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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
