Roughneck - An Autobiography Part 7

"How," I said, "could I help it?"

"But you don't like Trixie, do you? Think you're too good to take favors off'n me an' Trixie?"

"Now, look," I said, "let's get this straight, once and for all. Trixie doesn't owe me anything, and even if she did I wouldn't-"

"S'all right, Tommy. No need to apologize. If you think you're too G.o.dd.a.m.ned good to lay my girl-'hic!-'it's perf.e.c.kly all-'hic!"'

He weaved again, and his meaty right hand came out. Obviously, or so I thought, he intended to give me a friendly pat on the shoulder, and for Trixie's sake I decided to endure it.

"-s'all right. Understand perf.e.c.kly. Think you're too d.a.m.ned good for Trixie, why-'hic!"' The hand wobbled, suddenly, and swung sideways. It landed on my ear with an agonizing 'cr-aack!'

The blow almost knocked me from my chair. Righting myself, I started to make a grab for him, but he was beaming at me waterily, too drunk-apparently-to realize what he had done. Moreover, Trixie had suddenly returned to our table, frowning at me, smiling tenderly at him.

"Tommy hurt you, Owl? Did he? What'd you say to him, Tommy?"

"Naah." He waved her away grinning. "Tommy an' me are buddies, ain't we, Tommy? Just havin' a friendly little conversation. Bring us some more whiz an' leave us alone."

"That's right, Trixie," I said. "Bring us some drinks and leave us alone. Owl and I are getting along fine."

Trixie gave me a doubtful look, something between an apologetic smile and a frown. But she brought more of the white lightning and choc, and left us alone again. As usual, we downed the drinks at a gulp.

It was simply too much too fast, particularly in view of the fact that I had eaten almost nothing all day. A thunderbolt seemed to race up my spine and explode in my skull, and for a split second I lost consciousness. When I came to, Owl had returned to his grievance.

So I thought I was too good for him and Trixie? Thought they were some kind of white trash, maybe? Well, that was all right. If that's the way I wanted to feel, why- His heavy hand wobbled and swung again. Again it cracked painfully against my ear.

Trixie started for us at once, of course. But I smiled at Owl amiably and he grinned at me woozily, still the innocent unaware, so Trixie went back to her own table.

Someone brought us more whiskey. Rather slowly now, studying each other covertly, Owl and I took it down. I wasn't quite sure yet about his condition and intentions. I was reasonably confident that he knew what he was doing, that he was doing it deliberately and with malice aforethought. Believing that I would do anything to keep the peace for Trixie's sake, he intended to sit here and gradually slap me silly.

That was his scheme, I thought. But I was not absolutely positive of it, and I had to be positive before starting a riot in a place like this. Also, I needed just a little more to drink to put me in the proper fettle.

The jelly gla.s.ses were refilled. Emptied. Surrept.i.tiously, I lowered mine below the table edge and thence into my pocket. Owl licked his lips cautiously and picked up his favorite conversation piece. His hand began its preliminary wobbling.

It darted, swung and landed. Smack on my ear for the third time.

By now we had become the cynosure of all eyes, to coin a phrase, one pair of which belonged to the proprietor. So while Trixie, confident that all was well between us, stayed where she was, we received a visit from the bouncer.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on here?" he demanded. "You guys want to fight, get the h.e.l.l out in the alley."

"Fight?" I grinned bewilderedly. "Alley? Do you want to go out in the alley, Owl?"

"Not me," said Owl firmly, and in extremely clear accents. Then, remembering his pose: "We're ol' buddies, mister. Whash all this stuff 'bout fightin'?"

The bouncer scowled, shrugged and walked away. I pushed back my chair.

"'Scuse me a minute, ol' buddy," I said. "Got to go to the john."

"S-sure." He bobbed his head drunkenly. "I'll jusht-hey, where's your gla.s.s?"

"The girl must have taken it away," I said. "You order up another while I'm gone."

I walked back to the men's room. Stepping up on the filthy sink, I pushed up the narrow window to the alley and unlatched the screen. I stepped back down again, removed one of my socks and slid the jelly gla.s.s inside. I knotted the open end, dropped it into my pocket and returned to the table.

Apparently Owl had got the notion that I had not intended to return, and now seeing me meekly before him again-a sitting duck as he saw it-he could scarcely conceal his malicious pleasure. It was a situation made to order for pimps, being able to beat h.e.l.l out of someone who could not strike back. Tossing his drink down, he started working up to the fourth blow almost before I had finished mine.

I slipped the sock out of my pocket and waited.

His hand waggled and found its target. I swung the sock.

He saw it coming and tried to fling himself sideways. It caught him on the side of his head, and the blow combined with his lurch sent him sprawling and stumbling across the room.

He landed on top of a table occupied by four oil field workers and their ladies. But this was not, I am happy to say, the end of his travels. Showered with whiskey, beer and splintered gla.s.s, the outraged group laid hands on him, men and women together. They hoisted him up and hurled him, even as children might hurl a doll. And Owl went sailing through the air, screaming until he crashed against the far wall.

It was a wonderful brawl, with Owl the center of attraction, but I got to see very little of it. The bouncer and the proprietor were heading toward me. So was Trixie, a beer pitcher swinging in each hand as she ploughed through the growing riot and wreckage. I fled into the toilet, and out the window.

I trotted down the alley, wondering if it might not be an excellent idea to leave town for a while. By the time I reached my rooming house, I had come to a decision.

I talked with Jiggs and Shorty, and we all conferred with our landlord. He generously allowed us to make up blanket rolls from our bedding, and also lent us five dollars. Early the next morning we caught a freight south.

15.

Jiggs hugged the top joint of casing and braced his feet against the derrick floor. He rocked his body to and fro, then stepped back frowning.

"Well?" said Shorty nervously. "What's the matter? It's just like I told you, ain't it?"

Jiggs shook his head ambiguously. "You try it, Jim. See what you think."

I hugged the pipe-it was twenty-four inches in diameter here at the well's top-and tried to rock it. I stepped back, avoiding my friends' eyes.

"Well, how about it?" Shorty blurted out. "G.o.ddammit, what's wrong with you guys? You-you ain't going to tell me that pipe's cemented?"

"Well," Jiggs shrugged, "maybe it ain't 'cement', but-"

"'Course it ain't! What sense'd there be putting cement in a duster?"

"-but it'll sure as h.e.l.l do until cement comes along. I don't think-I'm afraid we ain't ever gonna..." He broke off, and there was a heavy silence for a moment. "Oh, Christ," he said at last. "What the h.e.l.l, anyway?"

Shorty looked at us, and we both looked away. He said, almost pleadingly, "Now, look, you guys. It's just mudded up-silted down. What d'you expect after all these years?"

"Sure," Jiggs sighed. "Bound to be something like that. Be d.a.m.ned funny if it did rock free."

"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 d.a.m.ned 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 embarra.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 c.o.c.kles 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 gla.s.s (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 b.u.t.t 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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.