“O.K., but if a goddam pump man can’t—”
“He doesn’t issue materials.”
He stood blinking at me, and he wasn’t kidded: he knew I didn’t know. But when I’d stood up for my pump engineer, that put the men on my side, and for that round he had to go along. The trouble-shooters left, he pulled down two bags of Aquajel to dump in the tank. But we’d lost plenty of time.
“Hannah, it’s just plain sabotage, and the guy is out to throw a monkey wrench into us every way there is, and as often as he can get away with it. So far as I can see, and from the little that Rohrer said, it’s him alone and doesn’t involve the rest of them. I mean, it may have, as of yesterday. The three drillers were on the Bakersfield jobs, and they were friends of your husband’s, or anyhow had worked for him. The rest, the boiler man and the pump man, are local, and I don’t think they care, one way or the other. Whatever they may think of me coming in, they take it like it comes. But Dasso means trouble. And if you’ll take a tip from me you’ll do one of three things. You’ll fire me, and at least make some kind of a play to get going again with your husband. With me out of the way, Dasso can run it fine, and will, whether Branch sobers up or not. Or, you’ll fire Dasso and let me muddle through, which I don’t recommend, but I’ll do my best. Or, you’ll fire us both and let a drilling company take over, which considering everything, is what I think you should do. But you’re just piling up trouble for yourself if you let things go on as they’re going now.”
“We’re keeping him, and you’re going on.”
“But look what it’s costing you.”
“Nothing like what it’ll cost to fire him.”
“How do you figure that out?”
“There’s the bank end of it, for one thing.”
“You mean—on the loan?”
“If we have a little trouble now and then, over a sump or a pump or something of the sort, that’s nothing. They all have trouble, and nobody thinks a thing of it. But when something human comes up, what they call a moral risk, God help us! They’ll call for immediate amortization, for more security, maybe liens on the filling stations, I don’t know what. Because they know that once I make any major changes, everything stops, and within twenty-four hours it’s practically a new deal. Whatever we do, we don’t joggle it. So Dasso’s a rat. He’ll pull stuff, and it’ll set us crazy, and it’ll cost. But at least the hole is going down, we’ve got our crews, we’re a going concern. The other way, we’re just an abandoned rig. And besides—”
“Yeah? What else?”
“I’d like to see you lick him.”
“What is this, entertainment?”
I’d gone over to her house, and she was lying on the sofa in the living room, a red corduroy dressing gown folded around her and a magazine in her lap. She stretched now, like a cat, and beckoned me over to her. I said to hell with that, I had too much on my mind. She nodded, watched me a while, where I was walking around, and said: “I don’t care what it costs. If it breaks me I don’t care. I’ve been a piker long enough. You’re going to lick him, and down to the last dime I’ll back you up.”
So we kept him, and I settled down to one damned thing after another that cost fifty dollars an hour to fix, shop charges extra. I learned the difference between a twist-off and a wobble-off, and maybe you don’t think that’s something. A twist-off is where they’ve got too much pressure on the bit, the table gives more twist than the pipe can stand, and she pops. A wobble-off is where they’ve got too little pressure on the bit, it gets to spinning faster than the pipe, and she pops. Either way it’s a fishing job, and they lose an hour or more even with the special tools they’ve got, and by the time they’ve caught their fish and rearranged their drill pipe a lot of time is lost before they’re in formation again. There’s plenty of that grief on any well, but a lot depends on the drills they use, with some suited to one formation and others to another, and I could tell from the way the drillers were acting they didn’t think much of Dasso’s ideas on the subject. So that meant I had to have separate huddles with them, and they co-operated, but it all took time, especially as I hated to tip how little I knew. And as soon as I’d licked him on that angle he crossed me on the cement. On an oil well, you’ve got one continuous visitor you don’t hear so much about outside the business. He’s the inspector from the state department of oil and gas, because you’re regulated to the last inch, on account of the way one loused-up job can ruin a lot of surrounding wells, as happened in Mexico, where the richest field in the whole gulf area was drowned in salt water so it’ll never run more than forty per cent of what might have been its capacity.
