Coronado: Stories

  And you and Gwen ran right the fuck out of that room.

  IN THE CAR, Gwen said, “You saw it, right? He shot his own mother in the ass.”

  “He did?”

  “He did,” she said. “Baby, she’s not going to die from that.”

  “Maybe. She’s old.”

  “She’s old, yeah. The fall from the bed was worse.”

  “We shot an old lady.”

  “We didn’t shoot her.”

  “In the ass.”

  “We didn’t shoot anyone. He had the gun.”

  “That’s how it’ll play, though. You know that. An old lady. Christ.”

  Gwen’s eyes the size of that diamond as she looked at you and then she said, “Ooof.”

  “Don’t start,” you said.

  “I can’t help it. Bobby, Jesus.”

  She said your name. That’s your name—Bobby. You loved hearing her say it.

  Sirens coming up the road behind you now and you’re looking at her and thinking this isn’t funny, it isn’t, it’s fucking sad, that poor old lady, and thinking, Okay, it’s sad, but God, Gwen, I will never, ever live without you. I just can’t imagine it anymore. I want to…What?

  And the wind is pouring into the car, and the sirens are growing louder and there are several of them, an army of them, and Gwen’s face is an inch from yours, her hair falling from behind her ear and whipping across her mouth, and she’s looking at you, she’s seeing you—really seeing you; nobody’d ever done that; nobody—tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark blue sky, and that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for Christ’s sake, her, and she’s laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady had fallen out of bed and it isn’t funny, it isn’t and you’d said the first part in your head, the “I want to” part, but you say the second part aloud:

  “Dissolve into you.”

  And Gentleman Pete, up there at the wheel, on this dark country road, says, “What?”

  But Gwen says, “I know, baby. I know.” And her voice breaks around the words, breaks in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt and she takes your face in her hands as Pete drives up on the interstate and you see all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream and then the window comes down like yanked netting and chucks glass pebbles into your shirt and you feel something in your head go all shifty and loose and hot as a cigarette coal.

  THE FAIRGROUND IS empty and you and your father walk around for a bit. The tarps over some of the booths have come undone at the corners, and they rustle and flap, caught between the wind and the wood, and your father watches you, waiting for you to remember, and you say, “It’s coming back to me. A little.”

  Your father says, “Yeah?”

  You hold up your hand, tip it from side to side.

  Out behind the cages where, in summer, they set up the dunking machine and the bearded lady’s chair and the fast-pitch machines, you see a fresh square of dirt, recently tilled, and you stand over it until your old man stops beside you and you say, “Mandy?”

  The old man chuckles softly, scuffs at the dirt with his shoe, looks off at the horizon.

  “I held it in my hand, you know,” you say.

  “I’d figure,” the old man says.

  It’s quiet, the land flat and metal-blue and empty for miles in every direction, and you can hear the rustle of the tarps and nothing else, and you know that the old man has brought you here to kill you. Picked you up from prison to kill you. Brought you into the world, probably, so eventually he could kill you.

  “Covered the center of my palm.”

  “Big, huh?”

  “Big enough.”

  “Running out of patience, boy,” your father says.

  You nod. “I’d guess you would be.”

  “Never my strong suit.”

  “No.”

  “This has been nice,” your father says and sniffs the air. “Like old times, reconnecting and shit.”

  “I told her that night to just go, just get, just put as much country as she could between you and her until I got out. I told her to trust no one. I told her you’d stay hot on her trail even when all logic said you’d quit. I told her even if I told you I had it, you’d have to cover your bets—you’d have to come looking for her.”

  Your father looks at his watch, looks off at the sky again.

  “I told her if you ever caught up to her to take you to the fairgrounds.”

  “Who’s this we’re talking about?”

  “Gwen.” Saying her name to the air, to the flapping tarps, to the cold.

  “You don’t say.” Your father’s gun comes out now. He taps it against his outer knee.

