The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  No one except David. With Thomas at his side, he could wait for the crisis to bottom out in early 2009 and then select financial products that would propel his fortune into the stratosphere on the wave of the stock market recovery. He suspected, in five or six years, he could grow his net worth by a factor of ten. Maybe more, depending on what Thomas could tell him. It was imperative to have the kid flown out of here as soon as possible. All David needed was a little rest, a little time to marshal his resources, and then he would act. If Alicia and Jonathan wanted to fret over what might happen in Wichita Falls tomorrow, that was their business. He was getting the hell out of here.

  “Gholson might think we’re nuts,” Jonathan said. “But he might not. At the very least, if he knew Todd had a son, if he knew where that son lived, maybe he would have someone watch the kid’s house. Just in case.”

  David wanted to reach across the center console and smack Jonathan in the mouth.

  Instead, he said, “You think Gholson is going to spy on some kid? Because the little guy threatened to take down the whole city?”

  “It’s some kind of lead,” Jonathan said. “Better to act on something than sit around doing nothing, right?”

  “Fine,” David said, and reached for his cell phone. “I’ll call him.”

  72

  Sally was looking out the window when Gholson opened the door. The way she was sitting there, perched on the chair, she could have been any normal woman admiring the view of Lake Wichita.

  But she didn’t turn around when he walked in. She didn’t respond when he called her name.

  “Looks nice out there, doesn’t it? Too bad it was a hundred and eight degrees this afternoon.”

  Gholson had leveraged his badge to arrange a Sunday meeting with Dr. Young, which was unethical behavior and something he would never dream of doing under normal circumstances. But he needed to understand the relationship between Sally’s illness and a similar condition suffered by Todd Willis many years ago, and this was the only way he could do so on short notice.

  Dr. Young had only seen Todd once, for two weeks in 1986. This information was included in the criminal case file, but the details of Young’s treatment were not. If Gholson were here on behalf of the investigation, he would have requested a subpoena to open Todd’s medical file. But since this inquiry was of a personal nature, he planned to lean on the relationship he had built with Dr. Young and appeal to the man’s good nature.

  Gholson wondered what Sally saw when she looked out the window. According to Dr. Young, there was nothing wrong with her ability to see or hear or employ any of her five senses, but once the signals reached her conscious mind there was some kind of roadblock, either in her perception of reality or her ability to render reactions to it.

  The more Gholson thought about it, the more his visit here seemed like a waste of time, and yet any moment Dr. Young would knock on the door. What could Gholson possibly say to him? He’d brought along the journal, but what did that prove? Anyone could have written the words on those pages. At any time. The journal proved nothing unless you were confident about the acquisition of the document and its chain of custody.

  “I wish you could hear me, Sally,” he said. “You have no idea how much I miss you. And the more I learn about this case, about Todd, the more I think there might be a way to save you.”

  Gholson approached his wife. He knelt behind her chair and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Sally stiffened ever so slightly, but beyond that there was no further response.

  “If you’re in there, if you can hear me, I want you to know you are as loved as the day I proposed to you. And if this is the way things are, if I never get to speak to you again, I’ll still be here loving you until the day I die. But if there’s anything I can do to help you come back, anything at all, I have to try. I just wish you could give me some kind of sign.”

  Sally turned around and looked at him. It was the first eye contact she had made with him in two or three months, and goose bumps prickled the back of his neck. He waited for her to say something, anything, but instead she turned back toward the window.

  “There’s got to be a reason all this is happening now,” he finally said. “Two people are dead. Multiple structures have been destroyed by fire. And the person writing these emails is threatening the entire city now. I’ve got the Feds involved and the whole police force is on high alert, but no one knows what to look for. Including me.”

  “Not long now, Jerry.”

  At first Gholson didn’t realize what had happened. The sound of her voice was so natural to him that for the shortest of moments he forgot about her years of silence.

  “Honey? Did you say something?”

  She didn’t turn around. Her gaze appeared fixed upon some distant point on the water.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  The taste in Gholson’s mouth was like he had pressed a fresh nine-volt battery to his tongue. His fingers and toes tingled. They burned.

  “Honey, what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  “He changed the beginning and the ending and now the cyclone is almost upon us.”

  Gholson was breathless. Whatever Sally was talking about, it wasn’t anything like what she would have said in her normal life. “Honey, are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “If you know where to look,” she said, “you can see everything. But I don’t understand the file system the way he does.”

  Gholson could hardly believe this conversation was happening. For a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating Sally’s voice, if maybe she wasn’t really talking to him at all.

  “I don’t know how to come back, Jerry,” she said. “But I wish you could join me in here.”

  There was a knock on the door. Gholson nearly jumped out of his skin. It was surely the doctor here to speak to him, but if he left Sally’s side to answer the door, would she be gone when he returned?

  “Join you? What do you mean, Honey?”

