Byzantium (14 page)

Back to Port

I’ve got a sunburn now, so there’s that. My stepfather puts another fish in the livewell, ripping the hook out of its jaw like it’s nothing, and then decides it’s time to go home. My mom’s been ready for a few minutes. I’ve been ready for hours.

I help prepare the boat, though no one asks me, taking down the raised fishing seats so they screw in level with the deck. Then I sit in the one up front.

My stepfather heads us back toward the boat ramp, opening up the motor when we get to the part of the lake where the hydrilla isn’t so bad. The boat bounces a couple times when we cross someone else’s wake, and then we round a bend and come in sight of the beach, where the Army Corps of Engineers trucked in sand so people can swim and play in a lake that poisons fish.

“You’re going to help me clean these bass,” he shouts up to me, and all of a sudden I’m sick of it, I’m so sick of it. He knows I hate cleaning fish: the dead scales sticking to my fingers, the fish blood on my hands. And of course my mom’s just sitting there, saying nothing.

Once, when I wrote to my dad and told him how crappy things were and begged him to let me stay with him, he wrote back that life is about adjustment. I couldn’t tell if he was talking about me or himself. He went on about Corporal Edwards, saying how when he returned home from the war, he found raccoons nesting in his cabin, his wife run off to New Orleans. Sure, being adjusted is easy if you’re dead, I thought, and in some book.

The shore’s rushing toward us, and I’m about to mouth off when it comes to me, the daydream from my other fishing trips. Me tumbling over the side, my mom and my stepfather seeing it all and springing into action to save me. I picture how they’ll worry, the quick sad flash in their faces. And then it’s like, why not? I mean, what if this is the thing, the one thing that’ll make everything else okay? And then it’s like I can’t not do it. I look around. The lake’s clear. I think about it, and then I stop thinking about it. I ball my legs and grip my knees, and I go.

Halfway over, I hear my mom shriek. I’m in the air, and my stepfather’s killed the engine. For a split second it’s like it’s all falling into place. They’re watching, I know they’re watching, and I want to keep this moment forever, the quiet, the smell of the lake below me, the wind whipping my hair, everything belonging, me belonging, just like I wanted.

Then I glance back, and it’s lost. They haven’t seen me at all. That pink hat has flown off my mom’s head—that’s why my stepfather stopped the boat—and they’re looking the other way, watching as the hat floats on a breeze. And it’s like, really? Really? I take a breath, but before I can shout to them, the lake reaches up to slap me and pull me in, and I’m gone.

T
HEY WERE HIKING DOWN THE HILL when they first heard the singing—a distant, lone man’s voice that seemed to echo off the river, or maybe off the canyon walls that rose at the trail’s end. Shelly said she thought the singing might be a radio, and Josh, her husband, said he wasn’t sure.

The hike was short, just over a half mile from the parking lot to the opening of Boquillas Canyon, where you were supposed to stop and watch the Rio Grande pouring between the sheer cliffs. The singing continued as they descended to the river’s edge, where the reeds kept them from seeing anything but the trail itself and the sky above.
Cuando,
the voice said, pleading.

“Probably one of those guys in the shelter,” Josh said. At the top of the hill, they had looked across the river and seen a small shelter made of sticks with four Mexican men squatting beneath it. Shelly had felt a pang of guilt while studying them—for being invasive, for being the privileged white woman peering into someone else’s hardscrabble life—but she couldn’t help looking. Mexico itself didn’t so much fascinate her as did the simple notion of a wholly foreign place just across the river.

“They were just sitting,” she said now, of the men in the shelter.

They hiked on. The trail bent and rose. Ahead of them the reeds and brush cleared, and in the trail’s path lay a row of painted walking sticks and colored crystals on a blanket. In front of the blanket sat a milk jug weighted with change and bills. Shelly guessed now the job of the men in the hut—to run across and snatch the goods and the day’s takings if the border patrol came over the hill. On the far side of the river a little metal boat was tied up. She discovered, too, the source of the singing.

Near the boat a man stood on the sandy bank, serenading them. He looked about fifty, wore jeans and a green shirt, and had binoculars at his eyes, alternately watching them and then turning to watch the hill, to see if anyone else was coming over. Beside the jug was a plain rock, painted with the words:
The Mexican Singing Victor. Your Donations Help Buy Supplies for the School Childrens.

Shelly stopped and took a dollar from her pocket and put it in the jug.
“Gracias,”
the Mexican Singing Victor called across the river. It was only about thirty feet wide, and shallow. Shelly waved her hand and then looked up toward the rising canyon walls.

“Why’d you do that?” Josh said with a slight scowl.

“Why not?”

“There’s border agents in the parking lot,” he said. “The signs said not to give those guys money.”

