Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  Now Coach’s head lowers in the firelight. His knuckles fall in his lap and he sighs. “When did you say you went out?”

  “We didn’t. We were just friends.”

  He nods. Hoists himself up by holding onto a tire. He opens the tailgate and climbs in, metal squeaks, junk rattles. He calls out, “Hey—is it kidnapping if you don’t ask for a ransom?”

  “Yes.”

  More rattling, and then the steady rasp of his snores. I stir embers with a stick. I want to believe we’re doing the right thing—that the girl out West is the same one I knew in high school, and all she really needs is to be reminded of who she is. Rilke says to “raise the submerged sensations of the ample past,” but later I’ll understand that’s slippery advice, because memory can be interpretive. Later I’ll realize that the synaptic fields where it lives are the same spaces where longing and desire exist, and sometimes memory is only a vehicle for those things.

  But even now, beside the cooling ash of our campfire, I don’t trust my motivations. That’s one of my most basic traits, and it’s mostly rooted in a broken jaw—the small metal cross in my chin reminding me that what I want and what I’m entitled to are traditionally separate things. To understand what I mean, you have to imagine me at fourteen: five foot six, a hundred and thirty pounds in oversized shoulder pads and a helmet I can remove without unbuckling it.

  April sun smothers the field. Cheerleaders sit in the bleachers, evaluating the world and hiding cigarettes. I chew my mouthpiece compulsively. I’ve been reading about Nick Adams and going to war and getting shot. I meet derisive stares knowing I have my ethos, imagining theories about pain and honor. When we move to open-field tackling, I’m first to volunteer.

  Coach Duprene sets me against Eric Dempsey, a monster-sized senior who’s an all-district linebacker. On the one hand, this might be cruel. To me, though, at the time, I think, He’s taking me seriously. He’s giving me a chance.

  When the whistle blows, Coach tosses Eric the ball. I don’t hesitate. I get my center of gravity low and straighten my spine by sinking my head into my shoulders and looking upward. I don’t swerve or go for his knees.

  A sudden gust and I actually hear myself break. Red, shocking pain. I roll over on the ground, sun stabbing my eyes, grass in my mouth, warm copper tastes, dirt. Before I black out, I glimpse the girls in the bleachers, little dots of color all in a line.

  So at twenty-one, I imagine life’s chief lesson is that you have to limit your longing, or it can fester until, say, it gets your jaw broken. And it’s that twitching metal cross that stains my expectations with dread. My eyes dart around in the dark. A log, a moon, noise of wind over rock. Coach cutting Z’s. Imagined sounds echo in my ears: the clatter of bowling pins falling, artillery booming into a Destroyer’s foredeck. My jaw sleeps. No rain.

  Telephone poles resemble crosses in the sun. A large green sign says, Welcome to California. Coach’s head dips and rises. I think he’s taking more Vicodin.

  “This is the farthest west I’ve ever been,” I say.

  Coach stares silent and bleary at the road. He fiddles with the radio and finds Merle Haggard singing “Mama Tried.” The day Amanda’s mother died, the intercom called her out of biology class. The way she removed her plastic goggles and undid her smock, I knew she was expecting this. I watched her leave from the window, wanting to reach through it and touch her sadness as she crossed the concrete walkway.

  At San Diego we take Highway 15 north. Later we rise into an elevated space of signs: slogans and bold, primary colors. Vehicles swarm us. I wonder if my own mother made it this far. Her initial postcards all came from Nevada. I have five postcards altogether, kept in a shoebox on the floor of my closet. Suppose one day near the end of senior year, you came home and your mother was gone. Your grandmother explained that your mom would be away for awhile. A cryptic note began, “Now that you’re seventeen,” and talked about each person having to “follow their own heart.” Phone calls came once a week for the next two months. I don’t look at the postcards anymore. The shoebox stays closed.

  Cars pull us and we merge, rising higher on the concrete slope. Below us, parking lots are everywhere, as if we’re flying over a city of parking lots. The air becomes a radiant gloom, a bleached fog. Enormous buildings vanish into this haze. Something burning—a stale, decomposing odor.

