Men from the rigs round about came to stare, snigger and laugh.
‘Hey, pal! You better watch out. You got yourself a leak right there. Can’t you see the nothing spilling out?’
‘Hey, mister. You wanna fill her up with water? I fancy a swim, me.’
Another joker took his coat and shirt off and pretended to get ready to dive in.
Tom let them laugh. It was one of the first warm and sunny days of spring. He ate sandwiches and joked with the men who had come to gawp. He brewed coffee on a kerosene stove and handed it out in tin mugs to anyone who wanted some. But it wasn’t long before Tom’s lunch was interrupted.
A heavy-set man with big Victorian whiskers came to stand in between Tom and the sun. Tom recognised the man as the head driller on one of the first wells to have struck oil.
‘This your tank?’ said the man bluntly.
‘Yep. You want some coffee?’
The man shook his head rudely. ‘What you planning to put in it?’
‘Sugar. I’m clean out of milk.’
‘The tank, for Chrissake, not the coffee.’
Tom shrugged. ‘It’s called an oil storage tank, so I figure I oughta use it to store some oil.’
‘I got oil.’
‘Hey, good for you. Congratulations,’ said Tom, without sarcasm.
‘And you got a tank.’
‘Sure have.’
‘I’ll give you a penny a month for every barrel of oil you store for me. Just till we can get a pipeline up the valley. Three or four months, maybe.’
‘It’s good coffee,’ said Tom. ‘Real fresh. I can’t persuade you?’
‘Three thousand barrels, is it? A penny a month. Three months. That’s – what? – ninety bucks. Call it an even hundred.’
‘No deal.’
‘No deal?’ The man was non-plussed. ‘You got no oil.’
‘Not a drop.’
‘I’ll give you a hundred and fifty. Right now, I’m pumping oil I can’t hardly use. I’m burning it off mostly.’
‘Now that’s a shame.’
‘One eighty?’
‘Nope.’
The day wore on. Word of Tom’s tank spread quickly. But by the end of the day, nobody was there to laugh at him, nobody was pretending to strip off for a quick swim.
Instead, a cluster of men squatted on the rocks round Tom’s little camp site. The situation up on the oilfields was pretty extreme. More and more oil was being struck, but with the road down to the valley all but impassable, the oil that was pumped was next to worthless.
When Tom announced he was there to buy oil, he had half a dozen eager sellers.
‘Tell you what, boys,’ said Tom, as the sun began to slope down towards the hills, ‘we’ll have an auction.’
‘An auction? How d’you figure that? We only got one buyer.’
‘It’s gonna be a special kind of auction. Here’s what I have in mind.’
And he explained. Tom’s idea was a kind of reverse auction. He’d offer to buy a thousand barrels of oil at twenty-five cents the barrel. At that price all six oilmen were eager sellers but Tom wasn’t yet ready to do the deal.
‘Now, anyone here willing to sell me a thousand barrels at twenty-four cents the barrel?’ he said.
The man closest to Tom looked like he’d been socked in the jaw. He sat heavily down on a rock.
‘Holy shit,’ he said, ‘we’re going down.’
But he raised his hand anyway. So did the others.
‘Six buyers at twenty-four cents?’ said Tom. ‘Who’ll sell at twenty-three?’
The six men raced to raise their hands. Tom picked the man who’d moved fastest.
‘Yours at twenty-three,’ he said. ‘Who’ll sell at twenty two? … At twenty one? … At twenty? … At nineteen?’
As the last gold vanished from the horizon, the men were still there. Still glum, still shocked, still bidding.
69
‘It’ll never get up,’ said Alan.
‘It will,’ said Reynolds.
They looked down at the truck, shimmering in the heat below. The khaki cab was covered in dust, knocks and scratches. It looked like an old prize-fighter after a losing bout.
‘They overheat. Even without a load, most of the trucks need to stop a couple of times to cool off.’
‘It’ll get up.’
