Michener, James A. (182 page)

The wedding was an emotional affair, for when a space was cleared beneath one of the bandstands, Reverend Fassbender put an end to the frivolity and began to act as if he were in a cathedral, which in a sense he was, for this honky-tonk was where the young working people of Houston's refineries worshipped, and when two bands struck up Mendelssohn's 'Wedding March' Maggie Morrison and other women in the audience began to sniffle.

Karleen, in her tight jeans, and Roy Bub, in his tight collar, the only one he had worn in a year, formed a pair of authentic Crocket-teers, and cheers broke out as they took their place before the minister, who quickly halted that nonsense: 'Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here in the presence of God . . .' Maggie whispered to Beth: 'Jesus attended a wedding like this at that big honky-tonk in Cana.'

When the ceremony ended, and an honor guard of cowboys fired salutes in the parking lot, Roy Bub's hunting partners watched with approval as the white pickup was delivered at the i door to serve as the honeymoon car. While the wedding was under way it had been decorated with leagues of streaming toilet paper, Mexican decorations, and a broom lashed to the cab. But what; Maggie liked best, as the pickup drove off, was the new sign Roy

Bub had added to his tailgate, for its emotion and the design of the heart seemed appropriate to this night:

IF YOU ^P NEW YORK GO TO HELL HOME

When the Rusk v. Rusk divorce proceedings revealed just how much money Ransom Rusk had, a score of beautiful women, and Texas had far more than its share, began plotting as to how each might become the next Mrs. Rusk, but the austere man directed most of his attention to multiplying by big factors the wealth he already had. He did not become a recluse, but his divorce did make him gun-shy, so he focused on the main problem, never voicing it publicly or even to himself. Intuitively he realized that if he retained, after paying off Fleurette, nearly $50,000,000, there was no reason why he could not run that figure up to $500,-000,000, which would move him into the big-rich category.

His first decision in pursuit of this goal was to shift his operations from the pleasant little town of Larkin, population 3,934, and into the heart of Fort Worth, population 393,476. He chose Fort Worth rather than Dallas because the former city was a Western town, with its focus on ranching, oil and fearless speculation in both, while Dallas was more a Texas version of New York or Boston, with huge financial and real estate operations but little touch with the older traditions that had made Texas great. In brief, an oil wildcatter and a Longhorn man like Ransom Rusk felt at home in Fort Worth; he did not in Dallas: 'Those barracuda are too sharp for me. I feel safer paddling around with the minnows.'

In Fort Worth he associated himself with many others who were risking ventures in oil, and especially the servicing of the oil industry. With his strong basic knowledge of how petroleum was found and delivered to the market, he was an asset to the men who financed those operations, and before long he was in the middle of that exciting game. The joy his father had found in Texas high school football he found in Texas big-time finance.

He was major partner in a company which built and sold drilling rigs; the wooden one that had spudded in Rusk #3 back in 1923 had cost $19,000; the ones he now built were well over a million each. He had also bought into a mud concern, that clever process whereby a viscous liquid, whose properties were modified according to the depth and character of the hole, was pumped into a hole while it was being drilled to correct faults and ensure production if oil was present. But mostly he toured Texas, like a hound dog chasing possums, looking for promising land that could be leased,

and this took him to the Austin Chalk, the petroliferous formation around Victoria, where he made a killing, and to the Spraberry Field, where he bought up seventy leases which produced dust and seven which were bonanzas.

At the end of one of the most aggressive campaigns in recent oil history, the value of Rusk's holdings had tripled, and he felt with some justification that 'I'm really just at the beginning. What 1 need now is to find that big new field.'

He was in this pattern of thought when into his modest Fort Worth office came an old man whose vision had never faded but whose capacity to capitalize upon it had. The years since 1923 had not been kind to Dewey Kimbro, now a seedy seventy-one with no front teeth and very little of the millions he had made on the Larkin Field. When he stood before the son of his former partner, he was a small, wizened man who had been married three times, each with increasing disaster: 'Mr. Rusk, my job is to find oil. I've found three of the good fields, you know that. I want you to grubstake me, because I have my eye on a real possibility north of Fort Stockton.'

