The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  The Russians were thoroughly used to such weather, and worked at their constant unhurried pace irrespective of climate, but the Persians suffered acutely. The tribesmen usually spent their winters down in the lowlands in their family compounds. The idea of working outside in these conditions appalled them, and nearly a third of the men employed simply disappeared till the camp seemed empty and joyless.

  Alan caught four men smoking opium. He disciplined them and confiscated their drug, but the men were moody and sullen, and four days later, when the supply truck came up from Shiraz, he smelled the odd meaty smoke and found the men grouped round an opium pipe with dull eyes and vacant faces. He did nothing while they were still under the influence, but the next morning he asked them to take their belongings and leave. The mood in the camp grew brittle and depressed.

  And yet, despite everything, the Muhammad Ameri No. 2 continued to make progress. They passed each milestone with a modest celebration: two hundred and fifty feet earned lashings of tea, sugared almonds and tobacco. Five hundred feet earned an open fire built with their precious coal, and two young kids spit-roasted over the blaze. They were at nine hundred and thirty feet now and the camp was abuzz with plans for the thousand foot extravaganza.

  Meanwhile, Reynolds and Alan met each night to examine their latest rock samples, and to compare them to the ones they’d taken from the Ameri No. 1. As usual – perhaps as always – the geology was inconclusive.

  ‘We’ll just have to go down until we find it,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Or until we run out of cash.’

  And day by day, their cash resources dwindled, the rock samples were unhelpful, their chances of failure grew.

  86

  There are important moments in life. Marriage. Baptism. Death. The first kiss, the first sex, the first broken heart. But however important these things feel, they’re not such a big deal. They happen a million times to a million people every day. Everyone has ’em. They’re nothing special.

  But most people aren’t oilmen. Most people haven’t assembled land, a rig, and a crew of riggers all in the same place at the same time just five hundred yards from a producing well.

  Tom had.

  He’d had to wait forty days before getting his rig (bought from some bankrupt exploration venture in Indiana), but they’d got it set up in double-quick time and now, at six o’clock on a rain-spattered evening, they lowered the drill to within three foot of the sandy earth. This was bigger than marriage. This was bigger than birth. This might – just might – turn out to be an oil well.

  ‘Hold up there, guys,’ said the Duster, producing two brown paper bags with a pint of moonshine whiskey in each. ‘We gotta do things properly from the drop.’

  He handed round the bottles and each of the men took a long slow draught, before spitting some on their hands and running their hands solemnly round the fishtailed drill bit. Earlier that day, Jeb Flecker had heated the forge up to white heat and hammered the blade of the bit so sharp you could have shaved with it. A bit didn’t need to be anywhere near that sharp, of course. After a single minute twisting in the soil, the edge would be lost in any event. But each of the drilling crew owned one per cent of whatever came up, and the superstitious intensity of that gang was greater than anything Tom had seen, even in wartime.

  Tom took his swig, rolled it round his mouth, spat on his hands, and baptised the blade. He swallowed the drink. It tasted of fire, blue-flamed and intense; the true illegal spirit of Prohibition. For some reason the taste made him think of Rebecca Lewi. He felt a sudden pang of longing for her company. Annoyed with himself, he spat on the ground and passed the whiskey bottle on round.

  The Duster took the bottle and nodded at Pipsqueak.

  ‘She’s in the crew.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘So.’ The Duster waved the bottle.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she’s gotta drink.’

  Tom thought of objecting, but the swell of opinion was against him. He wiped his dirty workman’s hands on the seat of his overalls, then bent to lift Pipsqueak to the bottle. The Duster splashed her with the fluid, and she spluttered indignantly but her tail wagged harder. Tom then passed her beneath the drill bit, like a lamb of sacrifice. The men nodded approvingly. ‘She’ll do,’ said the Duster, meaning the rig, not the dog.

  ‘Then let’s get moving,’ said Tom. His voice was quiet, almost reverential. He had chosen his tone just right.

