The Moth

21

The Sunday after that I slept late, as spring means work on a fruit ranch, and I’d had a hard week. Around ten o’clock, when I strolled over from breakfast, church bells were ringing somewhere, and I had a wild notion to sing in the choir because I felt like it, and at last have peace, even if it hadn’t much glory attached to it, or much pay. It had been a week since I’d seen her, and it seemed that maybe I never would again, and that I could forget about her, and everything she’d mixed me up with, and especially Branch. It wasn’t all hope, either. One night, on a trip to Whittier with the light truck, I had taken a sneak to have a peep at the well. It was just like it had been, with the rotary table going around in the middle, a driller camped at the drum, roughnecks standing around, and Dasso off to one side, giving orders. It looked like she didn’t need me, and I might be out. That suited me fine. Because coming home that Monday morning, with her at the wheel saying nothing and the gray damp drifting in from the ocean, I’d had a bad time. It had hit me all in a lump as it hadn’t before, that it was all very well to talk mean to her, and maybe she was cold and maybe she was wild and maybe she was bad, but it took two to cook up the kind of cross we had tried to get away with, and here at last I tumbled that one of them might be me. But a week had gone by, and I’d heard nothing from her, and there was no getting around it, I might be out.

This Sunday morning, though, I had hardly gone in the bunkhouse before there came a rap on a horn, fast, sharp, and nervous. I went out, and there she was, in the car. I walked over and said: “Well stranger, where you been keeping yourself?”

“Jack, I’ve been keeping myself a good many places, and I’m fine, and it’s a beautiful day, but — will you please get in so we can talk as we go and not take the whole day about it?”

“We in a hurry or something?”

“All hell has broken loose.”

“... What kind of hell?”

“At the well! Will you get in, so we can go?”

I got in, and we whizzed to 101, and were leveled off for Long Beach before she went on: “It’s the police, and what they’re threatening to do to us if we don’t take care of the mud. It’s — all over the place and you’ll have to do something about it.”

“All over what place?”

“The street!”

“If I’m to help, say something.”

“When they pump it the cuttings add to volume, and water is added too. So more comes out than goes in. The increase in volume makes an overflow. It has to be pumped somewhere. Generally a sump — a big sink banked up with dirt. But the man my husband made his arrangements with, on the next property, has changed his mind, or needs his sump himself, or something. He says it was on a personal basis with my husband, and now it’s different, or — I don’t know what he says, I haven’t even seen him. But we’re cut off from his land, and we can’t stop drilling and the mud’s running out into the street, and it’s a violation, and the police are there, and—”

“Can’t your husband do something?”

“He isn’t there.”

“Where is he?”

“At the Hilton.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“I don’t know.”

“The last I heard of it, he was going to carry on for you till this well was down. Now he’s at the Hilton and he’s not carrying on. Come on, what’s happened?”

“He’s been drinking.”

“On account of us?”

“I guess so. Jack, you’ll have to—”

“Why can’t Dasso do something?”

“He’s nothing but an employee.”

I wanted to ask what I was, that I could do something, but as I’ve said, I’d got it through my head by then that it took two to make a mess like we had, and if I’d started it, I had to finish it, or try to. We drove on, and pretty soon we were in Long Beach, and I kept trying to picture what the mud was like. And when we turned into the little street that led up Signal Hill, there it was, trickling down the ditch, the same kind of gray, with a greasy shine to it, they have on the upper Eastern Shore of Maryland. And there at the corner, where it was slopping down a grating into a drain, was a cop, poking it with a stick to keep it from caking. And on the other side of him were two firemen with a hose, playing water on it a little further up the hill, to keep it liquid, so it wouldn’t choke the whole ditch. We went up the hill and all up and down my back I could feel this sick feeling, because I had no idea at all what I was going to do about it. At the well, except for cops in a car and the mud running out of a pipe into the ditch, things looked as usual. The driller was at his brake, the rotary table was spinning around, roughnecks were there, and Dasso was off to one side, talking with a police sergeant, who kept looking at his watch.

When he saw us park, Dasso came over. “Well, Hannah, I guess this does it. I’ve told him we daren’t stop that drill, but he says we’ve got ten minutes to get that mud under control, and if we don’t, he’s shutting us down.”

