When I heard them drive off I lit the gas, went out in the kitchen and made coffee, and made her drink some. Then I put her to bed. I spread a blanket over her. I found a blanket for myself, wrapped it around me, and camped in a chair. When the sun came up, she was asleep, but I was still sitting there, trying to figure where I was at with my life, if any.
21
THE SUNDAY AFTER THAT I slept late, as spring means work on a fruit ranch, and I’d had a hard week. Around ten o’clock, when I strolled over from breakfast, church bells were ringing somewhere, and I had a wild notion to sing in the choir because I felt like it, and at last have peace, even if it hadn’t much glory attached to it, or much pay. It had been a week since I’d seen her, and it seemed that maybe I never would again, and that I could forget about her, and everything she’d mixed me up with, and especially Branch. It wasn’t all hope, either. One night, on a trip to Whittier with the light truck, I had taken a sneak to have a peep at the well. It was just like it had been, with the rotary table going around in the middle, a driller camped at the drum, roughnecks standing around, and Dasso off to one side, giving orders. It looked like she didn’t need me, and I might be out. That suited me fine. Because coming home that Monday morning, with her at the wheel saying nothing and the gray damp drifting in from the ocean, I’d had a bad time. It had hit me all in a lump as it hadn’t before, that it was all very well to talk mean to her, and maybe she was cold and maybe she was wild and maybe she was bad, but it took two to cook up the kind of cross we had tried to get away with, and here at last I tumbled that one of them might be me. But a week had gone by, and I’d heard nothing from her, and there was no getting around it, I might be out.
This Sunday morning, though, I had hardly gone in the bunkhouse before there came a rap on a horn, fast, sharp, and nervous. I went out, and there she was, in the car. I walked over and said: “Well stranger, where you been keeping yourself?”
“Jack, I’ve been keeping myself a good many places, and I’m fine, and it’s a beautiful day, but—will you please get in so we can talk as we go and not take the whole day about it?”
“We in a hurry or something?”
“All hell has broken loose.”
“... What kind of hell?”
“At the well! Will you get in, so we can go?”
I got in, and we whizzed to 101, and were leveled off for Long Beach before she went on: “It’s the police, and what they’re threatening to do to us if we don’t take care of the mud. It’s—all over the place and you’ll have to do something about it.”
“All over what place?”
“The street!”
“If I’m to help, say something.”
“When they pump it the cuttings add to volume, and water is added too. So more comes out than goes in. The increase in volume makes an overflow. It has to be pumped somewhere. Generally a sump—a big sink banked up with dirt. But the man my husband made his arrangements with, on the next property, has changed his mind, or needs his sump himself, or something. He says it was on a personal basis with my husband, and now it’s different, or—I don’t know what he says, I haven’t even seen him. But we’re cut off from his land, and we can’t stop drilling and the mud’s running out into the street, and it’s a violation, and the police are there, and—”
“Can’t your husband do something?”
“He isn’t there.”
“Where is he?”
“At the Hilton.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“I don’t know.”
“The last I heard of it, he was going to carry on for you till this well was down. Now he’s at the Hilton and he’s not carrying on. Come on, what’s happened?”
“He’s been drinking.”
“On account of us?”
“I guess so. Jack, you’ll have to—”
“Why can’t Dasso do something?”
“He’s nothing but an employee.”
I wanted to ask what I was, that I could do something, but as I’ve said, I’d got it through my head by then that it took two to make a mess like we had, and if I’d started it, I had to finish it, or try to. We drove on, and pretty soon we were in Long Beach, and I kept trying to picture what the mud was like. And when we turned into the little street that led up Signal Hill, there it was, trickling down the ditch, the same kind of gray, with a greasy shine to it, they have on the upper Eastern Shore of Maryland. And there at the corner, where it was slopping down a grating into a drain, was a cop, poking it with a stick to keep it from caking. And on the other side of him were two firemen with a hose, playing water on it a little further up the hill, to keep it liquid, so it wouldn’t choke the whole ditch. We went up the hill and all up and down my back I could feel this sick feeling, because I had no idea at all what I was going to do about it. At the well, except for cops in a car and the mud running out of a pipe into the ditch, things looked as usual. The driller was at his brake, the rotary table was spinning around, roughnecks were there, and Dasso was off to one side, talking with a police sergeant, who kept looking at his watch.
When he saw us park, Dasso came over. “Well, Hannah, I guess this does it. I’ve told him we daren’t stop that drill, but he says we’ve got ten minutes to get that mud under control, and if we don’t, he’s shutting us down.”
