In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Explosions Like everyone else his age, Jeff Blaise knew how to blow things up. "Where do these children learn what they know?" Ethan Marbell had once exclaimed. "How to break locks, jimmy windows, set off plastic explosives. It seems a nation of subversives were trained and graduated out of family basements meant for Ping-Pong and gin rummy/' Jeff seldom went into the details about his own education. All he said was, "Any popular science mag has directives on that plastic explosive—C-4, it's called. Even government pamphlets can tell you how to use it. Ironic, wouldn't you say?" But with him it really went back farther still, to Louisiana and the swamps when, as a boy in high school, he had gone with a friend of his, already a sophomore at LSU, up the river to farming property the boy's family owned but seldom saw. There they discovered flooding out of control, the row tops in one field barely visible above the water. The beavers had built dams along a bayou. The overseer had wanted to use dynamite, one reason he had called. Jeff's friend had volunteered to "attend to it," but Jeff's idea of that was to do it themselves. "Dynamite's old-fashioned stuff. There's a plastic they've got now. All you do is mold it, sink your fuse in, play out a line, and hit the current." Before the week wasout the dams were blown sky-high,the beaver population reduced, and the water draining back into place. The boys left, thinking themselves heroes, while the beavers were already at work on major repairs. The year he finished college, Jeff (still with the memory of that 247 2 4 8 T H E N I G H T T R A V E L L E R S bright flash against the scraggly line of bayou trees) was in possession of a fellowship grant for graduate work at Hopkins in Baltimore. He would be assistant to a professor there, possibly even to Dr. Ethan Marbell. Money, extra money, was his need, for clothes, travel, room rent. This was why he found himself working through the summer for a small oil company with four rigs out in the Gulf south of Grand Isle. Every day in the company launches he went out with the two other supervisors to monitor one or another of the pumping stations, to check on the flow, regulate the gauges. They ferried out alternate crews to replace the ones already stationed. He shared quarters with the two supervisors and the crew ashore in two mobile homes near the marina. He burned nearly black in the sun, a curious sight with blond hair burning paler every day and a stubble of light beard. On weekends, showered, shaved, and fresh, they headed up to New Orleans for a night of drinking, sometimes a pickup, came back late Sunday with slowly fading hangovers. If a fire started on any of the rigs, or if a hurricane struck, they were commissioned to set a charge that would blow shut the oilflow. They also had to evacuate the crews. In late August, after a week of oppressive weather, the warning came: a hurricane was off Jamaica, moving toward New Orleans. There were long phone calls to the head office in Mobile. But Jeff, as he was later to recall, made none of them, had no conversations with the powers there at all. It was toward noon when they went out into a choppy sea, turned charcoal gray, a mottled gray sky vertical before them like a standing presence. The nervous swollen day sensed its own troubles. One of the supervisors kept throwing up over the side, making the other two lean toward the opposite gunwales, trying not to hear or look. At the first rig they mounted to the platform. Jeff carried up the C-4 explosive, marked HIGHLY DANGEROUS—but even at the onset, looking behind him, he sawFrank, the other nonvomiting supervisor, climbing behind, hauling with him a second canvas sack. "Hey, that's too much/'Jeff said. "Careful of that stuff. You know what it—" Frank, with his black Mexican mustache, his sidelong look, never said a lot. He didn't now. He walked to the other side of the platform, where the ladder dropped down into choppy water. "I'm going down to set it up." [18.118.227.69] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

Share