the moment because, just between you and me, I’ve got this funny feeling the economy is just about shot, if the state budget is any indication. That’s why I’ve been hiding heavy gold bars all around the governor’s mansion, just in case Jennie and I and the kids need to am-scray pronto some evening. I made a treasure map of what’s kept where, and the great side benefit of having the gold on-site is that I can test the honesty of my staff. They know I watch them.

“Eddie!” I say, jerking my foot back from the edge of the shaft, triggering a small cave-in. He scrabbles to my side, temples sweating. “Eddie,” I say, “I want to pull the miners the last few feet myself, so that they land in my arms.”

“The issue with that, Governor,” Eddie says, “is the rescue pod weighs two tons.” He raises his Muppet-like hands helplessly.

“Perhaps if Jennie helped, if we enlisted Bryce and Terry,” I say, flexing so the suit sleeves pull taut. Bryce and Terry are my two strong children, absent today, but just a phone call away at their peewee foot- ball scrimmage.

“The engineers say we have to use the winch,” Eddie says. “We don’t want to drop the miners back down the shaft.”

I accept this with good grace. I’ll be right on the scene, the second person each miner will embrace after their preselected loved one. First would be better, but I’m reasonable. Maybe one miner will choose to fall into my arms instead of his mother’s or girlfriend’s. I suggest to Eddie that a suggestion could be whispered through the underground cable, into the miners’ ears. He winks.

The story of the miners is my story, really. Let me take you back to a deprived childhood, for we were poor as shit. I never knew my father, the rat, whose only contribution to my life besides some chromosomes was my last name, which has come in handy only twice: one time as a teen, and then in election season, when the name got me lots of Latino votes despite my policies. It cut both ways, of course, losing me ground with the white racists, but then my good looks factored in too, so it turned into a wash or maybe a slight net positive. I was not unpalatable to many voters. Not quite a majority, but many. “They love you,” my mother had roared into my chest the night I won.

My mother, bless her, did her best with me and Manny. She had me when she was just fifteen, so it was inevitable that we’d slide into the Airliner Motel on Pacific Avenue, for twenty bucks a week in advance, settling onto yellow mattresses beside a yowling air conditioner that leaked gray water on the brown carpet. The walls were nicotine brown from generations of cigarette smokers, and Ma did her part to help darken them, as did I, once I turned twelve.

She worked every night at an establishment next door called Pirate Booty, a buccaneer-themed titty bar. It had neon, too, a sign with a parrot who nudged open a treasure chest with his beak. Inside the chest were long, thin ladies’ legs that kicked up piles of gold coins. Manny and I would sit on the curb by a dumpster and watch the sign for hours. Money and women, and women and money. Ma claimed she was just a waitress, but she came home with crumpled wads of ones. One night she was crying, a bruise ringing her eye. When she saw me, she brought her hand to my face and told me that the world was better elsewhere, that I should always remember I had every right to the best things in life, and that there was no shame in going after them.

Manny never made it out of the underclass like I did. He was too thoughtful, too stubborn to try and learn the ropes. I tried to tempt him away from his low-paying job, but he never answered my calls or voice mails. A proud fellow. You think looks don’t matter? Examine a photo of me and Manny at eighteen and sixteen. Me with my strong nose, jutting cheekbones, stature, and Manny with his soft chin, round cheeks, petulant lips. The lips of a spoiled boy who was unwilling to compromise, to work within an unjust system to get ahead. And my lips: thin, sure, manly. Our destinies etched on our faces.

Everyone waits so eagerly for the mine capsule to descend. The rescuers pace with tools in their fists, in search of something to fix. My fear is that in their zeal they’ll adjust something they shouldn’t, and the capsule will careen down the shaft. Jennie sighs and shifts, and Eddie rushes to bring her a chair. He holds her hand a moment longer than he needs to. She pats his thigh.

Now the first miner rises up in the pod. There’s a long moment when the men with tools wrangle open the shining tube. The door swings open, achingly slowly. The miner’s child weeps. And there he is, curled in the arms of paramedics. Eddie, Jennie, and I spent last night poring over pictures of the miners, picking who’d ascend first. We settled on the handsomest, and the crying kid is gravy. His wife removes his hard hat so that the cameras can more easily capture the charming features. His hair is limp, but his jaw is powerful. The report- ers explain that his name is Raul Bustos and he misses his mother’s chorizo empanadas. I grasp his hand and whisper, “Write a book fast, if you want my advice.”

