Friendswood (25 page)

Just as she jumped to the ground, she heard something like rocks dropping about ten yards away. She looked over to the trailer, but the lights were still off. She saw a shadow, maybe a dim silhouette gliding back and forth in front of the opening in the fence. But that was wrong, had to be. Anyway, she was mostly invisible. If she'd had a lookout, she could have taken her time.

She trudged through the uneven terrain. The flashlight with the red beam only gave her the dimmest sense of the ground ahead.

Ten yards farther, she spotted a giant roll of copper wire, gleaming. People broke into houses just to steal wire like that, and she guessed whoever usually stayed in the trailer was supposed to keep an eye on it. It seemed to be calling to her suddenly, as if the universe did not want it left there, but without help, she couldn't take it. And she remembered the manual said, “The prudent monkey-wrencher never acts spontaneously. His every move is planned ahead of time.”

To find her car, she had to walk farther than she remembered down the dirt road, and just when she thought she'd lost it, there it was: next to a little pine tree. Driving home, on the nearly empty highway, her body light, she looked out at the passing headlights, turned past the vacant, darkened gas station, and something pressed against her heart, as if to remind her who she was.

L
EE SAT
IN THE MORNING HEAT
of the window, drinking her coffee. She looked for some sign—in the paper, online—that the bulldozer had actually been disabled, that she'd disrupted Taft's construction, but all the local news was about Thanksgiving, soup kitchens serving turkey to the poor, what Texas looked like during the time of the pilgrims, a corn festival at the Alamo. Maybe they didn't even know the bulldozer had been sabotaged—it had to have been sent in to the shop by now. She wanted to go back to make sure she'd done it right, but that would be stupid.

At the grocery store, in the aisle lined by soda bottles, exposed under those lights, she ran into Jack's old friend Wesley, now the chief of police. She might have swerved her cart and walked away from him, but if he'd seen her, that would seem odd. She thought if someone had spotted her car that night at Banes Field, she might still dispel doubts about herself with aggressive friendliness, by swaying the conversation back to him.

“Hey there, you still playing the sax?”

His eyes looked puffy, pasty in their folds, as if he hadn't slept, and he didn't seem to recognize her at first. “Sure am?” And then he knew her again.

“Still out at that place in Houston?”

“First Saturday every month.”

“I'll have to get out there sometime,” she said.

He nodded and seemed to be searching her face. “Hardly seems worth it, surely not just to see me play—I stand in the back.”

“I've been meaning to, but I don't make it to Houston much.”

“The traffic.” She felt him looking at her chin, her nose, her eyes.

“You alright these days?”

Maybe her voice had betrayed her, or the way she held her arm against her chest. “Oh, yeah. Right as rain.” She pushed her cart toward the green bottles and cereal box faces in the aisle ahead.

She drove home, and as soon as she stepped out of her car, an SUV pulled in behind her, and her neighbor Hal stepped out of it with a rueful, pious smile. As he came toward her in his blue suit, the polyester weave of it caught a sheen.

“Howdy,” he said. “This'll just take a minute. You've got a minute, don't you?” She didn't like his tone.

The manual said, “Keep calm and practice a blank face.”

“I know what you've been up to.” He was smiling, shaking his head. “Oh, don't think I'm not paying attention.”

She smiled, but there was a war drum in her chest. They stood in the shade, and she folded her arms, glanced up at the brown, curling leaves.

“It's just not going to do you any good,” he said. “So I'm advising you to just hold up right there.”

“Do you always go around with orders like that?”

The Zindlers next door stood over by their mailbox with cups of coffee, Myrna talking behind her cupped hand, and her floppy-haired husband nodding. They would favor Hal's side, but it might actually be satisfying to be caught, to defend what she'd done.

“Oh, I think you know what I'm talking about. All that tinkering with soil samples. It's not going to make a bit of difference. Not a bit. And it's trespassing too, you know that. You can do whatever study you want, but if it's not sanctioned, it's not legit. From now on, no one's getting away with setting foot on that property—it belongs to Avery Taft.”

“I'm sorry. I'm confused. What's your part here?”

Hal rubbed his cheek. “Well, that's easy. A little while ago Taft asked me to partner with him.” He turned his head to the side. “I want to see those homes sell. People need jobs around here.”

“Thanks for the warning,” she said.

“Taft's building is going ahead. It's approved. It's good for everyone. You know that, don't you?” He cleared his throat. “Hell, I've even talked with your boss when we were out golfing the other day—he agrees wholeheartedly.”

Either this was a lie, or Doc had been out drinking beer, trying too hard to be gracious. She'd have to ask.

“Well, you've stated your opinion there. Thank you,” she said. “Very helpful.”

