The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  “You’re the one who stopped calling on your own mother.”

  “Yes, but do you understand why?”

  She drank from her glass again, this time consuming most of what was left.

  “I suppose because you don’t care for it much.”

  “Mom, I get the feeling you couldn’t care less about me. That after the tornado you just gave up on everything.”

  “Such melodrama. Poor ol’ Johnny, nobody loves him.”

  “Make fun if you want. But if you do care about me, you have a strange way of showing it.”

  His mother didn’t respond to this.

  “Do you remember, a long time ago, when you heard me talking on the phone to a girl? Her name was Alicia and I asked her to be my girlfriend. Do you remember that?”

  “I do. Wasn’t my finest hour as a parent.”

  “Yeah, and what you did stuck with me a lot longer than an hour. I grew up thinking all women were like you. Half the reason I married Karen was so I didn’t have to be single anymore.”

  “Your generation blames everything on their parents,” she answered. “Why don’t you take some personal responsibility for once?”

  Jonathan stood up and turned to leave. “I can see this was a waste of time.”

  “Johnny, wait.”

  He stopped walking but didn’t turn around.

  “I’m sorry for doing that. You have to understand how hard it was when your father died. I didn’t see how I could ever raise you alone. Kenny felt the same way when he lost Lynette.”

  Now Jonathan turned around.

  “If that’s true, why weren’t you closer to me? I was just a kid and you were an adult. I needed you.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. But I needed someone, too.”

  “But once you met Kenny—”

  His mom finished the rest of her drink and looked at him carefully.

  “Let me tell you something. I’ve never told you this and I’ll never speak of it again. But the day of the tornado, your father had just closed the biggest business deal of his life. He agreed to terms with a wealthy oil man, and the contract was going to make us a little bit rich ourselves. Your father had worked hard his whole life, and I helped this family scrimp and save and keep our heads above water. The two of us were finally about the reap the benefits of all that sacrifice.”

  She lowered her voice and looked outside at Kenny. Kenny smiled a sarcastic smile.

  “That man came over and ruined everything. If it wasn’t for him, your father would have survived the same as we did. And if you want to get down to brass tacks, the reason Kenny showed up at our house that day is because you were friends with his son. So maybe I blamed you for what happened to your father.”

  “That seems fair. How could I have known about Dad’s business? About the tornado? I missed him as much as you did, you know.”

  “There’s no way you could have missed your father as much as me. I loved that man. We shared a bond most people will never understand.”

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a bond between mother and child? Didn’t you ever realize his death wasn’t my fault?”

  His mother raised the empty glass to her lips and tried to drain more liquid from it. Then she reached behind the end table and retrieved a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. She poured herself a shot’s worth and downed it in one swallow. It was obvious she was far drunker than Jonathan had realized.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “Usually in a marriage it’s the wife who wants children, but in my case it was the other way around. And if I hadn’t conceded to your father on that point, he might still be alive. So maybe it’s my fault he’s gone.”

  Jonathan stared at her. He couldn’t decide if it was the alcohol or simple meanness that produced venom from her mouth.

  “Honestly,” she said, “this is stupid. You coming here to make amends, me trying to apologize for what I did. Could I have been nicer to you? Sure, I could’ve. But I wasn’t. I had a tough time, you had a tough time, and that’s how the world is. There isn’t anything we can do it about it, anyway.”

  “I’m sure that’s how it seems when you’re a drunk old woman. I came here to salvage a relationship with you, and you seem hell bent on ensuring it doesn’t happen.”

  His mother laughed hatefully. “You must have figured it would be a nice, heartwarming scene, something out of a movie, the two of us reconnecting after all this time. But that’s not how the world works. This is all going to go a certain way, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. So let me count the final hours and drink in peace.”

  Jonathan understood, finally, after all these years, that he’d lost both his parents in the tornado. One had taken longer to die than the other, but he’d lost both of them just the same.

  “Go ahead and kill yourself if that’s what you want,” he said. “You won’t see me again.”

  “The water is freezing, son, and there aren’t enough boats. I don’t want to be around when the ship finally sinks.”

  “You’ve lost your mind.”

  “Not yet,” his mother said. “But I’m doing my best.”

  64

  It was late, nearly midnight, and Daniels had gone home hours ago despite the ominous email that had arrived in Gholson’s inbox this afternoon. Daniels’ position was there was nothing to be done about such a sweeping threat to the city, and that if he didn’t get some sleep he wouldn’t be worth shit tomorrow.

  Gholson wished he could sleep.

  The email was bad news, but he was forced to concede that Daniels was correct: A threat to the entire city was too general to address directly. He had forwarded the email and the contextual information about this week’s events to Homeland Security, which was protocol, but he doubted the Feds would elevate the terror threat based on some crazy moron in Wichita Falls. The only tangible action to take at this point was to remind the beat cops to keep their eyes open for anything unusual and hope the arsonist wasn’t in possession of a suitcase nuke.