Dasso was looking at her, but he was really talking to me. The officer came over and she pleaded with him and said to close the well down now would practically mean they’d lose hundreds of feet of hole, and he said he realized that. He said he’d given two hours already, and wanted to accommodate her every way he could. But, he said, the law was the law. Strictly speaking, he was obliged to shut her down now, but he didn’t want to be any harder on her than he could help. She asked what he wanted her to do, and he said he didn’t know, but that mud couldn’t indefinitely discharge into the street. Dasso began to whistle something, the cop looked me over, and she was biting her lips, hoping I could do something. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I got out. Off to one side were two tanks that had been brought in to take care of production when the well started. I didn’t know what they were doing there at that time, but I could see they weren’t connected up with anything, and that they were empty. I made a quick flash and flashback with my eye, and it seemed to me if the mud pipe were turned at the elbow joint up near the well, the end of it, where the mud was pouring out, would just about swing over the nearest tank and would even reach the other. I went over, grabbed it in both hands, and pulled. It didn’t move, so I called to the men for a little help. Then it turned and the mud splattered all over me. We walked the end around until it was over my head, where the ground fell away to the tanks. I was in a shower of mud, but gave a last push and then heard it drumming on metal, inside. I turned to Dasso: “That ought to hold you for a while. Soon as one fills, use the other.”

Dasso’s glasses clouded from the venom in his eyes. Then he looked at her. “Yes, Daz, I think that’ll do it.”

“... Is he in charge now?”

“As my representative.”

I turned to the cop: “As I figure it, those tanks will do it till tomorrow, when I’ll have a proper sump put in.”

“Well, not quite till tomorrow, I’d say.”

“Violation’s taken care of for the present, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes sir, only—”

“Then O.K.”

I said it like a grand duke dismissing the barber, and he called to the cop down the hill and to the firemen, then went to the car and drove off, with the other cops. “Jack! Get in! I have to kiss you — before you wash off that mud.”

“Got no time.”

I didn’t need any cop to tell me I was talking much too optimistic about those tanks, that they couldn’t hold us any more than a couple of hours. I’d be back where we started, if I didn’t make a place to dump mud. For a minute I concentrated, trying to remember the name of the guy with the ditcher, but then I had it: Stelliger. I went in the shack they used for an office, looked him up, got him on the phone. I’d hate to tell you what a hundred-percent American mechanic takes for a little Sunday emergency job, but pretty soon here he came, riding his ditcher, with his truck and shovel right behind. I started him in right away, on the hillside just above the drilling rig where the tanks were filling. With the ditcher, I had him make four deep trenches, then start in at right angles and criss-cross them, so one was falling right in on the other. Then with the shovel, I had him begin loading loose dirt on the truck, dumping it at the other end of the property. If I looked around, I knew I could probably find some guy not so far away that was making land in a marsh somewhere, and get rid of my dirt there, but I didn’t have time to look around. I dumped dirt where I could dump it, then the last few loads I piled it up around the hole I was making, and pretty soon it was a regular sump — not a very neat one, but a fair job for a rush order, and big enough to hold all the mud we’d pump for quite a few days. When they were done she drew the check. “I’m sorry, Hannah, at the cost, but—”

“I’m not. I’m glad.”

“But it had to be done, and—”

“Will you get in now?”

“Can we eat?”

“Me, if you want to.”

The night shift had come on by then, and everything seemed to be going fine, so she took me to a drive-in, where we had sandwiches and coffee, and then to a little hotel on Anaheim Boulevard, where I called up Holtz and told him I was leaving. He raised holy hell, as I expected, and offered me more dough, which made me feel proud and sorry at the same time, but there was no help for it, I’d taken over an oil well and had to see it through. As she was lending me her car, I took her home, had another look-in at the well, and finally went to the hotel and turned in. By sunup I was back on the job. Around noon Monday was when the trouble started.

