Roughnecks

by James J. Patterson

  Just getting from the Airstream to Marty’s Bronco was hard to endure. Then from the Bronco into the bottom doghouse, then back outside and up those stairs, took a herculean effort. And those four-hundred-degree blasting furnaces only ensured they wouldn’t die on the job.

  Seventy below, someone said of the wind chill. No one wanted to hear it. With only the eyeballs and nostrils exposed, Zak could feel the sweat under his arms and in his crotch growing ice pellets on his flesh as he worked.

  As the weeks wore on, it began to dawn on the roughnecks in the City Park that there might not be any but the one Tiger rig coming their way after all. Sure, there was plenty of work with other wildcatters in the area, but Tiger was the rig of choice, the carrot everyone wanted at the end of the stick, with its big new iron and high wages. The excitement and happy rumors had stopped. As a consequence, the population of the camp began to dwindle.

  Day after day, night after night, Zak began to feel that the earth had slipped out of orbit, that it was turning and twirling so slowly, so randomly, dropping away from the sun. He thought that Gaia had lost her sense of purpose, was drifting aimlessly through space, that she no longer cared, that she had willfully fallen out of sequence and communion with the other planets. That she was twisting off.

  At seven a.m. when he got off work, it was still dark. Night-time arrived, impatiently, in the late afternoon. The night sky was so black and hostile and cold it wasn’t hard to imagine that one of these rigs could actually puncture the heart of the world, and bleed her to death.

  The cold can do strange things to a man.

  IT WAS MID-FEBRUARY, THE WIND it was howlin’ and the snow was outrageous, as the old song went, and as Marty and the boys were beating a path in the dark down rig road, Marty suddenly stopped the Bronco.

  The rig was gone.

  “Did you take a wrong turn?” OK asked. They all craned their necks in every direction, but the lights, the sound, weren’t there, nothing!

  Marty crept forward.

  “De path in de snow is fresh,” he said.

  When they rounded a bend at the top of a small incline, his headlights picked up the rig in the distance, dark and silent as a tomb.

  “Omigod,” Tommy said quietly.

  “Dere’s deth here,” Marty said just as quiet.

  “Gas?” Zak thought out loud.

  “Can’t be sure,” Jon answered.

  They crept forward.

  The giant rig looked like a huge ship sitting peacefully on the bottom of the ocean. They could hear the wind whistle through the girders.

  “Dere’s cars still here,” Marty observed as they got close.

  “Look!” Zak pointed up to the floor where flickering flashlights were whipping about.

  “Well, it ain’t gas!” Tommy said.

  The five roughnecks leapt out of the Bronco and ran through the blistering cold to the bottom doghouse door and used their cigarette lighters to find their way in the dark.

  They got dressed in shivering silence, firing their lighters every couple of seconds to see what they were doing.

  “Marty, what the fuck is going on up there?” Zak asked as he hauled on his thermal overalls.

  “Doze engines are all down, dat’s alls I know! But I have a good idea.”

  They tumbled out of the doghouse door and made tracks to the stairs. They found a roughneck sitting on the bottom steps, not moving. Marty gave him a shake, he groaned.

  “Grab dis guy and carry him up!” Marty gave the command. “He’ll freeze to deth down here if we don’t!”

  It was Billy Knott, Rory’s old motorman from Bomac 34, working on Archer Hansom’s crew, who greeted them inside the doghouse.

  “The diesel fuel has jelled and the engines are dead. The boys are out there trying to bleed the lines right now!”

  “Fuck dat!” Marty said as he pulled his crescent wrench from his back pocket. “Wellm’n, Jonny, Billy, come witt me, Zak stay close, we’ll need dose strong arms.” And Marty grabbed a roll of duct tape as they marched out the door.

  There were six or seven roughnecks all holding flashlights for the men crouched down dealing with those clogged fuel lines, and Marty said “Gimme three flashlights and tape’m together and make me a torch. You guys keep doin’ what yer doin’!”

  Marty hobbled past that big number one Cat, past the boys trying desperately to bleed the lines, and down a short flight of stairs to another motor house on its own skid just behind and below. They burst inside. Marty grabbed the new torch and, after a quick look around, said, “Dere it is!” and grabbed a thirty-pound iron bar with points at the end. He looked around again and found its extension and quickly fitted them together. He stood by the engine.

