That Old Ace in the Hole (19 page)

“My God, it stinks,” said Habakuk.

“That’s a money stink,” said the lease man. “It’s a flowin well, all right. By God, it’s pretty far east a be part a the Amarilla Arch, but what else could it be? You sure enough got you a shallow discovery well. How deep did you drill?”

“I don’t know. It was my partner. We figured maybe two, three hundred feet, so maybe around there. I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. Four, five days’ work?”

“That’s awful shallow. Your panhandle wells is usually around three thousand feet. Cable tool drill takes sixty to ninety days to git it. This could be just some little maverick shallow pocket. I reckon we ought a talk business. Who knows what’s down there?”

“What do I need you for?” said Habakuk. “I do everything myself my whole life. I got an oil well here already been drilled. I don’t need you.”

The geologists were twittering like birds behind them.

“Mr. Milkbeak,” said H. H. Potts. “You got you a little shallow awl well but no field tanks to keep the awl in, no way to git the awl from the well to the tanks you don’t got, no gatherin lines to connect to the trunk pipeline, you got nobody a buy your awl, you got no casin in that well and for all you know, it could be cavy and slump in. And what will you do when she goes into the decline curve when she’ll have to go on the pump? You don’t know the awl-gas ratio neither, and you don’t know the formation pressure. It takes thousands and hunderds a thousands a dollars to set up a awl field. You got no idea the size a this awl field. There’s surely more to it than one little pissy well. The Texas Railroad Commission has to come out here and take their data so it can be prorated. You can’t have a well just spittin out awl on the ground like you got here. Awl is a complicated and expensive business, sir, and a cooperative one.”

Habakuk slumped. Potts was right, he knew nothing. He was no oilman. He would have to go along with this fellow whom he disliked. But he would not be fleeced.

“How much?” he said.

“Well, sir, the lease could be for five or ten years and as for long thereafter as awl or gas in commercial quantities is produced. You, as the landowner, git a royalty. Condor Awl bears the full expense a drillin and settin up the wells, they build the tanks, put in the pumps, lay the pipe and—”

“How much?”

“The standard royalty in the awl business is one-eighth.”

“But the land is mine. All the oil under the land is mine too!”

“But the company bears the considerable expense a construction and maintenance. Awl under the land is not the same as awl in a pipeline.”

“I don’t care. One-eighth is not enough. I want a tenth!” Ha, he thought, at the look of stupefaction on H. H. Potts’s face, he can’t get around
me.
He took the strange play of expressions across the man’s features as his realization that he had been bested, and, when Potts said, “Mr. Milkbeak, I guess I’ll have to give in to you. We’d better go up to the house and work through the contract before you change your mind and ask for one-twentieth.” Habakuk smiled broadly.

Two hours later the man departed, still without coffee, after scratching out all references to “one-eighth (1/8)” and substituting “one-tenth (1/10)” and having Habakuk initial each change in the margin on the six-page printed lease form. Habakuk’s signature was on the dotted line.

By noon a team of men were fitting pipe over the head and installing a pump to move the oil. A crew of pipeline men were laying pipe. A begrimed man with a mule team and a fresno were shaping an earthen tank.

Around noon Ace pulled up at the house.

“Hear you had a lot a traffic out here this mornin. How’d you make out?”

“My God, it was something. Seventeen cars. The geologists are still out there. It is an oil well. There was this fellow from Condor Oil, said he come from Oklahoma City. I didn’t like him but a man not in the oil business can’t do it alone. I signed the oil and gas lease for ten years, but I got the best of the bargain.”

“Did you?”

“Oh yes! He was only going to give me one-eighth royalties but I said I wanted one-tenth and after a while he gave in.”

“Habakuk, he offered you one-eighth royalties and you held out for one-tenth?”

“That’s right.”

Habakuk was disconcerted to see the same curious expression on Ace’s face that he had seen on Potts’s. “Why? What’s wrong with that?”

“Habakuk, important you come to town with me
right now
. I mean it. Save you a lot a grief in comin years.”

And so they went into Woolybucket, Ace driving. He pulled up in front of the Good Time bakery, went in and came out a few minutes later with two boxes. They drove out of town, pulled off at a roadside picnic table, Ace saying not a word, ignoring Habakuk’s querulous demands for an explanation, for he had begun to suspect that something was wrong, though he could not pin down what it was.

At the picnic table Ace opened the boxes disclosing two pies, one apple, one cherry. He put the cherry pie in front of Habakuk, the apple on his side of the table, and took out his horn-handled jackknife.

“Watch,” he said. He cut the apple pie into eighths and handed his knife to Habakuk. “Now, you cut that there cherry pie into tenths and we’ll see who got the biggest pieces.”

