It wasn’t enough.
One Friday evening, Tom trudged back to the boarding house alongside Lyman Bard, the rest of the team lagging a couple of hundred yards behind.
‘Are we going to make a strike, you reckon?’ asked Tom, whose language was already fast Americanising.
‘Couldn’t say.’
‘But you must have a gut feel for it. You’ve been in the game for long enough.’
Bard wrinkled his nose and spat. ‘There’s oil around here, I’d say. Nine Snake Creek ain’t gonna be the only place with oil. I’d say our chances were as good as anyone’s.’
‘And what happens if you strike?’
Bard shrugged. ‘We strike.’
‘But what do you get out of it? What difference does it make to you?’
‘I get two per cent of anything we bring out the ground.’
‘Two per cent?’
‘There are plenty of guys offer nothing.’
‘Say you make a strike of two hundred barrels a day. That’s around four bucks in your pocket if prices are strong. Two bucks if they’re not.’
‘That’s why I get paid by the day, strike or no strike.’
‘You never wanted to drill for yourself?’
As they were speaking, a swollen orange sun crept down behind the hump-backed mountains. The grassy hills faded from green to blue to purple as the light left them. Down in the boarding house, kerosene lamps began to sparkle – the valley was far too remote for electricity.
‘Who said I haven’t?’
‘You did?’
Bard nodded and told Tom the story that, novice as he was, he’d already heard a dozen different times from a dozen different oilmen. Bard had finished a job, borrowed a rig, spent money to buy drilling rights, hired crewmen with beer money and promises. He’d drilled. Ran down three thousand feet through difficult ground. His money gave out. His derrick was needed elsewhere. He sold up, moved out, moved on. Eighteen months later, a team from one of the big oil companies reopened his well, went down another nine hundred feet, and struck oil.
‘There’s no money in drilling, I figure,’ said Bard. ‘Too many folks chasing too little oil. Be lucky if the oil don’t give out on us sometime soon. Youngster like you oughta be in autos or radio. Something with a future.’
Tom shook his head. He didn’t bother saying it, but he didn’t take Bard’s advice seriously. Bard didn’t take his own advice seriously. The man was an oil addict. Even though he was working for someone else, he drilled like he had till the end of the week to strike oil or else lose his life. While on the job, he was never still. The only time he slowed down was when the rotating table was turning properly, the drill bit was sounding right, the boiler was giving enough pressure, and the derrick contained a section of thirty-foot pipe in place and ready to screw on to the drill as it descended.
‘No oil. No hooch,’ said Bard. ‘That’ll be one hell of a dry country.’
Tom glanced sideways. Bard was referring to the Eighteenth Amendment – the prohibition of alcohol – which had sailed through Congress and Senate almost undebated, and was on its way to being ratified by virtually every single state in the union. By January of next year, 1920, the manufacture and sale of alcohol would become an offence against not merely the law of the land, but the very constitution itself.
They were close to the boarding house now. The food that was served was plentiful but atrocious. The only thing that saved the place from being torn down in a riot was the huge quantities of beer available at absurdly low prices. The loud voices of men and beer were already mixing with the wind off the plains. Tom indicated the shapes of men moving in the twilight ahead of them.
‘You reckon they’ll stop drinking just because Uncle Sam tells ’em to?’
Bard shrugged. His interest in any question not directly related to oil was fairly limited. ‘S’pose they’ll have to go thirsty.’
‘That’s a lot of thirst,’ said Tom.
Bard made some kind of answer and moved on into the boarding house, aiming to get cleaned up before the dinner bell rang. Tom was normally quick to the washtap himself, but on this occasion he stood back, feeling the movement of the night air on his face, looking at the stars beginning to speckle the violet sky.
