I once used a boat hook to kill a moccasin that was trapped in the current. I threw it up on the deck to scare Lizard. I don’t know why. Later I felt ashamed and told a prostitute in a Morgan City bar what I’d done. She tapped her cigarette ash in a beer can.
“My stories are a little weird?” I said.
“I think you’re in the wrong bar,” she replied.
Every memory in my head seemed like a piece of glass. I woke the second day on the hitch to a single-engine, canary-yellow pontoon plane coming in above the trees, swooping right over the upper deck. Ten minutes later, down in the galley, I saw the plane touch the water and taxi to the bow of the quarter boat. The pilot was Hamp Rieber, a geologist with degrees from the University of Texas and MIT. His hair was mahogany-colored and wavy, combed straight back with Brylcreem. He liked to wear polo shirts and jodhpurs and tight, ventilated leather gloves, and always buzzed us when he visited the quarter boat or the drill barge. One time Lizard climbed on the pilothouse and flung a wrench at him. He missed the prop by less than a foot.
Hamp was sent to check on us by the Houston office. Sometimes he went to a brothel in Port Arthur with the crew, although I couldn’t figure out why. He was rich and lived with a handsome wife in an old plantation house south of Lake Charles.
He came in and started eating scrambled eggs and bacon and pancakes across from me. Lizard was three places down. A big window fan drew a cool breeze through the room. It was a fine time of day, before the sun started to flare on the water and the smell of carrion rose out of the swamp. Hamp’s face was full of self-satisfaction while he talked. I wished Lizard had parked that wrench in his mouth.
“You look thoughtful, Elmore,” he said.
“I’m philosophically inclined.”
“Been reading your thesaurus?”
“I go my own way and don’t have truck with those who don’t like it,” I said.
“You’re a mystery man, all right,” he said, reaching for the grits. “I always get the feeling you’re looking at me when my back is turned. Why is that?”
“Search me.”
“Yes, sir, a regular mystery man.”
I got up with my plate and coffee mug and finished eating in a shady spot on the deck. I wished I could float away to a palm-dotted island beyond the horizon, a place where machines had never been invented, where people drank out of coconut husks and ate shellfish they harvested from the surf with their hands.
The real reason I didn’t like Hamp was because of what happened down in Latin America. At first the Indians were curious about our seismograph soundings, but eventually they lost interest and disappeared back into trees that clicked and rattled with animal bones. Hamp selected a drill site in the jungle and we started clearing the earth with a dozer, piling greenery as high as a house, soaking and burning it with kerosene and turning the sun into an orange wafer. The soil was soggy, with thousands of years of detritus in it. When it was compressed under the weight of the dozer, the severed root systems twitched like they were alive.
We put up the derrick and starting drilling twenty-four hours a day, using three crews, tying canvas on the spars when monsoon amounts of rain swept through the jungle. After we punched into a pay sand, the driller ignited the flare line to bleed off the gas, and a flame roared two hundred feet into the sky. The sludge pit caught fire and blew a long flume of thick, black, lung-choking smoke all the way to the horizon. It hung over the jungle like a serpent until morning.
The next night the Indians showered us with arrows.
The company built a wooden shell around the rig. It must have been 120 degrees inside. By noon the floor men were puking in a bucket and pouring water on their heads to keep from passing out. But at least we’d stymied the Indians, we thought. Then an Indian shot a blowgun from the trees at one of our supply trucks coming up the road. A kid from Lufkin got it in the cheek and almost died.
“This shit ends,” Hamp said.
He’d flown a spotter plane in Korea and bragged he’d shot down Bed Check Charlie with a .45.
“What are you aiming to do?” I asked.
“Know who Alfred Nobel was?”
“The man who invented dynamite.”
“Nobody is going to catch flies on you.”
At sunset Hamp and another guy flew away in a two-cockpit biplane. About ten minutes later we heard a dull boom and felt a tremor under our feet and saw birds lift from the canopy in the jungle. A minute later there was a second boom, this one much stronger, then we heard the drone of the plane’s engine headed back toward us. Lizard was standing next to me, bare-chested, staring at the smoke rising from the trees and the sparks churning inside it. He poured mosquito repellent on his palm and rubbed it on his neck and face. “Satchel charges,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“He brought them from town a couple of days ago. He was just waiting on the excuse.” He looked at my expression. “You keep them damn thoughts out of your head.”
“What thoughts?”
“The kind a water walker has. It’s their misfortune and none of our own. Stay the hell out of it.”
I looked around at the other men on the crew. They had come out of the bunkhouse, some of them with GI mess kits in their hands. None of them seemed to know what they should say. The tool pusher, a big man who always wore khaki trousers and a straw hat and a Lima watch fob and long-sleeve shirts buttoned at the wrists, looked at the red glow in the jungle. You could hear the wind rustling the trees and smell an odor like the chimney on a rendering plant. “I don’t know about y’all, but I got to see a man about a dog,” he said.
The others laughed as he unzipped his fly and urinated into the dark.
In the morning the tool pusher told me to take a supply truck to the port twenty miles away and pick up a load of center cutters for the ditching machine. I tried to convince myself that Hamp had frightened the Indians out of the village before he dropped the satchel charges, that he meant to scare people and not kill them. My head was coming off as we drove down the dirt road that skirted the jungle. It was raining and the sun was shining, and a rainbow curved out of the clouds into almost the exact spot where the fire had burned out during the night.
I told the driver to stop.
“What for?” he said.
“I got dysentery. I’ll walk back.” I took the first-aid kit and a roll of toilet paper from under the seat.
The gearshift knob was throbbing in his palm. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Elmore?”
“Some Tums and salt tablets and I’ll be right as rain.”
The huts in the village had been made from thatch and scrap lumber and corrugated tin the Indians stole from construction sites. The satchel charges had blown them apart and set fire to most everything inside. I counted nine dead in the ashes, their eyes starting to sink in the sockets like they were drifting off to sleep. I took some alcohol out of the first-aid kit and poured it on my bandanna and tied it across my nose and mouth, and tried not to breathe too deeply.
There was not a living creature in the village, not even a bird or insects. The only sound came from the cry of a small child, the kind that says the child is helpless, unfed, and thirsty, its diaper soaked and dirty and raw on the skin.
I followed a path along a stream that had overflowed its banks. The ground was carpeted with leaves and broken twigs. Then I started to see more bodies. There were nails embedded in some of the trees, blood drags where people had tried to reach the water, pieces of hair and human pulp on the rocks by the stream. The child was lying on its back next to a woman who looked made out of sticks. One of her breasts was exposed. She wore old tennis shoes without socks and a wooden cross on a cord around her neck. A tear was sealed in one eye.