The Do-Right (14 page)

He cleared his throat. “Couldn't say what I'd do, Mrs. Miller. Think you got to be there yourself to gauge that choice.”

She nodded thoughtfully, her pink lips pursed. The bird barrettes in Linda Miller's hair, he saw, were ducks.

XVIII
XVIII

DELPHA JUMPED OUT of the Ford Falcon to watch the bridge swing round on its pivot. She wanted a clear view and a closer one of the red tugboat, flying the star of Texas and towing a loaded barge. Isaac got out too, shoving against the breeze to open his cranky door. They stood off the side of the road in the gravel and weeds and primroses. The car—Isaac's dad's, carrying a rusted wound in a fender—was third in line, and they weren't the only ones to spill out. This was the beach road on a Sunday, and everybody in a hurry to get there. Delpha had Joe Ford's permission to travel that sixty miles and back. Sunny day topping ninety-three, their hair blowing in the steady wind.

“Look at that!” She had to holler it, delighted, over the wind.

The white-haired man steering the tugboat was smoking. The barge's deck was painted brick red, and it carried stacked yellow shipping crates, one blue. The wind was pulling waves in the canal and bending the tall green grasses by the girders of the bridge.

With the windows rolled down, it was too noisy to talk. Neither of them minded. Isaac played a tape of Credence Clearwater Revival and kept hooking her by the neck. She'd stretch over and kiss the hollow beneath his jaw. He knew she'd been to the Gulf once before—or her mother had told her she had when she was a kid. Not since. They were
eagled-eyed on the last rises until Delpha flung out her finger, screaming, “I see it! There it is! There it is!”

It was what children did, competed for who could see the water first. When she twisted to Isaac, he was watching her, long hair crazy around his head, grinning.

The land was unclutching them, falling away to a blue seam that reached left to right as far as she could turn her head and past. It wasn't possible to fit it all into her eyes at once, to inhale deep enough. Stunned, Delpha expanded, immense, uncontainable, taking in this horizon and its wide salt breath. Not long ago, she had wanted
to be
Room 221 in the New Rosemont Hotel. Now she beheld the live, immeasurable ocean, heard it, smelled it, knew she would not fit in that room in the same way again.

Isaac stopped the Falcon right on the beach. They pulled off their shirts and jeans, joking. Shy of the bikini rack, Delpha had bought a black one-piece bathing suit she had to tug down on her butt. Isaac stripped off to some long, flowered shorts he called jams, too big for him. He made her submit to being wiped with Coppertone, and she rubbed it on his back and chest, smoothed it onto his face with his eyes closed. He kissed her. Then he wanted to charge straight into the Gulf that was turning over and over out there.

Delpha shook her head and walked barefoot across the powdery dunes, feet sinking in, sand sifting between her toes, sticking to her. Hair whipping back, she walked across the hard-packed sand scattered with shells and bottle caps, tar and dead jellyfish and a kid's red shovel. Onto the water-washed sand and into the clear, lacy, cool nipping tide that chased ankles. Water chill as she let it climb her legs, Isaac squeezing her waist. Delpha nudged him away and lifted her arms. The waves came on.

She bobbed, jumped and was propelled higher, broke through the wave. Or she let the brownish whitecap crush her down into the sucking, swirling water, rush her to the shore till she foundered, stomach in the sand. Then she plowed back out to the breakers, shoving against the heavy, warm water with her thighs. Such a pleasure to lose form and weight, become motion and sensation. Delpha squinted against the sun and the salt in her eyes. Her toes didn't touch the bottom except to push off again. The sunbeams she couldn't look at headon flashed down in intersecting rays, bent into diamond shapes. She lost time out there.

Finally she let Isaac, chopping out, drag her through the churning waves back to two towels, a white one from the New Rosemont and another sizable one patterned with green seahorses. The wind chilled the water on her skin, but the sun heated shivers away. They lay facedown a while on the hard sand, cheeks mashed, hair dripping, breathless, hearing kids' windblown shouts and jeeps blasting rock and roll. Isaac's hand crept over to hers and held it.

