Sprocket Comes to Call
Sprocket Comes to Call
I glanced up from a shovel full of pig slop just as the Driller made the corner down by the dried-up bed of Hanson’s Creek.
The sun was about half set, so at first all I could make out was a long dark something churning up a cloud of red-dirt dust. It was as wide as the road and then some. And long—the front of the Driller must have been more than a hundred feet past the curve before the cloud at the end trailed off and blew away. I never saw nothing like it in my life before.
I yelled out. By the time it drew up down at the turn-off into our cattle guard, all eight of us, Papa and Grampaw and us four kids, plus two dogs, were clustered in front of the porch steps with three squirrel guns, a deer rifle, a hayfork, and a slop shovel pointed in its general direction. It stopped at the cattle guard, and the dust started to settle. The lower flanks were streaked red and gray from travel, but the rest of it was as black as a moonless night, only all slick and shiny like the intestines of a fresh-slaughtered bull. Hundreds of stumpy feet marched in place all the way down its length. I had a thought that shooting it probably wouldn’t do much more than tee it off if it decided to come through the gate and eat us and the farmhouse. It stood about forty feet away, with the people getting more quiet and the dogs getting more noisy every second, and then a head popped out of a hole that opened in its top near the front. The rest of a human body followed until a bearded man was free from its innards. He slid down the slope of its ten-foot-high flank and walked towards us. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit with colored patches sewed all over it. On his head perched a battered silver-metal hat with a wide brim all the way around.
“Howdy, folks,” he called out as he walked toward us. “I’m Doc Miller. This’d be the MacFarland place, I take it.” He tugged leather gloves off and offered his hand for a shake as he drew near. He was a big, strong-looking man. He came nearly up to my chin height, and I suspected if we arm-rassled, it’d be a chore to put him down.
Papa nodded cautiously, handed me his gun, and stuck out his own calloused hand.
“Didn’t mean to startle you folks. Pleasure to meet y’all.” The man twitched his head back in the direction of the road. Holes had opened up in half a dozen places along the Driller’s body and more men were climbing out of them. “We heard in Hemphill that y’all had been a little water-poor of late and came by to see if you’d be interested in a business proposition.”
We hadn’t seen rain for most of a month. We’d been managing to haul in barely enough water for man and beast, but the corn visible in the field behind the house had already started to turn from green and gold to brown and dead. Papa couldn’t have said he wasn’t interested even if he’d wanted to. Without water, and soon, this year’s harvest would be ten acres of dry stalks. Last year hadn’t been much to speak of, and this one just might be bad enough to run us off the land.
* * *
The next morning, Doc Miller stood on top of the head of the Driller directing things. The pasture looked like the carnival had arrived. They’d pitched half a dozen tents of various bright colors, and they fussed with piles of strange equipment and odd-shaped boxes which littered the pasture’s shady side. Towser stayed close beside me, every now and then growling half-heartedly. I squatted off to the side for about five minutes before I caught Doc’s eye.
“Hey, boy. We been running a little short-handed. You want to help out a bit? Drillin’ is an exciting, romantic business, and you might learn something.”
“My name’s Henry Lee, sir, and I’d be pleased to help out.”
“Hey, Razer!” he called out to one of the scurrying men. “You take over while I give Mr. Henry Lee MacFarland a tour of Sprocket.” He slid down the Driller’s side and led me along its length, slapping it affectionately on the flanks as he went.
“This here is Sprocket. There ain’t too many like him.” He stopped where a bunch of large and small folds in its dark hide stretched for a dozen feet or so. “He’s close to bein’ the biggest Driller I’ve ever seen. And he still ain’t got his full growth on him.”
He rubbed an area about a foot above one of the creases. The crease unfolded lazily and an eyeball twice the size of my head poked out. It stared at us for a long second, then slipped back under its cover. Doc stooped and pulled at the blubbery edge of a crease that ran knee-high for eight or nine feet. “He’ll go down more’n twenty thousand feet—that’s four miles, Henry Lee. There ain’t a drilling rig in the world better than Sprocket at finding oil and making hole down to it.” The crease split open, and I took a step back. Towser had stayed back a couple of dozen steps, watching tensely. He’s a good squirrel dog, but this monster had him spooked. Had me a mite edgy, too.
As the crease widened into a huge black and red pit, I took another quick step backwards and Towser broke into barking and making stiff-legged hops back and forth. A slick, sticky-looking white tube shot out of the pit and wrapped him up. It was so quick, all I really saw was a glimpse of a struggling, yelping blob half visible inside the tip before it sucked back inside.
