He’s turning them upright for me. I look at them without touching. Pulling my head back I see the details clearly now. I glance up and around quickly but no one’s interested in one man’s odd game.
I don’t stop his deal; I pay at the register for my coffee and his breakfast, pointing him out to the waitress. Outside I lean over the newspaper rack, my fingers through its cold wire frame, and look through the window. He picks up the stacks and wraps around the rubber band.
Downtown it’s either foggier or my eyes are worse as the day wears on. In the city library I hold the National Geographic at arm’s length.
COMMUNITY STILL GRIEVES
It’s been almost three months since our city was racked by the barbarous “Posed Murders” of the Jeffrey Holms family: Jeffrey; his wife, Alice; their two daughters — Kathryn, 5, and Sarah, 10. Many residents of Galveston have written expressing their grief at the senseless loss of one of the city’s most successful young businessmen. We can only offer this consolation. The Holms family was deeply committed to our community. Jeff and Alice chaired many civic organizations over their fifteen years here in Galveston. But two stand out — the United Way and the Seamen’s Mission. The Holms family lives on in these and other fine organizations and in the hearts of all those the Holmses’ special brand of humanity touched. So we must, as difficult as it is, put these dreadful things away and turn from the distrust of our fellowman such cruelty naturally brought out in all of us. It’s time to invest our emotions in valuable projects that speak of man’s worth. This way the Holms family lives on.
October 1986
I think I’ve had another stroke. For a long time there were only shadows. Then, later, light and color. Now someone pushes me out into the large filthy room full of windows and them and their noise. So I sit but I don’t look around at the others.
I tell myself stories until someone pushes me back, hands hoist me onto the soft damp mattress.
Someone visits. Sits blocking the lower windows and my view of scrub oak, an empty bird’s nest between forks of a thin branch.
I think it’s the awful young man from the seaside café. But maybe it’s only the orderly though this uniform is navy blue, the name tag blinding silver in the light. I wasn’t on the coast at the end, before the first rain of light, shadows, noise. But if it’s him, I turn away. He’s crazy. Such nastiness in those photographs. But moving my head takes a half hour. The field of vision slowly shifting to the left. The others in chairs everywhere. The faces. Dirty gowns. Near my feet a yellow puddle from one of us. I clench my teeth. It takes a half day, toward dark, to do that. Surrounded by them now and powerless. My hands nowhere near Navy Colt or thin brown belt. They just go on and on. Living until they’re wheeled back inside too.
I cry. There’re hundreds here. Hundreds everywhere. Thousands on the street. Themselves. Their children. But the young man chooses foolishly. And takes terrible pictures.
In the Marine Corps our motto was Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. Semper Fi. I had a bumper sticker that said that once. Always true to my country. But not now. Surrounded by so much to be done. Sitting in their piss and stink. In the middle of this herd. Outside some fool takes his Polaroid from door to door. And then visits me here. No, it’s the orderly. But he’s new then. Knowing the difficulty of my movements, he sits close, his knees touching mine. He smooths the dirty plaid blanket and deals the cards faceup. It’s an old game I’ve played years ago. Mexican Sweat. Except in his version only I get cards. I moan and he talks more. Brings me water. Holds my head back. The young man deals and deals; all the cards seem to be face cards. The game involves questions. A card, his dark finger pointing, a question. Card, finger, question. But around me there is noise. Outside there’s traffic in the street. We don’t need this game, I try to tell him but can’t. My tongue thick. There is work. Let’s work. But someone else to my right starts in with questions. His fingers on the pictures are pink and fat. His coat sleeve navy blue with a white strip. But my jumpsuit’s black. My hand on the cold struts, the wind a hundred miles an hour through the stubby wings and then I let go. Out of nowhere. The earth coming up like a dream. From here pastures are green and plowed fields brown. Blue lakes, white straight roads. Nothing ugly yet. Not until I rush down and they rush up and the impact is tremendous.
RISING WATER, WIND-DRIVEN RAIN
August 1687
Pierre Eugene Berthier locked his fingers in the roots along the creek bank and pulled himself up. The two men below stared after him, shading their eyes from the terrible sun. Berthier ignored them; he walked away from the dry creek into the sparse shade of the post oaks. A dozen things might have troubled him, led to another series of desperate pains just below his ribs that would bring a cold sweat underneath the hotter, constant sweat. He scratched his arm covered with the red welts from mosquitoes which swarmed in black droves despite the lack of pools anywhere in the sandy bends of this goddamned nameless creek. “Should we name it, too?” they had joked at first, after they had strangled the bastard farther south on some other, larger creek. Maybe it was wrong to have done it then, as he knelt.
Or Berthier could worry about the Karankawas somewhere along here who ate flesh. Soaking it for two days in tidal pools. “They like their salt,” they had once joked. The weapons heavy, the helmets like ovens around their brains. The past an endless series of mistakes and deaths: shipwreck—“push on goddamn you men”—illness, wrong turns—“lazy bastards.” The names of saints pouring out of his foul mouth like some priest gone mad. Along this flat, wooded plain no heights to name but dozens of creeks colored by the clay in their banks. Once running blood red, yellow. But now, at best, damp patches of sand quickly shrinking under the long hours of sun.
Pierre Eugene Berthier left them in the creek. Call it St. Berthier, he thought. The creek of St. Jude. He smiled as he walked farther into the post oaks and onto what, in 150 years, would become the Mecham survey and, in 150 years more, lot 51 of Amarilla Creek, “Homes from the low 90s.”
There were no garden hoses underfoot, no edge of a porch to sit on. Down below, the two men chewed miserable pieces of tobacco leaf as thin as paper and looked at their hands. No faded Coke cans to pry from the yellow clay, not a single shiny piece of broken glass to snag their eyes.
Berthier sat and then stood again. It was not from a dream, he thought. So somewhere, at sometime, it had happened. He was thirty-seven so there was not all that much to recall. The singing of birds brought it back — the image of a rooster crowing. But there was no sound to it. The bird was red but mottled by the shade of a tree. It stretched its neck, flung wide its wings, and raised its beak skyward.
Must be the product of little food and diminishing portions of water, he thought. But he had recalled it the morning they had decided. He saw it right now as he considered moving them farther from the creek. “The hell with St. Jude’s course.” He’d move them overland and due east. Sitting, then rising again, he walked down to the men and thanked God for their salvation from the name-spewing madman. He recognized in his heart the rooster’s mark on him — whatever, whenever it had been. Always an anxious man, Berthier was less daring than determined. And despite the newly surging pain in his stomach, he felt he must read such a thing with optimism.
In a few minutes he would help them out of the creek and together they would continue listening for savages and the sound of running water, a sound easily hidden by the noises of birds, men, the soughing of the wind in these dwarf trees.