I sat back in a shallow sandbed. I’d brought two cans of Coors and popped one while Tiffany ran out to the tide, totally astonished and almost tripping over her own feet. Rocky took her out to the water and they’d be chased back up by the dying waves, the girl’s laughter flung like bells, a sound of pure thrill that didn’t seem foolish.
When Rocky got splashed her suit clung to her like wet tissue and I could make out her nipples and the crease of her ass. She waved to me, stood there with her sister while the waves flopped over them, coating them with sparklers, the girl shriek-laughing, and the blue and purple waters behind them were scored with foam and drew out so totally that you could imagine a time the entire planet was only sea and sky. But a boat towing a skier crossed the horizon, and through the mists to the east you could make out an offshore rig.
They came back up the shore. Rocky sat with Tiffany to try showing her how to build sand castles. Tiffany pointed out at the Gulf and said, “Where’s it go?”
“Into the ocean.”
“What’s that?”
“More water.”
“Where’s it go?”
“Oh, hush,” said Rocky, and she tickled the girl’s ribs.
Rocky’s legs were stretched out while she packed the wet sand, and it was hard not to look at her so I found things on the beach. A patch of broom sage where something glittered. A pair of fat little boys scuttling into the surf. Gulls riding thermals, swooping to skim the surface with their bills. A rainbow-colored kite held by someone far down the beach, someone I couldn’t see. The kite wobbled and danced and looped in tight circles, and Tiffany saw it and poked up at it with her finger.
A pack of boys walked by, flipping a football, and they all quieted and stared at Rocky as they passed. She noticed them and started showing Tiffany how to pack the sand.
I took off my shirt and lay prone to the light. Tried to imagine my cells storing up the sunshine.
Rocky said, “What’re those scars from?”
“Which ones?”
“Them round ones up your side.”
I fingered the dimpled skin and kept my eyes closed to the sun. “Buckshot.”
“Like a shotgun?”
“It was far off. They just peppered me.”
“What about that other? On your shoulder.”
“Knife.”
“That must have been a big knife.”
“It was.”
“And that one up on your leg?”
“Dog.”
“I knew it. I figured that one was a dog. Did you kill it?”
“The dog?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t remember.” But I did.
I waited for her to ask me something else, and when she didn’t say anything I peeked through my lids and saw she’d gone back to focusing on Tiffany.
After my beers were gone I dozed in and out for a few minutes, and when I woke Rocky was on her back, sunning herself beside me. Little beads of water and sand clung to her skin, and sweat had gathered in a pool at her navel. I had to get away from that, and I walked out to the water.
Tiffany cheered and ran beside me, hopping. The rainbow kite was still up there, jabbing and slicing the pale gold air.
The girl stopped at the break and reached up her arms, groaned as if by effort she could reach my shoulders. Then I held her above the water, acting like I’d toss her out into the ocean, and she screamed and laughed at once. I felt like yelling something with her, but I didn’t. I pinched her nose and threw us both into the waves, holding her up while I went under and the briny water poured over me, and she laughed and spat and gasped with amazement, unsure, then asked for it again.
For the rest of the day, her weight echoed in my empty hands, light but dense, her throes and kicks. I walked her back up the beach, and once in a while the little girl would commit a gesture that seemed very womanly, like pulling wet hair behind her ear or straightening her swimsuit with a brief, serious face.
Rocky lay out on the sandbed, shining at us.
I remember a buddy of mine once telling me that every woman you loved was a mother and sister you didn’t have, at once, and that what you were always really looking for was the female part of yourself, your female animal or something. This guy could get away with saying something like that because he was a junkie and read books.
When we walked home it was impossible to avoid falling back and watching Rocky from behind in that swimsuit, but I don’t think I could have actually touched her.
In late afternoon we ate fried shrimp and oyster po’boys, and I took them to the arcade along the piers. They played Whac-a-Mole and Ms. Pac-Man, tossed rings. I wandered the pier but didn’t let them out of my sight.
Some black men perched along the pier with fishing poles, and an overturned rowboat sat on the beach below. There was a hole in it and I could hear a cat mewling through the hole, and thousands of scarlet prize tickets were scattered on the sands.
Later at night, we watched a movie with I think Richard Boone on the television, and by the time I left them they were tired and pleased-looking, and I realized I felt good about that.
Back in my room I felt good about the way I’d left them.
Then I was dogged by something I couldn’t put into words. Like I’d forgotten something important, but didn’t know what.
I walked outside and looked through the spotted night, the hot wind stirring the palms and coursing out to the heavenriver of stars. I walked.
Antique grain elevators and warehouses stood around the South from the old days of cotton-exporting, and some of the elevators had floodlights. Salt rain and the smells of shrimp and oyster hauls hung in the air. A man was helping his friend walk with an arm around his shoulder.
The clunk of my boots on asphalt sounded like a clock’s hand. A smoke-gray cat kept pace with me on the opposite sidewalk for a while. On a bus bench an old bearded guy was drinking from a paper bag and weeping. He told me he was happy. He’d gotten out of prison that day.