Doc immediately commenced to beating on the creature with both fists. “Dammit, Sprocket! Spit that goddam dog out! You know better’n to act like this!”
After a second, the eyeball reappeared and blinked at us twice. Doc picked up a crowbar laying in the grass and started whupping on Sprocket with that. He jumped aside when a hole appeared in the crease right in front of him and Towser jetted out, still yelping. He hit the grass running and kept going.
Doc beat on Sprocket a couple’a more times before he threw the crowbar aside. Then he turned to me, grinning. “Hell of a drilling rig, Henry Lee, but I can’t say his humor is always in the best of taste … so to speak.”
Sprocket’s enormous mouth gaped open again and Doc stepped up on its lip. “C’mon. Let me show you his guts.” He saw me hesitate and grinned again. “Hell, don’t worry. This ain’t his eating mouth. It’s his drilling mouth.” He pointed down at his feet. “See? No teeth.” He stepped off the lip and marched inside the monster. If he could do it, so could I. The mouth closed behind us.
It wasn’t dark for more’n a second, because Doc pulled open a curtain of flesh a couple of yards further on. We stepped into a hallway almost twice my height that must of stretched the entire length of Sprocket. It was lit by glowing warts spaced along the hall at head height, each about a half a foot in diameter. The walls were pink, shot through with darker red veins, and they moved in and out slowly. A musky breeze shifted direction every few seconds.
As Doc led me down the hallway, he pointed out holes and creases along the way. “Now this here, Henry Lee, is my bunk room.” He pulled it open, and I looked over his shoulder. Inside was a small round room holding a couple of chairs and a bed with a lamp over it. Colorful tapestries covered the walls and floor. A bulky wooden desk stood next to a set of rungs leading to a hole in the ceiling which let early morning sunlight in. “Since I’m the tool pusher on this rig, I get the room that’s most forward.” He closed it and walked on.
“Most of the rooms front of the tongue base are living areas. You know, bunkrooms, mess hall, head, that sort of thing. Now here …” We’d reached the tongue, a long, white snaky tube that lay in a groove in the center of the hall and gradually thickened as it led back to a hump about thirty feet further on. “Here is Sprocket’s drilling tongue.”
He peeled back white blubber from its tip and exposed a gleaming black bone, with three ratchet-edged pyramids angled off from its sharp point. “This is the drill-head and these here are Sprocket’s drilling cones,” he said, tapping one of the pyramids. “He twists ’em back and forth when he’s making hole. They bite into earth and rock and chew it up.” He let the blubber flop back over the cones. I’d gotten over worrying about being eaten alive and was starting to get interested in what he was saying.
We walked further down the hallway. The tongue got thicker, until it was higher than my head. At its very rear, it disappeared into the floor. Beyond it men hustled about, carrying things and calling to each other. “The tongue actually goes back almost all of the rest of Sprocket’s length under the floor. It compresses when it’s not drilling, then stretches out as far as it’s needed, the deeper we go. We’re only going down to the aquifer on this one. Won’t give it any kind of workout at all.”
“Uh … no offense, sir, but how come you’re finding water for us instead of being somewhere else drilling for oil?”
He leaned against the base of the tongue and pulled makings out of a pocket on his shoulder. “Well, Henry Lee, we just finished doing a couple of wildcat wells up north.” He grinned humorlessly as he shook tobacco out and rolled. “They all come up dry, and the operator went broke before he paid us. It damn-near busted us. We’re heading down to a field opening up near Odessa. Looks like it’s gonna be pretty rich. But a man’s gotta eat along the way.” He licked the endpapers and struck a phosphorus match off his hat. “Probably drill a dozen fast holes around here on farmsteads and then move on.”
A man at the far end of the hall yelled at us. “Hey, Doc! We’re ready to spud whenever you are.”
“Be right there, Razer.” We walked down the hallway and out Sprocket’s rear end. Doc made a final check of everything. A hose led from one crease to another, and he yanked on it to make sure it wouldn’t come loose. “Leads from his water bladder to his mud bladder,” he explained. “Since we’re going so shallow we’ll just use fresh water for drilling fluid.” Various machines and hoses were hooked into other creases, and he checked all those.
