Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  His mother smiled. She had a beautiful smile. She reached for his hand, but he drew away.

  The next morning, they caught the flight from Lima to Chimbote, four hundred kilometres north along the cold-current Pacific that turned the coastal plains to desert. The small plane landed hard on the dirt airstrip and rumbled to a halt outside a small mud-brick building. Twin propellers spun to a stop and the pilot opened the door. The young man stepped outside. A hot wind blew rivers of sand across the airstrip. He narrowed his eyes, helped his mother off the steps, took the heaviest of her bags. They were the only ones on the flight. The pilot unloaded the rest of their luggage, started the engines and taxied away. Soon they were watching the plane claw its way into the sky, the buff and ice-capped saw of the Andes far off, the cold sea to their backs.

  The taxi came not long after, as his mother had said it would. She spoke excitedly with the driver as the car rattled along gravel roads, past dunes and broad washes devoid of green. How anyone could live out here, he could not imagine.

  His mother’s Spanish was excellent, learned as a girl, at school and for more than a year living with a family in Spain as an au pair. They were here to do a job. This wasn’t sightseeing, she’d told him when they had first discussed her plan. A mission, more like, she’d said.

  Almost two hours later, they came to the village. She’d never met them before, only corresponded over more than a decade. The mother was short and of matronly girth, but with a big warm smile. Elvira, the original foster child, was fifteen now, still in school. The youngest of her five siblings was two, a smiling, runny-nosed bundle that Elvira carried on her hip like a practised young mother. The two women greeted each other as long-lost sisters, hugging and crying and chattering excitedly in Spanish. They were shown into the house, a one-room breeze-block structure with clean-swept packed-dirt floors. In one corner, a small table and some chairs, and along the facing wall, six stacked mattresses. A sheet hanging from a rope screened off the other part of the house.

  The young man sat where he was told to. He sipped the hot, sweet tea provided, smiled at the children who surrounded him and laughed each time they reached to touch his hair and whispered pelo de oro to each other. His mother opened their cases and presented blankets, pots, pans, paper and pens, books and toys for the children, clothes and warm jackets for the winter, one after the other, as if it were Christmas. The young man sat and watched her and looked at the faces of the family members as they examined the gifts. They stayed an hour, their driver waiting outside in his taxi. And then it was time to go. His mother chattered through her tears, kissed each of the children and embraced her counterpart. Then she got into the taxi. She waved as they pulled away, the family lined up in front of their little house, laundry flapping on the line nearby, and she kept waving until well after they and the small village they were part of had disappeared in the haze and nothing remained but the long expanse of the cold-current coastal plain.

  Eventually, she stopped waving, and then turned back and sat looking out the front window. ‘Rhys would have loved this,’ she said.

  ‘Would have,’ said the young man.

  March 7th. Still on the way to Geneva

  I push the seat back as far as it will go and try to retreat further towards the fuselage. I am now crammed up against the window. For the past hour, I have been in uninterrupted physical contact with the woman in the seat next to me. The soft dough of her hip and arm flows unimpeded across the frontier of the armrest, invading the small rectilinear space my company is paying me to inhabit for these two hours. In any other situation, this would be categorised as sexual harassment. Me the perpetrator, of course. I should have asked for an aisle.

  Now she is watching a movie. I glance over at her screen. Some female superhero is beating the shit out of a bunch of dim-witted villains in a scene of perfectly choreographed emasculation. With her superior strength and skill, she dispatches one with a straight right to the face, decapitates another with one cut of her sword and chokes out a third with a flying triangle between her slender thighs. They are a lot bigger than her, burly Special Forces archetypes with thick shoulders, close-cut beards and dark clothing, but they are no match for her.

