Читать книгу Goodnight, Texas - William Cobb - Страница 8

THE SEA WAS RISING and into it Goodnight was sinking. Along Red Moon Bay the pink beach houses on stilts loomed above the lapping water like boxy wooden flamingos. Resort homes flooded and were abandoned. As the water rose it seemed to hold nothing but pulsing white jellyfish. The world bloomed with rust and Goodnight became a fishing village without fish. Every day the shrimpers left dock and plowed the waves with their nets, bringing home a harvest of nothing. In the smokeblue aquarium world of the bars, they drowned and argued.

They went broke slowly, slowly enough to see it happen to each other and to enjoy it, to enjoy the notice and the watching of it. They thought about leaving and doing something else for a living, roughnecking maybe, but the oil rigs were mostly shut down and weren’t hiring.

They considered sinking their boats for the insurance money. They rubbed their faces dramatically and took a long time to an­swer if you asked them something, even a simple question like How ya doing? They smoked too many cigarettes, argued, fought, and hid from the wind outside that made the bay waters choppy and frogback green, their boats strain against the moorings in the docks.

That September Gabriel Perez arrived late for work as a hand aboard the Maria de las Lagrimas. The bonewhite fifty-footer was at the boat basin in Goodnight, moored in its boatslip under a blue-eyed sky. Laughing gulls floated and jeered above it. The morning wind already furrowed the waves of Red Moon Bay into sliding jade trenches topped with frothy whitecaps. The captain, an Anglo named Douglas, sat on the tailgate of his rusting pickup, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He had an Abe Lincoln beard, ears like conch shells, and the skin of weathered planks, like a poor man’s Ancient Mariner.

Gabriel pulled his El Camino in beside him and got out, held his cigarette in his lips, tucked his rubber boots under one arm, and took the keys from the ignition. He walked up to Captain Douglas, squinting from the smoke drifting into his eyes. Across the street a terrier barked, chasing a sooty cormorant from its perch on a creosote post. A Latina woman in an apron stood a few feet away, tossing french fries to the bird, who caught them in its beak.

Gabriel set down his boots and took the cigarette from his mouth. Sorry about being late, he said. Car wouldn’t start.

The captain sipped his black java and squinted back, looking up at Gabriel and into the sun. Save your heartfelt sagas of mechanical failure for some other job, he said, his voice boozer rough. This morning arrives the proverbial pink slip.

Come again?

You heard right the first time. We’re officially out of work.

Gabriel cussed, spat. He said it figured. The minute I fucking woke up, he said, I knew this was not my day.

Douglas nodded and sighed, like a drought farmer regarding a tumbleweed. He explained the owner had informed him that morning that he’d decided to sell out, couldn’t afford the costs of diesel and their pay with how little they’d been catching. They couldn’t compete with the shrimp farms in Brazil, raising them for half the price it cost to catch what few were left in the Gulf.

Fucking Brazilians, said Gabriel.

My sentiments exactly.

Gabriel drop-kicked his rubber boots into the pitted asphalt of the dockside road. He shook his head and walked in a tight circle toward the El Camino and then back. Finally he said, What do we do now?

Douglas believed that to be a good question.

Something else, he said.

Gabriel thought about it for a minute, squinting into the heat-lamp sunlight. They stood silent and stricken. The crawdad smell of Red Moon Bay engulfed them. On the surface of the water near their boatslip, beside the hull of the Maria de las Lagrimas, floated a white rubber glove like a severed hand, in a rainbow sheen of diesel, beside a pair of dead minnows.

What do we do now? began Douglas. He smiled like a mortician about to detail the price of caskets. I suggest something that does not involve fish.

ABOUT NOON GABRIEL was back near the docks. He found a place in the mother-of-pearl oyster-shell parking lot of the Black Tooth Café. He’d been drinking for two hours, Tecate with whiskey chasers, but had brushed his teeth to fool the world, downshift his rage-a-holic transmission into sweet and innocent. In his present blurry condition his movements were like a Tejano gunslinger, deliberate and pointed.

He checked his face in the rearview to make sure he was composed, handsome as ever, teeth straight and white, black hair thick as a brush. He was in his early twenties and perhaps losing that lousy job was the best thing that could happen to him.

When he stepped out, he watched his reflection, liking the way he looked in the window glass of his gold El Camino. Things would work out. He was young. He had potential. Plus he owned a car the color of good tequila. He smoothed back a shock of his hair and straightened his bushy eyebrows, then stood as tall and straight as he could for being a bit on the short side of things.

