Friendswood (32 page)

She pulled over on the gravel shoulder, parked, put a scarf over her hair, tied it in the back, and put on her white plastic sunglasses, though it was cloudy. She'd read that you could get almost anything here—that the guy who owned the place had a delusion that he was some kind of soldier. She'd entered a movie and become the character she wanted to follow.

A small explosive, maybe, a baby one. She knew men who'd used some equivalent of dynamite to clear out an old shed or a patch of trees.

The stand was a crude wooden overhang with slanted tables full of
neatly stacked tubes and boxes. A young guy with a buzz cut in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off stood behind the goods next to a metal box.

“Are you Allen?” she asked.

He pointed with his thumb at the shed nearby. “He's over in there.”

She'd walked over the pink gravel and into the film, where she'd be the actress, speak lines that had come to her as if she'd heard them before in a dream.

When she got to the shed in the back, there was a deep groove down the middle of the door. It looked like someone had tried to break through it with a metal pole, but hadn't quite. After she knocked, she heard him say, “Just a sec,” but it took a few minutes for him to open the door.

“Are you Allen?” she said. “Someone from the Ammo Chat sent me.”

“Ammo Chat?” he said, as if he'd never heard the name.

“Yeah. I've got a proposition.”

He wore a yellow bandana on his head, a dingy white T-shirt. “Come on in.” She was surprised at his friendliness. When he smiled at her, she saw that his top two teeth pointed toward each other in a V.

“I heard I could get more here than just what you got out on the for-sale tables.”

“Someone on Ammo Chat said that?”

“Yeah.”

“You might do better at the gun and ammo place down the road. You got ID and everything, right?”

She looked down at her scuffed-up boots. He was trying to see how much money he could get from her. “Not really.” There was a handmade contraption for holding a beer that hung from the ceiling, a reclining chair attached by wires to some kind of mechanical instrument in a gray box.

“Well, then, that is a problem.” He turned to walk toward a table where there was a huge aquarium. It was filled with large, fluorescent pink rocks
and strewn with dirty pieces of chicken or pork, and she could just see the sharp end of a reptilian tail in the corner, where the thing had burrowed itself.

“I need to blow up a shed in the back. We're making room for a pool. Can you help me out with that?”

He appeared to be about her age, with gray, wiry hair to his shoulders and a fat, boyish face. “Well, normally, you'd need a permit for that. There are folks you can hire, you know . . . who know what they're doing.”

“I've looked into that,” she said. “But it's so expensive. Isn't there something else we could do? I kind of wanted to do it myself, surprise my husband, to tell you the truth. He says he won't build a pool because it'll be so costly just getting rid of the shed. I'd like to show him, you know? Just have him come home, and it be gone.” Against a corner wall, a pile of neatly folded dirty rags, and on another table, vials of bright blue liquid aligned next to a large plastic bucket.

“These aren't toys. You could hurt yourself.”

“Really, are they any worse than those cherry ultrabombs y'all sell?”

“Maybe you could send your husband over, and I could show him.”

On her way to the shed, she'd glimpsed a battered-looking ATM over next to the stand. “I've got five hundred,” she said. The reptilian tail curled up.

Allen sighed and shook his head. “You sure you want to do this?” He scratched at his chest, and she could see the mat of hair beneath his thin T-shirt, a big purple scar there like a misshapen watch.

“How much will that ATM machine let me take out?” She knew it was weak not to bargain, but she didn't care.

He shrugged. “I don't have anything for you.” She went out of the shed to the machine. She had to submit five different requests in order to get three hundred more dollars. She was surprised she could get that much.

When she came back and held out the money, he was friendlier. “What's your name?” he said, tilting his head.

“Debbie.”

“Will you take off your glasses? I want to see your eyes, you got such a pretty smile.”

She wiggled her glasses up and down as she backed away from him.

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

“Give me half of that money, and I'll tell you how. But you got to get your husband to help. Go look up how to do it on the Internet. Try AmmoArm dot com. The plastic one. You either have it all at home or you can get it. Follow the directions to the letter. The temperatures have to be exact.”

She handed him the bills. “You really won't sell me one?”

“Really. I don't have anything, and if I did, you know these days, that could get me in a lot of trouble. I mean, you're not an Arab or anything, and I don't think you're a crackpot, but still. I've got to protect my business.”

