February (19 page)

What I was saying, John said, is that the trouble now is a guy doesn’t have to think any more. And this can be a danger. It’s not good for the industry, the culture that has developed around safety. They’re like a crowd of old women.

He would not shut up about the rigs and protocols and things none of them wanted to hear.

Safety is a good thing, Helen said.

Nobody spoke. Claire was fiddling with her corsage and a pin dropped on the table.

Did you hear that pin drop, Claire said.

I don’t want to start something, Helen said.

Then don’t start something, Mom, Cathy said. John knows safety is important.

I was just saying, John said.

Shut up about it, John, Cathy said.

What I was saying—

Why don’t you shut up?

Okay, champagne, John said. Can I say champagne?

It was spring and still cold outside, but there was sun, and Claire had been at a beauty salon and she smelled of product.

Let’s get one with your grandmother, Cathy said. Helen put her arm around the girl and drew her in.

Don’t wrinkle me, Claire said.

The champagne cork shot up, hit the ceiling, and fell on the table. A white twirl of foam spewed out of the bottle and Cathy held out a glass, but John put his mouth over the bottle opening and his cheeks bulged out.

The doorbell rang.

He’s here, Claire said. She flapped her hands in front of her face as if she were overheated, and her eyes watered. Her eyes turned, under the glaze of tears, from blue to ultramarine, and the bell rang again. She instantly became matter-of-fact. Somebody answer the door, she said. She put the champagne glass to her lips and crinkled her nose because of the fizz.

Don’t ruin your makeup, Cathy said. She’s ruining her makeup. Tell her not to ruin the makeup.

Don’t ruin your makeup, honey, Helen said.

I’m not ruining my makeup. And they turned, all of them, to greet Claire’s date. But it was Mrs. Conway from down the street.

I came to get a look at you, Mrs. Conway said. The date had not arrived. The conversation juddered back up to a loud volume. Helen looked at the clock on the stove. On the way to the bathroom Helen checked out the front door and stood there, watching the kids playing street hockey.

Her grandson Timmy in the net. Patience getting ready to shoot. The puck flew up hard and hit Timmy, and he bent over it and dropped to his knees and didn’t move. Everybody on the street stood still. Timmy put his hand to his helmet as if his head was too heavy for his neck. Then they were both kneeling, Timmy and Patience. She had her hand on his shoulder, her head bent close to his. They spoke, like that, on their knees. A car came up behind them, headlights in the dusk. They were lit and solemn and lost in something intimate and full of childish innocence.

Then Timmy stood and raised his stick as if he were going to bring it down on Patience’s head and bash her brains out. He raised that stick so fast that Helen caught her breath: Two hands, over his head. Helen cracked the door open to shout, but Patience leapt out of the way and doubled over with laughter and the stick came down on the asphalt with a slap and cracked in two. The kids moved the nets to the side and the car went past, and they moved the nets back.

In the kitchen behind Helen the talk kept getting louder and brighter; there was more laughter. Mrs. Conway told about a case of gout. She’d come down with a case of gout, she literally couldn’t walk, and then she’d thrown out the opposite hip. They all laughed.

The foot and then the hip, Mrs. Conway said. They were roaring with laughter. Someone slapped the table.

In the bloody mall, then, Mrs. Conway squawked. Going with the shopping cart. First one thing, then the other, Mrs. Conway said.

Helen saw the street lights pop on. They flickered and popped, mostly all at once. One or two came on after the others. And then a taxi pulled up and the kids moved the nets again and Helen backed away from the window, just a little, and there the young fellow was in the suit and he was paying the taxi, she could see him in the cab light, and he was what? A half-hour late? Not even. Twenty minutes. She saw him look at the piece of paper and look at the house, and she went back into the kitchen and the doorbell rang.

The talk in the kitchen faltered. It dipped to a near whisper while John answered the door.

And then, there he was. He walked into a crowded silent kitchen and saw Claire with a cracker and a cube of cheese raised to her mouth, the other hand cupped to catch crumbs. Claire lowered the cracker. How pink that dress is, Helen thought. It had taken a month and a half to do the beadwork. They were all waiting for him to say how beautiful, but he was taking Claire in, and the crowded kitchen and the cracker with the cube of very orange cheese and the silence.

