The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  Later she would claim her dreams were mainly about the tornado in ‘79, how she was afraid another giant storm would come and take them both. But Gholson suspected she was hiding something, because Sally sometimes spoke during her dreams, and she never said anything about a tornado. She did, however, mention people’s names he’d never heard of, she talked a lot about windows, and on more than one occasion she seemed to be speaking to someone named Thomas. Gholson couldn’t help but wonder if she was cheating on him, and one day he almost confronted her about it, but how could you accuse someone of infidelity because of what they said in their sleep?

  A few weeks later Sally announced she was pregnant, and the good news seemed to clear whatever had darkened her internal skies. She told Gholson the dreams had probably been caused by hormones, and her doctor concurred. Over the next seven months her nightmares were almost non-existent, and it seemed the psychological trauma had passed.

  But it had not passed.

  “Sally,” he said, “I think maybe I believe you now.”

  His wife stirred again. Her legs jerked a little under the covers. But that was all.

  The evidence bag sat in his lap. He picked it up and removed the item inside. It was a spiral-bound notebook. A notebook with all sorts of things scrawled in it, drawn in it.

  Song lyrics were written in it.

  “Honey, this journal . . . it belonged to a kid I arrested in 1983. I took it from his home that year to use as evidence during trial. I told you about this case a long time ago, how Sgt. Curtis basically ignored it, and the kid walked? Well, tonight I went to our evidence archive and managed to find this journal again. We’ve had the thing for twenty-five years.”

  Gholson reached forward and put his hand around her wrist. He hoped she might turn toward him and smile. He always hoped that, but it never happened. Three years ago his wife had finally reached the end of a long descent into mental illness, and though he could sit in this room and speak to her, she was lost. She had retreated into a world where things were not the same as the way Gholson understood them, and he missed her deeply.

  “Something is really wrong here,” he said to her. “I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ve got a feeling it’s related to what happened to you. And if I can figure all this out, maybe we can get you some help. I sure miss you a lot.”

  Sally stirred. Didn’t say anything.

  27

  The insulated cabin of David’s Gulf Stream was whisper quiet, and the interior looked more like a small hotel room than the human sardine can familiar to most air passengers. Kimberly, the flight attendant, was discreet and (at David’s request) rarely emerged to check on them.

  Across the aisle, Meredith lay sleeping on the sofa, her hair a blonde waterfall spilling toward the floor. David sat with his seatback in the full, upright position. He was working on his second Mountain Dew, struggling to hold sleep at arm’s length, because if he napped during the day he could not fall asleep at night. And sleep was difficult for David under even the best circumstances. There had been so many occasions recently where he lay awake for five or six hours, sweating into the sheets, that two months ago he’d installed an HVAC system that could chill the ambient air temperature in his master bedroom to fifty-one degrees. So far, however, the cold weather hadn’t made it easier to sleep. Its only measurable effect had been on Meredith, who was now forced to sleep under an electric blanket whenever she stayed over.

  Hidden in the console next to him was a mini flat screen monitor. He flipped it out and pushed buttons until a GPS map popped up. The plane was currently 51,000 feet above the southernmost tip of Nevada, cruising at an implausible ground speed of 613 miles per hour. More button pushing changed the channel on the flat screen until he reached the view of the underbelly camera. There was Lake Mead, narrowing into the Colorado River as the plane raced eastward. He looked out the window for a wider view and saw brown earth stretching into infinity.

  From this high up the world looked more like a map than reality. He couldn’t imagine the blasted landscape below as a place where real humans lived, and he wondered if, far above, someone else was looking at David and his $75 million plane from a similar perspective.

  Even now it was difficult to reconcile how money of such magnitude gave him license to do whatever he wanted. Fair or not, David could find a way to arrange almost anything. Buy it. Watch it. Play it. Hear it. Almost anything.

  But money couldn’t stop you from wondering if your life wasn’t really your own.

  Imagine a world in which you looked at a stock ticker and believed you could see information that should not be there. How the first time you saw the Yahoo! search page, in 1995, it seemed familiar to you somehow. Imagine yourself unsurprised by iPods and iPhones, how between 1998 and 2008 you earned just shy of $290 million by investing in the corporation that manufactured such products. These things could be no coincidence.

  If David were honest with himself, he would concede that in the past few months he had become afraid of sleep. When he put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, he heard footsteps, slow and inexorable. He couldn’t shake the feeling they were following him somewhere, that he was marching toward an unknown destination where something terrible was going to happen. And when he did finally fall asleep his dreams were often bizarre, like how he once found himself inexplicably trapped beneath a mountain of manila folders, so many he could not claw his way out of them. In another dream he had fled at inconceivable speeds down metallic-looking hallways from enormous, fuzzy balls of lightning. And several times he had watched as a giant tornado with great spiraling tentacles snatched him out of the sky, the image and sound of it so real, so lifelike, that upon wakening he could not shake the feeling that he hadn’t really been asleep at all.

