Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"We're coming!" Jimmie said, and climbed onto one of the inner tubes.

Waves knocked us over twice and it took us almost a half hour to cross the trough between the third and second sandbars. I thought I saw a fin break the surface and slide across the sun's afterglow, and, once, a hard-bodied object bumped against my leg, like a dull-witted bully pushing past you on a crowded bus. But after we floated past the second sandbar, we entered another environment, one connected to predictability where we could touch bottom with the ends of our toes and smell smoke from meat fires and hear children playing tag in the darkness.

We told ourselves a seascape that could contain predators and the visitation of arbitrary violence upon the unsuspecting no longer held any sway in our lives. As we emerged from the surf the wind was as sweet as a woman's kiss against the skin.

The girl said her name was Ida Durbin and she had seen us through binoculars from the jetty and paddled after us because a shark had already attacked a child farther up the beach. "You'd do that for anybody?" Jimmie said.

"There's always some folks who need looking after, at least those who haven't figured out sharks live in deep water," she said.

Jimmie and I owned a 1946 canary-yellow Ford convertible, with whitewall tires and twin Hollywood mufflers. We drove Ida back to the jetty, where she retrieved her beach bag and used a cabana to change into a sundress and sandals. Then we went to a beer garden that also sold watermelon and fried shrimp. The palm trees in the garden were strung with tiny white lights, and we sat under the palms and ate shrimp and watched the fireworks explode over the water.

"Are y'all twins?" she asked.

"I'm eighteen months older," I said.

She looked at both of us. "Y'all sure favor for brothers who aren't twins. Maybe your mama just liked the way y'all looked and decided she'd use just one face," she said. She smiled at her own joke, then looked away and studied the tops of her hands when Jimmie's eyes tried to hold hers.

"Where you live, Ida?" he asked.

"Over yonder," she said, nodding vaguely up the main drag.

"You work here in Galveston?" he said.

"For a little while, I am. I got to go now," she replied.

"We'll drive you," he said.

"I'll take a cab. I do it all the time. It's only fifty cents," she said.

Jimmie started to protest. But she got up and brushed crumbs of fried shrimp off her dress. "You boys don't get in no more trouble," she said.

"Boys?" Jimmie said, after she was gone.

Galveston Island was a strange place back in those days. The town was blue-collar, the beaches segregated, the Jax brewery its most prominent industry, the old Victorian homes salt-bitten and peeling. It was a vacation spot for the poor and the marginal and a cultural enclave where the hard-shell Baptist traditions of Texas had little application. Every beer joint on the beach featured slot and racehorse machines. For more serious gamblers, usually oil people from Houston, there were supper clubs that offered blackjack, craps, and roulette. One Sicilian family ran it all. Several of their minions moved out to Vegas in '47 with Benjamin Siegel. One of them, in fact, built the Sands.

But nonetheless there was an air of both trust and innocence about the island. The roller coaster in the amusement park had been officially condemned by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the notice of condemnation nailed on a post hard by the ticket booth. But every night during the summer, vacationers packed the open cars that plummeted down warped tracks and around wooden turns whose spars and rusted bolts vibrated like a junkyard.

Churchgoing families filled the bingo parlors and ate boiled crabs that sometimes had black oil inside the shells. At daybreak, huge garbage scows sailed southward for the horizon, gulls creaking overhead, to dump tons of untreated waste that somehow, in the mind's eye, were refined into inert molecules of harmless matter.

But inland from the carnival rides, the fishing jetties, and the beachfront beer joints and seafood restaurants, there was another Galveston, and another industry, that made no pretense to innocence.

During the next two days we didn't see Ida Durbin on the main drag or on the amusement pier or on any of the jetties, and we had no idea where she lived, either. Then, on Saturday morning, while we were in a barbershop a block from the beach, we saw her walk past the window, wearing a floppy straw hat and a print dress, with a lavender Mexican frill around the hem, a drawstring bag slung from her shoulder.

Jimmie was out the door like a shot.

She told him she had to buy a money order for her grandmother in Northeast Texas, that she had to pick up her mail at the post office, that she had to buy sunburn lotion for her back, that she was tied up all day and evening.

"Tomorrow is Sunday. Everything is closed. What are you doing then?" he said, grinning.

She looked quizzically at nothing, her mouth squeezed into a button. "I reckon I could fix some sandwiches and meet y'all at the amusement pier," she said.

"We'll pick you up," he said.

"No, you won't," she replied.

The next day we discovered a picnic with Ida Durbin meant Vienna sausage sandwiches, sliced carrots, a jar of sun tea, and three Milky Way bars.

"Some folks don't like Viennas," she said, and she pronounced the word "Vy-ennas." "But with lettuce and mayonnaise, I think they're real good."