Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  In the late afternoon sunlight I got my first clear look at the dactyls. They both spread their wings and made funny wooka-wooka sounds, their beaks jabbing at the sky while the claws at the leading edges of their wings flexed and clasped. Their wingspans exceeded twenty feet. They differed from each other in a couple of ways. The one that Stevie called Maureen stood almost a foot taller than Sonny. And growths of feathers, scraggly as Stevie’s beard, blue and green and yellow and red, sprouted on different parts of their bodies.

  Steve took up a rag hanging on a peg beside the big chicken-wire cage that I figured they lived in. He dunked the cloth in a trough of water, then wrung it out.

  “Come here, Sonny. Let Papa clean you.” He made the burping and clicking sounds again, and Sonny echoed them. He furled his wings and waddled up to Steve. Steve took the cloth and began to wipe the blood off his beak.

  “They went out for dinner this afternoon,” he explained. “Usually they get by on what I bring them, but twice a week I turn them loose. The school has an arrangement with a sheep-rancher a couple of miles north of town. They take one of his flock, and we reimburse him at about twice the going rate.”

  I shivered. “Hoo, I bet that terrorizes the flock as much as it did me.”

  “Surprisingly, no. They drop out of the sky from a thousand feet up, grab one at the edge of the flock, and are gone in half a second. Sheep are amazingly stupid. They don’t even react. There’s a cliff up near Mumford, north of town. They drop the sheep on top of it and have dinner.”

  He dunked the cloth in the trough again. Brownish red stained the water in it. “The cliff’s necessary because they’re what we call stooping birds.” He squeezed the cloth and applied it to Sonny’s beak again. “That means they can’t take off from level ground. They have to drop off the edge of something and fall awhile until they gain enough velocity to fly. That’s one of the reasons we keep them on top of the Vet Building. Once or twice they’ve gotten stranded on the ground, and we had to bring them back up here in the elevator.”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh. I’ve never seen any birds that look anything at all like these.” Maureen waddled over and cocked her head from side to side, inspecting me with first one eye, then the other. I held my ground. Then a long purple tongue snaked out the side of her mouth toward me and I jumped back.

  Stevie laughed. “She just wants a taste. Like a dog licking you so she’ll be able to recognize you better. They’re not modern birds, Henry Lee. Their kind haven’t existed on this earth for millions of years.”

  Her tongue tickled as she ran it down the side of my face. She clucked and cooed. I reached out and scratched the side of her head like Stevie had. She hiccupped happily.

  “Something interesting happened about ten years ago.” Stevie continued. “A volcano blew up in Antarctica. You might have read about it.”

  I shook my head. “Nope, I’m just a country boy. Grew up reading the Bible and the Farmer’s Almanac.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Ridiculous superstitious trash. Anyway, a team of geologists stationed at McMurdo Sound down there went to monitor it. It had cracked a glacier wide open. Purely by chance, one of the team spotted an ice boulder that encased a nest and a clutch of twenty-three pterodactyl eggs. In perfect condition.” He finished up with Sonny. “Here, Maureen. Clean-up time, sweetheart. Amazingly, eighteen of the eggs contained viable genetic material.”

  Sonny went through the open door of the chicken-wire cage and used his claws to walk up the wall until he got to a rubber-covered steel bar suspended on thick ropes below the tin roof. He climbed onto the bar and began to rock happily back and forth like a huge, repulsive parakeet.

  “The eggs were transported to MIT, where I was a grad student at the time. To make a long story short, we studied and planned for five years. The pterodactyl genetic material was damaged in places, so we introduced material from modern-day birds into the DNA chains after intensive computer-modeling and a lot of sweaty guess-work. Then we enucleated a couple of dozen ostrich eggs and took our best shot at it. We got ten live birds.” I hadn’t understood half the words he was using, but I got the general drift, so I just nodded and tried to look intelligent.

  He finished up with Maureen and slapped her on the flank. She hiccupped and went to join Sonny. We hooked our fingers in the chicken-wire and watched them.

