When Zak and Jon returned they found Marty, wearing a big heavy chain around his neck, forming a dust-covered human barrier in front of his car, keeping the trucks on the return side from colliding into the trucks charging up the go side. Wheeling and dealing. Zak slung the Jeep into position, threw his outfit into four-wheel drive as Jon hooked them up and they were off! Jon, loyal comrade that he was, in the lead running interference for their desperate little convoy.
They cannonballed up and down the crazy terrain. In and out of the endless procession of semis, gin trucks, flatbeds, and pickups. Jon was flashing his lights, waving one arm, honking his horn, and screaming, “We’re comin’ through!”
In the Jeep, Zak bounced in the driver’s seat and tried to keep up. The side and back windows of the Jeep’s ragtop were of that foggy plastic no human eye can pierce, leaving Zak visibility only through the front windshield and side mirrors, so he couldn’t see the real excitement that was taking place behind him.
Zak’s big tires were picking up tons of dirt and gravel and spewing it all over Jezebel like machine-gun fire. In seconds, the windshield was so pockmarked visibility was gone. The headlights busted out. The paint all along the hood and the sides was peppered by a million pellets. Marty could only guess when to touch the brake and when to leave off, smashing again and again into the Jeep’s invincible back bumpers.
For Cynthia, there was no end to the madness. Those forty miles to the Four Buttes turnoff lasted a screaming, clutching eternity. Every time she came close to Marty pounding him and beseeching him to stop he brushed her away with a strong arm, bloodying her nose and bruising her arms. She was a raving, ranting, very upset person.
It was at just this time, as that main highway was coming into view that the Jeep got a flat.
As soon as they all three rumbled to a stop, Cynthia leaped from the car, her eyes wild, her arms flailing, “Look at it! Look at it! It’s ruined! I told you so! I told you not to tow it! Look at all the money this’ll cost!”
The windshield was completely pitted. All four headlights and the parking lights were smashed. There were ten thousand pockmarks from one end of the wagon to the other. The grillwork in front was a twisted mess. The body of that automobile was quite obviously ruined. Zak took a step back in horror. Jon, who had gotten out of his car to see what the trouble was, retreated the second he saw it. Cynthia pounded on Marty’s chest. Then she ran at Zak and pounded on his chest. The veins in her neck were bulging. Saliva whipped into a white lather at the corners of her mouth. Her normally ruddy cheeks were crimson with rage as she kicked and punched and screamed. Getter boys honked their horns cheering her on as they passed in both directions. Marty, helpless until now, looked at Zak as if to ask, What should I do? Zak shrugged. Marty then lifted her up in a big bear hug, shushing her and squeezing her. Her fat belly jiggled under her dirty red T-shirt. Her arms and legs pumped until, at last, she had no more wind to carry on. When he put her down, she crawled sobbing back into the car, determined to protect what little there was left. She cocked her head, and staring into a distance, resumed her argument with some unseen party.
Zak tried to explain to Marty that he hadn’t known how bad they were getting it, but Marty shrugged and smiled, “What can ya do?”
Nothing about the car, that’s for sure, Zak thought, but he could do something about Cynthia’s ravaged feelings. He went over to the car and sat down beside her. Tears were streaming down her face and her lower lip completely overlapped the upper. He knew that there was a tirade going on inside her head and felt that maybe if he gave her a chance to pour some of it out on him it would make her feel better.
At the risk of sounding trite, he said, “I’m awfully sorry about what’s happened, Cynthia, I really am. It’s just a bad deal. A bad deal all the way around.” Her body became stiff and still. She clutched the wool seat covering. Her face relaxed and she stared straight ahead. But she was listening. “It’s not our day, that’s for sure,” Zak pressed on, “no sir, just not our day.”
She sniffed a couple of times and ran an awkward hand across her nose. Then bowed her head and rubbed her eyes with her palms and murmured in a little voice, “That’s for sure.” It wasn’t often that she heard compassion, sympathy, and understanding in a male voice, and even though what Zak was saying did nothing to ameliorate the reality of the situation, he could tell by the way she knitted her brow that the thought and the gesture were well taken. As long as someone cared about her distress, there was hope for all of them. Even the thunder of the passing Getter trucks was hushed for that one moment by her last quiet sob as she relaxed her grip on the wool seat covering and her shoulders resumed their familiar slouch. Zak realized, as he witnessed her pure grief-stricken outpouring, that they had all been riding on a collective momentum that had to stop or be stopped somewhere. Rig road on moving day was as good a battlefield as any.
