The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  “I figured my son was dead,” Mrs. Willis finally said.

  “Why did you think that?” David asked.

  “He came to see me a couple of years ago. He’d been living in Austin since he dropped out of high school. He played in different bands over the years, and always told me he was going to make it big someday. He’d say, ‘You wait and see, Mom. One of these days everyone in the world will sing my songs.’ But when he showed up here the last time he was in terrible shape. It was the drugs. He used them even back in high school, I know he did, but when he came to see me I could tell his body was just about to give out. He was so frail, and his skin, it was so yellow and hard it looked like someone had tried to . . . ”

  Mrs. Willis trailed off and looked at the ceiling. Tears trickled out of her eyes and she absently wiped them away.

  “I invited him to stay with me, but he said he had to go. He was twitchy and impatient and I felt so sorry for him. I tried to touch him and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He was always a haunted young man, but this was worse. He was terrified.”

  “I’m sorry,” David said. “It must have been horrible for you. Did he say why he couldn’t stay with you?”

  Mrs. Willis reached for a box of tissues on the table beside her chair. She seemed unsure about confiding in them.

  “I’m a terrible mother.”

  “I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother,” Jonathan told her. “Whatever the reason is that he didn’t stay, I’m sure it was nothing to do with you.”

  “Well, Todd never married. But playing in a band as long as he did—in a college town, no less—I hate to say it, but I’m sure he had plenty of girls willing to give him a free ticket. As it turns out, one day some girl from Wichita saw him play and approached him after a show.

  “She was a few years behind him in school, but I guess she recognized him. From all the news coverage when Todd was a kid, you know. And later that night they did what young people are prone to do when they’re lonely and have been drinking all night.”

  Jonathan smiled, hoping to encourage Mrs. Willis, hoping he wouldn’t offend her instead.

  “As far as Todd told me, he spoke to the girl once or twice afterward but didn’t see her again for a long time. Actually, he said they texted. I guess that’s what passes for love letters and courting these days. Typing on your phone.

  “Anyway, I guess this woman called him one day and delivered unexpected news: Todd had fathered a son. The child was about ten years old at the time, and the woman finally decided she should give Todd the chance to see him. That’s why he came to visit me. To talk about what he should do.”

  Jonathan took in a hitch of breath. “Where does this woman live now?”

  “In Wichita, of course. Todd said she flunked out of the university and moved back there. I believe she works as a nurse.”

  Jonathan exchanged glances with David.

  “Mrs. Willis,” he said, “how long ago did Todd visit? Exactly?”

  She thought for a moment and then said. “I guess it’s actually been about three years. I know because I turned sixty the month before he showed up.”

  “Do you have any contact with the child?” David asked her. “Since he’s your grandson?”

  “I would have liked to. I had no other children. But after Todd left I didn’t hear from him again. He might have told his father, but Pete and I had a falling out many years ago and he will barely speak to me now. I don’t know if I’ll ever see the little boy.”

  Mrs. Willis was crying openly now. Jonathan wanted to console her, but he didn’t see how anything he said would help. He was honestly surprised she had told them this much.

  “I guess you think Todd is the accomplice you mentioned,” Mrs. Willis said.

  “Well,” David said, “we don’t know where else to look. Unless it’s Adam, which we doubt.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if it was Todd. If he’s alive, I’m sure the drugs have taken him into a very dark place. What I am surprised about is that you had to fly here to find all this out. I thought for sure he would have told you this stuff when he went to see his boy.”

  “Why would you think that?” Jonathan asked.

  “Because he planned to make a new life in Wichita. He was going to meet his son and then reconnect with his old friends. He said it was time to make things right with you boys, but it sounds like he never got the chance.”

  62

  David was back in his squalid hotel room after returning from Corpus Christi. Both Jonathan and Alicia would arrive in the next thirty minutes so they could review what they’d learned today. He poured himself some scotch and took it into the shower, where he stood for a long time thinking about Todd. If you believed Mrs. Willis, her son had returned to Wichita Falls three years ago to meet the child he’d never known and also intended to make peace with his old friends. That Todd had never contacted Jonathan didn’t mean a whole lot. It was easy to imagine, in order to function as a father, he had spent time reconnecting with the boy’s mother and trying to kick his drug habit. Maybe later he had relapsed, like three years later, which would bring them to the present day. In a compromised state Todd could have decided it was time to make his old friends pay for their childhood lies, a theory that aligned perfectly with the unknown arsonist’s chosen targets. David wasn’t clear why Todd would have approached Bobby directly and convinced him to burn down Lone Star, and it wasn’t obvious how he had managed to remain off the grid (and thus unfindable by Gholson), but these were questions David planned to ask Todd when they finally confronted him. Which, if Erik could locate the father, might be tomorrow.

  He made himself another drink while he dressed. What he needed now was a plan. He wanted to understand Todd and how he had known about the music. Like the process exactly. Was it something he could effect at will? How clear was the experience? And, of course, was he willing to drop his ridiculous revenge plot and focus on something more productive?

  There was a knock on the door. David was pleased to see Alicia had arrived first.

