What They Wanted

by Donna Morrissey

  It was little more than a rustic-smelling closet, consisting of a narrow bunk and a small, bare window. After checking beneath the thin mattress for anything that crawled, I unrolled my sleeping bag and sat down on it, drawing my knees up to my chin and staring morosely out the window. The skinned trunk of what was once a jack pine jutted up outside, a few limbs near the top sagging towards the forest. Ben’s and Chris’s voices sounded loudly through the room door, their words audible despite the continued opening and shutting of the fridge and cupboard doors, squeaking floors, and Cook’s hacking cough.

  “The mud, the mud,” Chris kept on, “tell me about the mud part.”

  “Jeezes, he’s gonna drive me nuts.”

  “I just wanna understand.”

  “You’ll understand, give it a few days, Pabs, it’ll all start coming to you, go check on your sister.”

  “She’s pissed at herself for coming. Is it mud-mud, like outdoor mud?”

  “Jeezes, it’s how we checks for pressure—with mud. Treated mud. We pump mud down the pipe, we pack it down like cement. If she starts coming back up the pipe, something’s driving it back up. What’s driving it back up—that’s your question—something’s pressuring that mud back up your pipe—everything on the rig is about pressure. Maybe it’s a nothing pressure, maybe it’s something big—a gas bubble from a crack in the formation that the seismic’s not showing. In which case you hope the fuck the mud blocks it—gives you time to cut off the pipe, keep that bubble from bursting up through and blowing your balls to smithereens.

  “And that, buddy, is a major part of Trapp’s job, of Push’s job, the engineer’s, the geologist, the mud-man, every fuckin’ man—to always be looking, be reading them gauges, see what your mud’s doing. If she’s not flowing, if the mud’s coming back up your pipe, something’s pushing it back up. Shut her down. First thing you do is shut her down. Shut the whole fuckin’ thing down till you finds out what’s pushing that mud back up. Could be nothing, could be something. Could be U-tubing, meaning a little bit of an imbalance thing happening that’ll right itself. Or it could be gas, pressure from an unknown gas pocket—”

  “U-tubing? What’s U-tubing?” asked Chris.

  “Way to go, bud, that’s a good question, that’s a real smart question, that’s a natural question because I never told you something integral about the whole mud thing, and you caught it—you never caught it, but you caught that you were missing something and you never bothered going on, letting it go, you questioned it. That’s a good hand, that makes for a good rig hand, you’re gonna be around for a long time, don’t tell your sister—”

  “So, what’s U-tubing?”

  “U-tubing is this. Imagine you got a big fucking straw, a McDonald’s milkshake straw, and you puts it down the neck of your beer bottle—like this—now see, your straw is your pipe and we’re drilling it down the hole—the neck of your beer bottle—now see here, all that space around your straw? Your straw don’t completely fill the hole, do it—well, that space around your straw is called your annulus, and that’s where your mud comes back up. The mud goes down your pipe, and back up your annulus—”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind your whys, I’ll answer all your whys—just take your time and listen and you’ll have all your whys—we pump mud down the straw, it filters out down at the bottom end— flows through your drill bit, got it? The mud flows down your straw, out through the drill bit, cools off your drill—gets pretty hot grinding through rock—and then as it’s cooling off your drill bit, it’s picking up all the rock and debris and shit that comes from your drilling, and then it floats it all back up your annulus to ground level. And then we drains it off into the shakers, shakes the shit out of it—your rock and stuff—and we circulates it right back down the hole again. Big cycle. And as long as everything is flowing smoothly down the hole and back up the hole, she’s going fine. It’s when the mud is not flowing fine—when she’s backing up the straw—that you got to shut her down, figure out what the fuck’s going on, what’s pushing your mud back up your straw. And when you gets her figured, you starts her back up and gets on with your business. How’s that, clear as mud?”

  “So, how do you know when it’s nothing?”

