by Rick Bass
Beneath those hills and hollows was the true basin, where the Gulf of Mexico had once come inland. White-sand beaches, and great toothy dinosaur-fish roiling just offshore. In this place, mankind was still several hundred million years distant, as if the table had been set, but then someone had stepped away and forgotten us.
In Utah, Brother Janssen had told us hell was nothing but an estrangement from God, an acknowledgment of what some, he said, thought of as a curse—the innate, inescapable, and beautiful loneliness of man—but his sermons were often puzzling to the point of apostasy.
The man I worked for, Homer Young, lived in a mansion. He had personal chefs, a private jet, multiple homes, a limousine. Money poured through him like water through a weir. Some men are hungry for power or experience, but his ravening was solely for money; and for that, I pitied him his captivity.
For a long time, we were the only ones working the Black Warrior. It was all ours, and we fell upon it with a hunger. Rigs were cheap back then, and it took only a week to reach total depth.
The wells were rarely big producers, but if you drilled enough of them, you could make a living. In this regard it was impossible to go backward: there was only accumulation, and the shining example of our old silver-haired boss, who spoke to us only of oil, never anything else.
Sometimes we found natural gas instead, which back then was useless. When this happened, we flared it, burning off the gas cap to get to the meniscus of oil that rested below. All throughout the Alabama backwoods, the flames from such wells danced, ascending thirty, forty feet, hissing and roaring, as if our shafts had been sunk to the center of the earth, and the center of the earth was fire.
The oil was what we were after. But it is a mistake of the ages, thinking some things are sweet, while others are waste. Brother Janssen had said everything in the God-made world has value, that there is no waste or loss other than that which we choose not to celebrate. That the only real ruin lies in our inability to fully engage, in every incandescent moment, in the brief longshot of having been chosen for the human experience.
In our ward, Brother Janssen had been largely ignored; he was viewed as well-meaning, but a little off the tracks—though by the time I got down in Alabama, I found myself strangely recalling much of what he’d said, things I’d thought I wasn’t paying attention to at the time, but which, due to the intensity of his storytelling, had remained with me. He abhorred the slave owner Philemon, but was a big fan of the angel Moroni, and shuddered when recounting the days of the prophet Jeremiah. He said it was life’s greatest journey to encounter doubt; that to truly know God, one had to become lost, had to find oneself crying in the wilderness. Only then could we begin to approach the beauty of the same divine loneliness that had made us. A loneliness so profound it no longer was even loneliness, he said.
My fieldwork was in the Alabama hills and in the sleepy courthouse there in Fayette, but my office job was down in Mississippi, in the hot glittering city of Jackson. I spent two or three days a week in Alabama, and the rest at the office in Jackson.
In Mississippi, I had a girlfriend, Genevieve, I’d met coming out of a gun and knife show. I had no business being there, but was curious about the phenomenon, as she was. She was fascinated by almost everything. Her piece-of-crap car had broken down, and I caught her admiring the wire wheel spokes of my company car—kind of a pimpmobile, really, but it was what Homer wanted me to drive—and she asked for a ride back to her grandparents’ farm. They had died several years earlier and the farm was pretty run down. I stayed the night, and that was that.
Genevieve never accompanied me on my trips to Alabama. It wasn’t that she would have been bored by the hills and farms; she just didn’t want to drive three hours then wait around while I did the courthouse work. She lived an hour outside of Jackson, in the opposite direction from Alabama, near Vicksburg, along the river, not far from the great battlefield. My life then was a long triangle, and I spent my time traversing it; driving, never stopping.
Genevieve stayed in Mississippi: painted, rode her bicycle along the river, read in the hammock she had strung on her back porch, gardened. She was tall, with long black hair, and often wore a headband, which made her look like an Indian. Sometimes she went into Vicksburg and played cards with the old drunkards who in good weather sat on benches on the high bluff and looked across the impossibly wide river, mesmerized by the volume of sediment flowing past—old mountains to the north dissolving and being carried to the sea; stumps, logs, branches, and giant foaming whirlpools—and by the barges, always straining.
This was back in the days when there was money everywhere. Genevieve said material wealth was overrated; that what mattered was the quality of life lived. Almost every day she made a new discovery or had a new adventure.
If there was any pain in her past, she never acknowledged it, seemed even to willfully ignore it with her steadfast pursuit of happiness and the more elusive thing, peace. It made almost no sense, why we were together—she with her bohemian mores and lifestyle and me with my allegiance to the Man—but we were. Perhaps we were both drawn to the vast middle ground between us.
Back and forth I went; ceaseless, indefatigable.
The lights from our rigs glowed in the forest like the brilliance cast by distant cities. It was a strange and powerful thing to be driving in the darkness and come around a bend and see the illuminated tower of a drilling rig lit like a temple.
Other times the rig would already have been moved off, and the flare ignited. At night the flares pulsed and wavered in a mesmerizing, soothing way, like deep-sea fronds at the bottom of the ocean.
The wellheads were always in the middle of a clearing; even in their roaring, they could burn only themselves, powerful but solitary, and, in that isolation, were no danger to anyone or anything else. Sometimes it took days or weeks for the flares to burn themselves out; other times, years. The geologists never knew how much they’d found until it was all gone.
