by Rene Steinke
“You’re crazy,” said Bishop. “We’re not three anything. I’m on my own. I’m going to get a pharmaceutical that makes you feel like you’re flying, literally. It turns everything tiny so you feel like a giant. A little of this, a little of that.”
Dex felt a nameless rage against all of them, wanted to hit Bishop’s smug, rosy face.
“A pharmaceutical, I said. Not a meth drug, not a drug dealer drug. But people will get addicted. That’s how I’ll make it.”
“I highly doubt it,” said Charlie, in his mock-professional voice. He had a way of pretending he was an executive at a company.
Dex ate one of the sandwiches sitting on the table, idly watching the highlights of a football game. The players running against the green and then frozen in midthrow, midcatch, or sprawled over the goal line. He would go back to school and take the biology quiz in last period—he didn’t feel like making that one up. He’d studied for the test last night, but right now he couldn’t remember even the first species. He decided to lay off the beer. Snow went into the kitchen to look for more food.
Snow came back with a plate of sandwiches, laid them down on the tree stump. Dex turned to Charlie. “Tsk-tsk. All these guys drunk off their asses in the middle of the day.”
“Livin’ large,” said Snow.
Dex had a vision of his mother huge, so large she floated up off the ground, her dress splitting at the seams. “Someone better make some coffee pronto, or they’ll be puking all over the couch,” said Dex.
“Not that I’m partaking—I’ve got a girlfriend. But you have to be wasted, don’t you think, if you’re going to put your dick right where another guy’s has been?”
Dex looked at Snow for signs that he was lying. “Come on, there’s no girl up there.” Snow’s face seemed stretched out at the sides, eyes jumpy, even as he pretended it was no big deal.
Just then, Dex spotted a flimsy blouse on the floor, all pathetically gathered up beneath a chair leg, He felt the beer come up salty in his throat.
“There is, buddy.” Snow’s hand shook when he reached for his bottle. “You know Willa Lambert? Seems like she has a few drinks in her, for sure.”
The room tilted, and there was a crashing of glass somewhere. Dex thought of Willa’s long, pale fingers, the short pink nails, laid flat on his desk on top of his typed paper. Goddamn Cully Holbrook. The football score flashed beneath the players against the green. 21–7, 21–7.
Dex stood up, shook out his legs. Charlie’s eyes were closed, and a gurgled buzz came from between his lips. It couldn’t be Willa, could it? It was just because she was nobody’s sister and had that eye makeup that they talked about her that way. KitKat. She wouldn’t offer herself to just anyone. But then again, she might be up there with Cully. Cully had a way.
Dex thought he wouldn’t say good-bye, just leave. He maneuvered past Weeks, leaning over the pool table for a shot, and walked fast toward the front door.
The entryway was tiled the color of bricks, and the sun caught in the chandelier overhead, sending down sharp white squares as he walked out, past the bright green plant on a stand by the door, a cactus holding up its arms like a prickled angel.
He got in his truck and drove. He had to admit that he didn’t know Willa all that well. Still, he thought it showed bad taste that she liked Cully Holbrook. Maybe Snow had got her mixed up with someone else—there were other girls like her, not particularly in any group. He hoped that was it, that he’d hear another girl’s name mentioned tomorrow. As he raced past the Walgreens and the stately gray Quaker church, a hard thing lodged in the pit of his stomach.
He passed over Crystal Creek, where back before parties, guys used to construct elaborate ramps out of old plywood and jump their bikes over the water. They had contests to see who could get over the widest part, and he remembered when Weeks had fallen in with his bike, hit his head on a rock, and had to go to the emergency room. That was so long ago. The creek was polluted now—walking down the pathway near it, he’d once seen a dead fish spitting bright green blood, and strange fluorescent yellow rocks.
He drove past Weeks’s house, yellow and flat, and past the old folks’ home, where there were always two or three old women, sitting in their wheelchairs on the porch, waving.
