Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  It had just got too close inside Sprocket. That didn’t happen too often for me, but after talking with Doc, I was wondering about Pegleg’s death and if it was going to follow me around for the rest of my days.

  I patted Sprocket half-heartedly and wandered down his length toward the rear of the ship. I brought the Epiphone around and strummed on it lightly as I walked. If anything, it made me feel worse. The notes sounded wrong, boring, stupid.

  After awhile I ended up on the fantail at the very rear of Miz Bellybutton.

  I sat down and played for half an hour, staring at the three-quarter moon, cranking up the Pignose as loud as it would go, and getting more and more depressed.

  “Say, you’re pretty good,” said a voice behind me. I turned. It was Chief Hightower.

  “Thanks.”

  He pulled a mouth harp out of his shirt pocket and blew into it experimentally. “You mind a little accompaniment?”

  I was still surprised that any of the ship’s crew was actually talking to me. I’d seen the chief once or twice since Pegleg’s body turned up, and he’d nodded politely at me, but he always seemed to be on his way someplace else at the time.

  “Couldn’t make it worse, anyhow,” I said.

  He nodded. “I guess. You were sounding awful depressed on that thing. What’s the matter?”

  I still didn’t quite trust that he wasn’t setting me up to say something nasty to me. “What you think?”

  He blew into the mouth harp again, doing a blurred upward chromatic run. Sounded like he would probably be competent on it. “Hmmm … I suspect you got the news today about the autopsy.”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Man from the DA’s office had a long chat on the radio with me and Captain Johnson day before yesterday. Asked us to re-interview the crew for any more details that might link you to Pegleg’s murder.”

  “Great.”

  “Johnson asked Mr. Miller again to remove you from the ship this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “You’re still here.” He tapped the harp against his palm. “Don’t worry about the captain. He’s edgy because this is his first time out on Miz Bellybutton. He’s trying to get along with a crew new to him, most of which don’t like you a bit.”

  “I noticed.”

  The chief grinned. “He’s caught between a rock and a hard place, because Mr. Pickett backed Mr. Miller up on this matter. Axis Ortell, our old captain, would have told Mr. Pickett to take a flying leap and then tossed you over the side if you pissed him off. Better for you to have to handle Johnson.”

  “I’m so relieved.”

  The smile faded off his face. “Hey, it’s not that bad. You didn’t do it. You’ll be cleared eventually.”

  “How do you know I didn’t do it?”

  He leaned against the rail and looked somberly at me for a long minute. Moonlight gleamed on his bald head. “I’m a good judge of character,” he said finally. “I’ve been around awhile, and I know very well what kind of person it takes to kill. You don’t qualify. I’m sorry for the way my boys have treated you. They simply don’t want to think it might have been one of them.”

  For some reason, I believed him. It made me feel less guilty.

  He blew into the mouth harp again. “I was listening to you,” he said. “Your problem is, you got the blues.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Best thing to do is play the blues when you got them.” A long wail like a lonesome train in the distance came out of the mouth harp. He followed it with an involved riff that sounded so sweetly aching that I shivered.

  He broke off and grinned. “See?”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s the blues. I’ve been a fan since I was a boy.”

  “What scale is that? The note intervals sounded almost like an incomplete Major, but your phrasing was—”

  He blew a descending six-note scale. “This is a G harp, so it plays blues in D,” he said. “I don’t know anything about scales, but that’s the notes I was taught.”

  I echoed the notes, and we worked it out over the next half hour. It was exactly the sound I’d been trying to find. It was so lonesome that it was perfect for how I felt. The band played jazz blues on occasion, but this was different. The progressions were simpler, more elemental. And somehow harder. The scale was a pentatonic minor with an added flat-5th, and I figured out that the song structure was a I-IV-V chordal progression in twelve bars, twelve/eight time.

  I started getting excited. “How come I never heard of this stuff before? This is great.”

