Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  He didn’t hear Laura come out. Nor did she say anything when she stood beside him on the patio. She just offered him a cup of coffee. He wasn’t surprised or disappointed to see her there—he thought she’d been awake most of the night, too, though neither tried to engage the other—but just accepted her presence as a given. Of course she would come out this morning. She was his wife, the mother of his two boys. The coffee steamed. It was too hot to drink, so he kinked the hose and dribbled some cool water into her mug, then his. Then he opened up the hose again and placed his thumb over the nozzle to arc water into the far part of the yard. The sun-grayed boards on the fence turned a pleasing brown when the water hit. Until they dried, they would look new.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Eric said.

  “I talked with Griff yesterday.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He said Justin feels lonesome.”

  “Lonesome.”

  “His word,” she said.

  Eric pivoted away from Laura to wet down the other side of the yard. He took care not to let any of the water spray the boys’ windows. He didn’t want to risk waking them. Then, before he thought better of it, before he realized he’d been marshaling his nerve to speak the words all night, he said, “I’ve been watching the Buford house.”

  “The Buford house.”

  “Ever since he made bail,” he said. “I park a little ways away. I’ve been telling you I was at school or running errands, but I’ve been watching their house. I’m sorry to have to admit that.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Not even once,” he said. “I was convincing myself he wasn’t there, but yesterday my father came and found me. I guess Mayne told him what I was doing. I guess he’d noticed me.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t call the cops.”

  “I know,” Eric said.

  “You could’ve gotten arrested.”

  “Mayne wants to cut a deal. He wants me to stop parking out there and to let him take his wife and Dwight out on the water the day of the Shrimporee.”

  “The Shrimporee that’s coming up? The one that’s hardly three weeks away?”

  “In exchange, he thinks he can get Dwight to change his plea.”

  “Cecil’s been negotiating with him? This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. She turned and took a few distracted steps toward the house, then walked along the fence and stood near the edge of the yard with the new distance between them. She started crying a little. She said, “What happens after they have their lovely day on the water and he doesn’t plead guilty?”

  Eric fanned the water over the grass. He said, “I don’t think we can take a trial. Garcia said Buford’s lawyer could tie this up for years with delays. I called him yesterday to ask his advice.”

  “Why am I not part of any of these conversations? Conversations about my son’s life.”

  “Our son,” he said.

  “Why am I just hearing about this now?”

  “I called from my father’s, just to ask if what Mayne was proposing would even work. If he could still change his plea. He can.”

  “So it’s decided? It’s a done deal? They get to have their time on the water? A nice day celebrating what he’s getting away with? What he did to Justin? How he hurt our son?”

  “Cecil called him last night.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning yes. Meaning it’s a done deal.”

  “None of this adds up,” she said. She ran her fingers through her hair, crossed her arms, and she did, at that moment, seem more confused than angry. Quietly, she said, “I was coming outside to bring you coffee and to tell you what Griff had said and—”

  “Cecil gave me a gun.”

  “He what?”

  “It’s a pistol he saw me looking at in Loan Star a while back. He gave it to me yesterday. It’s in our truck now.”

  “You were looking at guns? I don’t know who I’m talking to right now. I don’t know what language you’re speaking.”

  “Mayne wants to push off before sunrise that day. He wants to leave before people start gathering for the Shrimporee that morning,” he said. “We’ll be there before they are.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and my father.”

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “Then we drive to Mexico and drop him off. We tell him he’s lost his American citizenship.”

  “Where does the gun come in?”

  “To persuade him to get in the car.”

  “Eric,” she said, but didn’t go on. Then she tried again, saying, “I don’t know … This doesn’t seem …” But what could she say? The only sound was the water pushing through the hose and pattering on the grass. The morning came up quickly, the sky filling with color that overtook the jet contrails. Lonesome, Eric thought. It seemed another failure, something else he needed to make right. He was already off to a poor start. His father had insisted that Eric not tell Laura, and he’d vowed he wouldn’t, but he wanted her to know what he was willing to do. This is who I am, he wanted to say. Remember me like this. He’d already said too much, though. He thought she might say something, or maybe just take his hand and lay her head on his shoulder until he finished watering the yard. She didn’t. He couldn’t hear or see what she was doing. His back was still to her. She might have retreated into the house, leaving as silently as she had come. To his mind, he was already alone.

