Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  “Carmen?” Elizabeth reached her hand across the table.

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry,” she laughed, slight. “I’m sorry. I don’t know—drifted off a moment…”

  “We were talking about the costume party.”

  “Thomas,” Carmen turned to him. “Do you like horses? Do you like to ride?”

  “I haven’t done it much, tell the truth.”

  “We’ll have to get you riding. You would love it. I bet you’d love a fox hunt. I’ll cut your hair and teach you to ride. I know you would love that. It’s just the kind of thing a man like you enjoys.”

  He inspected the distribution of color in a maroon sheet he’d created. The color boiled and left bubbles in the glass, faded from dark-rust to translucent brown. When he lowered the sheet, Astra was standing in front of the tent.

  He set the sheet down and went to her. “Where have you been? You stopped working.”

  She touched his chest with her fingers and looked preoccupied, as if trying to solve a math problem in her head.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She watched the furnace, dark eyes reflecting the flames at the furnace door. “I stopped working.”

  “Why?”

  Astra didn’t answer. She gently let her hands fall off him and kept looking at the furnace, as though mesmerized by the flames.

  “Do you want to see what I’m doing? Look—” He swept his hand over the studio and showed her the blue pieces he’d already cut. She didn’t move, placid as a sleeper.

  “Astra?”

  Orange sparks flittered in her eyes. “Would you leave with me?”

  “What?” He turned her around by her shoulders, but she didn’t look at him.

  Her voice hushed, suddenly a quiet, intense whisper. “Could you do that? Could you leave here with me? Is there any way we could do that? I want to leave. Will you come?”

  “What do you mean? I’ve got work to do. Here,” he steered her toward the wooden bench. “Watch. I’ve got another batch about to go in.”

  She rose and flattened her dress.

  “Wait. Don’t go. Look at my design.” He took his sketchbook out. She turned and began walking away. “Wait,” he grabbed her arm. “What is it? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” Their hands lingered until the fingers slipped away as she turned. He watched her retreat, her blue dress pulled by the breeze, and he thought of slim summer flowers in a high meadow wind.

  NOVEMBER. COLORS FADE AND SCATTER ON BITING AIR.

  Carmen dipped a porcelain comb in a bowl of cold water, tapped it against the rim and ran it through his hair. Her face was so close, he could see the slivers of brass in her eyes. The scissors made a soft crunching noise, whispers of hair falling into the water, where it lazily turned. She measured out small lengths between her fingers with a concentrated gaze. He understood she had very specific ideas about how his hair would look.

  “It’s just the right color,” she said, not really to him.

  She lay the scissors on an end table and told him not to move. “Wait,” she said, walking to a back room. After a minute or two she returned with a tin of Beechum’s Hair Wax. She opened the tin and dipped it in the bowl of water, stirred it with her fingers, and they came out stuck with soft yellow wax that she ran through his hair, smoothing the crown and sides. Then she combed it. Standing in front of him, the neck of her white dress drooped at his eyes, her pale chest dotted with earthy freckles.

  “How’s this?” She handed him a mirror and answered herself. “It’s perfect.”

  In the mirror his hair shined and fit his head like a golden rubber cap. The pomade smelled like perfume. “Very nice.” It would grow back.

  Suddenly she dropped down and hugged him fiercely, gratefully, as if he were a dear friend she had not seen in a long time.

  He had the issue of effective binding to consider. He could shear the glass into tiny degrees of color he would fuse and contain with copper bonding to make individual panes. Or he could try to make the color gradient even and use large, whole pieces for the panes. It was necessary to commit. He already had eight sheets—two blues that went from deep indigo to sapphire, two reds, a green with interesting patterns, two yellows, and one that started off as maroon and ended up brown.

  He worried he was becoming confined by the limits of his imagination. When the window’s concept first struck him, he felt the energy of genuine inspiration. But here he was, weeks now, engaged in the same familiar processes, the redundant techniques of craft that fairly doused the passion that brought about the initial idea. It was as if he’d started down a strange road with exotic flora and heaven’s weather, a fragrant path through uncharted lands, and now he was walking in circles around a rock he’d passed several times.

