The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  By that time it was the middle of the night. Dad and Grady had gone back to the hotel in San Angelo while the others had stayed behind to help. Since the well was shallow and mostly through sand, the driller used compressed air to push the debris out from the hole, rather than fluid or “mud.” The sediment billowed back to the surface through a pipe called a blooey and into a shallow sump pit, where Buddy and Jacques caught samples in cloth bags and labeled them according to depth. Once the driller reached six hundred feet, he telephoned Bob at home, as instructed, and the engineer climbed out of bed and drove over. Inside the doghouse now, he and Orville examined the rocks for signs of hydrocarbons. Some oily film appeared, but not much. The logging tools they’d sent down the hole—which measured the density and porosity of the formation, among other things—hadn’t convinced him, either.

  “Probably not,” he told Orville, shaking his head.

  But the geologist stuck to his hunch. “It’s there all right.”

  So Bob told the driller to go deeper—past a formation called the No. 5 San Angelo Sand and into another one known as the Clear Fork. At some point the next afternoon, Bob walked by the blooey and saw it running dark, then motioned for the machinery to stop. His nose told him everything.

  They lined the well to twelve hundred feet, then lowered frac charges to blast holes in the casing. Some acid was poured down to melt the sediment, mostly dolomite and siltstone, which freed the oil to bleed its way in. To get the well flowing, a swabbing unit arrived to suction the hole and pull the liquid to the surface. When that happened, the whole gang was ready.

  They were perched over a small storage tank when it first appeared, pulsing through the pipe. It was a gorgeous light crude, a perfect forty gravity, and shone dark green under the sun.

  “Look at it!” Grady said. “Will you just look at it!”

  He let the oil run over his hand and the others followed, weak in the face of its power, the way Billy Sunday had done over sixty years before in Ranger.

  “It’s still warm!”

  “Yeah! It feels like … like milk!”

  By now the swabbing crew had a decent flow, and the casing head gas rising off the tank was so strong that it soured the air. About the time Bob’s nose registered the smell, he saw something that filled him with terror. It was Grady, one hand under the black fountain while the other waved a lit cigarette. It took him two seconds to reach the tank and pull Grady off, otherwise they would have been blown to bits.

  * * *

  The Guinn No. 1 delivered twenty barrels a day, thanks to a secondhand pump jack, and because the well was shallow and cheap to drill—around eighty thousand dollars—it began paying for itself in no time. Dad and Hugh typed out the numbers and took them to investors, and within weeks, they’d raised enough money to drill two more successful wells. Just like that, Grady Cunningham was a bona fide oilman.

  The desired persona was now complete. For the first time, Grady stood in the same arena with Joshua Cosden and Raymond Tollett, along with every historic man in Witch-Elk boots who’d ever harnessed the land to his will. The maiden strike, however average, set things in motion. Twenty barrels a day, it turned out, was plenty of fuel for Grady to punch the business into warp speed.

  He had a lot of catching up to do. Over in Midland, men were flying in Bulgari reps from Manhattan to sell jewelry to their wives. In Big Spring, Grady had to contend with a pair of men who’d married into the Dora Roberts family, whose ranch was giving oil again like the days of ’27. Their Ferraris whizzed down Gregg Street, and one of them even flew around town in a helicopter.

  From his perch in the Petroleum Building, Grady aimed for the stars.

  * * *

  The whole gang flew to Dallas to buy gold. By now they were taking chartered King Airs. Gone were the Piper Navajo and the sweet-faced Norwegian pilot, along with his friendly wife. No one seemed to know where they’d gone, or why, and no one seemed to care. One shiny thing was replaced by another and the ride continued to move.

  This time to Bachendorf’s. Its owner, Harry Bock, was a Lithuanian immigrant who’d survived Dachau and now operated one of the most exclusive jewelry stores in the country. The private collection was housed at its well-guarded office in downtown Dallas, where select clients were greeted with open bottles of champagne to pique their spirits. Leaving Bachendorf’s that night, Ann wore a ten-carat diamond as big as her thumbnail, while Mom wore a gold nugget necklace pendant the size of a thick half-dollar. For Dad, Bock designed a gold nugget ring in the shape of Texas, with a diamond in the place of Big Spring. On his wrist was a gold-plated Rolex.

