Friendswood (35 page)

C
ULLY LAY
in the curtained bed in the tiny back room of the trailer, on top of a worn musty blanket, knees drawn up, phone pressed to his ear. “I wish I could go, but I have this shit job,” he told Brad, who wanted him to go to some dive bar with him in Alvin where they didn't card.

“Can't you blow it off? What are you, the security guard? It's not like anything's going to happen if you leave.”

José had warned him off guys like Brad, who tried to use meanness as a masquerade for manliness. José had called earlier from his rented U-Haul truck to say good-bye to him, his terrible hacking cough like a motor trying to start in his throat. “Now, you stay away from the crazies,” he said. He was on his way to a job in El Paso.

“Alright, then, Cully son, I'll get Lawbourne to go with me. You have fun out there with your dirt.” Brad hung up.

He was trying to escape without their noticing, but Cully didn't want to hang out with Brad and Bishop anymore. In the trailer, he could drink beer all night if he wanted to. He could watch TV and eat potato chips and get paid for it. He'd got bored by Brad's bullying; and the time he'd taken one of the pills Bishop offered, he'd felt like his head had lifted off his body, spinning like a pumpkin, somewhere apart from him. It wasn't anything personal really. But with them, there would be more accidental fuckups like the one with Willa Lambert, which still clawed at him, the way her face looked when she'd passed out in that bed. He still had no
idea what exactly Bishop put in her drink. And there was no one to tell that to.

Cully went to the miniature kitchen, which he got a kick out of—the tiny stove, a refrigerator the size of a doghouse. He made himself a turkey sandwich on whole wheat and put on his music. It was a CD he'd found at a garage sale, and he'd never heard of the band, but he'd liked the cover art, a gun growing out of a skull.
“My prophecy is spelled in bones, /
The world breaks apart, and blades make it whole.”

His dad wanted him to pray more, but fuck that, he didn't get from prayer whatever his dad did. He wished he did. He wished there were a remedy for the damp pain he got in the pit of his stomach ever since that day with Willa. He'd been so drunk he'd blacked out, and his consciousness had only flickered on again when he was already fucking Willa, who was asleep, and he'd pulled out right away, his dick wilting in the open air. He'd had sex with two other girls previously, but they'd been willing, very willing. He hadn't needed to trick Willa and hadn't intended to; he hadn't even been quite sure how he'd got there (only later Bishop told him how, powered by whiskey, he'd lured her upstairs to watch TV, how he had his hands all over her on the way up the stairs, but Cully didn't remember any of it, and as Bishop retold the story, it felt eerily as if he had been a puppet master, moving people along for his entertainment).

He'd thought at first that if he could only work hard enough, he'd start playing football the way he used to. If he pushed it, ran enough miles, maybe carried the ball everywhere, he'd stop feeling bad. But the blackness had infected his game. And now he didn't give a shit about football.

Somehow, it killed him that she slept with her mouth open, her long black eyelashes pressed to her cheek.
“Your pain calls birth an affliction, and the number is marked on your brow.”

The sandwich was salty and satisfying. He took a Lone Star beer out of the minifridge and sat at the long, sliding window, looking out. There was a sight line from just outside the trailer all the way to the
warehouse on this side. On the other, he could barely make out the skeletal outlines of the houses. He didn't care anymore about doing a good job, either, keeping watch. Once Avery had come over to the trailer on a Saturday night and brought Cully a plateful of brisket and pickles. “Thought you might be hungry.” He was grinning and strutting as he approached the trailer. He ate with Cully at the miniature table and rubbed his chin. “Don't ever take it for granted, what you have, son. You just don't know when it could be gone. Don't ever think it'll be yours forever.”

Goddamn easy things to say when you were richer than God. Cully didn't feel like drawing him out, letting the man give him more of his fake wise advice, like a Texan Yoda. “Yes, sir.”

“You work hard for things and then you might get them, but you don't ever take it for granted. That's my secret, if you want to know.” Avery winked. “Look at what happened back in September with the hurricane. Those people who lost their homes.”

But if they'd appreciated their homes, they'd still have lost them in the end, so what did it matter? “Yes, sir,” Cully said.

Avery's face was serious, but there was bluster in his mouth, as if he might burst out laughing any minute. “I knew there was something real smart in you and now you've confirmed it.” He stood up. “You're a good man,” he said, and he slapped Cully on the back as he left. As if that sealed it. The guy was an asshole.

