“Why?”
“Because he’s a liar from his hairline down to the soles of his feet,” I said.
“You underestimate him.”
“About what? My father’s death?”
“Lying is probably one of his virtues. If he had his way, I’d be a lampshade.”
HERSHEL AND I had bought a half interest in a doodlebug rig, a seismograph drill barge with propellers that allowed it to move from location to location, where it would be anchored to the floor of a river or bay with four hydraulic pilings. Once the drill site was established, a long, flat powerboat strung recording cables in both directions from the barge, sinking the instruments to the bottom of the river or the bay. After the exploratory hole was drilled, the deckhands would begin building explosive charges from cans of dynamite that screwed together end to end in sticks of six. A can of primer was attached to one end and screwed into a second and third stick. Then a nitro cap and an electric wire were attached to the last can and the charge dropped down the hole, the cap wire slithering through the driller’s hands as it disappeared inside the pipe.
That’s when everyone went to the stern or got on the jug boat, and the shooter would holler “Fire in the hole!” and twist the switch on the detonator. The explosion was so powerful, it would slam the iron hull of the barge against the water and send a geyser of sand and brackish water high into the air and often break dishes and cups in the galley. Seconds later, a huge dirty cloud of sulfurous yellow smoke would rise from the water and drift back through the barge; if you breathed it,
the inside of your head would ache for the rest of the day.
The seismograph crew was working deep in the Atchafalaya Basin, an enormous watershed composed of marsh, saw grass, cypress swamp, rivers, networks of bayous that didn’t have names, inland bays, and miles and miles of flooded tupelo gums and willow trees. The crew worked ten days on the water and five days off. The work was hard and physical and sometimes dangerous; in the summer the crew did it under a blistering sun, and in winter they lived in wet clothes from sunrise to sunset, wading through waist-high swamp while they strung electronic recording cable from a spool on their backs. They were brave and hardworking and never complained about the food or the low pay; most of them had soldiered all over the world and were carefree and irresponsible in the way that children are. When it came to women and matters of race, they had the lowest self-esteem of any group I have ever known. They also got in trouble, often for reasons that made no sense other than a desire to see how much harm they could do to themselves.
Morgan City, down on the coast, with its Spanish-tile roofs and stucco buildings and palm trees and stilt houses along the Atchafalaya River, looked like a conduit into a nineteenth-century Caribbean postcard, a place where anonymity and a self-congratulatory paganism were a way of life. The bars and the brothels never closed. Slot and racehorse machines were everywhere. The Cajun girls were beautiful and often illiterate and believed any story told to them. Fugitives from the law only had to step on a boat to find themselves one week later in Brownsville or Key West or on the Mexican coast, eluding the law like a cipher disappearing inside a bowl of alphabet soup. What better place for a man who believed he had run out of options?
Hershel and I had nothing to do with hiring the crew on the doodlebug barge we had bought a half interest in. That didn’t mean we weren’t responsible for what they did. He and I were in the pilothouse on the barge when one of the drillers got into it with a jug hustler on the deck. The party chief was away on the quarter boat, and we were the only form of authority on the barge. I had seen the driller in action before. His nickname was Tex because he had the word “Texas” tattooed in large blue letters across his back, not unlike the food-dye lettering on the rind of a smoke-cured ham. A geologist nobody liked had flown his pontoon plane right over the top of the barge, causing everybody to scatter except Tex. He climbed up on the drill with a monkey wrench, and when the plane came in for another swoop, he threw the wrench, barely missing the windshield and the geologist’s face.
Hershel went down the steel ladder from the pilothouse onto the deck and approached the driller. The jug hustler had offloaded a crate of cap wire from the jug boat by throwing the crate over the gunwale onto the deck, not knowing that a vial of nitroglycerin was inside each spool of wire. Four feet away, stacked against the pilothouse, were 160 pounds of canned dynamite and primers. Hershel talked to both men. All the while, Tex kept rotating his head, looking everywhere except at Hershel.
“So that’s it. Let’s get back to work,” Hershel said.
“I don’t want to get to Glory in pieces,” Tex said.
“Neither do I,” Hershel said.
“Then this little pipsqueak here needs to stop putting others at risk.”
“He didn’t know about the nitro caps. Now he does,” Hershel said.
“I didn’t see your signature on my paycheck, sir.” Tex was bare-chested and had a sculpted upper body that was as hard and tapered as a cypress stump. He rotated his head again, his eyes empty.
“The party chief isn’t here. So I’m the skipper until he gets back. Tell me if that doesn’t quite sit right.”
“I was looking for a job when I found this son of a bitch.”
“The jug boat is going to the levee for supplies at fourteen hundred. You can be on it if you want.”
Tex looked at his nails. “I don’t give a shit one way or the other.”
Hershel nodded as though in appreciation of a profound concept. “I’ll have your drag-up check ready by the time you pack your duffel. Get off the barge.”
“This is a hard-boiled outfit. Got a man lecturing and firing people and talking military language like he’s Dwight Eisenhower, with a foot that looks like a duck’s.”
I went down the ladder. “You’re gone, buddy. Not at two but right now. Got it?”
Tex picked up his shirt from the deck rail and drew the sleeve up one arm, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Is there something you want to say?” I asked.
He scratched his head. “Let me think. No, not right now. I’ll catch y’all later, though,” he replied. “Like the ole boy says, you’ll know when it’s my ring.”
In the early A.M., three days later, someone broke into the cast-iron lockbox where we stored the nitro caps and the detonator on a sandbar three hundred yards from the barge. The thief built a stick of at least twelve dynamite cans and blew the pilothouse into smithereens. The most likely suspect was our friend Tex.
The same day, the cops picked him up dead drunk in a mulatto brothel on the north side of Lafayette. He claimed he had little memory of anything he had done during the last forty-eight hours. We thought we had our man. The problem was the family who ran the brothel. They were glad to see Tex taken away. He had passed out in the trailer behind the brothel after he had spent all his money, and they hadn’t been able to get him out. They didn’t like him, and because they were protected by the Mafia in New Orleans, they didn’t fear him. The point is, they had no reason to provide him an alibi. They said he had been at the brothel, in one stage of debauch or another, from before the time of the explosion until the sheriff’s deputies had arrived.