The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  He opened the door again, shook his head once, and stepped back inside.

  The little sink was full of cups and glasses. A pitted peach lay in two halves on a cutting board. On the side of a cabinet, hanging from a triangle of picture wire, was a Pegasus stenciled on a mirror. She looked at her feet and wondered where her shoes were.

  The man sat across from her.

  “Where is your car?” he asked.

  “In a field.”

  “I help you with it later.”

  “It’s crunched into a square,” she said.

  He considered her. A small gust of wind rattled the trailer.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We deal with all later.” His voice was the ocean gently rocking.

  He pulled the crocheted blanket off the love seat and put it over her shoulders. “My friend, I think you may have shock.”

  “My car’s just stuck.”

  “You said it was crunched into a square.”

  “Yes.” She paused.

  “Give me your hand.”

  He examined her fingers, took her wrist and turned it over.

  “Were you in the car when the tornado hit?”

  “I was looking for a place to make a peanut butter sandwich.” She stood up, alarmed, and looked around.

  He pointed to the vat of peanut butter. She sat. He took her pulse. His nails were clipped to the quick, dirt on the pads of his fingertips, the nail beds dotted with white splotches and white streaks. There was a black beauty mark on his cheekbone. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought. It was only the deep lines by his mouth, his eyes, between his brows and across his forehead. Like the apple heads she’d carved as a kid that became old ladies, once dried.

  He felt her forehead then patted her shoulder.

  “You’re going to be okay. I have some slivovitz. Plum brandy. I make it myself. Give me your clothes, I put them in the dryer.”

  He pulled a bottle from a cabinet and got a robe, scarlet. A mangy crushed velour. She took it into the bathroom, which was a closet made of vinyl paneling with a small frosted window and a shower door that didn’t seal. Naked, with bruises all over her body, she looked in the mirror. Her pupils were dilated. Her hair had twigs in it. Her overgrown bangs were plastered to the sides of her cheeks. Her face was covered in scratches.

  The man tapped on the door. “Are you fine, lady?”

  “I’m staring at my face.”

  “It would be good if you come out.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  She bundled up her wet clothes and put on the robe. Stepping into the hallway, she handed the bundle to the man. She saw there was now a bottle of brandy and a glass on the table and next to it a pack of Marlboros. The pack was newly opened and one cigarette was pushed forward. A box of matches lay on top.

  Sitting, she tried to feel anything about her situation. The car was gone. She was in a stranger’s robe in a trailer behind a castle.

  “Try it.” The man filled her glass. “In the shed, the dryer,” he said, and left.

  She drank it like water. He came back and sat on the other side of the table.

  “Do you have family here?” he asked.

  “Why is it clear if it’s brandy?”

  “Maybe you call.” He took out a cell and clicked his tongue. “No signal. We try in while.”

  Taking up the pack of cigarettes he pushed one toward her with his thumb.

  “I don’t smoke,” she said, and he lit one for himself.

  “Why are you building a castle?”

  “I want to be King!”

  He laughed but she had no reaction.

  “Just fucking kidding you, man. I hate kings.”

  He poured more brandy into her glass.

  “Are you Russian?” she asked.

  “Fuck no, if I was Russian I’d have to kill myself for being such an asshole. I’m from Czechoslovakia.”

  “That’s not a country,” she said.

  “What do I care about what some fucking politician says?”

  She froze, confused. “I think I was trying to be polite,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I know this. It’s not you. It’s these fucking people. They don’t know potatoes grow in dirt.”

  She drank and he poured her another glass.

  “So lady, where are you from?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Do you have friends in Texas?”

  She giggled but the giggling turned into an unfamiliar kind of laughter that became coughing, only not coughing but laughing.

  “Why do you laugh this way?”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  From his face she could tell it wasn’t one of those jokes you can explain and still have it be funny.

  He put out his cigarette and reached for the pack, pushing another toward her.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  He took another one for himself and lit it.

  “Maybe we try the phone now?”

  He handed it to her. There was a signal. She dialed Kirsten.

  “Hi, just checking in.” She switched the phone to her other ear. “I’m in Texas.” She looked at her bare feet. “Everything’s fine.” She hung up.

  “Your mother?”

  Cheyenne didn’t say anything.

  “We try again later. No stress. Maybe we make your car drive.”

  “It’s her car.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She doesn’t have insurance.” She started to giggle again.

  The man took a plate out of the cupboard and got a banana and a peach from a wire basket. He sliced the banana into little ovals, cut the peach in half and set the plate beside the brandy bottle.

  “So lady, here.”

  “She doesn’t have any money.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Basically.”

  “It’s okay. We take everything slow.” He pushed the fruit closer. “My name is Jirshi. What is yours?”

  “Cheyenne.”

  He smiled. “You are Indian?”

  “No, I’m not Indian.” She could see he was disappointed and she wished she’d lied. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shrugged. “That’s all right. I also not.”

