Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  She picks at her thumbnail.

  I keep my eyes on the landscapes while I talk. “And I look out the window, and I saw you. You were walking across the football field in your uniform, and you’d taken your shoes off—and you were taking your time, kicking up water with your toes. I could see little splashes of it, and you would spin around now and then, you were looking up at the sky, and in the glass I’d lose you in the sun. And you’d step out of the light, kicking water, in your skirt, looking really distracted. And, it wasn’t that you were beautiful, and you were, but it wasn’t that.” All my stored years cohere into language, and I believe she can yet be reclaimed. “I remember thinking: I knew what was distracting you. You know? Even though I couldn’t name it, or put words to it, I had this sense, this real calm feeling, and I used to be pretty nervous I guess, but a feeling—like the world was a good place, because I could see it with your eyes.”

  The dog seeks my leg and whines a faint, choked sob. A newscaster tells a silent story on TV.

  She closes her robe some and touches my cheek. “Bobby. Look, you’re a sweetheart. I mean it.” She wipes her eyes with a tiny laugh that almost echoes the one I remember. “I’m sure I was just high, though. I was taking a lot of acid back then.”

  Her fingers trace my jawline, stopping under my chin. “You’re sweet. But you need to leave.”

  Because there’s nowhere to look but at her, I close my eyes.

  This is where all my stories converge. Every lost moment between experience and memory meets at a crossroads: at the metal X in my jaw, where her fingers sit like a shotgun barrel.

  “…Can I have five more minutes?”

  “No.”

  Someone shouts, and I open my eyes.

  We move outside, where the voice came from. In the near distance, just beyond the porch’s light, Coach sits on the lawn, holding his face. Tony looms over him, fists clenched.

  Tony sticks out his jaw. “He said he was going inside. I told him no.”

  It’s hard to not pity Coach crumbled on the lawn that way, struggling with a palm over his eye, but I manage. I walk over and Tony steps in front of me. “You want some?”

  “Tony—” Amanda calls behind me. “Come on. It’s all right. Come inside.”

  Coach sprawls at my feet, holds the chloroform out like some impotent offering. The front door shuts and we are left alone on the lawn.

  I tell Coach to get in the truck.

  In the driver’s seat, I toss the chloroform out the window. He slumps against his door with a bruise swelling over his left eye. “This really worked out great,” he snaps.

  I study him, trace the lines on his face with my eyes and keep staring after he meets my look. He turns to the window and I watch him for a few moments before twisting the key.

  The engine turns over, stuttering, and we move forward.

  Later, a second search will occur.

  Back in Port Arthur, I see an advertisement for a firm in Houston called Reunions Inc. Because there is still one question to answer, one piece of unknowing I will not abide, I contact them. What follows are two months where I continue to work for Alamo, letting the vacuous fields and long empty skies pass by like frames of an overexposed film, telling no stories, taking soil samples and testing air with my nose for signs of contamination. Only occasionally during this period, I’ll reflect on Coach Duprene.

  We made the drive back in silence. I drove and Coach kept his face to the window. Red-clay mesas and purple skylines. Half-conceived mountains in distant mist. His guilt as certain as the road beneath our wheels.

  I will not see him again.

  Reunions Inc. returns a report that costs me $300. The envelope spends an entire day sitting on my kitchen table. The company’s logo feels like it’s trying to stare me down. After five beers, I open the envelope and remove two sheets of paper. This is what they say:

  Travis Corresi is a missing person. His last known whereabouts was on the Leslie Charles, a cargo ship out of Shanghai, lost in the Yellow Sea in 1989. But I’d always known that. All my life, my father died at sea.

  Tearing down every bit of philosophy, every maxim in the house, I crushed the notes, making a single bundle, and decided there was only one story. Everything that’s gone before is one story, the same long one, and if it doesn’t end then the next decade might be like the last one, a period of anxious stillness that sees you crouched nervous like a mouse in a corner, leaves you mourning a life you never really had.

  That life is fragmented into scenes you barely recall, their significance due only to their lack of competition, until these moments, this life, become like a pair of green eyes you’re convinced you once saw, blinking at you in the sky of a long wandering night, when you wondered what you were doing driving this late, and how you’d make it home. Years you can’t remember, because you were too busy disguising true sadness as trumped-up nostalgia.

