End Vision, page 15
As the crowd cheered, Ramon wrapped Andrew up in a bear hug and dragged him toward the curb. Andrew stumbled and lost his footing with the momentum, his full weight now pulled steadily by Ramon.
“Alright...Alright...Let me go, Ramon.”
Ramon released his grip, and Andrew regained his footing.
“Goddamnit, Andrew. We need to go now!”
The officer had made it back to his cruiser and was on the radio. The Korean stood in place, looking stunned. Forty-plus phone screens now pointed at the scene. People dictated what was happening into their phones (this officer was trying to tase a homeless man!), shouted anti-police rhetoric, or just captured the mayhem.
“Okay,” Andrew slurred to Ramon. “Let me go.”
The two made their way through the crowd. People patted Andrew on the back and shouted words of approval. Andrew smiled widely and waved a hand up toward the crowd as they pushed their way through to the other side and started up the sidewalk at a slow trot toward the apartment.
“I feel like the Beatles,” chuckled Andrew, slapping Ramon on the back. “Man...you really saved my ass. That was getting out of hand.”
Ramon said nothing. His anger at Andrew, his now off-the-charts paranoia, it was all too much for him to handle. When he finally keyed in to the apartment, he deadbolted the door, sat on the couch, and cradled his chipped head into his hands. His breathing grew heavy, and he felt on the verge of hyperventilating. He lifted his head, saw Andrew scanning the apartment. It had been months, maybe a year, since Andrew had last been over to see him, and even drunk, he suddenly had a very guilt-ridden look on his face. Ramon watched as Andrew caught sight of his own pathetic reflection in the mirror across the room, his stained and wrinkled clothes, his hair in a tumbleweed tangle, the whites of his eyes taken over by a red-rooted system of branches.
“Jesus,” Andrew muttered, staring at himself. “What have I done? What have I been doing?” Slowly, he pulled his gaze from the mirror and walked to the couch. Andrew sat and put his arm around Ramon’s trembling shoulder.
Ramon sighed. “It was Cara,” he said staring forward into the dim light of the living room. “Cara had the information leaked. She is up to something and she has a man following me.”
“I know.”
Ramon looked at Andrew. He smelled liquor strong on his breath and pouring from his pores in a sticky sweat. “You need help...I think I might need help...I don’t know what to do.”
“I know,” Andrew repeated. “I know.”
Ramon began to weep. Andrew gripped him tightly. The two boys from Amarillo, Texas sat together, silent, leaning on each other for protection against whatever might lay on the other side of the blacked-out windows, their eyes straight forward, staring at the darkness. Or maybe at nothing at all.
Part II
Summer, 1948
Nóstos
William woke on the cool sand to the cawing of gulls overhead. The night’s bonfire had reduced to ash. The tide was out, and the smell of seaweed and salt had intensified. William sat up, scratched at the scabs forming on his forearms, and surveyed the scene. The bodies of his companions lay around the smoldering ring. Empty soda and beer bottles littered the area. Cigarette butts shoved into the ground like arrows. Beaches always looked so much dirtier with the tide out.
William poked and stirred the ashes with a stick. A few embers gasped and glowed. The waves were now crashing and returning home a mere ten feet from the camp. William sorted through the remaining wood and collected a few small twigs, placing them over the remaining embers in a Comanche-styled teepee. On his hands and knees now, he placed his face just inches from the coals, turned away from the ash, inhaled the salty, cool morning air, turned back to the ember, and exhaled deeply from his lungs in a slow, long breath. The embers cracked and glowed. Tails of smoke emerged in curly wisps. He turned his head again, and repeated the process, taking precautions not to inhale the ashen air circulating over the pit, but instead from the new air rolling in from the sea. With each breath, the coals grew hotter until, at last, a small flame ignited. The flame was delicate. A baby. He coddled it with his hands and slowly fed it with pinches of dried seaweed. The flame ate ravenously. Now, from the smaller twigs, the fire began to take proper shape. The flame rose and danced with the gulf air, together twisting, together falling, together rising in a narrative of fire and wind.
William watched, content. Proper logs lay stacked across the flame. The fire growled as it consumed. Heat rolled off nicely, and William, hunched squat on his legs, warmed his hands on the flame and stared out across the gulf. He listened to the rhythms of the tide, to the calls of the birds; he noted how the same salty air that fed the crackling fire also supplied the breath to his very own lungs.
“You are good at that,” a female voice said from behind him.
William turned. Sharron stood there, wrapped in a gold and black high school sweater. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed her smile. He covered his chigger-ridden arms with the warm palms of his hands.
“Do you mind if I join you?” asked Sharron, moving toward the flame. “It’s cold this morning.” Sharron opened the sweater and welcomed the heat from the fire. Her mahogany hair twisted high onto her head and parted in odd patterns, a bird’s nest crown. The little trails which forked across her face mapped the intricate patterns of a night spent sleeping out under the stars, but led here to this moment with him beside the early morning fire burning hot on the beaches of the Galveston Bay.
