Corpus Christi

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  Jesse’s father was a man named Luis Ortega, and he had operated a bucket crane in the pits, but when I knew him, he was laid off and uninterested in returning to work. He stood six feet tall and wore western shirts with a turquoise necklace. To make money, Luis brought animals in from Mexico— snakes, monkeys, and birds, toucans and parrots and macaws. He drove a rusted-out Ford Ranger with a camper, so on those weekends when he returned from Celestun or Reynosa, he stashed what he called his “exotics” in burlap sacks and crossed the border without trouble. The animals stayed in the house until he sold them, and when I visited, the birds squawked and got wings stuck through the bars of their little cages. The monkeys threw their shit at you.

  Jesse was a year older than me and had been with girls older than him. He was unlike the friends I’d had before moving to Southport, clean-cut, parochial-school boys who would have ridiculed his accent behind his back and who would have avoided making eye contact with him in gym. They would have been surprised by our friendship, would have expected me to be afraid of him, too. And I was, but I enjoyed his company because life moved faster with him and it made me feel older, more in the thick of things. Some nights after football games, he lifted Luis’s keys and we took girls swimming in the pool behind the Catalina Motel. If we couldn’t do that, we drove to the bay and gigged flounder and netted blue crabs. Luis would be drunk and watching Mexican wrestling by then, or passed out, or trying to recoup his losses at the dog track in Corpus, so if he entered our minds it was only to think that we didn’t have to worry about him.

  The day I want to describe was a Saturday in August. Jesse called early that morning—so early I suspected he’d not slept the night before—and he invited me to the beach, which I thought sounded fine. He had some girls lined up was my guess, or he wanted to catch snakes in the hummocky dunes and sell them at the pet store where Luis sometimes got rid of his birds. I told Jesse where I would be working—that summer I cleared overgrown lots for an investor—and expected him to meet me soon after I arrived, but I waited an hour before Luis’s Ranger sped toward the property in front of its dust cloud. Jesse’s hair was long and he wore black jeans with what my mother called his Mexican wedding shirt. She considered Jesse trouble.

  “Who kept you up?” I asked. Jesse was rubbing his eyes. The air conditioner blew cold.

  “Birds,” he said. “We’ve got a house full. No one wants them right now.” He eased the Ranger onto the road, then began steering with his forearm at the top of the wheel. Miles passed with only the noise of driving, the wind slicing around the truck and the dashboard rattling. The clock showed ninefifteen and the sky was still washed in pinks and lavenders, like the soft colors inside shells.

  “Luis is serious about a woman,” Jesse said eventually. A row of lantana bushes streamed by, and two pump jacks, motionless and miles apart, rolled over the horizon. “She sleeps over while her husband works shifts at the refinery. She calls herself Fancy, but I doubt it’s her real name.”

  “It could be,” I said. “I went to grade school with a girl named Season.”

  Jesse glanced in the rearview mirror, then adjusted it. We passed a fireworks stand, just a plywood box painted red, white, and blue with faded ribbons hanging from the roof. We were traveling west, heading toward Southport.

  “Luis came in my room last night.” Jesse shifted in his seat. “I thought the big bastard would break my bed.”

  He wanted me to say something—I felt that—but I fixed my eyes outside and waited. Some grackles were scavenging in a sorghum field. Finally he said, “I pretended to sleep. Then he started talking. Not even whispering, just jabbering in his regular voice.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He feels like he’s woken up in another man’s life. And he said love has no conscience. It was crazy talk. I thought maybe he was dying.”

  We drove under a Fourth of July banner that was still stretched over Main Street, and entered Southport. I didn’t know what to say to Jesse. I saw the building where my mother and I rented an apartment above the Yellow Rose, the bar where she waitressed, and her curtains were still drawn. I assumed she’d stayed up late again, talking with her sister in San Francisco. “Maybe we’ll move out there,” she’d said into the phone two nights before, “and make a new start under the redwoods. I’ll find a job and put Curtis in private school.” When my father left two years before, we’d moved from the Hill Country and settled in Southport to make a new start by the ocean. I’d always doubted we would stay there long, so it didn’t bother me to hear my mother talking.

