The brown beaches were strewn with washed-up gulfweed in a ragged line along the tide break. Rocky watched people who stood over smoking grills, and she watched the mostly naked girls and the boys following them like starving dogs. I could tell she was thinking about other lives. A lot of people her age expected to live forever and saw life as a kind of birthright to endless good times.
I never did see things that way, and I knew that she hadn’t, either.
Now and then she looked harassed by her own potential, like certain young people, and you might notice then the way a stillness spread through her eyes, and her unguarded face forgot to play a role, just looked stunned by confusion and remorse, while the features of this face were organized by a kind of country pride that wouldn’t admit confusion or remorse. I knew something about that, too.
I didn’t know what to do with her.
I didn’t quite understand why I was here, and I knew I wouldn’t stay.
A reasonable and even kind course of action was to get a hotel for them, pay it up for a few days, and split. It was hard, though, to look at the little one and not feel some twinge of larger generosity. But that’s the urge that fucks you, gets you paying tickets that aren’t yours.
Middle-aged men lugged surfboards under their arms. Tour buses lurched like drunks around corners.
The place was different when I came here with Loraine, less developed. We’d rented a house on stilts along the beach, and it seemed more like a small town then. We’d grilled shrimp with beer batter and toasted tequila. Smoked pot together in the bathtub. She said we were best when we weren’t serious, that there was no point in getting serious. I guess I never really believed her. Loraine once told me marriage was a social construct that turned pleasure into a business arrangement, and I tried to be cool about that. She was a lot younger than me, nine years. She made me feel like trying a straight life, though, welding or something, trying to settle down with her, but she would say, Does that pay as much? and, Why screw up a good thing?
I had wondered sometimes what that would have been like. Home in the evening, dinners. Having a couple tykes, watching them grow. I thought now that I wouldn’t have minded trying that, giving it a whirl.
Both the girls just stared out the windows, and now and then the little one would gasp and dart her face to Rocky and point.
We drove all the way west along the seawall and then back, and they looked at the same things twice with fresh enthusiasm. I was trying to locate the place where we’d rented that house so many years earlier, but I think a stone-and-glass resort was there now. Or maybe I just couldn’t find it.
I picked a motel a few blocks north of a pocket beach on FM 3005. It was L-shaped, its center a parking lot ruptured by thick shoots of scouring rush and weeds. Its walls were old brick painted baby blue, a single story with a flat roof and the low arm of the L jutting out into a glass office beside an old carport shaped like a painter’s palette. A sign said WEEKLY RATES under a larger, vertical sign whose stacked letters read EMERALD SHORES. Outside the lot and near the street a stripped palm tree curved toward the ground, bent over a pile of yellowed fronds.
I turned off the truck and said to Rocky, “You all are my nieces, yeah?”
She nodded. “You’re my mother’s brother.”
“Where’s she now?”
She thought. “Vegas.”
“Where’s your father?”
She shrugged. “Died on an offshore rig. A cable knocked him overboard. I knew somebody like that.”
The parking lot was empty except for a couple cars with bent antennas and rusted trim, a station wagon on two spares, a motorcycle propped over a dark pool of oil. Aluminum foil covered one set of windows. It was the sort of place for people with nowhere else to go, a motel where the occasional guest checked in to commit suicide, people too absorbed in their own failures to pay much attention to us.
I held open the door to the office for the girls. Three small fans focused around the counter and their hum mingled with the grinding roar of a boxy A/C wedged in a hole in the wall. Rocky held her sister’s hand and they looked at a display stocked with tourist brochures.
I could hear a radio or television playing from a side room, someone ranting about liberals, and I rang the tarnished bell on the counter.
Tiffany kept rotating her head, staring at everything, the dimpled ceiling, the faded seashell wallpaper, the hard-stamped pink carpet. I bet the air-conditioning was something else for her.
A woman emerged out the room behind the counter, her flesh so grooved and dehydrated it might have been cured in a smokehouse. It was sun-baked the color of golden oak and draped across jagged bones. Squirrel gray hair. Her eyeglasses had a square of duct tape holding them together at the center, and she pushed them up on her nose.
“Help you?”
She looked over my shoulder at the girls. The two hard creases framing her mouth seemed like they reached down to the bone.
A piece of paper taped to the wall outlined prices, said the weekly rate for a single was one-fifty.
“We’ll take two singles,” I said. “Each for one week.”
She cocked her head. “They’re yours?”
“My sister’s. Nieces.”
“Well, that’s a darling girl.”
Rocky walked up and told Tiffany to say hi, but the little girl ducked behind her sister’s legs, embarrassed.
“What’s your name, precious?”
“Tell her your name, sweetie.”
The girl laughed a little.
“It’s Tiffany,” said Rocky.
“How old is she?”
“Three and a half.”
The woman’s smile caused her face to rupture. I kept wondering what she’d looked like before the sun had its way with her.
We could hear the radio from the next room. I knew it was a radio now because the voices were those of a call-in talk show, and a man was discussing the New World Order and the Mark of the Beast. A starfish clock on the wall had stopped at eleven twenty.
