Texas by the Tail

nosed attitude is simply frankness and economy of speech.

A merchant may tell you to go somewhere else if you don't like his prices. But it's a friendly suggestion, not an insult. A resident may stare at you a long time before answering a question-and he may simply shake his head and not answer at all. But he isn't being impolite. He wants only to think over his answer carefully- and naturally it would be rude to show no interest in you-and if he finally decides he has nothing to say, then how can he say anything?

It's an attitude born of the prairies, of the loneliness, of the infrequent necessities for speech since there were so few to speak to. It was born of the cattle industry, the distantly separated ranches, the need for deeds rather than words, the wisdom of carefully looking over all strangers.

You see, Big Spring was a cattle town not so many years ago. Just another wide place in a dusty road. A town like any other such town, built around the traditional courthouse square; its streets drifting with dust, its iron-awninged buildings baking under the incredible heat of summer, ice-painted with the North Pole blasts of winter.

That was how it looked when the two wildcatters first saw it-like the ass-end of Far Nowhere. The town, for its part, looked upon them with little more favor. The town had seen wildcatters-prospectors for oil- before, and this pair just didn't fit the picture.

There was first of all their drilling rig; a cable-tool rig, naturally, since the rotary had not then been perfected. It was one of those big Star-30 machines, a so-called 'portable' rig which occupied two railroad flatcars with its accessory equipment. None of the harum-scarum wildcatter breed had ever owned such a rig-an outfit worth a not-so-small fortune. And these two were the last people in the world who should have owned it.

They were a middling-old man and his son. The father wore the unmistakable stamp of defeat, a man who had drilled one dry hole too many. The kid looked mean and snotty and very sick, and he was all three and then some.

Into the rig and the job it had to do, the old man had sunk his home, his furniture, his insurance policies; every nickel he could beg and borrow. That still left a hell of a hump to get over, for an outfit and a job like this, so the kid had kicked in for it. The kid was a loner, he'd been one almost since the time he was old enough to walk. Some things had begun to happen to him about then that shouldn't happen to kids, and maybe they could have been avoided and maybe they couldn't have. But it was all the same to him. He didn't ask for excuses, he didn't give any. As far as he was concerned, the world was a shit pot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it. As far as he was concerned, he had plenty owing to him. And he was hell on wheels at collecting.

He was now nineteen years old. He was suffering from tuberculosis, bleeding ulcers and chronic alcoholism.

Rig hands, drillers and tooldressers accompanied the old man and his son. Huge tractors were hitched onto the rig, and it was hauled eighteen miles out of town to the drill site. They had no road to haul it over, of course. A road had to be made, straight out across the tumbling prairie, up hills and over streams, through hub- high mud and sand.

It took a lot of money. They were in over their ears before they were ever rigged up. They started to drill, and the hole went down a hundred and twenty-five feet-and every inch of it was a high-priced waste of money. For the driller hadn't known his stuff, and he'd got a crooked hole. And you can't set casing in a crooked hole. You can't-when you're using cable tools-go down very far before your drill bit and stem drag on the side.

Wildcats are always Jonahs. You're in unexplored territory, and you never know what you're going to get into until you've already got into it and it's too damned late. This particular wildcatter had enough hard luck for a hundred wells.

The boiler blew up. The rig caught on fire. The mast snapped. The tools were lost in the hole a dozen times. The drill cable bucked and whipped, cleanly slicing off a tooldresser's head.

The kid announced that he had gone his limit; he had nothing left but his ass and his pants and they both had holes in them. His father said that they would manage some way, and he took over the financing from then on.

The well finally got drilled. It wasn't a gusher but it was a very respectable producer. Diffidently, the old man asked his son what plans he had for the future.

'You mean what do I want to be when I grow up?' the kid said sarcastically. 'What's it to you, anyway? When were you ever interested in what I wanted to do?'

'Son, son…' the old man shook his head sadly. 'Have I really been that bad?'

'Oh, hell, I guess not. But I'm just not much on talking about things. You talk about what you're going to do, you never get it done.'

The father guessed that it was probably a slam at him. He had, possibly, always indulged too much in talk. 'I suppose,' he said timidly, 'you've been counting on having a lot of money?'

The kid said, why not? They'd brought in a good well, and they had hundreds of offsetting acres under lease. Conservatively, they were worth several million dollars. 'But I'll settle for a hundred and eighty-two thousand. I won't live long enough to spend any more than that.'

'A hundred and eighty-two-Why that particular figure, son?'

'I've been keeping a little black book since I was seven years old. There are one hundred and eighty-two names in it, one for every rotten bastard who's given me a hard time. I've shopped around, and I can get them bumped off for an average price of one thousand dollars.'

'Son-' The father shook his head, aghast. 'What happened to you? How can you even think of such things?'

'Thinking about it is all that's kept me alive,' the kid said. 'I can die happy knowing that I'm taking all those bastards to hell with me.'

The father decided that it was a good time to give his son the word. The kid listened with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, as one accustomed to seeing his dreams washed down the john.

'So we don't own anything, huh? You hocked it all to get the well drilled.'

'I'm sorry, yes.'

'What about the rig and the tools?'

'All gone. The trucks, our car, everything.'

'Goddam,' the kid said. 'Those one hundred and eighty-two bastards could be dead right now for what this well cost!'

He had a right to be pretty damn sore about it, he felt, but somehow he couldn't be. Somehow, he wanted to howl with laughter, because when you thought about it, you know, it was really funny as hell.

He started to take a drink, and then decided that he didn't want any. He lighted a cigarette, noting wonderingly that he no longer had ulcer pains. He coughed and spat in his handkerchief, and there was no blood in the spit.

'My God,' he told his father, and there was awe in his voice. 'I'm afraid I'm going to live!'

He and the old man walked out of town together; they couldn't afford anything but the ankle express. With the discovery of oil, Big Spring was already burgeoning into a city. The old man turned and looked back at it from its outskirts, and there was pride in his defeated eyes.

'We did that, son,' he said. 'You and I. We caused a city to bloom in the wilderness. We've made history.'

'We should have stood in bed,' the kid said. But then he laughed and gave the old man an affectionate slap in the back. For his physical health was not all that had improved during the past two years.

Out there on the prairies where time had stood still for endless eons, out there where nature loomed large and man was small, he had gotten a new perspective on himself. And his once all-consuming problems had shrunk in size, and he had grown proportionately in the only way that growing matters. Out there he had discovered that a man could be much less and much more than the sum of his moments, and that what had