Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 5

Max Williams had been, for as long as he could remember, a man unafraid to take risks – but cautious and calculated in the risks he took. He was an athlete, a wizard with a basketball, a three-time All-Southwest Conference point guard under the guidance of the legendary Doc Hayes at SMU. He had been the man working behind the scenes to raise the money necessary to bring professional basketball to Dallas. He had worked to build a successful franchise for the Dallas Chaparrals in the old red, white, and blue basketball days of the ABA. He had won big in the Dallas real estate market during the furious and fortuitous dirt-dealing days of the early 1970s, then watched as a sudden and unexpected economic downturn snatched the fortunes away from them all as quickly as the shadows of a black Texas thunderhead turned to night. No dusk. No lingering shades of daylight. No hint or even the promise of a full moon. Just darkness. Out of nowhere. Darkness. Pure, unadulterated darkness.

But black was the color of oil, and Max Williams did not hesitate to change gears in either his life or his business. For him, good, raw land had always been the promise. He had sold the top of it and watched developers raise tall buildings, shopping centers, and home estates on dirt that had been transformed from five thousand dollars an acre to a hundred grand for the same patch of dirt. He had decided that he might as well find out what lay far beneath the surface of the good earth. As he often thought, if you want to make real money, you have to get into a business where the money is.

For all practical purposes, the nation, if you believed what you read, might be operating on the gold standard. In reality, however, the good, old U.S. of A. was running on the oil standard. Oil just happened to be where the gold was.

Before leaving Dallas, Williams had placed a Texas map across his desk and began tracking the highways and farm roads that crisscrossed their way like a broken spider’s web through the sprawling landscape east of Austin. The collection of towns seemed to be scattered and plentiful, small and smaller. He circled each of them. Taylor. Rockdale. Elgin. Bastrop. LaGrange. Lexington. Serbin. Caldwell. Somerville. Dime Box. Fedor. Giddings.

There it was. Didn’t look like much on the map. The key said it had a little over two thousand people, probably with as many tractors as cars, and he doubted if any of them had been affected by either oil or wealth. Williams leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his thoughts ramble from Dallas to a town blessed, for whatever reason, with a big chalk well. It had no business being there, not in the chalk anyway.

Something, he thought, wasn’t quite right. Then again, maybe some poor boy operator in Giddings had beaten the odds and finally gotten it right. Driving seven hours south on a gut hunch was crazy. It might be a wild goose chase, the longest of long shots. But he would never know unless he found out for himself.

Max Williams shrugged and reached for the keys to his Blazer. Six hours later, he found himself driving south, some nine thousand feet above the gardens of chalk, easing slowly across a parched and dying landscape that seldom ever felt the cool perspiration of rain on the furrows of its farmlands.

He still looked like the athlete he had always been. He was in his mid-thirties. His crew cut had long ago begun to thin on top. He wore denim jeans and boots, mostly a gentle smile and never a scowl. Williams thought a man played the game for only one reason, and that was to win, whether he was in business or the sporting arena. Moral victories didn’t count. Losses were unacceptable.

He had drilled a little down in the rigid limestone formations of the Frio County oilfield, and the scoreboard had shown mixed results. Won a few. Broke even on a few. Found a little oil but not nearly enough of it. The gamble wasn’t particularly bad, but he had definitely not been able to exceed his expectations. The Austin Chalk was a cruel and foreboding opponent even when everything went perfect, and it hardly ever did.

Around him, across unbroken pasturelands, scattered herds of cattle grazed on scattered patches of grass. Peanuts fought to survive in soil where stunted cotton had once withered and perished. Aging farmhouses and weathered barns sat back on the rocky knolls beneath stands of post and blackjack oak, pecan, elm, and mesquite trees. Blackberry vines lined the ditches beside barbed wire fences. The sun bore down harshly on the road, and the heat rose up in dizzying waves above the clay and sand that, more or less, held Lee County together. The winds tortured the earth like a furnace whose coals were smoldering embers.

He crossed Yegua Creek and headed toward Giddings, his eyes scanning the horizon for anything that might resemble the near or distant presence of oil. A derrick. A pump jack. A stack of pipe. A rig. A tank. A truck stained the color of crude.

Max Williams adjusted his sunglasses and stared down an empty road. It appeared to him that he could well be the only living soul around, not counting the cattle, the goats, the coyotes or the turkey vultures hanging on a power line. Williams wasn’t quite sure what he was searching for or exactly where it might be located, but he had been told that somewhere out there within the near reaches of the town limits was the big chalk well, the damnedest well any of them had ever heard about. If the rumors were right, the well sat upon an uncharted and unforgiving field that had broken the hearts and emptied the pocket books of wildcatters for generations.

All alone, it sat. A single well. The one-in-a-million well. Remote. Isolated. An orphan. If he could track down the big chalk well, Max Williams reasoned, he might be able to drill another one just like it, provided, of course, he could raise the funds and there was any oil encased in the thick, unyielding creases of the Austin Chalk.