He headed toward the door and grimaced, noting the license plates of the vehicles filling the lot. Wisconsin. Minnesota. Saskatchewan. Iowa. The place was full of old Yankee tourists and if there was one thing he hated it was the fucking tourists. Fucking old white tourists. Snowbirds. They were always smiling and friendly. They lived their whole fat lives in good moods. They had pink noses and white hair like lab rats. The only thing they needed now was whiskers and a cage. They discussed the flavor of gumbo like it was the weather or local gossip. Like I think the gumbo is especially good today, don’t you? Just the right amount of shrimp. And the okra! You can’t get okra like this in Madison! It was enough to make you want to jab an oyster knife in a snowbird’s gut.

Staring at all the Northern license plates in the parking lot, Gabriel felt like Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn.

Good moods came easy to these Yankee tourists. They had all the money they needed and then some. Gabriel spat on the tire of an RV from Michigan as he passed by. Stepping into the Black Tooth, lost in his brain, in his enojo sombrío, he calculated a vehicle like that must cost a hundred grand, easy.

Behind the counter stood the owner of the Black Tooth Café, a Russian émigré named Gusef Smurov. He saw the steady demise of Goodnight as an end of this world. But he knew another would arise in its place. Gusef could always recognize the sooty under-feathers of bad times. When the old fisherman Mr. Buzzy had his leg amputated after a catfish wound infection set in, Gusef helped him more than any other person in Goodnight. To cheer him up he said, Yes well think of money you will now save on shoes.

Gabriel walked in and took a place at the counter. He stared at the menu in fake concentration, as if pretending to read the Gospel of Luke and not getting what all the fuss was about. His face took on a resemblance to the bronze statue of a vaquero. He wore blue jeans, workboots, and a plain white T-shirt. Around his left wrist was tattooed a bracelet of mesquite thorns, no wider than a pencil. The barbs of the thorns were graceful, blue and sharp.

Gusef asked how he was doing.

Gabriel did not look up from the menu. He said, You want to know the truth?

No. But this you will tell anyway.

The truth is I lost my job. The owner is throwing in the towel on the shrimping business.

Gusef looked out the window and shrugged. Yes well it is not such bad thing. So you fishermen catch no fish. You will have more time to drink. Or stay at home and get much amusement out of shouting obscenities at your wife and gruesome children.

This time Gabriel gave the Russian a sharp look. Not me, he said. I don’t have any wife or children.

Perhaps someone is lucky.

Gabriel put down the menu. You think you’re a funny man, don’t you?

Perhaps you should learn to take joke, Mr. Tough Guy.

Maybe you should tell one, said Gabriel. He looked around the dining room. Is Una here?

She is here but has no time for love talk. She is busy now.

I’ll wait, he said.

Before long a pretty girl walked up and put her hand on Gabriel’s arm. She was four years out of high school but so small she could have passed for a junior high student. Her hair was blue-black and shimmery, like grackle wings. Her lips the pink of boiled shrimp. She brought Gabriel a glass of iced tea with two lemon wedges. She wore a plain blue dress and flip-flops. She’d lived in Goodnight all her life, but her father was Vietnamese, her mother Mexican. Her name was Una.

She touched Gabriel’s cheek and asked him what was the matter.

He told her how he’d been laid off. The injustice of it all. How the pendejos could have given him some warning. It wasn’t right. I’m not worthless, he said in a loud voice. They treat me like I’m nothing, less than nothing.

Una made a pained face. She said, I’m sorry.

Well so am I, said Gabriel, but it doesn’t matter. He started to go on about the coldhearted bastards that owned the shrimpboats, but Una took a step away. She said, I’m kind of swamped.

Okay. Sure. Go.

Don’t be like that.

Like what?

Have you been drinking?

Don’t start, okay? He directed his attention to the menu. Who’s the new guy?

What new guy?

The one in the apron.

Oh. He’s just a high school kid. He’s not new. He’s been here a couple weeks already.

First I’ve seen of him.

He got kicked out of school.

For what?

He got caught with a knife. In class.

Shit. I did that. You didn’t see me getting kicked out.

Well. He did.

What makes him so special?

Gabriel? I’m kind of busy right now?

He reached over and squeezed her hand. Don’t worry. I’ll be here.

She nodded. I better go. I have orders.

Sure, he said. Don’t let me keep you from feeding las turistas.

He went back to considering the menu. After a moment he realized she had not even asked what he wanted to eat. A grilled cheese would have been nice.

Beside him at the lunch counter, perched on a stool as pleased as punch, sat a chubby bald man with a white beard, wearing a loud red and yellow Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. He looked like Santa Claus on vacation. He beamed at Gabriel and said, The gumbo is wonderful today. I don’t know how they do it, but really, it’s to die for. I give it four stars.