Finally, we stood at Sprocket’s head. A dozen men sat in folding chairs, fiddling with various instruments. Doc stuck his arm in to the shoulder through a crease next to the mouth and felt around for a few seconds. “Pressure’s good, Razer,” he said to the man who’d called us and, who now stood next to him. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Four men pried open Sprocket’s mouth and walked inside. A minute later, they emerged, carrying the tongue between them. Doc pried back the tip’s cover for one last inspection of the cones, then laid it on the ground.
I’d been so interested watching him that I’d barely noticed the movements and sounds of the men in the chairs.
Doc walked over to a crate in front of them and handed me two carved sticks that were on it. “Here you go, Henry Lee. Time to work.” The sticks didn’t weight much, and when I tapped them together, they made a pleasant hollow sound. I felt like an idiot standing there with them. What kind of work could I do with a couple of sticks?
Doc picked up the crowbar that he’d used earlier to get Sprocket to spit out Towser, and commenced to beating on him again, this time in a more rhythmical pattern. “Time to get to work, you lazy bastard!” he yelled. “We’re ready and you’re ready and it ain’t no use pretending you’re asleep.” This time I was far enough back so that I could see it when both huge eyes opened and tried to stare cross-eyed at Doc. Satisfied, he backed off, reaching down to give the drilling tongue one last caress.
“Stokers ready?” he called out to a couple of men who stood next to a high pile of wood next to another opening in Sprocket’s side.
“Bet your ass,” was the reply.
He pulled a foot-and-a half-long wand from a narrow pocket I hadn’t noticed before that ran down his right leg. “Now, Henry Lee, I’m depending on you to help us out with this. You just watch my baton and hit those sticks together in time.”
He raised the wand and took a deep breath. “Ah-one-and-ah-two-and-ah …”
The men in the chairs started blowing and rubbing and pumping their instruments all together, as his wand moved in graceful curves through the air. I missed the first few beats, but after that I did fine, the sticks’ mellow, clear sound following perfectly.
Oh, it was wild, blood-stirring music. That tongue jerked erect for a minute and then plunged into the earth, twisting and squirming. Sprocket’s eyes squeezed shut, then popped open again. His sides heaved gently, and his hundreds of feet tramped in rhythm with the gypsy music. The stokers off to the side began to chant in a language I didn’t understand as they chunked logs into Sprocket’s eating mouth.
We played for what seemed to be hours. I was in another world.
* * *
We didn’t make music all the while he was drilling, of course, and I had work to do anyways. Papa got back from Hemphill after lunch. The Grange Bank had given us the loan, so we spent the rest of the day sawing and hammering, making irrigation troughs. Sprocket drilled close to five hundred feet, going below the aquifer to leave a reservoir of water in the bottom of the well. They finished late that evening. I did get to watch after supper when they snapped twenty-inch surface casing onto his tongue and set it in the hole, then mixed and poured a dozen sacks of cement around the wellhead to make sure it stayed in place. I talked with Razer and Doc some while I helped mix the concrete in a trough. They planned to move on down the road to drill another water well the next day at the Brewster place. Back to slopping pigs for me. I fell asleep listening to them partying in the pasture.
* * *
The next morning I’d already finished the morning chores before any of them stirred. The tents were still pitched where they’d been, but Sprocket had wandered over toward the back of the pasture. The dozen scraggly cows we owned gave him a wide berth. Doc was slouched over a campfire, sipping from a battered tin cup when I walked up. “Hey there, Henry Lee,” he called out. “You old enough to drink coffee?”
“I’m nineteen last month, Doc. I can do whatever I damn well please.”
He squinted up at me. “Feeling kind of salty this morning, ain’t you?”
I crouched and poured coffee into another tin cup. “Aw, I didn’t mean nothing. I guess I’m sorry to see you going. Yesterday was fun.”
“Like I said, it’s a romantic, exciting way to live.”
“Yeah. Looks like it beats dirt farming, anyway.”
About that time the ground started to shake. A thunderous pounding came from Sprocket’s direction. His hundreds of feet were stomping the back of the pasture into mud.
Doc jumped to his feet, looking disgusted. “Damned fool!”
“What’s he doing?”
He threw the last third of his coffee into the fire. “Seismic testing.” He shook his head. “Yesterday when we were drilling and he was marching in place, he got one baseline. Now he’s going for the other one.”
“I don’t understand.” Sprocket’s thumping speeded up.
“When he pounds the ground like that, it sends sound waves through the earth. Sprocket hears ’em when they slow down or speed up or reflect off different geological formations. Two baselines gives him a three-dimensional map of what’s down there. The damned idiot’s looking for hydrocarbons. Ain’t no oil for two hundred miles in any direction.”
