it should have. The damn thing was hanging at least ten good feet in the air, and the flexible steel acid hose curled out of it like the long, coiled stem of an ancient Oriental pipe, the kind used to smoke tobacco and sometimes marijuana, if one were so inclined.
Chuck Alcorn opened the door of the pickup truck and stepped out. A cool wind crept across the empty prairie and kicked up dust against his boots. The sudden, ominous sound of metal clanging against each other startled him. He jerked his head around, and his gaze swept swiftly across the well site. Trouble made its own peculiar brand of noise, and he had heard trouble rumbling his way before. That was the oil business, the nature of the beast. Hope for the best. Expect the worst.
The ground-level flow lines that connected the well to the storage tanks were shaking violently, threatening to tear themselves loose at any moment. The cylindrical separator unit was flaring gas, rocking with turbulence back and forth, looking and sounding for all the world like the beginning of a small war.
Chuck Alcorn had no idea what was going through the lines. But he knew it was moving with a powerful force. Hang on, he thought. Don’t let it get away from you. Ride it out. Volcanoes had erupted with less intensity. He watched as his tool pusher leaped from the rig and rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?” Chuck Alcorn asked.
“You ain’t gonna believe it,” Alfred Baros said, his breath coming in short bursts.
“Ain’t gonna believe what?”
“That dadgummed thing is flowing with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure.”
Chuck Alcorn ran to toward the derrick, climbing up the metal arms of the rig so he could read the gauge at the top of the nipple valve, trapped in the air far higher than it should have been. Sure enough, he discovered, the well was flowing with fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, an enormous and extraordinary amount of pressure. Chuck Alcorn held on and prayed the well wouldn’t blow with him still hanging on the rim of the derrick.
If Chuck Alcorn had expected a great plume of oil to burst from the earth and come roaring through the top of the crown, he was sorely disappointed. Instead, the City of Giddings well had merely delivered a massive overdose of crude. It wasn’t sticky. It wasn’t black. It was free of tar. It had less viscosity and possessed a higher gravity than black oil. A spray of oil bathed his hands, and he slowly shook his head, muttering to himself, it’s the honey-colored oil. Damn, if it’s not the honey-colored oil. Just like the crude that Union Producing had found and lost.
If the hole was dry then, it certainly wasn’t now. And the golden oil was almost good enough to pump straight into his Ford Pickup without ever having to go through the rigors of a refinery.
By the time Chuck Alcorn crawled down from the derrick and jumped off the rig floor, the storage tanks had already collected forty barrels of oil, and, as near as anyone could figure, the City of Giddings well would deliver more than three hundred barrels before the day shut down on them. Chuck Alcorn laughed out loud. Sonuvabitch, he thought, it hadn’t been an old chalk dog after all. His wallet didn’t feel nearly as empty as it had been. He had wanted a producing well. Now, from all outward appearances, he had himself one.
“We’ve got a problem,” Alfred Baros told him.
“Doesn’t look like a problem to me.”
“The well came in a whole lot quicker than we thought it would,” Baros said. “And it came in strong, as strong as a straight flush. Nobody expected this to happen. Not in a million years, we didn’t. I’m afraid the crew didn’t have time to remove the acid hose and install our production equipment.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“It looks like we’ll have to kill the well so they’ll be able to go back in and rig up the equipment like it’s supposed to be.”
Chuck Alcorn frowned. His face hardened. He glanced back at the oil flowing wildly into the storage tank. “You’ll have to kill me first,” he said.
Union Producing had made a fatal mistake in shutting down the flow in 1960 and virtually ruining the oil well. Even then, a basic, hand-me-down superstition held by old wildcatters hung heavy over the City of Giddings well. For decades they had said, based on their own experiences, never kill an Austin Chalk well because it’ll never come back.
The chalk is too unpredictable, too treacherous. If you get lucky, leave well enough alone. If you get the oil flowing, don’t mess with it. Chuck Alcorn had no reason to tempt fate. He would not make the same tactical error that Union Producing had made a dozen years earlier. “Leave everything the way it is,” he told Baros.
Chuck Alcorn realized immediately that the valve and hose connection was not right for producing oil. Hell, it probably wasn’t even safe if he left it the way it was for too long. There was even a real danger of the hose suddenly coming loose and spraying a frenzy of uncontrollable oil all over the place, triggering a gusher that could drown them or burn them alive if it caught fire. Chuck Alcorn squared his shoulders and sighed. That, he decided, was a risk well worth taking. He had a well. A damn fine well. He did not want to lose it.
During his two decades in the business, Chuck Alcorn had always been highly skeptical of the Austin Chalk. He had heard tales of untold riches flowing like quicksilver from the depths of the limestone. Hard to grasp. Harder to hold. Gone before you knew it was leaving. Had he beaten the chalk? Or was the chalk merely setting him up for failure at another time and in another place? Chuck Alcorn wasn’t sure exactly what he had or what, if anything, he might find next.
Within days, he gave in to his better judgment, knew he was probably making a serious, perhaps fatal, mistake, and temporarily shut down the City of Giddings well. He didn’t have mud pumped down the hole. Instead, he used a special freezing process to stop the flow, a daring move that gave him the time he needed to gingerly remove the workover rig and hook up production equipment that wasn’t nearly so hazardous.
The nipple valve was still dangling precariously above him, but Chuck Alcorn was far too superstitious to think about lowering it. That’s where it was hanging when the oil came rushing in. That’s where it would remain.
He built a metal tower around the pipe, then implemented steel hose to connect the valve to the flow lines on the ground. Unorthodox, perhaps, but it had not been the first time that Chuck Alcorn had to dredge up the hand-me-down skills of a backyard, shade-tree mechanic in a desperate attempt to resuscitate or rescue a well. There was no blueprint for his plan. Just a gut feeling, and gut feelings didn’t always pay off.
Chuck Alcorn stepped back, squared his shoulders, and waited, as nervous, he said, as a frog in a hot skillet. He nodded. Alfred Baros turned the valve. Nothing at first, then oil began to flow again. He had met the chalk on its own terms, and, at least for the moment, he breathed the rarified air of a survivor.
And there it would sit, an orphan well, nothing around it but parched and empty land, a one-of-a-kind well, producing more than three hundred barrels of oil a day, every day, week after week, year after year, as regular as clockwork. Reliable. Dependable. Old Faithful. For Chuck Alcorn, it seemed to have an endless supply of oil coming out of a bottomless pit, the honey-colored residue, perhaps, from Reinhardt Richter’s chambers of a volcanic hell. Defying the odds. Defying the chalk.
Chuck Alcorn grinned every time he thought about it. Owning the big well was better than owning the bank. The big well. The big chalk well. Just sitting all alone out in the middle of nowhere, hovering over the gates of hell, producing one barrel after another and waiting for Max Williams to find it.
Chapter