  “If you stop him from taking the kid, maybe we can make our own ending.”

  The nine-volt battery was more like ninety volts now. His vision turned red. Warning red.

  “Make our own? What ending?”

  The door opened, and Dr. Young poked his head in.

  “Everything all right in here?”

  “Yes,” Gholson said. He turned and looked at the doctor. “Sally has been, uh, she’s been talking to me. Haven’t you, Honey?”

  Sally was staring out the window. Her face was a blank page.

  “Sally? Tell the doctor how you’ve been speaking to me.”

  She didn’t respond. Dr. Young looked dubious.

  “She spoke to me. I promise she did.”

  “What did she say?”

  There was no point in trying to explain himself. Gholson could see clinical doubt in the doctor’s face. Arrogant disbelief. He could already guess how the conversation would proceed if he inquired about the similarity between Todd’s and Sally’s conditions.

  “Or maybe I only imagined it,” Gholson finally answered.

  73

  Adam was chewing on a brisket sandwich, staring out his windshield at the setting sun, when his cell phone rang. He’d just spoken with his foreman about a delivery of flagstones that were two weeks late, and he hoped the foreman was calling back with an update about the flagstones. He was parked in front of the new project again, which yesterday afternoon had become a freshly-poured foundation. Soon there would be a wood skeleton, then sheathing, then a roof, and at some point the ambulance-chasing owner would bring his wife here. The mister would smile and the missus would cry, and they would dream fraudulent dreams, imagine a few pointless memories that might occur inside those walls, and at no point would they think of the pain that would also happen, pain that was as eventual as the rising sun. The pregnant wife wouldn’t acknowledge the likelihood of philandering by her husband. The ambulance chaser wouldn’t tell her about the hot new paralegal. They were Baptists and pillars of the commun
ity, and also hypocrites who enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else while pretending to honor the values of Jesus. He should never have agreed to build their stupid dream home.

  They were blasphemous, these thoughts that oozed like motor oil through his mind, but Adam couldn’t help himself. He’d almost sworn when his foreman protested at being called on a Sunday afternoon, and now Adam picked up the phone without looking at the Caller ID, ready to threaten the foreman with his job if he wasn’t more cooperative.

  “Hello? Give me some good news, Danny.”

  “Hey, Adam,” said a voice who was not his foreman. “It’s Jonathan.”

  “I thought we were through with this.”

  “Just because you didn’t want to talk about it, that doesn’t mean it’s over. Either way, I think we figured out who is setting the fires, and I thought you’d want to know.”

  The brisket sandwich ceased to be a marginally pleasant fullness in his gut. It became more like a hot slug of lead that was not at all pleasant. Because lately the truth was becoming more insistent. Lately it was waving its hands, whistling, flashing its privates—making all manner of distasteful gestures to call attention to itself.

  “Adam?” Jonathan asked. “Are you there?”

  “My parents were hypocrites. They blamed everything on me.”

  “What?”

  “But I was just a kid. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you all right?”

  Adam pushed the handset away from his ear. He had the weird feeling he’d never seen a cell phone before. Like it was some kind of futuristic communicator, small and black and shiny. Phones were supposed to be big, plastic, tan things with buttons as big as the tips of your fingers. They were connected to a base by a coiled cord of the same color.

  He pressed the communicator back to his ear and said, “So you were saying about the fires. You know who set them?”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said. “Todd has a thirteen-year-old son. Turns out he’s one of my students and we think it’s him.”

  The relief was immense. Because of the unexplained dirt on his feet, Adam had feared he was the arsonist.

  “How did you figure that out?” he asked.

  “We found the kid and talked to him. We also talked to Todd’s dad. It’s complicated. We’ve just left a message with Detective Gholson and now David and I want to meet with you.”

  Adam could hear music, distant and cavernous. He could hear his parents drunk and laughing with their friends at the silly song.

  “I don’t think we need to meet,” he said. “You figured it out. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Adam—”

  “Really, it’s no problem. He’s just as proud as he can be.”

  “Listen, when we talked to Todd’s father—”

  “Of his anatomy.”

  “Dude, what’s wrong with you? What are you talking about?”

  “He’s going to give us a peek.”

  Adam placed the handset of his phone onto its imaginary base. He started his truck and drove away from the house.

  The atmosphere in his mind was unstable.

  The cap was about to break.

  74

  Adam drove directionless for a while, orbiting the city, trying to decide L what to do. Except he already knew what to do. The problem was marshaling the courage to actually go through with it.