  The spiral notebook he’d found in the evidence archive, however, was more than bad news. It was a mystery that rattled Gholson’s confidence in himself, in the world at large. He had not yet shared the notebook with his partner because he was afraid Daniels would accuse him of forging it. After all, the content inside was impossible. The lyrics were impossible.

  The lyrics for thirty-three songs.

  A couple of these tunes had been released to the world when Todd was still a kid, either during or before the summer when he had been apprehended for arson, but the rest of them had been recorded and released after that time.

  There were two ways Todd could have known about these songs so far in advance: 1) The kid was one of the most successful (and private) songwriters of all time and had submitted these songs to a number of artists who turned them into popular radio hits, or 2) Todd had known about the songs before they were written and released in some other, extraordinary way.

  Option 2 was preposterous, but so was Option 1. When you were dealing with two impossible ideas, and one of them had to be true, it made sense to choose the likelier one.

  Right now he was leaning toward Option 2.

  Gholson was a Christian man. He didn’t make it to church all the time, but he went often enough to believe in the Savior, to be confident in the Lord and all His glory. In fact, the primary reason Gholson had chosen to pinch Crane for information instead of Adam Altman was because Altman was a member of his church, an upstanding, well-known member of the community, and Gholson didn’t see any reason to fuck with the guy. Crane did not enjoy the same luxury, so he had been the target of Gholson’s confusion.

  But Crane was either clueless or knew about the music and was unwilling to talk about it.

  There was no question about the reality of the song lyrics. Even though Gholson wasn’t a fan of popular music—he preferred old-school country like George Jones and Jerry Reed—he was nonetheless able to use the Internet to pin down the source of the lyrics. They
were a varied lot: Don Henley, U2, Depeche Mode, Madonna, Pearl Jam, Coldplay, Nirvana, Alanis Morissette, Def Leppard, and so on.

  Gholson had taken possession of this journal in 1983 during the original arson investigation. There was certainly no disputing that fact. And if Option 2 was the correct choice, then the idea of time was different from what Gholson had been taught. An idea like that made you wonder what was real in this world.

  An idea like that was enough to frighten a man like Gholson, who preferred his reality old-fashioned, thank you very much.

  Was it more important to solve the case or to understand the mystery of the song lyrics? Whoever was sending the emails knew the answer to the mystery, Gholson felt sure, which meant solving the case would likely take care of everything. And the purpose of his job, remember, was to protect the citizens of Wichita Falls by removing criminals from the street. But since the first day of this case, when Alicia Ulbrecht’s house had been torched, Gholson had felt a personal connection to the events that transcended police work. He felt like he was meant to be involved directly. A crazy part of him even wondered if the reason he had remained in the same job for this long was so he would be here now to lead this investigation. That was ridiculous, of course it was, but so was the possibility that Todd Willis and Gholson’s own wife had suffered at different times from the same rare illness.

  If he understood what had happened to Todd, if he could talk to the man himself, would that provide Gholson with more information about Sally’s condition? Was it possible to help her somehow?

  Gholson didn’t know, but he sure as hell was going to find out.

  At such a late hour he was the only one left in this part of the station. Many lights were off and his computer monitor was a bright rectangle in front of him. The most recent email was centered in a small window.

  EMPTY LAKE, EMPTY STREETS IS WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THIS CITY WHEN I’M DONE WITH IT. I’M GOING TO WIPE WICHITA FALLS OFF THE MAP WITH A DISASTER OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS. I HOPE YOU’RE READY, DETECTIVE.

  Tomorrow, Gholson would go talk to his wife again, if for no other reason than to hear her voice. Maybe she would acknowledge him this time. Even if she didn’t, it seemed likely something was going to change soon.

  He had the feeling something big was coming.

  65

  Now it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, and Adam couldn’t sleep. During the past hour he’d gone into the kitchen for water, peed, watched a few minutes of television in the living room, returned to the kitchen to eat some deli turkey, heated a cup of milk in the microwave, peed again, and was finally headed back to bed. Once he was under the covers he would lie there until either he fell asleep or sunlight peeked through the windows, because distracting himself had clearly done nothing to make him sleepy.

  On the way to the master bedroom he stopped to check on Bradie. She had kicked aside her blue blanket, and was now sleeping on her back, arms and legs stretched out as if she were ready to embrace someone. He picked up her favorite stuffed animal—a zebra striped pink and black—and cuddled it against her. Bradie stirred and clutched the zebra, but didn’t wake up. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and shut the door behind him.

  Adam padded down the dark hallway, opened his bedroom door, and snuck into bed. Rachel was breathing steadily. He didn’t want to wake her because over the past few nights his wife had made a point of touching him more than normal, had slept with her arm draped over him and her face near his. Last night she had even kissed him with an open mouth. These physical gestures were signals: The urge to make love was approaching again.

  When they were a young couple this urge had lived on a predictable and short cycle, like the rising and setting of the sun. But now that he and Rachel were more mature, the urge had changed into something like a comet’s orbit, an erratic celestial body that appeared rarely, without warning, and then retreated deep into space again.

