Petrogypsies (12 page)

Sailors scurried into and out of the foc’sle, battening down hatches and cranes and lifeboats.

Razer yelled at me from the platform on the derrick and waved me to him. The riser pipe spun and twisted below the hay pulley.

I sighed again and headed toward the hole.

A sailor in a yellow slicker staggered into me when the deck rolled again. He grabbed me by the arm and hissed, “You son of a bitch! Watch where you’re going!”

His one good eye squinted angrily at me. I was still sleepy and not too excited at the prospect of working all night in a storm on a moving surface, so I didn’t say anything. I just jerked my arm loose and moved to go around him.

I got past him, and he kicked me in the butt. When I turned to face him, he swung at me again. The deck rolled, and he lurched into me.

I put a hand on his chest and shoved him away. His breath reeked of sour beer. He started cussing at me in a loud voice. Half a dozen hands stopped to watch. About then I got tired of being the center of attention with Pegleg.

“I don’t know what your problem is, mister,” I said. “I’ve stayed clear of you as best I could. But I’ve about had it. You keep screwin’ with me, I’m gonna straighten out your attitude once and for all.”

Of course, that didn’t help a bit. He swung again, and I decked him. (I never thought about where that word came from before, but now it made sense.) He landed on his back and bounced once.

Right then, all the lights went out. The rain had shorted out the lines. Sprocket immediately brought all his external running lights up to maximum illumination, but they didn’t make much difference.

I watched Pegleg’s shadow on the deck for a second, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to make another try for me, so I headed off toward the derrick.

We worked all night. The most fun happened when the hold-downs on a stand of ten-and-three-quarter-inch casing came loose, and the pipe skittered all over the deck, knocking three other stands loose. This happened before we got off the hole and nosed into the wind. The deck was barely stable enough to let us unship one of the cranes, so we spent a dangerous hour corralling and securing the pipe again before it did more damage. In the dark. They didn’t get the lights back on for hours. Sprocket helped by using his body as a barrier to keep the wild pipe confined to the rear of the ship.

After we finished with the pipe, we carefully moved back onto the hole and anchored with the nose of the ship into the wind, but when we tried to reattach the riser pipe, the ship was still tossing too much. We decided to wait until the storm finished blowing. Far as I was concerned, we should have chugged back to shore and docked for a couple of days.

The only other event of note, and one that came to haunt me later, because it led to me being out of everybody’s sight for more than an hour, was when Sprocket and me lost it at the same time, right after we gave up on the riser pipe. My stomach finally couldn’t take the strain any more, and I leaned over the rail and fed the fish.

As I completed the first series of spasms, Sprocket moved up beside me and began to empty his stomachs with one mouth and his bladders with the other. Not a pretty sight.

I staggered in the dark to the nearest stairwell that led below. I managed to stumble through the deserted corridor until I found a head and spent the next eternity on my knees squeezing porcelain.

* * *

Sprocket had managed to reach twenty-five hundred feet before the storm hit, so we decided to go ahead and set surface casing before we resumed drilling. Right after we hooked the riser pipe joint into the string, while it still bounced up and down on spring-loaded bearings, Sprocket stepped up and peered into the moon pool. His tongue slipped into the top of the riser, then back out, dripping seawater. His eyes popped wide open and began to vibrate from side to side, then squeezed shut. His tongue dropped back into the hole and started running in rapidly.

Doc walked over and tapped him with a thirty-six-inch crescent wrench. “Hey, Sprocket! Get alert, boy. We ain’t drillin’ today. We’re settin’ surface pipe.”

Sprocket ignored him.

Five minutes later, his entire body recoiled convulsively from the hole. The whole front end of his body clenched up in a way I had never seen before. As we all stared at him, he slowly reapproached the moon pool. His tongue played into the hole again.

When he stopped this time, his tongue started to twist and twitch delicately.

“Looks like he’s fishing,” Doc said. “But we ain’t got a fish in the hole.”