With those Getter trucks still roaring past, the only thing to do was get that tire changed and get out of there in one piece. Marty, Cynthia, and Jezebel were towed to the Cenex station in town, after which Jon and Zak retreated to the hotel, where they threw themselves on their beds and were out cold in seconds.
It was early evening when the two roughnecks stirred, took turns in the shower, and clomped downstairs.
In the hotel lobby, Zak and Jon found some old-timers gathered in stony silence before a big box black-and-white TV where some young men, hands bound behind their backs and blindfolds around their heads, were being slowly pushed through an angry mob, the words “Tehran…Ayatollah…Hostages…” coming from the speaker turned up loud.
“Think we outta nuke’m?” someone asked.
“Quiet,” someone else scolded, “I’m trying to hear.”
The two roughnecks decided to go elsewhere for an early supper before heading off to work.
IN THE DAYS AFTER FREDDY’S accident, Jesse didn’t return. The men began tearing down the rig, all four crews working the same shift. In the middle of this process, days off for Jesse’s crew rolled around again. Jon put things this way.
“Look, without Jesse or another crew member, once we spud-in at the new location, well, we’ll be shit out of luck, I say we beat it on down to Watford and see what’s up.”
They flipped a coin. Jon drove.
They arrived in town along about dusk. Zak recognized the place, but in other ways he was seeing it for the first time. He could tell the roughnecks from the local townsfolk at a glance now. He could see clearly how the oil traffic influenced every aspect of the town’s daily life. How, unlike Scobey, the town had assimilated the integrated elements, but there was a price.
Although there was very little sign of decay in either town, there was little or no opulence either. The oil business in the field, Zak decided, is rigged for efficiency and speed. It was this total abandonment of any pretense to permanence that probably didn’t set right with folks who had intended to put down roots here. Across the region, as the boys made their way south, Zak could see that atop of all the cattle and croplands sat the newly erected steel and aluminum buildings to house the support services needed to facilitate the ever-fluctuating needs of the oil patch. Any aesthetic architectural design was forsaken but for the purposes of efficiency and need. The harsh lines of expedience added a sense of urgency to the ancient landscape. Immediacy by its very nature is a temporary condition. Even though the oil boom with its highs and lows had lasted more than a generation in this area, the underlying notion was that at any second, the oil patch itself might simply pick up and move elsewhere, taking everything with it. This was the unspoken anxiety that got under the skin and carried with it a dull numbing edge. The bottom line was that little Scobey would remain should the oil traffic disappear. Watford City, on the other hand, would more than likely just dry up and blow away.
When at last the two men reached town, it didn’t take long to find out that Freddy had a trailer parke
d in the City Park.
Zak and Jon drove first to a liquor store and bought a bottle of whiskey, then to the park. The park itself had become an overflow station, so to speak, as trailers and RVs had claimed one corner of the place and there was a small roughneck village cropping up, already filling about a quarter of the space. They strolled between the vehicles. Freddy’s trailer was smack dab in the middle. “Howdy gents!” they heard a welcome and familiar voice call out from an open window.
Freddy was camped out on a comfy old sofa, the cast on his leg stretching up past the knee, his right arm in a cast with a sling around his neck. He had only been delivered from Billings the night before and so Jon and Zak unpacked his duffel bag, propped him up in front of a television set with the bottle of whiskey conveniently within reach. Then dashed out to the store and got him fixed up with TV dinners, sandwich stuff, and an extra bottle. They opted for whiskey over beer, partly because he wouldn’t have to get up for a piss so often and, too, because Freddy’s buddies might drink all the beer.
“It’s going to be tough leavin’ Fred in that ol’ trailer, he looks like dog shit,” Jon said quietly as he and Zak made their way back with the provisions.
They sat around and had one last drink together, not saying much. As Zak and Jon were walking out the door, Freddy called Zak back into the trailer. “Here,” he said, digging into a sack beside the couch where he lay. “I bought this before breaking out, thought it might come in handy, shooting a snake or something.” He pulled out a rolled-up chamois and laid it out on his lap. It was a new Colt .45 long barrel, shiny and black. Zak didn’t know much about guns but it looked expensive. “It’s my favorite gun,” Freddy continued as he fished through the bag and came up with a box of bullets.
