When we climbed aboard the rig, the clothes of the floor men were flattening against their bodies; they looked like men on the deck of an aircraft carrier. I had to yell for the geologist to hear me: “Mr. Pine believes we need to get that blowout preventer in place!”
“Pine is an interesting guy!” the geologist yelled back.
We climbed the ladder into what was called the doghouse, with the geologist and tool pusher and driller and two men who were majority stockholders in the company. Even though I had introduced Rosita as my wife, they kept looking at her out of the corners of their eyes, as though they had to remind themselves who she was or why she was there. Through the windows I could see the long gray-green, mist-shrouded coast of Louisiana, a strip of barrier islands and swamps and bayous and flooded trees that seemed left over from the first days of Creation. Above me, the derrick man on the monkey board was leaning out into space on his safety belt, racking pipe, his hard hat cinched with a strap under his chin. Down below, around the wellhead, I could see the roughnecks on the floor wrestling with the drill bit and the tongs, the oiled chain whipping around the pipe. They never missed a beat, never looked up in apprehension or fear when lightning struck the water or thunder boomed on the horizon.
None of the men in the room was sympathetic with Hershel’s point of view—namely, that he knew more about drilling for oil than they did. The tool pusher took me aside. He had a round, clean-shaved face that was bright with windburn; he wore an insulated long-sleeved denim shirt and khakis that were hitched up high on his stomach. He glanced at his wristwatch, then glanced at it again.
“Are we taking too much of your time?” I asked.
“No, I appreciate y’all’s concerns,” he replied. “But that man over yonder drilled an offshore well about six miles from here in 1937 and went ninety-four hundred feet before he hit a pay sand. He’s also the majority stockholder in this company. If I was y’all, I wouldn’t be telling him his business, Mr. Holland. Another way of putting it is Mr. Pine is becoming a king-size irritant.”
“Hershel’s instincts are usually pretty good,” I said, trying not to remember New Roads.
“Religion is for the church house. Instinct is for the horse track. This here is a dollars-and-cents environment, Mr. Holland.”
I felt Rosita next to me, felt her arm slip inside mine, her hip touch against mine. “How’s your overhead so far?” she said to the tool pusher.
“Couldn’t be better. This whole job has been smooth as Vaseline.”
I looked him in the face to indicate my feeling about his metaphor, but he didn’t catch it.
“Which would be more costly?” Rosita asked. “Taking a preventive measure now or incurring a couple of dozen lawsuits?”
“Believe it or not, little lady, we’ve considered all the possibilities.”
“Are most of those men out there Cajuns?”
“Quite a few. Yes, ma’am.” He was looking straight ahead, visibly tired of the subject.
“How would you like explaining yourself to a jury made up of your employees’ relatives?”
The tool pusher’s eyes clicked sideways, fixing on hers. “Fellows, could I have your attention a minute?” he said to the other men in the room.
THE BLOWOUT PREVENTER went into place. Offshore rigs were primitive in those days, lacking the galleys and living areas they contain today. We ate supper on a shrimp trawler anchored to the base of the rig and pitching against the rubber tires hung from the stanchions. I say “we.” Hershel ate nothing more than a piece of buttered white bread while he drank black coffee so hot it would scorch the paint on a fire truck. No one was happy with us; installing the blowout preventer was time-consuming and expensive. We had a minority interest in the rig but had prevailed over people with far greater experience in the oil field than we had. As the hours worn on, I became convinced our victory was Pyrrhic and once again Hershel’s prophetic gifts would prove illusory.
The three of us slept on narrow bunks inside a small cabin on the trawler. It was cold at sunrise, the early sun a paradoxical burnt orange inside black clouds that looked like smoke from a batholithic fire under the Gulf, the waves three feet high and hitting the trawler’s wood hull with the steady bone-numbing rhythm of a metronome. Hershel was undaunted. He shaved with cold water and dried his face with his shirt, his eyes jittering. “Let’s go up to the doghouse,” he said.
“I think we’d better stay out of there,” I said. “I think if the wind drops, we should head for shore.”
“Trust me on this, Weldon.”
I have, I have, I thought. But I kept my own counsel. Rosita and I went to the galley to eat breakfast, depressed with our prospects, bored with the routine, anxious to get back on land. “I wonder what’s going on in the world,” she said.
I remembered the morning paper I had picked up from the lawn and stuck in my coat pocket. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I went to our cabin and returned to the galley, flipping open The Houston Post, glancing at the headlines above the fold. Then I sat down across from Rosita and flipped the paper over and looked at an article at the bottom of page one. Hershel had gone up to the doghouse.
“Weldon?” she said.
“What?”
“Your face is white.”
“Remember the man I went to see Sunday night?”
“What about him?”
“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a blackmailer.”