  “Most times you don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on thousands of feet below ground. You make educated guesses. That’s why experience pays in this game. Roughnecks are paid to put the pipe down the hole. Push and Frederick are paid to keep it down. One bad-assed pocket of gas can send them pipes shooting through the air like spaghetti. And I already told you—foremost thing on a rig is pressure. Pressure of the mud flowing down the pipe, and the pressure of the formation pushing back up. If one pressure overcomes the other, you might have a kick. You think quick, you act quick. If something odd’s happening, check it out, else risk losing your balls, your rig, your whole fuckin’ crew.”

  “And a kick is—”

  “A kick is when you got an almighty blast coming back up your straw—either we hit a gas pocket, or whatever—if we don’t get her in time—see the pressure on our gauges—up she comes, and she’s as unforgiving as the sea when she gets riled up. Probably the most important job on the rig is the driller, because he’s the one staring at his gauges, always staring at his gauges to make sure they’re balanced, always balanced.”

  “And Trapp’s the driller.”

  “Trapp’s the driller. Go check your sister, ask her if she’d like a drink.”

  “You all right in there, Sis?” Chris hammered my door, sending pain shooting through my head. Feeling more contrary than Mother on a dirty day, I slumped further into the sleeping bag, wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  ALL BECAME QUIET in the kitchen after a spell, leaving just the muted roar of the rig for company. Believing the boys had turned in for the night, I peeled off my clothes and burrowed beneath my pillow. Sometime later I awakened to Chris and Ben clinking glasses on the table and arguing heatedly over a game of cribbage. I thought to get up but my limbs refused to move—jet lag, I thought, that’s what’s making me so tired and cranky, jet lag. I yawned and drifted betwixt sleep and awakenings. Someone, from somewhere outside the cookhouse, started strumming the sweetest of sounds from the heart of a guitar.

  Chris poked his head inside my room once, whispering my name. I murmured something about joining them, and he went back to Ben and his cards, leaving the door ajar, their voices filtering through more clearly—Chris with his incessant questions about the workings of a rig, Ben’s answers becoming more elaborate with each shuffling of cards and clink of whisky glasses.

  “… Keep your eyes open, Pabs, and swivelling in your head. That, bud, is your safety training course, you’ll get no more than that. So repeat what I just said every two seconds—got that, every two seconds—and ask questions, ask whatever question you want; the more you know, the more you watches out for. Problem with them roughnecks walking about town with missing fingers and lame legs is they didn’t swivel their eyes, didn’t ask questions. Most rig hands are just going along. They’re mostly new and they’re just going along. Only a few people on a rig really knows what’s going on around them, and they don’t really know—nobody really knows what’s going on down the hole; you can only guess, you can only figure, you can only surmise.

  “Your engineer, he’s got to have academics. Tool push don’t need academics, just a backload of experience working the rig. As with your driller—experience is what makes a good driller, and intuition. That doesn’t come in books. And there’s your geologist—he needs his academics. And then there’s me and you, buddy, and a couple of others. Rig pigs. And rig pigs don’t require academe or experience to be hired. The floor becomes our teacher. When you’re working the floor you learns the floor—how to run pipe in or out of the hole, how to change motor parts, what to paint, what to grease, do this, do that, whatever the hell comes along.

  “And after a few years you actually start learning some things abou
t what’s happening down the hole. You see things happen and after a while you start putting things together. You keep adding bits of knowledge every day and you start getting more than lumps in your head, you start to actually get some knowing about the way things work, you start adding two plus two, you start keeping the screaming jimmies from addling your brain—listen to them over there, screaming for days, one long jeezes scream …”

  I tried not to listen to the jimmies screaming across the way as I lay there, focusing on Ben’s and Chris’s voices instead. Then the guitar found its way back in with another soft melody and I fell quietly into the dark hole of night.

  NINE

  IAWAKENED with a surge of panic and no notion of where I was. Something clattered against my window and I scrambled out of my sleeping bag with a cry.

  “Hey, Sis. Wakey, wakey.”

  I near collapsed, my sense of relief as sharply felt as the fear had been. Crossing the room, I slid open the window. “Fool!” I hissed as Chris waved up at me. His face looked ghastly in the greyish, predawn light, but his shapeless, brand-new coveralls looked brighter than a chimney fire at night. “Fool!” I muttered again as he leaped back, doing a clumsy pirouette in his new steel-toed boots.

