Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  Somewhere nearby, a dog was barking. She went on, pulling her feet up high to get through deeper mud, her boots and the hems of her jeans caked in it. Finally, she came to the slope where the weeds grew up to her shoulders. She pressed through the stalks and leaves to another chain-link fence, this one cut open. As she made her way through the loose wire tines, they tore a hole in her shirt. She jumped down the incline.

  About a hundred more yards through dandelions and spear weeds, the remnants of old Rosemont splayed across the land and into the trees, all the ruins of her old neighborhood, knitted into the foliage. Bits of cement lay across the weeds and brush beneath orphaned telephone poles and lampposts.

  She followed the rain gutter that had once run alongside Crest Street. A dingy fire hydrant squatted in a patch of yellow wildflowers, a streetlight hooked over a wild-haired bush, and farther on, ten yards of old asphalt ran through the weeds. She spotted the shell of an ancient air conditioner with a bird’s nest on top of it, and a rusted metal rectangle on the ground that claimed NO PARKING BEYOND THIS POINT. She stepped off the asphalt back into the mud.

  A decade ago, just before they’d razed most of the houses—a leftover sign sat in Fred Borden’s yard: FOR SALE, 2-2-2, WITH 45 PLUS KNOWN TOXIC CHEMICALS AT NO EXTRA CHARGE. A security guard trolled the empty streets in a golf cart, windows mostly boarded up, doors padlocked shut.

  Now, at the edge of the woods where Autumn Street would have been, a square steel frame clung to cement, what was left of someone’s house, and an ancient garage freezer tilted against a tree, its door swung open. This used to be her block.

  On one of her early visits back here, inside a piece of door and marking the crumbled remains of her own house, she’d found the clover brass knocker. What else was left: a stump of brick chimney attached to a slab of concrete, three small stone steps that had once led to the front door. But nearly each time she came back, she found a different artifact in the ruins—an old beer bottle, a plastic lawn elf, a chair.

  She stepped up through the red thorns and down again into the weeds of the entryway, past the living room of grass and cinder block, and then she stood in her kitchen, where yellow weeds with sticky flowers clung to her jeans. She looked out where there used to be a window. The air had a kind of empty commotion. Over where the laundry room had been, she noticed a few birds, grayer than the old pipe where they’d landed, pecking at the cement. She felt the old upstairs ghosted above her, the bed where she’d slept with Jack, and Jess’s bedroom, with its window overlooking the street.

  In front of her, the oak tree she’d planted for Jess when she was a baby was strangely still alive, perfectly shaped like one you’d see drawn in bright colors in a children’s book, its leaves lush and healthy. Jess as a toddler used to walk around its base, saying, “Hear those birds?”

  She’d let Jess and her friends run all over that field, even as far as the warehouse when they were older. Cows would sometimes wander over—the grass yellow and dry in summer and winter, only green in the spring—where Jess found odd bits of pipe, fluorescent-colored scraps of rubber, tiny pink pebbles the size of coarsely grained salt, which she brought home with her in her pockets.

  Jess would say, “I’m heading out, Mom,” and she’d run, barefoot, through the door. That ugly field had seemed benign for so many years, fooling everyone with its open space and common weeds, its sorry-looking stooped trees.

  She hadn’t eaten since morning and felt weak, but the sun was lowering over the trees now, and there wasn’t much time. As she made her way to the other side of Banes Field, the ground slid beneath her steps. The dog was still barking, though it didn’t seem to have come any closer. She went through the first gate and down the slope that led to the land Taft Properties had bought.

  It was now marked out for construction with small wooden survey stakes topped with orange plastic flags. They stood out against the brown grass like bright artificial goldfish. Unbelievable. He didn’t even have a permit yet, and the land had already been surveyed. Taft claimed that this area didn’t have the same limitations as the land beneath Rosemont, but even Lee knew that soil fifty feet underground had subterranean movement. The chemicals could still leach to the surface over here.

