Disclaimer

Disclaimer: I am providing the content on this blog solely for the reader's general information. This blog contains my personal commentary on issues that interest me. Unless otherwise stated, the views expressed on this blog are mine alone, and not the views of any law firm with which I am in any way associated or any other member of any such law firm. Nothing on this blog is intended to be a solicitation of, or the provision of, legal advice, nor to create an attorney-client relationship with me or any law firm. Please view my "Full Disclaimer" statement at the bottom of the page for additonal information..

Friday, August 30, 2013

Friday Fiction: Devils Walk Through Galveston Ch. 2



This is the third installment of Devils Walk Through Galveston, my first novel.  The prologue and Chapter 1 (which introduced the crime and criminal) were posted earlier.  This chapter introduces the police officers who hunt John Doddy.  I hope you enjoy it and share.

2.  Vincent driving Eli home, evening

            Driving South in the white Crown Vic; trim level P.O.S concealing a supercharged engine and armored gas tank.  A pistol-grip shotgun in a rack hugging the door.  Pistol holster beneath each of their seats holding a .45/.410. 
Evening in June in Houston.  Seven o’clock and they drank their breath.  Sun cutting through the haze of the East Side.  Vincent and Eli sat quietly passing over the Ship Channel.  They both looked left as they passed over the crest of the massive bridge. Passing tanker trucks inching up the steep grade.  Watching the shadows cast by cat-crackers, orange flames ripping out of flare towers, dirty smoke falling over the Manchester neighborhood hugging the refinery fenceline.  The ammonia stench hit them first.  Then the butadiene, like burning tires.  Vincent turning the air conditioner off, closing the vents.  Miles of refineries and chemical plant pipes reaching up and rolling over like tendrils.  The aluminum jacketed pipes a maze of shining veins stretching low and reaching up to flare off steam and smoke and fire the forty-five miles to Galveston on both sides of the narrow, muddy channel emerging from the bayous of Houston.  Fully laden tankers creeping through the sluggish water, heading straight toward each other.  Their wakes the only thing pushing the tankers apart to pass by with inches between the hulls.  Other tankers parked right next to the refineries with six foot diameter hoses connecting the ships directly to the refinery lines, through the maze of exchangers and vessels, then a hundred miles of pipe later out to waiting tanker cars and pipelines diving underground.  The ships rising slowly up out of the water as millions of dollars of oil crept out.  Workers small as ants moving around in Nomex coveralls.  Always a haze hanging in the air.  Always motion, night or day. 
            Eli spoke first, as they descended: “I have a question.”
            “Yes, those pants make your ass look fat.”
            “That wasn’t the question.”
            “That’s the answer.  You’ve been waiting to ask me that since you bought ‘em”.
            “I bought these two years ago.  We met two weeks ago.”
            “Your ass still looks fat in them, Eli.”