  Astra, asking him to leave, bothered him. It indicated the sorrow in her that he chose to ignore, and her desperate eyes made it hard not to take her request seriously.

  He thought if he saw Astra he could come back and think clearly, an idea he wanted to fight, but didn’t.

  The woods murmured, black, moonless, constant frog croaks. The trail was a hint of light at points on the ground, but he remembered the way and pushed through branches and tall ferns he stumbled against. A wet odor on the air, plant-rot, unseen piles of dead flower petals creating sweet bursts of fragrance as his feet slushed through compost.

  Through the racket of frogs and his own movement, something like voices emerged. They startled him and he crouched for no good reason.

  The voices came from a lower level, drifting up as loose, rhythmic talk of men. He moved toward it quietly. As he pressed through a kind of laurel shrub, he realized he’d been treading carelessly close to the edge of a drop which was at least fifteen feet above the forest floor.

  The voices slurred together and traded comments, but he couldn’t understand them. They grew louder, yet muffled, and below he made out the dark forms of two men walking a path. What he’d taken for muffling became a brogue. The squat, jaunty form was Volta. Laughter. Hushing. He moved along the ridge, trying to stay in the same direction as them, not having any definite goal.

  Their path broke from the ridge and Thomas paused in a huddle of palmettos where the ridge curved. He could make out their passing by noise and subtle tremors that passed through the darkness when any part of it was disturbed. He cleared away brush to make out where they might be going, and saw that below revealed a flat, open area, somehow familiar.

  Saw the two figures, small, away now, move out from the forest and cross the open area to a cabin, barely visible on the other side. At the cabin the door opened, filled with the big, solid form of Astra’s father. The men entered, and the cabin door closed.

  Thomas walked back to the studio.

  He decided to shear the glass into small pieces for a mosaic structure. It would be much more complex, require firm commitment, but give him the greatest control and opportunity to impress people. Later in life he would denounce the composition, largely for that quality, approving of its destruction.

  In his one reference to the window, he qualifies it as “the work of a young man, too eager to please, overcompensating for a clear lack of emotional weight by aesthetic innovation and uncomformity.” However, these early experiments with fragmentary binding directly relate to certain of those three-dimensional sculptures that would bring him some fame in the early sixties, especially the celebrated Ascent of Sinai, which features at its center a decahedron made of such panes.

  Carmen brought a package wrapped in brown paper to the studio, and she appeared jittery, moving her tongue behind her lips. Her hands pushed the package into his chest and pressed it there. It felt lumpy, light with cloth.

  “What?”

  “It’s for the party. Oh! And this.” From a handbag she withdrew a smaller package.

  “You shouldn’t give me things.”

  She squeezed his wrist, twisting her feet and moving too much. “It’s for your own good. Go ahead,” she nodd
ed. He opened the small box. An ivory-handled straight razor, an envelope, a disc of Mickleson’s shaving soap. She brushed the blond stubble on his face, and he felt her hand falter. “You have to shave.”

  Her upper teeth were arranged at crooked angles that somehow enhanced her smile as she waved the envelope. “Friday, you will need this. It’s your invitation. Everyone’s expecting us.”

  “All right.”

  “Eight o’clock, Thomas.”

  “Yeah.”

  She shot forward and kissed his cheek, hopped backward once, smiling, and walked down the field.

  Inside the brown paper he found a British soldier’s uniform of olive wool, with leather belt and holster, a soup bowl helmet, a pair of putties with brass buttons. A small note said: We expect you at eight o’clock.

  Sunset Friday he shut off the furnace, its extinguishing hiss articulating his mood.