You look beautiful, he blurted, and everybody laughed, and Mrs. Conway imitated her gout walk—across the kitchen floor, slopping champagne—and Helen told everyone to serve themselves.

This is ready, she said.

. . . . .

John’s Survival Training, 1992

LIKE ALL THE
other men working on the rigs, John had to get into the simulator. He was wearing the survival suit. He had to strap himself in. There was a small staircase that rose to the shell of a helicopter with chairs strapped to the floor. You punched out a window. You pulled the ribbon and pushed gently with both hands so the helicopter window floated away. That was the idea. You pushed gently or you kicked the shit out of the window.

He broke into a drenching sweat. The survival suit was too warm, the rubber boots too heavy. It was a big suit, with ventilation zippers, but John had zipped everything up. He’d Velcro’ed the polypropylene cuffs. The suit stuck to his calves and his back; it rubbed against his neck. He strapped himself into the helicopter seat.

The instructor’s name was Marvin Healey. Marvin tucked his index finger under the safety belt and lifted it away from John’s stomach and let it slap back against him. Then he patted John on the shoulder.

You’re all strapped in there, Marvin said.

He glanced down at John and must have seen the lines of sweat on his brow and temple. John knew what would follow: they would sink the capsule and water would flood through all the seams, rising in the plastic bubble to cover his feet and legs and groin and chest and neck, and then they would tip it over so John would be upside down, and his face and neck and the rest of him would go all the way under.

It was that covering of the face with how many cubic tons of terror that got him. It closed in on you and pressed and was cloying, and it would be only a number of seconds before it sucked away your life. You had to trust the others to get you out. He had lost consciousness the last time.

Passing out was easy, passing back in was difficult. Passing back in required intuition and faith. Faith cannot be willed. Shame and failure and vomiting were all part of passing back in. You awoke to all that was wrong with you. You were left inside out, all your most private parts showing.

The instructor had introduced himself as Mr. Healey and he had called each man by his last name followed by the first. O’Mara, John. As if he were reading from the clipboard.

Mr. Healey said: I’m looking for a volunteer. O’Mara, John did not volunteer to go first.

Mr. Healey gave a lecture about safety and how it would change your life in ways not necessarily obvious at first, but eventually—Mr. Healey promised—there would be an occasion, such occasions fell into each modern life at least once without warning or fanfare, and then these safety skills would most definitely be required. The men would be grateful, Mr. Healey predicted.

The ordinary survival suit is a man’s best friend on the water, Mr. Healey said. It’s that simple.

As Mr. Healey lectured, John remembered a nun from elementary school talking about a boy who had died near the water fountain when they were in grade three. John had been standing behind Jimmy Fagan, waiting for his turn at the fountain. Suddenly the boy had held the side of his head and staggered to the staircase and clung to the banister as if they were in a rough sea. John remembered the little spigot, the water that bubbled up when you twisted the handle, and the boy, Jimmy Fagan, with his mouth buried in that wet silver arc.

A simple soul, the nun had said. John remembered that. It was what they were to strive towards: simplicity. As far as he had understood it, simplicity entailed a kind of forgetting. Forget that you matter. Or that anything matters.

The surface of the pool behind Mr. Healey was glaring with ceiling light, weaving and unweaving.

They were to strive towards a forgetting equal to the glacial scraping John had learned about in geography that year. A gouging out of anything that was not simple.

Somebody has to go first, Mr. Healey said. He rose twice on the balls of his feet. He was wearing white sneakers and they were unpleasantly feminine. Marvin Healey worked out and the muscles in his chest were like those of a comic-book avenger, and he had a tan, and his hair was incandescent silver. It was an easy shade of grey to associate with wisdom.

Can I have a volunteer, Mr. Healey asked. Only two of the ten men in the class could swim. These men did not volunteer. They were mute.

