‘You can thank an old bastard name of Rufus Haygood for that.’
‘Rufus Haygood?’
‘Yeah. I was finishing my thesis at the University of Louisiana and these hotshot interviewers from ITT and Esso and AT&T and Bell Labs were giving me all this steam about how good it was gonna be workin’ for them, and one day old Rufus comes up to me and says he’s ramrodding a wooden jack-up rig out in the Gulf and he says, “I’ll give you ten silver eagles an hour, which is more than you can make dancin’ with those goddamn lard-ass bastards, and I’ll teach you everything there is to know about the oil game and you can teach me about books”—and I find out, you know, he never went to school. So for the next seven years I dragged around with him from one rig to another and he’d give me shale and blowholes and rigging for an hour or two, and I’d give him Shelley and Coleridge and Hammett for an hour or two back. But I learned about oil, yessiree.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s with your Alec, wherever that might be. Drowned. Fishing in some dipshit lake in Florida. Got drunk and fell out of the boat. The old bastard never did learn to swim.’
Outside, the wind wailed past the window, peppering it with sleet.
‘Wonderful night to stay in,’ Marge said. ‘We could build a fire and snuggle up.’
‘If we had a fireplace.’
‘We can make believe,’ she said.
‘I haven’t been laid for three months.’
She held up four fingers. ‘Gotcha beat by a month,’ she said.
‘You’ve got a reputation as the Thoreau virgin,’ Lansdale said.
‘Been checking up on me, hunh?’
‘Well, it’s my job, make sure everybody on this rig is happy. We can’t afford morale problems.’
‘I’ve got one you can take care of right now,’ she said, closing in on him.
Lansdale said, ‘You are shameless.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘ain’t it a kick in the ass.’
He laughed, a big laugh, and nodded. ‘Ain’t it, though,’ he said.
And laughing too, she ripped open her work shirt. She was not wearing a bra. Her breasts, firm from the hard work on the rig, stood out, the nipples already signalling her desire.
Lansdale stood near the wall, staring at her. He shook his head. ‘Incredible,’ he mumbled, tearing off his shirt and throwing it on the floor.
She was still seven or eight feet from him. She zipped down the fly of her jeans very slowly.
‘Need some music?’ he asked.
‘Unh unh.’
He sat down on the bed, leaning back on his elbows, watching every little move she made. She was swaying back and forth as she slowly slid the jeans over her hips and let them fall away. A curl of black hair peeked over the top of her bikini panties. She turned away from him, still swaying, and began to tighten and loosen her buttocks. She had an absolutely incredible ass.
‘Hard work sure becomes you,’ he said.
She hooked her thumbs under the edge of the panties and slipped them down partway, still moving, still swaying to the music in her head.
He zipped down his pants and pulled them off. He was rock-hard and bulging against his Jockey shorts. She looked at him over her shoulder, began moving backwards toward him, turning as she reached the edge of the bed and sliding her hand under her panties, caressing herself as she looked down at him. He could hear her fingers sliding through her lips, She knelt between his legs on the edge of the bed and began massaging his hard penis through the shorts, then finally she slipped her hand under them, pulled them down to his thighs, and began stroking him. He jerked, involuntarily, surprised by her callused hand. But she had a special talent, rubbing the underside of his penis with the palm of her hand while her fingers stroked the top.
Lansdale closed his eyes, ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you ought to patent that.’
‘Just the beginning,’ she said, and leaning over, sucked him into her mouth, her teeth nibbling at him. He leaned forward, reached out, and took one of her breasts in his hand and caressed it with his fingertips, letting the palm of his hand barely touch the nipple. Her tongue darted and traced the length of him and he sat up a little more, sliding his hand down to her hard belly, his fingertips just touching the edge of her panties. She began to hunch, moving against his hand. He could feel the moisture through the silk, feel her distending clitoris as he stroked the length of her vagina.
She started to laugh, but then the laugh became a soft moan. ‘Goddamn,’ she cried out. Her legs began to tremble and she fell on her side next to him, grabbed his head and thrust it between her legs. He ripped her panties off and sucked her hard clitoris into his mouth, moving his head in tight little circles and flicking his tongue.
Her fists tightened in his hair, guiding his head as she moved with him. She began to tighten all over. She sucked in her breath, held it, then let it out in short spurts. And again. And again. She rose against him, hooking her heels behind his hips.
The tempo increased, her breaths coming shorter, the movement faster. Then all the muscles in her body seemed to freeze, her head moved slowly back, her legs straightened, her breathing stopped for a moment, and then she began to cry out and thrash her head back and forth and she came.
‘Oh God,’ she cried, ‘enough,’ but he didn’t stop and she felt it building again, felt the trembling, the fire streak down her nerves and envelope her entire body and she began coming again and she could not talk and her breath seemed to be caught in her throat and then suddenly it all burst out at once.
He rolled over on his back, slipped his arm under her waist and dragged her to him, lifting her so she was lying on her back on his chest and she reached down, found him and shoved him into her, while he stroked her breasts with one hand and masturbated her with the other.
‘No... more,’ she gasped, but he couldn’t stop. He thrust harder and harder, faster and faster, his fingers fleeting over her mound and as she tightened around him, he finally exploded with a great cry of relief and then he began to laugh, and a moment later she came again. He raised his knees and pressed down on her thighs and stayed in her as long as he could as the storm howled past the window.
IV
Lansdale awoke sharply from a deep, untroubled sleep. He lay on the bed for a moment, blinking his eyes, wondering what had awakened him so abruptly. The lights in the bedroom were still on and Marge lay beside him, sleeping soundly. it was 3:05 A.M. He sat up and grabbed the hot-line phone and punched out the number of the stabilizer control room. It only rang once before someone answered ‘Hello.’
‘This is Chief, who’m I talkin’ to?’
‘Barney Perkins.’
‘Everything all right down there?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Lansdale was stunned by Perkins’ response. He jumped up, cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear, and grabbed clothes from the floor, chairs, wherever they had fallen a few hours before.
‘What d’ya mean, you’re not sure?’
‘We got a... uh . .. like a tremor, Chief.’
‘Tremor?’
‘Yeah. There was like... I dunno, it was like . . . the whole rig shivered...’
‘Shivered? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
Lansdale was watching the monitor as he spoke, looking at the exterior of the Thoreau, draped with ice, like some primitive ice castle. Searchlights played the seas around the rig.
The waves were battering the legs, smashing small ice floes to bits.
‘I think maybe ... uh, maybe we took a hit from . .. maybe a small iceberg or something.’
‘“Or something” my ass. There’s no “or something” out there, for Christ’s sake. I’ll be right down.’
He slammed down the phone, Then he picked it up and punched out the number for the radio room.
‘Radio room. Harrison.’