Kanata (46 page)

The first maps of the country weren't of the land but of the sea: Portuguese maps of the Grand Banks that showed where the cod were. The land was barren, distant, useless; the water filled with riches. Now it was the land that was lucrative. Geologic maps extending from Alberta down to Texas showed synclines and anticlines, fluid permeability and seismic markings, the bleak wizardry of science in search of buried oil.

The smell of diesel hung in a breeze that carried black clouds east and dispersed them gently over the rape crop. Engines droned in the dark. A few shapes moved in the field, antelope perhaps. From the drilling floor, Michael could see
another derrick to the west, its lights perpendicular to the flat dark plain. Oil was an inevitability. You threw the slips into the hole, rammed the tongs into place, and they snapped tight and twisted the drill pipe apart. A new pipe stabbed in and tightened. Pull the slips and drill another thirty feet through the stubborn D-3 formation. Oil was the western subtext, waiting to erupt.

The war had taken the young, and Michael worked with men who were older than he was. He worked here and there. With a threshing crew that had come up from Nebraska, following the harvest to Cartwright, north of the Canadian border. He had worked as a ranch hand down near Pincher Creek. Briefly, he had lived in Toronto, framing houses with tireless Italians who mourned their homeland and cursed the bland food. He walked the ravines in autumn under the cover of fiery maples. There were deer and he found evidence of coyotes though never saw one. He read constantly, finding solace and companionship in books. His mother used to tell them stories and read to them, and Michael wondered if the white books had been for him and the native tales for Stanford.

She was alone now. Dunstan was gone. Michael was playing chess with him one evening, waiting on another of his sclerotic defensive moves, when the old man tipped over onto the floor, felled by a stroke. He survived for another five months, but he had been eaten by the melancholia that first set in when his son died in the war. Then his ranch gave out. Michael suspected that it was grief that finally consumed him. He settled Dunstan's affairs, and for a few years ran some cattle on the land left to his mother, but it was too small to work in country where you needed ten acres a head, and they sold the property to a neighbouring rancher.

It was March and Michael couldn't taste spring. His hands were cold, the wet gloves of no use. They made a connection on the drilling floor, then Abe Babiak, the driller, went into the doghouse. Michael and the other roughneck, Ennis Cowley, joined him. It was the middle of the graveyard shift, and Isaacs, the derrickman, hadn't come down from the stick, not even for lunch.

“What's with Isaacs?” Ennis asked. “He's like a treed raccoon up there. Why don't he come down? He's smoking over the wellhead too. Blow us to kingdom come.”

Michael had noticed that Isaacs was out of sorts. He might have been drinking. A career oil worker in his sixties, worn out.

Babiak lit a cigarette and blew the smoke upward. It hit the low ceiling and curled back into the small space. He had a hunched muscular frame and the face of an ogre, his thick nose broken by the spinning chain years ago. There was one naked bulb in the doghouse that threw a deathly light. Outside it was black.

“He's still stunned as a heifer,” Babiak said. “You didn't hear. Jesus. Long Change, Isaacs heads home like usual. He's got a farm up near Rimby, don't know what the fuck you can grow up there but. Works three weeks, then drives up spends the afternoon in the Rimby bar, most of the evening. Decides to go home, see if he can talk the old lady into sawing off a piece of tail. Opens his door at midnight, what does he find? Doris lit out. And not just lit out. Christ listen to this. She takes every stick of furniture. Takes the goddamn fixtures. Curtain rods, door knobs, carpets, fridge, stove. House as empty as a whore's heart. His clothes in a pile on the floor.”

Ennis thought about this for a moment. “I guess she was trying to tell him something,” he said.

“You got that part right,” Babiak said. “Took the car and the trailer too. Not even a note.”

“How long were those two married?” Ennis asked.

“Too long, apparently,” Babiak said.

They stood in the doghouse warming themselves and then went down to check the blowout preventer under the drilling floor. There were problems with the hole but the toolpush said orders were to drill dry and that was that. Sitting on top of all that gas with no circulation mud. Babiak had been against it. “If you had half a fucking brain you wouldn't be drilling dry going into the D-3 formation.”