They squinted down at the truck. It was carrying the twelve-foot drill bit that Reynolds had seen in the desert. Anglo-Persian had refused to sell any of its equipment to its upstart competitor, not even the equipment that was good only for scrap. That had been as expected. When Reynolds had finished his reconnaissance, he and Alan had ridden out to the local Bakhtiari chieftain. Alan explained how certain materials had been left to rot by Anglo-Persian, and how he personally had a great use for those materials.
The chieftain had furrowed his brow. He’d ordered lemon sherbet and the slaughter of two young lambs for a feast. Then, once a sufficient volume of gold had changed hands, the chieftain had agreed to act. The very next week, he’d ridden out to the drilling site with a great troop of men, mounted variously on horses, motorbikes and trucks. The men had swirled around the camp, fired off a few shots to indicate that they weren’t to be trifled with, then stolen everything that Alan had asked for.
Around the same time, the Russian smugglers completed their part of the transaction. Alan’s cash had been enough to buy a complete set of drilling tools, storage tanks, temporary pipelines, and various other sundries. The equipment had been delivered by a tramp steamer with Russian Soviet documentation claiming that a cargo-load of grain had been delivered. Some of the Russian-made stuff was brand new; much of it already well used. Alan had more than a suspicion that some existing working installations had been simply dismantled and shipped out – right under the noses of the Revolutionary Red Guards.
With all the equipment assembled, the next task had been to haul it down to the Zagros: an immense labour. Roads were mostly nonexistent. Bridges were absent where spring floods had washed them away. Mules got lame and trucks gave up the ghost. And so they’d built rafts and rope bridges. They’d levelled mountain paths. They’d planted dynamite beneath falls of rock. They made and carried with them a mobile forge, so that they could improvise replacement parts for their battered trucks.
And now it was all almost here. Below them, the truck ground its gears and began the ascent. The air was giddy with the heat and the temperature inside the engine casing must have been unthinkable.
‘A bottle of cold beer says it’ll make three stops or give up completely.’
‘A bottle of beer if it doesn’t make it in one.’
There was no beer in the Zagros and no way of making it cold even if there had been. So far, since they’d begun work in Persia together, Alan owed Reynolds seventy-five bottles of cold beer, while Reynolds owed his boss sixty-one. The truck ground its way up the hill. The slope was steep and though Alan had road-gangs working on the track pretty much all the time now, the terrain was a mixture of gritty sand and sharp rocks and the track simply disintegrated under the pressure of the heavy tyres. The truck negotiated the first bend and seemed to waver a moment.
‘It’s stopping.’
‘It isn’t.’
The driver found the right gear and continued on up. The drill bit on the rear looked like some giant molar dragged from some dinosaur’s jaw. It glinted dirtily in the sun.
‘How are your sums?’
For the last few nights, the lamps had been burning late in Alan’s tent as he figured out the total cost to the start of drilling. Back in London, Reynolds had advised him that doing things Anglo-Persian style would end up costing more than forty-five thousand pounds – or more than half their available funds just to get their equipment in place for the start of work. The truck ground on. A sudden lift of air brought a smell of petrol fumes and hot oil.
‘Good,’ said Alan. ‘We’ll come in just over fourteen.’
‘Fourteen? Fourteen
thousand pounds? By God, that’s an achievement.’
Alan nodded with a smile. ‘Not just that. There was a whole case of cold beer in it for me, as I remember.’
Reynolds acknowledged his debt with a glower and a tug at his moustache. ‘The truck’s still going, though.’
It was true. The truck was close enough now that they could hear the din of its engine bouncing around the craggy slopes. Alan shook his head. He couldn’t understand it. Every truck overheated on this last slope. Every one. Most of them needed to stop and cool off with their hoods up for at least a couple of hours. But the truck with its massive load had already run much further than the others had.
‘If it does get up, we can start drilling tomorrow.’
‘If? If? It will get up. I’ve told you.’
Alan shook his head. ‘It won’t.’
Reynolds chuckled. He knew something Alan didn’t.
‘Ice in the radiator?’ asked Alan.
‘Where would I get ice from?’
‘Freezing water then.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve speeded up the fan.’