  “It’s Negro folk music,” the chief said. “From the way you’ve been talking, your bunch comes from a more classical orientation. I don’t know much about that sort of music. I just know what I’ve learned about the blues from a life spent hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks.”

  We played for another hour, me mostly accompanying with chords while he wailed. He showed me some variations on it, including minor blues, which sounded positively suicidal. It was wonderful.

  Eventually, we went back to his stateroom where he cranked up his record player and put on one of the hundreds of blues records arranged neatly in three cases beside his bed. I realized we hadn’t even scratched the surface. I managed to pick clumsily along with a few of the easier tunes.

  Finally, exhausted, I headed back for Sprocket.

  The chief escorted me to the bulkhead and shook my hand. “Thanks, Henry Lee. I haven’t had so much fun in a long time.”

  “Me, neither. Mind if I come listen to more of those records some other time?”

  “Sure. Any time at all.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “I believe in you. You’re going to be all right.”

  I was grateful as a puppy given a new bone.

  * * *

  Me and the chief hung out a lot together after that. I’d go to his room for hours and listen to his records and play along with them. A couple of the hands on Sprocket’s crew knew a little about the blues, but said they didn’t much care for them. Preferred the more technically demanding forms of jazz or classical music. Doc pulled a couple of instruction books about the blues from out of the file cabinet for me, but otherwise seemed less than interested. His new composition was keeping him up at all hours, anyway.

  The chief would talk to me when I visited, and he showed me around the ship and the engine room. I think he tried to get a couple of the sailors to party with us in his room, but I ain’t sure. Nobody ever showed up. He visited with us and Sprocket during his off-time, for dinner and the like. Seemed to get along with everybody. I showed him around the drilling operation, explaining the ins and outs of making a well as best I could.

  He made me feel better, but I still got depressed about most of the ship’s crew thinking I was a murderer. Life went on.

  Sprocket was down around twelve thousand feet when he hit a pocket of high-pressure sour gas. It was the middle of a lazy afternoon. Most of the crew was taking a nap while me and Big Mac watched the drilling. Mac had gotten bored and was face down on the deck doing one-handed push-ups. A couple of sailors leaned over the balcony rail that ran around the back of the foc’sle, smoking hand-rolls. They still hadn’t thawed to us much, but some of them seemed to enjoy listening to Sprocket’s soothing hum while he made hole.

  Sprocket had been in the hole for about a day and a half, drilling steady. Suddenly, his low, relaxed purr got louder and higher. His eyes began to blink open and shut rapidly. Then he stopped drilling and marching. He took a couple of steps forward and clamped his mouth over the wellhead. The wrinkles on his face deepened as he pressured up on the hole.

  “Doc!” I yelled. “We got a problem!”

  After a couple of seconds Doc’s head poked out of the hole in the top of his room. He yawned and dug sleep-crackles out of his eyes. Then
he climbed out and crawled forward on his knees until he could see the way Sprocket’s mouth covered the wellhead.

  “Drilled into a high-pressure formation,” he said. “Get the mud weighted up.”

  “Believe it’s more than that.” Sprocket started to march in a different cadence, driving his legs down in triplets, hard against the ship’s surface. It wasn’t the signal he usually made when he hit a high-pressure zone. I’d seen another Driller march in this cadence only once before. “Believe he’s got into some sour gas.”

  “Aw, crap,” Doc said. Then he looked at me speculatively. “You’re on tower, Henry Lee. Handle it.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I looked over my shoulder at the sailors in the foc’sle. They’d clumped together in a bunch and were watching us intently. I moved closer to where Doc sprawled. I spoke as soft as I could and still be heard by him. “I could kill everybody on this ship if I screw up.”

  Doc nodded. “Uh-huh. But you been around the oilpatch almost two years now, Henry Lee. You been standing tower by yourself for half of that. You can’t handle the pressure, I’d just as soon find out now.”

  “But—”

  Doc frowned at me. “Don’t but me no buts, boy. You’re in charge. What you gonna do?”

