Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  He knocked on the door and Astra’s father opened. He took up the entire doorway. “What? Who are you?”

  “I want to see Astra.”

  The Indian eyed him. “I don’t owe you anything.”

  He didn’t understand the relevance. “Can I see Astra?” He tried to fit around her father but a stone hand shoved him back.

  “You have money?” the man asked.

  “What?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  Thomas stammered. “I don’t have anything with me.”

  The Indian nodded sympathetically. “Come back with ten dollars.” He slammed the door. Thomas ran around the side of the cabin and peered through the only window on the other side.

  A gray, grimy patina fogged the window, peppered with dust and loose hair. He could see into a dank-looking room with a small bed. The bed was covered with tangled sheets and, bound up in the sheets, a small bundle curled on one side. Black hair pouring from the open end of the sheets, he watched the blankets rise and fall with breath. He tapped at the glass.

  The bundle on the bed shifted. From a part in the thick black hair, a single dark eye turned to the window. The eye was swallowed by bruise, indifferently regarding him within glossy purple swelling. The eye blinked slow, dully, at the face on the other side of the clouded window. A small brown hand brushed hair off the other eye. Then both eyes turned away and the bundle curled into itself and the gray mildew on the window seemed to swallow the whole picture.

  He jogged through the woods, past groping branches and shrubs, to his studio, and the total quiet that defined the place that day.

  Thick copper tape sat spooled for welding the panels into place. He began to reheat a blue sheet, intending to begin the shearing process, and he took out the shears and observed the strength of the blades. The shears were perhaps a little dull, salted with specks of rust. He wanted to start with a large panel and build around it. The blue had many gradients. The brown glass could look red in the light, and that was something he would have to consider when finalizing their placement.

  He used a file to scrape rust and iron off the shears, crimson and silver flakes drifting to the ground. He’d scrape once across the blade, watch the particles fall and land, then scrape again. Falling slowly into a small pile, a tiny brown snow, the flakes began to embody something else to him, something he felt or used to feel, someone he once knew.

  He moved in circles for an hour, picking something up and putting it down, rearranging materials. Then he walked to the bunkhouse.

  When he entered the doorway, talk ceased. Most of the men were in there, sprawled in various states of recovery. A couple sat up in their bunks. They watched him walk toward one end of the hall, his footsteps sounding solitary. Jack Alden was cutting a plug of tobacco and he watched too.

  Volta lay on his back, arms over eyes. He sat up when Thomas stood over him. “Hey, young son. Have a good time last night?” Volta rolled over to face the other men. “He’s practically our boss now, y’know.”

  “Hey,” Thomas said. Volta looked back at him. “What were you doing at Astra’s?”

  Volta eased off the bunk and stood close to Thomas, the top of his head barely reaching the younger man’s chin. “Why don’t you talk to the Indian, John Monro?” Volta smiled. “The man’s awful at cards.” He looked around the room. All of the men were sitting up, and he took a step toward Thomas.

  He poked a finger at Thomas’s chest. “Or you think any girl around’s for you alone?” A few murmurs rippled through the bunkhouse. Volta glanced around again and spoke louder.

  “You think you walk in here, among men who work fer a livin, men who sweat and exhaust themselves?” He spread his arms in an avuncular expression. “Well fuck you.”

  Thomas swung at Volta. He sidestepped it easily and threw Thomas into a bunk. The Scotsman hit him twice in the kidneys before he could recover, and when Volta moved over him, Thomas kicked up and back, striking the groin, giving him space to stand.

  He charged forward, planted a foot, and hurled all his weight behind the fist. Volta’s nose burst red—the blood splash hanging spiderlike in the air. Volta caught his next blow by the wrist, and he squeezed. His hand dug in a pocket, face lost in dark fluid, only the eyes and teeth visible. “Right. That’s how you want it?” Volta pulled his hand out of his pocket. Brass knuckles wrapped his fist. “I do hate to be the one to teach you.”

  Volta drove the knuckles down, once, holding Thomas by the wrist. Thomas’s legs went out and left him suspended like a punching bag. The knuckles fell again, ripped an eyebrow, split his lip up to a smashed nose. He could hear men shouting from an echoing place above him.

  A haze of pain, blood in his eyes, he reached up and squeezed Volta’s testicles, yanked down. Volta screamed and dropped him. Thomas tried to crawl backward, blind. Volta cursed, doubled over, clutching himself. His crotch was wet. “That’s how it is? That’s how it is?” Thomas tried to crawl, but Volta walked up and stomped his groin. He kicked his spine and ribs, then loped to his bunk and dug through his rucksack, saying over and over, “All right. All right.”

  The room hushed when Volta produced a bowie knife from his bag. He crouched over Thomas. Hearth light glistened on the blade. Volta rolled him over.

  Thomas couldn’t see any of this. He only sensed that something bent over him, a noisy mass on the far shore of a murky lake in and out of which he bobbed. He felt something roll him over and he gurgled, realized his throat was filled with fluid that tasted like copper. He was drowning in a lake of copper.

