Finally, Taylor spoke up. “Martin, it was really good to see you and I hope you have a good time over Thanksgiving.” Always the diplomat, thought Martin, she could be sending off the Ambassador to Japan with that salutation. Taking his cue, he reached out oddly to shake her hand and wish her the best.
A smiling Taylor looked over at Martin’s dad and said, “And can you tell your son to stop stalking me?” They all laughed. On cue, the three large men and Taylor turned back down the aisle toward checkout. In a few minutes, everybody was out of the store and back on the road. The questions about this woman—and Martin—no one asked.
It was late afternoon when Martin pulled into his parents’ drive. On Thanksgiving Day, he couldn’t sleep so he had gotten up at five and gone for a long walk up behind their house. He had spent the last day around the house, visiting with the relatives, playing ball with his nephews, eating leftover food and inventing new reasons to get outside and get some fresh air. Finally, Sunday had arrived. It was time to head back to Houston. After lunch he had said goodbye, and his brother came by with his kids to take him to the Lacrosse airport. The weather conditions were a little different this time, with crisp, clear blue skies. His brother’s youngest boy had cried when Martin had hugged him goodbye. They hardly knew each other, but Martin could feel the love between them.
Martin arrived in Minneapolis all right, but there was a long delay again and his plane didn’t take off until after seven. He tried to sleep on the plane but couldn’t. He was going home… or was he? The pilot announced their approach to Houston. Martin had always dreaded Sunday nights. In the heavy, humid air of evening, he could see the long, neat lines of houses over Houston. He thought of their house. They had painted over the brick two years ago, in a fashionable light gray that Liz had liked. The dark shutters had looked good too. Even he had grudgingly admitted it. The azaleas had been neatly trimmed around the front entryway. Perhaps the time away had been good for them both. Maybe things would be different. Clearer. At the same time, he felt powerless to deal with Liz and her complaints, mostly because many were valid. Liz wanted more. Hell, Martin wanted more. He just hadn’t taken the time or made a plan or maybe he had lacked the guts to go after it—whatever “it” was. What exactly was he going to do?
CHAPTER 14
When the light turned red on Memorial, Martin swung his Acura out onto the road and headed west. Thankfully, he was going against the traffic as it wove its web into downtown Houston, each of the drivers peering intently over the steering wheel, meeting the morning sun. It was 6:45 a.m. and Martin would probably be first into the office again that morning. Sometimes his colleague, Krenovich, would come in extra early so that he could run his high-end geological simulation programs with dedicated computer power. Martin and Liz had talked to the kids. They said they were having some problems and they needed a break. Liz had done most of the talking while Martin sat idly by, trying to be calm, reassuring. She had said that sometimes “friends” need time apart to plan and think about what they want to do, and that things had changed between Mom and Dad. His oldest daughter asked all the hard questions: “Are you getting divorced? What are you fighting about? Why does Dad have to move out?” It wasn’t so much that she was on his side; she was just giving Liz maximum grief. Liz didn’t tell Martin she wanted a divorce; she just kept saying she needed time to think about things. He had talked to his attorney and he knew it was bad for him to agree to move out, but at this point he really didn’t have much leverage. Liz said she would probably just file for divorce if he didn’t move out.
It hadn’t been that hard. In fact, the whole family had pitched in as he pulled together his stuff and made a few trips back and forth from the house to his apartment at the Memorial Creole. Liz and Martin had actually rented there, when they had first moved to Houston, and the place was still safe, clean and well kept. He was free to do whatever he wanted. He had time of his own.
He hated it.
