Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Same thing. They’re down in the mouth about our prospects. I told them if they didn’t get the blowout preventer on, the sky was going to be on fire tonight.”

“It’s down there?” I said.

“I could smell it.”

I didn’t want to think about the two dusters we brought in outside of New Roads, a direct result of Hershel’s conviction that a huge pay sand lay under our feet.

“Come on, Weldon. We need a diplomat. If those guys don’t get the blowout preventer on, every guy on the floor is going to be incinerated.”

“Let’s don’t get out of the paddock too fast on this one, Hershel,” I said.

His face was stretched as tight as a helium balloon, his system hitting on all eight cylinders. “It’s going to blow. I’ve never felt so strong about anything in my life. I’m sweating all over.”

“I believe you, Hershel,” Rosita said, placing her hand on his arm. “Can I come along?”

I saw the rigidity leave his face; he smiled.

The boat was a sixteen-footer with a console and a canvas top and two big outboard engines. The sky was darkening, the barometer dropping, the groundswells in the Gulf long and green and as flat as slate, tilting sideways, as though the horizon were out of kilter, then suddenly cresting in waves that could cover the gunwales. Each time we slid down the far side of a wave, cascades of foam slapped across the windshield. If Rosita had any fear, it never showed.

When we climbed aboard the rig, the clothes of the floor men were flattening against their bodies; they looked like men on the deck of an aircraft carrier. I had to yell for the geologist to hear me: “Mr. Pine believes we need to get that blowout preventer in place!”

“Pine is an interesting guy!” the geologist yelled back.

We climbed the ladder into what was called the doghouse, with the geologist and tool pusher and driller and two men who were majority stockholders in the company. Even though I had introduced Rosita as my wife, they kept looking at her out of the corners of their eyes, as though they had to remind themselves who she was or why she was there. Through the windows I could see the long gray-green, mist-shrouded coast of Louisiana, a strip of barrier islands and swamps and bayous and flooded trees that seemed left over from the first days of Creation. Above me, the derrick man on the monkey board was leaning out into space on his safety belt, racking pipe, his hard hat cinched with a strap under his chin. Down below, around the wellhead, I could see the roughnecks on the floor wrestling with the drill bit and the tongs, the oiled chain whipping around the pipe. They never missed a beat, never looked up in apprehension or fear when lightning struck the water or thunder boomed on the horizon.

None of the men in the room was sympathetic with Hershel’s point of view—namely, that he knew more about drilling for oil than they did. The tool pusher took me aside. He had a round, clean-shaven face that was bright with windburn; he wore an insulated long-sleeved denim shirt and khakis that were hitched up high on his stomach. He glanced at his wristwatch, then glanced at it again.

“Are we taking too much of your time?” I asked.

“No, I appreciate y’all’s concerns,” he replied. “But that man over yonder drilled an offshore well about six miles from here in 1937 and went ninety-four hundred feet before he hit a pay sand. He’s also the majority stockholder in this company. If I was y’all, I wouldn’t be telling him his business, Mr. Holland. Another way of putting it is Mr. Pine is becoming a king-size irritant.”

“Hershel’s instincts are usually pretty good,” I said, trying not to remember New Roads.

“Religion is for the church house. Instinct is for the horse track. This here is a dollar-and-cents environment, Mr. Holland.”

I felt Rosita next to me, felt her arm slip inside mine, her hip touch against mine. “How’s your overhead so far?” she said to the tool pusher.

“Couldn’t be better. This whole job has been smooth as Vaseline.”

I looked him in the face to indicate my feeling about his metaphor, but he didn’t catch it.

“Which would be more costly?” Rosita asked. “Taking a preventive measure now or incurring a couple of dozen lawsuits?”

“Believe it or not, little lady, we’ve considered all the possibilities.”

“Are most of those men out there Cajuns?”

“Quite a few. Yes, ma’am.” He was looking straight ahead, visibly tired of the subject.

“How would you like explaining yourself to a jury made up of your employees’ relatives?”

The tool pusher’s eyes clicked sideways, fixing on hers. “Fellows, could I have your attention a minute?” he said to the other men in the room.

THE BLOWOUT PREVENTER went into place. Offshore rigs were primitive in those days, lacking the galleys and living areas they contain today. We ate supper on a shrimp trawler anchored to the base of the rig and pitching against the rubber tires hung from the stanchions. I say “we.” Hershel ate nothing more than a piece of buttered white bread while he drank black coffee so hot it would scorch the paint on a fire truck. No one was happy with us; installing the blowout preventer was time-consuming and expensive. We had a minority interest in the rig but had prevailed over people with far greater experience in the oil field than we had. As the hours worn on, I became convinced our victory was Pyrrhic and once again Hershel’s prophetic gifts would prove illusory.

The three of us slept on narrow bunks inside a small cabin on the trawler. It was cold at sunrise, the early sun a paradoxical burnt orange inside black clouds that looked like smoke from a batholithic fire under the Gulf, the waves three feet high and hitting the trawler’s wood hull with the steady bone-numbing rhythm of a metronome. Hershel was undaunted. He shaved with cold water and dried his face with his shirt, his eyes jittering. “Let’s go up to the doghouse,” he said.

“I think we’d better stay out of there,” I said. “I think if the wind drops, we should head for shore.”