All the Land to Hold Us (29 page)

The drilling mud—with tiny flecks of the gnawed-out stone floating in suspension—was then circulated back out of the hole. The drill cuttings were strained out of the fluid and examined minutely for any clues of oil or gas, scrutinized for lithology, color, taste, fossil content, all variables that might help the geologists ascertain where exactly they were in the lost landscape of their imaginations, two miles below, and poured back into the waiting open pit of brown froth, where a mud man, diligent as a baker, kept close watch on the density and pH and clay content of the vile brown soup, which steamed slightly from its brief contact with the heated innards of the earth's distant interior.

There were no regulations, requirements, or restrictions regarding the construction and maintenance of the mud pits (which also housed waste oil and diesel fuel from the various workhorse engines required in lifting the great gleaming tonnages of drilling pipe in and out of the holes); and because the mud pits that were springing up around the drilling operations represented the only surface water for miles, all manner of wildlife began flocking to the pits, seeking nourishment and respite from the desert's anvil of heat.

Rendered bold by their need, the animals usually waited until night to get into the pits, though when they came (the drilling rigs ran twenty-four hours a day, six days a week), the animals did so wantonly, walking right past the roughnecks' parked cars and trucks and on out into the shallow mud pits, wading straight in like penitents seeking baptism.

The animals—coyotes and deer, foxes, skunks, bighorn sheep, wild turkeys and bobcats, and an occasional black bear—would drink greedily from the thick, toxic slurry—which usually had a skim of an inch or two of water floating atop the heavier drilling mud, like cream separating from the milk below—and then they would roll luxuriantly in the chocolate-milkshake-colored mud, splashing, while the roughnecks on the drilling platform above looked down in wonder, the mud pit illuminated at night by the brilliant halogen blaze of the rig's Christmas-tree lights, wattage so powerful and incandescent that the lights of each rig were visible at any distance upon that planar landscape (a flatness that belied the exciting jumble of topography below, the architecture of the past), and even visible, or so the geologists had been told, from space.

Once the animals had drunk from the toxic pond, it usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the sickness to settle in. It afflicted the smaller animals first, so that sometimes they died outright and sank to the bottom of the pit, where they were later fished out by the roughnecks, bloated carcasses slimed elephant-gray with the silt at the bottom of the pits—though usually the animals were able, despite their discomfort, to lunge back to the banks of the pit, where, with a caking of mud draped over them now as heavy as concrete, they would collapse a short distance away, lungs heaving and internal organs poisoned.

On their brief smoke or lunch breaks, the roughnecks would hurry down from the catwalk and hose the gray and brown drying layer of mud from the coats of those animals still living, and would drag them over into the shade of the drilling rig, so that by the time the stalking heat of the day returned, the sick and dying animals might know some peace and comfort; and just as the mounds of chipped drill cuttings grew like anthills at the site of each well's location, so too did the pyre of bloated carcasses of the bestiary that had been summoned by the allure of the mud, and the promise of water in the desert.

Birds, too, settled into the mud pits, not just migratory waterfowl but colorful little songbirds passing back and forth to the tropics, struggling in the mud with oil-soaked wings, as bedraggled now as moths: and in the early years, the oilmen had attempted to pull these victims out, dabbing them each in a bucket of valuable fresh water, and spending hours, sometimes, on each wing—the same men who days earlier had been machine-gunning the night sky, and shredding even the beauty of the stars with their violence: though the searchers had other tasks and chores, and the sky was filled with birds, they could in no way begin to keep pace with the steady supply of birds that kept funneling into their pits, so that eventually they gave up and allowed their hearts to harden, and became accustomed to that waste.

Richard would lie there some nights, occasionally in the bunkhouse but more often crooked and cramped in the back seat of his car, catnapping between bit trips, with the diesel clatter of the rig as familiar and even lulling to him now across the years as the sound of distant surf breaking, and it would seem that Clarissa's leaving, her fear, had carved in him a gash or rend, the exact shape of which he could still feel, and that even with years passing, the flow from that wound could not be stanched; that he could still hear it trickling away.

