Winston Finds Oil
By: J.S. Lender
Tags: Surfing, Dogs, Short Story, Fiction, Humor

High school was coming to an end and we were all scared to death. As we drank our beers and thought about the waves we had caught that day, we collectively gazed out over the mighty blue Pacific Ocean lying meekly beneath the all-powerful sun and pretended that we were somehow unaffected by the weight of it all.

1959 might seem like ancient history to you youngsters, but believe me, it isn’t. It might as well have been last week. Put down your phones and pull up a chair and I’ll tell you all about it.

Before the 1960s, Tucker Hill was just a sleepy little California town on the outskirts of Long Beach. There was nothing out there but a few cottages and shacks, with some stray coyotes roaming the hills.

And there was oil. In fact, there was so much oil that it would seep right through the ground in some places. A few of the small time oil men had been drilling around Tucker Hill since before the Depression and there were a few oil derricks scattered up and down the California coast. But the big oil companies had yet to invest the big bucks needed to suck all of that luscious black gold out of those virgin hills.

I ran with a pretty rowdy gang of kids back then. We were a little on the rambunctious side, but we all managed to stay out of jail. Except for Ronnie. A few years after high school, Ronnie wound up in prison for running a pyramid scheme. He told me he had needed the money because he was going through a divorce, but I had told him that the whole scam sounded like a loser from the outset. I suppose nothing makes a man more desperate for money than a divorce. Take my unsolicited advice, kids — sometimes it’s cheaper to keep ‘er , if you catch my drift.

Anyway, our gang spent the spring and summer months of high school surfing down at Seal Beach. You could say we were a bit on the lazy side. None of us could ever manage to wake up early enough to surf before dawn, so we would paddle out at Sunset Beach in the late afternoon after the wind calmed down and the water turned smooth and glassy.

After surfing, we would stop by the liquor store and grab whatever beer we could get ours hands on. Howard was the only one in our crew who was twenty-one, so we would all pitch in a few bucks and send him into Winner’s Circle Liquor to pick up a case of Lucky Lager. Howard would always refuse to chip in for the beer because he said he deserved payment for his “services.” He always was a cheap bastard and none of us bothered fighting with him about it.

Back then, the boards were so big and heavy that there were only a few ways to haul them down to the beach. That year I had bought an old black hearse at an auction for two hundred dollars, which made me the official “surf chauffeur” for the summer.

After securing the Lucky Lager from the liquor store, I would drive the hearse up a narrow dirt trail to the top of Tucker Hill. The guys sat in the back of the hearse with the boards, while Fred rode shotgun with me up front. We would hang out at the top of the hill, drinking one Lucky Lager after another, while watching the sun set over the dark blue Pacific Ocean.

Scattered across the smaller hills just below us, we spied dozens of men from the oil company. They had already built a handful of oil derricks on Tucker Hill, but they still had a lot of work to do. It was obvious that the lion’s share of oil had yet to be yanked from the ground, as the men worked in shifts around the clock. Just as the sun set and the sky grew violently dark, floodlights would flip on and cast a blinding glare from one hill to the next. The men never stopped working and searching.

Actually, the men themselves did not do much searching. One day I heard a low, deep howling. ARRROOOOOOOH!! Then I saw a little pooch sniffing and strutting all over those hills. He was a brown and white basset hound with just about the longest, floppiest ears I’d ever seen. This dog moved like a big husky clown and he was born to do just one thing: sniff. Boy, could that dog sniff up a storm. Up, down, and all over Tucker Hill.

At first, we couldn’t tell what that old basset hound was searching for. He would scour the hills and a cluster of men from the oil company would follow close behind.

Sometimes, the basset hound would wander off deep into the bushes, and the oil men would yell, “Winston, get on back here now!”

Winston would sniff and trot his way all up and down those hills, past the oil derricks and through the bushes, all day long and into the night. It eventually occurred to me that the oil men had Winston out there sniffing for black gold from down below.

Apparently, Winston’s nose was so damn strong that he could tell where the pockets of oil were lying underneath the soil.

If Winston sniffed over a hill or two and he didn’t smell any oil, he would look back at the men and shake his head back and forth as if to say, “No oil here, boys.”

Once the oil men got that signal from Winston, they would make their way over to the work trucks and the whole crew would get to work setting up tents in those oil free zones. Since the oil men had to live on the work site, they needed to pitch their tents on a spot where they wouldn’t have to worry about oil exploding up out of the ground and shooting them into the air like a dirty black lava volcano.

But let me tell you, once Winston caught himself a whiff of some of that precious black gold with his wet nostrils, he put on quite a show. The first thing Winston would do was stick out his left paw as straight as a flag pole. It was always the left paw, for some reason. Then Winston would take that left paw and draw a great big X in the dirt. But Winston couldn’t stop himself there, because I guess he couldn’t contain his own excitement. He would do this little dance in front of the X. His rump and tail would sway side to side like an old lady dancing in a conga line at a wedding. Then for the big finale, Winston would stick his snout straight up into the air with his floppy ears dangling in the wind and make a terrific deep howl. AARRROOOOOOH!

