Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  “So are we having fun?” she asks.

  “I’m going down there for a second.” I tell her. “Will you wait for me?”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to go down there for a second.” I pack my poncho with my skateboard in my backpack. “Stay a second. Please. I have to do something.” I leave the backpack with Tsuny and start working my way down the hill, toward the people on the lawn.

  Spotlights are yawning up, and I hear people talking and laughing, and as I round the high grass I see Pop standing alone, the baby curled up in his arm. I know that one day everything will end. I know my life and Pop’s life will be washed away, and all the things I see and love will be wiped out, and the world will be all that is left. As if he knew I was near, just then Pop’s face lowers from the clouds and he stares at me, a little cockeyed, like I’m someone he isn’t sure he is seeing. We stand still, and we look at each other.

  NEPAL

  SEPTEMBER. THE WOODS DELAYED HIM. COLORS OF MAPLES and elms distracted Thomas, white dandelions drifting airborne across his path, everything an invitation to linger. He walked from his home in Linn Creek, and other men passed him on the way—a migration of strangers riding or hiking to a point in southern Missouri where an unfinished castle stood. When he was four years old, his father told him about this castle, erected by a rich man, eastward in a place called Ha Ha Tonka. His father, Lars, a stonemason, came from Montreal in 1903, one among hundreds of workers imported from other countries to construct a European-style castle for Robert M. McRyder. At one dip in the road, wind eddied and maintained a small tornado of leaves in an otherwise still clearing, and he loitered there. He carried an old shaving mirror, a square of glass whose edges were rubbed enough as habit, hand in pocket, the corners were worn opaque and glossy as mother of pearl.

  Six miles from Ha Ha Tonka, a truck bearing bushels of yellow squash gave him a ride. The trees curved toward the road and canopied the trail into town. He used his mirror to catch light through the foliage.

  He was a glazier, and he had deep faith in surfaces. There was the known—surface—and the unknown. Surfaces were full of clues. He liked to read history and character into them. He was tall at nineteen, Scandinavian. In the circle of sunlight slowly nearing, at the end of the tree tunnel, he felt the place rise to meet him, dear, like a precious stranger.

  Atop a steep hill the castle blocked daylight. Orange beams haloed its walls and he saw men lined up in front of a large tent. At his turn in line he presented two stained-glass decorations to a man with a ledger. He said his full name, “Thomas Knut Koenig.”

  The man didn’t look up. “What do you do?”

  “Glass, sir. I make it. Fire it, set it. Anything.”

  This was in 1922. Robert M. McRyder, the rich man, had died in an automobile wreck in 1906, and his castle had been abandoned with only its outer walls built, a shell rustling through sixteen winters. Waiting, Thomas sensed, though when encountering new things, he usually felt they had somehow anticipated his arrival.

  His father had settled in Linn Creek, found a wife, and died when Thomas was eight. His mother had remarried six years ago to a widowed, bookish minister with a wild daughter named Naomi. Now, in 1922, McRyder’s three sons had pooled their resources to complete the castle’s construction. While the man with the ledger eyed his glasswork, Thomas studied the castle: three stories of beige stone, ten gables, windows that stared with regal indifference, nine greenhouses and a tall water tower. He tried to be analytical, but its sudden actuality affected a quiet reverence in him. He was slightly stunned, like when he’d bolt awake in the middle of the night and have to systematically reassemble his world by reciting his name and the names of objects in his room.

  He dreamed all the time back then, every time he fell asleep: vivid, intense dreams, “often exhausting in their richness and peril.” So when he woke, he was tired, as if he’d ended a long journey, and some days it got to where he was always tired and always dreaming and couldn’t tell the difference.

  They gave him seven dollars a week, minus two for food and lodging, to set glass in the greenhouses. This was not really what he wanted.

  He wanted to create a window that would cause people to stare and tilt their heads, that would create silence in its beholders. The glass for the greenhouses was already cut to specifications. The job required no skill, much less art; anybody could have done it. He found the land, however, stunning in its beauty and variety, “with that sacred quality in old, untouched places of stone and vine.”

