Sydney, the chief engineer, a little fireplug of a man who would wear a white T-shirt in a blizzard, sat down heavily with a whistle. “Oh boy, fresh meat.” He squeezed the oiler’s neck.
The steel door next to the starboard triple-expansion engine banged open, letting in a wash of frigid air around the day fireman, pilot, deckhand, and welder who came into the big room cursing and clapping the cold out of their clothes. Through the door the angry whitecaps of Southwest Pass foamed up against a leaden sky.
“Close that damned pneumonia hole,” Raynelle cried, sailing cards precisely before the seven chairs. “Sit down, worms. Usual little game, dollar ante, five-dollar bourrée if you don’t take a trick.” After the rattle of halves and dollars came discards, more dealing, and then a flurry of cards ending with a diminishing snowstorm of curses as no one took three tricks and the pot rolled over to the next hand. Three players took no tricks and put up the five-dollar bourrée.
The engineer unrolled a pack of Camels from his T-shirt sleeve and cursed loudest. “I heard of a bourrée game on a offshore rig where the pot didn’t clear for eighty-three passes. By the time somebody won that bitch it had seventeen hundred dollars in it. The next day the genius what took it got a wrench upside the head in a Morgan City bar and woke up with his pockets inside out and the name Conchita tattooed around his left nipple.”
Pig, the day fireman, put up his ante and collected the next hand. “That ain’t nothin’.” He touched three discards to the top of his bald head and threw them down. “A ol’ boy down at the dock told me the other day that he heard about a fellow got hit in the head over in Orange, Texas, and didn’t know who he was when he looked at his driver’s license. Had amnesia. That sorry-ass seaman’s hospital sent him home to his scuzzbag wife, and he didn’t know her from Adam’s house cat.”
“That mighta been a blessing,” Raynelle said, turning the last card of the deal to see what trumps was. “Spades.” She rolled left on her ample bottom.
“No, it wasn’t no blessing,” the day fireman said, unzipping his heavy green field jacket. “That gal told him she was his sister, gave him a remote control and a color TV, and he was happy as a fly on a pie. She started bringing her boyfriends in at night, and that fool waved them into the house. Fixed ’em drinks. Figured any old dude good enough for Sis was good enough for him. The neighbors got to lookin’ at her like they was smelling something dead, so she and her old man moved to a better trailer park where nobody knew he’d lost his memory. She started into cocaine and hookin’ for fun on the side. Her husband’s settlement money he got from the company what dropped a 36-inch Stillson on his hard hat began to shrink up a bit, but that old boy just sat there dizzy on some cheap pills she told him was a prescription. He’d channel-surf all day, greet the Johns like one of those old dried-up coots at Walmart, and was the happiest son of a bitch in Orange, Texas.” The day fireman spread his arms wide. “Was he glad to see Sis come home every day. He was proud she had more friends than a postman with a bag full of welfare checks. And then his memory came back.”
“Ho, ho, the merde hit the blower,” the engineer said, slamming a queen down and raking in a trick.
“Nope. That poor bastard remembered every giggle in the rear bedroom and started feeling lower than a snake’s nuts. He tried to get his old woman straight, but the dyed-over tramp just laughed in his face and moved out on him. He got so sorry he went to a shrink, but that just cost him more bucks. Finally, you know what that old dude wound up doin’? He looked for someone would hit him in the head again. You know, so he could get back the way he was. He offered a hundred dollars a pop, and in them Orange bars most people will whack on you for free, so you can imagine what kind of service he bought hisself. After nearly getting killed four or five times, he give up and spent the rest of his settlement money on a hospital stay for a concussion. After that he held up a Pac-a-Bag for enough money to get hisself hypmotized back to like he was after he got hit the first time. Wound up in the pen doin’ twenty hard ones.”
It took three hands of cards to finish the story, and then the deckhand in the game, a thick blond man in a black cotton sweater, threw back his head and laughed, ha ha, as if he was only pretending. “If that wadn’ so funny it’d be sad. It reminds me of this dumb-ass peckerwood kid lived next to me in Kentucky, built like a string bean. He was a few thimbles shy of a quart, but he sort of knew he wont no nuclear power plant repairman and more or less got along with everybody. Then he started hanging with these badass kids, you know, the kind that carry spray paint, wear their hats backward, and light their farts. Well, they convinced the poor bastard he was some kind of Jesse James and got him into stealing cell phones and electric drills. He started strutting around the neighborhood like he was bad shit, and soon the local deputies had him in the backseat for running off with a lawn mower. Dummy stole it in December.”
