Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  Sprocket drilled twenty-four hours a day, his sides heaving with the effort. Illuminated at night by the light-poles set up all along his length, the stokers fed him continuously the first week. Then the first of a series of bloated brown tankers showed up on the scene and hooked up to him. I was there when Doc himself stuck the hose firmly into Sprocket’s eating mouth, and we stood back as he began to suck on it like a calf at the teat.

  “Ol’ Sprocket’ll eat just about anything, Henry Lee,” he said with pride, “but what he loves second best is that refined, high-octane, lead-free, pure sweet gasoline.”

  “What’s he like best?”

  He grinned evil-like. “Fresh dogmeat.”

  I hadn’t seen Towser since the day Sprocket almost ate him.

  “Just funnin’,” Doc said before I could ask the awful question. “What he likes best of all, of course, is heavy crude. Oughta see the way he gets to shaking and shimmying and moaning when he hits a producible formation. You don’t think he’s workin’ himself into a lather just because we play pretty music for him, do you? That’s just how we sweet-talk him into doing favors for us—like drilling your little water well, or trying out a wildcat some damn fool has a religious faith in—but he’s in the business strictly to fill his belly with petroleum.”

  “And,” he added, “For the romance and excitement of it all.”

  * * *

  Eight nights after Sprocket started drilling, I snuck away from the house after bedtime. Papa hadn’t come right out and told us younguns to stay away from the gypsies, but his mind was easy enough to see. I guess the rest of my family was born to farm. Me, I’d lay in bed after breaking my back in the damned, boring-to-death fields, and hear pagan music, and the hum of many voices, and the whining, trembling noise Sprocket made in his search for the thing he loved best, and I’d want to cry for some reason.

  Doc was talking to a couple of casing gypsies when he spotted me coming. They stood in a half circle in front of Sprocket, who was surrounded by half a dozen other oversized beasts. Doc didn’t seem too surprised to see me. “Howdy, Henry Lee. Just couldn’t stand it any longer, could you?”

  “Sir?”

  “I recognized the symptoms the first day, Son. Not too hard to do. I got ’em myself about your age. Still got ’em.”

  There wasn’t nothing I could say to him.

  He turned to the casing gypsies. The reason I knew they were casing gypsies is they were all women. Casing gypsies always were. They wore dark green jumpsuits, but theirs fit a whole lot better than the men’s. Over the next few weeks, Doc told me stories about the wild ways of casing gypsies that I not only didn’t believe, but, due to my lack of experience, couldn’t even understand half the time.

  He spoke to the dark-haired woman that must have been their crew chief. “Ramonita, we’re gonna be ready to start snapping on that twenty-six-hundred feet of twenty-inch surface pipe in less than an hour. Big Red’s hooked up and ready to cement. How come I don’t see your pipe here?”

  She swayed a few steps forward and tapped his chest with a black-tipped finger. “Because,” she purred, “your half-smart segundo, Razer, moved Big Red and his bulk cement holder onto location ahead of time. They’re blocking us out, as usual. They’re asleep, as usual.”

  Her purr deepened into a snarl. “And it’s your goddam job to straighten it out, not mine. We’ve been ready since this afternoon.”

  About that time, I wandered off, too embarrassed to listen to the rest of the conversation.

  * * *

  Ramonita was actually pretty nice, once you got to know her. That night I helped her and her casing crew snap on the surface casing. Sprocket pulled his tongue out of the hole for it. Each joint of casing was a twenty-foot tube of dark ceramic that their beast excreted. It unfolded in half, lengthwise. They placed the first joint right behind his drill-head, so that his tongue rested on a double trough, then snapped it closed around the tongue and sealed the seams with a special glue. Then they hoisted the rear end of the casing vertical into the air with a sling hung from a tripod scaffolding they’d erected, and fed the first joint most of the way into the hole. The end of the length of pipe tapered in, then flared out again. The next joint’s front end snapped right over that nipple, and so on.

