The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(64)

The first time that he saw her at the hospital she came shuffling up the hallway in the paper slippers they’d issued her and she smiled thinly and took his hand. When he came the next day he handed her a package but she wouldnt take it.

Why? he said.

I know what’s in it.

What’s in it?

Slippers.

Okay.

I like these. I’m sorry, Bobby. You’re sweet to bring them. But I dont want them. I dont want to be different.

But you are different.

No. I’m not. In any case if I wanted to be who I am I wouldnt be some person wearing special slippers.

Maybe we should talk about something else.

He lay back on the cot with his arm over his eyes. I shall not die for thee oh woman of body like a swan. I was nurtured by a cunning man. Oh thin palm, oh white bosom. I shall not die for thee.

He fell asleep turned to the cold steel wall, his face in his hands.

He slept and woke again and lay listening. The thrumming in the walls. He thought that what he was hearing now was the storm. He got up and went up to the jackhouse and looked out the window. A wild salt spray blowing across the catwalks and through the superstructure. The sodium lights were steaming. He turned the iron wheel and put his shoulder to the door and leaned against it. Out in the torrential night a continual highpitched scream and blinding rain. He pulled the door shut and turned the wheel. Good God, he said.

He went down and wandered through the crew’s quarters on the third deck below. At one point the lights flickered and he stopped and stood still. Dont do this, he said.

The lights steadied. He turned and went back to the cabin and rummaged a flashlight out of his bag and shoved it in his back pocket and went out again. When he came back he had a bowl of ice cream and he sat in the bunk and crossed his legs and took up Hobbes again. He went to sleep with the lights on and when he woke it was day.

He went topside and stood looking out at the storm. Whole sheets of spray were passing over the decks. The entire rig was shuddering and seas were lapping at the bridge rails from forty feet below and falling back again. He went down and sat on the bunk and dug out his shavingkit and his toothbrush. Then he just sat there. He had an uneasy feeling and it wasnt the storm. More than uneasy. He tried to go over what the helicopter pilot had said to him. It wasnt much.

After a while he went down to the galley and found some eggs and fixed breakfast and made a cup of tea and sat down at the table to eat. Then he stopped. There was an empty coffeecup over on the counter. He didnt remember seeing it there before. Would he have noticed it? It must have been there. He got up and went over and took hold of it but of course it was cold. He sat back down and ate the eggs.

He put the cup and plate and the silver in the sink and went up to the dayroom. He tried the television again. Nothing. He racked the balls on the pooltable and broke and ran a game of eightball. Padding around the table in his socks. The table had a list to it at one corner and the rails were pretty dead to bank off. He ran the table and stood his cue in the rack and went back down and stretched out on the bunk. He got up and went to the door and shut it. There was no way to lock or latch it. He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt. He padded down to the galley and got some hamburger patties out of the freezer and put them on the counter to thaw. Then he went up to the operations room and sat and watched the storm. Someone was on the rig with him.

He went back and slept in the bunk with the desk pushed against the door and when he woke in the late afternoon the desk was backed away a good foot. The vibration of the rig was slowly walking it across the floor. He looked around the room. What else had walked? He got up and pulled the desk away and went down to the galley and got the meatcleaver and came back and sat on the bunk and hefted the thing in his hands. He pushed the desk back against the door again and tried to read. He went back up to the operations room. The storm continued almost unabated and dark was moving over the gulf from the west. A number of lights were out in the rigging. He sat watching the distant sea darken to black.

He wandered through the quarters below with the meatcleaver in his hand. Later he went up to the galley and fried two hamburgers and put them between slices of bread with mustard and sat at the table and ate them and drank a glass of milk. The milk in the glass shirred in endless circles. He looked at the meatcleaver lying on the table beside his plate. Henckels. Solingen. Could you bury that in someone’s skull? Sure. Why not?

He tried to think of who had known that he was going to Florida. What if the rig went down in the storm? Rigs do. Who would know he was even on it? The airline put him in Pensacola. After that nothing. The helicopter? Gulfways? Did it even say Gulfways?

The rig isnt going down in the storm. What do they want? What does who want? Would you just get on a helicopter with anybody? You did. One more day. Two max.

He went back to the room with the meatcleaver in hand and pushed the desk against the door and stretched out on the bunk and closed his eyes. This is really stupid, he said.

When he woke it was close to midnight. The bunk was shaking and he thought that that was what had awakened him. The desk was half way across the room. He wondered would the lights go out. No reason for it. Everything on the rig was selfcontained.

He sat up. He was cold and he thought maybe it was the cold that woke him. If there was someone on the rig they would have come by now. What sort of seas could take down a jack-up rig?