Cheery story, Meredith says. When do they get eaten?
Galveston, oh Galveston, Elizabeth sings.
Cabeza de Vaca and his men stoke the smudge fires for the Karankawa to keep mosquitoes away. Soot in their nostrils and eyes all night long. Their skin dried, blackened.
Barbecue de Vaca, Zadie says.
Then one day, a day that will change everything, Cabeza de Vaca, he saves one of the Karankawa. Makes an incision in the injured man’s chest with a knife and removes an arrowhead pressing against his heart. The Karankawas’ eyes widen in amazement and fear. But before Cabeza de Vaca stitches him back up, he’s shocked to see other things in the man’s chest cavity. An opal class ring Cabeza de Vaca’s wife, Maria, had lost years before. A flesh-colored hearing aid. A stick of her pink coral lipstick. Her ivory-handled seam ripper. Cabeza de Vaca, always the showman, holds the objects from another world in his hand for everybody to see.
Zadie and Elizabeth cover their mouths in mock surprise.
Meredith rubs the scar along her abdomen.
After he’s stitched up, the Karankawa man opens his eyes. Rises. His dark skin shimmers with grease and soot. The air around him vibrates with a future he almost didn’t have.
The sun hammers Cabeza de Vaca’s bare chest until it shines like armor.
Meredith fans her face. Quite the hottie, she says.
One of our mothers isn’t sleeping much these days, they all say. She’s waiting.
The Karankawa, Jack says, gather around Cabeza de Vaca, their faces tight, and demand to know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
Tough crowd, Elizabeth says.
You know how to whistle, don’t you? Zadie says to Jack in her best Lauren Bacall. You just put your lips together and blow.
37
THE HIDEOUS MAN set fire to Hollis’s car. He couldn’t say exactly when this was. All his lovely things, gone. Books and maps and photos of the girls. All his talismans. In the backseat, Hollis had propped up his sleeping bag and pillow and blanket like the figure of a sleeping man. He’d hidden in the woods and waited. The fire, fueled by his possessions, was very bright.
38
ON THE PHONE, the caller said he’d read Rosa’s column. He said he thought he might be able to help. Might be able to identify the men on the DVD she’d found. He’d been in the shop that day. Could he see the video? The caller wouldn’t leave his name. He seemed young and distracted. At points during the conversation his voice seemed to fall off a cliff. Hello? she’d say. And then he’d fetch it back.
He told her a rambling story about an airplane crash. A baby cried in a field. Someone was lost. Someone came back. It made no sense.
Sir, she interrupted, can I ask you something? Why now? If you were in the shop, why wait until now to come forward? Have you called the tip line?
The caller said he was a father now and often thought about the girls. Then he said something that tumbled into the void, a tiny thing way down there.
Sir? she said. She could hear a child’s singsong voice in the background.
You have to tell the story, he said finally.
Blood thudded in Rosa’s ears.
39
THREE YEARS AFTER Michael’s parents divorced, when he was seventeen, his mother, Kay, met a man, an ocularist—a maker of prosthetic eyes—remarried, and moved to Chicago. She and Michael didn’t talk much anymore. A phone call at the holidays, Alice’s birthday, his own. Festive occasions, his mother called them. When she visited them in Austin once, they’d gone to the Zilker Botanical Gardens and Alice fed the koi in the pond. Michael’s mother wanted Alice to hug her and call her Grammy, but the heat had made Alice red-faced and irritable. She wanted Alice to try on clothes at the mall, but it was near Alice’s nap time and so they’d said their good-byes at the Ruby Tuesday while Alice wailed inconsolably about a stuffed tiger kitten that he’d later find wedged in the backseat of the car. Pulling away from them in the parking lot, his mother’s eyes shone with need, and it pained him to remember the way he and Andrew had always taken advantage of her, telling even transparent lies because she would believe anything.
