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GOODNIGHT, TEXAS
ALSO BY WILLIAM J . COBB
The Fire Eaters, a novel
The White Tattoo, short stories
GOODNIGHT, TEXAS
William J. Cobb
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 William Cobb
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cobb, William J. (William James), 1957-
Goodnight, Texas : a novel / William J. Cobb.
p. cm.
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-26-3
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1-932961-26-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-932961-44-7
1. Texas—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O199G66 2006
813’.54—dc22 2006016143
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book design by SH • CV
Originally published as an Unbridled Books hardcover.
First paperback edition, 2007.
For Elizabeth
Global climate change will affect the physical, biological, and biogeochemical characteristics of the oceans and coasts, modifying their ecological structure, their functions, and the goods and services they provide. Fluctuations in fish abundance increasingly are regarded as a biological response to medium-term climate-ocean variations, and not just as a result of over-fishing and other anthropogenic factors. With global warming and sea-level rise, many coastal systems will experience accelerated coastal erosion, elevated sea-surface and ground temperatures, [and] increased levels of inundation and storm flooding.
· CLIMATE CHANGE 2001, INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE
It is said that animals are presciently aware of impending seismic doom. Catfish jump out of water. Bees mysteriously evacuate their hives. Hens stop laying for no apparent cause. Mice appear dazed and can be caught by hand. Deep-sea fish are found at the ocean surface.
· SIMON WINCHESTER’S KRAKATOA: THE DAY THE WORLD EXPLODED: AUGUST 27, 1883
He remembered lying on the floor of a cabin, looking up at the famous gunfighter Texas Jack Omohundro, . . . and clearly seeing there wasn’t anything anywhere but the two of them, that they were the two parts God had made everything else out of.
He’d said, “Jack, you and I are what everything else is made of.”
Texas Jack was working on a bottle of his own. He’d said, “You want the truth? I hate Texas.”
And Charley said, “See there? That’s just what I’m talking about.”
· PETE DEXTER’S DEADWOOD
GOODNIGHT, TEXAS
1
THE SEA WAS RISING and into it Goodnight was sinking. Along Red Moon Bay the pink beach houses on stilts loomed above the lapping water like boxy wooden flamingos. Resort homes flooded and were abandoned. As the water rose it seemed to hold nothing but pulsing white jellyfish. The world bloomed with rust and Goodnight became a fishing village without fish. Every day the shrimpers left dock and plowed the waves with their nets, bringing home a harvest of nothing. In the smokeblue aquarium world of the bars, they drowned and argued.
They went broke slowly, slowly enough to see it happen to each other and to enjoy it, to enjoy the notice and the watching of it. They thought about leaving and doing something else for a living, roughnecking maybe, but the oil rigs were mostly shut down and weren’t hiring.
They considered sinking their boats for the insurance money. They rubbed their faces dramatically and took a long time to answer if you asked them something, even a simple question like How ya doing? They smoked too many cigarettes, argued, fought, and hid from the wind outside that made the bay waters choppy and frogback green, their boats strain against the moorings in the docks.
That September Gabriel Perez arrived late for work as a hand aboard the Maria de las Lagrimas. The bonewhite fifty-footer was at the boat basin in Goodnight, moored in its boatslip under a blue-eyed sky. Laughing gulls floated and jeered above it. The morning wind already furrowed the waves of Red Moon Bay into sliding jade trenches topped with frothy whitecaps. The captain, an Anglo named Douglas, sat on the tailgate of his rusting pickup, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He had an Abe Lincoln beard, ears like conch shells, and the skin of weathered planks, like a poor man’s Ancient Mariner.
Gabriel pulled his El Camino in beside him and got out, held his cigarette in his lips, tucked his rubber boots under one arm, and took the keys from the ignition. He walked up to Captain Douglas, squinting from the smoke drifting into his eyes. Across the street a terrier barked, chasing a sooty cormorant from its perch on a creosote post. A Latina woman in an apron stood a few feet away, tossing french fries to the bird, who caught them in its beak.
Gabriel set down his boots and took the cigarette from his mouth. Sorry about being late, he said. Car wouldn’t start.
The captain sipped his black java and squinted back, looking up at Gabriel and into the sun. Save your heartfelt sagas of mechanical failure for some other job, he said, his voice boozer rough. This morning arrives the proverbial pink slip.
Come again?
You heard right the first time. We’re officially out of work.
Gabriel cussed, spat. He said it figured. The minute I fucking woke up, he said, I knew this was not my day.
Douglas nodded and sighed, like a drought farmer regarding a tumbleweed. He explained the owner had informed him that morning that he’d decided to sell out, couldn’t afford the costs of diesel and their pay with how little they’d been catching. They couldn’t compete with the shrimp farms in Brazil, raising them for half the price it cost to catch what few were left in the Gulf.
Fucking Brazilians, said Gabriel.
My sentiments exactly.
Gabriel drop-kicked his rubber boots into the pitted asphalt of the dockside road. He shook his head and walked in a tight circle toward the El Camino and then back. Finally he said, What do we do now?
Douglas believed that to be a good question.
Something else, he said.
Gabriel thought about it for a minute, squinting into the heat-lamp sunlight. They stood silent and stricken. The crawdad smell of Red Moon Bay engulfed them. On the surface of the water near their boatslip, beside the hull of the Maria de las Lagrimas, floated a white rubber glove like a severed hand, in a rainbow sheen of diesel, beside a pair of dead minnows.
What do we do now? began Douglas. He smiled like a mortician about to detail the price of caskets. I suggest something that does not involve fish.
ABOUT NOON GABRIEL was back near the docks. He found a place in the