            “I’ve been working out.”
            “Still fat, but muscular.  Maybe phat.  You’re working toward phat, I can tell.”
            “Seriously Vincent.”
            “What?”
            “Seriously, I’m thinking of getting a motorcycle.”
            “Seriously, that’s not what you want to ask me.”
            “It’s not about the pants.”
            “One, it’s always about the pants nowadays.  Get some new pants.  Lose all the old pants she bought you or you bought with her or she tolerated or she liked, or whatnot.  Fuck all that.  Get some new pants, some new shoes.  Those shoes are atrocious.”
            Quiet a minute.  Then Vincent told him,  “We’ll go this weekend. It’ll be awesome.”
            “I don’t have money for that.”
            “But you have money for a motorcycle.”
            “I was going to fix one up.”
            “When did you learn how to fix a motorcycle?”
            “I’ll get a book, you know, the internet.  My grandfather used to work on them when I was a kid.”
            “Eli, what do you want to ask me?”
            “Nothing.”
            “Something.  What do you want to ask me?  I know what you want to ask.” 
            “Enough.”
“Eli, just say it. I’m not going to say it for you.  Ask me about her.  I spent enough time on nice couches in crappy offices.  You have to say it.”
            “Just drive Vincent.”
            They followed the loop and got off on Navigation.  Drove by a park where kid’s mothers watched over them absentmindedly, speaking softly of telenovelas, children’s indiscretions, indiscretions the women dreamed of.  Their men with other men drinking beer on benches under trees.  Dominos an excuse.
            §§
            Vincent pulled into the neighborhood that Eli’s house was in.  Not Eli’s neighborhood.  Not for the last six months.  He got the TV.  She got the neighbors.  They barely waved.
            The house was red brick with a deep porch and six-foot windows in the front.  Still-infant bushes Eli had staked with fertilizer twice a year.  Fresh mulch the realtor had recommended.  He opened the front door to quiet.  Too much quiet.  It stopped him cold each night.  Eli put his badge and gun on the kitchen counter.  Looked into the kitchen and sat hard at the table.  Looked at the whiskey cabinet and left it shut.
The house had low ceilings and an attic fan, drop-down panels on the tops of the doors.  Built before air conditioning when the fan was supposed to push hot air back out.  In August it was like a hair dryer through the house.  In June, it gave a nice breeze.  The house a little too expensive for the both of them.  They planned to grow into the house as the boy grew, as the trees grew and he built a jungle gym in the backyard and the dog matured.  It was quiet now.
            He used to tell her he needed quiet after a long day.  He used to sit outside in the car for a minute before coming in, listening for shouting, barking, music and the TV.  Tightening up.  He told her he needed peace after working in chaos all day.  But the boy had been four and the dog one.  At six-thirty she’d had enough and needed the help. She didn’t need him sitting in the car.
§§
            Her hair was black and thick and long.  It flowed down to her low back.  Her hair was what first struck Eli as he saw her standing in line for ten-dollar-a-bottle Merlot in six-dollar plastic cups at the Greek Festival at the University of St. Thomas. 
Eli had come with some friends and was standing on the edge of the crowd, on the grass of the esplanade that ran through campus.  He saw her from behind in a group of girls.  She taller than the others, with long, black, curly hair.  He stared just long enough for her to feel it and turn around to glance at him.  Eli in jeans and boots and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  A gyro at his lips, dripping white sauce down his fingers onto the back of his hands.   Eli’s eyes got wide and he looked away slightly.  Down at his food.  Thinking where the napkins were.  Knowing what he looked like.  She turned to her friends and began talking again, waiting for the line to move.  Waiting for him to move.  Hoping he’d clean up first.
            Instead, he stood there and finished his gyro.  He couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t trite – I like your hair?  I like your butt?  Both were true.  Both were weak.  He had no good lines.  His friends saw him staring and waited patiently to see what he’d do.  He was fearless on the streets.  He was the first man through the door in a raid or warrant serve.   When Eli was in uniform, he fought like he was already dead.  Each morning he got on his knees at the foot of his bed and prayed – asked for forgiveness for his sins and accepted that he would not be home that night.
But here, out of uniform and on the street in jeans looking at a woman with an impossibly thin waist, he felt all his mortality.  Felt all his weaknesses and faults.  Felt his knees buckle slightly when she’d looked at him.  Felt like an ass with a gyro dripping down his hands.  So he did nothing.  Trying to think of something to say.   Some way to approach her.  Thinking of excuses not to.  His friends saw all this and let it go.  They’d seen it before.  Back then they thought he’d grow out of it in high school.  Had tried to set him up with their cousins.  But he’d stayed quiet at the barbecues when the pretty girls with too much perfume hovered at the edge of his conversations.  So now they told him to sit down on the curb.  It was too hot to be standing and moving much.  Just settle in and watch the people walking by.  Drink the wine.
            When she had her plastic glass of wine, she turned around and walked past her friends, past the line, to the tall man with broad shoulders in a too large shirt who, thankfully, had finished the gyro and was sitting on the curb with his friends.  It was the way he’d looked at her.  Despite the gyro.  Not trying to see through her clothes or imagining her up against something.  Not dirty.  And not just glancing.   In those few seconds, she had the feeling that he saw beauty in her.  That he was finding the beauty in her and couldn’t look away for long. 
So, she walked up to him and kept walking until she was standing over him.  He tried to stand up from the curb but she had put her hand out gently, telling him it was o.k. to stay sitting down.  Gauging where his eyes rested - up to her face or below.
