by Skip Horack
ALSO BY SKIP HORACK
The Eden Hunter
The Southern Cross
Copyright © 2015 by Skip Horack
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This edition published in 2015 by
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Horack, Skip, author
The other Joseph / by Skip Horack.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-425-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77089-426-6 (html)
I. Title.
PS3608.O657O84 2015 813’.6 C2014-902784-2
C2014-902785-0
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
—JOHN MUIR
FOREWORD
On Christmas Day in 2008 two men, one Australian, the other Nigerian, watched a ponytailed American, my little brother Roy, leap from an oil rig into the Gulf of Guinea. Christmas Day —but, to the third- and fourth-century pagan Romans, as our father taught us as boys, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.
Nearly three years after Roy made his jump, a woman named Margaret Mokwelu drove from Newark to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. That was in the second month of my unlocking, back when I —Thomas Joseph, the lost and kidnapped Navy SEAL, free after two decades of imprisonment —was still making headlines. During Roy’s own disappearance Margaret had been working in the citizen services office at the U.S. consulate in Lagos. A duffel bag of my brother’s effects came into her possession, but attempts to locate any next of kin in the States were unsuccessful. His few things were eventually recycled and released into the world’s endless river of need, and even today, somewhere in Nigeria, there is likely an African man wearing his jacket, a child who sleeps in his T-shirt.
But, and bless her for this, there was one item Margaret took an interest in and kept for herself: a three-ring binder containing pages and pages of looping script. Roy’s binder sat inside Margaret’s desk in Lagos for a year because those reminiscences of his, they touched and haunted her, and she brought it with her when she immigrated to America. Finally Margaret, and that thick gray binder, came to me.
Margaret’s former boss in Nigeria is now a D.C. lobbyist, and through his connections she was able to arrange a visit with me at Walter Reed. I had been there a week, awaiting a surgery to remove the inch of knife blade an Arab fisherman had broken off in my hip in January of ’91. And although I suspected Margaret might be an intelligence officer, a mind trick designed to ferret out any inconsistencies in my account of the time I’d spent off the grid, after she presented me with Roy’s binder my only thoughts were of him. I was twenty and he was twelve when I saw him last. I’m forty-one years old now. If not for Margaret, I might never have met my brother as a man.
I play a part in the story you are about to read, but I already know this won’t be the manuscript New York, or anyone, wants from me. You want to read of how I was taken by the sea and coughed up by the sea, sold by fishermen, then Bedouin, before being smuggled out of Saudi Arabia on a night plane and encaged for over twenty years as the private, hidden-away curiosity of a wealthy madman. You want the story of my Arab Spring liberation and of my journey through the desert. I understand. That story will be told one day, but for now, another story. The story of my brother and his search for my daughter. Roy comes first. I owe him that much, as it was on my behalf, or at least in my memory, that he set off on his journey. The journey that began with an e-mail from California. The journey that ended with his dive into the Gulf of Guinea.
A confession: I might very well be betraying Roy by letting the world know his secrets, and if that is the case I hope he will forgive me. My only defense is that I believe his trials and tribulations are worth sharing. There is a lot to be learned from the life of Roy Joseph, and this is the best way I can think of to honor him.
So Margaret Mokwelu, thank you. And thank you as well to those who have begun helping me organize and polish Roy’s disjointed, untitled “notes” into a book. Also, although a few names must be changed for anonymity, this endeavor never would be possible without the graciousness of the many who have agreed to be identified in these pages. Otherwise, except for my dedication and the occasional epigraph, the words that follow will be his. Speak, Roy.
Thomas M. Joseph
New York City
February 22, 2012
For our family
And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.
—GENESIS 37:19
PART I
The Louisiana Notes
Along with all the other frailties of the average man —his carelessness, his prankishness, his tobacco habit, his cola habit, his inclination to rest once in a while and chat with his neighbor —there must also be expected one more: his natural human proclivity for sticking his head in mysterious openings, putting his fingers in front of fan blades, and pulling wires and pins on strange mechanical objects which he finds.
—ARTHUR LARSON,
The Law of Workmen’s Compensation
My name is Roy Joseph, and I have nine fingers. Five on my right hand, four on the other. The pinkie is the one missing. I lost it two summers ago on a jackup drilling rig that stood in two hundred feet of green Gulf of Mexico water —about thirty nautical miles south of Grand Isle, Louisiana, and the Airstream travel trailer I once called home. I think of melted wax whenever I look at the scar, or the hard white fat that runs along the side of a raw strip steak.
September 2007. The Loranger Avis. A steel island of heat, sweat, and noise. Everything is heavy there, and everything can bite you. The Loranger Avis had been situated where the continental shelf drops off into the Mississippi Canyon. Go a little farther south and the real deepwater starts —instead of jackups and fixed platforms, out that way you’ll find drill ships and semisubmersibles, other kinds of floaters.
