“What about it?”
“I paid half of the four dollars it cost to make it. I want to take my half to Victoria and let Kitty Lamar hear it. Then I’m going to send my half to the Greaser.”
I said that to piss him off good, which sometimes was the only way you got Eddy Ray outside of his own head. He went inside the house and came back out with the 45. It was wrapped in soft tissue and taped around the edges, and I knew that Eddy Ray hadn’t given up his music.
“Does Kitty Lamar still paint her toenails?” I asked.
“Why?”
“’Cause I always thought they were real cute.”
He stared at me as though he’d never seen me before.
And that’s how our band came back together and that’s how “The Oil Driller’s Lament” went on the charts and stayed there for sixteen weeks. But Eddy Ray Holland and the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City were never an item again. That’s because she married R. B. Benoit, Dobro player extraordinaire, also known as myself, in a little Assembly of God church in Del Rio, Texas. The church was right across the river from the Mexican radio station where, on a clear night, the Carter Family and Wolfman Jack beamed their radio shows high above the wheat fields and the mountains, all the way to the Canadian line, like a rainbow that has nowhere else to go.
Water People
Our drill barge was moored out in the middle of this long flat bay, like a big rectangle of gray iron welded onto a cookie sheet. I mean it was so hot anything you touched scalded your hands and the sun was a red ball when it rose up out of the water and you could smell dead things on the wind out in the marsh, amongst all those flooded willows and cypress and gum trees. That was right before Hurricane Audrey hit the Louisiana coast in 1957. The thundershowers we got in the afternoon weren’t anything more than hot steam, and when lightning hit on the sandbars, you could see it dancing under the chop, flickering, like yellow snakes flipping around in a barrel full of dark water.
Skeeter was our shooter, or dynamite man, and was about forty years old and thought to be weird by everybody on board, partly because he was a preacher over in Wiggins, Mississippi, but also because he had a way of coming up behind you and running his hands down your hips. In other words, he wasn’t apt to make a skivvy run to Morgan City, although that could have been because he was a religious man. The truth is doodlebuggers did the dirtiest work in the oil field and it was no accident other people referred to us as white niggers.
I watched Bobby Joe, our driller, drop the last six-can stick of explosives down the pipe and feed the cap wire off his palms. Bobby Joe’s chest looked like it was carved from a tree stump; it was lean and hard and tapered, swollen with muscle under the arms, tanned the gold-brown color of worn saddle leather. He had a BCD from the Crotch for busting up a couple of S.P.’s. He told me once his little boy drowned in a public swimming pool in Chicago that was full of colored people and Puerto Ricans. The next day he told me he’d lied because he was drunk and I’d better not tell anybody what he’d said. Like I’m on board to write the history of Bobby Joe Guidry.
I wrapped the cap wire around the terminals on Skeeter’s detonator and screwed down the wing nuts and said, “You’re lit, pappy,” and everybody went aft or got on the jugboat that was tied to the stern, and when Skeeter gave it the juice, those eighteen cans of hot stuff went off with a big thrummmmmp deep down in the earth and fish jumped all over the bay like they’d been shocked with an electric current. The force of the explosion kicked the drill barge’s bow up in the air and slapped it back against the surface, then a second later brown water and sand and cap wire came geysering out of the pipe the way wildcat wells used to come in years ago, and a yellow cloud of smoke drifted back across the jugboat and filled the inside of your head with a smell like a freshly tarred gravel road.
Skeeter wore a long-sleeve denim shirt and a cork sun helmet and steel-rim glasses that caused him to crinkle his nose all the time. His face was round as a muskmelon, puffy with the humidity, always pink with fresh sunburn, and his eyes blue and watery and red along the rims, like they were irritated from the smoke that seeped out of the water after he’d zapped the juice into the hole and given things down below a real headache. Bobby Joe was wiping the drilling mud off his chest with a nasty towel he’d gotten out of the engine room. His hair was the color of dry straw under his tin hat and there was a green and red Marine Corps tattoo on his upper arm that was slick and bright with sweat.
“Y’all put too many cans down, Bobby Joe,” Skeeter said.
Bobby Joe went on wiping at his hands with that rag and didn’t even look up. “I tell you how to do your job, Skeet?” he said.
“We’re killing fish we ain’t got to. You can blow the casing out the hole, too,” Skeeter said.
“You study on things too much.” Bobby Joe still hadn’t looked up, he just kept on wiping at those big, flat hands of his that had scars like white worms on the backs of his fingers.
“Hit don’t say nowhere we got to blow half the damn bay into the next parish,” Skeeter said.
“Skeet, you put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog sniffing around a brooder house,” Bobby Joe said. “I declare if you don’t.”
We knew it was a matter of time before one of those two ran the other off. The party chief would abide any kind of behavior that didn’t hurt the job; that’s why he’d let a liberty boat head for the hot-pillow joints in Morgan City the fifth night out on the hitch, about the time some guys would start messing around in the shower and pretend it was just grab-assing. But he wouldn’t put up with guys hiding vodka in their seabags or fighting over cards or carrying a personal grief out on the drill barge, it got people hurt or killed, like the time this Mexican boy I’m fixing to tell you about fell off the bow and got sucked under the barge just when the skipper kicked over the screws, and not to be overlooked it cost the company a shitload of money.
His nickname was Magpie because he was missing two teeth up front and he had black hair with a patch like white paint in it. He weighed about three hundred pounds and traveled around the country eating lightbulbs and blowing fire in a carnival act when he wasn’t doodlebugging. Bobby Joe said he saw him cheating in the bouree game and told him to his face. Magpie might have looked like a pile of whale shit but I saw him pick up a six-foot gator by its tail once, whip it around in the air, and heave it plumb across the barge’s deck and leave two or three drillers with weewee in their socks. Magpie told Bobby Joe they were going to have a beer and learn some helpful hints about behavior when they got off the hitch, and Bobby Joe replied he knew just the spot because the dispenser for toilet seat covers in the can had a sign on it that said PEPPERBELLY PLACE MATS.
A week later we were way down at the mouth of the Atchafalaya, with storm winds capping the surface, and Magpie fell off the drill into the current and was swept down under the hull just as I was running at the bridge, waving my arms and yelling at the skipper, who was looking back over his shoulder at the jugboat with a cigarette in his mouth. This retarded kid on the jugboat was the first to see Magpie surface downstream. He vomited over the rail, then started screaming and running up and down on the deck till his father put him in the pilothouse and wiped his face and held his head against his chest. Think of water that runs by the discharge chute on a slaughterhouse. The thunder and wind were shrieking like the sky was being ripped loose from the earth. I don’t care to revisit moments like that.
The quarterboat was moored with ropes to a willow island and at sunset Skeeter would stand out on the bow in the mosquitoes by himself, where all the sacks of drilling mud were stacked, or sometimes get in a pirogue and paddle back through the flooded trees. I used to think he was running a trotline but I found out different when he didn’t think anybody was watching him. He had a paper bag full of these little plastic statues of Jesus, the kind people put on their dashboard, and he’d tie fish twine around the feet with a machinist’s bolt on the other end and hold it to
his head with his eyes squinted shut, then sink it in the water and paddle on to the next spot.
“You been out here long, W.J.?” he said when he was tying the pirogue back up.
“Not really.”
I felt sorry for him; it wasn’t right the way some guys made fun of him behind his back. He was at Saipan during the war. That was a lot more than most of us had done.
“You got something fretting you, Skeet?”
“A Mexican boy gets shredded up in the propeller and don’t nobody seem bothered.”