Petrogypsies (6 page)

My feelings must have showed on my face, because she looked me in the eye and said, “I might have asked if I’d had to, though. You’re kinda cute.” I grinned foolishly. “A little bit clumsy, though,” she finished.

I couldn’t take that, even off her. “If I’m so clumsy, how come I landed on top?” I asked.

She took my arm and led me towards Sprocket’s front, where they were setting up to run pipe. “Maybe I wanted you on top,” she said softly. Her fingers pressed into the muscle of my biceps, making it get hard in response. Then she walked off to get with her crew to help them set up the pipe derrick.

* * *

We started in the afternoon and set surface casing through the night. I took turns between paying attention to Sprocket’s needs and helping with the pipe. I hadn’t known that Star was the
segundo
on the crew, which meant that she did most of the supervising and a lot of the actual work, while her crew chief—lady name of Sabrina—kicked back and chatted with Doc while she kept an eye on the overall operation. Seems Doc and Sabrina had known each other off and on for some years and were real good friends.

Sprocket laid his tongue down for the first twenty-foot joint of casing to be snapped shut behind his drill-head. Then the casing gypsies with the epoxy pots mixed up some and spread it along the seam that ran lengthwise down the casing joint. It was a quick, thermosetting resin that hardened up in just a few minutes while they hoisted the joint up vertical in the air and ran most of its length in the hole. The joint narrowed slightly a couple of feet before the end, then flared out again. The next length of pipe was hoisted up in the derrick and snapped over the first one’s nipple, epoxied, and let down in the hole itself. Then again. And again. We did that for almost eleven hours, putting a hundred and thirty joints of sixteen inch casing in the hole, averaging one every five minutes.

Sprocket hummed and grunted and danced in place while the crew played wild, high-energy music to keep us moving that casing at a good clip. The casing gypsies sang a clear, pure harmony while they yanked joints off the pipe rack and hoisted them twisting and spinning in the air, throwing capering shadows around us, then stabbed them on the joint sticking out of the hole. Somehow, whenever I looked at Star, she was looking at me. Eventually a billion bright night suns came out in that infinite high-plains sky.

I ain’t smart enough to really explain what it feels like. All I know is, it’s better than anything else I ever run into. You go out onto locations in places that God’s forgot about. You put up with boredom and hard weather and staying dirty and wet for days on end, and you do without sleep until the insides of your bones hurt.

And it’s worth it. No matter where you go, you got family, you got friends. And I got Sprocket. I get to be one of the gypsies that has the dangerous chore of tearing into the Earth, and, with heart and guts and skill, ripping from its dark hiding places the petroleum that powers an entire civilization.

* * *

That evening, Big Red and his crew pulled onto location and began to set up to cement when we got all the pipe in the hole. This was the same bunch that had done the cementing on the well on my Papa’s farm. They’d come to the field ahead of us, and Doc was glad to see them. He told me cement crews were all crazy people, and I should stay the hell away from them socially if I planned to keep out of jail. Earl the Pearl, the cementer on Big Red, seemed to select his crew on their ability to party twice as hard and sleep twice as much as the average human being. But Doc said there wasn’t nobody that could concrete like they could.

* * *

I was eating breakfast and watching Pearl release his top plug so Big Red could pump it down-hole when Star wandered over and hunkered down in front of the fire. She poured herself a cup of coffee. She’d gotten cleaned up and put on a shiny new green jumpsuit. The zipper was in the usual place.

“Been a long night, Henry Lee,” she said, flashing those glowing blue eyes at me over the rim of her cup. “You about ready to go to bed?”

I nearly choked on my biscuit. She stretched like a cat and went on as if she hadn’t noticed. “Myself, I ain’t all that sleepy. Razer tells me you ain’t spent much time around casing animals yet. Thought you might like a tour of Lady Jane.”

Actually, I’d seen about as much as I wanted to of the insides of the Casing Critters when they was drilling the well on my Papa’s farm, but it looked like Razer thought I needed more schooling on the subject. Who was I to argue?