Nothing ever happened out there, but Avery Taft believed someone had sabotaged the bulldozer months ago, and Cully had been there when Avery ripped José a new one. “Under your watch!” Avery shook his finger at this man—easily fifteen years his senior and more honorable than Avery ever would be. A veteran. A man who told stories that held lessons, a man who stopped by every Saturday night to give Cully one of his wife's cinnamon cakes and some coffee. Avery had walked away in his tight jeans and his too perfect shiny boots. He always held his head back and snorted before he spoke, and he held his eyes either in narrow, suspicious
slits or in lazy, heavy-lidded boredom. Cully had tried to tell his mom about it once, started in on his imitation of Avery's drawl, but she waved her arm at him and said, “Hold it right there, mister. You respect people. That man gave you a job. He may be your father's partner one day.” It was sick, it was so obvious that Avery believed he knew better than anyone else—and that was why Cully stole the copper wire and pipes from him.

After the bulldozer incident, one night when José brought the cinnamon cake and coffee, Cully mentioned that it would be easy enough to “lose” one of the spools, and José said, shaking his head, laughing, “No, man. Some guy tried to get me to do that a couple years back. Has a warehouse in Texas City—sourcing from all these constructions sites.”

“I'm not kidding,” Cully said.

“Yes, you are. You're a good kid.”

“The way he talks to you? Don't you deserve something for putting up with it?”

“No, no. Not my way.”

“You're too honest, that's why.”

The cinnamon cake was still hot, moist in his mouth. José wore a battered sailor's cap, pulled it low over his eyes. There was a jagged pink scar on his cheek that made him look like a badass, though he wasn't at all.

José clicked his tongue. “But I didn't say I wouldn't tell you where the warehouse was.”

The place was over in Texas City next to a way station. Cully drove the wire and pipes over in his truck and sold it to a guy with a red Mohawk in a dirty corduroy jacket. He'd smelled for some reason, like bananas. The guy gave him a stack of strangely crumpled hundred-dollar bills that didn't seem real but were. Though José protested, Cully gave him half.

Cully turned on the TV and watched a little bit of a preseason baseball game. Soon it would be time to go on his rounds. He watched the white ball arc against the green, the left fielder moving back to the fence, catching it in the pocket of his glove. The fans were stomping in the bleachers. A man had painted his face green and wore an alligator-jaw hat.

He finished his beer, turned off the TV, took his flashlight, and went out. The land seemed more like country in the dark, not as gnarly as it looked in daylight. They'd have to do landscaping to make it look livable, even decent. He walked over the rutted dirt, headed toward the warehouse, with its single overhead light, crickets humming in and out. He slapped a mosquito off his arm.

The moon was a crescent tonight, hanging like a hook. He'd picked up the CD at a neighbor's garage sale for twenty-five cents, the plastic cover all scratched and smudged, and he'd listened to this:
“What is evil but good
pained by its own hunger and thirst? Truth finds bread even in the desert, even in desert.”
He'd known better than to take Willa to the Lawbournes' house. He'd known by the way she looked at him that she hadn't done much before with any other guy, and he'd liked that, her perfect trusting face, how its look made him feel a power over her—as if he were fire or a gun. After it all happened, he wanted to apologize, but he didn't know how—she was different, smeared, blurrier. And anyway, it would have always already happened to her. One of those things.

He circled the building site, made his way up to the slope toward the hurricane fence. José always liked to go around this way, by the gully. He was almost back to the trailer when he saw, way off, near the first shell of house, a ghostly funnel of light, which went out as soon as he saw it. He heard, maybe, branches breaking, and started to walk in that direction.

I
T WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT
when she left the house, a square of blue light across the street two houses down; a car coming back late pulled into a driveway at the corner; and she stepped behind the trees, the heavy canvas bag strapped to her shoulder. She felt elongated in her spine, and full of nerves, as if more of them were growing just under her skin.

At this hour, the traffic was light. A semi truck lumbered and groaned, passing in the next lane, and the speed of it shook the frame of her car, the bright headlights briefly lit up the interior, then darkened. Ahead, the gray and looming overpass looked nearly ancient, monumental, its plain thick arch over the flat landscape. She concentrated on the highway lights until she turned off at the exit.

At the gravel road, she parked at a tilt in a shallow ditch. An accident or sabotage. Let people wonder. In her black ski mask, black shirt, black pants, black socks over her flat shoes, she was a moving part of darkness. Her steps made crunching sounds on the gravel, the taste of old coffee in her mouth, and the wool tight against her face.

When she came to the entrance in the fence, she saw it was locked more tightly than usual, and there wasn't even wiggle room for her frame. She'd have to climb it. She leveraged her foot up on the locked chain and pulled herself up, clutching the crowned wires. At the top she pushed her leg over, felt the metal prongs scrape against her torso and chest, swung herself over and let go, landing with a loud thump that rang painfully in
the soles of her feet. Through the eyeholes in the mask, she felt the hot breeze.

She headed in the direction of the trailer she'd seen the last time, past the large trees and toward the warehouse, though she could barely see the outlines in the dark. She wouldn't hurt anyone. She didn't have that in her. The trailer seemed far enough away from the skeletons of houses, but still. She walked toward it, and didn't see any lights.