  I pull myself away from my neighbour’s movie and open my father’s manuscript to the last story I’ve read. So my uncle’s name is Rhys. Was. It’s pretty clear that by the time my dad goes to Peru with his mother – something he never told me about; or if he did, I didn’t listen – Rhys is gone. Gone where? Mental asylum? Runaway? Lying in a hospital somewhere in a coma? Dead? I feel as if I am looking at my life through a mirror, as if my father is writing not about his life, but mine. As if our lives are – were – two parallel yet intersecting timelines, one now ended, the other, mine, sputtering along still, into some indeterminate future.

  I am suddenly overcome with something I can only describe as melancholy – a word he would have used. Reflection comes, although I do not want it. I try to push it away.

  I am forty years old. Divorced. My only daughter hates me. She tells me so each time I see her. She is only ten. I sell insurance products to companies that hope they’ll never need them. In six years at the firm, I have received just the one promotion. My back bears the trample scars of the women who’ve been quota’d up to partner ahead of me, five of them now. Better pay, bigger offices, nicer cars, business-class travel, despite less experience and, in all cases but one, poorer sales performances. Hell, I even covered for two of them a few years back when they went off on mat’ leave. Worked time and a half for over a year. It isn’t at all how I thought it would be. Not how he said it would be.

  And now, of course, there’s Constantina. The bright spot. Every time I see her, she tells me she loves me. She wants to get married. She wants to have children with me. Four, she says. Four. Every time I think about it, panic rises in my chest, quakes through the muscles of my shoulders and neck. I take a deep breath, fill my lungs slowly and deliberately. The woman plastered against me glances over at me for a second, then goes back to her movie misandry.

  I’ve tried this once already and failed. The thought of doing it again, knowing what I know now, fills me with dread, even though I know that Constantina is not Maria. Of course, it was different in my dad’s time, when I was a child, watching him and Mum and learning how these things worked. But that was a long time ago. After two decades of determined social re-engineering, I am now expected to be something I am not, to perform a function for which I am neither physically built, nor mentally wired. I am not gentle. I don’t hear the baby’s cry. The sound does not dig through my stomach like Maria always described it doing to her. It certainly does not get the milk flowing. I sleep right through it. One time, Maria came home early one morning from a business trip and there was me sleeping off a dozen rye and Cokes and Rachel bawling her eyes out, not fed and with her diaper full. Maria dumped a bucket of cold water over me and stood there screaming at me for at least fifteen minutes, until I thought she was going to blow a vocal cord or pop a blood vessel in her face. Then she stood there and, step by step, made me change my daughter’s diaper, warm the bottle and sit and feed her. And the whole time, all I could think was, You might as well geld me, you bitch. I have never felt so humiliated. It wasn’t the actions, the caring. I’d done all that many times before. And I loved my daughter – I love her now, more than I can express or understand, so much it hurts. It was something else. The enforcement, maybe, the smug oversight. The assumption that it wasn’t enough just to do it, I also had to obliterate myself, to become something I was not. I remember leaving the house as soon as I’d finished feeding Rachel, getting on my bike, tearing down to the dojo and beating the shit out of the heavy bag for an hour. Then some bloke came along who wanted to spar and we went at it tooth and tong for at least ten rounds, until he caught me with a spinning side kick to the ribs that stunned me, and a left hook that put me down and had me seeing stars. It was then, after
wards, in the bar, that I said to myself: I am gone. I don’t give a shit how much money you make compared to me, or what the expectations of men are now. And I don’t care how beautiful you are, or about this fantastic life we seem to lead, with the nice cars and this house in Kew and the holidays to Mauritius and St Barts with all your other banker friends. I am not made for this. OK, so it only took me another three years. And it was Maria who kicked me out in the end. Could never quite bring myself to do it. But it was a relief when she told me to go. Does love only go so far?

  Texas

  In the nineteenth year of his life, the young man, who was not yet an engineer but was on the road to becoming one, went south to work in the oilfields of Texas. He lied to US customs officials at the border and two days later arrived in Brownwood on the Greyhound from Abilene. It was a Tuesday in June, and the temperature had hit a hundred and five. He rented a room in the attic of a house in the old part of town down by the river. It was a big wood-sided place with gardens front and back, surrounded by big cottonwoods. The old lady who owned the place offered it him for a hundred and fifty a month, which was what he made in two days working in the oilfields.

