The Moth

22

I didn’t come to all at once, as it was part of the crown block that hit me, a pulley shackle I found a couple of days later, and I took the count from loss of blood as much as concussion. But the whole time I was under, the roar of the fire was in my ears and its glare in my eyes, and I think they’d have reached me in hell. After a while there was yelling, and I was being rolled, then carried on a stretcher. Next thing I knew, I was waked up by water in my face, but the yelling was still going on, and the roar and glare were still there. I began to look around, and saw I was in the Golden Glow, stretched out on the bar. The water I couldn’t figure out. Then I saw they’d jammed a garden hose on the spigot over the sink, and run it out of the window to keep spraying the building, so it wouldn’t catch fire from the heat. But it was just a jam-on connection, and there was a leak that spouted over me. I moved, and was clear. Then I heard the flap of canvas outside, and footsteps on the roof, where they were pulling a tarpaulin over one whole side of the building, so they could wet that and be safe. That cut off the glare, but nothing cut off the roar. I was out for a while after that, and then a fellow with a white coat was shining a light in my eyes and looking at my head, and I heard him cluck, like what he saw was bad. Then he shot something in my arm and went. I wanted to crawl outside and run, but I couldn’t move. I don’t remember anything of the ambulance backing up or the orderlies carrying me out or the trip to the hospital or going up to the operating room, where they put the stitches in. When I did come to it was all at once, in what I could see was a hospital room, with the roar fainter, like it was some distance away, but the glare still bright enough to read by. My head hurt, my face twitched, and my belly fluttered. When I turned my head I could see somebody at the window. It was Hannah. She came over and patted my face, but all the time she was looking outside, and in a minute she went back to the window. “Can you see it, Jack?”

“No, thank God.”

“It’s just horrible. And it frightens me to the inside of my bones. It — ruins me, I’ve no illusions about that. And yet — it fascinates me... What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something must have gone wrong.”

“Ask Dasso.”

“... What’s he got to do with it?”

“He was up there, waiting for it. In the Golden Glow, parked at the window, all but holding a stop watch.”

It seemed to me I had to get over by the well and do something, I didn’t know what, but terribly important. Pretty soon I jumped out of bed, and went staggering to the closet for my clothes. “Jack! You can’t go out! You’re in no condition to! And besides your clothes were sent out to be washed — they were filthy, from blood! There’s nothing there but your suit.”

Off in the hall I heard a buzzer, where she was calling a nurse, and in a minute one came. All I had on was a hospital shirt, but fat chance that stopped me. If coat, pants and shoes were what I had to wear, I might as well be getting them on.

Come hell or high water, I was due on the hill, and meant to get there.

The taxi man couldn’t get within two blocks of it on account of the crowd, or at least he said it was the crowd. If you ask me he was plain scared, and I didn’t blame him. What was coming out of that hill was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was shooting straight up in the air, a red plume in the night, just like one of those torches you see at the end of a pipe, burning gas off the wells in Texas, except instead of being three or four feet high, this was three or four hundred. It swung this way and that, sometimes licking down to the ground, when there’d be yells and screams, and all the time sending off thick clouds of smoke that were black one second, blood red the next. To one side, leaning at an angle, was what was left of the derrick, with girders curling up like bacon on the griddle, and dropping off with a clatter. On the other side, by what would have been Mendel’s fence if it hadn’t burned to a row of charred string pieces, was the pile of drill pipe, all twisted up like a mile-long snake, and part of it showing red hot. Later in the day the firemen dragged it off with a falls they rigged, and cut it up with a torch. Now, though, they were letting it lie, and concentrating on the oil that was plopping in gushes out of the well, where the pressure would force it to the top, but didn’t quite carry it up in the air. It was running down the hill with flames all over it, where it was burning, and from that, and the heat, came the danger to people standing around, and other property, that it would catch fire. So the firemen on the three foam generators were smothering it with foam. The guys on the engines were drenching everything with water within two hundred yards: Mendel’s stuff, the refinery, the Golden Glow, the grocery store next to it, the garage next to that, the filling station on the corner, and even the trees in the cemetery and derricks on beyond. Other firemen had pushed up the road, within maybe fifty feet of the well, and were racing back and forth with cans full of dirt. I couldn’t tell what the idea was, at first, but then I saw they were making a trough, kind of a ditch on our land, that they could divert the burning oil into, and run it into the big sump I had made, below the refinery. In a few minutes they had their bank of dirt ready, and then the oil flames began sliding toward the sump, which was billowing with foam before even the oil slid into it. The foam put the flames out.

