“Sorry, old man. I got me a date with that blonde switchboard gal, and the only oil I want is some hair oil to slick a piece over this spot.” He rubbed a little patch of bald on the back of his head with the barrel of his gun. “I didn’t have this spot when I come up from Texas, and I don’t much care for it.”
Nothing I said could turn Jess. And Dock followed Jess, even though he didn’t care nothing about buying no ranch. He just had his back up. But Joe finally give in. He said I could have half his money and maybe the rest later, depending.
That give me what I needed.
Just like the paper’d said, Smackover was a dumpy little place. Bad, rutty roads going into it and bad, rutty roads going outa it. And, to get into town, you had to cross over a big wide gully, called the Smackover Creek, and the bridge was a old swaybacked thing that shook and shimmied like it was just about to bust apart.
Well, that bridge shook and shimmied a lot under me ’cause I was driving over it in a big, seven-seater, $4,400 Cadillac Imperial Limousine. I’d traded in one of our Studebakers because it was a long trip to Arkansas, and I knowed if the town was booming with oil hunters, I’d likely have to sleep in my car.
Soon as I drove in, I seen I was right.
There was thousands and thousands of people swarming all over that little town: oil promotors in high-dollar suits, roughnecks and roustabouts in greasy work clothes, “oilfield doves” in not much of nothing. When I first got outa my Cadillac, I run straight into one of them doves. She was wearing a shiny pink dress and rubbing a lamppost up and down.
“Hey, mister, you hungry? Twenty dollars, I’ll make you a lemon pie.”
“You keep your lemons, sister,” I said back. “I gotta go about some business here.”
“Oh, go to hell!”
She spit at me and started in on the next old boy getting outa the next big car. And, lemme tell you what, there was plenty of next old boys getting outa next big cars. There was only one hotel in the whole place, and it was already full up to the gills. So the townsfolk was putting up cots under ever’ roof there was—in the grocery store, the beer joint, the blacksmith shop—and renting ’em for $2.50 a night. Even the barber was in on the thing. He was renting out his barber’s chair in shifts, he put out a sign that said: “six hours of shut-eye guaranteed.” He was charging $3 a shift, even more’n them cots. I guess because his chair was padded and leaned back.
And all around the edges of the town, there was dozens of tents set up—some of ’em filled with whole families, babies and all.
At night, I slept in the back seat of my Cadillac with a loaded .45 on my lap.
It’s one of them sad facts of life: where there’s lots of money, there’s most likely gonna be lots of crime. The robberies was getting so bad around there, and there was so many killings from streetfights and shooting scrapes, folks was starting to call the south end of Smackover “Death Valley.” And there was so many workers getting killed in accidents on the rigs, a undertaker had come to town and set up business in one of the tents. His coffins come to him in pieces from a factory—four sides, four ends, four tops, and four bottoms, and some screws and nails and hinges—and he put ’em together in that tent.
There was a new graveyard started in a field west of town, and it already had two dozen humps of fresh dirt.
But the danger didn’t bother me none.
Daytime, you couldn’t go one inch down that Main Street without hearing some story about somebody that knowed somebody that’d struck it rich. And turns out, a lot of that oil was coming up right near that Smackover Creek.
Well, I didn’t waste no time. I bought me about $30,000 worth of “prime” creek bottom leases. Somebody give me the name of a “smart-as-the-devil” driller and I hired him on the spot. His name was Clyde. He was a short, stocky, red-faced fella, built like a wrestler, all muscles. He’d been working on derricks so long he even smelt like oil. And he knowed how to talk that oil language. Just like thieves have their own words, words that mean this and that, so do them oil people.
Clyde taught me some of them words, so my workers’d know who was the boss. He taught me that “rope-chokers” was the boys that handled the cable tools and “mud-drinkers” was the boys that did the rotary drilling and was always getting sloshed with soupy mud. “Boll-weevils” was the green workers, the farm boys fresh offa the cotton farms that you had to watch real close. Some of ’em didn’t know the diff’rence between a valve and a choke. And “boomers” was the one that knowed what they was doing, they’d caught the oil fever a-whiles back, but they might be here today, yonder tomorrow.
