Remember Me Like This (20 page)

Fishermen stood on the piers. An oil tanker made its way through the ship channel. It rode high in the water, which meant the cargo hold was empty and the captain would load up on crude in Corpus. Already, the line at the ferry landing was deep, curling out into the marina. The ferry docked and the long steel gate swung open like an
arm. A few cars and trucks clattered onto the landing, and then the line of cars ahead of Cecil started proceeding onto the boat. He doubted he’d make the ferry before it was full and was preparing himself to wait for the next trip when the orange-vested attendant on the deck waved him aboard. Cecil eased off the clutch and pressed the accelerator. The attendant motioned for him to kill the engine, then threw a heavy wooden block behind the truck’s rear tire as they were pushing off.

My lucky day, he thought.

The boat rose and fell on the water. There was no rhythm to the movement; the waves came randomly and with different lifts and drops. Occasionally the ferry driver gunned the engine and the vessel surged unexpectedly forward. A few gulls were hovering like kites tied to the railing. The engine rumbled. The horn blew.

That Cecil was driving to Corpus that Wednesday morning truly registered with him only when he accelerated off the ferry, the truck bumping over the lowered gate and onto Mustang Island. Now that he knew where he was going, he also knew he’d been headed in that direction since he’d climbed out of bed. The sky hung low, a washed-out blue strewn with downy clouds. Bach was playing, first the Prelude and then Suite no. 1. He passed the Bufords’ property and saw Mayne’s Mercedes in the horseshoe driveway. There were also a couple of
NO TRESPASSING
signs nailed to the fence that Cecil didn’t remember from before. Then the stretch of grass-feathered dunes, the tidal flats, the smell of baking sand. A man lumbered along the beach with a metal detector. Behind him, a pair of surfers were trying to make the best of the chop. The Bach swelled. An SUV with words shoe-polished on its window approached, and Cecil hoped the writing would have to do with Justin—it happened from time to time, and he always got a charge—but when the truck passed, he saw that the owner had just listed the vehicle’s specs and the words
FOR SALE
. Strip malls streamed by. Souvenir and sandwich shops, bait stands and convenience stores that sold beer, ice, and sunglasses.
(Connie had sometimes said, “If I lost weight the way I lose sunglasses, you’d be married to a pin-up girl.”) Vendors sold beach towels suspended from clotheslines. To Cecil, it appeared that each offered the same prices on identical inventory—towels that depicted the Confederate flag, the Texas flag, the Mexican flag, and towels with wolves howling at the moon and pink-bikini girls riding motorcycles, towels that looked like Budweiser cans. The vendors sat under tents, waiting like spiders for tourists. He briefly considered stopping and buying something for Griff and Justin, but he couldn’t make up his mind and then he was on the causeway, looking down on the water and oyster reefs and spoil islands as he ascended.

C
ECIL USED TO TELL
E
RIC STORIES
. T
HAT
’
S WHAT
C
ONNIE WOULD
say: “Oh, your daddy’s just telling stories.” If they took a drive somewhere—to the zoo in Brownsville or the rattlesnake races in Refugio—when Eric was too young to know better, Cecil would slyly honk the horn with his palm and then look around in confusion. “What is it, Daddy?” Eric would ask from the backseat, and Cecil would say an airplane had landed on their car’s roof. The boy could laugh! Cecil told him there were swamps in Louisiana where spheres of fire bloomed nightly and rolled across the water like soccer balls, and he said there were caverns running beneath much of South Texas, tunnels with secret entrances and exits, and yes, of course, he knew where they were. One afternoon when they were driving home from an airshow at the Army Depot in Corpus, Eric asked how Flour Bluff got its name and Cecil invented a story about a pirate who covered the dunes in white flour so that his sons could pretend it was snow. “But,” Cecil said, pleased by the way the tale suddenly fitted itself to the language, “it was all a bluff. It was a big flour bluff.”

Years later, after Eric started teaching Texas history, he said, “You had the flour part right.” He explained that the area was named after an event in 1838 when Texas forces captured a band of
men smuggling flour and other contraband in from Mexico. “I like the pirate and snow version better,” Cecil lied. He was already imagining how he’d dispense the information at the pawnshop, how he’d brag on his son having taught it to him. He also knew he would, for the rest of his life, think of Eric’s story every time he came off the Kennedy Causeway and drove into the Bluff.

