Hobbs, New Mexico glimmered through the dust.
It shrank into his rear-view mirror, a wobbling string of distant lights back in town flickering and fading. That’s how it was, along with warm memories of the Saxony Steak Room. The memories reminded him of another night in another steakhouse before she left.
What struck him about the town was how it gave off the unmistakable impression of a place where anything could happen. That’s how he pegged it, even though the town was rarely, if ever, mentioned in any travel guides.
Maybe that was because Hobbs seemed more like Texas than New Mexico. Or because of the detritus of a wildcatter’s glistening dream that turned sour.
One day in summer of 1938 a banker came down to Hobbs from Albuquerque.
George Kaseman was president of the Albuquerque National Trust and Savings Bank. He was an investor in an oil and gas project and went out to watch what they called a shooting.
Shooting an oil well wasn’t usually dangerous. They did it when production wasn’t up to par and they felt that either an obstruction was clogging the well or the hole was crooked.
Outside Hobbs, while the banker watched, they started to lower their mixture of blasting gelatin, cooked up with nitroglycerin, guncotton and wood pulp. That’s when the nitroglycerine for the shoot went off prematurely. Seven men at the drilling site were killed, including the banker.
It probably didn’t matter if the pressure control systems on the well worked or not. Nothing much could have stopped it. Right after the explosion bulging cumulus clouds began to crowd the improbably blue sky.
He didn’t know any of that until much later, when he wound up in Wenatchee, Washington looking for his brother. For some reason he kept thinking of Hobbs, New Mexico. He figured he’d head back down there, maybe use some of his savings to buy a motel.
If he couldn’t find a motel for a good price, maybe he would open a welding shop again. He still had a MIG welder in storage.
But that would be only if his brother would join him, and he wasn’t sure what kind of shape his brother would be in if and when he found him.
