The character William Zachary Harper first appeared in the book Bermuda Shorts by James J. Patterson.
ROUGHNECKS
James J. Patterson
and
Quinn O’Connell, Jr.
Alan Squire Publishing
Bethesda, Maryland
Roughnecks is published by Alan Squire Publishing, an imprint of the Santa Fe Writers Project.
Copyright © 2014 James J. Patterson.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, James J.
Roughnecks / James J. Patterson and Quinn O’Connell, Jr. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-9848329-6-5 (paperback)
1. Oil industry workers—Fiction. 2. Self-realization—Fiction. 3. Oil well drilling—Fiction. I. O’Connell, Jr., Quinn. II. Title.
PS3616.A8773
[R68 2014]
813’.6—dc23
2014007779
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher (www.AlanSquirePublishing.com).
ISBN: 978-0-9914087-0-2
Cover design by Randy Stanard, Dewitt Designs, www.dewittdesigns.com.
Illustrations by Jack Brougham.
Copy editing by Nita Congress.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Edition
Ordo Vagorum
The people of the earth, the family of man,
wanted to put up something proud to look at,
a tower from the flat land of earth,
on up through the ceiling into the top of the sky.
— Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes
When a man wants to lose himself, he loses himself,
that’s all there is to it…
— Clare Morgan, A Book for All and None
You get to know men, not by looking at them, but by having been one of them.
— Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
Contents
The Williston Basin 1979
Prelude
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
One Year Later
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
The Williston Basin
1979
Prelude
IT WAS NIGHT TOWER ON Bomac 34, The Widowmaker. Rain crashed down through the black Montana sky. It crashed down through the blazing lights on the tower in dizzying waves that hammered the floor of the rig and made that iron sing out in a monotonous harmonic blast. Added to the constant high-pitched scream of the big twin diesel engines, it became an earsplitting roar. And the rain crashed down on the men who were trippin’ ’er out.
In spite of the rain, that driller had the engines in high-high and like human cogs in a machine, the boys were just gettin’ it! He eased up on the brake handle and the next joint leapt up from the center of the floor. After thirty feet of pipe had gone straight up, there passed another joint and another thirty feet. Then came another. The fourth joint surfaced and glided to a stop just outside the mouth of the hole. Instantly the worm, the motorman, and the chainhand were there with the slips and had them in place a bare fraction of a second after the pipe had come to a halt. They knew their jobs and they knew how to ration the tremendous energies required to make it through the night. And they were looking hard into seven more hours before the tower was over.
The worm and the chainhand grabbed their tongs and swung them into place. The chainhand’s back was to the driller as he faced the worm with the pipe standing between them, chain tongs taking the bottom male, worm tongs taking the top female joint, and that chainhand yelled into the booming night, “Take a bite!” as the two men slammed their monstrous tongs against hard iron making them latch and grip firm. They owed it to themselves not to miss a trick so each checked the other’s latch facing him. No sooner than that the driller hit the cathead, sucking in the worm tong’s chain, and suddenly, four thousand pounds of torque broke the joint like the stubborn lid on a jar of peanut butter. The chainhand removed the tongs from the bottom joint, leaving the top ones on to steady the pipe. The driller kicked in the rotary table, turning the joint in the hole to the left, and the two sections separated. Swiftly, the chainhand removed the worm tongs as the driller eased up on the brake handle raising that pipe a mere three inches, and it was free, dangling in the derrick, fearsome and unpredictable, ninety feet tall, weighing fifteen hundred pounds. The chainhand then pushed the awesome stand away from his body, out over the rotary table where the motorman’s cautious arm could corral it, and in those precious seconds when he would have leverage, manhandle it further toward its appropriate resting place. The driller slowly let it down as the motorman guided it, sliding down his shoulder and thigh, cradling it into position, until the clang on the derrick floor signaled it had hit home.
Up in the crow’s nest, ninety feet above the floor of the rig, one hundred and fifty feet above the earth, unsheltered from the pounding fury of the wind and the rain, the derrickhand stood face to face with the giant elevators that still held the pipe in the driller’s control. When the pipe was set to rest on the floor, he looped his rope around the top of it, unlashed the elevators, and yanked the pipe into an upright position so that it nestled in the fingers at the top of the rack where pipe stood in columns ten and eleven strong. The elevators then made their swift descent and were received by the chainhand’s upreaching arms. He pulled the backside toward him to prevent it from banging down on the top of the joint and steadied it so the motorman could grab it by the horns and guide it down past the pinhead. The chainhand pushed and the motorman pulled up and together they scissored it shut with a crash and a latch. They pulled away the slips and up shot another ninety feet of pipe.
