by Rick Bass
Simon Craven was a financier from Dallas, and previously London, whose dreams and appetites were so large that he was frustrated by the smaller successes, deeming as failures any wells that tested initial flows of less than five hundred barrels per day. Impatient and edgy, he had a hawk’s face and dark brown eyes, was tall and dressed always in white, and wore a Panama hat.
Only occasionally had Richard seen him look happy. Whenever a wildcat blew out or tested in excess of a thousand barrels a day, Craven—the consortium called him Sy—would burst into song, with tunes and lyrics that seemed to bear no connection whatsoever to the event at hand. Present on the scene of such success, he was as likely to begin braying “The Yellow Rose of Texas” as he was “Oh, Danny Boy,” or even a gospel hymn; and in some instances he had launched into song even as the bodies of workers who had been killed in the blows were still being hauled away.
The laborers he utilized were neither skilled nor rare, they were as common and relentless and desperate as ants, and he was not shy about admitting his values—the discovery of one more rank wildcat was worth, or superior to, any number of Mexican laborers—and not shy either about his hopes for and interest in Richard, who, having sharpened his skills on the distant Paleozoic oceans beneath Odessa, was proving, despite his youth, to be one of Sy’s better geologists.
Richard had never seen Sy look relieved or at peace—only taut and pensive, or exuberant—and, even more so than with the aging Red Watkins (whose blotchy face belied countless cold beers drunk, and countless sunburns), Richard received the impression from Sy Craven that such a lifelong leaping between ferocity and exuberance was not sustainable, and that Craven’s days might be even more numbered than the frail and fading old driller’s.
As Red Watkins’s ill health seemed to be etching itself more and more plainly upon Watkins’s surface, across the years, so too did Sy Craven’s seem to be building within him far below, and all the more potent and deadly for its not being seen.
The other investor in Richard’s well-being and development was a semiretired prospector, a man named George Waller, who possessed just enough geological and financial and drafting skills to be able to explain and sell the prospects generated by the staff. Whereas Sy Craven seemed to take extra caution in mollycoddling Richard, and making sure he was treated with respect—grooming him for future continents—George Waller was uneasy with Richard’s skill, and the reliance he found himself having to place upon the young man.
George Waller dreaded ceding control to anyone or anything, and it unnerved him greatly that Richard had so much more knowledge of the world beneath the world, the world that Waller was responsible for selling, sometimes to dupes and stooges, though other times to qualified and knowledgeable partners and investors who sought, at great premium, to join in on the play.
If Sy Craven’s relationship to Richard was cautious and delicate yet candid and open in its predatory nature—not unlike that of a man choosing twigs in an attempt to start a fire, upon whose flame the fire starter’s continued survival depends—then George Waller’s relationship to the young geologist was almost the exact opposite, an exhausting and debilitating mix of passive-aggressive bullying and wheedling that was completely fear-based.
Craven’s fear was not that Richard might leave—he understood the young man was too wounded, and needy, and too desperately hot, like all the rest of them, upon the elusive slipstream trail of the oil and gas—but feared rather that Richard might simply not develop to the fullest of his talent.
And so Sy Craven sought to nurture him, almost as if in love with him. As if in love with the future.
Waller’s fear was more immense: that Richard would fail, or that he would abandon the consortium at their most critical time of need. Some of the structural and stratigraphic traps that Richard was mapping were so complicated and unlikely-seeming that they were often hard for Waller to fully comprehend, much less sell to other partners.
Waller was usually able to mask his unfamiliarity or discomfort with the strange prospects and their fractured logic (the unconformities in time and lithology, the radial faulting, and the overreliance, in Waller’s opinion, upon delicate and invisible permeability barriers) by referring to the prospects as “sophisticated”—even as he himself knew better than anyone that at this level, there was no investor worth his salt who would buy into any of these larger prospects without understanding them inside and out.
And yet, the prospects kept striking oil and gas, and the consortium kept pumping and siphoning it up out of the ground, so that soon enough, a not-so-subtle transformation began to take place, in which George Waller found that investors were wanting to know which geologist had authored the map they were looking at; that George Waller was now selling the geologist as much as the geology. And again, this reliance upon the surface, and upon the present, made him uncomfortable, resentful of the power Richard held—even if unasked for—over the success or failure of George Waller’s selling of the packages.
In a perverse way, Richard’s successes were even making it harder for George Waller to sell other perfectly good prospects—and for this, too, Waller found himself nurturing a swelling resentment.
As a way of reasserting some degree of control over the younger man (George Waller was in his early sixties, had spent all his life in the oilfield; had been present at the end of the Spindletop play, had made and lost half a hundred fortunes, and twice as many enemies), Waller had taken to calling Richard by nicknames, which he did with anyone by whom he felt threatened, or toward whom he felt aggressive, which was almost everyone. An investor who had fallen on hard times and who had had to leave the consortium, Buckminster Williams, became Bucky Boy, and then, falling farther into the abyss of gone-by time, Buckfuck, while Waller sought to imprison other associates with simple names like Mr. D and Happy Man and Señor Maximum.
