Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  *

  The next afternoon he called Sal. “Can we meet?” Dave said. “I have a couple of things to discuss with you.”

  “We’re playing tonight,” Sal said. His voice was still belligerent, as if that was how he always dealt with hope. “Can’t we do it over the phone?”

  “Yeah, okay. Listen, uh, there’s a change in the lineup for the showcase.”

  “A change in the lineup? What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Columbia’s out, but I’ve got—”

  “What do you mean, Columbia’s out?”

  “Columbia doesn’t want to send anybody to the show. But I’ve got—”

  “They don’t want to send anybody? What the fuck, are you a producer there or not?”

  “I never said I was a producer, I said—”

  “You’re not a producer? Then what the fuck are you doing handing out your business cards and setting up fucking showcases?”

  “Sal—”

  “What the fuck are you doing playing with us like this?”

  “Sal, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m saying to you. I’ve got Tom Dowd, Phil Ramone, and Erik Jacobsen coming to see your fucking show, all right? That’s the guys that produce fucking Ray Charles and the Rascals, John fucking Coltrane, and The Lovin’ Spoonful, all right? So you are actually three times better off than you would have been if Columbia came, and I am not going to make a fucking penny out of this if you get a record deal. I did it because I didn’t want to let you down. All right?”

  He was shaking again, listening to silence over a phone line again. Finally, quietly, Sal said, “Tom Dowd? You got Tom Dowd to come hear us?”

  “That’s right. Don’t fuck it up. Get to your originals right away, and if you want to write a couple more in the next two weeks, that might be a real good idea. Bring a lot of people and make sure they yell requests for the originals. Got it?”

  “Dave, I’m sorry,” Sal said. “We’ve been through a lot of disappointment, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Tell me about it.”

  *

  Dave started to dial Crystal’s number twenty times over the next two weeks. Once he made it all the way through. He hung up after ten rings.

  The day after the showcase, Tom Dowd called him. “I owe you one. I’m cutting a demo with them next week, and if it sounds as good as I think it will, we’ll probably release it as a single.”

  “I hope they sell a million,” Dave said.

  “I still don’t see what you’re getting out of this.”

  “I’m not sure I do either,” Dave said. “But somebody ought to get what they wanted out of this deal.”

  *

  By the end of July, Cole’s patience was gone.

  His boots were broken in and he could glide across the dance floor with a reasonable amount of flair. If he only had a hat, Jerry told him, the women would be all over him.

  The woman he wanted all over him had come back to the Tyler Motor Inn with him three times. He’d gotten her out of her bra, but the minute his hands went below her waist, she pulled away.

  He’d played guitar and sung for her. “Not bad” was all she ever said, though he knew she was impressed. They’d spent hours on the phone, Cole searching for hidden meanings in everything she said, and everything she didn’t.

  She was not hard to figure. Father split when she was 5, mother’s attempts at dating hadn’t worked out. No female friends—other girls were either jealous or too “provincial.” She was too smart and too ambitious for Tyler. Cole was “just a kid,” as she never tired of reminding him, and she was looking for a lifeline to the Big City, whatever Big City was available.

  As for work, the sum total he’d gained from his days on the rig was some muscle on his upper body and a farmer’s tan. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have that for his future, with nothing more to look forward to than a wife and kids spending his pay as fast as he earned it.

  His alarm went off at six am on Monday, August 1. He felt dazed, irritable, clumsy. The first day of his next-to-last week, and he didn’t know how he was going to endure the next 12 days.

  Corrina had been over the night before, and he’d played “Do You Believe in Magic” and the Contours’ “Do You Love Me” because of the line about “now that I can dance.” He’d finished with Ray Peterson’s “Corrine Corrina,” which he’d worked up especially for her. The usual mixture of making out and wrestling ensued. Corrina never got carried away with the heat of it the way Cole did. He’d asked her about it, and she’d said she liked the closeness. That he was “sweet,” but what she may or may not have felt in the realm of passion was not something she intended to share with a kid like him. He hadn’t gotten to sleep until nearly one.

