by Skip Horack
The house belonged to an old classmate of Tommy’s, and a number of those SEALs had come as well. I got the sense my big brother had been like their little brother —he would have easily been five years younger than most of the platoon —and I was sitting on a couch with two of them. One was a tree trunk of a guy from out west, the other had a Hispanic accent. They called him Rico. It seemed a lot of the SEALs went by nicknames, and earlier the big SEAL had told me and my parents that Tommy’s had been Orion. He was steadily drinking. I think he might have been the only SEAL who was drinking, in fact. He was the biggest and the oldest, about thirty-five. School was his nickname, though once or twice I also heard someone call him Purcell, and after Rico left us for the bathroom he looked over at me. “I have to tell you something,” he growled.
“Okay,” I said, and he kept staring as I prepared for yet another adult to promise that everything happens for a reason, perhaps share some grief story of his own. Maybe even say that SEAL chant I’d been getting hammered with all day: You’ve lost a brother, kid, but you’ve gained a bunch of them too.
But no. “It wasn’t just a helo crash,” he said. “Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Nah, he went out like a hero.”
I was shy, but when I saw School was through talking I asked him what he meant. He said he’d spilled too much already, and as hard as it is for me to believe now, I must have screeched then, trying to squeeze more out of him. Tommy’s Dry Springs buddies came over, doing their duty, angry that I seemed angry, but the SEALs were kind enough not to laugh at them. These were men, and these were professionals. They didn’t make a hobby of fighting, and even School appeared to go from drunk to sober. It was a sight, watching them close ranks and be calm all at the same time. Level voices, thumbs in pockets, ready without looking ready —and that lack of posturing allowed Louisiana tempers to settle.
School and the rest of the SEALs pulled out for their Ruston hotel before I could throw any more questions his way, and I stayed at the house with the Dry Springs folk. Eventually a long-ago girlfriend of Tommy’s convinced the others she was all right to drive me home, and in the car I told Camille what the man called School had said to me about Tommy’s death. She just pet my brush cut and whispered, Try to put that away, sweetie. That’s not gonna make you hurt any less.
Camille was twenty-one to my fourteen, knew more about the ways of the world, so I took those words of caution to heart, at least for a while. Still, I did think to find out School’s real name. Camille dropped me off in front of my house at some graveyard-shift-at-the-chicken-hatchery hour, and after Mom finished fussing over me and went back to bed I opened the guestbook from the memorial service, flipping through pages until I hit upon the neat row of thirteen SEALs. Lionel Purcell. I wrote that down on my hand, but there was no need. It would stay burned in my brain from that day forward.
I didn’t realize it was lingerie night at Carl’s Lounge until I walked through the door. To drum up business, on occasion the owner brought in these women to parade around in lingerie and act like they were hawking underwear. I wasn’t in the mood for that, but there aren’t so many boozing options in Grand Isle. I drank up at the bar for a while, and a skinny girl named Sierra had just come by to wave raffle tickets at me for the third time when someone called my phone. I saw PRIVATE NUMBER and lost my nerve. Yes, I’d written that e-mail, but I also hadn’t expected things to happen right away.
“Wanna answer that?” Sierra asked.
I would say Sierra was in her twenties, but not by much. She was from Arabi—St. Bernard Parish—and wearing a red satin thing nearly the same color as her hair. Sometimes drinking can make me almost chummy. I said no, then told her all of it.
“Bad news,” she said.
“So what should I do?”
“I’d buy more tickets.” She bit down on her lip, twirled a finger in her Kool-Aid hair. She smelled of baby powder. “You sorta look like a guy in that pirate movie.”
“Depp? I get that a lot.”
“You wish.”
“I watch a shit ton of movies. Errol Flynn? I get him too.”
“Who? No. Just some dude rocking that same hack-and-whack you got going on. But your pirate isn’t ugly. Take a compliment.”
She had me marked as a pushover, another horny fool in offshore Red Wings, but I’d been hoping for a sign and this would have to do. See, I only have a foggy window of boyhood recollections of my brother, and every year I lose more. In maybe my last one I’m twelve years old and we’re stuck in a rainstorm together. And in the first, well, there are pirates. The family is in Disney World, and I’m as happy as I’ve ever been.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for that.” I passed Sierra a twenty, and she smiled. One of her lower canines had been capped in silver, so she was like a pirate herself. She tore four of the raffle tickets from the roll and tucked them into my jeans. I had a pocketful of them now.
“I don’t think you need to ever talk to that girl,” she said. “I never knew my daddy, and I never wanted to.”
But a little later PRIVATE NUMBER called again, and by then I’d pulled myself together. I hurried to the parking lot and picked up. “Hello?” I said.
“Is this Roy Joseph?”
“Joni?”
“This is her mother.”
They claim everyone, everywhere, has an accent. That saying a person has no accent is the same as saying a place has no climate. But the precise way that woman spoke did make me think of just such a sterile place. A white room with the thermostat set at seventy-five degrees.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I walked over to the LeBaron and sat on the trunk.
“My daughter tells me she contacted you. You wrote her this evening?”
