In An Arid Land (11 page)

Sunrise over Houston was exciting to only one of us and he was driving. The rest of us slept, curled up in various corners of the Chevy. Perhaps the smell of the salt air woke me. I watched the land change, watched it go from dark loam to gritty sand, from narrow blacktop to bright white bridges and causeways. The town itself was nothing but shacks and bait shops and a grocery store, everything weathered and blanched. We stopped for some last-minute provisions and then headed down the beach.

The trailer lay in the dunes like a derelict ship. Streamers of rust ran over its rounded, once-silver shoulders and down its dented sides to the cinder blocks upon which it sat.

Daddy had to kick the door to get it to open and once inside we were greeted with an incredible show. Dozens of mice, squealing and scurrying about, dashed for safe places. They leapt from counters and raced up the airy frayed curtains and spun around in the thin layer of sand on the table top. Daddy looked on, smiling, as if he had arranged this performance just for us.

"As always," he said, glancing at me, the youngest, "the first order of business is mice. The traps are under the sink."

While they unloaded the car I set a dozen mouse traps with cheese he had brought along just for that purpose. I put them behind the smelly couch, in smelly cabinets, up on the icebox, underneath the bunks and cots we were to sleep on.

"They seldom work," he said. "Don't much like killing the little monsters anyway. But for some reason just having the traps out seems to keep 'em in hiding. You did good, son."

That afternoon Dad and Lawrence went back to town to rent a boat, so Derald and I took a swim in the Gulf. Then Derald put on jeans (at that time he changed clothes three or four times a day) and we walked far up the beach. It was midweek and there were very few people out. A couple of fishermen battling the surf, a mother and her child, a pair of lovers. Derald was so much older that he usually spoke to me from a great distance, as if, like Lawrence, he were more an uncle than a brother.

"Thirteen, eh?" he said.

"Yeah, next week."

"That's a big one. You'll be a teenager, almost a man."

He looked at me then and a certain light entered his eyes.

"Come on," he said. "I want to show you something."

We went up into the dunes and from somewhere in his jeans he produced a pack of Marlboro's. I was astonished. Until the last year or so he had always been the good boy (Debate Club, History Club, the baseball team) a good boy with a fierce, determined depth in his eyes. He did everything with a vengeance, nothing it seemed for pleasure. If he did it he wanted to do it well and little in a boy's life came naturally to him. So he tried too hard, strained himself. Everything needed a purpose.

"Ever smoked before?" he asked.

I shook my head no.

"Well, it's time you did."

"I'm just thirteen, Derald."

"A head start then. I was almost fourteen when I started." Then his face changed and he spoke the old warning: "If you tell, I'll kill you. I mean it."

He stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it with a Zippo lighter that he also produced from some hidden place in his jeans. "Suck," he said. We sat there and he watched me. I could tell he had experience. He held the smoke down in his lungs and exhaled through his nose. I just puffed, like a woman my mother knew, and tried to blow smoke rings in the wind. Derald helped me, showing me how to round my lips and work my jaws, and then we just sat still, silent, like old men after a hard day's work, enjoying the scene before us: the wide and worldly roaring Gulf.

"Why do you hate Daddy?" I asked when we were up and moving again, kicking through the dunes more or less toward the trailer.

"I don't hate him."

"Well, what is it between you?"

"Nothing really."

"It must be something."

"Yeah, it's something, I guess. It's a lot of things. He wants me to be an engineer and go to Rice. He says engineers are respected and make a lot of money. He's afraid I'm going to turn out like Lawrence. More than anything he wants me to be successful. He wants me to have all the things they don't have."

"And you don't want to be successful?"

"I don't know what I want to be, not yet. Do you?"

He smiled like an uncle.

"And there's a girl," he said.

"Jenny?"

He nodded. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"What about Jenny?"

"He's afraid we're up to something and might try to get married or something, before our time, and louse up his plans."

"Married?"

"It happens, kid, you'll see. And it's enough to drive you crazy." He stopped and looked out at the Gulf and the immense blue sky and I just watched him. It was like he was searching for something. "All I know is I want to be gone."

"You mean we'll never see you again?"

"Sure, you'll see me again, numbskull. There'll be summers and Christmas and all. I just mean out of the house."

"What's wrong with the house?"

"It's theirs."

"What's wrong with them?"

"They're them, that's all."

Confusion must have painted my face, for he did something then he had never done before without prompting from Mom or Dad for a photograph: he put his arm around me, lightly on my shoulders, and looked directly into my eyes. He was about to say something, but embarrassment caused him to glance away. The question what, what is it? was almost out of my mouth when he said, "Hey, look," and started running. "They're back."

I followed him through the dunes, trying to keep up. And then in one of the depressions I noticed he jumped, as if to avoid stepping on something, but I wasn't quick enough. That's when the strange thing happened. Just as Derald yelled, "Watch out!" I tripped and fell and something splattered.

"Good Lord, boy, you stink," said Lawrence.

"What is it, Dad?" asked Derald, who had run to get them. We were all four standing in the dunes looking down at the carcass.

"I don't know exactly. Kind of looks like a burro or something. I've heard there were wild burros around here."

"Must have been coyotes," said Lawrence. "Or a wolf."

"Yeah, last night or the night before," Daddy said.