“He was trying to blackmail you?”
“The issue involved Hershel and Linda Gail. He also had two photos of my father. One showed my father just before he was killed in an explosion down in a bell hole. Another showed his body right after the explosion. All these years Grandfather and my mother and I had no idea what happened to him. The man’s name was Harlan McFey. He was a detective. I had hoped to find out who he was working for.”
“Is that why you went to see Roy Wiseheart?”
“Yes, I thought maybe he’d hired McFey. He said McFey had worked for his father but was fired two years ago.”
“Go back to what you said about Hershel and Linda Gail.”
“She’s probably having an affair.”
“How do you know?”
“McFey had a photo of her in a compromising situation. Half of the photo was torn off. I don’t know who the man is. I thought it might be Roy Wiseheart. I talked to him about it. I believe what he told me. I don’t believe he’s romantically involved with her.”
“You have to leave this alone, Weldon.”
“Just walk away?”
“Linda Gail has the mind of a child. Nothing you can do will change that. She’s Hershel’s responsibility.”
“I need to find out the circumstances of my father’s death. I have to find out why he didn’t write or tell us where he was.”
“But you have to leave Linda Gail and Hershel’s marital problems out of it.”
“Okay, General Lowenstein.”
“You want a slap?”
I looked out the porthole and saw two strange phenomena occur in a sequence that made no sense. The wind dropped, and instead of capping, the waves slid through the rig’s pilings like rippling green silk. Then the surface quivered and wrinkled like the skin on a living creature. I unlatched the glass on the porthole and looked up at the roughneck on the monkey board. He had unhooked his safety belt and stepped out on the hoist, one hand locked on the steel cable, and was riding it down to the deck, rotating his arm in a circle, like a third-base coach telling his runners to haul freight for home plate.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“You have to see this. There’s nothing quite like it.”
We climbed the ladder onto the floor of the rig. I could smell an odor similar to rotten eg
gs leaking off the wellhead. The tool pusher and driller and Hershel were coming out of the doghouse. An unshaved roughneck with a beer barrel’s girth was dancing by the wellhead, joyfully pumping his loins against the air, his tin hat cocked on his head.
I could feel a vibration through the soles of my shoes, then the pipes on the wellhead began to sweat in drops that were as big and bright and wet to the touch as a bucket full of silver coins lifted from a sunken galleon. Every connector pipe was as cold as an ice tray fresh out of a freezer. The driller dipped a board into a can of turpentine and lit it and touched the burning end to a flare line that immediately erupted in flames reaching a hundred feet into the sky.
The confined eruption of oil and natural gas and salt water and sand through the wellhead created a level of pressure and structural conflict not unlike an ocean channeled through the neck of a beer bottle. The molecular composition of the steel rigging seemed to stiffen against the sky. A hammer fell from somewhere in the rigging, clanging through the spars as loudly as a cathedral bell, but no one paid any attention, even when the hammer bounced off the roof of the doghouse.
“Wahoo!” Hershel said, jumping up and down on the deck. “Wahoo!” He began singing the lyrics from a song I’d heard beer-joint bands play for years: “ ‘Ten days on, five days off, I guess my blood is crude oil now. I reckon I’ll never lose them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.’ Lord God in heaven, we’re rich, Weldon!” Then he shouted again: “Wahoo!”
He wasn’t through. He stood on his hands and walked across the deck.
“Did you ever see a happier man?” Rosita said.
“Never,” I replied.
“The private detective killed in the hit-and-run?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let his evil live beyond the grave,” she said.
About the Author
Photo credit: Frank Veronsky
James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, and named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, is the author of more than thirty previous novels and two collections of short stories, including such New York Times bestsellers as Light of the World, Creole Belle, Swan Peak, The Tin Roof Blowdown, and Feast Day of Fools. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/James-Lee-Burke
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SimonandSchuster.com
Also by James Lee Burke
DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS
Light of the World
Creole Belle
The Glass Rainbow
Swan Peak
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Pegasus Descending
Crusader’s Cross
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
Purple Cane Road
Sunset Limited
Cadillac Jukebox
Burning Angel
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
A Stained White Radiance
A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
Heaven’s Prisoners
The Neon Rain
BILLY BOB AND HACKBERRY HOLLAND NOVELS
In the Moon of Red Ponies
Bitterroot
Heartwood
Cimarron Rose
Wayfaring Stranger
Feast Day of Fools
Rain Gods
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
OTHER FICTION
Jesus Out to Sea
White Doves at Morning
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict and Other Stories
Two for Texas
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Half of Paradise
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by James Lee Burke
Originally published in 1997 by Hyperion
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First Pocket Books paperback edition October 2014
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ISBN 978-1-4767-8256-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-8257-7 (ebook)
Cimarron Rose Page 32
