“Hey that’s great, then you’ll be a two-car family!” For some reason, that was funny and they all laughed. “Do you drive, Cynthia?” Zak asked innocently enough.
This question startled her more than the slap on the thigh had and immediately Zak wished that he could withdraw it. She blushed deeply and then looked over to Marty for help. Marty, however, always waited an agonizing moment whenever she was on the spot. It was his way of first allowing her a chance to get out of it by herself. It was an unwelcome opportunity. The thoughts came upon her too fast for her to sort through them. There weren’t enough words for them all anyway. And they’re waiting for an answer! No! I can’t drive! Never! Couldn’t! I’d die if I had to! I won’t! Things happen so fast when I try to drive! Isn’t it great that Marty does all the driving? ’Cause he’s my man and he looks after me and he understands that I positively cannot drive! So I don’t HAVE to drive! She stammered and blushed deeper, her eyes darting frantically from Zak to Marty to Jon to Marty and back to Zak. There was no way she could have made such a complicated explanation out loud, especially to men who expect answers that are short and to the point. Just before it would have been cruel to wait any longer, Marty stepped in and said, “She don’t drive.”
Their joyride took them in aimless directions over grassy fields, hills, and wide-open spaces. Marty demonstrated all the extra features, the four-wheel drive, the heavy-duty thises and thats, the dashboard gadgets, the deluxe sound system, and the like, as Jon passed around some fresh warm beers.
“We figured what de hell’s a point in workin’ all the time if all you end up doin’ is fightin’ de got tam elimints. Jonny and I was sayin’ dat in dat Jeep’ve yers yer like an old-time cowboy and his horse. Travelin’ round de country. Livin’ outside. Sleepin’ out on the land at night listenin’ to de coyotes. There aren’t many places you can’t go. Jezebel wadn’t goin’ nowhere.”
“Yeah and the Jeep eliminates many of the hazards of moving about in this kind of terrain. In fact, it turns a major obstacle into something fun. I gotta admit though, there’s a lot more room in here for sleeping,” Zak laughed. “Wanna trade?”
“I don’t know,” Jon said. “I kind of think of a car as my reward for all the work and bullshit I put up with. Leather seats, a big engine, a smooth quiet ride. Something nice to take your mind off all this crap. Maybe a new Toronado. Sure a car like that’ll take a beating out here, but who cares? When she goes down for the count, pony up and get another one. That’s what makes America great, right?”
While Marty and Zak prattled on about the relative differences between choosing a practical vehicle as opposed to a luxurious one, whether having a vehicle that could conquer all the elements a harsh place like the Williston Basin could throw at you wasn’t in itself a luxury, Jon’s thoughts roamed back to his date with Mary Ellen. When she answered the door of her apartment, she shrieked when she saw Jon all clean of face and dressed in military green slacks and a loud Hawaiian shirt. She normally dressed down when bartending, not wanting to give any of the local men the idea they could start trouble, but tonight she wanted just the opposite effect without affecting too startling a change. She decided on her favorite jeans, the really tight ones with the perfect hole in one knee with threads that stretched across and rhinestones up each leg. She had pretty calves and ankles and liked the way her pants came down to the middle of her shin. She wore medium-high white pumps that she reckoned would still only bring the top of her head to Jon’s chin. A white halter top that showed off the tantalizing contour of her breasts with a lace-up front allowing just a peek. Over this, to cool things off and to keep her warm when the sun went down, she threw a baby blue sweater that very nearly matched her eyes. Her hair she parted on the side for a change and clipped it back on one side. She decided on bangs. A touch of gray eye shadow that always gave her eyes that dewy look. As she put on her lipstick, red, it occurred to her that she had never kissed a man with a beard before. She decided upon a thin gold chain with a cross that she considered to be more like an arrow pointing down to where the good stuff was, two plastic bracelets that made a clackety sound when she moved suddenly, dangly brass earrings and a coral ring her mother had given her completed what Jon soon discovered to be a pretty delightful picture.
