Carla, too, turned to look, though she had to peer over Lucy Maud’s forearm. The sky, black like dark water, as if night were fresh on their heels and running them down. Carla shuddered, thinking no car was fast enough, thinking the only safe place was home.
Without saying anything else, Lucy Maud turned the car around and headed back. The rain would soon start, and they could see the storm on the horizon, but right now the world was golden, and the air from a dream. Whatever Lucy Maud had needed to get from the store was forgotten, and they were the only car on the road. But it didn’t rain yet.
5:00 P.M.
Boyd took her field guides with her because what else was she going to do? Her mother was planning the whole thing, wedding included, for Boyd’s grandfather and his longtime sweetheart, Sylvia, and Lucy Maud, frankly, was a mess. The details were too many for her, and she was feeling pulled in all directions, and she didn’t have a good handle on any of it. She was nervous, apt to bite back if spoken to, so Boyd knew to lie low. And when Boyd’s father, Kevin, arrived at the restaurant, Lucy Maud’s face went pale except for two crimson circles high on the cheekbones, and Lucy Maud did her best to ignore the man who was still technically her husband but who hadn’t actually been in almost a year. Lucy Maud had made the mistake over one painfully hopeful weekend that Kevin had spent out at the lake of asking him to be her father’s best man.
When they’d arrived at the restaurant, Lucy Maud’s twin sister had already been there and had been for some time, drinking wine and decorating. Boyd was surprised by this; Lou wasn’t one to drink. In fact, every morning Lou attended an AA meeting down at the community center, but not because she was an alcoholic. Lou was lonely. At forty-seven, she had never married and was still living with Boyd’s great-great-aunt Fern, and so every morning that Lou could, she headed down to the meeting and said that she was there for support, though nobody needed it. Truthfully, Lou never touched the stuff, which was why Boyd was surprised to see her putting them back, swaying on her feet as she decorated, draping white plastic over tables and strewing white beads over the plastic. When she finished, she went out to the patio, where a bluegrass band was playing, and she took off her shoes and stomped her feet as if she’d seen one too many mountain movies. Boyd was fascinated by this display and came to stand against a post, watching, trying to understand. Lou always had a vulnerability, but somehow it was now more exposed, a wound, open and weeping, and Boyd caught from Lou a ragged edge, a sense of something submerged, a certain gasping for breath. Boyd pitied her and stood close, ready to go to her aunt if Lou should suddenly realize that people were watching her in a not-kind way. Boyd couldn’t bear for Aunt Lou to feel that people were laughing at her. After a moment, Boyd realized that the brown hair of the fiddle player was floating on the wind, and it had been a long time since Boyd had known an afternoon wind. She looked up at the sky, surprised by the black on the horizon.
When Lou went back inside, Boyd followed, and Boyd’s grandfather arrived, along with his bride-to-be, Sylvia, and they both looked as if they didn’t know where they were supposed to be. Sylvia wore a green wrap dress and Boyd’s grandfather a bolo tie, and Boyd could feel their unease. “We didn’t ask for this,” Sylvia whispered to Boyd’s grandfather, Homer. “Who is paying for this?”
Boyd saw Sylvia’s eyebrows rise even higher when the group was seated and, after the salad, rib eyes were served, eight giant slabs of beef going around the table, an absolute fortune’s worth of dead cow, and Sylvia said, “We could have just had a barbecue.” Meanwhile, Lucy Maud’s eyes had taken on a fearsome sheen, and she moved around Dahlia’s banquet room as if animated by puppet strings, redraping Lou’s tablecloths and pushing in chairs. “Sit down and eat your food,” Lou told her, and Boyd grimaced. Lucy Maud did not like to be bossed around by her twin sister.
