The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Mrs Hershey, you know perfectly well that’s nonsense. If you want to be a millionaire, you need to sign a good deal with a capable oilman. Nobody gets to be rich if they don’t strike oil.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had promoters in here. Young men. Charming men. They’ve promised –’

  ‘I’m not a promoter,’ said Tom, losing his patience. ‘I’m an oilman. I have papers here. We can sign them now or you can leave them. If you leave them I won’t come back. If Shell Oil sinks its well and comes up with nothing but dirt, then you won’t make one red penny out of your land, and you know it.’

  ‘I’m just a lonely old woman. I’m just –’

  Tom plonked the papers down and looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to leave in one minute from now … fifty seconds …’

  Mrs Hershey blubbed and sucked at the last of her drink.

  ‘… forty seconds … thirty seconds …’

  ‘I don’t have my glasses. I can’t read those tiny little letters. I know you lawyers. I know …’

  ‘… twenty seconds … fifteen … ten …’

  Hershey stopped crying and grabbed the papers. ‘Sixty bucks an acre, twenty per cent royalties, and a six-month no-drill-no-deal clause.’

  Tom laughed. Hershey had obviously learned something from the promoters who’d visited. ‘Sixty bucks an acre it is. The termination clause you want is already there.’

  ‘And twenty per cent royalties. Twenty-five. I’m all on my own. I’m –’

  ‘Fifteen per cent. Take it or leave it.’

  Hershey looked coy again, wondering whether another serving of tears would squeeze more money out of Tom. The stack of dollars on the table riffled a little in the breeze. The ants paused for a moment in the doorway to let the new sand settle before they continued to ransack the house. Hershey decided against tears. ‘I’m just an old woman, living here on my own. I’m –’

  Tom stood up. He picked up the contract. He picked up the dollars. ‘So long, Mrs Hershey. Thank you for your time.’

  His footsteps crunched on the sandy floor. The screen door screeched as he pushed it open. Pipsqueak, who had been busily cleaning her paws, looked up and shook herself. ‘Let’s go, girl.’ They walked away.

  They hadn’t gone fifty yards before there was a commotion behind them. Mrs Hershey had crashed her way to the door and was leaning over the rickety rail of the veranda, hollering at them.

  ‘OK, mac! Sweet Jesus! Fifteen per cent. And don’t forget, I’m busting a gusset for ya.’

  81

  The air cracked and rippled with rifle-fire. Wild teams of horsemen tore up the valley, wheeled round and descended, robes fluttering, pistols blazing, knives flashing in the sun. Not to be outdone, the truck drivers drove frantically alongside, risking an axle every time they plunged into a pothole or struck a larger-than-average rock. Men and boys hung to the sides of the trucks, holding on with one arm, and waving shirts or flags or firearms with the other. By some miracle, however, the only actual blood lost that afternoon belonged to a pair of juicy young lambs, slaughtered with immense ceremony by the fat Persian cook and two of his assistants behind the cooking tent.

  George Reynolds showed his delight by pumping more blood than ever into his crimson face, and shaking Alan’s hand as though intending to detach it.

  ‘By God, laddie, it’s good to see you! By God, it is! The camp hasn’t been the same, not the same at all.’

  Alan took his hand back. He was fifteen pounds lighter than before his illness and his strength wasn’t yet what it had been. He greeted every single one of his men by name, hugged them close in the Persian manner, and asked each of them the questions they were burning for him to ask (Husain, and how was his shoulder? Mohammad, and how was his driving coming along? Ahmed, and hadn’t his goddamn bloody English improved!)

  And yet when the feasting and the jubilation had begun to subside, something like an air of gloom began to settle over the camp. The well was down to fifteen hundred foot, but progress was becoming slower with each passing day. More to the point, Reynolds had been observed shaking his head, and muttering and losing his normally unflappable temper.

  ‘I’ll not beat about the bush, laddie,’ he said, taking Alan into his tent. ‘Take a look at these samples.’

