Destiny, Texas

by Brett Cogburn

  Everybody had the oil fever. That was the only reason I could see for the size of Hamish’s audience. Unless you were an oilman, sitting in the sun watching Hamish’s crew was like watching grass grow. But, no matter, the crowd hung around throughout the day. Whispered rumors went through the crowd about what Hamish’s crew were doing.

  “I worked with DB down in Beaumont, and he knows what he’s about,” a man said, pointing to where Hamish’s driller was leaned over the hole in the middle of the drill floor, staring intently down it with one hand on the drilling cable. “He thinks he’s about there and getting nervous. When you see old DB get nervous you had better look out! The whole dam rig’s about to blow sky-high or it’s a gusher for sure!”

  “Should have got him one of those new rotary rigs,” another said. “I wouldn’t dig a hole with one of those cable antiques.”

  “I hear the well on the Johnson’s place is making a hundred barrels a day,” a woman said to the woman beside her, keeping her hand to one side of her mouth as if the gossip was too juicy for the rest of the crowd. “Harriet Roberson down at the store told me that Lydia Johnson was spending money like it would never end and bought five yards of new dress material like it didn’t cost anything. Said Lydia’s husband had bought him one of those new go-devils to plow his fields, but couldn’t get any work done because he was too busy driving it up and down the roads and showing it off to his neighbors.”

  “I saw Lydia yesterday,” the other woman said. “She wouldn’t even talk to me, with her nose up in the air. I guess now that she’s rich she’s too good for us.”

  I listened closely, but nobody seemed to know what they were talking about, other than sharing rumors about who had gotten rich with oil in their backyard or who had gone broke trying to drill for it.

  It was nearing sundown, and still nothing happened. Hamish’s crew ran several different kinds of tools down the well bore, and that was about as exciting as it got. The only thing of interest to me was that the driller left his work once and went over and chewed out one of his men. When he went back to looking down his hole, the man he had tore into threw his cigarette on the ground and ground it out with his foot.

  “DB is worried about getting gas back. If I was him I would fire that damn fool for smoking a cigarette. Stunt like that could blow us all to hell,” the same oil field man who had spoken earlier said. “Could be a gusher. Could be, but I remember that Heywood well at Jennings. That thing burned for a week. Smoke so thick you couldn’t see for miles. I thought we were all dead.”

  The driller and his crew spent an hour pulling the drilling cable up out of the hole, attaching another tool on the end of it, and running it back to the bottom.

  “He’s going to swab it,” one of the men said. “If he’s swabbing it that means he thinks she might flow.”

  “What’s ‘swabbing it’ mean?” I asked them.

  “Going to work that swab tool up and down inside the casing like a pump on a windmill to make a little suction. Old DB has run some casing pipe down the hole to line it, but he’s left a little stretch unlined at the bottom where that black sand is. If there’s oil there, sometimes it’s stuck back in the formation and doesn’t want to come out.”

  “If the oil does start to come out, is he going to have to rig up some kind of pump and engine to get the oil out of the hole?”

  “Later, maybe, but not at first, at least if he’s got himself a well that’s any account.”

  “That’s why everyone is down here to watch,” the other man said.

  “Why are all these people here?” I asked. I was there because I was curious, but I didn’t understand why so many people had shown up to watch something so boring. Maybe they were simply curious like me. Maybe they wanted to see who the next rich man or the next broke fool in the county would be.

  “Sometimes it comes out of the hole in a hurry. Know what I mean?” A roughneck nearby that had overheard our conversation laughed.

  “You mean a gusher?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  I still wasn’t sure what to expect. From all accounts a gusher was when oil started shooting up out of the hole, and that was what every oilman in Texas dreamed about. I watched as the drilling cable worked up and down. The driller said something to Hamish, and Hamish jumped off the rig floor and started toward the crowd, waving his hands and shouting for everyone to move farther away from his rig.

  The crowd began to move back reluctantly, but before they had moved far enough to matter, Hamish’s driller bailed off the rig floor and ran toward the crowd. His crew was right on his heels.

  A waist-high stump of the casing that lined the well was sticking up in the middle of the drill floor and it began to shake and rattle. You could hear it all the way back where we were. And then we heard something else that I can’t describe, and then black oil shot out of that casing in a six-inch stream. It hit the crown on top of the wooden derrick and spread into a fountain some one hundred feet high. Within seconds, everything within a seventy-yard radius of the rig was covered in oil. People cheered like they had seen the Messiah himself riding down out of the clouds in a golden chariot pulled by angels.

  “Look at your brother!” Carmelita shouted above the noise of the crowd with her eyes as big as saucers and a smile on her face.

  Hamish and his driller were soaked in oil and dancing some kind of jig together and shouting at each other like wild men, while the oil continued to fall over everything.

  “Looks like a good well,” one of the roughnecks I had been talking to earlier said. “That Dollarhyde is going to have to get her shut in and some storage pits dug or hire some tanks built. Iffen it was me, I would have shut her in earlier, instead of letting all that money blow out on the ground.”

