by Texas
'Don't you believe it, Mr. Rusk. Petroleum products come in at a dozen different levels. Maybe the easy oil is finished, but how about the deep gas?'
'Dewey, stands to reason, if there was oil or gas out there, the big boys would have found it.'
'No, Mr. Rusk,' Dewey pleaded, still standing, for Ransom had not invited him to sit and he knew he must not appear presumptuous. 'Big boys only find what little boys like me take them to. I know where there's oil, but I need your money to buy the leases and sink a well. This time it'll be a deep well.'
'Dewey, you've been peddling that story across Texas. What I will do, because you were a good partner to my father, here's four hundred dollars. Get yourself some teeth.'
'I was going to do that, Mr. Rusk, but what I really need is your support on this new prospect.'
He was given no money beyond the four hundred dollars, which he did not use for teeth; he spent it traveling to other oil centers in search of funds which would enable him to pursue his latest dream, and in the meantime Ransom was visited by someone who wanted a contribution for a much different enterprise. It was Mr. Kramer, the old-time oilman who was now interested only in wind velocities and armadillos.
'Mr. Rusk, to put it bluntly, I'm asking you for four thousand dollars to trap armadillos and deliver them to this leprosy institute in Louisiana.'
'What are you talking about?'
'You may not know it, few people do, but the armadillo seems to be the only living thing besides man that can contract leprosy. Their low body temperature, twenty-nine point seven to thirty-five degrees Celsius, encourages the bacillus.'
'You mean those critters in my front lawn . . .'
'Don't get excited. It's not transferable to humans, the kind they develop. But it is the only way that our scientists and medical people can experiment on what causes and cures this dreaded disease.'
'Of course you can have the money, but you mean that our little bulldozers have some utility in the world 7 '
'That's just what 1 mean. You see, with nature, you can never tell. The armadillo has been preserved through these millions of years, so we must suppose that it can host a particular disease which has also existed for millions of years.'
'Now wait a minute, I don't want you trapping Lady Macbeth and her Four Witches.'
'Make that eight witches. She just had four more pups, all female again.'
'Where do the males come from?'
it balances out. Don't ask me how.'
It was a hundred miles from Fort Worth to Larkin, but with Rusk driving, it would require only an hour and twenty minutes, so the men decided to dash out to inspect the armadillo problem, and as they sped along the broad and well-engineered roads Ransom asked Mr. Kramer what he thought of Dewey Kimbro, who had haunted the oil fields during the period that Kramer had worked them.
'Standard Texan. Always going to hit it big. Wastes his money on women. You'll have to bury him some day, two hundred dollars for the funeral, because he'll wind up without a cent.'
'He brought in a lot of wells.'
'You're not thinking of bankrolling him, are you?'
'Most of the big finds in Texas, even the real gushers, have been found by.crazy geologists like Dewey. He says he knows something . . .'
'I'll admit this, Mr. Rusk. Men like me, we work the fields, it's a living. We get paid well, we save our money, we retire to a decent life. A man like Dewey, he never retires. Four days before he dies, not a cent to his name, he'll be promoting the next well. I was an oil worker. He's an oil dreamer.'
In Larkin, after Rusk noticed with some satisfaction that Lady Macbeth and her eight helpers had by now pretty well chopped
the onetime bowling lawn to shreds, he asked: 'Now, where do you propose to trap these armadillos for the hospital in Louisiana?' Kramer took him a few hundred yards to the banks of Bear Creek where a family of about fifty of the armored animals centered and to a spot farther along the creek where another settlement of about forty maintained its headquarters: 'They like moist ground. Two things that can kill the armadillo, very cold winters and a prolonged drought.'
'Do they need so much water?'
'Like camels, they can exist on practically none, but when the sun bakes the earth during a drought, they can't dig easily. And that means they can't eat.'
The part of any visit to Mr. Kramer's place that Rusk liked best came when he was allowed to play with the three tame creatures that Kramer still kept in his kitchen and out in the yard, and it was difficult for Ransom to explain why he found so much pleasure in them: They aren't cuddly, and they aren't very responsive, but they are endlessly fascinating.'
