In An Arid Land Read online

  In An Arid Land

  Thirteen Stories of Texas

  Paul Scott Malone

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  "Bringing Joboy Back" first appeared in American Fiction 88; "Prize Rope" in New Growth 2: Contemporary Short Stories by Texas Writers; "The Lost Earring" in New Virginia Review; "The Sulfur-Colored Stone" in Writers' Forum; "Floundering" in Descant; "The Unyielding Silence" in Southern Humanities Review; "Mother's Thimbles" in Writers' Forum; "A Minor Disturbance" in Other Voices; "The Pier, The Porch, The Pearly Gates" in Pembroke Magazine; "The Wondrous Nature of Repentance" in Concho River Review; and "In an Arid Land" in Black Warrior Review.

  I wish to thank the editors of these publications, Alexander Blackburn in particular, for their faith and encouragement. I also wish to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the Society of Southwestern Authors and the University of Arizona's Program in Creative Writing for their generous support.

  Copyright © 1995, Paul Scott Malone

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Malone, Paul Scott

  In an arid land : thirteen stories of Texas / by Paul Scott Malone.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-87565-140-2

  1. TexasFiction. I. Title

  PS3563.A43246415 1995

  813'.54dc20

  94-16972

  CIP

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Cover and text designed by Barbara Whitehead

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PRIZE ROPE

  THE LOST EARRING

  THE SULFUR-COLORED STONE

  BRINGING JOBOY BACK

  FLOUNDERING

  THE UNYIELDING SILENCE

  MOTHER'S THIMBLES

  A MINOR DISTURBANCE

  THE PIER, THE PORCH, THE PEARLY GATES

  FURNITURE

  EVELINE'S LIZARD

  THE WONDROUS NATURE OF REPENTANCE

  IN AN ARID LAND

  For Cheryl

  PRIZE ROPE

  We're fixing up a majestic breakfast for our first morning. In my old black skillet, on my green Coleman stove, sitting on green metal legs above a little sand dune, nine patties of Jimmy Dean's HOT sausage are sizzling. The sausage is my job. I study it closely, turn each patty with the long blade on my Swiss Army knife, sniff the wonderful greasy odor, take a sip of my screwdriver in a plastic cup. Then I glance up looking for Eddie.

  I find him out in the surf, still in its morning calm. He's fishing again, his big head and his long black rod silhouetted against that monster sunrise. He casts, turns his body to battle a low wave, reels in his bait like some machine. Eddie doesn't much care for fishing; he's doing it because that's what men do when they go to the beach, and because he's heartbroken.

  "What's on his mind?" Ed Senior wants to know, coming up behind me. "I don't think he slept at all and he hasn't spoken a word since we got up, just a grunt now and then, like an animal."

  "Squaw problems," I say.

  "That's what I figured," he says.

  "So what's new, huh?"

  "Dern women," says Ed Senior and he snorts a laugh to show he's joking; he doesn't know the facts of the matter. I know the facts and I know it's not Marcia's fault that Eddie's heartbroken; this is No-Fault Heartbreak, you might say. She changed, he changed, they changed, an old American story; and I happen to know she's in Albuquerque this week looking for a place to live.

  We stand there worrying, wearing nothing but swim trunks, wriggling our toes in the sand, me with my knife, him with his Dutch oven full of biscuits, staring out to sea like wives of old. Eddie's my best friend, has been most of my life, and he's Ed Senior's only son. We've come here, to this lonely stretch of beach, because Eddie wanted us to. An empty house is a mean companion. So here we are, three white guys loose upon the earth.

  "Dern women," the Old One says again, grinning at me as he turns away. He goes back to his fire pit, pokes the coals with a stick and replaces the Dutch oven on the blackened grate. The biscuits, the coffee, the fried potatoes with onions and some kind of private seasoning he brought along-these are Ed Senior's jobs, and he knows what he's doing. The eggs are Eddie's job.

  "Is it time yet?"

  "Pretty close," he says. "Better call him in."

  We both look out to sea. Eddie casts again, reels it in like he's in a bad hurry, with an awkward but furious kind of precision, like it's a chore he's got to get through but never will.