Which was true. Every now and then a tool breaks up on you downhole, or the wireline snaps, or some idiot drops a valve handle in, and you have to fish for the pieces before you can get back to business, but this hole shouldn’t contain anything other than the sea water we were using for drilling mud.

After a minute, Sprocket caught whatever he’d been fishing for and started back out of the hole. Typically, he’d just suck a fish up inside his drillstem and grip it with his foreskin, but that’s not what he did this time. I wouldn’t have either, if I’d been him.

He backed away from the moon pool while he pulled his tongue up the last few yards. At first, I didn’t recognize what he had retrieved from the hole and dropped on the ramp. His tongue quickly slithered away from the shapeless mass of clothing on the deck. It smelled real bad. Then I realized what it was.

Sprocket had pulled a dead man out of the hole. He lay face down in front of us. Fish had eaten parts of him. Sprocket’s tongue had been wrapped around his legs. He must have been floating head-down near the bottom of the hole.

Nobody moved for a long couple of breaths. Doc went up the ramp, bent over, and turned the man on his back. The face was chewed up so much you couldn’t identify him by it. But the eyepatch had stayed in place.

Every head on deck turned in my direction.

I found myself blurting out, “I didn’t kill him!” Sounded guilty as hell.

Nobody looked completely sure they believed me. I wouldn’t have believed me, either.

Doc came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “He probably fell in the hole accidentally, Henry Lee.” In a lower voice he went on. “But if not, if, say, he come at you last night, and you had to defend yourself and maybe panicked afterwards, it ain’t too late to come clean. Nobody would blame you for defending yourself, Henry Lee.”

“I didn’t kill him, Doc,” I said. “Swear to God.”

He looked at me for a long second. Then he squeezed me on the shoulder. “I believe you, Henry Lee. Now all we got to do is convince everybody else.”

* * *

I heard somewhere that the captain of a ship is the final law aboard it, and I halfway expected Captain Johnson to have me thrown in the brig, if they had one, and fed bread and water till they keelhauled me or whatever they do at sea. However, it turned out that the Coast Guard had jurisdiction of all ocean-going crimes, even outside territorial waters, when the U.S. was the country nearest to their occurrence.

Sparks radioed ashore, and a Coast Guard cutter met
Miz Bellybutton
as we passed Point Bolivar. They escorted us to their station beside the ferry landing.

Their place looked fancier than some of the yacht clubs along the coast, until you noticed that most of the yachts nosed into the docks had artillery bolted onto their decks.

The main building resembled a tropical plantation house. Inside was the same rich look, with the place all carpeted and low-key, furnished in wicker and chrome. I got interviewed by some fella dressed like an admiral. Seemed like a nice guy, asked friendly questions, listened to my side of the story, then showed me another reason the place wasn’t a yacht club by throwing me into their own personal jail while he interviewed everybody else on the ship that he figured might have anything to contribute.

They fed me bread and water. Plus big helpings of chicken with mashed potatoes and hot rolls and green beans and iced tea. It was a sad waste. For the first time in my entire life, I couldn’t empty the plate.

Not that their bunk was so uncomfortable, but I didn’t sleep worth a damn that night, either. What mostly kept me awake was I couldn’t remember whether in Huntsville they still hung people or had moved up to the hot squat.

In the morning they let me go. The admiral hadn’t decided I was innocent. Doc had gotten some judge to remind them that they didn’t really have enough evidence to charge me, and until they did, maybe I better not be locked up. A preliminary examination had been done on Pegleg, and it showed that he had been bashed on the head. It also showed that he was pretty drunk when he died, and there was no way to say he hadn’t fallen in on his own and banged his head inside the pipe or on the way down to it.

Star waited outside the Coast Guard station’s fence for me. As well as Sprocket and Lady Jane and both our crews.

I stopped a few feet away from her. “I didn’t kill Pegleg, Star.”

