Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  “I’m getting rid of the tools,” he said. “That’s it. It’s on to plan B.”

  She loved him to pieces. To death. Anyone would have. You had no choice when it came to someone like Clovis Peach.

  Lula May had been inside shelling peas for her mother when she saw Clovis on their wooden porch. Her mother, who was giving Lula May’s youngest sister a bath, was still in earshot, so Lula May snuck out onto the porch and shut the screen door quietly behind her.

  “Git, Clovis! My mom’s home. And she wasn’t kidding when she said she’d call the cops the next time she saw you wolfing around our house.”

  “Guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” Clovis said, smiling a crazy ear-to-ear grin. A feverish feeling rose in her at the sight of his torn clothes. “Lula May,” he whooped, “I robbed the City Trust.”

  She almost dropped her basket of peas.

  “I got a surprise for you, but you got to come quick.”

  He dragged her by the hand away from home and through alfalfa pastures and flowering brush, in the direction of his shack.

  “I thought it would be easier to get back across the river if I had a hostage,” Clovis said. “They wouldn’t call the cops if I had the girl with me.”

  But a little voice inside her said, wouldn’t it be harder to get across the river with a hostage? Wouldn’t the cops be more likely to chase you if you’ve kidnapped someone? He nearly ripped her elbow out of its socket yanking her down through the hill trails.

  “A hostage?” she said.

  “Yup. Miss Sugar.”

  The bank had wide, easy doors laid into a smooth stone front, cool as ice and just as slick, with a handful of low steps leading up to it from the sidewalk. Its friendly scents of writing paper and drugstore perfume were nothing like the wild loamy smell of Clovis’s land.

  When he reached the top step, Clovis took the gun from his waistband and stepped forward to stake his claim. He pushed through the doors and fired a warning shot into the air.

  On his way out of the bank, as an afterthought, he grabbed Miss Sugar around the waist and held her to him, pressing the muzzle of the gun against her ribs. (Lula May could see her creamy hands helplessly gripping the counter, her sloping cow eyes when she realized what was happening. No, no, no, noooooo.) The keys to her flower shop jingled as Clovis spun her out the door as if they were dancing.

  On the other side of the river, they hiked through clumps of paloverde, pushing and panting until their teeth ached. Clovis pretending he wasn’t lost, putting on invincible airs for Miss Sugar. Finally, they made it to his shack.

  “See?” he whooped, pushing the solid sorghum stalks aside. “Told you so,” he said. “Right where I said it would be.”

  Clovis pushed open the door to his shack and, at first, in the dim light, Lula May could not make out the shape of Miss Sugar, lying on her side, gagged and hog-tied on his single bed. There was a cut on her cheek.

  When Lula May saw that she was hurt, she fetched some rags, poured the remaining water from the soda bottles into a pot, and set it to boil. Tried to make herself believe this wasn’t happening. She carried the steaming pot water over to the table beside the bed, sat down next to Miss Sugar, and placed a dampened cloth against her cut.

  “Clovis, you can’t do this.” Her voice was so low, so foreign, she scared herself.

  “What’s with you, Lula May? I thought you’d be happy. Now I can buy you all the nice things you ever wanted.” He stopped to massage his forehead, as though his plan for the next twenty minutes could be rubbed down from there.

  She leaned over the bed where Miss Sugar lay slumped on her side. “Please, don’t worry,” she whispered into the woman’s ear. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Get away from her. Go get the truck.”

  “What?”

  “I ain’t saying it twice.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I left it on Taylor Ridge.” He narrowed his eyes into slits. “You want the cops to come?”

  She thought about it. She hadn’t asked him why he’d robbed the City Trust. She didn’t want to know if he had done it for her, though of course he had. He loved her.

  Lula May felt angry at Miss Sugar without knowing why.

  Clovis shoots his gun at the ceiling then makes his way to the teller’s window. With the money in hand, he grabs Miss Sugar and pulls her up off the floor, where she had fallen to her knees and thrown her arms over her head at the bang. He is a man sweeping her off her feet, out the door, past the town, into woods of thorny scrub and sagebrush.