The burro's belly was torn away completely and most of its neck. Flies buzzed. The stench hung in the air like a cloud and it hung on me like an overcoat. They all looked at me in fact as if I were wearing an overcoat there in the hundred-degree sunshine, as if there were something special about me all of a sudden, as if I knew something they didn't, had done something they hadn't. Even then I had read about hunters smearing the blood of a boy's first kill on his face in a rite of initiation. But I was no hunter and the blood on me was not their doing.

"Are you hurt?" my dad asked.

"No, sir."

"Well, go take a bath. Hurry. And we'll burn those clothes."

When I came outside again, Lawrence had a dinner fire going in the pit. I dropped in my tee shirt and cutoffs and we watched them burn. It was almost sunset but the sun remained a hellion in the western sky, so we sat in lawn chairs on the shady side of the trailer. On this the first night we ate well: steaks and baked potatoes, French bread and brownies. Dad and Lawrence sipped beers and Lawrence sometimes lifted his bottle of whiskey.

"Go easy on that," my dad said.

"Oh, I will, I will," said Lawrence, grinning. "Don't want to waste my old buddy."

Daddy grinned too, but kept shaking his head no whenever Lawrence offered him the bottle.

"How about you, Der?"

"No, Lawrence," said Daddy. "He's too young."

"And just how old were you, Kimo Sabe?"

Daddy grinned again. "That was a different time."

"I've tasted it," said Derald proudly, and Daddy gave him a hard but playful look of disapproval.

"A taste is one thing"

"Oh, good Lord, Roger, the boy's about to go out and do battle with stingrays tonight, he's about to go off in a month or two and do battle with the State of Texas's finest eggheads. Why hell, he's a man in every way but one, and from what his mother tells me there's suspicion over that."

Daddy and Derald both groaned over this reference to Jenny.

"A little sip to fortify him won't hurt anything."

Again Daddy smiled. Then he said, "Gimme that bottle. And if you tell his mother, I'll kill you."

Daddy raised the bottle and took a drink and I could see by the way his body trembled that it had reached its mark and by the light in his face that the mark was a good one. He motioned to Derald to come get the bottle. Derald jumped up, took it and then stepped back. Lawrence grinned wildly, the provocateur. "Just one little one," warned Daddy. He turned up the bottle, turned it down, swallowed, and his eyes immediately went to glass. He blinked and coughed and stumbled, and the men laughed.

"Gimme that bottle," said Daddy and up it went.

Then it was Lawrence's turn again. By now the sun was down and there was a rich sheen of dying color in the low sky. The Gulf was in its evening calm and the sound of the waves came up in a peaceful rhythm. Sparks flew from the pit and their faces were bright joyous ovals in the glow of the firelight. Lawrence and Daddy joked and recalled other good times, and then somehow the bottle was in Derald's hands again and he was drinking again and I was looking on in wonder. It was a scene the likes of which I had never witnessed. It was grand. No animosity, no back talk, nothing mean at all. The electricity of brotherhood pulsed in their veins. They laughed and teased and slapped their legs, and their eyes were happy.

Lawrence had the bottle again, holding it by the neck just above the sand as if it were a great weight, and out of nowhere I heard him say, "Hey, Wayne, how about you?"

"I don't know, Larry," said Daddy. "I mean, no."

"Just a taste," cajoled Lawrence. "Come here, son."

I looked at Daddy. Lawrence looked at Daddy. Derald looked at Daddy. Daddy looked away.

"Come on, Rog," said Lawrence. "Christ, the boy killed a burro today with his bare hands. That's cause for celebration."

"Just a tiny smell, by God, and I mean it now."

The bottle was in my hands. It had such a sturdy, such an important feel, square and heavy, and I held on tightly, afraid I would drop it and ruin everything, afraid this joy would spill out of them all if the liquor spilled. I could feel their eyes on me, feel their grins. I lifted the bottle to smell. Such an odor, like something metallic and awful, a powerful fuel. I cleared my throat, swallowed, literally gulped. Then I put the bottle to my lips, waiting, savoring, a little fearful perhaps. I gulped again and then turned it up and drank the brimstone.

The men laughed and applauded, glanced at each other.

Such a feeling! Such warmth! Such a blaze of the internal lights! Now the electricity surged in my veins too.

"Wow!" I said and they laughed again.

So it was with light in our hearts that we set out in the car for our first night's floundering. Lawrence and Derald sang a song in Spanish. The boat on its trailer behind us banged and clattered cheerfully as Daddy drove us over the rough sandy road to the bay. Salt grass and sand dunes passed in the headlights and at one point we stunned an animal beside the road, its eyes fiery green dots. "A coon," Daddy said.

"Or a killer bobcat," Lawrence put in and he glanced back at me. Derald, beside me, sniggered and poked my ribs and I poked him back. "Hey now," he said. "Easy."

We were all alone at the boat launch, which was nothing but a jagged slab of cement at the end of the road. The night was so dark, the human touch so frail here, that Lawrence had to light a lantern before we could see what we were doing. It took him quite a while and they giggled over it. Way off, it must have been miles across the bay, gleamed one yellow speck of light.

The boat was barely large enough for the four of us and all our gear. The lantern hissed, the little Evinrude sputtered and growled and moved us forward slowly along the bank. Dad kept saying that in this bay was the best floundering in all the world, but only I paid him any attention. Derald and Lawrence were still swigging from the bottle and cutting up, and Daddy had to tell them to calm down, to hush.