What They Wanted (28 page)

A hearty laugh from Cook. “Want to skin it for supper, Susie—or Sylvie, is it—Sylvie?”

Looking sheepish, I went outside, sinking onto the step, watching Chris up on the flatbed dragging about grocery bags. The rumbling, whinnying sounds of the rig overshadowed the quiet of the evening air. A white light suddenly flared over the rig floor and up the leg of the derrick, giving it a clinical, disorienting look. The stench of diesel tasted on my tongue and I closed my eyes, thinking despairingly of the soft green grass of la la land, as Chris disparagingly called it, and the late-evening quietude of guitars and song on the riverbank.

Ben came out on the step behind me, bear cap in his hand, gently stroking its fur. He held it before me as though in offering, but seeing my brooding look he tossed it inside the truck instead.

“Not impressed, huh—with the camp,” he said. “That’s fine. Shoot you if you were.”

“Smaller than I thought.”

“Minimal crew. Told you, rough camp. But hey,” he dropped down onto the step, “what happened back there—with Trapp and Push—don’t worry about that. They’re always at it. It’ll blow over—give it a day or two.”

“Trapp’s gonna be weird, seeing me here.”

“Trapp’s weird with everybody. Come on, grab some stuff.”

“Told you not to come,” said Chris. He hopped onto the ground, hauling a crate of milk off the truck. “Having second thoughts, aren’t you? Told you not to come. Here, carry in some grub, earn your pay.”

“Oh, shut up, Chrissy.”

“Don’t freakin’ call me Chrissy.”

“Swear like a man,” I chided, and got off the step, ignoring the crate of milk he was pushing at me. Dragging my knapsack and sleeping bag off the flatbed, I headed back inside the cookhouse.

“I start in the morning,” I said to Cook, who was dumping stuff directly from the bags into the deep freeze. Under her dubious look I dragged my gear to the room off from the kitchen sink.

It was little more than a rustic-smelling closet, consisting of a narrow bunk and a small, bare window. After checking beneath the thin mattress for anything that crawled, I unrolled my sleeping bag and sat down on it, drawing my knees up to my chin and staring morosely out the window. The skinned trunk of what was once a jack pine jutted up outside, a few limbs near the top sagging towards the forest. Ben’s and Chris’s voices sounded loudly through the room door, their words audible despite the continued opening and shutting of the fridge and cupboard doors, squeaking floors, and Cook’s hacking cough.

“The mud, the mud,” Chris kept on, “tell me about the mud part.”

“Jeezes, he’s gonna drive me nuts.”

“I just wanna understand.”

“You’ll understand, give it a few days, Pabs, it’ll all start coming to you, go check on your sister.”

“She’s pissed at herself for coming. Is it
mud
-mud, like outdoor mud?”

“Jeezes, it’s how we checks for pressure—with mud. Treated mud. We pump mud down the pipe, we pack it down like cement. If she starts coming back up the pipe, something’s driving it back up. What’s driving it back up—that’s your question—something’s pressuring that mud back up your pipe—everything on the rig is about pressure. Maybe it’s a nothing pressure, maybe it’s something big—a gas bubble from a crack in the formation that the seismic’s not showing. In which case you hope the fuck the mud blocks it—gives you time to cut off the pipe, keep that bubble from bursting up through and blowing your balls to smithereens.

“And that, buddy, is a major part of Trapp’s job, of Push’s job, the engineer’s, the geologist, the mud-man, every fuckin’ man—to always be looking, be reading them gauges, see what your mud’s doing. If she’s not flowing, if the mud’s coming back up your pipe, something’s pushing it back up. Shut her down. First thing you do is shut her down. Shut the whole fuckin’ thing down till you finds out what’s pushing that mud back up. Could be nothing, could be something. Could be U-tubing, meaning a little bit of an imbalance thing happening that’ll right itself. Or it could be gas, pressure from an unknown gas pocket—”

“U-tubing? What’s U-tubing?” asked Chris.

“Way to go, bud, that’s a good question, that’s a real smart question, that’s a natural question because I never told you something integral about the whole mud thing, and you caught it—you never caught it, but you caught that you were missing something and you never bothered going on, letting it go, you questioned it. That’s a good hand, that makes for a good rig hand, you’re gonna be around for a long time, don’t tell your sister—”

“So, what’s U-tubing?”

“U-tubing is this. Imagine you got a big fucking straw, a McDonald’s milkshake straw, and you puts it down the neck of your beer bottle—like this—now see, your straw is your pipe and we’re drilling it down the hole—the neck of your beer bottle—now see here, all that space around your straw? Your straw don’t completely fill the hole, do it—well, that space around your straw is called your annulus, and that’s where your mud comes back up. The mud goes down your pipe, and back up your annulus—”

“Why?”

“Never mind your
whys
, I’ll answer all your
whys
—just take your time and listen and you’ll have all your
whys
—we pump mud down the straw, it filters out down at the bottom end— flows through your drill bit, got it? The mud flows down your straw, out through the drill bit, cools off your drill—gets pretty hot grinding through rock—and then as it’s cooling off your drill bit, it’s picking up all the rock and debris and shit that comes from your drilling, and then it floats it all back up your annulus to ground level. And then we drains it off into the shakers, shakes the shit out of it—your rock and stuff—and we circulates it right back down the hole again. Big cycle. And as long as everything is flowing smoothly down the hole and back up the hole, she’s going fine. It’s when the mud is not flowing fine—when she’s backing up the straw—that you got to shut her down, figure out what the fuck’s going on, what’s pushing your mud back up your straw. And when you gets her figured, you starts her back up and gets on with your business. How’s that, clear as mud?”