As he cut Habakuk learned the vital difference between fractions and percentages. His rage at having outwitted himself was awesome and he stamped and swore terrible Dutch oaths while Ace looked on, shook his head and ate pie, one slice after another, favoring the eighths.

“Just the same, I fool myself this time but never another. I am through with the cattle business. Now I am a oilman. You wait. I beat them at their own game.”

“Better get up pretty early in the mornin then. Awl people is smart.”

But Habakuk put his mind to it, discovered that beneath the flat panhandle lay a buried granite mountain range, the Amarillo Mountains, staggeringly rich in oil, natural gas and helium, the site of a great strike in 1916. He devoured books on oil, buttonholed oilmen, followed crews and dogged lease men and invested the money from his one-tenth Condor share in a dozen oil ventures. By the end of World War II Kampen Oil was a small but powerful corporate entity.

Five years later Habakuk visited his cousin in Java and, his eye sharpened for oil, he bought promising land, a few years later leased it to Shell–Royal Dutch, which pumped more than two million barrels a year from the field. He was in Kuwait and Qatar, he had interests in Venezuela. In 1961 Kampen Oil seized Condor in a hostile takeover. By then H. H. Potts was long underground, but Habakuk van Melkebeek went to the Oklahoma City Freewill Baptist Cemetery and found the gravestone.

“You are fired,” he said to the basket of faded wax lilies.

T
he Cutaway missed Habakuk van Melkebeek and Ace Crouch badly. Instead of assigning a pair of cowboys to the job Slike contracted out to the new partners for mill maintenance.

“Hell, they know the Cutaway mills inside out. In the long run it’s cheaper,” he explained to the owner. For Habbakuk and Ace it was steady income during the hard years.

Ace was twenty-two, strong and quick, not unattractive in a rough way, though his eyes were too close together and his limp brown hair hung over his eyes. But he was tall and strong, the bony shoulders wide, his chest deep with muscle, and he was quick to smile. He started going to the Saturday night dances in Cowboy Rose, but rarely drank, the memory of his terrible hangover day on the windmill still strong in memory. He stopped at a single beer and, while other young men hung around the trucks drinking and guffawing, fighting like beetles with clumsy swipes at each other, rearing and pawing, falling onto their backs and kicking up again, he danced. He danced rags, polkas, swing, breakdowns and two-steps until he knew every girl, every dance call, every fiddler for miles around. It was the height of Texas swing and on Saturday nights he’d drive to barns, dance halls and honky-tonks a hundred miles distant to hear Billy Briggs and his XIT Boys, Rip Ramsey and the Texas Wanderers, the Lone Star Playboys, Dub Adams and the K-Bar Ranch Hands. There were great bands in those years, Shorty Bates and his Texas Saddle Pals. He often slept in the car, ears ringing with the thump of “Rattle Snake Daddy” and “Motel Blues.”

One night he met Valentine Eckenstein—Vollie—the full-breasted middle daughter of a German wheat farmer in Twospot. She worked at the government relief office food distribution center, packing boxes with staple goods for families on relief, but her pleasure, as his, was the weekly dances. She was a pushover for the musicians on the stage of the dance hall, standing at the edge and gazing raptly at them, singing, “Old Tascosa and CanAYdiun, dah-da-dah-da-dah.”

She was not pretty, but there was a freshness to her strong-boned face with its shapely mouth, and hazel eyes accentuated by straight thin brows. Beyond this her features were symmetrical, perfectly balanced, which gave her a kind of lasting beauty. That physical symmetry was enough for Ace, indoctrinated by a windmiller’s predisposition for balance. Vollie’s hair was thick and curly, and the color of butterscotch; she mashed its wildness under a beret. She was strong, with a good-natured laugh. She had a sense of humor and saw the jokes of life. After two months of “Banjo Boogie” and “Holes in My Soles,” Ace went out to the farm to meet her parents.

Old man Eckenstein was not, as he had feared, the truculent and aggressive German father who believed his every sentence was meant for a stone tablet; he was one of those men who could throw peanuts into the air and catch them in his mouth. Here was the source of Vollie’s dazzling smile. The old man greeted Ace with a kind of jovial relief. Vollie’s mother, an example of the faded brightness of middle-aged farmwives, wore wire-rimmed glasses whose lenses often fell out, causing a huge uproar until the missing glass was found and replaced, gave Ace questioning looks. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but some instinct held him back.

The family liked ice cream and on Sunday afternoons they sliced fruit, or took a jar of strawberries from the root cellar, mixing the sweet preserves into the cream and sugar, packing in the salt and taking turns cranking the ice-cream maker. Ace gained four pounds courting Vollie.