  Coach’s face crinkles. “Smells terrible.” His words slur. A Volvo honks as we drift into the wrong lane. In February of senior year, a story was told in the track team’s locker room. They said Amanda had gotten wild. She rode back from a basketball game on a team bus, and something crazy happened. Howls and laughter. I dressed in a hurry, trying not to believe this.

  The truck squeals onto the shoulder. Coach slams it into park. “We need to figure out where the hell we are.” His pupils float in bloody murk. “You—you gotta drive.”

  I sink into the driver’s seat. The engine rumbles and Coach slumps against the window. With my hands on the wheel, I feel new and worthy. This is what we see: dry concrete reservoirs, asphalt everywhere, heat-warped air. Mexicans. People wearing sunglasses that make them look like insects. Convenience stores and billboards—pictures of bronze, muscled flesh, cleavage. I glance at my own slight, pale biceps.

  Once, I saw Amanda crossing a flooded football field, kicking up water with her bare feet, and I devised a yearlong muscle-building program. Self-improvement notes still decorate my house: A fragment of sacred duty saves you from great fear. All pain is the result of desire. People are generally as happy as they choose to be. But some time after Los Angeles I take those notes down. Papers crackle as I crush them and my footsteps boom on hardwood floors throughout my house.

  At a gas station, Coach waits in the truck while a Persian helps me with the map. He says the zip code, 91411, is “in the valley.” We have to go farther west. Coach pops two Vicodin. Streets and sidewalks radiate heat like a skillet.

  American XXXtacy is part of a strip mall in what’s known as the San Fernando Valley. Their sign is a simple red-letter job on smoky glass doors, tinted so you can’t see inside. A few cars in the parking lot. Dusk. A hillock rises at the far end of the mall and on top sits a TGI Friday’s. Coach has been staring out the window. His fingernails rap against the door and he rubs the brown bottle of chloroform. He hasn’t spoken since I got directions.

  “Stay here, why don’t you?” I say. “Let me go see what I can find out.”

  He stumbles out, head down. “I’m going in.”

  “Look, Coach. Let me talk to them—I’ll make up a story. Trust me, I sort of got a plan.” I ask him for his driver’s license and tell him to trust me again. I leave him leaning against the truck.

  The office has lime green carpeting, stamped down and gouged with cigarette burns. It smells vaguely like rubbing alcohol and Vaseline. A door behind the front desk is closed. Posters decorate the walls: The Goddaughter Part II, Back-Ended to the Future, and one of Mandy LeRock wearing a transparent raincoat and standing under an umbrella—Rainwoman 5: Eye of the Storm. Those aren’t her breasts. A receptionist greets me, an older woman with overcooked skin—orange, papery. She wears flared eyeglasses.

  “Can I help you?”

  Smiling, I show our driver’s licenses. “We’re both from Port Arthur. We drove a long, long way.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “Do you see that man out there?” Beyond the window Coach slumps on his tailgate, puffing out wafts of smoke. “His daughter is an actress.” I point to the Rainwoman poster. “Her real name is Amanda Duprene. She’s from Texas. We’re looking for her.”

  “I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to—”

  “Ma’am. We don’t want to make trouble. But, it’s, the thing is…he’s dying. He’s dying and he just wants to see his only daughter before he goes.”

  She looks past me, out the window. In the parking lot Coach appears folded. His back is bowed and he coughs into his hand, smoke blanketing him and dissolving into dus
klight. He really does look sick.

  “We’re trying to find her. That’s all. We’re not making trouble for anybody.”

  For some reason, she whispers. “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “What does he have?”

  “Pancreatic cancer.”

  “Oh, Lord.” She puts her hand to her mouth. “Just a minute. Okay? I’ll be right back.” She takes our licenses and walks to the back room, opening the door only wide enough to step through. A moment later, she reappears. “Sir? You can come in.” My heart skips, but through the door is just another desk with a young, thin man behind it. A bag from McDonald’s spills french fries across his desk.