They were crouched in the half-darkness when they heard it. A guttural groan, less a noise than a feeling that came up through their boots. A burp of mud spilled over the drilling nipple and they all froze. “Get out,” Babiak said, urgently and quietly, almost to himself. They scrambled out from under the drilling platform. Michael's hard hat banged off a pipe and he started to sprint west in his heavy rig boots, running through a foot of snow. The noise was like being inside an airplane engine. The well was blowing in, all that oil and gas sitting at two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure spewing out. The earth giving up its dirty secret. Fifteen feet in front of him one of the rotary table master bushings landed in the snow, three hundred pounds of steel suddenly settled deep in the snow like a bomb. Pieces of shale rained down as shrapnel. Michael ran to the boilers and shut them off. The air was gaseous. The fear of fire was in all of them. The very air could burn. They scrambled back up to the floor, got the string off the bottom, lifted it as high as they could, chained down, and took cover. The air was a roar, oil blowing southeast, covering the snow. Michael ran to the toolpush's trailer at the north end of the lease and
found Isaacs lying in the black snow, covered in oil. He looked like a newborn seal. His neck was broken. He hadn't tied himself off and was taken with the first gush. Standing on the boards a hundred feet up, smoking a Belvedere, looking at the empty darkness and thinking of Doris and then the well blew.

Michael opened the trailer door and there was a woman standing there in a man's cowboy shirt. She had pale skinny legs that were lightly veined with blue. There were circles under her eyes.

“Where's he at?” Michael said.

“I woke up when I heard the noise,” the woman said. She was cradling herself in the cold. The trailer smelled like kerosene.

“Well blew in,” Michael said.

“It might take more than that to wake him,” the woman said. There was an empty bottle of rye on the kitchen counter.

Michael walked past the girl into the bedroom at the back and shook the push until he opened his eyes, which were confused and then hot with anger. “Well's blown in,” Michael said.

They waited until first light before going back up the steel stairs to the doghouse. Sand was blowing out and the air was gritty and wet. There were trucks and lights all over the lease now. The company men had arrived.

Inside the doghouse, Babiak looked through the cloudy circle of window out to the drilling floor and said, “I imagine we'll see some Chinamen come out of that hole soon.”

The pipe had broken off in the standpipe, the threads stuck in there, and Michael put on the extra derrickman harness and crawled across the drilling floor with a brass
diamond-point chisel and a hammer. Cement trucks were coming up the lease road. They had to regain circulation but they needed that connection to the standpipe, and it wasn't possible with a piece of pipe broken. Babiak and Cowley were holding on to the rope that was tied to the harness, ready to pull Michael back. In case there was trouble, Cowley said without irony. How could there be more trouble? The biggest blow-in on the continent. Michael slid around on the slick floor and tore his knee on a snag in the steel. He managed to get the chisel in place, crouching awkwardly, and began to tap. He wondered when the whole thing would suddenly flare into blue flame. Crouched there he could see a newspaperman picking his way through the oily snow, holding a pail over his head. He got a piece out and worked at the remains, reaching in with his hand. It was still too stiff to move and he chiselled some more, loosening the last pieces and rotating them out with his bare hand that was beginning to freeze. He crawled back to the doghouse. Below them Isaacs was laid out on the bed of a company truck, still covered in oil.

A
tlantic No. 3 blew wild for six months, a million barrels of oil covering wheat fields three miles away. Newspapermen came from Europe and Texas and Toronto to witness its unceasing anger. Newsreels played all over the world. Clips were shown before every movie at the Palace Theatre in Calgary and got a cheer each time, the celluloid confirming that they were part of history. Locals came out to watch the blow-in like it was television.

Men came out to the well site from Texas and Calgary and Oklahoma, murmuring like shamans. There were men
who would run anything down the hole: oats, diesel, sawdust, Ping-Pong balls. They flared some of the gas, but it kept blowing. They tried getting the Hosmer button over the hole and latching it tight but the steel lid flew away like a postcard in a hurricane.