  His ears were ringing, so he didn’t hear the gunshot, only felt the floorboards beneath him thump with weight. He understood that the dark mass was no longer on top of him, and as he sank under the surface of dark waters, a black bubble burst on his lips.

  Silence echoed in the room. Abberline stood in the doorway, arm still outstretched. The pistol’s smoke twisted upward and broke against the wooden rafters.

  Two ribs, four fingers, his nose, and jaw were broken. A doctor came to the McRyder’s cabins and set the bones, stitched his lip and scalp, splinted his nose and left the family with morphine and laudanum. The second morning, a fever rose that no one thought he would survive.

  His face was bandaged and he slept in delirium. Carmen remained by his bed. She was sleeping on the fourth night, and Elizabeth McRyder was the only person to hear Thomas finally wake.

  He started moving in jerks, mumbling. Elizabeth stood in the doorway holding a candle by her stomach, and watched his shadowy, swaddled form wrestle against the sheets, and heard him say “Astra” twice. The next morning, his fever broke.

  Ambient light filtered through the bandages. Dull, sulfuric light. He could smell alcohol and balm on his face. He heard someone weeping, whispering. Gradually, through this slow sensory accumulation, he realized he was awake. Someone was crying close by. A girl’s voice, familiar, English, said the name “Edward” between sobs.

  Elizabeth McRyder was talking to Mr. Abberline in the front doorway, while from a window in the back of the cabin Kenneth watched the dissipating leaves being gathered on the wind, the short jabbing bursts of wind the jagged landscape created. One moment, a huge pile of ripe color would fly up, as if kicked by an invisible boot, then form a tight spiral that swept briefly in one direction before letting the leaves fall. As though for an instant they’d attained life, then lost it. The land touched his deepest appreciations.

  After a week, they unwrapped the bandages. Harsh light blinded Thomas, and he did not see Carmen raise her hands and turn her face around. He heard her moan.

  Strange, blue-capped angles composed his face, and one side of his gouged hairline sat higher than the other. Dark thread stitched along the high side of the scalp, and also stitched from his lip to his right nostril. Kenneth was near him and didn’t speak. Elizabeth walked Carmen out of the room.

  Later, he was alone, and heard them talking from somewhere in the house, but the room and adjoining hallway were e
mpty, and he couldn’t tell from where the voices traveled.

  He didn’t see Carmen as he gathered up his things. Kenneth gave him some superficial advice, “Rest for awhile. Let us know if we can do anything.”

  Thomas wrote on a piece of newspaper: ILL FINISH WINDOW.

  “Well,” Kenneth scratched the back of his head, stopped, and smiled. “Well, just take things easy. That’s not important now. After all, we already have a window there.” Kenneth checked the hallway and took Thomas by the arm, a little too directly to be polite. “Listen, you know, you let me down.”

  “Why?”

  With rigid jaw, he clearly communicated his disappointment. “This…brawling. Ridiculous. A real waste.”

  The silent woods anticipated winter. His path was damp, blued by evening, leaves disintegrating underfoot as he limped slowly into the forest, making stiff motions.

  The one window was still broken at Astra’s cabin. No lights burned inside and the door opened without resistance. The stove was gone, but its black iron chimney craned down from the roof, dripping thin flakes of soot above a small black pile. The two rooms were empty. Dust wafted across the floor.

  He stood in the yard and in darkening light found two wheel tracks led by hoof prints. The tracks moved out of the dirt circle and into tall bluestem. The grass flattened in a direct line that led to a wide dirt road. Shortly down this road, the tracks were lost to wind and rain, buried under hard, chilled dirt.

  *

  Few men remained at the bunkhouse. The ones there turned aside when seeing his stitches and dented cheek. Jack Alden was carving a block of balsa and he looked up, wood shavings and tobacco leaf hung in his beard.

  Thomas spoke with difficulty, not moving his jaw and wincing. “Do you know where the big Indian is? Jack Monro is?”

  Alden rested his eyes on Thomas’s face, then turned down to his whittling. He shook his head “no,” and added, “You might talk to Abberline. They was talking a couple days ago. Last time I saw Monro around.”

  As Thomas walked out, Alden said to him, “A beard’ll cover most of that.”

  He hammered on Abberline’s door, and the supervisor opened, holding an unlit cigar between his teeth.

  “Well,” he said. “He did a job on you, didn’t he boy?”

  “Where’s the Indian?” The words were slow and hurt.

  “Excuse me?” He looked possibly amused by the amount of time it took Thomas to finish a sentence.

  “Ind—Joe Monro. Where?”

  Abberline lit his cigar methodically, held the smoke and released it above his head where it lingered in a gray halo. “I would like to suggest to you,” he looked at Thomas and inhaled again. “I would like to suggest that you take this opportunity to reflect on your luck at being alive, and perhaps consider ways you might repay the McRyders for their friendship.”

  “Where’s Monro?”