He was alone. He was angry. He was starting to feel desperate. What does a man do when it’s just not good enough? Where does he go? Why are we even here? These questions haunted him. For the first time in his life he lay awake, sleepless, desperately chasing his dreams over the last twenty years, always ending up back where he was with no way ahead. In many ways, Liz had been right. He had just been getting by, but in lots of ways they were doing great—much better than most people—but it just wasn’t good enough any longer. Liz had said she was tired of waiting and waiting for something, even if she wasn’t sure just what. It wasn’t only to work out at the Houstonian with her friends. It wasn’t to pick the kids up from soccer to take them to piano. She wanted more, and Martin concluded that one way or the other she was going to get it, either with him or without him. She was hungry, and she was bringing out things in him that he hadn’t felt in a long time: anger, determination, and unyielding focus. He had always known that he could do almost anything; he just never had had to do it before. He would be the ruler of his own world; that’s what he wanted; or at least that’s what Liz wanted for him.
As he walked up to the door at Basin Oil, his thoughts came back to the business at hand. For some reason, he genuinely liked the smell of his office. His desk—or more accurately, a huge, old viewing table—was teak wood, worn smooth from the miles of maps and drawings that he had dragged across it over the years. The lock turned tightly in the steel frame of the glass door in the lobby, and then clacked open in the morning stillness. He was the first one in today, after all. He always left all the lights off, navigating his way nicely to his office in the northwest corner on the second floor. Again, the lock to his office, and then some sense of being home, he silently smiled as he found himself exploring the irony of thinking this was home. He didn’t have a comfortable, high back chair in the office—never had—but he settled down on his gray, Steelcase drafting stool, and put his feet up on the table. Quietly looking about the room, he took time to view each item carefully, individually. As the minutes passed, he could hear the early traffic out on the Katy Freeway, muffled through the tinted glass. It had been two weeks since he had gotten back from Wisconsin and moved out, and he had been thinking. He had thought of their friends, many of whom had made it big; mostly friends through Liz. Last week, he had been up to Oklahoma to review some stuff on their deep gas wells and he had been thinking. He had thought about how men had chased their dreams, taken risks, done what they had to do. He had been looking at the whole geophysical process and he had been more than thinking. He had been formulating a plan. It had started “Up North” in Wisconsin. He was ready to begin. He didn’t have much time.
Conceptually, the entire oil exploration business is not that difficult to comprehend. In its earliest days in Pennsylvania and even some parts of the South like Louisiana, prospectors would literally walk back hollows, valleys and lowlands, looking for oil oozing from the ground. Before the wide acceptance of the combustion engine and electric lighting, much of the early oil was refined as lamp oil to light the homes of early Americans in the mid- and late-19th century. Finding these places where the oil pockets were close to the surface was really quite straightforward, and the sinking of a simple pipe driven to a hundred or eventually several hundred feet into the ground was a well-defined set of tasks. They called them “oil wells” because they weren’t that much different from water wells. At that time, much of the effort in the fledgling oil business centered on handling the oil once it was out of the ground, and sending it via wagon, barge, and eventually railroad, from the early fields around Titusville, and Oil City Pennsylvania, and over the hills to the industrial cities of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Battles were fought, and fortunes were won in those days; none of course bigger than that of John D. Rockefeller, effectively the father of the modern integrated oil company. Rockefeller made money on oil all right, but he made a fortune as well on the transportation networks he built to move oil and other goods around the northeastern U.S. After a time, giant oil fields were discovered,
like the Permian Basin in Texas that held thirty billion barrels of oil—not even to mention natural gas.
By the 1960s and even the mid-1970s it had become a different world. In the United States oil and gas were abundant but harder to find. The prospective fields of hydrocarbons, or “prospects,” as they are called, were deeper, resulting in greater need for investment, higher demands for engineering execution and, as a result, much higher risk than the early oil barons had ever known. Companies would even band together as working interest owners to share the cost and the risk of failure and pool their intellectual capital to successfully reach even deeper down for some of the largest of fields called “elephants,” those with reserves of more than five hundred million barrels of oil. These days it was exceedingly rare for big oil companies, or even an especially gifted independent geologist or geophysicist, to find a colossal new field. In some smaller, independent oil companies, a big oil find could make fortunes for all of the executives in the company. Famous Texans like Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, Roy Cullen and H.L. Hunt (who had fifteen children), headed some of the world’s richest families, sometimes on the discovery of just one good oil field on which they held the mineral rights.
