Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  Brandy shrugs. She’s back to looking like one of them, a girl.

  “Our mother says we shouldn’t play with you,” Tricia says.

  “Why?”

  “Well … because.”

  “That don’t make sense. She brought Allie here, and Allie’s a Mexican, right Alejandra?” She says the j with a puff.

  “She thinks you’re trash,” Allie says.

  “She don’t want to get caught, that’s all,” Brandy says.

  The girls lie on their backs, looking up at the broken beams under the stilts.

  “Where’s your family?” Tricia asks.

  “Oh, my Uncle Cody? He’s gone on his errands.”

  “Was he out there last night?” the girls want to know.

  “Cody? I have a lot of uncles. They all like Melanie. Everyone likes Melanie.”

  Tricia’s father died a few summers later. Or was he their father? He worked a lot. When he was home, his soft eyes were on Melanie, always. He was a tall man, gray hair, gray eyes, cuff links. His heart gave out, and when he was gone, the summer after, her mother brought them to Corpus Christi, to a different beach, and her skin was tanned this time, her hair in blond cornrows. There was a different man and a different party.

  “Husband?” Tricia says, thinking he will not answer to anything now. Their daughter is sleeping on the king bed beside them, bottom up in the air, legs tucked under.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “But I want to know. What made you love me? Something, right? Maybe you can just remember that moment and it will help.” But he is already turned away. There is sand in the bed. The sheets smell funky, as if they’ve been sprayed with air freshener but left unwashed. She won’t sleep. She walks out onto the balcony. The hotel doesn’t face the ocean; it faces a water park. Beyond the water park is the ocean, but she can’t see it, not from here.

  When it started, maybe the fourth day? Or the fifth. She remembers her mother’s warm breath on their faces.

  Melanie, they call her, when they are at the beach. “Girls,” she whispers, “my girls …” Trina turns around, grabbing Tricia’s elbow. Grace and Allie are fast asleep.

  “Oh, don’t bother,” Melanie says. “They won’t wake up. I took care of that. This is just for you, for my kittens.”

  And she takes them out to the sea, one pretty daughter on either side, and they seem to glide with her. She whispers to them, and sings, and she tells them what happens at night is different. “We don’t talk about what happens at night in the daytime.” They walk and walk until they find a bonfire. “Come on, my kittens.” Melanie smiles and everyone smiles back, men who aren’t teenagers but not really men, college boys mainly, and a few women in shorts and Rockets T-shirts. Trina takes her mother’s hand, and Tricia rolls her pajama bottoms up over her calves, walking into the water. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do. Her mother was kissing those men last night, and when she glanced over her shoulder, Trina was too. Tricia puts her head under the water, wishing it were colder. When she looks back everything gleams.

  Were things really brighter then, or are they just more vivid in childhood?

  She remembers moonlit foam, the waves splashing … The women were gone, it was only Melanie and Trina who remained, and Melanie was on top of one of the men, leaning back, digging her hands into the sand, smiling upside down. Tricia was too far to see her mother’s face, but she knew she was smiling like a little girl hanging from monkey bars. Melanie’s body was bobbing back and forth, all her pale hair spilling on the ground. Trina was on another man, kissing.

  “You are both cats,” their mother tells them, giggling, as they walk back. “Like your momma. Meow, meow.”

  Tricia is silent, and Trina runs ahead, her arms open wide. Once they’re on the cots out on the balcony, she whispers, “I could taste melted marshmallow on his tongue. It was sweet. He sucked on my tongue hard and then he let it go. It almost hurt, but it felt good.”

  “I don’t want to hear. That’s slutty,” Tricia tells her.

  “No. We’re cats. In the morning we’ll be different people. Like Melanie said.”

  They wake at sunrise, and Trina touches her elbow, and they walk out into the ocean to bring in the traps, not speaking. Tricia thinks maybe it was something like a dream.

  At home, they live in a long ranch house. Sometimes they turn off the hallway lights and play ghost. Their mother takes many naps during the day, but she is more like a mother there than she is on the beach. She pours them Count Chocula cereal in the morning, she talks about report cards, she makes them grilled cheese sandwiches. She even watches television with them sometimes. It’s entirely possible, when they come out here, Tricia thinks, that their mother is some sort of cat lady.