When each well neared its end, its burning was preceded by an even greater roar as the gas molecules spread ever farther apart, becoming more dilute with each passing second. The death roar could be heard for miles, across the folds and blue ridges, and lasted for several hours. After that came a great rasping as the earth burped the last of its gas; and then the geologists discovered whether the treasure of oil lay beneath that cap of gas, or only salt water.
My apartment in Jackson was at the south end of town, in a cheap complex. Rabbits lived in the vacant lot next door. Genevieve never came to visit me there—the place had no soul, and I did not need it to possess any soul. I arrived there tired, late at night, slept without dreaming, left again without even fixing coffee. Not a single picture adorned the bare walls. My work was taking leases in Alabama and my play was with Genevieve in the bottomlands outside of Vicksburg.
The girl who clerked in the courthouse, Penny, had been in and out of my mind for some months. She wasn’t movie-star beautiful like Genevieve but there was something about the way she greeted the day, and her smile—her happiness—that got me every time. Some people can annoy you with their irrepressible good cheer. They are living unquestioned lives, you might think. But Penny wasn’t that way. Her happiness seemed to come from some deeper core. She reminded me of where I had come from.
She was there at eight o’clock every morning to open the courthouse doors, where I would often be waiting on the foot-smoothed marble steps with a carton of milk and a doughnut, having risen predawn in Mississippi to make the drive. Sometimes I thought about bringing her a doughnut too, but I was happy with Genevieve and didn’t want Penny to misconstrue it as flirting.
It was usually already warm by the time Penny opened the doors, but inside the high-ceilinged courthouse, the air was cool, still and quiet. She always dressed up for work, light cotton dresses with bright floral prints, and smelled as if she had just gotten out of the shower. She lived next door to the courthouse, and would let herself in through the back door that conne
cted to her yard. The courthouse was one of the oldest in Alabama, one of the few that had not been burned in the Civil War. The records in Fayette County had not been transferred to microfilm, and computers were nonexistent. Everything was still written down by hand—every wedding and divorce, every birth and death, every property deed and transfer of title.
In transferring land, rarely was there any reservation of mineral rights. People could not envision anything of value residing beneath them. There was only the surface, back then. It was an easy place to work.
Of the secret world below, the old sandy beaches, the hill people had no concept. They had a clearer vision of heaven and its gold-lined streets than they did of the sea that had once lapped and rolled below them.
Homer’s geologists were good at what they did, and they were relentless. They could find the oil wherever it was hiding: beneath a preacher’s barn, or the town square; beneath cemeteries; beneath the mighty Alabama River, farther east, in which giant whiskered sturgeon cruised the bottommost mud.
They sometimes drilled dry holes, finding impermeable clay beds where they had prophesied there would be oil-bearing sand—and when this happened, a pall settled over the office that lasted the rest of the week. But they always found more oil, more gas: flaring the gas until the sweet oil came rising up.
The geologists placed huge pressure on me as well. Once they believed they had the oil corralled, they would instruct me to go out and get the leases, and not to take no for an answer; while in the meantime, Homer had provided me with a budget line I was not to cross. It was a lot of pressure.
There was one lease Homer wanted above all others in the Black Warrior, near the center of an area we called the Antioch prospect. The property belonged to an old woman named Velma Carter. Homer instructed me to go after it, and after her, and I did.
The ancient beach buried deep beneath the old woman’s farm was the same shape as the hills above, with the surface resting over the old dunes like a blanket draped over a pillow. Half a mile below her house, said the geologists, was an anticline, and the beach below that anticline was full of oil. Up above, Velma’s property was encircled by a halo of dry holes where other attempts had just missed. They were so close to what they wanted.
Other suitors had approached Velma—courtroom drifters, unattached to any team of geologists, fly-by-night title searchers known as lease hounds: shiftless geezers who held a worldview that the only way to get rich was by feasting on the mistakes of others, buying leases for a pittance.
They straggled into the basin like starving wolves looking for lambs. They would shadow me, and when they discerned the regions I was interested in, they began taking speculative leases in that area.
In this, I relied upon Penny to help keep our company’s intentions hidden from the other lease hounds. Surprisingly, it was her idea, not mine. She kept my leases in a special drawer, waiting for me to say when to file them, which she would then do all at once. This wasn’t illegal; there was no law that a lease had to be filed within a certain number of days for the transfer to be valid. A backdated or earlier signature meant nothing. All that mattered was the date the lease was entered into the courthouse records. Whoever filed first owned it.
By this point I had secured most of the leases for the Antioch prospect. But in order to keep them secret, I couldn’t file them until I got Velma’s critical lease. In this, I was vulnerable.
If Penny had liked another lessee better than me, and that lease hound had top-leased me—taking a lease on the same property I’d already leased, so that the landowner got paid twice—Penny could have recorded that second lease before my original one, and I would have been in trouble with Homer. There would’ve been a legal kerfuffle. But she liked me best. She had her cap set for me, I think now—well, I know it now, and I knew it then. It was an old story. I had come in from the outside, brought drama and novelty.
