Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  They feed the gulls, then run to the back of the boat when the birds dive down. Grace tells a story about mean boys who throw Pop Rocks at the gulls.

  “That is just so sad,” the twins say.

  “Did you think of that together?” Allie asks.

  “What?” they say together.

  “When you talk together like that. Like you have the same thoughts. It’s cool,” Allie says.

  “We are nothing alike,” Tricia says.

  Grace smiles, a close-lipped smile. Allie wonders if she does that because of her overbite. It’s a cute overbite. Allie likes her again. She has velvety hair and she is good at anything school-related, as long as it doesn’t involve athletics. Grace and Allie are the A students; the twins, they are B-plus with an occasional A.

  “I’m going inside,” Tricia says, and this disappoints Allie. She likes it out on the boat. She sniffs the air; it smells briney, with a hint of dirty bathroom. She would like to stay to see if any dolphins follow the ferry, but she won’t be separated from her twins. Once inside, they play Go Fish until the boat docks.

  The house is on Crystal Beach. The twins have spent their summers here since they were tots, running up and down the stairs in matching T-shirts. There are only a few rules at the beach: take off your flip-flops on the balcony before you go inside, so that you don’t track sand in everywhere; and be sure to check in before sundown with Melanie.

  Inside, the house is all one big room, with a little harvestgold kitchenette and a claw-footed bathtub behind the sink. The house is furnished with rattan and wicker, and there are four big beds. But the girls will sleep out on the balcony on cots, facing the sea.

  Maybe on Saturday Melanie will take them back on the ferry to Galveston, where they can eat shrimp in little glass bowls with red cocktail sauce and bottomless glasses of Coke. Melanie is prone to sudden bursts of happiness, and the girls love her for it. Sometimes on these trips she takes them all to get their toenails painted. Or she’ll take them to Murdoch’s to buy matching sunglasses and netted bags of shells.

  At Crystal Beach they can run as far as they want. At night the girls will find older boys. One boy, Murph, drives a Jeep and they all pile in and scream and he speeds through the water, splashing. “Ah, naw,” he says, when Tricia kisses the back of his neck. “He tasted like man-sweat,” she whispers to them later. They sing him songs. Say Say my playmate, come out and play with me. And then the rhymes get dirtier. But it’s Grace that whispers the spookiest:

  Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

  All dressed in black, black, black

  She has a knife, knife, knife

  Stuck in her back, back, back.

  She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe

  She cannot cry, cry, cry …

  There’s a teenager at the beach when they get there. Her name is Sylvia, and she is some distant relation to the twins and Melanie. She and Melanie make daiquiris and sleep on the balcony, slathered in coconut oil. The girls agree that Sylvia is not nearly so beautiful as Melanie, although she is sixteen, the age of beauty. The girls—it was Tricia or Trina who came to this conclusion, Allie can’t remember which—all agree. Sixteen is the age; the age that it is appropriate to lose your virginity, to have a boyfriend, to wear a miniskirt.

  More interesting than the teenager, there is a girl across the dunes. This girl introduces herself on the second day. Her name is Brandy. Her voice is rich and throaty, like a smoker’s.

  “It’s sort of beautiful,” Grace says.

  “But too old for her body,” Allie declares.

  She is a pleasant combination of warm golden hues, honey skin and hair, light amber eyes, jeans cut off before her buttocks end. She lives there. She’s a townie. Her house is lit up at night, every night, all night. One of the windows is busted.

  “Is that her room? How does she sleep at night?” But once Allie thinks about it, she decides she would like to sleep in a room with the ocean right outside, every night, whistling into the hole in her windowpane.

  “It’s a bullet hole,” Grace says.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” Allie tells her. “Whoever lives there, her single mom or whatever, can’t afford to fix it. That’s all.”

  Tricia glances over at Grace, casting her pale lashes down. She agrees, she agrees with Allie. Grace can be such a child.

