Petrogypsies (3 page)

“They didn’t find anything but a lot of holes that had been drilled in what is now the Anadarko Basin. No bodies. No other physical evidence. Marley said the aliens must have disposed of everything else. He died not long after. But by then he had explained how the critters worked together to make a well.”

“He come down with typhus, too?” I asked.

“Nope,” Doc said. “Shot for bein’ in the wrong woman at the wrong time. Ol’ Marley was pussy-crazy.”

Razer took off his hardhat and held it over his heart. “Our founder,” he said piously. “We been tryin’ to uphold his example ever since.”

“Personally, I think they’re all just hallucinations,” Pearl’s
segundo
, name of Goose, said. “We’re all actually havin’ the D.T.’s.” He tossed me his bottle. “Here. Drink enough of this, you won’t see ’em any more.”

I looked up at the sky and wondered.

* * *

I didn’t get much sleep the next three weeks, what with working all day in the fields and being with the gypsies every night. I helped out on most all of the critters at one time or another, learning how drilling mud was mixed and why, or helping the tool gypsies dress and move their tools when they were getting ready to run in the hole for a squeeze job, or unpacking float shoes and collars to attach to the bottom of a string when they got ready to run it in. All of them was real friendly, answering all my dumb questions, and telling me stories about the far places they’d been and the things they’d seen and done.

But I kept coming back to Sprocket. The deeper he got, the more he had to exert himself twisting that long, talented tongue deep into the bowels of the earth, clamping his mouth over the well head to fight downhole hydrostatic pressure until they could weight up the mud, whenever he hit a high-pressure zone. I got to know him inside and out, literally. Doc and the crew taught me how to care for him, and keep him clean, and feel inside his guts to monitor his vital signs so the stoking could speed up or slow down, or they could play music to calm him or spur him on.

They didn’t need to spur him on much. He was drilling like his life depended on it.

The proudest moment for me came one night when we were down about ten thousand feet. We’d just started in the hole to hang some eight-and-five-eighths-inch liner pipe off the bottom of a ten-and-three-quarter-inch long string. I was standing at the well head when it slipped a little. Displaced mud gushed out of the hole, drenching me from head to foot. The second pair of coveralls I’d ruined. I only had one pair left.

When we finished up, and I was kicked back and sipping on some heart-starter, Doc strolled up with a cloth-wrapped package under one arm and a silver-metal hardhat under the other. He dumped them at my feet.

“I don’t mind you getting underfoot ever now and then, Henry Lee,” he said. “But I do mind you doing it in them damned old messy coveralls.”

I set down the cup with unsteady hands and untied the string and shook open the package. Inside were two gray, patched jumpsuits and a pair of steel-toed workboots.

“If they don’t fit, you’re out of luck,” he said. “They’re the biggest sizes we got.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Ain’t a present,” he said gruffly. “You earned ’em.”

Then he strode off, shouting at Big Red’s crew for not getting their cement down-hole fast enough. I hid the clothes under my bed during the daytime and wore them at night when I went to the gypsies.

* * *

Sixteen-thousand feet, seventeen-thousand feet, eighteen-thousand feet, and still no strike. Sprocket’s hide began to lose its sheen and get wrinkled and rough looking, but he drilled on, heaving and panting. He sucked gasoline in vast quantities, forcing his tongue through rock that grew harder and hotter. The mud circulated up practically boiling, and we began to coat his tongue with special unguents when it came out of the hole, looking burned and chafed.

The camp grew quieter when he passed twenty-thousand feet, his maximum rated depth. More pressure, more heat, but no hydrocarbons.

* * *

I missed six nights while we got in the corn. The weeks of no sleep finally caught up with me. I simply couldn’t handle harvesting any more and working all night, too. I worked like a zombie in the fields all day, and couldn’t bring myself to visit the camp under Papa’s watchful eyes when sunset neared. I collapsed into bed right after supper each evening, sick as a dog, and slept without dreams until Papa shook me awake at dawn. Being sick don’t matter when the crop’s got to come in. When I saw Doc or one of the other gypsies I waved at them from a distance, but they only waved back and hurried about their business.

I came back the seventh night. They stood around Sprocket in silent little groups … no music, no laughing and joking.

Sprocket had somehow shriveled. His hide hung in loose rolls all along his length, and every few minutes a painful wheeze streamed from around the edges of his drilling mouth where he’d mashed it into the ground around his tongue. His head twitched spastically, and his eyes were squeezed shut in agony.

Doc turned a dead face to me when I touched him on the shoulder. “Oh … hello, Henry Lee.”

He fumbled at his shoulder pocket and came out with a tobacco bag. When he saw it was empty, he let it drop. “Sprocket’s down somewhere around twenty-three thousand feet,” he finally said. “We can’t measure for sure, because he’s refused to stop drilling for three days. We’ve got twenty-pound mud in the hole, and he’s still having to fight the bottom-hole hydrostatic. He’s had his mouth dug in for a blowout preventer since noon.”

I was frightened as much by the slurred, toneless way he spoke as by the meaning of his words. “Make him stop, Doc. The oil ain’t worth it.”