  “Hi, there,” he said. When they hugged, he enjoyed the warm firmness of her body. It was rare for him to look at a woman on the wrong side of thirty, but aside from a weariness around the eyes, Alicia looked much younger than her actual age.

  “I thought Jonathan would be here by now,” she said.

  “Should be any time. Want a drink while we wait?”

  “Sure.”

  He poured a healthy scotch and invited her to sit with him on the sofa, which was gray and upholstered in an abrasive fabric that had surely been invented solely to cover cheap hotel furniture.

  “So Meredith went back to California?” Alicia asked.

  “Yeah. I guess you could say we had a fight.”

  Alicia reached forward and squeezed David’s arm. “I’m sorry about that. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. We’ve been having some issues.”

  “Issues?”

  “She thinks I’m afraid of commitment. Maybe she’s right. Or maybe I’m just not in love with her.”

  Alicia digested this statement in silence.

  In the meantime, David took a drink of his scotch and said, “I’m surprised you’re still single. I doubt there are many women like you in this town.”

  “Well, thank you. I guess the problem is there aren’t that many men in Wichita, either. Like I said, I want to move away one of these days.”

  “Does Jonathan know that?”

  “Yeah, we talked about it.”

  “Would he consider moving?”

  “Why do you ask that?” Alicia said. She looked down at her fingers and fidgeted with her cuticles.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I got the feeling the other night Jonathan might be interested in you again.”

  “Yeah, I suppose he is.”

  “And how do you feel about him?”

  Before she could answer, there was another knock on the door. Jonathan was there with two pizza boxes in his hand.


  “I saw the delivery guy in the lobby,” he said, and stepped into the room. “So I just paid for the food there and brought it up myself.”

  Jonathan set the pizza on the coffee table in front of the sofa where Alicia still sat. He didn’t seem pleased to find her here already.

  “I see you guys are drinking.”

  “We are,” David told him. “Let me pour you one and then let’s dig into this pizza. I’m starving.”

  David and Alicia remained on the sofa together, and Jonathan pulled a chair up to the coffee table. Between bites the two men recalled their visit to Mrs. Willis: Todd’s experiences in Austin, the drugs, the girl from Wichita Falls who recognized him.

  “So he turned out to be a musician? I’m surprised he didn’t record all his famous songs and get himself a music contract.”

  David could tell she was joking. It was obvious she still didn’t accept the reality of Todd’s gift.

  “But the big reveal,” Jonathan said, “is that he got the girl pregnant. Todd has a son. And she didn’t tell him until the kid was like ten years old.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “The kid would be thirteen now. Which got me wondering on the way over here: What if he’s in one of my classes?”

  “Holy shit,” said Alicia.

  “The other thing,” David explained, “is Todd planned to meet with everyone when he came back to town. To make things right, she said. But he obviously never spoke to Jonathan, and we assume he didn’t talk to Adam, either.”

  “If he came back here to be with his son,” Alicia said, “he might have decided to focus on that. Like get himself sober and be a father. Sometime later he could have fallen back into the drug habit again, lost touch with reality, and then here we are.”

  David was pleased to hear his theory corroborated, and impressed by how quickly Alicia had constructed her solution with the available data. He found himself wanting to have sex with her. Like right this minute he wanted to. It wasn’t a matter of pure physical attraction, not when she was pushing forty and could not compete with the nubile skin and raw sex appeal of a young woman like Meredith. It wasn’t necessarily the scotch’s hold on him and the prospect of an empty hotel bed tonight. The reason David wanted to sleep with her arose from a strange combination of her intelligence and his own desire to take something Jonathan obviously wanted for himself.

  David could remember a time when he hadn’t been this way. As a kid he had believed everyone treated each other with respect, the way they preferred to be treated themselves. It made no sense for the world not to function in this manner, because no other alternative made logical sense.

  But certain life events had corrected these naïve beliefs out of him, and David, being a survivor, being a winner, had adapted to the world as it truly was. If he had learned anything at all from his dad, it was this: Take what you want and let everyone else fight over the rest.

  The scotch went down quickly after the pizza was gone. Bladders filled, visits to the bathroom ensued, and eventually David and Alicia were alone together again.

  He grabbed the bottle and two paper coffee cups.

  “Want to take a shot with me?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Jonathan?”

  “He seems a little drunk to me. Don’t want to encourage a hangover, you know.”

  Alicia looked at him doubtfully.

  “What about me? Aren’t I too drunk?”

  “Not yet,” he said and smiled. “But we’ll get there eventually.”

  When she agreed to take the shot, and when the scotch went down so easily, David could tell his strategy was working. When Jonathan returned and she behaved as if nothing had occurred while he was away, the plan moved even farther forward.

  But there was a break-even point where, beyond it, alcohol would sabotage the effort he had invested in his prospect. So eventually he moved to end their little party.

  “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow,” David explained. “We’ll probably know the name of the kid and his mother by then. We may know who Todd’s father is. We’ll want to visit them, and it’s probably not a good idea to do it hungover.”