  Audrey came out with a head full of dark hair. Then her dark hair fell out and was replaced by still darker, plumier hair. From the beginning, she latched without difficulty. Tricia held her whenever she cried. She remained toothless until she was a year old, and then they all came in at once. Audrey was up all night, feverish, and Tricia would stick her index finger over the sore gums as her baby clamped down. “Go ahead,” she’d whisper, “bite Mommy. It’s okay.” Audrey was colicky too; Tricia held her in the steamy bathroom and rubbed her back as her little one cried and gasped. Sometimes it was Tricia’s body Audrey wanted, and the baby would touch her mother’s face and turn it away as she took the nipple into her mouth. She twirled her fingers, closed her eyes. Tricia misses that sometimes. How just the breast could soothe her daughter into a trance. Nothing seems to have replaced that kind of content.

  Tricia called her mother once, during a particularly difficult day of colick.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know, sweetheart,” Melanie said. “I didn’t nurse you two. Why don’t you get someone in to help? Where’s the little shit?” That’s what she calls David, Tricia’s husband.

  Her mother is not so very far away now. She lives with another husband, in Dallas. But Tricia has not seen her in almost ten years. She hasn’t seen her sister either. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. They talk about it, about meeting for something, for a holiday. But there are always islands to visit, things to be done.

  Her husband is gone; he is here but he is already gone. Tricia is a woman, not a cat. She can’t keep him, nor dispose of him. She loves him, or at least she wants him back so that she can try to love him.

  There’s something, something that may have happened, or maybe didn’t. Not at the beach, but at the house on Albans Lane.

  It was a late night, some night outside of time; she can’t remember her age. And she can’t remember if it was before, or after, the summer Allie and Grace disappeared. Tricia woke to a sound, a low hum. She walked into the living room. Candles flickered. The light was warm and bright, unlike any light she had seen before. The table was set with the green glass plates. Everything seemed burnished, as if someone had polished the air. Her mother was there, leaning back in her chair, white shirtsleeves rolled up to her elbows, a bloodstone dangling where the buttons began. And across from her was Trina. Her hair was brushed clean and pulled back off her neck with a black velvet ribbon. She wore a red dress, white lace tights, and patent leather Mary Janes. She nibbled a big slice of white cake and swung her stockinged legs under the table.

  They were more beautiful than any two people Tricia had ever seen. She rubbed the crust from her eyes and watched. Melanie was laughing, and Trina kicked the table leg and looked right back at her.

  Watching them together was almost like looking into one of those little plastic snow globes her mother put out at Christmastime. Another world, lovelier and smaller than this one. If it could come outside and into this world, it wouldn’t be so magical. But you wanted to get inside it just the same.

  The night it happened, the moon was murderously bright.

  That’s what Melanie says when she wakes them: “Wake up, wake up, my girls, The moon is murderously bright!” And this night, she wakes them all, Grace and
Allie, Tricia and Trina. “Wipe the sleepy dirt from your eyes. This night is enchanted. It will last for a hundred years.”

  The air itself feels charged. Allie and Grace stand up, wobbling, rubbing their eyes. They would follow Melanie anywhere.

  The house flickers in the distance. That broken house seems to come alive at night and die every morning.

  And Tricia remembers, yes—before that summer, it was an empty, abandoned shack, the stilts sinking into the sand, the windows boarded up. Tricia and Trina would go there, find things that had washed up. A glass disc full of colored blue water and pale sand. There were old shoes, baby bottles, fish skeletons. Once, a ring they thought was diamond, but when they brought it to Melanie, she told them it was cubic zirconia. Oh, and a coral necklace. That had been a treat, how they rinsed it and handed it to their mother. It was their greatest find.

