Bobby Byrd: Lone Star Noir

So these girls, setting off on their weekend with a mother the other mothers like because she is pretty and rich, know they will run on the beach, build sand castles, and stand around a bonfire with boys. They lick sticky fingers and sing a song about a smashed bumblebee.

At first, they don’t notice the man who is behind them, watching, although if they did it would give them a kick; they like it when people watch them, especially together.

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

All dressed in black, black, black

With silver buttons, buttons, buttons

All down her back, back, back.

She cannot read, read, read

She cannot write, write, write

But she can smoke, smoke, smoke

Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.

Then Grace sees the man and covers her mouth. She jabs Tricia’s ribs.

“He likes your creamy thighs,” Allie says, just to see if Grace will hide behind her fingers. She does.

“He looks like Kenny Rogers,” Trina says, and he does.

“Maybe he is Kenny Rogers,” Allie says. It’s possible. His snow-white beard is very well groomed. His nose is red and a little bulbous.

They sing “The Gambler” and point and laugh. He squints his eyes. They slam the door. The ferry has arrived.

Melanie, the twins’ mother, puts out her cigarette. They are listening to Neil Diamond. Even Neil Diamond has a kind of soulful glamour when Melanie Parks listens to him.

This all happened years ago, in the summer of 1982.

The girls stand on the ferry, throwing day-old bread at the seagulls. Grace stands at the prow, looking down, waiting to be splashed. She turns green yet will not back away. She is prone to seasickness. But she never backs out of a dare. The girls have to admire her for that.

They feed the gulls, then run to the back of the boat when the birds dive down. Grace tells a story about mean boys who throw Pop Rocks at the gulls.

“That is just so sad,” the twins say.

“Did you think of that together?” Allie asks.

“What?” they say together.

“When you talk together like that. Like you have the same thoughts. It’s cool,” Allie says.

“We are nothing alike,” Tricia says.

Grace smiles, a close-lipped smile. Allie wonders if she does that because of her overbite. It’s a cute overbite. Allie likes her again. She has velvety hair and she is good at anything school-related, as long as it doesn’t involve athletics. Grace and Allie are the A students; the twins, they are B-plus with an occasional A.

“I’m going inside,” Tricia says, and this disappoints Allie. She likes it out on the boat. She sniffs the air; it smells briney, with a hint of dirty bathroom. She would like to stay to see if any dolphins follow the ferry, but she won’t be separated from her twins. Once inside, they play Go Fish until the boat docks.

The house is on Crystal Beach. The twins have spent their summers here since they were tots, running up and down the stairs in matching T-shirts. There are only a few rules at the beach: take off your flip-flops on the balcony before you go inside, so that you don’t track sand in everywhere; and be sure to check in before sundown with Melanie.

Inside, the house is all one big room, with a little harvestgold kitchenette and a claw-footed bathtub behind the sink. The house is furnished with rattan and wicker, and there are four big beds. But the girls will sleep out on the balcony on cots, facing the sea.

Maybe on Saturday Melanie will take them back on the ferry to Galveston, where they can eat shrimp in little glass bowls with red cocktail sauce and bottomless glasses of Coke. Melanie is prone to sudden bursts of happiness, and the girls love her for it. Sometimes on these trips she takes them all to get their toenails painted. Or she’ll take them to Murdoch’s to buy matching sunglasses and netted bags of shells.

At Crystal Beach they can run as far as they want. At night the girls will find older boys. One boy, Murph, drives a Jeep and they all pile in and scream and he speeds through the water, splashing. “Ah, naw,” he says, when Tricia kisses the back of his neck. “He tasted like man-sweat,” she whispers to them later. They sing him songs. Say Say my playmate, come out and play with me. And then the rhymes get dirtier. But it’s Grace that whispers the spookiest:

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack

All dressed in black, black, black

She has a knife, knife, knife

Stuck in her back, back, back.

She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe

She cannot cry, cry, cry…

There’s a teenager at the beach when they get there. Her name is Sylvia, and she is some distant relation to the twins and Melanie. She and Melanie make daiquiris and sleep on the balcony, slathered in coconut oil. The girls agree that Sylvia is not nearly so beautiful as Melanie, although she is sixteen, the age of beauty. The girls-it was Tricia or Trina who came to this conclusion, Allie can’t remember which-all agree. Sixteen is the age; the age that it is appropriate to lose your virginity, to have a boyfriend, to wear a miniskirt.

More interesting than the teenager, there is a girl across the dunes. This girl introduces herself on the second day. Her name is Brandy. Her voice is rich and throaty, like a smoker’s.

“It’s sort of beautiful,” Grace says.

“But too old for her body,” Allie declares.

She is a pleasant combination of warm golden hues, honey skin and hair, light amber eyes, jeans cut off before her buttocks end. She lives there. She’s a townie. Her house is lit up at night, every night, all night. One of the windows is busted.

“Is that her room? How does she sleep at night?” But once Allie thinks about it, she decides she would like to sleep in a room with the ocean right outside, every night, whistling into the hole in her windowpane.

“It’s a bullet hole,” Grace says.

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Allie tells her. “Whoever lives there, her single mom or whatever, can’t afford to fix it. That’s all.”

Tricia glances over at Grace, casting her pale lashes down. She agrees, she agrees with Allie. Grace can be such a child.

Allie’s mom is a single mom. She can afford to fix broken windows, but she can’t afford add-a-bead necklaces or adoptive Cabbage Patch dolls. Allie’s mother often reminds her that there are children who don’t have enough money for band instruments or three square meals. There are children who run wild and don’t know their times tables because there is nobody looking out for them, aiming for a better quality of life. Allie isn’t sure what she means by better quality of life. When Allie visits the twins, Melanie isn’t around much. She imagines it would be very lonely to live that way without a twin. The twins have each other though. And there is little doubt, when she watches them in their matching bunny-fur coats and freshly curled wings, singing the winter holiday program or twirling their batons in unison at the football game, that those two have achieved a finer quality of life. Last winter, when the other girls in the program snuck makeup on in the bathroom, Trina and Tricia wore nothing more than Vaseline on their brow bones and bow-shaped lips. When they throw the batons up high, they spin in unison, and there is never any question that they will catch the batons at the exact same moment. Every time they spin down. Every time.

Many years later, one of the girls will be a woman.

She comes here with her husband and her daughter, they take the ferry out to Crystal Beach.

There isn’t any parking, and the husband says, “Goddamnit, why didn’t you tell me?” when the state trooper tickets them for expired registration.