He stares past me. He wilts back onto the stretcher. I grab his limp arm and wave it at the crowd. They cheer. I don’t want to let go, but the paramedics make me.

The other time my last name helped: One morning when I was fifteen, while Manny and I were taking turns exploding out of the dumpster at the Airliner, trying to scare each other, a pickup truck with a bunch of young men in the back pulled up. They looked like us. The driver asked my name and if I wanted to work, and I said yes and gave him my name, first and last, and a good thing, too, because that last name got me on the truck. Manny tried to climb on, but the driver told him no; he was too small. Manny’s top lip rose to his nose, a prelude to tears. “Don’t you cry, Manny,” I shouted. I settled into the bed, refused to look back as the truck pulled away. The guys all were talking Spanish. I just smiled and nodded.

We headed south on back roads for twenty minutes or so, through fields of milo and wheat and bare prairie, until we arrived at the salt mine. I got loaded up: a hard hat with a light and battery pack, a self- rescuer. The conditions were tough. You’d expect it to be cool inside, but no. The air was hot, and so dry and salty that it took only a week before I was coughing up blood. Some of the miners who had been at it longer had pink teeth from the blood in their throats. I got paid forty dollars weekly, tax free, but five dollars went straight to La Cuchilla for protection. The men of the gang impressed me greatly, even as I hated them. They wore alligator boots with the snouts still on, leather pants, and shiny shirts richly patterned with designs of gold nuggets, chains, and jasmine flowers. They had extravagant tattoos— crowns, crossed spears, names in Gothic script, and eagles with snakes in their beaks.

One of the miners taught me a song about them, and we’d sing it to each other. I got him to do a rough translation:

Beware La Cuchilla, 
They’ll come for you! 
Beware La Cuchilla, 
They’re after you!

They come with their guns, 
They cut with their knives, 
They slash with their machetes, 
And they want to start a fight.

Beware La Cuchilla,
They like to watch you sleep. 
Don’t go out at night,
Lest La Cuchilla string you up!

Manny started at the mine just as soon as he was tall enough. What we liked to do best on our days off was wallow in puddles in the motel parking lot. When we saw clouds forming, we laid ourselves in dips in the pavement, telling stories about our future while the rain beat our faces. We knew so little of the world. Manny wanted to be very tall and not to have to do any more bending or digging. He had knobby knees that popped out of joint if he wasn’t careful. I didn’t mind bending or digging, so long as I could have a fine pair of alligator boots. Now I have a closet full, with snouts of all sizes and peering glass eyes. I can’t wear them in public, more’s the pity, because the animal-rights fuckers would give me hell. Manny got his wish too. Half of it, anyway.

The family of the second miner, Matt Bartow, describes him as “a person who loves parties.” Jubilant, he raises a cheer from deep in the hole. He has brought us presents. Can you guess what? A bucket of salt from the mine. These chunks are treated with great reverence for the cameras. The rescuers hold them in eager fingers, hopeful that the cameras might pan up to their looks of awe, such handsome faces behind the anonymity of the jumpsuits. Matt hands me a rock, and I kiss it and hoist it above my head to applause.

My mother didn’t like her boys working at the mine, but we didn’t like her working at Pirate Booty, either, so that was square. I kept in mind her words of advice about how I didn’t deserve any less than anyone else, and it wasn’t long before I confronted my mine bosses with evidence of their labor violations—safety procedures and hiring practices. And of course tax stuff. I stuck it to them, with Manny to back me up, though neither of us cut a very imposing figure, at eighteen or sixteen. I explained that I’d only feel content if they gave me a portion of their own wages each week. I enjoyed the hundred-fold salary increase for several months before I sensed that their patience with me was stretched so thin they might kill me. Then, I turned them in, and the grateful mine owners, whose hands had never touched raw halite, who had never felt the burn of mineral salt in their nostrils, whose blood was not in the mine, as mine was, gave me even more money.

The third miner, Juan Frivola, falls down as the pod door swings wide. His face, which Prairie Vision’s high-definition cameras fix upon, is pale as a lizard’s belly. Two strong men in their jumpsuits hoist him up and bundle him into the ambulance. There is a red smear on one man’s shoulder where Juan’s mouth was. I stab at my own shoulder to show him the imperfection, but Eddie is confused and goes after me with a handkerchief, intent to rub away the phantom stain.

All these Latino names might get you wondering about labor practices. I know that game. The papers are all in order, all impeccable. Tattling on the mine bosses got my amigos deported, which I felt awful about, so hiring my countrymen now is a little way to even the score, God help me. There’s a lot of atoning to do.

