Authors: Harry Bingham
‘Where would I get ice from?’
‘Freezing water then.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve speeded up the fan.’
‘Yah!’ Reynolds didn’t even condescend to answer that one. The air was ninety-eight degrees in the shade. You could send a small gale through the engine and not help it at all.
‘Then it’ll stop.’
‘It won’t.’
Behind them the derrick cast an increasing shadow on the dust. They were going to start drilling not half a mile from the spot Muhammad Ameri had first pointed out. The well was already christened Muhammad Ameri No. 1 in the American fashion, and Ameri himself had swept into camp eight days previously with forty mounted warriors to inspect the work and to remind Alan who had first brought him to the valley.
Meantime, there was plenty of work to do. Punching a well using the old-fashioned percussion method would be devilishly slow work, but slow didn’t matter, as long as they could manage steady.
The truck was only a little way beneath them now. Through the open cab window, Alan could see the sweating driver, dressed in loose Persian robes and a bristling growth of hair on his upper lip that (for once) put George Reynolds’ moustache to shame. A piece of melon rind lay discarded on the passenger seat. There was little more than a hundred yards to go now and the slope was easing. Reynolds had been right …
The melon rind. The image stuck in Alan’s mind.
The truck clawed its way over the lip of the hill and levelled out. The drill bit became horizontal and the ropes that held it began to slacken. Melon rind.
Reynolds chuckled. ‘I’m looking forward to that beer,’ he said.
But Alan didn’t hear him. He was running to the truck. The driver was getting out of the cab, amidst the cheers of his companions. Alan reached the truck and snatched open the hood.
The engine was hot, all right, but not boiling. A gigantic watermelon, split down the middle, had been jammed over the radiator. When Alan put his hand to the melon it sizzled and spat with the heat and even the outer rind was scorching to the touch. Reynolds had arrived next to Alan, panting in the sun.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘a cold beer will do me fine.’
The driller let the whisky hum its way down his throat.
‘You got yourself a sweet bottle there,’ he commented.
‘It’s the last one,’ said Tom. He was no longer running alcohol. Profits from the business had become large enough that competition between rival providers was being settled with fistfights and shootouts. Tom wanted no part of that – and besides, his only interest in whisky had been to get himself a start in oil.
‘Shame that. Drank some moonshine recently, pretty much turned me green.’
Tom made no reply. His campfire crackled and subsided. The night sky spread out a million stars, like a jeweller anxious to make a sale. Behind Tom, not one but four oil tanks lay groaning full of oil.
The driller reached for more whisky and continued his story. Tom listened with half an ear.
‘So, anyways, this guy Casey has gone down pretty near six thousand feet. The drill is running through a layer of crumbly brown shale, dry as a bone, shale like he ain’t never seen before. No money to continue on. Backers are refusing money, telling him to go to hell. Old Grandma Halstead, whose land he’s squatting on, she’s telling him to go to hell. Casey swears there’s oil, there.
Swears
it. Anyhow, he hears about a hole two miles north that’s hit oil. He runs along, asks to see their drilling log. Begs them. They tell him to go to hell. Round about this time, everybody’s telling Casey to go to hell. So he steals it. One night, he busts in, reads their drilling log: “5,700 feet, brown shale – unusual type, easily broken. 5,750 feet, brown shale – same. 5,780 feet, sticky brown shale, stringers of oil sand. 5,800 feet, oil sand … oil sand … oil sand.”
‘Well now, Casey reads this here log book and figures his drill bit is roundabouts a hundred feet above a field every bit as sweet as anything that John D. Rockefeller could dream of. So what does he do? Heck, what would anyone do? He sells the coat off of his back. He sells his watch. He pretty much sells the tongue out of his mouth. He gets together enough money to drill one more weekend. Sunday evening, there are gas bubbles coming up. Indications of oil. The riggers go crazy. Old Grandma Halstead’s bringing out chicken pie and moonshine whiskey like deliverance day has come early. By this time, everyone had always known there’d be oil there and no one’s telling Casey to go to hell no more. Ten feet more and they strike it big. Near enough two hundred barrels a day, with Okie crude up at near one dollar twenty the barrel.
