Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  TWO SHORES

  HOT WIND GUSHED INTO JOANNE’S CAR. CATTAILS AND WILD marsh flowers passed, orchids drooping like spilt milk in the grass along the muddy banks. Beyond the banks, cypress knees spread into flat, wet land. Sam watched a blue heron keep pace with the car for a time, its tall shadow stretched across the road and flapping beside them. He studied Joanne driving. Her face was round and smooth, tiny, without Lana’s angular cheeks or long jaw.

  Her eyes were orbicular, dark, perceptive-looking. Beneath each a small crescent of flesh puffed slightly, which was oddly appealing. She was once a gymnast at LSU and now taught phys ed at the elementary school in Port Salvador. In conversation she often composed subtle lists. Things to do, things not to do, things to remember, things to buy. She liked to let her brown hair fall over half her face when she felt playful, and lying across her bed she’d reprimanded Sam for living here two years and never seeing the Creole Nature Trail. That was on the list of things to do.

  The trail was a highway that traced the very edges of the sinking coast. Driving it, they observed nutria and alligators slinking into the water, wildflowers and large white birds beneath an incendiary sky. They rode in Joanne’s Acura, with the sunroof open.

  A polka-dot scarf tied her hair back, her sculpted arms shining in a blue tank top, small hands on the steering wheel. She turned down the stereo and said to him, “Did Lana ever tell you about her dad?”

  She had this way of suddenly breaking long silences with nonsequiturs, as if she couldn’t really abide silence for long, something in it making her uneasy. He said, no, Lana never told him about her father.

  “Her parents died,” she said. “Her mom first, when she was real young. Then she lived with her dad. He never worked, but he used to take her around town.”

  “To do what?” About fifty yards ahead of them, a brown deer bounded across the road. He waited for her to answer his question, but she watched the road awhile.

  “He wasn’t related to us. Lana’s mom was my mom’s sister. But she said that her dad used to take her to all these places. Like business offices and sometimes bars, one time a car dealership, she said. And her father would have someone’s name on an index card. Someone he once knew. He’d give her the card and tell her what this person looked like. She was like seven, eight, nine years old. He’d tell her what this person looked like, and what their name was, and he’d send her into places to find these people. Then she would give them a note saying she was Burt Slaton’s daughter, Lana, and the note asked these people for some money.”

  “Really?” Sam asked. The sun streaked in bursts over the car. Wind caused them to shout a little. “How often did that happen?”

  “All the time,” she said. “That’s what he did. That was their lives. He collected some kind of government assistance, and brought his daughter around to all these people he once knew to get her to ask them for money.”

  “But he must have done something, at some time?”

  “I think he was an engineer for awhile, before Aunt Alice died. He drank a lot and maybe took pills too. I don’t know. I remember him saying he had back trouble.”

  Sam saw something—a thing of savage violence that he couldn’t verify. Out his window he observed a great rustling in the middle of a field of high grass. Amid that calm green, a shadowy, sunken patch shook furiously, as if in seizure—something struggling, being taken down. While she spoke, he kept staring out there, trying to glimpse the animals involved, but only seeing the green stalks shaking, grass and turf flying outward.

  “The way he died?” Joanne said. “The way he died was, when Lana was eleven, he had her travel up into this high-rise office in Baton Rouge. She had to ride this elevator, and it was glass, she told me, and she told me she could look down at the pavilion in front of the building and see her dad standing there with his hands in his pockets. She didn’t talk about it until she’d lived with us awhile.”

  She reached over and took his hand. He lost sight of the rustling grass as they passed over a waterway where islands scattered out in the sun.

  “So she went up to this guy’s office, high in the building, and she goes in and tells the receptionist to please tell this man that Burt Slaton’s daughter is here. The guy comes out and Lana goes in his office and gives the man the note asking for money, and the man says, ‘Your father shouldn’t be doing this.’ And he gets up and he wants to know where her father is. And Lana tells him her dad is standing outside, so he goes to the window to check and he looks back at her like he’s shocked or something. So she goes up to the window and looks down and sees a crowd of people standing around her father. Her dad’s lying on the sidewalk, just like that. Dead. And she’s looking down on him from way up in that building.”

