She ain’t mad or nothing. I can see that. She ain’t appalled that we destroyed her house. In fact, as she holds her eyes on mine, I can see she’s maybe thought about doing this herself once or twice, maybe came back here for that very reason.
I say, “You’re Lurlene, right?”
She steps up on the back of the fridge, arms out for balance, just one toe up there, her other leg out in the air. She nods, looking down at the heating coils. “And you’re Mister Quarterback man, ain’t you? East Lake BMOC, all that shit?” She’s looking at the fridge below her, a small smile creeping up her thin face, and she draws shit out in that Texas woman’s way, makes it sound as wide as a field.
“Ma’am.” I lift an imaginary Stetson off my head.
The way she’s doing that balancing act atop the overturned fridge just kills me for some reason. There’s four strange boys standing in her house, and the house looks like them boys rolled a grenade through it, but she’s up there doing her ballerina act and somehow taking control of the situation by acting like there ain’t really much of a situation to speak of. She just sucks the breath from my chest, I’ll tell you what.
She looks out past my shoulder at the living room and whispers, “Dang. You all fucked this place up.”
Terry stutters. He says, “We didn’t mean to, miss.”
She hops off the fridge, lands beside me, but keeps her eyes on Terry. “Didn’t mean to? Boy, I’d hate to see what you could do, you had a mind to.”
Terry laughs and drops his eyes.
“Any liquor left?” She moves into the living room and I follow.
“Sure.”
“I’d like me a tequila,” she says, moving toward the bar, about the only thing left standing. “And then we can all go to work on the upstairs. What you say?”
SOMETIMES, AFTER THE sun’s gone down and Daddy’s been sitting out back all day drinking Lone Stars and adding some sour mash to the mix too, he’ll end up looking at his shitty house and sloping back porch and hard Texas dirt and he’ll cry without a sound. He’ll sit there, not moving or shaking or nothing, just sit rock-still, his face leaking.
Says to me once, he says, “I’d known this was what it was all about, boy, know what I’d a done?”
I’m maybe ten. I say, “No, Daddy.”
He takes a long pull on a can, tosses it aside, and belches. “Died earlier.”
WE’RE UP IN Mr. and Mrs. Biddet’s bedroom, taking a butcher knife to the big, fluffy, four-poster bed, just me and Lurlene. Terry and the Lewis brothers are in Lyle’s room and by the sounds of it, they’re tearing that place down to the fucking studs. For some reason, I’m not as mad at Lyle as I was when we came here, hell, as I was the whole winter and spring. I’m still mad, though. Madder than ever maybe. But it’s something besides Lyle I’m mad at, something I can’t put a name to. Something out there that hulks over the flat land like a dinosaur shadow, something bigger than Lyle and bigger than Texas, maybe. Something huge.
Lurlene’s done tore hell out of all four pillows, and it hits me as the room fills with feathers, a blizzard of them swirling between me and Lurlene, sticking to her hair and eyelashes, me spitting them off my tongue—it hits me and I say it:
“How do we know when they’re coming back?”
Lurlene laughs at me and blows at some swirling feathers and arches her back to catch some of the blizzard on her throat.
“They’re gone down to Corpus, boy. Hell,” she says, drawing it out the same way she drew out shit, teasing the word, “they won’t be back till late Monday. They go every weekend come summer. Them and their precious Lyle.”
“Gone down to Corpus,” I say.
“Gone down to Corpus!” She shrieks and hits me with what’s left of a pillow, the down spilling into my shirt.
Then she drops to all fours and crawls across the bed to me and says, “You think this is a rich house, boy?”
I nod, my throat drying up, her green eyes so soft and close.
“This ain’t nothing,” she says. “How’d you like to go to a house four times this size? Do four times the damage?”
Seems like I forget how to speak for a minute. Lurlene and her green eyes and too-thin face and body have slid into me somehow, under the flesh, under the bone. I’m about certain I’ve never seen any creature so beautiful as this girl with the butcher knife in her hand and that crazed laugh in her pupils. You can see hope living in her—anxious, lunatic hope, but pure and kind too, wanting only to be met halfway.
