by Greg Iles
All seemed fine until a lab test revealed that Lily’s blood had developed antibodies to the fetus’s blood. Lily was Rh-negative, the baby Rh-positive, and because of the severity of their incompatibility, Lily’s blood would soon begin destroying the baby’s blood at a dangerously rapid rate. Carrying Annelise had sensitized Lily to Rh-positive blood, but it was in subsequent pregnancies that the disease blossomed to its destructive potential, growing worse each time. An injection of a drug called RhoGAM was supposed to prevent Rh disease in later pregnancies, but for some unknown reason, it had not.
Waters and Lily began commuting a hundred miles to University Hospital in Jackson to treat mother and fetus, with an exhausting round of amniocentesis and finally an intrauterine transfusion to get fresh blood into the struggling baby. This miraculous procedure worked, but it bought them only weeks. More transfusions would be required, possibly as many as five if the baby was to survive to term. The next time Lily climbed onto the table for an ultrasound exam, the doctor looked at the computer screen, listened to the baby’s heartbeat, then put down the ultrasound wand and met Waters’s eyes with somber significance. Waters’s heart stuttered in his chest.
“What’s wrong?” Lily asked. “What’s the matter?”
The doctor took her upper arm and squeezed, then spoke in the most compassionate voice John Waters had ever heard from the mouth of a man. “Lily, you’re going to lose the baby.”
She went rigid on the examination table. The doctor looked stricken. He knew how much emotion she had invested in that child. Another pregnancy was medically out of the question.
“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “How do you know?” Then her face drained of color. “You mean…he’s dead now? Now?”
The doctor looked at Waters as though for help, but Waters had no idea what emergency procedures might exist. He did know they were in one of those situations for which physicians are not adequately trained in medical school.
“The fetal heartbeat is decelerating now,” the doctor said. “The baby is already in hydrops.”
“What’s that?” Lily asked in a shaky voice.
“Heart failure.”
She began to hyperventilate. Waters squeezed her hand, feeling a wild helplessness in his chest. He was more afraid for Lily than for the baby.
“Do something!” Lily shrieked at the stunned doctor. She turned to her husband. “Do something!”
“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the doctor said in a soft voice that told Waters the man was relearning a terrible lesson about the limits of his profession.
Lily stared at the fuzzy image on the monitor, her eyes showing more white than color. “Don’t just sit there, damn you! Do something! Deliver him right now!”
“He can’t survive outside of you, Lily. His lungs aren’t developed. And he can’t survive inside either. I’m sorry.”
“Take-him-OUT!”
In the four years since that day, Waters had not allowed himself to think about what happened after that-not more than once or twice, anyway. Lily’s mother had been reading a magazine in the hall outside, and she burst in when Lily began to scream. The doctor did his best to explain what was happening, and Lily’s mother tried everything she knew to comfort her daughter. But in the ten minutes it took Waters’s unborn child’s heart to stop, his wife’s soul cracked at the core. The sight unmanned him, and it still could now, if he allowed the memory its full resonance. This was how he had survived the past four years without sexual intimacy: by never quite blocking out the horror of that day. His wife had been wounded as severely as a soldier shot through the chest, even if the wound didn’t show, and it was his duty to live with the consequences.
The ring of the telephone sounded faintly through the French doors. After about a minute, Waters heard Lily call his name. He went inside and picked up the den extension.
“Hello?”
“Goddamn, John Boy!”
Nobody but Cole Smith got away with calling Waters that, and Cole sounded like he already had a load of scotch in him.
“Where are you?” asked Waters.
“I’ve got Billy Guidraux and Mr. Hill Tauzin with me in my Lincoln Confidential. We’re ten miles south of Jackson Point. You think this land yacht can make it all the way to the rig?”
“It hasn’t rained for a few days. You shouldn’t have any trouble. If you do get stuck, you’ll be close enough for Dooley’s boys to drag you in.” Dooley’s boys were the crew working the bulldozers at the well location.
“That’s what I figured. When are you coming down?”
Waters didn’t answer immediately. Normally, he would wait until the tool pusher called and said they had reached total depth and were bringing the drill bit out of the hole before he drove out to the rig location. That way he didn’t have to spend much time doing things he didn’t like. On logging nights-the last few anyway-Cole usually talked a lot of crap while the investors stood around giving Waters nervous glances, wishing the only geologist in the bunch would give them some additional hope that their dollars had not been wasted on this deal. But tonight Waters didn’t want to sit in the silent house, waiting.
“I’m leaving now,” he told Cole.
“Son of a bitch!” Cole exulted. “The Rock Man is breaking precedent, boys. It’s a sign. You must have a special feeling about this one, son.”
Rock Man. Rock. Waters hated the nicknames, but many geologists got saddled with them, and there was nothing he could do about it when his partner was drunk. He recalled a time when Cole had kept his cards close to his vest, but Cole had held his liquor a lot better back then. Or perhaps he was just drinking more these days. For all the pressure the EPA investigation had put on Waters, it had bled pounds out of his partner.
