“What did you ever like about me, then?”
Her fingernail tapped her chin. “I don’t really remember. A kind of power, probably. But”—she sighed—“the kind that can only get you so far.”
“There haven’t been many like that. For me.”
She put her head in her hand and half covered it. “I don’t know what, in your mind, you’ve turned all this into. I was a stupid kid. That’s all. I made mistakes. The tough guy. Oh, that’s hot. I was stupid. A kid. I love my husband. My husband is a good man. I love my life with him.”
Her scowl seemed baffled, no longer amused, and it stiffened all her beauty. Then she faced the window and the day outside reshaped her face in a softer way. I could feel the sensations that had skirted me fleeing. I tried to hold on to them by remembering us sitting cross-legged in bed, playing cards naked, but it didn’t work, and I wanted to find a way to talk to her about time, how movement confuses you and wears you down, prevents things from sticking.
“What’s he do?” I said. “Your husband.”
“That’s enough. I need you to get out of my house.”
I stood up and walked over to her.
She looked up wearing a very bored, tired expression, and brandished a kind of garage door opener. “You see this, Roy? This sends an alarm to those Halliburton boys driving around out there.”
I shrank. “Jesus. I was only going to say goodbye.”
“Sure you were.”
She followed me to the door, keeping a few paces behind. I opened it and stepped out, hammered by the light. On the porch I turned back to her.
“I’m dying,” I said.
“Aren’t we all.”
The door thunked shut.
At the truck a hacking cough seized me and wouldn’t subside. I retched as I started the engine, dropping a thin string of bile on the seat. I passed two security cars on my way to the interstate. I knew the past wasn’t real. It was only an idea, and the thing I’d wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn’t name—it just didn’t exist. It was only an idea, too.
I suppose you have to be very careful how you use your memories.
The thing was, once I admitted that to myself, everything that had ever happened to me still seemed important, more important, even. This is what you bought with your life.
I pulled onto the shoulder at the entrance to the freeway cloverleaf, and above me the concrete looped and knotted, the cars loud, wind whipping, white noise thickened with greasy exhaust and petrol fumes.
I thought about getting a room and whiskeying myself up. I could just drink and smoke in a motel room forever.
I had a strong taste of iron off the breeze, and it made me think of Matilda, the old black woman who cooked at the group home. Matilda was spiderlike, dark brown, and bent in her movements, her face like a walnut. She liked to stand in sunbeams and didn’t give anything away about what she thought. She dipped tobacco that she cured herself and flavored with schnapps, made blood pudding with buckets of dark blood the hunters brought her as charity, men and their sons showing up with pails they’d drained from their kills, and I’d watch those men and think of the boys out with their fathers in the dark morning, the dew beads on the grass, stalking silent, following their fathers’ backs. We ate a lot of blood pudding, and the taste, like iron shavings mixed with cornmeal, was heavy in my mouth just then, and I remembered the same taste and smell when I left the recruiting station and took the bus to Beaumont, remembered the taste had still been in my mouth when I found Robicheaux’s-on-the-Bayou and asked for Harper Robicheaux.
I felt along my mouth with my tongue and watched the passing cars enter the freeway, and the gamy taste brought with it the heavy feelings of sunlight on my skin, the layers and layers of lush greenery, the soft chirring sounds that were part of the silence, the silence in the cotton fields, the briars cutting your hands, long days spent hunched and picking, blind with dirty sweat.
Tiffany’s laughter pealed through my head, those sounds she made as I tossed her into the waves. And Rocky’s face, distressed, recalled a badly staked tent in a shuddering gale.
A dragonfly kept circling my head as if it had something to tell me, and the air of the hot night was like breathing ashes. In the distance I could hear the cars pass whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like the great heartbeat of some huge animal that had swallowed me.
Amarillo was gas stations and storage units, low-end strip clubs between motels, pounding winds. You could drive and drive but there would still be only the plains and the water towers and the small derricks bobbing up and down like seesaws. I watched truckers and bathroom whores trudge through the drizzle, moving between the laundromat and the service station where the big rigs sat in rows under halogen lamps. A woman with real tall hair climbed out one truck and got into another right next to it. The girl in my room made a contrite, apologetic face while I stood at the window. She was on the bed and I could see her in the glass.
“What’s wrong, mister? Tell me what to do. You tell me what you want.”
Her pale face and ink black hair floated in the glass. I was naked beside the curtains and watching the parking lot. I sipped JW.
When I didn’t answer her, she said, “You’re just drunk, baby.”
I hadn’t planned on meeting her, but the night found me in Amarillo after a day of driving in the wrong direction. An outpost of bright lights, a truck stop more like a small village, had a laundromat and bar posted beside it, and facing it across the giant lot a short motel of single rooms squatted.
I’d walked into the bar first, but the tinsel around the bottle island looked too gaudy and the slope-eye of the waitress came out of the shadows like an anglerfish materializing from the darkest part of the ocean. Static filled the television’s noise, and the voices from it sounded like endless newspapers being crushed. The bartender’s jaw hung slack and he turned to look at me with an evil blue light flickering across his face, which seemed without thought. There was no one drinking in the bar.
