Roustabouts

It was at the end of a long day of mucking sludge from the inside of an oil tank with a shovel-headed pole and a hose that we scared up the gopher that ran beneath the bucket of the backhoe — the wide one in front with roughly the dimensions of a coffin that resembles the bulldozing apparatus of a bulldozer. The front bucket of the backhoe was resting, turned downward into the dirt, when the gopher ran under it, so it must have been a gigantic chamber to him, looming and dark, though certainly safer than the outside world from which he had escaped, in which rocks as large as his body hurtled toward him from the hands of my coworkers, who aimed to cripple and kill. We all had our hardhats and safety glasses on, plus t-shirts with their sleeves torn off to expose our tan arm muscles, blue jeans, steel-toed boots, all slimed with mud and oil. My fingers were cut and gouged from slips of wrenches and I kicked around at the edge of the well site waiting for the gopher to outsmart them and flee into the protection of the surrounding desert so we could go home. I wasn’t in a hurry to leave — the desert was as good as any other place I had to be, plus the sky was an impressive shade of gray — but my role as outcast appeared all the more defined during these attempted animal slayings, as it did when anyone talked about race or immigration or homosexuals or politics or women. The only person on our crew other than myself who was profitably killing time between college semesters was David, a geo-engineering student at the University of Wyoming who affected a Southern accent when he said things like, “Niggers get no pity from me.” His father was also a racist engineer and had gotten David this job through his connections at Chevron, although it’s unclear why anyone would need connections to get this job. David was skinny and somehow seemed dumber than everyone else on our crew, but it’s likely he had some sort of slow intelligence that would suit him perfectly for driving around on dirt roads from oil well to oil well, monitoring their gauges, napping atop plateaus in his truck, and condescendingly telling the roustabout crews what was going wrong so we could fix it. There were several of these people working in our field and they fawned over David when they found he was being groomed as one of their own, but their enthusiasm for him faded as the summer went along and his lack of contribution to lunchtime banter grew increasingly conspicuous. Idle chat fills the oil field’s long days, and David just never had much to say.

The front bucket of a backhoe is as heavy as any huge boulder a gopher could run under, but decidedly inferior cover, as it can be lifted with the easy pull of a lever to expose all that’s underneath. Jeff, the lead rodent-killer of our pack, whose poor aim with a stone did nothing to damper his excitement at the prospect of murder when any small fauna appeared in our midst, was quick to realize the inadequacies of the gopher’s hiding place and was outwardly proud of his plan to exploit it: “Chris,” he said, “get up in the backhoe and lift the bucket up.” He laid out the script for the second act wordlessly by picking up a football-sized chunk of sandstone. Chris, an Alabama native with whom I shared a similar adolescence as a small-town punk rocker and thus got along with pretty well, despite his insistence to refer to me as Napoleon after Jeff had pointed out that my poofy brown hair bore resemblance to the indie-film antihero’s, was quick and happy to oblige. He hopped in the backhoe’s cab and maneuvered the bucket, still pointed downward and looking from the side like the appendage of a praying mantis, eight feet into the air. I could imagine the gopher’s surprise at having his sturdy cave lifted from above him, a grim sky and the figure of Jeff’s aggressive frame replacing it. So great was his terror that when Jeff’s first effort to spike the rock onto his spine failed on account of poor aim he did not run away from the puff of dust that had erupted a foot to his left. An embarrassed fury welled in Jeff as he scooped the rock up for another shot and brought it down powerfully on its mark. Something broke in the gopher’s back and it propelled itself around in circles with its still-functioning hind legs, its limp forward torso acting as a pivot point in the dirt. Jeff, a 220-pound ex-Marine from Florida with a shaved head and a bully’s smile began to jump up and down like a cartoon ape, landing his thick boot soles on top of the screaming animal. Aaron, a genuinely smart and slightly teddy-bearish person who in partnership with Jeff oversaw our crew, stood with his arms crossed looking amused and parental. David egged Jeff on with the shrill yeahs and fist-pumps of a weakling who backs the stronger boy in a fistfight out of self-interest. I looked on in nonchalant amazement, and in the cab of the backhoe Chris reeled with howls of glee and accidentally bumped the lever that controlled the front bucket and brought all 800 pounds of it crushing down across Jeff’s back. He flattened to the ground like hot syrup splashing onto a pancake. The back half of the dead gopher stuck out from under his leg, which was spread-eagled along with the rest of his limbs. Thoughts of what to do in the event of Jeff’s death reeled through everyone’s heads until he rolled onto his side and began moaning, proving he was still alive. I wandered out into the sagebrush, staring at the sky, my path a shallow arc.