Welcome to Texas

Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here... you're on your own.

- from Joel and Ethan Coen’s

Blood Simple

People go just where they will. I never

noticed them, until I got this feeling

that it’s later than it seems.

- Jackson Browne

There is no later. This is later.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

1

We danced close on the wooden porch, holding each other so tightly, trying to make love again through our clothes. My music came through the screen door, and as I wrapped her tighter in my wool coat we both tried to fit our lips around the bottle of vodka I was sloshing around in my free hand. All night we had been taking swigs after every new verse by Steve Forbert. “Meet me in the middle of the night, let me hear you say everything’s alright, bring me southern kisses from your room.” She laughed as my mouth pushed hers away and sucked clear booze from the very bottom of the bottle. I gurgled as I spoke.

“Do you want some of mine?”

Swallowing a little, I put my lips to hers and pushed the rest into her mouth. Her swallow sent an awesome cloud of alcohol fumes up her throat and over her lips, wrapping itself around our unbroken kiss. Lumber wheezed under our feet, and the night went on forever, stretching into the dry panic grass around my house, settling in over the moonlit reeds, seeping down so deep it went into the soil.

Teacher orientation that morning had been terrible. Held upright on no sleep by bad coffee, the lights of the Galveston causeway still in my eyes, I saw her rise from a sea of faded dress shirts and thinning hair. Another English teacher. I could tell. She was younger, with a tumble of black hair just beginning to stretch into its full bloom under the water weight of her morning shower. But there was weariness collecting in rounded crescents underneath her big brown eyes. Years of bent reading and frustration had stretched them down into bags, stalactites in a cave of worry. Those milk-chocolate peepers got me hard immediately.

Memory turns her into a flattened lie though. My mind struggles vainly to separate her image from the one that hovers inside an oval in the Galveston County newspaper. The article still lays unread, draped over the arm of a chair I never use. “Six Young Women Missing Along I-45 Since 2007.” I can’t claim her as a real person anymore. She is a living last-known photograph. She ran into the grass behind my house to piss and is gone forever.

2

I should feel something. The house is not, never was, really mine, but the first rent payment was paid, and the feeling of serfdom had passed by the time I brought her over. My record collection was in, my books were resting in place along the walls, already wearing a coat of local dust. She helped me put the first cigarette burn in the carpet. The home is mine, even if the house isn’t, and unless I move, or a freak tornado rips it out of the ground, nothing anyone can do will change that.

Still, a part of me wants to walk the realtor into the field out back and twist her head around several times so she gets a good look at what she’s done to me. But at this point I’d be a coward to blame her, and I refuse to let this house turn into my own Amityville Horror. A collection of old grass and grey wood will not overwhelm the new life I have started here.

3

First day of class over, first round of police interviews done, and the frisson of mystery from that night is gone. On my way toward the back of the police station I caught a glimpse of her mother and father in the waiting area. They seemed at pains to look worried, as if, like a spell, a show of anxious uncertainty could undo what had almost certainly happened to her.

I first learned about the “Texas Killing Fields” from an old college friend who works in the department, and realized with a hard swallow that, for a certain type, I was living on the most valuable bit of land in the state. No wonder I had the house so cheap. A twenty-acre rectangle of grass and still water stretching around the Calder oil field, resting inside a border of churches and schools and family homes, the fields have served as an improvised cemetery for thirty young women since 1971. This is the landscape I look at every time I stand at my sink and wash dishes. The police tell me I’m in no danger. I’m not the kind of person who needs to worry about ending up in the field.

4

Third week of classes over, and college friend tells me I’ve been cleared as a suspect. Celebrating with a cigar and a glass of Wild Turkey on my back porch, I saw a lone figure a few acres distant looking at me above the field. Against the deep purple of the sunset he looked totally black, and I knew it was a man by the way he moved. Something in the way he stared, fixed on another figure who might possibly be a lady. Drunk again, I hopped off my porch and waded into the reeds the way I used to run into the surf every summer when mom and dad brought me to the beach. I would bolt from their car and down the concrete steps of the seawall, before diving chest first into the brown swell of the Gulf.

As I moved closer through the grass, I thought maybe I’d find her again, as alive and sexy as she was the first night she lived for me, but as I looked into the dirt and back up to the stranger on the horizon, anger rose up in a flood, and I charged at him as fast as I could. He ran at my first second of movement, like we were connected by a solid rod that pushed him back as I went forward. The whisky in my stomach got hot like gasoline inside an engine, and suddenly I wanted to see human meat stretched open by pressure and pain. I wanted to catch whoever was running from me. I wanted to hold him down and snap his ribs one by one just to hear him scream.

As I charged through the grass it seemed the sun set faster and faster, and the moon got brighter and brighter. I was dragging the night in behind me, pushing the day down behind the planet. A few wet patches of flattened grass and his trail disappeared into a fringe of trees.

Nausea clutching my insides, the lingering taste of my cigar foul and acid, I continued on. I stopped in the dark to throw up against a tree, and then, feeling better, sped up, knowing I would catch nothing that night, but still running as if the answer I needed was just ahead. Somewhere in the dark the booze had dragged me into an invisible curve, because I came out of the trees facing the house. Behind me I heard crunching, and a noise deeper still of a child crying, but my legs were shaking, and I only wanted water and my bed.

On my way home through the field I lost my way once or twice. The panic that came in those moments was strangely claustrophobic for such an open space. Each moment of disorientation brought the grass closer. I could hear it growing. The sound lasted as long as I was lost. Maybe it would grow over my head and cocoon me like a giant spider if I lingered too long in one spot. The moon was straight up above when I found the house and crawled up on the porch. After sleeping against the wood for an hour or two I made my way to bed, and dreamt of a white wooden cross tilted in mud, and her face in the beam from a flashlight. Her left eye socket was empty, and she grinned in the piss-colored light of an old bulb. All her teeth were missing.

5

The water pressure in this part of the county is better than I expected. Not too hard, nice and warm. For nearly ten minutes I washed dirt out of my hair, and the hot shower was soothing against my throbbing head. Every day I feel her memory slipping away, going down the drain like this dirt. A substitute was found for her classroom while they look for a new teacher. No good done by worrying. I have a stack of papers to grade, and a long night of frustration and red ink ahead of me.

6

The police tell me they found a pair of lady’s shoes wedged inside a culvert a few miles away near Ervin Avenue. They can’t be hers, can they? She was almost completely naked when she stepped off the porch and into the field. Could she have put them on while my back was turned? Why would she put her shoes on just to urinate?

7

Last night I dreamt of her face again. Both her eyes were missing now, but her teeth were back in, shining like new. The flashlight on her face got brighter and brighter until I could no longer see anything, just a field of white, like I was staring into the sun. It was then that I awoke with the distinct feeling of someone having just left my side. Somewhere close I heard the creaking of wood and the gurgling of wet soil, and, with one foot still in my dream, I knew someone was behind me in the dark, straightening the wooden cross in the mud.

8

Found a pair of muddy shoeprints on my back porch, pressed down onto two of the squeakier boards underneath my bedroom window. I can’t tell if they are mine from a few nights ago, when I chased after that man, or if they are someone else’s. I guess I've been too busy to notice.