He hauled out the cooler and Delpha a grocery sack, more towels, and Calinda Blanchard's straw hat. Towel for her shoulders, fresh towel for a tablecloth. She laid out the picnic: containers of tuna fish with egg and dill pickle and chicken salad with sweet. Some of Oscar's puffy dinner rolls. He'd rolled her out some extra dough to bake early that morning. Sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, salted and peppered, little jar of Spanish olives. Jar of watermelon chunks and peach crescents, juices running together. Half a dewberry cobbler, also courtesy of Oscar, a rich man with shortening. His golden crust crunched in their teeth and buttered their tongues. They were sun lotion-greasy, salt-sticky, hungry, ate sand with every course. The Gulf roared and crested and broke, ran toward them and crept away.

They took the ferry to Galveston, Isaac insisted. Driving a car onto a boat was something, they had to get in line, watch the man with the pocket flag beckoning them to a stop. People slammed out of their cars, kids shrieked and ran up the stairs. Isaac fetched the sack with the leftover rolls, and he and Delpha planted themselves in the back of the ferry, feet spread against the sway. White bubbling wake piled up on itself.

The gulls! Dark wings hooked into the air, the white-breasted gulls hung crying. Layer upon layer of them. Hold up a piece of bread and a gull swooped. Another slid into its place before the first had snapped the tidbit from Isaac's or Delpha's fingers. Laughter bubbled out of them continuously like the wake behind the ferry. They couldn't stop until all the rolls were fed, the wall of gulls treading the air still demanding. Long-beaked pelicans were strung out across the water, floating with decorum like cats settled with paws beneath them.

They took a promenade through Galveston where Isaac pointed out the tall, stately houses—turrets and white filigree balconies, palms and pink oleander. The Sunday traffic suffocated Delpha, and soon they were back in the long line for the ferry. On the return trip, Delpha caught Isaac's arm, her own speared out. “Sharks! Look!”

“No way, no way! Dolphins!” Isaac yelled over the ferry's engine, and they leaned on the prow's rail watching the two dolphins make their curved leaps until they faded into the glitter of the water.

They stopped at Swede's store's outside shower to wash some of the sand out of their hair, off their sunburned faces and shoulders and necks, and bought hotdogs and Cokes to eat while they dried.

Parked down on the beach again, they leaned against
one another and tracked the low yellow sun as it marked its lighted road on the waves and then reddened the clouds as the water rose over it. Delpha loosened Isaac's jeans and put him in her mouth.

It was midnight when they arrived at the swing bridge again, and no commerce was waiting. The canal was dark and empty, busy about its own, subject to no human business. They drove through the rickrack metal framework and out the other side to unlit two-lane.

Isaac wanted to stay, but he didn't fight about it. He dropped her off at the New Rosemont's door, kissed her, gripping his hands over her ears so he could bring her face to his. Delpha walked through the dim lobby, two lamps on, and into the kitchen to drink a glass of water. She wiped her mouth with the back of her sunburnt hand and rinsed out the glass.

Such a day.

The harelip chaplain spoke up from the stool nearest the stove, out of the path of the yellow, backdoor light. He repeated his farewell line. Always the same line, standing to leave because he could leave because for him the gates would swing open. Telling Miss Wade he'd see her next time. Gentle, jagged smile. Before his two hands closed on hers, he held them apart as if the world fit between them.

       
This is a day of good tidings
.

       
This is a day of good tidings and we hold our peace
.

Reciting those lines to a prisoner—the pinch she'd felt at his presumption was tempered because he'd seemed aware of it. Eventually she'd asked,
So what angel said that?

No angel
, the chaplain answered contentedly.
Lepers
.

XIX
XIX

BYRON MILLER LIVED in a close-plotted neighborhood on the eastside of town, little bitty wood-shingled house with two runners for a driveway and weeds growing up the middle. He'd been fishing over the 4
^th
of July holiday, away from home. Now Phelan came upon him in the driveway after supper, working on his pickup. He was taller than his brother James, sturdier-boned, and had more forehead creases, deeper set. Probably not a lot of hair under the ball cap. The brother put down a timing light and wiped his hands with a red rag, finger by finger, as Phelan introduced himself.

The friendly blinked out of Byron Miller's cinnamon-brown eyes. “My brother sent a private eye to come get his leg. Damn if that ain't the end.”

“End of what, Mr. Miller?”

Byron Miller squatted down, replaced the tool in a slot in a green metal toolbox. He talked to the box. “You know, my wife's brothers, she got four of them and any one of them'd walk through fire for the other. Work on each other's plumbing, paint their houses and stuff. Kinda like a crew. I like being around them. But they's pretty close in age.”

