Things can’t hold up here. The salt gets into everything, stripping paint, rusting fenders, corroding walls. I could smell the room thick with it, and in the water stains on the ceiling I saw cities and fields of erosion.
You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.
A shy knock sounded on my door, and I rolled to my feet. Rocky stood in cold sodium light, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of little blue shorts fixed all the way up her legs. She was hugging herself and a blush saddled her nose and cheeks, her eyes chafed.
“Roy.”
She came inside and I shut the door, turned on the lamp. I sat across from her on the bed. She drew her knees up and curled her legs in the chair, and I couldn’t stand the view it afforded, so I had to be careful to place my eyes just to the side of her. She sniffled and hugged her knees.
“What’s wrong?”
“Look at you. All your hair’s gone.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I been thinking.”
“A late bloomer.”
“Right.” She chuckled and sniffled and brushed a blond lock off her forehead. “I’s just thinking. I think—how old are you?”
“Forty.”
“I mean, I’m eighteen, man. That’s nothing. Right? I mean, no matter what happened up till now.”
“Eighteen is nothing. You got time to start your life over three or four times if you want.”
When I said that to her was the first time I really felt too young to die. The dumbest complaint. I thought how everybody says the same thing when I come to see them with my gloves on and my baton out. Wait, wait, they say. Wait.
Her eyes were wet and she’d rubbed her nose raw. She faced the window, where harp strings of light drew around the curtains, and her eyes focused on something beyond them. “Talk to me, Roy. I need to hear something, man.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop glancing at her legs and thighs. Desire always seems vaguely humiliating.
“What were you doing when you were eighteen, Roy?”
I took out a cigarette and offered her one. I lit them both. I said, “I was working in a bar and running playback bets around the south, Louisiana and Arkansas and Mississippi, mostly.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where you put money on horses to juke the odds for bookmakers.”
“Oh.”
More sounds drifted from outside, and our smoke unspooled and broke against the discolored islands on the ceiling. Music from car radios a block away, a woman down the sidewalk shouting to a man about re-spon-si-bil-i-ties, really snapping off each syllable.
“How’d you get into doing that?” Rocky asked.
I shrugged. “I was supposed to join the Marines.”
“Oh, yeah?” She folded her legs down across her and straightened her face to mine. Her nose and cheeks were bandaged by pale blond freckles, and the moisture made her eyes look wider. “What do you mean?”
“When I turned seventeen, I took the bus to go to the recruiting center. I did. I sat in there a couple hours. There were a lot of boys in there. They had their mothers or fathers with them, and they wore jeans as patchy as mine. Mended shirts. Their hands were real calloused from farmwork. The mothers and fathers couldn’t scrub all the dirt off themselves. I watched the men doing the recruiting, talking to the parents. That was what they did. They hardly talked to the boys. They just told the parents, We’ll teach him this, he’ll learn that, come back a man. You know. I didn’t like that they only talked to the parents. I didn’t like the way those other boys just stood off to the side like horses at auction. And I had been thinking of doing something anyway. Something else.”
I stopped myself and held the cigarette upright while it unfurled smoke. It looked like the refinery towers that stood across the lake in the place I grew up.
“What?” she said. “What were you thinking about doing?”
“There was this place in Beaumont where my mom had worked before I was born. She’d talked about it a lot. A bar called Robicheaux’s. She talked about her old boss there, Harper Robicheaux, what a great guy he was. He was this man-among-men type. She said she sang there sometimes. Then she’d sing for real. In the house.”
“Did she sing good?”
“She did. I suppose she stopped when I came along.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I left that recruitment office and took another bus over to Beaumont and found that place. Robicheaux’s. It was really called Robicheaux’s-on-the-Bayou. I went in and found that man she’d talked about, Harper, he owned it. I had to wait for him. He was like this powerful shady dude, but real friendly, with a lot of friends. I told him who my mother was, and he was nice about that. Asked me how she was, looked sad when I told him she’d passed. He asked me what I wanted and I said a job. I started off that way. I worked in his bar awhile, and when he decided I was smart he put me running playback.”
She smoked and picked at her toenail. “Before you went to that bar, you were living with who?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Beidle. They ran the group home.”
“Your mom was gone?”
“She’d died, years before. Got sick.”
“Was it the same thing as you have?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I put my cigarette out and followed the blood-colored line of salt rot staining the baseboards of the room. Mary-Anne hadn’t gotten sick, or at any rate not like I was. When I was ten the people on the I-10 bridge said they reached out for her and she just nudged herself off the railing. She didn’t make a sound, they said. One or two ran to the rail and saw her fall, her dress blossomed around her, five hundred feet down.
I’ve always imagined myself falling. That seems like a long way to fall without making a sound.
Rocky said, “What about your dad?”
“He was all right. He’d been a Marine. Korea. Died. Not in Korea. The refineries.” I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
I was in my twenties before I figured out that John Cady must have known I wasn’t his. He was five-seven and I was six-three by my fifteenth birthday, and I didn’t have his or Mary-Anne’s dark hair, or their chins, yet he never had me call him anything but Dad.