He was the only one of his friends who lived in a trailer, and it sat on a lot between the Baptist church and a row of houses above the creek. Often he felt a twinge of embarrassment when he first saw it, coming home. But today its smallness seemed safe—as if it could only do so much harm. He threw open the thin, light door, saw his mom on the couch, drinking coffee and flipping through a magazine.
“Honey, what are you doing home?”
“I don’t feel so good,” he said.
He sat next to her, and let her pat his knee. He turned on the TV with the clicker, and without looking at her, handed her the medicine.
THE NEXT DAY he woke up at dawn and couldn’t go back to sleep, the birds were so loud. He pushed aside the curtains next to his bed and looked outside. The grass outside the trailer was long and yellow and weedy. They might live in a trailer but not like trailer trash, his dad always said. And look at that. He pulled on his jeans and went outside, got the lawn mower out of the shed, and went to work. He didn’t care who he woke up. The grass had to get mowed before he went to school.
Pushing the mower at the edge of the land first, which bordered the playground behind the Baptist church, he hated Cully Holbrook, who’d do just about anything to get laid. Dex had seen him brag at the urinals. He’d seen the girls Cully had been with, pretty and ugly. Sure, Dex wanted it too, but there was a limit. He might get a girl tipsy, but he wouldn’t touch her if she got drunk. And there it was—another reason it couldn’t have been Willa there yesterday—she wouldn’t be a drinker.
When he turned the mower around and made another path through the grass, his mom came out of the trailer in her bathrobe, rubbing her eyes, yelling.
He turned off the mower.
“Dex, what in the hell?”
“It’s got to get done sometime.”
“Now? You’ve decided to do it now? Oh, forget it, your sister’s up now anyway.” And she waved him away and shut the door.
He turned on the mower again and focused on the weeds, gripped the rusted handle and pushed into the yard, the frantic blade spinning beneath him, green spitting up all around.
WILLA
WILLA WOKE IN A STRANGE ROOM, dim but for the dusty beam that streamed purposefully through the curtains, carrying a message.
She sat up, felt the pinch of her open zipper, cold air on her arms and breasts, sunlight wavering on the floor next to the scrawl of her bra. “Cully?” She pulled the sheet up to her shoulders, thinking he’d be back any minute. Above the nightstand there was a small wooden fish on the wall, abstract in shape, either the Christian symbol or plain decoration, she couldn’t tell. “Hey, Cully?” She did not smell like herself.
She remembered leaving school at lunch with him in his truck. He’d reached across the clutch to put his hand on her knee, his tawny face in profile, the straight, jutting nose and even chin. The engine revved at the corner, Toby Keith on the radio, a puddle of daisies in the median off the road. After that, there were just broken pieces: she’d been looking over a balcony at the ropy shadows below; someone’s hand in her hair; the doll’s-eye blue of the swimming pool; a plaid shirt; a boy’s face, the gaze as empty as a cloud.
She hugged her knees to her chest. There was a sharp pain between her legs that radiated into her thighs. She tried to ignore it, shifted her legs to the right.
On the nightstand, there was a photo of a woman crouching on the beach, some secret in the turn of her mouth and the angle of her eyes, waves crumpled behind her, the wet sand flat and shiny. Willa remembered now that she and Cully were supposed to go to the Lawbournes’ for lunch. Was that Ben Lawbourne’s mother? The
woman’s eyes were tiny dark squares like his, but she couldn’t be sure.
She saw her own mother’s pinched face. “You hardly ever make just one mistake,” she always said, and that was why you had to “get right” with forgiveness.
Willa stared at the framed print that hung above the dresser, her head hollow. Across the bottom it was printed THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON. Above that, a block of violet bled into the red space surrounding it. She prayed, I’m just the same. Make me exactly the same.
Outside the window she could see the telephone line and a tree. Maybe she had fainted. That was why she couldn’t remember. Someone thought it was a problem with her heart or lungs and had taken off her shirt. Where was it? They’d brought her up here to lie down.