  “Okay, we gotta do dis or we all gonna die in here! Listen! Dis is de rig’s second trottle. Number one trottle is up at driller’s station. We gonna start diss back up like an old Model T, by crankin’ it with all the torque we can get. Dis ten feet of pipe will give us what we need, but it’s gonna take a bunch a tries. We gonna use Jesse’s system! To stay strong we get two guys try and crank it, after dey try two or tree times den two more guys tap’m on de back and take obber, diss is gonna work but we don’t have long! Ready?”

  “Yeah!”

  Marty jammed that cheater bar into its rightful spot, then told OK and Jon to grab that bar as he went and manned the starter.

  “Now!” Marty screamed, and the two men gave it everything. It moved­, but not much.

  “We gotta hear it click! Again!” They hit it again. Nothing. After two more times, Zak and Billy took a turn, then Tommy and Jon, then OK and Zak. A little panic was setting in and the boys got mad, and when they got mad the adrenaline gave them extra strength. Jon and Billy took over, and as soon as Marty heard that life-saving click, he hit the starter, hit the gas, the engine roared then died, and the torque kicked back, sending Jon and Billy flying!

  Zak aimed the flashlight, and OK and Zak found the cheater bar, put it back in, and the two roughnecks cranked that son of a bitch with all their might.

  Click!

  Starter! Throttle! Boom! That big engine growled, then sputtered, then caught, and roared back to life!

  The boys up on the floor cheered.

  Diesel went pumping through those freshly bled lines and Tiger Mike rig number one thundered out in the black frozen prairie night. Soon the lights were back, and heat was pouring out onto the floor and into the doghouses.

  It was Archer’s crew they were there to relieve, and Archer was exhausted.

  “The rig shut down in stages and we couldn’t tell what the hell it was,” he said over smokes in the top doghouse after he and Marty worked together to get ’er turning to the right again, circulating to maintain the hole.

  “That was some Indian trick, Marty,” Jon said with admiration.

  “I nebber seen diesel fuel gel like dat before. But I heard about it,” Marty said.

  “I didn’t think it was possible,” Zak said.

  “Normbally it ain’t,” Marty said. “But, well, you seen anyting resemblin’ normbal out here, Zakko?”

  Zachary Harper just shook his head.

  “You never know in the oil patch,” smiled OK Wellman.

  Marty led his men back out onto the floor and the roughnecks took their stations.

  And the cold, and the night, and the tower continued.

  One Year Later

  Epilogue

  What was it Skidder MacIntyre had said? Something like, Save up your pay and when that brutal Dakota/Montana winter hits, head’m on down to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and stake out a place to burrow in for the season. Zak thought he might even have seen good old Skiddy thunder past him on the highway riding one of those newfangled Harley-Davidsons, the one everybody loved to hate, with a belt drive instead of a chain. I bet old Skidder got it for
nothin’, he chuckled to himself.

  William Zachary Harper settled onto a barstool at the Calliope Saloon and surveyed the bottles on the top shelf. Irish whiskey. Good Irish whiskey. Damn. He ordered a glass, neat.

  The ride down from oil patch country had been pleasant, but for the cast on his left foot where Tommy Tomlinson had dropped a collar sub that busted the steel toe out of his boot, cracked the bone in the top of his foot, and broke his big toe. Boy it hurt. He shuddered to imagine young Marty, tucking those broken toes under the rest and pulling on those socks and shoes. Zak had made it through the rest of the round trip though, before twisting off for the season.

  Once in Steamboat, he had found a group house full of bartenders and other food-service types, ski slope operators. He bought himself some new clothes. The guys back at the house even told him they could find work for him. He said he would wait until he got his cast off, but really, he just wanted to rest, to think, to crawl back into his own skin, to be left alone, to think on his next move.

  The whiskey didn’t burn much after the first couple of sips, and warmed his blood. All around him sat tourists, city types, locals, and a few cowboys. Skidder had been right, it was a pretty cool spot. Everyone was laid back, not too showy, not as many stuck-ups here as you might find in the more resort-like towns built only for millionaires and their wealthy brats.

