The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  And that was why he had a flat packet underneath his pillow that rustled when he moved.

  71

  The Persian summer was fading into autumn, but they were in the midst of a mini heatwave, which brought back all their fiercest memories of summer. Mules and horses slept lazily in the shade. Those men who were not immediately required to work loafed under cotton awnings thrown up by the ever-resourceful tribesmen. The timber derrick stood idle, and the drilling crew (three Poles who had worked in America, two Russians and a gifted young Persian) bickered in four languages over a game of cards. The sun hammered down.

  In one corner of the drilling site, the heat intensified into something almost solid. Even twenty feet away there was a wall of heat. Beyond that point, every step forwards carried you to a whole new contour of temperature. It was almost literally like stepping into a roasting oven.

  Alan entered the furnace.

  At the rear of the miniature forge, a Persian boy worked the bellows with his feet. Every minute or so, he dipped a wooden ladle into a pail of water that sat beside him and poured it over his head. By the end of the minute his hair had dried off and was ready for another drenching.

  At the front of the forge, the heat was a horizontal punch that never lost its force. Reynolds laboured away over a metal tube that had become badly kinked. Reynolds’ face was never less than ruddy, but right now it would out-crimson a tomato, outblaze a field of beetroot. All along his well-waxed moustache, globules of sweat hung like beads on a party frock. The shirt was glued to his back.

  ‘My turn,’ said Alan.

  ‘Almost done, laddie.’

  The metal tube was a key component in the Russian-made boiler. The boiler supplied power to the rig. No tube, no boiler. No boiler, no drilling. No drilling, no oil. This was the boiler’s seventh breakdown inside two months.

  Reynolds finished his work of banging the incandescent metal into shape. Alan held the tongs and allowed Reynolds to work the metal with both hands. Eventually it was done. Alan threw the tube sizzling into a bucket of cold water, and both men ran from the heat and doused themselves in the river. The Persian boy working the bellows emptied the rest of the bucket over his head and ran to get the quid of tobacco that he’d been promised.

  Reynolds drank a small ocean of tea, as Alan took the tube between his feet. He began work with a metal file to get the tube to an exact fit. It was a nightmarish way of working, fabricating sophisticated parts with a crude forge and a collection of metal files, yet the alternatives were limited. Basic metalwork could be done in Karachi: a mere fifteen hundred miles away. But for more complex operations, there was nothing for it but to telegraph the specifications to England and have the parts built there and shipped out.

  Reynolds watched Alan at work.

  ‘Half a day, laddie, and we’ll have the boiler back in action.’

  ‘For another week.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’ll be satisfied with another week’s progress.’

  Alan half-laughed. Reynolds’ stubborn determination to sink the well was second to none. Setbacks, disappointments, breakdowns and calamities were all in the day’s work to him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan, ‘me too. As long as we get some more fuel.’

  Further away from the rig, there was a stir in the camp. The first whoops and yells of greeting went up. A couple of rifle shots were fired wildly into the air.

  ‘That’ll be the truck with the fuel now,’ said Reynolds happily. ‘We start drilling again tomorrow.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  The supply of fuel they’d had for the boiler – a mixture of coal, coke and wood – had all gone into feeding the furnace. They now had a nearly functioning boiler but no fuel to fire it. From the rocky valley walls, the sound of a truck motor began to echo. These days, the road up to the drilling site had been improved and a large supply of ‘patent Reynolds radiator coolers’ – watermelons, in other words – now lay in a stream at the base of the slope. It was eight weeks now since they’d last had a truck fail on the final slope, and some of the wilder Persians liked to run truck races down into the valley and back, complete with mounted escorts, random gunfire, and huge forfeits to be paid by the losers.

  Alan filed patiently at the tube. Reynolds was already looking for something else to do. His colossal impatience filled the camp, and infected others. Alan had noticed how the Persian tents had gradually formed themselves into neat army-style lines under Reynolds’ brusque supervision. The rabble of men they’d started with had now become a well-disciplined body. They supplied the camp, mended the road, ran the forge, prepared food, supported the drillers, and protected the camp from attack. They had even learned enough mechanical skills to begin repairing engines and fabricating spares with almost no supervision.

