by Rory Harper
Doc shrugged. “Hydroco may drill more’n a hundred wells hereabouts. You figure from there, Henry Lee.”
It wasn’t hard to figure.
“So,” Doc continued, “long about tomorrow morning I’ll make a call on the Drilling Superintendent for Hydroco, and we’ll do some business.”
“Don’t believe you’ll need to wait till then,” Zeke said. “He’s coming in the tent now.”
We swung casually around to look toward the entrance. Framed in the opening by the setting sun was a fella that looked to be the size of a grizzly bear. With not much less hair on him.
“Name’s Jack Small. Everybody calls him—”
“Everybody calls him Tiny,” Doc said in a voice so cold it must have hurt his teeth. “We’ve met.” He leaned back and put his elbows up behind him on the bar, with the bottle hanging loosely from his right hand.
The fella at the entrance looked around the tent and spotted Zeke. He started through the crowd in our direction. About halfway, he saw Doc and stopped in his tracks. Their eyes locked up. After a second he moved forward again until he stood in front of Doc.
Doc stayed leaning back casually, eyes staring straight into Tiny’s eyes. “Henry Lee, meet Mr. Tiny Small,” he said, smiling. “I owe him a big favor. Four years ago he was the company man on a hole we was drilling down near Thompson’s Bottom. I was segundo under Cutbait Benton. Nice old guy. I moved up to being Sprocket’s pusher after Tiny murdered him. Thanks for the help, old buddy.”
“You’re a lyin’ son of a bitch,” Tiny growled. “It was a fair fight.”
“Fair, my ass. Cutbait was half your size, and you didn’t even give him time to back away before you broke his skull.”
It happened quick. Tiny’s right hand shot out. Without even thinking, I grabbed his wrist before his hand wrapped around Doc’s throat. It was like yanking on a crowbar set in cement, but his hand moved back a few inches. Meantime, Doc had smashed his bottle against the bar and pressed the jagged end against Tiny’s stomach.
All three of us held in place for a couple of breaths, thinking about the next move. Finally, Tiny growled and stepped back, twisting his wrist loose from my grip and glaring at me. Then he turned on Doc. “Put down the bottle, and we’ll do some business, right here, right now.”
Doc showed his teeth. This time it wasn’t anything close to being a smile. “I ain’t in the mood for dancing, old buddy. D’ruther carve you up seriously. Grab a bottle for your own self.”
For just a second, Tiny looked around like he might take Doc up, then he turned and moved toward the entrance. “You ain’t never working for Hydroco again,” he threw back over his shoulder. “Not in this field nor anyplace else!”
Doc, me, and everybody else in the silent tent took a shaky breath when he was gone. Doc looked regretfully at the weapon in his hand. “Well, hell, it was almost empty, anyway,” he muttered.
* * *
The next morning, Doc and Razer vanished right after breakfast, taking Sprocket with them. I felt disappointed because Star’s crew had been called out to location right after the little scene with Tiny. I hadn’t even got to introduce myself. Now it looked like we might be heading on down the road before we even got properly settled in. But I wasn’t as hungover as most of the crew, so I fiddled away the morning working on some junked-up hose connections that’d been left behind.
They came back around noon. We packed up and headed out to make location on one of the three Mooney Producing leases.
Mr. Mooney had to guide us to the lease. It was barren, flat, dusty country all the way. When we drew up on it, a mile from the nearest road, I saw that we weren’t exactly alone. We all climbed out of Sprocket and Doc hurried over to Mr. Mooney’s pickup truck. I tagged along. The way to graduate from being a worm is to poke your nose into everything that nobody stops you from.
“Goddam it, Mooney, you didn’t say nothing about this!” Doc started off.
Mr. Mooney stepped off the pickup’s running board and shut the door behind him. “Didn’t seem important,” he said mildly. “They’re on adjoining leases. Ain’t none of our business, really.”