  Creeping through the kitchen so’s not to wake Cook, I unlocked the door to a cool rush of air. The treeline was black as smut against the brightening sky, the rig a ghoulish yellow. I quickly shut the door behind Chris, reducing the screaming jimmies to a distant whine. I looked at him easing himself into a chair now, a twist of orange in the cup of night.

  “Got any tea?” he whispered, looking cautiously at Cook’s door. “And bread, got any bread?”

  I found the light switch and sat beside him. “Look, Chrissy—Chris—I know I done this,” I began, speaking lowly. “But I can’t help it, I don’t like it here—no, listen to me,” I pleaded as he started to protest, and I went into what I thought was a well laid-out argument about the dirtiness of the rig, the dangers, the racket, the bad tempers, the lousy beds.

  “Tea, tea,” Chris kept cutting in, “gimme a cup of tea.”

  I carried on some more about Cook, her coughing, her smoking, the crampy kitchen space.

  “Knew you wouldn’t like it, told you not to come—”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “No, you stop it, you just shush it,” he exclaimed with a flash of temper. “Bloody la la land.”

  “Shush yourself.” I pursed my mouth as the door popped open and in walked Ben, wearing yesterday’s T-shirt and jeans, a yawn baring a full mouth of teeth, minus a molar.

  “Just like back home,” said Ben in hushed tones, “everything but grub cooking in the kitchen.”

  “She’s picking on me, Ben.”

  “Feels sorry for you, bud.”

  I turned from them, staring at the package of bacon Cook had laid on the sink to thaw, torn between throwing it in the frying pan and throwing my knapsack aboard the back of Ben’s truck.

  “For the day at least, you’re going nowhere,” said Ben. “Can’t leave the boys stuck.”

  I cut open the bacon, tossing it in the pan, cringing at the loud thump from Cook’s room, followed by a rack of wet coughs.

  “Her heart’s big,” said Ben.

  I ignored him and set to making a pot of coffee, sliding bread into the toaster and fixing mugs none too gently before the boys. Cook’s room door opened and she trod into the kitchen on little slippered feet. She tottered before Chris, then looked at me, her small eyes blinking with bafflement as though she didn’t recognize us. At Ben’s cheery good morning, her eyes cleared.

  “You’re an early rise,” she said to my apology for waking her, and with a pleased look, she shuffled inside the bathroom.

  The sound of the shower followed, and a few minutes later Cook reappeared, hair slicked wetly beneath a hairnet and underarms jiggling as she started whisking eggs for pancakes.

  Some of my foreboding lifted as I spent the morning replenishing the men’s coffee, serving them food in the same stealthy way I’d served the crowd in the bar. They were certainly a sullen-looking crew, aside from the big-boned, big-framed engineer, Frederick, who most certainly evoked the halls of academia with his black-framed glasses and cleanly pressed khakis.

  He was a kinda likable guy, with a wide smile and a hearty voice that sounded loudly through the cookhouse as he boomed out good morning to Cook and me. No doubt he felt equally as big within himself as he took a seat, spreading out his elbows and taking up half the side of the table, and through long dips of coffee, engaged himself with an ongoing commentary about the weather, the muddied roads, and the latest Rocky movie crowding the theatres.

  Hunched over a bowl of bran and cold milk was the geologist fellow, who kept looking around the table with the squinty eyes of one peering too long and too hard at something up close, and trying to determine what the thing was. Beside the geologist sat Dirty Dan the derrickman, a short, wiry fellow with a handsome face who seldom spoke. A couple of look-alike brothers sat next to him, thin and tense, small bright eyes zapping around the cookhouse as they gulped back coffee. Chris sat amongst them, chancing a few questions about the weather and the time. Aside from Frederick, who responded pleasantly enough, he was brushed aside by the others like a fly hovering around their necks.

  Push blew in through the door, his thick, broad frame appearing to fill the cookhouse. Immediately his sights fell on me. A curt nod and he raised a hand of greeting to Chris.

  “Which sandbox did you fall out of?” he asked roughly but with a hint of humour.

