Roughnecks

by James J. Patterson

  “You a lawyer?” the old man asked.

  “No sir, my name is Zachary Harper and I’m workin’ on this Bomac rig over here on your property. I just hired on with them and I was wondering if you would be kind enough to let me pitch a tent somewhere not too far from the rig.”

  “Kind enough,” the old fella said in a shamelessly mocking tone while turning to his ranch hand, then returning to Zak’s open gaze said, “You boys are used to takin’ whatever you want.” He pulled a pipe from his overalls and lit up. A dank, sweet, blue cloud hovered for an instant and then dissipated.

  “If you’d rather I didn’t, I’ll understand,” Zak said and took a step backward.

  “So, what’re you fixin’ t’do in this tent of yers?”

  Zak laughed nervously, “Stay in it till I get paid and can afford to put a roof over my head.” He looked at Jon for support but Jon wore a blank face.

  “Well, makes no difference,” the man said. “Where you want to go, young fella, is just down this road a piece,” he pointed with the stem of his pipe down the private drive that continued on past his ranch, “until you come to a crick. Follow that crick a little ways and you’re going to come smack up against a great purple outhouse with a moon on the door. I built it myself when I was a kid. There’s a bend in the crick right there that’s been my favorite fishing hole long as I can remember, and that’s a long time. See for yourself. Drop a line in there some morning and you’ll catch yourself some breakfast. Ain’t nothin’ better. That’s the spot to pitch yer tent.”

  Zak then made the mistake of offering him some money from his future pay and all the farmer did was spit.

  “Pitch yer tent, then get back up on that rig over yonder and find me some oil, and when yer done, punch another hole and find me some more. And by the way, that’s the loudest fuckin’ thing I ever heard, and she never quits.” He turned to walk away. “I’ve gotten used to it. Don’t think the animals ever will.”

  AS ZAK AND JON BOUNCED down the dirt road that led to the creek, Zak let out a loud hoot.

  They pulled up next to the outhouse and jumped from the Jeep like a couple of fearless skydivers.

  “Yup! I think these accommodations should suit you to a T, Mr. Harper!” Jon laughed and kicked a stone into the creek. “The plumbing works, you’ve got running water.” He lifted his nose and breathed in the cool breezes that wafted down the canyon carved by the creek between the hills. “Hell, the Pioneer doesn’t have central air conditioning!” He turned to see Zak lying on his back in the grass holding a freshly lit cigarette between his teeth, staring pensively up into space. “How’s that mattress?” Jon inquired, caught up in the housewarming spirit of the event.

  “A bit on the firm side, good for the back though, why don’t you try the sofa?”

  “We can’t be sitting on our ass! This is moving day. Now let’s see this tent of yours?”

  Zak dragged thoughtfully on his cigarette, his brow wrinkled, lifting the bill of his cap and his bent wire frames made him look cockeyed. “A tent would be nice.”

  Jon decided to sit down after all. “I thought you said you had a tent.”

  “Nope. I said I’d like to pitch a tent out here, didn’t say I had one.”

  “Y’know, I’m beginnin’ to worry about you. Been out in the patch just one day.” Jon shook his head and reached for a Marlboro. Zak smoked a Vantage.

  “Oh hell,” Zak explained, “the nights are cool, the days are warm, the weather’s still good. I’ll be all right.”

  “All right. Sure. Until a coyote comes along and takes a bite out of your ass while you sleep. I don’t mind tellin’ ya, you’ve got a strange way of doin’ things, mister.”

  “I’m a worm, ain’t I?”

  “Yup,” Jon laughed, “that you are.”

  THEY STILL HAD A COUPLE of hours to kill before they were due back on location and so they palled around Scobey doing errands. Jon gave Zak the cook’s tour. They stopped in at the grocery where Zak unabashedly spent the last of his funds on big jars of peanut butter and jelly, a half-dozen loaves of whole wheat, several packs of smokes, and four rolls of toilet paper. Jon picked up a loaf of white bread, some lunch meats, a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of whole dills, and a six-pack of Pepsi.

  Jon took Zak to the coin laundry where Zak refilled his plastic water jugs from a tap at the sink. They drove out to the rodeo grounds and sat on the bleachers and ate sandwiches in silence.

