by Roman McClay
Then we’d cook in huge open pots, on open flames and they’d churn out etouffe and gumbo for us as we smiled in truncated ways, so the swollen and fissured lips wouldn’t rip any further that day.
The outlaw ethos was de rigueur ; it was men handling shit themselves. This is where men live and work out beyond the State. We didn’t call out for pizza, nor for the cops, we handled anything and everything ourselves. We welded our own broken metal, we changed out our own fluids and pistons on the diesels, we cooked our own meals and settled all family business with harsh words and harsher hands when the words didn’t work. We sewed up our own wounds with sutures we had learned to thread and tie ourselves .
This was how work was accomplished; it was feature not a bug.
And anyone that wanted to eat gumbo or finish a well-bore, that man knew the violence done to produce both confections; he knew the recipe for all. A man in the oil field would no more object to these conditions that a diner in the city would rebuke the knife or the spoon.
I thought of the 5,000 pound Monels , huge non-magnetic drill pipe, and how one piece had come crashing down on us from above like God’s judgment one day as we moved from rig-floor to mudtank. There was a crescent shaped dip in the railing around my mudtank that had absorbed the fall of this kind of pipe one other time and the railing -6g steel, square tubing- had in fact saved my life as I was on the bottom catwalk as the Monel fell from above. I had personally stick-welded that section of railing a few days earlier, when it needed repair. That was likely the most important weld of my life.
My hand would later seem to always find that dip of sine-curve as I made my rounds around the tank. Not unlike the way your tongue will find gaps where a tooth used to be. Mapping the world, updating it, finding clues and writing them down so each day ain’t a goddamn surprise.
I can still conjure up the feeling of Mil-Bar sacks, 100lbs each, carried on my shoulder up these cruel firemen ladders -not stairs, ladders- over and over from endless pallets of 50 bags each; these brown bags of a clay-like material were purely introduced to the tank’s 100 barrels -that’s 4,200 gallons- of non-potable water as avoirdupois . As weight.
The whole point of that Mil-Bar was to make water heavy. You think a man doesn’t resent it a bit as he carries 100-pound bags 200 times a day just to make water heavy? I often wondered -at the time- about the necessity of such work.
Giving weight to drilling fluid was increasingly required to push the cuttings up from the burrowing drill head as it jammed its oblique angles further down and into the Piceance of Colorado’s western slope.
It was a seemingly meaningless, and tedious, and punitive task that was as weighted down with purpose as I was with the sacks on my traps, and my inability at first to comprehend this was irrelevant to its ultimate meaning. The job was giving me meaning before I was smart enough to name it. But, soon enough the words would come. Actions first, then feelings; then words.
I learned about compression properties of water versus amalgamated fluids, I learned fluid density, in a manner no classroom could convey when that drilling fluid literally pushed me up a meter off the mud-screens and into the mud-sprayed air when we unexpectedly hit hydrocarbons at a mere 5,000 feet down in the formation.
The drill fluid is pumped through a closed-circuit from the bottom of the 4,200-gallon mudtank, down hole, back up from the bottom of the bored-out hole, maybe four or five thousand feet down, then up through the annulus that surrounds the hole and the drill and into the top of the mud tank over vibrating screen used to clean the fluid of all the shit that you just dug out of the goddamn ground.
It was fast, and voluminous, and the earth’s heat was in that return mud, it would reach over 100 degrees in temperature and it came back with a vengeance and speed .
I had just climbed down from the crow’s nest after locking in another 3,000 pound joint in the kelly for the driller and was now standing in front of and scraping those screens with a square shovel watching thousands of gallons of chunky fluid flood on top of the 6-parallel screens; it was a total of 36-feet long, the tank was the size and shape of a small -maybe female- Sperm Whale.
At any rate, I am making sure these cuttings are flowing off the edge into the reserve pit and clean drill fluid is returning to the tank when I notice bubbles in the soup. Now, I’d never seen bubbles in drilling fluid before, so I had to think about what that might mean.