  A couple of other heads had popped up along Sprocket’s top. They all stared at me, waiting. Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been schooled up on how to handle sour gas. I took a deep breath.

  “Sour gas! Get your asses below, worms! Now! I don’t want to see any of you again without a respirator on your face!”

  I gestured at Big Mac. “Bring me a mask and get one on your own self.” He gave me a mock salute and double-timed away.

  I licked a finger and tested the wind with it. We were lucky. The wind blew from the nose of the ship. The foc’sle was upwind. But the engine room wasn’t. I moved myself upwind of the hole, just in case.

  “Razer!” I yelled. His head popped up out of his hole. The respirator covered his entire face, with the oxygen cannister hanging down on his chest. He yanked the straps down tighter where they met at the back of his head. He goggled at me through the face-plate. “We got spare masks in the iron room. Get ’em to the engine room ASAP. Along with a detector. Explain to the chief. Show him and his boys how to use ’em.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up and ducked below again. As a couple of the crew, all wearing masks, popped out of holes atop Sprocket, I turned to the sailors that was gawking at the goings-on. “One of you, please get the captain for me. The rest, stay upwind of the hole.”

  “What’s the big deal, lubber?” one of them shouted.

  “No big deal. Just kindly stay away from the wellhead till we say otherwise.”

  I turned again and saw Doc had climbed out of his room and was getting ready to slide down Sprocket’s side.

  “Hold up there, Mr. Miller!” I said. “You get upwind with your shaving kit and take that beard off right now.” The hair on his face would keep the mask from making a perfect seal. And, around sour gas, perfect is the only way to be.

  “Aw, Henry Lee,” his words came muffled through the respirator. “I got positive pressure blowing on this thing. I even smeared Vaseline all over my face.”

  “Fine for you. You get killed on your own tower. Long as I’m in charge, we do it API.” My voice rose again. He wasn’t the only one on the crew that sported a beard. “You hear that, people? Shave it off. Right now! That means sideburns, too!”

  If there’s one thing a gypsy hates most, it’s taking the hair off his face.

  One of the hands, I couldn’t tell who with the mask on, slid down Sprocket’s side and started setting up a sour gas detector. They’d be deposited in various places around the location, especially by the reserve pits. Sometimes sour gas could percolate through the mud undetected until it released there. Also around the pipe joints all over the location.

  “Set the low-level screamer to go off at 20 ppm,” I said. “High-level at 50 ppm.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Teach your granny to suck eggs, Henry Lee,” he said. Never hurts to remind somebody in a situation like this. He turned on the detector. It didn’t start screaming.

  Mac popped out of a hole on top and tossed me a respirator. I snatched it out of the air and had it loose around my neck when Captain Johnson showed up on the balcony.

  “Where’s Mr. Miller?”

  “He’s busy,” I said. “I’m in charge right now. You and me need to talk.”

  He didn’t look happy at that. He got even less happy shortly.

  “Captain, we’ve drilled into a pocket of hydrogen sulfide gas. I don’t know how much of it there is, but until we get it taken care of, I’d like you to keep your hands away from the hole as far as possible, preferably upwind of it.”

  “Why?”

  I felt like screaming, but I explained patiently. “Because it’s poisonous as hell. A concentration of two hundred parts per million in the air will kill you dead as a mackerel on a mountain top. You can’t see it because it’s transparent, and the first whiff numbs your sense of smell, so you don’t know you’re breathing it until you drop over. Then you’re in real trouble, since it’s heavier than air and tends to pool near the ground.”

  “My god!”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh. It’s scary stuff. Good news is, Sprocket caught it before it did any damage, and we know how to handle it. Give us a day or so, you and your crew can get back to business as usual.”

  “Mr. Pickett never said a word about my crew facing this sort of hazard when we made our agreement.”

  “It’s not all that common. He probably didn’t think of it.”

