Petrogypsies (7 page)

“Like her? Goddammit, Henry Lee, if you actually like her, you’re even worse retarded to turn her down. The only ones you dump is the ones that make your stomach turn.”

“It’s just I didn’t want her getting no wrong ideas—”

“Wrong ideas! She had the best goddam idea in the world! What is the matter with your head, son?”

We went around for a while, and I just couldn’t make Razer see it, but I guess talking helped me understand a little more. Mostly I guess it was that if I’d been chasing after her, I’d know what to do if I caught her. But she’d been chasing me, and I wasn’t sure at all what would happen if she caught me. Razer and Doc had told me about casing gypsies. I wasn’t afraid she’d think she owned me for life. I was afraid she’d jump me once and then be on her way to the next fella.

* * *

We figured there was some serious hydrocarbons somewhere down there, but didn’t know where. Only that it looked like it was going to be deep. Doc kept an eye on Uncle Foots’ and Munchkin’s locations, but we couldn’t trade well information with them any more, since Tiny declared them to be tight holes. Tight hole means no well information at all goes out.

We had to keep weighting up our mud as we got deeper, with more hydrostatic pressure, but it wasn’t a scary deal, like with the well on the farm. Sprocket would come out of the hole when you needed him to, for working on his tongue, or whatever. But he was drilling hard as he could. Razor said Sprocket was having five-hundred-foot days, and if he kept it up all the way down, we just might beat Uncle Foots in the mating drill. I moped around, but I guess you get used to anything, so mostly it didn’t show and didn’t keep me from taking care of business.

We hung a nine-and-five-eighths-inch liner off the bottom of the thirteen-and-three-eighths down to fifteen thousand feet. We hadn’t been having any problems with hole collapse or nothing, but Doc figured there wasn’t no sense in pushing our luck. Big Red ran the cement, but the casing crew wasn’t Lady Jane’s.

The liner tested out fine; didn’t have to squeeze the shoe or the top of it. Another high-class job from Big Red.

Sprocket drilled some more.

At seventeen thousand feet, the Gas Tankers quit arriving. Mr. Mooney drove his pickup into town to check it out. He didn’t come back that day. Sprocket’s gas reserves started getting low, due to the sincerity of his drilling.

The mud crew needed to go to camp to stock up on barite and a few other chemicals their engineer felt they were running low on, so me and Doc rode into town the next morning with them and their beast, leaving Razer in charge of the location. We found Mr. Mooney in one of the three beds in the infirmary, right off the Notrees town square.

He was banged up bad. Couple of cracked ribs. His face looked like somebody had broke a whole fistful of knuckles on it. Or maybe they just used a two-by-four.

He didn’t talk so well, what with the way his mouth had been rearranged. “It was Tiny,” he mumbled.

Doc just nodded. He’d already figured that part out.

Seems that Mr. Mooney had gone to the gas depot to see why we wasn’t getting any, and was told that the bank had cut off his credit. He stormed over to talk to his banker, who wouldn’t tell him much, just kept saying that they’d been keeping an eye on the situation and felt he had become a bad risk, and they weren’t throwing good money after bad. Mr. Mooney figured Tiny had gotten to the banker somehow. And when he’d gone to face Tiny about it in his office—” Dumbass move, there,” Doc muttered—Tiny had put the hurt to him. A couple of the goons that hung around with Tiny told the Sheriff that Mr. Mooney started it. It was his word against theirs.

“Sorry, Doc,” Mooney finished. “Guess Tiny’s beat us.”

Doc snorted. “Naw. He’s just upped the ante a little bit.”

“But I don’t have any cash left. We were running on credit.”

“Your credit’s still good with me, Mooney, and we got enough money from that monster well that Sprocket drilled on Henry Lee’s farm to bankroll the rest of this operation.”

Outside, Doc squinted up at the sun and headed toward the camp. “That was real nice,” I said. “Helping out Mr. Mooney that way.”

He grunted. “Ain’t no nice about it. The man owes us money, and if we let Tiny bust him, we’ll never see it. We stir a little of our own cash into the pot, I figure we got a pretty good chance of coming out ahead on the deal.”

“How come Tiny gets away with all this stuff? If he’s as rotten as he looks to be, somebody should have fixed his wagon a long time ago.”

