Galveston

by Nic Pizzolatto

  “What’re you . . . ?”

  “I’m staying in my room. I had a long night, too. In the morning I’ll talk to Nancy. I’ll have thought of something by then. We can’t stay here anymore. We have to leave.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “Leave it.”

  “I’m sorry I made you listen to all that stuff.”

  I opened the door for her, and she walked out, but paused a second, seeing Tray’s motorcycle still outside his room. She looked over her shoulder at me and didn’t say anything. I stood in the doorway and watched her step to her room, and she turned back one more time to look at me, as if I might have disappeared, then closed her door.

  I spent some time in those early morning hours trying to think my way through to the next right thing. I wanted those girls to have some money. At the center of Rocky was a learned fear of what it really meant to have no means.

  Maybe she’d keep on doing the things she did regardless. I wasn’t sure that mattered.

  I scratched at my chest, and it was tender and sore inside from the violence of my coughs.

  My disease had made haste of things. I believe if I’d had a life to live I might have stuck around those girls, tried to make it work for them awhile. But I just wasn’t going to last that long.

  I watched my smoke break against the curling wallpaper, and as the level in the bottle sank and my thoughts became intuitive, manic, a plan gradually formed.

  I dug out the folder from Sienkiewicz’s house.

  I squared things with Nancy and she seemed at least temporarily satisfied about Tiffany’s welfare and maintenance. I told her we’d be leaving. I started to walk away and she said, “You seen Mr. Jones around anywhere?”

  I stopped, shook my head. “Saw him yesterday, in the afternoon for a little bit. To ask about Rocky.” I faced his room. “His bike’s still here.”

  She didn’t comment.

  “Did he owe for the room?”

  “No. He actually had a couple days left.”

  I didn’t say anything else and walked to the girls’ room. Rocky sat behind Tiffany, stroking her hair on the bed while they watched television, a talk show. I said, “You need to stay with your sister today. Be good. I’m coming back.”

  She seemed chastened and washed out, shoulders slumped, and she spoke softly without turning to me. “What’re you doing?”

  “I’m working on something. I’ll be back later. It’s something for you all.”

  “Okay.” She studied Tiffany’s hair, her face passive and careless. Her fingers moved automatically, coglike.

  I made sure they had a little money, and I drove to San Marcos to start a bank account with First National.

  I’d restudied the papers in the folder. Manifests, shipping arrivals and departures, with handwritten notes that recorded the vanishing of certain containers which were circled red and doubly referenced in an accounting notebook that described payments and shipping losses in a surprisingly plain style of recording, no codes to cipher or floating figures between margins. The name Ptitko was fairly abundant. I suppose Frank Sienkiewicz thought this would be like insurance for him, something to keep him safe.

  Pretty stupid, actually. Maybe he was trying to make a deal with prosecutors and there was a tip-off. Maybe he threatened Stan with it. I don’t know.

  First National had branches all over the place, including New Orleans, and I could call on a phone from anywhere and get an account balance by punching in a few numbers.

  All you needed back then was a driver’s license and secondary form of ID. I attached the account to the mailing address on my license, somewhere in Alexandria.

  This took most of the day, and when I returned in the late evening I looked in on the girls. Rocky had taken to bed. She lay staring at the ceiling while the television droned and Tiffany amused herself with a stuffed bear the old women had bought for her.

  “Hey. You all right?”

  She blinked at the ceiling, its map of gray-brown water stains.

  “You feeling sick?”

  “No.”

  “Well. What’s going on?”

  She spoke drily and with a slackened mouth, but her eyes flinched a little and seemed to concentrate, as if she watched a movie playing out on the blotched plaster above. “I’m just resting. I’m just tired, Roy.”

  The girl arched her head back to watch us, and the bear hung limp in her hands, which were wrapped around its neck as if she’d choked it.

  “You’re not sick?” I asked.

  “No. I’m not. Really.”

  Tiffany’s eyes went back and forth between us, searching for clues, and a sliver of fear pulsed across my back. I wondered for maybe the dozenth time what might lie ahead for her, and I thought of the girl at the truck stop in Amarillo.

  Rocky spoke again. “I’m just resting up, Roy. I’m just coming down and getting my head straight. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Her pupils moved like they were following a hive of motion. “A good night’s sleep, I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m leaving again for a bit. Just a few hours, is all. I shouldn’t have to leave again. So I don’t want you to worry. Watch your sister and I’ll be back late tonight. That’s thirty bucks. Get a pizza or something.”

  “Okay.”

  Tiffany twisted the toy back and forth in her hands, its arms flapping.

  “I thought maybe we could go out tomorrow,” I said, and it sounded a little stupid, but I felt like I needed to leave her with something, a promise of some kind to see her through the night. “Maybe just the two of us. Dinner. Something like that.”

  “Sure. That sounds nice, Roy.”

  “All right. Well, see you, girls.”

  “What’re you going to do, really?”

  “Make a phone call.”

  The air outside was black and starless, and rain felt certain in the dense atmosphere. One of the truck’s headlights was fading on me, and ahead the left-side beam flickered and dimmed, a drizzle blinking on and off. If they had a way of finding out the area code or something, I thought it best to make the call away from the city. I drove a couple hours into Louisiana, up to Leesville. Just in case.