After everyone was well filled with steak, it looked, for a moment, as if there would be calm for a little while, as if everybody had settled in and could just enjoy one another’s company. Sylvia—now in her late sixties and still stylish and trim, with big Sophia Loren glasses—leaned against Homer, which intrigued Boyd, because they’d been dating since the early seventies. The history was too complicated sometimes, and it seemed crazy to Boyd that all of that drama had resulted in this calm rehearsal dinner decades later. Karen was gone and her husband was gone, and only Sylvia and Homer remained. At the end of the table, Boyd’s great-great-aunt Fern, tiny and folded into herself, smiled privately, tapping her lip with an index finger, remembering something that Boyd could not read. Boyd’s father, Kevin, had his phone out, checking baseball scores. Lou had a finger hooked into her chardonnay, fishing out what looked like a piece of cork, one eye narrowed so that she could see better. The pastor was there from the Lutheran church, and Boyd knew he was there only because her mother had insisted. Homer and Sylvia had wanted to go to the justice of the peace.
Boyd got out her bird guide, remembering a black-and-blue jay she’d seen on the lake that morning. It was, for the moment, quiet and pleasant, and she wished that Isaac had come. That afternoon, she’d felt a pain in her left thumb and she’d thought of him then and thought again of him now. He would have loved that rib eye, oozing blood and marbled with fat.
But that morning Isaac had headed back toward San Saba. He’d ridden up the hill with Carla and then gotten in his Corolla and gone home, going the long way, going over the low-water crossing by Cottonwood Shores. No other houses were this way until the crossing, and then came a whole neighborhood, which had gone up in nine months in the early eighties. Not many houses were the other way, either, the way with the bridge. A land developer owned much of that scrubland, waiting for the time when it would be worth enough to build on. Isaac knew that it was a weird way for Boyd’s mother to live, thinking that she had this whole side of the lake practically to herself, but knowing that one day, they’d be squeezing in houses over here, too.
No water was in the low-water crossing, and though the depth gauge at the side of the road stated that the water could rise to six feet, Isaac could not imagine that amount of water covering this crossing. His car eased up the other side, and then two right turns and he was on the main highway, headed toward home, and running dangerously low on gas. But he was in a hurry, and he passed the last station without stopping, knowing he had enough to come back this way once he’d reached his father and found out what was going on, and what his father’s plan was.
But his father wasn’t home when Isaac got there. He pulled into the yard and killed the engine, the heat of the day just now waxing, warming the car. His father’s Subaru wasn’t in the yard, and the front door was shut, which meant nobody was home. This time of year, it was too hot to close doors and windows, and usually Isaac’s father had the door wide open but the screen door shut and a box fan propped up right inside.
He called his dad’s cell phone and heard it ring inside the house. Isaac went in, his phone still at his ear, following the sound of his father’s. He found it in the living room, on the table by the brown velour easy chair, next to a full ashtray. Balanced on the edge of the ashtray was the burnt end of his dad’s roach, pinched tight by a clip. Isaac picked up his father’s phone and looked at it for a minute before setting it down again.
He wandered into the kitchen, where his father’s breakfast dishes sat on the table next to an open issue of Omni magazine. The magazine’s pages were well-worn; it had been defunct for decades, but his dad kept all of the issues he’d ever received, despite the information in them being nearly obsolete. It didn’t matter, though, to Ruben King; a thing’s age was a marker of value, too. Ruben King had eaten eggs and chorizo for breakfast; a smear of chile remained on the plate. Isaac picked up the plate and put it on the counter next to the sink. The wood-look laminate of the countertop was buckling, and Isaac shook his head. Ruben’s careless attitude toward housekeeping had contributed to his parents’ divorce, and Isaac’s mom was now in California. It was not likely that Isaac’s m
om’s breakfast dishes were still on the counter.
Isaac didn’t know what to do. He looked down at his thumb, which had only recently stopped bleeding. The wound hung open, thick and fleshy, almost labial. He sniffed; it smelled like rust. His father had said he’d known the voice on the radio, that it had been a neighbor, but Isaac didn’t know which one. Not that they had that many neighbors out here. Nobody wanted to live out here in the mesquite and the limestone dust, far from the water. Allen Potivar lived up the road, but he was on oxygen these days, and Isaac didn’t imagine that he did much tramping around the country. John and Roger, down the road in the other direction, spent most of their time in Austin, but Isaac guessed that one or the other of them could be out here for the long weekend. The other neighbors were farther away, and Isaac didn’t know how well his father knew them. It’d be different if Isaac had gotten gas, if he had enough to drive around the countryside hunting Ruben’s Subaru. But Isaac hadn’t, and his father had told him to meet him at home, so Isaac decided to wait.