“Freddy,” Zak laughed, “I really appreciate this but I don’t…”
“Pick it up and look it over. It’s loaded. Remember, there’s no safety on these guns, so if you stick it in your pants like Doc Holliday, you will blow your balls off! But that’s the very same gun that was issued in 1872 by the U.S. Army. It fought the Indian wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, they called that gun the ‘peace maker.’ That’s the gun that won the West, Zak!”
Zak handled the gun without putting his finger through the trigger loop. “I’ll want it back someday, don’t forget, but I’m not going huntin’ for a spell, that’s for sure, but you, the way you like to be outdoors with the coyotes and all, you never know. Oh, and here,” Freddy kept digging in his bag and came up with a new coffee pot. “Never got to use this either. It’s an old-fashioned percolator. C’mon, take’m both. I might see a snake from time to time when I’m back drivin’ thumper trucks, but until then you go ahead.”
“Don’t worry, Fred.” Zak tucked the chamois into his jacket, figuring it was easier to take it than to refuse; he grabbed up the pot as well. “I’ll get ’em back to ya by the time you’re on your feet again. Thanks.” Zak moved toward the door.
“Zak?”
“Yeah?”
“I damn near got the hang of it, didn’t I?”
Zak stopped at the door. A cord of emotion tightened around his throat. Freddy’s eyes were wet behind his thick glasses now held together with duct tape. Zak smiled warmly and nodded yes.
“You take care of yourself.”
Zak stepped outside and took a deep breath before walking to Jon’s car.
“What was that all about?” Jon asked. “Is he gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, he’s all right, gave me this coffee pot,” Zak said solemnly. As they pulled away, he could see the light from the table lamp beside Freddy’s couch glow forlornly through the deepening blue dusk. For a second, he thought he saw Freddy’s big head bob up, like he had lifted himself for a moment to glimpse his friends drive off.
The gun, wrapped in its leather rag, fit uncomfortably under his arm inside Zachary Harper’s canvas vest inside his jacket.
X
When Eileen saw Jon and Zak step heavily into the City Bar, she dropped what she was doing and hurried over to them, her face full of alarm, her voice shaking, somewhere between anger and fear. “What’s been going on up there in Scobey?”
Jesse Lancaster had been there since she opened that morning and was now half-sprawled across the bar, stinking drunk and getting worse by the second. No one would come within five feet of him. The energy pouring off him was violent, irrational, and dangerous.
Jesse had to squint to recognize the two roughnecks stepping cautiously toward him. He shrugged his shoulders with a woozy growl and looked away. As they drew closer, he turned on his stool to get as much of his back facing them as possible like an angry gorilla. Jon and Zak eyed each other. They then took stools on either side of the driller.
“Get away from me!” he scowled and pushed his elbows out in each direction to reclaim his space. His mouth hung open. His eyes were fixed on no set target; rather, his senses were all tuned in two directions, anticipating assault from either side or both.
“C’mon, Jesse,” Jon said in a voice that was dry, carefully implying nothing. “Why don’t we get some food and dry out a little. It’s a long drive back to Scobey.”
“Scobey?” Jesse spat with atrabilious sarcasm and contempt. “I ain’t goin’ back to Scobey.”
“Now no one’s tellin’ ya you got to go back to Scobey. God knows you don’t haveta if you don’t wanta,” Jon spoke calmly, slowly. “But if you were to come back up, well, you could ride with us. We’ll worry about your car later. It’ll be easy. Whaddya say, huh?”
Jesse whirled around to face Jon dead on. The whites of his eyes were reddish brown. His breath was stale but for the whiskey vapors. His teeth were dirty. His clothes stank. For a second, neither Jon nor Zak had a clue what the old man was going to say or do.
“Look goddamnit,” Jesse started out slow and calm, attempting to approximate Jon’s reasoned tone of voice as nearly as possible but falling into near-violent anger quickly and he was speaking way too loud. “Don’t you fuckin’ hear too good? I ain’t goin’ back to Scobey or anyplace else! I’m twistin’ off! I’m through. Finished! I’ve had it! Now the two of yuhs can get the hell away from me and leave me be!” This last he bellowed so the whole room could hear. Men looked up. Some started from their chairs, wondering if now was the time to put an end to this. Zak looked them back into their seats as Jon concentrated on his older driller.
“Jesse, that just don’t make sense. You know it don’t,” Jon’s voice dropped down to nearly a whisper. “We’re all countin’ on ya, Jesse, all of us. Shit, if you quit we’re all out of work.”