  “Jesus,” Sam said, feeling an inexplicable wave of hot guilt wash over him. He hadn’t spoken to Lana in nearly two years. Now she had been dead for three weeks.

  “Then she came to live with us,” Joanne said. “We’ll turn around soon, and on the way back we’ll stop for dinner at a rib place I know.”

  As they rolled on into the sunken plains of overgrown swamp, Sam considered it all being taken up by ocean, the life covered over and wiped away. He’d learned a lot about Louisiana in the two weeks he’d been seeing Joanne. She liked to explain things.

  Louisiana’s coast is a skirt of islands and swamps double the size of the Everglades. Over eight thousand miles of canals crisscross these wetlands, fragmenting them, allowing lethal saltwater to bleed into brackish and fresh water, boosting erosion. Computers that simulate land loss for the next fifty years show the coast dissipating, and places like Shell Beach, LaCroix, and Grande Isle vanishing under water. When Joanne explained that to him—that the land they were on would one day be beneath the ocean—Sam considered the possibility of beauty in this hostile, subtropical place, that perhaps its transience lent it a different sort of beauty. Sam was originally from the East Coast and now taught composition at the junior college here.

  Because of Joanne’s story he began thinking about the question Lana had asked him on their first night together, when she’d stood in front of her mirror, staring at her own face. In memory she grew more complex to him, acquiring subtext and implication.

  The car slowed to turn at a red clay circle carved out of the shoulder of the highway. “Hey,” Joanne said, pulling at the wheel. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just how pretty it all is.” They passed a tribe of brown pelicans roosted on a group of cypress knees. “And tragic.”

  “Tragic?”

  “It’s all disappearing, isn’t it?”

  “Oh.”

  SAM GALT WOULD HAVE NEVER MET JOANNE REAVER IF HE had not found a letter in his mailbox. Two other men had received the same. For the past year, self-pity and dread had rubbed him raw, and the letter didn’t help. It asked him to be at the Crescent Moon Café at three o’clock on the twelfth, which was today. The Crescent Moon Café was not a place he frequented, but it was where he’d met Lana Slaton. He’d been new to the gulf coast town of Port Salvador back then, more than a little baffled how, at twenty-nine, published, a specialist in the Romantics, he’d found himself riddled with student loan debt and marooned at a junior college on the edge of the world. The people he saw around town vaguely frightened him. Burly men with sloped brows and thick arms, big-assed women in stretch pants and baggy shirts, poofy hairdos, oversized religious jewelry. On his second week in town, impossibly lonely, a little scared and drinking six beers every evening, Sam had come to the Crescent Moon with a volume of Keats and a pack of Camels. The café was a mile outside of town in a port village called LaCroix. Lana had been his waitress.

  Now, almost eighteen months later, he’d received a letter from her, asking him to meet.

  The letter said,

  Sam, you may not remember me, but I guess you do. We met about a year and a half ago and went out a couple times. First, let me say that I am not writing because I want m
oney or any other type of aid from you. I am writing simply because I have made changes in my life, and I am not the person you once knew, and I care very much about the truth and telling it, and I know that if nothing else I have to be able to give my child the truth. I am writing a letter like this to two other men. Please believe that I am not trying to take anything from you.

  He’d slept with her exactly three times, and at first he’d taken meeting her as an indication that a young man could tumble into effortless sexual encounters a great deal in Port Salvador. But now, by the time he received her letter, she remained the only woman he’d been with since moving here.

