“I don’t—see, Doctor, the whole point—I feel, I don’t know, I don’t know why no one wants me to find out if this baby was mine.”
“Perhaps,” the doctor mused, “they’re wondering why, if you care so much, you weren’t here for Lana when the child was born.”
“What? What is that supposed—you have no idea. I mean, why shouldn’t I know, why should I have to—and then explain myself? Explain myself, to you, when she wrote me a letter?”
The doctor watched Sam pull the crumpled paper from his pocket and shake it in front of him. This was Lana’s letter, which Sam had begun carrying over the past few days. “I spoke to this man. Who killed her? He stood—Why should it—I am not allowed to care? Is that what I’m being told?”
The doctor’s face leveled polite indulgence. He slid a box of tissues across his desk, and Sam didn’t know why until he realized there were tears coming from his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his cheeks. “This is ridiculous. I’m sorry. I don’t—”
“It’s all right. Just try to settle down.”
“I mean—I never behave like…I don’t know.”
The doctor looked to the side while Sam pulled more tissues from the box.
“I don’t see—” Sam paused, inhaled deeply. “Maybe it’s—my parents died? Not long ago? And I never really—or—then I came down here. I’m sorry for this.”
The doctor rose. “Would you like a prescription for something? A small scrip for Xanax or Valium?”
“No. No, I’m okay. It’s just—could you let me stay a second?” The sincerity of his plea struck the doctor. “I just need to think a minute. I can’t—”
Sam became aware of the ticking clock. It took several seconds before he could speak again. “I can’t tell—you think you understand how you feel, or, your motivations? But everything’s always changing? And those things change, in, you know, a moment, and it’s just… difficult to get a handle on.”
“Oh,” the doctor said, not understanding what Sam meant, though thinking that he’d been wrong in his assumption—it appeared to him now that this young man had loved the dead girl. The doctor sat back behind his desk and said, “Yes, of course Mr. Galt. I didn’t mean that you had to go right now. Take some time. And think about what I’ve said, and if you come back to me, if you come back and this test is what you want to do, I’ll help put it through for you. But you can’t think straight like this.”
“No,” Sam said. “I can’t.”
“No. So I want you to relax, Mr. Galt. Talk to a friend.”
Sam shook his head and laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. He bundled all the crushed yellow tissues together, shaking his head. “I just don’t know.”
Standing to offer him the wastebasket, the doctor nodded and put a hand on his shoulder. He patted him there. “It’s all right. Take a breath.”
They stood like that and didn’t move until the ticking clock had settled the room back to its natural, ordered tranquility.
When Sam got home that night he was still confused, but he told Joanne where he’d been.
“You went there? Why didn’t you tell me? What did they say?”
“They told me to think about it first.”
“See?” she said, her voice climbing higher and higher. “And, so, you’re going to—I can’t believe you did this without telling me.” She waited for him to answer, and when he didn’t she started crying. “I don’t even know you nowadays.”
He didn’t speak while she continued to voice protests and beg him to talk to her. She talked and cried for almost an hour, and he never said anything. When he was getting into bed she was still talking.
She turned on a lamp. “You’ve never stopped thinking about her,” she said. “You love her, don’t you? Just tell me.”
Sam sat up, reached across her face and turned off the light.
The emotions of his hospital visit faded quickly, and Sam already felt embarrassed at the way he’d behaved in front the doctor. What remained in the wake of his tears was an acute sense of his own lack of feeling, a realization of how far his distances ran. He thought about black smoke dispersing into blood, the mingling of blood. Some time after, he lost the letter Lana had written.
He never returned to the hospital, or pursued the testing, but silence persisted between him and Joanne. She understood his withdrawal as intimation that his thoughts were not on her, and he never attempted to dissuade her of that notion. But the more withdrawn he became, the more adamantly she pursued their future. He was passive, stoic, without strong feelings for any of his choices.
They were married early the next summer.