Geologists swore there was. Geologists said the chalk was rife with oil. But geologists, at least the smart ones, never spent their hard-earned money to drill and find out. A few wildcatters, too stubborn to listen to reason, had discovered just enough crude to tempt them, taunt them, and condemn their worthless souls to wander an oil patch perched just on the sane side of purgatory. The oil struck with fury, then, a few days later, barely leaked out of the hole in the chalk. A promise. A disappointment. A lie. The great lie. Max Williams was undeterred. He no longer had any interest in Dallas real estate ventures. Those days had passed him by. Those days were dead. The market had cured him. But there were investors still around in the financial shadows who understood the burgeoning potential of the oil business. Well, perhaps they did not really understand the complex, complicated, and unpredictable inner workings of mapping anomalies and anticlines beneath the ground with odd little voodoo boxes and drilling an oil well.

But, make no mistake, they were quite aware of the riches that could be attained by coaxing crude by the barrel from the holy inner sanctum of the earth. And they liked the gamble. No. They were obsessed with the gamble. The roll of the loaded dice. The turn of a roulette wheel, which was little different from the rotation of a drill bit down amidst the final resting place of the dinosaur. Deep sand. Shallow sand. Quicksand. Mud. Clay. Rock. And the Austin Chalk.

The chalk just might be the death of them all. It was all the same. That final spin of the wheel, that final five- and six-figure bet, always triggered within them a greater sense of exhilarating fear than those first coins on a poker table. But that last dollar, good or bad, was the only one remembered. Then again, it was only money.

There were many sane and rational economic speculators who argued that oil, at least in the vast undiscovered, untapped Texas fields, just might be the safest bet left on the board. The ages-old conflict between Israel and Egypt had abruptly spilled over into war. Egypt had been the aggressor. Israel struck back, swiftly and with dead certainty. The Arabs blamed the West for building Israel’s military power and, in retaliation, began slowly tightening the screws on production throughout their massive oil domains.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC, announced an immediate five percent cut in October of 1973, promising that additional cuts would be made each month until Israel again retreated back inside its 1967 border.

The cartel also implemented an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands. Oil dependent nations felt the sharp and sudden pain of an energy crisis, driving them closer to the precipice of chaos and even panic.

Texas was unshaken. But then, as an oilman said over a short glass of Chivas and ice one night, what’s best for the rest of the nation is good for Texas. The price of crude had been ratcheted up from three dollars a barrel to ten dollars a barrel, and wildcatters turned their eyes and their rigs toward great unknown reservoirs of oil which, according to rumors, were still untouched beneath the raw lands of a state that boasted a single white star in its flag.

Sure, oil had its risks. Sure, there were no guarantees. Pocket change was made from guarantees. Real wealth came from real risks. Win some. Lose some. That was their motto and, for many, the dictates of their religion. Just make sure, they said, you win a few more than you lose. It was, they knew, the difference between sipping champagne and draining a warm beer.

Max Williams gently tapped the brakes of his Blazer as he eased into downtown Giddings, dissected sharply by the crossing of Highway 290, which connected Austin to Houston, and Highway 77, which connected somewhere north with somewhere south and not much to speak of in between, including Giddings. The past had not deserted the town. The past had never left at all.

Giddings looked much as it had in the 1950s when it looked much as it had in the 1930s. Not a lot had changed except the license plates, the red light hanging above the intersection and, of course, the price of barbecued ribs. Giddings was a typical small-town Texas farming community, a down-home concoction of pickup trucks, gimme caps, cowboy hats, tobacco cans stuffed in the back pocket of patched and faded denim jeans, and frayed overalls, bleached by the sun. Stooped shoulders. Hard eyes. Square jaws. Boots shuffling along the edge of a dusty street. Backbones that were gun barrel straight. Burnt, rawboned faces that bore the unmistakable scars of long hours and hard work in the glare of the blistering heat.

Driving past them, as they walked along the sidewalk, Max Williams could not tell the rich from the poor if, perhaps, there was any difference between the two. They all looked alike and dressed alike, and a few could hit a moving cat at twenty-five paces with a well-timed spit of tobacco juice.

Giddings may not have been dying, but decay had set in, and its farmers were too worried about today to be concerned with tomorrow or, God forbid, any day beyond that. They were the salt of the earth, the roots of Lee County, the sweaters. They sweated over the price of hogs and cattle. They sweated over their peanut crops. They sweated over the lack of rain that condemned their crops and the hailstones that ruined them. They sweated over the cost of a second-hand pickup truck, a tractor that had plowed its last field and burned out its last engine, a water well gone dry, and another business closing its doors. Sweat and work. Sweat and worry. That was pretty much all they did. In Giddings, there was enough sweat to go around for them all.

A highway stretched out belly flat in all four directions, straight lines and main lines across the gardens of chalk. Max Williams glanced ahead, then into his rearview mirror, and only an occasional oak or pecan tree blocked his line of sight. No derrick. No rig. No stack of pipe. No truck stained the color of crude. Surely, he thought, the reliable and unreliable sources hadn’t all been wrong or mistaken. Those unregulated rumors passed along in the cafes and bars of Frio County described a big chalk well in terms usually reserved for rainbows and pots of gold.

Were all of them talking about the same well? Was one real and one a myth? Which one had been drilled below the rocky landscape of Giddings? Or would the big chalk well turn out to be a myth, too?

The big well.

If it were as good, as predictable, as productive as the report indicated it was, the big well could change his luck and his fortune. Max Williams was sure of it. But where in hell was it? And what was the well of the world doing down in the gardens of chalk, out on a God-forsaken patch of ground that hovered above the howling innards of hell itself?