Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  She wiped one cheek with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigar. “Can you tell the difference, Henry Lee?”

  I reached over and wiped the other cheek. “You still make me blind and crazy both, but I’ve known for a long time that you’re the finest lady I’m likely to meet.”

  “Aw, damn.” She put down her cigar and kissed me. “You’re so sweet. You sure make it hard for a girl to feel bad. Hold me awhile?”

  About ten minutes later, she stirred from cuddling and straddled my chest. “You been so sweet, Henry Lee,” she said. “For you, tonight only, I’m gonna cut the price in half.”

  Then, before I could quit laughing, she began to show me once more what a loving, real woman she was.

  * * *

  We loaded out on Mr. Pickett’s boat three mornings later. It had been dry-docked in Todd Shipyards for almost three months while they modified it to become the world’s first deep-sea drillship.

  Sprocket went on board easier than any of us thought he would. It took only an hour of coaxing and music before he placed the first foot on the specially made heavy-duty gangplank that had been laid from the dock to the deck of the Belle Butange for his benefit. The sailors leaned over the rails and hooted while we cajoled him. Finally he trudged up it, grumbling in low C.

  I got hung up with saying good-bye to Star, who’d come down with the rest of Lady Jane’s crew to see us off, so I didn’t ride on board with him.

  When I did go up the gangplank, the action had moved mostly forward. Sprocket had been led to stand lengthwise along the keel of the ship, right behind this tower that jutted up about a third of the way back from the prow. Later on, I learned the tower was called the foc’sle, and contained inside it, split into four levels, the galley and the crew’s bunkrooms, among other things. The captain and his officers steered the ship in a big room at the top of the foc’sle, what they called the wheelhouse. It had thick glass all the way around, so they could see icebergs and other boats coming at them from any direction.

  A couple of sailors still lounged on the rail near the gangplank, and waved back when I waved at them. One of them had a big purple bruise on his cheek. T-Bone had wanted us all to get acquainted before the cruise. I guess we did. Another sailor headed my way carrying a heavy coil of rope. He was looking back over his shoulder shouting something at somebody back beside Sprocket. It wasn’t until he faced in my direction that I saw the black patch that covered his left eye.

  He’d left the Bali Room right after the fight, so I hadn’t had a chance to get straight with him. I angled so as to cross his path. He was already frowning when he turned, and it just got more sincere when he spotted me.

  When we got within a few steps of each other, I stuck out my hand. “I’m Henry Lee McFarland, sir. I’d like to apologize for my part in the goings-on at the Bali Room the other night.”

  I figured the fight had been mostly his fault, but I could have been a little less quick on the trigger myself.

  He dropped the coil of rope to one side and scowled ferociously at me. “I don’t care if you’re Jesus’s bastard brother, lubber. You and me still have some settling to do.”

  The four or five sailors lounging against the rail perked up and started paying attention to us.

  I didn’t try to keep the smile on my face, but I spoke as evenly as I knew how. “Bad feelings won’t do neither of us any good, mister.”

  He stepped up and prodded my chest with a forefinger and stared at me with one cold gray eye. “You better stay tight with your oilfield trash friends as long as you’re on my ship, lubber. I catch you alone some evening, you’ll be found scattered in pieces all over the Gulf.” While I watched his finger draw back for a last prod, he sucker-punched me in the gut, hard, with his other fist. It bent me over and he hit me in the mouth while I was down. The ring on his hand tore my lip.

  Before I could react, a burly, bald-headed man stepped up and shoved us apart. The one-eyed sailor stumbled back and tripped over the coil of rope that he’d dropped.

  “We’ll have none of that on board my ship,” the bald-headed fella said. The look on the sailor’s face indicated that he didn’t agree. The bald-headed man saw the look, too. “You have any doubt about it the purser will pay you off right now and you can be on your way.”

  The one-eyed sailor glared at me one more time and then looked away. “No problem, Chief,” he said.

