“I wouldn’t let it bother me, Skeet,” I said. “Bobby Joe’s got a two-by-four up his cheeks sometimes.”
“Hit ain’t him.”
“So what’s got you down?”
“My ministry ain’t gone nowhere. Same back in Wiggins. I might as well be out talking in a vacant lot.”
We unloaded the box, then heaved it empty up on the deck. The water was capping in the south and you could smell salt in the wind and see birds flying everywhere.
“Maybe if you went about it a little different,” I said. “Sinking those little dashboard statues is a mite unusual.”
“I done something I never could make up for,” he said. “A bunch of Japs was down in a cave, maybe seventy or eighty of them. I blew the mountain in on top of them. You could hear a hum through the coral at night, like thousands of bees singing. It was all them men moaning down there.”
He scratched a mosquito bite on his face and looked at the willow islands and the leaves that were starting to shred in the wind.
“Sometimes people have to do bad things in a war,” I said.
“I almost had myself convinced they wasn’t human. Then I seen them people going off the cliffs at Saipan. Women threw their babies first, then jumped after them, right on top of the rocks, they was so scared of us.”
I pulled the anchor and we drifted out into the current. The sun’s afterglow made a dark red light in the water.
“What’s that got to do with statues?” I said.
“I bring Jesus to them people who jumped into the sea. The same water is wrapped all the way around the earth, ain’t hit? Hit ain’t that way with land. You could drive this boat from here to Saipan if you had a mind.”
“I say don’t grieve on it. I say let the church roll on, Skeeter.”
But there was no consoling him. He sat on the deck rail, his face like an empty pie plate, and I kicked the engines over and hit it hard across the bay. The sky in the south had gone white as bone, the way it does when the barometer drops and no birds or other living things want to be out there.
Hurricane Audrey flat tore South Louisiana up. It killed maybe five hundred people in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, and left drowned people hanging in trees out in the marsh. We rode it out, though, with the wind screaming outside, houseboats spinning around upside down in the current, and coons climbing up the mooring ropes to hide from the rain on the lee
side of the deck.
Then the third day the sun rose up out of the steam like a yellow balloon over the cypress trees and we were climbing back on the crewboat and headed for the drill barge again. The night before, I’d been out looking for a bunch of recording jugs that got washed overboard, and till we picked up the dynamite caps and primers at the lockbox out on the sandbar, I didn’t even notice Skeeter was gone and we had a new shooter on board, a man with a steel-gray military haircut and skin the color of chewing tobacco who didn’t have much to say to anybody and worked a crossword puzzle. Everybody was enjoying the ride out to the barge, smoking hand-rolls, drinking coffee, relaxing on the cushions while the bow slapped across the waves and the spray blew back over the windows, when I asked, “Where’s Skeeter at?”
Suddenly nobody had diddly-squat on a rock to say.
“Where’s he at?” I said.
“He drug up last night,” one fellow finally said.
“That don’t make sense. He would have told me,” I said.
“He got run off, W.J.,” another guy said.
“The hell he was,” I said. Then I said it again, “The hell he was.”
All I could see were the backs of people’s heads staring at the windows. The engines were throbbing through the deck like an electric saw grinding on a nail.
At first I thought the party chief decided it was either Bobby Joe or Skeeter and it was easier to hire a new shooter than a driller who had to keep a half-dozen other men who hated authority in line and make them like him for it at the same time.
But that evening, when I talked to Ray, the party chief, he cut right to it. So did I, just as soon as I found Bobby Joe up in his cabin, playing solitaire on his bunk, biting a white place on the corner of his lip.
“You sorry sonofabitch.”
“I don’t let a whole lot of people talk to me like that, W.J.”
“He won’t be able to work anywhere. That was a lousy thing to do, Bobby Joe.”