  Which was perfectly fine with Adam. He had never been that comfortable with lovemaking in the first place, and as their encounters grew infrequent, he became less and less familiar with intimacy. His discomfort for the act itself intensified. These days he dreaded the comet’s appearance.

  He lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to clear his desktop of open applications. He tried not to think about dirt on his shoes or flames glowing in the night or exposed concrete foundations divided in half by deep, shadowy cracks. He didn’t think about his parents catching him with Evelyn and he didn’t think about Joe Henreid and he certainly didn’t think about the way his sister’s face had been caved in by a bloodstained brick.

  Then something fell against his crotch. Something like a hand. It reached blindly for his underwear and squeezed.

  “Hey, sexy.”

  There was no possibility of denying her. The argument that would follow if he didn’t indulge Rachel would be far worse than intercourse itself. So Adam turned and put his hand on her waist, gently, to give himself the chance to warm up to the idea. But Rachel pulled off his briefs and jerked on his penis as if she were playing a video game.

  “God, I’ve been missing you,” she said, and rolled on top of him. Her panties were gone, and she rubbed against him, already wet.

  Adam looked up at the shadow straddling him. In this absence of light he could almost imagine she was someone else, a woman with no virtue he could justly defile. He imagined meeting her in a bar somewhere. Imagined buying her a drink and going back to her cruddy apartment, pushing her onto the unmade bed, where she would let him rip off her panties and dive headfirst into the warm and forbidden place between her legs.

  He was stiffer now, stiff enough that Rachel lifted him a little and slid him inside her. He clutched her waist, and gradually his grip drifted toward the cleft of her butt.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. “Making love to me?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Tell me you like it,” she said in a full voice.

  “I like it.”

  “Make noise. Baby, I want to know you like it.”

  Adam didn’t enjoy being loud during lovemaking. He didn’t want to grunt with her, speak stupid, clichéd phrases to her. He had learned to be quiet a long time ago and that’s how he liked it.

  Of course he might have said all kinds of indecent things to some anonymous slut he met in a bar, but he’d never met an anonymous slut in a bar.

  The conflicts he felt about sex made Adam wonder if he were mad. He could not resolve his unconditional love for his family, or his special relationship with the Lord, with the pornographic images that spooled out like high-resolution IMAX film whenever certain urges called attention to themselves. It felt almost as if he were two separate entities: a low-brained, dim-witted animal and a loving, spiritual servant of the Lord. He hated himself for fantasizing about sinful sex, for coveting some imagined woman over his own wife, and yet he could not climax otherwise. Often, on nights like this, Adam fantasized about running from the house, screaming into the night, never to return.

  “I wish you’d make more noise,” Rachel said when it was over. “Or say something. When you’re so quiet it makes me think you’re not enjoying it.”

  “I didn’t want to wake Bradie.”

  “Her room is on the other end of the house. She can’t hear us from there. We’ve talked about this.”

  “I’d like to hear your explanation one night when we get too loud and she shows up in the doorway.”

  Rachel turned over, facing away from him. Adam lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. After a few minutes his wife’s breathing became deeper and more gradual. She twitched twice and was asleep.

  Adam, by contrast, lay there for minutes that swelled into hours, staring into the darkness of the ceiling, not imagining that his life was a great mass of spinning water, a whirlpool swirling into a giant drain, not hearing the shrill sucking sound as the world devoured him alive.

  66

  Somehow David was both hungover and to a degree still dr
unk, and he was distantly aware that his phone had buzzed during the night, at least once and maybe a couple of times. Because he hadn’t bothered to text or call Meredith since she left, some of the messages were probably hers. And hopefully Erik had texted him with information about Todd’s father and son. There wouldn’t be much to do today otherwise. Without a plan to locate Todd, he’d be forced to deal with Alicia again, and Jonathan, and suffer through more earnest conversations about the impossible music, about what it all meant.

  In David’s experience, people who sat around debating the meaning of life usually didn’t spend much time living it, and they certainly didn’t have much say about how things actually worked. You couldn’t get elected to office these days by being a thinker, and you certainly couldn’t accumulate the kind of wealth that mattered if you spent much time in existential space. To succeed in life you were required to actually do something proactive, and since everyone was going to end up dead in the end, what was the incentive to consider the point of the journey? This was why David was more interested in partnering with Todd than considering the philosophical implications of his apparent ability.

  At the edge of his peripheral vision he saw a foot protruding from under the bed sheet. The foot seemed to be moving, sliding toward him, and eventually made contact with his leg. When it did, a hand also emerged from the sheets and reached for his arm.

  “How can you stand it out there?” a voice asked. “It’s like below zero.”

  In a world without consequence, David would have used his own foot to shove the girl out of his ratty bed and onto the floor. Unfortunately, this was no such world.

  “I like it cold.”

  “Yeah, well last night you told me you wanted it hot.”

  Her hand let go of his arm and reached instead for his dick. David pushed her away.

  “What’s your problem, man? You some kind of crank in the morning?”

  He couldn’t remember her name, but that wasn’t the worst. Until she pulled back the covers and showed her face, David couldn’t be sure what she looked like, either.