Boomtown

The Mesa Inn in Westin was braced for the evening by the time I got there. A sign at the door set the dress code: No Torn T-Shirts, No Work Clothes, No Greasy Boots. The bouncer next to it looked like he might be working the job so that he could buy more weights; enough maybe to make the distinction between his neck and his head disappear completely.

About half the saloon-style tables were four and five around with big young men in clean hats and shirts for the evening.

I ordered a double Scotch.

"You new in town?" said a voice next to me. There was a sharp Southern accent to it, and when I turned, I was looking at a round, boyish face under a cap that said Mud on it.

"Came in this afternoon," I told him.

"You looking for work?"

"Yup. Like everybody else in this town, I guess."

"Ever work derrick hand?"

"No," I said. "Never worked anything. This is my first oil field."

"You ain't never been in the patch before? And you come here? Shee-it." He pulled back a bit to get a better look at me. "Tell you what. You could not have picked a worse field to break into. This is the wormiest operation I ever saw, and I seen 'em all over the world since I was thirteen years old, and I'm thirty-five next month."

The bartender asked us if we wanted another drink, and when I said yes, Mud said he'd have another Budweiser and to take mine out of the $20 bill on the bar in front of him. Then he lit a cigarette, looked at me again and shook his head.

"How old are ya?" he said. I told him 33. "What the hell are you doing trying to come into the patch at thirty-three?"

I told him I needed the money. I didn't tell him I was a writer, that I was a mechanical moron, in over my head just sitting at a bar in an oil boomtown.

"Well, you might make some money, all right, if these wormy sombitches don't kill you first." He looked at his beer and dusted an ash off his white jeans. "Course, if somebody broke you in good, you might be all right. I could do that ... if I wanted ... if you was worth a shit. I'm a pusher over at D and J." When I asked him what a pusher was, he said, "Boy, you really don't know nothing whatsoever, do ya?"

"Nothing whatsoever," I said.

"Normal thing is for a rig to carry five men," he said. "Worm, motor hand, chain hand, derrick hand and the driller. That's a full crew. Tool pusher's the guy that hires 'em all, then makes sure they stay sober and have everything they need in the way of equipment to keep the rig running. Also sees they don't get lazy or stupid, which they mostly are, anyways." He smoked. "Where'd you come here from?"

"San Francisco."

"Frisco?" he said. "Nothing out there but queers and spears, what I heard."

Which turned out to be about the end of my patience for the nasty string of dirt eaters I'd met that first long day in nowhere Wyoming.

"Tell you what," I said, using his accent. "Why don't you just drink your beer and pick this evening's fight with somebody else." There was a pause while I looked him straight in the face and thought, Oh, shit, here we go.

"Now, don't get all pissed on," he said. "I didn't mean nothing by that. I ain't never been to Frisco. I was just talking. You got a temper, though, don't ya?"

"It's been a bad day," I told him.

"This is a bad place if you ain't got a job. Course, I could line that out for ya right here, if I wanted."

He looked at his beer as if it were my turn to say something. I didn't.

"How much school you got?"

"Too much, probably."

"You got college?"

I nodded.

"How many years?"

"All four," I told him.

"Shit," he said. "And you out of work. Don't make sense. I barely got through ninth grade and I never been outa work except when I wanted to be. My daddy put me in the patch when I was thirteen, me and my brothers. He used to say, 'I could send you to college for ten years and you'd just come out queer.' "

I had my second big Scotch all the way in me when he said that, and I was beginning to see the humor of the entire exchange. There was something about Mud that didn't mean to be hostile, no matter what he said. He was trying to be cocky, but it wasn't quite working. He just wanted to talk to somebody and anybody would have done that night. It occurred to me that his daddy had probably also told him that anybody who drank alone was an alcoholic.

"College boy," he said. "I'll be damned. This place is so full of trash you just don't expect it."

"Strange times," I said.

"You queer?"

"Not yet," I said.

The pretty little bar waitress pulled into the station next to me and ran off a list of drinks that sounded like a takeout order for the James gang. Then she asked the bartender to tell the bouncer that there was a woman at a table in the far corner with a gun in her purse.

"I could hire ya right here and now," said Mud, squinting sideways at me.

"What kind of work?"

"Put you in the yard, break you in right, then get you out worming on one of the rigs. I got a couple of worms I'm gonna be running off in the morning ... so I got room for ya. I'm just afraid you'll get one pay check and take off. Depends if you're worth a shit."

"I have to check on another job in the morning ..." I bluffed.

"The hell with that," he said. "You just show up tomorrow morning at eight o'clock in the yard and I'll put you on. You're hired."

"How much does it pay?"

"Eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour," he said. "I know that don't sound like much, but that's for the first forty hours a week. I'll get you sixty or seventy hours and it's time and a half after forty, so's you'll do all right. Plus, there's other side lights in the patch. You'll make some money, don't worry. If you's worth a shit."

I asked him where the yard was. "You just walk out this door and look west," he said, pointing toward the bandstand. "The tallest derrick you see, right next to the highway, is the one we're rigging right now. Biggest rig in Wyoming--Cooper 750."

He slurred the word biggest.

"I'll be there," I said. "What's your name?"

"Sonny," he said, shaking my hand. "You be there." Then he looked at me sideways. "College boy," he said. "Ain't that a thing."

At first light, I drove to the Outpost for a Styrofoam cup of coffee, then across town to D and J, as Sonny had said I would, by using the huge derrick as a guide. It stood along the highway edge of the yard, and when I drew it into my notebook map, I estimated that it was 100 feet tall. It soared up off the rear of a huge truck like the extended ladder of a fire engine.

Around 7:30, a white pickup with a D and J sticker on the doors pulled into the dirt drive. One of the five men in the crew cab got out and opened the gate. As the truck rolled through, he hopped onto the big steel bumper under the tail gate. When the driver saw him there, he punched it, and a geyser of dust enveloped the rear of the truck, which took off in a series of skidding figure eights that finally spit the clinging man ten feet out of the dirty cloud and rolled him another ten across the hard ground. He got up holding his elbow, and while he walked to retrieve his hard-hat, the fat man who'd stepped from the driver's seat yelled, "You gotta ride to the buzzer or you don't get no points, cowboy." Then he laughed as if it were the little moments like this that made getting up in the morning worth the trouble.

Over the next ten minutes, two bobtail welding trucks drove into the yard, an old Plymouth dropped three hands at the gate and a kid on a motorcycle cruised in. He was followed by a catering truck that blew a couple of bars of Dixie on its horn, then parked in the long morning shadow of the derrick. The driver got out, threw open the quilted chrome panels on the sides and shouted, "Java, it's java."

As I started toward the catering truck, another D and J truck came out into the yard as if it were being chased. I got out of its way and saw Sonny behind the wheel as it went by. He didn't look happy. He skidded the truck next to the gathered hands and yelled out the window at the fat man.

"You got nothing to do around here, is that it? Nobody works unless I'm here. I swear to God I'll run you and your whole damn crew off if you don't find things to do around here."

The fat man was looking straight at Sonny, and what he wasn't saying was all over his face: Don't push too far. You're not big enough for the job. His crew was looking away and at the (continued on page 80)Boom Town(continued from page 72) ground, as were the rest of the hands.

"I want you rigging the brake today," Sonny told the fat man. "And I want your crew to wash the rig real good all the way up."

The fat man nodded slowly, then sent two of his hands for buckets, brushes, soap and rags. When Sonny spotted me, he drove ten feet to where I was standing and said, "Well, College, you made it. That's good. You go ahead and start swabbing the rig with Tom's crew. Be smart up there. Watch where you put your feet. I got to run that other worm off."

I watched him drive another ten feet to a young hand who listened for a minute, then did a little pleading. Finally, Sonny told him, "You was missing two days, and you wasn't worth that much while you was here. Just stop over to the office, get a check and go on down the road." He left the kid standing there and drove out of the yard.

I walked over to the group with the buckets. The fat man was saying something angry about Sonny that he interrupted in midsentence when he saw me. "What are you looking for?" he said.

"Sonny told me to work with your crew today."

"My ass," he said. "I don't need no more crew. You tell Sonny find you something else." He turned to walk away.

"You tell him," I said. He stopped the way a batter stops when he's a few steps toward first base on ball four, then hears the umpire call strike three. He looked at me as if I were the second person he wanted to kill that morning but couldn't; as if I'd be a lot easier to kill than Sonny if it came down to that.

"All right," he said. "You want to wash, you can wash. You can start in the crown." He pointed to the top of the rig. "You get you a bucket and a brush and you climb till you're looking at the sheaves. Then you start washing."

"What are the sheaves?" I asked him.

"Shit," he said. "You ain't too wormy, are you? You ever been on any kind of rig at all? No, you haven't, have you? Well, then, this ought to be real fun for you. If you don't fall down and get yourself dead." He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. "You go ahead and get on that thing over there with the rungs in it--that's called a ladder--and you keep climbing till you run out of rig and you'll be looking right at the sheaves." Then, without taking his eyes off me, he said, "Get him a bucket, Marlin, and get one for yourself."

