Friendswood (29 page)

H
AL HAD BEEN UP LATE,
half watching a game on TV in the dark, among shadows of furniture and upholstered pillows. The game ended, the Cowboys lost, and he opened his laptop to check email. There it was. “Wanted to let you know Cully's doing a fine job, José said. Not a brick out of place. Avery.”

“Goddamnit.” Hal slammed his computer shut, and the shadows around him just sat there. In the bedroom, Darlene would be snoring softly, wearing the flannel nightgown that reminded him of his mother. His head felt too heavy to hold up, his shoulders sore and fatigued. He pictured himself taking off his pants and getting into bed next to Darlene, and had a strong feeling he was not going to get the exclusive listing from Avery Taft. He'd had his chance, and he'd failed somehow.

Cully should have been working an internship, doing something for his future, and instead Avery had him doing toady work, work whose danger Hal had played down to Darlene because he'd been so desperate to have a line back to Avery.

He felt his face burning in the dark. He felt the smallness of his house around him, the cheapness of its furnishings.

He had to fight against this defeatism. Attitude was everything. He'd given a hundred dollars to the Victory Temple last week, but it wasn't enough. He wanted to give more.
Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now
herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

There had to be an answer to this. He was a good man. He loved his wife and son. If he prayed, if he was patient, there had to be an answer. He lay there all night, waiting, stared out the window at the streetlight's metal hook and luminous tent.

The next night, around eleven, Avery called to say copper wire had been stolen. Two bolts had gone missing, plus some copper-plated pipes that had been locked up in one of the homes, and Hal began to worry about Cully out there in that trailer all alone. Plus, if Darlene found out the half of it, she would be furious.

He told her where he was going, her curves hidden beneath a thick white shirt, her eyes red from watching TV, but he lied about the reason, said he was just going out there to keep Cully company for a couple of hours.

“It must be boring,” she said, “just sitting out there. I hope he's at least using the time to get some homework done.” She was talking from the side of her mouth, as she did more and more lately for some reason, as if it was too much trouble for her to turn her face to him.

“God willing,” he said, hiding his worry with a smile and wink. He was almost too good at hiding things from her now.

“Bye, hon,” she said, snuggling down into the couch pillows, some woman on the TV cooing about diamonds.

Hal called to tell Cully he was coming, and Cully said he'd leave the gate open for him.

When he got to the site, he parked next to the sign that said
NO TRESPAS
SING: TAFT PROPERTIES
. He took a flashlight from the kit in his car, and used it to find the gate in the hurricane fence, which Cully had left slightly ajar. He wiggled the beam over the empty territory ahead. As he walked through the dirt and weeds, the beam caught on a gray rabbit, hopping through the long grass, and its frenetic aliveness startled him. He could just see the glare from the TV dribbling through the trailer's
window. As soon as he got there, he opened the screen door, knocked, and yelled, “Hey, it's your dad!”

As he walked in, Cully stood up, his plaid shirt untucked, his face slack, and his hair all mussed, though it was only eleven. There was a book open on the table, an empty glass, and a crumpled bag of potato chips. Hal didn't want to think about what Cully might have been doing, but he certainly didn't look ready to catch anyone at anything. Hal had expected to find him at attention, his posture straight, eyes alert.

“You alright, man?”

“Yeah!” Cully said, rubbing his eyes. “I guess it's just been quiet out here—you know, nothing happens. Once in a while I go outside and stare at the dark, listen for cars.”

“You've got a big responsibility here.”

“Yes, sir.”

He told Cully what Avery had said about someone stealing copper wire and pipes. “Yeah, Dad, he told me, but I don't know—if José didn't see anything, I don't see how I'm supposed to.”

“Look, the way he's paying you, I think you do whatever Avery says, right? You'd better keep your head up. Where do you sit? Over here by the window?” Hal got up and went to the cushioned bench next to the spot that looked out in the direction of the buildings. “You can see the warehouse pretty well, I guess.”

“Depends on the night.”

“But you'd see a car coming along, wouldn't you? Avery should light it all better. I'll ask him about that.” But even as Hal said it, he knew he probably wouldn't. It had to be just some kids that had stolen the wire—a one-time thing.

