Oil Rig: Luther

Luther wasn’t gifted with a refined tongue by any means. In fact, he sounded pretty dumb when he spoke because he repeated a lot of words for lack of any others. He was from a little town in the middle of the country named Piatie. It was one of those places where working men were born to die or born to die trying to die somewhere else. Luther’s daddy had been an engineer for the same company, but now lived at home, far from anything, among the delicate receding of nature, having been fired for misconduct of the sexual kind. Luther, far from his daddy’s unpleasantness, was large and kindly. He didn’t seem interested in hurting anybody, let alone for his own pleasure. In fact, he seemed interested in the opposite. He often stopped his work to ask if you were alright, to find out how the day was treating you. If you past him in the depths of the rig, whilst others wouldn’t stop moving chain piping if you told them you were about to drown, he would stop and he would wave, knowingly smile. The harder you worked the more likely your money was to come quick, but Luther didn’t seem bothered about the money. He was a man resigned not only to the lifestyle but also the likelihood that this lifestyle would remain for good. He wasn’t fighting, like everyone else was, to get out. Joey wasn’t even convinced that Luther would get out if he could. Like a man expiring inside the same old cell, Luther had only ever known the light of an early morning, the swerve of an endless blanket of ocean, the two or three legs of a giant oil rig standing proudly through every storm. It was all he knew and so despite his emotional intelligence, his kindliness and genuine care for his fellow workers, there didn’t seem to be much for him to reach for other than that. There wasn’t a lady outside of Luther’s working life, as far as Joey knew, not a sibling or a grandmother waiting for his return. Only Luther’s daddy, smouldering in the ashes of the distance which Luther seemed insistent on leaving for the wind to clear up behind him. Luther reminded Joey of an old saying his own daddy had taught him; a good rider makes his race horse believe that winning the race will buy them their freedom. Luther was outrunning something as well as he could, perhaps his past or something less forgivable, and blinders may as well have been covering the smiling corners of his eyes, the whip may as well have been coming down on his big happy shoulders each dream-eyed morning, each bloodshot evening. Or maybe he just ran for the thrill. Maybe the blistering wind and rain that, in the middle of the sea, was unobstructed by hills and cliffs and so freely dancing, was Luther’s one true lover, his only lover. Joey did hear, however, that a few years later Luther took a month of leave from the man made islands to bury his daddy at a graveyard near a convenience store off the Kentucky state freeway. They bundled the old man up, put a flower between his stupidly praying wrists, and lowered him into the ground slowly like something fluid being poured from a palm that could not bear to keep it, had picked it up not intending to in the first place. Luther didn’t cry. His daddy was his only family but he didn’t cry. He didn’t need to say or do a thing; the end of his daddy had been made final a long time ago, in his mind. Even so, when everyone was gone, when the black dressed grievers had given up their acts of regret and left for the food stalls where requiem could easily return to its usual dreaming, and the arms of the surrounding trees like bad bridges had finished drooping beneath the weight of all the day’s rain, Luther stood over his daddy’s grave and said, casually, almost a little rudely, good night for now, old shithead, I’ll see you where you’ve gone when it’s my turn, where the oil must be clean as love and forgiving as a good dog. We’ll work the lonely rigs in paradise. We’ll work them hard. We’ll work them together.