So it was on his mind as he passed the men fishing in waders in the cloud-gray water, but before long he was paying strict attention to the area. He turned off the Bach, concentrating. There were places to rent kayaks and Jet Skis, and places to get tattooed and pierced. A Baptist church was hemmed by a newly laid asphalt parking lot, so for half a mile the air smelled of piney tar. Tall, spindly weeds grew through buckled sidewalks. Highway barrels from a long-stalled road repair project had faded from bright orange to a translucent pink; one was doubled over like it had been hit with a baseball bat. Cars with sun-blistered paint, and bumper stickers that read
GUN CONTROL IS BEING ABLE TO HIT YOUR TARGET
and
1 CROSS
+
3 NAILS
=
4 GIVEN
. The Army-Navy Credit Union anchored the corner of Waldron Road, and behind it loomed a Walmart, the lot already bustling. On the marquee of another church were the words
FREE TRIP TO HEAVEN
.
DETAILS INSIDE
. A nail salon, a palm reader, men selling watermelons and pecans and nets of oranges at the stoplight. Cecil turned onto Yorktown Boulevard, passing an abandoned shopping center. The storefronts were scrolled with elaborate gang tags that looked like calligraphy.

How many times had he trawled through here in the last four years? Eric, too. Or, worse, how many of these sorry places had become familiar to Justin in that time? Surely Dwight Buford had pushed a cart through the Walmart and bought cheap fried-fish baskets at the Boat ’n Net off to the west. Cecil remembered that Justin had loved hush puppies, and it was destabilizing to think the boy might have eaten countless quantities of them an hour away from Southport. Flour Bluff had been papered with the
MISSING
flyers.
Early on, volunteers had hung them, and once their involvement dwindled, Cecil and Eric had driven out with tape and staple guns. Maybe Buford had tooled around in his truck tearing them down before he threw his paper route—or more sadistically, he might have made Justin do it—or maybe if Cecil dedicated himself, he could scour the area and find one of the flyers still hanging in a window. He turned up the air conditioner and readjusted the vents to blow on him. He’d started sweating.

Bay Breeze Suites was a one-story complex about two miles beyond the Bluff’s center. A slack chain-link fence bordered three sides of the property. The grass was patchy and blond. No trees. No shrubs or hedges. There was a gravel parking lot and a blue dumpster with trash bags spilling onto the ground. A young girl was lazily throwing a basketball at a rusted, bent-down hoop. The apartments themselves were painted brick, a neglected aqua. Each had a window unit and a screen door, and a few had folding lawn chairs out front. Residents used old coffee cans full of sand for ashtrays. The complex was horseshoe-shaped—Cecil thought it had been an old no-tell motel at some point—so the layout formed something of a courtyard. In the center of the dry grass stood a brick barbecue pit and a metal picnic table. There were empty beer bottles arranged on the table, maybe from a gathering the night before or maybe from as far back as the Fourth. Cecil parked his truck near the road, put on his sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat.

The door of Apartment 23 had been boarded up with three-quarter-inch plywood. The front window, too. Had it not been for the crime scene notices stapled in the center of the boards, someone might have surmised the apartment had been battened down for a storm and forgotten. Cecil had expected such a barricade, but he was still disappointed. Seeing firsthand the conditions in which Justin had lived seemed necessary. He had no intentions of telling anyone he’d visited Bay Breeze, and yet he believed he’d return to Southport with a perspective that would somehow prove beneficial.
What that might be, he didn’t know. He only knew he’d expected to find something here, and he knew this now because he knew he wouldn’t find anything at all.

When he turned to walk back to the truck, the girl with the basketball was blocking his path. Cecil bumped into her, was suddenly on top of her. He had to grab her arm to keep from knocking her down.

“Excuse you,” she said.

Cecil dipped his chin in apology. His eyes scanned behind the girl, looking for people watching from between parted curtains.

“I’m going to start charging admission,” the girl said. “Ten bucks a head. I’ll be filthy rich by the time I’m sixteen.”

Her hair was a dark, listless red. It hung to her shoulders and she had to keep tucking a hank behind her ear. She wore an oversized tank top and frayed cutoffs over a purple one-piece bathing suit. She started dribbling her basketball and the noise reverberated down the walkway. Cecil brushed past her and moved swiftly toward his truck. He walked with his head down as if it had started pouring rain.