  27

  THE DAY BEFORE THE BODY WAS RECOVERED IN THE CORPUS Christi ship channel, the residents of Southport were scrambling to prepare for the Shrimporee. This was the first Friday in September. Blankets of heat, packed tight with humidity, lay over the town. Steam wafted from the still-damp asphalt. A ragged unnamed tropical depression had washed ashore earlier that week, and with it came days of rain. The storms were long and gray, messy at times, and loud, too, blurring and battering when wind got behind them. Station Street flooded for a few hours. Fences fell, and trees, snapping, exposed the blond wood inside the trunks, a color so raw it looked obscene. Tides rose. Ferry service was intermittent, then entirely suspended until the weather slacked off. A few boats in the marina got knocked around, bashed into the docks; one took on water and capsized. Lightning struck a tree out on the blacktop highway, and a driver swerved off the road, water sluicing and barreling over the car before it wound up in the ditch. The area needed the rain—lake levels were down and the fields were parched and the temperatures had been spiking day after day—but the weather had also halted the considerable work required before the mayor could ring the Shrimporee bell.

  Now, on that boiling Friday, men were hustling to rig up the Ferris wheel and smaller carnival rides, to assemble the dunking booth and hoist the stage for the musicians, beauty pageant, and shrimp-eating contest, and to erect the remaining sixty-odd vendor booths. They’d started early, laboring under generator-powered lights long before birds began calling for morning. They didn’t break for lunch, but ate sandwiches and tacos between hammer swings. They rubbed handfuls of crushed ice on the back of their necks, the inside of their elbows, and over their sun-ruddied faces. They soaked bandannas in thermos water, then tied them around their heads. They did everything they could to push through, to stand against the lost time.

  When the storm had been at its worst, when it stalled just offshore and whipped the coast with one gritty band of rain after another, there was talk of scrapping the Shrimporee for the first time in four decades. (The festival was founded by the Chamber of Commerce and the Fraternal Order of Eagles to commemorate Southport’s centennial and to generate revenue for local merchants. That the Shrimporee had never been canceled was a point of pride in the community, a testament to its collective resolve.) But as the weather abated, talk turned to expediting the preparations. The Chamber called for volunteers—men with trucks and trailer hitches, bakers and electricians, anyone who was willing to sweep waterlogged debris from downtown sidewalks. Restaurants and families with kitchen space were asked to boil p
ots of shrimp for jambalaya and étouffée. Children were invited to blow up as many balloons as they could. Church groups pitched in, and members of the Coast Guard and VFW, the high school football team and booster club and 4-H club. By lunchtime on Friday, the prettiest stretch of Station was being cordoned off and lined with streamers and bunting and the children’s balloons. The high school band rehearsed in the mucky baseball field. The Junior League put finishing touches on parade floats; the Castaway Coffee Club brought coffee and kolaches to the volunteers. Everyone watched the sky and the bay—now just smudged mirrors of each other—and tried to divine their future from the scroll of clouds.

  Since his youth, Eric had associated the festival with the end of summer and the beginning of the school year, which always started the following week. It was a threshold. A line of demarcation. He always felt a little older on the other side of it, as if what had come before was suddenly unreachable. This year’s festival was also imbued with a kind of providence. If it happened, if the weather stayed clear and the town could put the pieces together by late this evening, then he could believe that his father’s plan would work. That it was just. That it was not simply right, but solely and absolutely right, that there were no other options. If the Shrimporee fell apart because some remnant of the storm came ashore or workers couldn’t complete the job in such torpid heat, then he’d take it as a sign that the plan should be aborted and Dwight Buford should stand trial. Whether he hoped the festival would be canceled changed every half hour. Every fifteen minutes. Every five.

