Chapter Two
I was twelve years old when they came to the house.
My older brother Bricklin was away at Boy Scout camp as a reward for his perfect grades in school. He’d already been gone for a week of his two-week summer camp, and I missed his company sorely. I passed the time by reading his scouting survival guide and pretending I was stranded on a desert island. I practiced making rabbit snares from willow branches. I cut primitive spears from oak branches and hardened the spear points over an open flame. I foraged for edible berries. Most of the time, though, I wandered around in the summer sunshine, scratched mosquito bites, and wished I’d paid more attention in school.
My family lived in an unincorporated area east of Oklahoma City where houses were few and far between. The only families in the area were separated by square miles of land that was thick with oak trees, spotted with oil wells, and threaded with rutted dirt roads that the homeowners shared with oil well service crews. One of those oil wells, an object of my fear and obsession, was a quarter mile from my house. When my bedroom window was open I could hear the oil well’s motor huffing as the drill rod went down and up and down again.
One evening before my brother left for camp, I’d stayed up past midnight reading a Tom Swift adventure novel, and I’d listened to the oil well motor as if it were a sort of siren song. When I finished the book, I decided that it was time to have my own adventure and conquer my own enemies. The oil well drew me towards it with a force that surpassed what little common sense I had, and in my mind it offered the opportunity for adventure. I’d climbed out through my bedroom window in my pajamas and house slippers, and I made my way across the red dirt road onto the narrow game trail that led to the oil well. The shadows cast by the dim glow of my flashlight made the woods seem alive with the potential for menacing encounters. I pressed on, wondering if I would make it back to my house alive. My fears weren’t entirely unfounded.
It was common practice in Oklahoma City for people to turn unwanted dogs loose ‘out in the country’ to fend for themselves. This happened often enough in my neighborhood that a pack of abandoned dogs had formed, connected with the coyotes in the forests, reproduced, and become a feral pack capable of taking down deer. I’d run across several carcasses in the forest which had been savaged so thoroughly that the only way to identify the animal was by looking at the paws or hooves. I’d heard the call and response of the dog pack several times as I read Tom Swift that night, but I hadn’t really thought much about it at the time. The sound of wild dogs calling to each other was just part of the soundtrack of living in my neighborhood.
At any rate, I continued along the trail until I reached the opening in the forest where the oil well had been drilled. In the moonlight, everything I saw or touched seemed alive with the potential for danger. The oil well, the sludge pond, the trees, the moon, even the sound of my footsteps on dried oak leaves seemed to crackle with an intoxicating resonance. The ink-black well machinery rocked back and forth like a giant insect. The air reeked with the powerful odor of raw oil sucked from the ground through a slippery silver pipe. The spine of the well, two stories high and twenty feet long, tipped up and down in the moonlight like a magician’s pendant until I became hypnotized and stepped forward to the base of the well. I’d clamped the handle of the flashlight in my teeth, grabbed the rungs of the ladder that ascended to the pivot point of the spine, and climbed up to the top of that mass of rocking iron. I gripped the two sides of the giant steel I-beam and swung a leg across the top like a rodeo cowboy mounting a bronco. Once I was atop the beam, I was overwhelmed by the sensations of the star-filled sky, the sound of the motor, the horizon rising and dipping in front of me, and the vibration of all that steel. It felt like I was in a dream-state rodeo. Eventually I came back to my senses, climbed down, and started home.
As I made my way along the game trail, the call and response of the dogs that I’d heard earlier that evening became louder and more frequent, and I began to wonder if the feral pack was following me. I hastened my pace and looked behind me frequently to see if I could spot any dogs, but I never did. Even so, my instincts told me that the dogs were closing in on me. My question about the proximity of the feral pack was answered when I reached my house. I crawled through the open window of my bedroom, looked back into the yard, and I watched a pair of wolf-like dogs appear in the pool of light cast onto the dirt through my opened bedroom window. The dogs paced back and forth, watching me and growling with a tone so low and threatening that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I slid the window shut and locked it. As I crawled under the sheets, I thought that Tom Swift would have been proud of me. I rode the scary beast, evaded the killers, and I survived.
My mother was furious the next day when she saw the oil stains on the carpet and bed sheets. I lamely offered the excuse that I must have sleepwalked to the well. The skin on my father’s face was tight with both disbelief and frustration when he heard my story. He clenched his fists and left the room, then returned with a hammer and a handful of galvanized roofing nails. He drove several of the nails into the rail on the window frame so that the window couldn’t be opened wider than a few inches. I wouldn’t be going out that window again.
After he’d finished hammering on the window frame, my father leaned in so close to me that his face completely filled my visual field. The pores in his skin, his beard stubble, even the small veins in the whites of his eyes seemed magnified. I could smell coffee on his breath.
“Are you listening to me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. You sneak out at night like that again, and I’ll put a deadbolt on your door and start locking you in at bedtime. You got that?”
I nodded again.
He looked at me hard, the muscles in his jaw tensed with anger, and then he left the room.
My mom rolled the dirty, oily bedsheets into a ball before putting the palm of her hand on my forehead to see if I was running a fever.
“Are you okay, honey?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“You’re scaring us, Del. You need to dial it back a little. Do normal stuff for a while. Would you do that for me?”
I nodded.
My mom left, taking the bedsheets with her.
My brother shook his head in wonder at my behavior. “If you’d quit doing weird stuff, Mom and Dad would stop being mad at you all the time,” he said.
“I prefer to think of myself as creative,” I replied.
“Yeah. Creatively weird. You sleepwalked your way onto an oil well. No one else even comes close to doing the crazy stuff you do. You keep this up and you’re going to get yourself committed to a psych ward. I heard Mom and Dad talking about it. You could wind up in a padded cell.”
At the time, I’d viewed Bricklin’s brotherly advice as an unwelcome nuisance from someone who lacked my fearless outlook on adventure. Looking back, I can see that he was trying to save me from myself.
“It’s under control,” I told him. “I won’t do it again.”
“I hope so,” Bricklin said. “Be better if you hadn’t done it in the first place. You understand that, right? You don’t have to put out a fire if you don’t start the fire to begin with.”