I’d been crouched with about forty other people, two or three hundred yards away, down the hill. I heard somebody call. When I turned, she was there, at the wheel of her car, and then I remembered seeing some car following the taxi. She said the hospital doctor had given strict orders I was to come back, but I paid no attention. I still had this idea there was something I had to do, and looking back at it now, I can understand how Caruso, when he got caught in the San Francisco fire in 1906, came running out of his hotel with a signed picture of Theodore Roosevelt clutched to his chest. It maybe didn’t look like much, but probably hit Enrico as the most important thing in the world, something he had to give his life for, if necessary. If from now on I acted like a bit of a fool, you might remember there’s something about fire that affects you that way. All of a sudden it came to me what this was that I had to do. Sliding around on my belly, trying to work my way closer, I’d come to three of my roughnecks who were fried up pretty good by the look of their faces, but weren’t paying any attention to themselves, on account of trying to do something for Funk, the driller that was on duty when she went up, who was under a blanket and weeping and bawling like some kid. And up close there, through the smoke I could see our shack, and every piece of paper we owned, our payroll cash, every contract, every permit, as well as our safe, was in it. It was on fire. The firemen would douse it with a hose, it would steam, the flames would go out, and then here they were again, just like somebody had lit them with a match. And it seemed to me I had to save it. I stood up in front of Funk and the three roughnecks. “O.K., men, let’s get our shack.”

“God, Mr. Dillon, do we have to do that?”

That was Funk. He sounded like some hysterical girl. “You want your money, Funk? You want to get paid?”

“Yeah, but can’t them firemen—”

“What’s the matter, you afraid? You want your money, that’s where the money is, and I don’t know how to pay it to you without first we go get it.”

They looked at me, the shack, and each other, and how much they wanted of it was nothing at all. But when I led on they followed. We slid downhill, where it was cooler, and at least that made them feel a little better. Then, up the road beside the cemetery, we began moving toward the fire again, and they began to whimper. I kept leading on. Every few steps we’d hit the dirt, face first, and crawl.

Then at our feet, running along the side of the road, I saw a length of hose. Pointing toward the shack, not ten feet away from me, was the nozzle. And then I knew if I could only get up there with it, get the door open and knock a hole in the floor, I could shove that nozzle through somehow and wrap it around the joist that ran under the doorsill. Then we could use the hose as a hawser, to pull the shack out on the road. It didn’t make sense, but nothing did, that night.

I yelled to Funk and the roughnecks to hold everything, grabbed the hose and began dragging it toward the shack. It was awful heavy that way, and the best I could do was two or three feet at a time, jerk, rest, then jerk again. But then once the fire licked close and I yelled from the pain of the heat, even while I was diving for the ground. It veered off, but after that it was too hot for anybody. I had to have something to shield me, and a few feet away, at the upper end of the Luxor property, I saw one of those signs that read “Keep Right” on one side and “Closed, Please Use Other Entrance” on the other. It was nothing but a board, maybe two feet wide and three feet high, but it had feet, so I could shove it ahead of me and hide behind it. I went and got it, put it between me and the fire, then under cover of it I pulled my hose two or three more feet, then pushed the board three or four feet, then pulled up my hose, and so on. Once, from up the hill, there was a yell, and I’d just squeezed myself behind it when here came the flame, licking all around me, and so hot I thought I’d go crazy. But water came too, where the firemen up the street had seen me and given me protection with their hose, even though they didn’t know what in the name of God I was up to. At last I got near the shack, so it was between me and the fire, and had a little real protection. The door was locked, but I threw my weight on it and it broke. I reached my hand inside, and sure enough there was the hatchet I had used to sharpen stakes. I came down with it on the floor, and pretty soon I had one board loose, then another. I pulled up the nozzle, pulled it through and jammed it, so it was caught. I went racing back to Funk and the men. “O.K., boys, come on with it — heave!”