As my mind deliberated over what it meant I heard the thumping of cavitation in one or more of the huge 24” in-line pumps below me that sounded like Satan banging on the mantle of earth that God, in a fit of pique, had sealed over him all those millennia ago. It was loud, and mean, and it did not sound like something that would just go away on its own. The sound had intent according to my auditory cortex and it had malice according to my lower layers down.
I turned 180 degrees to the rear -unlinked to the location of the sound- I turned out of ontological fear for my soul in that moment. This atheist had a moment of doubt in my doubt, in my denials of that which was beyond the rational and sane. I spun around to meet some imp or demon I knew -I just knew- was coming up out of that goddamn hole we were drilling. We were unleashing forces we knew nothing about , I said it and I knew it in my soul.
What my soul knew my ears had not yet heard; it was more than that pump cavitation that was banging beneath me now. The entire 100-foot tall and 100-ton sprawl of our drill-rig was vibrating and like a tuning fork conducting that diabolical rapping at the earth’s cellar door; and it was doing this as the string section of this black aria -the 1,700 horsepower diesel engines- were screaming at 3,000 rpms. It was now a roar; a convergence of sound waves of ontological wrath.
You don’t know fear until the earth itself is pissed off at you; you don’t know -not until then- what our ancestors felt every day as everything East of Eden tried to kill them for the last one billion years.
Shit, I believed in God then, not in my neo-cortex; but in my balls.
And I hadn’t even yet noticed that the gas-imbued fluid -for that is what those bubbles meant- that gas-imbued fluid was charging and belching out of the 10” return valve in bursts of unlit -but highly combustible- liquid now.
I just stared at the rig for a few moments -for how long I have no recall- but I stared and let that noise and swaying of the derrick hypnotize me for elongated seconds, vertical seconds that the monks call Shangwu and Xiawu : the past above you, and the future below.
The volatile drilling fluid was atomizing and heating up behind me and bursting out of the valve. The gas was now backing up into the mud-tank itself so that a nimbus of vapor and a cataract of rain comprised of that fluid had begun to cover -like its own weather system- the upper deck and myself as I stood there with my eyes finally un-holstered from that drill rig; my eyes now swinging around wildly searching for movement like the predatory eyes of the wolf .
I swiveled my head and finally saw those roustabouts and floor hands fleeing their stations across the pad toward the Tool-Pusher’s shack. These, my shipmates, had left the drill running and abandoned their posts.
Anger is a gift. Anyone who says otherwise is an unappreciative, spoiled brat. Nature gave us anger and hatred as our port-side and starboard long-guns when caught between the nihilism of unfettered pirates and the tyranny of one of Her Majesty’s Ship-of-the-Line.
The only people who turn their noses up to the need for such weapons are those who unthinkingly take delivery of their sundries and fuels and ambergris from our battered ships whilst they are in harbor and they themselves never leave the safety of shore. The bourgeoisie can be polite, they have no need of violence as they have other men -rough men, as Orwell put it- do violence for them.
I needed those floor-hands and that goddamn driller to shut off that drill before I could cut power to my circulation pumps or their own drilling pumps would lock all that NatGas in between the well-head and my mud tanks; and the dry sucking would cause the gas to expand and heat up even more. If I uni
laterally shut off my own pumps I’d be building a 4,200-gallon bomb beneath me, and that line between me and the drill be the fuse. D espite my eschatological impulses, I said, no, fuck no , to that. I was in search of a less dangerous solution, I’d blow it all to hell as a last resort, I said.
I couldn’t tell you -then or now- the flash point of natural gas, but I knew enough not to heat it up one degree more than ambient temperature required.
And there they ran leaving that drill head and their pumps and those huge angry diesels running at full fucking bore while my thousands of gallons of drill fluid & gas were erupting in as-of-yet incombustible boils and Perseid meteors and heavy and greasy rain. I was as mad as a hornet and I hadn’t even as-of-yet seen how covered I now was in a skimcoat of brown and flammable liquid.
I spun like a mud-wasp as my anger turned to triage and I threw scrap pieces of plywood onto the shaker-screen and began loading bags of Mil-Bar on top of it to stop these stochastic eruptions of fluid that were emitting from the top of the tank every few -irregular- seconds.