So there I was on the edge of the North American continent, twenty-nine years old and working the second morning of a two-week stint. Three hours into a twelve-hour tower. Just a few days before, I’d received an e-mail from someone claiming to be my dead brother’s daughter. More about that later, but that’s where my head was. I was layering a fresh spool of quarter-inch wire evenly across the slow-rolling drum of an electric hoist, and thinking on that e-mail, when another roughneck —Malcolm, a weight-lifting Cajun —sang out. We were fifty feet above the Gulf, and it was as loud as it always is up top. There was no understanding what Malcolm was saying, but he was pointing behind me. I shut the hoist off and turned around. A long sport fisher was coming up on us, a teal Contender powered by triple 250 Yamahas. Nothing unusual. The legs and substructure
s of offshore jackups and fixed platforms create sort of a reef beneath the surface, and that shelter brings the forage fish that in turn attract snapper and grouper and sports.
Malcolm came over and we watched the boat drop from its plane, settling into the water as it skidded to a stop. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar setup, and a fucking kid was driving. I figured he was around twenty. His buddy, as well. They were both shirtless, had gelled hair and lifeguard tans. The first-mate pal moved up to the bow holding an aluminum rig hook like a shepherd’s staff. He was wearing white shorts and black sunglasses. Risky Business Tom Cruise Wayfarers, I think. The driver positioned the Contender on the lee side of the Loranger Avis, and Cruise snagged his hook onto one of the legs of the jackup.
They had a rope tied to the rig hook. The outboards died, and the current pulled the Contender away. Cruise let the rope play out from his hands, and when they were ten yards back he hitched to a front cleat and the rope went tight. Only the bow was facing us, and though I couldn’t see an autograph I had a good enough hunch —Cash Flow, Boy Toy, First Strike —some bullshit like that. Allowing boats to do this is against policy on most any drilling rig, especially since 9/11, but our toolpusher wasn’t up for getting on the loudspeaker and bouncing them yet. We take our shots where we can, and that’s a game some pushers enjoy —letting the sports go through the trouble of tying on before hollering at them to break off.
The Gulf was as smooth as a forest lake, and the two rich kids were in the stern being cool together when a sweat-soaked roustabout came sidling up to me and Malcolm. He was new to the oil patch, no older than the boys in the boat. I can’t remember his name, and I’m not sure I ever knew it. Worms, we called these greenhorns. They’d shaved most of his hair off the day before; his hard hat was loose and wobbling.
The roustabout pointed at the Contender. “Sweet, huh? That a thirty-six-footer?”
I nodded just to be nice. I was a worm once. All us hands had started out there. “Yeah. That’s a thirty-six.”
Malcolm was less patient. He was glaring at the kid. “You need something, worm?”
The roustabout took a step back, even blushed a click. “No sir.”
Malcolm rolled his cinder-block head around, letting some idea wash over every part of his brain. “Well,” he said, “we need something from you. Find Owen and tell him we want the key to the V-door. Don’t fuck it up.”
The roustabout said, “You bet,” and hustled off. It was all grab-ass, snipe-hunt foolishness. Owen would send him to Jimbo, and Jimbo would send him to Mud Duck, and Mud Duck would send him to Darius. Eventually the kid would work his way back to us empty-handed, and if he had any sense at all, realize the V-door of a drilling rig isn’t an actual door. No hard feelings. Like I said, we’d all spent time as worms.
I looked down at the Contender. The boys were baiting free lines for amberjack and maybe cobia when the forward cuddy opened and out came two girls. Blondes. I knew then that, policy or no policy, we weren’t going to be treated to any runoffs over the loudspeaker from the toolpusher, a man sitting high above us in an air-conditioned office, no doubt studying on those girls same as me. He was hidden behind tinted windows, but I could picture him up there in his clean clothes, binoculars in his hands.
Malcolm was watching the girls too. He’d been clutching the sleeve of my coveralls ever since they appeared. They were wearing purple gym shorts and neon swimsuit tops. One tangerine, the other flamingo. The girls lit cigarettes and popped wine coolers, put their thin arms around each other and began siren-swaying to a song I couldn’t hear. The rich boys grinned at them but kept at that tough labor they were doing. They already had two free lines cast, and they were prepping deep-sea rods when the girls grabbed beach towels and danced their way to the bow. LSU was written in gold letters on the asses of their shorts, and I imagined scratching out my own message to drop onto them:
I used to be a Tiger myself, y’all. Made the Dean’s List my first semester and sat in classrooms with princesses like you. So I’m not the born-trash moron you think I am. Hell, a decade ago your kind copied my notes, invited me to parties.
The girls spread their towels across the flat bow, and I saw one of them had a bottle of suntan lotion tucked in her waistband. That killed me, especially with thirteen days left in my stint. Not lust —just the stinging ache that comes with witnessing the carefree and beautiful and unknowable exist in my same world. But it was also nice, in a way, having them there to help move my thoughts, even if for a moment, away from the out-of-nowhere e-mail that had been tearing at my mind.
