Helter Skelter
** Editor's Note: This story contains language that some readers might find offensive.
Gary huddled atop the helideck, hands away from his balls. He wouldn’t let the bastards get him. He’d jump before risking the pain and maybe even permanent damage.
Stuck between fear and a hard place, he wasn’t hard now, his scared dick the size of a baked Shrinky Dink.
In the darkness Gary couldn’t see the water, but he knew it was there, always there, lapping the platform, all he saw during the day, a freaking frightening sight when he stared too long and thought too much. Over the spare minutes he’d steal for himself, he’d zone out watching the speedy yellowfin in the slapping waters below. Refocusing, he’d look up and be startled, each time, at the vast blue in front of him.
When a co-worker had hauled up a large fish, vibrant and dazzling, he’d told Gary it was a dolphin. “It don’t look like Flipper, Gaudin,” Gary had replied, making sure to put the stress on the last syllable. The brilliant greens, blues and yellows of the fish had faded to gray as soon as its life had. “It’s a dolphinfish, not a dolphin, dumbass. It’s not the same difference.” Gary had felt a retort—coonass—on his tongue but swallowed it. The Cajuns bantered the label about, almost affectionately it seemed, to each other, even sported bumper stickers on their trucks proclaiming them Registered Coonasses, but Gary reckoned the reaction the term would get coming from him wouldn’t be a good one.
Now, as Gary stood above the unseen sea, he guessed jumping from the helideck would be like jumping from the top of the 42-story First Wisconsin Center. He wasn’t a snitch, not even to save his nuts, but he knew his boss wouldn’t have helped him anyway. Yesterday, the driller had singled him out.
“Where you from, boy?”
“Wisconsin, Boss,” Gary had responded with a ready smile.
“Damn Yank,” the boss said and walked away.
Smile collapsing, Gary resumed scraping away at the rust spots on the breakout cathead, preparing it for his next task of painting. The driller would then use the cathead to apply torque to connect another joint to the drillpipe, but Gary would’ve moved on to another piece of equipment by then, the never-ending oxidation requiring continuous maintenance.
Gary didn’t understand why these guys thought anyone from north of, say, Tennessee was a Yankee, but, as he was learning, the South was a different country. The only similarity between the state he was from and the one he lived in now was that for both the legal drinking age was eighteen.
The big news from before he started this job—and everyone was still talking about it—was the opening three months ago of that new Superdome in New Orleans. Looking at its photo in The Daily Advertiser, Gary had found it ridiculous, as if a giant alien spaceship had lost its ball bearings, damaged its takeoff apparatus after landing and then had no choice but to stay put.
Last month Gary had daydreamed of hitching a ride to New Orleans, finagling a ticket to the Packers game. He’d figured the team he’d rooted for all his life would show these Louisiana boys, with their insane love of Archie Manning, some real football. The Packers had lost the first three games of the season but so had the Saints, not that that shut up the welders he was working with at the time. Even if he could’ve thumbed a ride, he didn’t have money for a ticket, which turned out to be a blessing, as the Saints came back, down 16-0, to beat the Pack at the last second by one stinking point. Still, Gary thought, being in the same building as Bart Starr and watching him patrol the sidelines in person, even from a tiptop seat with binoculars superglued to his eyes, would’ve been awesome.
Instead, he and his brother Craig had watched the game in a honky-tonk and then slunk away from the hooting Saints fans. Near the backdoor, with that weird washtub music whining away, Craig had spotted some chick he knew from school and started chatting, muttered to Gary to stay away from his apartment for a while. Craig’s constant refrain was of girls here being easier than those back home. Maybe it was true, but Gary couldn’t understand what they were saying half the time; the essence of their speech eluded him. Maybe Craig, who’d been here longer, understood their lilting, melting words, or maybe he pretended he did. Maybe it didn’t matter what they said and Gary was the only one who thought it should. Even at his horniest, Gary knew he wanted someone he could talk to, not just screw.
