Friendswood (16 page)

“No, thanks,” she said, smiling. “I'm a happy heathen.” She grabbed the edge of the door. If he hadn't been married to Jess's old second-grade teacher, she would have closed it on him.

“Any chance you might change your mind? I sure would like to talk, if you ever got the inclination.”

“No, no inclination.”

“Alright then, well, the other thing is, I just want to reassure you Avery Taft has done his due diligence in getting that land tested. He sure has. The EPA came out not once but twice.” She wondered which office Steeburn was from, the one in Dallas or the lab in Houston. With Professor Samuels's signature on the new readings, they might pay attention if the numbers were high enough.

“Did they? Did Taft Properties send you over here?”

The smile on Hal's face seemed to scatter, the features pulling away from one another. “No, no, no, no. I just wanted to save you some trouble. See, we're going to be selling the houses over there, and I have two thick notebooks of scientific evidence that the soil in Banes Field is now toxin
free. Completely safe for human health. You can see it for yourself if you'd like to come by the office sometime?”

“I appreciate your concern, I do,” she said, summoning sweetness. “But I'm looking out for some new test results. I could show you those when they're ready.”

“Ms. Knowles, I don't mean to be rude.” He scratched his forehead. “You really think you've got something better than the EPA?”

“You know what?” she said. “I'd like to see.”

“Excuse me?” The two alcoholic red patches on his cheeks darkened into flat, dead berries.

She noticed the pen in his shirt pocket, the reasonableness of his blue shirt. “I do appreciate your trying, but you know I don't need to see your binders. That's about the size of it. Bye, now.”

She closed the door. She went back into the house and emptied all the cabinets looking for aspirin. An image came to her of Jess, playing in Banes Field, kneeling in the mud, building something out of rocks with another girl. She'd come back bleeding, having scraped her knee—toxins probably getting into her even then.

On the radio now, the news was blaring about a woman who'd donated her liver to a stranger and saved his life.

R
USH CAME OVER,
and they sat outside on the patio, drinking wine, trees spreading a green lace against the sun. Only a few of the oak trees' leaves were starting to yellow.

“This is nice. A little breeze here.” Rush sat back, took small sips from her glass.

“So, you'll come out to New Braunfels with us in November, right?”

“We'll see. Maybe.”

“Tom has a lot of friends up there—some of them single.”

“Can any of them dance at all?”

“I imagine.”

Lee envied the way Rush tended calmness like a garden. Part of that equanimity, though, was bought—now and then she disappeared and met an old boyfriend somewhere secret, just platonically. They got drunk on margaritas and flirted, but neither of the spouses knew—and that was how she was able to give the rest of herself to the family and to surly Tom—there was an economy to her mothering of them all.

“Have you seen Sam?” Lee asked.

She shook her head, looking into the glass. “I ended it.”

“Why?”

“Because I could see where it was going. Bound to go. I've got my kids. And Tom . . . he's clueless, sure. And he'll never change. I've given up on that dream. But I built this life and I just decided I'm going to live in it, you know?” She narrowed her eyes.

“You could get Tom to take you out once in a while.”

“Hah. Maybe.” She bit at a fingernail. “Marin's real good at art class—did I tell you? She drew this portrait of me. Line drawing. Even I have to say, it's the spitting image. But there's these creases on either side of my mouth. They made me look so depressed. I was telling her how great it was, but the whole time I was thinking, do I really look that bad?”

“You're just as beautiful as ever. Even sad.”

Lee wanted Rush to have her flirtations back, or she wanted Tom to come back to seeing Rush as something other than his burden. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Rush had Bryce. She had those beautiful girls—they put their shiny-haired heads on her shoulder. They held her hand.

“Well, it's not like I couldn't get a boyfriend if I wanted to.” Rush's hair blew to the side in the breeze, the skin on her chest gently wrinkled, faint red lines rivering to the middle.

“Well, that's obvious.”