This process was repeated again, and again, and again, as the night wore on and the rain came down. Another joint was broken. Mud, sediment, and chemicals spewed from the break into the motorman’s face and he cursed violently. He stood back from the rotary table and coughed and spat and wiped his eyes. In a frozen moment, that driller, chainhand, and worm held their positions, waiting for the motorman to recover and regain his place. He threw a fierce malignant stare up through the lights on the tower, through a million silver needles raging. His flesh crawled under oozing muddy rags. A chill rippled through him, draining his energy like a shorted-out fuse drains a powerful battery, leaving him disgusted, pitiful, and sick with malice. Voices broke in, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” then washed away. He was standing there invisible and alone, and everywhere he looked he saw cold pitiless iron. It loomed above him. The rain stank of it. It showed in the stares of his coworkers, who regarded him, he was certain, as nothing more than a human appendage of this same iron beast, just as he regarded them.
Before time resumed, before he t
ook his first step, they knew. Their groans and curses and insults were just a distant nagging echo that he answered with his own vicious self-satisfied sneer. But his defiance was hollow. His final triumph reduced to a simple statement, a confession that only God and the universe could hear, and, luckily for him, neither cared. As he moved toward the stairs that led to the bottom doghouse, to an escape he told himself was liberation, he said, “Fuck this.”
WHEN THEY WERE OUT OF the hole and had ’er on bank, the driller waved the derrickhand down from the diving board and signaled the worm and that chainhand to follow him into the top doghouse. He walked slowly over to a bucket, fished out a rag, and wiped some of the rain and the sweat and the mud from his face. He then opened the knowledge box, found a pack of Marlboros, lit up, then offered them around. The worm, a big heavy kid, took one gladly. The driller studied the worm as the worm’s chubby fingers fumbled with the cigarette lighter. He had only been in the patch three weeks and probably wasn’t going to make it. Time would tell.
“Jon,” the driller said to his chainhand, “get downstairs and break out a new bit, a J-33. Dress ’er up and get ’er ready.” The chainhand had only been waiting to be told. He stepped out into the deluge calmly as though it were a warm spring day. “Fifer,” the driller’s fierce hazel eyes refocused on the worm, “clean out that junk sub and hose down the floor.” The worm looked sadly at his half-finished cigarette and tossed it away as he stepped outside. Then the driller stepped heavily toward the top doghouse door. He was going to find his motorman.
THE IRON DOOR TO THE bottom doghouse blew open as if shot by a cannon. The motorman came awake on the bench where he lay to see the driller stomping furiously toward him.
“What the hell’s the matter with you!” the driller shouted and kicked the motorman off the bench, landing him in a slimy sprawl across the floor.
“I decided to sack ’em up. Head ’em back to town with the boys after tower,” he said, pulling himself to his feet in an attempt to face the driller man to man. The driller would have none of it.
“Like hell you will!” he thundered, and the two men gripped each other and slammed into the lockers. “You’re not sleepin’ down here while the rest of us pull a round trip, you lazy shit! You sack ’em up and head ’em back to town now!” From location it was ten miles of dirt and another ten miles of gravel just to the main highway. The motorman had no car.
The young motorman struggled to free his fists, but the driller had the better of him and drove him hard into the lockers two more times. “Now you listen here, you son of a bitch. If you can’t get ’er, you can’t stay! You’re run offa this location, son. So pack up yer gear and get the fuck on down the road!”
As the driller relaxed his grip, the motorman took advantage and sent a fist toward his face, but the blow glanced harmlessly off his cheek, over his ear, and into thin air behind his head. At this, the driller responded with unexpected ferocity. He bashed his hard hat down into the young man’s face, slicing the soft soggy skin of his cheek, nose, and forehead while pinning his neck and shoulder to the wall. Faster still, he delivered six or seven lightning strikes to his tender solar plexus before grabbing him by the shoulders and heaving him bodily across the narrow room, where he landed in a crumpled heap on the floor, gasping for air and smearing blood.
The driller picked up his hard hat and waited a moment to see if there was any fight left in his motorman before issuing his final verdict. “You sack ’em up now! And you head ’em out now!”
THE FULMINATING ROAR OF A late summer storm and the black night still loomed over the Williston Basin like a defiant warrior’s shroud. But the sparks of the many Sioux council fires had long been extinguished. The buffalo wallows that held the rain could not be found. The white man’s iron horse that had thundered across the open palm of the Great Spirit had also faded and was gone. Another had taken its place. They were after the rich black blood of the sacred earth. Had just pulled fifty-eight hundred feet of pipe and were preparing to run ’er back in. The driller stepped back onto the floor and moved directly to his station. The worm, the derrickhand, and the chainhand looked at the old man with concern and then eyed each other, the mud on their faces unable to conceal the knowing looks that every roughneck understands. And the rain, and the night, and the tower continued.
I
Always be aware. Look out for danger at every turn. Don’t lean up against anything and don’t touch anything. Keep your ears tuned for strange noises and remember, it’s better to run than to wait around to see what’s happening.
