Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

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.”