“You could too,” she said. “Tell me, I've never understood why you don't go out and get one.”

“It's just Jack.”

Rush flicked her a stern look. “Yeah, you need to move on. What's the girlfriend—Susie?”

“Cindy.”

“Well, he's moved on. What are you waiting around for?”

Lee shrugged.

“I think he was an ass for leaving when he did. I'll never forgive him for that.”

“Oh, I wasn't all there back then either.”

“Of course you weren't. You were in shock.”

There was a day she'd just lain in bed, afraid to move, afraid to open her eyes, something fragile held under her hands at her chest. She could hear outside the huge flowering of the world, all full of itself, birds, wind in trees, traffic on the streets. But it was the thing under her hands that needed solidity, and she pressed against it hard, afraid it might dissolve between her fingers.

“I can't even imagine . . .” Rush lowered her eyes. “But I want you to be able to have fun again. Remember how we used to go to the Marles and drink and dance? Remember how we used to take the kids out to Galveston and ride the waves?” Over the radio,
Willie Nelson's mournful crooning.

“Yeah.” Pleasures like that seemed trivial to her now, but she didn't want to say that, to make it true. She noticed a pale green fungus growing in the knot of the birch tree, like small torn pieces of paper glued there.

“Well.”

“Well.” Lee slapped a mosquito against her thigh, drank down the rest of the wine. “Aren't we having fun now?”

H
AL WALKED HOME
after trying to talk sense into Lee Knowles, lay down on the couch in front of the local news on the TV, and fell fast asleep. When he woke up, he pulled the computer onto his lap, got to his email and sent this message to Avery Taft: “Hey good buddy. Made some headway with our greenie neighbor. Will report back soon I hope.”

Avery called him a little later. “Did she say anything about some pictures of a container?”

“No, she sure didn't.”

“Huh. Here's where I need you to keep my confidence.” He coughed. “See, one of the containers where they buried the chemicals, it popped up after the hurricane.”

“Is that so? Well, it seems bound to happen.”

“It's nothing, a natural occurrence, but you know someone could make something of it.”

“They like to do that, don't they?”

“So, right away, as soon as I heard about it, I hired all my Mexicans and their buddies to go out there and dig a hole and rebury it that night, put it back down ten feet where it couldn't hurt anyone. It was a real tricky situation. But somehow she got out there before I got the thing buried. She has these blurry photos, but she's mouthing off about it all over town.”

Hal might have underestimated her, but he'd get her to back down,
even so. “Oh, I don't think she'll be mouthing off again, Avery. We had a good chat.”

“I hope you're right, buddy. Let me know about that old property of mine too.”

A little later, Darlene came home and then Cully, sullen, as he'd been ever since he'd been suspended. Hal had fought to make sure the boys could still play football after the two weeks' suspension, and Principal Johnson had agreed, just barely, at the urging, he suspected, of Coach Salem. But still, with Cully at home, Hal was afraid his son might be absorbing all his own failures, and he prayed about it constantly, as he did again, that night, in the dark of their walk-in closet, his head among the tails of his cotton shirts, Darlene clattering downstairs in the kitchen, Cully in his room talking secretively into his phone.

A little while ago Hal had opened a box in the attic to find his crumpled letter jacket with the tiny football sewed onto the
F
and trophies with tiny gold quarterbacks, one arm cocked back to pass, the other pushed out to defend. The pose. They perched on cheap marble squares marked with gold plaques for the years 1979, 1980. There was a tangle of blue ribbons for track and sportsmanship, all faded now to purple. And he wouldn't let the nostalgia grip him, quite, but the feeling was of looking at the relics of someone who'd died. His son still had all of that glory, the bright, athletic blue, unfaded. Why would he squander it?