When she got to the trailer, she walked around its perimeter, dry grass shushing around her sock-covered shoes. She knocked on the door. She knocked again and yelled, “Hello in there!”

The sound of her voice seemed to turn around and yell back at her. No one there.

The darkness softened, turned felted and warm, all the ugliness hidden under the bowl of star-flecked sky, the slopes of trees in the distance. This was just where Jess had ridden that black horse, that day Jack was afraid and Jess had shown off for the neighbors, so agile and capable.

She could still turn and go back. She could try again to let this all go, to let people take their chances, as they seemed to want to do. But something like breath hovered around her, a new coolness that had not been there earlier. The day Jess died, as Lee pressed ice against the soles of her daughter's feet, she'd felt Jess's body shrink away from her, Jess's face turned to the pillow, as she murmured in her sleep. Watching her, Lee felt the part of her daughter that wasn't flesh, what was beyond Jess's tiny, wasted legs and her altered, bony face—this invisibleness more real and alive than anything else. She'd even reached out her hand to it. Now that same cool pressure came up, insistent against the wool of her mask.

Using her red-beamed flashlight occasionally to find her footing, Lee navigated in the dark to the house skeletons, just over the ridge. She stopped near a lone tree, propped her canvas bag at her feet, wiped the sweat from her neck. Ahead of her, she could just make out the spine of the bulldozer, the etched outlines of the house frames.

She picked up her bag and kept walking, her vision on these targets. Nothing moved in them. They just enlarged themselves, became more detailed so she could make out the cage of boards, the cement floor, the giant coil of copper wire. She made her way to the first shell. The house would have been huge, the framework for ten or eleven rooms set into the outline of it, the sketch of it in wood. Just under the rectangle frame for the front door, she reverently arranged the waxy square, whispered under her breath, “Do it right.” She stood to run the fuse through the thick bush until she stood five yards away at the end of it, holding the cord like a leash, then setting it down against an angle of old branches. She walked through a small clearing to the other house frame, taller, narrower, a head of wood eaving the top. She skimmed along the edge of the foundation to a spot with a stubborn impression in the cement, cradled the waxy square there, on the side closest to the other house. She strung the fuse through dry dirt, lit the end, and went to light the other fuse. Maybe the fuses were too long, and one or the other wouldn't work. She waited until the last string was confidently burning, then turned and ran far, almost to the trees. She crouched near a wild-leaved plant.

She tasted the wool in her mouth, the sweat under her mask. She stared out at the dark, where the frames were no longer visible. The leaves rubbed against her pants, smelling like turpentine. Something small and alive moved in the grass nearby, a bird, maybe, or a rabbit. From all around came the few sounds in the silence, the far-off whoosh of traffic, the rustle of leaves and weeds in the breeze, a bird or a bat flapping wings overhead. There were black bursts of cancer inside Jack's lungs. She pictured them in the dark. When she listened for a second, she could hear the gallop of blood in her veins, the wrinkle of her shirt sleeves. She carried Jess with her everywhere, even here, worked to keep her alive by staying alive herself, heart thumping now under her bra, stars blinking just under her skin. All of Jess's faces, her gestures, things she'd said, still alive inside of her. The dark space loomed between her and the house
frames. She could just make out or imagine the tiny lights of the burning fuses.

Then the ground fell up to the air, and she crashed onto her back. She quickly sat up again, saw pieces of wood and rocks fountained over the flames. Golden hair unfurled into the sky. Quills of smoke pushed up confettied debris, then faded to fainter and fainter exploded gray feathers. She didn't know how long it took to settle.

Wood planks lay in giant bonfires, but the sky was still black, unflinched. There was a metallic smell in the smoke. The wing flap in her chest was sinking fast now, something dead in her. The large eave of the second house fell from the top of the pile.

She crept back to survey the damage, so she would know what they would find in the morning, and when she got close, the flickering light caught on a face in the grass. She wasn't sure. A paleness, a shape. She walked closer, shone her red beam down on the body of a young man, his mouth in a grimace. He had wide, muscled shoulders, and his arm was bleeding through his plaid shirt, but he started to stand up, leaning on the other arm, his face so bloody she couldn't see his eyes. “I'm okay,” he said. “I'm okay.” He was in shock. A roll of copper wire lay overturned next to him, gleaming in the shrub.

Somehow she remembered the questions she should ask. “What day is it?”

He stared at her. She was still wearing her mask, and she felt the nakedness of her eyes. “Saturday.” He slurred his
s
.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” She made a peace sign. The flames might spread toward them.

“Two.”

“What is your name?”

“Cully Holbrook.”

Through the fires all around, out of the past, the name crept back to her. It couldn't be. There had to be a million of them.

“You aren't Hal's son?”

