Roughneck (12 page)

       "Ain't that the way you feel, Jim?" Shorty looked eagerly at me. "Don't you figure it's just silt or mud?"

       "Sure," I said. "We hook the bull wheel into it, and it'll pull slick as snake oil."

       "Sure," Jiggs repeated. "Sure it will."

       I was practically certain that it wouldn't, and so was he. And so, for that matter, was Shorty. Perhaps he had been able to get some motion from the pipe on his original visit to the well, but he must have known that something had been gripping it solidly and not too many hundreds of feet below the ground. He had deceived himself nourishing an almost baseless hope until it had become belief. And now here we all were, and there was nothing to do but go ahead.

       Silently, we cleaned out the tool house and spread out our blanket rolls. We built a fire, and set a lard-can "kettle" on to boil. The farmer who owned the land had given us a grubstake—blackeyed peas (fifty pounds), cornmeal (fifty pounds), coffee, salt pork and other staples. We would eat, at least, as long as we worked on the project.

       We had been on the road three days, walking the last thirty-five miles. But worn out as we were, we tossed sleeplessly for most of the night. We were all too worried to sleep, too disappointed. At the first crack of daybreak, we were up drinking coffee, and by dawn we were at work.

       There was a great deal to be done. Basically, the rig and tools were in good shape, but that long-ago contractor had left things in a mess and the vandal, Time, had made mess into chaos. Thousand-pound timbers had sagged and slipped. Collapsed spools of cable were spewed every which way, mingled and intermingled in Gordian tangles. A twenty-foot stem—tons of solid steel—was jammed back into the calf wheels. The walking beam had toppled down into the belt house. The—but let it go. You would have to know your drilling rigs and terminology to appreciate the damage.

       Our first task was not with the rig proper but on the pump to the adjacent water well. For while we could carry water for ourselves from the farmer's house, it would take thousands of gallons a day to keep the boiler going. We stripped the engine down, sandpapered its twin pistons and relined the bearings with our single precious bar of babbitt. We filled the tank from the farmer's precious supply of gasoline. And after a mere seven or eight hours of cranking, the damned thing ran.

       We all felt better after that. There is something about having water, when you have been without, that does things for a person's spirits. We all took a bath, and flushed out the tank and boiler lines. Using the farmer's tools, we all fell to chopping wood which we stacked in cords before the boiler's feed box. In all, we were about three weeks securing our water and fuel supply. With that taken care of, we were ready to start on the rig.

       Now, there are no light objects around drilling machinery. The stuff all weighs into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It is meant to be moved with winches and cranes—with machine power. And we had a great deal of clearing away to be done before we dared cut steam into the rig. Everything had to done by hand, ours alone, ostensibly, and since ours were simply not adequate...Well, I can't explain it, how we got the necessary help. All I can do is tell you about it.

       We would be struggling futilely with some immovable object, when suddenly, from north and south and east and west, men would come plodding through the tangles of underbrush and blackjack. Negro and white, sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Poor ragged devils, even poorer than ourselves if that were possible, bonily emaciated with the ravages of hookworm and malaria. Exactly the right number came to get the job done—no more, no less. They expected no pay and they seemed surprised and embarrassed by our thanks. As soon as the task at hand was completed, they departed again.

       It was an eerie phenomenon, one that I have observed nowhere else but in the "lost country" of the Deep South. There were no telephones in the area, and many of our helpers came from miles away. Incredible as it seemed, we were forced to accept the fact that these men could anticipate our need hours before it arose. They knew what we were going to do before we did! We would start to work in the morning, faced with so many tasks that we didn't know which to tackle first. Or, perhaps, we would start on one job, then shift to another. In any case, when the time came that we needed help, it was there and in the right amount.

       Unlike Shorty and Jiggs, I could not shrug off this weird state of affairs as "just one of them things." There is a peculiar twist of my mind which impels me to fly into every puzzle as though dear life depended on it. So I pestered our farmer friend about it whenever he put in his appearance. And while I never got a straight explanation of the riddle, I did achieve some understanding of it.

