All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The men would shove and bend the taut carcass of the deer into the back of the plane as best as they could, smearing the fuselage with blood as they lifted the deer through the small door, so that the plane appeared to be anointed with some biblical waiver of immunity, some endowment of Passover: and crowding themselves back into their little chariots, and ascending back into the sky, the oilmen behaved as if they believed this was the case.

  They knew no restraint, possessed no sense of governance, and they seemed to Richard—particularly in those brief moments when they were airborne—to possess a singular power, not just the strength of confidence, but of destiny. It seemed to him that their unending hunger was a source of liberation rather than a captivity; and although he knew better, he followed them, and sometimes even pretended to be one of them. Still falling.

  On the return flights to their village, the excesses of the night before would conspire with the bounciness of the little planes and the heat of updrafts to release from some of their membership great expectorations of vomit. The pilots, flying in crude staggered-wing formations like miniature bombers, would call out the various updates of such distress to the passengers on the other planes, gleeful at the turmoil of their lily-livered compatriots, though chagrined, too, at having to experience it themselves; and while providing such reports, they would often key the microphone next to the face of the afflicted as he leaned bent over gagging into whatever makeshift container he had been able to snatch up.

  The airwaves amidst all the planes would be amplified with the sound of that retching, the sky would rage with tortured gags, and the pilots ferrying those passengers who’d fallen ill would push the throttle all the way in and make downwind landings with flaps full up, fairly flying the planes into the ground in an effort to be free of the stench as soon as possible; and bailing out of the open doors even as the plane was not yet finished rolling to a stop, they would lie there in the blazing heat, gasping at fresh air, looking as if they had fallen straight from the sky.

  Always, after such sojourns, they summoned one of the many slave-wage paisanos they kept at beck and call ready for such tasks, and while the oilmen crawled off to their air-conditioned bunkhouses to sleep the rest of the day away, if their drilling schedule would allow it, the paisanos would scrub away the damage, hosing the planes down, polishing and waxing them in the sun, and cleaning and butchering whatever bounty the great hunters had procured.

  Later in the afternoon, the servants—“employees,” the oilmen called them—would build a great fire in the open-pit barbecue ring they had dug in the center of the compound, and by nightfall the glowing mesquite coals would be radiating enough heat to bake to a porcelain glaze the sidewalls of the pit, with the deer being rotated slowly on a spit, basted with chipotle barbecue sauce, one small child applying the sauce with a broom as another child turned the crank of the spit like an organ grinder, both children’s faces blistering from the heat, and with the succulent odor of fresh meat-juice spattering onto the coals.

  The oilmen ate only meat—no fruit or fiber, no vegetables other than fried onions and fried potatoes, and drank salty margaritas, and smoked cigars and cigarettes, all except for Red Watkins, the driller, who would be dead before any of them.

  Unlike the others, who tended to careen through life with wild amplitudes of oversteering followed by violent correction, Red Watkins was neat in almost everything he did. On the rig floor, he made sure that his crew kept every tool in its precise place, so that in the event of a blowout or any other calamity, a roughneck could find the proper tools, even blindfolded. He insisted that his rigs be tended more carefully than would be animals or even men, resting them every seventh day (though he was not religious), and seeing that the filters and oil and other lubricating fluids were changed on every operating engine far in advance of schedule.

  “Making hole,” they called the act of drilling, just as “pulling pipe” meant they were coming out of the hole, for any of a number of different reasons, while “setting pipe” or “running casing” meant only one thing, that the oil or gas had been discovered, and the production pipe would be sent down into the hole and cemented, so that it could stay there forever, and would be perforated then, so that the oil and gas could flow out of the earth and into the wellbore and up the hole into the waiting world above, ready to be ignited—the oil industry composed of but perhaps half a hundred such two-word commands, as if even language was an impediment to the yearning to drill farther, drill deeper, make more hole, find more gas.

  And even when the roughnecks were not making hole, even when the rig was resting, being hosed and cleaned and cooled for its Sabbath rest, Red Watkins made sure his workers were neither idle nor relaxed. He busied them with painting the pipe stands and the legs of the derrick in bright silver paint that was the same color as their hardhats, and the driller’s doghouse cherry-red, and the stucco and adobe temporary office buildings near their encampment snow-white, even if they had just painted these things the week before. It was expensive and wasteful, they went through hundreds of buckets of paint each week, but Red Watkins was determined not to let the men go slack or soft with even a single idle or lazy Sunday afternoon, and so he worked them as if training them for some upcoming physical challenge for which they were not yet adequately prepared.

  And once the new-old paint was scraped clean from that one item with its one blemish or imperfection, the roughnecks would begin painting again, working carefully in the heat to apply smooth and cautious strokes, so that there would be no roughness, no striation, only a bright and perfect gloss; and Red Watkins would follow along behind the workers, cruising past in his jeep (itself an open-topped, unpainted, sandblasted wreck of a thing), sipping a cold beer and squinting through his cat-eye glasses, his silver flattop haircut still burnished with the flecks of the same red he had been born with and once possessed in such abundance.