  She ate a piece of peach to make him feel better.

  “She likes Indians, your mom?”

  “I was named Cheyenne because my mom thought she’d found an ancestor that wasn’t a colonizing fuckhead.”

  “Maybe you are part Indian.”

  “We’re not anything good at all.”

  She felt a shudder. Her hands were starting to shake.

  Jirshi thumbed another cigarette forward.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  He lit it for himself.

  * * *

  —

  She slept in his bed while he crashed on couch pillows in the kitchen. The wind picked up but the storm didn’t come back. In the morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only the castle.

  Her clothes were dry and folded by the bed and Jirshi had left her a pair of canvas tennis shoes. They fit enough to put on but not enough to wear without blistering. She heard a saw outside. When she found Jirshi, he was behind the castle, shearing stone under running water, gray from mineral dust.

  “Good morning, lady.”

  His hair was wrapped in a paint-stained T-shirt and twisted into a Sikh’s turban. His forearms were gray from where the water had splashed as he worked. At his hip was a homemade knife. A steel chain dropped in a loop from his belt to a large leather wallet sticking out of his back pocket. She looked at the growing stack of stone blocks, buckets of sand, and powder.

  “You’re a mason.” She looked at the castle. “Can I go inside?”

  “I sho
w you later. I’ve been thinking we need to get your license plates. They tow it maybe and charge your mother.”

  “God, that never even occurred to me.”

  “It’s okay. I help you.”

  He undid his T-shirt turban and dipped it into a bucket of water, then wiped down the table and threw the shirt back in the bucket.

  “Maybe your car is not so bad and runs if I work on it.”

  The giggle came again. “Yeah, let’s check out the car,” she said.

  Jirshi filled a bucket with tools and grabbed a couple of quarts of oil out of a shed.

  Cheyenne scanned the castle grounds. “Where’s your car?”

  “I have a truck but I lend her to a friend who goes on vacation to Oaxaca for two weeks. I think—I take a break from building these fucking patios and ugly kitchens, work on the castle, finish the wall—if I have my truck, a job comes? I have to say yes because you don’t know if it comes again. But if I have no truck what can I do?” He shrugged. “I say no and it’s not my fault.”

  Once outside the fortifications Cheyenne shaded her eyes but couldn’t see Kirsten’s car.

  They waded into the high grass.

  “I go with her once to Oaxaca. They have good fruit. You can walk on the beach without getting tar on your feet. Not like Galveston.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t really know this part of the world.”

  “I like it except for the people.”

  They reached a field where the grass was beaten flat from cattle.

  “How did you end up here?” she asked.

  “I have a great-great-uncle. When I was young he told me stories of a Czech man here that gives any Czech coming a job.”

  “So you came for work?”

  “No, that was a hundred years ago. That’s how my uncle came. The land I build on was his.”

  They came to a dead steer tossed by the tornado. Its body was contorted and buzzing with horseflies. Cheyenne got light-headed. Jirshi bent to look for the brand.

  “I think I know whose she is. This poor stupid cow. I don’t eat them. I eat only fruit so it’s okay for me but this,” he gave a quick nod to the steer, “is no good for anybody. Not only cows but people. A couple of stupid cows gone and,” he made a gesture of washing his hands, “like that, you’re done.”

  He took the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. There were two left and he offered her one. She shook her head. They started walking.

  “I was raised in a communist country. We always talk of freedom. Like rock and roll and saying whatever you want without being afraid. I live for this then. There at least you could drink and play music in the woods all night, have a fire and sing, maybe talk—no one bothers you. You get it out, whatever it is. Here cops come at ten. Quiet, quiet, quiet, everyone shh, always this shhh. But I am no fucking mouse. I want to go home but I think it is gone forever, that place. Do you like heavy metal?”

  “More the idea of it.”

  “Everything is a copy from now on, I think. Not like Ozzy. I wanted to be a drummer. I see Black Sabbath on their first show in Prague. They start ‘War Pigs’ and everyone loses their mind.” He played a drum-fill in the air across a rack of toms and belted out, “Gen’rals gathered in their masses…” but his voice, loud and nasal, didn’t carry in the humid air.

  “After the show I have sex with my girlfriend for the first time, and I think, maybe it stays like this from here on. The wall is down, we’re teenagers and we go.” He clapped and sliding one palm off another made the sound of a jet and a knife-edge cut to the sky with his hand. “Gone.”

  “Who deals with the dead cattle?”

  “They get their bodies. Like your car. Someone has to come.”

  He smoked, tapping the ashes into the front pocket of his black jeans.

  The smell hit her of the hot wet soil mixed with the scent of dew evaporating on the blades of green shoots and bramble leaves. “I think I’m done hearing about the end of the world,” she said.

  She stopped to reassess their position. “I’m not sure we are going the right way.”

  There were oak trees on the other side of the highway but she couldn’t quite tell if they were the same oak trees.

  They started to walk.

