I didn’t see The Driller again until the next weekend, when he knocked on the door to say “hi” to us kids and take my mom out for the night. He was wearing pointy cowboy boots this time and carrying roses. Wendy looked at my mom.

“What time are you coming back?”

Mike answered, “I’ll have her home early. I have to work tomorrow.”

I asked, “Are you sleeping over?”

My mom said, “You’d better be good and go to bed at nine.”

Then they walked out the door.

He did indeed sleep over, and in the morning he asked my mom if he could take me to work with him. He said it was a shallow well and we’d be back not long after lunch. Surprisingly, she said yes. He told me to put on some old clothes. I went to my room and changed as fast as I could.

I kissed my mom goodbye, and we loaded up into his big white truck. We headed out of Port Saint Lucie into the next town north, Fort Pierce. We pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant where my mom worked and drove around back, where there were four small cottages. He parked and went into one of them, coming out wearing white rubber boots and a T-shirt with patterns of black lines that I would later recognize as dope stains from the pin end of drill pipes.

We left the cottages and drove into a dirt road neighborhood of run-down wooden houses, pulling into the backyard of one of them and parking in front of what I thought was a shed. The Driller got out and knocked on the door. It was answered by a tall man who seemed to be in his fifties. His nose looked like a big, ripe strawberry, and he was only wearing underwear. Some words were exchanged, and the tall man went back inside. Mike came back to the truck and said, “That’s Raydar. He helps me sometimes.”

Raydar came out of the shed dressed for work, wearing white rubber boots and carrying a tall can of Budweiser, which he finished off and tossed back toward the shack. As he walked to the truck, he stopped to throw up. I slid over on the seat with the shifter between my legs. There was enough room for me to sit between the shifter and Raydar, but I was shy, and he smelled funny.

As I grew up riding in front of the shifter, I was eventually given control of it, and that’s how I started to learn to drive. First, learning how and when to shift in the middle of that bench seat.

Mike was building a bigger rig to use for drilling irrigation and freeze protection wells in the orange groves, and later, when he finished building it, I learned to use the pedals and steer in the groves.

“Jimmy, Ray. Ray, Jimmy. Jimmy is Loraine’s son,” Mike said.

As we were leaving, Ray said, “Good to meet you, Jimmy.” Then he looked past me at Mike. “I need to go to the store.”

We stopped at a gas station to fill up a gas can, and Ray came out with a six pack of tall Budweisers. He opened one and was drinking it as he walked to the truck. Mike had bought a bag of ice and emptied it into a yellow water cooler.

The rig was already set on the well location in the backyard of a very nice house with the derrick raised. I watched as Mike and Ray grabbed shovels and started to dig a small earthen pit behind the rig. When they finished, they connected the truck to a trailer beside the rig and backed it up to the pit. On the trailer there was a three-by-two centrifugal pump and a water tank. They connected hoses from the pump to the rig, filled the pit with water, started the pump, and when it was primed, Raydar turned the water into mud.

Mike went over how and when to throttle the pump up and how to engage the clutch. He even explained what the pump did and why.

He said, “When I point my finger up and spin it, pull the throttle out until I stop with my finger. When I spin it down, push the throttle in. When I push my fist out, push the clutch in, and pull it out when I pull my fist in.”

And that was my first job on a drilling rig.

I could go on about the well, but I won’t. We all know how to drill a two-inch gravel-packed well to sixty feet. I will say that by the end of the day, I understood that the mud went into the pump, out of the pump, into the rig, out of the bit, up the hole, and back into the pump.

They connected a two-inch gas-powered pump to the well casing and grouted it up. I helped Raydar backfill the pit. Mike spoke to the homeowner as he wrote him a receipt, and we all shook his hand and thanked him.

Mike drove the rig back to a wholesale supply store where he was building the big rig behind the building. Me and Ray got in the flatbed, and he pulled the trailer, following behind Mike while he drank the last of the six beers he bought that morning.

We left the rig and trailer there, I slid back into the middle seat, and we dropped Ray off at a bar with a dirt parking lot that had a few Harley Davidsons and a couple of pickup trucks in it. I’m not sure how much he paid Ray, but he gave it to him in cash. He paid me twenty dollars.

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I didn’t expect to get paid, but good thing I did because the next day I had to use five of them to replace my mom’s garden hose. I’d gotten it stuck in the ground trying to see how deep I could get it to go. When I stopped seeing water come back up, I thought something might be wrong, but I kept pushing it down without returns and got it stuck in the hole.

That weekend, I learned that sometimes no answer is the answer you wanted. I learned a little about alcohol. I learned some of the basics of drilling with mud. I learned that drilling blind is dangerous and can cost you money if you don’t do it right.

I got to know The Driller a little better. I heard him rattle off a string of curse words, some I’d never heard before, and some that just shouldn’t be said together back to back. As time went on, I got to know him better than my mom did.

At that time, he was a good man. As time passed, I saw him stray from being good, and I saw him come back to good. My life imitated his in a lot of ways, as did most, if not all, drillers I’ve known.

He’s still living outside the U.S. I still talk to him, and he’s not coming back. Raydar’s been dead for a long time now. I knew him for about six years before he died.

I’m thinking now about how I never wanted to be the man Ray was, and how close I sometimes come to being that man. But I usually get sober at just the right time, for just the right amount of time. It’s like pushing the garden hose into the dirt. You have to pull it out before it loses circulation and gets stuck, or you’ll never get it out of the hole.

I’ll be fifty-eight years old in a couple of months. Been drilling full-time for forty-two of them. I’m studying for my seventh state drilling license now. I don’t have a lot to show for it. I’ve made a whole lot of mistakes and a whole lot of holes.

I hope that in the end, the water I brought to the world washes the mistakes away. Thanks for taking the time to read this story. I hope y’all liked it, because there are more to come.