She says, “Huh, boy? You want to?”
I nod again. Ain’t doing much with myself anyway, and suddenly, I’m pretty sure I’ll follow Lurlene anywhere she says. Bust up anything she wants. The whole goddamn world if she asks me nice.
ABOUT FIVE YEARS back, we break down on Route 39, just me and my mother, and we’re standing there in the white heat with the dirt, dying of thirst for a hundred flat miles in every direction and Daddy’s piece-of-shit truck gone gasping into a coma beside us, and my mother puts a hand over her eyebrows to scan the emptiness and she looks like any fight left in her just up and died with the truck. She looks like she can remember a time before she got where she is now, and all those different who-she-could-have-beens fork out like trails before us, branching off and branching off into all that Texas dust until there’s so many of them they just have to fade away to nothing or else she’ll go blind trying to keep count.
Her voice is dry and torn when she speaks, and it takes a couple breaths to get the words out:
“Remember, Sonny, times like these—remember that somewhere there’s someone worse off than you. You’re always richer than someone.” She tries for a smile as she looks over at me. “Right?”
POORER, I’M THINKING as we get back in the Cougar and follow Lurlene’s directions to this other house. You’re always poorer than someone. And that poor is a high fence keeping you out of all the places other people can go. Only places you get to go are the shitty ones nobody else wants to visit.
Always poorer, I’m thinking, and then we reach this house Lurlene’s directing us to, and I’m suddenly thinking, Maybe not.
Because whoever owns this house may not be poorer than anyone. Whoever owns this house may be the richest person in the world.
The front lawn is bigger than East Lake’s football field. The house behind it is sprawling and beige with a red tile roof and it seems to spread itself from end to end like a god.
We come up to a tall, wrought-iron gate stretched between two beige brick columns that match the house. The gate is a good twenty feet high, and even with all the tequila-and-beer courage I got from the Biddets’, I can tell you I feel nothing but relief when I see that gate and realize we ain’t getting in. I see it in Terry’s face too, even though he says, “So now what do we do?”
Lurlene’s sitting on the console between us, hunched forward, skinny arms wrapped around her knees. She takes a last swig from a bottle of Cuervo and hands it to Terry. I’m ready for her to say, “Drive through it.” I’m ready for her to say anything. I might not like it. But I’m ready.
All she says, though, is, “Could I get by, kind sir?” and slithers over my lap and out the door.
She saunters up to the gate in her white boots and tarnished schoolgirl skirt and behind me, Vaughn Lewis says, “I’m fucked up.”
“Me too,” his brother says.
I look at Terry. He shrugs, but I can see the booze swimming in him, making his eyelids thicken and squiggle.
Lurlene finds this box sticking out of the column on our left. There’s numbers on it, and her fingers dance over them and then she’s heading back to the car as the gate begins to open, just starts sliding back into the bushes behind the column on our right. Lurlene hops in and sits in my lap, tosses an arm around my neck and looks out through the windshield as the gate goes all the way back.
She tells Terry, “Time to put it in ‘drive.’”
THERE’S A PICTURE of my parents taken just before they got mar
ried. It’s 1949 and my daddy’s wearing his uniform. It’s all neat and sharply creased, and his hair is short and slicked back, and he has all his teeth. He’s beaming this white, white smile, holding my mother so tight with one arm that she looks about to bust in half. She’s smiling too, though, and it’s a real smile. She was happy then. Happier than I’ve ever seen her. She’s young. They’re both young. They look younger than me. Behind them is a chain-link fence with a sign on it that says FORT BENNING, GA. My mother’s dress is white with a pattern of what looks like black swallows on it, those swallows soaring across her body.
And, man, she’s happy. She’s happy, and my daddy has all his teeth and all his fingers.
LURLENE GETS US in the house the same way she got us through the gate. Her fingers dart across these numbers on a gizmo beside the front door and then we’re inside.