The sun, now freed from the horizon, reflected the world back out across the water to William in an impressionist smear. Where were his manners? He stood.
Sharron giggled and sat beside him with her legs crossed. She studied the fire and invited him to sit with a pat from her hand. He sat. “It really is beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he agreed, looking not at the fire but at the side of her young, plump face.
“Where did you learn to build a fire like that? We always use gasoline.”
“My father taught me.”
Sharron smiled. “That’s nice. You’re very good at it.”
“We spend a lot of time outdoors.”
“On the ranch?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as ta say its a ranch…”
“Your friend John over there sure seemed to paint a picture of a sprawling ranch last night.”
“Well, ya know…” He hoped his sunburned skin hid the blush which William knew was spreading, “I think John had a little much’ta drink.”
Sharron laughed from the bottom of her belly. William was not used to a woman behaving freely, as if he were not a man and she were not a woman but they just both were.
“You don’t say?” She glanced to where the others still slept heavily, a sleep which accompanies a late night of beer drinking. “And you didn’t?”
“Oh, no ma’am...I mean, I had a couple...but I’m not a big drinker, to be honest.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t like the way it makes things seem, I guess. I like to see things the way they are.”
“And how are things?”
“I’d say things are pretty damn...um, pretty dang great.”
“They don’t look that great, if I may say so,” she teased, pointing at his body.
He became intensely self-aware of the bites and the sunburn. William stared down at the sand, embarrassed fully now.
“Oh, stop it!” teased Sharron, nudging his shoulder with hers.
William could smell her hair. It was nice. She smelled like a woman.
“What happened?”
“Oh...well...see...I didn’t know about chiggers, and we were up at Lake Charles getting Jim, and I guess me not knowing about chiggers don’t mean that chiggers didn’t know about me.”
She giggled.
He felt good. He felt right. He sat up now with purpose. “Then yesterday I spent all day swimming in the gulf. I’d never seen the ocean before. The water felt good on my bites, and I guess I got a little burnt. But, looking at it now, it don’t seem so bad as I thought it was.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “You have some color.”
William studied his arms. The burn really wasn’t bad at all.
“The bites are pretty bad, though.”
Sharron broke out again in laughter, and this time William joined her. He took a cigarette pack from the pocket of his jeans and offered one to Sharron. She shook her head ‘no’. William lit his poking stick on the fire and used the flame to light his cigarette. He took a drag.
“Why didn’t you talk to me last night?” she asked.
William thought about the night before. He had stayed away from the group, mostly keeping to himself or talking to John. “Oh...I was embarrassed about my looks,” admitted William. “I didn’t think a bunch of girls...excuse me...women...I didn’t think a pretty woman like you would want to talk to a stranger like me looking the way I did...the way I do with the bites and whatnot…”
Sharron pulled the cigarette from his fingertips and took a drag. She blew the smoke out in a long stream. “I wanted you to.”
Oh the confusion and excitement he felt upon hearing that sentence. His body hummed. His stomach seemed to have no bottom. His mouth went dry. His chigger-bitten pecker stirred around in his pants. The smile this sentence made on his face spread wide. “You did?”
“I did,” she said, handing him back the cigarette.
They sat in the moment and watched the fire, felt the heat in the space they shared together.
“Why?”
“It was just something about you. The way your friends talked about you...They seem to really respect you, William.”
She said his name. The way she said it made him feel like a king. Like an adult. Like a man with the world at his fingertips. He wanted badly to call her by her’s.
“You seemed like a person I wanted to get to know. Who gets to say why it’s that way with some people and not with others? It’s just something that is...I guess.”
“Well, Sharron, I’m here now. What do you want to know?”
She thought. “What’s it like where you live? What is your favorite thing?”
William could answer half of this accurately. “It’s flat. It’s windy. It’s cold in the winter and an oven in the summertime.”
“That doesn’t sound that great, William.”
Again with the William!
“You rise early in the mornings before the sun and make coffee. When you leave the house to check the animals, it’s quiet except for the wind. You can hear the wind moving across the top of the fields. It’s nice. My grandmother once told me a story. About God. About how thousands of years ago people called God Yahweh. But the name was too sacred to be spoken out loud. If I listened in the early hours, before the animals woke up, I could hear the world itself calling out to God through the sounds of the wind. Yahweh. But I always thought maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was God calling on his creatures to wake up the way your mother does when she sits on your bed early in the morning and strokes the top of your head and whispers your name softly to you so that when you open your eyes there isn’t just darkness, you get to see her instead of the darkness, so that you can wake up feeling calm and safe in knowing that she is there with you. I think this is why it’s always so windy in the morning time before the sun rises. God is whispering to His children. Because when you are out on the prairie early, that's how the wind sounds over all that open space: calming and familiar and safe. And slowly the birds start chirping, the roosters start crowing, the cattle rise up and snort and stretch out, and all this happens before any light at all can be seen. And I like it. I think it’s special.”
Sharron watched him as he spoke. “That does sound special,” she said. “How big is your ranch?”