Willa saw how the violet paint in the picture had different intensities at different points in the square, parts of it worn away, so the violet and red fought against each other. Rubbing the thin circle charm on her bracelet, she knew Cully wasn’t coming back, and she tried to summon a word to say to Dani, jerk, player.
She’d had to skip history class in order to go to lunch with him. She’d faked a note from her father because his spiked signature was easier to forge than her mother’s, and the attendance clerk had barely given it a glance. That was the first thing she’d done wrong. The metallic taste in the drink came back to her.
Cully had worn jeans with a frayed hole at the knee. When they got there, he’d poured what looked like two capfuls of vodka into her glass, and though she’d never had hard liquor before, she drank it with the measure of bravado she needed to be there with him in the first place. It was a new school year, and she wasn’t going to be timid. She’d said, “I don’t even like you,” flirting.
The delicate green plant in the corner seemed to spider up the wall. She felt that if she didn’t move too quickly, if she slipped on her shirt and quietly walked the long distance down the stairs (who was down there?), she could just walk home, and it would be over. Whatever had happened somehow wouldn’t be true, and she’d be back in her bedroom in her own house.
She pulled her legs over the bed, stumbled to find her clothes. The violet square was like a bright reprimand. What did it mean? She stepped into her shoes, found her bra, put it on, and looked for her shirt under the rocking chair and behind the plant. She knelt on the floor and peered under the dresser at the dusty dark. Then she just pulled the sheet off the bed and hung it around her shoulders like a cape. She walked into the hallway, which opened to a balcony overlooking the entryway. A chandelier dangled across from her like an overturned bouquet of ice chips.
Below, near the front door, a woman with red hair was watering potted plants. She turned her head, not looking up, “Someone home?”
Willa moved back so the woman couldn’t see her. There was fractured light and the smell of air conditioner and soap, and then there were a few seconds of nothing. She went into the bedroom, quietly pulled the door shut, sat down in the rocking chair. She’d so wanted to impress him, wearing beneath her blouse the secret bra that she hid from her mother in the back of her dresser drawer. She studied the painting again. The violet block thrown hard against the red seemed like the blank stretch in her afternoon. “Now why is that in a museum?” her father would say. “It’s just a trick on folks. A trick that makes somebody somewhere rich.”
A spill of coins. Half a dirt footprint on the rug arrowing to the wall. A different one, the whole shape, pointing to the bed. Fainter ones leading to the door. On the bed, a small spot of blood smeared the bottom sheet where she’d been lying on it. Willa got up to pull the bedspread over it.
The door swung open. Willa stopped the chair from rocking back. The red-haired woman held a watering can in one hand, Willa’s shirt in the other. “I thought I heard someone up here!” On the woman’s chest, there were three islands of orange freckles over the low neckline of her dress.
The woman tossed the shirt onto Willa’s lap. “This yours?” A spill of flowers fell on Willa’s jeans. “You know where Ben is?”
Willa pulled the sheet tighter around her.
The woman’s overplucked eyebrows wrinkled. Willa could see their original half-moons in the slight ghostly imprints in her forehead. “You mean to tell me you’re alone?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The woman looked away, earrings jingling. “My God, there’s bottles and what all down there.”
She went to the window and pulled back the curtains. “I promised to keep an eye on things,” the woman said. “Oh, dear God.” But the “dear” was not affectionate or sorry. “Just get dressed, okay? Then I want to call your mother.”
Willa heard the digits tease and circle like a nursery rhyme, but she couldn’t bring up her home phone number. Something was really wrong with her head. As she fastened the tiny buttons of her shirt, she tried to get the number straight. She picked up the phone and stared at the rows of symbols. Finally she handled the pen lying there and the pad with FRIENDSWOOD BANK imprinted at the top, and without thinking she scribbled down something familiar and handed it to the woman, who turned her back to Willa as she dialed. The numbers chirped as she punched them with her finger.
“Hello? I think I have your daughter here.” Willa heard her mother’s muted voice. “Yes, at Seventy-one Calling Creek Drive. I’ll let her explain.”