“What’s wrong with that?” the day fireman asked, pitching in a dollar.
“Who’s gonna buy a used mower in winter, you moron. Anyway, the judge had pity on him, gave him a piss-ant fine, and sent him to bed with a sugar-tit. Said he was a good boy who ought to be satisfied bein’ simple and honest. But String Bean hung out on the street corner crowing. He was proud now. A real gangster, happy as Al Capone, his head pumped full of swamp gas by these losers he’s hanging around with. Finally one night he breaks into the house of some gun collector. Showing how smart he is, he chooses only one gun to take from the rack, an engraved Purdey double-barrel, mint condition with gold and ivory inlays all over, a twenty-thousand-dollar gun. String Bean took it home and with a two-dollar hacksaw cut the stock off and then most of the barrel.
“He went out and held up a taco joint and got sixteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. Was arrested when he walked out the door. This time a hard-nut judge sent him up on a multiple bill, and he got 297 years in Bisley.”
“All right,” Raynelle sang. “Better than death.”
“He did ten years before the weepy-ass parole board noticed the sentence and pulled him in for review. Asked him did he get rehabilitated and would he go straight if he’d get out, and he spit on their mahogany table. He told them he wont no dummy and would be the richest bank robber in Kentucky if he got half a chance.” The deckhand laughed again, ha ha. “That give everybody a icicle up the ass and the meetin’ came to a vote right quick. Even the American Civil Liberties Bambi-huggin’ lawyers on the parole board wanted to weld the door shut on him. It was somethin’.”
The pilot, a tall man dressed in a pea jacket and a sock cap, raised a new hand to his sharp blue eyes and winced, keeping one trump and asking for four cards. “Gentlemen, that reminds me of a girl in Kentucky I knew at one time.”
“Why, did she get sent up two hundred ninety-seven years?” the deckhand asked.
“No, she was from Kentucky like that crazy fellow you just lied to us about. By the way, that king won’t walk,” he said, laying down an ace of diamonds. “This woman was a nurse at the VA hospital in Louisville and fell in love with one of her patients, a good-looking, mild-mannered fellow with a cyst in his brain that popped and gave him amnesia.”
“Now there’s something you don’t hear every day,” the engineer said, trumping the ace with a bang.
“He didn’t know what planet he came from,” the pilot said stiffly. “A few months later they got married and he went to work in a local iron plant. After a year he began wandering away from work at lunchtime. So they fired him. He spent a couple of weeks walking up and down his street and all over Louisville looking into people’s yards and checking passing busses for the faces in the windows. It was like he was looking for someone, but he couldn’t remember who. One day he didn’t come home at all. For eighteen months this pretty little nurse was beside herself with worry. Then her nephew was at a rock concert downtown and spotted a shaggy guy who looked familiar in the mosh pit, just standing there like he was watching a string quartet. Between songs her nephew asked him if he had amnesia, w
hich is a rather odd question, considering, and the man almost started crying because he figured he’d been recognized.”
“That’s a sweet story,” the day fireman said, rubbing his eyes with his bear-sized hands. “Sydney, could you loan me your handkerchief? I’m all choked up.”
“Choke on this,” the pilot said, trumping the fireman’s jack. “Anyway, the little nurse gets attached to the guy again and is glad to have him back. She refreshes his memory about their marriage and all that and starts over with him. Things are better than ever, as far as she’s concerned. Well, about a year of marital bliss goes by, and one evening there’s a knock at the door. She gets up off the sofa where the amnesia guy is, opens it, and it’s her husband, whose memory came back.”
“Wait a minute,” the deckhand said. “I thought that was her husband on the sofa.”
“I never said it was her husband. She just thought it was her husband. It turns out that the guy on the sofa she’s been living with for a year is the identical twin to the guy on the doorstep. Got an identical popped cyst, too.”
“Aw, bullshit,” the day fireman bellowed.