“That’s right. Is this all some sort of put-on?”
“No, Mr. Joseph. Your brother and I weren’t a couple, but yes, we slept together once. He was her father —her biological father.”
In Dry Springs Tommy had done his fair share of dating. I’d always assumed he kept at that in the navy, and at thirteen I had been surprised when no Jane Doe surfaced to tell my family she’d lost the love of her life. But this was 2007. “Wait, please, back up,” I said. “Just once?”
“We met at a party,” she explained. “On the beach. He brought me home and left in the morning. That was all it was supposed to be. I never spoke to him again. But that January I discovered I was pregnant, then I saw on the news about his helicopter. After a lot of thought, I decided to have the baby.”
“How old is she?” I’d already done the conception-to-birth math in my head, but I was trying to catch her in a lie.
“She turned sixteen this month.”
That hit me like a crane block. September ’07, less sixteen birthdays, and around nine months in the womb, would be December 1990. Right when Tommy had deployed. So it was at least possible. “And you’re sure she’s his?”
“Entirely. There was no one else.”
“You’re gonna have to prove it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Anybody could call and say what you’re saying.”
“I’m not interested in proving anything to you, Mr. Joseph. And I only called because Joni is insisting.” I heard her sigh into the phone. “I didn’t mean for that to sound as rude as it did. My point is that we will be leaving you alone now, but please know how sorry we are for the loss of your brother.”
“I’m not asking y’all to leave me alone. You really never knew him? Other than that one night?”
“No. No, I didn’t. Not my finest hour. I couldn’t even remember his last name until I saw his photograph on TV.”
“And you’re in San Diego?”
“At one time.”
“And now?”
“I’d rather not reveal that.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“No.”
I saw a man come stumbling from Carl’s with a plastic cup in one hand and a broken cigarette in the other. He had his arms stretched out on either side of him like he was being crucified, and indeed —emaciated, bearded, chestnut hair down to his shoulders —he did resemble Jesus on the cross. Throw me in a Turkish prison, give me a year without scissors, a razor, a square meal, I’d be him.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment, but then she spoke. “Several months ago we hired someone to help us learn more about your brother, and that led us to you.”
“Hired someone?” Jesus had spotted me on the trunk of the LeBaron and was now strutting my way. I tried to wave him off, but he kept coming toward me. He was piss drunk and clucking, making little chicken noises.
“An investigator.”
I covered the phone with my bandaged hand and hollered at Jesus. “Come on,” I said. “I’m talking here.” He stopped about ten steps away and cocked his head, watching, but then I lobbed him one of my Winstons and he went wandering.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Sorry.”
She continued. “That was something Joni really wanted. So it was for her —but, to be candid, I had my own concerns.”
“Concerns?”
“Medical history. Whether there was anything I should be aware of for her sake, Mr. Joseph. Diseases, for example.”
“I’m fine with Roy. Even if you’re not gonna tell me your name.”
“Okay.”
“I guess your investigator found out about my parents?”
“He did. How horrible.”
“And you learned all this but never called me. Why?”
I was pretty certain why, but she’d put me in one of my martyr moods, and I wanted to make her say sex offender. Or at least I thought I did. She started to speak, but I interrupted her.
“That happened a long time ago,” I said. “The girl was in high school, but I was only nineteen myself. That doesn’t make it all go away, but you should know how young I was too.”
“It isn’t necessary for us to discuss that. After you wrote Joni tonight she told me what she had done, and now she understands it was a mistake. I’m very sorry. You must be completely taken aback.”
“Hundred percent.”
“I’m sure. You have every right to your privacy. We won’t be disturbing you again.”
“Tommy, my parents, those deaths were all accidents.” I didn’t really have anything more to add, but I was attempting to keep her from bailing. “Though there is some medical stuff I should mention. Dad’s dad passed not long after Tommy went missing, and after that the rest of my grandparents. Heart attacks across the board, I believe. All around age seventy.”
“Heart disease, then?”
“I suppose. Mom and Dad didn’t get on with their parents. I never even met them.”
“I see. Well, that’s —” She cleared her throat, and it was as if I could hear her thinking. “Is there anything else that might be important?”
“That was all I had insofar as family. No uncles, no aunts. But y’all already know that, don’t you?”
“I should probably tell you good-bye now.”
Then I realized something, and suddenly I was angry. “My mom and dad had a right to know they had a granddaughter, lady. That would’ve meant a lot to them.” My voice was rising, but I couldn’t stop. If what she was saying was true, for most of the six years my parents had lived after Tommy went, this girl had been out there. “That was a fucked-up thing to keep to yourself. How could you do that?”
The line went dead, and I looked across the parking lot. Jesus was over near Highway 1 watching cars cruise by. And though on some other night I might have gone over and steered him inside before he got clocked, on that night I was feeling selfish and low, and I left him standing there to fend for himself.
I stayed on at Carl’s, drinking and stewing, and later, just as I was about to leave, I won a prize in the lingerie raffle. Sierra brought over a black lace nightie in a cardboard box. She’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt that fit her like a sock. “I made it so you’d win,” she said. “Yep, yep. So you gotta tell me what happened to your hand.”
