The Moth (35 page)

He asked what about her foreclosure notice, and she said it wasn’t due for ninety days, as all payments had been kept up to the time of the fire, and no more were due right away. He said he wished he was fixed like that, that his foreclosure was set for next week. Now at last he took a paper from his pocket, some thin typewritten sheets with a blue cover that looked legal. “Mrs. Branch, as I often told your father and I’ve told Mr. Dillon here, I’ve thought for a long time if we could only marry your wells to our refinery, well, we could go places. There’s a lot of angles to it I don’t go into here, but not to get too mysterious about it, we have one son of a gun of a time getting oil to run on, and from the beginning we’ve just done a trucking business and we’re running stuff that moves by the dark of the moon, both in and out. And you’re under contract, for the next couple of months anyhow, to a company that don’t care if you go well or not, that’s got all the oil it can handle, that leans over backwards to observe all this red tape they’ve sewed us in, that won’t take but a limited amount of what your wells can pump, and that’s got no more in the way of a future for you than a snowball has in you know where. Well, I’m a stubborn fellow. I hate to give up. So this is what I’ve done. I got an option out of them, my owners I mean, that says you can buy that place for ten thousand dollars. The refinery, that is, with lease on the land and everything that’s on it, and they’d be glad to get it. Cost me fifty dollars of my own money, twenty-five dollars for the option, twenty-five to a lawyer for drawing it up. They’re hooked up all wrong for the oil business, but they’re straight people and you needn’t be afraid they’ll play you any tricks.”

“Who are they, Mr. Rohrer?”

“Just fellows Mr. Dillon has seen a dozen times around, that chipped in for Mace and his dynamite job, and never even bothered to tell him their name. Little fellows in the oil business, that have to be crooked in order to be straight. I mean, maybe their oil is hot but their word is good.”

We sat talking about it, pretty gloomy. He made no bones about it, it was a pretty poor deal, an option to buy for ten thousand dollars, something that would be foreclosed in a week, and so useless, from what was roaring next door, that nobody would lend a dime on it, or anything. “But, Mrs. Branch, I only say, where there’s a thousand-to-one chance, let’s take it. You got the ten thousand dollars, or can get it on this residence property here, or somehow, and I’ve got the thirty-day option. We admit it’s a poor outlook. Mace has got going again, and got authority from the state man, and money enough, to tunnel into the well, under the cemetery, and tap that casing. That’ll be plenty of time for most of them, as the foreclosures aren’t all due as soon as ours, but it’ll take ten days to two weeks, and it won’t do us any good. However— we don’t know. Maybe it rains hard and the fire stops. Maybe the pressure eases, and the well stops. Maybe—it’s a thousand to one but at least it’s a chance.”

“Can they do that? Go under the cemetery?”

“Probably.”

“My family are buried there, it so happens.”

“If it was a question of blocking them off, like you tried to do once, maybe those graves would do it, though it’s my impression that whole cemetery question was settled long ago, as there’s hardly a company, including yours, that hasn’t whip-stocked under there for whatever they could pump out. But as it’s a question of hurrying them up, or would be if it was possible to hurry them, why I’d say your family’s no great help.”

She went out, came back with her handbag, and laid down some money. I could see it was ten-dollar bills, and she counted out ten. He handed five back. “I don’t ask anything for myself in this, Mrs. Branch—though of course, if we get a deal, I wouldn’t be offended at an offer to take over the whole production end, from wells to gas, oil, and asphalt. But I’m not interested in corings from the option. The fifty dollars I paid out, O.K. on that. This other fifty dollars I can’t accept.”

She picked up the tens and he began reading her some kind of assignment, in her favor, he’d had typed on the bottom of the option. Then he signed it and handed it over to her. “It’s yours now any time you want to exercise it.”

“Just a matter of ten thousand bucks.”

“You never can tell.”

We sat there, all pretty gloomy, and she put out another drink and we drank it. After a long time he turned to me and said: “You know why Mace has got to go in the side of that hill with a tunnel and timbers and big gang of men—or thinks he has?”

“I bite. Why?”

“He wrecked that casing, with his shot—or thinks he did.”

“Well—wasn’t that the idea?”

“You think so?”

