Elias orders bottles of Coors and shots of tequila. Then he says, “How have you been?”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Thanks for asking.”
“Why are you in Dallas? I thought you weren’t, you know, supposed to travel.”
Sarah doesn’t mention the probation officer who must give permission for Elias to leave Travis County.
“I had some things I needed to attend to.” His tone is light, but the words are ominous. Elias harbors a well of anger deep inside, more so than even she does.
“You have to let stuff go,” she says. “Resentments will eat you up.”
“Look at you, being all Dr. Phil.” He smiles. The expression is not pleasant.
They drink in silence for a few minutes.
“How’s Austin?” Sarah figures this is a safe topic.
The state capital is a good fit for Elias. It’s full of pothead musicians, hippies and burnouts, college students majoring in going to college. A perfect place to get lost among the other bits of human flotsam and jetsam.
Elias sighs. “I needed a change of scenery.”
On the TV over the bar, the sports coverage disappears for a moment, replaced with two still pictures: RockyRoad35 in his uniform. And the motel where he died.
The text underneath the photos reads, DEPUTY MURDERED; WOMAN IN DALLAS COWBOYS CAP SOUGHT AS PERSON OF INTEREST.
Sarah stares at the screen, everything crashing back on her, the enormity of what she’s done. Her teeth chatter even though it’s warm in the bar. She feels Elias staring at her.
Finally, the picture of the deputy goes away, replaced by an image of a power plant, Black Valley Generating Station.
Sarah takes several deep breaths and looks at her brother.
He is staring intently at the screen. At the power plant that has shut down because of what the news anchors are saying is too early to be called a terrorist attack.
An unthinkable question forms in her mind.
“What have you done?” she whispers.
He shrugs and takes a long drink of beer.
Elias has always been full of grandiose plans to avenge a litany of perceived wrongs. Several months ago he’d mentioned how easy it would be to take down the power grid.
Sarah points to the TV, lowers her voice even more. “You did that?”
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to the hospital?” he asks.
Sarah doesn’t reply. A sense of despair envelopes her. She can’t discern if it’s because of her current predicament or what her brother’s done. Or, are they one and the same in some weird way?
“Are you okay?” Elias asks. He almost sounds genuinely concerned.
She struggles to control her emotions, surprised that she cares this much about what happens to her brother. After a few moments, she realizes how much she wants to share her burden with him, to confess what happened in the motel room.
Rocky’s death presses down on her shoulders like a sack of lead.
“I’ve done a bad thing.” Sarah blurts out the words, a tear trickling down her cheek.
“My darling sister?” His expression is one of mock surprise. “Did you cheat at bridge?”
Tequila burns in the pit of Sarah’s stomach, and her head feels wobbly. The glow from the alcohol is threatening to overwhelm her. She takes a drink of beer to cool the fire.
Elias chuckles. “Or did you murder someone in the throes of passion?”
She shudders, an image of Rocky’s body flashing in her mind’s eye.
It would be a mistake trying to talk to her brother. He’s mean, and what little compassion he had disappeared during his time in prison.
Fuck him.
She leans close, whispers, “What’s it like to kill another human being?”
An awkward stillness descends upon their impromptu family reunion.
Elias flexes his finger, a murderous expression on his face.
Sarah wonders why she always brings up topics that cause pain. Oh yeah. Because it’s fun.
“Do you think I like to talk about that?” Elias says.
“It’s just a question.” She downs her third shot, liquid courage coursing through her veins. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”
Rocky’s stench fills Sarah’s nostrils. The room is spinning. She is drunk, words starting to slur.
They drink in silence for a bit, each wallowing in their respective anger. The news comes back on, more images of Rocky and the motel.
“Why do you keep looking at the TV?” Elias asks.
Sarah shakes her head, reaches for her fourth shot. Tears well in her eyes, and she doesn’t know why.
The news ends. Sports coverage returns to the television.
A man in a blue work shirt with a Jiffy Lube emblem on the breast is sitting on a stool next to Elias. He is watching the TV over the bar as well, drinking a mug of beer. Every so often he glances at Sarah, a look of concern on his face.
Even drunk, Sarah recognizes the man for what he is, a white knight looking for a damsel to save.
Elias’s eyes are filmy and moist, clouded with alcohol.
Jiffy Lube eases closer. “You all right, ma’am?”
Sarah nods, wipes her face.
Elias turns slowly on his barstool, stares at the man. “She’s fine.”
“She don’t look fine.” Jiffy Lube puts his beer down. “She looks upset.”
“It’s all good,” Sarah says. “We’re just catching up, me and my brother.”
Jiffy Lube, who is about forty pounds heavier than her sibling, nods slowly.
This should be the end of it, but with Elias, shoulds and coulds are just puffs of smoke in a mountain breeze. Meaningless, inconsequential.
“Okay then.” Jiffy Lube nods like he’s done some great service to humanity.
Elias doesn’t respond.
Then, like a stack of plates teetering too high, the final words are uttered and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Jiffy Lube picks up his beer. “Ain’t no need in making a lady cry, now is there?”
