Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  The noise dropped in volume. The pictures on the screen flicked from one scene to another as Sprocket checked through the selections available.

  “He loves that moron thing,” Doc said at a more conversational level. “Ever time we been here he stands in front of it like a idiot for hours and hours on end. Doesn’t even notice people working on him. They’re all like that, Drillers, Cementers, you name it. It’s like it sucks their brains right out of their heads. If we had these things set up on location, we’d never get nothing done. They’d all just stand around dribbling on themselves watching the goddam tee-vee.” I knew about tee-vee, of course. I’d seen ’em in bars all over the state. But this screen was about ten times bigger than any other I’d seen. Obviously custom-made for oilpatch critters.

  Sprocket settled on a beach scene with lots of girls bouncing around in teeny-weeny bikinis. Strange choice for a Driller, I thought. But Sprocket still surprised me with himself about once a day, so I didn’t dwell on it much. I also tried not to dwell on the girls in bikinis as we folded up the umbrella and chairs, but I caught Star smiling at me tolerantly anyhow.

  “Hey, Doc! Long time no see!” A girl appeared in the doorway of one of the little offices along the wall and took long strides toward us.

  She had her hair cut short as a boy’s, which was a horrible mistake, since she was otherwise definitely a female.

  “Hey, Hillary! How you doin’, sweetheart?” Doc slid down Sprocket’s side and hugged her with great sincerity when she got close enough. I kept an eye on Sabrina. She didn’t seem to be getting no emotional problems about Hillary and Doc. Not that she was the jealous type, mind you.

  She finished stowing a couple of chairs and slid down Sprocket’s side and hugged Hillary herself.

  “Hillary was on Sabrina’s crew for a couple’a years before she decided she liked vet work full-time,” Star said beside me. “Casing gypsy, born and bred.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I wasn’t sure for a second whether she was one of the kittens in Doc’s basket.”

  Star shrugged. “Doc had a lot of kittens, and more’n one basket. Maybe still does. You’d know better than me about that.”

  In the last year or so, I had learned some good times to keep my trap shut. This was one of them.

  “Anyway,” Star went on, “I don’t think Sabrina figures she has exclusive ownership rights.”

  “They sure been acting otherwise for the last six months.”

  “Yeah. It ain’t like either of them.”

  “Getting old, I guess.”

  “Must be.” She finished with her umbrella. “Henry Lee, we ain’t talked about it much, but I don’t figure I got exclusive ownership rights on you either, you know.”

  “I know that.”

  “And vice-versa. I grew up a casing gypsy. Moving from camp to camp, location to location. I learned early on that nobody ever owns anybody.”

  “I understand that, Star. I never tried to hold you down, did I?”

  “No, you never did.”

  Doc called us to come down and be introduced to Hillary. Star had been moody for the last two weeks, and I had the feeling somehow that we had just finished an important conversation, but I didn’t know whether I’d screwed up my end of it or not.

  * * *

  Hillary and an assistant in a white coat dragged the tongue-tip over to a bench and clamped it gently in a large cushioned vise. Sprocket didn’t seem to mind; his eyes never left the tee-vee screen.

  “Now, let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said as she unwrapped the bandages. The tongue twitched a little when she came to the last layer, but Sprocket still kept on watching the tee-vee.

  “Oh, my,” Hillary said. She lifted his tongue-tip, turning it over and looking at it from all sides. “No sign of infection. The wound is uncharacteristically ragged. Usually the cut’s much cleaner.”

  “You mean this kind of thing happens all the time?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. It’s fairly rare. I’ve seen it maybe a dozen times. About the only instance that will cause a Driller to lose a length of tongue is when he’s involved in a hole collapse or casing implosion. He gets trapped in the hole, and the crew has to run a tool downhole on wireline as far as possible and shear him loose. But that’s not what happened here, is it? Looks like the collapse itself severed it. Very messily.”