I said what else would it be, and he looked at her, and she didn’t know any different, and he kind of grinned into his drink, then said: “I talked to quite a few people. I talked to a dozen people today—two dozen. All in the oil business, and they all thought, same as you, that the purpose and object of the shot was to wreck that casing, to stop up the hole and shut off the fire and leave them all sitting pretty—to say nothing of ruining a well that cost Mrs. Branch two hundred thousand dollars.”

He began to giggle into his glass, and she freshened it. Then: “Isn’t that the most amusing thing you ever heard in your life? Don’t that show how little people know about their own business? Imagine that! There’s casing there, five lines of it, one inside the other, from the eleven-inch pipe you started with down to the five-inch line that’s carrying the gas. It runs up through a cellar floor made of solid concrete, and yet with a charge of dynamite Mace thought he could wreck the top of the well, so dirt and rock and stuff would cave in on it and stop it up—
if
that’s what he thought, though I’m beginning to wonder if he really thought
anything.
I mean, there’s such a thing as bringing up stuff to go
boom,
closing your eyes, and trusting to luck. You ask me, Mace heard all his life about shooting a burning well, got it in his mind a certain way, and had no idea why you really do shoot it, and neither did any of his friends. And mark what I say: He shot it. He’s going around saying the heat set it off prematurely, and as he was using a push-button switch, that just snapped off after he pressed it, it didn’t know any stories to tell on him. But listen: I was with him, and I know. I was right in the next room there in our little refinery office, where he had his wires, not looking outside, but looking at
him,
because I was wondering why he didn’t give them one on his whistle, to hike his powder up higher—”

“I remember—it was dragging the sump.”

“And I
saw
him press that switch!”

“But
how
should he have done it?”

It was she that said it, but I was opening my mouth to, because by then I was plenty crossed up. He said: “He should have exploded it
over
the well. Over the open end of the casing, where the gas is pouring out. That would have made a tremendous concussion, enough to drive the gas down in the pipe—we don’t know how far, because nobody was ever down there to measure. But far enough. A real jolt, to interrupt the flow for one, two, or maybe three seconds. Then it roars out again, but the fire is out. It’s just like your gas stove. You cut it off one fifth of a second, the shortest time it takes you to close the valve and turn it on again, and it’s out, isn’t it? It’s the same way with a burning well. Stop it that long and it’s still roaring, so far as the gas goes. But the fire’s out. You can get in there, and look at it, and work on it. You can stand next to your pipe. There’s no more heat.”

“Yeah, and then what?”

“You shut off that gas. With a gate.”

“A—? Something we swing on?”

“A valve. You close it.”

“You got one with you?”

“What you need, you get it made. Any good oil-tool works can do it. And it’s no great job to put on. If the flange is still there, the attachment with bolt holes around the edge that goes on all casing, to hold the Christmas tree when the flow starts, you just slip the edge of your gate over it and drop one bolt through. Then you turn it till all holes are in position and the gate is square on the pipe. Of course the gas whistles and hisses and scares you to death, but it’ll go through without any trouble. Then when all your bolts are tight you just close your valve and you’ve got it. It’s got handle bars on it, so a couple of men can turn it—or if you’re getting fancy with it, you have it made hydraulic. Me, I’d take handle bars. In emergency, make it simple... And if the flange is gone, you shove in an inside pack. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You take a length of pipe small enough to go inside the inner casing with some room to spare, and around it put three wide bands of rubber. Around it, above the rubber bands, threaded on it to turn, and sized to slip easy inside the casing, you fit a collar. On the end of the smaller pipe you fit your gate, handlebars and all. You slip the whole thing down into the casing, with everything open, so the gas flows right on. Then you screw down the collar till it bulges out the rubber and makes a tight seal against the casing. Then you screw down your gate, and you’ve got it. To put the thing on, once it’s made, ought not to take more than two hours.”

“Why doesn’t Mace do that?”

“Maybe he don’t know about it. But if you ask me, he’s gun shy. He made a mess of one shot, and now he’s dogging it. He’s doing what they do when the casing
is
wrecked—when it’s all gone, from sand and pebbles cutting it out, ten or twenty feet down in the ground, with the pressure throwing dirt up and cratering it all around. Then there’s nothing to do but go down and get it. They work in by tunnel, peel off outer casing, throw a split sleeve around the inner pipe, cut through that, put a plug in, then come out through the tunnel with a new line of pipe and with that save the well. That is, if it all goes well. If not, in the end they have to get the Eastman survey outfit in, let them line up a new well, whip-stock down with it, intersect the burning well at maybe five thousand feet, pump it full of mud, close it and lose it. Or drive into the oil sand just beside the burning well and take the pressure off. And all that is six-figure stuff—and it’s on her. Under the law, she’s booked with it. Nice.”