  Jesse turned off Main Street and onto Farm Road 53, which runs south. He said, “I told Luis he was full of shit.”

  “Was he drunk?” I tried to picture Luis sitting in the dark, philosophizing. I’d not known him to talk much unless he was drinking, but he was not my father and I did not live with him.

  “I didn’t think that, but it’s possible. He asked me to tell him a secret.” Jesse glanced at me. “So I said I was leaving today, running away. I told him you were going, too, and we were stealing his truck.”

  “You said I was going?”

  Jesse shrugged, looked out his window. The Catalina Motel came into view ahead of us, the VACANCY sign glowing faintly against the morning sky. We were nearing the string of resale shops where shrimpers hocked their belongings between good hauls.

  “Luis didn’t believe me,” Jesse said. “He wants us to grab some things from Fancy’s house, before her husband’s shift ends this afternoon. It’s her big getaway.” Jesse didn’t look at me. We were driving away from the beach and toward the port and ship channel. The smell of exhaust seeped into the cab, and caliche pelted the floorboard under my feet. “If a red Chevy’s in the driveway, it belongs to her old man and we’ll turn around and let Mr. Hardass handle it.”

  I didn’t argue, because Jesse’s mind was already made up. The road turned to asphalt and we continued south, with little ahead of us except puddles of heat that opened, then evaporated on the blacktop. There were cotton fields and cornfields, and the sun looked heavy, syrupy—it warmed my face and arm through the window, and my eyes started getting drowsy as we drove. We passed a few cars, but mostly the road was quiet. Jesse gunned the engine and swerved at some seagulls on the shoulder, then he laughed when I grabbed the dashboard. Eventually a little house emerged on the horizon and it seemed nice from the distance, but when we were upon it, the windows were boarded over and I saw that no one had lived there in a long time.

  THE NEIGHBORHOODS ALONG THE SHIP CHANNEL are poor and neglected, mostly small tract houses rented by servicemen or Vietnamese shrimpers or families who cannot afford anything better. The air conditioner had quit on us, and I smelled the rotten-egg odor of the oil refineries across the bay, where Fancy’s husband worked. We drove slowly and looked for a street called Lucille. Jesse’s mood was sour, though I also believed the idea of breaking into Fancy’s thrilled him. I was not excited about it. I hoped that we would see the red Chevy at Fancy’s house and step away from whatever was poised to happen, but when we found it, her narrow seashell driveway was empty and Jesse steered in.

  The front door was unlocked and when Jesse opened it, cold air rolled out of the house the way it rolls out of motel rooms—I could hear a window unit humming. The living room was clean, furnished with a couch and chair and television; it smelled lemony. A brass-framed mirror and a painting of some mallards hung on the walls, but there was nothing else, and the sparseness made it seem like a space where people slept but did not live. I felt giant in that little room, as though my slightest movement would shake the house. Jesse slipped into the hall saying, “Hello. Hello.” I thought to wait in the truck, but didn’t want to go outside alone.

  Jesse began rummaging through the rooms, opening and closing drawers and closets, while I sat at Fancy’s kitchen table. A stack of bills addressed to Phillip Bundick lay across from me, as well as a scrapbook someone had been filling. The pictures were from the beach, mostly
of a dark-haired woman wading with a little girl wearing blow-up arm floats. The woman looked too young to be the girl’s mother, maybe only a few years older than me or Jesse. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face, and in one photo, her nipples, small and dark, showed beneath her white bathing suit. In another shot, a man held a dead rabbit over a campfire, and below the picture were the words “Bunny cooks a bunny,” written in a woman’s looping, optimistic script.

  “I can’t find her jewelry,” Jesse said. He opened the refrigerator behind me, throwing a triangle of light over the table and pictures. “But I packed a bag of her clothes. And he’s set with guns and knives. We could pawn them in Corpus.”

  “We’re too young. They wouldn’t let us.”

