Remote, Alaska

Jebediah Turnip returned to his motel room with weary steps upon the frozen Alaskan tundra, his muscles so tired they buzzed and twinged. His arms was sore and tuckered, and his legs ached like sinners on a Sunday. The grass crackled like frozen fingers underfoot until he stepped onto the cold concrete of the motel. His boots left moist prints until he got to the room he shared with another roughneck. He smiled sloe in the lips at the sight of his roommate Buck being somewheres else. Buck musta dallied along the route from the rig where they both labored. But then Jeb frowned at what he did see:
The motel room was a pigsty. And not a nice pig neither. Like a Berkshire pigsty.
Scowling foul, Jeb put his hands on his waist.
Buck’s clothes was spread all over the floor like fallen frogs. The motel room stank of Buck’s dirty socks. A pair of filthy briefs done got tossed willy-nilly to one side and landed on Jeb’s Bible — the Holy Bible, the word of the Lord on high, and it had done been got covered in Buck’s groin hair and grits-and-gravy grease.
None of that was a surprise for those who look with their eyes, mind you, for Jeb been noticing Buck and his slovenly ways since they shacked together in this motel room last week. He chalked it up to Buck growing up in a trailer park. Jeb’s paw said them trailer parks was dens of sin and inequity.
Buck and Jeb done come to Remote, Alaska, to work on a oil rig. They ain’t know each other when they arrived, but they came from the same region on the same bus, so they ended up in the same motel room together. Remote, Alaska, ain’t have enough motel rooms for all the roughnecks who came to work here. The oil rigs right outside of town needed working men, but the town never built no boarding houses or long-term dormitories for the workers.
All there was was this one mud-slush woodpot motel without enough rooms for all the workers. So they gots to double up. Some folks was even more cramped than that, so Jeb was told to count his blessings by Mr. Razinelli, the rig manager.
The bathroom was tiny, barely big enough for the both of them to stand in there. The linoleum was chipped and cracked and simply incomplete in part near the ceiling, like the tiling man done run outta tiles and never wanted to come back to this desolate spot of tundra. It smelled like a summer swimming hole after it dries up so it’s just a muddy patch of dead frogs. The bathtub was tiny too and green with fungus and mushrooms growing from the drain, but they managed to both get in there at the same time, as snug as apples in a pie.
From Jeb the Farmboy