  The restaurant was a brick-and-wood diner set back from the road near the lip of a ravine. Tacked beside the door, a large plywood moon’s flaking paint was the color of buttermilk. Some pines grew between the building and a small, oyster-shell parking lot, which held a few pickups and cars. Sam parked his Honda near the road and smoked a cigarette before going inside. The day was a mountain of light bearing down on the village, and the diner’s roof blazed, two sheets of pure sun. To the west, sluggish barges slunk through shipping canals beyond the levee. In his head he rattled off his standard grievances: the heat, the moisture, the pollution, the phenomenally unhealthy, uneducated locals, the wealth of the churches. He tensed with the feeling of threat that had dogged him for the last year—a paranoia that he would be subject to imminent, irreparable harm if he stayed in Port Salvador. That fear had inspired Sam to attempt writing a novel, something he could try to publish that might provide credentials to spirit him out of here. The work kept him indoors, with his cigarettes and air-conditioning.

  A maroon Mercury pulled off the road and parked near the café’s entrance. A man slightly older than Sam, wearing a gray suit, exited the car and walked into the diner. He didn’t look like he lived in LaCroix. Sam pegged him as a lawyer. This part of the country was flush with them, venal meatheads who went to Tulane or LSU and dispersed along the coast to feed on tragedy and divorce. They all had commercials on the local stations and low billboards along even the most rural roads. He wondered if he was going to have to talk to a lawyer in the near future.

  What I mean to say is that I have a child. He is nine months old and named Aidan. I am certain that his father is one of three men, of which you are one. Again, I do not want anything from you, even if it is the case that you are his father. I want only to be able to tell my son who his father is, on the day when he might ask. To that end, I only want to meet and talk with you regarding the methods of testing available to us. I was kind of a mess when we knew each other and please don’t think I am putting you on in some way. I have made many changes in my life since then, and I am a person dedicated to honesty and living clean.

  He still didn’t know how he felt. He couldn’t help an initial sense of persecution at the idea that he might have a child with this girl, whom he truly didn’t know, with whom he’d only shared certain bad habits. After their third encounter, she never called again, and he never felt a strong urge to call her. All in all, he had considered the affair a bit confusing, but exceptionally neat and undramatic. Now he’d decided to wait and see what the proper tests revealed before allowing his emotions to spin him around. It wasn’t as if she’d written to inform him that she might have passed a lethal virus into him, a shadow in the blood.

  Enough, he thought. Walk in the goddamned door.

  The cowbell above the screen door rang and the door cracked shut behind him. The dining area was shaped like a squared W with its middle prong replaced by a counter and kitchen. Hearty, fried smells thickened the air. Many of the tables were empty, but at a few, rough-skinned men in work clothes chewed their meals. The café thrived on stevedores, fishermen, and the refinery workers who passed through at lunchtime with dozens of orders to-go. An older woman with broad shoulders and a wide, crinkled neck called to Sam from behind the counter.

  She wore a long white apron over her T-shirt, and said, “Just one?”

  He stepped forward. “I’m supposed to meet someone. Actually, do you know her? She worked here. Her name’s Lana.”

  The woman studied him from her hard, flat face. She nodded, pointed to the counter, “Have a seat.” Sam noticed that the man in the gray suit, the one he’d seen in the parking lot, was sitting at the counter.

  He sat next to the man and asked for some coffee, which the older woman delivered without comment. Sam blew into his mug, determined not to look at the man beside him, possibly a fellow candidate for fatherhood. But would she do that? Would Lana gather all three of them together at the same time? Why? He kept his head down, stirring sugar into his cup and staring into the inky whirl.

  Sam didn’t hear the phone ringing, and he didn’t notice the old woman leaving the counter to answer it.

  “So,” a low voice said to him. Sam turned to the man on his right, whose face was shiny as polished leather. “You know Lana, huh?”

  Stunned a moment, Sam started to answer, but just then the old woman returned to the counter and began gathering things from underneath it. She moved quickly, almost frantically, and rose up with her bag. Her lips pursed and her jaw worked side to side, as if she were grinding her teeth. When she spoke her creased cheeks shivered.