Ace got on well with the other daughters: Maxine, the oldest, dressed always in georgette frocks and high-heeled pumps to fit her position as second assistant town clerk; Honey, rather fat and with silken braids, who was a champion breadmaker; and Hilda, the youngest, homely with blond eyelashes and pinched mouth, who wanted badly to be an aviatrix and badgered old Eckenstein to let her learn to fly with Rupert Bayliss Rigg, a Charlie-at-the-wheel crop duster. There was a toddler in the family as well, Little Emily, with straight black hair and a peevish elf’s face. Bob gathered vaguely that Mrs. Eckenstein was taking care of the child for someone. It was only after he and Vollie were married in the tiny stone Lutheran church in Twospot in 1936 that she told him her sister Maxine was the baby’s mother, the baby an unplanned accident.

In September of 1939 war broke out in Europe. Ace thought it inevitable that the United States would get into it. Habakuk said that steel windmill parts would be hard to get if that happened and they began stockpiling gears, trusses, heads, blades in the big warehouse. Roosevelt changed the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in the month, persuaded that more shopping days for Christmas would improve the economy. In stores one could see the new flickering light tubes filled with neon gas, said to be more efficient and cheaper to run than lightbulbs. King-size cigarettes and cup sizes for brassieres made news. The world was rushing along. There was more work for van Melkebeek and Crouch, deep wells and big pumps as the panhandle began to expand into something called the “Golden Spread.” The talk was all of irrigation and increased crop production and sometimes a single field would have eight or ten windmills pumping water into tanks that fed irrigation ditches, and still it wasn’t enough.

“They say there’s big water down below, deep down. Deeper than any little old windmill can pump,” Ace said to Habakuk.

“Well, that’s where it’s going to stay until they get better pumps than we got now.”

Ace and Vollie lived in the old bunkhouse on the Eckenstein place, and it was a red-letter day when Ace ran a telephone wire from the main house to the bunkhouse.

Ace called her one day. “I’m out at the Wrink place,” he said. “Ah, I need you to go to Amarilla, to our supply shop and pick up a rod-type O’Bannon cylinder. Habakuk’s not there but José will have it waitin for you. I just talked a him. He’ll put it in the back a the car. I need you to bring it on out. There’s nobody at the shop can do it. José don’t drive and nothin to drive if he did. The rest a them’s all out in the field. So bring out the damn thing out to me,” he said. “County Road J and turn north on Wrink Road. Watch the tracks, the wheel tracks. You go through Wrink Crik. Shouldn’t have a bit a trouble, just gun it and keep going, good hard gravel bottom. The water’s only about fourteen inches deep. Turn off at the sign for Wrink Ranch. There’s a cattleguard and just past it a kind a wet place, big clump a willers and just past the willers a dead cow in the goddamn ditch and you head out left. About half a mile and there’s a gate. It’s kind a hard to open so I’ll git somebody a keep a watch for you and open the gate. Now I don’t want you to drive dangerous, but we need that damn cylinder soon as you can git it here.”

The trip into Amarillo and then the drive to the Wrink place took two hours, but Vollie was glad to get out of the cramped little bunkhouse and away from the washing machine with its churning scum of windmill grease.

She pulled up at the gate. It was made of barbwire strands stapled to a post that was firmly held by fixed wire loops at bottom and top. It was the tightest, most difficult gate in the county, and the maker clearly had taken great pride in making a gate that only one man in a hundred could open with anything approaching ease. She could not budge the wire and even prying up on the top loop with a heavy screwdriver from the tool jam on the passenger floor did not move it. There was no one in sight to help get the damn thing loose. She heaved on the post and it gave a thousandth of an inch. She got a crowbar from the truck and began to pry at the wire loop. It was so taut it made a fine singing hum every time the crowbar moved.

Then she saw the rider coming toward her through the grass. Disheveled and panting, her fingers red and grooved by the wire, she waited for him.

As he came near she could see the sweat patches on his blue shirt, the wet fabric almost black. He stopped at the gate, dismounted, letting the reins trail. He seized the post, pulled it toward the main gate upright, jamming the loop up over the post with the heel of his hand, though it took three or four punches. The gate, tension released, collapsed into limp strands. He smiled at her.

She looked at him and there was light on the water. The sky flared up in black leaps and she stepped an involuntary step toward him. He was the most beautiful human she had ever seen, the right one for her. Heavy shoulders and arms inside the plaid shirt, the square masculine face, four-day growth of reddish bristles catching the light, narrow eyes, squinted enough not to disclose the color, hidden by dark lashes. His thick, dark red hair stuck out carelessly from under a cap. He was dirty and pouring sweat, the shirt showing a few dry patches at the shoulders, the rare face red and sweat runnels down the cheeks and jaw and into the wet hollow of his throat. He gave her that easy quick smile, drew back the gate so she could drive through, his sleeves rolled up and showing heavily muscled forearms, hairy.