The engineer leaned back and put his hand on a valve handle. “I better pump this place out.”
“Hey,” the pilot yelled above the bickering. “I knew this girl. Her family lived across the street from my aunt. Anyway, after all the explanations were made, the guy who surfaced at the rock concert agreed it would be best if he moved on, and the wandering twin started back where he left off with his wife. Got his job back at the iron plant. But the wife wasn’t happy anymore.”
“Why the hell not?” the engineer asked, dealing the next hand. “She had two for the price of one.”
“Yeah, well even though those guys were identical in every way, something was different. We’ll never know what it was, but she couldn’t get over the second twin. Got so she’d wander around herself, driving all over town looking for him.”
“What the hell?” The deckhand threw down his cards. “She had her husband back, didn’t she?”
“Oh, it was bad,” the pilot continued. “She was driving down the street one day and saw the rock-concert twin, got out of her car, ran into a park yelling and sobbing and threw her arms around him, crying, ‘I found you at last, I found you at last.’ Only it wasn’t him.”
“Jeez,” the engineer said. “Triplets.”
“No.” The pilot shook his head. “It was worse than that. It was her husband, who was out on delivery for the iron plant, taking a break in the park after shucking his coveralls. Mild-mannered amnesiac or not, he was pretty put out at the way she was carrying on. But he didn’t show it. He pretended to be his twin and asked her why she liked him better than her husband. And she told him. Now don’t ask me what it was. The difference was in her mind, way I heard it. But that guy disappeared again the next morning and that was five years ago. They say you can go down in east Louisville and see her driving around today in a ratty green Torino looking for one of those twins, this scared look in her eyes like she’ll find one and’ll never be sure which one she got hold of.”
Raynelle pulled a pecan out of her overalls bib and cracked it between her thumb and forefinger. “That story’s sadder’n a armless old man in a room full of skeeters. You sorry sons of bitches tell the depressingest lies I ever heard.”
The deckhand lit up an unfiltered cigarette. “Well, sweet thing, why don’t you cheer us up with one of your own.”
Raynelle looked up at a brass steam gauge bolted to an I beam. “I did know a fellow worked in an iron foundry, come to think of it. His whole family worked the same place, which is a pain in the ass if you’ve ever done that, what with your uncle giving you wet willies and your cousin bumming money. This fellow drove a gray Dodge Dart, the kind with the old slant-six engine that’ll carry you to hell and back, slow. His relatives made fun of him for it, said he was cheap and wore plastic shoes and ate Spam, that kind of thing.” She turned the last card to show trumps, banging up a king. “Sydney, you better not bourrée again. You in this pot for forty dollars.”
The engineer swept up his hand, pressing it against his T-shirt. “I can count.”
“Anyway, this boy thought he’d show his family a thing or two and went out and proposed to the pretty girl who keyed in the invoices in the office. He bought her a diamond ring on time that would choke an elephant. It was a nice ring.” Raynelle looked at the six men around the table as if none of them would ever buy such a ring. “He was gonna give it to her on her birthday right before they got married in three weeks, and meantime he showed it around at the iron foundry figuring it’d make ’em shut up, which basically it did.”
“They was probably speechless at how dumb he was,” the deckhand said out of the side of his mouth.
“But don’t you know that before he got to give it to her that girl hit her head on the edge of her daddy’s swimming pool and drowned. The whole foundry went into mourning, as did those kids’ families and the little town in general. She had a big funeral and she was laid out in her wedding dress in a white casket surrounded by every carnation in four counties. Everybody was crying and the funeral parlor had this lovely music playing. I guess the boy got caught up in the feeling because he walked over to the coffin right before they was gonna screw down the lid and he put that engagement ring on that girl’s finger.”
“Naw,” the engineer said breathlessly, laying a card without looking at it.
“Yes he did. And he felt proud that he done it. At least for a month or two. Then he began to have eyes for a dental hygienist, and that little romance took off hot as a bottle rocket. He courted her for six months and decided to pop the question. But he started thinking about the monthly payments he was making on that ring and how they’d go on for four and a half more years, keeping him from affording a decent ring for this living girl.”
“Oh no,” the pilot said as the hand split again and the pot rolled over yet another time.
