2008.
What an impossible year.
My left foot bends out as if it’s always trying to walk away from me. I drag crooked tracks. The sand in Galveston is coarse and gray, specked with orange and yellow particles, and in the early morning the beaches are mostly deserted, and Sage runs freely up and down the shore with the gnarled giraffe in her mouth. I pass my tongue along the porcelain bridgework against my gums, and I remember.
The note Cecil left on my door is a small Post-It, and its message crashes through my mind like a rogue wave: Roy—some hard-ass in a suit asking about you. Didn’t give me a name.
I guess I could get back to my room and start packing, light out for new territory a little farther west. It doesn’t seem possible that they’d be looking for me now, but there’s nobody else it could be.
Maybe twenty years later some goombah opens the books and gets the idea to settle old business. Maybe.
I ponder my history and admit that nobody looking for me could have friendly intentions. My stomach’s heavy with this sense of a marker come due.
And the note has me thinking about Rocky even more than usual.
I think of her talking about herself in a bar in Angleton while green and purple lights from the dance floor glide through the sheen of her eyes, and her face grows more vivid when I remember that face as it told me things.
She talked about being four or five and sleeping in the backseat of a car in the woods, where a man had driven her mother. There were lots of trucks parked around a couple trailers, and her mother didn’t come back till the morning, when she exited a trailer with her makeup smeared, and the man drove them both back home, and no one said a word.
Sage runs to my feet and rattles water off her coat.
I climb down the inlet beside the abandoned pier where I keep crab traps. My legs are stiff and the wet air causes my hands to ache and clench into claws. When I pay for things people notice my hands. The fingers are crooked and my knuckles bubble like blisters.
I could run, make a break for it.
But the solace of walking Sage and collecting the crab traps is a little thing I can allow myself this morning.
These are the same beaches where Cabeza de Vaca’s men were reduced to cannibalism, where the pirates Aury, Mina, and Lafitte slipped the law. Here Lafitte, who built a fortress named Campeche, ran slaves, whores, saloons, and served as the island’s governor until he had to flee after firing on an American vessel. But before his flight he treated the island to a four-day orgy overstocked with whiskey and women. Walking the foggy beaches in the morning, air thick with salt and decay, you get the impression this place is still nursing a hangover from all that history.
I think of Rocky holding my hand and telling me about being in that car as a little kid, and how it is the same thing with the history of this island. The stories have become the place. I read a writer who said that stories save us, but of course that’s bullshit. They don’t.
But stories do save something.
And they killed a lot of time for me over the last twenty years. More than half of them in prison.
Farther out, the gray cypress of the pier has rotted and the boards are broken and collapse into the brassy fog. A few gulls perch on the posts near the end of the thing, their chests out like tiny presidents. Fiddler crabs scuttle away from my feet. The calm, rhythmic slap of the tide. You can see the winds building farther out in the Gulf—the sky beginning to stir in a very slow, sweeping churn. The weather makes the bolts in my skull seem to tighten.
I stand under the dock, and the way the pilings converge at its center the pier looks like a flooded cathedral. I wince, closing my fingers around the line, and hoist up the wire cage, foamy film washing my tennis shoes. I flip the catch and dump four blue crabs into the canvas sack slung from my shoulder, then hinge the catch again and toss the basket into the tide. The crabs struggle and thrust against the bag, the heavy canvas stretching, and I realize I’m thinking about Carmen, too, this morning. I can almost taste that smell of Camel menthols and Charlie perfume instead of this salt-clotted air.
Climbing back up, I pause with Sage because past the broken pier, just outside the bank of bright fog, I see a school of bottlenose dolphin break the surface in greased arcs. Sage drops her toy at my feet and shakes water off again. The dog has a curious, flirtatious spirit, a red-and-white Australian shepherd, slim, with pale green eyes and a flopping tongue. We stand there a minute because I hope to see the dolphins again, but I don’t. Bramble and thistle crust the dunes, and a barge crawls out the fog toward the shipping canals, slides across my good eye.