“This Robicheaux guy? You liked him, huh? I could see it just now. The way you talked about him.”
“I guess I liked him all right. He was surprised as hell the first time he met me.”
“Why?”
I rolled my eyes and sighed, but I wasn’t minding it, telling these things I never told people. I started tugging off my boots. “Well,” I grunted. “He was a big guy, like me, looked a lot like me, actually. Same face. He was surprised that we had the same face.”
“He looked like you?”
“Just like me.”
She thought on it a moment and I think missed my point. She said, “Weird. What was he like?”
“Smart. People liked him. Did good business with the Italians along the coast, up in New Orleans, and a lot of the bikers in Arkansas and Texas.”
“Huh. What happened to him?”
“Somebody blew him up.”
“Blew him up?”
“Just what I said.”
“Sorry, Roy.”
“That’s all right.”
“Sorry.” She put out her cigarette and shoved her hands beneath her thighs, stretched out her legs, and the muscles in them pulled like ship cable.
I scratched my knee and felt my new face, the slack in the skin. She said, “I think I really kind of fucked things up.”
“You don’t need to see it that way,” I said. I stood and walked to the sink, drank some water from it and washed my eyes—in the mirror my face was already beginning to look ordinary.
She peeked over her shoulder at me.
“You killed people before, Roy? Besides those men in that house
.”
I wiped my face and walked back. “A couple.”
“How you feel about it?”
“Give me a break.”
“Sorry.” The disappointment in her glance was a little prodding. Death was making all my habits and consistencies unnecessary. Certain behaviors were changing. Like the way I was talking so much.
I said, “I feel like a soldier feels about it. People I did for, they weren’t no innocent bystanders. They weren’t anybody who hadn’t put themselves in the place they were at. I look at it more like, they created a situation, and it required me to deal with it. They called it down.”
She sniffled and breathed through her mouth, pinched her toes. “I been thinking that you’re gonna leave us here.”
I didn’t reply to that. I stayed standing, though, so she might get the idea to go back to her room.
“You can tell me if you are, man. I mean, I get it. It makes sense. Even if you’re sick. I mean, it don’t make sense to hang around. I’m not mad or anything.”
“You’ll get a job. Take care of Tiffany. Win the lottery.”
“I was looking at her earlier in there, and I kind of thought you were leaving us, and how bad a mess I’d made of everything. Even just following that dude Toby. He was queer. I thought it’d be all right. What a mess.” She studied the smoldering cigarette. “But you know, man, it wasn’t ever anything but a mess to begin with.”
“I’m not leaving yet,” I said.
“Well,” she sighed. “It’s not your mess, man. It’s mine.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“It never changed out there, you know? It was just always hot. Same fields, same grass. Nothing to do. I mean, I saw the rest of my life. Just day after day like that.”
“I had a place like that,” I said. But I winced, saying it, and I got angry with myself for talking along with her, angry mostly at the feeling that I wanted to talk about those empty fields and the flooding sun, about Loraine and Carmen. I wanted to say things about them but didn’t know what.
She said, “Watching those kids out there today, on the beach? I kept thinking I just wanted a real life.”
“It’s all a real life.”
“But you know what I mean. I want Tiffany to have that, too. Someplace regular.”
“Then that’s what’ll happen.”
Her face was dry now. She grinned and her eyes scrunched. “You look so weird with all your hair gone.”
“I didn’t recognize myself. That’s good, I guess.”
“You don’t look so much like a psycho as before.”
I turned up the A/C, and its churning rose louder and the glass in the window rattled. “You should get some sleep. We’ll figure out something else tomorrow.”
She held up a hand for me to help her rise, her eyes half-lidded and playful for a second, and that bothered me. She saw that it bothered me and stopped, walked real slow to the door. I couldn’t help staring at her shorts, which had risen up her crack from sitting.
She paused and said, “If you want to leave, it’s okay. It’s all right. You did a lot for us, Roy. You can go ahead. We’ll be fine.”
I opened the door and said, “I might.”
The man who’d been sitting on the stoop had moved to a grassy patch beside the sidewalk where he lay near a street lamp. Mosquitoes boiled in the tent of light beside him.
She turned back to me before going to her room, stopped herself from saying something.
I said, “If I’m here in the morning, it means I haven’t left yet.” I closed the door. After I was alone again a restlessness nagged me. I flipped through every television channel four or five times. I folded up all my clothes and put them in the dresser, one piece at a time, and then I took them all out and put them back in the duffel bag. I broke down and cleaned my .380 with a pencil and washrag. It felt like something was missing now, something hard to define, but noticeable by its absence.
I sensed that I had wronged myself by talking so much.
It looked like Emerald Shores kept a few regulars. The station wagon on the spare tires belonged to a family in number 2. The guy with the motorcycle kept aluminum foil across his windows, in number 8. Two older women shared number 12 and owned the late-model Chrysler on busted shocks whose front end sank forward like a drag racer. In the morning a guy across the way was prodding sausages on a short charcoal grill that burned greasy, peppered smoke everywhere. He sat on a folding chair and waved to me.