He wouldn't have cared about his business if she'd been a man. “Alright then?” He led her out back, behind a ten-foot-tall cement barricade that went along the highway. It was loud because of the traffic, and he had to shout at her, even though he stood just a few feet away. “Awesome! Pack your fuse at six yards. I can sell you that part.” He handed her a tennis ball–sized spool of thick cord. “You should smile more. You've got a nice one.”

He rubbed at the side of his neck, and she noticed grease or dirt in the wrinkles there. “Just plan it out,” he said. “And get ready to run.”

A
LL DAY AT SCHOOL,
his elbow bandaged, he'd been rehearsing what he'd say to them, even writing down an occasional word on one of his notebooks:
PILLS, LOUD MUSIC, UPSTAIRS
. After school, as soon as the bell rang, before he could change his mind, he got into his truck and drove to the station. He parked in the back, afraid his mother or one of her friends might see his truck there and worry.

The entrance area was messy and busy, a lady at a desk on the phone, policemen walking in and out, signing papers, ignoring him standing there. Finally, the lady at the desk asked him what he wanted. “I want to report something,” he said.

She clicked her tongue. “You're going to have to give me more than that, son.”

“Okay. I know about a crime against a girl.” He couldn't say the word, especially not to this lady, with her broad nose and her dull green eyes. “Can I please talk to an officer?”

She softened slightly, raked her fingers into her long black hair, and picked up the phone to talk to someone named Rob. Dex pushed his hands deep into his jeans pockets, felt for the change and folded bills in there. She hung up the phone. “Okay, let me take you back.”

She led him into a large, loud room, where a radio blared and men shouted over it. Short partitions separated the desks. At the back, there was another door, and this was where she was taking him. The placard
outside it said
ROB
GRACIA
. She opened the door for him and said, “There you go.”

The man sitting there motioned him inside. He had brown skin, a blocky frame, his hair so neat it looked almost fake. “What can I do for you? You said you witnessed a crime? What kind of crime?” His voice was kinder than Dex imagined it would be.

Dex doubted that he himself had used the proper words. He thought of Willa's face, felt Bishop's cheek against his knuckles. His smirk pasted there right up until the last minute.

“So a girl I know was at a party. This guy put a pill in her drink.” A bulletin board behind Mr. Gracia was covered with xeroxed notices, handwritten notes, and two grim mug shots of a man and a woman. Dex's eye fell to a note that said “Call Dave” in red marker.

“Where was this party?” He pulled out a pen and legal pad.

“Lawbournes, Seventy-one Calling Creek.”

“Who was this guy with the pills?”

“Bishop Geitner.”

Mr. Gracia nodded, but his face didn't show any emotion, and this made Dex more nervous. He'd expected somehow to be encouraged, to be guided along in his narration, and he saw how that was all wrong. Mr. Gracia seemed not to care whether he told him the whole story or not.

“How do you know this?”

“I was there. There were a lot of guys there, and everyone at the school knows about it, pretty much, but the girl didn't report it. Willa Lambert.” He wanted to see more reaction in the guy's face, for God's sake, but he seemed to be willing it to stay still. He seemed more like a paper pusher than someone who would carry a gun.

“How do you know her?”

“She's my friend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

There was a snapshot of lightning pinned to the bulletin board, and a
yellow ribbon that said
THIRD
. Dex felt more and more wrong in that space the more he talked, but something pushed him along, some force of motion that had been gathering, the way speed gathered in the pedals of his bike.

“How many people were there?”

“I don't know. Fifteen?”

He would have thought Mr. Gracia might be shocked by this, but his face was passive, and he scratched his nose. “And where were the parents?”

“I don't know.”

“Were you drinking?”

“I had half a beer.” Mr. Gracia raised an eyebrow, but didn't look up from his pad.

“What about the others?”

“Bourbon, beer, Red Bull.”

Dex said he wished he'd come earlier, but he hadn't known what to do. As much as he disliked Cully, it might not have been his fault—Willa had probably liked him, and it was Bishop who put the pill in her drink. Maybe Cully hadn't known? But Bishop, Trace, and Brad—they'd planned it.

He finished saying what he knew, and the awfulness of it still physically pained him, burned his stomach.

“Okay, now, my question for you, Dex, is why hasn't the girl come forward?”

“She's ashamed.”

“Her parents know?”

“I think so.”

Mr. Gracia nodded. “So, there's not much that we can do on our end if the girl doesn't report it herself.”

“She doesn't remember it.”

Mr. Gracia sighed and shook his head. “What was she doing over there?”