Buying, crewing and running an oil rig cost around twenty-five thousand dollars. Men like Bard, who drilled on the cheap, were like poor men trying to stay in a poker game with a ten-dollar ante. Tom wouldn’t make that mistake. He wouldn’t drill until he was ready. He wouldn’t drill until he had enough cash. He’d always assumed that he’d make his money – somehow or other – from oil, but maybe it didn’t have to be like that. Maybe there were other ways. Not safe ones necessarily, but fast ones, good ones.
Tom nodded to himself. He wanted fast, he didn’t need safe. His pulse quickened. He began to run.
59
Sir Adam looked at his son.
All across England, a generation of men looked older than they were. War had driven lines deep into youthful faces. The eyes of twenty-year-olds held expressions that would have been disturbing in men twice their age. And Alan? He was twenty-six years old. What with war and his hardships in Persia, Alan could easily have passed for thirty-five or even more. His face was so deeply bronzed from Persian sun and high altitudes that it seemed hard to believe he had ever been fair-skinned as a boy. His hair, meantime, had become so deeply bleached that it seemed almost white, his eyebrows all but invisible.
But there was something else in his face too. Something that Sir Adam understood but couldn’t very well mention. Alan was still painfully in love with Lottie. Sir Adam gazed a little too long and hurriedly turned back to the papers. The maps were spread out on the full-size billiard table in the billiard room at Whitcombe House. Although it was broad daylight outside and the heavy brocade curtains were thrust back away from the windows, the electric lights above the table glowed at full strength to give the maps as much illumination as possible.
‘These are quite astonishing. Extraordinary.’
Alan nodded. He’d stayed in the Zagros – measuring, surveying, photographing, examining – until the job was done. Valley after valley had fallen beneath Alan’s rock-hammer and sample bag. He knew the geology of the northern Zagros better than any man in history. The table was littered with fossil, rock and soil samples.
Sir Adam riffled through the maps, using lumps of rock to keep them flat. His own command of geology was much less good than Alan’s, but he still knew enough to identify the sites of greatest interest – and enough to know when there was virtually no hope of oil at all. Most of the maps fell into the latter category and Sir Adam’s anxiety increased with each new sheet he examined. His expression must have revealed his concern.
‘We always knew it was going to be difficult,’ said Alan. ‘I never thought we’d find oceans of the stuff.’
‘Mmm,’ Sir Adam agreed. He pulled one of the maps to the surface. There were some geological formations of the right kind of age, and some structures that could possibly indicate an oil reservoir underneath. ‘This dome shape here. An anticline, possibly?’
An anticline is an arch-shaped structure buried deep beneath the ground. If the curve of the arch is made of a good impermeable rock and if the strata beneath contain oil, then an anticline is the perfect place for oil to collect – and the dream of every oilman.
‘Possibly, Father. Most likely not.’ Alan pointed out a few indications on the map that suggested the anticline was empty of oil now, even if it had ever held any.
‘But worth a try, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps. But look at this.’
Alan brought out the one map he’d held back. This was a map of Ameri’s valley, and the neighbouring valleys to east and west. A thin red cross – the only red mark on any of the maps – was labelled in Alan’s neat handwriting: ‘Oil seepage!’ Sir Adam studied the map with mounting interest.
‘You actually found oil?’
‘I found enough t
o light a kerosene lamp for about twenty-five seconds. Not even a teaspoonful.’
‘But still … oil.’
‘Yes, oil. It smelled good. Not too much sulphur. Not much tar. If there is oil there, it’ll be a beautiful one. Light, sweet-smelling, easy to refine.’
Sir Adam stared back at the map. He was looking for the structures that might indicate some hope: an anticline, a salt dome, a ‘nose’ or monocline. There was nothing there. ‘In America, I understand, they have places where they mine oil. They literally dig shafts into the hillside and let the oil drain out. Even if there’s no chance of conventional drilling, you’ve found your hillside here. Perhaps a different approach …’
‘Father, they get twenty barrels a day from those mines. Thirty if they’re lucky. That’s all very well when the market’s on your doorstep, but this oil’s got to be carried all the way to England. If we don’t strike it big, there’s no point in striking it at all. But look at the map. Look back at the map. You’re missing something.’
