a minor conversion (power play)

Briggs had fought, as he called them behind closed doors, those “fucking pelican-saving treehuggers,” throughout his adult life all the way through the recent crisis. It was a fucking disaster. Briggs would spend meetings, in a room that smelled recently vacuumed, stuffing his face with donuts covered in colored candy like rabbit pellets. He wouldn’t just eat one or two either. He’d eat three or four. It made me sick just looking at him.

I’d sit there in my tall-backed chair wondering when it would be appropriate to slip out of the room. Many a morning, I was developing an intestinal emergency myself. But I wanted to give the impression I was low key.

Briggs called me Ice. I could lay it down all cool and rational, and people wouldn’t realize I’d told them to fuck off until they were two miles down the highway. When my daughter would call on the phone, she’d point fingers at guys I’d been working with for 25 years and would call them worse names than I ever remember using in front of her. Her mouth was as filthy as my drowning lungs. I made an executive decision then not to tell her about my health.

I wasn’t going to Biloxi. I was out here, and that’s the way it was going to be. Though I do miss the horizon.

Marissa brings in a tray. I hear tea cup clanking against the spoon. She draws back the curtains. With her back to me, I look out the window. I want an orange. I can imagine eating one so clearly that my mouth begins to water.

For the 300th time since we moved here, I sit there wondering with all the money we had, why I’d settled on this place with a bedroom that looked out over a cell phone tower and power lines. My wife always hated it, but she never said a word. I think it’s because she knew I loved it before I did. It’s been late for me, just recent days, to learn all these things I loved. Semi-abandoned antennas, the smell of air’s first hint at fall, the delicate texture of afghans between thick fingers.

I lay here with my eyes closed because I don’t want Marissa to talk to me this morning. She’s negotiating all this pity. To throw it off she chats a lot. She asks me a lot of questions—not about long ago, but recently. She wants the story of the rig, the explosions, the cover ups. She wants the inside scoop.

The last time she asked me questions, I felt like throwing my bowl at the crucifix on the wall I’d not taken down since my wife’s death. I’m not a heavily spiritual man. I’ve gone to church on the important days of the year. I’ve said prayers before a meal when I have company. I’ve said god bless to friends at appropriate moments.

Pragmatic is what I am. My life was built on underwater lines of geology. Then it became a life of managing things. Layers. A figure sitting in shadows rocking. Marissa’s hovering above me now like a bobber on the surface of one of those ponds I’d fish as a boy. I shouldn’t cry.

Power, I mutter out loud. I stare out at the lines that look all of the sudden like cables under the ocean. I feel something electric like a charge move through me. I’d like to play a saxophone in the wind.

Briggs, that goddamn idiot: “we made a few little mistakes early on.” We made a lot of goddamn mistakes the whole way, I’d say.

I was glad I had Meyers draw up another will yesterday. I worry about the birds. When Briggs gets wind of it, he might well have a heart attack. I start coughing in a fit of laughter until I finally stop.

Marissa comes back in and takes my hand. I look over at her and smile. I won’t be long, I say in an odd voice, like I’m stepping out for a smoke. She pets me palm to forehead and back across the head’s crown repeatedly, until I fall asleep.