by Roman McClay
He wore the dust, the mud and speckles of blood from several cuts and abrasions -that couldn't be avoided in the oil field- on his clothes and his skin and face and his boots like a secondary skin, like a skein, and it stuck close to him filling each possible crevasse , each fissure, each possible way inside.
Underneath those loose-fitting clothes he wore swaddling underwear that hugged close to his frame and outrigging parts. Under it all he needed to be held close and so his first layer was taut and chaste; and their compression felt like compassion to the parts closest to his heart and lungs.
As he walked with aplomb toward the company-man's trailer the dust seemed to undergird his feet farther ahead -outpacing his gait- while the dust plume at his back heaved and fell back toward the derrick and strove up toward the less ponderous sky. The weight of whatever phenomenon pressed down on his head and shoulders buffered him and buffeted the languid cloud; some wind, or magnetism, or some part of the arrow of time stopped and retreated, back to the bow, and now all but his tread and his boots were clearly in view as the company-man peered out between the blinds of the rectangular trailer that housed these managers of men.
The man from EnCanna had heard the air compression and felt the sand-blasting of dust on the glass; he had been watching the rig and then, from the plume, he saw this man emerge.
“Derrick man at 12 o'clock, Merle,” the small, ancient, man said to the tool-pusher who was seated at his desk in this 8 by 20 trailer.
Merle showed no sign of his angst or opprobrium; his demeanor as placid, if gruff, as the hills that encircled them all. Most things moved slowly, if at all, in the mountains; until they moved all at once. But like the formation herself, Merle’s hydro-carbons roiled at depths just as the geologists had predicted for the previous pad: low but not low enough. He felt himself begin to bubble under his skin at the aperture, the border, the line in his sand between him and his next goddamn conversation with Lyndon MacLeod.
The trailer's doorway was immediately filled with just that man; the rig noise came in and his hard hat came off and slammed on the map desk -the formation maps were always there so men could see where in the sea of these leviathan-fuels that they were- and he pulled heavily on the open door welding it closed with knowledge that soft-pawing it prevented it from latching at all. His eye-protection, smoked but not black, occulted his vision as he looked down at his gloves; he removed them with attention to each finger and lay them with insouciance on the raised railing that separated their side from his in this trailer clearly too small for the three of them; despite the diminutive size of the company-man from EnCanna .
“We’ve TDd; just circulating; healing the hole,” he packed as much information in three bursts of fragments as if he had to pay them by the word.
“Mud engineers and directional hand say the tools in the hole need to come out,” Merle said as if giving orders .
“We'll trip out,” the derrick-man looked at his analog watch, a monolithically black over-sized block of metal, “at 1400 hours; at this depth, that’s 3-hours to trip out,” he lanced each article, like, ands, and, the, and got to the goddamn point.
“Them boys were trying to get home to Denver by tonight, by early tonight,” Merle leaned on the, early .
“Well, healing the hole will make that trip out clean and easy, pay me 30 minutes now and I'll pay them a few hours in hang-ups later. We ain’t drilling straight down Merle; this is directional drilling,” he said with enough bite to make the company-man wince and make the tool-pusher, Merle, begin to let some of that bubbling gas leak out of his mouth. It was as if this arrogant derrick man’s words had tore open the earth itself.
“The day I need a lecture from you greenhorn is the day I drive back to Wyoming and forget what a derrick man does for me,” Merle said underneath his heavy mustache and between his uncared for teeth; the words flew like a few reconnaissance bats from a cave on the backside of an east facing slope as the sun set in the dusk of a summer solstice. He was testing to see how far this would go.
“This is a day, like any other; a day I know exactly what to do. And I come in here -out of courtesy- and I tell you we just now touched down at 7,700 feet and that we will circulate the hole until 1400 hours as per the orders of the guy who signs the checks on this project, Merle.
“As for the drill string, I’m going to rack back each one of those 60-foot joints myself, because your guys dropped a few didn't they; and that -as they say- speaks for itself. Res ipsa loquitur ,” he ended in Latin, removed his eyewear, pointed his orbs directly at Merle like just one or two loaded cylinders of a revolver, languidly gathered his gloves and while still gazing reached over and reclaimed his black hat.