He knew that stupid incident at the Lawbournes' had only happened because Cully was drunk, because his pals were there, because it took discipline and practice to learn to restrain a lust. Thank God Principal Johnson didn't know the whole story—it would have been the end of the season. Cully had confessed it, that he'd had sex with a drunk girl, and then found her a little later with one of his buddies in the bed. He said no one knew except the ones who'd been upstairs. There always were and always would be girls like that, Hal told him, but it was a man's job to judge the situation. Darlene didn't know either, and he told Cully to keep
it that way. “Ask God for forgiveness and move on. Do not talk to the girl again, you hear me?”

Hal prayed to bring goodness and rightness back to his family. He prayed for guidance and strength and wisdom. Hal knew he could pass his success on to Cully too, and actually, he did feel the wealth coming, like sunlight in the clouds, the way one beam would come down and seem to point itself directly at him, how, when he prayed, he felt a face above him somewhere, nodding in agreement.

H
AL WENT OVER
to Quaker's Landing to show an old colonial. The prospective buyer was a pretty, almond-eyed blond woman with a tattoo of a bluebird on her upper arm, dainty, just at the curve of biceps. They walked up to the black wooden door with a strange pilgrim-head knocker. Taking the colonial cues too far, if you asked him.

“I like that park down the way,” Ms. Lansing was saying.

He put the key in the lock, and it wouldn't turn. “The high school just made the list in
Texas Monthly
. I know a lot of the teachers myself—went to school here with some of them. And my son's there now.” He wrenched the key in the other direction. “Just having a little trouble.” He leaned against the door and turned the key. It moved halfway, but wouldn't click open. He moved away and jiggled the door while he turned the key, trying to make it catch, but that didn't work. “I'm sure this is the right one.”

It had happened to him before, not with this house but with others. The owner got accustomed to the loose locks and the specific trick to unlocking them and forgot to tell the person showing the house.

He rang the bell again. “Maybe someone's home. Just a minute.” He was smiling, thinking,
Goddamn these fuckers
.

“I like this one,” she said in her kitten voice. “It's the perfect size, and
I like those columns, I don't know why.” He called the owners on his cell, but he got the answering machine.

“Well, let me try this one more time.”

He put the key in the lock and telegraphed a sense of his will into the key, and this time, by God, it turned.

“Hooray!” said Ms. Lansing.

“Hello!” he called out. “Hello! Realtor here!” Just to be safe. He'd more than once caught people in bed, usually with their pajamas on, but still.

They walked inside, and he saw Ms. Lansing's posture wilt. On the table, plates with the dry yellow lacy remnants of eggs, a pitcher of souring milk. In the living room, kids' Legos scattered across the carpeting, a dirty doll with blue chewing gum stuck in the hair. A faint smell of diapers and diaper wipes. Standing in the mess, he felt repelled by humanity. People, wanting to fail. It was easy enough when you weren't trying.

“I guess they forgot to tidy up this morning,” he said.

She averted her gaze out the window to the next-door neighbor's well-kept yard.

In the old days he would have already been planning how to get a drink in him, but instead he said a small, positive prayer to keep himself on track.

He always told Cully the same thing—God wants you to do good. “Let's see what else we've got for you today,” he told Ms. Lansing. He only had to walk with his eyes straight on the path and not look away.

He was back in the office, emailing with a mortgage broker, Dennis, an annoying, self-important guy with a huge forehead, who relished his power, took hours to return emails but even longer to return phone calls. Diana, the company's administrative assistant, was out sick, and though the office was quieter, everything was taking longer to do. The water cooler stood nearly empty next to the bathroom door. He could hear only Stan at the cubicle way at the other end, clicking at his computer keyboard.

When his cell phone rang, he hoped it was Dennis, so he could finish their damn deal, but he saw Cully's name flash on the screen.

“What's up, son? I'm in the middle of work here.”

“I ran out of gas.”

“What do you mean you ran out of gas?”

“I just forgot I was on low, and didn't see the light, and I was driving back from the gym and got stuck.”

