31
“Will you look what the wind blew in.”
A grease-stained man had directed Peter to the commissary, where he’d found Michael sitting with a group of a dozen men and women, using forks grasped in filthy hands to shovel plates of beans into their mouths. Michael leapt off the bench and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Peter Jaxon, as I live and breathe.”
“Flyers, Michael. You’re enormous.”
His friend’s chest seemed to have doubled in size, straining the fabric of his jumpsuit; his arms were roped with muscle. A robust growth of blond stubble roughened his cheeks.
“Tell you the truth, there’s not much else to do around here besides cook oil and lift weights. And word to the wise, nobody uses that word around here. It’s all ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’ ” He gestured toward the table. “This here’s my crew. Say hello to Peter, hombres.”
Introductions all around. Peter did his best to record the names but knew they’d be gone within minutes.
“Hungry?” Michael asked. “The chow’s not bad if you breathe through your mouth.”
“I should report to the head of DS first.”
“He can keep. Since it’s past twelve hundred, odds are good Stark is pie-eyed anyway. It’s Karlovic you really need to see, but he’s gone up to the reserve. Let me get you a plate.”
They shared their news over lunch, returned their trays to the kitchen, and stepped outside.
“Does it always smell this bad?” Peter inquired.
“Oh, this is a good day. When the wind switches around you’ll be crying. Blows all the crap down from the channel. Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Their first stop was the barracks, a cinder-block box with a rusty tin roof. Curtained sleeping berths lined the walls. A huge, long-faced man was sitting at the table in the middle of the room, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards.
“This here is Juan Sweeting, my second,” Michael said. “Goes by Ceps.”
They shook, the man greeting him with a grunt.
“How’d you get the name Ceps?” Peter asked. “I haven’t heard that before.”
The man curled his arms, popping a pair of biceps like two large grapefruits.
“Ah,” said Peter. “I see.”
“Not to worry,” Michael said, “his manners aren’t the best and his lips move when he reads, but he pretty much behaves himself as long as you don’t forget to feed him.”
A woman had emerged from one of the berths, wearing only her underclothes. She yawned into her fist. “Jesus, Michael, I was trying to get some rack.” To Peter’s astonishment, she draped her arms around Michael’s neck, her face lighting with a greedy smile. “Unless, of course …”
“Not the time,
Her body was lean and strong, her hair, bleached by the sun, cut short. Attractive but in an unconventional, slightly masculine way, radiating a frank, even carnivorous sensuality.
“You’re the guy?”
“That’s right.”
She gave a knowing laugh. “Well, good luck to you, friend.”
“Lore’s fourth-generation oiler,” Michael said. “She practically drinks the stuff.”
“It’s a living,” Lore said. Then, to Peter: “So you guys go way back, I guess. Let a girl in on the secret. What was he like?”
“Pretty much the smartest guy around. Everybody called him the Circuit. It was sort of his nickname.”
“And a stupid one, too. Thanks a bunch, Peter.”
“The Circuit,” Lore repeated, seeming to taste the word in her mouth. “You know, I think I kind of like that.”
At the table, Ceps, who had said nothing, gave a feminine moan.
“Shut up, the both of you.” Michael was blushing to a degree at odds with his newfound muscularity, though Peter could also tell that part of him enjoyed the attention. “What are you, thirteen? Come on, Peter,” he said, steering him toward the door, “let’s leave these children.”
“See you later, Lieutenant,” Lore called merrily as they made their exit. “I’ll want to hear
In the intensifying heat of the afternoon, Michael gave Peter the lay of the land, taking him to one of the towers and explaining the refining process.
“It sounds pretty dangerous,” Peter said.
“Things happen, it’s true.”
“Where’s the reserve?” The oil, Peter knew, came from a holding tank deep underground.
“About five miles to the north of here. It’s actually a natural salt dome, part of the old Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Oil floats, so we pump in seawater and out it comes.”
His friend had acquired a bit of Texas in his voice, Peter noted. Not “oil” but “awhl.”
“How much is left down there?”
“Well, a shitload, basically. By our estimates, enough to fill the cookers for another fifty years.”
“And once it’s gone?”
“We go looking for more. There are plenty of tanks spread along the Houston ship channel. It’s a real toxic swamp up there, and the place is crawling with dopeys, but it could tide us over awhile. The next closest dome is Port Arthur. It wouldn’t be easy to move the operation up there, but with enough time we could do it.” He gave a fatalistic shrug. “Either way, I doubt I’ll be around to worry about it.”
Michael announced that he had a surprise to show Peter. They walked to the armory, where Michael retrieved a shotgun, then to the motor pool for a pickup. Michael clipped the shotgun into a stand on the floor of the cab and told Peter to get in.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
They drove out of the compound, then turned south on a cracked blacktop that ran parallel with the water. A salty wind gusted through the truck’s open windows, taking the edge off the heat. Peter had seen the Gulf only a couple of times; its ancient span, too huge to hold in his mind, unfailingly took his breath away. Most entrancing were the waves, long tubes gathering size and momentum as they approached, falling in a curl of brown foam at the water’s edge. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Peter knew he could sit on the sand for hours, just watching the waves.
Stretches of the beach were swept clean, while others still bore the evidence of catastrophe on a grand scale: mountains of rusting metal twisted into incomprehensible shapes; beached ships of every size, their hulls bleached and pitted or else stripped to the struts, tilted on the sand like exposed rib cages; ridges of undifferentiated debris, pushed inshore on the tide.
“You’d be surprised how much stuff still washes in,” Michael said, gesturing out the window. “A lot of it comes down the Mississippi, then curves along the coast. The heavy stuff’s mostly gone, but anything plastic seems to last.”
Michael had veered off the road and was now driving close to the water’s edge. Peter stared out the window. “Do you ever see anything bigger?”
“Once in a while. Last year, a barge still loaded with big containers washed in. The damn thing had been drifting for a century. We were all pretty excited.”
“What was in them?”
“Human skeletons.”
They came to an inlet and turned west, following the edge of a tranquil bay. Ahead was a small concrete structure perched on the water’s edge. As Michael brought the truck to a halt, Peter saw that the building was just