Dasso was looking at her, but he was really talking to me. The officer came over and she pleaded with him and said to close the well down now would practically mean they’d lose hundreds of feet of hole, and he said he realized that. He said he’d given two hours already, and wanted to accommodate her every way he could. But, he said, the law was the law. Strictly speaking, he was obliged to shut her down now, but he didn’t want to be any harder on her than he could help. She asked what he wanted her to do, and he said he didn’t know, but that mud couldn’t indefinitely discharge into the street. Dasso began to whistle something, the cop looked me over, and she was biting her lips, hoping I could do something. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I got out. Off to one side were two tanks that had been brought in to take care of production when the well started. I didn’t know what they were doing there at that time, but I could see they weren’t connected up with anything, and that they were empty. I made a quick flash and flashback with my eye, and it seemed to me if the mud pipe were turned at the elbow joint up near the well, the end of it, where the mud was pouring out, would just about swing over the nearest tank and would even reach the other. I went over, grabbed it in both hands, and pulled. It didn’t move, so I called to the men for a little help. Then it turned and the mud splattered all over me. We walked the end around until it was over my head, where the ground fell away to the tanks. I was in a shower of mud, but gave a last push and then heard it drumming on metal, inside. I turned to Dasso: “That ought to hold you for a while. Soon as one fills, use the other.”
Dasso’s glasses clouded from the venom in his eyes. Then he looked at her. “Yes, Daz, I think that’ll do it.”
“... Is he in charge now?”
“As my representative.”
I turned to the cop: “As I figure it, those tanks will do it till tomorrow, when I’ll have a proper sump put in.”
“Well, not quite till tomorrow, I’d say.”
“Violation’s taken care of for the present, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes sir, only—”
“Then O.K.”
I said it like a grand duke dismissing the barber, and he called to the cop down the hill and to the firemen, then went to the car and drove off, with the other cops. “Jack! Get in! I have to kiss you—before you wash off that mud.”
“Got no time.”
I didn’t need any cop to tell me I was talking much too optimistic about those tanks, that they couldn’t hold us any more than a couple of hours. I’d be back where we started, if I didn’t make a place to dump mud. For a minute I concentrated, trying to remember the name of the guy with the ditcher, but then I had it: Stelliger. I went in
the shack they used for an office, looked him up, got him on the phone. I’d hate to tell you what a hundred-percent American mechanic takes for a little Sunday emergency job, but pretty soon here he came, riding his ditcher, with his truck and shovel right behind. I started him in right away, on the hillside just above the drilling rig where the tanks were filling. With the ditcher, I had him make four deep trenches, then start in at right angles and criss-cross them, so one was falling right in on the other. Then with the shovel, I had him begin loading loose dirt on the truck, dumping it at the other end of the property. If I looked around, I knew I could probably find some guy not so far away that was making land in a marsh somewhere, and get rid of my dirt there, but I didn’t have time to look around. I dumped dirt where I could dump it, then the last few loads I piled it up around the hole I was making, and pretty soon it was a regular sump—not a very neat one, but a fair job for a rush order, and big enough to hold all the mud we’d pump for quite a few days. When they were done she drew the check. “I’m sorry, Hannah, at the cost, but—”
“I’m not. I’m glad.”
“But it had to be done, and—”
“Will you get in now?”
“Can we eat?”
“Me, if you want to.”
The night shift had come on by then, and everything seemed to be going fine, so she took me to a drive-in, where we had sandwiches and coffee, and then to a little hotel on Anaheim Boulevard, where I called up Holtz and told him I was leaving. He raised holy hell, as I expected, and offered me more dough, which made me feel proud and sorry at the same time, but there was no help for it, I’d taken over an oil well and had to see it through. As she was lending me her car, I took her home, had another look-in at the well, and finally went to the hotel and turned in. By sunup I was back on the job. Around noon Monday was when the trouble started.
We were running mud into my makeshift sump by then, but I wanted to get things lined up right, so I got ready to make a regular sump, over on the far end of the property next to where the first well had been drilled. So you’ll get it straight, all that happened later, I better tell you how it was laid out. There were two streets, not any bigger than lanes, one going up the hill, the other across it, and her property lay right at the intersection. Over from her, next to the street that ran across the hill, was the cemetery. Up the tilted street, the one that ran over the top of the hill, and separated from her by nothing but a barbed-wire fence, was the little refinery, with its compressor unit in one corner. Out of every well comes oil and gas, and the gas is first trapped, then run into a compressor unit, or absorption plant as a big one is called, and the casing-head gasoline extracted. That’s the high-octane stuff that’s mixed with all good gas like Central American coffee is mixed with ordinary coffee, and for the same reason, to give it pep. The oil goes to a refinery to be cut up into something that will sell, or in the case of a big company with plenty of dough to spend, to a cracking plant, which is the same as a refinery, except they do it under a pressure a refinery doesn’t have, and get all kinds of by-products the refineries miss. This refinery was a teapot, with three stills running gas fires, pipes leading to flash towers, bubble towers, storage tanks, and the rest of the stuff that goes with a job that stays on a half acre of ground. Her land was an acre, with six wells running along one side, by the barbed-wire fence, all with the derricks removed but pumps going, each with a gas trap, which is a little inverted tank about the size of a house hot-water tank, and two gauging tanks which are eight or ten feet high and maybe six feet across, the same kind I used for mud. They’re always set up in pairs, so one is filling while the other is emptying into the pipe line. She had an annual contract with Luxor, or luXor, as they spelled it, and everywhere you looked was some kind of valve with their X on it, connecting with their lines that led to their plant, down the hill maybe a quarter of a mile. Near the refinery, on the other side of a wooden fence was another small independent like herself, named Mendel, the one that had let Branch use his sump, and then changed his mind.