BETWEEN HERE AND THE YELLOW SEA
INTERSTATE 10 AFTER MIDNIGHT, WESTBOUND. EL PASO NOW. Coach Duprene says he can drive till morning. Blank asphalt rolls ahead, but I’m seeing Amanda, picturing the way she looked in high school: small-chested in a cheerleading uniform, auburn hair, green eyes, freckles. Grasslands give way to desert with purple and orange barely visible, hallucinated colors. Then such immensity of night over flat, featureless land, I can see how certain people could fear open spaces.
“You see that?” Coach asks.
“What?”
He uses a bottle of Cuervo to trace an arc across the windshield. “All the stars are gone. It got pitch-black.”
I stick my head out the window, into explosive air, and he’s right. Around us is nothing but darkness, and even though the sky’s invisible, I know a storm is coming. “It’s going to rain.”
He passes the tequila. “How you know?”
I tap a scar under my chin. “Broken jaw.”
The metal in my lower jaw twitches, something that happens when the air is charged with electromagnetism. Steel stitches an X in my mandible because when I was fourteen, convinced of my own possibilities, I tried out for the football team. That was seven years ago. Coach still coached the Port Arthur Toreadors back then. I never made it past tryouts, but I went to a lot of games. I’d be the boy sitting quiet, peeking between loud fathers in front to watch red and blue cheerleaders kick and clap. My favorite cheerleader was Coach Duprene’s daughter, Amanda. Honey-skinned, her eyes closed when she smiled. The kind of cheerleader who paid attention, actually cared about the score. She’d follow the game while the rest of her squad twisted their hair or discussed what to wear to the after party.
“You said it,” Coach says, and I wonder if I was thinking out loud. He nods to the windshield, where rain spatters. I’m used to thinking out loud, especially in a moving truck. At this time, I still work for Alamo Sewer Treatment in Port Arthur, and my days are spent driving backroads with a clipboard, noting phosphorous and ammonia levels in the watershed, making sure farmers aren’t spreading chicken shit over their fields. In the evening you might catch me at Petro Bowl or Chili’s, trying to buy drinks for grade school teachers and secretaries, but at work I drive alone, five to seven hours, and on those days I tend to narrate my thoughts, turning observations into stories. Rilke writes, “Love your solitude, for solitude is difficult.” I remind myself not to think out loud.
Rain builds, and before we reach Las Cruces a torrent lets loose, hiding the road under a curtain of water. Metal writhes in my jawbone. The wipers don’t do much, and Coach leans close, squinting. He takes a pill from a brown plastic bottle.
“It’s late enough,” he swallows. We pull over on the shoulder, rain drumming. He slouches against a window and tugs his baseball cap down. Coach doesn’t coach anymore, but he receives a generous stipend from Port Arthur High and the honorary title of athletic coordinator, which is what eight district championships and two state titles gets you in East Texas. I watch him breathe, softened, rain making the windows look like creeks, and I try to connect this man sleeping so calmly with the man I used to see, the steaming, granite-faced commander on the edges of hallways, on the sidelines of a game. I try to figure how he got from there to here. I do that because at this age one of my essen
tial habits is to look for causal links, find stories, and I spend a great deal of time combing through the past, as if answers were there. I’m at an age where I drive in circles, and I take the words of poets and famous men at face value. I’m four years out of high school, living in the house my grandmother left me, and it won’t be until some time after Coach and I reach Los Angeles that I stop looking for answers.
My cheek rests against the window because it’s cold and dulls my jaw’s throbbing. Coach starts to snore.
I was there the day she left. I mowed lawns back then, and on that Sunday I worked the yard next to Coach Duprene’s house. A red Chevy Blazer parked in their driveway. Four boys I knew from school were in that truck. The back end sagged with boxes and bags, a surfboard. High school was over, and they were all moving to California. Coach Duprene watched from the porch and didn’t wave as the truck rolled away.
Someone, we can now say, should have stopped that Chevy. It’s no secret. She makes movies under the name Mandy LeRock. I’ve only seen one.
Lightning flashes over a plain, lights my reflection in the rainy window, and I realize I’m not telling the whole story. There are two stories here. In the first I am sitting beside Coach Duprene in his truck. We are driving to Los Angeles to kidnap his daughter.