  Ha Ha Tonka’s centerpiece is a crack in the earth, shaped like a needle’s eye. Long ago, groundwater and surface water ate away at bedrock, forming sinkholes, caves, springs, hills, and collapsing a huge cave passage, creating a broad chasm a half-mile long. McRyder castle overlooked this chasm, and its charred ruins still stand there today.

  Thomas walked the edges of the canyon. He took out his mirror and shined a shred of light on the opposite rock wall, bridging the gulf. He turned his hand and the light stretched into a rhomboid form, passing over the geography—dun-colored bluffs pocked with shadow like the face of the moon, fractured walls of slate-gray flint three hundred feet high, reefs of ancient fern and pine trunks. His teacher, an old Italian named Rossitto, once told him that the alchemy of glass was twofold: it transformed rough mineral into smooth surface, which was chaos to order, and it colored light, which was the illumination of the invisible. So much for that. He just enjoyed the light’s revelation on the cliff face, an almost intimate gesture, as if the rock were confiding in him.

  A Scotsman named Volta supervised him. They were the only ones working on the greenhouses, and Volta talked a lot. Despite disappointment with his task, Thomas remained thorough in his duties. He wanted to perform, minded his breaks, swiftly pieced in sections of clean glass—at times too fast for Volta. He told Thomas to ease off, pace the job, but was ignored.

  In the improvised commissary, a tent with pine benches, Thomas noticed a serving girl. She was small and dark with large black eyes above a small chin, her face widest at its cheekbones. Sometimes, like now, he didn’t realize he was staring.

  She said, “Go on. There’s others in line.”

  The tent housed peppery scents, aromas of garlic and butter. At a table with other men, Volta was telling a joke, his face resembling an inflamed grapefruit under a curly black wig.

  “St. Louis women are better than any Texas.”

  “Hell you say.” A man nudged Thomas’s arm. “Look. He knows.”

  He smiled, felt awake and close to life. They ate green beans and potatoes and rabbit and squirrel.

  “I seen a magician in Kansas City could take off his head and walk around with it.”

  Another man said he’d climbed mountains on four continents and spoke about Nepal. “It’s magic. Some snow there isn’t white, it’s pink or blue.” He said in a temple he saw a holy man levitate for over an hour while chanting a word he couldn’t repeat.

  Thomas’s eyes were drawn back to the girl. She wore an aloof expression, a definite distance between her mind and the job at hand, and didn’t seem to speak. Her ladling was all wrist, automatic, and an essential thing revealed itself in her portrait, a fundamental distraction. He felt a tinge of recognition. The curve of her backside, in a blue dress, brought to mind his stepsister, Naomi, specifically Naomi’s eyes on the occasions she’d walked in his room wearing an open-neck nightgown, fresh from a bath, her chestnut hair soaked and dripping, the loose nightgown transparent in moist patches. She would ask a perfunctory question, like if he’d seen her whalebone comb anywhere, but a wicked goading in her eyes and the way she strategically held the candle more truly colored the scene. Then fevered time after, alone in the dark, wishing she’d walk in and catch him.

  Back at the greenhouses, Volta pointed out three men and four women strolling the perimeter of construction. “Thas the McRyders. Bill, Leroy, and Kenneth.”

  These men dressed in stiff bright clothes,
hair slicked flat to their scalps. They lived with their families in a set of cabins a mile from the site.

  “They’re away often. Then Abberline’s in charge.”

  Abberline rode a large roan and kept a long-barreled pistol strapped to his leg for everyone to see. Gray muttonchops framed his small, puckered mouth, and he rode in britches and a wool coat. Volta said he was English. He reminded Thomas of a falcon he’d once seen bound to someone’s arm. When his head swiveled, it seemed the same smooth and locking motion as a revolver’s cylinder aligning.

  The McRyder party passed the greenhouses and nodded to Thomas and Volta. One of the women walked behind—a very thin blond following the couples, holding a flower in one hand. Rather urban in a green dress and black beret, she fingered pearls around her neck, seemingly with disappointment. As they passed below, she glanced up at Thomas but went back to staring at her flower, which he could now see was no flower but a dandelion.

