The Endless Hat of J. Bartholomew Crude

They say you could see J. Bartholomew Crude’s hat from three counties over. It started as a normal top hat, black silk stretched over a sturdy frame, but it just kept going up and up until it vanished into the clouds. Weather balloons would occasionally ping off its brim, and pilots learned to give Dallas a wider berth than usual, just to avoid that peculiar hazard.

Crude himself was unremarkable from the neck down – a portly man in an oil-stained suit who perpetually maintained exactly seventeen lit cigars. He kept them arranged in specially-designed holders that circled his person: four in each hand, three in his breast pocket, two behind each ear, and two more clenched between his teeth. The seventeenth was always tucked into his hat band, sending lazy smoke signals up the length of his extraordinary headpiece.

"A gentleman requires precisely seventeen cigars," he would say through his teeth-clenched pair. "Sixteen’s unlucky, and eighteen’s just showing off."

The oil baron’s peculiar habits had served him well through three decades of boom and bust. While others drilled based on geological surveys and scientific data, Crude would tilt his head back – way, way back – until his hat swayed like a dowsing rod. Wherever it pointed when the ash fell from the seventeenth cigar, that’s where he’d drill. He’d never hit a dry well.

His board meetings were legendary, held in a custom-built skyscraper with a hole in every floor to accommodate his hat. Directors would ride the elevator to whatever altitude their agenda items required – environmental concerns were discussed at cloud level, where the hat’s width provided convenient shelter from the rain, while layoffs were handled near the base, where the shadow was darkest.

Only once did anyone dare ask him why he needed such a tall hat. It was a fresh-faced journalist from the Houston Chronicle, barely a week into the job.

"Young man," Crude had replied, puffing symmetrical smoke rings from his twin mouth-cigars, "in this business, you’re either reaching for the sky or digging yourself into the ground. I prefer the former."

The article never ran. The journalist switched careers and became a haberdasher, specializing in perfectly normal, reasonably-sized hats.

As for the seventeenth cigar in the hat band – some say on still nights you can see its glow above the clouds, a tiny red star that never moves, marking the spot where J. Bartholomew Crude’s ambition finally ran out of atmosphere.