Roughnecks

by James J. Patterson

  By this time they had been talking for more than an hour. Zak’s laundry was done. He was leaving it sit. When Corey had finished the walking tour of his pockets, he at last found what he had been looking for in the first place. It was a little ball of tissue paper he kept loose in the lining of his coat. He held his knees together, placed it reverently in his lap, and slowly pulled the paper away until there rested in his cracked and spotted hands a shiny medal with a faded and tattered cloth attached.

  “There are few people,” Corey let the sentence trail off unfinished. His long thumb and jagged forefinger caressed the little icon. “You know where this is from,” Corey said in a near whisper. He was falling away fast.

  “No, no I don’t,” Zak prodded softly. It wasn’t a military medal, and, judging from the French words and the Maple Leaf on one side, he assumed it came from Canada.

  “I was given this, I earned it, oh, it must have been, hmmm,” Corey began again. His eyes turned watery, and searched a far-off terrain. His expression changed from a ponderous, searching, curious, far-off gaze, to one of warm familiar recognition, to a halting fearful sadness. At last, the man folded the old medal back into the sepulcher of tissue and jacket lining, certain he had just recounted the entire story; that the explanation for all that had passed, how he had come to be here, in this way, in this old laundromat, in this faraway and unknown place, had been revealed to, and would live on in the memory of, this unlikely newcomer. He looked at Zachary Harper with trusting naked eyes. “And now you know.”

  The old-timer returned his things to his pockets. Zak busied himself gathering up his laundry and even swept up the dried mud chips he had scattered across the floor with a broom he found in the back room.

  Corey followed him out to the Jeep and when Zak turned to say goodbye, Corey shook his hand enthusiastically, putting his free hand over their hand clasp, lingering in an odd manner that made Zak think he had more to say.

  “Look, I sure appreciate the chat, can I get you a cup of coffee?” Zak said, his real intention being to buy the old man breakfast. If Zak was sure that a certain percentage of what Corey told him was Total Mars, then it also seemed plausible that a certain percentage of what Corey had told him would be totally accurate.

  “I don’t want any coffee.”

  “Well, how about the bar, I could get us a beer or something.”

  “Stitch Cronan likes to drink. But he only drinks on Tuesday afternoons and then he only drinks at Ginger’s Bar, down the street there.” Corey nodded his head in the direction of the bar. “You get on over there next Tuesday afternoon and you’ll find him. You’ll know just who he is too. Ask him to let you stake out a spot and don’t beat around the bush about it either.

  “And another thing,” Corey said as Zak climbed into his outfit and fired ’er up. “You’re a smart one, no doubt. But here’s one last thing you don’t know. Just about dawn, you go into that old outhouse by the creek and right there where the first light comes through the moon on the door, you’ll see a little something there.”

  “I will,” Zak said.

  “See that you do.”

  “Good day, sir.”

  As Zak pulled away, Corey turned and crossed the street. In his side mirror, he saw Corey peering into the window of Simone’s Bar with his hands cupped over the glass. After a moment the door opened and Sam, wearing a long morning robe with her hair all down, a shocking black against her milk-white face, stepped out onto the sidewalk to invite him in, looking to the right and the left as she did so. The familiarity of their greeting was curious, as was Corey’s appreciative bow before he stepped inside. As she closed the door behind them, Simone stopped and took notice of the Jeep. For a moment she seemed to be looking directly into the mirror, making eye contact with Zachary Harper.

  THE SUN BALLOONED HUGE AND red on the horizon as all that afternoon Zak lay out on the bumpy lawn beside the creek by his tent. As darkness advanced, Zak knew that the boys would be expecting him back in town, but he couldn’t see getting into another all-night boozathon. His alcohol intake of late was beginning to offend his normally abstemious nature and though he felt beholden to Jon and Freddy for including him in their doings and hated to disappoint them, he decided to turn in early just the same. He had to be ready to get back to work the next afternoon and wanted to be in tip-top shape.