Inside two weeks, Clyde had hired him a good crew and had three derricks up and the drills a-churning.
Like I told the boys, if you got the money, ain’t nothing you can’t do.
Soon as things was going good, I shot back up to Omaha to let the boys in on ever’thing, and to show them oil lease papers to Louise. I didn’t know if she’d look at ’em, or if she even look at me. But I lit on over to the Loyal soon as I got back, and I set ’em on her lap.
“I done it, honey. I’m a oil man.”
There wasn’t a wisp of a cloud the day we left Omaha to go back to Smackover. And inside me, I was feeling good as that sky was clear blue. We was all heading down to look at my new wells in that new seventy-horsepower Cadillac. Me and my three brothers and Louise.
Yeah, it’d worked.
When I’d laid that lease on Louise’s lap, only thing she said was Lewis’d been missing me, and that she’d sent him up to her folks in Wisconsin for the summer to get his mind on something else. She never said one word about how long we’d been apart, or what we’d talked about on that park bench. And when I give her a hundred dollar bill to hire a fill-in lady at the cigar stand, all she done was take it.
It was damn strange. Damn, damn strange! Only I was so tickled at having her back, I didn’t think too hard on it—how come she was acting like she was acting. Maybe she’d had time to think over ever’thing I’d told her, and maybe it’d come to make sense. Or maybe she was just happy I was finally a oil man.
And I was, just about.
Right before we took off, I got a telephone call from Clyde, we was almost there. They was down about a thousand and five hundred feet, and folks all around was hitting oil at two-thousand.
Yessireeeeeeeeee!
Me and Louise sunk into the seats of that long Cadillac like we was millionaires already. Dock was setting in the jump seat. Jess was in the front seat with Joe, who was doing the driving. Dock was a little boogered over traveling in the daytime, thinking some law might rank him from the “Wanted” posters that’d been sent out ever’where. But I told him to quit that worrying. Wasn’t no laws gonna be looking for a escaped con from Texas in a Cadillac with three men in business suits and a short lady.
We stopped overnight at rooming houses along the way, and I spent the evenings telling ’em oil stories.
I told ’em about a farmer that’d made him a half million in one week. And when the bank cashier asked him what was gonna do with all that money, that old boy spit some tobaccy juice, real straight, through his teeth, the way them old farmers do, and said in a proud kinda way: “First thing I’m gonna do is buy me a extra pair of suspenders so that I won’t have to be changing ’em every Sunday to my other pants.”
That story was true. I’d talked to that old farmer myself.
It was on the last leg of the trip, I first seen the clouds. They was over to the west of us. Parts of ’em was white and fluffy, like cotton bolls. Only they was starting to get black on the bottom of ’em, and the tops was puffing up. You could see ’em growing right before your eyes. And they was starting to get shaped like a anvil.
I didn’t like none of that. We was on a paved highway right then, and my Cadillac had automatic windshield wipers—the first year they’d had them things—but the road to my leases wasn’t nothing but dirt. If it come up one of them bad summer storms, that road’d turn in
to a soupy mudpit.
“Give her some gas, Joe,” I said.
He let loose with a “Yee-haaaaaa!” and we tore down that highway and around them curves like we’d just robbed us a bank. But when we come to the turn-off, and we cut over to that little old dirt farm road, the road was rough and rutty.
Joe had to slow it down to a crawl.
It’d already rained earlier in the week, I could tell. The road was full of little gullies, criss-crossing this-a-way and that-a-way, where other folks driving down it had slided around and spun their wheels. But the only rain I wanted to see right then was black rain—squirting up from outa the ground.
There was tall pine trees on both sides of us, except when we was passing patches of cotton and corn. Some of the cotton patches was white with flowers, others of ’em was just thick with green. And workers—whole families of ’em, little kids and grownups—was bent over in the green patches, chopping weeds with long, hard hoes, just about holding body and soul together, nothing more.
Louise couldn’t get over the fields that was already blooming. “So pretty,” she kept saying.