  He thought about last night, when Rachel had complained he was too quiet during sex. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned this—it had been an issue ever since their wedding night, when Rachel’s first, desperate, animal noises had startled him flaccid. Every feminine bark had chipped away at his concentration; every high-pitched yap had disturbed the well-constructed illusion he’d built to conceal reality. The fiction of their nights together, he wanted to believe, was that no graphic sex would ever be had by anyone. Any possible romantic encounters were to be of the quiet, cable channel, underwear-covering-privates variety, they were to occur in strategic lighting, and they were not to involve fluid or mention of body parts. But Rachel’s yapping preempted his PG illusion. The noise overrode his carefully programmed V-chip. Christian woman that she was, Rachel nevertheless felt like consummating their love in a decidedly un-Christian way.

  Adam didn’t know how to change himself. It didn’t feel natural. He had been frightened of intimacy since childhood, and the only sex he’d ever felt comfortable with was the single-player game. Behavior of that sort was necessarily silent. When you were trying to be covert, you couldn’t exactly close the bathroom door and belt home runs at the top of your lungs.

  You couldn’t scream the way his mother had.

  Eventually Adam found himself parked in front of his first childhood home. He remembered how the structure had been stripped to its foundation, remembered Christi’s tiny arms wrapped desperately around his waist as she begged him to protect her. And he had refused. Not because he didn’t love her (he missed her desperately) but because something about him had changed after the encounter with Evelyn. Adam might have blamed his mom for leaving her young children alone as the tornado approached, but even she was merely an imperfect human. No, the real blame for Christi’s death, for the devastation to Wichita Falls as a whole, belonged to God. It was He who had conjured the tornado from the volatile atmosphere. It was God who had directed the giant vortex to churn through neighborhood after neighborhood of His devoted children—the worst hit neighborhood was named, in fact, “Faith Village.” Why would God send the tornado through a city of devout believers like Wichita Falls and not somewhere comparatively more evil, like Las Vegas or New York City? Why, in fact, were tornadoes most common in the middle part of the country, where God’s children were most highly concentrated? This made no sense to Adam. The only way it could make sense was to believe God did not love His children. That perhaps for some reason He held them in contempt. Perhaps, of all His children, God detested Adam the most. Maybe that’s why He had sent five-year-old Evelyn to proposition Adam in a New Orleans living room so many years ago. Maybe her proposal had been a test he had miserably failed.

  Adam’s family had been on vacation at the time, which meant his daddy didn’t have to go to work and could watch baseball and drink out of metal cans with his friend, Chuck. His mother could lounge on the back porch with the lady named Carla, sipping drinks that were pretty colors like red and green, that were made of ice like a Freezee but didn’t smell like a Freezee. And since Chuck and Carla were the parents of a daughter one year older than Adam, it was natural the two children should also play together, should spend much of this time unsupervised. So it happened one night that the mommies and daddies were in the kitchen playing Wahoo—a game of marbles set upon an old wooden board—while Adam and Evelyn entertained themselves in the living room. The mommies and daddies were enjoying their drinks and smoking cigarettes and using words that, at home, under normal circumstances, would have been off limits.

  Evelyn was sitting next to the TV, but since there was nothing on the three channels but news, she had turned the set off. Music boomed at them from the living room. Evelyn was wearing a nightgown. Adam was in his green and white pajamas. She was five and he was four.

  “Are you a big boy or a little boy?” asked Evelyn.

  “I’m young but I’m big for my age.”

  “Are you big enough to play an adult game?”

  “Like Wahoo?”

  “No, like Peek-a-Boo.”

  “That’s a game for babies,” said Adam.

  “Not this game.”

  She lifted her nightgown. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath and he could see a crack between her legs. At first Adam was surprised to see how empty and smooth it was there, but then he remembered that in some important ways girls were different than boys.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” he said.

  “Now you do it. Now you show me yours.”

  Adam wanted to shake his head, because
it was wrong what she was asking. And yet he didn’t want to disappoint her. She was five and he was four and he didn’t want to look like a baby.

  “We could get in trouble,” he said.

  Evelyn dropped her nightgown, and the fissure vanished. “You’re a scaredy-cat, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then show me.”

  Quickly, before he lost his nerve, Adam hooked his fingers into his pajama bottoms and pulled them down. His little boy bobbed innocently. That’s what his mom called it: his little boy. Evelyn looked at it and smiled and he yanked the pajamas back up where they belonged.

  “See?” she said. “Nobody got in trouble.”

  From the kitchen Adam could hear the roaring of his father and the squealing of his mother. They laughed and yelped and coughed like animals. The song on the radio was very strange, and someone kept calling someone else The Streak.

  Evelyn said, “You want to do something else?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll put my mouth on yours if you’ll put your mouth on mine.”

  Evelyn smiled. She pulled her nightgown up again.

  This time he considered leaving. He could get up, go to the room where his clothes were, where his temporary bed was . . . but then he remembered he was staying in Evelyn’s bedroom. She might kick him out. Or she might suggest the game again, in secret, in the dark. He thought about going to the kitchen where his parents were, but his father had already ordered him twice to stay out, and anyway he wasn’t a tattletale.