After the door shut and LJM was gone, Chauncy Brimmel -the company-man from EnCanna - said, “I’d turn the Eiffel Tower into a triple and wildcat for oil under it before I’d let that guy work one more of my pads; you call MacIntyre and have him pull that boy’s card.”
Merle nodded but let the phone lay there untouched. He heard the man, and he had every intention of telling Curtis MacIntyre that this derrick-man was unwelcome, but not until he had used him all up. They had 34 more holes to drill on this side of the mountain and that boy was useful. He was like a 48-inch pipe-wrench that didn’t bend, nor break, but just happened to have a spell placed on it by some bruja , an unfortunate spell that made it talk from time to time.
With the door to the trailer shut behind him and the vacuum inside it thus sealed from the din of the abrading tools in the hole, the high RPMs of the diesel motors of the rig and the furious swirl of the ejecta of earth, the derrick-man forgot all about the men inside it; they were as relevant as trash in the vacuum of space, he thought, and he liked it better down here with the dirt and the noise and malice of animals; not out there in the cold of the vault.
He walked away purposively from the sealed and off-set nucleus of the well pad -the tool-pusher’s shack- toward the invigilating hammer and tong of the rig. He bent his head -just by a few degrees- to the side and into the cumulous of atomized rock that was swarming around his approach like hornets guarding their Rex Mother as she flies back to the hive’s actual center. The Rig was where the work of the cell went on; the Rig is what he cared about .
He laid the glasses back on his face and wiped them, pawed them, as they turned opaque with dust. His body he let accumulate with the blasting particulates without even thinking of dusting off. As he ascended the stairs to the driller's controls, the roughnecks -each camouflaged in the same vagaries of brown and black effluvium- swarmed in and away from him as they traversed the platform and set up their tools for tripping out of the hole. The driller yelled dispassionately over the roar, “TD'd 18 minutes ago. Mud weight is 8.1; mudman is adding Milbar now. We’ll seal and heal that formation and start trippin’ out on your say so derrick-man. You gonna do the whole string by yourself?”
“Roger that,” the derrick-man barked and spoke down into the man's upper chest, trying to get close to his right ear. “What's our exact twenty?”
The driller looked at his screen and located total well depth. “77-80,” he said.
“Copy that,” the derrick-man boomed over the roar of the diesels.
“You gonna text Curtis?” the driller asked.
“Yeah, pull up on that string so we don’t hit 7,800,” the derrick-man said.
The driller began to manipulate the controls, “who's finishing the well after we set surface?”
“Curt has a deal with EnCanna , they bring in whoever to grab the hydrocarbons, that’s above my pay grade. I'm gonna text him that, 77-80,” he repeated the number to confirm and the driller nodded in ascension.
The ort cloud of granules blew up around the well head as the driller lifted up the drill string to prevent the weight of it from augmenting the hole any further. That mini-maelstrom caught the wind and closed in around them curtaining the driller as he turned into his controls and it backed and divided him from the derrick-man as he as
cended the ladder to the crow's nest 20-meters above the floor; the dust brought forth from the earth cloaked him and gave him an occluding cape at the back and shoulders and neck. And it gave him cover as he climbed up the ladder to the nest.
The worker bees were still weaving around the string; the hydraulic tongs swinging toward the spinning gyre of cylinder upon cylinder; the bees eager to meet the center. As he pulled up on the drill string the jetsam of more aerated earth sprung up around them like plumes of pollen as vibrating wings of the eusocial bees hovered over the heated, sexually frustrated stamen and pistils of hole and the string. The drilling floor was caught in the whipping up of the inseminating eddies like concussive rings of raindrops landing in dead Caribbean seas; each wee drop of deep-earth dust carrying more and more wealth of information for the saturated pool of air that had the wisdom to ignore; to refuse to absorb. Everything was coated, soaked, and the dust flew and floated on to some part of the pad in which to lay peaceably.