She asked to see my driver’s license and I slid the fake over with two hundreds and five twenty-dollar bills.
“There’s another 24.67 for tax.”
I gave her two more twenties and watched her fill out the card. Her hand shook when she worked the pencil and she seemed to have one ear turned toward the voices from the radio.
“I suppose we’ll be all right,” she said, cocking her head to the other room. “Being the sovereign state of Texas. The UN invades, we’d be the ones to shoot back.”
I tried to smile but the face I made caused her to frown a little.
I said, “We’re from Louisiana.”
“Well.” She returned to writing on the receipt. “Louisiana belongs to the Catholics.”
I glanced at Rocky and told the woman, “All right.”
She handed me a receipt with two room keys, each on a rubber surfboard.
“That’s nineteen and twenty, right outside, directly across the lot. I’m Nancy Covington. You need something, I’m always here.”
I thanked her but a further point seemed conveyed by her expression.
“Just to say,” she added. “I’m good friends with lots of policemen. Just to say. Mind what goes on in the rooms.”
Rocky and I looked back and forth and both girls smiled at the woman.
“Good Lord, that is an adorable girl. You must be the very cutest thing ever came through here.”
“Let’s hope she stays that way,” said Rocky, and they both tittered.
Our rooms were side by side and each had dark green, all-weather carpet, oil paintings of the beach, and an imitation- wood dresser, nightstand, and small table. They smelled of suntan lotion, sweat. The wallpaper was the same peach-colored pattern of seashells as in the office, and in my room it was splitting at the seams and curling in the humidity. The sink faucet shook and rattled for a while when turned on, and maroon water stains painted the corners. Big A/Cs were stuck in holes under the
window of each room, and the curtains were thick, navy blue, and their plastic coating blocked the sun like a wall of bricks. There was even cable TV.
Tiffany sat on their bed and soon got absorbed in a show with puppets and cardboard sets. I watched Rocky unpack their knapsacks and stow her sister’s clothes in the dresser drawers. Her skirt hugged her ass when she squatted, and I felt my blood stir and cheer in admiration of it.
But there was still this kind of phony aspect to our scene. Like we were both pretending about something, and we weren’t going to talk about it.
“What now?” she asked.
I thought a moment. “Suppose we should do some shopping.”
“Um.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I got it covered.”
A dull warning prickled in me—old alarms raised by favors, the encouragement of certain dependencies.
“You shouldn’t be paying for us, Roy.”
“Not like I can take it with me.”
I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I wanted a drink pretty bad, too; I suppose to help me ignore those instincts that told me to hold on to my wallet and stop this playacting. Leave them now.
We found a JCPenney in a mall, and I waited while she chose some clothes. Malls make me edgy, people trying so hard to buy things, and it seemed like I noticed more and more fat people every day.
I watched Rocky hold up a skirt and blouse next to each other, and big women waddled among the racks, sifting hangers, checking tags, leaving pants unfolded and lying across displays, and they looked bloated and unhappy and hungry to spend.
I’ve found that all weak people share a basic obsession—they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you’d be better off developing a drug habit.
Something becomes too enjoyable, too consistent, and before you know it, you’re compromised.
This was what happened with Loraine, and I guess it had happened a little with Carmen, too. I resented that.
Rocky picked out a skirt, blouse, and two-piece swimsuit, and when I encouraged her she went back for a couple tank tops and a pair of jeans. At a K&B drugstore we bought toothbrushes and such, and I also bought a set of electric clippers. We went for lunch at a place near the hotel, close to the seawall, scoured wood with its own concrete tidewall, a mural of faded sea creatures painted across it. We ate on a patio and a group of teenagers congregated against the mural, smoking and posing, and Rocky hunched her shoulders a bit, pointed her face away from them. She took only a couple bites of her cheeseburger.
Tiffany ate her fries in a dainty manner, and Rocky looked between her sister and the teenagers, and it seemed like she didn’t want to watch them but couldn’t help it. She moved her food around, glanced at the kids, then dragged patterns in her ketchup with a soggy fry.
I washed down two burgers with a Budweiser, reclined a little, and inhaled the hot, salty air, stowed it in my lungs. “What do you think?” I asked her.
“Huh?” She dropped her fry. “I mean, thanks.”
“What do you think about it here? It looks all right.”
“It’s okay.”
“I bet she’s gonna like the beach.”
“Yeah.” She crossed her arms on the table and looked down at Tiffany, and her smile struck stiff and quick.
“I bet you can get some kind of waitress job around here. You’re cute. They’ll hire you.”
“Maybe.”
A waiter in baggy shorts took our plates and asked Rocky if she wanted hers to go. She told him no but I said to wrap it. He walked off and she barely lifted her face, shifted the waxy place mat around.
I scanned the walls, fishing nets strung along the outside and plastic crabs and crawfish stuck in the webbing, a marlin mounted above the doorway, framed newspaper articles about the 1900 hurricane. The past keeps revealing itself here. Surfaces are always eroding.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
She looked hurt. “What do you mean?”
“You’re sulking.”
“I don’t know. I mean, it just catches up to me sometimes.” Her eyes gleamed when she said it. “I mean, I was doing all right, not thinking too much. It’s just everything. You know.”
