The Other Joseph

by Skip Horack

  “This is it?” I asked, and at the sound of my voice the covey went scurrying into a thicket like a herd of pip-­pipping mice.

  Joni put her hand down and began to walk backward toward the stones, the pulled molars of some diseased giant. “Mom says there used to be a bear cage here,” she said. “Like, a hundred years ago. That bear on the state flag —­Monarch —­he was here.”

  “No kidding.”

  She blew a puff of breath into her bangs. “Queen Sierra Club, my mom. For a while every other poem of hers was about the bear grove.”

  None had been in Salted Waters, but a week later I read a ­couple online in the Cybermobile. A short poem called “The Wild Bear Caught,” a long poem called “Modern Druids.”

  “Come with me,” said Joni.

  We went into the clearing. There were no plaques or signposts —­just those misshapen chunks of cut limestone that looked to have been chiseled from a quarry generations and generations past —­and I listened as Joni told me their history. How the stones were from the chapter house of a Spanish monastery that had been dismantled and shipped to America in the 1930s. How, according to her mother, the monks at that plundered monastery had been keepers of “ancient knowledge concerning the earth.” How eventually, mysteriously, some of the medieval stones wound up here: the former site of a cage for a bear called Monarch, one of the last California grizzlies.

  Joni seemed like she had more to say, but then she was interrupted by the hum of her phone. She didn’t answer the call, and from the annoyed look on her face I knew that somewhere, at that same instant, Nancy had a phone in her hand as well. That mother was checking in on daughter.

  So the spell had been broken. If I wanted to learn anything else about the bear grove I would have to find it out on my own. A fallen oak limb was propped sideways over two of the largest and squarest of the stones, and I sat down within a skeleton of branches. “This was worth seeing,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Joni sat next to me on the limb. There were tiny red bumps splashed across her once-­smooth cheek, and her button nose was as red as a burn. Sam had bitten her without even being there. “It’s cool,” she agreed.

  Then my cell began to ring, and the thicketed quail resumed with their warning pips as I dug the phone from my jeans. Several of the tear slips I’d pruned from those Mark Sorensen flyers went ticker-­taping through the air.

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  “What?”

  My phone went silent, and I showed her the number. “Tell me that’s not your mom.”

  “Shit.” Joni shot from the cracked limb, a flushed quail herself. “Shit, shit, shit. She knows. Daniel did this. He —­” And before she’d even finished talking her hand was humming again. She slapped her phone against her thigh as she paced around the bear grove, her white Nikes kicking dead leaves from the dirt. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to call her back or she’ll do something wack.”

  I raked my fingernails across the scaled bark of the oak limb. You could have killed me with a touch right then. All of us poor, tragic Josephs. I guess the brooding part of me always suspected my search for Joni would end in disaster for us both. And now that was happening. I shook my head, stood. “We almost made it,” I said.

  Joni was walking a circle, but then she broke from her orbit and pitched into me, shoved by a ghost. I caught my balance as we hugged, her hands on my chest. She pushed free when our shoulders met, and I don’t remember what all was said in those last hurried, frantic seconds we shared. I know she told me she should be alone during her call to Nancy. I know I didn’t argue with her. I know we had a sudden and pathetic farewell. She ran from the bear grove on the same trail that had brought us there, melting into the trees as I was left behind. My scout had abandoned me, and I shut off my phone. If there was ever a time for me to run as well, but I was untraceable now. Louisiana didn’t want me and California didn’t want me—the whole merciless country didn’t want me—yet the bear grove felt like a sanctuary. So long as I stayed there only Joni could find me.

  And if not, let them come. Let me make my stand in this bizarre, sacred place and go out with some dignity. I waited in the center of the clearing, the occasional pips of one determined quail still scolding, still rebuking, until I heard the crunch of footsteps in the forest behind me. Joni, I thought. She’d gotten lost somehow, taken trail after trail only to get tossed back into the bear grove. Or maybe she understood exactly where she was and where she was going. Maybe she realized I couldn’t beat them by myself, and we would see this fight through together.