I wonder why Cecil referred to the guy as a “hard-ass.” I wonder what questions, exactly, this man asked about me.
I could run.
Or I could stay put and wait. Face the music, as people say.
It strikes me that this might be a good death. And long overdue. Then the rise in my pulse and the speed of my thoughts turn into a sensation of careful, total awareness, like waking up.
I toss Sage’s toy ahead and I turn to look at my crooked prints. The way my back and neck hunch you wouldn’t believe I once stood six-three, and the patch on my left eye lends me a superficial resemblance to the pirates who once ruled this coast.
My shadow ahead is twisted enough to be some spindly, crustaceous thing that crawled from the tide. Shambling out of history.
After I empty the crab traps I walk Sage through a couple parking lots to the doughnut shop. The air in Finest Donuts is as tense as I am. Roger hardly scratches Sage, and then only after she nuzzles his leg persistently. He stares at the chessboard and then at Deacon’s face, which is slack-jawed, his eyes hooded, his long arms dangling, so black he looks like polished Shinola. Deacon hasn’t been around the past couple days and now here he is, crack of dawn, and I can smell the gin and piss from the door.
Finest Donuts leases the last slot on the western end of a very small strip mall that’s blocked from Seawall Boulevard and the beaches by another, much larger and newer strip mall to the south. The pizza place beside Finest closed months ago, so now there’s only a locally owned drugstore and tobacco shop, and most days the strip’s windblown parking lot is occupied only by sand drifts and discarded flyers. We just had the seventh anniversary of 9–11, and a small banner outside the store reads WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
I suppose that’s one of the things we do in here. We sit around not forgetting.
“And now you have to start all over,” Roger says to Deacon. “From zero. You give back the chip. You feel like it was worth it?”
I glance at Errol, who’s at the counter blowing steam off his coffee, and he raises his eyebrows like it’s been touchy in here all morning. One of the three pots of coffee is already emptied, and the ashtrays have a fair share of butts, so I wonder how long they’ve been up. The chess game looks like it stalled, with Roger having a tidy collection of Deacon’s pieces.
“You begin by admitting you are powerless,” Roger says to him, lighting a new cigarette. He chases the first drag with black coffee and folds his thick arms on the table. Roger keeps a small mustache trimmed to military regulations, and the ease with which his face communicates disappointment can feel a little tyrannical. I don’t envy Deacon, whose eyes are lacquered and stunned, and I step over to Errol and lay my sack of crabs on the counter.
Roger says to Deacon, “You begin again. Over and over. Each time, whatever it takes.” Deacon nods slowly, a tear scrawling down his cheek. He raises his cup of coffee with two hands, brings it to his lips slowly, like sacramental wine, and his look of confusion and shame reminds me of Rocky.
Deacon’s bent neck reflects in the glass display facing the front of the store, a penitent shadow over the rows of doughnuts and cakes under fluorescent tubes. I think about Cecil’s note, the man who’s asking questions, and I wonder if they’ve sent more than one man to find me. I would.
Errol shakes his head, folds up a paper he’d had open to the racing form. “
I won’t go back to offtrack,” he says to me. “You can’t meet any woman worth a damn there, anyway.” I sit down at a booth between him and the chess table, and Sage draws figure eights around my ankles before settling between my feet. Deacon nods at me and tries to smile. I notice he has a fresh knot of purple bruise on his forehead and a red stain in the white of one eye. He grew up here and blew a basketball scholarship to Texas Tech, and he was working as something at Wal-Mart, but the sense this morning is that’s no longer the case. He calls me Captain Morgan sometimes, because of the eye patch.
“How you, Deacon?” I say.
“All right, all right.” He blows on his mug. The smell of gin off him overpowers the coffee and pastries and even cigarettes now.