  The truck approached.

  ‘Fuel,’ said Reynolds. ‘Lovely fuel. I’ll get it unloaded.’

  Alan nodded. He was busy. If he stopped filing for five minutes, then drilling would be delayed by five minutes. He didn’t stop.

  The truck came over the lip of the hill, then gunned its engine and tore into camp in a racket of screaming gears and gleeful whoops. From the back, a couple of men began unloading goodies: fresh fruit and veg; three live goats; a very scrawny sheep; tobacco; a sack of rice; another sack of wheat flour that they’d use to bake flat bread. There was no sign of fuel.

  Reynolds was over arguing with the men, but one of the tribesmen, a youngster called Ahmed, came running up to Alan. Ahmed was exceptionally proud of his increasing command of English, which he’d been learning from the Polish members of the drilling team.

  ‘Well?’ said Alan. ‘What news?’

  Ahmed’s face broke into a vast grin. ‘Three bloody goat. One bloody no-hope sheep. Plenty goddamn tobaccy.’

  ‘And the fuel, Ahmed? What about the –’ Alan silently swallowed the swearword that had been about to come out. ‘What about the fuel?’

  Ahmed puzzled over the English. Alan was about to say the same thing in Persian, but Ahmed saw his intention and vigorously shook his head.

  ‘Few-ell? Few-ell?’

  ‘The fuel. Coal for the boiler. Fuel to put inside the boiler.’

  ‘Ah!’ Ahmed’s face brightened into a smile, brilliant as daybreak. ‘Ah, few-ell, few-ell! Yes.’ He put his shoulders back and head up, as though making a formal statement to a military authority. With huge pride visible in his face, he said, ‘Today, aqa, no goddamn few-ell.’

  72

  Tom sold.

  Not at a dollar the barrel – he’d never expected that – but at eighty-three cents the barrel, after all transportation costs. No longer needing the tanks, he sold them too. He paid off his loan. It was slightly over a year since he’d set foot on Ellis Island, telling the pen-pushers that he’d come to America to drill for oil. Back then they’d laughed at him: him and his forty-eight bucks. They wouldn’t be laughing now. When all was said and done, Tom would walk away from Wyoming with near enough eleven thousand dollars to his name.

  But before he walked anywhere, there was one person he needed to say goodbye to. He found her at her two-room apartment over a bakery store. It was just gone one in the afternoon and she was still in her dressing gown, having a couple of eggs for breakfast. What with his recent business commitments, it was a little over seven weeks since Tom had spent any real time with her.

  ‘Hey, Rebecca. I just wanted to call round, say I’m off.’

  She looked at him carefully and brought another forkful of egg up to her mouth. Good morning,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Sorry. Good morning. Afternoon. Whatever.’

  ‘You’re off?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Off to where? Off for how long?’

  Although Rebecca had been in the States much longer than Tom, her accent had almost not shifted at all, whereas his accent and vocabulary was becoming daily closer to those of the oilmen he lived next to. Most people meeting him now would have guessed he was from some
where in New England and would have been genuinely surprised to find he was from Old England, and not so long ago either.

  ‘Off-off. I got some money now. Enough to drill with.’ Tom checked himself. His last statement had fallen a little short of the truth. ‘Well, almost enough, I guess. But enough to give it a go.’

  Rebecca stared curiously at him. Tom was still standing up, hat in hand, his bag at the door.

  ‘Are you coming in or going out?’

  ‘Huh? Going out, I guess.’

  ‘You don’t even want a cup of coffee?’

  Tom hesitated. He was uncomfortable in her room. There was only one bed in the apartment – a monstrous old brass dinosaur – and Tom well knew what it was used for and how often. The sight unsettled him. When in town, he’d come to like and depend on Rebecca’s company and conversation, but whenever he could he arranged to meet in a public place: a restaurant or bar. But now was a time to make an exception. He threw his hat on the bed, took his coat off, and sat down.