We were running mud into my makeshift sump by then, but I wanted to get things lined up right, so I got ready to make a regular sump, over on the far end of the property next to where the first well had been drilled. So you’ll get it straight, all that happened later, I better tell you how it was laid out. There were two streets, not any bigger than lanes, one going up the hill, the other across it, and her property lay right at the intersection. Over from her, next to the street that ran across the hill, was the cemetery. Up the tilted street, the one that ran over the top of the hill, and separated from her by nothing but a barbed-wire fence, was the little refinery, with its compressor unit in one corner. Out of every well comes oil and gas, and the gas is first trapped, then run into a compressor unit, or absorption plant as a big one is called, and the casing-head gasoline extracted. That’s the high-octane stuff that’s mixed with all good gas like Central American coffee is mixed with ordinary coffee, and for the same reason, to give it pep. The oil goes to a refinery to be cut up into something that will sell, or in the case of a big company with plenty of dough to spend, to a cracking plant, which is the same as a refinery, except they do it under a pressure a refinery doesn’t have, and get all kinds of by-products the refineries miss. This refinery was a teapot, with three stills running gas fires, pipes leading to flash towers, bubble towers, storage tanks, and the rest of the stuff that goes with a job that stays on a half acre of ground. Her land was an acre, with six wells running along one side, by the barbed-wire fence, all with the derricks removed but pumps going, each with a gas trap, which is a little inverted tank about the size of a house hot-water tank, and two gauging tanks which are eight or ten feet high and maybe six feet across, the same kind I used for mud. They’re always set up in pairs, so one is filling while the other is emptying into the pipe line. She had an annual contract with Luxor, or luXor, as they spelled it, and everywhere you looked was some kind of valve with their X on it, connecting with their lines that led to their plant, down the hill maybe a quarter of a mile. Near the refinery, on the other side of a wooden fence was another small independent like herself, named Mendel, the one that had let Branch use his sump, and then changed his mind.

The new well was near Mendel’s fence, starting another row of six. The temporary sump I had made was right alongside of it, and the new sump, the bigger one I was going to build that would hold us a while, was at the lower end of her property. But on something of that size, I couldn’t jackleg the way I had on the little sump, so I told Stelliger to come on Tuesday, and that Monday morning drove up to Long Beach and found a place that had a second-hand transit. Then I came back, borrowed a roughneck off the driller, and began setting stakes for tire grading. I’d been at it maybe an hour when that sixth sense, or my ear maybe, told me something was wrong. I looked over. Dasso was nowhere around, but the guy on the mud pump was at the screen, looking down at the stuff that was flowing back over it, Then the driller noticed something and looked up. Then the pump gave two or three coughs, while the pump man dived for the throttle. He was too late. It blew out with a noise like a cannon. Steam roared all around, the driller reached for his throttle, and everything stopped.

By one o’clock, a trouble-shooter was out there, from a pump company I found in the classified phone book, that I had to find somehow or other, if anything was to be done, as Dasso didn’t show for an hour, on account, he said, of slipping down to the Hilton to see Branch. He acted like that was all right, and while they were putting new parts on, I took a little walk around so I wouldn’t blow my top and pretty soon that brought me to the refinery. On the other side of the fence a guy was standing, watching what was going on. I guess he was around fifty, tall, thin, and leathery-looking, the way they all seemed to be in this business, and he had on the same overalls, canvas cap, and open shirt the rest of them wore. He spoke, and I did, and he told his name, which was Rohrer, and there didn’t seem to be much to do but tell mine, which I did. He said he figured I was the new super on Seven-Star, which was the first I knew we had a name, and I said I was. He kept looking at me, like he was trying to size me up, then said something that sounded like some kind of a feeler: “Always had a friendly place in my heart for Seven-Star. Great little company, not too well handled, if I may say so.”

“... How do you mean, Mr. Rohrer?”

“Well, they’ve made their deal, or I hear they have, with Luxor, and it’s none of my business and year after year they pass me by. But between you and me and that gatepost over there, a little refinery can often switch things around, these days especially, in a way the big company can’t. Or shall we say — won’t?”

He winked and I asked him if he ran the refinery and he said he did: “All by myself most of the time. Hits people funny, on an oil plant, that you don’t need a whole gang running around and eating lunch when the whistle blows at noon. They forget it all works on valves and gauges and shut-offs, and one man, if he knows what he’s doing, can handle it just as good as twenty.”

“If he knows what he’s doing.”

“... I guess you’re kind of new here.”

“Well — just a little.”

“As we all are — once.”

He studied the gang for a while, then said: “Little trouble, I see, with your pump.”

“Blew a cylinder head on me.”

“Unusual, nowadays... Used to be, a pump would blow out almost any time, but not now, the way they get corings whenever they want, and can tell what they’ve got. Mr. Dillon, just from what I know of the formation they’re into down there, I’d say that mud needs conditioning. There’s a lot of material over there, piled up over there in bags, but I haven’t seen one pound of it dumped in all morning.” Then, as I could feel my face get hot, on account of never having heard of weight material, he went on: “You’re new here, as we’ve said, and you probably don’t know it’s up to the drilling foreman to watch what you’re in, from the corings, and keep the mud at proper consistency, to control its viscosity and weight as required, and it has to be him that’s responsible. And — speaking of matters of that kind, I’d say yesterday was a very funny time to get caught short of a mud sump, and still funnier time with nobody around to see where the stuff was running, for somebody accidentally on purpose to put in a call for an officer.”