A half a mile away two other Drillers, accompanied by Mud Mixers and Gas Tankers, were making hole. Sprocket and them formed a roughly equal triangle. Doc pointed at the one on the left. “That one over there is a female!”
Mr. Mooney squinted and pretended to be surprised. “Well, so she is.” He dug a tobacco tin out of his jeans pocket, opened it, and popped a chaw into his cheek. “Started drilling three days ago, both of them. Tends to make a man think there’s oil somewheres hereabouts.”
Suddenly Doc laughed. “You sneaky bastard! You acted like I was breakin’ it off in you on the daily rig charge. With a female over there, Sprocket’s gonna be drilling full-tilt all the way to TD.”
Mr. Mooney shrugged. “Still want to do some business?”
“Hell, yeah! You ever seen a mating drill before?”
“Nope. Kinda looking forward to it.”
We drifted back to where the crew was clustered around Sprocket, joking and pointing at the other two Drillers.
* * *
Sprocket wandered around the lease for awhile, getting the feel of it. Eventually he stopped in one place and began seismic testing. His hundreds of feet drove hard in cadence against the ground, raising a powdery cloud along the length of his body for five minutes. Then he meandered some more and did it again in another place. Listening for oil-bearing sands.
The two Drillers on the adjoining leases made it almost a certainty that he’d hear something worth going after, but I noticed that all of us clustered together holding our breaths when he finally finished up and ambled in our direction. Sprocket wasn’t hardly ever wrong. If he said no hydrocarbons, Doc would probably cancel the contract with Mr. Mooney. And I could tell he didn’t want to do that.
Sprocket approached and towered over us. Suddenly his deep green eyes popped wide open, whirling madly. A groan of anticipation shuddered through his body. His drilling mouth gaped open and his tongue shot out, white and translucent, to wrap around Doc’s legs. It yanked him to the ground, then flailed through the drilling crew, knocking men off their feet like ten-pins. Shouting and laughing, everybody that was able to grabbed ahold of that wild twisting drilling tongue and wrestled with it. I got a grip behind the drillhead and held on for dear life.
We were going to make us some hole!
* * *
Mr. Mooney left location to make arrangements for Gas Tankers and surface casing, as well as lining up a Mud Mixer for later on. He seemed to feel that now that he had a Driller under contract, he wouldn’t have too hard a time with the rest. Doc wasn’t so sure, but it wasn’t his problem.
We spudded in around three that afternoon, with the usual gypsy ceremonies. Sprocket’s gasoline reserves would let him drill for about three or four days before needing a refill.
Sprocket positioned himself facing the female Driller, his eyes fixed on her. Doc and the rest of the guys wouldn’t tell me what was going on, just made the squiggly worm sign with their fingers and grinned when I asked, but it was pretty obvious. Him and the other male Driller was competing for her affections, as they say. I speculated the one that showed to be making hole the most sincerely would get her. But how would she know who was doing the best? It took me a while, but I come to the conclusion that she’d know who was drilling fastest by taking seismic readings while she drilled. I was awful proud of myself for figuring it out so good without any help.
* * *
We played music for about an hour after Sprocket started drilling. Afterwards, I was leaning against his side, watching him get it on and feeling the screaming hum that vibrated through him, when Razer walked up and squatted beside me. Me and Razer got along fine. He was about ten years older than me, and rough as a rooster in a brand-new henhouse. Talked a lot a
bout the baby-dolls he’d known and the fights he’d lost. He was a good old boy. He was holding a shovel in his left hand.
“Time for you to get some more technical education about making a well, worm,” Razer said. I looked at the shovel. He patted it. “We plan to make about twenty-six-hundred foot of twenty-inch hole before we set surface casing.”
I nodded. “Just like you did on the well you drilled on my farm.”