Rickety outdoor steps had led Zachary Harper to his cousin O’Mally’s apartment atop a two-story wood frame building that was badly in need of a paint job. They listened to music, drank some whiskey, and talked about drilling for oil. On that dark last night in Grand Forks, North Dakota, O’Mally’s advice had seemed cryptic to Harper’s inexperienced mind, like some ancient creed for survival in the unknown, and yet Zachary Harper had left still grasping for the tools needed to prevent unexpected circumstances from finding him unready.
Look out!
HIS COUSIN’S VOICE BROUGHT ZACHARY Harper awake all at once. Immediately his stomach began to churn and boil as he realized where he was and why. His joints were stiff and sore. He had slept under his Jeep, hazarding the elements for the luxury of stretching his legs, and now found himself wedged between the sodden earth and the grimy underneath, and Jesus, it had rained.
Zachary Harper rolled slowly out from under his Jeep and stood up, squinting across the wide multicolored landscape of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Erosion had overtaken the deposition of this strange land between one and four million years ago. What the Indians had come to call mako sica had been translated in reverse by the French to mauvais terres, what people now called Badlands. He did a hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups, not only to get the blood flowing and free his muscles but to quell the anxiety and fear that nagged his every waking moment—Am I strong enough?
He made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from a loaf of bread and family-sized jars that he kept within reach in the back of his outfit with his gear. He watched as the ascendant early morning sun went to work on the moist terrain around him, and he slugged down a long drought of mineral water from a plastic jug. He smoked a cigarette and cleared his head.
The name was Brewster Blackwell. It was all he had to go on.
Zachary Harper wheeled his dirt-brown, dirt-covered, black rag-top CJ7 left out onto Highway 85 and pushed in a tape, “Old man take a look at my life/I’m a lot like you,” he sang at the top of his lungs. It was ten a.m. when he down-shifted into Watford City, North Dakota, unaware this had been an oil town since the mid-fifties, that the first production well ever drilled in this region was just northeast of town. There were a lot of other things he didn’t know. He didn’t know where he was going to find a job, but the forty dollars in crumpled reserve notes tucked into his Levi’s pocket told him it better be soon.
About half a block past the Sagebrush Bar on Main Street, he parked the Jeep and checked himself in the rearview mirror. He flattened down his heavy mustache with the palm of his hand, adjusted his wire rim glasses, and pulled his yellow baseball cap down tightly over his brow. In the crown of the hat was a black patch with yellow lettering: “Trans-Alaska Pipeline Project.” At twenty-seven years old, he was already half gray, but fully aware that simply looking older didn’t necessarily make one look more experienced.
The Sagebrush was crowded. Not unusual for ten in the morning. Some looked up to see the stranger enter, but most did not. He walked down the lane behind the backs of the men sitting at the bar, his expression blank, matter-of-fact, and avoided eye contact with those sitting in the booths that lined the opposite wall. He found an unoccupied stool at the end of the bar. Spending any portion of his remaining funds on liquor was a major sacrifice, but that was the way it had to be if he was going to find work, and he o
rdered up a draft. He smoked. On a shelf above the bar resting on a shot glass was an old baseball covered with faded autographs and next to that four trophies. Tacked to the wall nearby was an old faded piece of paper with tiny ballpoint lettering only a sober man could read, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone at any time.” The man seated next to him was drinking whiskey and staring straight ahead. Sometimes the man’s eyes would follow the barkeep as he shuffled back and forth behind the bar.
When Zak was about halfway through his beer, he got the barkeep’s attention and asked, “Do you know where I can find a man named Brewster Blackwell? I hear he may need a hand.”
“Yeah. Generally, he’s either here or at the City Bar. Or you could find him at home. You just head south a few blocks on Main here, take a right at that Badlands Exxon, and at the end of the second block there on the right you’ll see a pink house. That’s Brewster’s. If you pass a drive-in ice cream stand, you’ve gone too far.”
BREWSTER BLACKWELL OPENED THE DOOR after the first knock. The whites of his eyes were murky and brown behind dark brown iris disks. His mostly gray hair was tousled and his face looked haggard under a two-day growth. Zak could smell whiskey on him. Over the man’s shoulder and through the door he could see a bottle of Lord Calvert and a coffee cup sitting on the kitchen table. Brewster Blackwell gave Zachary Harper a curious look up and down.
“I’m a cousin of Calico O’Mally’s,” Zachary introduced himself. “I understand you and he worked together up on the North Slopes.”
“Oh sure,” Blackwell said thoughtfully. He stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him. Zak could hear the sound of dishes and female voices coming from inside. “Calico was a good hand. Threw chain. What’d he ever do with all that money he was savin’, start a whorehouse?” Brewster smiled, revealing a row of broken, discolored teeth.
“No, no,” Harper laughed, “he’s gone back to school. Taking business.”
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