by Amber Burns
One every four hours or so turned into one every two hours, and so it progressed. It was not instant, nor was it a slow process, but soon I was finding Allen to get my supply on a weekly, then daily basis. I was out of it most days, sitting at that bar and staring at the sea, which was calm now that it was out of storm season. It was this state of mind I was in when I walked into “Ink Your Skin” on a Thursday afternoon. It was a bad day and I was thinking of Maxwell something fierce.
The girl behind that counter couldn’t have been more than twenty five years old, but I’ll never forget her words, or her calm demeanor.
“Good afternoon, what can I help you with?”
She smiled up at me, her dark red hair in pigtails. I tried to talk but my first attempt failed. She passed me a Kleenex, and only then did I notice the wetness on my face.
“Thanks, sorry.”
She walked out from behind the counter, and disappeared for what seemed like ten minutes, coming back with two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Here you go, looks like you’re having a rough day,” she said kindly.
I just nodded, still wiping at my face.
“I want to get something in memory of a friend who I lost in Afghanistan a few weeks ago,” I blurted out. “He was a high-school friend, we were on two tours together, and I watched him die.”
She walked over to her counter and came back with a sketch-pad and pencil.
“Tell me a bit about him?”
I started rambling about Maxwell.
“His name was Trent Maxwell, his family owned a Horse Ranch outside Odessa, and he loved it, spent every moment he could with those animals. We used to spend our summers out there together in High school, working the ranch. He gave his life for this country, he was only twenty seven.”
I drank my coffee and sat back, still in the happy numb haze of the drug, and when she showed me her drawing, I smiled.
“I love it.”
Two horses ran side by side, in astonishing detail, across a field where the flag blew in the breeze on a pole off in the distance. There were two figures in shadow leaning against the fence post underneath it, and at the bottom was written the date I’d given her as his date of death along with the words, ‘Never Forgotten’ in a soft cursive script.
She nodded.
“I’m glad, you give me time to draw out the stencil for this, and come in tomorrow. Now I know you are taking something, can you tell me what it is so that I know if you’ll bleed excessively?” She asked this last part softly and with compassion in her voice as she placed a delicate hand over mine.
“I take Xanax, for the shakes and some PTSD issues I have.”
She nodded, “That’s okay then. My name is Kate, by the way.”
I frowned, “I’m sorry I’ve been rude Kate, I’m Michel.”
After seeing Kate at the tattoo studio and deciding to get the memorial tattoo, I went back to the boat and vanished into oblivion, lying on the deck while the sun set overhead with a beer in one hand. The gentle rocking of the water lulled me into a semi-comatose state of relaxation. Before I knew it I was walking back into the tattoo studio the next day. Kate had a bed ready, sterile and prepped, and all the instruments of the trade laid out. It was not my first tattoo, but it was the biggest, and when she rubbed the stencil onto my back, it took up the whole space, from shoulder to shoulder, and down to my waistband.
“You ready for a good few hours of pain Michel?” She asked, grinning like a little she-demon.
I took a deep breath and stuck my face down in the hole provided.
“Do your worst pretty lady.”
The pain was therapeutic, eight and a half hours of catharsis. The endorphin high was almost too much, and my Xanax need only kicked in once I got back to the boat again. It felt like I was in a state of shock from the prolonged pain.
The healing process over the next few days was a bitch. The location of my ink meant there was dry and scabby skin I couldn’t reach to rub cream onto. It sucked being alone. I ran into Kate again two weeks later, and she invited me back to her studio for coffee. We had coffee, and then she asked to inspect her handiwork. Once my shirt was off, she trailed her fingers tenderly over the shapes of the horses, rubbing in a soothing ointment.
“It’s perfect,” Was all she’d said before I’d turned around and seized her roughly.
We were at each other like animals, kissing, biting and scratching, tearing at each other’s clothing. With her sitting on the edge of her own tattoo table I lifted her skirt and she slipped her panties aside.
“Here,” she said as she passed me a condom.
I started to roll it onto myself when I realized I was only half hard and my head was cloudy. The need, the want for a woman was there, but the ability seemed to be eluding me. I tried for a few more seconds to encase myself in the slick latex before dropping it, half open, to the floor.
“I… I’m sorry,” I managed to mumble while retreating out of the studio.
I left her studio with my legs shaking. When I got back to my boat, took a pill and climbed onto my bed, I hadn’t been with a woman in months, more than a year in fact. I wanted love, not empty sex anyway, but was a bit upset I was unable to make it happen nonetheless. I fell asleep at about three in the afternoon to the gentle sway of the water under me, and at six, my cellular phone’s incessant ringing woke me. With a sleep-fuzzy head I sat up and answered, almost expecting bad news, and not prepared for what I heard…
“Michel Deverroux?” The voice on the other end of the line asked tentatively.