  One of the sailors on the railing behind us said, loudly. “You gypsies aren’t satisfied with Pegleg, huh? Gonna kill us all!”

  Captain Johnson wheeled on him. He looked angry for the first time since I’d seen him. “That’ll be enough, mister!”

  The sailor looked at us both stonily and took another drag on his pipe.

  The captain turned back to me. “Have Mr. Miller meet me in the radio shack when he’s free,” he said. Then he left.

  * * *

  The chief patted the derrick strut. “Nice. This little episode is getting us all a twenty-five percent raise.” We both had backpack respirators on, but I’d had enough practice in the last day and a half that I didn’t have any problem understanding his words.

  Sprocket still sealed the hole. Right beneath his mouth, I hammered some more on the knocker half that connected the relief line to the riser pipe, tightening it.

  “I figured it took something like that to quiet Captain Johnson down,” I said. “Nobody offered us a raise, though.”

  “Way I heard it, Doc didn’t ask for one. Said you boys already knew what you were getting into. Mr. Pickett apparently agreed.”

  “Everybody is staying?”

  “Mr. Pickett offered to send a speedboat out to ferry anybody who wanted it. Nobody’s quit just yet. If this burn-off looks good, I imagine the whole crew will hang on. It’s good money.”

  Sprocket blinked beside us, and banged his drillhead against the pipe beside me. He was almost out of the hole. I gave him another few seconds to get completely clear, then pointed at the valve on the other side of the pipe, a few yards above my head.

  “How about turning that wheel for me?” I said to the chief. “Clockwise, to shut it.”

  “Sure thing.” He leaned over and closed it.

  Sprocket backed down the ramp away from the hole. “Make sure it’s snug,” I said. “That’s the blow-out valve. We don’t want no sour gas escaping through it.”

  He put a bind on the wheel. “I thought Sprocket was your blow-out preventer.”

  “Sometimes he has to be out of the hole even when there’s a kick, like now. That valve has special teflon-lined inserts for sour-gas service. It�
��ll hold against a twenty thousand psi pressure differential. So will this one.” I touched the wheel on the valve beside me.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “You should be. They cost about five thousand bucks apiece.”

  I looked up at Razer at the top of the derrick. I pumped my fist up and down a couple of times. He looked toward the bow and repeated the motion. A couple of seconds later, he pointed at me and moved his finger in a circle. I twisted the relief valve open and climbed out of the hole.

  The sun had gone down a couple of hours ago. I went with the chief to the bow rail and watched along with the rest of the hands.

  Just as we arrived, Doc triggered the electric igniter. A couple of hundred feet away from the ship, bright orange suddenly glared into the sky.

  We’d coupled lengths of steel hose to make a long boom out over the water. The end of the boom rested squarely across one of Miz Bellybutton’s lifeboats. It rose lazily in the gentle swells, slowly shifting the shadows thrown by the billowing, burning sour gas.

  The fire burned all night, dangerous and beautiful.

  * * *

  Sprocket drilled another thousand feet, to make sure that was all the sour gas we were likely to run into for the time being, then we invited Pearl and Big Red out to cement a liner over it all.

  After it tested, Sprocket went back to business as usual. He still had to be coaxed into the hole, and I could see a worried look clouding Doc’s face every time it happened. Nobody quit Miz Bellybutton, but only the chief thanked us for the pay raise.

  * * *

  We completed the drilling program fifty-eight days after we first anchored on location. Sprocket TD’ed at twenty thousand feet, exactly as planned.

  T-Bone’s drilling venture had got lucky first time out. As far as the well itself was concerned, it went perfect after we disposed of the sour gas. No hole degradation, no more unwanted fluids or gases infiltrating, no thief zones. But we did hit three good zones on the way to TD: producible amounts of light crude at eighty-eight hundred feet and twelve thousand two hundred feet, and, as a bonus, a high-pressure reservoir of clean, non-stinky natural gas at fifteen thousand seven hundred feet.