  “The project couldn’t have succeeded without a lot of inter-university cooperation. Half a dozen schools contributed money, personnel, computer time, equipment. As part of the deal, P&A got a breeding pair when they’d matured enough to travel. Sonny and Maureen. And they got me.” He sighed. “It hasn’t worked out too well for any of us.”

  “How come? Sounds like everybody ought to be thrilled. Y’all got some live dactyls, didn’t you?”

  “Almost. Like I said, we injected foreign genetic material. Sonny and Maureen are part cockatoo. They’re cockadactyls, not pterodactyls. We tagged the cockatoo sequences. The plan was to breed back to a pure form, gradually eliminating the tagged sequences. We estimated it’d take about a dozen, maybe two dozen, generations.” He sighed again. “But none of the dactyls have bred yet. They reached sexual maturity two years ago, and they don’t even try. We’re wondering if we screwed up their reproductive systems when we put in the cockatoo genes.”

  He turned away from the cage and stared out over the roof. “Some of the schools are getting impatient. The Stone Magnolia and I got along fine until a year or so ago. I thought she was a pretty nice lady. Then she started to change. I don’t know … maybe she just ran out of patience.” He shrugged. “Now she foams at the mouth when the subject of cockadactyls comes up.”

  “Can she do anything about it?”

  He gave me a lop-sided smile. “She’s my department chair, and, as you oil gypsies say, she has suction. Lots of suction, with P&A’s board of regents. She can do damn near whatever she wants to. So far, she hasn’t thought of anything.”

  He took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “But she will,” he said. “She will.”

  * * *

  Hillary had us stop off at her apartment complex on the way to the camp so she could pick up some clothes and other stuff. She planned on going out with us for the evening, and had decided to get ready aboard Lady Jane after supper. Her place was on the edge of town, in almost the same direction we would have had to go anyway.

  While we waited for her, me and Sprocket meandered among a small field of pump jacks across the street. Jacks in various sizes were spotted all across the state, some places more than others. They pumped oil out of wells that didn’t have enough pressure downhole to get to the surface otherwise. A jack looked like a large black horse-like animal with its nose dipping up and down tirelessly and the half-wheels on the rear kicking around like a donkey’s. They pumped the oil into nearby storage tanks which would be emptied by vacuum trucks every week or so, depending on how much the wells produced.

  Half the jacks were motionless, since the Railroad Commission strictly limited how quickly a reservoir could be depleted of its hydrocarbons.

  We passed one that was partly dismantled for repairs, and I got a bad idea. I took a hammer and a thirty-six from the iron room and opened the hole under the pump jack.

  “Hey, Sprocket. Oil. Look, oil.”

  He didn’t respond, so I got him to open his mouth and pulled his tongue-tip over to the hole.

  “C’mon, boy. Run on in there. Get you a little snack.”

  He just stared at me. I pulled his tongue closer to the hole and tried to insert it into the hole. I had it in less than a foot when he jerked it loose and galloped out of the field.

  I ran after him, shouting. I caught up with him in the street. He stood there trembling, with his eyes tightly closed.

  Hillary came up behind me with a small suitcase and a large purse as I was rubbing the area over his right eye, trying to calm hi
m down.

  “I saw from my window,” she said.

  “Did I mess him up worse by pushing on him? I feel like such a idiot.”

  She set down her suitcase and started to rubbing him, too. “We’ll see,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.” She sounded like she was trying to convince all three of us.

  * * *

  It was the largest camp I’d been in, with maybe ninety critters on hand, which meant fifteen to eighteen hundred people. A lot of them worked the Austin Chalk and other fields around Aggie Station, but others were there strictly for educational purposes.

  Hillary said the camp should grow past a hundred critters and two thousand people by the time the semester started in two weeks. Our convoy had grouped together near the center of the camp. Hillary and me might have had a hard time finding our bunch in the twilight, but I asked some kids playing with a baby Cementer, and they gave us directions.

