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 2
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,