The Sons of Adam (37 page)

Reynolds was silent for a while, then began to nod in agreement. It was a solemn moment.

They had enough money for two, possibly three, wells and their first one had just failed.

Other men might have waited for morning. Not Tom.

Alamitos No. 1 drew oilmen to it like sailors to a mermaid. The oil-slippery ground by the Shell rig became a marketplace for ideas, deals, offers and handshakes. Two blocks from the gusher, an enterprising barber lit up his shop and sold hot coffee at fifty cents the cup, while his wife handed round home-baked carrot cake and refused all payment. Tom hung out on the sidewalk outside. He was already half-famous. People pointed him out. ‘That’s him, English Tom, the guy with the land parcel down on the hill.’ Drillers came to him and presented their credentials.

‘Evening, mac. I heard you got some land.’

‘I have.’

‘The way you see it, would that be producing land?’

Tom explained where his land was – not the best location, but not bad – and the amount: twenty-seven acres. When he mentioned the size of his acreage, men stopped dead in their tracks. No one had twenty-seven acres. Apart from Shell, who hardly counted,
no one
had that much land. And that was the moment when the conversation would change tack. It wasn’t the rigger asking questions of Tom, it was the rigger pleading to be considered.

‘Well, sir, I’m mighty pleased to make your acquaintance. My name’s Dave Larzelere, you might of heard me spoken of as the Duster on account of some bad luck I encountered round down Torrey Canyon way, but I’m a fair hand with a drill and I reckon there ain’t too many rigs I can’t handle, and I wouldn’t mind mentioning that any poor luck as I might have had in the past is good an’ finished, seeing as the last two wildcats I worked on turned out to be producers, and pretty good ones at that …’ The Duster spat on the ground, wondering if he’d said too much or not enough. His spit was brown and gluey and it balled up in the dust. Like many oilmen, he was addicted to chewing tobacco, since the smoking sort was dangerous anywhere near a producing well. ‘And, anyways, I was wondering if mebbe you’d be needing some help any time soon?’

Tom rejected some men and accepted others. He wanted experience – he knew he was still short of knowledge – but most of all he wanted eagerness. He couldn’t offer much by way of wages, but he peeled off percentage shares in his oil rights and handed them out like they were diamond mines, which in a way they were.

By two in the morning, he had a team of drillers: tough, experienced and as hungry as he was.

The next item was money. To sink one well would cost around twenty-five thousand bucks. By cutting down on wages and handing out royalty interests, Tom could cut that figure down to maybe twenty-one or twenty-two thousand. That still left a ten-thousand-dollar gap between what he had and what he needed.

No problem.

There are promoters and promoters. Some of them are all-mouth-no-money, first cousins to outright fraudsters, men so hopeless they wouldn’t find a nickel in a packet of gum. Tom stayed clear of these. He asked big questions, tough questions about rigs and equipment and investors and distribution contracts. He used his interrogation to winnow away the losers, until he was left with the real men, architects of oil deals, men who could put together a business transaction from a concrete cell. Tom found a man he trusted, and by six o’clock in the morning, he had made the arrangements he needed.

He should have been tired, but he wasn’t. He’d spent every penny he owned, but he had something better. He had land. He had a rig.

And he could smell the oil.

Winter came.

Some days, when snow was falling, it was impossible to drill, and Alan let the men keep to their tents, watching the valley disappear beneath its mantle of white. In the morning when the snow had stopped, they would be up before dawn to chip away at the ice that snagged the cables and clogged the pulley. They’d shovel fuel into the rickety old boiler, and stand around it, drinking their morning tea, grateful for the warmth. They went to bed fully dressed except for their boots, and even their boots they tucked into their bedding, to keep the ice from caking them during the night.

They began to have accidents. One of the Persian riggers allowed the heavy bailing tool to fall on his foot, and he lost three toes and could no longer walk without a stick. Even worse, one of the trucks, attempting to get up the hill in vile weather, rolled over and killed one of its occupants. They held a burial service up at the camp, laying out the dead man like the effigy of a saint and burying him with a Koran folded over his stomach to keep out the devil.

The Russians were thoroughly used to such weather, and worked at their constant unhurried pace irrespective of climate, but the Persians suffered acutely. The tribesmen usually spent their winters down in the lowlands in their family compounds. The idea of working outside in these conditions appalled them, and nearly a third of the men employed simply disappeared till the camp seemed empty and joyless.

Alan caught four men smoking opium. He disciplined them and confiscated their drug, but the men were moody and sullen, and four days later, when the supply truck came up from Shiraz, he smelled the odd meaty smoke and found the men grouped round an opium pipe with dull eyes and vacant faces. He did nothing while they were still under the influence, but the next morning he asked them to take their belongings and leave. The mood in the camp grew brittle and depressed.

And yet, despite everything, the Muhammad Ameri No. 2 continued to make progress. They passed each milestone with a modest celebration: two hundred and fifty feet earned lashings of tea, sugared almonds and tobacco. Five hundred feet earned an open fire built with their precious coal, and two young kids spit-roasted over the blaze. They were at nine hundred and thirty feet now and the camp was abuzz with plans for the thousand foot extravaganza.

Meanwhile, Reynolds and Alan met each night to examine their latest rock samples, and to compare them to the ones they’d taken from the Ameri No. 1. As usual – perhaps as always – the geology was inconclusive.