O’Mara, John: Marvin Healey said. He was looking down over the names on his clipboard. Mr. Healey had divulged personal information about himself now and then during the classes, sometimes by way of instructive anecdote—he had told the men, for example, about his phobia of birds. One day he’d come out of a gas station in Bay Roberts to find a seagull sitting on the front seat of his convertible. He had gone next door to Mary Brown’s and bought a jumbo box of fries to convince the gull to leave the car. He’d called to it and clucked his tongue and stood in the sun, bareheaded, for close to a half-hour, begging the seagull, whispering and praying and tossing fries, and the bird had watched him, thoroughly unmoved. Then Mr. Healey had felt something brush against his pant leg and had looked down to see there were perhaps fifty seagulls at his feet, pressing closer and closer. The lesson, he had told the class, was not to panic.

Mr. Healey gave a little wave to someone in the office and the capsule sank into the pool.

Water has a single imperative. Every drop is hurling itself towards itself always. All water wants is to eat out its own stomach. It flushes through itself and becomes heavier and faster and it plows on, even while remaining still.

There were divers on the floor of the pool, dressed in black rubber, and when viewed from the surface their bodies warbled thin as burnt matchsticks and then ballooned squat and wide.

No man would ever survive the North Atlantic for more than five minutes without a survival suit that fit properly, even if he could swim. And the chances of surviving a helicopter crash, even with the suit, were next to nothing. Every man knew that. They all knew. But each man ever to set foot on an oil rig had to kick his way out of a simulated helicopter crash if he wanted to keep his job.

John and his plastic capsule were dropped into the pool. The water rushed in faster than anything had ever rushed anywhere. It was a property of water—it could move faster than you’d think. It moved all at once. Water came in and John’s head was under and he kicked the door.

He remembered to release the straps, which was better than the last time he’d tried, and then he passed out. Which only meant he would have to do it again.

. . . . .

A Storm, 1980

SOMETIMES HELEN REMEMBERS
how that dog went missing a half-hour before the storm started. The rain fell in straight sheets, without a breath of wind. There were hundreds of thousands of separate sheets, one behind the other, and together they made a translucent wall. The trees at the corner of the lawn warped and wobbled behind the wall of water as if they were in gelatin. The shed was wonky. The rain danced off the flagstones. It struck the stones so hard it might have caused sparks. The water in the dog’s bowl spilled over. It was getting dark and the dog hated the rain. One of the kids had forgotten to shut the back door.

Cal put on rubber boots and an oilskin he had hanging in the back porch, and he took the flashlight. The pale circle cast by the flashlight jiggled all over the grass. He got in the truck and started the engine. Sometimes the sound of the engine was enough to make the dog come. The headlights came on and the rain in the headlights fell very fast and straight like sewing needles.

Helen couldn’t leave the house because the children were asleep. There was lightning and it lit up the bedroom with a stark light that seemed blue-tinged or too white. She went to the window to watch, and the lightning showed the rain outside and it leached the green lawn of colour so that it looked grey and it made the side of the white church, far away on the hill, flash. The ocean went grey and the wild foam on the waves was ultraviolet. It was a spank of unnatural light that lasted too long, and then it fluttered and sucked itself back off the land and the ocean, and everything was darker than before. The thunder rolled a long way. It seemed to roll all the way from Bell Island, across the ocean. It came right up to the lawn. It rolled onto the lawn and boomed there just outside the window. It made the window panes rattle in the old, half-rotted mullions. This was the house they had bought around the bay, and they came out in summer when Cal was off the rig.

Helen had fallen asleep without ever having decided to lie down, and she woke when Cal came back. He leaned against the door frame and wept.

All I can think, he said. He must be trapped or he can’t come home. He doesn’t like the rain. Helen went to hold Cal but he shook her off.

I’m soaking wet, he said.

They’d fought about the dog. They’d fought about it sleeping on the bed. Cal left forks with wet dog food in the sink and the smell made her gag. He let the dog kiss his face. He fed the dog from the table. Cal held a chunk of barbecued steak in the air above the dog’s head and the dog looked up at it and remained very still.