Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  “All right, men,” Doc started. “Mr. T-Bone Pickett has invited us to his place tonight as his personal guests, free of charge. That don’t mean you got permission to act like a bunch of wild animals. Don’t start no fights. Don’t spit on the carpet. Don’t throw food, not even at each other. Don’t fart loud nowhere but in the men’s room. Those of y’all that ain’t got a date—don’t mess with the professional ladies in the bar. They cost more than you got, and they won’t take kindly to you trying to dicker with ’em.” You could tell he didn’t count on his talk having much effect. Then he looked over at Razer and rolled his eyes. “Just try not to act like you was raised in a barn, okay?” he finished up.

  Razer licked his mustache and combed it some more. “Doc, we wouldn’t do nothing to embarrass you in front of Mr. Pickett. I’ll keep these boys to my own high standards of behavior and attitude. You can depend on me, hoss.”

  “Aw, hell,” Doc muttered, more to himself than to any of us. “At least I tried.”

  When we marched out Sprocket’s mouth, we found that the ladies had already exited from Lady Jane’s mouth. Casing gypsies are all women, and for some reason most of them are medium-wonderful to look at. About half of them paired up with hands on our crew. Star swayed toward me. Her shiny dark hair fell in numerous braids to hip-height. Instead of the usual half-zipped jumpsuit and steel-toed workboots, she wore high-heels and a midnight-black dress that I immediately wanted to rub against. It was cut high up the sides and low down the front. The places that curved in on Star did it a few inches more than on most women. Likewise with the places that curved out.

  Even after her being my main squeeze for almost a year, I still got seriously paralyzed at the sight of her. Not to mention the sound, and smell. And touch. And taste. And—

  “Hey, sailor,” she whispered as she slid against me and linked her arm through mine. “You looking for a good time tonight?”

  “I could do with a little minor partying, honey. You available?”

  She bit me on the earlobe, sending tingles down to my ostrich-skin.

  “Might be,” she breathed.

  Before we left the parking lot, we strolled over to Sprocket and Lady Jane. While Star chatted with Lady Jane, I scratched an area about five feet off the ground on Sprocket’s hide. After a second he moaned in pleasure and a crease in his hide unfolded to reveal a deep green eyeball about twice the size of my head. He just loved being rubbed. Come to think of it, I kind of enjoyed it when Star rubbed me, too.

  “We won’t be gone too long, buddy,” I said. “You and Lady Jane keep each other company.”

  I felt guilty, partying without him. But there wasn’t no way he was going to get into the Bali Room. It was a coat and tie place, and they didn’t make coats and ties his size.

  I guess he didn’t mind. He just purred and leaned a little harder into the hand that rubbed him.

  * * *

  The Bali Room was actually a bunch of rooms, strung out along a pier that ran out from the seawall for almost a quarter of a mile into the Gulf. We went through several rooms before we come to the main restaurant one. The maitre-guy told us Mr. Pickett had been delayed by some other business of his, but had left a message with his people to take care of us. The waiters was all nice to us, although the guy with the big key around his neck, what Doc called the wine steward, almost showed some surprise when Doc spent ten minutes grilling him about the contents of the wine basement before ordering several kinds of wine for before, during, and after dinner. Doc never talked about it much, but he spent a couple of years on the other side of the Gulf near the end of War Number Two, and he got knowledgeable about all them fancy wines, since Beam and branch water was in short supply over there.

  We finished up with brandy and cigars in a private drawing room for VIPs like us. I don’t smoke, myself, but Star can appreciate a fine Havana, given the chance.

  After that, Doc cut us loose. Reluctantly. Most of us headed for the casino, which was situated farthest out on the pier. Me and Star sat in on a couple of card games. Separate tables, of course. I been playing penny-ante since I was knee-high to a coon, so I pretty much stayed even. Star, on the other hand, is a barracuda. Lucky, too. I played strip poker with her once. Ended up in my skivvies before she had her socks off.