Her face crumpled and she rushed forward and held me. “Goddammit, Henry Lee. This is
me!
I never thought you was anything but innocent!”

We stayed ashore for another day, with me and Star spending the night in Lady Jane. Nobody acted any way other than decent to me, but every time I talked to somebody, I could almost see the thought going through their heads:

Did he, or didn’t he?

Maybe I was too sensitive about the whole thing. Maybe not everybody thought that. But I realized that if somebody asked me the question out loud, I couldn’t do nothing but deny the charge. Just like the Coast Guard didn’t have no way of proving I had murdered Pegleg, I didn’t have no way of proving I was innocent. And maybe never would. That’s a hell of a thing to carry around with you. Because, crazy as it sounds, even though I knew I was innocent, I started wondering if I was acting like I was guilty. How do you act if you’re innocent? Do you talk about the whole thing, or do you stay silent? Do you act angry that you could even be suspected, or relieved that they let you go?

And how do you make yourself believe that somebody believes you’re innocent when they tell you so? How do you handle people who pretend like nothing has happened, and their dealings with you are business as usual?

I guess I knew Star and Doc and Razer believed me to be innocent. But I still felt guilty of something somehow.

That Friday we got ready to go back out. Would a guilty man want to go, or would he stay ashore? I didn’t know, so I didn’t make no fuss either way, and Doc didn’t ask me to stay back at the camp.

Sprocket marched up the gangplank like he’d been doing it all his life, and we followed. Captain Johnson waited for us behind the foc’sle. He looked more like a depressed stork than ever. When me and Doc reached him, he held up his hand.

“Mr. Miller, I’d like a word with you.”

“Fine. Start talkin’.”

“Privately, if we could.”

“This about Henry Lee?”

The Captain nodded.

“Then I don’t believe there’s no reason to talk about the man behind his back.”

“As you wish. I don’t want Mr. MacFarland aboard my ship.”

“How come?”

“Don’t be difficult, Mr. Miller. You know why.”

“No sir, I don’t. You can enlighten me.”

I had to give Captain Johnson credit. Doc wasn’t helping him at all, but he stood his ground. “Very well, sir.” He looked at me. “I don’t want Mr. MacFarland aboard my ship because he may have murdered one of my crew.”

Doc brought his face close to the captain’s. “Two things. First—in this country a man’s considered innocent till proved guilty, and Henry Lee ain’t even charged with a crime. Second—you don’t tell me who works for me, just like I don’t tell you who works for you. We both contracted to drill a well for Mr. Pickett, and I plan to keep up my end of the deal, with the crew that I picked for it. You run your crew and I’ll run mine, and we’ll both stay happy.”

The Captain didn’t turn red or nothing. His face just got a little stiffer. After a second he nodded and turned to go.

Doc caught him by the elbow. “Captain, it ever occur to you that Henry Lee might be innocent? I’ve known the boy for some time, and I believe he is. If I’m right, there was either a terrible accident a couple of days ago or somebody else on board your ship killed Pegleg. Maybe one of your own crew. Until we learn more, don’t be so quick to point a finger.”

I got to stay on board, but it wasn’t like I got your returning hero’s welcome by the ship’s crew. Most of them leaned on the rail, watching us blank-faced, while we steamed back out into the Gulf. One of them caught my eye and silently mouthed one word.

“Killer.”

* * *

For the rest of the drilling program, Sprocket was reluctant to go into the hole. We had to coax him and play extra-sweet to him. I couldn’t blame him for it. If I had found Pegleg’s body the way he had, I might have wanted to keep my tongue in my mouth, too. Once he got to drilling, he was fine, though.

Three weeks later, Big Red came out on the barge and cemented a thirteen-and-three-eighths-inch long string for us. We fed lunch to Pearl and his hands, then they headed back to shore.

After supper, Doc called me into his room. His desk and his bed were covered with piles of musical notation paper. A couple of days before, he’d started working on another composition. Crumpled sheets littered the floor.