  So the house is up for sale. Last night you decided not to pack anything, and spent time staring at the long, fenced prairie across the street.

  Now you might picture your next story, your second one, but don’t be too definite, don’t make a vision you might cling to, or create an idea you lose yourself in. Don’t look at a map and ponder the depth of the Yellow Sea, don’t imagine the shapes of its waves. Don’t contemplate lost parents or lost girls. Resist the urge to explain their stories, because eventually you’ve got to understand that an answer isn’t the same thing as a solution, and a story is sometimes only an excuse.

  If you have to, let yourself imagine the mood of this story, the places it might happen, what the weather will be like. Tell yourself it will be a world, at least, where you’re less abandoned, and sustained by more than illusion. If you have to.

  Just leave before you change your mind.

  THE GUILD OF THIEVES, LOST WOMEN, AND SUNRISE PALMS

  THE RV PARK WAS BASICALLY SIX TRAILERS SURROUNDING A grassy mound. On the mound old concrete foundations shot up from the grass like broken teeth. Hoyt’s glasses steamed up on the ride over, sweat soaked his back. He leaned his bicycle against CB’s silver Airstream. He pulled his shirt down over his large stomach with a pang of self-loathing, walked up the two steps and paused because he heard voices on the other side of the thin doorway. CB never had visitors, and Hoyt guessed it might be cops.

  The night before, CB had used his good hand to spread out jewelry stolen from the Tronke home: many rings, a silver Rolex and gold Tag Heuer, a choker lined in diamonds, a pearl necklace, and other precious things. The back office of CB’s pawnshop smelled like dust and rat poison. To one side of the jewels had sat a DVD player, a fifty-capacity CD changer, and two shotguns, also from the Tronke’s house. CB always said to get guns whenever you can: guns moved easier than jewelry. Guns were the easiest thing to sell.

  CB has told Hoyt that CB used to mean Charles Bailey, but now it meant Coffin Boat. CB used to be enormous. He used to hold the state triple-A division record in the shot put. He has a composite plastic plate in his hip and a note that excuses him from metal detectors. He’s always refused to tell Hoyt stories about Iraq. CB’s skin is dark brown and hard like wood, and he has a thick face, a flat nose, black eyes. He is full Choctaw. Great pink scars engulf his left arm—a gnarled arm seeded with shrapnel, always bent in a way that reminds Hoyt of the tiny, useless claw of a T-Rex. Hoyt met CB two years ago, pawning the first thing he ever stole, a neighbor’s shiny .45 Magnum.

  At the RV park Hoyt decided the voices he heard were too quiet to be the police, so he knocked on the door. From the other side of the door CB said “hello” like it was a question.

  Hoyt opened the door and saw CB kneeling on the floor. His bad leg was stretched out. His thick black hair fell around his big face. The hair covered an arc of scar Hoyt knew existed above CB’s left ear. A woman was lying on CB’s couch. CB nodded to Hoyt and returned to the woman.

  He’d propped a small bowl of water between his knee and bad arm. He was washing the woman’s f
eet with a purple sponge. The girl looked at Hoyt once, then ignored him. She had short red hair and moon-white skin. She was slim in a muddied green dress, her white legs dangled off the arm of the couch. She looked like she had just run through the forest. Her top lip and right eye were bruised, swollen. Blood trickled from her feet and into the bowl. A few pebbles and pine needles stirred in the water.

  CB looked up and his eyes were trembling. “Can you give me ten minutes here man?” Then he wobbled on his knee and the bowl tumbled, splashing pink water over the all-weather carpet. The girl moved off the couch to help him gather the bowl. Before he left, Hoyt saw them both kneeling in front of one another.

  Across from CB’s Airstream was a larger, brown trailer. A wooden sign leaned against it: an opened pink hand with a blue eye at its palm hovered above the words Mother Divine—Palmistry Tarot Spiritual Guidance Your Future. The words were written in a peeling red with a bleached-out shadow of each letter beneath the cracking paint.