  Allie’s mom is a single mom. She can afford to fix broken windows, but she can’t afford add-a-bead necklaces or adoptive Cabbage Patch dolls. Allie’s mother often reminds her that there are children who don’t have enough money for band instruments or three square meals. There are children who run wild and don’t know their times tables because there is nobody looking out for them, aiming for a better quality of life. Allie isn’t sure what she means by better quality of life. When Allie visits the twins, Melanie isn’t around much. She imagines it would be very lonely to live that way without a twin. The twins have each other though. And there is little doubt, when she watches them in their matching bunny-fur coats and freshly curled wings, singing the winter holiday program or twirling their batons in unison at the football game, that those two have achieved a finer quality of life. Last winter, when the other girls in the program snuck makeup on in the bathroom, Trina and Tricia wore nothing more than Vaseline on their brow bones and bow-shaped lips. When they throw the batons up high, they spin in unison, and there is never any question that they will catch the batons at the exact same moment. Every time they spin down. Every time.

  Many years later, one of the girls will be a woman.

  She comes here with her husband and her daughter, they take the ferry out to Crystal Beach.

  There isn’t any parking, and the husband says, “Goddamnit, why didn’t you tell me?” when the state trooper tickets them for expired registration.

  “Forgot about that,” Tricia says. When their child falls asleep in the back, she reaches over. This trip is about him, how he says he feels no love for her anymore. She climbs over the seat, in the daylight, thinking, This will do it, this has to do it. Her long pale hair in his face, her mother’s blue eyes, the lashes darkened now. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says, and when his arm fumbles and he pushes her off, she’ll think, Fuck it. You fucker.

  He doesn’t push her off, he is soft there, holding his head back from her face.

  “There are worse things in life than a job you don’t like and a wife who leaves you cold,” she says. “You could have a knife in your back.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. You aren’t thinking about it anyway,” he says.

  And he is right, until she seats herself again and looks back at her daughter.

  “Don’t make yourself cry for my benefit,” he says.

  “Man, it’s really changed,” she says aloud on the drive back. She’d imagined walking along the beach, their girl on his shoulders, her hand inside his. She would point to the dunes, And there it is, that’s it, that’s where… and he would put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her away. Or no, he would rest it on the nape of her neck, cradling.

  There is a coffee shop with free wi-fi, and they pass gift shops, even a couple of hotels. “It wasn’t like this back then. It was just houses and a corner store. We used to go crabbing, did I tell you that? Mom would cook them for us, if we cleaned them and pulled them apart. We did it when they were alive. It didn’t bother us. Grace said they had no nerves. One time, I was about to gut one of them and it started eating its brains out. Autocannibalism, Allie said. She was the smart one. We thought it was funny. And we ate mussels too. Trina and I, we brought the traps in every morning, We woke up at the same time. Trina said the same sound woke us, but I don’t remember. I don’t know. Maybe I never heard the sound.”

  He is smoking, window down. She would like to think that he is afraid of his own love for her, but the way he’s looking at the windshield, she’s thinking maybe not. They’ve been married for eleven years. When she met him, he was a skinny studio art major at a stat
e college. Now he’s grown more handsome. And glib.

  In the backseat, her baby girl gurgles. Two years old, fingers in her mouth. Her hair is black like her daddy’s, cut straight across her cheeks. Her eyes are blue like her mother’s, like her grandmother’s, like Trina’s.

  The girls sleep out on the balcony, listening to Judy Collins tapes. She sounds so otherworldly. There is a song with whales calling, and a song about eyes like isinglass windows. The girls don’t know what isinglass is, but it sounds like something from old ships or lighthouses. Then Allie puts in Stevie Nicks. Sylvia and Melanie are dancing in the field. They wear black bathing suits and sarongs. Melanie unties her sarong, letting it float up, up, and away. It’s a warm and breezy night. Across the way, at that girl’s house, men whoop and holler.

  “I want to call my mom,” Grace says. “Your mom drinks too much.”