  When the job was being done according to his satisfaction, he would smile a sweet smile of pure contentment—and this was a thing the roughnecks strove for, without quite understanding why, just as they sought to avoid the blue curses and tantrums, the scorn and invective Red Watkins would pitch if he discovered the job being done improperly.

  But he never made a mistake, and for this he was viewed with awe and fear, if not quite respect. As well, he did the hiring and firing, and so for the roughnecks and roustabouts who populated the little camp (sleeping in their own separate bunkhouse, kept apart from the geologists and engineers), Red Watkins was more powerful than God. He did not deign to serve as the judge or arbiter of disputes, but instead merely sent both or all disaffected parties packing back to the States, so that beneath his command there was no dissent at the surface, only humming, straight-lipped efficiency, even if grievances and complaints writhed below in the men’s souls like grubs in wormwood: and together, without exception, they chased the oil.

  Red Watkins loved to cook. From his travels in the South, he had learned a great many recipes, knew the uses and tastes and sources of spices most of the other men had never even heard of, not just cumin and paprika and chili, but saffron and cardamom, Chinese five-spice and mirin; and he knew the effects of their various combinations.

  At first glance his concoctions seemed flavorful, but simple—high fluffy creamy cathead biscuits, fried doves and quail, frog legs, venison tenderloin, roasted peppers stuffed with goat cheese, basil, and, strangely, peanuts, or olives, or the poached cheeks of fish; huge slabs of steak, embedded with nothing more than cloves of garlic and dressed with but a crust of olive oil and rosemary, nothing more.

  But there was a perfection, a ferocity of control, both in their preparation and in their cooking, which brought out their best; and he knew how to arrange a menu, pairing those items—meat, potatoes, and a dessert—in a way that seemed to allow the food to transcend itself. He did not cook all the time, but the men looked forward to it when he did, and all that day, their work would be inspired.

  He would puree Bing
cherries and ancho chilies in his molasses and brown sugar barbecue sauce, would slice coins of ginger in with the mysterious black beans he kept simmering over a campfire in the desert heat for days on end, the beans taking on a vitreous, iridescent sheen of sweetness. He mixed shredded coconut into his cold buttered flaky pie crusts—almost always, just one or two slight and different elements were thrown into the mix, so that the food continued to masquerade as normal or average, only to explode with richness upon the palate—and, as with everything else in their lives, the men could not get enough.

  Despite Red Watkins’s neatness, there was waste, excess, in their temporary village, and at the well sites scattered beyond, across the desert and along the base of the mountains, and—as the searchers discovered more oil and gas—up into the mountains themselves, scabs of bright new roads ascending the canyons like stitches, with plumes of dust rising from the bone-white roads like the drift of smoke from ascending fires.

  Because there was no surface water in the area, save for an occasional thin creek, each drilling well needed its own pit dug beside it, broad and shallow, in which the drilling fluid was kept, which was then circulated down into the hole to help lubricate the drill bit, to assist in better cutting and grinding, and to condition the hole to keep its shape.

  The drilling mud—with tiny flecks of the gnawed-out stone floating in suspension—was then circulated back out of the hole. The drill cuttings were strained out of the fluid and examined minutely for any clues of oil or gas, scrutinized for lithology, color, taste, fossil content, all variables that might help the geologists ascertain where exactly they were in the lost landscape of their imaginations, two miles below, and poured back into the waiting open pit of brown froth, where a mud man, diligent as a baker, kept close watch on the density and pH and clay content of the vile brown soup, which steamed slightly from its brief contact with the heated innards of the earth’s distant interior.

  There were no regulations, requirements, or restrictions regarding the construction and maintenance of the mud pits (which also housed waste oil and diesel fuel from the various workhorse engines required in lifting the great gleaming tonnages of drilling pipe in and out of the holes); and because the mud pits that were springing up around the drilling operations represented the only surface water for miles, all manner of wildlife began flocking to the pits, seeking nourishment and respite from the desert’s anvil of heat.

  Rendered bold by their need, the animals usually waited until night to get into the pits, though when they came (the drilling rigs ran twenty-four hours a day, six days a week), the animals did so wantonly, walking right past the roughnecks’ parked cars and trucks and on out into the shallow mud pits, wading straight in like penitents seeking baptism.

  The animals—coyotes and deer, foxes, skunks, bighorn sheep, wild turkeys and bobcats, and an occasional black bear—would drink greedily from the thick, toxic slurry—which usually had a skim of an inch or two of water floating atop the heavier drilling mud, like cream separating from the milk below—and then they would roll luxuriantly in the chocolate-milkshake-colored mud, splashing, while the roughnecks on the drilling platform above looked down in wonder, the mud pit illuminated at night by the brilliant halogen blaze of the rig’s Christmas-tree lights, wattage so powerful and incandescent that the lights of each rig were visible at any distance upon that planar landscape (a flatness that belied the exciting jumble of topography below, the architecture of the past), and even visible, or so the geologists had been told, from space.

