Greg Iles: Sleep No More

“The fetal heartbeat is decelerating now,” the doctor said. “The baby is already in hydrops.”

“What’s that?” Lily asked in a shaky voice.

“Heart failure.”

She began to hyperventilate. Waters squeezed her hand, feeling a wild helplessness in his chest. He was more afraid for Lily than for the baby.

“Do something!” Lily shrieked at the stunned doctor. She turned to her husband. “Do something!”

“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the doctor said in a soft voice that told Waters the man was relearning a terrible lesson about the limits of his profession.

Lily stared at the fuzzy image on the monitor, her eyes showing more white than color. “Don’t just sit there, damn you! Do something! Deliver him right now! ”

“He can’t survive outside of you, Lily. His lungs aren’t developed. And he can’t survive inside either. I’m sorry.”

“Take-him-OUT!”

In the four years since that day, Waters had not allowed himself to think about what happened after that-not more than once or twice, anyway. Lily’s mother had been reading a magazine in the hall outside, and she burst in when Lily began to scream. The doctor did his best to explain what was happening, and Lily’s mother tried everything she knew to comfort her daughter. But in the ten minutes it took Waters’s unborn child’s heart to stop, his wife’s soul cracked at the core. The sight unmanned him, and it still could now, if he allowed the memory its full resonance. This was how he had survived the past four years without sexual intimacy: by never quite blocking out the horror of that day. His wife had been wounded as severely as a soldier shot through the chest, even if the wound didn’t show, and it was his duty to live with the consequences.

The ring of the telephone sounded faintly through the French doors. After about a minute, Waters heard Lily call his name. He went inside and picked up the den extension.

“Hello?”

“Goddamn, John Boy!”

Nobody but Cole Smith got away with calling Waters that, and Cole sounded like he already had a load of scotch in him.

“Where are you?” asked Waters.

“I’ve got Billy Guidraux and Mr. Hill Tauzin with me in my Lincoln Confidential. We’re ten miles south of Jackson Point. You think this land yacht can make it all the way to the rig?”

“It hasn’t rained for a few days. You shouldn’t have any trouble. If you do get stuck, you’ll be close enough for Dooley’s boys to drag you in.” Dooley’s boys were the crew working the bulldozers at the well location.

“That’s what I figured. When are you coming down?”

Waters didn’t answer immediately. Normally, he would wait until the tool pusher called and said they had reached total depth and were bringing the drill bit out of the hole before he drove out to the rig location. That way he didn’t have to spend much time doing things he didn’t like. On logging nights-the last few anyway-Cole usually talked a lot of crap while the investors stood around giving Waters nervous glances, wishing the only geologist in the bunch would give them some additional hope that their dollars had not been wasted on this deal. But tonight Waters didn’t want to sit in the silent house, waiting.

“I’m leaving now,” he told Cole.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole exulted. “The Rock Man is breaking precedent, boys. It’s a sign. You must have a special feeling about this one, son.”

Rock Man. Rock. Waters hated the nicknames, but many geologists got saddled with them, and there was nothing he could do about it when his partner was drunk. He recalled a time when Cole had kept his cards close to his vest, but Cole had held his liquor a lot better back then. Or perhaps he was just drinking more these days. For all the pressure the EPA investigation had put on Waters, it had bled pounds out of his partner.

“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he said in a clipped voice.

Before he could ring off, he heard coarse laughter fill the Continental, and then Cole’s voice dropped to half-volume.

“What you think, John? Can you tell me anything?”

“At this point you know as much as I do. It’s there or it’s not. And it’s-”

“It’s been there or not for two million years,” Cole finished wearily. “Shit, you’re no fun.” His voice suddenly returned to its normal pitch. “Loosen up, Rock. Get on down here and have a Glenmorangie with us.”

Waters clicked off, then gathered his maps, logs, and briefcase. He kissed Lily on the top of the head as she worked, but her only response was a preoccupied shrug.

He went out to the Land Cruiser and cranked it to life.

Waters was four miles from the location when the rig appeared out of the night like an alien ship that had landed in the dark beside the greatest river on the continent. The steel tower stood ninety feet tall, its giant struts dotted with blue-white lights. Below the derrick was the metal substructure, where shirtless men in hard hats worked with chains that could rip them in half in one careless second. The ground below the deck was a sea of mud and planking, with hydraulic hoses snaking everywhere and the doghouse-the driller’s portable office-standing nearby. Unearthly light bathed the whole location, and the bellow of pumps and generators rolled over the sandbar and the mile-wide river like Patton’s tanks approaching the Rhine.

Something leaped in Waters’s chest as he neared the tower. This was his forty-sixth well, but the old thrill had not faded with time. That drilling rig was a tangible symbol of his will. At one time there were seventy oil companies in Natchez. Now there were seven. That simple statistic described more heartache and broken dreams than you could tell in words; it summed up the decline of a town. Adversity was a way of life in the oil business, but the last eight years had been particularly harsh. Only the most tenacious operators had survived, and Waters was proud to be among them.

He turned onto a stretch of newly scraped earth, a road that had not existed ten days ago. If you had stood here then, all you would have heard was crickets and wind. All you’d have seen was moonlight reflecting off the river. Perhaps a long, low line of barges being pushed up-or downstream would send a white wake rolling softly against the shore, but in minutes it would pass, leaving the land as pristine as it had been before men walked the earth. Seven days ago, at Waters’s command, the bulldozers had come. And the men. Every animal for miles knew something was happening. The diesel engines running the colossal machines around the rig had fired up and not stopped, as crews worked round-the-clock to drive the bit down, down, down to the depth where John Waters was willing it.

Drilling a well represented different things to different people. Even for Waters, who had pored over countless maps and miles of logs, who had mapped the hidden sands, it meant different things. First was the science. There was oil seven thousand feet below this land, but there was no easy way to find out exactly where. Not even with the priceless technology available to Exxon or Oxy Petroleum. In the end, someone still had to punch a hole through numberless layers of earth, sand, shale, limestone, and lignite, down to the soft sands that sometimes trapped the migrating oil that sixty million years ago was the surface life of the planet. And knowing where to punch that hole…well, that was a life’s work.

In the 1940s and ’50s, it hadn’t been so hard. Oil was abundant in Adams County, and quite a few fellows with more balls than brains had simply put together some money, drilled in a spot they “had a feeling about,” and hit the jackpot. But those days were gone. Adams County now had more holes in it than a grandmother’s pincushion, and the big fields had all been found as surely as they were now playing out-or so went the conventional wisdom. Waters and a few others believed there were one or two significant fields left. Not big by Saudi standards, or even by offshore U.S. standards, but still containing enough reserves to make a Mississippi boy more money than he could ever spend in one lifetime. Enough to take care of one’s heirs and assigns into perpetuity, as the lawyers said. But those fields, if they existed, would not be easy to find. No rank wildcatter was going to park his F-150 to take a leak in a soybean field, suddenly yell, This here’s the spot! with near-religious zeal, and hit the big one. It would take a scientist like Waters, and that was one of the things that kept him going.