“He won’t stop, Henry Lee. We’ve played to him, and talked to him, and shut off his gasoline, and he just won’t stop.”

He reached out and rubbed Sprocket’s mottled skin. “Sometimes it happens this way. They just go crazy and won’t stop drilling.” His hand dropped to his side. “Until they die.”

We stood together, not saying anything for a long time. Finally I knew what I had to say, even if it wasn’t true.

“You’re wrong, Doc.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe Sprocket’s gone crazy. You told me he’s the best Driller in the world for finding and getting down to oil. Either you were wrong then, or you’re wrong now. Sprocket’s going for the deepest, biggest reservoir that’s ever been found.”

His big hands clenched, but I guessed angry was better than the way he’d been before. “You don’t know what you’re saying, boy. You’re just a typical worm. You run around here a couple weeks, and you think you know it all. You …”

“I know one thing, Doc. Sprocket ain’t in this business to kill himself. Like you said, he’s in it for the petroleum!” I was shouting now, leaning right into his face, mad as hell for no reason I could say. “And for the romance and excitement, too, you son of a bitch!”

I turned around and started yelling at the other gypsies. “What’s the matter with you people? Did you come here to find oil or not? How come you’re standing around like a bunch of—” I tried to think of the worst thing I could call them and found it. “Like a bunch of dirt-farmers!”

I rushed over to where the instruments lay in a pile and started throwing them at dumbfounded gypsies. “Play, goddam you! Sprocket’s doing his part of the deal. Least you can do is give him some music to work by if you’re not gonna work yourselves.”

I ran out of words and stood glaring at them. Nobody moved. There was silence except for Sprocket’s harsh panting and mine. I whirled, with a fist cocked to fly, at a scuffling noise behind me. Doc had his wand in one hand and the rhythm sticks in the other.

“I do believe you may be right, Henry Lee.” His voice rose. “Come on, people. It ain’t over till it’s over!” In a lower voice, he said, “I’m damned if I’ll hold Sprocket’s funeral while he’s still alive.”

* * *

I helped them hook him back into the gasoline tanker, and took turns massaging Sprocket’s heart muscle. We played and danced all night. I don’t know if any of it did Sprocket any good. Along about daybreak I was sprawled against his side, right underneath an eye, beating my rhythm sticks together drunkenly in time with his weakening gasps while half a dozen gypsies kept up on their instruments. The rest had fallen asleep where they stood or sat. A long shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see Papa’s grim face above me.

“He’s dying, Papa,” I said. “He wants it so bad nothing or nobody can stop him.”

“The family’s in the fields finishing with the harvest, Son.”

“Not today, Papa. I’ll be a farmer tomorrow, but please, not today.”

Sprocket’s breathing stopped.

For a frozen second I sat there. Then I lurched up, almost knocking Papa aside. “Doc! Doc! He’s not breathing.”

Doc had fallen asleep in a chair, his baton slipping from his fingers to lie in the dirt. I frantically yanked him erect and dragged him to Sprocket. Shaking his head to clear it, he inserted his arm into a crease and felt around. “Pressure down to nothing,” he muttered.

Finally, blessedly, I felt the tears streaming down my face. “It’s over.”

Then Sprocket’s body started to shimmy, quick little waves traveling along his body. Doc jerked his arm out as the first real convulsion hit. Sprocket’s eyes popped open, nothing but the whites showing. His body began to jerk and twist and hunch, carrying dozens of his feet off the ground at once.

Then a deep growling sound like a hurricane grew in the air, and Sprocket’s body began to tie itself in knots as we all backed away.

“Jesus, Son of God!” Doc yelled. “The well’s coming in on us!”

I looked down at Sprocket’s mouth and saw it grinding in the dirt, squeezed tightly around his tongue, and knew Doc was right. In addition to the normal bottom-hole pressure, Sprocket had drilled into a real high-pressure formation, and the upward force was trying to blast everything out of the hole. Sprocket was fighting it with his last remaining strength.

The wrinkles in his hide disappeared as he swelled up. Doc began to backpedal. “He ain’t handling the kick! His bladders are filling with mud coming up. Head for the tall grass! Blowout!
Blowout!
”

We all turned and ran like the devil was after us. The gasoline tanker, which was the only beast close up to Sprocket, ripped loose, crashed through the fence into the woods bordering the pasture, and left a wake of shattered pine trees behind him. The rest of the beasts took off in whatever directions they were already pointed in. In the midst of the turmoil, I caught a glimpse of Papa, high-stepping his best. He was fresh from a night’s sleep, so he was just about leading the pack. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he was willing to find out from a safe distance.

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Sprocket bloated like an enormous black balloon. Then he blew out. It looked and sounded like a tornado erupted full-grown from the top of his head. A stormy dark gusher fountained a hundred feet in the air. I kept running. If it caught fire, I’d be fried to the bone in a second.

Finally, I fell face down between two furrows, exhausted. It started to rain on my back, and I turned over. The rain was black. It was oil.

