Dreams of Cool Waters

While going through the books on my shelves, I came across a copy of something I wrote a couple years ago. Six years ago, actually, a story I did up for a creative writing class I was taking my last year of college, when I actually had a chance to take classes that didn't involve structural engineering and soil mechanics and thermodynamics. There's a note scrawled on the copy from my creative writing professor, telling me to submit it to the school's literary magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow, which I did. They printed it, which makes it, I suppose, my first piece of published fiction. I'm throwing it up here because I was surprised to find, on rereading, that I'm not embarrassed of it, and actually rather proud of it. And because I can. So give it a read, if you like.

And yes, I was reading a lot of James Lee Burke at the time. So sue me.

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Dreams of Cool Waters

I have never believed in Fate, that we are guided by unseen forces to some inevitable, unavoidable conclusion. Rather, I have always held true to the idea that we create our own fates, condemning and redeeming ourselves through our own thoughts and actions, with no help whatsoever from some unseen Higher Power who orchestrates our movements as though we were puppets on strings. So when my younger brother, Buddy, closely pursued by cruisers from both the Sheriff’s Office of St. John’s Parish and the State Police of Louisiana, floored his Corvette around the bend of Reef Shore Road, ricocheted off the front end of a Blue Star tanker truck and pinwheeled in a blazing mass of twisted metal and rubber through the guardrail into the Gulf of Mexico, I could only understand it at face value, as a tragedy of reckless, misguided youth. The irony in the details did not escape me, but I accepted them as random occurrences that could be observed without full understanding, like the collision of molecular particles or the death of a star. I chose to think this way, not because it was simpler, but because to do otherwise would give me the freedom to disregard the consequences of my own actions, to accept my own destruction as the final act in a play already written and to commit myself freely and unconditionally to a warm whiskey embrace, the final act in the darkly comic tragedy of the unrepentant alcoholic.

I wonder, often, what Buddy’s own interpretation would be.