So I said, “Sure,” gulped a last piece of ham down, and followed Star over to where Lady Jane stood. She looked a lot like Sprocket at first glance. I could understand how the fella at the filling station in town might have gotten confused. But if you looked careful, you could tell the difference. She had about twenty percent fewer legs, for instance, and her hide wasn’t strictly black like a Driller’s, but more of a deep chocolaty color.

Star scratched her a bit and talked to her, introducing me, then we went inside through her mouth. The differences inside were even more obvious. No drilling tongue, since she didn’t drill. What she did was eat a lot of everything she could get her teeth on, especially gravel. Star led me down the center of the hallway that ran her length.

“When Lady Jane eats, the material is digested through a series of stomachs, then separated into two distinct bladders that run along her sides.” She rubbed a toe along one of the two curbs that ran the length of Lady Jane just in front of the doors. “The bladders extrude processed material into these tubular sacs. She can produce four joints at a time on each side, for a total of eight joints of casing at a time, in two different sizes. Right now, for instance, she’s working on some eleven-and-three-quarter stuff we’ll be putting into a well up north of Notrees in a couple of days.”

To tell the truth, I’d been so fascinated by Sprocket when he was drilling on the farm that I really hadn’t found out that much about casing. “How can you control what size pipe she manufactures?”

“Same way you control Sprocket’s drilling. She recognizes certain tunes as signals for certain kinds of casing. And we talk to her. Like Sprocket, she understands about two hundred words.”

“Sounds pretty simple.”

She gave a shake of her head, making her long hair swirl. “Wrong. The casing has to meet a lot of specifications. The length, weight, and outer diameter of each joint have to be uniform, with a specified maximum drift, to fit in the hole properly. Likewise, with the inner diameter, for setting downhole tools inside. Depending on what quality of casing you’re producing, from F-25 up to V-150, you got to come up to American Petrogypsy Institute standards on collapse and burst pressures, elasticity, and tensile strength, not to mention resistance to chemicals encountered in the well, especially acids and bases. The casing itself is a complex, bonded multi-ply organometallic ceramic composite. Any impurities or inaccuracies in manufacture means it don’t come up to API and makes great drainpipe in some town’s sewer system.”

I was impressed. “You’re mighty serious about this, ain’t you?”

She smiled, and it was a different Star, not the flirty, mind-killing female I’d seen up to now. “I’m as serious about Lady Jane and casing as you are about Sprocket and drilling, Henry Lee.” Then the smile changed, and she was back to her other self.

She strolled down past a couple of more curtains made of Lady Jane’s flesh, coming to stop beside one. “I guess I fibbed a little, Henry Lee. Actually, I’m pretty tuckered out.” She pried open the curtain, to show a room not unlike those inside Sprocket. A large, downy bed covered half its space. Embroidered, colorful rugs hung on the walls and covered the floor, and a ladder was bolted into Lady Jane’s flesh, leading to a hole in the ceiling.

“You like my place?” She looked at me over her shoulder as she stepped in. I stood in the doorway. The temperature must have been going up quick. I felt like I was on fire. My tongue felt too thick and dry in my mouth to let me speak.

“I bet you’re tired, too.” She sat down on the bed. “Maybe not
too
tired, though?” She pulled the zipper all the way down on her jumpsuit and shrugged out of the top. It fell until it was stopped by the swell of her hips. Then she stood up and swayed toward me, lifting her arms to pull her hair back. “You think you can help me get this the rest of the way off, darling?”

It was like somebody else took control of me. Whoever he was, he was an idiot. “I gotta go, Star.”

She stopped a foot in front of me, amazed.

I looked at the floor. My mouth said more words without me willing them. “’Scuse me. I, uh, I’ll see you later on …” I stumbled back and the curtain slipped closed on her outraged, hurt expression.

When I could think again, I was outside. I saw Doc going toward the edge of the lease on the side toward where Uncle Foots was drilling. I figured he was going to do some visiting, and maybe it would be a good idea for me to get off location for awhile. Then I saw Razer and a couple of the other fellas running after him. Then I saw the look on Doc’s face, and my eyes swung to where he was going.