  It's unlikely he'll catch anything; we all know this. There's a fat old noisy dredge as big as a destroyer working in the shrimp boat channel just down the island from us and it's pumping the sludge over the jetties into the Gulf. Just our luck. The water all around is gray and gritty, the fish gone elsewhere.

  I turn the sausage for the last time, slice off a juicy bite to be sure it's done, put down my knife and then I trudge through the sand to the water. I stand in the water, staring at Eddie, just watching him, still silent, until he turns and sees me.

  After breakfast Ed Senior mixes up a new round of screwdrivers. He squeezes a lime wedge into each red cup and tells us it's his own personal recipe. We grin like conspirators, touch cups in a toast and then sit in folding chairs beneath the shelter we have erected with a blue plastic tarp and four crooked poles of driftwood. Ed Senior slaps Eddie's knee and shows an enormous smile to be uplifting. He says, "Boys, this is the life, ain't it?"

  The tarp flaps and complains overhead. We sip our drinks, smoke cigarettes we wouldn't smoke back in the city, breathe in the salty air, gaze at the roaring Gulf. Already it's ninety degrees and we're sweating, our pale bodies suffering.

  It's an elaborate camp we have made. Our huge rented tent snaps and grumbles in the anxious breeze. Inside is all our personal gear, knapsacks and satchels and gimme caps, books that won't get read, two sleeping bags, Ed Senior's aluminum cot, a Playboy magazine, a .357 Ruger automatic, our wallets full of money and credit cards and fishing licenses purchased at a bait shop yesterday, along with tiny photos of loved ones. Round about are ice chests and old trunks, jugs of fresh water and big red gasoline cans, pairs of sneakers and tackle boxes already settling into the sand. A second spare tire, which the park rangers suggested we bring along when Eddie called last week, serves as the bar; it is covered with leaning liquor bottles and even, as a sort of joke by Ed Senior which we the young ones don't get, a metal martini mixer and a squat round decanter of expensive liqueur.

  "Grace and style, boys," he explained when he emptied the "liquor store," one of the trunks, while we were setting up camp.

  To put it straight, we overloaded. The roof of Eddie's big Jeep was weighted down so cruelly on our drive down here that the ceiling liner touched my head in the backseat. Better to have than to have not was our motto in packing. We are sixty-three miles from civilization. We are a long way from home. We are without supervision. This is how he wanted it; he wanted Remote. He has owned the Jeep for two years, put 64,000 miles on it, and yesterday, grinding through the deep soft sand in our search for Remote, was only the third time he has used the four-wheel drive.

  Eddie rises, gulps the rest of his drink and without a word to either of us he picks up his rod and his bait can and then he walks like a man with a mission straight into the water.

  We fish for a while, catch nothing, but it feels good being in the warm surf, which is up now and fighting us. We're on the first sandbar. The water is groin deep. Ed Senior and I are working the trench between us and the beach. Eddie's still casting out, into the oncoming waves. He reaches way back with his brand-new surf rig and heaves with all his might, sending the sinker and the shrimp on its hook into a tremendous arc that ends with a tiny splash out amo
ng the breakers. Each time he looks somehow disappointed, as if he's trying to hit Florida or the Gulf Stream with every toss and intends to keep at it until he does.

  Soon Ed Senior tires of the fight. I can see it in his drooping red face, his weary gray hair. He waves at me, points to the camp and smiles before he wades through the trench to the beach. He dries himself, changes into some baggy plaid shorts and a polo shirt, and I see him disappear into the tent for a nap.

  Another hour of nothing. Now I'm tired too and I can feel the sting of the sun on my white-boy shoulders. Eddie the Machine is still working, casting out and reeling in, casting out and reeling in. I make my way down the sandbar to him, and he actually flinches and jumps when he senses me there beside him. He looks at me like I'm a Hammerhead come to eat him.

  "Let's go in," I yell over the roar.

  He shakes his head no, indicates with a nod that I should go ahead though if I want to. He reels in, turns to toss again and it's then that I notice there's no bait on his hook nothing but curved steel. With that same look in his face he heaves and sends his naked hook flying toward Florida.

  I yell, "Hey, man, they've stolen your bait."