They drank a beer in her apartment and then left to get some food and take it out to the country and watch the sun go down. He had cleaned the Oldsmobile from top to bottom, but when she stepped inside he was hideously embarrassed. Boot scratches on the dash that he had never noticed before seemed to jump out at her. The carpet was stained and torn under her perfect ankles and those hot white shoes. The lighter was gone, from the time Ogre had drunkenly lit a cig, given the lighter a shake, and then tossed it out the window. He had to pump the brakes every time he slowed the car down making a wheezing sound as he jerked his knee up and down like a spaz. By way of apology, he made nervous jokes about how tough a roughneck was on his ride, and although she clearly didn’t care about his car, he began thinking seriously of taking that little trip down to Williston himself.
After a drive out to Four Buttes, they parked the car on high ground and watched the sunset while sharing sips from a bottle of wine. When he first drank after her he could taste lipstick on the bottle’s rim and its flavor mingled with the wine. As the sun set in her swimming blue eyes, he tried to concoct a sentence without sounding like a stupid come-on, to tell her how pretty she was and how he hadn’t realized, when she interrupted his thoughts to say, “I’m glad you shaved your beard. I didn’t realize you were so handsome. Did you shave it off just for me?”
He thought he would just look away and say no, that he was getting tired of it and had meant to cut it off weeks ago. But when he looked at how different she had made herself from the girl he had come to know at the hotel, and when he thought of how much he was enjoying her company, something inside told him that for once in his life he didn’t have to bullshit. He canceled that last order and he looked her directly in the eyes and said, “Yes.”
“That’s so sweet, thank you. You know I liked your beard, but you’re much better looking without it. Some men grow beards to hide a weak chin or a scar, or simply because they’re shy, but you should never hide such a handsome face.”
He meant to just lean over and kiss her for being so nice to him. He had only wanted one taste more of that delicious wet wine and lipstick. But as he began to pull away, she gently touched his shoulder asking him to linger and their mouths opened deeper. As he drew her close, her arms folded around his neck and her mouth slipped entirely into his and then withdrew and his mouth slipped entirely into hers and he withdrew. His big hands felt deliciously rough against her back. He was astonished at how light and pliable she became in his grip, how dizzy it made him just to feel her pressed against his chest. When they parted, his eyebrows lifted and he smiled with surprise. She took a deep breath and linked an arm through his as naturally as though they had been together for years.
“Wow, Jonny, I’ll have some more of that, please.”
That night when he dropped her off, they kissed again for quite some time in the car in front of her apartment. He cupped a hand over her breast and felt it, its firmness and its shape. He felt her nipple, the size of a quarter, harden in his palm through her halter top. He was embarrassed by his work rough hands and didn’t want to push his luck so he didn’t go any farther, though she ached for him to. She didn’t invite him in and he didn’t ask her permission. They made plans to see each other again just as soon as possible.
As Jon sat there in the Bronco reliving every sight and smell from the night before, Zak was thinking about the winter. Until this moment it had seemed a long way off. But now he remembered seeing the local townsfolk scurrying about in the past week or so with loads of firewood, snowmobiles on car-drawn flatbeds being taken in for servicing. He had noticed plows being attached to the front of pickup trucks in people’s driveways and garages. Local kids had put dow
n their lacrosse sticks and were playing street hockey. It was coming closer every day.
“Speaking of winter,” he said without thinking, “how bad is it going to get?”
“Oh,” Marty cocked an eye at the others, “’bout de same as Sout Dakota.”
WITHOUT THE TOWER FOR A landmark it was difficult to say over which hill the location was. No one had paid any attention, of course, to the crazy zigzag direction Marty had taken off in when they first headed out. There was nothing manmade for miles around, and so Marty had just opened ’er up. They four-wheeled over one steep rise after another taking each like a dinghy taking the waves out on the open sea, except that now they were in need of a rescue party.
“Does anybody here know exactly where we are?” Zak changed the subject.
