Query Letter / A Yankee Woman in the Oil Patch (Analysis)
Dear Mr. Kirschbaum,
Maria Difillipo, a curly-headed, chunky, Italian-American girl from Pennsylvania, and she's searching for a life. After an incident with a study circle and a biased teaching assistant, Maria decides to leave her elite Ivy League school for a life as a mudlogger in the oil patch in Texas.
(A small translation note is needed for those who don’t speak Oilfield fluently. “Oil patch” can be loosely translated as “any place where people are drilling for oil”. A “mudlogger” is not someone who finds mysterious trees made of mud and cuts them down; she is a person who looks at little pieces of rock as they come up from the drill bit and tells people how close they are to finding oil.)
Maria is everything oilmen hate. First, she’s a woman – the only woman mudlogger in the state. Second, she’s a college-educated geologist. Finally, she’s not just a Yankee, she’s a damn Yankee (translation: she’s not only invading Texans’ space, she’s taking their jobs).
Her new life is, well, interesting. No one can pronounce her name, so they just call her Yankee Woman. She’s stuck crashing on her boss’ couch because the oil boom is causing a waiting list for an apartment. A road grader crushes her Datsun B210GX on her first day of work, her first trainer hates training, in this order, new people, Yankees and women, and her “mentor” is a drunken idiot who thinks that getting into Maria’s pants is not only his right but his duty.
Things take a turn for the better when Maria hits meets Tommy Lee McCamey, son of the largest independent oilman in The Basin. A Yankee Woman in the Oil Patch follows Maria as she finds oil, love, tarantulas, scorpions and an awful lot of dust in the oil patch.
Although A Yankee Woman in the Oil Patch is my first novel, I have writing experience related to my career as an environmental, health and safety professional. I’ve also written two children's books with environmental themes.
I felt compelled to write this novel because I lived it. At the age of 22, I was the first woman mudlogger in the state of Texas. Most of my characters are loosely based on people I met there, and the majority of the situations I write about really happened. It's just the names that have been changed to protect the innocent.
I've attached the first chapter of A Yankee Woman in the Oil Patch for your review. Thank you for your time and your consideration.
Regards,
Annette Russo
a.russo@rcn.com
UP AND AT 'EM, LITTLE LADY
SMACK!
His hand slapped the meaty part of my left thigh, right up where it joins my butt. (I say this like there are some parts of my thigh that aren't meaty. Yeah, in my dreams.) It was a hell of a way to wake up, but after two weeks I was getting used to it. They say you can get used to hanging, if you do it long enough.
“Alright, little lady, up and at 'em. There's a plate of huevos rancheros in Tres Ojos with your name on it. And I have no intention of lettin' those puppies get cold.” His West Texas drawl was almost incomprehensible at five AM, but he'd been saying the same thing for the last two weeks. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure there'd be no deviation from plan today.
“C'mon, girl, move your behind.”
“Billy, I'll move my behind when you get yours out of here. I may let you get your morning jollies by pulling off my blanket and smacking me on the ass, but don't expect me to dress in front of you.”
“OK, little lady, but don't keep me waiting. I jes' hate it when a woman keeps me waiting.” He sauntered out of the trailer, favoring me with a yellow-toothed, grizzled smile as he slammed the door.
I got up from the couch that doubled as a bed in my mudlogging trailer, splashed water on my face and under my armpits, threw on a beat-up pair of jeans and an old T-shirt, and went out to meet Billy. He was squinting up at the rig, checking out how long he could stay at breakfast in Tres Ojos. “She's turnin’ real slow, so I think we can have us a fine breakfast this morning. You might want to leave the trailer open. I told my boys they'd have to catch your samples while we was eating.”
Oh, big, generous man. This was a one-man (or in my case, one-woman) mudlogging job. The logger doesn't have time to catch the samples and analyze them, so the roughnecks were already catching the samples for me. I decided to let it pass, and try to be gracious. “Thanks, Billy, I appreciate that.”
“No problem, little lady, 'smy pleasure.”