  His face is acne-scarred, scanning our licenses. “Are you for real?” he says, sucking his fingertips. The receptionist clasps her hands in the doorway.

  I tell the story of Coach’s cancer while eyeing stacks of videotapes on the desk, explain how difficult it was to drive the old man here from Port Arthur. The man chews fries as I talk. At the end, he asks me for a contact number and says the most he can do is pass the message along to Amanda. He’s sorry, they can’t just give out addresses, especially to family.

  The woman catches me at the outer door. She passes me a slip of yellow paper. “You don’t know where this came from,” she says. Pats my arm. On the paper is an address.

  Coach nods and falls into his seat. Back on the highway, he stares at the chloroform and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know about this.”

  It takes us another two hours to find the address.

  A ranch-style house in Van Nuys. Palmetto and ferns, palm trees with ridged skin and no foliage. A yellow Corvette in the driveway. From bay windows, pale lemon-colored light lies in three wavering rectangles on the trim green lawn. Around are similar houses, warm air. We park across the street and turn out the lights.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  His head, reclined, turns slowly. “Go home.”

  “C’mon. Do we go to the door? Do we wait to see if she comes out?”

  His eyes are lacquered dots, absorbed by wrinkles and folds.

  “Coach?”

  He closes his eyes. Laborious breaths. “Go see.”

  “Me?”

  “Go see.” He brandishes the chloroform in some gesture of reassurance.

  The porch light is off, and a dim peach glow emits from the doorbell. I walk toward it, through darkness between windows, the doorbell’s glow like the end of a tunnel.

  I would watch her green eyes, the smile that always closed them. I remember things like her face lit by a Bunsen burner’s quivering flame, laughter bursting from her like confetti. Once, I saw her slap Junior Wendell’s hand away from her skirt, and I felt the confinement of a teenage girl. The way her mind was full of longings—a knot of emotions constantly rising to the surface, like a tumbleweed rolling downhill, carrying her over a harrowed suburban field, past the shopping mall and long acres of bluestem grass, to backseats of cars, truckbeds.

  I knock. Again. “Who is it?” from behind the heavy wood.

  “Amanda Duprene?”

  “Who is it?” the voice repeats.

  “Um…Robert Corresi? From Port Arthur?” A porch light ignites and brightness blinds me. The door opens the length of a chain lock, and a dog’s black nose sniffs the gap. A pair of female eyes, brown and bloodshot, glide over me. The door closes and metal slides loose.

  In the second it takes for the door to swing wide, I become conscious of my looks, until I remember that I don’t have acne anymore, and my haircut is better than it was in high school. She has dark skin, and her reddish hair is pulled back. She holds a large brown Rottweiler by its collar. Light from inside silhouettes her, making her robe almost translucent blue. Her voice is familiar, but rawer, deep—“I know you.”

  She manifests from the light, becoming solid, as if stepping from the place where I keep her in my mind.

  Her eyebrows are plucked into precise waves; her cheeks and chest shine. She stares, eyes fractured with red, tilts her head, “I know you.”

  “Robert. From high school? We were lab partners?”

  The dog whines and she crouches to scratch its ears. “Hush, Pete.” She looks up. “Bobby? Bobby Corresi?”

  “Robert. Nobody calls me Bobby anymore.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you. We’ve been driving.”

  She glances over my shoulder. “Who’s we?”

  “Me and your father. Your dad’s here. We drove to see you—”

  “What?” Amanda moves past me, and I see Coach standing in the dark behind his truck, only bare hints of him visible. She points furiously in his direction. “What did you bring him here for?! What do you want?! Get him out of here!”

  Before I can reply, a man steps into the foyer. He’s about my height, but with hard muscles and toasted skin. He wears a white tank top, jogging pants and lots of earrings. His short glossy hair stands straight up. He puts an arm around Amanda’s waist and stares at me. “What’s going on, babe?”