  “Yeah,” Alicia said. “Plus I have to drive home, and I’m already feeling a little shaky.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” David said. “I’ll call you guys tomorrow when I hear from my friend.”

  Jonathan shook his hand and hugged Alicia. It was easy to see he was highly displeased, but in this situation, if he were to reveal how he felt, he would come off paranoid and unattractive. It wasn’t a fair fight at all.

  As David escorted Alicia through the hotel, he felt a twinge of guilt about what he was doing to Jonathan. But he pushed the thought aside. Empathy was dangerous when you were working to secure victory. It could erode your will. The way to win, he’d learned from friends in the military, was to employ sudden, overwhelming force. Often you could subdue your opponent before he ever realized there was a fight.

  As the two of them walked out of the hotel and across the parking lot, neither said a word. David could sense reluctance from Alicia, so he chose a subtle angle of attack. When they stopped at her car, he fired.

  “Want to grab a drink?”

  “Um,” she said. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Does Wichita have any good bars?”

  “Let’s try Toby’s. It’s just a few minutes away. Hop in.”

  No matter how much he achieved, David never stopped being amazed at how easily life came to him.

  63

  Jonathan knew his suspicions were borne from paranoia. Both Alicia and David were his friends, albeit from a former life and only newly reunited, and there was no way either of them could be so calloused and imprudent. Especially not a second time. Still, he could not shake the feeling that they had been flirting with each other the entire night, communication passing between them in code for which he possessed no key. Who knew what had happened when they were alone together?

  Sitting here on the bed of his hotel room, navigating the television menu past $10 pay-per-view feature films and $18 porn, Jonathan was overwhelmed with the bizarre direction his life had taken over the past couple of days. Bobby’s death, Fred Clark’s murder, his own house being destroyed by fire . . . these were the sort of events that happened to other people, that you saw on the evening news or maybe in a gritty Hollywood drama. But this wasn’t a movie. It was his life. His house was gone. His furniture and dinner plates and everything he’d ever written, it was all charred or melted or reduced to ash. Sure, tomorrow he might join David and Alicia on a hunt to find Todd’s dad, and if they were lucky, they might eventually understand why someone was attacking them in this way. But what then? What would his life look like a week from now? A month? Could he be expected to go back to teaching like nothing had happened? Maybe he would spend more time with Alicia, or maybe she would take her insurance settlement and move somewhere else like she’d always wanted.

  He looked around the room at the cheap bedding and the striped carpet and the air conditioning unit that droned like an in-room lawn-mower twenty-four hours a day and wondered how he would endure this place for the next six or eight months. Alicia was staying with her parents, but Jonathan would never dream of asking his mother to—

  Then he remembered the look on David’s face when he came to understand, in an instant, that he had misunderstood his father’s feelings toward him, and that they would never have the opportunity to reconcile. If there was ever a time for Jonathan to approach his mother, wasn’t it now? Wasn’t it possible, as Kenny dealt with the loss of his son, that her will might be softened?

  The drive to Tanglewood didn’t take long, but it was full dark by the time he approached the old house. He sat outside for a few minutes, meditating on the buzz of scotch in his brain, before summoning the nerve to approach the door. When he rang the bell, he felt like an outsider, a stranger to this place where he’d lived almost nine years.

  Kenny answered the door.

&
nbsp; “Well, hello there,” the old man said. Jonathan had not seen him in a few years, but he looked the same as he always did. Tired, haggard, drunk. “Come on in, son.”

  His mother had moved her wooden rocking chair from the bedroom to the den. She was sitting in it now, idling back and forth, and the sensation of déjà vu was so dizzying that Jonathan put his hand on the sofa to steady himself.

  “Look who decided to pay us a visit,” she said. A drink of some kind sat on a table beside her chair. She lifted the glass and sipped on it. “We gotta have a death in the family before you come calling?”

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Kenny. I’m really sorry for what happened to Bobby. I know it must be tough on you.”

  “Thank you much,” Kenny said. “Carolyn isn’t quite as sympathetic.”

  “That boy of yours has been drifting since high school. No kids, depressed wife, job going nowhere. It’s no wonder his mind flew the coop.”

  “That’s an awfully bleak way you have of looking at things,” Kenny told her.

  “I’m an awfully bleak woman.”

  They were both drunk, or close to it. Jonathan wondered if his visit here would turn out to be for nothing. Still, he forged on.

  “Kenny, would you mind if I had a few minutes alone with my mom?”

  “You can have all the minutes you want. I’ve had my fill of her this evening.”

  He walked out the back door, onto the porch, and lit a cigarette.

  Many years had passed since the summer he met Todd, since the night Jonathan talked to Alicia on the phone, yet it seemed like he was living that scene all over again. The rocking chair still ticked in a recognizable way, and the look in his mother’s eyes was as full of wrath now as it had been that night. Except for the silver in her hair and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, she even looked the same. The primary difference between now and then, Jonathan thought, was her power over him had diminished, even if its effects had not disappeared completely.

  “Mom, the reason I came here tonight is because I don’t want us to go through life not talking to each other.”