'I think you like them because of the oil derricks on their back.'
'Now that makes sense.' But what really pleased him was the way they rousted about like oil-field workers, bruising and brawling, knocking one another over, then scampering like a team to the latest noise or the newest adventure. They were social animals, accustomed to working together, and when holes were to be dug, they were formidable.
'It just occurred to me, Kramer. If we could train those little devils, we could dig oil wells in half the time.' The armadillos seemed to sense that Rusk was their friend, for when he sat in a chair they enjoyed romping with his feet, or sitting in his lap. They had no teeth that could bite a person, and when at ease, kept their eighteen formidable, lancelike toes under control.
But in the long run, it was the extraordinary beauty of their armor and the ever-present sense that these were creatures from a most distant past that allured. Sometimes Rusk would sit with 3ne in his hands, staring at its preposterous face—all nose, beady eyes that could barely see—and he would ask Kramer: in what bog did this one hide for twenty million years?'
He provided the funds for leprosy research, but was pleased when his gardener informed him that more than twenty armadillos now resided in the Rusk fields. None of them were tame, but they made a noble procession when they set out at dusk to excavate >onie neighbor's lawn.
*
When he returned to Fort Worth he found Dewey Kim-bro, still with no teeth, perched outside his office, talking excitedly with his secretary. As soon as the old wildcatter spotted him, he jumped up, took his arm, and accompanied him into the inner office: 'Mr. Rusk, I don't want to talk if or how or even how much. Just when.'
'What do you mean?'
'I've spotted a field you have to put under lease. And then you have to pay for the exploration well.'
'Now look, Kimbro . . .'
'No, you look. Where do you suppose you got the money you now have? They say in the papers more than a hundred and fifty million. Because I found a field for your daddy. I'm an oilman, Mr. Rusk. You owe me one last shot, because I know where oil can be found.'
The plea was irresistible. In an average year Rusk had been spending three million dollars on the hunches of men with far dimmer track records than Dewey Kimbro and with far less dedication to the oil business. He did owe the old man one last shot: 'I'll do it.'
'No tricks. I'm too old for tricks.'
'My father warned me that you were completely honest, Dewey, but if anyone crossed you, you bided your time, then shot him in the back . . . dead of night.'
'Your father ever tell you how we got the Yeager land back under our control? He had me goad the poor devil till he lifted his shotgun, then your father drilled him.'
'It's a deal. Now where is this precious land that's going to make us both rich?'
'You richer, me rich.' And he drove Rusk to a big ranch, El Estupendo, tucked away among the mesas north of Fort Stockton.
'This land couldn't produce goats,' Rusk complained, but Dewey's enthusiasm could not be quenched, and in their secret explorations he showed the financier faults whose edges protruded and domes half hidden by mesquite.
'There could be oil down there,' Rusk conceded, and Dewey cried: 'There has to be!'
The ranch was one of the nine accumulated by Lorenzo Quiin-per in obedience to the
principle laid down by his famous ancestor . Yancey: 'If you grab enough Texas land, somethin' good is bound to happen.' Quimper was not in residence, and in his absence the place was run by a young Mexican in whom he apparently placed much confidence. 'I am Candido Guzman,' the manager said in carefully enunciated English. 'Mr. Quimper's the man in charge.'
'Where is he?'
'Who knows? Maybe at the Polk ranch, down on the Rio Grande.'
They made a series of phone calls and located Quimper, not at any of his western ranches but in his newly built ranch on the shores of Lake Travis near Austin, and as soon as he heard the name Rusk he told Guzman: 'Keep him there. I'll fly right out.' Climbing into his Beechcraft, he directed his pilot to drop him off at the improvised runway at El Estupendo, where Candido was waiting, as always, with his pickup. 'What's the focus?' he asked, using a phrase he liked, and Guzman replied: 'Oil, I think. I went in to Fort Stockton to ask about Kimbro and they told me "Oil."