  After a few hours of lifting and snapping casing, I guess I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. We worked to the rhythm of the music made by gypsies from half a dozen specialties, and it made that casing feel light as goose feathers.

  When we were done, I collapsed into a chair and watched while Big Red pumped cement down the inside of the casing and out the bottom and back up the outside into the annulus between the casing and the hole, bonding it in place. Doc strolled over with a cup and a plate heaped with sausage and thick pieces of bread.

  “Here you go, Henry Lee. Oilpatch work may feed the soul, but every now and then you gotta feed the body, too.”

  I took a big bite of the sausage, and it felt like my mouth had caught on fire, so I took a deep swig from the cup, and the flames leaped higher.

  “You’ve killed me,” I finally managed to choke out. “What is this stuff?”

  “Just boudain and a little heart-starter. Good stuff.”

  After that, I took small bites of everything that was offered to me. That heart-starter kind of growed on you after awhile, though.

  * * *

  A couple of hours later, I took another break and wandered over to the fire where a bunch of the hands was relaxing.

  “I’ve been thinkin’,” I said, to nobody in particular.

  Doc and Razer both grabbed their hardhats and slapped them on. “Uh-oh!” Razer said. “Head for the hills!”

  “Aww, come on!” I said. “I know thinking’s dangerous, but I can handle the pressure.”

  They pretended to relax. “Well, if you’re sure …” Doc said doubtfully.

  “Seriously, what I been wondering about is, oilfield critters ain’t like any other animals around. How come is that?”

  “They’re the last of the dinosaurs,” Razer said.

  “They’re actually giant, mutated catterpiggles created by atom-bomb explosions,” Big Mac, another one of Sprocket’s hands, volunteered.

  “They’re from Australia,” Pearl, the head cementer on Big Red, said. “Animals from Australia is all different from normal.”

  “Actually nobody knows where they come from,” Doc said. “But I think they’re aliens from outer space.”

  “You believe that old story?” Pearl asked. Half the guys around the fire hooted, but the other half just nodded.

  “I read Marley Monmouth’s diary in the library up at P&A,” Doc said.

  Texas Petrological and Agricultural College at Aggie Station is the main center of learning about the oilpatch. A couple of the guys on the crew had mentioned going there once or twice for vocational training on how to be better hands on their crews. One or two admitted to taking correspondence courses on occasion.

  “I read that diary, too,” Pearl said. “Ol’ Marley had obviously slipped his transmission.”

  “If you’d been through what he claimed to have been through,” Doc said, “you’d be a little funny, yourself.”

  “What was it he had been through?” I asked.

  Pearl snorted. “He was out in the sun too long in the Anadarko Basin.”

  “Nobody had any record of oilpatch critters until about a hundred and twenty years ago,” Doc said to me. “Until Marley Monmouth brought a herd of fifty-three of them down the main street of Duncan, Oklahoma, that is. All the critters we know of now are descendants of that herd. He claimed that there had been almost two hundred of them, but the rest were dead. He said that he had been part of a wagon train pushing west a couple of years before. One night, strange, alien monsters captured everybody in the wagon train. They took their prisoners into the wastela
nds where there was what we’d now call a very busy field being drilled. Marley and his people was used for slave labor to make the wells.”

  Doc paused for a moment as the bottle reached him.

  “According to the diary, the aliens had captured several wagon trains and a bunch of Indians. They were not nice guys. They treated their hands like dogs, worked ’em till they dropped. Treated the critters awful poorly, too. There was only about two dozen of the aliens, but they had weapons that shot out rays that would burn up whoever they touched. Typhus started to sweep through the camp. The slaves got so desperate that they revolted. Most of ’em got killed. The critters helped ’em fight, and most of them got killed, too. But some of them escaped. Marley had half a dozen people with him, including two Indians, inside one of the Cementers when he got to Duncan, but all of them except Marley had come down with typhus and died without talking. An exploring party went out to check his story. Took a lot of guts back then, since it was hostile Indian territory.”