We heaved, and it was nothing but an eight-by-six shack any wind could have blown over, but it could have been the Woolworth Building for all we were able to move it. I began to scream, but Funk put his hand on my arm and I looked. A car was backing up. It stopped, and Funk bent the hose over the rear bumper and said something. It ran ahead two or three feet, then stopped as the hose tightened. Then the rear wheels spun and you could smell rubber. Then it got traction and the shack began to move. It came slow at first, but once it was over the ditch it came sliding almost as fast as a man could run, right down the middle of the road after the car, with me and Funk and the gang running with it and yelling, and people cheering from behind the ropes in the block below. Then the joist pulled out and what had been a little building with door and windows and a roof just collapsed into a pile of kindling. A woman got out of the car and opened the luggage carrier. The gang got the safe aboard, then the filing cases, transit, hatchet, and junk. Next thing I knew I was in the car, and then I saw Hannah was driving. “Well, Jack, are you satisfied?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Pretty silly, you know.”

“Couldn’t let the stuff burn though.”

“What stuff? It would have been replaceable, except for the cash, and even that’s in the safe — a guaranteed fireproof model, and it ought to be, as it cost enough. But you’re not replaceable.”

“Gee, that’s tough.”

“Will you go to the hospital now?”

“I won’t go anywhere.”

“Look at yourself in that mirror.”

“What for?”

“You’re burned. Badly.”

“O.K.”

But it was daylight and I caught sight of the car. It looked like smallpox had hit it, with the paint raised up in blisters all over, and the foundation red bleeding through in big ugly blotches. I began to get sick thinking what I must look like, and all the time she was unloading the stuff in a filling station my stomach kept fluttering and clutching. All around were star clusters, and the trademark “Seven-Star,” which was the name of the gas she sold, the first I’d seen of it. But I wasn’t paying any attention. My face and hands had started to feel hot, and all of a sudden I was begging her to get me to a hospital, quick, for fear I’d claw all the skin off before they could fix it.

I stayed in the hospital that week and the next. In addition to the bandage on my head, that they kept changing, there were bandages on my hands and neck, and all over my face, except for three slits over my eyes, nose, and mouth. In spite of all they had smeared on, I itched like I’d been put down in quicklime, and about every hour a new doctor was there, saying the head wasn’t so bad, in spite of a pretty deep cut, but the burns, which I had inflicted on myself, were critical. Between doctors were Chief Wolfson, of the fire department, Mr. Bland, the city attorney, and Mr. Slemp, head of the department of oil and gas. They asked me plenty, but they all came back to the blowout preventer, and I thought I’d go nuts tracing it back and forth, when I came on the job, whether I’d inspected the thing before I had it attached, how many wells it had been used on before, and so on. About the second day Chief Wolfson let the cat out of the bag. They’d got a hook on it after they dragged the pipe out of the way, pulled it out, taken it over to fire station No. 1 and gone into it, taking pictures, and making a record of every nut, bolt, screw, and part. And the rubber gasket inside, that forms part of the packing that takes care of pressure, was rotten. I’d been expecting something like that, so what I said was I hadn’t known about it, but would rather put off talking until the hypos had worn off, and my mind was clearer. But Wolfson was no sooner out of the door than she jumped up, where she’d been sitting there listening, and blew off. “So that’s what Dasso was waiting for!”

“Nice guy, Dasso.”

“Then at last, Jack, we’ve got him.”

“What for?”

“Putting on a faulty blowout preventer.”

“I thought I did that.”

“But if you didn’t know about it—”

“If not, why not?”

“You mean you’re just going to do nothing?”

“What would you do, for instance?”

“Why — report him!”

“Who to?”

“The city. Of course.”

“O.K. But when he sues for that million-dollar slander, million-dollar defamation of character, and million-dollar personal injuries, caused by your super having the bad judgment to bust him in the kisser, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“When he—”

“Unfortunately, it’s what you can prove.”

In addition to the visits, there were the newspapers, with pictures. I never saw so many columns given over to smoke and water and flames in my life, or so many pictures of a guy in charge of a job. They ran four or five they took in the hospital, when the reporters showed up for interviews, and then the A.P. must have picked it up, so the East got busy. Then there were pictures of me passing, kicking, tackling, and everything there was. But it really got good when they dug up Little Lord Fauntleroy, with the blond curls over my collar and the angel-of-sweetness look in my eye. In between that they had editorials that practically said I ought to be run out of town. And every night, as soon as the street noises died off, would come the roar, like they’d brought Niagara Falls in to spend the summer. And once it got dark, the glare never stopped. After a while it began to give me the hibby-jibbies. I mean, when a fire started they were supposed to get it out, weren’t they? But nothing that was said, by the state man or the fire people or the city attorney, sounded like they had it out or nearly out. They kept getting tighter in the lips and rougher in the talk.