Gabriel looked at the white-haired tourist without smiling. In a low voice he said, If I was you but I knew what was going on in my head? I think I’d just scoot the fuck over and shut the fuck up.

The Santa Claus man quit smiling and moved away.

THROUGH THE ROUND ship’s portal window in the door that divided the kitchen from the dining area, Falk Powell stood watching. He’d only been working at the Black Tooth for two weeks, an orphan and seventeen years old. He watched Una bend and wobble in the orbit of the shrimper Gabriel, the tough dude, who in Falk’s eyes seemed small and sinewy as a snake. A snake or a monkey. All wiry limbs and veins bulging beneath golden skin, a simian brow. To him Gabriel resembled the other bullies in school, Anglo or Chicano, goons who grew angrier as they grew older, as they realized that with each passing day their backs got closer to the wall.

When Una returned to the kitchen for a dessert order he followed her into the walk-in cooler. She was getting a slice of key lime pie for a customer. They kept the pie in the cooler beside a stack of chilled white plates. Falk pretended to be searching for something, standing near her in the cold air. He picked up a bucket of cherry tomatoes for the salad bar.

Una? Why do they call you that?

It’s my name.

But why?

She scooped a slice of the key lime pie onto a plate with a spatula. Maybe because I’m the one.

He considered this. He said, I should have known that.

What?

You being the one.

Standing that close, Falk could smell her perfume. To him it smelled like fabulous Vietnamese flowers and he had never been to Vietnam. When she turned to leave they squeezed close.

I think about you, he said.

She could not help but smile. She felt sorrow for this misfit. His parents dead and gone, living at his cousin’s, expelled from school as dangerous. His was a story of misfortune and mala suerte. When any soul with eyes could see he was gentle and quiet and only needed to be loved. He should be suckled like a child, pampered with dulces, and made to laugh.

With one hand she held the key lime pie carefully away from her body. She put the other hand on his chest, against his white apron smeared with mustard stains. You think about me?

I do.

She stared at his lips. What do you think?

I remember you.

She kept her eyes leveled on his mouth, then stood on tiptoe and lifted her face to his lips. They kissed once and pulled away, then Falk pulled her hips close to his and kissed her again, her mouth opening like a hot flower, the smell of her breath, a taste of sweetness, her lips warm and smooth. To Falk it felt as if he had stooped to enter a tunnel where all the world faded away and there existed only the here and now of her scorching lips, her smooth muscular tongue in his mouth. All his flesh tingled and dimly he was aware of how she held the plate with its slice of key lime pie away from her body, her tiny feet lifted out of her flip-flops, his hands on the small of her back, feeling the swell of her hips through the thin cotton cloth of her blue dress.

When they separated she pushed him away softly, still looking at his lips, whispering that she had to go. She left him there in the walk-in cooler. In this coolness his body still tingled, and he struggled with the surprise of the moment, the before-and-after-ness of it. After a moment he left the walk-in carrying a tray of breaded shrimp.

Gusef stood outside the door, shaking his head. You should not love this girl, he said. This woman. She is good person but that does not matter.

Falk stood there, holding the tray of breaded shrimp in front of his body. He looked up to Gusef and listened to what he said. I was just getting some shrimp, he said.

She is like sun. She will blind you.

Falk simply stood there, blinking, the smell of Una’s kisses still with him, a loose smile on his mouth making him appear slightly drunk.

Gusef reached out and tapped his forehead. Wake up, silly boy. You will love her and you will end up dead. And this you will regret from dark hole of wisdom called grave.

As Una moved into the dining room, glancing at the occupied tables to see who was ready for the check and who needed iced-tea glasses refilled and who looked like they wanted her attention, she savored the taste of Falk’s kiss on her lips. She would have to lie to Gabriel. She would ridicule Falk as nothing but a boy. A güero who didn’t know nothing. She would hate these words, the words that would come out of her mouth, a mouth still warm with the taste of the boy’s sweet tongue.

A person can be nice. Nice and tender and soft-spoken. He was the opposite of this one, Gabriel, a man and harsh to all but her. She hated and feared lying to him, the lies she felt compelled to tell and, for the moment at least, to believe herself.

For a good two years Una had felt something like love for Gabriel. She knew the stories about him and thought most of them exaggerated. People liked to have a badass around to make them feel high and mighty about themselves. Everybody knew he’d stuck a knife in Pedro Alamogordo’s gut, but that was considered by most a positive civic development. Still she knew in her heart and veins that Gabriel was a man upon whom she could not count. Plus he had an anger problem. Whatever feeling Una had that might have been called love was now worn thin and weak, the memory of a good time one night long ago followed by a year of bad ones.