  The drillers knew what to do. The boiler was fired up. The pressure was right, the rig was strong and level. First, they raised the massive lifting block that caused the drill bit to lower to the ground. The Duster brought it to rest on the sand as gently as a mother kisses a baby. He nodded. ‘Boiler Bob’ Colvin threw the valve that passed pressure through to the kelly. The kelly turned. The drill pipe turned with the kelly. The bit twisted into a rapid blur, drove down into the soil, and was buried. Tom let out a sigh, that was one-quarter pain and three-quarters bliss.

  He had just spudded in his very first well.

  87

  Spring 1921.

  It was still cold, but the valley floor was clear of snow, and the river running through it was high and dangerous with meltwater. A couple of their goats lost their footing when the bank collapsed, were swept away, and found drowned two miles downstream. Everywhere in the camp, the ground was being churned into slush. The winter fight against cold had turned into a new fight against mud.

  The Muhammad Ameri No. 2 had failed.

  They hadn’t struck oil. They hadn’t found signs of oil. The chippings that came up from the well bottom gave Alan and Reynolds no hope. If they’d had time and money, they’d have continued, of course. But they didn’t. With every day that passed, their money was draining away and time was measured in money. As Reynolds said, ‘If we don’t move now, we may as well not move at all. We simply won’t have the cash to sink a third well to a proper depth.’

  The derrick stood a hundred feet high. As well as the derrick, they’d have to move the boiler and pump-house and camwheel and lifting tackle and cable. Even a short move would require all the men to labour for a week.

  ‘Time to get a bloody move up,’ said Ahmed.

  But Alan was unhappy about something. He squinted up at the glinting snowline, he rubbed his chin (newly shaved in boiled snow-water), and pulled slowly at a half-eaten flat-bread that was the day’s breakfast. He had put on weight since his illness the year before, but he was still thinner than he had been. His face had lines that had never been there before, not even during the war.

  High up on the valley wall, a chain of bedraggled calico flags was beginning to poke through the snow. Alan had put the flags up there last year, marking out the strata of oil sand that Ameri had found. Because the strata were exposed, there was no chance of finding oil in any quantity, but you could at least trace the line where the oil had once been.

  The line of flags was further evidence in favour of Reynolds’ impatience to move. The flags were never more than two thousand feet from the top of the ridge, and sometimes as little as eleven hundred. If the same logic applied on the valley floor, then oil should be found at between eleven hundred and two thousand feet. They’d driven the first well to eighteen hundred, and the second one to more than two thousand. Everything in logic said they should move the well now, and get cracking on their third and final hole …

  Eventually, Alan made up his mind. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We leave the derrick where it is.’

  ‘What? Great Scott, laddie! There’s no use in giving up. We’ve still got cash enough to –’

  ‘We’re not giving up. We’re going to carry on down.’

  ‘Good Lord, haven’t we been through this?’

  ‘Goddamn boiler not wanting any more down,’ said Ahmed helpfully. ‘Lousy useless damn-fool bugger.’

  ‘Down,’ said Alan decisively. ‘George, look up at the flags there. What do you see?’

  ‘I see an oilfield at eleven hundred to t
wo thousand feet in depth. There’s no sense in going deeper.’

  Alan nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve always seen too. That’s why I was so sure we had to move the well. But maybe we’ve been seeing the wrong thing all along. Maybe the valley is giving us the clue we need and we’ve been too blind to see it.’

  Reynolds grunted. He didn’t like detective novels. He didn’t see that there were any two ways about it.

  Alan used his flatbread to point at the left-handmost flag. ‘That flag is at least four miles from us and I got a real whiff of oil from that site.’ Then he pointed right, far up the valley. The line of calico flags tapered out of sight as the valley curved. ‘That way, the field stretches for another three miles at least. I imagine the field goes further still, I just couldn’t get to it because of rockfalls from higher up.’

  Reynolds nodded. This was baby stuff. He knew it all.

  ‘So what do you see? What are the flags telling us?’ Alan asked.