Around the end of the second week, on a Tuesday, I still had the bandage on my head, but it was gone from my face and hands, and though I couldn’t shave and looked like something in the Monday line-up, at least I had on clothes she had brought me from the hotel, and was sitting up. Then sometime before lunch the phone rang and she took the call and from the quick way she said I’d been taken up on the roof, I knew it was bad. Then little by little as she talked I got it that it was Mr. White, of the bank, talking for other operators in the field, and that he wanted to bring them over to talk to me. When she said no, he waned her to bring me to a meeting in the Luxor offices at two o’clock, but she said the doctors wouldn’t permit it. There was more talk, something about his seeing her that evening. She still said no, and after a while hung up. Then: “I don’t know what it is, Jack, but he’s got that or else sound in his voice, and you mustn’t under any circumstances talk to him until I can find out what it’s about. He holds paper from them all. They’re in a spot. The fire department has closed a lot of them down, wells and all, Luxor’s main cracking plant hasn’t run a barrel in two weeks, everything’s at a standstill, and something has to be done — or so he says. The worst of it is the field. Every bit of that gas that’s burning is saleable, eventually, to the gas company, if it stays underground, but when it blows off that way, it’s a dead waste. To say nothing of the oil.”

“What’s to be done?”

“... Could you take a ride?”

So she lent me the keys to her car and I went off for a ride, so as not to be there in case he came. I headed south, and there it was, still doing business at the same old stand, pouring flame and smoke right into the sky and spreading a pall over the city that made the sun look like some kind of a thin red dime. I passed the hill, and off to my left could see firemen and ropes, where they had it blocked off. When I got to the traffic circle I couldn’t hear it, and when I leveled off toward Seal Beach I couldn’t even see it, or the smoke. It was a beautiful sunshiny day and for a few minutes it was like being let out of jail to be able to leave it behind, feel like myself once more, and just roll, even if it was in a car that looked like it had smallpox from what the heat had done to it. But then, around Huntington Beach I began to think about it again, and I guess if you left a tiger in the front parlor, you’d run away if you could, but there’d be a limit to how far you could go, or how much you could drop him out of your mind. Pretty soon I turned around, and in almost no time I could see it, a red torch shining against the blue.

I parked at the ropes, got out, and went through. A fireman stopped me, but when I said who I was he let me pass. I walked to the bottom of the hill and circled around, and all the time I stared at it, and listened to it, and inhaled it, where the heavy greasy smoke would lick down. And once more, I could feel myself get a little wild, as I beat against the question: Why did this thing, this crazy, roaring thing out of a nightmare worse than any nightmare I ever had, have to happen to me? Then I began getting a little weak, and edged around, hoping to get to the Golden Glow and get something to eat. That brought me to the top of the hill, and below me was spread a deserted forest of silver derricks and towers and tanks, with not a wheel, not a walking beam, not a rotary table moving, with no fire showing under a still, and no human being in sight, except for kids staring through the ropes and a few firemen running a water pumper and a foam generator, just in case. Everywhere, on the refinery, on Mendel’s property, on the upper end of Luxor, on the stores and cafes and filling stations, were sheets of asbestos, held on by wires, or nailed to roofs with little tabs to keep it from tearing. The firemen kept one hose going, so everything, once every ten minutes maybe, got a good wetting.

I tried the door of the Golden Glow and it opened and Jake stared at me ten seconds before he knew me. He asked how I was, and I told him, and he said they’d had a time around there, yes, sir, quite a time. But he wasn’t too friendly, and when he had my order, for beer and coffee and sandwiches, he went off. Over near the bar were three firemen having lunch and talking about baseball, which had just started again. My stuff came and I ate and felt a little better, then felt somebody looking at me. I looked up and it was Rohrer, in another booth. He finished his coffee and came over and looked, like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Is that you, Mr. Dillon?”

“Yeah. Little worse for wear, but it’s me.”

“They sure fixed you up.”

“Fire out there. I went too near it.”

“I saw you. They gave you a hand, as I recall.”

“They should have waited. In the hospital I was better.”

“That I can believe.”