  That Christmas morning, I was lying on the floor watching cartoons when a big moving truck pulled up to the curb. Before I knew it, two men were walking through our front door carrying the largest television I’d ever seen. It was cased in polished wood and its weight caused them to waddle. They set it down in front of me and carted off our old TV, which suddenly looked pathetic.

  “Watch your cartoons in style now, kiddo,” one of them said, and winked. A minute later, a beige Rolls-Royce appeared in the drive. Grady stepped out wearing his giant wolf coat, its hem nearly dragging the dirt. He didn’t even bother to knock and was shouting before he stepped inside.

  “Let’s see that new Magnavox,” he said to Mom, gesturing with his cigarette as he marched toward the living room. “Those sonsabitches wanted an extra hundred dollars to deliver it on Christmas, so I wanna see it.”

  He stopped at the doorway and his face brightened at the sight of his gift. It was the first time I’d ever seen the coat, and instantly I thought of Luke Skywalker stuffed inside the cavity of the Tauntaun.

  “Sugar,” he said to me, exhaling a big cloud of smoke, “I want you to always remember something: your uncle Grady takes care of your family. You hear that?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now,” he said, spinning around, “where’s that Bobby Gaylon? We got work to do.”

  I watched Dad follow Grady out to the Rolls-Royce, and Grady opened the trunk. Down inside were dozens of Christmas hams and turkeys he was delivering to old people and the poor—to retirees living in the Canterbury apartments down the street, and to elderly parents of friends and employees (Bob and Opal got a ham, and so did Uncle Herman and Little Opal). Families on the north side opened their doors that morning to find Grady standing there in his wolf coat like Daddy Warbucks, the Rolls billowing steam by the curb, and Dad lugging a frozen bird up the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Buddy was driving around doing the same.

  That afternoon, Opal was pulling the ham out of the oven when we arrived for Christmas lunch. Zelda and Charles were visiting from Albuquerque, Norma Lou had driven over from Odessa, and Preston’s family had come from Alvin. They were seated around the living room when Mom and Dad walked in wearing their own fur coats, which Grady had given to them that morning (I’d been too preoccupied with the new television to notice). Mom had on a frothy white fox and Dad’s was a velvety chocolate rabbit. Standing in Bob and Opal’s tiny living room, they looked like a couple of Hollywood stars who’d lost their way.

  “My lands!” someone said.

  “Will ya look at that!”

  “I told ya he’s Richie Rich!” Bob shouted, and beamed at the sight.

  Preston looked at the coat and the fat Rolex on Dad’s wrist, then shook his head. “I guess you’ve done pretty good for yourself, little brother,” he said, and there was a tinge of sadness in his voice. He knew Dad was never coming back.

  The high life suited us kids just fine. My sister Marci and I loved riding in Uncle Grady’s fancy cars. We especially liked the Rolls-Royce and the long white Excalibur. The company dinners at the Branding Iron and the Brass Nail club and restaurant were huge events. I sat next to Grady while he waved his cigarettes at Dad and the boys and shouted orders at the poor waitress: “Bring this kid whatever he wants!” he demanded. I got a chicken-fried steak with onion rings, ate half, then announced, “I’ll have chocolate cake
!” making sure to wave my arm with the same bravado before Mom took me down a peg. With Grady, every boy was a king! Every man a millionaire!

  For show-and-tell that year, I brought a mason jar full of oil that Dad had skimmed off one of the tanks. Standing in front of the class, I popped open the lid and dipped my finger into the green-black liquid. As the oil streaked down my hand, the room filled with its sulfury vapor.

  “Y’all smell that?” I asked, my accent as thick as the crude. “My daddy says that’s the smell of money.”

  * * *

  Out at the company’s oil lease, Bob Wilson and his colleague Orville Phelps were trying to gauge the extent of the field, looking for the oil that had eluded them in the San Angelo Sand. First and foremost, they wanted to explore the property across the fence, which belonged to a rancher named Jones. So one afternoon, Dad drove up the caliche road and knocked on his door, a case of Coors under his arm. By evening, the two men were backslapping on the porch and Jones was wearing a Cunningham Oil cap, a few of which Dad kept out in the truck.