At the counter Gabriel now sat alone. He ate a bowl of gumbo, crumbling a fistful of Saltine crackers into the bowl. He thought about what the tourist had said and didn’t get it. Gumbo was gumbo. Shrimp and crab, okra and spices, tomato and basil. There was no mystery. He thought the tourists were full of shit and wanted to turn around and shout at them, tell them they should go back to Minnesota or Manitoba or any of those other cold fucking states that started with an M. Let them know they weren’t wanted. That they were out of place.

He held his tongue. Una walked by and he knew she was pissed at him for drinking in the middle of the day, something she hated. The next time she passed he told her he’d be back to pick her up at the end of her shift. She asked where he was going and he said he didn’t know. He needed to think.

Gusef watched Gabriel leave and frowned. He saw right through his skin to the darkness of his soul and the clouds in his brain. He told Una she should find somebody new. He said, This angry fisherman, no.

Una told him she needed him to run a credit card for table four.

Gusef seemed swollen with romantic and moral indignation. He will not do, said Gusef. I speak truth. He has two ideas in his head, and it is crowded.

DOWN SHORELINE DRIVE from the Black Tooth Café was the Sea Horse Motel, also owned by Gusef. It was a two-story eggshell stucco beside the green and sluggish Red Moon Bay. Wrought-iron railings and red shingle roof. Cheap enough that when people checked in and signed the old-fashioned register it was like a release form for no complaints. Its claim to stylishness was the fanciful figure of its neon sign—an elaborate sea horse, the name in script above the matching icon with its amber stallion neck and spiny emerald mane. The loopy letters of the neon grapefruit script in the office window usually read Vacancy.

Walter Hamilton—the tourist Gabriel had insulted in the Black Tooth—and his wife were staying at the Sea Horse. They had recently arrived in Goodnight for the fall and winter months. Walter was retired and considered his life one of ease and refinement. He saw no reason for Gabriel to threaten him. For two hours afterward his hands trembled. He drove back to the Sea Horse in his RV that was big enough to accommodate a touring rock band. He told his wife he was going fishing.

I don’t care if there’s anything in the water but jellyfish and old crab traps, he said. At least I’ll be alone.

She watched him leave and wondered what in the world.

Before heading to the pier Walter bought a Dr. Pepper from the motel’s vending machine in a breezeway near the office, beside the ice machine. He removed the twelve-ounce can from the machine’s low mouth and hid it in his tackle box. Being borderline diabetic he was supposed to avoid unnecessary sugars but he couldn’t help himself. Dr. Pepper was just one more thing he was hiding from his wife.

India Hamilton was a righteous woman and did not stand for foolishness. She believed in discipline. Drinking soda pop was not altogether sinful but certainly undisciplined and if she had seen Walter with the can he would have caught the sting of her tongue.

India’s hair, like Walter’s, was white as snow-goose feathers. Her skin was pale and crinkled, befitting a healthy woman sixty-six years of age. Together India and Walter resembled Mr. and Mrs. Claus and, what’s more, they owned a farm in Minnesota that raised Christmas trees.

With the Dr. Pepper hidden in his tackle box, Walter brought India a bucket of ice before he left for the pier. She asked if he was all right.

Your hands are shaking, she said. Have you had your pills?

I’ve taken my pills.

Then what’s wrong?

I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going fishing.

She turned back to the newspaper crossword she was doing at the table in the Sea Horse Motel’s kitchenette. As he was leaving she said, The fish won’t listen.

On the pier Walter Hamilton skewered a dead shrimp on his treble hook and cast into the frothy green waves of Red Moon Bay. He set the Dr. Pepper can on the bleached planking beside him and squinted into the wind. Sunlight reflected off the water in bright spangles. He watched the waves, the fractured glass way they rippled and broke against the barnacle-encrusted black pillars of the piers. Drawn to the smell of sugar, a red wasp flying above the waves landed in the mouth of his Dr. Pepper can, crawled inside, and began to sip.

Walter did not notice this.

He was mesmerized by the breaking waves against the pier pillars, distracted from his anger with Gabriel, how the wave shapes were so geometrical. He saw in these shapes the hand of a gentle and creative God. India had been on a Jesus kick lately. He didn’t know what to make of that, but he feared fervent believers. Too much of that, next thing you know you’re barricaded behind a bullet-riddled crucifix, daring the feds to come in and get you.

After a moment he remembered his thirst and took a sip from his soda can. As he gulped the wasp inside stung his bottom lip. He felt a piercing jab and flung down the can, swiped at his mouth, swatting the pulpy body of the wasp into the waves. He whined in pain and groaned. His right hand began to shake with palsy.