  The pay phone leaned outside an abandoned gas station, the soft earth sunken on one side. The fuel prices on the station’s signs were all blank, and the windows of the office next to the garage were covered in garbage bags that had been cut and stretched over. I thought of the bags I’d bought for Tray, and my hands started shaking. At the pay phone I took a couple nips from a J&B pint, stood in the booth, and smoked a cigarette. The thick forests that bordered the old highway screamed with insects, and the concrete lot fractured where weeds had sprung up like stiff hair, chalk yellow under the streetlight that hunched over the phone booth like a protective mother. Outside its glow the trees rattled in the wind.

  When my cigarette was finished I smoked another one. Then I held the receiver in my hand, dropped my dimes, and dialed.

  I had to roundabout with the bartender, George, and I almost asked him how his ear was doing.

  “Tell him it’s Roy,” I said.

  A couple long minutes passed while I waited for him to come on the line, and I listened to the insects and watched moths and mosquitoes hover and try to rise in the jaundiced light. Before he spoke I heard a click, a slight increase in static, but I knew he had this thing attached to his office line that kept anyone from listening to his calls.

  “This must only be someone fucking with me,” said the voice on the other end. It was deep and scratchy as a bullfrog’s, stilted too, bent around his New Orleans accent, and he always enunciated precisely. “This really you?”

  “It’s really me,” I said, and I heard him inhale a cigarette, could hear the burning tobacco crackle. I thought of Carmen smiling over her shoulder at him. I felt exposed in the streetlight, alone with the empty road, the shrieking darkness.

  He said, “Some piece of work. I mean, that was impressive.”

  “I didn
’t have any choice about that.”

  “No. I can see that. We cleaned it up. Damn, though. I wondered if we’d hear from you, you know?”

  “Surprise, surprise.” I heard his cigarette pop and snap softly and I could picture his round, frowning face, the contempt in that calculating, beady stare and the smoke drifting out his nostrils.

  “You coming back around here?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t imagine.”

  “Yeah. Figured.”

  “Why, though? I don’t get it.”

  “Why what?” he said.

  “Why’d you do for us like that, Stan? I mean for what?”

  “You got it wrong, Big Country. This wasn’t us. It was Armenians. They had their own thing with the guy. Their business. You guys all just showed up at the same time. Bad luck for us. They didn’t mean to get into it with you. They were just there for him.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. Bad luck. But hey, bad luck for them, right?”

  “You’re straight?”

  “Word of honor.”

  I studied my reflection in the smudged, cracked glass of the booth. I didn’t look like myself. I’d lost about eight pounds in the last week, and all my hair was gone. “Except,” I said, “you told us not to bring any guns. Remember that?”

  He didn’t say anything. I think he put out his cigarette.

  “Stan?”

  “Ah. All right. You got me.”

  “You got that much of a problem with anybody who’s laid pipe to her, you’re gonna have a few hundred bodies to put down.”

  “Watch that shit, Big Country.”

  “To do us like that, over what. Her? It’s grotesque.”

  “Ah. That’s not really it, though. You. Angelo. You aren’t exactly key to the enterprise, you know? The thing was: Why not do it? Like smashing a spider. Three birds, one stone. You two go down for Sienkiewicz. You know? Why not do it? The why is because I fucking say so. The why is I decide.”

  “Your mind’s a pit of snakes.”

  “You understand.”

  I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. I focused on the wavering leaves that outlined the edge of the darkness.

  “So,” I said. “I have something.”

  “So.”

  “Cargo manifests. Records. A ledger that explains transactions real clearly. Your name everywhere. A really long and really detailed letter explaining operations. All in the dude’s handwriting. I guess this is what the supersoldiers wanted.”

  I heard something smash on the other side of the line.

  “Shit-eyes,” he said. “On my eyes—”

  “On your eyes, then. You called it down, you Polack greaseball motherfucker. This is what they were there for, right? This thing Sienkiewicz put together.”

  Smoldering static on the line. The bugs filled the lamp’s cone of light like flakes in a snowglobe. Movement—shadows fell from the trees to the south. The road lit up as headlights exploded. An engine’s growl, and my heart skipped as a van cruised past, blinding me for an instant and washing me in gasoline fumes, yanking my shadow tall across the lot.

  “Where you calling from?” Stan asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Seventy-five K. Deposited.”

  “Heh.”

  “It’s a bargain.”

  “I think it’s a bit much.”

  “Copies go out. Times-Picayune. Baton Rouge. Something national. The original to the feds. ‘Ptitko,’ it says. Right here. Nearly every page. ‘Ptitko.’”

  “Still.”

  “Get a pen, because I’m about to hang up.”

  “See, though? What assurances do I have?”

  “You can be assured if anything happens to me it’ll go out anyway.”

  “I don’t want to be hearing about this the rest of my life. I don’t want you calling again when you blow through the cash.”

  “I guess you’ll have to figure that my word is better than yours. As long as I stay breathing, it stays safe. I read about the guy they have in charge, the fed attorney, Whitcomb. I read in the paper he’s real fired up about Sienkiewicz going missing.” He didn’t respond to that. “This buys me out. I’m done. You got a pen?”