“And you go on rounds?”

“Two or three times a night.”

“Well, I'm going to sit up here with you. At least for tonight. Give us a chance to catch up at least, right?”

Hal looked at Cully, his muscled shoulders, that face, young and
plump, the mouth always angled, but he had the sense that his son's sleepy-eyed passiveness might actually be fear.

He'd been ignoring it all this time—that Cully just wanted to make amends—but Hal blamed himself that the thing with the girl had ever happened. He hadn't set a good enough example. He had never said to Cully directly, “Look, you need to honor a woman's body.” He had never said, “Protect the weak.” He had never talked to him about how he'd tamed his own lusts. It hadn't been easy.

Cully turned on the TV, and they watched the end of a basketball game. The frantic push to the net, and one black guy's long arm octopusing upward. Hal much preferred the slow, magisterial span of football—but he let himself go with the frantic back-and-forth, got fascinated by a freakishly tall white guy who barely had to move once he got under the basket.

“Dad,” Cully said.

“Yeah.”

“I'm really okay out here by myself. I can handle it.”

“Oh, I just wanted to talk, to tell you the truth.”

Cully sighed. He was so far away, with his legs up on the chair, denim fading at the muscles, his hair too long over the ears and all awry—Cully was drifting even farther now. What was in that cheap wood cabinet over the sink—not groceries? Tools, he guessed, flashlights. He rubbed the skin just under the top button of his shirt, an itch there. And just then, he made a bargain with God:
I'll make it right with Cully, and you can please swing the blessings my way—get Avery to set things in order.

“I want you to forget about that thing that happened, son.” He wanted to win his boy back, to feel his own benevolent authority again. “Get it out of your mind and stay as far away from that sort of thing as you can. Stay the hell away, you hear me?” He was surprised at the violence in his voice and saw his hand fisted on the table, the wedding ring glinting in the one light. “God gave us sin so we can know his mercy. And you know his mercy, boy, you got me?”

Cully gave him a salute.

S
HE'D BEEN NAPPING
when the knocking at the door woke her, and with her mouth tasting like salt water, her hair in her face, she propelled herself to the door. There was Atwater, his face flushed and birdlike, shiny with sweat.

He held out some papers. “I found out some things. You'll want to know.”

She felt almost too tired to stand and hold the door open, a lethargy in her limbs, and a phrase from Avery Taft's letter repeated itself:
Cease and desist
 . . . She invited Atwater inside anyway, and poured them each a glass of iced tea. They sat at the kitchen table.

“I think I told you I had a little money put aside for research. And here's what I've got: you know, Garbit gave Rue Banes a lot of the oil remains that she used for refining—that was true. They offered to help her with the technical side of disposing of the leftover chemicals after refining, what to do with all the stuff she couldn't use, and then they didn't. They just didn't. But they knew even then that the oil solvents were bad. I have that right here.” He tapped at the stack of papers.

She wanted to be drawn in, but it was too late. “Of course they did. How could they not? To tell the truth, I don't know how much energy I've got left for this anymore.”

“The new benzene levels are actually through the roof. Even worse than the ones you found. But that's not even what I came to tell you. I
found some new combinations of oil solvents. Let me give you an example. Have you ever mixed cleaning products? Like Ajax and bleach? It makes this whole other gas. Worse than either one. Well, same thing here. There's likely a lot of other chemical combinations down there, you know. The agencies don't like this because there's no science. There's no way to keep everything stable and just have one variable. Data doesn't work too well when everything is changing all at once.”

He gazed at her with a childish earnestness, as if he expected her to shout about this with him. He reminded her of the ones who believed in a Jesus about to come—he still believed a lot of people were bound to care. She sighed. “What do you mean by all this, really? You know it's old news to me.”

“I may have found a combination in Banes Field that, in high enough concentrations, will harm people pretty fast. It's not that high now, in the soil I tested—but who knows? There might be very high concentrations somewhere else around that property. One shovel in the wrong place.”

Okay, he had a point, but she resisted it, felt so tired, a headache coming on. She was impatient suddenly for him to leave.

