Petrogypsies (20 page)

Sprocket Goes to School

It was the loudest, most bizarrest conglomeration of machinery I’d ever seen or heard.

The crowd surrounding it seemed to feel they was getting their entertainment dollar’s worth. Every half a minute or so they’d erupt into cheers and whistles. The whole thing was set up about fifty yards in from the street, over by a clump of trees. Next to it somebody had assembled a refreshment stand and a small set of portable bleachers for the faint of leg and back.

We had a good viewpoint, being on top of Sprocket as he churned down University Drive. Since Aggie Station is a college town, and the college is Texas Petrological and Agricultural, the streets had been built to size, wide enough for use by Drillers and Cementers and Mud Mixers and Casing Critters and all the others. Not like a lot of them narrow, twisty country roads out in the ass end of god-knows-where that we have to make do with most of the time.

The day was bright but unusually coolish for late August, with a wind coming down from the hill country to the northwest. This was good news for the dozen fellas scrambling all over the strange machines. Looked like they’d have dropped on a normal summer day, with all the exertions they were making.

Doc and Sabrina and me and Star lounged back in our folding chairs on top of Sprocket’s back, under a huge grass-green sun umbrella we’d bolted down. Five other umbrellas dotted Sprocket’s length, with most of Sprocket’s and Lady Jane’s crews up top socializing.

Doc picked up the jug of iced lemonade on the table between us and topped off our Mason jars.

“What on Earth is that ridiculous-looking contraption?” I asked Star.

Doc grinned. “Hey, Sprocket!” he sang out. He stood up, folded his chair, and whacked Sprocket over the left eye with it. “Over thataway! Let’s us watch the show some.” Sprocket growled to himself, but he slowed and gingerly climbed over the curb, taking care not to spill anybody’s drinks. He could be thoughtful that way when he chose. It wasn’t all that often that he chose, mind you.

Lady Jane politely followed behind. She’d stayed with us when the rest of our convoy split off to head for the camp east of town.

Two derricks stood side by side. Under one of them a Driller was doing his business, making hole with a high musical whine while a gypsy band played for him. He was hooked up to a Mud Mixer and a Gas Tanker, both of them apparently asleep despite the noise of the crowd. That part was all as usual.

However, machines and lines and platforms and all kinds of unrecognizable equipment had sprouted all over the other derrick, especially down around the drilling floor. A thick, braided steel cable hung from an oversized hay pulley. A hellaciously noisy diesel engine rolled one end of the cable onto a drum that was bolted to the drilling floor. The cable went straight down to where the wellhead would have been if a Driller was drilling there. The cable and drum looked kind of like a wireline setup, but I had no idea what all the other machinery could be.

“Them Aggies never give up, do they, Sabrina?” Star said.

“I guess not, honey.” Sabrina clicked her knitting needles together. She was just starting some red wool long johns for Doc. He was only slightly embarrassed that she was doing it in public. “I was here for the first contest. When was it, Doc? Nine years ago? Ten?”

“Ten,” Doc said. “We met that year, I believe.”

“Why, so we did. I remember.” She pretended to prick him with the tip of a needle. “You were such a big stud back before you got old. Cut through the co-eds like a red-hot poker through a basket of kittens.”

I winced at the image that created. Doc muttered something none of us caught.

“Eh, dear? What was that?” Sabrina asked him.

Doc leaned over and kissed her on the ear. “I said, I ain’t so damn old. How do you know I ain’t immoral like that no more, darlin’? Henry Lee and me both could probably leave a pretty broad wake behind us here if we decided to.”

“Yeah!” I said loyally. Star dug an elbow in my ribs. “Uh, I mean, you leave me out of this! I’m an innocent bysitter and, besides, what the hell is all that machinery doin’ over there anyways?”

“You better just keep on bysittin’, bud.” Star said. “And that is a drilling rig over there.”

“I
know
that, smarty. I’d recognize a Driller from the smell alone. But what’s all that stuff next to it, on that other derrick?”

“Star just told you,” Sabrina said. “It’s a drilling rig, Henry Lee. A
mechanical
drilling rig.”

I stared at it for a long eight count. Then I busted out laughing. “Well, if that don’t beat all!”

“Uh-huh,” Doc said. “About half a dozen schools at the university here cooperate in designing and building machines to imitate the real thing. They’ve spent some serious research money on it, and they’ve come up with some purty ingenious stuff. See that cable going in the hole?”