  “Told her to tell you that’s all she knew. I’d hid it here. Somewhere here.”

  “Lotta ground.”

  You nod.

  Your father turns so you are facing, his hands crossed over his groin, the gun there, waiting.

  “The kinda money that stone’ll bring,” your father says, “a man could retire.”

  “To what?” you say.

  “Mexico.”

  “To what, though?” you say. “Mean old man like you? What else you got, you ain’t stealing something, killing somebody, making sure no one alive has a good fucking day?”

  The old man shrugs, and you watch his brain go to work, something bugging him finally, something he hasn’t considered until now.

  “It just come to me,” he says, his eyes narrowing as they focus on yours.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve known for, what, three years now that Gwen is no more?”

  “Dead.”

  “If you like,” your father says. “Dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three years,” your father says. “Lotta time to think.”

  You nod.

  “Plan.”

  You give him another nod.

  Your father looks down at the gun in his hand. “This going to fire?”

  You shake your head.

  Your father says, “It’s loaded. I can feel the mag weight.”

  “Jack the slide,” you say.

  He gives it a few seconds, then tries. He yanks back hard, bending over a bit, but nothing. The slide is stone.

  “Krazy Glue,” you say. “Filled the barrel too.”

  You pull your hand from your pocket, open up the knife. You’re very talented with a knife. Your father knows this. He’s seen you win money this way, throwing knives at targets, dancing blades between your fingers in a blur.

  You say, “Wherever you buried her, you’re digging her out.”

  The old man nods. “I got a shovel in the trunk.”

  You shake your head. “With your hands.”

  DAWN IS COMING up, the sky bronzed with it along the lower reaches, when you let the old man use the shovel. His nails are gone, blood crusted black all over the older cuts, red seeping out of the newer ones. The old man broke down crying once. Another time, he got mean, told you you aren’t his anyway, some whore’s kid he found in a barrel, decided might come in useful on a missing-baby scam they were running back then.

  You say, “Was this in Las Vegas? Or Idaho?”

  When the shovel hits bone, you say, “Toss it back up here,” and step back as the old man throws the shovel out of the grave.

  The sun is up now and you watch the old man claw away the dirt for a while and then there she is, all black and rotted, bones exposed in some places, her rib cage reminding you of the scales of a large fish you saw dead on a beach once in Oregon.

  The old man says, “Now, what?” and tears flee his eyes and drip off his chin.

  “What’d you do with her clothes?”

  “Burned ’em.”

  “I mean, why’d you take ’em off in the first place?”

  The old man looks back at the bones, says nothing.

  “Look closer,” you say. “Where her st
omach used to be.”

  The old man squats, peering, and you pick up the shovel.

  Until Gwen, you had no idea who you were. None. During Gwen, you knew. After Gwen, you’re back to wondering.

  You wait. The old man keeps cocking and recocking his head to get a better angle, and finally, finally, he sees it.

  “Well,” he says, “I’ll be damned.”

  You hit him in the head with the shovel, and the old man says, “Now, hold on,” and you hit him again, seeing her face, the mole on her left breast, her laughing once with her mouth full of popcorn, and then the third swing makes the old man’s head tilt funny on his neck, and you swing once more to be sure and then sit down, feet dangling into the grave.

  You look at the blackened shriveled thing lying below your father and you see her face with the wind coming through the car and her hair in her teeth and her eyes seeing you and taking you into her like food, like blood, like what she needed to breathe, and you say, “I wish…” and sit there for a long time with the sun beginning to warm the ground and warm your back and the breeze returning to make those tarps flutter again, desperate and soft.

  “I wish I’d taken your picture,” you say finally. “Just once.”

  And you sit there until it’s almost noon and weep for not protecting her and weep for not being able to know her ever again, and weep for not knowing what your real name is, because whatever it is or could have been is buried with her, beneath your father, beneath the dirt you begin throwing back in.

