When asked later, no one could
recall, really, where the Gusher came from, or, at least, they couldn’t agree.
Some with wilder imaginations said they saw him pop right out the top of the
rig. Just squirt out like a strike itself. Others swore he had come up the
plank road, as if he were a service hand about to start his tour. To a man, and
they were all men on the rig that day—which is probably why the nonsense took
hold—none of them were surprised: you push so much mud down a hole and
something is bound to come up.
Most of them
working the rig that day were from around town. They had been glad when the
operating company that owned the lease on the Celestin farm had not only
decided to activate the lease but to hire a local drilling company to get the
hole down. Word had quickly spread, and so it was that when the tool pusher
came out to take a look at where the rig was to go up, one of the local men who
had previously worked on a rig with him made sure to be in his path. Alcée
Trodon, the tool pusher, was himself from a small town and knew how times could
come and go. Hiring those men who crowded around that day, on what was then
only an unused old cow pasture with the tallest structures among the grass
being the red ant piles, was not only good for them but good for the drilling
company. It would reduce operating costs because they wouldn’t have to hire a
caterer or laundry operation, since all the men would be able to bring their
lunch and to take their dirty clothes home. So much the better.
As it turns
out, most of the men didn’t even have to bring their lunch, as Mrs. Celestin
was a widow and was so happy to have regular company that she began bringing
out big pots of gumbo or chicken fricassee, with plenty of rice, almost as soon
as the rig had begun to go up. By the time they had been ready to spud in the
men working on the rig, happy not to have to pack a sandwich for lunch but also
uncomfortable with the lack of reciprocity that Mrs. Celestin’s generosity
represented, had convinced her her cooking was so good that she should open up
a lunch house. They were, of course, her principal clientele. It was certain
that the oil lease was or would be paying her a pretty penny, but they all knew
how hard life had been for her after her husband had died. And at such a young
age. Big Theo Celestin had been a damn good rancher in his day, a Creole
horseman proud of his ability to handle livestock as well as people. Everybody,
black or white, though perhaps some of the latter not so happily, thought that
Theo Celestin was one of the smartest ranchers the area had ever known. It was
his heart not his head, however, that had given out. Goodness, and it was a big
heart he had, him.
Tee Theo, the
Celestin’s son, was no rancher and had taken to his father’s pastime, playing
the accordion, as his profession. He made a reasonable living, especially now
that the boom was on for zydeco music everywhere, and it was the money he sent
home that made it possible for Mrs. Celestin to hold onto the farm. The rig
crew knew all this and, also, sensing the impropriety of an elderly black woman
serving a group of mostly white men for free, were deeply relieved when her
lunch house opened with some picnic tables surrounding the old summer house
which became the new restaurant’s kitchen.
It was at the
picnic tables that the discussion about how exactly the Gusher had arrived had
its first run. Like all such matters, within days, if not hours, the various
versions began to gather into differing theories and eventually to collect into
a single, sensible story that everyone felt comfortable telling. The
roustabouts, both black and white and all local men who mostly went to the two
Catholic churches in town—which were also black and white—were the ones who
swore the Gusher had come out the top of the rig. Everyone turned to the
derrick man, who with his perch up on the monkey board would surely be in a
place to confirm or deny the truth of this version, but he had been busy
grabbing for the next section of pipe and could only report that he felt
something like a wind rush out of the pipe and past the side of his head. He
normally would have thought it was a pocket of gas, but whatever it was had
given him the frissons as it blew past him. Almost made him shit down both
legs, it did.
At the mention
of the chills, a number of men nodded their heads, but the mud engineer, who
had two years of college and had been looking at his gauges at the time, and
was thus not really in a position to weigh in on anything but still felt a need
to, attributed the frissons to the chill that had settled in this February, and
this the week before Mardi Gras. But it was going to be cold this year running
Mardi Gras.