‘We’ll just have to go down until we find it,’ said Reynolds.

‘Or until we run out of cash.’

And day by day, their cash resources dwindled, the rock samples were unhelpful, their chances of failure grew.

There are important moments in life. Marriage. Baptism. Death. The first kiss, the first sex, the first broken heart. But however important these things feel, they’re not such a big deal. They happen a million times to a million people every day. Everyone has ’em. They’re nothing special.

But most people aren’t oilmen. Most people haven’t assembled land, a rig, and a crew of riggers all in the same place at the same time just five hundred yards from a producing well.

Tom had.

He’d had to wait forty days before getting his rig (bought from some bankrupt exploration venture in Indiana), but they’d got it set up in double-quick time and now, at six o’clock on a rain-spattered evening, they lowered the drill to within three foot of the sandy earth. This was bigger than marriage. This was bigger than birth. This might – just might – turn out to be an oil well.

‘Hold up there, guys,’ said the Duster, producing two brown paper bags with a pint of moonshine whiskey in each. ‘We gotta do things properly from the drop.’

He handed round the bottles and each of the men took a long slow draught, before spitting some on their hands and running their hands solemnly round the fishtailed drill bit. Earlier that day, Jeb Flecker had heated the forge up to white heat and hammered the blade of the bit so sharp you could have shaved with it. A bit didn’t need to be anywhere near that sharp, of course. After a single minute twisting in the soil, the edge would be lost in any event. But each of the drilling crew owned one per cent of whatever came up, and the superstitious intensity of that gang was greater than anything Tom had seen, even in wartime.

Tom took his swig, rolled it round his mouth, spat on his hands, and baptised the blade. He swallowed the drink. It tasted of fire, blue-flamed and intense; the true illegal spirit of Prohibition. For some reason the taste made him think of Rebecca Lewi. He felt a sudden pang of longing for her company. Annoyed with himself, he spat on the ground and passed the whiskey bottle on round.

The Duster took the bottle and nodded at Pipsqueak.

‘She’s in the crew.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘So.’ The Duster waved the bottle.

‘So?’

‘So she’s gotta drink.’

Tom thought of objecting, but the swell of opinion was against him. He wiped his dirty workman’s hands on the seat of his overalls, then bent to lift Pipsqueak to the bottle. The Duster splashed her with the fluid, and she spluttered indignantly but her tail wagged harder. Tom then passed her beneath the drill bit, like a lamb of sacrifice. The men nodded approvingly. ‘She’ll do,’ said the Duster, meaning the rig, not the dog.

‘Then let’s get moving,’ said Tom. His voice was quiet, almost reverential. He had chosen his tone just right.

The drillers knew what to do. The boiler was fired up. The pressure was right, the rig was strong and level. First, they raised the massive lifting block that caused the drill bit to lower to the ground. The Duster brought it to rest on the sand as gently as a mother kisses a baby. He nodded. ‘Boiler Bob’ Colvin threw the valve that passed pressure through to the kelly. The kelly turned. The drill pipe turned with the kelly. The bit twisted into a rapid blur, drove down into the soil, and was buried. Tom let out a sigh, that was one-quarter pain and three-quarters bliss.

He had just spudded in his very first well.

Spring 1921.

It was still cold, but the valley floor was clear of snow, and the river running through it was high and dangerous with meltwater. A couple of their goats lost their footing when the bank collapsed, were swept away, and found drowned two miles downstream. Everywhere in the camp, the ground was being churned into slush. The winter fight against cold had turned into a new fight against mud.

The Muhammad Ameri No. 2 had failed.

They hadn’t struck oil. They hadn’t found signs of oil. The chippings that came up from the well bottom gave Alan and Reynolds no hope. If they’d had time and money, they’d have continued, of course. But they didn’t. With every day that passed, their money was draining away and time was measured in money. As Reynolds said, ‘If we don’t move now, we may as well not move at all. We simply won’t have the cash to sink a third well to a proper depth.’

The derrick stood a hundred feet high. As well as the derrick, they’d have to move the boiler and pump-house and camwheel and lifting tackle and cable. Even a short move would require all the men to labour for a week.

‘Time to get a bloody move up,’ said Ahmed.

But Alan was unhappy about something. He squinted up at the glinting snowline, he rubbed his chin (newly shaved in boiled snow-water), and pulled slowly at a half-eaten flat-bread that was the day’s breakfast. He had put on weight since his illness the year before, but he was still thinner than he had been. His face had lines that had never been there before, not even during the war.

High up on the valley wall, a chain of bedraggled calico flags was beginning to poke through the snow. Alan had put the flags up there last year, marking out the strata of oil sand that Ameri had found. Because the strata were exposed, there was no chance of finding oil in any quantity, but you could at least trace the line where the oil had once been.

The line of flags was further evidence in favour of Reynolds’ impatience to move. The flags were never more than two thousand feet from the top of the ridge, and sometimes as little as eleven hundred. If the same logic applied on the valley floor, then oil should be found at between eleven hundred and two thousand feet. They’d driven the first well to eighteen hundred, and the second one to more than two thousand. Everything in logic said they should move the well now, and get cracking on their third and final hole …

Eventually, Alan made up his mind. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We leave the derrick where it is.’

‘What? Great Scott, laddie! There’s no use in giving up. We’ve still got cash enough to –’

‘We’re not giving up. We’re going to carry on down.’