So the boys fished, and the girls sunned. And Malcolm and I were looking down on them when the blonder of the blondes smiled up at us. Then she said something to her friend, and they both did a yoga curve, pulled off their shorts. Seeing them in their bikini bottoms was too much for Malcolm. He brought his hard hat against mine and yelled into my ear. “If she winks, she’ll screw,” he said. “Am I right, Roy?”
If she winks, she’ll screw. Rig chatter. That’s what we say when we get a seized pipe connection to loosen a bit, means we’ll be able to twist it off sooner or later. I shed my work gloves, let my hands breathe. “Yeah,” I told him. “They should start climbing to us before long.”
Malcolm’s face was like a question mark. I can be a soft talker. A mumbler too, at times, but he slapped my chest and wandered off. I stayed put, still looking at the girls. They were propped on their elbows, eyes masked by enormous sunglasses. Enough. I switched the hoist on so it could eat more wire, but then I took another peek at them. The shiny blondes leaned their heads back in sync, showing their throats as they stared at the sun, and I pretended they were watching me like I was watching them. I wondered what they saw. A shaggy-haired, gloves-in-the-mouth gargoyle in steel-toed Red Wings and fire-resistant coveralls, safety glasses and a white hard hat.
Then I did something incredibly stupid. I forgot my surroundings for a second —all it takes —and let my hand rest on the drum of the hoist I was supposed to be watching. I felt nothing really, just a tug and a sudden burn before I jerked away. I looked and saw the thin wire had sheared my little finger off right where it met my hand. My snipped pinkie was lying there on the grate, and even as I was bending to pick it up, I was thinking, No huge deal, the doctors can fix this. I’ve seen worse out here in the oil patch, much worse.
And I almost had the finger when Malcolm came running. Apparently he’d spotted me there, doubled over and bleeding. He meant well, but that was more bad luck for me. His boots shook the grate, jostling my pinkie, and all I could do was stand there and watch as it slipped through a crack and went plummeting down into the Gulf beneath us, really not so far from where those girls lay sunning.
I sat cross-legged on the grate and let Malcolm hop to. He’d been in the Marine Corps and could play hero when necessary. Someone had tossed him gauze from a first-aid kit, and he held my left arm over my head as he wrapped the hand. The pain had showed up, and the alarm had been sounded. The crew was all gathered around, and a few of them were wearing life jackets because you never know. By then hurt had me blabbering nonsense, and most of the guys were looking away so as not to humiliate me. We weren’t allowed to smoke except in the smoking room, but Darius put an unlit cigarette between my lips. I guess he thought that might help me get calm. My right hand had latched onto a pair of scissors that had fallen out of the first-aid kit, and Darius asked if he could take them from me. I nodded, and then I think I was about to really break down when I caught sight of the wide-eyed roustabout. Someone had put one of those little orange safety cones on top of his hard hat without him knowing it. Coned him, as we say on the rigs. Another Loranger Avis game. We’d been doing that to each other all summer. The roustabout was looking at me horrified and wailing, Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow —but I couldn’t take a coned worm seriously.
So I started lau
ghing as I went into shock. Laughed even though I hardly ever laugh. Laughed even though I knew I’d gone and fucked myself. It was an hour before the Air Med meat wagon arrived to take me to Lady of the Sea, but the Contender was still attached to us when the helicopter began its slow descent. The girls hurried from the bow as the bird touched down on the helideck, the wind from the rotor blades spiraling their yellow hair. I saw the three outboards bubble to life, and Tom Cruise went up front to free the rig hook. Jimbo had given one of the medics my duffel bag, and they were leading me toward the helicopter when the Contender took off west. Finally I glimpsed the name painted across the hull of that big goddamn boat. The Great Wide Open. Picture that scrawled in bold, black cursive.
My brother Tommy and I grew up on a farm in the tiny north Louisiana town of Dry Springs, on eleven acres that bordered a large tract of pine forest belonging to a paper company. Two fenced pastures and a barn, a vegetable garden and a pond and a ranch-style house. My parents were teachers at the high school (Mom, science; Dad, history). Almost-hippie types, at least in a back-to-the-land sort of way, and bookish. Farming was something they enjoyed, and at different times we had cattle and sheep, horses and honeybees. As a boy our dog was a heeler named Blue, and as a teenager, Rocky the Catahoula. There were always chickens and barn cats, and every fall we took three hogs to Mencken’s Slaughterhouse.
Both of my parents had been raised in Natchitoches Parish, on opposite sides of the Cane River, the only children of families that had hated each other for generations. Dad was Romeo to Mom’s Juliet, and their forbidden teenage romance turned into something even more earnest and determined while they were in college together at Northwestern State. Right before graduation they married at a courthouse, and taking teaching jobs in Dry Springs had been their way of leaving Natchitoches Parish and their snarling kinfolk behind for good. They’d been disowned —orphaned, for all intents and purposes —and Mom was pregnant with Tommy when they moved onto the farm. She gave birth to him at the hospital in Ruston, the closest city to Dry Springs of any real size, and eight years later I came along, their “surprise” baby.