  His partner slapped him on the back. “Henry, you been working pools long enough to know that you ain’t an oil man unless you can show off a gusher. Besides, it looks like old DB and that Dollarhyde can afford to waste a little. That’s a ringtailed tooter of a well if I ever saw one.”

  Hamish came running through the crowd, casting about with his eyes until he spied us. He grabbed up Tiffany and hugged her, even though she playfully chided him for getting oil all over her clothes.

  Hamish swung Tiffany around in circles and then let her go and began to chase his boy around and around her, his outstretched arms covered in the black slime making the boy giggle and dodge.

  When Hamish finally stopped and looked up at me the only bit of his face that wasn’t black was two white rings around his eyes and a pale smear on one cheek where he had swiped at it with a rag Juanita offered him.

  “I did it,” Hamish said, smiling like a madman.

  I sniffed the air. The stench of oil was everywhere.

  He saw me do that. “That’s money you’re smelling. Lots of it. This well will make us a fortune, and the next ones even more.”

  “You’re going to drill more of them?” Juanita asked.

  “Oh yes! This is only the start. We own all this ground, and if the rest of it is like I think it is, we’re going to have our very own oil pool.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Looks like you’re going to be rich.”

  “We’re going to be rich, brother. Think of what you can do to the ranch.”

  “You were right, Hamish. Papa would be proud.”

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  It was a little after daylight and I was feeding the horses when I saw them coming four abreast down the road. I could see the twinkle of sunlight on Moon Lowe’s badge, and the skinny man beside him was that Deputy Long, the one who had helped Moon beat on Miguel and had tried to have a go at Carmelita. I hadn’t seen Zeke in years, but he was with them, too, riding on the other side of Moon. Moon wasn’t playing games when he brought Zeke with him.

  And that wasn’t all that let me know that they weren’t showing up to arrest me. No, the old man himself, Clayton, was out wide of Zeke, his horse dragging behind a little. I woul
dn’t have thought he could even sit a horse anymore, but there he was, no matter how he slumped in the saddle. It took a lot of hate for a man in his condition to have ridden to find me.

  I gauged the distance to the barn, but they were already too close. Zeke spurred his horse up on my left, stopping between me and the barn. There was gray in Zeke’s hair that hadn’t been there once upon a time, but older or not, he looked as mean as ever.

  Moon and Deputy Long parked their horses directly in front of me, about ten yards away. Clayton hung back a little, more to my right. I could see in their faces that they thought they had me like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  I stuck the pitchfork I had been using in the ground and tugged the glove on my hand off with my teeth. It was a cold, windy day, and I was going to be slow getting my Colt out from under my coat.

  Moon Lowe smiled. Leave it to him to gloat. “Where’s all the tough talk now, Dollarhyde?”

  I moved my right hand slowly and gingerly worked at unbuttoning the one button that held the front of my coat closed, expecting them not to let me get that far.

  “I’m here to arrest you for threatening a duly appointed officer of the law,” Moon said.

  “You’ll get safe passage to jail,” Clayton threw in quickly, his voice as trembling and slurred as it had been when I last saw him in his office. “You have my word.”

  Standing there with my back to the corral fence and facing them, I knew a lie when I heard it. Taking my chances there and then was better than being shot in the back on the road and Moon’s posse claiming I had resisted arrest or tried to run. If they wanted me to beg or plead, they were going to have a long wait.

  “I don’t think he believes you, Pa,” Moon said.

  Deputy Long already had his Winchester lying across his saddle swells, and he held it one-handed and poked it in my direction. “No, not a desperate man like Gunn Dollarhyde.”

  Only Clayton and I didn’t laugh.

  “Shut up!” Clayton said. “Gunn, if you’re packing a pistol, pull it easy and throw it on the ground.”

  I got my coat unbuttoned and let my arm lower.

  “Go ahead and give me an excuse. I been waiting for this for a lot of years,” Zeke said.

  Moon’s horse was turned a little to my left, and he thought I didn’t see him slipping his pistol out of his holster on the side away from me. I threw back my head and laughed.

  “What are you laughing at?” Moon had that pistol almost clear of his holster.

  “I’d about given up on you boys ever showing up,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Clayton cocked his head at me to hear over the wind.

  “What took you sons a bitches so long?”

  My words threw them off a little and made them all hesitate, and I took advantage of that split second that I had bought myself. I raked back the right side of my coat and my hand found the butt of my Colt far faster than I had dared hope. Moon tried to bring his pistol to bear on me under his left arm but he bobbled the barrel of it against his saddle horn and his shot went off wide of me.

  I shot Moon twice in his side, telling myself if I got one of them it was going to be him. He grunted when the second bullet hit him, and his horse took a high lunge with him slumped over its neck.

  By that time guns were going off like a cannon volley. I was vaguely aware of Deputy Long’s rifle shot busting splinters from a fence rail beside me, and I felt something else tug at the side of my coat. There was a wooden water tank in front of the windmill tower three steps to my left, and I dove against it, hoping to put it between me and Zeke over by the barn. The sides of the tank were only waist-high, but it was the only cover I had.