“... What are you getting at, Mr. Rohrer?”

“I told you I felt friendly?”

“You sure did.”

“Keep your eyes open, boy.”

I went back to the pump, and they had it going again. The guy from the pump company checked two or three things, then said to me: “Mister, it’s all the same to us, and fixing pumps is our business. Just the same, unless you want to have this trouble again and practically all the time, if I was you I’d keep an eye on the consistency of that mud.”

I thanked him, watched how the roughnecks kind of looked at each other, and at Dasso, who stood there shaking his head. I let it jell on that basis, and then, kind of easy, without getting excited, I said to him: “Dasso, I think he means you.”

“Means — who did you say?”

“Were you watching it?”

“Well — I wasn’t here, Jack. I—”

“Where were you?”

“I told you. I was at the Hilton. Mr. Branch—”

“Nobody came to me for leave to go to the Hilton. Myself, I was putting down stakes. I can’t build sumps, watch the condition of mud, and do eighteen other things you’re supposed to do. Now if you want to stay on here, I got to know if you’re where you’re supposed to be, accepting your responsibility, or over to the Hilton cocktail bar, lolligagging all over the place on things I’m not even informed about. Now which is it going to be?”

“O.K., but if a goddam pump man can’t—”

“He doesn’t issue materials.”

He stood blinking at me, and he wasn’t kidded: he knew I didn’t know. But when I’d stood up for my pump engineer, that put the men on my side, and for that round he had to go along. The trouble-shooters left, he pulled down two bags of Aquajel to dump in the tank. But we’d lost plenty of time.

“Hannah, it’s just plain sabotage, and the guy is out to throw a monkey wrench into us every way there is, and as often as he can get away with it. So far as I can see, and from the little that Rohrer said, it’s him alone and doesn’t involve the rest of them. I mean, it may have, as of yesterday. The three drillers were on the Bakersfield jobs, and they were friends of your husband’s, or anyhow had worked for him. The rest, the boiler man and the pump man, are local, and I don’t think they care, one way or the other. Whatever they may think of me coming in, they take it like it comes. But Dasso means trouble. And if you’ll take a tip from me you’ll do one of three things. You’ll fire me, and at least make some kind of a play to get going again with your husband. With me out of the way, Dasso can run it fine, and will, whether Branch sobers up or not. Or, you’ll fire Dasso and let me muddle through, which I don’t recommend, but I’ll do my best. Or, you’ll fire us both and let a drilling company take over, which considering everything, is what I think you should do. But you’re just piling up trouble for yourself if you let things go on as they’re going now.”

“We’re keeping him, and you’re going on.”

“But look what it’s costing you.”

“Nothing like what it’ll cost to fire him.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“There’s the bank end of it, for one thing.”

“You mean — on the loan?”

“If we have a little trouble now and then, over a sump or a pump or something of the sort, that’s nothing. They all have trouble, and nobody thinks a thing of it. But when something human comes up, what they call a moral risk, God help us! They’ll call for immediate amortization, for more security, maybe liens on the filling stations, I don’t know what. Because they know that once I make any major changes, everything stops, and within twenty-four hours it’s practically a new deal. Whatever we do, we don’t joggle it. So Dasso’s a rat. He’ll pull stuff, and it’ll set us crazy, and it’ll cost. But at least the hole is going down, we’ve got our crews, we’re a going concern. The other way, we’re just an abandoned rig. And besides—”

“Yeah? What else?”

“I’d like to see you lick him.”

“What is this, entertainment?”

I’d gone over to her house, and she was lying on the sofa in the living room, a red corduroy dressing gown folded around her and a magazine in her lap. She stretched now, like a cat, and beckoned me over to her. I said to hell with that, I had too much on my mind. She nodded, watched me a while, where I was walking around, and said: “I don’t care what it costs. If it breaks me I don’t care. I’ve been a piker long enough. You’re going to lick him, and down to the last dime I’ll back you up.”