  She barely regards him. “Nothing.” Back to me, she asks, “What did you bring him here for?” She yells over my shoulder. “Stay over there! You don’t come near this house!” Her dog keeps hopping up, lunging and choking himself on his own collar, barking from the frenzy in her voice. The man next to her shifts his eyes from me to Coach and back again. Through all this I notice with somber clarity how sweet she smells.

  She looks at me, accusing. “What?”

  “Amanda. Can I talk to you? Please—just for a second. We really drove a long way. I just want to talk.”

  Her eyes narrow suspiciously, and her dog sniffs my crotch.

  “Please.”

  She huffs loud. “Hold on.” And she shuts the door and leaves me standing in a cone of dull light on her porch. Murmurs come from inside the house. Coach’s cigarette smoke plumes up on the far side of his truck like a phantom tulip.

  When the door opens again, Amanda points over my shoulder, “He can’t come in. He stays outside.” The man beside her walks out the doorway and bumps hard into my shoulder, passing. “Tony’s going to wait out here too.” He positions himself behind me with his arms crossed.

  She and the dog step to one side and I move into a foyer with a dried flower arrangement standing on a nice marble table, then into diffused light and the scent of incense, jasmine maybe, a television’s flickering blue in a living room of brown, thick-cushioned furniture. Maroon walls and photographs of landscapes, some odor lingering from the kitchen. I can’t believe we made it, that I am standing here.

  Amanda mutes the TV. She motions me to the couch and curls her legs beneath her, covers them with the robe. Pete the dog lies on a cushion between us. I feel my chest tightening. Her lips look bee-stung, and I suppose it’s collagen or something. Her breasts are too round and firm under the robe. Her eyes are brown.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  “We just—I mean, I came here to help you, I guess. We want to bring you home.”

  She rolls her eyes and laughs. “Right. Whatever. Perfect.”

  “Look—”

  “You look. What do you think—are you judging me? You bring my dad out here, and, and what—” she rubs her nose and talks fast. Even though it’s cool in here, beads of sweat have broken across her brow. “I mean, what do you know? We’re like lab partners freshman year? So you know me or something?” Her laughter is bitter, nothing like it used to be. She has gray rings under her eyes. I can’t get over her eyes.

  “Do you wear contacts now?”

  “No.” The question confuses her. “Look,” she makes an encompassing gesture over the entire room. “Do I look like I need help?” She scratches the dog. “I mean, I haven’t done drugs in almost a year.” Stares at her toenails, painted purple. On her ankle is a small cuneiform tattoo. “I haven’t made a movie in four months. I mean, I don’t think I’m even going to again. Probably.
I’ve got offers for, like TV and stuff.” She tugs her hair and brushes something off a sofa cushion. I remember the hair-tugging. She always did do that. There’s so little I recognize here.

  “But you’re not happy. You’re better—”

  She throws up her hands. “See? This is what I’m talking about. You come out here and what, because you don’t like the way I live my life?”

  “Come on—”

  “No. You come on. Really, Bobby. I have news for you. The world’s a lot bigger than Port Arthur, Texas. Okay? A lot bigger. How I make my living isn’t your business, and it sure as hell isn’t that asshole out there’s.”

  “Tony?”

  She frowns sarcastically. “My dad.” Rubs her nose. “But it’s my life. Mine. You need to worry about your life, right? Do I tell you how to live your life? What do you do anyway?”

  A moment of hesitation. “I work for Alamo Sewer Treatment. I monitor groundwater.”

  She claps. “Wow. Super. Never left town, right? Never went to college, right?”

  “I don’t know, not yet, but—”

  She puts her head in a hand and laughs. “I cannot believe you actually came all the way out here. I cannot believe you brought my father here.” She stares hard at me. “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve.”

  I look at pictures on her wall, black-and-white photos of empty vistas and lonesome shorelines, and all I can think of is to try and convince her of what I still know, a speech I’ve rehearsed since we entered California. “I saw you once. It was sophomore year. Early sophomore year. I guess you didn’t have eighth hour back then, but it had just rained, and I’m waiting for the bell to ring, you know? Bored, the sky’s that weird gray where there’s sunshine, but no blue, and I just want to go home.”