“Well my father has fifty acres out of Spearman. It’s not a lot, but it does what he needs it to. What I’d really like to do is get a little place of my own that I could grow into. Start with a few head, some chickens, goats, have a little garden for the house. That’s what I want. How ‘bout you?”
“My family runs a tire shop and filling station in town. It's not much, but we do fine. We get a lot of help from tourists like you.”
“Do all the girls wear men’s sweaters down in these parts?” asked William, pointing to the wool she had wrapped around her small frame.
Sharron’s color changed. “This? No. It’s just a sweater a friend gave me to wear.”
“Now, I might be a country boy, Sharron, but I know what wearing someone else’s sweater means.”
She removed the sweater, folded it, and placed it next to her on the sand. “I don’t have to wear it anymore. It has warmed up nicely.”
He smiled.“Good...So what about school?”
“What about it?”
William lit another cigarette. “What year are ya in?”
“I’ll be a senior next year. What about you?”
“I just graduated.”
“What’s next?”
“I figure I’ll take the year and work and start saving for my land.” He wanted very much to ask her to come with him, to pack up and get in the car and come north. But how? How could he responsibly ask her to stop school and run off with a boy she had just met? Who didn’t even have a place of his own.
“That is really great, William.”
“Sure will be lonely up there all by myself.” William looked into her eyes.
Sharron turned to face him. She rubbed the sweater’s wool between her fingertips. “William...I…”
“Water!” John yelled.
William turned from Sharron. The tide had crept up on them without their knowing. How had they not seen? John, shirtless and barefoot, raced toward the gulf. The tide had stolen his shirt and was now pulling it to open water. The commotion woke the rest of the party, and the group fumbled for their belongings in different states of sleep and undress. Sharron rose to help, ran to her friends, and the girls shrieked and giggled as the tide began to kiss their bare feet.
John had succeeded in rescuing his shirt and moved toward Jim and his sweetheart who were safely away from the encroaching water. Sharron and her party had regrouped as well and stood in a tight huddle, laughing and fixing each other’s clothes. They had all moved into their comfort zones, and started telling exaggerated accounts of what had only just occurred.
William flicked his cigarette butt at the fire. The great body of sea water before him nipped at the edge of the flame. It wouldn’t be long now. He noticed the black and gold wool sweater still resting in the sand, inches now from being pulled in by the surf. The water swept in smoothly and quickly, like a rock sliding on ice, reached its zenith, and then slid back in reverse. The saturated and stained sand, dark at the water’s retreat, became lighter with each second until it was once again covered by the sea. He watched it inch toward the sweater. He took a step toward it, to grab it, to save it for Sharron. Why give her another man’s sweater? The sound the waves made was not unlike the wind, was only a bit different, more like Kkkrrrraaaaahhhhh… sssssshhhhhh. Like the loud breaths of sleep. It took three swells to extinguish the fire. William watched as the sea meticulously erased the scene:
Crash. The flame.
Crash. The wood.
Crash. The coal smear of ash-stained sand.
He was happy. He stood tall. He looked out once more across the limitless water before him and breathed deeply. He wanted to remember the salty smells and the image of this moment. As he began the short trek back toward the group, the gulls began descending from the sky, eager to pick through whatever might have been unclaimed by the sea. A black and gold sweater bobbed in the distance, receding slowly into the frame of the horizon.
William and Sharron walked together across soft sand toward the cars. They stayed a few paces behind the group. It was really nice to meet her, William told her. It was her pleasure, she said. A simple enough exchange, yet he found joy in it. Exposed, away from the fire’s warmth, the two became bashful again. They spoke softly and looked down at their slow-moving feet, each step a movement closer to departure. William kicked at random pieces of debris strung out across the beach in an undulating line that had washed onto shore and marked the high tide. Just days before, he had been uncertain of his place in the world. Now he found himself cemented on a path beyond his control and understanding. He had not a fear in the world, yet was scared to death at what he was feeling in these moments leading him across the pillowy sand. William knew instinctively that any problems the future might hold for him could be dampened by her presence at his side, as she was now.
Sharron grew quiet as they drew closer to the cars and separation. When they finally reached the dirt lot, John, Jim, and the two girls from Lake Charles stood together, staring down at a flat tire.
“It’s your car,” said Jim. “You change it.”
“We drove into this crummy dirt lot down a crummy dirt road because of you,” replied John. “You change it.”
“I’ll tell ya what, I’ll rock, paper, scissors you for it,” said Jim.
“You got it...Now, is it rock, paper, and throw on scissors? Or are we going rock, paper, scissors, and throwing on shoot?”
“Throw on shoot.”
Rock. Paper. Scissors. Shoot!
Jim showed rock. John showed paper.
“Get to work!” John exclaimed, dancing a victory dance.
“No! Best two of three,” Jim demanded.
“Now, you never said that at the start, Jim. You can’t make up rules as you go.”
“Everybody knows it’s always two of three!”
“That is the old trick,” John said to Sharron. “You don’t say two of three at the start, so that if you win the first one you can claim it a win. But if you lose the first one you can say that it was supposed to be two of three and you stay in the game.”