  “Glad to hear it. You two shake hands now, and then you go about your business, Pegleg.”

  Pegleg shook my hand, but I don’t believe he meant it. After he had picked up his rope and vanished belowdecks down a nearby stairwell, the bald-headed man grinned at me.

  “Don’t mind Pegleg,” he said. “He’s hard to get along with only when he’s drunk or hungover.” He stuck out his own hand to be shook. “Of course, he’s always one or the other. So I guess it’s up to me to welcome you aboard the Belle Butange. Or Miz Bellybutton, as we call her. Sorry I missed meeting you people the other night. I hear that a good time was had by all. I’m Chief Hightower. Head of the engine room crew on this tub.”

  I shook his hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir. Uh … that sailor. His name’s Pegleg?”

  “That’s what everybody calls him.”

  “But he ain’t got a pegleg. He’s got—”

  “He’s got only one eye. And it would be terribly rude for anybody to draw attention to that fact.” The chief laughed. “So we call him Pegleg.”

  * * *

  The day stayed sunny, and the ocean stayed smooth. It took Miz Bellybutton six and a half hours to get to location, which turned out to be nothing more than a stretch of water identical to the rest. It was fifty-four miles from the nearest dry land. None of Mr. Pickett’s bureaucrats had a call to a penny’s worth of any hydrocarbons we might chance to discover out there.

  The jetty rigs near the beach all had a circular hole cut into the center of the platform, through which their Driller could run his tongue to the wellhead. They called it the moon pool. I didn’t understand why until I looked down at one on a clear, full-moon night.

  Todd Shipyards had cut the moon pool right behind Miz Bellybutton’s foc’sle. Run it right though the body of the ship, by sealing one of the cargo holds and removing a couple of plates from the bottom of the hull and the top of the deck. Then they welded a full derrick in place above it.

  An hour after we anchored on location, we set up around the moon pool and started tuning up our instruments. Sprocket looked dubious about the whole idea.

  After he’d let Doc check out his drillhead one last time, he meandered up the ramp that led to the moon pool, until his mouth hung right at the edge. He stuck his tongue out and dropped it into the water, then pulled it out again. Not too enthusiastic.

  Finally, everybody was ready. The whole ship’s crew seemed to have gathered behind the balcony railing that circled the third and fourth levels of the foc’sle. Captain Johnson and his officers peered through the wheelhouse’s windows. I personally hooked Sprocket to a cargo hold full of lead-free gasoline, so he couldn’t gripe about being too thirsty to work.

  Doc pulled his baton out of the long slender pocket that ran down the right leg of his gray, patched jumpsuit. He tapped it on the podium in front of him and everybody quieted.

  He raised the baton for a long second, then brought it down in a graceful arc that kicked the band into Spuddin’ on a Wildcat.

  Sprocket shuffled uncomfortably at the lip of the moon pool, but he knew what was expected of him, and Drillers gotta drill. His tongue dropped free and headed for the bottom of the ocean.

  A minute later, he got there, and his tongue began to rotate. The furrows of doubt between his eyes smoothed and vanished. He began to hum along with the song while he spudded in on the first deep-water offshore exploratory oil well. Making oilpatch history, we were.

  * * *

 
The next day we ran thirty-inch diameter drivepipe down. In case we ran into problems later and had to set casing more often than planned, Doc and T-Bone had decided Sprocket should make the widest hole possible all the way down. The ocean floor had checked to be about five-hundred-and-thirty feet below, and Sprocket had drilled two hundred feet, so we ran twenty-six joints, each thirty feet long.

  Usually, Lady Jane and her crew would come on location to set the pipe that she had made, but it wasn’t practical at sea to do it the traditional way. Instead, the sailors had used the half-dozen cranes on board to cover a sizable portion of the deck with stands of pipe in various sizes. I thought about Star and missed her the whole time we ran the drivepipe in the hole. Big Red had been towed out on a barge. He didn’t look like he was any more enthusiastic about the experience than Sprocket had been, but he was a pro. We hooked lines from the barge to the wellhead, and the cement job was perfect as usual.