  “Oh, go inside and call her then,” Trina says. Allie and Tricia smile.

  Grace falls asleep with her glasses on, her arm thrown over her face.

  Allie, Tricia, and Trina watch as Melanie and Sylvia walk off past the dunes.

  “She’ll find a bonfire,” Trina says.

  “Will she come back?” Allie says, then thinks about how that sounds.

  “She always does,” the twins say.

  Allie whispers, making her voice low, husky. Like the girl’s. “I don’t think she’s a girl,” Allie says. “She’s a spook. She’s a ghost. She’s a demon inside a girl’s body.”

  And then she hisses:

  Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

  All dressed in black, black, black

  With silver buttons, buttons, buttons

  All down her back, back, back.

  She cannot read, read, read

  She cannot write, write, write

  But she can smoke, smoke, smoke

  Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.

  She asked her mother, mother, mother

  For fifty cents, cents, cents

  To see the elephants, elephants, elephants

  Jump over the fence, fence, fence.

  They jumped so high, high, high

  They reached the sky, sky, sky

  And they didn’t come back, back, back

  Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly!

  July can’t walk, walk, walk

  July can’t talk, talk, talk

  July can’t eat, eat, eat

  With a knife and fork, fork, fork!

  She went upstairs, stairs, stairs

  To say her prayers, prayers, prayers

  And bumped her head, head, head

  And now she’s dead, dead, dead!

  In the mornings the twins carry in the crab traps. They wake up at the same moment, and leave Grace and Allie asleep on the balcony. They walk in their pajamas, and wear flip-flops to protect their calloused feet from the sticker burrs.

  July Fourth, firecrackers and watermelon. Melanie sips a mint julep from a tall blue glass. The girls sip from the bottom of the tumblers. Their father is there, for this celebration, an arm thrown over his wife’s shoulders. They are surprisingly broad for such a petite woman. Allie approves of the exposed freckles, the blood-red stone dipping in between her breasts. The only makeup she wears is dark lipstick, and her toenails match. Her skin is dead-girl white. Tricia and Trina are wearing batiked sarongs like their mother’s. Allie would have said, On the beach a woman should be golden, but Melanie’s skin is right, it’s unexpected. Her husband has the kind of muted, rumpled handsomeness that complements a great beauty. Everyone wants to touch her, just for a moment. Tricia and Trina watch her from a distance, that woman they might become. She is drunk, but not slurry drunk. Women lean in toward her; men brush her arm as they walk by. The girls run up to her with plates of oysters and shrimp, offerings. She rests her hand on Allie’s shoulder for a moment and says, “This is my girl. These are all my girls.”

  The girls stay downstairs in the junk room, sipping lukewarm Lone Stars. That’s when they see the neighbor girl across the field, dancing with a sparkler. She moves in waves, making ribbons with the sparks. Allie is the one who stands up and calls to her.

  “Brandy, Brandy! Come here. We have beer!”

  Brandy motions for them to come to her, waving that sparkler around and around.

  The way Melanie taught them in the car, it goes like this:

  Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

  All dressed in black, black, black

  She has a knife, knife, knife

  Stuck in her back, back, back.

  She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe

  She cannot cry, cry, cry

  That’s why she begs, begs, begs

  She begs to die, die, die.

  They are clapping, laughing. Tricia loves the way her mother takes to the freeways, speeding, passing, changing lanes with ease. She never curses at the other drivers, and she talks her way out of tickets. One trip, she’d blinked her eyes and said, “My little girl is sick.” Trina leaned over the seat and shivered. That officer wanted to give them a police escort to the hospital. Later, they’d laughed, and Melanie bought them all—what were they called back then? Blizzards?—at the DQ. She’d dared Grace to finish it, knowing full well she would. The things they got her to do, just to see if she would. It seems wrong, now, looking back on that, a grown woman getting a little girl to guzzle down something so big and sweet it made her puke.

  The two weeks they spent on Crystal Beach in the summer of 1982 are broken bits in Tricia’s head.