“She didn't know. She didn't know what they were . . .” He thought of his mother's chubby, disappointed face, and Layla, with her blue pom-poms. He thought of Diana, that woman he'd danced with the other night, who'd wept on his shirt and wouldn't say why. Willa, he realized, would probably never be his girlfriend.

“Okay, then,” Dex said, wanting to be done, afraid to say more.

“You kids.” Mr. Gracia pinched the end of his nose, pulled at it, then shook his head. “You don't even know what you're doing half the time, do you?”

A man opened the door. He was shaking his index finger at Mr. Gracia, and said loudly, “I have one word for you: Dannon!”

Mr. Gracia looked up and grinned, held up his open hand. “Told you so, brother!” It was some kind of victory. After the man closed the door again, Mr. Gracia's smile faded. “Alright then. Dex, are we finished here?”

A
VERY
T
AFT'S OFFICE
was hot and airless, and through the window, the sky looked pewter, solid as a plate. “Well, that's funny,” Avery said, “because I heard again from the lady at the EPA—Atwater and your neighbor are at it again apparently, sending over new soil readings.”

Hal's nose and forehead started to ache. “Well, I sure am surprised to hear that. I must have sat with Lee for an hour in her living room.”

“I'm going to see what more my lawyer can do now, I guess.”

Hal couldn't let it go. His heart quivered like a goddamn bird's, singing
prosperity, prosperity.
“I was glad to be of help with the sale. I sure would like a chance to work with you again.”

“There's not much I can give right now, except to my lawyer. At this point.” There was an unfamiliar grit of aggression in his voice. “I never promised you a thing,” Avery said. “Did I?”

“No, you sure didn't. I grant you that.” The room went dark for a second, then flashed back to the hard, white lights.

On the drive home, Hal felt fat and tired, passing a slow-moving metallic green car driven by a gnome in a green hat, and he sped up to meet the bridge ahead, where the trees hung over the creek. Goddamn Avery Taft. Hal was mostly annoyed that he hadn't known from the beginning that he wouldn't get the exclusive, pissed that he hadn't got right enough with God to deserve it, pissed that Taft had beat him yet again, though Taft had been puny and hapless on the football field, and
Hal had been the good one, the really good one, and none of that mattered anymore, though it should have, because what had made him good he still had inside of him. He knew it. Darlene knew it. God knew it. But Avery Taft didn't, that bastard, and he'd cut him off.

Now Cully seemed to feel he had something to prove by going to that trailer every Saturday night. Well, alright. But he was still his father.

He passed the old fig plant, the construction crowding up the highway over near Bayside, and he saw a picture of a girl on a vodka billboard that looked like her, so he couldn't stop thinking of Justine, the twenty-five-year-old administrative assistant they'd had at the office a couple of years before. She hadn't been exactly beautiful, but there was an assuredness in the way she moved, a grace in her fingers when she wrote something down or handed him a check, that brought to mind visions of her touching him. There was something around her mouth too, that resembled Darlene, but Darlene in a younger, thinner state, a reality apart from her kitchen gear and nail polish smells. He had a hard time not blushing when he was around Justine because, in his mind, he'd done all kinds of things to her, and she to him, daydreams he had to hide, but he felt them glowing through his face when he looked at her, as if his skin had turned to a TV screen showing it all to her as porn.

He tried to concentrate on his hatred and resentment of Avery, but all he could think about was Justine. Where was she now? Did she still want his advice on selling property? She had gone off to Plano to work for one of her father's friends, as he recalled. He thought he had her cell phone number somewhere. It seemed that her smooth skin could calm him, make him feel the possibility again. He could imagine a whole new life with her if he closed one eye.

He said a prayer.
I've got the devil in me. Help me here, Lord. Where has your prosperity gone? Why am I so misbegotten?
Why have you not held up your end of the bargain?
His son out for the season, his wife annoying him, his business in shambles. He looked up through the windshield at the clouds, clotted and dull, listless up there near heaven.

Then there was Dawn splashing into his mind soon after, naked in a blue pool. Recently he'd been so ashamed to think of her, so sorry for Darlene, but now, as he drove in his car with the coffee stain on the seat, the crack in the plastic dashboard, as the trees streaked past, he felt as if he'd deserved that affair, every minute of his hands on her skin, every time she let him come inside of her. And hadn't he returned to Darlene, loving her even more?

When he was driving down near the boat sheds, he called Darlene on his cell. “There's a possum tearing up the backyard,” she yelled. “You need to come take care of it.”

“Sweetheart.”

