The Other Joseph (2 page)

M
Y NAME IS ROY JOSEPH, AND I HAVE NINE FINGERS
. Five on my right hand, four on the other. The pinkie is the one missing. I lost it two summers ago on a jackup drilling rig that stood in two hundred feet of green Gulf of Mexico water—about thirty nautical miles south of Grand Isle, Louisiana, and the Airstream travel trailer I once called home. I think of melted wax whenever I look at the scar, or the hard white fat that runs along the side of a raw strip steak.

September 2007. The Loranger Avis. A steel island of heat, sweat, and noise. Everything is heavy there, and everything can bite you. The Loranger Avis had been situated where the continental shelf drops off into the Mississippi Canyon. Go a little farther south and the real deepwater starts—instead of jackups and fixed platforms, out that way you'll find drill ships and semi-submersibles, other kinds of floaters.

So there I was on the edge of the North American continent, twenty-nine years old and working the second morning of a two-week stint. Three hours into a twelve-hour tower. Just a few days before, I'd received an e-mail from someone claiming to be my dead brother's daughter. More about that later, but that's where my head was. I was layering a fresh spool of quarter-inch wire evenly across the slow-rolling drum of an electric hoist, and thinking on
that e-mail, when another roughneck—Malcolm, a weight-lifting Cajun—sang out. We were fifty feet above the Gulf, and it was as loud as it always is up top. There was no understanding what Malcolm was saying, but he was pointing behind me. I shut the hoist off and turned around. A long sport fisher was coming up on us, a teal Contender powered by triple 250 Yamahas. Nothing unusual. The legs and substructures of offshore jackups and fixed platforms create sort of a reef beneath the surface, and that shelter brings the forage fish that in turn attract snapper and grouper and sports.

Malcolm came over and we watched the boat drop from its plane, settling into the water as it skidded to a stop. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar setup, and a fucking kid was driving. I figured he was around twenty. His buddy, as well. They were both shirtless, had gelled hair and lifeguard tans. The first-mate pal moved up to the bow holding an aluminum rig hook like a shepherd's staff. He was wearing white shorts and black sunglasses.
Risky Business
Tom Cruise Wayfarers, I think. The driver positioned the Contender on the lee side of the Loranger Avis, and Cruise snagged his hook onto one of the legs of the jackup.

They had a rope tied to the rig hook. The outboards died, and the current pulled the Contender away. Cruise let the rope play out from his hands, and when they were ten yards back he hitched to a front cleat and the rope went tight. Only the bow was facing us, and though I couldn't see an autograph I had a good enough hunch—
Cash Flow, Boy Toy, First Strike
—some bullshit like that. Allowing boats to do this is against policy on most any drilling rig, especially since 9/11, but our toolpusher wasn't up for getting on the loudspeaker and bouncing them yet. We take our shots where we can, and that's a game some pushers enjoy—letting the sports go through the trouble of tying on before hollering at them to break off.

The Gulf was as smooth as a forest lake, and the two rich kids were in the stern being cool together when a sweat-soaked roustabout
came sidling up to me and Malcolm. He was new to the oil patch, no older than the boys in the boat. I can't remember his name, and I'm not sure I ever knew it. Worms, we called these greenhorns. They'd shaved most of his hair off the day before; his hard hat was loose and wobbling.

The roustabout pointed at the Contender. “Sweet, huh? That a thirty-six-footer?”

I nodded just to be nice. I was a worm once. All us hands had started out there. “Yeah. That's a thirty-six.”

Malcolm was less patient. He was glaring at the kid. “You need something, worm?”

The roustabout took a step back, even blushed a click. “No sir.”

Malcolm rolled his cinder-block head around, letting some idea wash over every part of his brain. “Well,” he said, “we need something from you. Find Owen and tell him we want the key to the V-door. Don't fuck it up.”

The roustabout said, “You bet,” and hustled off. It was all grab-ass, snipe-hunt foolishness. Owen would send him to Jimbo, and Jimbo would send him to Mud Duck, and Mud Duck would send him to Darius. Eventually the kid would work his way back to us empty-handed, and if he had any sense at all, realize the V-door of a drilling rig isn't an actual door. No hard feelings. Like I said, we'd all spent time as worms.

I looked down at the Contender. The boys were baiting free lines for amberjack and maybe cobia when the forward cuddy opened and out came two girls. Blondes. I knew then that, policy or no policy, we weren't going to be treated to any runoffs over the loudspeaker from the toolpusher, a man sitting high above us in an air-conditioned office, no doubt studying on those girls same as me. He was hidden behind tinted windows, but I could picture him up there in his clean clothes, binoculars in his hands.

Malcolm was watching the girls too. He'd been clutching the sleeve of my coveralls ever since they appeared. They were
wearing purple gym shorts and neon swimsuit tops. One tangerine, the other flamingo. The girls lit cigarettes and popped wine coolers, put their thin arms around each other and began siren-swaying to a song I couldn't hear. The rich boys grinned at them but kept at that tough labor they were doing. They already had two free lines cast, and they were prepping deep-sea rods when the girls grabbed beach towels and danced their way to the bow.
LSU
was written in gold letters on the asses of their shorts, and I imagined scratching out my own message to drop onto them:

I used to be a Tiger myself, y
'
all. Made the Dean
'
s List my first semester and sat in classrooms with princesses like you. So I
'
m not the born-trash moron you think I am. Hell, a decade ago your kind copied my notes, invited me to parties.

