The Moth (28 page)

“O.K., but what’s the rest of it?”

“I said it works damned well. What do you say?”

“So does a stink bomb.”

“That’s not nice.”

“Neither is it. Even if it
does
work.”

It was an hour, I guess, before she decided to go on. Then: “I’m trying to say, if you’d stop insulting me every minute, I had a hunch. Some weeks ago. Like the one I woke up to in the poker game. That maybe you’re a straight and also a flush—beauty and brains all in the same package. I mean, if you tried, you could make the
business
go damned well, too.”

“Meaning, on husbands, you want to switch?”

“Well?”

“No.”

“Jack, I’m sorry, but for me pretty well isn’t well enough. It has to be damned well or I’m not interested. For three years now that jerk has been trying to sell me something just as good. Telling me I shouldn’t get excited. That I should take it easy. That I should wait. That things are bound to get better.

And I’ve listened to him. Owning property that should make me rich, that could mean something if it was handled right, I’ve stood by and watched it go from bad to worse, until it’s a
mess.
My wells are pumping less all the time, and in a few years they’re going dry. And yet I have to keep this miserable shack, when with smart work I could have a real place at Pebble Beach, all because a damned jerk—”

“That jerk is a swell guy.”

“A jerk is a jerk.”

“If he says wait, I’d bet waiting does it.”

“I want what I want when I want it!”

“Who sang that was a basso named—”

“Shut up... You going to spray fruit all your life?”

“I didn’t start my life spraying fruit, and I don’t expect to end it that way. But just at the moment, until I see where I’m coming out, I’m doing it. I booted the beans into the fire just once too often, I’m sorry to say, and the way I paid for it I hope you never find out, because I’m not going to tell you. But at that, compared with the onion-hoeing I see most of them doing, and the lousy grand operas some of them are singing, and all the other stuff that’s being done by guys too proud to spray fruit and too dumb to do anything else, my job suits me fine.”

“Jack, I’m talking about big things.”

“You’re not talking about anything that I can hear.”

Now I was myself again, quite a few things had come back, and one of them was the twist in me that made me blow my top when somebody was trying to make me do something I didn’t want to do. And I was finding out things about cold heart. As long as it’s a toy, it can be as childish as anybody, and roar, or kick slippers through the window, or whatever. But when it really sees something it wants, it can wheedle, wait, and watch you for the right time, the right night, and the right place. She let me run down, and when it got dark lit the grate, so we sat there in the blue light from the gas. Then she made coffee and opened some chili con carne. When I said it was time we got started back to the ranch, she got up meek as pie, handed me my tie, and helped me on with my coat. I’d got some new clothes, and she said they looked swell.

But when we got to the Long Beach traffic circle, instead of cutting inland she kept on through Long Beach, and pretty soon turned to the right, into a small narrow street. And then all of a sudden we were in oil, with the reek of it everywhere and derricks all around us, thick as trees. “You like that smell, Jack?”

“Would anybody?”

“You would. For one thing it speaks to your damned machinist’s soul. And for another thing you’ve got brains enough to know it comes from the guts of the earth, and turns wheels and things, and is important.”

“It’s pretty terrific.”

“Couldn’t you say so?”

“I could, if it wasn’t a build-up.”

“For what?”

“The big switcheroo.”

“You’re damned right it is.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“I generally get what I go after.”

There are no street lights in an oil field, and we rolled along pretty slow, through gray tanks, gray pipes, gray pumps, and gray steam. But then, ahead of us, was a string of lights going straight up, in the air, and when we got nearer I could see they were hanging from a derrick. “Now
I’m
excited, Jack. That’s a new well going down.”

“They work on Sunday?”

“Sunday, Monday, every day, three shifts twenty-four hours around the clock. They have to keep going. If they didn’t, if they broke it off for any length of time, the cuttings would settle in the mud, they’d have to clean out their hole, and they’d lose hours and hours.”

“Mud? What’s that for?”

“It’s pumped through the drill.”