  I noticed that, aside from its size alone, this camp was different from the others I’d been in. For one thing, half a dozen permanent buildings were scattered around inside the fence. And there was an awful lot of kids and young oilfield critters running around. The ones you couldn’t see, you could hear, having a grand old time with each other.

  They’d saved a slot between Lady Jane and Munchkin for us. When Sprocket slipped in, dinner was ready, which was fine by me. A growing young fella needs lots of nourishment from what Razer called your four basic carbohydrate groups—boudain, chicken-fried steak, spaghetti, and chocolate pie. The smell rising over the whole camp was making my tummy talk to me.

  * * *

  After dinner I got introduced to another gypsy custom that I could have done without. No other camp that we’d stayed in had this particular way of helping you to introduce yourself, but they did things different, and stupider, at Aggie Station.

  Me and Star was talking quietly, leaning up against Lady Jane, when Doc called me over and motioned for me to stand beside him. The crews for Sprocket, Lady Jane, Munchkin, and Big Red all came to their feet and stood behind us. The head of the camp, Wiley “the Wildman” Throckmorton, solemnly pulled forward a four-wheeled red wagon heaped neck-high with white towels. Most of the rest of the camp gathered behind him in a semicircle.

  The Wildman bowed to us all formal-like. Doc bowed back, then looked at me. I hastily bowed, too.

  “Welcome to the camp, folks,” the Wildman said loudly. “Always good to see our brothers and sisters come to school up here.” He took a deep breath. I started to relax, figuring we was going to get a long-winded, boring speech.

  “Y’all have fun. Make the stacks neat.” He handed me the end of the rope that he’d tugged the wagon forward with. “We figure y’all oughta be done about midnight.” He smirked and started moving away.

  The crowd behind him cheered and whistled enthusiastically.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I whispered to Doc.

  “They expect us to dry and stack about forty million pieces of dinnerware,” he whispered back. I looked at the towels packed on the wagon. There was a lot of towels, enough to wash and dry thousands of dishes. Then I looked at the long, long table that circled a huge trough in the center of the camp, about twenty feet away. It was piled high with dishes and glasses and cups and spoons and forks and knives. Gypsies had been putting them on the table all while we were eating, but there had already been a mountain before dinner. I hadn’t taken much notice of it, since I was busy defending myself against starvation.

  I looked at the wagon again. I began to wonder if we had enough towels. Doc took the rope from my hands.

  “Appreciate the honor,” he called out. He held the end of the rope up high, then dropped it. “But I don’t believe we’ll be needing these towels here.”

  The camp went deathly quiet.

  “You mean you ain’t gonna wash the dishes?” the Wildman finally choked, in a high, outraged voice.

  The crowd started to mutter ugly mutters. I got ready for a fight, which might be better than washing all the dishes they’d lined out for us.

  “Not personally, we ain’t.” Doc let the muttering get louder for a minute, waited for the crowd to begin to edge toward us. Then he smiled. “But that don’t mean they won’t get cleaned.” He turned to Sprocket and the crew. “Let’s get it on, boys.”

  While the entire camp watched suspiciously, we followed Doc’s directions and ran a couple of lines from the industrial-size faucets among the troughs. We half-filled one of Sprocket’s bladders with nearly boiling water, then poured in a half-dozen sacks of 20-40 sand for scouring, then a barrel of well-cleaner, which ain’t nothing but highly concentrated soap. Then, while Sprocket held the bladder’s outside orifice wide open, we dumped into him all the pots and pans and dishes and spoons and forks and cups and bowls. All the dinnerware was metal, mostly aluminum and tin, since glass and dainty china don’t travel all that well into the places our kind of folks end up going to.

  Frankly, it looked to me like some of the pieces had been saved up for a couple of days, or maybe even weeks. I overheard a couple of comments in the crowd that didn’t persuade me otherwise. All of the pieces had identifying marks scratched some place on them, so there wasn’t any chance of them getting mixed up.