  So I turned, but instead of Joni’s Tommy face I saw a skyscraping beanstalk of a man in a wide-­brimmed black hat thrash his way past saplings and enter the bear grove. His head was down, but he was moving toward me, a trench coat draping his reedy frame like the ebony robe of a judge. He carried no bird on his spidery arm that day, but I was certain this was the falconer, the sokolnik. Of course that spooky guy came here. Of course he worshipped here. And though for a brave moment I held my ground among those old oaks and ageless stones —­and though perhaps the falconer only wanted to quickly pray to strange deities and go —­any true courage passed down from my parents went to Tommy, not me. That tall man couldn’t have been as threatening as he looked, but I just couldn’t tell. I have been wrong about so many things.

  PART IV

  The Africa Notes

  But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-­fingered ­people.

  —­JAMES DICKEY, Deliverance

  For the past eight months my new Airstream has been a hotel room in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. I’m two-­weeks-­on, two-­weeks-­off again, albeit on some very different oil rigs. A land rig in the Niger Delta to start, but now: my first stint for a London-­based drilling company on the Mantis 15, a Gulf of Guinea jackup located due south of Bonny Island. The Mantis 15 pulls crew from all over the globe, but somehow I am the only American hand. To these Europeans and Australians and Africans, I’m just the nine-­fingered, soccer-­ignorant Yank who keeps to himself. The long-­haired oyibo with the binder and a backpack full of books. They don’t want to know me yet, and I don’t want to know them. In a way maybe this is what I’ve always been meant for.

  After those months in the hot, humid interior I’m relieved to be on the water again, and every night I’ve found time to put down my pen or my book and go outside to look across the black. From the Mantis 15 the gas flares of the African mainland are like far-­off torches, the lights of scattered platforms and other jackups like near stars. And though there have been radio rumors of pirates in speedboats, to date they have left us alone. We are untouchable here, a planet unto ourselves.

  In January I didn’t turn thirty as a rich man after all. Weeks before —­just as Louisiana was removing my name from the sex offender registry, and at the dawn of the Great Recession —­a ruined and vengeful Mr. Donny Lee shot “financier” and fraud Gil Bean in the neck at the entrance to a Dallas courthouse. My incarcerated accountant/adviser has become a Forbes celebrity vigilante, but most of my money is gone, lost to a Ponzi scheme that stole billions from fish much bigger than me.

  So here I am, four days into a stint that will see me through Christmas, back doing the only job I know how to do. But good-­bye Grand Isle, and good-­bye Gulf of Mexico. Good-­bye Airstream, and good-­bye LeBaron. Sam is living with Malcolm’s family in Louisiana, and there are even more boxes packed into my storage unit now. Leaving that dog was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do, but money can be made sucking dinosaur wine on these West African rigs, and like most of these hands —­from the young Brits always chattering about vacations to Costa Blanca and Thailand, to the local-­content-­hire Nigerians who go on and on about cell phones and marriage —­money is what I need. We’re all small pieces of this Mantis 15 puzzle, on rent to a Big Oil supermajor for almost two hundred th
ousand dollars a day.

  I once dreamed I could choose to have a free-­roaming life of adventure, but whatever the continent, whatever the gulf, there is no real adventure in busting your ass on any oil rig, and it takes more than long hair to be free. So although I am once again a roughneck, I am also a college student. Nicholls State has an online program for rotating offshore workers, and between stints I’ve been taking classes, plugging away at a Thibodeaux associate degree from the desk of a third-­world hotel room. The only dream I have now is that maybe I can start over. Riches have been a false god for me in the past, but all I’m angling for these days is enough of a pocketful to truly be finished with oil patches and begin a new path. Even if I don’t know where I will go, or even what I will next become.

  A slow-­typing paralegal, perhaps —­because in addition to the weaselings of that Texas grifter Mr. Donny Lee decided to Jack Ruby, there’s another stomach punch I’ve had to contend with. The fucking law. In August Louisiana limited felony “carnal knowledge of a juvenile” to when the difference in age between an Eliza Sprague and a Roy Joseph is four years or greater. So the way the criminal code is now I never would have been an RSO in the first place. Lionel Purcell once told me that triumph without struggle means nothing. And though I’m not an alcoholic, and though every Russian novel I’ve read has been tedious, the past is the past, and I try not to think about what might have been.