  Jesse closed the refrigerator and the light over the pictures vanished. He pressed a beer can to his forehead, rolled it across his brow then back again. He said, “You know all the impossibilities.”

  “Maybe she hides the jewelry from her husband,” I said.

  “Maybe he hid it from us.”

  Jesse opened the beer and the snap of the tab cracked through the house. The small bag he’d stuffed with Fancy’s clothes lay inside the hall and after a swallow of beer, he unzipped it and removed a pink negligee. He pinched it by the lacy straps, as if it disgusted him. “How’s this?”

  “It smells like strawberries,” I said. Seeing the teddy made me feel like a child, and I wanted to leave. “We should get going.”

  “It suits her,” he said. Jesse wiped his face on the satin, then crammed it back in the duffel. “She’s fruity.”

  He leaned close to the table, peering at the picture showing the woman’s nipples. I smelled the beer and his sweat.

  “That’s her,” he said. Then after another pull from the can, he added, “More or less.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but didn’t care to ask, and Jesse disappeared into the back of the house again. I thought he was getting a little drunk, that maybe he’d been drinking earlier that morning, and that we would not go to the beach. I studied the picture again. I wondered what Fancy had been thinking right then, if she knew Luis yet or if this was a happier time in the life with her husband. She wasn’t smiling in the photo, which made me believe she hadn’t wanted the picture snapped at all.

  Ten minutes passed before Jesse came down the hall with Fancy’s jewelry box, a little black hutch with an Oriental dragon slithering across its lid. Something made me believe he’d found it earlier, though I couldn’t say what that was. “Let’s go see Luis,” he said. “We’ll bring this back early and collect a reward.”

  “Okay,” I said, maybe too quickly, and stood up. “What about the beach?”

  “We’ll go later. I want you to see her. She cooks naked.”

  I shut the scrapbook and thought I wouldn’t mind seeing Fancy’s body, but I supposed she never cooked that way and Jesse was only saying words.

  “She brought some shark meat over yesterday. They’re grilling it tonight. You’re invited.” Jesse placed the jewelry box on the counter and surveyed the kitchen, as if he’d lost something. He leaned against the wall. A car passed outside, then when its noise died away, I heard the din of the refrigerator and crickets trilling in the yard. I thought we would have left by then.

  “I could run away today,” Jesse said. He made a fist, then fanned his fingers. “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Everyone has.”

  “The world is different than we think,” he said. His eyes caught something behind me—maybe his reflection in the brass mirror—and he asked, “How old do I look?”

  “Seventeen,” I said. “You’re seventeen.”

  “If you didn’t know me, how old would I be?” He puffed out his chest, straightened his posture.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not good at this.”

  “I could pass for twenty or twenty-one and enlist right now.” Jesse’s chin and cheeks were smooth, so he looked like a boy, not even a young man of his age, and I thought the recruiters would laugh if he tried fooling them. “When I get a pilot’s license,” he said, “I’ll fly my jet under bridges.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” I lied.

  “Luis is 4-F,” he said. “It means he’s more harm than good.” Saying that seemed to satisfy him, and I sensed we were about to head out when he added, “I hate the fucking beach. I never want to go again.”

  A quality I’d not heard before, a rawness, weighted Jesse’s voice. “Okay,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  “If I ran away, I’d go somewhere without water.” Jesse raised his eyes to me, then gazed into the front room with its few pieces of furniture. “Somewhere where the earth is solid.” And I realized Jesse wasn’t drunk at all, but that he hated Fancy for staying in his house and hated his father for being his father and that maybe he hated me because he knew I saw that. I was glad not to be Jesse then, and it relieved me when he pushed himself away from the wall and started outside.

  We drove with our windows down and the landscape inched by without change—dry, yellow fields running alongside the two-lane road. To the east, smoke from a scorched crop lingered against the rock-white horizon. We were heading north. Neither of us spoke much during the drive, though eventually I said, “I’d go somewhere with snow.”