The night of the accident, a warm and still August evening on the downslope of one of the hottest summers Louisiana had suffered in years, I found Buddy at a place called Whitney’s. Whitney’s was still called a “storage facility” on the parish survey maps; it was an old wooden barn, set on the borders of the marshes that separated the mainland of St. John’s Parish from the Gulf, that had been converted into a speakeasy sometime during Prohibition and remained a drinking establishment despite its lack of a liquor license and formal recognition by the Board of Health. The current owner was Cody Brulene, a tall, thin black man with wiry ropes of muscle that covered his body and writhed like snakes under his clothes when he wrestled a full keg to the tap or hauled a violent drunk out the steel front door. Few white people drank at Whitney’s, but Buddy had the rare ability to make himself welcome anywhere he desired to be. Brulene liked my brother because he played guitar for free on Thursday and Saturday nights, and because Buddy never drank, which made for one less beer-sodden or whiskey-crazed hazard Brulene had to watch out for.
This night, Buddy was in fine form, sitting on a stage hammered together with warped plywood, lit by two harsh white floodlights mounted on the ceiling. Buddy and his guitar were steamrolling their way through an electrified rendition of “La Jolie Blonde.” His fingers flew in a blur across the strings, his head and feet beating in time to the music, fine droplets of sweat gleaming on his tanned forehead and in his tousled hair. His eyes were shut tight against the lights as he sang, and the French-Creole lyrics rolled off his tongue and into the air with a rhythm and ease that spoke of years on the bayou, not months.
Watching him, I remembered my old belief from when we both were younger: that my brother was not a man at all, but a concentrated mass of pure energy, cast in human form. His short flaxen hair seemed to stand on end, and his lean frame was constantly in motion. Buddy seemed endlessly driven by the rhythm of music only he could hear, and which he could only express through his frenzied finger pickings on his acoustic guitar. I once found him sleeping on the couch of our parents home on the South Shore, and was amazed to see his fingers twitching incessantly, as though even in dreams the music within sought to free itself from the confines of Buddy’s brain. But Buddy rarely slept, choosing instead to spend all hours of the night in the strangest company he could find to keep his interest. In Boston, while a student at Harvard University, he had frequented nightclubs, all-night diners, VFW Halls, anywhere he could find random characters and conversations that he could file away in his prodigious memory, to be later immortalized in his songs. It was at Harvard that Buddy had become exposed to the impassioned movements and rhetoric of the Far Left: animal rights, women’s liberation, and, particularly, the environmental movement’s battle against the corporations and conglomerates that sought to ravage the planet’s natural resources to their own advantage. After his graduation from Harvard Law and the abandonment of Massachusetts, the state in which we were born and raised, for the warmth of coastal Louisiana and the environmental crusade against the oil refineries polluting the Gulf, he had discovered the dramatis personae that the deep South had to offer. The good-old boys, with their pick-up trucks sporting gun racks and decals of the Confederate flag, and their callused, sun-browned hands wrapped around bottles of Jax and Rebel Yell; the Southern blacks, whose immediate relatives still bear the scars of slavery, and who realize better than any that all the proclamations and amendments an apologetic government can offer bear little weight against the sight of a cardboard sign bearing, in uneven scrawl, the words “No Coloreds”; the Cajuns and Creoles with their bastardized French; the mulattos, with skin a color that is neither white nor black, but rather, like their heritage, vague and undefined; and others, a mongrel conglomeration of fine breeding and inbreeding that defies all description. They were like nothing Buddy had ever seen, and he insinuated himself among them with a skill that the most adept chameleon would have envied.
Buddy finished the song as I moved to take a seat at a table along the wall, managing to be inconspicuous in spite of the lightness of my skin. Squinting through the burning spotlights, he spied me and grinned, then fell into a graceful rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues.” The music seemed to seep into the silent crowd, and I saw a few of the older men close their eyes and nod their heads slowly in rhythm. A young man emerged from the door in the rear of the building and, oblivious to the moment taking place, shouted to an acquaintance seated at the bar. Withered by the looks of the listeners, he sheepishly shrugged his shoulders and, head lowered, slunk quietly across the room to his bar stool. On stage, Buddy played the last chords, let them fade into the silence, then stood. The men in the crowd remained silent for another moment, then nodded their heads in appreciation before returning to previous conversations. Buddy knelt to put his guitar back in its case, and then Cody Brulene was standing by my table.
“Buddy, he sho’ can play,” said Brulene, bobbing his head in appreciation. “He play the hands off the devil.”
I took a sip of my drink. “Given the chance, he probably would.”
“You want anothuh Coke, Mistuh Church?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you, Cody. And it’s Mike, or just Church.”
“Whatevuh you say.” He turned to walk away.
“Cody?” I called.
He turned back to face me.
“You call my brother by his first name. I don’t understand why I don’t just get the same.”
Cody grinned, his broad teeth sparkling white against the ebony skin of his face.
“That boy, he sho’ can play,” he said again, and walked away.
Buddy stepped down from the stage, guitar case in hand, and made his way over to my table.
“Hey, bro,” he said. “What’s the haps?”
“Thanks for the song.”
He grinned. “Hey, I know you’re a Leadbelly fan.”
I looked at him closely. His deep blue eyes burned brightly, and his fingers drummed in rapid fire on the tabletop.
“What’s the deal, Buddy?” I asked.
His eyes widened, and his mouth turned down in a guilty frown. “What’re you talking about?”
“Larry called for you.” I watched his frown grow deeper. “He said to tell you ‘to meet them at midnight.’ I took that to mean that you and your Greenpeace version of the Untouchables have some big plans in the works.”
He raised his hands slightly from the table. “What can I say? You got me. I’m tired of picketing the county courthouse with my thumb up my ass. Things gotta change.”
“What’s the plan, Bud?”
He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Get this,” he said in a low voice. “We’re gonna nuke the Blue Star refinery. Blow it sky high. We’re meeting tonight at Larry’s and we’re gonna head over from there.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “What are you on, Buddy? You can’t take out an oil refinery.”
He nodded slowly. “Gonna do it, Mikey. They’ll see the glow in Mexico.”
I shook my head. “I’m not fucking around, here. You’re talking major shit. Blue Star’ll have your head on a spike.”
Buddy laughed. “What, you don’t think Daddy’d be able to get me out of it? I’d send him another letter. From jail. This time, he’d have a platoon of lawyers on the first plane down.”
My father had received a sealed envelope in June, two months after Buddy had driven south with three of his fellow students in environmental law. The envelope contained a postcard bearing a picture of an enormous offshore oil platform mining the coral reefs of the Gulf of Mexico, and a letter three pages long in which Buddy described, in detail, a few days he had spent with three winos in a Southern Freight railroad car, drinking wood alcohol and listening to stories of the French Quarter in the 1950’s. My father had never been one to appreciate Buddy’s unique sense of humor, and I had been sent down here immediately, driven by my father’s fervent orders to find my younger brother and keep him from harm. I was between jobs, and remained, despite my best efforts, financially dependent on my father, and as a result, subject to his wishes. And it was not as unusual a request as it might sound: since childhood, I’d often found myself thrust into the role of Buddy’s protector, and I had assumed this would be little different from past experiences. My brother tended to be perpetually involved in a conflict of some sort, ranging from minor confrontations in Boston pubs to more serious matters involving police attention; in twenty-four years, Buddy had been stabbed with a broken bottle, beaten with a pool cue, shot at, throttled, and maced. The end result of these violent escapades was always the same: I would receive a call from my father, at some time between dusk and dawn, requesting me to go to a particular bar, hospital, or police department to retrieve my brother and bring him safely home. My father’s firm belief, and the statement that he used to conclude each of these calls, was that Buddy had a good heart, but his head wasn’t always in the right place. This, I always assumed, was intended to both justify my brother’s actions and instill purpose and moral conviction in my own missions of mercy, and it consistently failed on both counts. I held strong to the belief that the only justification for Buddy was our mother's death, and I knew my father believed the same. But the subject of my mother and what the county coroner had politely referred to as her "inadvertent overdose" was one which my father had silently decreed would remain unspoken. Intelligent as he was, he refused to acknowledge the psychological effects on a boy who, at eight years old, found his mother in bed with an empty bottle of prescription sleeping pills and a quarter of scotch which had spilled what remained of its contents on the coverlet.
Buddy saw the look on my face, and he raised his palms as though to ward me off. “Hey, bro,” he said. “No screw-ups this time around. We got it all planned out. We go through the fence, we’re in five minutes, we’re out. Getting caught’s nowhere in the program.”
“It never is, Buddy.”
He studied my face, then stood up, walked around the table, and leaned over until his lips were inches from my ear.
“Fly low, brother,” he said softly.
And he was gone.
I sat there for a moment, then headed for the parking lot. I got there in time to see Buddy’s cherry red Corvette spinning out of the lot, kicking up a cloud of dust and cinders in its wake. His hand waved from the open driver’s window, and rock-and-roll blared from the interior. I stood and watched the glowing red spheres of his taillights fade with the music and eventually disappear. I contemplated racing to my own car and tailing him to Larry’s, where I could try to reason with him further. But Buddy’s burning sense of inner conviction and complete disregard for posted speed limits made both of these courses of action unlikely to succeed. I thought about simply waiting at the refinery for Buddy to show up, then physically overpowering him, and found this solution to be even less plausible than the first. I suddenly realized that I was tired, both mentally and physically, almost to the point of exhaustion. These ideas of car chases and midnight battles at refinery fences struck me as foolish and meaningless, minor inconsequential skirmishes in my never-ending war against the sheer force of my brother’s overwhelming instinct for catastrophe and self-destruction. Buddy, it seemed, could defy all logic and scientific principles and remain forever in motion, but I realized then that I could not, and I no longer felt the urge to try. Instead, I walked back into Whitney’s and asked Cody Brulene if I could use his phone.