  The Jones No. 1 hit the seam they were looking for. Their second attempt missed it completely and came up dry, and so did their third. But the next four produced nicely. With the wells across the fence, the company now had greater cachet when pitching investors. Bowman was so happy about getting his small percentage that he threw a cookout at the rock house with fried catfish and homemade ice cream. He even let the boys dance with his pretty wife. For the first time, Dad and Hugh started receiving royalties. With every check came a tiny stake in the jumbo Texas dream.

  Sometimes the boys came to the house for dinner when Dad grilled ribs, and I’d hear things. Like how Grady flew twenty-five people to Aspen in two King Airs for St. Patrick’s Day, running up to strangers in his wolf coat trying to kiss them, shouting, “Are you Irish?” Or how Grady was talking about opening offices in Denver and Midland, even buying a big farm.

  “What’s he doing buying a farm?” one of them asked.

  “Hell if I know,” another said.

  “Hey, is it true he just ordered twenty-two Cadillacs?”

  “Probably, crazy sonofabitch.”

  “Hell, you should’ve been with us in Denver,” one of them said, then described eating at the Chateau Pyrenees, where down in the basement was a bowling-ball-looking thing with a spout that poured wine down your throat, “some VIP deal.” And how on the way home, someone said, Shit, Grady, we ain’t far from Vegas! So Grady told the pilot to turn the plane around and they spent three days at Caesars Palace.

  For me, Grady’s boys epitomized cool, with their long feathered hair, tight jeans, and leather jackets. What’s more, their language was profane and intoxicating and reminded me of Bud Davis from Urban Cowboy, which I watched on our big new television. When Mom and Dad went out, our babysitters were too busy with my sisters to worry about what I was doing. And what I was doing, at seven years old, was killing time in a Pasadena honky-tonk. Never mind that John Travolta was an Irish-Italian from New Jersey, the people in Gilley’s were familiar to me—their clothes, the longnecks they drank, the way they talked, and how they stood half-cocked with their thumbs down in their jeans. That was how Dad carried himself, with his weight shifted to one leg, and how I too saw myself standing against the intemperate world.

  One night the boys took me on a beer run, but instead of going straight to the store, they peeled off the main road and raced down the side streets along the dark arroyo. Sitting in the backseat, the rush of wind from the open windows roared in my ears, and the speakers—cranked with Van Halen—seemed to pulse in my stomach. I began to panic, and when I opened my eyes the boys were hanging out the window hurling beer bottles into street signs. Each time one exploded into a puff of glass, they whooped and hollered, causing my whole body to flinch.

  * * *

  Once Mom finished with her real estate classes, she started taking us to First Assembly of God, on the corner of Fourth and Lancaster. Our history hung heavy under the roof my great-grandfather Clem had built a half century earlier, mixing with the smell of old hymnals and wood polish. And there was living history, too. Little Opal and Herman occupied their usual places toward the front, along with other aunts and uncles. And after years of resistance, my grandfather Bob was finally in regular attendance.

  It helped that Papaw had taken a liking to the pastor, Brother Rick Jones. Shortly after being hired, the preacher had dropped by the house to introduce himself, and he and Bob became fast friends. Jones hailed from West Texas and his father was a driller who still worked the rigs. “A man I can listen to,” Bob said. The preacher started stopping by regularly for coffee and even helped Bob tinker with the trucks. In turn, Papaw put his fly-killing days behind him and donned a three-piece suit. He sat in a pew and listened to Brother Jones, digging the grease from his nails with his Old Timer knife.

  With Mom and Opal as my examples, I began to form my own relationship with God, whom I loved without question. It would be another two years before I gathered the courage to kneel at the altar and accept him as my savior—it would happen at a summer church camp—but until then, I became a half-pint soldier in service of the Cross. That year our youth group, the Royal Rangers, asked us to raise money to help missionaries in the godless reaches of the globe. They gave each kid a little Buddy Barrel to fill with coins, but I knew I could do better. The first chance I got, I went with Dad to the Petroleum Building and had Grady’s boys stuff mine with cash.