  She wouldn’t tell me how much she victimized the gentlemen at her table, but after we wandered into the main bar, she nudged me. “Henry Lee,” she said, “I could afford to treat you to one of those professional ladies in the booths off to the side, if you want.”

  “I believe I already got an extremely talented amateur lady lined out for later on, thank you very much anyhow.” I may not be a genius, but I’m a survivor.

  It was a good bar. Real dark. We danced a little bit to the music from the band that was sweating under the red-and-blue spotlights. That velvety black dress felt as good under my hands as I had thought it would.

  Everybody seemed to be having a fine time. Most of the crew drifted in after a while, walking loose and feeling spruce.

  The last drilling we did was a shallow injection well at Freddieville, just a couple miles up the road from the coast. It was contracted by Mesh Petroleum, which was one of the companies owned by Mr. T-Bone Pickett, an old-time wildcatter who had made it good and diversified into all sorts of other enterprises. Including high-class nightclubs on the island. Doc and him knew each other from back when Doc was a kid and T-Bone was rubbing two dollar bills together to try to grow a third one. Doc said T- Bone liked to collect businesses, like some people collect baseball cards or china figurines. He visited us out on location a couple times. Mostly for nostalgia, I had figured. For the last twenty years, nobody’d been in a position to make the man get mud on his boots unless he wanted to.

  However, it seemed like he’d been mulling over offering us some kind of mystery deal, which he invited us to discuss this evening at one of his clubs on the island.

  So I recognized him when he came striding through the bar, with about a dozen men following him. He was a compact, solid man with brush-cut white hair, and he somehow reminded you of a lion. Not from the way he moved. Just from his eyes. He nodded and smiled when he saw us. Razer yelled over the music that Doc and Sabrina was still back in the casino someplace. T-Bone waved to indicate that he’d heard, then said something to the men with him. The tallest, skinniest one of them left with him, and the rest drifted into the bar. I figured they were business associates of his.

  We did some more dancing and drinking. About three or four songs later, one of the men that had been with T-Bone approached our table. He looked like a rough character. Had a black patch over his left eye.

  I could tell he was stoked, but he seemed to be handling it okay. “Mind if I ask your friend for a dance, mate?” he asked.

  I looked at Star. She shrugged. “No problem with me, mister,” I said.

  They got out on the floor and fast-danced. I kind of kept an eye on them. Not jealous or nothing, mind you. When the first song finished, she turned to come back to the table, but he said something to her, and, after a little hesitation, she started a slow dance with him. I kept a sharper eye on them now, especially on where he put his hands while he held her. She had to move his hands twice, and about halfway through the song he whispered something in her ear.

  She broke away from him and came back toward the table me and Razer and his baby-doll was sitting at. He followed her and caught her by the arm, just as she reached her chair.

  “What’s the matter, missy? Fifty dollars not enough? We can negotiate.”

  I scraped my chair away from the table, but Star waved me back. “Nothing to talk about, mister. You made a mistake, that’s all.” She pulled her arm loose.

  He laughed, real ugly-like. “Not likely, missy. I know a high-tone whore when I see one.”

  I stood up. She put a hand on my chest. “Take it easy, Henry Lee. He’s a w
hole lot more fried than he looks.”

  “How does a hundred dollars sound, whore? That has to be more than this lubber is paying.”

  That did it. “Mister,” I said, “maybe you better take your self and your money someplace else before your whole evenin’ gets ruint.”

  He swung on me. Didn’t hit nothing but my shoulder, and he nearly fell down in the process. Real drunk, he was. I stepped forward and grabbed him by the shirt-front and lifted. He was a normal size fella, almost a foot shorter than me. Not much takes the fight out of a man like being picked up one-handed and just held in place for a minute or two, maybe with an occasional shake.

  Only, he pulled a knife out of his back pocket and slashed my arm. Barely nicked me. I dropped him on his butt. He started cussing and screaming about how he was going to spread my guts out on the deck and then tromple on them. He tried to get up and come at me, so I gently kicked him in the face. The knife went flying.