  He brought his costume to the bunkhouse, where men were already donning clean pants or just shedding shirts and opening jars of liquor. Everyone happily accepted orders not to go near the castle until Monday. At the bunkhouse several men looked up from their cots and watched him with indefinite expressions. Volta sat at a card table with Jack Alden, another man, and Astra’s father. Her father was in a chair, but his chin rested on his neck and hair fell over his face. He didn’t move, and Alden and Volta looked at Thomas, then Volta said something and he and Alden began laughing. The men on their bunks watched Thomas gather his things. He walked out while Volta and Alden’s laughter rose, one of them shouting something he pretended not to hear.

  He bathed in a cold creek and shaved there, sat drying next to a fire. The soldier’s costume was laid out on a log across from him, as if he were sharing camp with it. When he was dry he crossed over to the log and dressed, the uniform itchy, and the helmet kept sliding on his head. The castle loomed through the trees and tall brush, high dark walls guiding him.

  Thomas parted a row of cutgrass and stepped onto the castle’s lawn. To the attendants standing under gaslight at the door, in the soldier’s costume he might have for a moment looked like a true ghost, wandered through the mist and explosions of a distant battle to materialize here, at the edge of the forest.

  Several cars sat on the lawn, drivers in black suits smoking cigarettes. The doormen wore white tuxedoes and domino masks. They led him by candelabras down a stone hallway, kept dark because there was still work to do on it. The buckles on his costume clinked as they approached a space of light and noise at the end of the hallway.

  The hall opened to an immense room where voices carried and people adorned in clothes from other eras mingled and waltzed. Torches perched up on all the rock walls. Four white men in formal wear and masks played music from a small, elevated stage. A bassist, two trumpeters, and a snare drummer. The music struck his heart as if announcing him.

  Long buffet tables lined adjacent walls. More Negroes served refreshments from silver dishes. Most of the guests had not arrived, but the onslaught of sophistication overwhelmed him.

  One man dressed as a brown bear. A couple baseball players. A bone-thin Cleopatra, complete with asps, smoked a cigarette in a slender holder. Others modeled in formal wear, with long capes, their only costume a porcelain mask covering the face.

  Wearing a severe gray suit and a golden domino, Mr. Abberline walked erect with hands behind his back, nodding tight-lipped smiles to guests. A thin layer of smoke blanketed everyone’s head. Thomas had been standing in the same spot for awhile when she grabbed his arm.

  Carmen dressed in white and sky blue—a Red Cross nurse.

  “Look!” she said, meaning at him. “I knew it would fit. Of course you’re forty two tall. I knew it!” She revolved. “Do you like mine?”

  He did. Especially the white stockings that covered her calves, something he’d never seen on a woman.

  She took his arm and led him across the room where in the torchlight people looked theatrical, notorious. Carmen tapped the back of another couple. Kenneth McRyder was attired in the uniform of a confederate general, with epaulets and a big hat. Elizabeth was a shepherdess, Bo Peep or something. Her hair was piled under a blue bonnet and she gasped, touched her gloves to her lips when she saw Thomas.

  “Uncanny,” she said.

  Carmen put her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder and they hugged. Kenneth nodded stiff approval while the women watched Thomas, and Elizabeth lifted Carmen’s head up. “So lovely. We’re going to have a wonderful time tonight.” She turned to the men and repeated herself. “We’re going to have a wonderful time.”

  Kenneth put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder and asked if he’d like a drink. The punch was fruity, loaded with grain alcohol. Within an hour guests began spilling into the ballroom. Witches and sad clowns, kings wearing purple trains lined with fox fur. Among these outfits moved figures in black, their sole disguise white masks with no features except a long white nose. Bass thrummed as the trumpets rose dirgelike from nowhere and the snare kept slow, steady time. In the ballroom were three couches and several velvet divans where guests lounged and talked. Carmen flushed and they both kept filling their punch glasses and laughing. His laughter felt easy.

  The man in a bear suit howled and used a ballerina to support himself. Kenneth and Elizabeth circled. Carmen led him to the dance floor, and she told him to move slowly back and forth as she rested one hand at his waist. He stared at a thin sprinkling of blond freckles around the bridge of her nose. The punch left pineapple and watermelon on his tongue.

