Friendswood

by Rene Steinke

  “Damn straight.”

  “Then Angie puked.” The guys laughed. “Girls are always asking me, ‘Take me mudding, take me four-wheeling.’”

  Lawbourne had a toy cap gun, and he was shooting the caps at the ground, the ashy smell snapping up in the air around them.

  “You know what?” said Dex. “Once I went over off Veemer Road, where those Rosemont houses used to be. Weeks noticed that the gate wasn’t locked, and we drove right in. No hills, but it’s a great big stretch of nothing.” That night, he and Weeks hadn’t even been drinking. They were just on their way home from the movies, and the ground was wet, so they decided to stop and give it a try. Weeks was laughing so hard he was snorting, and Dex’s hands burned against the rubber padding on the steering wheel. As they churned through the mud, looking straight out the windshield, the stars and blackness whipped over them like a wild blanket, and they let the back wheels fan out, raising splatters like huge ripped curtains.

  “Was that before or after you stole the mailman’s clothes?” said Scotty.

  Dex looked down at his blue work shirt and pants from the thrift shop. “After.” That was always his way with these guys—deadpan.

  Lawbourne shot the cap gun into the air, a flash of toy silver. He shot it again, with a determined look—actually aiming for something, and the smoke rose up in the dark.

  “No, we went out there too once,” said Trace. “A bunch of us, people sliding around in the back. Shit. If you can get through the gate, you can drive all over that place. We followed this one road all the way back into the woods, and then the girls got scared.”

  Dex felt something in the back of his throat but didn’t know how to say it. And didn’t want to waste his words with this crowd anyway. He knew from his dad how petroleum could make people sick—he knew all the right precautions to take if you worked with it. Those oil residues in Banes Field had been buried and sealed up, the way they were supposed to be, and now the place was only gnarly land, good for mudding and not much else.

  “It was too bad because, you know, we were thinking of taking girls inside one of the ruined houses, nice and empty. There’s toilets and staircases—all kinds of shit,” said Brad Razer, a pocket of Skoal caught in his cheek. Suddenly Dex could smell the menthol. He’d never been inside one of those abandoned houses, but he’d heard people had left TVs, clothes, chairs, and Weeks claimed he’d found bottles of perfectly good whiskey inside a metal cabinet.

  Bishop Geitner, who didn’t play but somehow was friends with all of them, came over holding out a bowl full of pills. “The blue ones are Ritalin, the orange are Klonopin, the green Xanax. Take your pick, pricks.” He had a face like an angry bird, a sharp small beak of a nose, and small dark eyes, a mouth that disappeared when he wasn’t talking. He stood there, stringy and average height, with the football players. Dex wasn’t interested in taking whatever someone had stolen out of his mom’s medicine cabinet. Beer worked just fine.

  He’d heard about what Bishop and Trace had done the other night when two goats escaped from a farm and somehow ended up on the sidelines of the football field, but he didn’t believe, no matter how drunk they were, that they’d really bash in the goats’ heads with bats. He believed the part about setting their tails on fire, farting around with cigarette lighters maybe, but he didn’t believe Bishop and Trace would actually beat them. There were jokes that they’d fucked the goats first, but he didn’t believe that either.

  Trace grabbed a pill, and a few of the other guys gathered around Bishop, who held his head back as if he wore a heavy crown.

  Cully had a girl with him now in the cab of his truck. In the shadows, Dex could just see that her head looked tiny against the passenger seat, but when Cully opened the door and the light went on, Dex saw her face, mouth open, laughing, sharp, fake-looking eyebrows.

  “Fucking Cully. What’s he do?” said Lawbourne.

  Dex shrugged.

  “He’s got, like, I don’t know.” Lawbourne shook his head, sipped his beer, and stumbled a little forward.

  “Maybe he’s just a good liar.”

  “Damn. I’d like to learn if that’s all it is.”