As Willa was tucking her shirt into her jeans, she noticed the small handwriting just above her hipbone, the letters cramped and dark blue. She licked her finger and rubbed her skin, but the ink wouldn’t smear. Slut.
MRS. THOMPSON, the red-haired woman, said she’d just come to check on things as a favor while the Lawbournes were away. “I don’t know what in the world to tell them. I didn’t think Ben would be such a maniac as to have a party in the daytime,” she said, waving her hand at the beer bottles and cans of Red Bull crowded on the kitchen counter. “My God, he’s going to have to pay for this.” She tilted her head. “You okay?” Willa nodded, not looking at her face. “Bet you’re pretty mad at your boyfriend. Where’d he go?”
“I told him I wanted to sleep.”
“Oh.” It looked like Mrs. Thompson believed her. “You know, I should tell your mother how I found you, but I’m going to let you do that.”
Mrs. Thompson waited now in the living room, watching television, a man’s voice shouting cooking instructions, while she smoked furiously, legs crossed, swinging her foot. Willa stood at the long, thin window near the front door, watching for her mother’s car. A lawn mower started up. Across the street, a sprinkler stuttered, then fountained straight up. If she didn’t remember, it was almost as if she were just the same. She pictured herself naked on that bed, the pear-shaped birthmark on her flattened thigh, the dry skin.
A white pickup screeched to a stop at the corner, turned too fast, its tail gate wagging. Then her family’s brown car turned the corner, the familiar dented hood slowly approaching. Willa opened the door and heard Mrs. Thompson behind her, expectant. “Your mother there now?”
“Yeah!” Willa called. “Bye!” She sprinted out and raced down the walk.
When she got into the car and slammed the door, her mother didn’t look at her but into the rearview mirror, and then turned her head to look the other way through the window at the street before she carefully began to pull the car out onto the road.
Willa saw Mrs. Thompson standing on the lawn, high-heeled shoes that looked tiny beneath her plump calves, her face confused, one hand on her hip, the other hand waving.
Willa’s mother waved back, but didn’t smile. Her lipstick had faded, and it was hard to tell what she was thinking because the corners of her mouth weren’t clear.
She didn’t say anything until they reached the next corner. “Well, young lady,” she started. “This sure is embarrassing.” Willa knew her mother was afraid that she’d set a bad example for Jana, and it would begin all over again with her little si
ster one day. “Some woman I’ve never met calling to say my daughter’s not in school.”
“I went out for open lunch.”
“Excuse me, but you don’t have that privilege.” Her mother glanced sideways at her.
“I know.”
“Who drove you there?”
Willa hesitated. The thought of her mother and Cully Holbrook in the same space, even if it was only the crowded space in her head, made her sick to her stomach. She said his name, and it grated against the silence like something bulky and metal.
“Hmm.” Her mother stopped at a light, looked over at Willa. “He’s a senior then. What are you doing going around with a senior?”
The light turned green, and her mother stepped on the gas with a force that seemed resentful. They turned onto Sunrise Drive, past the new subdivision—large houses with turrets and windows with stained glass, the yards still a jumble of turned dirt and cement blocks. They passed the busy stripmall–gas station intersection, crossed Chigger Creek, then were on the highway toward home. Willa looked through the car window at the sky, the unknowing clouds passing slowly above her. Then they were driving next to a pasture. Two horses stood dully munching blocks of hay stacked in the grass. Another horse galloped alongside the road. She wasn’t sure if it was real. Its long black mane streamed behind it, a horse escaped from history.
WHEN THEY GOT to the house, Willa was relieved not to see her dad out watering the yard, or in the living room sitting with his feet up in the recliner. She ran straight up to her room, to her bed. She lay down and stared at the ceiling, a pain in her chest like a spoon scooping at her heart. Her laptop sat open on the desk, but she was afraid to check her email. Staring at the light fixture, she tried to feel nothing. For half an hour, she stared at the round gold screw in the middle of the glass.