When CB reappeared he passed Hoyt the small baggy in a handshake. CB’s stiff leg dragged toward the door. He said, “You still owe me two for that nine.”
“I know.” Two weeks before, Hoyt had purchased a nine-millimeter semiautomatic from CB on credit. Hoyt stopped walking and asked, “What’s for dinner?”
The girl, Robin, answered from the kitchen. “It’s just Hamburger Helper.”
“I love Hamburger Helper.” Hoyt moved toward the couch. He sat down. “I think I figured something out about that house on the water. We should talk about it, you know, come up with some plans.”
“Not right now.” CB rubbed the short hair on the back of his head.
“What’d you cut all that off for? You look retarded now.”
“Ah, it’s too hot.”
“There’s not much to eat,” Robin interjected. She turned the stove off and lifted the skillet above two bowls on the counter. “It don’t make much.” The counter was clean and shiny.
Hoyt felt mean all of a sudden, insulted. “Hey, I forgot your name, lady,” he said.
She served the meat and noodles into the bowls. “Robin.”
“Hey, Robin, do you know what CB stands for? You probably think it stands for Charles Bailey, don’t you?”
She put spoons in the bowls and gave CB an impatient expression.
He put a thick hand on Hoyt’s shoulder and said, sternly, “Hey man, what’re you doing?”
“Tell her about Coffin Boat. Give her the score.”
“Come outside. I want to show you something.” He guided Hoyt off the couch and out the door.
Sun sparkled in broken glass on the ground. Hoyt said, “What I was thinking was we could paddle into the boathouse from the lake.”
CB’s dead foot scraped loose bits of glass and gravel. “Look dude, the thing is, she’s having a kid, okay?”
“She’s pregnant?”
CB nodded. A trace of happiness in his features alarmed Hoyt.
“So what? Where’s her husband?”
“She’s with me now.”
“How do you know her?”
“We go back. This’s how it is with me.”
Hoyt held out his hands. “Don’t you think somebody’s looking for her?”
“Man, get out of here.” CB turned with his stiff gait. “You’re a negative mother, you know that?”
He went inside and closed the door. Hoyt saw the sign across the way. Palmistry Tarot Spiritual Guidance Your Future. He had three scenarios for his future. In one, he worked his way into the full-time position of drug dealer and fence. In another, unlikely, he was employed, with a family, sitting down for dinner. In the third scenario, he pictured himself going crazy, just like his mother. They’d put him in a white room where he’d sing to himself.
When he got home he could hear music from his father’s room. The door was shut, and Zydeco played loudly. This was the music his father grew up with as a boy in Morgan City, a gulf port where the first Tarzan movie was filmed. Hoyt knocked softly, but no one answered. A moment later, the music raised in volume.
The next afternoon Hoyt’s father said he wanted to talk to him. Hoyt had seen his father folding clothes into a suitcase earlier that morning. His father came into the living room carrying a large gray suitcase and a red duffel bag. He sat down next to Hoyt and turned the television off.
“How you doing?” His father had the same friendly expression he used when showing someone a house. He put his hands on his knees and said, “Listen, if I had to go away for a little while, just a trip for a few weeks, you’d be okay, huh? I mean, you’re out of school and everything.”
“Yeah,” Hoyt shrugged. The back of his neck became hot. “Where you going?”
His father’s few wrinkles had been hardened by exercise, making sharp creases. “Well, I’m not sure yet. It could be a few places right now. It depends on some things.” His blue eyes glanced at Hoyt then darted away. “Don’t worry about it. Best thing I should do is call you when I get there. It might be better.”
“Why?”
His father scratched his forehead and smiled at Hoyt. “Listen, I might not be going anywhere. It might not even happen. If I—I mean, we’ll see. But I’m going to leave you some money.”
“I got money.”