  That night he was startled by some gruff noises outside his tent. Coyotes looking for food. Zak slept with his hand on the thick leather scabbard of his knife.

  Later, that same night he was awakened again and crept outside to investigate. Finding nothing, he sat down by the water, drinking in the peaceful night. The balmy air had turned cool, then chill, and the moon did not impose itself outright on the terrestrial scene. He saw in the sky a swirling flash of color. It faded, to be replaced with tall spectral pillars of light—glittering, crystalline, ghostly towers rising high beyond the distant horizon. Was he mistaken, or could he hear something, a musical resonance, broadcasting itself to the outer cosmos? Zak shook his head to clear his senses and listen. He wondered if the many thoughts cascading through his mind were similar, perhaps even identical, to those that welled in the hearts and emotions of men and beasts a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago, as they looked on in wonder at these same northern lights? He wondered if the hint of the unknown had comforted or taunted them with the knowledge that there is always more, so much more. And he could almost hear the old man’s voice:

  “There’s a lotta things you don’t know.”

  VIII

  That second week Zak walked the mile and a half to location every day and found that walking was helpful for getting him limbered up and ready for the day’s work ahead. It was a tough week, too. Four of those six days were spent tripping pipe. Two of those were the grueling round trips and the tricky and tedious laying-down process associated with drill-stem testing. The big boys down in Texas wanted to be damned sure before they abandoned that hole. Out of four crews working six and eight—that’s eight hours a day six days a week—Zak learned that two of those crews had worm drillers. Jesse Lancaster, far and away the most seasoned man on that rig, had more experience than any two guys there. Over drinks at Simone’s, he revealed this was his eleventh year on the Widowmaker alone.

  “When did you first break out, Jesse?”

  “With the Greeks,” Jon broke in on the old man.

  “Drillin’ y’mean? Oh, just about ’54. Oh ho ho, it was rough, I didn’t want to go drillin’. No no. I got pushed into it. Went out to work one mornin’, November, there was just a few snowflakes flyin’ by. This one driller we had, as soon as he seen that he was gone. He was unemployment bound. It was right in the boom y’know. This one toolpusher comes and says ‘Jeez, y’know Jesse, I need a relief driller ’cause one of my drillers has twisted off, another got his arm broke.’ I said, ‘I don’t wanna drill.’ He says, “Yes y’do.’ I says, ‘No I don’t!’ But I helped him out. Then he comes up’n says, ‘I got good news and bad news, the good news is I don’t need no relief driller no more, the bad news is you’re goin’ permanent driller.’ I said, ‘But I don’t want t’drill!’ and he says, ‘Either that or look for a different rig.’ Well there weren’t many rigs around. ‘Aw shit,’ I says, ‘who told you I could drill?’ Same thing happened with this rig here. Eleven years later he still hasn’t found another driller.”

  Each day Jesse would step from his trailer, ready to go to work, and just listen to the thousands of noises all happening simultaneously, cocking his head like some old prairie dog looking to spot trouble before trouble spotted him. He was able to discern the slightest variation from what he knew should be working out there.

  Because of Jesse’s experience, and the relative inexperience of his other drillers and crews, that toolpusher came to rely almost exclusively on Jesse’s crew to perform the critical tasks as they came up, a situation in which Jesse took great
pride. If that toolpusher could postpone a difficult task four more hours until Jesse’s crew arrived he’d do it, just making that bit last as long as he could. As a result, Zak and the boys ended up having some of the most horrendous towers imaginable. When the boys would start to flag a bit from the grueling pace, Jesse had a way of jamming the brake handle and popping the clutch, making the entire rig, from ground to crow’s nest, shudder and shake! Everyone, no matter what they were doing, would snap to attention instantly, and Jesse would simply smile and raise his eyebrows as if to say, “Well, how about it? Let’s get back to ’er!” But they were good, and they were getting better. None of this had gone unnoticed by the other crews. They were beginning to refer to Jesse’s crew as the “Golden Boys of Bomac!” and when they sensed trouble coming, in the form of another trip or test, their motto was, “The Golden Boys’ll take care of it! The Golden Boys can get ’er!” which was not as irksome as it could have been because it was true. But there were larger issues involved with one crew shouldering the lion’s share of the load.