“Yeah, Doc usually likes to start off that way. That’s about as deep as the Railroad Commission will generally let you drill before getting on your butt to lay pipe.” He pulled a little book with a red cover out of his back pocket and started thumbing through its dog-eared pages. “Yo, here’s your lesson for today: ‘Capacity of hole.’” The page was covered by a table of numbers. No words, hardly. Just numbers. I followed his pointing finger. “Twenty-inch hole has a capacity of 2.1817 cubic feet per linear foot. Sprocket makes about four hundred foot of hole on a good day. And he’s gonna have a lot of good days, this being a mating drill. Let’s us figure three days before Mooney gets us a mud crew out here. Twelve hundred foot of hole. That calculates to a tad more than twenty-six hundred cubic foot of cuttings coming up out of that hole. Them cuttings have to go somewheres.”
“I gotta dig a reserve pit,” I said.
He clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s a pleasure schooling a young worm as smart as you, Henry Lee.” He handed me the shovel. “Me and Doc figure a pit ten deep by fifteen wide by twenty long will do just fine until the mud crew can get here and make their own big one.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Razer, digging a hole that size will kill me dead!”
“Do the best you can, worm. Me and Doc have confidence in you.”
I moaned. “What if the mud crew don’t show up in a couple of days?”
He stroked the end of his moustache. “These shovels is built solid-like. Don’t wear out for a long time.”
When I drag-assed around to the other side of Sprocket I saw all of the fellas on the crew standing in a circle about thirty feet away. All of them had shovels in their hands. Behind me, Razor snickered, and he pushed me forward. “They been waiting for you to make the first shovel-full, Henry Lee. We gonna let the worm spud in on this particular hole.”
We worked late into the night on that damn pit. Of course, the mud crew arrived the next day before dinner time. Burned me up.
* * *
I shouldn’t admit it, but there’s usually a fair amount of time for screwing off when you’re on location. Oh, sure, Sprocket needs caring for, and so does the hole, but a lot of it is just standing back for a day or a week and letting him do his business, then stepping forward and working like an animal as long as necessary. Trouble is, you got to pay attention, because it can change from off-duty to assholes-and-elbows in a matter of minutes.
This one started lazy in its own way. We got a good mud crew, and that can make or break you right there. Seems Tiny had hacked off their mud engineer, too. I never heard it spoken, but it seemed to me that him and Doc figured to make as many holes for the independents in the field as they could, just to mess with Tiny, then move on to where matters weren’t so tense. Good thing about being a gypsy is you don’t have to kiss nobody’s butt unless you got a taste for it. Just pull up stakes and find somebody more reasonable to do business with.
Until we got to setting our first string of casing, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do, besides maintenance chores. I practiced guitar steady. Doc said his main instrument was the piano, but he was a composer and arranger, so he knew how to play everything a little. He spent as much time as he could teaching me the basics. I had trouble with the instructional materials sometimes, since I never was much for book-learning. At first, I couldn’t make a musical sound at all, but after I learned a few chords and the movable Major/Relative Minor scale, it started being fun. My hands and fingertips ached all the time.
Sprocket drilled and sucked from a Tanker full of gas, every now and then wanting some music played to keep him happy. We started with fresh water in the hole for mud. We’d move on to the more exotic and complex mixtures as we got deeper and encountered formations requiring them. Mr. Mooney moved his trailer onto location and wandered around sticking his nose into things. He was polite about it all. Mostly because he was a naturally polite fella, I think, but also because he sure as hell didn’t want no personal problems with the crew of the only Driller he had any chance of getting to make a well for him.
I ran chores for everybody. The worm on the rig does everything from bringing coffee to looking for the left-handed pipe wrenches. In between chores and guitar practice, Razer broke me into the mysteries of the red book. I never would have believed all the figuring you have to do to make a well. You got to be able to figure volumes and heights, displacement and capacity, buoyancy factors, hydrostatic pressure and fluid weight conversion, chemical and physical properties of various gases and liquids as they affect the well, and on and on till you want to puke. Razer told me we’d just get a running head start with it on this well. I wasn’t all that hot with numbers, either, and the red book about broke my mind on occasion. I’d be schooling for years before I could balance all that on the fly. Made me realize that digging that reserve pit was one of the easy jobs.
