Friendswood (38 page)

D
E
X WAS FINISHING UP
his shift at Casa Texas, pouring salt into the salt shakers, pepper into the pepper shakers, and screwing on the metal tops. He rushed because this was his least favorite part of the job, and when Pammy walked past him, he said over his shoulder, “Don't forget me. My tip jar's over there.” He nodded to a shelf just at the end of the bar.

“I never forget you, honey,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“You sure did yesterday.” She treated everyone this way, but now Dex understood how to work it, how to talk to her. It was almost as if she enjoyed this part.

“You mean to say I have to pay you for yesterday too?”

“Yeah,” he said. It used to bother him that he had to ask, but now he didn't even care.

He put in an order for tamales and burritos to bring home to his mom and Layla, and he sat at the bar, drinking a ginger ale, waiting for the bell to ring in the kitchen that signaled the food was ready to go.

Next to him sat a man with long, gray hair, the color of dull metal pipes. He had a face like a friendly crocodile's, long bumpy chin, a wide, uneven smile that slashed the bottom of his face from the top. Last night, before he'd begun his set, he'd said, “You can't help who you fall in love with. That's for sure. It's either a disaster bad as a hurricane or it's home. But you've got nothing to do with it, that's the problem.”

On the bar, the shot glasses lined up next to his beer. Dex wondered how he'd be able to play.

“You got a good job here?” the man said, bringing the whiskey to his lips.

“Yeah, I like it alright.”

“You do good in school?”

“I do okay.”

The man lifted his shot glass to him in a toast. “Well, keep to your studies, son. Keep to your studies.”

Then the bell rang, and Dex got up to go back to the kitchen. The man turned on his stool and unlatched his guitar. As Dex was leaving, he was meditatively tuning it, plaintive, pure single notes.

At work, when Dex stayed to watch the band, he tried to think of women as shapes in the dark, as beautiful, kind vessels, but then he always ended up talking to one or another and he'd fall for a voice, or a comment about the idiocy of men. He'd seen Willa on the street outside the grocery store the other day, her graceful arm swinging a small paper sack. Then he looked up at the sky, clouds gathering like huge gray beards, an airplane inching overhead, and he let the longing for her go up into the blue.

At home his mother was reading the newspaper at the table, her hair flat, her makeup scrubbed away.

“I brought you some food. Have you had dinner?”

“Not really. Thanks, sweetheart,” she said, and she looked at him again in the way he'd sought out ever since he'd been a boy. She'd told him weeks ago, “I'm glad you went to the police.” Even if there'd been no discernable difference made to the pattern of things, he'd said what needed to be said.

He made a plate of food for her, and he made a plate for himself, but she seemed to want to read rather than talk. “I can't believe all this stuff about Avery Taft. Class-action lawsuit coming his way for sure. That man knew what was in the ground, but just went on building anyway. Tried to hide it. Can you imagine . . .” Her voice trailed off.

The smell had lingered for a few days after the Banes Field explosions, and he'd heard Cully had been scraped up pretty bad. A bitter sulfur taste, he'd thought, was caught in his throat during that whole week, but then it went away, and by now, Dex was sick of hearing about it.

“It looks like now they might dig up the field and incinerate what's there. They'd have to evacuate that side of town for that, but I guess that's the safe way to do it.”

“Huh.” Whatever they decided, it would take months. There wasn't anything he or his mom could do about it; the mayor and the city would make all those calls. “We're far enough away, right?”

“That's what they say,” she said. “We could probably stay put or not. I'll be glad when this business is over.”

“Yeah.” He didn't want to talk anymore.

It was a tranquil night, a time when Dex was usually at work, and he'd missed being able to be out in the warm air, with the cricket sounds and dark. “I'm going to sit outside.”

“Okay.”

He took his food out the door and sat on the cinder block steps that led up to the trailer. The tamales were lukewarm, but maybe even more delicious that way. His dad had said something about a certain spice, what was it? A rare one mostly found in Mexico. He couldn't remember the name of it.

He heard water running in the kitchen sink inside, a clanking of dishes. The food was warm in his belly, and the street and grass seemed lacquered with moonlight. He sat back to look up at the black sky. The Milky Way wheeled overhead, a neatly arranged arch beyond the leafy trees, all the other stars holed up in the night, not telling yet what they knew.

S
HE RAN THROUGH
the foot-high grass of the old golf course, skimming along the woods, each tree as she passed it a puff of green. She was done with sitting still in her room. She felt speed back in her leg muscles, paced her stride, so she wouldn't stop too soon, felt her breath opening up in her chest. She passed the ruined bricks at the front of the old country club, the triangular roof protecting the graffiti and absent door that led into the darkness. She passed a white-latticed gazebo and a large garage, full of golf carts with dirty, bright canopies, and she headed out into the long green of the seventh hole, where the outlines of sand traps still fell off to the side.

The sunlight was low, white and crystalline over the houses. Her face was hot and salty, her hair wet with sweat, and she stopped for a moment near a tree to get her bearings. She bent to catch her breath, bowing her head, resting her hands on her knees.

When she looked up again, there, from the lowest branch, the voices like a loud breeze. Dog. Lamb. “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.” Where had Lee Knowles's strength come from? She had suffered so much, and she still stood upright, able to say words to Willa that meant she wasn't a slut or stupid or a piece of skin-covered meat. But of course, the beasts already knew these things. On her right forearm, she'd written
Measure the sun.
She held up this forearm against the beasts.