I nodded. The drum reversed, pulling the cable out of the hole. A couple of fellas sweated over a control panel beside it.

Doc continued, “They got a pointy tool attached to the end of that cable, with some heavy-weight collars screwed on above it. They pull it up a ways and then drop it free-fall to the bottom of the hole. The tool fractures the rock and they circulate the particulates out while they’re pulling the tool back up the hole. Works damn well, all things considered. On a good day, I’ve seen ’em make three, four hundred foot of hole. Then something breaks down and they spend the next three days fixing it.”

“What’s that Driller doin’ next to ’em, then?”

“Drilling,” Star said. “Every year they have a big contest, and the Aggies trot out their new, improved version of a mechanical drilling rig and stage a contest to see who can make hole the fastest and the bestest, down to ten thousand foot. The losers spring for a big party the weekend before school starts.”

I marvelled at the ingenuity of the Aggies. The cable tool abruptly released and the cable whined into the hole. The crowd cheered again. Then I had an alarming thought. “Wait a minute! What if them fellas make a machine so good that nobody needs Drillers no more? Just put it on automatic and come back when you’re ready to go into production. We’d be in a fix!”

They all laughed. “Ain’t too likely,” Doc said. “Sometimes we forget just how complicated it is to make a well. They ain’t won a single drilling contest yet. Nobody can’t make machines good enough to compete with living critters made for the
purpose. The technology just ain’t in place, maybe never will be. It costs too much, it breaks down too often, and it just don’t make hole fast as a Driller.”

The cable started winching out of the hole again. Next door to it, the Driller quietly, steadily hummed to itself as its tongue ripped a hole into the earth. Not all noisy and dramatic like the machines. Merely taking care of business and getting the job done.

“I guess,” I said doubtfully.

“Hey, Sprocket!” Doc called out. He went through the folding and whacking procedure again. He was just too lazy today to go to his room and get the crowbar that he usually drove with. “We need to get on over to the vet building. Gonna miss your appointment if we don’t get it in gear. Vet building, boy!” Sprocket groaned; once he got stopped he didn’t much like to fire up again. “We’ll come on back here later on, Henry Lee.”

“Yeah, I’d like that, Doc.”

The drilling contest receded behind us. I turned and watched it until a building got in the way.

I don’t know why, I started to hum a little tune to myself, I don’t remember all the words to it. Something about John Henry, he was a steel-driving man.

* * *

P&A was tucked away in the hill country in the middle of the state. I’d imagined it would be crude and primitive, not much more than a bunch of shacks and ugly brick buildings, since Aggie Station had a reputation for not being a completely civilized place. Instead, the campus looked modern and well-manicured. It was also five times as large as I had thought it would be. It looked like a small city, with its own miniature skyscrapers. I liked it. The buildings tended to be crowded together and the streets were mazes, but Sprocket knew where he was going, as he had visited the vet more than once. I had found out that oilfield critters, whenever possible, spent their first year or two at Aggie Station for pediatric care and basic training.

Eventually, we drew up on a building six or seven stories high. Sprocket chugged around to the back. A down-ramp led to an open bay wide enough for three Drillers to march in side by side.

The entire bottom three floors of the building was actually one huge room, broken up into cubicles around the edges by little head-height dividers. All sorts of equipment was scattered over the floor. Five separate areas, like oversized repair bays in a garage, were boxed by blue lines on the concrete floor. A Mud Mixer was in one of them, with a dozen people in white coats crawling all over it. A Cementer faced the wall in the bay farthest from us, apparently unattended and asleep. Sprocket proceeded to park in one of the open bays. He acted strangely eager to get to his place.

I figured it was just because he had been on the road for a week and was ready for a rest.

A big shiny piece of square gray glass, at least three yards across, hung on the wall twenty feet in front of his eyes. A long cable hung on a clip next to the glass, and on the end of it hung a box covered with buttons the size of dinner plates. As soon as Sprocket stopped moving, his tongue shot out and grabbed the cable and pulled the box toward him.

He dropped the box to the floor in front of him and his tongue-tip started pushing buttons. The bandages didn’t seem to slow it any. The square of glass lit up with moving colors and noise blared from a grill beneath it.

“Turn that goddam thing down!” Doc yelled.

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.”