The miners’ crisis, I must admit, arrived at just the right time. Despite all the things I’ve got going for me—my wealth, my kindness, my success in the recent election (in which I received 48.6 percent of the vote)—no one likes me. My economic policies (big old tax cuts, aggressive privatization so the free market can do its good work) have been described as “bizarrely inhumane” and “downright wrongheaded.” I got booed at a college basketball game. My popularity rating was in the crapper, and suddenly the miners were buried, so my thought was, why not bring them both up at once? The initial reports gave the men a slim chance to live. There were twenty-two of them stuck down there, and if they had made it to the safety room, a big if, they would have six square feet of living space per person. Which is not enough. I measured it out in my office. Did you know that’s only 2.4 feet each way?

I gave rousing speeches about the miners’ inevitable survival, about our duty to these poor trapped men. And never once did I doubt. True leadership, I’ll say in the book about myself that I’m itching to start writing, is this: surety in one’s rightness, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. My approval rating is at 54 percent now, up twenty points from just a month ago. Already I’ve got my fingers crossed for another disaster. Not another mining one. A minor one.

But wait, I still haven’t told you the whole truth and nothing but. It’s important to get this recorded accurately, because someday my term will end and my second autobiography must be written. I have jotted several titles already in a calfskin notepad I keep close to my heart: Up from the Underground: The Adventure of an Uncommon Common Man; This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Mine Land: A Poor Lad’s Improbable Journey to Places of Power and Privilege; Salt of the Earth, Salt from the Earth; From the Mines to the Stars, through Difficulties.

The whole truth is that I keep a small box of Flint Hills Artisanal Salt in the drawer of my nightstand, and sometimes when my wife is asleep I flick my tongue through it, swallow it down with scotch. I remember my brother. And, yes, I cry. Manny isn’t with us now, nor will he be. It pains me to say more.

Another thing I should probably mention, just to be thorough: The first thing I did after my election was deputize some old pals, call them “volunteer lawmen,” give them shiny gold badges (they already had guns), and have them track down La Cuchilla. Preying on such weak people, miners and the like, all blue collar, made the gang, in turn, vulnerable, without resources. Middle-aged, slow, and alone, without anyone to miss them. The noses of their alligator boots were so worn the stuffing showed. Today they are still housed in a prison in a secret location. They are well treated.

After the inauguration, I moved my mother to a big new house in a neighborhood called Mariposa Heights. She’s having the time of her life gardening in minishorts and sipping daiquiris on the patio. The neighbors, doctors and lawyers, know not to complain about her, if they want internships for their sons and daughters.

Now the miners emerge regularly, like goods on an assembly line. Every time the pod door releases, the crowd oohs and aahs for the unearthed man. My back, touchy from so much pickaxing in my youth, seizes as I stoop over the stretchers. I no longer want to scoop up each man and carry him to the ambulance, like a groom sweeping his bride across a threshold. I settle for some hearty shoulder pats.

Bent over the man the earth has coughed up most recently, I stiffen. He’s got Manny’s face. Those eyebrows that nearly meet above his nose, his big dark eyes, his full lips—all there before me.

I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but, yes, on some level I had hoped that perhaps, somehow, Manny might, for he was after all lost underground—but wait. The man turns his head, and the illusion—for it’s a dumb illusion, a trick of the fading light—is dispelled. A birthmark the shape and hairiness of a tarantula disfigures the miner’s cheek. This man is no Manny. I want to kick him, but that wouldn’t be proper, so instead I bite my cheek until my teeth meet. I swallow before baring my teeth for the cameras.

I lied about La Cuchilla being treated well. After they were captured, some alive, some dead, some somewhat alive, I wanted to hold a press conference about what I had done to them, to release pictures of the disgraced gang members, their faces spat on, their heads stomped by the volunteer deputies’ boots. But those are not the images that should be shown, Eddie reminded me. And he’s right, of course. More photos of children with robots they made despite cuts to education, more farmers looking pleased with themselves, riding high on tractors in fields of waving golden wheat. Fewer mangled noses, mouths blubber- ing for mercy, though Kansas citizens are tough on crime, and most, I feel sure, would want to see the gang members’ skulls cracked, the silk shirts stained beyond the skills of even the most adept dry cleaner. Nearly all of us are doomed to lives that are just foregone conclusions because of the circumstances of our births. That’s why I’m a fan of small government.

