Water Memory by Daniel Pyne

Author:Daniel Pyne [Pyne, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon
Published: 2021-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hundreds of identical bushy-haired, sun-faded bobblehead dolls of an American ball player hang by fishing line from the rafters of a ceiling that towers overhead. The name printed on their bases is Pedro Martinez. In the foggy recesses of her memory, she recalls that this person was a pitcher for Boston, because shortly after he got cancer, her husband took her to an Orioles game in which Martinez played. Dennis kept shouting at the field, “Just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” He kept laughing, so delighted Sentro never bothered to ask what it meant.

Big bell heads judder in a faint, swirling breeze.

Sentro has been staring up at them and puzzling if this is a new part of the West Texas dream she was having: sitting in the darkened motel room with her back to the silent Scooby-Doo bleed of a color-shot pay television on top of a minibar, listening as her mother sings, small, desolate.

And I come to town just to hear the band . . .

The bullhorn booms again, “MRS. SENTRO?”

Her mom rocks on the edge of the bed in her periwinkle pjs, ankles crossed, the pistol in her lap and both her hands on it, trembling, eyes dry, lipstick faded, singing:

. . . I know all the songs that the cowboys know—

Sentro asks, “Mom?”

“Está acordada,” is the answer she receives.

No, not dreaming anymore.

Flat on her back on a sagging SpongeBob pool-float mattress, Sentro feels her head nestled in ice packs and discovers the girl with the rainbow braces leaning in to mop her face with a cloth. Colt-like and slender, the girl has a baby bump that brushes against Sentro’s arm.

“I’m cold.” Sentro tries to sit up. The sudden movement causes the girl to jerk back, scared, but Sentro’s wrists are handcuffed to upended shopping carts on either side of her; she’s not going anywhere. The cuff chains clatter loudly in the quiet and bring scuttering from the shadows the scarred kid she wrestled on the skiff, his cricket bat poised high for a downswing.

He barks: “Fique lá.”

“What? Whoa.” A rush of vertigo blindsides Sentro again; nausea wrings her empty stomach.

“Sit back. Take it slow.” A weedy, tropical-browned middle-aged Anglo man-child pulls the little cricketeer back behind him and looms over Sentro and the girl; he’s wearing a lurid Hawaiian-print shirt and filthy, threadbare bermuda shorts. “Your brain, on ice.”

His eyes are almost colorless. His riot of bowl-cut hair wants to be blond.

Worrying again that she’s still dreaming, Sentro scans her surroundings: some kind of Spanish baroque ballroom with institutional carpets and stacked hotel banquet chairs and bleak faux-ironwork fixtures replete with empty sockets and cobwebs and rust. Heavy velvet drapery bleeds bright daylight from massive lead glass windows that rattle when what must be truck traffic passes close outside. This makeshift residence, once perhaps the faded centerpiece of an abandoned grand hotel, has been sectioned with a maze of packing crates and muslin screens and upended water-stained plywood pallets, and it overflows with multiplying booty apparently plundered from hijacked cargo ships.

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