Bad Peaches - Part III

And then, I can feel dirt… sand… under my fingertips. My eyes open and close swiftly to bright clear skies which I momentarily squint into before I feel heavy rain patter down over the dry ground and myself. I pull myself wearily up from the ground and realise, looking down at my clothes; not rain, not water – oil.

I’m surrounded by desert, people are tearing around and shouting; orders to put out lights, cigarettes, fires; get this or that equipment; and someone is calling me –“Hank”- I look around still bleary from the.. from whatever happened. Again-“Hank!”
A short man blackened and slick with oil grabs my shoulders; Walt Haines, my business partner.

‘Oil, Hank, oil!’ He laughs and wipes his hand over my face laughing and then turning to the ferocious spout of oil towering above us. ‘Christ, we comes for gold and we finds it alright, even if it ain’t yeller.'

Yes. Yes, now I remember. We were digging out here for gold. Digging nearly a week without a find and then… hell broke loose.

I tug on his shoulder and shout, above the torrent of the oil, ‘Walt, what happened to the horse?’

‘What?’ he squints, in the strange manner people do when they can’t hear you, so I shout again. He answers, ‘Horse? What horse? You need a horse we got plenty over at camp.’ He shrugs and turns back to the oil.

Then another call; ‘Boss? Boss!’ I look towards the burly figure shouting over at me from behind some displaced rocks, ‘Over here, sir!’

I stare for a further moment and then, patting Walt’s shoulder, I rush over to the scene. The burly figure, Sergeant Laurence, one of my longest-serving men, and several other workers are crowded around a prostrate figure, a young man, no older than twenty years, I start to ask what the matter is – but then I notice the expanding puddle of blood in the sand, some absorbed by the dry dust, but mostly pooling up near his head, now mingling with droplets of oil.

He twitches a little. But the light has gone from his eyes.

‘Are you alright, sir?’ the Sergeant bustles, his thick moustache, smeared with oil, flicks up and down as he speaks.

I raise my hand and speak curtly, under the circumstances; ‘I’m fine. Get this boy out of here,’ I gesture to the two other men, ‘Get him back to camp.’

‘Doctor?’ asks one.

I shake my head and turn quickly back to the scene, settled chaos now. I make my uneasy way towards the other men, the dry desert earth now an acrid marshland, the Sergeant follows me, presumably his vast bulk allowing him an extra advantage of purchase over the slick ground, and we attend to the other men; asking, is anyone else is injured? a few broken bones, nothing serious, boss; my head still rings; anyone caught down the shaft? Simpkins, sir.

Two dead. My mercenary mind is unable not to begin doing internal calculations; weighing the profit and loss of two dead men against a tide of oil and prospect. The result of the calculation remains respectfully at the back of my mind, for now.
I snap back into attention at the Sergeant’s bellowing; ‘Alright you men, back it up, back to camp. No sense standing around and getting your Sunday suits all oiled up. Let’s move, boys.’

The Sergeant, running calculations in my head again, is surely literally worth his weight in gold; a veteran of the Civil War, like all good officers he knows what his commander would want him to do in an emergency and now freed from the regulations of the military he is able to carry them out without the order from me. The men gather themselves up and form a troupe bound for the camp, like some dark pack of ghouls from a child’s nightmare.

Sergeant Laurence only starts out once he’s sure Walt and I are coming along too. Walt is still grinning from ear to ear, and apparently has been all the while he was gawping at the spout as his teeth are like little liquorish candies.

‘Christ, Hank, this is better than a ton of gold, for sure,’ he says, rubbing his filthy hands together, wringing them with anticipation, or greed.

I sigh, more reserved, ‘The hell we know about moving oil?’

‘We’ll sell to Standard, they’ll pay. Boy’ll they ever pay.’

‘Sure, we’ll sell those bastards this heap of oil and they’ll have every last speck of gold here too.’

‘What’ll we wanna be scrubbing around for gold when we sell to ol’ John D.?’

‘Ol’ John D. will be laughing himself to yet another bank with all the gold under our feet here. I say we wait. We-‘

‘Awh, Hank, we ain’t getting no younger, I’m tired of all this. Don’t you wanna sleep in a bed off the floor? A good meal? Nice girl?’

‘I’m already married-‘

‘Well then you could get yourself another gal, too.'

I glare.

‘Each to his own, Hank, each to his own...’ says Walt as he sticks his hands into his pockets, swiftly taking them out upon realising they, like everything, are covered in oil.