What they run you ragged about is cementing casing at the right points, and in fact cement is to oil what the gin was to cotton or wing camber to airplanes, something that took them out from behind an eight ball that had had them completely stymied. Because in mountain fields, fresh water flooded the wells long before they hit oil, and in coastal fields salt water, and in coastal-tidal, which pretty well covers California, both. And not only could water flood any well that was drilling, but a wide area as well, so it might easily involve a whole lease, and bankrupt the operator. So in 1903, when the industry had hardly begun, they figured a way to shut it off. They pumped cement down through the casing, with enough pressure back of it to force it up and around, between the pipe and the formation. It worked. It shut off everything, inside and outside, solid as a rock; inside the pipe they drilled the cement out, and went on down to the oil with a nice clean hole that wouldn’t flow oil ruined by salt water when they got to the surface with it. That was the beginning of oil in a big way, and in a few years they made it law most places that a man had to shut off his water with cement whether he wanted to or not. Nowadays they pump through a plug, as they call it, a block of concrete with valves in it made of plastic, so when they’re set with their cement they just drill right through their plug and go on with their hole.
But when the corings began showing water sand, and Mr. Beal, our state man, told me to set my cement, I’d never heard of cement, and once more I had to get busy with the classified phone book and tell a cement outfit to be on deck in the morning. But when I saw Hannah that night she began to roar. “Cement? Why, that contract was let months ago!”
“You know who with, by any chance?”
“But of course! With Acme!”
“Then I’ll ring them up, and tell them to stand by for a call. And call up this other outfit and say I’m sorry, but I don’t know a cement contract from a left-handed monkey wrench, and they needn’t come.”
“Didn’t Dasso tell you?”
“What do you think?”
“You mean he just sat there and let you talk?”
“He’s your sitter, not mine.”
When I finally did pop Dasso on the chin and tell him to get out of there it made no sense, as it was the one time he wasn’t guilty of anything. We were getting deep by that time. Around four thousand, when gas began coming up through the mud, Beal said get connected up with the blowout preventer, so of course that meant nothing to me, but the driller swung his hook out for something that had been on the ground ever since I’d been there, and that looked like a cross between a bell buoy and a slide trombone. He and Dasso and the roughnecks swung it up in the air and over the casing, and for the better part of an hour they were bolting it in place. Then we got going again. Pretty soon we began getting oil, and that was a heartbreak, because Mr. Beal ordered continuous coring, so we’d have a record of all formation penetrated, else we’d have to set and cement more casing. The reason for that was the terms of our permit. From the first pool, our six other wells were taking all we were entitled to, and if we were to put another well down, it had to go further and find oil deeper down. Other wells in the field were tapping that second zone, but whether it extended under our property nobody could be sure, so it came under the head of new development. Everybody knew how it was, so nobody had much to say, and then the driller looked around an
d wanted to know where were the core heads. There weren’t any. With that it seemed to me I’d had about all I could take. I didn’t really swing on Dasso. My fist seemed to do it, and he hit the dirt and sat blinking at me. Then he took off his glasses and looked. Then I remembered you weren’t supposed to hit a guy with glasses. Then I felt like a heel and helped him up and handed him his hat. Then I went over to the shack and wrote his time. Then I went back and rang up the service company that kept our stuff in shape, and they said Mr. Dasso had already phoned, and the truck was on its way over with the core heads. So of course that made me feel great. Instead of going over to the crew, who had heard me at the phone, I went over to the wire fence to get my face set again. Rohrer was there, and I knew he had seen it. “Well, kid, I think things’ll be better now.”
“That I wonder about.”
“It was due, and overdue, and your gang’ll respect you for it.”
“They might, if it didn’t so happen that when I rang the service shop it turned out Dasso had already done what I fired him for not doing, and I never knew any gang yet that bought it when somebody got the wrong end of the stick.”
“Did he tell you what he’d done? Was he tongue-tied that he couldn’t say it? Did he ever tell you what he was doing, or give you any report you didn’t crowbar out of him? Don’t you worry about that gang. They know if it wasn’t this it had to be something else, and it didn’t make much difference what, or if all the fine points were right or not. He had it coming. You’ll get along better.”