When I got back to my room it was so quiet the alarm clock’s tick seemed to reverberate, and the small sound said to me that it was late, later, then later still.
Time had passed. I was old.
In the morning I was up before the girls and I watched dawn break on the bay, where the water yellowed a little, and the shrimping fleets spread out into it, small schooners with bony jibs and baggy nets. These ships crawled out into the sea with the slow and coordinated process of a natural migration. The sun in the evening or the sun in the morning charged the sky with hysterical colors, green and purple and hot reds and oranges, unreal, the clouds of the old MGM Westerns.
Slow movements. Changing colors.
I was noticing new things.
Rocky said that she guessed she should start looking for a job today, but I told her we should all go to the beach instead, and we did.
That evening we met two more regulars, old women who shared the Chrysler with the broken antenna. Their names were Dehra and Nonie Elliot, sisters with the same wiry gray hair in the same cauliflower-shaped style, and they dressed in stiff dark fabrics like clergy, wore thick crucifixes around their necks.
Lance had been grilling some burgers and I’d brought a six-pack of Coors outside. The girls came, too, and after watching Tiffany from the window of room 12, the two sisters ventured out to meet her.
They bent at their waists to shake hands with Tiffany, who bit her thumb kind of demurely.
They had gentle, amused faces, carried hunched backs with the dignity of quiet burdens. The one named Dehra wore glasses and tended to speak out more.
You look less suspicious when you’re willing to meet people.
Dehra told me, “We have four sisters who’re nuns at the Sisters of St. Joseph in Houston. We used to live in Denton but we sold our parents’ house. We thought we’d buy a place in Florida, but you know, we’ve just been driving around Texas, really.”
“Well, we wanted to be close to our sisters,” Non
ie said.
“That’s true. But we’ve been here three weeks.”
“We keep meaning to get a more permanent place.”
“I don’t know why. But we can’t seem to get up the energy to find one.”
There was something girlish about them, a lack of guile in their calm, sexless faces. “Do you go to the beach much?” I asked.
“Oh, my no. We don’t really care for the sun.”
She said that as her sister tried to offer Tiffany some clove gum while the girl moved shyly around Rocky’s legs. I had the fleeting urge to tell this woman about my lungs.
Lance had set up a folding card table and Nancy brought out a sack of hamburger buns, ketchup and mustard, paper plates. She set them on the table and looked me over.
“I remember just the other day you had all that hair. Look at you. You afraid somebody’s going to recognize you?”
I said, “Too hot around here for all that hair.”
Lance flipped the burgers and said, “I bet these’ll be as good as the place in Austin. Greenbelt Grill. You ’member that, baby?”
Nancy flexed her eyebrows at him and frowned.
He looked at me and said, “It’s this country-cookin’ place we used to go to.” He turned back to Nancy and said, “You ’member?”
She just sighed real loud and rolled her eyes at him in a pitying way, as if he’d embarrassed himself. She walked back to the office.
Tiffany was laughing with the old sisters now, and she was making them laugh.
“She used to be a lot different,” Lance said. “She straightened up before me and I guess she’s taken it a little far, maybe. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t see Nancy just like she is now, you understand. I see all the Nancy I ever knew, and there were all sorts of her. She likes that I got all that history, even if she acts like she don’t.”
Rocky had come outside, and so had the kid from room 8. He had long red hair and kind of a bookish quality, delicate, and the torn jeans and biker boots he wore seemed severely out of place.
They started talking to each other against the wall by the rooms, and he said something and Rocky laughed. The boy wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and his narrow shoulders hunched a little, hands in pockets.
He saw me looking and waved. Rocky seemed nervous.
The father from room 2 came out. He shut the door behind him, only opening it enough to slip out. His tongue moved over his lips as he surveyed the grub.
He stood by the grill and sort of looked around at everybody. “We all begging hamburgers like starving dogs!” he announced to nobody in particular, kept an eye out for some reaction, and when there was none he tried to look occupied in thought.
“I’m Tray,” the boy with the red hair said to me. He held out a hand, and his eyes blinked from thin gray pockets. Rocky picked up one of my beers and sipped it.
I shook the boy’s hand. “Tray Jones,” he said, and his eyes darted over my forearms, back to my stare, and he seemed like he wanted to tell me something. He was so thin I had the impression his shirt weighed him down. He said, “Most people call me Killer.”
“Of course they do,” I said.
The father took the next three hamburgers. I thought about saying something, but when I saw he was taking them back to the room I was glad he was leaving and let it pass.
He had them piled on a single plate and he glanced over his shoulder to us as he walked to his room and unlocked it, peeking back to me again when he slipped inside, just opening the door a few inches and sliding through.
Tray Jones was still standing beside me. “You seen ole boy’s kids in there? Look like they ain’t eat right in a while.”
I nodded. Rocky sat on the stoop watching the old ladies talk to Tiffany.
He took out a pack of menthols and offered me one. I turned it down. He lit it and said, “Where’d you do your time, brah?”
“What?”
“It’s cool, man. I can always tell a natural convict. Way you ate your sausages, man.” He chuckled. “You know?”
