Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  eventhorizonpg.com

  Sprocket Comes to Call

  I glanced up from a shovel full of pig slop just as the Driller made the corner down by the dried-up bed of Hanson’s Creek.

  The sun was about half set, so at first all I could make out was a long dark something churning up a cloud of red-dirt dust. It was as wide as the road and then some. And long—the front of the Driller must have been more than a hundred feet past the curve before the cloud at the end trailed off and blew away. I never saw nothing like it in my life before.

  I yelled out. By the time it drew up down at the turn-off into our cattle guard, all eight of us, Papa and Grampaw and us four kids, plus two dogs, were clustered in front of the porch steps with three squirrel guns, a deer rifle, a hayfork, and a slop shovel pointed in its general direction. It stopped at the cattle guard, and the dust started to settle. The lower flanks were streaked red and gray from travel, but the rest of it was as black as a moonless night, only all slick and shiny like the intestines of a fresh-slaughtered bull. Hundreds of stumpy feet marched in place all the way down its length. I had a thought that shooting it probably wouldn’t do much more than tee it off if it decided to come through the gate and eat us and the farmhouse. It stood about forty feet away, with the people getting more quiet and the dogs getting more noisy every second, and then a head popped out of a hole that opened in its top near the front. The rest of a human body followed until a bearded man was free from its innards. He slid down the slope of its ten-foot-high flank and walked towards us. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit with colored patches sewed all over it. On his head perched a battered silver-metal hat with a wide brim all the way around.

  “Howdy, folks,” he called out as he walked toward us. “I’m Doc Miller. This’d be the MacFarland place, I take it.” He tugged leather gloves off and offered his hand for a shake as he drew near. He was a big, strong-looking man. He came nearly up to my chin height, and I suspected if we arm-rassled, it’d be a chore to put him down.

  Papa nodded cautiously, handed me his gun, and stuck out his own calloused hand.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you folks. Pleasure to meet y’all.” The man twitched his head back in the direction of the road. Holes had opened up in half a dozen places along the Driller’s body and more men were climbing out of them. “We heard in Hemphill that y’all had been a little water-poor of late and came by to see if you’d be interested in a business proposition.”

  We hadn’t seen rain for most of a month. We’d been managing to haul in barely enough water for man and beast, but the corn visible in the field behind the house had already started to turn from green and gold to brown and dead. Papa couldn’t have said he wasn’t interested even if he’d wanted to. Without water, and soon, this year’s harvest would be ten acres of dry stalks. Last year hadn’t been much to speak of, and this one just might be bad enough to run us off the land.

  * * *

  The next morning, Doc Miller stood on top of the head of the Driller directing things. The pasture looked like the carnival had arrived. They’d pitched half a dozen tents of various bright colors, and they fussed with piles of strange equipment and odd-shaped boxes which littered the pasture’s shady side. Towser stayed close beside me, every now and then growling half-heartedly. I squatted off to the side for about five minutes before I caught Doc’s eye.

  “Hey, boy. We been running a little short-handed. You want to help out a bit? Drillin’ is an exciting, romantic business, and you might learn something.”

  “My name’s Henry Lee, sir, and I’d be pleased to help out.”

  “Hey, Razer!” he called out to one of the scurrying men. “You take over while I give Mr. Henry Lee MacFarland a tour of Sprocket.” He slid down the Driller’s side and led me along its length, slapping it affectionately on the flanks as he went.

  “This here is Sprocket. There ain’t too many like him.” He stopped where a bunch of large and small folds in its dark hide stretched for a dozen feet or so. “He’s close to bein’ the biggest Driller I’ve ever seen. And he still ain’t got his full growth on him.”

  He rubbed an area about a foot above one of the creases. The crease unfolded lazily and an eyeball twice the size of my head poked out. It stared at us for a long second, then slipped back under its cover. Doc stooped and pulled at the blubbery edge of a crease that ran knee-high for eight or nine feet. “He’ll go down more’n twenty thousand feet—that’s four miles, Henry Lee. There ain’t a drilling rig in the world better than Sprocket at finding oil and making hole down to it.” The crease split open, and I took a step back. Towser had stayed back a couple of dozen steps, watching tensely. He’s a good squirrel dog, but this monster had him spooked. Had me a mite edgy, too.