Elias slides off his stool. “What’d you say?”
Jiffy Lube doesn’t respond, a slightly befuddled look on his face, like maybe he’s just now realizing that the skinny guy with the thick hair and the glassy eyes is capable of more than his appearance indicates.
Elias says, “What are you trying to tell me, chubby boy?”
Jiffy Lube frowns. He puts his beer back down. “You looking to get your ass kicked?”
“When I was in the joint,” Elias says, “I used to fuck fat guys like you.”
Jiffy Lube gulps, clenches his fist.
Before he went to prison, Elias had been in the military, a demolitions expert with the Eighty-Second Airborne, well trained in armed and unarmed combat. He can do amazingly horrible things to another human being with just his hands and feet.
Sarah almost feels sorry for Jiffy Lube.
Elias moves like a ballerina, his actions elegant and choreographed. He turns away like he’s thought better of the path he’s chosen, this meaningless altercation. Then he rears back his arm and slams an elbow into Jiffy Lube’s nose, one smooth motion.
There is a noise like a side of beef being hit by a brick, wet and sloppy, a slight crunch.
The other man falls to the floor with a thud.
Conversation in the bar stops. Everyone stares at Sarah and her brother.
Elias tosses money next to their empty shot glasses.
The bartender doesn’t move. His eyes are wide.
Jiffy Lube is groaning on the floor. Blood coats the lower half of his face.
Elias grabs Sarah’s elbow, guides her to the door. No one stops them.
Outside it is dark and the heat of the day has begu
n to dissipate.
“You really hurt that guy,” Sarah says. “He was just trying to be nice.”
“He disrespected me.” Elias leads her toward a gray Chevy pickup. “I think Papa would have been proud.”
Papa was their grandfather.
Sarah looks back at the bar, wonders if the police have been called yet.
“Do you want to take a ride with me?” Elias says. “Or do you want to go back to the hospital?”
Her husband and Rosa are with Dylan. Perhaps it’s better that way.
Sarah heads to the passenger side.
Elias says, “Watch out for the gun on the floor. I have Papa’s thirty-thirty with me.”
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE -
Sarah’s brain spins as her stomach rumbles and the back of her throat burns from the tequila.
Elias guns the motor of his pickup as they speed down Gaston Avenue away from the bar where they left the man in the Jiffy Lube shirt bleeding on the floor.
Streetlights flash by, strobing the interior of the Chevy.
The neighborhood is bleak. Rundown apartments. Stately old homes that have been converted into boardinghouses. Convenience stores that sell sweet wine and discount-brand diapers.
Elias makes a couple of turns, and a few minutes later, they are on Garland Road. They drive past pawnshops and bars and used-tire stores.
“Where are we going?” Sarah’s words slur.
He doesn’t answer. Instead he pulls into the parking lot of a liquor store. He gets out, goes inside, and emerges a few minutes later with a paper sack under one arm. Back in the pickup, he puts the sack on the seat, pulls out two cans of Coors.
“I’m drunk,” Sarah says. “I don’t want a beer.”
He hands her one anyway. She opens the can of course, because there’s no such thing as enough in their family, only the hollow feeling that nothing ever seems to satisfy. She longs to get online and set up another meeting with a horndog.
Elias pulls out of the parking lot and drives north for a few miles until they reach the spillway at the bottom of White Rock Lake, a large body of water in East Dallas surrounded by expensive homes.
He parks at the foot of a small hill. Together, they climb the steps to the crest, Elias carrying the sack, Sarah wobbling, using the handrail. At the top, they sit on a bench and take in the view of downtown, an array of lights that look like pale stars in a cosmos full of dark haze.
Elias retrieves a pint bottle of Cuervo tequila from the sack and takes a drink, followed by a sip from his Coors.
“I left my daughter alone in the hospital,” Sarah says. “What kind of mother am I?”
“Why’d you have a kid anyway?” Elias asks. “We’re not exactly parental material, you and me.”
“You’re not a woman.” Sarah feels a flash of anger. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh yes.” He chuckles. “The ovaries, the need to nurture, blah-blah-blah.”
“Why are you so mean?” Sarah yanks the bottle from his hand. Takes a long swig.
Elias laughs, a deep-throated noise like their grandfather used to make.
Sarah wipes a drop of tequila from her chin. “You sound like him.”
Elias opens another beer as a phone rings.
Sarah looks at the screen of her cell. Her husband is calling, no doubt to ask where the hell his wife is since their only child is alone in a hospital room with only a platoon of nurses and a superstitious nanny to care for her.
This is a conversation Sarah would rather not have at the moment, so she sends the call to voice mail.
“Have you been back to Papa’s house lately?” Elias asks.
An image of the dead deputy flashes in Sarah’s mind.
“A hot day like today,” Elias says. “Makes me remember eating watermelon on the back porch.”
Summer heat always makes Sarah think about the August afternoon when she’d been eight and her grandfather had locked a Mexican guy in a car with the windows rolled up. The Mexican’s hands had been duct-taped behind him.