  But this night, there are men around and inside it. The women who are there are there for the men. There is a woman with stiff breasts and boots that go way up past her knees, walking toward the water. She looks painted onto the landscape. “It’s a stripper,” Grace whispers, and Trina says, “Be quiet.” The girls run beneath the house, looking for something. They whisper, wonder if they’ve walked into a ghost story. It’s very dark beneath, and there’s a sliver of light where the stilts rise to their highest, where the light from the windows and the moonlit ocean cut through.

  “Do you think Brandy is here tonight?” one of the girls, probably Allie, whispers. Grace is scared. Allie takes her hand.

  Upstairs, Melanie’s laughter, ice giggling inside a tumbler, war whoops.

  A man jumps from the deck to the sand. When he sees them down there he squats, smiles. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  He’s reaching for Grace, and she begins to cry. She’s still in her pink pajamas, the ones with daisies all over them. Allie wraps an arm around her and so she feels the bottoms dampen. Grace has wet herself. It’s just a party. That’s when they hear Melanie say, “Come on, Grace, it’s all right. Come on out.”

  “It’s okay,” the twins whisper. “It’s Melanie.”

  It’s Mother’s Day. There are no Mother’s Day gifts; David didn’t come up with anything and Audrey’s too young to have done anything on her own. They sit in the lobby, eating their free continental breakfasts. Tricia peels a bruised orange for Audrey, and then they make waffles. Audrey is fascinated by the waffle maker. She sticks her fingers into the syrupy cherry sauce. “Oh, sorry, Mommy,” she says, “not sanitary.”

  David looks awful. Like his eyes are just holes punched into his face. He hasn’t even bothered to shave. “Why would you, for this grand occasion?” she says, and too late she realizes she said it aloud. But he just nods.

  And that’s when she squints, blurring his features a bit. Men, for her mother, were interchangeable. She liked to have sex with them, and she liked to look at them. She liked them to look at her. But beyond that, they didn’t interest her. And so, for Tricia, her father had been a scent, a cigar, cuff links, a nice leather chair. Those men on the beach, they were bar boys or college boys, or working men in soiled shirts and Stetsons. Her father wore boots with his suit. He liked to call them his girls.

  She squints at David, and sees him … tries to make him flat. Isn’t that what he’s done to her? She is nothing, he says, it’s nothing, it’s never been any good, it’s no use … For a moment, he’s a loser with a five o’clock shadow. And then he gets up for more coffee and he’s back to being David again.

  “Well,” she says when he comes back, “can we go out? For crab maybe? I’d like to do that.”

  When David and Tricia were first married, they lived in Austin, down the street from UT. They walked their dog to the Crown and Anchor once a week for beer and soggy fries, and she liked to sit out on the lawn and listen to the football games. She liked the roar of the crowd, which carried like voices over water down Duval Street. The announcer’s voice was masculine, rich, slow and easy, like her father’s. After the game, if they’d won, kids would drive down the roads yehawing, whooping. She reminds herself that they were innocent whoops of joy. Or probably. Or most likely. But maybe there was a fine line. Something David said to her, tonelessly, once, as he was throwing out platitudes in that dim voice he used lately, was, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.”

  That wasn’t it, though, for Melanie. She didn’t hate anyone, really. Some people were beneath her, that’s all. She liked fun.

  David won’t go out, and so it’s Audrey and her mommy, facing the seawall. Audrey has pineapple juice and a sunfish bib. Tricia orders king crab, and then another. She can’t remember ever feeling so hungry.

  “It’s all right, it’s Melanie,” they tell Grace. There’s that windchime laugh, and Melanie’s voice, saying sweetly, “That one’s the plain one.” Then the sounds settle, as if something thick has descended on them all. Upstairs there’s moaning and sighs, and something warm and rich, a cawing, a mewing. Tricia and Allie crawl under the floorboards of the deck and look up through the slats. Grace is whimpering, and those moans, they seem to come from a creature buried for centuries, but they’re coming from Melanie. She’s straddling one of the men. Her body moves up and down, riding waves. Brandy’s there too. She looks like a boy, standing in the doorway in a man’s shirt, a pipe in her mouth. Tricia and Trina climb from under the deck and their mother looks over the man’s shoulder and smiles.