The air was a torrent of swirling earthen ejecta and it served as cover and marionette for the mechanical hands and legs of each worker. They all seemed subsumed by the earth they were invigilating, as they crawled over her pierced belly and back; the drill string the harpoon, the Monel and directional-tools at the tip of the spear lodged deep into the blubber of the Gaian Leviathan; the wound spurting a tan, to brown -to black now- mist as the circulating drilling fluid mixed with the planet's own material, darkening it and separating it from the foam and aerated dust. They all worked both in isolation and in tandem like eukaryotic cells building an organism; a fractal project with ladders down and platforms up; a view of a planet from space with no natural north or south; a view from a suburb of the cosmos that is always both at center of her expansion and always hurtling away from any navel at all.
The roughnecks began to back away from the hole and edge out toward the platform’s outer perimeter. As the string held fast and as the circulating fluid began to weight the ejecta and the swirling dust fell back to earth, each man began to see the other. The driller appeared like an apparition to them and they focused on his hands. Colin, a Florida redneck with methamphetamines and nicotine chasing each other like fox & hound through his bloodstream and over the blood-brain barrier as over a hedgerow and into a pond, tightened his belt one notch toward itself like an ouroboros asp, the mouth eating the tail. He was emaciated, and the sinew was stretched taut over a small skeletal substrate; he held no ballast though and each task was done as quickly and as capably as any boat in the water would after it was lowered from the larger ship.
“You ever seen a Beaut Knot?” he screamed jovially up the ladder to the derrick-man climbing insouciantly toward the nest. Lyndon ignored him and continued to climb; not clipping in to the clutch; ignoring the lanyard line, rejecting it for its lie of safety; it was an apparatus for show, for OSHA, but of no use in a real danger at all.
“You ever seen a Beaut Knot?” Colin said again but this time to his cellmate on the floor, a stocky Colorado native who had never much visited the high country in his two-decade life, much less lived at elevation like they all did now. The man wiped dust from his black goggles and looked at Colin for the answer to his own question.
“Ever?” Colin prodded; not taking the hint.
“Show me,” Randy said and moved this burlesque along.
The redneck’s arms shot out from his once-white wife-beater toward the Jobox that walled the platform and grabbed a 2-meter length of rope that had been mired under a 1-meter pipe wrench that made anyone carrying it look like an elfin miniature with a mere plumber’s tool. He began to manipulate the fibers and fashion it symmetrically using his recently cinched belt as the showman’s stage for his wrangling of the old hempen rope. He had Randy hold the end of the loop and in the final pull of the knot, Colin held in one hand the rope origami that formed two circles at the edges and a floppy, distended parabola in the center vaguely in the form of an outsized penis and two testicles, one that might attend whomever could carry and wield that pipe wrench -the one he’d displaced to grab the rope- with just one hand.
“Ain't it a Beaut? ” he said with a grimy grin as large and menacing as a gorilla’s; a slant of face similar to some gash in some flesh that was pulled in two directions as its joint articulated. This card trick of rope tricks played well in the oil field and Colin used it like a politician used canned jokes her staff had written, worsening with practice, not improving. It said something about jokes and humor writ large : that it’s the spontaneity of it that gives it its power to thrill us; the feeling that our joker has just seen what's amusing about a situation in the same amount of time we had to be clever, and yet he’s beat us to it. If he's had more time to see the humor in something before we have it's like seeing the test questions before the test: it attenuates the marvel and anything impressive about the result. A joke should be told but once and in the heat of the battle of wits; not as a war story repeated ad nauseum .
The grin remained until the driller full-throated a beckon to Colin from the other side of the platform. The rope was dumped back in the Jobox and Randy faced the spinning drill-string again .
“You two ready to trip out?” the driller barked.
“He’s as touchy as a Cuban greeting,” Colin said to the kid and then laughed; he then turned and said to the driller, “yeah, we come all the way out or circulating half way or what?” Colin gritted his teeth in between the way and the what of that sentence. His amphetamines gave him lock-jaw sometimes.