“Yeah, honey,” I said. “Ever’thing looks pretty from the back seat of a Cadillac.”
Except black clouds.
When you grow up a farm boy, you know ever’thing there is to know about clouds. You know just how to read ’em—if they’re wispy or lumpy or flat; if they’re white or blue-gray or dark gray or green; if they got tails or hats or ragged bottoms; if they’re sailing or strutting or whirling.
Only you didn’t need to be a farm boy to read these clouds.
Now they was pitch black, and moving towards us.
Joe seen ’em too, but on that rutty road, he couldn’t pick up our speed. Besides, we was starting up a high rise. And no sooner we was over the crest, lemme tell you what, them ugly black clouds blowed right outa my head.
There they was! My three derricks.
They was in the valley down below, running in a line along the banks of that creek. Looked like windmills, made out of wood, with crossbars, except they didn’t have no fans on top, and they was a lot bigger and taller. Steam engines was turning the drills, all going at a steady put-put-put.
“Look at ’em, Lou!” I said. She took my hand.
We kept on the road down the rise. I told Joe to stop at a jerry-built lumber shack close by one of the derricks.
It give me a charge being so close to them working derricks. They was beautiful—big steel bits sinking into that red, red ground, cutting through hard, hard rock. And while them bits was churning, the workmen was pouring some kind of liquid down into the casings, and ever’ time the drills’d sink a little deeper, mud and dirty water’d come sloshing up. Some of the workers was so covered with mud they looked like booger-men.
I seen Clyde over at Derrick No. 2; his arms was waving this-a-way and that-a-way. He was giving orders to the workers. But when he seen us, he shot right over. He had grease all over his face, and clothes, and hands.
“Hoddy, boss!”
“Hoddy, Clyde. How’s it coming?”
“Real fine. No. 2 oughta be striking any time now.”
“Yessir!”
“Only I tell you, boss,” and the smile on Clyde’s face flashed off his face, “it ain’t gonna be none too soon.”
Uh-oh.
“How’s that?”
“Lemme show you something.” He pulled out a greasy rag outa his back pocket and wiped his hands. His hands was blacker when he was done, but he didn’t act like he seen it. He reached into another pocket, pulled out a map and unfolded it.
He pointed a greasy finger. “These’r your leases, the ones colored pink. These ones, the ones in blue, they’re other people’s leases. Almost ever’ one of the blue ones has got wells that are producing. Some of ’em are right here.” He pointed to where blue places was butted up agin pink ones. “What’s happening—I can’t prove it, but I know it’s going on—is some of our neighbors here has been drilling slant holes.…” he jabbed his finger at a angle under the pink places, “.… right under your land. Sucking up oil from right under our feet here. And it ain’t going into your tanks. It’s going into theirs.”
Slant holes?
“But that ain’t legal!” I was so mad I coulda kicked a hole in the ground.
“Hate to say it, but there’s lots that ain’t legal in this business. Too much money in it. This one, well, it’s like if you got a bunch of straws in a ice cream sodey, and you got a bunch of people sucking on it, and you ain’t. It means we gotta get your straw stuck in there, and start sucking too.”
“We oughta put the laws on them canker-eyed screwworms,” Dock said. Then he thought about what he said. He didn’t say no more.
I looked over at iron pipes stacked next to the lumber shack. “Poke ’em in, then! Poke ’em in! You gotta put on extra crews, do it.”
I was starting to feel sick in my gut. All them dreams about being rich as John D. Rockefeller, or William Wrigley Jr.…
Right about then, something wet hit my face. Only it wasn’t crude. Them black clouds’d been raining up west of us, and now they was right up on us. A wind was whipping up, and all of a sudden there come a big white flash and a KER-BOOM!
“Let’s get you back in the car, honey,” I said to Louise. “Little shower coming up.”
I knowed better. One ear to that thunder boom, it wasn’t gonna be no little shower. And sure enough, before we could get back into the car, them raindrops’d turned into sheets of water. Like somebody’d picked up the Gulf of Mexico and put it up in the sky, and pulled the plug.