“Listen!” Jesse started in one direction, then the other, not knowing which way to direct his thoughts. He sliced his hand gently through the air for emphasis, and, looking at that hand, it was as though he held it there to keep the madness of his thoughts back just long enough for the meaning in what he was about to say to get through. “You guys don’t want me for a driller. No wait! Now hear me through.” He was concentrating on keeping as much of the slur from his voice as possible. He didn’t want to sound like he felt sorry for himself. He wanted to sound like the same old Jesse giving the boys some constructive advice. “You’ve got to look at what happened to Freddy.” And he brought his hand down for emphasis again. He spoke each word slowly. “Really look at it. How’d you like that should be you, or Zak here, or Marty. Huh?” He looked imploringly from one to another, his hard black eyebrows edging upward under a hanging lock of dirty black hair. “The day I start hurtin’ people, that’s it. You know it. I know it. If it was you, you’d feel the same goddamn way. So get the fuck away from me and start lookin’ for another job.”
“Jesse, I know you feel responsible for Fifer. Shit, maybe it is your fault. But you know that sometimes accidents just happen. Nobody’s perfect. You know you’re still the best driller out there, bar none. We need ya. George needs ya. Shit Jesse, I don’t wan
t to work for anyone else.”
Jesse waited. When next he spoke, it was like a father to a young son who doesn’t understand a grown-up hurt. “I’m not going to hurt people, Jonny. The day I start is my last day. I ain’t drillin’ anymore. No goddamn more. That’s it. I might go back after a while and work the floor. Go back to worm’s corner and start over. Sumpthin’. But no more drillin’. A man’s got to know when he can’t get ’er.”
Jon tossed a look over the back of Jesse’s shoulders at Zak for some help, finding it hard to keep coming up with positive ideas. Zak took a stab.
“Christ Jesse, I just think you’re taking this a bit too hard. I mean, I’m a worm, and, well, I suppose I can sit here and think of a dozen times at least in the past few weeks when I could easily have gotten hurt, but, well, Lady Luck’s been with me, that’s the only difference I can see. Hell, I think that if you were to ask Freddy himself he’d be the first to say there’s no hard feelings.”
Jesse listened in silence, then shook his head no.
It was like that time there at the City Bar when Jesse Lancaster and Harper first met. How Jesse would come and go. Drunk out of his mind one minute, crystal sharp the next. He straightened up and looked Zak coldly in the eye.
“Everything you say is true, Zak. Everything. Taking Freddy on was a gamble. There’s no doubt about that. And some men might excuse themselves on those grounds. Some men might be damn glad that company hand and that toolpusher were there when it happened to back him up. Glad that he could point the finger at that toolpusher for stretching the normal bounds of propriety by asking us to do a job that might have gone to the next crew. Another man might say, ‘Well, these things happen,’ but that’s not good enough for Jesse Lancaster, son, and I’ll tell you something, I don’t know where you come from or even if you are who you say you are and I don’t care. I’ve seen the way you come runnin’ when it’s time to pull your fair share and I’ve seen you do work that should rightfully been done by some of the others. You’re a good hand, Zak. That’s why you haven’t been hurt. That and because, know it or not, Jonny here, and myself, Marty, and yes, even Freddy, have all been keeping our eye on you. When you know what I know, when you’re on top of every minuscule event happening on and around the floor of an oil rig, there isn’t a man on that location that you don’t know what he’s doing every minute. You know how long it’s going to take him to do a job and you know if he’s going to fuck it up. Yeah, you know that too. You know when and you know why. And mister, you do something about it beforehand. I learned those things early, the hard way, they are a part of my life. That, to me, is what responsibility is all about. Without it, what’ve I got? There’s no pension waiting for me when I get too old. I have no savings to speak of. All I have is a lifetime of respect, self-respect, damn it. The admiration of good men. Nothing more, nothing less. I made great roughnecks, and I mean great ones, out of the most ordinary hands. What driller on that fuckin’ Bomac rig would have lasted an hour with Freddy Fifer as his chainhand? Zak, I’m just too damn good not to know when I’m goin’ down. I don’t believe that in my shoes you wouldn’t feel exactly like I do.” Jesse was no longer addressing Jon and Zak but was speaking quietly, fluidly, his words barely audible, staring straight ahead, as though explaining himself to God. “I should have known. I’ve said no to George a thousand times. So why, why, why didn’t I get Jon, or Marty? It would have been so natural. To have stayed out on that floor was unthinkable! Worms make mistakes like that. Not me. Not the kind of driller I once was.”
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