Tres Ojos was the closest town to my rig, about 15 miles as the crow flies, 25 as the pickup drives. Tiny and mostly Spanish-speaking, the
town was the only refuge for the roughnecks and roustabouts, providing them with entertainment (several cantinas and a topless bar), food (as long as Tex-Mex was your poison) and, in my case, bathrooms. Yes, that’s right, bathrooms. The office had, in their inimitable wisdom, given me a trailer with no toilet facilities, so every time Nature called, I hopped in my car and drove to the best restaurant in Tres Ojos, La Cascada, where Senora Villareal allowed me to use her bathroom. She also usually sent me home with some freshly made tortillas and salsa. I guess she felt sorry for me.
I've got to be honest, here. You just don't make a 25-mile trip just to pee, and since my rig was in a cotton field next to the highway, peeing outside was out of question. After thinking it through, and being too late to consider the drive to Tres Ojos one afternoon, I decided that my only recourse was to use the stainless steel sink in my trailer. There were two downsides to this. It was the only sink in the trailer, constantly in use for sample analysis and general living. More importantly, it was chest-high, so using it as a substitute toilet meant that I had to drop my drawers, leap into the air while executing a somewhat awkward half-turn, land with all required parts hanging over the sink, and balance until Nature's call had been satisfied. All of this while the faucet pumped water from the rig into the sink. Hey, it wasn't pretty, but it beat the hell out of driving cross-legged for 25 miles, all the while hoping that you don't get caught behind farm machinery or 2000 head of cattle.
Billy had caught me at this game more than once, and it made his day every time. Grinning like a carny, he reminisced as we drove along. “Woman, do you remember the first time I caught you whizzin' in your sink?” His laugh almost strangled him. “You called me ever name in the book while you was tryin' to hop down from there. And when you finally did, you got them jeans stuck around your knees and fell flat on your face. I thought I'd die.”
Somehow, I didn't remember it as being quite as funny. And I wasn't happy that all of this merriment at my expense was causing us to drive through a field rather than on the road. “Uhh, Billy, shouldn't we be on, like, the road?”
“Oh, yeah. You know, I jest couldn't believe it. Still can't. I never though I'd see some prissy Yankee settin' her lily-white butt on some dirty ol' trailer sink, but there you was, plain as day, mooning these old eyes first thing in the morning. A fine hello, little lady, a fine hello for an old hand like me.”
“I'm always glad to oblige, Billy.”
Senora Villareal greeted us at the door of La Cascada, as usual. “Juan, traigame huevos rancheros, muy picoso, por mi amigo Billy. Y por la senorita, huevos, papas y jugo de naranja. Is OK? Eggs, 'tatoes and juice for you?”
“Is perfect, Senora.”
Billy made a ceremony out of eating his eggs, pouring on a little extra Tabasco sauce to make sure the eggs would scorch his throat as they went down. “Nothin' like a little heat to get a man's blood goin', especially out here where there's no extry friendly women.” He leered in my direction, then winked at Juan. “Little lady, someday you're gonna do my heart good and eat you a mess of these huevos. Then maybe we can get you that Texas passport.”
God, I really hated being called “little lady”. Better “hey you” or “yo bitch” than “little lady”. And Billy's way of saying it didn't help either, being just this side of a come-on. But, hey, this was Texas, where women were still called “little lady”, and where some women even like it. “Well, Billy, I figure that you're eating enough huevos rancheros for the two of us. I'll stick with my plain eggs and potatoes, OK? You know us Yankees, we have weak constitutions when it comes to nuclear food first thing in the morning.”
“Yep, I can see that. You poor folks jes' don't know what you're missing. Well, eat up, little lady, we got us an oil well to drill.”
“Yeah, that we do, Billy.”
On the drive back, Billy talked about the well. “Where do you think we are in the section? I figure we're just about down to the Ellenberger.”
“Just about. We should hit it some time today, probably late this morning.”
“Any show yet?”
“Not much, but that's pretty usual in this formation. We should see some as soon as we hit the top of the Ellenberger. At least I hope we do.”
Billy gave me a sidelong look. “What do you care if we hit big on this one? You get paid either way.”
“Yeah, but I own a thirty-second of this one, so if it hits, I just might be on easy street.”
“How'd you get a thirty-second?”
“I smiled pretty for the owner, that's how.” I gave Billy my best innocent young thing smile.
Damn, girl, they gave you a piece of the action for that? They must have been hurtin' cowboys.”
I really did hope this well came in and came in good. A thirty-second was just about the smallest piece of the action of a well, but on a good producing well it could mean a yearly income of, say, ten to twelve thousand dollars, free and clear. Nice annuity.
