A Clearing in the forest (6 page)

Wilson understood the labels.

“Coffee break's in here, follow the guys in,” Pete continued. “Coffee only, you hear? If I find so much as a drop of booze within a mile of this rig, the man who's got it gets his bottom kicked by me personally. Now get going.” He pushed the plate of cookies toward Wilson to show him the speech was a formality, but Wilson was thinking of other things and missed the friendly gesture.

The mud sucked at Wilson's feet as he walked toward the derrick. A narrow ladder ran up along the scaffolding to the tower. The first few rungs didn't bother him because he was too busy watching the big yellow block that held the drill shaft. The block was at least twenty feet high. Everything there seemed outsized. Looking down, he thought he recognized Lyle Barch. He had heard Lyle was working on one of the rigs and was sorry it was this one.

Wilson's hands were getting sweaty and he was having trouble getting his breath. Heights always made him queasy. The only way he could bring himself to continue up the ladder was to stare hard at the rung right in front of his eyes, study all the shades of gray and brown and black in the metal, really look at it as though it were a painting or something he had to memorize. If he looked up toward the top of the tower or down to the receding ground, he got panicky.

When he finally pulled himself onto the platform, he was horrified to see the floor was nothing more than a strip of metal grating. You could look down between the slats a hundred feet to the ground.

“Welcome to the ‘Top of the Rig,' gourmet lunches and dinners, bar always open.” T. K. reached into his back pocket, took out a bottle of Jack Daniels, tipped it, and swallowed. He offered it to Wilson, who hastily shook his head, looking over his shoulder as if Pete might be floating around in the air up there watching them.

“What can I do for you, buddy?” He shifted the last piece of pipe out of its slot and looked like he was getting ready to start down.

He was tall—six-feet-four or-five. Wilson felt like Jack climbing the beanstalk and meeting the giant. Would he leave him here alone? Wilson grabbed the railing and managed to answer the man. “Pete told me to report to you, then go right down and work with Ferrelli.” The lighting up here was strange; the red glow from lights along the side of the derrick gave everything an unearthly look.

“Ferrelli? Hell, we could use a man with us. Well, since you're up here, I'll give you the five-dollar tour. Next time be sure you wear a safety belt. Heard the score on the baseball game?”

Wilson looked dumbly at him, too frightened to hear anything, but T. K. didn't seem to notice and went right on talking in a friendly way. “That crazy pitcher the Tigers got—the Bird—I'd give a lot to get down to Detroit and see him. Working this shift, I don't even get to see him on TV.”

Shouting over the noise, T. K. started to explain what he was doing. Wilson kept nodding, but he wasn't listening. He was so scared standing way up there on the platform that he wished he were dead.

Finally T. K. shut up. Thank heaven he was going down first, so there would be something between Wilson and the ground. But when Wilson tried to follow, he couldn't make himself put his foot on the first rung. Then he saw the space between himself and T. K. grow greater and fear of making the trip down by himself got him started. Once they reached the ground, T. K. said he'd see Wilson later and took off toward a pile of casing. Wilson stood there shaking, wiping sweaty palms on his jeans.

Lyle Barch approached Wilson. “How ya like it up there?” His smile was derisive. “Wait till you get up there on the block.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when we got to get up there in a hurry, we just hang on to the block and ride it right up to the top of the tower, like an elevator.”

An elevator without any floor or sides, Wilson thought gloomily. He could tell Lyle was enjoying the effect his words were having.

“Never expected to see you here,” Lyle said. Didn't think you were the type.”

What type did Lyle mean? All kinds of men worked on the rigs.

For a while Wilson had owned his own motorcyle, a battered job he had rebuilt from an abandoned wreck. Lyle had tried to talk him into joining up with his gang, but Wilson had refused. Since then, Lyle wouldn't have much to do with him. More than once Wilson had seen Lyle's name in the Oclair
Tribune
for things like “drunk and disorderly behavior” or “careless handling of a motor vehicle.”