  Carl, or “Old Smoky,” as the boys called him because of the S-shaped briar that was forever puffing smoke out of his big reddish-brown beard, was worm drilling for the crew that worked daylights, seven a.m. till three p.m. Old Smoky and his crew were all local boys from over in Flaxville, between Scobey and Plentiwood, and drove to and from location in Carl’s big blue Blazer with a gun rack in the back large enough to hold all five rifles. They were called “The Cowboy Crew” because they all wore cowboy hats, boots, and kerchiefs, chewed tobacco constantly, and not one of them ever took their boots off for love or money. They’d wear those boots even while working up on the floor instead of the steel-toed Red Wings, which were just standard wear for most roughnecks. Toes are cheap in the patch and that extra few millimeters of steel protection could mean a lot. Jon, who paid extra attention to a man’s style and comportment, didn’t appreciate wild deviations from what he would consider smart or sincere. He just thought that Cowboy Crew was fucked in the head.

  During that third week, Zak also learned how to read the geolograph. This was a square device with a domed lid. Dead center in the geolograph was a twenty-four-hour clock with a needle. Under that needle ran a spool of paper, in the margin of which was scribbled all the pertinent information needed for an accurate description of the well. Ever so slowly that needle scrawled across the surface of the page providing anyone who was interested a detailed account of what was going on out on the floor every minute of every day. It counted how long it took to go down a foot, and Zak had to catch his samples every ten feet. It recorded the elapsed time from when they began a trip to when they had ’er back drilling again. It showed how long every connection took. If he had a moment to spare, either when he arrived on location or sometime during that tower, he’d lift that lid and take a peek at what had been going on over the course of those earlier towers.

  It was Frank Kramer, the company hand, who showed Zak the meaning of the cardiogramlike lines inching their way across the paper. When Zak had an extra minute, or when he was on his way somewhere that took him past the machine, he might come upon Frank standing there studying those lines, or find him simply leaning against the machine, having himself a think. More and more, Frank—a serious man, older than Zak and the boys, but a bit younger than toolpusher George Cleaver—seemed to enjoy those little explications, like maybe they were helping him work something out in his mind that had become a major pre­occupation.

  Zak got so proficient at reading the geolograph that if he was up in that top doghouse a minute or two before the daylights crew came off the floor, he might laugh and say as they came through the door, “Looks like that thirty-seventh stand gave you boys a little trouble!”

  After a hard tower of tripping pipe, Jesse and the boys would all gather in the top doghouse for a coffee and a smoke. Jesse would laugh, “Jeez boys tonight we sure had those slips a-crackin’ and those tongs a-breakin’!” Freddy was gaining confidence with each throw of the chain, picking up the pace, getting stronger and stronger.

  “Is it my imagination, fat boy, or are you losin’ weight?” Jon chimed in, teasing but half-serious on one of those occasions.

  “Well,” Jesse answered for his chainhand, “throwin’ that chain’ll either make a man out of’m, or kill’m.”

  Each night and most of every day Zak slept like a mummy all wrapped up in his sleeping bag inside the tent by the outhouse by the creek.

  MONDAY EVENING, GEORGE CLEAVER, TOOLPUSHER working for the Bomac Drilling Company rig number thirty-four, had had the providential good sense to pretend he needed some supplies in town and get the hell off location before he killed someone.

  “Bourbon,” Sam called out to Hal when she saw George enter the bar. Hal, who was tending bar while she got caught up cleaning highball glasses, simply nodded and reached for the Wild Turkey.

  A combination of irritating setbacks, incompetence, unavoidable circumstances, and personality clashes had, over the previous weeks, united to put George in a black mood, and it was those notorious black moods that had earned him the nickname “Rusty” behind his back. Frank, the new company hand, was a good man, but goddamn it, anybody with one brain to rub against the other could tell they had been going all out for weeks. With only one driller out of four truly experienced at that brake handle, they were lucky to be on schedule at all.