Tiny Small stood on the edge of the lease, with Uncle Foots’ crew behind him, shifting back and forth on their feet, looking uncomfortable. Tiny towered over Mr. Mooney, who stood just on his side of the property line laid out by surveyor’s stakes.

I was right behind Doc as he strode up beside Mr. Mooney.

“You know you’re not welcome here, Mr. Small,” Mr. Mooney was saying. “You step onto this lease and interfere with the drilling operation I’ve contracted for, and I swear I’ll have the Sheriff jail you for trespass and assault.”

“Suits the hell out of me,” Tiny said. He took a step, then looked at Doc. “Better yet, how about I invite your chicken-hearted pusher over to my side for a little, whatcha call it, Doc? A little dance?”

Doc growled and stepped forward. Mr. Mooney put a hand across Doc’s chest. “Godammit, Doc! That’s just what he wants! We’re already losing rig time!”

I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was right. Sprocket had stopped drilling and was watching us.

Doc looked at him. “Mr. Mooney, it won’t take me more than a few minutes to step over there and rip off his head and piss down his neck.”

“I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time, but as long as Sprocket’s on my location, you’re on my time. If you can’t live up to your contract, pull out of the hole and head on down the road. I don’t need to worry every day whether somebody’s gonna come along and distract you from taking care of business.”

“He’s right, Doc,” Razer said. “We’re here to make some hole. Everything else can wait.”

Tiny raised a hand and picked his nose and flicked it at Doc. “If you had any balls you’d already be over here, fuckhead.”

And it happened again like it had the last time I saw Doc face Tiny in the tent. Suddenly he changed from hot as a pistol to cold, cold, cold. His voice went soft and deep. “No hurry, Tiny. You be in camp when we finish producing this well. We’ll see who walks away and who gets carried away.” He turned his back on Tiny. “Okay, people. Break’s over. Time to get back to making hole.” He raised his voice. “That means you, too, Sprocket!” Sprocket made a wet, floppy spluttering sound around his tongue and went back to drilling and marching.

* * *

The fun part of making this well was over, for awhile. The weather turned mean—cold and windy and usually wet. We didn’t much party with the other crews for fear that Tiny might have us busted for trespassing or something. Just stayed on our lease and took care of Sprocket while he drilled.

We hit oil at around ninety-three-hundred feet. Mr. Mooney got medium excited. Had a straddle packer with some test tools run in the open hole. It was a marginally producible zone. Way too much sulfur in it, among other things. When they flow-tested, it came in okay for a while, then dropped off. Not much pressure, not much volume, not much quality. Not much worth messing with.

So we ran a string of thirteen-and-three-eighths pipe down and cemented over it. Star’s crew came out to run it, and she mostly ignored the hell out of me. While they were on location, I kept rehearsing a speech inside my head about how I was sorry and wanted to be her friend and would she give me another chance. Somehow, I didn’t ever get my nerve up enough to say it to her.

That evening, Razer wandered over to where I was off by myself on the edge of the location, staring into a campfire I’d lit. He sat down beside me.

“What’s the matter with you, Henry Lee? You been acting like somebody shot your dog.”

“Aw, I don’t know, Razer.”

“Uh-huh. You been getting a little insane over Star, ain’t you? I noticed y’all not talking to each other. What happened, you come on too hard when you made your run at her?”

“I wish that was it! I didn’t have a chance to make no moves, she was coming on to me so strong.”

“Well, hey, that ain’t nothing to be moping around about. That’s one fine-looking little baby-doll.”

“Except she’s all bent out of shape and won’t talk to me no more.” I felt more and more like an idiot as I told him what happened.

He was flabbergasted. “You mean this baby-doll asked you in for a visit— and you turned her down? You said, ‘No ma’am I don’t believe I want none of that fine stuff.’ You—” Words failed him. The idea of turning her down was so strange that he just couldn’t handle it.

“You don’t understand, Razer. It’s because I like her.”