  “No sense in taking two vehicles,” Jon said as they were leaving for work. “You can stay in the hotel again tonight if you want.”

  They parked Zak’s Jeep behind the old hotel and threw their gear and groceries into the back of Jon’s Oldsmobile and were off. Jon peeled off the highway at those four buttes and drove like a madman. His tires were bald. His shocks were gone. They rumbled and rolled down the winding dirt and gravel roads that led to location like they were on the Mad Mouse’s Wild Ride. Zak hung on for dear life, lifting himself off his seat before each crash landing as they launched and hurled themselves over every rise. What the heck, he thought, a wreck might have been preferable compared to what might be waiting for them on location. They were facing another day shorthanded and the thought of repeating the trial and strain of the previous day’s effort was quickly becoming more than he could stand.

  When the hundred-and-fifty-foot tower of Bomac 34 crested the horizon, Zak felt compelled to speak up.

  “What do you think they’ll have us doin’ today?”

  “A man never knows in the oil field.”

  Well shit! Zak thought. Given what we did yesterday a guy should have some idea what the next few days will be like. He didn’t appreciate Jon’s complacent attitude but Jon just wasn’t very talkative and, as they drove on, the car continued to pitch and swerve with the crazy dirt road. Zak sat back in his seat and tried to calm himself. Wait and see, he thought. Jon waited for every new turn in a road he had traveled many times; Zak would wait and take what was coming when they reached Bomac 34.

  They arrived on location at twenty minutes to three. Jon parked the car a short ways from the rig. When the dust had settled, he took a quick look around before concluding, “Shit.” No Fifer. Zak pulled the handle on the door and made a move to step out, but Jon didn’t budge. He just flipped on the radio and dug into his shirt pocket for a smoke.

  “Eight hours is what they pay me for and eight hours is what they get,” his Zippo clanked open and a burst of flame was followed by a gust of sweet blue smoke that hit the windshield and rolled back into Jon’s squinting eyes, “not eight hours and twenty minutes.” Zak pulled the door closed as though he agreed but, frankly, he was itching to get changed and just sort of buck himself up for the long day’s work ahead. Instead they sat and smoked and listened to the radio. Had he been on his own he would have been in there and dressed, ready to go. There was no pipe standing in the derrick. A large, red, six-wheeled flatbed truck was parked next to the catwalk. Zachary Harper spent the remaining minutes before work resisting the urge to ask stupid questions.

  At five minutes to the hour Jon got out of the car, and at exactly the same instant the trailer door opened across the way and out stepped Jesse and Marty.

  In the bottom doghouse the three men were just closing their lockers before going up to the floor when the door opened and in waltzed Freddy Fifer. He was six foot one, two hundred thirty pounds, mostly fat. He wore old cowboy boots, Levi’s, and a Western shirt that stretched over his bouncing belly. He had short messy black hair, a round pudgy face, and small friendly brown eyes behind thick black-framed glasses that squished against the doughy clay of his face.

  “Well, I may be late but at least I made it!” he announced, throwing his big arms open wide in a gleeful gesture of reunion.

  All right! Zak wanted to shout. Marty and Jon barely looked up.

  “Well, well,” Marty said as he waddled
past Freddy on his way out the door, “look what de cat dwragged in.”

  Jon was on his way out as well and as he turned from his locker said sweetly, “Hi honey!” then gave Freddy a loud smack! on his fat right arm that must have stung like hell. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch you decided to show up today.” He paused for a meaningful second before calling him, “chainhand,” and stepped through the door.

  Freddy’s ruddy cheeks bunched up like overripe crab apples and his fat little mouth formed a silent O as he gave his arm a rub where Jon had let him have it. He huffed and hustled down the lane of lockers, sat down on the bench, and began changing his clothes. Zak could tell by the man’s concentrated effort that he was moving as fast as he could—slow as molasses. As Zak started for the door, Freddy realized he had forgotten his manners, stood up in Zak’s path, held up his drawers with one hand, and stuck out his other hand for Zachary Harper.

  “Hi, I’m Freddy. So you’re the new worm?”

  “Zak Harper.”

  “Glad to know yuh.” Freddy’s eyes were like his handshake, weak, friendly, eager, kind, and a little afraid.

  “You ever bin chainhand before?” Freddy asked as he huffed off his cowboy boots.