  Dad attended church sometimes. But for him, the old tabernacle where he was raised was too redolent with history. It was like every sin he’d ever committed still hung at the foot of the altar in a cloud, always there to remind him, along with church ladies who gave him the same sidelong stare as when he and Ronnie used to come in buzzed. Brother Jones may have been an easy touch, but hell was still hot and sin was the only ticket there. Most Sundays Dad stayed home.

  “If those blue-haired women wanna treat me like I’m sixteen and running wild, I won’t disappoint ’em,” he said.

  And how could he? He was having too much fun. Or at least he told himself as much. Never in his life had he been so well dressed or had as much money in the bank. And wasn’t the price of oil only going up? It was true the recession was pummeling the market and people were starting to sweat. But when analysts were still forecasting eighty-five-dollar crude (“Eighty-five in ’85!” the oilmen chanted), who was Dad to doubt them? The local economy was so strong that the new prison was training inmates how to roughneck so they could join a crew upon release. “There’s not enough qualified men,” the instructor told the Herald.

  But for Dad, it wasn’t easy keeping up with Grady, especially with three kids and a wife, and with Grady showing no signs of slowing down. The last few trips with the boys, Dad had managed to stay behind—someone had to run the business—but Grady still found ways to steal him away.

  A morning trip to the Guinn lease turned into three days in San Angelo, spent mostly in the hotel bar with eight of the boys and whoever else happened past. They must have gone through a case of whiskey, and one of those nights Grady kept trying to buy the marble statue in the hotel lobby. Or was that in Midland? Then it was over to Hobbs, New Mexico, to look at Grady’s farm, which he was buying off his uncle Alvie. Standing hungover in a cotton field had proved disorienting, to say the least. A weekend ski trip to Ruidoso had turned into … how many days? He couldn’t say.

  He remembered being at the horse track and Grady talking in fake Spanish to people and how everyone thought it was funny, then after dinner he and his cousin Selena tangoed in the street and backed up traffic. Grady must’ve lost several thousand dollars on horses that day and there he was, dancing. Then to Dallas and back again, the blur of tarmac lights. Then, of course, there were all the late nights at the Brass Nail, Dad’s Rolex pushing one more midnight while a bunch of strangers plundered the company’s tab.

  By early 1982, Mom was working full-time selling houses and had to wake up early.
Whenever Dad left for three days and stuck her with us kids, she grew furious. “Just tell him you have to leave,” she implored, but Dad said he couldn’t. Grady was like Der Butt, the leader of a gang he just couldn’t quit.

  Truth was, they were flying too high to even see the ground. To help Grady maintain that kind of velocity, he started buying help. It seemed like everybody was on something, whether it was coke, speed, or Tennessee whiskey. Even the Herald ran a big series about the amount of drugs flooding Big Spring because of the boom. “Almost all the workers smoke and eat speed,” a roughneck told the paper. Men were doing anything to pack in the long hours, not knowing how long the bonanza was going to last. In fact, the driller on the Jones lease had to send his crew home one night because they were so high. Buddy, who lived with Grady and Ann, wound up running casing for them. He was nearly killed when a rabbit line shot out of the hole and knocked him off the pipe rack, breaking three of his fingers.

  Roughnecks could buy speed for a dollar a hit, while “prellies” were ten and guaranteed sixteen hours of wide-eye. But cocaine wasn’t for oil hands. At three thousand dollars an ounce, it ran like pipeline across cherrywood desks where the toy pump jacks bobbed up and down to “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” It was railed out in restroom stalls at the Petroleum Club, in dark-windowed limousines that snaked between the tanker trucks blasting “Bloody Mary Morning.” It was at the Brass Nail, where the waitress left it in cellophane baggies in the change slot of the cigarette machine. And it ate like cancer at the great families that had built Big Spring.

  The Dora Roberts fortune melted away not only on Ferraris and helicopters, but famous “Elephant Hunt” parties thrown at one of the biggest ranch houses in town, where bowls heaped with cocaine sat out like bean dip for all to share. As for Raymond Tollett’s money, it walked from an idling limousine to a dealer’s door on West Eighteenth Street, with Buddy’s one good hand sweating against the wheel.