  George looked to his right and left at the old duffers sitting next to him at the bar and that suffocating feeling that had roared up inside him from time to time since he was a kid threatened to explode again. He needed room. Over the years George had come to know the triggers and off switches of his fiery temper very well. He studied that temper like it was a strange and dangerous animal that had come to live in his house. He learned to channel its ferocious energy into his work. Being out on location twenty-four hours a day seven days a week helped. Staying on top of so many men and so many details allowed him to vent in all directions, and things made of iron don’t break so easy, he chuckled to himself. If he had to run off a crew, or put down some rebellion up on the floor, all he had to do was act like himself when he was mad. Let’s face it, some silly little mess-up you let slide today could happen again tomorrow and blossom into a full-blown disaster. And sometimes, naturally, George didn’t have to pretend.

  Maybe Frank was right. Maybe they could’ve gone faster. But for that you need four good crews all up to speed, and where you gonna find four decent crews out here? With so much work happenin’ down around Williston and Watford it was a miracle he put together four crews willing to come out this far at all. Or maybe he should run off one of those worm drillers and take that brake handle himself. That would sure take a load off Jesse and his boys and he’d have another top-notch crew to help move things along, but that would be a short-term proposition; what he needed was a long-term solution. Nope, then he’d be too busy to push tools. What to do?

  George took a sip and let out a gasp as the sweet fiery elixir burned down the hatch. He watched Sam, dipping glasses two at a time into the hot water, then into the rinse. Her beads and earrings clattered and clacked, her breasts swayed beneath her billowing blouse. Her hair was pulled back, revealing a pale white neck. He wondered if these old farts sitting so stiff and silent at the bar had ever made love to a woman like that? Hey, you fucks! he wanted to shout. He wanted to see some spark, some sign of life. He wanted to know if these guys were survivors of the Great Charade, or if they had always been stay-at-home types who had been perversely rewarded for their timidity with the longevity they so coveted all through the years. He knew the answer by the way they avoided eye contact. By the way they tried to ignore the roughnecks when they came to town. The way they snickered at Simone behind her back and sure enough disapproved of her when an opinion was called for. Yeah, he knew the type. The type of asshole he had come to the patch to escape. Oh fuck you! he thought. He just wanted to kick all their asses. He took another
sip that burned not at all. He shook his head, and gave a deep chesty grunt he couldn’t stifle no matter how many shots he hit it with.

  Now Jesse Lancaster. There’s a driller. Truth be told, it was Jesse and his boys who were gettin’ ’er done on this location. That’s a fact. What he wouldn’t do for three more just like’m. Old Smoky was capable but that friggin’ crew of his, what a bunch of nutbuckets they were. And the rest? Shit. Rory, he had to admit, was okay, slow, but okay. He held up a finger and ordered another drink. Sam’s was the only bar in town that stocked his brand, so he gratefully drank every drop. She assured him he was the only customer who ever called for it.

  That goddamned Frank. Yeah, he’s young and all but that’s no excuse. It wasn’t bad enough that they both had to live side by side on location, but you’d think that he’d a figured out by now how to go about keeping those fuckers down in Texas off their backs long enough to get the fuckin’ job done. Sure, the money boys are nervous nellies, but you can’t let them rule your roost every goddamned minute. Christ Frank! Don’t be such an ass-kisser! Tell them what they want to hear and keep the rest on a need-to-know basis. Yeah, George shook his head again like he had split in two and was listening to his other half, he knew it wasn’t as easy as all that.

  He thought about Frank, ten years younger than he, broke out in the patch as a roughneck in California. He knew the job but he was also the type that speaks the language of the city boys and bankers pretty good too. George drained his glass. He could see himself in the mirror behind the bar. He had news for his own apparition in the mirror staring back at him. You ain’t never gonna be no company hand.