Wilson understood in part what bugged Lyle. Until the oil boom, jobs had been scarce. There was no industry. All you could do in summer was wash dishes in the restaurants—and even for those jobs there was plenty of competition. You watched the summer kids walk around with their tennis rackets or flash through town in fast cars. In winter even the movie theater closed down. All you could do was go into Oclair and watch the level creep up on the big snow gauge in the middle of town. There had been times when Wilson himself had done things he later regretted, just because he was so bored.

He decided that as long as they were working together, they might as well be friends. “Do we bring our own lunch or what?” he asked Lyle.

“You can if you want, or there's a truck comes by with sandwiches and pizza.”

“I'll see you at lunchtime, then,” Wilson said and walked toward the engine shed. After the climb up the rig, the mud oozing up around his boots was wonderfully reassuring.

Inside the shed, there was a pleasant smell of machine oil. On the wall a huge hand-lettered sign read: IN THE EVENT OF A BLOWOUT ALL ENGINES MUST BE SWITCHED OFF IMMEDIATELY.

These were the biggest engines Wilson had ever seen. But, even for such monsters, one of them was vibrating too much. He looked for a wrench and found one beneath a label that said “wrench.” Pete must have been here.

When Ferrelli came in, he saw a boy hanging over the number one engine, tightening up a bolt on the bedplate, a smile on his face.

9

Frances Crawford counted seven men, a car and a truck. On the back of the truck was stenciled in large red letters the word EXPLOSIVES. The men scrambled out of the cars and, lugging their equipment, headed north through the woods along a cable line laid earlier in the week. Every one hundred feet they drilled three six-foot holes. The dynamite men came along behind them and placed charges in the holes. Then, using a shooting box, the men set off the explosives. By monitoring the sound waves from the explosions as they bounced off rock formations thousands of feet below ground, a computer could estimate whether or not there was a chance of finding oil there.

The little army advanced efficiently, not stopping to rest until its men came to the riverbank, where they had to decide the best way to cross. One man pointed toward a shallow spot in front of Frances's cabin, but the others shook their heads. Instead, they took off shoes and socks, rolled up pant legs, and waded across a somewhat deeper spot, holding their equipment out of the water. The stream's iciness surprised them and they laughed and shrieked like school children.

On the other side of the river, they stopped to dry off. A couple of the men knelt down to drink the clear water from the stream. Finally they picked up their gear and disappeared into the woods.

Frances had been at the window all morning. Now she knew how the early settlers who loved the woods must have felt when the landlookers and cruisers came through the countryside buying up whole forests for the lumbering companies to cut down. The dog, hackles up, ran back and forth, yelping nervously each time a charge went off. When the explosions were no longer audible, she left the window and hurried outside.

She expected some drastic change—bits of the earth's crust scattered over the ground, a fire, craters. However, apart from the trampled bracken and some bare spots about the size of a saucer where the charges had been exploded, there was nothing to see. Perversely, it was not what she wanted. She would have been pleased to find beer cans, trash, dead birds and animals, the earth ripped open, anything to justify the rage she felt over the assault on her land.

But nothing was there except a July day full of yellow flowers. Goldenrod was in bloom, as was the St.-John's-wort, with its butter-yellow petals. The mullein blossoms had begun their long climb. Cinquefoil trailed along the ground, and beside the stream was a stand of jewelweed where dragonflies came and went.

Frances walked along the river, telling herself nothing would come of the tests, confident the river would contrive some spell to throw the machines off. She saw men in Texas puzzling over the computer results, “Look here, look at what that tape does when we get near the river, certainly can't be any oil there. We'll have to try elsewhere.”

Her fantasy was interrupted by a rustling on the ground: a meadow vole after last fall's acorns. She passed some sickly chokecherry trees, shrouded with deserted-tent worm webs. The milkweed growing along the trail gave off a cloying smell. She stopped to pick some blueberries which grew on the steep bank. A white-throated sparrow sang from the top of a nearby pine. As she stopped picking to listen, the dog trotted by and upset her berry basket.

