Another Neglected Hobby - The Fortune Chronicles - The Fortune Chronicles.pdf

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The Fortune Chronicles
Working Draft
CHAPTER ONE
Hank Powell
June 29, 1977
Hank Powell, dressed in dusty gray coveralls and a greasy
welder’s cap, pulled a red industrial cleaning rag from inside a
cardboard box in the bed of his pickup. He splashed it with
diesel and stood cleaning the grime off his hands as he stole an
occasional glance at the jar sitting on the fender. He still
couldn’t quite believe what he thought he’d seen a few hours
earlier, that it must have been some kind of hallucination caused
by the heat. Though he hadn’t really felt light-headed before,
when it happened, or when he saw what the thought he saw happen,
he had jumped back from the equipment he was working on,
grabbing hold of a sampson post on the pump jack, just to keep
from falling down. He had stood there for almost a full minute
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© 2014 Mark Cotton
No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
THE FORTUNE CHRONICLES
NEAL HINDSMAN
before leaning down to peek inside the machinery again, and even
then he had been prepared to retreat if need be.
Things got a little bit fuzzy after that. He could remember
digging around in the bed of the pickup until he found the old
Skippy peanut butter jar filled with nuts, bolts and washers he’d
gathered from years of taking apart oilfield equipment. And, he
could remember hastily unscrewing the lid and pouring the
contents out on the ground like a thermos full of cold coffee.
Not that the nuts, bolts and such were valuable, but they’d saved
Hank’s bacon on a number of occasions when he’d needed some
hardware and was miles away from an oilfield supply store. But
he didn’t even stop to think about ever needing those nuts and
bolts again when he dumped them in the dirt. It was like he
wasn’t even thinking at all, but acting on orders telegraphed
into his brain from somewhere else.
Then, the next thing he knew, he had finished disassembling
the equipment he came for, loaded it into the pickup bed and
realized the sun was a lot lower on the horizon than it had been
just a few seconds before. And, that old Skippy peanut butter jar
was sitting on the front fender of the pickup, the lid screwed on
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THE FORTUNE CHRONICLES
NEAL HINDSMAN
and half-filled with what had scared the bejesus out of him; the
stuff he’d seen inside the fittings of that oil pump.
Just glancing at the jar—he didn’t want to look directly at
it—made his belly quiver and his hands shake, but he couldn’t say
why. Right now, the dark blue mud inside looked like a couple of
cups of heavy crude oil, the same sort of stuff he had been wiping
off his hands for years. But the color was all wrong. For the
moment it was a blue-purple color, but then again it wasn’t like
any color Hank could ever remember seeing before. It was sort of
blue, but not really blue, and not purple even though it might be
similar in some way to purple. His eyes tried to stay fixed on
the jar, as if they could figure out what the color was if they
studied it long enough. But, it was the very fact that Hank
wanted to sit and stare at the jar that made him struggle to
avoid looking at it. It felt like looking directly at it might
cause his mind to blow a fuse before it could figure out how to
even look at such a color, and he could wind up losing another
couple of hours with no way to account for the time.
But, the glowing blue-purple wasn’t the only color so hard
to comprehend that it threatened to turn him into a drooling
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THE FORTUNE CHRONICLES
NEAL HINDSMAN
idiot. Since he’d regained his awareness of where he was and what
he was doing, he’d seen the Jell-O From Below turn bright orange-
red, brighter than any hunter’s safety vest and he’d seen it turn
a fluorescent green that reminded him of the plastic water
pistols he’d seen kids playing with. Some of the colors brought to
mind the blacklight posters he’d seen in a hippie girl’s bedroom
one wild night spent drinking with a pulling unit crew from
Hobbs. She’d turned on that blacklight and everything just
glowed like Hank had never seen before or since, up until now.
Except these colors were glowing like that blacklight poster in
broad daylight, and some of the colors Hank had never seen before
in his life. They were beautiful, but seeing them made his mind
squirm around trying to find a way to make those colors fit with
everything else he’d learned about the world up until that point.
He knew it was silly for a grown man to be terrified by what he
was looking at, but all the same it was reassuring to know that
the lid to that jar was screwed on tight.
Hank had spent the better part of the month of June going
from one abandoned well site to another on the Williamson Ranch,
salvaging what equipment he could before the oil well servicing
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