  “And, I should add, you might show me some gratitude.”

  “For what?”

  The smoke descended over his face like mountain fog. “For saving your life.”

  Carmen answered the door and he pushed past her, seeing only the back of her hair as she turned her face away.

  He asked, “Do you know where they made her go?”

  “I don’t—who?” Carmen kept her eyes on a bureau. She adjusted a crystal figurine, a stampede of horses, with her long white fingers.

  He saw Elizabeth McRyder standing in the hallway, her cold expression still and knowing. “Was it you?” he asked. “You sent her away?”

  She said, precisely, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Hello. Is there a problem?” Kenneth’s voice from behind.

  Kenneth stood beside Abberline in the foyer, with the front door open behind them. Abberline eyed Thomas bemusedly and passed a thumb across the handle of his revolver. The five people stood as the points of a tense pentagram, and Carmen stared at the floor, traced the crystal manes of the stampeding horses. The horses were a single piece, individual forms wrestling through the lumpy crystalline welding of their base. She did not look up when he left.

  Carmen returned to England shortly after Christmas. In 1930, she married a bank officer twenty years older than herself. She died in London, during a bombing, in 1944.

  Due to financial troubles, in 1936 the McRyder brothers leased the castle as a hotel and vacation resort managed by an old matron named Josephine Raliegh. In 1942, sparks from a fireplace kindled a blaze among the mansion’s wooden shingles, and the castle was soon gutted by fire.

  A rain of white ash snowed all the next morning.

  The Missouri Chamber of Commerce made Ha Ha Tonka a state park in 1978, and elected to leave the castle’s remnants as they were, only the singed outer walls standing.

  Thomas Koenig finished the window, his first privately commissioned work, in March of 1923. The stitches had come out months before, and his hair was long again. Unsure even if they would use it, he continued to work through Christmas, devoting all his time to the refining of surface, to facture and passage—the way pieces fit and their overlying textures.

  At one point, he was going to insert a girl’s face in the window. He spent days sketching it until he felt a workable portrait emerged. She would have brown skin and black hair, dark eyes. But even though he’d drawn her perfectly, he couldn’t deny that the face intruded on the rest of the composition, and he abandoned the idea.

  When the window was finished, the McRyders actually liking it a great deal, he supervised its insertion into the wall of the eastern gable, where it stayed until the fire of ’42. In that blaze the window swelled with fierce light, it perspired, flames creating a kaleidoscope that danced, trembled, and shook. Then the glass burst in thousands of colored shards, as if spit from the rock, trailed by fire.

  There is a long life. There are incoming decades, the twentieth-century wailing, rushing him through. There are sculptures in the fifties and sixties, a series of lectures, and a glass mural for the United Nations building.

  But I want to picture him then, after just completing his window. I want to meet him in the place where he starts asking different questions.

  They are hauling his window up with thick hemp rope and squeaking pulleys. He leans precariously far off a fiberboard ledge they’ve rigged. The heavy, fragile spire of glass twists and sways until one of the men reaches out, while another one pulls the rope, and the edge comes into his gloved hand. After the window is installed, Thomas stays two more days.

  He sits below it and stares, free to be exhausted, but has to question it, the window: what it is, because it isn’t what he envisioned in his mind. Not at all. Since it’s not, he has to ask what, exactly, it is, and what it’s worth.

  He hikes around the chasm’s edge to view it from a distance, sees that it contrasts the neutral stone like a sore bleeding light. He sleeps near it to see what moonlight will do.

  The one certainty he concedes is that the window, simply, is not very good. Against the muted stone the colors now look gaudy, chosen for their bright strangeness, and missing the cohesion he’d wanted. The shapes and forms cause the composition to seem cluttered, noncommital. The only thing he likes about it is the single, branching oak at its base—elegant, pleasing. It represents for him what the window could have been. But as for what it is—it becomes clear that he hasn’t done a very good job.

  Just what had he thought it would be, and had he ever even seen it clearly in his mind? Eventually, was it even worthwhile? Hard to say now. The more he ponders the piece, the more significant its errors become. He asks himself what one has to do to make such work worthwhile. This is a new question.

  He walks down the bluff, canvas rucksack hoisted, turning down the same road he arrived on, and dragonflies fill the air between clawlike branches, knobby and brittle, the path matted with soggy leaves. Shadows pass over his face, a boy, the two new pink gouges and crooked nose.

  He turns and disappears behind a bend of skeletal t
rees.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Among various kindnesses from both friends and strangers, this book would not exist without at least the following people. They have my deepest gratitude and appreciation:

  Matt Clark, 1966-1998

  C. Michael Curtis, for his faith and generosity

  Skip Hays, for patient instruction in reading,

  writing, and more practical matters

  Thanks to Kate Nitze for all her enthusiasm and efforts on my behalf.

  I owe an additional debt to the great Yasunari Kawabata,

  whose “Palm-of-Hand” stories suggested an anecdote

  recounted in the first part of “Two Shores.”