  About that time three of his friends jumped me from out of nowhere.

  They crawled all over me, but I was still standing when two of them got snatched off of me suddenly. Razer put one in a hammer-lock and throat-clutch. Big Mac carried the other one over his head and tossed him out through the entrance door, which was closed at the time. Big Mac’s a wrestling fan and likes dramatic stuff such as that.

  Everybody in the room started fighting everybody else. Women screamed and furniture broke and glasses flew though the air. Fortunately nobody got chunked out a window, since it was twenty feet down to the surf and they might have drowned. It was fun for a few minutes, though. Me and Star fought mostly back to back, me barehanded and her with a chair leg in her right hand.

  The party had started to naturally wind down, everybody a little battered and getting cautious, with most of the breakables already broke, when Doc and Sabrina and T-Bone and the tall, skinny fella that had earlier been with T-Bone appeared at the door. None of them said a word, but the fighting stopped immediately as they was noticed.

  Beside me a fella and his date crawled out from under one of the few tables that hadn’t been overturned and started to brush each other off.

  “Perhaps we should cease giving our trade to the Bali Room, Sandra,” he said. “It looks as though they’re admitting the lowest sort of trash these days.” He looked at me! I didn’t start the damn fight!

  He must have seen something in my face that he didn’t like, because they scurried on out of the room.

  A few minutes later, the crew gathered in a room built on top of the gambling casino at the end of the pier. Nobody had taken any serious damage. Your typical recreational bar fight. The man with T-Bone had remained with his hands in the bar while we was conducted out by Doc and T-Bone. Sabrina took her crew to the ladies’ lounge to tidy up.

  Eventually the casing gypsies rejoined us, followed by the strangers we’d tangled with. They looked more racked up than us, of course, but not by much. Most of them grinned at us and we smiled back. No hard feelings. I didn’t see the fella with the eye-patch among them. We all settled down into a bunch of overstuffed couches and chairs that mostly looked out of a big floor-to-ceiling window onto the ocean. You could see lights scattered off along the bay, mostly ships at anchor, and close below the window, a small Driller making hole on a platform at the end of a granite jetty.

  Mr. Pickett saw to it that we was all comfortable, then poured himself a dose of heart-starter into one of those big snifter glasses. He swirled it around and took a sip. Then he wandered over to the big window and pointed at the jetty rig.

  “All the oil on this planet didn’t get buried under dry land,” he said. “But all of it that did, at least on this continent, and for fifty miles out from the coast, is under the stewardship of the godamnedest, greediest, most incompetent bunch of bureaucrats since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “And it ain’t much better in any other country. Everybody taxes and regulates the oil producers, especially the independents, until it ain’t hardly possible to do business any more. Then they bitch about prices bein’ too high to suit ’em. Me and the rest of the board of Mesh Petroleum believe we’ve come up with a way to get outside the jurisdiction of the bureaucrats. A way to acquire some hydrocarbons without getting crippled by the regulations and taxes they impose. They’ve made it damn near impossible to play the game in their yard. So we’re gonna take our ball and play somewhere else.”

  He took another sip of heart-starter. “Somebody’s got to be first to drill farther offshore than we can run these jettys. About fifty miles offshore, beyond the reach of the bureaucrats. How’d you folks like to help make oilpatch history?”

  * * *

  We left an hour and a half later. We’d made up with the sailors and had a time visiting with them and talking about their boat. We all voted to take T-Bone up on his proposition, and I looked forward to doing business with him. The tide was running in, and the crash of the surf sounded loud and clean. The salt air was plumb invigorating. The valet guy’s stool sat empty beside his booth when we went by.

  “Just a second, sweetheart,” I said to Star. I checked my pocket and found a silver dollar.

  I cast around and spotted him over in a corner of the lot beside a fancy car with its hood up. A Bugliosi or Masturbatto or some other kind of low-slung mafia car that would fall apart after thirty seconds off a paved road. This one apparently even had trouble in parking lots. The fella that had made the crack about me in the bar was bent over beside the valet guy, looking at the engine, while his date ground on the starter. It growled and whirred real healthy, but the engine wouldn’t kick over.