'Wouldn't that put you in the Permian Basin?'

'On the edge, yes.'

'But everyone knows the good fields in the Permian have been developed.'

The men were speaking of one of the major oil fields in the world, a late discovery that had occurred in the middle of a vast, arid flatland of which it was once said: 'Any living thing in this godforsaken land has thorns, or fangs, or stingers, or claws, and that includes the human beings.' It was a land of cactus, scorpions, mesquite and rattlesnakes. Some intrepid heroes had tried running cattle on it; in a cynical deal the University of Texas had been given vast amounts of the barren land instead of real money, and an occasional oil well had been tried, with more dust at two thousand feet than at the surface.

Then, on 28 May 1923, when the latest dry well had sunk beyond three thousand feet, workers were eating breakfast when they heard a monstrous rumble and felt the ground shake. Down in the depths of the earth, an accumulation of oil under intense pressure broke through the thin rock which had kept it imprisoned for 230,000,000 years and roared up through the well casing, exploding hundreds of feet into the air. Santa Rita # 1 had come in, signaling a vast subterranean lake of oil in the Permian Basin. The first wells were on university lands, and hundreds of the subsequent wells would be too, providing that school with a potential revenue exceeding that of any other university in the world.

Later, when the Yates Field came in with its Permian oil, one well produced nearly three thousand barrels an hour from a depth of only eleven hundred and fifty feet: 'Drilling in the Yates, you just stick a pole in the ground and jump back.'

With its incredible millions from the Permian, the university would leverage itself into becoming a first-class school, and a thousand dry-soil farmers would find themselves to be millionaires, with a ranch in the country—the old homestead dotted with oil rigs— and a bright new home in Midland, identified by the Census Bureau as 'the wealthiest town per capita in the States,' with more Rolls-Royces than in New York.

But by 1969 those days of explosive wealth were over; the Permian had died down to a respectable field that still produced more oil than most, but did not throw up those soaring gushers whose free-flowing oil had once darkened the sky. Midland now served as husbandman to wells already in operation and was no longer in the exciting business of drilling new ones. As Ransom Rusk told his father's favorite wildcatter: 'Dewey, the Permian Basin is a discovered field.'

'Don't you believe it, Mr. Rusk. Petroleum products come in at a dozen different levels. Maybe the easy oil is finished, but how about the deep gas?'

'Dewey, stands to reason, if there was oil or gas out there, the big boys would have found it.'

'No, Mr. Rusk,' Dewey pleaded, still standing, for Ransom had not invited him to sit and he knew he must not appear presumptuous. 'Big boys only find what little boys like me take them to. I know where there's oil, but I need your money to buy the leases and sink a well. This time it'll be a deep well.'

'Dewey, you've been peddling that story across Texas. What I will do, because you were a good partner to my father, here's four hundred dollars. Get yourself some teeth.'

'I was going to do that, Mr. Rusk, but what I really need is your support on this new prospect.'

He was given no money beyond the four hundred dollars, which he did not use for teeth; he spent it traveling to other oil centers in search of funds which would enable him to pursue his latest dream, and in the meantime Ransom was visited by someone who wanted a contribution for a much different enterprise. It was Mr. Kramer, the old-time oilman who was now interested only in wind velocities and armadillos.

'Mr. Rusk, to put it bluntly, I'm asking you for four thousand dollars to trap armadillos and deliver them to this leprosy institute in Louisiana.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You may not know it, few people do, but the armadillo seems to be the only living thing besides man that can contract leprosy. Their low body temperature, twenty-nine point seven to thirty-five degrees Celsius, encourages the bacillus.'

'You mean those critters in my front lawn . . .'

'Don't get excited. It's not transferable to humans, the kind they develop. But it is the only way that our scientists and medical people can experiment on what causes and cures this dreaded disease.'

'Of course you can have the money, but you mean that our little bulldozers have some utility in the world 7 '

'That's just what 1 mean. You see, with nature, you can never tell. The armadillo has been preserved through these millions of years, so we must suppose that it can host a particular disease which has also existed for millions of years.'