I’m sure you’ve seen volcanic eruptions, that is the model you should use for this kind of natural phenomenon. Huge, seemingly idiopathic bursts of dangerous fluid with a viscosity that made it heavy and pushy and reminded me of the Heavy Hands of my Sifu , my Argentine, Kun Tao teacher, and master of Indonesian-silat de-Thouars .
The discharges were well over 3-meters into the air now, and covering everything in this slick, heavy, flammable fluid and starting to break the screens and bend the thinner gauge steel around the frames and it was obviously getting worse, picking up more and more gas; a Deus Ex-Machina from below.
Even four bags -so 400 pounds- into my stop-gap measure strategy, the weighted plywood still rode up on top of these geysers every time it breached as if the board and bags were merely a thin sheet of paper with the words, heavy bags , written upon it in post-nuclear ink .
It heaved and pitched and rolled under that volatile mix and now looked like a weapon in the hands of the mud-wraith itself; a mace chain and I was right there like Saint Michael watching it flail.
And I don’t even know what I cared about at this point other than to prove to those AWOL floor-hands that their cowardice wouldn’t infect me at all.
I jumped on top of that board and those bags to add my 214 additional-pounds-of-doom on top of that unthinking, unfeeling, Cetacean blow-hole; but the tank blew -spouted- again and the whole horizontal axis lifted me and my board and my bags a meter up in the air as if I had merely added my notarized signature to the unenforceable plywood document from before.
My weight and all its hostility added no resistance to the Will-to-Power of these turbid plumes from the Earth.
I rode that fluid breaching the surface of the tank like I was Fedallah tied to its flank; I rode it until I slipped off and slid into the shaker one-over and broke through the screen as it shook me like some vibrating motel bed. And after I saw the futility of trying to tame the chimera of Industry & Nature I let the mud puke and spit and convulse and deplete the tank’s reserves and I just walked down to the rig platform as it swayed and pitched like a ship going down under the Kraken itself. I hit the kill switch with my forearm and dropped down onto one penitent knee.
III. 2036 e.v.
“One of the phenomena that always vexed me,” he pulled on his beard shaping it into a black point, “was that revenge was never satisfied -never satisfying- unless the motherfucker I was dispatching knew he was beaten.
“And frankly, murder has a very short half-life: they know you beat them for a few seconds maybe once the knife is in them or the gun pulled; but they probably think they’ll survive right up until the point that they black out. So, they of course never wake up, but they don’t know that. They really don’t know you’ve beat them. This attenuates the effectiveness for me anyway.”
He sat down on the fallen tree, a Pinon pine about two feet in diameter and 40-feet long that lay sideways along the ridge to his property and overlooked a massive verdant valley below. He pulled a cigar case from his jacket pocket and removed a cigarillo from it and bit its end off. He dry-spit the leaf wrapper from his mouth and then lit it.
“Of course, Tertullian said that the -that one of the- pleasures of heaven was looking over the edge,” he stuck his large right arm out and pointed south over that valley they looked out over, “and witnessing the writhing, the tortures of the damned in Hell.”
He dipped his head a bit to the side as a way to denote ambivalence or lack of satisfaction in this conceit. He drew smoke through the cigarillo and they sat in silence. The common corvids that nested in the Junipers and Aspen around them; three, then four, flew by silently, their blackness offering a brilliancy all its own against the ambergris of the winter sky.
“I’m what Pascal called, the man so made that he cannot believe ,” he said and let the silence return, as the crows dropped down in the valley by tucking one wing in and letting the buoyant thermal veins of air push the remaining wing up, effecting a barrel roll down 500-feet until the blackbird unfurled that tucked wing and stabilized again.
“You see that?” he pointed at the falling birds with the brown cigar in between his index and middle finger, the tattoo on his right hand, black and cogged, hung out in the air along with his directional thrust, “they barrel roll, just like when we skydive and need to get off our backs; pull one arm in and let the air push us back over.”
