When the music started they were still almost two seconds apart, which only whipped everyone into an even more berserker frenzy, one music system echoing the other. Soon there was a pile of cassettes in a box with people rummaging through them searching for duplicates. They roasted piles of sausage, fowl of many different varieties, and a whole deer, with some of the men from Fort Berthold hanging around to help out and enjoy the party.
Just as things were getting under way, Zak took the opportunity to pass the hard hat and collect enough for Bowles and even some more for the Parks and Recreation Department.
At one point, members of the executive roughneck committee of due diligence were standing several paces removed from the action when Scotty Becker strolled up and joined them.
“This is starting to take on a life of its own,” he said, as everyone danced, and drank, and howled. There were a couple of fights.
Freddy, meanwhile, all hopped up on booze and painkillers, took a spill. A bunch of fellas picked him up and hauled him back to his trailer, and put him on his bunkbed where he pissed himself and passed out. They left him to sleep it off.
Meanwhile, roughnecks had formed a giant circle and took turns dancing drunkenly into the open space, each doing his own hilarious roughneck boogie. Zak even took a turn doing a Mr. Natural truckin’ swayback stuttering two-step from one side of the ring to the other.
“Some of the town folk have called the police,” Scotty quipped as he and the boys sipped their beers and enjoyed the show. “Our one cop is over in Killdeer having his supper, he called me. Said I should call him back if we really need him. I suppose he could drive over when he’s through and throw all you boys in a jail we don’t have. I’m sure you’re breaking a couple of hundred ordinances no one’s bothered to look up before,” he said as someone handed him a joint. “The church ladies want the National Guard called out,” he laughed. “I wonder when they’ll show up?”
“They better bring their own beer,” Skidder replied.
“Not to worry, Scotty,” Archer said, one long arm draped about Scotty’s neck. “By supper time tomorrow you’ll never know any of this ever happened.”
The last time Zak saw Scotty Becker that night, he was dancing a drunken can-can with several other roughnecks in the center of the circle. Their arms over each other’s shoulders, they turned left and kicked, then right and kicked, horribly out of sync with one another, kicking each other in the ass, in the shins. At this point, Smoke Denton cannonballed into the chorus line, knocking them all down like bowling pins. An enormous rumbling wrestling match ensued. As the body pile moved about the circle, Skidder pointed with a beer and a cig in the same hand and said, “Them’s the Dallas Cowpies!”
By two p.m. the next day, those roughnecks had their little camp cleaned up like nothing ever happened.
TIGER MIKE DRILLING RIG NUMBER one was east of town. Turning north at Johnson’s Corner, past the Four Bears Lodge on the Fort Berthold Reservation, then over the Missouri River Bridge, seven miles down the first dirt road on the right after the bridge, then a left where the road ended, then three more miles and bearing right for another four miles, until they found an old abandoned farm. Up that road another couple of miles, there it was.
Jon Sandlak had been right. That new iron on Tiger Mike was raw, and rather than the usual two or three days to nipple up, it took three grueling weeks. The challenge, of course, was to get all the pieces to fit just right. They had to cut a hole here, refit a piece of pipe there, readjust a drop hole, and reroute the entire water system around. The wiring had to be invented almost from scratch.
Zak found it tremendously exciting to piece a giant rig together that had never drilled a hole. No one really knew how to put it together. Every rig, after all, has its own way to take it apart and put it back together. The way those two doghouses line up, for example. Until you try you don’t know for sure if you do this one first, or the mud house, then you realize you forgot to prop up the canteen. All the while those gin trucks keep unloading new pieces of the puzzle.
Jesse knew Bomac inside and out, could do it in his sleep. But no one knew this rig, and no one would know if they had got ’er right until they fired ’er up and gave ’er a go.
It was Marty’s crew now, with Jon working motors, Zak throwing chain, Tomlinson at worm’s corner, and OK as derrickhand. The bottom line in the oil patch is that everyone wants to make as much money as they possibly can. So those crews on Tiger were the envy of everyone because Tiger Mike paid more than anyone else.