“I imagine some have tried. But he’s big and mean, and in case you haven’t figured, he don’t fight real clean, either. And his sponsor happens to be the regional vice-president of Hydroco.”

“What’s a sponsor?”

“Well, I guess I’m your sponsor, for instance. Your sponsor is the person that looks out for you, helps you on up the ladder, bails you out when you screw up. Now, the big oil companies, some of ’em, play heavy games that way. If you don’t have a decent sponsor, you don’t go nowhere in the company, no matter how good you are at your job. You have a good sponsor, he takes care of you, and you climb the ladder, even if you’re a asshole like Tiny.”

“How come somebody would be Tiny’s sponsor?”

“Probably Tiny does dirty work for him that most folks wouldn’t touch. Having a sponsor ain’t a one-way deal, it’s one of those back-scratch affairs. Your sponsor helps you climb the ladder, you help him keep from falling off it. Nobody can survive by himself in a large corporation. You got to have troops backing you up, snitching for you, doing stuff to take out your competition.”

“Well, if you’re my sponsor, what am I supposed to do for you?”

“Work your butt off and take care of Sprocket. We don’t play the sponsor game like the oil companies. I sponsored you onto the crew because I believe you have a natural aptitude for this business. You work hard without bitching too much, and I ain’t never seen Sprocket take to anybody as quick as he did with you.”

“Same here. Sprocket’s great.”

“Well, we’ll see how you feel once the new wears off. Meantime, we got to go arrange for some juice for Sprocket.

* * *

Three days later, Sprocket was still drilling his gums off. Doc and Razer figured he was down close to nineteen thousand feet. We hadn’t had him pull out of the hole to run wireline in and find out because there didn’t seem no point to it. It would just cost time we couldn’t afford, and nothing to be gained by the knowledge.

In the early afternoon, Big Red pulled up onto Munchkin’s location, closely followed by a Casing Critter.

Doc took off his silver-metal hardhat and wiped his forehead with his bandanna. “That just don’t make no sense. Why the hell are they out setting casing at this point? They sure as hell ain’t TD’ed. We’d of seen that.”

Razor pointed. “Doc, they ain’t running pipe. Pearl’s up on Big Red, and they’re mixing concrete.”

Doc looked thoughtful for a second, then threw his hat down on the ground, hard. He booted it fifteen feet on the bounce. “That’s goddam wonderful! It ain’t like we’re made out of money or nothing!”

I was confused. Which wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Only thing to do was ask more stupid questions, like usual. I did, and Doc finally calmed down enough to answer.

“Chances are real good that Munchkin has hit a bad lost circulation zone.” He explained that if you hit a zone with a pressure lower than the hydrostatic pressure of your column of drilling fluid, it would drink the mud out of the hole until the pressures equalized. Some zones could suck up everything you could put in the hole for a month, and ask for more.

Big Red would be pumping down some cement to squeeze off the zone. It didn’t look like they were planning on screwing around that way for too long, since they had casing coming on location. If you can’t plug off, you just go down with casing and cement above and below the zone, isolating your hole from it.

“Well, can’t we do something to keep from losing circulation in the first place?”

“Nope. Shallower, we’d maybe try some cellophane chips in the mud, but at this depth the bottom-hole temperature is so high they’d burn up before they got down.”

Six hours later our hole lost circulation, and Sprocket wasn’t real happy about it. He quickly went dry down to his drillhead, and he wanted us to do something about it.

I stayed with him while Doc and Razer headed over to the edge of the lease in Munchkin’s direction, and motioned for Pearl to wander over. I rubbed Sprocket’s hide and sang to him, trying to get his eyeballs to slow their spin. He was coming out of the hole, after drilling dry for a couple of dozen more feet. We hoped he hadn’t messed up his drilling cones.

Doc and Razer came back looking discouraged. “Pearl says they’ll be cementing casing on Munchkin’s location soon as they can get it in the hole. They just tested and the thief zone won’t squeeze off.” He wandered over in front of the dinner pot cooking over the fire and lifted the lid, looking in without much real interest. “Looks like Tiny realized what was going on out here when the call came in for Big Red and got a corner on the market. Pearl says the other four Cementers in the field are out on Hydroco locations bouncing from well to well. Big Red moves over to Uncle Foots’ location when he hits the thief zone, then he’s got a couple’a other deals with Hydroco he’s on standby for.”