  Laura had been distant and surly with him since they’d talked on the patio. With the boys, she was the opposite; she seemed relaxed, taking Griff shopping for school clothes and mapping out Justin’s private studies. Having something to work toward had always grounded and invigorated her. For weeks she’d been wearing her dolphin pendant, earrings, and bangles that clacked together as she watered the remaining plants. She carried herself like a woman who’d gotten a raise, but when Eric tried to engage her, her affect flattened out. She went silent. Last week, she’d had coffee at the Castaway Café with Tracy Robichaud to discuss plans for the Shrimporee, but with Eric she would relay only that Justin’s event would be short and sweet. Her reticence scared Eric, left him feeling vulnerable and paranoid. Their longest exchange had been her saying she didn’t want him keeping the gun in the truck. She’d been adamant, confoundingly so. “Put it in the garage or under the house or in your sock drawer, I don’t care, just get it out of the truck,” she said. They were cleaning up after supper one night, and although he’d promised to remove the pistol after the boys went to bed, she wasn’t satisfied. She said, “Now, please.” So he’d wrapped it in an old bath towel and shoved it behind his dress boots high in the closet.

  She didn’t approve or understand, but he hoped she would eventually forgive him. Or he hoped she would eventually relent enough to see the decision from the perspective he was trying to convince himself was his. He had an opportunity to make their lives better, to restore some semblance of comfort and safety, an opportunity to prove—to his family and to himself—how much he longed for their happiness and what he was willing to sacrifice to ensure it. Had she given him the chance at any point in the past three weeks, he would have told her what had been going through his mind lately, the refrain of Texan soldiers leaving their families to fight at the Alamo: It’s better for a son to grow up in a country without a father than to grow up with a father and no country. He wanted Laura to perceive his fear and watch him press on, to watch him carry it with him. So last night, when she returned from a late shift at Marine Lab, when the house was loud with the last of the rain on the roof and wind slammed against the siding, and she had, without a word, straddled Eric, he was stunned. And worried. Worried that his reaction should be less grateful, less shocked. Worried that he was being duped in some way. Worried, finally, that what had happened with Tracy would happen again, that his mind would fill with thoughts of Justin and Dwight Buford and guilt, and his body would fail, but soon Laura was guiding him inside her, and he could only hear their breathing and the storm. Her skin tasted of salt water and smelled of rain, of the violent clouds that had opened over her.

  “You don’t have to do it,” she said, her head on his chest.

  “I should’ve done it as soon as he was released,” he said. “It should already be over.”

  JUSTIN HAD BEEN DOING WELL WITH HIS DRIVING. PARALLEL parking, driving over the Harbor Bridge, the rules-of-the-road quizzes—nothing fazed him anymore. He’d also settled on a layout for his room, a layout that seemed to Eric very similar, if not identical, to the original. His sleep schedule was starting to even out. Lonesomeness still surrounded him like a moat.

  Griff’s stitches had dissolved the week before, and he seemed more himself. Or he seemed himself, but a little older and more jaded, as if he’d emerged from a long sleep whose dreams had hardened him. His younger son, looming larger. Last Monday, Eric had peeked into Griff’s room and glimpsed him holding Sasha, letting the snake convey from one hand to the next, and though he wasn’t as confident as Justin, he no longer looked afraid. Curious, Eric thought. He looked curious. Then, on Wednesday night, when they were all playing a board game Fiona had brought over and lightning was scratching the sky and a clap of thunder rattled the windows and shook the house with such force that the girl jumped in her seat, Griff had impulsively reached for her hand to comfort her. There’d been no hesitation, no concern for who would see or what they’d think. Once the thunder had passed, he brought her wrist to his lips and kissed her pale skin. Eric and Laura and Justin exchanged quick, saucer-eyed glances—each of them thinking, Well, look at that—and they were bound furtively together by the sweet surprise of it all.

