The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(63)

I’m all right.

You been on one of these before?

Yeah, once. Why?

Because if you get any serious seas you cant get aboard them.

You dont think anybody is coming out here.

I’d be surprised.

Western reached in the back for his divebag and climbed out. The light aluminum door hummed in the wind. The wind moaned in the steel rigging overhead and in the light-towers and it moaned in the big Link-Belt cranes.

I’ll take you back if you want, the pilot said. It’s no skin off my ass.

Thanks. I’m all right.

He shut the door and the pilot leaned over and secured the latch and pulled pitch on the collective and the helicopter lifted off the pad. Western stood there with his clothes thrashing about him in the wash of the rotor, watching through squinted eyes as the chopper rose up into the lights and then banked away toward the Florida coast with the navigation lamps dimming and finally vanishing in the darkness.

He shouldered his bag and made his way along the steel catwalk toward the cabin and opened the steel door and stepped over the sea transom into the companionway. He closed the door and secured it with a turn of the wheel and leaned on the table there and took off his steeltoed construction boots and left them in the floor. The operations room was just off to the left. He shouldered his bag and went down the stairs in his sockfeet to the quarters below.

Everything had the look of a ship. The narrow corridors and the gray steel bulkheads. The iron handrails and the lights in their wire cages overhead. But it wasnt a ship and except for the low steady throb of the prime mover deep in the bowels of the rig there was no sound and there was no movement.

He found the mess and the galley and he opened the reefer and got out some sliced corned beef and a loaf of bread. He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk. He left his bag on the wooden picnic table in the mess and wandered through the quarters. The rooms were small and fitted with bunkbeds. The legs set in holes in the floor. Small bathrooms with steel showers and stainless steel commodes of the type used in prisons. He stood in the companionway with the milk and the sandwich. Hello? he called.

He wasnt sure how to get back to the galley. He made his way along the corridors and up and down the steel companionways and finally he came to an outside door. He’d eaten most of the sandwich and he’d drunk the milk and he set the empty glass in a corner and finished the sandwich and then turned the big iron wheel to back off the latch on the sea door.

The wind snatched the door and slammed it against the bulkhead. He stepped out and wheeled the door shut behind him and made his way along the catwalk and down the steel stairs. Below him was the drillingfloor. The tower rose into the windy night and in the overhead lights birds circled mutely and stood against the wind and then turned to be sucked away instantly into the blackness. He leaned against the bulkhead with his jacket popping. There were stinging bits of salt in the air and the whole rig seemed to be adrift and careening through the night sea.

He turned up his jacket collar and went along the deck. He looked in through one of the heavy glass windows bolted into its painted steel frame. He was already very cold and his teeth had begun to chatter. He continued along the bulkhead until the helicopter pad came in sight and then he made his way to the doorway he’d first entered and went in and shut the door and went down to the galley and got his bag off the mess table.

He went along the gangway and took the bunkroom closest to the mess and set his bag on the little desk and switched on the lamp. He sat on the bunk and leaned back against the cool metal wall. A slight electric tremor. He thought he could doze off to it. He sat up and unzipped his bag and got out his fleecelined nylon jacket and laid it out on the bunk. Then he got up and went down to the galley again. He looked through the reefer and the walk-in hoping to find a beer but there was no beer on the rigs. He got out a can of apricots and he looked for a canopener but he couldnt find one. Finally he took a meatcleaver and stoved in the can with the heel of the blade and got a spoon and went back to the bunkroom and sat on the bunk eating the apricots. They were pretty good. He ate some more and then took the can back to the galley and put it in the reefer again. He wandered the lower deck looking into the rooms. He stood listening. Hello? he called.

He went back to his bunk and got out a paperback copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan. He’d never read it. He pulled down the pillow from the upper bunk and fluffed the pillows and lay back and opened the book.

He read the first twenty pages or so and then put the open book on his chest and closed his eyes.

When he woke Hobbes was still on his chest. He lay listening. The sound of the outer storm muted in the structure. Something else. He sat up and closed the book and swung his feet to the floor. It was two twenty in the morning. He put his hand against the cold steel of the bulkhead. The deep heartbeat in the bowels of the rig. Some two thousand horsepower. He got up and went out in his sockfeet and down to the dayroom. He turned on the television. Static and white snow. He tried several channels and then turned it off.

He went back up the companionway and opened the outside door. The wind was in full gale. A high shriek. The sea below the airgap was a black cauldron and the birds were gone. He pulled the door shut and cranked the wheel. He went back to the galley and got the can of apricots and went up the hall to his room and sat on the bunk and ate some more of the apricots and then set the tin with the spoon standing in it on the desk.