  An invisible thing seemed to crowd in the dark around them, as if despite all the space across this sprawl of asphalt there wasn’t enough room for all of them to be there. They started to talk about girls then, who’d sent which naked picture, because you couldn’t see the girls’ faces, only their racks—they were shouting over one another—and Dex started to walk back to his truck because it didn’t seem like Weeks was going to show up after all.

  Suddenly, guys started making goat sounds and laughing. Trace was following Dex, so drunk or high that he walked in a very slow, jangly way, careful not to spill out of himself.

  “Got a bone to pick with you, Dex.”

  “What’s that, Trace?”

  “You told the coach.”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t talk to the coach about you.”

  “No one else would do it.” Bishop came over to them, but he could barely keep his balance. “Do you know how much shit we’re going to get for this? How many miles my buddy’s going to have to run?”

  “Hey, I heard the story from someone, but I didn’t really believe it. You want to go beat up goats at night, that’s your problem.”

  Cully’s truck streaked out of the parking lot then, the red taillights straggling behind it, the motor gunning.

  Bishop, Trace, and now Brad and a couple of others stood around Dex.

  “Come on, man. Dex wouldn’t do that,” said Lawbourne. He called over to the other truck, where some guys stood smoking. “Hey, Hershel! Dex is an honest man, right?”

  “Damn straight!” Hershel called back, holding up his beer.

  “Bullshit,” said Bishop. “I’m not even on the goddamn team, and I wouldn’t care except you’re messing with Trace.” He grabbed Dex’s arm and squeezed it.

  Dex shook him off. “Get the hell away from me. I’m leaving.”

  Lawbourne said, “Bishop, come on. Don’t be an asshole.”

  Dex walked as slowly as he could over to his truck. There was laughter behind him. He couldn’t tell if it was the joke after the tension explodes or if they were laughing at him walking away.

  He got in his truck, shaken, and turned on the radio loud. He pulled out of the parking lot methodically, because he didn’t want to seem in a hurry. He drove for half an hour through the extra-dark streets, stalling before going home, past the mansions on Sunrise Drive, down Riverback Avenue, where the old trees hung overhead, no one else on the roads. He circled around to the intersection where the gas station was still lit up and turned onto 2351, where he passed an occasional car, and a billboard with a vodka girl, smiling down as if she knew him. He was on his way to Houston and would soon turn around at the San Jacinto exit, so he could go back home. This was the time of night when drunks rammed their cars into telephone poles, when guys ended up thrown out on the side of the road, vomiting, or got lost somewhere out in Pasadena where you could get drugs in baggies at the closed-down and abandoned drive-in, right under the giant plastic man with one hand broken off. But for now, just driving forward made him feel okay again—he’d get his currency back from Bishop and Trace. Headlights mopped the black road ahead of him, and the overpass arched in the distance. Dex tried to think about what his dad would say about all of this, but nothing came to mind.

  LEE

  LEE MET JACK IN THE NINTH GRADE when she’d moved from Beaumont with her mother to a tiny apartment over by the Perry’s department store. He felt sorry for her at lunch, sitting all by herself, and brought his sandwich over to say hello, and he was so friendly it took twenty minutes for her to believe in it. Jack knew nearly everyone, his parents having lived in town for decades before he was born, but she didn’t have another conversation with
Jack for two years, when they found themselves, one day, throwing birdseed from a float in the homecoming parade.

  They almost got married right after high school—the spring after she’d found her mother passed out in her car in a parking lot in daylight—but they decided to wait. They both went to the University of Houston, spent weekends at the beach in Galveston, where Jack rented a house on stilts that stood right in the bay. They’d been walking on the shore, water lapping up against the hard sand, sunburned and sweaty, when Lee’s mother, in her house twenty miles away, walked up the stairs and died of an aneurysm. On their stroll that morning, Lee found three whole sand dollars, their middles still thick under the stamp of the clover, their thin edges uncrushed, and as her feet skimmed through the beery foam of the water’s edge and Jack walked beside her, singing badly, she’d felt a peace that she would only remember long after she heard the news. If it had happened that her mother had died from the drinking, Lee would have blamed herself, but the way it occurred, she didn’t blame anyone.