  Past her, he saw Kenneth and Elizabeth McRyder standing outside a circle of dancers. Elizabeth was speaking to Kenneth, who nodded in time with her words. When Thomas noticed Elizabeth watching him, she didn’t look away.

  Later saw guests dozing on couches, smoking long cigarettes with stunned expressions while others lay on the lawn and some engaged in games in various hallways. The frenzy of motion and drink distilled to quiet whispers and exhausted postures.

  Carmen had taken off her hat, hair tussled around her face, and pale eyes widened, teasing, hopeful behind the apricot strands. She found a candelabra and grabbed Thomas’s wrist, leading him away from the main ballroom. Stone steps ascended to darkness. The candles hung shadows down her face as she beckoned him up the stairs, an image of cottony light.

  She brought him to a stone cloister where a large, old picture in a heavy frame leaned against a wall. She crouched down with the candelabra. “Look. They found this weeks ago.” He squatted beside her. The photograph was sepiatone and the flames colored it orange and gold. In the picture, men swarmed a vast landscape of trees and rock, some near and some far. At a stand of grass in the center, two men stood wearing dark suits and sober expressions. Thomas studied it a moment before realizing it was the land where this castle stood.

  Carmen rested a hand on his shoulders. “It’s dated 1903. That man on the left is Robert McRyder. The other one’s Adrian Van Brunt, the architect, but look—” she moved the candles across the picture with a gesture of summation. “All those men working in the background. Couldn’t one of them be your father?”

  He could hear the candles burning. Their light illuminated the slumped dust motes rising slowly around them. He leaned toward the picture until his face was nearly against its glass. The images blurred up close. One man pushed a wheelbarrow full of stone toward tiny train tracks that ran behind Van Brunt and McRyder. Another held a pickax at the apex of a swing. Thomas’s own face reflected dimly in the glass. Up close the picture seemed remote and judgmental, and his eyes narrowed in defense; 1903, year of his birth. He understood that his father had merely labored here, one among hundreds, and rather than connection, he felt dislocation. Instead of imbuing the present with the past, the picture reinforced a belief in his own singularity, his unique, isolated stature—even the picture had only been waiting for him to view it. Carmen’s hand slid down the back of his neck.

  He stood, unbalanced, the candelabra between them. Her face became haunted in the candleli
ght and she smiled, her expression loosened and her mouth fallen slightly open. As he stepped to her, she backed against the wall. She blew the candles out one by one.

  He walked her home late, leaving her standing in front of the cabin, with Kenneth and Elizabeth’s silhouettes against the shades. Still in a soldier’s uniform, he fell asleep easily at his studio, picturing further celebrations attended by a slightly older, more refined version of himself, an imperturbable man, someone other people admired and wanted to know.

  Shortly after dawn he woke with sudden energy, as if he’d been in the middle of saying something. A clouded sky hushed the castle’s hues and on the bluff it no longer appeared so formidable. He knew its halls, secret staircases, and its legacy had diminished. The weather cool and gray, the land felt deserted, not a figure stirring. After coming home, drunk, he’d laid his glass on the ground, and this morning the flat sheets looked triumphant, winking back by catching the damp daylight. Everything was near at hand.

  But the sleeping quiet cast a dreamlike quality on the studio. He turned a paddle in his hand, letting the rough iron handle roll over his palm. Rossitto once said, “The easiest thing in the world is not to work.” The silence, the lack even of birds, created an unreal presence—a mood that inspired wandering, and his feet began moving into the stillness. He put the paddle down and just started walking, still in his soldier’s uniform.

  He hadn’t intended to follow the ridge through the forest, down to the bend where below bent a dilapidated cabin in a clearing of dust and bluestem, and snakeskins fluttered from a pine branch. Astra’s home still had the broken window. A wild turkey, lone and preposterous, waddled through the dusty yard. He was preparing to descend when the cabin door opened.

  Volta exited. His nappy black hair stood on end and he relieved himself on a tree, moaning as he did. Behind enormous ferns, Thomas watched the man belch and shuffle down the path into the forest. He was thinking that maybe a card game had taken place.