The crews on the other two rigs were friendly enough. Even though they were drilling for Hydroco, that didn’t mean we was enemies. We visited back and forth and partied together a couple of nights. The female was named Munchkin, and her crew was tickled pink that she had two males courting her at once. Spanky Blankenship, the male Driller’s pusher, didn’t seem to mind the competition from Sprocket. Uncle Foots was a strong, young deep rig almost as big as Sprocket, and he had a three-day headstart on his hole, though I didn’t know till later what kind of difference that could make in the contest.
* * *
On the sixth day after we spudded, Sprocket reached twenty-six-hundred feet. We’d moved to a light gel-based mud containing some particulates because we’d been losing returns on the fresh water. Nothing serious, just meant we had gone through a water zone, and it was taking circulating fluid into it. The gel and particulates caked up and helped seal off the zone from the hole until we could cement it. Sprocket started coming out of the hole, getting ready for running surface pipe, so Doc figured it was a good time to clean his mud bladder. Sometimes you have to wash him out by hand because running water through the bladder won’t do the job well enough, what with the particulates settling out and sticking to the walls.
It was messy work. I climbed around inside the bladder, scrubbing with a soft brush while Sprocket trickled water in. Whenever it got about knee deep, I’d bail out the solution with a bucket, dumping it into a tub set in a framework a couple of feet off the ground right below the sphincter that opened on the outside world. The tub had a nipple on the bottom, and I’d knocked together a couple of lengths of suction hose, leading them off to the reserve pit, so at least I didn’t have to worry about emptying the tub when it got full.
I finished up after a couple of hours. I guess I must of looked like the Abominable Sludgeman. I climbed out of the bladder rear-end first through the sphincter, feeling behind me with my feet. Just as I straightened up, standing in the middle of the tub, something touched my ankle. Startled the hell out of me. I yelped and twisted halfway around, slipping in the gunk that was still on the bottom of the tub. Before I knew what was happening, the tub flipped out from under me, and I fell backwards onto whoever had touched my leg.
I ended up on top. I might have guessed who it would be. The zipper on her jumpsuit mashed against my mouth. It was located down about where it had been the last time I watched it. I moved my head back a few inches and saw I’d smeared mud all over her. Confused, I untangled my hand from her hair and tried to rub some of the mud off her chest, then froze, realizing what I was doing and exactly where I was doing it.
> She giggled. Her hand moved to cover mine, but didn’t seem to be in a hurry to move it. I knew I should say something to apologize, but I couldn’t figure out what. Some girls have that effect. Make you turn stupid.
Finally, she squirmed out from under me and sat up and finished brushing herself off as best she could. “Looks like we could both use a bath, Henry Lee. You are Henry Lee, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, Henry Lee, you know any place around here two people can take a bath?”
I felt sorrowful. I shook my head.
She ran fingers through her hair, untangling the snarls as much as possible, taking a deep breath or two. I tried to keep from fainting. “Aw, too bad,” she said. “Maybe some other time, huh?”
I nodded.
“You do talk, don’t you, Henry Lee?”
I nodded. She looked at me like she was waiting for something.
“Oh … oh, yeah,” I said. “Uh, pleased to meet you, Star.”
“How’d you know my name?” She stood up and started brushing off her jumpsuit.
I had an answer for that one. “Same as you know mine. I asked somebody.”
She extended a hand to help me up. “I didn’t ask anybody your name. Doc just requested me to find you ’cause y’all need to set up for my crew to run pipe.”
My feelings must have showed on my face, because she looked me in the eye and said, “I might have asked if I’d had to, though. You’re kinda cute.” I grinned foolishly. “A little bit clumsy, though,” she finished.
I couldn’t take that, even off her. “If I’m so clumsy, how come I landed on top?” I asked.