  She moved into the house with Jack’s family, and two years later, when Jack got a job, they got married. Neither of them had planned on staying in Friendswood, but that was how it had turned out. Jack liked feeling famous, he joked, walking around a town where everyone knew him. Lee liked it less, hating put-on cheerfulness, but she had friends, people like Char and Rush and Maisie Rodgers, whom she’d gone to school with, who’d got married or started businesses nearby.

  She certainly never thought of it as an oil town, as a place with tainted air or soil. People rode horses on the shoulder of the road. Kids fished in the creeks. The woods were still uncharted, and unnamed species of trees still grew there. Back then, you had to drive for twenty minutes before you saw the highway.

  She and Jack were outdoors a lot in those years because their first place, before the Rosemont house, was so small. They strolled along pastures where the cows watched them steadily as they munched or turned away; they took long walks out along the dirt roads where the horse farms were. Jack had a friend who would let Lee ride his horse out all the way practically to Pearland, while Jack hung back, smoking, by the crude wooden fence. She remembered how she and Jack sat outside at night in those days, drinking beers on the hammock, or wandering the side roads, bottles tucked inside their jackets.

  The night Lee guessed that Jess was conceived, she and Jack jumped over the fence to the fig orchard where Jack had worked as a boy, and they lay down under a tree. Her back pressed against soft broken fruit and leaves, and when he looked down at her, his grin seemed to spread against the sky.

  Jack, smelling of sweat and beer, pulled off her shirt and reverently laid his whole hand over her breast as if he were swearing an oath. She pushed up her skirt, felt the soft hair on his legs against her smooth thighs. That night she wanted him, but more than that, she wanted to go through him, into the vine unfurling on the barbed-wire fence, into the branches holding green fruits like small charms. “Relax,” Jack kept saying. “There’s no one else here.”

  The open mouths of crushed figs pressed against the backs of her thighs, and she wanted to give herself over to the humidity and green. It was an odd lust, spreading into her fingertips, the fig trees in their rows; the moon; the dark, fecund air; the moist dirt; the ocean twenty miles away.

  All during her pregnancy, Lee said that must have been the night the baby was conceived, though there was no way of telling for sure.

  LEE’S CAR WAS IN THE SHOP, so she had to walk the mile to city hall, but she planned to stop at Maisie Rodgers’s house on the way to drop off some samples from Doc. Going along the side of the main road, busy now with four lanes of traffic, she felt exposed in the grass along the curb, but there was no other route. Cars honked at her, and she looked up to see a blurry stranger giving her the finger or a shadowed friend waving hello. She rehearsed what she’d say at the city council meeting, going over the technical information in her head. Though she had the photographs, evidence was no guarantee they’d listen.

  She crossed at the busy intersection of Friendswood Drive and the highway, cars humming all around her as she waited for the light. She crossed, found the sidewalk next to the bakery’s parking lot, and kept her eyes trained on the trees, thick trunked and wild leaved above. She walked past the firehouse, saw the remnants of the homecoming float over to the side, blue-and-white crepe paper still stuck in the chicken wire.

  Maisie Rodgers lived now on a road that ran alongside Robertson Park, but years ago, she’d lived on Crest Street, the area closest to where Taft wanted to build again. She came to the door in fur slippers and jeans, and said hello with her wide smile and sleepy eyes. “I brought you something,” Lee said, handing her the small bag of tubes and bottles.

  “Thanks, honey.” Maisie hugged her. “I’ve been using that last thing Doc gave me, and I think it’s working.” She touched the edge of her chin.

  “Well, there’s mostly just lotions in there, but there’s a fading cream he said you could try.” In the living room, the air conditioner droned loudly over the matched white furniture and photographs of Maisie’s daughter, Laura, in her dance gear—fringed halters and cowboy hats. Laura had been Jess’s best friend, and now she was twenty-six, a professional dancer at the big rodeo shows. Lee had gone with Maisie and Ben once to see her performance with ladders and white flags.