So we kept him, and I settled down to one damned thing after another that cost fifty dollars an hour to fix, shop charges extra. I learned the difference between a twist-off and a wobble-off, and maybe you don’t think that’s something. A twist-off is where they’ve got too much pressure on the bit, the table gives more twist than the pipe can stand, and she pops. A wobble-off is where they’ve got too little pressure on the bit, it gets to spinning faster than the pipe, and she pops. Either way it’s a fishing job, and they lose an hour or more even with the special tools they’ve got, and by the time they’ve caught their fish and rearranged their drill pipe a lot of time is lost before they’re in formation again. There’s plenty of that grief on any well, but a lot depends on the drills they use, with some suited to one formation and others to another, and I could tell from the way the drillers were acting they didn’t think much of Dasso’s ideas on the subject. So that meant I had to have separate huddles with them, and they co-operated, but it all took time, especially as I hated to tip how little I knew. And as soon as I’d licked him on that angle he crossed me on the cement. On an oil well, you’ve got one continuous visitor you don’t hear so much about outside the business. He’s the inspector from the state department of oil and gas, because you’re regulated to the last inch, on account of the way one loused-up job can ruin a lot of surrounding wells, as happened in Mexico, where the richest field in the whole gulf area was drowned in salt water so it’ll never run more than forty per cent of what might have been its capacity.

What they run you ragged about is cementing casing at the right points, and in fact cement is to oil what the gin was to cotton or wing camber to airplanes, something that took them out from behind an eight ball that had had them completely stymied. Because in mountain fields, fresh water flooded the wells long before they hit oil, and in coastal fields salt water, and in coastal-tidal, which pretty well covers California, both. And not only could water flood any well that was drilling, but a wide area as well, so it might easily involve a whole lease, and bankrupt the operator. So in 1903, when the industry had hardly begun, they figured a way to shut it off. They pumped cement down through the casing, with enough pressure back of it to force it up and around, between the pipe and the formation. It worked. It shut off everything, inside and outside, solid as a rock; inside the pipe they drilled the cement out, and went on down to the oil with a nice clean hole that wouldn’t flow oil ruined by salt water when they got to the surface with it. That was the beginning of oil in a big way, and in a few years they made it law most places that a man had to shut off his water with cement whether he wanted to or not. Nowadays they pump through a plug, as they call it, a block of concrete with valves in it made of plastic, so when they’re set with their cement they just drill right through their plug and go on with their hole.

But when the corings began showing water sand, and Mr. Beal, our state man, told me to set my cement, I’d never heard of cement, and once more I had to get busy with the classified phone book and tell a cement outfit to be on deck in the morning. But when I saw Hannah that night she began to roar. “Cement? Why, that contract was let months ago!”

“You know who with, by any chance?”

“But of course! With Acme!”

“Then I’ll ring them up, and tell them to stand by for a call. And call up this other outfit and say I’m sorry, but I don’t know a cement contract from a left-handed monkey wrench, and they needn’t come.”

“Didn’t Dasso tell you?”

“What do you think?”

“You mean he just sat there and let you talk?”

“He’s your sitter, not mine.”

When I finally did pop Dasso on the chin and tell him to get out of there it made no sense, as it was the one time he wasn’t guilty of anything. We were getting deep by that time. Around four thousand, when gas began coming up through the mud, Beal said get connected up with the blowout preventer, so of course that meant nothing to me, but the driller swung his hook out for something that had been on the ground ever since I’d been there, and that looked like a cross between a bell buoy and a slide trombone. He and Dasso and the roughnecks swung it up in the air and over the casing, and for the better part of an hour they were bolting it in place. Then we got going again. Pretty soon we began getting oil, and that was a heartbreak, because Mr. Beal ordered continuous coring, so we’d have a record of all formation penetrated, else we’d have to set and cement more casing. The reason for that was the terms of our permit. From the first pool, our six other wells were taking all we were entitled to, and if we were to put another well down, it had to go further and find oil deeper down. Other wells in the field were tapping that second zone, but whether it extended under our property nobody could be sure, so it came under the head of new development. Everybody knew how it was, so nobody had much to say, and then the driller looked around and wanted to know where were the core heads. There weren’t any. With that it seemed to me I’d had about all I could take. I didn’t really swing on Dasso. My fist seemed to do it, and he hit the dirt and sat blinking at me. Then he took off his glasses and looked. Then I remembered you weren’t supposed to hit a guy with glasses. Then I felt like a heel and helped him up and handed him his hat. Then I went over to the shack and wrote his time. Then I went back and rang up the service company that kept our stuff in shape, and they said Mr. Dasso had already phoned, and the truck was on its way over with the core heads. So of course that made me feel great. Instead of going over to the crew, who had heard me at the phone, I went over to the wire fence to get my face set again. Rohrer was there, and I knew he had seen it. “Well, kid, I think things’ll be better now.”