We got along so much better it was no comparison, and I began telling myself I’d learned more about oil than I’d realized. Stuff that we needed began coming on time, instead of three hours late like when Dasso had charge, the fishing was cut to half what it had been, and counting all cementing, setting of new casing, and everything else we had to do, we were making half again as good time. Hannah was dancing all over her living room whenever I saw her, and wanted to open champagne for me. I said let me do my work. At fifty five hundred feet we began to get gas, and I got so nervous I hardly left the place, but slept on the desk that was in the shack, and got up every hour or two, to keep track of what was going on. Pretty soon our corings came up with kind of a combined smell of coal tar, crackcase drainings, and low tide on a mud flat, a stink you could smell ten feet, that was prettier than anything Chanel ever put out. It meant oil, and this time we could keep it, with no need to go to a deeper level. Everything had that feeling in the air. The state man said take it easy, and we slowed to half speed. Scouts, supers, and engineers began dropping around from other wells, so at any time there’d be eight or a dozen of them standing around, waiting. The super from Luxor dropped over, and we picked out where the new gauging tanks would be put: right over from the head of our double row of six, the first of a new double row of six, as we hoped, with the foundations all in line. I got out my transit and set stakes for the concrete. I ordered a Christmas tree.
One night around eleven I went to the Golden Glow, a cocktail bar that caters to night shifts. Not many were in there at that hour, so I drank my coffee, dropped a nickel for a tune on the juke box, and rested. Then, in a booth, I noticed somebody, and when he turned his head I saw it was Dasso. It threw me out, because it still bothered me, the way I had clipped him. Jake served him something, and some time went by, but still he sat there. After a while I went over. I said hello and he said hello but kept looking out the window. I said I was sorry I’d hit him, that I’d been under a strain. He kept looking back and forth, first at me, then out the window, and didn’t seem to hear me. I lifted up a prayer I should be kept from hitting him again, and went back to my table. I paid and went out. I began to cuss and get hot under the collar and took a walk down the hill. I came back.
Then it began creeping in on me there was something funny about it. He hadn’t sneered at me, or cracked mean, or done anything. He just hadn’t heard me. Then it came back to me, the way he’d kept looking out the window, and the long time he’d been there, talking with Jake, eating his sandwich, doing all kinds of things he didn’t generally do, because if ever there was a wolf-it-down-and-get-out kind of guy, it was he. Then something shot through me: He was waiting for something, and that window faced right on our well. Next thing I knew I was running. I’d shamble three or four steps up the hill, then slow to a walk, then run again, and all the time there was growing on me some hunch of something about pop. I got in sight of our well, but already I was too late. Dead ahead of me the string of lights began to shake. Then a guy yelled. Then, far up on the rig, something began to move down, on a slant. I saw it was the derrick man on the fourable floor, sliding down the safety line. Then here it came. Brother, if you ever saw six thousand feet of drill pipe go up in the air and then come down and wrap itself around an acre of ground like a plate of spaghetti, you won’t forget it in a hurry. And when on top of that, the friction of drill pipe against casing sets what’s coming out of the ground on fire, you’ll hardly know which scared you worst, the roar of that flame, the thunder of stuff coming down all around you, the screams of your crew, or the way their white hats looked like some kind of horrible bugs, getting out of the way before the world came to an end.
I slammed face first in the mud, and screamed and prayed like the rest, and then all of a sudden I didn’t even do that, because something banged on my head, and that was the last I knew for a while.