She gazed through their shapes to the oak tree, saw how it would grow, how the leaves would bud and spread into green hands, the branches rivered into the air. She took a step back, touched her forehead, and felt a warm sting like a sunburn. A gray rabbit hopped through the dandelions, and wings flapped in the branches above her. When she looked back at the beasts, the wind had erased them.

She went on to run another mile. Rounding the corner of her street, she saw her dad outside with the topiary clippers as he worked on the hedge, which he liked to keep square, though it grew round. She stopped running at the driveway, and walked up, pinched at her sweaty shirt to pull it away from her torso.

He stood up from his work. “How far'd you go?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Three miles?”

He looked her in the face as she came toward him, and he was quiet, suppressing a smile. “Good work.” He saluted her. “Better make it four next time,” he joked. He leaned forward again to snap the clippers, and as she passed, he handed her a branch with a very small, blue flower. “It ain't much,” he said. “But it's what I've got.”

She went inside the house, ran up to the bathroom, took off her damp T-shirt and shorts, and laid them to dry on top of the hamper. Getting into the shower, she let her hands graze the tops of her thighs, which were tight again, the soles of her feet sore and tough against the cool porcelain. She lifted her face to the spray of hot water, soaped her hollowed belly, the swell of her breasts, and ran the washcloth over the words on her forearm, the skin still faintly pink and raw. She'd been taught to take a quick shower, not to hog the bathroom, but today she let herself stand under the water for a long time.

While she was getting dressed, Jana was singing along to a pop song in the other room, probably holding her hairbrush like a microphone, waving her arm overhead and swaying her hips. She was so loud sometimes you could hear her from the other side of the house, but she had a strong, low-pitched voice. Lately, when Willa heard her sister singing, her
mother clanking pots in the kitchen, her father's voice calling out to the neighbors, she hoped that the beasts would leave her soon, and she could hang on to the things in front of her again.

She went down into the living room where her mother lay with her feet up on the couch, reading for Bible class. It was summer, and Willa would have no home study for three months. The days were longer, and she and Dani would drive out to the beach at Galveston, and her mother would become preoccupied by the tomatoes she grew, and Jana would practice her gymnastics in the backyard.

Her mother closed the Bible and sat up. “Why don't you help me set the table? We'll eat on the patio.”

Willa took a handful of forks from the drawer and followed her mother outside. As they smoothed the bright white cloth on the table, the blue-tinted air was cooling down. “Now tell me again this thing you're supposed to do with Dani tomorrow night?”

“It's a concert at a place called Sevens.”

“In Houston.” Her mother set down a bowl and sighed.

“Yeah.” Willa's stomach tightened. They might take even this away from her. She was still afraid that in their worry, her parents might take away her whole life.

Her mother walked back toward the screen door, and her voice wafted through the dimness, “You'll be home by twelve-thirty.”

O
N THE WAY
TO
H
OUSTON
in Dani's car, they rode with the windows down and sang along to the radio. All of time seemed to stretch ahead of them on the road, the white lines ticking like seconds, on and on. A strip mall on the right, woods coming up on the left, the sky huge and blue and empty. She wanted to get out and feel that blue above her, like a door always opening.

They parked off Montrose Boulevard near the Texas Tattoo Parlour.
At Sevens, there were sixes and nines and threes stenciled in paint along the side wall, and glittering plastic sevens hung from the ceiling. The show itself was a disappointment, three ragged guys onstage who seemed too high to sing. Willa and Dani left early and went walking along the streets downtown, stacked lights of skyscrapers in the distance. They walked past a coffeehouse, filled with faces, weary or cheerful or bored. Cars whizzed past, cartoonishly loud, blowing a hot wind against them. No one recognized her here; no one knew where the Lawbourne house even was. On this sidewalk, her anonymity felt magic.

“Are you hungry?” said Dani. “Let's get some food. Let's head over to the Disco Kroger's.”

In the aisles, they saw the girls in glittery tops and teetering heels, the guys in T-shirts with gelled hair, the music blaring at this hour, because, Dani said, the management wanted to lure in the young people. A girl was actually dancing over by the pharmacy. They bought sandwiches, and Dani used her fake ID to get them a bottle of red wine, and they went back through the parking lot and out to the curb to sit on the hood of Dani's car. Across the street, there was an old house with a porch where some people congregated, smoking, sitting on the rails, talking seriously over the music.

Willa wasn't afraid anymore of red wine. She took a few sips and listened to the song trilling loud from the speakers in the upstairs windows. The woman's voice seemed to start on a tiny thread and then flew up around them like a hundred kites. Willa felt the music go through her at one point like an airy sleeve, and within her, the shape of something ugly turned inside out.

Dani struck a match on her jeans to light her cigarette. “I met a girl who lives there,” said Dani, bringing the cigarette to her lips. “She goes to Rice.”

“That's where I want to go,” said Willa. She'd just decided in that moment. There was a woman sitting on the porch steps, with black hair that looked like she'd cut it herself, and a guy playing a bass, just quietly
holding up the neck, plucking the strings, though no one could hear it over the stereo. She pictured herself on that porch; she saw herself older and new.

After they finished eating, they lay down on the warm hood and watched the passing cars.

“You look different tonight,” said Dani.

“My hair is up.”

“No, I mean your face. For so long you looked, I don't know, kind of wiped away. Now you've come back.”

A white convertible passed by, the women wearing silk scarves that trailed behind them, and an old rickety truck followed, the bed filled up with old chairs, clattering. Beyond the streetlights, just above the skyline, a faultless darkness seemed to flow from the world's center. A motel sign at the end of the street lit up its blue neon letters, but she could just see the edge of it, which said
STAY
.