Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  The boy remembered the woman who’d sat drinking at the Upper Terrace restaurant with his father two months ago, though she’d only been with them for a couple hours before walking unsteadily out the doors. Now she was talking over a plate of oysters to a thick man who wore a beige suit and had reddish skin. They seemed to be part of a small, smartly dressed group.

  The father straightened his suit and smoothed back his hair. “She used to be a model. Did I tell you that? In New York. And she was on stage. Isn’t that something?”

  “Yeah.”

  They stood still a second, watching between people as Therese laughed at something the man in the beige suit said.

  “That’s Bill Hays. I think they used to go out.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “No. They’re just with a group.” As if the boy offered a rebuttal, David looked down and said, “People stay friends, Dru. Like me and your mother. We’re still friends, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  They waited some more, neither saying a word, and the boy became tense, wondering what would be required of him. Bill Hays belched into his fist, wiped his mouth with a napkin he let fall to the ground, and touched Therese’s shoulder before he walked to a betting window. David nudged his son’s arm and said, “Come on.”

  She was a tall, slender woman in a green dress that fell below her knees, with thin, pursed lips and hair neatly cut into a bob. Some kind of propriety was broken by a quality in her smile, in her theatrical eyebrows, the way her mouth seemed constantly on the verge of making a joke. But on the whole she appeared sapped of all moisture, her blond hair a bright color, but without shine, like chalk dust. She lit a cigarette and exhaled into the bleached light, looking distant even after she spotted David leading his son toward her.

  “Hey, Therese.” His father smiled.

  “Hi,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “You remember Andru, my boy? He spotted you across the floor.”

  Her eyes drooped toward the boy and her mouth curled. “Hey Dru. Were you this tall last time?” She turned her head to the side and inhaled. Her eyes looked back to David, but her face remained in profile while she exhaled, her lashes clumps of black.

  “So we were going to grab some lunch.” His father said.

  “I was just thinking I’d like some fruit. I was thinking I’d like some persimmons.”

  “You want some persimmons?”

  She seemed amused. Her perfume was so strong it stung the boy’s eyes. He was watching her and his father, watching the empty space between them and the small party around them, knowing he and his father were not part of it—and sensing that part of what his father was doing involved shutting out the knowledge that his son understood they didn’t belong here.

  “They’re my favorite. You can’t find good ones around here. All the time I was a little girl, I loved persimmons.” She smiled at the boy. Smoke slipped out between her teeth. “How about that? You believe I was ever a little girl?”

  He blushed.

  She winked at him and he looked up at his father, who was staring with a kind of blank patience at Therese.

  Just then Bill Hays reappeared, solid and glowing in the beige suit. He was taller than any of them, his sunburned skin and cowboys boots of a glossy, thin hide.

  “Well, hey Dave. What do you know?”

  The father seemed to simultaneously shrink and inflate, his head bowing and tilting, but his shoulders back, chest out. “Got my boy in. Thought we’d grab some lunch, catch some races.”

  Bill Hays looked down at Andru with green, sympathetic eyes. The boy wore a black Iron Maiden T-shirt under a leather jacket and blue jeans, his hair a stiff helmet of spikes. “You like the races?”

  The boy shrugged. “Sure. I guess.”

  Bill Hays smiled, put a hand at the small of Therese’s back. “Big horse fan you got there.” David was expressionless, tapping his racing form against one leg.

  The party began to move. Bill said to Therese, “We should get up there.”

  She nodded and put out her cigarette, took up her purse and winked again at Andru. “You don’t let him get you into trouble, all right?”

  “Hey, hey, watch it,” David said, laughing. A thing in his father’s laugh unnerved the boy, a forced, excessive quality he worried over.

  As Therese and Bill turned, David began walking with them. “So where you guys going to be?”

  Bill smiled. “Triple Crown Room, all day.”

  “Oh.”

  Bill raised a hand like a crossing guard would. “Dave. Take care.”