“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he said in a clipped voice.
Before he could ring off, he heard coarse laughter fill the Continental, and then Cole’s voice dropped to half-volume.
“What you think, John? Can you tell me anything?”
“At this point you know as much as I do. It’s there or it’s not. And it’s-”
“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished wearily. “Shit, you’re no fun.” His voice suddenly returned to its normal pitch. “Loosen up, Rock. Get on down here and have a Glenmorangie with us.”
Waters clicked off, then gathered his maps, logs, and briefcase. He kissed Lily on the top of the head as she worked, but her only response was a preoccupied shrug.
He went out to the Land Cruiser and cranked it to life.
Waters was four miles from the location when the rig appeared out of the night like an alien ship that had landed in the dark beside the greatest river on the continent. The steel tower stood ninety feet tall, its giant struts dotted with blue-white lights. Below the derrick was the metal substructure, where shirtless men in hard hats worked with chains that could rip them in half in one careless second. The ground below the deck was a sea of mud and planking, with hydraulic hoses snaking everywhere and the doghouse-the driller’s portable office-standing nearby. Unearthly light bathed the whole location, and the bellow of pumps and generators rolled over the sandbar and the mile-wide river like Patton’s tanks approaching the Rhine.
Something leaped in Waters’s chest as he neared the tower. This was his forty-sixth well, but the old thrill had not faded with time. That drilling rig was a tangible symbol of his will. At one time there were seventy oil companies in Natchez. Now there were seven. That simple statistic described more heartache and broken dreams than you could tell in words; it summed up the decline of a town. Adversity was a way of life in the oil business, but the last eight years had been particularly harsh. Only the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.
He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflectin
g off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up-or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.
Drilling a well represented different things to different people. Even for Waters, who had pored over countless maps and miles of logs, who had mapped the hidden sands, it meant different things. First was the science. There was oil seven thousand feet below this land, but there was no easy way to find out exactly where. Not even with the priceless technology available to Exxon or Oxy Petroleum. In the end, someone still had to punch a hole through numberless layers of earth, sand, shale, limestone, and lignite, down to the soft sands that sometimes trapped the migrating oil that sixty million years ago was the surface life of the planet. And knowing where to punch that hole…well, that was a life’s work.
In the 1940s and ’50s, it hadn’t been so hard. Oil was abundant in Adams County, and quite a few fellows with more balls than brains had simply put together some money, drilled in a spot they “had a feeling about,” and hit the jackpot. But those days were gone. Adams County now had more holes in it than a grandmother’s pincushion, and the big fields had all been found as surely as they were now playing out-or so went the conventional wisdom. Waters and a few others believed there were one or two significant fields left. Not big by Saudi standards, or even by offshore U.S. standards, but still containing enough reserves to make a Mississippi boy more money than he could ever spend in one lifetime. Enough to take care of one’s heirs and assigns into perpetuity, as the lawyers said. But those fields, if they existed, would not be easy to find. No rank wildcatter was going to park his F-150 to take a leak in a soybean field, suddenly yell, This here’s the spot! with near-religious zeal, and hit the big one. It would take a scientist like Waters, and that was one of the things that kept him going.
Another motivator was simpler but a little embarrassing to admit: the boyhood thrill of the treasure hunt. Because at some point the science ended and you went with your gut; you slapped an X on a paper map and you by God went out to dig up something that had been waiting for you since dinosaurs roamed the planet. Other guys were trying to find the same treasure, with the same tools, and some of those guys were all right and some were pirates as surely as the ones who roamed the Spanish Main.
Waters’s Land Cruiser jounced over a couple of broken two-by-fours, and then he turned into the open area of the location. Parking some distance from the other vehicles, he got out with his briefcase and map tube and began walking toward the silver Lincoln parked beside the Schlumberger logging truck. The car’s interior light illuminated three figures: two in the front seat, one in back. Cole Smith sat behind the wheel. Once he spotted Waters, the Continental’s doors would burst open with an exhalation of beer and whiskey, and the circus would begin. As Waters walked, he breathed in the conflicting odors of river water, mud, kudzu, pipe dope, and diesel fuel. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, but it fired the senses if you knew what it added up to.
Suddenly, the driver’s door of the Lincoln flew open, and the vehicle rose on its shocks as Cole Smith climbed out wearing khaki pants, a Polo button-down, and a Houston Astros baseball cap. Cole had been an athlete in college, but in the years since, he had ballooned up to 250 pounds. He carried the weight well; some women still thought him handsome. But when you studied his face, you saw his health fading fast. The alcohol had taken its toll, and there was a dark light in his eyes, a hunted look that had not been there five years ago. Once only infectious optimism had shone from those eyes, an irresistible force that persuaded levelheaded men to take risks they would never have dreamed of in the sober light of rational thought. But something-or a slow accretion of somethings-had changed that.