It was in fact
someone dressed in a Mardi Gras costume that Mrs. Celestin saw as she came into
the yard from the back, where she had been cleaning up the summer kitchen cum
lunch house. She was particularly satisfied with the meal she had made that
day: smothered pork steak with rice and gravy, lima beans, and greens. It had
been a favorite of Big Theo’s and it did her heart good, though perhaps it had
not done his heart good, to see the men from rig eat so heartily and happily
what she served them. She knew some of their wives and thus could be certain
when they said that it was the best pork steak they had ever had that they were
not lying. She was old-fashioned that way, proud of her cooking, proud of her
kitchen, and proud of her yard.
She was less
than happy then to see a stranger tramping, and trampling, through one of her
beds, which she had so carefully covered with pine needle straw that she had
raked herself from a stand of pines elsewhere on the farm, hauled in old
garbage bags in her two-wheeled garden cart, which Big Theo had made for her with
big bicycle wheels on the side, and lovingly spread over the cut-back stubs of
her roses, tucking them in for the winter.
“What you think
you doing, you, mashing my roses like that?”
The Gusher
looked up, a bit startled but happy to have someone before it.
“And how come
you dressed up like that, you? Mardi Gras is not until next week. Don’t tell me
you come to fool with an old woman special like. Go on and find yourself some
young thing who thinks it’s funny. I don’t care, me.”
She turned to
go in the side door of the house which led to the little den her and Big Theo
had made that was right next to the kitchen, so that they could talk more
easily while she made supper and he watched the news, always worried about the
weather and the economy because both would mean how well they might do that
year, but the Gusher kept right on coming, and Mrs. Celestin got a little
afraid: this fellow was a good size and maybe he wasn’t here to clown around
but to do something worse. She decided to be as brave as she could be, even
though her old knees weren’t too sure they could last too long.
“Go on, you. I
ain’t got time to mess with you. I got no chicken, no rice, and I certainly got
no money for you.” Well, that last part wasn’t entirely true. She in fact had a
rather large amount of cash in the pocket of her dress, underneath her apron.
The crew members preferred to pay her in cash: that way, it was up to her how
much she actually made that day, they would say and smile at her and wink. “I
got nothing for you. Not today. Come back next week. Fou Mardi Gras.” She
reached into her dress pocket as if she was reaching for a door key but what
she was really doing was reaching in to squeeze the money in the palm of her
hands. She was prepared to lose it, but she damn sure wanted to feel its
thickness one last time before she did. Her and Big Theo had done all right
over the years, they had held onto this farm, hadn’t they?, but it was not easy
being a single black woman at any time, anywhere. Folks, black and white, had
been nice enough to her after Big Theo had died, but while most shared what
they could, they could only do so much, and, she thought, some of them had
thought her a little crazy, a little greedy even, to hold onto such a
good-sized farm. They never said it, but she had seen it in their faces, in
their looks: why’s that old woman hold onto all that land? She ain’t doing
nothing with it, except keeping it. Even friends had on occasion suggested that
she sell the place and buy herself a little house in town, something more her
size. Why, the money she would make on the sale would pay for the house and
give her a little something every month for the rest of her life. We should all
be so lucky.
But it wasn’t
just about her, and most people knew that. There was Tee Theo to think about,
too. This land was Celestin land, and it wasn’t just for her to say what
happened to it. It wasn’t even for him to say. He was just a young man, him,
and he had no idea yet what family land meant, especially a black family’s
land. Right now, he just knew it was fun roaming about, a few stars in his
eyes, as he played music like his father had only ever dreamed of playing. Oh,
how that boy could play. It used to make his father so happy, hearing him
practice out in the barn. That’s my boy, Malu. Listen how he play that thing?
Big Theo hadn’t lived to see Tee Tee, as he was sometimes known, have himself a
band and a career. But music only lasts so long, Mrs. Celestin thought to
herself, and then what you got?
