Cap and the men lived like trolls in the engine shed. They set up a table made of a cable spool and they put a coal-oil lamp in the middle and sat around it on empty wooden liquor boxes and dynamite boxes. They cooked on their tiny cast-iron stove and slept on the floor. One late, hot evening George Lacey drove in and walked in the door of the engine shed and said good evening and sat down with them.
“I’m snooping,” he said. He reached for a deck of cards. “And looking for something to do of an evening.” He shuffled the cards. “I’ll deal you a hand.”
“I don’t play,” said the captain. He lay back on his bedroll, on the floor beside the stove, with a candle stuck in a sardine can. “I quit.”
“Quit what?”
“Shooting dice and playing poker. I don’t wager.” The wind sang in disjointed hoots at the edge of the tin roof and Captain Crowninshield squinted at the Magnolia field connections foreman in the dim light.
“Well what do you do for entertainment, Mr. Crowninshield?”
“I’m reading a book.”
“What’s it about?” Lacey spun the cards out from man to man and laid a handful of pennies on the table.
“It’s a detective in Los Angeles that’s mixed up with fast women and gangsters.”
“Leave him read,” said Andy. “You just have to leave him read.”
The driller figured Lacey was going to ask him when they were going to give it up. All the core samples were dry as fossils and no sign of sand. In fact Andy had pulled up a sample with a strange birdlike skeleton in it, like a print, something beached in a waterless limestone sea. Both Andy and Otto laid down their cards and yawned until their jaws cracked.
“You play dominoes?” said Lacey.
“Hell yes.” Crowninshield emptied a box of black dominoes out onto the cable spool.
“You got the old well log?” said Lacey. “From when they drilled here before?”
Crowninshield tried to think what business George Lacey had in this wildcat well, and thought for a moment. He should just ask him. When they had reached three thousand feet, Captain Crowninshield asked the shabby producer if he still had the old well log from fifteen years ago, and the producer said he probably did, that he might be able to find it somewhere in his papers. Tells you what kind of outfit Beatty-Orviel was. And he did find it, the long thin strip of paper with mysterious seismograph markings on it, and in some parts the markings were thick with spikes and in others they were so tight as to form a solid bar. Crowninshield had stuffed it into a cardboard box somewhere, he wasn’t sure where. But he left his dominoes and went searching through his piles of papers in the Carnation box. He found it. He flipped through the log by the light of the kerosene lamp. Ran his finger down the jittering black lines indicating strata.
“What does that tell you?” Lacey said. He scraped up his pennies and put them in his coat pocket.
Andy and Otto lay in their blankets beside the stove and snored.
Crowninshield said, “Not much. In the five years since they drilled here, there’s been a lot of oil pulled out of the field. All over the Woodbine field. Lot of oil, lot of gas.”
“I know it,” said Lacey.
Crowninshield sat down again and shoved the well log at Lacey.
“It means the pressure in the entire field is reduced. The law says now if you hit salt water you got to pump it back in, keep the pressure up. They learned that in the big East Texas strike. In ’31. They haven’t been pumping back salt water like they should, law or no law. So when the pressure changes, gets lower, that means the oil all over the field has probably shifted. It ain’t in the same places it was when they first drilled this hole here, fifteen years ago. So everbody’s guessing.”
“There’s two wells over at Apache where they hit salt water,” said Mr. Lacey. “They’re just letting them blow.” He set up his dominoes.
“I know it.”
“I personally don’t think it ever stops shifting,” said Lacey. “It is my personal theory that something is making more of it down there. Making it all the time.”
The wind sliced through the leaky sills and blew a spider across the floor. It trod with sticky legs across the remains of a shepherd’s pie.
“What’s your interest in this, George?” Crowninshield set up his own line of dominoes.
“A lady has invested in this well that…” He paused. “Somebody I know.”
“Hmmm.”
“Jack Stoddard’s widow.”
“Hmmm.” Crowninshield wiped his hand over his bald head. “I knew Jack Stoddard. The less said the better.”
Andy sat up in his blanket and said, “Judas priest, when is that wind going to quit?” He flopped down again.
“I’ll bring some tow sacks you can stuff under those sills,” said Lacey. He folded up the well log.
Otto turned in his blankets and said, in the strangled, low tone that comes out of a dream, “The wages of sin is death.” Then he kicked his feet out straight and began to snore.
“So are the wages of virtue.” Crowninshield considered his dominoes. “And wages is plural.”