“You do?” His father rose on heavy, flexing thighs. “It doesn’t matter.” His father dug in the duffel bag and produced twenty hundred-dollar bills. “This is just in case, okay?” He handed it to Hoyt and for just a moment, a brief instant, his voice seemed to crack and reveal something else. “Be careful with this. It might have to last you awhile. Okay? You want to stretch this out.”
He touched Hoyt’s shoulder, then hoisted the suitcase and duffel bag. He walked to the driveway and loaded the bags into the trunk of his car, a red early-nineties Cadillac he’d bought at an auction the summer before.
He came back in the house and said, “Like I’m saying, I don’t even know if I’m going to have to leave. It’s all just in case.” He made another trip to the bedroom, this time moving the cardboard file boxes to the DeVille.
Shortly after, his father said he had a date, and left wearing a brown suit and gray silk shirt. Hoyt explored his father’s room.
The drawers were empty except for bits of odd change, matches and scraps of paper. Slippers were under the bed, but many hanging clothes were gone. The closet was nearly bare, but at its back, in the top right, was a shelf Hoyt had never noticed when there had been clothes hanging. A paper bag sat up there in the shadows, and he took it down. Things inside rattled. Hoyt’s own closet was filled with unopened CDs, stolen clothes he never wore, books he never read. He wondered what his father had been hording, feeling for the first time that they had a common quality.
He sat on the floor and unfolded the bag. All the pictures of his mother that his father had taken down were in the bag and he touched their frames.
He put them back in the bag, and put the bag back in the closet.
He didn’t see his father the next day. By nightfall he was supposed to deliver the cocaine to Lucas George’s party. Hoyt walked his bicycle past cars that started filling the curb about fifty yards away from Lucas’s house. The entire neighborhood was large homes with nice lawns. The Georges had two stories of brick and brown siding, two gables, and a long porch. A plank fence with open sides surrounded their acre. Hoyt had done a few bumps of the coke Lucas ordered, and his vision felt clear and his head hummed with purpose. He was aware that he would be nineteen in a few months. The same age CB was when he got blown up and lived, when he became Coffin Boat.
Young voices carried down the street. Hoyt’s heart quickened as he moved toward them. Ahead, lights in the house were on, and a few teenage silhouettes meandered in the yard. He could hear faintly the music as he walked. He felt his jacket. In one pocket was the gram of cocaine, in the other, the nine millimeter. He thought he’d really like to shoot someone in the foot. Maybe they would put him in the gated white building in the green and open land.
He was late. Hoyt began circling the perimeter of the party. He recognized many of the people as faces that didn’t know him and stayed in the dark, the way a prowler might. Through French doors, young people could be seen, the girls laughing, boys wearing ball caps, clutching cans of beers and talking too loud. People in the backyard surrounded a keg, and the girl Hoyt recognized as Lucas’s girlfriend was walking around with a garbage bag, picking up discarded beer cans and removing drinks from the lacquered tables and shelves.
Hoyt paused and wondered why he was not one of those voices, why he had never been. The answer felt obvious, but was broken up across eighteen years. His thumb brushed the trigger guard of the gun in his pocket. Then his thoughts were impeded by a girl’s voice.
“Oh, hey, I know you. Luke was looking for you.”
Hoyt saw Lucas’s girlfriend. She was small and smiling pleasantly, holding a garbage bag full of cans and cigarette butts.
“What are y
ou doing out here? There’s beer in the back.”
“Oh, yeah. I just got here.”
She put one hand on her hip and cocked her head backward. “Luke was waiting on you. I’ve almost had enough, but you should go in.” She lifted the garbage bag. “This is bullshit.”
Hoyt watched the party while the girl began to pick up the stray bits of trash on the ground, tossing them into her bag. The way she moved and smelled made him swoon with want, and he was so tired of that feeling, and felt the gun in his hand, knew she was so close. He took a long breath. He had a clear thought, in a voice different than his own. No one is going to help you. The phrase for unknown reasons seemed to lift his spirits.