“Here’s the Rock Man, boys!” Cole cried, clapping a beefy hand on Waters’s shoulder. “Here’s the witch doctor!”
These must be the mullets, Waters thought, as the two visiting big shots followed Cole out of the Lincoln. As a rule, he never used derogatory slang for investors, but these two looked like they might deserve it. There had been a time when he and Cole allowed only good friends to buy into their wells, but the business had gotten too tough to be picky. These days, he relied on Cole to find the money to finance their wells, and Cole’s sources were too numerous-and sometimes too nebulous-to think about. The oil business attracted all kinds of investors, from dentists to mafiosi to billionaires. All shared a dream of easy money, and that was what separated them (and Cole Smith) from Waters. Still, Waters shook hands with them-two dark-haired men in their fifties with Cajun accents and squinting eyes-and committed their first names to memory, if only for the night.
“Everybody’s feeling good,” Cole said, his mouth fixed in a grin. “How do you feel, John Boy?”
Waters forced himself not to wince. “It’s a good play. That’s why we’re here.”
“What’s the upside?” asked one of the Cajuns-Billy.
“Well, as we outlined in the prospectus-”
“Oh, hell,” Cole cut in. “You know we always go conservative in those things. We’re logging this baby in a few hours, Rock. What’s the biggest it could go?”
This was the wrong kind of talk to have in front of investors, but Waters kept his poker face. In two hours they could all be looking at the log of a dry hole, and the anger and disappointment the investors felt would be directly proportional to the degree their hopes had been raised.
“If we come in high,” he said cautiously, referring to the geologic structure, “the reserves could be significant. This isn’t a close-in deal. We’re after something no one’s found before.”
“Damn right,” said Cole. “Going for big game tonight. We’re gunning for the bull elephant.”
He leaned into the Lincoln’s door and pulled a Styrofoam cup off the dash, took a slug from it.
“What’s the upside?” insisted Billy. “No shit. Cole says it could go five million barrels.”
Waters felt his stomach clench. He wanted to smack Cole in the mouth. Five million barrels was the absolute outside of the envelope, if everything drilled out exactly right. The odds of that happening were one in a hundred. “That’s probably a little generous,” he said, meeting Billy’s eye.
“Generous, my ass,” Cole said quickly. “Our Steel Creek field was three million, and John was predicting one-point-five, tops.” He poked Waters in the chest. “But Rock knew all along.”
“So you said,” growled Billy, his eyes on Waters.
“The statistics say one out of twenty-nine,” said Cole. “That’s the odds of hitting a well around here. John’s drilled forty-six prospects, and he’s hit seventeen wells. He’s the goddamn Mark McGwire of the oil business.”
“So you said.” Billy was measuring Waters like a boxer preparing for a fight. “Five million barrels is a hundred and fifty million bucks at thirty-dollar oil. We like the sound of that.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Waters said, his eyes on Cole. “I need to talk to the engineer. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”
He walked up the steps of the Schlumberger truck, a massive blue vehicle packed to the walls with computers, CRTs, printers, and racked equipment. Schlumberger rotated engineers in and out of town pretty often-most of them Yankees-but the man at the console tonight had worked several of Waters’s wells.
“How’s it going, Pete?” Waters handed the engineer a surveyor’s plat showing the well location and name.
A bookish young man with John Lennon glasses looked up, smiled, and answered in a northern accent. “The tool is calibrated. Just waiting to hit total depth.”
“Cole been up here yet?”
“It’s a solid play. But it’s definitely a wildcat. It could shale out.”
“God knows that’s right. Happens to the best of them.”
Waters grabbed a walkie-talkie off the desk and clipped it to his belt. “I’m going up to look at the rig. Holler if you need anything, or if Cole gets to be too much of a pain in the ass.”
Pete grinned. “I’ll do that.”
Waters stood by the river on a patch of gray sand, watching a string of barges plow upstream in the darkness. The spotlight of the pushboat played across the surface of the river like the eye of a military patrol boat, and for good reason. There were sandbars out there that could turn that ordered line of barges into a lethal group of runaways floating downriver with nothing to slow them down but bridge pilings or other vessels.
The spotlight swung past him, then back, and he raised his hand in greeting. The light hung there a minute, then moved on. Waters smiled. The man behind that light was working through the night, just as he was, and that gave him a feeling of kinship. The same kinship he felt with the men working the rig behind him. He had made a point of speaking to the driller and crew when he went up to the rig’s floor. Then he got a Coke from an ice chest on one of the workmen’s trucks. The driller said Cole had brought crawfish and smoked salmon, but Waters didn’t want to spend any more time with Billy and the other mullet than he had to. It was times like this-waiting out the last few hours when the chips could fall either way-that he sometimes questioned his choice of career. And that kind of thinking led to other questions, some better left unasked. But tonight the voice that asked those questions would not stay silent.