Heat and Light (10 page)

Herc studies the bartender, taller and younger than he is, but probably not as strong. He's done this since childhood, the runt's habit of sizing up his tormentors, though these days Herc is all lats and deltoids and nobody has given him trouble in years.

“He's a guard at the prison,” says Jorge, who looks pretty good, all things considered, for a hazmat casualty about to star in his own OSHA report. “I seen him in his uniform.”

At that moment a cell phone rings in Brando's pocket. Barks, actually, deep and resonant like a German shepherd.

“What the hell is that?” Legrand says.

“That's nobody.” Brando turns off the phone, which has been barking since lunchtime. It emits strange noises all day long, beeps and peals and snatches of music. Once it even farted, the thunderous ripping fart of a dyspeptic old man. “Hey, officer. Another shot over here.”

“To
Law and Order,
” says Herc, raising his shot glass—a dig at Mickey Phipps who, being Christian, spends every night alone in his room staring at the TV. It's the first time in months they've gotten him out for a drink. “You must a seen every episode by now.”

“I guess I have,” Mickey says, grinning. He is the steadiest of the crew, easy and good-natured. The rest have done their share of acting out, Brando and Legrand especially: bar fights, drunken capers, women. After ten years working rigs, Herc has seen it all before. Send a man a thousand miles from home; work him like a mule for two weeks straight; then let him loose with money in his pocket. Only a saint like Mickey Phipps will avoid making a fool of himself. This time tomorrow he'll be on a plane back to Houston, drinking ginger ale and reading from his pocket Bible, a man who wants nothing more from life than to spend every spare minute with his wife and kids.

Mickey pretend-sips his beer, still full after half an hour. “How 'bout you? Any plans for the weekend?”

Only Mickey would ask such a question and expect an answer.

“Oh, I don't know. Might could drive up to Canoe Creek.”

“You get a fishing license?”

“Not yet.”

Legrand howls. “Who you kidding? You'll be propping up the bar at the Days Inn like usual, and I'll be setting there with you.” He raises his glass to Herc. “Fishing, my ass.”

Herc knocks back his shot, knowing he'll regret it in the morning. Drinking with Legrand has already subtracted years from his
life. Vince has this effect on all who know him, the several ex-wives, the identical twin brother dead already, in some hideous freak accident involving liquor and heavy equipment and God knows what all. Probably it can be expressed mathematically, what his friendship does to your life expectancy. Insurance companies have formulas for it.

A girl makes her way through the crowd.
Eye-talian Gia,
the roughnecks call her. Usually she is behind the bar, a stunning dark-eyed girl with long curly hair.

Brando spots her first. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Mickey flinches visibly. Herc, sitting between them, wants to slug them both: the holy roller with his ladylike sensibilities, the arrogant punk running at the mouth.

Brando runs a hand over his stubbly hair. A year out, he still keeps it army-short. “It's supposed to be her night off. I can't get away from that bitch. What does she want from me?”

“Your daddy ought to have explained that to you,” Legrand says.

“Hey, boys. Where have you been?” Gia asks Brando. “I just called you. I've been texting you all day.”

She's a little skinny for Herc's taste—he likes voluptuous women—but still, a beautiful girl.

“I forgot my phone,” Brando says.

Gia frowns. “You never go anywhere without that thing.”

“The battery's dead.” He lies effortlessly, without blinking or fumbling, as though he doesn't care whether anyone believes him or not. Herc watches his performance with a kind of awe. He hired the kid against his better judgment—even in a job interview, Brando was all tattoos and attitude. But he served a tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan, which ought to count for something. This was Herc's thinking at the time.

“I need to talk to you,” says Gia. “Can we go outside?”

“Now?”

“It's important.”

Brando chugs the rest of his beer, half a glass in a few gulps. He drops a crumpled five on the bar. “Be right back.”

“I doubt it,” says Jorge, watching them go.

“Can't say I feel too bad for him.” Legrand drains his glass. “I'd say that's a good problem to have.”

AT MIDNIGHT JORGE AND LEGRAND ORDER ANOTHER ROUND.
Herc excuses himself to take a leak.