  She pulled out the jars and the shovel from her bag, bent down, cleared a section of weeds away, dug a shallow hole, and filled the jar with soil. Twenty feet in the other direction, she bent down, dug a hole about eight inches deep, and filled another jar. The mud was deeper in parts of this section, and some of the survey stakes had toppled. She went on working, all around her the wet, dead grass, the chaotic bushes, the past pressing down from the sky.

  There was a voice she heard in her head, sometimes with Jack’s intonations, sometimes with Jess’s. “Time to leave.” She wanted to get a sample near a bald spot in the middle of the gray weeds. A wasp droned close to her, and she flung her hand to hit it away, but it got close to her face, buzzed against her cheek, then looped and stitched back. Wincing, she flicked her hand again and stumbled. The wasp flew off.

  Then she saw the thing about twenty yards away, as big as the bed of a pickup truck. The gray corner angled up from the mud beneath a sick-looking sapling. Was it some lost bit of cement? She went closer, her boots smacking in the muck as the dull shape clarified itself. One flat side of it had wrestled up into the air, the other side still sunk into the ground. A giant, filthy, gray vinyl box. The top of it was charred with a bright pink and brown stain, and a crack jiggered its way down the middle, where a copper liquid leaked out in a thin, jagged stream. Her heart punched in her chest. Back in January, Professor Samuels had said this could happen, though it had seemed so unlikely then. “You get enough rain, it shifts the water table—it can pop a container right up.”

  And there it was. For years, the container had been safe down there, but now the land had excreted it, the way coffins sometimes came back up in a flood. Her head filled with pressure. In the distance, the pine trees seemed to lean forward. She smelled something acidic and bitter, benzene fumes or worse, and covered her nose and mouth with one hand as she took the camera from her bag with the other. The light was already going, but she’d get the picture somehow. She pressed the button to open the lens.

  This was the thing she’d been waiting for, but didn’t know how to name, the thing that would redeem her. Over the woods, the sun, a bright orange candy set on fire, dangled. She snapped the photographs. The dog barked again. She took twenty-two pictures of the upturned container. Then she ran.

  HAL

  HAL DID BETTER with the husbands on closing sales—he tried to catch the eye of Mr. Coller, who kept looking away. “I don’t know,” said his wiry wife, as they rounded the corner to the kitchen, new, pristine cabinets gleaming like wet Wite-Out over the dingy ones that had been there before. “I’m just not feeling enough space on this side of the house, enough air.” She fluttered her hand toward the living room off the kitchen, which Hal admitted was smaller than most, but recently tiled and sunny, a room that carried cleanness and possibility like a new prayer.

  That was when Hal officially gave up.

  Finally, he’d been able to start showing houses again after the storm, but only those on this side of town, where there hadn’t been flooding. For the moment, there were goddamn few houses to list, and now he also had to battle Mrs. Coller’s vague feng shui ideas. He could never tell if that nonsense would work for a sale or against it. Another woman had remarked on this very house that the energy was just right, that the doors opened exactly where they were supposed to open, the windows at exactly the right angles to the sun. He smiled at the husband when the wife started talking that nonsense, telegraphed through his shrug, You don’t get it either?

  He was pretty sure Mrs. Coller didn’t really want to buy but had some ulterior motive with her husband, some manipulation he wasn’t privy to. Women did that sometimes, wanting to see a lot of houses on the outer reach
es of their price range. But it was a strange time to try something like that, just after a hurricane.

  As they left the living room and walked through the bright entryway, a skylight shining down, Hal tried to remain optimistic because that was how you made sales.

  Mr. Coller chuckled at his wife’s objections. “But that sure is a nice pool!”

  Hal wanted to shake him. Don’t you see what she’s doing? I’m not a marriage counselor, buddy.

  Still, Mrs. Coller had the last word. “I’d like to see that one on Lottie Lane.”