“That’s right. He got some tools and after midnight went down to the Heavenly Oaks Mausoleum and unscrewed the marble door on her drawer, slid out the coffin, and opened it up. I don’t know how he could stand to rummage around in whatever was left in the box, but damned if he didn’t get that ring and put the grave back together slick as a whistle. So the next day he give it to the hygienist and everything’s okay. A bit later they get married and’re doin’ the lovebird bit in a trailer down by the foundry.” Raynelle cracked another stout pecan against the edge of the table, crushing it with such ease that the welder and the oiler looked at each other. “But there’s a big blue blow fly in the ointment. She’s showing off that ring by the minute, and somebody recognized the thing and told her. Well, she had a thirty-megaton double-PMS hissy fit and told him straight up that she won’t wear no dead woman’s ring and throws it in his face. Said the thing gave her the willies. He told her it’s that or a King Edward cigar band because he won’t get out from under the payments until he’s using a walker. It went back and forth like that for a month with the neighbors up and down the road, including my aunt Tammy, calling the police to come make them shut up. Finally, the hygienist told him she’d wear the damn ring.”
“Well, that’s a happy ending,” the deckhand said.
Raynelle popped half a pecan into her red mouth. “Shut up, Jack, I ain’t finished. This hygienist began to wear cowboy blouses and jean miniskirts just like the dead fiancée did. The old boy kind of liked it at first, but when she dyed her hair the same color as the first girl, it gave him the shakes. She said she was dreaming of that dead girl at least twice a week and saw her now and then in her dresser mirror when she woke up. Then she began to talk like the foundry girl did, with a snappy Arkansas twang. And the dead girl was a country music freak, liked the classic stuff too. Damned if the guy wasn’t waked up in the middle of the night by his wife singing all eleven verses of ‘El Paso,’ the old Marty Robbins tune, in her sleep.
“This stuff went on for months until he figured
it was the ring causing all the trouble, so he got his wife drunk one night, and while she was asleep slipped that sucker off and headed to the graveyard to put it back on that bone where he took it. Soon as he popped the lid, the cops was on him asking what the living hell he was doing. He told them he was putting a twenty-thousand-dollar diamond ring back in a coffin, and they said, ‘Sure you are, buddy.’ Man, he got charged with six or eight nasty things perverts do to dead bodies, then the dead girl’s family filed six or eight civil suits and, believe me, there was mental anguish, pain, and suffering enough to aggravate the whole county. A local judge who was the dead girl’s uncle sent him up for six years, and the hygienist divorced his ass good. Strange thing was that she kept her new hair color and way of dressing, started going to George Jones concerts, and last I heard had quit her job at the dentist and was running the computers down at the iron foundry.”
“Raynelle, chere, I wish you wouldn’t of said that one.” Simoneaux, the welder, never spoke much until late in the game. He was a thin Cajun, seldom without a Camel in the corner of his mouth and a high-crown, polka-dotted welder’s cap turned backward on his head. He shrugged off a violent chill. “That story gives me les frissons up and down my back.” A long stick of beef jerky jutted from the pocket of his flannel shirt. He pulled it out, plucked a lint ball from the bottom, and bit off a small knob of meat. “But that diamond shit reminds me of a old boy I knew down in Grand Crapaud who was working on Pancho Oil #6 offshore from Point au Fer. The driller was putting down the pipe hard one day and my friend the mud engineer was taking a dump on the engine-room toilet. All at once they hit them a gas pocket at five t’ousand feet and drill pipe come back up that hole like drinking straws, knocking out the top of the rig, flyin’ up in the sky, and breakin’ apart at the joints. Well, my frien’, he had a magazine spread out across his lap when a six-inch drill pipe hit the roof like a spear and went through and through the main diesel engine. About half a second later another one passed between his knees, through the Playmate of the Month and the steel deck both, yeah. He could hear the iron comin’ down all over the rig, but he couldn’t run because his pants was around his ankles on the other side the drill column between his legs. He figured he was goin’ to glory with a unwiped ass, but a cook run in the engine room and cut him loose with a jackknife, and then they both took off over the side and hit the water. My friend rolled in the breakers holdin’ on to a drum of gasoline, floppin’ around until a badass fish gave him a bite on his giblets, but that was the only injury he had.”
Signals Page 34