Lying there, just before sleep, in those fragments of moments where he was not occupied by his work, he would be forced to wonder,
What do I want—what do I want next
? He felt off-balance, not knowing what he desired—desiring nothing, really, hunting the oil below almost dispassionately, in cold blood—as anomalous, with that absence of desire, among the other oilmen, as might be a foreigner who did not speak their language.

He envied the oilmen, with their crude and simple and seemingly bottomless desires, chasing a past that lay miles below. They seemed to him to be hostages of another kind, but intensely and deeply alive. They did not seem to be visitors in the world.

The desert, with the blue-and-buff chaparral of the Sierra Occidentals just to the west, the soft foothills reminding him of the contours of a woman's body that might never age. What was it about a desert landscape, he wondered, that produced such needs and appetites, such oversized dreamers and flash-in-the-pan pretenders?

Was it this way always for any landscape of outer limits, he wondered—landscapes defined by absence, rather than presence? Perhaps some excessive, even childish, yearnings arose as if from the soil itself in some inhospitable environments, any strife-filled borderland near or even just beyond the edge of comfort.

And yet: these pirates with whom he was associating were not all charlatans; and their dreams and desires, even if outlandish and fevered, were not unattainable. They had dreamed a thing, scenting it at first as an animal might imagine cool and distant water, and they had moved toward it like men possessed by a purer truth, abandoning their past lives and stepping recklessly into the future: and what they had found in the desert and the foothills was not a dream, but tangible and real as the men themselves.

Always, they found just enough of their treasure to be termed successful, to sustain and reward them, and to lure them and encourage them to proceed onward:
Más allá
, farther on.

 

The entire consortium possessed the most hardy and enduring of constitutions. Many of the men had significant physical strength, but also a toughness. They would crawl away from their semicontrolled crash landings, and their twenty-four-hour nonstop revelry, and go straight back to work when the occasion called for it, which was often.

Back into the fields the oilmen threw themselves, laboring for forty or fifty hours at a time, unabetted by any drugs: doing whatever was required of them—logging the wells, drilling out bridge plugs, analyzing cuttings, and skidding rigs to new locations; and they gloried in their labor and their desire, reveling in it every bit as much as they did their play times. They were like sailors, Richard thought. He had often envisioned the unseen stony landscape far below as being implacable as the heart of a frozen sea; and in the oilmen's after-hours revelry, they seemed like crewmembers on wild shore leave.

It was estimated that it would take them eight to ten years to properly define and tap into the reservoir, whose shapes were still unknown to them.

Only the rigs above the reservoir moved, probing and searching, penetrating; and if the stone below was the deepest and most unknowable of oceans, and the men above (he never wondered why there were no women; who would want to be among such men?) were indeed sailors, then, in the moving waves up at the surface, they were all chasing the slipstreams of wealth that snaked and wound their way in wild and mysterious arcs, ancient loops and patterns of logic that existed just beneath the feet of the unsuspecting.

In addition to the curiously aggressive Red Watkins, with his wildly alternating spells of placidity, even tenderness, and ill-temper, there were two others within the consortium who took an interest in Richard, and who were grooming him for the arc of a longer future, a corporate life spent pursuing the riches of South America and China, Russia, Africa, and—always the prize plum—the Middle East.

Simon Craven was a financier from Dallas, and previously London, whose dreams and appetites were so large that he was frustrated by the smaller successes, deeming as failures any wells that tested initial flows of less than five hundred barrels per day. Impatient and edgy, he had a hawk's face and dark brown eyes, was tall and dressed always in white, and wore a Panama hat.