'Well, if a man has nine Texas ranches, one of them ought to have oil/ Quimper said, and Candido replied: 'Mr. Quimper, the papers say you already have two with oil,' and Quimper said: 'You can never have too many.'
When Rusk and Quimper met in a tin-roofed shack on the ranch, they formed a powerful pair, Rusk older and more cautious in Texas gambling, Quimper more eager to leap at a promising chance. In personal appearance, too, they were contrasting, Rusk leaner and more sharklike, Quimper fleshier and more prosperous-looking. Ransom said little, and Quimper could hardly be stopped, indulging in such Texas phrases as 'Wiser'n a tree full of owls' and 'We'll dig the damned well and nail the coonskin to the barn door.' He also uttered a great truth about oil in Texas: 'My pappy told me: "Lorenzo, in an oil deal always be satisfied with the overriding royalty of one-eighth. Let the other dumb bastards do the drillin' and grab their seven-eighths. You'll always come out ahead." And time has proved him right. Gentlemen, you can have your lease, but in some ways I'm a lot wiser than my pappy. Not ten years, like the early ones. Two years. Not fifty cents an acre, like he did. Three dollars, because this is prime land. And not one-eighth, three-sixteenths.'
'They told me you were a miserable bastard, Quimper,' Rusk said, 'but you have the land, you've been to law school, even though you flunked out, and they say they're putting you on the Board of Regents at the university, so you must know something. It's a deal.' They shook hands, and that's how the exploration of those barren wastes north of Fort Stockton began.
They left the positioning of the first well to Kimbro, but from a distance they hovered, watching him. 'Vultures waiting for the old man to die,' Dewey said of them one day as his drilling probed deeper and deeper, with no results. 'They'll wait in vain.'
This enforced waiting had one productive consequence; it be-
came an opportunity for Rusk to renew acquaintance with a gifted gentleman who worked the oil fields. He was Pierre Soult, collateral descendant of one of Napoleon's better marshals, and another of the engineering geniuses France was producing in these years.
Pierre Soult, latest of this enterprising breed, had worked with Rusk before; it was his genius that prodded development of the procedure of digging a deep hole in the earth, filling it with dynamite, and then placing a dozen sensitive detectors at varied distances and exploding the charge. His detectors recorded how long it took for the reverberation to penetrate the earth below, strike a granite base, and come bouncing back. Exquisite timing and even more exquisite analysis revealed secrets of the substructure, and from these Soult could advise his clients as to what lay beneath the ground and where best to dig to find it.
'Seismographic exploration,' Soult called his process. 'We are like the scientists who detect and record earthquakes thousands of miles away. With our dynamite we make the little earthquake and record it half a mile away.'
Of course, his procedures were now much advanced over those primitive ones Rusk had employed in his early days of oil exploration, and when Rusk complimented him on this, Soult said: 'I've about run my course with seismography. I'm thinking seriously about a new device to solve mathematical problems, useful in all fields, very daring. A hand-held computer.'
'What?'
'Given the proper technical advances, and I think I know a way to ensure them, you can carry in your hand, Mr. Rusk, more mathematics than Newton and Einstein together ever mastered.'
'Come see me when this is over. That is, if we strike oil.'
'If there is any around here, you'll find it. My little earthquakes ensure that.'
One very hot afternoon, temperature 104 degrees, humidity seven percent, when the log at 22,000 feet had shown not a sign of carbon, a mighty roar from below signaled an upsurge of oil and gas so powerful that it tore away the superstructure as it struck the air, ignited from a spark thrown by crashing steel girders, and flamed into a beacon visible for seventy miles across the flat and arid land.
Five crew members were incinerated. A hundred thousand dollars' worth of petroleum products burned for days, then a million dollars' worth. Dewey Kimbro's men tried every trick to control, the wild flames of Estupendo # 1; they poured in tons of mud to seal off the flow of oil, they tried dynamiting the hole to exhaust
its oxygen, but nothing worked. The flames roared into the midnight sky and helped the sun illuminate the day.