  Joni, my Gettysburg. After the bear grove I locked Karen Yang’s keys in the apartment and didn’t turn my phone on for two days. I was crossing arid badlands, bound for Grand Isle, as Nancy’s voice mails stabbed at my ear. Dumped by Joni, Daniel had betrayed me to Nancy —­betrayed me in the exact fashion I had promised not to betray him —­and when I finally called Nancy she was still furious, but she was fair. Somehow Joni had been able to convince her I was no monster, and Nancy agreed to give me the opportunity to redeem myself by staying away. This time the terms of my plea deal, my surrender, my retreat, are more reasonable. Until Joni is through with high school I will cut off all contact with her or say hello to a restraining order. But beyond that, I am Joni’s decision to make.

  Then Joni got on the phone. She told me that a year and a half wasn’t that long to wait. That in the interim her notebook and recollections could be enough. And out of respect for her mother, and equal parts anxiety and fear, I haven’t bothered her since. I have a number in my head, and when my bank account hits that mark I’ll return to America. I will reclaim my old buddy Sam, and eventually —­if I’m certain I’ll conduct myself better, that I won’t act so goddamn cagey and scared —­maybe I will make another trip to see her, if she asks.

  I hate to admit this, but right now I imagine Joni the same as I imagine Tommy. She is a memory drifting further and further away. But if nothing else, I am a man who can wait.

  Months ago I began taking what I call notes. A comp assignment gone haywire for this born-­again freshman. I started by telling my life story to myself, but what I really wanted to make sense of was my failed attempt to rejoin the world. The things I might have done differently. The things I couldn’t have helped. I felt as if if I wrote that down I could get rid of it, and now those stories are all told. Going forward, the things I write of will be new things.

  This morning I spent the first hour of my seven-­to-­seven tower tripping pipe on the rig floor, then another two assisting with the scheduled maintenance of the mud pumps —­and after being holed up in that pump room, on break I needed to be somewhere open to beat back the claustrophobia. And the helideck is the best place for that on any rig. Ours juts from the northwest corner of the Mantis 15 like a big green stop sign, and though hands aren’t supposed to be loitering on helidecks, I’ll keep going there until they catch me.

  I dropped my hard hat and tied my hair back, took off my safety glasses and my gloves. A slanting, wire-­mesh fence bordered the perimeter of the helideck, and I walked toward the Americas in greased and muddy coveralls. Close to the edge, but not too close, just enough so I could look down into near waters below. The legs of the Mantis 15 have the jackup pinned to the Gulf of Guinea bottom, and there is always magic in watching bobbing seas slide by all around and not feeling even the slightest of a rocking or a sway. Like the earth is turning without me. The decay of the silted Niger was at battle with the salt of the blue, and cool, dry Harmattan winds were blowing their smog of Sahara dust over everything. The sun was high, the hazy sky the color of pioneer denim, and through the dust-­fog of that trade wind I could see the fins of requiem sharks patrolling for mackerel and rig trash. In the daylight there is so much more to look at here, so much more to tell.

  I was at the very top of all those stacked things —­Gulf, rig, helideck —­but soon my break was ending. The seas are always moving, of course, and they were still moving then, the waters that had been under me before now far, far away. My face was gritty with dust swept from a distant desert I would probably never see, and I thumbed at my eyes. I was hunting my hard hat. I was ready to continue servicing our mud pumps. Hour after hour of replacing worn gaskets and valves, liners and pistons.

  My life has been a series of flights in search of safe havens and culverts, and I can feel something coming for me even now, actually. But I’m trying not to be afraid anymore. It doesn’t always have to be something bad, I keep telling myself. For once it might just be something beautiful.

  AFTERWORD

  And then, three years ago, on that Christmas Day off the coast of Africa, Roy vanished. A war came for my brother like a war came for me.