Marlin was a big kid with a quiet face, the one who'd been thrown from the bumper of the truck. "Marlin don't much like heights," said the fat man, "but we're going to cure him. He's going to follow you up, then the two of you work your way down."

It seemed as though Marlin might say something, but he didn't. Instead, he looked at me as if the whole thing were my fault, as if I'd somehow drawn the meanness out of the fat man and he'd been splashed by accident.

I took one of the large plastic buckets from him, dropped a stiff brush into the soapy water and carried it to the base of the rig. The bucket was a little over half full and weighed about 15 pounds. The fat man and his crew watched me as I set it down and relaced my boots. All right, you fat bastard, I thought, watch this: I don't know a sheave from a drill bit and I've maybe held a pipe wrench twice in my life, but today's the day I get on this derrick and make you look the fool you are, because if there's one thing I can do, it's climb, and I mean buildings or trees or rocks. And if you think the perfect steel geometry of this stubbly little oil rig holds even small fright for a guy who has clung from a dirty little one-finger crack 15 times as high as your goddamn sheaves, then just watch this.

I swung into it and got about ten rungs up before I had to stop and make some adjustments. The heavy bucket was putting a serious limp in my moves. My rubber-soled boots didn't feel very good on the steel rungs, either.

"You only got a hundred feet to go," said the fat man. "Don't get tired, now."

That pretty much did it. I let the bucket slide into the crook of my right arm so that I could get both hands on the ladder and I started climbing as if anger were muscle. Which it was for a while but not for long on the vertical, and 30 feet up, I felt myself moving into the zone where the bill comes due on what you've spent.

•

The balcony at the top of the rig looked like a work station, probably for the derrick hand, I thought. I wasn't sure what he did, but he had a great view of Westin from up there: the hills, the sawmill, the river and the railroad tracks that cut through town along its banks. The sun was warm, the breeze light, and for the first time, I noticed a beautiful old roundhouse on the western edge of town. It looked to be 100 years old and the railroad was still using it. There were bays for a dozen engines arranged in a circle around the short stretch of track that rotated them in and out of the freight yards. While I watched an engine turn, a lovely, throaty whistle came up and the Amtrak passenger liner from Oakland came out of the hills and slid through the valley, then disappeared through a rocky notch in the east.

I heard the fat man shouting and when I looked down, I saw Marlin standing at the base of the rig with his bucket. Christ, I thought. Hauling a pail of water and a fear of heights up this ladder was going to be an awful piece of work. He stood on the bottom rung anyway, which made me guess that he was more afraid of the fat man than he was of altitude; then he stepped back down and I wondered. The fat man yelled again, and this time, Marlin got onto the ladder and started slowly up. He must need this job worse than I've ever needed one, I thought. The morning was less than an hour old, he had already been thrown from the back of a truck, and now he was making his way up toward what would surely be panic when he passed the point at which the body knows by instinct that a fall could mean death. About ten feet up, he stopped and hugged the ladder. He didn't look up or down. He stayed where he was, breathing badly, till the fat man shouted again, then he began moving, pausing on every rung as if it might be his limit. He stopped again just over 30 feet up, and this time, he almost lost the bucket when he tried to get a full body grip on the ladder. He managed to hang on, but I heard him whimper in a way I'd whimpered myself just before I took a 60-foot screamer off a rock called Royal Arches. It's a pathetic sound that comes up from a place inside that has accepted the inevitability of what's about to happen. The difference was that on Royal Arches, I'd been on a rope that had saved me.

Marlin was clamped to the ladder like a mollusk, which was good, because panic was all over him. If he tried to move, he was going to fall.

"Pour the water out," I shouted.

"I can't," he said without looking up.

"Drop the bucket."

When he didn't answer, I started down. I stopped two rungs above him. "Don't move. Try to relax," I said, even (continued on page 136)Boom Town(continued from page 80) though I knew that nothing sounds more ridiculous when you are where he was. "Focus on your breathing," I said. I sat into the rung I was on, locked my feet around the sides of the ladder and leaned out backward and downward.

"Let me have the bucket," I said. Nothing. "All right, hold on with your left arm and just let go with your right long enough for me to get the bucket off." Still nothing. I reached down and got the handle of the bucket and lifted the weight of it off his arm. "Now, just let loose long enough for me to get it out of here." He looked up at me. All the fear in the world was on his face. "We're all right," I said. "Just let me take the bucket." He let go, I lifted it free and he dived back into his cling.

I looked down and saw the fat man and his crew watching us. Just for a second, I thought of dropping the whole goddamn bucket on them. Instead, I poured it out and watched them scatter as the soapy foam broke into a shower and sprayed them.

"Got 'em," I said.