The knock on my door came a few hours before sunrise the next morning. I had been having a dream in which I was chained to a chair on the sandy bottom of the sea. Multi-colored fish of all shapes and sizes swam past my head, between my legs, through the rungs of the chair. I writhed violently in the chair, kicking my legs and tossing my head back and forth in terror as I struggled to free myself from the rusty chains that bound my arms and upper torso. The fish congested into a massive school, and darted past my chair and into the musky green of deeper waters, leaving a dense cloud of sand to mark their passing. The sand swirled into a large funnel cloud, like a tornado, and then grew darker until it was the grimy black color of crude oil. A figure walked out of the dark funnel and came towards me, and I saw it was Buddy. He was naked, and where his eyes had been, only empty sockets remained. Black streamers clung to his limbs and torso, and when he opened his mouth and reached out his hand to touch me, I saw his fingernails and teeth were black. I kicked out with my legs, and my chair buckled beneath me, and then I woke to find myself on the floor next to my bed, drenched in sweat. I heard the pounding on the front door and stood. My entire body trembled violently, and I felt nearly overcome by the old familiar feeling of the recovering alcoholic, that desperate and all-encompassing need for a drink. I grabbed a T-shirt off the dresser and pulled it on with effort as I went to the door.
When I first met Burton Donahey of the St. John’s Parish Sheriff’s Office, it was at a Fourth of July picnic at the park across from the parish town hall. He had been wearing an enormous white T-shirt that nevertheless fit him like a sausage skin and bright orange Bermuda shorts. He had recognized me as a newcomer and offered me a bottle of Jax gleaming with shards of ice from the Styrofoam cooler he carried. I had declined and told him why, and his eyes had brightened as he plunged a huge hand back into the cooler and retrieved a bottle of Coke, saying as he did so that he’d finally found someone who could drive him home.
Tonight, Sheriff Donahey was in full uniform, but his tie was crooked, and his left shirt-tail hung down over his belt. His large brown eyes were soft, his massive shoulders slumped as though they bore a great weight.
“Hello, Church,” he said softly, and his voice was like distant thunder rolling in off the green waters.
I stood back from the doorway and let him in.

