Philipp Meyer - The Son

When Flores was gone they pulled each other’s clothes off in the pantry, they tried it first standing up, but it was not satisfying and finally she was on the floor, among the bags of beans and flour, she felt a brief cold flash as if her father was seeing and judging her and then she decided she would do as she pleased.

SIX MONTHS LATER the first drilling rig was up and running. After all the shot testing, Hank decided the best place to start was in one of the old Garcia pastures. He insisted (disgustingly, she thought at first, then endearingly) on putting the samples of rock into his mouth; he plucked them right from the shale shaker. They were starting to taste like oil, he claimed, and if she wanted to learn the business, she would have to learn how it tasted. He offered her a crumbly piece of limestone from several thousand feet below the earth. It was wet with drilling mud, she smelled it, it was sulfurous and disgusting. She touched it to her tongue and wanted to gag immediately; it did taste like oil, but it tasted like other things as well, like something bitter or rotten, it had been in the damp earth for eighty or a hundred million years.

Near the end of the day the big Cummins diesel had suddenly changed pitch, the drill string gave a little hop and then dropped into the hole and then the derrick, the entire steel superstructure above them, gave a loud groan as if suddenly burdened.

“Not good,” Hank said.

The engine was running with less strain, it was quieter, but the hands were suddenly moving with purpose. There was a movement high in the derrick; the derrickman had come off the monkey board; he was half jumping, half sliding down the ladder. He brushed past her, running down the stairs toward the mud pits; a short time later, the mud motor got louder.

Nothing seemed to have changed but everyone was running around like a circus. It was amusing. She leaned back against the railing.

The piperacker and tongman were cutting sacks of yellow barite powder and dumping them into the mud pits; the derrickman was pumping mud from the reserve.

Now she could see a change: the return mud pipe, which had been flowing smoothly out onto the shale shaker all day, began to burp and sputter. The drilling mud was what kept the drill string in the hole; the drilling mud was the only thing keeping gas from blowing out of the wellbore.

She began to get nervous. A minute later there was a popping noise and mud blew out over the top of the traveling block. There was a sulfur smell and Hank pointed at her and said: “Get out of here.”

“Why?”

“We’re getting kicked.”

Then he stopped paying attention to her again. She was not sure if he was treating her like a girl. She decided she would not be treated any differently. She stayed where she was. She would never learn this if she went running off every time things got complicated.

“Get off the rig,” he said again, but she didn’t. He declutched the drill string and dropped the rams. More drilling mud blew out over the traveling block, spattering her dress and shoes.

“Get the fuck off the rig, Jeannie.” He shoved her roughly to the edge of the stairs. She looked back at him and finally went down. He was ignoring her again. She sat on a rock a few yards away. She was scared, though she was not sure of what. On the other hand if something happened… it was fine. She would be there with him.

After ten or fifteen minutes, the burping stopped. Mud began to flow into the pits again. The men began to laugh and the way they were clapping each other on the back, all talking very fast and grinning uncontrollably, she knew they had all been afraid. There were hundreds of empty Baroid sacks blowing around in the wind.

Hank waved to the motorman to shut the engine down and the hands all sat by the doghouse. One of them lit a cigarette, but Hank reached over and plucked it out of his mouth and crushed the ash carefully into the dirt.

“Maybe we can hold off on that cowboy shit, you think?”

The man nodded.

Then he turned to Jeannie: “Next time I ask you to leave, you leave.”

“How am I going to learn if I leave when things go wrong?” she said.

“You would not have learned anything. This would have been a fireball they would have seen from town.”

The roughnecks were slumped on a bench in the doghouse. The derrickman was pacing back and forth, cursing the mud pumps.

“What about the rams?” she said.

“Sometimes the gas is coming up no matter what. You can do everything perfect but you can’t always stop it.”

After that she did not want to be away from him. If he was on a well that blew out, she would be on it as well. She would not be alone again.

Tonight she found me in my office. I had given her one of the trucks to take to Carrizo, half expecting she would never return.

“Did I scare you?”

“A little,” I said. I realized I had indeed been expecting her to disappear, which had made me feel both relieved and depressed.

She looked around. “All these books. And you sleep here?”

I nodded.

“Because of me?”

“I got in the habit before my wife left,” I told her, which was not entirely a lie.

She took a seat on the sofa. “Look at me,” she said, holding out her hands. “I’m like a dead person. I can’t stand to even look in the mirror.”

“You just need to eat and rest.”

“I can’t stay that long,” she said.

“I already told you I don’t mind.”

“But I do.”

It was quiet and she looked around again.

“How old are you?”

“I am eleven years younger than you are,” she said. “Though I now look older.”

“You are still very pretty.” It was not true, not really, and yet all the blood went to my face. If it is possible to make an improvement in four days, she had. Her skin was no longer dry, her lips less cracked, her hair washed and shining. But she didn’t appear to notice my compliment.

“You know I imagined telling you all these things for years now, but when I see it hurts you, I feel guilty. Then I am angry at myself for feeling guilty. And yet the past two nights, I have slept very well here. Which also makes me feel guilty. I guess I am the coward after all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“You’re not in a position to judge.”

She continued to look around the room, at all my books, floor to ceiling, and her eyes got soft again but I could not help the feeling she was not long for this earth; I had seen dead people with more weight to their bodies.

“There are many farmers here now?”

“Yes.”

“And the other Mexican families? The ones who were here?”

“Some of them went to Michigan to work. Some disappeared. Some are dead.”

She asked which ones. I opened my journal and told her what I had written, though I mostly knew it from memory.

Killed in the riots: Llewellyn and Morena Pierce, Custodio and Adriana Morales, Fulgencio Ypina, Sandro Viejo, Eduardo Guzman, Adrian and Alba Quireno, all four of the Gonzalo Gomezes, all ten of the Rosario Sotos except the two youngest, who were adopted by the Herreras.

Fled during or after the riots: the Alberto Gomezes, the Claudio Lopezes, the Janeros, the Sapinosos, the Urracas, the Ximenes, the Romeros, the Reyes, Domingo Lopez, unrelated to Claudio, Antonio Guzman, unrelated to Eduardo (killed), Vera Florez, the Vera Cruzes, the Delgados, the Urrabazes.

“There may have been others I have not heard about.”

“Well, you wrote them down,” she said. “That is something.”

“There are more,” I said.

The ones who had moved to Detroit for work: the Adora Ortizes, the Ricardo Gomezes, the Vargases, the Gilberto Guzmans, the Mendezes, the Herreras (including the two daughters of Rosario Soto), the Riveras, Freddy Ramirez and his family.