She had asked me this already, but I’d told her I didn’t want to talk about it. “Broken finger,” I said now.
“Aw, poor baby.” She looked around like she was making sure no one was eavesdropping on us. “You got a place? A real place? Not some fish camp in the marsh?”
“Real enough.”
“ATM by the jukebox. Gimme ten more Jacksons, I’ll make breakfast for you.”
“I’m speaking to a cook?”
“Quit messing.”
Every now and then, like maybe six times in the past decade —during the rowdiness of the annual Tarpon Rodeo, usually —I would find myself binging beside a flirtatious out-of-towner and we’d wind up in a bed together. But this business with Sierra, I had never really done anything like that before. I was her sucker, the chump she’d chosen to bleed dry, and cards were coming at me fast. Between the beers and the painkillers my thinking was off. Here was someone who didn’t seem repulsed or frightened by me, so I summoned some cash and walked with her to the LeBaron.
Pearl Lane. Sierra sat in one of my lawn chairs while I saw to Sam in his kennel, making sure he was set with food and water since he wouldn’t be sleeping in the Airstream. He was four years old, around my age in dog years but a puppy in these moments still, realizing I had come home, and his whinings went from excited to wounded, shaming his jailer as I walked away.
When I got back Sierra started saying something about me taking a shower, but I wasn’t too high on letting her out of my sight. Apparently she could see that. “I’m not planning to rob you,” she said, standing. “Where am I gonna run?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then shower up. I’m not asking. I’m telling.”
“I already had one today. I even shaved.”
“So? Shower again. It’s a new day today, anyways. Past midnight, Cinderella.”
I pulled the door open, and she followed me inside. After I switched on the lights she shimmied onto the counter beside the sink, keeping herself hunched so her skull wouldn’t rub against the ceiling.
“This ain’t so awful,” she said.
“Thanks.” It was hot in the Airstream. I went by her and put the AC on at full blast.
“You got any music?”
I didn’t have a CD collection or a stereo or such. They had music stations with my satellite-television package, and that was enough. Classic country and classic rock. I usually went for one or the other, depending upon my mood. I handed Sierra the remote control. “Check out the up channels,” I told her.
I made to kiss her then, but she turned her head. “Shower time,” she said. “You gotta, baby.” She slid off the counter and grabbed at my cheek. “Scrape those teeth too. But there’s not gonna be any kissing.”
“Really?”
“Really. That goes for any part of me, not just my mouth.”
I still didn’t love the idea of leaving her alone with my things, but I knotted plastic grocery bags over my bandaged hand and ducked into the bathroom, chomping on a toothbrush as I waited for the water to run warm. Soon my tile of a mirror began to fog, but I knew what I looked like. There are two basic cuts of roughneck —the neat-as-a-cat, military-esque type and the more unkempt, Roy Joseph sort —but, regardless, all of us who’ve been stinting long enough have the same weathered, high-mileage face. The same permanent squint.
I showered as quickly as I could while Sierra flipped around on the TV for a song she approved of. When I came out, rainy-haired and towel-wrapped, some boy-band tune was on and she was wearing the nightie
I’d won. She had her own hair up in one fist like a bright red squid and was spinning in a slow circle. I threw the plastic bags in the trash, and she tossed me a condom from a pink backpack she’d brought along with her from Carl’s.
“That’s better,” she said. “See?”
“I guess so.”
She plucked at the steel vial of Panther Mound dirt hanging from the chain around my damp neck. “What you got in there? Bumps?”
“Dirt. Dirt from where I grew up.” The vial had been threaded to seize closed forever. I couldn’t have unscrewed it even if I’d wanted to.
“Dirt?”
“It’s like a memento.”
She frowned. She wasn’t interested in that. “You swear to God?”
“That it’s not coke? Yes. I swear to God.”
“Too bad. Coke would get you kissed.” She tugged at the towel hitched to my waist, and I tried to stop her but she got it off. “What’s wrong? Stiffen up, limpy.”
“Give me a second.”
“Tick tock. There’s no waking me once I fall asleep.”
She let my towel drag behind her as she made for the bedroom in the back. I followed, then sat on the bed when she began dancing again.
“You think you could just lie next to me?” I asked.
“That’s how it works.”
I gave the condom back to her. “And sleep, I mean. Just sleep. Maybe let me hold you.”
That stopped her. First she looked puzzled, but then she looked pissed. Seeing that transformation play out was like watching a snake coil up. “Listen here,” she said. “I don’t give no refunds.”
“I’m not angling for one.”
“You a fag or something?”
“No.”
The nightie was too big for her, and one of the straps was hanging off her shoulder. She relaxed, then shrugged. “When I started doing this on the side everyone said that —that there’d be dates who’d only wanna talk —but I ain’t never seen it till now. Congrats.” She brushed at the other strap with her hand, and the nightie dropped around her ankles. She was all bones and hard edges. The AC had cooled the Airstream way down, and her skin was splotchy and covered with goose pimples.