  He was sitting in his open doorway when Donald and Jerry pulled up at 6:25. Donald was already dipping his Wintergreen Copenhagen and the inside of the Falcon smelled like mint and rotting leaves. Cole’s stomach wanted to turn inside out.

  Jerry looked him over in the rear-view. “Looking a mite green this morning, College. Corrina keep you up last night?”

  “Not the way I wanted her to,” Cole said.

  “You should talk to your daddy,” Donald said, and spat into a paper cup. “Maybe he could pull some strings. I think all this frustration is beginning to interfere with your job performance.” They both liked to kid him about his father having gotten him the job. Cole knew that if they had a real problem with it, the talk would have been behind his back.

  At the Greasy Spoon, he was unable to finish his eggs or start his bacon, and Donald obligingly took care of both. “If your daddy could see you now,” Donald said. “Hangover and blue balls. Not the summer he had in mind for you, I imagine.”

  At the rig, they found that the graveyard tour—which Cole had learned, in keeping with tradition, to rhyme with “hour”—had started tripping pipe at dawn. Every joint of pipe had to come out of the hole, be unscrewed from the string, and dropped in the rack, all 6,000 feet of it at this point, to get to the drill bit to replace it. Time spent tripping was money for no new footage, creating pressure to get it done as quickly as possible.

  They changed clothes in the doghouse, each turning his back to the others in the quaint modesty of rural men that Cole studiously followed. He hated the first clammy touch of the sweaty, oil-stained jeans and T-shirt from the previous day. They put on their hard hats and went out onto the steel floor of the derrick, which stank of diesel and lubricating mud and vibrated constantly from the 1500 horsepower motor.

  Elton, the driller on the daylight tour, was in his forties, his face as cracked and brown as drought-ravaged farmland. Stray salt-and-pepper whiskers where he’d missed shaving. Each of the three drillers was the lead man on his shift, and all three reported to the tool pusher, the boss of the rig. Though Elton was generally easygoing, every time they started a trip he ordered Cole off the rig, said he could get a closer look another time.

  Today, as Jerry scampered up to the monkeyboard, 85 feet above the derrick floor, and the rest of the crew swarmed in to replace their graveyard tour counterparts, Elton finally said, “You can stay on the floor. But keep at least five feet away from the rotary, and don’t get in nobody’s way. Watch what they’re doing and watch out for the fucking chain.”

  Elton went to the graveyard driller and took his place behind the big lever that controlled the throttle. Two roughnecks from the graveyard tour stood over the rotary while Elton hoisted a thribble, three connected joints of pipe, out of the hole. One of the roughnecks slapped a collar around the top of the fourth joint to hold it in place, while the other swung a four-foot pipe wrench onto the bottom of the thribble and gave it a full turn counter-clockwise. As soon as he pulled the wrench off, the first roughneck whipped one end of a heavy chain around the same spot, whistled at Elton, and then stepped away while the motor pulled the chain hard enough to spin the thribble free. The chain was barely off when Elton hoisted the pi
pe into the air, and the graveyard derrickman, high up in the lattice of the rig, wrapped his own chain around the top of it and pulled it toward the rack at the side of the derrick where another two dozen thribbles already stood, the roughnecks on the floor putting their shoulders into it to push from below.

  Seeing the process up close was infinitely more alarming than watching from a distance. The roughnecks joked and pulled faces at the same time that each of their movements had a fierce concentration and precision. Things happened so fast that there was no leeway in the system, no room to take a breath.

  Even as he thought that, some small anomalous sound or shadow made him look up and see the body falling toward him and a glint of metal in the air.

  He reflexively lifted his right hand. Something brushed his glove and knocked his hand away, hard, before clanging into the metal floor, and then somebody yanked him backward, off his feet, and he heard, but didn’t see, Jerry’s body slam into the derrick floor a couple of feet away.

