All the Land to Hold Us (28 page)

In Mexico, however, isolate amidst a foreign culture and foreign tongue, the oilmen were forced to band together in a small clan on the outskirts of the village in which they were making their latest big play (relentless self-dramatizers, they referred to it as their Last Great Play, at the base of the Sierra Occidentals—though what Richard believed, even as a young man, was that the world was huge, and that there would always be one more great play, and then another, and then another).

Besieged as they were by loneliness, the independent oilmen—a disparate and mongrel mix of Texan financial backers and renegade politicians with part-time connections to the Mexican and United States governments, Cajun roughnecks and north Mississippi and south Alabama roustabouts and South Texas water-well drillers, self-taught engineers who could drill a well with a broomstick and a rubber band—men who could not, would not, be diverted from their goal, regardless of what that goal was—gathered in the evening to drink and talk.

United not just by their goal—cheap shallow oil and gas in a nation not yet bound and hamstrung by environmental restrictions—the den of rapscallions became not unlike a small community, gossiping and begrudging and yet remaining intensely loyal to one another.

They played cards in the evening and went into Rio Hondo, drinking and whoring and commandeering entire restaurants. They flew their little planes through the night sky and across and around the mountains while drunk, flying wherever and whenever they wanted, as if the little buzzing aircraft were nothing more than toy rides at an amusement park.

They flew with powerful spotlights and shone them down onto the desert floor, and into the oak and piñon forests of the mountains, where the beams, bright as comets, sought the reflecting red eyes of foxes and coyotes, deer and little wolves, jackrabbits and javelinas, which the oilmen pursued for sport. Sometimes they poked rifles and shotguns out through the popped-open vented windows, angling to get a shot.

Owls flew beneath them, ghostly in the glare of the spotlights, and the worst of the reprobates fired at the gliding birds below, as if the owls were not hunters like themselves but acted as some kind of shield, providing a net or layer of intervening grace separating the denizens of the desert floor.

They staged mock dogfights too, games of chicken in which their little planes would buzz one another, flying straight-on toward each other before flaring away at the last second—always, the rule was for each fighter to peel to the right. Sometimes, after they had fired into a herd of mule deer, securing what they called camp meat, they would land their planes on the desert, landing whenever and wherever they wanted—a gravel road, or even the floor of the desert itself—and with the rich scent of freshly chopped prickly pear sweet in the air from where the propeller had whacked out a swath upon landing, and the gin scent of crushed juniper beneath the plane's wheels, the oilmen spilled out onto the chalky, dusty desert and ran whooping after their wounded prey, baying like bloodhounds, following the injured animal sometimes by sight though other times by the crimson trail of blood.

They tripped and stumbled in gopher holes and ran over the backs of buzzing rattlesnakes; and often, the wounded bucks got away, leaving the oilmen to come straggling, lost and breath-heaving, back toward the plane. Often they could not find the plane again in the darkness and were forced to spend the night in the desert, bivouacked beneath a scraggly mesquite tree, no longer omnipotent, but as meek and lost as coyote pups, until the harsh flat light of desert morning revealed to them the next day the distant glint of their carriage, and they could stagger back to it, holding their heads with both hands to minimize the jar of each hung-over step.

Other times they found their quarry, sometimes stone dead though occasionally still living, in which case the rougher of the oilmen could be counted on to leap upon the dying animal with pocketknives or stones, putting the animal out of its misery, as they referred to it, before gutting the animal and then dragging it in a wandering backtrack that roughly approximated the blood-painted markings of the flight; and being the youngest, it was usually Richard who was called upon to sledge the carcass back toward the plane.

The brow tines of the deer's antlers would dig into his palm and wrist and forearm as he pulled it across the sand, and although he found the ritual unpleasant, he chose not to perceive that his own life had any other route; or rather, that this path to his other desires was the most feasible as well as the most mythic: and in his desire for the oil and gas just below, there was not much that he would not have done.