  “Wasn’t a hole collapse,” Doc said grimly. “He chewed off his tongue, about fifty feet behind the drillhead.” He saw the question on Hillary’s face. “Oh, he didn’t go psychotic on us, Hillary. He saved our lives by what he done. It’s a long story. Tell you the details tonight.”

  “Hmph. Okay.” She examined the tip some more. “Good thing he only lost about fifty feet of length.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked. “Take longer to regenerate otherwise?”

  “No. The drill-head will regenerate approximately two yards forward of the edge of the wound. What’s gone in length is gone for good, though. I had one last year that lost almost ten thousand feet. Ruined him for deep wells. Sprocket got off easy in that respect. He looks healed up enough that we should leave him unwrapped from here on. Air and sunlight and exercise of the tip will be beneficial.” She unclamped the vise and allowed Sprocket’s tongue to slither back in his mouth.

  “Well, Henry Lee, we gotta go over to the camp and find some medicine for this terrible dry throat I have acquired,” Doc said casually. “You mosey on over when you finish up here.”

  “What! I gotta stay here while y’all party?”

  “Just till Hillary and her bunch finish up on the preliminary exam. Shouldn’t be more than a couple’a hours, right, Hillary?”

  Hillary looked up from a clipboard she was examining. “Hmmm? Oh, I imagine, about that. We’ll shut down around fivish or sixish regardless. Meet y’all at the camp?”

  “Oh, sure. Henry Lee and Sprocket’ll give you a ride.”

  “We will, huh?”

  “Now, now. I told you that being segundo on a crew is mostly a pain in the butt. You might as well practice bein’ left behind, starting right now. It won’t be the last time. Matter of fact, long as you’re here, you might get the red folder off my desk and make a head start on that inventory of all Sprocket’s equipment that we were talking about.”

  “You gonna stay with me, Star?”

  “Sorry, Henry Lee,” Sabrina said. “I need her to help get us and Lady Jane settled in at the camp.”

  “You’re a big boy now,” Star said sweetly as she kissed me on the cheek. “You can handle it. Watch tee-vee with Sprocket.”

  Wasn’t much I could do but stand there and wave bye-bye, like a big boy, while they all piled into Lady Jane and trundled on out of sight.

  I begun to suspect that maybe Doc wasn’t merely trying to keep me from getting a swelled head when he told me that people didn’t fight and die to be the segundo on a crew.

  * * *

  Hillary made it clear that her and her bunch considered me to be unnecessary to their exam, and Sprocket wasn’t the least bit sociable, hypnotized by the tee-vee as he was. He changed channels to some kind of nauseating nature film thing about snakes and frogs and insects slurping mucus and eating each other. So I spent about thirty minutes inventorying tees and crossovers and swages and such before getting terminally bored.

  Hillary said she didn’t mind, when I asked her if I could wander around the place a bit, as long as I kept my hands in my pockets. Wasn’t that she didn’t trust me, she just didn’t want me bulling around messing with her expensive scientific equipment. By then the other two critters had cleared out and the examiners that had been working on them had disappeared, so we had the hangar to ourselves.

  All the bays were practically identical, so I finished checking them out shortly. I didn’t have the leastest idea what most of the equipment was for, anyway. After awhil
e I found myself at the foot of one of the stairs that climbed to the catwalks on the second and third floor levels. Situated at several places around the perimeter were controls for various cranes and hoists that hung over the whole area.

  Hillary glanced at me when I got to the second floor level right over Sprocket’s bay, so I leaned over the rail and called out, “Hey! What’s these cranes and stuff for?

  She took her pen out of her mouth and strolled over to the foot of the stairs.

  “Sometimes we have to lift our patients completely off the ground. Late last year, for instance, a Tanker and a Driller were caught in a blow-out that ignited, over by Hempstead. They were brought in, unconscious and severely burnt, by a couple of Army Corps of Engineers heavy-haulers. We used the cranes to transfer them into and out of liquid bath tanks while they healed. We’d debride the dead flesh and then keep them bathed, antiseptic, and gravity-neutral.

  “They make it okay?”