  I sat on the ground with my back to it and took aim at Clayton, the only one of them with a clear shot at me. His horse was dancing sideways and fighting the bit, and my first shot missed him badly. I thumbed back my hammer for another round just as Deputy Long came around the water tank from my left with his Winchester to his shoulder and working the lever like he was fanning a fire. One of his bullets spanged off the ground between my outstretched legs and ricocheted off a nearby fence post. I shoved my Colt at him at arm’s length and let him have one. From the way his hat flew off and the way he reeled limply backward I must have shot him in the head. His body stayed on his runaway horse for a few strides before it toppled slowly from the saddle.

  Clayton’s horse had gone so wild that it had him out of the fight for the moment, and I got to my knees, thinking I would try to spot Zeke where he had been by the barn. It would be like him to be circling around the corrals looking for a shot at my back.

  I poked my head up over the waist-high side of the tank just in time to catch a glimpse of him still in front of the barn door with a shotgun leveled on me. Before I could duck, a load of buckshot slapped the water right in front of me. I fell on my side behind the tank barely in time to avoid the second charge from Zeke’s gun.

  Thinking his double-barrel was empty, I lunged to my feet and threw a wild shot at him. He was bumbling his reload badly, and I was taking more time with my second attempt at him when something knocked my bad leg from under me before I could get my aim. I went down on the seat of my pants, with only a fence post at my back keeping me halfway propped up. My knee felt like it was torn off and the pain was so bad it took me a bit to realize that Clayton Lowe had gotten his horse under control and was walking it right at me and blazing away with a little pocket revolver.

  There was no time but to snap a shot at him from my hip. Shooting like that is no way to hit anything, but I did manage to hit his horse or close enough to it to cause it to rear high on its hind legs, pawing the air like a circus horse. I worked my hammer and tried another shot, but my Colt snapped on an empty chamber. I didn’t even remember having fired that many times, but that’s the way it is when things get crazy. Everything is happening so fast you can’t remember half of it when it’s over, much less when it’s happening.

  I looked up into the shadow of the horse rearing over me and hurled my pistol at its head. The horse walked backward on its hind legs, so straight up in the sky that it looked ten times its size. As if in slow motion, it fell over backward and I heard the thump of the saddle horn hitting the ground and Clayton’s bones snapping beneath it. He screamed in such agony that the sound of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  The horse kicked out frantically and squirmed and twisted on its back in an attempt to get rolled over and find its feet. It left out in a dead run when it finally managed to get up, the whites of its eyes showing as it stared back at Clayton’s body bouncing off the road beside it, limp and lifeless and flopping so that it looked like no real man at all.

  Another buckshot charge hit the side of the water tank, and I knew Zeke was coming to finish me off. I caught a glimpse of his hat above the tank as he walked his horse around it. And me without anything to defend myself with, and too shot up to even stand and take it like a man.

  I looked up at Zeke when he rode into sight, staring down at me and grinning with the double bores of that 12-gauge staring at my face like another set of eyes. I could already feel the hole in my chest he was about to open up.

  I had gotten more of them than I had thought I would. Even old Wild Bill Hickok himself couldn’t have done better, unless you count those penny dreadfuls they write about him. A man doesn’t face down four men and expect to get them all, much less live. Not out in the open with nothing but a Colt pistol and guts.

  It had been a good life.

  Who was I kidding? There was a time when I didn’t care if I died, and a time when I felt like I was already dead. But I wanted to live. There was Carmelita and baby Joseph, and the boy, Pancho, who liked me for no reason that I could put a finger on, and smiled and laughed at the things I said to him, although nobody ever considered me a funny man. That felt good, and thinking on those things made me wish to hell I still had my Colt and one more bullet to fight with.

  That sorry Zeke had me de
ad to rights, and I spat on the ground at his horse’s feet, glaring at him and not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing me scared.

  “This is gonna hurt, Dollarhyde,” Zeke said.

  A gun went off before he could pull his trigger, a big one, and then again. The air went out of him in a grunt and he fell from the saddle like he was poleaxed. I stared at him lying facedown at my feet, not a twitch of life left in him.

  And then someone else was coming around the water tank. It was Hamish and he looked down at Zeke’s body and then at me while he thumbed another paper cartridge in Papa’s old Sharps.

  “Never expected to see you,” I said.

  “That’s why I’ve always told you to let me do the thinking.” Hamish squatted down and winced when he looked closer at my knee. “I swear, you’re bound and determined to lose all your limbs.”

  My pants leg was soaked through so much that there was already blood growing a circle in the dust beneath my knee. “You watch out. I don’t know if Moon’s finished off.”

  Hamish looked back over his shoulder and winced. “No worries about him.”

  I undid my bandanna from around my neck and Hamish tied it above my knee as tight as he could to try and slow the bleeding. It was the same knee on my game leg. I never had any luck.

  “That looks bad,” Hamish said.

  “It’s too far from my heart to kill me.” I tried to laugh to lift some of the worry from him, but it hurt too bad and I gave it up. “This wasn’t your fight.”