  Certainly he had not been sleeping in 1983 when he listened to the tinny notes of a monophonic Casio keyboard and Todd’s warbling, off-key voice. He could remember the moment clearly, or so he believed.

  Todd’s eyes had seemed like black holes, curving infinitely upon themselves. The lyrics, he claimed, were his own.

  Nobody on the road

  Nobody on the beach

  I feel it in the air

  The summer’s out of reach

  Empty lake, empty streets

  The sun goes down alone

  I’m driving by your house

  Though I know you’re not home

  “What are you thinking about?” Meredith asked him.

  David looked over and saw her sitting up on the sofa. He hadn’t even noticed she was awake.

  “Nothing. Just the past, I guess.”

  “Missing your dad?”

  Ever since the news had come from Texas, Meredith had been waiting to rescue David from grief. She didn’t accept the indifference he felt toward his past and specifically his father. The longer David held off the inevitable tearful breakdown, the more Meredith agitated, unsure of her place in his life or on this trip.

  “No,” he said. “There’s just going to be a lot of work to do. And I might see some friends I haven’t spoken to in a long time. People who knew Bobby.”

  “You think someone might know why he killed your father?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” David said. “But it’s been so long since I’ve talked to anyone from my past that it might be nice to verify I have one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, when you live your whole adult life in a place different than where you grew up, your childhood feels like maybe it didn’t happen. Like it’s all fake.”

  “Um,” Meredith said. “Okay. So the plan is talk to the police first and then look up your old friends?”

  “I suppose. I don’t know how long this is all going to take. I’ll have to find my dad’s attorney and figure out if there’s a will, how to execute his financial and legal situation. I’ll need to arrange a burial or cremation, depending on if he had any requests or preference for that.”

  “So you don’t know any
of this? You guys didn’t speak every once in a while?”

  “I told you already I hadn’t spoken to the man in close to twenty years.”

  “Yeah, but I thought you meant you, like, barely talked. Not that you literally didn’t speak at all.”

  “Why would you think anything other than exactly what I told you?”

  “Because, David, you don’t like talking about your past. It’s hard to know how you feel about any of it.”

  “I prefer not to think about it.”

  “But he was your father. Aren’t you upset you didn’t get to say goodbye to him?”

  When David had begun to make real money, when he first moved to California, he had often fantasized about an eventual confrontation with his father. He imagined a heated exchange where he would point out how wrong his father had been about everything. The old man believed the only honest way to make a buck in the world was to earn it through sacrifice and suffering. He believed simple, hard-working folk from small towns were the backbone upon which the entire free-market economy of the United States rested. In order to prove the old man wrong, David’s plan had been to earn a better living than his father without ever having to hold an actual job. When that goal was achieved with almost no effort at all, David redefined his barometer of success and decided he should wait until he had earned a full million dollars. But in 1989 he met a man named Beny Alagem, who wanted to exploit the growing market for personal computers, and David invested a few hundred thousand dollars in the company called Packard Bell. Alagem and his buddies at California State Polytechnic cultivated relationships with Sears and Wal-Mart and within a few years became the biggest seller of PCs in the United States. By the time he was 27, David had already earned $86 million from this investment, and his father was a lifetime away. It seemed pointless to explain real wealth to a man who still believed barbecuing meat was a noble way to earn a living, who personally manned the register so he could chat with each guest. That his father referred to his customers as “guests,” that he believed a smile on every face was vital to his business, made David want to scream. In the first few years of sales, for instance, Packard Bell’s return rate had reached 17%, and customer dissatisfaction was so high it became nearly impossible to take the company public. David had earned millions anyway.

  “We looked at the world through completely different eyes,” he explained to Meredith. “He hated my life and I hated his. After my mother died we had nothing to talk about, so no, I’m not disappointed I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. If he had died slowly, like wasted away with cancer, it would have put us in the awkward position of pretending either of us cared. Honestly, this way is better.”

  “That’s awful,” Meredith said. “That’s no way to think of your father.”

  “You don’t know shit about my father.”

  Meredith looked away, clearly hurt, and he knew he was treading on thin ice with her. Which was sort of the point, wasn’t it? To find ice thin enough to fall through?

  But when she looked back at him, she had composed herself. Clearly her reserves of patience were far greater than his own.

  “I can understand if you don’t want to talk about your father. What about your friends, then? After we see the police, who will you call?”

  “When I was younger we had this club. The guy who killed my dad was the president of this club.”

  “Oh, God. So you think the attack was personal?”

  He could see why it might look that way to someone on the outside, but David was fairly certain Bobby’s problem had not been with his father. Probably the old man had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “I have no idea if it’s personal or not. I’ll guess we’ll see what the detective says.”

  “And the other guys in your club?”

  “Yeah, it will be helpful if I can find any of them. The other kids were Adam and Jonathan and Todd. Jonathan was probably my best friend, but we had a falling out after I put the moves on his girlfriend.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. She and I got to talking one day and we kissed.”