He walked up to the girl. “Hey, it’s Mary, right?”
“Mm-hm,” she nodded in the manner of a gracious hostess.
“Mary, could you tell Lucas that Hoyt said ‘forget it.’ Also that he’s not getting his money back. I spent it. I’m not dealing to some shitbird that can’t invite me to his party.”
At first she laughed a little. “What?”
“Seriously. Not this minute, though. Give me about ten to hit the road.” He winked at her and walked away, fading back into the shadows. She had a very small smile on her face. Was that the first time he’d ever winked to anyone? he asked himself. Yes.
His father had never come home. A small shed behind their house contained rusted garden tools and beach toys, an inflatable child’s raft. The raft was gray rubber and took some time to inflate. He squatted in the dark, puffing hard. Its nozzle tasted moldy and plastic in the total dark of the shed.
On the water the raft sank in its middle while its front and back ends jutted upward. Hoyt’s legs hung over its sides. His legs disappeared into black water that covered his lap, drenched the paper bag laying on it. He paddled across the slough in the liquid silence, sliding toward the house on the other side of the water, its shape looming, blocks of shadow on stilts, something like the future there, a shape waiting to be mapped. Hoyt rubbed his nose, which stung. Dripping echoed as he drifted into the boathouse out of curiousity. He could see the outline of a door that seemed connected to the main building. It probably would have worked, he told himself.
He paddled back toward his side of the slough. Some gray clouds unveiled a moon like the glowing print of a boot’s heel in black mud. At the center of the slough he dropped the paper bag with his mother’s pictures into the black water, and he watched them sink. In the water the pictures ripped through the wet bag. Momentarily the brown paper floated back up, torn and empty, sitting on the surface of the water like a scab.
A week passed. Rain on a few days. His father never came back.
He got beaten up by three football players, but he felt good.
One of the men in a black suit pointed to the bruises on Hoyt’s cheek and forehead. “Did your dad do that to you?”
Half his forehead was swollen, and his left cheek was purple and maroon. “No. Some kids jumped me.”
Hoyt sat on the couch. Two deputies stood by the front door, and a second man in a suit was strolling around the house casually, inspecting bookshelves, opening cabinets. They’d come early in the morning. He’d seen two cruisers pull into the driveway, and he knew they’d caught him. He rose from bed in a hurry, expecting questions about a series of home invasions, or maybe to just be arrested. Of course just to be arrested. They don’t come get you to have a chat. To prepare him, his fears had anticipated this, and the event had the feel of something he’d been seeking.
The deputies wore brown, short-sleeved uniforms with wide-brimmed hats. The two men in suits held a search warrant. The deputies stayed by the front door while one of the other men walked back and forth in front of Hoyt. Hoyt was waiting to be charged when they saw the contents of his closet. But when the questions started, all they talked about was his father.
“You sure he didn’t hit you? A guy who’d do that, he’s not too good.” The man paced, shaking his head slowly.
“He didn’t.”
The other man in the suit walked out the hallway. “This’s in the bedroom.” He held up a fold of bills.
“What’s that?”
The man in the hall thumbed through the bills. “It’s two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand dollars.”
Hoyt didn’t look at them. “He said he was leaving and that had to last me awhile.”
The man sat on the couch next to Hoyt, resting his wrists on his knees. He had a deep, mumbly voice. “And he didn’t say anything to you about where he was going? You got no idea where he is?”
“He wouldn’t say. Just said he’s leaving for awhile.”
The two men in suits looked back and forth at one another. One dropped the money on the couch. “Your dad ever talk about something called Sunrise Palms?” He squatted down to look Hoyt in the eyes. “He ever say anything about Florida? Come on, kid.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t think it’s a little weird your dad lays two G on you and leaves all of a sudden? You don’t ask about that?”
Hoyt lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “I did ask. I did ask.”
“And?”
He put his head down again. The two men exchanged looks. One of the deputies idly examined a fingernail.
