“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.
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?”