In the second story, the reflection in the glass, I’m a teenager named Bobby who lives with two generations of women, a mother and her mother, on empty stretches of grazing land. This boy sleeps in a room with no air-conditioner and mows lawns for spending money. He’s a student athlete, but only runs track. His grades are good, and he draws the same picture over and over again in his notebooks, from every angle: a Naval Destroyer taking counterfire off the coast of South Vietnam.
And what joins both stories, their causal link, is Amanda Duprene. We’re lab partners freshman year and biology class is after lunch. I can’t stomach dissection exercises, but Amanda handles the cutting. I build refuge from ammonia and formaldehyde in the scent of her hair and neck: shampoo, lotion, sweat. On Fridays she wears her cheerleading uniform. A lot of these long days are eased by watching autumn sun move over the back of Amanda’s legs, from one o’clock till two, and this is the girl I’m searching for.
Later, a second search will occur.
It will be undertaken after we get back home, by an investigative firm in Houston whose specialty is locating people. They’re called “Reunions Inc.,” charge me three-hundred dollars and take two months to produce results. Their report is mailed to me in a big white envelope with the company logo printed on it: two open palms cradling three people, who all hold hands under a shining yellow sun.
For now, though, outside Las Cruces, it’s like we’re parked under a waterfall. Coach sleeps and grinds out each breath. I should have brought something to read. This is the snug, familiar isolation I experience at work, when I’m eating my lunch in a truck cab and reading, say, a Saint-Exupéry book about desert pilots. Then I steer the company truck over dirt roads that go on for miles and miles without passing a house, hazy gold cordgrass and grain fields yawning into horizon; checking groundwater for ammonia spikes and algae blooms; turning to the empty seat beside me, telling my stories.
The countryside ripples with superheated colors. Surfaces look like they were cleared with explosives. We cleaned up at a truck stop in Tucson, and I’m labeling things with brochures we got there. Cholla cactus and greasewood. Sagebrush, saltbush. All the clouds stack up over one particular peak of the Maricopa Mountains, like a volcano’s portrait. Near Theba we decide to fish for our dinner. Late afternoon, a tiny branch of the Gila River splits high green meadow grass.
Coach starts going through a pile of tarp and tools in the bed of his truck. “Can you cast open-face?” he asks.
“No. I don’t know anything about fishing.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Well. What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“I think I got a closed reel in here. How’d you grow up in Port Arthur and not learn to fish?”
I shrug and let Coach shake his head while he digs for a pole. How should I answer him? Should I tell stories about growing up hearing guys tell fishing stories? Terminology like secret passwords to me: leaders, streamers, spinners, D-lines. The grass is tall and soft. The creek makes watery noise, gathers light.
Coach finds a pole and says, “I’ll set the line for you.”
He shows me how to attach a stone sinker. He demonstrates the best way to get a neon rubber salamander on the hook. The push-button cast is simple. I flick my wrist and the salamander flies, trailing shimmery filament. Then here we are, Coach Andre Duprene and Robert Corresi, fishing—illegally, I guess—among Joshua trees and painted stones. I watch Coach’s wrists, the way his hand starts to call the line back almost as soon as it’s cast, and I mimic his movements.
Any coach will tell you that mimicry and repetition are the fundamental learning tools. But what could you mimic if, imagine, you’re a boy waking up for seventeen years to rooms choked by perfumes and powders? Say, for instance, every time your clothes get hung on the line, bras and billowing panties flank them—the mother’s skimpy things with lace, the grandmother’s wide-bottomed and big as sails. Say certain things are always on the periphery of your senses: smell of wet stockings, reds of lipstick, tampon wrappers. You burn yourself countless times on untended curling irons.
A lot of the time you’re nervous and don’t know why. Biology class is the highlight of your days. Time waiting for the bus after school, cheerleaders watching athletes, these graceful hunks of movement on sunburnt fields.
In the spring of your fourteenth year, two weeks after you’ve read In Our Time, you try out for the football team, and Eric Dempsey breaks your jaw. Next fall, Amanda’s mother will die.