I suppose that’s how a basset hound says, “Put the pedal to the metal boys, we’ve got some oil here!”

That’s all it took for the oil men to start building an oil derrick, night and day. There was no telling how little time they had before that black lava started shooting right out of the ground, and those stingy oil bastards didn’t want to miss out on one single dime of profit. You’ve never seen an oil crew work so fast. It seemed like those wooden planks appeared out of nowhere and an army of shirtless men would hammer so fast and hard it sounded like the world’s most obnoxiously loud typewriter running at about two-hundred and fifty words a minute.

Those oil men had a good thing going with Winston. He was a loyal old pooch who was always more than happy to help those men find oil. But even the most loyal of dogs have their limits, and those oil men never gave Winston a single minute of rest.

One evening at dusk I was sitting on top of the hill with Fred throwing back a few Lucky Lagers, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t have poor Winston running at full speed from one hill to the next, sniffing through bushes, trees, and cacti. At one point Winston stuck out his tongue and I could see his ribs heaving in and out like a bony old steam engine just about ready to shoot out one last puff of steam before dying. But those men kept dragging Winston up one hill and down the next like he was some sort of mechanical mule.

Once the sun finally passed down behind the hills to take a rest for the evening, Winston was allowed to curl up on an old dirty blanket, where one of the men would throw him a spoonful of mush and a tiny bowl of water. Winston was so exhausted that he barely touched the mush, and took just a few licks of water.

Here’s where things get interesting. About a week later a real nice swell brought us some good waves and I was surfing with the gang at Sunset Beach all afternoon. I drove the hearse back up to our usual spot on the hill before sundown, and there we were drinking beer and smoking Pall Malls and jawboning about a bunch of nothing. Howard unveiled his great big plan to join the Navy, but Artie broke the news to him that he would probably spend four years washing dishes and cleaning toilets instead of commanding a fleet of battleships in the South Pacific.

About two hundred feet down the hill we saw poor old Winston making his rounds, looking for new oil spots. I couldn’t help but notice that Winston looked like he had had all of the fight kicked out of him. His snout was almost scraping the dirt, his tail was dragging, and he had a slight limp at his front left paw. Maybe some of the oil men got drunk and beat Winston when his snout failed to find the goods. Maybe Winston had come down with a nasty case of the doggy flu. Perhaps Winston was just tired. After all these years, I still can’t figure out what happened with Winston, but what I saw that day made me realize that those who roam the earth on four paws understand more than we realize.

Winston sniff sniff sniffed his way up and down the hill. At one point, he stopped and stuck out his left paw, looking like he was ready to draw a big giant X in the dirt and begin his little doggy dance to show that he found oil. It looked like his paws were getting stuck in something gooey in the dirt, and I could see him struggling to take small steps. Then suddenly, Winston put his left paw down, and just kept walking.

He looked back at the men and slowly shook his head. “No oil here, boys.”

Winston went back to camp and curled up on his dirty old blanket, allowing himself just a few sips of water but skipping dinner altogether.

Just before sundown, the oil fellas set up a whole row of tents where Winston had been sniffing that afternoon. As the men settled down in their tents and made a campfire, Winston curled up on his dirty old blanket and gazed upon the crew with his dirty old brown eyes. It appeared as if Winston was sleeping, but he was watching intently. Watching and waiting. Breathing and sighing. Down in the newly made camp, Winston could hear cups clinking, bottles clanking, and drunken men hollering.

Winston licked his lips, and his muzzle formed a little doggy smile.

The ground rumbled ever so slightly, as if baby demons in hell were having a slumber party and were passing around a stolen bottle of daddy’s Jack Daniels. The sound of the rumbling stayed constant, but the intensity continued to grow. One of the men in the camp sat upon an old log and stomped both feet squarely on the ground and was as still as a bronze statue, as his ass rumbled beneath him.

“What in the hell is that?” he asked the others.

Before one of the other dirty faced men had a chance to respond, the earth opened beneath them and a filthy, greasy, black ocean blasted every one of them straight into the atmosphere. Tent poles, chairs, wooden stumps, and sleeping bags exploded upward like the dirtiest and blackest Fourth of July fireworks show you’d ever seen.

Winston instantaneously perked up, lifted his left paw and pointed it at the cluster of horrified, oil covered men below him. He wiggled his rump and shook his tail with a kind of zest and ecstasy I had never seen any other living creature exhibit. And then Winston’s outrageous howl smothered all the land.

AARRROOOOOH!!!

Winston gathered his composure, straightened his spine, and casually and regally trotted down Tucker Hill and headed straight toward the Pacific Ocean.

THE END