We walk around for a while. Ain’t none of us, except Lurlene maybe, ever seen a house this big. Ain’t sure any of us knew there was a house this big. The front hall has two staircases that meet at a curve up top. It’s got a chandelier the size of a fucking Cadillac and all these vases that’re taller than any of us, including Terry, and the walls leading up the staircases are lined with paintings in gold, frilly frames.
On the second floor, there’s a ballroom, Lord’s sake. And past that, a room with a long bar and a pool table twice as big as the one in the Biddets’ house with these leather sacks for pockets. In the guy’s study there’s a desk you could sleep on and never worry about rolling off. There’s another bar in there and bookcases lining the walls and the ceilings go up a good fifteen feet and there are ladders on rollers for the cases. I go up to that desk and there’s a picture of this guy with his wife and two kids and another of him on a golf course and another of him, Jesus Christ, shaking hands with Lyndon Baines, himself. The King of Texas. Man who walked away from the Big Job and said, Fuck it. I ain’t no president. I’m a Longhorn. You all fight the war on poverty and the war against the yellow folk, I’m going home.
I say to Lurlene, “Who are these folks?”
Lurlene sits up on the corner of the desk. She picks up the picture with the guy and LBJ. She holds it by the corner in one hand, her wrist bending back, and for a second, I think she’s going to throw it across the room.
She puts it back, though. Right where she picked it up from. Exactly. Maybe it’s all the dark oak in there or the red-wine leather chairs, or all those thick book spines staring down at us. Else, maybe it’s just LBJ staring out from that photograph, at us, but I know all of a sudden that we ain’t going to touch this room. Ain’t going to do a damn thing to it. The rest of the house, maybe, but not this room.
Lurlene says, “I go to school with the daughter.”
I look at the pudgy guy with LBJ. “His daughter?”
“She was my friend at Saint Mary’s.” She fingers the hem of her skirt. She looks up at the high ceilings and shrugs. “She ain’t my friend no more, though. She ain’t nothing but shit.”
She hops off the desk and I can see that her eyes are wet, not much, but wet just the same, and a little red. She places her palm on my chest as she passes and gives me a peck on the cheek.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go downstairs. See how much destruction your friends done.”
MY GRADUATION, MY mother gives me twenty dollars she’s managed to tuck away. She tells me to go have some fun, I been getting too serious.
Daddy gives me his old truck. Same one broke down on my mother and me that time. Says to me: She’s all mine.
I spend a week patching that old bitch together, blow the whole twenty dollars in junkyards on hoses and bushings, a distributor cap.
The afternoon I get it running, I take a few of my father’s Lone Stars and chase a red sky across miles of scrub gone purple with the dusk. I pull over in the middle of all this nothing, and I sit on the hood, and I drink down those beers one after the other until the world’s gone dark around me. And I wonder what the fuck’s going to become of me. I wonder what I’m supposed to do now. Got me a useless truck and a useless high school diploma. I should be like my parents were in that 1949 picture, all smiling and hopeful and shit. But I ain’t. What’s waiting for me out there, out past the dark and the whole of Texas, ain’t nothing I’m looking forward to. And what’s waiting behind me don’t amount to anything neither but what stole those smiles off my parents’ faces.
I lean back on the hood. I look up at the stars. I look up at the black, black sky. It’s so quiet. And I think about what my daddy said about how he would have died earlier had he known what the world was going to bring. And I sort of get that now. I sort of do.
To die. But not by my own hand. And not by some yellow man’s neither. But somehow. In a big blaze that’ll light up the dark sky. Something like that.
COMING DOWN THE stairs, me and Lurlene are wondering just what the other boys have been getting up to, imagining a big rich house turned into a squatter’s shack in the fifteen minutes we’ve been gone, but when we turn into the living room past that gigantic entry hall, we find Terry and the Lewis brothers just standing around, fidgeting, and I can tell by the cushions on the three different couches in there that they ain’t even tried to sit down. They just been standing there the whole time, hands in their pockets or wiping against their jeans, and the moment I walk in, Terry says, “We don’t like it here.”