I’m so lost in reverie that the pole almost flies out of my hand. “Whoa, whoa,” I say and Coach is calling for me to pull up, jerk the rod, reel him in. The line flashes, stirs the water, stops. It goes slack and comes back with the salamander shredded. Coach holds the hook up.
“He got a piece of you. When you feel the tug, give it a jerk, make the hook catch. Then work him awhile. Let him wrestle and get the hook dug in worse.” Coach puts another salamander on and returns to his spot, about fifty feet away. That tug on the line exhilarates me. For the rest of the evening I’ve got the pole in my hands, smiling like a goon. Coach catches two trout and I lose two more.
We cook them over a fire that Coach builds in a clearing. He found hot sauce under some clothes in his truck. The sun is almost down. Nine o’clock now. Blue hues.
“Smells good,” I say.
“These’re fine.” Coach has a new pint of Cuervo. The fish pop and crackle. “Well,” he says, “I guess we’d better get straight on how we’re going to do it.”
I nod. Fire makes our faces orange and jumpy.
What we come up with is to locate the address taken from a videotape I have. The address is for American XXXtacy, the company that makes Amanda’s movies. We start there. Find her. Coach stole chloroform from the chemistry lab. From there, he says he hires a deprogrammer. Apparently, a lot of people had to be deprogrammed in the seventies, and Coach has much faith in this idea.
We sit around a waning fire, now sharing the night’s second pint of Cuervo. I’m not used to drinking hard stuff. Usually, it’s just Lone Star while trying to talk to secretaries at Petro Bowl amid the banging racket of tenpins. “Where do these bottles keep coming from?”
“I went shopping before we left.” He lights a cigarette. Coach wears good cowboy boots, maroon eel-skins, and a denim shirt he got when he was thinner. He’s retained a full head of sandy-gray hair, still kept in its boxy crew cut. He passes the bottle. “You said your dad was military?”
“Navy.” I swig the tequila.
“I flew jets, you know.”
“I know.”
He takes a long drag. “And what happened to him?”
“The USS M
ullinix. Took counter-battery while retaking Quang Tri. My dad was a sergeant. I never met him.” This is the story I believed most of my life, and I’m still comfortable telling it. “Travis Corresi was one of five men lost.”
“Goddamn,” Coach says wistfully, upturning the bottle.
Only five months ago, dying of pancreatic cancer, my grandmother explained that Travis Corresi never served on the USS Mullinix. He was just a merchant seaman stationed in Port Arthur for one week in 1973, when my mother was fifteen. They went out only once.
Coach taps ash into the fire. His eyes glisten from a web of wrinkles, and I can imagine an event for each line drawn: flying in Vietnam, coaching the Port Arthur Toreadors for fifteen years, losing a wife named Marguerite to encephalitis, losing his only child to the state of California. Skin around his eyes is a catalog of gouged disappointments. He takes Vicodin every couple hours. I think things would be better for him if he had a son.
We get around to discussing the day I broke my jaw.
“I remember that,” he says, grinning. “That was you? Boy, Dempsey laid you out, huh?”
I steer the conversation to Amanda. We start drinking faster.
His cigarette trembles in his mouth. “You know, she had real joy in her. Maggie used to say—” he takes a long drag, exhales, “that’s a happy kid.”
I nod. “She was always in a good mood.”
“Well,” his face puckers. “But she did have a temper. She did have to have things just so.” Coach makes a mincing motion with his fingers. Our fire is smoldering ash, red glow dying like the battery light on my mineral tester. We’re silent until he tosses his smoke and speaks with grim, exhaling effort. “No court would convict us.”
“Nope.” I remember saying the same thing two nights ago, during the conversation that started all this. We were both drinking alone at Petro Bowl, and I saw a tall boy in a letterman jacket leave a group of teenagers to approach Coach at the end of the bar. These snickering kids watch their friend ask Coach a question. Coach grabs the boy’s throat and throws him over a table. I pull him off, and he bucks in my arms until I say into his ear, “Coach. Coach. I loved her too.” We ended up getting a bottle and sitting in his truck, remembering her loudly.
Between Here and the Yellow Sea Page 8