  “Nope.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad.” Freddy sounded genuinely disappointed.

  As Zak skipped stairs up to the top doghouse, he wondered if facing his first day as chainhand caused Freddy the same feelings of apprehension and anguish that Zak had felt just the day before. All he really knew was that they were going to have a full crew, for better or worse, to combat whatever problem was going to be thrown at them that afternoon and things didn’t hurt so bad after that.

  Up on the floor Zak was relieved to see there was really very little going on. A “Test Situation,” someone called it. They weren’t turning to the right, that is, they weren’t drilling. Everything was stationary. The motors were running as always and their constant high-pitched scream ripped the air. Jon, in his new capacity as motorman, immediately set out to run a check. He checked the water levels, temperatures, the oil, and made sure they were getting plenty of number one diesel fuel. The first motors he checked were the giant twin Superior diesel engines up on the floor pulling the drawworks.

  “We need oil,” Jon said, and the two of them went down to the ground and fetched four five-gallon buckets of oil and carried them back up the stairs. “Those old seals on these engines leak about fifteen or twenty gallons of oil a day, so I check on’m at least once every tower.”

  From there he went down to the light plant which was next to the mud shack. The light plant was powered by two generators, and so he checked both of those motors. When that was done, he continued around behind the mud shack and the mud tank to where the desilter was located. The desilter was run by a Jimmy Motor, another of Jon’s responsibilities. From there it was around to the other end of the mud tanks to the desander, and he gave its motor the once over.

  Meanwhile, back up on the floor, that toolpusher, Jesse, and a six-foot-five-inch, two-hundred-sixty-pound giant of a man were standing at the doghouse door going over some figures. When Fifer arrived, ready to go to work at last, no one even looked up. Zak, who had been trying to blend into the walls, approached Freddy and said, “Look, I’m just going to kind of follow you around if you don’t mind.”

  Freddy shook his head. “Don’t mind at all. C’mon, we’ll Zurt up!” He then broke out a couple of grease guns and handed one to Zak. From there they proceeded at a leisurely pace to roam randomly over the rig, hitting various spots with grease. As they stopped here and there, Zak noticed some rather nasty bruises, cuts, and scrapes all about Freddy’s fingers, forearms, and shins. “Worm bites,” Freddy explained.

  “How’d you ever learn where all these Zurt spots are?” Zak wanted to know after they had hit about twenty.

  “Hell, nobody ever showed me. I just make the rounds whenever things are slow and every now and then I come across another one.” Freddy was a likable fellow and his approach to life was obviously much like the way he located his Zurt spots. It occurred to Zak that Freddy could answer a lot of questions, that together they might make learning the ropes a little easier.

  The big fella up there in the top doghouse with Jesse and the toolpusher was, according to Freddy, “The Man From Halliburton.”

  “Don’t know his name,” Freddy volunteered as he hit the Zurt gun and a shot of grease went splat! all over a joint. “Halliburton runs the drill-stem tests. No telling how long we’ll sit on this one.” Forever would be fine with Freddy. “Sometimes they only run a few hours, sometimes more than a day. Depends on what the big boys want it to say. That’s his truck down there, the red one.”

  Back in the top doghouse, they found Jon leaning quietly against a locker by himself smoking a cigarette and listening to Jesse, that toolpusher, and The Man From Halliburton continue with their strategy session. When Freddy and Zak walked in, however, invisibility was impossible and the three roughnecks eyed each other as if to say, “This is not the place to be.” Without a word, they followed Jon out the door. Zak was about to ask Jon what he should be doing when Freddy grabbed his arm and said, “C’mon Zak, let’s start scrubbin’!”

  Not having the slightest idea what he was agreeing to, Zak followed Freddy as he waddled and huffed his way around the rig. They picked up a couple of plastic five-gallon buckets that the dope for the pipe comes in, threw in some water, a little soap, then added some diesel fuel for cutting grease. They grabbed a couple of wire brushes and started scrubbing the pump house. Unreal, Zak thought. When in doubt just start scrubbing the rig. Zak set himself to scrubbing that pump house. Every now and then, Freddy would look up as he lazily scrubbed away to see Zak applying all the elbow grease he could possibly muster. And Freddy Fifer did not know what to make of Zachary Harper.