  “Which is probably what really happened to his wagon train.” Pearl said. “Killed by Apaches.”

  “They didn’t find anything but a lot of holes that had been drilled in what is now the Anadarko Basin. No bodies. No other physical evidence. Marley said the aliens must have disposed of everything else. He died not long after. But by then he had explained how the critters worked together to make a well.”

  “He come down with typhus, too?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Doc said. “Shot for bein’ in the wrong woman at the wrong time. Ol’ Marley was pussy-crazy.”

  Razer took off his hardhat and held it over his heart. “Our founder,” he said piously. “We been tryin’ to uphold his example ever since.”

  “Personally, I think they’re all just hallucinations,” Pearl’s segundo, name of Goose, said. “We’re all actually havin’ the D.T.’s.” He tossed me his bottle. “Here. Drink enough of this, you won’t see ’em any more.”

  I looked up at the sky and wondered.

  * * *

  I didn’t get much sleep the next three weeks, what with working all day in the fields and being with the gypsies every night. I helped out on most all of the critters at one time or another, learning how drilling mud was mixed and why, or helping the tool gypsies dress and move their tools when they were getting ready to run in the hole for a squeeze job, or unpacking float shoes and collars to attach to the bottom of a string when they got ready to run it in. All of them was real friendly, answering all my dumb questions, and telling me stories about the far places they’d been and the things they’d seen and done.

  But I kept coming back to Sprocket. The deeper he got, the more he had to exert himself twisting that long, talented tongue deep into the bowels of the earth, clamping his mouth over the well head to fight downhole hydrostatic pressure until they could weight up the mud, whenever he hit a high-pressure zone. I got to know him inside and out, literally. Doc and the crew taught me how to care for him, and keep him clean, and feel inside his guts to monitor his vital signs so the stoking could speed up or slow down, or they could play music to calm him or spur him on.

  They didn’t need to spur him on much. He was drilling like his life depended on it.

  The proudest moment for me came one night when we were down about ten thousand feet. We’d just started in the hole to hang some eight-and-five-eighths-inch liner pipe off the bottom of a ten-and-three-quarter-inch long string. I was standing at the well head when it slipped a little. Displaced mud gushed out of the hole, drenching me from head to foot. The second pair of coveralls I’d ruined. I only had one pair left.

  When we finished up, and I was kicked back and sipping on some heart-starter, Doc strolled up with a cloth-wrapped package under one arm and a silver-metal hardhat under the other. He dumped them at my feet.

  “I don’t mind you getting underfoot ever now and then, Henry Lee,” he said. “But I do mind you doing it in them damned old messy coveralls.”

  I set down the cup with unsteady hands and untied the string and shook open the package. Inside were two gray, patched jumpsuits and a pair of steel-toed workboots.

  “If they don’t fit, you’re out of luck,” he said. “They’re the biggest sizes we got.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “Ain’t a present,” he said gruffly. “You earned ’em.”

  Then he strode off, shouting at Big Red’s crew for not getting their cement down-hole fast enough. I hid the clothes under my bed during the daytime and wore them at night when I went to the gypsies.

  * * *

  Sixteen-thousand feet, seventeen-thousand feet, eighteen-thousand feet, and still no strike. Sprocket’s hide began to lose its sheen and get wrinkled and rough looking, but he drilled on, heaving and panting. He sucked gasoline in vast quantities, forcing his tongue through rock that grew harder and hotter. The mud circulated up practically boiling, and we began to coat his tongue with special unguents when it came out of the hole, looking burned and chafed.

  The camp grew quieter when he passed twenty-thousand feet, his maximum rated depth. More pressure, more heat, but no hydrocarbons.