  At first, he’d done pretty well, sold a big house out on Windsong to an executive at a drug firm, and another one just down the street to a surgeon. But now some people just recklessly relied on the Internet rather than, God forbid, pay a live person, and so his luck had turned. He no longer felt like the son who’d got the blessing and more like the one who’d been cast out. He knew if he was to keep making a living at this, then he had to find another strategy, an exclusive, or sell commercial properties, not residential ones.

  “Okay, then.” Hal led them out the front door. “Let’s go take a look.”

  He believed he needed to pray more. He needed to get rid of bad moods and doubts, especially when he was out on calls. That was the devil trying to get him. And he’d said good riddance to the devil last year when he stopped drinking cold. So, as he opened the door of his SUV for Mrs. Coller, he said a quick prayer to get his head back in the game. Mr. Coller got in the backseat, and they drove off.

  “Nice car,” said Mr. Coller.

  “It does me alright,” said Hal. He’d bought it at an auction last year, a great deal, though he could barely afford it. In real estate, your vehicle was the office—you needed a good one. They passed Avery Taft’s new subdivision off Blissfield Drive, but he didn’t even point to it because it was out of their price range and most of the houses weren’t finished yet. They were building at least two more subdivisions too, now that the market was whizzing. One of them, he’d heard, would be out near the old Rosemont site, that blight on the landscape. Taft Properties was his best hope—he wanted an exclusive listing for one entire inventory—and he might have a chance at it too, because Avery and he used to play football together back in school.

  “Now this here house,” said Mr. Coller. “It’s close to the flood zone, isn’t it?”

  “It’s on the higher ground,” said Hal. “Hurricanes come with the territory, right? But that last one was just a fluke and a monster and it caught some people. You won’t find anything higher in League City or Pearland, I tell you that.”

  “Oh, we’re not looking to move outside city limits,” said Mrs. Coller, staring out the window with a pursed smile. Darlene said that only women really lived in houses, and men just ate and slept in them.

  Hal glanced in his rearview mirror at Mr. Coller, his head turned to the side, a hand rubbing at his chin. He looked like a guy who’d just remembered he’d forgotten to shave or take out the trash, and Hal got the feeling the guy’s whole life was full of jagged moments like that—one mistake after another rising up to laugh at him. Just watching him, Hal knew he was liable not to interest them in the next listing either.

  Later, he went to Joe’s Barbeque, sat eating a snack at the small rickety table, but the meat tasted metallic and it had a strange hard texture. He could only eat a few bites.

  There were photos on the walls of the varsity football teams since 1940. As he looked into the stony faces of the players from 1941, a pride pressed up in his chest: honorable tradition. Pushing through those brick walls. His hand moved into a fist, the muscles in his legs tightening. And there was 1980, he and Avery in the front row. They’d shared a flinty nostalgia for Coach Rowan, who’d made them run so far they vomited; who made them play fully suited up in 110 degrees; who had a habit of saying, “Go down there and hit those monsters hard.” Coach liked to use a pointer decorated with Indian feathers when he narrated plays in the field house, and he drank large, powdered protein drinks the color of celery. Hal had been a good player, and missed his lighter, firmer body, those cut muscles and the litheness that came from weights and drills that made him feel like an alley cat. So he made cracks about getting fat, though he wasn’t really, just middle-aged soft. But he’d never been as good a player as his son was.

  Hal felt closest to his son when he sat in the stands, watching a game. Cully, beneath the gladiator shoulder pads and blue-and-white helmet, could swivel his hips and cut a corner with a grace Hal had never had. He felt this was somehow his son’s true self, the way he caught the ball to his heart and ran past the thicket of other players, the green space widening behind him, the way he leaped over the goal line, the applause a huge cosmic radio, just about to announce something big. And here it was, another season, and Cully had already been catching miracle passes during two-a-days.