I yawned. “Yes, who is this?”
Nobody had looked specifically for me since I’d come home, and I carried a constant fear with me of getting called back on duty, honorable discharge or not.
“My name is Murray Conrad, and I am an attorney in charge of your uncle’s last will and testament. Mr. Lechat passed away a week ago, and I have managed to locate you, finally.”
He hesitated. “Are you there Mr. Deverroux?”
Oh I was there alright, I was scrabbling for my bottle of pills.
“I’m here, I’m just a little bit shocked. I didn’t hear that he’d died. Andy’s dead?”
I grabbed at my water and saw the glass almost in slow motion as it fell to the floor and shattered into fine shards. I clamped the phone between my shoulder and ear, and crawled to reach for a bottle of water shaking.
“Keep talking, sorry, I just dropped a glass.”
I swallowed two of the tablets. Andrew Lechat was the last member of my family I had actually been in touch with, he still spoke to me via letters on a regular basis after I joined the military, and had taken me in when my mother and father disowned me when I was very young, and this was a huge blow.
“Yes Michel, he is dead and he left his house to you, the beach house in Galveston. I believe you are there at the moment anyway, in the area?”
I could have sworn my heart stopped.
“He did what?”
“He left you a house, and there is a sizeable financial inheritance too, including proceeds from the New York property where he lived for the past few years that he wished sold. Andrew Lechat was childless, and everything was left to you. He was a very wealthy man Mr. Deverroux.”
This was probably not sinking in correctly, and I dumbly answered.
“Yeah, um, I’m here, at a… Well, I’m here.”
“Good, I’ll courier you a stack of papers and a set of keys to the house along with the address of the house, it is standing empty, and yours as soon as you want it Michel. I understand you have just come back from Afghanistan?”
I nodded to myself.
“Yeah, I was there.”
Murray finished with, “I’m sorry, it’s a tough place, I did a tour myself, lost a leg to a landmine and then came back. Adapting to life here isn’t easy after… I’ll get those things sent off, you’ll have them tomorrow.”
The medication took me to my quiet place, and I sat there on the floor where I
’d ended up after taking them, my phone slipping from my fingers as I stared at the pattern on the wood. Maxwell was dead, the child was dead, and Andrew was dead too, and now I had no one. My mother and father were alive, but they sure weren’t interested.
I spent the day sitting in the bar, my usual spot, waiting for the courier to arrive with my papers and my keys, I’d told them to just deliver here. It may have been a bit dodgy, but I thought it was a good idea. I also called Allen who said he’d met me with my supply and “slip in a little ‘something special’.”
The day was a blur of a number of beers and a number of pills, the ‘something special’s’ of which I couldn’t identify… I would later find out these little beauties were actually called Tramadol, an opioid-type painkiller, and stupidly you could actually buy them over the counter.
Eventually I received the package from the courier and signed for it. After grabbing my duffel from the boat, I took a cab to get to the house, giving the cabbie the envelope with the address on, because I don’t think I could have found my way to a toilet if my life depended on it I was so high. I figured I’d fetch the boat to a closer slip at a later stage. Upon arriving, I dreamily fiddled with the keys and I swear it took me an hour to find the keyhole; never mind get up the stairs and to the front door. I wasn’t sure I enjoyed this sensation so much, it was as though I was walking on a cloud, looking through a cloud, and everything I tried to touch was enveloped in cloud-like fluff.
I didn’t even see what the house looked like when I fell into it that first time, I barely made it to the couch before I collapsed.
The next morning, the door was wide open and my duffel still lay on the stairs. A warm breeze blew off the sea, and my head ached ferociously. When I stood, swaying on my feet, my stomach heaved, and the nearest place I could reach was the open front door. As I straightened after losing my stomach contents over the rail and wiped my mouth, I looked straight ahead from where I stood.
My view consisted of a wide open snow white stretch of beach with a small border of dunes and succulents between it and the house, this was traversed by a wooden walkway. The breeze carried the smell of the sea and iodine scent of washed up seaweed. The entire scene was something straight out of a Nicholas Sparks movie and felt unreal.
I looked around me at the porch I stood on, and noticed the rough-hewn wooden furniture scattered about, no pillows were in sight. I guessed they would be inside stored away, and the wood obviously needed care; it was splintered, dry and in places worn. The stairs I’d somehow staggered up the previous night were broken and a few were even missing. How I hadn’t broken a leg was a miracle.
By noon I’d taken a walk around the outside of the house and confirmed what the porch had left me suspecting, that I’d inherited a wreck. There was storm damage to the boards and the yard was a jungle. I dragged myself back up the stairs and inside.
“And that’s only the outside of it,” I muttered to myself as I picked up my duffel, took it to what I presumed to be the main bedroom, and then hunted for the kitchen.