  Rebecca stood up, found a clean cup, and poured him out some coffee, adding cream and two or three spoonfuls of sugar. Quite early on, she’d seen through his guard to something important about his experience in prison.

  ‘You were very short of food,’ she’d announced over a meal together. ‘You must have been very hungry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Starving?’

  ‘Yes. Starving.’

  ‘Nothing from the Red Cross?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Am I upsetting you?’

  ‘No. I don’t like to talk about it, but it doesn’t upset me. Why would it? It’s over.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Rebecca had grunted, the way she always did when she didn’t like one of Tom’s answers. ‘But the war ended soon enough to save you?’

  ‘No, not really. I decided to escape rather than starve. They caught me and shot my friend. They could have shot me, but didn’t. The camp commandant sent me to work on a farm instead. There was food there. I survived.’

  ‘I see …’ Rebecca stared at him, and put her hand out to Tom’s arm, which was curled round his plate of food as though defending it from assault. ‘It’s all right now. I’m not going to steal it.’

  For a moment, Tom resisted angrily. If he wanted to curl his arm round his plate, it was up to him. The muscles in his arm knotted. She kept her hand there, pulling his arm away, the warmth from her skin bleeding through his woollen jacket. There was a brief struggle of wills. Then he’d given way. He moved his arm. There was nothing now to guard his plate. There was a rush of blood into his forearm, as though he’d been keeping it tense for the last five years. He panted with a mixture of feelings he didn’t recognise.

  Rebecca continued to gaze. Then she nodded. ‘That was brave.’

  ‘What do you mean, brave? It wasn’t anything. I just moved my arm, for God’s sakes. Who the hell cares where I put my goddamn arm?’

  Rebecca had made no answer, but ever since then she’d been highly sensitive to his feelings about food. Without even asking, she’d begun adding cream and sugar to his coffee. The brew was richer than he’d liked at first – or, rather, richer than he’d thought he liked. But it suited him. He began eating more sweet things, more creamy things, more of the food he’d have killed for in prison.

  They drank their coffee and ate some warm rolls from the bakery down below.

  ‘Nice,’ said Tom, with his mouth full. ‘Do you mind?’ He helped himself to more coffee.

  ‘You’re welcome. I have more cream in the icebox.’

  She wasn’t too careful about tying her dressing gown and her long dark hair was loosely held at the back, making a kind of halo round the slightly oversharp features of her face. She had the smell of a woman only just woken up. Tom felt intensely attracted by her. When she was in her prostitute’s get-up – low-cut blouse, too much make-up, a skirt that showed plenty of leg – he had felt both drawn to her and disturbed, but the disturbance had always won out. To this day, Tom hadn’t had sex with her, setting some kind of record in terms of his friendships with women.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said at last. ‘I probably oughtn’t to, but I will.’

  ‘Gee, thanks. That’s a heck of a compliment.’

  ‘I’m pleased you didn’t stay with your bootlegging. In a way, I never thought you would stick with it.’

  ‘Uh-huh, and did you ever think you’d stick your job for this long, Fräulein Lewi?’ He pronounced her name the way she did, husky and Middle European.

  She flushed. ‘I can’t remember saying anything to you which deserved that,’ she said. ‘I think you’d better drink your coffee and go. Perhaps you were only trying to save me from missing you at all.’

  ‘Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘You did mean it.’

  Irritation flashed in Tom. She was always like this, Rebecca, never able to leave a thing alone.

  ‘OK, so I meant it. It’s a dirty job and you know it. I think you’re better than it and I sure as hell don’t like you doing it.’

  ‘I know your opinion. And I’ll do whatever I want.’

  Tom grabbed his hat and his bag. ‘Right. You do whatever you want. You always have done, always will.’

  He left, letting the thin wooden door slam shut hard behind him.

  He strode angrily down Main Street heading for the station. Dammit, that woman irritated him. If she weren’t a cheap little hooker in some cheap little oil town getting ridden by any young roustabout with a few bucks in his pocket, she could be … Tom didn’t know what she could be, but he knew she bothered him.

