Friendswood (3 page)

There was a voice she heard in her head, sometimes with Jack's intonations, sometimes with Jess's. “Time to leave.” She wanted to get a sample near a bald spot in the middle of the gray weeds. A wasp droned close to her, and she flung her hand to hit it away, but it got close to her face, buzzed against her cheek, then looped and stitched back. Wincing, she flicked her hand again and stumbled. The wasp flew off.

Then she saw the thing about twenty yards away, as big as the bed of a pickup truck. The gray corner angled up from the mud beneath a sick-looking sapling. Was it some lost bit of cement? She went closer, her
boots smacking in the muck as the dull shape clarified itself. One flat side of it had wrestled up into the air, the other side still sunk into the ground. A giant, filthy, gray vinyl box. The top of it was charred with a bright pink and brown stain, and a crack jiggered its way down the middle, where a copper liquid leaked out in a thin, jagged stream. Her heart punched in her chest. Back in January, Professor Samuels had said this could happen, though it had seemed so unlikely then. “You get enough rain, it shifts the water table—it can pop a container right up.”

And there it was. For years, the container had been safe down there, but now the land had excreted it, the way coffins sometimes came back up in a flood. Her head filled with pressure. In the distance, the pine trees seemed to lean forward. She smelled something acidic and bitter, benzene fumes or worse, and covered her nose and mouth with one hand as she took the camera from her bag with the other. The light was already going, but she'd get the picture somehow. She pressed the button to open the lens.

This was the thing she'd been waiting for, but didn't know how to name, the thing that would redeem her. Over the woods, the sun, a bright orange candy set on fire, dangled. She snapped the photographs. The dog barked again. She took twenty-two pictures of the upturned container. Then she ran.

H
AL DID BETTER
with the husbands on closing sales—he tried to catch the eye of Mr. Coller, who kept looking away. “I don't know,” said his wiry wife, as they rounded the corner to the kitchen, new, pristine cabinets gleaming like wet Wite-Out over the dingy ones that had been there before. “I'm just not feeling enough space on this side of the house, enough air.” She fluttered her hand toward the living room off the kitchen, which Hal admitted was smaller than most, but recently tiled and sunny, a room that carried cleanness and possibility like a new prayer.

That was when Hal officially gave up.

Finally, he'd been able to start showing houses again after the storm, but only those on this side of town, where there hadn't been flooding. For the moment, there were goddamn few houses to list, and now he also had to battle Mrs. Coller's vague feng shui
ideas. He could never tell if that nonsense would work for a sale or against it. Another woman had remarked on this very house that the energy was just right, that the doors opened exactly where they were supposed to open, the windows at exactly the right angles to the sun. He smiled at the husband when the wife started talking that nonsense, telegraphed through his shrug,
You don't get it either?

He was pretty sure Mrs. Coller didn't really want to buy but had some ulterior motive with her husband, some manipulation he wasn't privy to. Women did that sometimes, wanting to see a lot of houses on the outer
reaches of their price range. But it was a strange time to try something like that, just after a hurricane.

As they left the living room and walked through the bright entryway, a skylight shining down, Hal tried to remain optimistic because that was how you made sales.

Mr. Coller chuckled at his wife's objections. “But that sure is a nice pool!”

Hal wanted to shake him.
Don't you see what she's doing? I'm not a marriage counselor, buddy
.

Still, Mrs. Coller had the last word. “I'd like to see that one on Lottie Lane.”

At first, he'd done pretty well, sold a big house out on Windsong to an executive at a drug firm, and another one just down the street to a surgeon. But now some people just recklessly relied on the Internet rather than, God forbid, pay a live person, and so his luck had turned. He no longer felt like the son who'd got the blessing and more like the one who'd been cast out. He knew if he was to keep making a living at this, then he had to find another strategy, an exclusive, or sell commercial properties, not residential ones.

“Okay, then.” Hal led them out the front door. “Let's go take a look.”