  Driving to his next appointment, late because of construction on 243, he heard a clattering song on the car stereo that made him tighten his fingers around the steering wheel. It was a song that reminded him of last year and the drives on which he’d caught himself singing along to the line about running away. Hal thought of that mobile home in League City he’d gone to each week last winter—painted purple inside, the threadbare couch, the chair sprouting stuffing. The affair only lasted seven weeks, but it had nearly killed him. Dawn had long, too-thin legs, and when he pulled away from kissing her, she had a wry tightness in her mouth that reminded him of what he was doing. Now that he really needed a clean slate, the memories kept crudding it up: Dawn’s tan, skinny legs wrapped around his waist, and the tiny shoes she wore, and the way he’d come home and feel sad at the sight of Darlene, her face in a nimbus of blue TV light, her grin set like a tiger’s. He had to stop himself, because too much thinking along these lines took him to places that deviled him. To pray was more rational—it put things in their places; it put God back in charge. “Stop me from worrying,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he felt a wave of warmth for Darlene again, the feeling he had looking at her in her baggy shirt and jeans, the pretty angles of her eyes. And he saw Cully sitting next to her at the dinner table, their identical noses and triangular chins.

  Darlene said if only he could learn how to relax, they would be happier together. “I don’t mind picking up after you or the snoring,” she said. “Just the bad moods.”

  “And the drinking.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s all done with, right?”

  Sometimes after work she rubbed at the knots in his shoulders, and whenever she did that, he felt held by her in this life, purposeful and safe, the way he’d felt years and years ago in the old house in the country, when his dad still had some kindness in him and before his mother started looking so scared.

  Hal forced a smile and walked out to the front of the drive to meet the couple who wanted to see a Tudor monstrosity, all gray turrets and fake-old brick, everything fake English, with a strange topiary of a misshapen horse out back and a bright pink shed, where the owner used to keep rabbits. The husband wanted to see the garage first, of course (they almost always did). It was potentially a weakness in this case, because it was just a two-car, and there was a partition down the front wall (fake English brick with vines) so that if they owned a truck, it wouldn’t fit inside.

  “What kind of car do you have?” Hal asked casually.

  “A BMW is our other one—this is a little small for storage, but not bad,” said the husband, jutting out his lower lip.

  Not bad. The thick whine in his voice irked Hal, but he tried to get past it. He found that if a client annoyed him he almost never made the sale—people just liked to feel liked.

  They went to the front door, and the wife was cooing about the beautiful ivy, and Hal was praying that the key would work because he didn’t think he could keep his temper if it didn’t, and he was distracted by the wife’s large breasts snug in the rainbow that arched over her
sweater. He needed to get a sale. He needed to be clean in the mind, to turn this bad luck around.

  The key fit in the lock, perfect. He opened the door, saw pricked-up brown ears and bared teeth. Shit. The skinny flank scraped past him, sharp, buzzed fur, and the dog ran into the street. The wife screamed, and Hal ran after the mutt. He chased it past mailboxes, past birdbaths, into a wet grassy yard, the stubbed tail bounding ahead, the little pink asshole teasing him.

  The dog ran around the curve in the street, and Hal ran as fast as he could now, his chest heaving, dress shoes slipping and clacking on the pavement, sweat gathering in his armpits, the skirt of his suit jacket flying.

  He was out of breath, in terrible shape, his face hot with effort and rage. He raced around the corner and the dog was gone. It would ruin the sale and he’d lose the listing too, plus he’d feel guilty as hell. Why didn’t the seller warn you when they had a pet? Common sense. There was a goddamn drought of common sense around there. Too many people just wanted to fail.

  He ran around back into a yard where a rusting swing set straddled a sandbox, then back around to the street dappled with tree shade, where a yellow car sped by. His eyes stung, and he felt the wind crushed out of him. Then he saw the dog’s stubbed tail sticking out from behind a big oak tree. Hal snuck up behind it, grabbed the mutt’s mangy flank just in time to have the dog pee on the leg of his pants.