  Cole tried to stand up. His legs refused to take his weight. He ended up on one knee, a noise like amplifier hum in his ears. Jerry lay with his neck twisted all wrong and blood leaking out of his hard hat. The life was gone from his face, like it was a rubber mask. Elton knelt next to him, hand to Jerry’s throat. Feeling for a pulse, Cole thought, though there was clearly no point.

  “Get that pipe in the rack,” Elton yelled, “before somebody else gets hurt!”

  Donald was standing over Jerry’s body now, saying, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Elton told him. “The number’s on the phone.”

  Donald didn’t hear. When Cole tried to get up and do it himself, everything tilted and he had to catch himself with his right hand, which was weirdly numb.

  The graveyard derrickman was yelling as he came flying down the ladder. “What happened? I didn’t even see him fall. Is he…”

  The pipe banged into the rack and then both shifts gathered awkwardly around the body, some of the men pulling off their hard hats. A couple of them, including the graveyard derrickman, looked like they were about to cry.

  “He come up onto the monkeyboard,” the derrickman said, “giving me shit like he always done. I had my back to him, I was working the string. I never seen him, just out the corner of my eye when he was already falling…”

  “Will somebody call a fucking ambulance?” Elton said.

  Two of the men ran for the doghouse.

  Cole was thirsty and he needed to lie down. His head felt fizzy. He didn’t want to say anything because Jerry was dead and whatever was wrong with him was probably just him being a wimp and he didn’t want the others to notice him in this condition.

  He sat down heavily.

  Somebody said, “Something’s the matter with Cole.”

  “Look at his hand. He’s bleeding.”

  Cole understood that they were talking about him. He didn’t have the strength to respond.

  Somebody had him by the shoulders. “Lean over,” he said. “Lean your head between your legs. Hey, somebody get some water!”

  Cole leaned forward and felt the blood rush into his brain. Somebody had a red plaid thermos of iced tea. He tried to reach for it with his right hand and a voice said, “Left hand. Use your left.”

  Somebody else said, “Get the glove off him. Gentle, now.”

  He took a drink with his left hand. Somebody knelt next to him and gripped his right arm tightly. Somebody else started pulling his glove and it stung his middle finger.

  “Oh shit,” somebody said.

  “Is that ambulance coming?” said somebody else.

  Cole looked at his hand. The end of his finger was a bloody ruin, blood dribbling out onto the derrick floor.

  His peripheral vision went dark.

  “Take it easy, man,” somebody said, patting him on the shoulder.

  There was something important he had to do. “Jerry?” he said.

  “Just take ’er easy.”

  He heard a siren in the distance. There’s an ambulance now, he thought. Maybe somebody could flag it down.

  Elton helped him to his feet, putting Cole’s left arm around his neck. “Lean on me,” Elton said. “I got you.”

  Cole was able to make his legs move. His heavy work boots dragged against the textured steel floor. “That’s it,” Elton said. “Watch the stairs.”

  I’m never going to live this down, Cole thought, as Elton helped him stumble down the steps to ground level. Having to be carried off the rig like a baby. He felt something in the palm and wrist of his right hand, not pain yet, but an iou for pain, and the numbers on it were high.

  The ambulance backed up to within 50 feet of the rig. It looked like a station wagon his parents used to have, only the body was bright red, and the top of the back part was solid white and studded with lights. Two young guys in white coveralls came running, carrying a stretcher that looked like an oversized ironing board.

  “Take this one first,” Elton said. “It’s too late for the other one.”

  They laid Cole out on the stretcher and strapped him down, then carried him to the ambulance, setting him on the ground by the open back door. One of them wrapped Cole’s hand in gauze while the other gave him a shot in his left arm.