  The boy and his father stood while the crowd moved around them and they watched the man in the beige suit and the slender woman as they walked to the elevator with their friends.

  He didn’t want to look at his father, whose disappointment felt smothering, and instead watched outside the entrance doors, at the sunlit street and the cars, the people walking together beyond the lucent glass.

  “Hah!” His father snapped his fingers, now livid, grinning like he had a sure thing. “Hold on. Stay right here.” David walked to a betting window and began flipping pages in the racing form, making a number of bets. It took some time, and the boy watched the quickness of his father’s hands across the pages, the tapping of his shoe, the way he leaned close to the teller and smiled at her. When he returned, stuffing tickets in a pocket, his father said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shopping.”

  “What about lunch?”

  His father directed him through the exit. “We’ll pick something up.” They walked outside as horns were sounding a race.

  *

  They started driving toward town and his father lit a cigarette. The afternoon felt crisp and chilly, radiant under a cloudless sky the color of a perfect heaven. They drove down Grand Avenue, and his father stopped at the first grocery store. He said, “C’mon, c’mon,” while he jogged toward its doors, his jacket flapping like dark wings under his arms as he hurried ahead.

  Inside, fluorescent bulbs enameled every surface in a sickly, diffused white. His father walked toward the produce aisles, gave his son a ten-dollar bill and told him to get a sandwich in the deli. His hand held the money behind him, while his body turned to examine the fruit laid out under thin piping that just then issued a fine mist.

  Andru got a corned beef sandwich and was sitting down at a small table when his father found him, his steps fast and stiff. Hands bunched into fists, a few errant strands of hair looped down to his nose. “Hey. C’mon. We have to go. Eat in the car.”

  Then more driving. His father running into three more grocery stores while he sat in the idling Lincoln. He chewed his sandwich slowly as the scene became familiar, watching the automatic doors part for his father, seeing him appear a minute later, pausing to sweep his hair back. It was one of the gestures most native to his father, the hand almost involuntarily rising up and smoothing down the mound of pomaded black hair. The boy knew that he, also, had that habit of putting a hand to his hair. His father’s ring gleamed when he fixed his hair in front of the grocery store.

  “Okay. There’s one more thing,” he said, shifting the car into drive. “The guy in there told me about a farmers’ market on Saturdays. He said they usually close around three, but we might make it. I can’t believe nobody has persimmons in this goddamn town.”

  The boy nodded. He let the plastic wrap fall between his legs, to the floor where black flies shot to inspect it.

  “How was your sandwich?”

  “Good.”

  His father raised up the radio and they descended a hill, turning back toward Central Avenue.

  It was close to four when they found the farmers’ market, completely abandoned, a few kiosks still standing but shuttered and padlocked. Other than one man loading boxes into a pickup truck, the immense parking lot was empty, its terrain of flat, cracked concrete stretching around them. The boy had his hands buried in his jacket. His father
walked over to the man with the pickup truck and spoke to him a moment, then watched the truck drive away. A wind had picked up and it caused his father’s suit to ripple, pulled his hair up and tossed it around while he turned, slowly, in a circle, looking out over the lot. There was something clear and final about the moment, both of them standing on a barren surface in the sunlight, but the boy didn’t know what it made him feel. His father was squinting, an almost confused expression on his face, as though stranded in the glare, uncertain.

  “Shit.” David trudged back to the car, head hung as his hand went to work automatically straightening his hair.

  Before returning to Oaklawn, his father stopped in one of the grocery stores they’d already tried. After about ten minutes, he emerged with a full paper bag. He handed the bag to his son while he got in the car. It was filled with oranges, peaches, apples, plums, and some green grapes.

  “They’re no good till after the first frost, this guy tells me. At that parking lot? But I’m like, hell, somewhere in the world right now they’re growing persimmons and shipping them out, right? So what the fuck?” His father lit a cigarette and didn’t say anything else on the way to the track.