  As the crease widened into a huge black and red pit, I took another quick step backwards and Towser broke into barking and making stiff-legged hops back and forth. A slick, sticky-looking white tube shot out of the pit and wrapped him up. It was so quick, all I really saw was a glimpse of a struggling, yelping blob half visible inside the tip before it sucked back inside.

  Doc immediately commenced to beating on the creature with both fists. “Dammit, Sprocket! Spit that goddam dog out! You know better’n to act like this!”

  After a second, the eyeball reappeared and blinked at us twice. Doc picked up a crowbar laying in the grass and started whupping on Sprocket with that. He jumped aside when a hole appeared in the crease right in front of him and Towser jetted out, still yelping. He hit the grass running and kept going.

  Doc beat on Sprocket a couple’a more times before he threw the crowbar aside. Then he turned to me, grinning. “Hell of a drilling rig, Henry Lee, but I can’t say his humor is always in the best of taste … so to speak.”

  Sprocket’s enormous mouth gaped open again and Doc stepped up on its lip. “C’mon. Let me show you his guts.” He saw me hesitate and grinned again. “Hell, don’t worry. This ain’t his eating mouth. It’s his drilling mouth.” He pointed down at his feet. “See? No teeth.” He stepped off the lip and marched inside the monster. If he could do it, so could I. The mouth closed behind us.

  It wasn’t dark for more’n a second, because Doc pulled open a curtain of flesh a couple of yards further on. We stepped into a hallway almost twice my height that must of stretched the entire length of Sprocket. It was lit by glowing warts spaced along the hall at head height, each about a half a foot in diameter. The walls were pink, shot through with darker red veins, and they moved in and out slowly. A musky breeze shifted direction every few seconds.

  As Doc led me down the hallway, he pointed out holes and creases along the way. “Now this here, Henry Lee, is my bunk room.” He pulled it open, and I looked over his shoulder. Inside was a small round room holding a couple of chairs and a bed with a lamp over it. Colorful tapestries covered the walls and floor. A bulky wooden desk stood next to a set of rungs leading to a hole in the ceiling which let early morning sunlight in. “Since I’m the tool pusher on this rig, I get the room that’s most forward.” He closed it and walked on.

  “Most of the rooms front of the tongue base are living areas. You know, bunkrooms, mess hall, head, that sort of thing. Now here …” We’d reached the tongue, a long, white snaky tube that lay in a groove in the center of the hall and gradually thickened as it led back to a hump about thirty feet further on. “Here is Sprocket’s drilling tongue.”

  He peeled back white blubber from its tip and exposed a gleaming black bone, with three ratchet-edged pyramids angled off from its sharp point. “This is the drill-head and these here are Sprocket’s drilling cones,” he said, tapping one of the pyramids. “He twists ’em back and forth when he’s making hole. They bite int
o earth and rock and chew it up.” He let the blubber flop back over the cones. I’d gotten over worrying about being eaten alive and was starting to get interested in what he was saying.

  We walked further down the hallway. The tongue got thicker, until it was higher than my head. At its very rear, it disappeared into the floor. Beyond it men hustled about, carrying things and calling to each other. “The tongue actually goes back almost all of the rest of Sprocket’s length under the floor. It compresses when it’s not drilling, then stretches out as far as it’s needed, the deeper we go. We’re only going down to the aquifer on this one. Won’t give it any kind of workout at all.”

  “Uh … no offense, sir, but how come you’re finding water for us instead of being somewhere else drilling for oil?”