An old, gangly type who wore headbands and sandals, a tank top advertising Corona beer. The scent made me hungry and I walked over, saw he had a small stack of paper plates by his feet.
“This is kind of the breakfast the place offers, man. I’m Lance.”
He pulled out a plate and dropped two sausages on it.
“You work here?”
“Not really. I used to be married to Nancy in there. Woman who checked you in? She lets me stay here. She likes me to make breakfast for folks in the morning, though. They’s no kitchen so I use the grill.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“She said you’s with a couple little girls. They can get some too, they want.”
I heard a door open and two children from number 2 stepped out with their father behind them. His hair jutted out and his face was flushed and swollen, his eyes bright red and shiny.
He looked me over, first thing.
He slapped the back of the boy’s head. “Don’t jump in front your sister. Let her get hers.”
The kids were dazed and squinted in the light, as if they’d just been woken from a cave. Lance grinned at them and transferred two sausages onto a plate for first the girl, then the boy.
I’d just finished mine. The man said to the kids, “Get inside now.”
“Mom said to get her some.”
“She don’t need no sausage. Tell her I said so.” He took a plate from Lance and watched the kids walk back to their room. He had a big face, long and wide, a little skipping stone of a chin, and a fat, smooth neck that erased his jawline. His hair was longish and unkempt, a wifebeater T and stiff, smelly jeans stretched by a cannonball gut that made his back curve inward.
“Morning,” said Lance.
“Yeah,” the man said. “It is.” He bit his sausage in half. Real hard-boiled, he wanted you to know. He had paranoid, naïve eyes. Used to be the biggest dog in a small yard, but his arms had gone soft now and were shaped like an old woman’s thighs.
“Nothing on the Kestrel, I just found out,” he said to me. “So that’s a bust.”
I looked at Lance and back to the other man. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s an offshore rig. We came down here ’cause I was supposed to get on one for Cities Service. But I get here and they say they never hired me. I said I got a letter. They tell me the letter doesn’t say what it says.” He looked to Lance for vindication. “And I’m holding it.” He finished his sausages and set the paper plate down on the parking lot.
He saw me reaching for my cigarettes. “Got an extra?”
I gave him one.
“Where you from? I figured you must work a rig.”
“Nah. I’m on vacation.”
“Where from?”
“Louisiana.”
“What part?”
“New Orleans.”
“I’m sorry for you, man. Been there before. All that rain and the Catholics and niggers.”
“It can swallow up some folks,” I said. “You have to know what’s what.”
“I knew a boy from New Orleans. Shot himself in the thigh. That boy was a fool.”
“Must be why they made him leave.”
His brow crinkled as he tried to suss out my meaning. I realized that another guy had come out, the one with the motorcycle, number 8, where the aluminum foil flattened against the window glass. He was young and scrawny, long-haired, and he stayed back a little, watching us in big sunglasses. The other man was still eyeing me, trying to understand what exactly
I had said to insult him.
“How many kids you got in that hotel room?” I asked, kind of mockingly.
“Just the two. And a woman.” He shook his head. “Gets fatter every day.” As a gesture of concession, he started talking about his wife. He’d had to make a point to her about swimwear a few days back, and she hadn’t left the room since. “She wants to act like I hurt her feelings or something. You know how they get.”
I flicked away my cigarette and walked back to my room. The boy from number 8 had bent down to ask Lance a question, and the other man just stood there looking around, turning back and forth, bewildered that no one was listening to him talk about his wife.
Closing my door, I saw that the long-haired kid was watching me now, and I looked back at him.
He grinned like we were old friends. He shot me with a finger gun.
When the girls woke up they ate and got dressed and we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. I figured the kid should get to see the beach. So I threw on torn jeans and wore them with a bright Hawaiian-style shirt I’d bought with a pair of sandals the day before, and I went down to the beach with them. There was no good reason for me to do this, but I still had the time to kill, and also an urge to see what the little girl made of the ocean and the sand. I was curious.
The father from number 2 was standing outside his room with a Michelob and he nodded to me on our way out. “Nice shirt,” he said, flipping his chin up.
We walked five blocks and crossed a median to the pocket beach off the road. Loose newspaper and food wrappers caught by the sandspurs shook in the breeze, and hairy sheaths of love grass fenced the sandy decline toward the ocean. Tiffany smiled, skipped beside Rocky, and pointed. The ocean sloshing up and reaching back forever.
Rocky took off her shorts and shirt, and she saw me watching and I glanced away. Her bikini was pretty skimpy, four triangles of red fabric, and my breath went deep at the sight. Deceptive curves and slim lines drew her, dancer’s muscles gone red across her pale skin where the sun warmed it, her cheeks and nose flushed, and the sun off her hair struck gold and white reflections. She squatted and folded her clothes on the ground with a propriety that struck me as massively erotic. She had broad shoulders for her size and her back was a hilly tract of muscle, the kind you have to earn.
Galveston Page 8