Kay lived in a Chicago neighborhood called Ravenswood. She and the ocularist had gotten a great deal on a house not far from Lake Michigan, she’d told him a month ago. He should bring Alice for a visit in the summer, she said. Alice would love the beach, the aquarium, the Lincoln Park Zoo. His mother even mentioned Lucinda, saying she’d recently been in touch, asking Kay to send her some photos of Alice. We talked just like two mothers, she’d said, her voice brightening.
When Michael and Alice drove into Chicago it was late morning and he could feel the cold through the windows. Snow swirled in the road ahead of them. In the distance, low clouds halved the skyscrapers downtown. He’d never been to Chicago, and as they drove in on Interstate Fifty-Five and turned onto Lake Shore Drive, the sheer size of the city struck him. It seemed to go on and on, bounded by nothing except Lake Michigan, which was more like an inland sea.
He’d spoken with his mother before they left his dad’s, and she’d seemed irritated with him, but she’d covered quickly with talk of Alice. There was always a place there for them, she said. Still, she needed to talk to her husband, the ocularist, since his daughter, Elise, was graduating from DePaul that weekend. A little hectic, she said, but doable. She would make it work. It was a treat, an early Christmas present, she said, worry pinching her voice. Alice, picking up on the conversation, loudly dictated her Christmas list. Michael felt the room tilt a little, panic flutter through him. His dad had even spoken to his mother for a few minutes, his voice softening as if speaking to a child. He’d turned away from Michael while talking to her, but now and then he’d look over, widen his eyes in mock frustration. On the drive to Chicago, Michael had called his mother twice and left messages, saying they’d be there a day sooner than planned, but he hadn’t heard back.
Why had he called the reporter the day before they left? Out of guilt? Fear? He couldn’t be sure. He was worried about the video. Was he sitting at one of the tables? Standing in line? It was somehow tangled up with his dead brother, disquieting dreams about a baby crying in a field. A part of him wanted to confess to the reporter things he’d never done.
In the backseat, Alice was playing a game with her dolls and looking up every few minutes, saying, It’s snowing and there’s a bridge and there’s a man walking across it and there’s a ship way down in the water but it has sunk right there and is not moving no matter what people say and the man is wearing a red scarf and it’s cold out and I’m hungry for a Nutella sandwich and a little carton of milk.
Alice was excited by the waves crashing against the storm wall along Lake Shore Drive, so they’d exited at Montrose Avenue and followed the signs to the beach parking lot, where they could get a better view. Bundled in their inadequate coats and gloves, they walked along the lake wall for a little while in the snow, Alice throwing chunks of ice into the spray and wind. “It’s wonderful weather out,” she said under her scarf. She made a snowball, hit him in the shoulder, and laughed. He tossed one back too high that clipped the top of her head. She put a hand to her head and started to cry and he felt his legs go weak. “Fooled you!” she said, leaping away from him and laughing.
In the distance, the lake merged with the gray horizon until he couldn’t tell which was which. They were about to turn back for the car when he saw a white Mercury pull into the near-empty parking lot and make several slow loops around, as if looking for a space. Two cross-country skiers were gliding across the park. As they came alongside the parking lot, the Mercury’s driver’s window came down and he could see a man speaking with the skiers, his breath streaming. Then the skiers pointed to the park and then beyond it to the wall where he and Alice stood, and the skiers glided off, a little faster than they’d come, it seemed to Michael. The air was sharp in his nostrils. He took Alice’s hand and they went the other way along the wall, away from the lot, careful to avoid sli
ck spots. Far out in the lake he thought he saw the outline of a ship. After a while they circled back to the car, got in, and sat warming themselves. “My face fell asleep,” Alice said, pinching her cheek. She laughed in amazement.
Michael smoked a cigarette with the window cracked. There was no sign of the white Mercury. His car was nearly out of gas. He grabbed Alice’s backpack from the passenger seat—where he’d put the cash and jewelry he’d taken from his dad’s house—and pulled two twenty-dollar bills from a zippered pocket. He drove slowly around the marina, its bare white piers sticking up from the water, where he imagined yachts would be moored in the summer. On them, carefree people drinking, laughing.