  The free hour before dinner, men played cards or rolled dice. Thomas crawled the chasm’s edge on hands and knees, examining dust and powdered rock. The land was rich with silicates. Their grain sifted between his fingers, rough, brittle, and he imagined an annealing fire to unite them. Every day at this hour he noticed the Indian serving girl playing checkers with a hunched, gray-haired woman.

  He followed the chasm until it reached a glade, one of many dotting this region, dry patches of the Southwest stalked by prairie spiders and scorpions. At a palmetto’s base, he saw a tarantula being mobbed by a legion of fire ants. He crouched down and watched for several minutes until the spider was only a surface of squirming ants, and the structure began to softly collapse.

  Most of them stayed in a long cedar bunkhouse where cots lined the walls, and a hearth occupied the entire back end, stale air full of smoke, laughter, curses, cheering. An enormous Indian with stony features betting on cards, slamming a booming fist against a wall in frustration.

  He sketched pictures, wrote recipes for glass. He offered the mountaineer a cigarette and asked him to talk more about Nepal.

  One day Volta sent him to the castle. “Y’tell Mr. Abberline we’re gonna need more mix for the mortar. A’this rate we’ll be out by the fifth house.”

  Inside the castle, men he recognized were installing paneling around one wall and two others hauled long stones being used as a staircase below a vertiginous ceiling of vaulted tin. On the floor spread an enormous chandelier, a gold-glass octopus. Grunts bounced off cold rock. Down a hallway voices dropped away and he could hear his own footfalls.

  He came to a room empty except for a long, narrow window that ran the height of the wall. Light poured through it in an isosceles triangle, a soft, idle light. Standing it in was a woman with her back to him.

  She wore a purple dress, a black shawl, and a bell-shaped hat. Outside the window a wall of cedars perched on the cliff’s edge.

  “Excuse me,” he said. She turned and he saw the woman who had been walking behind the McRyders, the dandelion-holder. Her skin was pale, sharp features drawn above a long neck and she even seemed delicate enough to have hollow bones, this sense amplified by her large, disclike eyes, which were bloodshot at their corners. What his mother called “an artistic temperament” could reveal itself in the sustained, silent stare Thomas often leveled at people. In social interaction, a need to interpret and question created distance in him—something he recognized only as a kind of mental boundary, a window behind which he could watch. He often stood too close to people. He stood too close to the woman in the room. “I’m looking for Mr. Abberline. Do you know where he is?”

  She wiped her eyes, took a step backward and shook her head “no.” As he turned she called, “Wait. I’m sorry. I think he might be at the water tower. I know they had a problem there.” An English accent lilted and curled her speech.

  “Thank you.”

  She kept watching his face in a discerning way. Her hand drew up suddenly, as if to touch his cheek, but she lowered it and took a step back.

  “Are you all right?”

  She turned to the window. “Yes. I’m a little out of sorts today, that’s all. It’s very beautiful here.”

  “You’re English?” He had a way of talking, too, that dismissed formality. He spoke to people as if he knew them well. It may be that this illusion of familiarity contributed to what happened later.

  She nodded. “Elizabeth McRyder is my aunt. I’m staying with her and Kenneth.”

  “It’s nice country. Good mineral deposits.”

  She laughed and pursed her eyebrows, curious. “My name is Carmen Rogers.”

  “Thomas Koenig.” He held up his hands to excuse himself from taking hers.

  She tilted her head and fixed the green saucers of her eyes on his face. Her eyes skimmed over him, blatantly searching. “That’s strange…It really is…”

  Her flesh seemed especially thin, and it displayed the flushing at her ears and neck brightly. Another exchange was taking place behind things, and he felt the center of his back grow hot.

  He spoke to break it off. “What is it?”

  At his question she pulled her hands close and looked at the stone floor. “Thank you for asking about me. I don’t want to keep you.”