“That I wonder about.”

“It was due, and overdue, and your gang’ll respect you for it.”

“They might, if it didn’t so happen that when I rang the service shop it turned out Dasso had already done what I fired him for not doing, and I never knew any gang yet that bought it when somebody got the wrong end of the stick.”

“Did he tell you what he’d done? Was he tongue-tied that he couldn’t say it? Did he ever tell you what he was doing, or give you any report you didn’t crowbar out of him? Don’t you worry about that gang. They know if it wasn’t this it had to be something else, and it didn’t make much difference what, or if all the fine points were right or not. He had it coming. You’ll get along better.”

We got along so much better it was no comparison, and I began telling myself I’d learned more about oil than I’d realized. Stuff that we needed began coming on time, instead of three hours late like when Dasso had charge, the fishing was cut to half what it had been, and counting all cementing, setting of new casing, and everything else we had to do, we were making half again as good time. Hannah was dancing all over her living room whenever I saw her, and wanted to open champagne for me. I said let me do my work. At fifty five hundred feet we began to get gas, and I got so nervous I hardly left the place, but slept on the desk that was in the shack, and got up every hour or two, to keep track of what was going on. Pretty soon our corings came up with kind of a combined smell of coal tar, crackcase drainings, and low tide on a mud flat, a stink you could smell ten feet, that was prettier than anything Chanel ever put out. It meant oil, and this time we could keep it, with no need to go to a deeper level. Everything had that feeling in the air. The state man said take it easy, and we slowed to half speed. Scouts, supers, and engineers began dropping around from other wells, so at any time there’d be eight or a dozen of them standing around, waiting. The super from Luxor dropped over, and we picked out where the new gauging tanks would be put: right over from the head of our double row of six, the first of a new double row of six, as we hoped, with the foundations all in line. I got out my transit and set stakes for the concrete. I ordered a Christmas tree.

One night around eleven I went to the Golden Glow, a cocktail bar that caters to night shifts. Not many were in there at that hour, so I drank my coffee, dropped a nickel for a tune on the juke box, and rested. Then, in a booth, I noticed somebody, and when he turned his head I saw it was Dasso. It threw me out, because it still bothered me, the way I had clipped him. Jake served him something, and some time went by, but still he sat there. After a while I went over. I said hello and he said hello but kept looking out the window. I said I was sorry I’d hit him, that I’d been under a strain. He kept looking back and forth, first at me, then out the window, and didn’t seem to hear me. I lifted up a prayer I should be kept from hitting him again, and went back to my table. I paid and went out. I began to cuss and get hot under the collar and took a walk down the hill. I came back.

Then it began creeping in on me there was something funny about it. He hadn’t sneered at me, or cracked mean, or done anything. He just hadn’t heard me. Then it came back to me, the way he’d kept looking out the window, and the long time he’d been there, talking with Jake, eating his sandwich, doing all kinds of things he didn’t generally do, because if ever there was a wolf-it-down-and-get-out kind of guy, it was he. Then something shot through me: He was waiting for something, and that window faced right on our well. Next thing I knew I was running. I’d shamble three or four steps up the hill, then slow to a walk, then run again, and all the time there was growing on me some hunch of something about pop. I got in sight of our well, but already I was too late. Dead ahead of me the string of lights began to shake. Then a guy yelled. Then, far up on the rig, something began to move down, on a slant. I saw it was the derrick man on the fourable floor, sliding down the safety line. Then here it came. Brother, if you ever saw six thousand feet of drill pipe go up in the air and then come down and wrap itself around an acre of ground like a plate of spaghetti, you won’t forget it in a hurry. And when on top of that, the friction of drill pipe against casing sets what’s coming out of the ground on fire, you’ll hardly know which scared you worst, the roar of that flame, the thunder of stuff coming down all around you, the screams of your crew, or the way their white hats looked like some kind of horrible bugs, getting out of the way before the world came to an end.

I slammed face first in the mud, and screamed and prayed like the rest, and then all of a sudden I didn’t even do that, because something banged on my head, and that was the last I knew for a while.