A couple walking down the pier stopped and asked, Are you okay?

Walter nodded. Something stung me I think.

The man said, Ouch.

The woman grimaced. She noticed Walter’s eyes watered and pink. Are you allergic to bee stings? Let me look.

Walter took his hand away and she made a face. Oh, my. It’s starting to swell. You should get that checked out, don’t you think? You might need a shot or something?

Walter dropped his fishing pole and headed toward the motel, holding his mouth in pain, feeling it begin to swell. He half worried he was being punished by a touchy God who knew his angry thoughts, his faithless doubts.

As he was walking he kept his eyes on the water, his face downcast and shamed from the sting. Near the end of the pier he saw something odd beneath the bubbled froth at the waves’ end. He stopped and stared. A new wave’s froth obscured it. Then came a clearing in the swells. There. A huge zebra-striped fish was beached in the shadows by the pier pillars, washed in by high tide. The biggest fish he’d ever seen.

In their hotel room, India was still doing her daily crossword puzzle. She was quite good at it, considering it her mental exercise, and was already halfway finished when Walter walked into the room with lips like little inner tubes. His face was red and blotchy. She called the front desk and asked for directions to the nearest hospital. Gusef was there. He offered to drive them, as it would be faster. He liked this old couple who had just arrived and wanted them to stay the season. He owned the RV park behind the motel and told them it would be perfect, a home away from home.

On the way to the clinic Walter told Gusef about the huge fish. He insisted he’d never seen anything like it before, that it was un­doubtedly something remarkable. While waiting at the clinic, Gusef called the Black Tooth Café.

THIS WAS NOT the only Goodnight in Texas. Another town called Goodnight stretched wide its dry and wind-chapped lips in a coyote howl on the Llano Estacado of the Panhandle. It was a tiny one-horse town east of Amarillo and north of the windblasted cliffs of Palo Duro Canyon, near the famous JA Ranch, a million-acre spread founded by Colonel Charles Goodnight in the 1880s. Goodnight by the Sea shared this history, although it was a one-time gig. On an early trip rounding up wild longhorns from the Mexican brushland of South Texas and heading toward the Brazos River area, Goodnight and his men had veered east during a spate of torturously hot weather to hug the coastline, where the wind off the Gulf and the summer rains kept the air cooler.

The land was flat and easy from the saddle. The shadows of turkey vultures marked the herds trail as the birds circled in the cloudy sky or caught the updrafts and floated ahead of the scudding thunderheads. Coyotes skittered at the edges of the herd, occasionally chased away by the bigger wolves. Mosquitoes in the swamps sucked the blood from man and steer. The small town starting to form at the edge of Red Moon Bay grabbed the name of Goodnight, hoping to lure the cowboys back to the coast, for the business. But it didn’t work. Only the name stuck.

Because of the duplicate names, the coastal town was officially Goodnight by the Sea, the seat of Mustang County. Mustang Island and the glitz and hubbub of Corpus Christi lay to the south. Texas being as huge and lanky as it is, Goodnight by the Sea was a good six hundred miles south of Goodnight in the Plains, so there wasn’t much confusion over directions.

The people of Goodnight had lived with the blessings of the sea for many years, for generations. They had grown used to it. They had grown complacent. When the fishing and the shrimping declined, they reasoned it was just bad luck. A lull. A year or two of sea drought. These things come in cycles. That was what they told each other. Next year would be payday. The big kahuna. The drunk-with-money stroll on Easy Street. If they didn’t go broke and toothless in the waiting. If their boats weren’t repossessed. If the puffy pinkfaced vampires at the bank didn’t get their grubby mitts on them, things would work themselves out. They always did.

But this was the year the light of Goodnight was fading. The planet was overheating. In summer the sea turned warm as mustang blood. Rain fell in torrents as if this sunny, windy coast of Texas were the Congo or Borneo. Ditches filled with an algae-green mix of brackish rain and swamp water. Alligators crawled through backyards, beneath rusting swing sets and barracuda wind kites, slept in the shadows of boat trailers. The deep green St. Augustine grass of the lawns grew so fast you could almost see it, feel it squirming beneath your feet like sand crabs. Oleanders bloomed pink and lush as mutated sea anemones. At night people couldn’t sleep from the ungodly chorus of croaking frogs.

The sweetheart Gulf of Mexico turned mythical and suspicious. Bottle-nosed dolphins beached themselves on the oyster-shell shores of Tin Can Point and Humosa Bay. Dead loggerhead turtles washed ashore like huge sand dollars. Huge swarms of mosquitoes filled the sky in gray clouds, and some of Goodnight’s oldest died from West Nile.