  When they get to Superstition River, Clovis hand-overhands his getaway raft, the cord tied tight, to this end a post, to that end a boulder. Miss Sugar just gapes at the river, her pinky-pink lipstick smeared. The water is black. She sits – not fussing, not fighting – on the edge of the raft, her backbone limp with despair.

  Sitting on top of her hands.

  Wondering how it would feel to jump in.

  Miss Sugar feels a chill looking into the blackness. Because water so beautiful, so deep and sweet, made dying seem like a cinch.

  “It must’ve been a cinch,” Lula May said, motioning with her chin, “getting her over on the raft like, no trouble.”

  “You’d think, huh?” Clovis picked at his teeth with his pinkie nail, which was jagged and dirty. “Looking at her, thin and innocent-looking, but, no, she was a handful. More than I bargained for.”

  Lula May rethought the river, Miss Sugar, too, and made them both rougher.

  Clovis tugs Miss Sugar through town, past the weather-beaten buildings, past Ed’s Hardware, past Chicken City. He doesn’t stop when she trips him up, only yanks her pretty lily-white arm harder over dust whirls and pebbles.

  Superstition River is swollen with dead branches and full of sharp-slice rocks, splitting in half anything softer than a stone. Miss Sugar digs her heels into the snakeweed along the riverbank, and even manages to twist away. But he catches her in a split second, as easy as if she were a child. Lula May pictures Clovis fighting the current, his arms heaving them across, his dirty white T-shirt clinging to his muscles. Town buildings fall into shadow behind the reeds.

  Miss Sugar: Let me go once we get to the other side.

  You won’t need me.

  Don’t kill me.

  We could make a deal.

  “Okay, I get it. You might not like what you see. But I’m telling you, it’s just a little blood.”

  “Why? Did she fall?”

  “Yeah, I guess she fell some.”

  “Must’ve been those shoes.” Lula May snapped her fingers. “Imagine, those fancy high-heel shoes in the woods.”

  “Lula May, she put me on the spot. I had to get us across the river, but she wouldn’t sit still, wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. I couldn’t figure her. I never wanted to get violent, never with a woman. I had to get us across the river. She made me have to settle her down.”

  She re-imagined Miss Sugar pacing the edges of the raft, cussing and calling Clovis the most stupid bank robber in history, as if eager to get herself pistol-whipped.

  With all her might Miss Sugar comes up behind Clovis and pushes him, futilely willing her ninety-eight-pound frame to be enough to launch him overboard. Later, she grabs the gunny sack with the money and threatens to drop it into the deepest part of the Superstition. (Still Miss Sugar doesn’t get that Clovis is running the show.) That’s when he splits her cheek open with the butt of the .38.

  Lula May could have helped her get away. She could have untied the knot, untied the knot, untied the knot. Instead, Lula May got the truck.

  Away and away Clovis twisted the steering wheel, each turn taking them closer to the border and farther away from the clearing off the empty stretch of highway where they’d let Miss Sugar go. The sack of stolen money was hidden under the seat, an inch behind the heel of Lula May’s boot. The truck roared past cinder-block houses with horse corrals and barns set back from the road and hung with chick
en-hawk carcasses. She crossed her fingers: Someone stop us, please. The hills came rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes and the world seemed unreal – a love story gone wrong with her plopped right in the middle. She squinted at Clovis: banks, hostages, getaways. Never in her craziest imaginings had she ever dreamed of this much trouble.

  She played with the door lock, opening and closing it. “So how far south are we going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Costa Rica. Panama. I reckon as far as we can get.” He leaned his head toward the open window, blowing out cigarette smoke.

  As they neared the Brownsville border crossing, approaching the bridge that joins Texas to Tamaulipas, Clovis said the police would not be expecting them to cross here because it was too far south. Lula May imagined the teams of police waiting for them in El Paso or Laredo – or maybe even as far north as Albuquerque – with their guns drawn. She had tried to assure herself: There’s still time. The custom guards will find something wrong with us. I know they will. And then they passed the Brownsville turnstiles, where people crossing the bridge on foot were putting in coins. Then they were driving over the Rio Bravo bridge, and then they were on the other side. Dear Jesus, she prayed, please help me.