There was no getting away from her—she was in one of her hopping rages, when her voice went flat and shrill like a tiny metal train track. “You get on home. There's glass and plastic all over the place, and I hate those things—he bared his teeth, Hal. He's liable to bite me.”

He started driving home to her on 2351, but the car seemed to take over without him, as if it were a live thing, a mechanical horse with its own will and purpose, and it took the exit headed to Pasadena. If he was going to drink again, he was going to do it spectacularly.

He ended up at the Ranch House Bar, a place he'd frequented in years past. It was an old-fashioned cowpoke place with a neon sign the shape of a lasso, a gold thread of lights circling the rope around the “Ranch House” letters, and plate glass windows behind which the dark bar hid a jukebox with lights shaped like strawberries. When he walked in, he recognized the bartender, whose name was Sid, though his sideburns were long now, and his gray hair had an old-fashioned curled lock in the front.

“Hey, there.” Sid's small blue eyes reflected nothing.

“Remember me?”

“I can't say I do, but welcome back.” Behind him, the rows of bottles like jewels with labels.

“Give me a bourbon.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, swinging around to grab a bottle.

To Hal's left was an enormous woman with black hairs on her chin, and to his right a dapper young man in a purple snap shirt with sunburned cheeks. He was talking to a skinny old guy with a chin that spooned under his face. “I can't believe you don't remember me, Sid,” said Hal, trying to get a smile out of him.

“Sorry, y'all come in here pretty frequently, it seems like.”

The fat lady snorted into her drink.

“I guess so. I guess so,” said Hal, pulling the glass toward him. The flashing lights and darkness were either a kind of paradise or a kind of oblivion. He still had time to be afraid of it, to push away his drink and walk out of there. Sure, God wants the best for us, Pastor Sparks was always saying, but he gave us free will. We are not automatons. He tried to think of a prayer, but his mind went blank and fuzzy—just like the television when cable went out.

The first sip tasted hard and metallic and fortifying in a way even as it hurt his throat. “Well, I did that,” he called out to Sid. “I might as well keep going.”

George Jones crooned on the jukebox. An older couple wearing matching polyester Western suits was dancing the two-step in front of it.

Sid plunged glasses into the sink behind the bar, his forearms disappearing, and the fat lady said, “One more, Bubba.”

“You see,” said the young guy beside him. “She always understood me. That was what was so great about her. I never had to explain.”

The boy's candor struck him like a hammer, and he thought of Dawn. That was why he'd loved her. That was why she'd been so hard to give up. She'd understood him in a way Darlene never had.

“She would just look at me, and she knew when I needed her, knew when to take off her clothes.” His lips were slack and wet, but the light in his eyes spilled into Hal. He finished his drink and took out his cell phone and went out to the little cement walkway to call her. Maybe she'd even talk him out of having another whiskey. Because she always understood
what he was going through. She'd know what to say to get him back. He stood on the cement with his legs a little apart to steady himself. Traffic whizzed by on the road, a quick cacophony of rap music out an open window as he listened to the phone ringing.

“Hello?” Her sweet, low-pitched voice.

“It's me.”

He heard something in the background, a small motor. “What do you want?”

“I just want to talk, baby.”

“Okay, talk.”

“This real bad thing happened with Cully.” He told her everything, the behemoths crushing his son out on the field, the Indian-given exclusive at Taft Properties, the cigarettes out by the lawn hose, and even Cully's confession about the girl and how he'd counseled Cully not to tell anyone.

“Are you a monster? Hal, I don't talk to you for a year and a half, and you're calling me to tell me this? My God, do you hear yourself? Did you ever, ever think about that little girl?” Cars sped past, the wind and exhaust of them in his face.

“She's hardly little.” He went back to how he pictured her, brassiere straps sliding out from her tank top, that black and blue stuff all over her eyes as if she'd been prettily hit—and wondered idly why he'd never bothered to look up her face in the church directory.

“She's a person, Hal, a girl person. That must be hard for you to imagine.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Goddamn you.”

Her cursing stung him. She had never cursed at him before. “I called you, a ‘girl person,' because I thought you would understand what I'm going through here. I'm at a bar. A bar on this woeful highway.” A semi truck hurtled in his direction, horn blaring, but he was far away, well on
the road's shoulder, gum wrappers and an old condom mixed in with the gravel around his feet.

She hung up.

He looked at the pale sky, the smell of car exhaust everywhere, the rectangular grays of the Houston skyline in the distance. He'd reached the end, and God wasn't there.