“Please,” Shelly said, coming up to him and then passing by. Josh didn’t say anything, just stood behind, giving her room. Shelly had learned over the years how Josh hated public fights, even though it was usually he who started them. She didn’t mind the Singing Victor seeing them. But Josh wouldn’t speak, and later, she knew, if he returned to the fight in the safe confines of their car or their tent, he would say that he’d felt the man’s eyes pressing into him. When she turned around, Josh was walking with his hands in his pockets, affecting calm, and Victor was watching the hill. He’d stopped singing now that he had his dollar.

THEY HAD SPENT THE WEEK IN FAR WEST TEXAS, the Trans-Pecos, hiking the Guadalupes and then driving down to Big Bend. This was their fifth year of marriage, and the trip was to mark their return to normalcy—they’d just taken twelve weeks of counseling after Shelly had caught Josh with his chubby, moonfaced student teacher, Karleen. Shelly had come to the school to bring him dinner, a surprise, and found the two clutching each other in Josh’s classroom. They parted, and the girl seemed about to speak, or to cry, but at Shelly’s stare she ran out of the room, bumping into a desk and toppling a box of pencils. How stupid she looked, Shelly thought, that stupid girl. It was the only thing she let herself think. Already the year had been hard—Shelly had lost her teaching job because of the school district’s funding cuts.

“Three months,” Josh said before she asked. He’d sat in one of the student desks and put his face in his hands. “God, I’m sorry.”

“Shit,” Shelly said in disbelief, the hurt still welling up as she sat at another desk. “I mean, shit.”

“We stayed late putting up posters,” Josh said. He stared at his desktop. A student, Shelly saw, had carved
cock
into the desk and colored the gouges with blue pen. “And it just happened, and then kept happening.”

“Just happened?” Shelley yelled. “I’m supposed to believe that? One minute you’re tacking a poster to the wall, and the next you’ve got your dick inside her?”

The smell of fried catfish and hush puppies rose from the food containers in the plastic bag. “I’ll do whatever you want,” Josh said.

Shelly wasn’t sure what to say. The anger made it hard to think. It was something hot pressing against her neck and her temples, like when her mother used to grab her. “Do you still love me?”

Josh looked up at her quickly. “Of course,” he said. “Yes.”

And so they had gone to marriage counseling. The counselor had told Josh to move out of the house, that Shelly could only let him back in when she trusted him. And Josh had to keep his cell phone with him, turned on at all times so Shelly could call him whenever she wanted, to see what he was doing. Josh also had to give Shelly a full daily schedule.

“I feel like a science project,” Josh had said, trying for a laugh.

“You broke our trust,” Shelly said, her voice sharp. “This is serious. You broke it, and now you have to earn it back.”

After two months, Shelly felt he had, and asked him to move back in. By the end of the counseling, they seemed well on the path together—that’s how Shelly thought of their marriage now, following that last session, as a path going up a hill, behind which the sun was rising.

LOOKING AT THE RIVER, Shelly pictured a dotted line running down its middle.

“It’s weird,” she said, “that that’s another country over there, only a few feet away, that we can see it, can walk to it—”

“But we can’t,” Josh said. “That’s just it.” He looked over to the canyon, up the hill behind them. “I bet there’s a border agent up there somewhere, talking with the ones in the lot. You go over that river, you can’t cross back, not unless you go a hundred miles either way to a border crossing.”

She didn’t mean she wanted to go over; she was just talking. “I’m only saying it’s stupid. It’s just right there.” She looked at the brown river. It wasn’t deep—a few feet at most. “It’s nothing. I could run there and back in two seconds.”

Across the river the reeds were green, like the ones on their side, and a burro was nosing behind a tall bush, which seemed too clichéd to be true, the burro, but there it was. The four men were still under their stick shelter, and Victor was still watching the hill for the next tourists.

“I’m just saying it’s dumb, is all.”

Josh ignored her, and they walked the last few yards toward the canyon without speaking. The trail ended where a giant mound of sand spilled from the canyon’s wall. Past this the river bank turned in, closed against the cliffs, and you couldn’t go any farther. They stood there, at the bank, peering at the canyon rising above them in a tight V of red and tan stone. Beneath the usual rote fascination, Shelly felt a sudden prickle of sadness. Someday she and everything around her would lie pressed under another layer of rock, that’s what the canyon said to her.

Shelly looked again at Josh. “Come on, let’s do it,” she said, taking Josh’s hand. “Just run there and back. No one’s here except Singing Victor and his cronies.” She nodded toward the shelter.

“Why?” Josh said, pulling his hand free. “What does that prove?”

“Nothing. Just how stupid everything is, I guess.”

“I don’t want to end up in Mexican prison.”

“God, don’t be this way. Come on. We just go there and back, together.”

“But those guys,” Josh said, looking at the shelter. “I bet they’re waiting for that. They’ll kidnap us or rob us or something.”

“No they won’t,” Shelly said. “That’s stupid. Please, it’ll be like our renewal.”

“Renewal,” Josh said.