  On the rigs, the new guys got all the shit jobs. On his first day, the young man scrubbed oil from well heads and valves and risers using a brush and a can of solvent. He scrubbed for eleven and a half hours with a half-hour for lunch. Come evening, he had a raging headache and was covered in oil from his eyeline to the soles of his boots. He tried to wash the oil from his work clothes and purge the solvent from his skin, but no matter how much detergent he used, no matter how much he scrubbed, the oil, the thick green paraffin and the polychlorinated ethylenes clung on. That night, he took a handful of aspirin and lay in the steel-framed bed, listening to the insects in the trees and wondering if he’d made a big mistake coming here.

  The next morning, he slid back into the same jeans and oil-soaked T-shirt and waited on the sidewalk in front of the house for his crew chief, Foy Lawson, to arrive and take him to the yard.

  ‘Jeez, they sure have let that old place go,’ said Foy, leaning across the bench seat to swing open the pickup’s door.

  ‘I like it,’ said the young man.

  ‘Where ya’ll from again?’ said Foy, hunched over the steering wheel. He had fair, greying hair and jacket-leather skin and wore a faded baseball cap that read Charlie Catherell Well Servicing on the front.

  ‘Canada.’

  ‘That’s up north, ain’t it?’

  ‘North of Washington State.’

  ‘I hear it’s winter pretty much all year round up there,’ said Foy. His teeth were stained from chewing tobacco, and several were oddly shaped and badly decayed. ‘Ya’ll got Eskimos and all?’

  The young man smiled. ‘Where I’m from on the west coast, it snows maybe a couple of times a year. But yes, in the Arctic, we have Eskimos.’

  ‘And ya’ll are a separate country?’

  ‘The Queen is our head of state.’

  ‘Queen?’

  ‘Elizabeth the Second.’

  Foy ruminated on this awhile. They had had an almost identical conversation the previous morning as they drove to the yard. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said as they bumped over the rail crossing on the outskirts of town.

  ‘He’s like a Messican,’ said Rodney, the other roustabout, from the back seat. ‘Come here to work illegal.’ He had dark hair, strangely pallid skin, and a borderline cleft lip that made him slur his words.

  ‘Hell, look at him, Rodney,’ said Foy, spitting from the open window. ‘He ain’t no wetback.’

  ‘Iceback, more like,’ said Earl Lawson, Foy’s son and second-in-charge. He was fair-haired like his father, had winter-sky eyes, and looked to be about the same age as the young man.

  Every member of the rig crew was missing at least one finger. Foy was missing three: both baby fingers, and the middle finger of his left hand at the second knuckle.

  ‘And you just keep your mouth shut about it, Rodney,’ said Foy. ‘None of us is wantin’ any trouble. You hear me, boy?’

  ‘Well, he sure talks funny,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Not everyone talks like you, Rodney,’ said Earl.

  Rodney tucked his chin to his chest, mumbled something.

  That day, they drove to a well site seventy miles west of Brownwood. The country was flat and dry, and there were pumpjacks spaced every quarter of a mile for as far as you could see in every direction. The temperature on the cab’s digital display read one hundred and six degrees Fahrenheit.

  Foy said the wells in this part of the country were old and were only producing a few barrels a day each, now, but still made money. The oil here was rich in paraffin, which gummed up the piping and slowed production, and so every few months they needed to come and pull out the tubing and the rods, clean them off and surge the well to get production back up.

  They pulled into a lease tucked in behind a low rise in the otherwise flat country. Foy positioned the truck-mounted rig and dismantled the pumpjack, and then they tripped out. The completion string was made up of twenty-nine-foot lengths of steel pipe screwed together, end on end. Extracting, uncoupling and laying down a section of pipe took the four-man crew about five minutes.