  A year or more after starting out, good old Skidder had himself quite a business, four trucks and ten guys scouring the region emanating from Watford. Yes, he and Josh Corban made quite a team. Josh let Skidder do his thing, and he said Skiddy saved his business.

  Tiger Mike Davis went broke, and sold that big beautiful rig right out from under everyone for scrap metal, just when they had all the kinks ironed, hammered, and welded out of ’er.

  Freddy Fifer shot himself through the heart with a Colt .45 long-barrel revolver. It was a classic. They called it the “peacemaker.” It was the gun that won the West.

  Before leaving the patch, Zak and Marty stood witness to the marriage of Jonathan T. Sandlak and the lovely Mary Ellen Swayzee, with OK Wellman, minister by mail of the Universal Church of Man, presiding.

  As William Zachary Harper sat at the Calliope Bar, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, lost in reflection, odd familiar voices broke in.

  “Oh Cy, those people at the Bison Gallery loved your work! I’m so happy for you!” a tall, blue-eyed blonde said enthusiastically as the two entered the restaurant bar. The other person was an even taller, handsome man who held her gently by the arm as they kicked the snow off their boots and removed their gloves, their cheeks rosy with the sun and the wet and the cold.

  Zak froze in his seat.

  Samantha Pennington, or Penny as she liked to be called, and Charles Winston Young, or Cy, also known as The Mad Painter, took barstools just a few seats down from where Zachary Harper was sitting and ordered Irish coffees.

  “Well,” Cy rubbed some snowflakes out of his hair. “We never found Willy, but at least I got a gallery showing out of this trip.”

  Zak had had a small media company on the side along with his banking job in his pre-roughnecking days, and these two were daily fixtures in his Georgetown rowhouse. Penny, among others, even rented rooms from him for a while. What would he say when they saw him? They had been such great and close friends. How could he even open his mouth to begin to tell them who he was, what he had become?

  “Oh Cy, I can’t believe I dragged you all the way out here for this. I’m so sorry. Thank God for the Bison Gallery!”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, Penny, it was kind of a fools’ errand, I’ll admit, thinking we could just drive out here, walk into a bar, and expect someone to just say, oh here he is. But hey, Penny, stranger things have happened.”

  “Oh I know. But I was so sure. Gillette gave me the creeps, and Williston? It was like slipping back in time.”

  “Well, hey, we got to see Devil’s Tower, Mt. Rushmore, I thought Rapid City was the real deal.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But damn, I was so sure,” she sighed.

  The lump in Zak’s throat was growing with each familiar inflection in their voices. He wanted to leap out of his seat, scream, Here I am! You won’t believe where I’ve been! But then what would he say?

  They finished their drinks and paid up. As they got off their barstools and zipped up their brightly colored down jackets, Zak took a chance and briefly looked them both in the eye. Penny smiled. He smiled. Cy gave him a friendly nod, and then they turned and walked out the door.

  In the mirror behind the bar, William Zachary Harper saw a man with longish salt and pepper hair, wearing a bandana and horn-rimmed glasses, with weathered skin, and a bit of a beard.

  They smiled at one another.

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of Roughnecks took place over a thirty-three-year span. In the course of all that time there have been scores of readers, editors, researchers, roughnecks from all walks of life, storytellers, doctors, park rangers, wildcatters, and many more very dear and patient friends; people whose largest contribution was simple encouragement, which, at times, you must know, is the greatest contribution of all.

  Here are but a few:

  Rose Solari, Joanna Biggar, Lisa Grey, Ken Butcher, John Freeburn, William Lawrence, Coleman Brewer, George Sterling, Kelly and Janice Kulseth, Darrel Fortner, Ted Husted, the forest rangers at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, James E. Fox of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, J. B. Hoffman, Alan Sonneman, Nita Congress, Steve Caporaletti, Loraine Vahey, Vincent S. Dicks, Robert E. Kibler, Russ Hanson, ShaunAnne Tangney, Mary Von Drehle, Ron Baker, John F. Patterson, Richard Peabody, Miles David Moore, Doug Hale, Murray Freeburn, Zachary Patterson, Patty Hankins, Joe and Betty Tate, the Watford City Chamber of Commerce, Steven Waxman, Randy Stanard, and Ron Kidd.

  An excerpt of Roughnecks appeared in Gargoyle 58.