The girl caught her ball and trotted close behind him, oddly reminding him of the seagulls that had hovered alongside the ferry. She said, “You don’t want my tour? How about for half price? Five bucks gets you all the child abuse and pedophilia you can stan—”

Cecil stopped and swung around to face the girl. He said, “If you so much as
think
those words again, I’ll put you across my knee and whip your little ass right here in the parking lot.”

She smiled, her eyes alight and taunting. She said, “Big talk from a pervert.”

He started toward his truck again, giving the girl a wide berth.

“Big talk from a dirty old man that drove into the sticks to see where a fat fuck used to give it to some sweet boy.”

He halted again. He stood still not because he was angry, but because her voice betrayed a protectiveness he recognized. The girl
was in front of him now, dribbling her ball. Her hair had fallen into her face, and although Cecil expected her to tuck it behind her ear, she left the lock hanging. He said, “You knew him?”

“So now you do want the tour? Classic indecisive pervert,” she said.

“I’m asking if you knew him.”

“Of course I knew him.”

“Tell me,” Cecil said.

The girl caught her ball and stared at him from behind her hair. A fan belt squealed a few blocks away. The girl never averted her gaze. Cecil thought she might be looking at her reflection in his sunglasses, but then he realized she was deciding what he was worth telling. She resumed her dribbling and said, “Everyone felt sorry for him.”

“Y’all knew what was happening?”

“Nope.” She watched the ball bounce between her palm and the ground like a yo-yo. “We thought Justin was his nephew. The story was that Dwight was his godfather and he was taking him in because Justin’s parents had been killed in a car accident up in Dallas. That’s the headline version. When Dwight told the story, it was all detailed and heartbreaking.”

“No one suspected anything.”

“It’s not a popular view now that we know he’s into ass-rape and all, but Dwight was cool. Like, he had karaoke parties and he’d give out free newspapers. He was rad at foosball. He’d always get the new videogames the day they came out. He bought Justin his snake. People, like,
admired
him for taking in his dead sister’s kid.”

“And what about Justin?”

The girl twisted the lock of hair and hooked it primly behind her ear. She said, “He was always real quiet, which totally made sense, given that we thought his parents had croaked. He never sang on karaoke nights, but he liked videogames and Sasha, his snake. I named her, by the way.”

“He never tried to tell anyone? Never tried running?”

“Nope,” she said. “And he had lots of chances. The three of us—me, him, and Sasha—used to go looking for shells and rocks. Once he found this really beautiful conch and gave it to me. It was pretty sick.”

Cecil didn’t know what to say. He was tired again, battered-feeling. An orange-and-white two-seater plane flew over and banked toward Cabaniss Field. The pilot was practicing touch-and-gos.

“Did you ever see a white Mercedes around here? The driver would have been wearing a straw cowboy—”

“Dwight’s father,” she said. “He came around last week for the first time. We’d never seen him before.”

“What was he after?”

“I didn’t talk to him, but I’m sure he’s after what you’re after, what I’m after, what everyone’s after.”

“And what’s that?”

“Whatever will make all of this go away.”

Cecil wouldn’t have said that’s what he was looking for, but the girl was right. He said, “Who talked to him?”

“Mr. Salinas,” she said. “I wouldn’t really call it talking, though. Mr. Salinas kind of gave him the old what-for. I’m given to understand a crowbar was involved.”

A sudden jolt of pleasure, a sense of admiration, the need to suppress a smile. Cecil said, “That’s a tough day.”

The girl studied him again, then nodded. She said, “He never opened up, not completely. Justin, I mean. I knew he had all of these walls up, but I assumed it was because he’d lost his parents.”

“You can’t take it personally,” he said.

“I swear I’m, like, really happy for him, I totally am, but I’m not stoked that he’s over there and I’m stuck here.”

The temptation was to placate her, to suggest that Justin would get in touch or their paths would cross again, but Cecil knew the therapist had told Eric and Laura that all the old ties needed to stay
severed. The Coast Guard plane made another pass, but the girl seemed uninterested now that she was thinking of Justin. She was holding the basketball in front of her stomach, cradling it with both hands.