  He leaned against the base of the tongue and pulled makings out of a pocket on his shoulder. “Well, Henry Lee, we just finished doing a couple of wildcat wells up north.” He grinned humorlessly as he shook tobacco out and rolled. “They all come up dry, and the operator went broke before he paid us. It damn-near busted us. We’re heading down to a field opening up near Odessa. Looks like it’s gonna be pretty rich. But a man’s gotta eat along the way.” He licked the endpapers and struck a phosphorus match off his hat. “Probably drill a dozen fast holes around here on farmsteads and then move on.”

  A man at the far end of the hall yelled at us. “Hey, Doc! We’re ready to spud whenever you are.”

  “Be right there, Razer.” We walked down the hallway and out Sprocket’s rear end. Doc made a final check of everything. A hose led from one crease to another, and he yanked on it to make sure it wouldn’t come loose. “Leads from his water bladder to his mud bladder,” he explained. “Since we’re going so shallow we’ll just use fresh water for drilling fluid.” Various machines and hoses were hooked into other creases, and he checked all those.

  Finally, we stood at Sprocket’s head. A dozen men sat in folding chairs, fiddling with various instruments. Doc stuck his arm in to the shoulder through a crease next to the mouth and felt around for a few seconds. “Pressure’s good, Razer,” he said to the man who’d called us and, who now stood next to him. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Four men pried open Sprocket’s mouth and walked inside. A minute later, they emerged, carrying the tongue between them. Doc pried back the tip’s cover for one last inspection of the cones, then laid it on the ground.

  I’d been so interested watching him that I’d barely noticed the movements and sounds of the men in the chairs.

  Doc walked over to a crate in front of them and handed me two carved sticks that were on it. “Here you go, Henry Lee. Time to work.” The sticks didn’t weight much, and when I tapped them together, they made a pleasant hollow sound. I felt like an idiot standing there with them. What kind of work could I do with a couple of sticks?

  Doc picked up the crowbar that he’d used earlier to get Sprocket to spit out Towser, and commenced to beating on him again, this time in a more rhythmical pattern. “Time to get to work, you lazy bastard!” he yelled. “We’re ready and you’re ready and it ain’t no use pretending you’re asleep.” This time I was far enough back so that I could see it when both huge eyes opened and tried to stare cross-eyed at Doc. Satisfied, he backed off, reaching down to give the drilling tongue one last caress.

  “Stokers ready?” he called out to a couple of men who stood next to a high pile of wood next to another opening in Sprocket’s side.

  “Bet your ass,” was the reply.

  He pulled a foot-and-a half-long wand from a narrow pocket I hadn’t noticed before that ran down his right leg. “Now, Henry Lee, I’m depending on you to help us out with this. You just watch my baton and hit those sticks together in time.”

  He raised the wand and took a deep breath. “Ah-one-and-ah-two-and-ah …”

  The men in the chairs started blowing and rubbing and pumping their instruments all together, as his wand moved in graceful curves through the air. I missed the first few beats, but after that I did fine, the sticks’ mellow, clear sound following perfectly.

  Oh, it was wild, blood-stirring music. That tongue jerked erect for a minute and then plunged into the earth, twisting and squirming. Sprocket’s eyes squeezed shut, then popped open again. His sides heaved gently, and his hundreds of feet tramped in rhythm with the gypsy music. The stokers off to the side began to chant in a language I didn’t understand as they chunked logs into Sprocket’s eating mouth.

  We played for what seemed to be hours. I was in another world.

  * * *

  We didn’t make music all the while he was drilling, of course, and I had work to do anyways. Papa got back from Hemphill after lunch. The Grange Bank had given us the loan, so we spent the rest of the day sawing and hammering, making irrigation troughs. Sprocket drilled close to five hundred feet, going below the aquifer to leave a reservoir of water in the bottom of the well. They finished late that evening. I did get to watch after supper when they snapped twenty-inch surface casing onto his tongue and set it in the hole, then mixed and poured a dozen sacks of cement around the wellhead to make sure it stayed in place. I talked with Razer and Doc some while I helped mix the concrete in a trough. They planned to move on down the road to drill another water well the next day at the Brewster place. Back to slopping pigs for me. I fell asleep listening to them partying in the pasture.

