Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles Read Free Book Online Page B

in and turned toface backward. He always rode backward, he wanted to see anything that might come up on him from behind. When she pulled the headlight knob the interior light came on and shone in her face and when she lifted her head she saw Ross Everett with one boot up on his running board watching her. She leaned out of the window and stuck her tongue out at him. He blew smoke from his nose and lifted a hand.

C HAPTER S IX
    A t the time when Jack Stoddard was felled by sour gas, few men were required to wear gas masks on the rigs. It was impossible to wear the bulky gear and get work done because it was hard to see or talk and your own breath fogged up in your faceplate. The occurrence of hydrogen sulfide gas is capricious and unpredictable. H 2 S is often precipitated out of the oil itself and gathers in half-filled tanks, seeps into low places beneath the rigs, suddenly appears along with the sweet gas without warning. H 2 S knocks people unconscious at 300 parts per million, and at 600 ppm it is fatal within seconds. It has a distinctive taint of rotten eggs, but the gas also has the peculiar quality of destroying the sense of smell after the first inhalation, as if designed by the devil himself to draw the unsuspecting into the odorless world of brain injury and death.
    Two other freight haulers brought Jack Stoddard home in the back of a truck, in a warm September rain straight off the Gulf ofMexico. He was laid out on a stack of blankets somebody had scooped up from the engine shack; he was covered with a slicker and awash in rainwater. His face and hands had the obscure, blue color of someone with cyanide poisoning, and although he was not conscious he floundered with vague shifting movements. Jeanine and Mayme told Bea to stop crying, he was going to be all right.
    He lay on the bed with blood running from his nose and ears. A young company doctor folded his bag together and said in a thin tenor voice that Mr. Stoddard should avoid any strenuous activity for the next month or so, and he could not say one way or the other whether Mr. Stoddard would ever regain his ability to drive a truck. The effects might show up in the lungs, but on the other hand, did they know whether or not somebody hit him over the head? The doctor bent down and looked into Jack Stoddard’s eyes and said, “Did? Somebody? Hit? You? Over the head?” He was a tidy young doctor. With a quiet and efficient gesture wiped up the blood trickling from Jack Stoddard’s ear and said this was the result of a concussion of some kind, not sour gas. It was impossible to get the company to pay the medical bills because Mr. Stoddard was a contract worker and not a Shell employee.
    Jeanine and her sisters watched as her father sat up straight in the bed and stared at them as if they were strangers. People completely unknown to him were gathered together in this small rent house with the ancient wallpaper and the lamp beside the bed in the gloom of the torrents washing down the windowpane, the iron bedframe and torn quilts. His two oldest daughters about to leave home, oddly grown to adults. A person wonders how it happens. His wife sitting with her head in her hands like somebody’s mother from the last century. She lifted her head and smiled at him.
    “You’re going to be all right, Jack,” she said.
    “I know it,” he said. “As soon as I get that horse in training.”
    The young doctor said, “Mr. Stoddard, do you know what day it is?”
    “It’s the day they asked me to fish out a wrench from the tank. One of those tanks. They thought it was a joke. That’s what day it is.” Jack Stoddard ran his hands over his blue face. He seemed to be checking to see if it was still there, on the front of his head.
    A long pause. Then the doctor said, “Who is the president?”
    “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he said. “I voted for him.” He fell back onto the pillows. “Tell these people to get out of here.”
    Their mother sat in the bedroom with