The new well was near Mendel’s fence, starting another row of six. The temporary sump I had made was right alongside of it, and the new sump, the bigger one I was going to build that would hold us a while, was at the lower end of her property. But on something of that size, I couldn’t jackleg the way I had on the little sump, so I told Stelliger to come on Tuesday, and that Monday morning drove up to Long Beach and found a place that had a second-hand transit. Then I came back, borrowed a roughneck off the driller, and began setting stakes for tire grading. I’d been at it maybe an hour when that sixth sense, or my ear maybe, told me something was wrong. I looked over. Dasso was nowhere around, but the guy on the mud pump was at the screen, looking down at the stuff that was flowing back over it, Then the driller noticed something and looked up. Then the pump gave two or three coughs, while the pump man dived for the throttle. He was too late. It blew out with a noise like a cannon. Steam roared all around, the driller reached for his throttle, and everything stopped.
By one o’clock, a trouble-shooter was out there, from a pump company I found in the classified phone book, that I had to find somehow or other, if anything was to be done, as Dasso didn’t show for an hour, on account, he said, of slipping down to the Hilton to see Branch. He acted like that was all right, and while they were putting new parts on, I took a little walk around so I wouldn’t blow my top and pretty soon that brought me to the refinery. On the other side of the fence a guy was standing, watching what was going on. I guess he was around fifty, tall, thin, and leathery-looking, the way they all seemed to be in this business, and he had on the same overalls, canvas cap, and open shirt the rest of them wore. He spoke, and I did, and he told his name, which was Rohrer, and there didn’t seem to be much to do but tell mine, which I did. He said he figured I was the new super on Seven-Star, which was the first I knew we had a name, and I said I was. He kept looking at me, like he was trying to size me up, then said something that sounded like some kind of a feeler: “Always had a friendly place in my heart for Seven-Star. Great little company, not too well handled, if I may say so.”
“... How do you mean, Mr. Rohrer?”
“Well, they’ve made their deal, or I hear they have, with Luxor, and it’s none of my business and year after year they pass me by. But between you and me and that gatepost over there, a little refinery can often switch things around, these days especially, in a way the big company can’t. Or shall we say—won’t?”
He winked and I asked him if he ran the refinery and he said he did: “All by myself most of the time. Hits people funny, on an oil plant, that you don’t need a whole gang running around and eating lunch when the whistle blows at noon. They forget it all works on valves and gauges and shut-offs, and one man, if he knows what he’s doing, can handle it just as good as twenty.”
“If he knows what he’s doing.”
“... I guess you’re kind of new here.”
“Well—just a little.”
“As we all are—once.”
He studied the gang for a while, then said: “Little trouble, I see, with your pump.”
“Blew a cylinder head on me.”
“Unusual, nowadays... Used to be, a pump would blow out almost any time, but not now, the way they get corings whenever they want, and can tell what they’ve got. Mr. Dillon, just from what I know of the formation they’re into down there, I’d say that mud needs conditioning. There’s a lot of material over there, piled up over there in bags, but I haven’t seen one pound of it dumped in all morning.” Then, as I could feel my face get hot, on account of never having heard of weight material, he went on: “You’re new here, as we’ve said, and you probably don’t know it’s up to the drilling foreman to watch what you’re in, from the corings, and keep the mud at proper consistency, to control its viscosity and weight as required, and it has to be him that’s responsible. And—speaking of matters of that kind, I’d say yesterday was a very funny time to get caught short of a mud sump, a
nd still funnier time with nobody around to see where the stuff was running, for somebody accidentally on purpose to put in a call for an officer.”
“... What are you getting at, Mr. Rohrer?”
“I told you I felt friendly?”
“You sure did.”
“Keep your eyes open, boy.”
I went back to the pump, and they had it going again. The guy from the pump company checked two or three things, then said to me: “Mister, it’s all the same to us, and fixing pumps is our business. Just the same, unless you want to have this trouble again and practically all the time, if I was you I’d keep an eye on the consistency of that mud.”
I thanked him, watched how the roughnecks kind of looked at each other, and at Dasso, who stood there shaking his head. I let it jell on that basis, and then, kind of easy, without getting excited, I said to him: “Dasso, I think he means you.”
“Means—who did you say?”
“Were you watching it?”
“Well—I wasn’t here, Jack. I—”
“Where were you?”
“I told you. I was at the Hilton. Mr. Branch—”
“Nobody came to me for leave to go to the Hilton. Myself, I was putting down stakes. I can’t build sumps, watch the condition of mud, and do eighteen other things you’re supposed to do. Now if you want to stay on here, I got to know if you’re where you’re supposed to be, accepting your responsibility, or over to the Hilton cocktail bar, lolligagging all over the place on things I’m not even informed about. Now which is it going to be?”