'Now wait a minute, I don't want you trapping Lady Macbeth and her Four Witches.'

'Make that eight witches. She just had four more pups, all female again.'

'Where do the males come from?'

it balances out. Don't ask me how.'

It was a hundred miles from Fort Worth to Larkin, but with Rusk driving, it would require only an hour and twenty minutes, so the men decided to dash out to inspect the armadillo problem, and as they sped along the broad and well-engineered roads Ransom asked Mr. Kramer what he thought of Dewey Kimbro, who had haunted the oil fields during the period that Kramer had worked them.

'Standard Texan. Always going to hit it big. Wastes his money on women. You'll have to bury him some day, two hundred dollars for the funeral, because he'll wind up without a cent.'

'He brought in a lot of wells.'

'You're not thinking of bankrolling him, are you?'

'Most of the big finds in Texas, even the real gushers, have been found by.crazy geologists like Dewey. He says he knows something . . .'

'I'll admit this, Mr. Rusk. Men like me, we work the fields, it's a living. We get paid well, we save our money, we retire to a decent life. A man like Dewey, he never retires. Four days before he dies, not a cent to his name, he'll be promoting the next well. I was an oil worker. He's an oil dreamer.'

In Larkin, after Rusk noticed with some satisfaction that Lady Macbeth and her eight helpers had by now pretty well chopped

the onetime bowling lawn to shreds, he asked: 'Now, where do you propose to trap these armadillos for the hospital in Louisiana?' Kramer took him a few hundred yards to the banks of Bear Creek where a family of about fifty of the armored animals centered and to a spot farther along the creek where another settlement of about forty maintained its headquarters: 'They like moist ground. Two things that can kill the armadillo, very cold winters and a prolonged drought.'

'Do they need so much water?'

'Like camels, they can exist on practically none, but when the sun bakes the earth during a drought, they can't dig easily. And that means they can't eat.'

The part of any visit to Mr. Kramer's place that Rusk liked best came when he was allowed to play with the three tame creatures that Kramer still kept in his kitchen and out in the yard, and it was difficult for Ransom to explain why he found so much pleasure in them: They aren't cuddly, and they aren't very responsive, but they are endlessly fascinating.'

'I think you like them because of the oil derricks on their back.'

'Now that makes sense.' But what really pleased him was the way they rousted about like oil-field workers, bruising and brawling, knocking one another over, then scampering like a team to the latest noise or the newest adventure. They were social animals, accustomed to working together, and when holes were to be dug, they were formidable.

'It just occurred to me, Kramer. If we could train those little devils, we could dig oil wells in half the time.' The armadillos seemed to sense that Rusk was their friend, for when he sat in a chair they enjoyed romping with his feet, or sitting in his lap. They had no teeth that could bite a person, and when at ease, kept their eighteen formidable, lancelike toes under control.

But in the long run, it was the extraordinary beauty of their armor and the ever-present sense that these were creatures from a most distant past that allured. Sometimes Rusk would sit with 3ne in his hands, staring at its preposterous face—all nose, beady eyes that could barely see—and he would ask Kramer: in what bog did this one hide for twenty million years?'

He provided the funds for leprosy research, but was pleased when his gardener informed him that more than twenty armadillos now resided in the Rusk fields. None of them were tame, but they made a noble procession when they set out at dusk to excavate >onie neighbor's lawn.

*

When he returned to Fort Worth he found Dewey Kim-bro, still with no teeth, perched outside his office, talking excitedly with his secretary. As soon as the old wildcatter spotted him, he jumped up, took his arm, and accompanied him into the inner office: 'Mr. Rusk, I don't want to talk if or how or even how much. Just when.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've spotted a field you have to put under lease. And then you have to pay for the exploration well.'

'Now look, Kimbro . . .'

'No, you look. Where do you suppose you got the money you now have? They say in the papers more than a hundred and fifty million. Because I found a field for your daddy. I'm an oilman, Mr. Rusk. You owe me one last shot, because I know where oil can be found.'