I say, “How come?”
He shrugs, his eyes wide. He’s kind of crouching a bit, shoulders tensed like he expects the ceiling to come crashing down on him. “Don’t know. Just don’t. Ain’t no place to set.”
I look around at all the couches and antique chairs. “Ain’t no place to—?”
“We just don’t like it,” Vaughn Lewis says. “We just don’t like it at all.”
Vaughn too is all tensed up, his eyes darting around, like he expects something with teeth and claws to charge him.
“We’re fixing to go,” Terry tells me.
“I want to look around some more,” I say, though I’m not sure I do.
“Come on,” Lurlene says. “We got some damage to do!”
Terry shakes his head. “Ain’t wanna touch nothing in this here house.”
I look at Vaughn and Morton. They both look ready to dive out the window.
And I can feel it too. Ain’t nothing here but an empty house, but it’s some mean house. Some big, mean, icy house. Too clean, too gleaming, ready to swallow us all.
Terry says, “We gone git, son.” He steps up to me, meets my eyes. “Got to git. Got to.”
I say, “Okay. Git then.”
“You coming?”
I look at Lurlene. The hope in those green eyes has gotten bigger and more desperate.
I say, “No. You boys git along. I’ll catch up.”
“You sure?”
I meet his eyes and nod. “We’ll see you.”
They each give Lurlene a shy nod as they leave, but they can’t get out of there quick enough. Seems half a second after they close the door behind them, I hear the Cougar roar out of there.
“The gate,” I say.
Lurlene shakes her head. “You on the inside, it opens by itself as you approach it. You on the outside…” She shrugs and walks around the living room looking at stuff.
I wander into a den and open up a gun cabinet. I look at all these beautiful shotguns with carvings on the barrels and in the stocks, but I don’t touch them. I go to the next cabinet and look at the handguns. I find one I like. It’s a black Walther with a bone white handle. Fits in my hand real nice. I drop the magazine into my palm, even though I can tell from the weight that it’s loaded. I slide the magazine back in. It’s the first thing in the house I’ve touched, and for a second I see my mother with her hand over her eyes as she looks off across miles of scrub and dead land, and I put that Walther behind my back and walk out of the room.
Me and Lurlene wander the house for the next hour and I don’t think we see but half of it. She shows me t
he scars on her wrists at one point, tells me it wasn’t but a “cry out.” Still, she says, all that blood on the bathroom tile. Like you never saw, she says. Like you’d never want to.
We find a bedroom that’s got its own TV and a walk-in closet and dolls piled to the ceiling atop this wide dresser. There’s a hi-fi in there and pictures on the walls of Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman and Paul McCartney, and I know we’re in the girl’s room, the one who used to be Lurlene’s friend.
We stand in the doorway and I say, “You want to bust it up?”
And Lurlene says, “I want to.”
I start to walk in. “Then let’s—”
She pulls me back. She sags into me. She says, “No,” in a sad crush of a voice.
I hold her as we wander around some more and eventually work our way back downstairs to the kitchen. There’s a staircase off the kitchen, kind of tucked away by the pantry, and we follow it down. We find a bedroom down there with a tiny bathroom and its own small kitchen. About the only small things I’ve seen in this whole house. The walls in the bedroom are bare, but there’s women’s clothes in the closet. Not the kind of clothes you expect to see in a house like this, kind of threadbare, Woolworth labels and the like.
The bed is small too, and we lie down on top of the covers, and for some reason, I feel comfortable for the first time since I entered this monster. I lie there with Lurlene and after a while she says, “How come we couldn’t do nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
“How come we didn’t even try?”
I say it again: “I don’t know.”
“She talked trash about me at school,” she says. “Told people I was cheap. Made fun of my clothes. Said I was common.” She slides an arm across my chest and holds on tight. “I’m not common. I’m not shit.”
I kiss her forehead and hold her.
“You still gone beat up Lyle?”
“No,” I say.
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