House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

In the Belly of the Whale

I N T H E B E L LY O F T H E W H A L E Maybe you don’t know how oil was formed. It was formed by things dying and being held in the earth. —JAMES STEWART, Thunder Bay () When the crew boat arrived at a little past dawn, I saw no way for us to get from the deck of the boat to the main deck of the rig, no stairs, no elevator.And yet the offshore oil drilling rig towered above us and blotted out the sun,a skyscraper teetering on three great steel pilings driven into the surface of the heaving sea. The slick pilings, shooting right out of the sea,offered no handholds,so the entire question of getting on and off the rig remained mysterious to me.I had been sleeping with the crew in rows of aqua-blue Naugahyde chairs in the darkened cabin below deck ever since we left Galveston several hours earlier. Now we had all lurched out onto the deck, sleepy and yawning, with hair matted and eyes crossed.I watched those rough and dirty men in T-shirts and jeans and construction boots carry their sea bags onto the rear deck of that ancient one-hundred-foot diesel boat and stand on the greasy wooden planks as if God himself were about to come down and lift them up to the deck above so that they could go to work. I had been waiting to meet the man in charge, Bud Cole, but he had been asleep below during the midnight trip, and now I saw him standing on the deck ahead of all the other men, his sea bag at his feet, first in line,it seemed,though in line for what,I still could not imagine. I staggered across the planks, which were blackened with oil and worn to a supple suede by years and years of boots and gear. I stumbled over  chains and wooden crates to get to Bud,and when I finally stood beside him, I gazed up at the amazing edifice of gray steel, which we faced in our tiny boat, bobbing on the open sea. A pile of brown rope lay at Bud Cole’s feet in the center of what looked to be an oversized orange life ring. Its purpose, if it had any, evaded me, as everything else about this trip had so far, ever since the twinkling lights of Galveston Island had withered and vanished on the dark horizon behind our churning green wake in the dead of night. Bud, in his blue jumpsuit, was built like a Rottweiler dog, the kind of man it would be difficult to knock over, because he was wide and had a low center of gravity. I was to learn that natural selection would favor that quality on an oil rig: a man like that is already down when he’s standing up,and so he would be less likely to fall off.Bud was looking up and away from me, so I poked him in the arm to get his attention , and my fingertip met something the texture of an inflated truck tire. It was Bud Cole’s tricep muscle. He glared at me as if deciding whether he’d have to fight or not. I introduced myself, and it became immediately apparent that no one had told him I was coming onto his oil rig. He turned his scowling, incredulous rage upon me: a visage that was reticulated with the complex carvings of sea wind and time, like a face on a crumpled hundred-dollar bill. He wore a hard hat, and beneath its brim were the small and venomous red spiders of his eyes, peering at me out of their agitated web of wrinkles. “I’m a writer,” I said by way of explanation. “Oh,” he said, his face breaking into the smile of a guard dog. “A writer. Just what we need.” And with no goodbye or further warning, he stepped onto the big orange life ring near his feet. The rope that had been piled within its circumference straightened up as if by a magical force and created a woven basket in the air, standing by itself without any evident reason why it should.The boat pitched and rolled with the sea, and Bud grabbed hold of some of the rope that stood inexplicably among us, and three other men grabbed hands full of...