“Uncle Foots hasn’t lost circulation yet?” I said. “That means Sprocket was ahead of him.”

Doc grunted. “Them zones don’t necessarily run horizontal. But I like to think Sprocket was ahead. Don’t matter, though. We ain’t going to be making hole again until the mating drill’s over. And probably not until Tiny figures a way to run us plumb out of the field. It’s hard to fight all the money he’s got behind him.”

Razer looked over towards Munchkin. “Doc, seems to me that since Sprocket was deepest, and since him and Munchkin are both down to the same thief zone, they could maybe both go into the hole, and—”

Doc frowned and shook his head. “It don’t work that way, Razer.

Razer wouldn’t meet his eyes, just shuffled his feet. “Just a idea.”

“Not the best one you ever had. I wouldn’t ask it of Munchkin or of Sprocket. We won’t say no more about it.”

I opened my mouth to ask what they were talking about. Doc saw me and grinned for a second. He made the squiggly worm sign with his finger inching up his forearm. “Got to figure this one out for yourself, Henry Lee. It’s got to do with the mating drill, boy.”

I shut my mouth. I thought I had already figured out the mating drill. Looked like there was more to it.

* * *

Nobody spoke much through dinner. Afterwards, I was sitting around the fire with the tip of Sprocket’s tongue in my lap. I’d pulled back the foreskin that normally covered it when he wasn’t drilling. His cones hadn’t been damaged, but the central spike’s point had been somewhat blunted and scored, so I was working with a diamond-dust file, honing it back to gleaming obsidian sharpness. It would regenerate in time anyway, but Sprocket appreciated the attention, and it’s always good to keep your equipment in shape. I’d just finished filing and was greasing its length when Spanky Blankenship slipped into the silent circle.

Without a word, Doc passed him the bottle. Spanky looked upset. He took a swig. “We didn’t want Uncle Foots to win this way,” he muttered. “It ain’t right.”

“Not your fault,” Doc said. “Tiny—”

“Fuck Tiny and the horse he rode in on. I got a mind to tell him to shove the contract and head on down the road. Maybe collapse the goddam hole first.”

“No reason to cut off your nose, Spanky,” Doc said. “Uncle Foots’ll make a fine daddy, and there ain’t enough Drillers around that we can afford to waste a mating.”

A couple or five drinks later, Earl the Pearl wavered in beside Spanky. He was a tall, lanky character, usually half-loaded, always laughing and telling jokes. He wasn’t laughing now. At least he brought his own bottle, although he’d already started it on its way to being empty.

“Your hands told me I might find you here, Spanky.” He took a sip and passed his bottle to Doc. “It ain’t right.” He looked apologetically at Spanky. “Winner’s supposed to take the prize. Sprocket was ahead.”

Spanky shook his head indignantly. “No such thing. I figure that thief zone’s on a slope.”

“Maybe.” Pearl shook his head. “Still ain’t right, though.”

“Yeah. Tiny shouldn’t go interfering in a mating drill. It ain’t right.”

“Uh-huh. I wouldn’t allow it if I was you, Spanky.”

“Me?” Spanky looked outraged. The bottle got around to me and I took another sip. The fog seemed to be coming in early tonight. Spanky struggled to his feet. “Me? All I’m trying to do is make a well! It’s you that got them in a bind. Getting yourself put on standby by Hydroco for the next forty years.”

Pearl looked guilty. “He offered a
bunch
of money to everybody back at the camp, Spanky. And nobody didn’t know ol’ Sprocket was up against the wall.”

“Well, it ain’t my fault you’re greedy, is it?” Spanky said belligerently. “Why don’t you tell Tiny to stick it, and come over here and cement Sprocket’s well when you finish mine?”

“Can’t do that, much as I’d like to,” Pearl said mournfully. “A man’s only as good as his word, and I promised as soon as I left your location, I’d head over to this well right outside of Goldsmith and do some block squeezing. Nothing in between. Now, if we could run some concrete for Sprocket while we’re still on your location … naw, that don’t make no sense.”