Gusef realized a giant fish beached near the Sea Horse could be useful. He decided to call Falk Powell, the high school kid he’d hired a couple weeks before, at the café. Falk was a teenager who would take pictures of people when they weren’t looking, wandering the aisles of Wal-Mart, say, or filling a tank at the Speed-n-Go. People shouted and threatened to kick his ass from one end of town to the next, but that didn’t make him stop.

Falk dried his hands on his smudged apron and answered the ringing phone. Leon the badmood bartender, whose ex-wife was known for wishing death and ruin upon him, advised Falk that if anyone asked, he wasn’t there.

The dim interior of the clapboard seaside café glowed in slow-motion gloom. Beer signs cast green shadows on the walls decorated with mounted trophy marlin and swordfish. At a table nearby Una was folding napkins, sitting as straight as if she were playing an invisible piano. In the soft light of afternoon she was so beautiful one could imagine she must have broken many hearts, men turned into fish and left to swim sadly beneath the pier lights, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

On the phone Gusef said, These pathetic stinking fisherman are joke. They cannot catch own dick with both hands. You show them. You take your camera and get photo.

Falk said okay, he would check it out. He hung up the phone, got his camera bag from beneath a kitchen table, and told Una the scoop. Why don’t you come along? he asked.

Una arranged the silverware to fold another napkin. I’m supposed to wait here for Gabriel. He should be by soon.

Oh, come on, said Falk. What are you, his servant?

No.

Well then.

You shouldn’t say that.

I did.

You shouldn’t.

Come with me. It won’t be the same without you.

Una finished rolling the silverware, tucking the white cloth dinner napkin just so.

Okay, she said. I guess. If we hurry.

This was after lunch, when things were slow. Only Mr. Buzzy lurked mumbling and burping in the bar, so Leon said he’d hold down the fort. He believed whatever washed ashore couldn’t be good. He expected a calamity nothing less than an asteroid or comet.

The doom patrol is heading our way, he said. I got a nose for these things. You find anything washed up there’ll be trouble. Those parks and wildlife sumbitches are going to be looking for somebody to blame, and it ain’t gonna be me.

Falk and Una walked to the end of the dock, hopped onto the sand beyond the concrete bulkhead, followed the shore. Falk led the way, pushed along by the buffeting wind like a boozy sailor. He was tallish, stooped and gangly, like a young Jimmy Stewart.

He carried his old Nikon with black-and-white film and stopped to take a shot of Una standing under a pier, striped with pillar shadows, her hair wild in the wind, her face moody. The sky was lumpy and mottled gray, the color of stingray bellies. Above them hovered a pair of black buzzards, canting into the wind, gliding, circling back. They flew so low you could see their wrinkled red faces, like winos awakened by barking dogs.

The stiff wind buffeted Falk’s white apron, blew Una’s black hair in her face, filled their skin and ears with the whirling sound, the smell of salty catfish breath. Una made a slight motion, a muffled hiccup. Her hand to her chest.

Ooh, she said. Enchilada burp. When she saw Falk point the camera again she shook her head no, put her hands over her face. Don’t you dare, she said. I look awful.

Are you kidding? You couldn’t look awful if you tried.

Oh, hush.

I mean it, he said.

What do you know? You’re a boy.

Falk squinted into the wind, his camera lowered. He turned around to look at Una, walking backward. They left two trails of footprints in the sand. Hers were like the brush strokes of a master artist. His were wide and ungainly, like the prints of snorkel flippers. He said, It’s not always about glamour shots.

They found the sea monster stranded halfway up the fine white oyster-shell fragments of the shore. From a dozen yards away it didn’t look like much of anything. A curdled raft of cinnamon-speckled sea foam floated against it, making the form beneath the surface appear like a black-and-white fishing skiff sunk in the shallows.

Up close it came into focus. It swelled into an improbable mass of enormous wide-mouthed fish. Big as an elongated VW Beetle, its scales striped with a black-and-white zigzag pattern, enormous black jelly eyes distended and swollen, ragged tail fin the size of a small whale’s. The wide mouth spanned the entire width of its body, some three to four feet, and had decayed into a bleached white strip, as if the enormous fish had coated its lips with zinc oxide.

Falk shot photographs low angle and above, walked out along the Sea Horse fishing pier for a bay-water view. Maybe this is what’s eating all the shrimp, he said.

Una stooped, tucked her skirt against the backs of her knees, looked into its mouth. O dear God, she said. There’s something inside. Something with legs.

Falk moved near, set his camera on the shore. With a piece of driftwood he pried the white-lipped mouth open wider and peered into the shadowy grotto of its gullet.