While the majority of the well-known major fields were under full development; advanced methods, computers and horizontal drilling continued to unearth a rare mammoth find here and there. Later, as oil prices fell in the 1980s and 1990s, the investment and exploration efforts increasingly focused on essentially untapped resources in underdeveloped areas of the world, where the proliferation of commerce, greed and technology had not yet come to pass. Exploration efforts shifted from the U.S. to places like Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Sakhalin Island, across Africa; these were the “ladies-in-waiting,” now subject to the onslaught, offering the spoils of man’s unquenchable thirst for oil.
Essentially, much of the work is based on measuring gravity, density, porosity, and amplitudes; familiar to any first-year college engineering student. On land, huge trucks with sophisticated listening devices lay cabled devices across the land surface of broad expanses suspected of holding potential hydrocarbon reserves. Once such cabling devices are laid, highly explosive charges are set off to send shock waves down into the bedrock below. Echoes from these shock waves would be received by “listening” devices spread across the surface. In some cases, explosives would be replaced with a mobile, three-ton “weight-drop” which would trigger similar shock waves. Differences in density in the underlying earth impact the speed and manner in which these waves echo back to cabled receptors. Sophisticated modeling programs and scientific analytical techniques blend together all of these reflected waves into a seismographic picture of the types of materials that lie beneath the surface. Oil reserves are often thought of as deep, unmitigated lakes of oil, hidden far below the surface. These are actually prevalent in some basins of the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia oil can be discovered and brought to the surface for less than three dollars a barrel. But in most of the rest of the world, oil is most typically ensconced in tiny pores of sedimentary rock, in varying layers, depths, widths and concentrations. Mixed in with these reservoirs are pools of saline solutions and massive caverns of varying grades of wet sand and rock that make reading exploration data a skill that very have ever mastered. Then, even the best geologists and geophysicists have their own share of big, dry holes.
CHAPTER 15
Liz waved at the guard as she drove up the entrance to the Houstonian Club. When she got closer, the guard who saw her coming raised the gate as she came down the lane. The club had nearly two thousand members, but at least a thousand only used the club for an occasional business lunch. Perhaps two hundred used the fitness center and tennis courts. Liz was one of the warriors who actually took advantage of her membership. She was more than a regular, showing up day in, day out to get a serious workout. She zipped past the guard house and into the parking garage under the huge two-story fitness center. Cruising down the ramp, she turned left against traffic and parked by the west wall next to the stairs. When they saw her on the monitor, they buzzed her in through the door and she came up the steps right next to the women’s locker room. It was a huge facility: three restaurants, two pools, an outdoor spa, tennis and squash courts, aerobics studio and a salon. Down on the south end of the property there was a nice-sized hotel and conference center. Martin would have a meeting at the conference center every once in a while, when his company would have a group in for a show-and-tell or a deal-making session.
This morning it was pretty busy for 8:15 a.m. but it was getting close to Christmas and all of the holiday parties were coming up. By the treadmills, there were a handful of people watching the morning news and working out. Liz dressed in no time and found her spot in the 8:30 a.m. aerobics class. Looking in the mirror at the front of the room, she checked herself over. It wasn’t like she really missed Martin, but she did feel as if something was missing. The kids knew that she had been unhappy for a long time, but now she knew they blamed her for the separation. She had tried to tell him over and over again what she was feeling. She wanted to be gentle, but in the end, she had been brutally direct. It was the only way he would listen. Maybe they could work things out. Maybe things were okay. Her life was slipping away from her and Martin wouldn’t do a damn thing about it. She wasn’t getting any younger, either. It wasn’t a single event that had occurred. It had been a process. Martin had gotten increasingly frustrated with his work. He had gotten good reviews and worked on Basin’s biggest projects, but when it came to a promotion to a management position, they told him he was not quite ready. He was not “dynamic enough” or he needed “more seasoning.” He would come home sullen, angry, and quiet. She would listen, but the story remained the same, and her empathy had waned.