  The chief sauntered up as we finished, cleaning his hands on a shop rag. He stepped to the edge of the moon pool and shouted up at me. I had stationed myself at the top of the draw-works to keep the lines clear as we ran in.

  “Afternoon, Henry Lee! Thought I’d see how you’re coming along.”

  “Doing just fine, Chief,” I answered. “Hooking up the telescoping riser pipe on top of the string.”

  The chief shook his head. “Ah, excuse me. I thought we all spoke English on Miz Bellybutton. I was mistaken.”

  I laughed. I patted the joint in front of me. “This particular piece is new to me, too. You know how y’all set anchors in the four directions of the compass to prevent the ship from drifting away from the hole?”

  He nodded. I turned the pipe slightly. I looked down at Razer on a platform below the moon pool opening, just above the water level in the hold. He signaled for me to turn the pipe just a hair more. “Well, the ship still rides up and down a bit. Mr. Pickett’s engineers anticipated that, so they designed and fabricated a special piece of pipe to be the top one. It’s actually two pieces, one slightly smaller in diameter than the other. The bottom part is epoxied to the top of the normal string of casing we’re running in the hole. The top part will be attached to that framework beside you, in the center of the moon pool. The two parts are sealed and greased so they can slide fairly freely, like a piston, when the ship rides the waves. That way the top of the hole stays stable, allowing us to work more easily through it.”

  Razer signaled me to let the pipe ride down the last crucial couple of feet. I did so, and he nippled it onto the joint below it and slopped epoxy all over it. One of the holds next to the moon pool had been converted to a mud pit. He hooked the mud lines that led from it to a tee that had been welded to the side of the pipe.

  “Hold on,” the chief said. “The top of that thing, that, ah, joint is twenty feet in the air. How can Sprocket drill that way? I’d think you’d want it flush with the deck, or a bit lower.”

  “You’re right.” I started climbing down from the draw-works. “After that epoxy dries we’ll punch the string down another thirty feet. The clever part is that, when time comes to move the ship off the hole, we just set a bridge plug, yank the top section of the riser pipe out, leaving the bottom part below the ship’s hull, and steam away.”

  “Uh … right.”

  Sprocket woke up. His drillhead poked out of his mouth, then fell to the deck as his eyes widened and began to vibrate horizontally. The drillhead glided toward the moon pool, snuffling loudly. It raised up off the deck like a cobra and turned in the chief’s direction, still snuffling. Sprocket started to tremble and hum. The chief drew back a step. “What did I do? Is he mad at me?”

  Before either me or the chief could move again, the drillhead darted forward and sucked the shop rag out of the chief’s hand. Then it swallowed his forearm.

  The chief tried to pull away. “That tickles!”

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Feels like he’s licking my whole arm.”

  Abruptly, Sprocket’s tongue withdrew and slumped back to the deck, then raised up and started snuffling again.

  “He’s been known to be rude on occasion,” I said. “But that’s the first time I ever saw him do that. What was on that rag, anyway?”

  The chief raised his hand and looked at it. Sprocket had even managed to clean the dark from under his fingernails somehow. He could do delicate work if he had to. “Ah … let’s see … I was working in my Goody Room on some bearings. Greasing them.”

  Sprocket’s eyes squinched shut in concentration. His tongue shot away in a loop around and behind him.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Chief, was there anything unusual about this grease?”

  “Hmmmm. Maybe. It’s called Muracon-E. We don’t use it except for three small, delicate bearings deep inside each engine train. It contains special anti-corrosion and de-viscosifying additives.”

  I picked up a nearby valve handle and pounded on Sprocket with it until he opened an eye. “You better not break anything!” I said to him. “That stuff ain’t yours anyways.”

  He closed his eye again. I pounded on him some more, but he ignored me.

  “Chief, you and me better head for your Goody Room right now! Sprocket’s trying to get to that special grease!”