       The "how" I never learned. But the "why-for," to use the dialect of the section, became clear.

       The occasion was one morning some five weeks after our arrival. We were practically through with the rigging up, and the farmer had been standing around watching us. With an almost abrupt adieu, he stepped down off the derrick floor and started for the backbrush. I asked him where he was going.

       "Over to Lije Williams'—" He paused uncomfortably. "Figger I'd he'p him clean out his cellar. Got a plumb big beam to tote back in place after the cave-in."

       I asked him when the cave-in had taken place. He mumbled evasively, somehow abashed by the question.

       "It hasn't happened yet, has it?" I said.

       "Didn't say that," he mumbled. "Just said I was goin' to he'p him."

       "How do you people know things like that?" I asked. And he shook his head awkwardly: he didn't know; he couldn't say; he didn't like to talk about it.

       "If you knew this cave-in was coming, why didn't you warn Lije? Maybe he could have stopped it."

       "Caint," he said simply, his face clearing a little. "Couldn't hardly do that. Suthin's what's goin' to be, it is."

       "So you do know," I said, "you just admitted it. How?"

       He was growing increasingly uncomfortable at the quizzing, and my friends were nudging me to get on with the work. But I kept after him, and his inherent politeness restrained him from telling me what he should have: viz., to mind my own business and let him mind his.

       "Looky, friend," he blurted out at last. "I caint—I don't rightly know how to—to—"

       "Make a stab at it," I encouraged him. "Put it in your own words. How do you folks know when somebody needs help?"

       He frowned troubledly, scuffing his overrun shoes in the rocky and ruined soil. He looked around at the desolate wasteland. And then his eyes lifted to the bleak, unpromising sky, searching perhaps for a Deity whose head seemed forever turned.

       "Got to," he said, bluntly.

       That was the end of his explanation.

       It was enough.

       With the wreckage cleared out of the machinery, we were able to complete the rest of the cleanup with power, and we got it done in a matter of hours. We used the remainder of the day to rig our casing cable and blocks; then, early the next morning, we fired up for the big event.

       Since the well had been a deep one, the steam lines were outsize, extra-heavy duty. Similarly, the boiler was something to warm the cockles of an oilman's heart. It had a capacity of one hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure (the safety valve was set to pop off at that point) which is enough power to move a mile-long freight train. It was certainly enough to move a pile of pipe, we felt...if the pipe was movable.

       I started off with the water glass (gauge) at the third-full mark, gradually opening the injector valve. The first fifteen or twenty pounds of pressure were hard to get, but after that, with the steam-driven blower cut in, the pressure rose swiftly. Shorty and Jiggs retired to the derrick floor, and readied themselves. At seventy-five pounds, I shouted a high sign.

       Shorty manipulated the gear lever. Jiggs kept an anxious eye on the cables and blocks. The derrick creaked as the line tightened. The guy wires began to hum. Then a sound like a monstrous groan rent the air, and there was a high-pitched, ear-shattering whining—and the bull wheel spun uselessly in its belt.

       We took the belt off, tightened it with a splice and put it back in place. It spun almost as badly as ever. No power was being transmitted to the machinery.

       We took it off again and resurfaced the wheel with bits of old belting. This time it held; there was not the slightest skidding or slipping. But when Shorty "hit it" with ninety pounds pressure, the seven-eighths inch casing cable snapped like a thread.

       We re-rigged with two lines instead of one. With the boiler pop-off valve shrieking, with a full one hundred and twenty-five pounds pressure, Shorty began to "run" at the pipe—to let the lines go slack and then hit it with everything he had.

       That went on for two days, at the end of which we had to knock off to chop wood. The pipe hadn't budged. Jiggs said it wasn't going to.

       "I ain't sore, understand," he told Shorty. "You musta known that pipe wouldn't pull, and you oughta have your butt kicked for draggin' me and Jim down here. But—"

       "It'll pull." Shorty's face flushed. "We're gonna re-rig with four lines."

       "What good'll that do? The two we got can take anything we can put on 'em."