“You know better than anyone that those chemicals may be buried, but that doesn't mean they don't migrate,” he said. “That doesn't mean they don't get pushed up when it rains.” He was right. She felt a hammering on the inside of her forehead.

“Well, you have to do something about it, Councilman.”

“I can't. That's why I'm telling you.”

“What good will that do? What the hell have I done that's made any difference? Aren't you the one who was elected to handle this sort of thing?”

He fiddled with his glass on the table, turned it with his thumb. “I've got an agreement with Garbit. Anything I say, I've got a multimillion-dollar corporation coming after me. I signed my life away.”

So that was why he worked at the library now: he'd done something
wrong at some point—they had something on him. And it was urgent, what needed to be done, even without these new findings, but she'd lost her ability to think about it anymore, to make any plans. “What do you want me to do?”

“Petition. Get the city to pay for the right kind of incinerator—one that will burn this stuff safely. They want to build houses, so get them to buy the incinerator. That's the only way to eradicate the compounds.”

She didn't fool herself. The blank, bland faces at the last city council meeting had not been moved. Instead, it seemed she herself might go blank. A hot sweat gathered under her arms. She was done. Anyway, Taft Properties would try to stop anything else she might do.

“We have to find someone else,” she said. “I've got a legal situation of my own, to tell you the truth.”

He pushed the papers toward her, with their crazy, dangerous numbers.

“But will you just look at this?”

“Avery Taft threatened to sue me.”

He sighed, forked his fingers into his hair.

“I'm retired,” she said. “I can't do it. Why don't you try the EPA? Get them to do their job.”

“I already reported it to them. Took a chance on that one, but I figured they'd protect me.”

“What did they say?”

“They said they would investigate.”

“So why can't they?”

“Avery Taft is already building. They've approved the land for use. They don't want to admit they made a mistake.” Atwater's shoulders hunched around his skinny frame. “I never wanted to get into any funny business. I wanted just a clean straight shot. That's how I live. You know, this isn't for me.” He sat back in the chair, and the wood creaked. “Will you think about it at least?”

“I'm always thinking about it. It doesn't help.”

S
HE WENT TO THE REFRIGERATOR
for a lemon, and she noticed the calendar. The number seven in the square seemed to stand up and bend as it foundered in her vision, darker than the other numbers, set against emptier white space, sacred and obscene. She went to the wall and flipped up the calendar page to March, covering the photograph of a dew-dropped yellow rose. She looked at the square day with the seven there, a Friday this year. It was always hardest as the day of the anniversary marched closer, and she dreaded how she'd have to mark it, usually lying on the couch with a bottle—staring at the walls or at the TV until the day was obliterated. Last year she'd killed her laptop when she spilled whiskey all over the keyboard and woke up to acrid smoke leaking thinly from the hidden battery.

She'd just finished eating a sandwich by the window, watching between the curtains, the small gray birds hopping in the grass like leaden rocks with eyes and legs and wings, and above them, the white blossoms already beginning to explode from the branches on the tree, and then Jack called. He hardly ever called when it was daylight.

“Listen.”

“I'm listening.”

“I got cancer,” he said, “of the lung.”

The cold of the air conditioner pressed against her cheek. “How do you know?”

“Went to the doctor. Cindy cried her ass off when he said it, so I'm pretty sure he meant it. He wasn't just running off at the mouth.”

“You should get another opinion.”

“I did. He's it.”

A sound like ten old metal fans came on in the silence between them. “Well, I can't have you dying on me,” she said.

“I might not be able to help it.” Beside her, the curtains seemed to have
turned from fabric into wood. She thought of the snakes of chemical sludge, how she'd first seen them, had known even then that they could crawl inside her life and coil up there. “Listen, I want to say some things to you,” he said.

She couldn't keep talking. “Not now, okay?” The ceiling seemed to be steadily lowering itself. An opaqueness in the windows. “Later? You need to let yourself get better first.” She had to get off the phone.

He sighed. “Alright then.”

She hung up. His “alright” echoed, small, in her ear.

She stood up at the window, looking at bark and green, and she paced through the living room to the front door, opened it, wanted to go somewhere. There was the dogwood tree, the white flowers shivering in the breeze. There wasn't anyplace to go. There wasn't anyplace in the world she could go.