He rubbed at his bleeding face. “You know him?”

The boy's eyes rolled back in his head, then returned. He could have died. He might still. “Don't try to move.”

He was already standing up, stumbling. She went to grab his arms so he'd lean on her, and this way, he could walk. They made their way slowly, chased by the heat in the air. “I'm okay,” he kept saying, his face covered in blood.

He was moving, stumbling, but she was relieved that he could walk if he leaned on her. She walked with his weight on her.

After what seemed like a long time, they got to the fence. He said, “Here.” He took out keys, and handed them to her, and she unlocked the gate. Somehow she got him to her car, though he was taller than she was, and heavy, and still in shock. She wondered if he would even remember her voice or what he'd seen other than her mask.

She started the engine and drove quietly and quickly down the back road. What felt like a hard packet of salt pounded outside of her chest.

The boy sat with his head resting against the window in the car, and blood ran down the side of his face from a cut at his temple. “Don't go to sleep,” she told him, afraid he might go into a coma. “Stay awake.” As she turned the car, his head knocked against the window. “Stay awake. Stay awake.” She started singing the song her dad had sung on longer car trips to keep himself from drifting off.

The night highway was nearly empty, which seemed unbelievably kind, given the shakiness of her driving. She could barely see the lines or read the signs. She took the Pearland exit and went down a road of strip malls toward the hospital. She would say they'd been in an accident. She would say they'd witnessed an explosion. None of that mattered really. He was breathing heavily, but the blood was mostly on his face and his arm. She didn't see any bone, though he held his arm at an impossible angle, twisted away from him, as if to pull it off. She hoped there wasn't some secret injury from the impact—something ruptured or torn.

She nearly hit a car passing in the wrong lane, and the honking roused him. “Huh?”

She took off her mask, her face cool and light, and the mobility of her chin felt strange. “I'll get you to the emergency room soon. Just a few more minutes. Can you talk?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you see?”

“Kind of.” He slumped farther down in his seat, and she thought she heard him crying.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's my fault,” he said. “God! I saw this coming. This is my fucking punishment!”

“What are you saying?” She just wanted to keep him awake.

The hospital, unstately and brown, was easy to miss, but she spotted the lit red sign for the ER, and swerved the car into the turnaround. She had not been back since Jess's last high fever, two weeks before she'd died.

She parked, pulled the socks off her shoes, got out, and opened the passenger side door to help him.

When he stood up, she saw the deep gashes under his eye as he looked at her for the first time. He nodded as he began to walk, surprisingly stately as he headed for the door. She followed, and he turned to her. “I got it.” He flicked his hand at her shoulder. “You can go.”

“I need to make sure you're alright.”

He seemed too weak and stunned to protest. She helped him inside the violently white room, accompanied him to the desk and signed him in. “He's been in an accident. He needs to be seen,” she said.

The woman at the desk was unsurprised, frowsy haired, in floral scrubs. Her large, pale eyes were heavily made-up, black insect wings blinking slowly. “I guess bring him on over here, and let's have a look.”

Lee started to go with him through the swinging doors to the back, and he shook her off. “I said I got it!”

“I need to make sure.”

“No, lady. You don't get it.” His eyes widened, and they were clear in the midst of all the dried blood. “Just get out of here. I don't want you here with me. It was supposed to happen like this.”

The lights seemed hot, and a drunk was snoring loudly on one of the waiting room chairs. “I mean it!” Just as the door swung open, he shoved her away. “I fucking hated him too. I'm alright.” He turned away from her, said to the short and moon-faced nurse, “Where do I go?”

Lee walked past the desk, past the wan, hollow-cheeked mother who hovered over her crying toddler boy, smoothing his sweaty hair, past the purple-faced drunk who sat staring at the road sign in his lap. She walked out the glass door and got into her waiting car.

She drove by habit down 2351, the road unrelenting, black and straight, and she hardly noticed where she was until she came to Main Street. The sobs were caught in her throat and wouldn't escape. She'd done what she had to do, and now there was nothing but to wait for what was to come.

She passed easily through the empty intersection, past the Kroger parking lot, dark except for its sign like a cereal box logo, past the store with a neon sign the shape of a cowboy boot, past the bank, where the black letters on lit-up white said
GO MUSTANGS!
Though football season was long over, there were silhouettes of blue horses on stakes planted in the yards of businesses and homes. She counted five before she came to the Quaker church, two more when she passed the library, five more as she passed the junior high school, and as she rounded the corner where the tiny, white flimsy house stood, she saw the horse's blue, galloping legs, frozen in wood, and felt she was running along with it.

At home, she called the hospital, pretending to be Cully's aunt, and asked how he was. He hadn't been admitted, and when she called again at 5:00 a.m., he still was not a patient, and she guessed that meant he'd gone home. Okay. That was it.