You got people
like this fellow here who always want to take, take, take, she thought to
herself and looked long and hard at him while she reached for the screen door
with her free hand, knowing all the while that she would have to pull her right
hand out of her pocket to open the other door. She was reluctant to let go the
money in her pocket, as if it meant relinquishing it to this costumed character
already.
It’s important
to note at this point that the Gusher was, in fact, not wearing a costume. It
was wholly and simply what it was, its appearance only an outward manifestation
of its own nature and the projections of those among which it found itself.
Malu Celestin’s
uncertainty, and the Gusher’s own newness, caused it to flicker for a moment.
The old woman blinked, and blinked again. There was a certain fuzziness around
its edges that made her think maybe her glasses had gotten a little dirty while
cooking today’s lunch, so she let go of the money in her pocket and pulled her
glasses off to wipe them on her apron. If this fool was going to rob her, she
might as well get a good look at him. As she pulled her glasses off, she saw it
was no Mardi Gras standing before her but a well-dressed white man in a rather
nice gray suit with a dark red tie, looking a lot like various bankers and land
men who had come to her at various times trying to buy the farm or the mineral
rights underneath it. She had told them all to go to hell, and she was going to
tell this one the same, damn thing. Where were you when Big Theo needed money
for his heart. Nowhere, that’s where. All you want is our land. It’s too late
now. Look back yonder. That’s a rig you see. You too late. Too late, damn you.
When she pushed her glasses back onto her face, however, it was the Mardi Gras
she saw again, and she was so embarrassed that she simply spun on her heel and
let the screen door slam good and hard behind her.
The image of
the Gusher, the Gusher itself, flickered because it was used to taking on
whatever shape its beholder gave it. That was its nature. Upon its initial
release it had no real shape, it was a smudge, a smear in the fabric of
reality. That was why the derrick man had seen nothing. There was nothing to
see. Or, to be exact, there was not yet anything to see. For while the Gusher
had no image, no shape at first; it still was there, and it was to that
presence that the men of the crew reacted. They felt something, and deep down
where things get felt, especially for men who work in the oil patch, the images
are vivid, drawn from the same deep well of our imaginations where dreams and
legends reside.
Some swore that
the legends of the loup garou must be true, and it was certainly the
case that the Gusher tried to be of some help later in the course of things.
Others said they saw the light of a feux follet in broad daylight and
wondered if they had drilled too deep, if hell was closer than anyone had dared
to imagine and that they had let a bad angel out. One could almost imagine the
denizens of some nether region jockeying pockets of oil to within reach of
humankind to whet our appetites and to aid in their own release.
Whatever the
truth of the matter, the Gusher was happy to be out, and its initial response
was to scream wildly like a child on a roller coaster. A few of the men heard
the whoop of a Mardi Gras runner on the trail of someone with either a guinea
hen to throw or dollar bills to give away, and so by the time the Gusher was on
the ground and coalesced into some sort of shape, it had become a Mardi Gras,
which suited it quite well, given the nature of its spirit.
And so it was
that the Gusher found itself again on earth, eager to get to work, to satisfy
human desires in return for only the smallest of payments. It was not fully
prepared, then, to be given what-for by the first human it encountered once it
was in form. It was a creature, whatever else it might be, eager to please, and
so it headed off to the rig, the last thing the old woman had looked at.
It was a Mardi
Gras, then, that the company man, John Foster, saw when he looked out his
office. He had been bent over the latest printouts from the day’s activities,
anxious to make sense of the well’s progress and to be able to forecast its
return on the company’s investment. The heater in his trailer office seemed to
have only two settings: off and hell. His compromise with the fickle nature of
the machine, which to John Foster extended to just about everything in
Louisiana, was to leave the door open a crack and let the air outside, suddenly
cool this past week, mix with the superheated air inside to render the trailer
habitable.