‘Yah!’ Reynolds didn’t even condescend to answer that one. The air was ninety-eight degrees in the shade. You could send a small gale through the engine and not help it at all.
‘Then it’ll stop.’
‘It won’t.’
Behind them the derrick cast an increasing shadow on the dust. They were going to start drilling not half a mile from the spot Muhammad Ameri had first pointed out. The well was already christened Muhammad Ameri No. 1 in the American fashion, and Ameri himself had swept into camp eight days previously with forty mounted warriors to inspect the work and to remind Alan who had first brought him to the valley.
Meantime, there was plenty of work to do. Punching a well using the old-fashioned percussion method would be devilishly slow work, but slow didn’t matter, as long as they could manage steady.
The truck was only a little way beneath them now. Through the open cab window, Alan could see the sweating driver, dressed in loose Persian robes and a bristling growth of hair on his upper lip that (for once) put George Reynolds’ moustache to shame. A piece of melon rind lay discarded on the passenger seat. There was little more than a hundred yards to go now and the slope was easing. Reynolds had been right …
The melon rind. The image stuck in Alan’s mind.
The truck clawed its way over the lip of the hill and levelled out. The drill bit became horizontal and the ropes that held it began to slacken. Melon rind.
Reynolds chuckled. ‘I’m looking forward to that beer,’ he said.
But Alan didn’t hear him. He was running to the truck. The driver was getting out of the cab, amidst the cheers of his companions. Alan reached the truck and snatched open the hood.
The engine was hot, all right, but not boiling. A gigantic watermelon, split down the middle, had been jammed over the radiator. When Alan put his hand to the melon it sizzled and spat with the heat and even the outer rind was scorching to the touch. Reynolds had arrived next to Alan, panting in the sun.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘a cold beer will do me fine.’
70
The driller let the whisky hum its way down his throat.
‘You got yourself a sweet bottle there,’ he commented.
‘It’s the last one,’ said Tom. He was no longer running alcohol. Profits from the business had become large enough that competition between rival providers was being settled with fistfights and shootouts. Tom wanted no part of that – and besides, his only interest in whisky had been to get himself a start in oil.
‘Shame that. Drank some moonshine recently, pretty much turned me green.’
Tom made no reply. His campfire crackled and subsided. The night sky spread out a million stars, like a jeweller anxious to make a sale. Behind Tom, not one but four oil tanks lay groaning full of oil.
The driller reached for more whisky and continued his story. Tom listened with half an ear.
‘So, anyways, this guy Casey has gone down pretty near six thousand feet. The drill is running through a layer of crumbly brown shale, dry as a bone, shale like he ain’t never seen before. No money to continue on. Backers are refusing money, telling him to go to hell. Old Grandma Halstead, whose land he’s squatting on, she’s telling him to go to hell. Casey swears there’s oil, there. Swears it. Anyhow, he hears about a hole two miles north that’s hit oil. He runs along, asks to see their drilling log. Begs them. They tell him to go to hell. Round about this time, everybody’s telling Casey to go to hell. So he steals it. One night, he busts in, reads their drilling log: “5,700 feet, brown shale – unusual type, easily broken. 5,750 feet, brown shale – same. 5,780 feet, sticky brown shale, stringers of oil sand. 5,800 feet, oil sand … oil sand … oil sand.”
‘Well now, Casey reads this here log book and figures his drill bit is roundabouts a hundred feet above a field every bit as sweet as anything that John D. Rockefeller could dream of. So what does he do? Heck, what would anyone do? He sells the coat off of his back. He sells his watch. He pretty much sells the tongue out of his mouth. He gets together enough money to drill one more weekend. Sunday evening, there are gas bubbles coming up. Indications of oil. The riggers go crazy. Old Grandma Halstead’s bringing out chicken pie and moonshine whiskey like deliverance day has come early. By this time, everyone had always known there’d be oil there and no one’s telling Casey to go to hell no more. Ten feet more and they strike it big. Near enough two hundred barrels a day, with Okie crude up at near one dollar twenty the barrel.
