had far more hope than experience and the Austin Chalk would break them or make them rich. They fought the land, dueled before judges, and battled each other in the field of broken hearts. They spilled more money than blood, but the scars ran deep. For some, the scars would last a lifetime. They drilled toward a confluence of volcanic channels, if Reinhardt Richter had been right, and stopped just short of the howling voices from hell. In time, the howling voices sounded a lot like their own.
Max Williams gazed through the dusty windshield of his Chevy Blazer, his eyes scanning the far country as it sprawled defiantly around him. A few rises that passed for hills. Mostly flat. A few trees clustered together here and there, mostly there. Tall grasses burned and wilted by an unforgiving sun. Weathered homesteads, the last known will and testament of stubborn farmers who fought the land, watered the crop rows with their own sweat, were too proud to ever even think about quitting, and considered it a good year if they broke even. Once the fields held cotton, then peanuts, always peanuts, and farmers cursed it and condemned it but could never quite convince themselves to turn it loose.
The land was called worthless by those who plowed it, godforsaken by those who could neither sell it nor live on it, and barren by the few speculators who, with more grit than sense, perhaps, jammed a drill bit down into the ancient layers of Austin Chalk, searching for hidden pools of oil. Then again, Williams thought, maybe the whole bunch of them was wrong. All it would cost him to find out was a little time.
Giddings intrigued him, although, he figured, the town was probably nothing more than some little hole-in-the-wall, dying cluster of decrepit buildings by the side of the road. He had never been there, had never wanted to go, or thought about going.
But Giddings had suddenly become the only place in Texas occupying his every thought. What did Giddings know that no one else in the chalk had learned, he asked himself, and how tightly was the little town holding on to its secret? Could the big chalk well be the gateway to an undiscovered field, or just a one hit wonder.
The Austin Chalk had a lot of those.
The noted geologist Everett DeGolyer had once said, “The greatest single element in all prospecting – past, present, and future – was the man willing to take a chance.” He might as well have been talking about Max Williams.
Williams knew there were a lot of places he should be that spring afternoon, and Lee County probably wasn’t one of them. He had driven south out of Dallas, letting the hours pass by with the long miles, on a quixotic, maybe even foolhardy, search for a mythical oil well, a big chalk well, that he had heard a lot of roughnecks, roustabouts, wildcatters, and geologists talk about, even though they claimed it was a rich orphan in ground that bore the remnants of rusting oil pipe and wounds of dry holes.
They all possessed the logs, the production reports, the shared research, but most believed that oil only flowed in great amounts from beneath the mythical well, the big chalk well. The remaining acreage would only take their money and give them back faint traces of oil. It had happened before. It would happen again. They had, from time to time, simply looked over the mythical well, shook their heads, and quietly drove away. A lot of big dreams had been burned in the chalk and blown like ashes with the wind.
The land simply wasn’t worth the trouble, they said. The well was in the chalk, they said. The chalk’s cold-blooded. It’ll tempt you and lie to you. The chalk will take your money, then turn its back on you. If one well was out there running oil, lost, or misplaced somewhere on the fringe of an out-of-the-way town known as Giddings, it was probably running the only oil in the chalk. A one-in-a-million well, they said. That’s all it was. The other scattered holes in the ground were simply holes in the ground. Dry. Empty. Hard enough to break you and your drill bit both. Too deep or too shallow. And there was absolutely no need to regret or worry about the cold cash a man poured into the chalk holes. It wasn’t coming back out. Maybe it would spit a little oil at you from time to time, but that was about all, and it was hardly ever anything to speak of, much less take to the bank.
Williams had heard it all before. The oilfield, wherever it might be, was always rampant and often corrupt with gossip, lies, rumors, and hope. A good oil operator, he knew, was someone who could separate fact from fiction and never believe too much in the fiction, no matter how good it sounded, and it almost always sounded good.
It had not sounded nearly so good when a weary Chuck Alcorn drove through the biting wind and dust of a land as dry as the bones of cattle that had fallen victim to a hard drought settling down upon the barren landscape of Lee County.
Chuck Alcorn had a job to do, and his work was never easy, seldom lucrative, and usually a pain in the ass. His was a face well known throughout the oilfield, and company men always dreaded that singular, self-loathing moment when they knew it was time to pick up the phone and call him. His name officially was C. W., but everyone called him Chuck. He was a junior. But nobody cared from which branch of the family tree he had descended. He made his money, what little of it there was, from a various assortment of failures and misfortunes encountered on a rig site. As he always said, “I managed to build the rough edges of my career on the unromantic side of the oil business.”
Chuck Alcorn, in the shank of another long, unforgiving day, standing up to his ankles in mud, his face splattered with streaks of oil and grease, thought he would kill for the outside chance of being a genuine, authentic, down-home wildcatter who owned his own oil well or maybe a field full of them. He learned about the intricacies and pitfalls of the business during his early years at Gulf Oil. Simple realities: The rich got richer, and the poor boy operations went busted, and so many of the fields wound up as graveyards for rusting pipe, burned out pumps, empty holes, and hopes gone awry.
By 1973, he owned his own oil well salvage company down in Victoria. However, Chuck Alcorn, it appeared, had never been destined to explore new fields, shoot and read seismographs, track down investors, negotiate with bankers, patch together leases and a drilling crew, and finally search down hole for a pool or a river of crude. He had, more or less, been condemned to the task of buying up old wells and attempting to rejuvenate them with a special treatment that the industry referred to as acidizing.
He took the old, the tired, the worn out and tried like hell to make them profitable. A few breathed a little life, but, sooner or later, the dead usually stayed dead.
He was, many believed, the oil business equivalent of a used car dealer.
Sometimes there was a little oil left smoldering in the ground. At a humiliating price of four dollars a barrel, it didn’t amount to much. Often more trouble than it was worth. Breaking even was becoming more difficult all the time.
Mostly he merely salvaged the pipe and equipment left abandoned in the field and sold it for scrap or to some little two-bit oil company trying to scrape by and maybe strike it rich with glorified leftovers from Chuck Alcorn’s personal junkyard.
He was forty years old, had hair turning gray long before its time, and stood six feet, four inches tall. Some of the ladies thought he had a boyish face, and others thought he was downright handsome, and none paid a lot of attention to the oil dirt buried beneath his fingernails. He was a working man. That’s all. A working man with the face of a boy and the hardened eyes of a man who understood the tribulations of disappointment.
Chuck Alcorn could be white collar when he needed to be, even put on a pin-stripe business suit when necessary, but he felt more at home in his khaki shirt, khaki pants, and brown cowboy boots, usually crusted with dried mud. In the field, he wore a battered cowboy hat with a narrow, curled brim and drove a four-door Ford pickup truck. Good on the road, off the road, in cow pastures, from one creek bank to another, and into terrain where only the brave dared to go and only the lucky came back out again with their sanity intact. Pot holes. Chug holes. Post holes. Didn’t matter. Chuck