  When they get to Galveston, David asks, “Why are there all these motels without windows?”

  “Oh,” Tricia answers, happy he is talking, “it’s because of the storms. It’s cheaper.”

  “Why would you come to a beach and stay in a motel without windows?”

  “Well, but you could spend a lot of time outside. And like I said, it’s cheaper.”

  Murdoch’s is still there. Audrey is awake, and her father carries her on his shoulders out to the pier and back. They build a castle; well, Audrey and Tricia build it. They search for shells and bits of broken glass. It isn’t safe for a three-year-old to carry broken beer bottles but Tricia wants to show her how to make a castle sparkle. “Don’t pick up the glass yourself. Just show Mommy when you find one.” Tricia’s lost track of the years it’s been since she’s seen a beach, any beach. Everything feels high and bright and washed out. Audrey grows bored with the castles and wants to swim. “Not today,” Tricia tells her. She thought that the ocean might frighten Audrey, but as soon as she saw it, her girl wanted to cross it. The ships, bigger than castles, the way the sky seems so much higher than it does at home—it’s Tricia that feels small and afraid.

  Allie Saenz was a tall, leggy girl. Her neck seemed long for her body, but she might have grown up to become a great beauty. It was always women who had something unexpected—Audrey Hepburn’s long neck, for example, or Angelina Jolie’s big, soft lips—that were so beautiful they unnerved. Allie would have been an imposing woman. Not like Melanie, who was soft and white, and she could wear anything and seem naked. There was nothing predatory about Melanie’s prettiness.

  The strange new girl, Brandy, takes them behind the dunes and whispers stories. “Your mother likes to fuck,” she says. The way she says fuck, it sounds really bad, like something luscious but wrong. “Fuck,” she says. Grace gets up and walks away. “You want to see her do it? Wait till her man leaves. That your daddy?”

  “Yes,” the twins answer together.

  “She’ll do anything.”

  “It’s a lie,” Allie says. Trina is crying. But Grace is very still, alert. When they walk back, Allie whispers, “She’s like a cat in the dark, your mother.”

  And they listen to the Fleetwood Mac song on the boom box, out on the balcony.

  She is like a cat in the dark

  And then she is the darkness

  She rules her life like a fine skylark

  And when the sky is starless

  All your
life you’ve never seen

  A woman taken by the wind …

  The adults are going to be up all night, out by the bonfire, drinking, dancing. People spill over from the broken house and the girls watch them. These are guys who get their muscles from working, not working out. Brandy is with them, and the way she stands in the firelight, she seems older. Maybe she’s a teenager like Sylvia. She is wearing cutoffs and cowgirl boots, her long hair gathered up at her neck in a banana clip.

  “Look at her,” Grace whispers, “I think she’s sixteen.”

  Brandy and Melanie dance together in the firelight, one shimmery and white, the other all golden, glinting lights. Melanie’s small hand rests gently in the curve of the younger woman’s—girl’s—waist, and for a few moments the laughter is muffled. Everyone is watching.

  It’s their father who ends it, laughing, calling them all to come inside.

  Sunday, the men go back to their jobs, and Sylvia leaves. Melanie makes daiquiris and lies out on the balcony, sleeping, while the girls dig a hole behind the dunes. “Just one thing, girls,” she says. “Stay away from that girl.”

  “You mean Brandy?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Why?” Trina asks.

  “Well, she’s kind of trashy. I know that’s not a nice thing to say. But I don’t think she even goes to school.”

  “You were dancing with her,” Allie says, and catches her eye.

  “Oh, that …” Melanie’s voice trails off. “Well, I’m a grown-up. You girls have fun.”

  A few minutes later, the girls all sit with Brandy beneath her shanty house, looking out at the bright water. It’s noon, and the sand is a bright white, bright enough to make Allie close her eyes against it. Brandy’s house is right up on the beach.

  “Don’t you worry it’ll get destroyed in one of the storms?” Trina asks.