“You mean, it would be just a two-hour job if that goddam fool hadn’t wrecked our casing?”

“Jack ...
did
he wreck it?”

“Well—ask me another.”

His mouth twisted over on one side, he hitched his chair closer, and said:
“He
thinks he did. So all right. He thinks he wrecked it, and that wrecking it didn’t work. And as black smoke is bellying down, and nobody can see, why maybe he’s right. Maybe he did wreck it. He sure wrecked everything else, so it’s reasonable he’d be discouraged. But me, I’ve been looking at it. From my refinery office I’ve been looking at it, whenever the smoke clears a little, which it does every couple of minutes, when a puff of wind hits it.
That casing’s just like it was! It’s sticking straight up!”

“After
that
blast?”

“You know anything about explosions?”

“Not much.”

“They’re tricky. They’re governed by a little principle called the cone of burst, which is the direction the discharge of energy takes, so something right in the path of it is blown to shreds, and something three feet away is hardly jarred. If you ask me, it was just this crazy idea he had, of wrecking the pipe, that saved it. That can of powder was yawing around, there on its falls, like a boat coming about in the wind, and if it was four or five feet from the pipe at the time he touched his button, the cone of burst would run slightly over the end of it. Of course,
you
might have been shaken up plenty, if
you
had been standing there, but then you’re not made of high-grade steel.”

“Rohrer, what are you getting at?”

“Jack, why don’t
we
shoot it?”

“You and me?”

“And her.”

“O.K.”

Her eyes had that shark look as she said it, and his face lit up as he raised his glass to her and had another sip of his drink. “That’s it. All three of us, you, Jack, Mrs. Branch, and myself. The masts are still out there, lying around—they haven’t got around to gathering them up yet. The cable’s there, the firemen’re there, and Mace is there. I’d just love to steal his men off him, so he has to stand around and watch us. Me, I’ll line it all up. I mean, I’ll get an outfit started on that inside pack and what has to be done. Her I want right by me, to run errands and phone and O.K. bills and handle finance. You...”

“Yeah, me?”

“... Jack, I’m not sure I’d have rigged those masts the way Mace rigged them. I think I’d have guyed one big mast to a step, and from that run a swinging boom—but those are the masts we’ve got, and we’ll have to make them do. But the way I want to do it, I don’t have any sap blowing whistles. I’ll be in the refinery office, and I’ll throw the switch. But the can of dynamite itself, I want to swing on that cable. Swing, like rockaby baby. And somebody’s got to swing it.”

“Meaning me?”

“Meaning you.”

He looked at me, pretty sharp, and went on: “You’ll have to be close. That can has to be swung a few times, short, controlled swings, so I can check how high it’s going to go, and everything else. Whoever swings it has to do it with a wire. We can’t use rope—it would burn in twenty seconds, once it got close to that heat. We use wire, plain baling wire. I’ll need three, four, five, six, or a dozen trial swings, and then she’s got to rock—one, two, and a heave. When she’s right over the hole, at the one moment when anything swinging stops stock still, I’ll touch my button. By that time you should be flat on your face, and with luck—and the cone of burst as I think it’ll develop—you’ll be all right. But get this, Jack: maybe...”

“Maybe I don’t have any luck—is that it?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

It was all ready, the inside pack made, the masts rigged, and the dynamite wired up, around sundown of the third day after that. I was there, with Rohrer inside the refinery office, looking like Superman dressed up for goalie on the interplanetary hockey team, in asbestos from helmet to shoes. The firemen had seen to that, and fact of the matter, it seemed to me they used as much juice on me as they did on the fire, which was pretty hard to get sore about. I had a helmet, mask, flyer’s suit, and gloves, everything either made of asbestos or quilted with it or stuffed with it, so if something went wrong at least I wouldn’t get fried like a bug in a light. And it seemed idiotic, the little I had to do, in relation to what it might cost me to do it. My job, as Rohrer said, was get out there, close to the fire, and give signals, whether the can was to go up, down, or sidewise, and how much. Then, when it was hanging right, I was to swing it, a little bit, a little bit, then more, then wham. It would all take, as well as I could figure out, five minutes, no more, and hardly any work.