“Oh, to cool it.”

“And carry away the cuttings from the formation. It’s pumped out then.”

“Didn’t they ever try water?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, if I could think of it they could think of it. Maybe water’s too thin to carry all that sand and grit and shale away with it.”

“Yes, I think that was the trouble.”

When we got near she cut over, straight across lots, and then we could see the drill crew, five or six of them, in slickers and hard composition hats, all around the rotary table, that was turning in the middle of the derrick floor, a few feet above ground level. They waved her back, but she kept looking them over, and pretty soon spotted one she knew, and spoke to him. He recognized her and said something to the driller, who craned around at us from the levers he had hold of, that were connected with a big drum that had cable spooled on it, and regulated the feed to the bit. He nodded and waved us over and we got out and climbed up there. “We’re putting on a new drill in a couple of minutes, if you want to see it done. I’d stand over by that rathole if I was you. We’re setting pipe on the other side.”

The rathole was an open pipe, sunk down in the ground, that they drop the Kelly in, as they call it, when they’re changing bits. We stood over there, and sure enough, they began coming up with the pipe. A guy went up to what they call the fourble board, that platform you see, about two thirds the way up on all oil derricks, and the guys on the ground began pulling out pipe. The traveling blocks would go up with a stand of pipe, and grab it with a tongs. Then with what they call a cathead they’d break the joint, spin it out with the rotary table, and when it was free, lift it out with a spring hook. Then the derrick man, the one on the fourble board, would guide it behind the fingerboard, as they call it, a rack that holds the pipe, one stand beside the other, as they take it out. Then another section of four would come up, and another and another. So fast I could hardly believe it, they had that pipe out, four thousand feet of it, by my figuring, a new bit on, and the pipe going down in the hole again. The bit was one I’d never seen, though I’d read about it. It had three pinions, with teeth in them, that rolled around and cut the rock, and in the middle of them was a hole that the mud circulated through, to pump out drill cuttings between drill pipe and casing. It made the bit I had smithed up, for the road quarry that time, look like something used by Indians ten thousand years
B.C.
She explained it all to me, as well as she could, and as soon as the rotary table was going again, so they were making hole, the driller came over and explained it, and in between, the roughnecks explained it. Everybody explained it, and I couldn’t help eating it up. I could have stayed there all night.

When we left the well, she took a different road, that led up a hill, and pretty soon she stopped. We got out, and she led me up a rise, past a cemetery, to a plot that had half a dozen wells on it, with one or two pumps going, but with the derricks removed. She explained that a wooden derrick is generally left standing, as there’s not much it can be used for anywhere else, but the steel ones get taken down and put up again. All the well needs, from then on, she said, is a Christmas tree, so there’s no use wasting valuable steel. The Christmas tree is an attachment for the control of natural flowing oil wells. She showed me one, and from the number of gauges and valves on it, all of them round and most of them different colors, you could see how it got its name. When pressure eases off, so they have to install pumps, the Christmas tree is taken away. I got the flashlight from her car, and climbed down into concrete pits and over pipes and through shed doors, and she answered my questions, pretty well, I’ve got to say for her. Then, after a while: “You know what place this is, Jack?”

“Yours, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“Where’d you get it, if I may ask?”

“From my father.”

“I remember now, Mr. Branch mentioned it, that first day I met him, when he gave me a lift. But he said something about your uncle, too.”