  Clovis twisted the wheel west onto Highway 2, following the river to Reynosa and then Monterrey; he twisted them into tumbling sun, Miss Sugar miles behind them.

  They arrived at the Monterrey market after the glaring fury of the noon sun and before the forgetful coolness of dusk. The market was a crush of elbows, hollering vendors, lanky dogs lapping in and out between the stalls, eating garbage off the pavement. Clovis bought tacos, which they ate while watching sun-burned tourists clad in white shorts and little white socks scuttle from stall to stall to test the weave of brightly coloured cloth; others limply rested in the shade on the low cement wall that circled the market. Everywhere the tourists went they left trails smelling of suntan lotion. In their dull, dingy work clothes Lula May and Clovis did not look like tourists, but Clovis said it was important that they did in a hurry. Above the stalls, long Mexican skirts hung from hooks and wires set up like clotheslines. Clovis pulled one down then another.

  “What do you think?” he asked her. It was green, gauzy, and translucent when he held it to the sun.

  She shook her head, feeding what remained of her taco to a flea-ridden dog.

  “Well, what about this one?”

  “Pink? Gawd, Clovis. I’m a redhead.”

  Clovis batted her hand away from the mutt’s patchy head. “Choose something.” Clovis’s eyes were wide open, which made her think he must know the effect narrowing them on her had, sharpening them to green shards. “I don’t know why you’re being this way.”

  “Think about it,” she said.

  The restaurant smelled of hot grease, blue smoke rising in spires and clouding the overhead fan. Above the fryers was a hand-painted sign in Spanish she couldn’t read. The plastic chairs and tables were covered entirely with Mexican beer labels.

  Lula May twisted her paper napkin, tearing bits off the end into a pile on her lap, as she tried to gather together her thoughts on all the things that had happened since yesterday.

  A breeze kicked in from Abasolo Street, where vendors and donkeys loaded with firewood crossed. The restaurant must have been a garage once; there was a big metal door at the front cranked open, leaving the insides exposed. There was no front wall to stop the dusty sidewalk scraps from swirling onto Lula May’s toes, or any bird from flying in and around the metal girders. She remembered how hummingbirds would fly into the windows of her family’s farmhouse, breaking their necks as they hit the glass, falling in feathery heaps she would later find on the wooden porch. Sometimes the hummingbirds collided into the windows by accident, but at other times, on seeing their own reflections, they’d smash against the glass on the attack, mistaking themselves for the enemy.

  Clovis held his beer to his forehead to cool down; the air in the restaurant was hotter than out on the street. Out past the restaurant’s open front, past the dusty Mexican buildings, was nothing but wide blue sky.

  They arrived at the Motel El Capy late in the afternoon. Because the manager insisted they sign the guest book, Lula May registered them under fake names – her handwriting was better than Clovis’s – and then they carried their bags, leather and new-smelling, to their room. They had bought them at the Monterrey market and filled them with new clothes she couldn’t have imagined herself ever wearing before. Clovis had bought pants and belts, shawls and T-shirts, wooden birds, even postcards like a man actually on vacation.

  There was a swimming pool at the back of a tiled hall, cement-circled and fenced in from the drought-stricken hills. Clovis sat in one of the sand-pocked metal deck chairs, slugging straight from a forty of tequila even though she had set a tray with lime, soda, and glasses by his feet before stretching herself out on a towel. Clouds came like a gift, wrapping sheets of coolness around the searing sun.

  Clovis ignored the tray and took another drink from the bottle. “Did I tell you what it was that made me decide to rob that bank?” he said, circling his finger around the lip of the bottle. She turned his words into big bubbles, nothing but shape and sound, and let them float past the pool chairs and up over the fence. “That fire was the last straw. You started believing the worst then; that nothing was gonna come of the mine. And what you had to put up with in the meantime … It did something to me too, me and my big-assed ideas. See, justice is something everyone’s got waiting for them, like in a big cosmic storehouse.”

