Oklahoma and grow beans once more. It’s slacking down in all the camps and with all the companies. Good times are over, so it seems. The war came to its goddamned end too early, that’s the trouble; that’s what I think. There’s more oil than the world will ever need in the next ten thousand years. Nobody wants to buy oil any more, and if anybody buys, damn knock me cold, he offers you flat two bits for the barrel, take it or go to hell. I know oil and I know when the fat is gone. All right, sit down and push your spoon between your teeth. Don’t worry, the boys will stand for what you eat today, and tomorrow too, if you want to stay.”
The Indian went to his own people, to the peons of the camp, where he stuffed his belly full. The peons had their own kitchen, managed by one whom they seemed to trust better than the two Chinese who were in charge of the catering for the Americans.
Next morning Dobbs and Moulton left to try another camp. The Indian was again with them. They could not shake him off. His excuse was: “I need work, senores, but I cannot go alone through the jungles, the tigers would get me. But these terrible beasts won’t do anything to me if I am with gringos. Tigers are horribly afraid of gringos, but un pobre Mexicano is eaten by them just like nothing, going alone through the jungle.”
Dobbs and Moulton threw stones at him to show him that he was not welcome. It looked somewhat awkward for two Americans looking for work and a free meal to bring along an Indian with them. Rough as they might treat that poor man to induce him to stay behind, he was stoical. He followed them like a dog, not minding stones thrown at him nor the promise of a sound beating. He would even have taken the beating if he could have gained by it the right to walk behind them. The two finally let him have his way. So he was the winner after all.
They reached another camp. It was the same story there. No work, and the outlook far from promising. The field manager had also the feeling that oil was no longer easy money, only he had another explanation to offer—that the new oil laws of the republic were to blame for the dying of the business. “That hell of a government is confiscating all the oil, declaring all oil land the property of the nation. Why, for devil’s sake, didn’t they think of that fifty years ago when we had no money stuck in it? The whole world goes Bolshevik, and I don’t care a worn-out step-in either. I’ll go Bolshevik too, first thing when I see it coming; that’s what I’m going to do, blaze my time. Sit down and fill up the ol’ tank to the rim. I got word from H.Q. we are closing down. Likely next week I can go along with you, pushing camps for a meal.”
Having made five camps and swallowed five different stories about the lack of work and the causes of the oil business breathing its last, both Moulton and Dobbs decided that it would be a waste of time and hard work to go any farther. In two camps they had already met men coming back from other camps who had lost jobs which they had held for years.
“Best thing for us to do,” Moulton said, “is to go back where we came from. In town there’s a better chance than here to get work and to meet somebody who is looking for men for rigging a new camp. Around here are the old established fields. There’s no chance here. Better look for new fields.”
“There’s something in what you say,” Dobbs answered. “I was told that to the north of the river, near the Altamira section, there might be something doing very soon. Guess you’re right. Let’s hoof back.”
So one day, late in the afternoon, they arrived in the port again. Moulton said: “Here we are. Now everybody for himself once more.”
With these words their partnership was broken up.
9
While they had been away, no change had taken place in town. The same fellows were hanging around the curbstones and pushing every man that came to town from the fields for a drink, a good steak, a gamble, and a girl. Not one of these curbstonepolishers had left for better places. And exactly the same boys that held the corner of the Southern Hotel and the entrance to the bank on the ground floor were doing exactly the same as they had done last week, last month, last year perhaps. That is to say, waiting to be taken to the Madrid Bar or the Louisiana to help somebody with money to get drunk. They all knew the prayers to say at the right time and in the right way and to the right gods. So they spent life, strength, and will-power.
Dobbs did not feel sorry for having gone out to the camps to look for work. It was worth the trouble to know that out of town jobs were just as rare as in town. He had no longer to worry about having missed his chances in life or having overlooked opportunity knocking at the back door.
One morning, strolling along the freight depot, he was hailed by the manager of an American agency for agricultural machinery. They were unloading machinery and he was asked if he would like to lend a hand for a day or two. He accepted and was offered four pesos a day. The natives who worked at the same job got only two pesos.
The work was hard and his knuckles peeled off ten times a day. Anyway the four pesos were welcome money. After five days the job was finished and he had to go.
A few days later, standing at the ferry that crosses the river to the Panuco depot and wondering if he might get a chance to go to that town for a change, five men came running along to catch the ferry that was just about to make off.
One of the men, square-shouldered and rather bulky, caught a glimpse of Dobbs, stopped, and yelled: “What you looking for? Job?”
“Yep. Got one for me?”
“Come here. Hurry, the ferry is making off. I’ve got a job for you if you want to go. Hard work, but good pay. Ever worked at rigging up a camp?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve got a contract to rig a camp. The hell of it is I’m short a hand; one dirty son of a bitch has kicked out and left me flat. Maybe malaria, or what the hell do I know, or perhaps it’s a goddamned skirt that’s holding him. I can’t wait for that guy to show up. All right, you’re hired.”
“What’s the pay?”
“Eight bucks American a day. Grub goes off on your expense. Figure the Chinese cook will charge one dollar eighty a day. You make six bucks a day clean. Hell, don’t stand and guffaw; come along.”
Only ten minutes ago Dobbs would have run after a job for two dollars a day like a hungry cat after a fat cockroach. Now he looked as though he expected an embrace of gratitude for taking the job offered.
“Come on or go to the devil,” the contractor cried. “You have to come the way you are; there’s no time to get your things. The ferry doesn’t wait, nor the train either. And if we don’t go right this minute we can’t make the train.”
Without waiting for a reply he grasped Dobbs by the sleeve and dragged him on the ferry.
10
Pat McCormick, the contractor, was an oldtimer. Before he had come down here, he had worked in Texas fields and afterwards in Oklahoma. He had come down here before the war, before there was anything that looked like a coming boom. There wasn’t a job connected with oil at which he had not tried his hand. He had been teamster, truck-driver, time-keeper, driller, tool-dresser, pumpman, storeman—anything that had come his way he had tackled. In recent years he had found out that there is more money in rigging up camps by contract—so much for the camp ready to start drilling. He had acquired an excellent eye for judging the job. He could look over a lot in the jungle and name his price for the job in such a well-calculated way that the company thought they were buying cheap when in fact he made a large profit on every contract. His trick was to get good and efficient labor cheap, cheaper than any company could get it. A company cannot hire workers with backpattings and cajoling, making them believe they are being taken on out of pity. Pat knew how to play the good fellow, even the Bolshevik comrade, to catch his men cheap. He could curse the big capitalist companies and their unscrupulous shareholders better than a Communist speaker when he wanted to softsoap good workers. According to him, he never came out of his contract with any profit; he always lost his good money, so hard-earned in better times, and he took contracts, he said, only because he could not see men who wanted to work suffer from unemployment and starvation. In camp he played the good fellow-worker, joking and - friendly. The whole job he handled as if it were a sort of co_operative enterprise in which all joined for the general good. He told how excellent Communism is; if he had his way, the United States and all South America would become a paradise for the Communists tomorrow.