  After Hoyt had sold the .45 Magnum to CB two years ago, he started hanging around and asking to hear war stories. The most CB ever said was, once, “I’s nineteen when I went and it only took me four weeks to get blown up and I came back.” CB showed Hoyt how to crosshatch strips of duct tape for windows, so when the glass shatters you can pull the tape away and the whole window comes with it. He showed Hoyt how to use a thin blanket to muffle the single strike of a ball-peen hammer. There had been many rules. Don’t mess with storm windows or dead bolts. A back entrance is good, a garage entrance is ideal. Partners divide search time and police pursuit. If you have to make a noise, make it once, and decisively. CB had told him, “I never met anyone who could disarm a good electronic alarm.” CB put all his faith in the unobstructed entrance. The unobstructed entrance is something people forgot, a wood chute or crawlspace, a third-story attic window. A point of safe penetration. The parts of an average door lock include the escutcheon, the faceplate, the latch bolt, and the rose. CB showed him how to use freon to freeze the bolt, then break it with a tap. Then he told Hoyt to forget all that stuff. He said to find the unobstructed entrance.

  CB said he learned everything from two uncles in the thieves’ guild. He said, If you’re caught, no one is going to help you. And, whatever you say, don’t say anything.

  By the time CB came outside, the pines around the park were practically glowing in sunset, a burning green. CB dragged his left leg down the steps and lit a cigarette. He cocked a big thumb toward the trailer. “She’s asleep or I’d let you in.” He’d put on blue jeans and sneakers, a black rodeo shirt with orange-yellow flames stitched over it, the left sleeve knotted and tied off to cover his arm. He’d said once that doctors tried to remove his arm but he wouldn’t let them.

  Hoyt said, “What’s going on? How’d you find a girl that would talk to you?” He felt a little jittery.

  Smoke eased out of CB’s stony face. “That’s Robin. I used to know her a long time ago. She showed up here this morning.”

  Hoyt wiped the sweat off his glasses. “And then you beat the crap out of her?”

  “Shut up. That’s how she was when she got here. I hadn’t thought I’d see her again.”

  “How’d she get hurt?”

  The muscles in CB’s face tensed. He looked annoyed. “She’d married some punk in Westlake.” That was a neighbor town, a swampy place of oil refineries and meth labs. “Anyway, what do you care man? Go eat something, fat boy.”

  “Maybe I’ll just blow up half my body.” Hoyt kicked at pebbles. “I need that stuff I asked you about. By Friday.”

  “The yak?”

  Hoyt nodded. CB told him he’d have it by Thursday. Sometimes CB gave Hoyt drugs to sell as a kind of cash advance against one of their scores. Over the past year, his senior year, Hoyt had traded drugs for academic work several times.

  A light breeze blew CB’s long hair across his cheeks. Where the wind lifted the hair you could see the bald curve of scar. Hoyt asked, “So what’s up with you and that girl, man? Who did that to her?”

  CB threw a stone at Hoyt, hollering that it wasn’t anyone else’s business. Just before riding away Hoyt yelled, “Hey! Does this have anything to do with the war?”

  The next morning Hoyt woke to the sound of loud whooping. The wall thumped. His dad had been sleeping with a woman named Miss Tilly for the past few weeks. She danced at T-Back’s over in Westlake. The week before, they’d been eating pancakes and Miss Tilly had popped open her robe, flashed one breast at Hoyt and winked. He thought about that as he finally got out of bed. He waited until he heard the sound of her Jeep leaving before exiting his room. He heard his father grunting through his morning push-ups. He poured a bowl of cornflakes and ate. His father appeared a few minutes later wearing a blue jogging suit. Where Hoyt’s body was soft, sloping and round, his father’s was tight, muscled. He told Hoyt “good morning,” drank the rest of the orange juice, and went for a run.

  Strange things had been happening in their house. Hoyt heard late-night phone conversations, his father’s voice raised in anger. He found his father home at noon, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes in silence. His father had started to bring home boxes, something he’d never done before, boxes labeled Sunrise Palms. The week before Hoyt had found three thick rolls of hundred-dollar bills in his father’s sock drawer.

  After two home invasions in their neighborhood, Hoyt’s father had installed an American Security 9000 alarm system. It had motion detectors. If you crossed an invisible barrier, high electric wailing commenced. Hoyt knew there were voids in the radio waves that caged their house. He couldn’t know where they were, though. The unobstructed entrance to his home eluded him.