  He got to the station. The train left in forty-three minutes. He bought a ticket and wandered over to a candy stall to look over what was on offer. He glanced at his watch. Forty-one minutes. She was right about his sweet tooth, though. Tom always now liked to carry a packet of something in his pocket, just like a spoiled seven-year-old. He bought some peanut brittle and munched on it … Thirty-seven minutes.

  All of a sudden, he made a decision. He left the station and went running back to Rebecca’s apartment. He didn’t knock on her door, just barged on through. She never locked it when she was at home.

  She was still there, still alone, reading an old murder-mystery novel and finishing the last of the coffee. She looked up startled, as her visitor crashed in.

  ‘A lot of people like to knock before entering,’ she commented.

  ‘Come with me. Don’t stay here. Pack your things right now and move out. There’s a train in half an hour. We’ll be on the West Coast tomorrow.’

  ‘Come with you? What does that mean?’

  ‘It means leave all of this –’ Tom swept his hand round the room, but particularly including the bed in his gesture –‘and come with me.’

  ‘Are you asking me to live with you? Like man and wife?’

  Tom was thrown by the question. He had no idea what he meant, he just thought it would be a good idea if they left town together. ‘I don’t know. Not like man and wife. Not like anything. Let’s just leave.’

  Rebecca had a very mobile mouth and it was fluttering with something now: amusement, fondness, a touch of mockery perhaps. Her deep eyes were impossible to read as always.

  ‘That’s a very well-thought-out proposal.’

  ‘It’s not a proposal, it’s just … Look, the hell with it. You want to come or not? The train’s going to be leaving soon.’

  ‘Right. And I believe there’ll be another one along in the same place tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not leaving tomorrow. I’m leaving now. You don’t want to come, that’s fine. I was only asking.’

  He turned to leave, but Rebecca had stood up and come close to him. He could smell the coffee on her breath, feel her warmth, and see the soft skin curving down to her breasts. He was intensely aroused.

  ‘Dear Thomas,’ she said, ‘don’t apologise. It was very sweet of you. You are a good man, even if you don’t always know it.’ She was fa
cing him and holding his shoulders. As so often with her, her deep eyes searched his face for the answer to some question. She took a step forward, rose on tiptoe and kissed him full on the mouth. It was a long, passionate kiss that sent his desire for her driving urgently through every fibre of his body.

  ‘Thank you for coming back. God bless you. And good luck.’

  And that was how he remembered her. Standing at the door, barefoot, in her dressing gown, smelling of sleep and coffee, the print of their kiss still warm on her mouth.

  73

  The first sign of trouble was a dose of ‘Basra belly’ that laid half the men in camp prostrate. The latrines were stinking and crawling with flies. Alan felt he’d emptied his guts out four times over, and the two Russians in the drilling crew had been caught threatening the Persian cook with a firearm, apparently accusing him of sabotage. Only George Reynolds was wholly unaffected, and he set about having the latrines hosed down with meltwater from the snow-capped mountains and keeping the drilling going as fast as possible.

  Because the meltwater was being diverted to the latrines, the camp’s drinking water had to come from some water butts set out by the cooking tent. The water should have been boiled first, but probably wasn’t. It should have been kept very separate from any food or water brought up from the markets round Shiraz, but again it probably wasn’t.

  Bash-bash-bash or zoom-zoom-zoom?

  No contest. The percussion method of drilling was vastly slower and more cumbersome than the modern rotary method. On the other hand, with the money that they had at their disposal, there was absolutely no alternative; and in some ways, the more rudimentary the technology they used, then the easier it was to fix when it broke.

  The massive drill bit had long ago been christened Mother Hubbard by English-speaking oilers, but the Polish members of the crew referred to it as the Mother-bloody-Hubbard, the Matka Hubbardski or just plain Mamusiu. Whatever its name, the bit was raised on a pulley system driven by an immense camwheel, then dropped. Then raised and dropped. Then raised and dropped. After a while the chippings at the bottom of the hole dulled the impact, and the Mother Hubbard was lifted out of the hole, set to one side, and a bailing tool dropped down instead. The bailing tool brought up chippings, until the base of the hole was reasonably clear, and the Mother Hubbard was set to work once again.