Petrogypsies (2 page)

* * *

The next morning I’d already finished the morning chores before any of them stirred. The tents were still pitched where they’d been, but Sprocket had wandered over toward the back of the pasture. The dozen scraggly cows we owned gave him a wide berth. Doc was slouched over a campfire, sipping from a battered tin cup when I walked up. “Hey there, Henry Lee,” he called out. “You old enough to drink coffee?”

“I’m nineteen last month, Doc. I can do whatever I damn well please.”

He squinted up at me. “Feeling kind of salty this morning, ain’t you?”

I crouched and poured coffee into another tin cup. “Aw, I didn’t mean nothing. I guess I’m sorry to see you going. Yesterday was fun.”

“Like I said, it’s a romantic, exciting way to live.”

“Yeah. Looks like it beats dirt farming, anyway.”

About that time the ground started to shake. A thunderous pounding came from Sprocket’s direction. His hundreds of feet were stomping the back of the pasture into mud.

Doc jumped to his feet, looking disgusted. “Damned fool!”

“What’s he doing?”

He threw the last third of his coffee into the fire. “Seismic testing.” He shook his head. “Yesterday when we were drilling and he was marching in place, he got one baseline. Now he’s going for the other one.”

“I don’t understand.” Sprocket’s thumping speeded up.

“When he pounds the ground like that, it sends sound waves through the earth. Sprocket hears ’em when they slow down or speed up or reflect off different geological formations. Two baselines gives him a three-dimensional map of what’s down there. The damned idiot’s looking for hydrocarbons. Ain’t no oil for two hundred miles in any direction.”

Sprocket abruptly stopped and ambled back in our direction. The men had all woken and stuck their heads out of their tents, cursing and groaning sleepily.

“Well, at least that foolishness is over,” Doc said, grunting as he picked up the pot to pour himself another cup. Sprocket reached us in a minute and towered over us silently. Doc stared at his protruding, rapidly-rotating eyeballs.

Sprocket’s tongue shot out of his mouth and began to drill furiously not three feet from me.

Doc threw his coffee into the fire again.

* * *

Papa didn’t approve of the whole thing, but his eyes bugged out nearly as far as Sprocket’s when the company man for Exoco pulled into the front yard in his brand new shiny red 1963 Ford pickup, hopped out, and showed him the numbers wrote down on the royalty contracts he offered. If the gypsies hit a good pocket of oil or natural gas, the first in an entirely undeveloped field, Papa and Exoco would make money beyond any human cravings. Exoco would finance the drilling costs and get the biggest share. The drilling gypsies would make out, too, but not nearly as much.

Doc just shrugged when we talked about the deal. “Exoco’s putting up some serious exploration money on this, Henry Lee. And we’re drilling on property that your Daddy owns the mineral rights of.”

“Yeah, but none of this wouldn’t be happening without you and Sprocket! It isn’t fair!”

He shrugged again. “You’d been around the oilpatch a little longer, you’d understand the economics of the situation. It don’t matter a hell of a lot, anyway. We ain’t in this for the money, much as I hate to admit it. It’s the excitement and romance, son.”

I thought the carnival had come to town when Sprocket first arrived. I was wrong. Within a week, the whole pasture was covered with strange beasts and strange equipment and even stranger people. The mud gypsies, the casing gypsies, the tool gypsies, the cement gypsies, and more—all converged on the MacFarland farmstead out of nowhere, all accompanied by one or more beasties that did something vital to the drilling of an exploratory well. In between chores and building and placing the irrigation troughs that led from the water well to the cornfields, I usually got loose only after supper. I wandered among the tents and lean-tos they erected, breathing in the amazing sounds and smells and sights the gypsies brought with them.

The Exoco company man shouted and strutted about the camp like a little dictator. I started to understand why nobody knocked him up-side the head for acting as obnoxious as he did when I realized that his company was footing the bill for everything and everybody in the pasture. Doc told him to go suck on sour gas, though, when he once made a suggestion about how to handle Sprocket.