“All out in one shot; and giving them engineers back their tools,” the driller added.
The derrick-man reached the nest and began wiping down the fingers of the platform; most of the crow's nest was empty space; like an atom. It was designed that way to give rows of parking space for the tall sections of drill pipe, two 30-foot sections connected together -head to tail- on this rig. Each section would be racked back to the farthest open space; manhandled with a belly rope as the bottom section was moved into place down below by the roughnecks. Two men below did what one man did above.
The kelly would be raised just above the derrick-man’s floor. Now at an angle with its bottom swung away from its top, the derrick-man with the weight of the pipe on the rope and the rope on his belly, he would place himself at the far end of the floor, then the driller would drop it to him, and he then would sling the rope around the pipe as it hung in the kelly-clamp . Then the men below would move the hanging bottom to its place on the floor, so the derrick-man could unlatch the huge metal clamp that held the top end of the pipe and then the 3,500 pound section could be pulled back with about 250 pounds of man-force.
The stick -the 60-feet of pipe- was like a pencil with its tip on a desk, and a giant with his finger on the eraser pressing down -to keep it up- and then tipping it at an angle away from the point; balanced until the giant brings it back to straight up and down. Once the clamp was unlatched with a two-fisted pull-back toward the chest, the heavy weight of the pipe would rest against the rope and the derrick-man could use his legs, back and arms to pull the pipe towards him, towards the farthest row of empty space in the finger-rows and slide it into place. They would be stacked in rows one section at a time; pulling the pipe up from the ground, the hollow pipe still burbling with drilling fluid, the outside of the string slick and melting with the same; the platform soaked with the slick fluid also, each man getting splattered and coated in it as well.
Besides the heaviness of each tool, each piece of pipe, the threat of smashing and falling and crushing was ever-present and the men moved their hands in subtle ways that avoided placing the palm and fingers on top of anything that had a mate; the threaded male end of a joint attracted the internally threaded female pipe just like nature and a roughnecks' hand should never be caught between the two even for a second; come not between the Dragon and his wrath , Lyndon said when instructing new hands in the basics of the oil patch and they liked it when they heard it whether they knew it was Shakespeare or not.<
br />
Pipe dope, the copper anti-seize was put on with a brush from the side, out flanking the threads. That shit was everywhere by the end of each tour ; a brown-black smudge that never came out; what was designed to keep metal from staying permanently mated, itself could not ever be removed from clothes and only barely from skin after taking 80-grit paper to the flesh. Nature has ironies like that everywhere, if you know where to look. The derrick-man could look to the metal of each other rig from up here; he could see flames here and there in the distance once they had lit the gas to prevent it building up on the pad .
The derrick-man pulled the pipes into place; only pushing once there was no threat of a pendulum swing crushing him between his foil and object of toil and the place it wanted to be.
The driller raised the kelly high and let the roughnecks slap the pipe wrench and tongs onto the seam; they held fast and he spun it counter clockwise and the joint held firm. The derrick-man placed his hand on his nest railing and felt the torque of the metal in his own bones. The roughnecks communicated by pheromones it could seem to some invigilating eyes; like ants who followed the trail of odorless chemical markers one sentinel would leave as it carried back food from a new source. Colin held the tongs in place; hydraulically and manually, and Randy immediately grabbed the 30lb sledge and began banging on the joint at its seam. The driller waited and let him hit it four more times then called out.
“Break,” he said as an order.
Randy stood back, dropped the sledge to his feet, and Colin cinched up on the tongs, his legs bracing for the hydraulic torque. The driller spun the kelly again and this time the joint sprang loose and earth-warmed fluid squirted out under some pressure; Randy wrapped a red rag around it to knock down the jets like a bandage on an arterial wound; and the driller waited to spin any further as the volume of mud leaked out of the straw, the whole length of 60 feet of pipe above them. Colin removed the tongs and swung them back into place and the job’s clock ticked over analog numbers that corresponded with money; the measure of all things in the modern world.