At first he thought he was seeing a drowned girl. Skeins and swirls of hay-colored hair streamed out of the great fish’s throat. He saw pale skin and what he thought was an ear or an open mouth. Only by bending closer did he realize what was there.

The hell, he said. It’s a horse. A small one. Like a colt or a Shetland pony I guess.

In the fish’s throat the small horse’s head faced nose first, its mane swirling forward, one hoof protruding aslant.

Una turned away. She said she couldn’t look at that. Why did she come down there? What was she thinking? It was horrible, what it was, and there was nothing they could do. I’m leaving, she said. I better get back before Gabriel shows up.

No, said Falk. Please? Just stay a minute? The excitement of it made his voice spike and quaver, struggling to be heard over the wind. See? Everything for a reason. If I was in school I wouldn’t be here to see this.

You’d maybe be learning something.

Ha. That’s a good one. He returned to the shore and leaned in for a close-up of the zebra-striped scales, the ridiculous white-lipped mouth.

You shouldn’t be proud, said Una. Being kicked out of school. It’s a mistake.

Did I say proud? Put your hand right here. I need something for scale.

I won’t touch it.

Who’s asking you to? I just want you close. Is that a sin?

She was smiling then, looking out at the waves, the bleached bones of the pier, sea creature in foreground, rocking in the pulse beat of tide. You, she said.

The bay shoreline was speckled white and gray, deep with tiny pieces of broken oyster and scallop shells. Fine bits of shell covered the flayed skin of the fish. Flies buzzed around its enormous, distended eyes. It smelled gamy. Falk and Una had to pinch their nostrils shut and gulp the air like beached groupers. He guessed the colt had come from the mustang herd on Isla Pelicano, the shelter island across Red Moon Bay. A mustang colt that had somehow drowned. When the huge fish tried to scavenge it, the body became lodged in its throat and killed it.

It was probably desperate because it couldn’t find anything else to eat, said Falk.

I told my cousin Dat the fishing around here is done for, said Una. They should rename it Desolation Bay.

Falk squatted close to the colossal fish and focused on the drowned colt, one dark eye visible in the shadows of the fish’s throat. The sun was off angle for good light, but he squatted to take another photo anyway. The wind died for a moment. Without the rush and tumble of air in their ears, the sound of the lapping waves seemed amplified. A mosquito lit on Falk’s hand as he was focusing the camera.

Don’t move, said Una. She leaned close and swatted the back of his hand, leaving a smear of blood. Oh, it got you.

Falk wiped his hand on the back of his jeans and went back to taking pictures.

You should have that checked out, said Una.

In the last week alone several people in the area had been hospitalized with West Nile virus. Two had died the month before.

Falk scratched the bite and frowned, a puzzled monkey face crossing his pink cheeks, his pale blond fuzz of hair. It’d take more than a mosquito to kill me.

Una reached down and rubbed Falk’s hair. You think? I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if we’re the next to go.

Falk laughed. What a morbid thing to say.

She touched the tip of one stiff spiny zebra fin with the toe of her shoe. It’s true, isn’t it?

Well, I mean, go as in split town or go as in float belly-up?

I don’t know. You make the call.

Falk reached up and squeezed her hand. Myself, I thought we’d be elected something. Prom king and queen. Most likely to appear on the cover of Coastal Living. That kind of thing.

Una squinted at the fish, then turned her face away, letting the wind blow her hair into her eyes. Falk couldn’t see the look she was wearing.

Maybe we should, she said.

FALK AND UNA returned to the Black Tooth, heading into the wind now, a gush of ocean spray dampening their faces. It was early fall or what passed for it in that part of Texas, warm, but they were used to it. The light was still flat and bright, the sky a water-color blue, as of a swimming pool at a motor court. There was a hurricane in the Atlantic again. Mustang County officials had ordered an evacuation in July when one had come close, but it had swerved and hit landfall south of Galveston, so the whole thing seemed a dud. This new one was two thousand miles away and beyond their worry radar. The live oaks along the sandy hills the other side of Shoreline Drive leaned away from Red Moon Bay, bent and shaped by the constant wind off the water, saltgrass waving knee high at their trunks. The sky full of gulls and terns, sandpipers and plovers pecking the shore.

For a moment Una held Falk’s hand, then smiled and let go, the warm Gulf air making them sweat on contact. She warned him about Gabriel. He could drive up any minute now.

Like I care, said Falk.

You should, she said. He could hurt you.

Falk shrugged. So could you. He gave her a look. Plus, I been hurt before.

Back inside the Black Tooth, the café’s fishnet-festooned bar was dark, Leon the bartender smoking a cigarette and moody behind the counter, the only customer Mr. Buzzy, the old one-legged black man leaning back from the table like a windblown oak, only the breeze warping him came from bottles.