Sprocket abruptly stopped and ambled back in our direction. The men had all woken and stuck their heads out of their tents, cursing and groaning sleepily.
“Well, at least that foolishness is over,” Doc said, grunting as he picked up the pot to pour himself another cup. Sprocket reached us in a minute and towered over us silently. Doc stared at his protruding, rapidly-rotating eyeballs.
Sprocket’s tongue shot out of his mouth and began to drill furiously not three feet from me.
Doc threw his coffee into the fire again.
* * *
Papa didn’t approve of the whole thing, but his eyes bugged out nearly as far as Sprocket’s when the company man for Exoco pulled into the front yard in his brand new shiny red 1963 Ford pickup, hopped out, and showed him the numbers wrote down on the royalty contracts he offered. If the gypsies hit a good pocket of oil or natural gas, the first in an entirely undeveloped field, Papa and Exoco would make money beyond any human cravings. Exoco would finance the drilling costs and get the biggest share. The drilling gypsies would make out, too, but not nearly as much.
Doc just shrugged when we talked about the deal. “Exoco’s putting up some serious exploration money on this, Henry Lee. And we’re drilling on property that your Daddy owns the mineral rights of.”
“Yeah, but none of this wouldn’t be happening without you and Sprocket! It isn’t fair!”
He shrugged again. “You’d been around the oilpatch a little longer, you’d understand the economics of the situation. It don’t matter a hell of a lot, anyway. We ain’t in this for the money, much as I hate to admit it. It’s the excitement and romance, son.”
I thought the carnival had come to town when Sprocket first arrived. I was wrong. Within a week, the whole pasture was covered with strange beasts and strange equipment and even stranger people. The mud gypsies, the casing gypsies, the tool gypsies, the cement gypsies, and more—all converged on the MacFarland farmstead out of nowhere, all accompanied by one or more beasties that did something vital to the drilling of an exploratory well. In between chores and building and placing the irrigation troughs that led from the water well to the cornfields, I usually got loose only after supper. I wandered among the tents and lean-tos they erected, breathing in the amazing sounds and smells and sights the gypsies brought with them.
The Exoco company man shouted and strutted about the camp like a little dictator. I started to understand why nobody knocked him up-side the head for acting as obnoxious as he did when I realized that his company was footing the bill for everything and everybody in the pasture. Doc told him to go suck on sour gas, though, when he once made a suggestion about how to handle Sprocket.
Sprocket drilled twenty-four hours a day, his sides heaving with the effort. Illuminated at night by the light-poles set up all along his length, the stokers fed him continuously the first week. Then the first of a series of bloated brown tankers showed up on the scene and hooked up to him. I was there when Doc himself stuck the hose firmly into Sprocket’s eating mouth, and we stood back as he began to suck on it like a calf at the teat.
“Ol’ Sprocket’ll eat just about anything, Henry Lee,” he said with pride, “but what he loves second best is that refined, high-octane, lead-free, pure sweet gasoline.”
“What’s he like best?”
He grinned evil-like. “Fresh dogmeat.”
I hadn’t seen Towser since the day Sprocket almost ate him.
“Just funnin’,” Doc said before I could ask the awful question. “What he likes best of all, of course, is heavy crude. Oughta see the way he gets to shaking and shimmying and moaning when he hits a producible formation. You don’t think he’s workin’ himself into a lather just because we play pretty music for him, do you? That’s just how we sweet-talk him into doing favors for us—like drilling your little water well, or trying out a wildcat some damn fool has a religious faith in—but he’s in the business strictly to fill his belly with petroleum.”
“And,” he added, “For the romance and excitement of it all.”
* * *
Eight nights after Sprocket started drilling, I snuck away from the house after bedtime. Papa hadn’t come right out and told us younguns to stay away from the gypsies, but his mind was easy enough to see. I guess the rest of my family was born to farm. Me, I’d lay in bed after breaking my back in the damned, boring-to-death fields, and hear pagan music, and the hum of many voices, and the whining, trembling noise Sprocket made in his search for the thing he loved best, and I’d want to cry for some reason.
Doc was talking to a couple of casing gypsies when he spotted me coming. They stood in a half circle in front of Sprocket, who was surrounded by half a dozen other oversized beasts. Doc didn’t seem too surprised to see me. “Howdy, Henry Lee. Just couldn’t stand it any longer, could you?”