  Justice? She could’ve laughed, knowing what she did. But she tried not to let herself think about Clovis’s .38, or Miss Sugar on her knees. Lula May turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at him wiping tequila off his chin with the heel of his hand. As she rolled over onto her stomach, she couldn’t help but think how at that precise moment there was nothing she liked about him.

  Lula May sat up and poured him a proper drink, even wedging a lime slice into the glass. She made him another drink. Then another. She made them bigger every time.

  That night, while Clovis lay in bed alone in the motel room, continuing to drink, Lula May sat outside in the courtyard, gazing at the door to their room. She was watching a gecko on the white exterior wall to the left of the door, flicking its hungry tongue at the light hitched up to an iron wall peg, drawing moths that flittered on the brink of the gecko’s reach. Moth after moth flying blind into that double-trap: the light, the gecko. At any point they could have flown away. But instead they kept flocking, closer and closer to the light, and closer to the gecko’s mouth.

  Miss Sugar had let herself be led from the truck on the road, through the bush, and then into the clearing.

  Lula May and Clovis had started walking back to the truck when she glanced behind her. Miss Sugar was still standing there, in the middle of the clearing, like a plucked flower, unmoving and half-bent. Her eyes darted over the yuccas then shifted to the sky. She took two small steps, as if testing the air in front of her, and then stopped. Her eyes turned to Lula May, all wide-open and begging.

  “Run, goddammit, run!” Lula May screamed. “Can’t you see you’re free?”

  The night Clovis died Lula May blamed Miss Sugar for being weak, for allowing herself to be taken hostage. She blamed Clovis for driving them into Mexico, for making Lula May go get the truck, for robbing the City Trust on her account. She blamed Clovis for making her love him too much, for tying up Miss Sugar on his sweetgum bed, for what she saw after she’d come back with the truck and pushed aside the door of his shack. For how even after Lula May’s eyes adjusted to the shadows and saw that his pants were undone and Miss Sugar was on her knees, she still loved him. Miss Sugar’s face was wooden and her eyes were dead-looking, unblinking. Clovis had the most peculiar expression on his face, as if he couldn’t decide whether to shout at Lula May or laugh. She closed the door quietly and sat outside the shack, chewing on her nails until he came and got her. She blamed hi
m for her love, for how even at that moment she would’ve died for him.

  The motel room was humid and the air felt like bath water against her skin. Clovis was tossing-and-turning drunk, moaning on the bed.

  She got the bottle of Valium from the glove compartment of the truck and crushed a handful of them into a fine dust with the edge of the empty tequila bottle; then she added some water, opened his mouth, and poured the mixture over his tongue and down his throat. He was so drunk he didn’t put up a fight. After a time his skin flushed and started to sweat; his eyelids fluttered. She kissed him, smoothing his hair away from his forehead.

  She remembered his last words, languidly drifting over the nubby bedspread and out the window: “You’ve become so beautiful. Lu-la, lusc-ious Lu-la.”

  His face was wet and flecked with the green-and-orange patterns of the back-lit curtain, and then his jaw clenched.

  She rocked back and forth on the bed by his feet, hugging her knees as he writhed on the tangled sheets. Once his stare remained fixed on the ceiling and his eyes stopped blinking, she peeled the sheets back and slipped between them like a lizard in a crevice, curling around his body. She unfolded his fingers one by one and ran them through her hair. She pressed his hands to her face, ran his callused fingers over the little bump on the bridge of her nose. She played with her breasts and put his fingers inside her: he would always be hers.

  Afterward, she ran a bath and scrubbed herself until she was surrounded by islands of skin floating on the water. Her mother would be at home, sitting by the phone, clenching her hands out of worry, waiting for any news of Lula May. She can see the police knocking on her parents’ door. Her father’s flustered face as he holds the screen open with his shoulder. Her mother next to him, eyebrows raised, shaking her head, refusing to believe the story coming out of the officer’s mouth is true. Lula May scrubbed until her skin was raw, but still she stayed in the bath long after the water had grown cold around her.