The Moth (34 page)

“O.K., let the community put it out.”

“Hasn’t the community responsibility, with regard to the fire department and all, been explained to you?”

“Why don’t they put the fire out?”

“They’ve tried. They’ve tried everything they have the legal right to try. They’ve tried foam, and they’ve tried fog. They’ve done what they can. The rest is up to you.”

“You mean, where fifty firemen flopped, I can go out there and tell it to stop and it’ll stop? Say, I’m good, ain’t I?”

“Dillon, you’ve got to shoot that hole!”

“Why don’t
you
shoot it?”

“I’ve told you, stop trifling! You—”

“Wait a minute,
wait a minute,
WAIT A MINUTE
!”

It was one of the guys that had just come in, and he got up and stared at White, who called him Mr. Mace and asked him what was on his mind. “Listen, Mr. White, I’ve been sitting here, paying attention to what’s been said, and I’d like to ask that question too: Why
don’t
you shoot it?”

“What are you trying to insinuate, Mr. Mace?”

“I’m not insinuating, I just want to know.”

“... Mr. Mace, my bank is not in the oil business, or in the business of putting out fires. We’re in the business of discounting paper on proper security, and whether you believe it or not, our only interest in this is getting our security, which is the property that has been pledged for these various loans, back on its feet again, so it’s good instead of bad!”

“Yeah, but just the same, the longer this goes on, the more operators get foreclosed out and the more property the bank acquires. And by New Year’s Day—”

“I resent that!”

White was like some lion as he got up and walked around the table. And sore as I was, and sick as I was, I believed him. I didn’t believe the bank wanted a bunch of properties that had been ruined, or was up to any tricks, but all of a sudden four or five of them, the small operators, were on Mace’s side, pretty excited. Pretty soon Mace turned to me. “Did you mean that, Dillon? That you’d let somebody else shoot it?”

“You want me to cross my heart?”

“You understand what this is? If that well is shot, that could wreck it. That could be the end of it, and that’s why the fire department can go just so far and no farther. You know about that?”

“What good’s the well doing me now?”

“And you’ll let
us
shoot it?”

“Brother, I’ll kiss you for it!”

She was pretty sulky about it, specially at the idea of how much she owed, what the well had cost her, and all the rest of it, as it lined up from the point of view of the future. But she didn’t argue about it, or act like there was anything else to do, until I happened to remember Rohrer, and his line of chatter about it being a wonderful time to buy a refinery. I told her about it as something funny, but she began staring at me, where I was back in my hospital bed again, and hardly said anything when the nurse came in with my dinner. She closed the window, to shut out the roar, and put the screen up, to cut off the glare, then went back to the chair that had been put facing the bed, and watched me eat. Then she poured my coffee and when I was done, took the tray out in the hall. Then she came back and sat there some more and stared at me some more. Somewhere around seven she said: “We are in the pig’s eye going to let them shoot it.”

“What?”

“Something funny goes on here.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“White, and what Mace was talking about.”

“There’s a well blowing off, if that’s funny.”

“And money’s being made out of it.”

“Listen, White’s a banker.”

“He’s a banker, and he’s not in the oil business, and he likes to flirt with me in a quiet way, and he’s a swell guy, and I like him. Just the same, without his wanting it that way, or trying to work things around that way, money’s about to be made out of that gasser of ours. Big money. Right on the dot, as soon as the notes say he’s got to, he’s foreclosing, and that means if that well keeps burning long enough, he’ll own the whole hill, and—oh no, Mr. Dillon, we’re not letting them shoot
that
well. Not till we’re cut in. Not till—”

“I’m sorry, I’ve given my word.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m sorry, just an employee. A former employee as of now. You want to block them off, you get somebody else to do it. So far as I’m concerned—”

“Jack.”

“... What?”

“Quit kidding me.”

“You think I love you too much to walk out?”

“No. You don’t love me at all, though maybe I can make you if we ever get out of the woods with this. But that damned machinist’s soul won’t walk out, no matter what I do about it. Jack, listen. If they shoot it we’re sunk. We’ve got no well, all we’ve got is the six old ones, and what we owe will swallow up what they pump for the next hundred years. Except it’ll more than swallow them up, and that means we’re just like the rest, we’re foreclosed. Can’t you see how it works? If the well goes on, White gets those other places all around, and probably the refinery. If it’s shot, he gets us, really the best property of all, because while I’ve only got six good wells, I’ve got a whole acre of land, and can get permits for more wells, which are the main thing. But—if White wants us, he’s got to make a deal. Rohrer was right, to that extent. It’s a wonderful time to buy a refinery—or steal one.