“Sir?”
“I recognized the symptoms the first day, Son. Not too hard to do. I got ’em myself about your age. Still got ’em.”
There wasn’t nothing I could say to him.
He turned to the casing gypsies. The reason I knew they were casing gypsies is they were all women. Casing gypsies always were. They wore dark green jumpsuits, but theirs fit a whole lot better than the men’s. Over the next few weeks, Doc told me stories about the wild ways of casing gypsies that I not only didn’t believe, but, due to my lack of experience, couldn’t even understand half the time.
He spoke to the dark-haired woman that must have been their crew chief. “Ramonita, we’re gonna be ready to start snapping on that twenty-six-hundred feet of twenty-inch surface pipe in less than an hour. Big Red’s hooked up and ready to cement. How come I don’t see your pipe here?”
She swayed a few steps forward and tapped his chest with a black-tipped finger. “Because,” she purred, “your half-smart segundo, Razer, moved Big Red and his bulk cement holder onto location ahead of time. They’re blocking us out, as usual. They’re asleep, as usual.”
Her purr deepened into a snarl. “And it’s your goddam job to straighten it out, not mine. We’ve been ready since this afternoon.”
About that time, I wandered off, too embarrassed to listen to the rest of the conversation.
* * *
Ramonita was actually pretty nice, once you got to know her. That night I helped her and her casing crew snap on the surface casing. Sprocket pulled his tongue out of the hole for it. Each joint of casing was a twenty-foot tube of dark ceramic that their beast excreted. It unfolded in half, lengthwise. They placed the first joint right behind his drill-head, so that his tongue rested on a double trough, then snapped it closed around the tongue and sealed the seams with a special glue. Then they hoisted the rear end of the casing vertical into the air with a sling hung from a tripod scaffolding they’d erected, and fed the first joint most of the way into the hole. The end of the length of pipe tapered in, then flared out again. The next joint’s front end snapped right over that nipple, and so on.
After a few hours of lifting and snapping casing, I guess I should have been tired, but I wasn’t. We worked to the rhythm of the music made by gypsies from half a dozen specialties, and it made that casing feel light as goose feathers.
When we were done, I collapsed into a chair and watched while Big Red pumped cement down the inside of the casing and out the bottom and back up the outside into the annulus between the casing and the hole, bonding it in place. Doc strolled over with a cup and a plate heaped with sausage and thick pieces of bread.
“Here you go, Henry Lee. Oilpatch work may feed the soul, but every now and then you gotta feed the body, too.”
I took a big bite of the sausage, and it felt like my mouth had caught on fire, so I took a deep swig from the cup, and the flames leaped higher.
“You’ve killed me,” I finally managed to choke out. “What is this stuff?”
“Just boudain and a little heart-starter. Good stuff.”
After that, I took small bites of everything that was offered to me. That heart-starter kind of growed on you after awhile, though.
* * *
A couple of hours later, I took another break and wandered over to the fire where a bunch of the hands was relaxing.
“I’ve been thinkin’,” I said, to nobody in particular.
Doc and Razer both grabbed their hardhats and slapped them on. “Uh-oh!” Razer said. “Head for the hills!”
“Aww, come on!” I said. “I know thinking’s dangerous, but I can handle the pressure.”
They pretended to relax. “Well, if you’re sure …” Doc said doubtfully.
“Seriously, what I been wondering about is, oilfield critters ain’t like any other animals around. How come is that?”
“They’re the last of the dinosaurs,” Razer said.
“They’re actually giant, mutated catterpiggles created by atom-bomb explosions,” Big Mac, another one of Sprocket’s hands, volunteered.
“They’re from Australia,” Pearl, the head cementer on Big Red, said. “Animals from Australia is all different from normal.”
“Actually nobody knows where they come from,” Doc said. “But I think they’re aliens from outer space.”
“You believe that old story?” Pearl asked. Half the guys around the fire hooted, but the other half just nodded.
“I read Marley Monmouth’s diary in the library up at P&A,” Doc said.
Texas Petrological and Agricultural College at Aggie Station is the main center of learning about the oilpatch. A couple of the guys on the crew had mentioned going there once or twice for vocational training on how to be better hands on their crews. One or two admitted to taking correspondence courses on occasion.
“I read that diary, too,” Pearl said. “Ol’ Marley had obviously slipped his transmission.”
“If you’d been through what he claimed to have been through,” Doc said, “you’d be a little funny, yourself.”