It was through
this crack that he saw a brightly-colored figure walk past. This was his fifth
year in the state and his second rig in the area outside of Lafayette that was
a series of prairies so carved up by bayous that the inhabitants called points
of land, and not inlets of water, coves. They would locate themselves by these
coves, or in reference to a nearby bayou, saying they lived up it, down it, or
across it. It had been a long uphill battle to learn this and other local ways
of talking about and acting in the world. For a time, he wasn’t sure if he was
an oil men or an anthropologist. One thing he definitely was not was a
psychologist, and by god he wasn’t about to let one of the rig crew gad about
in his Mardi Gras costume, and that was definitely what he saw.
On the previous
land rig he had run in this part of the world he had had to put up with the
increasing rowdiness of the crew as Mardi Gras approached. He even had had to
shut down the rig on the day of Mardi Gras when not enough people had shown up.
When he had driven out to the house of one of the floor crew and told the man
that it was Mardi Gras or his job, the man had looked him straight in the eye
and said, “Mr. Foster, I done gave you Christmas and I gave you New Year’s.
That’s okay. That’s okay. But Mardi Gras is my day and no one can have that,
except me. Me, I quit.” For fear of losing the rest of the crew, he hadn’t
driven to any other house that day, just gone home to his own and taken the
expected phone call from the central office that afternoon when he didn’t fax
in any production report. Oh, he had caught hell that day and probably extended
his sentence by another five years in what seemed like a hell personally
designed for him.
John Foster had
grown up in a Midwestern city where buildings nestled firmly in bedrock. In
such an environment, life was solid, sure, straightforward. He had taken an
engineering degree at the state’s major university, putting himself through
college by joining the ROTC. While serving out his time in the military, he had
been stationed in the Mideast and had gotten to know some of the American oil
men stationed there—they spent time comparing “tours of duty” and longing for
home. He had gotten to be particularly close with one of the civilians and that
had resulted in a job offer when he got out of the military.
Life in any
large organization, John Foster had concluded, is pretty much the same. The
names of the actors changed but the roster of dramatis personae remained the
same. And the plots. The plots and counter-plots were much the same. With that
in mind, he set about making his way up the company ladder the way he had
worked himself up the hierarchy in the military. All was going well until he
made one fatal mistake, which had resulted in his fall from grace and his exile
to Louisiana.
Louisiana,
however, had proved indifferent to military conquest. He had researched the
place when its name had shown up in a letter that came from the vice president
in charge of operations. Banishment seemed to be the very function, if not
origin, of the place. It had been carved out of the swamps by French convicts
and castoffs, built up by a series of groups that were refugees from elsewhere:
Cajuns dumped south by the British, Creoles run north by their slaves, Islenos
forced west by the Spanish, carpetbaggers skulking south to make their fortune.
The outer circle of Hell must be populated by a better selection of peoples. The
only revolutionary war battle to be fought in the state was fought after the
war was over and the Civil War battles seemed to have amounted to nothing more
than alternating occupations by armies bent on grabbing what they could, mostly
from people who already had little to begin with.
The landscape
itself was similarly indifferent to conquest. What looked like land was water;
what looked like water was land. Nothing was solid. Nothing lasted. Every stop
sign he had seen was faded to a dull pink from the subtropical sun, and the
major bridge through the nearby swamp ran along piers that were not set on
bedrock but had simply been driven into a thicker layer of mud. All this
indifference had a profound effect on the psychology of the natives of the
place, from what Foster could tell. They, too, seemed indifferent to making
distinctions, to distinguishing themselves through hard work and productivity.
The members of the rig crew all drew handsome paychecks, and yet as soon as
they had collected enough to last them through whatever hunting season was
coming up, they seemed content enough to take off, to quit and re-up when the
money had seen its last use.
Fine for them,
but by god Foster had better things to do with his life than to become one of
them, and this well promised to be his ticket back to civilization and a chance
to begin making his way up the company ladder. And that meant no fool was going
to start acting crazy on his rig. Mardi Gras be damned. This was his well, his
rig, his time.