“So, how do you know when it’s nothing?”

“Most times you don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on thousands of feet below ground. You make educated guesses. That’s why experience pays in this game. Roughnecks are paid to put the pipe down the hole. Push and Frederick are paid to keep it down. One bad-assed pocket of gas can send them pipes shooting through the air like spaghetti. And I already told you—foremost thing on a rig is pressure. Pressure of the mud flowing down the pipe, and the pressure of the formation pushing back up. If one pressure overcomes the other, you might have a kick. You think quick, you act quick. If something odd’s happening, check it out, else risk losing your balls, your rig, your whole fuckin’ crew.”

“And a kick is—”

“A kick is when you got an almighty blast coming back up your straw—either we hit a gas pocket, or whatever—if we don’t get her in time—see the pressure on our gauges—up she comes, and she’s as unforgiving as the sea when she gets riled up. Probably the most important job on the rig is the driller, because he’s the one staring at his gauges, always staring at his gauges to make sure they’re balanced, always balanced.”

“And Trapp’s the driller.”

“Trapp’s the driller. Go check your sister, ask her if she’d like a drink.”

“You all right in there, Sis?” Chris hammered my door, sending pain shooting through my head. Feeling more contrary than Mother on a dirty day, I slumped further into the sleeping bag, wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

ALL BECAME QUIET
in the kitchen after a spell, leaving just the muted roar of the rig for company. Believing the boys had turned in for the night, I peeled off my clothes and burrowed beneath my pillow. Sometime later I awakened to Chris and Ben clinking glasses on the table and arguing heatedly over a game of cribbage. I thought to get up but my limbs refused to move—jet lag, I thought, that’s what’s making me so tired and cranky, jet lag. I yawned and drifted betwixt sleep and awakenings. Someone, from somewhere outside the cookhouse, started strumming the sweetest of sounds from the heart of a guitar.

Chris poked his head inside my room once, whispering my name. I murmured something about joining them, and he went back to Ben and his cards, leaving the door ajar, their voices filtering through more clearly—Chris with his incessant questions about the workings of a rig, Ben’s answers becoming more elaborate with each shuffling of cards and clink of whisky glasses.

“… Keep your eyes open, Pabs, and swivelling in your head. That, bud, is your safety training course, you’ll get no more than that. So repeat what I just said every two seconds—got that, every two seconds—and ask questions, ask whatever question you want; the more you know, the more you watches out for. Problem with them roughnecks walking about town with missing fingers and lame legs is they didn’t swivel their eyes, didn’t ask questions. Most rig hands are just going along. They’re mostly new and they’re just going along. Only a few people on a rig really knows what’s going on around them, and they don’t really know—nobody
really
knows what’s going on down the hole; you can only guess, you can only figure, you can only surmise.

“Your engineer, he’s got to have academics. Tool push don’t need academics, just a backload of experience working the rig. As with your driller—experience is what makes a good driller, and intuition. That doesn’t come in books. And there’s your geologist—he needs his academics. And then there’s me and you, buddy, and a couple of others. Rig pigs. And rig pigs don’t require academe or experience to be hired. The floor becomes our teacher. When you’re working the floor you learns the floor—how to run pipe in or out of the hole, how to change motor parts, what to paint, what to grease, do this, do that, whatever the hell comes along.

“And after a few years you actually start learning some things about what’s happening down the hole. You see things happen and after a while you start putting things together. You keep adding bits of knowledge every day and you start getting more than lumps in your head, you start to actually get some knowing about the way things work, you start adding two plus two, you start keeping the screaming jimmies from addling your brain—listen to them over there, screaming for days, one long jeezes scream …”

I tried not to listen to the jimmies screaming across the way as I lay there, focusing on Ben’s and Chris’s voices instead. Then the guitar found its way back in with another soft melody and I fell quietly into the dark hole of night.

NINE

I
AWAKENED
with a surge of panic and no notion of where I was. Something clattered against my window and I scrambled out of my sleeping bag with a cry.

“Hey, Sis. Wakey, wakey.”

I near collapsed, my sense of relief as sharply felt as the fear had been. Crossing the room, I slid open the window. “Fool!” I hissed as Chris waved up at me. His face looked ghastly in the greyish, predawn light, but his shapeless, brand-new coveralls looked brighter than a chimney fire at night. “Fool!” I muttered again as he leaped back, doing a clumsy pirouette in his new steel-toed boots.

Creeping through the kitchen so’s not to wake Cook, I unlocked the door to a cool rush of air. The treeline was black as smut against the brightening sky, the rig a ghoulish yellow. I quickly shut the door behind Chris, reducing the screaming jimmies to a distant whine. I looked at him easing himself into a chair now, a twist of orange in the cup of night.

“Got any tea?” he whispered, looking cautiously at Cook’s door. “And bread, got any bread?”

I found the light switch and sat beside him. “Look, Chrissy—Chris—I know I done this,” I began, speaking lowly. “But I can’t help it, I don’t like it here—no, listen to me,” I pleaded as he started to protest, and I went into what I thought was a well laid-out argument about the dirtiness of the rig, the dangers, the racket, the bad tempers, the lousy beds.

“Tea, tea,” Chris kept cutting in, “gimme a cup of tea.”

I carried on some more about Cook, her coughing, her smoking, the crampy kitchen space.