  Eddie glances at me with those cool blue eyes in his reddening face and he shrugs his reddening shoulders as if it doesn't matter, and he starts reeling in again. So I leave him there and slog it to the beach. In camp I find one of his tee shirts flapping from a pole of the shelter.

  On the front of the tee shirt, in faded blue letters above and below a faded blue stencil of a big Texas gobbler, it says, Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot A Marathon for Health Greater Houston Heart Association. I remember that day. I remember a photograph of Eddie and Marcia, their faces worn out and drained of color but happy, their dark hair stringy and wild under their sweatbands, his hammy arm across her shoulders, and each of them wearing a Turkey Trot tee shirt. They're looking right into the camera and their eyes are the Lights of Expectation. Also in the picture are his mom and Ed Senior, who'd come in to town for the occasion, beaming like proud parents should. I took that picture, though I hadn't run in the race, to celebrate his return from the brink. He was healthy again after two years of struggling with itthe crud in his veins, the goo in his lungs, those murderous habitsand we were crazy with joy and love for what he'd done.

  Back into the waves I go, carrying the tee shirt on a mission of mercy, and when I get to him I holler, "Hey, better put this on, you're roasting." He smiles at me and nods his head in thanks. I take his rod while he slips the shirt on and I very quickly bait his hook with a shrimp out of my own can.

  He smiles again, nods again, takes the rod from me, turns, heaves, trying once again for Florida.

  About mid-afternoon Ed Senior emerges from the tent squinting and blinking in the blinding glare of sun and sand.

  "Good God, Matt, is he still at it?"

  "Yessir," I say.

  "Has he caught anything?"

  "Not that I've noticed."

  We glance at each other with looks of wonder and concern, and then sit under the sagging shelter drinking beers.

  We sit there for quite a while, saying little, just watching Eddie out in the surf, the flight of an occasional pelican, a sand crab scampering about. The tarp above us is whooshing like a flag now.

  Ed Senior is restless after his nap. He fidgets in his chair, scans the beach looking for entertainment. All of a sudden he says, "Hey, let's go do some scavenging, want to?"

  "Well sure. Sounds fine with me."

  "Wonder if he'll come along?" he says, looking out at Eddie.

  "He's got to be tired."

  "Gotta be."

  "We'll coax him out with beer."

  We take six cans from an ice chest and with two of them raised high I struggle through the water to the sandbar while Ed Senior starts the Jeep and drives down to the water's edge to wait. It's a reluctant Eddie who follows me out. He gets in the back seat and the Old One drives us up the beach in the direction we came from yesterday. The tide is out and so Ed Senior guns up the Jeep, races along the wet hard pack, splashing through pockets of water, and we're all grinning over it like riders on a roller coaster. Soon we're at the part of the island where the junk, the jetsam and flotsam, the debris, the detritus whatever you want to call it is the worst, the deepest, the ugliest.

  It's a depressing sight 'like the Aftermath', as Eddie put it yesterday when we ground our way through here but heartening, too, to scavengers like us. In the soft sand between the tide line and the high grassy dunes is all the stuff of modern life. Plastic laundry hampers, plastic milk crates, plastic jugs, half submerged in the sand. Huge chunks of lumber with rusty nails protruding dangerously.

  Hypodermic needles, little brown bottles, big green bottles, faded beer cans, lengths of oceangoing rope. Gifts from Mexico, New Jersey, Europe and all the ships at sea.

  We wander through it, watching where we step, picking up this, picking up that, tossing it down. Soon we settle on rope as our objective no telling what you might use it for. We drive a ways, spot a telltale yellow piece poking out of the sand, stop, get out, pull on it, and twenty feet surface in a long circular line. Two hours we stalk the beach, going five, maybe six miles, until there are two filthy laundry baskets full of coiled, stinking rope in the back of the Jeep. The Prize Piece is perhaps two inches in diameter, perhaps thirty feet long, with impressive loops woven into both ends. Eddie, smiling, says he'll use it as a clothesline, "or maybe to hang myself when the time comes."

  Now we are disgusted with scavenging, hot and stinking and exhausted, and headed back to camp. Eddie's driving. He's going fast, right at the water's edge the roller coaster again, only faster, more erratic up and down off low dunes, splashing through cuts in the beach at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour. We're whizzing along, enjoying the cool breeze, the thrill.