"Oh, man, don't fuck with Tom," Marlin said without looking down. "He came back from 'Nam real violent."

Great, I thought. One of the unexploded bombs from the war. Probably ambushed in the jungle and can't talk about it. Probably all right as long as the death anger doesn't build up, as long as he can throw somebody from a moving truck once a day.

"Do you want to climb down?"

"I can't go down," he said.

"Then let's go up to the platform. Take it slow, rest as often as you want, one step at a time, nothing to it."

I did five rungs, then saw Marlin begin to climb slowly, putting a careful pause between each move. About a minute after I reached the platform, he pulled himself up next to me and sat on the grating, breathing hard.

I saw the fat man walking off toward the shed with one of his crew. The other two were climbing with their buckets onto the wide lower beams of the rig. The only man on the ground still watching us was a guy wearing a red bandanna.

"Who's that?" I said.

"Reno," said Marlin. "The yard boss."

"Just the man I want to talk to," I said. I grabbed the empty bucket, climbed down the ladder and walked over to where Reno was standing.

"Wonder if there's a way I can fill this, then haul it up on a rope. Trying to climb with it is nuts."

"Then why'd you do it?" he said.

"I didn't know any better."

He looked at me as if that were the right answer, then he said, "We can pull it up there on the cat line."

"What's that?"

"That little cable," he said, pointing. "You go on back, I'll run it up for you."

"All right," I said. "And how 'bout a safety line?"

"We ain't got any," he said. "We're supposed to have 'em ordered, but they ain't here yet."

"How 'bout a hard-hat?"

"Ain't got those, neither, but I think they's coming this afternoon."

When I was a few steps away, he said, "Try not to do just any fucking dumb-ass thing one of these jag-offs tells you to do. Else you'll go outa here in a bag."

•

Back on the platform, Marlin asked me my name and I told him.

"Well, thanks," he said. "I just kinda choked out there."

"I know the feeling," I told him. "In fact, I had a pretty bad moment of my own with that bucket. I think the fat man was trying to kill me."

"Don't go calling him the fat man so's he can hear it. He just might kill you."

Reno whistled from the rig floor. He had a bucket on the cat line and he'd started one of the engines. I told Marlin to go ahead and start washing from where we were, that I'd climb the last 30 feet to the crown and start there. I scrambled up to the little crow's-nest and waved at Reno. He pulled the lever and ran the bucket all the way up.

I started washing the sheaves, and at first, the job seemed as if it were going to be purely absurd. It was a brand-new rig and there wasn't a spot of oil or grease on it, just a thin coat of prairie dust. But as I worked down out of the basket on top into the Xs and Vs of the widening beams, it became clear that the climbing wasn't quite as simple as it looked, that I'd better learn exactly what you could grab and what you couldn't. At one point, I tried to use a wiring conduit for a hold. It was painted the same white as the half-inch pipe I'd been hanging onto and it looked just as rigid; but when I grabbed it, it moved, which put a shot of adrenaline into my empty stomach.

•

Things in the yard were slow for the next two days. There were about 15 of us and there wasn't much for us to do. The big rig sat quietly waiting for parts while the hands loitered about at look-busy make-work.

Marlin and I spent most of those two days in the derrick using a case and a half of Turtle Wax to polish all 115 feet of the damn thing. We worked our way from the crown to the base, and when Sonny could find nothing else for us to do, we started up again. I reshined Marlin's work, he reshined mine. I told him that it felt stupid to be rubbing on a vehicle that we weren't going to be able to use to pick up girls.

"Don't complain, we got the good job," he said, pointing with his rag to a couple of hands below us in the yard who all morning long had been polishing a chromed set of socket wrenches as if it were their grandmothers' sterling.

"And when we strike oil," I said, "we're going to put it in wine bottles, right?"

"Aw, hell," he said. "This rig might never even go drilling ... if you want to know what I think. Been four weeks since Sonny hired our crew and started promising that I'd go out on the next hole. They can't find an oil company wants to hire 'em is what's wrong. They been putting bids in, all right, but they can't find no takers, probably 'cause the two rigs they got working is broke down half the time, one thing and another. Oil companies don't like to see that two-thousand-dollar-an-hour down time. Word gets around. We could be dicking around here a long time before this outfit gets another bit in the dirt."

"I wouldn't mind if we dicked around long enough for me to learn what's what on this machine. At least enough to keep myself safe," I said.

"You'll be OK," he said, "long as you know which way you're gonna jump if things cut loose. Long as you never put your feet between two pieces of metal."