  WHEN THEY WERE ABOUT HALFWAY done scrubbing that pump house, they looked up to see Jesse urgently waving them up to the floor. As if on cue, Marty came tearing out of the mud shack and Jon was already taking double steps up the stairs to the floor.

  This apparently was the moment everyone had been waiting for. Once they were topside, Jesse gave the command to “Prepare the floor!” and Zak followed Jon and Fifer through the motions of readying the collar subs that they had used to yank the larger pipe through the hole near the end of the trip the day before. Next, the tongs were greased up with new dyes put in them. While this was going on, Marty was steadily climbing upward to his station, ninety feet above the rest of the crew.

  Jon, Fifer, and Zak changed the tong heads and as they did, it dawned on Zak that they were preparing to trip that son of a bitch out of the hole exactly as they had the day before. His thoughts became frantic as they made ready for another grueling combat session with that iron. My God! Is it going to be like this every day? Jon seemed to have a quiet smirk on his face, and Freddy Fifer was already sweating profusely. At least Freddy represented another pair of hands and that had to account for something.

  That day and into the evening they tripped more than seventy stands out of the hole, plus another six stands of heavy collar. With three men working those slips and four hands to push those stands over to bank, it had taken a lot longer to reach the exhaustion level that had come so early on the day before. Still, the work was feverish and grueling. He was surprised to see that there was no bit on bottom when that last collar was finally through the hole. Instead, there were pipes. All different shapes and sizes neatly packed together which stood sixty feet high in the derrick once completely out of the hole. These were the testing tools. The Man From Halliburton, who had been standing next to driller Jesse throughout the entire trip, now stepped in with authority. The next step was to disconnect these pipes and that Halliburton man took Jesse and his crew through their paces. To Jesse he screamed over the din of the engines and the hiss of the drawworks, “All right, pick up on ’er another half foot!” and the
n to Jon and the boys, “Throw in your slip! Okay, now hurry and change yer dyes! Your tong heads!” To do that, a reducer was needed because the pipe they were now dealing with was smaller and of varying shapes. “Take your bite here!” he showed Jesse where he wanted that next pipe separated. After all twenty-five pipes had been dismantled and laid down on the floor, Jesse disappeared into the top doghouse putting his crew at that Halliburton man’s disposal. Zak hired out to give him a hand down on the truck while the others stayed up on the floor and lowered his pipes to them.

  When that Halliburton man climbed up onto the back of the flatbed and stood there like a colossus, his mighty arms folded, and Zak bounced up after him, and for several minutes they watched Marty climb slowly down from the tower.

  “How long’ve you been with Halliburton?” Zak wanted to know.

  “A few years,” the man spoke with an easy voice that was almost a drawl. He reached into his shirt pocket for a Pall Mall, tapped it against his wristwatch, dried his lips with his sleeve, and lit up.

  “They a good outfit to be with?”

  “Sure,” he looked at Zak, sizing him up for a second, then leaned over the side of the truck and spat. “They believe in starting a man from the ground up. That’s my experience with ’em anyway. Y’know,” he gestured up at the floor, “this life gets awful tough on a guy after a certain point. I went out roughnecking for ten long years. Hard years, boy, I’ll tell you the truth.” He obviously thought that Zak might now, or sometime in the near future, be in the same boat. “I thought sure as hell I was going to burn myself out here in the patch. That’s no lie. Jesus,” he spat once more, clearing the edge of the truck by several feet. “I was drinkin’ too. But there’s some pretty smart fellas out here hidin’ out under all that mud. Some guys know when the time is right to make a change. Others are content to keep doin’ the same old shit forever.”

  “So you’ve been with them for a while?”

  “I guess. It feels like I’m just gettin’ started though. Halliburton gave me a break. Started me out loggin’. Put me in the logging division, I should say. Then it’s a matter of going out and running your drill-stem tests,” he ticked off the successive stages of his career thus far on his long fingers, “and then becoming a district manager. That’s the job I’m up for now. From there it’s into the home office where you can start workin’ your way up the ladder. A few more years out in the field and I’ll be just right for it. I’ll have all the experience a man could possibly need, that’s for sure. I figure that in five or six more years I’ll be makin’ a hundred thousand a year or thereabouts. Their benefits are real good.”