The girls spread their towels across the flat bow, and I saw one of them had a bottle of suntan lotion tucked in her waistband. That killed me, especially with thirteen days left in my stint. Not lust—just the stinging ache that comes with witnessing the carefree and beautiful and unknowable exist in my same world. But it was also nice, in a way, having them there to help move my thoughts, even if for a moment, away from the out-of-nowhere e-mail that had been tearing at my mind.

So the boys fished, and the girls sunned. And Malcolm and I were looking down on them when the blonder of the blondes smiled up at us. Then she said something to her friend, and they both did a yoga curve, pulled off their shorts. Seeing them in their bikini bottoms was too much for Malcolm. He brought his hard hat against mine and yelled into my ear. “If she winks, she'll screw,” he said. “Am I right, Roy?”

If she winks, she'll screw. Rig chatter. That's what we say when we get a seized pipe connection to loosen a bit, means we'll be able to twist it off sooner or later. I shed my work gloves, let my
hands breathe. “Yeah,” I told him. “They should start climbing to us before long.”

Malcolm's face was like a question mark. I can be a soft talker. A mumbler too, at times, but he slapped my chest and wandered off. I stayed put, still looking at the girls. They were propped on their elbows, eyes masked by enormous sunglasses. Enough. I switched the hoist on so it could eat more wire, but then I took another peek at them. The shiny blondes leaned their heads back in sync, showing their throats as they stared at the sun, and I pretended they were watching me like I was watching them. I wondered what they saw. A shaggy-haired, gloves-in-the-mouth gargoyle in steel-toed Red Wings and fire-resistant coveralls, safety glasses and a white hard hat.

Then I did something incredibly stupid. I forgot my surroundings for a second—all it takes—and let my hand rest on the drum of the hoist I was supposed to be watching. I felt nothing really, just a tug and a sudden burn before I jerked away. I looked and saw the thin wire had sheared my little finger off right where it met my hand. My snipped pinkie was lying there on the grate, and even as I was bending to pick it up, I was thinking, No huge deal, the doctors can fix this. I've seen worse out here in the oil patch, much worse.

And I almost had the finger when Malcolm came running. Apparently he'd spotted me there, doubled over and bleeding. He meant well, but that was more bad luck for me. His boots shook the grate, jostling my pinkie, and all I could do was stand there and watch as it slipped through a crack and went plummeting down into the Gulf beneath us, really not so far from where those girls lay sunning.

I sat cross-legged on the grate and let Malcolm hop to. He'd been in the Marine Corps and could play hero when necessary. Someone had tossed him gauze from a first-aid kit, and he held my left arm over my head as he wrapped the hand. The pain had
showed up, and the alarm had been sounded. The crew was all gathered around, and a few of them were wearing life jackets because you never know. By then hurt had me blabbering nonsense, and most of the guys were looking away so as not to humiliate me. We weren't allowed to smoke except in the smoking room, but Darius put an unlit cigarette between my lips. I guess he thought that might help me get calm. My right hand had latched onto a pair of scissors that had fallen out of the first-aid kit, and Darius asked if he could take them from me. I nodded, and then I think I was about to really break down when I caught sight of the wide-eyed roustabout. Someone had put one of those little orange safety cones on top of his hard hat without him knowing it. Coned him, as we say on the rigs. Another Loranger Avis game. We'd been doing that to each other all summer. The roustabout was looking at me horrified and wailing, Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow—but I couldn't take a coned worm seriously.

So I started laughing as I went into shock. Laughed even though I hardly ever laugh. Laughed even though I knew I'd gone and fucked myself. It was an hour before the Air Med meat wagon arrived to take me to Lady of the Sea, but the Contender was still attached to us when the helicopter began its slow descent. The girls hurried from the bow as the bird touched down on the helideck, the wind from the rotor blades spiraling their yellow hair. I saw the three outboards bubble to life, and Tom Cruise went up front to free the rig hook. Jimbo had given one of the medics my duffel bag, and they were leading me toward the helicopter when the Contender took off west. Finally I glimpsed the name painted across the hull of that big goddamn boat.
The Great Wide Open.
Picture that scrawled in bold, black cursive.

M
Y BROTHER TOMMY AND I GREW UP ON A FARM
in the tiny north Louisiana town of Dry Springs, on eleven acres that bordered a large tract of pine forest belonging to a paper company. Two fenced pastures and a barn, a vegetable garden and a pond and a ranch-style house. My parents were teachers at the high school (Mom, science; Dad, history). Almost-hippie types, at least in a back-to-the-land sort of way, and bookish. Farming was something they enjoyed, and at different times we had cattle and sheep, horses and honeybees. As a boy our dog was a heeler named Blue, and as a teenager, Rocky the Catahoula. There were always chickens and barn cats, and every fall we took three hogs to Mencken's Slaughterhouse.