  Once the animals had drunk from the toxic pond, it usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the sickness to settle in. It afflicted the smaller animals first, so that sometimes they died outright and sank to the bottom of the pit, where they were later fished out by the roughnecks, bloated carcasses slimed elephant-gray with the silt at the bottom of the pits—though usually the animals were able, despite their discomfort, to lunge back to the banks of the pit, where, with a caking of mud draped over them now as heavy as concrete, they would collapse a short distance away, lungs heaving and internal organs poisoned.

  On their brief smoke or lunch breaks, the roughnecks would hurry down from the catwalk and hose the gray and brown drying layer of mud from the coats of those animals still living, and would drag them over into the shade of the drilling rig, so that by the time the stalking heat of the day returned, the sick and dying animals might know some peace and comfort; and just as the mounds of chipped drill cuttings grew like anthills at the site of each well’s location, so too did the pyre of bloated carcasses of the bestiary that had been summoned by the allure of the mud, and the promise of water in the desert.

  Birds, too, settled into the mud pits, not just migratory waterfowl but colorful little songbirds passing back and forth to the tropics, struggling in the mud with oil-soaked wings, as bedraggled now as moths: and in the early years, the oilmen had attempted to pull these victims out, dabbing them each in a bucket of valuable fresh water, and spending hours, sometimes, on each wing—the same men who days earlier had been machine-gunning the night sky, and shredding even the beauty of the stars with their violence: though the searchers had other tasks and chores, and the sky was filled with birds, they could in no way begin to keep pace with the steady supply of birds that kept funneling into their pits, so that eventually they gave up and allowed their hearts to harden, and became accustomed to that waste.

  Richard would lie there some nights, occasionally in the bunkhouse but more often crooked and cramped in the back seat of his car, catnapping between bit trips, with the diesel clatter of the rig as familiar and even lulling to him now across the years as the sound of distant surf breaking, and it would seem that Clarissa’s leaving, her fear, had carved in him a gash or rend, the exact shape of which he could still feel, and that even with years passing, the flow from that wound could not be stanched; that he could still hear it trickling away.

  Lying there, just before sleep, in those fragments of moments where he was not occupied by his work, he would be forced to wonder, What do I want—what do I want next? He felt off-balance, not knowing what he desired—desiring nothing, really, hunting the oil below almost dispassionately, in cold blood—as anomalous, with that absence of desire, among the other oilmen, as might be a foreigner who did not speak their language.

  He envied the oilmen, with their crude and simple and seemingly bottomless desires, chasing a past that lay miles below. They seemed to him to be hostages of another kind, but intensely and deeply alive. They did not seem to be visitors in the world.

  The desert, with the blue-and-buff chaparral of the Sierra Occidentals just to the west, the soft foothills reminding him of the contours of a woman’s body that might never age. What was it about a desert landscape, he wondered, that produced such needs and appetites, such oversized dreamers and flash-in-the-pan pretenders?

  Was it this way always for any landscape of outer limits, he wondered—landscapes defined by absence, rather than presence? Perhaps some excessive, even childish, yearnings arose as if from the soil itself in some inhospitable environments, any strife-filled borderland near or even just beyond the edge of comfort.

  And yet: these pirates with whom he was associating were not all charlatans; and their dreams and desires, even if outlandish and fevered, were not unattainable. They had dreamed a thing, scenting it at first as an animal might imagine cool and distant water, and they had moved toward it like men possessed by a purer truth, abandoning their past lives and stepping recklessly into the future: and what they had found in the desert and the foothills was not a dream, but tangible and real as the men themselves.

  Always, they found just enough of their treasure to be termed successful, to sustain and reward them, and to lure them and encourage them to proceed onward: Más allá, farther on.

  The entire consortium possessed the most hardy and enduring of constitutions. Many of the men had significant physical strength, but also a toughness. They would crawl away from their semico
ntrolled crash landings, and their twenty-four-hour nonstop revelry, and go straight back to work when the occasion called for it, which was often.

  Back into the fields the oilmen threw themselves, laboring for forty or fifty hours at a time, unabetted by any drugs: doing whatever was required of them—logging the wells, drilling out bridge plugs, analyzing cuttings, and skidding rigs to new locations; and they gloried in their labor and their desire, reveling in it every bit as much as they did their play times. They were like sailors, Richard thought. He had often envisioned the unseen stony landscape far below as being implacable as the heart of a frozen sea; and in the oilmen’s after-hours revelry, they seemed like crewmembers on wild shore leave.

  It was estimated that it would take them eight to ten years to properly define and tap into the reservoir, whose shapes were still unknown to them.

  Only the rigs above the reservoir moved, probing and searching, penetrating; and if the stone below was the deepest and most unknowable of oceans, and the men above (he never wondered why there were no women; who would want to be among such men?) were indeed sailors, then, in the moving waves up at the surface, they were all chasing the slipstreams of wealth that snaked and wound their way in wild and mysterious arcs, ancient loops and patterns of logic that existed just beneath the feet of the unsuspecting.

  In addition to the curiously aggressive Red Watkins, with his wildly alternating spells of placidity, even tenderness, and ill-temper, there were two others within the consortium who took an interest in Richard, and who were grooming him for the arc of a longer future, a corporate life spent pursuing the riches of South America and China, Russia, Africa, and—always the prize plum—the Middle East.