The old man had set out a picnic for Sarah and Elias, and together all three of them watched the car. Two hours went by. Then the old man said, “That’s what happens when you don’t pay what you owe.” He’d packed up his grandchildren and left, the Mexican still in the stifling car, fortunately no longer kicking and screaming.
“I was at the house not long ago,” Elias says. “Going through his things.”
The home in Bowie County remains as it had been when the old man died. His clothes are still in the closet, dishes stacked in the cupboard. Ten-year-old newspapers resting on the coffee table in the den.
The county talked about turning the house into a museum, the years having whitewashed the owner’s reputation, a favorite son of East Texas who overcame staggering hardship to become a man of wealth and influence.
“The old Colt of his,” Elias says. “Remember the Python?”
Sarah doesn’t reply. Elias and his obsession with guns, almost a fetish if you ask her.
“I couldn’t find that one,” he says. “You know how I like to keep his things in order.”
“Are you even supposed to have firearms?” Sarah says. “I thought felons couldn’t own guns.”
Elias slides one hand down Sarah’s thigh to just above her knee. He grabs the flesh and squeezes.
Sarah gasps.
He applies more pressure, fingers digging into muscle.
Sarah squirms, tries to get away, a futile move. “Please. Stop.”
“Where’s the gun, Sarah?”
She doesn’t reply. The pain in her leg shoots its way up her torso.
The revolver is in the wall safe in her closet along with the prepaid cell phone, her little stash of tools she uses with the horndogs.
She longs to tell him where the Python is, what she’s been using it for, aching to share her adventures with someone. Her brother is the obvious choice. But sharing is dangerous, a display of weakness. So she remains silent, breath coming in heaves, sweat dripping down the small of her back.
A period of time passes, a few seconds that feel like an hour. Then, Elias moves his hand and the pain goes away.
“We’re not finished,” he said. “I want that gun.”
Sarah stands, wobbly. “You think that makes you a tough guy, roughing up your sister?”
He stares at her like she’s an animal at the zoo, one who’s doing a particularly interesting trick.
“The power plant was a bad play, Elias. You screwed yourself with that little move.”
He tosses an empty beer can down the hill.
“You don’t understand how they’ll react.” She rubs the spot on her leg where his fingers had been. “If they catch you, all the lawyers in the world won’t be able to protect you.”
“If they catch me. Ha.” Elias stands and cups his hands. He shouts toward the sky: “CATCH ME CATCH ME CATCH ME.”
Sarah realizes her brother is insane. The time in prison, their upbringing, how could he be anything but damaged?
A jet flies overhead, gray contrails against the night sky.
Elias sits back down, cracks another beer. “What’d you do today that was so bad anyway?”
She doesn’t answer.
He stares at the downtown skyline. “It’s a big city, isn’t it? All those lights.”
Silence.
“I like to hurt people,” Sarah says. “I wish I knew why.”
Elias rubs his eyes with both hands, taking several deep breaths. Sarah wonders if he’s having a mental breakdown of some sort.
“It’s a nice night.” He stands, walks toward the steps. “You don’t mind walking home, do you?”
Her house is ten miles away, across an entire city.
“You’re leaving me?” she says.
“Good night, Sarah.” Elias heads down the hill, gets into his pickup.
She watches him go. When the lights of the Chevy disappear, she pulls out her phone and dials a number she knows by heart. She leaves a message—the make and approximate year of Elias’s truck and the license plate.
Then she calls Walden and asks for a ride home.
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR -
I lived in a house behind the post office, a rental which was a few blocks from the town square.
The home was made from red brick. The front had a wide porch with swings at either end. An old magnolia grew in the yard along with several crepe myrtle trees.
The house and the neighborhood reminded me of where I’d grown up, a small town just south of Dallas, a Norman Rockwell setting marred only by my mother’s never-ending battle with drug addiction and my father’s bitterness toward her. He’d been the county sheriff at the time.
A little after seven in the morning, I padded into the kitchen and started the coffeemaker.
In the living room, the couch was empty except for a tangle of sheets and a rumpled pillow. Whitney’s bag sat by the coffee table. The second bedroom didn’t have a bed, only a bassinet, hence the sofa as a guest room.
By the time the coffee was ready, Whitney had returned, carrying a white paper sack. She wore a pair of yoga pants, a gray T-shirt, and athletic shoes. She was sweating, face flushed.
“I went for a run,” she said. “Picked up breakfast while I was out.”
She was breathing heavily, too, making her Boston accent more pronounced.
I looked at my watch. “Coffee’s ready.”
“There was a lot of traffic at this one store.” She opened the sack. “They were selling something called . . . kolaches?”
The middle section of Texas had been settled by central Europeans in the nineteenth century—Germans and Poles, Slovakians. Kolaches were a Czech pastry, kind of like a donut stuffed with a fruit filling.
“Thanks.” I got out some plates. Glanced at my watch again.
“Why are you checking the time so much?” She poured a cup of coffee.
Cops always notice stuff like that. Why should Whitney be any different?
I looked at the phone mounted on the kitchen wall. If the call came, it was usually at about seven fifteen.
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