“What was it he had been through?” I asked.
Pearl snorted. “He was out in the sun too long in the Anadarko Basin.”
“Nobody had any record of oilpatch critters until about a hundred and twenty years ago,” Doc said to me. “Until Marley Monmouth brought a herd of fifty-three of them down the main street of Duncan, Oklahoma, that is. All the critters we know of now are descendants of that herd. He claimed that there had been almost two hundred of them, but the rest were dead. He said that he had been part of a wagon train pushing west a couple of years before. One night, strange, alien monsters captured everybody in the wagon train. They took their prisoners into the wastelands where there was what we’d now call a very busy field being drilled. Marley and his people was used for slave labor to make the wells.”
Doc paused for a moment as the bottle reached him.
“According to the diary, the aliens had captured several wagon trains and a bunch of Indians. They were not nice guys. They treated their hands like dogs, worked ’em till they dropped. Treated the critters awful poorly, too. There was only about two dozen of the aliens, but they had weapons that shot out rays that would burn up whoever they touched. Typhus started to sweep through the camp. The slaves got so desperate that they revolted. Most of ’em got killed. The critters helped ’em fight, and most of them got killed, too. But some of them escaped. Marley had half a dozen people with him, including two Indians, inside one of the Cementers when he got to Duncan, but all of them except Marley had come down with typhus and died without talking. An exploring party went out to check his story. Took a lot of guts back then, since it was hostile Indian territory.”
“Which is probably what really happened to his wagon train.” Pearl said. “Killed by Apaches.”
“They didn’t find anything but a lot of holes that had been drilled in what is now the Anadarko Basin. No bodies. No other physical evidence. Marley said the aliens must have disposed of everything else. He died not long after. But by then he had explained how the critters worked together to make a well.”
“He come down with typhus, too?” I asked.
“Nope,” Doc said. “Shot for bein’ in the wrong woman at the wrong time. Ol’ Marley was pussy-crazy.”
Razer took off his hardhat and held it over his heart. “Our founder,” he said piously. “We been tryin’ to uphold his example ever since.”
“Personally, I think they’re all just hallucinations,” Pearl’s segundo, name of Goose, said. “We’re all actually havin’ the D.T.’s.” He tossed me his bottle. “Here. Drink enough of this, you won’t see ’em any more.”
I looked up at the sky and wondered.
* * *
I didn’t get much sleep the next three weeks, what with working all day in the fields and being with the gypsies every night. I helped out on most all of the critters at one time or another, learning how drilling mud was mixed and why, or helping the tool gypsies dress and move their tools when they were getting ready to run in the hole for a squeeze job, or unpacking float shoes and collars to attach to the bottom of a string when they got ready to run it in. All of them was real friendly, answering all my dumb questions, and telling me stories about the far places they’d been and the things they’d seen and done.
But I kept coming back to Sprocket. The deeper he got, the more he had to exert himself twisting that long, talented tongue deep into the bowels of the earth, clamping his mouth over the well head to fight downhole hydrostatic pressure until they could weight up the mud, whenever he hit a high-pressure zone. I got to know him inside and out, literally. Doc and the crew taught me how to care for him, and keep him clean, and feel inside his guts to monitor his vital signs so the stoking could speed up or slow down, or they could play music to calm him or spur him on.
They didn’t need to spur him on much. He was drilling like his life depended on it.
The proudest moment for me came one night when we were down about ten thousand feet. We’d just started in the hole to hang some eight-and-five-eighths-inch liner pipe off the bottom of a ten-and-three-quarter-inch long string. I was standing at the well head when it slipped a little. Displaced mud gushed out of the hole, drenching me from head to foot. The second pair of coveralls I’d ruined. I only had one pair left.
When we finished up, and I was kicked back and sipping on some heart-starter, Doc strolled up with a cloth-wrapped package under one arm and a silver-metal hardhat under the other. He dumped them at my feet.
“I don’t mind you getting underfoot ever now and then, Henry Lee,” he said. “But I do mind you doing it in them damned old messy coveralls.”
I set down the cup with unsteady hands and untied the string and shook open the package. Inside were two gray, patched jumpsuits and a pair of steel-toed workboots.
“If they don’t fit, you’re out of luck,” he said. “They’re the biggest sizes we got.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“Ain’t a present,” he said gruffly. “You earned ’em.”
Then he strode off, shouting at Big Red’s crew for not getting their cement down-hole fast enough. I hid the clothes under my bed during the daytime and wore them at night when I went to the gypsies.