  “The Goody Room is locked,” the chief said. “I’m the only one with a key.”

  “Even worse. Sprocket ain’t got much moral character where petroleum derivatives are concerned. I’d be real embarrassed if he tore down your door getting to this Muracon-E.”

  The Goody Room was a couple of dozen feet from the entrance to the engine room proper. Sprocket hadn’t yet lost his patience when we got there, both of us out of breath from the run. His drillhead still snuffled around the area, looking for an opening to sneak in, rather than battering through.

  “That’s remarkable,” the chief said. “How he found it so quickly.”

  “What’s remarkable is he didn’t sniff it out sooner. His foreskin can sense hydrocarbon molecules in parts-per-billion concentrations. And it looks like he considers Muracon-E to be a genuine gourmet item.”

  The chief took a ring of keys from his pocket. “Well, no reason to let things get out of hand.” He turned to unlock the door to his Goody Room.

  “No call to give in to him that way,” I said. “Let’s find us a couple of crowbars. If we knock his drillhead away from the door for fifteen minutes or so, he’ll understand the Muracon-E is off-limits.”

  “I don’t mind. It’s not particularly expensive, and I have three unopened cans left, enough to last for years. I’ll feed him the can I opened today.”

  He opened the door and Sprocket’s tongue tried to dart inside. I grabbed ahold of it and wrestled it while the chief got a five-gallon can off a workbench that was welded to the bulkhead next to the door.

  “He probably can’t smell the stuff that’s still sealed,” I said. “But if your Goody Room gets broken into in the middle of the night, you’ll know who did it.”

  The chief wanted to watch him drink it, so I captured Sprocket’s drillhead and followed the chief topside and across the deck with it until we stood in front of Sprocket again. Both Sprocket’s eyes tracked us as the chief deposited the five-gallon can on the deck and pried the top up.

  Usually, when Sprocket got excited, his deep green eyes spun clockwise. But this time, they held wide open and vibrated rapidly sideways, just like when he’d first smelled it.

  I let go of his tongue. It thumped to the deck and slid sidewise until it trapped the can inside a circle about three feet in diameter. The drillhead lifted off the deck and, snuffling more slowly now, cautiously peered over the top of the open pail. It dipped in delicately, then withdrew, only the first couple of inches of his drill spear dripping a chewy, glistening black liquid. Then his foreskin puckered and vacuumed the Muracon-E inside his drillstem.

 
He repeated the process, even more slowly. He moaned with delight.

  “I don’t know what that stuff’s got in it,” I said. “But if I saw a human being acting that way around it, I’d know for sure it was illegal.”

  The chief was fascinated. He watched while Sprocket took almost an hour to lovingly, agonizingly devour his treat.

  Then Sprocket ate the can. And the lid.

  * * *

  A week after we got to location, Sparks reported that ships at sea were warning of a storm brewing out in the Atlantic. It looked like it would be blown into the Gulf if the prevailing winds continued to prevail.

  He kept us on top of the situation as the storm came right at us, getting stronger as it went. It hit three days after the first report. According to the sailors we talked with, it wasn’t much of a storm, really. More like a heavy collection of gusty rainclouds. We decided to keep on drilling through it if we could. You don’t stop making a well just because it rains or snows a little bit. This is one of the less wonderful facts about working the oilpatch. Sometimes it almost makes up for the good stuff. Setting pipe in the midst of a freezing sleetstorm, for instance, can get old, awful fast.

  The skies were clear and the sunset was unusually glorious the evening before the storm hit. I worked the afternoon tower, from three to eleven. Naturally, I got woke up by the ship rolling from side to side. The sphincter ring muscle had clamped shut the hole in my ceiling. Sprocket usually only does that when the weather outside has gone to hell, or in the dead of winter to make it easier to maintain internal thermal equilibrium.

  “How about a light?” I yelled. After a second, the wart over my bed brightened enough for me to see my clock. It was a little after midnight.