“I can hear your teeth back there,” Andrew said. This was when Michael was twelve. They were crawling through the storm sewer, and Michael’s teeth were chattering. He was cold and scared. “Would you die for me?” his brother asked him once. “I mean, if you were up on the University Tower and this crazy guy with a gun said your brother could live if you’d jump, would you do it?” Andrew was passing his thumb through a lighter flame. Michael shrugged, said he didn’t know. Andrew laughed. “It’s a long way down, bro.”
Andrew’s friend Jeff, who always messed everything up, was down in the tunnel with them. “Why is your brother such a pussy?” Jeff’s voice said somewhere up ahead. Jeff was always talking about how he’d like to give it to Lisa Soto or Meghan Schmidt. Jeff had shown them some foreign porn movies once, videos that Jeff had stolen from his dad’s German friend and kept in a tackle box on his closet shelf. The people in them did things to each other that seemed somehow beyond their control, as if they’d better do it or else. As if they had a gun to their heads. Everything outside wanted in and everything inside wanted out. Seen up close, the jumbled body parts looked like voracious animals or insects engaged in some fierce combat. Michael clenched his teeth, moved faster in the tunnel. Water trickled between his knees. Every few feet something brushed his face or clung to his hair and he slapped wildly at his head. He was weak and everybody could see it, Michael thought. His insides were turned out like pockets.
At one point the storm sewer tunnel widened out and the ceiling rose and became a kind of room where all the tunnels converged. It smelled bad here. A mixture of shit and turpentine. Ahead of him, Andrew’s flashlight beam jittered along the floor. In one corner was a dirty twin mattress set high on plastic crates. All around, stacks of old magazines, used spray paint cans, glass jars. A camping lantern hung from a rope. Then Andrew turned his flashlight toward the ceiling, and bright shapes emerged out of the darkness. The painted naked body of a woman stretched above them. Her fleshy hips curved along a bulge in the ceiling. Oaks and cypresses grew from the dark tangle of her vagina. Between her breasts ran the blue veins of creeks and rivers that emptied at her navel into an iridescent sea. Her lower lip was pierced with a fishhook threaded with a silver chain. Her blue eyes were cast upward, like a saint’s. Michael’s knees grew weak, and something inside him fell silent. For a few seconds he thought his heart had stopped beating.
“I’d fuck her,” Jeff said. He laughed.
Andrew held the flashlight steady on the painted woman. The fishhook and silver chain gleamed.
Up ahead in one of the tunnels, there was a loud scuffling sound and Michael imagined a trapped animal. Its eyes burning with fear and need.
Michael remembered a family photo taken when he was six or seven. His mother is young, her hair braided in pigtails, standing with the three of them at a roadside overlook in Big Bend National Park. It’s late spring. Desert flowers are in bloom. Andrew and his dad are on the right, goofing around, making wild eyes and pointing at something below. Michael is standing in front of his mother. Her tanned arms drape his chest, holding him close, as if afraid he might lose his footing.
40
THE HIDEOUS MAN. Can you tell me what he looks like?” the giantess asked Hollis. She tried to hide her stature by leaning toward him, elbows on the picnic table, but he knew. Her left eye drooped a little, almost imperceptibly. Her ear lobes were large but not gangly. Proportional. Fitting for a giantess, he thought.
“It’s hard to say,” Hollis said. He fingered the names of Lil’ Steve and Ernesto carved into the picnic table beside her little red recorder. She said she was a reporter, not a cop, and he believed her. She laughed high in her nose (also relatively proportional) and didn’t smell like fear dressed up as order. Her smell was smooth and papery.
“Other people described a young man in a long coat.”
“Yes.” On the table, her shadow bent toward his.
“That’s who you saw?”
“There’s a great commotion in his face,” Hollis said.
“Commotion?”
“Like before a tremor,” Hollis said. He grinned though he knew he shouldn’t.
“A seizure, you mean?”
Hollis laughed. “No. Like in the earth,” he said. “A tremor in the earth.”
Grackles squawked from the trees.
When she smiled Hollis felt his sinuses open.
“He’s hard to picture? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Like before a tremor,” Hollis said. “All the animals in commotion.”