Both admonitions had the ring of good working advice, till early the next afternoon, that is, when I found myself crowded onto the rig floor with a dozen other hands in the punishing roar and nasty stink of the big diesel engines, on the end of a guy rope that was attached to five swinging tons of steel called the traveling block. For some reason, it wasn't hoisting into place the way it was supposed to. Sonny was at the motor controls yelling at (continued on page 161) Boom Town (continued from page 136) the fat man, who was standing two feet from him, pointing into an open binder at a page with some sort of diagram on it. While the two of them went around on the subject, I looked at my feet. They were planted not between two pieces of metal but in the center of a taut pattern of moving cable and chain that would have easily delivered me every imaginable injury in a single stroke if something had snapped. And if I had to jump, it was going to be straight backward off the rig floor and 20 feet to the ground, which was littered with angle iron and pipe collars.

It was the sort of moment I would have expected to deepen my general fright, but it didn't. True helplessness is relaxing in a strange way. Standing there with that many ways to die under my feet and over my head, I remember thinking there was absolutely nothing to do but trust that the motley collection of roughnecks and oil tramps on the floor around me knew what they were doing and that in keeping themselves safe would accidentally keep me safe, too.

And, little by little, I was learning. For instance, that a "cunt hair" is a specific unit of measure. Fits somewhere in the metric system between zero and a millimeter, as in "Bring it this way a cunt hair." Goes with a general attitude that seems to take all this machinery to be female, as in "Come on, baby, turn, be a sweetheart." And when it sticks, "You whore, you bitch, you miserable slut."

•

Two weeks into the job, shit rain began to fall one afternoon. The company man from Puma Oil showed up in the yard ready to yank the one field contract D and J had working if Sonny didn't fire the entire evening crew. Sonny said he couldn't blame him for being mad: catching the whole crew passed out the way he had, around midnight, with the rig drilling on its own at about half the rate it should have been. The Puma man had waked them by throwing pipe collars against the steel walls of the doghouse, then told them to trip the string out of the hole and put a new drill bit on the end. They told him to fuck off, which is not something you tell the man from Puma Oil unless--as Sonny put it--you're ready to twist off and go see Momma. Which is exactly what Sonny had told them to do when he caught up with them. In their place, he had sent the fat man and a small crew into the hills to work evening tour, which was going to amount to a double shift for them after their day in the yard.

It was three in the morning when the phone rang. "Listen," Sonny said, "get your pants on. I need you to drive into the yard, get that Mex, Ramone.... Call Reno--his number's by the time cards--tell him to bring his truck, then I want all three of you out at number sixteen as fast as you can get there. Tell Reno we probably got burned-up bearings."

Reno, Ramone and I drove through dark prairie till the topmost derrick light jumped into view, then all the derrick lights and the flat pad that had been cut from the hillside to accommodate the lonely operation. Three pickups sat at the base of the rig, their headlights aimed at its huge motor. Two men were on the machine, using a small sledge on the handle of a long wrench. Five others stood in a tight semicircle below them, breathing steam into the cold air.

"Sombitch is fused on there," said Sonny as the three of us joined the fat man's crew to watch.

"Let me try it," said the fat man.

"Just stay right where you are," said Sonny. "You done enough for tonight."

"She burned up?" said Reno.

"I don't think so," said Sonny. "Don't smell like it, anyways."

"It just locked up is all," said the fat man.

"That's 'cause you tried to pull up off the bottom without--"

"The hell I did," said the fat man. "All I done was--"

"All you done was drive it like a fool," said Sonny. "And I ought to run your ass outa here for it." The fat man started to say something but swallowed it. His crew stood with their hands in their pockets, looking at the ground.

Reno and Ramone got onto the catwalk and looked into the naked works. They talked, then Sonny sent Ramone to our truck for some sort of hydraulic jacking device that they attached to the nub of what looked like an axle among the gears. Reno pumped the jack handle till he could barely move it. Sonny took over and put another ten strokes on it, then stopped and shook his head. "Fucker's deep froze in there," he said.

Ramone pointed to the biggest of the gear wheels and pantomimed half a turn. "Might work," said Sonny, then he climbed a ladder onto the floor, to the controls.

I put at least 15 feet between myself and the rig as the huge engine fired, and even so, I wanted to plug my ears. I didn't, because nobody else did. Not that it would have done any good against the awful roar, which came after my whole body, turned it into a drum, shook my bones and my blood.

Marlin walked over to me and said something. I pointed to my ears and made a signal that meant kablooie. He leaned closer and shouted, "Don't think anybody knows what the hell they're doing around here."