There were few thoughts of waste. It was a celebration. With the big strike at Leduc the year before, oil had filled the imagination of the province. After digging 133 dry holes, Imperial Oil finally hit big and Calgary was drunk with possibility. Atlantic No. 3 was a baptism.

M
ichael worked as derrickman for a Commonwealth rig through the summer, coaxing the drill pipe toward him with a rope, struggling with the stand, staring ninety feet down to the drilling floor, his harness tied to the rail. You could see from up there and he liked that expanse. To the west the mountains appeared as jagged teeth, and to the east the receding fields curved into the horizon.

The stick wasn't for everyone. Heights were a problem, even for some of those who said they weren't. Michael had seen men climb the ladder—like scaling a ten-storey building—and they started out fast and then slowed and sometimes came to a dead stop, and someone would have to go up there and talk them down. Others could manage the climb but once they were up there, it was a new kind of vertigo. You stared east into a thousand miles of flat land. You had to tie the harness to the railing and then, trusting that double clove hitch, lean out over the drilling floor. Babiak told him that on Big Indian No. 3 he was working motors and the derrickman fell to the steel floor like a splayed cat. Not as much blood as you'd think but everything
inside him was jelly. Even at his age, Michael floated up the ladder, not using the safety harness unless the toolpush was around. He felt liberated by the climb. Ascension. Wasn't everything based on it? In life, in death? He left his burdens on the ground.

At dawn the sun broke through the blurred line of grey clouds that hovered at the horizon, and Michael could see two antelope springing through the fields. The ordered lines of the land. The surveyors had laid it out in grids, each section defined by gravel roads, the land claimed by immigrants and handed down, each farm filled with death and hardship and the renewed promise of spring.

Michael stayed up in the derrick and watched the sun rise until shift change. In the change room, Babiak and Ennis Cowley were already stripping off their coveralls, putting them in bags to take home and wash. There was a new roughneck, Curtis, a skittish, pale nineteen-year-old with a homemade tattoo on his forearm that read Trouble. He was six feet tall and maybe 165 pounds.

“What you got planned for tonight, Trouble?” Michael asked him.

“I'll have some fun,” he said, as if Michael might doubt it. “You wanna believe I'll have fun.”

They had been paid the day before. Michael looked at Curtis, with his tentative pugnacity and hand-tooled boots, the kind of boy who cashed his cheque and asked the teller for fifty-dollar bills, and carried it all in his pocket. He'd want to pull a fifty out in the King Eddie and buy a round, let the waitress know he was serious business.

The day driller, Washburn, opened the door to the change shack.

“Babyduck, where'd you hide that log?”

“Same place I always hide it,” Babiak told him. “In the desk.”

“Well I didn't see it there.” Washburn stood silhouetted in the doorway, the day bright behind him.

“Maybe take your head out of your ass.”

Washburn walked away, leaving the door open. “Christ,” Babiak said. “You move his plate over six inches the son of a bitch would starve to death.” He pulled on his cowboy shirt and snapped the pearl buttons shut.

Michael grabbed his work clothes and walked out to his car and drove back to the hotel. The end of the graveyard shift brought the greatest relief. The sun coming up, the day beginning. Michael felt optimistic. It was the last week of August and cool in the mornings, summer's power nearly gone.

He showered, put on a clean shirt and new suede cowboy boots, and ate a big breakfast at the Royal Café, then went back to his room and slept for nine hours. He woke up at seven, and went back to the Royal for a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, then walked downtown. The town was warming to Saturday night, people on the streets with expectant faces and starched clothes. He saw Babiak standing in front of the King Eddie, waving him over. Babiak's hair was slicked down and his pitted face was freshly shaved and Michael could smell aftershave from three yards away. Babiak was wearing a black and beige cowboy shirt with diamond-shaped buttons and there was a crease ironed into his jeans. He had a wife, apparently, though no one had ever seen her. His daughter had run away, Michael heard. Babiak never spoke a word about his family.

“I'll buy you a beer, Mountain Horse,” he said. Inside it was smoky and smelled of stale beer. A country band was
on stage struggling through Eddy Arnold's “Texarkana Baby,” the lambent eastern notes of the pedal steel curving in the air.