He latched the toolbox and stood up. “James, he was a change-of-life baby. I 'member Mama and Daddy not getting along all that good and Daddy, he had a fit when he found out. Me and Sherry, we were at that age to be embarrassed having
all our friends seeing our mother pregnant. Kids. But when they brought him home, it was like we had a brand new toy, and he had two sets of parents, with me and Sherry. Now he wouldn't piss on either one of us if we's on fire.”

“That's a shame.”

“Sure is. I'm the oldest. You get older, your folks pass or lose their minds, you think about that.” The wiping hands paused, and Byron looked at Phelan, a straight-on, steady look. “You have brothers?”

“I do.”

“I bet y'all hang together, help each other out, all that shit, don't you?”

Phelan pretended to consider. “Can't say that we do, sorry to say.”

Given the pained cut of Byron's mouth, he thought it best to run with some small talk a while. “So he's the youngest. Tells me y'all call him Nutbox. How'd he come to get that nickname?”

Miller's featherweight smile hardly dented his dour expression. “Aw, isn't nothing to do with being crazy or nothing. You know those cans say Peanuts on them, and you give it to somebody they open it and a spotted snake on a spring jumps out. He's about five and Daddy, he played that trick on him. James thought it was a real snake. He run a mile. Just hollering. Got night, Mama had to hunt him and drag him back home. Daddy and Sherry called him Nutbox after that. Just family stuff.”

“He didn't like it, though?”

“Used to sull up. Always thought it was cause he's so little. Not just when he was a kid. Hell, Sherry's tall as me and I'm six foot. She got a boy on Forest Park's team led them to State. Plays center. James, Nutbox, that is, he took after Mama. Fine-boned as a finch.”

“So he didn't play any sports?”

“They let him on the football team his senior year. Should have seen him. Pads were wearing him. They put him in the last game of the season when they were down 45-7 and he couldn't hurt anything. Playing Charlton Pollard. Damn if he didn't get hold of a kickoff and run it to the ten.” Byron Miller's smile was a little more genuine now. “Then those black boys just piled on and sunk him into the ground. You know, they don't have birth certificates. Some of 'em probably thirty-five years old.”

Phelan remembered hearing that rumor every time a game with Charlton Pollard, the all-black school, came around. And only at that time. He also remembered James Miller's eyes burning as he described Joe Frazier slugging it out with a broken thumb.

“But James kept playing.”

Byron Miller looked at him surprised. “Yeah, quarterback threw him a pass. Set it right in his hands. And James dropped it. Daddy ragged him all the way home. Didn't shut up till he saw his hand next day, took him over to Hotel Dieu for a x-ray. Wrist broke.”

“Must have been a little hard on your brother.”

“Daddy could be hard. You messed up, he sat you down in Mama's rocker and wailed the back of your neck with his belt. That was the judgment seat. You jumped up, he pushed you back down in it. Hurt like hell, but you had to take it. I took it. Nutbox liked to've squalled down the house.”

Byron Miller's eyebrows lifted. “Daddy was just kiddin' James about that pass. Kidded everbody, not just my little brother. With the heart congestion, more'n ever, seemed like. Not 'sposed to smoke or eat any salt, drove him crazy. Only thing sweetened him up was to play cards with the couple
buddies he had left. Hell of a poker player. Passed last year, and Mama's mind wandered off after him.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

Byron Miller gazed down on the weeds between the driveway's two concrete runners. Then he made fists to clean his knuckle creases.

“Thorough man with a rag.” Phelan smiled.

Miller looked up at him, hooked his chin toward his front door. “Old habit. Try to leave the dirt outside my house.” His gaze was steady.

“Admire your policy. You got the leg, Byron?”

The man stuck the rag in his back pocket. “Couldn't tell you if I did.”

Phelan put his foot up on the bumper, leaned in. “What's the beef? Your brother didn't tell me anything, but there must be one. You don't strike me as a man'd be mean for meanness sake.”

Byron squinted toward Phelan, then folded his arms. “Don't have a beef. Sherry does, and I'm standing by her. Didn't even tell you, did he?”

Phelan shook his head. “Said you and his sister were jealous because of the money he got after the accident. How about, he owed you money, then got this big chunk and didn't pay you, and you're holding the leg hostage.”

The brother hawked and spit by Phelan's toe. “Accident was three years ago. Money. 'Salways bout money, isn't it? That's what ninety-nine percent of folks're after. You just ran into the one percent, buddy.” Byron Miller latched the truck's hood, picked up the toolbox, and went into his house.