Buddy and his crew had nearly made it through the refinery’s chain-link fence with wirecutters when a St. John’s patrol car spotted them. The three other men had frozen in the harsh white glare of the police spotlight like deer trapped by the headlights of an automobile. But Buddy was moving even before he heard the metallic drone of the officer’s voice over the megaphone, sprinting along the fence and then darting across the dirt road that circled the refinery to where his Corvette was hidden in the thicket. He vaulted over the door and into the driver’s seat as the police car roared into motion, the driver pulling a sharp skidding U-turn and heading back in Buddy’s direction while his partner cuffed Buddy’s companions. Buddy flared the engine and shot off into the darkness, kicking on his lights as he did so. The driver of the police car hadn’t seen the license numbers, but he had managed to get a good enough look at the car as it took off, and within minutes every law enforcement officer in the area was keeping his eyes out for a red sports car with out-of-state plates.
Buddy gave chase for almost fifteen minutes, once nearly slipping his pursuers completely when he turned off onto a back road and shut off his lights. But there were too many: the St. John’s Sheriff’s office had already put extra patrols in the area around the refinery, and the driver of the patrol car who had first spotted Buddy had radioed the State Police almost immediately. No one had expected him to run, but now that he was, they were more than ready to chase him down. Buddy must have known this, just as he must have known that the patrol car had not found him at the refinery fence by accident. And three years of Harvard Law would have taught him that he could give it up it right then; he hadn’t really done anything yet, and he’d get some chickenshit B&E charge that a public defense attorney with half a brain could get knocked down to a misdemeanor, and he’d boogie out of the courthouse with nothing worse than a hefty fine. But, as Buddy had said, getting caught wasn’t in the program. So when he hit a straight-away on the two lane road that bordered the Gulf of Mexico, he shifted gears and put the pedal to the floor. The ‘Vette shuddered for a second, spotlighted in the high beams of the pursuing automobiles, then began to steadily widen the gap until the police were nearly a quarter-mile behind. Donahey told me that by the time he got to the curve, the Corvette was doing over a hundred-and-sixty miles an hour. Buddy took the curve high, like a stock-car driver, crossing the double line into the left lane as he raced around the bend. The oil tanker in the other lane, on its way back to the refinery, had slowed to take the curve, and the driver had enough time to see the cherry red color of the car in his headlights and jerk the wheel to the left before the ‘Vette hit his cab and exploded. The rear end of the Corvette flipped outward, and the body of the flaming car rammed through the guard rail, spinning on its axis, and plunged into the dark waters of the Gulf.