I took a cigarette. “Nowhere.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay.” He nodded, offered me a light. His nails were bit to the quick, his shirt pulled down past thin wrists. I figured he’d have tracks up those arms. “I went down in Rowan, Oklahoma,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and stick to the south.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six last March.”
“What were you doing in Rowan?”
“Oh.” He raised his shoulders to hit the cigarette. “Doing some work this ole boy I used to run with. My partner. We were doing good till he gets in a fight this bar. They come to take him, want to look in his car. I didn’t even know how it started. I’s sleeping in the backseat.”
“Huh.”
Lance said, “We got three more ready.”
I told the girls to go ahead and eat. The old women walked Tiffany up to the table and helped her fix a burger. Tray still stood beside me.
I was wondering what this kid wanted from me.
“I got some people here now,” he said. “I got some people I know here.”
I didn’t say anything and finished my beer.
“You know you remind me of, man?” he said.
I raised my eyebrow and twisted off a fresh cap.
“Guy from the movies. What’s that guy? He was in the movie about the cockfighter. And the other. Ole boy driving around with a head in the car.”
I thought for a second. “That guy looks like a horse.”
“But not in a bad way, really.”
“Here.” I handed him a beer and took the rest off to my room. I wasn’t hungry.
The sky was a bottomless red and shadows revolved on the cracked asphalt.
After midnight I’d cracked a fresh bottle of Jameson because I didn’t sleep anymore unless I had a load on. I was well into the bottle’s second half and time began to pool and flood for me, lost moments, fantasies that opened and closed like puzzle boxes, so I have trouble remembering the exact procession of events. There was a mania to my thoughts, though. I felt like crying but couldn’t quite make it happen. When I first saw the X-rays I had walked out the doctor’s office in a hurry, pushed through the door as soon as I heard the words small-cell lung carcinomas.
Now I wanted to know how much time I had. I must have called information for the doctor’s home number.
I have some recollection of being fired up and cursing, and that a man on the phone sounded like he was asleep, and I could hear a woman’s voice behind him. I think I had to remind him who I was, and who had referred me to him.
I believe I said something like, “How long? How long do I have?”
He said he didn’t know and couldn’t say and tried to explain to me the necessity of further tests, biopsies. Yes, the overwhelming odds were that I had small-cell carcinomas. I think he tried to convince me to come back in.
“You just ran out the office, last time. We didn’t get a chance to really get into the treatment options.”
I think I remember being deeply insulted by his inability to answer me, feeling he was patronizing me, and all of a sudden I had great hatred for this man. I admit that certain essential connections weren’t firing in my head at the time. But I pictured the pink, freshly scrubbed look of him, the gray hair trimmed and neatly parted, the cold, practiced way he’d told me about my death.
It just seemed like for a second, in that dark, salt-ridden motel room, in the middle of the night, with my breath hot against the telephone, I had located the main villain, the enemy of my whole life.
And I think, now, that I just wanted to hear him be scared. Like me.
“You fucking sawbones quack motherfucker,” I said. “You want me to come back in? I’ll come back in. Then we’ll see about getting a straight answer.”
He protested my anger, argued his innocence.
“I got the address right here, you prick. 2341 Royale. Probably a big house. Of course it is.”
&n
bsp; “What? No, no—listen—”
“Your old lady know about the gambling? She know how deep you’re in for? You degenerate prick.”
“Now. Now, listen—just stop a minute—”
I think that’s around when I slammed the phone down. I must have flung it across the room, because the next morning it was in pieces against the far wall, the line ripped from its socket.
When I woke the next day the sun was rising and the room was hot, my pillow soaked in sweat. I was shirtless and my chest had red abrasions all over it, scratches, as if something wild had been at me. I looked at my fingernails and the marks on my chest. The bottle lay on the floor, and I dimly questioned the displacement of the telephone.
I experienced the murky horror that comes with certain hangovers, where you wonder what exactly you’ve been up to, what tickets you’ve written.
But I didn’t remember making any calls. I chalked the phone up to the ordinary collateral damage that occurs around delicate objects when you drink like that.
I bought newspapers. A local one for the classifieds, the Houston Chronicle, and The Times-Picayune out of New Orleans.
The Times-Picayune had a brief story saying that Sienkiewicz was wanted for questioning in an ongoing probe.
The implication was that he’d skipped town.
No mention of Stan Ptitko. Nothing about Angelo or the other men or the woman and what happened at Sienkiewicz’s house in Jefferson Heights.
I pondered what Stan was doing. If he had people out looking for us. How many would that be, and how far could they search. It didn’t matter, all told; we were a needle in a haystack.
I still had that folder I took from Sienkiewicz’s house, but I didn’t see any real play in it. Maybe I’d mail it to the D.A. before heading down Mexico way.
I kept telling myself I’d leave them. First, it was when I’d gotten them a place to stay for a while. Then I decided it would be once Rocky got a job.
I spread the classifieds on the bed.
“Here’s one for a hostess. There’s another. Babysitter. You could do that.”
Galveston Page 9