  According to a senior Nigerian naval officer generous enough to correspond, the pirates selected December 25 for reasons both practical and symbolic. First and foremost, Captain Bolewa surmised, their leaders —­secretive figures viewed as warlords by some and Robin Hoods by others —­likely presumed, not altogether incorrectly, that the pirates would encounter a distracted and somewhat reduced crew as they attempted to seize the Mantis 15, the last known place Roy was seen alive. And although no one ever took official credit for the Mantis 15 assault, Captain Bolewa was confident the pirates were aligned with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. This militant group claims to oppose the exploitation and oppression of the ­people of the Niger Delta, and the devastation of the natural environment, by partnerships between the government and oil corporations, and months earlier MEND had initiated Operation Hurricane Barbarossa —­an ongoing string of actions intended to bring down the oil industry in the region pursuant to an “oil war” targeting pipelines, facilities, and work sites. In Christmas, Captain Bolewa speculated, MEND saw an occasion to send a message of defiance to the West.

  Which returns me to Roy, Christmas Day, and the Mantis 15. An Australian named Liam Simms remembers tranquil seas and a battered twenty-­foot panga with a two-­hundred-­horse outboard. The speedboat came in fast out of the setting sun, and there were eight pirates in total. Fatigues and bandoliers. Black balaclavas. They carried Kalashnikovs and machetes and, on the shoulder of a pirate in the bow of the now-­idling panga, an RPG he kept leveled on the Mantis 15 as another man spoke broken-­English, surrender-­or-­be-­fired-­upon demands through a bullhorn.

  BSX Drilling had employed a tactical security team to provide for the safety of the Mantis 15 —­as was done for most, if not all, significant drilling rigs in the Gulf of Guinea —­and the Mantis 15 team was comprised of four former special forces types of various units and nationalities, led by Simms, an ex-­sergeant from Australia’s 2nd Commando Regiment. It was Simms who went on the loudspeaker to direct the crew to collect on the far side of the rig while the security team took defensive positions. And it was Simms who presented himself unarmed at the railing, shouting down to the bullhorn man as he tried to calm the masked, faceless pirates in the speedboat fifteen meters below.

  The primary, immediate threat was the pirate in the bow with the RPG, as a well-­placed warhead would have unleashed hel
l on the Mantis 15. But to surrender the rig to pirates was only a slightly less frightening prospect. Accordingly, Simms continued to buy time until —­and I am speculating here —­a corporate office monitoring the situation from thousands of miles away radioed in orders, and a member of the security team shot the RPG pirate in the chest with an M4.

  The fighting ended quickly. Two pirates who opened up with Kalashnikovs were also killed, and a fourth was shot as he lifted the dropped RPG. He fell forward with it into the water, and seeing the RPG lost overboard, the other pirates chucked their weapons. Simms had his men hold their fire, so what would have been a turkey-­shoot massacre was avoided. Still, three pirates lay dead in the speedboat and one was in the Gulf, hurt and bleeding, fighting to keep his head above surface, treading water but only barely.

  But the pirates had a contingency plan, apparently—because then a man sitting on the gunwale of the panga began popping and tossing floating smoke canisters to provide cover. The orange smoke billowing from the gap between the speedboat and the rig, as well as the fading light of sunset, made it difficult for Simms to describe what happened next. What he does know is that my brother and another crew member, a Nigerian cook, came alongside him at the railing. Simms warned them back, fearful there might be more shooting, but Roy, and the cook, stayed there with him, looking into the darkness and the smoke. Almost zero visibility, yet they could hear the splashings of the pirate in the water. The cook and then Roy grabbed life rings and threw them blindly into the Gulf, but the wounded pirate was screaming now. Simms moved over to the cook, about to push him out of harm’s way, when he saw the American with hair “like a Gypsy Joker” biker climb the railing and point down at something.

  The pirate in the drink had gone quiet, and Simms recalls Roy glancing back twice before flipping off his hard hat and jumping, disappearing, into the orange of that smoke cloud. “He seemed angry,” Simms told me. “Not afraid, not crackers —­cut-­snake mad. And then he went over like he was a bloody lifeguard.” Maybe a minute later, Simms heard the speedboat’s outboard throttle up and drone away.