A half an hour later, she called him back. “Okay, tell me what he said.”

He had a tumor in the right lung. Chemotherapy for eight weeks, followed by radiation. Three rounds.

“You'll get through it,” she said. “Is Cindy being good to you?”

“She baked me a pie.” The scratch and lilt of his voice. If she could see his face, see that it still had color.

“You need me to come up there and do something? Will you let me know?”

She looked at the dirty pot on the stove and felt a crick in her throat. The worn tile floor beneath her had been his family's, walked on by his father and mother and him for decades.

“Sure will. Doctor sat down and told me all these stories today—people recovering at wild odds, people going on to run marathons. That'll be me, running to the finish line in little tight shorts.” He chuckled.

“Well, how do you feel today?”

“I feel good really. I ate brisket and then I drank a beer and walked about a mile. It felt good.”

“You do know how to enjoy yourself. That can't hurt.”

He might still recover. They might still talk like this.

“This councilman just came to me with more terrifying stuff about Banes Field.”

“You've got to quit that.”

“I want to quit, I do. I'm tired. It's just, if something else happens, how can I not be responsible?”

“Lee, we couldn't have known. No one knew what in the hell might happen.”

“Except Rue Banes.”

“Not even her. How could she have? And then still gone on with it? Hiring all those teenagers?”

One of them, a grown man now, prophesied the Armageddon in the Safeway parking lot. Of the others she knew about (there had been several), one was dead from a car accident, and there was Stewart, who pumped gas, his face eager and worn. “But you couldn't have known and all the pan-banging you've done doesn't change that. I mean—”

“Next month is the day again,” she said.

“Goddamnit. I saw that. Look,” he said. “Cindy's calling me. I'll call back soon.”

She went outside in the backyard and stood among the trees, so much taller now than they'd been when they first arrived at that old house, and made a new room for their sick daughter. But the yard had not changed. She wouldn't let it, with its pines and the large, pink stone in the middle, the metal bench painted gray. It had always calmed her to look out at the bird feeder dangling, the burnished texture of bark, the sameness. But now it agitated her.

She would help him as best she could. She'd done this before. Jack might be tired and nauseous, but there were remedies for it, little tricks she'd
known about when she'd gone to the treatments with Jess. When she was looking for the pamphlets on managing chemo, she lost her eyeglasses.

She went to the phone station, paperback books shelved above, a notepad stuck to the wall below, phone books pillared neatly on the desk. No files. They weren't in the file cabinet either, and in the dimness, her vision seemed foggier than ever. She checked the table under the coat rack in the entryway. Back in the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator to get the pitcher of cold water and in the widening fan of white light, something fell to her feet. She bent to pick up the case—her glasses. Then, in the jumbled drawer beneath the kitchen counter, she finally found the documents from the Samuels research that she'd been meaning to file away, along with the cancer file, and the
Getting Through Chemotherapy
pamphlet. She checked to see if she could find the last email from the Texas Green League guy, to tell him he could keep her on the Listserve, but she was essentially done, and she opened something from an address she at first thought she recognized: [email protected]:

THE MAN CHRIST JESUS ARRIVES IN HARTLING, TEXAS IN MARCH. THE WORLD IS TALKING ABOUT THE ARRIVAL OF THE MAN CHRIST JESUS ON MARCH 7; COME AND MEET THE MAN MAKING NEWS HEADLINES IN EACH COUNTRY HE VISITS AND LISTEN TO HIS MESSAGE WHICH CONFIRMS HIM AS THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST. FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DR. DIEGO EMMANUEL DE JESUS THE INCARNATION OF GOD IN MAN, AND SEE WHY HIS FOLLOWERS ALREADY KNOW IT IS THE YEAR OF THE SECOND COMING.

Below this, there was a fluorescent painting of Jesus in a white robe, cut to show bronzed muscles. Where was Hartling, Texas, anyway? This handsome, pissed-off Jesus looked strong and nimble, and he was coming on the right day, the seventh. If she wasn't going to cause trouble anymore, maybe he would.