“Amateur,” says Legrand, who is famous for never urinating—a skill so valuable, in a derrickman, that they ought to screen for it in the job interview, right along with the drug test. By this measure Legrand is a consummate professional. Never once has Herc shut down the whole show so Vince could descend the hundred-foot mast to piss.

“Time to get your pisser checked,” says Legrand. “Get you some Stream Solutions.”

“Don't give me that,” says Herc. “I know you keep an empty Coke bottle up there.”

“You have insulted my honor,” Legrand says.

From the men's room Herc heads out the back door, to the rear parking lot. In his truck he dials his home number. Colleen answers on the first ring. Sitting, probably, in her usual spot on the sectional, nursing a wine cooler and watching a movie on the Lifetime network, another sensitive melodrama about noble women and the men who abuse them.
The wife-beater channel,
she calls it. She seems to have a limitless appetite for such stories. He's stopped wondering why.

“Honey, it's me.”

Dead silence.

“I wanted to say hi to the boys.”

“It's eleven o'clock.”

Shit.
Even with the time difference, his kids have been in bed for hours. And yet the delay was necessary. He's a better liar with a few drinks in him.

“I guess this means you're not coming.” Colleen sounds fed up, weary. “When were you going to tell me?”

They've had the same conversation, with minor variations, since last summer, through the fall and endless winter. In those months Herc has seen his family exactly three times. Colleen reminds him, often, that this isn't what he promised. Mickey Phipps spends two weeks per month in Texas. Herc, if he wanted to, could do the same.

If.

“I'm telling you now. I got to work next week.”

“No kidding. How'd that happen, Marshall?” As pissed as he knew she'd be. She must be, to use his full name.

Herc pauses for a breath, remembering Brando—deadpan, perfectly relaxed—at the bar. “We're stretched pretty thin here. Nothing I can do about it. My guys aren't too happy, I can tell you that.”

“Oh,
really
? Because I ran into Didi Phipps at the store. She says Mickey's coming home.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“Mickey's not working,” he says, backpedaling. “I got another tool pusher up here can do it. It's the rig manager that's out. I got no one else to run that crew.”

“What's wrong with him?”

Herc's mind races. Food poisoning? Threw his back out?

“I don't know,” he says irritably. “What do I care what's wrong with him? The point is, I got to work. That's going to be forty-two days without a break. Shit fire, Colleen. You think I'm happy about it?”

His irritation seems to convince her. He's been short with her lately; she has come to expect it. Again he thinks of Brando: when all else fails, be a prick.

He's known Colleen exactly two-thirds of his life, since they were both fifteen. She knows him better than anybody ever has or will, and there is comfort in that. There is also boredom, resentment, disappointment, and shame. After so many years, she knows what he is and isn't; the limits of his abilities, his character, and even his love.

“Aw, baby, I'm sorry,” she says softly. “I just miss you is all.”

Herc closes his eyes. “I miss you, too.”

“What do you boys do for fun up there?”

“
Law and Order
is on the TV.”

Colleen laughs low in her throat. “It's always on. You need to get out of that room. Maybe one of the guys will go drink a beer with you.”

“That's an idea. Tomorrow night, maybe.”

“All right, then. I'm running out of steam here. I been up since six.” She makes a kiss noise into the phone. “Call me tomorrow, okay?”

“Will do,” Herc says.

HE'S WORKED IN PENNSYLVANIA TEN MONTHS:
long enough to have a small affection for the place, not long enough for it to take the slightest notice of him. The town was welcoming at first, his Texas plates an easy conversation-starter:
It's a work truck. We're up here drilling.
As the leaves fell, the local mood shifted with the weather, turning cold and sharp. People groused about the detours and roadwork, the truck traffic. The same thing had happened in Shreveport, but in Louisiana he didn't feel like a foreigner. Not since the air force, his year on Okinawa, has he felt so far from home.

And yet home is its own kind of heartache. After two weeks on the rig he forgets how to talk to people, his wife especially. When Colleen meets him at the airport, she seems exhausted, worn down by the kids and, it seems to Herc, a long list of grievances: every
thing he missed in the last two weeks, every essential chore he failed to do. Only his boys seem excited to see him. The boys are the good part—their natural and generous enthusiasm, their authentic, uncomplicated joy.