‘That’s the only way to make money in this world, I reckon. Find yourself a drill and a patch of land. Go see what’s down there.’
The driller reached for the whisky bottle again. Tom rolled onto his side and threw another log on the fire.
‘Did you ever drill for yourself?’ he murmured.
‘Me? Sure. A coupla times. Never struck, though I came closer than a tightwad to his wallet.’
Tom nodded and swallowed some whisky himself. He’d hung around the oilfields long enough to know the pattern. Everyone had stories about people like old Casey So-and-so. The people telling the tales swore they were true. Maybe they even believed them. But if you asked them the magic question – ‘Did you ever drill for yourself?’ – the answer was always the same.
More than a half of the older oilers had sunk a wildcat well at some time in their lives. Every single one of them had missed a fortune by only a few hundred yards. ‘Neighbouring block turned out to be some of the richest acreage in West Texas.’ ‘The field came to an end, right there at the boundary fence. Far side gushed like the Niagara Falls. My side, drier’n a dead coyote.’ ‘Ran outa money, but if we had’ve gone on another two hunnert feet, would’ve smacked right into the Tannawassa sands, the richest oil deposits in that part o’ Californey.’ And so on and so on.
Tom’s liquor business had financed three of the oil tanks. A regular bank loan had brought in enough cash to buy a fourth tank, a six thousand barreler, with enough left over to let Tom buy as much oil as he needed.
As he’d expected, his first auction had been his worst. That first evening, the price had ended up at fourteen cents a barrel. Tom refused any further deals for twenty-four hours, then began buying again. The guys with surplus oil had thought about things overnight. Their maths looked simple. They could burn oil and get nothing. Or they could sell the oil to Tom Calloway and get something for it, no matter how miserable the something. The second auction had ended down at eleven cents. The third down at six and a half.
Right now, Tom had around fifteen thousand barrels of oil, purchased at an average price of slightly more than ten cents. He slept up on the hills amongst his tanks, protecting his precious oil against thieves or vandals. He missed seeing Rebecca – missed her with an odd intensity at times – but aside from that, he was happy.
‘Pipeline will be here soon,’ said the driller.
‘Three weeks, or so they say.’
‘What’ll you do when it comes?’
‘Sell, of course.’
‘You should get plenty. Maybe one dollar the barrel … Sheez!’
‘Maybe.’
‘What you gonna do when you sell out?’ said the driller. ‘There’s some land over Stone Creek way looks pretty rich to me. Wouldn’t mind making hole over there, see what there was.’
‘Stone Creek, huh?’ said Tom, not exactly excited by the tip, but never one to pass up the possibility of good information.
‘Right. Listen.’ The driller rolled closer to Tom, speaking in a whisper in case the mice and the rabbits and the owls and the prairie grass would overhear him and broadcast the news to every oilman west of Pennsylvania. ‘Got a friend’s been over there. Prospecting. On the quiet. He ain’t seen nothing, but he can smell it. Got the nose for it, see. We’re just looking around now for the money to start drilling. Wouldn’t let you in on it, ’cept I can tell you’re a real oilman, an’ all.’
Tom’s interest, small to begin with, faded away to nothing. He yawned and lay down. His coat was rolled up to make a pillow. Beneath the coat there was a flat packet that rustled as Tom moved his head.
‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘It’s all about the smell, you see. Some folks can smell it, other folks can’t. It’s simple as that.’
‘I guess,’ said Tom, not keen to argue.
But it was horseshit. Obvious horseshit.
Oil that lay ten feet underground couldn’t be smelled, never mind oil five thousand feet down. For all the stories about Casey So-and-So and all the rest of them, Tom had never met anyone who had drilled and made money. There was a reason why the big guys stayed big and the small guys stayed small.