He caught me up on what had happened, but so far as real stuff went, there wasn’t much to tell. Soon as they got first things under control, like the oil and near-by property, the firemen had gone to work on the fire itself from the well. “Getting apparatus near it was the tough part, but working behind shields and throwing up barricades of one kind or I another, they got a concentration of water lines in there, four or five on each side, with fog nozzles on them. That took them a couple of days, but then they let go with them, driving right into the flame, and got wonderful results. Right away, sprayed fine like that, the water turned to fog, and then in a few minutes to steam, or pure vapor, all around that fire, cutting it off from oxygen, choking it. It was a beautiful thing to see, as the fog crept up and up, and above that they began hitting it with regular streams, and they began turning to fog, so for a minute or two, except away up in the air, there was hardly any flame, nothing but black smoke billowing all around, which was the real sign, because of course flame is nothing but incandescent smoke anyway, where the carbon particles are heated white hot, and when it goes black, it’s cooling. A big crowd was out there, and you could hear the mutter go around, and yells as boys hollered to other boys to come look, so you had that feeling, it’s been licked, they’ve got it. Then I heard one of the firemen begin to yell cusswords at the top of his lungs, and here it came, just a little puff of wind that didn’t last five minutes. But it tore a hole in the fog, and the fire leaped back to the hole, with a roar like nothing you ever heard, just like when you light a gas log in the parlor, you know how it does? Just leaps around, purring like a cat purrs, but this was more like a herd of elephants purring. Then they had to start all over again, and I guess they tried it a dozen times. But they never got a real fog again, and I guess you can’t blame them, when they kept it up for three days with no luck, just to quit. A dozen of them were in the hospital with burns and all kind of injuries by that time, and they’re human too.”

He told about how he’d had to drain his own tanks and whatever he had, but the battalion chief had been decent to him, letting him run his stuff into my sump, so he could burn the gasoline a little bit at a time, while they foamed everything but one corner. “But — we’re standing still. Not doing a thing. Does that mean anything to you, Mr. Dillon?”

“No more than the rest of it. Fact of the matter, I’ve reached the point where one more thing closed down is one more thing, that’s all.”

“A wonderful time to buy a refinery.”

“A—? For who to buy?”

“You, maybe.”

“How would I buy?”

“You could get the money.”

“Off those trees that got burned up?”

“Off something else that’s burned up.”

“I don’t get you.”

“That dame would let you have it, Mr. Dillon.”

“... Has she got it?”

“She could have.”

“I doubt if she’s got enough.”

“What you got to go on? To doubt on?”

“She’s hard hit too, you know.”

“Kid, I said it’s a wonderful time to buy a refinery. Have I got to say more? Listen, my owners are up against it. They’re doing no business and they got to do business or they’re sunk. I mean they owe money. I mean there’s a certain community builder of this locality, that might answer to the name of White if somebody happened to look him up, that’s accommodated them to the tune of quite a few thousand bucks, and he’s been reasonable, I’ll say that for him. Him and his bank. But the more reasonable they were, the worse it is now. I mean, the result of all that reasonableness has been that nothing has really been paid off since 1929. We got notes, they all got notes, that have just dangled, with a little chopped off them now and then. But at least we were working. But now that goddam thing is running wild, it’s burning and nobody knows when it’s going to stop. These gassers, they go on for months sometimes before they shoot ’em or tap ’em or they cave in or whatever makes ’em quit. I mean, they’re really little volcanoes all by themselves, and nobody knows what’s going to happen, or when. Boy, they’re scared, and White’s no help. He’s scared too, and he’s putting on the heat. They need dough, and any reasonable amount—! How do you know she can’t afford it? I’m telling you, it’s a wonderful time to buy a refinery!”

It was the first it had entered my mind, the idea that if you had a hole in the ground that was running wild and on fire at the same time, there might be a way to make something out of it. Later on, I polished that idea up, and as I’ve told you, hit the jackpot. But not that day, even to rise one inch to the bait. He shook his head and said: “Kid, I like you, I see things in you only an old-timer would have eyes for, and I’ve felt it, it’s in the cards you should get this teapot I work for. With that property of yours — assuming those wells are not injured and I don’t think they are — and this little pop-goes-the-weasel I’ve got, we could have the snuggest little business around here. And you don’t even hear me, you don’t even know what I mean.”

After a while he looked up and I swear he turned green. He put his hand on my arm, then was standing beside me laying a buck on his check. He said: “You don’t mind, kid, if I duck? If I beat it the back way? It’s better they not find me here! I mean, it’s better you and I not be seen talking together!”

With that he was gone. Outside, there were voices, and then, through the window, coming into the place I saw White, Branch, Dasso, and four or five of the guys who had been at the house that first Saturday afternoon, when I was a gentleman and a scholar and a good judge of liquor, besides being an all-American back and a bass singer.