SEVEN

In retrospect it was one of the most important days of my life. I was getting sidetracked from my original purpose for being in town, but I reasoned that I would have plenty of time during the week to attend to my oil interests and still pursue the poker game on the weekends. After all, the poker game was intended to be a long-term project from the beginning. Besides, if a man isn’t willing to get sidetracked long enough to get rich along the way, then he doesn’t have much business being here in the first place.

Adolph Havel turned out to be an old Czech cotton farmer. He was about seventy and balding, with a thick, hard body, shaggy eyebrows and an iron ball of a head. Hospitable, he had a Mexican serving girl bring us coffee out on the porch of his house, a two-story sandstone structure with hand-hewn rafters and thick walls that must have dated back to frontier days. He also had an iron will to match his head.

“Already today has been one man out from the oil companies, but I won’t deal with them,” he said in a thick accent.

“Why not?” I asked.

“They vant to screw me.”

“In what way?”

“They only offer to give me one-eighth of production royalty. I vant one-sixth and vill get it or vill never lease. In Loosanna dey give one-sixth.”

“You’ve got it,” I said firmly.

He eyed me suspiciously for a moment. “And a fifty-dollar-each-acre lease price, too.”

I calculated quickly in my head. According to his deeds he had 887 acres. That came to almost $55,000. I only had $30,000, and none of it was mine. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and remembered that moment in the car the day before when I told Della I’d trust her with my life. I reached into my briefcase. “It will have to be a fourteen-day draft,” I told him. “That’s customary in the oil business.”

Havel pounded his big fist down on the porch rail and said, “Vie haf deal. I vill get schnapps to toast. Or maybe you like beer?”

I should have taken beer. The schnapps was some kind of clear liquor that tasted like kerosene and kicked like a mule. I left Havel happy that day, but a week later he could have gotten ten times that amount. Yet I never heard a word of complaint from him. After the lease was drilled he realized so much from royalties that the original lease price seemed meaningless.

On the way back to town I passed the Smith well. Cars were still lined up along Route 9, but there wasn’t much left to see. A half dozen trucks from a well service company out of Midland were clustered around a site, and the wellhead had been capped sometime during the night. Another company had brought in two truckloads of casing, and crews were standing by to cement the well in, all of it on the tab.

That was something I came to admire about oil people. The day before, Coby Smith didn’t have enough credit to get an RC Cola and a Moon Pie at the little crossroads store a half mile from his drill site, but the minute the Midland company heard of the blowout they were on their way. They arrived about sunset and went to work capping the well without so much as a handshake. They knew better than anybody else that the strike might be a fluke, a small pocket of oil under great pressure that would play out in just a few days. But that’s the way the oil business works. When a well is brought in, certain things have to be done now, things that won’t wait until next week or next month after some gang of jokers has met and hashed it all out in a boardroom a thousand miles away.

*   *   *

I stopped for a late breakfast at a little café on the outskirts of the city. By the time I got to the office there were a half dozen landmen working away in the records room, and one guy stood pounding on the counter and yelling at Mona. He was having no more effect on her than the tide would have bursting against a granite cliff. She was utterly implacable. Maybe in a thousand years, but he wasn’t moving this young woman today.

“Hey, fellow.” I laughed, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Calm down.”

He wheeled around and started to say something, then noticed my size and bit it off. “What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Do you know how much these people are charging to use their files?” he asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“Fifty bucks a day! Old man Bobbet used to get five dollars.”

He was a soft-looking man, about five ten, dressed in a nice suit with a diamond tie pin and alligator loafers.

“Yes,” Della said as she came out of the back. “And Mr. Bobbet wore moth-eaten sweaters and drove a beat-up old car. We bought this business to make money. So come up with the fifty dollars, or get out of here and quit wasting my stenographer’s time.”

He growled once more, hauled his wallet out of his pants and slammed a fifty down on the counter. “And I want a receipt,” he said.

“Why certainly, sir,” Mona said sweetly.

I followed Della into the back. “You’ve sure got things stirred up around here,” I told her.

“You haven’t seen anything yet. After this boom takes off I’ll be getting fifty an hour, not a day.”

“Della, for heaven’s sake!”

“You keep quiet and let me handle this. Did you get the lease?”

I told her what I’d done and she looked at me in wonder. “But you don’t have that much money, do you?” she asked.

“You said for me to lease it no matter what. I figure that if this turns out to be as good as you think, in a few days we’ll be able to sell part of it for enough to cover the whole draft.”

“But did you do that because…”

“I did it because when I said I trusted you, I meant it. All the way.”

Her eyes got soft and misty. She turned away from me and dabbed at them with the sleeve of her blouse.

“Della,” I said, putting her hand on her shoulder.

“Oh, hush!” she told me without turning around. “Go get me another hamburger.”

*   *   *

We didn’t have long to wait to find out the extent of the field. Three days later the second well came in and it was even bigger than the Coby Smith strike. The blowout completely destroyed the derrick and put one roughneck in the hospital with a broken back. Meanwhile a drill-stem test had been run on the Smith well, and it was flowing at the rate of more than three hundred barrels an hour through a three-inch choke valve. Had it been allowed to flow freely under its own pressure, it would have made more than twenty thousand barrels a day. The race was on.