He believed he needed to pray more. He needed to get rid of bad moods and doubts, especially when he was out on calls. That was the devil trying to get him. And he'd said good riddance to the devil last year when he stopped drinking cold. So, as he opened the door of his SUV for Mrs. Coller, he said a quick prayer to get his head back in the game. Mr. Coller got in the backseat, and they drove off.

“Nice car,” said Mr. Coller.

“It does me alright,” said Hal. He'd bought it at an auction last year, a great deal, though he could barely afford it. In real estate, your vehicle was the office—you needed a good one. They passed Avery Taft's new subdivision off Blissfield Drive, but he didn't even point to it because it was out of their price range and most of the houses weren't finished yet.
They were building at least two more subdivisions too, now that the market was whizzing. One of them, he'd heard, would be out near the old Rosemont site, that blight on the landscape. Taft Properties was his best hope—he wanted an exclusive listing for one entire inventory—and he might have a chance at it too, because Avery and he used to play football together back in school.

“Now this here house,” said Mr. Coller. “It's close to the flood zone, isn't it?”

“It's on the higher ground,” said Hal. “Hurricanes come with the territory, right? But that last one was just a fluke and a monster and it caught some people. You won't find anything higher in League City or Pearland, I tell you that.”

“Oh, we're not looking to move outside city limits,” said Mrs. Coller, staring out the window with a pursed smile. Darlene said that only women really lived in houses, and men just ate and slept in them.

Hal glanced in his rearview mirror at Mr. Coller, his head turned to the side, a hand rubbing at his chin. He looked like a guy who'd just remembered he'd forgotten to shave or take out the trash, and Hal got the feeling the guy's whole life was full of jagged moments like that—one mistake after another rising up to laugh at him. Just watching him, Hal knew he was liable not to interest them in the next listing either.

Later, he went to Joe's Barbeque, sat eating a snack at the small rickety table, but the meat tasted metallic and it had a strange hard texture. He could only eat a few bites.

There were photos on the walls of the varsity football teams since 1940. As he looked into the stony faces of the players from 1941, a pride pressed up in his chest: honorable tradition. Pushing through those brick walls. His hand moved into a fist, the muscles in his legs tightening. And there was 1980, he and Avery in the front row. They'd shared a flinty nostalgia for Coach Rowan, who'd made them run so far they vomited; who made them play fully suited up in 110 degrees; who had a habit of saying, “Go down there and hit those monsters hard.” Coach liked to use a
pointer decorated with Indian feathers when he narrated plays in the field house, and he drank large, powdered protein drinks the color of celery. Hal had been a good player, and missed his lighter, firmer body, those cut muscles and the litheness that came from weights and drills that made him feel like an alley cat. So he made cracks about getting fat, though he wasn't really, just middle-aged soft. But he'd never been as good a player as his son was.

Hal felt closest to his son when he sat in the stands, watching a game. Cully, beneath the gladiator shoulder pads and blue-and-white helmet, could swivel his hips and cut a corner with a grace Hal had never had. He felt this was somehow his son's true self, the way he caught the ball to his heart and ran past the thicket of other players, the green space widening behind him, the way he leaped over the goal line, the applause a huge cosmic radio, just about to announce something big. And here it was, another season, and Cully had already been catching miracle passes during two-a-days.

Driving to his next appointment, late because of construction on 243, he heard a clattering song on the car stereo that made him tighten his fingers around the steering wheel. It was a song that reminded him of last year and the drives on which he'd caught himself singing along to the line about running away. Hal thought of that mobile home in League City he'd gone to each week last winter—painted purple inside, the threadbare couch, the chair sprouting stuffing. The affair only lasted seven weeks, but it had nearly killed him. Dawn had long, too-thin legs, and when he pulled away from kissing her, she had a wry tightness in her mouth that reminded him of what he was doing. Now that he really needed a clean slate, the memories kept crudding it up: Dawn's tan, skinny legs wrapped around his waist, and the tiny shoes she wore, and the way he'd come home and feel sad at the sight of Darlene, her face in a nimbus of blue TV light, her grin set like a tiger's. He had to stop himself, because too much thinking along these lines took him to places that deviled him. To pray was more rational—it put things in their places; it put God back in charge.
“Stop me from worrying,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he felt a wave of warmth for Darlene again, the feeling he had looking at her in her baggy shirt and jeans, the pretty angles of her eyes. And he saw Cully sitting next to her at the dinner table, their identical noses and triangular chins.