  We played a little casual free-form jazz in C Dorian mode while Sprocket foamed up the water in the bladder, then turbulated it by marching in place and pressure-squirting water from bladder to bladder. You couldn’t hardly hear the clanging collisions of all the stuff in his bladders over the music, which was maybe the idea.

  After a half hour, Doc called a stop to the playing. I hooked up the orifice to a hose that led off to a big disposal pit on the edge of the camp. Sprocket emptied the dirty, soapy, sandy water through it, then switched back to another hose with clean water and rinsed the dishes.

  He stuck his tongue out and sputtered wetly at the crowd, then winced. Maybe not so good an idea until his drillhead grew back. He started to hum, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Four of his orifices gaped open and began to whistle as they sucked air in. He swole up like he had just before he blew out on my daddy’s farm.

  A geyser of steam jetted from the top of his head through his blowout relief sphincter.

  Doc leaned over and whispered to me, “Razer and me figured this out last time these turkeys laid a month’s worth of dirty dishes on the crew. We swore we wouldn’t get suckered again.”

  After about five minutes, the geyser trailed away into nothing. A minute later the whistling died, and the four intake orifices clenched shut. The orifice that led to the dishwashing bladder gaped open.

  “High-pressure pneumatic drying,” Doc said. He stepped forward, and gestured for the rest of the crew to follow him.

  “Okay, folks, let’s stack ’em. Neat, like the Wildman asked.”

  * * *

  We stacked the last of the dishes around eight o’clock.

  Doc yelled down Sprocket’s hall while I was fumbling with my cuff-links. “Anybody got any preferences where we start out tonight?” A chorus of contradictory suggestions came from all of the rooms.

  “How’s about we make it to Jon-Tim’s Juke Joint?” Doc asked. “Hillary says they got a band in tonight that plays them dirty ol’ low-down blues that Henry Lee likes so much.”

  Everybody booed and howled.

  “No, no! We hate that garbage!”

  “Uh-uh! Anything but the blues!”

  “I’d rather listen to cats fightin’ under the front porch!”

  “Country and Western forever!”

  “Bob Wills is still the king!”

  “Well, it’s settled, then,” Doc said. “We’ll go to Jon-Tim’s and take in some blues.”

  * * *

  Jon-Tim’s Juke Joint had been designed with oilfield critters in mind. The place was actually a huge wooden-paneled rectangul
ar pit a couple of hundred feet on a side and eighteen feet deep in the ground. An asphalt parking lot surrounded it. A pavilion roof, festooned on top and bottom with various-colored lights, protected it from the weather. The pavilion roof was a good fifteen feet above the ground.

  Half a dozen stairways led from the surface down to the sawdust-covered floor of the pit, which was arranged like the standard inside of a good road joint, with a bar running the length of one wall, the bandstand against the opposite wall, a cleared dance area in front of the bandstand, and a bunch of tables and chairs densely packing the rest of the available space.

  Critters crowded most of the way around the edge of the joint, their faces poked over part-ways into the pit, but Sprocket and Lady Jane found a couple of parking slots next to each other and glided into them. Munchkin had stayed in camp to watch over her young’uns, and Big Red and his crew had gone off to raise hell and shoot pool at a place called Fajita Rita’s where we were supposed to meet them later. After the crew climbed out through Sprocket’s mouth he nosed up until a yard of his front end dropped over the edge of the pit. Lady Jane did the same as soon as she was emptied. I’d felt guilty before on occasion about leaving them outside while we went in and partied, but Jon-Tim’s had solved that problem. They built so that the critters could attend the party, too.

  As we was settling into a couple of tables, the band came on and began to fiddle with their instruments. A high-cheeked black man who had a red electric guitar strapped to him leaned into the microphone. He was dressed all in black leather. Had a big nose, a small mustache, and eyes that seemed to glow from inside with a smoky light.