 

The men would shove and bend the taut carcass of the deer into the back of the plane as best as they could, smearing the fuselage with blood as they lifted the deer through the small door, so that the plane appeared to be anointed with some biblical waiver of immunity, some endowment of Passover: and crowding themselves back into their little chariots, and ascending back into the sky, the oilmen behaved as if they believed this was the case.

They knew no restraint, possessed no sense of governance, and they seemed to Richard—particularly in those brief moments when they were airborne—to possess a singular power, not just the strength of confidence, but of destiny. It seemed to him that their unending hunger was a source of liberation rather than a captivity; and although he knew better, he followed them, and sometimes even pretended to be one of them. Still falling.

On the return flights to their village, the excesses of the night before would conspire with the bounciness of the little planes and the heat of updrafts to release from some of their membership great expectorations of vomit. The pilots, flying in crude staggered-wing formations like miniature bombers, would call out the various updates of such distress to the passengers on the other planes, gleeful at the turmoil of their lily-livered compatriots, though chagrined, too, at having to experience it themselves; and while providing such reports, they would often key the microphone next to the face of the afflicted as he leaned bent over gagging into whatever makeshift container he had been able to snatch up.

The airwaves amidst all the planes would be amplified with the sound of that retching, the sky would rage with tortured gags, and the pilots ferrying those passengers who'd fallen ill would push the throttle all the way in and make downwind landings with flaps full up, fairly flying the planes into the ground in an effort to be free of the stench as soon as possible; and bailing out of the open doors even as the plane was not yet finished rolling to a stop, they would lie there in the blazing heat, gasping at fresh air, looking as if they had fallen straight from the sky.

Always, after such sojourns, they summoned one of the many slave-wage paisanos they kept at beck and call ready for such tasks, and while the oilmen crawled off to their air-conditioned bunkhouses to sleep the rest of the day away, if their drilling schedule would allow it, the paisanos would scrub away the damage, hosing the planes down, polishing and waxing them in the sun, and cleaning and butchering whatever bounty the great hunters had procured.

Later in the afternoon, the servants—“employees,” the oilmen called them—would build a great fire in the open-pit barbecue ring they had dug in the center of the compound, and by nightfall the glowing mesquite coals would be radiating enough heat to bake to a porcelain glaze the sidewalls of the pit, with the deer being rotated slowly on a spit, basted with chipotle barbecue sauce, one small child applying the sauce with a broom as another child turned the crank of the spit like an organ grinder, both children's faces blistering from the heat, and with the succulent odor of fresh meat-juice spattering onto the coals.

The oilmen ate only meat—no fruit or fiber, no vegetables other than fried onions and fried potatoes, and drank salty margaritas, and smoked cigars and cigarettes, all except for Red Watkins, the driller, who would be dead before any of them.

Unlike the others, who tended to careen through life with wild amplitudes of oversteering followed by violent correction, Red Watkins was neat in almost everything he did. On the rig floor, he made sure that his crew kept every tool in its precise place, so that in the event of a blowout or any other calamity, a roughneck could find the proper tools, even blindfolded. He insisted that his rigs be tended more carefully than would be animals or even men, resting them every seventh day (though he was not religious), and seeing that the filters and oil and other lubricating fluids were changed on every operating engine far in advance of schedule.

“Making hole,” they called the act of drilling, just as “pulling pipe” meant they were coming out of the hole, for any of a number of different reasons, while “setting pipe” or “running casing” meant only one thing, that the oil or gas had been discovered, and the production pipe would be sent down into the hole and cemented, so that it could stay there forever, and would be perforated then, so that the oil and gas could flow out of the earth and into the wellbore and up the hole into the waiting world above, ready to be ignited—the oil industry composed of but perhaps half a hundred such two-word commands, as if even language was an impediment to the yearning to drill farther, drill deeper, make more hole, find more gas.