  ‘That there’s an oilfield between eleven hundred –’

  ‘But what size of oilfield? Big or small?’

  ‘Lord’s sake, lad, if we ever hit the damn thing, it’ll be enormous. What, seven miles long, by Lord knows how many wide! I didn’t leave a comfortable berth in London just to find any old tiddler.’

  Alan nodded. ‘Precisely. Exactly. The field – if it exists – is enormous. It shouldn’t make a blind bit of difference where we stick our well. If there’s oil here at all, it’s beneath our feet right now.’

  He spoke in a voice of absolute authority. It was a voice he’d acquired as a leader of men on the battlefields of France and Flanders. Nobody who’d ever heard him use that tone had disagreed. Nobody was going to today. Alan took another bite of his flatbread and tossed the rest aside.

  ‘We go on down.’

  88

  How many times and with how many women had Tom had sex in his life?

  He didn’t know. The answer was a lot, of course, but he’d always felt it would be contemptible, ungentlemanly in him to count.

  His first girl had been Susan Risinghurst, an apple-cheeked farmer’s daughter in Whitcombe. His most regular lover had been Laura Cole, a shop girl that he’d become close to in London before the war. His first foreign conquest had been a French woman, Amélie, about whom he remembered virtually nothing. His most disastrous one had been with Alan’s Lisette, that awful August morning in Saint Tess.

  But of all the pretty, laughing, dimpled crew, there was only one girl who regularly entered Tom’s dreams at night and his imagination during the day. Only one: and one of the very few that Tom had never even tried to have sex with.

  Rebecca.

  He couldn’t get her out of his head. He loathed the thought of her profession. He remembered being infuriated by her intense stare and intrusive questions. What was more, to put the matter at its very lowest, he wasn’t even sure he found her attractive: with her narrow chest, overdefinite nose, and deep-set eyes.

  But that wasn’t the point. The simple fact was that he couldn’t get her out of his head. One day in early spring, he handed the well over to the Duster, walked down to the railroad depot and caught a train out to Wyoming.

  He was determined to find her. It felt nearly as important as finding oil.

  When he arrived there, nothing had changed. Downstairs, the bakery still ran its business. Upstairs, the door still needed a coat of paint. A ribbon of linoleum still peeled away from the wall.

  Tom knocked.

  No answer.

  It was still early. She wouldn’t – thank God – still have any clients at this hour, but there was no chance that she was already up, dressed and gone out. Tom knocked again, long enough and hard enough to wake anyone inside.

  No answer.

  He leaned against the door and felt it bulge against the frame. He tested the weight and strength of it, then crashed into it with his shoulder. The door bowed in the middle and sprang open.

  The room was empty. Not just empty of her, but empty. There was a table there, a couple of chairs, and the bed, stripped of all its linen and looking more than ever like a great brass beetle in the corner. Even the smells were gone. The room didn’t smell of Rebecca any more, it just smelled of old carpet and stale air.

  For fully two minutes, Tom stood like a block, frozen.

  The tiny kitchen and shower room were both empty. There was nothing in the place at all: not so much as a coffee cup. Dazed, Tom was about to leave. Then, on a sudden impulse he dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. A cheap suitcase lay on the floor, shoved away against the wall. Tom reached in and dragged it out.

  As he pulled the case out into the light, something fell from its top surface: a paper-bound exercise book. Tom opened it. Two columns of figures straggled down the pages, marked in pencil. Each row was neatly labelled with a word, written in Polish, or simply a date.

  Tom tried to read the Polish, but didn’t get far. Of the two twins, Alan had been the linguist, not Tom. The figures were no more comprehensible. The first column seemed to contain random amounts, some of them marked by a minus sign, the others apparently positive. The column on the right was marked ‘Dlug’. The number in the dlug column started out large at the top of page one, then fell gradually, ending up at zero on the ninth page of the book. The figure zero was ringed twice in red. All the following pages had been left blank.