  “Call me Rousty,” said Chris.

  “Rousty, is it?”

  “Will that be coffee or tea?” I asked Push. Swiping off a place at the table with a rag, I pulled back a chair.

  “Not before his whisky,” said Frederick. He met Push’s eyes with a deep, rumbling chuckle and went back to forking pancake into his mouth, still chuckling.

  Push shot him a contemptuous look, his pale grey eyes glimmering like metal.

  “Hang out in the doghouse till you’re told otherwise,” he instructed Chris and went to the refrigerator, one massive hand swinging open the door, the other scooping up a chunk of cheese and package of liver pâté. Frederick’s chuckle switched to the heh heh heh-ing of a bemused parent as Push tucked a baguette beneath his free arm and marched out of the cookhouse.

  Lifting aside a scrap of gauze filming one of the windows, I looked through the morning light at Push’s bull neck as he strode towards a black pickup, one beefy hand fisting the cheese and liver to his chest, the other clutching the baguette to his side like a machete. He jerked sideways, then stood at ease before a crewman who was leaning against his pickup, hawking and spitting. I near busted my face through the window scrutinizing the crewman. With his flat face and silvery eyes he stood as a replica of Push, only skinny and gaunt, as though the air had been punctured out of him.

  Ben had since returned to the cookhouse, wearing a faded, baggy sweatshirt that smelled like diesel and a hard hat clamped to his head. “Push’s dumb-ass twin, Skin,” he said, looking through the window beside me. “Starved in the womb. Push gluttoned all the grub. Oh, here we go.” Ben let out a wearied sigh, leaning closer to the window, the cold plastic of his hard hat touching my cheek. Trapp, a brown sweatshirt tied around his neck like a fur collar, his lips baring small white teeth, was creeping furtively from his bunkhouse up behind Push.

  Push twisted around, holding up his chunk of cheese like a live grenade. So quick were his movements that Trapp snatched back his step in surprise. Recovering, he held up his hands in mock surrender, rattling out his flat ha ha ha laugh.

  Mouth twisting into a snarl, Push swung inside his truck. He raced the motor, jammed his foot to the accelerator, and burned towards the rig, the knobby cleats of his tires flinging back chunks of mud that splattered against the side of the cookhouse like turds of dogshit.

  Trapp was silent now, his body stiffer than a week-old corpse as he watched after
Push. A shudder went through him, and a smile of such eeriness that it felt its way through the cookhouse window to me. Ben watched, tighter than a strung bow, as Skin horked a big one in Trapp’s direction and then hopped up the cookhouse steps.

  “Just boys,” Ben said, “got to have their playtime.”

  He went outside to have a word with Trapp, ignoring Skin, who was stepping in through the kitchen door. Draping a lanky arm around Cook’s portly waist, Skin laughed at her chiding and waltzed her, with her platter of pancakes, to the table, whistling “Waltzing Matilda.”With a thick lock of hair falling over his forehead, he fell upon the pancakes like the half-starved creature Ben had made him out to be.

  And now Trapp walked in, his sharp features looking frail, his skin pallid with his shorn haircut. Without the sideburns and chin hair, his small, pinkish mouth quivered as though exposed to a sudden cold.

  “Long way from home, ain’t it?” he said to me in a distrustful tone.

  “How you doing?” I asked politely, but his greeny eyes were already shifting past me. Chris, his cheeks stuffed with pancakes, his mouth shiny with syrup, raised a fork in greeting and slid his chair over as Trapp, touching a hand to his shoulder, sat down beside him. He mumbled a greeting to Frederick then set his eyes on Skin, who was ravishing the bacon and staring back at him through his overhanging lock. The rest of the crew carried on drinking their coffee and finishing off their pancakes, their bodies instinctively drawing away from Trapp as though he still carried the foul stench of the sump hole.

  But Frederick spoke quite amiably to him, chatting up another film he’d recently seen and listening closely to the few sparse comments Trapp sent his way.

  “Yeah, Trapp and Frederick—they like ganging up on Push,” Ben would tell me later. “Plus Trapp’s a sponge for learning the rig, and Frederick loves having someone listen to his spews.”