  “Are you traveling or on vacation?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever had what people think of as a vacation.”

  “We do that all the time when I grow up. I love travel. Always. I go anywhere. Before I start the castle, I take lots of holidays. I go to Turkey—I become a fruitarian so I go for this—and to Laos and Burma. Terrible government but the people. These are fucking great. Real people. They have a fruit I like, rambutan. Do you know it? It looks like a sea urchin. Crazy. But I like it so much so I go there for that. They have it here sometimes but by the time they ship, it has no taste.”

  “Can you really live on fruit?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  She saw two trees bending over a depression on the other side of the road. “What kind of trees are those?”

  “Pecan,” he said.

  “I saw trees with no bark.”

  “Tornados can do this.”

  The sun was high and the dew gone. Every part of her was damp from sweat. It was good to have slept and be clean in clean clothes, even if the blood didn’t wash all the way out. She didn’t mind the sun burning her cheeks or the flies.

  “So lady, where is it you need to get to in this car?”

  “North Carolina. I’m going to meet a woman who might be my real mom.”

  “You are adopted?”

  “One of us was. I have a sister. It might be her.”

  “Your mother doesn’t tell you?”

  “She does not, in fact.”

  “Maybe she has a reason.”

  They hit a fence she didn’t remember with a gate over a cattle guard and went through it into another field.

  “I don’t think she is my mother, the one who raised me.”

  “She tells you really nothing?” He stopped. “Is that your car?”

  In the dip of the field was the Toyota. It was half its original size with a corona of safety glass around it. The rear axle rod had snapped in two and one shaft was driven several feet into the ground.

  “You are a lucky lady. I think no one lives in this car.”

  When they reached it, he circled the driver’s side, then took off his belt, squatted down, and whipped it beneath the car to clear the grass of snakes before crawling under to look at the chassis. He came out shaking his head.

  “Can we get money for the metal?” asked Cheyenne.

  “Toyotas of this time have not much metal. The tow truck cost more for sure. Best we can make sure there is no way for these pigs to find a name. No name, no fees. The storm is maybe good here. With this crazy tornado if they can’t find who owns it? They forget it.”

  They pulled the license plates and filed off the VIN numbers where they could. Kirsten didn’t have insurance and did her own maintenance so there was zero paperwork to worry about. Cheyenne carried a wheel, Jirshi carried the bucket of plates and handles, the jack, and the spare, and they trudged back across the green pastures toward the castle.

  In the trailer, Jirshi made coffee. He got some star fruit out of the fridge for lunch. Cheyenne felt like she’d done something wrong by showing him the car but couldn’t explain what it was.

  “This woman,” he said once they were sitting, “the one who might be your mother, can she help you get to where you need?”

  “She doesn’t have any money.”

  He dug his thumbnail into the grooves of the exposed plywood on the table.

  “My last paycheck I spend on stone. All of it. I think, if I do this, I must finish my wall.”

  She took some star fruit.

&nbs
p; “My truck is in Mexico. I owe everyone money. Maybe in a month I have a job but I have no way to help you now. Even when my truck comes there is no money for gas to take you to North Carolina.”

  “I have gas money. One way anyway.”

  He smiled briefly. “I am not a pretty lady like you. Nobody helps me and I get stranded.”

  She finished the star fruit. He washed some cherries and put them in a cup. She ate them because he’d done it, not because she was hungry. He washed the cutting board and wiped the knife.

  “You said I could see the castle,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Against the backside of the castle, directly across from the trailer, piles of wood and brick were stacked next to a low scaffold that, now partially deconstructed, reached nowhere. A bale of hay had come unbound. Opening from the center out, blown by the storm, it covered the scaffold base in straw. Twelve feet up the wall, under the lip of a wooden corbel that ran around the castle, Cheyenne saw several hornet nests.

  “We start here.” Jirshi pointed. “This is the orchard.”

  Cut into patchy grass on the south side of the perimeter wall was a rectangle of broken-up ground but nothing was growing in it. A small tarp sheltered saplings in pots, little green sprigs now dead and splayed on parched soil. Jirshi ignored them as he passed, as if they were no longer speaking.

  “I plant fig trees here. Apricots and pears, there. Peaches I maybe must put outside the wall for better sun. They do better that way, I think. I also try this way of splitting the tree so that it grows sideways, but it dies. I am still learning. What is it they say? Master, master, where’s the dreams that I’ve been after? So funny, these words but I make my orchard for sure. Master, master—do you know this?”

  She shook her head.

  “I like it very much.”

  They stood at the edge of the empty orchard. Cheyenne wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to see. She bent her head and platted her hair into a short braid, but having no rubber band, it unraveled as soon as she moved. Jirshi walked to the wall, dumped rainwater out of a compost bucket, flipped it, and set it beneath an arrow slit so she could look out. She got up on it and leaned into the embrasure. The field behind the castle was a strip of green and tan and sky. Two cows moved across the arrow slit.