We’re all on the program here, though really I don’t have a choice—I can’t drink, meetings or not, but I still come for the stories. And it gets me out of the apartment.
Roger checks his watch and says, “Why don’t we start?” He goes through the twelve steps, asks if anybody wants to share. All eyes are on Deacon. He starts to speak but puts a fist to his mouth, shakes his head. Another tear skips helplessly down his cheek and he says, “I don’t know if, right now, I mean—”
I want to help him out, and I sigh, “I’ll share.” This surprises everyone a little. Roger and Errol watch me closely. “My name’s Roy. I’m an alcoholic. I got nineteen-plus years sobriety.” They all say hi to me like we’re meeting for the first time, and I look at Deacon. “You remind me of someone this morning. A girl I knew a long time ago. I guess I’m thinking about her a lot today. She had a hard life.”
The canvas sack on the counter shifts and stirs. We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it. They wait for me to go on.
“I’m thinking about her now. Something happened—I got a note, this morning. It made me think about her.” For one second I think I’m finally going to tell the whole thing, but I stop myself. Everyone’s waiting for me to continue, though, and I end up just talking a little about Rocky.
She told me she had a long walk home from where the school bus stopped, and she had to walk under an old overpass that was filled with strange graffiti, and on the other end of the tunnel sometimes older boys hung out drinking and smoking, and when that was the case she’d have to wait in the darkness of the overpass, wait until they’d gone and the light at the end of the shaft was empty. Once she waited until after midnight, and when she got home nobody noticed she was late. Thirteen years old.
I stammer and mumble through the anecdote, and everybody looks confused when I’m done, but they thank me. It’s obviously one of those stories that no one knows how to take. They can’t understand the point.
The point of the story is how she told it, the way her face looked away when talking, glancing back to see if I was listening. The slow, measured quality of her words.
I know that for all of us here, the Finest Donuts chapter of AA, our testimonies let us bale up memory, bind years of degradation and guilt into these manageable units that we can put on a shelf, take down, and skim in the safety of tales.
I never told my real story.
Errol talks about losing a bunch of money at the track over the weekend. We thank him.
Deacon finally gets up the courage to tell us about the old friend he ran into at work, who offered to buy him a drink, and when he’s done confessing and wipes his eyes, we thank him.
When we’re done everyone stands for more coffee and I remember the book in my jacket. I take out a slim paperback, and I hand it to Roger. A novel I’d borrowed about two boxers in Southern California.
The book seems to interest Deacon, because he slides it off the table and starts reading the back cover. Roger huffs.
When he’s dusted to the elbows with flour and sugar, you can’t see the marine tattoo on Roger’s left forearm, but right now it’s a blurred greenish blue smudge beneath a canopy of thick hair, shaped vaguely like an anchor.
Errol says, “I’m saying we need to make a plan to meet pussy. You got to put yourself in the game. Who’s with me?”
Deacon holds the book up to Roger and asks, “What you say this about?”
Roger says, “Fighting.”
Errol shakes his head and cocks the brim of his trucker’s cap down, snaps open his paper. Errol appeared at the meetings shortly after me, walking out the sand flats talking about how he’d been hauling rig across vast deserts and no-man’s-lands, ice trucking in Canada, breaking highway up and down the Southwest. He chews his fingernails even when he doesn’t want to, when he’s talking to you, and his eyes will dart down and ask you to excuse the weakness of the habit. I’ve seen his rig but I don’t know the last time he hauled anything in it.
Errol closes his paper again and says, “You need to project an aura of safety, of friendliness. Above all, they need to feel you’re listening to them, even when there’s no sense in it.”
Roger says, “I think, at a certain point, you prefer to be lonely.”
Roger has three ex-wives and bought the doughnut shop on the tail end of his last bender, in ’92. He and Errol start talking about the new hurricane that formed off Cuba weeks ago and has been dancing up the Mexican coastline. Every other one gets a guy’s name now, and this one’s Ivan or Izzy or something.
