Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Nice guy, Dasso.”

“Then at last, Jack, we’ve got him.”

“What for?”

“Putting on a faulty blowout preventer.”

“I thought I did that.”

“But if you didn’t know about it—”

“If not, why not?”

“You mean you’re just going to do nothing?”

“What would you do, for instance?”

“Why — report him!”

“Who to?”

“The city. Of course.”

“O.K. But when he sues for that million-dollar slander, million-dollar defamation of character, and million-dollar personal injuries, caused by your super having the bad judgment to bust him in the kisser, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“When he—”

“Unfortunately, it’s what you can prove.”

In addition to the visits, there were the newspapers, with pictures. I never saw so many columns given over to smoke and water and flames in my life, or so many pictures of a guy in charge of a job. They ran four or five they took in the hospital, when the reporters showed up for interviews, and then the A.P. must have picked it up, so the East got busy. Then there were pictures of me passing, kicking, tackling, and everything there was. But it really got good when they dug up Little Lord Fauntleroy, with the blond curls over my collar and the angel-of-sweetness look in my eye. In between that they had editorials that practically said I ought to be run out of town. And every night, as soon as the street noises died off, would come the roar, like they’d brought Niagara Falls in to spend the summer. And once it got dark, the glare never stopped. After a while it began to give me the hibby-jibbies. I mean, when a fire started they were supposed to get it out, weren’t they? But nothing that was said, by the state man or the fire people or the city attorney, sounded like they had it out or nearly out. They kept getting tighter in the lips and rougher in the talk.

Around the end of the second week, on a Tuesday, I still had the bandage on my head, but it was gone from my face and hands, and though I couldn’t shave and looked like something in the Monday line-up, at least I had on clothes she had brought me from the hotel, and was sitting up. Then sometime before lunch the phone rang and she took the call and from the quick way she said I’d been taken up on the roof, I knew it was bad. Then little by little as she talked I got it that it was Mr. White, of the bank, talking for other operators in the field, and that he wanted to bring them over to talk to me. When she said no, he waned her to bring me to a meeting in the Luxor offices at two o’clock, but she said the doctors wouldn’t permit it. There was more talk, something about his seeing her that evening. She still said no, and after a while hung up. Then: “I don’t know what it is, Jack, but he’s got that or else sound in his voice, and you mustn’t under any circumstances talk to him until I can find out what it’s about. He holds paper from them all. They’re in a spot. The fire department has closed a lot of them down, wells and all, Luxor’s main cracking plant hasn’t run a barrel in two weeks, everything’s at a standstill, and something has to be done — or so he says. The worst of it is the field. Every bit of that gas that’s burning is saleable, eventually, to the gas company, if it stays underground, but when it blows off that way, it’s a dead waste. To say nothing of the oil.”

“What’s to be done?”

“... Could you take a ride?”

So she lent me the keys to her car and I went off for a ride, so as not to be there in case he came. I headed south, and there it was, still doing business at the same old stand, pouring flame and smoke right into the sky and spreading a pall over the city that made the sun look like some kind of a thin red dime. I passed the hill, and off to my left could see firemen and ropes, where they had it blocked off. When I got to the traffic circle I couldn’t hear it, and when I leveled off toward Seal Beach I couldn’t even see it, or the smoke. It was a beautiful sunshiny day and for a few minutes it was like being let out of jail to be able to leave it behind, feel like myself once more, and just roll, even if it was in a car that looked like it had smallpox from what the heat had done to it. But then, around Huntington Beach I began to think about it again, and I guess if you left a tiger in the front parlor, you’d run away if you could, but there’d be a limit to how far you could go, or how much you could drop him out of your mind. Pretty soon I turned around, and in almost no time I could see it, a red torch shining against the blue.

I parked at the ropes, got out, and went through. A fireman stopped me, but when I said who I was he let me pass. I walked to the bottom of the hill and circled around, and all the time I stared at it, and listened to it, and inhaled it, where the heavy greasy smoke would lick down. And once more, I could feel myself get a little wild, as I beat against the question: Why did this thing, this crazy, roaring thing out of a nightmare worse than any nightmare I ever had, have to happen to me? Then I began getting a little weak, and edged around, hoping to get to the Golden Glow and get something to eat. That brought me to the top of the hill, and below me was spread a deserted forest of silver derricks and towers and tanks, with not a wheel, not a walking beam, not a rotary table moving, with no fire showing under a still, and no human being in sight, except for kids staring through the ropes and a few firemen running a water pumper and a foam generator, just in case. Everywhere, on the refinery, on Mendel’s property, on the upper end of Luxor, on the stores and cafes and filling stations, were sheets of asbestos, held on by wires, or nailed to roofs with little tabs to keep it from tearing. The firemen kept one hose going, so everything, once every ten minutes maybe, got a good wetting.

I tried the door of the Golden Glow and it opened and Jake stared at me ten seconds before he knew me. He asked how I was, and I told him, and he said they’d had a time around there, yes, sir, quite a time. But he wasn’t too friendly, and when he had my order, for beer and coffee and sandwiches, he went off. Over near the bar were three firemen having lunch and talking about baseball, which had just started again. My stuff came and I ate and felt a little better, then felt somebody looking at me. I looked up and it was Rohrer, in another booth. He finished his coffee and came over and looked, like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Is that you, Mr. Dillon?”

“Yeah. Little worse for wear, but it’s me.”

“They sure fixed you up.”

“Fire out there. I went too near it.”

“I saw you. They gave you a hand, as I recall.”

“They should have waited. In the hospital I was better.”

“That I can believe.”

He caught me up on what had happened, but so far as real stuff went, there wasn’t much to tell. Soon as they got first things under control, like the oil and near-by property, the firemen had gone to work on the fire itself from the well. “Getting apparatus near it was the tough part, but working behind shields and throwing up barricades of one kind or I another, they got a concentration of water lines in there, four or five on each side, with fog nozzles on them. That took them a couple of days, but then they let go with them, driving right into the flame, and got wonderful results. Right away, sprayed fine like that, the water turned to fog, and then in a few minutes to steam, or pure vapor, all around that fire, cutting it off from oxygen, choking it. It was a beautiful thing to see, as the fog crept up and up, and above that they began hitting it with regular streams, and they began turning to fog, so for a minute or two, except away up in the air, there was hardly any flame, nothing but black smoke billowing all around, which was the real sign, because of course flame is nothing but incandescent smoke anyway, where the carbon particles are heated white hot, and when it goes black, it’s cooling. A big crowd was out there, and you could hear the mutter go around, and yells as boys hollered to other boys to come look, so you had that feeling, it’s been licked, they’ve got it. Then I heard one of the firemen begin to yell cusswords at the top of his lungs, and here it came, just a little puff of wind that didn’t last five minutes. But it tore a hole in the fog, and the fire leaped back to the hole, with a roar like nothing you ever heard, just like when you light a gas log in the parlor, you know how it does? Just leaps around, purring like a cat purrs, but this was more like a herd of elephants purring. Then they had to start all over again, and I guess they tried it a dozen times. But they never got a real fog again, and I guess you can’t blame them, when they kept it up for three days with no luck, just to quit. A dozen of them were in the hospital with burns and all kind of injuries by that time, and they’re human too.”