It should be
noted that John Foster was not a particularly religious man. He had been raised
in a protestant church heavy enough on liturgy that the ritual mostly slipped
by his young mind as a series of moves, like a dance, that one performed: sit,
kneel, sit, stand, sit, stand, kneel, leave. So when he first stuck his head
out the door to hail the miscreant in the Mardi Gras costume his first real
glimpse of the Gusher shimmied for a moment in Foster’s own uncertainty about
the ultimate order of things.
“You!” he
cried.
The Gusher
turned first its head, then its body, getting used to the way those sorts of
things worked again.
“Yes, you!”
John Foster’s own body followed his head out of the trailer doorway. The Gusher
was still so newly formed that it did not yet have a voice, and so it could
only cock its head.
“Get out of the
damn costume or get off this damn rig.”
Still a little
disoriented—after all, not more than an hour or so ago it had been rushing up a
couple hundred feet of pipe and exploding into the blue of the sky—the Gusher
cocked its head the other way and wondered why it was being sent away, given
what it had to offer.
“Get off this
damn rig at once or I’ll rip that mask and costume off you and throw you back
down the hole you crawled from.” It had taken Foster some time to reacquaint
himself with the dramatic and rough nature of a rig crew’s way of speaking. He
just wasn’t aware that it wasn’t a metaphor since in fact it so closely
described reality.
He watched as
the figure that appeared to him as a Mardi Gras, with the tall, conical hat,
the colorful mask, and motley but bright shirt and pants, stood before him. He
was tempted to do something more, but when he heard the voices of the rest of
the crew as they filed back into their places after lunch, he thought it best
to drop the matter. No good to make a big deal out of it. It would only open
the door to more clowning on their part. That’s how these Cajuns and Creoles
were: a short chain demanded yanking. John Foster probably imagined it as a
sense for weakness, but what he didn’t know about them was that the probe only
hurt when you resisted. Once you gave in and laughed with them, you were all
right. Of course, men like Foster never get it.
The Gusher was
having a hard time getting it, too. He sensed a certain weakness in Foster that
made him worth considering. Louisiana had always been a good hunting ground for
human weaknesses: they got sent here. That’s why the likes of the Gusher had
pushed oil so close to the surface, like baiting a hook. Greed and avarice.
Always they came looking for easy money and they were easy pickings. Early
capitalists, later industrialists, and, oh, the politicians. So quick to rise
to power, so hard to convict. Or sometimes they came because it was the last
place others would look. Some of the Gusher’s prize finds had been priests and
gamblers and others who themselves prayed upon human weaknesses. Greed and
avarice.
When the men on
the rig next looked up, they saw John Foster talking with some guy in a gray
suit and a dark red tie. Damn, another company man. That wasn’t good. They were
probably behind schedule and would have to work over-time in order to make good
on whatever nonsensical goal some engineer, or worse, manager, had established
for the well. Lord, those idiots were a pain. The only thing that made their
appearances worth while was how what they pretended to know about the actual
business of making a well come in was balanced by how little they actually
knew. Someone recalled another company man visiting a rig so far out in the
country that he had had to sleep with the crew because no hotel accommodations
were available. He had gotten up in the middle of the night to relieve himself
and wandered too near the generator setup and peed on a live wire. Now that had
been something.
Foster and this
guy appeared to be thick as thieves, just talking and talking, which is what
company men do best. Had the noise of the machinery fallen away on that late
winter early afternoon, had the wind dropped, and the sound of the two figure’s
voices traveled across the suddenly cool air, the crew would have heard the
figure in the gray suit telling John Foster that things were looking good, very
good. The numbers couldn’t be better. The well looked very promising.
“It’s looking
like a gusher, John, a real gusher.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m
telling you. The company is very happy with the way things are going. Very
happy, I’m telling you, John. Just tweak a few things and I bet we can bring
this thing in and you’re going to be the man of the hour.”
“Tweak what few
things?” Foster asked.