  Grace is in laps, hands around and inside her, the pink pajamas in a soiled heap, flung across the deck. Tricia chews the back of her hand, then bites her tongue and tries to taste. She turns away, crawls back under. And Trina stays.

  Tricia and Allie lie there, thinking. Tricia holds Allie’s hand, then puts her head against her chest, listening. Allie is still, but for her heartbeat.

  Even now that she’s grown, she believes in this, that Allie heard her thoughts.

  They know you are here. You have to run.

  I’m afraid. We have to do it together.

  No. They won’t hurt me. I’m her kitten.

  They took Allie down though. Tricia’s eyes were closed, her hands digging deep, deep into the sand, pushing deeper, to where the sand was damp. So she didn’t see it, but she knows Allie fought. She wasn’t even looking for Melanie, but Melanie was watching, Tricia knew she was watching. Allie screamed and flailed, fighting with her nails and teeth. The men were different than they were with Grace, they weren’t thick and private. They whooped and laughed. What must it have sounded like? There were still people out there, in their vacation homes. But later, in the morning, when the patrol cars came, people said they only heard a party.

  Tricia never dreams of that night. Instead, she dreams of a dark room and sounds: a rooster crowing, wind chimes tinkling, men whooping, a woman moaning, giggling, tearing, screaming. Sometimes there are people there with her, in the black. Sometimes an alarm clock interrupts, and sometimes the other sounds overwhelm.

  In the morning, her girls stood behind her. Melanie’s eyes were red-rimmed, and she pushed her sunglasses up her nose. The policeman spoke to them separately. “No, we were sleeping. They must have dared one another to go exploring,” Melanie told the men. “Those girls were always fascinated with that house.”

  Allie’s mother, a nurse at Texas Children’s, moved away to somewhere in Virginia, and then to someplace in the Midwest, and then she moved again and again, from hospital to hospital. She felt no anger toward Melanie. She wrote letters, asking again and again what the girls did that day. And Melanie sang her the songs they sang, told her about the virgin daiquiris she made them. “I feel close to you, Melanie,” Allie’s mother said.

  “I know. I do too. I know how lucky I am. I’m surprised you don’t hate me, with my two still here.”

  “I don’t have many girlfriends,” Melanie said to her twins when she hung up. “I’m glad she feels she can talk to me.”

  After a while the phone calls stopped. Allie’s mom never came b
ack to Texas.

  On that drive back, they returned early. The sky was damp and close. It was the kind of muggy Houston weather that felt as wet as rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.

  “The clouds look like smashed brains,” Tricia said.

  “It’s a hard day, I know, kittens,” Melanie said. She turned on the radio and rolled the windows down. She sniffled, wiping her nose with her wrist, and lit a cigarette. In that moment, Tricia believed her mother was as close to sad as she could ever be.

  She and Trina weren’t really twins, after that.

  Someday, when David is gone—and he will be gone, Tricia is sure of that now—she’ll bring Audrey back to the beach. They’ll buy matching skull shirts on the Strand and have their pictures taken together in a booth. They’ll come here in the winter and search for sand dollars, and dip their ankles into the surf. It’s not so crowded in the wintertime. Tricia will raise her hand up to the sky and sprinkle the shimmers all over the water, just as her mother used to do. She’ll laugh and tickle her black-haired daughter. “I come from a long line of witches,” she’ll say. “My grandmother was a witch, and her daughter was a witch, and I am a witch, and you!” She’ll jab Audrey in the ribs until she giggles. “But not for real. Just for pretend.”

  “That’s right,” Tricia will cackle, “we’re good witches. And just for pretend.”

  What she remembers that day as they drive back, David silent as she points out the freighters and the gulls to Audrey, what she remembers on that very bright day is how, after the men had gone away in their trucks, her mother carried the naked bodies out into the sea.

  It wasn’t ceremonious; it wasn’t unkind either. The bodies looked like bodies, not Allie, not Grace. Legs and arms and necks in the moonlight. They were lovely the way a wet, dead fish shining in the dark is lustrous before it splits open and begins to rot.