  PHILLIP BUNDICK’S RED CHEVY SAT IN JESSE’S driveway, the driver’s door yawning open. When I saw it, I swallowed, heard the muscles roll and contract in my throat. Jesse muttered something in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. He braked—I remember how softly he pressed the pedal—but let the truck roll forward and parked on the road a short distance from the house. His eyes stayed on the house. A window fan propped open the front door, but from our view it was impossible to see inside.

  “We should call someone,” I said.

  Jesse rubbed the back of his neck, something he did when he got nervous, and cut the ignition. He stashed Fancy’s jewelry box under his seat, something I wouldn’t have thought to do, and pushed the duffel behind my heels. “Go call someone,” Jesse said. “Maybe your mother or the cavalry or the President.” Then he was hopping the ditch and crossing his yard. He stepped onto his porch without hesitating and went inside the house and out of my vision.

  The engine pinged and clicked as it cooled. A boy and girl who lived next door to Jesse rode past on bicycles, locks of sweaty hair clinging to their foreheads. They had grown since I last saw them. The girl stood and started pedaling hard, then the boy raced after her and they were gone. I tried to recall when I’d last ridden a bicycle but couldn’t, could hardly remember learning to ride one. I thought of my mother, wondered if she’d woken yet. If she was awake, I hoped she was visiting with one of her friends or watching her soap operas and not worrying about me. Then I climbed from the truck, eased my door closed, and started for the house.

  “Who the Jesus are you?” Phillip Bundick said when I appeared in the door. He was holding Luis against the wall with a black snub-nosed pistol pressed into his throat. For a moment the only part of my body was my heart, pumping so hard I felt it inside my head. Jesse stood just inside the threshold facing his father and Phillip Bundick, while Fancy sat on the couch, her knees bent to tuck her feet beside her. Her hair was blond now, unbrushed, and her hands covered her eyes. She wore a red silk kimono with a yellow dragon embroidered on the shoulder. Fancy looked recently woken; she and Luis both did; he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Phillip Bundick stomped his boot and the house rattled—the framed needlepoints on the wall, the table in front of Fancy and the empty bottles on it, the windows. A bird screeched in another room.

  Phillip Bundick pushed the gun deeper into the fat under Luis’s jaw, which made him flatten his palms against the paneling. “Well,” he said and cut his eyes at me again.

  “He’s my friend,” Jesse said. “He’s meeting me here to go crabbing.”

  “Have you been in my house, too?” Phillip Bundick leaned his weight into Luis and stomped again, twice.

  I opened my mout
h to speak, without any idea how to answer, but Fancy said, “What difference does that make now, Bunny?” She raised her head from her hands, wiped her eyes, and momentarily the only sounds were her sniffling and the fan in the front door.

  “Because I’m not accustomed to men gallivanting through my house unless I’ve invited them,” he said. He twisted his neck, then focused on Luis’s chest, pale and hairless, like another stomach. Luis stood on his tiptoes to try and gain some leverage, but soon he relaxed. Then without turning his head, Phillip Bundick found me with his eyes. “Do you know your friend’s father makes a habit of putting his pecker in places it doesn’t belong?”

  “Oh, Christ, Bunny,” Fancy said. Jesse glanced at her as if she’d spoken out of turn. My hands felt heavy at my sides, as awkward as boxing gloves, and I wanted to cross them behind my back, but stayed still.

  “Well,” Phillip Bundick said in a defeated tone, “you should know that about him. And my wife is recently one of those places.”

  “They’re just babies,” Fancy said. At another time, I thought she would have made a scene and stormed from the room, but Phillip Bundick twisted his fist and turned his knuckles against Luis’s throat and Fancy did not move. He didn’t look violent. His arm shook from the pressure it took to hold Luis that way, and I thought he probably enjoyed his wife calling him Bunny, that maybe she was the only person in the world who called him that. Phillip and Fancy Bundick, it occurred to me, were much older than I’d imagined and the pictures on their table were from years before; I did not know who the little girl might be. Phillip Bundick seemed about to say something then, maybe to Luis or Fancy or to himself, but he just clenched his jaw and squinted his eyes. His face flushed. Then he rammed Luis between the legs with his knee. It was a short, solid blow, and Luis buckled.