The one on the couch spoke. “And you got a mother in Charter House. That right?”
Hoyt nodded.
“You see her much?”
He shook his head.
The man stood and walked over to his partner. “So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
The men stood still, communicating wordlessly, tilts of their heads. They handed Hoyt a card and instructed him to contact them if he heard from his father. The card said Securities and Exchange Commission. They told him they would be watching. They said, “keep your nose clean.”
On the way out, one of the men turned around and said, “Is there something you want from us? Something we can do if you help out?”
Hoyt thought a moment, then stepped back into the doorway. “I don’t want anything.” He closed the door.
*
CB smacked his lips and rubbed his eyes, groggy in the doorway. He was shirtless. Half his big chest was collapsed scar tissue that flowed horrifically into his left arm. His eyes were bloodshot and murky. “What happened to you?” He said. “Look at you, dog.”
Hoyt shrugged. “Got jumped.”
CB turned back inside, opening the door for Hoyt to follow. A box of cereal and several empty beer bottles were strewn around the living room, some broken glass, disarray. CB put on a T-shirt and came back in the room with two bottles of Old Style. One of the plaster walls had a fist-sized hole in it.
“Where’s that girl?”
CB handed him a beer and shook his head. He turned the bottle up, drawing almost half of its contents.
“Gone?” Hoyt said.
“She wasn’t ever here, man.” CB kicked an empty bottle over with his dead leg. He moved to a pile of records on the couch, sorted through them and found his box of cigarettes. “Stupid, man. Look at me.”
Hoyt watched CB fall into the couch and suck hard on a cigarette.
“What’re you up to?”
“Nothing.” Hoyt set down the beer and turned to the doorway. He sat down on the steps outside, looking at the park, the concrete slabs that broke through the ground. Mother Divine’s big open palm faced him across the way. CB came and stood next to him, leaning against the doorway.
“You want something else to drink?”
Hoyt shook his head.
“You all right?”
“I think I am.”
They stayed there for several minutes, and neither spoke. The shadows in the grass stretched, and the lights between the pines became orange and red. CB flicked his cigarette and cleared his throat. “I’s thinking about what you said. About paddling up
to that lake house? That might work. We should get on the water and check it out.”
“That’s okay.”
“No?”
He watched the high grass wave against the concrete. “Never mind about it.”
“You don’t want to?”
“No.”
CB bent down and studied Hoyt’s cuts and bruises. He stood up and turned away. “You know, you always ask, but I wasn’t even in the fight. We were playing football around mines. We didn’t know.”
Hoyt said, “Don’t tell me about it.” He tossed a rock. “You took out fifteen enemy troops with your bare hands before they got you with a grenade.”
“I was swatting them off me like ants.”
“They thought you were a giant.”
“Yes they did.” CB threw his bottle into the trees. A sunset haze overlaid the clearing. “You want to get high?”
“No,” Hoyt said. “I don’t want anything.” And he didn’t.
But on the way home he saw two pretty girls walking the street outside the mall, laughing and eating ice cream, a glittering 4X4 Jeep with chrome package. He pedaled toward deep recesses of cypress and sumac, and he saw the egrets in white ascension and the moon on the water. There he recognized the old ropes of want, desire, tugging, and gradually it was clear to him that he had no choice, that the world would never let him go.
A CRYPTOGRAPH
ADAM LEFT ONE NIGHT IN APRIL, AND SHARON FOUND A paint-dusted stencil under his bed. Everything else in his room was as he kept it—the computer, the television, CDs, most of his clothes, his high school pictures, yearbooks. She sat on his mattress after taking the stencil from its place under the bed. She scrutinized it like a note she was meant to find. A cardboard sheet, no bigger than a file folder. The picture of a military tank had been cut out of it, with the words Police State cut below. Orange spray paint lined the edges of these voids. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen this picture sprayed anywhere in town.
Between Here and the Yellow Sea Page 11