Reno came down off the catwalk and told the fat man and the rest of his crew to stand aside. Marlin and I were far enough out that he didn't say anything to us, and we stood where we were. Ramone left the jack where it was and stepped out of the face of the machinery. Sonny waved, then dropped the engine into gear. The motor strained, the rig shuddered, the pipe stands hanging in the derrick rattled, something snapped and the steel bar they had been working to free exploded out of the guts of the machine and harpooned 15 feet straight into Marlin's chest. He went onto his back without a sound, arms spread, fingers stiff, eyes wide open and fixed desperately on me. I got onto my knees next to him and almost immediately felt hands on the scruff of my jacket as someone threw me out of the way. When I got a look, the fat man was kneeling where I had knelt, breathing steam into Marlin's eerie stare.

The engine noise died into a terrible quiet as Marlin's crewmates scrambled to him. Reno arrived just behind them, shouldered in, got to one knee, then said, "All right, all right ... he's alive.... Don't touch him yet." The fat man rocked back on his haunches, picked the steel bar out of the mud, looked at it, then stood and screamed, "Sons of bitches ... motherfucking sons of motherfucking bitches...."

Sonny stopped halfway down the rig steps when he saw the fat man turn and cock his arm, then whip the heavy bar through the air straight at him. The strength of the throw was unbelievable. The bar missed Sonny but ricocheted off the steel stairs behind him and into his hip. He hugged the handrail to keep his footing, and when he looked, the fat man was moving toward him. Sonny pulled his sheath knife. "Come on, cocksucker," he said, as if things were just getting good. "You want some of this.... You want to dance?"

The fat man stopped and looked at him. Sonny was smiling. "That's it, asshole," he said. "You're run off, you hear? This whole motherfucking mess is your fault and I want you the fuck outa here. You go ahead and get that man to the hospital, then drop that truck off in the yard and get back to Salt Lake any way you can, I don't care how. You hear me?"

The fat man stood perfectly still.

"I mean it, now," said Sonny. "I ain't gonna fuck with you no more. Just get on down the road."

All of us had frozen when the fat man threw the steel, and all of us were still frozen as the two of them stood there, one with a knife and one in a rage.

"For Chrissakes, this man's hurt bad!" Reno shouted.

The fat man looked at the group huddled over Marlin, then turned back and pointed at Sonny. "You and I ain't finished," he said.

"Unless you want this up your ass," said Sonny, shaking his knife, but the fat man had already started for the truck.

Marlin had begun to shiver badly, and his eyes had closed. I stood and felt my own shakes, felt the blood rush to my head and had to sit again. I crawled back into the group about the time Ramone came from the doghouse with two blankets. Then all of us lifted Marlin, wrapped him and set him gently back into the mud.

The fat man backed the pickup to us. There was a discussion as to whether Marlin would be better off in the front seat or stretched out in the cargo bed, in the cold.

"His chest is probably caved," said Reno. "I don't know about sitting him up."

"Just get out the way," said the fat man, then he lifted Marlin as if he were a sleeping child, carried him to the cab and slumped him onto the seat. The rest of his crew were barely into the bed of the truck by the time the fat man gunned the engine, threw two muddy rooster tails, gained the road and disappeared around the hillside.

"He gonna be all right?" Sonny asked Reno when he reached us.

"I don't know," said Reno. "Pretty bad."

"Damn," said Sonny. "I waved everybody out of the way."

As Reno walked toward the rig, Sonny took my arm and walked me toward the trucks. "Listen," he said. "I want you to know I was watching you. I knew that thing was maybe gonna let go, but I thought you was far enough back, I swear I did. It's the kind of thing you can't always tell. This ain't tiddlywinks."

I didn't say anything.

"You ain't gonna quit on me, are you?" he said.

"Sonny," I said, "this is crazy for me. I don't belong here."

"Nobody belongs here," he said. "It's just a place you end up at. And as long as we're here, we got to help each other ... is all I'm asking."

"I'm sorry, I can't do this," I told him.

"What I need you to do is drive into the yard and make some calls is all. Want you to phone the hospital, see how that boy's doing, then call up the boss and tell him what happened. You can do that, can't you?" I nodded. "And tell the boss we'll have this thing up and drilling by the time the morning tour gets here. Then you wait in the yard till the other hands get in, tell 'em just sit tight."

•

I killed three rabbits on my long way back over the ragged dirt track toward town. I told myself it couldn't be helped. I was working against the kind of fatigue that follows a deep scare, using what small focus I had left to hold the road and to remind myself that I wasn't safe yet; that the awful worst usually happens away from the crux; that calamity is a sniper; that you never hear the shot that kills you; that every time I'd braced myself against the promise of violence--whether it was hanging by chains and cables over my head or getting mean drunk on the stool next to me--nothing had happened.