And after a few minutes of waiting, sitting in his dad’s easy chair, smoking the rest of his dad’s joint, Isaac decided he should probably head to a doctor. But the same concerns stopped him: his dad’s whereabouts, the fuel gauge resting on E. So he decided to sew up the wound himself and brought the first aid kit to the kitchen table.
The first aid kit was not well-kept. It had an Ace bandage, some ancient Pepto-Bismol pills in plastic packaging, three Band-Aids decorated with Peanuts characters, two sealed alcohol wipes, and a roll of surgical tape. He took the tape and the Band-Aids and left the kit on the kitchen table. Flies circled his father’s breakfast plate on the counter. Isaac had been gone a year, Isaac’s mother, Melissa, nearly a decade, and everything seemed coated in grime.
He needed a needle and had no idea where to find one. He dug through the drawers of his dad’s desk and found playing cards, drafting pencils, a slide rule. A sliver of geode, purple shards dusty. In one drawer was a mass of bread-wrapper ties, and Isaac didn’t know what his dad was saving those for. No needle, no thread.
Next his father’s medicine cabinet: an orange prescription bottle of hydrocodone, a container of Tums, calamine lotion. The drawer next to the bathroom sink: tweezers, toenail clippers, and finally, a travel sewing kit. Isaac poured rubbing alcohol over the gash in his thumb, wincing and blowing on the wound, then he carried the sewing kit back to his dad’s chair.
He threaded the needle with black thread, tied a knot at the end. This last part was tricky because the thread was so flimsy and his left thumb so tender. He pinched the wound shut with the thumb and index finger of his right hand, having to set down the needle. How was he going to do this when he only had one free hand? He could wrap it up in surgical tape, he guessed, but no. He’d decided he was going to sew it shut, so here he was, needle threaded, mind steeled against the pain he imagined was coming, and he was going to do it.
He tried counterpressure, pressing his left thumb into the table, and still the wound gaped. He flattened his thumb between his knees, but the angle was too awkward; he couldn’t sew the wound shut like this. Finally he put his left thumb in his mouth, squeezing the end of the wound shut with his teeth, the other end of the wound clear of his mouth. Then he closed his eyes and shoved the needle through.
Insane the amount of pain. He gasped, losing his tight grasp on the wound. How could a needle feel like this, as if he were pushing fire into his skin? The needle was a sliver, the wound hardly threatening or serious, but he felt the needle up his arm, in his armpit, in the socket of his shoulder. He closed his teeth again, bringing the thread around for another pass, and tasted a thin stream of blood draining through his teeth onto his tongue. Another pass, this time slower, and it was worse. He hesitated, letting go of his tight hold on the needle, and he pushed it through with the heel of his hand. Another sickening pain, and the needle dangled on its thread from his thumb. He didn’t know if he could do another stitch.
But he did and then he was done, and then the pain subsided when the needle was clear. He tied the thread as best he could with teeth and right hand, then went into the bathroom and poured alcohol over his thumb again. Now a dull throb was centered in his bone, and he opened the bottle of hydrocodone and chewed two, the bitter taste a comfort on his tongue.
He went in the kitchen and opened a Shiner, taking the beer back to his father’s easy chair, and settled down to wait for his father. Across the county, Boyd had been getting ready for her grandfather’s rehearsal dinner. When he finished the first beer, he drank another, then he fell asleep, his head and heart slowed by the medication. He would sleep through this night, exhausted, and almost through the next. Eight hours from this moment in the chair, when his father called, his cell phone would ring in the dim house, and Isaac would not wake up.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
The Gold Isn’t the Only Thing People Want
But this story is not a treasure hunt. Not really. Something about the gold fascinates, doesn’t it? Something about being buried and recovered. That’s why all of those people are looking for that art dealer’s treasure in the Rockies, why people still get excited if we find a bag of money that might once, briefly, have belonged to D. B. Cooper, that hijacker who parachuted away with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But other things are here, a latent richness of earth and water, and in Texas, we’ve believed ever since oil geysered out of Spindletop in 1901 that our fortunes are to be made underground. To be hauled out of the earth, drilled, fracked, mined. Did you know that Llano County contains every naturally occurring element known to man? Even if you didn’t, some people do. It’s some people’s job to know these things, to reduce the earth to resources, to know where to find them. The earth subdivided into parts, and some of those parts are worth a lot of money. When the dam was built, when the lake was filled, we buried two of the most valuable hills in the country, hills full of uranium. And still, when the lake falls enough, people come out to fetch it.