“Yahwhooooooo!” Marty bellowed, for at that moment they surprised a bunch of cows grazing on a steep declivity. “Yeeehaw!” he hollered again as the animals scattered in all directions.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Cynthia cried. “You’re scaring them!” Marty just howled the more and pulled the vehicle to the outside of the herd and, reaching under the dash, grabbed the CB mike, and flipping a switch on the dash he brought the mike to his lips.
“Moooaaah!” could be heard booming through a concealed loudspeaker outside on the roof.
“Ahhhmooooooo!” he bellowed again. Marty then wheeled the Bronco in a semicircular orbit around the herd, gradually slowing to a much less frenzied pace. In another moment, the cows collected themselves in a fast but easy gallop alongside of them. Cynthia’s alarm dissolved into a childlike glee and she rolled her window all the way down, put her hands on the sill, and rested her chin there. Zak found himself sitting there in the back momentarily charmed by the fluidity of her emotions, and tried not to think that if they had hit one of these beasts, they would all be in pretty bad shape right now.
“Okay team, this has been real, but let’s get’m back to location and see what’s up,” Jon said.
“Dat’s what I bin tryin’ t’do for de past half an hour!”
“I was afraid of that,” Zak chimed in.
Marty brought the Bronco to a stop, and they climbed a nearby hill and looked in all directions. The prairie wind whipped their faces and lifted hair from under collars.
“Over dere,” Marty pointed, and when they squinted into the distance they could barely make out a cloud of dust.
BACK AT LOCATION, THINGS WERE beginning to heat up in a big way. George was just pulling up with his toolpusher’s trailer in tow. Carl and that Cowboy Crew were right behind him. Rory’s boys were behind them, including the mammoth derrickhand Zak had observed in action his first day out.
George cursed out loud as he stepped down. “Shit! No Jesse.”
George was all bent out of shape, mostly at himself. Having to pamper that Cowboy Crew through every phase of their duties had become a silent irritation and a constant distraction. And now George had neglected to hire a backhoe to dig the drainage ditches that run three-quarters of the way around the rig. So he blamed that Cowboy Crew for his current negligence. Rory was right. He should run them bastards off, but how? Who would replace them? And how was he going to keep a fight from breaking out and his good people from twisting off?
But maybe there was a blessing in all of this after all. George smiled. With an endless procession of semis and gin trucks on their way and due to arrive at any moment, time was of the essence. He yanked a tape measure from his pocket and paced around the imaginary rig, marking with his boot where he wanted those drainage ditches dug. He then assembled his drillers, Carl, Rory, and Marty subbing for Jesse, and told them that every available hand was to grab a shovel and break dirt! That included the Parker Brothers, who arrived on the heels of Rory’s men.
The Parker Brothers were the swing crew on Bomac 34 taking the towers of the men on days off. Zak hadn’t seen much of these guys and they were largely a mystery to him. Once a week they relieved him and once a week he relieved them. He knew only that they were called the Parker Brothers because that’s what they were, brothers. All but one that is, and it was easy to tell the odd man out because he was dark and the rest were fair. One of their crew was a most unlikely roughneck. He was very young with a slight build, a baby face, and large quiet eyes. He stayed back from the others and followed their lead as shovels were passed around and everyone took to digging. As time went on, Zak kept his eye on the kid and noted that he had to dig twice as hard and twice as fast to just keep pace with his older, bigger brothers, and everyone else for that matter, who were making an effort to be sure but not pushing it to the limit the way he had to. To test this theory, Zak decided to try digging just as hard as the small guy was. To use the same amount of energy he appeared to be using, just to see how it felt.