  * * *

  I missed six nights while we got in the corn. The weeks of no sleep finally caught up with me. I simply couldn’t handle harvesting any more and working all night, too. I worked like a zombie in the fields all day, and couldn’t bring myself to visit the camp under Papa’s watchful eyes when sunset neared. I collapsed into bed right after supper each evening, sick as a dog, and slept without dreams until Papa shook me awake at dawn. Being sick don’t matter when the crop’s got to come in. When I saw Doc or one of the other gypsies I waved at them from a distance, but they only waved back and hurried about their business.

  I came back the seventh night. They stood around Sprocket in silent little groups … no music, no laughing and joking.

  Sprocket had somehow shriveled. His hide hung in loose rolls all along his length, and every few minutes a painful wheeze streamed from around the edges of his drilling mouth where he’d mashed it into the ground around his tongue. His head twitched spastically, and his eyes were squeezed shut in agony.

  Doc turned a dead face to me when I touched him on the shoulder. “Oh … hello, Henry Lee.”

  He fumbled at his shoulder pocket and came out with a tobacco bag. When he saw it was empty, he let it drop. “Sprocket’s down somewhere around twenty-three thousand feet,” he finally said. “We can’t measure for sure, because he’s refused to stop drilling for three days. We’ve got twenty-pound mud in the hole, and he’s still having to fight the bottom-hole hydrostatic. He’s had his mouth dug in for a blowout preventer since noon.”

  I was frightened as much by the slurred, toneless way he spoke as by the meaning of his words. “Make him stop, Doc. The oil ain’t worth it.”

  “He won’t stop, Henry Lee. We’ve played to him, and talked to him, and shut off his gasoline, and he just won’t stop.”

  He reached out and rubbed Sprocket’s mottled skin. “Sometimes it happens this way. They just go crazy and won’t stop drilling.” His hand dropped to his side. “Until they die.”

  We stood together, not saying anything for a long time. Finally I knew what I had to say, even if it wasn’t true.

  “You’re wrong, Doc.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t believe Sprocket’s gone crazy. You told me he’s the best Driller in the world for finding and getting down to oil. Either you were wrong then, or you’re wrong now. Sprocket’s going for the deepest, biggest reservoir that’s ever been found.”

  His big hands clenched, but I guessed angry was better than the way he’d been before. “You don’t know what you’re saying, boy. You’re just a typical worm. You run around here a couple weeks, and you think you know it all. You …”

  “I know one thing, Doc. Sprocket ain’t in this business to kill himself. Like you sai
d, he’s in it for the petroleum!” I was shouting now, leaning right into his face, mad as hell for no reason I could say. “And for the romance and excitement, too, you son of a bitch!”

  I turned around and started yelling at the other gypsies. “What’s the matter with you people? Did you come here to find oil or not? How come you’re standing around like a bunch of—” I tried to think of the worst thing I could call them and found it. “Like a bunch of dirt-farmers!”

  I rushed over to where the instruments lay in a pile and started throwing them at dumbfounded gypsies. “Play, goddam you! Sprocket’s doing his part of the deal. Least you can do is give him some music to work by if you’re not gonna work yourselves.”

  I ran out of words and stood glaring at them. Nobody moved. There was silence except for Sprocket’s harsh panting and mine. I whirled, with a fist cocked to fly, at a scuffling noise behind me. Doc had his wand in one hand and the rhythm sticks in the other.

  “I do believe you may be right, Henry Lee.” His voice rose. “Come on, people. It ain’t over till it’s over!” In a lower voice, he said, “I’m damned if I’ll hold Sprocket’s funeral while he’s still alive.”

  * * *

  I helped them hook him back into the gasoline tanker, and took turns massaging Sprocket’s heart muscle. We played and danced all night. I don’t know if any of it did Sprocket any good. Along about daybreak I was sprawled against his side, right underneath an eye, beating my rhythm sticks together drunkenly in time with his weakening gasps while half a dozen gypsies kept up on their instruments. The rest had fallen asleep where they stood or sat. A long shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see Papa’s grim face above me.