“Gonna be bad.”
“Might not.”
“You seen what it looks like on the news?”
Then Leon pushes through the glass door and the bells jingle. “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Who owes alimony in here?”
“Flip the sign, would you?” Roger asks, and Leon turns around to spin the sign on the door to OPEN. When he turns back Roger says to him, “Thought your ex got married.”
“Not me. One of you boys looks like you’re getting served.”
“What?” Errol says.
Leon leans against the doughnut counter and stretches his legs, enjoying the moment of withheld information. “Dude out there’s watching the store. Parked across the lot. Saw him I’s coming up the road.”
I hoist myself up and Sage follows me to the window.
“Guilty conscience,” Leon says, nodding at me.
Out the window I see at the back, far end of the lot, a black Jaguar sitting alone. There’s a man inside wearing sunglasses and clearly watching the place. There’s nothing else to watch this time of morning.
“What is it?” Roger asks.
I back away from the window. “He’s right. Guy’s watching the place.” I move to the counter and take up my crab bag.
“What’s with you?” Leon says.
“Nothing. Have to cut out early,” I tell him. “Painting the boss’s rental today.” I click my tongue for Sage. She picks her toy off the linoleum and wags her tail at my ankles.
They’re all watching me now.
“Hurricane might hit the next few days,” Errol says, “and he wants to paint his house?”
I shrug and move past the counter and through the kitchen, my head throbbing, Cecil’s note burning in my thoughts.
“Where you going?” Roger says.
I’m already walking at a trot, through the swinging door, and I call behind me, “Going out the back way.”
When I push through to the alley behind Finest Donuts my heart’s thrumming and I start trudging up the levee of sand that separates the next business park. My breath wheezes in the warm air. I think of hobbling out of Stan’s Place twenty years ago, running through the field with shouts swelling behind me, gagging on my own tongue. I can tell myself I have no reason to assume that man in the Jaguar is following me, but I’m still afraid to look over my shoulder.
I haven’t decided how to answer this paranoia. To stay or to run.
Rocky makes me want to stay.
THREE
Clear of the cities, Texas turned into a green desert meant to hammer you with vastness, a mortar filled with sky. The girls eyed it like a fireworks show.
The 45 causeway southboun
d, into the north side of the island: rainbow-colored sailboats stuffed the harbors, fishing trawlers whose nets draped from jibs like cypress moss. Bums crouched in the shade of palm trees and telephone poles. The palm trees were shorn of leaves and looked like gnawed ribs plunged into the dirt. A bony dog with matted fur limped down the sidewalk at a trot, maybe on his way to Pelican Island. Teenage girls in skimpy two-pieces, sitting on the hoods of cars, the sun in their teeth, in the chrome trim, the sun in the bottle caps strewn around the tires and the crushed beer cans stamped into the asphalt. The older guys crowded around them, passing out cans of High Life or Lone Star.
The Gulf was dark blue and dappled with napalm by the miles-wide sun that peered over it. The air had a coating that magnified the sun, shunting it into blades. All the people had coins in their sunglasses.
Girls in bikinis roller-skated along the seawall promenade, a group of skateboarders clanged and ricocheted off guardrails and curbs. Beach balls flew and bounced in the shadows of the big resorts along the shoreline. You could smell the open-air fishmarkets, the baskets of shrimp and peppered crawfish boils where the old beach dogs scrounged around for guts and shells under the tables.
Signs of history: old Spanish churches hardening in the heat; white stone and pink brick, adobe, stucco; a three-masted ship from the 1800s, full of false pride at the Seaport Museum.
You could broker the future here. Dump your memories into the white light of the Gulf like leaves into a bonfire.
The little girl’s hands were on the window, her mouth hanging open. She whispered as if it were a secret. “What’s it?”
Rocky spoke in her ear. “That’s the ocean, baby.”
“What’s it?”
“Water, sweetheart. Lots and lots of water.”
Galveston Page 6