  One of the few advantages of the percussion method of drilling is that, because you have to keep clearing the hole with a bailing tool, you end up with a complete record of the rock you’re drilling through. Reynolds had collected and labelled all the samples collected on the drill to date.

  ‘Here’s the sandstone layers we drilled through to begin with. No surprises there. Then capstone. Solid honest-to-God capstone, hard and impermeable. I tell you, laddie, I was so excited I almost stopped drilling, so that you could be here for the fun of the oil strike.’

  Alan looked sharply at his partner. ‘And?’

  ‘And I decided not to stop. I went right on. We got through the capstone and we arrived at this.’

  He passed a sample bag to Alan, who opened it. It was sand. The sand that had once been a sea floor, the sea floor they had been drilling to reach. The sand was as dry as million-year-old bones.

  There was no oil.

  Not a drop, not a trace, not a sniff.

  82

  Pipsqueak heard the roar and woke with a bark.

  Tom, who’d been dozing, leaped awake with a shock.

  The scattered inhabitants of Signal Hill pulled their coats over their shirtsleeves and went tearing out into the gathering dusk.

  The Shell rig had struck oil. Struck loud enough to wake a town. Struck hard enough to shake the ground. The rig was a magnet that drew all life to it. And why? Because oil isn’t just a commodity like cocoa or nickel or pig-iron. Oil is fuel. It’s warmth and movement and light. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty close to life itself – and the nearest darn thing to money the earth provides. And here it was. A huge great jet of the stuff, whooshing into the air and slapping down on the earth from a hundred and twenty feet or more. People on the windward side had their faces, beards and hats glossed over with the fine black spray. Nobody minded. Kids and adults ran forwards to get their heads wet, palms open to gather in the precious juice. One man even kneeled beneath the fountain, bare-chested and face pointed up towards the black rain, that fell as if by magic.

  The rig was a magnet because everyone, right down to the smallest child, understood what had happened. On this extraordinary night, the whole world had changed for ever. It wasn’t even like winning the lottery; it was better than that. The lottery, you have to buy a ticket. With the lottery, in the end, you know it’s just a matter of luck. Everyone buys a ticket. A certain percentage get lucky. If you could go on long enough, you’d get your own piece of luck.

  This wasn’t like that. This was like being fingered by God. And God didn’t just present you with a bland little cheque covered in zeros – this was a gift for men – real men, hard and shrewd – to profit from. The lucky ones were those who owned land up on Signal Hill that night, any land at all. Overnight, they’d become backyard millionaires, or would be if they could figure the angles. People’s minds turned to royalty percentages, lot sizes, drilling concerns. Some people would be presented with an opportunity like this and fritter it away. They might agree to fifteen per cent when they could take thirty. They might sign up with an all-talk-no-money promoter. They might be seduced by the numbers and end up selling a million-dollar well for a cheesy hundred thousand bucks.

  While the Shell men slaved to get the rig under control, the frenzy went on. People continued to gather. Now it wasn’t just the residents of Signal Hill, it was people from further away: Long Beach, Wilmington, Huntingdon Beach. These were the envious ones. The people who didn’t find themselves sitting on a quarter-acre block of Paradise. They looked on too, but their mouths were tight, and they held their kids away from the fountain of dancing black.

  With Pisqueak in his arms, Tom also looked on. All his life, he’d been waiting
for this. His Hampshire childhood, then war, prison, hardship, the all-American experience of starting with nothing and working for everything. All of it, every last hour of it, however sad or terrible, was leading up to this monumental moment. He breathed deeply. He would gamble everything. He would win colossally – or lose everything he’d staked.

  And over them all, the winners and losers, the dreamers and the jealous, the thick black jet continued to spout.

  83

  ‘It may only be a pocket.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or a false bottom. It may be nothing more than a fold in the rock, laddie.’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  Since Alan’s illness, Alan and Reynolds had become closer. Previously, if they’d ever used each other’s names, they called each other Montague and Reynolds. These days, Reynolds only ever called Alan ‘laddie’, and if Alan called Reynolds anything, he called him George.