  The one who’d wrapped his hand knelt down. He had red hair and freckles and was only a few years older than Cole. “If you feel weird, it’s because you’re in shock, okay? It’s something your body does to keep you from feeling what happened to you. I want you to keep your right hand pointing up at the sky, like they’re swearing you in on Perry Mason. You’re going to be okay. We got to go get the other guy and we’ll be right back.”

  As they grabbed another stretcher and sprinted away, the shot began to take effect.

  Cole had never felt anything like it. The stretcher turned into a giant rubber raft and floated away into the ocean, bobbing gently to the rhythm of his pulse. A cool breeze touched his cheek and time stopped. Cole watched the clouds overhead. The sky was the exact blue of a colored pencil that he’d had in fifth grade.

  They came back with Jerry on the other stretcher. A sheet, stained reddish brown, was pulled up over his face. They slotted Jerry’s stretcher into the right side of the ambulance, then they lifted Cole. “You can put that arm down now,” the redhead said.

  As they slid Cole in next to Jerry, he was vaguely aware that he would have been claustrophobic if not for the drug. He didn’t want to think about Jerry, lying so close by. He turned his head the other way and stared out through the window.

  The ambulance started up and swayed heavily over the rutted road. Pines and scrub brush, finally giving way to farmland. They emerged onto blacktop and the driver hit the gas. The scream of the siren was comforting in its seriousness.

  At the hospital, they transferred him to a gurney and left him in a hallway. He’d meant to thank them and now they were gone. A stark, office-style clock on the wall said that it was not yet 8:45.

  A young guy in a short white coat took the gauze off and looked at Cole’s finger. He had closely trimmed brown hair and a long nose and lots of lines at the ends of his mouth. A plastic tag on his coat said jeckyl. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  Cole had gotten a peek that didn’t bode well. “Starting to,” he said.

  The guy waved a nurse over. “Get me a cc and a half of Demerol, would you?” He looked at Cole again. “Once we get some drugs in you, I’m going to debride this. That means clean it up. They’ve got a call out for an orthopod to sew this back together, but he’s usually out drinking this time of day and they may have to sober him up.” He squinted at Cole. “That’s a joke, son.”

  Cole nodded. The nurse came with a hypo and a cotton ball that dripped alcohol. Cole had always hated getting shots before. He couldn’t remember why.

  The guy in the white coat dragged a cart over and turned his back on Cole, tucking the hand under his arm so Cole couldn’t see what he was doing.

  “Are you a doc
tor?” Cole asked.

  “Intern,” he said. “Almost a doctor, as Bill Cosby says. My name’s Pete. What’s yours?”

  “Cole.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Forgive me if I don’t shake hands. Nyuk nyuk nyuk. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Well, my boy, I think you are definitely going to get laid out of this deal. The girls will melt with sympathy at the sight of your disfigurement. A touch of the melodrama, let them see how you’re suffering inside, you’ll be in like Flynn. Can you feel anything when I do this?”

  Cole had a moment of panic. “No.”

  “That’s good, because I’m not doing anything yet.”

  Somebody else, Cole thought, might have been amused. He couldn’t stop thinking about the accident. Jerry must have dropped his chain before he fell, and that was what had hit Cole’s hand. Why in God’s name had he reached up like that? Then the second shot caught up with him and he drifted away.

  The next time he looked up, he saw that Pete was gone and that the clock now showed a few minutes past 10. The time after that, the gurney was moving and doors flew open in front of him.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  “We’re taking you to surgery,” said a female voice. He was groggy enough, and her East Texas accent was thick enough, that he had to puzzle over the words.

  They brought him to a room that was gray tile and shining steel, and they shifted him onto another, colder surface. His teeth chattered as they strapped him down. Three nurses, two men in white surgical gowns. One of the men put a heavy rubber mask over Cole’s nose and mouth. “Wait,” Cole said. Nobody was listening. The air inside the mask was cold and tasted like metal.

  “Take some deep breaths for me,” a male voice said.

  Cole tried. It tasted bad and he was shaking with cold.