“You know I admire your conviction, and all the work you've done on behalf of the community.” He held up his index finger. “Just hear me out. What we do need people to be in an uproar about is that Robertson Park. Do you know that if we don't get a spending approval for that park, we'll lose a good part of that acreage? That park is the center of our city, one of the only places these days where our kids can go and just play.”

“I'm sure there's others who've got that about covered.”

“Don't sell yourself short. I'd be glad to coordinate something for you.”

“No, thanks.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. “Now, you're a reasonable lady. I know you are. Do you really believe all this effort's going to come to more than a hill of beans?” He lifted his hand, then dropped it again. “Well, alright then. So we understand each other?”

“We sure do,” she said, turning to her door. She left him standing there on the driveway, and she went inside her house, lay down on Jess's bed, and closed her eyes.

W
HEN THE RAIN CAME AGAIN,
and just three months after the hurricane, it flooded under the trailer so it looked like a rectangular boat floating on top of a hill, and the vegetable garden drowned; and because it was another of his mother's fantasies that they would all eat those string beans and tomatoes, he knew she'd ask him to replant them.

The storm pounded the roof like some misbegotten broken engine rattle, and he couldn't sleep those two nights, afraid as he watched the water rising. He hated his dad then, and there was nothing to do but watch rain in the window. His mom had to be everything; she had to take up so much space to make up for his absence; she had to be larger than was healthy for her. Those days as they waited by the TV, to see if they'd need to leave, a dampness in the couch, a leak dripping onto the stove top, his mother had seemed strangely calm and buoyant, teasing Dex and Layla that they'd all have to get aboard a boat, that she had two kids and two cats and that was enough for their little ark. She seemed supernaturally confident that they would be okay.

It turned out the trailer was perched on high enough ground, and the rain had stopped just before the water would have soaked the rug on the floor. He'd heard that the game room of the Baptist church next door had filled up with water and someone would have to gut it.

Now that the streets were dry again, he looked out the window and
noticed that some drunk had knocked over and crumpled the stop sign on the corner, and he knew his mother would be on the phone yelling about it for days. She seemed too big for their home lately, kept bursting through all the careful, invisible walls he'd built around himself. He went to the Xbox to put on
War
, so he could stare at the soldiers running away from him before he exploded their tank, and he could go far into that rectangular tunnel of battle, and when he hit a convoy in the distance twice, he felt elated and proud, as if he'd just defended his family.

Then she came in the door, breaking through it even though she'd only opened it, hadn't even slammed the cheap, light thing, as she so often did.

“You didn't tell me, goddamnit! Dexter William . . .” Her face was tight and young looking. “You lied to me. Where's your sister? I don't want her to hear this.”

“She's out. Mom, I didn't lie.”

“You sure as hell did. You know how I had to hear you were at that party? From Wanda Betts.”

“I felt bad.”

“Well, I sure as hell would hope you'd feel bad. You'd better swear to me right now you didn't touch her.” His mom had no idea he'd been going out to see Willa, but he didn't think telling her now would help.

She threw her bag on the couch, and coins and makeup spilled out on the floor.

“I didn't know she was there until it was too late to help.”

She shook her head and walked to the kitchen area, slammed open a cabinet. “First, you nearly get suspended for fighting and now this. I can only imagine what your dad would have to say.” The walls of the trailer were squeezing in to make a smaller tunnel, a smaller life, as his dad and the rest of the world grew larger, louder, forgetting about them. “I'm ashamed of you,” she said. “You know how much I hate that?”

He felt a pressure on the top of his head and against his shoulders.

“God, Mom,” he said. “I'm sixteen years old.”

“Goddamn right,” she said. “You've got to do better than that.”

A
FTER HE
DROPPED OFF
W
EEKS,
he didn't want to go home yet, and he didn't know where to go. On an impulse, he turned down Farm Road 1 toward Casa Texas. They'd still be serving even though it was late.

The parking lot was crowded and when he got inside, the restaurant was darker than he remembered, and there was a sweet, chlorine smell, and then the smell of spices. Carlita stood at the hostess stand in a hot- pink, billowy dress.

“How many?” she said. She didn't remember him.

The tables were filled, and in the back, he heard the loud music, could just make out a few couples dancing.

“Oh, I'm not here to eat. I wondered if I could see Mr. Holgine?”

Her chubby face was shiny and exasperated, her pink lips painted to match her dress. “What about?”

“He offered me a job a while back.”

She shook her head no just barely and said, “He's real busy tonight, but let me see if we can find him.”

She turned and shouted something at a waiter in tight pants and asked Dex to wait in one of the wooden chairs lined up along the entranceway.