  ‘Look at the valley walls. There’s folding, perturbation, upheaval on a massive scale as well as some quite violent local disturbances. The plain truth is that round these parts the strata are all to bug– – pardon me, all to cock. There’s no telling what’s up, what’s down. We could go down another hundred feet and hit a gusher.’

  Alan drummed his fingers on the folding table, crunching on the pile of dry sand brought up from the bottom of the well. They were talking by the light of a kerosene lamp. The kerosene was brought up by truck from Shiraz, and the Shirazi merchants obtained theirs from the Anglo-Persian works at Abadan. They were using their competitor’s oil from two hundred miles away, and for all they knew they were sitting less than a mile above a massive oilfield of their own. The smoky yellow light threw Alan’s gaunt shadow next to Reynolds’ stocky one on the sloping canvas wall. Alan’s drumming fingers appeared in huge relief.

  ‘Yes, George, but we have to consider all the factors. It’s getting harder and harder to sink the well. The weight of the cable inside the hole is now many times the weight of the old Mother Hubbard at the bottom. No matter how much we patch up our boiler, we have to recognise that it’s reaching its limit.’

  ‘Well now, that’s true.’

  ‘And the geology might still be favourable, but the odds have shifted against us.’

  ‘Well, that’s true too.’

  Alan’s fingers still drummed in silence on the billowing tent wall. George Reynolds stroked his thick black moustache. Since beginning to drill, he’d allowed it to grow ever longer and more piratical, as though competing with the Qashqai for some Best-Moustache-in-Camp prize.

  ‘But even that’s not my main concern,’ said Alan.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Money. It’s costing a lot to maintain the camp, but I don’t see any way to reduce expenses. We needed every man we had last week just to clear the road after the landslip … The fact is that we’re going to run out of money sooner or later and we have to make every penny count. Every day. Every hour.’

  ‘Aye.’ Reynolds sighed heavily. ‘Laddie, I didn’t tell you this before, but my Auntie Enid died recently – no, don’t worry, I hardly knew the old bird, lived in Leicestershire on a farm, hoarded money like a magpie. Anyway, she left me five thousand pounds, I understand. It’s there to drill with, if you want it.’

  ‘That’s very handsome of you, George! My thanks, indeed!’

  ‘No, laddie, don’t be silly. You can give me my share if we hit anything, and we can be beggars together if we don’t … You know that I’d sooner strike oil in this valley than anything else in the whole world.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Me too.’

  They were silent a moment. Alan had spoken the truth, or almost. Apart from Lottie, finding oil had become the only thing still important to him since Tom’s death. He wondered if there was any business in the world quite like it: a business that stole your soul away, a business that could make fond romantics of the hardest heads. Reynolds’ offer was a splendid one, but five thousand pounds would keep them going three months at most. Winter was setting in and drilling through the short and icy days would be quite hard enough, even without a failing boiler.

  ‘I told you about Mickiewicz, did I?’ said Reynolds interrupting.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He says he can’t drill tomorrow. Another saint’s day apparently. A religious holiday.’

  ‘Saint Halina of the Numberless Excuses, I expect … What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him you’d have a word with him in the morning.’

  As the Poles’ morale had begun to drop, so the number of their religious holidays had begun to multiply.

  ‘Would you say Ahmed is ready to become a full-time rigger?’

  ‘Yes, I would … I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too. Also Ali-Baba.’

  ‘Ali-Baba? Ali-Baba? Well, maybe. At a pinch.’

  ‘We’re pinched, George. The Poles don’t want to be, here and I don’t feel like forcing them … I’ll tell them they can take the rest of the year to glorify their blessed saints.’

  The long silence lengthened. By night, the Mother Hubbard was left on a slack cable at the bottom of the long hole. With a bit of breeze like tonight’s, the loose wire slapped against the winch and pulleys and sent a low moaning out into the night. It sounded like the moan of a dying well.

  ‘We’ll move her, George. First thing tomorrow. We’ll move the derrick and drop a well three miles further up the valley. The Muhammad Ameri Number 2.’

  Reynolds was silent for a while, then began to nod in agreement. It was a solemn moment.