I realize now that it was Penny, not me, who held all the power, as she let those leases stack up, accumulating like the days themselves. We were all waiting on Velma. It was Penny who dispensed those records of desire, the great double-winged books she slid squeaking and squealing from their castered drawers at my behest. The sharp odor of the heavy books as they first emerged back into the light; the flex of Penny’s slender arms as she retrieved them for me. She loved me those mornings, there in the cool silence of her courthouse.
I would thank her, take the great registry books, as if receiving Joseph Smith’s golden tablets from outside the hills of Cumorah, and carry them into the adjacent workroom, which I usually had to myself.
From those books—ordered by section, township, and range, their every economic gesture ledgered within—I made meticulous notes about ownership interests, and then went out into the field. I left Penny behind and walked out into the sunlight of the town square, past the statues of Confederate dead, and got in my company car: an outsider’s car, a two-tone Chevrolet Caprice with those wire-spoke rims. I would spread my maps on the velour seat beside me and drive up into the hills, searching for the hidden people, the hidden prospects.
After the gas cap burned off a well, if there was only old salt water, brined by the ages, utterly useless, it would come gushing out in a glurping fountain, splattering everywhere, ocean-scented, and the geologists would curse. Engineers would be called in to pump concrete down the hole, to set a bridge plug across the perforations that had allowed the gas to rush out in the first place, as if from a genie’s bottle.
Welders were summoned, wearing their astronaut hoods and tall boots, mucking through the mud, and with the blue spark of their hissing torches would weld a steel plate over the top of the casing as if sealing off the territory of the never-born.
For a year or two, nothing would grow in the vicinity of the failed well, the vegetation having been poisoned by the salt. But after a couple more years, the dead gray ghosts of trees would tip over in a storm, and the dazzling salt pan, as white as the scuffed hardpan beneath a schoolyard swing set, would be refreshed following a few seasons of rain and rot. Green would spread back in over the scar, returning with such vigor that it buried even the warped clay road that had led to the failure, and no one would know there had once been a great fire.
Other times—and these were the times we lived for—the sweet green-black oil came leaping up from the well once the last of the gas was gone. The oil pulsed onto the ground in ropes and rivers, and the engineers scrambled to shut off the wellhead.
The oil smelled delicious, with just the faintest whiff of sulfur—in the way that while driving at night in the summer you can catch a whiff of faraway skunk, and find the odor pleasing—and the bouquet was enhanced by the heat of the midday sun.
Glittering dragonflies were drawn to it immediately, dabbing their abdomens into it as if for a taste. They bumped and clattered into one another, crashing into the oil and coating their wings with it, struggling upon its syrupy dark surface.
They decorated the oil with their futility, and the more nimble butterflies—azures, monarchs, zebra swallowtails—were summoned also, seeking any moisture they could find in the heat and falling into the soup, where they continued to flap, not as in the misery of leave-taking but as though unconcerned by their predicament.
Velma Carter had gone senile, was the thing. A haunted husk of the woman who had borne her clan, she lived at the end of a long winding red-clay road. Her relations said she had been in decline for years. Her house, the highest point in the county, was perched so far above the lowlands that you could stand in her front yard and peer down upon hawks soaring on the warm currents that rose in puffs from the green fields below.
The house was crumbling, but carried, still, the ghost of grandeur. It had once been a mansion, and even in its awful senescence there was something magnificent about the exuberance of its rot. The roof and walls sagged, but the porch columns were still intact, and immense. Virginia creeper vines shrouded it, as though holding it together.
Velma lived
there not with her prosperous children and grandchildren, but instead with the more wastrel of her kin. I was never sure, on my visits, how many of her relatives resided there. On some occasions there would be eight or ten, and yet when I made a return trip, there could be twice that many. They came and went, seemed to use the house as a way station in their desperate lives.
Despite this, there were always unused rooms. It was hard to imagine why the house had been built so large in the first place; hard to imagine what lives had passed through it: though there seemed to be no ghosts but the living inside.
People in the hills said Velma used to be a pistol, in the old days. A dancer and a churchgoer both: a woman with a spine of steel. Folks still recounted how she drove her purple roadster through the hills at night, dragging a heavy logging chain behind it just to watch the sparks.
All intensity had fled her eyes now. She seemed to see almost nothing, and what she did behold was with a gaze so soft as to no longer even belong to her. She was a stranger to herself, and to all who had known her; gutted by the gone-away fire.
Each time I went up to her house in that sled of a muscle car—a V-8 with a bad muffler, so that my approach sounded like the rumbling of artillery—the impression I got from the Carter clan holed up with her was that they were outlaws, even within the realm of their kin. At least four and most likely five generations resided there, but what was most striking to me, and unsettling, was the spirit of lethargy and barely contained despair that pervaded all the inhabitants.
Even the toddlers—grimy, snot-nosed sausage eaters clad only in ill-fitting diapers—played somberly with their dump trucks, ramming them listlessly into each other, as if such gestures, performed enough times, might yet result in the realignment of some intricate system of fate that would change their lives.