  The Triple Crown Room was on the Upper Terrace, the highest level of the race track. It was next to an expensive lounge called the Arkansas Room, and was accessible only by special reservation or by dint of clout. In front of the doors stood two tall men in khaki pants and blue blazers with the Oaklawn crest on their left breasts. The doors were dark, polished wood, so shiny the boy could see his father’s reflection in them as he spoke to the two men in jackets, the paper bag held in the crook of his left arm.

  His father was saying he only needed to get in there for five minutes. I just have to drop something off. “Come on, Jerry,” he said to one of them. His father put down the paper bag and handed a twenty-dollar bill to the man. They opened the doors and said, “Be cool, Dave,” as if it were an order.

  “Yeah,” his father answered, lifting the bag. “C’mon, Dru.” He cocked his head for his son to follow.

  The Triple Crown Room smelled like rich meat and the light was warmer, more yellow in there. White-clothed tables spread between burnished wood walls with brass trimmings, and a mahogany bar with a marble top stood near the entrance. People in suits and dresses talked and laughed at the tables, cigar and cigarette smoke revolving upward. A big-screen TV showed the races and results while servers in vests and white shirts weaved around tables. His father spotted Therese sitting with Bill Hays and about nine other people at a table near the other side of the bar. He pointed to a barstool and told his son to sit down, and he walked toward the table.

  Andru asked for a glass of water and idly slid a few napkins over. He started folding a napkin and watching his father.

  He saw his father crouch down next to Therese, and the table looked at him, smirking as he drew her attention to the bag he held.

  Therese chuckled, “Oh, jeez.” She looked at his father as if he were playing a joke on her, but after staring, became somehow pitying. “Oh, come on, Dave.”

  His father stood. “I thought you’d like it. That’s all. There isn’t a persimmon in this goddamn town.”

  Therese looked at Bill Hays, and he stood gracefully and laid his cigar in an ashtray. He walked around her and put his hand on David’s shoulder. People at the table were watching sternly. “Okay, Dave. Come here. Come with me.”

  “Hey, what—here,” he said, extending the bag to Therese as Bill Hays gently turned him around. Therese stood and took the bag, still grinning.

  “Dave, we’re going to have a talk, all right?” With one arm over his shoulder, Bill Hays guided his father past the bar, and his father said, “I’ll be right back, Dru.” The two men in blue blazers were watching, shaking their heads as if such incidents were all too typical. They stepped aside as Bill Hays and his father walked out the doors.

  The boy sipped his water. Therese laid the brown paper bag on the bar, and some of its contents rolled out, oranges in green mesh, the other fruit divided into tiny plastic sacks. She sat on the stool to Andru’s right and lit a cigarette, put her hand under her chin and stared at him.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” she asked.

  In his hands, the napkin had almost completely transformed into a swan. “Books.”

  “You like to read?”

  “I guess.”

  “Mm-hm.” She blew smoke across the bar, then reached over and patted the top of his hair. Searing heat washed over his back and neck. “That’s some sharp hair you got there. That’s a lethal weapon.”

  He made an uneasy, stunted laugh and continued folding the napkin. The oranges and cherries were lying just outside the paper bag.

  “Does your dad give you trouble about your hair?”

  “No. He says I can look however I want.” That was true, and he felt a burst of loyalty and love for his father.

  “Good for him. Do you like the races?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?” Her perfume seeped into his sinuses. She scooted her stool a little closer, leaned her chin out to him on her hand. “What do you know about horse racing?”

  He kept his head down, folding the napkin, and said, “Handicapping is predicated on the principle that the future will repeat the past.”

  “You know what that means, though?”

  He stopped folding and turned to her. She had that amused grin on her face, the not-quite-benign spark in her eyes. He could see flakes of powder in the cracks above her lips. “It means you can tell how a race is going to be run by how the horses ran other races.”