His various attempts at redefining and owning Richard, even if briefly—for the few moments in which the shadow of the name lingered—included Cave Man (due to the fact that, unlike the others, Richard eschewed the opulence of the oil culture) and Wonderboy. (Other times, when the aggression was barely manageable, it was Boy Wonder.)
Richard had been confused by George Waller at first, taken in initially by the man’s manners and smile and general effusiveness. It made no sense to Richard, but it seemed to him more than ever—particularly since he had dared to see all the way into, and still love, Clarissa—that the more experienced he became at peering beneath the flat surface of a landscape, reaching down into the unseen vision of the folded layers hidden below, the more accurately he was able to likewise cipher the hearts of the men and women he encountered.
A human being was nothing like a mountain range, nor was even the coldest heart like any stone. But it seemed to Richard that in learning to look for, and see, the one thing, he had developed skills that allowed him to perceive the other. He understood immediately that the height of George Waller’s grimaced-smile fawning—teeth bared like those of a skeleton’s—was matched only by a corresponding depth of resentment and loathing; and he was cautious around Waller, even as he spent an increasing amount of time in the older man’s company, explaining the prospects to him. And when Waller still failed to understand them, Richard would explain to him how to at least talk about them as if he did; how to sell them, how to promote them. And this was deeply frustrating to Richard, for it took away from the time in which he could be exploring and generating new prospects.
And though if Richard had been asked about it, he would have opined that he considered himself to be outside the club, isolate and separate not just in his talent, but also by disposition, a truth he had not yet realized was that he had been absorbed by the oilmen nonetheless. They had not yet consumed him, but he had been swallowed. He had no goals other than the finding of more oil. In this, he was not quite a taker—was more of a giver—though his appetites were no different from their appetites, and there was nothing in the world before him but oil, and not
hing in his life now but the past.
They were all dying, all of them—Red Watkins, Richard knew, and Sy Craven, quavering between his torments for more, always more, like a leaf of paper that has just settled into a flame but has not yet ignited, and George Waller, whose soul was not so much rotting as simply funneling down some vast drain, with Waller not even making the slightest attempt to grasp or claim it.
They were all in varying stages of spiritual decay—even Red Watkins, with his old man’s childish rages, a hostage, as in infancy, to his temper—and yet still Richard considered himself apart from them; as if, by virtue of his observing these things in them, he had rendered himself immune.
Their emotional deaths were masked, too, by the wrack of their aging bodies. A lifetime of exposure to Halliburton fracturing fluids, benzenes and acetones, ammonia nitrate and sulfuric acid, and all the other brimstone aromas of their profession, coupled with long hours, the hot sun, and wanton alcoholism, had conspired to dash against the rocks the strength they had once possessed in their youth, little different from Richard’s own strength—and yet here, too, Richard thought that because he could see these things clearly, he was immune.
As his years in Mexico advanced and he rose higher in the company, being assigned greater interests and royalties in his various prospects, assembling more wealth and gaining ever-more knowledge of the secret and tangled traps of the old lands below, he watched as one by one the older geologists and drillers began to totter, nearing collapse: though still they soldiered on, as if the oil was their god, and their work their prayer.
Goiters began to mount on some of the oilmen while their muscle mass withered year by year, so that it was as if they were being turned inside out, becoming as knobby as a blighted riverbed, bright cobble baking chalk-white in the sun.
Syphilitic chancres began erupting like tiny geysers on many of them, legacy of countless trips to whorehouses around the world, the sores drying and cracking in the desert sun as their immune systems faltered.
Only Richard moved among them untouched.
Tough as nails, however—tougher, he suspected, than he could ever dream of being—they kept on, in many instances hiring their surgeons and physicians to come work on them out in the field to save time, and to prescribe fairly radical treatments. They had all had their prostates sawed out at one time or another, and even those who fell prey to the most dire of prognoses chose work over everything else, so that more than ever work became a prayer for them; and Richard moved with them, adjusted his rhythms and patterns to match theirs, and continued falling, tumbling with them through space and time, even as he continued to believe himself apart from them.
There was a tally, a running total of interest points, charted by Sy Craven, in which each geologist (as well as the engineers and production personnel) was assigned little ownerships in the world below, which, at the end of their service, they would be able to convert to ownership in the company, claiming their proportionate shares not just of all the oil and gas the company had produced and sold, but all that which had been discovered and claimed, residing beneath the desert floor and stretching up into the mountains in hidden lobes and fingers.
None of the geologists or other specialists had ever claimed their percentages—the caveat in doing so was that they had to retire—and though any one of them could have done so and walked away rich, heirs to the spoils as well as the fruit of a foreign country, so deeply had they fallen into the spirit of the chase—so fully had it become the sinew of their lives—that they would have been bereft without it, and would sooner have renounced their names or even their lives before they abandoned their profession, or the joy of and glory in working in the Sierra Occidentals, and one of the greatest inland plays in recent history. It had been decades since such a reservoir had been found, and almost anyone who knew about such things said that there would never be another one like it.