The rectangles of fluorescent lights above him seemed to zap and intensify, a spidery headache forming in his forehead. “Dammit, Cully!”

Hal had found a hundred cigarette butts behind the house by the spigot to the garden hose. And Cully had been falling asleep regularly just after dinner on the couch in front of one of those stupid shows where the guy or the gal gets a rose. Since his suspension, it didn't seem as if Cully always showered in the morning, and his mother scolded him for the stubble on his cheeks.

“Sorry, Dad.” Something in his voice sounded tremulous, just a shade.

“Where are you?”

“Out in the oil fields.”

“Now what in the hell are you doing out there?” The fluorescent rectangles seemed to be clacking together, the papers strewn over his desk shuffling themselves—he'd never get it all untangled before night.

“I'm in the middle of something. Where's your mother?”

“Don't know. She's not answering.” It wasn't like him to run out of gas—he treated that truck like a treasure.

“I've got a mountain of work here, Cully. It's got to get done today. Can't you call a buddy or something?”

“I could, but I think my phone's about out of juice.”

This was not like his son. One of the reasons he'd trusted him with a truck in the first place was that he so lovingly and responsibly took care of it, the regular oil checks, a wash on Saturdays. And he had dozens of friends he could have called, was on that phone all the time.

“Dad? Are you coming?”

“Just sit tight. You may have to wait, but I'll get there.”

He got his car keys from his suit jacket and went out to the lot.

It was so hot that his dress shirt stuck to him in sweat. What was Cully doing out there near the oil fields anyway? Hal got into his car and drove to the gas station, filled up a small gas can, and put it in the trunk. When he got back in the car, he looked at the index card on his dashboard, and remembered what Pastor Sparks had read from Scripture the other day. “There is no lack, for my God supplies all my needs.” No lack.

He spotted Cully's truck parked on the shoulder at the end of the dirt road, the black oil rigs seesawing in the dry land beside them, bobbing their heads up and down. The thin smell of heat and chemicals.

Hal put the can of gasoline on the ground next to the truck's back wheel, and opened the passenger side door. Cully's face was red and covered with sweat.

“Whatever made you want to come out here?” Hal asked.

Cully looked at him blankly, then lifted the corner of a smile. “Sometimes I come out here to think.”

“Think?”

Cully nodded. The pimples around his chin formed an angry purple beard, and he was still wearing his dirty gym clothes, which smelled rank.

“Think about what?”

“Stuff. A lot going on right now. Seems like it's hard to keep it all straight. Never mind. You got some gas for me?”

“Look, I know you're missing the big game with Spring,” Hal said, “but you can't let the pressure get to you. You've got to practice as if you're going back tomorrow.”

Cully pushed his hair, wet with sweat, away from his face and nodded. “I know. I just feel it's all bad out there, that there's not one good thing.”

Cully was upset, but Hal felt manipulated, having to come to him this way. “You want to talk about it?”

Was it the girl? There was a prickling at the back of his neck. Hell, he'd seen the same thing and worse, back in the day.

“Nah. Just makes it worse.”

Cully had maybe not told him everything, but he wasn't going to pry—these were teenagers, and prying only led to stony silence. “You've just got to be logical about it. Say your prayers. Tell Jesus what you're working for.”

“Jesus, isn't he already supposed to know?”

“Don't bullshit me. You know that isn't the point.”

Cully rubbed the tops of his thighs with his hands.

“I'm just saying you've got too much time on your hands now. Just do your schoolwork and run your laps. Don't think too much—think long, you think wrong. There's a lot of wisdom in that. You okay, son?” Hal needed to talk to that Dennis, start to move toward closing on this house.

“Yeah, I'm good.” Cully nodded, his face pointed at the front windshield, as if he was determined to get out of there.

Hal wasn't sure he believed him, but the papers on his desk seemed to spread before him in phantom slips, floating around the car. “Alright, I'll get going then. We can talk again after supper.”