  “I ran into Rush at the wine bar. She said she’s trying to get you out more.” Maisie turned her face under the window light, and Lee saw the scars beneath her makeup, on her chin and cheek. The rash had afflicted her months before they’d proven anything about Rosemont, and the scars, despite all Doc’s prescriptions, had never quite gone away.

  “I’ve just been working a lot,” said Lee.

  Maisie had news about Joe Stacken, who’d gone to a party down in Mexico weeks ago and still wasn’t back, and Ruthie Winters, who’d got so angry at her mother, she threw her cell phone into the pool.

  When Lee told her about spotting Avery Taft’s survey stakes, about the photos of the container, Maisie said, “Are you shitting me?” She shook her head. “Back in the summer, I heard someone from the EPA was coming around to see Rosemont folks again. He went to see the Shipleys, the Browns, and I think even over to Pasadena to see the Juarezes.”

  “And I can’t even get anyone at the EPA to return my calls.”

  “I thought he was just asking about how they were doing, checking in, but maybe he was looking for something more? I don’t know. Maybe he had a line on Taft? I just thought it was, you know, same old, same old. They have to cover themselves, right? I should have told you, but we went right up to Mobile after the hurricane, had to get all new drywall down here, so I haven’t been around.”

  “Do you know the guy’s name?”

  “No. But I can give you everyone’s addresses. That was my street—all those people. Every year, we still send Christmas cards.” She was smiling broadly as she rummaged in the drawer to get paper and pen. “I wish we could see them all more often.”

  When Lee left, Maisie stood at the front door. “Where the hell’s your car?”

  AT CITY HALL, Lee always tried to sit near the front, so that she’d be noticed. During the tedious talks about zoning and property taxes, she fidgeted on the folding metal chair and watched the faces of those men on the dais—the mayor throat-clearing and slicing the air with a flat palm, the lead councilman surveying them all from above with that thin smile. It was rare that she managed to get her concerns on the agenda anymore, but during the time set aside for other business at the end, she could usually say a few things about her research before adjournment, and maybe two or three out of thirty people would listen.

  An older man she didn’t know sat next to her—he kept staring at her shirt.

  “Call to order.” Mayor Wallen sighed behind the podium, but she didn’t believe in his feigned exhaustion or in his modest blue jacket and khakis. She bel
ieved in the black deadness of his eyes.

  Avery Taft sat at the end of her row, his cowboy boots jutted out in front of him on the floor. They’d put him on the agenda to “report on the commercial viability of the former Rosemont site and its area.” No one would prosecute, but it might be illegal that he’d already surveyed the land, even though the “debate” had been last month, and the official vote wasn’t until November.

  There was a report on zoning for a liquor store, a school voucher. The way these meetings worked, you’d think no one ever listened to anything. For years, it had seemed that way, but Lee had made little cracks in the system, little marks they couldn’t easily erase. She knew that room better than she’d known any classroom in her school years, the stacked photographs of the earliest football teams—1939, 1940, 1941—those earnest unguarded faces staring out, trying to look tough, their baby faces exposed under shiny, neatly oiled-back hair. The American flag on the stand. The walls that had once been cinder block but were now covered in fake wood paneling with strange patterns like stretched-out faces in the grain.

  Councilman Burns, with his large, blunt face like a bull’s, introduced a representative from the EPA, a Ms. Dawson, and he leered as she stepped up to the dais in her tight teal suit.

  “Good afternoon.” With her pert blond pageboy, Ms. Dawson had one of those overly animated faces, the wide eyes with brows that shot up just for hello, the enthusiastic ands and buts, the excavated smile.

  “I’m here at the request of the city council, to address Taft Property’s request to build next to the old Rosemont site. As you know, that area, which had been listed as a Superfund site, has been treated with the method of burying the chemicals in approved containers.” Lee still hoped that in the end, those photographs meant she’d won something. Ms. Dawson went on with the official line, repeated the version of history Lee had heard a hundred times, her words clipped and chirpy, as if it had all been good news.