Everyone nodded and Jack Two smiled as they looked in the direction of his outstretched hand and fingers; Jack Four looked instead at the man. Then two of his Jacks, began their patrol, walking away from him, and thus pushed the perimeter out another 20 meters to the west and east. The third Jack began to orbit the compound of shipping containers converted into living quarters. His main Jack, Jack One, stood -stayed- three meters to his leeboard side.
“I used to have a dim view of ravens; took Shakespeare at his word when he placed them beneath the Eagle,” he withdrew the arm, stuck the tobacco in between his brilliant white teeth -the only thing on him not scarred or fissured or weathered or limping- and talked whilst holding it there with his dentine; rifling through his pockets with both hands in search of a small bottle of prescription narcotics.
“What’s next, the crows to peck the eagles ?” his lieutenant, Jack One, quoted the salient line from Coriolanus .
“Yeah,” he turned back from the edge and nodded approvingly at the reference and removed the cigar long enough to throw a 10mg hydrocodone into his maw.
“But those goddamn corvids are smart, man,” Blax said. “Much smarter that the bard knew or that we even knew until pretty recently. They do these 3-stage tasks to retrieve food that require understanding how each independent task will lead to the next; it’s quite something; most animals can’t do that; most can only use a tool in one-step; to you know, like use a stick to push a lever that opens a door to a favorite food.”
“Most humans can only figure out one-step problems,” Jack One said without a grin.
“It’s really fascinating to see them figure out each totally independent step as if the whole, goddamn, gestalt phenomenon is obvious to them the whole time,” Blax looked out over the valley, and saw nothing man-made; he smelled the smoke from his cigar and the taste of the analgesics on his throat and the warmth of comradery from his men as they flanked him and covered his six. He drew breath again through the cigar and let the flavor coat his tongue and the smoke ball up in his mouth; the nicotine absorbing alongside the painkiller past the blood-brain barrier.
One of the recon drones flew by them next, and Blax switched his own POV to its camera-view and got a bird’s eye from above and just aft of them; he then switched back to his own point of view. He didn’t like to stay in that drone -one-window- mode too long; it disoriented him lately. He wondered if it was something inside his biological brain, or his Post Genetic Coder, or the gyroscope of the drone. He sent a flash to X2 -the home’s mainframe- to check out the drone’s metrics lat
er to see if this could be repaired.
His melancholia was innate , he believed that. He had tracked it with his maturation; his morphology. My God how silly and joyful and fun, he was for years, he remembered; in high school he was literally voted, class clown . Nothing could be more ironic now than that rubric festooned upon him by his peers at 17-years-of-age. His humor had remained , he assured himself, but, like everything about him it had become, well, it had taken the ride with him into these new regions, these tunnels of human feeling and thought; and thus, it darkened in hue.
But , he had to admit, he did place less emphasis on being funny now ; and it occurred to him why: he had used humor as a way to ingratiate himself with others, he had been funny to be popular; which he had been. He had been popular at every school he had attended from first through 12th grade; from Wethersfield , England to Mojave , California to Ramstein , Germany DoD schools; from San Antonio, Texas to Mason, Ohio. He was avant garde , he was a little odd. He was good looking, and girls flocked to him, but he had something there the whole time that scared them. And yes, he was funny, he admitted and shook his head, knowing that nobody thought that now.
He thought this not as a way to bolster himself or brag; he was doing a forensic analysis on himself that would seem odd to any outsider, any clinician, any criminal investigator; as they would arrogate that right to dissect such a man and his motives to themselves. A man like him -an outlaw, a criminal- was not supposed to be introspective. He was not supposed to feel the world at all.
He was not picked on, or bullied, or made fun of, or estranged from girls or shunned by the cool kids; he was not awkward or shy; well, not that much. He was adored by every strata; he moved seamlessly from the Hessians and Goths, the girls and the jocks and the smart kids too; shit, he recalled, he was in the AP classes of course, as bright as he was. He got stoned with the stoners; he sold weed from his locker, he was a brigand but he was more-or-less kind. He lacked the malice of many of the drop-outs, the angry and violent kids who did fit the profile of those who you knew would grow up to be felons and wife-beaters and drug addicts.