After Gary’s graduation from high school, Craig had convinced him to join him in Louisiana. Besides women, Craig had reasoned, work was to be had, sweaty work most of the time, but in the winter you wouldn’t suffer that harsh cold off the lake that froze the inside of your forehead and the contents of your nostrils. Gary wouldn’t miss that at all, though he did miss Kirk, his best friend back home. He’d imagined being in the bar with that turkey, both of them downing beers, singing along with “The Joker” on the jukebox to drown out the zydeco, and feeling buzzed enough to approach some girls. Without Kirk for courage, Gary had left the bar and walked, hitchhiking part of the way, to the Vermilion. In the river’s urban corridor, he hid his loneliness. Moss draped the bark of trees in and alongside the bayou, weeping over the flat, wide water that caressed their roots.
On his first visit to the Vermilion, an accidental discovery in late summer, he’d seen a stunning multicolored duck and its mate perched on a branch—what kind of ducks did that?—but, upon sensing Gary’s presence, they’d flown away, one of them uttering a panicky sound like a creaking door. He’d stood motionless, hoping for the bird to return, gloomy over the escape of the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Seeking it on later visits had proved fruitless.
The summer’s confusion of croaking bullfrogs and the piercing crescendo of a multitude of insects had disappeared as well. Only a scattered piping of creatures had greeted him. Early October darkness settled downward and a spot of whiteness appeared, immediate and close. Almost as soon as Gary had wondered where it’d come from and what it was, he’d realized it was a girl, jogging, the white of her ribbed top and satiny shorts glimmering in the gathering dusk. She slowed down as she neared Gary, smiled as he backed up to give her room on the skinny trail. She’d picked up her pace and he’d stared at the small rounded mound flaring out from under her fitted shirt until all trace of it was gone.
Every night, before falling asleep, he thought of the girl. In the ongoing movie in his head, he named her Abby, after a city, if it was big enough to be called one, the Vermilion flowed past. Tonight all fantasies involving Abby’s pert butt had vanished. At dinner he’d sat next to Gaudin and wheedled the meaning of the sideways looks, the snide laughs and the loud innuendos that had erupted from Barrios and Melancon all day. Gaudin’s bitter sneer, as he recalled the hazing of his own first tour, implied that Gary wouldn’t be able to escape the same fate. “Same difference, Yank, mais oui.”
In bed, scared out of his gourd, Gary had kept his hands between his legs—a futile prophylactic, he knew—while keeping an ear out for the perverts. The two roughs might’ve been members of the Charles Manson Family as far as Gary was concerned. Out of loneliness and boredom, he’d read the rumpled copy of Helter Skelter making the rounds, interest high since that Squeaky Fromme woman had tried to kill the president a couple months ago. In spite of Gary’s dread, the adage of the squeaky wheel getting the grease flitted through his head, twitching his lips into a slight smirk, his snort not quite hysterical. The paperback had smelled like sweat and piss, but he’d read it in just a few nights, only putting it down when his eyes wouldn’t stay open, the first book he’d ever finished. If they’d made them read stuff like that in school, he’d have read more.
Over the fitful rhythm of multiple snorers, he’d heard the Mansonites creeping into the bunk area. The oilcan whispering between them contained the lubricant Gary, as low man on the pecking pole, slid on pipes during the workday, sometimes all day. He’d hopped out of bed, run like a madman and clambered up to the off-limits helideck. Now, hunkering at its farthest edge, he heard cursing and the can clanking against the stairs. Younger and quicker, Gary was poised to run around the square, wear the jerks out. Instead, as he saw the first figure emerge, Gary jumped him, corralling the man’s legs low; surprise was his ally. He pushed his opponent down and swiftly moved upward to put the hulk, not knowing or caring which one it was, in a headlock. Gary wasn’t cutting weight any longer, hadn’t been since he’d been runner-up at the state finals, but that still put him at only 114 pounds.
As he realized Melancon was the one he was throttling, Gary felt himself flying. His back hit the ground and, as he saw Barrios advancing, Gary stretched his leg to its limit and kicked the can Barrios must’ve set down before he pulled him off Melancon. The spout wasn’t capped, at least not securely, and grease smeared the deck, leaving an oasis of gunk between Gary and his assailants. Barrios slipped, swearing as he fell. “F-in’ Yankee worm, think you better than everybody.” Melancon stood up, skirted the puddle, and Gary scuttled backwards, ready to lash out with his feet.