He waited longer and longer to buy his ticket, until the inevitable happened: at Thanksgiving, at the last minute, every flight was booked. He took his licks from Colleen, then booked a room at the Days Inn and spent the holiday getting hammered with Vince Legrand, whose latest wife had kicked him out for good. Herc spent his hangover sleeping and watching television, savoring the indifference of his motel room, its clean anonymous quiet. This was a new version of himself, or maybe an old one he'd forgotten. As a boy he'd been happiest on horseback, far away from everyone.

His two weeks of freedom stretched before him, eventless days. He rose early no matter his condition, spent two hours in what the Days Inn called the
fitness suite,
a windowless basement room with a battered treadmill and weight bench. He'd lifted weights since high school, the short man's salvation. (He's five six on tiptoe.) This one discipline made him feel better about everything, as though it canceled out whatever nonsense he'd been up to the night before. In the afternoons he took long drives, or wandered the aisles of Walmart. It was in no way a pleasant place to spend time; it was simply unpleasant in a familiar way. In recent years he'd loitered at Walmarts in Shreveport, in Fayetteville, in Casper, Wyoming. Each offered the same merchandise, the same signage, the same sort of friendly old person greeting folks at the door. The clientele, too, was the same: lone women, elderly couples, young mothers with children strapped into shopping carts, clamoring for candy or toys. The sort of regular life a person stops seeing, doing the work he does. Watching them, Herc was acutely aware of his own perversity, spying on regular families in Walmart when his own regular family was waiting for him in Houston.

The sameness of days. The monotony was curiously restorative.
He couldn't say why, but two weeks alone was exactly what he'd needed. For the first time in years he recalled his scripture:
On
the seventh day, he rested.
As a boy he'd decided this was pure human invention, that God, being God, wouldn't need to take a break. The Sabbath was a fabrication by the man wielding the pen, the unnamed Israelite who dreamed up the creation story. Tuckered out by long weeks of fishing the Galilee or growing wheat in the desert, he embroidered this elaborate fantasy, this mother of all excuses, just to get a day off work.

You had to hand it to him.

At Full Gospel Sunday school such insights were unwelcome. By age twelve Herc had the God beat out of him; his father, the preacher, had done the beating himself. Hanging from a hook in the pastor's basement workshop was a wooden paddle he called the Grace Stick, a two-foot length of polished oak he'd carved with those words. And yet grace was God's gift, something you were supposed to want.

Herc could not imagine hitting his own children for any reason. It seemed the opposite of grace.

He might never have stepped inside a church again, if not for Mickey Phipps. Seven weeks ago, the Pittsburgh airport closed for a late-season snowstorm, Mickey had slept on Herc's floor at the Days Inn. When Sunday morning came, he asked the desk clerk about a church.
Not Catholic, not Lutheran. Just plain Christian,
said Mickey.
That's all I am.
Overcome by the black despair of a crippling hangover, Herc agreed to tag along.

They wondered, at first, if they'd botched the directions. Two Hundred Susquehanna Avenue was an empty storefront. Then Mickey spotted a handbill on the plate glass door, printed on somebody's home computer:

Living Waters, a Bible Fellowship.

The Rev. Jess Peacock, Pastor

Inside, a small crowd of locals waited on folding chairs. The plywood altar was draped with a white cloth. No organ, no choir: music was supplied by a boom box set on the floor. The whole business had an improvised feel, a child's playacting. Herc thought of himself at five or six, playing preacher in the barn loft. He'd saved several playmates from eternal damnation, baptizing them solemnly in the creek behind the barn.

When a pretty dark-haired lady rose to the pulpit, it took him a minute to understand what he was seeing. The Reverend Jess Peacock was a woman.

She was dressed in a gray pants suit, the sort of outfit Hillary Clinton had worn in her presidential campaign. His wife, who hated Hillary Clinton, had called the pants suits hideous, but Herc secretly liked them. His upbringing, probably: he liked to see women modestly dressed. Colleen still wore the short skirts she'd favored in high school. Somewhere along the way, she'd gotten the idea he liked them. Maybe he'd complimented her once, to make her happy; maybe he'd even meant it at the time.