We sat there at my kitchen table in silence for a moment, and then Sheriff Donahey got to his feet and lumbered to the refrigerator. “I could use a beer,” he said, opening the refrigerator door. “You keep any around?”
I tried to talk, and found I could not. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat. “I try not to,” I managed.
He looked at me. “Right,” he said. “Sorry. I forgot.” He took a can of Coke from the refrigerator, closed it, and sat back down. “I should give it up myself.”
“How was the driver?”
Donahey looked at me, his eyes wide, and then he nodded slowly. “Right. The driver of the truck. He’s okay, believe it or not. The truck jack-knifed, and he got banged around a bit, but nothing serious. The tanker was empty, but I’m still surprised the thing didn’t go like a roman candle. Son of a bitch should buy lottery tickets.”
I nodded.
Donahey studied the top of his soda can. “Incidentally, we took his blood alcohol level. Point two-one. The prick was loaded. These goddamn truckers do their runs with handles of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam under their seats, and they wonder why we’re pulling them over all the fucking time.” He stood. “I have to get going. Come by my office in the morning.”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said, getting slowly to my feet. I walked him to the door, and started to close it behind him when he turned.
“This wasn’t your fault, you know,” he said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
His eyes blazed, and he reached out and gripped my shoulder with a hand the size of a frying pan.
“Listen to what I’m telling you,” he said. “Buddy was a head case. If he’d made it through to the refinery, he’d probably have burned himself up right along with it. You did the best thing you could have done. Nobody thought he’d run.”
“Thanks for saying so, Sheriff,” I said. “But I still made the call.”
He released my shoulder, and his hand fell limply to his side. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “You still did.” He turned and walked slowly to his car, got in, and drove away.
I stood there for a moment, and then my body began to tremble as it had when I first woke, and I sat on the front step with my elbows on my knees, my hands clenched, my chin resting on my knuckles. I sat there, listening to the dwindling chatter of the nocturnal insects and the rising calls of the herons coming in off the water, until the first rays of the sunlight began to cut through the cypress trees. Then I went inside, showered, dressed, and ate some breakfast. When I had done all else there was to do, I picked up the phone and called my father.

I did not leave Louisiana. Nor do I think I ever will, at least permanently. To leave would be to close a door on something I am not willing to put away, and I believe that only by staying can I view what occurred clearly, without the taint of distance or regret. I came south because of Buddy, and I remain here for the same reason. Not to wail against the cruelties of life and weep at his terrible demise, for these serve no rational purpose. It was not Fate that put Buddy on that road, nor a Higher Power that plunged his flaming Corvette into the water. It was a choice; no less, no more.
No, I stay so that I may remain in contact with the spirit that I feel when I stand on the shore of the Gulf with my eyes closed, feeling the warm breeze on my face, tasting the salt air in my mouth, hearing the last chords of Leadbelly echoing in my ears as though across a darkened room, and seeing, with my mind’s eye, into the cooler depths of the blue-green waters, where the blackened remains of a cherry red Corvette sit rusting away, silent and still.