  That Friday, the last day of summer school, Eric dismissed his students early. They wanted to link up with their parents and friends pitching in with the Shrimporee preparations. Eric usually made an end-of-the-term speech, encouraging them to pay attention to history as they moved into the future, but today he was distracted, thinking about the pistol on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. Thinking of all that it presaged, all that it might bring to bear by tomorrow. So he simply told the students to enjoy the Shrimporee and to get ready for the new school year. They left the room single file, hooting and hollering and high-fiving him. A few of the more sentimental students hugged him. As if they were sending him off to war.

  When Eric got home, Griff was downing a glass of cranberry juice in the kitchen. He and his brother had spent the morning working in the yard, collecting fallen branches, while Laura went grocery shopping. “She wanted to go before the Shrimporee to avoid the lines,” Griff said, rinsing out his glass. “Now she’s taking a nap. Justin is, too.”

  “What say we take a drive?” Eric said. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before that moment, and yet now he wanted it more than anything.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Of course not,” Eric said. “We just haven’t spent much time together lately.”

  “Oh,” Griff said. “Okay, sure, yeah.”

  In the truck, Griff asked if they could go to the Teepee pool. He wanted to see if the rest of the coping was gone. To avoid the Shrimporee detours and stalled traffic, they tacked through back streets strewn with branches and toppled garbage cans. Eric watched for Mayne’s Mercedes and Tracy’s Volvo, and he tried to remember the last time he’d ridden with just Griff in the truck. He seemed to take up more space in the cab. He also seemed diffident, like he still thought the drive would end with his father accusing him of something, grounding him. The streets got worse closer to the water. On Beechwood, one of the snapped trees cut off the route completely, so Eric had to twist and look through the rear window as he reversed down the block. He turned onto Mary Street with its canopy of mesquite that he’d always loved, then onto Jackson and eventually Coral Road.

  “Papaw used to like to drive around after storms, looking at what had gotten hit and what had been left u
ntouched,” Eric said. “My mother called those drives ‘expeditions.’ ‘We’re going on one of Daddy’s expeditions,’ she’d say. He liked to go through people’s garbage, too. If he saw something he could use, he’d take it.”

  “That’s probably why he works at Loan Star. Because it’s full of things people don’t want anymore.”

  “I bet you’re right,” Eric said. “I bet you’re absolutely right.”

  They curved onto Sand Dollar Street, which ran parallel to Station. People were in the soggy yards, clearing debris.

  Eric said, “The Shrimporee used to make me sad. I used to think of it as the official end of summer.”

  “I hope they have the rubber duck race again this year.”

  At the Teepee, Griff bounded from the truck before Eric had even shifted into park. Eric hadn’t set foot on the Teepee grounds since it had been shut down. He remembered how the boys used to like to visit the place, how they’d chase each other around making Indian noises. The motel had been built shortly before he and Laura started dating; they’d stayed here one night, just as a goof. Now most of the teepees lay in chunks. Everything dusty, everything broken to pieces. Weeds grew through the seams in the cement, bearded the bottoms of the few teepees still standing.

  The pool was half-full of brown water. A layer of chalky dust and yellow pollen filmed the surface, like powdered sugar. The walls were tagged with graffiti—some of it in bubble letters, some in cryptic single-line flourishes, some of it crude and crudely painted. He could read the words STEAM and EYE LEVEL and SKATE OR DIE, DIE, DIE, MY DARLING! There was an image of a rat with X’s for eyes, and two large spheres that were either targets or breasts. A thin leafy mesquite branch floated on the surface, along with a couple of Styrofoam cups and a plastic bag, a palm frond that looked like a ruined fan. Eric found everything about the property depressing, not least the knowledge that it was where Griff had spent so much time in the last few years. It seemed exactly the kind of place where a boy would get pummeled. He wanted to leave, to forbid Griff from ever coming back.