“Oh, nothing to
worry about, John. It’s really all in the paperwork. Let’s go inside, go over
the numbers, get you to okay a few things and you’ll be on your way. On your
way back to the top, taking the elevator up into the Houston skyline and taking
your place on the top.”
The two men
disappeared into the hot trailer, much to the envy of the crew, whose hands had
been caught off-guard by the sudden cold spell and were a bit numb, a bit prone
to slip, knocking the skin off a knuckle or jamming a finger. They saw less and
less of John Foster in the weeks and months that followed, but when they did he
was always accompanied by the talkative guy in the gray suit.
The well did
come in and come in big. John Foster moved on to bigger and better projects,
they heard, for these things get around in the oil patch, and then one day they
heard from the new company man that Foster had suffered a major setback and
been forced to resign in disgrace and no one really knew what had become of
him. The new company man had been telling all this to Alcée Trodon and one of
the roughnecks happened to be standing nearby.
“It’s like the
time Felix Guidroz tried to cross the bayou,” the roughneck said.
“What you mean,
Joe?” Trodon asked.
“It was a
couple of years ago. We were running Mardi Gras and we had stopped at Avery
Comeaux’s place and he had thrown us a nice chicken. What we didn’t know at the
time, though, was that he hadn’t clipped the wings on that chicken.”
The new company
man turned and looked at Trodon to see if this was a story worth following, but
Trodon was still looking at the roughneck.
“What passed,
Joe?”
“Well, Alcée,
we took off after that chicken like normal, you know, across the yard and then
across a little field. Now, you don’t know Avery’s place, but he’s right next
to the bayou, and that chicken saw those trees along the bayou and lit out for
them. When he got there, he flapped his wings a little bit to get up into those
trees and, man, you should have seen it, that bird suddenly realized he could
fly.”
“Come on!”
Trodon said.
“I’m telling
you the truth, he realized he could fly and so he didn’t stop at the trees but
took off across that bayou comme ça.” With that, the roughneck made a wobbly
hand gesture that enacted the ungainly flight of a chicken, used to being
grounded, taking to the air.
“What passed
then?”
“Well, we was
coming across that field a quite a clip and Felix Guidroz was at the front,
because he hadn’t caught him a chicken yet that year and he wanted to catch one
bad. You know, he has that new, little young wife and he wanted to have
something to brag about later on.”
“Oh yeah,”
Trodon said, noticing out the corner of the eye that the new company man was
getting a little antsy and impatient, believing the men to be drawing out the
story in order to avoid working.
“So we got to
the edge of the bayou just in time to see this damn chicken take off across it.
We tried to stop but it was like trying to stop a train, you know? You just
can’t stop all of a sudden. And poor Felix, being at the front and all, he had
nowhere to go but in the bayou. Right as he got to the edge and he began to
lean out over the water he started to flap his arms like they were wings.”
“Come on,”
Trodon shouted in disbelief.
“I’m telling
you. He flapped his arms. I think he thought he could fly across that bayou
just like that damned chicken.”
Trodon laughed
at the image but it was all too much for the new company man who had to ask,
“What’s a bunch of you guys chasing chickens got to do with John Foster, with
anything?”
“Well,” the
roughneck said, “he fell in the bayou and we had to pull him out and go send
David to pick him up some more clothes so he could finish the run. Any man who
thinks he can fly deserves to fall in the water. We still laughing about that.”
“I suppose so,
I suppose so,” Trodon said, but sensing that the only thing the company wanted
to get was back to work, waved the roughneck off. He pushed off from the steel
plate he had been leaning against, enjoying its warmth on his back, and turned
to check a few gauges. It would be time to turn in the day’s numbers in an hour
or two, and he knew how company men felt like their fate turned on those
numbers.
© 2002, John Laudun. All
rights reserved. No duplication, electronic or otherwise, without permission of
the author. Permission, however, is usually generously given by contacting the
author at laudun@louisiana.edu
or by post at the Department of English, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA
70504-4691.
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