  Me and Star moseyed over. I tossed the silver dollar to the valet guy when he straightened up. “That’s for being a sport about Sprocket and Lady Jane.” I looked at the guy who owned the car. “Need any help, mister?” Bygones, and all that.

  “We’ll have it fixed in a minute,” he said, cold as a Baptist talking to a bootlegger. His date punched the starter again.

  “Fine.” I took Star’s hand and we started to walk away. “I was you, though, I’d see if there was any gas in the tank before I run the battery all the way down.”

  We caught up with the rest of the crew about halfway to the back of the lot. Star was still giggling at the look on the guy’s face when he found that his gas cap was gone. We figured some j.d. had sneaked in after it got full dark and siphoned his tank.

  My attention got drawn off to the side when I saw something light-colored moving close to the ground in the dimness at the side of the lot. For a second, I figured it was the j.d. But it didn’t really look that much like a person. I touched Doc on the shoulder.

  We veered over to the side of the lot to give it a closer examination. It was a gleaming white length of Sprocket’s drilling tongue, sliding along the asphalt like an albino anaconda. It shouldn’t have been where it was because Sprocket had parked more than two hundred feet further toward the back. In the dark, we couldn’t even see him from where we stood.

  We traced the length of tongue, being careful not to step on it. It ran toward the entrance of the lot, passing in front of the noses of half a dozen cars. We got to the tongue-tip just as it turned in and ran beside a Packard convertible. The point of the main drill spear extruded from the tongue’s foreskin. The tip snuffled along the ground like a bloodhound on the trail of a fella that had left the obedience training school at Huntsville State Prison without graduating.

  When it got near the rear of the car it lifted the last few feet of itself into the air and began to feel along the fender.

  Doc and me bent over close to watch what happened next. Sprocket’s tongue found the rectangular crack of the gas tank cover. The tip carefully positioned perpendicular to it, then slipped into the crack and pried the lid up on its hinge. Then the tip receded inside the foreskin. The foreskin contracted into a sucker and tightly encircled the gas cap. Slowly, it flexed and t
wisted and rotated, unscrewing the cap. After a few seconds the gas cap came loose and vanished, sucked inside the drill stem.

  The foreskin elongated and contracted in diameter. When it was about an inch across, it inserted into the gas tank. Shortly, the tongue silently began to pulse as fluid passed through it.

  Doc straightened up. “The son of a bitch is sucking the tank dry! He’s a goddam vehicular vampire!” He looked wildly around the lot. “Jesus, Son of God! How many cars has he drained tonight?”

  Me and Star and Sabrina about fell on the ground. Doc slammed the lid and Sprocket’s tongue jumped out right quickly, spewing gasoline all over Doc’s new suit.

  When Sprocket danced past the little valet guy, every one of us on the crew poked out of our holes up top and tossed him a silver dollar apiece. We figured he had a long night ahead of him.

  * * *

  The best part of the evening had just started to start when Star pulled away from me. The camp lay quiet around us, and the hole in the ceiling of Star’s room perfectly framed the full moon. She threw the cover back and reached to the table bolted down beside the bed. A second later a phosphorus match flared and she slowly sucked into life the last of the Havanas she’d gotten at the Bali Room.

  She rolled it back and forth between her fingers, staring at the glowing tip. “Henry Lee, do I act like a whore?”

  Before I could say anything, she went on quickly. “I mean, this ain’t the first time a man’s called me names. I know I flirt around—” She blew out the match, but not before I saw tears tracing down her cheeks in the moonlight.

  “Star …” I wasn’t sure what to say. “The problem is, you’re so much of a woman that it shines through every move you make. I think most fellas are blinded from the brightness of it. Maybe even scared by it, like I was for awhile. And some of the stupid ones can’t tell the difference between a real woman like you, and a whore, which is nothing but a empty woman-shaped machine made for separating a man from money.”