Information.
Simple as that.
Information about where oil was likeliest to be found. Information based on geology and seismology and clever men making complex calculations. Information about available land and prices and refinery capacities. And that was why Tom listened to the driller, but didn’t get excited. That was why he spent his days thinking out his next move.
And that was why he had a flat packet underneath his pillow that rustled when he moved.
The Persian summer was fading into autumn, but they were in the midst of a mini heatwave, which brought back all their fiercest memories of summer. Mules and horses slept lazily in the shade. Those men who were not immediately required to work loafed under cotton awnings thrown up by the ever-resourceful tribesmen. The timber derrick stood idle, and the drilling crew (three Poles who had worked in America, two Russians and a gifted young Persian) bickered in four languages over a game of cards. The sun hammered down.
In one corner of the drilling site, the heat intensified into something almost solid. Even twenty feet away there was a wall of heat. Beyond that point, every step forwards carried you to a whole new contour of temperature. It was almost literally like stepping into a roasting oven.
Alan entered the furnace.
At the rear of the miniature forge, a Persian boy worked the bellows with his feet. Every minute or so, he dipped a wooden ladle into a pail of water that sat beside him and poured it over his head. By the end of the minute his hair had dried off and was ready for another drenching.
At the front of the forge, the heat was a horizontal punch that never lost its force. Reynolds laboured away over a metal tube that had become badly kinked. Reynolds’ face was never less than ruddy, but right now it would out-crimson a tomato, outblaze a field of beetroot. All along his well-waxed moustache, globules of sweat hung like beads on a party frock. The shirt was glued to his back.
‘My turn,’ said Alan.
‘Almost done, laddie.’
The metal tube was a key component in the Russian-made boiler. The boiler supplied power to the rig. No tube, no boiler. No boiler, no drilling. No drilling, no oil. This was the boiler’s seventh breakdown inside two months.
Reynolds finished his work of banging the incandescent metal into shape. Alan held the tongs and allowed Reynolds to work the metal with both hands. Eventually it was done. Alan threw the tube sizzling into a bucket of cold water, and both men ran from the heat and doused themselves in the river. The Persian boy working the bellows emptied the rest of the bucket over his head and ran to get the quid of tobacco that he’d been promised.
Reynolds drank a small ocean of tea, as Alan took the tube between his feet. He began work with a metal file to get the tube to an exact fit. It was a nightmarish way of working, fabricating sophisticated parts with a crude forge and a collection of metal files, yet the alternatives were limited. Basic metalwork could be done in Karachi: a mere fifteen hundred miles away. But for more complex operations, there was nothing for it but to telegraph the specifications to England and have the parts built there and shipped out.
Reynolds watched Alan at work.
‘Half a day, laddie, and we’ll have the boiler back in action.’
‘For another week.’
‘Aye, well, I’ll be satisfied with another week’s progress.’
Alan half-laughed. Reynolds’ stubborn determination to sink the well was second to none. Setbacks, disappointments, breakdowns and calamities were all in the day’s work to him.
‘Yes,’ said Alan, ‘me too. As long as we get some more fuel.’
Further away from the rig, there was a stir in the camp. The first whoops and yells of greeting went up. A couple of rifle shots were fired wildly into the air.
‘That’ll be the truck with the fuel now,’ said Reynolds happily. ‘We start drilling again tomorrow.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
The supply of fuel they’d had for the boiler – a mixture of coal, coke and wood – had all gone into feeding the furnace. They now had a nearly functioning boiler but no fuel to fire it. From the rocky valley walls, the sound of a truck motor began to echo. These days, the road up to the drilling site had been improved and a large supply of ‘patent Reynolds radiator coolers’ – watermelons, in other words – now lay in a stream at the base of the slope. It was eight weeks now since they’d last had a truck fail on the final slope, and some of the wilder Persians liked to run truck races down into the valley and back, complete with mounted escorts, random gunfire, and huge forfeits to be paid by the losers.