Mr. Buzzy said he knew he shouldn’t be drinking this early in the day. But it was too late to stop now. Hell, I been doing it so long I can’t remember when I started. No point in getting downmouth now is there? What good is that?

His nose was purple-black, broken-veined, and shaped not unlike the saddest, smallest bell pepper. His hands shook when he spoke. Falk wanted to hold them to make them stop, but that was something you just didn’t do. He couldn’t imagine actually touching such wrinkled claws.

What Mr. Buzzy loved and what Mr. Buzzy knew how to do was to fish. He knew where to find the flounder, in the shallows, in the salt flats at night, perched in a skiff, an open-face saltwater reel under his thumb, a limber rod casting its thin shadow in the moonlight, tinged with gold where the Coleman lantern cast its glow.

He never spoke about children, wife or brother or sister, but everyone imagined his family must be miles away and dead most likely. All he had in the world was the brew he loved to drink and the fish he caught.

He gestured for Falk to come close.

You oughtn’t be out in public like that, said Mr. Buzzy. Wearing an apron like that. Like an old wartneck woman makin’ biscuit gravy. People start thinkin’ things. He spoke in a husky voice that descended into a phlegmy laugh.

Falk grinned and considered his food-besmudged apron. Right, you got a point. But, I mean, I can’t stop people from thinking, he said. If they commence to talking, you let me know.

I will do that, said Mr. Buzzy.

Falk asked if he needed another beer. Mr. Buzzy closed his eyes and said, Like a hound needs howlin’ lessons.

Tell me somethin’, he added. What you and that sugar-tush waitress gal doin’ walkin’ outside? Now don’t lie to me. He winked and waved his cane gently, like he expected a story not necessarily factual or accurate.

Falk explained about the enormous dead fish. How huge it was. How it had a white colt in its maw, probably drowned from the mustang herd on Isla Pelicano. What a strange and fabulous thing. The black eyes staring from beneath the green water’s lightspangled surface, the clownwhite lip skin peeling away.

That’s not a good thing, said Mr. Buzzy. No sir. Where is that fish? I need to see this with my own two eyes.

A quarter-mile down shore. Beside the Sea Horse fishing pier.

That’s too far, said Mr. Buzzy. He held up his stump, the empty sheath of his old khakis pinned back, his leg severed above the knee, the squat thigh muscular and unnatural looking through the faded tan cloth. How the hell am I supposed to get there with this thing? Tell me that.

Falk rubbed his nose and made a noncommittal sympathetic don’t-I-know-it-and-then-some face like he had no answer to a question such as that but he understood why it might be asked. He suggested perhaps a ride could be arranged.

Mr. Buzzy shook his head like he’d had enough, maybe too much. It’s gettin’ to be where a man can’t move from one place to the next without some advance plannin’ and strategizin’. Ain’t that the hell.

Falk asked Leon if they had a shovel out back or somewhere.

Why’s that?

Falk said it just didn’t seem right, letting the fish wash up on the shore like that. You know it would end up buzzed by flies, baked by sun, stinking to high heaven. Least he could do would be to plant it in the dark.

Mr. Buzzy nodded Amen and said, A horse be washin’ up dead in the mouth of a fish, now that’s a foretellin’. Bad things a-comin’.

Maybe if we bury it nothing bad will happen, said Falk.

What? said Leon. Are you stoned or just plain foolish? It’s worth money. Call the Smithsonian. D.C. White pages. They’ll know.

Mr. Buzzy frowned. Don’t tell those parks and wildlife bastards. Bloodsuckers. This is hush-hush, is what it is.

Falk absentmindedly started untying his apron strings. I need some better shots anyway. First I’ll take another roll or two. About sunset. The golden hour.

Leon fished a pack of cigarettes from his front pocket. I’ll help. We split the profits, fifty-fifty, capisce? You sell that to the AP wire service for money. I got a brother-in-law who works there. I’ll call and set up a meeting. Get some big bucks before the weekend.

You think?

A giant fish with a horse in its craw? I know.

Mr. Buzzy waved his cane in the air. Before they started spending all this money made off a big dead fish, could somebody head next door to the Speed-n-Go and get him a pack of smokes?

I’d do it my own self, he said, but at most I be half a man. His trembling barnacled hands, like the flippers of a hoary sea turtle, nudged a cluster of coins and bills on the table top.

Falk took the cash and stepped outside, his mind filled with the idea of big money and the lazy swirl of Una’s black hair, the bloom of her oleander-petal lips. In the sky above him floated laughing gulls like white paper kites.