Diggs's Oil Rig

He had worked the rigs for six months before he laid his eyes on Marlene Specter, and the grisly frame she inhabited. Her shift started a few hours into Diggs’s, and he’d spy on her from across the lunch room. His ham sandwich hanging out of the confines of the wax paper. Conversations were muted at this point in the day.

The shift workers worked a beastly schedule, four months on a rig, out in the Gulf of Mexico. Four months of isolated stretches of time, interrupted only occasionally by the two week breaks at the end of each stretch. Drunk in any number of Mexican towns, sunlit mornings biting into the juicy pulps of oranges, rekindling fires, banging out treatises on typewriters, boarding houses full of strangers that didn’t ask for favors, characteristics forgotten when they took the little dinghy out onto that lonely phallic symbol on the flat shallow waters of the Gulf.

Two weeks into a bustling four month stint, Diggs sees her outside, during one of those midmornings where one cant help but admire the perspective the job offered, the continuity of it all: Sun up in the morning, blindlingly announcing itself, retreating downward below the horizon line, dinner, a prayer and a quick nip off the flask underneath the mattress, a cough, snort and the slow, drifting feeling where the sleep comes.

She’s installing a flat drill head on the main master compressor. This is the heart of each rig, secretly beating, while the collector takes all the credit. For hundreds of years wars have been fought over this sludgy muck, families fortunes squandered, entire nations at war, it’s the fabric of our existence, its what put the industrial into the industrial revolution. It’s the great equalizer, and in the hands of a miserable few, counting down the days until the next boat comes by off to the other country, barbed-wire cactus blossoms, mid morning siestas and corn tortillas heated in clay pots.

On this morning, installing the drill head, he hears her curse, and the ballistic fall out that comes out afterwards. They exchange hostile glances, great leap forwards in communication for this lot. They’d sit next to each other the following day, at dinner, when he was finally curious enough to sit down, cough and collect the basic necessities:

“How long you out?”

“You gotta name?”

“What are you running from?”

Diggs didn’t ask the last question. He’d wanted to, even planned out how it was going to come out, like he knew the answer all along, just checking to see if she was game, if she wanted what he had wanted each night, staring up at the bunk, scrawling out a vague portrait of her, metal shavings flecked downward, irritating his skin, preventing sleep from dragging him across the seas and into a nocturnal reverie.

He asked the first two though, and Delilah answered, seemingly surprised that a man had sat down this quickly. She guessed it would take another week at least, to have one of these silent brutes sit down and make the basic knowledge collection, to warn the others.

“She’s a dike. Why she’s on this rig is beyond me, but she’s trouble”

“Made a mess in town, I hear, knocked someone out, there’s a child alone”

But Diggs just sat there, taking in the responses, surprised at the simple results.

“I’m from Montana originally, I drove all night two weeks back, Tim told me about the rig, and the money, and the time.” “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, divorced three months ago, kid’s with him, in Nevada, horrible place, dry, no water.’

The way she answered made Diggs think back to his high school sweetheart, and the matted clump her hair would become when shed wear his bike helmet, and he could feel her heart through her T-shirt, blinding down the road, skid marks on the road.

There was a way in which she’d use her fork, that showed she didn’t need anybody, and because of that, Diggs felt like he needed her. It was the way it went, those who need are not needed, and those that needn’t worry about being needed, well, they’re the ones who are needed.

Diggs knew the way it went, and spent the rest of the week polishing off his portrait above his bunk, Holding the shavings, placing them into a small pill bottle.