May 23
6:00 P.M.
It started to rain during the ceremony.
Boyd had still not heard from Isaac. She’d called him when she’d returned to her mother’s house, protective of Lucy Maud, setting up for bed in her own bedroom instead of heading down to her campsite. He didn’t answer—his phone ringing eight, nine times—and she wondered if he’d gone somewhere with his father, if Ruben King had tracked down the neighbor. She wondered if the neighbor had been the one to call in to the radio show.
That morning had dawned humid and thick, the sky the color of unbleached cotton, the air dense enough to pull legs and arms into torpor. She and her mother had headed over to Aunt Fern’s late morning, on the far side of the lake. Boyd had gone inside, sat down at the kitchen table, and put her forehead on the cool oak surface. Lou, who seemed not to be hungover, came to her and put her hand on Boyd’s shoulder blade. Boyd knew Lou felt sorry for her, felt that Boyd didn’t have any kind of childhood, felt that Lucy Maud was a tough mother and that Kevin was an absent father. Boyd raised her head with a jerk, looked through the kitchen window off into the distance, blinking. She got up without saying a word and went to the living room for her backpack full of field guides. When she left the house and walked across the yard, out toward the lake, she could feel Lou watching her through the window.
After a while, though, they came and got her to help set up for the wedding. They worked in the heat, in the low nineties, for close to an hour, arranging the chairs and wrapping them in tulle. Boyd’s mother had hot-glued hundreds of white silk flowers to the gazebo, and a wasp’s nest was tucked into the eave.
Later that afternoon, with the wedding party assembled in the gazebo, the wind picked up and raindrops fell, heavy and fat, splatting on the sidewalk from the porch to the driveway. The sky was yellow, bruised and golden, and the heaviest rain held off for a minute.
The preacher felt the urgency and rushed them through the ceremony
. Boyd stood with the tiny pillow, her face blank when the preacher asked for the ring. The bride’s dress blew against Boyd’s grandfather’s suit pants, pasting itself, and Homer took Sylvia’s hand, uncomfortable with the big to-do. The wasps slumbered in their nest, and down the little hill, the lake’s surface was gray. A lily blew from Sylvia’s bouquet, and Boyd chased it. Sylvia’s hand went to her head to secure the tiny veil pinned there, and the wind knocked over a chair.
Soon, the white silk flowers came loose and blew away, at first one by one, but then in concert. When the preacher pronounced the couple man and wife, the flowers circled and danced in the air around them, and the sky roared with the first of the thunder. Boyd breathed the smell of rain on the leading edge of air, watched those flowers floating.
“Everybody inside,” Lucy Maud shouted. “Bring your chairs!” Beside Lucy Maud, Boyd’s father carried four chairs, two in each arm.
Inside, Kevin tapped the keg of Lone Star. Aunt Lou took a sip from a red plastic cup, then handed it to Boyd. An elderly couple held hands on the sofa, and Aunt Fern went to them, talking quietly, and their faces revealed their confusion. Aunt Fern these days was still earnest and kind, but she no longer made any sense. Fern recognized their confusion, however, and said instead, loud enough for Boyd to hear, “But wasn’t the wedding pretty, all those flowers flying around?”
The phones of the elderly couple chirped, one after the other, and the man pulled his phone out. “Tornado warning,” he said as phones around the party buzzed and vibrated. The woman said, “Is that the one where there’s really a tornado? Or is that a watch?”
“Turn on the TV,” Boyd’s dad said, and Boyd was stunned when he wrapped his arm around the waist of Lucy Maud, who was drinking Asti Spumante out of a plastic flute and grinning. Boyd knew her dad was genuine, but she also knew that this reconciliation would be short-lived. Her heart hurt for her mother. Somebody handed him the remote and they flipped through the channels, every local station giving a weather report.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 5