  “Ma’am.” He tipped his head, relieved, but disappointed also, abruptly wishing to change his last question. As she turned again to the window her shadow was drawn tall across the floor.

  After talking to Abberline, he walked back to the greenhouses and saw this woman, Carmen, staring out the same window, hazed behind the dull glass like a doll displayed in stone.

  *

  He used a deerskin pouch to gather silicates before dinner. Today the serving girl was alone.

  She sat on a gray rock with the checkerboard flat and her blue dress draped over her legs, playing by herself. A pleasant frustration entered him, as if he’d heard a tune he could neither recall nor forget. He stood above her.

  “Who’s winning?”

  She slid a piece and didn’t look up. “How’s your dirt?”

  “This is glass.”

  She glanced up and back to the checkers.

  “Really,” he let the powder fall through his hand. “There’s glass everywhere here.” When she didn’t look up he started talking about himself. “I make glass. That’s what I do.”

  She brushed hair off her face. “Do you play checkers?”

  Light mottled them through the cedars while she reset the board with short fingers, small palms. They were silent. When she’d taken three of his pieces, he asked, “What do you think about the castle?”

  It was behind them, unassailable, somehow indignant in its stone mass. She tied her hair in a ponytail. “It’s been there my whole life.”

  “You grew up here?”

  She didn’t answer, but bent forward and took one of his pieces.

  “My father helped build it,” he said.

  “You make glass?”

  “Yes.” After a moment, he seized the question. “My stepfather’s a preacher. One of his congregation taught me.” It was the only thing he liked about church, the windows. “I grew up in Linn Creek.”

  “Do you know what Ha Ha Tonka means?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Laughing waters.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Astra Monro.” She was sixteen, Osage, and had a low, flinty voice, like warm iron filings. It touched something in him. In his limited experience, females seemed to be always either constructing or enacting secret plans. His stepsister, Naomi, was in the main petulant, chronically unreasonable, and lied like a child. She was engaging, though, actually fascinating. But Astra’s benign indifference seemed without need or conniving.

  If surfaces attracted him, then a mystery of great distance in hers, desolation even, drew him closer, a harsh and beautiful desolation, like pictures of the desert. He kept eyeing the center of her collarbone, where sunlight pooled in a lucent oval. At dinnertime he watched her walk into trees
with the board under her arm and sunshine striping the slim taper of her back.

  The castle grew, acquired itself. Tenacious elms and cedars crowded its borders. Sheep flooded the furrowed hills, hill light lambent and blue at morning. He played checkers with her twice more that week, but couldn’t concoct a way to breach her distances. A partial solution came one night a few days later, when he left the bunkhouse.

  All the noise and smoke had become stifling to him. Over the past weeks, the bunkhouse had developed a rank odor: sweat, tobacco, the myriad and pungent expulsions of grown men. He’d often sleep with his blanket pressed to his nose, smeared with musk oil, but one night around ten he simply left with the blanket and deerskin pouch, intending to explore and possibly sleep under a tree.

  He wandered away beneath a white, muting moon, down to where mulberry and red maple spread apart onto a grove of bluestem.

  Astra stood out in the tall grass, wearing her blue dress, apparently doing nothing but standing. The light made her skin brassy and her dress ash gray. She heard the grass rustle and turned to see him.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Are you looking for glass?”

  “Not really.”

  “The white dust you like, it’s all around the rocks back south.”

  She led him out the grove, through heavy stands of pine that ended near a rock ridge bordering one of Ha Ha Tonka’s hundred ponds. He watched the dress’s canvas conform to her haunches as she walked. They arrived at a tall cliff face of opaque calcite and glimmering quartz edges. When he touched a finger to the ground he tasted a bitter wealth of alkalis. Astra helped him gather them.

  On the way back he told her how to make glass, what a furnace consisted of, the minimum heat required, what minerals to add for color. He asked her why she was in the woods so late.

  She said “look” and pointed up through a break in trees at a dull, yellowish star that was actually Saturn. She spoke about its ring and many moons. He was skeptical.