Only occasionally had Richard seen him look happy. Whenever a wildcat blew out or tested in excess of a thousand barrels a day, Craven—the consortium called him Sy—would burst into song, with tunes and lyrics that seemed to bear no connection whatsoever to the event at hand. Present on the scene of such success, he was as likely to begin braying “The Yellow Rose of Texas” as he was “Oh, Danny Boy,” or even a gospel hymn; and in some instances he had launched into song even as the bodies of workers who had been killed in the blows were still being hauled away.

The laborers he utilized were neither skilled nor rare, they were as common and relentless and desperate as ants, and he was not shy about admitting his values—the discovery of one more rank wildcat was worth, or superior to, any number of Mexican laborers—and not shy either about his hopes for and interest in Richard, who, having sharpened his skills on the distant Paleozoic oceans beneath Odessa, was proving, despite his youth, to be one of Sy's better geologists.

Richard had never seen Sy look relieved or at peace—only taut and pensive, or exuberant—and, even more so than with the aging Red Watkins (whose blotchy face belied countless cold beers drunk, and countless sunburns), Richard received the impression from Sy Craven that such a lifelong leaping between ferocity and exuberance was not sustainable, and that Craven's days might be even more numbered than the frail and fading old driller's.

As Red Watkins's ill health seemed to be etching itself more and more plainly upon Watkins's surface, across the years, so too did Sy Craven's seem to be building within him far below, and all the more potent and deadly for its not being seen.

The other investor in Richard's well-being and development was a semiretired prospector, a man named George Waller, who possessed just enough geological and financial and drafting skills to be able to explain and sell the prospects generated by the staff. Whereas Sy Craven seemed to take extra caution in mollycoddling Richard, and making sure he was treated with respect—grooming him for future continents—George Waller was uneasy with Richard's skill, and the reliance he found himself having to place upon the young man.

George Waller dreaded ceding control to anyone or anything, and it unnerved him greatly that Richard had so much more knowledge of the world beneath the world, the world that Waller was responsible for selling, sometimes to dupes and stooges, though other times to qualified and knowledgeable partners and investors who sought, at great premium, to join in on the play.

If Sy Craven's relationship to Richard was cautious and delicate yet candid and open in its predatory nature—not unlike that of a man choosing twigs in an attempt to start a fire, upon whose flame the fire starter's continued survival depends—then George Waller's relationship to the young geologist was almost the exact opposite, an exhausting and debilitating mix of passive-aggressive bullying and wheedling that was completely fear-based.

Craven's fear was not that Richard might leave—he understood the young man was too wounded, and needy, and too desperately hot, like all the rest of them, upon the elusive slipstream trail of the oil and gas—but feared rather that Richard might simply not develop to the fullest of his talent.

And so Sy Craven sought to nurture him, almost as if in love with him. As if in love with the future.

Waller's fear was more immense: that Richard would fail, or that he would abandon the consortium at their most critical time of need. Some of the structural and stratigraphic traps that Richard was mapping were so complicated and unlikely-seeming that they were often hard for Waller to fully comprehend, much less sell to other partners.

Waller was usually able to mask his unfamiliarity or discomfort with the strange prospects and their fractured logic (the unconformities in time and lithology, the radial faulting, and the overreliance, in Waller's opinion, upon delicate and invisible permeability barriers) by referring to the prospects as “sophisticated”—even as he himself knew better than anyone that at this level, there was no investor worth his salt who would buy into any of these larger prospects without understanding them inside and out.

And yet, the prospects kept striking oil and gas, and the consortium kept pumping and siphoning it up out of the ground, so that soon enough, a not-so-subtle transformation began to take place, in which George Waller found that investors were wanting to know which geologist had authored the map they were looking at; that George Waller was now selling the geologist as much as the geology. And again, this reliance upon the surface, and upon the present, made him uncomfortable, resentful of the power Richard held—even if unasked for—over the success or failure of George Waller's selling of the packages.

In a perverse way, Richard's successes were even making it harder for George Waller to sell other perfectly good prospects—and for this, too, Waller found himself nurturing a swelling resentment.