  She shrugged. “The tanker was physically all right in a couple of months, but she’s phobic. Won’t go near the wellhead anymore. We’re still doing therapy on her, trying to desensitize her to her fear.”

  “How about the Driller?”

  “He’s fine,” she said. She frowned and went on more slowly. “About the only thing that can make a Driller phobic is for it to lose a piece of itself downhole.”

  “Like Sprocket did.”

  “Like Sprocket did, yes. Have y’all tried to get him to run into the hole since the accident?”

  “No, ma’am. No reason to. How do we find out if there’s going to be a problem?”

  “If he won’t go in the hole anymore, there’s a problem. We’ll check it in a week or two, after his tongue has healed more.”

  “What if …”

  Hillary shrugged. “Some get over it. Some don’t. I’m sure he’ll be all right. Sprocket’s a young Driller, and they’re resilient.”

  * * *

  I wandered up to the third floor and took the seat behind one of the crane control boards for a while, looking over the hangar below. Just as I was getting comfortable, I heard a scratching sound behind me and turned around.

  Standing on the ledge outside the window, not five feet from me, was a creature I’d never dreamed in my worst nightmares. It stood tall as a man, all black leather and batwings and long, sharp beak. The monster spread its wings, and I saw that deformed hands with long claws twitched at the wings’ midpoints. Its head cocked sideways. It glared at me with beady red eyes and clacked its beak metallically. I knew exactly what it was thinking:

  “My, that certainly does look tasty. I think I’ll crash through this window and eat it right up.”

  It clacked its beak again and took a step closer to the window. I let out a yowl and scrambled out of the control seat. I made it to the floor of the hangar almost as fast as if I’d simply dived over the rail.

  I was leaning against Sprocket’s flank and trembling when Hillary stepped out of his mouth. “Something the matter, Henry Lee?” A couple of her crew popped out of holes along Sprocket’s top and stared at me like I’d lost my brains. Sprocket glanced at me, saw I was all right, and went back to watching the tee-vee.

  “I … he … it … uh, wings, claws! Big, black monster! Acckkk!”

  They all looked puzzled, then Hillary started to snicker. “He must have seen Maureen or Sonny,” she said to her crew. They laughed, too. I didn’t appreciate it one little bit.

  She hugged me, which actually provided a nice distraction from the mortal terror I was experiencing. “There, there. Maureen and Sonny look like something from the backside of hell, but they’re harmless.”

  “Didn’t look harmless,” I mumbled, hugging her in return. She smelled real good. “Looked hungry.”

  “No, no, Maureen and Sonny don’t eat anything bigger than sheep. You probably scared the poor dear half to death.” She let go of me and stepped back.

  “What the hell are Maureen and Sonny anyways?” I asked.

  “Dactyls.” She looked at her watch. “Tell you what. We’ll be messing with Sprocket for another forty-five minutes or an hour. Why don’t you go up to the top floor and get another look.”

  “I don’t think …”

  “They’re interesting critters. You may never get a better excuse.”

  “Yeah …”

  “And you need to make sure Sonny or Maureen is all right after the scare you gave it.” She turned me around and swatted me on the rear. “C’mon. You’ll enjoy it. Elevator’s down that hall and on your left. Seventh floor. Find Stevie Goolsby. He’s their keeper. He’ll be happy to introduce you to them.”

  “Uh … how about another hug to reassure me some more?”

  * * *

  Actually, once she told me they didn’t eat Henry Lees for dinner, I was kind of interested in getting a more formal introduction. So I took the grungy elevator to the eighth floor. When the doors opened, there was a long hallway in front of me. None of the nameplates on any of the doors had Stevie Goolsby’s name on them. I tried a couple of doors, and they were all locked, so I wandered down the hallway, looking for signs of life, to where it teed. I took the right-hand branch and tried a couple of more doors, with no luck.

  I heard a door clack open back around the corner from where I had come. I started back, to get directions or see if it was Stevie Goolsby. I could hear two of them talking. The woman had an accent that dripped honeysuckle onto the floor. Just before I turned the corner, I realized she was in the process of chewing his ass off, so I held back.

