He pulled two more beers out for us.
“But, like I said. They got Willie-Son in Alabama.” He shook his head and upended the beer. I could see it clearly, the orphan in him. The deprivation.
I set down my bottle and leaned forward. “Look, kid. You seem like a good clipper to me. But you got the wrong idea. I threw off all that illegality a while back.”
“Oh, come on, man.”
“It’s true. I got to take care of them girls now, and we’re just down for some sun and waves. Then we’re moving on. I got no use for what you’re talking about.”
Dismay snuffed the light in his eyes, hung his mouth open a bit. “You’re kidding me.”
I shook my head, stood and finished the beer, set the bottle on the table beside his books. “I wish you all the luck with it, though. Keep your head on a swivel.”
I’d turned to the door and he said, “You could take care of them girls a lot better with this score. You don’t need fifteen grand, man?”
I looked over my shoulder and said, “Not where I’m going.” I thanked him for the beer and left the room.
The wind through the trees was a sparse sound and behind it sat a great silence, and the small sounds were like trinkets scattered across that silence. I looked along the walls at all the red metal doors under the humming light, and the yellow tape across number 2, a couple of cars, the kid’s motorcycle. The open air felt confining.
A couple days later a newspaper convinced me to finally ditch the girls. Rocky had gone on the job hunt downtown. Third day in a row. I’d seen her off on the bus because I wanted her to get used to making her own way around town. Nancy had gone to the grocery store and rented a couple cartoon movies for Tiffany. She came to the girls’ room and asked if Tiffany wanted to watch Cinderella on the VCR in her office. The two old sisters were waiting there, and I watched Tiffany skip behind as they crossed to the parking lot. They’d been spending a lot of time with her. The little one seemed to light up around those older women and they sure delighted in her presence.
I was sitting out in the parking lot, getting sun—I’d gotten in the habit of soaking my chest in sunshine, as if it could burn my insides clean. I sipped JW in a paper cup, perusing the Houston Chronicle and Times-Picayune. No news about the fed’s investigation into the ports. Nothing about Stan Ptitko or the house in Jefferson Heights.
I’d started drinking more JW than usual. I didn’t even wait for noon anymore. One pull on the bottle would jump-start the morning. I found it necessary to rouse my spirit that way. And it helped me sit still while I took the sun.
At the end of the Chronicle’s crime report, shoved into the bottom right:
Reclusive Man Found Shot in Home;
Wife, Daughters Missing
The body of Gary Benoit, of Orange, Texas, was found in his home off Big Lake Road on Thursday by two local boys. Coroner states that Mr. Benoit had been shot once in the stomach, and an animal had apparently come upon the scene first. Deputies confirmed that it had taken several days to come across the body because the deceased had no neighbors or employment. The sheriff’s office has released no other information, but Mr. Benoit’s wife, Charmane, is wanted for questioning, and they are seeking any information as to the whereabouts of his infant daughter, Tiffany, and stepdaughter Raquel, 18.
My heart plopped into my stomach like a stone. Rocky’s tears took on a whole new context. I recalled the distances in her face when she’d sat in my room and talked about her life, the shock and stuttering and wide, flitting eyes. Some people’s crazy was worse than others.
This is why you make rules, why you stay mobile and ready to walk. I crushed the papers and tossed them into the oil-drum trash can standing in an alcove between rooms. Whatever shred of sense I still had screamed for me to light out, ditch this situation.
That’s what I did.
I threw my things in the duffel bag, took the lockbox and my JW. Scoped out the motel from my window and when the coast was clear tossed my things in the truck and pulled out the lot, made sure that I didn’t look in my rearview mirror until Emerald Shores was out of sight.
My pulse thrummed like I was making a jailbreak, and alongside that this incoherent disappointment curdled my gut. There’d been something with her that had set off my imagination, I admitted, some kind of dumb hope in a bad place. A cure.
That was over.
It didn’t matter, I told myself. Now it was just me and Texas. Me and cancer.