OK Wellman really excelled. He could handle a cutting torch and a welding machine, and could get any engine to start, skills that really came in handy. He had learned all that stuff farming as a teenager. Zak didn’t even know where the dipstick was on those big diesels. He was a fast learner, though, and didn’t need to be shown more than once what went where. But this was the rig of rigs. It was new and it was huge and clean and packed with power. Two giant Caterpillar engines, the biggest anyone had yet to see, which didn’t leak twenty gallons of oil a day, as those Superiors did on Bomac 34. It sang and growled and purred sweet screaming loud music to roughneck ears.
On top of it all, everything wanted to freeze, and freeze hard. So they spent their time welding and hammering, cursing and filing, and after each tower the boys were dead on their feet.
The rig also had giant heaters capable of blasting four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It was enough for now.
Once they spudded-in and those elevators swept upwards into the tower, they would glide back down already coated with hard thick ice, and the boys had to grab their blowtorches—six-foot propane wands that they kept running all the time—to blow the ice away long enough to get ’er done, each and every time.
A couple of weeks after the Ruff Neck Jam Bo Ree, those Indians returned, and soon there were several roughnecks trodding through the ever-falling snow wrapped in heavy deerskin or elkskin hides, noshing on pemmican, which everyone called jerky. A padlocked box behind many a trailer was full of naturally frozen meats of many kinds. Archer and Skidder lined the inside of Baby Blue with pelts. OK and Zak used them on their beds and wore them about their shoulders, lined the walls, and lay them on the floors.
It was about then that Mary Ellen dropped in to bring Freddy a tub of soup she had made. She found him in shocking condition. The trailer stank of rotten flesh. Freddy was half out cold, stupid with painkillers and booze, with what looked like puss oozing out of his cast near his toes. When the docs came, they whisked him off to Williston, and as Zak and OK helped load him into the ambulance, the doc explained.
“He must have reinjured the leg and not known it, or decided not to do anything about it. The leg wanted to swell up in that cast and got badly infected. It seems like he might have, well, urinated or something. I can tell you though, they’ll have to take the leg to save his life. He owes you one, little lady,” he said, turning to Mary Ellen, who was in tears.
AND THEN IT TURNED REALLY cold.
Along about Thanksgiving, Rory and Hale Parker and the last of the old Bomac 34 crews pulled into camp, having TD’d, or touched down at last. They had a present for their old pals. Bomac had given everyone a turkey for the holiday. They must have had thirty of them in the back of Rory’s pickup. Zak and OK took a half dozen to work, and all they had to do was set them in the open mouth of those giant four-hundred-degree heaters and those birds cooked up just fine. They ate them with their hands.
Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, six of the region’s roughnecks were killed on the job. Two more got drunk, got lost in the mazelike labyrinths, where everything was snowy white and all landmarks were obliterated by the snow. They passed out and froze to death in their trucks. There were a hundred and ten serious injuries.
One roughneck at another location got caught up in the chain and the drawworks tore him in half.
On another rig, a driller crowned out.
That kelly flew up to the top of the rig, hit the top so hard it busted free, and on the way down knocked the derrickhand from his perch, sending him a hundred and fifty feet to his death. Then the kelly, the blocks, the elevators, and the whole shebang crashed down to the floor and squashed big Danny Waller like a bug. They said he stood there watching it come down and just couldn’t move.
“I guess that driller was feelin’ ‘quite rammy’ that day,” Skidder sighed when he heard the news.
A lot of guys had at least a touch of frostbite. OK, working up in the derricks exposed as he was, had it on the tip of his nose, a couple of his fingers, a couple of toes, and one of his ears.
“Jesus, that wind is evil as sin. You know up there the tower; she just sways. Doesn’t look like it from down below but up there in that tower you can really feel it, how she sways. It’s like you’re a flea atop a giant flagpole.”
“Ya,” Marty sympathized, “it’s like you gotta get your tower legs. Den when you get back down, you can still feel ’er swayin’ when yer standin’ still!”
