Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

One night around eleven I went to the Golden Glow, a cocktail bar that caters to night shifts. Not many were in there at that hour, so I drank my coffee, dropped a nickel for a tune on the juke box, and rested. Then, in a booth, I noticed somebody, and when he turned his head I saw it was Dasso. It threw me out, because it still bothered me, the way I had clipped him. Jake served him something, and some time went by, but still he sat there. After a while I went over. I said hello and he said hello but kept looking out the window. I said I was sorry I’d hit him, that I’d been under a strain. He kept looking back and forth, first at me, then out the window, and didn’t seem to hear me. I lifted up a prayer I should be kept from hitting him again, and went back to my table. I paid and went out. I began to cuss and get hot under the collar and took a walk down the hill. I came back.

Then it began creeping in on me there was something funny about it. He hadn’t sneered at me, or cracked mean, or done anything. He just hadn’t heard me. Then it came back to me, the way he’d kept looking out the window, and the long time he’d been there, talking with Jake, eating his sandwich, doing all kinds of things he didn’t generally do, because if ever there was a wolf-it-down-and-get-out kind of guy, it was he. Then something shot through me: He was waiting for something, and that window faced right on our well. Next thing I knew I was running. I’d shamble three or four steps up the hill, then slow to a walk, then run again, and all the time there was growing on me some hunch of something about pop. I got in sight of our well, but already I was too late. Dead ahead of me the string of lights began to shake. Then a guy yelled. Then, far up on the rig, something began to move down, on a slant. I saw it was the derrick man on the fourable floor, sliding down the safety line. Then here it came. Brother, if you ever saw six thousand feet of drill pipe go up in the air and then come down and wrap itself around an acre of ground like a plate of spaghetti, you won’t forget it in a hurry. And when on top of that, the friction of drill pipe against casing sets what’s coming out of the ground on fire, you’ll hardly know which scared you worst, the roar of that flame, the thunder of stuff coming down all around you, the screams of your crew, or the way their white hats looked like some kind of horrible bugs, getting out of the way before the world came to an end.

I slammed face first in the mud, and screamed and prayed like the rest, and then all of a sudden I didn’t even do that, because something banged on my head, and that was the last I knew for a while.

I didn’t come to all at once, as it was part of the crown block that hit me, a pulley shackle I found a couple of days later, and I took the count from loss of blood as much as concussion. But the whole time I was under, the roar of the fire was in my ears and its glare in my eyes, and I think they’d have reached me in hell. After a while there was yelling, and I was being rolled, then carried on a stretcher. Next thing I knew, I was waked up by water in my face, but the yelling was still going on, and the roar and glare were still there. I began to look around, and saw I was in the Golden Glow, stretched out on the bar. The water I couldn’t figure out. Then I saw they’d jammed a garden hose on the spigot over the sink, and run it out of the window to keep spraying the building, so it wouldn’t catch fire from the heat. But it was just a jam-on connection, and there was a leak that spouted over me. I moved, and was clear. Then I heard the flap of canvas outside, and footsteps on the roof, where they were pulling a tarpaulin over one whole side of the building, so they could wet that and be safe. That cut off the glare, but nothing cut off the roar. I was out for a while after that, and then a fellow with a white coat was shining a light in my eyes and looking at my head, and I heard him cluck, like what he saw was bad. Then he shot something in my arm and went. I wanted to crawl outside and run, but I couldn’t move. I don’t remember anything of the ambulance backing up or the orderlies carrying me out or the trip to the hospital or going up to the operating room, where they put the stitches in. When I did come to it was all at once, in what I could see was a hospital room, with the roar fainter, like it was some distance away, but the glare still bright enough to read by. My head hurt, my face twitched, and my belly fluttered. When I turned my head I could see somebody at the window. It was Hannah. She came over and patted my face, but all the time she was looking outside, and in a minute she went back to the window. “Can you see it, Jack?”

“No, thank God.”

“It’s just horrible. And it frightens me to the inside of my bones. It — ruins me, I’ve no illusions about that. And yet — it fascinates me... What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something must have gone wrong.”

“Ask Dasso.”

“... What’s he got to do with it?”

“He was up there, waiting for it. In the Golden Glow, parked at the window, all but holding a stop watch.”

It seemed to me I had to get over by the well and do something, I didn’t know what, but terribly important. Pretty soon I jumped out of bed, and went staggering to the closet for my clothes. “Jack! You can’t go out! You’re in no condition to! And besides your clothes were sent out to be washed — they were filthy, from blood! There’s nothing there but your suit.”

Off in the hall I heard a buzzer, where she was calling a nurse, and in a minute one came. All I had on was a hospital shirt, but fat chance that stopped me. If coat, pants and shoes were what I had to wear, I might as well be getting them on.

Come hell or high water, I was due on the hill, and meant to get there.

The taxi man couldn’t get within two blocks of it on account of the crowd, or at least he said it was the crowd. If you ask me he was plain scared, and I didn’t blame him. What was coming out of that hill was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was shooting straight up in the air, a red plume in the night, just like one of those torches you see at the end of a pipe, burning gas off the wells in Texas, except instead of being three or four feet high, this was three or four hundred. It swung this way and that, sometimes licking down to the ground, when there’d be yells and screams, and all the time sending off thick clouds of smoke that were black one second, blood red the next. To one side, leaning at an angle, was what was left of the derrick, with girders curling up like bacon on the griddle, and dropping off with a clatter. On the other side, by what would have been Mendel’s fence if it hadn’t burned to a row of charred string pieces, was the pile of drill pipe, all twisted up like a mile-long snake, and part of it showing red hot. Later in the day the firemen dragged it off with a falls they rigged, and cut it up with a torch. Now, though, they were letting it lie, and concentrating on the oil that was plopping in gushes out of the well, where the pressure would force it to the top, but didn’t quite carry it up in the air. It was running down the hill with flames all over it, where it was burning, and from that, and the heat, came the danger to people standing around, and other property, that it would catch fire. So the firemen on the three foam generators were smothering it with foam. The guys on the engines were drenching everything with water within two hundred yards: Mendel’s stuff, the refinery, the Golden Glow, the grocery store next to it, the garage next to that, the filling station on the corner, and even the trees in the cemetery and derricks on beyond. Other firemen had pushed up the road, within maybe fifty feet of the well, and were racing back and forth with cans full of dirt. I couldn’t tell what the idea was, at first, but then I saw they were making a trough, kind of a ditch on our land, that they could divert the burning oil into, and run it into the big sump I had made, below the refinery. In a few minutes they had their bank of dirt ready, and then the oil flames began sliding toward the sump, which was billowing with foam before even the oil slid into it. The foam put the flames out.