We couldn’t barely see the derricks.
“Dad-gum, it’s Noah’s flood!” Joe said. “We better get back to town ’fore the roads mud up.”
“Yeah,” said Dock. “We gotta get back there ’n sell some shares in this company. ’Fore ever’thing’s sucked up ’n all.”
That was one of the few bright things Dock ever said in his life.
It was too late. The road behind us was already muddied up. We couldn’t have gone a hundred feet in that soup.
There was a knocking on the window. It was Clyde, all shook up.
“River’s rising!” he hollered. “I’m moving my men up!” He pointed to the top of the rise. “Let’s git y’all up there too!”
“What about the derricks?”
“We’ll hitch your automobile to the mules.”
“What about the derricks?”
“Gotta see how high the water gets …” He was breathing hard. “Lotta creeks feed this old gully … I’ve heard about flashfloods, these parts, but I dunno … it’s all a risk … gotta drill where the oil is … and trust in the Good Lord, I guess.”
Goddamn! I didn’t know how the Good Lord was feeling about me right then. And I knowed all about flashfloods from back home in Texas. It’s when the ground can’t soak in no more water, and the creeks start rising fast, and they all start dumping water into the river, and you get a huge, tall wall that builds up and builds up and builds up—and then crashes downstream like nothing you ever seen in your life.
But what the hell could we do about it?
We all got out of the car, except for Louise, and stood soaked. Big mules was hitched to the Cadillac. And with them big mules pulling and all of us men pushing, we moved that big machine up the rise, through deep, thick mud.
I was too sick to my stomach to climb back into the car. I stood with Clyde looking down towards my derricks. Through them sheets of rain I could make out that the river was rising.
“Can’t we tie ’em down?”
He shook his head. “They’re down good as we can get ’em. Too risky, anyhow. If it’s raining upstream near like it’s raining here, best we can do is pray. Way that water’s rising, only the Good Lord’s gonna save ’em now.”
“Oh no, He ain’t,” said Joe sticking his finger out from the front seat of the car. He was pointing upstream.
And there it was—a wall of wate
r, high as a three-story building, coming right on down that river … churning, foaming, chewing up ever’thing in front of it. Carrying uprooted trees, dead mules, dead horses, a crashed-up farm wagon, ever’thing and anything you could think of. And before you could blink your eyes, that wall of water hit the derricks.
Over they went, one by one.
Nobody said nothing. What was there to say? It was like that wall of water’d knocked all the breath outa us. Except for Jess. He leaned down and pulled out a flask that was strapped to his calf. He opened it and then he opened his mouth.
“They’re right,” he said when he come up for air, “the ones that say water don’t mix with oil. Water’s nothing but the work of the devil. God knows, I’d never pollute no whiskey with it.”
I didn’t think it was funny. Neither did anybody else.
TWENTY-FIVE
We was setting in my room at the Loyal, back up in Omaha. Me and my three brothers. It was our last night there. We was switching over to a two-bit boarding house. I hadn’t ordered up no thick-cut ribeyes. I couldna paid for ’em. My brothers all had long faces. You’da thought they was the family of a dead man at a funeral.
Joe lit into me. “We had ever’thing, Willis! Now we got nothing!”
“Oh, hell, Joe. Nobody’d get nowhere in life if they didn’t take chances.”
“Why you gotta take your chances with my money?”
“If it wasn’t for me, you boys’d still be walking around in horse shit.”
“Yeah, well, horse shit smells better’n bullshit, old man.”
“What’cha saying, little brother?”
“I’m saying you’re a thief, Willis. You took all my money, din’cha? I told you you could take $15,000 and you took thirty. Ain’t one red cent left in my lockbox. I checked it.”
Joe was right. I had took all his money. But I done it for his own good. I’d honestly thought them oil wells was a sure bet. Well, they wasn’t. And so the talking went on, Joe throwing me the blame for ever’thing, me trying to tell ’em there was oil under our leases. And it was still there, even if some of it was getting drained off by them slant drillers.
All Honest Men Page 22