First light was turning to pale halo over the eastern hills by the time I pulled through the open yard gate. I used the keys Sonny had given me to let myself into the big shed, found the boss's number and dialed it. While it rang, I rehearsed a short version of the evening: We had a man hurt out on number 16 tonight. Sonny thinks you ought to go by the hospital, but he says don't worry, they'll have the rig fixed by the time the day crew comes on.

When there was no answer, I called information, then the hospital. I asked the woman who answered if they'd admitted an oil-rig injury.

"Name?" she said.

"I only know his first name, Marlin," I told her. There was a long pause.

"You have no last name at all?" she said.

"No, I don't," I said. "But come on. How many rig casualties can there have been tonight?"

"Three," she said in an almost bored tone.

Chest injury, I told her. Probably brought in within the past hour. She put me on hold again. "Who are you?" she said when she came back on the line.

"A friend. I'm with the same company. I was there when it happened."

"Well," she said. "The doctor's with him, but it looks like a crushed sternum, maybe a collapsed lung. We're trying to arrange a life flight for him to Salt Lake."

"Is he going to make it?" I asked.

"Critical but stable," she said.

"What about the men who brought him in?" I asked her.

"They left when I called the police. The big one threatened the doctor. He seems to have a mental problem."

I tried the boss again, and when there was still no answer, I walked back to the truck, started the engine for heat, lay across the seat and slept.

I woke to a noise at the driver's-side window. It was B.J., a driller from the other crew.

"How'd you get promoted into a truck?" he said.

I looked at my watch. It was a little after seven. I rolled the window down and told him the story.

Other hands arrived, drifted over. They listened as if they'd heard it before: Rig down, man hurt, a face-off with knives, a whole crew sent packing--just another day at the office, just another violent night in the middle of nowhere drilling for oil.

The catering truck arrived and most of us walked over for coffee.

"Where's Tom now?" said one of the hands.

"I don't know," I said. "Last report, from the nurse at the hospital, he was still in a rage. Sonny told him to drop the truck off or he'd have him arrested. I don't know if he'll show or not."

The boss's truck came into the yard. When he saw the bunch of us idling at the lunch truck, he drove over and barked out the window at us, "Having a tea party, are we?" He looked as if he hadn't slept, as if sleep wouldn't have done him any good, anyway.

"There's been some trouble," I said.

"There's gonna be trouble, all right. Where the hell's Reno? Where's Sonny?"

"Out on number sixteen," I said. "We had a man hurt last night. Pretty bad, I think. The rig went down. We went out to fix--"

"What the hell you mean, the rig went down?" he said.

I was about to answer when a company truck splashed into the yard with Sonny and Reno in the front. Ramone was in the back. They parked next to the shed, then walked to the boss's truck.

For the next five minutes, we watched as Sonny stood by the boss's window, making large gestures, appealing to Reno for witness, yelling sometimes, listening while the boss yelled at him.

I was getting a second cup of coffee when a small plane lifted out from behind the northern hills, banked west and climbed into the bright sky. I thought it might be Marlin, hoped it was.

The boss finished whatever he was saying to Sonny, then spun his truck into a wide U-turn. He came out of it near the gate, then stood hard on the brakes just in time to make a skidding nose-to-nose stop with the last of the company pickups.

The fat man sat motionless behind the wheel, staring at the boss through the mud-splattered windshield. What was left of his crew piled out of the truck and backed away as if it were ticking. The boss waved his arm, meaning Back it out, then he honked his horn, which made me think he didn't quite understand the awful promise of the moment. I did, and found myself looking around for cover, something to duck under or behind if the yard all of a sudden turned into the O.K. Corral.

The boss threw his gear shift into park, flung open his door, then walked to the fat man's passenger window, where he made another angry move-it gesture and started to yell something. Whatever it was, he didn't get to finish it, because the fat man hit the gas, blew the boss off the door, smashed forward into the empty truck in front of him, then shuddered it straight back across the yard till steam burst from his radiator and the engine died.

There was a stunned silence. Sonny broke it by yelling at Reno to call the cops. The fat man made several tries to restart the stalled pickup, then climbed out, glanced slowly around the yard at all of us, then faced Sonny with a look that was beyond anger, beyond fear, full of the kind of insanity that has no heat, that seems to be coming up out of the quiet eye of a terrible storm that's about to break.

Sonny pulled his knife, but he didn't look like he wanted this round.

"You might as well just back off'fore it gets any worse," he said, but there was no authority to it, none of the hot blood that had seen him through the first standoff. Then, as if his knife had begun to feel small under the circumstances, he added, "The cops is on their way."