Several blocks away I pulled into an alley and wiped down the gun and silencer she’d taken, smashed it, and threw the pieces in different Dumpsters.
When I reached the highway I drove north on 45 and pretended I didn’t know why.
By the town of Teague I was considerably buzzed and my thought-to-action ratio had sped up so that I was making the phone call before I could stop myself. I hadn’t been to Dallas in years, but some time ago I’d paid an investigator I knew to find out where she was. I’d kept the information in my lockbox. I don’t know why I did that, really. When I hit Dallas I checked a phone book and confirmed the address. Her husband’s name. Everybody had listings in those days.
“I was just passing through here, really. Thought I’d call . . . Ran into somebody. Clyde in Beaumont. He just said you lived here. Got married—that’s great. I was just passing through. You’re in the phone book— Yeah. Surprise . . . I don’t do that anymore—I weld, mostly. In a couple unions. I’s down in Galveston, on a rig. Coming back up through. Remembered you were here. Had the time to kill— Listen, how’d you feel about getting some lunch? No, no— Just to say hi . . . No. I don’t do that anymore.”
* * *
A neighborhood in the Brentwood area, oilmen and minor celebrities, CEOs, semiretired politicians, wives playing tennis. A former heavyweight champ lived somewhere around here. Crenellated mansions loomed above precisely sculpted shrubbery and wrought-iron fencing, long rising carpets of bright green grass a half inch high, far off the road, winding stone driveways with their own street names, granite fountains. Private security cars patrolled the streets under arbors of live oak that flecked the pavement with sunshine.
The security cars were black with blue sirens on the roof, and they slowed as my truck passed.
I found the address and parked beneath a drooping oak. Some kids ran between sprinklers high up on one of the yards. It seemed like they should be in school. I wore my straw cowboy hat and sunglasses, and even with that shade the air so dazzled I had to squint.
Her house was a sierra of red brick and white shingles, columns framing the door. A garage off to the right was larger than the houses where I lived in Metairie. My JW was empty and I couldn’t quite catch my breath.
Could you have lived here? I thought. Would you have ever known what to do with yourself?
I saw her move past a kitchen window and my throat narrowed.
Up close the brick of the house had a rosy tint, almost pink, and the paint on the shutters was precisely stripped to give an impression of antiquity. Ivy up the walls as neatly groomed as a professor’s beard. My boots clunked and swerved up the pebbled driveway, which circled a stone birdbath big enough for two people.
A heavy, deep-stained door with a brass knocker in the shape of an eagle’s head. I rapped with my fist. Never have used knockers.
Liquid courage, booze logic. I’d once heard that porpoises can commit suicide, but I don’t know why that was on my mind.
Click of heels on tile. Sliding of locks, a creak. Loraine wore an accommodating face, a mask whose refinement made me feel a little subhuman just then, a little raw.
I took off my sunglasses. Twitches under my eye as I watched her expression fall and fade.
“Huh,” she said. “I wondered.”
She was no heavier but the skin of her neck was a little sun-creased, different shades in her hair, dyed the color of maples in October. Dark slacks fitted her hips and a white blouse poured down her like cream. A string of pearls and a large rin
g in addition to her wedding band and diamond. She ran the pearls between her fingers while she searched my face.
“You look completely different,” she said.
“Hey, Loraine. Loraine. Hey.”
Her eyes fell to my lips and then my stomach and back up to my own. Her cheeks had fallen some, I think, little pleats around her lips, and I wished that women would just ignore the urge to cut their hair short when they hit thirty.
“Roy. Well. Good God.” She glanced behind her back as if someone else were there. “I told you I was busy.”
“I only wanted to talk to you a second. I’ll leave when you want.”
“I told you I was busy.”
“I’ll stand out here.”
“Well. What is it you want?”
“Talk,” I muttered. “Catch up.” I shrugged, as if it were a question.