“Hey Liz, pumping some iron today?” It was Hilton Sinclair. He was always at the club. She knew he was working at the French Company, Prolea—one of the executives. It seemed to Liz that these days he worked only when he wanted. She had finished aerobics and had made it upstairs for some weightlifting.
“Nothing special, Hilton,” said Liz, “just trying to work some flab off the old lady here. You’re early today.”
“Yeah, well nothing going on today. The market was flat in London this morning. There’s a big OPEC meeting tomorrow so everyone’s sitting tight. I thought I would come over and get in a little extra work out before tomorrow.”
He was older than Liz, probably in his late forties or early fifties. Jet black hair, showing some balding, he had grown a mustache about six months ago and actually looked a lot better. Rugged. But basically, he was a body builder type guy masquerading as a businessman, and he spent too much time working on his tan. Liz had known a dozen guys like him at the club. Most of them worked out as avidly as she did and spent the balance of their time talking about making it big. She had heard Hilton had already made it big back in the late seventies. He was an oil trader. They made a lot of money, but it seems they spent a lot of money, too. One of Liz’s friends had told her that Hilton was on marriage number three. He was always direct, matter of fact, but low pressure.
“So, what are you doing today?” asked Liz.
“Legs and abs today. A bunch of us are meeting at the pool for lunch so I’ve got some time to get in a good workout.” Hilton was big at poolside. Frequently out there on really nice days. “Why don’t you come by for a while today and visit? I’ll buy you lunch.”
Liz was just slightly taken back. “Well, I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I’ve got a ton of stuff I need to get done today. We’ll see.”
“Great, maybe see you later. Lunch at 11:30.” He was off in the opposite direction, walking all the way down to the end of the giant weight room where the ab boards were tilted up looking out the windows over the tennis courts.
At 11:00, Liz was still in the club. Usually, she was long gone by now. She had showered and done her makeup and hair. She hadn’t been out to the pool for three months,
but it was an unusually warm day out there for this late in the year. She checked her watch—11:25. She looked in her locker and saw her suit hanging there for her. The kids were in school, a perfect day, Martin certainly wasn’t around, she did have errands to run…
The iron gate creaked as she slowly swung it open and then slammed it shut with a clang as the big spring pushed it back to latch. She moved slowly, careful not to look too long at any one thing, or in any one direction. She stepped off the pebbly surface up onto the wood cedar deck that bounded the north end of the pool, out of the slight breeze and into the direct sunshine. A flock of chairs languished on the deck, some older, retired men dozing in the midday sun or reading the Financial Times; others with dark sunglasses chatting amicably on an extended lunch hour. In the corner, back against the building, six or seven people were gathered. Hilton Sinclair turned as she walked over, the group following his gaze. He greeted her with a big smile and the wave of his arm.
“Liz. Come on over, let me get you a chair.” In one movement, he was out of his chair, dragging a chaise lounge into the circle for Liz.
“Glad you could make it, Liz, let me grab you a towel.” Hilton took about ten short steps to the towel rack while she stood there waiting. He returned with two oversized towels and tossed them down on her chair. The rest of the group never left their conversation but followed Hilton’s movements all the way. They were talking about some guy who had opened a new restaurant down in the village. Liz had seen two of the three women many times before but had never introduced herself. The rest of the group seemed vaguely familiar, but she really didn’t know any of them.
Finally, Hilton settled down in his chair and leaned back. “So, everybody, I think if you’ve been around the club you may already know her, but if you don’t, this is Liz Cantrell. Liz, this is Sheri, Michelle, Peggy, Ron and Rick. Everybody, say hi to Liz.”
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