  “Actually, Steven, Ah b’leeve the depahtment has just about come to the end of the road with yoah sloppiness.”

  “But I’m just on the verge of—” His voice was high and uncertain.

  “You’ve been just on the vudge, suh, evah since the depahtment brought you-all heah. Frankly, Ah haven’t seen any real puhformance out of you in the last foah yeahs. Just promises and a specialization in a bizarre, unprofitable lahn of research that drains much-needed funds from awuh school.”

  “The dactyls are not bizarre and unprofitable, Rene!”

  “The budget committee is beginnin’ to thank otherwise. The dactyls have not fulfilled awuh expectations, have they? Money is tight. We ah goin’ to have to make some cuts this yeah. If we don’t see some tangible results by the next fundin’ cycle …”

  “Aw, come on, Rene! You can’t do basic research by the clock.”

  “Puhhaps, but I’m afraid yoah clock is tickin’, Steven. Good day, suh.”

  I hung back out of sight, not wanting to eavesdrop, but not wanting to walk in on the middle of their happy discussion, either.

  I heard her heels clicking away from him down the hallway. The elevator doors whooshed open and shut.

  I waited a minute, so he could go back in his office, and I could come in without him knowing I overheard their conversation.

  When I peeked around the corner, he was standing in front of his office, staring absently at the wall beside my head.

  His eyes focused, and he stared at me instead for a few seconds.

  I stared back. He was a short, wiry guy, made me think of an elf with bad eyes. His glasses were so thick they looked like Coke-bottle bottoms strapped on his face with chicken-wire. He was wearing a dirty green dress that I later learned was a lab smock. The screaming red hair on his head tried to escape in all directions, but his scraggly beard looked too sick to do more than drip limply off his face. A thick gold ring piercing his left ear looked completely out of place.

  I cleared my throat.

  “I didn’t know we had an audience,” he said.

  “Sorry. Uh, I didn’t mean to be an audience. Uh, Hillary told me to find you, and I was looking around up here, and …”

  He shrugged. “What the hell. The Stone Magnolia probably would have kept eating on me if you’d been st
anding beside us doing a tapdance and singing ‘Camptown Races’.”

  I shrugged uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

  “Not your problem,” he said. “What does Hillary need?”

  “Well … she thinks maybe I scared Sonny or Maureen when one of them terrorized me, and she wanted me to check with you. She said you’d introduce me to them.”

  His whole look changed. His eyes swole up happily behind his glasses. “Yeah, I’ll introduce you to my babies.”

  He took me through the door he and the Stone Magnolia had come out of. The large room inside was a laboratory, with mysterious equipment scattered around on big marble-topped tables. I always thought doing science would be clean and tidy, with smart-looking guys talking fast while they drew diagrams on blackboards and cooked stuff in funny-shaped glassware. This room was an ungodly mess. It did have a lot of funny-shaped glassware on the tables, though. Most of it was dirty. I didn’t get much chance to look around, because he grabbed a ring of keys out of the drawer of a desk against the far wall and took us back out into the hallway.

  He led me to the door next to the elevator. We went into the stairwell and climbed up a short flight of stairs. “Gotta keep the tourists off the roof,” he explained as he used one of the keys on the ring to open a door at the top of the stairs.

  The dactyls must have heard us coming.

  When Stevie opened the door they jumped us, screeching and flapping and cackling. They both looked ugly and mean and hungry and unprincipled, but Stevie held his ground, so I did, too. Then I noticed they both had still-damp blood staining their beaks.

  Stevie started making little burping noises and grabbed a beak with each hand. He shook their heads back and forth vigorously while they tried to crowd us back into the stairwell so they could kill us out of sight from the public. After a minute of this foofaraw, I figured Steve and them were merely demonstrating how happy they were to see each other. He started scratching their heads where their ears would have been if they had any ears, then shoved them back out on the gravel-covered roof.