He waited for half an hour, watching the people, the handsy couples, the families with the screaming little kids, the women in heels and low-cut dresses, laughing at one another's jokes. He started to get hungry from the smell of tortillas, and when he saw the clock over the margarita machine, he realized how late it was.

He went back up to the hostess station. “Did Mr. Holgine say he would see me?”

“We've got a full house, see?” She pressed her body back to let a few customers walk past her.

“He's a friend of my dad's.” He didn't want to leave before he had that job.

“Oh, alright.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Let me go check the kitchen.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Holgine came back, looking for him. He wasn't smiling as he always had in the past. “What's this about, son?”

“I'm Dex, Mac's son. You offered me a job a while back?”

His small, dark eyes swept to the left, then to the right. “Yes, my friend! How is he?” He clapped a hand on Dex's shoulder.

“He's good. Out on a rig again now.”

“You'll work hard like him, won't you?”

“I sure will.”

Dex watched Mr. Holgine's sharp nose and long chin, and tensed himself for the warnings and details. “Be here tomorrow at five,” Holgine said.

“That's it?”

“See you.” Holgine waved, smiled, and turned to rush back to the candlelit dimness of the dining room.

Dex drove home, wind picking up garbage along the shoulder, spinning pale plastic bags and silver cans into the dark. He'd replace his excuse for lateness with his victory about the job, and then she couldn't be mad.

W
HEN HE TOLD HIS DAD
about Casa Texas, he seemed to want to keep Dex on the phone. “Oh yeah? Well, what do you know? Did you meet Marquis yet? Marquis's a character. Ask him to tell you about Merides.”

“I just met Mr. Holgine, but he was too busy to talk.”

“Huh. Well, Fred Holgine will take care of you. He's a good man. Tell
you what, if you can save a thousand dollars, I'll put the rest toward a new truck. And next time, you, me, and your sister will go out to dinner there. Get us some fajitas.”

Dex's mom didn't like it that he'd “quit the team,” and warned that if his grades dropped even by one letter, he'd have to stop working. She didn't say it, but Dex had the sense that it rankled her, him working for one of his dad's old friends.

A
S
SOON AS HE STARTED W
ORK,
he picked up the skills, mostly being invisible. He watched the people eating at the tables, waiting for them to put down a fork, to push away a plate, and then he was there to take it from the table into the kitchen, where he stood over the trash, cleaned the plate, and then, steam coming up into his face, he fit the dish into the prong of the dishwasher, while the old, skinny dishwasher with stringy, pockmarked arms talked about the rodeo he'd signed up for. “Man, I'm quitting this hog hole,” he'd say every night. Later in Dex's shift, he helped the waitresses refill the salsa jars, the salt and pepper shakers. He wiped down the tables. Each waitress was supposed to give him 10 percent, but there was a mean one with sharp cheekbones and wizened, narrow eyes, who only gave him five bucks, saying, “Sorry, just didn't make quota.” Still, it was good money for him, fifty or sixty a night.

As he was leaving, when the dining was slowing down and there was just one waitress left on call, the dance hall in the back would start to fill up, and he'd catch glimpses of slow-dancing couples with their bodies pressed together, a hand cupping an ass or a woman showing her breast from the open side of a sleeveless shirt. Or he'd see them two-stepping, drunker seeming, stomping and stumbling. He could remember watching his parents dance the two-step just once—at a wedding. And he'd been surprised to see his dad's big body so graceful that night, the swivel
of his shoulders, the nimbleness of his booted feet, his mom smiling at his lead, her skirt swirling as they turned together, and how their footsteps mirrored each other's.

Later that week, he stayed on to watch the dancing from a dark table, where miraculously, someone had left a full bottle of beer, and when he was sure no one was looking, he took sips from it. There was a band that night on stage—a guitar player and a lanky singer, a drummer, and a fiddler with a goatee, whose wild, tangled gray hair whipped around as he brought the fiddle to the crook of his neck.

Dex liked being among these people who had nothing to do with high school, as if he'd been allowed for a night to visit the future, to live in a twenty-year-old's body. It made him feel superior. He wanted to take whatever this was and have it at the ready the next time Cully or Bishop or Trace gave him shit. Here he was learning what it meant to be a certain kind of man, the kind who could handle himself, who could talk to women he didn't know.

The singer called out, “Alright, y'all,” and started playing a catchy song Dex almost knew but didn't—a woman cheating, a man abandoned, but the tune wouldn't let sadness get in the way of its swing. The sharp heel of the singer's boot tapped along.

“You know how to do it?” said the mean waitress, whose name he'd just learned was Pammy.

“Do what?”

She nodded to the people dancing. “That.”

He shrugged. “Not really.”

She pulled him up by his arm. “Dance with me. I'll teach you.”