Fifteen minutes later, the gusher gradually grew smaller, and finally sank back into the ground. Cautiously, we slipped and scrambled among drenched wreckage until we came to Sprocket. Somehow, he’d held on and finally shut it in. He squirmed and wiggled happily in the middle of the mess, a deep, dynamo hum vibrating his entire length.

* * *

Three mornings later, the gypsies had washed off and repaired their belongings as best they could. The pasture and cornfields were covered with petroleum—black, clumpy globs of it, drying in the summer sun. A welter of intersecting pipes and valves called a Christmas Tree guarded the hole that Sprocket had drilled. I stood on Sprocket’s head and turned all the way around slowly. Papa and Grampaw and my brothers clustered in front of the farmhouse.

A trail of dust led down the road back to Hemphill and places beyond, marking the departure of all of the gypsies except Doc’s crew. Doc’s head popped out of the hole beside me.

“About time for us to go, Henry Lee,” he said.

I slid down Sprocket’s side and walked slowly toward my family. Behind me Sprocket’s legs started to churn in place, limbering up for the march ahead of him.

When I hugged him, Papa tried his best to smile, because he loved me.

Sprocket’s drilling mouth opened instantly when I tugged on it. We were halfway to the cattle guard before I made it through Doc’s room and up his ladder.

As we looked back and waved good-bye, Doc said, “Damned if I understand you, Henry Lee. That well’s gonna produce a whole lot of oil, and it’s gonna be the only one around here, ‘cause I don’t think anyone else is crazy enough to try to get into a reservoir that deep. You could stay and be one of the richest men in this state.”

I dropped my hand and turned to face the road. “Money’s fine for them that value it, Doc, but I’ll take the romance and excitement any day.”

In-Between

We had settled down outside Waco that night. For the past week, we had mostly stayed on back roads, since Sprocket traveled slower than most any truck or car. His cruising speed was about thirty miles per hour. When I finished washing the dishes after dinner, Doc called me into Sprocket.

“How’s it going so far, worm?” he asked. He stood beside a curtain that opened onto a room across the hallway from his.

“Just fine, Mr. Miller, sir. I lo-o-o-ve my job.” As soon as I hired onto the crew, everybody forgot my name and started calling me ‘worm’. Razer had explained that it was an old custom; everybody new to the oilpatch got called that until they demonstrated that they’d learned the basics. Fortunately, the old custom didn’t demand that I had to pretend to like it. Matter of fact, being disrespectful seemed to work better than any other response.

“Well, good,” he said. “You seem to have mastered the important stuff quick. So I got some more for you to do now.”

I groaned. The important stuff he was talking about was washing or cleaning or painting or scouring anything that didn’t move out of the way quick enough. I had put in fourteen-hour days since we left the farm, repairing steel hose, greasing bearings, cleaning Sprocket inside and outside, cooking dinner, cleaning up afterwards, and on and on.

It wasn’t farming, and wasn’t nearly so hard as farming, so I enjoyed every second of it. Of course, I didn’t let anybody on the crew know that.

I figured he had some more stuff for me to clean or fix.

“Hey, Sprocket, how about lightening up in there?” he called.

The warts inside the room began to glow softly, then brightened further.

“Today, we start the most important part of your schooling, boy.” We stepped inside. I looked around the room. I only recognized about a third of the instruments. “You got a passable sense of rhythm,” Doc continued, “but we need to get you up to speed on a real instrument.”

The walls were covered with hanging tubas and oboes and trumpets and saxophones in three sizes. Black leather cases containing god-knows-what cluttered the floor. He pulled open the top drawer of a file cabinet bolted to the wall and displayed hundreds of music scores; then he opened other drawers that were full of books and further small instruments made of wood and brass.

“You got any preferences?”

I looked around the room, almost breathless. “Uh, not really. I always kinda wanted to play the fiddle.”

“Huh. Afraid the violin is hard as hell to play well. Best to start on it while you’re less than four feet tall. I’d prefer we find something that you can sound decent on fairly quick. Besides, Razer already plays fiddle for us.” He pulled a saxophone from the wall. “How about this? Tenor sax.”

I took it gingerly and handled it for a second, looking it over. I blew into the mouthpiece. It made a sound like a horse throwing up.

“Well, maybe,” I said.

I shuffled aside, fingering the keys on it. My foot bumped into a case leaning against the wall and knocked it over. The top sprang open when it hit.

It revealed my instrument.

Fifteen minutes later we left the darkened room behind us. Doc carried the books and music folios he had pulled from the file case. I held my case by the handle. I had clipped to my belt the tiny battery-driven amplifier. The curving word ‘Pignose’ was impressed in tin along its top, with a tiny metal snout poking out above the speaker grill.

In my room, we dumped all the goodies on the bed, and I popped the case open again. Under the neck of the cherry-red instrument were extra sets of strings, a couple of cords for hooking up to the Pignose, and a flat box holding a couple of dozen picks.

I picked it up, and somehow it felt immediately comfortable in my hands. I slipped the strap over my head and settled it across my chest. I smiled. I caressed the headstock, which was inlaid with the word ‘Epiphone.’

Doc shook his head mournfully. “Just what the oilpatch needs. Another hillbilly guitar player.”

I barely heard him. I was in love.