  * * *

  The next morning I’d already finished the morning chores before any of them stirred. The tents were still pitched where they’d been, but Sprocket had wandered over toward the back of the pasture. The dozen scraggly cows we owned gave him a wide berth. Doc was slouched over a campfire, sipping from a battered tin cup when I walked up. “Hey there, Henry Lee,” he called out. “You old enough to drink coffee?”

  “I’m nineteen last month, Doc. I can do whatever I damn well please.”

  He squinted up at me. “Feeling kind of salty this morning, ain’t you?”

  I crouched and poured coffee into another tin cup. “Aw, I didn’t mean nothing. I guess I’m sorry to see you going. Yesterday was fun.”

  “Like I said, it’s a romantic, exciting way to live.”

  “Yeah. Looks like it beats dirt farming, anyway.”

  About that time the ground started to shake. A thunderous pounding came from Sprocket’s direction. His hundreds of feet were stomping the back of the pasture into mud.

  Doc jumped to his feet, looking disgusted. “Damned fool!”

  “What’s he doing?”

  He threw the last third of his coffee into the fire. “Seismic testing.” He shook his head. “Yesterday when we were drilling and he was marching in place, he got one baseline. Now he’s going for the other one.”

  “I don’t understand.” Sprocket’s thumping speeded up.

  “When he pounds the ground like that, it sends sound waves through the earth. Sprocket hears ’em when they slow down or speed up or reflect off different geological formations. Two baselines gives him a three-dimensional map of what’s down there. The damned idiot’s looking for hydrocarbons. Ain’t no oil for two hundred miles in any direction.”

  Sprocket abruptly stopped and ambled back in our direction. The men had all woken and stuck their heads out of their tents, cursing and groaning sleepily.

  “Well, at least that foolishness is over,” Doc said, grunting as he picked up the pot to pour himself another cup. Sprocket reached us in a minute and towered over us silently. Doc stared at his protruding, rapidly-rotating eyeballs.

  Sprocket’s tongue shot out of his mouth and began to drill furiously not three feet from me.

  Doc threw his coffee into the fire again.

  * * *

  Papa didn’t approve of the whole thing, but his eyes bugged out nearly as far as Sprocket’s when the company man for Exoco pulled into the front yard in his brand new shiny red 1963 Ford pick
up, hopped out, and showed him the numbers wrote down on the royalty contracts he offered. If the gypsies hit a good pocket of oil or natural gas, the first in an entirely undeveloped field, Papa and Exoco would make money beyond any human cravings. Exoco would finance the drilling costs and get the biggest share. The drilling gypsies would make out, too, but not nearly as much.

  Doc just shrugged when we talked about the deal. “Exoco’s putting up some serious exploration money on this, Henry Lee. And we’re drilling on property that your Daddy owns the mineral rights of.”

  “Yeah, but none of this wouldn’t be happening without you and Sprocket! It isn’t fair!”

  He shrugged again. “You’d been around the oilpatch a little longer, you’d understand the economics of the situation. It don’t matter a hell of a lot, anyway. We ain’t in this for the money, much as I hate to admit it. It’s the excitement and romance, son.”

  I thought the carnival had come to town when Sprocket first arrived. I was wrong. Within a week, the whole pasture was covered with strange beasts and strange equipment and even stranger people. The mud gypsies, the casing gypsies, the tool gypsies, the cement gypsies, and more—all converged on the MacFarland farmstead out of nowhere, all accompanied by one or more beasties that did something vital to the drilling of an exploratory well. In between chores and building and placing the irrigation troughs that led from the water well to the cornfields, I usually got loose only after supper. I wandered among the tents and lean-tos they erected, breathing in the amazing sounds and smells and sights the gypsies brought with them.

  The Exoco company man shouted and strutted about the camp like a little dictator. I started to understand why nobody knocked him up-side the head for acting as obnoxious as he did when I realized that his company was footing the bill for everything and everybody in the pasture. Doc told him to go suck on sour gas, though, when he once made a suggestion about how to handle Sprocket.