Letters From the Grave

without turning away from the spray to breathe. He was bone weary from lack of sleep and the cold water. At least, the sun might have a chance to warm the water without the cloud cover. He hoped the commercial fishing boats would be out in the calmer conditions. He still had enough body fat that he could survive a couple days without food before exposure got to him. He also knew the Gulf currents would move him several miles an hour, even though he would have no sensation of movement while immersed in it. If a boat passed by or a low-flying helicopter, he would need to be alert. There wouldn’t be many chances to attract attention, maybe none. All the helicopter companies and fishermen would be alerted to look for him. The Coast Guard would be out also, but they wouldn’t know where he went down, not even close. As the hours passed, he was drifting miles away, so the chance of anyone looking for him and finding him was almost impossible.

  At the crest of one swell, Jake saw a red beacon light and a couple white working lights from a platform to his left. He wasn’t sure if the current was carrying him in that direction, and it would be useless to try to swim against it.

  After the sun rose, the derrick began disappearing without the brightly colored contrast against a dark sky. As he watched it, the distance seemed to be increasing. After the sun had risen to about twenty degrees above the horizon, a helicopter flew over, about a mile from his position. He waved his arms, but the pilot didn’t see him. He wasn’t surprised, having looked for downed pilots himself many times. It was impossible to see a dot on the surface unless the sea was glass smooth, which it was not.

  Around midday, with the sun directly overhead, another derrick came into view at the horizon. This time it was in the direction of drift. From the top of the swell, he figured it was probably six to eight miles away. The current was carrying him in that general direction, but he would need to swim to intercept it. Adding to his troubles, an afternoon thunderstorm was forming overhead, which would eliminate visibility again. He could drift within a few hundred yards of the platform and never see it.

  He checked his watch, which was a diving model. At three to four knots of current, he would be in the general proximity of the derrick in about ninety to one hundred-twenty minutes. If the storm hit, his watch would be his only navigation instrument. He was very cold and had difficulty moving from lost sensation in his legs and hands.

  A gull landed about twenty feet away, as if to offer company to a dying man. Then the first clap of thunder sounded, and the black clouds rolled in. He could see the curtain of rain approaching. He rotated half way to get one last glimpse of the derrick before it disappeared in the storm, trying to gauge the angle across the swells.

  His grandmother was the daughter of a bible-thumping Methodist preacher from Arkansas. Jake had never been religious, but he said a prayer today. It took extreme effort to stroke in a slightly southern direction, which he estimated would put him on course to drift under the platform. It was still miles away and a miscalculation would mean he could drift past without seeing it in the heavy rain or, worse, seeing it but not being able to swim across the current to reach it.

  Then the rain hit him like a machine gun firing all around him. His eyes stung from salt water bouncing under the deluge, and he couldn’t see the bird anymore. Please, God, help me!

  He continued to swim obliquely through the on-coming swells, hoping that it was the right direction. As his blood started flowing again, his hands and feet regained some of their feeling. But soon his lungs began to hurt. He wasn’t in shape to swim far or hard. He had to stop and let nature take its course.

  His watch said two-fifteen in the afternoon, but he couldn’t see more than fifty feet in the darkness of the storm. He closed his eyes to block the salt spray and drifted for several minutes until the first wave of rain passed. When he opened his eyes, the derrick was looming like a giant spider, the height of a sky scraper, only a quarter mile away. Looking at the gigantic steel pillars supporting it from the sea floor hundreds of feet below, he could tell that the current would carry him north of it by almost a hundred yards.

  With renewed strength, he swam with every ounce of strength he had perpendicular to the current. He had to intercept the derrick or die trying. Then a second wave of rain smashed down as a lightning bolt hit the derrick with a deafening crash. Even with the noise of the rain on the water all around him, the thunder hurt his ears. He put his face down in the water and tried to swim freestyle, as he had when competing in high school. He wasn’t dressed for it. After several minutes of exhaustive effort, he rolled onto his back, trying to capture some rainwater in his mouth. He could go no further and had no idea where the derrick was in the deluge. As he lay floating on his back, he had the sudden sensation of crustacean smells and a huge dark shape crossed over, and then the rain stopped. He was under the platform on a collision course with one of the four twelve-foot diameter legs.