By the time we got back to the rig, I had two sets of samples waiting for me. I grabbed the first sample, opened the brown bag and poured the sandy-looking rock granules out into the grease strainer we used to clean them. These rock chips, called cuttings, came from down in the well, where the drill bit ate away at the formation. A good bit of shaking and sloshing was required to clean the drilling mud off of the cuttings. Once they were clean, I put them in the small plastic sample dish and peered through the binoc scope, checking to see what we were hitting and trying to correlate that with what I knew about the geology of the basin in this area.
Billy had plunked himself in my trailer, poured himself a cup of coffee. “Well,” he drawled, “see anything good?”
“We're almost to the top. I see some of that nice white limestone that tops off the Ellenberger. Let me check for a little show.” I put some of the sample in a thumb dish, squeezed three drops of chloroethane on it, and shoved it into the black light box. Oil fluoresces under black light, and chloroethane liberates it from the rock chips. “Just a little; nothing to write home about. Let me check the next sample.”
Much more white limestone was visible in this sample, and I was pretty sure we'd hit the top of the formation. I did the chloroethane number again, and was rewarded with a streaming cut, pink fluorescent tongues licking out of the side of the thumb dish where I'd placed the second sample. “Got a decent streaming cut here, Billy. Want to take a look?”
“Sure do, little lady.” He bent his grey, balding head to the viewer on the black light box and squinted at its contents. “You're right, that's a decent cut. Won't make us much money, but we might could be on the way to somethin' better. You'll let me know, now, if we're fixin' to hit something big?”
“Yep. I sure will.”
By the middle of the afternoon, it was clear that we were on to something big. Under the black light, the samples no longer resembled a Day-Glo delta. Now they were a mushroom cloud of blazing pinks and greens, bleeding outward and upward from the edge of the dish. I got on the intercom and called up to the drilling floor.
“Hey, Billy, I've got something you'll really like here. I've got me a blooming cut, lots of color, with some streaming out of the edges. Want to call the geologist?”
“Damn, girl, I guess I do. I think it's time we tested this puppy. Oh, what does the GC say?”
“We've got peaks, my friend, lots and lots of peaks. There's definitely some gas in that hole.”
“Catch your next sample and see what you got. I'm gonna go raise me up a geologist.” The intercom clicked off to the sounds of Billy's guttural chuckle.
My next sample was more of the same, a good-looking limestone with lots of oil, something no mudlogger ever minds seeing. The gas chromatograph was chattering along, needles moving to the right of the chart paper. Might be some natural gas down there too.
I let Billy know, and he called in the oil company's geologist. These guys never come out to the rig unless something looks good. We mudloggers usually like to have our good samples show up around three AM, so we can call some soft company geologist away from his nice comfy bed. There was no such luck on this hole, but hell, I had a thirty-second, so if it came in, I didn't care when the company man came out. Just as long as he agreed that it was time for a test.
We shut down the rig, sent some of the roughnecks on a beer and barbecue run, and waited for the geologist to arrive. Two hours later he was in my trailer, munching on a barbecue sandwich, drinking a beer and looking at my samples. (I remembered the cardinal law - you always feed the company man, no matter what time it is.) After careful consideration, he turned to me and smiled. “Looks like you called this one just right. I'm going to call a DST.”
DSTs are drill stem tests, and their purpose is to determine how much oil, if any, is in the formation. They're hard work for the roughnecks, but party time for mudloggers. We can sleep, eat, go home, do anything we want during a DST. Me, I was going home. A nearby, working bathroom won out over my curiosity about my fiscal future. I asked Billy to call me when they pulled the test, so I could see if ten thousand bucks a year would be winging my way.
"Why sure I will, little lady, but you don't need to haul your butt all the way back to town. I got me a big old site trailer, with two bedrooms and everythin'. And you don't have to whiz in the sink, neither.”
The thought of spending any time alone in a trailer with Billy was enough to get my feet running in the opposite direction at the speed of your average tornado.
“Gee, thanks a lot, Billy, but I'd just like to crawl into my own bed for a night or two.” I patted the side of his cheek. “You call me now, OK?”
“Yeah, I'll call you. This 'un should take two days at most.” He whacked me on the butt as I jumped into my little Honda. “Take care, now and drive safe.”
