Galveston

by Nic Pizzolatto

Some places open themselves for you, but there was nothing gatelike about New Orleans. The city was a sunken anvil that sustained its own atmosphere.

I sat on a stool and ordered a beer. Then I remembered that I was dying and changed the order to a Johnnie Walker Blue.

“Look—you were just saying you’re running, now, huh? And I’m running—you just said, huh? We’re from the same parts, man. Why don’t we just run together a little while and see how it goes?”

Lake Charles was one of the easiest places to get your ass kicked on the Gulf Coast. And any place south of here was a white-trash terror camp.

I’d known dudes like this my whole life, country morons stuck in a state of permanent resentment. They abuse small animals, grow up to beat their kids with belts and wreck their trucks driving drunk, find Jesus at forty and start going to church and using prostitutes.

I deemed the weather offensive, the way the air lay on me like a giant tongue, clammy, warm and gritty as embers.

The land we passed split like a shattered clay tablet into grassy islands and all the dark, muddy water spread down to the Gulf in the southern distance. The sunlight glazed ripples and mud shallows with white fire.

All this rolling world of kudzu and bony trees and black water seemed to mean something to her, the way it meant things to me, and she watched out the window with a surrendering gaze.

In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.

the lesson of history, I think, is that until you die, you’re basically inauthentic.

September, middle of hurricane season, the skies are coiled, lead-colored clouds that resemble spun sugar.

You can see the winds building farther out in the Gulf—the sky beginning to stir in a very slow, sweeping churn. The weather makes the bolts in my skull seem to tighten.

I know that for all of us here, the Finest Donuts chapter of AA, our testimonies let us bale up memory, bind years of degradation and guilt into these manageable units that we can put on a shelf, take down, and skim in the safety of tales.

Clear of the cities, Texas turned into a green desert meant to hammer you with vastness, a mortar filled with sky.

Loraine once told me marriage was a social construct that turned pleasure into a business arrangement, and I tried to be cool about that.

Malls make me edgy, people trying so hard to buy things, and it seemed like I noticed more and more fat people every day.

I’ve found that all weak people share a basic obsession—they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you’d be better off developing a drug habit.

You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

I walked outside and looked through the spotted night, the hot wind stirring the palms and coursing out to the heavenriver of stars. I walked.

He hit his cigarette with a laconic sort of attitude, a reserve he’d rehearsed but not yet mastered.

I think it’s just that this type of thing goes a lot smoother if there’s a big killermanjaro across the table when the deal goes down. A guy like you.”

“Oh, Lord. You’ve gone sentimental, Roy. You’re one of those nostalgic middle-aged men now.” She shook her head with pity. “I’d rather you’d stayed the strong, silent type. I’d rather remember you like that.”

I could just drink and smoke in a motel room forever.

A dragonfly kept circling my head as if it had something to tell me, and the air of the hot night was like breathing ashes. In the distance I could hear the cars pass whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like the great heartbeat of some huge animal that had swallowed me.

Amarillo was gas stations and storage units, low-end strip clubs between motels, pounding winds. You could drive and drive but there would still be only the plains and the water towers and the small derricks bobbing up and down like seesaws.

rear portion of the service station had a doughnut shop inside, with booths and a few tables, and this was the place some men gathered. Large men shaped like pinecones, pants hung low off assless waists, overalls, denim.

You’re born and forty years later you hobble out a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you’re going to do with it.

This reading habit I picked up over the last twenty years doesn’t make me a different person. It just became the best way for me to spend time, since I couldn’t drink.

I felt a mutual recognition. Like he knew something about the big empty fields, the one-room apartments, coffee made on a hot plate, the voice that calls lights out. And for my part I was the only one who understood the terror of where he found himself at the end of everything, in that alley with me.

I sipped from a new, better bottle of whiskey, and smoked cigarettes, watching outside with my knees bouncing and fists clenching.

“You shouldn’t wear mascara,” I said. “You don’t know how. You look ridiculous.”

I could make out from here the bruising on her thigh, but she still looked good, that lean body and rosy pale skin, the lithe muscle and truly first-rate butt. Part of Rocky was this great beauty she wouldn’t let into the light yet, because it had never found its proper place. I believe that.

The lights went down over the dance floor and George Strait started singing, that rich sober drawl, and people rose to step onto the floor, the old couples out early, men with belt buckles the size of human hearts.