The fat man got a small tight smile around his mouth. This is it, I thought. The streets of Laredo. But it wasn't. Incredibly, he turned quietly and walked for the gate, almost sauntering. I couldn't believe it. I don't think anybody else believed it, either, because no one moved a step. Except the boss, who gave the fat man wide berth as he strolled calmly through the gate and out of the yard.

Maybe he's going to get a gun, I thought as we watched him disappear among the heavy equipment that was parked in the yard next to ours.

"Did I miss something? Is it over?" said B.J.

"Looks like it," I said.

"Don't feel like it," he said.

A relieved sort of milling took up among the hands around the coffee wagon. Ramone walked past on his way to his camper, shaking his head. Sonny holstered his knife, then met the boss at the crumpled trucks.

"Least now you see what I'm dealing with," Sonny said.

The boss gave him a disgusted look. "Just get one of these trucks running so I can get over to Puma and clean up your mess," he said.

About the time Sonny got the hood up, a police cruiser rolled into the yard without lights or siren. The boss waved it over, then squatted at the driver's door and spoke to the young cop behind the wheel. Sonny bent into the conversation with his two cents; then, as the two of them stood to point to the yard next door, a diesel revved somewhere among the parked earth movers and the biggest of the yellow bulldozers backed, turned and began a heavy crawl for the fence.

There were shouts of "Holy shit!" and "Oh, my fucking God!" as the huge cat folded the chain link like chicken wire under its treads, then took an angle for Ramone's camper. Ramone had one foot on the rear step and the other in the camper before he realized the full lumbering truth of the moment. He jumped free just as the teeth of the bucket pierced the tinny shell, then smeared it sideways off the bed of the truck.

The cop used his radio, then unracked the gun on his dashboard and stood out of the car to watch with the rest of us as the fat man lifted the dozer's shovel and dropped it onto the cab of Ramone's truck.

"Shoot the fucker!" yelled Sonny. The cop took a step out from behind his cruiser, then stepped back as the big machine swung in our direction, snorted black smoke and rolled straight at us.

We scattered like rats. I ran a wide arc to the rig and scrambled up onto the floor with Ramone. Others made for the gate, where the catering truck almost ran them down on its panicked way out of the yard. Reno and the boss headed for the shed, along with B.J. and the fat man's orphaned crew.

Sonny was the last to move. The cop peeled out in reverse, which left Sonny between the dozer and the dead company trucks, where, for one dumb moment, he stood like a rodeo clown over a downed cowboy, waiting for the big yellow bull to veer. Finally, he ran and a second later, the fat man slammed the dozer full-on into both trucks, shattering the windshields, blowing the front tires, crushing the hoods. Then he backed up, raised the bucket and began a brutal sort of detail work on the boss's truck.

There were sirens from two directions as three more police cars converged on the gate and skidded in next to the cop who had answered the first call. They talked while the fat man destroyed the second pickup.

When the police had a plan, six of them walked through the gate in a loose phalanx, riot helmets on, visors down, shotguns pointed into the air. They stopped when the fat man disengaged from the ruined trucks and headed for a fresh one, the last of the company pickups, the one I had driven into the yard and parked next to the shed. As he went to work on it, the nervous police formed a wide horseshoe around the machine, and one of them used a bullhorn. Whatever he said was lost in the noise of the last truck's slaughter and the ripping of the aluminum shed wall. Finally, at a signal from the cop with the bullhorn, one of the officers got to one knee and lowered the barrel of his gun.

It was a strange moment, because, in a way, from the time I'd gained my safety on the rig floor, I'd felt myself rooting for the fat man, liking him, admiring the justice of his rampage, hoping that before they figured out how to stop him, he'd pound every vehicle to scrap and leave the whole dangerous, drunken, sloppy operation out of business.

Now it looked like they were going to shoot him. Not that he seemed to care. The sight of the police and their guns hadn't broken his workmanlike concentration at all. He finished the third company truck while the cop with the bullhorn issued a last warning, then turned his cool fury to the demolition of the shed itself.

I winced as the shot went off, saw the shooter duck backward out of the hail of pellets that ricocheted over him off the engine block. And whatever he hit, it was a kill shot: one diesel cough and the dozer went dead--bucket frozen in the air--dangling an unfinished mouthful of aluminum paneling.

The fat man was the first to move: Slowly, carefully, he took off his hard-hat, hung it on a gear lever, leaned back in his seat, looked at the guns, then around the yard at ruins of the company fleet. Then he smiled. Miller time.

"All right, you fat bastard, I thought, watch this: If there's one thing I can do, it's climb."

" 'Try not to do just any dumb-ass thing these jag-offs tell you to do. Else you'll go out in a bag.' "