  For a few seconds, Tom stared.

  Then, in a moment, it all fell into place. Dlug meant debt. Rebecca had kept accounts to track the money she earned and the money she still owed. When the money had been paid, her job was over.

  Tom reached for the suitcase, but he already knew what he would find: Rebecca’s working clothes. He broke the lock on the case. There were a couple of dark red dresses, with their low-scooped necklines. There was a black lace choker, a tube of lipstick, some stockings, a glimpse of more dark lace. Tom slammed the case shut and stood up abruptly. He felt an odd mixture of sexual excitement, loss, confusion and anger. More than ever, Tom felt the urgency of his desire to find Rebecca. The urgency and the uselessness.

  Tom kicked the suitcase away from him back under the bed. Then, hating the idea that anyone else might find it and get a kick out of it, Tom crawled back down on his knees to lug it out again. He’d take it down by the railroad track, cover it with kerosene and do the job properly.

  But not the book.

  Tom needed a memento of the woman he wanted. The clothes represented the part he’d always been ashamed of. The book represented … Well, what the hell did it represent? Rebecca must have been the only whore in the continental United States to use double-entry bookkeeping. He flicked back through the pages, taking pleasure in the sight of Rebecca’s handwriting. As he flicked, some dates caught his eye. For instance, 17 December 1919 was followed by the sum of nine dollars fifty cents in the first column and a corresponding reduction in debt in the second. Income. Tom was looking at Rebecca’s records of income.

  The sight sickened him again. He was about to throw the book into the suitcase and leave it to join the rest of the prostitute trash on a trackside fire, when something caught his eye: 24 December 1919. A long line had been drawn across the page, and both columns had been left blank. December 24 was Christmas Eve, the day Tom had asked her to sell whiskey for him.

  He’d offended her deeply that night, but the long line told a story. She hadn’t made one red cent of income that night, her big brass bed had had only one occupant.

  Tom quickly flicked to the other dates when, as far as he could remember, he’d enjoyed a bottle of wine with her. On each occasion, there was the same thing. A long line drawn across the page and not one penny of income earned. Tom breathed out with a sigh. So he wasn’t alone in feeling something for her. She too had felt something for him.

  Tom looked up, startled by a sudden feeling of emptiness.

  He was standing in the exact spot where she had kissed him that one time, when he’d burst back into her room to ask
her to leave. He remembered the surprise of that kiss and the intense joy it had given him. He had returned today to ask her again to leave with him. Leave as man and wife. This time, he’d have given her time, he’d have done it properly, not been rushing off to catch a train.

  He’d have done a lot of things, if only he’d been in time to catch up with her.

  Would have.

  Would have.

  The most useless words in English.

  89

  Summer 1921.

  The Persian sun baked the sky to brittle whiteness, while the burning earth turned to dust beneath it. The camp had mostly emptied of people now, and the bare dozen that remained worked like dogs from first light to well beyond the last lick of fire on the western horizon.

  Since Alan had decided not to move the derrick, progress had been desperately slow. It was far too late to undo the decision – money was running through their hands all the time – but their disappointment was as bitter as the wind-blown dust that entered their clothes, their food and their bedding.

  The Ameri No. 2 now stood at two thousand seven hundred feet. As Ahmed had predicted the lousy goddamn boiler didn’t want to go down any further, and breakdowns and stoppages were now an all but daily occurrence. On many days they made no progress at all. On other days they went five feet, sometimes ten feet, once and only once seventeen feet. Alan and Reynolds had stopped their meticulous sample collection. If they hit oil, they hit oil. If they missed, they missed. Things were inshallah – in the will of Allah – and rock samples wouldn’t help them much either way.

  The shortage of money made economy increasingly essential. Kerosene lamps were permitted only for matters directly related to work. Food was now restricted to rice, flat breads and vegetables, except once a week when a couple of chickens would be shared among everyone. Fuel prices in Shiraz had risen because of bandit activity in the mountains, and fuel was desperately needed up at camp.