Call me,she’d said, her smile wide.Let’s do this again properly.
That had been a year ago. Maybe more.
I’d told myself I was busy. I’d told myself that building this department from the studs up required every spare second of my breath. I’d looked at her name in my contacts a dozen times and promised I’d do it tomorrow. I’d lived forty-five minutes away for three years, and I’d acted like we were on different continents.
Call me, she’d said. I hadn’t.
And now, I never would.
Chapter Seven
Jack
Forty feet up and the wind was a living thing. Below, the platform spread out in steel and noise and pipeline, the flare stack punching fire into a sky that didn't care. North Dakota in March. The horizon was a straight line in every direction, which sounds like freedom and isn't.
I was on the monkey board when the string came up. Each stand rose out of the hole and I'd reach out, grab the wet steel, swing it into the fingerboard and latch it home. Ninety feet of pipe per stand, the whole string shuddering as it cleared the rotary table below. You had to time it right. Too early and the pipe took you with it. Too late and you were chasing it, and chasing pipe on a derrick was how men lost fingers. Or lives.
I didn't think about the timing anymore. My hands just knew.
The drill floor was a roar of diesel and white-blue light, but up here, it was just the wind. It came off the flats without apology, finding the gap in my collar and the grit in my gloves. It bit at the three-day growth I hadn't bothered to shave, and I didn't mind the sting. There was something comforting about weather that didn't pretend to be anything but cold.
Another stand came up. I reached, grabbed, swung, latched.
Below me the crew moved through their work and I moved through mine. Roughnecks on the drill floor, the driller at his console, the mud logger in his little cabin off to the side watching the samples come up from two miles underground. An oil well in progress. Organized chaos if you knew what you were looking at. Just chaos if you didn't.
I came down when the string was fully racked. Hand over hand on the ladder, the steel cold through my gloves, the wind dropping as I cleared the derrick. Back on the drill floor someone nodded at me and I nodded back and we left it there.
The afternoon went. A pressure check on the mud pumps. Lunch in the bunkhouse. Two more hours helping break out the BHA when the bit came up worn to the nub. By the time the shift ended my back had its own opinion about the day, and it wasn't a good one.
I grabbed my jacket off the hook in the dry shack and walked to the north side of the platform where the noise of the rig felt a little more distant. The sun was dropping over the flats, the light turning that color it only did out here—not golden, not warm. Something thinner, almost like a bruise. The flare stack threw orange against it and the shadows ran long and jagged across the snow.
A few years back I'd have had a beer in my hand right now. Earlier than that, something stronger. There'd been a winter in Whitehorse where I'd done more damage than I liked to think about, and a stretch in Montana before that which didn't bear examining too closely. I wasn't proud of those years. I also wasn't sure I regretted them exactly. They'd been something to move through and I'd moved through them.
Now I just sat.
The flats ran to nothing in every direction. I'd been places that were beautiful—the coast up near Ucluelet, a logging camp in the Rockies where the mountains did something to the lightthat didn't seem real. This wasn't that. This was just flat and cold and indifferent, and I'd been here six months, which was longer than some and shorter than others. One day I'd move on from here too and it would blur into the rest of them.
I didn't think about what I was moving away from anymore. That was the work of a younger man.
Roy found me twenty minutes later, still in his hard hat, gloves stuffed in his back pocket. He had something to say and wasn't sure it was his business to say it—you could see it in his face.
"That phone of yours has been going off since before supper," he said. "You left it in the dry shack. Kid on days kept coming to find me about it, didn't know what else to do with himself." He shrugged. "Figured you'd want to know."
"Thanks Roy."
He nodded and stood there a second longer than necessary, deciding whether something was his business or not. Then he pulled his gloves on and walked back toward the bunkhouse.
I didn't move right away.
The thing was, my phone didn't go off. That was just the shape of it—a few numbers from previous rigs, men I'd worked alongside and liked well enough and never called. Nobody who'd ring twice let alone all afternoon. There was just one exception to that and there had only ever been one.
Cassie would call. She was the one person I'd kept the same number for—twelve years, every rig, every state, the same ten digits. So she could always find me. Last time we'd spoken she'd been telling me about Lily, some story about school that had made her laugh while she was telling it. I'd listened, smiling at nothing, and felt the ache of a life happening somewhere without me in it.
She wouldn't call all afternoon unless something was wrong. And in my family, "wrong" usually had a long reach.
I got up.
The dry shack was too warm after the platform, the heat from the electric baseboard hitting me before I was fully through the door. A couple of guys were at the table, cards out, not really playing. Someone had the TV on low in the corner, the flickering light making their faces look grey.