“Right.”
“Just. Everything since last night.”
“We’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to find us.”
Tiffany’s head darted up and she shot a finger at my beard. “I found you!”
Rocky said to me, “I know. I think you’re right, I mean. It’s just the way things are. Now and then I think. It doesn’t seem fair.” She wiped her eye and chewed the back of her lip. “I just wonder if I can ever expect different.”
I thought about her problem and pulled a cigarette, tamped it on the table, and said, “It doesn’t seem fair, because it’s random. But that’s why it’s fair. You get me? It’s fair like a lottery’s fair.”
“Shit, Roy. Is that supposed to help?”
I lit my cigarette and pushed back from the table so I could stretch my legs. “Yeah,” I said.
“Not for me.” Her cheeks and nose flushed bright red, and she blinked back tears.
“Look, though. It works both ways. Tomorrow you could get rich and fall in love.” I’d never believed that, but I tried to sound convincing.
“Oh, yeah. I’m sure.”
She started folding and unfolding her place mat and looked past the levee toward the ocean. She seemed especially small, too young and frail against the backdrop of long red cloud strands and golden sky. I watched Tiffany drawing in her ketchup with her fingers. She looked up at me and then at her messy hands and she laughed, sucked her fingers clean, and poked them back in the ketchup.
On the way home I bought a paper so Rocky could look through the classifieds. I wanted her to begin having thoughts about the future again, mostly because I thought that would make it easier to leave them. Tiffany started nodding off as soon as we were back at the motel, and Rocky’s eyelids fluttered, a rapid exhaustion taken hold, so we split up at our rooms.
An empty six-pack container stood next to the curb as though waiting for a bus. Across the parking lot a shirtless man was sitting on the stoop outside a room, his head in his hands.
I shut my door. Before I plugged in the clippers I took my knife and hacked off the pelt of hair at the back of my head. I held it in my hand a moment because I was a little surprised how long it was, and I kind of felt like I’d lost a part of myself more crucial than I’d supposed. Then I dropped it in the trash and turned on the clippers. I put a quarter-inch guard on and shaved my head and used the same setting on my beard, so that my jaw and scalp had an even level of gray-blond stubble.
I confronted my face. My reflection was always what I knew it would be and never quite what I expected, but this time it was brutal—the large planes of empty flesh, the small bent nose, the slit of mouth and wide, squared chin. My whole life it seemed I’d dimly anticipated seeing another face besides this severe mask Loraine once compared to the features on a Choctaw totem pole. The comparison was true when I was young, and more true now with a longer brow, my hair retreating in a widow’s peak, my eyes drooped and cheeks falling. The eyes were odd to me. Dark brown, widely spaced, they seemed larger without all the hair. But as long as I could remember, it seemed like my real face went unrepresented, that there was within me another face, with sleeker, purer features, a sharp jaw and Roman nose, the bust of some centurion who conquered the ancient world. Forty years now with the same face, and still a part of me expected to see the other guy in the mirror.
I ran my hand over my bristly scalp and thought of chemotherapy patients.
I left the television off and stretched out on the bed. Water stains blotched the ceiling like tiny continents no one had ever charted, and I imagined algae blooming throughout my chest in a chain of eruptions.
I wondered how bad this was going to get, and I w
ondered how I would handle it when it got bad.
I had put my Colt and the gun Rocky took in the lockbox, along with the money, and I kept it at the bottom of my duffel bag. The bullet train had more appeal than getting sick, but the problem with suicide is that by the time anybody goes through with it, the damage is already done. And to be honest it frightened me, though in my time I’d done lots of things that scared me.
Drinking myself to death in Mexico also held some attraction.
But in either case the irony pestered me. I was the one left standing in that foyer. Why should the only man to walk out that house be the one who was planning on dying anyway?
Weirdest, I had no real urge toward revenge. Which is not like me at all.
There was even, I think, some part of me glad to be done with it all, with the gamblers and junkies and Stan Ptitko and the Armenians, and it could be I’d been feeling this way for a while, which was the real reason I’d gotten that other identity made up in the first place.
I was out.
Beyond the room the insects chirred and the world began to stain darker, reds and blues seeping between the curtains, colors that recalled a street corner in Hot Springs, years ago, and the bugs and the faint shushing of the ocean joined the noise from the air conditioner. A woman’s voice skittered from the other side of the window, laughing, and I heard someone stumble and a bottle broke.
I closed my eyes and there was Carmen, smiling over her shoulder. Loraine clawing at my sides. I remembered that at the street corner in Hot Springs with the red and blue lights, the lights were in a puddle and I had been sitting on a curb like the man out in the parking lot. My knees bent and my head between them, my knuckles bloodied.
My stint in reform school: heating a toothbrush under a book of matches till I could twist off the bristles and shove a razor blade into the soft plastic.
When I was seventeen and bar-backing at Robicheaux’s, a tiny old man drank quietly all night by himself once, didn’t talk to anybody, and around midnight I saw him fall off his stool. Cracked his head open and died right there at everyone’s feet.
I opened my eyes.
Galveston Page 7