  “High drama on the Texas prairie,” Meredith said. “So does Jonathan still live around here? Will you call him?”

  “I suppose I’ll at least look him up. Adam was hard to know, and Todd moved away before I did, so I doubt he’ll be around.”

  “Well, I hope you find some closure on this trip, David. I get the feeling you have a lot of unresolved issues from your past. You’ve always been hard to know, but lately you’ve been even more distant. You haven’t been acting like yourself. And I mean before your dad was killed.”

  David wondered if the time frame she was referring to coincided with the purchase of the engagement ring. She was probably sensing his indecision toward her, and it was impressive how supportive she was being even after he had spoken to her so harshly. Either she was afraid of killing the golden goose or she really did care about him. The problem was he couldn’t tell the difference.

  “I get the feeling,” Meredith added, “that you knew something bad was going to happen before it actually did.”

  28

  An hour and a half later they were on the ground in Wichita Falls. L David rented a silver BMW SUV and called the detective, who was available to meet right away. As they drove into town, he could feel the city sucking the life right out of him. The oppressive heat, the flat topography, the familiar landmarks and poorly-maintained expressway—these were things David had left behind for a reason.

  They drove over a bridge and Meredith pointed across the river.

  “Is that the ‘Wichita Falls?’”

  “Sort of.”

  “Why does it look like that? Why is it beside the river?”

  David smiled wryly. “The old falls weren’t much to speak of, and the river absorbed them a long time ago. So in the 80s we ‘Put the Falls Back in Wichita Falls.’”

  “I see.”

  “Willard Scott came with the Today show.”

  “And you told me this place was the middle of nowhere.”

  David smiled and kept driving. According to his GPS receiver, the police station was less than five minutes away. As they approached, he called information to ask for Jonathan Crane’s phone number. When there was no listing, he called Erik, a friend of his who worked for the NSA, and asked him for help.

  “I’ve got a cell number here for a Jonathan M. Crane in Wichita Falls, Texas,” said Erik almost immediately. “Schoolteacher. That sound like him?”

  “Maybe,” David said. “Let’s have the number.”

  Meredith seemed amused by this. “So you just call your buddy and get someone’s cell phone number in three seconds?”

  “Erik is good like that.”

  “Must be nice to have whatever you want at the snap of your fingers.”

  “That’s what I pay him for,” David growled.

  They drove for a bit longer and Meredith didn’t say anything else. Her silence grew pregnant with meaning.

  “David, what are we doing?” she finally blurted.

  “The police station is just up here on the right.”

  “No, what are we doing? Are we going anywhere, or are we just passing the time?”

  One of life’s great contradictions was how worthless it felt to discuss your relationship with a woman, and how the one thing that could silence her was something you couldn’t bring yourself to do. The longer she went on, the more he wanted to flush her $740,000 engagement ring down the toilet.

  “I know you don’t like talking about it,” Meredith said, “but we have to sometime. And all you ever do is change the subject.”

  “I enjoy being with you,” he answered. “I think you enjoy being with me. Why do we have to be going anywhere?”

  “Because I can’t wait on you forever. I want to have children someday.”

  “I’ve told you I’m open to marriage. Why do you have to push so hard?”

  �
�Push so hard? If I even bring up Christmas plans you freak out. You’re thirty-nine years old, David. You can’t live like this forever.”

  “I have an expiration date. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Of course not. But you’ve said before you want to have kids. Do you want to start when you’re fifty? Do you want to be nearly seventy when they graduate from high school?”

  A few months ago, to free himself from a conversation similar to this one, David had suggested he would consider having children someday. Now he wished he could reach into the past and punch himself in his own fat mouth.

  “I’m going to be thirty-one in a month,” Meredith added. “It’s not so great when women try to have kids after thirty-five.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I know you can’t wait on me forever. I think we should sit down and have a serious talk.”

  “What is there to talk about? Do you want to be with me? Or do you want to let me go and look for someone else?”

  “I want to be with you.”

  “Is it a prenup thing? Are you worried about money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I don’t want us to have a prenup,” Meredith said. “But I will if it’ll make things easier for you.”

  “We don’t need a prenup.”

  She smiled a little. Her eyes glistened with tears. “I appreciate that.”

  “Sure,” he said. Though if they were ever married he would definitely insist on a prenup.

  In California, municipal buildings were erected tall and with personality, but this police station was a squat tan and white rectangle adjacent to the freeway. The parking lot was literally under the overpass.

  “So far,” Meredith said, “I am very impressed with Texas. Flat and hot and angry. No wonder everyone here carries a gun.”

  They climbed a few steps and went inside the station, where they were greeted by a hurricane of cold air and a fat woman behind a desk. The woman was wearing the largest police uniform David had ever seen. On her neck was a mole or a skin tag the size of a marble.