As it got colder and colder, Zak and OK kept a big white paint bucket in the Airstream for middle-of-the-night pissing. They would use it, then open the back door, and toss it out. A yellow ice splash formed each night, but was soon hidden under the next layer of snow.
Across the way in Baby Blue, Archer and Skidder just cracked the front door long enough to relieve themselves through the opening. Consequently, there grew an enormous yellow mound of ice just to the left outside the door. It was waist high by Christmas. The inside of their camper looked like a caveman’s dwelling. Archer had taken to painting elaborate little stick figures on the deerskin; here one throwing chain, there one falling from a tower. Each time he heard of another casualty, it went up on the wall.
Skidder and Josh Corban, his boss, rented a tiny warehouse space west of town for shipping and receiving. They hired Jesse Lancaster to man the phone and keep the heaters blasting. It became a roughneck refugee parlor from the cold. There was one rule only—no beer—but Jesse had his ever-present Black Velvet handy under his desk for keeping his coffee the way he liked it.
At the Sagebrush between towers, OK and a new guy, Cowboy Bob, had a regular table. Bob had been chief ramrod at the Campbell Soup Ranch down in Wyoming, the largest ranch in the state, or so he said. Bob had been riding the range on horseback all his life and had lost his pickup in a poker game. Guys remembered seeing him hitchhiking into Watford City with a saddle over his shoulder and a duffel bag under his arm. And now, even in the harsh winter, he would ride out into the snow checking on and servicing cricket wells. Religion and politics were all he cared about. Most steered clear of them both. Zak couldn’t get enough. “The Cowboy Preacher,” they called him.
“Look,” OK would say under his breath to any newcomers to their round table, “If ol’ Bob asks you if you ever heard of a feller named Rosmini, or the constitution of social justice, do us all a favor, and just say sure, and get up and go have yourself a trip to the bar.”
“Enjoy the boom while it lasts,” Bob would snicker when he had a few belts in him. “Down in Florida, President Carter has a test program where the government will write off a hundred percent of your costs switching to solar power, and they have a ninety-eight-percent success ratio of people asked to participate. Yes sir, your days are numbered in the oil patch, boys!”
The snow fell, and then it fell some more. The constant white was blinding. Wind chill was reaching twenty below and still sinking.
On Tiger they were working twelve and twenty-four. Marty was drillin’ for Zak’s crew, Archer had another, and Blackie had his. Twelve hours on and twenty-four off, and although it made more sense as the commute was becoming a genuinely life-threatening pain in the ass, it was also turning the men into zombies. Getting to work at seven p.m., off at seven a.m., then back at seven a.m. and off at seven p.m., the day/night schedule had some just dizzy and confused, and cranky as hell.
Tiger number one was the rig of rigs and on that first hole they went down 12,411 feet. Adam Nossiter over at the mayor’s office said it might be the deepest well ever dug in North Dakota.
THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ZAK had just awoken from a nap. OK had been spending a lot of his off hours over in Arnegard with Julie and her mom, so Zak blissfully had Big Red to himself a lot of the time. As he stepped out of the Airstream with a mind to hit the Sagebrush for a bowl of chilli, he could hear the low rumble of a GM motor with a bad exhaust pipe. And there coming toward him down camp road in the snow was a big old 1967 deep purple Cadillac Eldorado that had seen better days.
The car came skidding to a stop right in front of him and from inside he could hear a female voice shrieking, “There he is!”
The door flew open and out leapt Jacqueline Loraine.
“Zachary Harper! You big beautiful bastard! There you are! I can’t believe I found you!” she shouted with triumph, and flung herself into his arms and laid a kiss on him that was cold, wet, and sweet as corn.
Before he could speak she introduced her companion plump, adorably bedimpled gal pal, Erica Simpson.
Astonished, Zak invited them into the trailer. As they warmed up, they explained that they’d decided to spend at least part of Christmas break roaming around roughneck land looking for him. Their first stop had been the Sagebrush Bar and they were directed straight here!
