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Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paradise. It’s not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers’ tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.
In Louisiana, refined or extracted oil is everywhere, sometimes in barrels buried in the 1920s. Working-class people display bumper stickers that read GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT. Former vice president Al Gore is mocked and denigrated with regularity for his warnings about arctic melt.
Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in our front yard and smell oil. It was not buried in the ground, either. It was pouring in thick columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf’s surface.
This particular blowout has been referred to again and again as a “spill.” A spill has nothing to do with the events that occurred southeast of my home parish. A spill implies an accident involving a limited amount of oil, one that will seep from a tanker until the leak is repaired or the ship’s hold is drained. The oil leaking from the tanker is not pressurized or on fire and incinerating men on the floor of a drilling rig.
Even when a well is completed under normal circumstances, there is a cautionary tale buried inside the sense of accomplishment and prosperity that everyone on the rig seems to experience. At first you smell the raw odor of natural gas, like the stench of rotten eggs, then the steel in the rig seems to stiffen, as though its molecular texture is transforming itself into something alive; even in hundred-degree heat, the great pipes running out of the hole start to sweat with drops of moisture that are as cold and bright as silver dollars. The entire structure seems to hum with the power and intensity of forces whose magnitude we can only guess at. The driller touches a flaming board to a flare line to burn off excess gas, and a ball of fire rises into the blackness and snaps apart in the clouds and makes us wonder if our pride in technological success isn’t a dangerous presumption.
When a drill bit hits what is called an early pay sand, punching into an oil or natural gas dome unexpectedly, with no blowout preventer in place, the consequences are immediate. An unlimited amount of fossil decay and oceanic levels of natural gas that are hundreds of millions of years old are released in seconds through one aperture, blowing pipe, drilling mud, salt water,
and geysers of sand up through the rig floor, creating havoc among the men working there and a cacophony of sound similar to a junkyard falling piece by piece out of the sky. The first spark off the wellhead ignites the gas. The explosion of flame is so intense in velocity and temperature that it will melt the spars of a rig and turn steel cable into bits of flaming string. In minutes the rig can take on the appearance of a model constructed from burned matchsticks.
My father, Big Aldous, was a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a commercial fisherman who, in the off-season, worked the monkey board high up on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He was illiterate and irresponsible and spoke English poorly and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans. He also had no understanding of how or why the Cajun world of his birth was coming to an end. My mother’s infidelities filled him with shame and anger and bewilderment, just as she in turn could not understand his alcoholism and barroom violence and apparent determination to gamble away their meager income at bourré tables and racetracks.
Big Al died in a blowout while I was in Vietnam. His body was never recovered, and I spent a great deal of time wondering whether he suffered greatly before his death. Sometimes I dreamed I saw him standing knee-high in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat tilted on his head, the swells around him denting with rain. I didn’t know what kind of death he died, but I knew one thing for sure about my old man: He was never afraid. And I knew in my heart, when the pipe came out of the hole on that windswept night decades ago, Big Al clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and jumped into the black with the courage of a paratrooper going out the door of a plane, and I also knew that as he plummeted toward the water with the tower coming down on top of him, his last thoughts were of me and my half brother, Jimmy, and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory. He died so we could have a better life. And that’s what I will always believe.
It seems to me a “spill” is hardly an adequate term to describe the fate of men who die inside a man-made inferno.
MY INTROSPECTION WASN’T taking me any closer to solving the disappearance of Tee Jolie and the abduction and murder of her sister, Blue. When I came home from work on Thursday, Alafair was reading a glossy magazine at the kitchen table, both Snuggs and Tripod sitting in the open window behind her. Tripod was wearing a diaper. “What’s up, Alfenheimer?” I said.
“Dave, can you get rid of the stupid names?” she said without looking up from her magazine.
“I will. Someday. Probably. What are you reading?”
“There’s a showing of Pierre Dupree’s work in Burke Hall at UL. You want to drive over?”
“Not really.”
“What do you have against him?”
“Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who seems to have someone else living inside him, someone he wants none of us to meet.”
“His paintings aren’t bad. Look,” she said, handing me the magazine.
I glanced indifferently at the images on one page and started to return the magazine to her. Had I followed through, perhaps none of the events that would happen in the next days and weeks and months would have occurred, and maybe we all would have been the better for it. I’ll never know. I stared at the photograph of a painting on the second page of the article. In it a nude woman was reclining on a reddish-brown sofa, a white towel draped across her vagina. She wore a mysterious smile, and her hair was tied behind her head and touched with tiny pools of yellow, like buttercups. Her neck was swanlike, her eyes elongated, her nipples as dark as chocolate; because of her position, her breasts had flattened against her chest, and her body seemed to possess the warm softness of browned bread dough.
“Dave, your face is white,” Alafair said.
“Take a look at the woman on the sofa,” I said, handing back the magazine.
“What about her?”
“It’s Tee Jolie Melton.”
She shook her head and started to speak, then stopped. She rubbed the ball of one finger on her brow, as though a mosquito had bitten it, as though somehow our conversation could be diverted from the direction it was about to take. “The figure looks like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian natives,” she said. “The portrayal is almost generic. Don’t make it into something it’s not.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I know Tee Jolie. That’s not her.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“I can’t prove it isn’t, but something else is going on in our lives that you won’t acknowledge.”
“Would you like to tell me what?”
“You’re imagining things about Tee Jolie Melton. Molly knows it and so do I and so does Clete.”