Darlene said if only he could learn how to relax, they would be happier together. “I don't mind picking up after you or the snoring,” she said. “Just the bad moods.”

“And the drinking.”

“Well, yes, but that's all done with, right?”

Sometimes after work she rubbed at the knots in his shoulders, and whenever she did that, he felt held by her in this life, purposeful and safe, the way he'd felt years and years ago in the old house in the country, when his dad still had some kindness in him and before his mother started looking so scared.

Hal forced a smile and walked out to the front of the drive to meet the couple who wanted to see a Tudor monstrosity, all gray turrets and fake-old brick, everything fake English, with a strange topiary of a misshapen horse out back and a bright pink shed, where the owner used to keep rabbits. The husband wanted to see the garage first, of course (they almost always did). It was potentially a weakness in this case, because it was just a two-car, and there was a partition down the front wall (fake English brick with vines) so that if they owned a truck, it wouldn't fit inside.

“What kind of car do you have?” Hal asked casually.

“A BMW is our other one—this is a little small for storage, but not bad,” said the husband, jutting out his lower lip.

Not bad
. The thick whine in his voice irked Hal, but he tried to get past it. He found that if a client annoyed him he almost never made the sale—people just liked to feel liked.

They went to the front door, and the wife was cooing about the beautiful ivy, and Hal was praying that the key would work because he didn't think he could keep his temper if it didn't, and he was distracted by the
wife's large breasts snug in the rainbow that arched over her sweater. He needed to get a sale. He needed to be clean in the mind, to turn this bad luck around.

The key fit in the lock, perfect. He opened the door, saw pricked-up brown ears and bared teeth. Shit. The skinny flank scraped past him, sharp, buzzed fur, and the dog ran into the street. The wife screamed, and Hal ran after the mutt. He chased it past mailboxes, past birdbaths, into a wet grassy yard, the stubbed tail bounding ahead, the little pink asshole teasing him.

The dog ran around the curve in the street, and Hal ran as fast as he could now, his chest heaving, dress shoes slipping and clacking on the pavement, sweat gathering in his armpits, the skirt of his suit jacket flying.

He was out of breath, in terrible shape, his face hot with effort and rage. He raced around the corner and the dog was gone. It would ruin the sale and he'd lose the listing too, plus he'd feel guilty as hell. Why didn't the seller warn you when they had a pet? Common sense. There was a goddamn drought of common sense around there. Too many people just wanted to fail.

He ran around back into a yard where a rusting swing set straddled a sandbox, then back around to the street dappled with tree shade, where a yellow car sped by. His eyes stung, and he felt the wind crushed out of him. Then he saw the dog's stubbed tail sticking out from behind a big oak tree. Hal snuck up behind it, grabbed the mutt's mangy flank just in time to have the dog pee on the leg of his pants.

W
HEN HE GOT BACK
to the office, he went straight to the bathroom, splashed water on a thin brown paper towel, and swiped at the stain near the hem of his trousers, but it still smelled of urine, maybe even worse than before. Coming out of the bathroom, he walked past the cubicles
and tried not to look at the other agent, Stan, who seemed intent on finishing up more paperwork. Hal sat down and just breathed for two minutes. He felt the ache in his heart for whiskey, and said a tired prayer.
Help.
He checked his voice mail, and there was a message from Darlene to pick up a carton of eggs at the store; a message from the broker about someone's credit standing; and, then, like an answer to his plea, there was one from Taft Properties: “Hal, old buddy. Any chance you can come by the office on Wednesday?”

The fluorescent overhead lights seemed to stutter and blink, and Stan looked up at him from across their desks, as if he'd heard the message too. Stan, with his round, pie face and grating laugh, would never amount to much as a salesman.