She studied me with a mouth caught between annoyed and amused, and the sensation of her flesh came back to me as real as anything, the warmth under my fingers and the taste of her moistures, the narrowing of her waist and the way it spread out into her ass, the flush of her skin, like a map of blood when she was spent. Her toenails in the bathtub. Her face was wide and tapered at her chin, and I remembered how it looked turned up to the ceiling with a big smile, gasping. These things haunted my nerves like the twitching of an old injury or an illness that leaves you prone to chills.
She double-checked the yard, the neighbor’s windows, and I thought I could almost smell the nape of her neck, a clean, citrus scent.
I could see her working out the easiest way to get rid of me. But I had some things to say. I was fairly drunk and I had things to say.
She laughed darkly. “Lord. Come on in, then. I don’t want you standing on my porch, you goon.” She opened the door and sighed. “It’s just for a minute, though.”
Inside, a long hallway stretched under a high ceiling, a wood floor so polished I could see myself all the way down in it, like water. Red and gold accents popped. As I walked behind her an inner tension unwound in me while my eyes soaked up the shape of her ass, my stomach unclenching at the memory of taking her from behind, keeping a thumb in that tiny hole the way she liked. It was more than the memory in my head, though. It was like my body remembered too, remembered by nearly feeling it again, the slippery grip of her, and I could almost taste her in my mouth. I lifted my thumb to my nose, half expecting the scent to be there.
A mirror with a gilded frame hung above a fine wood console, and little tables with jars or vases were set here and there, scarlet flowers. The hallway opened into a vaulted living room with a kind of small chandelier overhead, and to the left a staircase wound above the room. Thick couches in sand and earth colors, a pair of chocolate leather chairs. These things embarrassed me. When she turned, the look on her face embarrassed me.
I felt foolish, because I marked the soft white tablets of light that came down through the tall windows, facing out on a plush yard and pool, iron patio furniture, and I understood what she had always been on her way to being. How little I’d been a part of that.
“I guess you changed your mind about marriage.”
“Well, you meet the right man.” Her smile had bite in it, and she folded her arms at the threshold of the living room. “I don’t really understand what you’re doing here, I have to say.”
I stared at her shoes. “I was just passing through. I’ve been—I mean, I was really just curious to hear how you’ve been.”
“Been? Been since, what, eleven years ago?” She sat down in one of the leather chairs, crossed her legs, and rubbed her pearls between her fingers again. She cocked her head, some humor in this for her.
“Sure. How’s the last eleven years been?”
“Let me see. Absolutely wonderful. There.”
“You look good.”
“When did you cut off all your hair?”
“Pretty recent.”
“You know, you’re not as handsome as I used to think.”
“I actually get that a lot.”
“You’ve kind of aged terribly.”
“Wait’ll it happens to you.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Um. No.” Heat flushed my face. She didn’t believe me. I started thinking I might tell her about my lungs, earn some sympathy. Then I could say what I came here to say.
“Roy, you really can’t stick around. I really am busy.”
My fingers grazed the marble top of an end table. A savage piece of me thought of taking her, right there on the couch. Ask first, sure. But either way.
“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m going away.”
“Well . . .”
“Do you—” I froze and handled a porcelain sculpture of clowns, put it down. “Do you remember when we went to Galveston for that one week? Seventy-six, I think.”
She rolled her eyes in a tired way and looked a little bored. I remembered Nancy’s face when Lance had tried nudging her down memory lane.
“I was thinking about it. On the beach. That was a good week. You told me about your sister, and your dad.”
“Oh, Lord. You’ve gone sentimental, Roy. You’re one of those nostalgic middle-aged men now.” She shook her head with pity. “I’d rather you’d stayed the strong, silent type. I’d rather remember you like that.”
“I’d just been thinking.”
“Well. What did you imagine I’d say?”
I shrugged. I could hear the ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner, and it echoed quietly in the high room. A few pictures stood on an entertainment center. Her husband was thick-faced with thinning hair, a kind of friendly, pampered look to him, like a terrier.