“You got it, bud!” I had to get out of there. Fast. Next thing you know, I'd have Billy in the front seat, and be eating huevos rancheros for dinner. Not an appealing prospect.
Driving home, I got to thinking about this well, and how it would probably be my last. I'd been here in West Texas for a year, and I'd logged about 23 wells. But the rig counts were falling, from 4000 working land rigs when I'd come out here to just over 400 now, and my company, which had employed 50 mudloggers, was now composed of me, two other loggers, our boss and our secretary. There were no new jobs on the board, no new holes being drilled in the basin. Not when oil was at 20 dollars a barrel. When I'd arrived, a newly minted geologist, oil had been at 65 dollars, and you just needed to be warm and breathing to get a job logging.
Two glorious, hot, sunny days passed before I got the call from Billy, two days in which I sunbathed, swam in the apartment complex pool, slept and grilled steaks for dinner. I picked up the phone dreading the news, but still hoping for the windfall that would be my own little piece of the Basin’s boom.
“Hello, little lady! You know who this is?”
No. Let me guess. Hmmm, the president? Mother Theresa? “Hi, Billy. How's the test going?”
“They're fixin' to pull the pipe back. I figure if you get that Yankee butt of yours on the road, you'll be here by the time they pull the last coupla joints out.”
“Great. Let me pack my things up, and I'm outta here.”
I hung up, pulled together some clothes, some food and my logging supplies, and drove the hour and a half to the rig. Just as Billy had promised, the last two lengths of pipe were being pulled out of the hole as I pulled onto the rig site. I threw my clothes into the trailer and sauntered over, oh so casually, to see what was going on.
The joints were coated with oil, always a good sign. But the oil collected during the test was the real treat. It was lime-green and clean, with none of that black sludge that so often defines West Texas crude. When the last of it came out of the test, even the geologist was whooping. You see, green oil requires a whole lot less refining than your basic black West Texas crude. In other words, we'd just hit us a fine well, and my thirty-second was going to be worth more than I had thought.
Good clean oil is a bonus for everybody, and this crew had a few traditions. First, they pulled Billy aside, took some of that green oil and rubbed it on his head. When I asked, they told me that green oil was supposed to grow hair on bald men. Pretty soon, all of the guys who were a little thin on the top had a layer of that oil on their pates. I also got into the act. No, they didn't spread any oil on me - anywhere - but I did get a nice vial of it for my own. Green oil is rare enough in West Texas that it's considered a prize.
I learned later that afternoon that the well was also producing unaided. Think Giant and James Dean drenched with the oil spewing from the well behind him. In real life, no one lets wells spew like that; oil's too expensive. My well was not spewing, just burbling, but that was good enough for me. I could see that annuity getting bigger all the time!
Folks in the oil patch don't celebrate good strikes too long. They've got trailers to take down, pipe to set and perf, logs to fill out, tests to do, and families to get to. The Tablelands Oil company man gave Billy and I a bonus (not large, but enough to buy a good meal), then went back to make sure the well was completed correctly. I said good-bye to the roughnecks, loaded my trailer, called into the office, and went to find Billy. My mother taught me to be polite, and I was going to take the time to say good-bye. I found him in the doghouse, up on the rig, supervising the pipe setting.
“Well, Billy, I'm going to get going. It's been good working with you.”
He took the hand I'd offered him. “Same for me, little lady. You take care now.”
“I will. You too.”
Billy screwed up his face like he was trying to figure out a differential equation. “Y'know, I jes want to say somethin'. I didn't want no woman on this job. I thought it'd mess up everything. And then they told me you was a Yankee, and I thought it jes' couldn't get worse.”
“And you feel differently now?”
“Hell, no, girl.” Billy chuckled at my stricken expression. “It was even worse than I thought!” With that, he whacked me on the butt and said, “Go on, now. Get out of here. Some of us folks have work to do.”
I looked back at the rig, watching the roughnecks wrestle the thirty-foot lengths of pipe into the hole, a sight now so familiar to me. But it hadn't been familiar when I'd first come into the oil patch, just one year ago. I’d been a different woman then, one who couldn’t speak Texan or “patch lingo”, who had never spoken to a freedom fighter, who’d never been in love, and who wasn’t sure that she could take care of herself. It was hard to remember her.
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I enjoyed this piece. It was a good story about the sanctity of a woman who was in a no woman zone. This story gives me inspiration to work for something even though all the odds are against me.
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