“It’s a tight one,” he said.

She wanted badly to touch the wet throat hollow, wanted badly to say, “Wait, it’s all been a mistake, I didn’t know you were coming, please touch me, please look at me.” Her blood was filled with slivers of fine steel all forcing against the inside of her skin, aligned to his pull. She stepped helplessly toward him as though to help with the gate, but he was dragging it back, turning from her and she saw his perfect body, balanced, a tall man, the dirty jeans full of the fine legs and buttocks. He held the gate back and there was nothing for her to do but get in the car and drive through. She came abreast of him. Now he was working a fence tool into the back of the top wire loop, reworking it into a wider loop. The sweaty hollow of his throat showed a line of dirt at the bottom curve, as fine as a hair.

“I thank you—” Her eyes were stinging, smoke burning, nothing to do with the gate.

“Bet you can git it open now,” he said.

“You must have built this gate,” she said. He did not answer and she drove across the dirt-colored grass toward the windmill rig, barely steering, watching him in the rearview mirror jerking at something on the gate, one elbow moving back and forth, then saw him go to the horse, remount, take off his hat and draw his hand over his face.

In the evening, sitting with Ace on the top step of the trailer house, sharing a bottle of beer, she said, “That guy opened the gate for me, who is he?”

“Oh, Ruby? Ruby Loving. He sings at the Spearman dances sometimes. He works for the ranch, just a hand, but the situation changed some recently. He got married two weeks ago. Married the rancher’s daughter.”

The pain of that disclosure made her gasp, and she disguised the gasp with a swig of beer. A venomous hate for the unknown rancher’s daughter poured through her.

“Hasn’t made no difference so far because he’s still buildin fence, but I imagine it will. I imagine he’ll get his hands on the ranch one day. Why, he wasn’t sulled up or nothin about openin the gate, was he?”

“No. No. He was nice. He was
nice
. But he never said his name, so I wondered.”

“Ruby. Ruby Loving.”

Well, that was the perfect name. She couldn’t think of anyone better made for loving.

“What is the rancher’s daughter’s name?”

“Honey,
I
don’t know. Her last name has to be Lilian. Her father’s name is John Lilian. He owns the Wrink place. But I don’t know what her first name is.”

She found out in a day or two. Of course it was Lillian—Lillian Lilian—and of course they called her Little Lilly. She was a barefoot five feet tall and with kinky orange hair and flat-chested. Thank God.

She did not see him again until late in the month. Ace was almost done with the Wrink windmills. The May day was sultry and packed with dirt blown by a fitful hot wind. She heard a truck in the yard and went onto the porch. The interior of the truck was shadowy and at first she couldn’t make out his face, didn’t recognize the truck. He got out and the moment she saw him come around the front of the truck her stomach turned over. Light on the water, the black current catching her. She went down the steps, stood facing him on the shady side of the truck.

“Hey. Mrs. Ace,” he said. “Ace wants me a tell you that he had a go in to Amarilla and that he will be late gettin back, you are not to worry.”

“Well, what on earth for? Go to Amarilla?”

“Two more wells. Boss wants a see two more wells long as he’s got Ace on the ground.” He leaned against the truck, crossed his heavy arms across his chest, crossed his right ankle over the left. He was wearing a baseball cap and was not as sweaty as the last time, though the hollow of that fine throat, red throat, almost turkey-skinned, was glistening and there were half-moons of wet under his arms. He was chewing gum. She could smell its sweet wintergreen flavor, see the flash of pink between his large white teeth. The blue work shirt was half-unbuttoned. There was a streak of dried blood on the back of one hand. He was talking about something, the weather, she guessed, but he pulled her attention so hard she couldn’t focus on anything like talk, staring was all she wanted, all she could handle, from the scuffed toes of his cowboy boots up the dirty line of packed jeans to the narrow waist and heavy studded belt, the triangle of waist to shoulder, the hot bare skin and dark hair, the stubbled jaws moving, chewing with wet and juicy speed while he talked, pointed at the clouds in the southwest with his chin, looking at the pure white masses swelling upward and saying something about keeping an eye on them.

She did it without thinking. An animal urgency seized her in its jaws for a few minutes, shook her wits loose. She stepped forward and lightly pressed the palm of her hot hand into his inner thigh, against the long shape of his sex. He stopped talking but did not move except to turn his eyes from the cloud to her eyes. His face was expressionless. He continued to chew the gum but very slowly, his eyes steady on hers. They were fixed in a tableau, he leaning against the truck, arms folded, legs crossed, the mound of his sex prominent, she, facing him, looking at him, with her hand in his groin. She could feel him hardening and lengthening under her hand. Whatever she expected it was not what followed.