“My father and uncle came here from Ohio, all hot to go in the oil business, and my uncle persuaded my father that the future of oil was in the selling end of it, not the production. They’d had romantic dreams, you see, as the papers were full of the boom out here, and they had some money they got from selling the hardware store they had run, back in Toledo. But then my uncle got to reading about the gold boom, back in the fifties, and how Mark Hopkins had made so much money, not from sluicing gold, but from selling shovels and boots and bacon to those who were sluicing it. He sold my father on the idea of garages, to sell the oil, or filling stations, as they’re called now, instead of wells, to produce it. So my father had to give up all his fine dreams, and try to get interested in these coal-oil sheds, as he called them, and presently he sent for my mother and me. And we had hardly got to Los Angeles when my mother caught cold in the miserable damp hotel my uncle had found, and it went into pneumonia, and she died. And my father arranged to bury her, as he thought in Tropico, as Glendale was called then, on the hill that’s now Forest Lawn Cemetery. But where the procession came was this hill, Signal Hill, as it’s now called. It was pretty forlorn, and my father hated to leave her here in the little cemetery we passed on the way up. He took it pretty hard, and after a while he decided that forlorn or not, he wanted to be near her, so he bought a lot, and almost every night we’d come to it, and stand looking over her grave and the ocean, and imagine what it would be like when we got the house built and began living in it, as at least he’d have his memories. My uncle was against it, but by that time nobody paid much attention to what he was against, as the filling stations weren’t located right for the way the town was growing, or anyhow most of them weren’t, and nothing that he touched had gone right. And then on Signal Hill they struck oil. So instead of building a home on it we drilled, right here on the land you’re standing on. And my uncle couldn’t get over it that in this way, almost as though God had taken a hand in it, my father had got what he wanted. My uncle messed things up, though, before he died, as usual. My father was for selling the stations and putting the money in this little refinery back of us, that had just been built then, and had cost too much, and could be had, cheap. He said when we knew what we were going to do with our oil, then would be time to go ahead on wells. But my uncle was frightened at something with any size to it, or anything except the peanut way he always wanted to do business. He insisted we get some wells down first, so we had money coming in, and then see about branching out. So that’s what he did, and had to borrow even more money from the bank than we would have had to do to take over the refinery. And the more oil we pumped, the cheaper we had to sell it to the pipeline companies, and to get gas for the stations, the dearer we had to buy it back. It was just a squeeze. At that time nobody knew what an integrated company was, but that’s what they call it now, and that’s what my father, just on instinct, wanted—a company that produces its own crude, manufactures its own gas, lube oil, fuel, and asphalt, and sells in its own outlets. But we bumbled along, and always it seemed if we could just get one more well we could break through. Then my uncle died, and a few months after him, my father, and they’re buried there, beside my mother. Then the bank ran things awhile, and after I came of age I ran it, with a little assistance from the bank, or anyhow the bankers. That’s where I got my ideas about men, in case it interests you, and maybe I’m wrong, but nothing’s come up to prove I am, yet. We had some wild parties, but the squeeze went on, exactly the same. And then, on the last well that was drilled, with money from the bank, I began seeing quite a little of the contractor. And it seemed, from the way he talked, that
he
might know what should be done. So in a soft moment, I married him. And just for a little while, we were headed somewhere, or that’s what he said. One more well, and we’d have that margin, that safe extra income, that would make it possible for us to talk deal to the refinery. So that’s what we’re doing now, getting ready for another new well—letting contracts for the derrick, for the cement, for everything except the drilling, because of course we do that ourselves because we used to be in the business and can do it cheaper, and in addition to that can give a lot of old pals jobs. So there’s the bank, just where it always was except it’s holding new paper for the old notes we paid off, and there are the wells, getting a little older each year, and here I am, not getting any younger that I notice.”

“Does anybody?”

“It’s a mess just the same. And if all that wasn’t bad enough here, now there’s the allocation.”

“The—? Did you mention it?”

“I don’t say it wouldn’t have worked, the safe and sane policy, though it reminds me a lot of my uncle. But then came the price wars, after the depression got started, with everybody pumping oil like mad, and selling it for what they could get. So of course that would damage the field, by lowering gas pressure. So after the election, in connection with the blue eagle there was all kinds of talk, and they were allowed to do some regulating. It’s all supposed to be voluntary, but they tell you what you can pump just the same... Twelve hundred barrels a day! For my six wells! When they’re capable of yielding three times that! Is that fair, now I ask you? What good is a new one going to do me if that’s how it’s got to run? And—he makes me perfectly furious with the
attitude
he’s got toward it.”