The Oldest King of the Coast

The oldest of the King boys became a kind of murderer, but most people weren’t surprised.

We grew up on the Texas coast, roaming beaches and loping through waist deep saltwater—shooting birds or gigging fish, playing with death the way students fidget a pencil.

We went to the same school but weren’t friends. I always thought the Oldest King looked like an 1980s movie villain—a bully, a spoiled brat, a Draco Malfoy.

It happened like this:

We grew up and he got drunk in Port Aransas, Texas and, in the early hours of some salty morning, he struck a pedestrian with his F-150—the pedestrian walking from his house to the beach, thumped down by a truck in the night.

A busted headlight, a broken body. The truck skidded to a stop and the pedestrian rolled off the road into a stack of brackish weeds and died gagging on muck, because the Oldest King of the Coast didn’t stop long and didn’t render aid.

He saw the dying body and drove straight to a body shop to have his front end repaired and painted.

“Hit a deer,” he told the body-shop tech. “I can’t believe how bad it is.”

The pedestrian was found in the morning and an investigation was conducted. A suspect was ascertained, and a warrant was issued for the Oldest King of the Coast.

He went into hiding. A manhunt was launched. The media coverage was extensive. The resources devoted were robust.

About a week into the manhunt the Oldest King turned himself in and several years later, as a condition of some bargain, he pleaded “no contest” at trial.

He only received probation. A five year sentence of drug tests, alcohol abstention, and 240 hours of community service.

I think the defense argued he didn’t realize he’d hit anyone.

The arresting officer said he’d never seen a clearer case.

“He was drinking. He drove over the victim. He sought to destroy evidence, and he fled the scene.”

The Oldest King became strange, regardless of the lenient sentence.

He developed a habit of visiting body shops.

In the years that followed, he’d show up to collision centers in his F-150, stammering about an accident, and he’d present his truck to the body-shop attendant in order to get estimates for his vehicle’s repair.

There wasn’t even a scratch on his truck though, and the Oldest King and the body shop attendants would stand in the parking lots staring at the truck—the attendants completely perplexed.

“How can’t you see it?”

“See what? There’s nothing to fix.”

“The dent,” the Oldest King would argue. “The goddamned dent in the goddamned fender.”

But, of course, there was no dent. He’d hit the pedestrian with a truck he no longer owned. Whatever was damaged was something invisible.

The Oldest King unravelled.

Before the accident, he built houses, but he’d start showing up to the homes he’d built, unannounced. He’d just ring the doorbell and talk to the homeowners, his feathery-blonde hair wildly messed and his waxy-green eyes broadcasting bizarre intentions.

“House okay? Treating you okay?” he’d ask the homeowners, his pale lips flattened into some truant expression.

“So far so good.”

“No unusual happenings? Broken things only you can see?” He’d look at nothing. Poke a brick in the foundation.

“What?”

“Objects moving? Getting lost?” He’d run his fingers across the house, consider the roofline.

“Are you asking if I have ghosts?”

He’d ring the doorbell again and listen intently. “Does that sound kind of different to you? Like something extra is in it?”

Word got around that the Oldest King might be building haunted houses, and after a while the phones dried up. No one wanted to build a cursed thing.

Then, he started holding hands with nothing—he’d just stand there with an empty hand, whispering at nobody.

He quit driving his truck, because the engine made noises only he was capable of hearing, and he’d spend hours with his hood open listening to the motor, and whispering to whatever invisible entity he kept company with.

“I know you hear it,” he’d say, his thumb rubbing where a held hand would be.

You’d see him walking up and down the road where his victim died, chatting to the air beside him, his one palm aimed at the sky.

People asked his girlfriend if he was okay.

“We all grieve differently,” she’d tell them.

But secretly, she grew concerned. She sought specialists and asked questions, and had the Oldest King monitored by a private investigator, but the investigator didn’t come up with much.

“He likes to be alone,” the investigator surmised. “Maybe he needs something like a doctor.”

Finally, the girlfriend asked him why he liked to be alone and who he held hands with.

“Hold hands with?” the Oldest King said, clearly holding an invisible hand.

She pointed to where his hand was, and the Oldest King looked down, and it was as if, for a moment, he became himself again, and he dropped whatever he wasn’t holding, and for a few weeks he seemed fine.

They even had a birthday party for him with an F-150-shaped cake.

But when the party was over and the guests had gone home, and only half the cake was left, the Oldest King of the Coast went to it and licked icing off the cake knife.

“It was such a great party,” his girlfriend said, but when she looked at him, something seemed lost from his eyes.

“What’s that on your cheek?” he asked, and the cake knife in his hand still had white icing on it, his grip tight, knuckles pale.

“On my cheek?”

“Is that where he went to?”

“Who?” she said. “What?” She watched the held knife.

“Come here,” the Oldest King said, lifting the cake blade. “I’ll get him out if you hold still.”

But, of course, she ran. Who wants to be cut open by a cake knife? She sprinted through the home, burst through the door, tarried out across the asphalt road, and the Oldest King followed her.

They sped out under the moon and toward the beach. Distant waves crashed and the myriad stars seemed lost above them.

Through thorny grass that launched from the sand, and up and over dunes, their legs sinking beneath them in the sand, the Oldest King stabbing at her ankles, but missing every time.

They hit the beach and it glistened wet in the moonlight, and she ran with all her might to the water, duck dove a few waves and swam out to the second sandbar.

The Oldest King didn’t follow. He stood on the shore and waist high waves broke into white bubbles.

He had lost the cake knife while stabbing sand, and after a while in the water, his girlfriend realized and began to holler at him, and I guess she broke through to him somehow, because after a while she agreed to come back to the beach, and he only hit her once. Balled his fist and thumped her stoutly across the jaw.

“Is it you?” he asked her. He clenched her wet clothes and shook her whole body. “Did he get out of your face?” And the Oldest King didn’t think anyone was in her cheek anymore, so he dragged her to her feet.

She cried quietly and they walked hand in hand back to the house, but once they were back and he was asleep, she stole his truck, went to the police station, pressed charges and got a restraining order.

This was a few years ago.

He hasn’t gone to trial over it yet.

These days, he spends a lot of time sitting cross legged at the beach

Watching the distant water as though waiting for something to come ashore.

* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.