Sir Adam studied the map. He couldn’t for the life of him see what his son was referring to.
‘Don’t you see it, Father? The fault line?’
A fault was another classic way in which oil could be trapped underground. If two strata are broken and overlap one another, forming a kind of roof, then oil could sometimes be found in the break.
‘A fault line? There’s obviously some change in geological contour east and west, but I don’t see –’
‘Here, Father, here.’ Alan snatched a billiard chalk from the cue rack, and slashed a thick blue line right through the map from top to bottom. The line stretched for twenty-two miles unbroken. ‘I didn’t see it either at first. Not for two months. Like you, I was looking for something narrow. Something a mile or two in extent, even five or ten. But the fault is as classic as you can get. Every now and then you can’t see it. It’s hidden by snow or rockfall or subsequent geological accidents. But when you get far enough back from it – join up the clues – let yourself see the obvious – then what you have is one of the biggest natural pools ever discovered.’
Sir Adam stared at the thick blue line. His son was right. The fault was on such a vast scale, it was easier to miss it than to see it. But there it was: as perfectly mapped as you could hope to see.
‘By God, Alan, that’s a fault indeed.’
‘Yes.’
‘And once upon a time there was some oil there.’
‘Yes.’
The two men looked at each other: father, son; old man and oilman. Alan had done all the research he could, but the question remained: did the fault contain oil, or was it as dry as a bone? There are infinitely more faults than there are productive oilfields, and infinitely more bankrupt dreamers than there are wealthy oilmen.
‘You’ll drill there?’
‘If I can.’
‘Do you have any money?’
‘No, not a penny.’
For all Alan knew, the fault concealed an ocean of oil. Unless he could find some money to drill for it, it might stay there for the rest of time.
‘Will you borrow it?’
‘Against what? No one will lend it.’
‘So there’s nothing else for it, I suppose. Set up an exploration company and sell shares in the enterprise. It’s a shame to give away control, but inevitable, I can see that.’
‘I’m not selling.’
‘Not selling? But surely –’
‘I’m not selling.’
The years of war and hardship had hardened Alan. His voice was a man’s voice: strong and decided. His father opened his mouth – then closed it. If Alan wanted to be pigheaded about selling shares, that was up to him. In time, he’d understand that there was no other way to raise capital. No other way on earth.
60
The oil was there all right.
Four miles away from the rig where Tom and the others drilled, six miles from the boarding house and a full sixteen miles from the nearest railroad, a gimcrack exploration outfit struck oil at five and a half thousand feet. The well produced just eighty barrels a day: a good strike, but hardly colossal. All the same, the excitement produced was extraordinary. If there was oil in one place, there might be oil right next door. The remote little bit of rolling country, situated where the open plains meet the mountains, began to jostle with new arrivals.
Drilling crews arrived by the day. The boarding house overflowed. The road down to town became waterlogged and near impassable. The first frosts sharpened their knives on a northerly wind. When Tom and the others went out to drill they wore woollen gloves and long undershorts beneath their trousers.
The lights in the bar were red-shaded and, in any case, were turned down low. The place was crowded with oilmen: junior roustabouts and senior drillers. An evil-looking pianist knocked out depressive tunes on the piano, while the usual half-dozen prostitutes sat in a huddle at the end of the bar and shared a drink together before the night’s work started.
Tom sat apart at a table by himself. He was in town for the night only, to pick up some drilling goods from the railhead before returning next day to the well.
As he looked round the room, there was a sudden yell of laughter from the prostitutes in the corner. Tom grinned at them. And as he grinned, one of the girls caught his attention in a way that the others didn’t. She was dark-skinned and dark-haired. Her face was too sharp to be pretty in a normal way: her chin was too pointed, her nose was angular and her forehead too high. But there was something unusually alive about her face. Her deeply set eyes were intelligent, alert but anxious. It was as though someone sensitive and gifted had been forced to live through a period of suffering or danger. Tom recognised the look. His years in prison had attuned him. The girl attracted him and troubled him in about equal amounts.