“Right,” she said, in a voice that nudged him along. She looked at him with her giantess eyes. It was like a child’s game, Hollis thought. She was waiting for him on the other side. Red rover, red rover, won’t you come over?
“Those girls,” the giantess said. “Their families. You can help them.”
An invitation to a party, he thought. A gathering of friends.
The creek was rushing down below, smooth, smooth. They were swimming in it even now. It filled the shallow sea.
The sun slanted through the trees.
“He works downtown,” Hollis said, though he wasn’t sure how he knew this. “One of the big hotels.” With his finger Hollis flicked a J-shaped piece of dried bird shit off the table. He looked at the giantess. Her eyes grew bright.
Red rover, red rover.
41
WHEN ROSA TURNED eight, her dad began dating the woman who would later be her stepmom. A relatively happy period, she remembered. Her dad’s girlfriend was in nursing school in St. Louis, so they’d take the train from Chicago some weekends and stay there. When they came back to their house in Chicago one Sunday night, something was wrong. They stood on the front porch with their suitcases and her dad put the key in the lock and tried to open the door. But it wouldn’t open. In a strange voice, one that made her think again of the woman lying in the field, he asked her to sit down on the steps. He pried open the door enough to find that their bicycles and their fridge were wedged into the narrow entryway to block the door. When they finally got inside, they discovered that someone had broken into the house by smashing through a floor-to-ceiling window in the downstairs family room. It had rained while they were gone, and water pooled on the wood floor beneath the window. The air had a musty smell. The downstairs rooms themselves were empty, everything stolen. The house echoed. She ran up the stairs, where her bedroom was. Near the top landing, her father’s dark blue sport coat lay crumpled against the railing, his empty cuff link box beside it. Her room, though, was as she’d left it. Her treasures—her red guitar, owl bank, art easel, rock polisher and cigar boxes full of polished rocks and bottle caps—all in place. Why had they taken everything else and spared her room? Her treasures? She remembered her dad putting her to bed that night, saying that she shouldn’t be scared, because the reason the thieves broke into the house was precisely because they weren’t there. This made sense to her but also seemed somehow inadequate. Her dad tried to put her at ease. He’d patted her back to put her to sleep after reading to her. But she wasn’t scared at all. She was amazed. All her treasures spared. It seemed a miracle. God intervening even though they weren’t believers. In her mind, she saw again the scene from The Ten Commandments she’d watched on TV the week before, the Israelites painting lamb’s blood on their
doors so the shadow of death would pass them by.
Rosa’s dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and she flew up to Chicago to see him. The cancer wasn’t advanced, but his PSA count was way up. On the phone he was lighthearted, said there wasn’t anything to worry about. If you live long enough, you get it. He told her a joke: “A man goes to see his doctor for his test results and the doc says, ‘I’ve got some bad news. You’ve got cancer and dementia.’ The man says, ‘Whew, I really dodged a bullet. I sure thought I had cancer.’ ” Her dad laughed. On the phone, she could hear him take a drag off a cigarette, exhale. He’d quit five years before, with the help of some drug that made you lose your sense of taste, appetite. His good spirits somehow made her feel orphaned already.
He mentioned on the phone that they were going to do some kind of targeted radiation. He wanted her there, she suspected, though he wouldn’t say it. She’d intended to fly to Chicago three weeks ago, but had gotten sidetracked by her fifth anniversary story on the murders. Interviews. The video. Detective Robeson. Hollis Finger. A recent lead on the young man in the overcoat. The caller. And then right before she left, there had been a break in the case, a person of interest identified. She’d heard it from her sources in the department.
At Midway Airport, standing near the luggage carousel, her father seemed more gaunt and stooped than she remembered. He was giddy while they waited for her luggage, touching her back and shoulders from time to time as if making sure she was really there.
“You get lovelier with age.”
“In the genes,” she said, and smiled.
“Got that right,” he said. “There’s some who hold my good looks against me.”
“It’s lonely at the top,” she said.
“I saw your mother recently. At a Tribune retirement party.”
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