  “All right fellas—Everybody’s got to go! You just take it with you. I got to close down. We’ll settle later.”

  Every man in the diner stopped and turned to watch the counter. The old woman tried to hold their stares for a second. Then her face broke like a sandcastle in a rain.

  “What happened?” Sam asked. “Are you all right?”

  “That was the sheriff. There’s been an accident.” She caught her face in her hands. “Lana’s not coming.”

  She lifted her purse over her shoulder and walked around the counter and clattered out the door, covering her face as she rushed behind the café. They all heard her car start and watched it kick up dust that settled in a red-brown patina across the café windows.

  Sam and the other man looked at each other with the same dumbfounded expression, then turned to the rest of the café. The suntanned laborers faced Sam and the man in the gray suit with accusatory glares. One of them, a young, rangy stevedore in his orange dockworker’s vest, seemed to watch with a face more curious than indicting. His eyes met Sam’s, and Sam looked away.

  Abruptly, the man in the suit rose off his stool, smoothed down his jacket, and walked out the door. The cowbell clanged and the screen door slammed shut.

  BECAUSE HE WAS WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE and love, Sam had planned to have a funeral somewhere in his book, and at Lana’s he found himself paying attention to the details of ceremony, the expressions of mourners, the placement of flower arrangements—material. He was slightly ashamed that his mind worked this way, but he didn’t know anyone at the funeral, and it was a good method to avoid eye contact. He’d noted a similar distance when attending his parents’ services, his mother’s within a year of his father’s.

  A low front of gray clouds squatted over the cemetery. The old woman from the café stood beside a younger woman who held her arm throughout the services. This girl had brown hair and a petite figure in black.

  There were a couple more women, older, but the rest in attendance were men, patrons of the café, Sam deduced. There were about thirty of them total, but no one Sam recognized, which is to say no one from the Department of Languages at Port Salvador Junior College. The priest lowered his hands above the two coffins, and the old woman choked out a sob. Lana’s car had crashed through the guardrail on the 2-10 bridge. She and her child were being buried in adjacent graves.

  The woman tossed a clump of dirt down as the coffin descended. The priest made the sign of the cross and the men began to drift off.

  Attempting to personalize his perceptions, Sam tried to remember sex with Lana, but he’d been drunk at the time and the images that came to him were inexact and distorted. Nothing stirred his heart. There were only clinical observations, or else the
words of other men who wrote of other feelings.

  As the small crowd thinned, Sam noticed a man in a navy sport coat and black shirt, a thin beard shading his jaw. This was the stevedore he’d marked at the café three days ago. Now the man locked eyes with Sam and started walking over.

  Sam looked around until it became apparent the stevedore was walking toward him specifically. He appeared to be younger than Sam, though his face was already burnished by the sun, fissures begun around his cheekbones. He stared bluntly out of deep-set eyes.

  “Hi,” the man said, offering his hand. “I’m Lee Robicheaux.”

  Sam shook. “Sam Galt.” A damp breeze sloughed between them.

  Lee spoke in a high, twangy timber, a voice born to hustle livestock. “I saw you at the Crescent Moon. You knew Lana?”

  “Yeah. For a little while.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Me too.”

  They were the only ones near the grave, though the woman from the café and her friend had only just begun to walk away.

  Lee’s eyes darted back and forth and he pinched his nose before leaning so close that Sam smelled brine and oil. His tone hushed to a throaty whisper, he said, “You got a letter. Right?”

  Sam looked at him. “That’s right.”

  Lee nodded and hunched, suggesting his harmlessness. He turned back to face the graves where two men in blue jumpsuits were shoveling dirt. “Me too, brother.” Lee drew a cigarette from a pack in his jacket and offered one to Sam. He took it and silently bristled at being called brother.

  “You remember that other fella sitting by you at the Crescent Moon that day?” Lee asked. “That one in the suit?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee lit their cigarettes. “I think he got a letter too.”