He dug like a madman! He drove his shovel mercilessly into the ground again and again, keeping his eyes down and concentrating on his work. His progress was incredible. He made the walls in his part of the ditch even and smooth. He made the floor level and flat. He charged along, thinking all the while about that young man’s lot in life. Having to take things the hard way because he was small. Things that came so much easier to the others. Things they took for granted. He thought of how oblivious the others were to his plight. Perhaps Zak was trying, in his way, to make the statement that you could choose to do something the hard way just-for-doing-its sake. His thoughts rolled over and over. Either way he looked at it there was a stiff, irrefutable problem here. The small guy worked harder than the rest so that they could never say he didn’t pull his fair share or that he couldn’t get ’er. But if everyone employed the same relative amount of energy the smaller guy did, then he would still be faced with the same problem, getting half as much accomplished as the rest. Working harder than the rest, Zak made more progress than anyone and working as hard as the smaller guy, he made twice as much progress. There was no leveling ideology. Zak began to feel that attempting to match the effort and stamina in that young man with a certain ferocity of his own was rather like trying to find east by going west. But he could try. He could also kill himself, he thought, and stopped for a second to catch his breath and let his heart ease up a bit. When he looked up, he saw that Jon had moved way ahead to give him room. That Jon was looking at him with a strange expression on his face that was somewhere between humor and contempt.
At last Jon stopped and said, “Zak, the canal is in Panama, this is a drainage ditch that we’re digging because Rusty is too stupid or too cheap to hire a backhoe!”
Zak looked down the line the other way. Marty had reacted to Zak’s quiet explosion of energy with an explosion of his own, figuring that a drainage ditch was as good a place as any to just get it. He paused for a half second and looked up at Zak with a wild half-crazed bedlamite grimace and screamed, “Whadd’re ya stoppin’ for?!” and flung himself back into digging with a vengeance. Jon shook his head; they were both nuts.
Soon those Getter and Black Hills trucks could be heard in the distance rumbling toward location and, like his Sioux predecessors, Zak wanted to put his ear to the ground and gauge the size of the herd. Maybe he would have been able to tell also that there was a small contingent of gin trucks intermingled with them. As the parade started to arrive, George began pulling roughnecks, one by one, out of the trenches and farmed them out around location until that Cowboy Crew were the only ones left digging.
And George Cleaver smiled.
Zak was one of the first hands selected, and he was hired out to ride as a swamper on a gin truck. This was a modified half-tractor with a derrick and a pulley in the back. Zak considered it a lucky break because he would be out of everybody’s way and wouldn’t have four different drillers telling him what to do.
It was then that the Getter toolpusher arrived to take command of operations and the assemblage of a massive oil rig was under way.
That Getter toolpusher wasted no time
setting everyone in motion. He directed traffic with a CB radio, barking orders to semis and gin trucks alike. Coordinating efforts while at the same time organizing through George and the four drillers at his disposal the teams of men that would be sent from one task to another.
Using the hoists on the gin trucks, two huge wooden mats were lifted from their beds on the semis and set in place on the big square patch of level ground. After the mats were set down there came the subs. Zak was thinking that when in doubt what to call a piece, call it a sub. These subs consisted of two genuinely enormous ironworks to be set parallel to one another on the mats making up two sides of the rig’s infrastructure. One faced the mud pits; the other was attached to the top doghouse.
By now the parade was in full swing, as one after another the flatbeds arrived. Semi-orderly commotion, hustle, and bustle that kicked up a cloud of dust rising from the trampled path in a vermicular weave that snaked through the grass country as far as the eye could see.
George, meanwhile, was running from one side of the slowly formatting rig to the other, his tape measure ever present, frantically trying to keep things in their proper geometric perspective, and succeeding admirably. The pump houses had to be assembled on the ground exactly where the belts would stretch down from the engines on the as-yet-imaginary floor overhead. The subs also had to be equidistant from the hole in the center. There could be no mistakes. The catwalks were assembled and the beaver slide unloaded and moved into place. As the afternoon wore on into early evening, the pace remained constant and unremitting. There was only enough time to do the job. No breaks.
All the while that Cowboy Crew kept digging those ditches, and slowly the message began to sink in that if any water needed boiling they’d get hired out to do that too.
It was in the midst of all this frantic activity that the flow of traffic was interrupted for a brief moment by a small trailer being pulled by a Mercury Marquis which separated from the parade pulling discreetly up alongside the toolpusher’s trailer on the away side to the rig.
Roughnecks Page 24