Sprocket drilled twenty-four hours a day, his sides heaving with the effort. Illuminated at night by the light-poles set up all along his length, the stokers fed him continuously the first week. Then the first of a series of bloated brown tankers showed up on the scene and hooked up to him. I was there when Doc himself stuck the hose firmly into Sprocket’s eating mouth, and we stood back as he began to suck on it like a calf at the teat.

“Ol’ Sprocket’ll eat just about anything, Henry Lee,” he said with pride, “but what he loves second best is that refined, high-octane, lead-free, pure sweet gasoline.”

“What’s he like best?”

He grinned evil-like. “Fresh dogmeat.”

I hadn’t seen Towser since the day Sprocket almost ate him.

“Just funnin’,” Doc said before I could ask the awful question. “What he likes best of all, of course, is heavy crude. Oughta see the way he gets to shaking and shimmying and moaning when he hits a producible formation. You don’t think he’s workin’ himself into a lather just because we play pretty music for him, do you? That’s just how we sweet-talk him into doing favors for us—like drilling your little water well, or trying out a wildcat some damn fool has a religious faith in—but he’s in the business strictly to fill his belly with petroleum.”

“And,” he added, “For the romance and excitement of it all.”

* * *

Eight nights after Sprocket started drilling, I snuck away from the house after bedtime. Papa hadn’t come right out and told us younguns to stay away from the gypsies, but his mind was easy enough to see. I guess the rest of my family was born to farm. Me, I’d lay in bed after breaking my back in the damned, boring-to-death fields, and hear pagan music, and the hum of many voices, and the whining, trembling noise Sprocket made in his search for the thing he loved best, and I’d want to cry for some reason.

Doc was talking to a couple of casing gypsies when he spotted me coming. They stood in a half circle in front of Sprocket, who was surrounded by half a dozen other oversized beasts. Doc didn’t seem too surprised to see me. “Howdy, Henry Lee. Just couldn’t stand it any longer, could you?”

“Sir?”

“I recognized the symptoms the first day, Son. Not too hard to do. I got ’em myself about your age. Still got ’em.”

There wasn’t nothing I could say to him.

He turned to the casing gypsies. The reason I knew they were casing gypsies is they were all women. Casing gypsies always were. They wore dark green jumpsuits, but theirs fit a whole lot better than the men’s. Over the next few weeks, Doc told me stories about the wild ways of casing gypsies that I not only didn’t believe, but, due to my lack of experience, couldn’t even understand half the time.

He spoke to the dark-haired woman that must have been their crew chief. “Ramonita, we’re gonna be ready to start snapping on that twenty-six-hundred feet of twenty-inch surface pipe in less than an hour. Big Red’s hooked up and ready to cement. How come I don’t see your pipe here?”

She swayed a few steps forward and tapped his chest with a black-tipped finger. “Because,” she purred, “your half-smart
segundo
, Razer, moved Big Red and his bulk cement holder onto location ahead of time. They’re blocking us out, as usual. They’re asleep, as usual.”

Her purr deepened into a snarl. “And it’s your goddam job to straighten it out, not mine. We’ve been ready since this afternoon.”

About that time, I wandered off, too embarrassed to listen to the rest of the conversation.

* * *

Ramonita was actually pretty nice, once you got to know her. That night I helped her and her casing crew snap on the surface casing. Sprocket pulled his tongue out of the hole for it. Each joint of casing was a twenty-foot tube of dark ceramic that their beast excreted. It unfolded in half, lengthwise. They placed the first joint right behind his drill-head, so that his tongue rested on a double trough, then snapped it closed around the tongue and sealed the seams with a special glue. Then they hoisted the rear end of the casing vertical into the air with a sling hung from a tripod scaffolding they’d erected, and fed the first joint most of the way into the hole. The end of the length of pipe tapered in, then flared out again. The next joint’s front end snapped right over that nipple, and so on.