“I kinda figured from your postcards that this would be the first place to look and if you were around someone would know where you were.”
It was just a few moments before Archer Hansom, alerted by his nose for adventure, tapped on the door. When he saw Zak’s company, his face brightened, “Well hello there!”
“Let’s get some chilli!” Zak suggested and the four of them trooped off toward the bar. When Jacqueline took Zak’s hand, Archer took Erica’s.
After a quick bite and a round of delirious conversation and several beers, Zak and Jackie left Archer and Erica at the bar, and he gave Jackie the cook’s tour of Watford City.
Of course she got straight As that semester, had written an anthropological paper on the people who worked the road crew with her that previous summer, which had gotten published in some rag that publishes that stuff, and had pinned his postcards to the wall over her homework bench, and talked herself out of breath getting him caught up.
When they passed an eyeglass store, she pulled him inside.
“Really, you must do something about these poor crooked frames,” she mothered him, just a little. The saleswoman recommended FDA-approved safety glasses. They had thick black frames and were just ugly as hell. “We call those ‘birth control’ frames,” she winked at Jackie as Zak tried them on. He ordered a pair of those for work, as well as a pair of brown square durable Z87s that weren’t quite as ugly, then a pair of horn rims that actually looked good on him.
He explained that he had to be up for work at five thirty the next morning, so he had to turn in around eight or nine p.m. at the latest. They were back in the trailer by five, and rolled around in deerskin blankets on and off all night, talking, playing, laughing, and loving. Since Zak and Archer were working opposite shifts, it must have been eight or so in the morning when they heard Archer and Erica creep in and take OK’s bed in the back, but Jackie and Zak barely noticed them, giggling like schoolkids under the skins.
The next eight days went by in a dream. Twenty-four hours between work towers gave them a few hours each day to talk and get to know one another. They hung out at the PDQ Club with OK and Julie and Lottie, and palled around a bit with Archer and Erica.
At one point Zak and Archer heard Erica say into Jackie’s ear, “You were right! This place is just crawling with nothing but great guys!” The girls were treated like celebrities, and were flirted with outrageously.
Skidder plopped himself down in their midst. “Hey Jackie,” Skidder asked with that wild good t’go twinkle in his e
yes, “Do you know why Zakko there loves it so much here in the patch?”
“Why, Skiddy?”
“Because dope comes in five-gallon buckets, joints are thirty feet long, and there’s a pusher on every rig!”
The boys groaned.
They ate fried chicken, liver and onions, and burgers at the Burger Ranch. Zak even made Jackie one his patented sandwiches for which he was becoming a bit of a legend: cheese, peanut butter, jelly, relish, A.1. sauce, baloney and, because she was special, he added a dash of Heinz 57.
“What in the world do you call this?” she asked, afraid to take that first bite.
“Condiment Surprise!” he smiled.
And just like everyone else, she loved it.
On days off Zak and Jackie drove Tatonka over to Minot to get away from everyone and be truly alone together, if only for a day and a night. They stayed at the cozy Riverside Lodge, heard some music at the Covered Wagon, and ate at the Dutch Mill. They told everyone they were married and that their rings had got lost in the mail.
When Jackie and Erica drove away, off to see the Crazy Horse Memorial going up near Mt. Rushmore, in the snow, Archer and Zak stood there in the morning gloom, and Archer Hansom turned to Zachary Harper and asked, “How did you meet her again?”
“None of your business,” replied Zachary Harper.
But that night, the pitch black enveloped him and the wicked cold returned, and as he went through the motions out on the rig, even with, as Jesse used to say, that chain a-crackin’ and those tongs a-breakin’, the absence he felt brought him some of the longest and loneliest moments he had known in quite some time.
I want to see what she sees, I want her to see what I see, he thought. And the beat went on.
DAYLIGHTS TOWERS WERE PUNISHING, BUT the night towers were truly a struggle for survival.
Roughnecks Page 41