I walked out and into a drizzle’s steady pour. Men in adjustable caps were towed back and forth by their bouldery guts. I passed the laundromat and saw the girl. She was young, hard to say her age, but she watched me through the glass and followed me with her eyes. She stood against a machine with her arms folded and her neck craned out, watching me in this posture like a mantis, with the light rain flowing over the window, and I had this feeling of a great tribunal pointing its fingers at me.
A rear portion of the service station had a doughnut shop inside, with booths and a few tables, and this was the place some men gathered. Large men shaped like pinecones, pants hung low off assless waists, overalls, denim. Aviator shades at night. They looked at me when I came in. Nobody was laughing, but they talked quietly and seriously and made little gestures with their cigarettes to drive home a point. Some stuck to their coffee and cigarettes and a few others passed around a pint of bourbon. The ones that weren’t sharing the bourbon kept dipping their paws in a box of crullers.
For a while I just stood in one of the aisles, with potato chips and jerky on my left and rows of single-serving medicine on my right. The harsh lights were like moonlight, only brighter. I kept seeing the men in the doughnut shop look over at me. The woman behind the counter wished me ill. The girl appeared outside then, on the other side of the window, and her eyes burned at me through the sliding water. She wasn’t going to let me get away. She’d ask me for money. That’s how it works. All they have to do is make eye contact.
But I looked up at the men in the doughnut shop and the fat woman scowling at me from behind the counter, and I felt the heavy, damp air of the bar blow over me again, and when I walked outside she was waiting for me. I stood beside her awhile, and we stared at each other.
“You want to buy some?” she said.
I asked her if she had a room, and she said no.
“You got a manager?”
She shook her head and folded her arms tighter. The rain was quitting,
and her neck craned out into it.
“It’s just me,” she said. “What do you think?”
A runaway. She wouldn’t be doing this long, between the pimps and psychos and cops. I pulled out my flask and took a hit, passed it to her. We watched the men moving around the pumps and the occasional woman step down from one of the parked rigs. A lot of times they run off and don’t understand where they are. Then they run back home, if they can. But it’s too late.
I looked her over again and wondered why her neck bowed like that. She had a bony face and her eyes were a little too close together and too large, insectlike, an impression of malnourishment in her skin. But she had strong shoulders and a nice body in a denim skirt with red tights and a black top, a large floppy purse hugged to her hip like an infant. She pulled some of her wet, utterly black hair off her forehead. “Come on,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “Follow me.”
It turned out I didn’t want her at all. I just hadn’t wanted to be alone. I tried conversing, tried to talk about things. But she was too much of a whore, wouldn’t even speak, just kept making for my pants. She was younger than I’d thought, too. After a while, when I was pissed off and she was embarrassed, I went back to my drink and stood naked near the window. The rain had started again.
“Just tell me what you want,” she said.
“How long you been working these parts?” I wasn’t sure where that question came from. I wouldn’t have asked a week ago.
I saw her stretch out on the bed, and in the glass her curving whiteness resembled smoke. “A couple days. I was sleeping on my feet yesterday.”
“The girls out here are dangerous. They’ll cut you. Their men will.”
She folded the covers over her. “I’m not staying here. I’m going west.”
The reflection of my face out of the black night mingled with hers and overlaid the things past the window.
“You might find the same thing out west,” I said.
“I don’t do charity,” she said. “I earn my way. Come back here and tell me what you want.”
When I didn’t move or answer she rolled over and curled up, pulling the covers tight. There was nothing in her to remind me of Loraine or Carmen, just a kid and frightened by where she’d run to. The rain tapping delicately at the roof and weeping down the window made me feel mean, and I knew this girl would never make it. I could see her life unspool. I got dressed, started to step outside, and she snapped at me without turning over. “Just pay me.”
I left some bills on the air conditioner and went out to my truck. I pulled away and left her the room, if she wanted it.
You’re born and forty years later you hobble out a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you’re going to do with it.
FOUR
Strips of sand wriggle across the street with the movements of sidewinders. Sage sits straight and alert as we wait for traffic to pass, cut through the parking lot of a day care and cross Pabst Road to the Knight’s Arms. Cecil rents rooms here at a weekly rate, and a consolation of staying in this place is the reassurance that you won’t be here long.
I’ve lived here five years, in an efficiency with a small couch that unfolds into a double bed. My television died a couple months ago, and books pile atop themselves along most of the wall, stacked on their sides like bricks, the way I learned to keep my books in prison, so you don’t need shelves.
I drop the sack in the sink and feed Sage. When she’s done eating she curls on her pillow beside the couch, and I’m still thinking about the man in the Jaguar, if he’s alone or if he brought friends with him. I turn up the wall unit and switch off the lights, and by nine thirty I’m in the management office.
Cecil is looking through the Life section of USA Today. He’s been living in the office since his divorce, but now his ex-wife’s moved to Austin and his house is free. Only now he’s thinking he’ll rent the house and keep living in the office until he meets another girl. I’m supposed to paint that house today.
He’s more than twenty years younger than me and the edge of a black tattoo peeks out from the back of his collar. He made some money in Washington State in the late nineties and moved here with his girl for the weather. The girl became his wife and then she left him for a DJ in Austin, and now he says they should have gone to Florida.