  Eddie, grinning ferociously, says, loud over the wind noise, "About time this Jeep started to look and act like a Jeep," and he takes us bounding over a little ridge. "Look at this," he says, pointing to a streak of beach tar on the pretty gray dashboard. "Now that's the way it ought to look." He guns it up, grins all around, his hair blowing, eyes bright. "Watch this," he says and this time all four tires come off the ground.

  "Wahoo," I holler, caught up in the moment, his moment.

  But I can tell Ed Senior is worried. The Old One is hanging on and frowning now with doubt. He wants to say something but won't, wants to be fatherly but can't. Eddie knows this. He glances over, returns his father's frown, and without warning he turns the Jeep into the surf, sending up spray like a motorboat, soaking us all, and then, stamping his foot on the brake pedal, he takes us to a rough tilting stop. The Jeep rocks up painfully on its side and hangs there for a tense moment before settling itself like a great wounded beast. Eddie smiles and looks around.

  "Holy cow, boy, you trying to kill us?" says Ed Senior, and he lets out a nervous laugh. "This ain't a Pershing tank, you know."

  Eddie opens his door and gets out. He runs, leaping through the waves, and dives in. Ed Senior and I sit there in the sweltering Jeep, wondering what he's doing.

  He emerges, splashes back in, comes right up to the Jeep and leans his big head inside the window, dripping water.

  "Y'all go ahead," he says, panting, his face blazing red. "I'll see you in a little while."

  "We can wait," says Ed Senior. "Whatever you're doing."

  "Naw, go on, I'm collecting sea shells."

  "Sea shells!" says the Old One. "What for?"

  Eddie backs away into the water, panting and smiling oddly, bends at the waist like a runner to catch his breath, and looks at our wondering faces through the window.

  "Because Marcia likes sea shells," he says.

  He turns, runs away, jumping through the waves like a big old crazy dog, stretches out his body and dives in again.

  The sunset's full above the dunes by the time Eddie appears in camp. Ed Senior, a martini in his hand, complete with olives, is moving fretfully arou
nd the fire pit. He has supper well under way not the broiled snapper we'd planned on, but steaks and baked potatoes and even sweet corn, a fine meal.

  "About goddamn time you showed up," he says to Eddie in a lilting, teasing voice. "Where're your sea shells?"

  It's true; he walked in empty handed.

  Giving the Old One a mean glare for bringing it up, Eddie says, "I'm not hungry, don't fix me anything," and Ed Senior returns the glare, his mouth hanging open in exaggerated shock.

  "But you gotta make the salad, I'm no good with salad."

  "I don't want anything, I tell you."

  "Ah, for crying out loud," says Ed Senior. "You can't go without eating, son, you haven't had a bite since breakfast."

  "I can go without anything I damn well want to go without," he says, and we're both a little hurt by his tone. We shuffle around in the sand, looking away, glancing back. Eddie seems to regret it but he's not apologizing. In haste he finds his rod and his bait can and he marches out to sea. He's lucky. The moon, about two slivers shy of full, is already up out there, hanging above the horizon like a great white eye giving off a big light.

  "Well, I'll say this," the Old One grumbles after a long while. "If determination could feed the world, ole Eddie'd be the breadbasket, wouldn't he? Or maybe the fishing net."

  "He'll get over it," I say, thinking hard. "I guess I did."

  We glance at each other in the fading sunset, knowing I'm lying in the service of friendship, knowing these are not the facts of the matter, both of us wishing I hadn't said it.

  "Let's eat," he mutters, turning toward the fire pit, and we are very quiet with each other all through the meal.

  It's late now. The big eye of the moon has crawled well up into the starry sky, its bright light intruding on our privacy, even here, in Remote, Texas. Ed Senior and I have long since had our feast of steak and potatoes, long since concluded that we should leave Eddie's meal warming in the Dutch oven above the coals, long since passed between us the squat round decanter of expensive liqueur that tasted of orange peels and sugar water, long since given up our inebriated talk of nothing (that worthless drowsy kind of talk that always follows the lowering of the lantern's flame when the newly arrived gloom of night involves you in its promise of rest), long since had our sighs and our yawns and let our heads nod, long since offered our good-nights.