Even today, down in the holding area where we keep La Cuchilla, a volunteer deputy with a brass badge flays the skin from the forearms of several gang members, telling them the pain will stop when they reveal what became of Manny. He wasn’t found in the mine; he never emerged from it. He must be somewhere, and La Cuchilla must tell me. If not, the skin will be allowed to heal and then stripped again. I think he’s still in the mine.

The miner Bernardo Parraguez is next up, a bald sixty-two-year-old with hungry eyes. His body is vole-like. I don’t like his look. There is a nice moment when he meets a daughter—illegitimate—for the first time. His wife stands to one side scowling at her husband and his toddler. Jennie goes and has a word with the wife, who puts on a smile even scarier than her grimace. The sweet scene makes me eager to see Manny again. How will he have changed? What stories will he have to share?

I should explain about my last night in the mines. You’ll probably ask yourself, because of course you’ve read my first autobiography, A Good Man for the Job, “Why hasn’t he told us what it was like for him down in the mines? He knows better than anybody what the trapped miners are thinking!” It hurts me to discuss it, because I lost my brother in the mine.

One night, long after Manny and I had quit our jobs there, he and I returned to meet with the owners, in from California, after the miners had left. A large payment was due, and I was eager to see whether the mine had kept up safety standards. Manny had been shaking before the meeting, and already I regretted asking him to join me. We’d both been drinking. The mine owners grumbled loudly about the price of my silence, which, I will admit, was steep, but them’s the breaks. It was what I believed the market could bear. They seemed nervous, scuffing their feet and dimming and brightening their head lamps. Soon we found out why: A La Cuchilla assassin lurked in a side tunnel. He sneaked up behind us while the fat owner told a story about a goat who wouldn’t stop eating until his stomach exploded. I was so busy figuring out the hidden message (I believe it had to do with greed) that I didn’t hear the goon. He clouted Manny on the head and would have done the same to me had I not fled. A purely logical interpretation is that Manny was killed in the mine. I don’t believe that. I watched the mine carefully for days, and no body was removed. He never came to me, which he would have done if he’d crept out through a hidden exit.

The world was too bad for Manny, too loud and venal and difficult. This is my world, not his. At the Airliner, he’d crawl into a corner far from the TV, pull a bedspread over his head, stuff his fingers in his ears, and rock. I think he found an even quieter hiding spot than that.

Hours pass, and just as the sun is dipping toward the flat horizon, shad- ing the whole sky orange, the last miner ascends. My entire staff and most of the reporters have sunken into chairs, though I still pace and rally the crowd that, too, has shrunk as loved ones follow their miners to medical facilities. Now the scene is mine. It’s as if I am giving birth, as if I myself am the mine, and the miners are emerging in that penis- shaped pod from my womb. A confusing image, but powerful.

Poor Domingo Chavez. All the reporters know of him is that he takes medicine for hypertension, “according to his ex-wife.” He arrives vomiting, his face bulging and his eyes screwed shut. Watery gray bile has sprayed his shirt, and everyone backs up, except for me.

I kiss him on both cheeks, my own sore from smiles. I whisper in his ear: “Where is Manny? He’s still down there, yes? The tunnel system of La Cuchilla is even more complicated than I thought, right?” His head shakes—maybe a nod. The ambulance drivers wheel him away. I can’t object too strenuously because the cameras are on me, and Eddie is watching from a lawn chair. Bear in mind your gravitas, his expression indicates. His attitude strikes me as a bit too free.

Just as the ambulance door is about to close, I hear a weak cry from the miner, and I rush toward him. “Uno más!” he says. “Hay otro, hay otro.” His eyes roll sideways; his body heaves and stills.

Of course there’s another. All this time I’ve known it.

Eddie tugs my coat, but I bat him away. Jennie watches with grim reserve, as if at last I’m justifying her concerns. They sit together, Jennie’s hand in Eddie’s blazer pocket. Eddie smiles strangely. The last few loved ones board the shuttle buses, mouths agape, teeth agleam. As I reach the hole, the rescuers stumble over each other, no longer sure of the script. The cameras roll on. I hop in the capsule and command the men to send me down. I’ll grab my brother by the scruff of his neck to haul him up to the light. Everyone will see what I’ve done for him. What great TV we’ll make. The shaft is too dark. I’m not afraid. A gust from below fills my pants. I touch the grip of my pistol. I raise my hand to wave, but nobody’s watching.

Read more from Issue 15.2.