I felt like shit warmed over, and as I walked through the spacious kitchen switching on appliances that had been long left off, I started realizing what I’d been doing to my body these past weeks. I was slipping into a repeat of my teenage years, and that was not a thing I wanted to do.
I didn’t even know where exactly I was, I mean, I knew I was in Texas, Galveston, but which part? The taxi ride from the night before was an amnesiac blur. The refrigerator hummed satisfactorily, but when I went through the cupboards they were bare except for a few bottles of wine in a rack, bags of crisps, canned soup, peaches and bottled water. Those would have to do for the afternoon, as I had no money left and needed to read through those papers the lawyer had sent me.
When I tried switching on a light in the living room later that afternoon, it didn’t work, so I sat in the kitchen with the stack of papers I needed to read, my hands shaking from the lack of Xanax. I knew I had to stop that shit, and would only take one or two at bed time to help with the bad dreams. Instead, I poured a glass of wine to try and calm the nerves.
According to the words on this sheet of paper, once I signed them and arranged for them to be returned to Mr. Conrad, I would be wealthier than I had ever dreamed. Hell, I’d probably be wealthier than the president. I signed them without a second thought and resealed the envelope, calling the courier company to collect it while I refilled the now empty wine glass. Simultaneously I pondered how Andy had gotten so wealthy, what did one do to become so rich in this day and age?
After my excursion through the wine rack the night before I had explored a bit of the house, and a few pieces of mail addressed ‘Crystal Beach’ told me my location at least. Not the most valuable real estate in the Galveston area after the damage done by Hurricane Ike in 2008. Not too many folks who lived here year-round had the funds to rebuild after the storm, and most had actually just upped and left. But there was a marina on the inland lagoon side of the coast where I could bring my boat so that it could be closer to home, and I resolved to do that soon.
I sat on the lounge floor now going through utility bills from a desk drawer and trying to find information on getting the phone line connected; I needed internet. As soon as I had the money I would go and buy a computer, because wealthy as Andrew had been, he had never kept one here. His laptop simply travelled with him I suppose. On searching the house I didn’t even find a modem though, so it was entirely doubtful.
The furnishings in the house were all very ‘New England’ style, I suppose the interior magazines would call it, and I had work to do making the place more my own if I was going to make it home. As it was I didn’t feel at all comfortable in it. I’d give that some thought over the next few weeks while I tried to get back on my feet. My first order of business was to go around the house and make a list of repairs to do, which I’d get to in the morning. It was getting late into the afternoon already and I felt my eyes drooping with an exhaustion I couldn’t explain. Even breathing right now seemed like effort, wasn’t this how the psychiatrists described depression? A tiredness that didn’t go away, an inexplicable sadness? No desire to really do anything, I just wanted to be numb.
I simply dropped the papers and walked over to the couch, I needed to buy groceries, and lightbulbs… And that was all I thought of before I fell asleep. I could do everything… Tomorrow.
3
Three weeks into living in the house at Crystal Beach I got tired of stumbling up broken steps, pulling curtains and hearing perished plastic hooks crumble under the stress of use, and staring at peeling paint. I stomped out through the door determined to go and buy everything I needed to fix this wreck, right then and there. Stupidity I know.
I was halfway down the driveway before realization dawned on me that I had no car and was miles from the nearest open shop. It was out of “tourist” season and all the local places were shut.
“Fuck,” I swore to myself.
Since I’d started trying to avoid Allen’s little ‘something special’s’ as well as running out of Xanax, my temper had gone to hell in a hand-basket. When I turned back to face the house, the old garage door caught my attention for the first time since I’d been here. I hadn’t come outside much after that first walk-around to assess damage. The weather had not been so great, and when I did leave the house it was to walk straight out toward the beach and stare at the horizon like a zombie, not look around the back of the place.
I shook my head. “What are the chances?”
The door opened stiffly, the joints rusted tight from the salt air. There inside, under a layer of dust, sat the most beautiful old Jaguar XKE I’d ever laid eyes on. I should have taken the old man for a Vintage car nut. It had a few spots of rust in its mint-green paintwork, but was otherwise perfect. I guessed correctly when I turned the key, which had been left in the ignition, that the battery was flat. After a charge and some tender loving care she’d run like a purring kitten. I disconnected the batter
y and took it inside, jury-rigged a charging mechanism (thank you military mechanical improvising skills) and sat down to calmly make a list of what I would need.
My hands were shaking again, but I had to learn to cope, my personality was too volatile and addictive to play with the fire I’d been handling. The car battery would take a few hours to charge fully, so I settled down with a book and a cup of coffee; the other bonus substance I had discovered a significant stash of in the kitchen cupboards. I compiled my grocery list, along with my hardware list, and then once again relaxed back with ‘Inner strength’ (some book on recovering from trauma which fate seemed to have intended me to find). I’d actually enjoyed and found the sappily titled book useful so far.
