Page 58 of Levi

I’m still turning that over when the big one collects his beer and ambles down the rail toward me.

“You’re the one Dante’s been hauling around,” he says. “I’m Tex. My name’s the one on the building.”

“Levi.”

“I know it already.” He props himself on the rail like a man with nowhere on earth to be, which I’m starting to suspect is his resting state. “Heard about your arrangement. Three drinks and all the food you can hold, on Dante’s tab. Sheila’s been planning this since lunch. You made her week. She gets to feed someone and run up the bill to a man who isn’t here to tell her to stop. That’s about as good as Christmas, for Sheila. Her and Stormy, that’s the blond guy who just walked back inside, have been working on a special tasting menu for you.”

He takes a pull of his beer and looks out at the water like the two of us go back years. “Where are you staying?”

“Alys Beach. Over on 30A.”

His head comes around slow. He looks back over his shoulder into the bar, unhurried, checking the room the way a man checks it before he tells you where the money’s buried. Then he leans in, and he drops his voice.

“You know that place used to be a cult, don’t you?”

I set my beer down and give him my full attention.

“I grew up right here,” Tex says. “Thirty years. And I’m telling you, when I was coming up, that stretch of road was nothing. Rosemary Beach had people. Seaside’s always been a madhouse. And then you’d hit that white stretch of nothing and everything just — stopped. No cars. No lights on. Four or five of those big white houses way back off 30A, down at the Gulf, all of them the same, all of them empty. And not empty like for sale. Empty like waiting.” He looks at me and nods, waiting for me to figure out what they were waiting on. “You didn’t drive through there after dark. That was understood. Based on a local ordinance of the soul.”

“The place is still like that,” I say. “I’ve been there for days. I’ve not seen one person. There’s a coffee place with nobody in it and it’s always open.”

“See what I mean?” He points the beer at me, vindicated. “Always open. For who?”

“I know, right? That’s what I tried to tell Dante, first day. We almost got into it. I asked him why he was selling houses in a cult compound and he got all huffy and told me it was a ‘luxury planned community’ built on Bermudian designs. And white paint.”

Tex stops dead for a second, like the phrase itself offends him.

“A planned community for what?” he says. “That right there is the multi-million-dollar question. A community’s got to have a community in it. That’s the law. What you’re describing is a compound with an aggressive realtor.” He nods again, satisfied with himself.

“Sounds about right,” I agree.

“Now me and Mickey,” he goes on, and there’s a gear-change in it, the story settling in for the long haul, “he’s the cop in the wheelchair. My best friend since seventh grade. We used to drive through there on a dare. Teenagers. His daddy’s truck. We’d go slow down the middle of it at night with the windows up, white buildings only on one side back then, and neither one of us would say a word till we were back out the other end. And one night — and I’ve never in my life told this the funny way, because it wasn’t — I looked up at the second floor of one of those houses, the big one that never had a car in the drive, and there was someone up there. White. In a robe. Moving across the window. Slow. Right to left, then gone.”

“A person?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. None of the houses were lit up that night. And there’s a ghostly shape crossing a lit window on the second floor, except the window’s not lit, so how’d I see it?” He straightens up off the rail. “Mickey floored the gas pedal and got us the hell out of there. We didn’t discuss it that night. We’ve discussed it exactly one time since, after enough peach schnapps to make us both honest, and all he said was ‘I know what I saw, Tex,’ and then he wouldn’t say anything else. We decided right then not to speak that ghost or whatever it was into existence. We don’t touch it.”

I slap my hand down flat on the railing, loud enough that Stormy looks over from the bar.

“I knew it. For days I’ve been telling myself I’m losing it. I stood in that white kitchen the first night and thought, this is a cult compound. Sure as the world. Somebody built this to be looked at and not lived in. There’s no dirt anywhere. The plants don’t look real.”

Tex looks at me for a second, and then his face opens up. I’ve passed a test he didn’t tell me was running.

“See, that’s how I know you’re alright,” he says. “Takes a certain kind of person to drive into that white silence and realize, correctly, on day one, something is wrong here. Most people see the money and turn their brain off. You saw the money and your brain got louder.”

“Swing by sometime,” I offer. “See it for yourself. Up close. I’ll give you a tour from the inside.”

“Hell no.” He says it instantly. “You want to see me, you come here. I don’t go in there, and I especially don’t go in there after dark, and I’m a grown man. I’ve made my peace with how that sounds. This bar has never once scared me. That road scared me at sixteen and I see no reason to give it a second crack at me now that I’ve got more to lose.” He raps his knuckles once on the rail. “You need anything, you drive to the Roadhouse. The Roadhouse doesn’t vanish into thin air when you look straight at it. That’s the whole difference between my place and yours.”

“What do you think’s really there, then?” I ask. “If you won’t come see.”

He considers it a good while, like I’ve asked him something serious, and maybe I have.

“There’s one of those houses,” he says, dropping back down to the buried-money voice. “The big one. All glass. Looks like an art museum from the outside. They say it’s got an aquarium inside it. Not a fish tank, now. An aquarium three stories tall. The orca whale kind. And everyone repeats that like it’s a charming little fact about the neighborhood.” He shakes his head. “I always figured they planted that rumor their own selves. Give folks something shiny to say so no one wonders what’s really being kept in that much water.”

I take the bait. “What are they keeping?”

“Mermaids,” Tex says, and laughs, this big slow rolling thing that shakes the rail, tickled down to the ground, and I go with him before I can stop it, the two of us on the deck cackling like fools over a cult that keeps mermaids in a three-story tank.