“Think White’ll buy you one?”

“He might, when I get through with him.”

“Doing what, for instance?”

“You’ll see.”

If my face hadn’t been red from the fire, and what White had to say to me, it would have been the color of steamed lobster after listening to that judge. He gave her the temporary injunction that she asked, of twenty-four hours, sight unseen. Then next day he heard the case, with Mace on deck as defendant, and ten other operators that were going to chip in and pay the cost of what they were going to do, and about a hundred newspaper reporters, photographers, townspeople, and God knows who-all. I hated it with everything there was in me. I hated it I had promised Mace, and had to renege, I hated it the fire was still going on, I hated it that we had caused a community catastrophe, and were trying to use it for our own gain. But I couldn’t turn against her, and I had to go on the stand and say that while I had given Mace a tentative promise, I’d gone into the matter further and come to the conclusion that our interest was seriously involved if we destroyed the well; that experience had shown that as soon as the pressure eased, with the escape of gas, the fire could easily be controlled; that a little time was the main factor, and that we were entitled to it; that all danger to surrounding property had been abated by the fire department; that no emergency any longer existed. I stepped down, and there were arguments by lawyers, especially by this young guy Horlacher that she had called up that night, and had a huddle with at her house, without me being present at all. After a while the judge took off his glasses, polished them with his handkerchief, then began swinging them back and forth by one earpiece, while he thought. Every so often he’d look outside, in the direction of the hill, where you could see the thing, burning brighter than ever. Then he began to talk. He talked mainly at me. He said it was common knowledge I had accepted a job, a job of grave responsibilities, which I had no capacity to hold, either in the matter of training, or by temperamental fitness. He said it had been alleged repeatedly in the newspapers, and not denied so far as he knew, that the catastrophe had been brought on by my negligence, a negligence all the more egregious in that science had relegated such things to the past, or had so relegated it if the most elementary appliances were properly utilized, which they were not. He said the fire involved the whole town, and especially every participant in the Signal Hill field. He said for me then to resist, on the basis of specious, trifling, and as he suspected, insincere arguments, the relief which public-spirited citizens were willing to provide, at their own expense, was an exhibition of contumacity unparalleled in his knowledge. He said my real motives, whatever they might be, were a subject on which he was not informed, but he could only wish it lay within the power of the court to punish me, and severely. He said in view of all these considerations, and the emergency, he was denying the application with the harshest rebuke he knew how to administer—costs to the plaintiff.

In the corridor, Mr. Slemp, the state oil and gas man, grabbed me by both lapels and all but shook me: “What are you trying to get away with, Dillon? Do you know what this is I’ve got in my hand? It’s an order, requiring you to abate that nuisance, that threat to this whole oil field, by shooting that well or whatever means there are available to you! By doing, at your own expense, exactly what they’re now getting ready to do, free—at least to you. That’s it, I sat there, listening to that judge, letting him sock it to you in words, and not doing what I had a perfectly good legal right to, sock it to you in dollars, grief, and sweat. You hear me, Dillon?”

“I hear you.”

“You’re in luck and you don’t know it.”

“O.K., you said it.”

“Don’t expect me to say it twice.”

He turned and went off. She had been trying to get a word in edgewise, and tell him it was her, not me, that had cooked the thing up. That didn’t take care of me feeling more and more like one of those untouchables they’ve got in India, or maybe a leper with a couple of hands and a foot missing. I must have looked glum, because she said: “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, you don’t have to snap at me.”

“I don’t have to be here, so far as that goes. I’d just like to say, though, that so far as I’m concerned at this time in this company and at this particular place, a nice chummy boxcar, with a floor board busted loose to let the fresh air in, a hot journal under one end and a flat wheel under the other, would come under the head of something to throw nip-ups about.”

“Now you’re being just plain nasty.”

“But not like our well is nasty, sweetie pie.”