  They had enough money for two, possibly three, wells and their first one had just failed.

  84

  Other men might have waited for morning. Not Tom.

  Alamitos No. 1 drew oilmen to it like sailors to a mermaid. The oil-slippery ground by the Shell rig became a marketplace for ideas, deals, offers and handshakes. Two blocks from the gusher, an enterprising barber lit up his shop and sold hot coffee at fifty cents the cup, while his wife handed round home-baked carrot cake and refused all payment. Tom hung out on the sidewalk outside. He was already half-famous. People pointed him out. ‘That’s him, English Tom, the guy with the land parcel down on the hill.’ Drillers came to him and presented their credentials.

  ‘Evening, mac. I heard you got some land.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘The way you see it, would that be producing land?’

  Tom explained where his land was – not the best location, but not bad – and the amount: twenty-seven acres. When he mentioned the size of his acreage, men stopped dead in their tracks. No one had twenty-seven acres. Apart from Shell, who hardly counted, no one had that much land. And that was the moment when the conversation would change tack. It wasn’t the rigger asking questions of Tom, it was the rigger pleading to be considered.

  ‘Well, sir, I’m mighty pleased to make your acquaintance. My name’s Dave Larzelere, you might of heard me spoken of as the Duster on account of some bad luck I encountered round down Torrey Canyon way, but I’m a fair hand with a drill and I reckon there ain’t too many rigs I can’t handle, and I wouldn’t mind mentioning that any poor luck as I might have had in the past is good an’ finished, seeing as the last two wildcats I worked on turned out to be producers, and pretty good ones at that …’ The Duster spat on the ground, wondering if he’d said too much or not enough. His spit was brown and gluey and it balled up in the dust. Like many oilmen, he was addicted to chewing tobacco, since the smoking sort was dangerous anywhere near a producing well. ‘And, anyways, I was wondering if mebbe you’d be needing some help any time soon?’

  Tom rejected some men and accepted others. He wanted experience – he knew he was still short of knowledge – but most of all he wanted eagerness. He couldn’t offer much by way of wages, but he peeled off percentage shares in his oil rights and handed them out like they were diamond mines, which in a way they were.

  By two in the morning, he had a team of drillers: tough, experienced and as hun
gry as he was.

  The next item was money. To sink one well would cost around twenty-five thousand bucks. By cutting down on wages and handing out royalty interests, Tom could cut that figure down to maybe twenty-one or twenty-two thousand. That still left a ten-thousand-dollar gap between what he had and what he needed.

  No problem.

  There are promoters and promoters. Some of them are all-mouth-no-money, first cousins to outright fraudsters, men so hopeless they wouldn’t find a nickel in a packet of gum. Tom stayed clear of these. He asked big questions, tough questions about rigs and equipment and investors and distribution contracts. He used his interrogation to winnow away the losers, until he was left with the real men, architects of oil deals, men who could put together a business transaction from a concrete cell. Tom found a man he trusted, and by six o’clock in the morning, he had made the arrangements he needed.

  He should have been tired, but he wasn’t. He’d spent every penny he owned, but he had something better. He had land. He had a rig.

  And he could smell the oil.

  85

  Winter came.

  Some days, when snow was falling, it was impossible to drill, and Alan let the men keep to their tents, watching the valley disappear beneath its mantle of white. In the morning when the snow had stopped, they would be up before dawn to chip away at the ice that snagged the cables and clogged the pulley. They’d shovel fuel into the rickety old boiler, and stand around it, drinking their morning tea, grateful for the warmth. They went to bed fully dressed except for their boots, and even their boots they tucked into their bedding, to keep the ice from caking them during the night.

  They began to have accidents. One of the Persian riggers allowed the heavy bailing tool to fall on his foot, and he lost three toes and could no longer walk without a stick. Even worse, one of the trucks, attempting to get up the hill in vile weather, rolled over and killed one of its occupants. They held a burial service up at the camp, laying out the dead man like the effigy of a saint and burying him with a Koran folded over his stomach to keep out the devil.