            As she walked over, he looked her up and down.  It wasn’t like the men at the coffee shop or the men just now in line.  It was like the time she sat as a model for an art class at the school, bare except for a thin sheet draping over her shoulder and breast, tucked just below her thigh.  Like the one student who was trying to translate her beauty to the page in charcoal; the rest of the guys staring at her nipples trying to control their erections.  
So, when she got to the edge of his feet and he stayed sitting on the curb with his eyes rested directly on hers, she asked, “So, are you an artist?”
            He was quiet, shy or matter of fact, saying, “No, a police officer.”
            “Why were you looking at me that way?”
            “What way?”
            “Like an artist.”
            “I have no idea what that would be.”
            She paused, pursed her lips, asking, “Ok, Mr. Police Officer, what did you see when you looked at me?”
            Eli didn’t pause.  “Your body is like a violin and your hair the instrument neck.”
She turned and walked away, back to her group of friends.
            Eli’s friends turned their heads to him, incredulous, “What the fuck was that - ‘your body is like a violin’?  That’s the best you got?  O.k. Eli, your dick is like a wet noodle.”
            Another friend, another cop, “Your game is like a fourth grader’s.”
            And Eli, still taken aback but kicking himself as his friends kicked him asked, “What would you have suggested?”
            “Not ‘your body is like a violin.’  What was next: ‘I want to strum your thong?  I want to play you like a virtuoso?  You will never get laid.”
            “We’re taking up a collection.  We’re going to have to rent you a girl.  It’s simply time for a hooker.  Pissing’s going to be painful, but it’ll be worth it.”
            Eli defensive, “She asked what I saw.  That’s what I saw.”
            “You didn’t have to tell her exactly what was going through your head.  Especially if that was it.”           
            “I wasn’t going to lie.”
            “Number one, if there was a time to lie, that was it.  Number two, it’s not a lie if it’s just bullshitting.  We have to work on your bullshit.”
            “You’ve been saying that since ninth grade.”
            “And we’ve been trying, man.  We’ve been trying since ninth grade. We should have gotten you a hooker back then.  It might have forestalled lots of emotional pain for you.”
            “Her body did look like a violin.”
            “Yeah, maybe it did.  But you could have said something else.”
            “What?  What would you have said?”
            “I don’t know.  Something about how nice her hair looked or how pretty her shirt looked.”
            “Why?”
            “That would show that you noticed something that she did.  It would be complimenting her efforts and skill as well as physical beauty.  Try it next time.”
            But that advice was wrong.  He’d stunned her.  She had not been stunned by a man in a long time.  Not stunned like that maybe ever.  When she got back to her two friends, they wanted to know who the guy in the white shirt was.
            She told them, “He was looking at me.”
            “So you walked over?  You walk over to every guy who looks at you?”
            “No.  Just the ones who look at me that way.”
            “Way?”
            “Way.”
            They stared.  One asked, doubtful, “That guy?”
            “For real.”
            “What way then?”
            “The way where he was looking at me, into me.  It felt like I was being laid bare in front of him.  But it felt safe.”
            From the one in a negligee top, “You got that from a look from a guy eating a gyro on a curb?”
            From the one in a tight t-shirt and half-sleeve Koi tattoos, “Wow.  I would have walked over.”
            “Thank you.”
            “So, what did he say when you got there?”
            “He didn’t say anything until I did.”
            “Quit fucking around. What did he say?”
            “I asked what he saw when he was looking at me.  He said my body was a violin and my hair the instrument neck.  But he said it quiet.  He said it like it was the truth and he’d tell me anything I asked.”
            “Did he say he wanted to play you?”
            “No.  Shut up.  You are not ruining this for me.”
            “That’s still kind of an odd thing to say.  Is he some kind of artist?  Who says that?”
            “Apparently cops says that.”
            “That guy?”
            “That’s what he said.”
            “He doesn’t look like a cop.”
            “No.  Not really.  Maybe he was lying about being a cop. He did seem shy about me and at the same time was self-assured about everything else.”
            “So that was it?”
            “What was it?”
            “The one line and you walked away?”
            “I didn’t know what to say.  What was I going to say, I always thought of myself as more of a guitar?  What?”
            The tattooed girl, “I’d do him.”
            “You’d do that thirteen year-old over there.”
            “That kid’s at least sixteen.”
            “You’re dirty.”
            “Why doesn’t he have your number?”
            “I’m a romantic.  If he wants it, he’ll come get it or come find me.”
            “I’m a realist.”
            The girl in the black negligee top walked over to Eli and his friends.  She wasn’t wearing a bra.  It was unnecessary.  She wanted everyone to know it.  She looked Eli’s two friends over, decided that they were worth the trouble and told Eli, “Hey, violin man, time to play.  I’m not going to give you her number.  But you should come over and talk to her.  Think up a better line on the way.  Maybe about a guitar this time.”  She looked over the guys, said, “You can bring your limp-dick friends.”   She then turned and went back.
            Eli’s friends shrugged their shoulders and clapped him on the back.  Said, “That sounded promising.”  They got up and looked down at him getting up.  All three walked over.  Loose shirts and long, slow strides.  The boys angling toward the negligee or tattooed girl, trying to choose before they got there and were chosen.             
            He walked up to within a foot of her.  The band playing loud now.  He leaned into her ear.  Said, “My name’s Eli.”
            She leaned in closer until her lips were almost touching his earlobe.  “I’m Danielle.”
            “That’s pretty.”
            “Thank you.  Let’s walk a little.”
            So they turned and walked.  Their friends following, conjuring up lines and flirtations.  Hands in back pockets, elbows rubbing the girls’ arms when they got close.  Trying to decide if the girls’ breasts were real or fake, not caring either way.

No comments:

Post a Comment