“Do you have kids?”
She started fingering those pearls again. “What are you nostalgic about anyway? It didn’t end good, Roy.”
“Nothing does.” But I wanted to answer her question by telling her how the dawn came into our windows at the place in Galveston, how the blue-white light had fallen over her in bed, sleeping on her stomach with no shirt, the sheets on the floor, and the smells of shrimp and salt on the cool Gulf breeze through the window, the sharp, sweet bite of those mojitos we’d lived on for the week, how important it seemed. How it was all intensely real to me now, how I could almost taste it and smell it and feel the ridges of her spine beneath my fingers.
I wouldn’t, though. I knew it was stupid, a little pathetic that I’d never managed to make better memories.
I walked over to study the pictures by the big television. She and her husband posed on a white mountain, smiling in ski gear. The two of them toasting drinks on some beach far more blue and vivid than the Gulf.
“Has he ever heard about me?”
“Not much. But yes. He knows everything about me, Roy.”
“I was thinking of a day. We were drunk on mojitos before noon. Scarfing crabmeat. We couldn’t get the smell off. Laughing at ourselves, covered in crab juice. Drunk. Showering off.”
“Okay, Tex. Simmer down, there.”
“And later it rained and we stayed inside the next two days. Watched cable. All this unquenchable fucking.”
“Yes, yes. I’m a dynamite piece of ass. Thank you, Roy.”
I sat on the other chair, across from her. The leather squeaked if I moved an inch.
“I can’t do this all day,” she said.
I couldn’t organize what I wanted to say. “It’s just. I’m going away. Leaving the country. And it had gotten me thinking. There was a time—or like I’ve been missing something, now. I didn’t know.” I was painfully aware now of how drunk I’d gotten. Her face had slackened to a kind of distressed condolence, and it made me feel small. “I wanted to remember things again.”
“Remember what, though? Remember being strung out? Remember watching you kick the shit out a poor cowboy who said hi to me? Remember drinking so much I threw up blood? This is what you’re talking about to me. This is what I’m remembering.”
“We had good—I believe we had good
times.”
“Oh. Oh, Roy . . .” She put a hand over her mouth and shook her head firmly. “I was glad when you went to prison, Roy.”
I said, “My life is over.”
She started looking around the room, like she was humiliated on my behalf.
“I told you about Port Arthur. The spades in high school. I told you about me.”
She sighed, exasperated. “How’d you say you found me?”
“Clyde. In Beaumont. He said you were out here.”
“How did he know?”
I shrugged.
“Christ. All my sins come back,” she said.
The clock’s ticking sounded like a woman in heels walking at a very slow and relentless pace across a marble floor.
“I have a meeting. I have Junior League, Roy.”
“When we stayed up on the dunes that night.”
“Oh, stop it. Really.”
“How much we laughed—I can’t remember. Do you remember what was so funny?”
“Get a grip, cowboy. Really. Locate a little dignity.”
“For a while I was going to weld. You remember. I was going to leave the club, those guys. I remember wanting to do that. You didn’t want me to. You liked that I did what I did.”
“So what? I was a kid.”
“All that fucking.”
“Spare me.”
“Hey. You were the one—”
“The past isn’t real, Roy.”
I stopped myself, caught on what she’d said.
“Listen to me,” she said. “The past isn’t real.”
This struck the center of me like a pickax.
She said, “You remember what you want. I remember you coming home with your shirt bloody. Asking me to hide a gun. You’d sober up a week and start talking about being different. Then you were drunk again for three weeks straight. You made it so I couldn’t be around you without being shit-faced. The things you said to me. You threw me around a little. Do you remember? Do you remember the fights at all? You were jealous of everything, Roy. You were resentful. You resented other people being happy. I remember thinking, This is the most frightened man I ever met. And so what, really? I’ve known worse men. I was a little relieved, though. When you went to prison.”
Galveston Page 11