  “Wait.”

  “No.” I read him the account number with First National. I said to make the deposit by four the next day or I was going to the post office. Then I hung up.

  My hands had started shaking again and my knees weakened, wobbled. I took a hard pull off the J&B. I stepped out the booth and threw up. Gnats and mosquitoes lighted on the bile and circled my head like a crown.

  The one dimming headlight held my vision on the drive back, and I pulled from the bottle and kept the radio off. My foot kept slipping off the gas pedal.

  On the island scattered fires trembled on the beaches. The wind was loud off the water. But for the low-lit sign and a desk lamp in the office, the motel was dark. Lance’s grill stood outside his door again.

  I peeked through the break in the curtains of the girls’ room and the faint blue glow of the television undulated over them. Rocky was curled, bunching the covers, and Tiffany lay next to her, her arms and legs kicked loose and splayed in a big T-shirt. I had the same fearful sense I had as a boy, when my stomach would hurt and my back would become stiff, and I would want to wander alone in the fields for days like a sick dog.

  The next day I mentioned to the two old ladies that we’d be leaving. It was another humid white day, salty and wet. We were going to let Tiffany go to the beach a last time and they asked if they could come with us. The walk was slow with them, and I lugged their two aluminum lawn chairs and Rocky carried a big canvas bag with everyone’s towels and things. She was more responsive today, and that morning she’d asked me where we were going on our big date. I’d forgotten suggesting that.

  Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life—people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle—and I wanted to alter that.

  The women wore their dark polyester-suit clothes, even to the beach, and they trundled up the sand with Tiffany, their stockings thick and brown and even then their varicose veins were visible in dark squiggles. The breeze rippled my big Hawaiian shirt as I set up their chairs. They lowered themselves real careful under wide-brimmed hats and sun-shades they’d slipped over their regular eyeglasses. Rocky seemed shy around the women as she stripped to her suit and they glanced over her. I sat on the sand next to the sisters for a bit, and we all watched Rocky lead Tiffany out to the waves.

  I could make out from here the bruising on her thigh, but she still looked good, that lean body and rosy pale skin, the lithe muscle and truly first-rate butt. Part of Rocky was this great beauty she wouldn’t let into the light yet, because it had never found its proper place. I believe that.

  She guided Tiffany into the water, the little girl still shocked and cringing at the waves, then bursting with laughter when they broke over her. It made Rocky laugh too, and she’d lifted the girl up and let the waves sweep over her legs, and we could hear their laughter popping and blending with the hiss of the water.

  Other people were out there and more appearing. Families, kids and teenagers, dark brown guys with sun-bleached hair who watched Rocky as they passed.

  The ladies clucked and giggled over Tiffany as her squeals carried up the beach. Sweat beaded the women’s jowls and they dabbed at it with a shared handkerchief.

  Dehra said, “She’s such a good spirit. Such warmth.”

  “Yes,” her sister said. “Such a good disposition.”

  “I, uh, appreciate how much you all have taken to the little one,” I said.

  “She’s very special.”

  “She is.”

  “I think so, too,” I said. I waited a bit and added, “It might be the case that they end up staying here awhile, after I leave.”

  Their faces admitted just the barest hint of confusion un
der the big hats and shades.

  “They need people to be nice to them. That little girl needs people looking out for her, if they end up sticking around.”

  “What do you mean?” Dehra asked.

  “I mean, if I wasn’t around. If the little one needed something.”

  “Oh.” They glanced at each other.

  “I know you all would watch out for her.”

  “Well, you know, we’ve never really—”

  “It’s all right,” I said, waving my hand. I stood up then and walked out to the beach. The sand pulled at my feet and made my legs heavy.

  At the water they were smiling at me, and Tiffany thrust her arms up and shook her hands for me to lift her. I waded into the warmth and grasped her beneath the arms, and she shouted when I tossed her in the air, kicking her legs and screeching so she could make the most of the escape from gravity. Splashing, the sting of salt.

  Rocky’s dimples looked sincere for a second, and she smoothed the wet hair across her scalp. Light sparkled out the water on her skin and in her eyes, in her teeth, but I kept catching sight of those small gray clouds on her thigh. She said, “You decided where you’re wining and dining me?”

  I turned around and saw up the beach. One of the two women was lowering a little camera they’d brought. Then they both just sat, frozen in their dark clothes, nunlike, their faces blank and shaded. Something about the doubling of the figures seemed conspiratorial. I thought about that bank account.

  The office was crowded with three bouquets of new flowers, gifts from Lance, I supposed. I was going to pay Nancy to watch Tiffany that night, but the ladies asked to have her, which surprised me because of their reluctance when I mentioned it on the beach. I went to the supermarket and rented some cartoons for them to watch.

  Around four thirty I phoned First National, and the money wasn’t there, only the fifty bucks I’d used to start the account.

  I stopped at a half booth next to a bodega where wetbacks patted their stomachs and drank beer from paper bag coolies on the sidewalk. It didn’t matter where I called from. I was gone the next morning.