A booming voice topped the stairs. “What the hell?” There was a pause as the driller took in the scene. “Y’all are off this rig tomorrow, first thing. Yankee, clean this up or I’ll let them do whatever they was planning. Barrios, Melancon, allons!”
Gary grabbed the spill kit, locating it easily enough in the glow of the nighttime running lights. He dusted sand over the muck and his brain panicked. He needed this job, for the money, of course, but also for a place to sleep and eat for weeks at a time, a break from hanging out at his brother’s dinky apartment, sleeping in a corner on the floor, sometimes with a pillow over his head to block out the rising noises of Craig and whatever girl he had over. The pillow couldn’t dispel the lingering smell of the potatoes he fried to accompany the mac-and-cheese he poured ketchup over while his brother dined at the campus cafeteria. Maybe he’d try a sprinkle of that Tony Chachere’s the cook used instead of ketchup next time. He’d sneak into the kitchen and take one of the green cardboard canisters before he was forced out of here.
Gary swept up the now-solid mess. With a mop from the supply closet, he wiped down the area until no one could tell anything had happened. Since he was a kid, he’d helped his mother maintain their boxy house in a spotless condition and, as a teenager, kept his father’s ’56 Bel Air running smoothly, though little credit the old man had given him.
“Blessed Mother of God,” his own mother had exclaimed when he’d called to tell her about his new job. “Don’t you know what happened off Grand Isle in June?” He hadn’t known; he was still in Wisconsin in June. He’d barely heard of the Gulf of Mexico then, much less one of its barrier islands. Gary hadn’t bothered asking how she knew. An avid reader of newspapers, she remembered all she read, stashing away the knowledge until she pulled it out for use on one of her sons, like a mother beaver with the family’s winter larder. A jack-up being tugged to a new worksite had started to tilt, she went on, and capsized in exactly one minute—she’d been precise on that point—dumping some of the twelve-man rig crew into the Gulf and trapping others in the hull for a harrowing twenty-six hours. One man died. “Please don’t take the job, Gary. You can come home if you need to.”
“At least it’s November, Mom, and hurricane season’s basically over. You won’t have that to worry about. I’ll be fine. Your prayers must be working ‘cause I’ve been blessed so far.”
Gary’s good luck, or the fulfillment of his mother’s prayers, had continued. His short time on the rig had been furnished with clear weather and sunsets the colors of rainbow sherbet. He’d experienced nothing more frightening before tonight than the ride in the personnel basket from the crew boat to the platform: riding the Mad Mouse at Fun Town had been scarier than that. So, yeah, blessed, that is, until tonight.
Back in his bunk Gary reiterated to himself his refusal to slink back home, to work in the meatpacking plant with his dad and his oldest brother, with most of Cudahy. He didn’t know what, but he wanted to make things. His fingers and hands ached with the yearning. The first job he’d landed in Louisiana was as a welder’s helper. He’d fused pipe at times and that had been okay, but entry-level guys were treated as a drop in a dredging bucket. The experience had gotten him this better-paying job. And now he’d lost it, before he’d had time to save up for anything, much less a place of his own.
Sore and bleary-eyed at breakfast, Gary noted the absence of the two thugs and avoided Gaudin’s questioning looks as he choked down the buttered grits he’d loved from the first time he’d tasted them. The other men pushed their chairs away from the tables to start the shift and the boss lifted his chin in Gary’s direction. Gary followed him to the scene of last night’s crime.
The chopper pilot waited in the cockpit. The driller turned to Gary. “You’re going to another rig, Olsen. Someone somewhere wants you. I don’t want to hear about you again. Stay out of trouble. Weevils rarely get second chances, certainly not three.”
Gary threw his bag into the cabin and bounded in after it. He put on the earplugs and headphones that had been issued to him, and the helicopter took off. With the sounds of the engine and the whirring blades muffled, Gary felt as if he were breaking apart. The pieces floated, soared, went wandering, searching. It felt like sadness, until he gathered himself in and smiled. He patted the Creole Seasoning in the inner pocket of his jacket as if it were a good-luck charm.