Red Adair, the Texan who specialized in the dangerous task of subduing oil-well fires, was summoned, and after three weeks he brought this tremendous conflagration under control. Rusk, bleary-eyed from watching the flames, told his new partner: 'Quimper, it hurts to see so much wealth vanishing in smoke. But when you know that a million times as much is still down there
With his royalty from the Estupendo field, Quimper more than doubled his wealth and was promoted into the rich category. Dewey Kimbro's share was more than two million, with which he purchased some new teeth, but within two years he was back prowling marginal fields, listening for leads at the morning breakfasts, searching for some new source of exploration capital; his wealth had vanished in divorce settlements, the acquisition of a fourth wife, and extensive lawyers' fees for getting rid of her after seven months.
The knowledge that his assets now totaled just under $400,-000,000 altered Ransom Rusk very little. He retained four Mexican servants at his Larkin home, but because he still tried to avoid entanglement with women, the mansion saw little social life. He spent most of his time in Fort Worth, where his frugal office had to be enlarged, for he now required a full-time accountant to keep track of his intricate participations in the various wells he supervised.
But he was never satiated; always he looked for that next big field, that lucky wildcatter who was going to lead him to the next gusher, and it was in pursuit of what he called 'the significant multiplier,' that he sought out Pierre Soult: is what you told me that day while we were waiting for Estupendo Number One true?'
'You mean about the radical new system for calculators?'
'Yes. How much would you need?'
'We must invent a new way to form silicon chips, and I believe I have it.'
'How much?'
'I'll have to hire real brains, you know. The best the Sorbonne and Cambridge and MIT produce.'
'How much, damnit?'
'Real brains cost real money. Maybe twenty million.'
if we're going to do it, let's do it Texas style. You can count on fifty.' They shook hands, and because of the way the world was developing, this investment would turn out to be the wisest he would make.
Spending so much time in Midland, a city ninety-eight-percent Republican, produced a significant change in Ransom Rusk. Already conservative, like most oilmen who took great risks but did not want others to do so, he moved steadily right to become a reactionary, dedicated to the principle that all government was bad and that enterprising men should be allowed to write their own rules. But at the same time he defended the depletion allowance, which enabled him to retain a huge percentage of the income he gathered, and he sought to drive from pu
blic life any political leader who spoke or acted against this preferential treatment enjoyed by oilmen. Government was all bad except that which furthered his interests.
He was partly justified in this stand: i gamble fantastic sums trying to find oil. Fifty, sixty million, and three-fourths of it can go down the drain. I deserve protection.'
Of course, on the one-fourth of his venture capital which was not lost he made gigantic profits, and these he spent freely in trying to defeat candidates who were not supportive of the oil industry: 'A basic rule of self-defense. The man who attacks my interests is my enemy.' It so happened that only Republicans could be seen as protecting his interests, so he was forced to oppose most Democrats, which he did with huge sums of money.
He had never liked Lyndon Johnson personally, but Johnson had been one of the staunchest defenders of big oil, so with his left hand Rusk slipped him generous contributions while with his right he continued to pull the straight Republican lever. He was quietly pleased when Johnson decided not to run in 1968, but when Hubert Humphrey was nominated to succeed him, he sprang into furious action: 'The man's an ass, a bumbling ass. The Republic will fall if he's elected.' And in his sour, sharply focused way, Rusk spent millions to defeat him, all the Democratic senators running that year, and sixteen selected Democratic congressmen whose votes had offended him.
He was delighted when the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon, for here was a man who had proved over a long period in public service that he knew what was good for the nation. Ransom invited Nixon to Texas, spent lavishly to influence his fellow oilmen, and literally bit his fingernails on election night when it looked as if Humphrey and George Wallace might, because of the inane electoral college, succeed in throwing the election into the House of Representatives. He did not go to bed all that night, and when morning came, with Nixon the victor by a precarious margin, he cried to the empty rooms at Larkin: 'The Republic has been saved!'