22
I DIDN’T COME TO all at once, as it was part of the crown block that hit me, a pulley shackle I found a couple of days later, and I took the count from loss of blood as much as concussion. But the whole time I was under, the roar of the fire was in my ears and its glare in my eyes, and I think they’d have reached me in hell. After a while there was yelling, and I was being rolled, then carried on a stretcher. Next thing I knew, I was waked up by water in my face, but the yelling was still going on, and the roar and glare were still there. I began to look around, and saw I was in the Golden Glow, stretched out on the bar. The water I couldn’t figure out. Then I saw they’d jammed a garden hose on the spigot over the sink, and run it out of the window to keep spraying the building, so it wouldn’t catch fire from the heat. But it was just a jam-on connection, and there was a leak that spouted over me. I moved, and was clear. Then I heard the flap of canvas outside, and footsteps on the roof, where they were pulling a tarpaulin over one whole side of the building, so they could wet that and be safe. That cut off the glare, but nothing cut off the roar. I was out for a while after that, and then a fellow with a white coat was shining a light in my eyes and looking at my head, and I heard him cluck, like what he saw was bad. Then he shot something in my arm and went. I wanted to crawl outside and run, but I couldn’t move. I don’t remember anything of the ambulance backing up or the orderlies carrying me out or the trip to the hospital or going up to the operating room, where they put the stitches in. When I did come to it was all at once, in what I could see was a hospital room, with the roar fainter, like it was some distance away, but the glare still bright enough to read by. My head hurt, my face twitched, and my belly fluttered. When I turned my head I could see somebody at the window. It was Hannah. She came over and patted my face, but all the time she was looking outside, and in a minute she went back to the window. “Can you see it, Jack?”
“No, thank God.”
“It’s just horrible. And it frightens me to the inside of my bones. It—ruins me, I’ve no illusions about that. And yet—it fascinates me... What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something must have gone wrong.”
“Ask Dasso.”
“... What’s he got to do with it?”
“He was up there, waiting for it. In the Golden Glow, parked at the window, all but holding a stop watch.”
It seemed to me I had to get over by the well and do something, I didn’t know what, but terribly important. Pretty soon I jumped out of bed, and went staggering to the closet for my clothes. “Jack! You can’t go out! Yo
u’re in no condition to! And besides your clothes were sent out to be washed—they were filthy, from blood! There’s nothing there but your suit.”
Off in the hall I heard a buzzer, where she was calling a nurse, and in a minute one came. All I had on was a hospital shirt, but fat chance that stopped me. If coat, pants and shoes were what I had to wear, I might as well be getting them on.
Come hell or high water, I was due on the hill, and meant to get there.
The taxi man couldn’t get within two blocks of it on account of the crowd, or at least he said it was the crowd. If you ask me he was plain scared, and I didn’t blame him. What was coming out of that hill was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was shooting straight up in the air, a red plume in the night, just like one of those torches you see at the end of a pipe, burning gas off the wells in Texas, except instead of being three or four feet high, this was three or four hundred. It swung this way and that, sometimes licking down to the ground, when there’d be yells and screams, and all the time sending off thick clouds of smoke that were black one second, blood red the next. To one side, leaning at an angle, was what was left of the derrick, with girders curling up like bacon on the griddle, and dropping off with a clatter. On the other side, by what would have been Mendel’s fence if it hadn’t burned to a row of charred string pieces, was the pile of drill pipe, all twisted up like a mile-long snake, and part of it showing red hot. Later in the day the firemen dragged it off with a falls they rigged, and cut it up with a torch. Now, though, they were letting it lie, and concentrating on the oil that was plopping in gushes out of the well, where the pressure would force it to the top, but didn’t quite carry it up in the air. It was running down the hill with flames all over it, where it was burning, and from that, and the heat, came the danger to people standing around, and other property, that it would catch fire. So the firemen on the three foam generators were smothering it with foam. The guys on the engines were drenching everything with water within two hundred yards: Mendel’s stuff, the refinery, the Golden Glow, the grocery store next to it, the garage next to that, the filling station on the corner, and even the trees in the cemetery and derricks on beyond. Other firemen had pushed up the road, within maybe fifty feet of the well, and were racing back and forth with cans full of dirt. I couldn’t tell what the idea was, at first, but then I saw they were making a trough, kind of a ditch on our land, that they could divert the burning oil into, and run it into the big sump I had made, below the refinery. In a few minutes they had their bank of dirt ready, and then the oil flames began sliding toward the sump, which was billowing with foam before even the oil slid into it. The foam put the flames out.