Both of my parents had been raised in Natchitoches Parish, on opposite sides of the Cane River, the only children of families that had hated each other for generations. Dad was Romeo to Mom's Juliet, and their forbidden teenage romance turned into something even more earnest and determined while they were in college together at Northwestern State. Right before graduation they married at a courthouse, and taking teaching jobs in Dry Springs had been their way of leaving Natchitoches Parish and their snarling kinfolk behind for good. They'd been disowned—orphaned, for all
intents and purposes—and Mom was pregnant with Tommy when they moved onto the farm. She gave birth to him at the hospital in Ruston, the closest city to Dry Springs of any real size, and eight years later I came along, their “surprise” baby.

Our farm was flat level except for at the back of one pasture, near the pond, where a tube of ground about six feet high and ten feet wide came snaking out of the pinewoods for thirty yards. For some reason, before I was born even, my father named that mysterious buckle of land after the place he claimed the Civil War had been lost. Cemetery Ridge. Dad used to say that Lee, sickened by the hell at Gettysburg, had leaned way too much on religion, deciding if victory for the South was God's will they'd be able to take that high ground. So a faith experiment, in Dad's opinion. A faith experiment by a man known as much for his self-control as for his piety. A man who had finished West Point without a single demerit. A man not prone to acting rashly. An honorable mistake, but a mistake all the same. “General Lee,” Pickett had cried, “I have no division now.” Generals gamble, and boys die.

So for years that was my family's joke name for our own miniature ridge—all the way up until the winter day in '88 when a briar-scratched graduate student from New Orleans came calling. He went by Ethan, if memory serves, and he was convinced Cemetery Ridge was actually a small section of an ancient Indian mound that lay mostly in those paper company pines. For the past month Ethan had been roaming all through that corporate forest on the sly, surveying and taking soil samples, and now he was hoping we would let him poke around on our land as well.

“Guy's a homo,” Tommy whispered to me.

My brother's hair was long and ragged that winter, and when he talked he'd hook a finger through his brown bangs to keep them off his face. That impish grin. High school Tommy always looked like a surfer to me. Some
The Lost Boys,
California kid now stuck in Louisiana.

“A dork,” I said, ten years old and wanting to play too.

Tommy snorted, then laughed.

“Frick and Frack,” said Dad. “Quiet.”

At first I think our father, being a history teacher, was embarrassed he hadn't seen Cemetery Ridge for what it might really have been, but in the end his curiosity won out over his pride, and he threw in with Ethan. Dad and Tommy and I spent the day with him in our pasture, watching the surveying of Cemetery Ridge, and a month later Ethan came to show us an aerial photo that had the contours of the entire spread-eagle hill drawn on it in white grease pencil. We saw the outline of a creature flattened like roadkill in the pinewoods. The hill had four legs and a head, and the tip of a long and curling tail trespassed onto our property. This was maybe a thirty-five-hundred-year-old effigy mound, Ethan told us. A very rare thing. Older than Stonehenge. Older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. In fact, except for a dirt bird over in Poverty Point, he didn't know of another effigy mound in all of Louisiana. I thought I was looking at a weasel, but Ethan was thinking panther. It might even be a prehistoric depiction of the Underwater Panther, he explained—a water monster many Native American tribes were documented to have worshipped.

But after that we never heard from Ethan the grad student again. Maybe he got his Tulane Ph.D. and left for some far-off place. Maybe he stopped believing. At one point Dad was communicating with archeologists from the state, but they were dubious. Though north
east
Louisiana does have a number of Indian mounds, those state archeologists thought our hill in Lincoln Parish sat a shade too far west to be an Indian mound of any sort, much less an effigy mound. Still, they seemed interested enough until the paper company bosses got involved. Political strings were pulled. No one was getting access to their land without a judge's order, and eventually that hill was forgotten by everyone but us Josephs.

And perhaps the hill wasn't some outlier Indian mound but a trick of geography. Maybe a hill was just a hill, I mean. Nevertheless, my father would spend a good portion of the nine years he had left on this earth obsessed. What was once Cemetery Ridge became the tail of the Panther Mound to him, and that same June, the day Tommy departed for basic training—choosing the navy over college and breaking my parents' hearts—Dad gave us each a little steel vial strung on a neck chain. A silver necklace for Mom, dog-tag ball chains for me and him and Tommy. The vials were about an inch and a half long and had been filled with Panther Mound dirt. Tommy is leaving us, said Dad. But this is our home, and this is our family. We'll keep these on us to remember that.

Tommy wept. A thing I'd never seen. Then he hugged our parents good-bye and punched me in the arm. He earned his SEAL Trident at nineteen just like he promised, and less than three years from that arm punch he would deploy during the buildup to Desert Storm. One of those four vials probably tumbles along somewhere in the Persian Gulf now. Another two lie buried in Louisiana. That only leaves mine. And though I'm no warrior, and though I suspect this stolen dirt may be cursed, I'll die too before I let anyone free it from my neck.