When he hired me in spite of the prison record, he said, “Tell you the truth, I didn’t think I’d find a guy that spoke English.” He wanted a man living on the grounds, so the position includes the efficiency, even though he’s living here now and doesn’t need me as much. He also lets me keep Sage when the motel policy is no pets. So I think of him as a decent guy.
He chews his sunken cheek and says, “You seen what’s happening with the hurricane?”
“Like every other September. You can’t ever tell what they’re going to do.”
“I guess. They’re talking state of emergency now. Mandatory evacuation in the next day or two, maybe.”
“Right when everybody leaves, it’ll turn into a squall off Padre Island.”
“It still freaks me out. Ever since New Orleans.”
“Listen.” I lean on the counter. “That note you left on my door.”
“Yeah. That guy catch up to you?”
“No. Tell me about him.”
“Sort of official-looking. Guy in a suit, professional type. Gruff. Asked if you were around. Told me your name. Asked if Roy Cady works here.”
The metal in my skull throbs, and all the morning’s disjointed thoughts come together in a siren sound rising in my head. “I was at the Seahorse. I cut out early.”
“Figured something like that. I didn’t say anything, though. I didn’t know. Guy didn’t want to leave a message, either. I didn’t like that.”
He slides the house keys over to me. “There’s a hole in the hallway wall you could patch up for me, if you feel like it,” he says. His brown hair is going too thin for him to keep wearing it spiky like that, and the bags under his eyes make him look older than he is. “Paint’s all in the truck. Bought some spackle, too, if you want to fix that hole. I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure thing.”
“I wondered about that guy,” he says, folding the paper shut. “Something off about him. A collection agency maybe? Lawyers get guys like that. So I didn’t tell him where you might be.”
“I don’t owe anybody money.”
“Hey, good for you.” He switches on the television behind the counter.
But I do owe things.
“What did he look like?” I ask.
“Like I said. Sort of a thick guy. Hair slicked back. Sort of tough-looking about it. You want me to tell him anything, if he comes back?”
“Did he say he’d be back?”
“When I asked if he wanted to leave a message, he just said he’d try back. I didn’t like that. The dude’s whole demeanor.”
“Don’t tell him anything.”
He’s watching the weather report on television and scratches his weak chin. I take the keys and turn to leave, but stop myself. “Tell him I’m not around. Even if I am. Just tell me if he comes back. Try to get a name again.”
“He anybody you know?”
“I got no idea who he could be.”
“All right. Remember the hole in the hallway, huh?”
I leave him and walk to the storage shed, haul out two big plastic tarps, rollers, mixing pans, and bring them to Cecil’s truck. He’s letting me borrow it to paint the house. I’m thinking about bagmen and skip tracers, the man in the Jaguar talking on a cell phone, telling his bosses he found me, and I wonder again if they’re sending anyone else.
Before I leave I turn on the hose in the courtyard. It has a spray-gun fixture at its end, and the sight of it in my palm sends a ripple of dread down my spine.
Both ha
nds shaking.
I lean behind the shed and smoke half a joint, hoping it will settle me and not fire up the paranoia. It ends up doing both, making me certain of my doom, which will be painful and humiliating, but also giving me a kind of Zen outlook on the inevitability of suffering.
I should buy a gun, maybe.
Upstairs I dig in my closet until I find the Remington hunting knife I won at cards a few years ago, a seven-inch blade with a serrated base. I run my thumb along the edge. It’s a little dull and I take the sharpening stone from the sheath, file the blade until with no pressure it draws blood from my thumb. I put the knife in one of the pockets of my overalls, check the parking lot for black Jaguars, and climb down.
I drive Cecil’s truck out of Spanish Grant and past the beaches to Point San Luis on the far west end. I pass Lafitte’s Cove and imagine the evil bravery of that time, the fires on the beaches. And I remember Rocky, of course.
Driving, this might be the farthest I’ve traveled in five years. Except for the odd nights at Finest Donuts or the Seahorse, when I need to be around people so I won’t go buy that final bottle, I usually stay inside. Even during the hurricane evacuations I’ve seen here, I’ve stayed home and watched the storms whip the air with leaves and rain. I squash the thought of taking Cecil’s truck up to Montana or Wyoming, maybe Alaska.
I suppose that’s when I admit to myself that I’m not going to run.
Cecil’s house is a bungalow on a raised foundation, painted a dull wheat color, and the yard is wild and overgrown. Between my hands and the bum leg, it takes a few minutes for me to bring all the supplies inside. The house is empty and all the curtains gone, so the light pours in through the windows in huge slabs of chalky white.
I lay down the tarp and unfold the newspapers, tape the wainscot in the living room. These rooms have a strange feeling, being empty and with all that powdery light pouring in. Such white and bereft light. It’s definitely a house, a place too big for one person. Families have moved through this space. I walk around, my left foot making a sandy sound scraping across the floor, and I pass through all these crosshairs of sunshine. I’m thinking about things I’ve read about this or that great painter. How the quality of light changes everything—not only what you see but how you feel about what you see.
Galveston Page 12