* * *
Sixteen-thousand feet, seventeen-thousand feet, eighteen-thousand feet, and still no strike. Sprocket’s hide began to lose its sheen and get wrinkled and rough looking, but he drilled on, heaving and panting. He sucked gasoline in vast quantities, forcing his tongue through rock that grew harder and hotter. The mud circulated up practically boiling, and we began to coat his tongue with special unguents when it came out of the hole, looking burned and chafed.
The camp grew quieter when he passed twenty-thousand feet, his maximum rated depth. More pressure, more heat, but no hydrocarbons.
* * *
I missed six nights while we got in the corn. The weeks of no sleep finally caught up with me. I simply couldn’t handle harvesting any more and working all night, too. I worked like a zombie in the fields all day, and couldn’t bring myself to visit the camp under Papa’s watchful eyes when sunset neared. I collapsed into bed right after supper each evening, sick as a dog, and slept without dreams until Papa shook me awake at dawn. Being sick don’t matter when the crop’s got to come in. When I saw Doc or one of the other gypsies I waved at them from a distance, but they only waved back and hurried about their business.
I came back the seventh night. They stood around Sprocket in silent little groups … no music, no laughing and joking.
Sprocket had somehow shriveled. His hide hung in loose rolls all along his length, and every few minutes a painful wheeze streamed from around the edges of his drilling mouth where he’d mashed it into the ground around his tongue. His head twitched spastically, and his eyes were squeezed shut in agony.
Doc turned a dead face to me when I touched him on the shoulder. “Oh … hello, Henry Lee.”
He fumbled at his shoulder pocket and came out with a tobacco bag. When he saw it was empty, he let it drop. “Sprocket’s down somewhere around twenty-three thousand feet,” he finally said. “We can’t measure for sure, because he’s refused to stop drilling for three days. We’ve got twenty-pound mud in the hole, and he’s still having to fight the bottom-hole hydrostatic. He’s had his mouth dug in for a blowout preventer since noon.”
I was frightened as much by the slurred, toneless way he spoke as by the meaning of his words. “Make him stop, Doc. The oil ain’t worth it.”
“He won’t stop, Henry Lee. We’ve played to him, and talked to him, and shut off his gasoline, and he just won’t stop.”
He reached out and rubbed Sprocket’s mottled skin. “Sometimes it happens this way. They just go crazy and won’t stop drilling.” His hand dropped to his side. “Until they die.”
We stood together, not saying anything for a long time. Finally I knew what I had to say, even if it wasn’t true.
“You’re wrong, Doc.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe Sprocket’s gone crazy. You told me he’s the best Driller in the world for finding and getting down to oil. Either you were wrong then, or you’re wrong now. Sprocket’s going for the deepest, biggest reservoir that’s ever been found.”
His big hands clenched, but I guessed angry was better than the way he’d been before. “You don’t know what you’re saying, boy. You’re just a typical worm. You run around here a couple weeks, and you think you know it all. You …”
“I know one thing, Doc. Sprocket ain’t in this business to kill himself. Like you said, he’s in it for the petroleum!” I was shouting now, leaning right into his face, mad as hell for no reason I could say. “And for the romance and excitement, too, you son of a bitch!”
I turned around and started yelling at the other gypsies. “What’s the matter with you people? Did you come here to find oil or not? How come you’re standing around like a bunch of—” I tried to think of the worst thing I could call them and found it. “Like a bunch of dirt-farmers!”
I rushed over to where the instruments lay in a pile and started throwing them at dumbfounded gypsies. “Play, goddam you! Sprocket’s doing his part of the deal. Least you can do is give him some music to work by if you’re not gonna work yourselves.”
I ran out of words and stood glaring at them. Nobody moved. There was silence except for Sprocket’s harsh panting and mine. I whirled, with a fist cocked to fly, at a scuffling noise behind me. Doc had his wand in one hand and the rhythm sticks in the other.
“I do believe you may be right, Henry Lee.” His voice rose. “Come on, people. It ain’t over till it’s over!” In a lower voice, he said, “I’m damned if I’ll hold Sprocket’s funeral while he’s still alive.”
* * *
I helped them hook him back into the gasoline tanker, and took turns massaging Sprocket’s heart muscle. We played and danced all night. I don’t know if any of it did Sprocket any good. Along about daybreak I was sprawled against his side, right underneath an eye, beating my rhythm sticks together drunkenly in time with his weakening gasps while half a dozen gypsies kept up on their instruments. The rest had fallen asleep where they stood or sat. A long shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see Papa’s grim face above me.