Tom grabbed a passing waiter and indicated the girl. ‘D’you have any wine in this joint?’
‘Wine?’
‘Yes, wine. They grow grapes. They squeeze ’em. They bottle ’em. Wine.’
‘Sure, downstairs someplace.’
‘Can you bring me a bottle of wine, two glasses and invite that girl to join me?’
‘That girl? The –’ The waiter had been about to say ‘whore’ or something similar, but he checked himself in time. ‘The dark-haired one. Sure, right away.’
After what had obviously been a long search, the wine arrived, followed by the girl. As she slid off her stool at the bar, she exchanged a laugh with the other girls, then tugged at her blouse to make sure her cleavage was sufficiently visible. To make doubly sure, she unfastened a button and did what she could to make her narrow chest look full and buxom.
By the time she arrived, Tom was (to his own surprise) burning with a sudden anger.
‘I only asked you to share a drink. I didn’t expect you to start undressing.’
The girl didn’t sit, she remained standing. ‘That’s a pleasant way to greet somebody.’ The words could have come out tough, but actually they didn’t. Her tone was cool and the rebuke was deliberate, but not at all coarse. Partly it was her accent, which was mid-European and husky.
‘I only want to offer you a drink. I’m not expecting to … to … for God’s sake, I’m not going to pay you.’ Tom’s voice hovered between conciliatory and aggressive. His mood was similarly uncertain.
The girl did up her button, and arranged her clothes more decorously. She took a longer look at Tom – again, he noticed her gaze, which almost seemed to expect the presence of danger – then a glance back at her girlfriends. She sat down, placing her bottom down on the seat first, then sliding her legs round to follow. It was the delicate way for a lady to sit, the way a London debutante might sit, not a cheap whore in a two-bit Yankee oil town. She sniffed the wine, then sipped.
‘In that case you ought to have bought a better wine.’
Tom laughed defensively. ‘It’s all they have. I was sick of drinking beer. If you want, I can –’
She smiled. ‘It’s OK. I was
joking. I’m sick of beer too.’
‘Tom Calloway,’ said Tom extending his hand.
‘Rebecca Lewi,’ she said. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance.’
Rebecca Lewi turned out to be solid gold. She was a Polish-speaking Jew from Vilnius in Lithuania. During the war, her family had been displaced, robbed, ill-treated and imprisoned. Somehow, they had found the means to pay for her and her twelve-year-old brother to travel first to Sweden, then on to America. They had arrived in 1916 and had been forced to wait more than three years before obtaining reliable news of the rest of the family. Her other brothers were either dead or in prison somewhere in Russia. Her parents were both alive and had hopes of resettling safely in Germany. She wanted them to come out to America, but they felt too old and too uncertain to make the move.
‘It will be good for them there, as long as the socialists don’t seize control.’
‘And your brother? The one you travelled out with?’
Rebecca’s face stiffened. ‘He came out here with tuberculosis. It was the main reason we came. I was terrified that they wouldn’t let him in, but even though the doctor on Ellis Island found the problem, he took pity on us.’
‘And your brother, he … ?’
‘He died. I did all I could, but …’ She shrugged. ‘The illness took him. Two years ago.’
‘I’m sorry …’ Tom tailed off, but a thought had struck him and must have been visible in his expression.
Rebecca answered his unspoken question. ‘Yes. The hospitals were expensive. I got into debt. Now I’m paying it off. I thought I would hate selling myself, but apparently one gets used to anything. I don’t want sympathy.’
Tom nodded. ‘All right. No sympathy.’
‘Good, and you?’ Rebecca changed the subject brusquely and decisively. ‘You’re English?’
The Sons of Adam Page 16