  “Mm-hm,” she inhaled, pausing a moment. “But also you can tell a horse not just by races he’s run, but by how his parents ran, and on and on.” She was tracing a kind of figure eight on the bar as if to illustrate the point.

  “Yeah.”

  She put a red fingernail on the paper swan and slid it toward her. “You know, I don’t think your dad’s having such a good day. You should do something nice for him.”

  When she said this a sudden anger flooded the boy. He wanted to scream at her, to tell her she didn’t know the man, not at all. Who was she? He felt a surge of pride and hope for his father so powerful that he almost spit in the woman’s face. He wanted to grab the sack of oranges and beat her with them, like he’d read about a man doing to a woman in a crime novel his father had.

  Instead, he began folding a new napkin, and as his anger festered he returned to his father’s face as he was walking out with Bill Hays. The frantic eyes, the unsure smile. The boy sighed sadly, knowing that it would now take only the slightest disappointment to push his father into one of the silent depressions he weathered. And he knew what his father needed now was an ally, a friend, a reminder that he was important, and loved.

  But just then something else happened. The boy looked at the discarded fruit and touched his hair, patting it in the mirror behind the bar. When he saw this a new fear gripped him.

  He folded the napkin halfway into a flower, then stopped and asked Therese if he could borrow two dollars. “I need change for the phone. My dad’ll pay you back.”

  “It’s no problem, sweetie.” She got her purse and took eight quarters out of a long wallet. She pointed to a pay phone at the other end of the bar.

  When he returned from his call, he asked her to tell his father he was going to wait outside on the bleachers, where he could watch the horses run.

  It wasn’t crowded on the bleachers. The frosty air kept most people inside, but a few stood along the railings, smoking and checking their forms. Three girls in fur coats leaned side by side on one rail, talking back and forth while watching the horses in their gates. Andru sat near the top, away from anyone, looking down on the track and listening between indistinguishable voices. He was picking out the silences within their dialogues, as if trying to narrow his range of hearing into just those silences, where he could sit within them.

  He’d only been there for
ten minutes when his father appeared. He stood for awhile in his suit, looking over the bleachers, the familiar, searching expression his son had seen all day. He let his father continue searching until he spotted him.

  His father walked up the metal stairs, footsteps resonating through the seats. “Hey. Um, we have to go.” He began taking betting slips out of his pocket and letting them fall. Other slips were stamped into the bleachers, dirty and unreadable. Andru stared down at the track. “Hey. C’mon, Dru. We have to leave.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I called Mom. She’s coming to get me.”

  His father’s face broke, startled, eyes wide. “What? Why? Go call her back—Dru, go call her back. If you want to go home I’ll—I’ll take you, okay? Call her back.” His high, sharp voice of panic.

  His son stared at the track. “I can’t. She already left. She said she was out the door.”

  “What? Why—is Frank coming?” His father clutched his own head and began rotating in half circles back and forth. A deep, cheery voice came over the speakers and spoke in numbers, called out the names of horses, Merlin’s Anchor, Desiree Blue Carafe, Shift Holmes Prince. His father stuttered, let a betting slip flutter to his feet. “I don’t, I don’t—” his breath small tufts of white against the flawless blue sky.

  “I don’t understand why you’d do that, Dru!” He crouched next to his son, his face confused and distressed. “I don’t understand why you did that. Why did you do that?!”

  The boy didn’t answer or look at him. He watched the horses. David rose and walked down to the rails. A gunshot opened the gates and the horses galloped forward.

  After the horses had run one lap, his father walked wearily back up the aluminum steps. He stood next to his boy a moment, then sat down. He said, “shit,” softly, ran both hands over his head and left it bowed under them.

  The boy didn’t turn. He was still thinking about the instant at the bar—when in the moment he’d felt most trapped, how quickly and easily he’d deserted his father. He nursed that understanding, and watched the races with his father hunched over next to him. He liked the way the horses suddenly exploded into thunder when they passed, rumbling the bleachers, then fading quickly back to the serene, secure state of silence.