  He flipped over just as he collided with the steel, riding a cresting wave. The impact was like being hit by a train, and the subsequent scraping down the side over barnacles and muscle shells cut threw his suit and lacerated his face and hands. Worse, the subsiding swell created a rush of water around the pylon carrying him past it and possibly all the way under the platform to the open ocean beyond. He needed to find something to grab. The next pillar was a hundred feet away, and he was approaching it rapidly in the violent ocean. If he missed something to hold, he would be swept past without any chance of swimming against the current. He hadn’t panicked yet, but was getting close now. On the side of the huge metal tube ahead was a maintenance ladder welded down the column that ended above the mean water level. He needed to be positioned to collide with it on a rising swell. Suddenly, his joy on locating the platform disintegrated as he realized all the odds stacked against him -- again.

  About twenty feet from the ladder, he fell into a deep trough that would either smash him against the wall or lift him to safety. He braced as the swell lifted him high. As he surged forward on the crest, he lost sight of the column and braced for impact, extending both arms to grab the ladder, wherever it hit him.

  He was thrown hard against the steel, knocking the wind out of him, but his right forearm struck the ladder, and he held on as the surge lowered around him. He was nearly unconscious and bleeding, unable to move. The water pulled him lower and away from the ladder, but his grip held, leaving him dangling by one hand as the next wave approached. He tried to grab the ladder with his second hand when a second swell slammed into him, crushing him against the rungs, then subsided again, trying to tear him off. He was injured, but struggled to pull himself up, one rung, then another. A third swell hit below the waist. And he continued pulling upward. Then he thought about the sharks. They were always around the platforms, big ones, hammerheads, black tip and tigers. The platforms were natural ecosystems, breeding fish up and down the food chain. Some pilots would fish from them, and Jake had caught eighty-pound lingcod between flight legs. Now, injured, bleeding and waist deep in the black water under the platform, he thought about giant jaws grabbing him before he could get high enough up the rig. He struggled upward and continued to fight for every inch of height above the ocean.

  About twenty feet farther up, he looked up and still had over sixty feet to go. He wrapped both arms around the side rails and tried to rest. This was not a working platform. It was completely silent. About fifty percent of the platforms were dormant, and less than twenty percent had crews aboard. This platform sounded dormant, but it was hard to tell with the ocean noise and storm raging. He was too tired to crawl further up, so he opened his flight suit and removed his belt, wrapping it around his body and one of the ladder rungs. He needed to rest.

  Will and Callie

  It was after midnight when he coasted the old Chevy pickup without lights quietly down the driveway to the back of Jake’s house. She was waiting by the back door, again with no lights on. He came up the stoop and embraced her, lifting her d
iminutive body up, feeling her muscles stiffen under the filmy cotton dress. “Hey babe, you really feel good.”

  “Um, you too, Will. Now put me down so’s we can get outa here.”

  He held her up longer, “Well, when do we get to fuck?”

  She pushed against him, “Once we’ve disappeared from Louisiana, dope. We got the rest of our lives. Now put me down.”

  He did as she instructed. He usually did when it came to sex, eventually. He repulsed her and was psychologically imbalanced. She feared him. But, when it came to sex, it amazed her how easily he could be manipulated with his one tract mind. Everything between them boiled down to sex with him. She had grown indifferent to it after so many years as a hooker.

  William “Will” Ryan grew up in Northeastern Texas. He didn’t really have a home, living with his father during his early years, occasionally helping him, harvesting crops along the picking circuits. Most of the time they lived in a camper shell on the back of his daddy’s pickup.

  He never knew his mother. Will’s father told him she was trash and unfit. Sometimes he told him she died, but the story changed often and