       "You'll see," said Shorty sullenly. "You guys don't want to help, you don't have to. I'll do it myself."

       Well, we weren't going to let him do that, naturally. So we finished the wood-cutting, and strung an additional two lines through the blocks and down to the stubborn pipe. Shorty then ordered a double-guying of the derrick—two guy wires for each of those we now had.

       We asked the reason for them. He was sullenly uncommunicative. The rig was going to be double-guyed, and to hell with us if we didn't want to help.

       Curiously, Jiggs and I did our share of the job.

       "Now," said Shorty, when finally everything was as he wanted it, "you think that derrick'll hold? You figure there's anything we can put on it, it won't stand up to?"

       There was only one answer to the question; the rig, of course, was bound to hold up. It was inconceivable that it shouldn't.

       "And them four casing lines? You figure they'll hold—three and half inches of solid steel line?"

       Yes, we nodded, and the lines also would hold. They could no more give way than the rig could. 'But—'

       "What the hell you drivin' at, anyway?" Jiggs demanded angrily. "The derrick an' them lines could stand up against three boilers like the one we got. They could take four hundred pounds of steam an' never feel it. But we only got 'one' boiler and we only got a hundred and twenty-five pounds, so—"

       Shorty walked off, leaving Jiggs talking. We followed him out to the boiler. He stepped up on the firebox door, and braced his body against the barrel. Taking a piece of wire from his pocket, he firmly wired shut the safety valve.

       By no means a professional oil field worker, I did not immediately grasp the significance of this action. But Jiggs's face turned slightly green beneath the tan.

       "Are you crazy?" he snapped, as Shorty leaped back down to the ground. "Why you think that's set to pop at one-twenty-five? Because it'll blow up if it don't!"

       "No, it won't," said Shorty grimly. "They test these things high. If it's set for one-twenty-five, it ought to take a hundred and seventy-five or two hundred. For a while, anyways."

       "Yeah, but for how long a while? And how you going to know if it ain't built up to two-fifty or three hundred? The gauge only reads to a hundred and twenty-five."

       "It won't raise more than two hundred. It just ain't got the fire and water capacity."

       "Well," Jiggs said, "I wouldn't want to be around it if it was carrying a hundred and fifty pounds pressure, but..."

       He turned and looked at me. So did Shorty. The decision was mine, their attitudes said. They worked up on the derrick floor, more than seventy-five yards away from the boiler. If it blew up, I would be the one to be blasted into the next county.

       I hardly knew what to say. We had put in almost two months here, and it was agonizing to think of going back to Oklahoma City empty-handed. But I naturally preferred returning empty-handed to not going back at all.

       "I don't like to ask you, Jim—" Shorty broke the silence. "But I honest-to-God think it'll be safe enough. You don't need to hang around the old pot...very much. Just crowd that pressure needle around until she hits zero again; then you can load the firebox with all it'll hold and head for the bushes."

       "Yeah. But suppose it blows while I'm doing all that?"

       "All right," he said dejectedly. "I'm not asking you to."

       "Anyway, the steam won't hold. You start hitting it in the rig and—"

       "It'll hold long enough, Jim! A half hour or so. That's all I need to get the pipe started."

       "And you think it will start?"

       "By God, its 'got' to!" he declared. "With all that power on it, it can't help but come, even if it's cemented. The rig and the lines won't give, so the pipe has to!"

       Jiggs scratched his head, remarked that for at least once in his life Shorty seemed to be making sense. I wasn't so sure, but as they waited, silently, looking at me, I felt compelled to go along with the stunt.

       "All right," I said. "I think I'm making a hell of a mistake but—all right."

       We drew the fire from the boiler, swabbed the flues and cleaned the firebox of its last speck of ashes. The next morning, while Jiggs and Shorty made a final check of the rigging, I retired.

       The pressure needle moved steadily toward the pop-off point. It swung past it with a sinister lurch, and on around to the zero pin. I wanted to run at this point; never in my life have I wanted to do anything so badly. But the box had to be well-stoked first and the ash was banking up so high that there was little room for the necessary wood.