Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Elizabeth said she had to go home. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “Just because he hit the pay horizon doesn’t mean anything.” It was a hot night, hazed over with fine dust carried high among the contrail clouds that made stars seem blurry, even the great yellow Arcturus. She and Lillian and Violet climbed into the Studebaker.

More and more people started up their engines and went home, the ones with children to put to bed. Others stayed on, perhaps fifty or sixty people. The men in good suits stood leaning against the car fenders, their ties pulled loose from around their necks, listening and watching. They had not always worn good suits nor had they always driven comfortable passenger cars. They knew the sound of a cable-tool rig, they knew what it was doing and what it was saying and they didn’t talk very much but listened intently. There was a light wind and the temperature fell slightly. The cartoon dog Pluto, painted on the flatbed truck door, grinned at everybody. Pluto, god of precious metals and of the underworld.

Andy said, “I’ll build us a fire for coffee.”

“No, don’t,” said the captain. He was filthy with drilling mud, and Otto and Andy stood ready at the forge fire and the bailer, if either were needed. Crowninshield held his hand on the cable, rising and falling two feet six inches. He bent toward it, intent, as if it were speaking to him.

He said, “Otto, put that forge fire out.”

Steam rose from the extinguished embers. The men all around noted this and turned to one another. He’s putting the damn forge fire out. A couple of cars started up and turned on the headlights to provide Cap with illumination. Several men crowded into a big Dodge to listen to the baseball game.

Otto and Andy were smoking homemades, sitting at the cable spool they used for a table on the drill platform, where they kept swivels and hooks and pieces of lead for bushing and a box of dominoes. Otto laid out a hand of dominoes. As he reached for a piece it danced oddly across the surface in a strange clattering jig and away from his hand. He frowned and grabbed at it. The rest of the dominoes started to rattle. They fell over and began to jitter about the surface like live things. Otto clasped them together in his hand and lifted his head with an alarmed look. Andy spread his hand out on the cable spool and felt it vibrating. The vibration grew stronger each second.

The entire drilling platform was shaking.

The engine began to rattle in its mounts and the Sampson post swayed weirdly sideways instead of up and down.

“Put out those cigarettes!” screamed Crowninshield. He jumped up on the platform and came running at them. “Kill the damn boiler fire, Otto! Now!” He snatched the cigarettes from their hands. “Put out the boiler fire, she’s coming in!”

Otto jumped to his feet and crashed through a pile of bailers and slammed the boiler door shut and cranked on the damper.

“Get the hell off the platform!”

Crowninshield and Otto and Andy all came off the platform at the same time. They struck the dirt and fell and got up again. They ran toward the engine shed. It was the only cover available. They heard the deep and sinister roar coming from the borehole as if something down there was calling out to them in a rage at being awakened from a million-year sleep. Andy’s hair rose all over his body.

Then he turned and saw the most amazing thing. He saw casing pipe rising up out of the borehole as if it were self-propelled, joints of pipe that weighed more than two hundred pounds apiece, flying up one after another, in a spray of white salt water that was as thick and hard as a sycamore trunk. And then more pipe was blown out by a great fountain of sand, enclosed in a foaming mist of gas that expanded like a geyser, sideways, snaking low and wild over the ground.

Then the massive drill bit rose up out of the hole, twenty feet long and weighing two tons, spewing straight up through the derrick and taking out the crown block along with it. Spars and shattered planks flew upward in ballistic fragments.

Within moments the pieces of lumber were raining down on the roof of the engine shed. Andy yelled, “Ooooh! Ooooh! Shit! There went the derrick!” Cap was on his hands and knees looking for the flashlight. They dared not strike a match to the lamp.

Then the oil came in, under great pressure, a standing column of jet that erupted with a deafening roar. The entire derrick blew away, leaving only the footings and twisted masses of metal.

The people who had gathered to watch were either huddling in their cars, or running, or driving away. Cap heard their engines, some of them growing more and more distant while overhead the tornado of pure oil wavered and shrieked and lunged snakelike into the night sky.

Crowninshield shouted, “Andy, Otto, we got to get help to get that thing shut down!” He had to yell over the noise of oil beating on the engine-shed roof. He sat crouched over as crude oil rained on the ground and the noise of the blowout sounded like some beast roaring and looking for prey.

“Okay, boss,” said Andy. His voice was faint and very calm in the most peculiar way. He sat on Cap’s bed among the detective novels and the sardine cans. “But I think we ought to hang in here and wait in case any more of that casing pipe gets blown out, you know, because if it lands on somebody, that’s all she wrote. They’ll ship you home in a shoe box.”

“I know it.” They hunched their shoulders up around their ears, as if they were being struck, and the flashlight shone on their anxious faces.

“We’re lucky something ain’t come through the roof already.”

Cap said, “I think we can make a run for it.”

“I never thought I’d live to see it,” said Andy. “A blowout like this.”

“You might not yet,” said Otto.

JEANINE STOOD AT the front door and counted the cars. There were five or six automobiles parked in their driveway. The telephone rang every five minutes.

“Oh, I don’t think we’re going to be rich,” Elizabeth said. “And if they don’t get it shut down they’ll lose pressure and they’ll junk the well. And there’s too many people to share the money with, but what the heck!” She hung up the telephone and turned to her daughters. “Who was I just talking to?”

There was laughter and shouts as more people drove in. Jeanine said hello to Betty, and Aunt Lillian, and a man named Mr. Lacey from the Magnolia field, all of them with congratulations and advice and cautions and recent figures on price per barrel.

“Elizabeth.” Mr. Lacey carried his hat in his hand. “I was never happier to be wrong in my life. And I’m just going to be rude here and insist on advising you. Beatty-Orviel is going to be made an offer and it could be by my company.” He turned his hat by the brim. “I can get you a volunteer blowout crew. From our company.”

Elizabeth turned to him with an interested expression and before long Mr. Lacey had to bring up the dreaded name of Harold Ickes and the attendant suggestion of dark cabals in Washington.

“We are going to have to tell the Texas Railroad Commission that what we have here is an eleven-thousand-foot well in order to increase your allowables.”

Elizabeth said, “Texas Railroad Commission?” She paused and touched his arm. “Allowables? Harold Ickes?”

Mr. Lacey said he would explain. He stood very still so she wouldn’t take her hand away, and his heart was drowned in a sweet, high-gravity sensation.

Lillian and Violet started making plans for a big dinner, and an entire turkey for the crew. Jeanine and Mayme brewed coffee and slammed cups on the kitchen table and sang snatches of songs; That old black magic has me in its spell…