Reaching out to save the basket, she let go of a sapling she was holding onto to keep her balance on the bank. A rock under her foot gave way and she slipped down the hill, her arms and legs scraping against sand and sharp twigs. She tried to catch hold of a branch, but she was moving too fast. When she finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, the basket lay empty a few yards beyond her. The dog had taken off after a chipmunk.

She tried to sit up, moving with great care. Her arms and one leg seemed to be all right, but the other leg was twisted under her body. There was a sharp stab of pain when she tried to move it. She felt it carefully. There didn't seem to be any break. Possibly it was no more than a bad sprain. Even so, it would be difficult to get back to the cabin.

She heard the voices of men calling to one another. At first she felt relief at the possibility of help. Then it occurred to her it must be the team from the survey company returning to their truck. It was insupportable that they should find her sprawled here, helpless. But how to get away? On her hands and knees? They would overtake her. She decided to stay perfectly quiet. If they discovered her, she would pretend nothing was wrong. She retrieved her basket with a stick so they would think she was picking berries. As she tried to get into a more comfortable position, a searing spasm shot through her leg. It was all she remembered until she came to, cradled in the arms of the large man who had drilled the holes for the explosives.

“Are you all right?” He sounded nervous, like someone who has just had a strange baby thrust into his arms. “I felt your leg before I moved you and I don't believe there's anything broken, but you should see a doctor.” The other men were gathered around her, peering down, worried looks on their faces.

She felt like a senile Snow White surrounded by outsized dwarfs. And the clumsy oaf had had the impertinence to feel her leg! “Just put me down,” she told him. “I can manage the rest of the way myself.”

“I don't think you ought to put any weight on that foot, ma'am. It looks pretty swollen.” The man was frowning.

When she began to wriggle in his arms, he reluctantly lowered her. The other men moved back as though she might explode when she touched ground.

And she did. She yelped with pain. Two of the men made a sling with their arms and silently waited. Without a word she lowered herself into it and put a reluctant arm around each man to steady herself. The procession moved toward the cabin.

“How did you know where I lived?” she asked.

“They briefed us before we came out. This was volunteer duty, like cleaning out a machine-gun nest. They said you might take a potshot at us,” The big man laughed; the others grinned.

She felt better. She might be helpless now, but she had made them think twice about tramping through her property. “I don't suppose you can control the results of your tests, what they say?” For that she would be happy to play the pathetic old lady and even whine a little.

“No ma'am,” the man said apologetically. “We don't have nothing to do with the results. They go right into a computer and then we send them off to the company. We never see the results.”

So much for that.

They were at the cabin. “Can we call the doctor for you? Or we could bring the truck over and take you right to the emergency room at the medical center.”

The thought of riding into town in one of their trucks was odious. “Thank you just the same, but I don't have a phone. If you'll put me down in a chair, I'll be fine. I feel much better.” And then, with a terrible effort, she added, “I'm glad you gentlemen came along. There's some lemonade in the icebox if you'd like some.” But the men seemed anxious to be on their way. Did they imagine that she had booby-trapped the icebox, she wondered, or put rat poison in the lemonade?

She hobbled over to the window and watched them squeeze like Keystone Cops into the small car and the truck and take off. What angered her most was that having tramped that land for fifty years, winter and summer, she had believed there was nothing she did not know about it. Now they had come with their fancy paraphernalia, and the fickle land had immediately yielded secrets she would never learn.

10

While Frances made a grumbling recovery from her sprained ankle, Wilson brought groceries to her and took over the delivering of her preserves to Elkins' Market. Even after her ankle had healed, he found himself turning down the sandy, rutted trail that led to her cabin. His days were spent at Mrs. Crawford's and his nights on the rig. He was amazed he could pass so easily between two such different worlds.

Today Wilson and Frances were sitting at the kitchen table. Spread out in front of them were some fossils he had found in the gravel pit and a pile of her reference books. Holding the fossilized pieces of coral in their hands, they tried to imagine from the illustrations in the books what the land had looked like millions of years ago covered by a sea of salt, a sea crawling with undulating animals that looked like exotic flowers.