  Coronado: A Play in Two Acts

  Introduction

  I WROTE THE first draft of “Until Gwen” in a mad rush one night on my front porch in Boston. The porch is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria. This proved crucial because a storm hit that night, a torrent of rain and lightning unlike any I’d ever seen before outside of the South. It was with that mad-scientist vibe, as the rain clattered on the roof and snapped off the street, that I wrote the first draft, from around seven in the evening until about four in the morning. I rewrote it a few times over the next few days and then shipped it off to Great Britain, to the writer John Harvey, who’d commissioned it for an anthology he was editing called Men from Boys. I went back to work on other things. But the story never quite let go. Bobby and Bobby’s Father and poor Gwen kept walking around in my head, telling me that we weren’t done yet, that there were more things to say about the entangled currents that made up their bloodlines and their fate.

  AROUND THIS TIME my brother, Gerry, showed up at my house. Gerry’s an actor in New York, and he arrived on my doorstep one Christmas Eve with two actress friends. The four of us spent the next ten days shooting pool in my basement, watching old movies, and talking about the nature of drama and story and the creative process. We also talked, usually around 3 or 4 A.M. in my kitchen, about the various lost loves and discarded hopes that accumulate as one’s life progresses in all its noise and folly. It felt like college, or certainly my early twenties; several nights, joined by other friends, we even ended up sitting on the floor. During those ten days, we hatched the idea that I would finally write a role for my brother and a play for the theater company to which he belongs. An aspect of my brother, Gerry, that’s worth mentioning—he is one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever known. In the top two, actually. The problem is that this innate decency often leads him to be typecast in “nice guy” roles. I promised him I would create his role against type: I would write him the meanest, nastiest, most unconscionable monster I could imagine.

  FINDING THAT MONSTER proved surprisingly easy because I’d already written him: Bobby’s Father. I’ve created villains before, but most are tortured or misunderstood and a lot less villainous than we might prefer in terms of our comfort level with the human race as a whole. Bobby’s Father, however, is all-villain-all-the-time. He possesses some measure of charm (I hope) that might make him a fun bar companion on a slow night, but otherwise he’s irredeemable. So I started with him and that led me back to Bobby and Gwen. It also led me back to those kitchen conversations about love and loss and hope. Gradually other characters began to emerge—a psychiatrist and his patient, two lovers carrying on an illicit affair, a sad-sack husband, a comic-relief waitress. I had no idea who these people were or how they connected to the story I’d told in “Until Gwen,” but every now and then one of them would mention a town called Coronado in such a way that suggested a measure of relevance, and I trusted these new characters would begin to account for themselves.

  THEY DID. HOW they did is the point of the play. And if Gwen and Bobby and Bobby’s Father never quite reach Coronado, and maybe none of the characters in any of my stories do either, then that’s okay, I think. It’s the trying that matters. The hope.

  Coronado premiered on November 30, 2005, at Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village. It was produced and performed by the Invisible City Theatre Company, under the direction of David Epstein, with the following cast:

  GINA Rebecca Miller

  WILL Lance Rubin

  WAITRESS Elizabeth Horn

  PATIENT Kathleen Wallace

  DOCTOR Jason MacDonald

  BOBBY’S FATHER Gerry Lehane

  BOBBY Avery Clark

  HAL Dan Patrick Brady

  GWEN Maggie Bell

  Coronado was performed as part of the closing-night festivities of the Writers in Paradise Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, on January 28, 2006. It was produced by American Stage Theatre Company and Eckerd College with set design by Scott Cooper. It was directed by Todd Olson with the following cast:

  GINA Nevada Caldwell

  WILL Steve Garland

  WAITRESS Megan Kirkpatrick

  PATIENT Julie Rowe

  DOCTOR Dan Bright

  BOBBY’S FATHER Tom Nowicki

  BOBBY Steve Malandro

  HAL Drew DeCaro

  GWEN Caitlin O’Grady

  YOUNG WOMAN Talia Hagerty

  MAN Kyle Flanagan

  Characters

  WILL a man in his twenties

  GINA a woman in her twenties

  DOCTOR a man in his late thirties

  PATIENT a woman in her mid-thirties

  BOBBY a man in his late teens, early twenties

  BOBBY’S FATHER a man in his mid-forties

  GWEN a woman nineteen years old

  HAL a man somewhere between forty and fifty-five

  WAITRESS a woman of indeterminate age

  A MAN and a YOUNG WOMAN

  Settings

  ACT I takes place in an unnamed bar at various times.

  ACT II takes place at the fairgrounds, a parking lot, and the bar, at various times.

  ACT I

  Scene 1

  A booth in a bar where a couple, GINA and WILL, sit.

  GINA So how was the trip?

  WILL Lotta two-light, three-bar towns. Hartow, Rangely, Coronado.

  GINA How is that place?

  WILL It’s coming up, I gotta say. Might be nice someday.

  GINA So you’re back.

  WILL And you’re going.

  GINA Just for a week.

  WILL A week. Jesus.

  GINA We can do two weeks.

  WILL Without talking? Maybe. Without touching, though?

  GINA I could bite through my lip looking at you.

  WILL I could…

  [GINA looks over at the bar, then back at WILL.]

  GINA This is what I remember—the first time you touched me. The first time you ever laid a finger on my flesh. You remember?

  WILL It was after work.

  GINA You smelled of Paco Rabanne.

  WILL You wore that blue blouse.

  GINA You said you hated your car. You said…

  WILL Yes?

  GINA No, you tell me.

  WILL Not fair.

  GINA Fair-schmair. And yes it is.

  WILL I said…I said…

  GINA You don’t have a clue.

  WILL I said…I said, “If you were air, I’d ne
ver take another breath just to hold you in.”

  GINA I always wondered if you heard that in a movie.

  WILL Nope. All mine.

  GINA Say it now.

  WILL I just did.

  GINA Not quoting. Say it for real.

  [Beat.]

  WILL If you were air, I’d never take another breath just to hold you in.

  GINA Mmm. Good line. Came as a surprise.

  WILL To me too.

  GINA How is that?

  WILL I don’t know. We never know what we’re going to say, do we?

  GINA Sure we do. We say “I need a haircut,” and “I’d like a Fiero,” and “I want a shelf organizer.” And “You look terrific,” and “What’s on at ten?”

  WILL Sounds so depressing.

  GINA Until you.

  WILL Until me…

  GINA I could say “What’s on at ten?” to you and not feel existential dread.

  WILL Until you, I, Jesus, fuck, I, my god, I mean, do you know I look at you sometimes and I just want to fucking cry? To scream? I want to grab you and squeeze you until your bones shatter. Not really, but you know? I want to tell the whole world that I couldn’t kiss you enough, lick you enough, fuck you enough. There is no enough with you.

  GINA You know, you know when you’re inside me or when I just catch a look from you—you’re at your desk, I’m at mine—or when I think of the way you looked by the side of the road trying to jack up the car? Saying, “Stop, Gina. Stop laughing”? I think, my god, this is my life? God gave me this? And I think how I could just spread you on a cracker and eat you whole.

  WILL I think, I think, I swear to Christ, how my whole life I felt something missing, you know? Like you were out there, somewhere, and I knew it, I did, but I never found you so I finally stopped looking. I told myself it was a fantasy. A child’s dream. Time to wake up, Will. So I did. I stopped believing and I got on with my life. I got on with my life. But then we met. And we talked. And suddenly I knew what I’d always known but tried to convince myself I didn’t.

  GINA What?

  WILL That you were the piece of me that went floating off into the ether when they pulled me from the womb. And I’m, right, I’m barely a fetus but I’m reaching for you, going, “Hey, come back. Please.” But you’re gone. You’re gone.