“He’s dying, Papa,” I said. “He wants it so bad nothing or nobody can stop him.”
“The family’s in the fields finishing with the harvest, Son.”
“Not today, Papa. I’ll be a farmer tomorrow, but please, not today.”
Sprocket’s breathing stopped.
For a frozen second I sat there. Then I lurched up, almost knocking Papa aside. “Doc! Doc! He’s not breathing.”
Doc had fallen asleep in a chair, his baton slipping from his fingers to lie in the dirt. I frantically yanked him erect and dragged him to Sprocket. Shaking his head to clear it, he inserted his arm into a crease and felt around. “Pressure down to nothing,” he muttered.
Finally, blessedly, I felt the tears streaming down my face. “It’s over.”
Then Sprocket’s body started to shimmy, quick little waves traveling along his body. Doc jerked his arm out as the first real convulsion hit. Sprocket’s eyes popped open, nothing but the whites showing. His body began to jerk and twist and hunch, carrying dozens of his feet off the ground at once.
Then a deep growling sound like a hurricane grew in the air, and Sprocket’s body began to tie itself in knots as we all backed away.
“Jesus, Son of God!” Doc yelled. “The well’s coming in on us!”
I looked down at Sprocket’s mouth and saw it grinding in the dirt, squeezed tightly around his tongue, and knew Doc was right. In addition to the normal bottom-hole pressure, Sprocket had drilled into a real high-pressure formation, and the upward force was trying to blast everything out of the hole. Sprocket was fighting it with his last remaining strength.
The wrinkles in his hide disappeared as he swelled up. Doc began to backpedal. “He ain’t handling the kick! His bladders are filling with mud coming up. Head for the tall grass! Blowout! Blowout!”
We all turned and ran like the devil was after us. The gasoline tanker, which was the only beast close up to Sprocket, ripped loose, crashed through the fence into the woods bordering the pasture, and left a wake of shattered pine trees behind him. The rest of the beasts took off in whatever directions they were already pointed in. In the midst of the turmoil, I caught a glimpse of Papa, high-stepping his best. He was fresh from a night’s sleep, so he was just about leading the pack. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he was willing to find out from a safe distance.
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Sprocket bloated like an enormous black balloon. Then he blew out. It looked and sounded like a tornado erupted full-grown from the top of his head. A stormy dark gusher fountained a hundred feet in the air. I kept running. If it caught fire, I’d be fried to the bone in a second.
Finally, I fell face down between two furrows, exhausted. It started to rain on my back, and I turned over. The rain was black. It was oil.
Fifteen minutes later, the gusher gradually grew smaller, and finally sank back into the ground. Cautiously, we slipped and scrambled among drenched wreckage until we came to Sprocket. Somehow, he’d held on and finally shut it in. He squirmed and wiggled happily in the middle of the mess, a deep, dynamo hum vibrating his entire length.
* * *
Three mornings later, the gypsies had washed off and repaired their belongings as best they could. The pasture and cornfields were covered with petroleum—black, clumpy globs of it, drying in the summer sun. A welter of intersecting pipes and valves called a Christmas Tree guarded the hole that Sprocket had drilled. I stood on Sprocket’s head and turned all the way around slowly. Papa and Grampaw and my brothers clustered in front of the farmhouse.
A trail of dust led down the road back to Hemphill and places beyond, marking the departure of all of the gypsies except Doc’s crew. Doc’s head popped out of the hole beside me.
“About time for us to go, Henry Lee,” he said.
I slid down Sprocket’s side and walked slowly toward my family. Behind me Sprocket’s legs started to churn in place, limbering up for the march ahead of him.
When I hugged him, Papa tried his best to smile, because he loved me.
Sprocket’s drilling mouth opened instantly when I tugged on it. We were halfway to the cattle guard before I made it through Doc’s room and up his ladder.
As we looked back and waved good-bye, Doc said, “Damned if I understand you, Henry Lee. That well’s gonna produce a whole lot of oil, and it’s gonna be the only one around here, ‘cause I don’t think anyone else is crazy enough to try to get into a reservoir that deep. You could stay and be one of the richest men in this state.”
I dropped my hand and turned to face the road. “Money’s fine for them that value it, Doc, but I’ll take the romance and excitement any day.”