And even when the roughnecks were not making hole, even when the rig was resting, being hosed and cleaned and cooled for its Sabbath rest, Red Watkins made sure his workers were neither idle nor relaxed. He busied them with painting the pipe stands and the legs of the derrick in bright silver paint that was the same color as their hardhats, and the driller's doghouse cherry-red, and the stucco and adobe temporary office buildings near their encampment snow-white, even if they had just painted these things the week before. It was expensive and wasteful, they went through hundreds of buckets of paint each week, but Red Watkins was determined not to let the men go slack or soft with even a single idle or lazy Sunday afternoon, and so he worked them as if training them for some upcoming physical challenge for which they were not yet adequately prepared.

And once the new-old paint was scraped clean from that one item with its one blemish or imperfection, the roughnecks would begin painting again, working carefully in the heat to apply smooth and cautious strokes, so that there would be no roughness, no striation, only a bright and perfect gloss; and Red Watkins would follow along behind the workers, cruising past in his jeep (itself an open-topped, unpainted, sandblasted wreck of a thing), sipping a cold beer and squinting through his cat-eye glasses, his silver flattop haircut still burnished with the flecks of the same red he had been born with and once possessed in such abundance.

When the job was being done according to his satisfaction, he would smile a sweet smile of pure contentment—and this was a thing the roughnecks strove for, without quite understanding why, just as they sought to avoid the blue curses and tantrums, the scorn and invective Red Watkins would pitch if he discovered the job being done improperly.

But he never made a mistake, and for this he was viewed with awe and fear, if not quite respect. As well, he did the hiring and firing, and so for the roughnecks and roustabouts who populated the little camp (sleeping in their own separate bunkhouse, kept apart from the geologists and engineers), Red Watkins was more powerful than God. He did not deign to serve as the judge or arbiter of disputes, but instead merely sent both or all disaffected parties packing back to the States, so that beneath his command there was no dissent at the surface, only humming, straight-lipped efficiency, even if grievances and complaints writhed below in the men's souls like grubs in wormwood: and together, without exception, they chased the oil.

 

Red Watkins loved to cook. From his travels in the South, he had learned a great many recipes, knew the uses and tastes and sources of spices most of the other men had never even heard of, not just cumin and paprika and chili, but saffron and cardamom, Chinese five-spice and mirin; and he knew the effects of their various combinations.

At first glance his concoctions seemed flavorful, but simple—high fluffy creamy cathead biscuits, fried doves and quail, frog legs, venison tenderloin, roasted peppers stuffed with goat cheese, basil, and, strangely, peanuts, or olives, or the poached cheeks of fish; huge slabs of steak, embedded with nothing more than cloves of garlic and dressed with but a crust of olive oil and rosemary, nothing more.

But there was a perfection, a ferocity of control, both in their preparation and in their cooking, which brought out their best; and he knew how to arrange a menu, pairing those items—meat, potatoes, and a dessert—in a way that seemed to allow the food to transcend itself. He did not cook all the time, but the men looked forward to it when he did, and all that day, their work would be inspired.

He would puree Bing cherries and ancho chilies in his molasses and brown sugar barbecue sauce, would slice coins of ginger in with the mysterious black beans he kept simmering over a campfire in the desert heat for days on end, the beans taking on a vitreous, iridescent sheen of sweetness. He mixed shredded coconut into his cold buttered flaky pie crusts—almost always, just one or two slight and different elements were thrown into the mix, so that the food continued to masquerade as normal or average, only to explode with richness upon the palate—and, as with everything else in their lives, the men could not get enough.

 

Despite Red Watkins's neatness, there was waste, excess, in their temporary village, and at the well sites scattered beyond, across the desert and along the base of the mountains, and—as the searchers discovered more oil and gas—up into the mountains themselves, scabs of bright new roads ascending the canyons like stitches, with plumes of dust rising from the bone-white roads like the drift of smoke from ascending fires.

Because there was no surface water in the area, save for an occasional thin creek, each drilling well needed its own pit dug beside it, broad and shallow, in which the drilling fluid was kept, which was then circulated down into the hole to help lubricate the drill bit, to assist in better cutting and grinding, and to condition the hole to keep its shape.