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.