  Inside, there were no pictures decorating the house. Walls were empty and bookshelves bare. There used to be many photos of Hoyt’s mother, but they had gradually disappeared, and finally, one day years ago, his father had told Hoyt that it was time they both moved on. Then all the pictures came down. Hoyt remembered a couple times with his mother that had terrified him as a child. They told him that she was a danger to herself and others, that she wouldn’t want to hurt him, not really, but she might.

  When he was six she was delivered to a gated white building that stood alone in green and open country. Ever since then, Hoyt had felt the house was locked into a certain moment. Shortly after the pictures came down Hoyt’s father began exercising relentlessly, devoting long hours to his real estate agency. He was tan. His teeth got whiter.

  His father hadn’t mentioned the new rug in the dining room. Hoyt looked at it. Blue and white with a muted bird pattern, the rug lay in a column of sun. The rug appeared to Hoyt in Wal-Mart, and he’d felt the familiar impulse to possess something. This was a constant impulse and unpredictably particular. The things he shoplifted often seemed random and useless. During his quieter moments he was conscious of a thousand vague desires tugging at him, yet the objects of these wants were always changing. He could possess things, but often once he acquired something he lost all desire for it. He couldn’t find whatever had attracted him about the rug now, but at the time, he’d thought it must remind him of his mother. The rug was so big that he simply walked out of the store with it rolled on his shoulder. It wasn’t the kind of thing the store expected to be shoplifted.

  Hoyt had known the thrill of burglary before CB. But what he liked was the air of a strange house, its furnishings and photographs, its smells. Two houses never had the same air. His feet padding silently, his flashlight’s beam might find a pair of shoes or half-drunken soda can, a family portrait, and in a hundred ways he could feel human essences filling the house.

  Bored, alone, Hoyt walked to the slough at the end of their block and smoked a cigarette. He smoked True menthols, CB’s brand. Along the bank of the slough, there were so many white egrets roosting that they obscured the trees. A three-story waterfront home stood across the water on stilts. Hoyt had discussed the potential burglary of that house with CB, but a plan was never formulated. He swi
rled smoke in his mouth and got the idea to enter the home from the water, through the boathouse. If he could keep coming up with jobs for him and CB, then the future was secured, and things didn’t really need to change.

  Later in the week, one of the football players that wanted the cocaine gave Hoyt 250 dollars. The player’s name was Lucas George. He had long blond hair and looked like somebody’s hero. Lucas was having a party at his parents’ house later in the week. He hadn’t really invited Hoyt to the party when he asked for the coke. It was suggested that Hoyt could just “drop it by.” His girlfriend picked her lip while she waited for Lucas to count out the money. She had a long waist and pert chest, and her body made Hoyt want to steal something.

  He felt excited biking to CB’s to deliver the money. He figured CB would offer him a drink, maybe they’d watch television, or maybe CB would let Hoyt fire his .380 as he’d done in the past. He could explain that girl who’d been there last time. Why, after all his stories about women, had CB never told him about one with red hair and skin like a Greek statue? At the RV park, a different CB stood in the doorway.

  His black hair was cut short and choppy, the sickle of scar tissue banding the left side of his head. He wore a plaid button-down shirt, with one sleeve rolled up and the other tied over his bad arm. “Hey man,” he said. His big head constantly leaned toward his right shoulder.

  “Hey.” Hoyt craned his neck trying to see around CB. The aroma of cooking meat blew through the door. “I got the money for that stuff.”

  “Right. Oh, right. Cool.” CB stepped back from the door and it opened wider. “I’ll get it.” He walked toward the small loft area at the trailer’s rear. He didn’t indicate if Hoyt should follow or not. Hoyt stepped inside the trailer.

  Things had been put on shelves. Beneath the smell of cooking there was the sharp hint of Lysol in the air. CB’s car magazines were stacked neatly beside a row of records that before had been sprawled around the stereo. Hoyt looked at the woman in the kitchen area. She stood before a skillet of hamburger meat and noodles. The meat sizzled and popped while she stirred it, and tiny beads of sweat were broken over her forehead. Her red hair was pulled behind her face, and her bruises had faded some. She was almost beautiful. Her eyes met Hoyt’s and he immediately looked away.