There were ten-year packages, and twenty-year severances, and thirty-year plans designed. The most durable among them, Red Watkins, had been with Sy Craven for forty-two years. No one left.
Each day that they went out into the flat pan of the desert and then up into the foothills of the charred landscape that was often still burning or smoldering from their recent revelry with the planes, they were each keenly aware of their power and luck. “Luckier than pigs in shit,” was how Red Watkins described it some evenings, standing up on the throbbing derrick floor, watching the dusk of the desert come creeping in, painting the mountains in alpenglow.
Richard would study the old driller and wonder what Clarissa might have made of him. It was possible there had never been an uglier or more grizzled human being. His beauty lay in the fact that he knew how to get the oil, any oil, all oil, out of the ground. His beauty lay in the volume of oil and gas he had sucked out already over the course of his life, like some mythic dragon, enough to belch plumes of flame that would scorch the world; enough oil to erase the beauty that had yielded it.
His beauty lay in the fact that he alone among them had transcended his hunger—finally—and yet still, he continued on, farther on.
Sy Craven was not a slouch of a geologist himself. He recognized what Richard was doing with his prospects, understood the aggressiveness with which Richard approached his maps, pushing or following his pencil into unknown territory. Like Richard, Craven had learned to see clearly beneath the surface of men as well as mountains, and like a conjurer, what he saw below Richard’s surface troubled him; and although Craven felt fairly certain that he would have no trouble getting Richard to the ten-year mark—another two years’ worth of oil—he sometimes had trouble convincing himself that he could be guaranteed another ten years of labor on top of that, much less another twenty or thirty years.
There were so many other places in the world where Craven wished to turn Richard loose, like a hound on the scent of a wounded stag; but with that sorcerer’s clarity, Craven saw the possibility that once Richard’s pain and disillusionment settled, and the scar tissue formed thick enough, Richard might not see the need any longer to construct maps as daring—and successful—as he was now drafting.
Sometimes Sy Craven would probe like a physician, trying to find and open back up the scars of memory. “A young man needs a partner,” he said. “Someone to go through life with. Or some young men do.” He studied Richard, pretending to only now be speculating about such matters. “But you had your shot, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Richard. “I had my shot.”
Still, Craven would be worried, would feel vulnerable and exposed, but could find no way to gain control over his youngest geologist. He knew that Richard was not by nature a quitter, and yet it seemed to him increasingly that Richard was like some of the wild animals that sometimes came through camp, down from out of the mountains.
Wilder than the deer and antelope that bent their heads to drink from the toxic sludge-ponds, or even to wade out some short distance into and then wallow in those ponds, were the occasional visitors from farther back: not just the black bears and coyotes, but the little Mexican wolves, and, in a drought year, an occasional grizzly bear, and once or twice, a jaguar. The crew rarely saw such animals—the animals managed to stay just beyond the throw of rig light, just on the other side of the pond—though the next day, checking the mud pits, the crew would find their fresh tracks in the powdery dust, and would sometimes even find the carcass of a deer or antelope which the predatory visitor had pulled out of the mud pit, as if to save it, only then to consume it.
The carcass would be torn open, and the pooling blood still warm and uncoagulated, with the destruction so recent that the desert flies had not yet even discovered it: and though the roughnecks and drillers would hurry back up to the rig floor and stare out toward the mountains in that morning’s first light, they would never see the departing visitor; though each time, they were convinced they would be able to glimpse the shambling hulk of bear, or the gliding shadow of dappled jaguar, its coat the co
lor of sunlight, tail floating behind it like a kite string: or even the lobos, half a dozen of them spread out and loping.
Always, however, there was nothing, only those tracks, which might as well have been left by ghosts, were they not as fresh and recent as the pencil erasings from the readjusted contour lines on one of Richard’s maps from the night before: as if the landscape below was returning to life and beginning to flow once more, no longer secretive, but known, and emerging, or reemerging.
The past less of a ghost now than the present.
Sy Craven grew more convinced that he was losing Richard. He refused to believe that Richard would leave before his ten-year investiture—but beyond that ten-year mark, he could no longer envision a future with Richard attached to either Craven’s leash, nor the earth’s.
There was no one thing, no particular clue, which led him to believe this, only his own fears and instincts, his own subconscious ways of knowing. Some nights he dreamed that Richard had gone out into the desert at night with the wolves and bears and jaguars—that he moved among even larger creatures: elephants, and the shadowy visages of mammoth-like hulks. He dreamed that Richard was crawling through the desert on his hands and knees with a little pickax, digging small objects from out of the sand and stone and pocketing them—that he was keeping them secret from the rest of the consortium, that he was not reporting them—and in his dream, Sy Craven leaned closer, desperate in the darkness to know what treasures Richard was pursuing, but was unable to identify them, sensing only that they were objects of incalculable worth, somehow possessing more value than all of the oil and gas that lay buried at various depths beneath the disintegrating sediment of the Sierra Occidentals.