She took his hand and tried to pull him with her, but he slipped out of her grasp, and she was off, dashing across the river, the water splashing up to her knees, and then she was on the other side. She turned and looked back at Josh, standing there, mopey, and then she looked at the canyon wall, then over at the green river reeds the trail had cut through. It was strange, now, looking at her own country across the way. She looked at Victor, who was looking at her, then turned back to face Josh. Her legs were damp. The wind coming from the canyon made them feel cool. Nothing had happened. Maybe people did this every day.

“Come on!” she shouted over the river’s muddy purling, but Josh just stood there.

SHELLY’S FATHER, a preacher, had given up the ministry some years back. He worked at a kiosk in a Dallas mall hustling cell phones, and lived in an upstairs apartment off the freeway. Shelly’s mother had left five years before, settling in Phoenix with a chiropractor and calling Shelly every few months or so to make sure she was still alive—that’s what she actually said, laughing her new dry desert laugh. Their marriage had always been one of silence, kept in place for the benefit of the small congregation of Highpoint Baptist, which occupied a metal-sided building between a bank branch and a gas station. Shelly feared that her parents’ marriage, which had crumbled so soon after her wedding, would somehow corrupt her own, and that first year she had wept often into Josh’s lap, hugging him tight and saying, “Don’t leave me, I’ll never leave you, please don’t leave me.” She was so scared then that someday he would, or she would. It seemed to be the natural order of things.

But Josh, Shelly soon saw, never worried, even with her holding close to him and crying in his lap. He was so caught up with the idea of himself, he seemed unable even to consider the fact that any distance could grow between them, no matter how much he pushed and pushed. True, he could be sweet and loving, but once, when she told him about how she wanted a big yard where she’d grow vegetables and raise chickens, he laughed and said, “You have such small dreams.” She felt the hurt for months. Still, she thought, maybe he was right. Lately he’d been spending his spare time in the bedroom they’d made into his study, determined to find the investment that would make them rich. He had a stack of prospectuses from Brazilian and Philippine companies, the cheap ink on their onionskin pages staining his fingers.

A couple nights before they left for West Texas, Josh cornered Shelly in the apartment’s kitchen and heatedly related his new plan: they would cash out her retirement fund (it was just sitting there now she’d been laid off, he said) and put it in a Philippine mining company he’d found. She knew nothing would come of it. Before his investing phase, he’d taken art classes at night and ended up with two drawings in a show at the community center in Grapevine. For a month after the show he’d talked of moving to the Virgin Islands, where he’d paint while she taught, and then the art phase had fizzled. But what struck her as she stood in the kitchen, cradling a mug of coffee while he gesticulated, was that his plans never allowed much room for her beyond ponying up money or holding the day job. She’d never realized that before—and she wasn’t asking for much, after all, only a yard and chickens. It was then, leaning against the refrigerator as she sipped her coffee, pretending to listen as Josh talked about manganese, that she first imagined life on her own, held that possibility against the vision of the path with the sun behind it. The path seemed less inviting now.

Standing in the kitchen, Josh had been looking at her, waiting for an answer to a question she hadn’t heard. She put away her meandering thoughts and asked him to repeat what he’d said. Because this too she’d learned from her parents’ marriage: that you can make a mistake and not know it for years and years. And even more terrifying, never learn what the mistake was, just feel its misery coming down on you for the remainder of your life. Sometimes her father claimed that marrying her mother was the mistake, other times it was letting her go. Mostly they didn’t discuss it.

SHELLY WALKED OVER TO THE BURRO. The animal was nosing at the roots of a small tree, pulling up bits of grass. When she got close, it huffed and trotted away a few feet. Victor and the other men weren’t paying attention to her now—Victor was watching the trail with his binoculars.

“Come back!” Josh shouted over the river. He was flapping his hand, motioning for her to cross. At first she thought he was only embarrassed, but now she saw he was scared.
“Please.”

Then Victor started singing again. More people were coming down the trail. Fine, she thought, and crashed through the water once more, the river silky and cool, the current pushing her a little as she crossed to her husband’s side. It was as simple as she’d said.

No one had leapt out at her, no sharpshooter hidden in the canyon face had fired. Josh hugged her, more tightly than usual, but her clasp was weaker, and she pulled away first.

“What’s the big deal?” she said. Victor was still singing, and, over Josh’s shoulder, she could see the passel of tourists coming down the hill, a fat man in a floppy hat at their head.

AFTER THE HIKE they drove over to the camp store, where Josh waited while Shelly took a pay-shower. The water was good and hot, and when she finished she dried herself with one of the towels they’d brought. She dressed and then went outside and sat under the metal awning, her hair still wet. She thought about the big lawn, the chickens running underfoot as she went to her tomato plants, basket in hand. Last week a friend from college had told her about an opening at her school in Waxahachie.

The day was in its full heat, but the shade made it pleasant, and every few seconds a breeze rose, coming across the parking lot and empty campsites. No one camped near the river. Everyone, like them, was up in the Chisos Basin, with the red mountains rising around them, where it was cooler. Josh sat next to her. Together they watched a roadrunner trot across the asphalt, then a rabbit came out from some brush and gnawed on a dandelion.