‘That’s the only way to make money in this world, I reckon. Find yourself a drill and a patch of land. Go see what’s down there.’
The driller reached for the whisky bottle again. Tom rolled onto his side and threw another log on the fire.
‘Did you ever drill for yourself?’ he murmured.
‘Me? Sure. A coupla times. Never struck, though I came closer than a tightwad to his wallet.’
Tom nodded and swallowed some whisky himself. He’d hung around the oilfields long enough to know the pattern. Everyone had stories about people like old Casey So-and-so. The people telling the tales swore they were true. Maybe they even believed them. But if you asked them the magic question – ‘Did you ever drill for yourself?’ – the answer was always the same.
More than a half of the older oilers had sunk a wildcat well at some time in their lives. Every single one of them had missed a fortune by only a few hundred yards. ‘Neighbouring block turned out to be some of the richest acreage in West Texas.’ ‘The field came to an end, right there at the boundary fence. Far side gushed like the Niagara Falls. My side, drier’n a dead coyote.’ ‘Ran outa money, but if we had’ve gone on another two hunnert feet, would’ve smacked right into the Tannawassa sands, the richest oil deposits in that part o’ Californey.’ And so on and so on.
Tom’s liquor business had financed three of the oil tanks. A regular bank loan had brought in enough cash to buy a fourth tank, a six thousand barreler, with enough left over to let Tom buy as much oil as he needed.
As he’d expected, his first auction had been his worst. That first evening, the price had ended up at fourteen cents a barrel. Tom refused any further deals for twenty-four hours, then began buying again. The guys with surplus oil had thought about things overnight. Their maths looked simple. They could burn oil and get nothing. Or they could sell the oil to Tom Calloway and get something for it, no matter how miserable the something. The second auction had ended down at eleven cents. The third down at six and a half.
Right now, Tom had around fifteen thousand barrels of oil, purchased at an average price of slightly more than ten cents. He slept up on the hills amongst his tanks, protecting his precious oil against thieves or vandals. He missed seeing Rebecca – missed her with an odd intensity at times – but aside from that, he was happy.
‘Pipeline will be here soon,’ said the driller.
‘Three weeks, or s
o they say.’
‘What’ll you do when it comes?’
‘Sell, of course.’
‘You should get plenty. Maybe one dollar the barrel … Sheez!’
‘Maybe.’
‘What you gonna do when you sell out?’ said the driller. ‘There’s some land over Stone Creek way looks pretty rich to me. Wouldn’t mind making hole over there, see what there was.’
‘Stone Creek, huh?’ said Tom, not exactly excited by the tip, but never one to pass up the possibility of good information.
‘Right. Listen.’ The driller rolled closer to Tom, speaking in a whisper in case the mice and the rabbits and the owls and the prairie grass would overhear him and broadcast the news to every oilman west of Pennsylvania. ‘Got a friend’s been over there. Prospecting. On the quiet. He ain’t seen nothing, but he can smell it. Got the nose for it, see. We’re just looking around now for the money to start drilling. Wouldn’t let you in on it, ’cept I can tell you’re a real oilman, an’ all.’
Tom’s interest, small to begin with, faded away to nothing. He yawned and lay down. His coat was rolled up to make a pillow. Beneath the coat there was a flat packet that rustled as Tom moved his head.
‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘It’s all about the smell, you see. Some folks can smell it, other folks can’t. It’s simple as that.’
‘I guess,’ said Tom, not keen to argue.
But it was horseshit. Obvious horseshit.
Oil that lay ten feet underground couldn’t be smelled, never mind oil five thousand feet down. For all the stories about Casey So-and-So and all the rest of them, Tom had never met anyone who had drilled and made money. There was a reason why the big guys stayed big and the small guys stayed small.
Information.
Simple as that.
Information about where oil was likeliest to be found. Information based on geology and seismology and clever men making complex calculations. Information about available land and prices and refinery capacities. And that was why Tom listened to the driller, but didn’t get excited. That was why he spent his days thinking out his next move.
The Sons of Adam Page 20