After a few hours of lifting and snapping casing, I guess I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. We worked to the rhythm of the music made by gypsies from half a dozen specialties, and it made that casing feel light as goose feathers.

When we were done, I collapsed into a chair and watched while Big Red pumped cement down the inside of the casing and out the bottom and back up the outside into the annulus between the casing and the hole, bonding it in place. Doc strolled over with a cup and a plate heaped with sausage and thick pieces of bread.

“Here you go, Henry Lee. Oilpatch work may feed the soul, but every now and then you gotta feed the body, too.”

I took a big bite of the sausage, and it felt like my mouth had caught on fire, so I took a deep swig from the cup, and the flames leaped higher.

“You’ve killed me,” I finally managed to choke out. “What is this stuff?”

“Just boudain and a little heart-starter. Good stuff.”

After that, I took small bites of everything that was offered to me. That heart-starter kind of growed on you after awhile, though.

* * *

A couple of hours later, I took another break and wandered over to the fire where a bunch of the hands was relaxing.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” I said, to nobody in particular.

Doc and Razer both grabbed their hardhats and slapped them on. “Uh-oh!” Razer said. “Head for the hills!”

“Aww, come on!” I said. “I know thinking’s dangerous, but I can handle the pressure.”

They pretended to relax. “Well, if you’re sure …” Doc said doubtfully.

“Seriously, what I been wondering about is, oilfield critters ain’t like any other animals around. How come is that?”

“They’re the last of the dinosaurs,” Razer said.

“They’re actually giant, mutated catterpiggles created by atom-bomb explosions,” Big Mac, another one of Sprocket’s hands, volunteered.

“They’re from Australia,” Pearl, the head cementer on Big Red, said. “Animals from Australia is all different from normal.”

“Actually nobody knows where they come from,” Doc said. “But I think they’re aliens from outer space.”

“You believe that old story?” Pearl asked. Half the guys around the fire hooted, but the other half just nodded.

“I read Marley Monmouth’s diary in the library up at P&A,” Doc said.

Texas Petrological and Agricultural College at Aggie Station is the main center of learning about the oilpatch. A couple of the guys on the crew had mentioned going there once or twice for vocational training on how to be better hands on their crews. One or two admitted to taking correspondence courses on occasion.

“I read that diary, too,” Pearl said. “Ol’ Marley had obviously slipped his transmission.”

“If you’d been through what he claimed to have been through,” Doc said, “you’d be a little funny, yourself.”

“What was it he had been through?” I asked.

Pearl snorted. “He was out in the sun too long in the Anadarko Basin.”

“Nobody had any record of oilpatch critters until about a hundred and twenty years ago,” Doc said to me. “Until Marley Monmouth brought a herd of fifty-three of them down the main street of Duncan, Oklahoma, that is. All the critters we know of now are descendants of that herd. He claimed that there had been almost two hundred of them, but the rest were dead. He said that he had been part of a wagon train pushing west a couple of years before. One night, strange, alien monsters captured everybody in the wagon train. They took their prisoners into the wastelands where there was what we’d now call a very busy field being drilled. Marley and his people was used for slave labor to make the wells.”

Doc paused for a moment as the bottle reached him.

“According to the diary, the aliens had captured several wagon trains and a bunch of Indians. They were not nice guys. They treated their hands like dogs, worked ’em till they dropped. Treated the critters awful poorly, too. There was only about two dozen of the aliens, but they had weapons that shot out rays that would burn up whoever they touched. Typhus started to sweep through the camp. The slaves got so desperate that they revolted. Most of ’em got killed. The critters helped ’em fight, and most of them got killed, too. But some of them escaped. Marley had half a dozen people with him, including two Indians, inside one of the Cementers when he got to Duncan, but all of them except Marley had come down with typhus and died without talking. An exploring party went out to check his story. Took a lot of guts back then, since it was hostile Indian territory.”

“Which is probably what really happened to his wagon train.” Pearl said. “Killed by Apaches.”