  The young man spent the day catching the free end of each section of pipe as it was removed from the tongs, and guiding it on to the pipe racks. He would then unscrew the lifting stub with a hand wrench, walk the lifting line back to the well head and screw the stub into the next section of pipe. A dozen sections in an hour, hour after hour. Around midday they stopped work and ate lunch, sitting on the ground with their backs against the rig’s tyres, pushing themselves into the thin wedge of shade thrown by the derrick. It was tough work, and dirty, but a lot better than scrubbing parts.

  Driving home that day the young man asked Foy why they were all missing fingers.

  ‘How long you fixin’ to work the rigs?’ said Foy.

  ‘Half a year, if I can,’ said the young man. ‘I’m hoping to go back to university next year to keep working on my engineering degree.’

  ‘Engineers don’t know nothin’,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Don’t you pay him no attention,’ said Foy to the young man. ‘He ain’t right in the head.’

  ‘They ain’t nothin’ wrong with my head,’ said Rodney.

  ‘Shut up, Rodney,’ said Earl.

  Foy drove on for a time and after they passed through Santa Anna, he raised his left hand and said: ‘This here finger I lost to a chain wrap four years ago near Galveston. The one next to it got crushed laying down pipe like you been doing today, don’t recall how many years gone now. ’Fore I had Earl, I reckon. Tell him, Earl.’

  Earl raised his right hand. ‘Got caught in the slips and ripped clean off. Never did find it.’

  The young man, realising he’d asked a stupid question, thought of apologising, but thought that would make it worse. So he kept quiet, tried to be respectful.

  ‘My finger got chewed up in the tongs,’ said Rodney. ‘Just last year.’

  ‘Plain stupid,’ said Foy. ‘I done told you, but you wouldn’t listen. Your own damned fault.’

  Rodney hunched his shoulders as if to hide his face. ‘Six months, you’ll be no different t’us, iceback,’ he mumbled.

  They worked on the same well for the rest of the week, then Foy gave them the weekend off. Saturday morning, the young man slept late, but was finally driven from his bed by the heat. He dressed and went down to the garden, waded through the chest-high grass and climbed the steps to the front door of the old house. The windows were all closed and shuttered. He knocked on the door. After a while, the old lady answered. She held the door ajar and peered out at him from the darkness through narrowed eyes. Morning lit her face. She looked much older than she had when he’d first met her.

  ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘Yes? What is it?’ She seemed not to recognise him.

  ‘Well, ma’am
, I was wondering if I could cut the grass for you?’ He stood back so she could look past him. ‘It’s my day off, and I’d be happy to do it.’

  ‘I’m obliged,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘But we have a man who comes and does it for us, now that my Emerson is no longer able.’

  The young man glanced over his shoulder. ‘When was the last time he was here, ma’am?’

  ‘I pay him to tend to the garden twice a month,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon me for saying, ma’am, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for a long time.’

  The old lady peered out at him. ‘It’s Warren, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She opened the door a bit more and peered past him. ‘Well, my word,’ she said. ‘It does look a state.’

  ‘I’d be happy to do it for you,’ he said. ‘No charge.’

  She smiled, revealing straight ivory teeth, and asked him to wait. She closed the door and a few minutes later reappeared. She had donned a wide-brimmed hat with a yellow ribbon, but with the same housecoat and mismatched slippers. She led him through the back garden to an old garage. Like the house, the garage looked as if it hadn’t been painted in decades. In places, the paint had almost completely peeled away, revealing patches of bare, worm-tracked wood. The old lady fumbled through a ring of keys, trying at least half a dozen before finding the right one. The young man swung open the door.

  ‘I haven’t opened this place up in years,’ the old lady said. ‘Not since my Emerson died.’ Her accent was Southern, but not nearly as broad and difficult to understand as those of the men he worked with.

  ‘Your husband?’

  She smiled and nodded. ‘Thirty-two years we were married. We met at university in Austin, right after the war. He was an engineer and I was studying English literature.’

  ‘What kind of engineer was he?’