So that was how come we all gathered the next morning to see the grand exhibition of fireworks that was put on by Mace & Co., not incorporated. They had wired two guys in Texas that make a business of putting out oil-well fires, but found they were tied up and went ahead on their own. Before we even got there, from court that afternoon, they were putting in concrete anchors for their poles, one in the road beyond the cemetery, the other in a vacant lot between the well and the Golden Glow. In the wet concrete they sat big steel eyes, and it was hardly set before they were bolting their masts to the eyes, big hundred-foot steel poles, that they rented from a company that made stuff for broadcasting towers. They worked all night, and by daybreak they had their guy cables rigged, and were pretty near ready with their main cable, a half-inch line between masts that was to carry their traveling blocks, so when they had everything ready they could lower their charge on a falls, explode it and put an end to the show. The masts weren’t in line with the well, as there was a danger that if the main cable tightened right over it, it would melt in the heat and come apart. They were set so it would run maybe twenty feet to one side, but the idea was that a light guide cable, worked by two crews maybe two hundred feet apart so it didn’t run over the well either, could pull the charge over in position. So that’s how it was done. When the concrete was set, the poles were raised and guyed. The main cable was pulled up, and the traveling block, with the falls under it, attached. The charge, one hundred and fifty pounds of blasting powder, was in a big can that rode on a steel seat, with the detonator wire rigged in through the top. By ten o’clock everything was ready. Mace gave all signals with a police whistle, and when he sounded four sharp ones the can began going up in the air. Then he sounded three, and it began to move on the main cable, swinging and spinning like something going aboard ship. When it got to the middle, he whistled once and it stopped. Then the gangs on the guide cable began to tighten up, and it began swinging toward the hole. But to my eye it was low. By now, with derrick gone and rotary platform gone and everything wooden gone, there was just this casing sticking up out of the concrete cellar floor, that was flush with the ground. There were four or five feet of it, and why, instead of bringing his can up level with the top of it, or above it, Mace kept bumping it along hardly clear of the ground, I couldn’t quite see, though Rohrer was to explain it to me later. But here it came and here it came, and hit the pipe like a croquet ball hits the stake, and hit it again and bounced off again, and still no signal from Mace, and still it didn’t rise higher. Then came a flash and a shock that sent poles, cable, blocks, and everything crashing to the ground. She and I were standing by her car, near the Luxor place, at least three hundred yards away, and even though we dived we weren’t any too soon, as stuff began falling all around us. But when we took our fingers out of our ears the fire was roaring just the same, and when we looked it was brighter than ever. Up near it men were running. Two of our gauging tanks were tilted over at a crazy angle, one of the masts was lying across the hind end of the Golden Glow, asbestos had torn loose, and was scattered around everywhere. She kept straining to see. “But look, Jack, it’s still burning!”

Uptown, newsboys were yelling my name. When we bought a paper it said the grand jury was going to investigate the blast, and see if criminal charges could be brought against me. What I had to do with it they didn’t explain, but when we pulled up in front of the hospital, three guys that seemed to be waiting jumped out at me. She gunned the car and shook them off, then started for her house without going back to the hospital. When we got inside she sat me down in the living room, and made me a drink and had the housekeeper, Irene, get something to eat. Irene treated me as though I wasn’t there. Hannah paid no attention, but rang the hospital, and said I was in a somewhat rung-up state on account of something that had happened, and she was keeping me with her till next day. I had another drink, then began to feel sleepy, and must have corked off, because when I woke up it was late afternoon and the phone was ringing. She answered, and somebody seemed to be coming. She was pretty glum. When the bell rang, a little after seven, it was Rohrer. He was in one of those hard-rock suits they all seemed to have, and was shaved and shined and had a haircut, but his face was long, and he sipped on the drink she poured for him without saying anything. Then after a while he mentioned how he’d known her father, and talked along on quite a lot of stuff that didn’t mean anything. Then he got started on White, and how bitter the little independents were against him. It seemed the foreclosures were starting. “They feel it’s not right. They feel it’s an act of God that they had nothing to do with, and there ought to be a moratorium. You may be surprised to know I’m on his side. The refinery’s in hock to him, we’ve got our foreclosure notice too, we’re hit just as bad as anybody. Still and all, White’s up against more than they realize. It’s not a question of being a good guy and giving other good guys a break. He’s got government examiners and the federal grand jury and all kind of things to think about. I mean, if the paper and law say foreclose, and he don’t foreclose, then he’s liable, and if the stockholders should lose, or if the bank shook, then all the independents from here to Texas and back couldn’t save him. He’s got to take those properties, whether he wants to or not. And yet in spite of that and of how they feel about him, I believe what he says when he tells them he’s not in the oil business, he’s in the banking business, that he’d rather have good paper than bad land, and will do his best to save them—if he can.”